The following is an excerpt from Luke Gilfedder’s “Wyndham Lewis: Modernism and the New Radical Right,” published in September 2025 by Logos Verlag Berlin.

Lewis felt it was no surprise that those who experienced the cultural collapse and apocalyptic change of the early twentieth century came to “see and feel everything” in fragmented, subjective “revolutionary terms.” In response to these new conditions, Lewis’s contemporaries, like Bergson, sought to establish a new, revolutionary connection with time that displaced concerns with the “rational self” in favour of reviving “lived, immediate experience” (Beck, 2019, p. 81). For instance, the creative aspect of Jünger’s Worker was his construction of a ‘new subjectivity’ from crises, one acclimated to the “particular demands” of a totally mobilised landscape characterised by danger, “variability,” and the “malleability of the deployment of men and means” (Jünger, 2015, p. 74, p. 207). Similarly, Benjamin exchanged objective universal temporality for the “subjective experience” of qualitative time, where “every instant is lived in its incomparable singularity” (Mosès, quoted in Beck, 2019, p. 151). Benjamin’s “politics of interruption” represented a radical revision of the Augenblick or decisive-moment theme—central to conservative revolutionaries like Heidegger and Jünger—and an integration of subjective, “epiphanic” visions of time into politics, a vision through which Benjamin aimed to counter the crises engendered by capitalist teleology (Beck, 2019, p. 148).

Conversely, Lewis regarded subjective time as another consequence of the anthropocentric worldview developed during the Renaissance, which culminated in romanticism. The “subjectivism” of the romantic, ‘Faustian’ (or today ‘suprahuman’) man was “associated fanatically” with a “deep sense of the reality of Time” as “against ‘Space,’ the “pure Present” of the antique world. He maintained that subjective time was one of the “ultimate phases” of a “universal attack” upon ‘Substance,’ upon the “common-sense of the Schoolmen”, and, finally, upon the whole “rationalist body of dogma… the beliefs of the Classical World.” The temporal instability of the early twentieth century—Spengler’s “Faustian or present period”—turned mankind into a “very quicksand for the foundation of an unchanging civilisation,” rendering him a “shifting basis on which no equilibrium of habit and civilisation could be established”; in other words, a “Subjective Man.”

Similarly, for Taylor (1989), the temporal instability and ‘crisis consciousness’ of the early twentieth century shifted modern culture’s centre of gravity of culture from the unified “I” of Romanticism to the “fragmented ego” of modernism (Beck, 2019, p. 60). In aesthetic terms, this shift was reflected in the transition from a subject rooted in expressivity (Romanticism) to a self rooted in experience and language (modernism)—particularly the subjective comprehension of time. [1]

This shift was epitomised by Bergson’s philosophy, which advocated a radical pivot in philosophy from studying objective “abstract time” to emphasising the “lived time” of our inner subjective experience. Bergson (1910, p. 114) paradoxically considered lived time as “concrete time”—the real-time we experience in our own conscious life—and to this “concrete time of duration”, which took the shape of continuous flux, he gave the name durée.

In The Childermass, Bergson’s position is represented by the Bailiff, a Devilish Mr Punch who is completely obsessed with subjective time and durée (Schenker, 1992, p. 146). Responding to a critical appellant at his court (Macrob), he shouts:

Eternity is in love with the productions of Time! The Eternal loves Time if you do not! …Time is the mind of Space – Space is the mere body of Time. Time is life, Time is money, Time is all good things! – Time is God! (Lewis, 1965b, p. 229)

Here, time is understood not as an abstract entity but, à la Bergson, as an immediate subjective experience, as durée—an inner experience grasped by intuition (Taşdalen, 2003, p. 11). For Lewis, in an age that increasingly values the subjective and the self, “Time” becomes “God” (Schenker, 1992, p. 147).

The very environs of the book—the phantasmagoric time flats— can be considered a sardonic dramatisation of this logic, a manifestation of Bergon’s durée put into “crazy practice”. It is as if Lewis is saying: “You want a world without Space, a featureless world given over to Time? Very well; here is what it will be like!”. Pullman and Satters are thrust into the deepest clouds of “space-time”, a Bergsonian hell where the objective world has been degraded into a farce of subjective time, with everything in constant flux. As Bergson (1911a p. 2) put it: “The truth is that we change without ceasing, and that the state itself is nothing but change.” Macrob is one of the few who dares challenge this notion of constant becoming and change, protesting to the Bailiff: “This static degradation is the opposite, even, of the becoming to which you are so partial”—a direct retort to Bergson’s Creative Evolution (1910, p. 207), which (in strikingly similar terms) discusses the extra-spatial “degrading itself into spatiality.” As a consequence of his protest, Macrob is cut into “fragments… stuffed and stamped” into a “large executioner’s basket.”

The Childermass suggests that, for Lewis, the emphasis on change in subjective time is a distortion of the natural order, a “rendering back” to LIFE—that “feverish chaos”—all that the mind had taken from her to build into forms and concepts. [2] This is why he rejected Futurism and Spengler as “Romantic” for fetishising time and instead championed “ahistoric” and “static” Classical cultures (Chinese, Indian, and Egyptian) for their emphasis on the “hard-edged” forms of space, as well as the ‘Classical Man’ who focused on the “immediate and sensuous… the ‘spatial’”. [3] For Eden (2023, p. 121), these assertions underscore Lewis’s essentialism, his devotion to ‘essence’ as contrary to ‘being’ and ‘becoming’—an essentialism expressed in Time and Western Man’s preference for Parmenides, who emphasised the unchanging and eternal nature of reality, over Heraclitus, the ‘weeping philosopher’ who proposed there is “nothing but dissolution and vanishing away, so that the river into which you step is never twice the same river, but always a different one”. [4]

Edwards (2016) also reads Time and Western Man as a critique of philosophies of becoming for their propensity to dissolve both individual personality (subject) and external world (object) into “streams of… breathless transformations”, none of which have any more reality than any other. The modernist disciples of Bergson’s ‘subjective time’ wish to return us to that ‘feverish chaos’ of pure sensation, where “identities dissolve”, and there is no “coolness of separation between you and me or between either of us or the senses that compose the empirical world” (Edwards, 2016, p.104). Lewis considered this a struggle between the ‘classical’ spatial world of common sense and a ‘dogmatic primitivism’—a primitivism which, in its oxymoronic incarnation among his contemporaries as ‘modernist primitivism’, he critiqued in his 1929 work Paleface. [5]

For Lewis, the pursuit of unity—the guiding motif of modernism’s turn to myth, primitive intuition, and ‘Time-worship’—threatened the disastrous collapse of the sacrosanct dualism between subject and object. His endorsement of the “rational logos” against modernism’s irrational inclinations was thus a theoretical strategy aimed at restoring this dualism and preserving the oppositional binary upon which individuality and (crucially) art—as we see in the next chapter—depended. To counter these philosophies of ‘becoming’ that defy easy separation between subject and object, Vorticism figured “movements of vision” as an “arrest and detachment from the great mechanism of the world” (McLuhan 2011, p. 11). McLuhan categorises Lewis’s artistic intellectualism as essentially Schopenhauerian: for Schopenhauer, who derided the German Idealists’ obsession with historical becoming, the principal worth of aesthetic beauty also lay in achieving a state of “pure contemplation, temporarily suppressing all willing, i.e., all desires and concerns” (Schopenhauer, quoted in Sutherland, 2018, p. 13).

Yet this conclusion—that Lewis simply adopts a traditionalist notion of a superior, metaphysical, immortal, and ahistorical realm of Being against the flux of modernity—is problematised in The Childermass. Lewis’s depiction of characters in the afterlife—who are not ‘purified’ essences but remain as socially conditioned as they were in life—suggests the ‘anti-traditional’ Heideggerian critique that, contra Evola, Being itself is inherently “changeable” and “historical” (Cleary, 2020). Once again, we find a postmodern scepticism—or, more precisely, Shakespeare’s “signifying nothing!”—undercutting Lewis’s metaphysics.

The Time Flats’ satiric take on Bergson’s ‘subjective time’ also engages with broader trends concerning subjectivity in the post-war period, an era characterised by significant advancements in language, science, and psychology, all of which contributed to a more fragmented perception of reality. Saussure introduced his linguistics of “perception and not of expression” (Greimas, cited in Schleifer 1987, p. xix), Freudian subjectivity gained prominence, and Einstein’s theory of relativity challenged Newton’s absolute concept of space and time. According to Lewis (1989a, p. 18), the colliding “constellations” of “wars and revolutions” with the resultant changes in meaning and consciousness created a sense of departure from the past, a feeling that “something had been skipped.” Language, struggling to keep pace with this rapid “change-stream”, decayed with “imprecision—the mere act of naming and describing could no longer capture the new sensibilities of the time.

In response, modernist literature broke from both Romanticism and its mid-nineteenth-century successor, literary Realism. Novels like Ulysses (and, more self-critically, The Childermass) adopted new experimental styles, rejecting critical aspects of literary Realism such as the reliable narrator, a stable sense of self, chronological narratives, and objective, unified perspectives of society and neat narrative closures (Childs, 2000; Yakin et al., 2014). Such changes reflected modernism’s scepticism regarding the possibility of absolute moral values and their increasing uncertainty about the nature of linear progress and objective temporality itself. Whereas Lewis turned outward to a ‘non-ethical’ and aggressively externalist satire, his contemporaries—influenced by Bergson, Freud, and Saussure— “turned inward”, placing a heightened valuation on the subjective and showing a fascination with the fragmented self (Konzett, 2015, p. 171). [6] Although Freud de-centred the individual and Einstein de-centred time, Saussure’s de-centring of language had the most immediate impact on this ‘inward turn’ in literary modernism. Saussure’s work contradicted the traditional realist view of language as a reflection of society, proposing that language “does not reflect” reality but constructs it (Chandler, 2002, p. 28). This perspective inspired modernism’s relativism and subjectivism, which later in the century developed into the nihilism of postmodern art.

Georg Lukács (1962, 1977) consequently critiqued modernism’s inward turn to subjectivity, seeing it as diametrically opposed to realism’s engagement with life. We must be wary, however, of overstating the difference between realism and modernism (Baldick, 2004). Unlike postmodern writers—who believe language is the only way to access reality—modernists still viewed language as a medium for conveying the world. Where postmodernists contend that ‘reality’ can only be interacted with subjectively via language, Modernists maintained that there did exist such a shared world, only that language was being stretched to breaking point in its endeavour to encompass it (Childs, 2000). The Childermass shows the struggle of this endeavour, and while a less ambitious work than, say, the proto-postmodernist Finnegan’s Wake (1939), it strives to be a book about the world (or at least, about a world), not the book “as the world” (Schenker, 1992, p. 139). [7]

The challenge for Modernism—existing “temporally and theoretically” between realism and postmodernism (Childs, 2000, p.62)—was that it became increasingly difficult to communicate a shared reality through language as words began to “slip, slide,” and “perish” under the “tension” of modernity (Eliot, 1959, p. 160). Paradoxically, this led to subjectivity emerging as a unifying concept for interpreting modern life. Individual perception was yoked to the collective historical consciousness of discontinuity, a phenomenon evident not only in Woolf’s pluralisation of subjectivity or Proust’s “subjective discontinuity” (Weinstein, 2005, p. 180) but also in the works of Jünger, Benjamin, and Bloch. [8] The writings of these modernists underscore the interconnection between a subjective apprehension of personal time and a fragmented collective consciousness of modern history (Beck, 2019).

Yet this modernist-Romantic shift from the “rationalist body of dogma” to collective subjectivity—a “new sensibility… now self-affirming or self-creating” (Pippin, 1991, p. 41)—was firmly opposed by Lewis. His emphasis on the critical intelligence’s role in revealing modernity’s degradations reflected a contrasting desire to revive classical Enlightenment values, seeking to confront the crises of time and values by reinforcing what remained of the Enlightenment’s rationalist aspirations (Wragg, 2005a). This explains why the vortex, rather than “freezing time”, offers a vantage from which one can observe the process of time from “outside itself” (Sutherland, 2018, p. 13)—the observer embodying Lewis’s belief in the power of the independent intellect and, above all, the artistic intellect to throw the mechanised world of flux into relief.

Full citations and references are available in “Wyndham Lewis: Modernism and the New Radical Right,” pp. 295–369.

link to Endnotes

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A prominent aspect of modern experience since the late nineteenth century has been the imposition of mechanised “empty time” by science, technology, and the Enlightenment economy upon all aspects of life. In response, Modernist, anti-Enlightenment, and New Radical Right thinkers seek a new relation to time, linking this empty, uni-directional time with capitalist catastrophes (Walter Benjamin), anthropocentrism (John Gray), and the Heraclitean elevation of becoming over Being (Giorgio Locchi), respectively. The ‘emptiness’ of Enlightenment time implies that its stages evolve within a ‘hollow shell’ of natural chronological time, without diachronic connections; they move “in” rather than “through” time (Jansen, 2016, p. 73). Time becomes merely the medium for historical occurrences, with no organic link between the past and present—only an artificially theorised sequence of stages through which humanity progresses towards enlightenment. 1

Conversely, for anti-Enlightenment thinkers, time is “incarnated” in historical events or instants (Jansen, 2016). These time perceptions can be called “concrete” (Bergson, 2005), embodied, or “organic” (Hölscher, 2014). They posit the revolutionary instant as disruptive events ‘breaking into’ history—a non-teleological vision that stands in contrast to the Hegelian concept of a historical reason progressively realising itself through the linear stages of a preordained telos. This holds even when such thinkers look to the past for their conceptions of instantaneity, as the reappearance of past elements can act as a form of “sudden interruption” (Beck, 2019, p. 5). A notable example is Benjamin’s “now-time.” In the messianic now-time, the return and the vision converge in the present instant because, within the “temporality of interruption,” tradition is “rediscovered” as illumined by a transformative future (Bohrer, cited in Beck, 2019, p. 152). Benjamin’s version of instantaneity, while influenced by Marxism and mystical Judaism, 2 shares with his reactionary modernist contemporaries an appeal to cyclical rather than linear time. It rejects the progressive, mechanical view of time as “beads on a rosary”, reinterpreting the present as a “time of the now” pierced through with “chips of Messianic time” (Benjamin, 1969, p. 263).

Many New Radical Right thinkers similarly advocate for a cyclical (precisely spherical) view of history and time, rejecting ‘empty’ linear time and its ‘catastrophic’ associations with industrialisation, liberalism, and modernity’s ‘nihilism’. In spherical time, history is not a continuous trajectory of infinite progress but works in cycles of “eternal return”. At any given moment, history can be “rolled in a direction” which places eternal, hierarchical, supra-individual, and organic values back at the centre of society (Griffin, 1999, p. 9). Indeed, Alain de Benoist—in Benjaminian terms—asserts that the historical “past” is a dimension or perspective implicit in every given moment: “Each present contains it… the past, thus, is latent in existence and can always be revived” (quoted in O’Meara, 2013, p. 97). 3

The idea of an alternative temporality is equally relevant to the political understanding of Aleksander Dugin’s (2017) neo-Eurasianist project, which rejects unidirectional time for a “synchronic model”.4 The neo-Eurasianist conservative does not fight for the past but for the “constant” and “perennial”, that which always remains “identical to itself”. In other words, the conservative, having rejected “empty time”, is concerned with “that which has been, that which is, and that which will be”—namely, Being as constant but under different modalities (Dugin, cited in Millerman, 2022, p. 117). While for ‘progressives’, Being is a “function of becoming,” for conservatives, time is a function of Being. Being is primary; time is secondary. However, in progressive ‘Western’ temporality, Being becomes not an idea but a “value, development, life, and the will-to-power… an arbitrary decision on the part of the subject.” (Dugin, 2014, p. 124). Because Being becomes the “function of values”—as Heidegger’s narrative of decline indicates—we arrive in “the space of total nihilism”. Indeed, Dugin views Heidegger as the exemplary “conservative revolutionary” who recognised that man is called upon to be the “guardian of Being,” while simultaneously taking a daring leap into “another Beginning”– the “Revolutionary” moment, the orientation toward the future.

The New Radical Right’s various metapoliticisations of ‘spherical time’ centre most coherently around Heidegger’s notion of “retrieval.” For Heidegger, crucially, the past can be “retrieved” within the “horizons of the present and the future,” revealing that it exists not merely as the past but as a “futural possibility” (cited in Bambach, 1995, p. 211). 5 Consequently, conservative revolutionaries like Armin Mohler favour the Sphere over the circle as the clearer model for ‘eternal return,’ as the sphere symbolises that everything is contained in each moment; the present, past, and future coincide (Locchi, 1973).

A notable parallel in Modernism is Yeats’s cyclical vision of history. Yeats believed that history, biology, and metaphysics were governed by two-thousand-year cycles, which he called “gyres.” Like the spherical model embraced by Nietzsche and the New Radical Right, Yeats’s alternative concept of time, while anti-teleological, does not strictly conform to a circle. Each ‘gyre’ should instead be visualised as a cone that starts as a tiny circle and then spirals outward and forward, expanding with each revolution. When it reaches its widest point, it begins to break apart under its own weight. Simultaneously, however, another gyre starts spiralling out in a direction antithetical to the first. According to Yeats, we are approaching a historical moment in which the current “gyre” of monotheism, father worship, universalism, and linear time—initiated with the birth of Christ and the end of particularist paganism—begins to break down. Some rough beast, slouching towards Bethlehem, “its hour come round at last,” will sow the seeds of the next gyre, which is its antithesis (Yeats, 1982, p. 211).

Yeats’s vision aligns with the New Radical Right’s metapolitical argument that the time is ripe for a “retrieval” of pre-Christian, Indo-European paganism. Just as centuries of particularist polytheism gave way to centuries of universalist Abrahamic monotheism (and its secular variant, progress), so the ideological defeat of modern liberalism will expedite the destined reversal to a pagan, ‘organic’ and roots-based social order. In the “interregnum,” society faces the collapse of entire frameworks of understanding as the centre no longer holds, anarchy spreads, and grand narratives lose power. Nevertheless, the cyclical conception of time in Yeats’s and the New Radical Right’s model renders inevitable this demise of the linear, egalitarian Judaeo-Christian tradition.

This notion that time is both cyclical and fated is arguably the most challenging and undesirable feature of the Yeatsian or Spherical vision. History follows cycles, and we cannot control it; it “controls us” (Kingsnorth, 2018). Lewis had a particular penchant in his polemics for rejecting these alternative visions of history. He admonished Spengler’s cyclical theory of the rise and fall of civilisations, saying Spengler probably reasoned it was “about time the West ‘declined’” to fulfil his “periodic principle” and satisfy “chronology.” 6 In Artists of the Right (2012), Kerry Bolton observes that Lewis, unlike many modernists of the ‘Right,’ viewed organic and spherical interpretations of history as fatalistic and “demoralising for the survival of the European race.” Indeed, Lewis wanted the European mind to liberate itself from the fatalism inherent in these modes of thinking, which had resulted in “the Great War” and would precipitate the wars that “threatened” to come. For Lewis, all manifestations of the “historic” time-mind were deleterious to human agency and were “peculiarly useful to the promoters of wars,” for such doctrines imply “it’s time for another war.” In other words, adherence to the concept of eternal recurrence would render the vision in Yeats’s “The Second Coming” more probable. 7 A similar apprehension may have dissuaded Lewis from finishing his own fictional portrayal of armageddon in the thirties—in his original (abandoned) sequel to 1928’s The Childermass, the “whole affair” was to “end in chaos”.

A closer analysis of the book, however, suggests Lewis’s critique of Spengler does not signify a complete rejection of eternal recurrence. 8 Lewis even seems to share with Yeats a vision of the present moment as existing within a longer historical cycle. Significantly, Tomlin (1969, pp. 26-27) highlights the cyclical structure of The Childermass and notes the occult significance of the Maha-Yuga symbol on the Bailiff’s Punch-and-Judy booth. In Hindu cosmology, the Maha-Yuga (great age) represents one complete historical cycle. It consists of four world ages (‘Yugas’) and implies the “successive decline in human righteousness”, culminating in the Kali-Yuga, where righteousness “reaches its nadir”. Other occult symbols, like the ‘goat-hoof’ beneath the Maha-Yuga sign and the recurring imagery of the serpent, 9 indicate that modernity has entered its final cyclical phase of degeneracy: man is in hell, as Ezra Pound said, “without dignity, without tragedy.” 10

The theme of eternal recurrence is further suggested by the arrival of the dead at the transit camp outside Heaven, where “with the gait of Cartophilus”, some “homing solitary shadow” is “continually arriving” in the “restless dust” of the turnpike”. These separate ‘solitary’ souls become one stream arriving perpetually— ‘turnpike’ evoking not only the idea of a toll-paying road but also of rotation. This sense of the eternally revolving slaughter mill of history is amplified when considering that the protagonists, Satters and Pullman, likely died in the Great War and are just two more lost souls roaming this plain of death, awaiting admission to the Magnetic City.

Despite its pessimistic evocation of eternal recurrence, The Childermass demonstrates that Lewis, in his creative work, was willing to explore ideas he would not countenance in his polemics. 1927’s Time and Western Man launched an unequivocal—almost doctrinal—attack on the ‘Time-mind’, a term Lewis used to group seemingly disparate concepts (including eternal recurrence) that he believed exhibited mechanistic thinking. For Lewis, anything that is “becoming, not become” is a “function” or “process” and hence “mechanistic”. Describing his critique of ‘time-philosophies’, Lewis writes:

I have attempted, variously, since 1927, to translate this analysis into more popular forms. But you have to go back into the philosophies that went hand-in-hand with Nineteenth-Century Science (as, for instance, Nietzsche came out of Darwin…) and into the philosophical glosses of the time-physics, really to master the structure of the contemporary mechanical Juggernaut. (Lewis, 1963, pp. 261-262)

Lewis saw much of modernism as the next chapter in this process, arguing that its literary and philosophical works, which embraced history as a ‘process’, exalted continual change, and portrayed reality as perpetually in flux, ultimately stripped the self of stability, free will, and agency.

This “time-for-Time’s-sake” philosophy, obsessed with becoming and perpetual flux, was directly opposed by Lewis to his ‘spatial’ philosophy, which championed form, presence, and the principles of classicism—principles that Spengler (Lewis argued) denigrated in favour of a “formless” Romantic yearning for tragic “Faustian” man and a return to a mythical “superhuman temporality” where past, present, and future merge. Contrary to the Nietzschean idea that this suprahistorical outlook is the temporality of eternal return, Lewis contends that the “world of Space,” rather than the “mental world” of time, embodies the true world of the ‘pure Present’. Only ‘faustians’ are historic, whereas the “pure Present” of the ahistoric Classical Ages is “obviously” the world that is “born and dies every moment.”

This idea is central to understanding Lewis’s “vortex view” of art and civilisation, which, as Marshall McLuhan explains, contrasts with the reactionary-romantic view. For Lewis, the “moment of art is not a moment of time’s covenant”. Rather, it is “specifically that experience of arrest in which we pause before a particular thing or experience” (McLuhan, 2011, p. 10). McLuhan conceptualises the vortex not as a flux but as a “dynamic, moving image” which is related to time yet also contains a “stable point,” the “spatial element from which its energy spirals originate.” (Lamberti, 2018, pp. 219-220). While the vortex, like the sphere, gyre, or lightning flash, can thus be viewed as one of many radical modernist counters to ‘Enlightenment time’, it does not aim to redeem or ‘re-enchant’ temporality. Instead, Lewis seeks to “arrest the flux of existence” so that the mind may be “united with that which is permanent” (McLuhan, 2011, p. 6). In Vorticism, art “plunges to the heart of the Present”—an “aesthetic solidification of time” (Sutherland, 2018, p. 13) that momentarily disrupts the “insistent, hypnotic” flux of modernity, particularly the “romantic chaos” and crises of industrial society. 11

Link to the Endnotes

Full citations and references are available in “Wyndham Lewis: Modernism and the New Radical Right,” pp. 295–369.

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‘Impressionistic Fuss’

The rejection of Impressionism, which the Italian painters were keen to emphasise, held little weight for Lewis: he maintained that Futurism, with its naïve enthusiasm for machinery and the ‘modern’, merely parodied Wilde and Gissing, being a “sensational and sentimental mixture of the aesthete of 1890 and the realist of 1870”.

Giacomo Balla: Forme rumore di motocicletta, 1913

“Wilde gushed twenty years ago about the beauty of machinery,” BLAST quips, “Gissing, in his romantic delight with modern lodging houses, was futurist in this sense”. Like Hulme, Lewis saw little distinction between the naturalist aims and techniques of late 1800s Impressionism and the arbitrarily named Post-Impressionist movement, which included Divisionism as a variant and which was claimed as a crucial element of Futurist aesthetics. Regardless of its ‘anti-pastist’ intent, both Hulme and Lewis felt that Futurism differed only in degree, not in kind, from the norms that had prevailed in European art since the ‘heresy’ of the Renaissance, and shared the same defects: the same superficial and “insipid” optimism rooted in a purely illusory confidence in continuity (the “flowing lines” and “absence of linear organisation” revealed, in Lewis’s words, an “inveterate humanism”). It was against this far-reaching tradition—stretching back to the ancient Greeks, those “Gods of the Renaissance”—that Lewis believed we should turn to the Classical Orient (in the “sense of Guénon”) for reprieve.

The abstraction Hulme and Lewis sought to revive—which permeated the ancient world and was most perfectly embodied in the Guénonian Orient—was a tradition that resulted instead from an immense spiritual and primitive fear elicited in man vis-à-vis the phenomena of the external world, an instinctive feeling of alienation and dread that the rationalistic development of mankind had gradually suppressed. As Worringer states, only the civilised peoples of the East—whose more profound world-instinct resisted man’s development in a rationalistic direction, and who perceived in the material world only the shimmering veil of Maya—remained tormented by the disjointed, bewildering, arbitrary flux of life, the relativity of all that is, and “all the intellectual mastery of the world-picture” could not denude them of this worldview. Their subsequent calling, as Lewis later wrote of his own profession, was “to solidify, to make concrete, to give definition to… to postulate permanence.”

The abstract temporality of Futurism’s machine art was hardly appropriate for bringing this tradition into the twentieth century. Yet amidst the “stylistic thundercloud” of radical modernisms gathering over pre-war Europe, Hulme foresaw the emergence of an authentic modern art that truly did express this profounder worldview: a “complex geometrical art” hardening out and separating itself from the other avant-garde movements—at odds not only with “naturalist dogmas” of post-Renaissance art but also with the flux and ‘messy’ attitude of humanism: the “state of mind” that had pervaded the ‘history’ of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (“Romanticism in literature, Relativism in ethics, Idealism in philosophy, and Modernism in religion”). Where the Futurists—in their unyielding romanticism and blind devotion to the “Great God Flux”—counterintuitively humanised the contemporary “mechanical juggernaut” and naturalised it into an ‘organic mechanism’, the new and severer art, according to Hulme, should be strictly inorganic: its forms (like machinery) bare, clear-cut, and “austere”. Following Worringer, Hulme believed the very “idea of machinery” should completely differentiate contemporary art from the “sloppy dregs of the Renaissance”—the artist not merely re-enacting the “frenzied evolutionary” nature of the mechanical world, but reducing it to its essential geometrical forms. Unlike the uncritical modernolatry of Futurism and the ‘safe’, tasteful anaemia of Cubism’s still-lifes and assemblages, Hulme’s authentically modern art would derive instead from the “subordination of the technological to the aesthetic.”

Our Hated Geometric World

BLAST had signalled Vorticism’s readiness to answer this call, asserting that by “bowing the knee to wild Mother Nature”—whether in her traditional or mechanical garb—the artist sacrifices his creative individuality, fusing his invention with the arbitrary and often mundane forms of the perceptually shifting world. While the Futurists accepted today’s ‘nature’ wholesale (“their paean to machinery is really a worship of a Panhard racing-car”), the ideal mechanical art envisioned by Hulme would more closely align with the geometrical arts of the ancient past, both in style (adapting the “intensity” of Byzantine mosaics, with their “rigid lines” and “dead crystalline forms”) and sensibility (being an objective, absolute machine art that embodies a “disharmony” or “separation between man and nature”). Unlike the naturalist impulse towards empathy—which finds its fulfilment in the beauty of the organic—this more primitive urge towards geometric abstraction sought beauty in the life-denying inorganic, in pure geometric regularity, and more broadly in all abstract laws and necessities. For Lewis’s friend, Ezra Pound, the early paintings by Lewis and the sculptures of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska exemplified a modern art that imbibed this spirit, liberating the imagination from the overly familiar world of the organic into one of semi-abstract forms and “planes in relation”. Take, for instance, Brzeska’s marble portrait of Pound—commissioned by Pound himself—which subdues the poet’s vaguely Nordic features and ziggurat hair into simple geometric planes until he resembles an Easter Island statue.

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska: Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound, 1914

The crucial move for Vorticism, in establishing its aesthetic philosophy, was to apply this juxtapositional, spatial model to ways of thinking about time. A few months before the launch of BLAST in 1914, Hulme delivered an influential lecture at the Quest Society on Modern Art, wherein he described Byzantine mosaics, the pyramids of ancient Egypt, and the figures and masks of ‘primitive’ tribal cultures as examples of artworks embodying his desired principle of discontinuity: the impermanence of the outside world, Hulme said, incited either dread or disgust in the archaic artist, prompting him to seek refuge in abstraction, in perfection and rigidity, in stable monumental shapes. In contrast to naturalism’s humanistic confidence in change, these abstract works wrested the object out of its natural context, out of the flux and contingency of the organic world, and strove to impose upon it the stamp of eternalness. As Lewis was commended in Hulme’s lecture as an exemplary practitioner of this new “constructive geometrical art”, there is good reason to believe that he was aware of it and was influenced by it in departing from Futurism and establishing the angular, anti-humanist, and anti-vitalist style of Vorticism.

The Great English Vortex

The dictionary defines a vortex as a whirling mass of water or air, and one might presume, from subsequent references to lines of flow, spirals, curves, and rings, that a movement calling themselves Vorticists would have produced an art that was certainly curvilineal and possibly soft-edged, evoking the fluidity and rotation characteristic of whirlpools and whirlwinds. Yet Vorticism—in contrast to the swirling patterns and compositional turbulence of Futurism—adhered to a rigidly geometrical, sharply delineated aesthetic of “diagonals, zig-zags and verticals.” Rejecting Futurism’s machine-idolatry and its proto-accelerationist exaltation of speed and change, the Vorticists, as Marshall McLuhan observed, instead sought to “arrest the flux of existence” so that the observer could be “united with that which is permanent.” As opposed to the “sentimental Future” as it was to the “sacripant Past,” Vorticist art “plunges to the heart of the Present” to create an aesthetic concretisation of time that momentarily disrupts the “insistent, hypnotic” rhythm of the mechanical world around us.

Declaring themselves not “the Slave[s] of Commotion but its Master[s]”, the Vorticists thus harnessed the tension between the formalism (and “static monumentality”) of Cubism and the “kinetic dynamics” of Futurism, bringing to the foreground the stillness that resides at the heart of all movement—hence the foundational metaphor of the vortex, a “circulation with a still centre.” Vorticism was, in other words, “a dynamic formism”, and the Vorticist at his “maximum point of energy when stillest.” In place of Futurism’s fetishisation of the new “beauty of speed,” la bellezza della velocità—which had the effect, in Futurist canvases by Balla, Severini, and Boccioni, of disrupting Lewis’s aesthetic preference for the Oriental rigidity of outline with blurred and multiple images—the Vorticists offered a controlled energy. Their machine aesthetic was a necessary vertebration of Marinetti’s “impressionism and sensationalism”, tempering Futurist melodramatics with Cubist sobriety, “Italian movement” with “French monumentality.” Where Futurist paintings were “swarming, exploding, or burgeoning with life,” Vorticist art was “electric with a more mastered, vivid vitality.”

Wyndham Lewis: The Dancers, 1912.

For Lewis, the vortex could thus be defined as a “great silent place” at the “heart of the whirlpool” where “all the energy is concentrated.” It was not a flux but a “dynamic, moving image” related to time but also “containing a stable point, the spatial element from which its “energy spirals originate.” But where Lewis’s vision of the vortex was centrifugal, the Futurist’s was centripetal, with “force-lines” that “encircle and involve the spectator so that he will […] be forced to struggle himself with the persons in the picture.” Positioning the spectator at the ‘centre of the picture’, making him ‘live’ in that convergence of flux, in a participative role, was a recurrent theme in Futurist theory: “all things move, all things run, all things are rapidly changing,” states the Manifesto tecnico, “we would at any price re-enter into life.”

This invitation to merge with the new live world around us epitomised, in Lewis’s view, the “arch mistake” of modern aesthetic philosophy—namely, the tendency to fuse things which would otherwise be discriminated—and stood in direct contrast to the Vorticist view of art as an “arrest and detachment” of the “great mechanism of the world.” The Futurists’ desire to ‘replunge’ into the “waves of the vital flux,” to “become the flux,” meant trading our substantial self for a series of ‘selves’ created anew with every ‘event’; we acclimatise ourselves to regard our personalities as the “continuous transition of one physical event into another.” And as the substantial self vanishes, so too does the world: the “proposed transfer” from the “beautiful objective, material world of common-sense” to the ‘organic’ world of “chronological mentalism” entails losing not only the “clearness of outline” of our individuality but also the “clearness of outline, the static beauty” of the world as that individuality commonly apprehends it. What archaic ages perceived as a chaotic universe—a flux and disorder threatening man’s distinctiveness—appeared to the empathetic artist as solid and familiar, a spiritual dynamism reflecting his optimistic sense of self and progress; the blasé confidence (or “suicidal faith”) that Time is ‘reality.’

Futurism and the Time-Cult

When Hulme refers to Futurism as the “deification” of the flux, he is recognising this same anthropomorphic self-confidence; for him, Futurism is an empathetic art product (indeed, by drawing the spectator into the centre of the picture, Futurist art replicates the effect achieved when the naturalist artist ’empathises’ himself into the outer world: freed from anxiety and spiritual fear, the external world begins to live, receiving all its life from man, who now anthropomorphises its inner essence, its inner dynamism). Hulme’s phrase thus implicitly yokes Futurism—usually associated with Italian fascism—to the ‘insipid’ optimism of his and Lewis’s contemporaries like Wells, Bennett, and Shaw, all of whom had as their central subject this most widely accepted of modern beliefs: the idea of progress. Modern man, as Lewis’s acquaintance, Stephen Spender, wrote, believes in progress as an objective reality existing outside himself, convinced that however “disappointing” man is, there is “no doubt” that machines improve and that the failure of individuals is contrasted with, if not “balanced by”, immense progress in the objective, mechanistic world.

Like Hulme, Lewis regarded the Futurist preoccupation with speed and change as indicative of a broader philosophical zeitgeist, one nurtured by Whitehead and particularly by Lewis’s bête noire, Henri Bergson. Bergson challenged the notion of ‘abstract’ clock-time with his concept of ‘real duration’ or durée réelle: the ‘lived-time’ of our inner subjective experience, which cannot be grasped by the spatialising, mechanising intellect but rather through the immediate faculty of intuition. By asserting the metaphysical and psychological primacy of la durée—and conversely, the illusory nature of everything that seemed stable and static—Bergson effectively inverted the traditionalist equivalence of truth with eternal perdurance. Lewis lamented the influence of Bergsonism, seeing it as the “great organiser of disintegration” in contemporary art and philosophy, both of which focussed on notions of process, change and becoming, as reflected in subjective experience, rather than on the ideas of the outwardly apparent permanence of the visual world and its relation of that visual world to eternal being.

Bergson’s vision of universal becoming—his new ‘organic’ philosophy, with its appeal to immediate experience, its anti-intellectualism, its demonisation of all spatial, external, objective, “physical” characteristics at the expense of temporal “mental” ones, its penchant for, in Samuel Alexander’s phrase, “taking time seriously”—was against all Lewis stood for as an artist: the common-sense visual realm of static, exactly outlined, and harmoniously proportioned things, apprehended, painted, and constructed by someone possessing his own stable self (consider, Lewis says, an immobile castle reflected in a glassy river—this is the perfect illustration of our “static dream”). Vorticism thus presented the counter-revolutionary case against the ‘revolution’ of Bergsonian time, which epitomised everything Lewis considered degenerate in art: flux, change, romanticism, the crowd, and the unconscious, whereas ‘geometric’ space represented all that he believed desirable: stability, permanency, classicism, the individual, and consciousness.

In Lewis’s most important critical volume, 1927’s Time and Western Man, he launched an all-out attack on various kinds of art and literature spellbound by this time-spirit, by philosophies of becoming, flux, or la durée. Lewis assumes an interconnection of the time-doctrines of Bergson, Alexander and Whitehead with the incessant movement of Futurism, the historiographies of Spengler, the ‘frenzied’ will-to-power attitudes of Marinetti, Sorel and Nietzsche, and the stream-of-consciousness techniques of Proust, Stein, and Joyce. From this lengthy list of animadversions, Lewis singles out Ulysses for its “obsessional application” of the naturalistic method—associated, as in Futurism, with the “exacerbated time-sense,” and later characterised the post-Joycean interior monologue as a “tumultuous stream of evocative, spell-bearing vocables, launched at your head—or poured into your Unconscious. … It may be an auriferous mud, but it must remain mud—not a clear but a murky picture.” For Lewis, these literary and visual works alike were conspiring to redefine “reality” as wholly temporal, dissolving both the individual personality (subject) and the external world (object) into “streams of… breathless transformations” none of which possessed any more reality than any other. Left unopposed, the modernist disciples of Bergson’s ‘religion of impermanence’ would return us to that ‘feverish chaos’ of pure sensation, where identities dissolve, and there is no “coolness of separation between you and me or between either of us or the senses that compose the empirical world.” In Samuel Butler’s words, Man becomes a quicksand on which “no equilibrium of habit and civilisation could be established.”

Up Life! Down Art!

For Lewis, Bergsonism in the arts thus represented a distortion of the natural order, a “rendering back” to LIFE—that “feverish chaos”—all that the mind had taken from her to build into forms and concepts (a symbolic reversal of the endeavours of the ancient Egyptians in raising from the swamp of papyrus the solid islands they later conventionalised into pyramids). He characterises Bergson as the “philosopher of Impressionism,” crediting his “gospel of fluidity and illiquation” for this ‘savage’ turn of the European intellectual world towards ‘LIFE,’ of which Marinetti’s Nietzsche-inspired “war-talk, sententious elevation, and much besides” was also a part. Indeed, the Futurist Manifesto—faced with Italy’s “flaccid inertia”—sought resolution in speed, in “energy” and “fearlessness”, with nerves that “demand war” and lust for “danger,” and proudly exalted “aggressive action, feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the slap and the punch”.

Luigi Russolo: La Rivolta, 1911

Russolo’s The Revolt (1911) transposes this declaration onto the canvas, employing energetic brushstrokes, triangular wedges, and a vibrant colour palette to capture the “emotive force” of revolutionary violence and “forcibly oblige the spectator” to be at the “centre of the painting”, to relive the fervour of the advancing mob. This urgent call for supplementary activity on the part of the spectator—the appeal to subjective experience—stood in direct contradiction to the ancient world’s need for abstraction. In the urge to abstraction, the intensity of the self-alienative impulse predominates: ‘LIFE,’ for the archaic artist as for Lewis, was felt to be a disturbance of aesthetic enjoyment.

The invocation to engage with the uncivilised emotions of the masses in Russolo’s canvas (and in Boccioni’s The Rising City) hence represented, for Lewis, an “identification with the crowd” and a “huge hypocrisy”—a failure to grasp the function of art as a phenomenon of separation and as the traditional “enemy of life.” He opposed Futurism’s elevation of intuition over intellect, subjectivism over objectivism, and valourisation of action-for-its-own sake (“truth has no place in action”), deeming it a ‘false-revolutionary’ approach that was less a countermovement than a surrender to the European zeitgeist. This evaluation is illustrated in the stick figures in The Crowd, whose French and Communist flags symbolise the various doctrinaire revolutionary ideologies of modernity, but whose ‘revolt’ Lewis depicts not as a vitalistic surge (as in Russolo’s painting), but as a mass of busy-bodying automatons “strut[ting] and pant[ing] in insect packs”, indistinguishable from one another and from the mechanical metropolis that ‘enframes’ them.

Wyndham Lewis: The Crowd, 1914-15

Revolution was too intimately associated with mechanistic ‘progress’, a submission to Hegel’s advancing logic of the dialectic and to its counterpart, the historical determinism and biological fatalism of Spengler’s ‘world-as history’” (i.e., ‘world-as-time’), which, according to Lewis, “so excellently fits in” with the “fatalist and evolutionist requirements” of orthodox ‘revolutionary’ thought begot by the time-mind. Vorticism’s jagged forms, sharply delimited by straight lines or geometric arcs, thus betokened a classical search for control and rationality in contrast to the fluid and imprecise approach of Futurism, which Lewis considered a continuation of the modernist “disorder” of Nineteenth Century ‘romantic’, ‘revolutionary’, European thought.

‘Wild, romantic, Rousseauesque’

Lewis’s denigration of Futurism as ‘romantic’ stems from his Hulmean interpretation of Romanticism not as a period but as a philosophical approach: Romanticism meant temporality and the myriad social ills Lewis associated with it: everything “romantically ‘dark’, vague, ‘mysterious’, stormy, uncertain”. Classicism, conversely, meant everything nobly defined and exact (the Hellenic, for Lewis, held no monopoly on the ‘classical’). Futurism was thus ‘Romantic’ for fetishising flux, speed, and dynamic action, while Vorticism was ‘Classical’ in emphasising detachment and the hard-edged forms of space. Romanticism possessed a similarly sweeping and negative connotation in Hulme’s thought: it represented nothing less than the artistic expression of the humanistic conception of man that had prevailed since the Renaissance (evolving, as it were, in a straight line from Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man to Rousseau). We have already noted that Hulme perceived Western humanism—the “slush in which we have the misfortune to live”—as intellectually insipid compared to the stark, “uncompromising bleakness” of Indian philosophy, just as he regarded Western naturalism as decadent and “anaemic” next to the angular hardness and bareness of Egyptian and African art. His principal contribution to modern British art, however, lay in linking these static Oriental and primitive worldviews with the emerging preference for the austere, hard, clean and ‘bare’ aesthetics evident in the works of certain contemporary British artists, thus endowing the new mechanical art with a vision of its traditions and its place in history. “Austerity” and “bareness” were the traits Hulme applauded in the work of Lewis and Jacob Epstein, and these, he stressed, were the “exact opposite” of Futurism (a descendant, instead, of the ‘Occidental’ romantic tradition).

Rebels of the North

By presenting the austere geometric works of the Rebel Art Centre painters—including his own—as a distinctly Anglo-Saxon or ‘Northern’ artistic expression, Lewis was thus able to further distinguish Vorticism from Futurism. The English were the “inventors of this bareness and hardness”, he proclaimed in BLAST, “and should be the great enemies of Romance.” After all, the English could accept the machine without the Futurist’s “propagandist fuss”:

England practically invented this civilisation that Signor Marinetti has come to preach to us about. While Italy was still a Borgia-haunted swamp of intrigue, England was buckling on the brilliant and electric armour of the modern world and sending out her inventions and new spirit across Europe and America.

Unlike all the ‘hullo-bulloo’ of Marinetteism about motor cars “more beautiful than the victory of Samothrace”, ‘the art for these climates,’ the Vorticists asserted, must be a “northern flower.”

Lewis follows Worringer in contrasting the lively naturalism and romanticism of early Southern European art with the Gothic formalism that flourished in the North, whose people had no “clear blue sky” arching over them, no serene climate, and no “luxuriant vegetation” to induce in their souls a “world-revering pantheism.” Faced with a “harsh and unyielding” nature, Northern man experienced not only the resistance of the environment but also his isolation within it, and so confronted the phenomena and flux of the outer world with a sense of “disquiet and distrust.” For Lewis, the “natural magic” of Western poetry derived its “peculiar” and penetrating quality from these “intense relations” of the Western Mind to the “alien” physical world of “nature.” He therefore urged his fellow artists to “ONCE MORE WEAR THE ERMINE OF THE NORTH” and even advocated for the return of “necessary blizzards” to reawaken that primitive sense of deep dread before nature—the disharmonious état d’âme that first compelled Northern man towards rigid lines and inert crystalline forms, rather than to the naturalistic and organic forms of the South.

That Vorticism remains a less influential movement than Futurism—being little more today than employment for art historians—doubtless speaks to our ongoing fetishisation of the south, of the sun, of “bright Latin violence and directness”—la gaya Scienza. For Vorticism, unfashionably, typified Worringer’s observation that Northern art aims to ‘de-organicise’ the organic, to translate the mutable and conditional into values of unconditional necessity. As with the Classical-Orient cultures Lewis praised for emphasising the hard-edged forms of space and the “immediate and sensuous… the ‘spatial’”, the art of the Celto-Germanic North strove to suppress every element of the organic by approximating it to a pure linear regularity. The happiness they sought from art did not lie in projecting or empathising themselves into objects of the outer world, but rather in wresting the object out of the external world, out of the unending flux of being—purifying it of its dependence on life and everything temporal or arbitrary—and elevating it into the realm of the necessary; in a word, to eternalise it. This, Lewis asserts, is the heritage being repudiated in the present ‘time’ modes—a repudiation that shows no sign of abating today.

Conclusion

Vorticism’s defence of its Northern heritage can be seen as a proclamation of Lewis’s essentialism—his counter-propagandistic belief in ‘essence’ as opposed to ‘being’ and ‘becoming’—an essentialism expressed in Time and Western Man’s preference for Parmenides, who emphasised the unchanging and eternal nature of reality, over Heraclitus, the “weeping philosopher”, who proposed that there is “nothing but dissolution and vanishing away, so that the river into which you step is never twice the same river, but always a different one.” It was this Heraclitean view of energy and force that the Futurists extolled, but for the Vorticists, as for Lewis’s Tarr, “Art is identical with the idea of permanence… Anything living, quick and changing is bad art always”. The artistic imagination, like the intellectual vision, should be devoted not to energy but to the Apollonian search for form: “to crystallise that which (otherwise) flows away, to concentrate the diffuse, to turn to ice that which is liquid and mercurial.”

But surely, as Northrop Frye protests, art is energy incorporated in form—the energy rhythm, the form plasticity. Overemphasis on one leads to a surging Heraclitean chaos; overemphasis on the other to a frozen Parmenidean one. Yet both these, as Frye suggests, are essentially the same thing: the root of evil in art lies in the “unfortunate tendency toward the abstract antithesis,” toward the composition of cheap epigrams which “minor critics revel in” and serious artists avoid.

Lewis, of course, was alive to this charge, as evidenced by a series of late-career ‘sea images’, nudes and bathers, painted in the mixed idiom of “pure-abstraction-and-stylized-nature” (he even pronounced the death of purely abstract art in 1939 and declared himself a “super-naturalist”). Yet this collection of brilliant watercolours, with their cloudy, watery spaces and huge, floating marine shapes—regarded by Walter Michel as the “imaginative and gayest” of Lewis’s career and his most ‘human art’ to date—only makes plain what Lewis had always considered to be the true relation between the artist and nature. He held the traditional view of imitation as working in the way nature works, with all the “beauty of accident”, but without the “certain futility that accident implies,” so that art becomes, in a sense, another nature.

Wyndham Lewis: Bathers, 1942

It is hardly surprising, therefore, to find in the sketches for these Etty-inspired nudes a stark Vorticist geometry still underlying Lewis’s newly flowing lines. Even as a super-naturalist, Lewis never revoked Tarr‘s dictum that “Deadness is the first condition of art,” a deadness based upon “the absence of soul, in the human sentimental sense”—this was why Vorticism first invoked the ‘abstraction’ of all the Pharaohs and Buddhas, our world of “matter,” against the “Einsteinian, Bergsonian or Alexandrine world of Time and “restless” interpenetration.” But Lewis’s paradisal 1940s paintings, these semi-abstract fantasies of “worlds moving round together in a chaotic corner of creation”, reveal that the Vorticist view of art was never a cold or mechanistic rationalism, as Frye’s critique implies. Art was the product, yes, of the “purest consciousness”, of the open eye, the open senses: the conduits to the constructing, shaping mind. But the producing, the actual act of creation—that, Lewis always believed, was strictly the ‘work of a visionary’:

… Shakespeare, writing his King Lear, was evidently in some sort of a trance; for the production of such a work, an entranced condition seems as essential as it was for Blake when he conversed with the Man who Built the Pyramids.

But if art is a “spell, a talisman, an incantation”, Lewis nevertheless insisted it was strictly a civilised substitute for magic, a distinction he makes explicit:

A great artist falls into a trance of sorts when he creates, about that there is little doubt. [Yet while] the act of artistic creation is a trance or dream-state, [it is] very different from that experienced by the entranced medium. A world of the most extreme and logically exacting physical definition is built up out of this susceptible condition in the case of the greatest art.

A different matter, then, from any creative automatism or from the blind art of flux, with its vitalist outpourings of the “hot, immediate egoism of sensational life” and its “surging ecstatic, featureless chaos” which is “being set up as an ideal, in place of the noble exactitude and harmonious proportion of the European scientific ideal.” It was this severer conception of great art that Vorticism employed to construct its nationalist avant-garde programme, making it more than just a parochial attempt to emulate Futurism. As BLAST asserts, what is actual and vital for the South is “ineffectual and unactual” in the North. This is why Vorticism—and not its continental counterpart—provides the most congruent aesthetic philosophy for new British art, and for contemporary Anglo-Saxon movements seeking, in a high modernist spirit, to “fuse national tradition with a futuristic drive for rapid technological progress.”

Perhaps it is not necessary to stress the distinction: as Lewis himself admitted, ‘Futurist,’ in England, signifies nothing more than a painter concerning himself with the renovation of art, of capturing futurity, or rebelling against the domination of the Past. Nevertheless, Vorticism—with its “bitter Northern rhetoric of humour”—remains not only the original but the true ‘Anglo-Futurism’. After all, it needs no prefix.

Part II of a two-part series.

link to Endnotes & References

The post Vorticism: The original Anglo-Futurism? Part II appeared first on The Miskatonian.

 In one of the more memorable anecdotes from Wyndham Lewis’s first autobiography, Blasting and Bombardiering, the Vorticist recounts meeting his Futurist counterpart, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, in a lavatory (Marinetti had gone to wash after a particularly energetic lecture during which had “drenched himself in sweat”). With characteristically thrasonic gusto, the Italian declares that Lewis is a Futurist – and promptly inquires why he has not announced himself as such:

‘Because I am not one,’ I answered, just as point blank and to the point.
‘Yes. But what’s it matter!’ said he with great impatience.
‘It’s most important,’ I replied rather coldly.
‘Not at all!’ said he. ‘Futurism is good. It is all right.’
‘Not too bad,’ said I. ‘It has its points. But you Wops insist too much on the Machine. You’re always on about these driving-belts, you are always exploding about internal combustion. We’ve had machines here in England for a donkey’s years. They’re no novelty to us.’

For those who view Vorticism simply as the English counterpart of Futurism—a precursor, perhaps, to today’s Anglo-Futurist movement—the tension revealed in this encounter between the founders of Europe’s leading avant-gardes should be illuminating. Their contretemps is all the more notable given the ostensible similarities between the two: both broke with tradition, both were preoccupied with the emergent machinic aesthetics of contemporary life, and as artists, both acted as “primitive mercenaries in the modern world”, capturing the “machinery, factories, new and vaster buildings”, “arsenals, and shipyards” on their canvases with the same savage force as a Magdalenian cave-artist in the Dordogne. Yet it was, in fact, as an act of secession from Futurism that Vorticism established its identity. While Lewis, like Marinetti, demanded that art be “organic with its time,” Vorticism’s aesthetic philosophy—in contrast to Futurism’s hot-blooded, Latin, and “feverish” bluster about the dynamism of modern life (speed, war, and technology)—was immobile, hard-edged, cold-blooded, and ‘Northern.’ Its primitiveness was ‘detached.’ Whereas Futurism felt the machine age “from within”, Vorticist art regarded its dynamism from the “outside, critically”—think Troilus and Cressida compared to The Iliad.

Vorticism’s “rebels of the North”, Lewis insisted, were a “diametrically opposed species” to the Futurists of the South. But no doubt because of its more austere character, Vorticism failed to secure the same influential legacy as its Mediterranean rival, becoming what Brian Sewell called “in the history of Western Art, no more than a hapless rowing-boat between Cubism and Futurism, the Scylla and Charybdis of the day”. In its day, however, Vorticism steered a decisive course between the ‘errors’ of its continental contemporaries, eschewing not only the unbridled esuberanza of Futurism’s techno-optimism but also the passivity and ‘deadness’ of Cubist abstractionism. Despite Cubism’s claim to the contrary, Lewis accused the Parisian movement of nature-copyism, critiquing Picasso as being a “miniature naturalistic sculptor of the vast natures-morte of modern life,” remarking that “however musical or vegetarian a man may be… his life is not spent exclusively amongst apples and mandolines”. The Vorticist manifesto, BLAST, derided Cubism’s still-lifes as being “a sort of machinery… machines without a purpose,” whose ‘naturalism’ enslaved the artist to the already existent ‘contrivances’ of the material world, the experience of which the Cubists merely sought to “reproduce” and “imitate like children”—he (Picasso), Lewis writes, “no longer so much interprets, as definitely MAKES, nature (and ‘DEAD’ nature at that).”

The ‘muscular dynamism’ of Futurism, with its rhythmic repetitions, blurring, and ‘lines of force’ (linee forze), thus served as an extremely important counterpoint and catalyst for Lewis, suggesting a model for a more active engagement with industrial life than that found in Cubism’s merely decorative modernism—a visual language that could explore the narrative possibilities of art in the machine age, rather than being a mere pasticheur of it. The converse problem with Futurism, as Lewis saw it, was its uncritical enthusiasm for the ‘melodrama of modernity’, and he characterised the “Futuristic gush” over speed and machinery as rendering the Latins the “most romantic and sentimental ‘moderns’ to be found”. BLAST went further, ridiculing the “Ginos of the Future” for their Automobilist pictures—with their careful choice of “motor omnibuses, cars, lifes, aeoplanes, etc.,”—as being too “picturesque, melodramatic and spectacular”, besides being “undigested” and (like Cubism) “naturalistic to a fault”. Futurism was, to use a later phrase of Lewis’s, a “fanatic naturalism”.

Ugo Giannattasio: Senza titolo, 1920

The ‘nightmare of the naturalistic method’
Lewis’s disparagement of Futurism as “impressionism up-to-date”, a heightened form of naturalism, echoes the criticism made by his acquaintance, T. E. Hulme, who dismissed the Futurist style as a mere “reflection” of the mechanical environment (there is no contradiction here: as the German psychologist, Theodor Lipps, observed in Ästhetik, mechanical forces are natural forces). In Hulme’s terminology—’borrowed’ from Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraktion und Einfühlung—Futurism was thus an extension of the vital or ‘empathetic’ art of Western Hellenic culture and the Renaissance, a naturalistic art expressing a worldview fundamentally opposed to the geometrical or abstract aesthetics of archaic cultures (principally Egyptian, Byzantine, and Oriental, but also seen—to a less profound degree—in Nordic pre-Renaissance art, a.k.a nordische Vorrenaissancekunst).

Vital art, characterised by its organic, emotional, and fluid qualities, sprang from a “more intimate feeling towards the world”, a “happy pantheistic relationship of confidence” between man and the flux of the “phenomena of the external world.” It corresponds to (i.e., results from and expresses) a confident attitude of continuity, which Hulme believed to be the foundation of humanism, insomuch as humanism regards progress as “an inevitable constituent of reality itself”, as “independent in its extent and performance as God”. Whereas the urge towards abstraction is the outcome of a “great inner unrest” provoked in man by the transient phenomena of the outside world—operating as it were from a principle of discontinuity—the belief in continuity signifies complete confidence in the external world, an uncomplicated sense of belonging in the constant flux of nature. Tending to flourish in temperate and agreeable climes, such confidence fosters a feeling of ’empathy’ that gives rise to mimetic representation and “world-revering naturalism”: as the artist delights in recreating the soft, vital forms of existing things, he resorts to the use of perspective and natural, sensual shapes.

It is little wonder Lewis believed the seeds of the “naturalist mistakes” were to be found “precisely in Greece,” where this confidence led to a Classical style whose beauty was living and organic, into which the need for empathy—unimpeded by anxieties regarding the outer world—could freely flow. Naturalism, however, as Worringer well understood, must be clearly distinguished from mere imitation of the natural world. Naturalism is, yes, the approximation to the “organic and true to life,” but not because the artist wishes to depict a natural object in its materiality faithfully, nor because he desires to give an illusion of a living object, but because his feeling for the “beauty of organic form that is true to life” has been stirred, and he seeks to give expression to this feeling. In other words, it is the happiness of the dynamic and organically alive—rather than that of ‘truth to life’—that has striven after. For the Hellenic naturalist, as later for the Futurist, art is objectified self-enjoyment.

This principle, for Worringer and Lipps, crystallises the essence of empathetic art. To enjoy aesthetically means to enjoy oneself in a sensuous object distinct from oneself, to empathise oneself into it, and what the artist emphasises into it is quite generally ‘life’ (energy, striving, and accomplishing—in a word, activity). This is why Hulme reasons that naturalistic or impressionistic art necessarily partakes of the flux—in the ephemerality and disorder of the natural world. What Hulme means by this, and by consequently dubbing Futurism the “last efflorescence of Impressionism”, is encapsulated in a passage from the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting:

The gesture which we would reproduce on canvas shall no longer be a fixed moment in universal dynamism… it shall simply be the dynamic sensation itself.

…a principle visualised in works such as Balla’s Speeding Automobile, Severini’s Blue Dancer or Boccioni’s Dynamism of a Football Player. For the Futurist, everything concrete is in fact, process; everything is involved in everything else (Alfred North Whitehead called this ‘organic mechanism’). Simply put, Futurism differed from Impressionism in emphasis only: whereas Impressionists analyzed color to capture the elusive qualities of light, Futurists examined motion to capture moving forms. Akin, however, to the naturalists of Worringer’s Classical-Hellenic tradition, the Futurists did not seek merely to imitate the new nature of the dynamic machine world. Acting as nature’s amplificationists, their objective was to project the lines and forms of the organically vital, the euphony of its rhythm—in fact, its entire inward being—outward, to “furnish in every creation a theatre for the free, unimpeded activation of one’s own sense of life”—thus allowing the spectator to experience gratification through the mysterious dynamism of organic form, in which one could enjoy one’s own organism more intensely. Given Lewis’s aversion to the use of “infantile or immature life” in art and his despisal of ‘the fluid’, it is little surprise that, several months after Hulme’s lecture, BLAST declared: “We are not Naturalists, Impressionists or Futurists (the latest form of Impressionism).”

Endnotes & References

The post Vorticism: The original Anglo-Futurism? Part I appeared first on The Miskatonian.

This paper was presented at the “Filibusters in Birmingham” conference on Wyndham Lewis,

University of Birmingham, United Kingdom, on 22^nd June 2023.

In 1956, Colin Wilson published The Outsider, an overnight literary sensation that saw the 24-year-old autodidact hailed as a prodigy and as Britain’s first home-grown existentialist. Wilson’s book, lauded by critics such as Edith Sitwell, Cyril Connolly, and Philip Toynbee, examined the “sickness of the twentieth century” through the works of cultural and literary “outsiders”, including Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, T. E. Lawrence, Shaw, Hemingway, van Gogh, Blake, and T.E. Hulme.  According to Wilson, such Outsiders were symptoms of a declining society, appearing like pimples on a dying civilization, whose alleged abnormalities represented attempts to manufacture heroism in an unheroic age.  The Outsider, in short, was a man who, for any reason at all, felt himself “lonely in the crowd of the second-rate.”[1]

Wilson sent a copy of his debut to T.S. Eliot, who responded kindly but said it was a pity to have left Wyndham Lewis out of the book, for Lewis was surely the “archetypal outsider.”[2] Wilson had elsewhere described an Outsider as “primarily a critic”, and said that the critic could even be a prophet if he cared deeply enough about his criticism.[3]  Lewis also believed there was nothing more valuable in a nation than the critic, whom he called the “sincere upside-down man”.[4]  “I have moved outside,” Lewis declared in 1927, becoming, in his “solitary schism”, a self-appointed critic of a society hostile to reason and art.[5]  Lewis defined Criticism as the introduction of light into a dark place; “Outsideness” being “where the light is”.[6] Given such views, it is no surprise Wilson made up for omitting Lewis from The Outsider, albeit 33 years later, in an excellent but sadly neglected essay called “Wyndham Lewis: A Refracted Talent?”.  To the good fortune of Wilson and Lewis scholars alike, a copy survives in the British Library archives.

Before Eliot’s letter, fate had brought the Outsider and the Enemy tantalizingly close together.  Despite their disparate backgrounds—Wilson being born in working-class Leicester in 1931, and Lewis on his father’s yacht off the coast of Nova Scotia in 1882—by 1956, they were living just a few streets apart in Notting Hill Gate.  Wilson made several attempts to get to grips with Lewis during this period, but each time to no avail.  Ezra Pound’s letters had led him to read Tarr (Lewis’s modernist debut novel), hoping to find another Ulysses, which Wilson described as the bible of his teens.  But he gave up after fifty pages, finding the book too trivial and personal for his tastes.  He preferred Lewis’s critical work, particularly Paleface and Time and Western Man.  Despite finding Lewis’s critiques of Joyce in the latter patronizing and schoolmasterly, Wilson found himself involuntarily chuckling.  Lewis had put his finger on the basic weakness of Ulysses: the attempt to build Stephen up into a kind of intellectual Superman, without ever offering to show the reader his intellectual credentials.  Wilson had intuitively felt this when he read Ulysses as a teenager but had forgotten about it in his general admiration of the book.  Now, Lewis revived the old distrust.

Following Wilson’s success with The Outsider, the playwright Ashley Dukes, who ran the Dionysus, a wine club in the Mercury Theatre and knew Lewis well, attempted to set up a meeting.  But Wilson hesitated: what was the point of meeting Lewis if he couldn’t yet appreciate his work?  By this time, Wilson was struggling through Lewis’s late-career masterpiece, 1955’s The Human Age, which, while praised by Hugh Kenner as a distinctive combination of Swift and Milton, [7]  Wilson instead likened it to a “mediaeval castle,” impossible to get into and quite possibly “not worth the effort.”[8]  When Lewis died in March 1957, Wilson regretted his reticence about arranging a meeting. There was something about Lewis that intrigued him.  Why had he interested Eliot so much? _

The question became more pertinent six months later when Wilson suddenly found himself in a position of critical neglect as grievous as Lewis’s.  The publication of 1957’s Religion and the Rebel was met with a violent critical backlash; the same London literati who lauded The Outsider savaging its sequel as “half-baked Nietzsche” and a “vulgarised rubbish-bin.”[9]  Overnight, it seemed, the philosopher-elect of the angry young men had become a working-class upstart who had gotten above his station.  Wilson felt this left his reputation in an even worse state than Lewis’s: whereas Lewis was still read by a small audience, including distinguished contemporaries such as Eliot, Yeats, and Roy Campbell, Wilson seemed to have no audience at all (although, in later years, everyone from David Bowie to Hunter S Thompson— even Colonel Gaddafi— would list The Outsider among their favourite books).  Wilson left London for Cornwall, hoping to escape the hostile press, fulfilling Lewis’s observation that “the writer does not ‘escape’ or flee from the world of men in general,” he is most likely “driven from it.”[10]

When Wilson next encountered Lewis’s work—via E.W.F. Tomlin’s 1969 prose anthology—he found he had acquired a new feeling of identification with Lewis.  As Eliot had suggested, here indeed was a true outsider, out of step with his time and equally unsympathetic to the assumptions his contemporaries took for granted, firing out book after book and polemic after polemic against the death drive of Western Society.  Lewis’s attack on the anti-human nihilism emanating from modern philosophy, physics, commerce, and social engineering (which conspires to obliterate the human element by sensuality on one end of the spectrum and sheer abstraction on the other) resonated with Wilson’s conviction that a civilization given over to scientific humanism, abstract philosophy, and material comfort was losing what little sense of purpose it had left.[11]  Recalling Eliot’s letter, and still curious as to whether this fellow Solitary Outlaw was an important writer, Wilson decided to settle the matter by writing an essay purely for fun, delivering his opinions as if “sitting over a glass of wine with friends”[12].

As a result, Wilsons’s essay on Lewis is a lively example of Existential Criticism, an original conception of Wilson’s which advocates that a writer’s work be judged on what he has to say rather than how he says it.  William James once wrote that “a man’s vision is the great fact about him”, and Existential Criticism seeks to examine that vision in a writer, to see how much of reality it incorporates or, conversely, determine how far the writer’s attitude to life is parochial or based upon some temperamental defect of perspective.[13]

Wilson begins by criticizing Lewis on this score, characterizing the satire of early stories such as Tarr and Cantleman’s Spring Mate as reading like a “savage, humourless Shaw.”  He finds that both works—indeed most of Lewis’s writings—present the “outsider artist” as a hero, and that, like Joyce, Lewis takes this artist very seriously—almost immaturely so.  (Wilson suggests that the penetration of Lewis’s digs at Stephen Dedalus springs from self-knowledge).  Tarr and Cantleman, he argues, are self-absorbed works, obsessed with the trivial and personal, much in the manner of a D. H. Lawrence novel or Ulysses, yet without the redeeming flights into impersonality such works take.  If Joyce was a “thin-skinned Irishman who disciplined himself into greatness,” and Lawrence a “thin-skinned Englishman who occasionally forgot himself enough to be great”, then Wyndham Lewis, Wilson argues, never forgets himself for a moment.[14]

This claim that Lewis is a solipsistic writer is not without precedent in Lewisian criticism. Other more hostile commentators, such as Stephen Spender and Northrop Frye, have expressed similar sentiments, and even Marshall McLuhan, a sympathetic reader, interpreted Lewis as a Gnostic Neo-Platonist, a Manichaean rejecter of the material world.[15]  Lewisian maxims like “art is the expression of a colossal preference” and “what is genius but an excess of individuality?” could, taken out of context, lend credence to this reasoning.[16]  But Lewis’s theory of art does not imply that externality is either subjective or unknowable.  Rather, he explicitly sides with the concrete and ‘material’ world, a ‘world of common-sense’ as opposed to the ‘mental’ world, and ‘dogmatically’ declares himself for the Great Without.  As Lewis writes in “Prevalent Design”, the mind may play ‘its searchlight on the objective world’ as illumination, but it is not the only existing reality.[17]  Lewis’s nuanced argument, briefly summarised, is that without the intellective shaping force of genius, the significance of the objective world remains mere potential, trapped within its own materiality. By engaging this objective world with his consciousness, the artist enables it to achieve aesthetic significance, his selfhood acting as a catalyst.  “Reality,” Lewis concludes, “is in the artist, the image only in life.”[18]

So far, Lewis’s position seems to align with Wilson’s thesis in The Craft of the Novel that art is fundamentally the shaping of material provided by the external world— the ‘organisation of nothing’ as Lewis put it.[19] Wilson further agrees that writers need a clear self-image to undertake this artistic shaping; without a strong sense of individuality, writers merely reflect the surface of reality, becoming describers rather than explainers.  In Lewis’s terminology, this private ego necessary for the creation of art is the not-self: a pure, non-personal intellect (distinct from the Self he refers to elsewhere as a ‘loathsome deformity’ contracted through indiscriminate mingling with mass man).[20]  For Wilson, however, cultivating a self-image is only a writer’s first step.  The great novels are not mirrors held inwardly to the artist’s heart but wide-angle mirrors that make the reader aware of his freedom, that liberate the human imagination and give man a glimpse of what he could become.  In Shaw’s words, art may be a magic mirror which enables man to see his soul, but beyond that, it has a more useful function: to reveal the future direction of human evolution.

Despite Lewis perfecting a powerful self-image earlier than most, Wilson believes his fiction never attained this final step of detachment.  Works like Cantleman and Tarr do not reach out to reality but instead exist in a vacuum of their own making.  This might give them an artistic unity and intensity, but the world reflected in a small mirror soon gets monotonous and suffocating.  Wilson contends that Lewis’ contemporaries find release from such close-upness by their symbols of meaning, be this religion for Eliot, war and courage for Hemingway, or the mystery of sex for D. H. Lawrence.  By juxtaposing such symbols of meaning with the world of immediacy, their novels avoid the insularity that plagues Lewis’s works, becoming universal as well as particular.  But Lewis, Wilsons says, seems to find sex as boring and irritating as he found everything else.  And as for war, Anthony Burgess once cruelly caricatured Lewis’s reflections in Blasting and Bombardiering as reading like a “gor-blimied police report”—“Allo-allo-allo-what’s-all-this-‘ere to the intellectual and the exquisite painter”.[21][22]  Wilson speculates that lacking the capacity for such abandonment of the self was Lewis’s reason for his fateful turn to politics as his form of objectivity.  Indeed, the Canadian essayist Bruce Powe speculated that Lewis’s total dedication to reading intellectually, without feeling or intuition, was partially responsible for his initial misreading of Hitler as a potential ally against a decaying society.[1] [23]

After highlighting solipsism and artistic pessimism as potential flaws in Lewis’s vision, Wilson discusses how they might have developed and their effect on Lewis’s value as a writer.  He believes Lewis was striving to achieve a post-impressionist revolution in prose, to transmute the Cubist craving for beauty through abstraction into text. Wilson defines this as a romantic urge, a turning away from the real world and towards a misty ideal one.  This is made clear by the following quotes from “Inferior Religions”:

“Beauty is an icy douche of ease and happiness at something suggesting perfect conditions for an organism… Beauty Is an immense predilection, a perfect conviction of the desirability of a certain thing… “[24]

Wilson claims that this formulation could have come from Yeats or even Walter Pater, a far cry from T. E. Hulme’s classicism with which Lewis is usually associated.  But Wilson makes an interesting distinction here: Hulme’s new Classicism never fully materialised, at least not in the way we like to think of it.  All that happened was that the emotional romanticism of the 18th century gave way to the intellectual romanticism of Proust, Ulysses, The Waste Land or Musil’s Man Without Qualities.  Only the likes of H.G. Wells and G.K. Chesterton truly dispensed with romantic idealism by turning squarely back to human reality, immersing themselves in socialism or Religion.  Wilson says Lewis glimpsed another vision, a third way, in which the ideal beauty of the Romantics could be achieved not by “flying up into the eternal gases” [25], but through a cold, precise, intellectual art, gleaming like the snows of the Himalayas – a painter’s “heaven of exterior forms”, in Lewis’s words. [26]  This does not sound like much of an existential defect; in fact, it is rather close to the worldview of Bernard Shaw – a Wilsonian hero – who rejected romantic idealism in favour of a discriminating idealism.  Discriminating idealism is just what Wilson perceives in Lewis’s paintings; their determined clarity, their quality of precision and coolness is said to remind one of Blake or, indeed, Shaw’s plays.

Thus, in Wilson’s account, a distinction develops between Lewis the painter, who remains alive and fresh; and Lewis the author, who was always somehow stillborn.  Wilson contends that Lewis’s effortless mastery as a painter failed to translate into prose for one key reason: painting can survive a lack of purpose— it deals in visual effects and can still be great even if the worldview of its creator is ambiguous.  But writing deals with ideas and cannot survive the same ambiguity.  Prose must have a positive impetus, a self-image and a purpose; satire alone is not enough.  Lewis may paint like that other great Outsider, Blake, but he is said to write with the technique of a Daumier.  Wilson feels this is a negative trait, and that Lewis places himself above his characters for the sake of lacerating them— only in 1937’s The Revenge for Love does one sense any sympathy between Lewis and his protagonist.  So where War and Peace feels bigger than Tolstoy personally, in The Apes Of God, we are never allowed to forget for one second that it is Lewis holding the brush, pulling the strings of his puppets.  The impression of extreme slowness in that book derives from such careful brushwork, but—as Anthony Burgess points out— we should be looking at the results of this virtuosity, not being asked to admire the process.[27]  Satire should, pardon the pun, be Swift.

Burgess reasoned that writers without painting talent produce the best word-pictures; they learn the trick of taking a quick photograph while time is off its guard.  Joyce’s precise technique of photographing his characters through words, for example, makes the reader blend with his descriptions, whereas Lewis constantly interjects himself as though trying to dazzle the reader with verbal brilliance, never allowing the object to appear in its own right.  This, Wilson says, creates a contradiction between Lewis’s impressive, even “monumental”, technique and his “rather vague, boring characters”.  This same miscalculation of effect was picked up on by Burgess, who said that the object of Lewis’s satire was often insufficient for the massive apparatus that he set into motion for its devastation; take, for example, the dabblers, dilettantes and racketeers of the late 1920s London art world, the targets of The Apes of God, most of whom are now forgotten.  Even Eliot said Lewis often squandered his genius for invective upon objects that “seem unworthy of his artillery” to everyone but himself, squandering his talent in ‘howitzers against card houses’.[28]  This metaphorical reference to Lewis’s service with the Royal Garrison Artillery during World War One emphasises Eliot’s implication that Lewis was perhaps delusional in his satirical targets, that his hatreds were a part of him because he understood nothing of what went on outside his own mind.

Wilson concludes that all such “miscalculations of effect” in Lewis’s writings are rooted in his solipsistic view of art, as encapsulated by the following quote from Blast 2:

There is Yourself: and there is the Exterior World, that fat mass you browse on.  You knead it into an amorphous imitation of yourself inside yourself.”[29]

Here Lewis is saying that the artist takes material from the exterior world, mentally digests it, and recreates the exterior world in his own image.  The self that emerges in the resultant work of art reflects the artist’s unique way of seeing reality. But in creating this image, the artist also, in a sense, creates himself (as Shaw’s He-Ancient says in Back to Methuselah: “You can create nothing but yourself”)[30].  But Wilson insists this is only the first step: Tolstoy or Shakespeare’s greatness depended on them not kneading the world in their image, but ultimately trying to get rid of “themselves” from their work, becoming more like a mirror or a magnifying glass.  The novelist’s aim is not only to create himself, to grasp his own purpose, but to enable the reader to understand himself and grasp his purpose too.  Therefore, when a great author has achieved a clear self-image, he may prefer to keep it carefully out of his work: Flaubert’s image is nowhere present in Madame Bovary, for example, but Madame Bovary could not have been created by a man without a powerful self-image.

Joyce presents an interesting comparison here to Lewis: he created a clear self-image, but after Ulysses, neglected to develop a direction, or rather, chose a direction that turned back on itself.  And so, Wilson says, his last book, Finnegan’s Wake, ended as little more than an “interesting rag-bag of linguistic experiments.”[31]  The issue is that Joyce, like Lewis, had only one basic theme: himself. Or, to put it more charitably, the conflict between the artist-intellectual and materialistic society.  Wilson speculates whether the character of the struggling painter in The Revenge For Love, Victor Stamp, is a partial admission by Lewis of this “parochial” defect.  In desperation, Victor decides to forego his usual mannerisms and paint something which would remind him least of Victor Stamp.  It still does not sell, because it is old-fashioned.  But old or new-fashioned, Victor never attempts to say anything, he – like Lewis – fails to recognise that the novel is not self-expression but a reaching out towards reality.

We must pause briefly to register the objection that has doubtless sprung to mind, at least to reader’s familiar with Lewis, namely that Lewis did know that the root of great art is the impersonal and the objective; moreover, he was a paragon of the ‘lone external viewpoint’, the champion of the detached observer.[32]  He attacks solipsism in The Art of Being Ruled, writing that “ideas of beauty, of a god, or of love, depend severally on separation and differentiation” and likens Freudian self-absorption the foolishness of “the savage who ate his god to procure divinity”[33].  By 1952’s The Writer and the Absolute, Lewis even bemusedly found himself to be ‘at last’ ‘on the side of the majority’ in rejecting the nihilism of Existential thinkers who vainly cut themselves off from the phenomenal world and “[flung] themselves to the floor” to contemplate their “echoless vacuity”.[34]  Yet we may argue that the clearest contradiction to Wilson’s interpretation is in The Letters Of Wyndham Lewis, where Lewis opposes the “crushing of the notion of the subject” and unequivocally states a belief in a sense of objective value which sees “the answer is there all the time; we ‘discover’ it”.[35]

Wilson is, however, too perceptive a critic not to have anticipated this response; he explains the above as merely demonstrating Lewis’s “Platonic sense of reality”.  This interpretation is the string with which he binds together his varying conclusions regarding Lewis’s merits and defects.  On the one hand, Lewis’s belief in a world of timeless ideals makes him an excellent critic of modern society, especially of the philosophies of time in Spengler and Marx, and in his merciless dismantling of imperfect idealisms – Lawrence, Hemingway, Orwell, Sartre, Malraux – in short, any kind of romanticism that is the opposite of the real.  But, on the other hand, Lewis’s Platonic nature is said to lead him into an artistic pessimism, a sense that the real world is corrupt and disjointed, and the artist must remain true to his ideal world.

As a painter, Lewis may have stumbled on Shaw’s trick of uniting the irreconcilable opposites of romanticism and anti-romanticism (this is especially evident in Lewis’s late-career paintings, such as 1942’s Homage to Etty, where the bathers were initially sketched as mechanistic figures, onto which Lewis grafted his newly-flowing lines).  But as a writer, Wilson argues, Lewis’s Platonism led him into a “life-denying pessimism”, and he spent more energy denouncing the world than expressing with discriminating idealism that “perfect conviction of the desirability of a certain thing”.  (This, one could respond, is only half true: Lewis’s art may be a devastating critique of material existence as European culture has shaped it, but it is not intrinsically nihilist).  As if unfavourably comparing Lewis to Shaw wasn’t enough, Wilson concludes by noting how much he has in common with George Orwell.  Both are said to be tough-minded and honest cultural critics, but who wrote “hysterical” and “bad” novels because of this same artistic pessimism, a pessimism out of which “no vital creation can spring”.[36]

With self-destructive determination, Wilson concludes, Lewis persisted in trying to create a prose equivalent of cubist painting, complete with its aesthetic theory and Platonic metaphysics.  His conclusion accords with Anthony Burgess’s belief that if Lewis had not been so good a painter, he would not have formulated the literary theory he did.  The theory came first, the books after, and that, Burgess says, “is where the trouble starts”.  Painting is, of course, spatial: emptiness is filled with solid objects that the observer instantaneously views.  But the art of the novel is temporal, as is the art of music.  Prose needs pacing. And pictorialism in fiction suppresses the narrative flow.  Wilson feels that Lewis tacitly admits this in one of his final books, 1954’s The Demon of Progress in the Arts.  There Lewis claims that he almost—almost—became a victim of artistic extremism at the outset of his career.  Fortunately, Lewis reflects, “the disease did not have time to mature with me.”  For another scourge, war, intervened, saving him from the irrational attempt to transmute the art of painting into music, to “substitute for the most naturally concrete of the arts the most inevitably abstract.”  But why this reference to music? No one was ever less musical than Lewis. It seems he was about to say “into prose” but stopped himself.  For that would not have been true.  The fact is, Wilson argues, Lewis did not escape the disease; he did try to transmute the concrete art of painting into a time medium, into prose.  When he realised the impossibility of this, it was too late.   Alas, Wilson’s final judgement is that Lewis was less the “enemy of the stars” than of himself.

Such an atypical interpretation of Lewis is highly contentious, but even if one disagrees with Wilson’s answers, his essay leaves us with better questions than we arrived with – surely the true mark of literary criticism. He intended for the piece to be “the kind of thing I would want to read if I was curious about Lewis” and on this count, he has succeeded.  It is a shame, however, that the essay doesn’t focus more on the sympathies between Lewisian and Wilsonian themes. Lewis’s aforementioned critique of existentialism—he once wrote that “Sartre’s novels are jokes about Freedom”—is the perfect foil for Wilson’s ‘New Existentialism’, which Wilson considered a corrective against Absurdism.[37]  Both writers also have a refreshingly intuitive approach to literary criticism, finding similar flaws, for example, in Hemingway’s characters.  Wilson says they know who they are, not what they want to become, just as Lewis writes, “they are invariably the kind of people to whom things are done, who are the passive (and rather puzzled) guinea-pig type – as remote as it is possible to be… from Nietzsche’s ‘super’ type.”[38]  Lewis, however, believes this is not a shortcoming in a work of art, it “defines it merely”, meaning “the work in question is classifiable as lyrical”.  To put this another way, Lewis allows a novel to be superior from a literary standpoint, even if it is existentially lacking.  In the final analysis, Wilson does not afford Lewis the same generosity.

The new avenues of thought opened by this essay make it a double pity that Outsider and Enemy never met, especially given that they once lived just a few hundred yards from each other. One senses that they had more in common than this essay suggests and could have found common ground over their similar exclusion by the establishment. But in place of critical honour, both had the outside.  Tales of Lewis’s London flat, crammed with paintings and drafts, and of Wilson’s hermitage in Cornwall, with its rooms and sheds bulging with 30,000 books, serve as testaments to the last literates of a post-literate age—two writers who removed themselves from the crowd, not in a snobbish withdrawal, but, as Lewis put it, “a going aside for the purpose of work.”[39]  When F. R. Leavis derided the Sitwells as belonging to the history of publicity, not the history of literature, we may conclude that no two writers embodied the reverse equation more than Colin Wilson and Wyndham Lewis.[40]

[1] Lewis’s reputation never recovered from the expression of this view in 1931’s Hitler.

[1] Colin Wilson, Religion and the Rebel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), p.1

[2] Colin Wilson. Existentially Speaking: Essays on the Philosophy and Literature (San Bernardino: Borgo Press, 1989), p. 83

[3] Colin Wilson, The Outsider (London: Pan Books, p. 246, 1963)

[4] Wyndham Lewis, Enemy Salvoes: Selected Literary Criticism (New York, Barnes & Noble Books, 1976), p. 180

[5] Wyndham Lewis, Enemy Salvoes: Selected Literary Criticism (New York, Barnes & Noble Books, 1976), pp. 22-23

[6] Wyndham Lewis, Rude Assignment (Santa Barbara, Black Sparrow Press, 1984,) p. 77

[7] Hugh Kenner, ‘The Devil and Wyndham Lewis’, in Gnomon: Essays on Contemporary Literature (New York: McDowell-Obolensky, 1958) p. 215

[8] Ibid, p. 89

[9] Harry Ritchie, ‘Look back in wonder’, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/aug/12/society [Accessed June 3rd 2023]

[10] Wyndham Lewis, Rude Assignment (Santa Barbara, Black Sparrow Press, 1984,) p.29

[11] Marshall McLuhan, ‘Nihilism Exposed’ Renascence, 8.2 (1955), pp. 97–9.

[12] Colin Wilson, Existentially Speaking: Essays on the Philosophy and Literature, (San Bernardino: Borgo Press, 1989, p. 10)

[13] William James. A Pluralistic Universe (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1977), p. 14

[14] Colin Wilson. Existentially Speaking: Essays on the Philosophy and Literature, (San Bernardino: Borgo Press, 1989, p. 83

[15] Marshall McLuhan, ‘Nihilism Exposed’ Renascence, 8.2 (1955), pp. 97–9.

[16] Wyndham Lewis, Doom of Youth (London: Chatto & Windus, 1932)

[17] Wyndham Lewis, ” Prevalent Design,” in Wyndham Lewis on Art: Collected Writings, 1913-1956, ed. Walter Michel and C. J. Fox (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969), p. 123

[18] Wyndham Lewis, Blast 1 (London: John Lane, 1914), p. 135

[19] Colin Wilson, The Craft of the Novel, (Bath: Ashgrove Press Limited, 1990)

[20] Wyndham Lewis, Blast 1 (London: John Lane, 1914), p.71

[21] Wyndham Lewis, Blasting & Bombardiering, (California, University of California Press, 1967).

[22] Anthony Burgess, ‘Gun and Pen’, (1967)

[23] Bruce Powe, The Solitary Outlaw (Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1987)

[24] Wyndham Lewis, The Wild Body (London: Chatto & Windus, 1927), p. 241

[25] T. E. Hulme, Romanticism and classicism, Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, (Oxfordshire: Routledge, Trench, Trubner & Co Ltd, 1924,) p. 120

[26] Wyndam Lewis, Time and Western Man, (London: Chatto & Windus, 1927,) p. 443

[27] Anthony Burgess, Urgent Copy: Literary Studies, (London: Jonathan Cape, 1968)

[28] T. S. Eliot, Charles Whibley: A Memoir, The English Association Pamphlet series, (London: Oxford University Press, 1931), pp. 4-8

[29] Wyndham Lewis, Blast 2, (London: John Lane, 1915,) p.91

[30] Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah Metabiological Pentateuch (London: Constable and Company, 1921)

[31] Colin Wilson, The Craft of the Novel, (Bath: Ashgrove Press Limited, 1990), p.132

[32] E.W.F. Tomlin, ed., Wyndham Lewis: An Anthology of his Prose (London: Methuen, 1969,) p. 18

[33] Wyndham Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled (London: Chatto & Windus, 1927,) p.22

[34] Wyndham Lewis, The Writer and the Absolute, 1952

[35] Wyndham Lewis and W.K. Rose, The Letters of Wyndham Lewis (London: Methuen, 1963), pp. 155, 37

[36] Colin Wilson. Existentially Speaking: Essays on the Philosophy and Literature, (San Bernardino: Borgo Press, 1989, p. 103)

[37] Wyndham Lewis, The Writer and the Absolute, (London: Methuen, 1952,) p.26

[38] Wyndham Lewis, The Writer and the Absolute, (London: Methuen, 1952,) p.86

[39] Wyndham Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled (London: Chatto & Windus, 1927,) p.373

[40] F.R. Leavis, New Bearings in English Poetry, (Chatto & Windus, 1971)

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