The Outsider and The Enemy

The Outsider and The Enemy: Colin Wilson on Wyndham Lewis

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)