“A chronic independence of mind is unpardonable in any age; in our own it has certainly been safer to praise independence than to exemplify it.”
Bracing
words from one of literature’s inveterate outsiders, English poet and critic C.H.
Sisson (1914-2003). He’s writing about another non-aligned figure, Wyndham
Lewis. Sisson prizes Lewis, his fiction, polemics and paintings. It must be
close to half a century since I first tried reading Lewis’ work – Self Condemned, a novel published in
1954. I failed. Periodically I’ve renewed the effort with The Apes of Gods, Time and Western
Man, scattered nonfiction, The
Revenge for Love. I can’t think of another writer whose work has so often defied my efforts. When I say I find most of Lewis unreadable, I’m being strictly honest.
Hell, I’ve read Finnegans Wake but can’t get any purchase on Lewis and I’m not even talking about such gems in his bibliography as “The Jews, Are They Human?” and “The Hitler Cult and How it Will End,” both published in that annus horribilis 1939. Lewis was one of the Literary Modernist “Men of 1914,” along with Joyce, Eliot and Pound. Pound is, on occasion, readable, but not by me, and Lewis has repeatedly defeated me.
In his essay
“Ernst Mach Max Ernest” (The Geography of
the Imagination, 1981), writing of “the styles I find most useful to study”
(Hugh Kenner, Mandelstam, Beckett, Wyndham Lewis, Pound, Charles Doughty), Guy Davenport
writes: “All of these are writers who do not waste a word, who condense, pare
down, and proceed with daring synapses.” And yet I find Lewis' prose clunky and prolix.
Literary
affinities are complicated. I owe half my education to Davenport but I can’t
swallow his romance with Lewis and Pound. The same goes for Sisson. And Hugh Kenner,
whose book on Lewis I’ve read. No critic speaks always and unequivocally for me. We have
to read even criticism critically. Two sentences after the passage quoted above,
Sisson writes:
“The reading public at large is always more aware of reputations than of merits; a critic who combines a clear eye for merits with a knowledge of the mechanics of literary reputation is sure to be in trouble.”
[Sisson’s essay served as the introduction to Enemy Salvoes: Selected Literary Criticism by Wyndham Lewis (ed. C.J. Fox, Vision Press, 1977) and was collected in Sisson’s own The Avoidance of Literature: Collected Essays (Carcanet, 1978) and in In Two Minds: Guesses at Other Writers (Carcanet, 1990).]
3 comments:
The early Pound poetry is quite readable and some astoundingly good. I gave up trying to read the later stuff and turned instead to Kenner's The Pound Era.
You've forgotten T.S. Eliot and Geoffrey Grigson, both of whom proclaimed Lewis's doubtful genius. I can't help but wonder if Lewis, Sisson, Grigson and Davenport wouldn't have given Anecdotal Evidence short shrift if they could.
I was slightly astonished to see The Apes of God back in print thirty years ago. It is very long, and I don't know that it would repay re-reading. I will say that I have unconsciously plagiarized a passage in it discussing how the prosperous and trendy will move in on the low-rent districts that artists and writer have made their own. I didn't think that The Self-Condemned was difficult to read. To like, perhaps.
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