There is really no middle ground in discussions of Wyndham Lewis’s significance and qualities as an artist. Some studies view him as a neglected but pivotal figure in the development of European modernism, while other, more hostile critiques focus on his self-imposed isolation, extremism, and elliptical relationship to the program of the modern movement. Paul Edwards’s book belongs in the former camp.

Lewis, undoubtedly, was a unique and exceptional cultural figure in the first half of the twentieth century. As the progenitor of the Vorticist movement, he introduced a Cubist- and Futurist-inspired aesthetic to the torpid English art world ca. 1914. Immediately after the First World War, he attempted to revive English modernism and to generate a debate encompassing the visual art, philosophical speculation, and social commentary. During the 1930s, Lewis developed his skills as a portrait painter while continuing to experiment in abstract design and to write some of the most provocative fiction of the period. As an expatriate in North America at the outbreak of war in 1939, he attempted to decipher the character of the New World in visual, literary, and critical terms. On his return to England at the end of the war, his weakening eyesight led to fewer visual artworks, but an increase in writing. Upon his death in 1957, he was recognized by a small group of intellectuals as a cultural figure of note.

Controversy, however, stalks the spaces between the lines of this thumbnail biography. Lewis’s neo-Nietzschean persona viewed conflict as a creative dynamic; his associations with peers were consistently fractious. His world-view was perceived as elitist and illiberal, and these characteristics were highlighted in his indictments of feminism, homosexuality, radical politics, and the romanticism of his fellow modernists. Lewis’s espousal of fascism—beginning in 1926 and culminating in a period of intermittent vocal support for Hitler between 1931 and 1937—left him marginalized in the English art world and condemned, in Auden’s words, as “that lonely old volcano of the right.” The later softening of this position, following his stay in North America, did little to reconcile his reputation. Consequently, he remains, at least in part, unforgiven—an influence and talent laid low by dissonant beliefs.

In his book, Paul Edwards asks that we return to the work in order to make our judgments. Specifically, his study examines, in considerable detail, the relationship between Lewis’s visual imagery and his writings as a means to re-evaluate the artist’s reputation. This itself is an ambitious task, as this artist’s output was prodigious. Previous evaluations of the work have been mixed. While Lewis’s associate, the poet T. S. Eliot, called him “the greatest prose master of style of their generation,” the philosopher and critic Anthony Quinton decried him as “the worst writer of English prose of the twentieth century.” The painter Walter Sickert might claim Lewis as “the greatest portraitist of this or any other time,” but Lewis is not commonly cited in surveys of European modernism. Edwards, however, has no reservations regarding the significance of his subject and informs the reader that the book “is written from a conviction that Lewis is of major importance” (1) both as a painter and a writer. Edwards strives to “explain…Lewis’s centrality to modernism” (1), and thereby awards him a due place in the pantheon of great twentieth-century artists.

The book includes detailed exegesis of both Lewis’s written and visual work, sometimes examined together, but more often separately. The study proceeds chronologically, from the early writings, collectively titled “The Wild Body,” to the primitive cubist drawings ca. 1911. Edwards consistently deals with the key philosophical sources of Lewis’s vision. Regarding the early work, the now-familiar triumvirate of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Bergson are cited. This trinity had lifelong resonance for Lewis, though his creative energies were shaped as much in rejection of these figures as in emulation.

Elsewhere, Edwards interprets Lewis’s first significant novel, Tarr, which is said to be “a brilliant and endlessly rewarding invention that establishes Lewis as one of the great modernist innovators” (51). This is followed by discussion of his proto-Vorticist and Vorticist images; Edwards declares the now-lost 1912 work Creation to be “art historically…the first modernist ‘masterpiece’ of British painting” (78). Generally, Edwards is more comfortable analyzing the literary material, especially Lewis’s drama Enemy of the Stars. Vorticism, of course, was fractured by the First World War, and the author correctly views this as a defining moment in Lewis’s development. In many senses his experience of war determined not only the nature of his output in the postwar period, but the substance of his personality and world-view. Besides abstract designs, Lewis painted many portraits during the postwar years. His subjects were usually that group of elect intellectuals he viewed as his peers, notably James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. Edwards declares that “the drawings of Joyce…are brilliant examples of Lewis’s ability to convey volume by outline alone” (247), and that works ca. 1923 “show how brilliantly Lewis was able to translate the precision of his drawing…into the grander scale of the traditional portrait” (249). This lack of a critical distance can become a little disconcerting but it is the measure of the author s stated conviction.

During the middle years of the 1920s, Lewis turned away from painting and developed a corpus of written work collectively termed the “Man of the World” project. Edwards’s analysis of these texts is highly sophisticated. Much of Lewis’s subsequent historiographical neglect stems from readings of these fictions, satires, and philosophical and sociological texts as proto-fascist and anti-Semitic. Edwards effectively revises such crude readings, but acknowledges that Lewis’s modernist failure to produce clarity, coupled with his insistent use of irony, leaves open a potentially discreditable reading of the work. Naturally, this dilemma comes sharply into focus in a section concerning Lewis’s politics in the 1930s. Although Edwards generally treats Lewis’s painting, literature, and thought as interdependent, he appears to view Lewis’s support for Hitler as expressing a dislocated aspect of his personality. This support is explained not as a contingent dimension to Lewis’s world-view, but as a determined resistance to the potential for a Second World War. Hence, Lewis was an “easy victim” of Nazi propaganda in 1931, amidst “his growing fear that worsening economic conditions were leading to war” (383). Lewis was a kind of fascist because he believed in appeasement, but this does seem to contradict the general thrust of his ideological position and even his much-vaunted modernism.

The 1930s were Lewis’s last great moment as a painter, and his late portraits are deservedly praised. To what extent they establish Lewis as a modernist remains open to question, and it may be that his more advanced and experimental work remained in the realm of the written word. In a final section, Edwards evaluates Lewis’s late writing, describing his travel book Filibusters in Barbary as “mixing colloquialisms with brilliant imagery” (433) and the novel Snooty Baronet as a celebration of “brilliant verbal inventiveness” (435). His assessment of the final books, collectively titled “The Human Age” and largely completed after he was struck by blindness, admits to their variable quality while recognizing their ambition and complexity. Near the close of the book, Edwards provides a fascinating re-evaluation of the late portraits, drawings, and sketches that were produced in North America and continued to be made until Lewis’s total blindness in 1950. This aspect of Lewis’s career has been largely ignored, and the study of these images contains considerable insight, though their merits may be overstated.

There is much to recommend in this book, not least the detailed appreciation of Lewis’s output. Some further consideration of the influence of the philosopher T. E. Hulme on his world-view would have been appropriate. In addition, there are aspects of Lewis’s fascism that are only glossed, and the issue of his modernism, though central, is never satisfactorily contested. More fundamentally, the project of this book attempts to complete Lewis’s transubstantiation to the “Men of 1914.” This would see him elected to the established canon of the Modern Movement, as a secular deity like his peers Joyce, Eliot, and Pound. It remains questionable whether this is a worthy motivation. The limitations of Lewis’s technique as a visual artist and the variability of his written work would mitigate against this conviction.