That Man and Enemy

Wyndham Lewis a Portrait of the Artist as the Enemy, by Geoffrey Wagner. 363 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press. $5.00

That strange man Wyndham Lewis, who died this winter, was painter, novelist and polemicist; and in all things he went against the grain. He refused to sing Hallelujah to the river-god as he was swept along, with the rest of us, in the flood of modernity. He refused, indeed, to sing Hallelujah to any god; and perhaps Mr. Kenneth Burke comes as close to the truth about Lewis as anyone does when he writes that Lewis’ “excoriations arise from a suppressed fear of death, or, in other words, from religiosity frustrated by disbelief.” But that is not the whole story.

RK

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Russell Kirk

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Wyndham Lewis a Portrait of the Artist as the Enemy, by Geoffrey Wagner. 363 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press. $5.00

That strange man Wyndham Lewis, who died this winter, was painter, novelist and polemicist; and in all things he went against the grain. He refused to sing Hallelujah to the river-god as he was swept along, with the rest of us, in the flood of modernity. He refused, indeed, to sing Hallelujah to any god; and perhaps Mr. Kenneth Burke comes as close to the truth about Lewis as anyone does when he writes that Lewis’ “excoriations arise from a suppressed fear of death, or, in other words, from religiosity frustrated by disbelief.” But that is not the whole story.