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| Wyndham Lewis - Lonely Volcano |
Wyndham Lewis often comes to people’s attention because he
was well known for his manifestos, especially those contained in the two issues
of BLAST. Lewis lamented the lack of radical
talent in pre-War London in his memoir Rude
Assignment (1950) saying — ‘I wanted a battering ram that was all of one
metal … A good deal of what got in
seemed to me soft and highly impure. Had
it been France, there would have been plenty to choose from.’
This makes him my kind of artist. Publishing is a perilous industry and we live in anodyne times, and these two factors combine to drive any sort of radicalism out of letters, with the general feeling being that everything has been done, and that book sales to the middle aged and the middle class are all that matters.
The term ‘manifesto’ occurs plenty in Lewis’s writing during the Vorticist period
of 1914-15. For the rest of his career, Lewis described his pronouncements on
art and literature as ‘propaganda’, ‘treatises’, or sometimes just ‘Blasts’, when
he was feeling all John Knox about things.
He even called himself a ‘polemicist’ or ‘pamphleteer’, and
mad old volcano that he was, he continued to fulminate against the pricks, all
the way to the end.
Lewis was a key influence on my novel The Studio Game from Fledgling Press.
