FLUXEUROPA: THE ART AND IDEAS OF WYNDHAM LEWIS

Lewis was Anglo-American, Ezra Pound and T S Eliot were American, W B Yeats and James Joyce were Irish and Gaudier-Brzeska was French.


----------------------- From FluxEuropa (which ceased active publication in 2003) thanks to a link picked up at my favorite (this week at least) blogziner site: Spike/Splinter UK
. . . An outline of the significance of the artist and writer, Wyndham Lewis, the leading figure of the artistic and literary movement known as Vorticism.

" PERCY WYNDHAM LEWIS was born in 1882 on a yacht off Nova Scotia of an American father and English mother. This beginning is significant. Lewis was to become a key figure of the English intellectual, artistic and literary avant-garde of the first half of the twentieth century, and few of this talented circle were English. Lewis was Anglo-American, Ezra Pound and T S Eliot were American, W B Yeats and James Joyce were Irish and Gaudier-Brzeska was French.

. . . more . . .


"Vorticist prose, of which Lewis's Nietzschean novel Tarr was the apotheosis, certainly followed Imagism in its verbal economy. It was terse and was characterised by clear visual images. Lewis did not enter, empathetically, into the emotions of his characters, but viewed them externally, as a painter or sculptor."

. . . more . . .

Although Lewis was at times his own worst enemy, his greatest mistake was to write a sympathetic account of German National-Socialism (Hitler, 1931) in which he naively treated Hitler as someone who would bring peace to Europe. He soon rejected this view and later wrote the ironically entitled book, The Jews, Are They Human? (1939), and The Hitler Cult (1939), but the damage to his career had been done.

In 1939 he went to North America (Windsor, Ontario) in the hope of escaping the unpopularity he had gained in England. This merely swapped infamy for anonymity and he was forced to scrape along in a hand-to-mouth existence."

. . . . . . . a note

Blogaulaire (your CPE host here) is reading the literary journal put out in Montreal in the 1950s and realeased as an edited, photo-duped paperback by Vehicle Press in 1983: "CIV /n" (ISBN: 0909890415) Among the original editors of CIV /n, there was quite a bit of support for Ezra Pound, especially from Louis Dudek and Anna Azzulo. Yes, I do see imagist devices in the Montreal group's oeuvre, including Irving Layton's and Leonard Cohen's verse and prose poems. But "Vorticism"? Wouldn't that be hard to define?

We'll be digging around to find that "Tarr" novel . . .