Wyndham Lewis: One-Way Song

Abstract

The career of Mr Wyndham Lewis is one of the most remarkable of our time. Before the war Mr Lewis had a European reputation as leader of the vorticist movement. Since the war, although he has painted a great deal, his painting seems to have become subsidiary to his writing. He has exploited his talent as a draughtsman to the full in his designs for covers and decorations for his books. One of the earliest of these prose works, Tarr, created a sensation. A philosophical work, Time and Western Man, produced a great stir, and when I was at Oxford it was even to be seen on the bookshelves of some of the younger and more advanced dons: but we were not encouraged to quote from it in our essays. During more recent years, in spite of the three or four numbers of The Enemy magazine, there has been a tendency among the critics to neglect his work.