Abstract
The Childermass, the first part of Lewis’s trilogy The Human Age,1 was published in 1928, but it did not attract a larger audience until after 1951. This expansion of interest was achieved, paradoxically, through the efforts of an enterprising left-wing BBC producer, D. G. Bridson,2 and via the medium of radio, on 18 June of that year, when Bridson realised one of his ‘most cherished projects for Third Programme’, and broke Lewis’s blockage with the larger project.3. Bridson, who was (unofficially) in charge of production of Third Programme poetry and who had strong views on the role of radio in the oral transmission of various forms of writing,4 had first read The Childermass in 1932, well before his involvement with radio, and had Șbeen struck by its great dramatic possibilities as pure theatre’.5 The critical acclaim was such that the BBC advanced to Lewis enough money for the two years of writing which he estimated were required to complete the trilogy.
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Notes
Omar S. Pound and Philip Grover, Wyndham Lewis: A Descriptive Bibliography with a Checklist of B.B.C. Broadcasts, compiled by D. G. Bridson (Folkestone: Dawson & Sons, 1978), pp. 169–75.
Kate Whitehead, The Third Programme: A Literary History (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), pp. 160–1.
D. G. Bridson, Prospero and Ariel: The Rise and Fall of Radio (London: Gollancz, 1971), p. 187.
Jeffrey Meyers, The Enemy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), p. 309.
Hugh Kenner ‘The Devil and Wyndham Lewis’, in Gnomon (New York: McDowell Obolenski, 1958), p. 217.
Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982), esp. pp. 174–7.
W. Lewis, American and Cosmic Man (London: Nicholson and Watson, 1948), p. 16, see also p. 140.
Wyndham Lewis (ed.), Walter Michel, Paintings and Drawings (London: Thames and Hudson, 1971), pl. 38, p. 361.
Irene M. Franck and David M. Brownstone, The Silk Road: a History (New York: Facts on File, 1985).
Thomas E. Connolly, ‘The Personal Library of James Joyce’, University of Buffalo Studies, XXII, i (April 1955) item 289, p. 36.
William York Tindall, A Reader’s Guide to Finnegans Wake (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969), p. 39.
Robert Fraser (ed.), Sir James Frazer and the Literary Imagination (London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 223.
Dennis Brown, Intertextual Dynamics within the Literary Group: Joyce, Lewis, Pound and Eliot (London: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 145–51; also Antonio M. Feijo, ‘Wyndham Lewis’s Knotty Relationship with Ezra Pound’, Enemy News, 32 (Summer 1991), pp. 4–10; and Caracciolo, ‘“Like a Mexith’s renowned statue bristling with emblems“: masquerade, anthropology, Yeats and Pound among Wyndham Lewis’s ‘“Apes of God'”, in Pound in Multiple Perspective, ed. Andrew Gibson (London: Macmillan, 1993), pp. 126–57.
Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, ‘Movements, Magazines and Manifestos: the Succession from Naturalism’, in Modernism: 1890–1930 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 193.
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 308–14, 365.
W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1955), pp. 348–9.
Catriona Kelly, Petruska: the Russian Carnival Puppet Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. xiii, 103, 136–9, Lewis notes ’the Soviet safety-valve’ of comic relief in the shape of licensed fools, see The Enemy, II, September 1927, pp. 107–8.
V. Tolstoy, Street Art of the Revolution: Festivals and Celebrations in Russia 1918–32 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1990), pls 36–7.
Rose Lee Goldberg, Performance: Live Art 1909 to the Present (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979), pp. 42–3.
Robert Motherwell, The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 123–96, esp. 159–61.
Ezra Pound, ‘For a New Paideuma’, in William Cookson (ed.), Selected Prose (London: Faber, 1973), pp. 257–8.
J. J. Wilhelm, Ezra Pound in London and Paris (University Park, Perm.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), p. 148.
Ezra Pound, Pavannes and Divisions (New York: Knopf, 1918), pp. 49–92.
Frederick M. Keener, English Dialogues of the Dead (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), p. 5.
Timothy Materer (ed.), Pound/Lewis: The Letters of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Jjewis (London: Faber and Faber; New York: New Directions, 1985), p. 247.
Wyndham Lewis, The Writer and the Absolute (London: Methuen, 1952), p. 5; hereafter WA.
Alexander Stille, Benevolence and Betrayal: Pive Italian Jewish Families under Fascism (London: Summit Books, 1992); and Susan Zuccotti, The Italians and the Holocaust: Persecution, Rescue and Survival (New York: Basic Books, 1987); and Istvàn Deàk, ‘Holocaust Heroes’ (an essay-review of a number of new books on the Jews in Italy), New York Review of Books, 5 November 1992, pp. 22 ff.
Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (eds), Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1890–1930 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976) see the little magazine as an extension of the manifesto, ‘functioning as the logical observe to the solemn, serious, debating Great Review’ (p. 203); Peter Keating, The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875–1914 (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1989) notes that small magazines offered independence from the circulating libraries (p. 279); Stephen Watson’s, Strange Bedfellows: the First American Avant-Garde (New York: Abbeville Press, 1991) provides a lively account of the interconnections among some of the personalities involved.
Frederick J. Hoffman, Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. Ulrich, The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947); Alvin Sullivan (ed.), British Literary Magazines, 4 vols (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983–4).
Gillian Hanscombe and Virginia L. Smyers, Writing for their Lives: The Modernist Women 1910–1940 (London: The Women’s Press, 1987); Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1910–1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986); and Shari Benstock and Bernard Benstock, ‘The Role of Little Magazines in the Emergence of Modernism’, The Library Chronicle of the University of Texas at Austin, 20.4 (1991), pp. 69–87, an excellent short study which provides an overview of the collection of materials related to the little magazine at the Harry Ransom Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.
Jerome McGann, Historical Studies and Literary Criticism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), p. 4.
Katherine Lyon Mix, A Study in Yellow: The Yellow Book and its Contributors (New York: Greenwood Press, 1969), p. 73.
James G. Nelson, The Early Nineties: A View From the Bodley Head (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 300; Nelson provides an excellent condensed account of The Yellow Book, pp. 298–302.
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Caracciolo, P.L. (1996). The Metamorphoses of Wyndham Lewis’s The Human Age: Medium, Intertextuality, Genre. In: Willison, I., Gould, W., Chernaik, W. (eds) Modernist Writers and the Marketplace. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24551-2_11
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