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| Literature |
| Herbert Lottman |
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| Marshall McLuhan |
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| Terrence Gordon |
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| Wyndham Lewis |
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| Vladimir Nabokov |
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| Wyndham Lewis: |
| Men Without Art |
| Afterword and Notes by Seamus Cooney |
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| Into the fallout generated by his satiric bombshell The Apes of God (1930), Wyndham Lewis sailed four years later with this collection of critical essays — a book that amounts to a defense of satire, that difficult art Lewis himself had practiced so brilliantly (and at such extreme cost to his social standing among British literati). |
| But Men Without Art contains as much attack as defense. Wielding his critical prose with the deft menace of a professional marksman, he picks out and homes in on weak spots in the work of his contemporaries, like William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf. His Faulkner is a "ranting sadist of molodrama," his Hemingway is a "bovine genius" hypnotized by the "faux-naif prattle" of Gertrude Stein, and his Woolf a confectioner of "pretty salon pieces" and "fashionable dimness." |
| Lewis’s own vigorous, sharply intelligent writing provides the perfect antidote to the "paleness" he abhors in the work of the "not very robust talents" of the Bloomsbury literati. It’s put to particularly effective use in such essays as "Mr. Wyndham Lewis," an apology for the "external," "cold-blooded" style of his satires, and "Is Satire Real," which explores the relation between satire and morality. |
| Lewis saw in the disillusioned, skeptical between-the-wars world a cultural "badlands" in which "no value that is not an economic value is permitted." |
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... the commercialization of the book-trade (of publishing, that is) has organized on an unprecedented scale, among educated people, the values and tastes of the cinema-mob. And of course all these things hang together, it is a perfect co-ordination of inferior values — the values of the least gifted and the least educated. |
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| 330 pages, Paperback, 6'' x 9'' (230 x 150 mm), English |
ISBN-13: 978-0-87685-686-4
ISBN-10: 0-87685-686-5 |
$ 15.00 |
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Gingko Press, Inc.
1321 Fifth Street
Berkeley, California 94710
Phone: (510) 898-1195
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| about: |
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| Percy Wyndham Lewis |
| (1882-1957) was a novelist, painter, essayist, poet, critic, polemicist and one of the truly dynamic forces in literature and art in the twentieth century. He was the founder of Vorticism, the only original movement in 20th century English painting. |
He is the author of Tarr (1918), The Lion and the Fox (1927), Time and Western Man (1927, 1993), The Apes of God (1930), The Revenge for Love (1937), and Self Condemned (1954).
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| Wyndham Lewis was ranked highly by his important contemporaries: |
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the most fascinating personality of our time... the most distinguished living novelist” |
| — T. S. Eliot |
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the only English writer, who can be compared to Dostoevsky” |
| — Ezra Pound |
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| about the editor: |
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SEAMUS COONEY was educated at University College Dublin and at Berkeley. Now Professor of English at Western Michigan University, he has published articles on Scott, Byron, Henry James, Austin Clarke, among others. He has edited the poems of Charles Reznikoff, co-authored the Black Sparrow Press Bibliography, and edited BLAST 3. |
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| Book design: Barbara Martin |
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