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| Wyndham Lewis: |
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| Men Without Art |
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| 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: 0-87685-686-5 |
| $ 15.00 |
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| About: |
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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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