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| Wyndham Lewis: |
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| Rotting Hill |
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| Edited with Afterword and Notes by Paul Edwards |
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Returning in 1945 to London from North America after a six-year period of self-exile, Wyndham Lewis found himself ''in the capital of a dying empire'' — not crashing down in flames and smoke but expiring in a peculiar muffled way.'' The extensive dry rot that had invaded his Notting Hill apartment — and the inconvenience caused him by carpenters striving to correct it — immediately came to symbolize for Lewis the degenerate condition of English society. When he described the dry rot to Ezra Pound — then hospitalized in America — Pound shot back a reference to Rotting Hill, giving Lewis the title for this collection of autobiographical stories.
As is the case with Lewis's other forays into social criticism, few targets are spared here. Lewis demolishes in a brilliant satiric fusillade everything he doesn't like about the brave new world they all live in: the war debt, food shortages, inefficient National Health services, shoddy manufactured goods, mediocre art, de-humanized education and the moribund Anglican church.
It's no surprise a book as radically acerbic as this one met with little popular acceptance at the time it was published. First issued in England in 1951, then in America in 1952, Rotting Hill soon lapsed into out-of-print status, and in recent years has been one of the scarcest and most sought-after Lewis titles. |
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That there was much rotting of the spirit in this blistering period, of what we pretentiously term history, was not hidden from me exactly. But I must confess that it was with surprise that, resting my hand carelessly upon a windowsill at our apartment, I found my nails sinking into the wood. The wood in our flat had up till then behaved on all occasions like wood. It was a week later, I think, that putting my hand out in the dark to turn on the light, my finger plunged into the wood of a door. These were my first contacts with the rot... |
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256 pages, Paperback, 6'' x 9'' (230 x 150 mm)
1 b/w illustrations, English
ISBN: 0-87685-646-6 |
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| $ 15.00 |
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| About the Editor: |
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Paul Edwards was born in Colchester, England, in 1950. He attended Cambridge University, and later studied the work of Wyndham Lewis at the universities of Birmingham and London. He has been the editor of 'Enemy News', the Journal of the Wyndham Lewis Society.
Mr. Edwards lives in Cambridge, England. He is a senior lecturer in English at Bath Spa University College.
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