The Wild Body by Wyndham Lewis

I’ve never previously read anything by the Canadian-born yet British Artsy all-rounder Wyndham Lewis, though have seen his paintings in several galleries and contexts over the years. I do, though, think he has a great first name, and for various personal reasons¹, I thought it was time I did a small amount of research into his literary output. This book – the 1927 short story (and short essay?) collection The Wild Body – seemed like a good place to start, as it is short (almost always a plus), published in a nice Penguin Modern Classics edition and, lastly, because I saw a copy of it on sale for a very low price. Three positives. Yes, three positives.

And read it I did, in scattered moments during an unreasonably (though seasonably) hot British July, ekeing through the 12 pieces around moments of sweaty movement…

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The back of the book includes a quote from T.S. Eliot, which proclaims Lewis as “The greatest prose master of style of my generation”. The fact that it was a writer predominantly known as a poet, rather than a prose writer, who made this assertion is not something to overlook. Because, yes, although Lewis’ work here is far from uninteresting, is often entertaining and contains several perceptive satirical comments and ideas that still hold sway a century after publication, this isn’t really a collection of work that asks very much of a reader, and (alas, because I really do like the guy’s name) doesn’t really offer that much back…

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The Wild Body contains 11 pieces of prose writing (and a Foreword), nine of which are packaged as if part of a singular cycle of stories (and a commentary upon them), plus two more stories.

All of the pieces had previously appeared in print (in some form) at least five years prior to the publication of this book, and most were written approximately a decade earlier, when Lewis was younger, hungrier, and mostly being noticed as a painter who dabbled in words, though he would later try to rebrand as a writer who dabbled in paints….

By 1927, he had attention and notoriety and prestige, and so was able, basically, to get anything published that he wanted, including these sketches, vignettes, humorous stories etc. that he had put out in small magazines a decade earlier.

And that, alas, is essentially the issue with the writing here.

It is all (pretty much) fundamentally aiming to be humorous, to be funny, to be witty, rather than to do anything else.

Lewis isn’t trying to document the ravages or the eternalities of the deeply human soul in these pieces… he isn’t trying to show the effect of the First World War on the psychology of a generation of conscripts… he isn’t trying to explore how technological and societal change tweaks the sense of personhood… he isn’t talking of great truths and huge ideas, he isn’t describing or dissecting power or the powerful, he is instead doing something that, sure, isn’t necessarily any less valid or societally useful, as he’s basically just playing with language while trying to tell some funny stories about rural parts of Europe and the peasants and peasant-adjacent crazies that live there…

The ambition of this collection, then, is far less elevated/exalted than the ambition and the ideals of the works of visual art that the young Lewis was creating that same decade… Lewis’ paintings of the 1920s have international prominence and fame and are exhibited as if major and significant examples of type and form and period and style…

Whereas his writing… not so much…

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To be honest with you, I’ve been keeping an eye out for some Wyndham Lewis for a while, intrigued by Lewis being one of the few 20th century writers and thinkers who publicly and openly refuted comments they had made at an earlier point in their life.

It’s surprisingly rare, still, for a writer or an artist or a thinker to acknowledge that they have said or written something that they later changed their opinion about in a fundamental manner.

Lewis had walked back his pro-fascistic comments of the early 1930s within a few years (rather than – the current trend – doubling down on them), and he managed to do so with enough presentation of sincerity for him to have been able to become and remain a canonical visual artist.

Maybe, then, it is his thoughts and comments from the early 1930s that have made him a writer whose work is hard to stumble upon secondhand..?

Have his books been hidden away, or softly recycled, with owners and booksellers knowing that there are distasteful (though later corrected) opinions within some of them, so discarding them all as a safer bet than filtering through or acknowledging the changes and meanderings of human thought and intellect?

I don’t know.

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So, yes, I read these silly stories through, and though there are some vivid descriptions and some funny jokes and some engaging, complex, images, ultimately it all just feels like comedy from another age (like the awful A Confederacy of Dunces) with very little to commend it for today.

Slight writing.

Which is fine, sure, but in contrast with the gushing blurb of this volume and Lewis’ culturally significant works of visual art, all just feels distinctly underwhelming.

I wouldn’t rush out to read The Wild Body. Though I wouldn’t boycott Lewis’ oeuvre off the back of this. So maybe I’ll visit with him again…

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1. Private ones. ↩︎