Re-introducing Wyndham Lewis's "Time and Western Man"

Wyndham Lewis and Time and Western Man

Paul Edwards

Wyndham Lewis is one of the most important British

modernists, but, like William Blake, the great British

Romantic, he is difficult to classify and has been

relatively neglected. Not only was he an avant garde

painter and pioneer of abstraction, he was also a

novelist and a critic. He wrote over 40 books, edited 3

magazines, including the Vorticist magazine, Blast,

Blast (cover), No. 1 (July 1914)

and he produced well over a thousand paintings and

drawings. He was associated with the other ‘Men of 1914’

(as he called them, Ezra Pound, James Joyce and T. S.

Eliot) but until fairly recently his written work was not

recognised as having an importance equal to theirs. I

think this is partly because of the immense variety of

different forms in which he worked, but it’s also because

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much of his writing (especially before about 1937) is

satirical in spirit and almost inhuman. Where other

modernists sought to convey the mobile workings of the

conscious and the hidden forces of the unconscious, Lewis

concerned himself very much with the ‘outside’ of things

as a novelist. In this, he was clearly following his

predilection as a painter: he liked the clear linear

outline of solid objects and of the human body more than

anything cloudy and amorphous (of the kind you see in

early Kandinsky abstractions, for instance). His own

abstractions consist of clear geometric shapes and

unmodulated colour.

Composition (1913: Tate)

Lewis’s politics have also been a sticking point: like

other English language modernists he was scornful about

liberal democracy and wrote in favour of authoritarian

government. In 1931 he wrote a sympathetic account of the

growing Nazi movement in Germany, and he remained an

‘appeaser’ until late 1937. Perhaps you notice that I

also gave 1937 as the date when his writing becomes more

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‘human’ (it is also the date when he began a series of

portraits in a new, more ‘human’ style

Froanna (1937: Glasgow)

– what I mean by this is that Western humanism contains

an element of psychological depth, and Lewis’s work

begins to share in this after 1937). In 1937 Lewis

visited Nazi Germany, and belatedly realised his

political mistake about Hitler, and over the next few

years wrote books opposing anti-semitism and Nazism. But

he remained and remains somewhat damaged by his political

ideas.

Time and Western Man was published in 1927, and there

is a good case for saying it is his most important work

of non-fiction (a case could be made for 2 or 3 others,

as well). It is one of a group of books (the others are

The Art of Being Ruled, 1926, and The Lion and the Fox – about

Shakespeare – 1927), and several long essays, all of

which originated in a single huge manuscript called ‘The

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Man of the World’, which he wrote between about 1922 and

1925. It covered sociology, political theory, aesthetics,

cultural criticism, theology, literary criticism and

metaphysics. When no publisher would accept ‘The Man of

the World’ as it stood, he broke it up and expanded the

parts into separate self-contained books. Time and Western

Man was the last to be completed and published.

In 1922 Wyndham Lewis seemed to have committed

himself being an avant-garde painter. He had had an

exhibition in London in 1921, called ‘Tyros and

Portraits’:

A Reading of Ovid (Tyros) 1921 (Nat Gal of Scotland)

‘Tyros’ were invented satirical figures: giant puppets

that epitomised the slightly shell-shocked new generation

facing a new society after the First World War. Lewis

planned and drafted a literary component to his Tyro

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project: ‘Hoodopip (the Life of a Tyro)’ (typescript at

Cornell Rare Books Div.). He started from the conviction

that the War had changed everything, that people were

now, as he said, ‘children of a new epoch’ (The Tyro no 1,

1921,). The revolutionary experiments in art that had

taken pace before the First World War needed

consolidating into ‘one mode’ that would ‘answer to the

mass-sensibility of outrtime’, as he said in a pamphlet

of 1919 (The Caliph’s Design), and project a new future that

modern technology now made possible. How this was to be

accomplished in visual art was not altogether clear. But

as well as these satires and incisive life-drawings,

Lewis also produced non-representational or hybrid

abstract-synthetic cubist works that were more ‘advanced’

than anything produced by other British artists of the

time.

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Figure Composition (1921) Cleveland One of the Backs (1922)

unknown

But Lewis virtually gave up serious painting in 1922, and

never held the exhibition of works of this kind that had

been promised him for Léonce Rosenberg’s ‘L’Effort

Moderne’ Gallery in Paris. Instead, he started to spend

most of his time in the British Museum Reading Room (the

collection has now moved and is called The British

Library) doing research for ‘The Man of the World’. Why

did he do this? It wasn’t because he thought art was not

important in the transformation of society. In Time and

Western Man he says that the ‘promised land’ found in art

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is the ‘substance’ of revolutionary utopias (Time and

Western Man, ed. P. Edwards, Santa Rosa, 1993, p. 24).

But although when he returned from the First World War he

thought that art should have a direct influence on the

visual and architectural environment, he did not think

that art was the place where revolutionary action itself

should take place. This would make art too much the

slave of politics and abolish the purely speculative and

truth-telling function of art, by making it enter too

directly into life: ‘the artist is relieved of that

obligation of the practical man to lie’, as he put it

(TWM 117). Art as direct action was something Lewis

always disapproved of – and this was one of the important

distinctions between Lewis’s ideas about Vorticism before

the First World War and the ideas of F. T. Marinetti for

Futurism. Marinetti was undoubtedly very influential on

Lewis, but instead of acting directly on life, Lewis

thought, Art should provide a reservoir of creative

dreaming for society.

Although he could have exhibited in Paris in 1922,

Lewis felt that he could not make enough money out of his

painting, and that it would not receive the recognition

he felt it deserved in Britain. It was in Britain that he

wished his painting to make an impact. That it was not

financially successful gave him a personal grudge, of

course, but his disillusion was also founded on a belief

that British society had, in a way, disallowed the kind of

dreaming to be found in modernist art (TWM 35). In other

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words, there was far more than an economic motivation at

work here. Without art, life loses its meaning, Lewis

believed; but the art that was dominant in Britain after

the First World War was nostalgic, purely formalist, and

wilfully turned away from the modernity that would, on

the one hand, transform life and consciousness for the

better, or, on the other, might jog us along

unconsciously towards another huge mechanised war and

mass-slaughter.

Art therefore had a vital function in Lewis’s view,

but that function necessitated a certain limitation to

the speculative; so there remained things that needed to

be done by other means. One of the reasons society

‘disallowed’ the creative dreams of the most advanced art

was because it did not understand that the new epoch,

furnished with new technologies, required new political

and social organisation. The first of Lewis’s ‘Man of the

World’ books, The Art of Being Ruled (1926) attempts to set out

the changes that were happening and were, he believed,

inevitable: the replacement of liberal democracy by some

form of socialism (centralised and authoritarian or local

and communitarian), the destruction of the nuclear family

unit, the growth of corporatism, changes in gender and

sexuality. These and other phenomena were not being

recognised, but society would need to make choices about

them, or it would sleepwalk mechanically into the future.

Roughly, The Art of Being Ruled presents the issues about which

choices will need to be made, and looks at their

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implications. On the dust-jacket it is stated that the

changes analysed in the book ‘necessitate a new,

strenuous and intellectual approach to life’. But Lewis

began to think that, instead of adopting such a critical

approach, culture at all levels – even avant-garde

culture – was simply replicating the contemporary

society’s tacit ideology of fatalistic mechanical change.

So Time and Western Man is a polemical critique of this

culture, and it is ostensibly in favour of what Lewis

thought of as genuinely revolutionary change, and in

opposition to culture that presented itself in the

fashionable costume of revolution but actually fostered

passivity and reproduced contemporary ideology with only

an ill-informed attempt at critique. This culture

betrayed what he thought was the genuinely revolutionary

function of the intellectual and artist. So-called

‘revolutionary’ experiment in the arts was, he believed,

weakened by a failure to evaluate the ideological

implications of its own media and assumptions. As he

writes in his Preface to Book Two of TWM,

But my conception of the role of the creative artist

is not merely to be a medium for ideas supplied him

wholesale from elsewhere, which he incarnates in a

technique which (alone) it is his business to

perfect. It is equally his business to know enough

of the sources of his ideas, and ideology, to take

steps to keep these ideas out, except for such as he

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may require for his work. When the idea-monger comes

to his door he should be able to tell what kind of

notion he is buying, and know something of the

process and rationale of its manufacture and

distribution. (136)

Lewis’s old associates, Ezra Pound and James Joyce, have

not done this, according to him, and he devotes several

pages to criticising Pound, and a whole chapter of nearly

40 pages to an analysis of the mind of James Joyce. In

both cases, one of his main criticisms is that their work

is about the past, and has nothing significant to say

about the present. This is where ‘Time’ in the title Time

and Western Man becomes important. Lewis talks about many

modern ideas about time, but this criticism of Pound and

Joyce is one of the most basic, and we can approach it

through a painting Lewis made in 1921, A Reading of Ovid

(Tyros), which I showed earlier. [see above].

In Time and Western Man Lewis quotes some statements by

Pound and Joyce that indicate a cyclical view of history,

a view that each moment of history has some parallel with

a moment in the past and will recur again in slightly

different form. Now in this painting, which satirises

the classical revival or ‘return to order’ in French art

after the First World War, the two grinning figures are

very modern and up to date. They are reading the Roman

Poet Ovid. Now there are several ways of interpreting

this strange juxtaposition of past and present, but I

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think that one of the most striking things is a quality

of incongruity. The painting stresses the difference

between past and present and tends towards stressing a

break in history: these modern men are hardly Roman, so

what relevance does the Roman past have to their lives?

Another painting of the same year, Portrait of the Artist as the

Painter Raphael,

Portrait of the Artist as the Painter Raphael (1921) Manchester

alludes to the same classical revival in France,

celebrated in a series of articles by the French painter

Andre Lhote in 1919. Again, Lewis’s point, or at least

his most obvious point, is that the identification with

the artist of the past is ironic; Raphael and Wyndham

Lewis live in different times and places, and the modern

world requires a different approach from Raphael’s.

He phrases this quite explicitly in Time and Western

Man:

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There is nothing for it today, if you have an

appetite for the beautiful, but to create new beauty.

You can no longer nourish yourself on the Past; its

stock is exhausted, the Past is nowhere a reality.

The only place where it is a reality is in time, not

certainly in space. So the mental world of time

offers a solution. More and more it is used as a

compensating principle. (81)

I suppose that Time and Western Man is now best known, and

consulted most, for its critiques of James Joyce, Ezra

Pound, Gertrude Stein, Charlie Chaplin and the expatriate

American avant-garde living in Paris. It is not just for

what the book says about them that it survives, however,

but the sheer rhetorical and imaginative force of its

critiques. These go beyond what was required so that

they become tours de force in their own right. About

Gertrude Stein’s early writing, for example:

What is the matter with it is, probably, that it is

so dead. Gertrude Stein’s prose song is a cold,

black suet-pudding. We can represent it as a cold

suet-roll of fabulously-reptilian length. Cut it at

any point, it is the same thing; the same heavy,

sticky, opaque mass all through, and all along. It

is weighted, projected, with a sibylline urge. It

is mournful and monstrous, composed of dead and

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inanimate material. It is all fat, without nerve.

Or the evident vitality that informs it is vegetable

rather than animal. Its life is a low-grade, if

tenacious, one; of the sausage, by-the-yard,

variety. (59)

The chapter on James Joyce, who was a friend of Lewis’s

caused a long literary quarrel between the two men, and

Joyce incorporated parodies of Time and Western Man into

Finnegans Wake, while Lewis put a parody of Finnegans Wake in

his own next work of fiction, The Childermass. Lewis thought

that in Ulysses, Joyce’s use of the stream of

consciousness, along with his fanatical naturalism,

robbed the novel of structure, while the theory of

cyclical history (derived from Giambattista Vico) that

structured the unfinished Finnegans Wake was too

‘mechanical’. These are aesthetic judgements, it would

seem, rather than ideological ones, just like his

judgement that a lyric passage in one of Ezra Pound’s

Cantos (No. 17) is ‘like a spirited salon-picture, gold

framed and romantically “classical” . . . . it is all

made up of well-worn stage-properties; and it is composed

upon a series of histrionic pauses, intended to be

thrilling and probably beautiful.’ (71) Aesthetic

judgements, however, seem to have been the deepest ones

that Lewis could make, and the ideological was actually

included within them rather than being something to be

treated separately. But why so virulent? ‘I warmed to

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my work’, he later confessed. It must be remembered that

Wyndham Lewis was also one of the most devastating

satirists in English since Jonathan Swift, and his

conviction that he had seen things that others were blind

to encouraged him to make his perceptions as vivid and

effective as he possibly could, even if it cost him his

friendships with his old associates.

Now, having introduced the topic, time, I should

also say something about the concept in the other half of

the book’s title, Western Man. And the first thing to say

is that ‘Western’ is on the face of it a geographical

concept referring to European civilization and its

offshoots in America and the Pacific. It refers, in other

words, to a certain tradition. What Lewis believes is

that this tradition is under threat, and is being

undermined by time-based philosophies. You will notice

that by mentioning tradition I have introduced a time-

concept, and it is tempting to charge Lewis with

inconsistency: if the past is nowhere a reality, and

artists have to create the new, then Western Man is not a

reality either – and to appeal to Western Man as a

concept is to tacitly appeal to a time-determined

principle of continuity that Lewis’s whole argument seems

to be committed to undermining.

I think that, ultimately, if one follows many of

Lewis’s arguments to their logical conclusions, many such

aporias, contradictions and incompatibilities would become

evident. It would be possible, therefore, to approach

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this book in a quite deconstructive spirit, and show its

philosophical polemics as hopelessly compromised by faith

in a metaphysics that is in a condition of collapse. To

do this we would need to place ourselves in the position

of Archimedes, and have a fixed and thoroughly grounded

position outside philosophy that would act as a fulcrum

and give us leverage and superior control over thought

than Wyndham Lewis had. If Lewis simply believed that

his arguments were secure, definitive and succeeded in

overcoming philosophically the positions he ostensibly

opposes, I suppose we would have at least something like

such leverage. We at least would know about the

relativity and instability of all the philosophical

positions he arrives at – for Time and Western Man has much

argument about philosophy within it.

But in fact Lewis shares our Archimedean position –

which is really an anti-Archimedean position – because he

was himself well aware of the limitations of reason and

of the ultimate inconsistencies in his own positions.

The knowledge places him at least partly outside

philosophy, speaking from within a way of life that may

carry its own philosophical expression and imply a

certain metaphysics but nevertheless cannot be grounded

in any Absolute. Metaphysics are ideological emanations

arising out of ways of life and the techniques that

determine them.

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Every occupation has its philosophy . . . a sort of

personal and functional philosophy adapted to it.

With the doctor, lawyer, engineer or schoolmaster,

this equally is the case. It sees the world through

the modes of its specialist experience. (311)

As we shall see, Lewis wishes nevertheless to claim

privileges for the aesthetic over mere philosophical

reason. (For a full discussion of these issues see David

Wragg, Wyndham Lewis and the Philosophy of Art in Early Modernist

Britain, Lewiston, 2005.) But he knows that the days of

the grand metaphysical systems are over, and in this book

he subjects two of them, Samuel Alexander’s system of

emergent evolution, Space, Time, and Deity and Alfred North

Whitehead’s theory of organic mechanism, sketched in

Science and the Modern World, to virulent criticism, largely on

the basis of the way of life of which they are (according

to Lewis, at least), the metaphysical expression. So he

writes:

What I am concerned with here, first of all, is not

whether the great time-philosophy that overshadows all

contemporary thought is viable as a system of

abstract truth, but if in its application it helps

or destroys our human arts. (110)

And in parallel to this disclaiming of any absolute

grounding for his arguments about ‘time’, he also

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disclaims authority for the other concept in his title,

‘Western Man’:

Western Man, as such, is of course the completest

myth. The only question is whether we should not

erect that myth into a reality, define it more (not

historically so much as in conformity with the realities

of the moment); and whether, in short, some such

generalization would not serve our purposes better

than the multiplicity of myths that swarm in our

drifting chaos. (134)

Ideally Lewis would like this ‘myth’ and its humanistic

expression to be one, ‘abstracted from . . . special

modes and private visions’ (311), but he is constantly

drawn to pluralism and is extremely sceptical of

syntheses: ‘The modern man, our perfect “Western Man”,

would have to be about six different people, perhaps;

taking his science, and the scientific spirit, still from

Greece, its home, but taking his art from somewhere else

– only to consider these two factors.’ (236)

To take the first of these two factors, science,

first. It is above all the philosophies that derive from

science and technology that Lewis is at pains to

criticise in the book for the way in which they have

expanded beyond their purely technical realm. For

example, the science of psychology undermines the

integrated humanistic subject. Through behaviourism it

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reduces the subject to a passive stimulus/response

machine, producing an obedient citizenry fit for

servitude in industrial production or slaughter in the

military during war. Or through psycho-analysis it

delivers the subject to a prehistoric past, an

Unconscious over which the subject has no control (Lewis

specifically likens this process to what is depicted in

the film, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. (300-1)). Lewis traces the

history of the dissolution of the subject in a chapter

called ‘The Subject as King of the Psychological World’,

showing its dethronement and partitioning by science and

science’s metaphysical equivalents, from Gottfried

Leibniz to William James and beyond.

But science as a whole may also be thought of as

having a metaphysical equivalent or expression. The most

perfect philosophical equivalent to the life of restless

change that science has brought us, Lewis finds in the

metaphysics of Arthur Schopenhauer:

science (which is a sort of Unconsciousness, is

blind and dumb, of course, and without

“personality”) must, if it could speak, and were

prepared to explain itself, give a similar account

of a non-human, purposeless, mechanical force.

Heavily disguised with an optimistic réclame, the

Time-god of [Henri] Bergson . . . is the same god as

Schopenhauer’s, still the god of positive science.

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The name changes, only from a hypostatized Will to

an hypostatized Time . . . . (313)

Lewis regarded Schopenhauer’s pessimism as fundamentally

honest, but Bergson’s optimism (about overcoming the

determinism of the Newtonian system through his

philosophy) as fundamentally dishonest. The force (durée

or élan vital) that Bergson presented as transcending

mechanism was actually the purest metaphysical expression

of subservience to the science-induced flux of modernity.

A more direct and intentional attempt to provide a

metaphysical equivalent to the concepts of modern science

is that of Alfred North Whitehead. Broadly, Whitehead

knows that the purely scientific picture of the world is

as impersonal and inhospitable to our traditional values

as it appears in Schopenhauer’s philosophy. His ambition,

therefore, is to encompass such values in his philosophy

of nature. His remodelling of the relationship between

mind and matter redistributes values between them and

marries the insights of the Romantic poets to a merely

technical description of nature and mind’s place in it.

Lewis has some criticisms of the detail of this – which

he thinks does not achieve the positive result Whitehead

believes it does. More fundamental, however, is his

objection to translating the merely utilitarian concepts

of science into a metaphysics intended in some way to be

a system of truth and reality, with accompanying

valuations, and, thereby, to be a philosophy of life.

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It would be wrong to attribute this to a naïvety on

Lewis’s part about science. In fact his understanding was

quite advanced. He had read Henri Poincaré and Pierre

Duhem and therefore did not naïvely take scientific

hypotheses as descriptions of truth, but precisely as

hypotheses. ‘The scientific object, the simplest aspect

of any given object, “exists” in the same sense and on

the same level of reality as the image. It is a world of

hypothesis: it is what should be there if the empirical

systems of fact could lead us to some absolute.’ (443)

But Lewis regards the ‘absolute’ implied by a scientific

(post-relativist) image of reality and outlined by

Whitehead to be humanly impoverished, unable to sustain

us, and, indeed, to remove the power of the human mind

and locate it in nature itself. It is anyway an

inappropriate extrapolation from a merely utilitarian

hypothesis. He expresses this in a typically vivid way:

If you asked the humblest of men if he would allow

you to chop his head off, provided he received the

assurance that his head would instantly become the

sun, even if he believed that you had the ability to

procure him this advantage, he would certainly

refuse with indignation. Such is human conceit!

(429)

Any valuing that is carried out on any grounds

except the aesthetic, it seems, Lewis opposes in this

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book. It is why he is able to treat works of art and

systems of philosophy to the same kind of critique, more

or less discounting the pretensions of philosophy to

reach truth independently of the language in which it is

couched. ‘I do not feel impelled to explain myself when I

am examining a mere philosopher’, he writes; the

philosopher ‘speaks my language, usually with less skill,

but otherwise much the same as I do.’ (136) But which

aesthetic is to provide standards, and by what authority?

We have come to the second of those two factors of

Western Man that Lewis referred to, ‘art’. Art should not

follow the greek scientific model, Lewis says in that

passage:

The modern man, our perfect “Western Man”, would

have to be about six different people, perhaps;

taking his science, and the scientific spirit, still

from Greece, its home, but taking his art from

somewhere else – only to consider these two

factors.’ (236)

‘There are many people today’, he explains, ‘who consider

Greek art less good as art because of its scientific

naturalism’, and ‘When science passes over into art, as

happened in Greece, it produces indifferent art, or at

best an art that is too “scientifically” close to

nature.’ (235-6) He enlarges on this in a book published

in 1929, Paleface: The Philosophy of the ‘Melting-Pot’, where he

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returns to the idea of ‘the West’. It turns out that

Lewis’s idea of what the West should be is really the

East! For he says there that in order to ‘rescue us’

from the ‘naturalist mistakes’ of Greece the West should

turn to the ‘Classical orient’. (Paleface, 255) European art,

he maintains, ‘except in the case of a very few

individuals of very great genius, has been so inferior to

the art of China, for instance, that it could almost be

said that the European had never understood the secrets

of the pure eye at all’. (P 251-2) And Lewis maintains

that non-western art, in emphasising geometry, structure

and linear definition, is actually a form of ‘machine-

art’ avant la lettre. He does not, however, either in Time and

Western Man or Paleface, really explain how an aesthetic

that recognises the changes that industrialisation

inevitably brings in the way that mankind lives and

imagines its own potentialities should be defined or

exemplified. Instead, throughout Time and Western Man, he

is at full stretch criticising, with all the rhetorical

power at his command, the aesthetics and philosophies

that unsatisfactorily incorporate such a recognition, and

thereby rob the human mind of its independence and power.

The examples he gives of the greatest art are not modern

at all (Bach or Michelangelo), and one passage that he

deleted from the final version of the book accords very

little with the ‘revolutionary’ aesthetic objectives he

claimed to espouse, while on the other hand it registers

a strong protest against the capitalist modernity that

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has engendered the ideologies his book is designed to

overcome:

It is the brutal mindlessness of the capitalist

industrial world, with its deadly array of gigantic

machines to destroy us, with its ideologies

marshalled to infect us with its soulless will. The

Moloch of Modern Ideas and its hierophants are a far

greater destructive force for us than the peaceful

courses of the stars and the occasional disquietude

of volcanoes or hurricanes. It is not Nature, but

they that is our enemy. Nature is indeed our

friend. . . We worship, if we worship, still the

virgin-goddess, the stars on the ocean, the break-

of-day: the natural magic that inspired our earliest

beliefs. (See TWM 527)

Professor Mariko Kaname has pointed out to me what seems

to be an allusion to Fritz Lang’s great film Metropolis in

this passage, and the imagery of its rejection of

industrial capitalism is certainly very close to the

images in the film. More research will be needed to try

and establish exactly when the passage was composed, but

the similarity is undoubtedly there, whether as a result

of Lewis having seen the film or not.

How can an aesthetic have any securer grounding than

the philosophical systems that Lewis treats so

scornfully? He does appeal sometimes to ‘nature’ or our

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‘instincts’, and in the rejected passage I have just read

even refers to a traditional pre-Christian nature worship

– so it is not altogether surprising that he excised it.

In the book as it stands he makes a move that is fairly

traditional in Western philosophy, calling on God to

provide a grounding. In accordance with his appeal to

the pre-modern Lewis almost provides a pluralistic

version of the Idealism of the great Irish philosopher

George Berkeley. Pluralistic, because, while Berkeley

developed his Idealism in order to subject us to an

admittedly rather benign Deity, Lewis instead makes us

subject to a deity that has completely renounced his

authority over us:

When at some moment or another in the process of

evolution we were introduced to that extraordinary

Aladdin’s Cave, that paradise . . . our minds: or

when the magnificent private picture-gallery of its

stretched-out imagery was thrown open, and we were

allowed to wander in it in any direction, and to any

private ends we pleased; that was certainly, if it

is the gift of a God, a highly democratic proceeding

on His part: especially when you consider that this

is not one picture-gallery, thronged by a swarming

public, but is one-apiece for any number of

individuals – the conception of so democratic a God

that He became aristocratic again, as it were, for

the sake of others – each individual, however small,

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made into an ‘aristocrat’ at once where His mind’s

eye is concerned. It is evident that thereby in a

sense God abdicated. He apparently no longer wished

to be ‘the Absolute’. So he introduced us to, and

made us free of, His Heavenly pictures. (376-7)

Pictures, picture gallery, stretched-out imagery: these

are not ‘reality’, surely, but aesthetic representations

of reality? Just so: and it is Lewis’s contention that

it is only in such aesthetic images that we can live, for

‘reality’ is too raw and too destructive of our

identities for us to survive in. Lewis’s God is,

therefore, as he says, ‘the supreme symbol of our

separation and of our limited transcendence’ of the real

(434): ‘limited’, because, of course, there comes a

moment for all of us when we are separate no longer and

death reunites us with the process.

In the meantime,

On a still day consider the trees in a forest

or in a park, or an immobile castle reflected in a

glassy river: they are perfect illustrations of our

static dream; and what in a sense could be more

‘unreal’ than they? That is the external,

objective, physical, material world (made by our

‘spatializing’ sense. . . .

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That is our world of ‘matter’, which we place

against the einsteinian, bergsonian, or Alexandrian

world of Time and ‘restless’ interpenetration. (425)

Despite this priority of the illusion over the real,

Lewis regards himself as to some extent a rationalist,

and is one to the extent that reason is preferable to

emotion or intuition by virtue of its coolness as a mode

of apprehending God and reality. But reason seems to need

to co-operate with the illusions provided by the

aesthetic and sanctified by God’s democratic pluralism:

And our reason is not the pragmatical member among

our faculties at all [as had been maintained by

Bergson], but for us the ultimate truth-bearing

vehicle. Yet it is only in league with our sensuous

machinery of illusion that it is able to convey the

‘real’, which machinery is pluralistic. (378)

Through reason we can safely deduce the real (which seems

to be, in a suitably Berkeleyan way, God), while

maintaining our temporary independence from it.

This is as much exposition of Time and Western Man as I

can reasonably give: if you don’t understand exactly what

‘time-philosophy’ is then I apologise. Somewhat

flippantly, I could tell you to read Lewis’s book and

warn you that at the end of it you still might not know

what it is, for the book bursts its seams in all

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directions. More seriously, I should say that Lewis was

consciously one-sided in all his polemical arguments.

His scepticism about the truth-telling ability of any

philosophical argument extends, he admits, to having

within him a measure of acceptance and agreement with

arguments and positions he opposes. The positions he

himself arrives at are therefore the product of an

internal struggle.

We have seen how he gave expression to a form of

nature-mysticism in a suppressed passage that would

potentially have embarrassed his argument. But at the

same moment as he finished Time and Western Man he produced

a painting – also in a way suppressed, since it was

simply painted on a wardrobe door and not initially

designed for exhibition, Bagdad. [continues . . .]

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Bagdad (1927) Tate

You will remember that one of the aspects of time-

philosophy that Lewis objected to was cyclical theories

of history. But Bagdad may be read precisely in such

cyclical terms, as Andrew Causey has pointed out (‘The

Hero and the Crowd’, Volcanic Heaven, ed. P. Edwards; Santa

Rosa, 1996). It represents the ‘winding stair’ of W. B.

Yeats, and the utopian return of a visionary past in the

vocabulary of modern architecture. It is not entirely

contradictory of the spirit of Time and Western Man,

however, since it conforms to the utopian function for

the creative dreams of the poet and artist outlined early

in the book. The dreams of the artist are the substance

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of the promised land of revolutions. And we can see the

dreaming head of the creative artist, a spiritual

presence, to the right of the architectural structure.

Nearly ten years later, however, Lewis makes

representations of history that seem at first sight even

closer to the historicism he opposes in Time and Western Man.

He criticised Pound there for inhabiting the past rather

than the present.

Portrait of Ezra Pound (1939) Tate

Here we see Pound shut in his own world of the past,

silhouetted against the Aegean by which Lewis says he has

genuinely walked with Sophocles (see TWM 68–9). He

repeated the charge in 1934 in Men without Art: Pound has a

‘tendency to regard a scuffle in fourteenth-century Siena

as fundamentally more interesting than a similar scuffle

in Wigan or Detroit today.’ (MWA 61). But is not Lewis

doing something like this himself in the painting The Siege

of Barcelona of 1936?

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The Surrender of Barcelona (1936) Tate.

And is he not drawing attention to cyclical history and

the repetition of events in Spain in 1472 in 1936, when

the Spanish Civil War was in progress? Republican

Barcelona did not actually surrender until 1939 – at

which time Lewis retitled the painting as The Surrender of

Barcelona to reinforce the parallel. (See Causey again:

‘Wyndham Lewis and History Painting in the Later 1930s’,

David Peters Corbett, ed., Wyndham Lewis and the Art of Modern

War, Cambridge, 1998.) I think the difference is that

Lewis sees this historical repetition as a sign that his

attempt to divert Western culture into a different way of

thinking has failed. The tradition of historical fatalism

he opposes has reasserted itself. As he says in Time and

Western Man:

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The Great War [of 1914–18] and the wars that are now

threatened are the result of the historic mind. It

is the time-mind at work: indeed, it is peculiarly

useful for the promoters of wars, hence its

popularity. It says, “It’s time for another war”. . . .

Shut into its dogmatic history-picture, it clamours

for repetition. (267.)

The depiction of cyclical history in this painting is

thus bitterly ironic, almost amounting to an admission of

the futility of all his polemical efforts in Time and

Western Man and the other books that emerged from his long

period of study in the reading room of the British Museum

in the early 1920s. (See Edwards, ‘It’s Time for Another

War’, in Corbett, op. cit.) The painting is a sardonic

farewell to those ambitions, as Lewis turns to a more

obviously empathetic expression of his humanism, both in

painting and novels. After the Second World War all that

seemed very remote to Lewis. In 1949 he looked back and

gave an insight into his state of mind after the First

World War when he wrote them:

for some time I was very sore and that soreness

increased, if anything, during the immediately

ensuing years. The sentimental side of me suffered

(I think now) more deeply than it should. – All that

is to be found in these books will never be seen

again, naturally, with that sharpness or

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excitement . . . or with so much distress. Habit

soon anaesthetises; it dulls and blunts. (Rude

Assignment 170)

Time and Western Man for us must remain one of the most

amazing books of the century, important both as the

expression of a particular historical moment and as a

demonstration of the capacity of a new discipline,

virtually invented here by Wyndham Lewis, Cultural

Criticism, to bring an unprecedented range of cultural

phenomena, high and low, within the range of its

critique. I have said that it was ineffective, and in

the light of its impossible ambitions it clearly was.

But in terms simply of literary history, it is beginning

to be seen as the transitional point between High

Modernism and what Tyrus Miller has called Late

Modernism.

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