The Filibuster: A Study of the Political Ideas of Wyndham Lewis 9781472554345, 9781472509901

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CHAPTER 1

That Notorious Machiavel

For a man who contrived to produce such an impressive body of creative and critical work, it is worth remembering that Wyndham Lewis was a comparatively tardy starter. Born in 1882, he was thirty-one before publication of his first separate work-a portfolio of drawings, Timon of Athens. A few of his stories and sketches had already appeared in the reviews, but he could not be said to have made his impact upon the public as a writer until a year later, when he dropped his explosive review BLAST like a puce bomb on the Georgian parlour floor. BLAST No. I was published on 20 June 1914: the second and final number appeared in July the following year. Naturally enough, the war and his own enlistment in the Royal Artillery did much to delay Lewis's full recognition over the next year or two. Work of his appeared in The Little Review, the most important of which was subsequently reissued in pamphlet form. His novel Tarr was part-serialized in The Egoist and published as a book in July 1918, attracting a good deal of critical attention and some highly appreciative reviews. But the end of the war brought little immediate increase in Lewis's literary output. A pamphlet of art criticism, The Caliph's Design, was published in 1919, along with a further portfolio of Fifteen Drawings. A few articles for the reviews, and the editing of two numbers of his own review The Tyro, carried him on into 1922-when, at the age of forty, like Waring, he mysteriously vanished from the scene. In that year, and for the best of reasons, Lewis 'went underground' as he chose to put it-or rather more picturesquely, 'buried himself'. Apart from his odd appearance in