1. Letter of Lewis to Julian Symons, 21 November 1937, in The Letters of Wyndham Lewis , ed. W. K. Rose (New York: New Directions, 1963), 246. [BACK]

2. Wyndham Lewis, Rude Assignment: An Intellectual Autobiography , ed. Toby Foshay (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1984), 148-149. Cited in text as RA. [BACK]

3. Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering: An Autobiography, 1914-1926 (London: John Calder, 1937), 6. Cited in text as B&B . [BACK]

4. Lewis advances a political analysis of male homosexuality in The Art of Being Ruled , especially the section entitled "Man and Shaman": The Art of Being Ruled , ed. Reed Way Dasenbrock (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1989), 239-273. [BACK]

5. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway [1925] (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 81. [BACK]

6. Wyndham Lewis, The Apes of God [1930] (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1984), 624. Cited in text as AOG . [BACK]

7. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks , ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 223. [BACK]

8. Oswald Mosley, The Greater Britain (Chelsea: British Union of Fascists, 1932), 23-24. [BACK]

9. By June 1930, according to Stevenson and Cook, there were z million out of work in Britain and a total of 11 million in 33 countries. John Stevenson and Chris Cook, Britain in the Depression: Society and Politics, 1929-1939 (London: Longman, 1977, 1994), 9. [BACK]

10. See Mosley, The Greater Britain , 19: "The Modern Movement is by no means confined to Great Britain; it comes to all the great countries in turn as their hour of crisis approaches, and in each country it naturally assumes a form and a character suited to that nation. As a world-wide movement, it has come to be known as Fascism, and it is therefore right to use that name." [BACK]

11. This question has become, perhaps, the crucial question for the Lewis criticism. Attempts to answer it have included a number of source-influence and contextual studies, most prominently: Geoffrey Wagner, Wyndham Lewis: A Portrait of the Artist as the Enemy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), derives his political views from French neoclassicism; Vincent Sherry, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism , follows Wagner's lead on this point; D. G. Bridson, The Filibuster: A Study of the Political Ideas of Wyndham Lewis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), challenges the conclusions of Wagner by considering the precise context in which Lewis's political statements were made; Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), interprets Lewis's work as exemplifying the historical affiliations between fascism and modernism while cogently criticizing modernism's evasion of politics; SueEllen Campbell, The Enemy Opposite: The Outlaw Criticism of Wyndham Lewis (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1988), focuses on the rhetorical and critical strategies of Lewis's "Enemy criticism"; Tom Normand, Wyndham Lewis the Artist: Holding the Mirror Up to Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), considers Lewis's development of a political iconography in his art and literary works to reflect and comment on current social life; David Ayers, Wyndham Lewis and Western Man (London: Macmillan, 1992), argues that anti-Semitism was central to Lewis's literary and political ideas; Reed Way Dasenbrock, "Wyndham Lewis's Fascist Imagination and the Fiction of Paranoia," in Fascism, Aesthetics, and Culture , ed. Richard J. Golsan (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1992), 81-97, considers the paradoxes of Lewis's radical suspicion of ideology and its tendency to shade over into political paranoia; Andrew Hewitt, ''Wyndham Lewis: Fascism, Modernism, and the Politics of Homosexuality," ELH 60 (1993): 527-544, concentrates on Lewis's attitudes toward homosexuality as the pivotal aspect of his fascist allegiances. This list is by no means exhaustive; it is intended to illustrate the scope and diversity of positions about the problem of Lewis's political views and the relation of his writing to them. [BACK]

12. See Lewis's letter to the Jonathan Cape director, G. Wren Howard, of November 1936 in The Letters of Wyndham Lewis , 240. [BACK]

13. Wyndham Lewis, Men Without Art [1934], ed. Seamus Cooney (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1987), 137. Cited in text as MWA . [BACK]

14. Richards himself was relatively positive about Lewis's work, and in the forties and fifties struck up a correspondence and friendship. See the fascinating documentation published in Wyndham Lewis and I. A. Richards: A Friendship Documented, 1928-57 , ed. John Constable and S. J. M. Watson (Cambridge: Skate Press, 1989). Included in this collection is Richards's approving review of Time and Western Man in the 9 March 1928 issue of the Cambridge Review . In the twenties and thirties, however, the admiration was not mutual. Constable and Watson suggest that Lewis may have seen Richards as a rival for the attention and friendship of T. S. Eliot, whom Lewis saw as a potential ally against those on whom he was waging polemical warfare. Lewis even went so far as to offer to share with Eliot the masthead of his periodical The Enemy when it seemed that The Criterion would fold. "Last week after hearing of its suspension, I saw Eliot," Lewis wrote. "I suggested that he and a few of the more important of his staff of reviewers, should come over into The Enemy lock stock and barrel." Letter of 16 December 1927 to Herbert Read, Letters of Wyndham Lewis , 172-173. Cited in text as LWL. [BACK]

15. William Empson, "The Cult of Unnaturalism," in Argufing: Essays on Literature and Culture , ed. John Haffenden (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1987), 627. [BACK]

16. F. R. Leavis, "Mr. Eliot, Mr. Wyndham Lewis and Lawrence" (1934), reprinted in The Common Pursuit (London: Hogarth Press, 1952), 243. [BACK]

17. T. R. Barnes, Review of Porteus ( ~933 ), in A Selection from Scrutiny I, ed. F. R. Leavis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 131 [BACK]

18. Normand, Wyndham Lewis the Artist , 51. [BACK]

19. Paul Edwards, Afterword, in Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man , ed. Paul Edwards (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1993), 482. [BACK]

20. Edwards, in his afterword to Time and Western Man , 481-498, presents a detailed account of the transformation of The Man of the World into separately published texts. My synthesis, which has somewhat different emphases than Edwards's essay, is indebted to his philological research. [BACK]

21. Wyndham Lewis, Letter to Ezra Pound, 29 April 1925, in Pound/Lewis: The Letters of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis , ed. Timothy Materer (New York: New Directions, 1985), 144. Cited in text as P/L . [BACK]

22. See Lewis's letter to Pound, 7 May 1925, in Pound/Lewis , 147. Enemy of the Stars would not be reissued until 1932, when it appeared with Desmond Harmsworth. [BACK]

23. For biographical discussion of these figures and their activities, see Hugh Ford, Published in Paris: American and British Writers, Printers, and Publishers in Paris , 1920-1939 (New York: Pushcart Press, 1975 ); Noel Riley Fitch, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties (New York: W. W. Norton, 1983); and Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris , 1900-1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986). [BACK]

24. Edwards, Afterword to Time and Western Man , 487. On the convergence and divergence of the "men of 1914," see Dennis Brown, Intertextual Dynamics Within the Literary Group — Joyce, Lewis, Pound and Eliot (Hound-mills: Macmillan, 1990); Julian Symons, Makers of the New: The Revolution in Literature , 1912-1939 (London: André Deutsch, 1987). [BACK]

25. Pound to Lewis, 6 June 1925, in Pound/Lewis , 149. [BACK]

26. Lewis to Pound, 11 June 1925, in Pound/Lewis , 150. [BACK]

27. As Edwards points out, Lewis was also granted patronage by Sir Nicholas and Lady Waterhouse in 1926, which gave him greater financial independence from the modernist community in Paris and London (afterword to Time and Western Man , 489). [BACK]

28. Tom Normand suggests an analogous trajectory toward "naturalism" in Lewis's painting: "In the final years of the 1930s Lewis was to produce his most accomplished work as a painter. Subtly unorthodox, cerebral and censorious, this work was all the more remarkable because it was completed in a portraiture that bordered on the naturalistic" ( Wyndham Lewis the Artist , 128). [BACK]

29. On Lewis's late turn away from satire, see Reed Way Dasenbrock, The Literary Vorticism of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis: Towards the Condition of Painting (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 183-190. [BACK]

30. Edwards, afterword to Time and Western Man , 463 [BACK]

31. Edwards, afterword to Time and Western Man , 463. Of course, aside from purely ideological differences, the mimetic, "realist" bias of much Marxist criticism would have precluded a sympathetic view of Lewis's far-from-classical fictional prose. [BACK]

32. Ferenc Fehér, "Ideology as Demiurge in Modern Art," Praxis 3 (1976): 185-186. [BACK]

33. Stephen Spender, "Writers and Politics," Partisan Review 34, no. 3 (1967): 359-381. [BACK]

34. Virginia Woolf, The Waves (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1931), 135. [BACK]

35. For a similar point with respect to academic readings of Joyce and Pound, see Bob Perelman, The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). [BACK]

36. Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 11. [BACK]

37. Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 6-7. [BACK]

38. Bernard Lafourcade, "Metaphor-Metonymy-Collage: Post-Modernist Aspects of Lewis's Style," Enemy News 25 (1987): 7. [BACK]

39. Daniel Schenker, Wyndham Lewis.' Religion and Modernism (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992), 45- [BACK]

40. Timothy Materer, Wyndham Lewis the Novelist (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1976), 161. [BACK]

41. Dasenbrock, Literary Vorticism , 135. [BACK]

42. David Graver has characterized well the performative aspects of the original format of the play. He sees in the presentation of Enemy of the Stars a "displacement of performance" onto the page and its semiotic elements. See "Vor-ficist Performance and Aesthetic Turbulence in Enemy of the Stars," PMLA 107, no. 3 (1992): 482-496. [BACK]

43. For the complex relations of professionalism and modernism, see Lawrence Rainey, "The Price of Modernism: Reconsidering the Publication of The Waste Land," Critical Quarterly 31, no. 4 (1989): 21-47; Bruce Robbins, "Modernism in History, Modernism in Power," in Modernism Reconsidered , ed. Robert Kiely (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 229-245; David A. Hollinger, "The Canon and Its Keepers: Modernism and Mid-Twentieth Century," in In the American Province: Studies in the History and Historiography of Ideas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 74-91; Lisa Tickner, "Men's Work? Masculinity and Modernism,'' Differences 4, no. 5 (1992): 1-37; and Bridget Elliott and Jo-Ann Wallace, ''Professionalism, Genre, and the Sister(s') Arts," in Elliott and Wallace, Women Artists and Writers: Modernist (Im)positionings (New York: Routledge, 1994), 56-89. [BACK]

44. Reprinted in The Letters of Ezra Pound , 1907-1941, ed. D. D. Paige (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1950), 43-44. [BACK]

46. On this point, see Jennifer Wicke, Advertising Fictions: Literature, Advertisement, and Social Reading (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 124: "By the time of the writing of Ulysses advertising . . . [is] so firmly ensconced as the necessary accompaniment to production of all kinds that literature begins to be colonized by it. Ulysses records this process, but by no means succumbs passively to advertising's takeover. The novel incorporates the interloper, and puts advertising language to work for its own purposes." [BACK]

47. Bradford Morrow and Bernard Lafourcade, A Bibliography of the Writings of Wyndham Lewis (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1978), 57-58. See also Omar S. Pound and Philip Grover, Wyndham Lewis: A Descriptive Bibliography (Folkestone, Kent: Archon Books, 1978). [BACK]

48. Wyndham Lewis, Paleface: The Philosophy of the 'Melting-Pot ' (London: Chatto & Windus, 1929), 100. [BACK]

49. Northrop Frye, "Neo-Classical Agony," Hudson Review so, no. 4 (1957): 597-598. [BACK]

50. Lewis felt a kinship in this respect to the painter Francis Bacon. In a review of Bacon from 17 November 1949, Lewis wrote: "Liquid whitish accents are delicately dropped upon the sable ground, like blobs of mucus—or else there is the cold white glitter of an eyeball, or of an eye distended with despairing insult behind a shouting mouth, distended also to hurl insults. Otherwise, it is a baleful regard from the mask of a decayed clubman or business executive—so decayed that usually part of the head is rotting away into space." Wyndham Lewis, "Round the Galleries," in Wyndham Lewis on Art: Collected Writings, 1913-1956 , ed. Walter Michel and C. J. Fox (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1969), 393-394. Stylistically, the language of this review is far closer to the expressionistic prose of The Childermass or The Apes of God than to most of Lewis's fictional prose of the 1940s. [BACK]

51. Dasenbrock, Literary Vorticism , 158. [BACK]

52. Dasenbrock, Literary Vorticism , 165-168. [BACK]

53. Douglas Messerli, "The Role of Voice in Nonmodernist Fiction," Contemporary Literature 25, no. 3 (1984): 281-304; see also Norman Friedman, "Point of View in Fiction: The Development of a Critical Concept," in The Novel.' Modern Essays in Criticism , ed. Robert Murray Davis (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 142-171. [BACK]

54. Messerli, "The Role of Voice," 289. [BACK]

55. Messerli, "The Role of Voice," 286. [BACK]

56. David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 4-7. [BACK]

57. Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film , 7-9. [BACK]

58. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 149-165. [BACK]

59. Christian Metz, "The Impersonal Enunciation, or the Site of Film (In the margin of recent works on enunciation in cinema)," New Literary History 22, no. 3 (1991): 747. [BACK]

60. On this point, see Jacques Aumont et al., Aesthetics of Film , trans. and rev. Richard Neupert (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), 35-36; see also Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen , trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). [BACK]

61. Details about this work have been drawn from Elizabeth Salter, Edith Sitwell (London: Bloomsbury Books, 1979) and The Sitwells and the Arts of the 1920s and 1930s (London: National Portrait Gallery, ca. 1994), as well as from Sitwell's autobiography, cited below. [BACK]

62. Edith Sitwell, I Was Taken Care Of(New York: Atheneum, 1965), 140. [BACK]

63. Leavis, quoted in Salter, Edith Sitwell , 12. [BACK]

64. O. Pound and Grover, Wyndham Lewis: A Descriptive Bibliography , 165-166. [BACK]

65. Wyndham Lewis, Engine Fight-Talk. The Song of the Militant Romance. If So the Man You Are. One-Way Song. Envoi . (London: Faber and Faber, 1933), 25. [BACK]

66. Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man [1927], ed. Paul Edwards (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1993) 249-250. Cited in text as TWM . [BACK]

67. See "The Prose-Song of Gertrude Stein" and "An Analysis of the Mind of James Joyce," in Time and Western Man , 59-66 and 73-110. For the Joyce-Lewis relationship, see Paul Edwards, " 'Clodoveo' and 'Belcanto': Wyndham Lewis and James Joyce," Blast 3: 126-133; and Scott W. Klein, The Fictions of James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis: Monsters of Nature and Design (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Lewis might have found an example ready-to-hand in the "Hades'' chapter of Ulysses , in which Leopold Bloom thinks of the gramophone as the auditory equivalent of the photograph, and of both as a means of preserving the memory of the dead against forgetting: "Have a gramophone in every grave or keep it in the house. After dinner on a Sunday. Put on poor old greatgrandfather. Kraahraark! Hellohellohello amawfullyglad kraark awfullygladaseeagain hellohello amawf krpthsth. Remind you of the voice like the photograph reminds you of the face." James Joyce, Ulysses: The Corrected Text , ed. Hans Walter Gabler, with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 93. Indeed, in an 1878 article for the North American Review , Thomas Edison had already mentioned this function as one among ten that he projected for the newly invented phonograph: ''The 'Family Record'—a registry of sayings, reminiscences, etc., by members of a family in their own voices, and of the last words of dying persons." Edison, quoted in Michael Chanan, Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and Its Effects on Music (London: Verso, 1995), 3. See also Jacques Derrida, "Ulysses Gramophone: Her Say Yes in Joyce," in Acts of Literature , ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 253-309, for a discussion of Joyce's novel as a "gramophonic," "anamnestic and hypermnesic" machine. [BACK]

68. Steve Neale, Cinema and Technology: Image, Sound, Color (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 73. See also Patrick Ogle, "The Development of Sound Systems: The Commercial Era," Film Reader 2 (1977): 198-212; and Douglas Gomery, "Failure and Success: Vocafilm and RCA Photophone Innovate Sound," Film Reader 2 (1977): 213-221. [BACK]

69. Ogle, "Development of Sound Systems," 203. [BACK]

70. Wyndham Lewis, The Childermass (London: John Calder, 1928), 63. [BACK]

71. U.S. copyright © 1963 by Wyndham Lewis. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. U.K. and elsewhere © Wyndham Lewis and the Estate of Mrs. G. A. Wyndham Lewis, by kind permission of the Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust (a registered charity). [BACK]

72. Fredric Jameson's term. [BACK]

73. The Childermass , 18. Cited in text as Ch . [BACK]

74. The similarity (which may indicate influence) between passages like these in The Apes of God and Beckett's free-floating dialogues in Waiting for Godot and Endgame is striking. Both Lewis and Beckett explore the seepage of theater into human relations, rendering action inconsequential and conversation unreal. Such conversations, since they are "scripted" in advance, are also infinitely repeatable—eventually, as Beckett suggests in Krapp's Last Tape and several of the late plays, even when the speaker is dead. [BACK]

75. Samuel Beckett, Watt (New York: Grove Press, 1953), 156. [BACK]

76. Wagner, Wyndham Lewis: A Portrait of the Artist as the Enemy , 73. [BACK]

77. On these issues of Starr-Smith's identity, see James English's excellent discussion of The Apes of God in Comic Transactions: Literature, Humor, and the Politics of Community in Twentieth-Century Britain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 67-97, esp. 96-97. [BACK]

78. Joan Riviere, "Womanliness as a Masquerade," International Journal of Psychoanalysis 10 (1929): 303-313; cf. Stephen Heath, "Joan Riviere and the Masquerade," in Formations of Fantasy , ed. Victor Burgin, James Donald, and Cora Kaplan (London: Routledge, 1986), 45-61. [BACK]

79. According to James English, Mosley was taken to fashioning himself after the German socialist leader Ferdinand Lasalle. Comic Transactions , 96. [BACK]

80. Dasenbrock, "Wyndham Lewis's Fascist Imagination," 89. [BACK]

81. Schcnker, Wyndham Lewis: Religion and Modernism , 78. [BACK]

82. Julian Symons, "The Thirties Novels," Agenda 7/3-8/1 (1969-1970): 47. [BACK]