A Tongue That Naked Goes

SELF CONDEMNED (407 pp.)--Wyndham Lewis--Henry Regnery ($4).

"A remarkable man, but of course impossible, quite impossible," is the sort of thing British intellectuals say of Percy Wyndham Lewis. Such comments are usually accompanied by a slight quavering of the speaker's shoulders, as if these still bore the unhealed scars of a Wyndham Lewis drubbing. To many, the mere mention of Lewis' name evokes a hefty figure, dressed in a broad black hat and sweeping black coat, glaring sternly at humanity through formidable glasses. Sir Osbert Sitwell recalls Lewis sitting at a restaurant table back in 1919. "Remember!"

Lewis informed the three Sitwells, "I'm thirty-seven till I pass the word round."

Dame Edith Sitwell has declared that she was so impressed by this royal command that for many years after, when told by a pulmonary physician to "say 99," the best she could bleat was "37!"

Wyndham Lewis-- (born 1884) has passed the word that he is no longer 37.

He is still capable of tongue-lashing friends and foes alike, as he did recently in The Demon of Progress in the Arts, a sharp assault on abstract painting and sculpture.

His latest novel. Self Condemned, is an unimpaired product of his powerful pen.

Half a century as painter, poet, novelist and polemicist has brought him niggardly financial reward, but his reputation is higher than ever before. A new generation is discovering Wyndham Lewis, and his publishers are reissuing his works amid applause from those who believe that he is Britain's foremost writer.

Barbers & Gardeners. Lewis' re-emergence is partly a sign of the times.

World War II has left behind it no trace of either the gaieties or the grim, radical dogma that swept Britain after World War I. Youth today is not so much flaming to be free as burning to acquire discipline. It was Wyndham Lewis' ferocious hatred of what he called "emotionally excited, closely-packed, heavily-standardized mass-units acting in a blond ecstatic unison" that caused his unpopularity in the '305. although he himself acted in unison of a sort with the Hitler regime--but only for a very brief spell.

Today, people listen more attentively when Lewis hammers away at his old conviction that both civilization and art depend on a far-seeing law and order. Mysticism, "unconscious'" expression, addled emotionalism are his .pet hates. He stands up for personal "consciousness" in an epoch in which civilization has half-drowned itself in mass emotion and the seas of the Freudian unconscious. As long ago as 1914 Wyndham Lewis was pouring curses upon Mother Nature and shaggy beards, arguing that master gardeners and stern hairdressers are the truest symbols of civilization.

In 1918, with publication of his first novel, Tarr, Lewis sprang suddenly into true prominence. Tarr was not only his first large-scale assault on woolly vaporings about love and life, it was (and still is) one of the greatest comic novels ever written in English. None of Lewis' later novels--even The Revenge for Love, The Apes of God, The Childermass--has ousted Tarr from first place, but each displays uniquely the mingled anger, intellectual probity and hair-raising humor that are the stamp of a Lewis opus. What is most curious and most defective about all these novels is that Lewis, archapostle of gardeners and barbers, is himself in capable of giving his often cumbersome style a well-trimmed look.

Creative & Destructive. Self Condemned, Lewis' first novel in 14 years, is another rough, tough clip off the old beard.

It is as good as anything he has written since Tarr, and stands head and shoulders above the general run of fiction. It is about a British professor and his wife who emigrate to Canada just before World War II. (Author Lewis, born in Maine when his globe-trotting parents took a cruise to the U.S., himself came to North America in World War II, stayed six years.) The book gives a shattering account of life in a rundown, chaotic, Cana dian hotel room during the convulsions of wartime. The real theme of Self Condemned is a blow-by-blow account of how a proud, independent man loses his integrity and makes a peace-without-honor with a way of life he despises. Professor Rene Harding leaves Britain because he finds himself hemmed in and hampered trying to teach his students his own version of history; Canada, he believes, will be different. Instead, Harding finds not only that the New World is as cautious and tight-lipped as the Old, but that history is an even more terrible problem than he had imagined.

Human beings, Harding argues, are divided into two races, "one destructive and the other creative." The destructive has always won in the end, Harding believes, but that is no excuse for the historian to follow suit and write histories which are mere rosters of destructive triumphs. For some day, after all, the victory may go to the creative. Self-exiled Rene Harding is a "creative" man who is doomed to be defeated by "destructive" fellow men. His conquerors are not little Karl Marxes; they are average men who are stubbornly determined to lead average lives and to cold-shoulder the stranger who threatens their peace of mind. Harding defends himself by putting a steely armor on and letting his heart freeze up. By war's end, Harding has surrendered because he no longer believes that creative man can ever win. He settles tamely into a snug U.S. professorship. "The Faculty had no idea that it was a glacial shell of a man who had come to live among them, mainly because they were themselves unfilled with anything more than a little academic stuffing."

Champagne & Pygmies. "American book clubs pay quite astounding sums, don't they?" Lewis asked a visitor recently. Self Condemned, like all Wyndham Lewis' books, shows just why Lewis is self-condemned never to revel in bookclub riches. It demands steady concentration and hard thinking, strikes through to the heart only by way of the head. The book is what its hero Rene Harding calls "a taper in a tornado." Author Lewis is likely to be lighting such tapers for some time to come. To be released this month are the radio adaptations of two new novels commissioned from him by the BBC. Though nearly blind as the result of a tumor involving the optic nerve, Lewis still manages to write, in large letters on sheets of white paper thumbtacked to a drawing board. His wife Anne types his manuscripts, reads him the newspapers (for several hours daily).

The Lewises still live in the now famed studio apartment in London's decaying Netting Hill section (it became "Rotting Hill" in one of his books) that has been their home for 20 years. Visitors are rare, with the exception of Lewis' old friend T. S. Eliot, who also keeps him supplied with champagne, Lewis' only drink. Though gentle and courteous to strangers, Lewis is too much on the boil ever to symbolize the cool peak of disciplined independence which he regards as the acme of civilization. His deepest strength lies in what Critic Geoffrey Grigson has called the brilliantly energetic "word-welding" to be found in Lewis' poems. These tell in essence what is the core both of Wyndham Lewis and the century in which he lives:

We are not very rich in laurelled heads

We are a little age, where the blind pygmy treads

In hypnotized Crusade against all splendour

Perverts male prowess to the middle gender . . .

These times require a tongue that naked goes

Without more fuss than Dryden's or Defoe's.

* Not to be confused with D. B. Wyndham Lewis (no kin), humorist and biographer (Francois Villon).

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