Snooty baronet

by Wyndham Lewis

A contemporary novel by the noted British writer and artist acclaimed by many critics as a virtuoso in the area of world artistry._"Unexcelled by any novelist since 1914, except Joyce." Jocelyn Baines, THE LONDON MAGAZINE

Genres: Contemporary, Fiction

308 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1932

About the author

(Percy) Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) was a novelist, painter, essayist, polemicist and one of the truly dynamic forces of the early 20th century and a central figure in the history of modernism. He was the founder of Vorticism, the only original movement in 20th century English painting. His Vorticist paintings from 1913 are the first abstract works produced in England, and influenced the development of Suprematism in Russia. Tarr (published in 1918), initiated his career as a satirical novelist, earning the praise of his contemporaries: "the most distinguished living novelist" (T.S. Eliot), "the only English writer who can be compared to Dostoevsky" (Ezra Pound).

After serving as an artillery officer and official war artist during the First World War, Lewis was unable to revive the avant-garde spirit of Vorticism, though he attempted to do so in a pamphlet advocating the modernisation of London architecture in 1919: The Caliph's Design Architects! Where is your Vortex? Exhibitions of his incisive figurative drawings, cutting-edge abstractions and satirical paintings were not an economic success, and in the early 1920s he devoted himself to study of political theory, anthropology, philosophy and aesthetics, becoming a regular reader in the British Museum Reading Room. The resulting books, such as The Art of Being Ruled (1926), Time and Western Man (1927), The Lion and the Fox: The Role of the Hero in the Plays of Shakespeare (1927) and Paleface: The Philosophy of the Melting-Pot (1929) created a reputation for him as one of the most important - if wayward - of contemporary thinkers.

The satirical The Apes of God (1930) damaged his standing by its attacks on Bloomsbury and other prominent figures in the arts, and the 1931 Hitler, which argued that in contemporary 'emergency conditions' Hitler might provide the best way forward in Germany damaged it yet further. Isolated and largely ignored, and persisting in advocacy of "appeasement," Lewis continued to produce some of his greatest masterpieces of painting and fiction during the remainder of the 1930s, culminating in the great portraits of his wife (1937), T. S. Eliot (1938) and Ezra Pound (1939), and the 1937 novel The Revenge for Love. After visiting Berlin in 1937 he produced books attacking Hitler and anti-semitism but decided to leave England for North America on the outbreak of war, hoping to support himself with portrait-painting. The difficult years he spent there before his return in 1945 are reflected in the 1954 novel, Self Condemned. Lewis went blind in 1951, from the effects of a pituitary tumor. He continued writing fiction and criticism, to renewed acclaim, until his death. He lived to see his visual work honored by a retrospective exhibition at London's Tate Gallery in 1956, and to hear the BBC broadcast dramatisations of his earlier novels and his fantastic trilogy of novels up-dating Dante's Inferno, The Human Age.

Reviews

[Jess]

This took me even longer to read than a WL novel usually does: I never quite got caught up in it in any regard. The afterword characterizes it as the apex of Lewis’s career, and has valid reasoning for that from a career periodization standpoint—but for me it just wasn’t very memorable.

Except for some truly horrifying sex writing.



All of her still passably lissom person—on the slight side—gave. It was the human willow, more or less. It fled into the hard argument of my muscular pressures. Her waist broke off and vanished into me as I took her over in waspish segments, an upper and a nether. The bosoms and head settled like a trio of hefty birds upon the upper slopes of my militant trunk: a headless nautilus on the other hand settled upon my middle, and attacked my hams with its horrid tentacles—I could feel the monster of the slimy submarine-bottoms grinding away beneath, headless and ravenous.

“Oh Listerine!” I sighed, as I compressed the bellows of her rib-box, squeezing it in and out—it crushed up to a quite handy compass—expanding, and then expelling her bad breath.

[Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

not too sure what to make of this one - it sort of gives the impression of a hastily put together, tossed off antinovel, and some of the critics who've dealt with lewis' work seem to agree, but as the afterword in this reprint notes there are hints of a deliberate focused intent here as well that would seem to contradict that interpretation. i didn't get much out of it, although it is always interesting to see how unfavourably lewis depicts his self insert characters.

[Peter Jakobsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lewis was an incendiary hater and this savage an hilarious trifle is worth a read for his acrid scenes involving his literary agent, 'Humph', including the delightful despatching thereof.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Illustrated by Lewis' Vorticist paintings, Snooty Baronet has a strong sneering tone and some nice modernist moments - the description of the hatter's automaton for instance. Lewis has a brilliant knack for characterisation, but this is a rather obscure read that gets more obscure as it goes along.