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Filibusters in Barbary
An entertaining account of Mr. Lewis' Moroccan and Middle East adventures. ILLUS.
307 pages, Library Binding
First published January 1, 1972
About the author
Wyndham Lewis
120 books162 followers(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.
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.
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August 25, 2020Affable enough, but recommended only for aspiring WL completists comme moi.
Typical WL in that the most alive bits are deep-dives into unhinged yet clinical mockery—& this in particular is the very best passage:
"What immobilized the march of progress upon the sea-front was, however, mainly a wholesale claim upon whole blocks of land, on behalf of a whole kennel of Bulldogs of one sort and another—all of whose interests are in the hands of a queer middle-aged middle-class Bulldog Drummond of an ex-Temporary Major. This odd, smug, highly respectable-looking filibuster lives outside Agadir in a smug white “Arab” house he has built for himself. What is this gentleman exactly? It is hard to say. He is a house-agent of a peculiarly Moroccan order. No doubt he was selected for the job on account of his typically British appearance: he is the real thing all right—the good, solid, pink, fetch-and-carry order of faithful dog-Toby of a man—his honest baldness inflamed with exposure to the African sun, with an invaluable air too of righting wrongs, about him, and assisting the poor downtrodden Arab against the wicked French, and really I dare say charged with a good bit of beefy romanticism of the station-bookstall shilling-a-volume order (the Briton in foreign parts, what what!—a bit of “secret service,” a dash of free-lance, but always sure to be anywhere where there’s a “scrap,” what what!) though doubtless aware which side his bread is buttered.—This strange plump Cockney-Scot was organizer and commander-in-chief of an assortment of pith-helmeted, Mill-Hill-Schoolish Tooting-Beck-bred hangers-on—he ran the principal estate office of Agadir, had a “dinky” dairy farm and his milk-cart affected to take milk to the town, but the town complained it was none too easy to get milk out of the Temporary Major.”
Typical WL in that the most alive bits are deep-dives into unhinged yet clinical mockery—& this in particular is the very best passage:
"What immobilized the march of progress upon the sea-front was, however, mainly a wholesale claim upon whole blocks of land, on behalf of a whole kennel of Bulldogs of one sort and another—all of whose interests are in the hands of a queer middle-aged middle-class Bulldog Drummond of an ex-Temporary Major. This odd, smug, highly respectable-looking filibuster lives outside Agadir in a smug white “Arab” house he has built for himself. What is this gentleman exactly? It is hard to say. He is a house-agent of a peculiarly Moroccan order. No doubt he was selected for the job on account of his typically British appearance: he is the real thing all right—the good, solid, pink, fetch-and-carry order of faithful dog-Toby of a man—his honest baldness inflamed with exposure to the African sun, with an invaluable air too of righting wrongs, about him, and assisting the poor downtrodden Arab against the wicked French, and really I dare say charged with a good bit of beefy romanticism of the station-bookstall shilling-a-volume order (the Briton in foreign parts, what what!—a bit of “secret service,” a dash of free-lance, but always sure to be anywhere where there’s a “scrap,” what what!) though doubtless aware which side his bread is buttered.—This strange plump Cockney-Scot was organizer and commander-in-chief of an assortment of pith-helmeted, Mill-Hill-Schoolish Tooting-Beck-bred hangers-on—he ran the principal estate office of Agadir, had a “dinky” dairy farm and his milk-cart affected to take milk to the town, but the town complained it was none too easy to get milk out of the Temporary Major.”
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