Self Condemned

by Wyndham Lewis

After Rene Harding becomes dissatisfied with the civilization of England, he leaves the country and travels in search of a new intellectually stimulating home.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Literature, 20th Century, Canada, British Literature, English Literature

407 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1954

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

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wyndham Lewis was a ferninster par excellence. In the early 1930’s he expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler. Around the same time he comported himself as an anti-semite. (Though eventually he about-faced on both these stances.) When nearly all self-respecting progressive intellectuals were hitching themselves to Communism, he remained staunchly right-wing. In the 1930’s he blasted nearly the entire British literary establishment in his corrosive satire The Apes of God (which I will read some day soon). Even though he died in the late 1950’s, his reputation is still smarting from his radical contrariness while alive, but someday…

He also founded what is considered the only early-20th c. British avant-garde art movement, Vorticism (whoopee!); though it was an appropriate tag for this man who was himself a whirlwind of activity and ceaseless production. He was as great a painter as he was a writer and novelist. In both media his hands and eyes were aggressive and incisive, marked by an intellectual clarity that could border on hallucinatory and a resolute forwardness (as if he couldn’t wait for the future to appear).

Self Condemned is I think his final novel, and in retrospect was probably not the best one for me to start with, as it clearly is a very mature work. Mature in the sense that it is meaty but also fairly sober and stoical, and has a lifetime of technical innovation and thought-work coded into it. It’s almost as if by the time he came to write this he felt no need to be blatantly NEW! and was able to write conventionally but still without compromising any artistic integrity. I was gripped throughout, as a reader and as a thinker.

It draws on many of his own life experiences – escape from Europe days before the breakout of WWII, isolation with his wife in a Canadian hotel during the war, hotel tragedy, and eventually an offer of a professorship in a US university – but instead of an artist the main character is a sort of rogue historian who has written a book about the “secret history” of the causes of WWII. He’s actually a borderline crank, but stops just short of attributing the war to any conscious conspiracies, instead attributing it to fatal flaws in the intelligence (or lack thereof) of world leaders and human nature in general. People need wars to satisfy base needs. But Rene Harding (the protagonist) is a radical objectivist, and might I add supremacist, who wants to radically alter the nature of world leadership by creating an intellectual aristocracy to run the show, a leadership that has no base needs (or at least knows how to contain them). This is basically the set-up. The rest of the novel details how this aloof objectivism of his suffers blow after blow, culminating in a tragedy from which he never mentally recovers.

It’s written with a great attention to telling details, and includes a wonderful extended sequence of being poor and living in a rather shitty hotel. It is also a book written on at least two levels – the obvious story-line level, but also on a level where the story-line of two people is the microcosmic story-line of the world at large. It is also very moving, that is if you can be moved by watching a rather cold intellectual beast get assaulted by his own very human emotions.

Now on to Tarr!

[Monty Milne · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first part of the book, set in England at the beginning of the second world war, contains some very funny (to me) satire of left wingers. There is an odious Marxist clergyman and a massively rich (and generous) Hampstead pseudo-intellectual: both are enjoyably mocked (and are types still found: I’ve met both of them). This for me was an agreeable opening (I hate Virginia Woolf nearly as much as Wyndham Lewis did), and it had the added bonus of being much easier to read than anything else I’ve read by this author. Of course, one doesn’t take it entirely seriously: satire is a deliberately distorting mirror.

When the scene moves to Canada, the humour is still there, but a darker and deeper narrative takes shape. Canada is mocked for its philstinism, parochialism and puritanism. Of course this is overdone: Wyndham Lewis’s misanthropy always has an element of playing to the gallery. And yet one can also see that – at any rate in 1940’s Toronto – there was some truth to the satire. (This novel caused me to read up about the history of Prohibition in Canada, for example – which I never even knew was a thing. I was shocked at what I learned.)

The real meat of the novel is – as the title suggests – about the unravelling of the central character’s world view. He is right to point out stupidity and hypocrisy. But his insistence on reason and objectivity makes him increasingly blind to nuance and the needs of others – especially those closest to him. His over analytical philsophy is inadequate, and is blown apart by the catastrophic ending.

When Wyndham Lewis finished this he was already descending into that physical blindness which darkened his final years. All this adds extra poignancy. Admitting mistakes isn’t easy for any of us. He wasn’t wrong about everything (e.g. Virginia Woolf). But he had the courage to admit he had been wrong about a lot.

[George · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well written, memorable novel with some very good dialogue scenes and a strong ending. The protagonist, Rene Harding, is a self obsessed married man who resigns as professor of history as his unorthodox views make him feel that by being true to himself he cannot teach what he doesn’t believe in.

Rene believes the war will occur, (it is 1939), and decides to leave London for Canada. Rene’s decision to quit teaching and move to Canada is made without firstly consulting with his wife. During the first three years in Canada, Rene and Hester live in poverty and self imposed isolation.

The novel deals with the problems of exiles and provincialism of a British ex colony (Canada), and describes the identity crisis of war transients.

This book was first published in 1954.

[Kim · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Self Condemned" is a novel written by Wyndham Lewis and published in 1954. Wyndham Lewis was born Percy Wyndham Lewis but he didn't like the name Percy so he dropped it. I happen to like Percy much better than Wyndham. He was not only an author but also a painter. He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art, and edited the literary magazine of the Vorticists, BLAST. I've seen his art and I'm not a big fan of his painting; so far I've only read one of his books so I'm not sure yet if I'm a big fan of his writing.

As to the one book I have read "Self Condemned" I did like it most of the time, I'm not so sure I would have if I were from Canada though. Lewis was born on his father's yacht while it was in Canadian waters off Nova Scotia. He retained his Canadian citizenship throughout his life, which is what enabled him to leave England in 1939 and spend tbe war years in North America. His belief was that he could earn more money in Canada and the United States than he could in England. He arrived in Toronto in September of 1939 and went on to New York, but when his American visa expired he returned to Canada. He called Canada a"sanctimonious ice-box."Lewis and his wife stayed in the Tudor Hotel in Toronto which became the Hotel Blundell in Momaco in "Self Condemned".If I were a resident of Toronto and knew that Momaco was his name for Toronto in the novel, I may have stopped reading when I reached Chapter 11 and read this description of my city:

"Momaco was so ugly, and so devoid of all character as of any trace of charm, that it was disagreeable to walk about in. It was as if the elegance and charm of Montreal had been attributed to the seductions of the Fiend by the puritan founders of Momaco: as if they had said to themselves that at least in Momaco the god-fearing citizen, going about his lawful occasions, should do so without the danger of being seduced by way of his senses.

Had this city not been, with so rare a consistency, ugly and dull, the Hardings might have been less cooped up. Being friendless, there was no temptation to leave their neighbourhood, and be depressed by the squalid monotony.:

Or had I been the owner of the Tudor Hotel and known of it being the Hotel Blundell, Lewis may not have found a room available on his next trip to Canada after I had read this description:

"The Room, in the Hotel Blundell, was twenty-five feet by twelve about. It was no cell. It was lit by six windows: three composed a bay, in which well-lit area they spent most of their time—René sat at one side of the bay, writing upon his knee on a large scribbling pad. Hester sat at the other side, reading or knitting or sleeping.

For the first year she had sat upon a piece of monumental hotel-junk, a bluish sofa. But it secreted bed-bugs, the summer heat disclosed, as it caused one occasionally to walk upon one of its dirty velvet arms."

I wouldn't think Lewis made many Canadian friends once his book was published, but now on to the story. The novel is about Rene Harding, a professor of History who resigns his position because he can no longer teach history the way it has always been taught. While I must say that I didn't quite understand all his reasons here are some of them:

'History cannot be merely an account of all that is interesting, in age after age: the Divine Comedies, the great religious and philosophical systems, the feats of Galileo, Newton or Pythagoras, or the arts, and the ideologies. As an account of what has happened that would be incorrect: for certainly all those things came into being, but that is only half the story, it is not "history". For all these things are products of man, and all have a more or less functional aspect. Once the aeroplane is invented, it is what happens to it afterwards, to what uses it is put, which is as much its history as its original construction. It is the same with the radio, the internal-combustion engine, and the rest: and as to books, their publication is almost meaningless by itself; "history" is there to tell us who read the book and what the book did to him. Now, why Professor Harding's history is, as we have said, pessimistic, is because man in general ignores, misuses or misreads these various products of the creative mind, a mind not possessed by man in general. So this explains why so many uninteresting figures, and even, in the seats of power, such criminals must be still described, why it is impossible for the historian to escape from them. Just as the smell from the sewers must be described in a novel in which it causes the hero's death, so the new historian is obliged to describe what is brutish and only fit for the garbage pail. To conclude, history can only be written as a tragedy, because all that is worth writing about that has come down to us has been denied its full development, has been nipped in the bud, or has been done to death."

As I said Harding resigns his position and plans to move to Canada, doing this without consulting anyone including his wife Hester. This seems extremely selfish to me, but then Rene Harding did seem like an extremely selfish person the entire book. In the first part of our book Harding tells his family and friends of his decision, shocking everyone, and taking his wife leaves for Canada. He has no idea what he will do for employment when he gets there but feels that he has to go. Harding doesn't seem to consider Hester's feelings at all or understand what taking her from her home and family means to her until they are on the ship.

"she sobbed. 'I am sorry, darling, I know what you're thinking, but I just can't help it. All this is too much for me.'

René was much affected. The realization of what this would be for poor Hester struck him now for the first time. He always forgot that Hester was a human being, because she was so terribly much the Woman. And then her world must appear to him such a petty world, that losing it could hardly mean very much. Indeed, it is rather what the grown-up traditionally thinks about the child; it cries its eyes out and it is impossible for the mature to understand that its heart is breaking, if for no other reason because it breaks so many thousands of times.

But René looked grave and was really sorry, as much as it was possible for him to be. It was the beginning of a new way of thinking about Hester, although, at that time, it did not continue for very long."

I also want to mention that while they are on their way to Canada World War II begins:

"The next day the radio announced the Declaration of War. At tea-time they were having tea in the lounge and the King's speech was broadcast. René took all this as a matter of course; and, indeed, the passengers in general appeared to be very little affected. This was natural enough, since most of them were on the ship so as not to be in Europe when this event occurred. With a frown Hester stared a little more than usual: whether this was authentic distress, or a desire to attract attention, it is difficult to say."

The rest of the novel takes place in Canada in the city of Momaco at the Hotel Blundell. The middle section of the book tells us, in depressing details, of the Hardings first struggling years in Momaco up to the turning point of the novel, when the hotel catches fire and burns to the ground. I found myself pitying Rene Harding and Hester so much in this section I often was near tears.

"They never left this Room, these two people, except to shop at the corner of the block. They were as isolated as are the men of the police-posts on Coronation Gulf or Baffin Bay. They were surrounded by a coldness as great as that of the ice-pack; but this was a human pack upon the edge of which they lived. They had practically no social contacts whatever. They were hermits in this horrid place. They were pioneers in this kind of cold, in this new sort of human refrigeration; and no equivalent of a central heat system had, of course, as yet been developed for the human nature in question. They just took it, year after year, and like backwoodsmen (however unwilling) they had become hardened to the icy atmosphere. They had grown used to communicating only with themselves; to being friendless, in an inhuman void."

"There is a wrong sort of hotel; one dedicated to the care of guests who have been deprived of their freedom, and have been kidnapped into solitude and forced inertia.—The Hotel Blundell was the wrong sort of hotel. It was just a hotel, it was not a prison, but for the Hardings, husband and wife, it stank of exile and penury and confinement."

"They must vegetate, violent and morose—sometimes blissfully drunken, sometimes with no money for drink—within these four walls, in this identical daily scene—from breakfast until the time came to tear down the Murphy bed, to pant and sweat in the night temperatures kicked up by the radiators—until the war's-end or the world's-end was it? Until they had died or had become different people and the world that they had left had changed its identity too, or died as they had died. This was the great curse of exile—reinforced by the rigours of the times—as experienced upon such harsh terms as had fallen to their lot."

All Hester wanted was to get back to England, saying things like she would give everything for one half hour in London. There is a scene where they no longer have any money and Hester can't go out because she doesn't have shoes anymore. Than a friend unexpectedly sends them 30 dollars and she can buy a pair of shoes. " She cried a little. It was like a cripple recovering the use of her legs!"It is during these years of hardship that Rene and Hester become the closest:

"But here, all the time, was the person he should have gone to. 'Hardship! I am beginning to love hardship. It sharpens the sight. When I look, I see. I see what a grand woman you are. I used to think that you were scheming and frivolous—I am afraid that you must have seen that I thought that.'

'I sometimes feared you thought that,' she agreed. She saw her chances of an opening slipping away. She had trembled when he spoke so favourably of hardship.

'I, no more than you, would seek hardship,' he said, and she started, for it was as though he had been listening in to her thoughts. 'But honestly, being imprisoned, as we have been, here, has its compensations. This barren life has dried out of me a great deal that should not have been there. And you have become integrated in me. This tête-à-tête of ours over three years has made us as one person. And this has made me understand you—for most people I should hate to be integrated with. It is only when years of misery have caused you to grow into another person in this way that you can really know them.' He waited a moment and then went on, 'In the other world, Hester, I treated you as you did not at all deserve. I cut a poor figure as I look back at myself.'

This section ends with the fire. Hotel Blundell burns to the ground, now Rene and Hester must find a new place to live. Hester sees this as the chance to get back to England, Rene realizes that he will never return to England.

The final section finds the Hardings living in another hotel. Hester is beginning to unravel, before in their years at the Hotel Blundell, she saw their years in exile as a time of suffering that they would escape from someday and return to England. The hotel burning seemed to her to be the opportunity to leave Canada, a place she hates, and finding that her husband doesn't feel the same way she falls into depression. They used to be united over their hatred of Momaco, now he never mentions the horrors of the city. Rene begins to have success in Momaco, he becomes a columnist for the Momaco Gazette-Herald.Hester is horrified, the last thing she wants is for him to begin to succeed in this awful city. At this point I was thinking that this couldn't possibly end well, and it doesn't, but I won't say anymore. I did like the book, there were one or two chapters that seemed too long and too wordy for me, but only one or two. Go ahead and read the book, I give it three stars.

[David D · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's refreshing to see a conservative writer finally engage with how deeply they hate themselves and human beings in general through the lens of total personal and professional collapse. Of course this was back when a right winger could actually fail rather than just get bankrolled by koch bros $$$.

[Owen Hatherley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Self Condemned is probably Lewis' least controversial novel, possibly because this time he tears into a character very like himself - a right-wing intellectual who moves to Canada on the eve of the war, and proceeds to gradually ruin his own life and that of his lover through his own corrosive self-importance. It's an uncomfortable read insofar as you're forced deeply into this not particularly delightful character's mind, and Lewis' critique of the not-quite-Lewis protagonist emerges subtly rather than via the polemical, caricatural sledgehammer he applied to others. It is, like all Lewis novels, something of a slog, dense and alienating and leeringly misanthropic. It's also fascinating and at times brilliant, with a relentless, grid-like logic; a snapshot of a deeply seedy and uneasy time and place and as always superbly written, with the visual intensity you'd expect from him and a compassion you very much wouldn't.

Also, for some reason the Goodreads page for this seems to have been merged with a completely different book.

[Czarny Pies · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read this dreadful book because Marshall McLuhan a good Canadian recommended it highly. It is a truly remarkable rant about Toronto (to which Lewis gives the name "Momaco" a reference to Mimico which is a neighbourhood of Toronto.) "Self-Condemned" is a hysterical rant by a cultured Englishmen against the provincialism and Puritanism of Canada made all the more remarkable by the fact that it was written immediately after WWII when pro-Canadian sentiment was highest in England because of the large number of Canadian soldiers who had served in the Royal Forces. One has to assume that McLuhan admired Lewis for his gall rather than his good manners.
Lewis criticizes Canadians for two things: first, they lack any culture and, second, they fawn over the English who they believe possess it. The protagonist is René Harding is a history professor who resigns his comfortable position in England due to an exaggerated belief in his own self-worth. He will then undergo the ordeal of Canada before regaining his former status as a great intellectual. In the course of events he will lose his wife and his immortal soul.
Some readers will find "Self-Condemned" to be a brilliant satire in the tradition of Evelyn Waugh. I found it rather disjointed. While its humour is unquestionably tasteless, I must confess that we Canadians often say and write terrible things about the English.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Self Condemned
By: Wyndham Lewis
1954

Why is it people feel they need to travel abroad to European countries to gain a sense of enlightenment and self actualization? It's strange when people from Western countries recount their journeys to France and Germany speaking of how they have become more cultured and knowledgeable once they have traveled across the ocean.

For Lewis it was the opposite. He came to Canada with his wife before the second world war to escape the proximity to violence and death. Many writers and critics have focused on how this novel has painted a horrible picture of Canada during the war. In defense, I will say Lewis subverts the mythology of Canada as being a neutral and inviting place by detailing the poverty and strife all people endured around the world.

The protagonist's wife commits suicide in this novel because she feels that her environment confines her and sets her up for impending failure. Critics have pinpointed this event as misogynistic. But I feel that this moment in the novel is less about Lewis' misogyny than how the war affects men and women. She is not a weak person. She made a decision to end her life based on living through the horrors war brings, like Virginia Woolf. It is a moment of agency that cannot be denied.

I have defended this novel in a number of ways because I feel it has been shafted by a number of critics who simply reduce it to an "anti-Canadian novel", but I feel it is much more. It's a balanced and controlled novel which illustrates reflection, understanding, and strife like few war time novels (away from the battlefield). I make this point because Lewis supposedly sympathized with Hitler leading up to the war and he has been marked by his political predilections to this day. This novel assisted Lewis in atoning for his past political oversights. And let his audience know the he was wrong to make such affiliations. I have not read many novels that discuss what Canada was like during WWII and I will have to check the 1001 list for more.

I will say that this is one of the best novels that I have read this year. Lewis' prose is even more impressive in that he wrote the novel while he was blind. I feel this novel is a great autobiographical recount of his life in Canada and a great work of humility.

oh yes, and his paintings in the novel supplement a great reading experience.



Grade:
A

[Sam Schulman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perhaps the greatest anti-Canadian novel ever written, which is still full of loving, careful, humorous observation of Canada in the 40s, and the most expansive novel of claustrophobia ever written, describing the life of an exiled, nearly broke, frieldless + childless couple confined to a 12'x25' apartment-hotel in Canada for most of its many hundreds of pages. Wonderful observations on the sex war, Canadian English v "peasoup" mutual hatred, climate, obsession with drink (why does no one remark that Canada was almost as insane about alcohol as the prohibition-era USA, and for a longer time), academia, professional history, and the way that relatively less "equality" measured by income fails to express a much wider and more striated range of inequality than that which exists now. A great hater of Virginia Woolf, Wyndham Lewis in his old age wrote a kind of reversal of "To the Lighthouse," a Woolfianly inward novel narrated by a personality rather like the Father in that book which I have read too often.

[Deanne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rene strikes me as a selfish man, he makes the decision to resign his job and head to Canada. His wife Essie is expected to drop everything and go with him. The first part of the book allows the reader to follow the couple as they meet friends and family before the journey. I've done this myself when travelling from the UK to New Zealand.
Once they arrive in Canada they become isolated, transplanted to an alien city with no friends and with the war started they are cut off. Lewis is very good at describing these events and the effect it has on their relationship.
Much prefer this to Apes of god, though I've found both interesting.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

This a powerful and political book that says a lot about history, politics, intellectual cowardice and ethical decision making. Historical scholar Rene Harding leaves his British academic post on the eve of WWII and takes his wife to Canada in a bid to get away from family, history and civilization itself. Lewis was a smart and funny writer who seemed like he intended this novel as both a parody of his own feckless behavior during WWII and a defense of it. Along the way he savages his critics, his countrymen, and Canadians.

[Stephen Rowland · Rating 4 out of 5]

Near-masterpiece, and the first Lewis novel I've been able to finish.

[Glenn · Rating 5 out of 5]

British crank and wife move to Canada (a fictionalized Toronto, feebly redubbed "Momaco," a rare instance of Lewis' writerly resourcefulness failing him) to wait out World War II and intellectual and personal disaster ensue. Autobiographical — things were crummy for the Lewises in Toronto but not SO bad as here — and consistently amusing in its "I sure am a serious person" self-regard. Nevertheless it is very vivid and alive and more of a "read" than its heft and perhaps its reputation might indicate.

Inspirational sentence: "A woman is always on the side of the lousy world."

Man, who invited THIS guy?

[Arukiyomi · Rating 2 out of 5]

To a certain extent autobiographical, this again, as with The Driver’s Seat, is about someone making their own decisions. This resonated with me as Professor Rene Harding resigns from his job which coincided with me resigning from mine. We also both worked in education.

However, while he pursues this course of action very much against the advice and wishes of his wife, I had the full support of mine. This comes back to bite him after he emigrates from the UK to Canada and his marriage starts to show cracks from cross-cultural strains.

The Canada of Self Condemned is always miserable, always cold and has no redeeming features whatsoever. In addition, Prof Harding’s own life starts to grow very familiar as all the things he has run from gradually find him out in his new surroundings.

It reminded me of a quote from a song I used to sing:

I’m running from the very clothes I’m wearing…

Having lived overseas as a child and then for 20 of my adult years, I can tell you firsthand that emigration is often spurred by the misplaced thought that life won’t be as troublesome in our new home. But as we said in Saudi, “Whatever you are, Saudi makes it worse.”

Lewis’ morality tale is well written. There are a couple of tragic events that are very well described. However, every now and then, there’s a Rand-ish rant on some aspect of intellectualism. It’s an OK novel, but I don’t think it’s in any way deserving of its place on the 1001 Books list. I mean, how influential can it be if it doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia entry? Come on now.

[Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

the previous late wyndham lewis novel i read didn't impress me very much, and this one isn't great either, but it is pretty interesting. the prose style is much tamer than his earlier work, but there are hints of his early style occasionally peeking through. the first section of the novel in england feels a bit like a weaker version of some of the satire in tarr or the apes of god, but once they get to canada it shifts into something else, much more claustrophobic and deeply unpleasant. it's hard to know what to make of the plot - rene harding is somewhat based on lewis himself, and sometimes seems to express lewis' own opinions, but then what are we to make of his gradual mental deterioration over the course of the book, and his eventual end as a mentally broken shell of a person? if the character's opinions are lewis' own then he seems to have moved from the outright reactionary tendencies of the 1930s to a sort of cynical elitist liberalism, clearly dissatisfied with the status quo but still committed to thorough anticommunism and vaguely hoping for some sort of enlightened global new deal. this all seems a bit lame when compared to the reactionary vitriol of his earlier career, and when he's lamenting the loss of the mensheviks in the russian revolution it's hard not to roll your eyes. it seems like this is probably how you're supposed to regard the character though, and if that's the case then it's hard not to see it as a tremendously harsh self criticism of lewis himself.

[Jeff · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lewis published this novel late in life, only a few years before his death. Clearly some of the intellectual, academic discontent of the protagonist is reflective of Lewis' own views of the post-World War II world. I found myself wondering if Rene's cynical, self-righteous attitude were being mocked or embraced by Lewis. The symbols of the modern world abound, particularly the burnt-out Hotel Blundell encased in a giant ice-cave. I struggled to get through this, but that might have more to do with the fact that I was in the midst of reading piles and piles of student essays at the time. But whatever I "wanted" from this novel, I didn't feel I was getting. I read other reviews of this book, with many folks saying that they had found Lewis' other novels tedious, but felt this one was considerably less-so. That gives me some degree of trepidation when I see "Tarr" sitting on my to-read shelf.

[Aileen · Rating 3 out of 5]

That is to say, it's very unpleasant. But I suppose it's supposed to be that unpleasant, so it's at least well-done. And there are a couple of really nice images to relieve all that horrible plodding unpleasantness.

[Josh Rachac · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't think I've ever read anyone funnier than Wyndham Lewis. This book had me roaring to myself like a lunatic-- in the barbaric 'ho ho ho' fashion, the gut laugh, as he put it, & not the 'ha ha ha' of parlor clevernesses. It's timeless stuff.