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| Lewis' portrait of T. S. Eliot; Eliot called him "the greatest prose writer of [his] generation" |
Having read in some of Marshall McLuhan’s collected works that Wyndham Lewis was among the greatest thinkers of his time, I couldn’t resist picking up the first book I saw with his name on it at a small bookstore a few years ago. As I’d learn as soon after, Self Condemned is a more minor, semi-autobiographical satire of his, not even known enough among current readers to warrant a modest Wikipedia entry. That said, it was absolutely worth the read, for its own sake but also to understand Lewis’ art, as well as his life. The story follows Rene Harding, a renowned and respected history professor, as he resigns his position and moves to Canada with his wife Hester. The first part of the book covers his goodbyes to various characters of his life in England, simultaneously illuminating the over-abstract but unalterable motives for his self-exile. The second part, which makes up the body of the work, details the dreadful isolation he and Hester endure for years in their tiny room at the Hotel Blundell in Momaco (a fictional Ontarian city based on Toronto). The third and shortest part tells how their lives in Momaco develop after the Hotel burns down.
The most palpable quality of Lewis’ writing is the realism. Everything is recounted in an extraordinarily imaginative (in the Aristotelian sense, not the Einsteinian) light. The characters, places, and events proceed so sequentially and analytically that one can hardly distinguish the amateurism from the genius. If he ever waxes poetic, it is only to sharpen the mental image where forensic description does not suffice. Lewis joins his contemporaries T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound in the charge of anti-sentimentalism, but unlike those two great writers of poetry and plays, Lewis deals in the realm of full-length novels, where one follows characters with inner lives for three- or four-hundred pages. The disinterest combined with the penetrating insight therefore yields an off-putting atmosphere, like watching a surgery being performed upon oneself: however upsetting and disaffecting, the spectacle is too intriguing to look away.
Lewis himself is attributed the quote, “Art is life with all the humbug of life taken out of it”; here, that philosophy, indeed duly applied, has the opposite effect of what one might think: instead of a superb drama, the work describes laboriously things that would be soon forgotten under less anti-human conditions. Actually, the dwelling on insignificant events and people in torturous detail inflicts on the reader that same curse Momaco puts on the main characters. The encounters with Mr. Starr stand out as a prime example: such a laughably insignificant character, who has no bearing on their lives outside of a fruitless meeting or two, is impressed on the mind with a hot branding iron. Painful as these pointless moments become, the horror shines truest in the “humbug”, which is most often tidily abridged in a few short paragraphs. The terrifying limbo, full of degrading memory and withering intellect, is, by this technique of synopsis, stretched gruesomely into eternity by the reader’s imagination.
The same meticulous, “documentary” tone makes the central purpose of the book difficult to pin down: is it a criticism of American/Canadian culture, or a moral tale of intellectual heterodoxy and its consequences, or a portrait of a relationship spiraling under the stress of isolation? It is in fact all of them at the same time, and anyone could justifiably call this work “unfocused” for that reason. Regardless, this work is probably one of the most prescient and relevant works for anyone of the niche that I belong to: young, dissident conservatives who were at a key moment of maturation when Covid hit. Philosophical curiosity and subsequent discovery - resulting disillusionment with the whole modern franchise - living in misunderstanding and seclusion without a distinct end in sight - frictional relationships under these conditions - a little “death” that forms a discontinuity with, and alienation from, the self of the recent past. For someone like myself, this book is almost too close for comfort.
McLuhan, in his description of Lewis’ project, seems to put it best: “Lewis pleases nobody because he is like an intruder at a feast who quietly explains that dinner must be temporarily abandoned since the food has been poisoned and the guests must be detached from their dinners by a stomach pump.”
