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The manifesto is a hilariously transgressive statement
of intent, it’s sadistic screed sham utopian, in the
style of Swift (one of its “BLESSED” writers.) This is
a satirical cabaret as much as an exercise avant aesthetics.
Taking apart England, France, “the years 1837 to
1900 – abysmal inexcusable middle-class”, this stance
of the grand nemesis, while its hatred may be genuine,
is also a knockabout routine, and Lewis knows it. This
stance of The Enemy is an anti-humanistic counter-pose
to prevailing morality which presents the artist as an
evil deity. Indeed, it presents the artist as a simultaneous
Anti-Christ and anarchist – to quote a certain later
descendant – and was every bit as much a cabaret act
when his forbear performed it.
Moving on into the pages of Blast – after the art of
Wyndham Lewis’ words, the art of his images. Living in
the aftershock, we may take it for granted, but this jagged,
fissured assault on the figurative sensibility must
have seemed terrifyingly alien at the time, inorganic, a
re-scalpelling of the soul made possible by the machine
age. They would be right, but this optical poetry creates
the same psychic rush his writing achieves. Take the
fractured curves of ‘Timon of Athens’, or ‘Slow Attack’.
The angular menace, the sheer visceral abandon
of these can still thrill today.
The other contributors to Blast compliment the attack.
Pound’s poetry is still in its infancy, but is still
so unlike anything which has come before to add
BUY Wyndham Lewis books online from and
new currents to the storm. Rebecca West’s short story
‘Indissoluble Matrimony’ is the most ‘conventional’
narrative here (Lewis, ever contrary, said it was the
only thing in the journal he enjoyed not written by
himself) but its tale of a husband and wife bludgeoning
each other in a lake combines an elegantly icy
authorial surface voice with a savage energy beneath
which add further prismatic whirls to the vortex. The
art prints of Frederick Etchells, Edward Wadsworth,
Cuthbert Hamilton and Jacob Epstein take Lewis’
style into still more redolent contours. But they don’t
match the inhuman originality of the master. It is the
painting and the prose of Wyndham Lewis that makes
this vortex spin. Both the prints and the writing are
a poetry of the sharp surface, a harsh, perverse carapace,
unalloyed and unique. Lewis is the consummate
elitist, untainted by the muck of mediocrity.
The achievement of Blast is to create an aesthetic
all of its own, a complete mental landscape every bit
as unique as Impressionism or Cubism, feeding into
the Dada and Surrealism that followed it. The merest
fragment can find an image of the whole movement,
perhaps the truest definition of ‘original’ art. Breton’s
Surrealist Manifesto had a clear debt to the manifesto
of Blast. Search on down the decades and the debt continues.
From the whirling non-linear narratives of Burroughs
and Atrocity Exhibition era J.G. Ballard, to the
savage surreal satire of Chris Morris’ BrassEye, each
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