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owe something to its serrated edge. In music, Mark E
Smith of The Fall has made explicit the fact his savage
jet-sprays of consciousness owe much to this original
renegade. The late Malcolm McLaren was never so
honest about the influence of Lewis on his own arch
art prankery, but it was there all the same. Indeed the
aesthetic of the whole avant-subversive-transgressive
Pistols wing of 70s London punk (as opposed to the
campaigning-idealist Clash wing) clearly took its cue
from the inventively scabrous oppositionalism and
fractured imagery of Vorticism, from the swastika-
Marx-crucifix emblems on their shirts, to the blackmail
lettering of Jamie Reid’s album cover attacking the
eyes just as the journal’s cover did all those years before.
McLaren and Vivienne Westwood even designed
a ‘Which side of the bed’ t-shirt which homaged the
“Blasted and Blessed” of the original manifesto, with
new heroes (Eddie Cochran, Joe Orton, Ronnie Biggs
and free radio stations) replacing the originals (Charlotte
Corday, The Pope and James Joyce), and the new
villains of (Mick Jagger, Salvador Dalí, Max Bygraves,
W.H. Smith and the Stock Exchange) replacing the old
(the British Academy, the Post Office, Captain Cook
and Sydney Webb.) The best of Blast’s descendants are
magnificent. But when your stance is a fetishised oppositionalism,
it is absolutely vital this is accompanied
with absolute, dynamic ingenuity. Anything less, and
the result is childish, boorish, worst of all plain boring.
BUY Wyndham Lewis books online from and
Its more degraded descendants could arguably include
every pitiful spitting punk band, and the piss-poor
amoral controversialism of Damien Hirst and Tracey
Emin. But then you shouldn’t blame Graham Greene
for Frederick Forsyth, nor Hogarth for ‘Mac’ of the
Daily Mail.
With Enemy Of The Stars, a two-handed play which
sees claustrophobically entwined individuals existentially
battling it out against an absurdist landscape, we
see an often overlooked influence on Beckett, with the
Vladimir and Estragon of Waiting For Godot descendants
of Arghol and Hanp in their stylised rhetorical opposition.
Lewis’ marred reputation means he very rarely
gets the credit he deserves for this inspiration for some
of the 20th century’s greatest masterpieces of theatre.
Yet of course Lewis’ reputation is eternally marred.
The underside to this thrilling pose, from black-hearted
nihilism, to the outright Fascism seen in the later career
of the man, has been explored at great length elsewhere.
The charge-sheet against this personally dislikable individual
is neither light nor slight. Of course his barbed
vision is open to abuse, abuse itself being its life-blood.
Aesthetics translated into politics is very often a bad
combination, as certain followers of that other great
pugilistic aphorist Friedrich Nietzsche have amply and
agonisingly shown. Nietzsche and Wyndham Lewis
are like gunpowder, their explosions can both ignite
beautiful displays, or lead to incalculable damage.
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