The Filibuster: A Study of the Political Ideas of Wyndham Lewis (Bloomsbury Academic Collections: English Literary Criticism)

Wyndham Lewis, as writer and painter, was one of the great creative geniuses of this century and also one of the most neglected. A large part of the cause of that neglect has been the enduring distrust of Lewis's political thinking, which has been greatly misunderstood and misrepresented. A leading intellectual in an age of intellectuals, Lewis was outspoken in praise and criticism, and, swimming against the mood of the times, became wrongly identified with the Fascist cause. Yet the truth is that there is no convenient political label to pin on Wyndham Lewis, for he was too much of an individualist ever to espouse a cause.

D. G. Bridson, a close friend of Wyndham Lewis in the latter part of his life, has examined critically the evolution of Lewis's ideas over some thirty years of writing. The Filibuster is an attempt to convey the changing, overall pattern of his political thinking, to clear away the misunderstandings and allow us to assess Lewis more truly both as a man and an artist, in the historical context of his times, the turbulent years between 1920 and 1950.

As a reviewer back in the thirties, D. G. Bridson discussed many books by the so-called ‘men of 1914' – Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis. He subsequently helped to get much of their writing heard on the BBC in his own productions, including five of Wyndham Lewis's major novels. He is the author of three volumes of poetry and verse drama and of a recent and highly praised autobiography, Prospero and Ariel.