Some Sort of Genius : A Life of Wyndham Lewis

"A man of undoubted genius," T.S. Eliot said of painter and draughtsman, novelist, satirist, pamphleteer and critic, Wyndham Lewis. He launched the only 20th century English avante garde movement, Vorticism, in 1914. His first novel, Tarr, was published in 1918. As an artillery officer at the third battle of Ypres, he gained his political education "under fire." His anti-war books of the 1930s argued against a war-mongering left-wing orthodoxy, presenting the case for the right. This made him look, uncomfortably, like a Nazi sympathizer. His reputation never recovered. However, after WW2, spent in penniless and bitter exile in Canada, he returned to London and received some recognition at last but it coincided, tragically, with the realization that he was going blind.

Paul O'Keeffe is a lecturer and journalist based in Liverpool.