Widely known today for his masterful paintings (I’ve always thought that his portrait of T. S. Eliot may be the best example of modernism in portraiture), Wyndham Lewis’s scathing and witty writings have for too long been out of print and unavailable for purchase. The publication of Paleface is a promising beginning to the republication of an author who has long been unrightfully excluded from the modernist canon for his deviance from acceptable political opinion.
In Paleface, Lewis takes to task the romantic primitivism of his peers, holding up for scorn the decadent and idiotic love of civilized man for the savage. As readers will surely know, while the targets of this scorn may have changed (certainly our enemies today are far less articulate than Sherwood Anderson), the fundamental contention remains, indeed has only worsened. Lewis spends a considerable amount of time holding up for mockery and derision the works of self-hating Whites who today are regarded as touchstones of the literary canon—chief among them D. H. Lawrence, a third-rate author who comes across here for what he actually is: a midgrade moron trafficking in a tired Rousseauvianism, communicated in turgid and unartful prose, and inflected with the sexual neuroses of an Englishman unable to face up to the final decline of empire. Likewise, the reader will find exposed the idiocy of another figure now regarded as canonical: W. E. B. DuBois, whose novel Dark Princess, excerpted here with Lewis’s scathing commentary, reads like the half-waking headcanon of the average liberal in 2024. Our enemies may indeed be less articulate, but they undoubtedly remain stuck in an intellectual mire that is at least a century old.
Lewis argues that the fetishization of non-European cultures by the intellectuals and self-styled artists of his time represents a superficial and ultimately self-serving attempt to escape the perceived sterility of Western civilization in the aftermath of the Great War. This romanticization, according to Lewis, diminishes the complexity and integrity of these cultures by reducing them to mere antidotes to Western ennui. Lewis’s polemical style is both invigorating and challenging, as he spares no effort in exposing what he sees as the hypocrisies and intellectual laziness of his peers.
Lewis’s analysis of the intersections between race and aesthetics is particularly insightful. He contends that the valorization of the “primitive” in art and literature serves to reinforce the stifling code of a quickly liberalizing dying empire, rather than subverting these outmoded forms of government for something genuinely novel. By appropriating elements of non-Western cultures, Western artists effectively neutralize their potential for genuine cultural critique; the enchantment with the superficially foreign and alien comes forth to prevent any soul-searching, any actual self-reflection on the part of the Western intellectual. In place of this demanding task, we get a new binary, whereby the foreign is Good, the natively Western is Bad. Lewis shows all of this up for what it is: intellectual laziness. To use his own cutting refrain: “Flash that up, you silly painters!”
Lewis’s prose is characterized by a sharp, incisive wit that enlivens his critical arguments. His style is unapologetically erudite, demanding a high level of engagement from the reader. Such complexity is part of what makes Paleface such a rewarding read; Lewis treats his reader as an intelligent interlocutor, rather than as a mere vessel into which ideological dogmas must be poured. Reading him is like talking to your brightest friend over several rounds of beer, in a quiet place where one need not worry about the intrusive eyes and eavesdropping ears of the public and its simple morality. Lewis challenges his audience to think deeply about the cultural assumptions underlying their aesthetic judgments, and to recognize the political implications of their artistic preferences.
— Harlan Wallace