Wyndham Lewis Quotes

Contradict yourself. In order to live, you must remain broken up.

What is the good of being an island, if you are not a volcanic island?

Instead of the vast organization to exploit the weakness of the Many, should we not possess one for the exploitation of the intelligence of the Few?

I do not think I have ever seen a nastier-looking man... Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist. [on Brit poet Percy Wyndham Lewis]

Art is the expression of an enormous preference.

Artists put as much vitality and delight into their saintliness and escape out as most men do their escapes into similar places from respectable existence.

The English certainly and fiercely pride themselves in never praising themselves.

I'm happy for you Agastya,you're leaving for a more meaningful context. This place is like a parody, a complete farce, they're trying to build another Cambridge here. At my old University I used to teach Macbeth to my MA English classes in Hindi.English in India is burlesque. But now you'll get out of here to somehow a more real situation. In my time I'd wanted to give this Civil Service exam too, I should have. Now I spend my time writing papers for obscure journals on L. H. Myers and Wyndham Lewis, and teaching Conrad to a bunch of half-wits.

Many great writers address audiences who do not exist; to address passionately and sometimes with very great wisdom people who do not exist has this advantage—that there will always be a group of people who, seeing a man shouting apparently at somebody or other, and seeing nobody else in sight, will think it is they who are being addressed.

One night Death left his card. I was not familiar with the name he chose: but the black edge was deep. I flung it back. A thousand awakenings of violence.

The art of advertisement, after the American manner, has introduced into all our life such a lavish use of superlatives, that no standard of value whatever is intact.

Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist. - about Wyndham Lewis

The intelligence suffers today automatically in consequence of the attack on all authority, advantage, or privilege. These things are not done away with, it is needless to say, but numerous scapegoats are made of the less politically powerful, to satisfy the egalitarian rage awakened.

But let me have silence always, in the centre of the shouting—that is essential! Let me have silence so that no pin may drop and not be heard, and not a whisper escape us for all our spouting, nor the needle's scratching upon this gramophone of a circular cosmic spot. Hear me! Mark me! Learn me! Throw the mind's ear open—shut up the mind's eye—all will be music!

People ought to be allowed to drop to pieces in any way they choose. I even disapprove of propping them up. Let nations, like men, die in peace. I rather feel as if I had been delivering pep talks to men dying of cancer.

We are against the glorification of “the People,” as we are against snobbery. It is not necessary to be an outcast bohemian, to be unkempt or poor, any more than it is necessary to be rich or handsome, to be an artist. Art is nothing to do with the coat you wear. A top-hat can well hold the Sixtine. A cheap cap could hide the image of Kephren.

The War went on far too long... It was too vast for its meaning, like a giant with the brain of a midge. Its epic proportions were grotesquely out of scale, seeing what it was fought to settle. It was far too indecisive. It settled nothing, as it meant nothing. Indeed, it was impossible to escape the feeling that it was not meant to settle anything - that could have any meaning, or be of any advantage, to the general run of men.

In a period of such obsessing political controversy as the present, I believe that I am that strange animal, the individual without any politics at all.

There is nothing contemptible about an intoxicated man (if it is nothing more than a bookful of words or a roomful of notes that he has got drunk on).

And to wish to be alone, or to drink alone, or to do anything else alone, is the first step to the supernatural: which, in its turn, is the first step to the stake or the crucifix.

Love performs its natural miracle, and they become part of us; it is a dismemberment to cast them off. Our own blood flows out after them when they go.

Death is the thing that differentiates art and life. Art is identical with the idea of permanence. It is a continuity and not an individual spasm. Life is the idea of the person.

...a flabby lemon and pink giant, who hung his mouth open as though he were an animal at the zoo inviting buns--especially when the ladies were present. [on fellow Brit Ford Madox Ford]

The first phase of modernism, which so far as the English language goes we associate with Pound and Yeats, Wyndham Lewis and Eliot and Joyce, was clerkly enough, sceptical in many ways; and yet we can without difficulty convict most of these authors of dangerous lapses into mythical thinking. All were men of critical temper, haters of the decadence of the times and the myths of mauvaise foi. All, in different ways, venerated tradition and had programmes which were at once modern and anti-schismatic. This critical temper was admittedly made to seem consistent with a strong feeling for renovation; the mood was eschatological, but scepticism and a refined traditionalism held in check what threatened to be a bad case of literary primitivism. It was elsewhere that the myths ran riot.

An uncomfortable thing happened now. He realised suddenly all the possibilities of this chance acquaintanceship, plainly and cinematographically. He was seized with panic. He must make a good impression. From that moment he ran the risk of doing the reverse. For he was unaccustomed to act with calculation. There he was like some individual who had gone nonchalantly into the presence of a prince; who—just in the middle of the audience—when he would have been getting over his first embarrassment —is overcome with a tardy confusion, the imagination in some way giving a jump. It is the imagination, repressed and as it were slighted, revenging itself. Casting about desperately for means of handling the situation, he remembered she had spoken of getting a dog to guide her. What had she meant? Anyway, he grasped at the dog. He could regain possession of himself in romantic stimulus of this figure. He would be her dog! Lie at her feet! He would fill with a merely animal warmth and vivacity the void that must exist in her spirit. His imagination, flattered, came in as ally. This, too, exempted him from the necessity of being victorious. All he asked was to be her dog! Only wished to impress her as a dog! Even if she did not feel much sympathy for him now, no matter. He would humbly follow her up, put himself at her disposition, not be exigent. It was a role difficult to refuse him. Sense of security the humility of this resolution brought about, caused him to regain a self-possession. Only it imposed the condition, naturally, of remaining a dog.

Deadness, in the limited sense in which we use that word, is the first condition of art. The second is absence of soul, in the sentimental human sense. The lines and masses of the statue are its soul. No restless, quick flame-like ego is imagined for the inside of it. It has no inside. This is another condition of art; to have no inside, nothing you cannot see. Instead, then, of being something impelled like an independent machine by a little egoistic fire inside, it lives soullessly and deadly by its frontal lines and masses.

The Press in 1914 had no Cinema, no Radio, and no Politics: so the painter could really become a 'star'. There was nothing against it. Anybody could become one, who did anything funny. And Vorticism was replete with humour, of course; it was acclaimed the best joke ever. Pictures, I mean oil-paintings, were 'news'. Exhibitions were reviewed in column after column. And no illustrated paper worth its salt but carried a photograph of some picture of mine or of my 'school', as I have said, or one of myself, smiling insinuatingly from its pages.

The world had become opaque and real again as he walked up St. James’s Street and past the Ritz. He had a feeling that he was taking an afternoon off from God. The adventurous modernity of the room in which he waited intensified that. One whole white wall was devoted to a small picture by Wyndham Lewis. It was like a picture of an earthquake in a city of aniline pink and grey and keen green cardboard, and he wished it had never existed.

Anything that survives the artist’s death is not life but belated drama.

Lowndes was a colleague, who was not very active, but had just enough money to be a cubist, that was to say quite a lot.

Somewhere or other, the painter Wyndham Lewis said that when alleged “objectivity” becomes a cult, parody becomes an irresistible urge. I would say, rather, that when inflexible Authority exists, the satirist and counterfeiter express two variations on, fundamentally, the same strategy for coping in such a world. The manufacturers/sellers of the “Guaranteed Drug-Free Urine” widely advertised these days exemplify the practical, as distinguished from artistic, mode of this insurrection.

All Good Bad Poetry is formal poetry because the reader is allowed to see exactly how the poem is failing to be good. Strained or unimaginative rhymes and awkward or inappropriately jaunty meters are easy to spot within an open grid of predictability. A formal poem risks bring indisputably bad, for any reader can recognize the ways in which it is bad, whereas free verse may offer a verbal camouflage where one's ineptitude has a fighting chance to remain undetected.

A man only goes and confesses his faults to the world when his self will not acknowledge or listen to them. The function of a friend is to be a substitute for this defective self,

No restless, quick, flame-like ego is imagined for the inside of it. It has no inside.

This is another condition of art; to have no inside, nothing you cannot see.

The purest thought is totally ignorant of death. Death means the perpetual extinction of impertinent sparks. But it is the key of life.

It will be seen that Mr. Wyndham Lewis is right, I am an individual so lacking in personal character, principles, etc., that I am ready to take up with Arnaut Daniel, Arnold Dolmetsch, Propertius, or any photographer in search of abstract design, or a modus of presenting forms moving, and moreover, I remain unrepentant.

Yet it is true that in our democratic society flattery does take the form of saying to people that they are like other people—rather than unlike or possessing something peculiarly their own. And the personal advantages that are chosen to flatter them about are those that they share with great crowds of other people.

The self-feeling bears no relation, amongst quite normal men and women, to physical fact. The nature of their particular physique, is not that the last thing of which they think ? Look, an intensely ill-favoured woman she will frequently behave as if she were very attractive. No one is surprised—for they in their turn are they not beauties too ? stunted puny men, to turn to men, do they not possess the assurance of a champion athlete ? Well then, all these people have the sensations of being what they are not : whatever happens, a something more favourable than the facts isn’t it ! This is the rule of the normal average.

The novelty of any time enables people to pretend that they are existing in the state of society that in fact they have superseded. (It is an old political expedient to pretend to be what you have destroyed.) They will pretend that their abuses are old abuses and that only their reforms are new.

To be a human being, any human being at all, is to be ‘ eminent ’ under communism.

if within a decade and a half you massacre ten million people in war and another ten million in civil war, it is not easy after that to return to a morality that regards it as wrong to pocket a salt-spoon.

That is enough—the blood is gratis ! Both the soldier and the communist enrol themselves to murder—one under militarist rules, the other under marxist disciplines. But both are homicide-clubs, you call your victim ‘ Hun,’ you call him ‘ Bourgeois,’ it is all one—no, wars and communes have cheapened murder.

Morality is of the surface. But also the values that decide whether a person is ridiculous or free from absurdity are pure conventions of a society, they exist only in a surface-world, of two dimensions.

Satire to be good must be unfair and single-minded. To be backed by intense anger is good—though absolutely not necessary.

The modern man whether of Bloomsbury Baltimore or Berlin has vanquished vanity—he offers himself to his own inspection as the worm he turns out to be. If he is vain at all, and it must be conceded that self-love is hard to kill, it is about his humility. His own Vernichtung is his greatest pride the laying bare of the nullity, the Nichtigkeit, that is the “ self” at the heart of energy, (which is merely the doctrine of Xt. that “ he who humbleth himself shall be exalted ” ! Be modest, protest you are nobody, a biological bagatelle and hi presto ! you will get top-marks, and be given authority, that is the idea—it is the Christian strategy.

Being born in a stable does not make you a horse. But living in a studio produces in some persons a feeling that they should dabble and daub a little.

By adopting the life of the artist the rich have not learnt more about art, and they respect it less. With their more irresponsible “ bohemian ” life they have left behind their “ responsibilities ”—a little culture among the rest. Indeed they are almost as crudely ignorant as is the traditional painter. Besides—living in cafes, studios and “ artistic ” flats—they are all “ artists ” in a sense themselves. They have made the great discovery that every one wielding brush or pen is not a “ genius,” any more than they are. But they have absorbed a good deal of the envy of those who are not “ geniuses ” for those who are (having in a sense placed themselves- upon the same level)—and the contempt of those who are, for those who are not. The result is that they abominate good art as much as bad artists do, and have as much contempt for bad art as have good artists ! There is more indifference to and often hatred of every form of art in these pseudo-artistic circles—in the studios, in short, now mostly occupied by them—than in all the rest of the world put together.

Society is a defensive organisation against the incalculable. It is so constituted as to exclude and to banish anything, or any person, likely to disturb its repose, to rout its pretences, wound its vanity, or to demand energy or a new effort, which it is determined not to make.

the world created by Art —Fiction, Drama, Poetry etc.—must be sufficiently removed from the real world so that no character from the one could under any circumstances enter the other (the situation imagined by Pirandello), without the anomaly being apparent at once.

this is not a quote but found out this morn that ford madox ford called his mate wyndham lewis 'D.Z.' which is peculiar isn't it, because that means drop zone. although I guess flight wasn't really a thing even for vorticists

You're a terrible feller,” said Butcher. “If you had your way, you'd leave us stark naked. We should all be standing on our little island in the savage state of the Ancient Britons; figuratively.” He hiccuped. “Yes, figuratively. But in reality the country would be armed better than it ever had been before. And by the sacrifice of these famous 'national characteristics' we cling to sentimentally, and which are merely the accident of a time, we should lay a soil and foundation of unspecific force on which new and realler 'national flavours' would very soon sprout.” “I quite agree,” Butcher jerked out energetically. He ordered another Laager. “I agree with what you say. If we don't give up dreaming, we shall get spanked. I have given up my gypsies. That was very public-spirited of me?” He looked coaxingly. "If every one would give up their gypsies, their jokes and their gentlemen—. 'Gentlemen' are worse than gypsies.