Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis. - Review - book review

Contemporary Review, April, 2001

Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis. Paul O'Keeffe. Jonathan Cape. [pound]25.00. 697 pages. ISBN 0-224-03102-3. Wyndham Lewis's reputation has declined since his death and in part this is because he engaged in so many different fields and because in the 1930s he was, or appeared to his critics, to have been an appeaser and, worse, an apologist for Hitler as seen in a 1931 pamphlet.

He was a pamphleteer and literary critic as well as a painter and skilled draughtsman but it is as the promoter of the avant garde fad, Vorticism and as a novelist that he is best remembered. The author, who has produced a scholarly edition of Lewis's first novel, Tarr, has written an exhaustive biography of a man who somehow fails to appeal. He remains, however, a major force in twentieth-century modernism and this carefully researched volume must now stand as the definitive biography.