A vorticist's tale

Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis. By Paul O'Keeffe. Jonathan Cape. 697pp, £25 in UK Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer. By Paul Edwards. Yale University Press. 584pp, £40 in UK

Even after spending 70 years on earth, wrote John Rothenstein of Wyndham Lewis, "he remained unweathered in our terrestrial climate; he stood out as harsh and isolated as a new machine in a field." It's an altogether appropriate image, both for Lewis's abrasive, intractable personality and for the disturbing, mechanistic fervour of his drawings and paintings. Both man and work should have been at home in an increasingly technological world which had, as Lewis rightly perceived, been largely initiated by the British Industrial Revolution. But for the most part he found pre-first World War Britain averse to his aggressive vision of modernity. To his fury, the climate was much more in tune with Bloomsbury's pallid reprise of French Post-Impressionist painting.

Notoriously vague about his origins, Lewis was born in a yacht off Nova Scotia in 1882 and grew up on the Isle of Wight from the age of six. His mother was English and his father, who quickly abandoned the family, was American. Wyndham attended Rugby and went on to study art, first at the Slade, then in Paris for several years, supported all the while by his devoted, hard-working and by no means affluent mother, who ran a laundry.

He swiftly established himself as a belligerent presence on the British cultural scene, as both artist and writer, and seemed set for a brilliant career. With Ezra Pound he founded Britain's only modernist movement, Vorticism, and an influential house journal, Blast, which was quickly forestalled by the first World War. Despite vigorous attempts to avoid it, Lewis saw service as an artillery officer, an experience that, reasonably enough, left him with a life-long horror of warfare. He also worked to good effect as a war artist.

Post-war Britain was antipathetic to his resumed modernist crusade and, though he made one brilliant series of figurative drawings and some fine portraits, overall the quality of his work declined inexorably. He was a prolific writer, but his philosophical tome, Time and Western Man, made little impact. His Bloomsbury satire The Apes of God alienated many supporters and, worse, his 1931 book Hitler was a sloppy, egregious misreading of the future dictator's character and policies.

Within a couple of years it was clear that not only was Lewis manifestly wrong, but his rash endorsement of Hitler and National Socialism was an unmitigated disaster in terms of his reputation in Britain.

A prolonged, wretched attempt to rekindle his career in Canada and the US, during which he desperately chased (and rarely caught) portrait commissions and lecture engagements, was a long-drawn-out, humiliating failure. He eventually ended up back in England, impecunious as usual, gradually succumbing to blindness, and perhaps paranoia, caused by a slow-growing brain tumour, increasingly embittered about his perceived neglect. In 1956, a year before Lewis's death, Rothenstein, then director of the Tate Gallery, was instrumental in organising a retrospective, which did not succeed in gaining him belated acclaim.

Among his peculiarities was his cruel, embarrassed reluctance to acknowledge any of the many women in his life, apart from his mother. In his writings, both critical and fictional, he formulated and advertised ideas with limitless ambition and breathtaking energy, and he could be a charming if sharp-tongued companion when he wanted to be. But he apparently possessed not one iota of persuasive charm in terms of his public persona, and seemed blissfully oblivious of his capacity to antagonise people. This lack was but another of the obstacles standing in the way of his acceptance as a major cultural presence in Britain and, in the longer term, as the significant force in the history of Modernism that Edwards feels him to be.

Though not oblivious to his shortcomings, Edwards is an enthusiastic fan and a fervent advocate, offering exhaustive - and exhausting - exegeses of every major endeavour, literary and visual. His readings are exceptionally attentive, closely argued and thickly detailed but, and this perhaps directly reflects a problem at the heart of Lewis's work, they are also convoluted and difficult to marshall in support of any convincing argument of putative greatness. And his overall view of Lewis as a postmodernist prophet, whose multitudinous critical endeavours effectively short-circuited modernism by disturbing its dreams of a grand, all-encompassing narrative, doesn't really wash.

O'Keeffe's life is an extremely readable and surprisingly sympathetic account of a decidedly unsympathetic subject. Drawing on a huge range of sources, he traces a relatively clear path through the tangled jungle of Lewis's personal and professional involvements. Clearly capable of inspiring loyalty, he fell out with almost everybody in the end, including many of his most benign and uncomprehending supporters. Dick Wyndham wasn't the only friend who was horrified to be the recipient of Lewis's blunt advice that: "People are only friends in so much that they are of use to you." Hemingway didn't like him on sight and his notorious, and retrospective, account of their meeting described him as possessing "the eyes of a failed rapist". Later, though, even after Lewis had savaged him in print, Hemingway provided him with a much-needed favourable reference in an unexplained act of generosity.

Despite Edwards's best efforts, it is by no means clear that, despite his sporadic brilliance, Lewis produced any one outstanding literary work, and a lot of the time you feel that, despite the apparent scale of his ambitions, he is in fact narrowly and myopically locked into personal obsessions and, misled by his own undoubted intelligence, prone to impulsive, reckless extrapolation. In both fiction and non-fiction his style is too prolix, insistent and knowing.

Though it too is patchy, his painting, beautifully reproduced in Edwards's book, looks stronger. The fact that through various pieces of ill luck most of his pioneering modernist pictures didn't survive is unfortunate. Influenced by, though distinct from Italian Futurism, Vorticism resonates in the art of the Russian avant garde. El Lissitzky acknowledged the influence of the radical typographic style of Blast. Besides which, the visual work is probably more accommodating than the written word of what Paul Overy has very accurately termed Lewis's "brutal, slightly inhuman energy."

Aidan Dunne is the Art Critic of The Irish Times