Paul O’Keeffe, Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham
Lewis (2000; London: Pimlico, 2001)
I started and abandoned The Enemy, Jeffrey Meyers’s 1980 biography of Wyndham Lewis, a couple of times, though I’m not quite sure why.
O’Keeffe is certainly a more graceful writer, but in the long run I don't know
whether he has the interpretive edge over Meyers—though he certainly has
amassed far more data, and has gone over the documentary record far, far more
closely.
(A bit irritating, indeed, how O’Keeffe lets his reader know
how he has gone through years of sign-in records for the National Gallery or
the Slade School, or through tax records, or whatever, in his own text.)
I commented on Facebook how Lewis comes across in this text as a
“colossal jerk,” at least in his early years; now I’m into his late thirties,
and he shows no signs of turning into a likeable figure. Clearly, O’Keeffe has
not gone to any exculpatory pains with Lewis, often singling out a particularly
jerkish action and letting it stand at the end of a chapter or a section of a
chapter like a ghoulish punctuation mark. Judged just on those actions—the
string of cast-off mistresses and illegitimate children, the constant
receptions of financial largesse responded to with surly incivility—Lewis comes
across as someone who is certainly “some sort of genius,” but not someone with
whom one might want to hang out. (Indeed, given the number of people who
precisely did want to hang out with
Lewis—lovers, painters, writers—it’s got to be counted against O’Keeffe that he
isn’t able or willing to convey precisely what people found so magnetic and
interesting about the man. And that, I’d venture to say, might be one of the
biography’s ultimate failures.)
O’Keeffe fails to convey a convincing portrait of Lewis’s
interiority, which I think is what a reader most hankers for in a biography,
especially a biography of a writer. I’ve gotten to Lewis’s late thirties now;
we’ve already passed through the Vorticist period, Blast, Tarr,
and a great deal of his most vital visual art. (I’d guess all of his most vital visual art, since now he’s at the
point where he’s mostly doing portraits.) And I still don’t have a very clear
picture of what makes Lewis “tick,” as it were. I suspect—indeed, I’m
convinced—that this is because of a paucity of documentary evidence. There
simply isn’t very much from Lewis’s own pen in his early years about
himself, or at least if there is O’Keeffe
hasn’t quoted or paraphrased it.
O’Keeffe is not very good, it must be said, on the visual
art. He can describe a picture adequately, but there’s no sense whatsoever of
what place Lewis’s art has within art history as a whole—where he comes by his
style, what makes his style vital and interesting, "new." We get an adequate account
of his break with the Omega Workshop/Bloomsbury (Fry, Grant, Bell), but it’s
told more in terms of a personal break with Bloomsbury than as a matter of
artistic principle. We get almost nothing about what Lewis’s own principles of
art might be, aside from some fleeting, anecdotal business distinguishing his own
work from the Italian Futurists. The whole very interesting business of
Vorticism is passed over painfully rapidly.
One would hope for more from O’Keeffe’s treatment of Lewis’s
writing, given that he’s edited Tarr for
the Black Sparrow Lewis edition. Unfortunately, there’s almost nothing. Aside
from some occasional comments, and a good deal of detailed description of the
business of publishing Lewis’s work, O’Keeffe gives us almost no sense of
what’s interesting or striking about Lewis’s writing, or what distinguishes it
(say) from Joyce’s Portrait,
which is presented as proceeding in tandem (at least in terms of publication)
with Tarr.
So in the end we have this enormously detailed, rather fat
volume chronicling the life of a major painter and writer which is very good
indeed on the details of his movements, his lodgings, his financial
arrangements, his amorous entanglements, and his business dealings; but which
is very sketchy on the work that prompts
our interest in the writer, and which doesn’t really in the end convey a
convincing picture of what makes this alternately energetic and otiose figure
tick, what motivates him.
But I’m only 2/5 through the book; I’m hoping things will
pick up in the latter portions, when Lewis’s paper trail becomes more concrete.
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