Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: The modernist latecomer and ‘permanent novelty’
- Chapter 1 ‘Changing the changing’: Wyndham Lewis and the new modernist ascendancy
- Chapter 2 Laura Riding, modernist fashion and the individual talent
- Chapter 3 The immolation of the artist: Henry Miller and the ‘hot-house geniuses’
- Chapter 4 Investing in the modernist legacy: Objectivist adventures in the ‘Pound tradition’
- Chapter 5 The last word: or how to bring modernism to an end
- Notes
- Index
Chapter 1 - ‘Changing the changing’: Wyndham Lewis and the new modernist ascendancy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 June 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: The modernist latecomer and ‘permanent novelty’
- Chapter 1 ‘Changing the changing’: Wyndham Lewis and the new modernist ascendancy
- Chapter 2 Laura Riding, modernist fashion and the individual talent
- Chapter 3 The immolation of the artist: Henry Miller and the ‘hot-house geniuses’
- Chapter 4 Investing in the modernist legacy: Objectivist adventures in the ‘Pound tradition’
- Chapter 5 The last word: or how to bring modernism to an end
- Notes
- Index
Summary
‘And, as to “progress” or “change”, there are millions of extremely different forms available. You should … wish: and you should steadily oppose what you do not wish.’
Wyndham Lewis, PalefaceIn the early 1940s, as Wyndham Lewis found refuge from the Second World War in North America, a young acquaintance named Marshall McLuhan began to find portrait-sitters and lecture appointments for the ageing modernist. Regarding one of the first engagements, a lecture for the Wednesday Club in St Louis, McLuhan would write:
As for topic at the W.C. – ‘Personalities in the world of modern art and letters.’ Yes, frankly, they want anecdotes about ‘Long-haired people I have known.’ You can please them completely, simply by making it a chat about familiar names – Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, Picasso, Augustus John, T. E. Lawrence etc. Let it embrace more than one field. A musician wouldn't be amiss.
McLuhan would prove himself to be a valuable ally for Lewis, generating ‘publicity’ and organising receptions for the artist – complete with suggestions to turn The Vulgar Streak into an ‘American bestseller’ by getting Basil Rathbone to play Penhale in a not-yet-existent Hollywood production. Lewis himself was not unaware of the complex relationship between his own high cultural artistic position and the mass culture forms that intrigued McLuhan.
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- Modernism, the Market and the Institution of the New , pp. 33 - 76Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009