In 1948, Wyndham Lewis published brief reminiscences of two longtime colleagues: Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. It was in 1915, Lewis wrote, that Pound first introduced him to Eliot. Pound was then at the height of his powers, producing beautiful poetry and vigorous essays in which he argued for hardness and clarity in literature. Lewis, England’s leading modern artist, was completing his first novel. Eliot, a pleasant and rather handsome graduate student visiting London between terms, had published some promising verse.
Lewis went on to tell how much the personal fortunes of his friends had changed in the ensuing thirty-three years. Pound was now “confined in a criminal asylum in America” while Eliot was “a rarely honoured member of his profession, dwelling in the bland atmosphere of general approbation.” Lewis might have added that he found his own position unsatisfactory.
Lewis was a man of sixty-six in 1948. For almost forty years he had practiced two professions side by side—artist and writer—producing roughly a thousand paintings and drawings and about thirty-five books. Despite all this, Lewis saw himself as a failure. He was known primarily in Britain. Few of his artworks had entered important collections; his books, even the best of them, were mostly out of print. Lewis’s financial prospects were so bleak in 1948 that he was seeking a college teaching post in North America, even though such employment would take him, perhaps permanently, from his lifetime home in London.
Though Lewis’s reputation and
