SOURCE: A review of Fables of Aggression, in Criticism, Vol. XXII, No. 4, Fall, 1980, pp. 390-4.

In the following review, Naremore offers a positive assessment of Fables of Aggression, which he concludes “is the best piece of criticism we have” on Wyndham Lewis.

“I do not think I had ever seen a nastier-looking man,” Ernest Hemingway once said of Wyndham Lewis. “Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist.” Lewis’s self portrait, leering from the cover of Frederic Jameson’s new book [Fables of Aggression], confirms that impression—as do the violence, misogyny, and fascist rhetoric in much of his writing. He was a mean customer, and partly for that reason he is the least read of the so-called classic moderns. Critical studies like Jameson’s (or Hugh Kenner’s earlier work, Wyndham Lewis) are quite rare...