SOURCE: "Tarr into Cantelman," in Wyndham Lewis, New Directions, 1954, pp. 49-57.

In the following excerpt, Kenner contends that the protagonist of Lewis's short story "Cantelman 's Spring-Mate " is a fusion of two characters, Tarr and Kreisler, from his novel Tarr, and embodies Lewis's interest in the interrelated conflicts between mind and body, logic and emotion, intellect and animal nature.

Lewis joined the army as a bombardier, shortly after finishing Tarr, and took his problems with him to France. Out of the complex experience of the war came two new efforts at focus: a story called "Cantelman's Spring-Mate" and an essay, "Inferior Religions."

"Cantelman's Spring-Mate,"³ the best of his early stories, which Joyce and Pound admired and on account of which, it is now difficult to believe, an issue of the Little Review was banned from the mails three years before the more notorious affaire Bloom, presents a new...