SOURCE: “Who Was Wyndham Lewis?” in The New Criterion, Vol. II, No. 10, June, 1993, pp. 26-38.

In the following excerpt, Cassidy presents biographical details of Lewis's childhood to explain his later inability to focus his art.

Everyone seems to have heard of Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957), but no one is quite sure who he was. He is known—more or less—as an artist, a novelist, a man of controversy, an associate of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, and a fascist. He was all these—and more. Lewis is a puzzle, so much so that many find it more expedient to ignore him than to try to make sense of him.

No one did more to create confusion about himself than Wyndham Lewis. His oeuvre is huge—and impossibly scattered. He published some forty books: visionary novels, satires, naturalistic novels, a body of short fiction, a book-length poem, art...