Wyndham Lewis Reading (and Misreading?) George Orwell

This paper investigates the attention paid to George Orwell by the modernist painter and writer Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) who made his name as an intellectual provocateur. It focuses on Lewis’s late book The Writer and the Absolute (1952), which culminates with a forty-page analysis of Orwell’s life and work. Orwell and Lewis were highly dissimilar: the first an internationally celebrated journalist, essayist and novelist associated with the political left; the second a less well-known, though still very significant, modernist painter, writer and critic associated with the political right. Despite these differences, they were drawn to each other’s writing and ideas, and The Writer and the Absolute remains a key early response to Orwell’s work and an idiosyncratic chapter in his literary-historical reception. The Writer and the Absolute also shows how strategically Lewis tended to interpret the activities of his literary contemporaries, who often act in his criticism as a foil against which he polemically outlines and defends his own principles. Having traced certain connections and points of difference between Orwell and Lewis, the paper examines the response of M.W. Freer to Lewis’s criticisms of Orwell – and concludes by suggesting that The Writer and the Absolute’s value lies less in what it tells us about Orwell and more in what it reveals about Lewis’s tendency to subject his peers to contempt.