LEWIS, (Percy) Wyndham

(1884-1957)

   UK writer and painter, known in the latter capacity as the instigator of Vorticism. His illustrations for Naomi MITCHISON's Beyond This Limit (1935 chap) constitute a co-creation of the book, which sheacknowledged. As an author, he was responsible for determinedly Modernist manifestos such as The Caliph's Design: Architects! Where is Your Vortex? (1919 chap) and novels such as The Apes of God (1930). Of particular sfinterest is The Human Age, a trilogy comprising The Childermass (1928; rev 1956), Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta, the two latter novels being firstpublished together as The Human Age: Book Two Monstre Gai, Book Three Malign Fiesta (1955). Like Philip Jose FARMER's Riverworld series, thoughwith greater impact, The Human Age depicts the posthumous existence of various characters. Pulley and Satters, the two freshly deceased protagonists of The Childermass, observe and join in the jousting, linguistic and intellectual, that surrounds the Bailiff, a sort of doorkeeper who decides the eligibility of applicants to the Magnetic City, and who, in Monstre Gai, takes them into the Third City, a DYSTOPIA based on the post-WWII UK and its Welfare State. Finding life difficult there, they all go on to Matapolis in Malign Fiesta, but Matapolis is Hell, and punishments abound; there is a sense of suffocating evil. A fourth volume, The Trial of Man, in which the two protagonists were to be transported toHeaven, remained unwritten. The arduousness of The Childermass, a major 20th-century novel, has kept many readers from its much more clear-cut sequels. WL is much less read than read about, a situation to be deplored.

   JC

   See also: ROBERT HALE LIMITED.