Abstract
Abstract People no longer wanted the self-effacements of impressionism, Wyndham Lewis told Ford Madox Ford in 1914. And while I have tried to show in my previous two chapters that literary impressionism was less self-effacing than one might suppose, nobody could doubt that the stunts and firework-displays Lewis had in mind were of a different order to the sad stories told by Conrad and Ford. ‘What’s the good of being an author’, Lewis demanded, ‘if you don’t get any fun out of it?’ This chapter is in part an attempt to determine what it was that Lewis got his fun out of. For the purpose of the stunts he performed in the years before the war was to outshine impressionism. Ford (Hueffer, as he then was) had given Lewis his big literary break by publishing some pieces in the English Reviell’. He was ripe for outshining.
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