A Whirlwind Voice

Many years ago (or it seems many years) I was lent a copy of The Apes of God, by John Moffett, then Literary Editor of the Otago Daily Times. The book fascinated, horrified and bewildered me. It seemed to be written about an order of beings who could not, or at least should not, exist. The same blend of fascination and horror overcame me as I burrowed through the pages of The Human Age; for there is only one Wyndham Lewis. But today the bewilderment is less – for I know that such beings do exist. Wyndham Lewis presents us with our unregenerate, shuffling, gabbing, horrifying selves. He does not add that love can and will, with a dexterous conflagration, consume these effigies and remake them; but he does make it abundantly clear that such a happening would only be plain, pure miracle. Love, of course, is outside his province. He is a satirist, a writer with direct moral intention, wielding Rabelais’s bludgeon, though without the tolerance shown by that great Catholic humanist toward the poor, forked, mandrake flesh.

page 298

The Human Age consists of a trilogy – The Childermass, Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta – of which only the last two books are contained in the present volume. I have never read The Childermass, but it is my intention to buy, borrow or steal it when it is ‘in due course published in the same format’. The plot of Books Two and Three, however, presented no difficulty on this account. James Pullman, a writer, and Satterthwaite, the boy who had been his fag at school, have passed over to the Other Side. There they find conditions similar to those on earth. There are political factions and hierarchies in Hell. The Devil cannot bear the sins of the flesh or the company of women. Pullman is drawn into infernal politics . . . It is impossible, by description or quotation, to convey the terrible hallucinating force of Wyndham Lewis’s satire. But if you read it, you will tremble and rejoice at this whirlwind in our midst.

1956 (143)