connoisseurs of fine modern art / just like the 1920s

The Apes of God

Afterword by Paul Edwards
Illustrations by Wyndham Lewis

'Every individual without exception is … unbearable'
Horace Zagreus, in 'The Apes of God'


This new edition of a modern classic of satire, out of print in America
for more than forty years, was originally published in London fifty years
ago where it instantly created a firestorm of outrage and vituperation.
The present edition preserves Lewis's full text all 625 pages of the 1930
edition and also retains the original cover illustration and sixteen
interior designs. Acknowledged by the critics to be one of the most
devastating books in our language, 'The Apes of God' strips bare the
social affectations and malaise that made the British culture of his time
so hateful to Wyndham Lewis.
The period of the late 1920s, described later by Lewis as ''the insanitary
trough between the two great wars.'' Lewis's mock-picaresque hero is Dan
Boleyn, a 20-year-old Irish innocent. Tutored by a 60-year-old albino
dilettante named Horace Zagreus, Dan travels reluctantly through the
London art world. He is horrified (and confused, and bored half to death)
by the false, contrived ''broadcasts'' of the ''Apes'' a series of
pseudo-artists who resemble, on the one hand, absurd mechanical dolls, and
on the other, very specific personages of the era (like Sir Osbert
Sitwell).
Lewis's version of a world in which habitual falsehood has created general
paralysis is fierce, unrelieved, and prophetic of an even more mediocre
future.
At the time of its publication, British poet and critic Richard Adlington
called 'The Apes of God' ''one of the most tremendous forces ever
conceived in the mind of man. For comparisons one must fall back to
Rabelais and Aristophanes.'' Despite gaining occasional champions since
then including W. B. Yeats, who praised Lewis's ''intellectual passion''
Lewis's satirical masterpiece has been resisted by our established
modernist sensibility. This is no doubt because its triumphant, hilarious
revulsion against cultural affectation continues to secretly outrage and
offend the guardians of that sensibility.

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