Having finally got round to finishing reading it, I can say I really enjoyed Paul O’Keeffe’s “Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis”. It seems to me that O’Keeffe has managed the book’s tone and balance really well; navigating between fact and narrative can be difficult when it comes to biography.
We are painted a picture of a pretty unpleasant individual: mostly rude, mostly angry, always biased, and always poor and begging for money. Talented of course, but disorganised and often dishonest. He must have been a difficult man to like – especially as you could be a friend one day and an enemy the next.
But with Eliot, Joyce, and Pound, Augustus John, Virginia Woolf and the Sitwells, what a period Lewis lived through when it came to art and literature! (And if it’s a period you’re interested in, I heartily recommend Hugh Kenner’s “The Pound Era” – which I may now just have to read all over again..!)
Ian Gouge - Writer 