A Cubist Telephone Book
No reviewer could perhaps be confronted with a more formidable spectacle than Mr. Wyndham Lewis's recent book. In appearance it looks rather like a kind of Cubist telephone book, and its contents are every bit as baffling as its appearance. The publishers (or perhaps it is Mr. Lewis himself), however, help one considerably by their account of the book inside the cover. The Apes of God, it seems, is a picture of London society, the '` gossip-column class," in the months immediately preceding the General Strike. The thesis of the book is the same as that put forward in Mr. Lewis's polemical works (not that this book is =- polemical, by any means)—that is to say, that the former British governing class is now completely decadent. The author describes the present book as " Reflecting the collapse of English social life in the grip of pest. Warcondition.s. Its theme is the confusion of intellect and of emotion as exhibited in a society beneath the shadow of a revolution- ary situation. It shows that society groping back to its childhood ; and how, beneath the threat of the future, whose significance it is too exhausted to grasp, it calls loudly for its Mamma, and returns to the bibs and bottles of its babyhood."
However unjustified this View may be, there is no doubt that all societies need the cauterizing hand of the satirist
It may be that Mr. Lewis has a mission to do for us what Swift did for the eighteenth century:. If so, his books will become immortal classics. However, it is not in the power of every hebdomadal reviewer to " spot " immortal classics, and hence there is no shame in our admitting that we have really no idea whether the present volume is such a classic or is merely six hundred and twenty-live pages of the stormy vapourings of Mr. Lewis's disordered genius.
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