Wyndham Lewis recalls how reading Dostoevsky opened an imaginative world to him, from the grotesque comedy of his characters to the struggle between freedom and predestination. In the second broadcast, Lewis asks why adults lose the visual fluency they had as children. He makes the case for visual art as a language and follows that idea into ordinary life, from everyday objects to the shape of cities.
Wyndham Lewis — 2 recordings in the archive.
Related reading: Rude Assignment by Wyndham Lewis.
Related reading: Wyndham Lewis on Art: Collected Writings, 1913–1956 by Wyndham Lewis.
Related reading: Demons (The Possessed) by Fyodor Dostoevsky.
With no disrespect to literature, I should never have applied such a term as crisis or turning point to the result of contact with a book or even a body of literature. I thought those things usually came about differently. For instance, Gustave Flaubert, the great pessimistic novelist, , described how, as a young man, he was one day walking along the street in war, and from a scullery window came the sickly odor of stale greens. Thereupon, in a flesh, he understood the meaning of life. A crisis as a rule materializes in some such way as that. For a long time there will have been gathering in the remote recesses of our consciousness an emotional residue of bitter or joyous or ecstatic experience. Then something occurs to cause it to crystallize and to take an unexpected shape perhaps with a terrible distinctness and definition. most about which we use the term crisis develops this way. things are smoldering a long time usually before they burst into flame. If there is something rotten in the state of Denmark, it doesn't immediately assail the nostrils. In Flaubert's case, he must already have had a very low opinion of life. He did not, however, know that it stank. , the disagreeable odor abruptly apprised him of that fact. Why should not a book, however, bring sudden enlightenment as much as anything else? And certainly I cannot recall any smell either fragrant or offensive which affected me so much as reading Shakespeare's tragedies or listening to Bach's music. generally it is when one is young that crises occur though not I think when one when one is in knee pants. Today, for instance, I feel sure that many young Frenchmen are deriving from the existentialist books of Jean Paul Sartre much the same type of pessimistic enlightenment that Flaubert received from the displeasing whiff. And those young men will have seen much in the past few years to prepare them for such a revelation. At all events, reflecting along these lines, I went on a search backwards into my young life to identify some really decisive experience. And at last, I came up against a solid mess of books. not one book as I had thought I might which supplied the answer. This was something that revolutionized my technique of approach to experience that did not merely give me a great kick…