Fighters With the Mouth

THE REVENGE FOR LOVE (341 pp.)--Wyndham Lewis--Regnery ($3.50).

Wyndham Lewis knows only one way to use a pen--as a spit. Over hissing coals of satire and irony, the British author-artist has broiled intellectual quacks (The Apes of God), ailing civilizations (Time and Western Man), and his own middle-class countrymen (Rotting Hill). Like Bernard Shaw, he outraged Britons in the '303 by following the trail of a sawdust Caesar, Adolf Hitler. But in 1937, when Shaw was busy touting Superman Stalin, Lewis became one of the first writers to bare the tyrannic fraud of Communism in a novel called The Revenge for Love. By ripping the adhesive tape of romance and pretension from the Spanish civil war, The Revenge for Love so stung drawing-room leftists that the book was boycotted with silence in Britain, not even published in the U.S. Read with the hindsight of 1952, the novel remains a remarkable political satire, one whose plot now ranks as prophecy and whose story blends into history.

Reds & Pinks. Percy Hardcaster is a beefy son of the slums whose tie with the Communist Party is simple and direct: he hates the upper classes. Sent to Spain to do propaganda work, he gets clapped into jail, loses a leg in an inept attempt to escape. Released and returned to England, he plays the Red hero and is lionized by the jackals of the party line. Most of them are arty fellow travelers from the Bloomsbury set, and their spirits are as dank as their cellar studio apartments. Black sheep sons of wealthy parents, ersatz painters and poets, they are all fighters with the mouth who like to play at social revolution between bouts of faddish chitchat and casual fornication.

Despising them as misfits on life's remainder counter, Hardcaster nonetheless loads them up with atrocity yarns and heroic bilge till they glow with vicarious martyrdom. In but not of the circle of worshippers is a rather decent couple, Victor and Margot Stamp, who keep turning up like good pennies. Victor is a down & cut Australian painter who has sunk to faking Van Goghs in an Old Masters "factory." Margot, his common-law wife, is a girl with a one-tract mind--not the Communist Manifesto but Victor's welfare. But Victor's Marxist pals have little use for the dialectic of true love. They maneuver Victor into taking a job smuggling guns into Spain.

Exit the Decoys. In the meanwhile, Hero Hardcaster has been losing favor with the Red-and-pink salon crowd. When he tells one over-amorous admirer that the atrocity tales were so much party propwash and that he himself was only a stupid bungler in Spain, the lady denounces him to the other pinkos as a low cynic. Hardcaster is only too glad to leave the froth front and take charge of the gunrunning scheme. How the Reds double-cross Hardcaster and decoy the innocent Stamps to their deaths in Spain makes for a mystery-thriller finish to Author Lewis' masterly expose of the fashionable leftism of the '30s.

What keeps The Revenge for Love from sharing the same shelf as Darkness at Noon is not lack of skill. It is the moral lint from Lewis' erstwhile infatuation with Hitler. References to Australian aborigines as "Blackboys," Hindus as "Baboos," and the Jews martyred by Nazi Germany as "offending Jews," shows that while Wyndham Lewis was rocking the cradle of humanism with one hand, he was cradling a rock of bigotry in the other.

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