Apoplectic Gristle

David Trotter

• Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis by Paul O'Keeffe
  Cape, 697 pp, £25.00, October 2001, ISBN 0 224 03102 3
• Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer by Paul Edwards
  Yale, 583 pp, £40.00, August 2000, ISBN 0 300 08209 6

The day he first met Wyndham Lewis, shortly after the end of the First World War, Ernest Hemingway was teaching Ezra Pound how to box. The encounter took place in Paris, where Pound had a studio, and Lewis, impassive beneath his trademark wide black hat, seemed content to watch in silence. ‘Ezra had not been boxing very long and I was embarrassed at having him work in front of anyone he knew, and I tried to make him look as good as possible,’ Hemingway wrote. So wide was the margin between master and pupil, both in musculature and in technique, that Hemingway could without difficulty refrain from doing his opponent any damage. Lewis, he felt sure, wanted to see Pound hurt. He was careful not to oblige. ‘I never countered but kept Ezra moving after me sticking out his left hand and throwing a few right hands and then said we were through and washed down with a pitcher of water and towelled off and put on my sweatshirt.’