In the grand scheme of his long career, there is one thing about the painter and writer Percy Wyndham Lewis that stands out. Namely, that he was an absolute nightmare to be around. Though he could apparently be charming, he fell out with everybody, often castigating them, either directly in his nonfiction writing or in vicious, thinly veiled caricatures in his novels. Ezra Pound, with whom he shared a huge mutual admiration, was dubbed “a revolutionary simpleton”.
Lewis was a misogynist who paid little or no mind to the welfare of his five (approximately) illegitimate children or their mothers. Ernest Hemingway, no feminist himself, once described Lewis as having “the eyes of an unsuccessful rapist”. Lewis had a bizarrely close relationship with his mother (his