Self Condemned [Paperback]

Wyndham Lewis (Author), Rowland Smith (Afterword)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1983

Self Condemned, originally published in 1954, tells the story of Professor René Harding and his wife, Essie, as they find themselves in Momaco, a fictionalized version of Toronto, following René's resignation as an academic in London, England. Reduced to a position at the second-rate University of Momaco, René and Essie suffer through a bleak and oppressive isolation in a dreary and alien city.

The novel, a devastating, disturbing satire of life in wartime Canada, explores the difficulty individuals face as they struggle to adapt to new surroundings while preserving their sense of wholeness, as well as the bond that develops between people during a shared experience of isolation.

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--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

Self Condemned tells the story of Professor René Harding and his wife, Essie, as they find themselves in Momaco, a fictionalized version of Toronto. The novel, a devastating satire of life in wartime Canada, explores the difficulties individuals face as they struggle to adapt to new surroundings while preserving their sense of wholeness. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

About the Author

Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) was born on his father's yacht off Nova Scotia but grew up in England. The author of many novels, including The Revenge for Love, The Apes of God, and Tarr, he was associated with T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pund. Besides being a leading figure of the Modernist movement in English literature, Lewis was also a much-praised artist whose portraits of T.S. Eliot now hangs in the Durban Art Gallery in South Africa. Lewis spent the Second World War in Toronto, and his experiences there formed the basis of Self Condemned. In Canada, where Lewis had relatives, he developed a friendship with Marshall McLuhan and lectured at Assumption College, later the University of Windsor.

Allan Pero is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Western Ontario. He has published papers primarily on modern British literature. Pero lives in London, Ontario.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 436 pages
• Publisher: Black Sparrow Books; 1st Corrected Ed edition (February 1983)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0876855753
• ISBN-13: 978-0876855751
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.7 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,447,427 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Canadian Tragedy, September 24, 2011

By 

Barney (US) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Self Condemned (Kindle Edition)

While I've always been a great admirer of the eccentric painter and author Wyndham Lewis, I find most of his fiction frustratingly unsatisfying. As George Orwell wrote in 1945, "Enough talent to set up dozens of ordinary writers has been poured into Wyndham Lewis's so-called novels... Yet it would be a very heavy labour to read one of these books right through. Some indefinable quality, a sort of literary vitamin... is absent from them."

That's not the case with Lewis's oddly gripping masterpiece SELF-CONDEMNED. Here, for once, Lewis tells a story that engages your emotions and involves you with the fate of his protagonist. The plot is simple and terrible. Rene Harding, an icily forbidding Oxford Don, decides that history is bunk and, to avoid becoming entangled in the upcoming war with Hitler, immigrates to an utterly dreary Canadian town with his feeble-minded wife Hester. There they suffer extreme poverty and neglect, which Lewis depicts slowly and remorselessly, in Dreiserian detail. There is no relief for the reader, no feel-good ending, but there is genuine catharsis.

Nobody would call this novel perfect. There are many aimless digressions and longueurs. But Lewis's vision is so original, and his descriptions are so vivid, I have no hesitation in giving SELF-CONDEMNED five stars. Highlights include a surreal, horrifying portrayal of a hotel burning down in the Canadian winter and creating a "fiery iceberg", a satirical encounter with one of those foolish Johnsonian professors who "roll towards their interlocutor heavy carefully picked words, reminiscent of those which thundered in the small talk of the formidable Lexicographer", and a funny scene in which Harding flings a copy of MIDDLEMARCH into the open sea.

I'm so glad this great novel is now available as an eBook. Hopefully it will encourage other e-publishers to release more of Wyndham Lewis's work.