SOURCE: "Wyndham Lewis," in A Reviewer's ABC: Collected Criticism of Conrad Aiken from 1916 to the Present,W. H. Allen, 1961, pp. 268-71.

In the following review of The Wild Body, originally published in the New York Post in 1928, Aiken admires what he considers Lewis 's first-rate narration in his psychological short stories, but finds that the writer's self-conscious theorizing mars his otherwise brilliant work.

Mr. Wyndham Lewis is something of a cornac himself—he is not without curious resemblances to his admirable portrait of a showman in the story called "The Cornac and His Wife." In this story we are presented with a melancholy creature who is in a sense a victim of his own audiences. His audience works him, just as he, too, in turn works his audience; a queer kind of reciprocal puppetry. The public expects, demands, extracts from the sad cornac the kind of humor it...