SOURCE: "The Wild Body: A Sanguine of the Enemy," in Nine, Vol. 4, No. 1, Winter, 1953, pp. 18-27.

In the following essay, Wagner argues that the collection of stories The Wild Body embodies Lewis's theory and practice of satire, explaining that his political thinking and comic sense have their roots in the conflict between the savage body and the cultivated intellect, and further that satire is at the heart of Lewis 's realism.

When Wyndham Lewis defined politcs, in America and Cosmic Man, as "a melodrama for teen-aged minds," he was hinting at what he was to elaborate in Rude Assignment, namely that "There are no good politics." Yet although there can be no "good" politics, he also asserted in Rotting Hill that contemporary fiction must be steeped in politics to be a true reflection of reality; this, in short, has been his dilemma. His art was born in war...