The Apes of God: Time to Re-Read this Beastly Book in 2017!

In this absurd sociopolitical climate we live and breathe in everyday here in the States, choking from the befouled air so malodorous with corruption that we must don our imported WWI gas masks in order to salvage and breathe whatever decaying virtues, untouched by Trump's toxicity, we might have left to inhale.  Oh this fetid defilement where we've been bait-and-switched the stench of carrion flowers for the promised roses.  Who are the apes of god today?  Where, oh where, is a writer hated by everyone like Wyndham Lewis when we need him right now? 

My copy, 4th pr. (1997), Black Sparrow Press

Perhaps you don't know Wyndham Lewis' writing? Know that he was a sharp-angled Enemy of the Establishment in Politics and especially the Arts. His august, adversarial gaze alone, melted the grease for the dilettantes he sautéed every day for breakfast and hors d'oeuvres.  His intense countenance was the austere art of Excoriation Incarnate.  The Bloomsbury Group, for instance, experienced many lovely and fruitful blossoms for a time ... until Wyndham Lewis (who'd collected himself a few ezra pounds over the years) made them all wilt.

'Between 1926 and 1930, Wyndham Lewis pub-lished eight books* ... The Apes of God formed an appro-priate and controversial climax to the series ... Though much praised at the time of publication ... these books are now excluded from the canon of writings that critics of modern literature have established as important or "major".

'This exclusion is, I think, mistaken, but as Frederic Jameson has pointed out in his book on Lewis, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, The Modernist as Fascist ... its consequences can be seen as fortunate. For the text's of Lewis' great contemporaries have lost much of their revolutionary freshness by being canonized and assimilated to the institutional world of academic discourse. By contrast, when we read Wyndham Lewis, we "come upon a modernism still extant and breathing, an archaic survival, like the antediluvian creatures of Conan Doyle's Lost World hidden away within a forgotten fold of the earth's surface". In reading Lewis, we can, says Jameson, "once more sense that freshness and virulence of modernizing stylization less and less accessible in the faded texts of his contemporaries." 

~ Paul Edwards, 1981, from afterword to the Black Sparrow Press edition of The Apes of God. 

Won't anyone, beyond yours truly, consider reading a book by (or about) Wyndham Lewis, in 2017?

*  "Between 1926 & 1930 Wyndham Lewis published eight books"

1. The Art of Being Ruled (essays, 1926) 
2. The Wild Body: A Soldier of Humour and Other Stories (1927)
3. The Lion and the Fox: The Role of the Hero in the Plays of Shakespeare (essays, 1927)
4. Time and Western Man (philosophy, 1927)
5. The Childermass (novel, 1928)
6. Paleface: The Philosophy of the "Melting Pot" (essays, 1929)
7. Satire and Fiction: Preceded by the History of a Rejected Review (literary criticism, 1929) 
8. The Apes of God (novel, 1930).