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he wouldn’t see her point of view in life, René must face that her perspective is now utterly closed to him. But why does he reach for her severed head? Why this grotesque gesture? It is as if he is trying, even after her death, to bring her gaze into line with his, as if they could again have the single perspective he fought so long to wrest from her. The desecration of her body is a radical form of denial — not just of the fact of her death but that he is in part responsible. In a variant ending to the novel, Lewis brings the Hardings back to London, by turns condemning René to working as an academic hack, and Hester to her suicide. But the important difference between the two endings (and the published one is superior, in my opinion) is that it focuses on René’s emotional collapse and the hollowing out of his psyche. In the published version, the inability to look upon his guilt produces a total dissociation from reality, which the novel calls “The White Silence.”
    He falls into another kind of cell — an achromatic prison that cuts off all feeling and all perception, a blinding labyrinth in which “the mind began to dream of white rivers which led nowhere, which developed laterally, until they ended in a limitless white expanse” ( Self Condemned , 428). When he slowly emerges from this psychosis, he finds himself haunted by his dead wife. He comes to dismiss these apparitions as “Hesteria,” effectively placing the blame for her death and his illness exclusively on her. And this gesture produces the final irony — it is in this moment that he is truly condemning himself; his academic career revives and flourishes, but at the price of his humanity. He is now, like the hotel that once housed him, a glacial, fiery husk of a man awaiting death. The chilling clarity with which Lewis is able to write such an agonizing, yet human novel is a testimony to his enduring power as a prose stylist. And the fact that he doesn’t flinch from telling us this story is an avowal of his confidence and respect for us, his readers.

    The original dust jacket, with an illustration by Michael Ayrton, of the first edition of Self Condemned , which was first published in 1954.

    Wyndham Lewis continued to write even after becoming blind in 1951.Three years later he published Self Condemned .

Some Books by Wyndham Lewis
    America and Cosmic Man . Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1948.
    America, I Presume . New York: Howell, Soskin and Company, 1940.
    The Apes of God . Ed. Paul Edwards. Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1981.
    The Art of Being Ruled . Ed. Reed Way Dasenbrock. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1989.
    Blast . 2 vols. Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1981.
    Blasting and Bombardiering: An Autobiography (1914–1926) . London: John Calder, 1982.
    The Childermass . London: Chatto and Windus, 1928.
    The Complete Wild Body . Ed. Bernard Lafourcade. Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1982.
    The Hitler Cult, and How It Will End . London: Dent, 1939.
    The Jews — Are They Human? London: George Allen and Unwin, 1939.
    Malign Fiesta . London: Methuen, 1955.
    Monstre Gai . London: Methuen, 1955.
    Men Without Art . Ed. Seamus Cooney. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1987.
    The Revenge for Love . Ed. Reed Way Dasenbrock. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1991.
    Rude Assignment: An Intellectual Autobiography . Ed. Toby Foshay. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1984.
    Self Condemned . London: Methuen, 1954.
    Tarr . New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926.
    Time and Western Man . Ed. Paul Edwards. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1993.
    Wyndham Lewis: Collected Poems and Plays . Ed. Alan Munton. New York: Carcanet Press, 1979.
    Wyndham Lewis on Art . Eds. Walter Michel and C.J. Fox. New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1969.

Further Reading
    Ayers, David. Wyndham Lewis and Western Man . London: Macmillan, 1992.
    Chapman, Robert T. Wyndham Lewis: Fictions and Satires . London: Vision Press, 1973.
    Edwards,