I’ve been meaning to put my musings on the books I read on this site for a while. In most instances it will be in areas where I am not an expert.

First off, the title refers to common thread in a person’s character that evokes the common (aka vulgar), or working class. In this case, it refers to mannerisms in the protagonist’s behavior.  It does not, as I was expecting, refer to a habit of exploding into profanity-laced tirades by a character.

Now that we’ve dispensed with that misconception, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book.  I won’t go so far as to say that I had a blast reading it. The characters are interesting enough that I wanted to know what was going to happen to them, but I wouldn’t say that was what I found most interesting.  I was most drawn to the detailed portrait of the importance of class in England between the wars.

Lewis set the book against the time period between the Munich crisis and the start of World War II.  To good effect, we learn about the characters based on how they react to the emerging crisis. Given that the book was written in 1941, the actual events are still somewhat fresh in the author’s memory, and he goes to the trouble to reference actual headlines from the British papers during the crisis.

Overall, the book was a good read and I regret that it sat on my shelf for several years before I actually read it.

The edition I read was this one, by Black Sparrow Press. The paper it was printed on was of great quality and the overall book design was excellent. Part of me wonders how much this affected my enjoyment of the book.  This edition also had a nice afterword that gave a good review of the criticism of this work over the years.

If you do read this work, look for the tongue imagery and, if you’re a Stendahl fan look for parallels with The Red and the Black. I can’t take credit for either of these observations, I have the afterword in the book to thank for those observations.

As a parting shot. I never realized that Wyndham Lewis was such a multi-talented individual: visual artist, novelist, and poet.  All I thought knew about him before reading the book, was that he was a “fascist novelist”.  This, incidentally, is a complete mischaracterization, as the themes in The Vulgar Streak make abundantly clear. It seems to my probably overly simplistic reading of his life, he, like many intellectuals on the left and right in the 1930s, was drawn to particular aspects of the fascist political system. In the common mind we equate fascists with the rebarbative policies of the Nazis. Nevertheless, to those living between the wars the fascist agenda was about action at a time when all of Europe was paralyzed by the aftermath of WWI. This agenda had nothing to do with racism, ethnic cleansing, etc. The love affair with Fascism was not just a European phenomenon given the strong influence fascist economics had on America’s New Deal.