The pictorial and literary works of Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) are among the great Modernist achievements. From 1918 to 1926 Lewis wrote an unusually large work to be called The Man of the World . Expediency and the vagaries of the trade forced this intended omnibus volume to be published seriatim, under broad, canny titles: The Art of Being Ruled (1926), The Lion and the Fox (1927), and Time and Western Man (1927). A few fictional breakthroughs brought the decade to a close: in 1928. Lewis published both The Childermass and a revised version of Tarr , and in 1930 a complex roman à clef, The Apes of God . The subject of this book, this difficult corpus is ruled by a negative reading of the Horatian injunction that poetry emulate painting; by a Nietzschean description of literature as the domain of a vexing 'blind ear' whose performative inception is a function of exuberance; by a deliberate perspectivism; by a remarkable political prescience (in the 1920s Lewis identified feminism and homosexuality as the two dominant political issues of the century, and exposed a rationale for this double emergence); and by a series of unevenly controlled self-revelations, epitomized in Lewis's characterization of Arghol, a crucial elective persona, as "herculean Venus." Inherent to any male quest-romance, the latter description condenses Modernism's nuclear, self-endearing plot.