Books: Fighters With the Mouth

THE REVENGE FOR LOVE (341 pp.)—Wyndham Lewis—Regnery ($3.50).

Wyndham Lewis knows only one way to use a pen—as a spit. Over hissing coals of satire and irony, the British author-artist has broiled intellectual quacks (The Apes of God), ailing civilizations (Time and Western Man), and his own middle-class countrymen (Rotting Hill). Like Bernard Shaw, he outraged Britons in the '303 by following the trail of a sawdust Caesar, Adolf Hitler. But in 1937, when Shaw was busy touting Superman Stalin, Lewis became one of the first writers to bare the tyrannic fraud of...