Some sort of genius

the long version

"He launched the only twentieth-century English avante garde movement, Vorticism, in 1914. His first novel, Tarr, was published in 1918. During the intervening World War, as an artillery officer at the third battle of Ypres, he gained his 'political education under fire'. Anti-war books of the 1930s argued against what he regarded as a war-mongering left-wing orthodoxy, and presented the case for the right. This placed him in the position somewhere between an advocate of appeasement and what looked uncomfortably like a Nazi sympathizer. Despite an admission, in 1939, that he had been wrong about Hitler, his reputation has never recovered from the stigma of Fascism." "This is the biography of a major but neglected figure of twentieth-century modernism. Paul O'Keeffe brings to his narrative a meticulous attention to the smallest, seemingly trivial, documentary details. Itemisation of lost laundry, shopping lists, strayed letters, the to-and-fro of official correspondence, and the chilling medical records of the last years, all provide an intimate and ironic counterpoint to the main events of Lewis's life."--Jacket.