The Childermass.: Section 1.

London: Chatto and Windus,, 1928. First edition, first impression, of the first book in Lewis's epic trilogy The Human Age, considered by the literary critic Frederic Jameson as "the supreme realization of what has to be called theological science fiction" (Jameson, p. 6). Childermass is the author's most experimental work, and "a veritable summa of [his] narrative modernism" (ibid.). The book follows the adventures of Sattersthwaite and Pullman, two Englishmen killed in the Great War, as they travel through a Dantesque afterlife while awaiting to ascend to The Magnetic City. Chatto & Windus paid Lewis a £200 advance for the complete Childermass, but his failure to produce volumes II and III resulted in a lawsuit. The contract was eventually transferred to Methuen, and the complete trilogy was not published until 1955, when Methuen published Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta in a single volume. Collectively, these three books constitute Lewis's longest single fictive work, which was dramatized for the BBC Third Programme in 1955. Octavo. Original yellow cloth, spine lettered in red, red saw-tooth border to covers, top edge yellow, bottom edge untrimmed. With dust jacket. Housed in a reddish-brown solander box. Spine toned, extremities a little rubbed, faint foxing to edges and outer leaves, light offsetting to blanks, contents clean. A very good copy indeed, sharp and fresh in very good jacket, a little rubbed, spine panel toned, faint foxing to verso and flaps, a few minor nicks and couple of short tears, unclipped. Morrow & Lafourcade A10a. Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist, 1981.