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Text © The Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust
Editorial material © Scott W. Klein 2010
First published as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2010
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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
WYNDHAM LEWIS
Tarr
Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
SCOTT W. KLEIN
OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
TARR
WYNDHAM LEWIS was a painter, novelist, critic, and the founder of Vorticism, the avant–garde art movement based in London before the First World War. Lewis was born in 1882 in Nova Scotia and moved with his mother to London in 1893. Following a brief formal education at the Slade School of Art, Lewis moved to Paris, where he painted, travelled widely on the continent, and gathered material for his fiction, returning to England in 1909. In 1914 and 1915 Lewis published the only two issues of the Vorticist review, Blast, with the participation of Ezra Pound and the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.
During the War, Lewis enlisted in the English army, serving as a gunner and bombardier. His first novel, Tarr, was published in 1918 in America and England with the wartime assistance of Ezra Pound. After the War, Lewis produced a wide range of art works, volumes of aesthetic and political criticism, such as The Art of Being Ruled (1926) and Time and Western Man (1927), the collection of short stories The Wild Body (1927), and the novels The Childermass (1928), The Apes of God (1930), The Revenge for Love (1937), and Self-Condemned (1954). During the Second World War, Lewis moved with his wife to the United States and Canada. He returned to England in 1945, where he continued to paint and write, until a pituitary tumour robbed him of his sight. He died in 1957 in London.
SCOTT W. KLEIN is Associate Professor of English at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. He is the author of The Fictions of James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis: Monsters of Nature and Design (Cambridge University Press, 1994).
CONTENTS
Introduction
Note on the Text
Select Bibliography
A Chronology of Wyndham Lewis
Map of Paris
TARR
Appendix: Preface to the 1918 American Edition
Explanatory Notes
Glossary of Foreign Words and Phrases
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
AN editor necessarily receives many kinds of help along the way, particularly when dealing with a novel such as Tarr, which expects many kinds of knowledge of its readers. I particularly thank Thomas Pfau, who assisted with translations from the German and with navigating some unfamiliar byways of German philosophy; Stephanie Pellet, who helped clarify subtleties of French usage; Paul Edwards, for his helpful comments on the annotations; and my wife Karen Potvin Klein, both for her substantial editorial assistance, and for many other varieties of patient support. My gratitude also to Wanda Balzano, Ian Duncan, Claudia Kairoff, Maria Makela, Carrie Preston, Jessica Richard, Dick Schneider, and David Weinstein, who provided advice in their respective fields of expertise.
The staffs at the Cornell University Library Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections and the Poetry Collection at the library of the University at Buffalo (State University of New York) provided invaluable help when using their archives of Wyndham Lewis’s letters and working materials. Finally, I am grateful to the Provost’s Office and the Archie Fund for the Arts and Humanities at Wake Forest University, whose support enabled me to work at these collections.
INTRODUCTION
Tarr, the first published novel by the writer, painter, and intellectual gadfly Wyndham Lewis, is the least known, most intractable, and arguably the funniest, of major early twentieth-century English novels. Where other once-shocking novels of the Modernist period have become domesticated by the universities and comfortably assimilated by contemporary taste, Tarr still snarls, as though through the bars of a cage, challenging approach by adventurous readers only. Recognition of its mixture of originality and vitality was part of the praise accorded to Tarr on first publication in 1918. Lewis’s friend and colleague Ezra Pound called Tarr ‘the most vigorous and volcanic English novel of our time’, comparing it to the early work of James Joyce and claiming, ‘The English prose fiction of my decade is the work of this pair of authors’.1 T. S. Eliot wrote in the literary journal The Egoist, ‘In the work of Wyndham Lewis we recognize the thought of the modern and the energy of the cave-man’, an encomium that Lewis would later often quote. But Eliot had also earlier declared that both Tarr and Ulysses, sections of which were appearing in the Little Review, ‘are terrifying. That is the test of a new work of art …Tarr is a commentary upon a part of modern civilization: now it is like our civilization criticized, our acrobatics animadverted upon adversely, by an orang-outang of genius, Tarzan of the Apes.’2
Lewis’s explosive sensibility became one of th
e novel’s early selling points. Recognizing the value of controversy, The Egoist—which serialized Tarr and then became its English publisher as a novel—ran a full-page advertisement containing press extracts of the novel’s reviews. According to this advertisement, the Weekly Dispatch echoed Pound’s and Eliot’s series of brilliant and destructive comparisons, calling Tarr ‘a thunderbolt’, while the Manchester Guardian warned ‘one must bring a fine persistence and an insatiable appetite for both aesthetic theory and squalor’. Everyman perhaps summed up the general paradoxical literary attitude towards Tarr, declaring, ‘In spite of its perverseness, nastiness, and bad temper, Tarr bears the marks of a strong, though unbalanced, intellect.’3
Energy, scandal, and alleged intellectual imbalance are scarcely attributes of a novel or author destined for the pantheon, let alone of a work to be admitted into the libraries of the drawing rooms of the period, which were more likely to contain the best-sellers of H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett—or even Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan—than the novels of Joseph Conrad or Ford Madox Ford. Nor, with some notable exceptions, has the contemporary academy known quite how to place Lewis among his contemporaries. Some scholars find his work too idiosyncratic or disagreeable to enter the literary canon, while others simply wonder why Lewis has not yet been accorded the attention he so obviously deserves.4 None of this would have surprised Lewis, who predicated his career as a writer and painter on his recognition of the status of the artist as avant-gardist outsider and as a critic of both the ethos of Edwardian England and of the dominant forms of Modernism that were supposed to present an alternative to British stolidity.
Lewis was born in Canada in 1882, but relocated to England with his mother when he was young. After two years of formal art training at the Slade School he moved to Paris to live among artists and hone his skills as draughtsman and painter. It was against this aesthetic background that Tarr took shape. Between 1907 and 1909 Lewis had begun working on a story that featured a German protagonist and a duel, which he wrote to a friend would be called ‘Otto Kreisler’. By 1910–11 Lewis had expanded the manuscript, and referred to it as ‘The Bourgeois-Bohemians’, a title used in the finished work to refer both to the novel’s milieu and one of its seven sections. By 1911 the work in progress was of full novel length—between 400 and 500 pages—and the shape had changed: the story of the German Kreisler would now be framed by the observations and love life of the English artist Frederick Tarr. At this stage of the manuscript’s development—it was still several years from publication—Lewis debated calling the novel either ‘Otto Kreisler’s Death’ or ‘Between Two Interviews’. In a letter to his friend Sturge Moore, he called Tarr’s two long philosophic conversations at the beginning and end of the book the ‘psychological pillars’ between which the rest of the story would hang ‘like a grotesque tapestry’.5
These rejected titles, and Lewis’s comments on them, underscore some of the aspects of Tarr that run counter to most readers’ expectations of an English novel of its period. Along with its descriptive experimentation and arguably jaundiced view of human nature, Tarr demonstrates an open declaration of narrative fatality (the rejected title ‘Otto Kreisler’s Death’ is subsumed in the published novel by the introduction of Kreisler as ‘DOOMED, EVIDENTLY’, [p. 64]). It juxtaposes traditional novelistic exposition with philosophic reflection, and it presents its long central section—from which the titular character virtually disappears—as not only a visual artefact (a ‘tapestry’) but a ‘grotesque’ one at that. How do these varied intentions coalesce?
In synopsis, the plot of Tarr is straightforward enough. It concerns the Parisian adventures of Frederick Sorbert Tarr, a young English painter, and Otto Kreisler, a failed German artist in his mid-thirties who is engaged on a path of self-destruction. Tarr considers himself to be a true artist in a world of ‘bourgeois bohemians’, the pseudo-artists of Paris who lack talent but can afford to rent studios for themselves, and who declare their independence from bourgeois society even as they create their own hypocritical community with its own equally predictable societal mores. Tarr acts as the spokesman for the novel’s aesthetic ideas, and he proclaims, as the model post-Nietzschean his first name ‘Frederick’ suggests, that he stands beyond conventional morality. The plot follows his romantic and sexual involvement with two women. The long-suffering Bertha Lunken, a German, is soft-hearted, simplistic, and filled with conventional ideas about romance, while the stylish cosmopolitan Anastasya Vasek exemplifies the new woman of the early twentieth century, intellectually self-sufficient and sexually independent perhaps to the point of alarm. The novel describes a sort of roundelay between these four characters, who change partners in a quasi-symmetrical dance of coupling and uncoupling.
Its shape suggests that Tarr should be a specific kind of European comedy. The pre-War European setting, the romantic foursome in which both men become involved with both women, and in which the men are respectively a military man and an artist and the women respectively versions of the ‘peasant girl’ and the ‘aristocrat’—such are the makings of a Viennese operetta, or the cinematic farces of Ernst Lubitsch that created contemporary analogues to those works beginning in the late 1920s. But Lewis has a considerably darker humour in mind. Like the disruptive Kreisler at the Bonnington Club dance, who ‘mistook the waltz for a more primitive music’ (p. 129), Lewis provides us with an alarming dance of art and sexuality closer to the fin de siècle of Arthur Schnitzler or Egon Schiele than to the confections of Strauss.
Part of the pleasure of Tarr is the juxtaposition of its formal patterns against its corrosive vision of human nature. Lewis deploys his debunking humour at a number of targets. Tarr skewers Kreisler, but it also satirizes the pretensions of his fellow Parisian pseudo-artists. It holds up to scorn the absurdity of the Germanic Romanticism that underlies both Kreisler and Bertha, the former a product of Prussian militarism, the latter steeped in received middle-class worship of the culture of Goethe and Beethoven. It scathingly reveals the inability of many of its characters to keep separate those human energies antithetically appropriate to the making of art versus the making of love.
Tarr’s relationship with Bertha, with which the novel begins, is a model of emotional and sexual co-dependency. It combines mutual erotic attraction with Tarr’s distaste both for Bertha’s national and womanly commonplaces. Tarr patronizes Bertha for her lapses of taste and sophistication, while Bertha, in her suffering, nonetheless gets to play the role of the world-weary victim of a man, in her indulgent view, too young and intellectually abstracted to know what he really wants out of life. At the novel’s opening Bertha’s comic status as Tarr’s ‘official fiancée’ marks only the novel’s first disruptive treatment of sexual and other social relationships. In Tarr the desires of the body and the needs of the mind are at loggerheads, and conventional mores are no more capable of accounting for their complexities than are the techniques of conventional psychological fiction.
Tarr’s later attraction to Anastasya, with her overt ‘swagger sex’, counterbalances Tarr’s relationship with Bertha both in theme and structure. In the novel’s opening chapters Tarr declares to his various male acquaintances that the man of genius needs to preserve his authentic vitality for his art, and that women must remain mere physical pendants to masculine creative energies. Anastasya’s appearance throws Tarr’s certainties into question, for Lewis presents her as being in every way Tarr’s match—as an intellect, as a sexual being, as a game-player in relationships, and as a manipulator of images. Anastasya tellingly explains how she arranged to be booted out by her family: ‘I inundated my home with troublesome images—it was like vermin; my multitude of little figures swarmed everywhere! They simply had to get rid of me’ (p. 89). Lewis creates Anastasya to be Bertha’s opposite in every way. If she seems therefore less well rounded in fictional terms, she nonetheless corresponds to an actual historic type, the women associated with the avant-garde of the pre-and inter-War periods as creators or consorts
, such as French dancer and author of feminist Futurist manifestos Valentine de Saint-Point, the poet Mina Loy (whom Lewis knew before the War), and photographer Man Ray’s model and companion Alice Prin, better known to the world as Kiki de Montparnasse.
Anastasya is the embodiment of the newly emergent twentieth-century woman, a flamboyant mixture of two journalistic constructions of the times, the intellectual ‘New Woman’ and the sexually open ‘Modern Girl’, and as such she hurtles down upon Tarr’s and Bertha’s late-nineteenth-century conceptions of women like a roller coaster. The sections of the novel dealing with Tarr—particularly the ‘two interviews’ with his male friends and with Anastasya at the restaurant towards the novel’s end—interrogate the relationship between male and female, art and sexuality, and the claims of the intellect against the claims of lived experience. Tarr and Bertha, Tarr and Anastasya, create as couples a set of narrative possibilities that are also a set of thematic oppositions, setting art against ‘life’ and Tarr’s theories against his behaviour. By its end, with Tarr married to Bertha in name only but continuing his dalliance with Anastasya, the novel poses a challenge to its reader: does Tarr emerge as everything he claims to be? Does Lewis intend readers to accept Tarr at his own valuation, including endorsing what most would consider to be his virulent misogyny?
The body of the novel places Tarr’s intellectual consistency into stark relief, as it details a series of absurd disruptions and upheavals caused by the frustrated and self-loathing Kreisler. In a near mirrorreversal of Tarr—for Kreisler is in some ways Tarr’s doppelgänger—Kreisler pursues first Anastasya and then Bertha, and in one of the novel’s most memorable set-pieces, he disrupts a society dance with his increasingly erratic and bitter behaviour. Other disasters accrue, as do the novel’s memorable descriptions of Kreisler’s growing violence and emotional imbalance. In these scenes comedy veers closer and closer to its all-too-serious opposite. An unexpected act of sexual violence serves as the novel’s most sober example of the ridiculous pushed to the edge of tragedy, as does Kreisler’s participation in a duel so stunningly mismanaged that its absurd motivation is matched only by the nihilistic comedy of its decline into chaos, and the dissolution of Kreisler himself.
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