Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) (2 page)

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.

In his conversations with Anastasya, Tarr acts as an explicit analyst of Kreisler’s behaviour, and by the novel’s end readers are invited to judge Tarr’s self-proclaimed superior objectivity and aesthetic sensibility. The novel balances Tarr’s nominal ability to look at life objectively, ‘from the outside’, and to separate his relationship to art from his relationship to sex, against Kreisler’s increasingly clear inability to separate art from life and sexuality from violence. At the same time, the novel presents Kreisler’s dilemma as the inheritance of his Romantic Prussia, which stands in more generally for the entropic and destructive behaviour of the militarism that threatened European culture in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Tarr
indeed questions throughout whether one can separate life and thought, sex and art, so readily. Although Tarr does at times engage directly with Kreisler, he is largely an observer of Kreisler from afar, an effect that is reproduced for the reader, for we observe and judge Tarr much as Tarr observes and judges Kreisler. And the novel’s nearly anthropological treatment of Kreisler as both a psychologically complex individual and a representative of a particular kind of culture asks us to contemplate more generally the nature of character in Lewis’s world—how men and women define themselves in couples, in groups, as individuals. Kreisler, for instance, and his climactic duel, embody one of the novel’s pervasive truisms: that all human relationships are tinged, when they are not wholly defined, by aggression and violence. All of the relations between characters in
Tarr
are duels of one kind or another—sexual, social, or emotional.
Etymologically, the word ‘duel’ derives from the Latin words
duo
and
bellum
—a war for two. Tarr’s initial tirade against Hobson sets the model for relationships
à deux
, which are built on the desire for control in a relationship which protects the self while attacking the other. The long scene early on between Tarr and Bertha, in which he proudly displays his ‘feeling of indifference’ while she parries with a world-weary stoicism, is a kind of emotional and social battle that Lewis describes as ‘a combat between two wrestlers of approximately equal strength: neither could really win’ (p. 48). Tarr’s dinner conversation with Anastasya is a kind of intellectual game-cum-challenge with high stakes for both egos. Her apparent initial rejection of him is a form of military strategy, and her seductive nudity in his studio thereafter becomes a challenge to which Tarr must verbally accede, crying ‘I accept, I accept!’ (p. 272). Bertha and Anastasya’s rivalry is portrayed in terms of a joust: Anastasya’s alternative story about Bertha’s relationship with Kreisler, Lewis writes, ‘charged hers full tilt’ (p. 157). When Kreisler approaches Bertha’s apartment building Lewis writes that she stands, with good reason as it turns out, ‘with the emotions of an ambushed sharp-shooter’ (pp. 158–9). Other examples abound: Tarr’s dilemma at the novel’s opening is literally to ‘dis-engage’ himself from Bertha, his ‘official fiancée’; both terms, ‘engagement’ and ‘disengagement’, suggest military as much as sexual manoeuvres. Kreisler’s duel with Soltyk depends upon a different kind of dis-and re-engagement. Kreisler displaces rage over a fantasized relationship with Anastasya upon both Bertha and the hapless Soltyk, taking sexual revenge upon the former and murderous revenge upon the latter. Lewis describes another Romantic approach only half-jokingly as a ‘siege’ (p. 117), and Tarr proclaims that he would like to be able to generalize the disengagement of divorce to any social bond: he complains to Hobson, ‘Oh for multitudes of divorces in our
mæurs
, more than the old vexed sex ones!’ (p. 8).

Tarr’s distaste for wider connections stems in part from the novel’s wide satire of the social world, which is presented as often comically inane and as an agglomeration of potentially inauthentic identities. In
Tarr
character is frequently a kind of mask. In Fraulein Liepmann’s salon, we are told, social facts ‘appeal to the mind with the strangeness of masks’ (p. 114), and characters in
Tarr
frequently appear as mere personae. Throughout the Bonnington Club dance scene,
for instance, Lewis casts Kreisler in the role of a ‘graceless Hamlet’ (p. 133), and he ‘act[s] satanically’ (p. 169); in conjunction with other theatrical images, Kreisler becomes a kind of bargain-basement version of Goethe’s Mephistopheles. (It is possible, indeed, to see his violation of Bertha as a grotesque echo of Gretchen’s betrayal in
Faust
.) In
Tarr
the generalized masking of the world threatens to become endless theatre, where character becomes role. Lewis makes explicit Kreisler’s entrapment in a kind of theatre: ‘Womenkind were Kreisler’s Theatre,’ he writes; ‘they were for him art and expression: the tragedies played there purged you periodically of the too violent accumulations of desperate life’ (p. 86).