Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) (3 page)

Yet where most novels laud the integrity of the authentic character and treat harshly those who wear multiple societal masks,
Tarr
does the reverse. According to Tarr, Bertha and Kreisler are paradoxically limited because they are too much themselves. They lack the capacity to adapt, to play roles knowingly instead of being taken over by prefabricated identities. Late in the novel Tarr philosophizes to Anastasya about an ‘authentic’ art whose greatest advantage would be its deadness and its externality, and he thinks of his own self as a kind of set of nested Matryoshka dolls that have only a painting at the core. Tarr considers this multiplicity to be an advantage, a way to manoeuvre in a society whose clichés and hypocrisy endanger the artist. He boasts of his insouciant multiplicity: ‘I’m an indifferent landlord, I haven’t the knack of handling the various personalities gathered beneath my roof’ (p. 19).

This scepticism about whether there is such a thing as an essential self, or whether the self is merely a matter of successful stage-management, explains in part why selfhood in
Tarr
is often conflated with nationality, the degree to which being ‘German’ or ‘English’ may be said to define one’s character. For Tarr, at least, individuals without a robust sense of self become merely predictable products of their national upbringing, an assemblage of the tics and prejudices of their national ethos. For this reason, one of the novel’s most contrarian jokes is that its Paris contains not a single significant French character. Everyone is a foreigner, and Tarr and Anastasya, the characters who are the most ‘international’, are also most able to adapt in a world that Lewis describes in pervasive imagery of fluidity, flooding, and survival. Kreisler and Bertha, who are in Tarr’s view the characters most mired in nationality, are also the
least changeable. Even their names suggest their limitations. Bertha’s surname ‘Lunken’ carries the opprobrious echo of that English term of stupidity, ‘lunkhead’. ‘Kreisler’—a name borrowed from German fantasist E. T. A. Hoffmann—derives from ‘
kreis
’, the German for ‘circle’, an apt appellation for a character stuck in a repetitive rut of his own making. (‘Kreisler’ may also suggest the German
kreisel
, ‘spinning top’, a mechanism that is set to furious movement from without, yet paradoxically gets nowhere, and finally collapses.)

Yet despite these ‘limitations’—or perhaps because of them—Bertha and particularly Kreisler often strike contemporary readers as the most engaging, the most ‘realistic’ of
Tarr
’s characters, the most psychologically plausible among Lewis’s otherwise constructed and externalized Parisians. Early reviewers in particular singled out Lewis’s characterization of Kreisler—self-loathing and self-destructive, prone to humiliation and black comic disaster—as the novel’s most noteworthy success. Kreisler’s clearest fictional ancestors are the tormented protagonists of Dostoyevsky, a heritage clearly on Lewis’s mind as he worked on
Tarr
.
⁶
But Kreisler’s character also explains the novel’s sheer strangeness for readers coming to
Tarr
expecting anything like the world view of the conventional English novel, which has seldom taken neurosis as its subject matter, let alone self-destructive pathology. For much like Tarr himself,
Tarr
refuses to be defined as being only ‘one thing’, or limited by a narrowly nationalist heritage. It takes the psychically charged worlds of Dostoyevsky and Goethe as its models, rather than basing itself upon the provincial worlds of class and social niceties typical of the English novel. Or, more precisely, it transposes the intellectual concerns of Continental novelists upon the microcosm of class and social niceties of its idiosyncratic bourgeois-bohemia. Ezra Pound wrote in his review of
Tarr
, ‘Lewis is the rarest of phenomena, an Englishman who has achieved the triumph of being also a European.’
⁷
‘Being also
a European’ is also one of
Tarr
’s greatest achievements. John Rodker once called Ford Madox Ford’s novel
The Good Soldier
, because of its sophisticated treatment of sexual mores, the finest ‘French’ novel in the English language.
⁸
Tarr
, with its international cast, its importation of a continental sensibility into English, and its tweaking of the English tradition of character and social analysis, may be thought of as perhaps the finest ‘Russian’ or ‘German’ novel in the English tradition.

Where
Tarr
turns to Russia or Germany for its novelistic models, its practices of style are a writer’s response to the early twentieth-century visual avant-gardes of France and Italy. During Lewis’s apprenticeship as a painter Paris was an international laboratory for aesthetic experimentation. The most advanced artists were displaying in the salons and galleries; the Fauvists were emerging, and Picasso’s and Braque’s Cubism was in full flourish. When Lewis returned from Paris to London in 1908 he was eager to see equally innovative artists in London. But Lewis was disappointed that most English artists and critics were unwilling to move beyond Impressionism; at their most radical, they approved of the decorative effects of Matisse. Lewis displayed his paintings briefly under the aegis of Bloomsbury art critic and tastemaker Roger Fry, and for a time Lewis worked at Fry’s Omega Workshop, where artisans translated French aesthetics into home decoration. Lewis became restive with such ‘middlebrow’ activity, however, and broke acrimoniously away from Fry, founding the Rebel Art Centre in 1914. There, with the collaboration of Ezra Pound and the sculptor Henri Gaudier–Brzeska, Lewis launched a new journal of the arts, the oversized and shockingly pink avant-garde
Blast
, pre-War London’s only significant attempt to establish a home-grown avant-garde movement in visual and literary art: Vorticism.

Vorticism elevated visual geometry and rhetorical paradox to the status of theory, even as the paintings of Lewis’s Vorticist period found a new style in its synthesis of elements of analytic Cubism with the
colouristic effects of both the Fauvists and the German Expressionists (in
Tarr
the German artist Vokt says of his own show in Berlin ‘It has not gone badly. Our compatriots improve—’, p. 101).
Blast
’s manifestos, however, derive their energy largely from a highly articulate opposition to Futurism, the first of the fully articulated twentieth-century European avant-gardes. In his founding manifesto of Futurism, published on the front page of the French newspaper
Le Figaro
on 20 February 1909, the Italian poet and journalist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti declared the principles of his new art, which would embrace technology and speed, reject tradition, praise both youth and war, and trumpet intuition over intellect. The ideas of Futurism emerged thereafter in torrents of hyperbolic individual and group manifestos, which promised to transform both painting, which should extol speed, and literature, which should become a pure field of word objects. Marinetti became a
succès de scandale
in London with his lectures and presentations, but Lewis and Pound objected to the Futurist rejection of aesthetic traditions, its praising of intuition above intellect, and its quasi-Romantic fetishizing of speed, which had the effect, in Futurist canvases by painters such as Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini, and Umberto Boccioni, of disrupting Lewis’s preferred stable geometrics with blurred and multiple images. In response, the manifestos of
Blast
declared that the Vorticist would extol intellect over emotion, form over (or in conjunction with) nature, space over time, balance over movement, and contemplation over action. Rather than declaring a straightforwardly singular aesthetic, Vorticism would erect in the place of Futurism a rhetoric of opposition and paradox, turning Marinetti’s call to total war into an aesthetic alarum aimed at both the academicism of British art and Marinetti’s then-pervasive influence. Vorticism would be both coruscating and objective, destructive and intellectually creative. It would, in the words of one of Lewis’s manifestos, ‘fight first on one side, then on the other, but always for the
SAME
cause, which is neither side or both sides and ours’.
⁹

Many of Tarr’s ideas are identifiably the same as those of the
Blast
manifestos: his programmatic and egoistic opposition to the conflation of ‘art’ and ‘life’, his vaunting of paradox above consistency,
and his preference for art that emphasized exteriors and stable objects rather than interiors and the behaviour of objects in time. (Arguably, differences of tone between the Kreisler and the Tarr sections of
Tarr
may be explained as artefacts of the novel’s prolonged composition, the ‘Vorticism’ of Tarr a later accretion upon the earlier psychological ‘realism’ of Kreisler.) But just as importantly, Lewis’s implicit dialogue with the painterly avant-gardes produces some of
Tarr
’s most striking descriptive and narrative effects. When Lewis describes Tarr as having only ‘the cumbrous [machinery] of the intellect … full of sinister piston-rods, organ-like shapes, heavy drills’ (p. 9), his sentence transforms a particularly avant-garde fetishizing of mechanism into a new kind of English prose style, one that attempts to translate painterly abstraction into words, to represent intangible qualities by the accretion of absurdist visual shapes. That accretion becomes a source for virtuoso experimental set-pieces. When Lewis introduces Anastasya with her ‘egotistic code of advanced order, full of insolent strategies’ (p. 84) his subsequent description is as densely and visually constructed as a painting. Anastasya becomes a kind of Vorticist canvas—‘When she laughed, this commotion was transmitted to her body as though sharp sonorous blows had been struck upon her mouth’, ‘her head was an elegant bone-white egg’—the details of which overwhelm Kreisler by their multiplicity, a ‘cascade, a hot cascade’ (p. 84). These passages are also keys to characterization. Lewis’s Vorticist-inflected descriptions tend to cluster around Tarr, Anastasya, and Paris itself, reaffirming the continuity of those characters and that location with Lewis’s approved ideas about art and selfhood. Conversely, Lewis’s descriptions of Bertha and Kreisler tend to visualize their outmoded Romanticisms as a reflection and partial parody of Futurism. For instance, when Lewis describes Bertha’s leg as appearing ‘like the sanguine of an Italian master in which the leg is drawn in several positions, one on top of the other’ (p. 39), he invokes not only a Renaissance sketch, but also the ‘multiple exposures’ of Futurist canvases, in which action through time is represented by the superimposition of shapes in space.
¹⁰

This description helps to suggest that Bertha’s identity is ‘out of focus’, and descriptions of Kreisler throughout are overtly anti-Futurist in their comic exposure of the limitations of Marinetti’s fetishizing of instinct, masculine power, militarism, and the Futurists’ programmatic ‘contempt for women’. Kreisler’s mayhem at the Bonnington Club, in which he becomes a pure mechanism of movement as violence, is as Futurist as a speeding automobile, and as ultimately doomed to crash and burn. Kreisler’s perversely mixed feelings of hate and love for Soltyk at the duel owe as much to Marinetti as to Dostoyevsky.
¹¹
And Kreisler’s rape of Bertha, which is both the most painful and the most technically virtuosic sequence of
Tarr
, can be understood as both an apotheosis of Futurist ideology and the logical endpoint of the sexual politics of
Mitteleuropa
that produced the very idea of the duel. Kreisler’s cultural inheritance elevates ‘woman’ (
das Weib
) into an abstraction of purity that is worthy of masculine protection, even as it simultaneously reduces her to an object subject to masculine control. As such the idea of rape becomes a mere extension of the ideology of the duel, and both dovetail all too neatly with Marinetti’s praise of intuitive action, destruction, and hatred of the conventionally feminine. As John Cournos wrote in
The Egoist
in a wartime essay ‘The Death of Futurism’, ‘Some day a book may be written to show how closely war is allied with sex. For the Futuristic juxtaposition of the glorification of war and “contempt for women” is no mere accident. This contempt does not simply imply indifference, but the worst form men’s obsession with sex can take, that is rape!’
¹²

Cournos could not have known that the book he was seeking was being serially published in the same issue in which he wrote. Yet Lewis’s ideological analyses are most powerfully delivered not by harangue but by means of visuality.
Tarr
’s single most memorable and disturbing image is perhaps the description of Bertha, after the rape, perceiving Kreisler as four disconnected figures impossible to reconcile with one another in space or time (p. 167). As a reflection of psychology the image tells us much about Kreisler’s increasingly fractured and
discontinuous selfhood, as well as Bertha’s attempt to cope with the trauma of her physical and psychic violation. But as pure imagery it also presents readers with an experiment in representation comparable to the fracturing of time and space by the human body in Marcel Duchamp’s painting
Nude Descending a Staircase
(1912), or to the sequences of stop-motion photography made by Eadweard Muybridge in the 1870s that inspired both Duchamp’s painting and the creation of cinema.

As this comparison suggests, the prose of
Tarr
responds not only to modern painting, but also to that other increasingly important visual innovation, the movies. When Kreisler appears in Bertha’s hallway ‘like a great terrifying poster, cut out on the melodramatic stairway’ (p. 170), he becomes a nightmarish advertisement out of German Expressionist cinema, a kind of Nosferatu before the great 1922 vampire film of that name by F. W. Murnau; before his death as a ‘tramp’ jerked around by waiters and in need of Time (p. 244) Kreisler becomes a kind of ghastly parody of screen comedian Charlie Chaplin, whose international popularity Lewis criticized in the prologue to the 1918 version of
Tarr
(see Appendix). Lewis tells us at one point that Kreisler grasps his situation with Anastasya ‘cinematographically’ (p. 88) and in so doing Lewis implicitly alerts his readers to the dangers of living life ‘filmically’—melodramatically, prey to the vagaries of time—no less so than when criticizing the Futurists. Bertha and Kreisler are doomed to be the victims of such aesthetic flux and its associated psychological and emotional upheaval. Only the aesthetically advanced Tarr and Anastasya, who embrace highbrow art, casual (‘swagger’) sex, and the life of the mind, have the tools to survive as observers of life rather than its hapless subjects, the theatrical or cinematic audience rather than its performers.