Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) (4 page)

But do Tarr and Anastasya indeed become life’s masters, by the novel’s end? One way to gauge their ultimate ‘success’ in Lewis’s world is to disengage
Tarr
temporarily from the traditions of the European novels and avant-garde visual experimentation, and consider it among its contemporaneous novels of English and Irish Modernism.
Thematic and formal linkages are surprisingly plentiful between
Tarr
and Ford’s
The Good Soldier
(1915), Lawrence’s
Women in Love
(1920), and Joyce’s
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
(1916). Ford’s and Lawrence’s novels tell stories, as does
Tarr
, of two sets of intertwined couples, whose social and sexual experiences become the subject of philosophical observation by one of the male members of its foursome. Lewis’s novel shares with Lawrence’s, whose fiction he loathed, a sometimes surprisingly sexual candour. (John Lane, who had published
Blast
, refused to publish
Tarr
in part because he worried it was ‘too strong a book’ in the wake of criminal proceedings brought against Methuen for publishing Lawrence’s novel
The Rainbow
.
¹³
) Lawrence’s novel shares with
Tarr
a concern for the place of sexuality and marriage in modern culture (albeit in a very different tonal register), as well as its inclusion of one male character who is largely defined by his theories about life, Rupert Birkin, and another, Gerald Crich, whose path to self-destruction is predicated in part, as is Kreisler’s, as a criticism of Futurism.
¹⁴
Ford’s novel shares with
Tarr
a structure in which one male character observes the self-destruction of a second male character whose motivations he tries to understand, while Joyce’s novel presents a male protagonist who struggles to grow into his nominally mature status as an artist. And like Joyce, Lewis presents his readers with a portrait of an artist as a young man, for he introduces Tarr as being in his early twenties, roughly the same age as Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus when he goes off to Paris at the end of
A Portrait
. It is tempting, indeed, to read the beginning of
Tarr
as a near-parodic continuation of Joyce, with Stephen transformed into Lewis’s very different young artist in Paris, no longer delivering aesthetic lectures on the streets of Dublin but rather theorizing about aesthetics in a series of cafés and studios.

But what
Tarr
mainly shares with all of these novels is a pervasive ironizing that ultimately undermines the readers’ uncomplicated endorsement of their protagonists’ visions of the world. Early in
The Good Soldier
the reader comes to suspect that Ford’s Dowell, the
first-person narrator, is an arrantly untrustworthy guide to himself or to others, and Lawrence’s and Joyce’s novels present their protagonists Birkin and Stephen as quasi-autobiographical versions of their authors as both inspired and self-absorbedly egoistic. One can identify both Birkin’s and Stephen’s ideas, often presented at didactic length, with ideas held by their novelists’ younger selves. But the novels also demonstrate their protagonists’ arrogance and failures of insight. Lawrence’s Ursula acts as a kind of surrogate for the reader in criticizing Birkin’s self-importance throughout
Women in Love
, and the final chapter of Joyce’s
Portrait
demonstrates that Stephen may be aesthetically brilliant, but that he is also self-important, quixotic, superior to his peers in intellect but inferior to them in empathy.

And so it is with Tarr. In a preface to the first edition, which he chose to omit in the 1928 revision published here (see Appendix), Lewis endorses Tarr’s ideas about art but firmly distances himself from Tarr’s management of his personal life. As the novel progresses, the attentive reader will note more and more flaws in Tarr’s dogged dependence on humour, anti-feminism, and egoism. After Tarr visits Kreisler in his rooms, for instance, Tarr feels ‘There was something mean and improper in everything he had done, which he could not define’ (p. 208). Later in the passage Lewis becomes yet more straightforward about Tarr’s misanthropy: ‘His contempt for everybody else in the end must degrade him: for if nothing in other men was worth honouring, finally his self-neglect must result, like the Cynic’s dishonourable condition’ (p. 209). These moments of temporary self-realization come in the wake of Tarr’s contemplations of Kreisler and Bertha, as he, and Lewis, begin to understand that jokes can be hurtful, that they may turn ‘too deep for laughter’ (p. 164) and are ‘able to make you sweat, even break your ribs and black your eyes’ (p. 211). As Tarr’s ability to juggle his ‘various selves’ threatens to desert him, he becomes at times defined by a Kreislerian theatricality: he is not only an actor, but an awkward one. Lewis describes Tarr at one juncture as ‘an untalented Pro on a provincial first-night’ (p. 187), and further declares that within the temporary triangle formed with Bertha and Kreisler ‘Tarr had the best rôle, and did not deserve it’ (p. 189).

Lewis has suggested this inconsistency earlier in the novel. When Tarr threatens to return to England from the Vitelotte Quarter, the
furthest he can bring himself to flee from Bertha is Montmartre, an easy bus ride away on the other side of Paris. His reaction to the scandal of Bertha being seen kissing Kreisler in the street is positively Victorian. When he writes in a letter, ‘for God’s sake get married quickly. It’s all up with you otherwise’ (p. 143), he sounds less like an advanced artist than an outraged maiden aunt. And when Tarr ultimately marries Bertha ‘For form’s sake’ (p. 281) one wonders if he is truly turning social expectation to his own advantage. On the one hand, Tarr outrages convention to underwrite his continued dalliance with Anastasya, ‘his illicit and more splendid bride’ (p. 284), but on the other, he may have simply fallen into the trap of bourgeois expectations he has earlier criticized, exchanging artistic for social ‘form’.

Tarr’s limitations are not lost on the novel’s other characters. Lewis initially mutes those criticisms, however, by putting them in the mouths of characters whom Tarr considers inferior. Hobson may appear passive in the face of Tarr’s prolonged tirade in the opening chapter, but he may also be all too used to hearing Tarr’s repeated invective to take it seriously. Indeed, Hobson rejects Tarr’s theorizing outright, saying ‘Your creative man sounds rather alarming. I don’t believe in him’ (p. 16). Bertha dismisses some of Tarr’s overt emotional cruelty, chalking it up to his immaturity (‘tu es
si jeune
,’ she tells him, p. 184), and one must recall throughout
Tarr
that Kreisler is in his mid-thirties, while Tarr is only in his early twenties. Hobson and Bertha, of course, are scarcely presented as authoritative witnesses within the world of the novel. But when even Anastasya hears of Tarr’s marriage, she looks blankly into his eyes and sees only a blasted landscape, in Lewis’s memorable phrase, ‘as though he contained cheerless stretches where no living thing could grow’ (p. 282).

Tarr may be a genius, but that does not mean that he is not also something of a fool. His name tells us so. ‘Tarr’ suggests several possible origins. It may be the nickname for a British sailor who can stay masterfully afloat in the metaphorical sea of Paris (‘All the nice girls love a tar!’ Lewis later writes in another context
¹⁵
); it may suggest the sticky tenacity, and perhaps the blackness, of his intellectualism; it may allude to a story by Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The System of Doctor Tarr
and Professor Fether’, in which madmen take over an asylum. But it also suggests the German ‘
Tor
’ (‘blockhead’), a near-homophone that appears in Kreisler’s consciousness in the text (p. 99). And although ‘
Tor
’ can mean ‘fool’ in the sense of a spiritual innocent (as in the libretto for Wagner’s
Parsifal
), Tarr is no holy
naïf
, no Dostoyevskian Myshkin to counterbalance Kreisler’s Stavrogin. He is at bottom just another version of the self-important artist, one of the ‘unscrupulous heroes’ that haunt the Vitelotte Quarter, who, as Lewis warns in the novel’s first paragraph, are ‘largely ignorant of all but their restless personal lives’ (p. 7). Tarr’s Apollonian pronouncements ultimately prove no more capable of securing for him a ‘healthy’ division between sex and art than do the Dionysiac excesses of Kreisler. The novel’s final words introduce the names of Tarr’s future sexual partners, and they suggest that the supposedly superior artist will become trapped in an irresolvable vacillation between women like Bertha—who are maternal, Romantic, and intellectually unthreatening—and women like Anastasya, who are intellectual extroverts and thus dangerous to the male ego.

In a final twist of the knife, Anastasya also falls victim to Lewis’s satire. Her conventionally feminine reaction to the news of Tarr’s marriage suggests the limitations of even her code of ‘swagger sex’; indeed, Lewis signals this somewhat earlier by noting that ‘Her romanticism, in fact, was of the same order as Bertha’s but much better class’ (p. 252). So by the novel’s end, both Tarr and Anastasya have been debunked, the biters have been bitten, and Lewis reveals the novel’s most pervasive, if subtlest, insight. No one, including the critic of inauthenticity in society and in art, can step outside the analytic gaze: the avant-gardist looks directly into the mirror when he condemns the world around him.

‘a sincerely ironic masterpiece’

The interest of
Tarr
goes well beyond its formal balances and intellectual patterning of theory evaluated against practice. Its treatment of fatality, its philosophizing, and its grotesque visuality serve to underline its representation, as Lewis writes of the opening meeting between Tarr and Hobson, of a kind of ‘camouflage of intricate accommodations’ (p. 8) with received novelistic form. In its
paradoxical box-within-box admiration and satire of its represented critics and their critiques,
Tarr
looks to the reader to be many different things at the same time, for it feints and parries like a skilled fencer against the reader’s expectations. It is undeniably bleak and at times still unsettling. But if readers can bring themselves to view its world from Lewis’s detached perspective, it is also smart, provocative, and blackly entertaining. Its intertwining of violence and humour may seem quizzical, but for Lewis the two are inseparable, as are both qualities from the world itself. ‘Mine is a repulsive task,’ he later writes, ‘I discourse matter-of-factly upon the most repulsive matters. But however ugly (and I have agreed that they are that), those things are quite
real
.’
¹⁶
This is one respect in which Lewis may be said to concur with Marinetti, who proclaimed in his 1912 ‘Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature’: ‘Let us boldly make “the ugly” in literature, and let us everywhere murder solemnity.’
¹⁷

That
Tarr
murders solemnity is beyond doubt. No novel before the work of Samuel Beckett so thoroughly introduces to the English tradition the idea of the Absurd (‘we represent
absolutely nothing
thank God!’, Anastasya drunkenly proclaims in the restaurant with Tarr, as though she has reached an apotheosis, p. 270). No other English novel sets its action in play with so little concern for morality: in his later
Rude Assignment
, Lewis writes that the story of Kreisler is expected ‘to awaken neither sympathy nor repulsion from the reader … His death is a tragic game.’
¹⁸
No other novel would have the temerity to begin a scene of rape with a man telling a woman ‘Your arms are like bananas!’ (p. 166), or to introduce an entirely new character in its last two words. Yet Lewis was sensitive to English charges that
Tarr
’s satire was an affront to all that was good in the novelistic tradition. He insisted that
Tarr
was ‘not (if you cared to cross the Channel) the first book in European literature to display a certain indifference to bourgeois conventions, and an unblushing disbelief in the innate goodness of human nature.’
¹⁹

For
Tarr
crosses many kinds of channels—between comedy and tragedy, between philosophy and satire, and ultimately between antihumanism and humanism. Lewis was initially concerned that Harriet Shaw Weaver, the first publisher of
Tarr
, might find the tone of the book ‘too heartless, bitter and material’. But he also wrote ‘if the book has a moral, it is that it describes a man’s revolt or reaction against his reason’.
²⁰
If we accept his description of
Tarr
as a kind of treatise on reason and detachment gone wrong, we may also understand the novel as part of a line of twentieth-century art whose themes Lewis anticipated, even if he did not directly influence them. Its haranguing philosophizing and its mordant criticism of a society that demands ferocious attack from within can be seen in such later Austrian novels as Robert Musil’s
The Man Without Qualities
(1930–42) and the works of Thomas Bernhard. Postmodern English art recapitulates many of Lewis’s central aesthetic concerns. Like
Tarr
, a film such as Peter Greenaway’s
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover
(1989) blends rebarbative intellectuality with social satire, sexuality, and anti-humanism, all treated with the most formal visual and aesthetic rigour. And a work of art such as Damien Hirst’s installation
Away from the Flock
(1994), which notoriously displays a sheep in a glass box filled with formaldehyde, addresses the same concerns as Lewis’s Vorticism: how art, in framing organic form by rigorous aesthetic geometries, can make the viewer reconsider the status not only of art, but of life itself.

And if these comparisons seem to be trying to rescue a form of humanism from Lewis’s often fiercely held anti-humanism (as Lewis himself would begin to do in such later novels as
The Revenge for Love
), it is worth remembering Horace Walpole’s claim that the world is a tragedy for those who feel, but a comedy for those who think. For
Tarr
, in containing opposites, can ultimately be read either as a comic endorsement of its rather heartless world, or by challenging the reader to bring to bear an understanding resistant to its satiric surfaces, as a denunciation of those who, like Tarr, would suppress the world of feeling beneath an all-powerful intellect. We may read Lewis’s signature novel both as saying what it means and as ironizing
its own first principles. And in this respect, as in many others,
Tarr
should be better known. With the passage of time its status becomes clearer, like the multi-purpose Bonnington Club it describes within its pages, as the ‘sincerely ironic masterpiece’ (p. 127) it was acclaimed on its first publication.