Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) (47 page)

‘It’s usual and we should do as the Romans
*
do—not that these are Romans!—we should observe a decent emotionality about these coarse mysteries—worship and appetite are one!—who said you could dispense with the veil?—it is impossible, try it!—there should be a blush of animal shame upon the joint of mutton—.’

‘You will break my heart!’

She pursued impetuously—

‘I don’t need you to tell me—there should be no trifling with the objects of sexual appetite—they are sacro-sanct I have agreed, under the fanatical frown of the mosaic code
*
—we are not pagans—you need not say it, I am already reminded!’

She recrossed the two massive dangling serpents of her legs—up above their thick white necks flashing as she changed them—up under her fore and aft serge apron.

‘We intellectuals’ she insisted ‘talk far too much about things that simply will not bear talking of and looking into—a high-brow girl
such as me must be sexually (oh that’s very very american) an abomination: I am convinced that with me a man would become impotent within a month at the outside, I mean it.’

Sitting crouched like a stage Whittington cat
*
upon his chair, with eyes devoutly riveted upon the exhibits of the demonstration as though he expected a Brocken ghost-mouse
*
to hop out and were sitting at the cock to pounce when it did, Tarr grinned painfully, without removing his eyes from the neighbourhood of the supposed exit.

‘A man’s leg in Ladies’ Hose is just as nice as a woman’s leg’ she remarked.

Tarr did not let go, unblinking he made haste to answer, motionless:

‘Or just as dull, as you would have it; both are—outside the imagination that is—.’

The intensity of his painful stare deepened and his face flushed. She uncrossed her legs and brought them to attention, pushing her skirt down enquiringly.

‘
Outside the imagination
—what is that? What do you consider the imagination is?’

Tarr flung himself back in his chair, took a cigarette from a yellow packet at his side, and lighted it with anxious fixity, the fixed look transferred from the mightier cylinders of meat to it, puny nothing of smoke.

‘In the case of the sucking-pig’ said Tarr, magisterially, flinging his flushed face up for air towards the ceiling ‘it is the tongue. The thing seen is merely disgusting to the eye, but it is delightful to the tongue: therefore the eye passes beneath the spell of the palate, and it is not an image but a taste—much more abstract, in consequence—that it sees—if one can say that it sees. The body of the sucking-pig is blotted out.’

Anastasya sniffed.

‘I think you forget that it is my breast from which we started this rambling argument. Also I would take leave to observe that it is not so easy to blot out a food-unit as you appear to think.’

‘You sound like the Duchess in Alice.’
*

‘Who on earth may that be—the Duchess of What?’

‘Of Alice.’

‘Oh. I was saying, it is by no means so easy—.’

‘I’m with you, I’m with you, you lovely contraption! But nevertheless it is time I were gone!’

‘He bursts into song!’

Tarr sprang up in his chair and delivered himself rather breathlessly as follows:

‘Listen to my explanation, I would give all the world from the Baltic to the Rhine—
bis an den Rin
—Geliebte—
*
darling—pig-girl! to embrace a sucking-pig if it possessed all the other attributes, of body and the rest, of the person I am now addressing, but I meant only that everything we
see
—you understand, this universe of distinct images—must be reinterpreted to tally with all the senses and beyond that with our minds: so that was my meaning, the eye alone sees nothing at all but conventional phantoms.’

Anastasya laughed shrilly and stretched up her arms above her head, looking down at the expansion of her breasts as she extended her torso to its limit.

‘So long as we understand each other—that is everything!’

He stood up.

‘I am hungry, let us go and discuss these matters over a rump steak’ she said rising after him, shivering a little. ‘How damp this place is! I am cold.’

He crossed the room to where his hat and coat were lying.

‘What does the good Bertha say to your new workshop? Now there’s a real woman for you! There’s no mistake about
her
!’

‘Yes good old Bertha’s the right stuff: she’s prime!’

‘My dear, she must be the world’s premier sucking-pig!’

‘The
ne plus ultra!
’

‘The
Ding an sich!
’
*
in the driest and most prolonged american she sang and they turned laughing unkindly at a certain homely womanly form towards the burnished door of the new workshop, passing the easel upon which the greek athlete, attacked with religion, disintegrated before the eyes of a watching harpie.
*

As they descended the Boulevard Rochechouart
*
Tarr stepped with an unmistakable male straddle: no bourgeoise this time! thought he to himself, but the perfect article! It rolled and swept beside him and more and more of its swagger got into his own gait until he was compelled to call a halt: he halted ‘the face that launched a thousand ships’
*
—a thousand transports crowded in her carriage and the impetuous rush of her advance—before a Charcuterie.

‘Delicatessen!’ he hissed significantly in her ear. In a protracted reverie they both directed their gaze upon a Frankfort sausage.
They passed on, Tarr toning himself down as best he could but rehearsing to himself her perfections—No Grail-lady or any phantom of the celtic mind
*
but perfect meat, horse-sense, accent of Minnesota, music of the Steppes,
*
german
Weltweisheit, Wesengefühl
*
and what-not—a prodigious mate!

They entered an expensive trippers’ restaurant
*
and devoured the Menu with hungry eyes from top to bottom in an immediate scamper. They ordered oysters: they would be his first, he had never before dared to eat an oyster, because it was alive.

When he told her that it was his first oyster she was exultant.

‘You perfect savage—your palate is as conservative as an ox’s. Kiss me Tarr—you have never done that either properly.’

The use of his gentile name was a tremendous caress. She presented her salt wet eating lips, he kissed them properly with solemnity, adjusting his glasses afterwards.

‘Why have you never eaten oysters?’

‘The fact that they were alive has so far deterred me but I now see that I was wrong.’

‘You are afraid of everything that is alive!’ she assured him with a portentous nod.

‘Until I find that it is really not to be feared on that score I believe that is true.’

‘You have a marked prejudice in favour of what is dead?’

‘But all human food is killed first and is dead—all except oysters’ he objected.

‘You have a down on life—it’s no good!’

‘I am an artist.’

‘Yes I’ve heard that before!’ she blustered gaily with a german conviviality that made him feel more than ever at home. ‘But the artist has to hunt and kill his material so to speak just as primitive man had to do his own trapping butchering and cooking—it will not do to be squeamish if you are to become a great artist, Mister Tarr!’

Tarr looked the great artist every inch as he haughtily replied:

‘Nevertheless there stands the fact that life is art’s rival in all particulars. They are
de puntos
*
for ever and ever, you will see, if you observe closely.’

‘That I do not see.’

‘No because you mix them up in your own practice.’

‘The woman, I suppose?’

Tarr gave her a hard dogmatic look and then asserted roundly, and probably finally:

‘
As such
, and with such resources, you are the arch-enemy of any picture.’

Anastasya looked pleased, and looked a picture.

‘Yes I see how I might be that. But let us have a definition here and there. What is art?—it sounds like Pompous Pilate!’
*

‘Life with all the humbug of living taken out of it: will that do?’

‘Very well: but what is life?’

‘Everything that is not yet purified so that it is art.’

‘No.’

‘Very well:
Death
is the one attribute that is peculiar to life.’

‘And to art as well.’

‘Ah but it is impossible to
imagine
it in connection with art—that is if you understand art—that is the test for your understanding. Death is the
motif
*
of
all reality: the purest thought is ignorant of that
motif
.’

‘I ask you as a favour to define art for me, you have not. A picture is art if I am not mistaken, but a living person is life. We sitting here are life, if we were talking on a stage we should be art.’

‘A picture, and also the actors on a stage, are pure life. Art is merely what the picture and the stage-scene represent, and what we now, or any living person as such, only, does
not
: that is why you could say that the true statue can be smashed, and yet not die.’

‘Still.’

‘This is the essential point to grasp:
Death
is the thing that differentiates art and life. Art is identical with the idea of permanence. Art is a continuity and not an individual spasm: but life is the idea of the person.’

Both their faces lost some of their colour, hers her white, his the strong, almost the ‘high,’ yellow.
*
They flung themselves upon each other socratically,
*
stowing away course after course.

‘You say that the actors upon the stage are pure life, yet they represent something that
we
do not. But “all the world’s a stage,” isn’t it?’

‘It was an actor that said that.
*
I say it’s all an atelier—“all the world’s a workshop” I should say. Consider the content of what we call art. A statue is art. It is a dead thing, a lump of stone or wood. Its lines and proportions are its soul. Anything living, quick and changing is bad art always; naked men and women are the worst art of all,
because there are fewer semi-dead things about them. The shell of the tortoise, the plumage of a bird, makes these animals approach nearer to art. Soft, quivering and quick flesh is as far from art as it is possible for an object to be.’

‘Art is merely
the dead
, then?’

‘No, but deadness is the first condition of art. The armoured hide of the hippopotamus, the shell of the tortoise, feathers and machinery, you may put in one camp; naked pulsing and moving of the soft inside of life—along with elasticity of movement and consciousness—that goes in the opposite camp. Deadness is the first condition for art: the second is absence of soul, in the human and sentimental sense. With the statue its lines and masses are its soul, no restless inflammable ego is imagined for its interior: it has
no inside
: good art must have no inside: that is capital.’

‘Then why should human beings be chiefly represented in art?’

‘Because it is human beings that commission and buy the art.’

A mixed grill
Montebello
and two
Poulets grain
had disappeared; a
Soufflé Rothschild
was appearing through the hatchway of the lift and a
corbeille
of fruit, comprising figs, peaches, nectarines and oranges, was held in readiness, a prominent still-life, upon a dresser.
*
Anastasya now stretched herself, clasping her hands in her lap. She smiled at Tarr. She had been driving hard inscrutable Art deeper and deeper into herself: she now drew it out and showed it to Tarr.

‘Art is all you say—have it your way: also something else: we will stick a little flag up and come back another day. I wish intensely to hear about life.’

Tarr was staring, suspended, with a defunct smile, cut in half, at the still life. He turned his head slowly, with his mutilated smile, his glasses pitched forward somewhat.

He looked at her for some time in a steady, depressed way: his eye was grateful not to have to be gibing.
*
Kindness—
bestial kindness
—would be an out-of-work thank God in this neighbourhood. The upper part of her head was massive and intelligent, the middle of her body was massive and exciting, there was no animalism-out-of-place in the shape of a weight of jaw—all the weight was in the head and hips. His steadfast ideas of the flower surrounded by dung were certainly challenged: but he brooded not yet convinced. Irritants were useful—he reached back doubtfully towards his bourgeoise: he was revolted as he recalled that mess, with this clean and solid object beneath his eyes,
but he remained pensive. He preferred a cabin to a palace, and thought that a villa was better for him than either. The second bottle of champagne was finished; its legendary sparkle damped his spirits.

‘What did you make of Kreisler’s proceedings? He was a queer fish!’ she asked.

‘Most.’

‘Do you suppose he and Bertha got on very well?’

‘Was Bertha his mistress? I can’t say. That is not very interesting is it?’

‘Not Bertha, of course, but Kreisler had his points.’

‘You’re very hard on Bertha.’

She put her tongue out at him as much as a small almond, and wrinkled up her nose.

‘What were Kreisler’s relations with you by the way?’ he enquired.

‘My relations with Kreisler consisted in a half-hour’s conversation with him in a restaurant, no more: I spoke to him several times after that but only for a few minutes. He was very excited the last time we met. I have a theory that his duel was due to unrequited passion for me. Your Bertha, on the other hand, has a theory that it was due to unrequited passion for her. I merely wondered if you had any information that might confirm her case or mine.’

‘No, I know nothing about it. I hold, myself, a quite different theory.’

‘What is that? That he was in love with
you
?’

‘My theory has not the charming simplicity of your theory or Bertha’s. I don’t believe that he was in love with anybody, I think that it was however a sex-tumult of sorts—.’