Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) (5 page)

T
HE
text reproduced in this edition is the revised second version of
Tarr
published in 1928 by Chatto and Windus.
Tarr
has an unusually complex publication history. As John Xiros Cooper has noted: ‘Just ask any one of the two-dozen Lewis scholars in the world which of the versions of
Tarr
is the best or most complete text. Be prepared for a lively response.’
¹
The first version of
Tarr
appeared in three different forms: as a serial in somewhat abridged form in
The Egoist
, published from April 1916 to November 1917; in an American edition published by Alfred A. Knopf on 27 June 1918; and in an English edition published by the Egoist Press on 18 July 1918, published under the name ‘P. Wyndham Lewis’. These three earlier editions contain significant variants. Lewis had worked on
Tarr
roughly from 1908 to 1915, but he put the novel in final form rather quickly during a period of illness before he enlisted to fight for Britain in the First World War. Lewis wanted to leave a literary legacy that would consist of more than
Blast
and a few published short stories if he were to be killed in action, and he placed responsibility for the publication of
Tarr
largely in the hands of his friend and collaborator Ezra Pound.

Pound found the manuscript difficult to place, in part because of the novel’s frankness about sexual matters. However, he was able to convince Harriet Shaw Weaver, with Lewis’s only reluctant approval, to publish
Tarr
in her journal
The Egoist
. Weaver further promised that she would publish
Tarr
thereafter in book form if Pound were unable to secure another English publisher. At the same time, Pound convinced John Quinn, the American lawyer and patron of Modernist authors, to interest Alfred A. Knopf in publishing an American edition. All of these early versions were problematic. Place-holding phrases that Lewis had intended to change made their way into the incomplete serial
Egoist
version. The Knopf edition was set from a mixture of the printed
Egoist
serial materials and pieces of manuscript that Pound was able to gather while Lewis was at the front, and Lewis was never presented with proofs to correct for this edition. Moreover, John Quinn became ill during the
production of the Knopf
Tarr
, and the proofreading on this edition was thus done so sloppily that Lewis later referred to this edition as ‘the bad American
Tarr’
.
²
Finally, while Lewis was able to correct the proofs for the
Egoist
book publication, this edition appeared in small enough numbers that by the mid-1920s it was difficult to find. For example, a sales flyer from W. Jackson (Books) Ltd. London, dated for the week ending 18 May 1928, describes a copy of the
Egoist Tarr
as ‘considered by many people as one of the finest novels in our language … out of print and practically impossible to obtain second hand.’
³

Lewis was thus pleased to create a new version of
Tarr
in 1928 for Chatto and Windus’s ‘Phoenix Series’, a line of inexpensive editions of modern novels. However, rather than present the publisher with a corrected or aggregate recension of the earlier versions of
Tarr
, and because Lewis had come to consider the 1918
Tarr
to be ‘a hasty piece of workmanship’,
⁴
he produced an entirely rewritten and expanded version of the text. He did this by unusual means—adding new material in black pen directly to the margins of a copy of the 1918 American edition. This working copy is preserved in the Wyndham Lewis Collection at the Poetry Room of the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, and it demonstrates graphically that after the first chapter of the 1918 version—which is crossed through entirely, and for which no revised manuscript exists—Lewis did not leave a single page of the earlier
Tarr
unrevised. Some of these changes are minor, such as alterations of character and place names. But in most cases the changes are substantial. Although Lewis cancels some earlier passages, his revisions are overwhelmingly additive. Many pages contain multiple accretions, the margins filled with balloons of new text and arrows that criss-cross so densely as to render some pages nearly impenetrable.

In places where Lewis added even larger passages of text, he pasted new manuscript material over passages to be cancelled, and attached extra sheets to the bottoms of the pages of the working text that needed to be unfolded by the printers (Chapter 9 of Part IV, ‘A Jest Too Deep for Laughter’, is particularly densely revised in this way).
For two sequences that he expanded yet more substantially—the preparation for Kreisler’s duel (Chapter 4 of Part VI, ‘Holocausts’) and Tarr’s later conversations with Anastasya (Chapter 1 of Part VII, ‘Swagger Sex’)—Lewis directs the printers to separate manuscripts and typescripts to be incorporated into the already densely revised text. Although no doubt a challenge for Chatto and Windus’s typesetters, the 1928 version of
Tarr
proved to be a success. Unpublished letters at Cornell show that Lewis’s editor C. H. C. Prentice reported to him in 1929 that the publisher had sold almost two thousand copies of the new
Tarr
; while a much later communication from the publisher notes that
Tarr
was one of three of Lewis’s books, along with
The Art of Being Ruled
and
Time and Western Man
, that had repaid their advances.
⁵

Lewis intended
Tarr
to be known solely in its revised version. The 1928 text served as the basis for all subsequent editions of
Tarr
in Lewis’s lifetime, including an edition published by Methuen in 1951 to which Lewis contributed a few further minor alterations. Nonetheless, some contemporary readers prefer the original 1918
Tarr
on the grounds that its greater stylistic roughness is closer in spirit to the avant-gardism of
Blast
and Vorticism than is the relative polish of the revision. Such readers regret in particular the loss of Lewis’s use of an idiosyncratic form of punctuation in some sections of the 1918 Knopf
Tarr
, doubled dashes that look like equals signs (‘=’) and that Lewis used to divide sentences from one another. The 1928
Tarr
, in compensation, is fuller and more complexly novelistic, containing more expansive descriptive and character detail without compromising the integrity of its aesthetics or its world view. With the availability of Paul O’Keeffe’s edition of the 1918
Tarr
, readers can make such judgements for themselves.
⁶

Finally, it is worth noting two idiosyncrasies of usage and orthography in the 1928
Tarr
. Lewis often prints foreign words and phrases in roman type, reserving italics for specific emphasis. He also prints adjectives referring to national, cultural, and religious groups without initial capitals. At times Lewis uses this orthography
playfully (as when he writes ‘But being a Pole, Soltyk participated in a hereditary polish of manner’, p. 119). But this orthography also represented Lewis’s considered belief that standard English usage overemphasized the importance of national differences compared to other bases for comparison or self-definition. As he explained in his journal
The Enemy
:

[M
Y
] use of capitals and lower case departs from current english usage. This has been objected to by some critics, and I agree with them that there is a good deal against it. Only between the german habit of over-capitalisation and the soberness of the French in their use of the capital letter (‘un français’, for instance, is what we write ‘a Frenchman’) the english usage seems rather illogically to hesitate … if you write ‘a gymnosophist’ or ‘an aristocrat’ with a small letter, I do not see why the name that describes another and no more important attribute of a person should receive a different treatment.
⁷

This edition thus reproduces exactly Lewis’s orthography as it appears in the 1928 Chatto and Windus edition, for as Lewis’s opening epigraph from Montaigne commands, one should ‘correct the faults of inadvertence, not those of habit’. And with that injunction in mind, this edition silently corrects also a small number of obvious typesetting errors, and a single misattribution by Lewis—where else?—to the source of his second epigraph from Montaigne.

Life, Letters, and Writings on Art

Lewis, Wyndham,
Blasting & Bombardiering
(London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1937; 2nd rev. edn, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967).

——
The Letters of Wyndham Lewis
, ed. W. K. Rose (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1963).

——
Rude Assignment: A Narrative of My Career up-to-Date
(London and New York: Hutchinson & Co., Publishers, Ltd., 1950); repr. as
Rude Assignment: An Intellectual Autobiography
, ed. Toby Foshay (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1984).

——
Wyndham Lewis on Art: Collected Writings 1913–1956
, ed. Walter Michel and C. J. Fox (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969).

Meyers, Jeffrey,
The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980).

Michel, Walter,
Wyndham Lewis: Paintings and Drawings
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971).

O’Keeffe, Paul,
Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis
(London: Jonathan Cape, 2000).

Pound, Ezra, and Lewis, Wyndham,
Pound/Lewis: The Letters of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis
, ed. Timothy Materer (New York: New Directions, 1985).

Tarr
: Specific Criticism and Contemporary Reviews

Ardis, Ann L., ‘
The Lost Girl, Tarr
, and the “Moment” of Modernism’, in
Modernism and Cultural Conflict, 1880–1922
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 78–113.

Cooper, John Xiros, ‘
La bohème
: Lewis, Stein, Barnes’, in
Modernism and the Culture of Market Society
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 215–42.

Currie, Robert, ‘Wyndham Lewis, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and
Tarr
’,
Review of English Studies
,
NS
, 30/118 (May 1979), 169–81.

Davies, Alistair, ‘
Tarr
: A Nietzschean Novel’, in Jeffrey Meyers (ed.),
Wyndham Lewis, a Revaluation: New Essays
(London: Athlone Press, 1980), 107–19.

Edwards, Paul, ‘Symbolic Exchange in
Tarr
’, in
Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 35–51.

Eliot, T. S., ‘
Tarr
’,
The Egoist
, 5/8 (Sept. 1918), 105–6.

Levenson, Michael H., ‘Form’s Body: Lewis’
Tarr
’, in
Modernism and the Fate of Individuality: Character and Novelistic Form from Conrad to Woolf
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 121–44.

Lewis, Wyndham,
Tarr: The 1918 Version
, ed. Paul O’Keeffe (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1990).

Peppis, Paul, ‘Anti-Individualism and Fictions of National Character in Lewis’s
Tarr
’, in
Literature, Politics, and the English Avant-Garde: Nation and Empire, 1901–1918
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 133–61.

Pound, Ezra, ‘ “
Tarr”
by Wyndham Lewis’,
Little Review
, 4/11 (Mar. 1918), 35.

Sheppard, Richard W., ‘Wyndham Lewis’s
Tarr
: An (Anti-) Vorticist Novel?’,
Journal of English and Germanic Philology
, 88/4 (Oct. 1989), 510–30.

Starr, Alan, ‘
Tarr
and Wyndham Lewis’,
ELH
, 49/1 (Spring 1982), 179–89.

Sturgeon, Stephen, ‘Wyndham Lewis’s
Tarr
: A Critical Edition’, unpublished PhD diss., Boston University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, 2007.

West, Rebecca, ‘
Tarr’, The Nation
, 10 Aug. 1918; repr. in
Agenda
, 7/3 and 8/1 (Autumn–Winter, 1969–70), 67.

Wutz, Michael, ‘The Energetics of
Tarr
: The Vortex-Machine Kreisler’,
Modern Fiction Studies
, 38/4 (Winter 1992), 845–69.

Lewis and Vorticism: General Criticism

Ayers, David,
Wyndham Lewis and Western Man
(New York: St Martin’s Press, 1992).

Cork, Richard,
Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976).

Dasenbrock, Reed Way,
The Literary Vorticism of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis: Towards the Condition of Painting
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).

Edwards, Paul,
Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).

Foshay, Toby,
Wyndham Lewis and the Avant-Garde: The Politics of the Intellect
(Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992).

Foster, Hal,
Prosthetic Gods
(Cambridge, Mass.; London: MIT Press, 2004).

Gasiorek, Andrzej,
Wyndham Lewis and Modernism
(Tavistock: Northcote House, 2003).

Hickman, Miranda B.,
The Geometry of Modernism: The Vorticist Idiom in Lewis, Pound, H.D., and Yeats
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005).

Jameson, Fredric,
Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979; new edn, London and New York: Verso, 2008).

Kenner, Hugh,
Wyndham Lewis
(London: Methuen, 1954).

Klein, Scott W.,
The Fictions of James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis: Monsters of Nature and Design
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

Mao, Douglas,
Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).