Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) (51 page)

(2) That the Englishman should become ashamed of his Grin as he is at present ashamed of solemnity. That he should cease to be ashamed of his “feelings”: then he would automatically become less proud of his Grin.

(3) That he should remember that seriousness and unsentimentality are quite compatible. Whereas a Grin usually accompanies loose emotionality.

(4) That in facing the facts of existence as he is at present compelled to do, he should allow artists to economize time in not having to circumvent and get round those facts, but to use them simply and directly.

(5) That he should restrain his vanity, and not always imagine that his leg is being pulled. A symbolism is of the nature of all human effort. There is no necessity to be literal to be in earnest. Humour, even, may be a symbol. The recognizing of a few simple facts of that sort would help much.

In these onslaughts on Humour I am not suggesting that anybody should laugh less over his beer or wine or forgo the consolation of the ridiculous. There are circumstances when it is a blessing. But the
worship of the ridiculous
is the thing that should be forgone. The worship (or craze, we call it) of Charlie Chaplin
*
is a mad substitution of a chaotic tickling for all the other more organically important ticklings of life.

Nor do I mean here that you or I, if we are above suspicion in the matter of those other fundamentals, should not allow ourselves the
little scurvy totem of Charlie on the mantelpiece. It is not a grinning face we object to but a face that is mean when it is serious and that takes to its grin as a duck takes to water. We must stop grinning. You will say that I do not practise what I preach. I do: for if you look closely at my grin you will perceive that it is a very logical and deliberate grimace.

In this book you are introduced to a gentleman named Tarr. I associate myself with all he says on the subject of humour. In fact, I put him up to it. He is one of my showmen; though, naturally, he has a private and independent life of his own, for which I should be very sorry to be held responsible.

Kreisler in this book is a German and nothing else. Tarr is the individual in the book, and is at the same time one of the showmen of the author. His private life, however, I am in no way responsible for. The long drawn-out struggle in which we find this young man engaged is illuminated from start to finish by the hero of it. His theory, put in another way, is that an artist requires more energy than civilization provides, or that the civilized mode of life implies; more
naïveté
, freshness, and unconsciousness. So Nature agrees to force his sensibility and intelligence, on the one hand, to the utmost pitch, leaving him, on the other, an uncultivated and ungregarious tract where he can run wild and renew his forces and remain unspoilt.

Tarr, in his analysis of the anomalies of taste, gives the key to a crowd of other variants and twists to which most of the misunderstandings and stupidities in the deciphering of men are due. He exaggerates his own departure from perfect sense and taste into an unnecessary image of Shame and Disgust, before which he publicly castigates himself. He is a primitive figure, coupled with a modern type of flabby sophistication: that is Bertha Lunken. The Munich German Madonna stands nude, too, in the market-place, with a pained distortion of the face.
*

Tarr’s message, as a character in a book, is this. Under the camouflage of a monotonous intrigue he points a permanent opposition, of life outstripped, and art become lonely. He incidentally is intended to bring some comfort of analysis amongst less sifted and more ominous perplexities of our time. His message, as he discourses, laughs, and
picks his way through the heavily obstructed land of this story, is the message of a figure of health. His introspection is not melancholy; for the strange and, as with his pedagogic wand he points out, hideously unsatisfactory figures that are given ingress to his innermost apartments become assimilated at once to a life in which he has the profoundest confidence. He exalts Life into a Comedy, when otherwise it is, to his mind, a tawdry zone of half-art, or a silly Tragedy. Art is the only thing worth the tragic impulse, for him; and, as he says, it is his drama. Should art, that is some finely-adjusted creative will, suddenly become the drama of the youth infatuated with his maiden, what different dispositions would have to be made; what contradictory tremors would invade his amorous frame; what portions of that frame would still smoulder amorously? These questions Tarr disposes of to his satisfaction.

So much by way of warning before the curtain rises. Even if the necessary tragic thrill of misgiving is caused thereby (or are we going to be ‘shocked’ in the right way once again, not in Shaw’s ‘bloody’ schoolgirl way?),
*
it may extenuate the at times seemingly needless nucleus of blood and tears.

P. W
YNDHAM
L
EWIS

1915

Tarr
is a highly allusive Modernist novel, and appreciation of Lewis’s achievement depends in part on familiarity with the referents of the novel’s erudition and the details of its cultural world. These notes provide information about Paris and the life of the artist before the First World War; about the histories and practices of British and European painting, literature, and philosophy; and about the popular and intellectual life of Europe during the period in which
Tarr
takes place.

As an ‘international novel’
Tarr
contains a good many non-English words and phrases. Translations of those words and phrases that require no further explanation will be found in the Glossary of Foreign Words and Phrases. Words and phrases requiring more detailed context or commentary are glossed below.

On occasion Lewis’s German spelling is idiosyncratic, and at other times (as the substance of his opening quotation from Montaigne suggests) the French and German in his characters’ speech reflect dialectical usages, foreign accents, and characters’ errors of grammar. In these annotations I have tried to note and distinguish between these different kinds of non-standard language.

period of illness and restless convalescence
: bouts of confinement to bed during 1915, caused by septicaemia. See Paul O’Keeffe,
Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis
(London: Jonathan Cape, 2000), 164–5.

Epigraphs
: passages from the
Essais
of Renaissance French author Michel de Montaigne (1533–92), the first from ‘Sur des vers de Virgile’ (‘On some verses of Virgil’), Book
III
, Chapter
V
:

I would have done it better elsewhere, but the work would have been less my own; and its principal end and perfection is to be precisely my own. I would indeed correct an accidental error, and I am full of them, since I run on carelessly. But the imperfections that are ordinary and constant in me it would be treachery to remove.

When I have been told, or have told myself: ‘You are too thick in figures of speech. Here is a word of Gascon vintage. Here is a dangerous phrase’. (I do not avoid any of those that are used in the streets of France; those who would combat usage with grammar make fools of themselves.) ‘This is ignorant reasoning. This is paradoxical reasoning. This one is too mad. You are often playful: people will think you are speaking in earnest when you are making believe.’ ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘but I correct the faults of inadvertence, not those of habit. Isn’t this the way I speak everywhere? Don’t I represent myself to the life? Enough, then.’ (
The Complete Works of Montaigne
, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), 667)

The second from the essay
De l’expérience
(‘On Experience’), Book
III
, Chapter
XIII
:

The more simply we trust to Nature, the more wisely we trust to her. Oh, what a sweet and soft pillow is ignorance and incuriosity, to rest a well-made head! (C
omplete Works
, trans. Frame, 822)

Baedeker
: a series of small burgundy-coloured travel guides published by Verlag Karl Baedeker in Germany, and in English from 1878 to 1918, so popular before the First World War that the name became generic to mean a guidebook of any kind. References in these notes to
Baedeker
are to the 1907
Paris and Environs with Routes from London to Paris
.

western Venuses
: attractive (and most probably American female tourists, whose voices are louder and more nasal than those of the Parisians, and who are reduced to near-silence (‘hushed to soft growl’) by their awe at, or their socially expected deference to, the art of Paris. The adjective ‘Western’ may distinguish these living beauties from the Venus de Milo, the best-known statue in Paris.

Thébaïde
: a hermitage or place of contemplation—in this sense the title of a drawing in Lewis’s portfolio
Timon of Athens
(1912)—but also suggesting the early play
La Thébaïde
(
The Story of Thebes
, 1664) by French author Jean Racine (1639–99), which recounts the hatred and war between Oedipus’ sons. Together the allusions suggest that Paris is both an Edenic retreat and the site of potentially fratricidal tragedy.

Vitelotte Quarter
: Lewis’s fictional name for Montparnasse, a neighbourhood of Paris on the Left Bank of the Seine in the 14th arrondissement. The
vitelotte
is a variety of purple French potato, brightly coloured but essentially prosaic, a sardonic name for a painter’s quarter.

Hollywood … buttocks
: Westerns were a popular staple of the early silent cinema in Europe as well as the United States. ‘Gun’, short for ‘gonoph’, is nineteenth-century urban slang for a thief. Thus, the effects of the cowboy’s swaggering walk are superimposed on attempted pickpocketing. The 1907
Baedeker
warns visitors to ‘be on their guard against the huge army of pickpockets and other rogues, who are quick to recognize the stranger and skilful in taking advantage of his ignorance’ (p. xxv).

Henri Murger’s Vie de Bohème
: French novelist, 1822–61. His
Scènes de la vie de bohème
(
Scenes of Bohemian Life
) appeared in episodes from 1847 to 1849 and was published in book form in 1851. It provided a romanticized vision of the life of the Parisian artist, and became the source of the libretto for the opera
La Boheme
by Italian composer Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924).

linseed oil
: a common base in oil paint, derived from flax seeds.

Boulevard du Paradis … Boulevard Kreutzberg
: invented names suggesting the intersection of a French Garden of Eden (‘Paradis’) with a Germanic site of Crucifixion (from Ger. ‘Mountain of the Cross’). A fictionalization
of the intersection of the Boulevard Raspail and Boulevard Montparnasse, where Lewis lived for a time in the Hôtel de la Haute Loire.

Campagnia
: a region of southern Italy, now spelled ‘Campania’.

Tussaud’s of the Flood
: ‘Madame Tussauds’ is a renowned wax museum on Marylebone Road in London created by Marie Tussaud (1761–1850); ‘the Flood’ refers to the story of Noah in the Old Testament (Genesis 6–9), in which near-universal destruction follows upon man’s failure to live according to God’s laws.

Cambridge
: Hobson is in many ways a lampoon of painter and art critic Roger Fry (1866–1934), who was educated at Cambridge and was a member of a prominent Quaker family. Fry was a powerful taste-maker in London, who lauded French post-Impressionism at the expense of the newer schools of experimental art, such as Cubism, and of English painters in general. Fry was an early supporter of Lewis’s painting, but they broke in 1913 over Lewis’s belief that Fry stole a commission from Lewis and the Vorticists. Lewis lambasts Fry in his aesthetic writing of the 1910s and 1920s: in the Vorticist journal
Blast
he labels Fry ‘
THE BRITANNIC AESTHETE
’, the ‘
GOOD WORKMAN
’, and ‘
ART-PIMP
’ (
Blast
1, pp. 15–16).

travesty of a Quaker’s Meeting
: a spiritual gathering of The Religious Society of Friends, founded in England in the seventeenth century, and known for its dedication to pacifism. Participants at such a meeting may sit in silence for substantial periods of time until a member chooses to speak.

fetish
: an inanimate object worshipped for its presumed magical powers, or as being animated by a spirit; used here to refer to that spirit itself.

daimon
: from the Greek for ‘divinity’, an indwelling spirit or genius.

A B C waitresses
: servers at branches of the Aerated Bread Company, a popular chain of bakeries and tea rooms in London. In
Blast
2 Lewis blesses ‘All A.B.C. Tea-shops (without exception)’ (p. 93).

Bloomsbury
: a fashionable residential area of central London in the borough of Camden, associated with the ‘Bloomsbury Group’ of writers and artists, including novelists Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) and E. M. Forster (1879–1970), biographer and essayist Lytton Strachey (1880–1932), economist John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946), and the painters and art critics Roger Fry, Duncan Grant (1885–1978), and Clive Bell (1881–1964). Lewis loathed Bloomsbury in part because of his personal battles with Fry and Bell, but also because he believed that the Bloomsbury artists endorsed an aesthetic that was merely decorative, feminine, and crypto-Victorian.

Walt Whitman … Buffalo Bill … Thomas Carlyle
: three notable nineteenth-century men who wore long hair: Walt Whitman (1819–92), American poet and author of
Leaves of Grass
; William Frederick ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody (1846–1917), American bison hunter and showman; and Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), Scottish essayist and historian, author of
Sartor Resartus
and
The French Revolution
.

“Roi … daigne”
: Fr., ‘I am not the King, I do not condescend to be the prince’, a variant of ‘Roi ne puis, prince ne daigne, Rohan je suis’ (‘King I cannot be; prince I do not deign to be; I am a Rohan’), the immodest motto of the aristocratic Rohan family of Brittany.