Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) (57 page)

Although Letchworth attracted a number of Fabian residents and had an active Fabian society, the Fabians were in fact against the founding of Letchworth, arguing that resources would be better spent to alleviate conditions in extant cities rather than in building new ones. Tarr uses ‘Fabian’ as a generic description for English socialist ideas.

reform-dressed
: see note to p. 119.

Jean-Jacques … natural man
: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who particularly in the
Second Discourse
(1755, also known as
Discourse on the Origin and the Foundation of Inequality Among Men
) described the necessary losses entailed by civilization as opposed to the savage state of man. In
Blast
1 Lewis blasts Victorian ‘
ROUSSEAUISMS
’ and ‘bowing the knee to wild Mother Nature’ (18–19).

Bouillon
: literally Fr., ‘broth’, here referring to the first popular chain of restaurants, founded in 1855 by the butcher Pierre-Louis Duval (1811–70), who had the idea of offering a single menu item of meat and meat broth at a reasonable price to the food market workers of Les Halles. In the first years of the 1900s restaurateurs opened somewhat more upscale
bouillons
that featured fuller brasserie menus and frequently art deco interiors. It may be this new kind of
bouillon
, blending inexpensive food with a working-class heritage and advanced aesthetic sensibility, that attracts Tarr and Anastasya.

cox of a boat
: short for ‘coxswain’, a boat’s helmsman. Typically, as here, the steersman of a racing shell who sits facing the other rowers, motivates them with loud verbal directions, and coordinates their oar strokes.

like the Cynic’s dishonourable condition
: a member of a school of ancient Greek philosophy marked by contempt for worldly pleasure, founded by Antisthenes (445–365
BC
), a student of Socrates, and usually assumed to take its name from the Greek word
kunikós
, ‘ dog-like’. The best-known of the Cynics, Diogenes of Sinope (
c
.404–323
BC
), reportedly lived in a tub and committed publicly shameful acts to protest against the artificiality of society’s comforts and taboos. His rude behaviour and disbelief in man’s honesty made him a byword for misanthropy and harsh self-treatment—to the point where contemporary medicine refers to pathological physical self-neglect, particularly among the elderly, as ‘Diogenes syndrome’.

Quixote … giants
: in the two-volume comic novel
Don Quixote
(1605, 1615) by Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547–1616) a country gentleman, Alonzo Quijana, becomes obsessed with chivalric
romances and comes to believe that he is a knight, setting off on a series of picaresque adventures with his neighbour, Sancho Panza. In vol. i, chapter 8, he tilts at a group of thirty or forty windmills, believing them to be giants. Throughout the novel Quixote misidentifies the common people of his contemporary Spain as the lords and ladies of medieval romance.

HOLOCAUSTS
: sacrificial burnt offerings, complete sacrifices. In the 1920s not yet associated with the mass killings of Jews by the Nazis in the late 1930s and 1940s.

comedian
: a comic actor, but likely with an echo of Fr.
comédien
, any kind of actor, including a performer in tragedy.

Café des Sports Aquatiques
: Fr., ‘The Aquatic Sports Café’.

Schoolgirl Complexions
: from the advertising slogan ‘Keep that Schoolgirl Complexion’, popularized by Palmolive soap in 1923. In his later writings such as
The Doom of Youth
(London: Chatto and Windus, 1932), 8), Lewis associates the phrase with society’s increasingly politicized obsession with youth.

‘Moonlight Sonata’
: the popular nickname for the Piano Sonata No. 14 in C sharp minor
‘Quasi una fantasia’
, Op. 27 No. 2, by German composer Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827). Such an orchestral arrangement of classical music for cabaret performance was typical of the times, but also serves as another example of the debasement of particularly German Romantic art into middlebrow decoration.

braves
: Native American warriors. On the stereotype of their impassivity, see the note to p. 59.

card upon a plate
: a French duel required the formal exchange of calling cards. According to formal etiquette, a gentleman visiting another gentleman at a restaurant or hotel under ordinary circumstances would send in his calling card, often on a servant’s silver tray, and wait in the reception area for his acquaintance to come and greet him. Refusal to greet the sender of the card meant rejection of the visitor’s society, and ripping it up would have been a grave public insult.

‘five o’clock’
: a small late afternoon meal, in imitation of the British tea. The
Pall Mall Gazette
noted in the late nineteenth century that ‘the little lunch, the five o’clock, imported from abroad, is now completely acclimatized at Paris’ (quoted by the
New York Times
, 18 December 1885).

blinded his opponent
: an absurdity, but possibly a distortion through gossip or imagination of the Russian having participated in a so-called ‘blind duel’, where only one of the two pistols is loaded.

second
: a trusted representative for the participant in a duel, who carries and receives the challenge, arranges the time and place—usually at dawn—makes sure the weapons are equal and properly loaded, and ascertains that the duel is conducted fairly.

justify the use of a revolver
: a matter requiring some nice distinctions in duelling etiquette, for the offence could be neither too slight nor too substantial. Two artists almost duelled in Paris in 1914 when the New York sculptor Edgar Macadams struck a blow at Waldemar George, Polish-French art critic and future contributor to the second issue of Lewis’s journal
The Tyro
(1922), knocking him unconscious. George’s seconds considered the blow to be too hard to fall under the rules of duelling rather than the purview of the law courts. George explained ‘had Mr. Macadams slapped me or called me names swords or pistols would have been in order, but he gave me a knockout blow, which is a form of attack that they classify as a “coup d’apache”, too violent for gentlemen to settle among themselves’ (
New York Times
, 14 May 1914; for
apache
, see note to p. 252).

the french laws would sanction quite a bad wound
: laws dealing with duelling in France were far more liberal than in Germany, because French duels seldom resulted in bloodshed or death—a subject of much derision by Germans, who took the culture of honour, and the bloodiness of its result, far more seriously than their French counterparts. A Frenchman noted in 1890 ‘when the duel takes place under conditions of irreproachable fairness, even though it should have a fatal issue, adversaries and witnesses escape most of the time unharmed from the tribunal’ (quoted by Kevin McAleer,
Dueling: The Cult of Honor in Fin-de-siècle Germany
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 184).

scottish solemnity
: a national stereotype, associated, among other cultural attributes, with the extreme severity of Scottish Calvinist worship from the time of the eighteenth century.

dummy
: one who acts as a tool for another.

mountebank
: originally a charlatan or seller of dubious goods, or an itinerant street entertainer; more generally, one who makes false claims for personal gain.

Sphinx
: an enigmatic or inscrutable person, from the monster of Greek mythology, having the head of a woman and the body of a winged lion, that terrorized the city of Thebes until Oedipus successfully answered the riddle it posed to all passers-by.

Luitpold
: a famous café in Munich, once the city’s most spectacular, named for Prince Luitpold of Bavaria (1821–1912). Lewis spent some time at this café with young German officers during a trip to Germany in 1906 (letter to his mother,
The Letters of Wyndham Lewis
, ed. W. K. Rose (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1963), Mar. 1906, p. 28).

fortifications
: a fortification wall was built encircling Paris from 1841 to 1845, with a set of polygonal forts added as reinforcement during the late 1870s. Kreisler’s taxi will pass the original wall, which was demolished only after the First World War, and probably the Fort Mont-Valérien, which overlooks the Bois de Boulogne (see note below). The modern Paris
ring road or
périphérique
was built in the 1970s in the space left by the demolished fortifications.

Bois
: the Bois de Boulogne, a large park located along the western edge of the 16th arrondissement of Paris. The Bois and surrounds were a common setting for Parisian duels.

fugue
: literally ‘flight’, a term from psychiatry, a reaction to shock that results in a patient’s hysterical disassociation from normal identity.

‘Browning’
: a semi-automatic pistol designed by American firearms designer John Moses Browning (1855–1926) and manufactured in Belgium; the Browning no. 2, manufactured in 1903, became a favourite police weapon, and was adopted by several European armies. The Browning became particularly notorious in 1914, when the south Slav nationalist Gavrilo Princip (1894–1918) used a model 1910 pistol to assassinate the Archduke Ferdinand, starting the First World War.

khaki cigarette
: strong Russian cigarettes called
papirosi
, made with dull-brown coloured unfiltered papers that are stuffed with cheap tobacco, usually attached to a tubular cardboard holder. In his 1947 novel
Comrade Forest
Michael Leigh describes them as ‘one-third tobacco, two-thirds mouthpiece’ (New York and London: Whittlesey House, McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1947), 143).

revolution of 1906
: peasant rioting, including the sacking and burning of manor houses, occurred in Russia in the summer of 1905 as part of the Revolution of 1905. After subsiding in late 1905, such rioting resumed on a large scale in 1906.

oxide of bromium and aniseed
: a pill to calm the nerves and settle the stomach. Bromium had been used as a sedative since 1857, usually in the form of potassium bromide, although the 1910
Practitioner’s Medical Dictionary
by George Milbry Gould lists ‘Bromid, Basic’, ‘a compound of a bromid with the oxid of the same base’ used to ‘allay nervous excitement’ (Philadelphia: Blakiston’s Son & Co., p. 215). Aniseed was used to treat gas and indigestion; because of its pleasant scent and taste, it was also used to mask the taste of other medicines.

vitriol or syphilis
: two agents capable of inflicting extreme physical harm—concentrated sulphuric acid, and a venereal disease that in its late stages can cause a number of deformations, including the collapse of the cartilage of the nose.

jujube
: a fruit-flavoured lozenge.

body … woman
: many images of such beaus, from eighteenth-century paintings to Dresden figurines, feature a similar posture; see, for instance, the central figure of the French dancing master in the print ‘The Levee’ from
The Rake
’
s Progress
by William Hogarth (1697–1764). However, the posture suggests the aggressiveness of German fencing as much as it does dancing.

pilules
: small pills.

‘C’est bien … Laisse-moi’
: Fr., ‘Fine, fine. Yes, I know. Let me alone.’

‘Mais dépêche-toi… faire ici’
: Fr., ‘Hurry up. There’s nothing more for you to do here.’

gargoyle Apollo
: a blend of a spout that projects from some Gothic buildings, such as Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, made in the shape of a grotesque animal or human figure, and the Greek god of light and the sun, who is often portrayed in art as a handsome young man.

one charge … twelve
: as a rule duelling pistols were single-shot flintlock guns that required reloading between firings. The semi-automatic Browning could fire multiple rounds from a cartridge without reloading. The physician exaggerates, however: Brownings of the period could fire seven or eight rounds without reloading, whereas Brownings that could shoot a dozen rounds without reloading were not manufactured until 1935. Some duels were in fact, however, fought with Brownings before the First World War: see, for instance, the fictional duel between Settembrini and Naphta in
Der Zauberberg
(
The Magic Mountain
, 1924) by German novelist Thomas Mann (1875–1955).

Saint Cloud
: a commune in the western suburbs of Paris, about 10 kilometres from the city centre.

excuperate
: a word unattested elsewhere in the English language. Presumably, a coinage meaning ‘expectorate’, from Spanish
escupir
‘to spit’.

Meaux
: a commune of Seine-et-Marne, in the metropolitan area of Paris, roughly 40 kilometres east-north-east from the city centre.

Rheims
: English spelling of Reims, a city of the Champagne-Ardenne region of northern France, roughly 145 kilometres east-north-east of Paris.

Verdun
: Verdun-sur-Meuse, a city and commune in north-east France, in the Lorraine region close to the German border.

Marcade
: an apparently fictional town, possibly named after Eustache Marcadé (1390–1440), author of
La Passion d’Arras
, a massive French mystery play about the life and death of Jesus.

‘Qu’est-ce qu’il … Il n’y est pas’
: Fr., ‘What do you want?’ ‘To see the superintendent.’ ‘You can’t see him. He isn’t in.’ ‘Foir le gommissaire’ represents phonetically Kreisler’s German-accented attempt to say ‘Voir le commissaire.’

spies
: France’s hysterical fear of German spies, active from the 1870s through the Dreyfus affair of 1894—when a French officer was falsely accused of spying for Germany—reached a new peak in the late 1900s, stoked by both the yellow press and scaremongers in the French military. The
New York Times
reported on 12 September 1909 that ‘French officials have seen a German spy in every shadow’, and that there were then six
spies caught in the act of collecting information from the Germans being held in a prison in Rheims (‘German Spy Scare Now Rife in France’).