Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) (58 page)

huge foot-rules
: most likely 2-foot carpenter’s rules, standard tools of the trade. Strips of wood or metal with a straight edge used to assist workmen in making straight work while plastering or keeping surfaces in plane. Such devices folded into four 6-inch lengths for convenience in carrying.

Fritz
: nickname for the German name ‘Friedrich’, used particularly by English soldiers during the First World War as a derogatory term for a German soldier, or by extension any male German.

tuel and killt man
: ‘I had a duel and killed a man’. Kreisler’s heavily accented German French is represented as heavily accented German English.

What a toupet!
: colloquial Fr., ‘What nerve!’, from the idiom
avoir du toupet
, ‘to have the audacity’.

‘En voilà … D’bout!’
: ‘My word, here’s someone who makes himself at home … Hey, buddy! You’d like to sleep in the open air? … Look here. You can’t spend the night here. Upsy-daisy! Hurry up. Get up.’

threatening an invasion
: a common fear among the French in the early twentieth century, intensified by French intelligence, who invented German invasion schemes in the late 1900s and attributed them to British intelligence in an attempt to solidify the alliance between France and England. Fear was also stoked by the popularity of a genre of fiction, the anti-German ‘invasion novel’, that emerged in England and France in the 1870s as a response to the Franco-Prussian War. A prominent example,
The Invasion of 1910
(1906), by the Anglo-French author William Le Queux (1864–1927), was a best-seller of the period.

contumelious Boche
: insolent or disgraceful German.

pick oakum
: to pull to pieces old tarry ropes, which were then used to make new ropes or to cover the planks of wooden ships to make them watertight, work that was very hard on the hands. A common occupation in Victorian and early twentieth-century prisons and workhouses.

bituminous
: containing bitumen, a kind of pigment made from asphalt and oil, associated with the darkening and cracking of surfaces over time found in some paintings of the eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. It was also used in the world’s earliest surviving photograph, taken in 1826 by the French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (1765–1833). The ‘old picture’ in question may be a time-damaged painting or an early photograph.

apache, the coster-girl
: period slang for a member of a Paris street gang, by analogy with the Native American tribe; a female costermonger, one who sells food in the street from a barrel, a term sometimes used as a general term of abuse.

the cure
: at German spa towns such as Bad Nauheim and Baden-Baden leisured Europeans who suffered from real or imagined health problems
‘took the cure’, which often involved drinking from the spa’s mineral springs at prescribed intervals.

had made himself ‘de la partie’
: Fr., ‘had joined in’.

des fauves, des grands fauves
: Fr., ‘of the wild cats, of the big wild cats’, such as the tiger, but also with an inevitable echo of the bold aesthetic rather than sexual techniques of the Fauvist painters.

Tintoretto mantle
: a loose, sleeveless cloak, often represented in exquisite detail in the paintings of Tintoretto (real name Jacopo Robusti, 1518–94), late-Renaissance Venetian painter.

open-work stockings … two-and-eleven-three the pair
: lace or ‘fishnet’ stocking, then as now associated with overt sexuality. ‘Two-and-eleven-three’ (two shillings, eleven pence, and three farthings) was a common figure of the period used to mean ‘inexpensive’, if not ‘cheap’, and suggests that the stockings are of artificial silk, all of which adds to Anastasya’s erotic credibility as a working-class ‘genuine girl’.

Dago
: an offensive term for a Spaniard or Italian, variant of the name ‘Diego’, at times used to disparage any foreigner.

Pantomime
: a form of traditional popular British stage entertainment that tells a fairy-tale-like story, typically performed during the holiday season. The ‘Principal Boy’, or hero, is traditionally played by an attractive young woman costumed in a short, tight skirt, with fishnet stockings, and knee-high leather boots. At a time when female apparel typically reached down to the ankles, the dress of the Principal Boy had considerable erotic appeal for male viewers—particularly when she stood ‘stern-on’, with her back to the audience, allowing full masculine appreciation of her legs and posterior.

imposs
: a colloquial abbreviation of the early 1920s for ‘impossible’ (Eric Partridge,
A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English
, 7th edn. (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1970)). An anachronism, given the pre-War setting of
Tarr
, perhaps to demonstrate that Anastasya is well ahead of her time even in her use of slang.

street-arabs
: period term for homeless children and vagabonds who lived on the streets, generally used as an insult.

‘The Man dreams but what the Boy believed’
: from ‘The Cock and the Fox: Or, The Tale of the Nun’s Priest, from Chaucer’, in
Fables Ancient and Modern
by English poet John Dryden (1631–1700) (
The Major Works
, ed. Keith Walker (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2003), l. 336, p. 715).

Can-Can exhibitionists
: a lively and risqué stage dance usually performed by a line of four women, known for its high kicks that exposed both petticoat and leg. Associated with such tourist night spots as the Moulin Rouge.

mohammedan eye
: a lustful eye, from a persistent deprecatory stereotype in English culture about Moslems and ‘The Turk’, derived in part
from the sexualized Houri of the Islamic paradise, and typified by such nineteenth-century erotica as
The Lustful Turk or Lascivious Scenes from a Harum
(1893).

Bovril-bathos
: ‘Bovril’ is the trade name for a concentrated beef extract invented in 1889, usually diluted with hot water to make beef tea—thus, ‘highly concentrated’ bathos. Also, less commonly, a slang term for a brothel. Both meanings are likely implied here.

Romans
: in the early years of the twentieth century, avant-gardists and intellectuals admired the pagan worship of sexuality while Christians condemned it, some attributing a number of pagan practices to the Romans in particular. For the latter see Sidney Calhoun Tapp, who wrote ‘When our Lord came, the Christ found all the world bowed down to sex worship, and pagan priests consecrating sex-lust for money. The Roman empire and the Roman world were filled with it’ (
The Truth about the Bible
(Kansas City, Mo.: Sidney C. Tapp International Biblical Society, 1916), 29).

mosaic code
: usually capitalized: the ancient laws of the Hebrews, named after the prophet Moses, consisting of the injunctions found in the first five books of the Old Testament. The majority deal with sin and forms of uncleanliness in the mode that Ezra Pound termed ‘the Mosaic negative’ (‘A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste’, 1912).

stage Whittington cat
: a popular animal character in a pantomime based loosely on the folk tales that accrued around Richard Whittington (
c
.1354–1423), medieval merchant and later Lord Mayor of London. In most versions the intrepid Dick Whittington gains fame and fortune through the rat-catching prowess of his cat, who is played by a costumed actor.

Brocken ghost-mouse
: during the phantasmagoric
Walpurgisnacht
scene of Goethe’s
Faust
, the protagonist breaks away from dancing with a young female witch when a red mouse hops out of her mouth. Commentators—and one of Havelock Ellis’s case informants in
Studies in the Psychology of Sex
(1897–1910, vol. ii, History XIII)—interpret this moment as an emblem of extreme male fear of overt female sexuality.

The Brocken, a mountain peak in the Harz mountains in Germany and the scene’s setting, receives its ghostly reputation from an optical illusion in which the light could project a climber’s image forward onto a wall of mist, creating an enormous glowing spectre. This phenomenon was much commented upon in Romantic literature, particularly in
Die Harzreise
(1826) by Heinrich Heine (1797–1856).

the Duchess in Alice
: a character in
Alice
’
s Adventures in Wonderland
(1865), a fantasy by English author Lewis Carroll (real name Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 1832–98) who speaks at times in confounding paradoxes, and treats Alice with alternating condescension and affection. She has a baby who turns into a pig under Alice’s eyes, and shows little interest in the transformation—rather the reverse of Anastasya, who playfully objects to Tarr’s reduction of her body to the abstract status of ‘sucking-pig’.

bis an den Rin—Geliebte
: all of Prussia: Ger., ‘To the Rhine, beloved’, although Tarr mistakes Germany’s name for its own longest river, in German the
Rhein
, in French the
Rhin
, for which
Rin
may be a Germanic phonetic approximation.

Ding an sich
: literally Ger., ‘the thing in itself’, a term used by Kant in
Kritik der reinen Vernunft
(
The Critique of Pure Reason
, 1781) to refer to the reality of the object independent of sensory experience.

harpie
: usually ‘harpy’, a filthy, ravenous creature described in Greek and Roman mythology as having a woman’s face and body and a bird’s wings and claws. Used by association to mean a nagging or shrewish woman.

Boulevard Rochechouart
: a road situated at the foot of Montmartre hill and to its south, in the 9th arrondissement.

‘the face that launched a thousand ships’
: a reference to Helen of Troy in the play
The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus
(1st pub. 1604) by Renaissance English poet Christopher Marlowe (1564–93): ‘Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships | And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?’ (
A-Text
, v. i. 90–1).

Grail-lady or any phantom of the celtic mind
: the Lady of the Lake in Arthurian legend, a magical and misty figure who gives the sword Excalibur to King Arthur, or perhaps the enchantress Morgan le Fay. Celtic folklore is in general replete with female phantoms and fairies, many of which are described, for instance, in tales collected by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) in
Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry
(1888).

accent of Minnesota … Steppes
: Anastaya’s multinational background, which combines her upbringing in the American Midwest with her Russian heritage.

Weltweisheit, Wesengefühl
: Ger., ‘worldly wisdom’, and ‘feeling for being’ (properly
Wesensgefühl
). The term
Weltweisheit
was used regularly in late eighteenth-century German thought to denote the full scope of philosophy; the term
Wesensgefühl
appears in the work of late German metaphysicians such as Eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906) and Ludwig Klages (1872–1956).

expensive tripper’s restaurant
: a restaurant for wealthy tourists, by inversion of the common nineteenth-century phrase ‘cheap-tripper’, or budget traveller.

de puntos
: a term from the sixteenth-century school of Spanish fencing, meaning thrusting at one another with rapiers or daggers (lit. Sp., ‘at points’). See, for instance, Mercutio in Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet
, who warns of Tybalt’s backhanded thrust, his
punto reverso
(
II
. iv. 26).

Pompous Pilate
: a play on the name of Pontius Pilate, Roman procurator of Judaea (
c
.26–
c
.36), best remembered for presiding at the trial of Jesus and authorizing his crucifixion. Medieval English mystery plays often portrayed Pilate as a braggart who spoke in comically pompous rhetoric.

motif
: Fr., and Eng. by adoption: a recurrent element in a design or work of art, particularly a significant theme or image.

‘high,’ yellow
: an American racialist term, often used offensively, to refer to the light skin of mixed-race people who share some African ancestry.

socratically
: in the spirit of philosophic inquiry represented by Socrates, presumably with an allusion to the eating and drinking of Plato’s
Symposium
.

“all the world’s a stage” …’ ‘It was an actor who said that’
: a quotation from
As You Like It
by William Shakespeare, spoken by the character Jaques (11. vii. 139). Shakespeare was a working actor who acted in supporting parts in many of his own plays.

A mixed grill … dresser
: an opening dish of several grilled meats, named after the Quai de Montebello in the 5th arrondissement, which runs alongside Notre-Dame Cathedral; a main course of two free-range chickens; a desert soufflé made with strawberries, pineapple, and maraschino liqueur; and a closing basket of fruit. The most elegant meal of the novel, juxtaposed with no little irony against the austere abstraction of the conversation.

gibing
: mocking, sarcastic.

Roederer
: champagne produced by the house of Louis Roederer (1809–70) in 1833. In 1909 Roederer became the official supplier of champagne to the Imperial Court of Russia.

Mute inglorious Miltons
: ‘Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest | Some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood’, a line from ‘Elegy written in a Country Churchyard’ by English poet Thomas Gray (1716–71), a meditation upon the many whose talents remained unfulfilled and have died unrecognized by the world (
The Works of Thomas Gray in Prose and Verse
(London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd, 1884), 76).

Diderot … Princesse de Clèves
: Denis Diderot (1713–84), French philosopher and writer.
La Princess de Clèves
(1678) was a novel by Madame de La Fayette (1634–93), but the princess of the anecdote in question was Catherine II of Russia, who is reported to have written to Marie Thérèse Rodet Geoffrin, ‘Your Diderot is a very extraordinary man. I cannot get out of my conversations with him without having my thighs bruised black and blue. I have been obliged to put a table between him and me to shelter myself and my limbs from his gesticulation’ (quoted in Arthur M. Wilson,
Diderot
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 632).