Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) (59 page)

the links
: a golf course.

colour line
: the imaginary line segregating the races. In 1903 African-American scholar and activist William Edward Burghardt (W. E. B.) Du Bois (1886–1963) wrote in
The Souls of Black Folk
‘the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line’ (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., p. vii).

‘No women pals?’
: i.e. ‘No lesbian lovers?’

“mauvais lieu”
: Fr., ‘a brothel’, literally ‘a bad place’.

Homely
: Tarr uses the word to mean ‘inclined to domesticity’, Anastasya uses it to mean ‘physically unattractive’.

acidulated demi-mondaine
: a woman of doubtful reputation whose outlook on life has soured.

Je fais de la réclame pour les Grecs!
: Fr., ‘I’m an advertisement for the Greeks’, using a now-outdated French term for ‘advertisement’.

ionian … hardly greek
: Ionian sculpture, product of the Eastern region of ancient Greece. Known for giving the human body softer contours than in other Greek sculpture, although generally considered provincial and idiosyncratic when compared to the art of Athens.

the Superman
: the
Übermensch
or superior man postulated by Nietzsche in
Also sprach Zarathustra
, a term first translated into English as ‘Overman’ in 1895 but given its more common English form by George Bernard Shaw in his 1906 play
Man and Superman
. Anastasya’s phrase ‘efficient chimpanzee’ refers to the popularization (and partial distortion) of the theory of human evolution in
The Descent of Man
by English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–82) but is also implicit in Nietzsche’s prologue: ‘What is the ape to a human? A laughing stock or a painful embarrassment. And that is precisely what the human shall be to the overman’ (
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 6).

sabots
: Fr., wooden clogs traditionally worn by Breton peasants.

enceinte
: Fr., ‘pregnant’.

a Roland for his Oliver
: two friends, the former dramatically heroic and the latter commonsensical, battle-comrades in the army of Charlemagne in the medieval French
chanson de geste ‘
Le Chanson de Roland’ (‘The Song of Roland’,
c
.1100). Roland ignores Oliver’s advice that he summon reinforcements by blowing his horn in battle; later, when the battle is almost lost, Roland blows his horn and dies. Tarr implies that Bertha’s pregnancy is another example of a self-defeating gesture performed too dramatically and too late.

Kreisleriana
: the name both of the book by E. T. A. Hoffmann (see note to p. 64) and a major work for piano in eight movements that was inspired by Hoffmann, Op. 16 (1838) by German Romantic composer Robert Schumann (1810–56). In
Kreisleriana
Hoffmann writes of his protagonist ‘In a disturbing way, his greatest suffering was frequently expressed in ludicrous terms’ (
Musical Writings
, 124).

Wellington … traps
: the Duke of Wellington supposedly predicted his defeat of Marshal Auguste Marmont’s French forces at the battle of Salamanca on 22 July 1812, when he glanced at the troops through spyglasses from an observation post near where he was eating breakfast.

Gainsborough and Goya
: English portrait and landscape painter Thomas Gainsborough (1727–88), and Spanish painter and printmaker Francisco
José de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828). Great artists of very different sensibilities, impossible to blend. Gainsborough produced aristocratic canvases typified by formal perfection and evanescent colours, while Goya inclined, particularly in his late work, to proto-expressionist explorations of nightmare.

Juggernaut
: an unstoppable force that crushes everything in its path, from Hindi
Jagannāth
, literally, ‘lord of the world’, a title of Vishnu.

mesmeric
: hypnotic, from the idea of animal magnetism developed by Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815).

peculiar
: i.e. because of the ‘manliness’ of her overt sexuality and superior intellect if Tarr allied himself with Anastasya he would feel like an intellectual ‘pederast’. For the German intellectual lineage of Tarr’s misogyny and distrust of accomplished women, see, for instance, Schopenhauer, who wrote ‘Only the male intellect, clouded by the sexual impulse, could call the undersized, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-legged sex the fair sex; for in this impulse is to be found its whole beauty … the most eminent minds of the whole sex have never been able to produce a single, really great, genuine, and original achievement in the fine arts, or to bring anywhere into the world a work of permanent value’ (‘On Women’,
Parerga and Paralipomena
, 619–20) or Nietzsche, who writes in
Zarathustra
, 41, ‘Women are not yet capable of friendship: women are still cats, and birds. Or, at best, cows.’

the Mairie of a fashionable Quarter
: each arrondissement of Paris has its own
mairie
or town hall, where civil marriage ceremonies were performed. Tarr’s choice of a ‘fashionable Quarter’ suggests his comic partial fall into the bourgeois niceties against which he has railed throughout the novel.

hors de combat
: Fr., ‘disabled’, literally ‘out of combat’, referring here to the indisposition of late pregnancy.

rue Servandoni
: a street in the 6th arrondissement, near the Luxembourg Gardens.

Luxembourg Museum
: the Musée du Luxembourg, situated near the Palais du Luxembourg.

the Drowned Girl
: the peaceful, smiling death mask of ‘L’inconnue de la Seine’ (‘the unknown girl of the Seine’), an anonymous girl who drowned in Paris in the late nineteenth century. Reproductions of the mask were popular for decades among artists and impressionable young women, the subject of a kind of early twentieth-century Romantic cult of suicide. As A. Alvarez notes, ‘During the 1920s and early 1930s, all over the Continent, nearly every student of sensibility had a plaster cast of her death-mask’ (
The Savage God: A Study of Suicide
(New York: Random House, 1972), 133).

Equal Rights and the Perfectibility of the Species
: in the
Second Discourse
Rousseau describes ‘perfectibility’ as a quality that separates man from the animals, but also paradoxically ‘the source of all of man’s miseries … the faculty which, by dint of time, draws him out of that
original condition in which he would spend tranquil and innocent days’ (Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
The Discourses and other Early Political Writings
, trans. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 141).

Place des Vosges
: the oldest square in Paris, in the Marais district, part of the 3rd and 4th arrondissements. Although across the Seine, not in fact remarkably far from Montparnasse—closer, indeed, than Montmartre—but in a neighbourhood not associated with artists, and not previously represented in the novel.

Rose Fawcett … Prism Dirkes
: names that suggests Tarr’s continued oscillation between women who are respectively like Bertha and like Anastasya. The first combines Bertha’s flowery Romanticism (‘Rose’) with her emotional fluidity (‘Faucet’); the second suggests both Anastasya’s angular beauty (‘Prism’) and her dangerous incisiveness (a ‘Dirk’ is a kind of dagger).

eight years ago
: probably 1908, although the mathematics would suggest 1907. Lewis signed and dated the Epilogue to the serialized
Tarr
‘P. Wyndham Lewis 1915’, an attribution retained in the English 1918 Egoist Press edition.

Prussian germs … past year
: in early 1915 the German army attacked using shells filled with xylyl bromide, and in April 1915 they attacked with poisonous chlorine gas during the second battle of Ypres. Nearly 6000 Allied soldiers died from such attacks before the adoption of gas masks later in 1915.

flames of Louvain
: in August 1914 German troops burned and looted most of the Belgian town of Louvain, killing hundreds of civilians and destroying its fifteenth-century university and library. This devastation became an international cause célèbre and a symbol for the brutality of the German war effort.

brain-waves and titanic orchestrations
: the influential histories of German philosophy and of titanic Romantic musical composition, from Beethoven to Wagner.

stray Irishman or American
: Irish novelist James Joyce and American poet Ezra Pound.

Italian Futurist littérateur
: Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti (1876–1944), Italian poet, self-promoter, and founder of the Futurist movement;
littérateur
: Fr., pejorative, ‘literary hack’.

Arsène Lupins
: versions of the wildly popular fictional gentleman thief, a literary character created in 1905 by French author Maurice Leblanc (1864–1941). The character of Lupin featured in twenty volumes by Leblanc, as well as subsequent sequels by other hands.

Over-man … Europe
: vulgarized versions of Nietzsche’s ideas pervaded intellectual Europe in the years surrounding the First World War. The first serial instalment of
Tarr
, for instance, was followed in the same column by an essay on Nietzsche and German aggression (‘Second-Rate Supermen’, Honor M. Pulley,
The Egoist
(3/4, 1 April 1916), 63).

maudlin and self-defensive Grin
: an echo of
Blast
1: ‘
BLAST HUMOUR
Quack
ENGLISH
drug for stupidity and sleepiness’ (p. 17).

Charlie Chaplin
: Charles Spencer Chaplin (1889–1977), English comedian and filmmaker, in 1915 an international phenomenon, the most widely recognized and highly paid entertainer in the world. Despite his respect for Chaplin, Lewis came to view the universal popularity of Chaplin’s Tramp as a sign of modern culture’s increasingly debased childishness, particularly in
Time and Western Man
(1927).

German Madonna … face
: the painting
Madonna with the Carnation
(1478–80), also known as the
Munich Madonna
, an early work of Leonardo da Vinci that hangs in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, Germany. Deterioration and subsequent improper restoration has caused surface distortions to the painting, which is especially noticeable on the Madonna’s face.

Shaw’s ‘bloody’ schoolgirl way
: several of the plays of George Bernard Shaw, such as
Mrs Warren’s Profession
(1893), were considered scandalous in the early twentieth century. To Lewis their treatment of ‘adult’ subjects was merely quaintly ‘shocking’ in a way easily assimilated by middle-class taste. In
Blasting & Bombardiering
, Lewis later wrote, ‘I am rather what Mr. Shaw would have been if he had been an artist … and if he had been more richly endowed with imagination, emotion, intellect and a few other things. (He said he was a finer fellow than Shakespeare. I merely prefer myself to Mr. Shaw)’ (2nd rev. ed.; Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967, p. 3).

A demain
(Fr.) see you tomorrow

à fond
(Fr.) thoroughly

à propos
(Fr.) relevance, timeliness

Aber
(Ger.) Just a minute, hold on

Abort
(Ger.) latrine

Assez
(Fr.) enough

ah, ça
(Fr.) an exclamation of insistence

ambitieux
(Fr.) one who is ambitious

Amoureuse
(Fr.) lover, femme fatale

Angriff
(Ger.) attack, onslaught

au courant
(Fr., and Eng. by adoption) up to date, acquainted with what’s going on

Auf wiedersehen
(Ger.) goodbye

Ausgelassenheit
(Ger.) exuberance, boisterousness

bas-fonds
(Fr.) the lower depths

Bureau de Tabac
(Fr.) a tobacconist’s counter, typically found inside a café

béguin
(Fr., colloquial) infatuation

Bengel
(Ger.) rascal

blagueur
(Fr.) joker

Boulevardier
(Fr.) man about town

calinerie
(Fr.) coaxing, cajoling

Celui-là
(Fr.) that one

C’est peu!
(Fr.) That’s not much!

cet oiseau-la
(Fr.) that character

c’etait une idée
(Fr.) There was an idea

champs de manœuvres
(Fr.) parade grounds

crime passionel
(Fr.) a murder committed in the heat of passion, usually sparked by discovery of a lover’s unfaithfulness, often dealt with leniently by the French courts

cochon
(Fr.) swine

commerçante
(Fr.) shopkeeper

Comment
(Fr.) What?

coup
(Fr.) blow, sudden move

crapule
(Fr.) good-for-nothing

de rigueur
(Fr., and Eng. by adoption) obligatory, particularly in matters of etiquette and fashion