Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) (6 page)

Mao, Douglas, and Walkowitz, Rebecca L. (eds),
Bad Modernisms
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).

Materer, Timothy,
Vortex: Pound, Eliot, and Lewis
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979).

——
Wyndham Lewis, the Novelist
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1976).

Meyers, Jeffrey,
Wyndham Lewis, a Revaluation: New Essays
(London: Athlone Press, 1980).

Miller, Tyrus,
Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts between the World Wars
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999).

Normand, Tom,
Wyndham Lewis the Artist: Holding the Mirror up to Politics
(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

Peppis, Paul,
Literature, Politics, and the English Avant-Garde: Nation and Empire, 1901–1918
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Peters Corbett, David (ed.),
Wyndham Lewis and the Art of Modern War
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Puchner, Martin,
Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

Sherry, Vincent B.,
Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

Wagner, Geoffrey,
Wyndham Lewis: A Portrait of the Artist as the Enemy
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957).

Wees, William C.,
Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972).

Further Reading in Oxford World’s Classics

Ford, Ford Madox,
The Good Soldier
, ed. Thomas Moser.

Joyce, James,
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
, ed. Jeri Johnson.

Lawrence, D. H.,
Women in Love
, ed. David Bradshaw.

A CHRONOLOGY OF WYNDHAM LEWIS

1882	(18 Nov.) Percy Wyndham Lewis born to Charles Edward and Anne Stuart Lewis in Amherst, Nova Scotia, Canada, by Lewis’s account on his father’s yacht.
1888–93	Family lives on Isle of Wight.
1893	Parents separate. Lives with mother in England.
1897–8	Educated at Rugby School.
1898–1901	Attends Slade School of Art in London; expelled.
1904–8	Moves to Paris. Travels within France, Germany, Holland, and Spain, which provided the subject matter for his earliest fiction.
c .1908	Begins to draft first version of Tarr , a narrative about a German and a duel, to be called ‘Otto Kreisler’.
1908	(Dec.) Returns to London.
1909	Meets Ezra Pound and Ford Madox Ford (then known as Ford Madox Hueffer). Earliest stories published in English Review .
1910	Art critic Roger Fry mounts revolutionary art exhibition ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ in London. Early stories appear in The Tramp: an Open Air Magazine .
1911	Joins the Camden Town Group of artists.
1912	Displays large canvas Kermesse (now lost) at the Allied Artists’ Association exhibition at the Royal Albert Hall. Other artwork included in Fry’s ‘Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition’.
1913	Briefly joins Roger Fry’s Omega Workshop, then breaks with Fry over accusation of stolen commission for the Ideal Home Show. Portfolio of drawings for Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens published.
1914	Founds Rebel Art Centre with Kate Lechmere. (20 June) first issue of Vorticist journal Blast appears under Lewis’s editorship, including play Enemy of the Stars and contributions by Pound, Ford Madox Ford, and T. E. Hulme. (4 Aug.) England declares war on Germany, entering the First World War.
1915	Meets T. S. Eliot. (July) Second and last issue of Blast , ‘WAR NUMBER’ appears, including contribution by Eliot and announcement of death of Vorticist sculptor Gaudier-Brezska in the war. Completes original version of Tarr .
1916	Enlists in the Royal Garrison Artillery, as Gunner and then Bombardier. Fights in third battle of Ypres. Tarr begins to appear in serial form in The Egoist (Apr. 1916–Nov. 1917). While Lewis is at the front, Pound helps arrange sale of Tarr to Knopf in New York.
1917	Gains commission as an official war artist for Canadian Corps headquarters. Short story ‘Cantleman’s Spring Mate’ published in Little Review : its sexual frankness leads to suppression of the issue by the US Post Office. The Ideal Giant (play). T. E. Hulme killed near Lewis’s battery.
1918	Tarr appears in America and England. Returns to London. Meets future wife Gladys Anne Hoskins (‘Froanna’).
1919	First one-man show, exhibition of war art, ‘Guns’ at Goupil gallery. The Caliph’s Design: Architects! Where is your Vortex? published by Egoist Press.
1920	(9 Feb.) Mother dies. Lewis forms ‘Group X’, which disbands after single exhibition in March. Meets James Joyce with T. S. Eliot during trip to Paris.
1921	(Apr.) Edits first issue of arts journal The Tyro . Exhibition, ‘Tyros and Portraits’. Begins period of ‘going underground’ to work on massive book project The Man of the World .
1922	(Mar.) Second and last issue of The Tyro .
1924	(Feb.–Apr.) Two excerpts from The Apes of God published in T. S. Eliot’s journal The Criterion .
1926	The Art of Being Ruled (political and cultural analysis).
1927	Time and Western Man (philosophical, cultural, and literary analysis). The Wild Body (short stories). The Lion and the Fox (study of Shakespeare). Edits first issue of The Enemy: A Review of Art and Literature (three issues to 1929).
1928	The Childermass (novel). (Dec.) Revised version of Tarr published by Chatto and Windus.
1929	Paleface: The Philosophy of the ‘Melting Pot’ . Meets W. B. Yeats.
1930	The Apes of God (novel). Satire and Fiction . (9 Oct.) Marries Froanna.
1931	Hitler. The Diabolical Principle .
1932	The Doom of Youth. Filibusters in Barbary. Snooty Baronet (novel).
1933	The Old Gang and the New Gang. One Way Song (poetry).
1934	Men Without Art (literary and cultural criticism).
1936	Left Wings over Europe, or How to Make a War about Nothing. The Roaring Queen (novel; suppressed).
1937	Blasting and Bombardiering (autobiography). Count Your Dead: They are Alive! The Revenge for Love (novel). Exhibition of paintings and drawing at Leicester Galleries. Begins to lose his sight from pituitary tumour. Twentieth Century Verse special Lewis issue.
1938	The Mysterious Mr Bull . Portrait of T. S. Eliot rejected by Royal Academy.
1939	The Jews, Are They Human? (polemic against anti-Semitism). The Hitler Cult: and How it will End . Tate Gallery acquires Portrait of Ezra Pound . (3 Sept.) England declares war on Germany. Lewis and wife move to Canada and United States for six years.
1940	America, I Presume .
1941	Anglosaxony: A League that Works. The Vulgar Streak (novel).
1945	(Aug.) Returns to London.
1946–51	Art critic for The Listener .
1948	America and Cosmic Man .
1949	(May) Retrospective Exhibition, Redfern Gallery.
1950	Rude Assignment (autobiography). Tumour diagnosed.
1951	Loses sight. ‘The Sea-Mists of the Winter’ (essay on blindness). Rotting Hill (short stories).
1952	The Writer and the Absolute .
1953	Special Lewis issue of Shenandoah .
1954	Self Condemned (novel). The Demon of Progress in the Arts .
1955	Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta (novels, The Human Age, Books 2 and 3 ; sequels to The Childermass ).
1956	The Red Priest (novel). (18 July) Dramatization of Tarr broadcast on the BBC Third Programme. (July–Aug.) Tate Gallery exhibition Wyndham Lewis and Vorticism .
1957	(7 Mar.) Death, Westminster Hospital, London.
1973	The Roaring Queen (novel), published posthumously.
1977	Mrs Dukes’ Million (novel, c .1908–9), published posthumously.
1979	(Apr.) Death of Froanna.

TARR

PREFACE

P
UBLISHED
ten years ago,
Tarr
, my first book, in a sense the first book of an epoch in England, is often referred to and a new edition has, for several years, been in demand. But in turning back to it I have always felt that as regards form simply it should not appear again as it stood, for it was written with extreme haste, during the first year of the War, during a period of illness and restless convalescence.
*
Accordingly for the present edition I have throughout finished what was rough and given the narrative everywhere a greater precision. A few scenes have been expanded and some material added.

W
YNDHAM
L
EWIS
.

November
1928

CONTENTS

Part
I
.
BERTHA

II
.
DOOMED, EVIDENTLY
—
THE
‘
FRAC
’

III. BOURGEOIS-BOHEMIANS

IV. A JEST TOO DEEP FOR LAUGHTER

V. A MEGRIM OF HUMOUR

VI. HOLOCAUSTS

VII. SWAGGER SEX

L’ouvrage eust été moins mien: et sa fin principale et perfection, c’est d’estre exactement mien. Je corrigerois bien une erreur accidentale, dequoy je suis plain, ainsi que je cours inadvertemment: mais les imperfections qui sont en moy ordinaires et constantes, ce seroit trahison de les oster. Quand on m’a dit ou que moy-mesme me suis dict: ‘Tu es trop espais en figures: Voilà un mot du cru de Gascoingne: Voilà une frase dangereuse (je n’en refuis aucune de celles qui s’usent emmy les rues françoises; ceux qui veulent combattre l’usage par la grammaire se mocquent): Voilà un discours ignorant: Voilà un discours paradoxe: En voilà un trop fol. [Tu te joues souvent, on estimera que tu dies à droit ce que tu dis à feinte.]—Ouy, fais-je, mais je corrige les fautes d’inadvertence non celles de coustume. Est-ce pas ainsi que je parle par tout? Me represente-je pas vivement? suffit.’

Montaigne
, Liv. III, ch. v.

Le plus simplement se commettre à nature, c’est s’y commettre le plus sagement. O que c’est un doux et mol chevet, et sain, que l’ignorance et l’incuriosité, à reposer une teste bien faicte!’

Montaigne
, Liv. III, ch. xiii, ‘De l’expérience.’
*

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