Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) Read online

  In places where Lewis added even larger passages of text, he pasted new manuscript material over passages to be cancelled, and attached extra sheets to the bottoms of the pages of the working text that needed to be unfolded by the printers (Chapter 9 of Part IV, ‘A Jest Too Deep for Laughter’, is particularly densely revised in this way). For two sequences that he expanded yet more substantially—the preparation for Kreisler’s duel (Chapter 4 of Part VI, ‘Holocausts’) and Tarr’s later conversations with Anastasya (Chapter 1 of Part VII, ‘Swagger Sex’)—Lewis directs the printers to separate manuscripts and typescripts to be incorporated into the already densely revised text. Although no doubt a challenge for Chatto and Windus’s typesetters, the 1928 version of Tarr proved to be a success. Unpublished letters at Cornell show that Lewis’s editor C. H. C. Prentice reported to him in 1929 that the publisher had sold almost two thousand copies of the new Tarr; while a much later communication from the publisher notes that Tarr was one of three of Lewis’s books, along with The Art of Being Ruled and Time and Western Man, that had repaid their advances.5

  Lewis intended Tarr to be known solely in its revised version. The 1928 text served as the basis for all subsequent editions of Tarr in Lewis’s lifetime, including an edition published by Methuen in 1951 to which Lewis contributed a few further minor alterations. Nonetheless, some contemporary readers prefer the original 1918 Tarr on the grounds that its greater stylistic roughness is closer in spirit to the avant-gardism of Blast and Vorticism than is the relative polish of the revision. Such readers regret in particular the loss of Lewis’s use of an idiosyncratic form of punctuation in some sections of the 1918 Knopf Tarr, doubled dashes that look like equals signs (‘=’) and that Lewis used to divide sentences from one another. The 1928 Tarr, in compensation, is fuller and more complexly novelistic, containing more expansive descriptive and character detail without compromising the integrity of its aesthetics or its world view. With the availability of Paul O’Keeffe’s edition of the 1918 Tarr, readers can make such judgements for themselves.6

  Finally, it is worth noting two idiosyncrasies of usage and orthography in the 1928 Tarr. Lewis often prints foreign words and phrases in roman type, reserving italics for specific emphasis. He also prints adjectives referring to national, cultural, and religious groups without initial capitals. At times Lewis uses this orthography playfully (as when he writes ‘But being a Pole, Soltyk participated in a hereditary polish of manner’, p. 119). But this orthography also represented Lewis’s considered belief that standard English usage overemphasized the importance of national differences compared to other bases for comparison or self-definition. As he explained in his journal The Enemy:

  [MY] use of capitals and lower case departs from current english usage. This has been objected to by some critics, and I agree with them that there is a good deal against it. Only between the german habit of over-capitalisation and the soberness of the French in their use of the capital letter (‘un français’, for instance, is what we write ‘a Frenchman’) the english usage seems rather illogically to hesitate … if you write ‘a gymnosophist’ or ‘an aristocrat’ with a small letter, I do not see why the name that describes another and no more important attribute of a person should receive a different treatment.7

  This edition thus reproduces exactly Lewis’s orthography as it appears in the 1928 Chatto and Windus edition, for as Lewis’s opening epigraph from Montaigne commands, one should ‘correct the faults of inadvertence, not those of habit’. And with that injunction in mind, this edition silently corrects also a small number of obvious typesetting errors, and a single misattribution by Lewis—where else?—to the source of his second epigraph from Montaigne.

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Life, Letters, and Writings on Art

  Lewis, Wyndham, Blasting & Bombardiering (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1937; 2nd rev. edn, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967).

  —— The Letters of Wyndham Lewis, ed. W. K. Rose (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1963).

  —— Rude Assignment: A Narrative of My Career up-to-Date (London and New York: Hutchinson & Co., Publishers, Ltd., 1950); repr. as Rude Assignment: An Intellectual Autobiography, ed. Toby Foshay (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1984).

  —— Wyndham Lewis on Art: Collected Writings 1913–1956, ed. Walter Michel and C. J. Fox (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969).

  Meyers, Jeffrey, The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980).

  Michel, Walter, Wyndham Lewis: Paintings and Drawings (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971).

  O’Keeffe, Paul, Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis (London: Jonathan Cape, 2000).

  Pound, Ezra, and Lewis, Wyndham, Pound/Lewis: The Letters of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, ed. Timothy Materer (New York: New Directions, 1985).

  Tarr: Specific Criticism and Contemporary Reviews

  Ardis, Ann L., ‘The Lost Girl, Tarr, and the “Moment” of Modernism’, in Modernism and Cultural Conflict, 1880–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 78–113.

  Cooper, John Xiros, ‘La bohème: Lewis, Stein, Barnes’, in Modernism and the Culture of Market Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 215–42.

  Currie, Robert, ‘Wyndham Lewis, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Tarr’, Review of English Studies, NS, 30/118 (May 1979), 169–81.

  Davies, Alistair, ‘Tarr: A Nietzschean Novel’, in Jeffrey Meyers (ed.), Wyndham Lewis, a Revaluation: New Essays (London: Athlone Press, 1980), 107–19.

  Edwards, Paul, ‘Symbolic Exchange in Tarr’, in Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 35–51.

  Eliot, T. S., ‘Tarr’, The Egoist, 5/8 (Sept. 1918), 105–6.

  Levenson, Michael H., ‘Form’s Body: Lewis’ Tarr’, in Modernism and the Fate of Individuality: Character and Novelistic Form from Conrad to Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 121–44.

  Lewis, Wyndham, Tarr: The 1918 Version, ed. Paul O’Keeffe (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1990).

  Peppis, Paul, ‘Anti-Individualism and Fictions of National Character in Lewis’s Tarr’, in Literature, Politics, and the English Avant-Garde: Nation and Empire, 1901–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 133–61.

  Pound, Ezra, ‘ “Tarr” by Wyndham Lewis’, Little Review, 4/11 (Mar. 1918), 35.

  Sheppard, Richard W., ‘Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr: An (Anti-) Vorticist Novel?’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 88/4 (Oct. 1989), 510–30.

  Starr, Alan, ‘Tarr and Wyndham Lewis’, ELH, 49/1 (Spring 1982), 179–89.

  Sturgeon, Stephen, ‘Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr: A Critical Edition’, unpublished PhD diss., Boston University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, 2007.

  West, Rebecca, ‘Tarr’, The Nation, 10 Aug. 1918; repr. in Agenda, 7/3 and 8/1 (Autumn–Winter, 1969–70), 67.

  Wutz, Michael, ‘The Energetics of Tarr: The Vortex-Machine Kreisler’, Modern Fiction Studies, 38/4 (Winter 1992), 845–69.

  Lewis and Vorticism: General Criticism

  Ayers, David, Wyndham Lewis and Western Man (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1992).

  Cork, Richard, Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976).

  Dasenbrock, Reed Way, The Literary Vorticism of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis: Towards the Condition of Painting (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).

  Edwards, Paul, Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).

  Foshay, Toby, Wyndham Lewis and the Avant-Garde: The Politics of the Intellect (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992).

  Foster, Hal, Prosthetic Gods (Cambridge, Mass.; London: MIT Press, 2004).

  Gasiorek, Andrzej, Wyndham Lewis and Modernism (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2003).

  Hickman, Miranda B., The Geometry of Modernism: The Vorticist Idiom in Lewis, Pound, H.D., and Yeats (Austin
: University of Texas Press, 2005).

  Jameson, Fredric, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979; new edn, London and New York: Verso, 2008).

  Kenner, Hugh, Wyndham Lewis (London: Methuen, 1954).

  Klein, Scott W., The Fictions of James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis: Monsters of Nature and Design (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

  Mao, Douglas, Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).

  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.