Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) Read online

  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

  PUBLISHED 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.

  WYNDHAM LEWIS.

  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.’*

  PART I

  BERTHA

  CHAPTER 1

  PARIS hints of sacrifice. But here we deal with that large dusty facet known to indulgent and congruous kind: it is in its capacity of delicious inn and majestic Baedeker,* where western Venuses* twang its responsive streets and hush to soft growl before its statues, that it is seen. It is not across its Thébaïde* that the unscrupulous heroes chase each other’s shadows: they are largely ignorant of all but their restless personal lives.

  Inconceivably generous and naïve faces haunt the Vitelotte Quarter.*—We are not, however, in a Hollywood camp of pseudo-cowpunchers (though ‘guns’ tap rhythmically the buttocks).* Art is being studied.—But ‘art’ is not anything serious or exclusive: it is the smell of oil paint, Henri Murger’s Vie de Bohème,* corduroy trousers, the operatic Italian model: but the poetry, above all, of linseed oil* and turpentine.

  The Vitelotte Quarter is given up to Art: Letters and other things are round the corner. Its rent is half paid by America. Germany occupies a sensible apartment on the second floor. A hundred square yards at its centre is a convenient space, where the Boulevard du Paradis and the Boulevard Kreutzberg* cross with their electric trams: in the middle is a pavement island, like vestige of submerged masonry. Italian models festoon it in symmetrical human groups; it is also their club.

  The Café Berne, at one side, is the club of the ‘grands messieurs du Berne.’ So you have the clap-trap Campagnia* tribe outside, in the Café twenty sluggish commonsense Germans, a Middle West group or two, drinking and playing billiards. These are the most permanent tableaux of this place, disheartening and admonitory as a Tussaud’s of the Flood.*

  Hobson and Tarr met in the Boulevard du Paradis.—They met in a gingerly, shuffling fashion: they had so many good reasons for not slowing down when they met, numbers of antecedent meetings when it would have been better if they had kept on, all pointing to why they should crush their hats over their eyes and hurry forward, so that it was a defeat and insanitary to have their bodies shuffling and gesticulating there. (‘Why cannot most people, having talked and annoyed each other once or twice, rebecome strangers simply? Oh for multitudes of divorces in our mœurs, more than the old vexed sex ones! Ah yes, ah yes—!’ had not Tarr once put forward, and Hobson agreed?)

  ‘Have you been back long?’ Tarr asked with despondent slowness.

  ‘No. I got back yesterday’ said Hobson, with pleasantly twisted scowl.

  (‘Heavens! one day here only, and lo I meet him.’)

  ‘How is London looking, then?’

  ‘Very much as usual.—I wasn’t there the whole time; I was in Cambridge* last week.’

  (‘I wish you’d go to hell from time to time instead of Cambridge, as it always is, you grim grim dog!’ Tarr wished behind the veil.)

  They went to the Berne to have their drink.

  They sat for some minutes with a stately discomfort of self-consciousness, staring in front of them. It was really only a dreary boiling anger with themselves and against the contradictions of civilized life; the hatred that personal diversities engender was fermenting under the camouflage of intricate accommodations and in each other’s company they were conscious of this stir. ‘Phew, phew!’—a tenuous howl, like a subterranean wind, rose from the borderland of their consciousness. There they were on the point of opening, with tired ashamed fingers, well-worn pages of their souls, soon to be muttering between their teeth the hackneyed pages to each other: in different degrees and disproportionate ways they were resentful.

  So they sat with this absurd travesty of a Quaker’s Meeting,* shyness appearing to emanate masterfully from Tarr. And in another case, with almost any one but Hobson, it might have been shyness: for Tarr had a gauche puritanical ritual of self, the result of solitary habits. Certain observances were demanded of those approaching him, and were quite gratuitously observed in return. The fetish* within—soul-dweller that is strikingly like a wood-dweller, and who was not often enough disturbed to have had the sylvan shyness mitigated—would still cling to these forms. Sometimes Tarr’s crafty daimon,* aghast at its nakedness, would manage to borrow or purloin some shape of covering from elegantly draped visitor.

  But for Hobson’s outfit Tarr had the most elaborate contempt. This was Alan Hobson’s outfit: a Cambridge cut disfigured his originally manly and melodramatic form. His father was said to be a wealthy merchant somewhere in Egypt. Very athletic, his dark and cavernous features had been constructed by nature as a lurking-place for villainies and passions: but Hobson had double-crossed his rascally sinuous body. He slouched and ambled along, neglecting his muscles: and his full-blooded blackguard’s countenance attempted to portray delicacies of common sense and gossamer-like backslidings into the inane that would have puzzled any analyst unacquainted with his peculiar training. Occasionally he would exploit his criminal appearance and blacksmith’s muscles for a short time, however: and his strong piercing laugh threw A B C waitresses* into confusion. The art-touch, the Bloomsbury* technique, was very noticeable. Hobson’s Harris tweeds were shabby, from beneath his dejected jacket emerged a pendant seat, his massive shoes were hooded by the superfluous inches of his trousers: a hat suggesting that his ancestors had been Plainsmen or some rough sunny folk shaded unnecessarily his countenance, already far from open.

  The material for conversation afforded by a short sea voyage, an absence, a panama hat on his companion’s head, had been exhausted. Tarr possessed no deft hand or economy of force: his muscles rose unnecessarily on his arm to lift a wine-glass to his lips: he had no social m
achinery at all at his disposal and was compelled to get along as well as he could with the cumbrous one of the intellect. With this he danced about it is true: but it was full of sinister piston-rods, organ-like shapes, heavy drills. When he tried to be amiable he usually only succeeded in being portentous.

  It was an effort to talk to Hobson: for this effort a great reserve of nervous force was brought into play: it got to work and wove its large anomalous patterns. Taking crudely the subject that was foremost in his existence he imposed it upon their talk.

  Tarr turned to Hobson and seized him, conversationally, by the hair.

  ‘Well Walt Whitman, when are you going to get your hair cut?’

  Hobson lifted up startled astonished eyes and sniggered.

  ‘Why do you call me Walt Whitman?’

  ‘Would you prefer Buffalo Bill, or is it Thomas Carlyle?’*

  ‘It is not Thomas Carlyle.’

  ‘ “Roi je ne suis: prince je ne daigne.”* That’s Hobson’s choice.* But why so much hair? I don’t wear my hair long: if you had as many reasons for wearing it long as I have we should see it flowing round your ankles!’

  ‘I might ask you under those circumstances why you wear it short. But I expect you have excellent reasons of your own. I can’t see why you should resent my innocent device: however long I wore it you would not suffer, we do not compete.’

  Tarr rattled the cement match-stand upon the suety marble and the garçon sang prettily ‘Tout de suite, tout de suite!’

  ‘Hobson, you were telling me about a studio to let before you left.—I forget the details—.’

  ‘Was it one behind the Panthéon?’*

  ‘That’s it. Was there electric light?’

  ‘No I don’t think there was electric light. But I can find out for you.’

  ‘How did you come to hear of it?’

  ‘Through a German I know—Salle, Salla, or something.’

  ‘What was the street?’

  ‘The Rue Lhomond.* I forget the number.’

  ‘I’ll go and have a look at it after lunch.—What on earth possesses you to know so many Germans?’ Tarr asked, sighing, as a burdensome afterthought.

  ‘Don’t you like Germans?—You’ve just been too intimate with one, that’s what it is.’

  ‘Perhaps I have.’

  ‘A female of the species, too.’

  ‘The sex weakens the “German,” surely.’

  ‘In Fräulein Lunken’s case does it have that effect?’

  ‘Oh you know her, do you?—Of course you would know her, as she’s a German.’

  Alan Hobson cackled morosely.

  Tarr’s unwieldy playfulness might, in the chequered northern shade, in conjunction with nut-brown ale, gazed at by some Rowlandson (he on the ultimate borders of the epoch)* have pleased by its à propos. But when the last Rowlandson dies, the life, too, that he saw should vanish. Anything that survives the artist’s death is not life but belated drama. This homely, thick-waisted affectation!—Hobson yawned and yawned as though he wished to swallow Tarr and have done with him. Tarr yawned more noisily, rattled his chair, sat up, haggard and stiff, as though he wished to frighten this crow away: ‘Carrion-Crow’* was his name for him.

  Why was he talking to this individual at all? However, he shortly began to lay bare the secrets of his soul. Hobson opened:

  ‘It seems to me, Tarr, that you know far more Germans than I do: but you’re ashamed of it. Hence your attack. I met a Fräulein Unger the other day, a German, who claimed to know you—I’m always meeting Germans who know you! She also referred to you as the “official fiancé” of Fräulein Lunken.—Are you an “official fiancé”—and if so what is that may I ask?’

  Tarr was taken aback, he looked round with surprise. Hobson laughed stridently: the real man emerging, he came over quickly on another wave.

  ‘You not only get to know Germans, masses of them, on the sly, you make them your bosom friends, engage yourself to them in marriage and make heaven knows how many more solemn pacts and undertakings to cement yourself still more closely to them.’

  Tarr was recovering gracefully from his relapse into discomfort: if ever taken off his guard he made a clever use immediately afterwards of his naïveté: he beamed upon his slip: he would swallow it tranquilly, assimilating it with ostentation to himself. A personal weakness slipped out, he picked it up unabashed, looked at it smilingly, and put it back in his pocket.

  ‘As you know’ he soon replied ‘ “engagement” is a euphemism. But as it happens my betrothed publicly announced the dissolution of our fiançailles yesterday.’

  He looked no more responsible than a young child, head thrown up as though proclaiming something of which he had reason to be particularly proud.—Hobson laughed convulsively, cracking his yellow fingers.

  ‘Yes, it is funny, if you look at it in that way: I let her announce our engagement or the reverse just as she thinks fit—that has been our arrangement from the start. I never know at any given time whether I’m engaged or not, I leave all that sort of thing entirely in her hands. After a severe quarrel I know it’s fairly safe to say that I am temporarily unattached. Somewhere or other the link will have been publicly severed.’

  ‘Possibly that is what is meant by officially—.’

  ‘Very likely.’

  He had been hustled—through his vanity, thought the Cairo cantab*—somewhere where the time could be passed: Tarr’s curiosities could now be lifted out and handled. On his side the secrets and repressions that it is the pride of the modern to disclose with a conventional obscene heroism Tarr flourished about with Hobson’s assistance. He pulled a wry face once or twice at the other’s sans gêne: but he was too good a modern not to court the ordeal.

  There was a considerable pause in which Tarr obtruded complacently this strange new-fangled weakness for the unlikeliest of things, his philogermanic* patent.

  ‘Will you go so far in this clandestine life of yours as to marry anybody?’ Hobson then enquired.

  ‘No.’

  Staring with bright meditative sweetness down the boulevard Hobson remarked

  ‘There must be a great difference between your way of approaching Germans and mine.’

  ‘Ay: it is different things that take us respectively amongst them.’

  ‘All the same you like the national flavour.’

  ‘I like the national flavour!’ (Hobson was familiar with this habit of Tarr’s, namely of beginning a reply with a parrot-like echo of the words of the other party to the dialogue: also he would repeat sotto voce one of his own sentences, a mechanical rattle following on without stop): ‘Sex is nationalized, more than any other essential of life, Hobson, it’s just the opposite of art there: in german sex there is all the german cuisine, the beer-cellar, and all the plum-pudding mysticism of german thought. But then if it is the sex you are after that does not say you want to identify your being with your appetite: quite the opposite. The condition of continued enjoyment is to resist assimilation. A man is the opposite of his appetite.’

  ‘Surely, a man is his appetite.’

  ‘No, a man is always his last appetite, or his appetite before last. And that is no longer an appetite.’

  ‘A man is nothing.’ Hobson picked his teeth, laughing.

  ‘Of course. Nobody is anything or life would be intolerable. You are me, I am you.—The Present is the furthest projection of our steady appetite; imagination, the commander-in-chief, keeps in the rear. Imagination is the man.’

  ‘What is the Present?’ asked Hobson politely, with much aspirating, sitting up a little and slightly offering his ear.

  But Tarr only repeated things arbitrarily. He extinguished Hobson with a glance, then he proceeded with considerable pomp:

  ‘Sex is a monstrosity. Sex is a monstrosity. It’s the last and ugliest piece of nonsense of a long line. I can see you raising your eyebrows. No? You should do so: I’m a pessimist—.’

  ‘A german pessimist!’

  ‘A
pessimist. I’m a new sort of pessimist. I think I’m the sort that will go down.’

  ‘Why not? But you must—.’

  ‘No! I am the panurgic*-pessimist, drunken with the laughing-gas of the Abyss: I gaze upon squalor and idiocy, and the more I see them the more I like them. Flaubert built up his Bouvard et Pécuchet* with maniacal and tireless hands, it took him ten years: that was a long draught of stodgy laughter from the gases that rise from the dung-heap.’

  ‘Flaubert—.’

  ‘No’ (Tarr raised his flat hand, threatening Hobson’s mouth) ‘he had an appetite like an elephant for this form of mirth, but he grumbled and sighed over his food. I take the stuff up in my arms and bury my face in it!’

  As Tarr’s temperament spread its wings, whirling him with menace and mockery above Hobson’s head, the cantab philosopher did not consider it necessary to reply. He was not winged himself. Tarr looped the loop and he looked on. A droll bird! He wondered, as he watched him, if he was a sound bird. People believed in him: his exhibition flights attracted attention. What sort of prizes could he expect to win by these a little too professional talents? Would this notable ambitieux be satisfied?

  The childish sport proceeded, with serious interludes.

  ‘I bury my face in it!’—(He buried his face in it!)—‘I laugh hoarsely through its thickness choking and spitting, choking and spitting. (He choked and spat.) That is my daily ooze: as far as sex is concerned I took to it like a duck to water. Sex, Hobson, is a german study: a german study.’ He shook his head in a dejected drunken manner, protruding his lips. He seemed to find analogies for his repeating habits in pictures provided by the human digestion.

  ‘All the same you must take my word for a good deal at this point. The choice of a wife is not practical in the way that, oh, buying a bicycle—think rather of the dishes of the table. Rembrandt paints decrepit old Jews.* Shakespeare deals in tubs of grease—Falstaff,* Christ in sinners. As to sex—Socrates married a shrew,* most wise men marry fools, picture post cards,* cows, or strumpets.’