Tarr (Oxford World's Classics)

by Wyndham Lewis

  ‘That’s all right, but it’s not true.’ Hobson resurrected himself dutifully. ‘The more sensible people I can think of off-hand have more sensible and on the whole prettier wives than other people.’

  ‘Prettier wives?—You are describing a meaningless average like yourself and their wives. The most suspicious fact about any man with pretensions to intelligence is the possession of an intelligent wife. No, you might just as well say in answer to my art-statement that Tadema* did not paint decayed meat, Rembrandt’s octogenarian burghers.’

  Hobson surged up a little in his chair and collapsed.—He had to appeal to his body to sustain the argument.

  ‘Neither did Raphael*—I don’t see why you should drag Rembrandt in. Rembrandt—.’

  ‘You’re going to sniff at Rembrandt! You accuse me of truckling to the fashion in my support of cubism.* You’re much more fashionable than I am, if we can be compared without absurdity. Would you mind my “dragging in” cheese, high game—?’

  Hobson allowed cheeses with a rather drawn expression: but he did not see what that had to do with it, either.

  ‘It is not purely a question of appetite’ he said.

  ‘Sex, sir, is purely a question of appetite!’ Tarr exclaimed.

  Hobson inclined himself mincingly, with a sweet chuckle.

  ‘If it is pure sex, that is’ Tarr added.

  ‘Oh, if it is pure sex—that naturally—.’ Hobson convulsed himself and crowed thrice.

  ‘Listen Hobson!—you must not make that noise. It’s very clever of you to be able to: but you will not succeed in rattling me by making me feel I am addressing a rooster.’

  Hobson let himself go in whoops and caws, as though Tarr had been pressing him to perform.

  When he had finished Tarr enquired coldly:

  ‘Are you willing to consider sex seriously or not?’

  ‘Yes I don’t mind.’—Hobson settled down, his face flushed from his late display.—‘But I shall begin to believe before very long that your intentions are honourable as regards the fair Fräulein.—What exactly is your discourse intended to prove?’

  ‘Not the desirability of the marriage tie, if that’s what you mean, any more than a propaganda for representation and anecdote in art: but if a man marries or a great painter represents (and the claims and seductions of life are very urgent) he will not be governed in his choice by the same laws that regulate the life of an efficient citizen or the standards of a eugenist.’*

  ‘I should have said that the considerations that precede a proposition of marriage had many analogies with the eugenist’s outlook, the good citizen’s—.’

  ‘Was Napoleon successful in life or did he ruin himself and end his days in miserable captivity?*—Passion precludes the idea of success: worldly failure is its condition.—Art and sex—the real thing—we’re talking at cross-purposes—make tragedies and not advertisements for health-experts or happy endings for the Public, or social panaceas.’

  ‘Alas that is true.’

  ‘Well then, well then, Alan Hobson—you scarecrow of an advanced fool-farm—.’

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘You voice-culture practitioner—.’*

  ‘I? My voice—? But that’s absurd! If my speech—.’

  Hobson was up in arms about his voice: although it was not his.

  Tarr needed a grimacing tumultuous mask for the face he had to cover. He had compared his clowning with Hobson’s pierrotesque* variety: but Hobson, he considered, was a crowd. You could not say he was an individual, he was in fact a set. He sat there, a cultivated audience, with the aplomb and absence of self-consciousness of numbers, of the herd—of those who know they are not alone.—Tarr was shy and the reverse by turns; he was alone.

  A distinguished absence of personality was Hobson’s most personal characteristic. Upon this impersonality, of crowd origin, Tarr gazed with the scorn of the autocrat.

  ‘As I said we’re talking at cross-purposes, Hobson: you believe I am contending that affection for a dolt, like my fiancée, is in some way a merit; I don’t mean that at all. Also I do not mean that sex is my tragedy, but only art.’

  ‘I thought we were talking about sex?’

  ‘No. Let me explain. Why am I associated sexually with that irritating nullity? First of all, I am an artist. With most people, who are not artists, all the finer part of their vitality goes into sex if it goes anywhere: during their courtship they become third-rate poets, all their instincts of drama come out freshly with their wives. The artist is he in whom this emotionality normally absorbed by sex is so strong that it claims a newer and more exclusive field of deployment. Its first creation is the Artist himself. That is a new sort of person; the creative man.’

  ‘All artists are not creative.’

  ‘All right, call yourself an artist if you like. For me the artist is creative. Now for a bang-up first-rate poet nothing short of a queen or a chimera* is adequate, the praising-power he’s been born with exacts perfection. So on all through his gifts: one by one his powers are turned away from the usual object of a man’s personal poetry or passion and so removed from the immediate world. One solitary thing is left facing any woman with whom he has commerce, that is his sex, a lonely phallus.’

  ‘Your creative man sounds rather alarming. I don’t believe in him.’

  ‘Some artists are less complete than others: more or less remains to the man.’

  ‘I’m glad some have more than the bare phallus of them.’

  ‘But the character of the artist’s creation comes in. What tendency has my work as an artist, for I am one of your beastly creative persons you will readily allow. You may have noticed that an invariable severity distinguishes it. Apart from its being good or bad, its character is ascetic rather than sensuous, and it is divorced from immediate life. There is no slop of sex in that. But there is no severity left over for the work of the cruder senses either. Very often with an artist whose work is very sensuous or human, his sex instinct, if it is active, will be more discriminating than with a man more fastidious and discriminating than he in his work. To sum up this part of my disclosure: no one could have a coarser, more foolish, slovenly taste than I have in women. It is not even sluttish and abject, of the Turner type (the landscape-artist) with his washerwoman at Gravesend.* It is bourgeois, and it is pretty, a cross between the Musical Comedy stage and the dream of the Eighteenth-Century gallant.’*

  At Eighteenth-Century Hobson moved resentfully.

  ‘What’s the Eighteenth-Century got to do with it?’

  ‘All the delicate psychology another man naturally seeks in a woman, the curiosity of form, windows on other lives, love and passion, I seek in my work and not elsewhere.—Form would perhaps be thickened by child-bearing; it would perhaps be damaged by harlotry. Why should sex still be active? That is an organic matter that has nothing to do with the general energies of the mind.’

  Hobson yawned with sullen relish.

  ‘I see I am boring you—the matter is too remote. But you have trespassed here, and you must listen. I cannot let you off before you have heard, and shown that you understand. If you do not sit and listen, I will write it all to you in a letter. YOU WILL BE MADE TO HEAR IT!—And after I have told you this, I will tell you why I am talking to an idiot like you!’

  ‘You ask me to be polite—.’

  ‘I don’t mind how impolite you are provided you listen.’

  ‘Well I am listening—I have even betrayed interest.’

  Tarr as he saw it was tearing at the blankets swaddling this spirit in its inner snobberies. At all events here was a bitter feast piping hot and going begging, it seemed, and a mouth must be found for it: this jaded palate had to serve under the circumstances and it had, its malicious appetite satisfied, to be taught to do justice to the fare.—He had something to say; it must be said while it was living: once it was said, it could look after itself.—As to Hobson, he had shocked something that was ready to burst out: he must help it out: Hobson
must pay as well for the intimacy. He must pay Bertha Lunken afterwards. Tarr at this point felt like insisting that he should come round and apologize to her.

  ‘A man only goes and importunes the world with a confession when his self will not listen to him or recognize his shortcomings. The function of a friend is to be a substitute for this defective self, to be the World and the Real without the disastrous consequences of reality.—Yet punishment is one of his chief offices. The friend enlarges also substantially the boundaries of our solitude.’

  *

  This statement was to be found in Tarr’s diary. The self he had rebuked in this way for not listening was now again suffering rebuke by his act of confession with the first-met, a man he did not regard as a friend even. Had a friend been there he could have interceded for his ego.*

  ‘You have followed so far?’

  Tarr looked with slow disdainful suspicion at Hobson’s face staring at the ground.

  ‘You have understood the nature of my secret? Half of myself I have to hide. I am bitterly ashamed of a slovenly common portion of my life that has been isolated and repudiated by the energies of which I am so proud. I am ashamed of the number of Germans I know, as you put it. In that rôle I have to cower and slink away even from an old fruit-tin* like you. It is idle to protect that section of my life, it’s no good sticking up for it, it’s not worth it. It is not even up to your standards. I have, therefore, to deliver it up to your eyes and the eyes of the likes of you, in the end—if you will deign to use them! I even have to beg you to use your eyes; to hold you by the sleeve and crave a glance for an object belonging to me!’

  ‘You’ve succeeded in making me sorry I ever mentioned your precious fiancée!’

  ‘In this compartment of my life I have not a vestige of passion. That is the root reason for its meanness and absurdity. The closest friend of my Dr. Jekyll would not recognize my Mr. Hyde,* and vice versa: the rudimentary self I am giving you a glimpse of is more starved and stupid than any other man’s: or to put it more pathetically, I am of that company who are reduced to looking to Socrates for a consoling lead.—But consider all the collages* marriages and affairs that you know, in which some frowsy or foolish or some doll-like or loglike bitch accompanies everywhere the form of an otherwise sensible man: a dumbfounding disgusting and septic ghost! Oh Sex! oh Montreal!* How foul and wrong this haunting of women is!—they are everywhere—confusing, blurring, libelling, with their half-baked gushing tawdry presences! It is like a slop and spawn of children and the bawling machinery of the inside of life, always and all over our palaces. The floodgates of their reservoirs of illusion, that is cheap and vast, burst, and sex hurtles in between friendships or stagnates complacently around a softened mind.—I might almost take some credit to myself for at least having the grace to keep this bear-garden* in the background.’

  Hobson had brightened up while this was proceeding. He now cried out:

  ‘You might almost. Why don’t you? I am astonished at what you tell me: but you appear to take your german foibles too much to heart.’

  ‘Just at present I am in the midst of a gala of the heart: you may have noticed. I’m an indifferent landlord, I haven’t the knack of handling the various personalities gathered beneath my roof. In the present instance I am really blessed: but you ought to see the sluts that get in sometimes! They all become steadily my fiancée too. Fiancée!—observe how we ape the forms of conventional life in our emancipated Bohemia:* it does not mean anything so one lets it stop. It’s the same with the Café fools I have for friends—there’s a greek fool, a german fool, a russian fool—an english fool! There are no “friends” in this life any more than there are authentic “fiancées”: so it’s of no importance what we choose to call each other: one drifts along side by side with this live stock—friends, fiancées, “colleagues” and what not in our unreal gimcrack artist-society.’

  Hobson sat staring with a bemused seriousness at the ground.

  ‘Why should I not speak plainly and cruelly of my poor ridiculous fiancée to you or to anyone? After all it is chiefly myself I am castigating. But you, as well, must be of the party! Yes: the right to see implies the right to be seen. As an off set for your prying scurvy way of poking your nose into my affairs you must offer your own guts, such as they are—!’

  ‘How have I pried into your affairs?’ Hobson asked with a circumspect surprise.

  ‘Anyone who stands outside, who hides himself in a deliquescent aloofness, is a sneak and a spy.’

  ‘That seems to me to be a case of pot calling the kettle black: I should not have said that you were conspicuous—.’

  ‘No. You know you have joined yourself to those who hush their voices to hear what other people are saying! Everyone who does not contend openly and take his share of the common burden of ignominy of life is a sneak, unless it is for a solid motive. The exemption you claim is not to work in, there is no personal rationale for your privileges, you make no claim to deserve your state, only to be lucky. But against what have you exchanged your temper, your freedom, and your fine baritone voice? You have exchanged them for an old hat that does not belong to you and a shabbiness you have not merited by suffering neediness. Your untidiness is a sentimental indulgence: we should insist upon every man dressing up to his income, it should be understood that he make willy-nilly a smart fresh appearance. Patching the seat of your trousers, instead of—!’

  ‘Wait a minute’ Hobson said, with a cracked laugh. ‘I don’t admit I am shabby, of course, but when you say I am sentimental because I am not fashionably dressed, I wonder if you mean that you are peculiarly free of sentimentality—?’

  ‘As to that I don’t care a fig, perbacco, put that away, I’m talking about you: let me proceed. With your training you are decked in the plumes of very fine birds indeed: but what does it amount to, your plumes are not meant to fly with but merely to slouch and skip along the surface of the earth. You wear the livery of a ridiculous set, you are a cunning and sleek domestic: no thought can come out of your head before it has slipped on its uniform: all your instincts are drugged with a malicious languor—an arm, a respectability, invented by a group of giggling invert-spinsters* who supply you with a fraudulent patent of superiority.’

  Hobson opened his mouth, had a movement of the body to speak; but he relapsed.

  ‘You reply “What are the grounds of all this censure? I know I am not morally defensible, I am lazy and second-rate, that’s not my fault, I have done the best for myself. I was not suited for any heroic station, like yours: I live sensibly and quietly, cultivating my vegetable ideas,* and also my roses and Victorian lilies:* I do no harm to anybody.” ’

  Hobson had a vague gesture of assent and puzzled enquiry.

  ‘That is not quite the case. That is a little inexact. Your proceedings possess a herdesque astuteness; in the scale against the individual weighing less than the Yellow Press* yet being a closer and meaner attack. Also you are essentially spies, in a lousy safe and well-paid service, as I told you before: you are disguised to look like the thing it is your function to betray—What is your position? you have bought have you not for eight hundred pounds at an aristocratic educational establishment a complete mental outfit, a programme of manners: for four years you trained with other recruits: you are now a perfectly disciplined social unit, with a profound esprit de corps. The Cambridge set that you represent is, as observed in an average specimen, a hybrid of the Quaker, the homosexual and the Chelsea artist.* Your Oxford brothers, dating from the Wilde* decade, are a more muscular body: the Chelsea artists have at least no pretensions to be anything but philistine: the Quakers are powerful ruffians. You represent, my good Hobson, the dregs of anglo-saxon civilization: there is absolutely nothing softer upon the earth. Your flabby potion is a mixture of the lees of Liberalism,* the poor froth blown off the decadent Nineties, the wardrobe-leavings of a vulgar bohemianism with its headquarters in the suburb of Carlyle and Whistler.* You are concentrated, highly-organized
barley-water:* there is nothing in the universe to be said for you: any efficient state would confiscate your property, burn your wardrobe—that old hat and the rest—as infectious and prohibit you from propagating.’

  Tarr’s white collar shone dazzlingly in the sun. His bowler hat bobbed, striking out clean lines in space as he spoke.

  ‘A breed of mild pervasive cabbages has set up a wide and creeping rot in the West: it is the lost generations described in Chekov* over again, that any resolute power will be able to wipe up over-night, with its eyes shut. Your kind meantime make it indirectly a peril and tribulation for live things to remain in your neighbourhood. You are systematizing and vulgarizing the individual: you are the advance-copy of communism, a false millennial middle-class communism.* You are not an individual: you have, I repeat, no right to that hair and to that hat: you are trying to have the apple and eat it too. You should be in uniform and at work, not uniformly out of uniform and libelling the Artist by your idleness. Are you idle?’

  Tarr had drawn up short, turned squarely upon Hobson, in an abrupt and disconnected voice screeching his question.

  Hobson stirred resentfully in his chair: he yawned a little.

  ‘Am I idle, did you say?’ he asked. ‘Yes, yes, I’m not particularly industrious. But how does that affect you? You know you don’t mean all that farrago. But where are you coming to?’

  ‘I have explained already where I come in. It is stupid to be idle: it is the most stupid thing. The only justification for your slovenly appearance it is true is that it is perfectly emblematic.’

  ‘My dear Tarr, you’re a very odd stick and if you’ll allow me to say so you should take water with it.* But I can’t follow you at all: why should these things occupy you? You have just told me a lot of things that may be true or may not: but at the end of them all—? Et alors?—alors?—quoi? one asks.’