Tarr (Oxford World's Classics)

by Wyndham Lewis

  He gesticulated, got the French guttural r with satisfaction, and said the quoi rather briskly.

  ‘You deafen me with your upside-downness. In any case my hat is my business!’ he concluded quickly, after a moment, getting up with a curling luscious laugh.

  The waiter hastened towards them and they paid him.

  ‘No I am responsible for you.—I am one of the only people who see: that is a responsibility.’ Tarr walked down the boulevard with him, speaking in his ear almost and treading on his toes.

  ‘You know Baudelaire’s fable* of the obsequious vagabond, cringing for alms? For all reply the poet seizes a heavy stick and lays about the beggar with it. When he is almost battered to pieces the man suddenly straightens out under the blows, expands, stretches; his eyes dart fire! He rises up and falls upon the poet tooth and nail: in a few seconds he has laid him out flat and is just going to finish him off, when a cop arrives. The poet is enchanted: he has accomplished something! Would it be possible I wonder to accomplish something of that sort with you? No. You are meaner-spirited than the most currish hobo. I would seize you by the throat at once if I thought you would black my eye. But I feel it my duty at least to do this for your hat: your misnamed wideawake,* at least, will have had its little drama to-day.’

  Tarr knocked his hat off into the road, and stepping after it propelled it some yards farther with a running kick. Without troubling to wait for the possible upshot of this action he hurried away down the Boulevard Kreutzberg.

  CHAPTER 2

  A GREAT many of Frederick Tarr’s resolutions came from his conversation. It was a tribunal to which he brought his hesitations. An active up-and-coming spirit presided over this department of his life.

  Civilized men have for conversation something of the superstitious feeling that ignorant men have for the written or the printed word.

  Hobson had attracted a great deal of steam to himself. Tarr was unsatisfied. He rushed away from the Café Berne still strong and with much more to say. He rushed towards Bertha to say it.

  A third of the way he encountered a friend who should have been met before Hobson. Then Bertha and he could have been spared.

  As he rushed along then a gaunt car met him, rushing in the opposite direction. Butcher’s large red nose stood under a check cap phenomenally peaked. A sweater and stiff-shouldered jacket, of gangster cut,* exaggerated his breadth. He was sunk in horizontal massiveness in the car—almost in the road. A quizzing, heavy smile broke his face open in an indifferent business-like way. It was a sour smile, as though half his face were frozen with cocaine.*

  Butcher was the sweetest old kitten, the sham tough guy in excelsis.* He might have been described as a romantic educating his english schoolboyish sense of adventure up to the pitch of drama. He had been induced by Tarr to develop an interest in commerce: had started a motor business in Paris, and through circularizing the Americans resident there and using his english connections, he was succeeding on the lines suggested.

  Tarr had argued that an interest of this sort would prevent him from becoming arty and silly: he would have driven his entire circle of acquaintances into commerce if he could. At first he had cherished the ambition of getting Hobson into a bank in South Africa.

  Guy Butcher pulled up with the air of an Iron-Age mechanic, born among beds of embryonic machinery.

  ‘Ah, I thought I might see you.’ He rolled over the edge and stood grinning archly and stretching in front of his friend.

  ‘Where are you off to?’ Tarr asked.

  ‘Oh, there’s a rumour that some roumanian gypsies are encamped over by Charenton—.’* He smiled and waited, his entire face breaking up expectantly into arch-cunning pits and traps. Mention of ‘gypsies’ generally succeeded in drawing Tarr—Guy’s Romanys* were a survival of Butcher’s pre-motor days.

  ‘Neglecting business?’ was all Tarr said, however. ‘Have you time for a drink?’

  ‘Yes!’ Butcher turned with an airy jerk to his car.

  ‘Shall we go to the Panthéon?’

  ‘How about the Univers? Would that take long?’

  ‘The Univers? Four or five minutes. Jump in!’

  When they had got to the Univers and ordered their drink, Tarr said:

  ‘I’ve just been talking to Alan Hobson. I’ve been telling him off.’

  ‘That’s right. How had he deserved it?’

  ‘Oh, he happened to drop on me when I was thinking about my girl. He began congratulating me on my engagement. So I gave him my views on marriage and then wound up with a little improvisation about himself.’

  Butcher maintained a decorous silence, drinking his Pernot.*

  ‘You’re not engaged to be married, are you?’ he asked.

  ‘Engaged to be married? Well, that’s a difficult question.’ Tarr laughed with circumspection and softness. ‘I don’t know whether I am or whether I’m not.’

  ‘Would it be the german girl, if you were?’

  Tarr chewed and spat out a skein of pale tobacco, eyeing Butcher.

  ‘Yes, she’d be the one.’

  There was a careful absence of comment in Butcher’s face.

  ‘Ought I to marry the Lunken?’*

  ‘No’ Butcher said with measured abruptness, flat but soft.

  ‘In that case I ought to tell her at once.’

  ‘That is so.’

  Tarr had wings to his hips. He wore a dark morning-coat whose tails flowed behind him as he walked strongly and quickly along, and curled on either side of his lap as he sat. It was buttoned halfway down the body. He was taller than Butcher, wore glasses, had a dark skin and a steady, unamiable, impatient expression. He was clean-shaven with a shallow square jaw and straight thick mouth. His hands were square and usually hot—all these characteristics he inherited from his mother, except his height. That he seemed to have caused himself.

  He impressed the stranger as having inherited himself last week, and as under a great press of business to grasp the details and resources of the concern. Not very much satisfaction at his inheritance was manifest and no arrogance. Great capacity was written all over him. As yet he did not appear to have been modified by any sedentary, sentimental or other discipline or habit: he was at his first push in an ardent and exotic world, with a good fund of passion from a somewhat frigid climate of his own. His mistakes he talked over without embarrassment—he felt them deeply. He was experimental and modest.

  A rude and hard infancy, if Balzac is to be believed, is quite the best thing for development of character.* Thereby a child learns duplicity and hardens in defence.

  An enervating childhood of mollycoddling, on the other hand, such as Tarr’s, has its advantages.—He was an only child of a selfish vigorous little mother. The long foundation of delicate trustfulness and irresponsibility makes for a store of illusion to prolong youth and health beyond the usual term. Tarr, with the Balzac upbringing, would have had a little too much character, like a rather too muscular man. As it was he was a shade too nervous. But his confidence in the backing of character was unparalleled: you would have thought he had an Age of Iron behind him, instead of an Age of Bibs and Binders.

  When he solicited advice, as now he was doing of Butcher, it was transparently a matter of form. No serious reply was expected from anyone except himself: but he appeared to need his own advice to come from himself in public.

  Did he feel that a man was of more importance in public? Probably not: but his relation to the world was definite and complementary. He preferred his own word to come out of the air; when, that is, issuing from his mouth, it entered either ear as an independent vibration. He was the kind of person who, if he ever should wish to influence the world, would do it so that he might touch himself more plastically through others. If he wanted a picture, he would paint it for himself. He was capable of respect for his self-projection, it had the authority of a stranger for him.

  Butcher knew that his advice was not in fact solicited. This he found rather annoying, as he wan
ted to meddle, loving Tarr and desiring to have a finger in all Tarr’s pies, especially where tenderness was in question. But his opportunity would come.

  Tarr’s affairs with Bertha Lunken were very exasperating: of all the drab, dull and disproportionately long liaisons, that one was unique! What on earth was this young master doing in this instance? Butcher could not fathom it. But it seemed that Tarr had acquiesced as an incomprehensible and silly joke.

  ‘She’s a very good sort; you know, she is phenomenally kind. It’s not quite so absurd as you think, my question as to whether I should marry her. Her love is quite beyond question.’

  Butcher listened with a slight rolling of the eyes, which was a soft equivalent for grinding his teeth. These women! These men!

  Tarr proceeded:

  ‘She has a nice healthy bent for self-immolation, not unfortunately, I must confess, directed by any considerable tact or discretion. She is apt to lie down on the altar at the wrong moment—even to mistake all sorts of unrelated things for altars. She once lay down on the pavement of the Boulevard Sebastopol* and continued to lie there heroically till, with the help of a cop, I bundled her into a cab. She is decidedly genial and fond of a gross pleasantry, very near to “the people”—“le peuple,” as she says, purringly and pityingly in her clumsy german french. All individuals who have class marked upon them strongly resemble each other don’t you agree—a typical duchess is much more like a typical nurserymaid than she is like anybody not standardized to the same extent as the nurserymaid and herself. So is Bertha, a bourgeoise or rather bourgeois-bohemian, reminiscent of the popular maiden: she is the popular maiden, at one remove.—I am not in love with the popular maiden.’

  ‘No!’ Butcher hastened to agree to that healthy sentiment.

  Tarr relighted his cigarette.

  ‘She is full of good sense. Bertha is a high-grade aryan* bitch, in good condition, superbly made; of the succulent, obedient, clear peasant type. At least it is natural that in my healthy youth, living in these Bohemian wastes, I should catch fire. I have caught fire; not much, slightly, at the tip.’

  ‘Stamp on it!’

  ‘No. That is not the whole of the picture. She is unfortunately not a peasant. She has german culture, and a florid philosophy of love. She is an art student. She is absurd.’

  Butcher did not dare to speak, but he shifted about approvingly, his eyes very bright indeed.

  Tarr struck a match for his cigarette.

  ‘You would ask then how it is that I am still there? The peasant—if such it were—would not hold you for ever; even less so the spoiled peasant.—But that’s where the mischief lies. That bourgeois, spoiled, ridiculous element was the trap, I discover. I was innocently depraved enough to find it irresistible: had it not the charm of a vulgar wallpaper, a gimcrack ornament? I fell to a cosy banality set in the midst of a rough life. Youthful exoticism has done it, the something different to oneself. Bertha is the one thing on earth I am not like myself, probably.’

  Butcher did not roll his eyes any more, they looked rather moist. He was thinking of love and absurdities that had checkered his own past, he was regretting a downy doll. But his friend’s statement had won him over as was always the case; such conviction lay very near the surface with the moist-eyed Guy Butcher.

  Tarr, noticing the effect of his words, laughed. Butcher was like a dog, with his rheumy eyes.

  ‘My romance, you see, is exactly the opposite to yours’ Tarr proceeded. ‘Pure unadulterated romanticism, look you Butch, is, when found in me, in much the same rudimentary state as sex. So they had perhaps better keep together? What do you say? I only allow myself to philander with little things. I have succeeded in shunting our noxious illusionism away from the great spaces and ambitions, that is my main claim to fame, so far. I have billeted it with a bourgeoise in a villa.’ He beamed suddenly at Butcher, who taken by surprise, coughed, staggered in his chair and mildly choked, his eyes filling with tears.

  ‘In a villa.’ Tarr pointed at the summit of a dusty little tree. ‘These things are all arranged above our heads, they are no doubt self-protective. All of a man’s ninety-nine per cent of submerged mechanism is daily engaged in organizing his life in accordance with his deepest necessity: each person boasts some invention of purely personal application. So there I am fixed with my bourgeoise in my skin, dans ma peau. What is the next step? The body is the main thing. But I think I have made a discovery. In sex I am romantic and backward. It would be healthier for all sex to be so: but that’s another matter. Well, I cannot see myself attracted by an exceptional woman, a particularly refined and witty animal—I do not understand attraction for such beings. Their existence puzzles me though I am sure they serve some purpose: but, not being as fine as men—not being as fine as pictures or poems—not being as fine as housewives or classical Mothers of Men—accordingly they appear to me to occupy an unfortunate position on this earth. No properly demarcated person as I am, is going to have much to do with them: they are beautiful to look at, it may be, but they are unfortunately alive, and usually cats: if you married one of them, out of pity, you would have to support the eternal grin of a Gioconda* fixed complacently upon you at all hours of the day, the pretensions of a piece of canvas that had sold for thirty thousand pounds. You could not put your foot through the canvas without being hanged. You would not be able to sell it yourself for that figure and so get some little compensation. At the most, if the sentimental grin would not otherwise come off, you could break its jaw, perhaps. No!’

  Butcher flung his head up, and laughed affectedly.

  ‘Ha! Ha!’ he went again.

  ‘Very good!—Very good!—I know who you’re thinking of’ said he.

  ‘Do you? Oh, the “Gioconda smile,” you mean? Yes. In that instance, the man had only his sentimental idiot of a self to blame. He has paid the biggest price given in our time for a living masterpiece. Sentimentalizing about masterpieces and the sentimental prices that accompany that will soon have seen their day, I expect: then new masterpieces in painting will appear again perhaps, where the live ones leagued with the old dead ones disappear.—Really, the more one considers it, the more creditable my self-organisation appears, I have a great deal to congratulate myself upon—you agree? Yes, you agree!’

  Butcher blinked and pulled himself together with a grave dissatisfied expression.

  ‘But will you carry it into effect to the extent—will you—would marriage be the ideal termination?’ Butcher had a way of tearing up and beginning all over again on a new breath.

  ‘That is what Hobson asked. No, I don’t think marriage has anything to do with it. That is another question altogether.’

  ‘I thought your remarks about the housewife suggested—.’

  ‘No. My relation to the idea of the housewife is platonic;* I am attracted to the housewife as I might be attracted to the milliner. But just as I should not necessarily employ the latter to make hats—I should have some other use for her—so my connection with the other need not imply an establishment. But my present difficulty centres round that question.—What am I to do with Fräulein Lunken? What, Butcher, is to be done with Miss Lunken?’

  Butcher drew himself up, and hiccuped solemnly and slowly.

  He did not reply.

  ‘Once again, is marriage out of the question?’ Tarr asked. ‘Must marriage be barred out? Marriage. Marriage.’

  ‘You know yourself best. I don’t think you ought to marry.’

  ‘Why, am I—?’

  ‘No. You wouldn’t stop with her. So why marry?’

  Guy Butcher hiccuped again, and blinked.

  Tarr gazed at his oracle with curiosity. With eyes glassily bloodshot, it discharged its wisdom on gusts of flatulent air. Butcher was always surly about women, or rather men’s tenderness for them: he was a vindictive enemy of the sex. So he invariably stood, a patient constable, forbidding Tarr respectfully a certain road. He spoke with authority and shortness, and hiccuped to convey the irrevocable
quality of his refusal.

  ‘Well, in that case’ said Tarr, ‘I must make a move. I have treated Bertha very badly.’

  Butcher smothered a hiccup. He ordered another lager, to justify the hiccups and prolong the interview.

  ‘Yes, I owe my girl anything I can give her. It is hardly my fault: with that training you get in England, how can you be expected to realize anything? I have the greatest difficulty sometimes in doing so. Listen. The University of Humour—that is what it is—that prevails everywhere in England for the formation of youth, provides you with nothing but a first-rate means of evading reality. All english training is a system of deadening feeling, a stoic prescription—a humorous stoicism is the anglo-saxon philosophy. Many of the results are excellent: it saves from gush in many cases; in times of crisis or misfortune it is an excellent armour. The english soldier gets his special cachet from that. But for the sake of this wonderful panacea—english humour—the English sacrifice so much. It is the price of empire, if you like. It would be better to face our imagination and our nerves without this drug. And then once this armature breaks down, the man underneath is found in many cases to have become softened by it; he is subject to shock, over-sensitiveness, and indeed many ailments not met with in the more direct races. Their superficial sensitiveness allows of a harder core: our core is soft, because of course our skin is so tough. To set against this, it is true you have the immense reserves of delicacy, touchiness, sympathy, that this envelope of cynicism has accumulated. It has served english literary art in a marvellous way: but probably it is more useful for art than for practical affairs. Then the artist could always look after himself. Anyhow, the time seems to have arrived in my life, as I consider it has arrived in the life of the nation, to discard this husk. I’m all for throwing off humour: life must be met on other terms than those of fun and sport now. The time has come. Otherwise—disaster!’

  Butcher guffawed provocatively: Tarr joined him. They both quaffed their beer.

  ‘You’re a dangerous man’ said Butcher. ‘If you had your way you’d leave us stark naked—we should all be standing on our little island in the state of the Ancient Britons with coracles* on our backs and curls on our shoulders. Figuratively.’ He hiccuped.