Napoleon … captivity: Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821), French military and political leader. Imprisoned and exiled by the British to the island of St Helena in 1815, Napoleon lived there as recluse until his death.
voice-culture practitioner: a follower of the vocal training methods of François Delsarte (1811–71) who believed that it offered aesthetic and social benefits for the singer, orator, and average speaker alike, and whose ideas were popularized in the late nineteenth century by such books as Society Gymnastics and Voice Culture, Adapted from the Delsarte System (1890, Genevieve Stebbins). Tarr’s use of the term as an insult suggests that ‘voice culture’ was the sort of effete late-Victorian trend typically embraced by Hobson’s coterie.
pierrotesque: in the manner of Pierrot, a melancholy, silent, white-faced clown often portrayed as moonstruck, the French version of a stock character of the Italian Commedia dell’arte.
chimera: an unreal creature or imaginary amalgam. From a beast of Greek mythology that was composed of parts of several different animals.
Turner … washerwoman at Gravesend: J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851), English Romantic landscape painter, watercolourist and printmaker, who lived for more than fifteen years at the end of his life with Sophia Caroline Booth. Booth was described as ‘good looking’ and ‘illiterate’ (A. J. Finberg, The Life of J. M. W. Turner, R.A. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), 438), and had run a boarding house in Margate before becoming Turner’s housekeeper in Chelsea. She exemplifies a woman of low class and intelligence who provides romantic and sexual satisfaction to a man of genius, although Tarr misidentifies both Booth’s profession and the seaside town where she and Turner first met.
gallant: a fashionable young man.
ego: Latin for ‘I’. Less an allusion to Freud than to the idea of the ego propagated in Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (The Ego and Its Own), a work of pre-Nietzschean philosophy by Max Stirner (real name Johann Kaspar Schmidt (1806–56)). Stirner’s idea of a self that transcends the limitations of religion and politics also inspired the name of Dora Marsden’s journal The Egoist, and Lewis alludes prominently to Stirner and The Ego and Its Own in his play Enemy of the Stars.
old fruit-tin: familiar British address of the period, comparable to ‘old bean’. Perhaps also playing upon another period usage of ‘fruit’ to mean ‘easy mark’ or ‘one who is easily deceived’.
Dr. Jekyll … Mr. Hyde: the main character(s) in Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), a short novel by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94). Subsequently a catchphrase for a person who manifests two irreconcilable sets of behaviours and personalities in different situations.
collages: Fr., ‘gluing, sticking’, but also a work of visual art, strongly associated with Cubism, where an aesthetic whole is created from an assemblage of different forms and materials. According to the Oxford English Dictionary the word ‘collage’ first appears in English in Lewis’s 1919 aesthetic treatise The Caliph’s Design.
Oh Sex! oh Montreal!: a lampoon of the refrain ‘O God! O Montreal!’ from ‘A Psalm of Montreal’, a satirical poem by Samuel Butler (1835–1902). The poem pokes fun at the Victorian prudery of the Montreal Museum of Natural History, which has stored away two plaster casts of classical statuary. As the custodian explains to the visiting Butler, ‘The Discobolus is put here because he is vulgar, | He has neither vest nor pants with which to cover his limbs.’ The poet responds, as Tarr might ask Hobson about Bloomsbury, ‘Preferrest thou the gospel of Montreal to the gospel of Hellas?’ (The Shrewsbury Edition of the Works of Samuel Butler, vol. xx (London and New York, 1926), 393).
bear-garden: an arena designed for the baiting of bears, a popular spectacle in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Figurative for a place where riotous behaviour is common and permitted.
our emancipated Bohemia: since the late 1840s a byword for a community of freethinking artists who live apart from middle-class convention, by association with the actual Bohemia, a region of Central Europe now part of the Czech Republic, thought to be the place of origin of the Roma people, who are popularly known as ‘gypsies’.
invert-spinsters: ‘inversion’ was a period term for homosexuality, first used by the British sexologist Havelock Ellis (1859–1939), author of Sexual Inversion (1897). Given the propensity towards both bisexuality and homosexuality in the Bloomsbury group, these ‘invert-spinsters’ may be understood to be either unmarried lesbians or effeminate males.
vegetable ideas: perhaps in any of its obsolete senses of ‘organic’, ‘capable of growth’, or ‘of the soul’, as in the ‘vegetable love’ mentioned in ‘To His Coy Mistress’ by poet Andrew Marvell (1621–78). However, Tarr likely means ‘vegetable’ in one of its modern senses, as featureless, monotonous, and dull, the mode in which Lewis curses ‘VEGETABLE HUMANITY’ in Blast (1, p. 15).
roses and Victorian lilies: common subjects of Victorian painting and verse; the lily was a standard emblem of Victorian femininity, as in Sesame and Lilies (1865) by art critic John Ruskin (1819–1900). The allusion insults both Hobson’s masculinity and his credentials as a Modernist.
Yellow Press: unscrupulously sensationalist newspapers, which often featured scurrilous personal attacks on public figures. The name derived from an issue of the New York World in 1885 that featured a colour cartoon of a child in a yellow garment (‘The Yellow Kid’), as an eye-catching experiment to increase sales.
Chelsea artist: an area of south-west London, home to the Chelsea School of Art, which was founded in 1895. Chelsea was known as London’s bohemian quarter from mid-Victorian times until roughly the First World War, and was associated with painters, writers, and political radicals.
Wilde: Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), Irish playwright, novelist, and society wit. The ‘Wilde decade’ was the 1890s, a time associated with decadence, the art movement Aestheticism, and during which Wilde was imprisoned for ‘gross indecency’ with another man. Wilde attended Magdalen College (Oxford) from 1874 to 1878.
Liberalism: a political philosophy that emphasized individual rights and property ownership, and limited central government, emerging from the Enlightenment and associated in the mid-nineteenth century with the party and governments of Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone (1809–98). By the mid-1880s so-called ‘classical’ liberalism found itself under threat by the emergence of socialism, and the ‘death of liberalism’ became a subject for debate for some decades. See, for instance, the book The Strange Death of Liberal England (New York: H. Smith & R. Haas, 1935) by George Dangerfield (1904–86).
suburb of Carlyle and Whistler: i.e. Chelsea, home to Thomas Carlyle and painter James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903).
barley-water: a bland British soft drink, usually flavoured with lemon, popular in the 1890s.
lost generations described in Chekov: a frequent subject of the plays of Russian playwright Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904), particularly his last play The Cherry Orchard (1904). They were the fading landed aristocracy and ‘superfluous men’ of the mid-to late nineteenth century in Russia, who were soon to be swept away by the powerful forces of a rising middle class and by the political upheavals of the Russian Revolution.
communism: a socioeconomic and political doctrine based on the theories of German philosopher Karl Marx (1818–83), who desired the establishment of a classless society in which property and the means of production are owned communally. Tarr finds Hobson an ‘advanced-copy’ of Communism because Hobson has subordinated himself in thought and fashion to the ideas of a larger group, and because from the vantage point of 1928 he represents the kind of privileged ‘parlour socialist’ that Lewis criticized in 1927 in Time and Western Man (ed. Paul Edwards (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1993), 124–6).
take water with it: ‘moderate your ideas and rhetoric’, from the use of water to dilute strong whisky.
Baudelaire’s fable: a description of the first part of the 1864 prose poem ‘Assommons les Pauvres!’ (‘Let’s B
eat Up the Poor!’) by Charles Baudelaire (1821–67), number 49 of the collection of short prose poems published posthumously as Le Spleen de Paris in 1869. The parallel with Tarr and Hobson breaks down at the parable’s end, however, where the poet identifies the beggar as his equal, shares his purse with him, and urges him to treat other beggars in a similar manner according to the ‘théorie que j’ai eu la douleur d’essayer sur votre dos’ (‘theory I have had the sorrow of testing out on your back’; Œuvres Complètes, Petit poëmes en prose (Paris: Louis Conard, 1926), 172). The beggar agrees with the poet’s advice—an unlikely response from Hobson.
misnamed wideawake: usually ‘wide-awake’, a soft, low-crowned felt men’s hat resembling those worn by American Quakers. It is ‘misnamed’ because Tarr considers Hobson to be spiritually and aesthetically ‘asleep’.
gangster cut: a men’s fashion inspired by Parisian fascination with American popular culture and crime stories.
cocaine: an addictive drug originally used as an anaesthetic in Germany in the 1880s, but adopted recreationally by bohemian circles in Hollywood and Europe before the First World War. When applied to the gums the drug can produce this ‘frozen’ expression.
in excelsis: Lat., ‘to the highest extent’, from ‘Gloria in excelsis Deo’ (Lat., ‘Glory to God in the highest’), the Gloria of the Catholic and Anglican mass, known also as the Greater Doxology.
Charenton: a south-eastern suburb of Paris, or the nearby Charenton asylum, later the Esquirol hospital, where the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814) was famously confined from 1803 to 1814.
Romanys: the Roma people, gypsies.
Pernot: slight misspelling of Pernod Fils, the most popular brand of absinthe, a green anise-flavoured liquor with supposed narcotic properties derived from the substance thujone. One of the most popular alcoholic beverages in Paris, it was banned in France and most of Europe in 1915.
the Lunken: a rendering into English of an Italian mode of referring to a woman to a third party as ‘la’ followed by the subject’s first name or surname. (See also ‘the Fuchs’, p. 156.)
Balzac … character: Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), nineteenth-century French novelist. He was subject to a neglectful childhood, and his novels often feature young men trying to make their way in the world after difficult beginnings. In his novel Cousin Pons he wrote ‘La misère … donna cette grande, cette forte éducation qu’elle dispense à coups d’étrivières aux grands hommes, tous malheureux dans leur enface’ (‘Indigence … put them through that hard and stringent course of education which she dispenses in the form of whippings to great men, all of whom have had an unhappy childhood’) (French edn (Paris: Éditions Garnier Frères, 1962), 64; trans. Herbert J. Hunt (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), 79).
Boulevard Sebastopol: a thoroughfare running north–south in central Paris that divides the 1st and 2nd from the 3rd and 4th arrondissements.
aryan: pertaining to the ancient Indo-European Aryan people, in particular a racialist notion of the French diplomat, writer, and ethnologist Joseph-Arthur, Comte de Gobineau (1816–82), whose Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (Essay on the Inequality of the Human Race) (1853–5) identified the Germanic with the Aryan peoples as the peak of racial civilization. At the time of Tarr the term was not yet identified with the Nazi racial policies of the 1930s, or specifically with anti-Semitism.
Gioconda: an alternative name for the Mona Lisa, a painting of a woman wearing an enigmatic expression by Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519). One of the world’s most recognizable paintings and, as part of the Louvre, one of Paris’s most popular tourist attractions.
platonic: in the sense of ‘ideal’, taken from Plato’s theory of forms, rather than the common contemporary usage, derived from The Symposium, to describe an intimate but non-sexual friendship between a man and a woman.
Ancient Britons … coracles: the indigenous Celtic inhabitants of pre-Roman Britain. A ‘coracle’ is a small, lightweight boat used by the early Britons, and still used in parts of Wales.
bum: American slang for a disreputable or dissolute man; also a fool, sometimes intended teasingly. The Oxford English Dictionary lists a quotation from the Observer for 2 April 1933: ‘ “Bum”, a term of affectionate obloquy which young American friends have applied to me … means not merely a fool, but a droning fool.’
Passy: a considerably upscale area of Paris in the 16th arrondissement, west of the Louvre and the Champs-Élysées on the Right Bank, a suggestion of the success of Butcher’s automobile business.
Samaritaine: a large department store, located in the 1st arrondissement.
‘Monsieur Lounes … sortir’: Fr., ‘Mr Lowndes? I think so. I didn’t see him leave.’ ‘Lounes’ represents ‘Lowndes’ phonetically as pronounced by the French porter.
Boswell: James Boswell (1740–95), Scottish lawyer, diarist, and author of The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), a biography of his friend and man of letters Samuel Johnson (1709–84), and thereafter a byword for a constant companion, observer, and recorder.
sombrero: a broad-brimmed Spanish hat, rather than the more commonly pictured Mexican variety, usually made of felt or some other soft material, used to protect the head from sun.
impressionist’s … represented: the invention of portable easels and oil paints in tubes allowed the Impressionists to move out of the studio, thus their emphasis on painting directly before the subject. For early twentieth-century avant-gardists Impressionism—with its emphasis on the subjectivity of vision and blurring of the object’s contours—represented a faded and already institutionalized radicalism.
Floridas of remote invasions: an echo of Blast that suggests that Paris is ‘invaded’ by an American mildness from across the ocean: ‘A 1000 MILE LONG, 2 KILOMETER Deep BODY OF WATER even, is pushed against us from the Floridas, TO MAKE US MILD’ (Blast 1, p. 11).
balzacian … comic: in the 1842 ‘Avant-Propos’ to his enormous fictional project La Comédie humaine Balzac wrote that he wished to emulate in fiction naturalists such as Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hillaire (1772–1844) by attempting to understand ‘Espèces Sociales comme il y a des Espèces Zoologiques’ (‘Social Species as though they were Zoological Species’) (Œuvres complètes, Études de Mœurs: Scènes de la vie privée, I (Paris: Édition Louis Conard, 1953, p. xxvi).
Petit Suisse: an unripened soft cheese from the Normandy region, literally Fr. ‘little Swiss’, served in individually sized cylinders and either seasoned with herbs or sweetened and eaten as dessert.
Luxembourg Gardens: The Jardin du Luxembourg, the largest public park in Paris, located in the 6th arrondissement.
Venus of Milo: a Hellenic statue from the late second century BC, discovered in 1820 on the Aegean isle of Melos. A popular tourist destination at the Louvre and one of the most recognizable pieces of art in the world.
westphalian: adj., from Westphalia, a historical region and former duchy of west-central Germany east of the River Rhine.
air-baths: exposing one’s naked body to the air, thought by theorists and practitioners to offer benefits for physical and mental health.
sanguine of an Italian master: a drawing done with blood-red chalk or crayon, sometimes used for preliminary studies for oil paintings. Used extensively by artists of the Italian Renaissance, including Leonardo da Vinci, who made sanguines as sketches for The Last Supper.
Dryad-like on one foot: like a tree nymph of Greek mythology, portrayed in the Pre-Raphaelite painting The Dryad, painted in 1884–5 by Evelyn De Morgan (1855–1919) as standing with one foot on the ground and one foot in the hollow of the tree.
bourgeois-bohemian: Lewis’s coinage for a way of life that claims to be radical but that recapitulates the middle-class mores against which it claims to rebel.
Islands of the Dead: Die Toteninsel, a nightmarish painting by the Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901). It exists in five different versions, all of which portray an isolated rocky island with ‘gi
gantic cypresses’ in the centre, and a small boat moving towards it in which stand a white-clad oarsman—perhaps Charon, the boatman of the dead from Greek mythology—and what appears to be a coffin.
brass jars … Normandy: souvenirs from the northern region of France known for its copper and coppersmithery; brass is an alloy of copper and zinc.
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