braves: Native American warriors. On the stereotype of their impassivity, see the note to p. 59.
card upon a plate: a French duel required the formal exchange of calling cards. According to formal etiquette, a gentleman visiting another gentleman at a restaurant or hotel under ordinary circumstances would send in his calling card, often on a servant’s silver tray, and wait in the reception area for his acquaintance to come and greet him. Refusal to greet the sender of the card meant rejection of the visitor’s society, and ripping it up would have been a grave public insult.
‘five o’clock’: a small late afternoon meal, in imitation of the British tea. The Pall Mall Gazette noted in the late nineteenth century that ‘the little lunch, the five o’clock, imported from abroad, is now completely acclimatized at Paris’ (quoted by the New York Times, 18 December 1885).
blinded his opponent: an absurdity, but possibly a distortion through gossip or imagination of the Russian having participated in a so-called ‘blind duel’, where only one of the two pistols is loaded.
second: a trusted representative for the participant in a duel, who carries and receives the challenge, arranges the time and place—usually at dawn—makes sure the weapons are equal and properly loaded, and ascertains that the duel is conducted fairly.
justify the use of a revolver: a matter requiring some nice distinctions in duelling etiquette, for the offence could be neither too slight nor too substantial. Two artists almost duelled in Paris in 1914 when the New York sculptor Edgar Macadams struck a blow at Waldemar George, Polish-French art critic and future contributor to the second issue of Lewis’s journal The Tyro (1922), knocking him unconscious. George’s seconds considered the blow to be too hard to fall under the rules of duelling rather than the purview of the law courts. George explained ‘had Mr. Macadams slapped me or called me names swords or pistols would have been in order, but he gave me a knockout blow, which is a form of attack that they classify as a “coup d’apache”, too violent for gentlemen to settle among themselves’ (New York Times, 14 May 1914; for apache, see note to p. 252).
the french laws would sanction quite a bad wound: laws dealing with duelling in France were far more liberal than in Germany, because French duels seldom resulted in bloodshed or death—a subject of much derision by Germans, who took the culture of honour, and the bloodiness of its result, far more seriously than their French counterparts. A Frenchman noted in 1890 ‘when the duel takes place under conditions of irreproachable fairness, even though it should have a fatal issue, adversaries and witnesses escape most of the time unharmed from the tribunal’ (quoted by Kevin McAleer, Dueling: The Cult of Honor in Fin-de-siècle Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 184).
scottish solemnity: a national stereotype, associated, among other cultural attributes, with the extreme severity of Scottish Calvinist worship from the time of the eighteenth century.
dummy: one who acts as a tool for another.
mountebank: originally a charlatan or seller of dubious goods, or an itinerant street entertainer; more generally, one who makes false claims for personal gain.
Sphinx: an enigmatic or inscrutable person, from the monster of Greek mythology, having the head of a woman and the body of a winged lion, that terrorized the city of Thebes until Oedipus successfully answered the riddle it posed to all passers-by.
Luitpold: a famous café in Munich, once the city’s most spectacular, named for Prince Luitpold of Bavaria (1821–1912). Lewis spent some time at this café with young German officers during a trip to Germany in 1906 (letter to his mother, The Letters of Wyndham Lewis, ed. W. K. Rose (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1963), Mar. 1906, p. 28).
fortifications: a fortification wall was built encircling Paris from 1841 to 1845, with a set of polygonal forts added as reinforcement during the late 1870s. Kreisler’s taxi will pass the original wall, which was demolished only after the First World War, and probably the Fort Mont-Valérien, which overlooks the Bois de Boulogne (see note below). The modern Paris ring road or périphérique was built in the 1970s in the space left by the demolished fortifications.
Bois: the Bois de Boulogne, a large park located along the western edge of the 16th arrondissement of Paris. The Bois and surrounds were a common setting for Parisian duels.
fugue: literally ‘flight’, a term from psychiatry, a reaction to shock that results in a patient’s hysterical disassociation from normal identity.
‘Browning’: a semi-automatic pistol designed by American firearms designer John Moses Browning (1855–1926) and manufactured in Belgium; the Browning no. 2, manufactured in 1903, became a favourite police weapon, and was adopted by several European armies. The Browning became particularly notorious in 1914, when the south Slav nationalist Gavrilo Princip (1894–1918) used a model 1910 pistol to assassinate the Archduke Ferdinand, starting the First World War.
khaki cigarette: strong Russian cigarettes called papirosi, made with dull-brown coloured unfiltered papers that are stuffed with cheap tobacco, usually attached to a tubular cardboard holder. In his 1947 novel Comrade Forest Michael Leigh describes them as ‘one-third tobacco, two-thirds mouthpiece’ (New York and London: Whittlesey House, McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1947), 143).
revolution of 1906: peasant rioting, including the sacking and burning of manor houses, occurred in Russia in the summer of 1905 as part of the Revolution of 1905. After subsiding in late 1905, such rioting resumed on a large scale in 1906.
oxide of bromium and aniseed: a pill to calm the nerves and settle the stomach. Bromium had been used as a sedative since 1857, usually in the form of potassium bromide, although the 1910 Practitioner’s Medical Dictionary by George Milbry Gould lists ‘Bromid, Basic’, ‘a compound of a bromid with the oxid of the same base’ used to ‘allay nervous excitement’ (Philadelphia: Blakiston’s Son & Co., p. 215). Aniseed was used to treat gas and indigestion; because of its pleasant scent and taste, it was also used to mask the taste of other medicines.
vitriol or syphilis: two agents capable of inflicting extreme physical harm—concentrated sulphuric acid, and a venereal disease that in its late stages can cause a number of deformations, including the collapse of the cartilage of the nose.
jujube: a fruit-flavoured lozenge.
body … woman: many images of such beaus, from eighteenth-century paintings to Dresden figurines, feature a similar posture; see, for instance, the central figure of the French dancing master in the print ‘The Levee’ from The Rake’s Progress by William Hogarth (1697–1764). However, the posture suggests the aggressiveness of German fencing as much as it does dancing.
pilules: small pills.
‘C’est bien … Laisse-moi’: Fr., ‘Fine, fine. Yes, I know. Let me alone.’
‘Mais dépêche-toi… faire ici’: Fr., ‘Hurry up. There’s nothing more for you to do here.’
gargoyle Apollo: a blend of a spout that projects from some Gothic buildings, such as Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, made in the shape of a grotesque animal or human figure, and the Greek god of light and the sun, who is often portrayed in art as a handsome young man.
one charge … twelve: as a rule duelling pistols were single-shot flintlock guns that required reloading between firings. The semi-automatic Browning could fire multiple rounds from a cartridge without reloading. The physician exaggerates, however: Brownings of the period could fire seven or eight rounds without reloading, whereas Brownings that could shoot a dozen rounds without reloading were not manufactured until 1935. Some duels were in fact, however, fought with Brownings before the First World War: see, for instance, the fictional duel between Settembrini and Naphta in Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain, 1924) by German novelist Thomas Mann (1875–1955).
Saint Cloud: a commune in the western suburbs of Paris, about 10 kilometres from the city centre.
excuperate: a word unattested elsewhere in the English language. Presumably, a coinage meaning ‘expectorate’, from Spanish escupir ‘to spit’.
Meaux:
a commune of Seine-et-Marne, in the metropolitan area of Paris, roughly 40 kilometres east-north-east from the city centre.
Rheims: English spelling of Reims, a city of the Champagne-Ardenne region of northern France, roughly 145 kilometres east-north-east of Paris.
Verdun: Verdun-sur-Meuse, a city and commune in north-east France, in the Lorraine region close to the German border.
Marcade: an apparently fictional town, possibly named after Eustache Marcadé (1390–1440), author of La Passion d’Arras, a massive French mystery play about the life and death of Jesus.
‘Qu’est-ce qu’il … Il n’y est pas’: Fr., ‘What do you want?’ ‘To see the superintendent.’ ‘You can’t see him. He isn’t in.’ ‘Foir le gommissaire’ represents phonetically Kreisler’s German-accented attempt to say ‘Voir le commissaire.’
spies: France’s hysterical fear of German spies, active from the 1870s through the Dreyfus affair of 1894—when a French officer was falsely accused of spying for Germany—reached a new peak in the late 1900s, stoked by both the yellow press and scaremongers in the French military. The New York Times reported on 12 September 1909 that ‘French officials have seen a German spy in every shadow’, and that there were then six spies caught in the act of collecting information from the Germans being held in a prison in Rheims (‘German Spy Scare Now Rife in France’).
huge foot-rules: most likely 2-foot carpenter’s rules, standard tools of the trade. Strips of wood or metal with a straight edge used to assist workmen in making straight work while plastering or keeping surfaces in plane. Such devices folded into four 6-inch lengths for convenience in carrying.
Fritz: nickname for the German name ‘Friedrich’, used particularly by English soldiers during the First World War as a derogatory term for a German soldier, or by extension any male German.
tuel and killt man: ‘I had a duel and killed a man’. Kreisler’s heavily accented German French is represented as heavily accented German English.
What a toupet!: colloquial Fr., ‘What nerve!’, from the idiom avoir du toupet, ‘to have the audacity’.
‘En voilà … D’bout!’: ‘My word, here’s someone who makes himself at home … Hey, buddy! You’d like to sleep in the open air? … Look here. You can’t spend the night here. Upsy-daisy! Hurry up. Get up.’
threatening an invasion: a common fear among the French in the early twentieth century, intensified by French intelligence, who invented German invasion schemes in the late 1900s and attributed them to British intelligence in an attempt to solidify the alliance between France and England. Fear was also stoked by the popularity of a genre of fiction, the anti-German ‘invasion novel’, that emerged in England and France in the 1870s as a response to the Franco-Prussian War. A prominent example, The Invasion of 1910 (1906), by the Anglo-French author William Le Queux (1864–1927), was a best-seller of the period.
contumelious Boche: insolent or disgraceful German.
pick oakum: to pull to pieces old tarry ropes, which were then used to make new ropes or to cover the planks of wooden ships to make them watertight, work that was very hard on the hands. A common occupation in Victorian and early twentieth-century prisons and workhouses.
bituminous: containing bitumen, a kind of pigment made from asphalt and oil, associated with the darkening and cracking of surfaces over time found in some paintings of the eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. It was also used in the world’s earliest surviving photograph, taken in 1826 by the French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (1765–1833). The ‘old picture’ in question may be a time-damaged painting or an early photograph.
apache, the coster-girl: period slang for a member of a Paris street gang, by analogy with the Native American tribe; a female costermonger, one who sells food in the street from a barrel, a term sometimes used as a general term of abuse.
the cure: at German spa towns such as Bad Nauheim and Baden-Baden leisured Europeans who suffered from real or imagined health problems ‘took the cure’, which often involved drinking from the spa’s mineral springs at prescribed intervals.
had made himself ‘de la partie’: Fr., ‘had joined in’.
des fauves, des grands fauves: Fr., ‘of the wild cats, of the big wild cats’, such as the tiger, but also with an inevitable echo of the bold aesthetic rather than sexual techniques of the Fauvist painters.
Tintoretto mantle: a loose, sleeveless cloak, often represented in exquisite detail in the paintings of Tintoretto (real name Jacopo Robusti, 1518–94), late-Renaissance Venetian painter.
open-work stockings … two-and-eleven-three the pair: lace or ‘fishnet’ stocking, then as now associated with overt sexuality. ‘Two-and-eleven-three’ (two shillings, eleven pence, and three farthings) was a common figure of the period used to mean ‘inexpensive’, if not ‘cheap’, and suggests that the stockings are of artificial silk, all of which adds to Anastasya’s erotic credibility as a working-class ‘genuine girl’.
Dago: an offensive term for a Spaniard or Italian, variant of the name ‘Diego’, at times used to disparage any foreigner.
Pantomime: a form of traditional popular British stage entertainment that tells a fairy-tale-like story, typically performed during the holiday season. The ‘Principal Boy’, or hero, is traditionally played by an attractive young woman costumed in a short, tight skirt, with fishnet stockings, and knee-high leather boots. At a time when female apparel typically reached down to the ankles, the dress of the Principal Boy had considerable erotic appeal for male viewers—particularly when she stood ‘stern-on’, with her back to the audience, allowing full masculine appreciation of her legs and posterior.
imposs: a colloquial abbreviation of the early 1920s for ‘impossible’ (Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, 7th edn. (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1970)). An anachronism, given the pre-War setting of Tarr, perhaps to demonstrate that Anastasya is well ahead of her time even in her use of slang.
street-arabs: period term for homeless children and vagabonds who lived on the streets, generally used as an insult.
‘The Man dreams but what the Boy believed’: from ‘The Cock and the Fox: Or, The Tale of the Nun’s Priest, from Chaucer’, in Fables Ancient and Modern by English poet John Dryden (1631–1700) (The Major Works, ed. Keith Walker (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2003), l. 336, p. 715).
Can-Can exhibitionists: a lively and risqué stage dance usually performed by a line of four women, known for its high kicks that exposed both petticoat and leg. Associated with such tourist night spots as the Moulin Rouge.
mohammedan eye: a lustful eye, from a persistent deprecatory stereotype in English culture about Moslems and ‘The Turk’, derived in part from the sexualized Houri of the Islamic paradise, and typified by such nineteenth-century erotica as The Lustful Turk or Lascivious Scenes from a Harum (1893).
Bovril-bathos: ‘Bovril’ is the trade name for a concentrated beef extract invented in 1889, usually diluted with hot water to make beef tea—thus, ‘highly concentrated’ bathos. Also, less commonly, a slang term for a brothel. Both meanings are likely implied here.
Romans: in the early years of the twentieth century, avant-gardists and intellectuals admired the pagan worship of sexuality while Christians condemned it, some attributing a number of pagan practices to the Romans in particular. For the latter see Sidney Calhoun Tapp, who wrote ‘When our Lord came, the Christ found all the world bowed down to sex worship, and pagan priests consecrating sex-lust for money. The Roman empire and the Roman world were filled with it’ (The Truth about the Bible (Kansas City, Mo.: Sidney C. Tapp International Biblical Society, 1916), 29).
mosaic code: usually capitalized: the ancient laws of the Hebrews, named after the prophet Moses, consisting of the injunctions found in the first five books of the Old Testament. The majority deal with sin and forms of uncleanliness in the mode that Ezra Pound termed ‘the Mosaic negative’ (‘A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste’, 1912).
stage Whittington
cat: a popular animal character in a pantomime based loosely on the folk tales that accrued around Richard Whittington (c.1354–1423), medieval merchant and later Lord Mayor of London. In most versions the intrepid Dick Whittington gains fame and fortune through the rat-catching prowess of his cat, who is played by a costumed actor.
Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) Page 44