Tarr (Oxford World's Classics)

by Wyndham Lewis

  Brocken ghost-mouse: during the phantasmagoric Walpurgisnacht scene of Goethe’s Faust, the protagonist breaks away from dancing with a young female witch when a red mouse hops out of her mouth. Commentators—and one of Havelock Ellis’s case informants in Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897–1910, vol. ii, History XIII)—interpret this moment as an emblem of extreme male fear of overt female sexuality.

  The Brocken, a mountain peak in the Harz mountains in Germany and the scene’s setting, receives its ghostly reputation from an optical illusion in which the light could project a climber’s image forward onto a wall of mist, creating an enormous glowing spectre. This phenomenon was much commented upon in Romantic literature, particularly in Die Harzreise (1826) by Heinrich Heine (1797–1856).

  the Duchess in Alice: a character in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), a fantasy by English author Lewis Carroll (real name Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 1832–98) who speaks at times in confounding paradoxes, and treats Alice with alternating condescension and affection. She has a baby who turns into a pig under Alice’s eyes, and shows little interest in the transformation—rather the reverse of Anastasya, who playfully objects to Tarr’s reduction of her body to the abstract status of ‘sucking-pig’.

  bis an den Rin—Geliebte: all of Prussia: Ger., ‘To the Rhine, beloved’, although Tarr mistakes Germany’s name for its own longest river, in German the Rhein, in French the Rhin, for which Rin may be a Germanic phonetic approximation.

  Ding an sich: literally Ger., ‘the thing in itself’, a term used by Kant in Kritik der reinen Vernunft (The Critique of Pure Reason, 1781) to refer to the reality of the object independent of sensory experience.

  harpie: usually ‘harpy’, a filthy, ravenous creature described in Greek and Roman mythology as having a woman’s face and body and a bird’s wings and claws. Used by association to mean a nagging or shrewish woman.

  Boulevard Rochechouart: a road situated at the foot of Montmartre hill and to its south, in the 9th arrondissement.

  ‘the face that launched a thousand ships’: a reference to Helen of Troy in the play The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (1st pub. 1604) by Renaissance English poet Christopher Marlowe (1564–93): ‘Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships | And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?’ (A-Text, v. i. 90–1).

  Grail-lady or any phantom of the celtic mind: the Lady of the Lake in Arthurian legend, a magical and misty figure who gives the sword Excalibur to King Arthur, or perhaps the enchantress Morgan le Fay. Celtic folklore is in general replete with female phantoms and fairies, many of which are described, for instance, in tales collected by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) in Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888).

  accent of Minnesota … Steppes: Anastaya’s multinational background, which combines her upbringing in the American Midwest with her Russian heritage.

  Weltweisheit, Wesengefühl: Ger., ‘worldly wisdom’, and ‘feeling for being’ (properly Wesensgefühl). The term Weltweisheit was used regularly in late eighteenth-century German thought to denote the full scope of philosophy; the term Wesensgefühl appears in the work of late German metaphysicians such as Eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906) and Ludwig Klages (1872–1956).

  expensive tripper’s restaurant: a restaurant for wealthy tourists, by inversion of the common nineteenth-century phrase ‘cheap-tripper’, or budget traveller.

  de puntos: a term from the sixteenth-century school of Spanish fencing, meaning thrusting at one another with rapiers or daggers (lit. Sp., ‘at points’). See, for instance, Mercutio in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, who warns of Tybalt’s backhanded thrust, his punto reverso (II. iv. 26).

  Pompous Pilate: a play on the name of Pontius Pilate, Roman procurator of Judaea (c.26–c.36), best remembered for presiding at the trial of Jesus and authorizing his crucifixion. Medieval English mystery plays often portrayed Pilate as a braggart who spoke in comically pompous rhetoric.

  motif: Fr., and Eng. by adoption: a recurrent element in a design or work of art, particularly a significant theme or image.

  ‘high,’ yellow: an American racialist term, often used offensively, to refer to the light skin of mixed-race people who share some African ancestry.

  socratically: in the spirit of philosophic inquiry represented by Socrates, presumably with an allusion to the eating and drinking of Plato’s Symposium.

  “all the world’s a stage” …’ ‘It was an actor who said that’: a quotation from As You Like It by William Shakespeare, spoken by the character Jaques (11. vii. 139). Shakespeare was a working actor who acted in supporting parts in many of his own plays.

  A mixed grill … dresser: an opening dish of several grilled meats, named after the Quai de Montebello in the 5th arrondissement, which runs alongside Notre-Dame Cathedral; a main course of two free-range chickens; a desert soufflé made with strawberries, pineapple, and maraschino liqueur; and a closing basket of fruit. The most elegant meal of the novel, juxtaposed with no little irony against the austere abstraction of the conversation.

  gibing: mocking, sarcastic.

  Roederer: champagne produced by the house of Louis Roederer (1809–70) in 1833. In 1909 Roederer became the official supplier of champagne to the Imperial Court of Russia.

  Mute inglorious Miltons: ‘Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest | Some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood’, a line from ‘Elegy written in a Country Churchyard’ by English poet Thomas Gray (1716–71), a meditation upon the many whose talents remained unfulfilled and have died unrecognized by the world (The Works of Thomas Gray in Prose and Verse (London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd, 1884), 76).

  Diderot … Princesse de Clèves: Denis Diderot (1713–84), French philosopher and writer. La Princess de Clèves (1678) was a novel by Madame de La Fayette (1634–93), but the princess of the anecdote in question was Catherine II of Russia, who is reported to have written to Marie Thérèse Rodet Geoffrin, ‘Your Diderot is a very extraordinary man. I cannot get out of my conversations with him without having my thighs bruised black and blue. I have been obliged to put a table between him and me to shelter myself and my limbs from his gesticulation’ (quoted in Arthur M. Wilson, Diderot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 632).

  the links: a golf course.

  colour line: the imaginary line segregating the races. In 1903 African-American scholar and activist William Edward Burghardt (W. E. B.) Du Bois (1886–1963) wrote in The Souls of Black Folk ‘the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line’ (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., p. vii).

  ‘No women pals?’: i.e. ‘No lesbian lovers?’

  “mauvais lieu”: Fr., ‘a brothel’, literally ‘a bad place’.

  Homely: Tarr uses the word to mean ‘inclined to domesticity’, Anastasya uses it to mean ‘physically unattractive’.

  acidulated demi-mondaine: a woman of doubtful reputation whose outlook on life has soured.

  Je fais de la réclame pour les Grecs!: Fr., ‘I’m an advertisement for the Greeks’, using a now-outdated French term for ‘advertisement’.

  ionian … hardly greek: Ionian sculpture, product of the Eastern region of ancient Greece. Known for giving the human body softer contours than in other Greek sculpture, although generally considered provincial and idiosyncratic when compared to the art of Athens.

  the Superman: the Übermensch or superior man postulated by Nietzsche in Also sprach Zarathustra, a term first translated into English as ‘Overman’ in 1895 but given its more common English form by George Bernard Shaw in his 1906 play Man and Superman. Anastasya’s phrase ‘efficient chimpanzee’ refers to the popularization (and partial distortion) of the theory of human evolution in The Descent of Man by English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–82) but is also implicit in Nietzsche’s prologue: ‘What is the ape to a human? A laughing stock or a painful embarrassment. And that is precisely what the human shall be to the overman’ (Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006), 6).

  sabots: Fr., wooden clogs traditionally worn by Breton peasants.

  enceinte: Fr., ‘pregnant’.

  a Roland for his Oliver: two friends, the former dramatically heroic and the latter commonsensical, battle-comrades in the army of Charlemagne in the medieval French chanson de geste ‘ Le Chanson de Roland’ (‘The Song of Roland’, c.1100). Roland ignores Oliver’s advice that he summon reinforcements by blowing his horn in battle; later, when the battle is almost lost, Roland blows his horn and dies. Tarr implies that Bertha’s pregnancy is another example of a self-defeating gesture performed too dramatically and too late.

  Kreisleriana: the name both of the book by E. T. A. Hoffmann (see note to p. 64) and a major work for piano in eight movements that was inspired by Hoffmann, Op. 16 (1838) by German Romantic composer Robert Schumann (1810–56). In Kreisleriana Hoffmann writes of his protagonist ‘In a disturbing way, his greatest suffering was frequently expressed in ludicrous terms’ (Musical Writings, 124).

  Wellington … traps: the Duke of Wellington supposedly predicted his defeat of Marshal Auguste Marmont’s French forces at the battle of Salamanca on 22 July 1812, when he glanced at the troops through spyglasses from an observation post near where he was eating breakfast.

  Gainsborough and Goya: English portrait and landscape painter Thomas Gainsborough (1727–88), and Spanish painter and printmaker Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828). Great artists of very different sensibilities, impossible to blend. Gainsborough produced aristocratic canvases typified by formal perfection and evanescent colours, while Goya inclined, particularly in his late work, to proto-expressionist explorations of nightmare.

  Juggernaut: an unstoppable force that crushes everything in its path, from Hindi Jagannāth, literally, ‘lord of the world’, a title of Vishnu.

  mesmeric: hypnotic, from the idea of animal magnetism developed by Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815).

  peculiar: i.e. because of the ‘manliness’ of her overt sexuality and superior intellect if Tarr allied himself with Anastasya he would feel like an intellectual ‘pederast’. For the German intellectual lineage of Tarr’s misogyny and distrust of accomplished women, see, for instance, Schopenhauer, who wrote ‘Only the male intellect, clouded by the sexual impulse, could call the undersized, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-legged sex the fair sex; for in this impulse is to be found its whole beauty … the most eminent minds of the whole sex have never been able to produce a single, really great, genuine, and original achievement in the fine arts, or to bring anywhere into the world a work of permanent value’ (‘On Women’, Parerga and Paralipomena, 619–20) or Nietzsche, who writes in Zarathustra, 41, ‘Women are not yet capable of friendship: women are still cats, and birds. Or, at best, cows.’

  the Mairie of a fashionable Quarter: each arrondissement of Paris has its own mairie or town hall, where civil marriage ceremonies were performed. Tarr’s choice of a ‘fashionable Quarter’ suggests his comic partial fall into the bourgeois niceties against which he has railed throughout the novel.

  hors de combat: Fr., ‘disabled’, literally ‘out of combat’, referring here to the indisposition of late pregnancy.

  rue Servandoni: a street in the 6th arrondissement, near the Luxembourg Gardens.

  Luxembourg Museum: the Musée du Luxembourg, situated near the Palais du Luxembourg.

  the Drowned Girl: the peaceful, smiling death mask of ‘L’inconnue de la Seine’ (‘the unknown girl of the Seine’), an anonymous girl who drowned in Paris in the late nineteenth century. Reproductions of the mask were popular for decades among artists and impressionable young women, the subject of a kind of early twentieth-century Romantic cult of suicide. As A. Alvarez notes, ‘During the 1920s and early 1930s, all over the Continent, nearly every student of sensibility had a plaster cast of her death-mask’ (The Savage God: A Study of Suicide (New York: Random House, 1972), 133).

  Equal Rights and the Perfectibility of the Species: in the Second Discourse Rousseau describes ‘perfectibility’ as a quality that separates man from the animals, but also paradoxically ‘the source of all of man’s miseries … the faculty which, by dint of time, draws him out of that original condition in which he would spend tranquil and innocent days’ (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Discourses and other Early Political Writings, trans. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 141).

  Place des Vosges: the oldest square in Paris, in the Marais district, part of the 3rd and 4th arrondissements. Although across the Seine, not in fact remarkably far from Montparnasse—closer, indeed, than Montmartre—but in a neighbourhood not associated with artists, and not previously represented in the novel.

  Rose Fawcett … Prism Dirkes: names that suggests Tarr’s continued oscillation between women who are respectively like Bertha and like Anastasya. The first combines Bertha’s flowery Romanticism (‘Rose’) with her emotional fluidity (‘Faucet’); the second suggests both Anastasya’s angular beauty (‘Prism’) and her dangerous incisiveness (a ‘Dirk’ is a kind of dagger).

  APPENDIX

  eight years ago: probably 1908, although the mathematics would suggest 1907. Lewis signed and dated the Epilogue to the serialized Tarr ‘P. Wyndham Lewis 1915’, an attribution retained in the English 1918 Egoist Press edition.

  Prussian germs … past year: in early 1915 the German army attacked using shells filled with xylyl bromide, and in April 1915 they attacked with poisonous chlorine gas during the second battle of Ypres. Nearly 6000 Allied soldiers died from such attacks before the adoption of gas masks later in 1915.

  flames of Louvain: in August 1914 German troops burned and looted most of the Belgian town of Louvain, killing hundreds of civilians and destroying its fifteenth-century university and library. This devastation became an international cause célèbre and a symbol for the brutality of the German war effort.

  brain-waves and titanic orchestrations: the influential histories of German philosophy and of titanic Romantic musical composition, from Beethoven to Wagner.

  stray Irishman or American: Irish novelist James Joyce and American poet Ezra Pound.

  Italian Futurist littérateur: Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti (1876–1944), Italian poet, self-promoter, and founder of the Futurist movement; littérateur: Fr., pejorative, ‘literary hack’.

  Arsène Lupins: versions of the wildly popular fictional gentleman thief, a literary character created in 1905 by French author Maurice Leblanc (1864–1941). The character of Lupin featured in twenty volumes by Leblanc, as well as subsequent sequels by other hands.

  Over-man … Europe: vulgarized versions of Nietzsche’s ideas pervaded intellectual Europe in the years surrounding the First World War. The first serial instalment of Tarr, for instance, was followed in the same column by an essay on Nietzsche and German aggression (‘Second-Rate Supermen’, Honor M. Pulley, The Egoist (3/4, 1 April 1916), 63).

  maudlin and self-defensive Grin: an echo of Blast 1: ‘BLAST HUMOUR Quack ENGLISH drug for stupidity and sleepiness’ (p. 17).

  Charlie Chaplin: Charles Spencer Chaplin (1889–1977), English comedian and filmmaker, in 1915 an international phenomenon, the most widely recognized and highly paid entertainer in the world. Despite his respect for Chaplin, Lewis came to view the universal popularity of Chaplin’s Tramp as a sign of modern culture’s increasingly debased childishness, particularly in Time and Western Man (1927).

  German Madonna … face: the painting Madonna with the Carnation (1478–80), also known as the Munich Madonna, an early work of Leonardo da Vinci that hangs in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, Germany. Deterioration and subsequent improper restoration has caused surface distortions to the painting, which is especially noticeable on the Madonna’s face.

  Shaw’s ‘bloody’ schoolgirl way: several of the plays of George Bernard Shaw, such as Mrs Warren’s Profession (1893), were considered scandalous in the early twentieth century. To Lewis their treatment of ‘adult’ subjects was merely quaintly ‘sh
ocking’ in a way easily assimilated by middle-class taste. In Blasting & Bombardiering, Lewis later wrote, ‘I am rather what Mr. Shaw would have been if he had been an artist … and if he had been more richly endowed with imagination, emotion, intellect and a few other things. (He said he was a finer fellow than Shakespeare. I merely prefer myself to Mr. Shaw)’ (2nd rev. ed.; Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967, p. 3).