Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) by Wyndham Lewis Read Free Book Online Page A

Streak
(novel).
1945
(Aug.) Returns to London.
1946–51
Art critic for
The Listener
.
1948
America and Cosmic Man
.
1949
(May) Retrospective Exhibition, Redfern Gallery.
1950
Rude Assignment
(autobiography). Tumour diagnosed.
1951
Loses sight. ‘The Sea-Mists of the Winter’ (essay on blindness).
Rotting Hill
(short stories).
1952
The Writer and the Absolute
.
1953
Special Lewis issue of
Shenandoah
.
1954
Self Condemned
(novel).
The Demon of Progress in the Arts
.
1955
Monstre Gai
and
Malign Fiesta
(novels,
The Human Age, Books 2 and 3
; sequels to
The Childermass
).
1956
The Red Priest
(novel). (18 July) Dramatization of
Tarr
broadcast on the BBC Third Programme. (July–Aug.) Tate Gallery exhibition
Wyndham Lewis and Vorticism
.
1957
(7 Mar.) Death, Westminster Hospital, London.
1973
The Roaring Queen
(novel), published posthumously.
1977
Mrs Dukes’ Million
(novel,
c
.1908–9), published posthumously.
1979
(Apr.) Death of Froanna.



TARR

PREFACE
    P UBLISHED ten years ago,
Tarr
, my first book, in a sense the first book of an epoch in England, is often referred to and a new edition has, for several years, been in demand. But in turning back to it I have always felt that as regards form simply it should not appear again as it stood, for it was written with extreme haste, during the first year of the War, during a period of illness and restless convalescence. * Accordingly for the present edition I have throughout finished what was rough and given the narrative everywhere a greater precision. A few scenes have been expanded and some material added.
    W YNDHAM L EWIS .
    November
1928

L’ouvrage eust été moins mien: et sa fin principale et perfection, c’est d’estre exactement mien. Je corrigerois bien une erreur accidentale, dequoy je suis plain, ainsi que je cours inadvertemment: mais les imperfections qui sont en moy ordinaires et constantes, ce seroit trahison de les oster. Quand on m’a dit ou que moy-mesme me suis dict: ‘Tu es trop espais en figures: Voilà un mot du cru de Gascoingne: Voilà une frase dangereuse (je n’en refuis aucune de celles qui s’usent emmy les rues françoises; ceux qui veulent combattre l’usage par la grammaire se mocquent): Voilà un discours ignorant: Voilà un discours paradoxe: En voilà un trop fol. [Tu te joues souvent, on estimera que tu dies à droit ce que tu dis à feinte.]—Ouy, fais-je, mais je corrige les fautes d’inadvertence non celles de coustume. Est-ce pas ainsi que je parle par tout? Me represente-je pas vivement? suffit.’
    Montaigne
, Liv. III, ch. v.
    Le plus simplement se commettre à nature, c’est s’y commettre le plus sagement. O que c’est un doux et mol chevet, et sain, que l’ignorance et l’incuriosité, à reposer une teste bien faicte!’
    Montaigne
, Liv. III, ch. xiii, ‘De l’expérience.’ *

PART I

BERTHA
CHAPTER 1
    P ARIS hints of sacrifice. But here we deal with that large dusty facet known to indulgent and congruous kind: it is in its capacity of delicious inn and majestic Baedeker, * where western Venuses * twang its responsive streets and hush to soft growl before its statues, that it is seen. It is not across its Thébaïde * that the unscrupulous heroes chase each other’s shadows: they are largely ignorant of all but their restless personal lives.
    Inconceivably generous and naïve faces haunt the Vitelotte Quarter. * —We are not, however, in a Hollywood camp of pseudo-cowpunchers (though ‘guns’ tap rhythmically the buttocks). * Art is being studied.—But ‘art’ is not anything serious or exclusive: it is the smell of oil paint, Henri Murger’s
Vie de Bohème
, * corduroy trousers, the operatic Italian model: but the poetry, above all, of linseed oil * and turpentine.
    The Vitelotte Quarter is given up to Art: Letters and other things are round the corner. Its rent is half paid by America. Germany occupies a sensible apartment on the second floor. A hundred square yards at its centre is a convenient space,