The signal omission from my critical papers is an adequate book on
Wyndham Lewis; my excuses, apart from the limitations of time, must be
that Mr. Lewis is alive and quite able to speak for himself, secondly,
that one may print half-tone reproductions of sculpture, for however
unsatisfactory they be, they pretend to be only half-tones, and could
not show more than they do; but the reproduction of drawings and
painting invites all sorts of expensive process impracticable during
the years of war. When the public or the "publishers" are ready for a
volume of Lewis, suitably illustrated, I am ready to write in the
letterpress, though Mr. Lewis would do it better than I could.
He will rank among the great instigators and great inventors of design;
there is mastery in his use of various media (my own interest in his
work centres largely in the "drawing" completed with inks, water-color,
chalk, etc.). His name is constantly bracketed with that of Gaudier,
Piccasso, Joyce, but these are fortuitous couplings. Lewis' painting is
further from the public than were the carvings of Gaudier; Lewis is an
older artist, maturer, fuller of greater variety and invention. His work
is almost unknown to the public. His name is wholly familiar, BLAST is
familiar, the "Timon" portfolio has been seen.
I had known him for seven years, known him as an artist, but I had no
idea of his scope until he began making his preparations to go into the
army; so careless had he been of any public or private approval. The
"work" lay in piles on the floor of an attic; and from it we gathered
most of the hundred or hundred and twenty drawings which now form the
bases of the Quinn collection and of the Baker collection, (now in the
South Kensington museum).
As very few people have seen all of these pictures very few people are
in any position to contradict me. There are three of his works in this
room and I can attest their wearing capacity; as I can attest the
duration of my regret for the Red drawing now in the Quinn collection
which hung here for some months waiting shipment; as I can attest the
energy and vitality that filled this place while forty drawings of the
Quinn assortment stood here waiting also; a demonstration of the
difference between "cubism," _nature-morte-ism_ and the vortex of
Lewis: sun, energy, sombre emotion, clean-drawing, disgust, penetrating
analysis from the qualities finding literary expression in "Tarr" to the
stasis of the Red Duet, from the metallic gleam of the "Timon" portfolio
to the velvet-suavity of the later "Timon" of the Baker collection.
The animality and the animal satire, the dynamic and metallic
properties, the social satire, on the one hand, the sunlight, the utter
cleanness of the Red Duet, are all points in an astounding
circumference; which will, until the work is adequately reproduced, have
more or less to be taken on trust by the "wider" public.
The novel "Tarr" is in print and no one need bother to read my critiques
of it. It contains much that Joyce's work does not contain, but
differentiations between the two authors are to the detriment of
neither, one tries solely to discriminate qualities: hardness, fullness,
abundance, weight, finish, all terms used sometimes with derogatory and
sometimes with laudative intonation, or at any rate valued by one
auditor and depreciated by another. The English prose fiction of my
decade is the work of this pair of authors.
"TARR," BY WYNDHAM LEWIS[5]
"Tarr" is the most vigorous and volcanic English novel of
our time. Lewis is the rarest of phenomena, an Englishman
who has achieved the triumph of being also a European. He is
the only English writer who can be compared with
Dostoievsky, and he is more rapid than Dostoievsky, his mind
travels with greater celerity, with more unexpectedness, but
he loses none of Dostoievsky's effect of mass and of
weight.
Tarr is a man of genius surrounded by the heavy stupidities
of the half-cultured latin quarter; the book delineates his
explosions in this oleaginous milieu; as well as the débâcle
of the unintelligent emotion-dominated Kreisler. They are
the two titanic characters in contemporary English fiction.
Wells's clerks, Bennett's "cards" and even Conrad's Russian
villains do not "bulk up" against them.
Only in James Joyce's "Stephen Dedalus" does one find an
equal intensity, and Joyce is, by comparison, cold and
meticulous, where Lewis is, if uncouth, at any rate brimming
with energy, the man with a leaping mind.
Despite its demonstrable faults I do not propose to attack
this novel.[6] It is a serious work, it is definitely an
attempt to express, and very largely a success in
expressing, something. The "average novel," the average
successful commercial proposition at 6_s_. per 300 to 600
pages is nothing of the sort; it is merely a third-rate
mind's imitation of a perfectly well-known type-novel; of
let us say Dickens, or Balzac, or Sir A. Conan-Doyle, or
Hardy, or Mr. Wells, or Mrs. Ward, or some other and less
laudable proto-or necro-type.
A certain commercial interest attaches to the sale of these
mimicries and a certain purely technical or trade or clique
interest may attach to the closeness or "skill" of the
aping, or to the "application" of a formula. The "work," the
opus, has a purely narcotic value, it serves to soothe the
tired mind of the reader, to take said "mind" off its
"business" (whether that business be lofty, "intellectual,"
humanitarian, sordid, acquisitive, or other). There is only
one contemporary English work with which "Tarr" can be
compared, namely James Joyce's utterly different "Portrait
of the Artist." The appearance of either of these novels
would be a recognized literary event had it occurred in any
other country in Europe.
Joyce's novel is a triumph of actual writing. The actual
arrangement of the words is worth any author's study. Lewis
on the contrary, is, in the actual writing, faulty. His
expression is as bad as that of Meredith's floppy
sickliness. In place of Meredith's mincing we have something
active and "disagreeable." But we have at any rate the
percussions of a highly energized mind.
In both Joyce and Lewis we have the insistent utterance of
men who are once for all through with the particular
inanities of Shavian-Bennett, and with the particular
oleosities of the Wellsian genre.
The faults of Mr. Lewis' writing can be examined in the
first twenty-five pages. Kreisler is the creation of the
book. He is roundly and objectively set before us. Tarr is
less clearly detached from his creator. The author has
evidently suspected this, for he has felt the need of
disclaiming Tarr in a preface.
Tarr, like his author, is a man with an energized mind. When
Tarr talks at length; when Tarr gets things off his chest,
we suspect that the author also is getting them off his own
chest. Herein the technique is defective. It is also
defective in that it proceeds by general descriptive
statements in many cases where the objective presentment of
single and definite acts would be more effective, more
convincing.
It differs from the general descriptiveness of cheap fiction
in that these general statements are often a very profound
reach for the expression of verity. In brief, the author is
trying to get the truth and not merely playing
baby-battledore among phrases. When Tarr talks little essays
and makes aphorisms they are often of intrinsic interest,
are even unforgettable. Likewise, when the author comments
upon Tarr, he has the gift of phrase, vivid, biting,
pregnant, full of suggestion.
The engaging if unpleasant character, Tarr, is placed in an
unpleasant milieu, a milieu very vividly "done." The reader
retains no doubts concerning the verity and existence of
this milieu (Paris or London is no matter, though the scene
is, nominally, in Paris). It is the existence where:
"Art is the smell of oil paint, Henri Murger's _Vie de
Bohême_, corduroy trousers, the operatic Italian model ...
quarter given up to Art.--Letters and other things are round
the corner.
"... permanent tableaux of the place, disheartening as a
Tussaud's of The Flood."
Tarr's first impact is with "Hobson," whose "dastardly face
attempted to portray delicacies of common sense, and
gossamer-like back-slidings into the Inane, that would have
puzzled a bile-specialist. He would occasionally exploit his
blackguardly appearance and black-smith's muscles for a
short time ... his strong piercing laugh threw A.B.C.
waitresses into confusion."
This person wonders if Tarr is a "sound bird." Tarr is not a
sound bird. His conversational attack on Hobson proceeds by
a brandishing of false dilemma, but neither Hobson nor his
clan, nor indeed any of the critics of the novel (to date)
have observed that this is Tarr's faulty weapon. Tarr's
contempt for Hobson is as adequate as it is justifiable.
"Hobson, he considered, was a crowd.--You could not say he
was an individual.--He was a set. He sat there a cultivated
audience.--He had the aplomb and absence of
self-consciousness of numbers, of the herd--of those who
know they are not alone....
"For distinguishing feature Hobson possessed a distinguished
absence of personality.... Hobson was an humble investor."
Tarr addresses him with some frankness on the subject:
"As an off-set for your prying, scurvy way of peeping into
my affairs you must offer your own guts, such as they
are....
"You have joined yourself to those who hush their voices to
hear what other people are saying....
"Your plumes are not meant to fly with, but merely to slouch
and skip along the surface of the earth.--You wear the
livery of a ridiculous set, you are a cunning and sleek
domestic. No thought can come out of your head before it has
slipped on its uniform. All your instincts are drugged with
a malicious languor, an arm, a respectability, invented by a
set of old women and mean, cadaverous little boys."
Hobson opened his mouth, had a movement of the body to
speak. But he relapsed.
"You reply, 'What is all this fuss about? I have done the
best for myself.'--I am not suited for any heroic station,
like yours. I live sensibly, cultivating my vegetable ideas,
and also my roses and Victorian lilies.--I do no harm to
anybody."
"That is not quite the case. That is a little inexact. Your
proceedings possess a herdesque astuteness; in the scale
against the individual weighing less than the Yellow Press,
yet being a closer and meaner attack. Also you are
essentially _spies_, in a scurvy, safe and well-paid
service, as I told you before. You are disguised to look
like the thing it is your function to betray--What is your
position?--You have bought for eight hundred pounds at an
aristocratic educational establishment a complete mental
outfit, a program of manners. For four years you trained
with other recruits. You are now a perfectly disciplined
social unit, with a profound _esprit de corps_. The
Cambridge set that you represent is an average specimen, a
cross between a Quaker, a Pederast, and a Chelsea
artist.--Your Oxford brothers, dating from the Wilde decade,
are a stronger body. The Chelsea artists are much less
flimsy. The Quakers are powerful rascals. You represent, my
Hobson, the _dregs_ of Anglo-Saxon civilization! There is
nothing softer on earth.--Your flabby potion is a mixture of
the lees of Liberalism, the poor froth blown off the
decadent nineties, the wardrobe-leavings of a vulgar
Bohemianism with its headquarters in Chelsea!
"You are concentrated, systematic slop.--There is nothing in
the universe to be said for you....
"A breed of mild pervasive cabbages, has set up a wide and
creeping rot in the West of Europe.--They make it indirectly
a peril and a tribulation for live things to remain in the
neighborhood. You are a systematizing and vulgarizing of the
individual.--You are not an individual...."
and later:
"You are libeling the Artist, by your idleness." Also, "Your
pseudo-neediness is a sentimental indulgence."
All this swish and clatter of insult reminds one a little of Papa
Karamazoff. Its outrageousness is more Russian than Anglo-Victorian, but
Lewis is not a mere echo of Dostoievsky. He hustles his reader, jolts
him, snarls at him, in contra-distinction to Dostoievsky, who merely
surrounds him with an enveloping dreariness, and imparts his characters
by long-drawn osmosis.
Hobson is a minor character in the book, he and Lowndes are little more
than a prologue, a dusty avenue of approach to the real business of the
book: Bertha, "high standard Aryan female, in good condition, superbly
made; of the succulent, obedient, clear peasant type...."
Kreisler, the main character in the book, a "powerful" study in sheer
obsessed emotionality, the chief foil to Tarr who has, over and above
his sombre emotional spawn-bed, a smouldering sort of intelligence,
combustible into brilliant talk, and brilliant invective.
Anastasya, a sort of super-Bertha, designated by the author as "swagger
sex."
These four figures move, lit by the flare of restaurants and cafés,
against the frowsy background of "Bourgeois Bohemia," more or less
Bloomsbury. There are probably such Bloomsburys in Paris and in every
large city.
This sort of catalogue is not well designed to interest the general
reader. What matters is the handling, the vigor, even the violence, of
the handling.
The book's interest is not due to the "style" in so far as "style" is
generally taken to mean "smoothness of finish," orderly arrangement of
sentences, coherence to the Flaubertian method.
It _is_ due to the fact that we have here a highly-energized mind
performing a huge act of scavenging; cleaning up a great lot of rubbish,
cultural, Bohemian, romantico-Tennysonish, arty, societish, gutterish.
It is not an attack on the _épicier_. It is an attack on a sort of
_super-épicier_ desiccation. It is by no means a tract. If Hobson is so
drawn as to disgust one with the "stuffed-shirt," Kreisler is equally a
sign-post pointing to the advisability of some sort of intellectual or
at least commonsense management of the emotions.
Tarr, and even Kreisler, is very nearly justified by the depiction of
the Bourgeois Bohemian fustiness: Fräulein Lippmann, Fräulein Fogs, etc.
What we are blessedly free from is the red-plush Wellsian illusionism,
and the click of Mr. Bennett's cash-register finish. The book does not
skim over the surface. If it does not satisfy the mannequin demand for
"beauty" it at least refuses to accept margarine substitutes. It will
not be praised by Katherine Tynan, nor by Mr. Chesterton and Mrs.
Meynell. It will not receive the sanction of Dr. Sir Robertson Nicoll,
nor of his despicable paper "The Bookman."
(There will be perhaps some hope for the British reading public, when
said paper is no longer to be found in the Public Libraries of the
Island, and when Clement Shorter shall cease from animadverting.) "Tarr"
does not appeal to these people nor to the audience which they have
swaddled. Neither, of course, did Samuel, Butler to their equivalents in
past decades.
"Bertha and Tarr took a flat in the Boulevard Port Royal, not far from
the Jardin des Plantes. They gave a party to which Fräulein Lippmann and
a good many other people came. He maintained the rule of four to seven,
roughly, for Bertha, with the uttermost punctiliousness. Anastasya and
Bertha did not meet.
"Bertha's child came, and absorbed her energies for upwards of a year.
It bore some resemblance to Tarr. Tarr's afternoon visits became less
frequent. He lived now publicly with his illicit and splendid bride.
"Two years after the birth of the child, Bertha divorced Tarr. She then
married an eye-doctor, and lived with a brooding severity in his
company, and that of her only child.
"Tarr and Anastasya did not marry. They had no children. Tarr, however,
had three children by a Lady of the name of Rose Fawcett, who consoled
him eventually for the splendors of his 'perfect woman.' But yet beyond
the dim though sordid figure of Rose Fawcett, another rises. This one
represents the swing-back of the pendulum once more to the swagger side.
The cheerless and stodgy absurdity of Rose Fawcett required the painted,
fine and inquiring face of Prism Dirkes."
Neither this well-written conclusion, nor the opening tirade I have
quoted, give the full impression of the book's vital quality, but they
may perhaps draw the explorative reader.
"Tarr" finds sex a monstrosity, he finds it "a German study": "Sex,
Hobson, is a German study. A German study."
At that we may leave it. "Tarr" "had no social machinery, but the
cumbrous one of the intellect.... When he tried to be amiably he usually
only succeeded in being ominous."
"Tarr" really gets at something in his last long discussion with
Anastasya, when he says that art "has no inside." This is a condition of
art, "_to have no_ inside, nothing you cannot see. It is not something
impelled like a machine by a little egoistic inside."
"Deadness, in the limited sense in which we use that word, is the first
condition of art. The second is absence of _soul_, in the sentimental
human sense. The lines and masses of a statue are its soul."
Joyce says something of the sort very differently, he is full of
technical scholastic terms: "_stasis, kinesis_," etc. Any careful
statement of this sort is bound to be _bafoué,_ and fumbled over, but
this ability to come to a hard definition of anything is one of Lewis'
qualities lying at the base of his ability to irritate the mediocre
intelligence. The book was written before 1914, but the depiction of the
German was not a piece of war propaganda.