Tarr (Oxford World's Classics)
Read Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) Online
Authors: Wyndham Lewis
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Text © The Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust
Editorial material © Scott W. Klein 2010
First published as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2010
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ISBN 978–0–19–956720–1
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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics have brought readers closer to the world’s great literature. Now with over 700 titles—from the 4,000-year-old myths of Mesopotamia to the twentieth century’s greatest novels—the series makes available lesser-known as well as celebrated writing
.
The pocket-sized hardbacks of the early years contained introductions by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, and other literary figures which enriched the experience of reading. Today the series is recognized for its fine scholarship and reliability in texts that span world literature, drama and poetry, religion, philosophy, and politics. Each edition includes perceptive commentary and essential background information to meet the changing needs of readers
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Table of Contents
to navigate through the material in this Oxford World’s Classics ebook. Use the asterisks (*) throughout the text to access the hyperlinked Explanatory Notes.
OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
WYNDHAM LEWIS
Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
SCOTT W. KLEIN
OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
W
YNDHAM
L
EWIS
was a painter, novelist, critic, and the founder of Vorticism, the avant–garde art movement based in London before the First World War. Lewis was born in 1882 in Nova Scotia and moved with his mother to London in 1893. Following a brief formal education at the Slade School of Art, Lewis moved to Paris, where he painted, travelled widely on the continent, and gathered material for his fiction, returning to England in 1909. In 1914 and 1915 Lewis published the only two issues of the Vorticist review,
Blast
, with the participation of Ezra Pound and the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.
During the War, Lewis enlisted in the English army, serving as a gunner and bombardier. His first novel,
Tarr
, was published in 1918 in America and England with the wartime assistance of Ezra Pound. After the War, Lewis produced a wide range of art works, volumes of aesthetic and political criticism, such as
The Art of Being Ruled
(1926) and
Time and Western Man
(1927), the collection of short stories
The Wild Body
(1927), and the novels
The Childermass
(1928),
The Apes of God
(1930),
The Revenge for Love
(1937), and
Self-Condemned
(1954). During the Second World War, Lewis moved with his wife to the United States and Canada. He returned to England in 1945, where he continued to paint and write, until a pituitary tumour robbed him of his sight. He died in 1957 in London.
S
COTT
W. K
LEIN
is Associate Professor of English at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. He is the author of
The Fictions of James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis: Monsters of Nature and Design
(Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Appendix: Preface to the 1918 American Edition
Glossary of Foreign Words and Phrases
A
N
editor necessarily receives many kinds of help along the way, particularly when dealing with a novel such as
Tarr
, which expects many kinds of knowledge of its readers. I particularly thank Thomas Pfau, who assisted with translations from the German and with navigating some unfamiliar byways of German philosophy; Stephanie Pellet, who helped clarify subtleties of French usage; Paul Edwards, for his helpful comments on the annotations; and my wife Karen Potvin Klein, both for her substantial editorial assistance, and for many other varieties of patient support. My gratitude also to Wanda Balzano, Ian Duncan, Claudia Kairoff, Maria Makela, Carrie Preston, Jessica Richard, Dick Schneider, and David Weinstein, who provided advice in their respective fields of expertise.
The staffs at the Cornell University Library Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections and the Poetry Collection at the library of the University at Buffalo (State University of New York) provided invaluable help when using their archives of Wyndham Lewis’s letters and working materials. Finally, I am grateful to the Provost’s Office and the Archie Fund for the Arts and Humanities at Wake Forest University, whose support enabled me to work at these collections.
Tarr
, the first published novel by the writer, painter, and intellectual gadfly Wyndham Lewis, is the least known, most intractable, and arguably the funniest, of major early twentieth-century English novels. Where other once-shocking novels of the Modernist period have become domesticated by the universities and comfortably assimilated by contemporary taste,
Tarr
still snarls, as though through the bars of a cage, challenging approach by adventurous readers only. Recognition of its mixture of originality and vitality was part of the praise accorded to
Tarr
on first publication in 1918. Lewis’s friend and colleague Ezra Pound called
Tarr
‘the most vigorous and volcanic English novel of our time’, comparing it to the early work of James Joyce and claiming, ‘The English prose fiction of my decade is the work of this pair of authors’.
1
T. S. Eliot wrote in the literary journal
The Egoist
, ‘In the work of Wyndham Lewis we recognize the thought of the modern and the energy of the cave-man’, an encomium that Lewis would later often quote. But Eliot had also earlier declared that both
Tarr
and
Ulysses
, sections of which were appearing in the
Little Review
, ‘are terrifying. That is the test of a new work of art …
Tarr
is a commentary upon a part of modern civilization: now it is like our civilization criticized, our acrobatics animadverted upon adversely, by an orang-outang of genius, Tarzan of the Apes.’
2
Lewis’s explosive sensibility became one of the novel’s early selling points. Recognizing the value of controversy,
The Egoist
—which serialized
Tarr
and then became its English publisher as a novel—ran a full-page advertisement containing press extracts of the novel’s reviews. According to this advertisement, the
Weekly Dispatch
echoed Pound’s and Eliot’s series of brilliant and destructive comparisons, calling
Tarr
‘a thunderbolt’, while the
Manchester Guardian
warned ‘one must bring a fine persistence and an insatiable appetite for both aesthetic theory and squalor’.
Everyman
perhaps summed up the general paradoxical literary attitude towards
Tarr
, declaring, ‘In spite
of its perverseness, nastiness, and bad temper,
Tarr
bears the marks of a strong, though unbalanced, intellect.’
3