Finally, Tarr
A year after my stated intention, and after the friendly advice of Splinters readers I’ve finally got round to finishing the novel Tarr by Wyndham Lewis. Part of this wait is not my fault. Its incredibly hard to get hold of this book in the UK. NO British bookseller stocks it at all, and neither does UK Amazon. So, I booked it through Amazon US…and waited…and waited……until they confirmed it was no longer in stock there either. Eventually I tracked an old limited print copy down through a US supplier by the name of Alibris. Ta for Tarr fellers (hiLARity.) So, what did I think of it then? A note on the dingy character of Lewis himself first. As I read in Dorril’s biography of Mosley recently, the man was a great deal more than “flirtatious” with Fascism as is often soft-soapingly claimed. He was a contributor to Mosley’s publications as well as an admirer of Hitler. Yes, he came repudiate some of these positions, but an authoritarianism both wild and cold, and above all a contempt for common humanity as a whole never ceased to pervade his work. Having read a bit about his life, this moral misanthropy seems to have tied in with a general amorality in his day to day dealings too. Wyndham Lewis was deeply anti-humanist, and in short Not A Nice Chap. So with that firmly established in my mind, it would take a strong gift for language to keep my interest. And guess what? To a huge extent, Tarr succeeded in just that. Wyndham Lewis’ writing style in Tarr is truly unique, in the purest sense. Fingerprint-like, it could not be reproduced by anyone else. Harsh and metallic, the language is both strange and surgical, as though honed with scalpels themselves cut into a queer shape. In this it mirrors the qualities of the man’s art uncannily. With odd words jutting at obtuse angles, popping up at points no-one else would place them, Lewis describes his caste of dissolute artists in early Century Paris with an unnerving sense of the minutiae of their expressions, their proclamations, their actions and habits. The English artist Tarr, proclaiming his elitist art and world view is clearly an avatar for Lewis himself, and fascinates just as he repels. The German artist Kreisler meanwhile is a brilliant study in malignant obsession. Lewis is an artist of the surface, he does not try to describe the inner life of his characters, but leaves the reader to surmise from the strange and stark description on show. That he succeeds in this is a great achievement, that he succeeds in inspiring great interest in these thoroughly unsympathetic characters as a further achievement still. While the writing may be brilliant however, there is an unmistakable sense of emotional disengagement that the author shows, which in turn translates back in to my final feeling for the work. There is a sheer ice in the blood of its being, and this feeling never leaves. The book is a work of art, one which I admire hugely, which I enjoyed hugely, but it is not a book I could love. It mirrors its warped creator too completely for that.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- Wyndham Lewis -An Appeal
- Percy’s Portraits - More Wyndham Lewis
- Reading in 2007 - Tenuous Intent
- Lewis and Eugenides on Joyce, Modernism and formal innovation in general
- Saul Bellow - An Appeal
