Tarr (Musaicum Rediscovered Classics). Wyndham Lewis

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      He impressed you as having inherited himself last week, and as under a great press of business to grasp the details and resources of the concern. Not very much satisfaction at his inheritance, and no swank. Great capacity was printed all over him.—He did not appear to have been modified as yet by any sedentary, sentimental, or other discipline or habit. He was at his first push in an ardent and exotic world, with a good fund of passion from a frigid climate of his own.—His mistakes he talked over without embarrassment. He felt them deeply. He was experimental and modest.

      A rude and hard infancy, according to Balzac, is best for development of character. A child learns duplicity, and hardens in defence.—An enervating childhood of molly-coddling, on the other hand, such as Tarr’s, has its advantages.—He was an only child of a selfish, vigorous mother. The long foundation of delicate trustfulness and childishness makes for a store of illusion to prolong youth and health beyond the usual term. Tarr, with the Balzac upbringing, would have had a little too much character, like a rather too muscular man. As it was, he was a shade too nervous. But his confidence in the backing of character was unparalleled. You would have thought he had an iron-field behind him.

      When he solicited advice, it was transparently a matter of form. But he appeared to need his own advice to come from himself in public.—Did he feel himself of more importance in public?—His relation to the world was definite and complementary. He preferred his own word to come out of the air; when, that is, issuing from his mouth, it entered either ear as an independent vibration. He was the kind of man who, if he ever should wish to influence the world, would do it so that he might touch himself more plastically through others. He would paint his picture for himself. He was capable of respect for his self-projection. It had the authority of a stranger for him.

      Butcher knew that his advice was not really solicited.—This he found rather annoying, as he wanted to meddle. But his opportunity would come.—Tarr’s affairs with Bertha Lunken were very exasperating. Of all the drab, dull, and disproportionately long liaisons, that one was unique! He had accepted it as an incomprehensible and silly joke.

      “She’s a very good sort. You know, she is phenomenally kind. It’s not quite so absurd as you think, my question as to whether I should marry her. Her love is quite beyond question.”

      Butcher listened with a slight rolling of the eyes, which was a soft equivalent for grinding his teeth.

      Tarr proceeded:

      “She has a nice healthy penchant for self-immolation; not, unfortunately, directed by any considerable tact or discretion. She is apt to lie down on the altar at the wrong moment—even to mistake all sorts of unrelated things for altars. She once lay down on the pavement of the Boulevard Sebastopol, and continued to lie there heroically till, with the help of an agent, I bundled her into a cab. She is genial and fond of a gross pleasantry, very near to ‘the people’—le peuple, as she says, purringly and pityingly. All individuals who have class marked on them strongly resemble each other. A typical duchess is much more like a typical nurserymaid than she is like anybody not standardized to the same extent. So is Bertha, a bourgeoise, or rather bourgeois-Bohemian, reminiscent of the popular maiden.”

      Tarr relighted his cigarette.

      “She is full of good sense.—She is a high standard Aryan female, in good condition, superbly made; of the succulent, obedient, clear, peasant type. It is natural that in my healthy youth, living in these Bohemian wastes, I should catch fire. But that is not the whole of the picture. She is unfortunately not a peasant. She has German culture, and a florid philosophy of love.—She is an art-student.—She is absurd.”

      Tarr struck a match for his cigarette.

      “You would ask then how it is that I am still there? The peasant-girl—if such it were—would not hold you for ever; even less so the spoiled peasant.—But that’s where the mischief lies.—That bourgeois, spoiled, ridiculous element was the trap. I was innocently depraved enough to find it irresistible. It had the charm of a vulgar wall-paper, a gimcrack ornament. A cosy banality set in the midst of a rough life. Youthful exoticism has done it, the something different from oneself.”

      Butcher did not roll his eyes any more. They looked rather moist. He was thinking of love and absurdities that had checkered his own past, and was regretting a downy doll. He was won over besides by Tarr’s plaidoirie, as he always was. His friend could have convinced him of anything on earth within ten minutes.

      Tarr, noticing the effect of his words, laughed. Butcher was like a dog, with his rheumy eyes.

      “My romance, you see, is exactly inverse to yours,” Tarr proceeded. “But pure unadulterated romanticism with me is in about the same rudimentary state as sex. So they had perhaps better keep together? I only allow myself to philander with little things. I have succeeded in shunting our noxious illusionism away from the great spaces and ambitions. I have billeted it with a bourgeoise in a villa. These things are all arranged above our heads. They are no doubt self-protective. The whole of a man’s ninety-nine per cent. of obscurer mechanism is daily engaged in organizing his life in accordance with his deepest necessity. Each person boasts some notable invention of personal application only.

      “So there I am fixed with my bourgeoise in my skin, dans ma peau. What is the next step?—The body is the main thing.—But I think I have made a discovery. In sex I am romantic and arriéré. It would be healthier for all sex to be so. But that is another matter. Well, I cannot see myself attracted by an exceptional woman—‘spiritual’ woman—‘noble soul,’ or even a particularly refined and witty animal.—I do not understand attraction for such beings.—Their existence appears to me quite natural and proper, but, not being as fine as men; not being as fine as pictures or poems; not being as fine as housewives or classical Mothers of Men; they appear to me to occupy an unfortunate position on this earth. No man properly demarcated as I am will have much to do with them. They are very beautiful to look at. But they are unfortunately alive, and usually cats. If you married one of them, out of pity, you would have to support the eternal grin of a Gioconda fixed complacently on you at all hours of the day, the pretensions of a piece of canvas that had sold for thirty thousand pounds. You could not put your foot through the canvas without being hanged. You would not be able to sell it yourself for that figure, and so get some little compensation. Tout au plus, if the sentimental grin would not otherwise come off, you could break its jaw, perhaps.”

      Butcher flung his head up, and laughed affectedly.

      “Ha ha!”—he went again.

      “Very good!—Very good!—I know who you’re thinking of,” he said.

      “Do you? Oh, the ‘Gioconda smile,’ you mean?—Yes.—In that instance, the man had only his silly sentimental self to blame. He has paid the biggest price given in our time for a living masterpiece. Sentimentalizing about masterpieces and sentimental prices will soon have seen their day, I expect. New masterpieces in painting will then appear again, perhaps, where the live ones leagued with the old dead ones disappear.—Really, the more one considers it, the more creditable and excellent my self-organization appears. I have a great deal to congratulate myself upon.”

      Butcher blinked and pulled himself together with a grave dissatisfied expression.

      “But will you carry it into effect to the extent?—Will you?—Would marriage be the ideal termination?”—Butcher had a way of tearing up and beginning all over again on a new breath.

      “That is what Hobson asked.—No, I don’t think marriage has anything to do with it. That is another question СКАЧАТЬ