Tarr

"Tarr" is a modernist novel by Wyndham Lewis, written in 1909-11, revised and expanded in 1914-15 and first serialized in "The Egoist" from April 1916 until November 1917. The American version was published in 1918, with an English edition appearing shortly afterwards.¹ Set in the bohemian milieu of pre-war Paris, it presents two artists, the Englishman Tarr and the German Kreisler, and their struggles with money, women, and social situations. The novel abounds in somewhat Nietzschean themes. Tarr, generally thought to be modelled on Lewis himself, displays disdain for the 'bourgeois-bohemians' around him, and vows to 'throw off humour' which he regards—especially in its English form—as a 'means of evading reality' unsuited to ambition and the modern world. This very self-conscious attitude and the situations that it brings about are, ironically, a major source of the novel's pervasive dark humour. Kreisler is a violent German Romantic of protean energy, a failure as an artist, and in many ways steals the focus of the novel. An indication of the extremity of his vivid portrait is Lewis's own wondering several years later if he had, in Kreisler, anticipated the personality of Hitler.

The American first edition used a punctuation mark (resembling an equals sign: '=') between sentences (after full stops, exclamation marks or question marks). It has been claimed that these were an attempt by Lewis, an artist, to introduce 'painterly strokes' into literature. This has, however, been disputed by Dr. John Constable, who believes that they are nothing more than a German punctuation mark briefly adopted by Lewis. Lewis himself wrote to Ezra Pound about this when reconstructing missing parts of the manuscript for the U.S. edition: "Were those parallel lines = Quinn mentions kept going by the Egoist, or not? Could not they be disinterred, & used by Knopf?" (Lewis to Pound, October 1917). Evidently not all were disinterred, as large stretches of the book as published are without them.

Lewis extensively revised the novel (as with some other of his early works) for a new edition in 1928, adding a new Jewish character, who is portrayed in an anti-semitic light, and altering many of what may be considered the best passages of the earlier novel.

¹O'Keeffe, Paul, ed. Tarr: The 1918 Version. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1996, 5.