Tarr by Wyndham Lewis

First published: 1918; revised, 1928

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of plot: About 1910

Locale: Paris

Principal characters

• Frederick Tarr, an English artist
• Bertha Lunken, Tarr’s fiancé and a German art student
• Otto Kreisler, a German artist
• Anastasya Vasek, a Russian
• Louis Soltyk, a Pole

The Story:

Frederick Tarr, an English artist living in Paris, is engaged to a young German woman, Bertha Lunken, a student in the Parisian art schools. Tarr dislikes Germans, although he knows a great many of them in Paris. It is his theory that either one has to be very intimate with them or one has to learn how to put up with them when one is not intimate. Not wishing to have it known that he is engaged to Bertha, he is on the point of breaking with her, for he considers her a dolt. He justifies his strange attitude on the grounds that all of his finer feelings go into his art, which leaves nothing over for sex. He admits that his taste in women is deplorable.

After a conversation with a friend during which he explains his theory, Tarr goes to his fiancé’s apartment. He feels some remorse for his treatment of Bertha, but he was attracted by her bourgeois-bohemian absurdities and her Germanic floridity and unwittingly became too involved. Now, he feels, a break has to be made. He, however, underestimates the intensity of feeling that Bertha developed for him. The scene in the apartment, carefully decorated with sham art that Tarr loathes, is comic yet tragic. Tarr cannot help feeling that he is treating Bertha shabbily, yet he is passionately convinced that marriage is not for him. Nor did he expect such floods of tears; but somehow the break is accomplished, and Tarr departs with the promise to see Bertha again after a few days.

Otto Kreisler, an impecunious German artist, lives on a small allowance grudgingly doled out by his father. He just returned from a trip to Italy and is more than usually hard up. Four years before, Otto made the mistake of marrying off an old sweetheart to his father. Since he refuses his father’s urgings that he give up art, return to Germany, and settle down into business, the monthly check, in revenge, is sent at irregular intervals. At this point, he is concerned with pawning his portmanteau as the result of failure to borrow money from an affluent compatriot, Ernst Volker. On his return from Italy, Kreisler discovers, to his horror, that his position as the recipient of Volker’s bounty is taken by a Pole, Louis Soltyk, and that no more money can be expected. He already owes Volker fifteen hundred marks. It is the psychological effect of lack of money that, by indirect means, propels Kreisler toward his final tragedy.

In a mood of discouragement—the check from home is late again—he goes to the Café Vallet for lunch. By chance, he finds himself at the same small table with an extraordinarily beautiful young woman who, after some preliminary conversation, explains that she is Anastasya Vasek and that she escaped to Paris from her parents’ bourgeois home. Kreisler is strongly attracted to her, because to him women are a kind of emotional pawnshop where he can dump his sorrows. With German sentimentality, he thinks of love as sorrowful. Determined to follow up that chance meeting, and despite the fact that his evening clothes are in pawn, he accepts an invitation from a member of the German colony, Fraulein Lipmann, to join her group at a dance at a club in the neighborhood. On the afternoon before the dance, he finds Anastasya sitting with Soltyk in a cafe. Again, he decides, the Pole is interfering in his affairs.

Driven by a kind of persecution mania, Kreisler deliberately makes a fiasco of the evening. On the way to the dance, he finds himself walking with Bertha and somewhat behind the other members of the party. Again, their peculiar German psychologies interact; he wishes to avenge himself through her on the more affluent guests; she feels that he is suffering and that she should make a sacrifice to console him. So Kreisler kisses her roughly, and she permits the kiss. They are seen by the other Germans, who are walking ahead. Kreisler arrives at the dance, dressed in rumpled morning clothes and still under the spell of his mania; he behaves abominably, insults nearly every woman present, and is almost thrown out. Worse, Anastasya laughs at him, turning his admiration to hate. The next morning, when the long-awaited allowance arrives accompanied by a command to return to Germany, Kreisler replies to his father that he will kill himself in exactly one month.

Shortly afterward, Bertha receives a letter from Tarr, informing her that he heard of the episode with Kreisler and that he is leaving for London. Furthermore, the “Kreisler affair” embroiled Bertha with her German friends. In a dreary mood, she goes out to buy lunch and meet Kreisler; after some conversation, she accepts his invitation to visit a café the following evening. This curious act is a defense against her friends; it is part of her theory that he is in distress, and it will contradict the story, now current, that his outrageous behavior was the result of Anastasya’s snub. Furthermore, her meeting with Kreisler will be a kind of revenge on Tarr. She succeeds in convincing herself that she is being driven into this strange friendship. Eight days later, in Kreisler’s studio, he possesses her by force, and the situation that she created becomes suddenly tragic. Kreisler comes to her apartment, offers to shoot himself, and finally departs after swearing to be her eternal servant. With her usual sentimentality, Bertha feels uplifted, as if together they did something noble.

Meanwhile, Tarr merely moves to the Montmartre district, where he feels that he can work in peace. He continues to frequent his old section with its German colony so that he can keep an eye on Bertha. Inevitably, he meets Anastasya, and just as inevitably, he encounters Bertha and Kreisler together. He cannot resist joining this pair; their “Germanness” gives him an ironic pleasure. Kreisler is baffled by the Englishman’s sudden friendship that leads Tarr to join him at a café evening after evening, and he finds his Teutonic solemnity not equal to the situation. Fearful of being driven mad, he threatens the Englishman with a whip, when Tarr goes to his room, and then pushes him out the door.

Tarr and Anastasya become attracted to each other. During this time, they have long conversations about life and art. A storm, however, is gathering. One evening Tarr, who joins Kreisler and a Russian at a café, sees the German jump from his seat, rush across the room to a group of Russians and Poles, and slap Soltyk’s face. That afternoon, Kreisler meets Anastasya and Soltyk; in a cold fury, he strikes Soltyk. Then he challenges the Pole to a duel. After much excited conversation, the challenge is accepted.

The duel next morning is another mixture of comedy and tragedy. The seconds are trying to effect an honorable compromise when Kreisler’s mood suddenly changes: He offers to forgive Soltyk if the latter will kiss him. As he leans forward, the enraged Pole leaps upon him; they fall to the ground, and the seconds begin fighting among themselves. When the dust settles, Soltyk’s friends try to lead him away, but they are stopped by Kreisler, who still holds his pistol. A Pole strikes at him; Kreisler fires and kills Soltyk. Kreisler flees. Five days later, penniless and hungry, he reaches a village near the border and is put in jail. In a last display of his disordered temperament, he hangs himself in his cell. His father pays the exact sum demanded by the town for the burial.

Meanwhile in Paris, Tarr and Anastasya rapidly become involved in an affair, and Tarr continues to see Bertha in decreasing “doses” as though he is taking medicine. As he is about to give her up, she tells him that she is pregnant and that the child is Kreisler’s. Out of pity, Tarr marries her, but he lives with Anastasya. Two years later, Bertha divorces him to marry an eye doctor. Tarr never marries Anastasya. He has three children by another woman.

Bibliography

Chapman, Robert. Wyndham Lewis: Fictions and Satires. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1973. Contains an excellent analysis of Tarr, particularly regarding the relations among the principal characters. Disagrees with those critics who have said that to reject the ideas of Frederick Tarr is to reject the novel.

Gąsiorek, Andrzej. Wyndham Lewis and Modernism. Tavistock, England: Northcote House/British Council, 2004. Introduction to Lewis’s life and work as both a writer and a painter, including his participation in the vorticist movement, his commitment to early avant-gardism, and his eventual movement away from modernism and toward a theory of satire. Examines his opinions on gender, sexuality, politics, society, and the commodification of culture and aesthetics.

Jameson, Fredric. Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist. Rev. ed. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Verso Books, 2008. Jameson maintains that Lewis differs from other modernist writers because he was a political novelist. He provides a framework with which to examine these political novels, focusing on Lewis’s use of language as both a symbolic and a political act.

Materer, Timothy. Wyndham Lewis, the Novelist. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1976. Discusses the role of humor, the genesis of Frederick Tarr, and the dynamics between Tarr the “satiric commentator” and Kreisler the “tragic protagonist.”

Peppis, Paul. Literature, Politics, and the English Avant-Garde: Nation and Empire, 1901-1918. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Lewis figures prominently in Peppis’s discussion of avant-garde literature in early twentieth century England. Peppis describes the impact of nationalism and imperialism on vorticism, and in a separate chapter he analyzes “anti-individualism and fictions of national character” in Tarr.

Pritchard, William H. Wyndham Lewis. New York: Twayne, 1968. Finds that the interest in Tarr lies less in the plot than in the restlessness and self-involvement of the characters, and the stylistic differences they engender.

Wragg, David A. Wyndham Lewis and the Philosophy of Art in Early Modernist Britain: Creating a Political Aesthetic. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2005. A reevaluation of Lewis’s works up to the 1930’s, analyzing the philosophical and art historical aspects of his writings and how these elements contribute to readers’ understanding of his political ideas. Useful for advanced students and readers with prior knowledge of literary history and critical theory.