Tarr
1918
Paris, 1913. In the studios and cafés of Montparnasse, two artists circle each other like boxers: Frederick Tarr, the coldly ambitious English painter who has sworn off 'humor' as a way of evading reality, and Otto Kreisler, a failed German Romantic whose violent energy spirals toward something darker. When both men pursue the same two women, the conventional Bertha Lunken and the terrifyingly modern Anastasya Vasek, Wyndham Lewis detonates a satire where every relationship is a battlefield and every conversation a duel. Lewis, the founder of Vorticism and the era's most ferocious aesthetic pugilist, wrote this novel as a calculated assault on the bourgeois-bohemians around him. What emerges is something far more unsettling than mere social mockery: a portrait of a civilization eating itself, where artistic pretension collapses under the weight of desire, and national character curdles into something sinister. The novel's 'tragic laughter,' as Lewis himself called it, cuts to bone. He would later wonder if in Kreisler he had glimpsed the making of Hitler. The answer, given what followed, is as chilling as anything in pre-war fiction.
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“An uncomfortable thing happened now. He realised suddenly all the possibilities of this chance acquaintanceship, plainly and cinematographically. He was seized with panic. He must make a good impression. From that moment he ran the risk of doing the reverse. For he was unaccustomed to act with calculation. There he was like some individual who had gone nonchalantly into the presence of a prince; who”
— Wyndham Lewis
“Death is the thing that differentiates art and life. Art is identical with the idea of permanence. It is a continuity and not an individual spasm. Life is the idea of the person.””
— Wyndham Lewis
“Love performs its natural miracle, and they become part of us; it is a dismemberment to cast them off. Our own blood flows out after them when they go.””
— Wyndham Lewis
“Deadness, in the limited sense in which we use that word, is the first condition of art. The second is absence of soul, in the sentimental human sense. The lines and masses of the statue are its soul. No restless, quick flame-like ego is imagined for the inside of it. It has no inside. This is another condition of art; to have no inside, nothing you cannot see. Instead, then, of being something impelled like an independent machine by a little egoistic fire inside, it lives soullessly and deadly by its frontal lines and masses.””
— Wyndham Lewis
“This is another condition of art; to have no inside, nothing you cannot see.””
— Wyndham Lewis
“No restless, quick, flame-like ego is imagined for the inside of it. It has no inside.””
— Wyndham Lewis
“The purest thought is totally ignorant of death. Death means the perpetual extinction of impertinent sparks. But it is the key of life.””
— Wyndham Lewis
“A man only goes and confesses his faults to the world when his self will not acknowledge or listen to them. The function of a friend is to be a substitute for this defective self,””
— Wyndham Lewis
“Lowndes was a colleague, who was not very active, but had just enough money to be a cubist, that was to say quite a lot.””
— Wyndham Lewis
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<a href="https://lex-books.com/book/tarr-3e346511-cb29-4534-a597-3fa7e738825f"><img src="https://lex-books.com/badges/read-on-lex.svg" alt="Read Tarr by Wyndham Lewis free on Lex" width="160" height="40"></a>[](https://lex-books.com/book/tarr-3e346511-cb29-4534-a597-3fa7e738825f)[url=https://lex-books.com/book/tarr-3e346511-cb29-4534-a597-3fa7e738825f][img]https://lex-books.com/badges/read-on-lex.svg[/img][/url]Read Tarr by Wyndham Lewis free on Lex: https://lex-books.com/book/tarr-3e346511-cb29-4534-a597-3fa7e738825fCite this book
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Lewis, Wyndham. Tarr. Lex, lex-books.com/book/tarr-3e346511-cb29-4534-a597-3fa7e738825f.Lewis, W. (1918). Tarr. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/tarr-3e346511-cb29-4534-a597-3fa7e738825fLewis, Wyndham. Tarr. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/tarr-3e346511-cb29-4534-a597-3fa7e738825f.
