Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) (50 page)

Daily, then, he proceeded with his marriage arrangements in the afternoons. He saw Bertha regularly, but without modifying the changed ‘correctness ‘of his attitude. The evenings he spent with Anastasya.

By the time the french marriage preliminaries had been gone through and Bertha and he could finally be united, his relations with Anastasya had become as close as were those with Bertha formerly. With the exception of the time from three in the afternoon to seven in the evening that he took off every day to see his fiancée, he was with Anastasya.

On September 29th, three weeks after Bertha had told him that she was pregnant, he married her—in the time between three in the afternoon and seven in the evening set aside for her. Anastasya knew nothing about these happenings. Neither Bertha nor she were seeing their german women friends for the moment.

After the marriage at the Mairie Bertha and Tarr walked back to the Luxembourg Gardens and sat down. She had not during the three intervening weeks mentioned Anastasya; it was no time for generosity, she had done too much of that.

They sat for some time without speaking, as though they had quarrelled. She said, then:

‘I am afraid Sorbert I have been selfish—.’

‘You—selfish—how is that possible? That would be something new.’ He had turned to her at once with a hurried fondness genuinely assumed. She looked at him with her wistful, democratic face, full of effort and sentiment.

‘You are very unhappy Sorbert—.’

He laughed convincingly.

‘No I’m all right.’

‘I don’t believe you Sorbert.’

‘I’m sorry. All right, I’m sad.’

‘Are you depressed?’

‘I am a little meditative: that is only natural on such a solemn occasion. I was thinking, Bertha, if you want to know what my thoughts were, that we must set up house somewhere and announce our marriage. We must do this for appearance’s sake. You will soon be hors de combat—.’
*

‘Oh I shan’t be just yet.’

‘In any case, we have gone through this form because—for certain reasons: we must make this move efficacious. What are your ideas as to an establishment? Let us take a flat together somewhere round here: the rue Servandoni
*
is a capital street: it is narrow, but it is good, it is cheap. There there are apartments. Do you know it?’

‘No.’ She put her head on one side and puckered up her forehead.

‘Near the Luxembourg Museum.’
*

He discussed the details of their movements: she had a great many things to pack—there was the chaise-longue, the pictures, the plaster casts of Beethoven and of the Drowned Girl;
*
he would lend her a hand.

He got up.

‘It’s rather chilly. Let’s get back.’

They walked for some time without speaking. So much unsaid had to be got rid of, without necessarily being said: Bertha had no idea where she was. Their ‘establishment’, as discussed by Tarr, appeared very unreal and also, what there was of it, disagreeable. What was he going to do with her, she wondered.

‘You remember what I said to you some weeks ago?’ he asked. ‘About Anastasya Vasek. I am afraid there has been no change in that. You do not mind that?’

‘No Sorbert. You are perfectly free.’

‘I am afraid I shall seem unkind. This is not a nice marriage for you. Perhaps I was wrong to suggest it?’

‘How, wrong? I have not been complaining.’

They arrived at the iron gate.

‘Well I’d better not come up now. I will turn up to-morrow—at the usual time.’

‘Good-bye Sorbert. A demain!’

‘A demain!’

A
NASTASYA
and he were dining that night in Montmartre as usual. His piece of news hovered over their conversation like a bird hesitating as to where to alight.

‘I saw Bertha to-day’ he said at last.

‘You still see her then.’

‘Yes, sometimes. For form’s sake.’

‘I don’t understand you.’

‘I married her this afternoon.’

‘You
what?
Was heisst das—married! Was that for form’s sake? What do you mean?’

‘What I say, my dear. I married her.’

‘You mean you—?’ She put an imaginary ring upon her finger.

‘Yes. I married her at the Mairie—over there.’

He slung his head to the right.

Anastasya looked blankly into him, as though he contained cheerless stretches where no living thing could grow.

‘You mean to say you’ve done that!’

‘Yes I have.’

‘Why?’

Tarr stopped a moment.

‘Well, the alleged reason was that she is enceinte.’

‘But!—whose is the child?’

‘Kreisler’s, so she says.’

The statement, she saw, was genuine: he was telling her what he had been doing. They both immediately retired into themselves, she to consider the meaning of this new fact; he to wait, his hand near his mouth holding a pipe, until she should have collected herself. But he began speaking first.

‘Things are exactly the same as before. I was bound to do that. I had allowed her to consider herself engaged a year ago, and had to keep to that. I have merely gone back a year into the past and fulfilled a pledge, and now return to you. All is in perfect order.’

‘All is
not
in perfect order. It is Kreisler’s child to begin with you say—.’

‘Yes, but it would be very mean to employ that fact to evade an obligation.’

‘That is sentimentality.’

‘Sentimentality!—Cannot
we
, you and I, afford to give Bertha
that
? Sentimentality—what an absurd word that is with its fierce use in our poor modern hands. What do we mean by it? has life become such an affair of economic calculation that men are too timid to allow themselves any complicated pleasures? Where there is abundance you can afford waste: sentimentality is a cry on a par with “the Simple Life”: the ideal of perfect Success is an invention of the same sort of individual as the propagandist of Equal Rights and the Perfectibility of the Species.
*
Sentimentality is a
privilege
, that I admit, hence its unpopularity, it is a luxury that the crowd does not feel it can possibly afford in these hard times, and it is quite right.’

‘That may be true as regards sentimentality in general: but in this case you have been guilty of a popular softness—.’

‘No. Listen. I will make it clear to you. You say it was
Kreisler’s
child—? Well, that is my security! It is a guarantee that the altruistic origin of the action shall not be forgotten?’

‘But that is surely a very mean calculation?’

‘Therefore it takes the softness out of the action to which it is allied.’

‘No. It takes its raison d’être away altogether. It leaves it merely a stupid and unnecessary proceeding. It cancels the generosity but leaves the fact—your marriage.’

‘But the
fact itself
is altered by that!’

‘In what way? You are now married to Bertha—.’

‘Yes but what does that mean? I married Bertha this afternoon: here I am punctually and as usual at your side this evening—.’

‘But the fact of your having married Bertha this afternoon will prevent your making anyone else your wife in the future.’

‘You don’t want to be my wife.’

‘No, but supposing I had a child by
you
—not by Kreisler—it would be impossible to legitimatize him. The thing is of no importance in itself: but you have given Kreisler’s child what you should have kept for your own!’

‘You would never want a child.’

‘How do you know? What’s the use of giving your sex over into the hands of a swanky expert, as you describe it, if you continue to act on your own initiative? I throw up my job. Garçon, l’addition!’

But a move to the Café opposite satisfied her as a demonstration. Tarr remained passive. She extorted a promise from him, namely to conduct no more obscure diplomacies in the future.

Bertha and Tarr took a four-room flat in the rue Festus, not far from the Place des Vosges,
*
a long way out, a peripheral home. It was a cheap place. They gave a party to which Fräulein Liepmann and a good many other people came. Tarr maintained the rule of four to seven, roughly, for Bertha, with the utmost punctiliousness. Anastasya and Bertha did not meet.

Bertha’s child was born, and it absorbed her energies for upwards of a year. It bore some resemblance to Tarr. Tarr’s afternoon visits
became less frequent. He lived now publicly with his illicit and more splendid bride.

Two years after the birth of the child, Mrs. Tarr divorced him: she then married an eye-doctor and lived with a brooding severity in his company and that of her only child.

Tarr and Anastasya did not marry. They had no children.

Tarr, however, had three children by a lady of the name of Rose Fawcett, who consoled him eventually for the splendours of his ‘perfect woman.’ But yet beyond the dim though solid figure of Rose Fawcett, another rises. This one represents the swing back of the pendulum once more to the swagger side. The cheerless and stodgy absurdity of Rose Fawcett required as compensation the painted, fine and enquiring face of Prism Dirkes.
*

L
EWIS
wrote an epilogue for the initial serial publication of
Tarr
in
The Egoist
. A version of that epilogue appears as a preface to the 1918 American edition. It also appears in amended form, divided into a prologue and epilogue, in the 1918 English Egoist Press edition. Lewis omitted this material from the 1928 revision of the novel, in part because it was originally intended to alert readers to the fact that Lewis created the character of Kreisler before the First World War, and that
Tarr
was therefore to be read during wartime as a prediction rather than a reflection of contemporary relations between England and Germany.

Lewis later regretted what he saw as the preface’s nationalism, writing ‘the first edition was disfigured, I am sorry to say, by a “patriotic” preface …it was a moment of great popular excitement, and I had been infected by it’.
¹
But the preface also criticizes aspects of the English national character, and, perhaps more importantly, it explicitly establishes Lewis’s claim of authorial distance from his protagonist. It is probably this latter element that led him to omit the preface from the 1928 revision. The preface gives away part of the novel’s game before it has even begun, and according to some of his friends’ criticisms threatened to lapse into pedantry.
²

The preface is reproduced below from the 1918 American Knopf edition. A set of variant paragraphs from the prologue of the 1918 English Egoist Press edition follows.

This book was begun eight years ago;
*
so I have not produced this disagreeable German for the gratification of primitive partisanship
aroused by the war. On the other hand, having had him up my sleeve for so long, I let him out at this moment in the undisguised belief that he is very apposite. I am incidentally glad to get rid of him. He has been on my conscience (my conscience as an artist, it is true) for a long time.

The myriads of Prussian germs, gases, and gangrenes released into the air and for the past year
*
obsessing everything, revived my quiescent creation. I was moved to vomit Kreisler forth. It is one big germ more. May the flames of Louvain
*
help to illuminate (and illustrate) my hapless protagonist! His misdemeanours too, which might appear too harshly real at ordinary times, have, just now, too obvious confirmations to be questioned.

Germany’s large leaden brain booms away in the centre of Europe. Her brain-waves and titanic orchestrations
*
have broken round us for too long not to have had their effect. As we never think ourselves, except a stray Irishman or American,
*
we should long ago have been swamped had it not been for the sea. The habits and vitality of the seaman’s life and this vigorous element have protected us intellectually as the blue water has politically.

In Europe Nietzsche’s gospel of desperation, the beyond-law-man, etc., has deeply influenced the Paris apache, the Italian Futurist
littérateur
,
*
the Russian revolutionary. Nietzsche’s books are full of seductions and sugar-plums. They have made ‘aristocrats’ of people who would otherwise have been only mild snobs or meddlesome prigs; as much as, if not more than, other writings, they have made ‘expropriators’ of what would otherwise merely have been Arsène Lupins:
*
and they have made an Over-man of every vulgarly energetic grocer in Europe.
*
The commercial and military success of Prussia has deeply influenced the French, as it is gradually winning the imagination of the English. The fascination of material power is, for the irreligious modern man, almost impossible to resist.

There is much to be said for this eruption of greedy, fleshy, frantic strength in the midst of discouraged delicacies. Germany has its mission and its beauty. But I do not believe it will ever be able to benefit, itself, by its power and passion. The English may a little more: I hope Russia will.

As to the Prophet of War, the tone of Nietzsche’s books should have discredited his philosophy. The modern Prussian advocate of the
Aristocratic and Tyrannic took
everybody
into his confidence. Then he would coquet: he gave special prizes.
Everybody
couldn’t be a follower of his! No: only the
minority
: that is the minority who read his books, which has steadily grown till it comprises certainly (or would, were it collected together) the ungainliest and strangest aristocratic caste any world could hope to see!

The artists of this country make a plain and pressing appeal to their fellow-citizens. It is as follows: They appeal:

(1) That at the moment of this testing and trying of the forces of the nation, of intellect, of character, they should grant more freedom to the artists and thinkers to develop their visions and ideas. That they should make an effort of sympathy. That the maudlin and the self-defensive Grin
*
should be dropped.