Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) (53 page)

misnamed wideawake
: usually ‘wide-awake’, a soft, low-crowned felt men’s hat resembling those worn by American Quakers. It is ‘misnamed’ because Tarr considers Hobson to be spiritually and aesthetically ‘asleep’.

gangster cut
: a men’s fashion inspired by Parisian fascination with American popular culture and crime stories.

cocaine
: an addictive drug originally used as an anaesthetic in Germany in the 1880s, but adopted recreationally by bohemian circles in Hollywood and Europe before the First World War. When applied to the gums the drug can produce this ‘frozen’ expression.

in excelsis
: Lat., ‘to the highest extent’, from ‘Gloria in excelsis Deo’ (Lat., ‘Glory to God in the highest’), the Gloria of the Catholic and Anglican mass, known also as the Greater Doxology.

Charenton
: a south-eastern suburb of Paris, or the nearby Charenton asylum, later the Esquirol hospital, where the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814) was famously confined from 1803 to 1814.

Romanys
: the Roma people, gypsies.

Pernot
: slight misspelling of Pernod Fils, the most popular brand of absinthe, a green anise-flavoured liquor with supposed narcotic properties derived from the substance thujone. One of the most popular alcoholic beverages in Paris, it was banned in France and most of Europe in 1915.

the Lunken
: a rendering into English of an Italian mode of referring to a woman to a third party as ‘la’ followed by the subject’s first name or surname. (See also ‘the Fuchs’, p. 156.)

Balzac … character
: Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), nineteenth-century French novelist. He was subject to a neglectful childhood, and his novels often feature young men trying to make their way in the world after difficult beginnings. In his novel
Cousin Pons
he wrote ‘La misère … donna cette grande, cette forte éducation qu’elle dispense à coups d’étrivières aux grands hommes, tous malheureux dans leur enface’ (‘Indigence … put them through that hard and stringent course of education which she dispenses in the form of whippings to great men, all of whom have had an unhappy childhood’) (French edn (Paris: Éditions Garnier Frères, 1962), 64; trans. Herbert J. Hunt (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), 79).

Boulevard Sebastopol
: a thoroughfare running north–south in central Paris that divides the 1st and 2nd from the 3rd and 4th arrondissements.

aryan
: pertaining to the ancient Indo-European Aryan people, in particular a racialist notion of the French diplomat, writer, and ethnologist Joseph-Arthur, Comte de Gobineau (1816–82), whose
Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines
(
Essay on the Inequality of the Human Race
) (1853–5) identified the Germanic with the Aryan peoples as the peak of racial civilization. At the time of
Tarr
the term was not yet identified with the Nazi racial policies of the 1930s, or specifically with anti-Semitism.

Gioconda
: an alternative name for the
Mona Lisa
, a painting of a woman wearing an enigmatic expression by Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519). One of the world’s most recognizable paintings and, as part of the Louvre, one of Paris’s most popular tourist attractions.

platonic
: in the sense of ‘ideal’, taken from Plato’s theory of forms, rather than the common contemporary usage, derived from
The Symposium
, to describe an intimate but non-sexual friendship between a man and a woman.

Ancient Britons … coracles
: the indigenous Celtic inhabitants of pre-Roman Britain. A ‘coracle’ is a small, lightweight boat used by the early Britons, and still used in parts of Wales.

bum
: American slang for a disreputable or dissolute man; also a fool, sometimes intended teasingly. The
Oxford English Dictionary
lists a quotation from the
Observer
for 2 April 1933: ‘ “Bum”, a term of affectionate obloquy which young American friends have applied to me … means not merely a fool, but a droning fool.’

Passy
: a considerably upscale area of Paris in the 16th arrondissement, west of the Louvre and the Champs-Élysées on the Right Bank, a suggestion of the success of Butcher’s automobile business.

Samaritaine
: a large department store, located in the 1st arrondissement.

‘Monsieur Lounes … sortir’
: Fr., ‘Mr Lowndes? I think so. I didn’t see him leave.’ ‘Lounes’ represents ‘Lowndes’ phonetically as pronounced by the French porter.

Boswell
: James Boswell (1740–95), Scottish lawyer, diarist, and author of
The Life of Samuel Johnson
(1791), a biography of his friend and man of letters Samuel Johnson (1709–84), and thereafter a byword for a constant companion, observer, and recorder.

sombrero
: a broad-brimmed Spanish hat, rather than the more commonly pictured Mexican variety, usually made of felt or some other soft material, used to protect the head from sun.

impressionist’s … represented
: the invention of portable easels and oil paints in tubes allowed the Impressionists to move out of the studio, thus their emphasis on painting directly before the subject. For early twentieth-century avant-gardists Impressionism—with its emphasis on the subjectivity of vision and blurring of the object’s contours—represented a faded and already institutionalized radicalism.

Floridas of remote invasions
: an echo of
Blast
that suggests that Paris is ‘invaded’ by an American mildness from across the ocean: ‘
A 1000 MILE LONG
, 2
KILOMETER
Deep
BODY OF WATER
even, is pushed against us from the Floridas,
TO MAKE US MILD
’ (
Blast
1, p. 11).

balzacian … comic
: in the 1842 ‘Avant-Propos’ to his enormous fictional project
La Comédie humaine
Balzac wrote that he wished to emulate in fiction naturalists such as Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hillaire (1772–1844) by attempting to understand ‘Espèces Sociales comme il y a des Espèces Zoologiques’ (‘Social Species as though they were Zoological Species’) (
Œuvres complètes, Études de Mœurs: Scènes de la vie privée,
I
(Paris: Édition Louis Conard, 1953, p. xxvi).

Petit Suisse
: an unripened soft cheese from the Normandy region, literally Fr. ‘little Swiss’, served in individually sized cylinders and either seasoned with herbs or sweetened and eaten as dessert.

Luxembourg Gardens
: The Jardin du Luxembourg, the largest public park in Paris, located in the 6th arrondissement.

Venus of Milo
: a Hellenic statue from the late second century
BC
, discovered in 1820 on the Aegean isle of Melos. A popular tourist destination at the Louvre and one of the most recognizable pieces of art in the world.

westphalian
: adj., from Westphalia, a historical region and former duchy of west-central Germany east of the River Rhine.

air-baths
: exposing one’s naked body to the air, thought by theorists and practitioners to offer benefits for physical and mental health.

sanguine of an Italian master
: a drawing done with blood-red chalk or crayon, sometimes used for preliminary studies for oil paintings. Used extensively by artists of the Italian Renaissance, including Leonardo da Vinci, who made sanguines as sketches for
The Last Supper
.

Dryad-like on one foot
: like a tree nymph of Greek mythology, portrayed in the Pre-Raphaelite painting
The Dryad
, painted in 1884–5 by Evelyn De Morgan (1855–1919) as standing with one foot on the ground and one foot in the hollow of the tree.

bourgeois-bohemian
: Lewis’s coinage for a way of life that claims to be radical but that recapitulates the middle-class mores against which it claims to rebel.

Islands of the Dead
:
Die Toteninsel
, a nightmarish painting by the Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901). It exists in five different versions, all of which portray an isolated rocky island with ‘gigantic cypresses’ in the centre, and a small boat moving towards it in which stand a white-clad oarsman—perhaps Charon, the boatman of the dead from Greek mythology—and what appears to be a coffin.

brass jars … Normandy
: souvenirs from the northern region of France known for its copper and coppersmithery; brass is an alloy of copper and zinc.

sinking feeling
: i.e. Bertha’s domestic decorations are a distressing manifestation of her middle-class taste.

Klinger
: a work by Max Klinger (1857–1920), German Symbolist painter and sculptor.

bouffonic
: Lewis’s coinage, presumably ‘comic, ridiculous’, from Fr.
bouffe
(in the sense of
l’opéra bouffe
, ‘comic opera’), or Eng. ‘buffoon’.

‘Berthe’ … ‘Oui’
: Fr., ‘Bertha, you’re a good girl!’ ‘You think so?’ ‘Yes.’ In this context
brave
is a weak compliment, even slightly pejorative.

Schatzes
: Ger., ‘sweethearts’, lit. ‘treasures’. The proper German plural is
Schätze
; Tarr pluralizes
Schatz
as though it were an English noun.

coup de foudre
: Fr., ‘love at first sight’. The context of smashed icons suggests, however, that Lewis is calling upon the phrase’s literal meaning, ‘a stroke of lightning’.

eikon
: alternative spelling of ‘icon’, an image or likeness, particularly associated with religious images of the Eastern Orthodox Church.

‘Vous … Geschmack’
: Fr. and then Ger., lit. ‘You are to my taste’, i.e. ‘You’re my type’. Bertha’s use of the formal
vous
to a male lover is not unusual for French speaker-address of the period, despite her use of the informal
Du
in German.

caravanserai
: an Eastern roadside inn, a large quadrangular building with a spacious court in the middle, where travellers by caravan could rest from the day’s journey.

Pasha … incog
.: a Turkish officer of high rank; abbreviated adv. meaning ‘incognito’, ‘with one’s real name and identity disguised’. The theme of
the disguised ruler circulating among his people is a staple of both Eastern and Western folk tales and plays.

villégiature
: Fr., ‘holiday, vacation’, in parallel with ‘caravanserai’ here short for
lieu de villégiature
, ‘holiday spot’.

Khalife
: alternative spelling for French
calife
, a caliph or the chief civil and religious ruler of a Muslim country. A caliph figures prominently in the titular parable of Lewis’s essay on art and architecture
The Caliph’s Design
(1919).

Hymen
: the god of marriage in Greek and Roman mythology, represented in art as a boy crowned with flowers and carrying a burning bridal torch.

‘Oh dis Sorbert … Dis!’
: Fr., ‘Oh, tell me Sorbert! Tell me! Do you love me? Do you love me? Tell me!’ Bertha’s shift to the informal
tu
marks her sudden desperation.

‘Oh … m’aimes!’
: Fr., ‘Oh, tell me. Do you love me? Tell me that you love me!’

Schopenhauer
: German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), best known for his work
Die Welt als Wille und Vorstelung
(1818,
The World as Will and Representation
). Schopenhauer was notoriously hostile to women, and in his essay ‘Über die Weiber’ (1851, ‘On Women’), he writes: ‘Women are qualified to be the nurses and governesses of our earliest childhood by the very fact that they are themselves childish, trifling, and short-sighted, in a word, are all their lives grown-up children; a kind of intermediate stage between the child and the man, who is a human being in the real sense’ (
Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophic Essays
, vol. ii, trans. E. F. J. Payne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 614–15).

astral baby
: in the late-nineteenth-century hermetic practice of theosophy the ‘astral plane’ was considered to be the next step above the terrestrial or sensible world. The ‘astral body’ was a sort of psychic body or aura made up of emotions, as the physical body was composed of matter.

Ganymed
: a 1774 poem by German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). Dealing with the mythic seduction of the boy Ganymede by Zeus, who is disguised as Spring, the poem was also familiar as the basis of art song settings by Austrian composers Franz Schubert (1797–1828) and Hugo Wolf (1860–1903). Tarr reads the first stanza beginning with the second line:

All round me, you glow upon me,

Oh spring, oh my lover!

With the rapture of a thousand loves

It thrusts at my heart,

This sacred sense

Of your eternal ardour,

Oh infinite beauty!

(trans. David Luke,
Goethe: Selected Poetry
(London: Penguin Books, 2005), pp. 7, 9)

Armageddon
: the place of the last decisive battle at the Day of Judgement in the Book of Revelation in the New Testament, thus, allusively, any final cataclysm.

more metropolitan speech
: in a more urbane and sophisticated manner.

earliest Science … holes
: Plutonism, an early school of geology in the eighteenth century associated with Scottish scientist James Hutton (1726–97), theorized that sedimentary rocks were forced to the surface by earthquakes and volcanoes, which were created by pressure originating from a subterranean molten core.

amazon
: member of a tribe of warrior women in Greek mythology.

Geschmack
: Ger., literally ‘taste’, in this context, ‘fondness’.

redskin impassibility
: a stereotype about the Native American peoples taken from nineteenth-century fiction and ethnography. See, for instance, a passage from
The Deerslayer
(1841), the popular American novel by James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851): ‘It is well known that the American Indians, more particularly those of superior characters and stations, singularly maintain their self-possession and stoicism … Chingachgook had imbibed enough of this impassibility to suppress any very undignified manifestation of surprise’ (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1901), 333.