It is hard now to remember that, at one time, the novelist, artist and critic Percy Wyndham Lewis was at the heart of that part of the Modernist movement known as Vorticism. He edited Blast, its self-consciously avant-garde periodical, which exploded into Britain’s cultural world in 1914 but imploded after only two issues, and another little magazine, The Enemy, in the late 1920s. He’s probably best known now for The Apes of God, his acerbic satire on London literary life, published in 1930, The Lion and the Fox, a collection of essays on the role of the hero in the plays of William Shakespeare, published in 1927, and Blasting and Bombardiering, an autobiography published in 1937. His friendship with the anti-Semitic American poet Ezra Pound, together with an enthusiasm in the late ’20s and early ’30s for the politics of Adolf Hitler, alienated him from many. These days Percy (a name he disliked and dropped as soon as he could) is a peripheral figure, a footnote in the margins of the literary and artistic histories of the 20th century.
In the past couple of years, there has been an attempt to resurrect his work and restore his reputation. It began with an exhibition of 58 of his paintings and drawings – including pictures of TS Eliot, Stephen Spender, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Edith Sitwell – at the National Portrait Gallery two years ago, and continues now with a new scholarly edition of Tarr which its editor, Scott Klein, of Wake Forest University in North Carolina, cheerfully describes not only as “the first published novel by the writer, painter and intellectual gadfly Wyndham Lewis” but also “the least known, most intractable and arguably the funniest major early 20th century English novel. Where other once-shocking novels of the period have become domesticated by academia and assimilated by contemporary taste, Tarr still snarls, as though through the bars of a cage, challenging approach by adventurous readers only.” Which is, you might think, damning with faint praise.
The story of Tarr is simple enough. It concerns two men – Frederick Tarr, a young English artist, and Otto Kreisler, a Prussian painter whose future is now behind him – living among the Bourgeois Bohemians (the original title for the book) of Paris. Their lives become entangled through two women – the long-suffering and romantically-inclined German Bertha Lunken and the stylish, modern Russian émigré Anastasya Vasek who has a fondness for “swagger sex” – with whom they fall in love (or, at least, in lust). But the narrative is just a skeleton on which Lewis can hang his discursive thoughts on the nature of art and life, sex and love, war and peace.
Pound, a deeply unpleasant man but a good editor, called Tarr “the most vigorous and volcanic English novel of our time”. But then he was also, of course, a mate. The Egoist got it about right when it said on the book’s original publication in 1918: “In spite of its perverseness and bad temper, Tarr bears the marks of a strong, though unbalanced, intellect.”
The novel is ambitious – this edition uses the text of the much-revised version of 1928 – and it is easy to see why it was never as popular as the novels of contemporaries such as Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy or HG Wells. It is blackly comic, if rarely laugh out loud funny, but Lewis’ essential lack of humanity – and his obsession with being an artist, darling, and a modern one at that – means that he cannot hold a literary candle to the likes of Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, DH Lawrence or James Joyce.
