【英文读物】Tarr.docx

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1、【英文读物】TarrPROLOGUEThis 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 ver

2、y 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

3、 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.Germanys large leaden brai

4、n 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

5、 of the seamans life and this vigorous element have protected us intellectually as the blue water has politically.In Europe Nietzsches gospel of desperation, the beyond-law-man, etc., has deeply influenced the Paris apache, the Italian Futurist littrateur, thex Russian revolutionary. Nietzsches book

6、s 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 Arsne Lupins: and they have made a

7、n 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

8、 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. We will hope that the English may benefit by this power and passion, without being unnecessarily grateful for a gift that has been bought with bes

9、t English blood, and which is not as important or unique as the great English gift bestowed centuries ago.As to the Prophet of War, the tone of Nietzsches books should have discredited his philosophy. The modern Prussian advocate of the Aristocratic and Tyrannic took everybody into his confidence. T

10、hen he would coquet: he gave special prizes. Everybody couldnt 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 c

11、ould hope to see!Kreisler in this book is a German and nothing else. Tarr is the individual in the book, and is at the same time one of the showmen of the author. His private life, however, I am in no way responsible for. The long drawn-out struggle in which we find this young man engaged is illumin

12、ated from start to finish by the hero of it. His theory, put in another way, is that an artist requires more energy than civilization provides, or than the civilized mode of life implies: more na?vet,xi freshness, and unconsciousness. So Nature agrees to force his sensibility and intelligence, on th

13、e one hand, to the utmost pitch, leaving him, on the other, an uncultivated and ungregarious tract where he can run wild and renew his forces and remain unspoilt.Tarr, in his analysis of the anomalies of taste, gives the key to a crowd of other variants and twists to which most of the misunderstandi

14、ngs and stupidities in the deciphering of men are due. He exaggerates his own departure from perfect sense and taste into an unnecessary image of Shame and Disgust, before which he publicly castigates himself. He is a primitive figure, coupled with a modern type of flabby sophistication: that is Ber

15、tha Lunkin. The Münich German Madonna stands nude, too, in the market-place, with a pained distortion of the face.Tarrs message, as a character in a book, is this. Under the camouflage of a monotonous intrigue he points a permanent opposition, of life outstripped, and art become lonely. He inci

16、dentally is intended to bring some comfort of analysis amongst less sifted and more ominous perplexities of our time. His message, as he discourses, laughs, and picks his way through the heavily obstructed land of this story, is the message of a figure of health. His introspection is not melancholy;

17、 for the strange and, as with his pedagogic wand he points out, hideously unsatisfactory figures that are given ingress to his innermost apartments become assimilated at once to a life in which he has the profoundest confidence. He exalts Life into a Comedy, when otherwise it is, to his mind, a tawd

18、ry zone of half-art, or a silly Tragedy. Art is the only thing worth the tragic impulse, for him; and, as he says, it is his drama. Should art, that is some finely-adjusted creative will, suddenly become the drama of the youth infatuated with his maiden, what different dispositions would have to be

19、made; what contradictory tremors would invade his amorous frame; what portions of that frame would still smoulder amorously? These questions Tarr disposes of to his satisfaction. So much by way of warning before the curtain rises. Even if the necessary tragic thrill of misgiving is caused thereby (o

20、r are we going to be “shocked” in the right way once again, not in Shaws “bloody,” schoolgirl way?), it may extenuate the at times seemingly needless nucleus of blood and tears.P. Wyndham Lewis1915PART I BERTHA CHAPTER IParis hints of sacrifice.But here we deal with that large dusty facet known to i

21、ndulgent and congruous kind. It is in its capacity of delicious inn and majestic Baedeker, where western Venuses twang its responsive streets and hush to soft growl before its statues, that it is seen. It is not across its Thba?de that the unscrupulous heroes chase each others shadows. They are larg

22、ely ignorant of all but their restless personal lives.Inconceivably generous and na?ve faces haunt the Knackfus Quarter.We are not, however, in a Selim or Vitagraph camp (though “guns” tap rhythmically the buttocks).Art is being studied.Art is the smell of oil paint, Henri Murgers Vie de Bohme, cord

23、uroy trousers, the operatic Italian model. But the poetry, above all, of linseed oil and turpentine.The Knackfus Quarter is given up to Art.Letters and other things are round the corner.Its rent is half paid by America. Germany occupies a sensible apartment on the second floor. A hundred square yard

24、s at its centre is a convenient space, where the Boulevard du Paradis and Boulevard Pfeifer cross with their electric trams.In the middle is a pavement island, like vestige of submerged masonry.Italian models festoon it in symmetrical human groups; it is also their club.The Caf Berne, at one side, i

25、s the club of the “Grands messieurs Du Berne.” So you have the clap-trap and amorphous Campagnia tribe outside, in the caf twenty sluggish2 common-sense Germans, a Vitagraph group or two, drinking and playing billiards. These are the most permanent tableaux of this place, disheartening and admonitor

26、y as a Tussauds of The Flood.Hobson and Tarr met in the Boulevard du Paradis.They met in a gingerly, shuffling fashion. They had so many good reasons for not slowing down when they met: crowds of little antecedent meetings all revivifying like the bacilli of a harmless fever at the sight of each oth

27、er: pointing to why they should crush their hats over their eyes and hurry on, so that it was a defeat and insanitary to have their bodies shuffling and gesticulating there. “Why cannot most people, having talked and annoyed each other once or twice, rebecome strangers simply? Oh, for multitudes of

28、divorces in our m?urs, more than the old vexed sex ones! Ah, yes: ah, yes!” had not Tarr once put forward, and Hobson agreed?“Have you been back long?” Tarr asked with despondent slowness.“No. I got back yesterday,” said Hobson, with pleasantly twisted scowl.(“Heavens: One day here only, and lo! I m

29、eet him.”)“How is London looking, then?”“Very much as usual.I wasnt there the whole time.I was in Cambridge last week.”(“I wish youd go to perdition from time to time, instead of Cambridge, as it always is, you grim, grim dog!” Tarr wished behind the veil.)They went to the Berne to have a drink.They

30、 sat for some minutes with what appeared a stately discomfort of self-consciousness, staring in front of them.It was really only a dreary, boiling anger with themselves, with the contradictions of civilized life, the immense and intricate camouflage over the hatred that personal diversities engender

31、. “Phew, phew!” A tenuous howl, like a subterranean wind, rose from the borderland of their consciousness. They were there on the point of3 opening with tired, ashamed fingers, well-worn pages of their souls, soon to be muttering between their teeth the hackneyed pages to each other: resentful in di

32、fferent degrees and disproportionate ways.And so they sat with this absurd travesty of a Quakers meeting: shyness appearing to emanate masterfully from Tarr. And in another case, with almost any one but Hobson, it might have been shyness. For Tarr had a gauche, Puritanical ritual of self, the result

33、 of solitary habits. Certain observances were demanded of those approaching, and quite gratuitously observed in return. The fetish withinsoul-dweller that is strikingly like wood-dweller, and who was not often enough disturbed to have had sylvan shyness mitigatedwould still cling to these forms. Som

34、etimes Tarrs cunning idol, aghast at its nakedness, would manage to borrow or purloin some shape of covering from elegantly draped visitor.But for Hobsons outfit he had the greatest contempt.This was Alan Hobsons outfit.A Cambridge cut disfigured his originally manly and melodramatic form. His fathe

35、r was a wealthy merchant somewhere in Egypt. He was very athletic, and his dark and cavernous features had been constructed by Nature as a lurking-place for villainies and passions. He was untrue to his rascally, sinuous body. He slouched and ambled along, neglecting his muscles: and his dastardly f

36、ace attempted to portray delicacies of common sense, and gossamer-like backslidings into the Inane that would have puzzled a bile-specialist. He would occasionally exploit his blackguardly appearance and blacksmiths muscles for a short time, however. And his strong, piercing laugh threw A B C waitre

37、sses into confusion.The Art-touch, the Bloomsbury stain, was very observable. Hobsons Harris tweeds were shabby. A hat suggesting that his ancestors had been Plainsmen or some rough sunny folk, shaded unnecessarily his countenance, already far from open.The material for conversation afforded by a sh

38、ort sea4 voyage, an absence, a panama hat on his companions head, had been exhausted.Tarr possessed no deft hand or economy of force. His muscles rose unnecessarily on his arm to lift a wine-glass to his lips. He had no social machinery, but the cumbrous one of the intellect. He danced about with th

39、is, it is true. But it was full of sinister piston-rods, organ-like shapes, heavy drills.When he tried to be amiable, he usually only succeeded in being ominous.It was an effort to talk to Hobson. For this effort a great bulk of nervous force was awoken. It got to work and wove its large anomalous p

40、atterns. It took the subject that was foremost in his existence and imposed it on their talk.Tarr turned to Hobson, and seized him, conversationally, by the hair.“Well, Walt Whitman, when are you going to get your hair cut?”“Why do you call me Walt Whitman?”“Would you prefer Buffalo Bill? Or is it S

41、hakespeare?”“It is not Shakespeare?”“Roi je ne suis: prince je ne daigne.Thats Hobsons choice.But why so much hair? I dont wear my hair long. If you had as many reasons for wearing it long as I have, we should see it flowing round your ankles!”“I might ask you under those circumstances why you wear

42、it short. But I expect you have good reasons for that, too. I cant see why you should resent my innocent device. However long I wore it I should not damage you by my competition?”Tarr rattled the cement match-stand on the table, and the gar?on sang “Toute suite, toute suite!”“Hobson, you were tellin

43、g me about a studio to let before you left.I forget the details?”“Was it one behind the Panthon?”“Thats it.Was there electric light?”“No, I dont think there was electric light. But I can find out for you.”“How did you come to hear of it?”5“Through a German I knowSalle, Salla, or something.”“What was

44、 the street?”“The Rue Lhomond. I forget the number.”“Ill go and have a look at it after lunch.What on earth possesses you to know so many Germans?” Tarr asked, sighing.“Dont you like Germans?Youve just been too intimate with one; thats what it is.”“Perhaps I have.”“A female German.”“The sex weakens

45、the German, surely.”“Does it in Fr?ulein Lunkens case?”“Oh, you know her, do you?Of course, you would know her, as shes a German.”Alan Hobson cackled morosely, like a very sad top-dog trying to imitate a rooster.Tarrs unwieldy playfulness, might in the chequered northern shade, in conjunction with n

46、ut-brown ale, gazed at by some Rowlandsonhe on the ultimate borders of the epochhave pleased by its propos. But when the last Rowlandson dies, the life, too, that he saw should vanish. Anything that survives the artists death is not life, but play-acting. This homely, thick-waisted affectation!Hobso

47、n yawned and yawned as though he wished to swallow Tarr and have done with him. Tarr yawned more noisily, rattled his chair, sat up, haggard and stiff, as though he wished to frighten this crow away. “Carrion-Crow” was Tarrs name for Hobson: “The olde Crow of Cairo,” rather longer.Why was he talking

48、 to this man? However, he shortly began to lay bare the secrets of his soul. Hobson opened:“It seems to me, Tarr, that you know more Germans than I do. But youre ashamed of it. Hence your attack. I met a Fr?ulein Fierspitz the other day, a German, who claimed to know you. I am always meeting Germans who know you. She also referred to you as the official fianc of Fr?ulein Lunken.Are you an official fianc? And if so, what is that, may I ask?”6Tarr was taken aback, it was evident. Hobson laughed stridently. The real man emerging, he came over quick