Read Online Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) by Wyndham Lewis - Free Book Online
Authors: Wyndham Lewis
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game—?’
Hobson allowed cheeses with a rather drawn expression: but he did not see what that had to do with it, either.
‘It is not purely a question of appetite’ he said.
‘Sex, sir, is
purely
a question of appetite!’ Tarr exclaimed.
Hobson inclined himself mincingly, with a sweet chuckle.
‘If it is
pure
sex, that is’ Tarr added.
‘Oh, if it is
pure
sex—that naturally—.’ Hobson convulsed himself and crowed thrice.
‘Listen Hobson!—you must not make that noise. It’s very clever of you to be able to: but you will not succeed in rattling me by making me feel I am addressing a rooster.’
Hobson let himself go in whoops and caws, as though Tarr had been pressing him to perform.
When he had finished Tarr enquired coldly:
‘Are you willing to
consider sex seriously or not?’
‘Yes I don’t mind.’—Hobson settled down, his face flushed from his late display.—‘But I shall begin to believe before very long that your intentions are honourable as regards the fair Fräulein.—What exactly is your discourse intended to prove?’
‘
Not
the desirability of the marriage tie, if that’s what you mean, any more than a propaganda for representation and anecdote in art: but
if
a man marries or a great painter represents (and the claims and seductions of life are very urgent) he will not be governed in his choice by the same laws that regulate the life of an efficient citizen or the standards of a eugenist.’ *
‘I should have said that the considerations that precede a proposition of marriage had many analogies with the eugenist’s outlook, the good citizen’s—.’
‘Was Napoleon successful in life or did he ruin himself and end his days in miserable captivity? * —
Passion
precludes the idea of success: worldly failure is its condition.—Art and sex—the real thing—we’re talking at cross-purposes—make tragedies and
not
advertisements for health-experts or happy endings for the Public, or social panaceas.’
‘Alas that is true.’
‘Well then, well then, Alan Hobson—you scarecrow of an advanced fool-farm—.’
‘What is that?’
‘You voice-culture practitioner—.’ *
‘I? My voice—? But that’s absurd! If my speech—.’
Hobson was up in arms about his voice: although it was not his.
Tarr needed a grimacing tumultuous mask for the face he had to cover. He had compared his clowning with Hobson’s pierrotesque * variety: but Hobson, he considered, was a crowd. You could not say he was an individual, he was in fact a set. He sat there, a cultivated audience, with the aplomb and absence of self-consciousness of numbers, of the herd—of those who know they are not alone.—Tarr was shy and the reverse by turns; he was alone.
A distinguished absence of personality was Hobson’s most personal characteristic. Upon this impersonality, of crowd origin, Tarr gazed with the scorn of the autocrat.
‘As I said we’re talking at cross-purposes, Hobson: you believe I am contending that affection for a dolt, like my fiancée, is in someway a merit; I don’t mean that at all. Also I do not mean that sex is my tragedy, but only art.’
‘I thought we were talking about sex?’
‘No. Let me explain. Why am I associated sexually with that irritating nullity? First of all, I am an artist. With most people, who are not artists, all the finer part of their vitality goes into sex if it goes anywhere: during their courtship they become third-rate poets, all their instincts of drama come out freshly with their wives. The artist is he in whom this emotionality normally absorbed by sex is so strong that it claims a newer and more exclusive field of deployment. Its first creation is
the Artist
himself. That is a new sort of person; the creative man.’
‘All artists are not creative.’
‘All right, call yourself an artist if you like. For me the artist is creative. Now for a bang-up first-rate poet nothing short of a queen or a chimera * is adequate, the
Hobson allowed cheeses with a rather drawn expression: but he did not see what that had to do with it, either.
‘It is not purely a question of appetite’ he said.
‘Sex, sir, is
purely
a question of appetite!’ Tarr exclaimed.
Hobson inclined himself mincingly, with a sweet chuckle.
‘If it is
pure
sex, that is’ Tarr added.
‘Oh, if it is
pure
sex—that naturally—.’ Hobson convulsed himself and crowed thrice.
‘Listen Hobson!—you must not make that noise. It’s very clever of you to be able to: but you will not succeed in rattling me by making me feel I am addressing a rooster.’
Hobson let himself go in whoops and caws, as though Tarr had been pressing him to perform.
When he had finished Tarr enquired coldly:
‘Are you willing to
consider sex seriously or not?’
‘Yes I don’t mind.’—Hobson settled down, his face flushed from his late display.—‘But I shall begin to believe before very long that your intentions are honourable as regards the fair Fräulein.—What exactly is your discourse intended to prove?’
‘
Not
the desirability of the marriage tie, if that’s what you mean, any more than a propaganda for representation and anecdote in art: but
if
a man marries or a great painter represents (and the claims and seductions of life are very urgent) he will not be governed in his choice by the same laws that regulate the life of an efficient citizen or the standards of a eugenist.’ *
‘I should have said that the considerations that precede a proposition of marriage had many analogies with the eugenist’s outlook, the good citizen’s—.’
‘Was Napoleon successful in life or did he ruin himself and end his days in miserable captivity? * —
Passion
precludes the idea of success: worldly failure is its condition.—Art and sex—the real thing—we’re talking at cross-purposes—make tragedies and
not
advertisements for health-experts or happy endings for the Public, or social panaceas.’
‘Alas that is true.’
‘Well then, well then, Alan Hobson—you scarecrow of an advanced fool-farm—.’
‘What is that?’
‘You voice-culture practitioner—.’ *
‘I? My voice—? But that’s absurd! If my speech—.’
Hobson was up in arms about his voice: although it was not his.
Tarr needed a grimacing tumultuous mask for the face he had to cover. He had compared his clowning with Hobson’s pierrotesque * variety: but Hobson, he considered, was a crowd. You could not say he was an individual, he was in fact a set. He sat there, a cultivated audience, with the aplomb and absence of self-consciousness of numbers, of the herd—of those who know they are not alone.—Tarr was shy and the reverse by turns; he was alone.
A distinguished absence of personality was Hobson’s most personal characteristic. Upon this impersonality, of crowd origin, Tarr gazed with the scorn of the autocrat.
‘As I said we’re talking at cross-purposes, Hobson: you believe I am contending that affection for a dolt, like my fiancée, is in someway a merit; I don’t mean that at all. Also I do not mean that sex is my tragedy, but only art.’
‘I thought we were talking about sex?’
‘No. Let me explain. Why am I associated sexually with that irritating nullity? First of all, I am an artist. With most people, who are not artists, all the finer part of their vitality goes into sex if it goes anywhere: during their courtship they become third-rate poets, all their instincts of drama come out freshly with their wives. The artist is he in whom this emotionality normally absorbed by sex is so strong that it claims a newer and more exclusive field of deployment. Its first creation is
the Artist
himself. That is a new sort of person; the creative man.’
‘All artists are not creative.’
‘All right, call yourself an artist if you like. For me the artist is creative. Now for a bang-up first-rate poet nothing short of a queen or a chimera * is adequate, the
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