Tarr

If you were to take with you on vacation Wyndham Lewis's Tarr as a beach read, it'd somehow manage to kick sand in your face. It isn't breezy, nor especially pleasant. There really isn't a character to like in the whole work. And, upon finishing it, you'll feel as if you spent a long time at a greatly demoralizing task like checking behind the testicles of prisoner after prisoner for crack rocks or razor blades. Yet, the novel succeeds on its own terms. Lewis's puerile Nietzscheanism blares from every page, and his prose is as jagged as his Vorticist paintings. But Lewis really was the modernist's modernist (sorry Joyce fans, but it's true), almost singlehandedly introducing Cubism to Ruskin-worshiping Albion, and, of course, shaking up the literary scene with his journal, Blast. In Tarr you see just this sort of modernist: a writer not afraid to take risks, not reluctant to enrage a reading public fattened on the solicitous complacency of realist novelists. Make no mistake, the guy was a fascist and a raging misogynist. But he was also a great artist. Oh, and take special care to get only the 1918 edition; Lewis heavily revised Tarr in the twenties, much to the novel's detriment.

Wyndham's power derives from his tendency to be reactionary. Orwell, Pound, T.S. Elliot and Lewis all began with leftist tendencies, and evolved into a realization of the folly of superimposed mind control as practiced by the left. This novel is a stark satire of these "artistic" propoganda aspects as channeled through art. To attempt to label Lewis with all the ghastly "--isms" is to attempt to superimpose a like kind of modern leftist template over a wonderful '30's rebellion against exactly this kind of labelling. Hard as it may be to believe it, this putative thought control was even worse then, during the political ascendancy of communism.