Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) Read Online Free PDF Page B

all-powerful intellect. We may read Lewis’s signature novel both as saying what it means and as ironizingits own first principles. And in this respect, as in many others,
Tarr
should be better known. With the passage of time its status becomes clearer, like the multi-purpose Bonnington Club it describes within its pages, as the ‘sincerely ironic masterpiece’ (p. 127) it was acclaimed on its first publication.

NOTE ON THE TEXT
    T HE text reproduced in this edition is the revised second version of
Tarr
published in 1928 by Chatto and Windus.
Tarr
has an unusually complex publication history. As John Xiros Cooper has noted: ‘Just ask any one of the two-dozen Lewis scholars in the world which of the versions of
Tarr
is the best or most complete text. Be prepared for a lively response.’ 1 The first version of
Tarr
appeared in three different forms: as a serial in somewhat abridged form in
The Egoist
, published from April 1916 to November 1917; in an American edition published by Alfred A. Knopf on 27 June 1918; and in an English edition published by the Egoist Press on 18 July 1918, published under the name ‘P. Wyndham Lewis’. These three earlier editions contain significant variants. Lewis had worked on
Tarr
roughly from 1908 to 1915, but he put the novel in final form rather quickly during a period of illness before he enlisted to fight for Britain in the First World War. Lewis wanted to leave a literary legacy that would consist of more than
Blast
and a few published short stories if he were to be killed in action, and he placed responsibility for the publication of
Tarr
largely in the hands of his friend and collaborator Ezra Pound.
    Pound found the manuscript difficult to place, in part because of the novel’s frankness about sexual matters. However, he was able to convince Harriet Shaw Weaver, with Lewis’s only reluctant approval, to publish
Tarr
in her journal
The Egoist
. Weaver further promised that she would publish
Tarr
thereafter in book form if Pound were unable to secure another English publisher. At the same time, Pound convinced John Quinn, the American lawyer and patron of Modernist authors, to interest Alfred A. Knopf in publishing an American edition. All of these early versions were problematic. Place-holding phrases that Lewis had intended to change made their way into the incomplete serial
Egoist
version. The Knopf edition was set from a mixture of the printed
Egoist
serial materials and pieces of manuscript that Pound was able to gather while Lewis was at the front, and Lewis was never presented with proofs to correct for this edition. Moreover, John Quinn became ill during theproduction of the Knopf
Tarr
, and the proofreading on this edition was thus done so sloppily that Lewis later referred to this edition as ‘the bad American
Tarr’
. 2 Finally, while Lewis was able to correct the proofs for the
Egoist
book publication, this edition appeared in small enough numbers that by the mid-1920s it was difficult to find. For example, a sales flyer from W. Jackson (Books) Ltd. London, dated for the week ending 18 May 1928, describes a copy of the
Egoist Tarr
as ‘considered by many people as one of the finest novels in our language … out of print and practically impossible to obtain second hand.’ 3
    Lewis was thus pleased to create a new version of
Tarr
in 1928 for Chatto and Windus’s ‘Phoenix Series’, a line of inexpensive editions of modern novels. However, rather than present the publisher with a corrected or aggregate recension of the earlier versions of
Tarr
, and because Lewis had come to consider the 1918
Tarr
to be ‘a hasty piece of workmanship’, 4 he produced an entirely rewritten and expanded version of the text. He did this by unusual means—adding new material in black pen directly to the margins of a copy of the 1918 American edition. This working copy is preserved in the Wyndham Lewis Collection at the Poetry Room of the University at Buffalo, State University of