Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) (55 page)

Massier
: a student at an atelier who is elected by his peers to act as secretary and treasurer for the studio, also responsible for posing the models.

as living statues do in ballets
: the statue who comes to life was a popular feature of ballet and melodrama from the time of
Pygmalion
(1762) by Swiss philosopher and composer Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78). The animation of inanimate figures was also a recurrent feature of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century ballets, such as
Coppélia
(1870) by Léo Delibes (1836–91);
The Nutcracker
(1892) by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–93), which is based on a story by E. T. A. Hoffmann;
Petrushka
(1911) by Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971); and
From Dust Till Dawn
(1917) and
The Truth about the Russian Dancers
(1920) by Arnold Bax (1883–1953).

gyrating … Fêtes
: a carousel, a French invention of the seventeenth century, found in many Parisian parks. The ‘Fêtes’ in question may be either the
fête foraines
, seasonal carnivals that date from the Middle Ages and reached the height of their popularity at the end of the nineteenth century, or specifically the Place de Fêtes, part of the Paris neighbourhood of Belleville in the nineteenth arrondissement which marks a spot where such regional fairs were held.

Bosche
: alternative English spelling of French
Bosch
, derogatory slang term for a German, used originally by French soldiers.

swine-dog
: Eng. translation of Ger.
Schweinehund
, a strong insult.

cinematograph and Reisebuch
: a movie theatre and a travel guide, such as a
Baedeker
.

vortex
: a whirling movement of matter, water, or gas around a central axis; metaphorically a situation that sucks one in and from which one cannot escape. The key symbol of Vorticism, the avant-garde art movement that Lewis created before the First World War.

Maenads
: in Greek myth the frenzied female followers of Dionysus, the god of wine and ecstatic experience; capable of peaceful coexistence with nature when left alone, but when spied upon capable of tearing apart cattle—and Pentheus, the king of Thebes—with their bare hands.

‘Wer …’ ‘… Fräulein’
: Ger., ‘Who is it?’ ‘Mr. Kreisler, dear lady!’ Kreisler’s German construction is unusual—
Der Herr
would typically be used to refer to a third party, not oneself.

Fontenay des Roses
: properly Fontenay-aux-Roses, a commune in the south-western suburbs of Paris.

the ‘Concert’ of Giorgione
: the ‘Pastoral Concert’ (
Fiesta campestre
,
c
.1510), one of a handful of known paintings by Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco (
c
.1477–1510), painter of the Italian Renaissance. An inspiration for the painting
Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe
(1863) by Édouard Manet (1832–83), it is now considered to be in part or in whole the work of Giorgione’s student Titian (1485–1576).

antimacassar
: a covering placed over the back of furniture to prevent it from being stained by macassar, a popular type of hair oil. Associated with the stodginess of traditional Victorian and Edwardian decor.

Jura
: a popular tourist destination, a system of mountain ranges that covers both sides of the Franco-Swiss border, extending from the Rhône to the Rhine rivers.

Peter the Great
: Peter I (1672–1725), tsar of Russia from 1682 to 1725.

raree show
: a street show or spectacle.

Great Russian and Little Russian
: terms used in the nineteenth century to differentiate between the ‘Great Russian’ language and culture as opposed to the ‘Little Russian’ language and culture of the territory of Ukraine.

Quattrocento
: the fifteenth century as a period of art and architecture in Italy. Literally It., ‘four hundred’, used as shorthand for ‘the 1400s’.

Paul Verlaine … old age
: French Symbolist poet (1844–96) whose scandalous life included a homosexual relationship with the younger poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854–91), whom he wounded with a revolver during a jealous rage in 1873. In his later life Verlaine degenerated into drug addiction, alcoholism, and poverty. His ‘old age’ could have been no older than a debauched 51.

‘Reformkleide’
: properly
reformkleid
, Ger., literally ‘reform dress’, an unstructured dress than did not require a corset to be worn underneath. Favoured by many
Jugendstil
artists and their wives—many of the subjects painted by Gustav Klimt (1862–1918) are portrayed in
reformkleider
—but derided as ugly by others, particularly depending upon the physique of the wearer. See, for instance, a description from a novel of the period: ‘the awful reformkleid was in vogue, and fat German women were displaying themselves in lumps and creases and billows and sections that rolled like the untrammelled waves of the sea’ (Gertrude Franklin Horne Atherton,
The White Morning
(New York: Stokes, 1918), 186).

‘Homme sensuel! … Homme égoïste!’
Fr., ‘Sensualist! … Selfish!’

siberian exile
: Siberia is a large northern territory of Russia known for its formidably harsh winters, and was used from the early seventeenth century as a penal colony and place of internal exile.

bona-fides
: guarantees of good faith.

megrim
: a headache, also specifically a migraine headache.

Rue de Rennes
: a street in the 6th arrondissement.

‘pious mountains’
: a literal rendering into English of
monts-de-piété
, the government pawnshops.

‘Smokkin’ … complets
: inaccurate Fr., ‘a full ensemble of men’s formal wear’.

stoop to Folly
: allusion to the poem ‘Song (When Lovely Woman Stoops to Folly)’ which first appeared in the novel
The Vicar of Wakefield
by Oliver Goldsmith (
c
.1730–74):

When lovely woman stoops to folly,

And finds too late that men betray,

What charm can soothe her melancholy,

What art can wash her guilt away?

The only art her guilt to cover,

To hide her shame from every eye,

To give repentance to her lover,

And wring his bosom—is to die.

(
Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith
, iv (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 379).

flapper
: although generally associated with the slender, stylish, and unconventional young women of the 1920s, the
Oxford English Dictionary
lists the use of ‘flapper’ as early as 1903, to refer to ‘a young woman, esp. with an implication of flightiness or lack of decorum’.

‘Get thee to a nunnery!’
: Hamlet to Ophelia in Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
: ‘Get thee to a nunn’ry, why woulds’t thou be a breeder of sinners?’ (
III
. i. 120). ‘Nunnery’ is usually taken to mean a brothel; Ophelia addresses Hamlet as ‘my lord’ five lines before.

simoom
: a strong desert wind that occurs in Arabia and the Sahara.

conservatory
: a greenhouse, particularly for delicate plants.

‘for it’
: ‘done for’.

Love’s horns
: an allusion to a song from Act 2, Scene 1 of the play
The Bride’s Tragedy
(1822) by Thomas Lovell Beddoes. The song portrays Love as a hunter, and begins ‘A ho! A ho! | Love’s horn doth blow, | And he will out a-hawking go’ (
The Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925), 184).

décor Versaillesque and polonais
: interior decoration associated with Versailles, an opulent French palace expanded by Louis XIV in the seventeenth century; the ‘polonais’ decor in question may be polonaise carpets,
Persian products of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that were bought by aristocratic collectors from Poland and were among the first such carpets displayed in Europe. It may also refer more generally to the elements of Baroque and Rococo design shared by Versailles with some seventeenth-century Polish art and architecture, which can be seen particularly in the city of Kraków.

en pleine abstraction
: Fr., literally ‘in the state of abstraction’, with the apparent meaning ‘having lost touch with reality’. A play on words that mixes the practice of the Impressionist artists of painting
en plein air
—‘in the open air’—with the incompatible practices of abstract painting.

faun
: in Roman mythology, a rural deity associated with lust, portrayed as half-human, half-goat.

satyric
: adj., ‘like a satyr’, the Greek equivalent of the faun.

weibliche Seele
: Ger., ‘feminine soul’, a crudely essentializing term associated with late-nineteenth-century pre-Freudian German sexologists such as Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825–95) and Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902), author of
Psychopathia Sexualis
(1886).

Comme toute la Pologne!
: ‘Ivre comme toute la Pologne’ (‘drunk as all of Poland’), French proverb for being very drunk indeed.

Mephistopheles
: a name for the devil, particularly the demon of the Faust legend, whose best-known manifestation appears in the play
Faust
(1808–32) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

‘Merry Widow’ waltz
: a popular tune from the 1905 operetta
The Merry Widow
(Ger.,
Die lustige Witwe
) by Austro-Hungarian composer Franz Lehár (1870–1948).

Bauern Ball
: properly
Bauernball
, a peasant’s ball (literally Ger. ‘Farmer’s dance’), a rustic dance typical of the Tyrol, or a German social event held in imitation of such an event, where attendees wear costumes representing the varied rural areas of the German-speaking countries.

berserker warrior
: an ancient Norse warrior known for frenzied and savage fighting: the origin of the modern English work ‘berserk’.

‘Lass’ mich doch, gemeine alte Sau!’
: Ger., ‘Leave me alone, you swinish old hag’ (lit. ‘common old sow’).

Gadarene Swine
: the New Testament Gospels of Matthew, Luke, and Mark narrate how Jesus exorcized a group of demons from a possessed man in Gadara, casting them into a herd of pigs: ‘And he said unto them, Go. And when they were come out, they went into the herd of swine: and, behold, the whole herd of swine ran violently down a steep place into the sea, and perished in the waters’ (Matthew 8: 32, King James translation).

A FEST … LAUGHTER
: an anti-Romantic echo of the final line of ‘Ode:

Intimations Of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ (1803–6) by English poet William Wordsworth (1770–1850): ‘To me the meanest flower that blows can give | Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.’ See also p. 164.

fifty-centime piece
: a coin worth half a franc. Very little money in a city where mailing a postcard cost 10 centimes. By comparison, the 1907
Baedeker
suggests that tourists to Paris budget between 15 and 40 francs per day.

ox-eye
: having large protuberant eyes, like those of an ox; used as an adjective (‘ox-eyed’) in Greek literature, particularly Homer, to describe the goddess Hera.

Gare St. Lazare
: one of Paris’s six large train stations, providing service to Normandy.

red-headed … Iscariot
: in Christian iconography Judas, the betrayer of Jesus, is often portrayed as a redhead. In France red hair is known as
poil de Judas
.

Sorbett … final consonants
: because the German Bertha has not learned to pronounce ‘Sorbet’ in the French manner as ‘Sorbay’, Tarr spells his pet name with a doubled final ‘t’ to match his orthography to her mispronunciation.

Dieppe
: a port on the English Channel, offering regular ferry service to Newhaven in England.

‘Verdammte … Donnerwetter!’
: three German expletives meaning roughly ‘Bloody hell’, ‘The Devil!’ (lit. ‘Lucifer match!’), and ‘Damn!’

oaths of Goethe
: aside from the occasional vulgarism in the early play
Götz von Berlichingen
(1773) and the
Walpurgistnacht
scene of
Faust
, Goethe was not particularly associated with crude language. Lewis likely refers in general to the somewhat fusty nature of Bertha’s expletives.

‘Na … Ruhe denn!’
: Ger., ‘Well then, leave me in peace!’

femme
: Fr., in this context ‘womanly’.

Salon d’Automne
: a prestigious recommendation for Clara’s work. The Salon d’Automne (literally Fr. ‘autumn salon’) was held annually in Paris in the autumn as an exhibition devoted to young artists. It was established in 1903 as an alternative to the conservative official Salon, and early such salons featured paintings by Paul Gauguin (1903 and 1906), Henri Matisse and the Fauvist painters (1905), and Paul Cézanne (1907).

English Review
: a literary and cultural journal founded in 1908 and edited by Ford Madox Hueffer (1873–1939, later known as Ford Madox Ford). Lewis published some of his earliest fiction in the
English Review
: ‘The “Pole” ’ in 2/6 (May 1909), ‘Some Innkeepers and Bestre’ in 2/7 (June 1909), and ‘Les Saltimbanques’ in 3/9 (August 1909). The passage quoted by Tarr is Lewis’s invention.

‘Mademoiselle est triste? … salaud?’
: Fr., ‘Are you sad, miss?’ … ‘Mr. Sorbet has upset you again, hasn’t he?’ ‘Yes, ma’am, he’s a bastard,’ ‘Oh, don’t say that, miss: what do you mean, he’s a bastard?’ Bertha’s French contains elementary errors—‘il est un salaud’ should be ‘c’est un salaud’. The use of polite titles is explained by the 1907
Baedeker
guide: ‘It is
also customary to address persons even of humble station as ‘
Monsieur
’, ‘
Madame
’, or ‘
Mademoiselle
’ (p. xxv).

“souillures de ce brute”
: Fr., ‘the defilements of that brute’.

reform-clothes
: see note to p. 119.