Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) (56 page)

potty
: British English, ‘mad’.

fillip
: a smart tap or blow; something that rouses or excites.

‘contretemps’
: disagreements, disputes, or mishaps; from a term in fencing, adopted from the French, ‘a badly timed thrust’.

quatsch
: nonsense, rubbish.

Modern Girl
: term for an unconventional young girl, mainly used in the 1920s, often as an alternative to ‘flapper’. The popular press of the day generally described the ‘Modern Girl’ as younger, more frivolous, and more overtly sexual than the so-called ‘New Woman’. Anastasya’s anachronistic status as ‘Modern Girl’ before the War reflects her social and sexual precocity.

neck
: nerve, effrontery.

Eldorado
: a fictitious country or city abounding in gold, believed by the Spanish and by Sir Walter Raleigh to exist upon the Amazon.

Gulf Stream
: a warm and fast-moving current of the Atlantic Ocean that originates in the Gulf of Mexico.

‘Oh Schwein! … du hasslicher Mensch du!’
: Ger., ‘You pig! Pig! I hate you—I hate you! Pig! Ugh! You revolt me!’ (lit. ‘You ugliest of men, you!’).

a Salon picture
: a conventional and unimaginative painting, of the sort typically shown at the official French art exhibition of Paris, held since the early eighteenth century by the Académie des Beaux-Arts (see also note to p. 75).

Susanna-like breast
: Susanna is a beautiful young wife in the Apocrypha who attracts two elders; they spy on her in the bath and accuse her of immorality when she refuses to sleep with them. The partially nude Susanna, usually portrayed under the lustful eyes of the elders, was a popular subject for paintings from the time of the Renaissance.

answer … outrage
: i.e. if Bertha were home in Germany, a male family member or male admirer would challenge Kreisler to a duel. Although duelling had fallen out of practice in England by the mid-nineteenth century, in Germany and France it was common until the First World War.

Place Clichy
: a square in the 8th arrondissement, north of the Seine and not far from Montmartre. It lies across town from Bertha and Montparnasse.

bibliothèque
: a cabinet originally for the display of books, but used to display any kinds of
objets d’art
.

Place Pigalle
: a neighbourhood in Montmartre, known as a centre of decadence. The 1907
Baedeker
warns ladies that some cafés ‘on the N. side of
the Boulevard Montmartre should … be avoided, as the society there is far from select’ (p. 22).

handsome Wellington beak
: a large hooked nose like that of Arthur Wellesley, First Duke of Wellington (1769–1852). His nose was so prominent that geographical features from Scotland to India still bear the name ‘Wellington’s Nose’ and ‘The Duke’s Nose’.

minor Tennysons
: later and lesser poets who imitated the very Victorian dress and poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–92), Poet Laureate of England from 1850 until his death.

hellenizing world … greek culture
: the Hellenistic Period (
c
.323–31
BC
) was the last great phase of Greek art, following the death of Alexander the Great and the incorporation of the Persian empire into the Greek world. Tarr’s painting suggests a struggle between late classicism and the Asian aesthetics it threatened to supplant—which in turn reflects the increasing influence of non-Western forms on artists of the period such as Picasso and the Vorticist sculptors Jacob Epstein (1880–1959) and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891–1915).

two colours … curves
: an apparent description of Lewis’s
The Dancers
(1912).

poxed
: syphilitic.

relief ships or pleasure boats
: fanciful terms for prostitutes.

‘fire-ship’
: mainly eighteenth-century English slang: one suffering from venereal disease, especially a prostitute. From the wartime practice of loading a vessel with combustibles and explosives, and sending it adrift to destroy other ships.

Rive Gauche
: Fr., the ‘Left Bank’ of the Seine, home to Montparnasse and Bertha.

souvenirs
: in the sense of ‘remembrances’ rather than ‘sentimental tokens’.

oreiller … aimer
: Fr., ‘Pillow of cool flesh where one cannot love’, a description of the somewhat heavy women typically portrayed in paintings by Flemish painter Peter Paul Reubens (1577–1640) taken from Baudelaire’s poem ‘Les Phares’ (‘The Beacons’), number 6 of ‘Spleen et idéal’ in
Les Fleurs du mal
(
Œ;uvres Complete, Les Fleurs du mal, Les Épaves
(Paris: Louis Conard, 1930), 20).

mercenary troops
: German soldiers for hire played a part in many European and New World wars, from the
Landsknechte
of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to the so-called ‘Hessians’ who fought for England during the American Revolution.

parvenu
: an upstart; someone lacking the accomplishments or polish for their claimed social position.

‘Sorbet … jeune’
: Fr., ‘Sorbet, you are
so young
.’

Young Werther … Sorrows
: in Goethe’s novel
Die Leiden des jungen Werther
(
The Sorrows of Young Werther
, 1774) the young hero is characterized by a ‘blauen Frack mit gelber Veste’ (Ger., ‘blue coat and yellow vest’) which he is wearing when he is found dying at the end of the novel, a suicide by pistol. The immense popularity of the book during the Romantic period led to what became known as
Wertherfieber
(Ger., ‘Werther fever’): young men adopted Werther’s colour scheme in fashion, and there was a sharp upturn in youthful suicides.

‘Peep-oh!’
: alternative spelling of ‘Peep-bo’, the child’s game of peekaboo.

Romany Rye
: a man who is not a Gypsy but associates with the Gypsies, ‘rye’ in the nineteenth-century slang sense of ‘man, gentleman’.
The Romany Rye
(1857) is the title of an autobiographical book by George Borrow in which he details his semi-fictional experiences with the gypsies of England.

Land’s End … John o’ Groats
: popular usage to mean ‘the whole of Great Britain’. Land’s End marks the extreme south-westward point of Great Britain, in western Cornwall; John o’ Groats marks the traditionally acknowledged, if not geographically accurate, extreme northern point of Scotland in north-eastern Caithness.

The Tiller girls
: troupes of English dancing girls founded in 1901 by John Tiller (
c
.1851–1925). The original women’s precision dance groups, they were trained in England and appeared in music halls and variety shows, including as resident dancers at Paris’s Folies-Bergère. They were the direct inspiration for the Rockettes of New York.

bouf!
: an interjection of surprise and dismay.

Fasching
: a German carnival, a pre-Lenten celebration typified by revelry and humour.

‘Deutsches Volk—the folk that deceives!’
: in
Jenseits von Gut und Böse
(
Beyond Good and Evil
) the German philosopher Nietzsche proposes a fanciful etymology for the word
deutsch
: ‘man soll seinem Namen Ehre machen—man heißt nicht umsonst das “tiusche” Volk, das TäuscheVolk …’ (
Friedrich Nietzsche: Werke in Zwei Bänden
, vol. ii. (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1973), sect. 244, p. 133; ‘it’s not for nothing that the Germans [
die Deutsche
] are called the “
tiusche
” people, the “
Täusche
” (deceptive) people …’ (trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 137).

Wagner
: the German composer Richard Wagner (1813–83), a notorious anti-Semite and author of the tract
Das Judenthum in der Musik
(
Jewishness in Music
, 1850), was nonetheless rumoured to have Jewish blood, perhaps because of Nietzsche’s claim in
Der Fall Wagner
(
The Case of Wagner
, 1888) that Wagner had a Jewish father.

‘See the Continental Press’
: the anti-British animus of the newspapers of Continental Europe was so apparent that Tarr cites this phrase as a cliché.
Such bias had been clear at least since the mid-nineteenth century: the
Quarterly Review
of 1848 called to task ‘those whole classes of the continental press which are the most rancorously hostile to England’ (83/165, p. 297). Even at the cusp of the twentieth century the British journal the
Nineteenth Century
would note ‘The Continental Press is still intensely hostile’ (no. 273 (Dec. 1899), 1029).

malin
: Fr., ‘cunning, sneaky’. Kreisler uses the masculine adjective where he should use the feminine,
maligne
.

whip … too
: a notorious quotation from
Also sprach Zarathustra
(
Thus Spake Zarathustra
, 1883–5), from the end of the section titled ‘Von altern und jungen Weiblein’ (‘Of little women old and young’), ‘Du gehst zu Frauen? Vergiß die Peitsche nicht!’ (Friedrich Nietzsche:
Werke in Zwei Bänden
, Carl Hanser Verlag, vol. i (Munich: 589); ‘You go to women? Do not forget the whip!’, trans. Adrian del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 50).

bubonic plague
: although apparently comically incongruous, the reference is surprisingly topical. There was a resurgence of plague beginning in 1894, and although the disease was largely confined to Asia, an International Sanitary Conference was held in Paris in 1903 to deal with the potential threat. This meeting and others led to the creation of the Office international d’hygiène publique (International Office of Public Health) in Paris in 1907, the forerunner of the current World Health Organization.

revenant
: one who returns to a particular place, or one who returns from the dead.

playing … gooseberry
: to be an unwelcome third party at a lovers’ meeting.

rapprochement
: an establishing of harmonious relations.

atmosphere … police-court romance
: i.e. of a scene between criminals, or between an accused criminal and an interrogating officer, in a popular crime novel (Fr.,
roman policier
).

casanovaesque stage-coach journey
: Giacomo Casanova (1725–98), Italian womanizer and author, whose name became emblematic for the suave seducer. His posthumously published
Histoire de ma vie
(
Story of My Life
, first published in French, 1826–38) is one of the earliest records of extensive travel through Europe via stagecoach. An English translation by Arthur Machen appeared in 1894.

revolutionary storm and stress
: during the 1848 February Revolution, which overthrew the government of Louis Philippe and led to the creation of the short-lived Second Republic in France (1848–52), a government commission on the problems of labour was established in the Luxembourg Palace. ‘Storm and stress’ is a common English translation of the German phrase
Sturm und Drang
(
Drang
more literally ‘urge’, or ‘drive’), taken from the title of a 1776 play by German author Friedrich von Klinger (1752–1831). The phrase is associated with a pre-Romantic late eighteenth-century
German movement in literature and music in which formal innovation went hand in hand with intensified subjectivity, emotionalism, and rebellion against moral and social conventions. The phrase is frequently used in English, often ahistorically, to refer to Romantic turmoil of any kind.

Lycée Henri Trois
: a double misremembrance on Lewis’s part, in name and location: the Lycée Henri IV, one of France’s most esteemed private schools, lies several blocks away from the Luxembourg Gardens, on Clovis Street in the Latin Quarter. Its grounds are not contiguous with the Gardens.

his Park
: compare to Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
by Irish novelist James Joyce (1882–1941), who feels similarly possessive of a Dublin park, describing his thoughts while ‘Crossing Stephen’s, that is, my green’ (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1992, p. 271).

‘Elle … parchemins
’: Fr., ‘She says the word, Anastase, born for eternal parchments.’ A quotation from ‘Prose pour Des Esseintes’ (1885) by the French Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–98). Called up by Anastasya’s name, the phrase is obscure in the original, and in this context is less thematically significant than it is an example of Tarr’s erudition.

after a fashion true
: an allusion to the repeated refrain ‘I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! In my fashion’ from ‘Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae’ by English poet Ernest Dowson (1867–1900).

Suarès … Ibsen
: the insight of André Suarès, French writer and critic (1868–1948), into the work of Norwegian playwright Henrick Ibsen (1828–1906). Suarès wrote two essays dealing with Ibsen for the
Revue des deux mondes
in 1903, and the book
Trois hommes, Pascal, Ibsen, Dostoïevski
, in which appears the sentence that Tarr paraphrases: ‘Par tout le Nord, il règne une rhétorique d’esprit, qui répond à la rhétorique de mots en faveur au Midi’ (Paris: Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue française, 1913, p. 96).

petits-maîtres
: lit. Fr., ‘small masters’, in English a largely derogatory term for minor practitioners of the fine arts; also, by extension, dandies or fops.

garden city … London:
Letchworth Garden City, known more commonly as Letchworth, is a town in Hertfordshire, England, that was founded in 1903 as the first manifestation of the urban-utopian ideas of Ebenezer Howard (1850–1928). The garden city was intended to offer the benefits of urban living without the crowding and squalor of the Victorian city, and was much mocked by the Press as a misguided liberal social experiment, although it was embraced both by area Quakers and the Arts and Crafts movement.

The Fabian Society was founded in 1884 and devoted to gradualist, non-Marxist collectivist thinking about social policy, taking its name from the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus
(
c
.280–203
BC
), who was known as
Cunctator
(Lat., ‘The delayer’) for his cautious tactics in war. The organization was founded in part by economist and reformer Sidney Webb (1859–1947), his wife Beatrice Webb (1858–1943), and Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), and became the pre-eminent politico-economic intellectual movement of the Edwardian era.