Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) by Wyndham Lewis

been modified by any sedentary, sentimental or other discipline or habit: he was at his first push in an ardent and exotic world, with a good fund of passion from a somewhat frigid climate of his own. His mistakes he talked over without embarrassment—he felt them deeply. He was experimental and modest.
    A rude and hard infancy, if Balzac is to be believed, is quite the best thing for development of character. * Thereby a child learns duplicity and hardens in defence.
    An enervating childhood of mollycoddling, on the other hand, such as Tarr’s, has its advantages.—He was an only child of a selfish vigorous little mother. The long foundation of delicate trustfulness and irresponsibility makes for a store of illusion to prolong youth and health beyond the usual term. Tarr, with the Balzac upbringing, would have had a little too much character, like a rather too muscular man. As it was he was a shade too nervous. But his confidence in the backing of character was unparalleled: you would have thought he had an Age of Iron behind him, instead of an Age of Bibs and Binders.
    When he solicited advice, as now he was doing of Butcher, it was transparently a matter of form. No serious reply was expected from anyone except himself: but he appeared to need his own advice to come from himself in public.
    Did he feel that a man was of more importance in public? Probably not: but his relation to the world was definite and complementary. He preferred his own word to come out of the air; when, that is, issuing from his mouth, it entered either ear as an independent vibration. He was the kind of person who, if he ever should wish to influence the world, would do it so that he might touch himself more plastically through others. If he wanted a picture, he would paint it for himself. He was capable of respect for his self-projection, it had the authority of a stranger for him.
    Butcher knew that his advice was not in fact solicited. This he found rather annoying, as he wanted to meddle, loving Tarr and desiring to have a finger in all Tarr’s pies, especially where tenderness was in question. But his opportunity would come.
    Tarr’s affairs with Bertha Lunken were very exasperating: of all the drab, dull and disproportionately long liaisons, that one was unique! What on earth was this young master doing in this instance? Butcher could not fathom it. But it seemed that Tarr had acquiesced as an incomprehensible and silly joke.
    ‘She’s a very good sort; you know, she is phenomenally kind. It’s not quite so absurd as you think, my question as to whether I should marry her. Her love is quite beyond question.’
    Butcher listened with a slight rolling of the eyes, which was a soft equivalent for grinding his teeth. These women! These men!
    Tarr proceeded:
    ‘She has a nice healthy bent for self-immolation, not unfortunately, I must confess, directed by any considerable tact or discretion. She is apt to lie down on the altar at the wrong moment—even to mistake all sorts of unrelated things for altars. She once lay down on the pavement of the Boulevard Sebastopol * and continued to lie there heroically till, with the help of a cop, I bundled her into a cab. She is decidedly genial and fond of a gross pleasantry, very near to “the people”—“le peuple,” as she says, purringly and pityingly in her clumsy german french. All individuals who have class marked upon them strongly resemble each other don’t you agree—a typical duchess is much more like a typical nurserymaid than she is like anybody not standardized to the same extent as the nurserymaid and herself. So is Bertha, a bourgeoise or rather bourgeois-bohemian, reminiscent of the popular maiden: she is the popular maiden, at one remove.—I am not in love with the popular maiden.’
    ‘No!’ Butcher hastened to agree to that healthy sentiment.
    Tarr relighted his cigarette.
    ‘She is full of good sense. Bertha is a high-grade aryan * bitch, in good condition, superbly