Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) by Wyndham Lewis Page A

made; of the succulent, obedient, clear peasant type. At least it is natural that in my healthy youth, living in these Bohemian wastes, I should catch fire. I have caught fire; not much, slightly, at the tip.’
    ‘Stamp on it!’
    ‘No. That is not the whole of the picture. She is unfortunately not a peasant. She has german culture, and a florid philosophy of love. She is an art student. She is absurd.’
    Butcher did not dare to speak, but he shifted about approvingly, his eyes very bright indeed.
    Tarr struck a match for his cigarette.
    ‘You would ask then how it is that I am still there? The peasant—if such it were—would not hold you for ever; even less so the
spoiled
peasant.—But that’s where the mischief lies. That bourgeois, spoiled, ridiculous element was the trap, I discover. I was innocently depraved enough to find it irresistible: had it not the charm of a vulgar wallpaper, a gimcrack ornament? I fell to a cosy banality set in the midst of a rough life. Youthful exoticism has done it, the something different to oneself. Bertha is the one thing on earth I am not like myself, probably.’
    Butcher did not roll his eyes any more, they looked rather moist. He was thinking of love and absurdities that had checkered his own past, he was regretting a downy doll. But his friend’s statement had won him over as was always the case; such conviction lay very near the surface with the moist-eyed Guy Butcher.
    Tarr, noticing the effect of his words, laughed. Butcher was like a dog, with his rheumy eyes.
    ‘My romance, you see, is exactly the opposite to yours’ Tarr proceeded. ‘Pure unadulterated romanticism, look you Butch, is, when found in me, in much the same rudimentary state as sex. So they had perhaps better keep together? What do you say? I only allow myself to philander with
little
things. I have succeeded in shunting our noxious illusionism away from the great spaces and ambitions, that is my main claim to fame, so far. I have billeted it with a bourgeoise in a villa.’ He beamed suddenly at Butcher, who taken by surprise, coughed, staggered in his chair and mildly choked, his eyes filling with tears.
    ‘In a villa.’ Tarr pointed at the summit of a dusty little tree. ‘These things are all arranged above our heads, they are no doubt self-protective. All of a man’s ninety-nine per cent of submerged mechanism is daily engaged in organizing his life in accordance with his deepest necessity: each person boasts some invention of purely personal application. So there I am fixed with my bourgeoise in my skin, dans ma peau. What is the next step? The body is the main thing. But I think I have made a discovery. In sex I am romantic and backward. It would be healthier for all sex to be so: but that’s another matter. Well, I cannot see myself attracted by an exceptional woman, a particularly refined and witty animal—I do not understand attraction for such beings. Their existence puzzles me though I am sure they serve some purpose: but, not being as fine as men—not being as fine as pictures or poems—not being as fine as housewives or classical Mothers of Men—accordingly they appear to me to occupy an unfortunate position on this earth. No properly demarcated person as I am, is going to have much to do with them: they are beautiful to look at, it may be, but they are unfortunately alive, and usually cats: if you married one of them, out of pity, you would have to support the eternal grin of a Gioconda * fixed complacently upon you at all hours of the day, the pretensions of a piece of canvas that had sold for thirty thousand pounds. You could not put your foot through the canvaswithout being hanged. You would not be able to sell it yourself for that figure and so get some little compensation. At the most, if the sentimental grin would not otherwise come off, you could break its jaw, perhaps. No!’
    Butcher flung his head up, and laughed affectedly.
    ‘Ha! Ha!’ he went again.
    ‘Very