Wyndham Lewis

“ For once it does not matter, but if persisted in it inevitably results in humour. Those who keep to themselves awaken mirth as a cartwheel running along the road by itself would. People feel with the “lonely” man that he is going about with some eccentric companion—that is himself. Why did he choose this deaf-and-dumb companion? What do they find to say? He is ludicrous as two men would be who, perpetually in each other’s company, were never seen to exchange a word—who dined together, went to theatre or café, without ever looking at each other or speaking.
So Kreisler became a lonely figure. ”

“ As to fighting with a man who was practically dead, to all intents and purposes, one mass of worms—a worm, in short—that was not to be expected of anybody.
So he became a violent snob.
It was Soltyk’s rude behaviour on the day before in the presence of Anastasya that had set him raving on this subject. The Russian Pole was up against a raving snob whose social dignity he had wounded.
Bitzenko and Kreisler came out to get Louis Soltyk like two madmen, full of solemn method and with miraculous solidarity. Their schemes and energies flew direct from mind to mind, without the need for words. ”

“ She was much more outrageous than Kreisler could ever hope to be: bespangled and accoutred like a princess of the household of Peter the Great jangling and rumbling like a savage showman through abashed capitals.
[125]
Her amusement often had been to disinter in herself the dust and decorations of some ancestress. She would float down the windings of her Great Russian and Little Russian blood, living in some imagined figure for a time as you might in towns on a stream.
“We are new lives for our ancestors, not theirs a playground for us. We are the people who have the Reality.” ”

“ Does not a living man need so much time to develop his movements, to lord it with his thoughtful body, to unroll his will? Time is what he needs!
As a tramp being hustled away from a café protests, at each jerk the waiter gives him, that he is a human being, probably a free human being—yes, probably free; so Kreisler complained to his fate that he was a living man, that he required time—that above all it was time he needed—to settle his affairs and withdraw from life. ”

“ Kreisler imagined the change that would come over this face when there was question of thirty francs. Estrangement set in on his side already, anger and humiliation at the imagined expression. This was of help. Here was his chance of borrowing that very insignificant but illusive sum. The man was already an enemy. He would willingly have knocked him on the head and taken his money had they been in a quiet place.
The complacent health and humoristic phlegm with which he grinned and perambulated through life charged Kreisler with the contempt natural to his more stiff and human education. ”

“ She came out with mixed feelings; gratefulness for the enormous indifference and ignorance flowing all round us; anger and astonishment at finding herself walking away in this matter-of-fact manner; suffering at the fact that the customary street scene would not mix with the obsession of her late experience.
No doubt Nature was secret enough. But not to tell this experience of hers to anybody also would be shutting her in with Kreisler, somehow for good. ”

“ He felt that the time had arrived for Life to come in for some of the benefits of Consciousness.
Anastasya’s beauty, bangles, and good sense were the very thing.
Despite himself, Sorbert was dragged out of his luxury of reminiscence without knowing it, and [202] began discriminating between the Bertha enjoyment felt through the pungent German medium of her friends, and this novel sensation. Yet this sensation was an intruder. It was as though a man having wandered sentimentally along an abandoned route, a tactless and gushing acquaintance had been discovered in unlikely possession. ”

“ Anastasya had at last got into line with him. She had been startled, awakened, and had also laughed. This was an exact and complete response to Kreisler at the present. Something difficult to understand and which should have been alarming for a woman, the feel of the first tugs of the maelstrom he was producing and conducting all on his own, and which required her for its heart: and then laughter, necessarily, once one was in that atmosphere, like laughing gas, with its gusty tickling. ”

“ After his long immobility the jump was of the last drollery. His fists clenched, his face emptied of every drop of colour, in the mere action he had almost knocked a man, standing beside him, over. The laugh, for him, had risen with tropic suddenness, a simoom of intolerable offence. It had carried him off his legs, or whirled him round rather, in a second. A young English girl, already terrified at Kreisler’s appearance, and a man, almost as much so, stood open-mouthed in front of him. As to Anastasya and Soltyk, they had very completely disappeared, long before, in all probability. ”

“ Not to go near Bertha was the negative programme for that particular day. To keep away was seldom easy. But ever since his conversation at the Berne he had been conscious of the absurd easiness of doing so, if he wished. He had not the least inclination to go to the Rue Martine!—This sensation was so grateful that its object shared in its effect. He determined to go and see her. He wanted to enjoy his present feeling of indifference. Where best to enjoy it was no doubt where she was.
As to the studio, he hesitated. A new situation was created by this new feeling of indifference. ”

“ A casual observer of the progress of Otto Kreisler’s life might have said that the chief events, the crises, consisted of his love affairs—such as that unfortunate one with his present stepmother.—But, in the light of a careful analysis, this would have been an inversion of the truth. When the events of his life became too unwieldy or overwhelming, he converted them into love, as he might have done, with specialized talent, into some art or other. He was a sculptor—a German sculptor of a mock-realistic and degenerate school—in the strange sweethearting of the “free-life.” ”

“ Clara entered sleepy-eyed and affecting ill-humour. Her fat body was a softly distributed burden, which she carried with the aplomb and indifference of habit. She had a gracefully bumpy forehead, a nice whistling mouth, soft, good and discreet orbs. Her days were passed in the library of the Place Saint Sulpice.
“Ach, lasse! lass mich doch! Get on with your cooking!” she exclaimed as Bertha began her customary sociable and playful greeting. Bertha always was conscious of her noise, of shallowness and worldliness, with this shrewd, indifferent, slow, and monosyllabic bookworm. ”

“ The police had rushed in and broken things off short, swept everything away, ended the banquet in a brutal raid. A deep sore, a shocked and dislocated feeling remained in Kreisler’s mind. He had been hurried so much! He had never needed leisure, breathing space, so much. The disaster of Soltyk’s death was raw on him! Had he been given time—only a little time—he might have put that to rights. (This sinister regret could only imply a possible mutilation of the corpse.)
A dead man has no feeling. He can be treated as an object and hustled away. But a living man needs time!—time! ”

“ Fräulein Lipmann, the fish he particularly angled for, was backward. They did not seem to want him very much at the dance. Nevertheless, after an hour of indefatigable manœuvring, the exertion of many powers seldom put forth in that salon, he secured the form, not the spirit, of an invitation.
Kreisler saw, in his alarmed fancy, Anastasya becoming welded into this gregarious female personality. The energy and resource of the Devil himself would be required to extricate her. She must be held back from this slough for the moment he needed. ”

“ Kreisler began tickling the palm of her hand slightly. When he saw it interrupted her words, he stopped, holding her hand solemnly as though it had been a fish slipped there for some unknown reason. Having her hand—her often-trenchant hand with its favourite gesture of sentimental over-emphasis—captive, made her discourse almost quiet.
“I know you have been wronged and wounded. Treat me as a sister: let me help you. You think my behaviour odd: do you think I’m a funny girl? But, ah! we walk about and torment each other enough! ”

“ Volker, naturally submissive, had broken away and was posing somewhere as a stranger. He felt physical disgust; this proceeding was indecent.
A spirit that has mingled with another, suddenly covering itself and wishing to regain its strangeness, can be as indecent as a strange being suddenly baring itself. A man’s being is never divined so completely and pungently as when his friendship cools and he becomes once more a stranger. This is one of the moments when the imagination, most awake, sees best. ”

“ Distant reminiscences of Bertha, grateful to him at present.
Kisses succeeded.
“I don’t want you!” Tarr said.
“Oh! Tell me what you want?”
“I want a woman!”
“But I am a woman, stupid!”
“I want a slave.”
She whispered in his ear, hanging on his neck.
“No! You may be a woman, but you’re not a slave.”
“Don’t be so quarrelsome. Forget those silly words of yours—slave, woman. It’s all right when you’re talking about art, but you’re hugging a woman at present. This is something that can die! Ha ha! We’re in life, my Tarr. We represent absolutely nothing—thank God!” ”

“ Bitzenko was quite in his element climatically; whereas Kreisler felt his hands getting so cold that he thought they might fail him in the duel.
But a car was heard beyond the trees on the Paris road. This sound in the listless blur of nature was [263] masterful in its significance. It struck steadily and at once into brutish apathy. It so plainly knew what it wanted. It had perhaps outstripped men in that. Men in their soft bodies still contained the apathy of the fields. Their mind had burst out of them and taken these crawling pulps up on its rigid back.
It was Staretsky’s car. ”

“ Soothed by the prospect of this rectification of the evening’s blunder, Tarr once more turned to reflect on it, and saw more clearly than ever the parallel morals of his Bertha affair and his Kreisler affair. His sardonic dream of life got him, as a sort of Quixotic dreamer of inverse illusions, blows from the swift arms of windmills and attacks from indignant and perplexed mankind. He, instead of having conceived the world as more chivalrous and marvellous than it was, had conceived it as emptied of all dignity, sense, and generousness. ”

“ Consider the content of what we call art. A statue is art, as you said; you are life. There is bad art and bad life. We will only consider the good. A statue, then, is a dead thing; a lump of wood or stone. Its hues and masses are its soul. Anything living, quick and changing, is bad art, always; naked men and women are the worst art of all, because there are fewer semi-dead things about them. ”

“ [27]
“You’re a terrible fellow,” said Butcher. “If you had your way, you’d leave us stark naked. We should all be standing on our little island in the savage state of the Ancient Britons—figuratively.” He hiccuped.
“Yes, figuratively. But in reality the country would be armed better than it ever had been before. And by the sacrifice of these famous ‘national characteristics’ we cling to sentimentally, and which are merely the accident of a time, we should lay a soil and foundation of unspecific force, on which new and realler ‘national flavours’ would very soon sprout.”
“I quite agree,” Butcher jerked out energetically.
He ordered another lager. ”

“ It beat on this wall of Paris drearily. Had it been endowed with properties of illumination and been directed there earlier in the day, it would have served as a desolate halo for Tarr’s ratiocination. For several days Kreisler’s watch had been in the Mont de Piété. Until some clock struck he was in total ignorance of the time of day.
The late spring sunshine flooded, like a bursted tepid star, the pink boulevard. The people beneath crawled like wounded insects of cloth. A two-story house terminating the Boulevard Pfeiffer covered the lower part of the Café Berne. ”

“ Tarr drank this toast with gusto.
“Here’s to Waste!” he said loudly. “Waste yourselves, pour yourselves out, let there be no High-Men except such as happen! Economy is sedition. Drink your blood if you have no wine! But waste; fling out into the streets; never count your yarn. Accept fools, compromise yourselves with the poor in spirit, fling the rich ones behind you; live like the lions in the forests with fleas on your back. Down with the Efficient Chimpanzee!”
Anastasya’s eyes were bloodshot with the gulp she had taken to honour Waste. Tarr patted her on the back. ”

“ Staretsky said, leaning on the back of Soltyk’s chair, with authority:
“Don’t be absurd, Louis: don’t be absurd. You must refuse to listen to him. All that rot about libelling and the ‘beautiful girl’: my God, man, you’re not going to take that seriously?”
“Of course not. But I shall fight the German clown. I want to. This is becoming ridiculous.”
Soltyk had made up his mind. He would never have armed himself and shot Kreisler in the street. That would have been too ridiculous. It would have had the touch of passion and intimacy of a crime passionel. ”

“ Practically every individual Frenchman of course has the filthiest taste imaginable. You are more astonished when you come across a sound, lonely, and severe artist in France than elsewhere. His vitality is hypnotically beset by an ocean of artistry. His best instinct is to become rather aggressively harsh and simple. The reason that a great artist like Rodin or the Cubists to-day arouse more fury in France than in England, for instance, is not because the French are more interested in Art! They are less interested in art, if anything. ”

“ Such successful people as Anastasya and himself were by themselves. It was as impossible to combine or wed them as to compound the genius of two great artists. If you mixed together into one whole Gainsborough and Goya you would get nothing, for they would be mutually destructive. Beyond a certain point of perfection individual instinct was its own law. A subtle lyrical wail would gain nothing from living with a rough and powerful talent, or vice versa. Success is always personal. ”

“ Hurried out on to the pavement, he could still see, at the bottom of a huge placid mirror just inside the café, the wriggling backs of the band of Poles. Drawing out his card-case, he had handed the waiter a visiting-card. The waiter at first refused it. He turned his head aside vaguely, as a dog does when doubtful about some morsel offered him; then he took it. Kreisler saw in the mirror the tearing up of his card. Fury once more—not so much because it was a new slight as that he feared his only hope, Soltyk, might escape him. ”

“ God’s in his Heaven, all’s well with the world! I am a pessimist, Hobson. But I’m a new sort of pessimist.—I think I am the sort that will please!—I am the Panurgic-Pessimist, drunken with the laughing-gas of the Abyss. I gaze on squalor and idiocy, and the more I see it, the more I like it.—Flaubert built up his Bouvard et Pécuchet with maniacal and tireless hands. It took him ten years. That was a long draught of stodgy laughter from the gases that rise from the dung-heap? ”

“ He had the protective instinct that people with a sense of their own power have for those not equals with whom they have been associated. He would have given to Bertha the authority of his own spirit, to prime her with himself that she might meet on equal terms and vanquish any rival. He experienced a slight hostility to Anastasya like a part of Bertha left in himself protesting and jealous. It was chiefly vanity at the thought of this superior woman’s contempt could she see his latest female effort. ”

“ Just as he was most out of his depth, Kreisler had run up against all this! It all had the mellowness of sunset, and boomed in this small alcove infernally.—By the fact of sex this figure seems to offer him a traditional substantiality. He clutches at it eagerly as at something familiar and unmetamorphosed—and somewhat unmetamorphosable—by Fate.
In the first flush he revolves with certain skill in this new champ de manœuvres, executing one or two very pretty gymnastics. He has only to flatter himself on the excellent progress, really, that he makes. ”

“ To give up another person’s love is a mild suicide; like a very bad inoculation as compared to the full disease. His tenderness for Bertha was due to her having purloined some part of himself, and covered herself superficially with it as a shield. Her skin at least was Tarr. She had captured a bit of him, and held it as a hostage. She was rapidly transforming herself, too, into a slavish dependency. She worked with all the hypocrisy of a great instinct.
People can wound by loving; the sympathy of this affection is interpenetrative. Love performs its natural miracle, and they become part of us ”

“ So much new matter for anger had been poured into the ear that it wiped out all the earlier impulse. Action must be again begun right down from the root.
Kreisler thrust his mouth forward amorously, his body in the attitude of the eighteenth-century gallant, as though Soltyk had been a woman. ”

“ Kreisler was in the wrong company. But he conformed for the sake of the Invisible Audience haunting life. He emulated the matter-of-factness and aplomb that impressed him in the others à outrance. So much was this so that the Audience took some time to notice him, the vein of scandal running through the performance.
In the conservatory he established his head-quarters.
From there he issued forth on various errands. All his errands showed the gusto of the logic of his personality, and not despair. He might have been enjoying himself. ”

“ Think of all the collages, marriages, and liaisons that you know, in which some frowsy or foolish or doll-like or log-like bitch accompanies the form of an otherwise sensible man: a dumbfounding, disgusting, and septic ghost!
“How foul and wrong this haunting of women is!—They are everywhere!—Confusing, blurring, libelling, with their half-baked, gushing, tawdry presences! It is like a slop of children and the bawling machinery of the inside of life, always and all over our palaces. Their silly food of cheap illusion comes in between friendships, stagnates complacently around a softened mind. ”

“ He would listen solemnly, like a great judge, to Suzanne’s perpetual complaints, sitting on the edge of her bed, hat on head. She was so humble and so pretentious. Her imagination was arrogant and constantly complaining. The form her complaints took was always that of lies—needless, dismal lies. She could not grumble without inventing and she never stopped grumbling. This, then, was one of Kreisler’s dwellings. He lived at large. Some of his rooms, such as this, the Café de Berne, and Juan Soler’s School of Art, he shared with others. ”