Word: tarr
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Jones was edged in a near dead heat by Oregon's Jerry Tarr, a relative newcomer...
...outcome of all this is the clear realization that Lewis has made few contributions in the positive sense, with the possible exceptions of "Tarr" and "The Apes of God," which may be reheard and remembered for their literary virtues alone. In the main, however, Wagner's study indicates that Lewis has been valuable chiefly through his constant attacks from the enemy position. Like the burr under the saddle, he has helped to hurry things along. Speaking of Vorticism, a movement initiated by Lewis, Wagner remarks, "It was a necessary interim. It 'hustled the cultural Britannia, stepping up that cautious pace...
...ferociously lit into the popular romanticism ("chaos of Enoch Ardens, laughing Jennys, ladies with pains, good-for-nothing Guineveres"). He introduced cubism to Britain, then characteristically turned on it fiercely when cubism became popular. In a series of novels written in prose as rough-edged as a raw nerve (Tarr, The Apes of God, Rotting Hill), he mocked and mauled socialists, his fellow intellectuals, the middle class ("dry-rotted yes-people who are clay in the hands of carpenters"). After his fashion, he gave the U.S. some rare admiration-"a great promiscuous grave into which tumble, and then disintegrate...
...with publication of his first novel, Tarr, Lewis sprang suddenly into true prominence. Tarr was not only his first large-scale assault on woolly vaporings about love and life, it was (and still is) one of the greatest comic novels ever written in English. None of Lewis' later novels-even The Revenge for Love, The Apes of God, The Childermass-has ousted Tarr from first place, but each displays uniquely the mingled anger, intellectual probity and hair-raising humor that are the stamp of a Lewis opus. What is most curious and most defective about all these novels...
...good as anything he has written since Tarr, and stands head and shoulders above the general run of fiction. It is about a British professor and his wife who emigrate to Canada just before World War II. (Author Lewis, born in Maine when his globe-trotting parents took a cruise to the U.S., himself came to North America in World War II, stayed six years.) The book gives a shattering account of life in a rundown, chaotic, Cana dian hotel room during the convulsions of wartime. The real theme of Self Condemned is a blow-by-blow account...