This book offers some really insightful pieces on the Pope John Paul II's "Veritatas Splendor." Especially thought-provoking was O'Keefe's piece on Augustine and perfectionism. A great resource for those who really want to think through this Vatican document.

In his first novel, set in the cafes and nightspots of Paris during the beginning of the twentieth century, Wyndham Lewis presents the reader with a gallery of figures who live as a master race of artists. The action consists mostly of rows, one culminating in violence, during which the cast of poseurs and atavists engage in esoteric debates, which enable Lewis to weave in his own political and artistic concerns into the manifold of polemic. Typically of his novels, with their Fascist, racist, sexist, elitist biases, "Tarr" pulls no punches, assailing conventional bourgeois values in art and culture and proclaiming the figure of the artist as supreme. Along with Ezra Pound, Lewis was the founder of Vorticism, the British counterpart of Futurism, and also the joint editor of Blast!, the magazine in which Vorticist views were enunciated. With its glorification of velocity, violence, modernity and the machine, Vorticism's major tenets are consistently applied in the novel, with its brutal, striking, seemingly spontaneous prose style and its portrayal of the artist as a sort of automaton who will risk everything to attain his end, regardless of the damage that this may cause to others. However, the novel is let down by its lack of incident and the way in which the author blatantly allows his characters to act as mouthpieces for views which are clearly his own. A minor, and now almost forgotten, classic.

With Tarr, Wyndham Lewis drags the reader through a few months in the lives of a collection of relentlessly self-absorbed and repulsive expatriates infesting the cafes and pensions of Paris just prior to the First World War. Cynicism and fermenting racial hatreds simmer just below the surface of a stew of intellectual banter and social intrigue. Conspicuous in its absence is any sense of sincerity or personal integrity of feelings. When a sincere response does erupt, it results in absurdity as when Tarr attacks the hat of his opponent in frustration after failing to win his point in a philosophical discussion. All of the principal characters are obsessive poseurs whose every behavior towards one another is propelled by a calculated maneuvering designed to improve one's position in an informal, but powerful, pecking order. The machinations are as complex as the motivations are shallow. More often than not, an agenda outruns the control of the agent who sets it in motion and the character then watches helplessly as events destined to blight his life unfold before him. Depressingly, the players do not appear to gain any insight from their foibles regarding the error of their ways and Lewis' dim view of the character of his fellow man is unleavened by the humor that finds its way into his later novels. The greatest flaw I found in Lewis' Tarr is one typical of the first novels of writers possessing an active intellect. The narrative flow is occasionally disrupted by the author's attempt to incorporate his own social and philosophical theories into the dialogue of his characters. And although this volume lacks the imagination and sophistication of Lewis' later works, there are a number of finely wrought passages which foreshadow the talent he is beginning to develop. My favorite;

For the last hour he had been accumulating difficulties, or rather unearthing some new one at every step. Impossible to tackle "en masse," they were all there before him. The thought of "settling everything before he went," now appeared monstrous. He had, anyhow, started these local monsters and demons, fishing them to the light. Each had a different vocal explosiveness, inveighing unintelligibly against each other. The only thing to be done was to herd them all together and march them away for inspection at leisure.

Tarr, The 1918 Version is an enjoyable and worthwhile read if you have the time, but if you will read only one book by Lewis, leave this one on the shelf and, instead, make a grab for The Apes of God.

Wyndham's power derives from his tendency to be reactionary. Orwell, Pound, T.S. Elliot and Lewis all began with leftist tendencies, and evolved into a realization of the folly of superimposed mind control as practiced by the left. This novel is a stark satire of these "artistic" propoganda aspects as channeled through art. To attempt to label Lewis with all the ghastly "--isms" is to attempt to superimpose a like kind of modern leftist template over a wonderful '30's rebellion against exactly this kind of labelling. Hard as it may be to believe it, this putative thought control was even worse then, during the political ascendancy of communism.