Rewriting Tarr Ten Years Later: Wyndham Lewis, the Phoenix Library and the Domestication of Modernism

Abstract

Four years before his death, Wyndham Lewis wrote to the modernist scholar Hugh Kenner: “In Tarr I had in view a publique d’élite.” This image of a difficult, uncompromising novel for an élite could well apply to the first version of Tarr – completed in 1915 and published by the Egoist Press in Britain and by Knopf in the United States in 1918. But in 1928, Lewis accepted an offer to reprint his novel in the newly created Phoenix Library, sold for only 3 shillings and 6 pence. Lewis decided to re-write the entire novel for this edition. At that time in his career, Lewis was eager to address not a “publique d’élite,” but a large audience who had never read Tarr before. Writing for the large audience that would read his novel in a cheap format, Lewis made his style much more accessible and less confusing for the common reader. Drawing on archival research in the Chatto & Windus records, this chapter takes the example of Tarr to argue that the Phoenix Library not only made available modernism to a much wider audience, but also transformed the modernist text itself.