Night Thoughts on Editing Tarr ________ Scott W. Klein A tale once told cannot be told again; The whistle whistles and it whistles still. (‘Night Thoughts’, C. H. Sisson) It may seem curious to begin an essay about producing a new edition of the 1928 text of Lewis’s Tarr for the Oxford World Classics series with the minor poetic genre of the ‘night thought’. Ever since Edward Young’s eighteenth-century poem of the title, best known to the general reader for its later illustrations by William Blake, the ‘night thought’ has implied a personal look backward, a remembrance of things past carrying with it a melancholy acknowledgement of opportunities lost. Yet as C. H. Sisson suggests in his poem of the same title, the ‘night thought’ implies a paradoxical relation between the one who contemplates and the past. The narratives of the past cannot be recaptured, on one hand, for the tale already told cannot be told again. On the other hand, the work of the past has always maintained a covert existence through time. What was once sounded (‘whistled’) continues to sound, if only in memory. Sisson’s poem implies that the past cannot be recaptured, but also, conversely, that the past has never been lost. I’d like to suggest that this paradox is particularly relevant to the editing of a work such as Tarr. For while Tarr has never been a ‘lost’ work, it is an important novel that has fallen out of print, leading for some a shadowy existence on the cusp of the canon as well as the cusp of availability. Its ‘whistle’ – sometimes strident, sometimes alluring – has never gone away, but it has become, to a degree, inaccessible. This inaccessibility is both pragmatic and aesthetic. The 1928 Tarr has been out of print for some years, and Paul O’Keeffe’s edition of the 1918 Tarr is technically out of print, although still available from some third-party sellers. Despite its substantial merits, Tarr is for most new readers a difficult book. Lewis filled it with bristling stylistic experimentation, and arguably unsympathetic characters. He expects familiarity with artistic and philosophic ideas of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the ability to read (or at least read past) many phrases and conversations in French, German, and Italian. One would 43