In the same year in which Conrad published The Secret Agent, Wyndham Lewis, then a member of the internationalist artistic coterie of Montparnasse, came up with an idea for what was to become the novel Tarr. It began as a short story of the duel and death of a German student in Paris, and then developed in Conradian fashion, gradually acquiring new characters and episodes, and becoming more of a critique of the bohemian style of life. Revised a number of times over a span of eight years, the book changed along with Lewis's interest in literary creation—as well as with the times in which it was being written—eventually evolving into an unsettling commentary on the cultural crisis of modernity. Completed long before Ulysses and other works which would come to form the high modernist canon, at the time of its publication Tarr was in many respects a ground-breaking novel whose pioneering attempt to render the realities of what was essentially a build-up to the Great War gave Lewis the right to call it “the first book of an epoch in England.”