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The Poet and the Ghosts Are Walking the Streets: Hope
Mirrlees--Life and Poetry.
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| Article Type: | Critical essay |
| Subject: |
Modernism (Literature)
(Criticism and interpretation) Experimental poetry (Criticism and interpretation) Poetic techniques (Criticism and interpretation) Poetic structure (Criticism and interpretation) National identity (Speeches, lectures and essays) Women's studies (Speeches, lectures and essays) Women's studies (International aspects) |
| Author: | Boyde, Melissa |
| Pub Date: | 05/01/2009 |
| Publication: | Name: Hecate Publisher: Hecate Press Audience: Academic Format: Magazine/Journal Subject: Women's issues/gender studies Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2009 Hecate Press ISSN: 0311-4198 |
| Issue: | Date: May-Nov, 2009 Source Volume: 35 Source Issue: 1-2 |
| Topic: | NamedWork: Paris (Mirrlees, Hope) (Poem); The Poet and the Ghosts Are Walking the Streets: Hope Mirrlees--Life and Poetry (Essay) Event Code: 290 Public affairs |
| Persons: | Named Person: Mirrlees, Hope |
| Geographic: | Geographic Scope: United Kingdom Geographic Code: 4EUUK United Kingdom |
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| Accession Number: | 217244389 |
| Full Text: |
Hope Mirrlees (1887-1978), a British writer, was until recently
perhaps best known for her fantasy novel Lud-in-the-Mist (1926), which
attracted a cult following after its republication in the 1970s. She
achieved a measure of celebrity as a result, attested to by the
photograph of her, taken with her dog, published in a 1973 Travel and
Leisure magazine with the caption: 'A frequent guest over two
decades, poet and novelist Hope Mirrlees and her pug, Fred, are very
much at home in the foyer of the Basil [a Knightsbridge hotel].'
(1) Mirrlees also produced two other novels, a biography, several
translations and a book of poetry. Early in her career she wrote what
has only recently been hailed as 'modernism's lost
masterpiece': (2) a long, experimental poem Paris (1919), one of
the first works published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth
Press. The experimental style and the epic length of Paris fitted the
Woolfs' vision for the Hogarth Press to publish 'paper-covered
pamphlets or small books, printed entirely by our two selves, which
would have little or no chance of being published by ordinary
publishers.' (3) In every aspect the poem treads new ground--it
contains numerous French words and phrases, is interspersed with
snatches of conversations, including direct speech, and does not conform
to conventions of regular rhyme, stanzas, punctuation or typography. The
Woolfs took immense care with the demands of Mirrlees's innovative
layout; it was, by Leonard's account, 'printed with our own
hands'--they produced 175 copies. (4) Paris sold well and reviews
pointed to its modernity--The Athenaeum highlighted its relation to
other modern works calling it 'immensely literary and immensely
accomplished' and locating it as somewhere 'between Dada and
the Nouvelle Revue Francaise.' (5) Paris went out of print for many years and was not republished until 1973 (in a version revised by Mirrlees) in the Virginia Woolf Quarterly, the year after an article by Suzanne Henig on Mirrlees's oeuvre was published in that journal. (6) Henig recognised both the importance of the totally overlooked poem and its resonances with other significant modernist works: 'this magnificent poem antedates The Wasteland (1922) and Ulysses (1922)) Despite Henig's essay, another thirty years passed before Paris was published again, this time in its original form, brought to critical attention by the scholar Julia Briggs who referred to it as 'a work of extraordinary energy and intensity, scope and ambition, written in a confidently experimental and avant-garde style.' (7) Briggs's commentary and detailed annotations, in Gender in Modernism, should mean that at last Paris will take its place as an important modernist work. The reading of Paris in this essay is framed by the concepts of the trace, what Derrida refers to as 'presence-absence,' (8) and of travel and movement through time and space. Highly allusive, layered with literary, artistic, religious, historical and topical references-creating a kind of archaeology of the city--Paris creates a modernist post-World War One view of the city, bringing it to life from fragments of past and present. As well as moving across centuries, the poem tracks an actual, temporal journey through the city. It takes place over twenty-four hours, commencing in daytime with a metro trip from the Left Bank under the Seine to the Jardin des Tuileries, on to various points on the Right Bank, observing Montmartre at night, before returning to the Left Bank at dawn when 'The sky is saffron behind the two towers of Notre-Dame' (l.444). Emerging from underground, the narrator, indicated as female--'Vous descendez Madame?'(l.14)--begins her walk through the streets, a modernist flaneuse. Mirrlees as a figure in modernist cultural history had until recently almost vanished without trace, and there still remains more to reveal and consider about her life and influence if the full impact of her work is to be understood and evaluated. In bringing together the traces of Mirrlees's biography as an element of this paper, she emerges as a travelling modernist in a broad sense, moving across overlapping coteries, from the intellectual circles of Cambridge to literary London and lesbian Paris. Elegantly dressed, relatively wealthy, accomplished in languages and the classics, she can be seen as a kind of intellectual flaneuse, working across literary genres, exploring and commenting on both the past and the present, never lingering long enough to be easily identified with a single group. The poet In August 1919 Virginia Woolf writes to her friend Margaret Llewelyn Davies about a visit from Mirrlees: Woolfs report of the evening to Davies offers several insights. Davies was the General Secretary of the Women's Cooperative Guild from 1889-1921, an organisation that, under her direction, became a powerful voice for women's equality. Lilian is her lifelong 'companion,' Lilian Harris, who was Cashier to the Guild. Woolfs detailing of Mirrlees's attention to dress, which indicates a more fashionable social life than the Woolfs and their home cooked meals, suggests that Woolf was intrigued by Mirrlees and perhaps a trifle jealous of her youth, her education, her facility with languages and her lifestyle. The Woolfs' inclusion of the influential British economist Maynard Keynes at the dinner is not surprising, since Mirrlees and he had several things in common. Like Mirrlees, Keynes' Alma Mater was Cambridge University and, like Mirrlees's 'companion' Jane Harrison, he was a Cambridge don. As well, he had just written The Economic Consequences of Peace in response to decisions he disagreed with which were made at the Treaty of Versailles in Paris; Mirrlees's poem also alludes disparagingly to elements of the Paris peace conference. Davies might well have been interested in all aspects of this dinner: she too was a Cambridge graduate and had a strong interest in economics, particularly the power of women as consumers. Woolfs reports of the stylish, educated, talented Mirrlees would have sat well with Davies' passionate belief that women should have the same rights and opportunities as men in all areas of their lives. The fashionable, independent Mirrlees was born in 1978 in Chiselhurst, Kent. Her father, William Julius, was a wealthy sugar merchant who co-founded Tongaat-Hulett, now one of the largest sugar companies in the world. (10) On her mother's side she was descended from Scottish royalty. (11) From an early age she travelled extensively, including extended periods in South Africa because of her father's business interests there. In South Africa Mirrlees had an African nanny who taught her to speak fluent Zulu. (12) In Scotland she went to St Leonards School for Girls in St Andrews, after which she briefly attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London before her interest in studying Greek took her to Cambridge University, where she became a pupil of the brilliant classical scholar and archaeologist Jane Harrison, at Newnham College. As well as Greek and Zulu she knew Latin, French, Russian, Spanish, Persian, Arabic, Italian and Old Norse. (13) From approximately 1912 she lived on and off with Harrison at Cambridge. In 1922 Mirrlees and Harrison moved to Paris, a city they had visited on numerous occasions. In Paris they attended the salon of their friends Gertrude Stein and Mice B. Toklas. When Stein and Toklas had travelled to England in 1914 they stayed with Mirrlees in Cambridge and she introduced them to the academic milieu; Stein writes about their experiences in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. (14) In Paris Mirrlees studied Russian, and with Harrison translated from Russian the Life of the Arch-Priest Avvakum, by Himself (1924), for which their friend Prince D.S. Mirsky wrote the preface. They also co-authored a charming, small volume The Book of the Bear: Being Twenty-one Tales Newly Translated from the Russian (1926) which contains a translation from another of their friends in Paris, the Russian writer Alexey Michailovich Remizov. They recount in the preface how 'at a party in Paris, we introduced Remizov to a witty French woman. As he is almost unknown outside of Russia, his name conveyed nothing to her. "Who was it that you introduced to me?' she asked afterwards; 'was it Aesop?" (15) In England Mirdees was on the fringes of the Bloomsbury group but a regular participant at the famous literary salon of Lady Ottoline Morrell held at her home, Garsington Manor. (16) T. S. Eliot considered Mirrlees to be one of his 'greatest friends'; he spent extended periods with her, and her mother and aunt, at their home in Shamley Green in Surrey during World War Two. (17) He later wrote how 'Shamley' felt like "home': the nearest I have had since I was a boy.' (18) Mirrlees writes that during all this time she and Eliot never discussed Paris adding that 'I am unaware if he ever saw it.' (19) But since the Hogarth Press published Eliot's epic poem The Waste Land only two years after they printed Paris it seems probable that Eliot may have read it. Certainly there are similarities between the poems in structure, inclusion of textual fragments, references to classical and historical sources and their concern with the modern city. The many allusions to classical literature and mythology in Mirrlees's poem are in all likelihood drawn not only from her own studies but also from the work of her 'companion' Harrison. The opening line: 'I want a holophrase' almost certainly alludes to Harrison's discussion of early language in Themis in which she demonstrates linguistic instances where subject and object become indistinguishable. (20) This concept describes an articulation of reality which supersedes/ reconstructs conventional binary divisions of mind/body, subject/ object. An absence of binarisms is in direct opposition to the dominant positioning of homosexual and lesbian sexuality--a topic which Mirrlees alludes to, obliquely, in Paris. The conditions of secrecy that surrounded lesbianism at that time emerged precisely because of its construction in discourse--it must remain an Other for the binary opposition to maintain its stability. If lesbianism (and homosexuality) become open and not merely an open secret, then the structure of binary logic is undermined. There are traces of 'different' sexualities throughout Paris, and the poet's desire for 'a holophrase' marks out a landscape in which the categorisations put forward in the new sexological disourses are potentially overridden. Certainly Paris references and critiques the nascent field of psychoanalysis: In this surreal image, Freud is figured as a rampant excavator indiscriminately exposing the underside of culture symbolised by the Louvre--implicitly contrasted, perhaps, with the painstaking and delicate work of the archaeologist sifting through sand and piecing together fragments or traces. Mirrlees's relationship with Harrison clearly influenced her life and work. There is considerable debate amongst Harrison scholars as to whether or not they were lovers. Harrison's most recent biographer acknowledges this when she suggests in a wry aside: "'Was Jane Harrison gay?" is a question that this book hopes to transcend.' (21) The comment is quoted from a letter Woolf wrote in 1925 to the French painter Jacques Raverat, and Beard uses it to make her case for the futility and inappropriateness of such guessing games: 'How crass a biographical project would it be for us now to attempt to decide precisely what emotions or sexualities were involved.' (22) However, Woolf knew no such bounds and the inference that Mirrlees and Harrison were lovers was made several times in her correspondence. She writes that 'we like seeing her and Jane billing and cooing together' (23) and, in a reply to a friend, who had just read Mirrlees's novel Madeleine: One of Love's Jansenists (1919), Woolf writes that Mirrlees 'has a passion for Jane Harrison, the scholar: indeed they practically live together.' (24) There are other references to the nature of their relationship: in a letter to Clive Bell, Woolf reports that she is writing a review of Madeleine: 'It's all sapphism so far as I've got--Jane and herself.' (25) In the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Gertrude Stein knowingly overturns the usual positioning of Mirrlees as Harrison's pupil when she refers to Harrison as 'Hope Mirdees's pet enthusiasm.' (26) For her part, Harrison dedicated Epilegomena: 'To Hope. In remembrance of Spanish nights and days.' The inversion of day and night may well be a key to another kind of 'inversion.' Certainly extant notes between the two women in the Harrison papers provide evidence of their intimacy. They affectionately refer to each other as the wives of 'Herr Bear,' a stuffed teddy bear which was a gift to Harrison from students. (27) The Book of the Bear is dedicated simply 'To the Great Bear,' in all likelihood a coded reference to the 'Herr Bear' of their intimate correspondence. However, most recently, Mirrlees's nephew Robin Mirrlees writes: In 1948, after her mother's death, Mirrlees continued her life of travel, this time to the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa where she lived on and off for over a decade before returning permanently to England the year after the publication of A Fly in Amber: Being an Extravagant Biography of the Romantic Antiquary Sir Robert Bruce Cotton (1962). In the jacket note she explains that Harrison's friends had wanted her to write Harrison's biography but that research had led her to the work on Cotton. Mirrlees had always intended to write a biography of Harrison and discussed it extensively with Harrison's former pupil, Jessie Stewart. The two women agreed that Stewart's biography would be on Harrison's work and Mirrlees's would focus on her life. (29) It seems likely that the public/private split implied by this is the reason why Mirrlees never published her account, given the secrecy surrounding women's intimate relationships. Formal discussion of sexuality, initially in the form of medical discourse, with the emergence of the discipline of sexology--a branch of psychology, along with related areas such as phrenology and criminology-became topical in the public domain at the fin de siecle but, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick shows in Epistemology of the Closet, it paradoxically also became a secret. (30) The public suppression of knowledge of lesbianism no doubt contributed to the kinds of literary representations of lesbianism produced in the early decades of the twentieth century such as Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness (1928) in which the lesbian is posited as an accident of birth, an invert, who seeks societal acceptance (the book was banned despite this approach), and Woolfs Orlando (1928) in which the lesbian is encoded obliquely. A further example is the widespread use of the genre of the roman a clef (the novel with a key) by writers who sought to textually represent lesbian sexuality, including Mirrlees in her roman a clef, Madeleine. Walking the streets Mirrlees's two works about Paris were both published in 1919. Clearly the city and its history interested and inspired her to work on the two diverse writing projects in the period immediately after the war. Madeleine is an historical novel which, like Paris, displays Mirrlees's considerable knowledge of the city's history and geography. The novel is set entirely in mid-seventeenth century France and focuses on the Parisian salon of the writer Madeleine de Scudery and the milieu of the precieux who frequented it. The complex, codified and interior spaces of the salon are at the centre of Mirrlees's exploration of historical Paris and the role of women within it. In Paris, Mirrlees turns to the contemporary exteriority of the streets of the city. But the modern city which the speaker observes is alive with traces of the past: 'In the Ile Saint-Louis, in the rue Saint Antoine, in the Place des Vosges / the Seventeenth Century lies exquisitely dying ...' In Paris the poet is the flaneuse, walking the streets of the city. It is the poet alone who can observe the ghosts that simultaneously walk there: Traces of the history of the city are interwoven with immediate sensation and response: 'I hate the Etoile/The Bois bores me' (ll.60-61), and with cultural commentary: 'President Wilson grins like a dog and runs about the city, sniffing with innocent enjoyment the diluvial urine of Gargantua' (ll.125-127)--an allusion to Woodrow Wilson, who, as part of the ruling group of leaders in Paris for the peace conference, marks out territory. One of the delegates at the Paris conference was the young Maynard Keynes, later Mirrlees's dinner companion at the Woolfs', who was outraged at the decisions made by Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau to impose harsh reparations on Germany. The sense of a city awakening from wartime is realised through images of spring: Lent, (l.262) the first of May, lilies of the valley, horse-chestnuts and lilac. But above these images of regeneration the 'April moon' is 'wicked' (compare 'April is the cruellest month' from The Waste Land) casting shadowy light on three of the major events which form a background in the poem: the Versailles peace treaty negotiations, the May Day protests and workers' strikes. If, as one critic remarks, 'it is scarcely accidental that the flaneur turns up in Paris [in 1806] directly the city emerges from the Revolution into the Empire; a new regime; a new century; a new city,' (31) then it should be no surprise that Mirrlees's speaker in early twentieth century post-World War One Paris and, more particularly, Mirrlees's Paris of the Left Bank and the lesbian salon, is a flaneuse. She is not, however, a pale imitation of the flaneur. According to the conventional view, women could not practice flanerie due both to the traditional impropriety of street-walking (prostitution) and the apparently gendered practices of consumer consumption: Traces of the flaneuse of Paris and her observational reverie through the urban landscape can be discerned in another text, Woolfs Orlando (1928), with its convergence of actual and historical temporality towards the end. She goes out on the same pretext of purposeful shopping that Janice Mouton has identified in Woolfs 1927 essay, 'Street Haunting, A London Adventure,' (33) but she fails to complete her purchase. Instead, Orlando embarks on a car journey, witnessing rapidly fragmenting and dissolving images of shop signs and crowded streets on her way: 'the process of motoring fast out of London so much resembles the chopping up small of identity which precedes unconsciousness.' (34) However, in Paris, the flaneuse is the detached observer, whose journey is predicated neither on a search for identity nor consumption: This flaneuse does not consume the products on offer and, instead, comments on the cultural imperative to consume figured in the observation of the rite of first communion to eat the body of Christ. The reference to Saint Hugh recalls the child martyr who was supposedly eaten by cannibalistic Jews but, here, children, 'charming pigmy brides,' take their revenge ironically through a sanctified Christian ritual by consuming the host at their first communion. In further sacrilegious mockery, she describes elsewhere how 'Le petit Jesus fait pipi' (l.135). In considering the imbrication of past and present, Derrida's comments on the trace are relevant: Paris is a poem of such traces, the most profound perhaps of which are the traces of wars. The freshest in memory is World War One, in which over one million French soldiers died and four million more were wounded: 'never again will the Marne/Flow between happy banks' (ll.196-7). While the poem could be seen as a reflection of the establishment of life in the city after the war, there are references to many past wars creating a sense of accumulation or layers of conflict. There is reference to the French civil war between 1648-53 known as the Fronde (which also figures in Madeleine): 'The ghost of Pere Lachaise/ Is walking the streets' (ll.175-176). Lachaise, after whom the famous Paris cemetery is named, was confessor to Louis XIV during the Fronde. There are references to the Napoleonic wars: 'I see the Arc de Triomphe,/ Square and shadowy like Julius Caesar's dreams' (ll.55-6). The speaker emerges from the underground at CONCORDE, the metro station at the Place de la Concorde, once the Place de la Revolution where Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette and 2800 others were executed by guillotine between 1793 and 1795. Concorde literally means 'agreement' and the speaker, from the vantage point of 1919, and in the midst of the Paris Peace conference says: 'I can't/I must go slowly' (ll.18-19). She first observes the 'little boys in black overalls' who play on the carousel in the Tuileries gardens riding 'round and round on wooden horses till their heads turn' (ll.23-26). They are marked in this image as the young men destined to become the soldiers in World War One whose untimely deaths will be later lamented in the poem by 'little widows moaning/ Le pauvre grand/ Le pauvre grand (ll.187-189). The poem is groundbreaking in its refusal of the dominance of nineteenth century realism not only in literature but in art: The poem points to how realism has overtaken reality--soldiers 'camping around the grey sphinx of the Tuileries' are more recognisable as commodities of consumption: The repeated commentary on art emphasises Paris as not only a centre for artists but also a repository for European culture. At times, Paris appears to figure resurrection through art such as the paintings that are being brought out from wartime storage: But Art as well as Christianity has the potential to corrupt. Traces of wars past, imaged by the 'masters' of the French nineteenth century salons, now 'Hang in a quiet gallery' (l.293). These pictures transform the suffering of war: 'Whatever happens, someday it will look beautiful ...' (l.286). Sex in the city Why did Woolf call the poem indecent? Religion is mocked, military heroes debased and, as we move through day into evening, across the city and up to Montmartre, images of modern urban life accumulate around the sensual, the sexual, the sordid: absinthe drinkers, tourists seeking sex, the lurid light of psychoanalysis. There are numerous allusions to sexuality in the poem and references to homosexuality and lesbianism, such as at the Moulin Rouge where an American voice says: In the final lines, the speaker refers to the decadent poet Paul Verlaine (1844-1896), lover of the poet Arthur Rimbaud: The poem, however, ends not with words but with a sign--Ursa Major, the most conspicuous constellation in the northern sky. Known as the Great Mother Bear, its appearance here is a coded reference to Harrison and Mirrlees's intimate relationship. They used the symbol at the end of many of their letters and notes to each other as a kind of signature and it also appears at the end of Madeleine. In this poem of traces, this is the final one--the trace of the relationship between the two women. Tracing the steps of the poet's journey on a map of Paris the shape of Ursa Major emerges in the course of the River Seine as it flows through the precise area traversed in the poem. The river is a central part of the poem with many allusions to it and to the various bridges which cross it and the ghosts who walk over them: Throughout the poem the speaker becomes increasingly submerged, from the initial journey under the Seine 'Brekekekek coax coax'(l.10)--signalling the journey by Dionysus to the underworld to bring the poet Euripides back from the dead--to 'I wade knee-deep in dreams' (l.310) until 'The dreams have reached my waist' (l.376). These lines recall Harrison's work on the origin of language: 'Language, after the purely emotional interjection, began with whole sentences, holophrases, utterances of a relation in which subject and object have not got their heads above water but are submerged in a situation.' (36) The choice of the sign of Ursa Major at the end of the poem, which starts with a call for a holophrase, represents the importance of that which is outside the divisions of language which were current in the early twentieth century. For Harrison and Mirrlees it represents a private coded space. Notes (1) William A. Krauss, 'The Small Hotels of London' in Travel and Leisure, February/March, 1973. (2) Julia Briggs, 'Hope Mirrlees and Continental Modernism,' in Bonnie Kime Scott, ed., Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007, p.261. (3) Leonard Woolf, Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911-1918, London: The Hogarth Press, 1964, p.236. (4) Leonard Woolf, Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919-1939, London: Hogarth Press, 1967, p.64. (5) William M. Harrison, 'Sexuality and Textuality: Writers of Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press, 1917-1945) unpublished dissertation, University of Delaware, 1998, p. 55. (6) Harrison, p.47. Mirrlees edited out 29 original lines and one endnote and added 14 new lines. (7) Briggs, p.261. (8) Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, Maryland: The John Hopkins University Press, 1976, p, 71. (9) Nigel Nicolson ed., The Question of Things Happening: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume II: 1912-1922, London: The Hogarth Press, 1976, pp.384-5. (10) Michael Swanwick, Hope-In-The-Mist: The Extraordinary Career and Mysterious Life of Hope Mirrlees, Upper Montclair, New Jersey: Temporary Culture/Henry Wessells, 2009, p.2 (11) Suzanne Henig, 'Queen of Lud: Hope Mirrlees,' Virginia Woolf Quarterly, no.1, 1972, p.10. Henig's information on Mirrlees, which up until the recent publication of Michael Swanwick's Hope-In-The-Mist: The Extraordinary Career and Mysterious Life of Hope Mirrlees was for many years the fullest biographical account of Mirrlees, appears to be based on a meeting with her and subsequent correspondence. In her opening paragraph she describes Mirrlees's house circa 1972: 'The mysterious author of Lud-in-the-Mist ... lives in calculated seclusion with a spoiled and very human pug called Fred in a stone house surrounded by fields of exotic flowers and turf inhabited by the fleeting ghost of a mermaid. Or so she believes. All efforts to trace the origin of the ubiquitous odor of fish ... have yielded futility.' (8) (12) Robin Mirrlees, 'My Aunt, Hope Mirrlees,' The New York Review of Science Fiction, March 2002, pp.17-18. (13) Henig, pp.8-10. (14) Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Chatham, U.K.: Week-end Library, 1935. Stein writes: 'Having now ten days on our hands we decided to accept the invitation of Mrs Mirrlees, Hope's mother, and spend a few days in Cambridge. We went there and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves ... It was very amusing meeting all the Cambridge dignitaries ... We were invited to lunch at Newnham, Miss Jane Harrison, who had been Hope Mirrlees's pet enthusiasm, was much interested in meeting Gertrude Stein. We sat up on the dais with the faculty and it was very awe-inspiring,' p.195. (15) Jane Harrison and Hope Mirrlees, The Book of the Bear: Being Twenty-one Tales Newly Translated from the Russian, London: The Nonesuch Press, 1926, p.ix. (16) Miranda Seymour, Ottoline Morrell: Life on the Grand Scale, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1992, p. 7; and Henig, pp.10-11. (17) Robert Sencourt, T.S. Eliot: A Memoir, London: Garnstone Press, 1971, p.140. (18) Swanwiek, p.49. (19) Bruce Bailey, 'A Note on The Waste Land and Hope Mirrlees' Paris,' T.S. Eliot Newsletter, Fall, 1974. (20) Jane E. Harrison, Epilegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, New York: University Books, 1966, p. 139. (21) Mary Beard, The Invention of Jane Harrison, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000, p.82. (22) Beard, p.82. (23) Nigel Nieolson ed., A Change of Perspective, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume III: 1923-1928, London: The Hogarth Press, 1977, p.164. (24) Nicolson, 1977, p.200. (25) Nicolson, 1976, p.391. (26) Stein, p.195. (27) Sandra J. Peacock, Jane Ellen Harrison: The Mask and The Self, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988, p.109. (28) Robin Mirrlees, p.17 (29) Beard, p.142-60. (30) Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991. (31) Priscilla Fernhurst Parker, 'The Flaneur on and off the Streets of Paris' in Keith Tester, ed., The Flaneur, New York: Routledge, 1994, p.22. (32) Parker, p.27. (33) Janice Mouton, 'From Feminine Masquerade to Flaneuse: Agnes Varda's Cleo in the City,' in Cinema Journal 40, No 2, Winter 2001, p.7 (34) Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography, London: The Hogarth Press, 1960, p.276. (35) Derrida, p.71. (36) Jane Harrison quoted in Leonard Goldstein, The Origin of Medieval Drama, Madison, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004, p.73. Dearest Margaret, Last weekend ... we had a young lady who changed her dress every night for dinner--which Leonard and I cooked, the servants being on holiday. Her stockings matched a wreath in her hair; every night they were differently coloured; powder fell about in flakes; and the scent was such we had to sit in the garden. Moreover, she knows Greek and Russian better than I do French; is Jane Harrison's favourite pupil, and has written a very obscure, indecent and brilliant poem, which we are going to print. It's a shame that all this should be possible to the younger generation; still I feel that something must be lacking, don't you? We had Maynard Keynes to entertain her, since we could offer little in the way of comfort.... Love to Lilian. (9) But behind the ramparts of the Louvre Freud has dredged the river and, grinning horribly, waves his garbage in a glare of electricity' (ll.413-415). So was Hope homosexual? No, definitely not, but I think she pretended to be! ... the fact is that Hope never got married, and I think some young man had a very merciful escape ... She was not at all interested in practical things or settling down in one place. (28) Sainte-Beuve, a tight bouquet in his hand for Madame
Victor-Hugo,
Passes on the Pont-Neuf the duc de la Rochefoucauld
With a superbly leisurely gait
Making for the salon d'automne
Of Madame de Lafayette;
They cannot see each other. (ll.368-374)Women ... compromise the detachment that distinguishes the true flaneur ... She is unfit for flanerie because she desires the objects spread before her and acts upon that desire. (32) All this time the Virgin has not been idle;
The windows of les Galeries Lafayette, le Bon Marche,
la Samaritaine,
Hold holy bait,
Waxen Pandoras in white veils and ties of her own
decking;
Catechisme de Perseverance,
The decrees of the Seven (Ecumenical Councils reduced
to the format
of the Bibliotheque Rose
,
Premiere Communion
(Prometheus has swallowed the bait)
Petits Lyceens,
Por-no-gra-phie,
Charming pigmy brides,
Little Saint Hugh avenged--(ll.294-306)The outside, 'spatial' and 'objective' exteriority which we believe we know as the most familiar thing in the world, as familiarity itself, would not appear ... without the non-presence of the other inscribed within the sense of the present, without the relationship with death as the concrete structure of the living present. (35) The Tuileries are in a trance because the painters have stared at them so long (ll.20-22) They look as if a war-artist were making a sketch of them in chalks, to be 'edited' in the Rue de Pyramides at 10 francs a copy (ll. 275-79) In the Louvre
The Pieta of Avignon,
L'Olympe,
Giles,
Mantegna's Seven Deadly Sins,
The Chardins;
They arise, serene and unetiolated, one by one from
their subterranean sleep of five long years. (ll.116-123)'I don't like the gurls of the night-club--they love
women.'
(ll.428-9)DAWN
Verlaine's bed-time ... Alchemy
Absynthe,[sic]
Algerian tobacco,
Talk, talk, talk, (ll.432-5)The Seine, old egotist, meanders imperturbably
towards the sea,
Ruminating on weeds and rain ...
If through his sluggish watery sleep come dreams
They are the blue ghosts of king-fishers. (ll.269-272) |
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