Little Funny Things Ceaselessly Happening

Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: A Poem was first published in 1920 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press. (Virginia typeset and hand-corrected the manuscript herself; she thought it “obscure, indecent, and brilliant.”) Mirrlees, then 32, had written Paris the previous spring while living in a Left Bank hotel with the classicist Jane Ellen Harrison, her partner and former teacher. The poem, recently reissued in a new centenary edition by Faber & Faber, conjures the interwar city by way of perceptual debris: memories, advertisements, songs, myths, images, and dreams. Its fragmentary and allusive structure anticipated T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land by two years. But Eliot’s London, the “unreal city,” offered sterility and isolation; Mirrlees’s Paris trembles with intimate involvement. Bookended with coded messages to Harrison, the poem’s observations are often charged with latent sexual energy: the “red stud in the buttonhole” of a frock coat, for instance, or the “soft mouths” of the nymphs in the Tuileries. The poem’s formal inventiveness depends upon this erotic dilation of awareness. In many ways, the concealed love at its center—significantly, that between two queer women—can be said to have catalyzed an early Modernist poetics.

Born in 1887, in Kent, to Scottish industrialists, Mirrlees attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art before going on to study classics at Newnham College, Cambridge. Harrison, an eminent scholar of Greek art and religion, served as her tutor there. Despite a nearly 40-year age difference, the two became companions. They lived together from 1913 until Harrison’s death in 1928, splitting their time between Cambridge and Paris. Mirrlees wrote three novels during this period, including the influential fantasy Lud-in-the-Mist (1926), for which she is best known today. After Harrison’s death, Mirrlees, devastated, converted to Catholicism and became a fringe member of the literary avant-garde. She lived with her mother in Surrey during World War II, where T.S. Eliot was a fellow boarder at the family home. (Eliot and Mirrlees became close friends in the 1940s. Though it is unknown whether he read Paris—the scholar Sandeep Parmar has elsewhere stated that “as a Hogarth author, he would surely have known of its existence”—he maintained a professional interest in Mirrlees while an editor at Faber.) Her later years were consumed by a monumental biography of the 17th-century antiquarian Sir Robert Bruce Cotton, only one volume of which was published before her death in 1978. Hers was a varied and accomplished literary life; however, her career as a poet essentially ended with Paris.

The Woolf scholar Julia Briggs has called the poem “modernism’s lost masterpiece.” This may be its primary draw for readers today, though such a formulation risks needlessly embalming Mirrlees’s work. It is too immediate, too living a poem for that. Better to simply board the metro line presented at its outset—the Nord-Sud—and ride from Montparnasse to Montmartre, the station posters passing in a blur: “ZIG-ZAG / LION NOIR / CACAO BLOOKER.” Paris is structured as a set of nested journeys: ostensibly from the Left Bank to the Right but also from day to night and from past to present. It suggests a city of superimpositions, both modern and ancient, an accretion of centuries, trends, technologies, half-glimpsed faces, and unlikely encounters. Details emerge before fading or breaking apart, like skywriting. The sun’s movement creates brief, transitional dramas of light and color. Here, for instance, is the coming of evening and with it the underworld of the city’s unconscious:

All down the Quais the bouquinistes shut their
green boxes.
          From the VIIme arrondissement
          Night like a vampire
          Sucks all colour, all sound.
 
      The winds are sleeping in their Hyperbórean cave;
 
  The narrow streets bend proudly to the stars;
 
 From time to time a taxi hoots like an owl.
 
 But behind the ramparts of the Louvre
 
 Freud has dredged the river and, grinning horribly,
 waves his garbage in a glare of electricity.

Apparent at a glance is the typesetting, reminiscent of the concrete poetry of Apollinaire’s calligrammes, which were collected in book form in 1918. The pauses between lines, the creeping indentations, the quick bursts and staccato repetitions lend the poem its syncretic dynamism. Mirrlees offers observations at a speed that precludes immediate interpretation. Perceptions are arranged and juxtaposed on the page with both sensual and spatial logic, their linkages as much visceral as intellectual. The poem is appealingly loose and democratic. Shopkeepers, musicians, and prostitutes are given equal billing with Moliere and Voltaire. Mirrlees’s conception of modernity is not only riotous and multivalent but also emphatically participatory. All-caps enthusiasms, fusty italics, bits of sheet music, commercial phrases, and shifting languages approximate this shared, shambolic din. Throughout, the drama of the self is largely absent, the nameless flâneuse at the poem’s heart acting as a sort of floating awareness, Emerson’s “transparent eyeball” riding the mists of the Seine.

Paris is also a poem of painterly dimension, written by a poet with a confident grasp of Modernism’s developments in the visual and plastic arts. Mirrlees applies considerable pressure to her scene making, condensing its multiplicity into a new visual grammar positioned somewhere between cubism and futurism. As in Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912), the figures are both frozen and flowing, caught momentarily in the poem’s visual field while moving perpetually onward into the imagination: “I gaze down at the narrow rue de Beaune… / Hatless women in black shawls / Carry long loaves… / Workmen in pale blue: / Barrows of vegetables: / Busy dogs: / They come and go.”

The “little people” across the Pont Solférino—memorably depicted as “flies nibbling the celestial apricot”—are described as “two-dimensional.” Architecture, too, is flattened into the irreality of a picture-book skyline: “The Eiffel Tower is two dimensional, / Etched on thick white paper.” Here is Paris the parchment city, an urban mobile. This compression is the gesture of a poet overcome by impossible sensorial volume, of “little funny things ceaselessly happening.”

Funny, of course, can also mean difficult to explain, the odd or unaccountable occurrence, as in “There’s something funny going on here.” In Paris, these “funny things” can just as often be hauntings, the city’s distinctive features—Pont Neuf, Ile Saint-Louis, Rue Saint Antoine, Place de Vosges, the Champs-Élysées—offering egress to phantasmal residues of the recent past. The Great War may be over, though the appalling slaughter still hangs over the arrondissements like a miasma. The city is “thick with corpses,” with “little widows moaning.” The dead walk continuously among the living. Workaday routines barely conceal the deep psychic wounds of Mirrlees’s Parisians:

And petites bourgeoises with tight lips and strident
voices are counting out the change and saying Mes-
sieursetdames and their hearts are the ruined province
of Picardie. . . .
 
They are not like us, who, ghoul-like, bury our friends
a score of times before they’re dead but—
 
          Never never again will the Marne
          Flow between happy banks.

In light of such devastation, the city’s effervescence—“gurls of the night-club,” “tortoises with gem-encrusted carapace,” “plaster pavilions of pleasure”—attains an aspect of manic compulsion. The party must continue lest the crippling hangover begin. For all its joy and appetite, the poem, like the city it embodies, exists in a state of precarity. A great vulnerability masquerades as reinvention. “I wade knee-deep in dreams,” Mirrlees writes, and later, “the dreams have reached my waist.” There is something faintly disturbing about this admission. (I can’t help but think of Woolf walking into the River Ouse 20 years later, her pockets filled with stones.) The whirling of sound and image can at times achieve an infernal speed. All seems destabilized. As if dizzied by the blur, the flâneuse reminds herself to be wary of the accelerations that besiege her: “I can’t / I must go slowly.”

This chaotic pouring forth, notably at odds with the dolorous splendor of The Waste Land, is perilous to readers only insofar as it trains their eyes upon surfaces to the exclusion of the poem’s inner workings. Paris can easily—and, at times, fruitfully—be read as a nascent work of the Jazz Age or as a proto-surrealist fever. It revels in the displacement of peoples and energies: “Paris is a huge home-sick peasant, / He carries a thousand villages in his heart.” Losing oneself in this bricolage is part of the poem’s legacy and lasting charm. But the garish, skimming quality of Paris conceals an intimate organizing principle. Surrounding its flood of images, tastes, and sounds is an intensely private frame of discipleship: an invocation to the ideas of Mirrlees’s partner.

Harrison was the foremost figure in the Cambridge Ritualists, a group of classical scholars who infused the study of ancient Greece with modern theories of “primitive” ritual. The holophrase, a linguistic instance in which subject and object are rendered indistinguishable, fascinated her. In her book Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (1912), she provided an example of a holophrase ascribed to an indigenous language of Tierra del Fuego: mamihlapinatapai, which means “looking-at-each-other-hoping-that-either-will-offer-to-do-something-which-both-parties-desire-but-are-unwilling-to-do.” She believed this suggested pre-modern speakers’ total involvement with their environments, the self dissolved in pure relation. The duality of mind and body is superseded by an articulation of shared reality. This interpretation made a profound impression upon Mirrlees. It is precisely this desire to replenish herself in collective experience—what Harrison termed “holopsychosis”—that gives Paris its cohering design.

Beginning her poem with “I want a holophrase,” Mirrlees gives Modernism its shadow mantra—a less visible partner to Pound’s “Make it new”—while also acknowledging the primacy of Harrison’s influence upon her work. Finding that the city comprises a series of irresolvable contradictions—tradition and innovation, commerce and culture, gaiety and mourning—Mirrlees has no choice but to seek coherence in paradox. Here the very project of literary Modernism begins to take shape beneath the pressure of a poet’s transformational desire. Her vision alters the properties of matter and space, allowing the flâneuse to “[s]corn the laws of solid geometry, // Step boldly into the wall” or quantumly compress distant places, as in the case of a street vendor’s wares: “quite near // Saunters the ancient rue Saint-Honoré / Shabby and indifferent … / An Auvergnat, all the mountains of Auvergne in / every chestnut that he sells.” The city expands and contracts upon her attentions, poised upon the threshold of some new, entangled realization.

In pursuit of the holophrase, Mirrlees moves confidently across registers, from the spatial to the temporal. “If only poets could only be antiquaries!” she later wrote in her biography of Cotton. “For antiquaries alone among mortals can restore the past and preserve the present, tangibly.” For Mirrlees, this tangibility is akin to mythic excavation. Like clay before it hardens, people, places, and things collect a record of intimate pressures. These artifacts, intuited by the poet, constitute the half-remembered dreams of the metropolis, absorbed by each new generation. Mirrlees’s essay “Listening to the Past” (1926) describes in greater detail this conflation of mysticism, imagination, and historical continuity:

A swift, fleeting sense of the past is as near as I have ever got to a mystical experience…a sudden physical conviction (like fingering for the first time the antiquity one had so often gazed at through the glass case in the museum), that Horace and Virgil did really once travel together to Brandusium, and that Horace was kept awake by mosquitos and the love-songs of tipsy boatmen…or, that at a definite point of time the larks were singing and there were milestones on the Dover road, as Chaucer jogged on his way to Canterbury.

The poem is filled with similar references to Paris’s past. It is not the war dead alone that haunt the streets but also philosophers, writers, and artists from other eras. (Readers are warned early on that “Paradise cannot hold for long the famous dead / of Paris.”) The vast unconscious of the city lays open to the channeling power of the flâneuse, who catalogs the surprising manifestations her awareness gives rise to: “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.” The autonomous spirit of Paris flows like amber through the streets, preserving the lives of its inhabitants, past and present, in specific moments. It is an invigorating, consoling image: a kind of urban ongoingness. It gives Mirrlees’s observations their particular character of perpetuity. Her sentiments, elongated with historical referents, transcend the context of the city, reshaping the imaginative prospects of a young and already benumbed century.

What readers are left with at poem’s end is a sense of modernity’s sinuous labyrinth, an immensity that eludes proper articulation but whose presence can be detected in the particulate effects of daily experience: “What time / Subaqueous / Cell on cell / Experience / Very slowly / Is forming up / Into something beautiful—awful—huge.” Where Eliot was finally unable to forge relatedness—“I can connect / Nothing with nothing”—Mirrlees’s holophrastic desire seems to join together the city’s disparate elements by force of will. Still, the poem’s afterlife has thus far been defined by its anticipatory relation to The Waste Land. However unfairly, Mirrlees seems destined to remain a poetic satellite: smaller, less understood, only partially visible. Paris may not finally be as resonant as Eliot’s masterpiece—it lacks an equivalent synthesizing vision of public and private catastrophe—but it remains a strange, daring, and electric work. It takes its rightful place alongside other significant poems—Charlotte Mew’s “The Fête” (1914), H.D.’s “Hermes of the Ways” (1914), Mina Loy’s “O Hell” (1919)—in the rich and often overlooked tradition of early female Modernism.

Faber & Faber’s elegant new edition of Paris looks to make good on an elusive resurrection for the poem. As Parmar explains in her afterword, “there have been several attempts” to reintroduce it to readers. Mirrlees herself is at least partially to blame for these failures. She denied a request from Leonard Woolf to republish the poem in 1946, finding certain passages disagreeable to her Catholic sensibility. Later, in 1973, she allowed the Virginia Woolf Quarterly to do so, having altered the poem’s “blasphemous” elements—masses became dirges; a long stanza about “the Virgin” was rewritten; a racial epithet became the then-acceptable Negroes—though the journal folded in just three issues. In 2007, almost 30 years after Mirrlees’s death, Julia Briggs commented on Paris in the collection Gender in Modernism. Her wonderfully detailed line notes from that compendium are included here, as is an enthusiastic but somewhat aimless introduction from the novelist Deborah Levy. After a century of marginality, the poem at last seems well enough provisioned to embark upon its second life.

Paris ends as it began, with a coded message to Harrison. The final line is an asterisk constellation of Ursa Minor, the great she-bear. Harrison often signed her correspondence to Mirrlees with this star sign in reverse. (It could also be a reference to “The Old One,” the couple’s teddy bear, which Parmar refers to as “a kind of shared husband.”) As conventional accounts of Modernism falter beneath the scrutiny of new scholarship—Francesca Wade’s recent book Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars comes to mind—the movement’s neglected stories will continue to find their way to the light. Here, then, is one such story, a poem inaugurating an era-defining aesthetic that also doubles as a Sapphic love letter in disguise. Mirrlees may not have unearthed the desired holophrase—indeed, that may not have even been possible—though her concentrated effort restores the city in fragments that even today glow with passionate life. “Whatever happens, some day it will look beautiful,” she presages in Paris. It is a statement of enormous confidence—the confidence, one suspects, of a poet in love.