a gallimaufry

Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars, by Francesca Wade

Glossing over my long absence from the Internet, I am back to enthuse about a book that most of you have already heard of and maybe read. (If you have read it, write your Thoughts in the comment section below this post!) I shall have to write about it from memory, because I do not actually have a copy, I borrowed my mother’s while I was in Britain. Perhaps this is no bad thing, it will curb my propensity to ramble on. (Or will it?)

Quite by chance, Francesca Wade discovered that between the two world wars five women writers lived in Mecklenburgh Square in London: HD, Dorothy L. Sayers, Jane Ellen Harrison, Eileen Power and Virginia Woolf. (I hadn’t ever heard of Harrison and Power: Harrison was a brilliant classical scholar who left Cambridge University in her seventies to set up house with Hope Mirrlees and translate and promote Russian literature; Power was a distinguished mediaeval historian who argued the importance of economic and social history, as well as being a Sinophile, prominent socialist and pacifist, and holder of wild parties.) At that time, Mecklenburgh Square was a place where a middle-class woman of modest means could rent a room of her own, alongside artists, radicals and poor families; a little rackety and Bohemian though not too much, certainly quite cheap and in close proximity to the British Library and University College, London.

A group biography of this sort explores the ways in which five women found, and then fought to keep, their rooms of their own. Not all of the women lived in Mecklenburgh Square very long – Woolf hardly at all – so Wade explores her five lives by moving back and forth in time around their sojourns there. She also uses the geographical centre of Mecklenburgh Square to pull together numerous threads of cultural life between the wars. Certain preoccupations absorbed all five. How did talented, curious and clever women navigate a world which denied them equality? Harrison and Power had to work for an institution, Cambridge University, which refused to award degrees to women; Woolf wasn’t even permitted a proper education and had to teach herself. Was it possible to marry – or have a fulfilling relationship – without sacrificing one’s work, if one was a woman? For HD and Sayers, pregnant outside wedlock, this involved particularly painful choices.

Shaping one’s own story was also important. HD wrote and rewrote versions of her autobiography many times over her life, as if trying on different dresses; Woolf skived off labouring away on her biography of Roger Fry to dash out ‘A Sketch of the Past’, scatterings of childhood memories. During the Blitz she watched London’s physical past being bombed to smithereens; eventually her own home and many of her possessions were also obliterated, tangible links with her youth and family gone for ever. Harrison and Power both destroyed their papers (Harrison burnt hers almost gleefully when she left Newnham), with terrible consequences for their posthumous reputations, their radical contributions to history forgotten or reattributed to men.

(Photograph of Mecklenburgh Square, ca 1930; Camden Local Studies and Archives, found here)

Other interests were more particular. Power was a socialist and her story encompasses developments in socialist thought as well as the rise of the League of Nations Union, pacifism and internationalism, all of which shaped post-WWI society. Both Power and Woolf became increasingly uncomfortable with the knowledge of their privileges and their reliance on the labour of working-class women. Through Harrison, we learn about the Russian diaspora and its influence on western European culture. Through HD, we learn about the Imagists and the difficulty of living a truly Bohemian life. (Also: that HD was a total slob who never emptied her ashtrays or washed up her wine glasses.)

Square Haunting is a book which has deservedly won a lot of praise. It is a marvellous group biography, full of detail and perceptiveness. It not only brings to life five women and their era; it also reminds us of the importance of taking the time and having the space to think, as imperative now as it was one hundred years ago.

 

Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Venice, Tokyo and London by Lauren Elkin

Shiny New Books 12 is out today (have there really been 12 issues?), always a cause for celebration, and I have written a review for it. Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Venice, Tokyo and London was just as good as I’d hoped (I’ve been awaiting its publication impatiently). If Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf, Sophie Calle, revolution and loitering interest you, then you know where the nearest library or bookshop is...

Meanwhile, I’m settling down to read the rest of Shiny and bankrupt myself.

‘Paris’, by Hope Mirrlees

Hope Mirrlees’ long poem, ‘Paris’, was published by the Hogarth Press in 1920. Virginia Woolf typeset it herself. Sandeep Parmar, in her introduction to the Collected Poems, describes this process as ‘incredibly frustrating’: not only was the poem technically difficult to set, but it was riddled with spelling mistakes (not all of which Woolf corrected) and Mirrlees was constantly revising it, even at proof stage. Woolf must have felt pretty murderous by the time the book was printed. When I worked as an editor, I occasionally dealt with authors who never stopped making changes, and ‘incredibly frustrating’ is a nice way of putting it. I sympathise with Woolf, while also marvelling: imagine having your poem typeset by Virginia Woolf!

Here is the beginning of ‘Paris’ (not really laid out properly, I’m afraid):

I want a holophrase

NORD-SUD

ZIG-ZAG
LION NOIR
CACAO BLOOKER

Black-figured vases on Etruscan tombs

RUE DU BAC (DUBONNET)
SOLFERINO (DUBONNET)
CHAMBRE DES DEPUTES

Brekekekek coax coax we are passing under the Seine

DUBONNET

The Scarlet Woman shouting BYRRH and deafening
St John at Patmos

Vous descendez Madame?

QUI SOUVENT SE PESE BIEN SE CONNAIT
QUI BIEN SE CONNAIT BIEN SE PORTE

CONCORDE

I can’t
I must go slowly

When I first read this, I was utterly bemused. What on earth is going on? I recognised a reference to Aristophanes’ comedy The Frogs, but really that wasn’t much help in understanding the poem. The Collected Poems includes Julia Briggs’s commentary on the poem and unless you are extremely well-versed in French cultural, social and political history, the French language, the Classics, the geography of Paris and the Bible, you will need it if you’re to understand what is going on in this poem. Without it, the poem veers towards unintelligibility for most of us. In fact, Mirrlees knew very well that her poem wasn’t easy because she included notes to it. She didn’t want to make it easy.  Her notes tell us, for instance:

Nord-Sud, one of the underground posters of Paris. Dubonnet, Zig-zag, Lion Noir, Cacao Blooker are posters. Rue du Bac, etc. are names of stations.

If we look at just the opening lines with Briggs to help us, what is going on? For starters, what’s a holophrase? Briggs writes:

‘holophrase’, a single word standing for a phrase, sentence or complex of ideas, and according to Jane Harrison [Mirrlees’ close friend and Classics scholar] characteristic of an early stage of language development [...] . ‘I want’ can also mean ‘I lack’. ‘Holophrase’ puns on ‘hollow phrase’.

So we begin with a need for words or ideas, an implication of a hollowness which requires filling. Then there’s a list of posters, which suggests that the poet is moving through space, specifically on the Paris métro: she’s going on a journey underground. She passes ‘under the Seine’. This reminds her of ‘Brekekekek coax coax’ (pronounced co-ax), the chant of the frogs who live in the river Acheron, which you must cross on your way to Hades. In The Frogs Dionysos, who is travelling to Hades to bring Euripides back from the dead because all modern tragedians are crap, is annoyed by the croaking of the frogs and asks them to stop, but they retort that the Muses, Pan and Apollo all adore their music and they will carry on, thank you very much. Is the poet also going on a quest under the earth, driven by dissatisfaction with contemporary arts?

Briggs tells us that ‘Vous descendez Madame?’ was what you said while trying to leave a crowded metro carriage if you were polite, and ‘Those who weigh themselves [up] often, know themselves well. Those who know themselves well, stay healthy’ was the motto on station scales. Amid the swirl of thoughts about Ancient Greece and art, these observations anchor us to the present and the concrete. They remind us that the poet is not only a consciousness but also a physical body moving through space. She alights at ‘Concorde’ –  both a reminder of strife (the Place de la Concorde was where the guillotine stood) and one of peace – concorde means ‘agreement’. Later on, after this opening extract, the poem makes direct reference to the date on which it claims to occur: 1st May 1919. At that time, peace negotiations were being held in Paris to settle the First World War, and Mirrlees refers directly to the war and the peace in her poem. This too grounds us in the present moment but situates it in the shadow of the past conflict.

‘Black figured vases on Etruscan tombs’ alludes again to death and the underworld (black-figure being a style of decoration which flourished in Greece in the 7th to 5th centuries). In the poem’s present there are too many new tombs and an overcrowded underworld. The ‘blackness’ of the painted and incised figures is taken up in the posters, for ‘Zig-Zag’ cigarettes were advertised with a picture of the head of an Algerian soldier, ‘Lion Noir’ was black shoe polish and Cacao Blooker is a Dutch make of drinking chocolate. The poem thus starts pulling in ideas of empire and colonialism, of a world beyond France, Paris, the métro.

In Revelation 17: 3–6 the Scarlet Woman is the Whore of Babylon who appears to St John, but she doesn’t shout ‘BYRRH!’ (Ahem, I initially thought this was an Ancient Greek adjuration!) Actually, Byrrh is, like Dubonnet, a fortified wine, and was advertised in Paris in 1919 by a poster of a woman dressed in scarlet, playing a drum and shouting. The woman looks soldierly, lewd, threatening. The poem has been dedicated to the Virgin Mary, but here the voice of sin and death, that of the Whore of Babylon, ‘deafens’ St John. Perhaps modern culture is challenging old culture but it’s complicated: women against men, advertising and commerce against religion and contemplation, noise against silence.

So what do we have so far? A quest provoked by a lack of words or ideas, by inadequate existing art forms. The quest begins with a descent into the underworld and then rises up onto the streets of Paris. We are shown a series of snapshots of a modern city as observed by the flâneur-poet, overlaid by layers and layers of history, infused with ghosts and ancient cultures. But of course, there is much more of it than these opening lines, you’ll have to read it yourself.

‘Paris’ as a whole is a poem packed with contrasts. Constantly referring to the past, it rejects and rejects and creates itself as a radical new form of poetry. It records fleeting impressions yet demands long, thoughtful analysis; it depicts a city open to everyone yet can itself only be deciphered by those with a privileged, educated background. (Or Julia Briggs’s notes!) It throws up into the air death and life, lasting (Greek vases) and ephemeral (metro posters), art and commerce, women and men, body and mind, the particular and the global, and wants them all. It’s the prototype Modernist poem. That’s what I think, anyway. At the moment. What about you?

(Illustrations: The old and the new in Paris: Eugène Atget, Cour, 7 rue de Valence, 1922, found here; Dionysos and members of his thiasos on a black-figure Attic vase in the Louvre, found here; Byrrh poster found here; photograph of the Tuileries taken in 1919 by Claude Moore, from the Presbyterian Archives Research Centre; found here)

To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface, by Olivia Laing

Memory is a funny business. Sometimes, moving through water, I feel I’m washed of all thoughts, all desires: content to luxuriate like a starfish, rocking on my own pulse, sensate to no more than the wavering light as it sinks through space to reach my eyes. I might as well have never been born; I’m not sure I know even my name. And then, on other days, the opposite occurs. There have been times when, sunk in a river or a chalky sea, I have felt the past rise up upon me like a wave. The water has loosened something; has dissolved what once was dry; weighted as if with lead, it filters now through my own veins. The present is obliterated, but what the eye sees, what the ear hears, it is not possible to share.

One midsummer, after the end of a love affair, Olivia Laing packs up some oatcakes, a large cheese, maps and ‘a pair of sandals of unparalleled hideousness’ and walks the river Ouse in Sussex, from source to sea. On her way she opens herself to experiencing life around her – the insects, the falling sparrowhawk, the wave of pollen drifting towards her across a field – and yet also meditates on the past – memories of visiting this river with her lover Matthew, industries now fallen into disuse, fossils, the draining of the marshes. Most of all, the book is haunted by the spirit of Virginia Woolf and Woolf’s own sensitivity to landscape and water.

Laing writes that she had spent the previous spring obsessively reading Woolf’s work and notes her preoccupation with water and its metaphors. ‘Woolf’s metaphors for the process of writing, for entering the dream world in which she thrived, are fluid: she writes of plunging, flooding, going under, being submerged. This desire to enter the depths is what drew me to her, for though she eventually foundered for a time it seemed she possessed, like some freedivers, a gift for descending beneath the surface of the world.’ During her journey Laing returns to Woolf’s work again and again, and her response to it is always sensitive and acute, bringing the novelist into the landscape and then freeing her from it.

Place was one of the sticking points in Laing’s failed relationship, as she is rooted in Sussex and he in Yorkshire. She grew up there, lives in Brighton and has regularly visited parts of the Ouse for years, although never before has she walked its length. She feels the land in her bones. Her observations of the countryside are beautiful; very precisely and knowledgeably written. She can identify birds by their song, neatly dissect an owl’s pellet and effortlessly list the plants she passes:

The field ended in a double ditch, and from it grew a mass of flowers in a profusion of colours and forms, such as is seen trimming the edges of medieval manuscripts. Black medick, I counted, buttercup, horsetail, ribwort plantain, hedge woundwort, musk mallow and curled dock, the clustered seeds a rusty brown. Wild rose, dandelion, the red and white deadnettle, blackberry, smooth hawksbeard and purple-crowned knapweed. Interspersed with these were smaller, more delicate flowers: cut-leaved cranesbill, birdsfoot trefoil, slender speedwell, St John’s wort, heath bedstraw, tufted vetch and, weaving in and out of the rest, field bindweed, its flowers striped cups of sherbet-pink and white. The stem of the knapweed was covered in blackfly, and a spider trap shaped like a dodecahedron had annexed a few pale purple flowers of vetch inside swathes of tight-woven web.

I particularly like the use of ‘trimming’ in that passage, which seems to me to work in both its senses: creating a bright border to the ‘text’ of the field and also shaping, as all this land is trimmed by the hand of man.

The landscape is physically marked by history but it also acts as a receptacle for memory in a less tangible way. As she walks and loiters and dips into the Ouse’s waters, Laing’s mind wanders. She traces her love of rivers and faint mistrust of woods to a spooky encounter with The Wind in the Willows, and this triggers a diversion into the life of Kenneth Grahame. Seeing bees, she ruminates on the Woolfs’ marriage, on Derek Jarman and his garden at Dungeness. Horsetail, ‘the living link between our own age and that of the dinosaurs’, leads her on to Gideon Mantell, who found traces of the iguanadon nearby in the early nineteenth century. She settles into a wallow and thinks about John Bayley and Iris Murdoch (marriages are something she thinks about quite a lot). The marshes sigh over the drowned knights who fled the Battle of Lewes and the army of Simon de Montfort, and death – Virginia Woolf’s, a farmer’s, a rat’s, our own – is never far away. Nor are other worlds and their visitors. Laing recalls Odysseus’ descent into the underworld, Dante’s tour of the Inferno, and the strange realms encountered by Cherry of Zennor and True Thomas. In a way this walk, this ‘journey beneath the surface’, is Laing’s version of this, a physical and intellectual descent into a world apart which may provide consolation, understanding. Thus the book is structured around a very particular locale but constantly moving outwards, absorbing new material, perhaps like a river too.

Essentially backward-looking as much of Laing’s journey is, reminders of the present are often rude shocks. A landfill site where Asham, the Woolfs’ home, once stood, disfiguring the hillside; a woman ranting and swearing in a pub garden. As the walk progresses and Laing spends more and more time alone with her thoughts and birdsong and bright air, one senses in her a growing distaste with the mass of humanity, mindlessly consuming and destroying. Even so, as she reaches her destination, she feels ‘as purely happy as I’ve ever been’.

But that’s how we go, is it not, between nothing and nothing, along this strip of life, where the ragworts nod in the repeating breeze? Like a little strip of pavement above an abyss, Virginia Woolf once said. And if she’s right, then the only home we’ll ever have is here. This is it, this spoiled earth. We crossed the river then and pulled away, and in the empty fields the lark still spilled its praise.

(The rather tiny photograph of Olivia Laing is from the Marsh Agency's website.)