Square Haunting

by Francesca Wade

  Their closeness, despite the significant age difference, was certainly unusual. Virginia Woolf airily told a friend that Mirrlees ‘has a passion for Jane Harrison, the scholar: indeed they practically live together’, and having read Mirrlees’s 1919 novel Madeleine – about a precocious seventeen-year-old girl who enters the glamorous entourage of the famed seventeenth-century Parisian hostess Mademoiselle de Scudéry, with whom she falls in love – Woolf took the book as straight autobiography: ‘It’s all Sapphism so far as I’ve got – Jane and herself.’ Unlike Harrison, Mirrlees (her youthful betrothal notwithstanding) never showed any romantic interest in men, and her early work in particular shows a deep engagement with ideas around sexuality and same-sex desire. In the early twentieth century, female sexuality was increasingly scrutinised by sexologists, psychoanalysts and lawyers; by 1921 the subject was seen as dangerous enough for parliament to debate making lesbianism (associated with over-education, prostitution, alcohol, nightclubs, divorce and vampires) a criminal offence like male homosexuality, but the question was shelved on the basis that women might not have considered the concept and it was preferable not to put ideas into their heads.

  Until the latter half of the century, language for lesbian desire remained, for the large part, either coy and euphemistic or clinical, even medical. In public, women tended to present their relationships vaguely: Virginia Woolf’s affair with Vita Sackville-West existed, sometimes uneasily, alongside their respective marriages; H. D. and Bryher referred to each other publicly as cousins, and masked their partnership – which Bryher’s parents never accepted – behind Bryher’s two marriages, first to the American writer Robert McAlmon, then to the bisexual novelist and film-maker Kenneth Macpherson, who was at the time H. D.’s lover. If same-sex desire was depicted in popular media, it was through the stereotype of the ‘mannish lesbian’: the bicycle-riding, trouser-wearing New Woman mocked with relish in Punch cartoons, whose alarming attitudes were assumed to extend to sexual depravity. There was little language for women whose ‘transgressions’ were less public, who enjoyed relationships with women which could not so easily be mapped on to the template of a heterosexual marriage – relationships, like Jane and Hope’s, which may or may not have been sexual (and there’s rarely the evidence to be sure either way) but which offered a subversive intimacy outside a nuclear family set-up. When Hope or Jane spoke of their relationship, it was always in coded, allusive terms, acknowledging that others might not understand, but not requiring outside approval: Hope’s 1923 novel The Counterplot is dedicated to Jane Harrison with a quote in Greek from The Odyssey – ‘Nothing is greater than when two people keep house together, man and wife, a great grief to enemies and joy to friends.’

  Woolf spent a good deal more time in her diaries and letters analysing Mirrlees’s character, not in an entirely positive way. She certainly admired Mirrlees’s literary talents, and was eager to support her career: she gave Madeleine a positive review in the Times Literary Supplement (though both she and Katherine Mansfield admitted privately that they found it pretentious and heavy-going), and in 1920 the Hogarth Press published Paris, typeset by Woolf, who made several mistakes and had to make corrections by hand in most of the 175 copies. But Woolf’s private descriptions of Mirrlees indicate a grudging respect tinged by jealousy, not only of her writing but also, significantly, of her intimacy with Harrison. In 1919, listing in her diary her friends, among whom she counts Mirrlees ‘latest of all’, Woolf dismisses her as a ‘spoilt prodigy’: ‘over-dressed, over-elaborate, scented, extravagant’ with a ‘greed, like a greed for almond paste, for fame’. But that August, Woolf described Mirrlees to a friend as one who ‘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?’ Woolf, who had always wanted a female mentor, and who herself had entered ambivalently into marriage, immediately saw the liberating potential of Jane and Hope’s partnership, founded on a deep affection and intellectual compatibility. Just as her life with Bryher offered H. D. a release from constricting gender norms and a new energy for writing, with Bryher as facilitator and collaborator, their relationship gave Harrison and Mirrlees a fresh stimulation and freedom. Unlike Cornford, Mirrlees was utterly committed to Harrison and to her writing: she looked after Jane, encouraged her and poured her own energies into shared projects. Later, Hope wrote that ‘influence was hardly the word of her effect on me. It was, rather, re-creation.’ Yet she also recalled, to her pleasure, Harrison’s telling her ‘that she had learned a great deal from me’, too; after Harrison’s death, when Mirrlees’s output had dwindled and her reputation declined, this glancing memory – and a few small books featuring both their names – would be the lasting reminder of these years, probably the happiest and most vital of both women’s lives. And in Paris and Bloomsbury their life together, begun at Newnham over pots of coffee and ancient Greek texts, flourished around a new, highly modern passion: for the Russian language and culture.

  *

  Jane Harrison had first taken up Russian in Cambridge during the First World War, seeking a new interest to distract her from the horrors being reported, and from the break-up of her intellectual cohort as friends and colleagues began to enlist. She told Gilbert Murray that learning the language had made her weep for joy: it was palpably clear, she wrote, that Russia ‘cares more than any other nation for things of the spirit’. Her choice of language was somewhat subversive in the circumstances. The signing of the Anglo-Russian Convention in 1907 had made Britain and Russia uneasy allies, but at the outbreak of war in 1914 the British press debated suspiciously whether Russia (still an autocracy rather than a democracy) should be considered Western or Eastern, civilised or barbaric. That August, while Zeppelins droned overhead, Harrison wrote to Mirrlees (who was back at her family home at Chislehurst in Kent), telling her she was learning Russian ‘for our new allies’ and urging Hope to learn it too. Whether out of her own interest or a desire to humour Harrison’s enthusiasm, Mirrlees accepted the challenge. In the spring vacation of 1915, the pair travelled together to Paris and joined a second-year Russian class (‘grammar and the Brothers Karamasoff’) at the École des Langues Orientales, where fellow students included a priest, some pawnbrokers, a French suffragette and a man ‘so fat he can scarcely speak’. ‘It is too fascinating,’ wrote Harrison to Murray. ‘I have always meant to devote my dotage to languages and now it is coming on.’

  In a lecture given back at Cambridge that autumn, Harrison described her days as ‘growing richer every moment’ with the study of Russian, which had offered her ‘a new birth and a new life’. She was not attracted by the prospect of access to works of literature (the products of individual minds), but to the language itself, which she saw as offering a rare insight into another group’s unconscious. Around this time, the idea of a common European language had begun to gain currency as a way of forging connections between nations, but Harrison disliked the proposal: ‘If Esperanto alone were spoken throughout the world, think of the desolation of it! To most of us life would be barely worth the living … When we take the trouble to learn a people’s language, it is then we draw near and touch their innermost, unconscious souls.’ Specifically, Harrison was fascinated by Russian grammar, especially the ‘far famed, much dreaded’ imperfective aspect – a voice which captures a sense of ongoing action and expresses a collective memory of a past beyond that of the individual – which she believed to be of ‘profound psychological significance’.

  Harrison was deeply influenced by the work of Henri Bergson, whose lectures in Paris, London and New York packed out halls, occasioned traffic jams and prompted his blacklisting from the Catholic Church. Bergson argued that Western thought went wrong in its determination to see time as a succession of events, one after the other; he preferred to consider time a
s an ongoing, endless process, a series of changes ‘which melt into and permeate one another, without precise outlines’. He called this la durée. Harrison was immediately riveted by the concept, which she saw reflected in the Russian imperfective aspect. Durée, she wrote, implies that we are something far greater than just ourselves, that we contain within us both the present and the past at once, and are somehow part of one another: ‘Each of us is a snowball growing bigger every moment, and in which all our past, and also the past out of which we sprang, all the generations behind us, is rolled up, involved.’ For modernist writers including Woolf, Joyce and Proust, Bergson’s theories opened up the opportunity to reimagine linear plots and to play with representations of consciousness, perspective and memory, while his existential call for humans to situate themselves in a time beyond the immediate present resonated with the generation seeking to rebuild society after the First World War. For Harrison, the realisation that an understanding of la durée was built into the Russian language made her feel a deep empathy with the Russian people: inherent to their self-expression was a sense of kinship that disregarded borders or national identity.

  Harrison and Mirrlees arrived back in Paris in October 1922, excited by the possibilities of the city and ready to immerse themselves in the study of Russian. They took rooms at the American University Women’s Club, a residence for postgraduate students recommended by Harrison’s old friend Alys Pearsall Smith, on the rue de Chevreuse in Montparnasse (Hope was delighted that ice cream was served daily, and the extensive library contained ‘all the recent detective stories’). After so many years in Cambridge, Harrison felt her world expanding, as if she had been launched into a technicolour future. Paris in the 1920s, wrote Gertrude Stein, ‘was where the twentieth century was’. The cafes of the Left Bank hummed with conversation about art, philosophy and literature, while its nightclubs pulsated with the euphoric rhythms of jazz. Montparnasse – known simply as ‘The Quarter’ – was home to an international community of artists, composers, poets and novelists who had gathered in pursuit of freedom and inspiration. Sylvia Beach’s and Adrienne Monnier’s bookshops on the rue de l’Odéon, in the sixth arrondissement, sponsored readings and offered convivial places for the avantgarde to meet informally in a semi-private space; James Joyce and Jean Cocteau struck poses for Man Ray at his studio; while Stein and Natalie Barney – both influential women who wrote and spoke openly of lesbian desire – hosted regular salons and cocktail parties in their homes, all within a short stroll of Jane and Hope’s lodgings. Angela Lavelli, an Italian-Russian friend of Roger Fry, took them to see the latest works by Picasso and Derain at contemporary galleries on the rue La Boétie (‘Cubism is now a back number & the stunt now is to be “savant”, i.e. Eclectic,’ wrote Hope excitedly), and persuaded the reclusive dealer Auguste Pellerin to show them his famous personal display of works by Cézanne (‘owing to Pellerin’s churlishness, his collection is almost inaccessible & so for most people Cézanne is an invisible source of inspiration – rather like God’). Hope purchased an embroidered blue frock coat of the latest style, a velvet cape and a grey felt hat ‘to wear with my coats & skirts in that holy place of ritual purity & reticence – LA RUE’, in between spurts of work on a novel. Virginia Woolf visited Paris in April 1923, and wrote home of their ‘Sapphic flat’, where she enjoyed seeing the two women ‘billing and cooing together’. But Jane and Hope’s Paris was not the elegant milieu of Paris Lesbos or America Abroad, but rather a community of Russian exiles, living on the margins of French society.

  Like many others in British literary and socialist circles, who saw in it a romance and sense of liberation akin to the French Revolution, Harrison had greeted with delight the February Revolution of 1917, during which the Tsarist establishment was overthrown by a mass uprising of soldiers and workers demanding liberty, justice and equality. ‘I feel that our chiefest hope for the future is Russia,’ wrote D. H. Lawrence that May, echoing the language with which he was describing his dreams of Rananim to H. D. and others around the same time. But in October 1917, Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik Party had ousted the provisional government, imprisoned (and later executed) Tsar Nicholas and his family, and seized control of the country. From that point, the triumphant insurrection turned into a chaotic civil war between the Bolsheviks and the counter-revolutionary White Army, forcing millions to flee the country and creating fledgling diasporas in cities across Europe. In the early 1920s, Paris became the cultural and political centre of Russia Abroad, its sixteenth arrondissement especially popular with émigrés.

  Unlike the American expatriates – Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein – who lived abroad by choice, enjoying Parisian cafe culture and its attendant freedoms, Russian émigrés arrived as refugees resigned to long-term exile. In a speech given in Paris in February 1924, Ivan Bunin – who in 1933 would become the first Russian to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature – proclaimed that ‘we are not in exile, we are on a mission’: to preserve Russian culture and heritage in their new homes and to transmit it to the wider world, recreating a version of national identity which could survive without territory or borders. Harrison’s sympathy was piqued immediately by the exiles’ predicament; her natural compassion for outsiders and underdogs made her determined to do what she could to help the displaced. She and Mirrlees attended all the performances given by the Moscow Art Theatre when it visited Paris in late 1922, as part of an ongoing European tour; Harrison was overwhelmed with emotion when several émigrés appeared on stage at the end of a Christmas Eve show and declared that the performance had given them hope for Russia’s continued survival. ‘All along it has been such a mixed joy,’ she wrote, ‘the wonder of their art and the pity and the shame that this amazingly gifted people were starving in thousands – it was almost unbearable.’

  Harrison’s personal relationship with Paris’s Russian community began the following year. In the summer of 1923, in recognition of her reputation as a pre-eminent thinker, she was invited to participate in the annual colloquia convened by Paul Desjardins at a twelfth-century Cistercian abbey at Pontigny in Burgundy. These ‘entretiens’ were tenday sessions of intellectual exchange – interspersed with walks, concerts and swims in the river – to which select scholars were invited. They aimed to counter the spirit of nationalism that had arisen since the First World War, forge collaborations which might form a model for a modern global society and extend conversations across European borders. Among the representatives invited in the post-war years were Edith Wharton, André Gide, Lytton Strachey, Jacques Raverat, Vernon Lee and Roger Fry (though never Virginia Woolf, to her annoyance). At Pontigny, Harrison took her place among a distinguished assembly of philosophers, writers and historians, including, to her delight, various members of the displaced Russian intelligentsia.

  During the first week, at which the main question under discussion was whether there is something intangibly national in poetry that cannot be translated into another language, Harrison was placed at dinner next to the existential philosopher Lev Shestov. That evening, they discussed the plight of Russian intellectuals, and Shestov told Harrison the story of a writer friend of his, Alexei Mikhailovich Remizov. Exiled by the Russian state after multiple arrests for his subversive politics, Remizov was currently struggling in Berlin, where post-war hyperinflation was diminishing living standards and the government was starting to clamp down on immigration. His friends and admirers, among them the writer Thomas Mann and the painter Nicholas Roerich, were raising funds to bring him to France: affected by Shestov’s account of his desperation, Harrison promised £5 and agreed to promote Remizov’s cause among her English friends. In November 1923, Remizov and his wife, Seraphima, arrived in Paris, and the following February, Shestov introduced him to Jane and Hope. Their shared passions, and unlikely friendship, would bring Harrison and Remizov together on two important projects of cross-cultural relations.

  Extremely short, with wide-rimmed horn glasses, Alexei Remizov spoke in
a whisper, but friends primarily remembered his mischievous grin. Occasionally he wore a wizard’s hat he had fashioned himself, and he was known to leave the house with a monkey’s tail protruding from a slit in his jacket. Harrison was instantly charmed by Alexei’s eccentricity and the kindness of Seraphima – a fellow radical socialist and a specialist on ancient Russian scripts – and above all, she was fascinated by his work. Harrison had first come across Remizov’s name some years earlier, when learning Russian at the École des Langues Orientales. She had been taken by his stories about the lives of Russian saints and the legends of Russia’s ancient, pre-Christian past, which struck her as sharing an affinity with the pre-Olympian Greek rituals she had studied. But she had soon given up struggling through his texts, deciding he ‘uses too many hard words’ for her rudimentary grasp of the language. Fortunately, his work was just beginning to appear in English translation, thanks to the assiduous efforts of none other than John Cournos. While in Devon with H. D. in 1916, Cournos had written an extensive essay about Remizov which was published in the Egoist that year, arguing that he ‘must be classed among those artists who say an old thing in a new way’; in 1924, Chatto & Windus published Remizov’s novel The Clock in a translation by Cournos, which he had begun while living in Mecklenburgh Square and continued to work on throughout his relationship with Dorothy L. Sayers. During his stint in St Petersburg in 1917, Cournos had met Remizov, then living in great poverty, toiling in a dark room, his windows draped in black fabric and tall candles lighting the old icons ranged before him on his writing desk. Seven years later Remizov still remembered with gratitude a bottle of concentrated bouillon Cournos had given him, which had lasted him through several meagre winters.