Square Haunting

by Francesca Wade

  In her letters to Gilbert Murray (who was bewildered by the turn her interests had taken), Harrison played down The Book of the Bear, insisting that it was an indulgence undertaken in her old age, a piece of children’s entertainment, not a consequential work. But Jane Harrison’s games are always to be taken seriously. In their introduction, Harrison and Mirrlees wrote that the bear stories were intended to ‘hold the mirror up to human nature’: in its subtle way, the book was Harrison’s homage to totemism, her plea to a world ruptured by war to think of a time when humans saw animals as companions to be respected rather than enemies to be subdued, feared or hunted. If, in the past, even the boundaries between human and non-human were flexible, asked Harrison, then how could it be that so recently, mere difference of nationality was considered significant enough to justify unmediated slaughter? Though she claimed, self-deprecatingly, that she had no more aptitude for politics than for plumbing, all her works, in their different ways, call for a society opposed to violence and domination, where creativity and cooperation are prized above war and individual heroism. The Book of the Bear is her poignant warning that only by celebrating difference can a lasting peace be won.

  *

  ‘We chose this neighbourhood,’ wrote Harrison from Mecklenburgh Street to Murray, ‘because it is close to the Nonesuch Press at which we are publishing a work of capital importance – The Book of the Bear. You will not receive a copy of it,’ she warned him slyly, ‘for your tone on that great subject is not all I could wish.’ The publishing house – a chaotic but successful venture begun in the basement of a Soho bookshop – was run by David Garnett, the affable Bloomsburyite always known as Bunny, and the son of Constance and Edward Garnett; Lytton Strachey had introduced him to Harrison in Paris. In 1925, his press had moved to a purple-and-emerald-panelled room at 16 Great James Street, the road where the Nation and Athenaeum (with Leonard Woolf as literary editor) had offices at number 38, and where Dorothy L. Sayers was living at number 24, preparing her second Wimsey novel, Clouds of Witness, for publication. From Mecklenburgh Street, Jane and Hope could walk in a couple of minutes to Bunny’s office to discuss matters of print run, paper quality and the illustrations commissioned from his then wife Ray Garnett, sweet drawings of chubby children leading amiable bears, which Harrison disliked (‘The Bear never rises to his real majesty,’ she complained to Jessie Stewart). From their new home, Jane and Hope dispatched regular updates on the book’s progress to Alexei and Seraphima Remizov, signing off with their Russian nicknames – Elena Karlovna and Nadezhda Vasilevna. They were deeply anxious about their friends, whose financial difficulties persisted: Mirrlees wrote a long essay in praise of Remizov’s work, and when The Book of the Bear was published at Christmas 1926, Harrison sent Remizov a cheque in advance of royalties, urging him to take a seaside holiday.

  Harrison’s desire to help Remizov was shared by D. S. Mirsky, a regular visitor to 11 Mecklenburgh Street. A former White Army soldier, Mirsky had arrived in London, disillusioned and impoverished, just as the Soviet government began to strip all civil rights from those who had fought against it. Living in Bloomsbury, first at 15 Torrington Square then at 17 Gower Street (though he spent half the year in Paris), Mirsky taught at the School of Slavonic Studies, then based at 24 Gordon Square, where he became Britain’s first fulltime specialist in Russian literature, writing regularly on the subject for mainstream publications and travelling the country on lecture tours. Since she had first met him in 1924, Harrison had delighted in Mirsky’s company, enjoying spirited debates on the finer points of Russian grammar, Bolshevism and contemporary literature. ‘I have lost my aged heart to a Bear Prince,’ she wrote to Murray: ‘why did I not meet him 50 years ago when I cld have clamoured to be his Princess?’ Their friendship was not only a fruitful personal connection, but also gave each of them a way into the other’s world: while he introduced her to Russian writers like Marina Tsvetaeva and Sergei Efron, Harrison brought Mirsky into the circle of the Woolfs and literary London, and secured him an invitation to Pontigny. The international coterie they created in London and Paris, bringing together friends from across the world, offered Harrison the community she had left Cambridge to find.

  Mirsky was deeply frustrated that the British appreciation of Russian culture appeared to be founded on a romanticised conception of the ‘Slav soul’, as extrapolated from Dostoevsky novels – impenetrable, mystical and melancholy – which he felt betrayed a superficial engagement with the literature. Mirsky’s annoyance at British readers was compounded by the fact that they appeared only interested in the classic novelists, and ignored modern writers, who were often struggling – like Remizov – in poverty-stricken exile. What made this even more egregious, to him, was that the work of these contemporaries tended to expose and interrogate the widespread brutality of Russia’s contemporary political climate, of which many British Russophiles remained blissfully unaware. Harrison was sympathetic to his complaints, and eager to use her influence to help his efforts in whatever way she could. She helped edit Mirsky’s books A History of Russian Literature and Contemporary Russian Literature 1881–1925, which included chapters on Remizov and Shestov. (‘I had a book dedicated to me by a Russian Bear – isn’t that elating,’ wrote Harrison to Murray.) Around the time Harrison and Mirrlees moved to Mecklenburgh Street, Mirsky was developing a new project, born out of his frustrations: to found, in Bloomsbury, a Russian-language literary journal, which would be free from political control, would preserve and promote Russian literary culture in exile, and would unite within its pages writers living both in and outside Russia.

  Since the revolution, publishing in Russia had practically ceased, especially for those who did not hold the same political opinions as the regime: Alexander Blok died of cancer accelerated by malnourishment; Anna Akhmatova’s work was banned and her flat kept under constant surveillance. Across other European countries, Russian-language publishers began to print books and newspapers, many deliberately avoiding the new spelling system and neologisms introduced by the Soviet government. These publications allowed émigrés a way to voice their concerns about the future of their homeland, or express their sense of disorientation, but they tended to be politically partisan and were reluctant to publish those – like Remizov and Marina Tsvetaeva, whom Mirsky considered the most significant writers outside Russia – whose work was not explicitly anti-Soviet in its themes. Mirsky’s journal was called Вёрсты (Versty), or Milestones, named after an Old Russian measurement unit which corresponded to the posts marking distances along main roads. Containing poetry, prose, literary criticism and historical documents, as well as articles on philosophy, art and linguistics, it sought to interrogate ‘today’s Russia and Russianness’ from an international standpoint. Each volume, to Harrison’s delight, included new work by Remizov; a supplement to the first issue contained the complete text of Avvakum, which Remizov had specially edited and transcribed. Harrison called the scheme ‘deeply interesting’, and zealously helped Mirsky with his fundraising efforts (on the proviso that Remizov was not appointed business manager – ‘you might as well elect a squirrel’). She personally sent him a cheque for £50, wishing she could provide the whole £200 he needed to underwrite the endeavour: ‘What fun it would be to be a millionaire & finance things really worth doing. It is intolerable that men like Remizov shld be dependent on the whims & silly politics of their inferiors.’

  Harrison turned her mind to connecting Mirsky with people who might help him, eager to ensure that Versty would be a significant project of Anglo-Russian cooperation. She advised him first to take counsel with Leonard and Virginia Woolf – ‘Not that they cld give money they are poor as rats but he is so experienced in journalism & has such a good business head also he is always interested in an adventure in thought’ – and to request an introduction to John Maynard Keynes: ‘a first-rate man of business & it is a sort of hobby of his to finance intellectual experiments that don’t and can’t pay’. Moreover, she insisted
, Keynes being married to a Russian ballerina, ‘Russia has for him a special glamour (is it really true that Russian has no word for glamour – what a language) … if you had Maynard at yr back you would be safe.’ Mirsky did write to Keynes, who donated £20, and to Leonard Woolf, who recommended E. M. Forster for a piece Mirsky hoped to commission on contemporary English fiction. The resulting essay, an early version of his Aspects of the Novel, appeared in Russian translation in Versty’s second issue, alongside a rave review by Mirsky of T. S. Eliot’s poetry (‘he is no doubt the best poet in England and is perhaps the greatest of postwar Europe’). Harrison was gratified by the success of her machinations, and thrilled to help a true collaboration emerge between exiled Russians and Bloomsbury literati. From her small house in Mecklenburgh Street, she was helping to forge projects which would reach audiences far beyond the square.

  Versty was a short-lived endeavour: its third issue (by which time the paper quality had noticeably diminished) would be its last, as its editorial board – Mirsky, the poet Sergei Efron and the musicologist Peter Suvchinsky – succumbed to arguments and in-fighting. But that final issue, published in 1928, included a substantial appraisal, by Mirsky, of the work of Jane Harrison and Hope Mirrlees: ‘prominent friends of Russia … and notable luminaries of contemporary English culture’. In his essay, Mirsky argued that Harrison’s eclectic passions were united by their insistence on ‘the destruction of the “Victorian” world view and the liberation of thought from puritan restrictions’. After Harrison’s death, he picked up this theme in a memorial lecture, arguing that Harrison’s work played a significant role – alongside the birth of Freudian psychoanalysis and the work of Dostoevsky – in the intellectual revolution of the early twentieth century. ‘The way walked by her from the study of Greek vases through that of primitive religion to Freud and to Tolstoy,’ he concluded, ‘will be recognised as one of the most illuminating expressions of the intellectual evolution of the English mind at the turn of two historical epochs.’

  *

  After the First World War, Harrison claimed, she didn’t open a Greek book for ten years. In her new homes she had created work very different from her classical studies – experimental collaborations and translations, the products not of solitary research but of friendships and circumstance. But in Mecklenburgh Street she returned to Themis, writing a new preface and adding an introduction by Gilbert Murray for a fresh edition. She also began learning Icelandic, in order to read the Eddas, and continued the Persian lessons she had started in 1921 (‘the richest civilisation I have touched yet – in some ways’) with the Islamic scholar Guy Le Strange. Her appetite for new ideas was undimmed, and the chance discovery – gleaned from an unusual coincidence she noticed in her reading – that the ancient cult of Orpheus and the work of Dante might share roots in early Iranian tradition set her mind whirring with links between ritual and language, literature and history. She acquired a commentary on the Qur’an, convinced that she was on the trail of an etymological echo across cultures and religious traditions which would ‘upset the whole eschatological, orthodox, Orphic apple-cart’. Just as decades earlier she had enjoyed confounding the establishment with evidence for early matriarchal societies, now she relished the chance to suggest that both a classic work of Western literature and the ritual practice of the ancient Greeks – the basis for Athenian democracy, still idealised as the epitome of rational order and enlightened thought – originated from an entirely other, Eastern religious tradition. It would be a provocative undertaking of just the sort she most enjoyed. But as her scholarly interest returned to myths of regeneration, Harrison’s own health began to decline. ‘Bother my vile body,’ she wrote, ‘I must wait a month before I plunge in.’ By September 1926 she was gleefully making plans ‘to re-write the mysteries’. But her illness precluded concentration, and a postcard sent that year to Jessie Stewart showed two donkeys resting in the sand, labelled in fountain pen J. E. H. and H. M., the caption ‘Nothing Doing’.

  Jane Harrison’s time in Mecklenburgh Street was marked by difficulties with her blood pressure; she took to lying in the square’s garden on a chaise longue, wrapped in a green rug, where she would dictate her letters to Hope, who remembered ‘a stream of suave sentences, punctuated by my giggles and her grimaces’. In June 1927, during a visit to a friend’s house at Camber, Harrison was taken ill with phlebitis and had to be brought back to London in an ambulance; at the end of August, she reported to Murray with some relish, she ‘went right down to the Gates of Hades & there she stayed fluttering to and fro, & it seemed that the gates must clang behind her’. A team of doctors and nurses (one living in Mecklenburgh Square, another deputised from Harley Street), including ‘a lusty masseur of Herculean build’, nursed her back to health, but her movement was now diminished. On 16 January 1928, she attended Thomas Hardy’s funeral at Westminster Abbey; otherwise, most of her time was spent in bed, in the tiny back drawing room of the Mecklenburgh Street house, where Hope read letters to her and regularly rebuffed visitors at the door. Harrison’s older friends, who already suspected Hope of trying to wean Jane away from her former life, grumbled to one another that she was ‘ungracious’ and ‘overwrought’ – but admitted she was clearly ‘very anxious and very devoted’. Virginia Woolf visited several times from Tavistock Square, in the midst of writing A Room of One’s Own.

  Jane Harrison died in Mecklenburgh Street on 15 April 1928. While the immediate cause of death was bronchial pneumonia, it was discovered in her final weeks that Harrison suffered from lymphatic leukaemia, which was somehow fitting, Hope wrote to Seraphima Remizov, since it was a disease ‘which as a rule only attacks young people’. Seraphima replied: ‘Dear N. V., I thank you for having written to me about the last days of our E. K., whom I shall always love … E. K. died on the first day of our Easter. According to an old belief, those who die on the first day of Easter – their soul goes straight to Paradise.’

  On 17 April 1928, Virginia Woolf recorded in her diary a poignant encounter in St George’s Gardens, the old graveyard behind Mecklenburgh Square:

  crossing the graveyard in the bitter windy rain, we saw Hope & a dark cultivated woman. But on they went past us, with the waver of an eye. Next moment I heard Virginia, & turned & there was Hope coming back – ‘Jane died yesterday’ she murmured, half asleep, talking distraught, ‘out of herself’. We kissed by Cromwell’s daughter’s grave, where Shelley used to walk, for Jane’s death. She lay dead outside the graveyard in that back room where we saw her lately raised on her pillows, like a very old person, whom life has tossed up, & left; exalted, satisfied, exhausted.

  Later, Hope received from Woolf a note which she would never forget. ‘It was only one line,’ Hope told her friend Valerie Eliot in 1965, consoling her on the death of her husband T. S. Eliot, ‘but it was more comforting than all my other letters put together: “But remember what you have had.”’

  A former Newnham student recalled Jane Harrison, at dinner, throwing out a theory that everyone has a time of life at which they are most fully themselves: some never surpass the promise of youth, some mellow and flourish in middle age, while others might suffer disappointments but end life happy as ‘delightful old ladies’. In Mecklenburgh Street, reflecting on her long life, Jane Harrison might well have concluded that her seventies were her time. When people asked if she’d like to be young again, Harrison pointed out that this was a silly question: ‘You cannot be – you that are – young again. You cannot unroll that snowball which is you: There is no “you” except your life – lived.’ There’s an echo here of Dorothy L. Sayers’s insistence that youth is overrated. Both these women felt anxious and awkward in their twenties, when the pressure to be feminine and beautiful – and to marry – was at its greatest, and before their decisions to live unconventional lives could be validated by achievement and success. But later in life, each came to value most highly her accumulation of knowledge and experience, which had moulded her into the person she was.


  When Augustus John described Harrison, in 1909, as a ‘puzzle to paint’, he recognised that she was still a work in progress: that he was capturing only one moment in a long, varied and complex life. Harrison’s illness thwarted work which might have made her time in Mecklenburgh Street even more central to her legacy. But in her final years, living and working independently in Bloomsbury alongside intellectuals and revolutionaries, still learning new languages and developing fresh ideas, Harrison was as fulfilled as she had ever been. It’s fitting that her lasting memorial should be in A Room of One’s Own, as an example of intellectual enquiry, a woman who was determined to interrogate assumptions in spite of society’s censure, and who was committed to finding a way to live that suited her own interests and accommodated her devotion to her work. In this way, as many of her friends suggested, she always remained young. ‘I had not realised that she was quite as old as 77,’ wrote Lytton Strachey to Roger Fry, when he heard of Jane Harrison’s death. ‘What a wretched waste it seems that all that richness of experience and personality should be completely abolished! Why, one wonders, shouldn’t it have gone on and on? Well! there will never be anyone at all like her again.’

  EILEEN POWER

  (1889–1940)

  20 Mecklenburgh Square, January 1922–August 1940

  I don’t really think I feel like a don.

  I want to write books. Oh dear, Oh dear!

  EILEEN POWER TO MARGERY SPRING RICE, 17 May 1911

  Eileen Power was in Madras when she received the letter that would determine the course of her life. A thirty-one-year-old lecturer in medieval history at Girton College, Cambridge, Power was travelling as the first woman to receive the Albert Kahn Travelling Fellowship, a grant which funded scholars for a year’s global exploration in the hope that ‘by the study and comparison of national manners and customs and of the political, social, religious and economic institutions of foreign countries’, they might return ‘better qualified to take part in the instruction and education of their fellow countrymen’. Kahn was an eccentric philanthropist whose major project, The Archives of the Planet, sent photographers to every continent in an attempt to document people’s everyday lives in colour; Power described her benefactor as ‘an enlightened French banker who gave you £1,000 and sent you round the world with instructions to widen your narrow academic mind’. The award came as a surprise to Power: her interviewer had commented suspiciously that she ‘might “defeat the objects of the trust” [sic] by subsequently committing matrimony’, and she had resigned herself to being passed over in favour of a man, in whom the same crime might be excused. Yet in September 1920 she left Cambridge and embarked, alone, on her first voyage outside Europe: an intrepid journey encompassing Egypt, India, China, Japan, Canada and North America.