Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: A Poem @ 100

CONCORDE: A Centennial Celebration

In her editor’s note introducing the first 2022 print issue of Modernism/modernity, Anne Fernald reflects on anniversaries and new beginnings in light of this weightiest of modernist centenaries: “1922 was a special year and its advent is special to us, in part because it is an anniversary not of violence, but of artistic achievement. If we value art as a mode of resistance to violence and a way to make meaning out of loss, then anniversaries that are determined by art are important.” An anniversary determined not by violence, but by art: what better way to open a cluster marking the centenary of a modernist long poem dedicated to the “Peace Carnival” of Paris in 1919? Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: A Poem, what Julia Briggs has irresistibly dubbed “modernism’s lost masterpiece,” follows the twenty-four-hour journey of a flâneuse as she strolls through Paris’s post-war streets, her lyric consciousness registering a sensory experience of the cityscape mediated by a vast knowledge of the Western cultural tradition.[1] It maps the range of continental avant-garde aesthetics of the 1910s (such as calligrams, montage, and parataxis) and anticipates the mythical methods and epic conventions of James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot. Paris is an event in Jonathan Culler’s sense of the lyric as a poetic act always unfolding in the present moment, involving “an active questioning of the process in which one is engaged;” the poem stages not only the speaker’s own triumphant act of transforming the overwhelming loss of the First World War into artistic meaning but also an interrogation of the very process in which she participates.[2] The centenary of an artistic achievement, then, offers itself as a mode of meaning-making amidst the great “DEUIL” (mourning) of post-war Europe even as it provides an ironic commentary on the often ineluctable relation between art and violence: “whatever happens,” writes the poet, “some day it will look beautiful” (ll. 148, 286).

Composed during the Paris Peace Conference, this “very obscure, indecent, and brilliant” poem was typeset by Virginia Woolf and published by the Hogarth Press in May 1920.[3] Thus, we arrive slightly belatedly at Paris’s centenary; however, this relation to our own belatedness, as is often the case with works of literary modernism themselves, proves to be particularly generative.[4] Perhaps the contingency of Paris having to share its centenary with that of The Waste Land and Jacob’s Room is, in fact, a necessity, given that the poem’s origins and reception history are indissolubly bound up with Eliot and Woolf. Indeed, as contributors Melanie Micir and Anna Preus anxiously ponder when deliberating how to introduce the poem to their students, “Should we play up the fact that Paris appeared two years before T. S. Eliot’s formally groundbreaking The Waste Land . . . ? Or, from an appealingly feminist pedagogical perspective, should we highlight the material history of the text, thereby tethering the contemporary significance of the poem to its status as an early publication of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press . . .?”[5] The former, they conclude, inevitably leads to extended comparisons between the poems, hitching the complexity of Mirrlees’s text to its “unquestionably famous counterpart”; the latter risks an “almost starstruck” absorption in the role Woolf played in “the printing of Paris.”[6] (Guilty as charged, as it seems unfathomable to preface the poem without the power of these words: “typeset by Virginia Woolf [herself!] and published by the Hogarth Press.”)

This anxiety of the either/or (perhaps more likely a both/and) that many of us who work on Mirrlees experience derives not only from Paris’s historical context but also from its critical reception. After a small print run of 175 copies, Paris disappeared for over fifty years, appearing again in 1973 with substantial cuts (per Mirrlees’s request) in the short-lived Virginia Woolf Quarterly. Once again, Paris fell off the map, surfacing some twenty years later—with excised passages intact—in Julia Brigg’s celebrated first annotated edition of the poem in Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections (2007). The year before, Briggs published Reading Virginia Woolf (2006), which contained a chapter titled “‘Modernism’s Lost Hope’: Virginia Woolf, Hope Mirrlees and the Printing of Paris” that would at once inaugurate the canon of scholarship on Paris and shape its future contours. Contextualizing, for the first time, the collaboration between the two women and offering a sustained reading of their mutual influence, this discussion (and the now well-known coinage “Modernism’s Lost Hope”) would frame the poem on the occasion of its appearance in Gender in Modernism and help to cultivate its aura—its singularity and allure stemming in part from its proximity to its (Woolfian) origins. Similarly, in anticipation of Sandeep Parmar’s renowned edition of Mirrlees’s Collected Poems (2011), the Newsletter of the T. S. Eliot Society published the first “mini-cluster” dedicated to Paris in which Cyrena Pondrom declared that the “imminent release” of the Collected Poems is “a splendid moment to revisit the possibility of this ‘lost’ woman modernist’s possible influence on T. S. Eliot, and in turn, his influence on her.”[7]

The significance of Woolf and Eliot as a frame for and justification of our interest in the poem continues to hold weight—how could it not when the most common reaction to “I’m teaching/writing on Hope Mirrlees” is still, “who?”? And yet, looking back over the surge in Mirrlees scholarship stimulated by the publication of the Collected Poems, which introduced Paris to a wider readership, we begin to wonder with surprise whether our “anxiety of influence” is well-founded. Peter Howarth’s opening chapter to The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry, which was published the same year as the Collected Poems, uses Paris as the nexus for discussing the intricacies and difficulties of modernist poetry in general.[8] Tracing this parallel genealogy, we find an array of engagements with Paris that, while often acknowledging Mirrlees’s more famous contemporaries, read the “complex intersections” of the poem in its own right and on its own terms.[9] Scholarship detailing Paris’s inextricable links to Woolf and Eliot has been and continues to be crucial for our understanding of the poem in particular and of Mirrlees studies in general; indeed, for better or for worse, without the institutional weight of these two figures, it is very unlikely that we would have something like “Mirrlees studies” at all.[10] However, given the abundance of scholarly publications that have appeared with growing frequency over the past few years, critical approaches to Paris seem to have exceeded their need to rely on these two icons as validation for the poem’s critical importance within modernist studies and for its expanded place on college syllabi.

A first centenary is a “hinge in time,” Paul Saint-Amour has recently written on the occasion of Beryl Pong’s different—though not unrelated—centenary cluster. Articulating future and past, a hinge affords us a glimpse over the edge, the “point at which a commemorative scale of years and decades begins to swing outward toward a longer scale of centuries and even millennia,” even as it necessitates a backward glance.[11] This centennial vantage point, poised, as it is, somewhere between prophecy and reflection, has allowed us to see the discrepancy between, on the one hand, the richness and variety of scholarship inspired by Paris and, on the other, the relatively marginal position Mirrlees continues to hold at the institutional level. This special cluster, the first sustained collection of essays dedicated to the poet and to Paris, seeks to close that gap. Building on the momentum occasioned by Faber & Faber’s 2020 publication of the first mass-produced, stand-alone edition of the poem, our aim is to usher in a new wave of Paris scholarship that pays tribute to the lineage of scholarly works that have made such a contribution possible while at the same time solidifying the poem’s aesthetic, cultural, and sociopolitical import through the power of visibility that a Print Plus format can bring. Effecting a kind of Mirrleesean-Copernican Revolution that places this understudied woman writer at the center and relegates her famous contemporaries to supporting roles, the contributions to this cluster use Paris as a point of departure for interrogating the debates and concerns central to modernist studies today: empire and the colonial/decolonial powers of language; feminist collaborations, influences, and genealogies; the geographical expansion of modernism beyond the bounds of Western Eurocentrism; new media and the digitization of experimental poetics; and our own pedagogical practices.

“An anniversary,” claims Anne Fernald, “is an occasion to reconsider what is in the middle and what is at the edges of the field.” If this cluster engages the politics of visibility central to any feminist recovery project, so too does it extend that project by enacting a reconsideration of the middle from the perspective of its so-called margins. This decentering yields, among other things, “CONCORDE” (agreement; peace): a work of art celebrating the power of art amidst the emancipatory dynamics of peacetime. Let’s not forget that a first centenary also designates, simply, a celebration. A joyful, ironic, erotic, irreverent flânerie through the psychogeographical landscape of post-war Paris.

DISCORD: Paris, Pedagogy, and Feminism

Even as we extol Paris’s liberation from its “more famous counterpart,” we admit that we envisioned this cluster in part as a response to the two clusters M/m has dedicated to Eliot and The Waste Land: Reading ‘The Waste Land’ with the #MeToo Generation and #MeToo and Modernism. Reading these clusters, which foreground questions of pedagogy, we were struck by the ways in which The Waste Land has become the terrain on which modernist scholars grapple with the principles of #MeToo, as well as by the litany of student affects that accompany the various pedagogical scenes described: discomfited, dispirited, exhausted, disturbed, enraged. While sharing these (“post”-Trump, -#MeToo, -Covid, -Roe) affective responses and acknowledging the irreducible necessity of having these kinds of conversations and battles around the text that has both established and defined much of modernist studies, we want to propose a change of scene. To reframe the question Megan Quigley asks in the first Eliot cluster, can we examine the ways in which “[Paris] acts as a kind of test case of how the #MeToo generation can change the way we read”? This is not to “cancel Eliot”; it is, however, to suggest an alternative. It seems true that part of our ethical commitment to our students lies in offering a range of world views and perspectives, especially those that have been historically silenced and erased. In short, The Waste Land should be taught in tandem with Paris.

In redeploying Rai Peterson’s argument for Nancy Cunard’s Parallax (“In short, Parallax should be anthologized and taught in tandem with Eliot’s work”), we intend neither to reclaim Mirrlees at the expense of other understudied women writers nor to make the case, with a nod to Mary Poovey, that all lost or understudied writing deserves recovery simply because it falls under the category “woman.”[12] Indeed, Paris’s figurative density and play remind us that such identitarian categories are catachrestic in the sense that they are inadequate and only ever proximate nominalizations. Rather, in claiming that The Waste Land should be taught in tandem with Paris, we are at once affirming the scholarly consensus that the two poems are doing something very similar and (thus) promoting a politics of pedagogy outlined by Barbara Johnson, which emphasizes the work of difference and relationality as opposed to the authority of the self-identical and absolute. In “Teaching Ignorance: L’Ecole des Femmes,” Johnson describes a theory of education “in which the conflicts and contradictions between teachers serve as the springboard for learning,” thus decentering the “Western pedagogical paradigms” that fetishize the “single authoritative teacher.”[13] Isn’t this single, authoritative “teacher” precisely the role accorded to Eliot when, for example, the “Norton Anthology of American Literature introduces The Waste Land by arguing that ‘the view it incorporated of modern civilization seemed . . . to catch precisely the state of culture and society after World War I’”?[14] By teaching these two modernist poems comparatively, we affirm a pedagogical practice that would “retain the plurality of forces and desires within a structure,” thereby “displac[ing] the One-ness of individual mastery” (181). This, writes Johnson, “could perhaps be labeled a feminization of authority” (181). Placing Mirrlees’s text alongside Eliot’s is a feminist gesture not only because it reclaims a “lost woman writer,” but also because it allows for the plurality of forces and desires between texts to inform the cultivation of knowledge and to ground the pedagogical scene.

By suggesting this side-by-side comparison of The Waste Land and Paris (a fitting way to mark their “shared” centenary), we are drawing on the discipline of art history and the methodology popularized by Heinrich Wölfflin. Wölfflin, a contemporary of Mirrlees and Eliot whose Principles of Art History (1915) would revolutionize the field, attracted overflowing and “spellbound” crowds to his lectures at the University of Berlin through his use of slide comparisons: the technique of simultaneously projecting two images on a screen, which facilitated the work of comparing and contrasting.[15] Through the juxtaposition of images, a dialectical relation unfolds in which students can grasp and articulate resemblances of and variations on style. This methodology, when applied to The Waste Land and Paris, would allow students to experience, analyze, and evaluate the similarities as well as the differences in these texts’ approaches to “modern civilization.” Oliver Tearle’s recent work, which offers an intricate comparative reading of the two poems, exemplifies the kind of approach we are describing, and to what purpose:

[U]nlike The Waste Land [Paris] is ultimately a celebration of love and sex, rather than dwelling on the sordid or unfulfilling aspects of human relationships. One of the many parallels between the two poems is their reference to "nymphs" as a euphemism for prostitutes. But whereas Eliot’s "nymphs" plying their trade by the side of the Thames (II. 175, 179) appear against a backdrop of sexual violence (the rape of Philomel), mechanical physical relationships (the typist and her boyfriend who appear later in "The Fire Sermon"), and Sweeney coming to Mrs Porter, Mirrlees tells us that her "nymphs are harmless," going on to enjoin the reader, "Fear not their soft mouths" (11.30–1), because medical advancements have discovered a way to treat venereal disease. Similarly, as the poem’s reference to Lysistrata suggests, Mirrlees’s metropolis is a space where women are in charge of their own bodies, unlike Lil from "A Game of Chess" in Eliot’s poem. (“Writing the Mother-City,” 58).

Mirrlees’s “woman of the crowd,” whose body moves freely and leisurely through the city space, participates in and disrupts a long tradition of flânerie almost exclusively reserved for (white) male bodies; her lyric “I” is not silenced, but rather disturbs and extends a poetic tradition reserved mostly for (white) male voices.[16] This is not blindly to celebrate Paris and its aesthetics, which, as some of our contributors address, possess their own fraught ideological and political positions. Nevertheless, the poem has the potential to transform the context in which we “read The Waste Land in the time of #MeToo” and to yield a different set of affective responses in the classroom. “What might [Paris] teach us now, in this already weary century?” Sandeep Parmar asks in her “Afterword” to the 2020 edition of the poem.[17] One response, among the many contributed to this cluster, is that Paris has something to teach us about teaching.

While we are aware of a certain tension created by foregrounding Eliot in our framing of Paris on the occasion of its centenary, we believe that the end justifies the means. By emphasizing a slight but crucial difference in Peterson’s phrasing, the suggestion is that while Paris need not necessarily be taught in tandem with The Waste Land, those of us who teach The Waste Land should seriously consider doing so in tandem with Paris. This asymmetrical chiasmus seeks not only to displace the violence imposed by a single authority and to produce alternate affective states in the classroom; it also seeks to challenge the mythos of the individual male genius in The Waste Land by insisting on its antecedent, thereby further opening this “more famous counterpart” to its own relational and collaborative underpinnings. Given the pedagogical possibilities of the Print Plus forum, this cluster advocates for and hopefully facilitates such transformative and subversive acts of reading in the classroom.[18]

The New Mirrlees Studies

The cluster’s initial call for papers was deliberately broad: we aimed “to present new work that reassesses the singularity of Mirrlees’s poem as well as its place within the broader network of literary modernism and early twentieth-century poetics.” Seemingly of their own accord, however, the selected contributions merged elegantly into four pairings, each of which extends the initial CFP by interrogating “the multiple modernities [Paris] variously engages, embraces, resists, or critiques.”[19] The first set of essays introduce us to the historical specificity of Paris in the spring of 1919: Matt Kilbane and Ruth Alison Clemens begin from a “plastic” consideration of the poem that embraces (and critiques) the aesthetic and material possibilities opened up by post-war modernity’s new urban landscapes. Taking 1919 as a specific moment in the semantic trajectory of the word “plastic” and tracing its multiple appearances throughout the poem, “Plastic Paris” explores how, in Paris, “to write plastically . . . is to set things up and simultaneously admit they could be otherwise.” Such a plastic methodology, which “trains its ecstatic attention on the fluid traffic between life and art,” informs the anti-institutional nature of Mirrlees’s views on art as well as our understanding of how her poetic alchemy transforms the cityscape of spring 1919 into “a map of a new Paris.” Building on this discussion of Paris’s plasticity as mediating the relation between art and life, “A Cartography of Hope: Mirrlees and the Poetics of New Materialism” argues that the poem’s blending of the aesthetically modernist and the philosophically materialist can be traced to the “plastic force” outlined in the preface to Mirrlees’s first novel, Madeleine: One of Love’s Jansenists (1919). Taking this preface’s statement on aesthetics as its starting point, Clemens shows how materialism and a materialist conception of literature is woven throughout Mirrlees’s oeuvre. This genealogy reveals, crucially, how Mirrlees’s materialist poetics becomes a “political cartography” in which both reader and the female body moving through urban space are “guided via spatially situated encounters that connect the lasting effects of imperialism to the contemporaneous condition of transnational Western commercialism.”

The next two essays similarly ground Paris in the time and space of its genesis, inviting us to consider Mirrlees within new contemporary formations and avant-garde contexts. In “‘The Russian Trace’: Connecting Paris: A Poem to Russian Modernism,” Sofia Permiakova challenges us to continue the efforts to “horizontalize” our understanding of modernist influences and aesthetics by rereading Paris through the avant-garde poetics of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s The War and the World (1917) and Aleksandr Blok’s The Twelve (1918). This rereading offers not only a movement beyond the “nineteenth century Russian prose canon, which still dominated the British reception of Russian culture in the early twentieth century,” but also alternate ways of considering the politics of Paris’s experimental aesthetics. Yasna Bozhkova, too, resituates Mirrlees within a new contemporary pairing, placing Paris alongside Mina Loy’s poetic triptych, “Three Moments in Paris” (1914). This comparative reading explores the implications of Mirrlees and Loy’s shared mise-en-scène: the flâneuse of the modern metropolis who simultaneously inhabits and critiques the dual position of “women as [both] consumers and objects of consumption.” This doubled perspective produces an “ironic feminist stance”—perhaps we might say en dehors garde stance—that bridges the two women’s poetic practice despite the scant archival evidence of their having met or read one another’s work.

The unwitting collaboration of the essays in this cluster could perhaps be viewed in the same way as Mirrlees’s engagement with the poetics of Loy or Blok or Mayakovsky: constellations born of immersion in the intellectual and political preoccupations of the time in which they were written as opposed to intentional dialogues. One of the most prescient chance encounters in this cluster is that of the two articles interrogating the relationship staged in Paris between language and colonial systems of power; a dialogue born not, of course, by chance alone, but by scholarship emerging from and within decolonial efforts across the academy. While Davida Fernández-Barkan’s “Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: A Late-Colonial Collage” demonstrates, from an art-historical perspective, how the visual culture referenced within the poem is inextricable from the North and West African diaspora present in Paris at its time of writing, Juliette Taylor-Batty’s “Hope Mirrlees, the Holophrase, and Colonial Linguistics” offers a compelling dissection of Paris’s reliance on colonial linguistic ideologies and their contribution to linguistic extinction and cultural erasure. These essays are urgent and far reaching, divulging new, interdisciplinary approaches for thinking about the colonial relations that made modernist artistic accomplishments possible.

The final two essays speak to collaborations in Mirrlees Studies beyond the collection presented here, where innovations in pedagogy and new digital methodologies come to the fore. Provocatively foregrounding the feminist elements of their collaboration, Melanie Micir and Anna Preus (“Feminist Modernist Collaboration, Then and Now: Digitizing Hope Mirrlees’s Paris”) narrate the complexities of creating the first digitized version of Paris—a poem at once intensely textual and visual. Forced to decide what to preserve and what to disregard in moving from print to screen, they bring into relief what proves to be the most challenging and exciting aspect of teaching Paris: how it is “difficult to bring the poem to life in the classroom without the use of other media.” As if in direct response, Cornelia Wilde (“Teaching the Aesthetics of Hope Mirrlees’ Paris”) hands the proverbial baton of collaboration to her students, whose transmedial interpretations of the poem engage in their contemporary zeitgeist as much as Mirrlees’s poem did her own. Using the formal innovations of Paris as an invitation to explore their own metropolis (Berlin) and other forms of media (audial, visual), the students’ responses to the poem are meta-reflexive, engaging the earlier questions of how one decides what to include and what to omit. Their processes highlight the intellectual and affective possibilities of the more creative avenues of pedagogy that Paris makes legible.

While this cluster offers generative parallels, our hope is that it inaugurates at least as many schisms and unresolved questions, thus tempting further collaborative work on Paris that continues to interrogate its role within Mirrlees and modernist studies. The essays presented here reconsider the poem from interdisciplinary, interlinguistic, and intermedial perspectives, asking important questions about what makes its aesthetics at once so singular (its “feminist ironic subjectivity,” its “plasticity,” its inherent openness to other forms of media) and so exemplary of canonical modernist poetics (its participation in the genre of the long poem, its use of montage to capture the fragmentation of modern urban experience, its capacious incorporation of “high” and “low”). In so doing, they reveal Paris as an important source for sustained engagement with the debates surrounding the politics of gender, race, pedagogy, and canon formation that productively challenge the field of modernist studies today.