Come Slowly — Eden —

1.

The first time I visited Paris, I tried to act it out. Written in 1919 and published the next year by Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press, Hope Mirrlees's Paris describes a springtime "psychogeographical flânerie" through the post-war city. In a dense, fragmented, and allusive style that anticipates The Waste Land (to an almost suspicious extent), the poem explores a city in the midst of its tenuous recovery from the ravages of war; it captures a moment — during the Paris Peace Conference — when Paris held a concentration of the world's social, political, and economic traumas and hopes.

And so it was that 91 years later an American student of English literature found herself in the Tuileries, piously reciting a couplet about pigeons — "Pigeons perch on statues / And are turned to stone" — and filling up an SD card (remember those?) with photographs that, at the time, she believed to be reasonably artsy. Mirrlees didn't dominate my literary itinerary: I made sure to buy Poems and Exiles, a little book of Joyce's less-celebrated works, from Shakespeare and Company. I even had my photo taken in the shop, thronged by other tourists and willfully forgetting that I wasn't actually standing on the same ground where Joyce had sat for a portrait with Sylvia Beach.  

If you had asked me back then why I was so intent on seeing as many of the poem's sights as possible, I would have blushed, and then fumbled through some yarn about how I thought it was important to understand the embodied experience of the poem, to have a material sense of its life, its world. I don't think that's false, exactly. If I'd been honest, though, I would have had to tell you, practically gushing, about the surprising warmth of the poem's genius, its charming combination of sometimes quite biting wit and pathos, its delicately managed shifts in scope, which made it feel both epic and tenderly particular. It had overcome me. If I'd been honest, I would have had to tell you: "Because I'm in love."

Is it possible to fall in love with a poem? And what does that do to us as readers? In "The Good Morrow," John Donne's speaker declares that "love, all love of other sights controls / And makes one little room an everywhere." He makes love sound (to me, at least) like a practice of obsessive but generous interpretation: love narrows the lover's focus but expands the scope of her imagination; it is constructive, beginning with the beloved but building outward into something beyond its narrow circumference, from "one little room" to "everywhere." (That "stanza" comes from the Italian word for room allows for my reading here, which only somewhat blunts the undoubted creepiness of the verb "controls" — after all, a little room can quickly resemble a prison cell.) To "control" all love of other sights, love might not be restrictive: it might simply be directive. Or it might provide a point of reference, a standard by which the measure and nature of other loves can be discerned.

Paris takes the beloved as just this — a point of reference, a cardinal star. The poem's final gesture casts love as a cynosure, an orienting presence: Mirrlees closes by representing the constellation Ursa Major with a clever arrangement of asterisks. The significance of this gesture was almost entirely private and intimate: the bear had become something of an emblem of Mirrlees's relationship with Jane Ellen Harrison, the path-breaking Cambridge scholar who was the poet's mentor, closest friend, and possibly her lover. As Sandeep Parmar explains:

During Jane's early days teaching at Newnham, three female students gave her a toy bear, which Jane named "OO," short for "The Old One." The Bear . . . had a totemic significance for Hope and Jane — he negotiated meetings between his "younger" and "elder" wife, and in part embodied their not only unconventional but impossible union by providing the "male" aspect of a secret, fantasy marriage.1

But Mirrlees's use of Ursa Major is not simply a sentimental inside joke. It resolves a serious problem presented at the beginning of the poem.

Paris begins in a station of the Metro, in the year 1919, as the speaker begins to travel along what was then the NORD-SUD line. Both literally and metaphorically, the poem opens by asking: Where are we going? North or South? To Hell — under the Seine, underground, into the underworld? Or heaven — signified by the poem's last image, of "The sky . . . saffron behind the two towers of the Nôtre- / Dame"? For the poem's 440 or so lines, the flâneuse wanders, seemingly directionless, while the unstable world transforms itself through her delirium: merchants' stalls become "little temples of Mercury"; some wrapped baguettes morph into "Triptolemos in swaddling clothes." Instead of directions, Mirrlees's concluding stars offer the speaker a means of spatial self-determination, a means of divining, by bringing two objects into relation, a stable point of reference. The line drawn between the two brightest stars of Ursa Major points to Polaris, the pole star — the sky's singular fixed point.2 Once again, love — in the figure of the great she-bear — is the value by which all other meaning is charted: love is an interpretive lodestar. It sets us wandering (and wondering), without a destination, without directions.

2.

Like many of its modernist kin, Paris, which Virginia Woolf described as "obscure, indecent, and brilliant," doesn't resist interpretation so much as it teases it.3 For those of us who enjoy difficulty in literature, poems like Paris are less a nut to be cracked and more a flower that blooms under the warmth of a reader's dedication. Every time I read the poem, another fragrant petal unfurls itself; after a while, leafing through those pages begins to feel like sitting in a garden.

And yet I long for Eden. By this I mean that there's a kind of understanding of the poem — mythical and primary — into which I'll never be admitted. I am always trying to access it, always trying to break in by means of the tools that have helped me foster my own garden: but the gates of Paradise do not fall because you strike them with a spade. My difficulty is difficult to articulate. It is certainly not what George Steiner, in his 1978 essay "On Difficulty," called "contingent" difficulty — the difficulty, put simply, of things "we must look up" (e.g. allusions, historical context, the definitions of words whose meanings are obscure or have changed).4 Such difficulty is possible to manage; it is, I think, the difficulty we most often associate with modernism, and Mirrlees's poem has more than enough of it to spare. Was this the difficulty that launched my train across the Channel? I went to Paris, yes, because I loved Paris, but I was hoping on my journey to grasp something more than just the poem's denotations.5 Because Paris's elusiveness does not come down to its allusions: if anything, they are the most tangible, the easiest parts of the poem to grasp.6 Such difficulty is just a demand for labor: at its worst, tedious, but at its best, delightful.  

What I'm grappling with might be closer to what Steiner calls "modal" difficulty. Modal difficulty is the difficulty of irreconcilable differences, often the difficulty of historical strangeness, of alien structures of feeling (what Steiner calls a "climate of consciousness"). It "confounds the reconstructive acquaintance achieved by virtue of knowledge and archeology of feeling with authentic apprehension, with penetrative inscape."7 I think of my difficulty as something of a sister to Steiner's modal difficulty — not an alienation from historical ways of being, but a foreignness to the impossible strangeness of another person's intimacies, a bewilderment provoked by the specificity of coterie taste and feeling as expressed in private verse. Perhaps I hoped to encounter the ghost of this knowledge in Paris, still haunting the Place de la Concorde.

Such knowledge, however, eludes biography, geography, lexicography, eludes even the kind of arcane gossip that Steiner qualifies as contingent. Dante "can cram Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise with gossip so private that elucidation hinges on an almost street-by-street intimacy with thirteenth-century Florence," Steiner asserts, but if it is the case that "in some time, at some place, the difficulty can be resolved," then, to him, it is something that can be looked up.8 But what if the gossip is so private that it hinges on there being only a few — maybe even only two — people who understand it? At such a level of intimacy, of restriction and particularity, might that knowledge not create a microclimate of consciousness, as it were? Might it not be tied to feelings so particular in nature that they can only be reconstructed by a very limited number of people, apprehensible by a habitus honed only into a very specific harmony?  

Steiner, confounded by his own example of modal difficulty, sets it aside, explained but unresolved. I cannot set mine aside, though, any more than I could blot out a star. The sparkle of its attachments — its embeddedness in a relationship obscured from my view — make my attachment all the more acute. 

3.

Let me put this another way: when I write criticism, when I interpret literary artifacts, I like to tell a story: at the very least, I want to tell myself a story. Here's where the poem comes from. Here's where it's been, and who took it there. Where do I want to take it? When you love something, you want to know everything about it; at least, I do. Where did you spend your childhood? What were your parents like? And then? And then? And then you met me.  

The story of Paris's emergence is a blank page. Although Virginia Woolf thought the poem brilliant, Mirrlees's reviewers were less generous.9 Paris was doomed to obscurity in more than one sense of the word: as embedded as the poem is in its historical moment, it is unstuck from literary history. So the misunderstood avant-garde masterpiece receded from view, and Mirrlees (with Harrison, at first) focused on other projects. Then, in 1928, the much older Harrison died, and Mirrlees, devastated, converted to Catholicism. ("Anyhow, what a comfort for you to have been all you were to her," Woolf wrote in cryptic consolation.10 She, too, was grieving for that towering figure of female scholarship, learning, and wit; her feelings come through in the poignant, veiled cameo she gives to Harrison in A Room of One's Own.11) When Leonard Woolf wanted to re-issue the poem in the 1940s, Mirrlees demurred, because she believed the poem to be blasphemous. (To be fair, it does describe girls receiving their first communion as "Charming pigmy brides.") Eventually, a bowdlerized version found its way into the short-lived Virginia Woolf Quarterly in 1973.12 But it wasn't until 2007 when the poem appeared in Bonnie Kime Scott's anthology Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections, helpfully introduced and annotated by Julia Briggs, that Mirrlees's verse began to enjoy readership and even critical attention. A 2011 edition of Mirrlees's poems, edited by Sandeep Parmar and including Paris, has cemented her status in the recovered modernist canon.

In Repression and Recovery, Cary Nelson suggests that the "nature" of recovered literary artifacts is "necessarily contemporary": "writing literary history necessitates enacting our own historical moment."13 Our vision of the text will always be reflective of the era of its interpretation rather than of the "thing itself," if such an object could ever truly exist.14 I try this presentism on for size; I take it to the extreme: I tell myself that in many real respects Paris is a contemporary poem. The writer of Paris is me, the reader: after all (as I like to shout at my students), "The birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the author!" Like any literature about the precarity of returning to normal — after war, after a pandemic — Paris resonates well in our moment. But of course "enacting [one's own] historical moment" isn't the same thing as neglecting to recognize another. With its references to Woodrow Wilson, to the "ruined province of Picardie," to vintage Metro ads, how could Paris be anything other than of its time? The work that it does in this moment is transhistorical — that's one of its virtues.

So Paris remains half-placed, half-timed, and only partly-attached: and I desperately attached to it. This is when we turn to the archive, that promising repository of mystifying fragments, scraps, hints, and talismans — kindling for the interpreting mind.

But here's the thing about archives. When you go to one, the worst thing you can do is have an idea of what you'd like to find. Archives are unruly. "The vast majority of what one finds there is mundane and monotonous," Brent Edwards warns — or promises? It's part of the charm of the archive, really, its "record of the inexorable production of the ordinary," especially because the record is so (charmingly) incomplete.15 The fascination of the archive's mundanity is that it constitutes a tiny crystallization of experience; it hints at all the things we'll never hear, see, touch. There are ticket stubs, but rarely the stub you want. There are letters but rarely the letter that illuminates the right thing, the event, the experience, the connection. Because so many of those things happen — or at least, they used to happen — in person, there's no record of them, especially when they happen every day, as a matter of routine. We might look to Harrison's research, for example, to find a source for a phrase or idea expressed by Mirrlees. Then again, David Trotter reminds us, "Mirrlees did not require a published source. She had Harrison to talk to."16

These are the things that love asks for, and not the mind. The mind reads about the Paris Peace Conference; the mind absorbs Jane Ellen Harrison's scholarship; the mind contemplates Cendrars, Apollinaire, Cocteau as influences. The heart rips Alcools from the mind's hands; heedless of reality, the heart demands to be there, to hear the secret conversations held as night settled high above the Rue de Beaune. The mind charts a course to higher ground. The heart spills itself over the empty quadrants of the map. The heart, longing for an impossible closeness, bullies the mind into confusion. 

4.

Mulling over this problem, the problem of the missing record, the empty tomb, the airless spaces where the breath finally falters, I keep thinking about Mrs. Dalloway. Clarissa defines life in relation to chatter: "A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he [Septimus] had preserved. Death was defiance."17 I think about the rhyme between matter and chatter — whether it's antagonistic or magnetic — and then I think about Mrs. Dalloway, a book filled with a kind of pyrotechnic chatter, the buzz and murmur of "life; London; this moment of June."18 Clarissa imagines that Septimus "plunged holding his treasure," protecting it from the chatter.19 It isn't always that some signal struggles to overcome noise, though. Sometimes a signal travels through it — how else could Septimus have reached Clarissa?

In an essay called "Listening to the Past," Mirrlees imagines a kind of radio that would pick up history's chatter.20 You wouldn't be able to tune it to a particular channel, a time or a place: instead, it would broadcast "old fragments of human speech blown in from the waste places of the universe" and patch them together like a kind of "kaleidoscope of sounds," an aural mosaic: chatter. Listening to it would offer you "new patterns for the ear, but not for the mind"; it would attune the auditor to a new kind of aesthetic experience. "There is a particularly glorious kind of kaleidoscope," she writes at the essay's close,

for which you yourself provide the materials for the patterns . . . And, as you gradually add to the collection of scraps, you sometimes find . . . that both the colors and the design of the patterns suddenly become much more beautiful. And . . . the same thing will happen when, into the kaleidoscope of sounds, with which we shall while away the winter evenings of the future, there float the words of some dead lover.

The words of the dead lover become part of a new context, one neither original nor organic. The setting is nonnative, artificial, not conversation but collage — the matter cannot be interpreted, only sensed, because it is a product not of design but of chance. There are conversations between Mirrlees and Harrison in her archive, letters sent and received, which make it hard for us to draw conclusions about the poem or their relationship: they point to an idiosyncratic, or perhaps simply a coded, conception that the two women had of their bond with each other. A thing there was that mattered — certainly, there was — but the two women plunged holding their treasure.

5.

What I've been trying to take account of here, what's been a source of savor and struggle, is the evasiveness of a certain kind of emotional difficulty in literature. This has to do with literature's intellectual challenges as much as all feelings have to do with thoughts. Interpretation and attachment tend to feed, foster, and strengthen each other. Attachment can motivate interpretation in the same way that love motivates thought — one gives the other emotional heft, a sense of personal stakes ("Love, all love of other sights controls"). But attachment also pushes interpretation to places where it can't sustain itself, pushes it to fill an emptiness that's created by desire as much as by cerebral curiosity. Interpretation driven by attachment can leave us bewilderingly bereft of direction: its interest might be obscure, idiosyncratic, mirror images of the psychological urges that make a person send a prayer to a poem in the sky. If a poem finds its way into the substance of your experience, it makes sense that you would want somehow to understand the poem's experience. You would want to get inside its psyche the way you would with a lover. So the largely empty, almost silent past of Paris taunts the reader whose own internal chatter resounds with the poem's lines.

If we are to consider the limits of interpretation, then, we must consider not only how we interpret literary objects, but also how we allow them to interpret us, to move and shape us. If we figure the work of interpretation as a kind of cultivation, there is also the parallel experience of being cultivated by a literary work: of being drawn to settings, intertexts, ideas, even beliefs. We grow and move in its direction, it becomes affixed in the sky of our being like a lodestar, and then another kind of work begins — of coming to terms with its distance, its inaccessibility, and at the same time with its presence, its brightness. You accept that the distance is what makes its brightness tolerable, that the remove is what keeps the star in view.  You see, too, that only by drawing a line between the two bright objects can the third and most sure be reached.

Eight years ago, when I was applying to graduate school, I was teaching at a boarding school in a small English village. One evening, after working anxiously on my applications at the local pub, I looked up and realized the sky was clear and studded with stars, and almost directly above me was the big dipper — Ursa Major. She loomed over the ancient village church and graveyard, lighting the tangled paths of the green beyond it. "JE VOUS SALUE," I whispered to the air, quoting the poem. The constellation seemed so huge and close. And I felt that I knew where I was, because there was north, and so I knew where home was, too, though it was so far away, because there was south, and east. And everything — I and my home and the ocean between us — felt connected by someone else's stars, which I had made my own.

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Michelle A. Taylor (@scriblerian) is a PhD candidate in English at Harvard. From October 2021, she will be the Joanna Randal-MacIver Junior Research Fellow at St Hilda's College, Oxford. Her current book project, In Rooms of Their Own, explores how twentieth-century coterie formations and material cultures shaped literary modernism and its 20th and 21st century legacies. She has published essays and articles in College Literature, Literary Imagination, Modernism/modernity Print plus, The Point, and The New Yorker.

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