Blue Arabesque

by Patricia Hampl

  But they came here, so many of my saints—Mansfield first to Cassis, then to Bandol and Menton; Fitzgerald with the Murphys near Antibes; Ford Maddox Ford meandering through Provence; Sybille Bedford as a girl with her bohemian mother to Sanary-sur-Mer, followed there after 1933 by a clutch of Nazi-fleeing German writers—Thomas Mann, Franz Werfel, Bertolt Brecht. Even Virginia Woolf spent a string of summers lured by her sister Vanessa’s idolatry of the sun to little Cassis, where I sit now (view of Med) drinking a cup of linden-flower tea (an inadvertent hommage à Proust who did not come here). I’m following them—they formed the century that formed me.

  Whatever inspiration radiates from the bronze plaque in its almost correct location in Marseille belonged first to the pagan world to which this place ever reverts, rooted deep in its Roman vines and olives. It is the inspiration that comes from contemplating not oneself or one’s own bit of news. This is the inspiration that abides in the contemplation of the greatness of others, their sacrifice, their terrible blindness and tragic missteps, their refusal to disappear after they have disappeared.

  Tradition, Chesterton said, is the democracy of the dead. The ancients believed in the dead, their enduring presence. They worshipped the dead. And why not? The dead are all around us, and maybe here, along this coastal range with its ultramarine light, the membrane separating us from us is just slightly more porous. Perhaps they wish to be of use, still.

  OF ALL OF THEM, I first chose for my pagan saint Katherine Mansfield. She might have been for me, as she probably is for most readers, one of the usual suspects rounded up in the anthologies, represented by her “perfect” short story, “The Garden Party.” Beyond this cameo, she might have receded into that twilight where minor writers refuse to be extinguished entirely, trailing clouds of her “exquisite” sensibility, the unfulfilled promise of her talent excused by her tragic early death.

  She might have surfaced again in the biographies of her more celebrated friends: Virginia Woolf, who saw in her a rival, and D. H. Lawrence, who used her as the model for Gudrun in Women in Love. She might have seemed that kind of filmy background figure—if I had come to her through her fiction.

  But I read Mansfield’s Journal and Letters first, documents pulsing with the ardent confusion of art and life that I was just beginning to scramble up myself. “I want to work,” she confided to her journal

  . . . so to live that I work with my hands and my feeling and my brain. I want a garden, a small house, grass, animals, books, pictures, music. And out of this, the expression of this, I want to be writing. (Though I may write about cabmen. That’s no matter.)

  But warm, eager, living life—to be rooted in life—to learn, to desire to know, to feel, to think, to act. That is what I want.

  She articulated for me what it was to want to be a writer—and against heavy odds.

  But even the autobiographical intimacy of those personal forms—journals and letters—doesn’t explain the fascination I developed for Mansfield in my teens that persisted into my twenties. The word fascination hardly states the case. For years, in college and graduate school, and beyond that through the series of dumb jobs and frequent moves I made from one crummy apartment to another as I, too, tried “to be a writer,” home was where I hammered a nail and hung the stark photograph of Mansfield’s hieratic consumptive face. My shrine, my saint.

  I read everybody with fierce appetite during those years—Whitman, Virginia Woolf, Lawrence, poets beyond count. I had many heroes. But I didn’t just read Mansfield. I stalked her. I tracked any shred of memory or gossip. When I found in Frieda Lawrence’s memoir that, during the period when they had lived next door in Cornwall, Mansfield had introduced her to Cuticura soap, I was off to Walgreens, thrilled to find that in 1968 it was still possible to buy the assertive clove-scented bar. A relic.

  I learned from one of her biographers (for a supposedly minor writer, she had quite a few) that Mansfield liked to keep “low bowls of bright flowers” on her writing table:

  I affected the same, and as a florist’s daughter, approved the gesture. She favored—again, according to Frieda Lawrence who could be counted on for girl talk—little jackets of “lovely colours and soft velvet materials”: soon my style as well, though my latter-day velvets draped over faded jeans. Mine was the moist devotion of a cultist, not the frank pleasure of a reader.

  Of course I also read the short stories. I approved her pitch-perfect ear for a volley of dialogue, the click of her snapshot scenes. Her descriptive delight in the world winked with bright, effortless figures. “After lunch today,” she wrote from Menton, “we had a sudden tremendous thunderstorm, the drops of rain were as big as marguerite daisies—the whole sky was violet. I went out the very moment it was over—the sky was all glittering with broken light—the sun a huge splash of silver. The drops were like silver fishes hanging from the tree.”

  The voice in my favorite stories (“Prelude,” “At the Bay”) combines cool authority with an unspoken, and therefore all the more convincing, heartache for her lost New Zealand. I knew that her Wellington had hardly been cherished at the time (no more had I cherished St. Paul). Like me, she knew she was a provincial, and she longed to escape—and did, to London in 1908, before she was twenty. But successful nostalgia is bred of regret, and Katherine Mansfield was a great regretter. After her relatively brief wild-thing period, illness turned her into a pondering, sometimes frantic, invalid. Her gleeful escape was twisted into lonely exile.

  Her fiction spoke to me in a less personal voice than the urgent manner of the Journal and Letters, but this too is evidence of her particular genius: Mansfield was a writer who could bare her soul and write with detached authority. She exposed the membrane between self and art, the porous fiber that transformed a raw girlish ambition and overheated poeticism into the remorseless assurance of fiction.

  Why were there no novels? I wondered briefly, but even this lack turned into virtue: Katherine Mansfield was a miniaturist, not a big-sweep writer, but all the finer for that, a noticer of gestures, a tender of oblique details, capable of the occasional well-aimed dart. She fretted about this: “Don’t I live in glimpses only?” she writes in a letter. But she also understood that her idea of a story’s form was genuinely new, “pure risk,” as she said, moving not by plot but by impression and association, episodes strung on a brief string of time. Her vision was essentially poetic, not narrative, and this enlivened her voice, and for me, her appeal.

  The condensed spirit of the penciled note gave her work a striking immediacy. For all her intensity, she was not a fainter and swooner. She was modern and proud of it. Her humor was mordant, even unkind. Her lyricism had a squeeze of lemon to it.

  Virginia Woolf might write to her sister in an initial assessment of Mansfield, that she found her “cheap and hard . . . unscrupulous.” But Mansfield possessed the keener eye for character, writing to Ottoline Morrell after this first meeting that she sensed in Woolf “the strange, trembling, glinting quality of her mind . . . she seemed to me to be one of those Dostoevsky women whose ‘innocence’ has been hurt.”

  Mansfield suffered—this, too, was important to me. As with Keats, everywhere and never forgotten, even in her most rhapsodic flights, her youthful death hovered. No wonder there were no novels. She died at thirty-four, after years of suffering from tuberculosis.

  But unlike Virginia Woolf or Sylvia Plath (the afflicted women writers my friends favored), Mansfield’s tubercular lungs were bursting to live, live. My saint might die, but extinguish herself? Never. Would Chekhov have killed himself? And Chekhov, I learned from the critics (including Mansfield’s own husband—and arch-promoter—John Middleton Murry) was the writer Mansfield most resembled. She translated, with a Russian friend, some of the earliest Chekhov stories to be published in English. A scandal stewed for decades after her death: had she plagiarized a Chekhov story, passing it off as her own in the very early years before he was much known to English readers? Her accusers and defenders hurled the
ir darts in the Times Literary Supplement for half a century after her death.

  She really resembled more truly Jean Rhys (Mansfield nailed “the woman alone” theme before Rhys got to it). Even more fundamentally, Colette was her kin. Like Colette, Mansfield had her youthful cabaret period, complete with club performances and lesbian flirtations, and though she wrote of the first generation of urban “free” women, her sensuous evocations of nature were her signature. Had she lived, she might have made a very likely English Colette, an earthier mother-of-us-all than Virginia Woolf.

  The Journal and the Letters were suffused with consumptive ecstasy. She saw it in Lawrence: “I recognized his smile—just the least shade too bright . . . his air of being a touch more vividly alive than other people—the gleam.” Her “work,” as she wrote of it in the Journal, became a kind of parallel universe, spiritualized, even sacral-ized as the clock ran out. She spoke severely of “sinning against art.” This, too, I reverenced: the religion of art.

  Keats was her saint. She wrote of him in her journal as of a colleague. Keats, in turn, had his heroes: he lugged around a portrait of Shakespeare wherever he lived—another young writer given to hero worship. I perceived—or created—of this relationship a lineage that lifted Mansfield out of the cramped quarters where she lodged in the rented rooms of the anthologists. Boldly (if privately) I attached her to the great Romantic dynasty as expressly configured by and for me: Shakespeare to Keats to Mansfield. She may have been the Pygmalion of the bunch, but I dragooned her into the firmament.

  And who was going to stop me? It was the early seventies, and we were supposed to be “discovering” women writers, wedging them into the literary canon any which way. Yet it is strange that I fastened on Mansfield. Virginia Woolf, whose novels I read at the time, and admired, did not compel me to rush off to buy her brand of face soap. Mansfield was my girl. But then, I didn’t “discover” her. She had been willed to me.

  I MUST HAVE BEEN about seventeen when Doris Derman turned to me in her majestic old St. Paul apartment just off Summit Avenue (a few blocks west of Jerome Hill’s boyhood house and a few blocks east of “the house below the average on a street above the average,” as Fitzgerald described his parents’ home where he learned Scribners would publish This Side of Paradise). She was standing in the shadowy living room, having just taken her martini from her husband when she said, in response to something I had said and which I have now entirely forgotten, “That is the sort of observation Katherine Mansfield made.”

  I had never heard of Katherine Mansfield; for a moment I thought Doris was referring to a friend of hers. In any case, Doris Derman, worldly mother of my first boyfriend, was willing to make the introduction. “You may have these,” she said, and walked over to her ceiling-high bookcase (itself an essential prop of the life I hoped to enter: the life of the mind) and handed me two books, one bound in faded orange linen with a yet-more-faded green spine, the other in a sad blue with dull silver lettering. The orange, its title stamped in worn gold, was the Letters, the blue was the Journal.

  It is hard to convey how stunned I was that such personal writings had been published. Stories, novels, poems—these were the stuff of books—weren’t they? But letters, diaries—I wrote them myself; I never imagined they could be “literature.”

  Doris Derman was the first person, besides a teacher, I heard speak with authority about books and writers. But her authority was different; she spoke not from a height but from within the precinct of the initiated. She had opinions, and they were based on nothing but her own taste and whim. Such brashness was unheard of in my convent-school world of hierarchy and certainty where references to authority were—authoritative.

  Living in the same neighborhood, in the same parish (as Catholic St. Paul referenced all civic boundaries), Doris knew my family, knew who I was and from whence I came. But we had never met until her son brought me home. He had artlessly confessed that his mother had told him before this meeting, “Beware of a girl whose family believes the world is no bigger than Linwood Avenue between Lexington and Oxford.” Our block.

  I wasn’t hurt by this tart dismissal that, of course, I was not intended to hear. In fact, I approved. It confirmed my own readiness to dismiss St. Paul and its careful Catholic ways that battened me far more (I later thought) than Katherine Mansfield’s stodgy Wellington had ever squashed her.

  But more than that: I was subtly thrilled that Doris had captured us, had summed us up—had written us, in effect. My family did not talk this way, did not think this way. The hauteur necessary to make such a remark, the aerial aloofness from—well, from Linwood between Lexington and Oxford—would have given my family nosebleeds. Doris’s cool ability to consign us to the higher world of description—to fiction, really—won me even before I met her.

  Though her husband was Catholic and, of course, her son was also, Doris was alluringly non-Catholic. She dyed her hair a blatant, unapologetic blond, and I understood she had once “written.” There was the definite sense that as someone who had written, she was in possession of talent, vast sums she held prudently in ethereal escrow.

  She was a good ten years older than the other mothers in the parish and she appeared to take no interest in doing her share at school functions. She let her husband handle the grocery shopping, all driving, any necessary encounters with nuns and teachers. He was a gentle man who seemed conscripted to serve her, nervously asking, as he handed her a drink he had mixed in the kitchen while she lay, stretched out on the couch reading in the shadowy living room, whether she felt all right. Heaven knew what she did on Sunday mornings when the rest of us were at St. Luke’s for Mass. She wasn’t simply a non-Catholic. It appeared she was not religious at all, perhaps an agnostic.

  This was all good, good news.

  I can’t think of Katherine Mansfield without conjuring Doris Derman—not because she entrusted her books to me and set me on the particular literary path—favoring clarity and immediacy, the bittersweet but fundamentally comic point of view—that I still think of as the high road. Not even because she introduced me to “the personal voice” in literature when she handed me Mansfield’s Journal and Letters, thus opening the door to memoir and the personal essay, forms I came to prize and practice. It’s simply that, over the years, her passion for Mansfield has become more eloquent to me than my own strenuous teen-idol feelings.

  Mansfield was the doomed artist for Doris’s generation. Make that the doomed woman artist. In a sense, Mansfield was this earlier generation’s version of Sylvia Plath. Or, to put it in the proper chronology, Plath was my generation’s version of Mansfield: the exemplary figure who combined talent, youth, beauty, passion, drive—and death. Early death.

  This is why Virginia Woolf, who committed suicide at fifty-nine, doesn’t quite figure in this equation. The exemplary figure of the doomed artist must be one extinguished before endeavor has fully transmitted itself into achievement. Death is the massive gilt frame that pulls the eye away from the work. But that’s the point: with certain writers it is impossible (and for Doris, undesirable) to separate the two. Doris was mesmerized not by the flicker of Mansfield’s talent but by the extinguished light, the burnt wick.

  Doris pondered all sides of the story, the glory of the bold escape from the provinces, the sexual high jinks (Mansfield was representative of the world’s first generation of “free women”), the brilliant lyric sensibility, the desperate final mysticism. The long consumptive death following on the heels of this sexually gallant youth conveyed metaphorically (that is, effectively) for Doris’s generation the terrible odds against a woman of talent and ambition.

  Mansfield’s work and life, taken together, enshrined the fineness of her talent and the punishment that came of the attempt to live the “free life” that she assumed was essential to the work. It was what a later generation of women would call a liberated life. And you got hammered for it.

  Fundamentally, Doris’s fascination with Mansfield had to do with what i
t revealed about the catastrophic result of the attempt to be free. Better to “have written” sometime briefly in the past, better to sock your talent safely away. Stay high in the shadowy apartment on Summit Avenue, keep your hair glamour-bright, accept another drink from your hovering husband.

  Mansfield’s death—coming, literally, out of the air—spoke forcefully to Doris’s generation of the implacable forces arrayed against the gallant woman. The final massive hemorrhage, at the Gurdjieff community near Fontainebleau where she had gone to “purify” herself, bespoke the barely grasped independence of the “new woman” and the dismal fate that awaited her for stepping outside the assigned circle of safety.

  Just so, several decades later, after another world war, and much else (including the development of drugs to cure TB), a later generation fastened on to the work and suicide of Sylvia Plath to express an otherwise inexpressible aspect of their sense of things. Plath’s suicide, her choice of death, appears to be the opposite of Mansfield’s frantic dash, from French seaside to alpine chalet, from doctors to quacks, finally to a proto—New Age guru, to save herself by any means. Yet they shared an emblematic power.

  Doris was a teenager when Mansfield died in 1923. Doris belonged to the generation that had just inherited the short skirts and bold bobbed haircuts that Mansfield, for one, made the daring symbol of the new woman. For Doris she was a tantalizing bohemian big sister. She’d been up to no good, and look what happened: sick, alone, exiled, dead. Her slim oeuvre was dwarfed by the journals and the passionate correspondence bred of terrible loneliness in which she alternately bemoaned her fate and shored up her courage and ever-dimming hopes with crystalline descriptions of the world about her. They are among the great letters in English literature, fairly compared to the letters of Keats.