Katherine Mansfield

by Claire Tomalin

  Miss Baker remembered herself as a friend apart from Katherine's group, one who listened and, in her own phrase, began to ‘see’ Katherine as one sees only a truly loved person. To some extent, she did suffer from feeling excluded from a good deal of her friend's life, partly because the Beauchamp girls were rich and able to go on many outings, to concerts and theatres and to buy new clothes with their aunt Belle, and also because there were other girls who enjoyed a different sort of intimacy. The most forceful and congenial was Vere Bartrick-Baker (no relation of Ida); she was a few months older than Katherine, shared her intellectual tastes and encouraged her in sophisticated reading and conversation quite beyond Ida. Vere and Katherine were in the same class, and were both dazzled by the young German professor, Walter Rippmann.

  I am ashamed at the way in which I long for German. I simply can't help it. It is dreadful. And when I go into class I feel I must just stare at him the whole time. I never liked anyone so much. Every day I like him more and more. Yet on Thursday he was like ice!9

  wrote the fifteen-year-old Katherine. Rippmann became their mentor, and it was he who encouraged them to read modern writers, the Symbolists and Decadents and social reformers: Bernard Shaw, Maeterlinck, Ibsen and Tolstoy, Arthur Symons and Oscar Wilde, whose prose Katherine soon began to imitate. Rippmann himself enjoyed some Wildean posing, and would advise the girls on the necessity of selfishness and avoidance of the Seven Deadly Virtues.

  Vere is described in the only story Katherine ever published about Queen's, ‘Carnation’, an evocation of a hot afternoon in a schoolroom full of girls, written in 1918, in which ‘Eve’, who is given thin red lips and a cruel little laugh, brings a red carnation into a French lesson and drops it down ‘Katie's’ shirt-front with a murmur of ‘souvenir tendre’, after the French master has done his best and Katie has allowed her thoughts to wander to the bare-chested man splashing the horses with water from the pump in the mews below the window. As a tribute to the school it is equivocal, but as a piece of atmospheric writing it is disconcertingly effective, rather as though Colette and D. H. Lawrence had come face to face in Harley Street.

  Vere's background was an unusual one. Her mother wrote poetry under her maiden name, lived alone in Surrey and proclaimed herself a widow, although she was, in fact, divorced – almost unheard of then. Both parents had been Plymouth Brethren when young, but had broken away from the movement, and the father, without much formal education, had managed to become a journalist on the Financial Times. All this was naturally intriguing to Katherine, who took a favourable view of unconventional families as well as literary aspirations; and Vere was possessed of advanced, even cynical, views on life. The two girls would meet in the school's dark lower corridor before lessons began, to discuss the ideas of their favourite writers, and were apparently suspected of ‘immorality’ of a kind unspecified.10

  The tone of their conversation may be guessed from the fragmentary draft of a novel Katherine began to scribble in her notebook towards the end of her schooldays, and in which the characters of the two girls are clearly based on Katherine and Vere (whose name sometimes appears by mistake for ‘Pearl’, that of the character). In one passage the girls, who are imagined sharing lodgings in London, agree to a permanent alliance, abjuring matrimony. It is, reflects ‘Juliet’ (Katherine), ‘death to a woman's personality. She must drop the theme and begin playing the accompaniment. For me there is no attraction.’11 In another, Pearl begins the conversation:

  Got a mood? she said.

  Yes, said Juliet. It's the very Devil. While it lasts I think it's going to be eternal and I'm contemplating suicide.

  It's sure to be something physical. Why don't you sleep better Juliet? Are you – you're not – expecting?

  Good heavens, no. The truth is, my dear girl – well I hardly like to own it to myself even, you understand. Bernard Shaw would be gratified.

  You feel sexual.

  Horribly – and in need of a physical shock or violence. Perhaps a good smacking would be beneficial.12

  Perhaps it is understandable that the good ladies of Queen's were a shade nervous about the friendship between the two girls; Pearl, ‘with her pale eager face and smiling ripe mouth, crying to Juliet “Here I am, here we both are. Trust me, dear, live with me, you and I to reach for things together, you and I to live and prove our new Philosophy.”’13 In a vignette Katherine wrote later and sent to Vere, she describes how they climbed to the top of the towers of Westminster Cathedral and looked down on to the distant house where they once exchanged kisses. Vere continued to haunt Katherine's imagination. Many years after her death, Murry (who proposed to Vere and then backed out) told her that Katherine

  once confessed to me that she was afraid of you, and that she felt that one day you would ‘strike back at her’. (I don't vouch for the actual phrase: but the sense of it is accurate enough.) I came (I don't know why) to the conclusion that there were some ‘incriminating’ letters. Possibly, because I knew that at one period Katherine was rather addicted to such letters. But I never had the faintest doubt of the reality of her fear of you.14

  If there were any such letters – and Katherine mentions them in her journal too – Vere destroyed them.

  Katherine's official writing during her three years at Queen's appeared in the school magazine, in which Rippmann took a particular interest. She became first assistant and then editor. Four of her stories are almost unbearably coy accounts of charming children getting up to mischief, but the fifth, ‘About Pat’, is quite different, a spare reminiscence of the Karori handyman Patrick Sheehan, told without a trace of sentimentality.

  But while Karori existed in her head, the three homeless years at Queen's effectively detached Katherine from her parents' world. She was always busy, working intensely at her cello and taking lessons at the London Academy of Music, where her cousin Henry worked, as well as at school. She dreamed of becoming a professional musician; she also kept a photograph of Arnold Trowell beside her bed, and saw him and his brother Garnet when they came to London, introducing both Vere and Ida to them. They had left New Zealand a few months after the Beauchamps, and studied in Frankfurt for a year. They were narrow-faced, thin, pale boys, Arnold with red hair and Garnet, always overshadowed, merely brown, not good-looking but impressive by virtue of their Continental student ways. They wore big black hats and smoked cigarettes in long holders, observed by Katherine with passionate admiration.

  At Easter 1906 Aunt Belle took the girls to Paris and then Brussels, where the boys were currently studying. Katherine and her sisters, entering into the spirit of the vie de Bohème of the Brussels music students, boasted of going for a swim naked. But Bohème was not all larks. Another music student, a friend of the Trowells called Rudolf, shot himself in a despairing moment soon after this visit. It was a real enactment of the fin de siècle melancholy that Walter Rippmann had encouraged Katherine to admire. Rudolf's passionate dedication to aesthetic living and his equally passionate rejection of life impressed and disturbed her.

  Rippmann himself actually married one of the Queen's girls in 1905. He invited several favourite pupils, Katherine included, to visit his Kensington house with its Japanese prints and aesthete's decor. The gulf between Ladbroke Grove and Tinakori Road was wide and probably unbridgeable.

  Nevertheless, in the spring of 1906 Mr and Mrs Beauchamp were there to escort their three daughters back to New Zealand. It was difficult to accept that ‘Home’ was not after all home. None of them was enthusiastic about leaving England, although the matter was not officially under discussion; their father was already upset about losing his sister-in-law, for Belle had found herself a husband, a shipowner, and embarked on a life devoted to tennis and golf. Harold the patriarch wanted no more tribal losses and began to lay down the law. Katherine was not to become a professional musician as she begged; and, while this upset her, she decided

  it is no earthly use warring with the inevitable – so in future I shall give all my time to writi
ng. There are great opportunities for a girl in New Zealand – she has so much time and quiet – and we have an ideal little ‘cottage by the sea’ where I mean to spend a good deal of my time.15

  But Katherine's initial docility and pleasure at seeing her parents again wore off during the summer. Harold busied himself with the congress of Chambers of Commerce of the British Empire, was received at Buckingham Palace by King Edward, and took Vera to France while the younger girls stayed in London. Katherine, still at school, clung to her friendships with Vere and Ida, who ‘believed in’ her, and took to solitary cello practice up in the French classroom in the evening. Some of the feminist tradition of Queen's had taken hold of her. She told Sylvia:

  I am so keen upon all women having a definite future – are not you? The idea of sitting and waiting for a husband is absolutely revolting – and it really is the attitude of a great many girls… It rather made me smile to read of your wishing you could create your fate – O how many times I have… felt just the same. I just long for power over circumstances.16

  But the only power she had for the moment was in her imagination: the power to impersonate characters in her notebook, where Juliet's adventures included a visit to a worldly-wise older man, Walter.

  ‘How about those complications?’ ‘O they're quite gone thank you. I… I took your advice.’ ‘That's fine, that's fine. I knew you would, my dear girl. I always said you had the grit in you.’ O the fearful paternal conceit.17

  She also sketched an encounter with the decadent Rudolf, who apostrophizes from his piano stool:

  Live this life, Juliet. Did Chopin fear to satisfy the cravings of his nature, his natural desires? No, that is how he is so great. Why do you push away just that which you need – because of convention? Why do you dwarf your nature, spoil your life?… You are blind, and far worse, you are deaf to all that is worth living for.18

  At some point during this year, Maata, who was being ‘finished’ in Europe, appeared in London; according to Katherine's cousin, ‘she took with her an introduction to a Madame Louise who made the Beauchamps' clothes… Maata… was mad on dress and went in donkey deep with Louise and left England without squaring up. Madame claimed the amount from the Beauchamps and if you Knew Uncle Harold you could imagine the commotion. I think the upshot was that the friendship was compulsorily cut short.’19

  Katherine and her family sailed for New Zealand in mid October. Aboard the Corinthic her life continued to be as drama-filled as her notebooks. There was an MCC cricket team aboard, and she embarked on a flirtation with an Adonis-like creature:

  He taught me piquet… It was intensely hot… The more hearts you have the better, he said, leaning over my hand. I felt his coat sleeve against my bare arm. If one heart is a very primitive affair, I answered, in these days one must possess many. We exchanged a long look and his glance inflamed me like the scent of gardenia.*20

  It was not quite Oscar Wilde, whose aphorisms she was busy copying out, supplemented by her own (‘No life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested.’ – O.W. ‘Happy people are never brilliant. It implies friction.’ – K.M.), but it ministered to her desire to appear worldly-wise and prepared for adventure. Privately, she indulged in some masochistic fantasy, congratulated herself on the beauty of her dancing and speculated as to whether she could make a conquest of him, or whether she might become une jeune fille entretenue. This, she decided, would be better than being the child of her parents, who were now watchful, quarrelsome, too interested in shipboard meals, and vulgar. Like many fathers who channel their pride into hopes for their daughters, Beauchamp found he had educated Katherine to despise him for having ‘an undeniable trade atmosphere’.21 She might be indulging in high-flown erotic fantasies, but her father called it ‘fooling around in dark corners with fellows’ and her mother was ‘constantly suspicious, constantly overbearingly tyrannous’.22 In truth, Katherine's interest in the idea that sex was a commodity which could earn money – and she was always fascinated by prostitution – was evidence less of vice than of her being her father's daughter, with a keen eye for business opportunities.

  ‘Would you not like to try all sorts of lives – one is so very small?’ had been her cry before leaving England, but long before the Corinthic docked at Wellington she was in rebellion against the prospect of her life there, the life she outlined satirically as

  The Suitable Appropriate Existence, the days full of perpetual Society functions, the hours full of clothes discussions, the waste of life. ‘The stifling atmosphere would kill me’ she thought. The days, weeks, months, years of it all. Her father, with his successful characteristic respectable face, crying, ‘Now is the time. What have I got for my money? Come along, deck yourself out, show the world that you are expensive.’22

  There is a sharp note here which may go nearer to the heart of the situation in the Beauchamp family in 1906 than any of Katherine's later, softened accounts of her family.

  She had been in England for nearly four crucially formative years – from fourteen to seventeen – living in a girls' school that allowed her a much greater degree of independence, physical and emotional, than she would have found at home, and that was situated in the heart of London, with immediate access to the life of the streets and parks as well as shops, galleries and concert halls. She had stayed in London and provincial hotels with her family, and visited relatives in various parts of the country, from Surrey to Sheffield. She had been to Paris and Brussels, and made friends among music students who spoke as familiarly of Germany as of England. Since all her dreams were of becoming a musician or a writer, and all her cultural heroes and heroines were European, it was natural for her to wish to remain. But something more than the sense of being at home in Europe was stamped on her by this period: this was the habit of impermanence. The hotel room, the temporary lodging, the sense of being about to move on, of living where you do not quite belong, observing with a stranger's eye – all these became second nature to her between 1903 and 1906. With this impermanence went the sudden forming of intimacies, the swiftly decisive declarations of friendship that so characterized her. She took up impressions with wonderful speed; she also took up people fast, sometimes too fast for judgement or safety; but then safety was never her concern.

  3

  New Zealand 1907: ‘The Suitable Appropriate Existence’

  Harold Beauchamp may well have felt mocked by all the good things he had done for his daughters: education, travel, the experience of Europe, independence. All three were disposed to mope over their loss and condescend towards what they were being brought back to, but Katherine was the fiercest. It is normal enough for an eighteen-year-old, weighed down by puppy fat and spurred on by huge ambitions, to rebel against the constrictions of family and home; in her case there was also some justification in the claim that she would find what she was looking for far more easily in London than in Wellington. Meanwhile, she faced what was on offer with less than delight: the city over the deep, crater-shaped harbour with its painted wooden buildings, leafy gardens and red tin roofs, surrounded by empty beaches and summer-flowering landscape; the comfortable house in Tinakori Road; the company of her generally affectionate sisters; and even the rediscovery of her little brother, Leslie, when he came home from boarding school. On a bad day, her Heimweh, as she chose to call it to her cousin Sylvia, was almost unendurable: ‘I feel absolutely ill with grief and sadness… How people ever wish to live here I cannot think… But I shall come back because here I should die.’1

  A real death had, in fact, faced her almost on arrival: that of her grandmother Dyer, the central figure in her childhood home. She died on New Year's Eve. Katherine had been too ‘busy’ to visit her, but she felt the drama of the loss: ‘Death never seemed revolting before – This place – steals your Youth… I feel years and years older and sadder.’2 Later she mourned and commemorated her grandmother in poems and stories, but she was too absorbed in her own life to do so now. The deaths in her notebook jottings are s
uicides or tragic illnesses of the young, the price paid for free and risky living – a price imagined easily and cheerfully enough by a young and healthy woman.

  Within weeks of Granny Dyer's end, another death brushed the family when a young workman living in a lane behind Tinakori Road was killed on the day the Beauchamps were giving a summer party. The eldest daughter, Vera, was sent down to the bereaved family with some food, still wearing her party dress and hat. Katherine observed and listened. When she wrote ‘The Garden Party’ fourteen years later, she made the story centre round the emotions of the ‘artistic’ daughter, Laura, who feels divided from most of her family by her sensitive, grieving response to the death. She sees them as crassly materialistic and snobbish and thinks she prefers the workmen who come to put up the marquee to the silly boys she has to dance with. At the same time, Laura does enjoy the party, and shares in the womanly life of the household with pleasure.

  The story is plainly not autobiographical, but the fluctuation between cold hostility to the family and warm enjoyment of some aspects of its luxurious way of life was part of Katherine's experience in 1907. There was pleasure to be had in concerts and parties, dances and new clothes. All the sisters turned up their noses when they re-encountered the New Zealand boys they had known as children (and none married a New Zealander). The departure of the English cricket team was deeply mourned. Chaddie insisted that all colonial men were inferior, and, although Katherine boasted about her own popularity as a dance partner and the five proposals of marriage she received from local men, she took none of them seriously and assured Vera that ‘living here you will certainly not marry’.3 Their Wellington cousins found them ‘frightfully English. Nothing in NZ was good enough for them… [They were] breaking their necks to get back to England’.4 Katherine in particular kept her family fully informed about her dissatisfaction; ‘the dear old thing I hate to feel she is so unhappy here isn't it a horrid state to be in so early in life?’ inquired Chaddie sagely of cousin Sylvia.5