Katherine Mansfield

by Claire Tomalin

  The Native Companion took two more contributions. One was a description of the Botanical Gardens in Wellington; the other, ‘In a Café’ set in London, has a girl of advanced views – she has read all the modern European authors – discussing Art and the Ten Deadly Conventions with a Trowell-like music student,

  slightly taller than she, with the regulation ‘stoop’ and heavy walk, and the regulation wide hat and soft tie. But to her he walked in a great light, and she knew that genius had traced the laurel wreath around his brows.19

  She steers the conversation to the subject of marriage and he teases her lightly; she gives him the violets she is carrying, and later finds them carelessly dropped outside the café. She grows ‘white to the lips’ but then starts to laugh. For all its juvenile posturing, there is something striking about the story and its heroine, who woos, is rejected and refuses to be broken-hearted. She is a much tougher girl than the later rejected women such as Vera in ‘A Dill Pickle’ or Mouse, with her soaked handkerchief, in ‘Je ne parle pas français’ a decade later.

  Brady was asking for more, and Katherine was growing in confidence. She also believed she had wrested permission from her parents to return to London and wrote jubilantly to the Trowells – all now settled in St John's Wood – to tell them to expect her in the new year: ‘Kiss London for me – and tell it - that when I come back I shall live in a tent in Trafalgar Square – and only leave it for Bayreuth.’20

  In the meantime she accepted an invitation from another musical friend of her own age, Millie Parker, to join her on a very different sort of expedition. This was a month's camping holiday in the northern wilderness, organized by Millie's Maori-speaking cousin. Work was set aside, although Katherine intended to take notes to be used as raw material for vignettes. It was to be a real adventure.

  Katherine and Millie set off together by train for Hastings, 200 miles north of Wellington, where they were to join the rest of the party, all older people unknown to Katherine. They included a farmer and a chemist with his young wife; she described them in her notebook as ‘ultra-colonial but kind-hearted and generous’. The plan was to travel with two large, horse-drawn wagons, carrying tents; their route would take them across some very difficult terrain, including mountains, scrub and pumice plain where the road sometimes disappeared altogether, and places where the Maoris were evidently hostile (it was only twelve years since the most recent fighting between Maoris and white settlers). Although they would occasionally camp near hotels, the intention was that they should prepare most of their meals and generally look after themselves. Katherine soon revealed that she did not know how to peel potatoes, but set to willingly enough when instructed.

  It was midsummer heat, and she was soon bitten and burnt, despite a large hat and the tight thick clothes that she, like all the women of the party, felt obliged to wear. Her laundry list, written out in the same notebook in which she mentions the pleasure of feeling the sun on her skin through her blouse, is heartbreaking: petticoat, bodices, drawers, stockings, vests and dress shields (worn under the arms against sweat). No wonder she sometimes felt ill in the sultry heat.

  Even from the wildest parts she sent letters home as well as keeping a journal, and her account of the long, rough rides, the walking and camping – the whole party shared an enormous tent – the spectacular landscape with its rivers, waterfalls and springs, and the many encounters with Maori families and groups, gives a vivid impression of the state of the country at the time. Casually and often almost illegibly scrawled, with dashes for punctuation, it has the true Mansfield voice, whether she is describing a storm in which they are lost and benighted in wet clothes in the ‘utter back blocks’, or her joy in the lily of the valley, clover and breast-high manuka, or bird-song at dawn, or a ‘wonderful huge horsefly’ by the Galatea River. She was interested in the Maoris, and sympathetic in particular to the young girls with their babies. Their guide was himself the son of a Maori mother and an English father; but this did not prevent signs of marked hostility from some groups of Maoris, which she also recorded.

  So there were some bad moments; but it was too interesting and arduous for Katherine to do anything but enjoy herself and gather copy just as she had intended. Her final description of camping in a pine forest near Lake Taupo, with lush grass, mimosa, honeysuckle, and splashes of light falling through the trees, is entirely idyllic.

  A few days later she and Millie were back in Napier. Katherine visited Edith, and treated her to satirical imitations of her travelling companions and the Maoris encountered on the trip; Edith was amused, and found her altogether much more ‘down to earth’. Then Katherine and Millie took the train for Wellington.

  In the train – December 17th – Has there ever been a hotter day – the land is parched – golden with the heat – The sheep are sheltering in the shadow of the rocks – in the distance the hills are shimmering in the heat – M. and I sitting opposite each other – I look perfectly charming.21

  Now she proposed to herself a programme of six hours' work daily with her cello, followed by three hours' writing; evidently she still thought of a musical career as a possibility. But her parents' agreement to let her go to London was rescinded, to her intense exasperation. One reason may have been the contents of her story ‘Leves Amores’ (mentioned on p. 37), which she had asked Miss Putnam to type for her in December. She apologized for it in advance, saying, ‘I'm afraid you won't like Leves Amores – I can't think how I wrote it – it's partly a sort of dream’.22 Dream or not, it is set in Wellington and names a local hotel. Miss Putnam may well have let her employer, Mr Beauchamp, see it, and it must have suggested to him either that his daughter was a practising lesbian or at least that she had an unhealthy interest in sex and squalor. He must have been appalled at the thought of her publishing, or even trying to publish, such a story, or even letting Miss Putnam see it.

  Miss Putnam's reaction to the story is not known. Later she described Katherine as a girl with a ‘fine proud bearing, magnificent dark eyes… and distinction’.23 But she also said that she never laughed and spoke ‘without inflection or vivacity’, which sorts rather oddly with Katherine's coyly flirtatious letters to her: ‘Well – I must go to bed – Shall I build a castle with a spare room for you – Yes I will – so please return the compliment’.24 And later: ‘Am just off to Island Bay for a long day & maybe an evening – I am going to write – and have to go to the sea for “Copy” – Do bring a book and come – too – dear – and we shall “paddle” and “bake”. Don't you love the two processes?’25 But whether Miss Putnam went for her paddle and bake, she never told.

  In January 1908 the Native Companion ceased publication and, although Tom Mills had decided she was a genius and wished to publish her work in his up-country local paper, it was not quite the same thing. Besides, he was making a nuisance of himself; she complained to Vera, ‘he likes me far too much’.26 Another admirer, a teacher from her old school, Miss Swainson's, advised her simply to go to Europe steerage, ‘with your genius and your future’. ‘That is gratifying,’ reflected the young genius, ‘but not feasible.’27 Her mother was meditating a plan whereby all three girls should return to London together for a limited time, sharing a flat and an allowance of £300 a year, but evidently Vera and Chaddie were more reconciled to life in New Zealand than Katherine, and more enthusiastic about the available young men.

  Still Harold hesitated, while Katherine grumbled and lamented in her journal; she also did more sensible things, such as enrolling for a typing and book-keeping course at the local technical college. She was attempting to write a novel about a Maori girl, amassing notes for stories and reading as voraciously as ever; Elinor Glyn and Elizabeth Robins* were discovered at this time, the last earning Katherine's particular tribute: ‘I like to think she is only the first of a great never ending procession of splendid, strong woman writers – all this suffragist movement is excellent for our sex – kicked policemen or not kicked policemen’.28 (She did not stay to ponde
r the fact that women had had the vote in New Zealand for several years already, without producing any discernible effect on the quality of life there.)

  Another woman writer who made an indelible impression on Katherine at this time was the Russian diarist Marie Bashkirtseff, whose posthumously published journal became a worldwide bestseller. Bashkirtseff, born about 1860 (the year of Chekhov's birth) was an aristocrat who determined to become a painter rather than a society beauty, studied in Paris in the care of an adoring mother who was separated from her father, and travelled in Italy, Germany, Austria and Russia as well as France. She became a friend of Maupassant, among other eminent men; and she kept a remarkably frank journal in which she recorded her wildly fluctuating moods, her feminist ideas and her artistic aspirations; but she developed tuberculosis and died at the age of twenty-four. Her mother had the journal published; and, though some discreet excisions were made, it is none the less a remarkable piece of self-revelation. It is easy to see how it would have spoken to Katherine: both women possessed a temperament in which despair and elation, love and jealousy, alternated; both had a passion for travel and the determination to pursue an artistic vocation rather than a social life.

  But Bashkirtseff lived her brief life at the centres of European culture, cherished by her mother and able to pursue her studies with the best masters. Fitzherbert Terrace, Wellington, New Zealand and the Technical College and General Assembly Library were no equivalent. In due course, the Beauchamps understood this and realized they must let Katherine go. ‘There was no question of standing in her light,’29 declared her father retrospectively; probably there was a certain amount of trepidation as to what she might get up to next if she remained in Wellington. Years later there would be a buzz about her name at tea-parties, and a sudden hush if a schoolgirl daughter came into the room.30

  None of her English relatives was willing to take her on; but a respectable lodging was arranged in a hostel for music students in Paddington. It was called, by coincidence, Beauchamp Lodge. Katherine was to have an allowance of £100 a year, not very much for a banker's daughter, but more than the annual earnings of a young schoolteacher at the time. She sailed in July 1908, after a farewell party given for her at the house of the Prime Minister. The New Zealand Freelance reported:

  A great number of the guest of honour's girl friends came to wish her good luck. There was a pig-drawing competition during the afternoo, which was won by Miss Esme Dean, and afterwards the book was presented to Miss Beauchamp as a souvenir. In the billiard room some beautiful records of Melba and Tettrezini [sic] were heard, and a fortune-teller was kept busy in another room. The tea table looked very pretty with bright-coloured lights in the centre, and little bowls of violets and primroses scattered about, and great bunches of myrtle and holly adorned the mantelpiece… Miss K. Beauchamp wore a dark brown coat and skirt, and black fox furs.31

  A few weeks before she left, Katherine wrote in her journal a very straightforward assertion of feminist independence, which must have sustained her through the pig-drawing and fortune-telling of that afternoon:

  Here then is a little summary of what I need – power, wealth and freedom. It is the hopelessly insipid doctrine that love is the only thing in the world, taught, hammered into women, from generation to generation, which hampers us so cruelly. We must get rid of that bogey – and then, then comes the opportunity of happiness and freedom.32

  Fine, fighting words which would always be in conflict with her rival desire to live out a perfect, loving relationship. Yet the claim on power and wealth as well as freedom shows that she knew herself, the banker's daughter, never drawn to the indignities and discomforts of poverty, and clear-sighted enough to see that her father's money had given her a London education that could be used to get her back to London, and not in the steerage class. She was always prepared to ask him and her friends for money, although she was also extremely proud of what she earned for herself and insistent in her wish to work for money; she was also notably generous and supersensitive to meanness in others.

  What she wanted was the power to control her own life without being held in any web of convention. Her instinct to return to London was just; the coolly independent Katherine could not exist in the context of her family, whom she felt to be stifling and intellectually uncongenial. She told Tom Mills that her father was interested only in money and her mother in social climbing, a judgement that may have been unfair and does not entirely sort with what she said later, but certainly had an element of truth to it. Little Leslie, sensitive and artistic as he might be, was not a strong enough ally; the example of Edith Bendall suggested a path to independence, but it did not go far enough. Katherine was right to doubt whether she could command power or wealth by her own efforts in the antipodes in 1908, whereas London was set like a stage for the entrance of a young woman of independent mind and talent.

  4

  London 1908: New Women

  Katherine sailed towards London in the summer of 1908 in the joyous mood of the successful rebel, confident that an exciting destiny must be awaiting her there. The time was well chosen; she was travelling to a country in which the patterns of Victorian life were being thoroughly shaken about, and none more vigorously than the pattern of Victorian womanhood.

  In New Zealand women had been given the vote in 1893 and had already declared that they hardly noticed the difference. In New Zealand too the Boer War had increased prosperity; Harold Beauchamp's fortune was considerably enlarged by it; but in England it had divided people and unsettled the old imperial confidence. Ideas which had merely hung subversively in the air until now began to take on body and strength, and behaviour which would have been unthinkable a generation earlier began to appear openly, at least in intellectual circles. Changes were of many kinds: in politics, over fifty Labour Members of Parliament reached the House of Commons in the 1906 election, and the Liberal Government had an unprecedented majority. The suffragette movement was approaching its militant zenith; in 1907 the first candidate of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, standing at a by-election in Wimbledon, was Bertrand Russell, member of the political aristocracy, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and distinguished as a philosopher and mathematician. A newspaper commented sagely that ‘the mere fact that a thinker of his intellectual distinction should stand primarily to promote women's suffrage marks an immense advance in the fortunes of the cause’.1 In the same year a pamphlet called ‘The Endowment of Motherhood’, the work of an early Freudian, Dr David Eder, was published, presenting the first written case for state provision to women who bear children as an alternative to financial dependence on men. The issue was hotly debated in the Fabian Society, where there were also violent arguments on the question of marriage reform in general, with H. G. Wells in favour and Beatrice and Sidney Webb against – Wells a feminist and great lover of women, the Webbs childless by choice and highly suspicious of any sexual irregularity.

  The arts were in a similar state of eruption. Galsworthy's novel attacking bourgeois and patriarchal marriage, The Man of Property, had appeared in 1906, its indignant revelations producing frissons of horror mixed with pleasure; even within marriage, it announced, a man might be said to rape his wife. A young Croydon schoolmistress of this period, whose cousin died in childbirth, said she regarded the bereaved husband as guilty of manslaughter.2 In the theatre the plays of Harley Granville-Barker and Bernard Shaw were critical of all the values of the governing classes, not least their view of women. Granville-Barker's Waste, in which two outsiders, one a sexually unconventional woman, the other an incautious politician, destroy one another, was banned in 1906. In response to this and other similar infringements of freedom, a Society for the Abolition of Censorship was set up and enthusiastically supported by the writing community; and its secretary, a young and much-admired writer called Gilbert Cannan, extended his own freedom to such a degree that he was soon cited by one of its leading members, the playwright J. M. Barrie, as co-respondent in a divorc
e case.

  New magazines, edited and written by new men and women, and read by an intelligentsia no longer confined to the middle classes, were appearing. The English Review started in 1908, with a declared policy of seeking working-class writers. Its editor, Ford Madox Hueffer, chose the year of its foundation to leave his wife for an outspoken feminist writer, Violet Hunt. Editorial advice was given by two other writers of advanced views, Wells and Edward Garnett, who was also busy writing plays with social themes such as unmarried mothers and women's suffrage at this time. In the pages of the English Review a young elementary schoolmaster with literary ambitions, David Herbert Lawrence, read Wells's serialized Tono-Bungay with passionate relish.

  Another essentially new magazine which Lawrence also read and recommended to his friends was the New Age, edited by an eccentric Nietzschean ex-schoolmaster called A. R. Orage; he too, following what looks like a pattern, was separated from his wife and living with a dashing woman writer, Beatrice Hastings. The pages of the New Age were crammed with eugenics, marriage reform, socialism, free love, protests against sweated labour and capital punishment, women's questions from abortion to the vote, psychoanalysis, foreign affairs, philosophy and theatre criticism, together with drawings by Augustus John and Walter Sickert, sometimes candid studies of nudes. The New Age had its own press, on which Eder's pamphlet, among others, was printed; Eder was a frequent contributor (he also married a divorced woman in 1908, Edith Haden Guest, née Low, a friend of Wells and a believer in ‘open’ marriage).

  The society that Katherine Mansfield was about to encounter in London was set to welcome a young woman scared of nothing and ready to pioneer social changes, to become, in fact, their heroic embodiment. The moment seemed made for her, and she for the moment. This was an adventurous and unorthodox society, open to new ideas, determinedly rejecting the values of its parents. If we pause to trace the experiences of some of Katherine's contemporaries who were later to become her friends, a clear pattern emerges of women crossing the barriers of class and defying the sexual conventions.