Katherine Mansfield

by Claire Tomalin

  Let us suppose that Floryan showed Katherine a German translation of one of Chekhov's stories, or translated one that he thought likely to interest her, or read it aloud to her and encouraged her to make an English version; however it happened, she produced as her own work a story she called ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’, which was, in essence, Chekhov's story ‘Spat' khochetsia’, a highly sensational account of child slave-labour and baby-murder. Different critics and apologists have seen this as an adaptation or a plagiarized version, but there can be no shred of doubt that Katherine's story is drawn directly or indirectly from a specific Chekhov story, and should properly be described as a free translation.* Of course, there is absolutely nothing wrong with such an exercise, provided that acknowledgement is made to the original; the fact that this became the first work of hers to be published in England (in February 1910), and that it appeared in her first collection (in 1911), each time without any acknowledgement of its source, may have seemed a light matter to her at the start; but the use to which Floryan put his knowledge later made it something quite different, as we shall see.*

  As for Floryan's other poisoned gift: medical evidence given by Katherine later suggests that she was infected with gonorrhoea late in 1909. It is hard to see any other candidate for this particular honour, unless we believe that she was totally promiscuous, which seems unlikely. In Floryan's favour, it must be said that it was all too common for men to believe themselves cured of the disease when they were, in fact, still contagious.

  Katherine's last extant letter from Wörishofen is dated 10 November; it is a Christmas message to her younger sister in New Zealand, and speaks of the Polish dictionary purchased with her birthday money, which had presumably arrived in mid October, adding that it was her constant companion. From Ida's reminiscences we gather that Katherine made a visit to Munich at this time; and from another friend's letter, who wrote urging caution, that she was in love with a Pole and planning to marry him after her divorce,1 and to live with him before it.

  A story of Katherine's written about this time, ‘The Swing of the Pendulum’, may build up the picture a little further. Its heroine, Viola, is a young literary woman sharing lodgings in a large German city with a lover with the Polish name of Casimir, also a would-be writer. As the story opens, Casimir is out seeking work from editors. He and Viola are described as having fallen in love when both had been unhappy: ‘They had been like two patients in the same hospital ward – each finding comfort in the sickness of the other – sweet foundation for a love affair.’ Troubled by conflicting feelings about Casimir, she reflects,

  I believed in him then. I thought his work had only to be recognized once, and he'd roll in wealth. I thought perhaps we might be poor for a month – but he said, if only he could have me, the stimulus… Funny, if it wasn't so damned tragic! Exactly the contrary has happened – he hasn't had a thing published for months – neither have I – but then I didn't expect to.

  In the story, the heroine finds herself almost tempted into prostitution: ‘If I'd the clothes I would go to a really good hotel and find some wealthy man… I wasn't born for poverty – I only flower among really jolly people’. She saves herself, just in time, for Casimir; though she keeps a would-be client at bay only by taking a bite out of his hand.

  In real life, something made her change her mind about Floryan. In mid December, when he made a visit to Poland, they were exchanging love-letters; his from Warsaw (dated 12 December) thanks her for telling him she loves him and for painting a picture of their future together in Paris, where she promises to make the tea while they smoke, and talk together, and read. It is a long letter, written in a beautiful, legible hand, in bad German and with a few English words. He tells her what he has been doing, discusses the poetry of Walt Whitman and some Polish books he plans to read with her and praises her beauty in

  deinem roten sweater (ist das gut?) und nur eine kleine Rezeda blume an der Brust – Was fur ein Garten war für mich…

  [your red sweater (is that right?) and just one small mignonette flower in your bosom – what a garden it was for me…]2

  He goes on to speak of feeling like a person new-born in the two months since he has known her, imagines her room in the white forest calling him to come, and says they will be meeting, probably in eighteen days' time. This suggests she planned to be in Paris at the end of the year.

  Instead, from Bavaria, she turned to Ida for help. Ida, failing to get permission from her father to fetch her, at least sent her the fare, met her in mid December and installed her in the newly opened Strand Palace Hotel.* From there Katherine wrote again to Floryan, now in Cracow, still apparently planning to join him in Paris, but mentioning that she was unwell (though not specifying her symptoms). Floryan's only other surviving letter to her makes one feel sorry for him. It is dated 9 January 1910. He has arrived in Paris, is at a hotel in the rue des Beaux Arts, and looking for a flat for them to share. He proposes to take a flat from 15 January, but is hampered in his search by his very poor French; and he cannot understand why he has had no letter from her for over two weeks. He is worried that she is still ill. He addresses her as his wife, and says he can do nothing without her:

  Ich kann ohne Dich nicht leben… weil ich Dich liebe – und diese Liebe – das ist jetzt mein Leben

  [I cannot live without you… because I love you – and this love is now my life]3

  These pathetic protestations fell on deaf ears. Although Katherine seemed to have recovered her health well enough to embark on new activities in England, she had turned against Floryan, and he appears to have heard nothing more from her; no doubt she hoped he would disappear back into central Europe.

  Both sides deserve sympathy at this point, for Floryan probably had no idea as to the cause of Katherine's change of heart, which must have seemed an inexplicable caprice; while she, struggling with the horror of symptoms whose significance she can hardly have understood, was in no state to write and explain anything to him. He found himself cruelly and mysteriously jilted, alone in a foreign country; she found herself with a hideous new sexual problem, hardly less difficult to cope with than the previous year's.

  In March she faced a new crisis, when she became violently ill with peritonitis. Ida becomes the chief witness here. She said she simply received a message from Katherine to say she was in a nursing-home (described by Ida as ‘second-rate’, which no doubt it was; Katherine would not have dreamed of submitting herself to a public ward, but she could not afford the fees of a first-rate nursing-home either). She had been operated on, and she complained to Ida that the surgeon's manner towards her was improper, and asked to be ‘rescued’, although she still had an open wound.

  Ida took her at once in a cab to her flat in the Marylebone Road. The bumpy journey was agonizing for Katherine. Sensibly, Ida called in a nurse. Years later, writing in her journal in December 1920, Katherine mentioned a ‘terrible operation’ she had endured: ‘I remember that when I thought of the pain of being stretched out, I used to cry. Every time, I felt it again, and winced, and it was unbearable. In fact, she had had her left fallopian tube removed, and the reason for its removal was that it was infected with gonococci. The surgeon's ‘improper’ manner towards her may have been a display of disrespect on that account, but much more likely it was an attempt to question her, examine her, establish a diagnosis and try to cure her disease, procedures she would almost certainly have found objectionable.

  Because gonorrhoea ceased to be the scourge it was, once sulphon-amide drugs appeared on the scene in the 1930s (followed by penicillin), there is little understanding today of what it once meant. At the time Katherine contracted it, the attitude of most British doctors was that it was a disease that needed to be considered in relation only to prostitutes and the armed forces (the only other women mentioned in the standard Oxford text book on venereal disease at that date are Indian women in Army cantonments). Ladies were simply unaware of its existence, because it did not impinge on their lives at al
l, in theory. Doctors in America and on the Continent, however, and some British women doctors too, were beginning to question this attitude; but they had not made much headway in 1910. In fact, the gonococcus had been isolated only a few years before Katherine's birth, in 1879, by a young German doctor (and for some years more, little notice was taken of his discovery).

  The disease, traditionally regarded as something trivial, was usually so in men; but in women it was a completely different matter. In men, the immediate symptoms were always obvious and painful, so that they tended to seek immediate treatment which, if efficiently managed, could be successful (although men often regarded themselves as cured before they were, and thus, in practice, passed on the infection). In women, the first symptoms were often negligible or transitory (or both), so that they might easily ignore them. As a result, the gonococci ascended into the womb, the fallopian tubes and the ovaries, one after another. Once established in the recesses of the body, the gonococci might become dormant, but were usually impossible to eradicate. The disease was also quite unpredictable in its behaviour; symptoms might flare up and then disappear again; a woman might have regular sexual relations with a man without ever infecting him, but then, with a different lover, have a recurrence of symptoms herself, and possibly infect him also.

  From the testimony of the most experienced specialists of the period, there was a pattern of healthy women becoming, apparently mysteriously, lifelong invalids, suffering from a whole range of symptoms which their family doctors could only seek to palliate, without, as a rule, understanding their source or, even if they did guess at it, being able to cure. Frequently they became infertile. If the bloodstream became infected with gonococci, as happened to some, the disease became systemic, producing a whole further range of miseries: painful and ultimately crippling arthritis in the joints; pericarditis (i.e., inflammation of the sac around the heart) and pleurisy (inflammation of the membranes surrounding the lungs). All of these things Katherine in due course suffered from.

  One way in which the blood became infected with the gonococci was through surgical intervention. For this very reason, expert medical opinion at the time of Katherine's illness was vehemently opposed to surgery on women with infections of the tubes, preferring to nurse them carefully and lengthily through the acute phase of any such infection until the worst symptoms subsided. Then, and then only, they might attempt the removal of irreparably damaged organs, but it had to be explained to the patient that their removal was no guarantee at all of a cure of the original infection.

  To summarize: doctors had found that a woman, once infected, was very unlikely to be cured unless she had immediate treatment (which was one of the reasons in favour of regulating and inspecting prostitutes). Ladies were most unlikely to have such immediate treatment, since they might not notice any symptoms and, even if they did, would probably be too embarrassed to go to a doctor with them. It was a classic Catch-22 situation.

  Katherine's operation was exactly what specialists in gonorrhoea advised against, because of the risk of spreading the infection into the bloodstream. Evidently this is exactly what happened: soon afterwards, she began to suffer from gonorrhoeal arthritis, which affected her hip joints, feet, hands and back at various times. Then, one after another, she suffered the symptoms of systemic gonorrhoea: her periods were markedly irregular, allowing her to believe herself pregnant more than once; she became infertile; after the peritonitis, she began to suffer from heart trouble and then later repeated attacks of pleurisy. These attacks have been described as warning signs of impending tuberculosis of the lung, which no doubt they were, but they were also very possibly one of the effects of the gonorrhoea.

  We have only to study her letters and look at her account in 1920, in which she said she was ‘never quite well’ from then on,* to see that from 1910 she was a chronic invalid; as such, her vulnerability to the tuberculosis bacillus must have been considerably increased. The picture of Katherine as a classic case of tuberculosis is true enough, but over it we have to superimpose another picture, that of the classic female victim of gonorrhoea.

  How much did she herself know? It has been assumed that she remained completely ignorant of her disease until enlightened by a Dr Sorapure in the winter of 1918. My own view is that she must have suspected something. She certainly took note of a ‘white discharge’ which she suffered from all through the summer of 1910. In 1914 Beatrice Campbell heard her drunkenly lamenting that she was a ‘soiled woman’.4 In 1915 she told her friend Koteliansky that she had a ‘special disease’.5 Both these remarks suggest that she had some idea of her condition.

  It is likely, though, that she did not connect her arthritis with her gonorrhoea, or fully understand that she had been sterilized by it, until Sorapure told her. Even he, consoling as he tried to be, could only attempt various alleviating treatments for the arthritis: injections and inoculations in the affected joints, fashionable but of disputed worth; there was nothing he could do to cure the primary lesion nine years after its infliction.

  Katherine recovered slowly from her operation. When she was strong enough, Ida decided to take her to the seaside to convalesce. She rented rooms over a shop in Rottingdean, on the Sussex coast between Brighton and Newhaven, and from there looked for a cottage. In Rottingdean Katherine became ill with what she called rheumatism, i.e., the arthritic pains in her joints caused by gonorrhoea. More doctors were called, more bills run up; they were forced to turn to Mr Kay, who took the trouble to come down and see the Sussex doctor, assuring him that all the bills would be settled. It seems unlikely that the doctor made a correct diagnosis, but, whether he did or not, there was little he could recommend except that Mrs Bowden should lead a quiet life, eat well, avoid alcohol and marital relations, and keep warm; and so, for a while, she did.

  7

  The New Age: ‘You Taught Me to Write, You Taught Me to Think’

  We must now return from this long medical excursion to Katherine's arrival at the Strand Palace Hotel in December 1909. She had some stories in her bag; she had her £100 a year, still handed out by Mr Kay in the City; and she had Ida to provide loving attention, and lend her extra money, or ‘T’ as they called it in their private language. Beyond that, where was she now to turn? One of the first things she did was to send a copy of Alice in Wonderland round to Dolly Trowell, inscribed ‘To Little Sister from Big Sister, Xmas 1909’; but this produced no response, although Dolly kept and cherished it. Then Katherine told Ida she was considering joining forces with a woman fortune-teller she had met at the Strand Palace: about as low a point in her career as could be reached. Soon a rather better idea occurred to her.

  Bowden, who had not heard from her since the previous March, and who was staying with some rather formal people in Lincolnshire for the weekend, suddenly received a telegram, or rather a whole series of telegrams, brought to him by his host's butler, urging him to meet her at once, and signed, for maximum impact, ‘your wife’. The butler must have enjoyed himself, and the manoeuvre was successful. Bowden knew nothing at all about what she had been doing, but, faced with her peremptory demands, he submitted again and invited her to come and live in his new flat in Gloucester Place. Fortunately for him, perhaps, the marriage remained unconsummated.

  Katherine told Ida that, owing to Bowden's suspicious nature, she could come to the flat only when he was out, and only under a false name, ‘Lesley Moore’ (this is the origin of Ida's ‘L.M.’). So things proceeded for another few weeks; Katherine had, at least, found free and comfortable board and lodging. And now Bowden, who, like his supposed rival Ida, deserves a thoroughly honourable place in any account of Katherine's life, offered her some of the best advice she ever had. She told him she had written some stories in Bavaria and offered to show them to him; uneasy as the ménage in Gloucester Place might be, he was ten years her senior, with a Cambridge education and literary connections. He thought her stories were good, and suggested she should submit them to the paper for which Saleeby and other
s of his circle wrote, A. R. Orage's New Age.

  Bowden was then kind enough to take her to the offices of the New Age, which were in one of the little courts off Chancery Lane: a couple of small, smoky rooms up a lot of stone stairs. Katherine's appearance and personality made an immediate impression on Orage. He looked at her work and declared that he would like to publish something. The first story he picked out was ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’. The dilemma for Katherine was acute. When he singled it out, she should obviously have said at once, ‘That one is actually a version of the work of another writer – the Russian writer, Chekhov.’ Yet this would inevitably spoil the moment of triumph, and perhaps cast a doubt over the authenticity of the rest of the stories. She said nothing. The moment passed, and could not be recalled.

  By coincidence, she sold an entirely original story to another magazine at the same time. It was called ‘Mary’, and was a sentimental precursor of ‘Prelude’. The setting is Karori, and it centres on ‘Kass’ and her two elder sisters; there is also a grandmother, a mother who undervalues Kass, and a mention of Pat, the handyman, who chops the head off a rooster. Kass nobly and secretly asks her schoolteacher to give a prize she has earned (for reciting, appropriately enough, ‘I remember, I remember, the house where I was born’) to her less gifted elder sister Mary. She suffers when family and visitors heap praise on Mary and then accuse Kass of jealousy. That night, Kass nearly blurts out the truth to Mary, but her better nature prevails, and she gives her sleeping sister a kiss.

  ‘Mary’ appeared in the Idler, a light, illustrated monthly magazine struggling to survive. No one has ever thought it worth reprinting. Curiously, its immediate neighbour in the pages of the Idler was ‘En Famille in the Fatherland’, the second part of a serial about a brisk English girl staying in a German family, featuring a pompous and greedy Herr Doktor Professor. The author was Cicely Wilmot. Neither Mansfield nor Wilmot appeared again in the Idler, which ceased publication within a few months, but a whole series of German stories now appeared in the New Age.