Katherine Mansfield

by Claire Tomalin

  To have stories in the New Age meant not only the distinction of appearing in a paper which had a reputation for being ‘more acutely alive than any other journal’ (or so Arnold Bennett was willing to testify in a plug for the paper that February), but also entry into a new world in which Orage offered encouragement, guidance and friendship. He followed up his first acceptance by printing three more of her German stories in March; and this time they were authentic Mansfield, dialogue sketches called ‘Germans at Meat’, ‘The Baron’ and ‘The Luftbad’, all obviously the fruit of her Wörishofen observations.

  Katherine said later that she owed a great deal to Orage's editing: ‘… you taught me to write, you taught me to think, you showed me what there was to be done and what not to do’.1 He certainly encouraged her to move away from the sentimental, the dreamy reminiscence or fantasy, and towards the succinct, the sharp observation, the puncturing aside. Pathos, childish charm, indefinable feelings and abstractions do not appear in the New Age stories; understatement, and an eye for absurdity, do. It is a giant step forwards from the juvenile problems of Juliet to the coolly impersonal narrator of these stories. She makes you feel she must be good company, and evidently Orage found she was, in life as well as on the page. She was as amusing as she was attractive, and whatever he may have heard of her past could not shock him, he knew all about unhappy marriages, the desire to escape from one's background, illicit unions, lesbianism even – he alleged that his wife Jean had been a lesbian – and fiercely independent women, one of whom he lived with: Beatrice Hastings.

  He himself was the real thing at last, in Katherine's eyes, a metropolitan man of letters with the power to deliver what he promised her. He was thirty-seven, his clothes were worn, his boots patched; but he was a charmer when he chose to be. Even the red birthmark on the side of his face conferred a certain glamour. He rarely had any money in his pocket – ‘No Wage’ was his own private title for his paper – and his usual form of hospitality was tea or coffee and cigarettes in the basement of the ABC tea-rooms in Chancery Lane, where proofs could be read and the next issue planned in the warmth at minimum cost. When he did have some cash, it might be Chablis and oysters in a nearby hotel lounge, but, like the best journals, the New Age ran mostly on sweat and magic. His office was a mere cubicle, with cartoons on the walls and a roll-top desk; there was one secretary and ‘manager’, a darkly disapproving woman called Alice Marks, who tried to protect him and must have been one of the essential props to the whole enterprise. There were times when he would weep at the sheer grind of turning out so much of the copy himself, Monday after Monday, but he was patient and genial with his contributors, and nothing delighted him more than discovering new talent and helping to shape it. He and Beatrice lived in various miscellaneous flats and cottages, never acquiring any settled home or way of life: or rather, their way of life was the New Age.

  Orage is the most difficult character to pin down among Katherine's many friends. He wrote nothing autobiographical, preserved an extreme reticence about his life and systematically destroyed his private papers and correspondence. His published writings are impersonal; although he felt passionately about many issues and some people, the tone is dry and detached. He had no talent as a reporter and his few attempts at fiction are feeble and dull, except in so far as personal attacks may be entertaining to those who know their object. His personality, which made a great impression on contemporaries as diverse as Bernard Shaw and T. S. Eliot, has to be summoned up from hints and fragments. He was born in 1873, lost his father early, and was brought up in wretched poverty by his widowed mother and unmarried grandmother in the village of Fenstanton, near Cambridge. His mother scraped a living by taking in washing. When he was fourteen she went to the squire, a Nonconformist named Mr Coote, to ask him to give the boy work as a labourer.

  Fortunately, the boy's exceptional ability had already attracted attention in the village, and the squire paid for him to stay on at the school and have some extra coaching. Orage – some said ‘Orridge’ but he preferred a pronunciation closer to the French and never used his first names – was a tall, attractive boy, good at sports, quick to learn anything, with a passion for reading, drawing and acting. Like Lawrence, he became a pupil-teacher and so reached a training college. He was twenty-one when he finished his training and went to teach at a Leeds elementary school.

  Soon he was wearing a red tie, haunting second-hand bookshops, joining in public debates, interested in the ideas of Madame Blavatsky, a member of a ‘Plato’ group, and engaged to an art student, a Scots girl whose middle-class parents were not pleased. In 1896 they were married, with the result that Coote, who also disapproved of this recklessness, refused Orage a loan to go to Oxford and work for a degree. Instead he settled to teaching – he would not move on from taking Standard I, in order to be sure to have time for his reading – and began to write for Keir Hardie's Labour Leader and to speak at Theosophical meetings. Mrs Orage, beautiful and intelligent, devoted to the ideals of William Morris, practised her craft as a needlewoman. Orage began to read Edward Carpenter, whose free-verse rhapsodies and association of advanced political thought and eastern mysticism appealed to him, in books such as Towards Democracy (1883), Civilization, Its Cause and Cure (1889) and Sex, Love and Its Place in a Free Society (1894).

  Not wishing to remain a schoolmaster for ever, Orage struck up an acquaintance with Bernard Shaw and sought to extend his range of activities. With a Leeds businessman, Holbrook Jackson, who introduced him to the works of Nietzsche, he began to plan a movement for cultural reform which became in practice the Leeds Arts Club, whose object was ‘to affirm the mutual dependence of art and ideas’. It was a success. Chesterton, Bernard Shaw, Carpenter and Yeats were among the speakers, similar clubs were formed in other Yorkshire towns, and its fame preceded Orage and Jackson when they went to London in 1905. There Orage first tried his hand at freelance journalism, produced two small books on Nietzsche – each a mixture of his own exposition and Nietzsche's aphorisms – and helped to form the Fabian Arts Group.

  From both Carpenter and Nietzsche Orage drew ideas about the relations between men and women. He rejected the Victorian code of a subject sex; he began to question the value of marriage as an institution; and in his Nietzsche in Outline and Aphorism he wrote that ‘few beings are at present wholly male or wholly female’. Carpenter's view of sexual union as having its own, intrinsic, mystical value, unconnected with procreation – a view Lawrence was to absorb and make central to his work – may have interested Orage equally. His own marriage was childless; it became unhappy; and he acquired a reputation, both in Leeds and in London, as a fascinator of women.2 At a time when most men prided themselves on being undemonstrative, Orage was quickly moved to tears and gestures of physical affection towards both men and women.

  The Orages parted about the time he came to London. Soon afterwards he met Beatrice Hastings. She was initially an ardent supporter of the suffragette movement, and burning with ambition to write: novels, poetry, polemic. Orage was somewhat bewitched by her, and she may be partly responsible for his arrest, the only man among seventy-five women, when a group of suffragettes attempted to rush the House of Commons in the spring of 1907.

  A month later, he and Jackson issued their first number of a magazine they had persuaded Bernard Shaw to help them acquire, the New Age. They subtitled it ‘An Independent Review of Politics, Literature and Art’, and their formula, front half devoted to politics, back half to literature and the arts, was later to be taken over by the New Statesman and other weeklies as the standard arrangement. Things went very well from the start. The paper sold at first for a penny (by 1910 it was 3d, by 1914 6d) and most of the contributors, though not the regular critics, went unpaid; they either worked for other, paying papers, or had professions. Orage worked with the zeal of a man who has found his true métier and, although he had no business sense (he would not try to get advertising, for instance, to Jackson's exasperation), the circulation ros
e rapidly from less than 4,000 to 20,000. But during 1907 the two editors fell out and by the start of 1908 Orage was sole editor and about to embark on his most dazzling period.

  The New Age was of the left – the young Enid Bagnold's father considered its politics ‘near treason’ – though rather of the utopian left than identified with any particular movement for long. Orage wanted controversy, and was more interested in stirring it up than in maintaining a consistent line. On the question of votes for women, for instance, the paper began with editorials as well as articles in favour, but as Beatrice Hastings changed her view of the matter, Orage followed her and by 1910 the paper was generally hostile to the suffragettes. On the other hand, he was responsible for appointing Arnold Bennett, who wrote a weekly column on books from 1908 until 1911, which was one of the great attractions of the paper for readers like Lawrence. Orage had a crazy and quarrelsome streak, but he was loved by his contributors and at his happiest in the editorial chair.

  Among his regular contributors in 1910 was John Kennedy, an Ulsterman on the staff of the Daily Telegraph, who wrote on foreign affairs in the New Age for the fun of it. He became Katherine's adorer for a while, and is rumoured to have presented her with a fur coat, something none of the others could have afforded, neither the radical Clarence Norman, a protégé of Bernard Shaw, nor A. E. Randall, who reviewed books and theatre under different names and was sour, learned and penniless. It was Beatrice Hastings who seemed made to be Katherine's friend; like her, she was English and yet not English, for her parents were settled in South Africa, and she had spent some years there. Her father was a successful shopkeeper and, like Katherine's, gave his wandering daughter an allowance. Beatrice too had been married for a while and was separated but not divorced; she had simply lost contact with her husband. She had also borne a child who had died in infancy, and seen her younger sister die in childbirth, if her confessional writings are to be believed. She was thirty in 1910, and welcomed a younger woman colleague to whom she could give patronage – for her advice counted with Orage – and sisterly sympathy.

  Beatrice had been writing regularly in the New Age for the past two years, using several pseudonyms. Most of her articles were feminist polemics, some couched in passionate language, especially when she discussed the sexual subjection of women to their husbands, or the treatment of imprisoned suffragettes. She wrote on the absurdity of the universities' refusal to grant degrees to women, and their rejection as members of the Chemical Society; still more striking were her humorous pieces, often written in dialogue form, in which ‘free marriage’ was discussed between an enthusiastic young fiancée and a worldly-wise older woman, or a ladies' tea-party conversation was used to explore the connections between sex, economics and childbearing. Beatrice, at her best, presented bold, clear and original arguments, while at her worst she became incomprehensible. She thought for herself, and her initial alignment with the militant suffragette movement and later criticism of it were very much her own affair, although Orage followed the same path, and both ended by believing that something much more fundamental than the vote would be needed to change the pattern of women's – and men's – lives.

  Neither these issues, nor the various radical causes taken up in the New Age, seem to have interested Katherine very much; but Beatrice was undeniably a model and example to her, as an independent literary woman, and very much the dominant partner emotionally with Orage. Perhaps they were all a little in thrall to one another for a time; certainly Katherine loved being launched and noticed, part of a world dominated by proofs and next week's issue, so-and-so's article, letters to the editor, a world in which Orage and Beatrice and she sat up late, discussing one another's work and ideas. She was still officially living at Gloucester Place, but Bowden was receding rapidly into the background. Ida too, whose dreaded father had decided to emigrate to Rhodesia, leaving her free at last in a flat shared with her sister, was made aware now that Katherine had found more congenial companions.

  Only then came the episode of her illness and operation, cutting across the excitement of the new friendships, but also giving her a simple exit from Gloucester Place. Orage and Beatrice, in the full flush of their enthusiasm for Katherine, wanted to be near her and came to Rottingdean to look for a summer cottage too. When they appeared, Ida moved back to London, and when they found their own place, she returned. She disliked Beatrice, predictably perhaps, but accepted Katherine's enjoyment of her company; and for Katherine, they were the best friends she had yet made, filling her life with talk and laughter that overcame the pain of her illness, encouraging her to become the person she wanted to be. A picture taken of her at Rottingdean was, she said, the first to show any character (we may disagree); and, once recovered and with no thought that her illness would recur, the summer of 1910 looked very bright to her. The kindly Bowden came to visit her once or twice, but Katherine maliciously sent him off with Ida to admire the local church, and made it clear that he was unwelcome. ‘Your wife’ had decided to be George Sand or George Eliot again. Meekly, he withdrew, and heard no more from her for two years.

  In July, Katherine returned to London to stay with Beatrice and Orage in a mansion flat in Kensington,* and a new series of her stories, still set in Germany, began in the New Age. The first two were concerned with the horrors of childbirth and marriage respectively, with special emphasis on the insensitivity of men, a topic on which Beatrice may have encouraged her to express herself, although she needed no encouragement to present a view of things in which people were divided between tormentors and victims. Beatrice herself had held forth so ferociously about the indignity of women forced into perpetual childbearing by ignorant and brutal husbands that E. Nesbit, the children's author and Fabian, had written to the New Age to point out that many women did, in fact, enjoy both their husbands and their children: a point that has continued to trouble vehement feminists. Had Katherine and Beatrice been able to write about contagious sexual disease, they would have been on stronger ground.

  In August, Katherine asked Ida to write to Garnet for her, returning the ring he had given her and telling him she was now finally separated from Bowden, and intending to use the pen name of ‘Mansfield’ only in future. If she expected a response, she was disappointed; there was no more contact with the Trowells, although Garnet kept her letters till he died.*

  Orage and Beatrice were exerting themselves on her behalf and found her a two-room flat in Chelsea, belonging to a painter friend, Henry Bishop, who was going to Morocco for the winter; it was in Cheyne Walk, with a view over the river and decorative touches that appealed to Katherine, such as a human skull used as a candle holder. She decided to sleep in the big front-room where she could see the trees in the lamplight at night; Ida, who had now given up any pretence of studying music, helped her to install herself, and observed with admiration as she started off in several new directions at once.

  First, there was a revival of her interest in performance. In the flat above, a Madame Alexandra who trained opera singers heard Katherine singing and – this is Ida's version – insisted on giving her lessons. Katherine bought a grand piano from her new teacher, but soon found she had not the stamina to practise for the hours expected of her and gave up, though she continued to play and sing for her own pleasure. The desire for impersonation appeared again when she visited a Japanese exhibition and at once began to receive guests in a kimono, with a bowl of chrysanthemums beside her. She had until now worn her hair long, parted in the middle and put up in a curly mass, but in the autumn she had it cropped into a fringe and brushed sleekly against her head, the style that was to become her hallmark long before short hair became generally fashionable. At once she took on a Japanese air of her own; she spoke of visiting Japan, and acquired a Japanese doll, Ribni. She also discovered a dressmaker and began to order a new wardrobe described by Ida as ‘small coats of lovely colours and soft velvet materials and… dresses with long fitting bodices and pleated skirts’.

  When she was not p
lanning clothes, sitting at the piano or writing, she found time to go to tennis parties, and at one of these she met a young schoolmaster called William Orton, who responded to her question ‘Do you believe in Pan?’ by becoming shyly attached to her.3 He was earnest and humble, and wanted to be a writer himself; his father, like Katherine's, was a tradesman. Orton, fascinated as he was by Katherine, already had a girl-friend called Edna Smith. Undeterred by this, Katherine bestowed the name ‘Lais’ on Edna, ‘Michael’ on Orton, and divided her attentions between the two of them. According to Edna, her love-affair with Orton was effectively broken up by Katherine, ‘who took rather a fancy to my lover and myself. She played with us both for a little while and then went on her way. She was a beautiful, wonderful creature and I never bore her any grudge.’4 Generous words, and for a nineteen-year-old the adventure of being taken up by an infinitely sophisticated woman of twenty-two was, perhaps, worth the loss of her lover. The three-cornered relationship, as long as she was dominant, was always to Katherine's taste. ‘What very pretty hair!’ wrote Katherine of ‘little Lais’ to Orton, ‘I expect I shall see her quite often and take her to concerts and I am sure I shall take her to the National Gallery.’5 Meanwhile, she gave him her opal ring and discussed marriage, though it was far from certain that either of them seriously desired it, quite apart from the fact that she was already married. They set up a communal notebook, in which she practised decadent phrasemaking and provocation: