Katherine Mansfield

by Claire Tomalin

  The story of his Oxford years, which he told in his autobiography Between Two Worlds, is instructive. They did not turn out at all as he or his family had expected. Instead of proceeding steadily through Modern Greats towards the civil service examination, he was thrown off course by the experience of university life itself. For most scholarship boys in 1910, Oxford was an opportunity, but not likely to be much fun. Murry overcame the disability of poverty with ease. During his first year he won his tutor's heart and was invited to a reading party in Suffolk. The experience, which turned out to be more a matter of sailing with carefree friends in the Alde estuary than reading, was so congenial that he decided he must simply sever himself from his shameful background, and this he proceeded to do. He found a farming family in Gloucestershire that took in paying guests and presented himself to them as an orphan who needed somewhere to spend his Oxford vacations. (It is the sort of adventure Katherine could well have gone in for, but which she would not have sought to explain or justify afterwards.)

  In Gloucestershire Murry at once became a favourite with his hosts. He bought a horse, which they taught him to ride, and he took up foxhunting. He embarked on a romance with the niece of the local vicar; but he also met a young Frenchman, a fellow lodger on the farm, who interested him in the idea of visiting Paris. At the speed of a picaresque hero with his eye on the next chapter, Murry abandoned Gloucestershire without farewell to the farmer, his wife or the vicar's niece, and spent his next vacation as tutor to a young golf-playing aristocrat in the Borders, in order to earn the money to go to France. In one sense this was an admirable plan: if the system of snobbery is there, better to use it rather than let it crush you. He found the pleasures of life in a stately home congenial, and grew more confident about his ability to plot his own life.

  He was, in any case, growing bored with classical studies and becoming more interested in modern languages and literature. His first visit to Paris, in the winter of 1910 (Katherine was living in Chelsea at the time), finished any prospect of becoming a civil servant. He began by spending his days reading Bergson and covering the city conscientiously on foot, district by district. In the evenings he sat in a café in Montparnasse. Presently, he was seduced by a sweet-natured girl who, as soon as she had won the heart of her innocent Englishman, gave up her life of easy virtue and adopted one of strict morality, in the hope of marriage.

  Her plan failed: after some severe pangs of conscience, Murry deserted her, again without explanation. It was an unkind but pardonable act of self-preservation; he was not cut out to be a Puccini hero, and Paris had other things more to his purpose on offer. An Oxford friend, Frederick Goodyear, with enough money from his father to live as he chose, arrived in Paris; he had many friends among painters and writers, and introduced Murry to groups ranging from Aleister Crowley and his black magic disciples to the more interesting entourage of Picasso and Derain. Here he made friends with ‘George’ Banks, a forceful and eccentric woman cartoonist who dressed like a man, revered the memory of Wilde and teased Murry for his innocence; and a genial Scottish artist, John D. Fergusson, who proclaimed himself a Fauve, and asserted that art was not a profession so much as a quality of being. It was a dangerous doctrine to give a young man on the brink of regarding himself as an artist; and at about this time Murry decided to become a poet and novelist. This was a serious mistake, for his gifts did not lie in that direction, and he wasted energy and paper for years on bad verse and flaccid novels, determinedly seeing himself as the heir to the English Romantics.

  As an editor he was a more credible figure; young as he was, his earnest enthusiasm impressed people, and he had a quick responsiveness to fashions in taste. In the summer of 1911 Rhythm was hatched with Fergusson's enthusiastic support and money provided by the father of another artistic Oxford friend, Michael Sadler. They did not plan it as an undergraduate magazine, but as something much more ambitious that aimed to cover the French and English avant-garde in literature and art, with forays into other languages, and to sell as far afield as Munich, New York and Glasgow. From the start Fergusson was a strong art editor; he provided fine woodcuts and drawings of his own, introduced the decorative work of his Irish-American girl-friend from Philadelphia, Anne Estelle Rice, and established a high standard in all that he commissioned. Almost all the plates and drawings look as good today as they did when they were chosen, from the Picasso in the first issue to the Derains, Ihlees, Peploes, Jessie Dismorrs, Orpens, Augustus Johns, Rothensteins and Gaudier-Brzeskas; and George Banks proved a clever cartoonist. The quality of the writing, unfortunately, rarely approached that of the artwork. The format, with its thick, wide-margined paper and large type, seems oddly inappropriate to the text but well matched to the illustrations.

  In the first issue Murry appeared as the disciple of the philosophers Bergson and Croce, proclaiming his allegiance to intuition and ‘the spiritual vision of the artist’. ‘Art is beyond creeds,’ he wrote, ‘for it is the creed itself. It comes to birth in irreligion and is nurtured in amorality.’ There were chunks of untranslated Croce and prose poems by a 25-year-old French writer Murry had made friends with and hailed as another Rimbaud: this was Francis Carco, fantaisiste poet, novelist of low-life Paris and friend of Colette; he had been one of her ex-husband Willy's ghost-writers. Later, Carco contributed Lettres de Paris alternately with another poet, Tristan Derème; the plan looked good, but the articles provided were not, Carco and Derème both being better poets than journalists.

  English poetry was represented at first by Murry himself and by Willy George. Murry's efforts were along these lines:

  Poor fools! We part. I am not heartless, yet

  I dare not see you. You must live your life,

  I mine, forgetting…1

  Later, he was writing under a different influence, but no better:

  The twinkling feet of all the little stars

  Have danced in my hair tonight:

  They made bright music at the golden bars

  About my heart tonight.

  Tonight my lover came over the hills,

  His feet were a bright fire;

  He strode across the black slopes and the rills

  With limbs that never tire.

  Despite this sort of thing, Rhythm was noticed, by artists and journalists, at any rate; in the third issue Orage's one-time fellow editor, Holbrook Jackson, appeared with a long polemic against charm in art, and better poets – W. W. Gibson, Harold Monro, Walter de la Mare – contributed later on. Murry's judgement remained shaky, both of his own powers and of other people's.

  His meeting with Katherine in December 1911 at the Georges' dinner-table, where she appeared in a grey dress and spoke with cool authority about the superiority of German to English translation from the Russian, was a momentous event in his life. She was all that he had expected, and more. What particularly struck him from the start, he wrote later, was that ‘she was not, somehow, primarily a woman’.2 He could enjoy listening to her talk without the distraction of sex. She seemed wonderfully simple and pure. Murry had gone through a bad time after his break with his Parisian girl; in a manly gesture intended to rid himself of remorse, he had persuaded an Oxford friend to take him to a brothel. The experience had been hateful in itself, and it had given him gonorrhoea; unlike Katherine, he had had his diagnosed and treated quickly, and was cured. But the experience had left him frightened. Katherine's cool independence seemed both refreshing and safe; he could fall in love with her without being required to do or decide anything.

  After their first meeting, he immediately wrote to her, suggesting she should contribute reviews to Rhythm; he sent her a volume of Crowley's verse, and asked for more of her work. She sent him some poems of her own, saying they had been turned down by Orage because they were in free verse,3 but nothing more for the moment. He returned to Oxford; but he had lost interest in his work there completely, although he was expected to achieve a First in the summer, after his years of scholarships and exhibitions.


  Katherine was maintaining fairly distant relations with her family, who were still in London, although in January she pressed them to patronize the beauty salon in South Moulton Street where Ida was trying to earn some money by what was optimistically called ‘Scientific Hair-Brushing’. Katherine was struggling with a story, and also apparently with bad health again, which she gave as her reason for returning to Geneva in February; perhaps she had found a congenial doctor there.

  On her return, she went to stay with Beatrice and Orage in Sussex. It was the last friendly time the three of them spent together. Orage chose to regard her readiness to contribute to Rhythm as an act of treachery, a quite unreasonable attitude since, with its tiny circulation and purely aesthetic aims, it was in no way a rival to a political weekly. In any case, it was absurd to expect her to write for the New Age alone if she hoped to make a living from her work; but paranoia flourished in Chancery Lane, Orage and Beatrice both being hypersensitive and quarrelsome. They were also fond of Kennedy, who was suffering the pangs of rejected love for Katherine. As soon as they began to see an enemy in her, she could expect to feel their wrath, and in March they began to attack Rhythm in the pages of the New Age, singling out her poems – already familiar to Orage – for their ‘flapping and wappering’, and suggesting that other items were vulgar or stupid. Their criticism was not ill founded, but it was scarcely called for.

  Murry, meanwhile, was seeking Katherine's editorial advice. When the Easter vacation arrived, he wrote to her from his parents' house, complaining that ‘je m'étouffe here’,4 saying that he proposed to call on her with a batch of manuscripts, and that he was thinking of trying to find a job in London. She gave him tea at Clovelly Mansions, serving it in bowls from the floor and sympathizing with his troubles. He told her how guilty he felt at letting down his college's hopes, but how impossible it had become to continue his studies. Then they both laughed, and Katherine pronounced that he should give up Oxford.

  Since this was, in any case, what he wanted to hear, Murry obediently visited his tutor and told him he could not continue at Oxford. His tutor, while disapproving, acted with extraordinary kindness and gave him an introduction to J. A. Spender, editor of the Westminster Gazette, who promised him freelance work and advanced him £5: another example of Murry's power to charm and impress. It was obviously absurd to give up Oxford within months of his final examinations, but no doubt he appeared, as so often throughout his later life, sincerely and helplessly in the grip of some idea too great to combat. Murry's self-justifying sincerity was always absolute, and he was never at a loss for words.

  He went straight to Katherine with the good news, telling her he felt he owed it to her, and then invited her to dine with him and Goodyear, who was about to take a job in advertising himself, and was full of envy and good advice for Murry. He must, for instance, leave home at all costs. When this had been generally agreed – Katherine and Goodyear took to one another – she suddenly offered Murry the Music Room in her flat, at 7s 6d a week. Somewhat dazedly, Murry accepted and was told to arrive the following Thursday; and, inquiring whether he liked eggs, she departed with a cool auf Wiedersehen, leaving Goodyear still more envious.

  Ida was called in to help Katherine prepare the room for this new male rival. She also contributed another fiver, which was discreetly placed with the eggs and other provisions laid out for Murry's use, and departed with some sense of being excluded, not entirely dispelled by Katherine's offering of a consolatory poem, written out especially for her (it later appeared in Rhythm). No one mentioned love at this point. ‘Mansfield’ and ‘Murry’ – so they addressed one another at first – shook hands at night if they happened to be in at the same time, and lived separate lives.

  This was in early April, a little after the Beauchamps – father, mother, Chaddie, Jeanne and Leslie, who had failed to win permission to go to Oxford or Cambridge – sailed for New Zealand again. There is no indication that Katherine felt the parting as a painful one. Since 1909 she had been calling her mother ‘Jane’ (another Beauchamp nickname) and neither troubled to preserve whatever letters they exchanged thereafter; nor did ‘Jane’ adjust her will to reinstate her difficult daughter. The two women never met again, and Katherine's later tributes to her read oddly in the light of the tenuousness of their bond. It was the all-forgiving Ida, always ready to come to her assistance however often she was slighted, responding to demands and infantile rages with absolving love and patience, who gave Katherine the real mothering she needed from then on.

  Murry's attempt to introduce Katherine to his family was, predictably, a disaster. Her single visit to Nicosia Road in Wandsworth was followed by the appearance of his mother and aunt together at Clovelly Mansions, intent on removing him bodily from proximity to the dangerous married woman. Murry (feeling sick, he says) pushed them out and did not see them again until 1914.

  Katherine was shedding encumbrances too; her interest in Orton and Edna now faded rapidly, but there were other complications. For a time she seems to have tried to conceal Murry's presence in the flat from some of her friends. Orage's cruelly funny account of these manoeuvres had Katherine whispering at doors, leaving false messages, sending telegrams and building up brilliantly complicated series of lies rather than let him know she had a young man installed on the premises. Another new friend, an Irish barrister with literary leanings called Gordon Campbell, introduced to her by the indefatigable Willy George, also went through the bizarre experience of spending several hours in conversation with her in one room, thinking they were alone in the flat, and then hearing Murry summoned from behind a closed door. The incident could well have come straight out of Orage's story, which he ran in the New Age in May: five episodes of pseudonymous private jokes and hostile portraiture in which Katherine figured as ‘Moira Foisacre’, a young widow with cultural pretensions and a complicated private life. Mrs Foisacre has had a brute of a husband, and currently possesses plenty of friends who are ‘the debris of her wrecked past’, and whom she keeps in careful compartments. Her clever writing has both a satirical and a sentimental streak, and her admirers think she has it in her to become a playwright; but, according to the severe narrator, ‘promiscuity of reflection, taste, judgement, character and intelligence is her distinctive and peculiar quality’.*

  Mrs Foisacre enjoys wide-ranging literary conversations (Maeterlinck, Whitman and Wells all figure) and is planning a sketch about Christian Scientists. She offers her visitors tea with the remark ‘Isn't tea in the afternoon like a sonnet of Rossetti's?’ Her flat is decorated with modern French drawings, she has installed a fountain in the middle of the room on the matting, and other furniture includes a piano and divans. Within this familiar-sounding setting, she is apparently concealing the presence of a young literary man.

  Orage ran his ‘Tales for Men Only’ on other occasions also; they represent his streak of general misogyny, but this particular one is a clear and blatantly personal attack, designed to wound and also to be unanswerable. Katherine never attacked him in return, whether for fear of him or because she accepted the truth of some of his criticism; and she never lost her respect for him.†

  For the present, Murry, who found her flawless, did not presume to question or criticize, and was prepared to publish almost anything she offered him, was in the ascendant. He, after all, was also an editor and, though he talked of being ‘so awfully out of it’,6 was better educated, and treated with respect by other intellectuals. The Westminster Gazette was giving him serious German works to review as well as a round-up, which provided him with a batch of books to sell each week. Life at Clovelly Mansions was not too uncomfortable. Poor Ida reports that at this time she was reduced to eating the oats from the face-packs at the beauty salon, where she worked for 10s a week.

  Katherine now invited Murry to ‘make me your mistress’. He declined, saying he felt it would spoil everything, reluctant to give up his role as the little boy in the ménage. Concealing her deeply hurt pride, Katherine cont
inued to listen to his confidences about the past, his Parisian love-affair and the ensuing miseries. She offered no confidences in return, nor did Murry invite them. Either he lacked the nerve, or he preferred to keep her image untarnished by reality.

  It did not take her long to overpower his resistance; within a very short while of her first onslaught, they began to sleep together. By his account, their relations remained very childlike; although both had had sexual experience, she was wholly reticent about hers, and his had been slight and nervous; Murry adds that he found no real sexual fulfilment until his fourth marriage, when he was in his late fifties, and that it came as a revelation to him. Katherine also wrote later that their love was ‘child love’, and this remains a sad, underlying inadequacy of their relationship, and helps to explain much of their mutual dissatisfaction later. For the moment, though, they were happy and busy, with brilliant hopes for the future. Like children, they lived mostly on the junk food of the day, meat pies and the cheapest possible restaurants; Katherine had no time or wish to cook, even though Murry tried to teach her to make stock out of cheap ham bones, throwing in a few vegetables to make a ‘pot-au-feu’.

  She began to think about getting a divorce and wrote to Bowden, inviting him to visit her and discuss the matter. When he did call politely, he had the impression or so he said later – that she was rather enjoying her role of free woman of letters, living outside the confines of convention like George Sand or George Eliot. They discussed the possibility of an American divorce, but found it would not be valid in England, and she was not prepared to be divorced as the guilty party, a process that would inevitably bring her name into the newspapers.