Katherine Mansfield

by Claire Tomalin

  Nothing was resolved, but in May she and Murry took a few days’ ‘honeymoon’ in Paris, where she had so ecstatically imagined living in the Latin Quarter in her letters to Garnet in 1908 and to Floryan in 1909 (and where she had subsequently stood up both Floryan and Ida on different occasions). This time Murry took her the rounds, and she met his Paris correspondent, Carco, who offered to give her French lessons; they had something in common, for he had been born in Tahiti (albeit of Corsican parents) and liked to affect a South Seas persona, much as she had played at being a Maori.

  On their return to London, Katherine suggested, with considerable cheek in view of Granville's association with Orage, that her publisher might like to back Rhythm. He agreed, taking on the financial dealings with the printers, and offering Murry and Katherine £10 a month to edit. For the moment, it looked like a good arrangement. Murry had also written to Rupert Brooke in the hope of a poem, and he introduced them in turn to Edward Marsh, private secretary to Winston Churchill and a generous patron of the arts, who offered to help with the finances too.

  With things apparently going so well, Murry, under some friendly pressure from his old tutor, agreed to sit his final examinations in Oxford. He took a supporting party of Katherine and Gordon Campbell, who was now a close friend, and they all stayed together outside the city at Boar's Hill while Murry underwent the ordeal, from which he emerged with a second-class degree, which was good under the circumstances. Katherine was promoted to the official position of Editorial Assistant and taken to meet Murry's current literary idol. This was Frank Harris, in his fifties and still possessed of the panache that had made him a good editor of the Saturday Review in the 1890s; his latest success was a life of Shakespeare, and he had a reputation for opposing Victorian prudery, which naturally attracted the young. Katherine wrote him an outrageous, flattering letter, saying he was her ‘hero and master – always' and enthusing about how he has made

  ‘this art business’ far more serious than ever before to me – and I thought it meant almost everything in the past years – but now I seem to realize for the first time what it may mean – and knowing you, and hearing you – I must needs go humbly. Ever since I have loved Tiger we have spoken of you.7

  ‘Tiger’ was of course Murry; or rather, he and Katherine had been given the joint nickname of the ‘two Tigers’ by another new friend, Gilbert Cannan, who had begun to write for Rhythm. In private the tigers began to call one another Tig and Wig.

  Wig's flattery of Harris was encouraged to the hilt by Tig, who was himself preparing a eulogy of their hero for Rhythm. Murry described one of Harris's novels as the greatest in the language, his short stories as the greatest, himself ‘a prince among men, a prince of talkers and critics’ compared with whom ‘Colleridge and Goethe have had but a half-vision’.

  Just as this tribute appeared on the bookstalls in the July issue, Murry's enthusiasm received a check. Harris had recommended Stendhal to his young disciple; when he began to read Stendhal he found that Harris's story ‘An English Saint’ was, in fact, plagiarized boldly from Stendhal. ‘I kept my discovery to myself,’ wrote Murry, ‘but my attitude to Harris was changed in a moment. I did not trust him any more.’8 Murry felt so strongly about the matter that, when Harris invited him cordially to become a director of the new fiction magazine he was setting up with comfortable financial backing, Hearth and Home, Murry refused. In his view, plagiarism was an unforgivable sin.

  Murry adds that, in addition to keeping the discovery to himself, it prevented him from contributing to Hearth and Home. He does not say whether he discussed the matter with Katherine, although it would seem surprising not to, given the closeness of their association, both personal and professional, since by now she had her name on the masthead of Rhythm. In the event, one of her stories did appear in the November issue of Hearth and Home. How had Murry accounted to her for his change of heart? If he did tell her about the plagiarism, how did she react? These are interesting questions, but they have no answers.

  She may have worried about the matter more than she cared to disclose to Murry, not least because her old friend Floryan had now tracked her down; he appeared in London bearing enough luggage to suggest that he intended to settle. Whatever her private feelings about this were, she persuaded Murry that he could make a contribution to Rhythm, and his name duly appeared as ‘Polish correspondent’. A full-page drawing of the new correspondent was prepared for the September issue. Murry accepted this incursion as obligingly as he usually fell in with what she proposed; in August, Sadler's name (and his father's backing) disappeared, and a prose poem of Orton's was in. Outwardly, at any rate, Katherine adopted an attitude of kindly mockery towards Floryan.

  He was not the only Pole to complicate their lives in 1911. Murry was introduced to a young French artist of outstanding promise, Henri Gaudier, at this time. Gaudier was primarily interested in sculpture, though he was also offering drawings to Rhythm. Part of his education had been in England, but his main reason for residence currently was to avoid military service. He was twenty-one and living with a Polish woman twice his age, Sophie Brzeska. Their relationship may or may not have been platonic, since Gaudier gave different accounts to different people, and, in any case, asserted that lying is indispensable to an artist. However things stood, the couple, half starved for both food and friends, were enchanted to discover a similarly artistic and unconventional pair who were good company and also promised to be a source of patronage.

  At first the friendship flourished. Gaudier started work on a head of Murry. He and Katherine enjoyed singing together, and carried on enthusiastic conversations in which they planned to go and live on a Pacific island. But when Sophie was introduced, Katherine's enthusiasm lessened. Sophie was undoubtedly a neurotic as well as an unfortunate woman, her life a long catalogue of woes and ill treatment by her family, lovers and employers. She had travelled the world from one miserable experience to another, and all this she began to confide to Katherine at length, including a period of intense lesbian attachments during a stay in New York. This was the wrong subject to raise with Katherine just then; she shuddered and retreated into Beauchamp gentility. An invitation to tea to meet her other Polish friend, presumably Floryan, was withdrawn by telegram, and Murry was told to invite Gaudier on his own. Later he too was grilled by Katherine as to whether he was a homosexual – to which the answer was probably in part yes – and she was responsible for breaking his friendship with Murry. This Murry minded very much; it was also sad for Rhythm, since Gaudier's drawings of birds and human heads are among the most attractive things in its pages.

  The other new friend who appeared about this time, offering himself as ally, contributor and helper, was Gilbert Cannan, fair-haired, handsome, pipe-smoking, dog at heel, the very model of the successful young Georgian man of letters. At twenty-eight he had already published several novels, and was translating Romain Rolland's ten-volume roman-fleuve, Jean Christophe, as it appeared; several of his plays, mostly dealing with social problems such as alcoholism, had been produced in the West End, and he had even been satirized by Bernard Shaw in Fanny's First Play. To Murry and Katherine, he represented the peak of achievement. Lecturing and reviewing in national papers came easily to him; he was a member of the Savage Club, and he lived in respectable Kensington. The publisher Martin Seeker was his close friend, and when his novel Round the Corner, which dealt with the problems of adolescent sex, was published in 1912, it was banned by many circulating libraries and enthusiastically praised by Wells, Compton Mackenzie and Hugh Walpole; it also led to invitations from Lady Ottoline Morrell, and the beginning of an intimate friendship with her.

  Despite all these promising signs, Cannan's life was not altogether easy. After being cited by J. M. Barrie in his divorce, Cannan felt obliged to marry Mary Barrie, who was seventeen years older than him. The case had been widely reported and, although many people expressed sympathy for Mary, there was a good deal of awkwardness. This made an obvious bond w
ith Katherine and Murry, who seem to have gone around accusing Bowden of being obstructive in the matter of her divorce. In fact, Mary and Katherine did not altogether admire one another: Mary thought Katherine insincere, and Katherine envied Mary her comfortable life. In one of her nicely equivocal statements, she wrote to her mother, ‘Mary Cannan is a charming woman; I wish that you had met her. I feel sure that you and she would get on beautifully.’9 But there were no doubts about Gilbert: he was impressive, likeable and had connections that were going to be very useful to Rhythm.*

  Also in the course of this busy summer, Gordon Campbell brought his Dublin fiancée, Beatrice Elvery, a painter who had trained at the Slade, to London to approve the house he had found in Selwood Terrace, off the Fulham Road. He took her to Clovelly Mansions to meet Katherine and Murry. Beatrice remembers how they were dressed in matching navy fishermen's jerseys, how they all sat on the floor to talk and how the conversation

  was about people going to bed with each other and other things that I had never heard mentioned in public before. I felt Katherine was trying to shock me and frighten me away. She was hard and bright and hostile.10

  Despite this bad beginning, the two couples became good friends. Gordon and Beatrice went over to Ireland to be married. The Cannans were also tired of living in London, and Katherine and Murry began to dream of a cottage in the country. Almost immediately they found a small house in the village of Runcton, set in the salt-marsh land between Chichester and Selsey, with a walled garden and trees. It charmed Katherine, who saw it as their wedding house and imagined having a child there. ‘At present I don't care any more for cities,’ she announced to her cousin Sylvia.11 They were so sure of their feelings for the place that they took a three-year lease, furnished it entirely on hire-purchase from Maples, had headed letter-paper printed, and engaged a manservant. Since it was a considerable journey from London, they did not give up the Gray's Inn Road flat; but they appeared to be launching into a settled domestic life in the country, with a useful pied-à-terre when they needed to be working in town. All this was so far from what they could actually afford that it is hard not to think they were encouraging one another into realms of high fantasy. Things went badly from the start.

  A few welcome visitors came. Goodyear, who arrived at the same time as Edward Marsh and Rupert Brooke, charmed everyone with his talk and his singing when they went out walking on the marshes. Ida's visit was not such a success. She and Murry decided they had nothing in common except Katherine, which was not really a basis for friendship between them. Ida noticed that the manservant was not keeping the place clean, and soon everyone noticed that he was a drunkard; he was also a thief. This was one problem. Another was the arrival of Henri Gaudier, who was hoping to bring Sophie to stay, and who ‘overheard’ Katherine saying rude things about her: how she felt their life in the country would be spoiled by a visit from her, how she pitied her but did not like her and wanted to shrink away from her, and so on.

  Gaudier's version is that he had walked half the way from London to Runcton because he could not afford the whole fare, arrived exhausted, heard Katherine talking at a window while she was hanging curtains and was so outraged that he departed again without speaking to them. Possibly Katherine was less innocent than she seems; at all events, the Gaudier-Brzeskas did not arrive to spoil life at the Runcton cottage, and he became a sworn enemy to Katherine and Murry, in his rage even shattering the head he had been sculpting.

  The next visitor must have been even less welcome. The paper's Polish correspondent, unwilling, it seemed, to return to Poland, arrived on the doorstep with two trunks full of books and papers and no other visible means of support. Katherine did nothing to turn him away, but the place was poisoned. From this potentially disastrous situation they were rescued by a different disaster. The publishing house of ‘Stephen Swift’ collapsed and Granville fled abroad, having increased the print order for Rhythm and leaving a debt of £150 (he was later arrested in Tangier and charged with fraud and bigamy).

  Katherine and Murry hurried to London to try to sort things out, leaving Floryan in sole possession of Runcton for the moment. The printers were proposing to sue for their money, convinced that Murry could easily raise it; a solicitor engaged to help them come to an arrangement managed only to run up another large bill for his unavailing services. Katherine then engaged to pay her allowance directly to the printers. She and Murry were intent on saving Rhythm. This meant finding another publisher, which they did without too much difficulty: Martin Seeker, keen to build up a list of new writers, proved very willing. Meanwhile, Edward Marsh advanced them money with his usual generosity, and said he would pay the salary of an editorial assistant, who was to be Wilfred Gibson (his poems appeared regularly from then on). Other influential figures, including Wells, promised to help with money or contributions; no one in the literary world likes to see a small magazine shipwrecked.

  Something was to be salvaged then, but the dream life by the salt marsh was not. Katherine had hoped briefly that she was pregnant, but now found this was only part of the dream. Maples was invited to repossess itself of all the new furniture. Even the Gray's Inn Road flat had to be given up. The two tigers moved stoically into one room in Chancery Lane, with only a camp bed, two chairs and a packing case. At least there was no room for Floryan. Returning to Runcton for a final clear-out, they gave him some money and devoutly hoped he would disappear. They had enjoyed little more than a month in the country.

  The first Seeker Rhythm contained some items of personal significance to its editors. One, Harold Monro's ‘Overheard on a Salt Marsh’, was a sad reminder of the marshes at Runcton; it was also one of the best poems to appear in the magazine, and was later much anthologized, and memorized by innumerable schoolchildren. From Gilbert Cannan came a plea for divorce reform that sat rather oddly among the literary contributions; and at the end appeared a review of a novel which had been out for some months, The Trespasser, by D. H. Lawrence. The review was almost certainly the work of Goodyear, and it failed utterly to take note of the striking originality and brilliance of Lawrence's gift in this book, which describes an adulterous love-affair ending in suicide; the story was substantially a true one, told to Lawrence by a woman colleague and, with her consent, turned into fiction. The condescending tone adopted by Rhythm's reviewer, who attacked Lawrence for being insufficiently objective and for his morbid psychology, is altogether beside the point and would seem a bad portent for relations between Lawrence and the magazine; but, in fact, Lawrence wrote to his friend and adviser Edward Garnett from Lake Garda inquiring ‘if Rhythm would take any of my sketches or stories’.12

  Lawrence, then twenty-eight years old, was a miner's son from the Midlands, a slight, arrestingly bold-faced young man with vulnerable lungs; there was tuberculosis in his family. He had been a pupil-teacher, a clerk and a scholarship winner, prodigiously quick to learn and prodigiously well read in the English and French classics. From the time of his studies at Nottingham University, he had rejected the chapel faith of his forebears, expressing the view that there should be more ‘thou shalt’ and less ‘thou shalt not’ in moral teaching. In 1908 he had found a teaching post in Croydon, and was already determined to become a professional writer; Hueffer and the English Review had given him his first encouragement, and Edward Garnett became his editor for his early novels. His background was totally different from Katherine's but he shared with her a rebelliousness, a bold curiosity, a belief in his own powers and an intense delight in the natural world. He had told his first sweetheart, Jessie Chambers, that he needed to be happy in order to write, and that ‘I think a man puts everything he is into a book’.13

  Lawrence had finished his third, and greatest, novel (described in a letter as ‘my novel Sons and Lovers – autobiography’) and was awaiting its publication in the new year, together with a volume of poems. The previous spring he had eloped with Frieda Weekley, taking her from her husband and three children, first visiting her family in G
ermany and then wandering south, alternating between ecstatic happiness and quarrels over her misery at the separation from the children. To Lawrence, life on the Continent was a revelation, and he hoped to be able to go on earning his living as a writer, and not be forced back into teaching. In January Katherine wrote to him in Italy, sending him a copy of Rhythm and asking him to contribute; and he agreed.

  A literary supplement was planned, in which Murry was to write on Baudelaire, and Cannan on Chekhov, who was just beginning to be noticed in England, following a performance of The Cherry Orchard which had baffled most of the audience but entranced a select few. Someone had to be found to review the first volume of Georgian Poetry, anthologized by Rhythm's patron Edward Marsh. John Drinkwater declined (probably because he was in it) but Lawrence (who was also in it) agreed, and sent a rhapsodic ‘review’ that must have puzzled the editors if they were expecting a sober assessment of the merits of Masefield, W. H. Davies, Walter de la Mare, Rupert Brooke, John Drinkwater and W. W. Gibson:

  Life is like an orange tree, always in leaf and bud, in blossom and fruit… What are the Georgian poets, nearly all, but just bursting into a thick blaze of being?… We believe in the love that is happy ever after, progressive as life itself… If I take my whole, passionate, spiritual and physical love to the woman who in return loves me, that is how I serve God. And my hymn and my game of joy is my work. All of which I read in the Anthology of Georgian Poetry.14