Katherine Mansfield

by Claire Tomalin

  Back in London, uneasy himself and aware of Katherine's dissatisfactions, Murry wrote to Lawrence – who was happily installed in a small pink house in the bay of Spezia – seeking advice both as to his relations with Katherine and his own future. Murry would not consider going to Italy, but he did want to try living somewhere abroad; yet he was perpetually anxious about money, whereas Lawrence had the divine capacity of living for the moment and trusting a few pounds would turn up before he and Frieda starved. Then too Lawrence had published three novels, as well as poems and stories, and his work was in demand, whereas Murry had nothing to show for the past few years but his degree, some experience of running a magazine that failed, and a mass of hack book reviewing which he was beginning to loathe. True, Martin Secker had now commissioned a book on Dostoevsky from him, and he also had the chance of a teaching job in a small German university; but what tempted him most was the idea of living in Paris, where he felt fairly confident that he could earn something in the literary line. In his letter to Lawrence, he explained that Katherine needed ‘little luxuries’ and that he felt worn out trying to earn enough for them. Lawrence replied to Murry in a long and wonderful tirade (of which this is only a small part):

  she doesn't want you to sacrifice yourself to her, you fool. Be more natural, and positive, and stick to your own guts. You spread them out on a tray for her to throw to the cats. If you want things to come right – if you are ill, and exhausted, then take her money to the last penny, and let her do her own house-work. Then she'll know you love her. You can't blame her if she's not satisfied with you… A woman unsatisfied must have luxuries. But a woman who loves a man would sleep on a board… Get up, lad, and be a man for yourself. It's the man who dares to take, who is independent, not he who gives. I think Oxford did you harm…10

  Lawrence obviously enjoyed giving advice from his position of impregnable authority as the elected consort of an older, experienced woman; and he may have underestimated how difficult Katherine could be. At different times during the autumn she was unwell; or she was pursuing work as a film extra, but finding the experience too grim to carry on with; or, according to Ida, experimenting with hashish; or taking refuge in Ida's room in order to be alone; or indulging in what the Campbells called ‘Dostoevsky nights’, when they sat up late drinking and there were displays of emotion. It was on one such occasion that Katherine burst into tears and declared she was a ‘soiled woman’. Murry, for all his talk of the artistic temperament, could never cope with her wild bouts. There is something of the small boy whining in his appeal to Lawrence; but Lawrence understood Katherine better than he did, and his advice was probably good, even if Murry was incapable of taking it.

  As for where they were going to live, he and Katherine now agreed on Paris. Murry visited the editor of The Times Literary Supplement, Bruce Richmond, who promised him he could review French books, and they persuaded themselves they could live much more cheaply in France than in England. In December they borrowed some money from Katherine's sister Vera, who happened to be in London, and commandeered all Ida's furniture, which was sent over to Paris; and after a few days in the Hôtel de l'Univers they moved into a flat in the rue de Tournon, which runs from the Luxembourg Gardens to the pont des Arts. Katherine wrote to her sister Chaddie to boast that she and Murry were now talking French together, and anticipating much happiness:

  The weather is icy, but Paris looks beautiful. Everything is white & every morning the sun shines & shines all day until it finally disappears in a pink sky. The fountains are just a bubble in their basins of ice – And now the little green Xmas booths are lining the streets – I am going to enjoy life in Paris I know.11

  And Katherine did love Paris; but Murry took fright almost immediately. He hated going to the office of The Times to request a reference for the estate agents letting the flat. He found that Carco, who was assiduous in his attentions, and other French journalists he was introduced to, were convinced that he could place their work in The Times Literary Supplement, which they insisted on seeing as some sort of official organ, for which Murry was virtually an ambassador. They offered him articles which he did not know how to turn down. Meanwhile, his own first piece (on Stendhal) was rejected by Richmond, and the six critical articles on ‘the present state of English letters’ which he toiled at for the Westminster Gazette met the same fate. Very soon he was panic-stricken at the gap between his income and their expenditure. A glimpse of Proust in a café one evening, ‘a tall slim man in black with a sickly yellow face’, a sight of Charles Péguy tying up a parcel of books in his own shop – these were thrilling, but not enough to overcome Murry's despair. In England, bankruptcy proceedings were threatening; even the patient Edward Marsh wrote to ask what was happening about the debt to the printers of Rhythm and the Blue Review.

  Friends in London came to the rescue. At the beginning of February, Spender offered Murry the job of art critic at £5 a week, and Gordon Campbell offered to put him up while he came to London to consider it. Once he was in London, Gordon advised him well about the impending bankruptcy; Murry went to the official receiver, explained how things were, and found officialdom sympathetic.

  There was obviously no point in going back to Paris, although Katherine wrote that the weather was deliciously springlike and was clearly not eager to leave at first. Goodyear turned up to visit her in February, and Carco was about; and it may have been at this time that she began to read Colette, whose novels about the conflict between love and independence in women's lives, La Vagabonde and L'Entrave, appeared in 1910 and 1913, and were certainly known to her (in November 1914 she reread L'Entrave and wrote, ‘I don't care a fig for anyone I know except her’ [i.e., Colette]).12 Colette's success on stage, her bisexuality and her acquaintance with the demi-monde were all likely to have interested her, and her vision may have played its part in Katherine's falling in love with France itself, although none of this was shared with Murry. While he took against France, she was drawn all her life to the beauty of French skies, townscapes and countryside, the ‘warm sensational life’ - a phrase she applied to Carco later, when she fancied herself in love with him. He disappointed her, but the idea of France remained powerfully enticing, and she wrote loving descriptions of it until the end of her life, her sense of pleasure as intense as Colette's, if more precarious. But now it was time to beat a retreat. Murry came back and Carco helped him to sell Ida's furniture (the only buyers he could find were brothel-owners). Katherine gave Carco a few souvenirs, ‘an egg-timer which charmed him and some odd little pieces like that’,13 which Ida must have heard with mixed feelings. They returned to England with little more than their books. Even Katherine's overcoat was stolen by the femme de ménage as a parting gesture and, to add to the doom-laden atmosphere, the concierge died as they moved out.

  The next four months were the bleakest Katherine and Murry had yet spent together. They had to borrow from Gordon Campbell to pay for a borrowed, furnished flat in Chelsea, while Katherine looked for cheap rooms (10s a week was what they thought they could manage); and Murry prepared himself for his new job as art critic for the Westminster Gazette. Ida was due to leave for Rhodesia again, this time on a more permanent basis, at the end of March, and on the same day Murry had his bankruptcy hearing. Katherine worried about money and went for long walks with Ida, revisiting the streets around Queen's nostalgically. She found her friend oppressive, but knew she would miss her and noted in her journal her awareness of the extraordinary quality of Ida's devotion and her own lack of response; except that, when Ida dressed her for an evening out, she felt ‘hung with wreaths’.14 Then she began to dream of New Zealand, and there were other twitches of memory. At a concert with Beatrice Campbell she fancied the violinist looked like Garnet; the crocuses in Battersea Park made her think of Bavaria in autumn. She worried about her writing becoming ‘pretty-pretty’, with some reason, for the only story that survives from this period is one of her most vapid, ‘Something Childish But Very Natural’. Both s
he and Murry were trying to produce work that would bring in money: he a novel, she a play, which she tore up.

  In April she found some rooms in Edith Grove, Fulham, which seemed just possible, in spite of a squalid communal staircase; they furnished them with a table and two chairs, and a mattress on the floor, and settled down miserably. Then Murry had an attack of pleurisy, and as soon as he recovered she collapsed in turn, with a galloping heart on top of the pleurisy. A decent doctor, seeing how things were, looked after them for nothing; and another friend got Murry the offer of a job in the Imperial Library in St Petersburg. While they thought this one over – and it is tempting to speculate on what might have happened had they set off for Russia just then – the Lawrences arrived back from Italy to be married. They went to stay with the Campbells. The Murrys were impatient to see them again. It was the end of June 1914.

  10

  1914: ‘Other People, Other Things’

  The return of Lawrence and Frieda in June 1914 delighted Katherine and Murry, and for the next two years Lawrence was a dominant figure in their lives. They were to spend a great deal of their time together, swapping friends, planning magazines, setting up club rooms and communal living arrangements, talking, quarrelling, scolding and complaining, both to each other's faces and behind one another's backs. It was during these years that Katherine probably told Frieda and Lawrence things about her New Zealand girlhood she did not tell Murry and that, as we have seen, Lawrence used in The Rainbow; and that she also unconsciously became, in part, a model for a character in Women in Love. Although their affection was deeply riven by malice, misunderstanding and bad behaviour, in essence it survived, and was reasserted before their deaths.

  For the moment Murry, at any rate, felt the contrast between their respective fortunes painfully. Frieda was now free to marry Lawrence, whereas Katherine had no divorce in prospect, as Bowden had gone to America with nothing resolved between them. Lawrence had been offered an advance of £300 by Methuen for his next novel, while Murry was struggling hopelessly with his first, Still Life (the title is apt enough) and had become almost entirely dependent on Katherine's allowance, which her father had providentially raised to £120 a year. Beauchamp always disliked Murry and regarded him as a scrounger, in contrast with his other sons-in-law, all of whom earned good salaries and supported their wives properly, as men were expected to do. Katherine was writing nothing and had been trying to find work as an actress, but there too had failed. In one of Murry's reminiscences of the period, he writes of ‘the enchanted and irrecoverable paradise of before the war’,1 but elsewhere records how, when the Lawrences came to supper in their wretched lodgings in Edith Grove, Katherine burst out with complaints against their squalor. After their guests had gone, she and Murry sat up half the night quarrelling about this ‘betrayal’.2

  The next day they agreed they would look for something better and found a flat they liked the look of, still in Chelsea; but here again disaster struck. The rooms were infested with bugs, and they were obliged to wage secret war with paraffin and sulphur, too mortified to tell anyone about their problem. (Lawrence and Frieda would undoubtedly have laughed and come to their aid in an entirely practical way.) Katherine gallantly tried to make a joke of it in private, by suggesting that they should imagine they were Russians, who would presumably take bugs more easily in their stride. Later, Murry was to say Lawrence accused him of being a blood-sucking bug; poor, respectable Murry, it was a more hurtful gibe than Lawrence knew.

  The two women were especially close at this time. With Ida away in Africa, Katherine had no other woman friend to confide in. The gloss had gone from her life with Murry, now that he was no longer an editor but simply a struggling, ill-paid art critic, and his loss of confidence in himself was not good for either of them. Frieda too was in an agonized state about her children. She thought of bringing her mother over from Germany to support her claim that she should at least be allowed to see them. As it was, when one day she approached them in the street, their aunt shrieked, ‘Run, children, run,’ and they obeyed with frightened faces; and when Frieda tried to address her ex-husband on the subject, he told her she was worse than a prostitute. However one may judge Frieda, this was less than Christian behaviour, and Katherine was very naturally full of sympathy.

  Also on Frieda's behalf, perhaps, she took a somewhat guarded view of Lawrence's other women friends. When they were all invited to Hampstead for a picnic with two, Catherine Jackson (later Carswell) and Ivy Low, and Katherine saw them running enthusiastically down the hill towards Lawrence, skirts flapping and calling out greetings, she turned tail and fled back to the underground station, muttering, ‘I can't stand that,’ with Murry in tow, protesting ineffectually.3 It was a pity, because they were both highly interesting and able women, but the whole Low connection aroused Katherine's tendency to mock. Ivy's aunt Edith was married to David Eder, who had turned from his New Age theorizing to another field, setting up as one of the first British psychoanalysts. Sons and Lovers being so clearly a study of the Oedipus complex, Eder was interested in Lawrence; and, although he never accepted Freud's doctrines, the two men became friends and there was much earnest talk of sex. The Katherine who had shocked Beatrice Campbell by talking brazenly about who went to bed with whom had now grown more reticent; or perhaps the whole subject seemed less amusing after two years with Murry, and she became caustic at the expense of the Freudians.

  Her flippancy did not prevent Lawrence and Frieda from inviting her with Murry to their wedding on the morning of 13 July at Kensington Registry Office in Marloes Road. Lawrence had first wanted Edward Marsh and an old teaching colleague as witnesses, but they were unavailable; so he fell back on his host, Campbell, and Murry. The men put on formal three-piece suits, Frieda enveloped herself in flowing silks, Katherine wore a sombre suit and another of her black hats, and all of them piled into a cab early on Monday morning. On the way, they suddenly realized that Lawrence had not yet bought a wedding-ring, and they had to stop while he hurried into a goldsmith's for one. This was the moment when Frieda took off her old, ill-omened ring and gave it to Katherine. She wore it in preference to any other for the rest of her life.

  ‘I don't feel a changed man, but I suppose I am one,’ wrote Lawrence,4 and made preparations to visit his sister in Derbyshire, leaving Frieda to pursue the question of the children. Lawrence had mixed feelings about being lionized in London. Murry was exasperated by Frieda's sublime indifference to her husband's appearance at social gatherings (he had to wear a dress suit to H. G. Wells's, and it did not flatter him); she took the view that he was simply a great man; but Murry felt an almost proprietorial concern for Lawrence's dignity. On another evening, the Lawrences took Murry and Katherine to a dinner in Soho organized by David Garnett to bring his Bloomsbury friends into the same orbit: a gesture of friendliness with many repercussions.

  The Lawrences planned to return to the continent in October. Meanwhile, he went north with some men friends for a walking-tour, and Murry and Katherine tried to organize a holiday of their own. Hearing of a cheap schoolmistress's cottage at St Merryn, near Padstow in Cornwall, they decided to go at the end of August. Then, on the fourth, taking them all by surprise, war was declared.

  Lawrence was sick at heart, not only because of his German wife and in-laws, but also because his escape abroad was now cut off. He came hurrying to London. Murry and Katherine were stunned and did not know what to feel.

  We drifted about London, bought newspapers, read them in tea shops; in the evening we swirled with the crowds from one embassy to another, were caught in strange momentary eddies of mass emotion, and flung aside, bewildered. We were neither for the war, nor against it. To be for or against a thing, it must belong to one's world; and this was not in ours.5

  Both were moved by the sight of the departing regiments as they stood in the hot, dusty night outside Green Park, and the next day, inspired by an old friend, he rushed off to Putney to enlist in a cycle battalion. He began to
have doubts on the bus back to Chelsea, and when he got home and told Katherine she would have to go to Cornwall alone, she refused. Murry decided he must have a holiday after all and, having failed to interest the Army in this idea, went to his own doctor, who kindly wrote him a note saying ‘Query TB.’ This set him free again at once and, feeling better, he called on his parents for the first time since the brawl at Clovelly Mansions. He and his father quarrelled over the question of German guilt, but at least they had their private armistice.

  A week after the start of the war, Lawrence, back in Selwood Terrace, invited Katherine and Murry to the Café Royal to meet a new friend, Koteliansky. Kot, as he became to all his friends – his full name was Samuel Solomonovich Koteliansky – was a Ukrainian Jewish law student who had come to England from Kiev with a scholarship in 1911 and remained, partly for political reasons, partly for sheer love of England, earning his living precariously as a translator. He was hampered by a very poor command of English, but helped in due course by many admiring collaborators (including Katherine). A serious and passionate man, generous to chosen friends, he took strongly to Lawrence, who reciprocated fully; in his invitation, he referred rather grandly to Murry and Katherine as ‘two little friends’.6 Perhaps this was insufficient inducement, for the introduction was postponed.