Katherine Mansfield

by Claire Tomalin

  Murry cannot be blamed for his ignorance of Katherine's actual experience (‘you… have got through without hurting yourself’), although it must have taken exceptional obtuseness to be as unaware of it as he was. His encouragement to her to think that she was somehow a genius simply by ‘being wonderfully what you are’ is culpably stupid, as is his nervous suggestion that she was both above right and wrong and yet at the same time wicked; but evidently the last suggestion, that only he could provide the right conditions for the ‘real’ and ‘good’ Katherine to flourish, did find a measure of response in her.

  Her letters grew more affectionate; descriptions of walks along the banks of the Seine and meals taken alone replace the Montmartre parties, and in this benign state she began work on a new story, which she planned as a novel. It was called ‘The Aloe’, and was the germ of ‘Prelude’. She also, for good measure, wrote flirtatiously to Kot; you can feel her determination to keep this new admirer on the leash as she coyly describes the pretty violet corset she has bought herself, fantasizes about a house far away in which ‘we’ might sit on the balcony in the evenings, smoking and drinking tea, tells him he is ‘one of my people’, and signs herself ‘Kissienka’, a name reserved for him: poor Kot, with his head too big for his body and his heart sometimes bigger than his good sense.

  At the end of March she was again in London, but she hated Murry's rooms in Elgin Crescent, and April passed in dissatisfaction. She returned to France for the third time in as many months and reinstalled herself in Carco's sunny flat; by day she enjoyed the blossoming trees and warm weather, and worked hard on her book: ‘Ça marche, ça va, ça se dessine; it's good’.31 By night she dreamed: of Rupert Brooke, news of whose death had just reached England, striking a chill into them all, and of Murry, improbably ‘dressed in khaki – very handsome and happy’.32

  Lawrence told Kot he found her letters from Paris ‘jarring as the sound of a saw’.33 He was going through trials of his own, being pursued to pay the costs of Frieda's divorce, unable to extract the full amount of his advance from Methuen, and in a state of quarrelsome crisis with David Garnett and his Cambridge and Bloomsbury friends. Lawrence had suddenly become aware of their tendency towards homosexuality, and reacted with mixed disgust and fascination; he found the idea loathsome, but he could not leave it alone. Murry, meanwhile, was moving into the position of favourite disciple. His dislike of Frieda had grown to such proportions that he wrote to Katherine in mid May, saying he planned to take Lawrence away for a summer holiday in which he would ‘see if I can urge him to the point of leaving her’.34 ‘I have an idea that he might be happy were he away with me for a bit, because he would know that I was loving him,’ he continued, to which Katherine responded very sharply with a short note: ‘Fancy GIVING YOURSELF UP to LOVING someone for a fortnight.’35 She began and ended with references to her rheumatism – ‘I am ill and alone voilà tout’ – and a day or two later she was back in London again.

  Murry was prevailed on to leave Elgin Crescent, and in June they moved to a small stucco house in Acacia Road, St John's Wood; Katherine was delighted to have a garden and an attic-study of her own (Murry was always inclined to think she could work in the living-room). The Campbells moved into a nearby house, and in August the Lawrences arrived in the Vale of Health, in Hampstead, and there were plans to hatch a new magazine, to be called Signature. Lawrence was counting on the publication of The Rainbow in September to bring him a pot of gold, as he put it, and his faith in Murry's powers led him to tell Ottoline that his disciple would in due course surpass him.

  Leslie Beauchamp, now at Aldershot, came to Acacia Road in August and September; Katherine and he sat talking over memories of Wellington together, and she was inspired to write a short, nostalgic sketch called ‘The Wind Blows’, which appeared in Signature's first issue (on 4 October). Her much sharper, longer story, based on her escapade with Carco, remained unpublished; perhaps she and Murry judged it simply too indiscreet about her and about the war. News came of another death in France, that of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. He was twenty-four.

  All through September Lawrence was busy and excited about Signature, which was to contain Murry's essays on ‘personal freedom, what it means to feel free in my own soul’, Katherine's sketches, and Lawrence's ideas on ‘impersonal freedom, the freedom of me in relation to all the world’.36 He tried to persuade Bertrand Russell and Cannan to contribute also, and to sell by subscription; it was to be printed in the East End, and the contributors were to have a club room in Bloomsbury for regular meetings and discussions.

  As it turned out, only three issues appeared, two in October and one in November, and the club hardly got going. At the end of September Lawrence brought Katherine and Murry a prepublication copy of The Rainbow, lovingly inscribed to them both. How they responded is not on record, but on 5 October Lawrence called again with the first review the book had received, from Robert Lynd in the Daily News, and sat watching them as they read it. Lynd said the book was ‘windy, tedious, boring and nauseating’, a waste of its author's powers, and specifically drew attention to the lesbian episode by likening the book to Diderot's La Religieuse (with which it certainly has nothing else in common). After this, other reviewers went in to the kill: Clement Shorter also picked out the lesbian theme and the chapter ‘Shame’, and another critic said the book betrayed the young men at the front. The publishers did nothing to defend their author from police intervention. There was a prosecution, and the book was ordered to be destroyed. It was a shameful episode from which Lawrence never really recovered.

  We have only Murry's testimony that Katherine ‘hated’ parts of The Rainbow, especially its ‘glorification of the secret, intimate talk between women, the sexual understanding of the female confraternity, which Katherine could not abide’.37 It is easy to see that Murry might have wanted her to feel this, but, in fact, she appears to have said nothing to Lawrence; and to have remained on good terms with him. Then, suddenly, literary questions were eclipsed for her. News came that Leslie, who had recently crossed the Channel, had been blown up while giving grenade instruction, on 7 October.

  She reacted in bursts of bitter grief, alternating, naturally enough, with fits of frenetic gaiety. She continued to see friends and go out, and we know, for instance, that she attended a party given by Gertler's friend Brett in her Hampstead studio, where she took Lytton Strachey's fancy, attracted a dinner invitation from Mary Hutchinson* and met and admired Carrington.38 Sometimes she was hostile to Murry, but then suddenly she carried him off abroad in the middle of November. They were to go to the south of France; Murry acquired a new certificate of exemption from Army service on grounds of health, and the house was passed on to a friend of Kot's.

  Like many travellers, they expected the Mediterranean coast to be perpetually warm and sunny, and were taken aback by the cold. Marseilles gave Murry food poisoning, and he hated their first hotel in Cassis, although Katherine wrote to Kot that she liked the place and was happy. Murry wrote too and she instructed Kot to ‘ignore the conjugal “we”’, saying it had no meaning for her.39 They moved on to Bandol, and by then ‘my little John Bull Murry’ had had enough.40 He said he wanted to buy a printing press, and returned to the metropolitan literary life where he thrived best, and where he soon received an invitation to Garsington for Christmas. It had been engineered by Lawrence.

  Katherine, for all her boasting to Kot of her single pride, was within a week again reduced to a state of shattered dependence on Murry. He had left believing her to be comfortably installed in the Hôtel Beau Rivage, and happy, and then, as if by malign magic, the coolly independent Mansfield disappeared. Letters suddenly became a lifeline for her, an umbilical cord through which reassurance – that she was loved and needed, that Murry was planning their future together, that he missed her – had to be pumped steadily. For her, letter-writing was never a problem. She could produce sheets every day, minutely observant, sometimes funny, sometimes lyrical, but then also reproachful
, agonized, alternating declarations of perfect love with flashes of disappointment, jealousy and rage. His replies were irregular, less frequent, less detailed and shorter. Proudly as he published most of hers after her death, he must have shrunk from them at times when they first reached him, sometimes several in a day, inexorably reminding him of her loneliness, her ill health, her needs. He reacted with guilty confusion to this punishment. When he promised to come and join her, she would tell him not to, yet she could not help painting pictures of the ideal happiness they might enjoy together if only he were at her side.

  All this, soon to become the standard pattern of their life, was now just beginning. Katherine was, of course, already chronically ill long before tuberculosis was established, and it is possible that, if her health had been good, she might have been able to make the break with Murry that half of her being desired. But with the fever, sore throat, ‘dysentery’ and above all rheumatism she went down with as soon as he left, so that she was confined to bed, her imagination turned to Murry at once. When she did not hear from him as fast as she expected to, she fired off a passionate letter of despair to Lawrence, who then attacked Murry in person, telling him he should not have left her alone, and suggesting that her illness was entirely due to his bad behaviour in ‘always whining & never making a decision’.41 Unfair as this may have been, Lawrence also took the trouble to send her a loving letter in which he did not mention his own troubles, but returned to the idea that they might form a community together. He and Frieda were going to borrow a small house in St Merryn, where Katherine and Murry had spent their 1914 holiday; they were there by the end of December, and wrote to Katherine kindly again early in January. Murry, meanwhile, had rushed to the Foreign Office to get his passport endorsed again, so that he could return to France. First, however, he spent Christmas at Garsington, installed in a cottage, going for walks with Lytton Strachey and Clive Bell, and rather pleased with the impression he was making:

  they seem to be rather deferential to what I say… I've come to the conclusion that the reason for it all is that they have a suspicion that between you and me there is actually happening that incredible thing called a grande passion… And I imagine that something of the glamour of it hangs about me nowadays.42

  For Murry, everything in life had to be turned into literature; even his feeling for Katherine was an occasion for self-congratulation because it interested (supposedly) the members of a new, distinguished group of people to whom he had been introduced. Clearly, he had no inkling that he was saying something that makes one quiver with embarrassment on his behalf.

  Katherine forgot about her rage and loneliness as her health improved. She wrote to Kot, saying how happy she was, and sent Murry conflicting telegrams, but also a description of the ‘perfect villa’ she had found for them just outside Bandol:

  It stands alone in a small garden with terraces. It faces the ‘midi’ & gets the sun all day long. It has a stone verandah & little round table where we can sit & eat or work… It is very private and stands high on the top of a hill. It is called the Villa Pauline.43

  She saw their perfect life together in her mind's eye, and on the last day of the year, having received his telegram to say he was coming, she ordered food, wine and wood for the stove.

  All the windows are open – all the doors – the linen is airing. I went to the flower market and stood among the buyers and bought wholesale you know, at the auction in a state of lively terrified joy 3 dozen rose buds and 6 bunches of violets.44

  He arrived on the first day of January. The spring flowers had begun to appear and the sea was showing its required Mediterranean blue in the sunshine. While the war waged to the north and thousands of young men followed Katherine's brother to the grave, she and Murry settled down to the most peaceful months of their life together.

  They were in many ways happy, he writing his Dostoevsky book on one side of the table, she for the first six weeks worrying about whether the impulse to write had died in her. Late in January she wrote in her journal that she wanted to try poetry and some sort of elegy for her brother, and thought she might keep ‘a kind of minute notebook, to be published some day’.45 By the middle of February she had done nothing, but then she took out what she had written in Paris the previous spring, ‘The Aloe’, and saw that it could be made into what she wanted to do; she started work, the weather grew cold and windy, and they sat by the fire, writing together all day. Their health was in equilibrium and, during this brief, confident period, Katherine noted her intention ‘to make enough money to be able to give [Ida] some. In fact, I want to provide for her.’46 She knew she was doing good work and, full of the sense of her own powers finding fulfilment, she wished to make provision for her ‘wife’, even while she enjoyed the company of her ‘husband’.

  The nature of their happiness together is caught in a phrase she used to him when, on a two-day visit to Marseilles to see her widowed sister Chaddie in March, she sent him loving letters. (It is worth noting that, for Katherine, letters were an end in themselves: she never hesitated to write them even when she would be seeing the recipient before they could possibly arrive.) Dwelling fondly on their good times at the Villa Pauline, she said, ‘I feel we are about 15 today – just children. You and I don't live like grown up people, you know.’47 She went on to console him that the Army ‘wont catch you’, as he feared it would, after Verdun. No doubt Chaddie was given a different version.

  They had been exchanging letters with the Lawrences, telling them how happy they were and receiving his warm pleasure in their happiness; ‘Cari miei ragazzi (My dear children), he addressed them. Only he lamented his own ill health, which made him miserable through the cold winter. Why did they not make plans to live together in the spring, he again asked. Katherine wrote to Ottoline (whom she had barely met, but who had lent Murry £5 for his journey south), telling her they planned to spend the summer with the Lawrences in a farmhouse near the sea, and later she wrote to Frieda saying how glad she was they would all be together. To Murry's friend Goodyear she wrote enthusiastically about England too, complaining now about the poverty of French cooking and the discomfort of French houses. Consistency was not her chief characteristic: no wonder Murry was often confused. But there is no doubt that she was in favour of the plan with the Lawrences. He wrote twice, insisting that he had no wish to bind them to any house-sharing arrangement, and Katherine then sent a telegram of her own to say she was definitely coming. She also wrote independently to him and he, anxious not to mislead her about the charms of Cornwall, said in his next letter to them both, ‘Do let the winter be gone, before Katherine comes to England.’48 He knew from the winter of 1914 that she feared the cold winds and the damp as he did, and he was tender towards her. When he found two cottages standing together, he hoped they would come to the bigger one with a high room which he christened ‘Katherine's tower’.

  So, at the beginning of April, warm from the Mediterranean spring, her happy, boyish lover at her side, her grief for her brother put behind her, the manuscript of ‘The Aloe’ in her bag, Katherine left France for Cornwall where, only eighteen months earlier, she and Murry had tried in vain to find a cottage in which to settle, and where now their dearest friends had found one for them. Frieda wrote to Katherine,

  I am so looking forward to your coming and to show you this place… I am so anxious now to live without any more soul harrassing [sic], we are friends and we wont bother anymore about the deep things, they are all right, just let's live like the lilies in the field.49

  This was charming; but Frieda also felt obliged to warn them that Lawrence had had a really bad time (‘Some of the wonder of the world has gone for him’), and for Katherine too the omens were not entirely good. In Marseilles, she had again suffered from a fever: ‘I shivered and my blood buzzed as though bees swarmed in my heart’.50 Her sickness, unnamed but chronic, was as closely woven into the fabric of her life as any friend or lover.

  11

  Cornwall 1916:
‘A Whole Spring Full of Blue-Bells’

  The north coast of Cornwall near Zennor is a bleak, barren and windswept place. In full sunshine the sea turns deep blue and green and peacock-coloured, and the coves with surrounding rocks and cliffs make perfect bathing places, isolated and romantic, with the tide crashing in and pouring out again to leave smoothly washed sand. But it is a treacherous sea – many ships are wrecked along that coast – and treacherous weather, turning black and terrifying in a moment. Snow was falling in March 1916, and into April the coast was shrouded in mist for days at a time. Still, Lawrence busied himself setting up his little community.

  The group of cottages he had found was called ‘Higher Tregerthen’ and stood about five miles north of St Ives; they belonged to a Captain John Short, who was prepared to let them cheaply. The Lawrences took a one-up, one-down stone structure at £5 a year for themselves, and sent sketches and descriptions of the more substantial building standing at right angles to theirs, which Short had previously converted for another writer, to Katherine and Murry. Its rent was £16 a year, and ‘Mrs Murry’ was to be the tenant. It was made up of three cottages in a row, with three doors opening into kitchen, dining-room and study at ground-floor level; above were bedrooms, the room over the study being known as the tower room, with big windows and panelled walls. This was to be Katherine's domain, set as far as possible from the kitchen, and accessible only through the downstairs study. It seemed a good place in which to work. ‘There is a little grassy terrace outside, and at the back, the moor tumbles down, great enormous boulders and gorse.’1