Katherine Mansfield

by Claire Tomalin

  Lawrence's delight in planning for Katherine shines out of his letters, even if there was an element of self-interest involved. His suggestion that a maid hired by them in common would prepare meals, which would be held in Katherine's house, would make things just about possible for him and Frieda in their cottage. Neither place had running water or inside sanitation, but he carefully arranged to have a privy moved so as not to offend Katherine, the ladylike member of the group (Frieda was indifferent to such things). He also insisted on damp-sealing and new white and colour washes, to please her. His descriptions of the site show how enthusiastic he became:

  It is a most beautiful place: a tiny granite village nestling under high, shaggy moor-hills, and a big sweep of lovely sea beyond, such a lovely sea, lovelier even than the Mediterranean. It is 5 miles from St Ives, and 7 miles from Penzance. To Penzance one goes over the moors, high, then down into Mounts Bay, looking at St Michaels Mount, like a dark little jewel. It is all gorse now, flickering with flower; and then it will be heather; and then, hundreds of fox gloves. It is the best place I have been in, I think.2

  Katherine shared his love of flowers, and her first letters after she arrived speak of the primroses, bluebells and violets growing by the creek that ran near their house and down to the sea; and later she gave this description of the atmosphere of the place to Virginia Woolf:

  Perhaps the house itself is very imperfect in many ways but there is a something – which makes one long for it. Immediately you get there – you are free, free as air. You hang up your hat on a nail & the house is furnished – It is a place where you sit on the stairs & watch the lovely light inhabiting the room below. After nightfall the house has three voices – If you are in the tower and someone comes from the far cottage – he comes from far away – You go by the edge of the fields to Katie Berryman's for bread. You walk home along the rim of the Atlantic with the big fresh loaf – & when you arrive the house is like a ship. I mustn't talk about it – It bewitched me –3

  To Brett, at the end of her life, she also recalled, ‘I had a whole spring full of blue-bells one year with Lawrence. I shall never forget it. And it was warm, not very sunny, the shadows raced over the silky grass and the cuckoos sang.’4 Frieda remembered walks on sunny days to Zennor, and a calm time when they all went out in a boat and sang together, ‘Row, row, row your boat’.

  Despite such sweet memories, Murry says Katherine fell into gloom as soon as they reached Cornwall on 7 April and found they had to spend ten days at the Tinner's Arms in Zennor, waiting for their cottage to be quite ready; and within a month she was writing letters that indicate how cross she felt at the situation she now found herself in.

  She described days in which Murry and Lawrence disappeared into the mist with their rucksacks on their backs, while she lay alone beside a fire in her tower, like Mariana, smoking and listening to the sound of her maid at work in the kitchen. She had stopped writing. Her health was not improved by the Cornish damp. She also attributed some of her unhappiness to the bleak, stony landscape, but there was a more personal reason underlying this. Instead of being absorbed in writing and love games, with Murry entirely in thrall to her, she began to fear that she might become the odd one out in the foursome.

  Lawrence struck her as changed, his moods alternating between a rather suspect ‘feminine’ gentleness in which he sewed and painted little pictures, and bouts of rage in which he beat the table and abused everybody indiscriminately, out of control and sometimes almost mad. ‘After one of these attacks he's ill with fever, haggard and broken,’ she wrote to Beatrice Campbell.5 Although he himself had warned her, ‘I myself am always on the brink of another collapse’,6 she either did not understand how precarious his health had become, or did not wish to. Only later, when tuberculosis attacked her as well, did she recognize the same propensity to rage in herself.

  Of Frieda too she now had not a friendly word to say. She complained even of her domesticity, irritated by her habit of washing clothes with a good deal of gusto in huge tubs of water. No doubt it was a necessary process, but nothing Frieda did was right. She was a ‘huge German pudding’ – Katherine always jeered at fat – and had absorbed, like an ogress, the real, dear Lawrence they had known into herself. Katherine particularly objected to Frieda's talk of sex symbols; in exasperation, the younger woman suggested that the Lawrences' cottage be renamed ‘The Phallus’, which Frieda good humouredly ‘thought a very good idea’.7 Frieda admired Katherine for her fastidiousness, saying later,

  If I had to describe her in one word I would choose the word exquisite. She was exquisite in her person: soft shiny brown hair and delicately grained skin, not tall and not small and not thin nor stout, just right. When we went bathing I thought her as pretty as a statuette.8

  Evidently the wild young Katherine, once so intent on sexual gratification, had now subdued herself. She believed that her relationship with Murry was all the better for being a form of child-love, and his temperament went along easily with this. The two tigers had turned out to be kittens. Katherine told Beatrice that Lawrence and Frieda ‘are both too rough for me to enjoy playing with’.9

  After a few weeks she decided that she could not put up with the Lawrences at all in their current state. Her descriptions of their behaviour are uncharitable but brilliant pieces of reporting. Never has the choreography of a full-blown marital row, with every detail and bit of timing perfectly observed, been so well set out. It is as good, or better, than anything in her stories, and shows what she could do with her gloves off and no straining for effect:

  Let me tell you what happened on Friday. I went across to them for tea. Frieda said Shelleys Ode to a Skylark was false. Lawrence said: ‘You are showing off; you don't know anything about it.’ Then she began. ‘Now I have had enough. Out of my house – you little God Almighty you. Ive had enough of you. Are you going to keep your mouth shut or aren't you.’ Said Lawrence: ‘I'll give you a dab on the cheek to quiet you, you dirty hussy.’ Etc. Etc. So I left the house. At dinner time Frieda appeared. ‘I have finally done with him. It is all over for ever.’ She then went out of the kitchen & began to walk round and round the house in the dark. Suddenly Lawrence appeared and made a kind of horrible blind rush at her and they began to scream and scuffle. He beat her – he beat her to death – her head and face and breast and pulled out her hair. All the while she screamed for Murry to help her. Finally they dashed into the kitchen and round and round the table. I shall never forget how L. looked. He was so white – almost green and he just hit – thumped the big soft woman. Then he fell into one chair and she into another. No one said a word. A silence fell except for Frieda's sobs and sniffs. In a way I felt almost glad that the tension between them was over for ever – and that they had made an end of the ‘intimacy’. L. sat staring at the floor, biting his nails. Frieda sobbed. Suddenly, after a long time – about quarter of an hour – L. looked up and asked Murry a question about French literature. Murry replied. Little by little, the three drew up to the table. Then F. poured herself out some coffee. Then she and L. glided into talk, began to discuss some ‘very rich but very good macaroni cheese.’ And next day, whipped himself, and far more thoroughly than he had ever beaten Frieda, he was running about taking her up her breakfast to her bed and trimming her a hat.10

  This has the ring of exact truth; what a war reporter Katherine might have made, if only she could have found a newspaper to send her to the front. But truth seemed less in evidence when she got on to the subject of Murry. To Beatrice she painted him as a comic character, forever losing his horn-rims as he jumps over stiles. To Ottoline Morrell she wrote, ‘Murry and I are so happy together – it's like a miracle,’ but a few days earlier she had told Kot that she was planning to come to London in June and that her dissatisfactions were by no means all with the Lawrences: ‘I am very much alone here… It may all be over next month; in fact it will be. I don't belong to anyone here. In fact I have no being, but I am making preparations for changing everythin
g.’11 She was silent on the subject of Lawrence's ideas of Blutbrüderschaft, which were originally meant to include her (‘Let it be agreed forever. I am Blutbrüder: a Blutbrüderschaft between us all. Tell K. not to be so queasy.’ 12). Now, perhaps because of Katherine's earlier queasiness, the question was discussed with Murry alone, and he says he shrank back, fearing a ‘pre-Christian blood-rite’ of some kind on the moors. All this could have made rich material for the satirist in Katherine. The fact that she made no comment – in writing at any rate – but simply grew gloomy and resentful, suggests that, however timid Murry was (thus disappointing Lawrence), he was not resistant enough to Lawrence's spell to keep in her good graces either. For her, Murry was good only when entirely subject to her.

  She was, in some ways, the least innocent of the party. The two men could wander the moorland, intensely discussing the meaning of male friendship, and Murry could be drawn in and out of sentimental hero-worship; but Lawrence, for all his painful interest in the subject, and the confession of his physical attraction to certain men (made in the suppressed Prologue to Women in Love), did not practise homosexual acts, and Murry had an extreme aversion to them also; according to his friend and biographer, Frank Lea, he had been the object of an indecent assault as a schoolboy, which had left him frightened. Katherine, though, knew a good deal about bisexuality and its discontents. She said nothing; but Murry felt her anger and withdrawal.

  Once again she began considering her escape routes. Although she had scarcely met Ottoline – a large Bedford Square party hardly counted – she was now into a gushingly flattering correspondence with her. It was a well-chosen moment for establishing her own private relations with the benefactress of Garsington, because Frieda and Ottoline were at the same time quarrelling furiously by post. Ottoline confided in Murry and Katherine: Murry himself was privately begging for money from Ottoline, and he repaid the £10 she sent him with a treacherously disparaging letter to her about Lawrence and Frieda, dated 12 April, even before he moved into Higher Tregerthen.13 Lawrence alone behaved with any dignity in this mêlée with Ottoline – for the moment, at any rate.

  By late May Katherine was insisting that Murry should look for another cottage on the south coast of Cornwall, which he obediently set about. The two couples withdrew from one another, Lawrence baffled, hurt and at times angry. It was at this stage that he accused Murry of being a ‘blood-sucking bug’; but, as he wrote to Campbell, ‘Why should I not bellow, if I am of the bellowing sort?’14 Frieda took the whole thing lightly, as usual; she had known worse. They all accepted the excuse that Katherine needed a warmer climate. Yet, as soon as she was installed in ‘Sunnyside Cottage’ at Mylor, she wrote to Kot, ‘Life is so hateful now that I am quite numb.’ 15

  She prepared her assault on Garsington, characteristically inviting herself:

  May I come and stay with you on the 13th July for a few days? I have to go to London on the 8th and I should so love to come to you. Only I don't know whether you will have me – for I'll be alone – Murry can't be with me. I feel as though I have so much to tell you and talk over. Even though we have barely met – its strange – With my love to you always16

  Intimacy was thus established with a mixture of wheedling and lying, for it does not appear that Murry was consulted as to whether he could be with her or not. It seems too that she made something like an assignation with Mark Gertler at Garsington; Kot was in the secret of this, and received Gertler's complaint when he arrived at the Morrell's only to find that Katherine had stood him up and returned earlier than planned to Cornwall – and Murry – again.* Lawrence, meanwhile, had been writing to Kot about Katherine:

  I think – well, she and Jack [Murry] are not very happy – they make some sort of contract whereby each of them is free. She also talks of going to Denmark! But don't mention to her that I have told you anything. She has so many reserves – But really I think she and Jack have worn out anything that was between them – I like her better than him. He was rather horrid when he was here… [Katherine] needs to be quiet, to learn to live alone, and without external stimulant.17

  A few days later, Lawrence wrote again, telling Kot,

  When you see Katherine, tell her to write to us and send us all the news: we are thinking of her, up in London. – You are quite right about her wanderings – she wants to run away from herself – but also from Murry, which complicates matters… I do wish she could learn to be still, and alone.19

  This is the voice of a friend, full of real interest and affection. Once Katherine had left her tower, Lawrence took it over as his study, and it was from here that he wrote his letters and continued work on his new novel, in which, of course, she figures.

  Women in Love was written between April and the autumn: thus it was begun while Katherine and Lawrence were in daily contact, and finished when they were on more distant, though still friendly, terms. By common consent, not only is Hermione drawn (in part) from Ottoline, Birkin from Lawrence himself, Ursula from Frieda, but also Gerald Crich and Gudrun from Murry and Katherine. Murry denied any resemblance to himself and Katherine, detested the book and read it, in part, as an attack on his kind of love. It is true that Crich has little in common with Murry beyond a few remarks that have a ring of him, and a refusal of Blutbrüderschaft: he is the worldly son of an industrial magnate, frequenter of Bohemian circles and models, with a brutal attitude to his workforce.

  With Gudrun, it is another matter. There is no doubt that, in many respects, she is clearly based on Katherine and, except at the very end of the novel, the portrait is a warm and affectionate one: perhaps this is what Murry disliked. Gudrun is exceptionally pretty and attractive, with dark, sometimes ‘dilated’ eyes and well chosen, boldly individual clothes. She is very much admired wherever she goes; she is gifted artistically, charming, spirited, a good talker, a bit of a feminist, a bit of a cynic. Gudrun, like Katherine, is ‘a restless bird… a bird of paradise’, always liable to drop her art if anything else catches her attention, always planning to go off abroad to Russia or Munich or Rome, lacking stamina and often on the defensive. When Lawrence describes Gudrun envying the freedom of men, we can hear Katherine's voice: ‘“The freedom, the liberty, the mobility!” cried Gudrun, strangely flushed and brilliant. “You're a man, you want to do a thing, you do it. You haven't the thousand obstacles a woman has.”’20 And later, objecting that she can't simply take her clothes off to go swimming, ‘Isn't it ridiculous, doesn't it simply prevent our living!’ When she swims, and sings and dances with her sister, we can see Katherine and Frieda in their cheerful moments; when she steps into a small boat and says lightly, ‘It's lovely – like sitting in a leaf’, that is Katherine's trick of miniaturization exactly.

  a rosy room, with herself in a beautiful gown, and a handsome man in evening dress who held her in his arms in the firelight, and kissed her. This picture she entitled ‘Home’. It would have done for the Royal Academy.21

  Her self-mockery is here too, when Gudrun says on the one hand that she could not bear to be married and ‘put into a house’, and then almost immediately confesses that she has a vision of

  Novelists rarely draw exact portraits, and it is a finicky, and finally impossible, business ‘proving’ that a character is inspired by a real acquaintance. Nevertheless, it is not only the similarity between certain episodes in the book to known facts involving Katherine and Lawrence (among them a trip on the Thames resembling one made in the summer of 1914, and the much-cited Café Pompadour incident) which suggests that something of the essential Katherine has found her way into Gudrun. There was undoubtedly a real intimacy between them, and Lawrence remained preoccupied with her over a period of years; as late as March 1919 he wrote to her, ‘you I am sure of – was ever since Cornwall, save for Jack’.22

  This is Gudrun, lying awake at night, as Katherine so often described herself doing,

  conscious of everything, her childhood, her girlhood, all the forgotten incidents, all the unrealized influences and a
ll the happenings she had not understood, pertaining to herself, to her family, to her friends, her lovers, her acquaintances, everybody. It was as if she drew a glittering rope of knowledge out of the sea of darkness, drew and drew and drew it out of the fathomless depths of the past, and still it did not come to an end, there was no end to it, she must haul and haul at the rope of glittering consciousness…23

  Another time, while her lover is sleeping and she is tormented with wakefulness, she reflects, ‘there are perfect moments’, a highly characteristic Mansfield notion:

  Wake up, Gerald, wake up, convince me of the perfect moments. Oh, convince me, I need it.

  He opened his eyes, and looked at her. She greeted him with a mocking, enigmatic smile in which was a poignant gaiety. Over his face went the reflection of the smile, he smiled too, purely unconsciously.

  That filled her with extraordinary delight, to see the smile cross his face, reflected from her face. She remembered that was how a baby smiled. It filled her with extraordinary radiant delight.*24

  By the end of the book, Lawrence is stressing Gudrun's instability and cynicism, and her lover's disappointment; although Crich wants to invade her privacy, which she resists, he also confesses that there is something disappointing about being with her. At first it seems ‘a great experience, something final – and then – you're shrivelled as if struck by electricity.’25 As for Gudrun,