Katherine Mansfield

by Claire Tomalin

  Did she want ‘goodness’? Who but a fool would accept this of Gudrun? This was but the street view of her wants. Cross the threshold, and you found her completely, completely cynical about the social world and its advantages. Once inside the house of her soul, and there was a pungent atmosphere of corrosion, an inflamed darkness of sensation, and a vivid, subtle critical consciousness, that saw the world distorted, horrific.26

  It was Murry, of course, who wished to claim Katherine for ‘goodness’, and who was terrified of the cynical, critical Katherine perceived by Orage, Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf and other attentive observers. Lawrence's account of her is acute in a way that Murry's could never be.

  Lawrence and Frieda spent one more weekend with Murry and Katherine, at Mylor in August, in which a semblance of harmony was maintained. After this Murry kept his distance, despite several attempts at restoring intimacy by Lawrence. Katherine and he exchanged letters from time to time – he wrote consolingly to her, for instance, for the anniversary of her brother's death – and she took several opportunities to defend him. The most famous is the incident in the Café Royal at the end of August. Sitting with Kot and Gertler, Katherine overheard two Indian undergraduates reading out Lawrence's newly published poems, Amores, and laughing; she thought they were being disrespectful and, in her characteristically dramatic way, asked them for the book politely and, when they handed it to her, simply walked straight out of the place with it. It was a striking scene, and when Kot reported it to Lawrence, he wrote it at once into his novel. Katherine also defended him later to Ottoline, sensibly telling her that the best response to his attacks and obsessions was to laugh at him. The friendship between

  Lawrence and Katherine, in short, though not exactly flourishing at this time, was by no means at an end.

  And what about Katherine and Murry? ‘Life feels wonderful and different for at last I am free again,’ she wrote to Kot as she prepared to take a train for London and then Garsington in July.27 It was a delusion. She was moving into a new and larger circle, but it was not one that would release her from Murry. Whenever she grew nervous, she took refuge with him, and although over the next eighteen months they played an elaborate game of hide-and-seek with one another, at the end of that time Katherine was more dependent than ever on her old loves, Murry and Ida, who was now on her way back to England from Rhodesia.

  For a while it looked as though Murry might be as ready to break free as Katherine. Significantly, he preserved none of his own letters to her between August 1916 and 1918; his memoirs are also studiously vague about their relations during this period. There is, however, a letter from him to Ottoline (dated 31 August 1916) 28 which says, ‘I have a queer suspicion that I must be in love with you’, and it is not the only such declaration he made. Murry appeared to be overtaking Lawrence in terms of success that autumn, with two books published (his novel and his study of Dostoevsky), and the comfort and protection of Garsington were important to him. There he met John Sheppard, who got him a place as a translator at the War Office, saving him from military service once again, and securing him a very decent salary. There too he must be the obvious candidate when one asks who warned Ottoline that she was the ‘villaines’ in Lawrence's new novel: she heard this in late November, when Murry was staying there without Katherine. Thus alerted, Ottoline insisted on seeing the manuscript of Women in Love and was so enraged by the character of Hermione that she told Lawrence she would sue if he tried to publish, and never forgave him. Lawrence was now reduced to extreme penury, his two major novels – the work of three to four years – without a publisher; though it's true that Ottoline was not the only stumbling block: no publisher was prepared to take on Women in Love then.

  Murry continued his wooing of Ottoline, and by the next summer he had his younger brother installed on the estate, working the farm with the conscientious objectors sheltered by the Morrells; and Ottoline offered Murry and Katherine the bailiff's cottage that Lawrence had hoped to have. Even when Murry overstepped the mark and, having asked Ottoline one evening if he might ‘come into’ her heart and been invited for a moonlit walk, hurried back to London the next day to confess to Katherine that Ottoline seemed to be in love with him, he was forgiven by both ladies. But Ottoline never relented towards Lawrence.

  Katherine too was a success at Garsington from her first visit, despite the fiasco of her failed rendez-vous with Gertler. According to Brett, who was there with her, she visited her in her room and proposed a pact of eternal friendship. Brett was pretty well enslaved. She gave a good painter's description of her friend:

  small, her sleek dark hair brushed close to her head, her fringe sleeked down over her white forehead… her movements are restricted; controlled, small, reserved gestures. The dark eyes glance about much like a bird's, the pale face is a quiet mask, full of hidden laughter, wit, gaiety. But she is cautious, a bit suspicious, on her guard.29

  Katherine extended sisterly intimacies to Carrington, who was intrigued, to Mlle Baillot, Julian Morrell's Swiss governess (later the wife of Julian Huxley), who found her charming and attentive, and to Ottoline herself. Katherine was invited frequently thereafter, although Ottoline's capitulation was only partial; she liked to be loved and admired as much as anyone else, but she came to suspect Katherine of disingenuousness and envy. It is true that Garsington contained all the luxury she had known briefly at home in 1907 and 1908; though she had deliberately rejected this, she never ceased to yearn for it in one part of her being. Katherine felt superior to her sisters with their comfortable, easy lives, but she also felt envious rage; and Ottoline, made into an honorary sister, was appreciated and resented simultaneously.

  The flattery and ‘charm’ of Katherine's letters to Ottoline are among her grosser effects; nevertheless, Ottoline was charmed. It was not simply that she was gullible; she also perceived something of her own rebellious spirit in Katherine, and found it sympathetic. Katherine's sketch ‘In Confidence’ reads almost like a transcript of her hostess talking:

  Perhaps you and I are going to be great friends – what do you feel? Sometimes I think you like me – sometimes I am not so sure. Strange little secret person! Do you think that anything you could tell me about your life and your experience could shock me? You would not, my dear. I burn to know and sympathize and understand. I feel so strangely that we two are very alike in a way. At any rate, we will have courage… Perhaps we even want the same things.30

  Katherine heard and hated the note of patronage, but there is something both touching and perceptive about the Ottoline who tells her bold younger friend, ‘perhaps we even want the same things’.

  Garsington was described as being more like Crotchet Castle or Gryll Grange, the imaginary mansions in which Thomas Love Peacock assembled his characters for reckless conversation and intrigue, than like any place in the real world. Ottoline had, in fact, succeeded in her early ambition to surround herself with entertaining people; she had made her escape from the Cavendish-Bentincks triumphantly (although she kept on good terms with them and one of her brothers bought paintings by her friends) and established herself in the role of patroness, benefactress and muse. For five years she had inspired love in Bertrand Russell, who told her that she had not only given him the experience of passion, but actually made his mind work better. She had insisted on her freedom to conduct the affair, while at the same time refusing to abandon her marriage. It had not been easy, but it had worked, though for Ottoline the intellectual companionship had always been more important than the sexual part of the relationship. Russell grew gradually more and more restive as a result, and was beginning to look for other women; but this did not prevent him from being a constant visitor at Garsington.

  The house, within bicycling distance of Oxford, was a stone Jacobean manor, and the garden was laid out with lawns, flowers in profusion, walks and ponds in which both fish and guests might swim. There were also peacocks and, according to one of the sharp-tongued guests,

  Ottoline her
self was not unlike one of her own peacocks, drifting about the house and terraces in strange, brightly coloured shawls and other floating garments, her unskilfully dyed red hair, her head tilted to the sky at the same angle as the birds' and her odd nasal voice and neighing laugh always seeming as if they might at any moment rise into one of those shattering calls of the peacocks.31

  Combining her own flamboyant taste with a respect for the taste of her artistic friends, Ottoline had decorated the house with brilliantly coloured paint and fabrics. It was big enough to hold half a dozen guests at a time comfortably, with cottages for any extra (once Katherine was put into the governess's attic room: another world, she noted); and just as she mixed her colours, so she mixed her friends from the aristocracy and world of politics with other groups; the progressives and pacifists, poets, artists and writers, some famous and distinguished, others unknown and even needy.

  Russell evidently put Katherine into his private mental collection of emancipated young women with good minds who might become sexually available. That summer he first met his future wife, Dora Black, a fellow of Girton College, Cambridge, and an enthusiastic devotee of free love; he also embarked on an affair with the actress Constance Malleson, without severing his links with Ottoline. Soon he was in pursuit of Katherine too. Lytton Strachey also noted that she was ‘very amusing and sufficiently mysterious’, or so he told Virginia Woolf, passing on Katherine's praises of her novel The Voyage Out, which Ottoline had lent her.

  ‘Katherine Mansfield has dogged my steps for three years,’ wrote Virginia.

  I'm always on the point of meeting her, or of reading her stories, and I have never managed to do either… Do arrange a meeting – We go to Cornwall in September, and if I see anyone answering to your account on a rock or in the sea I shall accost her…32

  Only in September Katherine was no longer in Cornwall, because Brett had invited her first to stay in her studio flat in Earls Court and then to move in, with Murry, to a house she and her fellow artist Carrington were renting from Maynard Keynes, at 3 Gower Street in Bloomsbury. Brett christened this menagerie ‘The Ark’, and soon Russell and Lytton were constant visitors and Brett was lamenting that everyone came to see Katherine. When Ida arrived from Rhodesia after her two years' absence, she was soon made to feel de trop. For the time being she withdrew prudently to stay with other friends and find herself a job in an aeroplane factory in Chiswick, alongside several aristocratic ladies who had turned to war work.

  Katherine was very occupied, if not with work, at least with her own popularity. Invitations came from Mary Hutchinson, from the Woolfs in Richmond (a first dinner that passed without comment on either side), from Lytton to tea-parties, from Ottoline for a weekend, from Russell to various private meetings. ‘I should love to come to tea with you on Wednesday but I have an engagement which I must keep. I shall not be free before six. Supposing I were to come to your flat then?’ she suggested boldly,33 and in her next note she told him,

  I have just re-read your letter and now my head aches with a kind of sweet excitement… on Tuesday night I am going to ask you a great many questions. I want to know more about your life – ever so many things… There is time enough, perhaps, but I feel devilishly impatient at this moment… I shall not read your letter again – It ‘troubles’ me too greatly – but thank you – Thank you for it.34

  It is unlikely that this flirtation went unnoticed or unreported. Katherine disliked intensely being talked about and became very wary of Bloomsbury gossip, rightly fearing the malice of Lytton and Clive Bell. Of course, her own conversation was not notable for discretion or tenderness; Russell wrote later that ‘her talk was marvellous, much better than her writing, especially when she was telling of things she was going to write, but when she spoke about people she was envious, dark and full of alarming penetration’.35 Carrington also preferred Katherine's talk to her written word; she described her later as ‘an extraordinary woman, witty and courageous, very much of an adventuress and with the language of a fish-wife in Wapping’.36

  Christmas 1916 was Murry's second and Katherine's first at Garsington. All the inmates of the Ark were invited, plus Russell, Lytton and the young Aldous Huxley; Clive Bell was already in residence, officially working on the farm as a conscientious objector. Katherine took presents for everyone, including a blue enamel pot for Mlle Baillot, but Murry arrived without any. He made up for it by leaving ingratiating, not to say amorous, notes of apology on the pillows of Brett and his hostess. Christmas passed in parlour games and the performance of a mock-Russian playlet devised by Katherine, for which Lytton donned a false red beard; it was considered hilarious at the time, although the fragment that has survived makes one feel the performances must have enlivened the text considerably.

  The Christmas party took the train back to London together. Katherine described in her thank-you letter to Ottoline how Russell took sheaves of documents connected with his work for conscientious objectors out of his green attaché case and spread them over her lap. She sounded cheerful, but she had already begun to withdraw from his pursuit; she had also decided to leave the Ark and find a flat of her own, independent of everyone, including Murry. Thus it is unlikely that her rejection of Russell was due to her love for Murry; rather it was a part of a general (and final) disenchantment with sexual entanglements, which had caused her so much damage.

  Russell was not an easy man to control, as many of his wives and mistresses could testify; Murry's sexual timidity and ineptness, his biddable nature, made him a much safer bet for Katherine. In January she wrote to him, while she was phasing Russell out, ‘My one overwhelming feeling is that we must both be free to write this year – and that even our life together must mark time for that.’37 It was an affectionate letter, but absolutely insistent that she must have a place of her own in which to work, and ruthless in its evocation of their past housing difficulties:

  Do you remember as vividly as I do ALL those houses ALL those flats ALL those rooms we have taken and withdrawn from… For the time they have broken me and I must live from week to week and not feel bound… Time is passing, and we cannot afford to waste another year.38

  She had also been made to feel, by estate agents and by the refusal of St John Hutchinson to give her a reference for a flat lease, the humiliations of her equivocal marital status. Respectability could extort its dues in London as well as in Wellington. At some time in 1917 it appears that Murry told his parents he and Katherine were married,39 a lie which meant that, when they did marry, they had to conceal the fact from them.

  For the moment, first she and then he moved to separate ‘studios’ in Chelsea, hers at 141A Old Church Street (the first studio flat she found was ‘snatched’ from her by a ‘perfidious Pole’, according to a letter she sent to Ottoline; one can't help speculating that it may have been Floryan40). It was a romantic place, squeezed in between two houses, with a huge, high north light at one end, glass doors at the other opening on to trees, a curtained-off bedroom and a gallery, where Katherine soon installed Ida, who sometimes surprised visitors by unexpectedly making signs of life from behind the curtain, or above.

  Katherine was now embarked on several false starts. For a while she acted as a film extra, found it gruelling and gave up; as the winter went by, she had a cough, and her right hand was out of action, presumably with rheumatic pain. Then she planned a full-length play called A Ship in the Harbour; no trace of it survives, although she had reached the third act in April. Her old incubus Floryan leaves his trace in another way about this time, for there are fragments of translation from the Polish playwright Wyspiański in her hand and his; but she told no one about this. In the spring she began to write for another old associate, Orage, giving him a series of dialogue sketches, none of which approaches the standard of her 1911 and 1912 pieces in the New Age; they were crudely worked and do not suggest she would have made a dramatist, however acute her ear for speech. It is to be hoped that Ottoline did not see the New Age, for she was sen
ding Katherine flowers and pressing invitations to stay, and receiving effusive ‘literary’ letters in return, just when the dialogue in which she figures as an affected and absurd hostess appeared.

  The one good piece of work produced in 1917 was her reworking of ‘The Aloe’. It came about through her developing friendship with Virginia Woolf. The approach of these two unstable, delicate and extraordinary women to one another was hesitant. Virginia's history since we last looked at it in 1908 had been quite as nightmarish as Katherine's, and she had advanced on her chosen path as a writer far less steadily than might have been predicted then.

  In Bloomsbury circles she was for a long time somewhat overshadowed by her exuberant sister Vanessa, who, with her husband Clive Bell, provided the strongest focus for Virginia's emotions. She turned down proposals of marriage from (among others) Lytton Strachey in 1909 and Sydney Waterlow in 1910. She worked hard for the women's suffrage movement in that year, but also suffered a mental collapse severe enough to necessitate nursing-home treatment.

  Recovered, she found and leased Asheham House, tucked into the downs behind the Sussex coast, for herself; but she still lived mostly in London, sometimes travelling with the Bells and keeping in their circle. When she did agree to marry, it was still within the confines of the group; Leonard Woolf had been at Cambridge with her brothers and Lytton and Sydney. Leonard's interests were political and literary, and his intention was to pursue them while devoting himself to keeping the balance of her precarious mental health; he resigned from the Colonial Office to marry. All this while, her first novel remained unfinished.

  She and Leonard were married in August 1912. There are many indications that she felt herself sexually unfitted to be a wife, much as she loved her husband, and her mental health remained disturbed. The novel, however, was at last completed in March 1913. Later in the year, she attempted suicide and was again in a nursing-home for two months, and under the care of nurses and Leonard for many more. In 1914 she seemed to be better, but it was decreed by the doctors that she must not have any children: confirming, perhaps, her vision of herself as defective in womanliness.