Katherine Mansfield

by Claire Tomalin

  She described the story called ‘Je ne parle pas français’, which she wrote and sent to him in February, as ‘a cry against corruption’. Leaving aside her own physical and mental state, this remark bears little relation to the work as it appears to an unprejudiced reader. She also said the story was ‘a tribute to Love’; in fact, it is about a voyeuristic but fairly harmless gigolo and an act of treachery committed by a character easily recognizable as Murry himself. Either Katherine thought she could get away with anything she said to Murry, or the gap between the artist and the tale was wider than usual: ‘Never trust the artist, trust the tale,’ said Lawrence wisely.

  She sent Murry the story in two instalments, and he lavished praise on the first, which set up the character of the narrator, Raoul Duquette. He is a young café-haunting Parisian writer, loosely modelled – or so she volunteered – on two of Murry's rivals in the past, Carco and Gertler. Duquette is small, vain, commonplace and pleasing enough to women to earn his living as a gigolo; Katherine was at pains to establish his style and to make him an entertaining figure. Some of her dramatic devices are crude – Duquette's ‘clever’ remarks followed by self-deprecating corrections become tedious – but on the whole the story is effective in establishing his character and milieu of small cafés, and the seedy Parisian sexual underworld.

  The second half of the story, which must have nonplussed Murry, introduced Duquette's English friend Dick Harmon, who arrives in Paris with an English girl-friend. Harmon contrives to be both wet and treacherous, abandoning the girl (who is known as ‘Mouse’, a name Murry sometimes used for Katherine) after having brought her to Paris and compromised her, since she has told her family and friends she is getting married. Harmon leaves a cowardly letter in the hotel where they are installed, giving his mother as his explanation for his departure: this, as Murry cannot fail to have been aware, recalls his own lies to his Parisian girl in 1911, which he had confessed to Katherine. However much he winced and swallowed, dignity dictated his response:

  I wasn't prepared for the tragic turn of ‘Je ne parle pas’, and it upset me – I'm an awful child. But it's lovely, lovely. I must read it right through again to taste fully the growth of the quality of that ending out of that beginning. The lift is amazing. And how the devil you get that sharp outline for Mouse I don't know.10

  Katherine inquired anxiously if he were disappointed; and though it is hard to speak of comedy at this moment in her life, there was something irresistibly grotesque about their exchange. Mouse was certainly calculated to appeal to Murry (helpless, tiny, exquisite, etc.) and he insisted on regarding her as in some sense the ‘secret’ Katherine whom only he knew – the ‘good’ Katherine. A moment's thought tells us that this shy victim, entirely at the mercy of two equivocal men, was as far from Katherine herself – the Katherine who travelled boldly alone, who went into cafés in her wide-brimmed hat, with a thorough appreciation of the admiration she evoked from groups of unknown men – as it is possible to imagine. Yet equally, the plight of Mouse, ‘abandoned’ abroad by the man she depends on, can be read as a signal of Katherine's view of her current situation, as a reproach to Murry. Twist it as he might, Murry could not come well out of ‘Je ne parle pas français’: and the true Katherine was to be identified with Duquette rather than Mouse, for it was Katherine who liked to sit alone in cafés, speculating about Madame and the waiters and the characters of the passers-by, savouring the time of day and the dramas of the clients; Katherine who was making a career as a writer, and Katherine who had a secret and disreputable past. But that was not something she would say, or Murry would allow himself to think.11

  If ‘Je ne parle pas français’ was a deeply subversive signal about her own complex nature and very mixed feelings about Murry, her letters continued to express entire faith in his love and literary judgement. She sent him next a purely sentimental story of children, ‘Sun and Moon’, and then ‘Bliss’, another study of a treacherous man, this time set among smart young London aesthetes. It is an uncertainly aimed piece of writing, starting as a reworking of a sketch that appeared in the New Age in 1912 (‘Mr and Mrs Devoted’) and culminating in the wife's discovery of her husband's infidelity with a friend for whom she too has a special feeling, not quite erotic but certainly passionate. The satire is too broad to be funny, and the finale fails to be poignant, but there is something powerful at work in the harsh picture of the young heroine and her feeling for her possessions: house, garden, carefully arranged dinner, boyish husband, baby whom she fights the nurse over. The almost hallucinatory intensity of some of the passages strikes with great force, if not always pleasantly.

  She sent ‘Bliss’ straight off to Murry again for his comments, and this time he did offer some tactfully worded criticism of details, which she accepted. She told him at this time that she did not expect to make money from her serious work, only from light stories and ones about children (a prophecy which did not come to pass). Increasingly now, she discussed her reading with him, in the tone of a writer who reads to learn. Murry sent her his review copies of modern French novelists (from The Times Literary Supplement, where he now wrote regularly), but she asked him particularly for Dickens. ‘I do not read him idly,’ she said.12 Our Mutual Friend, in which she particularly relished the Veneerings, Edwin Drood, Nicholas Nickleby and Master Humphrey's Clock were all read in Bandol, as well as some Mrs Gaskell, and English sixteenth-century poets.

  There was plenty of time for reading: mornings and evenings had to be spent in bed. As the spring flowers bloomed, she was tempted out for short walks, but mostly she was content with the bouquets brought to her room by an attentive young Corsican maid. Ida earned nothing but scorn and hatred, as a living reminder of her past, and emblem of her present dependence and separation from Murry. Katherine was now determinedly looking forward to being married and setting her disordered past behind her, coming into the fold where both her family and his would give their healing love and approval. She sent presents and messages to his mother, and her own now became ‘Mummy’ again. She and Murry exchanged love-talk as embarrassing to eavesdrop on as all such talk is (though Murry did not mind publishing it); but her need to believe in the validity of their love grew with her anxiety about her own condition.

  Although it had been on doctor's advice she had sought a warmer climate, even on her journey south she had begun to hear contrary opinions about its possible benefits. Two women in the train recounted with gruesome relish the speedy deterioration of a young friend of theirs who had travelled to the coast with nothing worse than bronchitis, and died within weeks of a haemorrhage brought on by the fatal climate. The Protestant graveyards of the coast too gave grim testimony to the many young patients from the north who had succumbed there. Even before her own haemorrhage Katherine had begun to think of returning to London sooner than originally planned; one reason she gave was her anxiety about the risks Murry was suffering from air raids. But travel was severely restricted because of the war, the French wishing to discourage frivolous holiday visits, and in principle she was not allowed back until she had been on the coast for three months.

  Impatient with all this, instead of sitting it out, concentrating on putting on weight and enjoying the improving weather, she threw herself and Ida into a series of manoeuvres designed to get permission to return to England early. They included fake telegrams from Murry about a sick mother, exhausting visits to the authorities in Marseilles, and a determined assault on a susceptible doctor by Katherine, dressed to the nines, made up and scented with the perfume she had bought for her wedding. The doctor, duly impressed, gave her a travel chit, and the two women left Bandol for Paris; but Ida's suitcase was lost on the way, and when they arrived in the capital on 22 March they found that the city was under bombardment and no one was allowed to leave.

  They went to the Hôtel Select in the place de la Sorbonne, taking rooms at the very top. Apart from the obvious folly of a lung-damaged person having six flights of stairs to deal with, they were
in some danger from the German shells, which were hitting Paris every eighteen minutes or so. Katherine was frantic with dismay at being stuck out of England and treated Murry to outpourings that sound more like screams than letters at times, so great is her rage and self-pity. ‘This is not Paris: this is Hell,’ she told him.13 It was necessary to report to the police every day, and there were also daily visits to be made to Thomas Cook in case there was any mail; but Murry's letters were not getting through, the authorities seemed to Katherine to take perverse delight in telling her she would be delayed for a long time yet, and her money was running out. In her more coherent moments, she described the wailing sirens, the sight of houses ripped open, the sheltering in ice-cold cellars, which were crammed with bodies and thick with cigarette smoke. These were so horrible that after a while she decided not to bother to go down. She raged against Ida, when Ida was not running errands for her, and spent the nights playing Racing Demon in her room.

  The two women celebrated Easter together by going to work in a canteen under the Gare du Nord, partly to pass the time safely underground, partly to earn some money; but it was too exhausting for Katherine, and after two days she gave up. She told Murry she was tired and frightened; he was equally wretched, having been given a week's leave which he had expected to spend with her, but now instead finding himself alone in London, knowing she was under bombardment, ill and miserable in Paris, and there was little he could do. He did, however, think of asking Sydney Waterlow (at the Foreign Office) to help and eventually, after Katherine had contrived to borrow money from someone she disliked – either Beatrice Hastings or Carco – Sydney's influence was brought to bear and they were allowed to leave for England. Once on the way, Katherine suddenly softened to Ida, and they played Patience happily together on the boat. ‘Try and forget that sad and sick Katie whose back ached in her brain or whose brain ached in her back,’ she wrote apologetically a few days later, when Ida had returned to her munitions factory.14

  Her reunion with Murry, dwelt on in every letter for the past month, was not as she had dreamt. He was all too obviously aghast at the physical change in her and, she suspected, frightened of becoming infected with tuberculosis himself. The fear was not unreasonable, since the disease was known to be infectious; but his way of showing it hardly squared with the romantic image of their perfect love insisted on so often in his letters. Instead of taking her in his arms, he turned fearfully aside and put a handkerchief to his lips.

  She went with him to his flat in Redcliffe Road to await the final stage of her divorce. After some false starts, it came through at last on 2 May (the same day that her old admirer Russell was sent to prison for attacking Government policy). Katherine summoned Brett to be a witness with a hectically cheerful letter.

  It will be Great Fun, Larks and Jollifications. I am wearing, of course, a Simple Robe of White Crêpe de Chine and Pearl Butterfly presented by our dear Queen. Murry, naturally, top hat and carnation buttonhole.

  Blessings on thee – I hope thou wilt be Godmother to my First Half Dozen-Katherine.

  P.S. We have decided (owing to the great war) to have a string band without brasses.15

  Ida, apparently, was not invited to the wedding, or if she was, she did not choose to attend. Brett came up from Garsington, Fergusson was the other witness, and on 3 May Katherine and Murry were at last married, at lunchtime, at the Kensington Registry Office in Marloes Road where the Lawrences had become man and wife four years earlier. Katherine continued to wear the ring Frieda had given her then, but the two couples were out of touch, the Lawrences now in Derbyshire, struggling against poverty, ill health and bitterness, for they had been banished from Cornwall for ‘military’ reasons.

  By Murry's own testimony, he felt nothing but anguish at his own wedding, and unhappiness during the following weeks when Katherine tried to ‘keep house’ for him in his rooms, which were, he said,

  gloomy and sunless, quite unsuited for one in her condition, and my one preoccupation was to get her away from them. She was… almost suspicious of my eagerness to find a different place for her. I was ‘trying to get rid of her’.16

  To the world she put on a brave front. Lunching with Virginia at Richmond a few days after the wedding, she began by pretending that her marriage was purely one of convenience. ‘After a good deal of worrying by me,’ wrote Virginia to Ottoline,

  she confessed that she was immensely happy married to Murry, though for some reason she makes out that marriage is of no more importance than engaging a charwoman. Part of her fascination lies in the obligation she is under to say absurd things.17

  Virginia also noted, with anxious eyes, how ill she seemed; and she declared to several people her warm feelings for this friend who seemed suddenly as vulnerable as herself, and her confidence in Katherine's stature as a writer.

  13

  ‘He Ought Not to Have Married’

  Just before her wedding, Katherine wrote to Ida to say that her Chelsea doctor had told her she definitely had consumption; but he appreciated, or so she claimed, that a sanatorium would kill her faster than it could cure her. He suggested a cure at home, on the condition that home should be at least on the heights of London, Hampstead or Highgate, and with this in mind she and Murry went to look for a suitable place. They came upon a narrow, semi-detached house of grey brick, high up over East Heath Road.

  Like most of her homes, 2 Portland Villas existed from the start in two distinct versions in Katherine's mind. In one, it was an ugly monster, nicknamed ‘The Elephant’ (because of its colour, perhaps – there is no other apparent reason) and disliked because it threatened to absorb the money she and Murry were trying to set aside for their dream house in the country. In the other, it was the charming house it actually appears today, elegant, tall and airy, with pretty windows under lintels shaped like pointed eyebrows, its rooms opening off a staircase into which the light and sunshine enter freely all day long. The south-facing garden at the back possessed a vine, and from the front windows there were views over the heath and the whole of London spread out below.

  While they hesitated over taking it, Katherine went down with pleurisy again. Her old friend Anne was in Cornwall with her husband for the summer, and she suggested Katherine should join them at Looe, a small resort west of Plymouth where she had found a perfect hotel on the sea, while Murry sorted out the question of where they were to live. Giving way to Murry's urgings, Katherine agreed to go, and Anne promised to devote herself to being a cheerful companion. Once more Katherine set off south, acknowledging that her presence seemed to torture her husband more than her absence.

  Anne made a fuss of her, and arranged for the staff of the Headland Hotel to provide extra food for the invalid. ‘I am always astonished, amazed, that people should be kind. It makes me want to weep,’ she wrote to Murry.1 Within a week, though, driven by her demons, she was raging. The hotel was too genteel; the guests changed into formal evening clothes for dinner, and raised their eyebrows at the spectacle of Katherine smoking between coughing bouts. She needed a sitting-room, not just a bedroom. She hoped Anne would find her other rooms, but then too, ‘I can't really talk to Anne at all’;2 she was insensitive, tasteless, simply too healthy – ‘trop forte pour moi’ – and she had a husband dancing attendance. The implied reproach is always there.

  Another few days, and both Anne and the hotel had become acceptable again. Katherine was appalled by her own violent swings of mood, but she could not control them; nor could she stop herself bombarding Murry with letters that have, at times, the force of a physical assault. His responses were those of a marionette, dancing helplessly as she pulled the strings this way and that, now reassuring him, now complaining, now angry; now wanting him to take Portland Villas, now set against it. And if they did take it, how would they run it? Ida, so often reviled to Murry, must now be accepted by him as an essential part of their lives, and invited to come and be ‘housekeeper’.

  Katherine did not scruple to put pressure on
Ida ‘for the sake of all that has been’;3 she was already her secret confidante when she lost weight, when she needed money, or iron pills; and, once it was settled that they would take Portland Villas, she was persuaded to leave her job, which she enjoyed, and take on the uncongenial task of trying to run a house in which her fellow residents had decidedly equivocal feelings about her. She had misgivings, and they were justified. Katherine's instructions for the decorations of the house provided a very plain estimate of her view of the relative status and needs of the three of them: her two rooms were to be painted white; for Murry's bedroom she suggested ‘a delicate flowery paper’; and for Ida's north-facing room at the top of the house, green paint, or if that was too cold, yellow.

  All the while, in Cornwall, her ‘spinal rheumatism’ was so bad that at times she thought it might paralyse her with its ‘devilish, devilish’ pain. The doctors who visited her were kindly but wholly ineffectual. She got more comfort from the homely ministrations of the old Cornish woman who did her room and brought her breakfast tray. One morning, seeing Katherine was suffering, Mrs Honey offered to recite to her the poetry she had learnt as a child long ago, forty-odd verses of ‘The Death of Moses’. Katherine listened, and, moved by this simple goodness, likened the old woman to a character from a Wordsworth poem. Mrs Honey also urged her to have children; it was sad advice, for in June she lost the hope she might be pregnant. The child that would not come was mourned obliquely in the increasingly frequent talk of dolls.*