Katherine Mansfield

by Claire Tomalin

  The central theme of the play is concerned with industrial relations and a failed miners' strike, but the young mine-owner Gerald has a friend, Oliver, and an ex-mistress, Anabel Wrath, a sculptress who has lived in Paris and been part of what she calls ‘a vicious triangle’ with the two men. Oliver clearly speaks with Lawrence's voice, and Anabel with Katherine's. (It is perhaps the only interesting aspect of the play, which, unlike Lawrence's other dramatic works, is unperformably bad.)

  Anabel tells Oliver that Gerald ‘loved him far too well ever to love me altogether’ and that while this undermined her relations with him, it did not prevent her from loving Oliver too, and trusting him: ‘You seemed to be warm and protecting – like a brother, you know - but a brother one loves.’

  ‘And then you hated me?’ asks Oliver, to which Anabel replies that she came to hate both him and her lover ‘almost to madness’. Madness and mad hatred were attributed to themselves by both Lawrence and Katherine at times,* and it seems fairly obvious that this dialogue is looking back at their Cornish days, and trying to put them in perspective. Oliver says of Anabel, ‘How she hates the dark gods!’: ‘and yet they cast a spell over her’ rejoins her cast-off lover.

  Although Lawrence took Touch and Go perfectly seriously, his desire that Katherine should read it must have been at least partly for her personal reaction to Anabel; unfortunately, if she gave him one, it is lost with all her other letters to Lawrence who, unlike Murry, had no careful eye on posterity.

  Lawrence also invited her to send him one of her stories now, but again there is no record of whether she did. He sent her his newly written The Fox, in which once again there is something familiar about the character of Ellen, with her ‘wisps of crisp dark hair’, her big, wide, dark eyes with their look which is ‘strange, startled, shy and sardonic at once’, her mouth ‘pinched as if in pain and irony’, the satirical flicker in her eye and ‘dangerous satire in her voice’; all of this sounds much closer to Katherine than to Lawrence's country neighbour, the other inspiration for the story, which describes a three-cornered household in which a man and a woman vie for the love of the dark-eyed young woman. It is one of Lawrence's brilliantly dramatic tales, and Katherine liked it very much,7 although the later version, done in 1921, with its stress on lesbianism and its violent dénouement, might have pleased her less.

  The reason for dwelling on these instances of Lawrence's use of Katherine's appearance or conversation in his work is simply to stress how strongly she inhabited his imagination at this time, when he felt vulnerable and unhappy, and may help to explain the extreme bitterness of some of his remarks later when she clearly seemed to ally herself with Murry against him. He now embarked on a series of deeply affectionate and intimate letters to her in which he was clearly trying to put their friendship on a solid and permanent basis. He invited her to come and stay at Mountain Cottage, urging her to get better ‘Quick – sharp’.8 He suggested that the two of them should ‘stand free and swear allegiance’.9 He discussed his relations with Frieda and hers with Murry, warning her against allowing him to make her into a mother-figure, and adding, ‘Frieda is the devouring mother. – It is awfully hard, once the sex relation has gone this way, to recover. If we don't recover, we die.’10 Frieda, he went on, would not submit to his desire for male preeminence, hence their fight. He reaffirmed his belief in friendship, not only between man and man, but between man and woman too, and he invited her to show this letter to Murry, and suggested that they should both come to Derbyshire for Christmas. Katherine was almost certainly too frail to consider such a trip; he had warned her of the icy winds in the hills. In his next letter, he told her he had been on a visit home and seen a sick childhood friend, now dying (he did not add that it was of tuberculosis); in a passionate outburst full of fear for her and no doubt himself too, he wrote, ‘Katherine – on ne meurt pas: I almost want to let it be reflexive on ne se meurt pas: Point! Be damned and blasted everything, and let the bloody world come to its end. But one does not die. Jamais.’11

  At Christmas they exchanged gifts by post: he sent her a piece of Derbyshire fluorspar, the brightly coloured crystalline rock mined in the region, and she sent tangerines, a handkerchief, a wheatsheaf for Frieda. In the new year he kept writing, disconcerted by the gaps in her replies, thinking she was ill, sending her books and describing his walks in the snow, the tracks of birds and animals, details she must have enjoyed; he questioned Kot about her health, and expressed concern to other friends that she was only on the verge of existence. In February he had 'flu so badly himself that his own life was in danger, but at the end of March he was writing again, complaining at the difficulty of bringing the four of them together again, especially Murry: ‘and if you must go his way, and if he will never really come our way – well!’12 This same letter went on to describe a dream Lawrence had had; in which Katherine visited him and was quite cured of her consumption; the two of them went out together to look at the stars:

  All the constellations were different, and I, who was looking for Orion, to show you, because he is rising now, was very puzzled by these thick, close brilliant new constellations. Then suddenly we saw one planet, so beautiful, a large, fearful, strong star, that we were both pierced by it, possessed, for a second. Then I said, ‘That's Jupiter’ – but I felt that it wasn't Jupiter – at least not the everyday Jupiter.

  Ask Yung [sic] or Freud about it? – Never! – It was a star that blazed for a second on one's soul.

  I wish it was spring for all of us.13

  This splendid letter, in which Lawrence's joy in the world and his strong, biblical language were offered like a present to Katherine, would seem to seal the bond of friendship between these two for good; but nothing works out so simply in the real world, and two things intervened now.

  One was that Katherine started writing to Frieda, ‘would-be-witty letters’ according to Lawrence, who was offended by this, after his proffered intimacy. The other was Murry's new position as editor of the Athenaeum, which put him in the position of patron, with the power to offer Lawrence work, and the income he desperately needed, or to withhold it. He took one article, and then turned down every single subsequent piece offered to him by Lawrence, whose desperate financial position he knew very well. Murry claimed later that Katherine agreed with his editorial decisions, which may or may not be true. She was certainly capable of being rude about Lawrence's work, especially to those who expected her to be, such as Ottoline and Murry. To no one else did she attack Lawrence, now or later, and even to Ottoline she confined herself to lamenting his lack of humour and the craziness of Women in Love, which she knew Ottoline loathed and resented already. Whether she pleaded his cause with Murry is another matter; she was ill and vulnerable, he was jealous and, as Frieda had already registered, in case of a real conflict Katherine would not break with Murry.

  When Lawrence came to London in the summer, he did not call at Portland Villas again, and in August he complained that Murry had lost some of his manuscripts. His own state was one of increasing bitterness, and the spectacle of Murry, so comfortably established and now so dismissive of his efforts, was hard for him to bear. What most people would express as sorrow, anger or perhaps spite became from Lawrence an uncontrolled, childlike rage; and since Katherine had allied herself with Murry, and failed to respond to Lawrence's proffered friendship, she also became the object of his rage. In October, Koteliansky – who seems to have stirred things up at times – had a letter from Lawrence saying he hoped Katherine, now in Italy and complaining of a plague of mosquitoes, would be bitten to death. A few weeks later, however, he wrote her a perfectly friendly letter from Florence.

  Then, when Murry went to spend Christmas with her, he took some of Lawrence's manuscripts with him and returned them to Lawrence from Katherine's address, implicating her in the rejection. It was this that brought Lawrence's outburst, in which he sent a letter to Murry, calling him a ‘dirty little worm’, and another to Katherine, telling her that he loathed
her, found her revolting (‘stewing in your consumption’) and hoped she would die. Katherine forwarded the letter to Murry, urging him to tell Lawrence he would hit him in the face if they ever met again, and both of them wrote understandably furious retorts to Lawrence.* Silence then fell for a while, although Lawrence continued to malign ‘the Murrys’ to other people, and was particularly incensed when Murry had his wife's stories heaped with praise in his own magazine, the review being written by his assistant editor, Sullivan.

  The striking thing about all this is that Katherine did not find Lawrence's outburst unforgivable and did not continue to hold it against him. Although circumstances meant they never met again, she understood rage and cruel outbursts only too well from her own experience; she had also, after all, seen Lawrence raging against Frieda often enough; and just possibly she did not hold herself entirely blameless.

  The depth of feeling between Lawrence and Katherine has been obscured by his spectacular rages and her occasional malicious remarks, which have, perhaps inevitably, attracted more attention than the underlying current of real affection and mutual interest. Yet there is so much to take into account: his fascination with her led him to incorporate her experience, conversation and physical appearance into his work. She, in turn, planned to imitate Sons and Lovers with an autobiographical novel of her own. For her, Lawrence had the warmth, the responsiveness to living things, the generosity of spirit that she could never find in Murry. Whatever irritation she may have felt at Lawrence's bad behaviour, or at shocking or uncongenial passages in his work, she acknowledged, over and over again, both that she loved him and that his writing was warm, breathing, living, vigorous and full of conviction, ‘written by a living man’.14

  Lawrence was someone she turned to in her imagination at crucial moments in her life, for example after her dream of dying (in December 1919) when she felt abandoned by Murry to her despair, and wrote in her journal, ‘I'd like to write my books and spend some happy time with Jack (not very much faith withal) and see Lawrence in a sunny place and pick violets – all kinds of flowers’.15 And in February 1922, when she was enduring awful suffering in Paris, she recalled to Brett the bluebells of the Cornish spring with Lawrence. Flowers and sunshine went with Lawrence. Murry, they both knew, was a doubter and a cold critic, counting the cost of everything. Lawrence and Katherine had much more in common, temperamentally, physically and in their circumstances. They were both real, imaginative writers (whereas Murry's efforts did not qualify him). Both were attacked and disabled by chronic illness, and both attempted to deny and ignore it. Both had moments when they doubted their own sanity. Both were aware of themselves as outsiders in the English literary world, and alert to condescension; while Murry, by virtue of his education and determined application, managed to penetrate it and become a power within it. Modestly as Murry sometimes acknowledged that his gifts were not to be compared with those of Lawrence or Katherine, they were gifts that put him in a position to make or break their reputations; and he was not always modest.

  In January 1922 Katherine told a correspondent how Lawrence had once asked her to swear friendship for life:

  At the time I was impatient with him. I thought it extravagant – fanatic. But when one considers what this world is like I understand perfectly why L. (especially being L.) made such claims… I think, myself, it is pride which makes friendship most difficult. To submit, to bow down to the other, is not easy, but it must be done if one is to really understand the being of the other.16

  During this last year of her life she thought of Lawrence a great deal, although he was away and out of touch (in Sicily, Germany, Italy, and then Ceylon and Australia). She expressed a vehement dislike of The Lost Girl, and refused to review it for the Athenaeum, although she was normally willing to say harsh things (instead Murry wrote a stinging attack of his own on the book). But when she came to read Aaron's Rod, Lawrence's next novel, she was delighted with it, and inscribed the following words in her copy:

  There are certain things in this book I do not like. But they are not important, or really part of it. They are trivial, encrusted, they cling to it as snails to the underside of a leaf – no more, and perhaps they leave a little silvery trail, a smear that one shrinks from as from a kind of silliness. But apart from these things is the leaf, is the tree, firmly planted, deep thrusting, outspread, growing grandly, alive in every twig. All the time I read this book I felt it was feeding me.17

  Perhaps the theme of the book, which describes a man abandoning his family and finding his own separate and independent fulfilment, spoke with especial resonance to her.

  The quarrel was not breached. Lawrence would not have been pleased if he had heard, in 1921, that Katherine was writing for the Sphere, edited by Clement Shorter, one of the pack of reviewers responsible for the suppression of The Rainbow. He continued to snipe at ‘the Murrys’ from across the world, mostly to Koteliansky. But in August 1922 Katherine wrote Lawrence's name into her will, as she wanted him to have a book of hers. He was also one of those she thought might have understood what she enjoyed about the Gurdjieff Institute, where she spent the last months of her life (the other was E. M. Forster); only she thought Lawrence's pride might be a stumbling block. In this last autumn of her life she received with joy a card he sent her from Wellington, addressed to her c/o Ottoline and inscribed with a single word, ‘Ricordi!’ She told Murry, ‘Lawrence has reached Mexico and feels ever so lively’.18 Koteliansky was probably her informant here, because he was trying to persuade Lawrence to write to her, and gave him news of her. In fact, Lawrence sent her greetings twice in December, through both Koteliansky and Murry, and in late November she encouraged Murry to write to him.19

  The strongest proof that she had forgiven whatever there was to be forgiven Lawrence, and that her heart was full of tenderness for her old friend, comes in a letter to Murry, written just before she went to Fontainebleau in October: ‘Yes, I care for Lawrence. I have thought of writing to him and trying to arrange a meeting after I leave Paris – suggesting that I join them until the spring.’20 But by then it was no longer possible.

  15

  ‘A Sense of Being Like’

  Katherine, Ida and Murry had a long, exhausting journey across France in the September heat, stopping at Menton, at Mr Beauchamp's suggestion, to see his cousin Connie, who ran a nursing-home in England but spent her winters abroad with an elderly woman friend. Connie was interested in Katherine, and touched by her plight. After meeting her, they travelled on to San Remo. When they arrived, and the hotel staff observed Katherine's state, the manager explained that they could not have a tubercular person on the premises; in fact, they must pay for the fumigation of the rooms. He did, however, propose to them the use of a small villa nearby in Ospedaletti, for a low rent: the Casetta Deerholm. They had little choice but to take it, and here Murry left the two women and returned to England. Until pipes could be installed, all the water had to be fetched, and Ida had to master the use of a charcoal stove for cooking. The manager warned them to beware of possible intruders, and thoughtfully provided them with a revolver, just in case; Katherine, fascinated, took it into the garden to practise loading and firing. She determined to keep it (and she did too). Thus she and Ida settled into their isolation, the succession of hot days bringing swarms of insects – these were the ones Lawrence hoped would bite her to death – the sound of the sea crashing below striking a forlorn note, and Italy itself in a state of muttering crisis in the aftermath of the war and the rising power of the fascists.

  The heat at least pleased Katherine. She planned to write a journal for publication, ‘From the Casetta’, to be an account of her six months' stay (she had told people in England she was going for two years, but secretly she and Murry had agreed that it was for the winter only). She noted the flowers and the butterflies, the wild thyme and rosemary on the hillside, the little cat that crept in one evening and purred for its meal; one afternoon she took the tram from Ospedaletti into San Remo, f
irst class, with velvet-covered, iron-hard seats, and went shopping for fruit and brioches and china. Murry remembered her birthday, and sent her a small silver spoon, exactly the sort of present she delighted in. Lytton wrote her a kind letter, Ida gave her a bottle of the expensive scent she liked; even her father sent her a note, if not a present. But at the end of this auspicious October she ran out of the medicine Sorapure had given her, and could not get the same thing made up; immediately she became frightened and depressed, and began to hate Ida again.

  Her father, whom she had expected to stay away for fear of infection, did now call on her, bringing his cousin Connie and her friend Jinnie Fullerton. They were not impressed by the Casetta. Mr Beauchamp took Katherine for a drive, picked her a bunch of wild flowers, gave her some cigarettes, and hugged her: ‘to be held and kissed and called my precious child was almost too much… it's having love present, close, warm, to be felt and returned’. This was what she missed and needed, or so she implied to Murry.1 The reproach was obvious. A few days later, she described how she thought of the mornings in Hampstead when she woke before him and lay touching him with her hand while he slept, his dark head turned away, while the light grew just enough for her to pick out the figure in the Dürer print on the wall. Then, more than once, she told him how she envied Virginia, who had the safety and comfort of Leonard's perpetual presence and care; she could not help being jealous.

  The weather turned cold. She told Murry,

  Cold frightens me. It is ominous. I breathe it and deep down it's as though a knife softly pressed in my bosom had said ‘Don't be too sure.’ That's the fearful part of having been near death. One knows how easy it is to die. The barriers that are up for everybody else are down for you and you've only to slip through.2