Katherine Mansfield

by Claire Tomalin

  And so the cross-currents of fear and hope and gaiety continued. When she felt well enough, she wrote detailed letters about the Athenaeum, criticizing the articles and making suggestions as well as sending her weekly reviews. She urged Murry to accept Ottoline's Christmas invitation. When Sorapure's medicine arrived, she rejoiced in its ‘superb’ effect. Sometimes, she said, she could not sleep at all, and then for days she was sleepy. At the end of November she was euphoric enough to write, ‘we must have children, we must’.3 In another breath, she accused Murry and Ida both of imagining her already dead; very often she would slip in a devastating remark of this kind, the rest of the letter apparently warm and loving. Her spirits rose and fell unpredictably, although the pronouncements of local doctors affected her deeply; one began by reassuring her that she would be cured in two years, explaining later that he was just trying to cheer her up because he saw she was depressed. Another, an Englishman, advised her to live comfortably and drink plenty of brandy or Marsala. Perhaps his advice was as good as any.

  In December, she sent Murry a poem, written when she had a fever, she said, which accused him of abandoning her and predicted that his place would be taken by another husband: a husband called death. It is a dreadful poem in both style and content, and to Murry it was like ‘a snake with a sting’. He was stricken, made immediate plans to come out to her for Christmas, and wrote to justify their separation in terms of the money he had to earn. Across this letter of his she scrawled scornful comments, and wrote back accusing him of caring too much for money and being unable to ‘play the man’.4 She took up the same theme in her journal, recalling how they had been like two men friends until disease turned her into a woman. Murry had stood it, she thought, because it was a romantic disease (‘his love of a “romantic appearance” is immensely real’), but he had betrayed their love by his failure to accept that they could live together on what they might earn, away from London.

  Even if Murry had some practical justification for his reluctance to leave his job, any fool could have seen that what Katherine wanted was for him to drop everything and stay with her. A mixture of blindness and wilful ignorance allowed him to make it obvious how much he preferred London to her company: he had his paper, and Waterlow as his lodger, and Forster and Russell dropping in, and Brett carrying him off to her studio, and Ottoline offering to sell him furniture, and important literary squabbles and puffs to busy himself with. When he did get to the Casetta for two weeks over Christmas, he was struck down with neuralgia, and when he left their letters became strained again. Katherine had ‘heart attacks’, fainting and weeping fits, and black depression. Then she sent him a story, ‘The Man without a Temperament’; it contained another implied reproach, though a subtle one, for its hero has devoted himself to his invalid wife and is living out an intolerable existence in foreign hotels. His patience is admirable, but whatever love there had been between the two has been extinguished by the constraints of their way of life, which is bitterly contrasted with the blithe world of the fit. The husband in the story may tend his wife, fetch her shawl, kill a mosquito that has got inside her net, but he can do nothing to revive the energy and love they have lost; just as, in life, Murry was too sluggish and self-absorbed to distract or amuse Katherine into forgetting her illness for a while.

  It took Murry another year before he could bring himself to try to play Leonard to Katherine's Virginia. Before that, in desperation she took up the suggestion of Connie Beauchamp in Menton, and decided to move there, where it was warmer and she could be looked after. The move was difficult – Italy was in turmoil, there was a postal strike, someone stole Katherine's overcoat and everything cost more than expected – and when she got to Menton she found Connie and Jinnie had decided to install her in a large private nursing-home rather than in their own Villa Flora. Ida was dispatched to a rented room, and for a few days Katherine luxuriated in the comfort and airiness of the place, the attentive nursing, massage and doctors; but then she grew suspicious of the atmosphere. It was full of elderly invalids, and cost more than she could possibly afford. She and Murry had another acrimonious exchange about money (and in the midst of this, Lawrence's attack reached her). Murry apologized for his meanness, explaining that there was ‘a certain amount of real insensibility in me’, and followed this up by telling her he had taken out a large life insurance policy, and sending her elaborate accounts.

  This enraged Katherine, but, as always, she set aside her anger and determinedly built up the image of their perfect love once again. She had got herself out of the nursing-home and into Connie and Jinnie's Villa Flora, and here she began to enjoy herself as she had not for a long time, fussed over and spoilt by the two motherly women. They took her for outings in their big car along the corniche roads, and bought her frocks, hats and other presents. Murry found her letters false, he said, but they seem very natural in their expression of enjoyment of luxury and affection; Katherine was craving the comfort she remembered from her girlhood, remembering her mother's ability to set everything in order. In her illness, she was desperate for some pleasure and reassurance.

  The fact that the two women were hoping, through all their mothering love, treats and shopping trips, to convert Katherine to their faith in Roman Catholicism did not really matter. She was perfectly prepared to flirt with the idea – indeed, for a day or two she thought she would convert, and wrote a secret letter to Ida to announce the fact – but the faith did not apparently take root, and Connie and Jinnie were disappointed. If Katherine worshipped at any shrines, they were pagan ones.

  Another source of comfort now was the appearance of a very rich English couple, Sydney and Violet Schiff, aesthetes and patrons of the arts on holiday in France and eager to meet Katherine. Sydney wrote novels (later he translated the last section of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu), Violet sang a little; her sister Ada Leverson had been a friend of Oscar Wilde; both Schiffs sought the company of writers and artists, and had given hospitality to Joyce and Wyndham Lewis as well as Proust, with perfect eclecticism. Katherine was grateful for their attentions, enjoyed being fetched by car for visits to their luxurious villa, and embarked on a warm friendship and literary correspondence with them.

  She was also busy planning her summer in England with Murry. All through March and April her letters were full of proposals for the month's holiday they would take together, now in an inn at Beaulieu in the New Forest, where they would sail and picnic under the trees, now at a hotel in the wilds of north Devon. Murry was in the process of buying a cottage in Sussex, a gage of faith in their future; the gesture fell a little flat, since they could not have possession for over a year (and, in fact, never lived in it). For all his daily letters, with their protestations of love and longing, he was deeply enmeshed in his separate life, spending weekends at Garsington and finding Brett a flattering and congenial companion.

  The four summer months in England did not turn out as she had planned and hoped. Whether through her physical frailty – ‘I can't go anywhere except by car and I simply can't afford cars for long trips’5 - or Murry's inertia, or a combination of the two, no holiday in the New Forest or Devon materialized. Ida made several plans to take her to the south coast, but they came to nothing. Instead, she sat, a virtual prisoner, in Portland Villas, while Murry pursued his editorial duties and spent a good deal of his spare time playing tennis with Brett, with whom he was now engaged in one of his ambiguous flirtations, simultaneously pressing his suit and declaring his loyalty to his wife. ‘It's been chiefly the experience of your loving me that has made me realize how sacred is my marriage,’ he wrote to her early in the year.6 Katherine was upset and jealous when she realized the situation, but she struggled with her anger as best she could. Brett was torn in her feelings, but Murry was able to continue this particular dance without guilt, no doubt through his technique of keeping his conscience in two layers, as he had explained to the Woolfs.

  The summer of 1920 was cold, or so it seemed to Katherine,
and she had to endure vaccine treatment from Sorapure which made her feel iller than ever, without producing any evident benefit. One day Murry did take her out in a hired car to her bank, and they went on to the Athenaeum offices, but she felt out of place among his male colleagues and embarrassed him by trying to talk to them about the beauty of the south of France. The Schiffs took her to the theatre, and T. S. Eliot brought his wife Vivien to dinner; Katherine observed her with dislike and envy, noting how Eliot leaned towards her, ‘admiring, listening, making the most of her’: lucky Vivien.7

  Her cousin Elizabeth, separated from Bertrand Russell's brother Francis,* also called on her, their first meeting since Katherine had taken her fiancé, George Bowden, to tea with her in 1909. The two cousins surveyed one another with some curiosity. No one could describe Elizabeth as a likeable woman: her ruthless egoism mixed with sentimentality, a blend that characterized many of the Beauchamp clan, prevented that. But she had a great capacity for hard work: she had borne five children, made a small fortune from her best-selling books and emerged the victor in her struggles with two consecutive aristocratic husbands, living a life of bold disregard for conventions of wifely and maternal behaviour. When she visited Katherine she was on the point of leaving for her Swiss chalet, where she habitually entertained smart guests and currently kept a young lover, A. S. Frere. Her success and independence must have seemed most enviable to Katherine. For her part, Elizabeth viewed her less robust cousin with genuine sympathy and admiration.

  Another visitor was Virginia Woolf, who came despite a question in her own mind as to how welcome she was. But then the pattern of Katherine's friendship with Virginia was markedly one-sided. Virginia was always the wooer, Katherine – after an initial period of flirtatiousness in 1917 – elusive, difficult, unpredictable, unresponsive. It was Virginia who posted flowers and cigarettes to Katherine; who suggested to her sister Vanessa in 1919 that she might let her Sussex house, Charleston, to Murry; who issued invitations to meals and weekends and wrote letters of affection and praise, whatever her private reservations. Virginia preserved Katherine's letters, whereas only two of the many she sent her survive. Virginia undoubtedly learnt both from Katherine's writing and from her criticism, changing her own direction as a writer and taking to heart Katherine's review of Night and Day, which appeared in the Athenaeum in November 1919: after this, none of her novels was cast again in the old conventional mould, none could have earned Katherine's gibe of being ‘Miss Austen up-to-date… extremely cultivated, distinguished and brilliant, but above all – deliberate… in the midst of our admiration it makes us feel old and chill: we had never thought to look upon its like again!’8 Stung as she was by this verdict, Virginia accepted its justice and did not let it prevent her from seeking out Katherine as soon as she heard she was once more at Portland Villas. She valued the exchange of ideas and the intensity of their communion, even if she felt the friendship to be ‘founded on quicksands’:9

  I find with Katherine what I don't find with the other clever women, a sense of ease and interest which is, I suppose, due to her caring so genuinely if so differently from the way I care, about our precious art. Though Katherine is now in the very heart of the professional world… she is, & will always be I fancy, not the least of a hack.10

  The affectionate relations established in 1919 had led Virginia to believe they had reached ‘some kind of durable foundation’, but the quicksands opened again when Katherine failed to write from abroad that winter or to make any move on her return. Yet as soon as they did meet, the spell was cast again. Virginia's accounts of her visits to Portland Villas during the summer of 1920 show her fascination with Katherine vividly, as well as providing a clear picture of the way life went on there, and Katherine's readiness to betray upon the shutting of a door. This is from a long entry for 31 May 1920:

  I had my interview with K.M. on Friday. A steady discomposing formality & coldness at first. Enquiries about house & so on. No pleasure or excitement at seeing me. It struck me that she is of the cat kind: alien, composed, always solitary & observant. And then we talked about solitude, & I found her expressing my feelings as I never heard them expressed. Whereupon we fell into step, & as usual, talked as easily as though 8 months were minutes – till Murry came in with a pair of blue & pink Dresden candle pieces: ‘How very nice’ she said. ‘But do fetch the candles.’ ‘Virginia, how awful what am I to say? He has spent £5 on them’ she said, as he left the room. I see that they're often hostile. For one thing – Murry's writing. ‘Did you like C. & A. [Murry's play Cinnamon and Angelica]?’ No, I didn't. ‘Neither did I. But I thought D. of an I. too dreadful – wrong – Its very difficult, often…’ [an essay called ‘The Defeat of the Imagination’] Then Murry came back. We chatted as usual. Aldous was our butt… But Murry going at length, K. & I once more got upon literature… A queer effect she produces of someone apart, entirely self-centred; altogether concentrated upon her ‘art’: almost fierce to me about it…11

  Katherine went on to say flattering things about Night and Day; a piece of disingenuousness which pleased but also puzzled Virginia: there was, after all, the matter of the review. She concluded, ‘Anyhow, once more as keenly as ever I feel a common certain understanding between us – a queer sense of being “like” – not only about literature – & I think it's independent of gratified vanity. I can talk straight out to her.’12

  In June, she again noted the enjoyment of ‘two hours’ priceless talk – priceless in the sense that to no one else can I talk in the same disembodied way about writing; without altering my thought more than I alter it in writing here. (I except L. from this.)’13 The last, parenthetic sentence is the most significant here: that Katherine was allowed an understanding and intimacy in conversation equal to Leonard's was an extraordinary tribute to the importance Virginia gave her. In August, she noted that she got ‘the queerest sense of an echo coming back to me from her mind the second after I've spoken’.14 The two women promised to write to one another, and Katherine said she would send her diary to Virginia from France.

  ‘Shall we? Will she?’ queried Virginia. ‘If I were left to myself I should; being the simpler, more direct of the two.’15 After Katherine's departure Virginia did write, and Katherine replied, telling her how much her visits had meant to her, and that ‘You are the only woman with whom I long to talk work. There will never be another.’16 It was a warm letter, and it ended, ‘Farewell, dear friend (May I call you that)’; but though Virginia wrote again, Katherine neither wrote nor sent her diary as promised. Something made her suspicious. Perhaps it was a (well-founded) wariness of Bloomsbury gossip and malice. Perhaps it was professional jealousy.* Perhaps Katherine simply felt unequal to taking on another correspondent, and underestimated the degree of Virginia's attachment to her.

  Katherine and Virginia admired in one another their professional dedication to writing. Both felt themselves to be writers first and foremost, everything else – their lives as women, social life, even success, although both craved it – was of lesser importance; and both took reviewing seriously as a corollary to their main work. Katherine praised the beauty of Virginia's prose, and was conscious of her range of knowledge; she could be sarcastic to Murry about ‘those Hours in a Library’, but she knew their value too. What she found lacking was immediacy, the thing she strove for in her own writing, and true human feeling; Katherine once said Virginia seized on beauty as though she were a bird rather than a person. It is a perceptive remark, for there is often a sense of remoteness about Virginia's observation.*

  Both writers were intensely interested in the ambivalences of family life and feeling between men and women, parents and children. Both also had an affinity with animals: Virginia had a dog narrate one novel, and Katherine told Kot (among others) she wanted to write a story centred on a cat or kitten.18 The immediacy of Katherine's writing, what Desmond MacCarthy praised as ‘the bright sharp-cut circle of her extraordinarily vivid attention’,19 her ability to be there and make
the reader be there alongside, made its impression on Virginia. Jacob's Room, her third novel, embarked on early in 1920, suggests that she had studied her friend's technique as well as pondering her review. Nothing about the new book resembles an Edwardian novel. Compared with Night and Day, it is overwhelming in its immediacy. There is no plot to speak of, but a series of impressionistic scenes, and a ‘merging into things’, as Katherine described it in a conversation reported by Virginia in August:

  I said how my own character seems to cut out a shape like a shadow in front of me [wrote Virginia]. This she understood… and proved it by telling me that she thought this bad: one ought to merge into things. Her senses are amazingly acute.20

  Of course Virginia knew other modernist writers (such as Eliot) and knew (and disliked) the work of Joyce and Dorothy Richardson; Katherine stood closer personally, and in her choice of themes. Both Virginia and Katherine made the fragility of feeling, of happiness and life itself, into their subject; both felt a degree of antagonism for the male world of action (and for male sexuality); both turned to their childhoods and their dead to nourish their imaginations. Jacob's Room is an elegy for a lost brother just as ‘Prelude’ was planned to be; and To the Lighthouse (which reverted, five years later, to the seaside theme of the opening of Jacob's Room, using the same winking lighthouse, the same small boy who wants to preserve the skull of an animal, the same painter who represents the child's mother by a single, violet dab) is an elegy for a lost family. The seaside theme is paralleled in Katherine's ‘At the Bay’, although neither writer knew of the other's use of it.

  Yet they remain very distinct. Virginia's writing is always reflective. Her people inhabit a world of social, cultural and historical connections; her houses and landscapes are rich in historical associations too. Katherine's characters often seem to inhabit a void; she excels, as MacCarthy said, ‘in expressing a child's sense of things’. In Woolf, books and paintings become the emblems and props of feeling, which might sometimes seem precarious without them. Sandra Wentworth Williams, with her eye for young men and her distracted husband, has her volume of Chekhov stories and receives from Jacob his volume of Donne poems. A Mansfield character would not buy a copy of Fielding's Tom Jones as a means of approaching the young man she is in love with, as Fanny does in Jacob's Room; in Mansfield it is more likely to be clothes or flowers, ephemera, that carry symbolic meanings: a muff, a fur, a hat, a lace handkerchief.