Without any web of associations, conventions or history, Katherine's characters make their appearances quite boldly, equipped with nothing more than charm or absurdity or pathos, against their settings of railway trains, seaside houses, hotels, flats, park benches and far, unlabelled corners of the world. Like their creator, they may strike us as both pungently alive and vulnerable. Katherine often gives them broadly comic speech or thought patterns, whereas almost all Virginia's characters speak and think in well-formed sentences; they may be mildly satirized, but they do not lose their elegance; in the brothel, Laurette murmurs ‘I used to ride’ with the composure of a lady.
The element of mandarin that is always present in Virginia's work is quite absent from Katherine's. Where the cadences of their prose are most similar is in descriptions of the natural world.
‘It suddenly gets cold. The sun seems to give less heat,’ she said, looking about her, for it was bright enough, the grass still a soft deep green, the house starred in its greenery with purple passion flowers, and rooks dropping cool cries from the high blue. But something moved, flashed, turned a silver wing in the air. It was September after all, the middle of September, and past six in the evening.
The room was gay with morning light. The big french window on to the balcony was open and the palm outside flung its quivering spider-like shadow over the bedroom walls. Although their hotel did not face the front, at this early hour you could hear it breathing, and flying high on golden wings seagulls skimmed past. How peaceful the sky looked, as though it was smiling tenderly.
The first passage is from To the Lighthouse, the second from a fragment (‘Such a Sweet Old Lady’), printed by Murry posthumously in The Doves' Nest; and the kinship is there, for all their general differences, in the shape of the sentences and the single image of menace dropped into each passage – such images being fundamental and characteristic to both their visions of the world.
Why did the friendship lapse before the end of Katherine's life? Evidently Virginia was hurt by her lack of response and, like many others, simply could not take in the severity of her illness. As late as August 1922, only months before Katherine's death, Virginia told Lytton Strachey that she had heard she was completely recovered. Without the excuse of disease, Katherine's tidal mood changes were less easy to overlook, and there were enough malicious gossips in both their circles to relay and exaggerate any slighting remark from one to the other. Katherine was stung by Bloomsbury, and knew Virginia could adopt a superior tone and crush her socially and intellectually if she chose. Virginia knew that Katherine was a liar and a flatterer. The figure of Murry did not help.
In the immediate aftermath of her death, Virginia wrote a long passage in her diary which is one attempt to sum up their relationship:
Katherine has been dead a week, & how far am I obeying her ‘do not quite forget Katherine’ which I read in one of her old letters? Am I already forgetting her? It is strange to trace the progress of one's feelings. Nelly said in her sensational way at breakfast on Friday ‘Mrs Murry's dead! It says so in the paper!’ At that one feels – what? A shock of relief? – a rival the less? Then confusion at feeling so little – then, gradually, blankness & disappointment; then a depression which I could not rouse myself from all that day. When I began to write, it seemed to me there was no point in writing. Katherine wont read it. Katherine's my rival no longer. More generously I felt, But though I can do this better than she could, where is she, who could do what I can't! Then, as usual with me, visual impressions kept coming & coming before me – always of Katherine putting on a white wreath, & leaving us, called away; made dignified, chosen. And then one pitied her. And one felt her reluctant to wear that wreath, which was an ice cold one. And she was only 33. And I could see her before me so exactly, & the room at Portland Villas. I go up. She gets up, very slowly, from her writing table. A glass of milk & a medicine bottle stood there. There were also piles of novels. Everything was very tidy, bright, & somehow like a dolls house. At once, or almost, we got out of shyness. She (it was summer) half lay on the sofa by the window. She had her look of a Japanese doll, with the fringe combed quite straight across her forehead. Sometimes we looked very steadfastly at each other, as though we had reached some durable relationship, independent of the changes of the body, through the eyes. Hers were beautiful eyes – rather doglike, brown, very wide apart, with a steady slow rather faithful & sad expression. Her nose was sharp, & a little vulgar. Her lips thin & hard. She wore short skirts & liked ‘to have a line round her’ she said. She looked very ill – very drawn, & moved languidly, drawing herself across the room, like some suffering animal. I suppose I have written down some of the things we said. Most days I think we reached that kind of certainty, in talk about books, or rather about our writings, which I thought had something durable about it. And then she was inscrutable. Did she care for me? Sometimes she would say so – would kiss me – would look at me as if (is this sentiment?) her eyes would like always to be faithful. She would promise never never to forget. That was what we said at the end of our last talk. She said she would send me her diary to read, & would write always. For our friendship was a real thing we said, looking at each other quite straight. It would always go on whatever happened. What happened was, I suppose, faultfindings & perhaps gossip. She never answered my letter. Yet I still feel, somehow that friendship persists. Still there are things about writing I think of & want to tell Katherine. If I had been in Paris & gone to her, she would have got up & in three minutes, we should have been talking again. Only I could not take the step. The surroundings – Murry & so on – & the small lies and treacheries, the perpetual playing & teasing, or whatever it was, cut away so much of the substance of friendship. One was too uncertain. And so one let it all go. Yet I certainly expected that we should meet again next summer, & start afresh. And I was jealous of her writing – the only writing I have ever been jealous of. This made it harder to write to her; & I saw in it, perhaps from jealousy, all the qualities I disliked in her… I have the feeling that I shall think of her at intervals all through life. Probably we had something in common which I shall never find in anyone else…21
Virginia wrote this wonderful, honest and honourable passage when she was ill herself, with a fever which in no way lessened her clarity of perception or expression. She was right in predicting that she would continue to be haunted by Katherine's ghost. In the winter of 1925, walking in Ken Wood with Leonard and depressed about Vita Sackville-West, with whom she was now in love, Virginia recorded how ‘all this part of Hampstead recalls Katherine to me – that faint ghost with the steady eyes, the mocking lips’.22 Possibly her discovery of erotic love for one of her own sex caused her to reconsider the feelings she had once had for Katherine, whose sexual ambiguity had been so firmly held in check when they knew one another.
In 1927 she reviewed Katherine's published Journal in the Nation, of which Leonard, always an admirer of Katherine, was literary editor. The article praised her for her ‘sane, caustic, austere’ attitude towards her work, and her lack of both vanity and jealousy, two sins Virginia was highly conscious of in herself. Four years later, in the summer of 1931, in answer to a question from Vita, she wrote this summing-up of her feeling for, and memories of Katherine:
We did not ever coalesce; but I was fascinated, and she respectful, only I thought her cheap, and she thought me priggish; and yet we were both compelled to meet simply in order to talk about writing. This we did by the hour. Only then she came out with a swarm of little stories, and I was jealous, no doubt; because they were so praised; but gave up reading them not on that account, but because of their cheap sharp sentimentality, which was all the worse, I thought, because she had, as you say, the zest and the resonance – I mean she could permeate one with her quality; and if one felt this cheap scent in it, it reeked in ones nostrils. But I must read her some day. Also, she was forever pursued by her dying; and had to press on through stages that should have taken years in ten minutes – so t
hat our relationship became unreal also. And there was Murry squirming and oozing a sort of thick motor oil in the background – dinners with them were about the most unpleasant exhibitions, humanly speaking, I've ever been to. But the fact remains – I mean, that she had a quality I adored, and needed; I think her sharpness and reality – her having knocked about with prostitutes and so on, whereas I had always been respectable – was the thing I wanted then. I dream of her often – now thats an odd reflection – how one's relation with a person seems to be continued after death in dreams, and with some odd reality too.23
Virginia's testimony to her relationship with Katherine (‘never again shall I have one like it’24) is of especial value and interest, because she was a friend and contemporary who faced some of the same problems, such as ill health and childlessness, and approached her work with the same dedication and professionalism; still more important, it is the testimony of a great writer. Virginia, like Lawrence, was devoid of sentimentality, so that, while her criticism is sharp, her love and praise ring with authority. Her Katherine, tricky and treacherous, burdened with the incubus of Murry (whom she nevertheless loves and depends on), utterly dedicated to the craft of writing although her stamina is broken by illness, seeking love and approval, but not so cravenly that she will write a false review, fascinating and inscrutable, fits remarkably well with everything that has been revealed about her since.
Two months before her own death, in 1941, Virginia was still recalling Katherine in her diary: a scene entirely to her credit, in which, taking the manuscript of Ulysses from the drawer at the Hogarth Press, Katherine began by mocking, and then stopped and exclaimed: ‘But there's something in this.’25
16
‘I am a Writer First’
In September 1920, Katherine and Ida set off south once again and, against all the odds, hope rose once again at the prospect of change, France, sunshine, a new doctor. There was also the comfortable sense that she had earned £40 from a commercial publisher, Constable, as an advance on a new collection of stories, carefully arranged by Murry with his old friend from Rhythm days, Michael Sadleir,* who was now a director of the firm. This was the first substantial sum she had earned from her work.
Her journal entries for the long train-ride register pleasure and amusement in the journey itself, fellow passengers and passing landscape, the view from a station where they stopped:
Breakfast Time. It grew hot. Everywhere the light quivered green-gold. The white soft road unrolled, with plane-trees casting a trembling shade. There were piles of pumpkins and gourds: outside the house the tomatoes were spread in the sun. Blue flowers and red flowers and tufts of deep purple flared in the road-side hedges. A young boy, carrying a branch, stumbled across a yellow field, followed by a brown high-stepping little goat. We bought figs for breakfast, immense thin-skinned ones. They broke in one's fingers and tasted of wine and honey.1
They travelled on to the Villa Isola Bella, another of Connie and Jinnie's places, standing at the end of their garden, just outside Menton. It was by far the most comfortable house she had yet established herself in in the south, and she revelled in its small luxuries, the velvet-covered furniture and gilt mirror, the silver teapot and supply of black dresses for the maid, the big mimosa in the garden, the tangerine tree, the sound of cicadas and frogs from the terrace, the sight of the sea, the smell of lemons, the lizards on the path. And as she grew iller (‘I keep having fever… fever and headache and nightmare pursue me. I must just keep dead quiet’2), she wrote more precisely and more wonderingly of the world about her:
After lunch today we had a sudden tremendous thunderstorm, the drops of rain were as big as marguerite daisies – the whole sky was violet. I went out the very moment it was over – the sky was all glittering with broken light – the sun a huge splash of silver. The drops were like silver fishes hanging from the trees. I drank the rain from the peach leaves and then pulled a shower bath over my head. Every violet leaf was full.3
The wind of the last days has scattered almost the last of the fig leaves and now through those candle-shaped boughs I love so much there is a beautiful glimpse of the old town. Some fowls are making no end of a noise. I've just been for a walk on my small boulevard and looking down below at the houses all bright in the sun and housewives washing their linen in great tubs of glittering water and flinging it over the orange trees to dry. Perhaps all human activity is beautiful in the sunlight.4
Behind the illness, and the heightened response to the world, Katherine had other worries. At about the time she was setting off, and with her new book (which was to be called Bliss) announced by Constable, her old lover Floryan Sobieniowski had approached Murry, now a figure of considerable repute in literary London, and suggested that it might be worth Katherine's while to pay him £40 for letters in his possession. He made some reference to ‘good received’. The sum he asked for was the exact amount of Katherine's advance from her new publishers: £40.
All Murry's correspondence for this period has disappeared, destroyed either by Katherine or by himself, but some of her letters have survived, and we know that she insisted on the money being paid without an instant's hesitation. Ida gave her the necessary sum, since neither Katherine herself nor Murry seem to have had any to hand, and Katherine instructed Murry to take Floryan to a solicitor and get his sworn statement that he would in future leave her alone. She said she would give ‘any money’ to recover the letters: ‘It's not a waste of £40.’5 She also told Murry she would like the letters destroyed, but that he must do whatever he thought best. At the end of September he sent her a telegram to say he had them, and was posting them off with Floryan's ‘signed declaration’, but all through October they mysteriously failed to arrive. Finally, after many queries from Katherine, they reached her on 2 November, and she made no more reference to them.
The contents, and Murry's response to them, remain conjectural. Katherine's willingness to pay the blackmail may well have disconcerted him; and whether he read them himself or not, during the month in which he failed to send them, the whole episode may have made him look at his wife in a slightly different light. If they related to nothing more than a long-extinct love-affair, would Katherine have been so desperately worried about them as to hand over without protest her entire advance on Bliss? It is perhaps more likely that something in them threatened to damage her professional reputation: and the most likely area might be references to her old plagiarism of Chekhov's ‘Spat' khochetsia’, ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’ in her version. This would explain both her acute anxiety and Murry's subsequent behaviour to Floryan, which certainly requires explanation.
In January 1927, Murry acceded to Floryan's demand that he provide a letter of support for his application to the Royal Literary Fund, and wrote warmly recommending him as someone deserving of a grant. Why should Murry have done such a thing, knowing that Floryan had blackmailed his late wife quite ruthlessly, if the only hold the man had on him was that he had had a love-affair with her in 1909? But if Murry feared his power to muddy her carefully fostered reputation as a flawless creature, it becomes easier to understand: he had just reissued In a German Pension and was about to publish her Journal. In 1946, Floryan again approached Murry and the Royal Literary Fund, and Murry again wrote a letter of recommendation.
There is a further indication that Murry had some inkling of the matter of Katherine's plagiarism. In 1916, when Constance Garnett embarked on her thirteen-volume edition of Chekhov's stories in translation, Murry knew little of Chekhov, Katherine was virtually unknown and In a German Pension was largely forgotten; but as the Garnett volumes were issued steadily, year by year, and as Murry became known as a Chekhov critic, Katherine must have begun to wonder when ‘Spat' khochetsia’ would be reached, and what he would think of it. In 1919, she wrote to Kot, denigrating Constance Garnett's translations, and suggesting he might rival and race her. In 1920, Murry heaped praises on Chekhov in his Aspects of Literature; in the winter of 1920, with the public
ation of Bliss, Katherine's own fame began to be established; one of the most influential reviews, that of Desmond MacCarthy, drew a particular parallel between her work and that of Chekhov. Early in 1921, she wrote to Constance Garnett, telling her what a wonderful translator she was, and from then on Murry praised Constance Garnett and Edward Garnett praised Murry as one of Chekhov's most understanding critics, especially for his perception of Chekhov's ‘candour of soul’ and ‘pureness of heart’. Murry also took to drawing frequent comparisons between Chekhov and Katherine.
In February 1922, Murry wrote to Katherine, telling her that he had received two Chekhov volumes for review, both of which (he said) they had read before: The Schoolmistress and The Schoolmaster. In fact, the first of these had been in print for several years, and Murry had actually received The Cook's Wedding (vol. 12), which contained ‘Spat' khochetsia’ (‘Sleepy’ in Constance Garnett's version). Murry reviewed the volume, his article appearing in both the English and American press in March and April respectively. Other reviewers commented on the particularly striking plot of ‘Sleepy’, but Murry's article was entirely devoted to general praise of Constance Garnett and a eulogy of Chekhov for his love of life, his truthfulness, his absence of didacticism, and so forth. Shortly after this, in May, Katherine instructed the firm of Pinker that she did not wish to have In a German Pension reissued. The grounds she gave were these:
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