About In a German Pension. I think it would be very unwise to republish it. Not only because it's a most inferior book (which it is) but I have, with my last book, begun to persuade the reviewers that I don't like ugliness for ugliness' sake. The intelligentzia [sic] might be kind enough to forgive youthful extravagance of expression and youthful disgust. But I don't want to write for them. And I really can't say to every ordinary reader ‘Please excuse these horrid stories. I was only 20 at the time!’
But perhaps these reasons have too much sentiment in them. As a business proposition it would I am sure be bad. It would, quite rightly, provoke all those critics who have been good enough to let bygones be bygones in judging The Garden Party. It is true, In a German Pension had a very good press. But it was that unpleasant thing – a succès scandale.6
This curious chain of reasoning was her last word on the subject.
When attention was first drawn to the similarity between Chekhov's story and Katherine's, it was gently done. In 1935, Elisabeth Schneider suggested that it must have been ‘unconscious memory’ at work. Another critic, Ronald Sutherland, tried to demonstrate that Katherine had actually ‘improved’ on Chekhov. But in 1951, E. M. Almedingen, a Russian scholar, made the case squarely for plagiarism in The Times Literary Supplement, quoting long passages from her own translation of Chekhov alongside Katherine's story, and linking it with her reluctance to have In a German Pension reissued.
Her allegation drew an evasive reply from Murry, who then left the field to other combatants. A stalwart defence was put up by Sylvia Berkman (‘careless rather than devious’) and Antony Alpers, who claimed that Mansfield was neither ‘furtive’ nor ‘ashamed of her youthful peccadilloes’; a curious statement from the biographer who himself did so much to show just how devious and deliberately misleading she could be.
A. E. Coppard also defended Katherine generously as an admired fellow artist, diluting the effect of his defence somewhat by adding that it had been ‘common knowledge’ twenty years earlier that the story had been plagiarized. Five years later, the Russian scholar Gilbert Phelps waxed sarcastic at the expense of Alpers's description of ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’ as a ‘free adaptation’ of Chekhov.7 By then the case for plagiarism had been thoroughly and unanswerably established by those in the best position to make it, i.e., readers of the original Russian.
Mimicry and plagiarism are close cousins, and many writers have testified to how much they have learnt from the first and how easy it is to fall into the second. In Katherine's case it was a quite minor and forgivable action: she had not copied the story so much as used it. Nevertheless, it must have haunted her, particularly as she lived alongside Murry's perpetual insistence on her truth and purity, her exquisite fastidiousness and her kinship with that other true and pure writer, Chekhov. For the same sin of plagiarism, Murry had turned against his idol Frank Harris.
Secretive as she was, she could not bear to be caught at any sort of disadvantage, exposed to mockery, vulnerable to gossip. The fear of exposure must have nagged and tormented her like a sharp pebble in her shoe. Hence, no doubt, her willingness to pay off Floryan, even though she and Ida were chronically short of money. Hence too, no doubt, Murry's subsequent generosity to the wretched Pole.
If further evidence as to the character of Floryan is needed, one has only to turn to a letter addressed to him by Bernard Shaw in 1924, in which he says he will never consent to see his Polish translator again if he can possibly help it: ‘it costs me too much’. His letter of dismissal ends, ‘Farewell, Floryan. God send you safe to Poland, and keep you there!’8
Floryan did not, however, return to Poland for many years; and after World War II, with the sufferings of all the Poles in mind, Shaw relented to him. In his old age, Floryan gave an interview to Zycie Literackie, a Warsaw literary weekly, in which he spoke at length about his association with Shaw; but he remained entirely silent on the subject of his friendship with Katherine Mansfield.
Despite the trouble with Floryan, Katherine worked throughout the autumn at the Villa Isola Bella with great intensity. To begin with there were the parcels of novels which arrived regularly from Murry – sometimes five in a batch – which she dealt with in a weekly piece, posted off punctiliously whatever her state of health. Not many of the books were worth the effort she put into them, but she turned out readable enough reviews. They are light-hearted and glancing, but fearless in mocking or chiding fashionable writers: Hugh Walpole, John Galsworthy, Gertrude Stein and Edith Wharton were all treated to some astringent words. In addition, she would sometimes take the trouble to go through the latest issue of the Athenaeum in a letter to Murry, making criticisms of each article, and suggesting ways in which it might be improved (for it was not doing well).
When Murry failed to pay her for her reviews, or when he forgot her birthday, she registered hurt; but then by the next post she would be reassuring him of her love, and wistfully expressing her hopes that he would soon join her. However often he disappointed her, it was still necessary for her to be able to draw on a vision of him as the ideal lover, with ‘a far nobler and stronger nature’ than her own.9 The strain of idealizing him must have been considerable at the best of times; and, in fact, he was now in the throes of another entanglement, this time with the glamorous and forceful Princess Bibesco (née Elizabeth Asquith), who had literary as well as romantic designs on him, for she too wrote short stories. But for the moment Katherine did not know about this.
The villa and garden gave her great joy: ‘the first real home of my own I've ever loved’,10 and she was devoted to her cook Marie, for whom food was a pleasure and an art. On sunny days she had a chaise-longue on the terrace where she read and wrote, taking to her bed in early evening, but often working into the night inside the mosquito nets. Her health was not improving, and in the middle of October she saw a new doctor, Bouchage, ‘a very decent, intelligent soul’ who insisted on going carefully through her whole medical history.* While he was looking into her secrets, she was also observing him. She divined that he too was tubercular:
I recognized his smile – just the least shade too bright… his air of being a touch more vividly alive than other people – the gleam – the faint glitter on the plant that the frost has laid finger on…. He is only about thirty-three…11
His questions about her early life may have helped to prompt some musing in a letter to Murry:
I've acted my sins, and then excused them or put them away with ‘it doesn't do to think about these things’ or (more often) ‘it was all experience’. But it hasn't all been experience. There is waste and destruction too.12
The next day she described dreams she has had, sinister, surreal fantasies of guilt and corruption – which is, no doubt, what they were – in which she was pursued by vile, drunken people led by Beatrice Hastings, who screamed ‘Femme marquée’ at her. As this first dream went on, she found herself in a theatre in Piccadilly Circus, the actors beginning to fail and drift away until the performance was interrupted by an iron curtain falling. Outside, it was the end of the world, a huge crowd standing under a greenish sky from which soft, fine ash fell, while Salvation Army people with boxes of tracts asked her, ‘Are you corrupted?’ In another dream, Oscar Wilde appeared with long greasy hair, joking one minute, sobbing the next. Perhaps the dreams were a way of telling Murry, who never asked Katherine anything about herself and never showed any curiosity about her past, something real about herself, something different from the child-wife he wished to believe in.
At the end of October, in a burst of surprising energy, she began to write stories again. Almost all were built around the figures of women who find themselves at the mercy of monsters of one sort or another, whether mothers or fathers, husbands or employers (only in ‘Poison’ is the man presented as the victim of the woman). They are stories of great intensity, finely and deliberately paced and finished, though some were written at a single sitting, in an almost hallucinatory state. When one was completed, Id
a might be summoned in the middle of the night to provide tea and sandwiches, an experience both women enjoyed. Some of the characters are drawn in brilliant caricature, some – the colonel's daughters, the ‘young girl’ – handled gently, and although the themes of vulnerability and isolation may relate to Katherine's sense of her own situation, there is nothing self-pitying about them. They are impersonal, hard-edged, the work of a true writer, not a complaining woman. In ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, in which Ida proudly fancied herself satirized, Katherine's ear for speech rhythms catches the fluttering self-effacement of the middle-aged spinsters who have been terrorized by their father all their lives, and have no idea how to live when at last he dies, with beautiful accuracy. Some – ‘Miss Brill’, ‘The Lady's Maid’, ‘The Life of Ma Parker’ – were conceived virtually as dramatic monologues; Katherine never lost her interest in performance, and as late as 1922 she wrote to Ida:
I intend, next Spring, to go to London, take the Bechstein Hall and give readings of my stories. I've always wanted to do this and of course it would be a great advertisement. Dickens used to do it. He knew his people just as I know old ‘Ma Parker's voice and the Lady's Maid.13
Katherine was now quarrelling with Murry by post again, the ostensible reason being his giving Constable a photograph she disliked for the jacket of her forthcoming book; but she was also annoyed by his failure to take time to discuss her work with her. ‘I don't want dismissing as a masterpiece,’14 she chided him sharply, and pertinently, for he was all too prone to greet her stories with a few exclamatory, flattering phrases, and leave it at that. She decided to approach an agent to act for her instead of Murry. J. B. Pinker, who had turned her down in 1912, agreed this time to take her on. He was one of the most successful of the relatively new tribe of literary agents; Arnold Bennett and Joseph Conrad were among his grateful clients, Lawrence and Wells among the ungrateful. Pinker enjoyed fostering new talent. He had an office in New York as well as London, and he set about helping Katherine to make money from her work at last.*
In December, Dr Bouchage insisted that she must at least stop the chore of reviewing, because her health simply would not stand the amount of work. She had developed a tubercular gland in her neck, which pressed painfully on an artery, and had to be lanced at regular intervals to let out large quantities of pus. Again she complained that she could do virtually no walking at all. From a medical point of view, what she needed now was rest, a simple routine and calm. Instead, a row blew up over Bibesco. Katherine did her best to be tolerant and wrote Murry a generous letter, telling him she knew how attractive he was to women, teasing him gently:
there is even a strong dash of the lady-killer in you! And think of the way you look in a glass if a glass is in the room – you return and return to it; it's like a woman to you – I have often noticed that…15
She went on to say, ‘Do feel free. I mean that.’ But she didn't mean it, of course, and when he committed the cardinal sin of sending her one of her rival's stories to read, she refused to, and raged to Ida. Murry wrote blubberingly to express his fear that he had contributed to the deterioration of her health, and she froze him in her grandest manner by return:
I have of you what I want – a relationship which is unique but it is not what the world understands by marriage. That is to say I do not in any way depend on you, neither can you shake me… I am a writer first.16
As always, part of her meant it, part of her believed she was a pioneer in a new form of marriage. Her story ‘The Stranger’, written at this time, is full of distaste for the intimacies and exclusivities of marriage, showing a possessive and insistent husband suffering from his wife's elusiveness and interest in other people. Lately too she knew that Ida's ministrations had done more to allow her to write than Murry had ever done. Yet she was vulnerable, and he could shake her to the core. Her creed of freedom meant freedom for her to withdraw and make other arrangements, not for him. The private cosiness of marriage seemed an irresistibly attractive protection against the world at times.
Bliss (the book) appeared in December; so did Murry, for his Christmas visit, in a sheepish state. Things were soon patched over, after a fashion. Seeing her frailty, guilty at his own, and knowing that the Athenaeum was, in any case, failing, he decided to give it up and settle for a while at Isola Bella. He had been invited to lecture at Oxford in the spring, and needed to prepare his material.
First he returned to London to wind up the magazine and explain how things stood to his friends. Katherine was ill with fever and pain throughout much of this time, but her book was getting a good reception, in particular a magnificent long review from Virginia Woolf's friend Desmond MacCarthy in the New Statesman. In January, Knopf published the collection in New York.
Murry returned to Menton, and Ida set off for London in turn to clear out Portland Villas. Katherine wrote regretting the house, complaining of Murry's meanness, complaining that Bouchage was no longer satisfactory or helpful and had told her she must leave the Riviera. She was worried about money, and angry at a letter to Murry she had intercepted:
Elizabeth Bibesco has shown signs of a life again. A letter yesterday begging him to resist Katherine. ‘You have withstood her so gallantly so far how can you give way now.’ And ‘you swore nothing on earth should ever come between us’. From the letter I feel they are wonderfully suited and I hope he will go on with the affair. He wants to. ‘How can I exist without your literary advice,’ she asks. That is a very fascinating question. I shall write to the silly little creature and tell her I have no desire to come between them only she must not make love to him while he is living with me, because that is undignified. He'll never break off these affairs, tho’, and I don't see why he should… I wish he'd take one on really seriously – and leave me. Every day I long more to be alone.
My life is the same, I get up at about 11. Go downstairs until 2. Come up and lie on my bed until 5 when I get back into it again.17
Prompted, perhaps, by the thought of Murry being so free with his literary counsels to others, she took up her pen again and wrote to her own literary master, Orage, telling him how grateful she was for what he had taught her about writing in the old days. The letter is obviously sincere, and at one stroke annihilates Katherine's argument to Murry that she considered In a German Pension unworthy to be republished, for, of all her collections, it most clearly bears the stamp of Orage's coaching. ‘You taught me to write, you taught me to think; you showed me what there was to be done and what not to do,’ she wrote to him in February.18
Later she sent a stinging rebuke to Elizabeth Bibesco, couched in terms that demonstrate what a formidable opponent she could be in straight combat with another woman. No one could possibly suspect from this letter that Katherine had once been a Bohemian and a merry adultress herself; the queenly tone of the rebuke may well have been an echo of the voice in which her mother had addressed her in those earlier years.
Dear Princess Bibesco,
I am afraid you must stop writing these little love letters to my husband while he and I live together. It is one of the things which is not done in our world.
You are very young. Won't you ask your husband to explain to you the impossibility of such a situation.
Please do not make me have to write to you again. I do not like scolding people and I simply hate having to teach them manners.
Yours sincerely, Katherine Mansfield.19
(The existence of a typed copy of this letter in a university library prompts the speculation that Katherine gave one to Ida; it seems scarcely likely that the Princess or Murry would have distributed copies.)
It marked a bad end to a bad winter for Katherine, but at least she had established a fundamental fact about herself at Isola Bella. It was that her writing mattered to her more than anything else: ‘more even than talking or laughing or being happy I want to write’.20 Nothing else was measured in the same scale. Shifty husband, failing health, the blackmail of an old lover and the trea
chery of other women, all these could be put aside with the brave and steely truth she had now set up as her device: ‘I am a writer first.’
17
‘Read as Much Love as You Like Into This Letter’
In May Murry returned to England, Ida arrived and the two women left the Mediterranean by train for Geneva. They alighted first at a hotel above Montreux, where Katherine pretended to the management to be suffering from nothing more than a weak heart. She was cheerful enough to mock the Swiss, as travellers do, for their cleanliness and respectability, their thick ankles, broad bottoms and large appetites, even their oversized bunches of flowers. As for her, she told her regular and affectionate correspondent Ottoline, ‘on my bed at night there is a copy of Shakespeare, a copy of Chaucer, an automatic pistol and a black muslin fan. This is my whole little world.’1 There was a touch of self-conscious and pathetic dramatization about this. The truth was, she was pleased and excited by the change of scene, the delicious mountain air, the spectacular scenery, even by hearing the German language spoken again, for which she felt a nostalgic affection from her Bavarian days.
Travelling further into the mountains up the valley of the Rhone to Sierre, where she had an appointment with an English doctor, she became more and more responsive to the beauty of the countryside and the old villages with their wooden houses, where the people still wore peasant costume. Her cousin Elizabeth had her chalet at Randogne, and the whole of that south-facing slope of the Alps was famous as a health resort. Katherine later said it was depressing to see so many obviously tubercular people about, but at first it seemed that now, at last, she had found the right place, and she wrote ecstatically to Murry about the possibility of renting a small wooden chalet of their own, where they could work together, comforted by a big white china stove in winter, with a kindly peasant woman to bring them coffee.
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