Katherine Mansfield

by Claire Tomalin

  What actually happened at Sierre was that the doctor put her straight into a clinic. She refused to stay in for more than one night, and the doctor offered her his mother's chalet, which was empty, as an alternative. It stood higher still, under the glaciers, at Montana-sur-Sierre, with the pine forests standing on all sides: the sort of place where you can believe you might live for ever.

  Murry wrote to say he was enthusiastic about the chalet and ready to live in Sierre for as long as she liked. His lectures were well received in Oxford; in one, ‘The Process of Creative Style’, he cited his wife's work, quoting from ‘Prelude’ as an example of true descriptive writing, alongside passages of Hardy and Shakespeare; and in a private letter to her he compared ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ to Chaucer and Shakespeare. (‘It's fairy. There's nothing been done to touch it these dozen years.’) It seems unlikely that critical commentary of this kind can have pleased Katherine very much, however ill she might be feeling. At the same time, Murry was writing a long article for the Athenaeum in which he attacked a translation by Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf of Chekhov's notebooks, saying it was

  almost a crime to make public fragments of an author's manuscripts which he obviously did not mean to show the world… a tendency that is already much too prevalent among those who meddle with letters – the tendency to approach an author by the backstairs.2

  When Katherine wrote to express her disappointment over the new volume of Chekhov stories from Constance Garnett, Murry agreed, and pointed out that ‘poor old Chekhov’ was probably writing for money, would doubtless have disowned half his stories if he'd had the chance, and had suffered from having them gathered by impious hands after his death. Of course, he went on, ‘he is lemonade compared to Tolstoy’. Chekhov, he added, could never get the whole of himself into anything he wrote; whereas Katherine could, and he and she were going to sit down and write really big novels together.

  The Woolfs and Koteliansky were, not surprisingly, annoyed by Murry's attack. As it happened, Virginia fell seriously ill for two months at this time, and when she recovered she read some of the stories in Bliss; she had already disliked the title story, and now she dismissed them as clever and disagreeable, leaving her feeling she must ‘rinse out’ her mind. For the time being, she allowed her jealousy of Katherine's success full rein.

  When Murry arrived in Switzerland in June, they moved into the Chalet des Sapins, perched at 5,000 feet among the pines, so high that patches of snow still lay about, like drying linen, wrote Katherine. She insisted on taking the room at the very top of the house, two floors above the bathroom, but Ida did not mind carrying jugs and basins of hot water up and down, even when she moved into lodgings in the village to give the other two more privacy. A routine was established that suited both Katherine and Murry very well. They read and wrote, sitting on their balconies as birds flew past, bright pots of flowers beside them and the forest and mountains all around. Katherine wrote to Brett that they had no intention of returning to England for years; here were woods and streams and the sound of bells in the air, golden sunshine with only occasional days of white mist, nights of planning future travel and future homes.

  There were good doctors too, even if no doctor would tell Katherine what she wanted to hear: that she might yet be cured. In spite of her airily cheerful account of their life to Brett, there were bleaker moments when she told her cousin she thought Murry should leave her and find himself a healthy wife, and have children. Still, he was content for the moment. They read Proust together, and Jane Austen, whose ability to make plots Katherine admired: ‘She makes modern episodic people like me, as far as I go, look very incompetent ninnies.’3 Modest as she was, Bliss was enjoying success, the publication in May of ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ had caused a stir (including a compliment from Thomas Hardy) and Pinker's efforts meant that her work was in great demand from magazines. As Antony Alpers has pointed out, this was not all to the good, since she felt obliged to deliver stories to deadlines, and passed some inferior work; nevertheless, the encouragement was a spur, and she responded by working for hours at a stretch and, despite a recurrence of her tubercular gland, the loss of teeth and all the horrors of breathlessness and pain, she produced another group of admirable stories.

  Murry was also working on a second novel (chiefly interesting, his biographer F. A. Lea notes, as evidence that he had no talent in the direction of fiction any more than poetry). He was also reviewing books, and in late July a copy of Lawrence's Women in Love, which had finally found a publisher, arrived for him. Although Katherine wrote ‘Really! Really! Really!’ to Ottoline, knowing her intense dislike of the book for its libellous portrait of herself, her real response to it is not known. Murry wrote a review attacking it for its ‘sub-human and bestial’ aspect and, while praising Lawrence as a writer whose gifts were valuable, condemned him for here ‘murdering’ his gift in the service of a search for ‘sensual mindless mysteries’. Murry, in short, saw Women in Love as a catastrophe (his review appeared in the Athenaeum, 13 August 1921). Since then, the novel has been read as a triumphant attack on the values of twentieth-century civilization by some, though more commonly, perhaps, as a very mixed offering in which passages of absurdity alternate with brilliant descriptive and dramatic writing. Few readers take Lawrence's sexual message to heart, either literally or allegorically; few have even attempted to decipher it. But, however ridiculous, or bathetic, or plain incomprehensible it becomes in certain sections – and however hard it is to understand why Birkin and Ursula enjoy ‘good’ sex, while Gerald and Gudrun are stuck with the bad kind – Murry's talk of bestiality misses both what is good and what is bad in the book.

  In a letter to Brett in August, Katherine remarked that Lawrence had ‘got it all wrong’ in his depiction of ‘tortured, satanic love’; but she prefaced this remark with praise: ‘What makes Lawrence a real writer is his passion. Without passion one writes in the air or on the sand of the seashore.’4 She went on to criticize his view of love and put in its place a ‘religion’ of love between human lovers, what she called an act of faith which replaced God, now that God no longer existed for us: ‘we must feel that we are known, that our hearts are known as God knew us’. This, recalling Murry's claim (‘Lo! I have made Love all my religion’), strikes one as both sad and artificial in the light of the actual relations between them. Just as Lawrence's declarations about love and the necessity for male dominance read with a hollow ring when one considers the state of affairs between him and Frieda (who became increasingly dominant throughout their life together), so Katherine's talk of being known by a lover as by God comes oddly from a woman whose husband was so oddly content not to know her.

  The stories Katherine was writing now were little concerned with love except in its negative aspects. ‘At the Bay’ shows a mother brooding on her inability to love her children, a young girl drawn by vanity and boredom to risk a flirtation with a married man who proves to be merely predatory and sinister, very like the man in her early story ‘The Swing of the Pendulum’. ‘The Doll's House' is a study of the cruelty of petty snobbery taught to children by their families. ‘Her First Ball' shows a girl falling into a black hole of despair, opened by a cynical dancing partner, in the middle of what should be an experience of unthinking enjoyment. ‘The Garden Party’ is about a crass and disunited family and the momentarily shattering experience of witnessing death in another family, again built around an innocent young woman. ‘A Married Man's Story’, a powerful, unfinished piece, is full of talk of poison, unhappiness and treachery; and it is hard to read its opening passage, in which a coldly withdrawn husband meditates on his sense of estrangement from his wistful wife, without one's mind slipping towards the evening scene in the Murry household; the man's account of his sense of isolation as a child also has obvious parallels with Murry on his own childhood. Even the most tender section of ‘At the Bay’ has the child Kezia asking her grandmother about a dead uncle, which brings her face to face wit
h the unendurable notion of her grandmother's death. The same melancholy pervades ‘Honeymoon’, ostensibly a light-hearted sketch set on the Riviera but shadowed by the presence of suffering and death in the shape of a spectral Spanish singer. And ‘The Voyage’, a flawless evocation of a child's consciousness, in which a little girl takes an overnight boat-trip with her grandmother, is built around the obliquely referred to death of the child's mother. The surface of these stories is calm and even bright, but their theme is mortality, and even the joy in them is like Keats's joy, ‘whose hand is ever at his lips/Bidding adieu’; and it is this precariousness that gives them their stinging clarity.

  On a bad day, Katherine was too weak to raise her head from the pillow; on a good one, she was up at seven-thirty and able to get herself out – just – as far as the trees surrounding the house, and sit on a log in the sunshine, enjoying the sense of being alone. Murry might go flower-finding, bringing her back specimens, and she might play the piano for a while; at other times they read Shakespeare aloud together, and her notebooks are full of comments on the plays which show how deeply attentive she was to the economy of their language, and the way a pictorial effect is produced in a few words, two things she, as a writer, was especially concerned with: all Katherine's reading was that of a modest apprentice to the writer's trade. It is one of the most attractive things about her. She understood the difficulty, and appreciated the achievement, all the more.

  Since they seemed so settled in Montana, Katherine asked Ida to go to London in August to collect her winter clothes and her cat, Wingly; Katherine was delighted to have her pet, and lavished love and attention on him. When, however, Ida decided she must make a second short visit to London to see her sister, who was expecting a baby, and proposed to act as escort to an English girl on the journey back to Switzerland, there was an explosion of rage from Katherine.

  You're the greatest flirt, I ever have met, a real flirt, I do wish you weren't. With all my heart I do. It seems so utterly indecent at our age to be still all aflutter at every possible glance… I am not going to flirt back, Miss, and say how I want you as part of my life and can't really imagine being without you. The ties that bind us! Heavens. They are so strong that you'd bleed to death if you really cut away. But don't – Oh please don't make me have to protest… You can, in spite of my rages, read as much love as you like into this letter. You won't read more than is there.5

  As far as flirtatiousness goes, it would be hard to improve on this angry example of the genre, and it marks one of the very few occasions on which Katherine seemed to doubt Ida's total loyalty, and pulled out the stops accordingly. But there was no need for her outburst: Ida returned quite unscathed and unchanged by her trip to London on her own business.

  She found the winter approaching, and the period of remission in Katherine's symptoms giving way to new onslaughts of fever and pain. Murry was happy in Switzerland; he was able to work well, he enjoyed the company of Cousin Elizabeth and her guests down the hill, he was learning skating and skiing with great pleasure, and he believed that they had found the best possible situation for Katherine. But she was growing restless. In October, she heard from Koteliansky, with whom she was determinedly rebuilding her friendship, of another Russian exile, a Dr Manoukhin who was now in Paris claiming to be able to cure tuberculosis by irradiating the spleen with X-rays. The treatment was said to have been effective for many thousands of Russian soldiers (a point which was hard to check) and it was not unreasonable to ask herself if it might work in her case. She also began to consider the possibility of curing her diseased body by mental and spiritual means, and the names of other oriental gurus began to be mentioned: Piotr Ouspensky, author of mystical books, who arrived in London from the east in September, and immediately impressed Orage; and trailing behind him news of another still, the Greek-Armenian George Gurdjieff.

  Murry, though not adverse to mystical ideas and experiences, was utterly opposed to Katherine seeking help from Manoukhin; but Katherine had another ally to hand, and she enlisted a willing Ida to make the necessary telephone calls to Paris. Once Christmas was over, for which Ida also organized the tree, pudding, crackers and presents, she went down the mountain to buy the tickets; and in the face of Murry's set disapproval, she escorted Katherine to Paris at the end of January, settled her in the Victoria Palace Hotel in Montparnasse, trudged around looking for an alternative hotel when Katherine complained it was sordid, visited agents in the hope of finding a flat to rent and performed her usual task of acting as lady's maid. Katherine was understandably nervous; she felt ill and exhausted, she quarrelled with Ida. When she set off to see Manoukhin she went first to the wrong house, where the sound of ‘scampering and laughter inside’ as she rang the bell seemed ominous; and when she found the right one, and he told her (through an interpreter) that he could cure her completely, she was wise enough not to believe him.

  The next day she decided, or half decided, to trust him after all: ‘I have the feeling that M. is a really good man. I also have a sneaking feeling… that he is a kind of unscrupulous impostor’.6 Even to Murry she sounded an only partially optimistic note. The action of the X-rays, she explained, would be like that of the sun, only more concentrated: it made them sound delightful. Manoukhin and his French partner had gone into her medical condition – heart and rheumatism as well as lungs – and were confident of a total cure. Privately she noted acute pain from ‘sciatica’ (another name for her rheumatism). ‘Put it on record,’ she wrote, ‘in case it ever goes. What a pain it is. Remember to give it to someone in a story one day.’7

  Despite her misgivings, she made up her mind to begin the treatment at once. It was expensive, 300 francs for each session. There were to be fifteen initial sessions, she told Murry, who was busy examining his conscience in scrupulous detail at the chalet to decide whether to remain and get on with his work or join her in Paris. ‘I see myself,’ she wrote to him with bleak humour, ‘after fifteen goes, apologizing to them for not being cured.’

  Ida was taking things too tragically for her, she thought of sending for Brett instead, and categorically forbade Murry to come. This, of course, brought him to heel at once, and Ida was sent back to Montana, pursued by contrite letters from Katherine, confessing that she had behaved like a fiend, ‘but ignore all that. Remember that through it all I love you and understand. That is always true.’8 This was soon followed by a suggested plan for their future lives in which she would spend six months a year with Murry in England, and six abroad with Ida, during which Katherine would work but they would enjoy many idyllic pleasures together:

  tea in a forest, cold chicken on a rock by the sea… concerts in public gardens, sea-bathing in Corsica and any other pretty little kick-shaws we have a mind to… For we must be happy. No failures. No makeshifts. Blissful happiness. Anything else is somehow disgusting.9

  In her next letter, this charming picture was cancelled, and she explained that Ida's very readiness to help her prevented her from making any effort herself; at the same time she asked her to make her some hand-sewn knickers (delicately referred to as pantalons) out of material Brett was sending her. In the next letter she reminded her to get the patterns for the knickers.

  In their two rooms at the end of a dark little corridor in the Victoria Palace, she and Murry played chess together, drank bowls of tea, ate what Murry managed to bring back from his shopping expeditions, and worked as best they could. Katherine produced ‘The Fly’, one of her most famous stories, a bitterly painful and perhaps too obviously symbolic story of a bereaved father and a struggling, doomed creature. In England, The Garden Party was published by Constable, sold out and went into a second and then a third edition. Sydney Schiff brought James Joyce to tea with the Murrys and, although Katherine had mixed feelings about Ulysses, she struck Joyce as understanding the book better than her husband. She was beginning to be a celebrity, receiving letters from admirers and requests for foreign editions of her work. At the same time the forefront of her li
fe was the treatment, which turned out to be less pleasant than a concentrated sunbath:

  one burns with heat in one's hands and feet and bones… Then one's head begins to pound… if I were a proper martyr I should begin to have that awful smile that martyrs in the flames put on when they begin to sizzle!10

  she wrote gallantly to Brett at the end of March. Then she began to put on some weight, and allowed herself a flicker of hope. For a spell in May she was well enough to go out for pleasure, to the Louvre, to some literary dinners; but when Ida called in on her way through Paris to London, she registered a doubt as to whether things were quite as good as Katherine claimed.

  As soon as Ida reached England, where she was planning to set up a teashop with a friend, she had a letter from Katherine which ended with the words,

  the old feeling is coming back – an ache, a longing – a feeling that I can't be satisfied unless I know you are near. Not on my account; not because I need you – but because in my horrid, odious, intolerable way I love you and am yours ever.11

  Within a week, having travelled back to Switzerland with Murry, who disastrously mislaid tickets and luggage, Katherine followed this up with a secret note. Apparently he could not begin to understand how ill she was, and would Ida help her to deceive him by ‘proposing’ to return to help: ‘the truth is I can't really work unless I know you are there’. Ida immediately wrote that she would drop all her other plans and come. Katherine warned her that she would behave no better, but that Ida should ‘try and believe and keep on believing without signs from me that I do love you and want you for my wife’.12 The word ‘wife’ now seemed so right that she used it in her next letter to Brett, apropos Ida's arrival: ‘the relief to have her is so great that I'll never say another word of impatience. I don't deserve such a wife.’13