Katherine Mansfield

by Claire Tomalin

  Katherine sometimes spoke of herself as being more man than woman in her relations with Murry, in the sense that she took her own decisions and ran her own financial, professional and emotional affairs and did not depend on him. Whatever sexual attraction there was in the first place seems to have drained away pretty thoroughly, leaving Katherine, at any rate, as a being desexed by her illness and his incapacity. Equally, whatever incipient eroticism there may have been in the relationship with Ida (and I do not believe there was much), it was buried very deep by Katherine's determined rejection of lesbianism and by Ida's innocence. When she spoke of Ida as her ‘wife’, it was not, obviously, in a sexual sense, but in profound acknowledgement of her as a constant and indispensable figure in her life, often irritating when present, haunting the imagination when not, slighted for other, more fascinating rivals but yet offering attentions no one else could ultimately match: an exasperating, and triumphant, patient Griselda of the twentieth century.

  I have suggested earlier that Katherine found in her exactly the mothering she never had from Mrs Beauchamp, and craved all her life: a warm, uncritical, generous and self-sacrificing devotion. Her rages against Ida were the rages of an angry infant; indeed, their whole story is a perfect illustration of the way in which one type of human relationship mimics and becomes a paradigm of another. Despite her claim to manly independence, Katherine also loved to be fussed over, given presents and flowers, have her clothes made by hand, offered delicious little meals on trays, all the attentions a child enjoys from an indulgent mother. Ida performed these functions, catered to Katherine's sometimes outrageous whims and summonses, cared for her physically and sympathized with her indignation against the meannesses and treacheries of others, whether family, friends or lovers. She was rewarded by knowing that her idol relied on her as on no one else. No doubt she derived considerable sly satisfaction from the spectacle of Murry perpetually berated for his lack of generosity, his coldness and unsatisfactory behaviour, even though he was always forgiven and reinstated. Ida learned to accept that Katherine loved him quite as much as she hated him, and that he was too deeply woven into her life to be cast off. She also knew that her own intimacy was older and deeper, that she and Katherine had shared more profound experiences than Murry had ever known, that Katherine trusted her with more than she trusted him; and whereas Murry would sometimes complain, absent himself, criticize or sulk, Ida had the terrific strength of the all-tolerant.

  With the arrival of Ida, Katherine now once more resolved to part from Murry. ‘We agreed that we had a depressing effect on one another,’ he wrote in his notes to her letters, but it seems unlikely he would have been responsible for the break at this stage. She and Ida moved to the Hôtel Château Belle Vue in the lower part of Sierre, where Brett came to join them for a time, while Murry stayed at Randogne, having long talks with Elizabeth and visiting Katherine at weekends.* The heat made her increasingly listless and, although she still struggled to write, she produced nothing to match her work of the previous season.†

  Early in August, she prepared two documents. The first was a private letter to Murry, which she deposited with her bank, leaving him all her manuscripts to do with as he pleased: ‘destroy all you do not use. Please destroy all letters you do not wish to keep and all papers,’ she instructed him, with just that ambiguity that so often appears when people are giving final instructions. It was a deeply loving letter, affirming her positive feelings for her husband, and undoubtedly intended to console him after her death, which it did.

  A week later, she asked Ida to help her compose her formal will, discussing each bequest with her, and urging her laughingly to accept any money Murry might ever offer her (‘don't hesitate’), his stinginess being an old joke between them. In this document she urged him much more directly to publish as little as possible of her remaining manuscripts, and to ‘tear up and burn as much as possible’.14 Had she given the instruction to Ida, there is no doubt that it would have been carried out, and we should now know less about her, and less of her writing; but it is also worth reflecting that she could have destroyed her papers herself and insisted on Murry returning her letters, had she really been set on their destruction.

  18

  ‘I Want to Work’

  Katherine's next move was to wire Brett, back in her house in Hampstead, asking if she might come and stay. She wanted to see Orage; she wanted to see Koteliansky; and she wanted to see her father, once again on a visit ‘Home’. Knowing his fear of disease, she explained to him in a letter that she was now entirely free of consumption, a very bold lie under the circumstances.

  Ida and Murry both travelled with her this time. Katherine was installed on the first floor of Brett's Pond Street house, and quickly made herself a card to hang on her door against visitors, with either ‘Out’ or ‘Working’ inscribed on it. After a few days in the house next door, Murry went to Garsington, and then to friends in Sussex; Ida stayed in Chiswick, from which she travelled daily to Hampstead in case Katherine needed anything.

  Frail as she was – one flight of stairs made her gasp for ten minutes, according to Brett – she maintained a hectic schedule, seeing the people she had come to see and several others; Dr Sorapure, who seems to have been his usual reassuring self, her old friend Anne Drey and an even older, childhood friend, Marion Ruddick. She saw her father twice (‘This was the last time I saw Kathleen’ is her father's entire comment in his memoirs) and her sisters Chaddie and Jeanne. Edward Garnett was eager to take both Murrys to meet his wife Constance in Kent, but this plan dwindled to a tête-à-tête luncheon in London between Garnett and Katherine.*

  Orage was an early caller, and took her to hear Ouspensky lecture on his own and Gurdjieff's ideas as to how human beings might change themselves. Orage was ripe for conviction, and carried Katherine with him. When the Schiffs invited her to lunch to meet Wyndham Lewis, she was deeply offended by his jeering abuse of Gurdjieff as a ‘psychic shark’, and wrote scolding him and the Schiffs.

  She had begun the irradiation treatments again, with a Harley Street man using Manoukhin's technique, but this time there was no perceptible benefit. Still, she saw her cousin Charlotte (Elizabeth's elder sister) and her brother-in-law Richard, for whom she felt great affection, and several of Murry's old colleagues from the Athenaeum; but she put off Ottoline and had no contact with any Bloomsbury friends. She made one visit to Murry in Sussex at the beginning of September, and they agreed tentatively that she might return to stay there in the spring. On the other hand, she told a young literary admirer (William Gerhardie, whose first novel she had recommended to a publisher) that she was planning to go to Lake Garda; she also said she was intending to write a play. When Kot called, they discussed the quarrel between Murry and Lawrence; Katherine defended Murry's hostile review of Women in Love, though not the manner in which he expressed his dislike of the book, adding, ‘You know I am deeply sorry for Murry; he is like a man under a curse.’2 Koteliansky urged Katherine to work, as a way of facing pain and suffering, but she said she could no longer write.

  At the end of September, Orage announced that he was quitting the editorship of the New Age. On 2 October, once more accompanied by Ida, and seen off by Brett, Katherine set off for the Continent again; and once again, the sheer fact of travelling elated her:

  We had a divine crossing, very still silvery sea with gulls moving on the waves like the lights in a pearl. It was fiery hot in Calais – Whoof! It was blazing. And there were old women with pears to sell wherever you looked… old hands holding up satiny baskets. So beautiful. English ladies trying to eat them through their veils. So awful. The way to Paris was lovely too. All the country just brushed over with light gold, and white oxen ploughing and a man riding a horse into a big dark pond. Paris too very warm and shadowy…3

  She and Ida went back to their old haunt of 1918, the Select Hôtel by the Sorbonne, taking cheap attic-rooms up five flights of stairs, but with wonderful views over the roofs of the university wit
h its monumental statues of ‘large grave gentlemen in marble bath gowns’.

  She went for a few sessions with Manoukhin, but they made her feel so ill with the pounding of her heart that she gave them up, although Ida obstinately believed the treatment had arrested the disease.

  On her thirty-fourth birthday, 14 October, Katherine wrote at length in her journal, half intending to send her confession to Murry (but she didn't):

  I have been thinking this morning until it seems I may get things straightened out if I try to write… where I am.

  Ever since I came to Paris I have been as ill as ever. In fact, yesterday I thought I was dying. It is not imagination. My heart is so exhausted and so tied up that I can only walk to the taxi and back. I get up at midi and go to bed at 5.30. I try to ‘work’ by fits and starts but the time has gone by. I cannot work…

  My spirit is nearly dead. My spring of life is so starved that it's just not dry. Nearly all my improved health is pretence – acting…4

  From this she justified her decision to try a different sort of healing with Gurdjieff. She rejected Murry's objections, saying that he knew nothing of the ill person she was, but only a fantasy of what she might be if she got better. The very risk involved in entrusting herself to Gurdjieff, who might be a charlatan, now seemed preferable to any other course she could think of, since her one quest was health:

  By health I mean the power to live a full, adult, living, breathing life in close contact with what I love – the earth and the wonders thereof – the sea – the sun. All that we mean when we speak of the external world. I want to enter into it, to be part of it, to live in it, to learn from it, to lose all that is superficial and acquired in me and to become a conscious, direct human being. I want, by understanding myself, to understand others. I want to be all that I am capable of becoming so that I may be (and here I have stopped and waited and waited and it's no good – there's only one phrase will do) a child of the sun. About helping others, about carrying a light and so on, it seems false to say a single word. Let it be that. A child of the sun.

  Then I want to work. At what? I want so to live that I work with my hands and my feeling and my brain. I want a garden, a small house, grass, animals, books, pictures, music. And out of this, the expression of this, I want to be writing. (Though I may write about cabmen. That's no matter.)

  But warm, eager, living life – to be rooted in life – to learn, to desire to know, to feel, to think, to act. That is what I want.5

  With this in mind, she submitted herself to an examination by Orage's friend Dr Young, who had himself abandoned his practice to join Gurdjieff, and received permission to go, accompanied by Ida, to Fontainebleau where he was installed.

  The background to George Gurdjieff's Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, the sonorous but not over-precise name bestowed on the enterprise at Fontainebleau, was not a simple one. Gurdjieff had advanced his theories about the way in which human character could be remoulded in Russia, where such cults were popular in the almost apocalyptic atmosphere of the years leading up to World War I and the Revolution. He had been driven west by the civil war. His father was a Greek carpenter, reputed to have been once a rich herdsman, but fallen on hard times. His mother was Armenian, and he was born some time in the 1870s in a territory disputed between Georgia and Armenia, somewhere east of Mount Ararat. He was a clever boy and was selected for a good education at a cathedral school, and then as a young man appears to have set off on his travels east, seeking holy masters, possibly spying, and picking up a living as a carpet salesman and odd-job man: he was shrewd and practical, never at a loss, a spellbinder. When he felt he had travelled and learned enough, he set up as a ‘master’ himself, working that area where revivalist preachers and advertising men meet, and immediately attracted disciples. He was not an ascetic, but a gross drinker, eater and fornicator, a big, strong man possessed of great authority; people who put themselves in his hands felt secure, despite his caprices, through the sheer power of his personality.

  Ouspensky, who was purely Russian, took up his ideas and began to lecture on them; the two men met in Istanbul in 1920. Then Ouspensky, who could speak English, attracted the attention of Lady Rothermere, the enormously wealthy wife of the newspaper proprietor, who summoned him to London (expenses paid). In 1921 both T. S. Eliot and Orage attended lectures and seances with Ouspensky, and Orage and Lady Rothermere became interested in what he had to say about Gurdjieff, who was now in Germany. He arrived in London also, early in 1922. The fact that he knew no western languages at all seems, if anything, to have added to his allure, for he quickly surpassed Ouspensky in popularity. Plans to establish his Institute in Hampstead were prevented by the Home Office, where he was suspected of being a spy; and, in any case, after a short spell in England, he himself expressed a preference for life in Paris.

  In October 1922, the beneficent Lady Rothermere, with a good part of the profits from the Daily Mail and Mirror to play with, used them to become patroness of two ventures that might have surprised their readers, one being a quarterly literary magazine, the Criterion, edited by T. S. Eliot, the other the Gurdjieff Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. It was set up on a large estate known as Le Prieuré, at Avon, near Fontainebleau, in the lovely wooded country south of Paris. Gurdjieff claimed that he raised most of the money for the rent himself, by treating drug addicts with hypnosis, by speculating in oil shares, and by setting up two profitable restaurants in Montmartre; but Lady Rothermere's contribution was probably more significant.

  Once a monastery, as its name suggests, Le Prieuré had been converted into a private mansion in the early nineteenth century. Since the war it had been standing empty, its huge park and buildings both much neglected. Gurdjieff arrived there for the first time on 1 October – he had taken the place sight unseen – and, with about one hundred disciples, set about stocking the farm and making the place habitable. The most comfortable parts of Le Prieuré were used by Gurdjieff himself and important visitors such as Lady Rothermere, and, accordingly, were known as ‘The Ritz’. Gurdjieff appointed servants for himself among the disciples; his personal habits were disgusting, and his bedroom and bathroom frequently needed the walls washing down (according to one of his most affectionate pupils, who performed this function as a boy*). Most of the disciples lived in small estate cottages or in comfortless, unheated rooms, which they no doubt welcomed, seeing the cold and inconvenience as part of their testing. They were set to work at once on building a huge oriental ‘tent’ out of an aeroplane hangar frame, complete with a throne for the master and lined with carpets from Bokhara and Baluchistan. It was to be a place for ritual dancing, meetings and holy observances. People's personalities were to be ‘broken down’ through severe manual work, compulsory oriental dancing and special tests, some of which resembled children's games: one called ‘Stop’, for instance, involved remaining absolutely motionless, whatever you were doing, at the command of the master. Orage was ordered to give up smoking and set to hard digging; not surprisingly, his health improved noticeably.

  Gurdjieff's creed was that civilization had thrown men and women out of balance, so that the physical, the emotional and the intellectual parts had ceased to work in accord. It is an idea that appeals to many people, and, indeed, has an obvious element of truth in it. Whether Gurdjieff's methods for righting the internal balance of his disciples had much, or any, merit is another matter. Since the whole thing depended on his personality, and made no scientific claims (as psychoanalysis did) or cosmological and moral claims (as most brands of Christianity did), it remained an amateur, ramshackle affair, and although Gurdjieff aroused passionate hate as well as love, his system seems to have done little lasting damage, and obviously allowed some people to change direction in a way that seemed helpful to them.

  For Katherine, Orage's enthusiasm and her feeling that she must find something, if not a miracle at least another change of direction before her time ran out, was decisive. There can be n
o doubt that she knew she was nearing the end. She could not work, she had grown dissatisfied with the scale and quality of the work she had already done, ‘little stories like birds bred in cages’ she described them to Orage. ‘Love’, Murry's religion of love, had also failed her utterly. Ida's love, loyal and precious as it was, was that of a subject, not an exchange between equals, and she knew that was, in the end, not right for either of them. Her family was close only in her dreams: dead brother, dead mother, unloved and envied sisters, father so much more satisfactory as a creature of fantasy than in reality. Gurdjieff and his Russian disciples seemed to offer the attraction of a large, exotic, extended family, and one that had faith in its own busy activities and might make a place for her without subjecting her to special treatment or nursing; something positive in place of doctors, weakness, despair.

  Katherine and Ida arrived at Le Prieuré together on 16 October for an exploratory visit. Ida was now the diary keeper:

  A drive in the sharp air through an avenue of immense trees, arriving at an old château, long and low, with a fountain playing into a round basin in a large courtyard, the flower beds full of crimson flowers and golden autumn leaves.6

  Katherine was given a pleasant room, with a mattress on the floor for Ida, and the next day Gurdjieff said she might stay for two weeks ‘under observation’. All the evidence suggests that he was behaving kindly towards a woman who was clearly dying; there was little question of any cure being offered. Ida was sent back to Paris to collect Katherine's things, and then given her last dismissal: or rather, in the long comedy of their association, a semi-dismissal.