Katherine Mansfield

by Claire Tomalin

  For while Katherine urged her towards independence, and affirmed her own happiness and self-sufficiency: ‘If you love me as you imagine you do how could you make such a moan because I was no longer helpless,’7 she scolded her briskly; at the same time, she still needed the old Ida. Her very next letter was an urgent plea for help again, as all her underclothes had been stolen from the laundry. Would Ida go to several shops in Paris for different items, about which she was most particular, and in addition quickly make her some ‘tops’, a shawl and a nightdress? This was followed up with more requests for things to be packed up and sent to her. Then she began to suggest that it would be a good idea for Ida and Murry to settle down together somewhere, perhaps on a farm. In fact, Ida found herself a farm to work on in Normandy.

  Thus did Katherine ‘release’ Ida, and at her death a long, affectionate and wistful letter to her lay unposted on her table: Ida, obeying Katherine's injunctions to become independent, had not written as often as she would like: ‘Write and tell me how you are will you? Dear Ida?’8 Katherine remained, until Ida's own death at ninety, the beloved idol, brilliant and beautiful, her sins excusable on the grounds of pain and illness, her friendship an unbreakable bond: ‘just as she expressed herself in writing, so I expressed myself in service.’9

  Eager as she was to enter into the life of the commune, Katherine was offered, and took, the job of peeling vegetables in the kitchen. It was something she had done very little of in her life, and it spoilt her hands, but she did not complain; in fact, she boasted that she was able to do it rather than staying in bed and having special meals brought to her on trays. Across the impenetrable language barrier, she felt drawn to the Russians in the group, and they found her attractive and touching, with her burning bright eyes, her frailty and enthusiasm. She watched the dancing and the farm activities such as pig-killing and the delivery of a calf; she made her own bed, kindled her own fire and washed in cold water.

  Her letters to Murry were still full of fantasy, only the fantasy had changed. Instead of the lovers' houses and children, she talked of how she was going to learn carpentry and farm work; already she was learning to weave carpets, and was about to be put in charge of the cows Gurdjieff had acquired; in fact, she was told to sit on a platform above the cowshed, following an old peasant remedy for tuberculosis. As time went by, she mentioned, without complaint, the difficulty in getting a bath or even a warm wash, and the intense cold, which made her stay in her fur coat: ‘I gird it on like my heavenly armour and wear it ever night and day’.10 (Anyone who has ever tried to scrape carrots in a fur coat will know what this means.) She spoke enthusiastically of the friendly atmosphere and Gurdjieff's wisdom, but she could not as yet say she had made many friends, although she was learning Russian. When Murry suggested a visit, she put him off; but then she had always done this, even when she most wanted him to come. Now she was obviously worried that he might judge the place, where meals were at all hours, the men looked like brigands, and she spent many hours sitting alone in her room or in the cowshed.

  She had, of course, one old friend to talk to: Orage, who said in the brief article he wrote in 1932 that he saw her almost every day at Le Prieuré. His account is dull and stilted, but worth pondering. He explains that she entered the Institute in order to undergo a process of self-training; that she had become dissatisfied with her work, and spoke of the need for literature to be more than didactic or aesthetic. Sometimes, he says, she claimed to have lost all interest in literature; at others she talked of working on new stories, and of having a contract for a book which she must honour.

  One day she sent for him to tell him she had a new idea, which was that she should present good characters attractively. Hitherto she went on, she had been a camera, but a selective camera. She wanted to write stories that would ‘first see life different and then make it different’.11 She showed Orage fragments of stories begun, but then destroyed them. So far her words, or her words as reported, are sadly too vague and general to be of interest. When she came to outline to him a plan for a story she was considering, at once she becomes interesting.

  It was to be about a married couple, both writers (Orage's unhappy phrase is ‘jointly competing for the divine laurel’). ‘One, or perhaps both of them, have had previous affairs, the remains of which still linger like ghosts in the new home. Both wish to forget but the ghosts still walk.’12 To Orage's question as to whether their exercise in ghost-laying would have a happy ending, she answered, ‘Not by any means. The problem might prove too big.’13 Orage's report carries the sad, but hardly surprising, confirmation that Katherine's imagination remained haunted by the effects of her secret early experiences upon her subsequent life, and by the bitter lesson that she could not simply write off her adventures and tragedies to experience, but had to live with their grim after-effects as surely as the Alving family in Ibsen's Ghosts. Behind the talk with Orage there is a sense that she is groping towards confession and expiation instead of secrecy: a secrecy which must have been, at times, as great a torture as any disease.

  In November, Gurdjieff decreed that Katherine should be moved into a tiny, uncomfortable room, without carpets. She told Murry it was warm, but the list of words for which she wanted Russian equivalents suggests otherwise: ‘I am cold. Bring paper to light a fire. Paper. Cinders. Wood. Matches. Flame. Smoke. Strong. Strength. Light a fire. No more fire. Because there is no more fire…’ The conditions were obviously too much for her to bear, and she was moved back into her old, comfortable room just before Christmas. She gathered the commune's children to make paper flowers for the festivities, and prepared to deliver some recitations of her work on Christmas Day itself.

  On 31 December she wrote loving letters to her father and her cousin Elizabeth; and to Murry, whom she had hitherto forbidden to visit her, at least until the spring, she now sent a pressing invitation to come within a week or so. January 8 or 9 was the suggested date, to which Gurdjieff had given his personal blessing. In fact, he wanted Murry to see his new theatre, which was to be opened on 13 January. Katherine told Murry exactly what clothes he was to bring, and asked him to include some shoes and a jacket for her in his luggage. ‘I hope you will decide to come, my dearest. Let me know as soon as you can, won't you?’14

  Murry arrived on the afternoon of 9 January. He found her ‘very pale, but radiant’. They talked together in her room, and she explained that she had

  perhaps now gained all that it had to give her, and that she might be leaving very soon. When she did, she would like to live with me in extreme simplicity in a small cottage in England, and she would like me to cultivate the land.15

  She then introduced him to various other inmates, including Orage, whom Murry had not seen for many years, the English doctor James Young and Olga Ivanovna (who later became Mrs Frank Lloyd Wright, and ran her own very strictly organized community in America).

  Murry's impression was that they all seemed serious, simple and also exhausted from their prolonged manual labours preparing the theatre. He himself lent a hand in painting coloured patterns on the windows. In the evening he and Katherine sat in the salon; at about ten she said she would go to bed. Her room was on the first floor. As she went up the stairs, she began to cough. Murry took her arm to help her. In her room, her cough became worse and ‘suddenly a great gush of blood poured from her mouth. It seemed to be suffocating her. She gasped out “I believe… I'm going to die.’”16 Murry put her on the bed and rushed for a doctor. The two who came immediately pushed him out of the room, although, as he always remembered, ‘her eyes were imploring me’. A few minutes later, and she was dead.

  19

  ‘What is Going to Happen to Us All?’

  Murry sent a telegram to Ida at once, and she arrived on the following day. Both she and Murry said they felt Katherine had benefited from her time at the Institute, bizarre as it was, and despite her death. Both must have known in their hearts that her death was, in any case, inevitable and close; perhaps it had
been as well for her to spend her last weeks engaged in something she felt enthusiastic about rather than simply waiting for the end. It's a view one can share, whatever reservations may be entertained about Gurdjieff and his entourage.

  The funeral took place in the Protestant Church in Fontainebleau, and was attended by Murry, Ida, Orage, Brett and Katherine's sisters Chaddie and Jeanne; Koteliansky, refused permission to travel, mourned at home in Acacia Road. Ida threw marigolds on to the coffin, and travelled back to England with a distraught Murry.

  In Wellington, Harold Beauchamp had just been honoured for his services to the Bank of New Zealand with a knighthood in the New Year's honours list, a fact that figured prominently in Katherine's obituary notice in The Times (which also placed her marriage to Murry in 1912). Beauchamp took as his motto Verité sans peur. With the growth of Katherine's fame he began to change his view of her, exactly as she had predicted. All the same, when Sir Harold came to write his memoirs, he was cautious enough to call in a ‘literary expert’ to write the chapter devoted to her, as though he did not trust himself to speak of her.

  At Garsington, Ottoline sat down to write a memoir of her dead friend, which she read out to an invited group one evening by candlelight. It has not survived, and her friendship with Murry lapsed. Brett began a grieving diary addressed to Katherine (or ‘Dearest Tig’); soon it became the repository of the details of her affair with Murry, who had no compunction about either seducing or dropping this forty-year-old virgin. Fortunately, the blood of the Eshers ran strongly in her veins, she showed great fortitude and found a new idol in Lawrence shortly afterwards.

  Ida became, for a time, companion and housekeeper to Katherine's cousin Elizabeth; but she could not be handed on like a useful piece of furniture, and soon she settled alone in a cottage in the New Forest, a tiny, remote place where she lived out her long life with few disturbances beyond the occasional literary sleuth struggling up the overgrown path. When she came to write her book about Katherine, fifty years later, her memory was dim, but the power of Katherine's personality was not. She gave her the uncritical devotion of a perfect widow: in its pages, Katherine is always either a victim – of family, of lovers, of illness – or an idol, brilliant and irresistible in all her whims.

  It took the news of Katherine's death to mend the quarrel between Murry and Lawrence, who wrote grieving from New Mexico,

  Yes, I always knew a bond in my heart. Feel a fear where the bond is broken now. Feel as if old moorings were breaking all. What is going to happen to us all? Perhaps it is good for Katherine not to have to see the next phase. We will unite up again when I come to England. It has been a savage enough pilgrimage these last four years. Perhaps K. has taken the only way for her.1

  After this, Lawrence wrote regularly to Murry again, even inviting him to look for a country house where they might settle near one another, and offering to contribute to the new magazine Murry was setting up, the Adelphi, with a reconciled Koteliansky as business manager; this was not out of any need for money, for Lawrence's financial position was at last secure, thanks to sales of his books in America. An uneasy peace was reached, and when Frieda travelled to England alone in the summer, Lawrence asked Murry to look after her.

  Murry sent Lawrence a copy of The Doves' Nest, a volume consisting of a few finished stories of Katherine's (‘The Doll's House’, ‘The Fly’, ‘Honeymoon’, ‘A Cup of Tea’) but mostly fragments. At this, Lawrence scolded Murry for making excessive claims for her work: ‘Poor Katherine, she is delicate and touching. – But not Great! Why say great?’2 He complained to another correspondent, in his most acerbic tone, of Murry's cheek in asking the public to buy Katherine's ‘waste-paper basket’.3 He did not know about her request to Murry in her will; nor did Murry ever give him one of Katherine's books, as she had requested, or apparently even bother to tell him of the bequest. Lawrence was irritated by the puffing. He was not an attentive or generous reader of his contemporaries, but he was ready to admire certain strengths in Katherine's work; only not at Murry's bidding. ‘She was a good writer they made out to be a genius,’ he said in 1925. ‘Katherine knew better herself but her husband, J. M. Murry, made capital out of her death.’4

  Still, the links between the old foursome of 1913 remained tenacious. It appears that Frieda tried to seduce Murry in the summer of 1923 and, although she did not succeed, Lawrence was angry and jealous enough to write a series of stories in the 1920s in which he systematically humiliated and sometimes killed off a figure modelled on Murry. In one, the faun-like hero is visiting the dead body of his beautiful young wife in a foreign convent (shades of Le Prieuré); he finds himself, through his display of grief, magically and irresistibly forced to smile. Presently, the attendant nuns notice that the corpse too has broken out into a smile: a cynical, Katherine-like one.

  In another story, as the hero wanders Murry-like from one woman to another in Hampstead, he is struck dead by the god Pan; and, in the oddest of all, another Murry-figure becomes the second husband of a widow whose first (a self-portrait by Lawrence) returns to haunt the guilty couple. The story culminates in the mysterious death of the second husband and the first husband's triumphant, ghostly, sexual repossession of his wife. For good measure, she is given the name of ‘Katharine’. It does not take a Dr Eder to read the significance of these works.

  Murry struck back in his own way after Lawrence's death, both by writing Son of Woman, which purports to praise but, in fact, denigrates him, often in crudely sexual terms; and by becoming Frieda's lover, briefly. No ghost appeared to strike him down. By the 1950s he and Frieda were corresponding warmly and nostalgically about the golden past.

  Lawrence was not the only one who thought Murry's zeal on Katherine's behalf excessive. Although T. S. Eliot sent a letter of condolence in January, saying he would be writing a critical article on her work, in June he wrote to his assistant on the Criterion, Richard Aldington, asking him to get ‘a copy of Katherine Mansfield's book for me when it comes out. I think her inflated reputation ought to be dealt with.’5 The article was not apparently written. Another friend of the Murrys, Sylvia Lynd, also spoke of Murry ‘boiling Katherine's bones to make soup’.6

  It is true that Murry did boil the bones, puffing and promoting Katherine's work through his own magazine, and running with Constable a well-organized and enormously successful publishing campaign in which segments of her work, fragments of stories, reissues, scraps of letters and pieces of journal (followed by ‘definitive’ versions of the same) were issued to the public all through the 1920s, and indeed into the 1950s. The pathos of her early death undoubtedly gave her work an extra appeal – people love to dwell on the words of the dying – but that alone would not account for its popularity, in England and America, France, Germany and in most countries touched by English culture.

  What did make her so popular? It was not only the delicacy, charm and pathos attributed to her by Lawrence. The sharp impersonality, the clarity and concision of the best stories made them genuinely startling. Her voice was the voice of modernity, bright, short-winded, sometimes whimsical, often ambiguous, with no claim to wisdom and no time for the scene-setting of the classical novelists. Her territory was that of the fragile emotions, half-understood feelings, the fine edge between the ridiculous and the pathetic; she could render the vulnerability of the young, the sad stirrings of the sick, the jealous, the powerless, those who make animals or inanimate objects the focus of their feelings. Other writers studied her approvingly for ‘her economy, the boldness of her comic gift, her speed, her dramatic changes of the point of interest, her power to dissolve and reassemble a character and situation by a few lines.’7 The decades may have taken some of the shine off the originality of her method, but they have not robbed the stories of their vigour. Even those who dislike them acknowledge that there is something pungently alive in them.

  Katherine's assessment of her own work was modest. Like all writers, she was pleased when she was praised and hurt by unkind
criticism or dismissal; but she reproached Murry with overpraising her: ‘I don't want dismissing as a masterpiece’. Her success meant a great deal to her, and she was businesslike in her letters to the Pinker agency. She saw herself as a professional, writing for money, always trying to learn from the work of other writers, aware of her own limitations and dissatisfied with her own best efforts. She noted in her journal, for instance, that ‘The Garden Party’, one of her most admired stories, ‘is a moderately successful story, that's all’.8 She accepted modestly enough Gerhardie telling her he did not like ‘The Fly’, though he was younger than her, and unpublished himself. Murry's claim that she was a genius would have seemed bizarre to her, accompanied as it was by his publication of negligible and discarded scraps and obviously private letters. She would not have been pleased either by his denigration of the meticulous professionalism she took so seriously, when he wrote that ‘there was no difference between her casual and her deliberate utterances;… her art was not really distinct from her life;… she was never what we understand by a professional writer’.9 Unable to control her while she lived, Murry could not resist manipulating her after her death to fit the pattern he preferred.

  Although Katherine and Murry often presented their relationship as the most important element in both their lives – and it did absorb a huge amount of their energy – there is a sense in which neither sought true understanding of the other. For each of them, the other became a symbolic figure very early on: she the good, suffering, spontaneous genius, he the ideally beautiful scholar–lover without whom neither life nor death could be properly contemplated. Each settled to a dream-version of the other. Murry, being the more self-absorbed of the two, was entirely content to live with a woman whose history he ignored and whose inner life he denied; and she, with her desperate desire for secrecy, was in some degree satisfied by this, even though, in the long run, it left her isolated and frightened in her perfectly protected privacy.