17 ‘READ AS MUCH LOVE AS YOU LIKE INTO THIS LETTER’
1. K.M. to Ottoline Morrell, June 1921, The Letters of K.M., J.M.M., vol. 11, p. 118.
2. Athenaeum, 4 June 1921.
3. K.M. to Elizabeth (Countess Russell), December 1921, The Letters of K.M., J.M.M., vol. II, p. 163.
4. K.M. to Brett, 29 August 1921, The Letters of K.M., J.M.M., vol. 11, p. 131.
5. Baker, op. cit., p. 172.
6. Journal, 1 February 1922, p. 293.
7. ibid., 4 February 1922, p. 294.
8. Baker, op. cit., p. 177.
9. ibid., p. 186.
10. K.M. to Brett, 19 March 1922, The Letters of K.M., J.M.M., vol. II, p. 199.
11. Baker, op. cit., p. 197.
12. ibid., p. 203.
13. K.M. to Brett, 6 June 1922, The Letters of K.M., J.M.M., vol. II, p. 216.
14. Cited in Lea, op. cit., p. 113.
18 ‘I WANT TO WORK’
1. Constance Garnett to Edward Garnett [1922], unpublished letter in possession of Richard Garnett.
2. Cited by Ruth Elvish Mantz, ‘In Consequence: Katherine and Kot’, Adam (nos. 370–75, 1972), pp. 95–106.
3. K.M. to Brett, 3 October 1922, The Letters of K.M., J.M.M., vol. II, p. 247.
4. Journal, 14 October 1922, pp. 331–2.
5. ibid., pp. 333–4.
6. Baker, op. cit., p. 213.
7. ibid., p. 218.
8. ibid., p. 226.
9. ibid., p. 234.
10. K.M. to J.M.M., 19 November 1922, K.M.'s Letters to J.M.M.: 1913–22, J.M.M., p. 688.
11. New English Weekly, 19 May 1932.
12. ibid.
13. ibid.
14. K.M. to J.M.M., 31 December 1922, K.M.'s Letters to J.M.M.: 1913–22, J.M.M., p. 699.
15. Murry's narrative, K.M.'s Letters to J.M.M.: 1913–22, J.M.M., p. 700.
16. ibid., p. 701.
19 ‘WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN TO US ALL?’
1. D.H. Lawrence to J.M.M., 2 February 1923, The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Boulton, vol. IV, p. 375.
2. ibid., 25 October 1923, p. 520.
3. D. H. Lawrence to Adele Seltzer, 24 September 1923, The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Boulton, vol. IV, p. 503.
4. Testimony of K. S. Crichton in Edward Nehls, D.H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1957), vol. II, p. 414.
5. Information from Mrs Valerie Eliot.
6. Information from Moira Lynd.
7. V. S. Pritchett in the New Statesman, 1946.
8. Journal, 14 October 1921, p. 266.
9. J.M.M., Katherine Mansfield and Other Literary Portraits (Constable, London, 1959), p. 72.
Appendix 1
‘Leves Amores’
I can never forget the Thistle Hotel.* I can never forget that strange winter night.
I had asked her to dine with me, and then go to the Opera. My room was opposite hers. She said she would come but – could I lace up her evening bodice, it was hooks at the back. Very well.
It was still daylight when I knocked at the door and entered. In her petticoat bodice and a full silk petticoat she was washing, sponging her face and neck. She said she was finished, and I might sit on the bed and wait for her. So I looked round at the dreary room. The one filthy window faced the street. She could see the choked, dust-grimed window of a wash-house opposite. For furniture, the room contained a low bed, draped with revolting, yellow, vine-patterned curtains, a chair, a wardrobe with a piece of cracked mirror attached, a washstand. But the wallpaper hurt me physically. It hung in tattered strips from the wall. In its less discoloured and faded patches I could trace the pattern of roses – buds and flowers – and the frieze was a conventional design of birds, of what genus the good God alone knows.
And this was where she lived. I watched her curiously. She was pulling on long, thin stockings, and saying ‘damn’ when she could not find her suspenders. And I felt within me a certainty that nothing beautiful could ever happen in that room, and for her I felt contempt, a little tolerance, a very little pity.
A dull, grey light hovered over everything; it seemed to accentuate the thin tawdriness of her clothes, the squalor of her life, she, too, looked dull and grey and tired. And I sat on the bed, and thought: ‘Come, this Old Age. I have forgotten passion, I have been left behind in the beautiful golden procession of Youth. Now I am seeing life in the dressing-room of the theatre.’
So we dined somewhere and went to the Opera. It was late, when we came out into the crowded night street, late and cold. She gathered up her long skirts. Silently we walked back to the Thistle Hotel, down the white pathway fringed with beautiful golden lilies, up the amethyst shadowed staircase.
Was Youth dead?… Was Youth dead?
She told me as we walked along the corridor to her room that she was glad the night had come. I did not ask why. I was glad, too. It seemed a secret between us. So I went with her into her room to undo those troublesome hooks. She lit a little candle on an enamel bracket. The light filled the room with darkness. Like a sleepy child she slipped out of her frock and then, suddenly, turned to me and flung her arms round my neck. Every bird upon the bulging frieze broke into song. Every rose upon the tattered paper budded and formed into blossom. Yes, even the green vine upon the bed curtains wreathed itself into strange chaplets and garlands, twined round us in a leafy embrace, held us with a thousand clinging tendrils.
And Youth was not dead.
[Signed] K. Mansfield.
Appendix 2
‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’: The Times Literary Supplement Correspondence
19 OCTOBER 1951
Sir – About three years ago Messrs. Constable reprinted the collected edition of Katherine Mansfield's stories. I had never read her before, but, looking through the volume, I got a curious sense of walking through once well-familiar rooms. The feeling was intensified when I came to the end of the volume which contains the stories under the collective title of In a German Pension – first published in 1911, and here prefaced by an introductory note by Mr J. Middleton Murry which told me that the sketches and stories composing the volume first appeared in the New Age between 1909 and 1911, that the publisher who brought out the book went bankrupt, and that ‘Katherine Mansfield was not very disappointed. She quickly became indifferent to the book; then hostile.’ Mr Middleton Murry mentions that later offers were made for the reissue of the book, but nothing would induce Katherine Mansfield to have it brought out again. As late as 1920 she wrote, ‘… I cannot have The German Pension reprinted under any circumstances… I don't even acknowledge it today. I mean I don't hold by it. I can't go on foisting that kind of stuff on the public. It's not good enough [the italics are K.M.'s]… I could not for a moment entertain republishing [it]…. It's not what I mean, it's a lie…’ But, some time later, Katherine Mansfield yielded to her friends' persuasion and Mr Middleton Murry quotes from her letter expressing consent to have The German Pension reprinted: ‘But I must write an introduction saying it is early, early work… because you know… it's nothing to be proud of. If you didn't advise me, I should drop it overboard… It makes me simply hang my head…’ Katherine Mansfield never wrote the introduction, and the only living story in the whole book is ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’. I read it, and the vague sense of familiarity became a disturbing certainty, and, bearing in mind that the Mansfield story was written about 1909, I turned to my Chekhov. The late Prof. Brückner's Literary History of Russia, translated by H. Havelock, and published in England in 1908, tells me that by 1905 most of Chekhov's stories had appeared in English.
The particular story I have in mind bears the title ‘Spat' khochetsia’. The tense of the second verb is rather untranslatable in English. It might be rendered as ‘I'd like to sleep…’ It was written by Chekhov in 1888 – i.e., when he was still a young man. It is a terrible picture of a single day in the life of a very small maid-of-all-work in a Moscow cobbler's family. It is a study in black pierced by a sin
gle poignant pinpoint of light: the child's desire for sleep. Her past and her present are but stage props. Not a sentence but leads to the inevitable horror of the climax when, half-awake, half-aware, the child realizes (however, falsely, as Chekhov says) that the baby, whose cot she must rock all through the night, is her main enemy, and she comes to a decision to overthrow the enemy by the only means within her reach. In her state of perpetually enforced drowsiness, the child half-dreams about her earlier years, her father's death, her mother's companionship, and the road she must walk to come within the gates of her salvation. The road is sleep, and she can't walk it – because of the cobbler's baby. Chekhov's consummate artistry does not allow him to cumber the background with irrelevancies. There is the child, and the ghostly silhouettes of her parents. There are the brutal cobbler and his wife brought to life within a couple of sentences. But the living people and the ghosts vanish soon enough: nothing is left except her memories of a kindly past, and the crying baby, whose wailing becomes a barrier between the little maid-of-all-work and the desire for sleep. So the shadows deepen unto absolute dark, and the crash comes – all within two or three paragraphs.
Katherine Mansfield's story is laid in Germany. The background is crowded. The mistress and her husband have other children, and another baby is on the way – which, however feebly, is used to explain the climax. A single page of Chekhov's, illustrating the little girl's terribly exhausting day, is here extended to a series of incidents, none of which have much bearing on the climax. Katherine Mansfield begins her story more or less in the middle of Chekhov's version, as will be shown below, and the Mansfield maid-of-all-work, in spite of far more specific biographical details than those given by Chekhov to his child, somehow never comes to life. The attention is distracted by the other children, the gossip of visitors, the irrelevant details, and in the end one is left with a sense of bathos rather than pathos. Did the climax come because of the girl's fear of yet another baby on the way, or because of the actual baby's incessant crying?
What follows are a few parallel passages from the two stories. The translation of the Chekhov passages is my own.
Chekhov (the middle)
Varka is going through the wood and crying hard, but someone hits her so sharply that she knocks her face against a birch. She raised her eyes and sees the cobbler, her master.
‘You – good-for-nothing – you! The child is crying, and you are asleep’; he pulls hard at her ear, and she shakes her head, rocks the cot, and starts crooning her song again.
Mansfield (the beginning)
She was just beginning to walk along a little white road with tall black trees on either side, a little road that led to nowhere, and where nobody walked at all, when a hand gripped her shoulder, shook her, pulled at her ear: ‘Get up, you good-for-nothing brat!’
Chekhov
There come moments when she wants to fall down on the floor and to sleep. The day passes. Looking at the darkening windows, Varka presses her numb temples and smiles for no rhyme or reason. The twilight teases her aching eyes and promises her quick, sound sleep. But guests arrive in the evening.
‘Varka, put the samovar on,’ shouts the mistress.
The samovar is small, but she must put it on five times before all the guests have had enough tea. The tea finished, she stands for an hour, looking at the company and expecting orders.
‘Varka, run and get three bottles of beer.’
She rushes off, trying to run quickly so as to conquer her sleepiness.
‘Varka, run and fetch some vodka –’
‘Varka, where is the corkscrew?’
‘Clean the herring –’
At last, the guests leave; the lights are put out, and her employers go to bed.
‘Varka, rock the baby,’ comes the last order.
Mansfield
She was afraid to sit down or stand still. When she thought of the nearness of bedtime, she shook all over with excited joy. But as eight o'clock approached, there was the sound of wheels on the road, and presently in came a party of friends to spend the evening.
Then it was:
‘Put on the coffee.’
‘Bring me the sugar tin.’
‘Carry the chairs out of the bedroom.’
‘Set the table.’
And, finally, the Frau sent her into the next room to keep the baby quiet.
Chekhov
[Here Chekhov makes Varka get back to her dream. She sees the road, but she feels she can't walk it.]
Something hinders her. She can't understand there must be an enemy who will not let her live or walk. She finds the enemy. It is the child. She laughs. It is wonderful. Why did she not grasp such a simple thing before?… She gets up from the stool, and, smiling broadly, her eyes unblinking, walks up and down the road. She is pleased and excited at the thought that she will soon be rid of the baby which now chains her whole body. To kill the child, and then to sleep, sleep, sleep…
Laughing, winking, shaking her finger at a green stain on the ceiling, Varka creeps to the cradle and bends over the child. Having strangled it, she at once tumbles down on the floor, and laughs at the joy of being able to sleep, and within a moment is fast asleep.
Mansfield
And she suddenly had a beautiful, marvellous idea. She laughed for the first time that day and clapped her hands… And then gently, smiling, on tiptoe, she brought the pink bolster from the Frau's bed and covered the baby's face with it, pressing with all her might as he struggled. Like a duck with its head off, wriggling, she thought. She heaved a long sigh then fell back on to the floor, and was walking along a little white road with tall black trees on either side, a little road that led to nowhere, and where nobody walked at all, nobody at all.
This is the only story of Katherine Mansfield's which I have been able to compare in detail with Chekhov's. There may be others. Unfortunately, I don't possess a complete edition of his stories and plays. Here and there, in the Constable edition of K. Mansfield, I have come across typically Chekhovian ‘beginnings’ such as, for example ‘Eight o'clock in the morning’ (Pictures, p. 119). If I can ever find a complete edition of Chekhov I might discover further parallels – I can't tell. Mr Middleton Murry attributes her reluctance to have The German Pension reprinted to a consciousness of its immaturity, but I am inclined to disagree with him. ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’ in spite of its different setting and far greater length, is merely a copy of Chekhov's story written twenty-one years ago, and not a very good copy either. Chekhov and de Maupassant had few peers in the art of short-story telling, and Katherine Mansfield was certainly not one of them.
E. M. Almedingen
26 OCTOBER 1951
Sir – Miss Almedingen has put a strong prima facie case that Katherine Mansfield's youthful story, ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’, was taken substantially from the story by Chekhov, ‘Spat' khochetsia’. But there are difficulties in this supposition, which need to be cleared up.
The first is this. Miss Almedingen assumes that an English translation of the Chekhov story was in existence in 1909. She bases this assumption on the statement in a German book published in 1908, that ‘by 1905 most of Chekhov's stories had appeared in English’.
I am confident that the German statement is not true. Few of Chekhov's stories had been translated into English in 1905; and still few by 1909. Indeed, I am pretty sure that the story which Katherine Mansfield is alleged to have copied was not available in English then. Has it been translated even now? If it has been, it is very curious that the many students who have written theses on the influence of Chekhov on Katherine Mansfield should have missed this apparently glaring instance.
On the assumption that Chekhov's story was not extant in an English translation in 1909 – and I must ask Miss Almedingen to prove that it was – a second difficulty arises. Katherine Mansfield certainly knew no Russian in 1909; in the last months of her life she was painfully learning the rudiments. So that if she did copy Chekhov's story, she must have had acce
ss to it in a French or German translation. I very much doubt whether a French version was extant in 1909. Chekhov's popularity came much later in France than in England. A German translation seems to be the only solution. Katherine Mansfield read German easily; she was in Germany in 1909; and I believe ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’ was written there. But if (as is possible) no German translation of Chekhov's story was extant in 1909, there is a real mystery, which needs explanation.
In the interim, I must protest against Miss Almedingen's insinuation that, if she possessed a complete edition of Chekhov's, she might be able to discover similar borrowings in other stories of Katherine Mansfield. What she calls ‘the typically Chekhovian’ opening of Pictures amounts to nothing; there is no reason to suppose even the influence of Chekhov here; and in any case it is quite different from the kind of borrowing, or copying, which is imputed to her in the case of ‘Spat' khochetsia’. On the face of it, that amounts to plagiarism. Therefore one must be wary of accepting it. It may be true; and it may be that, as Miss Almedingen suggests, this was the real reason why Katherine Mansfield was so extremely reluctant to have In a German Pension republished. But, until it is proved that she could have had access to this story in either an English, French or German translation in 1909, judgement must be suspended. It would be very helpful for those ignorant of Russian if Miss Almedingen would direct us to an English translation of the whole Chekhov story in order that it may be more diligently compared with ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’.
J. Middleton Murry
Editor's note: For purposes of comparison the most accessible version of ‘Spat' khochetsia’ is Constance Garnett's translation (Sleepy) contained in Select Tales of Tchekov (Chatto & Windus, 1927; reprinted 1949).
2 NOVEMBER 1951
Sir – Mr Middleton Murry has asked me for a proof that an English translation of Chekhov's ‘Spat' khochetsia’ was extant in 1909, and I can furnish such a proof.
Katherine Mansfield Page 33
