Katherine Mansfield
Page 36
* Abingdon Mansions, Pater Street.
* Garnet worked as a musician in South Africa and then settled in Ontario with his Canadian wife; he gave up music during World War II to work in the Ford factory, and died in 1947.
* In 1913, Clovelly Mansions was renamed Churston Mansions,8 and No. 69 became No. 19. The views are not quite what they were, especially at the back, but the five front windows let in lots of sun. For some years until 1986 the next-door building housed the Sunday Times newspaper; for six years the author shared K.M.'s view, with the addition of the Post Office Tower and one or two other later features.
* It has been alleged by Antony Alpers that this was Francis Heinemann. He denied this categorically to the present author.
* Pinker did become Katherine's agent in 1920, however; see p. 213.
* Walter George was half French, an ex-literary editor of Vanity Fair, prolific author, ardent for women's emancipation, hospitable, with a finger in every pie; he had just published a best-seller about a respectable young widow driven to prostitution, A Bed of Roses. Though generous and ambitious, he was not a gifted writer.
* The judgement is strikingly similar to that of Aldous Huxley in Those Barren Leaves, written after Katherine's death, where she is satirized as Mary Thriplow.
† Orage's view of Katherine fluctuated: after her death, he told Frieda Lawrence that she was the only woman he had ever truly loved.5
* Although largely forgotten today – Cannan became schizophrenic and spent his life from the age of forty in a mental hospital – in 1912 he did appear to be one of the most promising young English writers, singled out for praise by Henry James, among others. He was also a pivotal figure in the intellectual community, not only introducing Murry and Katherine to Seeker, but establishing a ‘poor man's Garsington’ in the Chilterns, with the same people visiting him and the Morrells, and Ottoline and Gilbert calling on one another. Cannan introduced both Mark Gertler and Lawrence to her.
* The story, which Lawrence had written in Croydon several years earlier, was called ‘The Soiled Rose’, and described the visit of a young, successful man to his old sweetheart, a farmer's daughter, now engaged to a passionate gamekeeper. Lawrence reworked it after its magazine appearance and renamed it ‘The Shades of Spring’.
* ‘Old Tar’ was printed in the Westminster Gazette in October 1913, but has been reprinted only once, by Ian Gordon in his Undiscovered Country.
* St John Hutchinson, a barrister, and his wife, Mary, were friends of the Campbells and also of the Bloomsbury group. Mrs Hutchinson was generally known to be the mistress of Clive Bell. They had a house in Hammersmith and a holiday farm in Sussex, and were exceedingly hospitable.
* This letter is given with the date 20 June in Gertler's letters, but such a date makes no sense, because Katherine invited herself on 27 June, and it is clear that this was to be a first visit. If Gertler's letter is, in fact, 20 July, it fits with the other facts and letters.18
* This striking account of someone smiling in reflex imitation also occurs in Katherine's story ‘At the Bay’, when Linda Burnell answers her baby son's smile in the same way.
* Murry, who had been reading the letters of Keats for the first time, may have recalled his remark at the same juncture: ‘I know the colour of that blood; it is arterial blood. I cannot be deceived in that colour. That drop of blood is my death warrant.’ Rib was Katherine's Japanese doll.
* That Katherine understood this herself is obvious from an entry in her journal for 18 October 1920, in which she described a desperate spinster pretending that her doll is a love-child.
* ‘The Monster’ here is one of Katherine's many unkind names for Ida; nicknames were very much a Beauchamp habit, and Katherine used them systematically to express either affection or contempt. The story referred to as breathing hate is presumably ‘Je ne parle pas français’, which Murry was proposing to print on the press he had bought in emulation of the Woolfs', and installed in the basement at Portland Villas.
* See, for instance, Katherine's letter to Murry in November 1919.6
* Murry destroyed Lawrence's letter to Katherine, which prompts a question about what else may have been in it.
* Elizabeth had two husbands: Henning von Arnim, whom she married in 1891 and who died in 1910, and Earl Russell (Bertrand's elder brother), whom she married in 1916 and from whom she was now separated.
* A letter from E. M. Forster to Sydney Waterlow in January 1921 indicates, albeit somewhat elliptically and obscurely, that Katherine could be just as jealous as Virginia over the question of their literary reputations: ‘K.M. in one of my rare conversations with her complained that Virginia's art had no penumbra, was it her metaphor ran, a broken off piece of living stuff, and implied that her own was, or that if one implied it wasn't the evening would be a failure socially.’17
* It must be remembered that Katherine died before Virginia's best work appeared; she did not read Jacob's Room, which was published two months before her death; Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, Between the Acts, etc., all came after.
* He changed his name from ‘Sadler’ to ‘Sadleir’ to distinguish himself from his father.
* See p. 77 above.
* Katherine never met her agent. J.B. Pinker died in New York in February 1922; his son Eric continued the business, but it crashed in the late 1930s.
* According to Karen Usborne's study of ‘Elizabeth’, her companion A. S. Frere heard Murry telling her that Katherine had contracted syphilis after her visit to Carco at the front in 1915, when she is alleged to have had her hair cropped like a soldier's and visited the trenches in uniform. Apart from the fact that she did come back with her hair cropped very short, this seems an unreliable bit of reporting by someone known to be hostile to Katherine, as Frere was; but it may be a garbled version of Katherine's gonorrhoea, which very possibly flared up again as a result of the Carco episode. It does suggest that Murry spoke of his wife in less exalted terms during her lifetime than later.
† The fragmentary ‘The Doves' Nest’, which reads like pale imitation of a Henry James story, and ‘The Canary’, written as a present for Brett, and perhaps best left at that, for it is one of Katherine's handful of truly mawkish efforts.
* Constance Garnett expressed some alarm at the prospect of entertaining Katherine on the grounds that she might be bored and ‘I should fancy her rather a difficult person, very what used to be called fin de siècle and decadent’.1
* Fritz Peters, an American who has given a wonderful account of Le Prieuré and the methods of the master in Gurdjieff (Wildwood House, London, 1976).
* The text has been copied from a typescript lent to me by Navin Sullivan, son of Vere Bartrick-Baker, who left it among her papers.