It may be a gloomy commentary on my generation that we chose as our exemplary figure a suicide. In Mansfield, Doris chose a figure on whom the fates descended, but whose pact with life itself not only remained unbroken, but was cranked up to an almost excruciating pitch of desire and attachment.
In Plath, on the other hand, my generation chose a model of brilliant sourness, a woman whose fury was finally directed at life itself, not at its cruel refusal to admit her and sustain her. Even if she was exemplary because we didn’t want to follow her, Plath was the lost woman writer who came to haunt us, as Mansfield haunted Doris Derman. But with this difference: Doris, I think, felt companioned by Mansfield. In spite of everything, she was a benign ghost.
Mansfield’s cool talent and her desperado life were indelibly bonded, if they had not been before, by Murry’s publication of the Journal in 1927, just four years after her death. The Letters followed swiftly in 1928. Although Mansfield knew a measure of literary, if not truly popular, fame in her lifetime, her appeal really hit its international stride as a result of Murry’s decision to fashion out of her voluminous personal writing books that made her the figure who could take, as he gushingly said, “her rightful place as the most wonderful writer and most beautiful spirit of our time.”
As a disgusted friend remarked at the time, Murry was “boiling Katherine’s bones to make soup.”
Doris did not see it this way—and of course neither did I. We believed in books. We spoke of them as of people whose integrity was above reproach, not objects fashioned and formed. We revered the final rhapsodic line of the Journal—“All is well.” We took the italics to heart and read them as a final triumphant testament. All is well.
Ah! Doris and I said, bowing our heads before the courageous farewell of our heroine. Ah!
NOW, ALL THESE years later, I’ve been given an apartment for four months in Cassis, a writing fellowship at Jerome Hill’s foundation—the sort of improbable postmodern perk that would have astonished Mansfield in her fruitless search for a safety net.
I’ve come to Bandol on a day trip from Cassis with two new friends (Susan, an Englishwoman, and her Danish husband, Steffen). We passed east through La Ciotat, the town Jerome Hill featured in his film autobiography, paying homage to the Lumière brothers’ first film clip ever shown in a movie house, the train engine pulling into the La Ciotat station. And now we’re here, in Mansfield’s Bandol, as I think of it, as if she owned it, this quiet Mediterranean fishing village in her day, a bright tourist town in ours.
This trip is an unabashed pilgrimage, though my days as a cultist are over. Here, during separate visits, Mansfield wrote “Prelude” and “Bliss,” which I have just reread and have urged on my new friends, glad the stories still seem fresh, glad to spread the word, as Doris once passed it to me. I have also reread the letters. But their magic has turned dark. Gone, the old thrill of exalted sensibility, the breathless lyric acuity trained on raindrops. Gone the romantic scrim that allowed me to ignore, in my poeticism, what it was all about: utter terror of the death bearing down on her.
We are looking for the place where Mansfield wrote “Bliss,” the Hôtel Beau Rivage, a name so evocative it sounds like the name of a hotel in a story rather than a hotel where a story was written. It is a beautiful day, still winter, as people here insist, though as a Minnesotan I know this is nonsense, and we are deep into spring, trees blossoming, tables set out for lunch, sailboats groaning companionably in their slips.
We have one of those lunches they write about in magazines, timeless and winey. There is crème brûlée, quivering under burnt sugar in a fluted glass dish, and little cups of bitter coffee to set you straight at the end of the meal.
We walk up the street to the hotel, a great peachy Belle Époque business; the grounds are parklike, gracious. A very small old man out of a cautionary fairy tale is pruning, with scissors far too big for him, an immense wisteria vine covering an entire wall. The vine’s main branch, espaliered against the stone, is thick as a tree. The scent is overpowering.
The old man smiles at my request—he has heard this before—and silently leads us through the grounds to the hotel entrance where we are handed over to a likewise diminutive old woman, his mate or his colleague. She points to the plaque mounted in the vestibule. In French it says: THREE HOURS AGO I FINISHED MY STORY “BLISS.” THANK GOD I HAD GREAT HAPPINESS IN THE WRITING OF IT.
The small woman nods as the old man did, ready to accommodate: yes, I may go up to see the Room. So up the little ascenseur we go, the little woman, Susan, Steffen, and I. On the top (third) floor, there it is—the door open (all the doors of all the rooms are open, waiting for their nonexistent occupants: we never see a single guest or tenant). The room is now a double, as it was not in 1918. Appliances are lined up along one wall for a kitchen.
It’s not exactly seedy, not even tacky, just honestly, seriously worn. The place was probably lovely in its day, but has been redone, it appears, in the miserable fifties, left to pickle in its unhealthy browns and beiges, its sickish greens. But oddly, the very cheapness of the veneers, the “modern” furniture sighing with shabbiness—all of it enshrines the life of hired rooms and not much money: her life.
The little woman nods—I may open the french doors, may step out on the balcony. Then I’m in the air, looking out, as she must have looked when she rose from her table, having had her three hours of “happiness in the writing.” So here it is: the same thrilling sea (more boats, more people, more everything, but the same blue, the same exalted height). “She took the best room,” the tiny old woman at my side murmurs, as if to say we all know how Katherine would, of course, take the best.
“KATHERINE HAS BEEN DEAD a week,” Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary after the news came from France:
At that one feels—what? A shock of relief?—a rival the less? Then confusion at feeling so little—then, gradually, blankness & disappointment; then a depression which I could not rouse myself from all that day. When I began to write, it seemed to me there was no point in writing. Katherine wont read it. Katherine’s my rival no longer. . . . Still there are things about writing I think of & want to tell Katherine. . . . And I was jealous of her writing— the only writing I have ever been jealous of.
It was sometime in the late 1980s that I read this rawly honest passage. Woolf’s Diaries were being published; the biographies were coming thick and fast. There was more about Mansfield as well. It turned out, according to a carefully sleuthed biography by Claire Tomalin, that although Mansfield had indeed died of TB, it was undiagnosed gonorrhea, contracted during her first year of “freedom,” that had weakened her and left her fatally vulnerable.
So much for freedom. Even the All is well finale of the Journal proved to be a bit of stagecraft—Middleton Murry’s. He had not simply edited the Journal—he had orchestrated it, piecing bits together to form a narrative that ended with this “triumph” of the spirit.
But Doris was long gone by the time I was reading the postcult biographies. My mother, still living in the neighborhood, had reported that people first noticed that the milkman (the milkman!) was showing up later and later on his rounds. Drinking at the Dermans’, was the word. Dead drunk at 10:00 AM, according to the woman at the drugstore. Also: seen wandering on Grand Avenue, thinning blond hair in disarray, wearing bathroom slippers in the snow.
Then, not seen at all, spending all her time in the dark, the blinds pulled, not even sobering up when her husband came home, the children grown and well out of it by now. Finally, sprawled on the bathroom floor, “found” by her husband when he came home from work downtown.
We had read the last line of the Journal as a personal message, almost a directive. All is well. We stayed with Mansfield to the end, past the little pleasures of tea at the Villa Isola Bella in lemon-sunny Menton where she wrote some of her best late stories. We followed her to the thin air of Sierre high in the Alps, past her furious marital disappointment in Murry. Doris made short work of him:
“A drip, obviously,” she said. We stayed with Katherine (as we called her) right to the moment she entered the weird community at Fontainebleau to be purified by the Master, and died her gasping, operatic death after running up a flight of steps. “She was so happy,” Doris said, as if she had been there. “She forgot to be careful.”
Still, all was well. Katherine had said so. Doris never had reason to disbelieve her testimony. Or maybe Doris kept to herself just how well she thought everything really was. Maybe she didn’t wish to disillusion me: maybe she wanted to pass along the literary torch, burning with a “too bright” gleam, but all the same, shedding the only light that mattered to us, what Katherine’s rivalrous friend Virginia called “the lamp in the spine,” the glow of the imagination powering a life.
My mother saw it more simply. “Doris Derman was a fine woman,” she said, as if someone had suggested otherwise. She did not like the gossip about the milkman. “She was a lady. She had talent.” Then she paused, searching for what she really meant, what for her was highest praise: “She was a serious reader.”
…
COOKING KATHERINE’S BONES to make soup . . .
Ours, of course, is an age with a stronger stomach for raw autobiography. We have also developed a taste for the writer’s story behind the story, for what is called “creative process,” what Henry James called “the celestial process.” Mansfield’s notebooks and letters provide fascinating, sometimes heartbreaking, testimony of both her life and her art. Her struggle against loneliness and the ache of abandonment she describes during the years of illness rise beyond personal complaints, and become, in her transparent prose, models of spiritual searching.
Like the letters of Keats and Chekhov that she revered, Mansfield’s personal writing is especially eloquent about the artist’s attempt to track the most direct route to the imagination against the sweeping tide of personal devastation. She trusted the wisdom of brevity and ellipsis. Chekhov, she felt, “made a mistake in thinking that if he had had more time he would have written more fully, described the rain & the midwife & doctor having tea. The truth is one can get only so much into a story; there is always a sacrifice. . . . It’s always a kind of race, to get in as much as one can before it disappears.”
Finally, no matter his motives, Murry was right: if Mansfield was not “the most wonderful writer” or “most beautiful spirit,” she certainly was the most emblematic woman writer of her time. More, even, than Virginia Woolf who envied “the bright sharp-cut circle” of Mansfield’s “extraordinarily vivid attention,” as Desmond MacCarthy described her style, which left Woolf confessing to her diary, “I was jealous of her writing—the only writing I have ever been jealous of.”
Mansfield, six years younger than Woolf, led a reckless bohemian youth, and had nothing of the Bloomsbury bluestocking to her. Her early death and aura of desperation may account for the virtual cult of Katherine that ensued from Murry’s publication of her personal writings. But there was—and remains—more to her enduring position in English letters. Mansfield has fairly retained her allure precisely because it has become increasingly difficult to pry her work (the stories) from her life (the notebooks and letters).
Like her adored Keats, Mansfield sought in personal forms—letters, notebook jottings—to reveal the heart of the imaginative enterprise as time closed in upon her. Her understanding that consciousness itself and what she called “glimpses” were the distinguishing marks of the modern writer has proved to be accurate. “The waves, as I drove home this afternoon,” she writes in an undated notebook from one of her Mediterranean residencies, “—and the high foam, how it was suspended in the air before it fell . . . What is it that happens in that moment of suspension? It is timeless. In that moment . . . the whole life of the soul is contained.”
For most of the twentieth century Mansfield’s “The Garden Party” was taught in English classes as a “perfect” story, included in virtually every anthology of short fiction. If it no longer appears as routinely, perhaps contemporary taste has finally caught up with Mansfield who assessed it coolly in her notebook as “a moderately successful story—and that’s all.”
Her longer, more atmospheric stories, like “Prelude” and “At the Bay” that recapture her New Zealand childhood, now seem more striking. They form a bridge between the “glimpses” of her notebooks and her “perfect” stories.
In 1915, in the south of France, she dreamed of keeping “a kind of minute notebook—to be published some day. That is all. No novels, no problem stories, nothing that is not simple, open.” In her frail notations from Gurdjieff’s Fontainebleau institute, Mansfield is often reduced to painfully eloquent single words and phrases for which she needed the Russian equivalent: ”I am cold, bring paper to light a fire . . . wood . . . flame . . . strength . . . light a fire . . . no more fire.”
Mansfield seems not to have made a grand last statement—no up-with-the-violins “All is well” as Murry had it. She put her faith in captured details, a modernist loyal to captured bits and fragments to the end. “It was an exquisite day,” the final paragraph of the Notebooks begins. “It was one of those days so clear, so still, so silent you almost feel the earth itself has stopped in astonishment at its own beauty.”
She kept up her “minute notebook” even when stories were beyond her. “Unruffled sea,” she wrote on the last page of her last notebook. “The gulls moved like the lights within a pearl.” It was, perhaps, her final “glimpse.”
SEVEN
Chapel
Soon I will leave. Leave the dream space of the sun-and-sea of Cassis, the edge of Europe where the twentieth century tried to imagine a new way of seeing things, of saying things. I’ll head back home to St. Paul where by now, early June, the lilacs have rusted away and winter has faded even from memory like one of those vengeful old gods nobody believes in anymore. A strange, amnesiac climate, my north. After months of abusive behavior, the bully winter always slinks off, lost in the sticky aphasia of summer. I love the change of seasons—that lunatic Minnesota remark, delivered to the dismayed faces of the sane in their temperate climates.
In my own “minute notebook,” written here in Cassis not far from where Mansfield dreamed of writing hers, all winter and into spring I’ve taken an escaped northlander’s delight in describing the weather, a tally of perfect days, the sun, the sea, daily remarking my escape as if my job were to report from the Other Side.
Even the mistral hasn’t been a fright, though people here speak of it solemnly, the ferocious wind blowing from the Alps like a reminder of the truth of things for those malingering, as I have done these sweet months, along the ancient coast where Civilization, according to the bronze plaque in the Marseille port, first risked coming ashore.
I’ve loved it here—of course. Sitting in the sun by the port, basking in one of the red canvas chairs at M. Brun’s (“my” café), ordering un grand créme, my market basket by my side, masquerading as a local, sometimes adding the prop of Le Monde, which I attempt to read, searching the far corners of my brain for the high school French the nuns crammed in there somewhere. I’ve loved pretending to live here, pretending to be native to this southern coast, going to the market with my leather-handled straw basket, walking up the slant of a side street to take my French lesson from Mme Lecat who shakes her head, purses her lips as only the French can do, and says, “Non . . . non, non, non.”
It is wonderfully bracing to be disapproved of by the French. You know you’ve been taken seriously, that life is affirmed as a serious matter of form, not simply a business of messy content. Comme il faut, Patricia! Comme il faut! And I do, suddenly, passionately, want to do things as they should, as they must be done.
The disapproval isn’t personal. It is simply the way things must be. Do not eat a bouillabaisse whose ingredients have not been first presented to you on a platter, the fish still weakly leaping from the silver dish. Only buy bread from the Lion d’Or boulangerie on rue Victor Hugo. All restaurants on the por
t are tourist traps. And much, much more. Life is covered with a gilded template of right ways and wrong turns. These are the rules of Mme Lecat, and I cannot expect to improve my French if I am unwilling to learn this grammar as well. When we go to the market together she shakes her head as I turn to one sausage stand, and nods approvingly toward another. They look identical. But I am now incapable of going to the first sausage stand.
Tears squinted in my eyes when the cheese man at the market (Mme Lecat’s cheese man, not the other one) said he would miss me. He came from behind his counter and took my hand. But the main thing about being here: how exactly it has been as I imagined it before I came. The little quais of this small Mediterranean harbor are crowded with family pleasure craft and a few, very few now, fishing boats, the air tangy with—what is it?—I want to say lavender but that may be from my own T-shirt that has been in a drawer I layered with sachets I bought at last week’s market. Beyond the flowers and sea-foam, there is always a wake-up-and-smell-the-coffee smell coming from the cafés that ring and define the harbor, and brief puffs of gasoline from the delivery vans and Vespas that go by.
I’ve been here off-season, which makes Cassis and all the towns I’ve visited along the Riviera these past months seem old-fashioned because empty, the social world slow enough for conversation, for banter, for the sitting-and-staring that is the core of living: the just looking of the artist life. The rush that is modernity has been on vacation while I’ve been here, living in the slo-mo of off-season, a replica of times past. On the weekends things begin to get crowded now and my northern soul sniffs the warmth: summer is coming, and it’s clear I must go. Soon this won’t be my place anymore.
Blue Arabesque Page 11