Several Strangers

by Claire Tomalin

  Confusion reigns in our minds; some mothers are chided by the authorities for failing to love and care for their subnormal children, others for morbid attachment to them. Some doctors persuade families to sacrifice one defective child to the ‘good’ of the rest by putting him in an institution. The Nazis killed them with a zeal that is not found altogether shocking by those who speak of the harsh demands of evolution. Rudolf Steiner schools, and projects such as the Camphill Village Communities for mentally handicapped adults, tell us that there are also people other than parents who are willing to devote their lives to scaling environment to these vulnerable members of the human race. Undoubtedly this is a test of civilization; but it is a hard test.

  West and his wife began by loving their child, unaware of her handicaps and proud of her beauty; and they have continued to love her with what one guesses is a different kind of love from that given to her elder sister, who progresses into life away from them, but which has nothing sickly about it. ‘We steal your condition (steal into it) by means of risky analogies, like the mystic borrowing the lover’s terms.’ ‘Until I knew I had to bring the world to you, I don’t think I knew or saw the world at all,’ he says, allowing on the same page a tribute to his wife’s role in ceaseless bottom-wiping and blotting up of pools. Mandy converts the entire house into her own ‘pleasuredrome’, strung with balloons, paper monsters dangling on drying Scotch tape, umbrellas – the paraphernalia we briefly allow our first two-year-old; and he watches her rather as those whose love for animals is both intense and intelligent watch and learn wisdom from them.

  ‘Attentiveness for its own sake could well be what the mentally handicapped person has as his own special gift’; he mimics Mandy’s with his own poet’s attentiveness, and sees (and offers us) this different, surreal world. The absorption is of the kind new mothers and new lovers show; but, in Mandy’s case, it must be unremitting. Special school relieves the parents and distracts her; but, as he sees, for her school is play; if she is to learn, it will be at home. She is his kingdom, safeliest when by one man mann’d.

  He ponders her future, since the book is a letter addressed to her and not to us, for the day she may be able to read it. He speaks of the ‘indefatigable effort’ of teaching her words, but clearly he is brilliantly equipped to make the effort, such a parent as an absurd universe does well to offer such a child. He has written a hymn of hope, but he knows the dangers of her state: ‘I want you to be anything but passive, but I also want you to survive’; ‘you are living in a dark through which others shepherd you.’

  Whether Mandy herself will ever progress from ecstatic listener while her father chants words from French bottle labels to reading this book remains in doubt. But he must for many of us succeed in enlarging our categories of what is bearable to dwell on, show us how some understanding and much love can grow from pain. He has made more things seem possible, and that is the true work of the poet.

  New Statesman, 1969

  A Fallen Woman

  Reappraisal: Letters to Imlay by Mary Wollstonecraft

  Two o’clock – My dear love, after making my arrangements for our snug dinner today, I have been taken by storm, and obliged to promise to dine, at an early hour, with the Miss —s, the only day they had intended to pass here. I shall however leave the key in the door, and hope to find you at my fireside when I return, about eight o’clock. Will you not wait for poor Joan? – whom you will find better, and till then think very affectionately of her.

  How many novels start as well as this? It is a love letter, written in a city in revolution, from an eminent bluestocking lady of thirty-four to a captain in the American army. The date is 1793, the town Paris, the woman Mary Wollstonecraft; for all her professed allegiance to Reason, her letters speak of spontaneity, warmth, clinging affection and a sensibility that make Marianne Dashwood seem a model of prudence and steadiness in comparison. As someone who has ‘always been half in love’ with J. J. Rousseau, Mary gives free rein to her feelings and her expression of them.

  The letters are extraordinary; they describe, directly and fluently, the sensations and emotions of love and longing, and of pregnancy and motherhood, with a frankness not equalled again in England till the twentieth century. Mary possessed a melancholy temperament and her love affair was mostly a matter of separations and disappointments (hence the abundance of letters); but she could be spirited and happy, especially when talking of her baby or imagining good days ahead. Here and there she adopts a highflown manner, usually when she begins to preach to her errant lover; much more often she writes, as the best letter writers do, with the appearance of being off her guard: ‘when my heart is warm, pop come the expressions of my childhood into my head’; ‘I do not want to be loved like a goddess; but I wish to be necessary to you’; ‘If you do not return soon… I will throw your slippers out at window, and be off – nobody knows where.’ Missing him, she ‘makes the most of the comfort of the pillow’, turning to the side of the bed where he lay. She meets friends who observe she is with child: ‘let them stare!… all the world may know it for aught I care! – Yet I wish to avoid —’s coarse jokes.’ She feels the ‘little twitcher’ move inside her, speculates whether it sleeps or wakes, grows anxious when it is still: ‘I sat down in an agony till I felt those said twitches again.’

  The letters tell their own story, but it is as well to fill in the background. Mary, fresh from the success of her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, but suffering from an unreciprocated passion for the artist Fuseli, decided to visit Paris in December 1792. The French admired her and at first she admired the revolution. Her circle included Tom Paine and the Helen Maria Williams to whom Wordsworth addressed a sonnet. In the spring of 1793 she met, at the house of an English friend, Gilbert Imlay, a native American who had fought in the War of Independence, written a still readable book on the topography of Kentucky and Ohio as well as an overblown novel, The Emigrants, aimed at reforming English divorce law and proclaiming the idyllic possibilities of life in the American wilderness. Imlay has been roughly handled by Mary’s biographers for his treatment of her, but I find it impossible not to have some sympathy for him; clearly he got himself into a false position; he had neither the nature to settle into matrimony nor the strength of mind to break off the affair which seemed so sacred and binding to her. Probably he was bowled over by her fame, her charm and her unusual sexual forwardness; the wooing was very swift. An early meeting place was at the Neuilly toll-gate, known to them as the ‘barrier’ (la barrière); the child, conceived there, was often referred to as the ‘barrier-girl’ and Imlay’s good moods as his ‘barrier-face’.

  They went through no marriage ceremony, but Mary registered herself with the American ambassador under the name Imlay (probably as a protection against imprisonment, to which English subjects became liable when war was declared). Both lovers at times referred to her as a wife, but Mary spoke cheerfully about not having ‘clogged’ her soul by promising obedience; their arrangement was of that semi-formal variety most difficult to manage smoothly. In spite of a grumble or two, she was delighted with her pregnancy, having strong theoretical views about maternity; but already Imlay was called away on business, the first of many separations that indicate the rapid cooling of his attachment.

  At least they provided us with Mary’s letters: her love, her reproaches, her self-chastisement for doubting him, her joy in the child. She followed Imlay to Le Havre, where Fanny was born in May 1794, under the care of an admiring midwife. ‘Nothing could be more natural or easy than my labour,’ she wrote to a woman friend. She was out walking eight days after the birth, and suckled her child: ‘My little Girl begins to suck so Manfully that her father reckons saucily on her writing the second part of the R – – – ts of Woman.’

  Soon Imlay was off again, and the story grows sadder and sadder as she travels with the baby to Paris, London, and then, on Imlay’s business, to Scandinavia. His infidelities drove her to desperation and she twice projected suicide, t
he second time saturating her clothes before walking into the Thames (Mirah’s method in Daniel Deronda; Charles Kegan Paul suggested that George Eliot was inspired by Mary). She was rescued by friends and Imlay tried to behave ‘kindly’ towards her; but kindness, when one looks for love, is the worst torture:

  I never wanted but your heart – That gone, you have nothing more to give. Had I only poverty to fear, I should not shrink from life. -Forgive me then, if I say, that I shall consider any direct or indirect attempt to supply my necessities, as an insult which I have not merited.

  I have been hurt by indirect inquiries, which appear to me not to be dictated by any tenderness to me. – You ask ‘If I am well or tranquil’ – They who think me so, must want a heart to estimate my feelings by.

  But Mary’s behaviour could be trying; on one occasion she rushed into a room where Imlay was sitting with some friends and thrust the two-year-old Fanny on to his lap. This was typical of one aspect of her – the impulsive, dramatizing side – but equally she knew how to pull herself together again. The most important and affecting aspect of the letters is their picture of a woman refusing to accept that she is ‘ruined’, a resourceless victim of seduction and abandonment; she goes down into the depths of misery again and again, but repeatedly determines to be rational and independent, to learn to cope with her situation both emotionally and financially and to give up her lover, in the end, without bitterness or demands. It was not easy for her, jealous, passionate, agonized for her child: ‘my little darling is calling papa, and adding her parrot word – Come, come!’ There is something heroic in her final words to Imlay: ‘I part with you in peace.’

  The story of the publication of the letters provides a tragi-comic epilogue. Few love letters survive, and those that do generally remain unpublished for decades; but Imlay preserved these and returned them at Mary’s request. In 1797 she married William Godwin and died within a few months in childbirth; whereupon this odd man, as an act of devoted homage, published her impassioned letters to her former lover. Deeply mistrustful of violent emotion at first hand, he seems to have been fascinated by the evidence of it at one remove; at any rate, though he tried to calm the Wollstonecraft temperament in Mary and later her daughters (Fanny and Mary, who married Shelley), he greatly admired it in her words to another man. Perhaps he felt safer thus. His preface begins: ‘The following letters may possibly be found to contain the finest examples of the language of sentiment and passion ever presented to the world.’

  Godwin’s action in publishing them called down the satirical contempt of his opponents. Even Mary’s supporters thought he had done her a disservice; an anonymous defender writing in 1803 attacked Godwin for his failure to protect her reputation by silence about her personal life. He was probably right; the eclipse of Mary Wollstonecraft in the nineteenth century can be partly attributed to Godwin’s revelations, which shocked middle and upper classes alike: a revolutionary thinker and unchaste to boot!

  Godwin expunged Imlay’s name from his edition, but it was generally known; he was ill regarded and disappeared from the scene, never (as far as we know) taking any interest in Fanny; he is thought to have died in Jersey in 1828. Fanny was kindly brought up by Godwin; her stepsisters Mary and Claire Clairmont were lively girls, but she was melancholic and committed suicide, alone in a Swansea inn to which she had travelled for the purpose, in October 1816; a sadly effective repetition of her mother’s efforts.

  Mary’s letters were reprinted in 1879 by Charles Kegan Paul and again in 1908 by Roger Ingpen. Both editors felt obliged to explain away and apologize for some of her behaviour and freedom of speech, and Ingpen quaintly dismissed Imlay as a ‘typical American’, always dashing about on business. The only good modern biography is a long and meticulously scholarly one by another American, Ralph Wardle. Mary Wollstonecraft is not much known in this age when we are able to be more understanding of her behaviour and also of her lover’s. Perhaps it is time for a new edition of her letters.

  New Statesman, 1971

  The Wife’s Story

  Katherine Mansfield: The Memories of LM

  All manuscripts notebooks papers letters I leave to John M. Murry likewise I should like him to publish as little as possible and tear up and burn as much as possible he will understand that I desire to leave as few traces of my camping ground as possible.

  In spite of this morsel of Katherine Mansfield’s will, John Middleton Murry published every scrap he could find, and her tigerish desire for privacy was sacrificed to please a public avid to sift through her secrets. But who can blame him? She was a genius, of the kind who provokes both worthy and unworthy curiosity, both the prurient wish to hear of the ill health and sexual practices of the mighty, and the abiding and educative human craving to try to enter into the minds of those we admire, to become them for a space (and I suspect the two kinds of curiosity are inextricably blended). What fury fills us when we think of the pious executors and grandchildren who burn letters and memoirs to protect the good name of the dead.

  Ida Constance Baker (otherwise known as LM, Leslie, the Mountain or Jones) who, at the age of eighty-three, has written a full account of her long friendship with Katherine Mansfield, confesses that she was very angry with Murry at one time for publishing all KM’s private, personal papers. But now she has forgiven him; her own relationship is described quietly, her own treasured letters – those Katherine had not made her burn – printed at last.

  We must be very grateful to her. Here is a valuable supplement to the two biographies (Mantz, 1933 and Alpers, 1954) and to the journal and letters. As well as many hitherto unpublished letters, it contains extra information about the early years in London between 1908 – the time of her second arrival in Europe – and 1912, when she met Murry. This was the period of hectic and impoverished vie de bohème, and Katherine destroyed her own journal recording her love affairs, first marriage, pregnancies and abortions; on this last topic she was silent even to LM. Another particular source of interest is the multitude of glimpses into the daily domestic routines that were crucial to her health and work later, and in which Miss Baker played so important and generous a part.

  Early in their friendship, which started at Queen’s College, Harley Street, in 1903, LM dedicated herself to the service of Katherine, perceiving, although there was never much intellectual rapport, that she was an exceptional person and soon realizing that she needed the sort of help that could come only from a friend who put no value on her own affairs or time. Throughout Katherine’s life LM came when she was summoned and disappeared again (sometimes reluctantly) when dismissed, gave up her jobs, took on domestic work that was totally uncongenial and endured scoldings and ridicule. She was mocked to her face and cruelly dealt with in letters, the journal and even stories. Why did she endure it?

  Obviously she loved Katherine passionately, and the relationship was more complex than a simple served and serving one; KM felt that LM was too emotionally dependent on her, hence the ‘incubus’ accusation; but she was dependent too, and could be jealous: ‘I only love you when you’re blind to everybody but us.’ To say that it was a lesbian attachment does not explain much; LM points out that Katherine’s first husband considered that this was the cause of the break-up of the marriage, and mentions that she did not even know what lesbianism was at that time. K’s mother thought the friendship ‘unwise’ too, in a euphemism familiar to anyone who has been at a girls’ school; in fact Katherine was pregnant by another man when she married. Katherine herself certainly knew what lesbianism was, as her journal makes clear, and was capable of flirting with either sex, but she was never in love with LM in the way she was with Murry or Francis Carco; only she enjoyed her power of attracting and enslaving, and then felt guilty and irritated by the humble, fussy adoration.

  Ida Baker ascribes most of Katherine’s bad temper to illness, and understandably stresses the positive aspect of the friendship, which emerges in her letters rather than in the journal. These letters, inconsisten
t, bossy, sweet, furious or cajoling, shine with the light of Katherine’s sensibility; outside the letters, the narrative sometimes creates the impression of a Katherine reverently shrouded in a butter muslin of conventional phrases. It is an all-passion-spent exercise, taking no account of passages in the journal that described hostilities or extremities of emotion between the two women, referred to as toothache by Katherine. There was for instance a scene in March 1914 when Katherine, coming out of Murry’s room, found LM with her ‘poor face all stained and patched with crying’ beside the fire, and tucked her up and kissed her with ‘quick loving kisses such as one delights to give a tired child’. ‘“Oh,” she breathed, when I asked her if she was comfortable. “This is Paradise, beloved.” ‘A paragraph later, Katherine is lamenting her inability to enchant Murry.

  This pendulum swinging between the elusive Murry who could not look after Katherine and the utterly devoted LM continued till the last few weeks of K’s life, when she withdrew from both. Until then the situation was this: Murry was quite incapable of nursing Katherine, making practical arrangements for her comfort – she was usually in pain and always weak – or even of loving her enough. LM alone would nurse and love and dust and light fires and shop and sew on buttons and bring the breakfast tray and the lunch tray and run after her with jackets that K childishly flung down. There is no doubt that she, with her genius and her illness, needed a ‘wife’ as well as a husband. And LM was that wife as truly as Murry was her husband; a wife whose protective instincts often maddened Κ into rage, but to whom she wrote in June 1922: ‘try and believe and keep on believing without signs from me that I do love you and want you for my wife’. Without her Katherine Mansfield would not have been able to write even what she did.