Katherine Mansfield

by Claire Tomalin

  Some of the Georgian poets must have been startled to hear themselves characterized in these terms; but the article does give a very clear impression of Lawrence's state of mind at the time. He was never to be so happy again as during these months of newfound love with Frieda and confidence in his work, backed by Garnett's judgement. Lawrence next promised Katherine a story for nothing; he told another correspondent that Rhythm was ‘a daft paper, but the folk seem rather nice’.15

  Nice as they might be, the editors were in increasing trouble. Although there were contributions from Katherine in almost every issue, often under pseudonyms, they consisted, for the most part, of weak and sickly poems, pointless stories about little girls and the rather forced humour exemplified by the theatre review written in dialogue between the ‘two tigers’, all so far below the standard she could reach, and had reached in the New Age, that Murry must be arraigned either for critical obtuseness or for being too besotted with her to use his judgement. The former is the more likely diagnosis, since he printed equally abysmal prose poems, stories and critical essays by other contributors: Richard Curle's halting account of how he loved Conrad but could not really explain why, Arthur Crossthwaite's leaden stories and, worst of all, Murry's own contributions. They are so awful that they make you wonder how any backing was found for Rhythm under such an editor. They range from his long, confessional poems to stories of staggering ineptitude. In one, a little boy (Dicky – the name he said he and Katherine intended to give the baby which failed to materialize) plays house with the little girl next door, who falls ill and dies, leaving him tragically alone. The most noteworthy thing about it is perhaps the fact that Dicky has a small blue lamp in his toy house, which is a particular point of attraction: the distant forerunner, presumably, of the famous little lamp in Katherine's later story ‘The Doll's House’.

  Still the paper staggered on. In December, Katherine and Murry moved into a combined flat and office at 57 Chancery Lane, and spent long hours trudging round London canvassing for advertising, a chore Katherine carried out with more success than Murry, being both bolder and more persistent. Between canvassing and trying to write, they were also dodging their enemies. Orage was just along the street, sneering at them, and Gaudier was sending increasingly menacing letters, accusing Murry of being a liar and a thief who got his drawings for Rhythm on false pretences, and failed to pay for them. Then Floryan arrived on their doorstep again, expecting to be put up in Chancery Lane. At this point Katherine announced that her heart was giving her trouble, and Murry agreed that she must be got away.

  Fortunately, Anne Rice had written from Paris, inviting them to a Christmas party. The Cannans and the Campbells, back from Ireland, were all keen to make the trip; somehow the money was scraped together and they went off in a party. Beatrice Campbell remembers Katherine being very cheerful in Paris (her heart presumably working normally again):

  I remember her gaiety, the way she would flounce into a restaurant and sweep her wide black hat from her bobbed head and hang it among the men's hats on the rack. I remember a group of men at a table running their tongues round their lips saying ‘Oh là là’ and her little muted laugh, delighted with herself… At night we went from café to café; there always seemed to be some terrific psychological drama going on, and we had to keep avoiding someone or other.16

  Anne Rice has also left a record of a self-conscious and self-dramatizing Katherine who appeared at the Closerie des Lilas on different nights in clothes so different they seemed almost disguises, now a hat covered in cherries, another time a cloak and a white fez, or a turban, with bright, red-lipsticked mouth: a bold and confident Katherine; a Katherine who reminds one of her own heroine in ‘The Swing of the Pendulum’, telling herself, ‘I wasn't born for poverty – I only flower among really jolly people, and people who never are worried.’

  9

  ‘All I Remember is Sunshine and Gaiety’

  Back in England, she was, all the same, embarking on a comfortless, disorganized and restless year, a year in which their projects failed and she and Murry were unproductive, ill and often unhappy. Katherine, though still contributing, appears to have given up editorial work for Rhythm, her last letter on its business being an apology to Edward Garnett, who had objected to Lawrence giving them a story for nothing. She wrote to Garnett in February, saying, ‘I explained to Mr Lawrence that we dont pay’;1 and they sensibly held the story so that its appearance should coincide with the publication of Sons and Lovers in May.*

  Lawrence was still in Gargnano on Lake Garda, working on a new novel called The Sisters, and reluctant to leave Italy, although Frieda was desperate to return to see her children. Should Sons and Lovers fail, Lawrence would have to return to teaching; although they were quite prepared to live on next to nothing, they still had to eat. The same problem beset Katherine and Murry in London. Even without paying the contributors, Rhythm continued to lose steadily; her allowance was going to the printers against their debt, and he had to slave at reviews for the Westminster.

  Penniless as they were, it was agreed that her health required she should leave London; and when the Cannans, who were moving to Cholesbury in the Chilterns, about thirty miles west of London, suggested they should rent a small house near them, they agreed. The Cannans' was a converted windmill, ‘Mill House’, into which Gilbert piled his huge collection of books and Mary put all her passion for interior decoration. The Murrys' was a small semi-detached brick villa on the Common; called ‘The Gables’, it had a ground-floor bathroom that stuck out at the back, an outdoor lavatory and an inadequate supply of hot water. The plan was that Katherine should live in the fresh air there, with Murry coming down for weekends. The Campbells generously agreed to share the rent, with the idea that they should share the place in summer. In practice, Beatrice Campbell went there exactly once and pronounced her visit ‘not a success’. She and Katherine managed to block the drains with congealed mutton fat while trying to wash up, and the landlord objected forcefully, in person, to Gordon and Murry's attempt to build a stone causeway across the garden to the lavatory shed, to protect Katherine's feet from the damp. Cholesbury was high up, and notoriously cold and windy.

  The Cannans did their best to keep Katherine amused, taking her out into the country to see friends and teaching her to play poker as an evening amusement at Mill House. When Ida came to stay, she disapproved of the atmosphere, but surprised herself and everyone else by winning large sums at poker. She needed cheering up, because she had been forced to move into a single rented room when her sister decided to join their father in Rhodesia; and she was still living on her beauty-parlour pittance.

  Cholesbury was no more immune to Floryan than anywhere else, and he soon turned up in quest of some of his possessions, which had been left with Katherine. Ida was deputed to hand them over from Katherine's box in Chancery Lane; and then something Floryan did caused Murry to post off a letter to Katherine ‘which you must keep. It only is definite proof of what a liar & Scoundrel Floryan is, and how he'll get us into trouble everywhere.’2

  Murry was under a different siege when Gaudier, accompanied by George Banks, invaded his office in May, insisting that he had promised to pay them for the work they had done for Rhythm, which he denied stoutly, and probably truthfully. More reasonably, they demanded the return of their originals, one of which was Banks's cartoon of Katherine. Gaudier then slapped Murry, reducing him to tears – for he still revered him as a genius - and left. Murry sat down immediately to write to Katherine, asking her to get Gilbert to ‘crush’ Banks, ‘or I shall kill her’.3 She was highly indignant on his behalf (‘Do not answer the door after office hours’4) and promised to get Cannan to do his stuff. She also returned Banks's drawing without further ado.

  In a last desperate attempt to keep afloat, Rhythm had now acquired a new name, the Blue Review; it was, in fact, in the first Blue Review that Lawrence's story appeared. Perhaps he heard rumblings of the Gaudier quarrel, because he asked a friend if he
intended to give any drawings to ‘that scoundrel, the Blue Review? “Scoundrel” is half affectionate, of course,’ he added.5

  All their difficulties had not made Katherine and Murry any more practical; Katherine heard that Bowden was about to serve divorce papers on them, and suddenly decided to look for a farm; but Bowden departed for America with no divorce settled, and the prospect of living on a farm disappeared as the Blue Review's debts piled up.

  Katherine's cousin Sydney Waterlow, in an attempt to be helpful, asked Murry to tea with Leonard and Virginia Woolf, who had been married for a few months and were planning to earn their living by their pens. To them, Murry appeared ‘a moon calf looking youth’; he reported to Katherine, ‘I don't think much of them. They belong to a perfectly impotent Cambridge set.’6 Still, Leonard did send him a story, and he wrote back praising it, although it was by then too late for the dying Blue Review. Its third and last issue contained a story of Katherine's set in a women's Turkish bath in Geneva - a bitter attack on supposedly respectable married women, suggesting that in secret they envy the women they profess to despise, more in her New Age style – and a fine review of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice (in its original German) by Lawrence.

  He and Frieda called at the Chancery Lane office with it almost as soon as they arrived in London in June, and were struck by the sight of Katherine, who happened to be in town, sitting on the floor by a bowl of goldfish, and showing her legs. Both couples had moved very fast through life lately, both had largely cut themselves off from their pasts, and both needed friends and the encouragement of feeling their loyal support. Lawrence was especially shaken that Garnett had expressed reservations about his new novel. There was an immediate attraction and sympathy between the two couples. ‘Love and running from husbands is desperate ticklish work,’ wrote Lawrence to Constance Garnett, describing Katherine and Murry to her.7 All four were equally involved from the start. Lawrence saw a critic and influential editor (or so he thought); Murry saw a heroic and productive writer; Katherine saw a tragically deprived mother who had lost her children for love; and Frieda appreciated Katherine's humour and her physical beauty, which complemented her own. Both men admired both women, Katherine witty and dark and exquisite, Frieda like a big, bold lioness with her mane of fair hair. ‘All I remember is sunshine and gaiety,’ wrote Murry of their first meeting, only one vivid picture remains, of ourselves sitting in opposite pairs on the two sides of an omnibus as we went off to lunch somewhere in Soho. Lawrence was slim and even boyish; he wore a large straw hat that suited him well. Mrs Lawrence, a big Panama hat over her flaxen hair. Straw hats, and sunshine, and gaiety.8

  Friendship sprang up and flourished at once. Frieda confided to Katherine her misery at being separated from her son and daughters; their father, Professor Ernest Weekley, refused to allow her to see them. Katherine at once offered to intervene as best she could, by delivering messages to them as they walked home from school. It was a kind action, and one can also see that it must have appealed to her taste for odd aspects of human behaviour, and that she enjoyed taking on middle-class morality in this dramatic fashion.

  From the start, Lawrence called Murry and Katherine ‘the Murrys’, just as he referred to Frieda as ‘Mrs Lawrence’, although she was not yet divorced from Weekley. Frieda and Katherine were both more deeply defiant of convention than Lawrence and Murry, and in both women the same streak of sexual anarchy that had first attracted the men later disconcerted them. But for the moment it was all serene. The Lawrences took a holiday flat at Broadstairs on the Kentish coast and urged the Murrys to come down for a weekend of talk, swimming and seaside pleasures.

  Before they could go, the Blue Review's debts had grown too large for Murry, Secker or any of the backers, and it came to an end. Katherine had been growing restless and resentful of her domestic role at The Gables, and abandoned Cholesbury without regret. She moved with Murry into a flat in Chaucer Mansions, Queen's Club Gardens in West Kensington. Ida took her furniture out of storage to lend them, Murry commandeered the sitting-room as his study, and Katherine was left with the kitchen/living-room in which to do her work. From here they went to Broadstairs for the last weekend in July, with Gordon Campbell accompanying them, as Beatrice had gone to Ireland for the birth of her first baby.

  In the evening, when the sands were deserted, the whole party went swimming, naked in the half light, and then feasted on beefsteak and tomatoes. Gordon was captivated by the Lawrences, and invited them to stay whenever they wished at Selwood Terrace. Lawrence gave them a copy of Sons and Lovers to read on the train back to London. Both Murry and Katherine saw at once that this was a great and powerful novel. The impression on Katherine was so strong that, within days, on 2 August, she wrote out a complete 35-chapter plan for an autobiographical novel of her own, and began work on it.9

  Both the plan, which runs to eight pages and in which every chapter is sketched out, and the two fragmentary chapters she wrote later in the year are of considerable interest, not only because they stand for the novel Katherine Mansfield never wrote, but also for the way in which they present the heroine, obviously based on herself, although she is given the name ‘Maata’ from her old friend, and another character, equally obviously drawn from Ida, who is given the name ‘Rhoda Bendall’. Maata appears in a harshly unsympathetic light as a young woman of great physical beauty, with ambitions to become a singer; she manipulates her various friends and admirers, using the devotion she inspires for her own ends. She justifies her taste for luxury with a defiant, ‘I need these things. They help me, I can't sing if I'm draggled and poor.’ She also suffers from violent swings of mood, sometimes loving and cheerful with her friends, sometimes withdrawing into periods of black depression for days at a time a trait clearly drawn from Katherine's own nature.

  Rhoda, who is given the opening chapter and who plays a major part in the story, is presented as pathologically self-sacrificing and masochistic in her devotion to Maata. Before a picture of Maata, Rhoda places a shell filled with incense dust, and addresses the photograph as though it were a shrine. Grotesquely humble and subservient, she falls in with every whim of Maata's, dreams of the touch of her lips, spends all her money on buying her flowers, paying for her lessons and even a fur coat for her, expecting nothing in return but the pleasure of being allowed to continue serving her idol. All this romantic – indeed neurotic – excess is presented without a trace of humour. Katherine seems to be attempting a wholly serious presentation of obsessive love. Whether Ida would have accepted this version of herself as containing much truth, we simply do not know. She was at pains in her old age to dismiss the notion that she had been masochistic.

  The plot is melodramatic in parts, though not always more so than the episodes in Katherine's life to which it seems to refer. Her heroine does not become pregnant, but she does enter into a loveless and unconsummated marriage with a well-to-do aesthete she hardly knows, and deserts him. There are no Beauchamps at all in the story, the dominant family being that of the ‘Closes’, clearly modelled on the Trowells, who talk jolly Edwardian slang and have lots of music, but are also discouragingly common compared with the exquisite Maata. Her relations with them appear to be very similar to Katherine's with the Trowells, although she makes Maata's lover, Philip Close, commit suicide.

  Only the first two very short chapters were actually drafted, the first entirely devoted to Rhoda, the second describing Maata arriving at a London railway station after two years' absence, met by Philip Close with his little sister, and also by Rhoda: Maata has sent telegrams to them both, and they are in competition for her company. She goes off with Rhoda in a hansom to the room she has found for her, promising to spend the evening at the Closes' – and that is all.

  This is no lost masterpiece, but it is a considerable curiosity. It is unlike anything else that has survived of Katherine's work. Throughout the synopsis Maata is shown as powerful and dominant in her relations with the other characters; even when she suffers, she does
not behave like a victim, but more like a Nietzschean figure who makes her own fate, without regard for morality or kindness. She also justifies her behaviour by referring to the needs of her art, in line with the view of the divine rights of artists expressed in the editorials of Rhythm which she and Murry had concocted in 1912.

  There can be little doubt that it was her reading of Sons and Lovers that inspired her to plan a Bildungsroman of her own, in which a central autobiographical character is shown undergoing formative experiences through various friendships and love-affairs, some morbid and destructive (although there is no Oedipal conflict). One or two touches suggest that Lawrence had put his fingerprint on her imagination: Maata's skin ‘flames like yellow roses’ when she undresses, and when Rhoda leans out of her bedroom window in the morning, ‘“A-ah,” she breathed, in a surge of ecstasy. “I am baptized. I am baptized into a new day,” which certainly does not sound like anything else in Mansfield.

  Why did she not work on it? Perhaps she soon realized that her gifts did not lie in the direction of a long book. As a writer, she always lacked stamina. Perhaps the setting of London's Bohemia, with its pleasures and perils, proved too shallow; when she did come to write well about her past, she went back to her origins, as Lawrence had done. Nothing suggests that Maata was going to be a very good book, but it might have been an intriguing one. A short first chapter was written within two weeks of the plan; in November another chapter, and then nothing more. During the same period she turned out an excellent New Zealand story ‘Old Tar’, and spoke of doing more.* They too failed to appear. Something was awry, and getting worse, and part of the trouble was her growing dissatisfaction with Murry.

  The Lawrences left England early in August, going first to Bavaria, and urging their new friends to join them later in Italy. Instead, Murry took Katherine over to Ireland to stay with the Campbells at Howth for a beach holiday. She was restless and ill tempered as they all pottered about, fishing, bathing, sailing and flying kites on the cliff top, while Murry and Gordon pursued knotty points in metaphysics together. Murry noticed that Katherine disliked him spending his time in this way with his men friends. He thought she was mistrustful of what he called his ‘intellectual mysticism’; a simpler diagnosis would be jealousy when she felt her dominance threatened. As so often in this situation, she set up an alternative focus of attention. She invited Ida to take a holiday in Ireland too. It was one of her calculatedly bizarre gestures, for the hospitable Campbells, who would gladly have found a bed for Ida, were told that she ‘preferred’ to stay away from the rest of the party, in rooms alone. Katherine would meet Ida on the rocks at the end of the beach for private conversations, contriving to give Beatrice, at any rate, the impression that she was telling Ida how much she disliked being in Howth.