Katherine Mansfield

by Claire Tomalin

  The Murrys set off for Cornwall, while the Lawrences moved to a cheap cottage found for them by the Cannans, ever eager for neighbours, at Chesham in Buckinghamshire. It was called ‘The Triangle’, and stood a few miles from Mill House. ‘I can't say we're happy, because we're not, Frieda and I,’ wrote Lawrence to Marsh.7 The war portended many difficulties for them, personal and financial. An entry in Katherine's sparse journal shows she was no happier, mistrustful of Murry and wishing she had another lover, one who would ‘nurse me, love me, hold me, comfort me’.8 Murry's memoirs insist, however, that all was well once they left town for Cornwall. They lived cheaply on cream, blackberry jam and eggs, and decided to look for a more permanent cottage, turning south to Fowey and the Truro River with no luck; then they travelled across to Kent and searched further for somewhere in Rye or Romney Marsh. As the sun shone and the war gathered momentum (Frieda was furiously denying tales of German atrocities) they enjoyed, according to Murry, one of the brief periods of contentment together that were always associated with good weather and isolation from rivals or treacherous confidantes.

  Katherine found time to write a patriotic letter to a friend of her mother's in Wellington, describing the piteous scenes as Belgian refugees arrived: orphaned children carrying dolls or kittens, an ‘old lady of 93, who had walked miles to escape the soldiers’.9 It made a good piece, and was printed in the Wellington Evening Post in November. Katherine then tried to get herself a job, ‘not far from the fighting line’ she told her father,10 and said she was going to be a reporter for a newspaper syndicate. Meanwhile, her brother Leslie had volunteered and was preparing to come to Europe to fight; Vera's husband joined a Canadian regiment and Chaddie's was a regular Army officer. No wonder the Beauchamps were scornful of Murry, and no wonder Katherine felt obliged to tell them later how hard he had tried to enlist.11

  There were no cottages to be found in Kent. Lawrence now suggested they should come and stay with them, and try to find a place nearby. So, about the time of Katherine's twenty-sixth birthday, they returned to their previous year's haunts and installed themselves in the Triangle. They noticed that Lawrence had lost his bloom of the summer; he looked thin and unwell, and had begun to grow a beard. Murry set off daily on a bicycle to look for a second cottage, leaving Katherine to talk. ‘She trusted me. I was older and she told me much of her life,’ said Frieda.12 When Murry found ‘Rose Tree Cottage’, three miles or so across the fields, going for 5s a week, Lawrence insisted on helping to prepare it, and expressed great scorn of Murry's languid way with a paint brush, hissing, ‘Get it done!’ and finishing the job for him at double speed.13

  When the Murrys moved out, the two couples continued to dine together twice a week, the men sharing the cooking. Frieda found Katherine ‘gay and gallant and wonderful’14 and was struck by her hard-working habits, which were in considerable contrast to her own. Katherine was always up at seven to get her housework done by ten, she said; but gallant as she may have been, she resented having to do it. When her father sent her five sovereigns extra for Christmas – produced by the avuncular Mr Kay with a little flourish – she immediately took on a woman to do the cleaning and reported that she much preferred to sit snug in her little sitting-room and hear someone else scrubbing. All this came in a gushingly affectionate letter to her mother, who had been ill. Katherine was trying to re-establish good relations after a long period of silence. She could not resist mentioning that Frieda was the daughter of a baron, but she did not venture any explanatory remarks about Lawrence's origins or work.

  Some time in November the meeting between Katherine and Kot took place, though not at all in the way Lawrence had planned it. One of the rolling quarrels about Frieda's misery over the loss of her children had arisen; Kot, who was staying at the Triangle, took Lawrence's part, and Frieda fled to Rose Tree Cottage in tears. From there, Katherine, no doubt playing her role in the drama with some zest, set off in the dark in her wellington boots and with her skirts tucked up – the duck pond went right across the lane in rainy weather – to inform him that Frieda did not intend to return. Lawrence shouted, ‘Damn the woman, tell her I never want to see her again’,15 at which Katherine simply disappeared into the night. It was a good scene, and Kot was instantly bewitched by her.

  As he got to know her over the next few weeks, he made this quite plain: he was happy to perform services for her and pressed presents upon her with a generosity that contrasted strikingly with Murry's stinginess. She was naturally charmed to have an adorer; and was quite prepared to flirt with him. Her intentions were never serious, but he became one of the people to whom she could safely complain about Murry. At various times in her life she put various friends in this role – Ida, Lawrence, Kot, Virginia Woolf – regardless of their sex, involving them in a private game in which she denigrated Murry while at the same time professing love to him. Only to her family she always praised him. Even if it was a way of working out a fundamental conflict for a strong-willed person who resented dependence on a lover, it proved baffling to her friends. Many of Kot's friends also disapproved of his love for Katherine, feeling she exploited him. He simply said, ‘she could do things that I disliked intensely, exaggerate and tell untruths, yet the way she did it was so admirable, unique, that I did not trouble at all about what she spoke it was just lovely’. 16 Although he had more than one falling out with her during her lifetime, he would not hear anything against her after her death.

  Kot was invited for Christmas, which the three country-dwelling couples had determined to make as festive as possible, in spite of the war (and the lack of Frieda's children); Lawrence promised to make punch ‘up in the attics, with a Primus Stove’,17 which he did to devastating effect. Gordon Campbell was invited also, since Beatrice was away in Ireland again, and a protégé of the Cannans, Mark Gertler. He was two years out of the Slade and already regarded as an artist of high promise, a lively and attractive young man with the exotic background of an East End Jewish family from central Europe and ‘the face of a Lippo Lippi cherub’ according to Edward Marsh, who was hoping to produce a volume of Georgian drawings to match his Georgian Poetry.18 Parties were planned at the Lawrences' on the twenty-third and the Cannans' on Christmas Day. According to Gertler's account (sent to Lytton Strachey),

  These were really fun. On both occasions we all got drunk! The second party, I got so drunk that I made violent love to Katherine Mansfield! She returned it, also being drunk. I ended the evening by weeping bitterly at having kissed another man's woman and everybody trying to console me.19

  The episode took place during a game of charades suggested by Kot. Later Gertler told his adored friend from the Slade, Carrington, that nobody knew whether to take it as a joke or a scandal, and the Lawrences were excited and intrigued. Gertler decided that he liked Katherine, and wanted to know her better. Her journal is discreetly silent about it; the charade had cast Murry as an abandoned lover and Gertler as his rival, and Katherine had refused to be ‘reunited’ with Murry at the end, as planned. In truth, she had already been writing genuine farewells to him in her journal: ‘Darling, it has been lovely. We shall never forget – no never. Goodbye! When once I have left you I will be more remote than you could imagine.’20 On New Year's Eve, which she spent soberly, alone with Murry, she went into the frosty garden with the thought of just walking away for ever; and Ida's ‘ghost… ran through my heart, her hair flying, very pale, with dark startled eyes’.21

  The next day she went to London and visited Kot in his office, the smoke-filled Russian Law Bureau in High Holborn, with its horsehair furniture and pictures, one of Christ with children, one of kittens with a basket of pansies, which pleased her by its ugliness.

  All through January she and Lawrence were both restless, finding the wintry discomforts of cottage life in the Chilterns more than their spirits or their health could stand. He and Frieda quarrelled on, Murry increasingly taking Lawrence's part and becoming hostile to Frieda; and Lawrence dreamed of setting up an
island community with a group of chosen spirits. At this time Katherine found even his talk about sex congenial: ‘Lawrence was nice, very nice, sitting with a piece of string in his hand, on true sex.’22 She consented to let Murry make love with her several times, but was in a state of fevered passion for the idea of Francis Carco, with whom she was exchanging love-letters, photographs and locks of hair.

  She and Murry were officially planning a party for the end of January – both Kot and Gertler, who had become good friends, were looking forward to it – but at the same time she had it in mind to take a flat in London, or even go to France. She wrote a long story, ‘Brave Love’, about a heartless and fascinating woman kept by a rich man, who breaks the heart of an innocent Russian sailor, possibly modelled on Gertler. Murry was noncommittal about it, understandably, for it is both artificial and melodramatic, one of her real failures, which he never collected.

  She spent a few days in London with Anne Rice, now married to an art critic, Raymond Drey, from Rhythm days; and when the Lawrences announced they were moving to Sussex, where Viola Meynell had offered them a cottage at Pulborough, the charms of Rose Tree Cottage diminished still further. The Murrys cancelled their party and spent the last night of the Lawrences' residence at the Triangle with them: ‘very untidy – newspapers and faded mistletoe’ commented houseproud Katherine, adding, ‘I hardly slept at all, but it was nice’.23 Then she went to London again, visited another agent (Curtis Brown: nothing came of it) and allowed Kot to escort her to several music halls and give her chocolates, cigarettes and clothes.

  On her return, she again told Murry she wanted to live apart from him in future. He was unresponsive, busy with a different emotional crisis over a fancied slight from Campbell. A few days later, a letter from Carco pressed her to come to France as soon as possible. Again she hurried to London where, at Mr Kay's, she unexpectedly came face to face with her brother Leslie. He took her to lunch to hear her news, which turned out to be two unblushingly delivered lies: one, that she was still as much in love with Murry as ever; two, that he was about to accompany her to France to do some reporting. Leslie passed this misinformation on innocently to the family; then, fulfilling his old ambition to attend an English university, went to begin his training to be an officer at Balliol, while his sister set off alone for Paris.

  Murry was left so disconsolate that he fell ill and fled to Pulborough immediately, to be looked after tenderly by Lawrence. Murry's dislike of Frieda was now well established; Katherine, on the other hand, sat down to write to her as soon as she reached her destination in France.

  She had to hoodwink the French Army officials to get into the war zone to visit her would-be lover. Today it seems an act of grotesque foolhardiness, but it was just the sort of adventure she thrived on. She had gone so far as to ask Beatrice Campbell to lend her some maternity clothes so that she could pose as a pregnant wife, but Beatrice had managed to dissuade her, and she fell back on the old tale of a sick relative. The weather was unseasonably warm and, despite the chilling sight of wounded soldiers, she was thrilled to be in France again, ‘such wonderful country – all rivers and woods and large birds that look blue in the sunlight’.24 Gray, where she was bound, was on the Saône, just east of Dijon; women were not allowed in this area, but Carco was as amused by the adventure as she was, and had taken a room for her in a village house, to which he conducted her, pretending to be a stranger. She describes their encounter charmingly and quite dispassionately in her journal:

  In the most natural manner we slowly undressed by the stove. F. slung into bed. ‘Is it cold?’ I said. ‘Ah, no, not at all cold. Viens, ma bébé. Don't be frightened. The waves are quite small.’ With his laughing face, his pretty hair, one hand with a bangle over the sheets, he looked like a girl.

  The sword, the big ugly sword, but not between us, lying in a chair. The act of love seemed somehow quite incidental, we talked so much. It was so warm and delicious, lying curled in each other's arms, by the light of the tiny lamp… only the clock and the fire to be heard. A whole life passed in thought. Other people, other things. But we lay like two old people coughing faintly under the eiderdown and laughing at each other.25

  Neither she nor Carco could even try to sustain the idea that they were passionate lovers. He had doubtless never expected anything more than a passing, friendly episode; he offered her the use of his flat in Paris afterwards and probably thought he had been of service to her, since she enjoyed adventures. But she felt obliged to work up a pique against him. Perhaps it was a way of squaring her guilt feelings; she and Murry, after all, took ‘Love’ seriously.

  In ‘An Indiscreet Journey’, the story she drew from the adventure, Carco hardly exists as a person; but in the much later ‘Je ne parle pas français’, which is usually supposed to contain a portrait of him as Duquette (indeed, Katherine suggested he was partly drawn from Carco), he is depicted as sexually passive, a gigolo, but not predatory. He is also possibly bisexual, a fantasist and a writer. Perhaps in truth Katherine felt too complicit with him, too like him, for comfort; and since she could not dominate him as she liked to do, she preferred to give up the affair. She then made him into an emblem of what she did not like about France, what she called its ‘corruption’ to Murry. But she kept her love of its ‘warm, sensational life’ intact.

  A week later she was back in the cold of Rose Tree Cottage. Murry, summoned by one of her telegrams, met her in London and accompanied her. He observed that she had had her hair cut very short, and seemed ‘aggressive and ill’.26 For two weeks or more she suffered from rheumatism so severe that she could hardly move, she told Kot, who sent her whisky and cigarettes. She sent him her story ‘The Little Governess’, in which she explores the vulnerability and terror of a young girl who falls into the hands of an apparently benevolent old gentleman. Its settings – a trans-European train, a hotel, Munich – were known territory for her, and she managed to combine a direct narrative simplicity with the frightening aspect of a fairy-tale about innocence, pride and wickedness. Not only is it a very successful story, it is also of a genre in which Katherine excelled.

  Kot was enthusiastic about the story, but he failed to place it for her. Anxious about her health, he pressed her and she wrote, ‘Yes, I have a special disease. Pray your Ancestors for my heart.’27 As far as we know, no doctor ever suggested to Katherine that she had heart disease, but she did have a special unnameable disease. What was she trying to tell Kot? The mystery increases when she told him a few weeks later (29 March), writing from Paris, that ‘the illness that I had in England and longed to be cured of – is quite gone for ever – I believe it was my “heart” after all’.28 Since she continued to suffer from agonizing rheumatism, she may have had other symptoms in mind, which cleared up in Paris, or possibly she just regretted the impulse to confide to Kot something so intimate that she would hardly acknowledge it even to herself.

  Before returning to Paris, she was well enough to go to Pulborough to see the Lawrences, with Kot in attendance. Murry was at a very low ebb. Lawrence had finished The Rainbow at last and even Campbell had nearly completed a novel, while he struggled on with Still Life. Katherine sent him a breezy, loving letter with drawings, and then went straight on to Paris, to stay in Carco's empty flat on the quai aux Fleurs, high up over the Seine, with Notre Dame and its gardens at the back.

  Lawrence was preoccupied with new friends: Lady Ottoline Morrell, E. M. Forster, Bertrand Russell. Murry found himself a two-room flat in Elgin Crescent, Notting Hill, and spent his time miserably, looking for linoleum and curtains. In his desperation he wrote to Orage, soliciting some work; the snub he got made him wince. Kot and Gertler called, but it was obvious they came to see Katherine, and went away disappointed. The only person who seemed pleased to see Murry was Floryan Sobieniowski, whom he ran into in the street, and who also asked for news of Katherine, and boasted of being very ‘bussy’: secretary to the Polish committee, translator of Synge, and with many projects under way, though
his English seemed no better. Murry could not resist a friendly response, to Katherine's annoyance.

  She was also spending time with an old enemy, Beatrice Hastings, who had left Orage and settled in Paris, where she held court among writers and painters: Max Jacob was her friend, Picasso and Modigliani both reputedly her lovers. Katherine regaled Murry, who had never met Beatrice, with accounts of her drunkenness and her fashionable Bohemian parties in Montmartre, where she described herself dancing with ‘a very lovely young woman – married and curious – blonde – passionate’.29

  She was deeply divided between her enjoyment of the pleasures of living in Paris alone and her sense that Murry was, after all, a safe lover, a refuge, not to be thrown away lightly for the sake of any unreliable French person. For his part, he sent her a letter at the end of March in which he spelt out the attitude he had determined to take in order to square his romantic view of love with the actual situation they were in. He began by referring to Beatrice Hastings, saying she and Katherine had some points in common: ‘I mean the Cabaret bit… that used to terrify me and almost killed me dead’ (perhaps he meant her performances at the Cave of the Golden Calf). But, he went on, Katherine was ‘the eternal woman’, envied by other ‘inadequate women’ who put up right and wrong against you, whose greatness is that there is no right and wrong save what you feel to be you, or not-you… Well with so much against you, it's a hard row to hoe, to be really you. (You is a type – the wonderful type from Aspasia to B.B. – [Beatrice Hastings] – Colette Vagabonde and you above all moderns). Naturally the tendency is to be extravagant and outrageous, retaliating against the hostility that puts up right & wrong against you. You by the sheer fact of your genius – genius is with you only being wonderfully what you are – have got through that without hurting yourself, and are very near to getting absolutely rid of your wickedness (that's only a figure of speech). Because of that, you'll stick to me; not so much because you love me, which you do, but because you know that you are more the real you, the good you, with me.30