Katherine Mansfield

by Claire Tomalin

  In March 1915 The Voyage Out was finally published by the firm of her half-brother, Gerald Duckworth. (Readers familiar with her history will not need to be told that she later accused him in private memoirs of sexually abusing her as a small child.) Immediately after publication she had a severe relapse of madness – hallucinations, raving abuse of her attendants and Leonard, refusal to eat – and only in 1916 did she begin to live something approaching a normal life, dividing her time between a house in Richmond and Asheham, taking up her pen again as a reviewer and starting on another novel, always carefully and tenderly watched by Leonard for signs of strain.

  In 1917 he suggested that they should set up a small printing and publishing business of their own in Richmond; his hope was to give Virginia an interest and occupation less emotionally draining than writing. She agreed, and it was called the Hogarth Press. Clearly, they were unlikely to attract established writers, and were on the lookout for those with their reputations still to be made. Katherine's name came forward as one of these.

  At first, Virginia found Katherine ‘cheap and hard’ in her manner, ‘unpleasant but forcible and utterly unscrupulous’.41 Despite this ferocious judgement, she called on her in Old Church Street and asked for a story. Then, at the end of June, she invited Katherine to dinner tête-à-tête, and listened while she told stories of her past. Virginia was impressed by these adventures in the real world, but did not repeat them to her sister, merely saying, ‘She seems to have gone every sort of hog since she was 17, which is interesting; I also think she has a much better idea of writing than most. She's an odd character.’42 Katherine, for her part, told Ottoline,

  I do like her tremendously… I felt then for the first time the strange, trembling, glinting quality of her mind – and quite for the first time she seemed to me to be one of those Dostoevsky women whose ‘innocence’ has been hurt.43

  It was a finely perceptive account.

  Meanwhile, the story was submitted, accepted and renamed ‘Prelude’. ‘Prelude to what?’ asked Lawrence irritably when he heard of it, although he and Katherine were exchanging thoroughly friendly letters again, and she boldly praised him to Ottoline too. The Woolfs were enthusiastic about the story, but before Katherine could visit them again both women were ill, she with rheumatism so bad that the doctor hinted, amid many thumps and bangs as he examined her, she should be wintering in the sunshine. She told Virginia she felt too ill and depressed to copy-type ‘Prelude’.

  When she was better, she went, without Murry, for a long weekend at Asheham. Lytton Strachey was a fellow guest, and Edward Garnett came for the day. Virginia and Katherine walked on the downs, observing thistledown, butterflies and many aeroplanes overhead. The war was entering its third year. The harvest was in full swing, and the sun shone; Katherine stayed on until Wednesday, and wrote an ecstatic thank-you letter in which she praised Virginia's latest story, declared that the two of them had very similar aims as writers, and defended herself against Bloomsbury gossip. Leonard liked Katherine, admired her work and approved the friendship.

  The auguries again seemed good. ‘Prelude’ was among her finest stories, and her longest yet. It is a description of a family moving into a new house in the country, written in a series of short sections without explanatory or linking passages; the reader is simply plunged directly into one fresh scene, one character's thoughts, after another. It is obvious that the inspiration is taken from the Beauchamp family and Katherine's childhood, but there is nothing confessional or indulgent about the story, in which the mother's detachment from the children is clear in a few lines, the children's chief excitement is to see a duck beheaded for dinner, and the women of the family are full of dissatisfactions and dreams of escape. Both in its setting – which is unstated, and disquietingly English-seeming without being English – and its handling of mood and character, it is boldly original. The lack of stamina which prevented her from producing a novel encouraged other virtues: speed, economy, clarity. They became her hallmark, admired and imitated by later writers.

  In October Katherine dined at Richmond and was given a few pages of proofs and high praise from the Woolfs. When Brett asked her about the story's form, she answered, ‘As far as I know its more or less my own invention… I don't feel anything but intensely a longing to serve my subject as well as I can’.44 She was in a state of high excitement. Then fell the blows.

  The first was that Murry became ill. He had lost weight and had pleurisy. He was also depressed, and the doctor said he must stop work and rest in the country. Katherine, fired with maternal concern, wrote at once to Ottoline, asking her to have him to stay. The next day she received a telegram which read: ‘OF COURSE DELIGHTED HAVE YOU BOTH DEAREST KATHERINE COME SOON WHY NOT TODAY OTTOLINE’.45 Katherine wouldn't go, but she saw him off and urged his hostess, and Brett, who was often there, to look after him. Murry was soon on the mend. Katherine went for a weekend at the beginning of December, and caught a chill.

  By the middle of December she was very ill, her bones aching till she felt ‘a crawling thing without the power of doing anything except cursing my fate’,46 her temperature soaring, Ida irritating her with cups of hot milk, the doctor on the way. ‘Dry pleurisy,’ said the doctor (‘an old complaint of mine!’). He bound up her chest and told her she must stay in bed and not even be driven in a warm car either to Garsington or to Aunt Belle, who appeared with Chaddie to succour her.

  To Anne Drey she confessed that she had been told she must never winter in England again or ‘I may become consumptive’.47 The next day she wrote to Murry at Garsington, where he was staying for Christmas again, that she had a ‘SPOT’ in her right lung; that she must go to the south of France; that she could not work; and that she wished they could be married before she went. She also wrote, and underlined: ‘Burn my letters’.48

  Murry returned to London now, and he and Ida helped her to prepare to leave for Bandol. Ida asked for a month's leave from her factory in order to accompany her, but at the last minute the Foreign Office refused her permission to go. Katherine made light of everything. ‘I am not an invalid really,’ she told Ottoline,49 and she and Murry went for a last visit to Garsington. After this he returned to his flat in Redcliffe Road and his job at the War Office, and she spent three days with her sister Chaddie. Then she left for France. The tuberculosis that had seemed to threaten Murry had alighted instead on her.

  Tuberculosis is an infectious disease. The question naturally arises as to whom Katherine caught it from. There is one glaringly obvious candidate. In the first winter of the war, and again in the spring of 1916, she lived in close proximity with the Lawrences, sometimes staying overnight at their cottage, and eating many meals in common. Lawrence was tubercular, although he did not acknowledge it. Frieda and Murry were both robust enough to be resistant, or may have had childhood infections which immunized them effectively against the disease; but Katherine, already chronically ill, was vulnerable. This may have been the real Blutbrüderschaft, more sinister than Lawrence had ever intended.

  12

  1918: ‘A Great Black Bird’

  Katherine set off alone, armed with little more than a doctor's certificate to allow her to travel across warring France. She had five years of life left, in which the old symptoms of her gonorrhoea would continue to torture her, while the new symptoms of tuberculosis would gradually destroy her. The comments of her friends and her own observations chart the steady weight loss, the rings slipping on her fingers, the face once plump growing drawn and haggard, the breath shorter, the temper blacker, the freedom even to move across a room slowly taken from her. At the same time, almost as though it were fattening on her sickness, her fame grew and began to blossom. Often she was too ill and low-spirited to work, but then there would be a burst of literally feverish writing, producing some perfectly judged and achieved stories. The quality remained uneven, and she was never satisfied with what she did, but she produced enough for two more collections in her lifetime, many fragments, man
y reviews and her poignantly allusive journal. Her letters to Murry fill up a larger volume than any of these; unfortunately, they only rarely show her at her best, and are sometimes of more clinical than literary interest, cruelly and repetitively revealing the pathological basis of her moods.

  The ninety-eight letters Katherine wrote to Murry over the next three months, however, form the most vividly self-revealing of all the sequences she addressed to him; they add up to more than 50,000 words, a far bigger slab of prose than any of her stories. The two blows of first his illness and then her own had revived her feeling for him strongly, and suddenly she found herself dependent on him as never before, as she faced the shock and stress of her condition. In effect, these letters chart the transformation of a young woman expecting three months' convalescence in the sun in preparation for her wedding into someone who has felt and acknowledged the mark of approaching death. Just before she left, on the dark January Sunday afternoon, she and Murry made love; when she arrived back in April, a stone lighter, he was at first too appalled and frightened to embrace her: ‘When I met her at the station, she was barely recognizable. She looked as though she had been for months in some fearful prison.’1

  Katherine always loved an outward journey, and her letters begin in a flurry of pleasure: the stormy Channel, the snug berth, snow on the ground at Le Havre and, for all the wartime delays and unheated trains, marvellous French food to arouse greed (seven sorts of cheese, she reported delightedly) and a blue-and-yellow brocaded room at the Hôtel Terminus by St Lazare, prudently booked in advance (this was as well, for Paris was full). But as she travelled south the next day, while her impressions remained sharply etched, the pleasure drained out. In its place came first disappointment and then fear. She had forgotten how cold it could be in the Midi in winter; only the sunny days at Bandol were fixed in her memory now. The hotel there was under new management, and even old acquaintances mysteriously failed to recognize her at first: ‘Vous êtes beaucoup changée… Vous n'avez plus votre air de p'tite gosse.’2 The journey had exhausted her: ‘I feel like a fly who has been dropped into the milk jug and fished out again, but it's still too milky and drowned to start cleaning up.’3 Then pain settled on her: ‘My left lung aches and aches… It is like an appalling burn. Sometimes, if I lift my arm over my head it seems to give it relief. What is it?’4 Two weeks later, she wrote: ‘There is a great black bird flying over me, and I am so frightened he'll settle – so terrified. I don't know exactly what kind he is.’5

  It took only two weeks more for her to find out exactly what kind of bird it was. Jumping from her bed in the morning to look out of the window, she coughed into her handkerchief and found it red. It was her first haemorrhage. ‘When I saw the bright arterial blood I nearly had a fit’; but her letter, frenetically bright too, was all reassurance for Murry:

  Look here! I can't leave this place till April. It's no earthly go. I can't and mustn't – see. Can't risk a draught or a chill, and mustn't walk. I've got a bit of a temperature and I'm not so fat as when I came – and, Bogey, this is not serious, does not keep me in bed, is absolutely easily curable, but I have been spitting a bit of blood. See? Of course, I'll tell you. But if you worry - unless you laugh like Rib does – I can't tell you: you mustn't type it on the typewriter or anything like that, my precious, my own – and after all, Lawrence used to: so did, I think, Belle Trinder.*6

  Pulmonary tuberculosis works in this fashion: it is an infection, produced when a tubercle bacillus gets into the lungs. In lucky cases, the body's natural resistance is strong enough to clamp down on the bacillus and lock it up in surrounding tissue, rendering it harmless; but when this fails to happen – in a person with low resistance – the bacillus proceeds to form large, cheesy masses in the lung, which break down the respiratory tissues and produce cavities. As the process continues, it eats into the bronchial passages; the tubercle bacillus can then be coughed or breathed out, and the sufferer becomes a source of infection to other people in turn. The disease advances further, eroding blood vessels. It is this which produces the haemorrhages.

  Once advanced so far, tuberculosis was usually expected to be fatal in Katherine's day. Today, of course, it is chemically curable; but even then cures were sometimes achieved. They depended on encouraging the body's natural resistance. The body itself had to seal off the tubercle bacillus even at this late stage, leaving the patient with severely scarred but still working lungs. The only way to promote this self-healing process was by rest, a good diet and nursing care. For this it was not necessary to go abroad. Indeed, the first decade of this century saw the establishment of many sanatoria in the British Isles, and a determined policy of public education aimed at prevention, diagnosis and early treatment of the illness. From 1912 on there was a National Tuberculosis Scheme, and notification of the disease was compulsory throughout Britain. Much stress was laid on its infectious nature, which had been established only with the discovery of the bacillus in 1882, and on the importance of thorough disinfection of rooms in which consumptive people had been living, and objects handled by them. Special clinics and hospitals (and in some countries schools) were set up to combat infection by isolating the sick from the community, since it was believed you could catch tuberculosis even by inhabiting a room previously lived in by a patient, through dry bacilli in the dust.

  Wintering by the Mediterranean was the old palliative for the disease – dry and warm air being considered beneficial – but modern treatment did not depend on travelling south. Instead it involved a strict regime of rest, fresh air, good food and nursing care, almost the exact opposite of what Katherine achieved by her journey. Had she been advised to adopt a sanatorium regime in the British Isles from the winter of 1917, it is just possible that she might have allowed her body to cure itself of tuberculosis, although in all likelihood she was already too debilitated; but it does seem that she might have been better advised under the circumstances, and when later she had better advice, she chose to ignore it.

  At this moment, Murry commands sympathy. As he explained later – and the truth of his account is clear from her letters – she wanted him to join in a pretence that she did not have the illness. By ignoring it, by accepting only such doctors' advice as she chose, they could somehow make it go away. After all, she may have thought, how much good had doctors done her existing chronic illness? Katherine's courage was never in doubt, but here it verges on insanity, we may think now. Yet at no time did either Murry or Ida have the strength of will to overcome her determination not to accept the fact of tuberculosis, with all that it meant. The idea of a sanatorium, which would entail separation, loss of freedom and enforced idleness, struck her as being like ‘a second lunatic asylum’, she told Ida.7 (Lawrence, of course, rejected the idea too, and died of his tuberculosis slowly, but Gertler, who had several spells in British sanatoria, appears to have recovered.)

  For the rest of her life, Katherine maintained two entirely disparate sets of beliefs in her head: one that she was incurably ill and indeed dying, the other that she would recover, have children, live in the country with Murry and be perfectly happy working and gardening in a rural paradise. It is not unusual for sick people to react in this way, but Katherine's insistence that Murry should join in the fantasy of recovery made things increasingly difficult for him. Had he been older or wiser, or a completely different sort of man, he might have been strong enough to play the game in a different way. His way was not an appealing one. Sad as it is to read their plans for an impossible future, it is worse to eavesdrop on their mutual flattery, which becomes part of the fantasy. She tells him he is a ‘Great Poet’, he declares that they are both geniuses. Both like to see themselves as innocent children in a corrupt world; at the same time they are the true heirs to the great tradition of English literature. Murry decides they have extra-sensory powers too, since they are so often thinking about the same topic at the same time; and he urges her to preserve his letters – ‘I think they may be important to us one day’8
– in contrast to her ‘Burn my letters’ of December. Poor Katherine: one especially cruel dream was that she was pregnant. In fact, her periods had stopped for the simple, sinister reason of her illness and weight loss. She noticed grey hair appearing at her temples. She was twenty-nine.

  Spurred by anxiety, Ida had again sought leave from her factory, and she had sat and wept remorselessly in front of the authorities until they relented, bent the regulations and gave her the travel permit she needed. Although Katherine had been wishing for her company, by the time she arrived at the Hôtel Beau Rivage in mid February she precipitated an attack of violent hatred and resentment. ‘What have you come for?’ asked Katherine at her iciest. Off went letters to Murry, accusing Ida not merely of stupidity and insensitivity but of ghoulishly battening on her illness, of wanting her death, of being a cannibal and – as though it were part of the same constellation of hideous vices – of being greedy. ‘I hate fat people,’ explained Katherine, forgetting (or perhaps remembering) how her mother had chided her for being a fat little girl. Now she herself was being urged to eat, to rest, to build up her weight; and she said she appreciated the French food, but mostly she smoked cigarettes and drank cup after cup of black coffee. No wonder she suffered nights of insomnia. In her better moments, she saw that her rage against Ida was pathological, and more than once she likened it to Lawrence's rages against Frieda.

  Ida was not the only object of hatred. She and Murry vied in abusing ‘H.L.’ (Her Ladyship, i.e., Ottoline) to one another. At the same time, Murry was seeing her, and on good enough terms to elicit a comment from Virginia (‘she's got Murry back again’);9 and Katherine was sending her affectionate letters. It was not a pretty piece of behaviour in either of them. Katherine also took the French nation as a whole into contempt for the time being, her fellow guests for their coarse digestive habits, the soldiers posted along the coast for behaving like soldiers, the doctor she visited for his sexual flattery and insinuating remarks about venereal disease. She told Murry that she found ‘corruption’ everywhere, and wished to cry out against it in her writing; but the corruption was more within than without.