Anne took Katherine for expeditions along the glittering summer coast, and painted her, a bold portrait in a brick-red frock, black eyes and fringe, lipstick mouth, a sense of strain in the pose of the head on the thin neck. Out of the sunshine, at night in her room,
I walk up and down, look at the bed, look at the writing table, look in the glass and am frightened of that girl with burning eyes, think, ‘Will my candle last until it's light?’ and then sit for a long time staring at the carpet – so long that it's only a fluke that one ever looks up again. And Oh God, this terrifying thought that one must die, and may be going to die. I have really suffered such AGONIES of loneliness and illness combined that I'll never be quite whole again. I don't think I'll ever believe that they won't recur – that some grinning Fate won't suggest that I go away by myself to get well of something.4
She was not exaggerating: Bruges, Bavaria, Bandol, Cornwall made a long litany, not yet completed.
Murry worked on at the War Office. Ottoline was still pressing the bailiff's cottage on them. The Woolfs were still printing Prelude. Murry went to dinner with them in June, and Virginia noted that he appeared ‘pale as death, with gleaming eyes, & a crouching way at table that seemed to proclaim extreme hunger or despair’.5 He told them that he had been near suicide at Christmas and had since kept going by worrying out a formula he called ‘indifferentism’ which involved keeping his conscience ‘in two layers’.
Virginia sent Katherine letters, flowers and cigarettes. Privately she doubted whether Prelude would sell more than one hundred copies, but in July it was finally published, and Virginia noted her satisfaction: ‘it has the living power, the detached existence of a work of art’.6 Ottoline loyally sent a copy to Russell in prison. He did not care for it, and took the opportunity to warn Ottoline against Katherine's malice. Ottoline was not much moved by this tip, perhaps understandably; there was simply too much treacherous talk and behaviour in their circle to allow one to drop friends for that reason. But Virginia's estimate of Katherine's abilities suffered when she read her story ‘Bliss’ in the English Review in August. Virginia found it superficially smart, poor, cheap and badly written, or so she irritatedly wrote in her diary on first reading it; still, she did not allow this adverse judgement to spoil their friendship. Something about Katherine, so alien in background and character, so fixed on her work, drew and fascinated the older woman.
At the end of June, Murry went to Cornwall for a week's holiday. Katherine explained carefully in advance that she was taking a separate room for him, perhaps to reassure him that he would not be too intimately exposed to her tuberculosis, perhaps also to keep her pain from him. She asked Ida to be at Redcliffe Road to meet them when they returned together, evidently feeling it impossible to cope without her help; and from mid July until the end of August, she stayed in hot, unhealthy Chelsea, too ill to make a proposed visit to Virginia at Asheham, or to go to Garsington, where the Morrells had quarrelled with Murry temporarily over his unkind review of their protégé, Siegfried Sassoon. Sometimes she was feverish, sometimes she was unable to walk at all. A ‘doctor’ came to give her electric treatment for the pain in her joints. She told Ida, ‘You see I am never one single hour without pain. If it's not my lungs it is (far more painful) my back. And then my legs ache…’7
Her own suffering doubtless affected her reaction to the news of her mother's death, received in mid August. She grieved, calling her ‘a most exquisite, perfect little being – something between a star and a flower’, a description which sits a trifle uneasily on the real woman who had dumped her in Bavaria to have a baby by herself, and even in her recently revised will confirmed her disinheritance. But Katherine insisted on Mrs Beauchamp's perfections of character to Brett, Virginia and Ottoline in turn. Approaching her own thirtieth birthday, and with the shadow of her own death in her mind, Katherine wanted to be reconciled to her memories of her mother. An idealized mother could be turned to as a model and a comforter; the process is similar to that shown by Proust, who makes his narrator's mother begin to identify with his dead grandmother. Katherine was overjoyed when her father told her later (in 1920), ‘you're your mother again’. She consented to go and stay with her mother's sister Belle Trinder, in Tadworth, an unusual gesture of family feeling for her; and from Belle's she moved into Portland Villas.
It was probably Belle who alerted Harold Beauchamp to Katherine's condition, so that he arranged for Sydney Beauchamp, now a very successful doctor indeed, to make a professional call on her in October. In the course of the autumn she saw at least four doctors. The first specialist, summoned by Murry, impressed her by his intelligence, and told her that she must go into a sanatorium, not necessarily abroad, but simply to have the discipline and nursing which would allow her lungs to heal; her condition was ‘serious but recoverable’. To Murry he said further that she had at most four years to live if she did not follow this advice. Ten days later, on her thirtieth birthday, came Sydney Beauchamp in his silk hat, who offered the consoling words, ‘Well, dear, of course you won't make old bones,’8 and gave the same advice about the sanatorium. By now she was feeling so ill, with ‘a terrible boiling sensation’ that she thought she might be dying. She turned to a doctor Stonham, recommended by Virginia; and he confirmed again that both her lungs were tubercular, and advised her to spend at least a year in Switzerland.
Still Katherine went on looking for a doctor, until she found one who gave her the advice she wanted to hear: Victor Sorapure, an Edinburgh-trained gynaecologist who had practised for some years in America and was now a consultant at Hampstead General Hospital. She saw him at the end of November. He was recommended by Anne Drey, and Katherine took to him because he allowed time to talk with her. ‘He helped me not only to bear pain but suggested that perhaps bodily ill-health is necessary, a repairing process and he was always telling me to consider how man plays but a part in the history of the world.’9 He also accepted her reluctance to go into a sanatorium as reasonable (he died of tuberculosis himself in 1933). Then he offered to treat her arthritis, and began a course of ferocious injections intended to relieve it. For a while she believed they helped. Ida misleadingly wrote in her memoir that Katherine was cured by Sorapure, but, since she was still suffering the same pains in 1919 and, indeed, right to the end of her life, the treatment cannot have been successful. The symptoms may have seemed less fierce for a while because, presumably at Sorapure's suggestion, she started regular doses of an opium-based medicine at this time too.
This is how she appeared to Virginia when she called at the Hampstead house in November:
Katherine was up but husky and feeble, crawling about the room like an old woman. How far she is ill, one cant say. She impresses one a little unfavourably at first – then more favourably. I think she has a kind of childlikeness somewhere which has been much disfigured, but still exists. Illness, she said, breaks down one's privacy so that one cant write – the long story she has written breathes nothing but hate. Murry and the Monster watch and wait on her, till she hates them both she trusts no one; she finds no ‘reality’.*10
Ida also described the domestic side of life at Portland Villas as she saw it. She took Katherine breakfast and lunch on a tray, and brought meals to her visitors. Katherine had no compunction about degrading her to the status of a servant; she asked her to wait at table without introducing her, and gave orders over her head (Ida was meant to be the housekeeper) directly to the maids, Gertie and Violet, who came in daily, and the cook, who lived in but then had to be sacked for drinking. Ida lit the fires, dusted and polished, did the shopping, made clothes for Katherine and received her scoldings if lunch was late. During the day Katherine sat in her own white study, with a huge muff to keep her feet warm, a yellow-painted table to work on and two windows bringing in the afternoon sun. When she was in a good mood, she could be high-spirited. Murry's brother Richard, a frequent guest, remembered how one day, when the man next door played his gramophone in the garden, she knew all the op
eratic songs he put on, and supplied appropriate gestures at the window. Perhaps she thought of Garnet and the Moody-Manners. She liked music halls just as much, and struck Richard as a true entertainer and extrovert, ‘very enmeshed with life’; he thought she and Gertler were similar in character. His account fits in well with Leonard Woolf's impressions of her:
By nature, I think, she was gay, cynical, amoral, ribald, witty. When we first knew her, she was extraordinarily amusing. I don't think anyone has ever made me laugh more than she did in those days. She would sit very upright on the edge of a chair or sofa and tell at immense length a kind of saga, of her experiences as an actress or of how and why Koteliansky howled like a dog in the room at the top of a building in Southampton Row. There was not the shadow of a gleam of a smile on her mask of a face, and the extraordinary funniness of the story was increased by the flashes of her astringent wit. I think that in some abstruse way Murry corrupted and perverted and destroyed Katherine both as a person and a writer. She was a very serious writer, but her gifts were those of an intense realist, with a superb sense of ironic humour and fundamental cynicism. She got enmeshed in the sticky sentimentality of Murry and wrote against the grain of her own nature. At the bottom of her mind she knew this, I think, and it enraged her. And that was why she was so often enraged against Murry. To see them together, particularly in their own house in Hampstead, made one acutely uncomfortable, for Katherine seemed to be always irritated with Murry… Every now and then she would say sotto voce something bitter and biting.11
This is not the Katherine of the journal, or the Katherine Murry that Ida saw – which makes the testimony of these two disinterested witnesses all the more significant. With a different audience Katherine could forget her role as exquisite victim or domestic tyrant, forget her irritation and pain for a moment, and laugh and joke. She sometimes, privately, allowed herself to deplore Murry's sluggish and insensitive ‘English’ nature, writing in her journal that ‘he is not warm, ardent, eager, full of quick response, careless, spendthrift of himself, vividly alive, high-spirited’,12 although after this catalogue of complaints she added firmly that it made no difference to her love for him. To a degree, they did enjoy the house together. They gave some parties, presided over from the sofa by Katherine, and old friends such as the Campbells, Kot and Gertler came to see her again. They kept cats, to which they were both deeply attached. Very occasionally, they might manage a short walk on the heath; and there were nights when they lay in bed together, reading poetry.
Katherine also had her hours of pleasure when she was alone in the house, with the sense that she, the Beauchamp family's Cinderella, had now achieved, after all, the dignity of a permanent home, a proper husband, servants, a position in life. When one of the cats came begging at lunchtime, she could give it cream in a silver spoon; and she enjoyed giving orders, to the cook or the shy new maid, and to Ida also, whom at this time she commanded to burn every letter she had ever sent her. Ida obeyed. But although she controlled her kingdom, happiness was rare at Portland Villas. Looking back, Katherine remembered the views from the windows on the stairs with pleasure, and the light ‘like the light of a pale shell’ in her room, but qualified her pleasure: ‘It should have been a perfect little house: it never came to flower.’13
At Portland Villas the end of the war came without much celebration, but at Christmas they managed wine, crackers and charades, in which Kot and the Campbells tried to revive some of the old gaiety, and Murry wore a paper hat. A moment of jealousy flared at the new year, when Katherine called to Ida and Murry was ‘very chagrined because I thought of her, and not only of him’.14 Otherwise, the new year brought a refusal from Heinemann, which did not wish to publish a volume of Katherine's stories; but Murry was offered exactly the work he most enjoyed, the editorship, at £800 a year, of a weekly called the Athenaeum owned by the philanthropic Arthur Rowntree.
The offices were in Adelphi Terrace, down by the river, and Murry's first issue appeared in April. He appointed Aldous Huxley and another friend with a scientific education, J. W. N. Sullivan, as his assistants, and enlisted many impressive contributors, the poets Eliot and Valéry among them, as well as Russell, Forster and many of the Bloomsbury group. Katherine became the regular fiction reviewer. Apart from this she was writing nothing, though she did help Kot with his translations of Chekhov's letters, a process that involved no more than correcting his versions, since she knew no Russian a disqualification shared by all Koteliansky's collaborators, who included Lawrence and the Woolfs. But Katherine could not be idle. ‘Life without work – I would commit suicide,’ she wrote in her journal in the summer.15 She was proud of Murry and interested in the magazine, but found him unwilling to involve her, forgetting sometimes even to bring a copy home, or to mention that he had an interesting book in the house which she might like to read – and this when she could not get out to a bookshop herself: ‘All this hurts me horribly, but I like to face it and see all round it. He ought not to have married. There never was a creature less fitted by nature for life with a woman.’16
She wrote frequently to her women friends, Anne and Ottoline – to whom she proposed a trip to Italy – and occasionally to Virginia. Many of these letters induce unease, because the tone seems forced towards something artificially literary, as though Katherine thought they might one day be adduced in evidence; and now that they are, they do suggest she was adopting poses to impress. To be fair, it must be added that the poses were taken up against a background of intermittent high fever, pain, spitting of blood and long courses of agonizing and unrewarding injections. Her courage is beyond question; it is her style that grates at times.
Harold Beauchamp arrived in London in August, with his youngest daughter, Jeanne, who was planning to stay in England, the last of the flock to abandon New Zealand for good. He had not seen Katherine since 1912, and his memoirs do not divulge what he thought, but tea at Portland Villas was obviously not a success. Murry was not prepared to feign appreciation of his father-in-law's jokes and anecdotes of business life, and the two men parted in mutual dislike. Whatever Katherine had hoped for from her father – displays of affection, offers of extra money to pay for medical treatment or comfortable holidays abroad – was not forthcoming. She decided she could not face another winter in London. Sorapure mysteriously advised against a sanatorium, and against Switzerland. Instead, he urged the Italian Riviera on her, a particularly bad suggestion, because the Italians had stringent public health measures against tuberculosis and did not tolerate infected patients in their hotels.
Before she left, she felt so frail that she sat down to write a will, without telling anyone, in the form of a letter to Murry which she left with Mr Kay. She bequeathed her manuscripts and any money to her husband, urging him to marry again after her death, and asked that Ida should dispose of her clothes. Then, accompanied by both legatees, she set off for Italy.
14
‘A Brother One Loves’
In October 1918 the friendship between her and Lawrence, which had been in abeyance apart from a few letters since 1916, was renewed when he called at Portland Villas, looking, Ida observed, ‘like an old Italian picture of Christ’.1 He had been through every sort of tribulation and humiliation since their last meeting, chased from Cornwall by the authorities on the grounds that Frieda was an enemy alien, unable to find a publisher for Women in Love ( The Rainbow, of course, remained banned), often ill, forced to seek charity to find a roof over his head; he was currently living in a cottage in Derbyshire, had again been forced to apply to the Royal Literary Fund for a grant, and again called by the Army and declared fit to be conscripted for sedentary work, which he declared he would not submit to. He was writing nothing but essays and stories, and longing to go abroad again, to escape everything he had come to hate about England, its rejection of his work, its military machinery, its climate. His bond with Frieda was feeling the strain of the harsh times they had both been enduring too. She had gone down with 'flu during thei
r visit to Hampstead; Lawrence called alone, and he and Katherine at once established a warm revival of their early affection. ‘I loved him,’ she wrote to Brett,
He was just his old, merry, rich self, laughing, describing things, giving you pictures, full of enthusiasm and joy in a future where we all become ‘vagabonds’ – we simply did not talk about people… Oh, there is something so lovable about him and his eagerness, his passionate eagerness for life – that is what one loves so.2
Lawrence continued to call alone, and to be at his most charming. The physical change in Katherine, her weakness and emaciation, shocked him. He wrote to a friend, saying she had consumption, and expressing the hope that she might get better if only she could go abroad somewhere warm, once the war ended. He added, ‘Mr Murry is quite flourishing – rather to my disgust, seeing she is so ill’.3 Murry, coming in during one of his visits and finding them merry and sweet-tongued together, ‘felt I weighed on them like a lump of lead’.4 He probably did. ‘Lawrence and Murry will never hit it off, they are both too proud, and Murry is too jealous,’ was her comment in her journal:5 something that needs to be borne in mind in all their later dealings.
As soon as Lawrence got back to Derbyshire, he sent her a copy of his play Touch and Go, wanting her opinion on it. Katherine's only recorded remark about it, that it is ‘black with miners’, sidesteps the fact that it contains scenes in which there are quite obvious references to her friendship with him.
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