Katherine Mansfield Page 12

  I have red and white tulips growing in the centre of the praying mat. The red ones look as though they have fed on brackish blood. But I like the white ones best. They are dying – each petal ever so faintly distorted – and yet such dainty grace. I wish you were here.6

  When she was not being decadent, or a follower of Pan, or Japanese, she tried being Russian. Another friend gave her a toy Russian village to play with, and she began to call herself Yekaterina and Katya; Diaghilev was in Paris, and Russia-mania was reaching England. Entertainment of all kinds abounded: Thomas Beecham was conducting his first season at Covent Garden, giving Richard Strauss's Elektra; in October, Elizabeth von Arnim's one-time tutor, E.M. Forster, published a novel called Howards End, charting with perfect accuracy the rift between the world of Katherine's parents and the world she was moving into; and in November, the post-impressionist exhibition opened, organized by Roger Fry and hailed by the New Age and Bloomsbury alike. Katherine gazed long at the Van Goghs, and said later they taught her something about writing, ‘a kind of freedom – or rather, a shaking free’.7

  There was nothing from her in the New Age that winter though according to her notebook she was intent on writing and, according to Orton, produced a great deal which she then destroyed. One story appeared in a magazine called Open Window, a melancholy fairy-tale with traces of both Hans Christian Andersen and Oscar Wilde, full of wrong choices and loss of innocence and love, which no reader of the New Age would have recognized as her work (and it has never been collected).

  The following May, her best piece of writing to date appeared in the New Age: ‘A Birthday’. The story has a childbirth theme and a New Zealand setting, converted summarily into a ‘German’ one, but what makes it so remarkable is that it is almost a piece of divination into the mind of its central figure. The middle-aged Andreas Binzer, self-loving, irritable, pompous and nervous, inhabits the story in every phrase, and his dissatisfied examination of the photograph of his wife – the more he studies her smiling face, the more he sees her as a freakish stranger, not at all a suitable mother for the son he is expecting - is an entirely original and distinctive effect. It is remarkable too that she should have written about birth entirely from the perspective of father, maid, grandmother, doctor, rather than her own grim personal experience: fledgeling writers so often find their own sufferings irresistible as copy. Reading ‘A Birthday’, you know at once that this is the work of a real writer who has hit an inspired vein.

  Yet there is a feeling of randomness about the achievement too. Katherine did not seem to be interested in building on a successful piece of work, but persistently dispersed herself in different styles and tones. In her writing, as in her life, she revelled in change, disguise, mystery and mimicry: the last she saw as the key to creation and understanding of character. It gave her freedom, but it also became a weakness; lacking stamina, she dispersed herself too widely in different effects. Considering how good ‘A Birthday’ is, you can't help regretting that she wasted energy on so much lesser work.

  Katherine stayed at Cheyne Walk until April, when Bishop was due home and she had to find somewhere of her own. She decided to move nearer the New Age offices and found a flat high up over the ugly Gray's Inn Road, on the fringes of Bloomsbury and the City, in a solid, handsome red-brick block called Clovelly Mansions.* No. 69 was on the fourth floor, but when the stone steps had been scaled the views were tremendous, over the city spires to the east, the roofs of Bloomsbury and distant Hampstead hills to the west; and the rooms were comfortable, two at the front which she called the Writing Room and the Music Room, with a bedroom, kitchen, bathroom and hall at the back. As usual, Ida helped out with the decorations: bamboo matting on the floor, brown paper and travel posters on the walls, a lot of yellow cushions, one black ‘sofa’ (a divan with the legs cut off), the piano from Chelsea and a few chairs. In the Writing Room, pride of place was given to a stone Buddha belonging to Ida – her family had brought it back from Burma – before which a dish of votive flowers was kept; and in the Music Room stood a bowl of water with an ornamental lizard in it, and a pawa shell from New Zealand. Katherine had a roll-top desk, like Orage's, to work at, and Ida also contributed a basket chair that had belonged to her mother; there was no table, and tea was habitually served from the floor. In the bedroom, a procession of elephants waving their trunks covered the cotton bedcover. The rent was £1 a week, and the lease was taken boldly in the name ‘Katerina Mansfield’.

  At this juncture Ida recalled that Katherine believed herself to be pregnant again and said she was looking forward to having a child, undeterred by the absence of a husband or, indeed, any certainty about its possible paternity. Obviously, there was a lover about, but there is no knowing who he was;* and, in fact, it is extremely unlikely that she was pregnant; but Ida, summoned away to Rhodesia in April, left some money in a bank account to help with the supposed baby. Katherine saw her off with a bunch of carnations. A letter to Orton speaks of having been sad, unreal and ‘turbulent’, but says she is happy in the new flat, where she lies on the floor, smoking.

  By May, when the Beauchamps were due to arrive in force for the coronation of George V, Katherine was staying at Ditchling-on-Sea with Beatrice and Orage; she was in a very jolly frame of mind, and writing a series of skits on popular writers for the paper. These included Bennett, Wells and the Poet Laureate of the day, Alfred Austin, who was made to extend greetings to the ‘bronzed Colonial’ over for the coronation. Relations between the bronzed Beauchamps and their problem daughter proved polite without being enthusiastic or intimate. There is no mention of any parental visit to Clovelly Mansions, although the seventeen-year-old Leslie was given a key and was thoroughly impressed by his sister's success. She took him to meet Orage, who praised her work; and when Leslie found she was usually out on the evenings when he called, she explained that she was acting as theatre critic to the paper (which was not true). Fired by this glimpse of the cultural scene, Leslie tried to persuade his father to let him go to Oxford or Cambridge rather than continuing with commercial shorthand in preparation for the business, but he had no luck. Harold Beauchamp was far from convinced that an English education had done his daughters good.

  In July, Leslie was horrified to find Katherine lying in bed with a fever so high that it induced the sensation of levitation (so she told Ida later). Pleurisy or bronchitis was diagnosed; and whatever caused her illness, she was advised by a doctor to get away, since London was stiflingly hot that summer. Orton wanted her to go to Brittany with him; the Beauchamps advised her to go to Spain, without volunteering to accompany her. She chose neither of these options, but set off for Bruges alone, having suggested in a letter to Ida, who was due to return to Europe, that they should meet in Paris. Characteristically, she changed her mind and hurried on to Geneva, leaving a telegram of apology for Ida; and when Ida got back to London, Leslie Beauchamp, who was still worried about his sister's health, urged Ida to set off again for Geneva. When she got there, she found Katherine reduced to £1, although apparently confident that something, or someone, would turn up. They shared a pension room for a while and then Ida, sensing that Katherine had better things to do, left. She was, in fact, seeing some friends from Wörishofen: not Floryan, whose whereabouts at this time are unknown, but a married couple with a child. In September she was in London again.

  The trip gave her some good travel notes, which she duly wrote up for publication in the New Age, and which show the free, cool Mansfield, who refuses to be pinned down and always runs away with a laugh, in fine form. But she was not well; nor was it in her nature to be careful with herself. Soon she was writing in the Orton notebook about a mysterious ‘Man’ who called at Clovelly Mansions at five o'clock, carried her off to the ‘Black Bed’ – presumably the divan – and proved an appreciative audience for her silver stockings bound with spiked ribbons, and yellow suede shoes fringed with white fur. ‘How vicious I looked! We made love like two wild beasts, she boasted; she also described he
rself performing a topless dance for his delectation.9 Poor Orton was no match for this sort of thing.

  Who was this mysterious and exotic ‘Man’ with whom Katherine chose to tease Orton? Antony Alpers speculated that he could have been Katherine's old German teacher from Queen's, Walter Rippmann, on the grounds that Ida Baker remembered him calling on them in Chelsea, and suspected his intentions. Ida, however, tended to suspect all Katherine's callers; besides which, she was not in England at the time of this entry in Katherine and Orton's joint journal.

  A far more likely candidate is a Viennese journalist, Geza Silberer, generally known by his rather fancy pseudonym of ‘Sil-Vara’. We know for certain that there was a love-affair of some kind between Katherine and Sil-Vara, because after her death, J. M. Murry wrote a long letter to Ida in which he inquired about this period and specifically asked, ‘When was her love-affair with Sil Vara [sic]? She once gave me all his letters to her to read and then burned them.’10

  Sil-Vara was living in London at this time, collecting material for articles on English life and characters. He was also interested in the theatre, and looking for plays to translate; his version of Synge's Playboy of the Western World was published in Germany in 1912. His journalism seems to have been fairly light-weight stuff. He turned out profiles of well-known writers and statesmen, and a series of sketches of London life, describing the Season, the Music Halls, the Royal Academy, White-chapel and various causes célèbres of the day such as the Crippen murder case and the activities of the suffragettes; the articles were collected and later published in Munich (in 1914) under the title Londoner Spaziergänge. Scattered among the general pieces are more specific tales of his introduction to a cultural and Bohemian circle through a Chelsea hostess called Gwendolen, who liked to entertain theatre people, painters, poets, novelists (male and female) and writers for small magazines. Gwendolen herself is well to do and well connected, but she has a taste for the slightly bizarre and outrageous; she sounds as though she could well have been drawn from Gwen Otter, a Chelsea literary hostess who was certainly known to Katherine (she refers to her affectionately, and expresses nostalgia for her parties, in a much later letter11).

  Sil-Vara was twelve years older than Katherine. Since Orton and Katherine were of an age, and Orton by his own confession sexually innocent, a 34-year-old Viennese journalist would have offered a considerable contrast. Sil-Vara lived on until 1938; but he does not appear to have said anything about his love-affair with Katherine. Perhaps she wounded his pride, or perhaps he was simply a discreet Viennese gentleman of the old school. It would be nice to know which of these two strong personalities dominated the other during this particular love-affair, or whether it was more a matter of posing than loving for both at this juncture of their lives.12

  At the same time, Katherine was writing to Edna in a flurry of exclamatory phrases:

  not yet do I know what it is that clamours for utterance at the gates of my heart – rather there are so many, with the richness of spoil in their hands (& the East! quite suddenly) that I still pause – deliberately – terribly – rave. I cannot afford anything in the faintest touch unworthy – Edna to write like that! Suddenly stir the wings of a giant and all-powerful desire - one wing stretched over the Future – the other over the past – and the flight of the wings is rapture – Art! Art! Do you too exult in the very word and lift your proud head…13

  This is pretty unfathomable nonsense by any standards, and the cry of ‘Art!’ is always a danger signal. Perhaps it is not surprising that the agent James B. Pinker, whose clients included Henry James, Conrad and soon D. H. Lawrence, returned the story Katherine sent him in October and appears not to have taken up her suggestion that they should meet to discuss her work.*

  It looks, understandably enough, as though she were trying to find outlets for her work other than the non-paying New Age; and yet it was the New Age that now helped her to her greatest triumph so far. A friend of Orage called Charles Granville, who had already published several books derived from New Age articles under the imprint ‘Stephen Swift’, offered Katherine an advance of £15 for her German stories. The success must have been particularly sweet, since her family was still in London to witness it. She rearranged them, putting ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’ towards the end, and adding two stories Orage had not printed, ‘The Swing of the Pendulum’ and ‘The Blaze’, a poor story about a respectable woman who ensnares men only to tease them; she also removed her name where it had appeared in the text of certain stories.

  In a German Pension appeared in December, nicely printed in green boards with an orange cover, and priced at 6s. The publisher described it as a ‘delightful literary novelty’, and talked in the blurb of Katherine's ‘malicious naïveté’ in describing the ‘quaint Bavarian people’, and also of her cynicism and satiric strokes. The blurb went on,

  The one or two chapters which might be called Bavarian short stories rather than sketches are written in a most uncommon – indeed thoroughly individual – vein, both in form and substance. Miss Mansfield's style is almost French in its character, and her descriptions will remind the reader of Russian masters like Turguenieff [sic].14

  Today this edition is so rare as to be almost unobtainable. On publication it was acclaimed as ‘impish’, ‘lively’, ‘caustic’, ‘amusing’ and ‘original’: all of which it was. Considering what its author had been through during the past three years, it was also a triumphant personal achievement. If there was a small Chekhovian time bomb ticking away inside, it was not going to cause any trouble for a long while yet.

  8

  ‘Make Me Your Mistress’

  Katherine now commanded the fame and dignity of a published author. Her name began to reach wider circles than those of the New Age. One of its contributors, a poet and novelist called Willy George,* arranged a dinner in order to introduce her to an Oxford undergraduate who was already co-editing a bilingual quarterly magazine called Rhythm. His name was John Middleton Murry, and he was to play a crucial, and largely unfortunate, role in her life.

  Murry himself had just done an article for the New Age. Orage was quick to notice the contents of other papers and, seeing that Rhythm had reproduced some studies by a painter yet unknown in England, Picasso, had commissioned a piece on him in November. George, for his part, had sent a fairy-story of Katherine's to Rhythm. Murry turned down the fairy-story; if he had admired her satirical writing, he was understandably baffled by this other voice. He was to spend the next eleven years being baffled by her, and still longer trying to shape her image into something he could cope with. Meanwhile, he wrote to her, expressing an interest in seeing something else of hers; and when she sent him her story set in the New Zealand backblocks, ‘The Woman at the Store’, he accepted it enthusiastically and pressed George to give him an introduction. The story was, indeed, a striking piece of work, and marked another departure in an entirely new direction. It dealt obliquely with a murder, and drew on her memories of the Urewera trip. It was also her first deliberate portrayal of her native country, a vivid and almost sinister evocation of the atmosphere of the sparsely inhabited wilderness, the poverty and ignorance of the people settled there, the ‘savage spirit’ of the place. But there is another theme: the woman at the centre, once a pretty barmaid with 125 ways of kissing, has been broken by marriage, childbearing, solitude, and responded with violence. The story is left coolly at that, neither characters nor author passing judgement. Anyone would have been excited to publish such a story by a young writer, and it is not surprising that Murry reacted so strongly.

  Katherine was nearly a year older than him, and George had told him she was immensely sophisticated, so that he set off from his parental home in Wandsworth in a slightly nervous frame of mind, although he was not quite an innocent in the London literary scene. He had, for instance, discovered Dan Rider's bookshop in St Martin's Lane, where you could hang about with the other hopefuls for a glimpse of a famous author; but he cherished the belief, so common i
n the literary world, that other people were in the swim while he was not. Yet to Katherine he appeared enviably brilliant, an editor at twenty-two, with the benefit of a classical education and studies at Oxford, Paris and Heidelberg.

  As to what Murry was really like, the question is not much easier to answer at this stage than it is about Katherine. He was young and unformed and certainly outstandingly gifted as a scholar. At school, he had learnt to be ashamed of his family – often an integral part of English education – but he had also learned to work hard and effectively. Getting from Christ's Hospital to Oxford was a way of escaping from the ugly little London and suburban houses in which his holidays had been spent, and from the tyranny of his father, a grinding petty civil servant whose highest hope for his scholarship-winning son was that he should follow him into the civil service, albeit at a higher level. In Murry's own accounts of his young life, he appears as a bewildered and sometimes beleaguered hero, always in search of Love, Faith, Art and other assorted abstractions and often ruefully puzzled by his own bad behaviour. He hardly mentions the one obvious driving force that ran through everything he did: ambition. It was not his father's ambition, and it was going to drive him in some surprising directions, but it was the real thing.

  The other immediately noticeable thing about him, testified to by many who met him in his youth, was his physical charm. He had what was called a fine head, with large hazel eyes and thickly springing dark hair. Katherine talked of his ‘lovely, frightening mouth’; and some attraction drew both men and women to him like flies to honey. Older people wanted to help him, younger ones sought his friendship or fell in love with him. Murry's characteristic stance was passive, bewildered delight at receiving all this kindness and affection. People who took against him said his eyes were blank or even reptilian, but this was rarely the initial impression. He was earnest, eager to listen and learn from new friends, and prone to hero-worship. One other striking thing was his sheer capacity for work, for mastering a subject or a language, or turning out a serious review to a deadline; well-informed words poured neatly from his pen. His hours at a desk had given him a scholar's stoop, so that although he was five foot eight and a half inches tall (as he noted with characteristic meticulousness in one of his many autobiographical musings), he seemed smaller.