Katherine Mansfield Read online

  If a later entry in Katherine's journal is to be believed, she had some experience with Maata during their schooldays that was sexually disturbing; it seems to have been more than a matter of a schoolgirl crush, and it became the germ of her awareness of her own bisexuality.

  Still the Beauchamps prospered. In 1901, when the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall visited New Zealand, Harold helped to entertain them and Jeanne presented a bouquet to the future Queen Mary. The elder girls were beginning to ‘appear with their parents in public and were all busy with their music and other accomplishments’.28 Vera and Katherine took piano lessons. Chaddie sang, and all three were prepared to entertain guests around the ebony piano on its dais.

  Katherine's interest in music took a new turn. When she was thirteen, the family met a good-humoured, attractive music teacher named Thomas Trowell, who had come from England in the 1880s. The elder of his twelve-year-old twin sons, Arnold, showed remarkable talent with the cello; the shy twin, Garnet, also played the fiddle well. There was a pretty ten-year-old daughter, Dolly. Katherine became speedily infatuated with the whole family, calling Dolly ‘little sister’ and going for long, confiding chats with the parents. Mr Trowell agreed to give her cello lessons. She became so obsessed that she took to wearing brown to match her instrument. Mr Beauchamp humoured this adolescent passion and the Trowell boys were invited to Tinakori Road to perform.

  Katherine, who had already caused a stir by questioning a schoolteacher about the meaning of free love, decided to be in love with Arnold, whom she renamed ‘Caesar’. In a sense, she was in love with the whole family, whose priorities and values were so fascinatingly different from those of the Beauchamps. They had no money, but were outstandingly gifted; they lived in a thoroughly informal, easy way, but were utterly dedicated when it came to the art of music. It was obvious to her that the Trowells, not the Beauchamps, were her soul-mates.

  Katherine was not alone in appreciating the musical gifts of the family. The twins – and particularly Arnold – were generally considered in Wellington to possess such outstanding talent that they deserved to be sent to study in Europe. The Trowells were in no position to pay for this, but a group of Wellington families agreed to raise the money, and it was settled that Arnold and Garnet should be sent to study in Germany in 1903. Among the benefactors was Harold Beauchamp.

  It may well have been this act of generous patronage that set him thinking about his own children's education; at all events, even before Arnold and Garnet could leave, Mr and Mrs Beauchamp had taken a momentous decision about their family. Vera, Chaddie and Katherine were also to go to Europe. They would be completing their education at Queen's College, Harley Street, London. It was an extraordinarily bold plan.

  2

  Queen’s: ‘My Wasted, Wasted Early Girlhood’

  They embarked in January 1903. Harold Beauchamp, with one of his pleasant, princely gestures, booked the entire passenger accommodation of a small cargo ship, the Niwaru, sailing via the Pacific and Cape Horn. There were nine in the party: the five Beauchamp children, both parents, and Annie's younger brother Sydney and sister Belle, a favourite with her brother-in-law. She had volunteered to remain in England to keep an eye on her three nieces, a position of authority that would not endear her to Katherine. Perhaps Belle had some thoughts that this was her last ‘chance’, for no suitable husband had appeared in Wellington, and she was nearly thirty; she had attempted a career in nursing, but been warned off with the threat of tuberculosis. Now, however, she was in stout health. Katherine was fourteen and physically mature; like many third daughters who grow up alongside their elder sisters, she took for granted the right to the same freedoms and privileges they had acquired. The voyage lasted for seven weeks. Katherine has left no account of what she thought of it beyond one brief, nostalgic reference in a letter written to her father during the last year of her life, when her mother was dead and her glances into the past had become gentle and regretful:

  I have a very soft corner in my heart for the Niwaru… Do you remember how Mother used to enjoy the triangular-shaped pieces of toast for tea? Awfully good they were, too, on a cold afternoon in the vicinity of the Horn. How I should love to make a long sea voyage again one of these days. But I always connect such experiences with a vision of Mother in her little seal-skin jacket with the collar turned up.1

  For Beauchamp himself, the proud and generous leader of his own troupe, this was the most enjoyable voyage of his life. It was also the last time he was in control of his entire family. Edwardian ocean-going ships could be very domestic; the Niwaru provided the ladies with a clavichord and a sewing-machine as well as a caged canary.

  A photograph taken at Las Palmas shows a remarkably handsome and well turned out family. Mrs Beauchamp and Belle display huge, pancake-like straw hats adorned with flowers and feathers, little Leslie is in a sailor suit and the girls are in high-buttoned boots, gloves and straw boaters; their hair is up and they are wearing ankle-length skirts and high-necked blouses. The men are in dark suits with stiff collars. Belle has two roses pinned to the front of her dress. It is a formally posed picture: everyone stares out at the camera, Mr Beauchamp with a pleased and confident air, his hair and beard white, sideburns still sandy. Mrs Beauchamp has her detached, correct, unruffled look; Vera, her anxious eldest daughter's face. Belle's expression is as well arranged as her costume, and Katherine's has a blank intensity: oval face, wide brow, neatly turned features, dark eyes that look as though they could be attentive if only they could alight on something worth attending to. Incongruously, her blouse is the most unkempt-looking garment of the party and the waistband of her skirt is visibly under strain; she was to be a fat girl for several years more, and even into her twenties was described as ‘square’ or ‘dumpy’ by non-admirers.

  The first month in England was taken up with cultural touring – Stratford was one of their first objectives – and with visits to the complicated sets of relatives who were, with Belle, to assume some responsibility for the three girls when the Beauchamp parents returned to New Zealand with their youngest children.

  The Retreat at Bexley in Kent was where Harold's much older -cousin, Henry Beauchamp, had settled in the 1860s after making a fortune in Australia. The most spectacular of his children was the youngest, ‘Elizabeth’, a source of anxiety in her wilful girlhood but now the pride of the whole family: not only had she captured a German nobleman as her husband, it was she who had produced Elizabeth and Her German Garden. She was, of course, no longer at Bexley, but in Pomerania, where she kept her typewriter in a summerhouse with Procul Este Profani inscribed over the door, and quarrelled with her husband. Her sister Charlotte had married a City merchant, and her son Sydney Waterlow (Katherine's second cousin) was now in the Foreign Office, but yearning towards a more intellectual and artistic life; later he hovered on the periphery of Bloomsbury and introduced Katherine into that circle.

  Two other Beauchamp cousins were Sydney, a doctor, and Henry, who was musical – he played the cello and sang – and perhaps for that reason was pressed into being made the girls' legal guardian. They instantly named him ‘Guardy’, and Katherine enthused about his poetical tenor voice.2

  It was to the Retreat that the girls went for most of their school holidays. The school itself was both unusual and unusually good: Queen's College, at 45 Harley Street, in the very heart of London, within walking distance of Regent's Park, Piccadilly Circus and Hyde Park. There was a family reason for the choice of school. Annie Beauchamp's father had left behind him, when he emigrated to Australia in the 1840s, a sister Eliza, an able and energetic woman who ran her own school in London and married another schoolteacher, Joseph Payne. Payne was self-taught and developed strong views on educational reform; he was particularly interested in the education of girls and helped to establish the Girls' Public Day School Trust. His son, Joseph Frank Payne, Annie's cousin, became a physician; his practice was in Wimpole Street and, sharing his father's views on the importance of girls' ed
ucation, sent his three daughters round the corner to Queen's College. It was natural enough, since the school took boarders, to recommend it to Annie for her girls too.

  The flavour of Queen's was a special one. It resembled neither the big, rather militaristic girls' public schools modelled on their male counterparts nor the high schools of the London suburbs and provincial cities, which were also given to well-organized and standardized academic forcing. Queen's had been founded in 1848 with the aim of cultivating individuality and free intellectual endeavour in its pupils rather than cramming them with facts or moulding them into preordained shapes. It was quite small, and still uncertain of its status, somewhere between boarding school and college; about forty boarders were tucked into little upstairs rooms and attics in neighbouring Harley Street houses, all built as private dwellings in the eighteenth century and so quite lacking in institutional atmosphere. Discipline was not strict: there was no uniform, and girls were allowed out in pairs to explore London – an adventurous policy in 1903, when the poor were considered an alien and possibly dangerous breed apart by most people.

  The curriculum was also very freely organized. From Katherine's records it is clear that girls were allowed to concentrate on favourite subjects and drop others altogether. She soon gave up theology, chemistry, geography, ancient history, drawing and arithmetic (for which she received o out of 150 in a scholarship paper) and kept only German, French, English, singing and cello. A minimum of ten hours a week in class was expected, with an hour of private study in preparation for each class. Much of the girls' work was done comfortably and informally in the library, which Katherine described to a friend as ‘thick Turkey carpeted, great armchairs everywhere, neat little tables, rugs, and charming pictures. Even Latin would be interesting in this room.’3 Girls were encouraged to make their own choice of books and a special arrangement with the London Library in St James's Square widened the possible range.

  Pupils did not sit for outside examinations; they were taught by visiting professors, many of them men, whose method was to lecture and set essays. Some of the lectures were so attractive that members of the public attended them. This free and flexible system had been set up by the founder, F. D. Maurice, the Christian Socialist and friend of Tennyson and Kingsley, a gentle, idealistic man who also founded a working-men's college.

  Girls tended to come from the merchant and professional middle classes, and a good many went on to enter professions themselves, although the school was by no means a forcing house for Oxford and Cambridge. The historian Gertrude Bell was a Queen's girl. So was Florence Farr, the feminist writer and actress admired by Bernard Shaw and Yeats. Sophia Jex-Blake, another fighter for women's rights and pioneer in medical training for her sex, had also been a pupil there. Among Katherine's classmates was the daughter of a Yorkshire mill-owner, a granddaughter of the founder, the daughters of a journalist and, of course, many doctors' daughters like the Payne cousins.

  The fees for Queen's were twenty-two guineas a term for boarding and nine for tuition, with a reduction for three daughters from one family, which must have appealed to Mr Beauchamp. Still, it was a handsome investment for a father to make in his daughters' futures. When the time came to part from them, he noted that it was ‘a wrench’. Katherine saw things differently, or so one of her fictionalized accounts suggests:

  She was to meet total strangers. She could be just as she liked. They had never known her before – oh, what a comfort to know that every minute saw the others farther away from her! ‘I suppose I am preposterously unnatural,’ she thought and smiled.4

  The sisters' room was at the top of 41 Harley Street, and they were taken up by another pupil, the aptly named Ida Constance Baker, who was to become the most devoted and remain the most faithful of Katherine's friends throughout her life. She was nine months older than Katherine, and neither quick-witted nor beautiful; but she had a thoughtful, gentle face framed in heavy, long hair. Where Katherine was elated at the adventurousness of her new life, Ida was melancholy at this first meeting. Her mother had just died and her difficult father had taken the younger brother and sister to the country, leaving her alone to board at Queen's for the first time. She was in desperate need of something to fill the gap in her life, which had been partly spent in Burma, where her father served as an Army doctor, although the family came from Suffolk. Like Katherine, she had been around the world, but her response was stoic rather than excited.

  On the first day she noticed Katherine's dark eyes observing everything about her. Then she found they shared a taste for poetry. Later, walking in Regent's Park, Katherine turned to her and asked commandingly, ‘Shall we be friends?’ Almost from that moment, Ida saw herself as devoted to Katherine's service; she would spend hours sitting with her in her room, while Vera and Chaddie were out, listening as she practised her cello, or talking about Katherine's plans, Katherine's future, Katherine's life. To Ida, Katherine seemed extraordinary in her dark beauty and her intensity.

  Katherine loved the bedroom, with its view over the lead roofs and the mews where the horses and the coachmen lived; she also loved the whole atmosphere of the school, and felt more at home there than at the Retreat. She wrote to her favourite cousin, Sylvia Payne, during a school holiday about how she thought constantly of Queen's and its ‘strange fascination’; in another letter written from school she described herself watching ‘the lamp in the mews below… flickering and moving about restlessly, and my flowers in my window… nodding and talking to me at a great rate.’5 A long section of her journal, written in February 1916 when she was living happily in Bandol, shows the remarkable detail of her memory:

  I was thinking yesterday of my wasted, wasted early girlhood. My college life, which is such a vivid and detailed memory in one way, might never have contained a book or a lecture. I lived in the girls, the professors, the big, lovely building, the leaping fires in winter, all the pattern that was – weaving. Nobody saw it, I felt, as I did. My mind was just like a squirrel. I gathered and gathered and hid away, for that long ‘winter’ when I should discover all this treasure… why didn't I listen to the old Principal who lectured on Bible History twice a week instead of staring at his face that was very round, a dark red colour with a kind of bloom in it and covered all over with little red veins with endless tiny tributaries that ran even up his forehead and were lost in his bushy white hair. He had tiny hands, too, puffed up, purplish, shining under the stained flesh. I used to think, looking at his hands – he will have a stroke and die of paralysis… I never came into contact with him but once, when he asked any young lady in the room to hold up her hand if she had been chased by a wild bull, and as nobody else did I held up mine (though of course I hadn't). ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘I am afraid you do not count. You are a little savage from New Zealand.’… And why didn't I learn French with M. Huguenot? What an opportunity missed! What has it not cost me! He lectured in a big narrow room that was painted all over – the walls, door, and window-frames, a grey shade of mignonette green. The ceiling was white, and just below it there was a frieze of long looped chains of white flowers. On either side of the marble mantelpiece a naked small boy staggered under a big platter of grapes that he held above his head. Below the windows, far below there was a stable court paved in cobble stones, and one could hear the faint clatter of carriages coming out or in, the noise of water gushing out of a pump into a big pail – some youth, clumping about and whistling. The room was never very light, and in summer M.H. liked the blinds to be drawn half-way down the window… He was a little fat man.6

  The precision of the recall is astonishing in itself, as is the way she builds fancifully upon it. No doubt her self-reproach about academic failure was justified – Queen's was often accused of letting its students idle away their time – but in 1916 she was judging herself against Murry, who had been educated to the standards of Christ's Hospital; there can have been no comparison between the levels of achievement aimed at by the two schools. And, in fact, her French and Germ
an, though ungrammatical, were fluent and effective. Ruth Herrick, a fellow New Zealander who was Katherine's contemporary at Queen's, recalled her insistence on trying to converse in French when neither of them knew more than a handful of words. Miss Herrick thought it was affectation, but it was evidence of spirit and intelligence as well. She also linked it with Katherine's general interest in mimicry and drama – helpful to a linguist – and added that she made up wild stories to impress, including one of rape and pregnancy.7 Since these themes crop up in early notebooks, the obvious thought is that she was trying out her plots on her friends, as well as enjoying shocking them. Katherine told lies all her life, but usually more for effect than advantage.

  For her, as for many precocious girls, an early interest in sexual adventure may have been partly a refusal of the feminine role required by family and other authorities, a defiance of their decrees. To be wilful, to be assertive, to be overtly interested in sex, was the prerogative of young men; but why should it be? Why not refuse the reticences and timidities expected of girls? If this boldness drew disapproval, it also gave her an exceptional appeal, because she was adopting the role of a young male in a predominantly female establishment. Katherine was unpopular with many of the girls at Queen's: ‘Those who were not her particular friends on the whole disliked her,’ a history of the school says diplomatically.8 A recent headmistress said quite flatly that a number of her contemporaries said they hated her because she showed off so much. But she had her group of admirers to balance the dislike of the majority, as anybody with superabundant vitality will.

  Miss Herrick was obviously irritated by the memory of the slavish devotion displayed by Ida Baker, and by Katherine's willingness to exploit it. But Miss Baker, who spoke with abiding tolerance and love of Katherine's temperament and needs, was critical in her turn of Miss Herrick's old intense attachment to Katherine. Each implied something ‘unwholesome’ – a word once favoured in girls' schools – about the other. The emotions and rivalries, persisting over so many decades, kept the hothouse hot; the two quiet and correct old ladies discovered, to their bewilderment, something called lesbianism, and began to tie this tag gingerly on one another while preserving their own intensities as blameless.