Katherine Mansfield Page 5
The one young man she did take seriously, and who remained her dream of sophistication and achievement, was Arnold Trowell, who combined the work of an artist with a successful career as a concert violinist in London. While Ida sent news and press cuttings of his appearances, Katherine drafted love letters (whether she posted them or not is another matter) and visited his parents and sister to talk about him. They were planning to join Arnold and Garnet in London, but for the moment she continued her cello studies with Mr Trowell and embarked on a strenuous regime of practice. Although Arnold wrote occasionally, he made no pretence of returning Katherine's feelings; clearly, he was the model for the elusive beloved, teasing, superior and finally indifferent, who appears in fragments of fiction written at this time. The faithful and loving correspondent was always Ida, to whom Katherine could pour out her grumbles about the family and her situation. ‘I hear, constantly, from Ida… You know how I love her very much indeed,’ she told her cousin Sylvia.6 She also kept in touch with Vere Bartrick-Baker, and mused about their reunion in her journal.
Ida was still living with her family in their Baker Street flat, a sheltered life as she called it later, in which serving and placating their short-tempered and tyrannical father was the chief employment of the daughters. Vere's education and ambitions had taken her no further than a job as a theatre usherette, which she found so humiliating that she soon gave it up to work in a country bank and live with her mother. Yet, from Katherine's perspective, they inhabited a promised land. What was there for her and her sisters to do, beside the social round and whatever their own wits could devise, now that they had left school and Europe behind? Leslie would follow Papa into the business, of course; there was no question of the girls doing so. In principle they had their ‘interests’: music and painting for Vera, singing for Chaddie, cello and literature for Katherine – all strictly ladylike and amateur occupations. But if Arnold could earn money and fame with his music in London, why should class and sex bar Katherine from following the same path? It was not as though she had any duties; she did not even make her own dresses, although, judging from many items in the social columns of the Wellington press, the Beauchamps kept squads of dressmakers busy with their tussores and laces, pipings, silks and matching hats.
And still they prospered.
Harold Beauchamp's a man of some rank,
Why, doesn't he manage a bank?
Oh, he cuts a fine figure,
And grafts like a nigger,
He'd swim if Customs Street sank!7
announced the New Zealand Freelance. For, in April 1907, he was elected chairman of the board of the Bank of New Zealand. He chose this moment to sell up 75 Tinakori Road and move his family into a more splendid house at 4 Fitzherbert Terrace.
There was a ballroom, a croquet lawn and a smoking room, where Katherine was frequently to be found with a cigarette, a habit which became a lifelong addiction. Her bedroom was arranged with the aesthetics of Ladbroke Grove in mind: the curtains were kept symbolically shut against the world outside, producing a ‘fascinating twilight’, a Velázquez Venus presided on the wall; in one corner stood the cello, and the scent of flowers, artistically arranged in low bowls, filled the air. Behind the curtains she worked at her sketches and stories, wrote her moody letters and read with furious energy. She borrowed books from the excellent library attached to Parliament House; at this time she read Balzac, Flaubert and Maupassant in French; Ruskin, Browning, Pater, De Morgan, Rossetti, William Morris, Stevenson, the Brontes and Meredith; and the American writers Hawthorne and Whitman. She was also interested in thoroughly up-to-date English writers preaching social reform: Bernard Shaw, Granville-Barker and Edward Carpenter. Few of their ideas can have fitted in very happily with the way of life at Fitzherbert Terrace, but Katherine's view was that their influence was urgently needed in New Zealand: ‘These people have not learned their alphabet yet.’8
Her passionate curiosity did not allow her to stay behind her drawn curtains for too long, however. She looked up her old school friend Maata, still fascinatingly beautiful, flirted with her and flattered her; Maata was pleased, but she was busy with her own marriage plans.* Then Katherine found something more serious. She learnt that the daughter of some old family acquaintances, the Bendalls, had a studio in Fitzherbert Terrace. Katherine called on her and asked if she could ‘be her friend’. Edith Kathleen Bendall was strikingly beautiful, twenty-seven years old (nine years older than Katherine), and had shown remarkable talent and initiative in her life. She was the eighth child of a sea captain turned marine surveyor who had been born in Bristol in the 1830s. The family were not well off, and Edith, who loved drawing, had paid her own way through art school by taking a job in the library. In 1904 she had earned enough from an exhibition of her work to pay her fare to Sydney, where she continued to study and was introduced to various magazine publishers; she was immediately given commissions, for her highly stylized drawings of children in particular. Frances Hodgkins, who became New Zealand's most famous painter, gave her some lessons and, although she had to return to Wellington when her mother became ill, she was now a fully fledged professional artist, selling her drawings regularly in Australia and New Zealand.
Edith was attractive, graceful and sweet-natured, but more important,
I was a worker and that's why she liked me. I was working all day in my studio and at 5 o'clock I went for a walk and she used to come with me. Kathleen asked if she could walk with me every night. I said, ‘I'd love you to, Kathleen…’ I was her real friend in Wellington… I was completely taken with her… She liked me and she let me know it.10
Katherine was deeply fascinated by this discovery of a true artist on her very doorstep. They planned to produce a book together: poems about children by Katherine, drawings by Edith. The poems were written, and survive; they are essentially a pastiche of Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses, with touches of Hans Christian Andersen. While they are on the sweet side for modern tastes, they are charming and skilfully written, and certainly publishable. Unfortunately, no publisher was found; but the friendship blossomed.
‘She wrote me these lovely little letters every night – perfect letters, absolutely beautiful’;11 and she invited Edith to go with her to the seaside bungalow her father had built among the rocks at Day's Bay, away from Wellington. There was nothing but a beach, a scattering of houses and the hills all around. The Beauchamps had built a very simple wooden structure on a point where the waves almost reached it, with just one main room and one bedroom furnished with bunks.
Here, alone with Edith, Katherine felt, according to her journal entries,
more powerfully all those so-termed sexual impulses with her than I have with any man. She enthrals me, enslaves me – and her personal self – her body absolute – is my worship. I feel that to lie with my head on her breast is to feel what life can hold… pillowed against her, clinging to her hands, her face against mine, I am a child, a woman, and more than half a man.12
Another passage describes her joy when Edith came silently to her and took her in her arms, to comfort her when she found her crying:
We lay down together, still silently, she every now and then pressing me to her, kissing me, my head on her breasts, her hands round my body, stroking me, lovingly – warming me… Then her voice, whispering ‘Better now, darling?’ I could not answer with words. And again ‘I suppose you could not tell me.’ I drew close to her warm sweet body, happier than I had ever been, than I could ever have imagined being.13
Edith recalled the bungalow and its bunks clearly and without embarrassment in her old age. To one of her generation and upbringing it was out of the question even to consider, let alone discuss, the possibility of an erotic relationship between two women. ‘I was completely taken with her,’ were her words at the age of ninety-eight, speaking of Katherine's incipient beauty, her plumpness, her lovely voice when she read aloud to her, and her fascination. At an earlier time, when she felt she had had e
nough of intrusive questioning about the relationship, she said she thought Katherine had simply misinterpreted her motherly gestures. No one can say with any certainty now whether Katherine was working up the incidents at the beach in her notebooks, dramatizing them to make literature, or recording a true experience; but despite the slightly comic invocation to Wilde, there does seem to be a genuine note here:
Here by a thousand delicate suggestions I can absorb her – for the time. What an experience! And when we returned to town, small wonder that I could not sleep, but tossed to and fro, and yearned, and realized a thousand things which had been obscure… O Oscar! Am I peculiarly susceptible to sexual impulse? I must be, I suppose – but I rejoice. Now, each time I see her to put her arms round me and hold me against her [sic]. I think she wanted to, too; but she is afraid and custom hedges her in, I feel. We shall go away again.14
She was probably right about Edith's respect for custom; and she had already met her future husband, Gerald Robison, a housemaster at Wellington College and ten years her senior. At all events, Katherine soon decided Edith was too passive, and ‘she will never be great’. Yet Edith did treasure Katherine's letters. She kept them in her bedroom, in a drawer. While she was on her honeymoon in 1908, a maid removed and destroyed them, or so she was told (or so she said). Evidently, they were disapproved of by someone; but ‘fancy taking letters out of a drawer in your bedroom!’15
Katherine seems to have retreated into more ‘normal’ love. Some unnamed men appear in a brief, torrid flurry in her journal. Arnold's distant magic still cast a spell at times, and Ida half remembered a piece of scandalous behaviour with a sailor at a dance, which annoyed the Beauchamps. Yet it was not as simple as that. Later in the year Katherine wrote a story called ‘Leves Amores’ which is undisguisedly lesbian, and sent a copy of it, together with a few of her other vignettes, to Vere Bartrick-Baker, who kept it among her papers until her death.* Katherine had learned that there was something in her nature that would not quite fit in with the accepted pattern of behaviour required by society; at the same time, she never wanted to reject that pattern entirely. She wanted marriage and children and the outward manifestations of a conventional arrangement. She feared Vere all her life, because she felt she had some sort of hold over her: doubtless it was this knowledge of the other side of her nature.
She accepted without reciprocating Ida's worship, mocking it to the world while privately relying on it; it did not cause a problem, because there was no physical attraction on Katherine's side. None of her sexual relations with men appears to have given her happiness or even satisfaction, and she said that her relationship with her husband, Murry, was more like that between two men or two children than between a man and a woman – and even that she was the man, Murry the woman. Throughout her work, men appear as clumsy, emotionally inept, cruel, treacherous, foolish, pompous, tyrannous, greedy, self-deluding, insensitive and disappointing; and the theme of women conspiring against and excluding men is a recurring one, as in ‘The Lady's Maid’, in which a servant sends away the man she is about to marry because she cannot bear to leave her mistress, or ‘At the Bay’, where all the women rejoice when the master of the house leaves for work, allowing them to get on with their real lives unimpeded.
Katherine does not appear to have written about her love for Edith Bendall beyond the journal entries, but it may have made its way into English fiction by a circuitous route. When Katherine was living near D. H. Lawrence and Frieda in the winter of 1914, they were on very intimate terms, and she was particularly dissatisfied with Murry. Frieda said later that Katherine ‘told me many things from her life’,16 and, indeed, this was one of the ways in which Katherine established intimacy, with her women friends especially. Frieda, with her interest in Freudian theories, was no doubt an enthusiastic audience for anything unusual Katherine had to tell, and it is very likely that Lawrence listened too, or that Frieda repeated her friend's stories to him. At this time he was reworking the manuscript of the book that was to become The Rainbow, in which the character of the young ‘New Woman’ struggling for emancipation, Ursula, is generally thought to be drawn from both Frieda and a former fiancée of Lawrence's, Louie Burrows, with episodes in the schoolroom taken from Lawrence's own experience as a teacher for good measure. The book was substantially finished, but at some point during the winter Lawrence suddenly introduced an entirely new and startling element into Ursula's story. In a chapter called ‘Shame’ he describes her lesbian passion for a schoolmistress called Winifred Inger. Ursula is meant to be about seventeen, Miss Inger twenty-eight, ‘clever, and expert in what she did, accurate, quick, commanding’. Ursula begins by admiring Winifred for her cleverness and then becomes obsessively interested in her body, especially after she sees her swimming in the school pool. Later Winifred, reciprocating Ursula's passion, invites her to a small bungalow beside the river, ‘a tiny, two-roomed shanty set on a steep bank’. After a discussion of feminist subjects such as death in childbirth and prostitution – both favourite Mansfield topics – the two girls go swimming naked in the dark summer night. As they go towards the water, Winifred takes Ursula in her arms and carries her into it, kissing and caressing her. Later Ursula suffers a revulsion (much as Katherine did, and recorded in her notebook), but then writes a ‘burning, passionate love-letter’.
This is not, of course, in any sense a factual account of Katherine's passion for Edith Bendall. Winifred is a different type of person, and Lawrence weaves her into the plot further by marrying her to Ursula's uncle. But Ursula (like Katherine) reverts to heterosexuality, resumes an unsatisfactory love-affair, becomes pregnant (as Katherine did in 1909) and loses her baby, again as Katherine did. The points of coincidence are striking enough, and the timing of the insertion of the lesbian episode into the manuscript of the novel is such that it is hard to resist the idea that Lawrence was doing what he so often did: using a portion of a friend's reported experience as the basis for his work.*
Ironically, it became one of the chief reasons for the banning of The Rainbow, which reduced Lawrence to desperate poverty for several years. Katherine made no comment on the book beyond an expression of dislike, according to Murry, at any rate. He certainly disliked it and found its sexual explicitness troubling. On the other hand, it caused no breach in her friendship with Lawrence. Perhaps she thought privately that he had caught something true in his treatment, or perhaps she was embarrassed at the possibility of Murry finding out that she had told other people things she had not told him.
In real life, the most characteristic part of the Edith affair is that Katherine did the courting, the letter-writing and the jilting, as she did in almost every affair she had. Edith bore no grudge, but went up to Napier, in the north of the island, for a holiday, where the two young women had a friendly meeting in December. Shortly afterwards Edith married; she and her husband were very happy, and had a daughter. Contact was never re-established between the two after they had become Mrs Robison and Katherine Mansfield, but when Mrs Robison wheeled her baby out in Wellington, Harold Beauchamp made a habit of stopping to look approvingly into the pram. Edith remained a cheerful, sweet-natured and maternal woman. She continued to paint into her old age, selling and exhibiting her work successfully. But she grew weary of Mansfield researchers pestering her with indiscreet questions. She lived to be 107 years old, clear in her mind to the last, dying in 1986.
When Katherine and Edith were planning their book, Katherine needed to have her poems typed; she turned to her father's secretary, who obliged out of friendliness. Soon Katherine was sending her prose pieces too. When Miss ‘Matty’ Putnam commented on the glumness of her work, Katherine responded with confident cheek: ‘Soon I shall write Poems full of cheerfulness – though to tell you a secret I prefer the others – the tragic pessimism of Youth – you see – it's as inevitable as measles!’17 She continued to produce morbid and decadent pieces, and to boast of her own sophistication. Katherine could be absurd, but there was never any doubt o
f her capacity for hard work and her passionate determination. Now, through her father, she met a journalist called Tom Mills and showed him some of her vignettes. He was impressed, if a bit taken aback by their tone, and advised her to submit them to a Melbourne literary monthly magazine, the Native Companion, which promptly took some. The first three appeared in the issue of October 1907. They were about girls dreaming of future fame, music students and London, and alternated between purplish description and a cynical, world-weary tone. Brady, the editor, wrote to Katherine, querying whether the author was really the novice she claimed to be. She answered boldly that she was indeed an obscure eighteen-year-old with a hatred of plagiarism, ‘a rapacious appetite for everything and principles as light as my purse’18 whereupon Brady sent her a cheque for £2. The Beauchamps were delighted and proud, and her father wrote privately to Brady, praising his daughter's originality; he did not know that she was writing at the same time to insist on the importance of her pseudonym. She could be ‘K.M.’ or ‘K. Mansfield’ but not K. M. Beauchamp; another name she suggested was ‘Julian Mark’, which she fancied enough to use when writing to her sister Vera, on holiday in Sydney.