Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence 9780748694426

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Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence

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EDL\JBURGH University Press ,;

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Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence Edited by Sarah Ailwood and Melinda Harvey

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© editorial matter and organisation Sarah Ailwood and Melinda Harvey, 2015 © the chapters their several authors, 2015 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10.5/13 Adobe Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 9441 9 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 9442 6 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 0454 9 (epub) The right of Sarah Ailwood and Melinda Harvey to be identified as editors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

Acknowledgements vii Abbreviations

ix

  1 ‘Like a thousand reflections of my own hands in a dark mirror’: Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence Sarah Ailwood and Melinda Harvey

1

Part I  Ambivalence   2 ‘The Twilight of Language’: The Young Evelyn Waugh on ‘Catherine’ Mansfield Naomi Milthorpe   3 ‘Where is she?’ Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth Bowen Jessica Gildersleeve

21 35

Part II  Exchange   4 ‘[O]ur precious art’: Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and the Gift Economy Kathryn Simpson   5 ‘The Silence is Broken’: Katherine Mansfield and the ‘Manifesto Moment’ Susan Reid   6 Circles of Influence: Katherine Mansfield, S. S. Koteliansky and Russia Gerri Kimber

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51

65

78

vi     Contents

Part III  Identification   7 ‘Worms of the Same Family’: Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth von Arnim Juliane Römhild   8 ‘Objectless Love’: The Vagabondage of Colette and Katherine Mansfield Deborah Pike

93

105

Part IV  Imitation   9 ‘God forgive me, Tchehov, for my impertinence’: Mansfield and the Art of Copying 119 Melinda Harvey 10 ‘[A]ctively making one feel’: Katherine Mansfield, Evolving Empathy and Intimate Influence in Virginia Woolf’s Writings of the 1920s and 1930s 137 Katie Macnamara Part V  Enchantment 11 12 13

Mansfield eats Dickens Michael Hollington Katherine Mansfield, Nettie Palmer and Critical Influence Sarah Ailwood The Meeting of Katherine Mansfield and Eve Langley Bonny Cassidy

155 168 180

Part VI  Legacy 14 Mansfield, Shakespeare and the Unanxiety of Influence Mark Houlahan 15 The ‘Burden’ of the Feminine: Frank Sargeson’s Encounter with Katherine Mansfield Janet Wilson 16 Writing from the Cellar: Revisiting the Villa Isola Bella Brigid Magner

195

Notes on Contributors

233

207 219

Bibliography 237 Index 251

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Acknowledgements

This has been a long time coming. Babies, illness, job changes and moves overseas have, at one point or another, intervened. It is the culmination of a shared love of KM discovered making chit-chat in the tutors’ room at the University of Wollongong in 2006 and rekindled at an accidental meeting in the Reading Room at the National Library of Australia in 2008. One of us had just returned from the Katherine Mansfield Centenary Conference in London with news of the formation of the Katherine Mansfield Society. The two of us became the Australian arm of that Society and convened a conference called Katherine Mansfield, the ‘Underworld’ and the ‘Blooms Berries’ at RMIT University in Melbourne in 2010. A panel at Victoria University in Wellington in 2013 followed. Now there is this book. We would like to thank the contributors to this volume for submitting such rigorously researched and expertly written chapters, for their willingness to tackle influence head-on, for the insights they have provided and for their patience with us as editors. We would also like to thank everyone who worked on the book at Edinburgh University Press, particularly Jackie Jones for her faith in us and for her support of all things Katherine Mansfield, and Dhara Patel, who has been unflappable in the face of our various requests. We would also like to thank the New Zealand writer and graphic artist Sarah Laing for providing such a beautiful cover for our book for almost no financial recompense. A book such as this requires small trips, additional archival research, face-to-face meetings and manuscript assistance. We wish to acknowledge the financial support of the Faculty of Arts and the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies at Monash University. We would also like to thank the Faculty of Business, Government and Law at the University of Canberra for supporting research (and researchers) across disciplines. Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to and love for our Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

viii     Acknowledgements

respective families: Tim, Peter and Max, and Adam and Iris. Thank you for sharing our adventures – which (so far) have taken us to London, Paris, Fontainebleau, Menton, Wellington, Melbourne and Canberra – enduring our absences, and indulging our talk of KM.

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Abbreviations

Unless otherwise indicated, all references to Katherine Mansfield’s works are to the following editions and abbreviated titles: Collected Fiction The Collected Fiction of Katherine Mansfield, 2 vols, ed. Gerri Kimber and Vincent O’Sullivan, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. Collected Letters The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, 5 vols, ed. Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984–2008. Collected Poetry and Critical Writings The Poetry and Critical Writings of Katherine Mansfield, ed. Gerri Kimber and Angela Smith, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Notebooks The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, 2 vols, ed. Margaret Scott, Canterbury and Wellington, NZ: Lincoln University Press and Daphne Brasell Associates, 1997.

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Chapter 1

‘Like a thousand reflections of my own hands in a dark mirror’: Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence Sarah Ailwood and Melinda Harvey In Katherine Mansfield’s early story ‘The Modern Soul’, a Viennese actress by the name of Fräulein Sonia Godowska details a symptom of what she calls ‘the curse of her genius’: ‘I find in all the works of all the greatest writers, especially in their unedited letters, some touch, some sign of myself – some resemblance, some part of myself, like a thousand reflections of my own hands in a dark mirror.’1

Sonia’s presentation of herself as sensitive, in tune with the ‘greatest writers’ – she later lifts a line from the Lyrisches Intermezzo but cannot say for sure whether ‘that is Heine or [her]self’2 – is viewed with scepticism by the sardonic first-person narrator, a young woman who appears in seven of the thirteen stories collected as In a German Pension in December 1911. Her response to Sonia’s assertion that she sees ‘some touch, some sign of [her]self’ in the writings of other people is to undercut it by refusing to notice the claims she is making for her own greatness: ‘“But what a bother,” said I.’3 Upon first glance, it would seem that the author shares her narrator’s attitude to Sonia; that Mansfield herself was a cure-guest for several months at the Pension Müller in the spa town of Bad Wörishofen, west of Munich, in the second half of 1909 establishes, among other things,4 a firm correspondence between them. And yet Sonia’s predicament is genuinely lamentable; she must be always in attendance on her sick mother yet she is a gifted thespian – we are told that ‘[t]he only soul who remained untouched by her appeal was the waiter’ who ‘was “off duty” and intended to show it’.5 Sonia is being a touch dramatic, perhaps, but not altogether inaccurate when she later maintains, ‘My tragedy is my mother. Living with her I live with the coffin of my unborn aspirations.’6 Sonia, then, is not meant to attract our ­unequivocal scorn Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

2     Sarah Ailwood and Melinda Harvey

in the same way that, say, Herr Rat does in two of Mansfield’s other ‘Pension sketches’, ‘Germans at Meat’ and ‘Frau Fischer’. Pamela Dunbar has argued that Sonia is, in fact, only one of two characters in the In a German Pension collection that are not ‘two-dimensional’ but ‘more complex and more problematic’ than the satirical sketch, as form, demands them to be.7 Dunbar goes on suggest that this ‘roundness’ of Sonia as a character is one of several instances when the diametric opposition of cure-guest and first-person narrator breaks down in the Pension sketches. The ambivalence Sonia inspires is, she contends, a sign of a double identification; the narrator ‘develops an antagonistic relationship with the titleheroine that itself has undertones of intimacy’ because she ‘appears to be a satirical self-portrait of Mansfield herself’.8 Dunbar’s suggestion that the cure-guests, amongst them Sonia, are, in fact, ‘a kind of repository, or dumping-ground, for rejected aspects’9 of not only the narrator but also Mansfield the writer opens up the possibility that the things they say can be understood as authorial disclosures. We propose that Mansfield shares Sonia’s sense of what it means to be an artist, of how creativity works. At this early point in her career, Mansfield was, like Sonia, finding in the works of other writers ‘some touch, some sign of [her]self’. As a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl at Queen’s College, London Mansfield copied down the words of other writers – Marie Bashkirtseff, George Eliot, but especially Oscar Wilde – into her notebooks.10 Her growing literary ambition lead her to identify other people’s examples to emulate; Wilde’s Salome (1891) is pastiched and his The Duchess of Padua (1883) plagiarised in the dramatic fragment, ‘The Yellow Chrysanthemum’, likely written in March 1908. In a later notebook entry dated 21 December 1908 she records her desire to write a ‘psychological study’ called ‘Strife’ ‘[a]bout a girl in Wellington . . . utterly disillusioned’ ‘in the style of Walter Pater’s “Child in the House”’ (1878).11 Prior to and after the publication of ‘The Modern Soul’, furthermore, Mansfield composed a number of stories that were indebted, in whole or in part, to other fictions: ‘The Education of Audrey’ (1908) alludes to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891); ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’ (1910) is in Antony Alpers’ words a ‘free rendering into English’12 of Anton Chekhov’s ‘Sleepyhead’ (1903); ‘The Festival of the Coronation’ (1911) modernises with acknowledgement Theocritus’ XVth Idyll from the Adoniaszusae. Upon closer inspection Sonia’s description of finding herself in ‘the works of all the greatest writers’ echoes Lord Basil Hallward’s explanation of how influence makes itself manifest in The Picture of Dorian Gray: ‘“Because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul . . . Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence     3

He becomes an echo of some one else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him”.’ But Hallward is saying that influence is a bad thing, because ‘[t]he aim of life is self-development. To realise one’s nature perfectly – that is what each of us is here for”.’13 It must have been clear to Mansfield at the time of writing ‘The Modern Soul’ that a major source of inspiration for her was past literature, and the degree to which she was finding she must lean upon it was causing her some disquietude. Thus, an anxiety her maker felt keenly is displaced onto Sonia. In the encounter between narrator and actress, Mansfield is confronting the potential curse of her own genius: the fact that her creative process entails a susceptibility to, even a dependence upon, other people’s writing. An actress is not usually the producer of her own scripts, yet Sonia stresses the artistry of what she does with them. When the narrator asks her what she will recite at the benefit concert she speaks of inspiration: ‘I never know until the last moment. When I come on the stage I wait for one moment and then I have the sensation as though something struck me here’ – she placed her hand upon her collar brooch – ‘and . . . words come!’14

This declaration is also met with some derision; Sonia takes a ‘breathless pause’ onstage before she commences her performance and the narrator speculates that it is ‘[t]hen, presumably, the winged shaft str[i]k[es] her collar brooch’.15 Yet it is incontestable that Sonia as a performer, and a very good one, brings new life to old words. By causing them to take on certain inflections, by embellishing them with choice gestures it is she who gives them the power to arrest and delight the audience: ‘Her loud, slightly harsh voice filled the salon. She dropped her arms over the back of the chair, moving her lean hands from the wrists. We were thrilled and silent.’16 From the start of Mansfield’s career, then, she was not only writing stories under the sway of other writers, but also musing upon the mysterious combination of originality and borrowings that produces great art. Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence offers a consideration of, if not a thousand, then fifteen reflections of Mansfield’s own hands in the dark mirror of the works of authors before and also after her time. The chapters contained here explore the ways Mansfield’s life and work were affected by, and have themselves impacted upon, other writers and their writing. We use the word ‘influence’ to describe these literary relationships without apology, despite the fact that it has a slightly moth-eaten ring to it today. Certainly, there has been only a trickle of sustained theoretical considerations of influence since Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence appeared in 1973. They include: Influx: Essays Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

4     Sarah Ailwood and Melinda Harvey

on Literary Influence (1977) edited by Ronald Primeau; Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History (1991) edited by Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein; Margaret M. Jensen’s The Open Book: Creative Misreading in the Works of Selected Modern Writers (2002); Mary Orr’s Intertextuality: Debates and Contexts (2003); and Andrew Elfenbein’s article in Modern Language Quarterly called ‘On the Discrimination of Influences’ (2008). These investigations into the nature, as well as the problem, of literary influence are drawn upon by the contributors to this collection. As far as Mansfield is concerned, haphazard attention has been paid to tracing the influence of prior literary texts on her fiction. Valuable contributions in understanding Mansfield’s influences include T. O. Beachcroft’s ‘Katherine Mansfield’s Encounter with Theocritus’ (1974), Vincent O’Sullivan’s ‘The Magnetic Chain: Notes and Approaches to K.M.’ (1975), which includes a pioneering discussion of Mansfield’s early ‘apprenticeships’ to Wilde and Pater, as well as the suite of articles that have dealt with the important Chekhov connection, beginning with Elisabeth Schneider’s ‘Katherine Mansfield and Chekhov’ published in Modern Language Notes in 1935.17 Examinations of influential personal relationships between Mansfield and her contemporaries have been much more common, arguably because of the extraordinary character of the associations she had with a number of high-profile writers. These studies were validated by Bonnie Kime Scott’s radical revisioning of modernism as a ‘tangled mesh’ of actual interactions between a multitude of writers of both sexes and many nations in The Gender of Modernism (1990).18 The so-called ‘new modernist studies’ has emphasised the role that the hothouse environments of the coterie and the little magazine played in the creation of texts that aimed to ‘Make It New!’ Scholarly contributions made by Angela Smith in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two (1999) and Sydney Janet Kaplan in Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction (1991) and Circulating Genius: John Middleton Murry, Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence (2010) have detailed Mansfield’s social relations with key contemporaries as well as the textual connections between their work to reveal how foundational she was to literary modernism, shoring up her place in the canon. Smith and Kaplan’s methodology – that is, tracing biographical and textual threads between Mansfield and other writers – has in turn influenced us as Mansfield scholars. Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence seeks to build on Smith and Kaplan’s towering work by taking an author- and text-focused approach to charting influence, but roams beyond Mansfield’s own circle – both backwards and forwards in time Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence     5

– by noticing how influence can skip across eras, places and cultures. It is, as our contributor Bonny Cassidy puts it, ‘a bushfire: it jumps and lands’. Mansfield’s example reminds us that engagement with dead or faraway writers can happen through acts of reading, translation and criticism. Attempts to understand Mansfield’s influence on subsequent generations of writers have been relatively light on the ground, but include Richard F. Peterson’s ‘The Circle of Truth: The Stories of Katherine Mansfield and Mary Lavin’ in Modern Fiction Studies (1978) and Uwe Baumann’s ‘Katherine Mansfield and Witi Ihimaera: A Typology of Reception’ (1999). This is particularly surprising given the centrality of Mansfield to both the short-story genre and to New Zealand literature. While it is accepted that Mansfield was New Zealand’s first truly successful writer, few studies have sought to trace Mansfield’s influence on specific New Zealand writers. The focus has, instead, been to explain the ways in which Mansfield does not fit into New Zealand literary history, an argument that Lydia Wevers suggests ‘is certain to remain inconclusive’.19 Although Wevers analyses the influence of colonial New Zealand literature on Mansfield, she does not explore how Mansfield has in turn influenced later New Zealand writers: ‘the short story as it was written and read in New Zealand was the fiction of a different country from hers’.20 Cherry Hankin makes a similar argument: she is set apart . . . because of an intrinsic difference between the kind of story she wrote and the kind of story written subsequently by many New Zealanders . . . many New Zealanders wonder just where she fits into our literary tradition.21

Although Hankin concedes that in ‘her choice of material’ Mansfield ‘was the forerunner of much subsequent New Zealand fiction’, particularly by Janet Frame, she concludes that ‘hers was an art that could not readily be imitated’.22 Yet it remains that Mansfield’s legacy has elicited a vast range of responses from New Zealand writers and artists. Indeed, this collection’s cover was designed by the New Zealand artist and writer Sarah Laing, who is currently working on a graphic novel of Mansfield’s life.23 In one of the few studies of responses to Mansfield, Linda Hardy argues: The inscription of Mansfield by contemporary New Zealand writers might suggest a desire to recover her as an analogous figure of origin and continuity – but what we find instead are split or divided representations: the signs . . . of cultural hybridity, rather than cultural identity.24

Chapters in this collection by Janet Wilson and Brigid Magner move beyond treating Mansfield as a problem for New Zealand literary Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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history, accepting her profound albeit burdensome influence for later writers, and taking a textual approach to tracing her legacy. We can identify a number of reasons why scholars have been reluctant to investigate Mansfield and influence head-on, both in New Zealand and beyond. First, there has been the need to shore up Mansfield’s reputation as a key modernist and a writer of consequence more generally, which has entailed a need to accentuate the ways in which Mansfield is original rather than derivative. This is a task that was begun by Smith and Kaplan and is now complete thanks to a new wave of Mansfield scholarship that has emerged in the last five years.25 The disinclination to investigate influence can also be read as gun-shyness. Mansfield was the subject of serious plagiarism accusations around the use of conspicuously Chekhovian elements in her stories, most notably in the Letters pages of The Times Literary Supplement in 1951.26 To hunt for further traces of other writers in her fiction might open old wounds. Yet Katherine Mansfield is a particularly apposite subject for a study of literary influence. Throughout her reading and writing life she engaged in a rich and unabashed dialogue with her literary predecessors not only in her fiction but also in her correspondence and personal writing, and thanks to Murry’s decision not to do as his wife asked and ‘tear up and burn as much as possible’27 we now have access to much of it. She was at the centre of literary culture in metropolitan London, not only connected with major literary figures of the day, but also working as a literary reviewer and editor, providing her with the means to exert her own influence on literary and artistic matters. One important matter to Mansfield’s contemporaries was the idea of influence itself. In ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), for example, T. S. Eliot presents the argument that authors acquire no meaning or significance wholly by themselves, that they do so by taking their place amongst the tradition by demonstrating their knowledge of and respect for it. Even those who felt Pound’s call to ‘Make It New!’ most strongly can be seen to be, nevertheless, under an influence. In the first instance the influence was Pound’s, and in the second, that of virtually any author or literary work from the past that they were reacting so violently against. The lack of scholarship of Mansfield and influence is reflective, moreover, of a broader problem. Influence has fallen out of favour with literary scholars, more generally, because of this: we don’t, possibly can’t, nor ever will, know exactly how literary influence actually works. It was the Egyptian-American literary theorist Ihab Hassan who itemised the difficulties of proving influence back in 1955 in his essay ‘The Problem of Influence in Literary History: Notes Towards a Definition’. According to Hassan, the term is much too ‘furtive’ and ‘vague’ to produce anyNot for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence     7

thing other than ‘superficial’ commentary because influence can be seen to have least eight possible ‘agents’ (from environment to a particular literary text) and take at least four different ‘forms’ (from forgery to collaboration). Furthermore, the creative process itself isn’t understood, least of all by the writer herself. For Hassan, all this nebulousness means that in claims of influence ‘a measure of speculation and uncertainty seems ineradicable’.28 Subsequent attempts to bring a degree of precision to influence studies in the last forty or so years, notably Bloom’s psycho-critical theory of influence, have the problem of not being widely applicable. As Bloom himself stresses, the scope of his particular inquiry into influence is circumscribed such that it doesn’t apply to other genres besides poetry, and even then only to poetry produced in the postEnlightenment period by ‘strong poets’, of which there are, according to him, very few. It is also possible that at least some of the anxiety about influence itself is due to the fact that its exploration sees the author at the centre of any investigation. Twentieth-century criticism spotlighted, instead, the role of the text and the reader in the making of meaning; evidence such as the biography of an author or her stated intention in producing a work of literature was rendered inadmissible. Influence, however, has an interest in these, and other, author-related matters because it must involve some direct or indirect consideration of how the creative individual works. This might explain the relative popularity of the term ‘intertextuality’ compared to ‘influence’ in the period; it allows talk of literary relations but bypasses contemplation of the author herself. However, recent scholarship such as Seán Burke’s The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida (2010) and Benjamin Widiss’s Obscure Invitations: The Persistence of the Author in Twentieth-Century American Literature (2011) have reminded us that authorial absence is a compositional and interpretive strategy rather than a fact. The time is ripe for a contemplation of influence again. We observe that, despite the climate of academic suspicion around influence, it has continued to be a focus of interest in the mainstream discussion of writers and writing. Journalists often ask writers about their reading lives in interviews. Reviewers often note the similarities between a new book and older ones in their efforts to account for and evaluate it. Writers and publishers often broadcast that certain books are written in explicit or implicit conversation with other books. The fact of the matter is that discernible points of contact between texts and authors do appear to exist. We also see no reason to be troubled by the fact that these points of contact can have a variety of flavours: intense, kindly, fleeting, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

8     Sarah Ailwood and Melinda Harvey

uncomfortable, hostile, and the list goes on. While we might take issue with Bloom’s ‘revisionary ratios’ as a sequence of evolutionary phases in the life cycle of a writer, his insistence that influence manifests itself by ‘misprision’, that it can exist where works lack obvious affinities or where negative emotions, such as melancholy and anxiety, are present is a major contribution. The structure of this book into six parts – Ambivalence, Exchange, Identification, Imitation, Enchantment and Legacy – intends to pay due respect to influence’s hues or tones. A feature of this book is that the textual connections traced are not necessarily ones of similarity (of words, themes, sensibility) and the personal relations are not necessarily interpersonal. We do not intend to diminish the complexity – even idiosyncrasy – of influence by attempting to explain it. Indeed, the fact that this one woman is the linchpin for so many different modes of influence proves that there is no pattern or formula that can entirely account for the way it works. Rather, the chapters in this book are organised such that each part focuses on a particular mode of literary influence pertinent to Mansfield, presenting a series of lenses through which influence might be understood. Part I explores ‘Ambivalence’ as an impetus to literary production. These chapters demonstrate that the very uncertainty that one writer feels toward another, intellectually or emotionally, can spawn a range of creative responses. They illustrate the limitations of theories of influence that say that writers either absorb or wage some sort of offensive against their predecessors by exploring literary responses to Mansfield that simultaneously acknowledge and deny the literary precursor. In ‘“The Twilight of Language”: The Young Evelyn Waugh on “Catherine” Mansfield’, Naomi Milthorpe exposes the satiric potential of influence in the first account of Mansfield’s literary connections to Evelyn Waugh, with special consideration of his schoolboy paper ‘The Twilight of Language’ (1921). Milthorpe describes satire as ‘a mode of writing by necessity alive to outside influence’ and notes the significant intertextual parallels of narrative, theme and technique between ‘Bliss’ (1918) and A Handful of Dust (1934), making the case that Waugh’s response to modernism should be interpreted not as rejection, but instead as ‘a destructive misreading that generates a parodic likeness’. In Chapter 3, ‘“Where is she?” Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth Bowen’, Jessica Gildersleeve examines the absent presence of Mansfield in Elizabeth Bowen’s personal and fictional writing to demonstrate how loss, desire and mourning might constitute a particularly female mode of literary influence. Gildersleeve explores Bowen’s ambivalent perceptions of Mansfield as a literary influence throughout her career, on the one Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence     9

hand protesting against her influence and defending her own originality, and on the other recognising her innovation and mourning her as a ‘lost contemporary’. For Gildersleeve, the literary relationship between Bowen and Mansfield defies both the Bloomian model of destroying the predecessor and the model of matrilineal heritage preferred by feminist literary critics. Instead, influence between Mansfield and Bowen registers as a ‘desire for kinship, and resentment that this bond does not exist’. Part I proves that ambivalence about the literary predecessor, and about the very nature of literary influence itself, can be a potent creative source. Part II, ‘Exchange’, explores relationships between writers who were contemporaries, sharing personal and professional connections, and traces the lines of influence between interpersonal exchange and literary production. These chapters reveal that influence is affected by the power dynamics at play between writers. Each of the chapters examines personal relationships that are essentially (though not wholly) positive, revealing that, even within a productive relationship characterised by warmth, generosity and admiration, power inequalities still impact the literary influence that results. In Chapter 4, ‘“[O]ur precious art”: Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and the Gift Economy’, Kathryn Simpson offers a new approach to understanding the relationship between Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, exploring their exchanges through the concept of gift-giving. Drawing on the work of their contemporary, Marcel Mauss, Simpson argues that the gift is fundamentally ambivalent: it is both generous and selfish, and it creates a personal bond but at the same time offers a challenge and demands a response and reciprocation. The ‘gift economy’ in the Mansfield-Woolf relationship, according to Simpson, ‘created a space in which this paradoxical pull of emotions and the power of reciprocal influence operated’. Acts of gifting and generosity – including praise, letters, conversation and, as Simpson argues, Mansfield’s idea for a story that later became Woolf’s ‘Kew Gardens’ – illuminate the power dynamic that existed between them, which constantly shifted from affinity to rivalry and envy. Simpson’s chapter reveals that exchange through gifting is a direct conduit of literary influence, powerful in and of itself. In Chapter 5, ‘“The Silence is Broken”: Katherine Mansfield and the “Manifesto Moment”’, Susan Reid explores Mansfield’s desire to influence other writers through alternatives to the ‘high manifesto’ favoured by her male contemporaries and collaborators D. H. Lawrence and John Middleton Murry. Reid emphasises Mansfield’s more subtle desire to influence through exchange, via ‘a quieter rehearsal of ideas amongst Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

10     Sarah Ailwood and Melinda Harvey

friends and artists’, describing Mansfield’s letters, a form premised on exchange, as revealing her conscious desire and determination to impress her ideas about art and life on her contemporaries. Reid’s chapter prioritises literary influence through the text itself, illustrating how, through her stories, reviews and letters, Mansfield was able to exert influence even at a distance from her friends and colleagues, exploiting her position as a successful, published writer to didactically advise others. Indeed, Mansfield felt it was a responsibility to do so: is it to be a moralist – simply to tell someone who does not know what must be done? To share one’s discoveries? Even if they don’t agree it seems to me you are bound to tell them what you have found best to do.29

In Chapter 6, ‘Circles of Influence: Katherine Mansfield, S. S. Koteliansky and Russia’, Gerri Kimber addresses Mansfield’s close personal and professional collaboration with the Russian S. S. Koteliansky. Kimber explores the exchange between Bloomsbury modernism and Russian literature by focusing on Koteliansky’s collaborations with Mansfield and others in translating works to make them available to an audience with an appetite for all things Russian. Although the translation process appears to have been an equal collaboration, power registers through Koteliansky’s desire, as an outsider, for acceptance, and the power Bloomsbury had to accept or reject him. Even with Mansfield, with whom he shared a ‘perhaps uncommon friendship’, the exchange was unequal. Part II reveals that exchange is a fruitful yet inevitably unequal mode of literary influence, in which the professional is strongly impacted upon by the personal. ‘Identification’ is the theme of Part III, which illustrates how literary creativity can be driven by the recognition of the writer’s self in another. In Chapter 7, ‘“Worms of the Same Family”: Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth von Arnim’, Juliane Römhild traces influence between writers who were artistic contemporaries, cousins and friends, exploring the relationship between kinship and literary influence. Römhild argues that von Arnim was an early influence on Mansfield, prompted by their close family ties, and outlines the clear impact of von Arnim’s Elizabeth novels on In a German Pension. Yet identification can also threaten person relationships, particularly when one writer enjoys more success than the other due to the adoption of different artistic ideologies and practices. Familial rivalry can itself, however, work as inspiration, revealed in the correspondence between Mansfield and von Arnim. Deborah Pike maps parallels in the personal lives and literary concerns of Mansfield and Colette in Chapter 8, ‘“Objectless Love”: The Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence     11

Vagabondage of Colette and Katherine Mansfield’. Mansfield identified with Colette as a kindred spirit who had very close thematic and stylistic concerns. In Colette’s novels, particularly The Vagabond, Mansfield found ‘a legitimate and desirable mode of life for a modern woman artist’ that she adopted in her writing and throughout her life. Pike argues that Mansfield’s identification in Colette of her own struggle between romantic coupledom and the solitude and self-realisation needed to create art provided a way of understanding her own experience. Part III reveals that identification with another can prompt a writer to frame their artistic goals and practices, through opposition or emulation. Part IV addresses ‘Imitation’, exploring two different dynamics of literary imitation at work in Mansfield’s life and work, both relating to her interest in Russian literature. In Chapter 9, ‘“God forgive me, Tchehov, for my impertinence”: Mansfield and the Art of Copying’, Melinda Harvey returns to the most discussed relationship of literary influence in Mansfield studies to argue that the plagiarism allegations regarding ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’ was not an isolated incident but instead part of a continuum, a compositional practice that privileged copying over pure invention. Harvey contends that copying was ‘central to Mansfield’s writing process and, ultimately, artistic and personal vision’, and that her writing practice involved much more ‘notetaking, sketching, drafting and revising’ than John Middleton Murry’s mythologising of Mansfield as a solitary genius has allowed. Harvey identifies three modes of copying – appropriation, translation and emulation – that disrupt conventional linear approaches to understanding influence: a precursor may influence a descendant, rather than the other way around. With Mansfield’s copying of Chekhov, she in fact becomes his precursor as her copying makes his texts available to a new audience, particularly with her translations and imitation of ‘The Child-WhoWas-Tired’. Harvey concludes that Mansfield’s ‘compositional practice was, in short, conscious, conscientious and, crucially, relational, and copying of one form or another was indispensable part of it’. In Chapter 10, ‘“[A]ctively making one feel”: Katherine Mansfield, Evolving Empathy and Intimate Influence in Virginia Woolf’s Writings of the 1920s and 1930s’, Katie Macnamara offers a reassessment of the relationship between Mansfield and Virginia Woolf by exploring how Mansfield’s imitation of Dostoevsky’s ‘underworld’ influenced Woolf’s perspective on Russian literature and on her friend and rival. Macanamara charts Woolf’s growing empathy for Mansfield in the years after her death, arguing that this empathy constitutes a form of influence itself, as imitations of Mansfield’s experience are located in Woolf’s diary, criticism, growing feminist sensibility and fiction. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

12     Sarah Ailwood and Melinda Harvey

Part V, ‘Enchantment’, consists of three chapters that explore how one writer’s passion for another can itself constitute a mode of literary influence. Read together, these chapters reveal diverse and perhaps unlikely trajectories of literary influence. In Chapter 11, ‘Mansfield Eats Dickens’, Michael Hollington draws on Mansfield’s own remark that ‘we all, as writers, to a certain extent, absorb each other when we love . . . Anatole France would say we eat each other’30 to explore her devotion to Dickens throughout her life and her absorption of ‘essential aspects of his humour’. His chapter reveals that Mansfield’s enchantment produced two tangible effects in terms of influence. The first concerns ‘the presence of numerous Dickensian stylistic devices in her writing’, particularly their ‘many shared satiric emphases, especially their critiques of the societies in which they lived’. The second relates to the revival of Dickens’ reputation in the interwar period. Hollington argues that in her capacity as a reviewer and through her connections to modernist magazines Mansfield ‘did as much as she could to reaffirm Dickens as a consummate artist both of tragedy and comedy’. In Chapter 12, ‘Katherine Mansfield, Nettie Palmer and Critical Influence’, Sarah Ailwood traces the lodestar role that Mansfield played for the Australian literary critic Nettie Palmer. Palmer’s literary archive reveals her enchantment with Mansfield as a reader, writer and literary journalist, highlighting the impact of Mansfield’s posthumously published personal writing on her. Mansfield’s presence in Palmer’s archive exposes a thread of literary influence between literary critics and, through Palmer, to an even wider network of literary correspondents. In Palmer’s reviews, letters and notebooks Mansfield alters, chameleon-like, to fit her purpose: the successful colonial writer in exile, the mourned absent contemporary and the incisive literary critic who prompts Palmer to reflect on her own professional writing. In Chapter 13, ‘The meeting of Katherine Mansfield and Eve Langley’, Bonny Cassidy explores the synergies between the life and work of Mansfield and the Australian novelist Eve Langley. Mansfield and Langley shared similar life experiences and artistic concerns, as well as a mutual sense of psychological and sexual ‘otherness’, underpinned by their dual enchantment with Oscar Wilde. Cassidy argues that the captivating influence of ‘Oscar’ on both writers also framed the nature of Mansfield’s influence on Langley: ‘a scenario of “doubled” influence, whereby Mansfield acts as a medium for the values Wilde represented’. Cassidy also notes shared literary techniques associated with objects and things; in light of Hollington’s chapter, this suggests the possibility of a ‘tripling’ of influence, from Dickens to Mansfield to Langley. Part V reveals the possibilities of enchantment, not only in terms of inherNot for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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iting literary technique, but also in terms of its real effects when the enchanted is a critic and reviewer, positioned to guide, both publicly and privately, literary culture. Finally, Part VI examines the idea of ‘Legacy’ as a literary motivator for later generations of artists and writers, exploring the possibilities and problematics associated with influence that spans centuries and continents. In ‘Mansfield, Shakespeare and the Unanxiety of Influence’ Mark Houlahan explores how William Shakespeare’s literary legacy influences Mansfield’s personal relationships and professional writing practices, and ultimately frames her own legacy. Examining Mansfield’s notebooks and correspondence, Houlahan reveals that Mansfield and Murry enjoyed a generous, three-way literary engagement with Shakespeare, which Houlahan describes as the ‘unanxiety of influence’ for the ‘bold, unafraid and explicit’ manner in which Mansfield used Shakespeare without any desire to emulate him. Houlahan particularly focuses on Mansfield’s enchantment with these lines from Henry IV, Part 1: ‘But I tell you my lord fool, out of this nettle danger, we pluck this flower, safety.’31 She recorded them in a 1916 notebook and used them again in the late story, ‘This Flower’. Murry, ultimately, placed them on her tombstone, enigmatically framing Mansfield’s own legacy. In ‘The “Burden” of the Feminine: Frank Sargeson’s Encounter with Katherine Mansfield’, Janet Wilson examines Mansfield’s legacy in terms of the development of a New Zealand national literature, as reflected in the social realist short stories of Frank Sargeson. Wilson contests the conventional view that Mansfield’s metropolitan impressionism was ‘inimical’ to Sargeson’s ‘ambitions for a cultural nationalism’, arguing that Mansfield’s legacy is not only a burden to be overcome but an ‘intertextual presence’, as they share a critique of colonial culture and its normative gender constructions and key techniques of literary modernism. Focusing on ‘The Canary’ (1923) and ‘A Man and his Wife’ (1939), Wilson argues that Sargeson adapted Mansfield’s ‘techniques of impressionism and impersonation’ to render masculine homosexual vulnerability and unrequited love in a homophobic society. Mansfield’s influence on Sargeson, then, suggests ‘continuity across the decades of New Zealand’s cultural nationalism’. In the final chapter, ‘Writing from the Cellar: Revisiting the Villa Isola Bella’, Brigid Magner interrogates the memorialisation of Mansfield and the complex effects of the Memorial Room at Menton for Mansfield’s legacy and for the New Zealand Writing Fellows who have inhabited it since its establishment in 1969. Magner argues that New Zealanders ‘have found it difficult to understand her writing and have felt unsure about how to celebrate her memory’ because of her expatriate status, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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and that her legacy is ‘often understood to be a burden by subsequent writers’. According to Magner, ‘[t]he perceived pressure to address Mansfield through their literary production is either translated into works of homage or more often sidestepped’. Taking up the idea of the ‘absent-present’ of literary tourism, Magner argues that the Memorial Room forces Fellows to confront Mansfield’s legacy; they ‘are encouraged to “channel” the spirit of Katherine, to partake of her greatness, in order to write their own books’. Yet while Fellows frequently claim that they are affected by their residency, ‘their work does not generally reveal traces of Mansfield, showing that literary influence usually fails to occur where it might be anticipated’. The chapters by Wilson and Magner reveal that although a literary legacy can inspire later writers both professionally and personally, this mode of influence is profoundly impacted by the manner in which the legacy is constructed in terms of cultural ideologies and institutionalised memorialisation. In addition to thematically exploring modes of literary influence associated with Katherine Mansfield, this collection engages with recent and emerging approaches to modernism and opens up new fields for Mansfield studies that demand further exploration. The first concerns Mansfield’s influence on Australian literary culture. Mansfield studies has, understandably, tended to focus on her connections with New Zealand and with the centres of metropolitan modernism. This collection expands the terrain of Mansfield’s influence to consider her impact in Australia, whose geographic, historical and cultural proximity to New Zealand is significant. It is no accident that Mansfield’s first published work appeared in the Melbourne journal, The Native Companion.32 Mansfield has long held a powerful and in some respects unique position in the Australian national imaginary, yet without the complexities and, it might be argued, the burden that she presents for New Zealand. Her death was widely reported in the Australian press, and the years that followed saw the reprinting of her stories in major Australian newspapers, public lectures on her writing, articles outlining her literary achievements and reviews of her published personal writing. In August 1927 the Melbourne-based Argus conducted a ‘literary plebiscite’ to assess the popularity of Australian writers of poetry and prose; despite being a New Zealander Mansfield received forty-seven votes, placing her twentieth out of a field of ninety-one and ahead of such accomplished writers of the era as Vance and Nettie Palmer, Ada Cambridge, Miles Franklin, Rosa Campbell Praed, Barbara Baynton and Mary Gilmore.33 In 1935 The Sydney Morning Herald described her as ‘our greatest Australasian writer’.34 Even as recently as 2012 the Melbourne-based Text Publishing released a selection of twenty-three of Mansfield’s Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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stories as part of its ‘Text Classics’ series, which is generally understood to be reissuing lost Australian classics. Despite this evident enthusiasm for Mansfield, there has been only piecemeal consideration of her influence on Australian literature. Relationships of influence have been identified between Mansfield and Australian women writers including Henry Handel Richardson, Barbara Hanrahan and Eleanor Dark,35 inviting further analysis of this unique trans-Tasman literary connection. In this collection, chapters by Sarah Ailwood and Bonny Cassidy contribute to this growing body of work, exploring Mansfield’s impact on Australian women writers between the wars. Second, this collection contributes to a growing interest in modernism’s engagement with the ‘middlebrow’. In recent years, a number of studies have sought to unpack the complex relationship between ‘High Modernism’ and the emergence of popular and mass cultural institutions and forms designed to serve the aspirational middle classes in Britain, Europe and the United States with a taste for literature.36 Although she has tended to be associated with the avant-garde, and ambivalently with ‘High Modernism’, Mansfield was also engaged with what might be called ‘middlebrow’ culture. As Jenny McDonnell has shown, throughout her career Mansfield negotiated the balance between the elite and the popular in both her fiction writing and in its manner of publication, arguing that ‘it was precisely Mansfield’s ability to occupy another marginal space – between “literary” and “popular” – that made her writing possible’.37 As a reviewer, too, Mansfield regularly engaged with fiction by middlebrow novelists including Rose Macaulay, Rhoda Broughton, Sheila Kaye-Smith and Hugh Walpole. In this collection, chapters by Juliane Römhild, Naomi Milthorpe and Jessica Gildersleeve expand our understanding of Mansfield’s relationship to the middlebrow by attending to relationships of textual influence between Mansfield and Elizabeth von Arnim, Evelyn Waugh and, to a lesser extent, Elizabeth Bowen,38 who have tended to be considered outside the realm of High Modernism, occupying ‘a position in the literary field between “high” and “low” cultures’.39 These chapters reveal the significant overlap between personnel and ideas variously labelled ‘highbrow’ or ‘middlebrow’ both during the era and since, illustrating the very fluidity of these categories. Third, this collection contributes to the current reassessment of literary and cultural engagement between Russia and Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Russia in Britain, 1880–1940, Rebecca Beasley and Philip Ross Bullock argue that cultural connections between Britain and Russia need to be re-examined in the light of an increased critical focus on globalisation and the transnational, to move Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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beyond the desire to locate sites of influence between specific individuals and groups and instead focus on the roles of institutions and of translation.40 Chapters in this collection by Melinda Harvey, Katie Macnamara and Gerri Kimber respond ambivalently to this call. They do contribute to this broadening and shifting in focus, exploring relationships between translation, copying and compositional practice in making Russian texts available for British audiences, and challenging conventional understandings of the reception of those texts in Britain. On the other hand they retain a commitment to tracing the effects ‘things Russian’ had on specific people and specific texts. This collection reveals the richness of influence as a lens for literary interpretation. To be attentive to influence means to sometimes need to have a biographical focus, to notice things such as the places a writer lived in, travelled to or produced work for and the people with whom she associated. Yet influence is also wantonly careless of things like realworld encounters, national borders and shorelines, cultural and linguistic differences, the restrictions of genre and the passage of time. It can even be temporally incontiguous; an inheritor might in some instances be a precursor. By charting some trajectories of Katherine Mansfield and literary influence, and seeking to observe the myriad ways by which influence can occur, this collection makes a compelling argument for the revival of influence as an approach to literary interpretation.

Notes   1. Katherine Mansfield, ‘The Modern Soul’, Collected Fiction, vol. 1, p. 219.   2. Ibid. p. 220.   3. Ibid. p. 219.   4. Pamela Dunbar offers a more fulsome list in Radical Mansfield, p. 10.   5. Mansfield, ‘The Modern Soul’, p. 218.   6. Ibid. p. 219.  7. Dunbar, Radical Mansfield, p. 10.   8. Ibid. p. 25.   9. Ibid. p. 26. 10. Mansfield, Notebooks, vol. 1, pp. 94–9. 11. Ibid. p. 111. 12. Antony Alpers, The Life of Katherine Mansfield, p. 111. 13. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, pp. 40–1. 14. Mansfield, ‘The Modern Soul’, p. 217 15. Ibid. p. 218 16. Ibid. 17. These include Joseph Warren Beach, ‘Katherine Mansfield and Her Russian Master’ (1951); Roland Sutherland, ‘Katherine Mansfield: Plagiarist,

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Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence     17 Disciple, or Ardent Admirer?’; Don W. Kleine, ‘The Chekhovian Source of “Marriage à la Mode”’; Claire Tomalin, Katherine Mansfield, pp. 72, 80. 18. Bonnie Kime Scott, Gender of Modernism, p. 10. 19. Lydia Wevers, ‘The Short Story’, p. 215. 20. Ibid. p. 222. 21. Cherry Hankin, ‘Katherine Mansfield and the Inner Life’, p. 1. 22. Ibid. pp. 27–8. 23. Some of Sarah Laing’s Mansfield images and commentaries may be found on her blog, < http://sarahelaing.wordpress.com/>. 24. Linda Hardy, ‘The Ghost of Katherine Mansfield’, p. 427. See also Bridget Orr, ‘Reading with the taint of the pioneer’, p. 448. 25. See, for example, Gerri Kimber and Janet Wilson (eds), Celebrating Katherine Mansfield; Jenny McDonnell, Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Marketplace; Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber and Susan Reid (eds), Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism, together with the establishment of Katherine Mansfield Studies and the publication of the definitive Edinburgh University Press Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield. 26. Tomalin, Katherine Mansfield, pp. 261–71. 27. Mansfield quoted in Jeffrey Meyers, Katherine Mansfield, p. 237. 28. Ihab H. Hassan, ‘The Problem of Influence in Literary History’, p. 73. 29. Mansfield, Letter to S. S. Koteliansky, 25 March 1922, Collected Letters, vol. 5, p. 128. 30. Mansfield, Letter to Arnold Gibbons, 13 July 1922, Collected Letters, vol. 5, p. 223. 31. William Shakespeare, Henry IV Part I, II, iv, 10. 32. Mansfield, ‘Vignettes’, ‘Silhouettes’, ‘In the Botanical Gardens’, ‘In a Café’, Collected Fiction, vol. 1, pp. 78–89. 33. Western Mail, 1 September 1927, p. 8. 34. ‘The Publisher Tells’, Sydney Morning Herald, 2 February 1935, p. 14. 35. Carol Franklin, ‘Mansfield and Richardson’; Elisenda Masgrau-Peya, ‘Towards a Poetics of the “Unhomed”’; Sarah Ailwood, ‘Anxious Beginnings’. 36. See for example Lise Jaillant, Modernism, Middlebrow and the Literary Canon; Erica Brown, ‘Introduction’, Working Papers on the Web; Nicola Humble, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel. 37. McDonnell, Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Marketplace, p. 11. 38. Nicola Humble makes the point that although Bowen was initially considered ‘middlebrow’ she has now entered the canon, illustrating that the term relates to more to the social history and reception of a writer and their work than to the work itself; Elke D’hoker, ‘Theorising the Middlebrow’. 39. Jaillant, Modernism, Middlebrow and the Literary Canon, p. 5. 40. Rebecca Beasley and Philip Ross Bullock, Russia in Britain, pp. 4, 6, 15.

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EDL\JBURGH University Press ,;

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Chapter 2

‘The Twilight of Language’: The Young Evelyn Waugh on ‘Catherine’ Mansfield Naomi Milthorpe On Sunday, 13 February 1921 a precocious English schoolboy gave a paper to a group of public-school cronies of an artistic bent who called themselves the Dilettanti. The paper begins: Mr Chairman and Gentlemen, Anyone who has read much modern literature will have been struck with its abnormality in subject and treatment, an abnormality which is generally unpleasant and, I contend, always inartistic. The object of this paper is to suggest a reason for this and a possible cure.1

While the general theme of the paper was the ‘abnormality’ of modern literature, in his specific arguments the young speaker focused on modernist prose as typified by Katherine Mansfield. Mansfield’s writing – in particular, her important story ‘Bliss’ (1918) – is regarded as emblematic and symptomatic of what the paper’s title portentously termed ‘The Twilight of Language’. While the paper could easily be dismissed as an insignificant consideration of Mansfield’s writing, it is interesting precisely because of its speaker: a seventeen-year-old Evelyn Waugh. The young Waugh’s grapple with Mansfield, whose writing becomes both a target for ridicule and a site of creative misprision, can fruitfully inform an understanding of the perception and reception of Mansfield’s influence and position by those outside her immediate sphere. Moreover, Waugh’s misreading of Mansfield is more generally suggestive of a model of late modernist and satiric praxis, in which a prior text is fragmented and remade in a new, ‘disfigured’ likeness.2 In his later career Evelyn Waugh launched regular salvoes against the abuses of modernism and modernity. Many critics cite as evidence for Waugh’s dislike of all things modern the supposed autobiographical fiction The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957), in which the protagonist abhors ‘plastics, Picasso, sunbathing and jazz − everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime’.3 Pinfold’s dislike, critically Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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extrapolated into Waugh’s dislike, manifests in the desire to shut out the modern world (a desire that, in the novel’s development, sends Pinfold mad). Pinfold’s madness is a late example of the double-edge with which Waugh engaged with modernity, as simultaneously dangerously disordered, and a creative source. In spite of his reputation and best efforts to paint himself as a reclusive crank, Waugh was a well-read and worldly man, keenly interested in contemporary aesthetic currents. In addition to his non-fiction writing, there are several instances of engagement with modernism in his satirical fiction: the Corbusier-esque architect Professor Silenus in Decline and Fall (1928), the overt references to The Waste Land in A Handful of Dust (1934) and the party invitations copied ‘from Blast’ in Vile Bodies (1930).4 Such instances indicate that Waugh’s relationship with modernity − and more particularly with modernist art and literature − was not one of wilful ignorance but engaged ambivalence. ‘The Twilight of Language’ offers an amusing demonstration of the young Waugh’s ambivalent reaction to High Modernist writing, and his latent talent for polemic and satire, which in the paper reach their zenith in an extended parody of Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’. Waugh’s reading of Mansfield in ‘The Twilight of Language’ suggests a young man at once willing to engage with avant-garde aesthetics and yet unable to be carried along by the modernist movement. It demonstrates the reception of Mansfield’s modernism by an emerging reader of the 1920s, indicating Mansfield’s status as a writer in the years before her death and the ways in which she, and her work, could be (mis)represented by ambivalent readers. Moreover, ‘The Twilight of Language’ highlights hitherto unrecognised parallels between Waugh and Mansfield, parallels that could indicate a wilful misinterpretation of Mansfield’s project and an influence via antipathy that extends into Waugh’s literary satire, in the splendid anti-modernist satire A Handful of Dust. In ‘The Leaning Tower’ (1940), Virginia Woolf outlines the protean variety of literary influence: ‘influences are infinitely numerous; writers are infinitely sensitive; each writer has a different sensibility’.5 Studies of influence from Harold Bloom onwards have shown the significance of literary antecedents, whether they are absorbed or − as Bloom would have it − battled.6 As Margaret M. Jensen has suggested, reading is an ‘active and creative endeavour’, and writers frequently engage in ‘creative misreading’ of key works. In Jensen’s account, such influence is ‘the unavoidable consequence of a life steeped in literature’.7 For the self-consciously literary modernist movement, influence is an overt creative manoeuvre, a calculated strategy; for the anxious generation that followed in its wake, the pressure of tradition is intensified by the very fact of modernNot for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

The Young Evelyn Waugh on ‘Catherine’ Mansfield     23

ism’s colonisation of the literary landscape. Mansfield’s influence upon Waugh has never before been recognised, and she is noticeably absent from critical readings of Waugh’s literary development, which commonly emphasise his reading of Victorian and Edwardian writers such as Dickens, Beerbohm, Chesterton and Ronald Firbank. This neglect of Mansfield is even in spite of Robert Murray Davis’s inclusion of ‘The Twilight of Language’ in his collection of Waugh’s early writings. ‘The Twilight of Language’, however, incontrovertibly demonstrates Waugh’s early awareness of Mansfield’s writing and, more importantly, his early absorption of her style via parody. The notion of influence is crucial in coming to terms with ‘The Twilight of Language’, for Waugh’s satirical reading of Mansfield, a reading which tests his facility with the belligerent techniques of the satirist − parody, polemic, and wilful rejection − is part-creative misreading, part-battle. Satire is a mode of writing by necessity alive to outside influence: it is responsive, interventionist and pugnacious, inevitably initiated by forces outside of itself, whether social, political or textual. As a literary mode, moreover, it is richly imitative and intertextual, its origins frequently springing from a desire to ‘disrupt’ or deform a prior discursive model;8 as Jonathan Greenberg and others have outlined, it is also a central mode of modernist writing.9 Bloom’s account of influence as battle can be fruitfully applied to satire’s violent encounters with its textual precursors: satire’s desire to expel or destroy through ridicule, parody, or explicit censure is an extremist expression of the imaginative struggle undertaken by Bloom’s anxious poets. Waugh’s parody of Mansfield indicates an influence that is textually absorbed even as it is violently rejected. ‘The Twilight of Language’ makes explicit Waugh’s reading of Bliss and Other Stories (1920): his paper tells us that he has read the ‘stories’ in their entirety, though he has found them ‘quite unmeaning’.10 Waugh’s reading of Bliss less than six months after the book’s publication in late 1920 is demonstrative of Mansfield’s position as a major figure in 1920s letters. Waugh was an adolescent, confined to a country public school, and yet somehow managed to read one of the major modernist books of the year. In a letter to his friend Tom Driberg in 1922, Waugh − retailing gossip from London − mentions Mansfield: your letter came as a welcome interruption to the long backchat of literary cliques. There are rumours that the Times Literary Supplement is going to cease, that Catherine [sic] Mansfield is not going to die after all, that [London Mercury editor] J. C. Squire has taken seriously to drink at last.11

His 1925 diary notes he was reading Henri Bergson, whose theories of time and flux were influential upon the Rhythm circle and, as Angela Smith Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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suggests, upon Mansfield’s developing literary aesthetic.12 These scattered instances − particularly his ribald humour at Mansfield’s ill health − suggest Waugh had an ambivalent awareness of what he perceived as the ‘modern’ literary scene, of which he views Mansfield as exemplary. While ‘The Twilight of Language’ is thoroughly enjoyable to read through the lens of a developing satirist’s art, it is important to note the teenager’s bafflement in the face of modernist language. ‘The Twilight of Language’ indicates that despite the young Waugh’s sympathy with avant-garde visual art, and even with modernist poetry such as T. S. Eliot’s, he was unappreciative of modernist prose. In presenting ‘The Twilight of Language’ Waugh is circumspect about modern writing, his sentences guarded by a wall of verbosity designed to rebuff interlocutors. He begins with a discussion of language itself − language, he argues, has been ‘worn out’: Words have become too subtle they have been used so often that their meanings have become enlarged and confused [sic]. They are like painting rags which have entirely lost their original colours. Every time they are used they get some slight deviation of meaning.13

Waugh’s early conservatism presents itself in the metaphor of the ‘painting rag’, with its contrast between the idea of an original purity ‘lost’ by the taint of ‘deviation’ and use. However − and this is characteristic of Waugh − immediately following the attack on misuse and confusion, he targets cliché: There are many nouns which have a stock adjective applied to them by all journalists and most lady novelists: ‘faultless evening dress;’ ‘implicit faith;’ ‘effete aristocracy;’ ‘lavish display’ [. . .] There are hundreds of words inevitably coupled together like this; originally they were appropriate but now they are simply used automatically like inseparable friends who are never spoken of singly.14

The lady novelist is a significant figure of derision, and forebodes an attack to come. After a complaint against the modern writer’s inability to ‘describe anything simply’, Waugh launches an assault against the contemporary novel’s predilection for the ‘outrageous’,15 a trend whose foundation in the corruption of language has, Waugh argues, extended to a corruption of plot, theme and character: I don’t think that I have found a novel written during the last five years which has pretensions to being literary, in which there is a single character who is not completely odious and repugnant.

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The Young Evelyn Waugh on ‘Catherine’ Mansfield     25 And this sort of novel has entered during the last two years into another phase, in which it assumes such a frantic obscurity of form that it takes an immense amount of intellectual concentration and a great many readings to elucidate any meaning at all. These are mostly written by women.16

The hostility animating Waugh’s dismissive formula ‘lady novelist’ returned later in his career in his now-infamous marginal notes to Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave (1944).17 Connolly’s book, a ‘wordcycle’ written under the pseudonym ‘Palinurus’, is, as Alan Bell argues, a ‘moving but disjointed compilation of his own aphorisms and of pensées borrowed from a lifetime of educated reading.’18 Bell, among others, has examined Waugh’s ‘biliously disapproving’ marginal abuse of Connolly, attaching scornful epithets to the various voices or modes of thought which he saw infecting Connolly’s prose and likening their appearance to ‘the intrusion of all the wrong people . . . like a party of actors in a charade who have mistaken their cue and spoiled the scene’.19 Of these characters, the ‘drivelling woman novelist’ is the most baffling to Waugh, and invites the most serious disapprobation; Connolly’s impersonation of the woman novelist is the ‘most unaccountabl[e]’ of all his ventriloquism, according to a long annotation on Waugh’s copy’s end-paper. H. J. Jackson suggests marginalia of this kind ‘is a responsive kind of writing permanently anchored to pre-existing written words’, an act of ‘self-assertion, if not aggression’ by ‘self-conscious readers’.20 In Waugh’s case, his marginalia in The Unquiet Grave can be linked to ‘The Twilight of Language’ through the figure of the ‘lady novelist’. Both are examples of self-conscious self-assertion by Waugh the reader against the creative power of the text that is read. His discussion of Mansfield follows directly from his remarks about ‘frantic’ novels written by women. He writes: I don’t know whether anyone hear [sic] has read ‘Bliss’ a book of short stories by Catherine [sic] Mansfield. I am told that it is incomparably excellent and, I must say, that I liked those that I could understand very much. But many of them are quite unmeaning at a first reading and it takes at least three to grasp the general trend of events at all.21

Waugh was not unwaveringly hostile towards women, or female novelists (witness his support of Muriel Spark and Nancy Mitford, among others), but seems rather to hold contempt for a certain species of emotionally intense, verbally dense writing that he identifies as particular to women (elsewhere, as we shall see, he attaches the same type of terminology to highbrow ‘modern’ writers). The echoing of language between his critiques of modernist writing and his criticism of ‘lady novelists’ Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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seems to coalesce in his juvenile attack on Mansfield, who he appears to have viewed as representative of both. While scholars such as Jonathan Rose have discussed the working-class rejection of High Modernism, Christopher Hilliard has traced a similar ‘popular aversion’ to literary modernism in the middle-class and middlebrow readers ‘schooled in an understanding of literature orthodox in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries’.22 Hilliard’s theory is illuminating in considering the young Waugh’s early impressions of modernism. Educated at middle-class public schools and reared on his father Arthur’s taste for Dickens, Shakespeare and Tennyson, Waugh’s literary experience was confined within the walls of Victorian conceptions of good taste. Arthur Waugh − the chairman of Chapman & Hall publishing company and a man of letters of the older generation − was particularly hostile to literary modernism, characterising an early anthology of modernist poetry containing, among others, Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (1915) as ‘unmetrical, incoherent banalities of . . . literary “Cubists”’.23 As Hilliard has observed, middlebrow preconceptions of what constituted the literary − dominated by the Victorian and Georgian conception of ‘beauty’ − led to hostilities such as Arthur Waugh’s, who was mocked by Ezra Pound in a subsequent issue of The Egoist as ‘the silly old Waugh’.24 ‘The Twilight of Language’ offers its most crushing criticism of modernist writing in its characterisation of the ‘frantic obscurity of form’ that causes the young Waugh considerable mental difficulty. Deciphering the obscurities of modernist prose, Waugh suggests, ‘takes an immense amount of intellectual concentration and a great many readings [in order] to elucidate any meaning at all’.25 Such a critique is closely reminiscent of standard complaints levelled against High Modernism’s difficulty; while we can acknowledge Mansfield’s distance from the central figures of High Modernism, the young Waugh clearly saw her writing as representative of High Modernist literary modes. Waugh cannot accept Mansfield on her own terms, nor does he propose a ‘cure’, as he had promised he would in the beginning of the paper − at least not in any considered way. Instead, he resorts to the form of medicine used by generations of satirists, and which would become his own personal salve against a world with which, as he retreated from it, he would increasingly feel at odds. The ‘cure’ comes from ridicule and parody, an appropriation of a fictional voice in order, as Robert C. Elliott theorises, to reject it.26 First, Waugh offers the norm from which his satire launches itself: an author fifty years ago might have written, ‘It was a cold November night and a heavy wind was beating round the house. Ursula sat over the fire and waited for Jimmy to come, trying the whole while to read her book.’27

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The Young Evelyn Waugh on ‘Catherine’ Mansfield     27

Here, Waugh offers a normative standard for fiction, the realist novel of manners. Ursula’s impatience is rendered from the outside, through the arrangement of physical detail. This is, presumably, the materialist mode of literature practised by ‘Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy’ and criticised by Virginia Woolf in ‘Modern Fiction’ (1921), the kind of literary realism that made ‘the trivial and the transitory appear the true and the enduring’.28 Waugh’s rendering of the materialist novel does not do precisely this: Ursula reading her book as she waits for Jimmy does appear trivial and transitory, but it also appears reasonable, incontrovertible in a peculiarly staid, Victorian fashion. There is no arguing with the Ursula and Jimmy of his first imitation, because there’s nothing there to argue with: there’s nothing there at all. The imitation is neither parodic nor approbatory: it’s simply dull. Later, Waugh would burlesque all three of Woolf’s materialists in his fiction − Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy are lampooned as representative of the bland stasis of Paul Pennyfeather’s Oxford in Decline and Fall, while H. G. Wells’ ‘pop sci mumbo jumbo’ suffers continual violence in his Unquiet Grave marginalia. Not one of the three is a notable writer in Waugh’s canon. But if they are not notable, they are also not difficult; they do not disturb his universe. Mansfield also experimented with parodies of Bennett and Wells for The New Age, as Carey Snyder argues, ‘as a tool to create a place for herself in England’s literary marketplace’.29 In Snyder’s account, the parodic articulation ‘performs the same cultural work as modernist-authored literary reviews and criticism . . . integral to the period’s “emerging economies of cultural prestige”’.30 Mansfield’s parodies of Bennett and Wells were executed with an eye to carving out a place for herself in a seemingly hostile literary world; any influence felt by Mansfield from these writers follows the Bloomian model of appropriation followed by violent assault. Likewise, Waugh appropriates Mansfield as a totem of a certain type of literary production, a symbol to be assailed in his efforts to create his own place in the world. Where the realism of Bennett and Wells is, for the young Waugh, simply dull, Mansfield’s stories ‘take some reading’.31 They are disturbing, and Waugh’s parodic inhabitation of Mansfield is vividly rendered, lively, and bitterly funny. Waugh visually contrasts his imitation from his argument by swapping inks − while the paper is written in black ink, the parody is written in brilliant red. Instead of writing from the material outside, Waugh observes, ‘Catherine Mansfield would write about ten pages straight off like this’: ‘November – and a great grey wind dashing into everything, stirring up leaves, copper leaves and grey wind. Well he’d come tonight – but the wind

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28     Naomi Milthorpe kept beating about and saying “Ursula” – but then the wind can’t talk. That’s all a wind is. I like a [thing?] like that, it occurred to me in bed about the wind saying Ursula – even a grey wind. What was the book about. Not about a grey wind and copper leaves anyway but then the wind was so noisy. It had been like that ten years ago – but that was before Jimmie’s time and he was coming tonight through the grey wind. Saying “Ursula” all the time. But then I don’t believe in winds or copper leaves – not really copper at least’ . . .32

Waugh’s repetition of images such as the ‘grey’ wind and copper leaves are clearly intended as parodic keys, which through unvaried iteration render the original absurd. Verbal repetition (‘wind’ is repeated eleven times) similarly works to dismantle meaning, turning an image potent with romantic sublimity into so much hot air. Parodic stream of consciousness demonstrates the narrator’s psychological fixation, a mania paralleled, Waugh implies, by Mansfield’s own (‘Catherine Mansfield would write about ten pages straight off like this’). Despite dissociating himself from modernism, in ‘The Twilight of Language’ and beyond, Waugh did share some techniques, concerns and anxieties with the modernist movement. For example, Waugh’s deletion of interiority in Vile Bodies indicates his acceptance of modernist theories of detachment and impersonality. Archie Loss, among others, has commented on Waugh’s interest in Wyndham Lewis’s ‘external method’ of satire, in which the novelist satirises the human subject by focusing on externals (movements, appearances, speech) rather than internal thoughts or emotions.33 His direct quotation from The Waste Land (1922) in A Handful of Dust, combined with his reassembly of various aspects of Eliot’s poem within that novel, denotes a satirical absorption of High Modernist techniques of bricolage and pastiche. That Waugh considered the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press, publishers of Eliot’s poetry as well as Mansfield’s short stories, an appropriate outlet for his first short story ‘The Balance’ (1926) implies an early eagerness to associate with the experimental publications of High Modernism (the Woolfs rejected it, and the story was published in Chapman & Hall’s more traditional Georgian Stories, that year edited by Alec Waugh − Evelyn’s brother).34 In other words, Waugh’s rejection of literary modernism is not as unambiguous as many critics argue. Through quotation, pastiche, parody and satire, Waugh’s non-fiction and fictional writing manifests his ongoing, ambivalent, but ultimately productive engagement with modernist aesthetics. As a satirist, Waugh rejects and chastises, but whatever is rejected must first be absorbed and, importantly, reassembled. Waugh stands, then, as an example of influence via antagonism. To reorient both Jensen’s and Miller’s formulations, Waugh’s is a destructive misreading that generates a parodic likeness. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

The Young Evelyn Waugh on ‘Catherine’ Mansfield     29

In spite of the young Waugh’s difficulty with Mansfield’s style, there are some potent points of comparison, including echoing imagery, paralleled cinematic techniques, and sharp social satire, between the Bliss stories and Waugh’s fiction. An elaboration of these could be fruitful in coming to terms with the dominant influence of literary modernism, or Mansfield’s writing more specifically, upon the writing of the interwar period. Of course, influence is not quarantined by genre; it has long been noted that cinema and song made their influence felt upon highbrow culture, and this extends to Mansfield’s writing. Sydney Janet Kaplan describes the ‘cinematic visual effects’ in Mansfield’s fiction, and Sue Thomas argues that in ‘Pictures’ (1919), published in Bliss and Other Stories, Mansfield ‘translates film technique to the page’.35 In ‘Pictures’ Mansfield uses the techniques of the cinema camera, including closeups and pans, detachment, and narrative parataxis. In the opening paragraphs of the story, as Ada Moss is lying in bed, her early morning thoughts are spliced with the visual pageants of ‘Good Hot Dinners’ and ‘Sensible Substantial Breakfasts’, which pass in cinematic montage ‘across the ceiling’.36 Close-up is used throughout the story, in showing the letter from ‘BACKWASH FILM CO.’ and the ‘dirty dark red rose’ on the hat of the woman in Beit and Bithem’s waiting room.37 In the Café de Madrid the narrator pans, like a camera, through ‘[m]en, palms, red plush seats, white marble tables, waiters in aprons’.38 A repeated effect throughout the story is the narrator’s close-up on ‘the person in the glass’, a figure whose confinement in the visual frame of the mirror suggests its detachment from Ada Moss, a visual antagonist reflected in the narrative camera lens. As Thomas has observed, these techniques serve to humanise Ada Moss, to elicit readerly sympathy by aligning the narrative camera with Miss Moss’s perspective.39 Waugh is, likewise, well known for his appropriation and advocacy of the techniques of the cinema. In a January 1921 letter to his friend Dudley Carew on the art of fiction writing (written, notably, just one month before his ‘Twilight of Language’ address and presumably around the same time as he was reading Mansfield’s stories), Waugh advocated the use of cinematic techniques: Try and bring home thoughts by actions and incidents. Don’t make everything said. This is the inestimable value of the Cinema to novelists (don’t scoff at this as a cheap epigram it is really very true). Make things happen . . . GO TO THE CINEMA and risk the headache.40

Waugh’s use of cinematic techniques is evident in ‘The Balance’, in which a traditional third-person narrative of thwarted love and selfdiscovery is enfolded within onion peel layers of commentary in the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

30     Naomi Milthorpe

form of cinema-caption dialogue, scene cards, and commentary from the cockney cinema audience.41 While the protagonist Adam Doure is the hero of the traditionally narrated ‘on-screen’ romantic comedy, ‘The Balance’ achieves a level of sharp originality through its effacement of sympathy through the use of multiple layers of voyeuristic reading. Waugh’s camera lens pins his characters inside a visual frame in which action and incident are divorced from emotion and sympathy. There are some intertextual echoes between ‘Pictures’ and ‘The Balance’. As in Mansfield’s story, Waugh uses an extended image of an antagonistic reflection, though Adam’s reflection, rather than simply making faces, talks back to its original.42 More significantly, one of the three dominant audience members Waugh uses to comment upon the narrative is named Ada. In Waugh’s story, Ada’s absurdly repetitive explanation of every reflective moment in the film in romantic/sexual terms (‘“’E’s in love with ’er”’), along with her cockney accent and her inability to properly read the experimental film (‘“[. . .] if it isn’t funny and it isn’t murder and it isn’t Society, what is it? [. . .] I don’t understand this picture.”’) mark her as a comic object.43 The juxtaposition between Ada’s reception of the film and what happens in the film narrative as we read it shows Waugh’s deployment of modernist parataxis to create satire (the class inflections of this story’s narrative layers are revealing: Adam, the upper-middle-class Oxonian inhabiting the traditional text, has a significant collection of fine books, while the cinema audience are mostly working class). In contrast to Mansfield, techniques borrowed from the cinema serve to mechanise Waugh’s human characters, rendering them things to be judged rather than humans deserving of our sympathy. The parallels between ‘Pictures’ and ‘The Balance’ demonstrate the use of similar techniques to effect different responses, and the two writers share stylistic traits that echo even more forcefully. Particularly noticeable is a mutual predilection for sharp social satire; Mansfield’s eye for caustic observations, particularly in ‘Bliss’, is prescient of Waugh’s early novels. In ‘Bliss’, Bertha Young compares Mrs Norman Knight to ‘a very intelligent monkey’, imagining her to have made her ‘yellow silk dress out of scraped banana skins’ and seeing her earrings as ‘little dangling nuts’.44 Bertha’s childlike, yet mocking, delight foreshadows Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, in which six-year-old John Andrew can barely contain his excitement at meeting a society dame, Polly Cockpurse, after his father, Tony tells him she ‘looks like a monkey’: For days to come the image of this hairy, mischievous Countess occupied John Andrew’s mind . . . When kindly people spoke to him in the village he

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The Young Evelyn Waugh on ‘Catherine’ Mansfield     31 would tell them about her and how she swung head down from a tree throwing nutshells at passers-by.45

John Andrew’s literalising of Tony’s descriptive comparison − an imaginative leap to which he returns several times throughout the novel, with great comic result – echoes Bertha’s revisiting of her own amused comparison in ‘Bliss’. Bertha has to ‘dig her nails into her hands’ so as to stop from laughing when ‘she noticed Face’s funny little habit of tucking something down the front of her bodice – as if she kept a tiny, secret hoard of nuts there’.46 The satirical result in both Waugh and Mansfield is to ridicule the pretensions to aesthetic and social superiority of these monkeyish characters. Mansfield’s use of satire as a means of distancing the highbrow table talk of the society types from Bertha’s sympathetic interiority is radically deployed by Waugh, whose excision of his characters’ inner lives leads to extreme narratorial detachment. In Vile Bodies and A Handful of Dust, for instance, his characters seem to possess little interiority at all: they are mouthpieces rather than subjects. There are other echoes. The names of the female characters (Bertha in ‘Bliss’, Brenda in A Handful of Dust) are a sort of off-rhyme. The replacement of the mother figure with the nanny also offers a point of comparison, although in Waugh’s work, Brenda takes little interest in her son. Moreover, there are echoes of the theme of marital betrayal in ‘Bliss’ and A Handful of Dust. However, in Waugh’s novel, it is the husband who is blind, so besotted with his country house, his child, and the seclusion of private life that he is caught unawares by his wife Brenda’s callous adultery. Just as Harry and Pearl Fulton arrive in separate taxis and Pearl ‘lives in taxis’,47 Brenda’s assignations with her lover occur in taxis. Mansfield’s symbolic association of the cat with a sexualised woman holds in Waugh’s novel, in which Brenda is described as rubbing her cheek against her lover’s ‘like a cat’.48 Bertha’s love of her house parallels Tony’s with his country seat, Hetton, in which there is ‘not a glazed brick or encaustic tile that was not dear to Tony’s heart’.49 The effect of the discovery of their spouses’ adultery symbolically disrupts or destroys both beloved spaces, neutralising any former affective meaning (mysterious for Mansfield, sentimental for Waugh) held within. While there is no explicit evidence of a direct influence of ‘Bliss’ upon A Handful of Dust, Waugh did nevertheless read Mansfield. Both he and Mansfield use similar techniques and motifs in order to effect detachment from the society characters and the cheating spouse, and closer alignment with a protagonist who is textually trapped by association with a symbolic place. While these intertextual parallels open sites for fruitful comparison, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

32     Naomi Milthorpe

they do not prove a direct line of influence in either direction, though it does not seem far-fetched, given the evidence of Waugh’s 1921 reading, to read Mansfield in Waugh. Mansfield, whose death in 1923 preceded Waugh’s published literary career by several years, was of course completely unaware of Waugh. On Waugh’s side, any suggestion of influence would presumably be denied; Waugh, as he aged, grew ever more impatient with modernism’s obscurantism. In ‘The Twilight of Language’, the young Waugh’s response to his inability to understand Mansfield is both characteristic and a presage of his later views. In critiques of modernist writing outlined throughout this essay, Waugh’s complaints remain extremely similar. Modernist writing is characterised, in 1921, by ‘frantic obscurity of form’ that renders prose ‘unmeaning’; in 1937, it ‘employ[s] a language which can be intelligible only to [itself]’; in 1945 it is the ‘drivelling’ of the highbrow novelist. Waugh’s view of modernism as a form of writing at odds with his Augustan ideals of clarity, reason and intelligence has one of its earliest incarnations in ‘The Twilight of Language’. Waugh’s repeated misspelling of her name (she is always ‘Catherine’) suggests a wilful disrespect, both for Mansfield’s experimental style, and for his perception of her membership of the modernist literary elite. But in spite of this latent hostility, his choice of Mansfield’s stories as the subject of his paper to the Dilettanti suggests a desire both to associate with the avant-garde through reading, and to overpower it through writing. Although Mansfield was a marginal figure within High Modernist circles, Waugh’s satire shows how her writing could be considered (by those on the fringes of literary culture) as representative of modernist aesthetics. In parodying Mansfield so richly, while simultaneously imitating materialist writing so dully, the adolescent Waugh forges a literary style apart from both traditions, charged with the destructive energy of satire. While the mature Waugh would deny any likeness with Mansfield’s ‘frantic’ prose style, the adolescent Waugh’s textual imitation of Mansfield’s writing lies in stark reality upon the page, early evidence of the creative misreading of the canonical avant-garde upon the avowed anti-modernist.

Notes  1. Evelyn Waugh, ‘The Twilight of Language’ (1921), Evelyn Waugh Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Box 11, Folder 4, p. 1.   2. For this model of late modernist praxis see Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism, p. 14.

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The Young Evelyn Waugh on ‘Catherine’ Mansfield     33  3. Waugh, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, p. 7.  4. Waugh, Vile Bodies, p. 44.   5. Virginia Woolf, ‘The Leaning Tower’, in Leonard Woolf (ed.), Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4, p. 163.   6. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 5.   7. Margaret M. Jensen, The Open Book, pp. 7, 17.   8. Leon Guilhamet, Satire and the Transformation of Genre, pp. 12−13.  9. Jonathan Greenberg, Modernism, Satire, and the Novel. See also Justus Nieland, ‘Editor’s Introduction. Modernism’s Laughter’, pp. 80−6. 10. Waugh, ‘Twilight’, pp. 7−8. 11. Waugh, The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, p. 9. 12. Waugh, The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, p. 218; Angela Smith, ‘Katherine Mansfield and Rhythm’, p. 113. 13. Waugh, ‘Twilight’, p. 3. 14. Ibid. pp. 4−5. 15. Ibid. p. 5. 16. Ibid. p. 7. 17. Waugh, marginalia in The Unquiet Grave by Palinurus (Cyril Connolly), no date, Evelyn Waugh Collection, Box 7, Folder 1, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Austin, TX. 18. Alan Bell, ‘Waugh drops the pilot’, p. 27. 19. Ibid. p. 31. 20. H. J. Jackson, Marginalia, pp. 81−90. 21. Waugh, ‘Twilight’, pp. 7−8. 22. Christopher Hilliard, ‘Modernism and the Common Writer’, p. 780. 23. Waugh, ‘The New Poetry’, p. 226. 24. Ezra Pound, ‘Drunken Helots and Mr. Eliot’, pp. 72−4. 25. Ibid. p. 7. 26. Robert C. Elliott, The Power of Satire, pp. 220−1. 27. Waugh, ‘Twilight’, p. 8. 28. Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’, in Essays, vol. 4, p. 159. 29. Carey Snyder, ‘Katherine Mansfield and the New Age School of Satire’, p. 127. 30. Ibid. p. 130. 31. Waugh, ‘Twilight’, p. 8. 32. Ibid. 33. Archie Loss, ‘Vile Bodies, Vorticism and Italian Futurism’, pp. 155−64. 34. Martin Stannard, Evelyn Waugh, p. 128. 35. Sydney Janet Kaplan, Katherine Mansfield, p. 17; Susan Thomas, ‘Revisiting Katherine Mansfield’, p. 71. 36. Katherine Mansfield, ‘Pictures’, Collected Fiction, vol. 2, p. 178. 37. Ibid. pp. 159, 165. 38. Ibid. pp. 169−70. 39. Thomas, ‘Revisiting Katherine Mansfield’, p. 72. 40. Waugh, The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, p. 2. 41. Waugh, ‘The Balance’, in Ann Pasternak Slater (ed.), Complete Short Stories, p. 10. 42. Ibid. pp. 35−6. 43. Ibid. pp. 10, 7.

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34     Naomi Milthorpe 44. Mansfield, ‘Bliss’, Collected Fiction, vol. 2, p. 146. 45. Waugh, Handful of Dust, pp. 45−6. 46. Mansfield, ‘Bliss’, Collected Fiction, vol. 2, p. 130. 47. Ibid. p. 127. 48. Waugh, Handful of Dust, p. 11. 49. Ibid. p. 9.

EDL\JBURGH University Press ,;

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Chapter 3

‘Where is she?’ Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth Bowen Jessica Gildersleeve

Recognition of Katherine Mansfield’s influence on Elizabeth Bowen is not new. Studies of both writers frequently note a kinship that Saralyn R. Daly suggests might be seen as a result of writers during the 1920s ‘exploring the short story medium with similar needs for expression’ and thereby moving ‘in kindred lines of development’.1 This comparison with Mansfield was one Bowen herself dreaded when her first collection of short stories, Encounters, was published in 1923. She later wrote: ‘I first read Bliss after I had completed my own first set of stories, to be Encounters – then, exaltation and envy were shot through, instantly, by foreboding. “If I ever am published, they’ll say I copied her.” I was right.’2 But even as – and perhaps more fiercely because – Bowen protests against the earlier writer’s influence, Mansfield is inescapably there. For Bowen, she lives on. This chapter will seek to tease out where we might locate Mansfield in Bowen, and how we might most usefully think about this vexed issue of literary influence. This chapter will focus on some short fiction by Mansfield and Bowen, including Bowen’s ‘Daffodils’ and ‘Coming Home’, both published in the Encounters collection of 1923, and Mansfield’s 1920 short story, ‘Miss Brill’. However, this chapter will do more than address traces or influences of Mansfield as they appear in Bowen’s short fiction. There are many clear affinities between the two – for example, the preference for the sketch; the spotlighting of an event, character, or moment; experimentation with free indirect discourse; the preoccupation with life and death, with mothers and children, with loneliness, isolation and despair; the sharpness of observation which at times falls into contempt; and the precision of language. A central premise of the present chapter, however, is to consider Bowen’s perception of Mansfield’s influence on her work, and therefore to address the extent to which Bowen felt Mansfield to be a lost or absent influence. Moreover, it asks how we might situate this within an understanding of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

36     Jessica Gildersleeve

woman-to-woman influence and the ways in which this is inflected by the language of mourning. Bowen’s literary relationship to Mansfield, that is, is figured as a simultaneous anxiety about her own originality, and a desire to be engaged in a dialogue with the earlier writer. In this way, the chapter will draw on, and attempt to move beyond, feminist responses to Harold Bloom’s work on literary influence, in particular the work of Annette Kolodny. In this chapter, I will not only consider what it means to, in Virginia Woolf’s phrase, ‘think back through our mothers’,3 but what it means for Bowen to yearn for Mansfield as a lost influence. The present study will therefore consider how we might describe literary influence in modernist short fiction by women, as well as what Mansfield means to and for Bowen, and for us, as a literary influence. Jane Austen is the only other woman writer Bowen writes of with as much frequency as Mansfield, but nowhere does she express for the former the kind of lament or lack she appears to feel for the latter. Similarly, though Bowen is conscious of the influence male writers as diverse as Sheridan Le Fanu, Guy de Maupassant, Henry James and Marcel Proust have had on her, for these writers, too, she appears to feel little personal connection. Their influence is noted, but their absence in the present is not. By bringing to bear on this discussion Julia Kristeva’s work on language and (maternal) loss, it is argued that we might see Bowen’s work as an unresolved struggle to mourn Mansfield such that loss and absence do not only permit Bowen’s writing, but, more precisely, constitute it. Thus, for Bowen to ask of Mansfield, ‘Where is she?’ figures a struggle to accept or locate influence, and to attempt to come to terms with the absence of the literary foremother. For Bloom, literary influence is inescapably bound to, even a product of, the structures of the Freudian family romance. In The Anxiety of Influence, he describes the poem as a representation of the poet’s anxiety to overcome, even deny, the influence of what he terms the ‘precursor’ or ‘parent poem’.4 This is the text to which the later poem – always, he says, a ‘misprision’ or misreading of the precursor – is indebted.5 He argues that ‘influence is a variety of melancholy or an anxiety-principle’,6 and that ‘a poem is a poet’s melancholy at his lack of priority’.7 Indeed, this kind of anxiety is clear in Bowen’s furious denial of Mansfield’s influence, the ‘exaltation and envy’ felt on her first reading of Mansfield. Paradoxically, even as Bowen denies the possibility of Mansfield’s influence, she might also be seen to affirm it. The anxiety of influence observed by Bowen at the beginning of her career is so pervasive it can even be felt twenty-six years after the event, when she wrote that Preface; angst can still be located in Bowen’s Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth Bowen     37

description of her sense of ‘foreboding’, and the apparent sulky adolescent resentment of ‘I was right’. The attitude expressed here recalls one of the stories from Encounters, ‘Coming Home’, in which the twelveyear-old Rosalind is shocked to find her mother absent from home when she wants to vaunt her achievement in an essay competition: ‘Where’s mother?’8 Rosalind can only imagine, torturously, that her mother, ‘Darlingest’, is dead. When eventually Darlingest does return, Rosalind hides, forcing her mother to ask where she is; wanting to ‘beautifully [hurt] her [mother]’, Rosalind sulkily refuses to share her news.9 Simply put, in this story, the mother or precursor’s absence provokes only hostility and denial. This is a hostility similar to that expressed by Bowen in her Preface to this first collection: ‘As far as I now see, I must have been anxious to approximate to my elders, yet to demolish them.’10 And demolish Mansfield she does indeed try to do in this Preface. While she initially tempers this by her suggestion that ‘At that age [she had written these stories before she was twenty-three] one is bound up in one’s own sensations – those appear to be new; actually, what is new is one’s awareness of them, and one’s pleased cultivation of that awareness’, by the essay’s end her satisfied praise for the collection is that it figures ‘an attempt to say something not said before’.11 Like Rosalind, who possesses a simultaneous longing to draw closer to and yet ‘hurt’ her mother, Bowen’s essay admits the desire to emulate her literary forebears, even while she emphasises her originality, severing any connection and destroying the authority of those who came before. But this Bloomian model of influence as a way of understanding the literary relationship between Mansfield and Bowen is problematic on two fronts. First, there is the difficulty of translating such a gendered model of creativity to its occurrence in a female literary heritage. Here we come to a problem identified by Woolf who, in A Room of One’s Own (1929), lamented the lack of a recognisable matrilineal literary tradition precisely as it presented what she calls the ‘difficulty which faced [women writers] . . . when they came to set their thoughts to paper – that is that they had no tradition behind them, or one so short and partial that it was of little help’.12 In a line so often cited, she posits that ‘we think back through our mothers if we are women’.13 But how can thought, creative thought, literary production, occur without the parent text? We arrive, then, at the problem of literary influence and of literary production for the woman writer; echoing Rosalind of ‘Coming Home’, where is the precursor, the mother text? What does this do to our understanding of literary influence within a female literary tradition? Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

38     Jessica Gildersleeve

Consider the way in which the concluding sentences of ‘Coming Home’ strike a final note of abandonment: Darlingest did not hear her; she had forgotten. She was standing in the middle of the room with her face turned towards the window, looking at something a long way away, smiling and singing to herself and rolling up her veil.14

Darlingest, mother, precursor does not hear, and worse, forgets her progeny’s presence; influence, it is devastatingly recorded, matters only to the latecomer. The lament is not part of a dialogue, but a call without response. This is where woman-to-woman influence falls out of the bounds of Bloom’s model. Earlier feminist revisions of Bloom’s work attribute this to the lack of a matrilineal heritage described by Woolf; Kolodny, for example, notes, ‘the canonical sense of a shared and coherent literary tradition is . . . essential to the utility of Bloom’s paradigm of literary influence’.15 Kolodny goes on to say, quoting Bloom, ‘what happens if one tries to write, or to teach, or to think or even to read without the sense of a tradition? . . . Why, nothing at all happens, just nothing.’16 According to Bloom’s Oedipal model of influence, the ‘ephebe’ must, in Bowen’s terms, ‘demolish’ the precursor; it is this continued enactment of warfare that forms descendant texts. But in contrast to the male authors ‘who celebrate their “liberation” from paternal authorities they have successfully learned to emulate’, Jeffrey Steele argues, ‘the female mourner [or author has] had to learn both how to distance herself from self-destructive paradigms of patriarchal influence and to recover her connection with a chorus of women’s voices’.17 Women writers, then, in the traditional counter to Bloom’s model, identify the impossibility of a struggle with the precursor precisely because that precursor does not exist. Where is she? But this suggestion that the literary relationships between women are described in terms of community and democracy rather than the egotism and genius of the patriarchal tradition, that ‘women [look] toward other women writers for affirmation and connection, not for difference or in competition’18 and that aggression does not form a part of the literary relationships between women is not entirely true, Terry Castle posits. Rather, she asserts that [selective misogyny] undoubtedly plays a larger part in the genesis of female creativity than has been acknowledged. How many great women, indeed, have been inspired to accomplishment by an annoyance with their mothers? How many have been prompted to write or paint by a curious lurking envy of some female rival?19

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Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth Bowen     39

This kind of ‘annoyance’, ‘lurking envy’, or jealousy is certainly present in those women whose work is shadowed, to some extent, by Mansfield’s. In ‘Hating Katherine Mansfield’, for example, Andrew Bennett explores the ‘ambivalent’ friendship of Mansfield and her contemporary, Woolf: ‘For Woolf at least’, he says, their relationship ‘involved issues of sympathy, fear of contagion and the passion of jealousy.’20 Indeed, the denial of reading Mansfield is shared by Bowen and Woolf: ‘I’ve not read Katherine Mansfield’, Woolf asserts in a letter in March of 1922, going on to add, tersely, ‘and don’t mean to.’21 Both Woolf and Bowen seem to resent and to deny that they have, in a sense, arrived too late. Mansfield has already innovated. There is a second way in which Bloom’s model might be seen to fail to accurately describe the literary relationship between Mansfield and Bowen, and that is because of the way in which Bowen’s writing about Mansfield shifted across her career. The younger Bowen denied Mansfield’s influence, or even familiarity with her. But this kind of rejection does not tell the whole story. In a letter to Alan Cameron (whom she would later marry) dated 19 January 1923, just ten days after Mansfield’s death, Bowen writes: Talking of short lives, aren’t you sorry about Katherine Mansfield. I feel as tho’ it were somebody I knew very well, don’t you? . . . Apparently she had been ill for years – lungs. I wonder if it was that that gave her writing that peculiar vitality. She certainly must have lived up to her means.22

The passage demonstrates Bowen’s perception of intimacy occurring alongside uncertainty about and unfamiliarity with her subject. Indeed, this suggests a simultaneous desire for kinship, and resentment that this bond does not exist. Incidentally, this is the same letter in which Bowen reports to Cameron that her collection, to be Encounters, has been accepted for publication, so that this letter at once describes the failed voice of the mother-rival, and the survival or establishment of Bowen’s own. In her 1945 essay ‘The Short Story in England’ Bowen demonstrates further ambivalence about Mansfield’s literary presence. She is torn between an assertion of her own originality and recognition of Mansfield’s influence: Katherine Mansfield’s tragically early death left her not lost to us as an inspiration. Throughout the 1920s, and into the 1930s, her imitators, inevitably, were many. What was better, quite independent talents found themselves encouraged, by her achievement, in their own belief in the short story.23

Even as Mansfield is acknowledged as ‘an inspiration’, Bowen rightly distances herself from the earlier writer’s ‘many imitators’, before Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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­iluting Mansfield’s influence to mere ‘encourage[ment], by her d achievement’. This fluctuation between intimacy and unfamiliarity, between inspiration and imitation, means that an exploration of literary influence as it presents itself in Mansfield and Bowen is more complicated than the previously discussed models of influence might suggest. The complex (and for Mansfield, posthumous) relationship between the two women suggests that woman-to-woman influence is best described not by anxiety but by desire. Whereas earlier feminist models of literary influence deny the possibility of a struggle with the precursor, the relationship between Mansfield and Bowen describes a battle, but one that is motivated by this very desire. If Kristeva is right to assert that mourning ‘conceals an aggressiveness toward the lost object, thus revealing the ambivalence of the depressed person with respect to the object of mourning’,24 then the woman-to-woman influence as figured in Mansfield and Bowen is constituted not by melancholia or anxiety, as described in Bloom, but rather by the desire or struggle to mourn of Kristeva’s work. Bowen’s Preface to a collection of Mansfield’s stories (Thirty-Four Short Stories, published by Collins in 1957) was titled, ‘A Living Writer’. In it, her observation that Mansfield ‘moved . . . among nothing but intimates or strangers’ describes that simultaneous intimacy and estrangement of their own literary relationship.25 In both this essay and the earlier letter to Alan Cameron this is figured as a kind of uncanny juxtaposition of vitality and mortality in Mansfield, so that in a passage of yearning from which the title of this essay is taken, even as Bowen asserts Mansfield as ‘living’, and as living on, she marks her absence: I may say that a fellow writer cannot but look on Katherine Mansfield’s work as interrupted, hardly more than suspended, momentarily waiting to be gone on with. Page after page gives off the feeling of being still warm from the touch, fresh from the pen. Where is she – our missing contemporary?26

Angela Smith has described a similar effect of Mansfield’s death on Woolf, stating that ‘Mansfield remained for Woolf a presence in absence, a faint ghost, throughout the years she survived her.’27 Mansfield remains, it seems, a vitalising force, simultaneously corporeal and spectral, in the work of those women she influenced. In a letter to her lover Charles Ritchie, Bowen continues to describe the connection to Mansfield she had felt in writing that Preface: I did have a curious feeling about writing it – a more personal feeling than I’ve had for a long time (about writing anything, I mean). At the outset, it seemed just a chore and a sweat having to write the preface at all, specially when I wanted to be getting on with my Rome book [A Time in Rome (1960)]. Then

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Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth Bowen     41 a curious sort of undertone from the subject, and I suppose also the personality of the woman, caught me. I became so deeply involved that the thing became more and more difficult to write – I could not have got into more of a fever if I had been G. Flaubert: literally at one point I sat up the whole of one night.28

Not only does Bowen’s ‘personal feeling’ emphasise her perception of an intimacy between herself and Mansfield – and an intimacy described in strangely romantic terms – but influence, here, becomes a kind of ‘influenza’, something ‘fever[ish]’, something ‘caught’. ‘A creative manner of seeing’, Bowen later wrote, ‘is infectious.’29 Mansfield, it seems, gets under Bowen’s skin. This desire for influence can also be seen as a desire to influence, a desire for interaction or a kind of dialogue, and it is this kind of desire that can be seen when Mansfield’s story ‘Miss Brill’ is considered in relation to Bowen’s ‘Daffodils’. Both stories describe the agonising social isolation of an unmarried woman, and the intense yearning of these women, Miss Brill and Miss Murcheson, not only to be noticed but to exert influence: literally, to take centre stage. Thus Miss Brill constructs an illusion of psychological affinity and exchange with her fellow concert-goers in the Jardins Publiques – ‘we understand, we understand’, she thinks − whereby they are all members of a ‘company’, and ‘even she had a part’.30 The story turns, of course, on the collapse of what Clare Hanson and Andrew Gurr call this ‘false community’.31 Similarly, when in Bowen’s ‘Daffodils’ ‘a gust of wind rush[es] up the street, whirling [Miss Murcheson’s] skirts up round her like a ballet-dancer’s’, and she feels ‘as though she had been enticed into a harlequinade’ and looks ‘round to see if anyone had witnessed her display of chequered moirette petticoat and the inches of black stocking above her boots’, her disappointment that there has been no audience for her performance is felt.32 Indeed, both women even anthropomorphise inanimate objects – Miss Brill, her fox fur; Miss Murcheson, her daffodils – in an attempt to satisfy this desire for an audience. These fetishised objects, too, come to operate within the terms of loss and the longing for dialogue described in the literary relationship of Mansfield and Bowen. In ‘Daffodils’ Miss Murcheson, desperate for company, converses with her daffodils until she hears the voices of her young students in the street. She invites the girls to stay to tea, but they refuse: Tomorrow they will be again impersonal; three pink moons in a firmament of faces. The three, released, eyed one another with a common understanding.

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42     Jessica Gildersleeve ‘Miss Murcheson has never really lived,’ said Doris. They linked arms again and sauntered down the road.33

Miss Murcheson’s isolation is underscored: first, by the daffodils themselves, for they remind her of those given to her the previous year by ‘Somebody’,34 and second, by the community of the children from which she is excluded, as the ‘firmament’ of their faces works to divide her from the rest of the world. Indeed, this juxtaposition of isolation and community is typical of Bowen’s early writing, and her early experience of writing, for as Victoria Glendinning points out, not only do Bowen’s early characters tend to ‘form conspiracies’ to compete and to ‘demolish’, but because ‘she had not read the stories of Hardy, Henry James, Maupassant or Katherine Mansfield’, ‘she was very much on her own’.35 The loneliness felt by her character is reflected in that of the writer’s. What Miss Murcheson misses are people, relationships; the daffodils only mean something, therefore, because of ‘association’.36 ‘There are lots of things’, she declares to the confused young girls, ‘that you only feel because of people. That’s the only reason things are there for, I think . . . Only, if I could be able, I’m always trying, to make you care about the little fine things you might pass over, that have such big roots underground.’37 Narrative language is precisely the kind of ‘little fine thing’ that outsiders (including the reader) must not ‘pass over’, but instead seek to fathom its depths. Indeed, the denial of such depths of meaning is, for Sara Beardsworth, isolating: ‘the absence of signifiers of loss leaves the depressive person a prisoner of affect, closed up with a weight of meaning, a painful innerness which has no meaning’.38 This is an idea with which Mansfield infected Bowen. The climax of ‘Miss Brill’ also concerns the rejection of the eponymous character from the perceived community, voiced by its young people: ‘Why does she come here at all – who wants her? Why doesn’t she keep her silly old mug at home?’39 The story records no response from Miss Brill, only that: to-day she passed the baker’s by, climbed the stairs, went into the little dark room – her room like a cupboard – and sat down on the red eiderdown. She sat there for a long time. The box that the fur came out of was on the bed. She unclasped the necklet quickly; quickly, without looking, laid it inside. But when she put the lid on she thought she heard something crying.40

Miss Brill literally shuts herself away in a crypt-like cupboard, and then repeats this gesture as she buries her fox-fur in its box. The ambiguity of the ‘something crying’ not only works to personify the fur as something to be cared for, but also signifies Miss Brill’s repression of her own misery as the ‘inanimation’ of herself – she only ‘thought she heard’, and moreNot for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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over becomes ‘something’ crying. Thus, for Françoise Defromont, ‘Miss Brill’ ‘shows a woman in her neurotic relationship with a love-object which she has invested with her fantasies, a fetish artificially substituted for the other, absent loved one – whether a man, her own sexual self, or a child’.41 Just as Bowen’s work longs for its precursor, Mansfield’s writing demonstrates the absence of the ephebe. (It is worth remarking, here, on the ‘real life’ traumas of mother and child loss experienced by Bowen and Mansfield, as the former lost her mother at thirteen, while the latter suffered through several failed pregnancies.) Importantly, as Sabine Coelsch-Foisner has recognised, the ‘climactic revelation towards which the story moves is symbolically stowed away in a box [so that] only the reader has realized Miss Brill’s despair’.42 That narrative itself refuses to acknowledge trauma and mourning; instead, both ‘Miss Brill’ and ‘Daffodils’ only approach loss, so that it is precisely in the refusal to narrate the absence that each story attests to it. As Defromont notes of Mansfield’s work (and we might say the same for Bowen), ‘disruptions in the . . . stories thus point to the vacant space of impossible mourning, to the silent words of unexpressed grief’.43 The terms of earlier feminist rereading of influence might read these kinds of markers of loss and absence as an indication of the fact that, in Kolodny’s words, ‘again and again, each woman who took up the pen had to confront anew her bleak premonition that, both as writers and as readers, women too easily became isolated islands of symbolic significance, available only to, and decipherable only by, one another’.44 However, the relationship of literary influence between Mansfield and Bowen is more complicated than this, precisely because it is in Bowen’s mourning for Mansfield that their narratives are brought into relation with one another. It is in that semiotic representation of loss that the work of these two women is brought into textual relation. We see in Bowen’s writing about Mansfield a tension between the anxiety or denial of influence evident in the Preface to Encounters and the desire for influence and an assertion of Mansfield’s survival, which characterises the later Preface, ‘A Living Writer’. ‘The thing’, said Bowen of her writing practice, and in language that echoes her description of writing about Mansfield, ‘was a struggle.’45 It is possible to consider that struggle in terms of this anxiety about and desire for literary influence. To this end, it is useful to turn to the work of Kristeva, for whom influence and intertextuality are questions of desire. Indeed, as Michael Worton and Judith Still point out, for Kristeva, ‘intertextual relations are passionate ones’.46 Intertextuality, or what Bloom sees as ‘poetic misprision’, is in many ways akin to what Kristeva terms ‘transposition’. Yet, where Bloom sees the production of creative work to arise at the site of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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misreading, Kristeva sees the process as one of mourning, and a desire for influence as dialogue; the ‘critical task of transposition’, she argues, ‘consists of two facets: the mourning gone through for the object . . . and the subject’s acceptance of a set of signs (signifying precisely because of the absence of object) only thus open to serial organisation’.47 Thus, we speak (or write) precisely because we mourn. This suggestion is particularly interesting in the context of Bowen’s discussion of literary influence, her 1962 essay ‘Sources of Influence’, in which she writes: Is it true that the writers of our day are too much subject to influence, from whatever source? Do they lack the resilience, the independent hardiness of their predecessors? Literary influence . . . seems harder now to throw off than once it was: it has been said that we have too many disciples, too few masters. If this be so, it may be found that, as a generation, we writers are in a transitional, learning stage: the task of expression appears a vast one – the old simplicities of the world are gone; the artist is hard-pressed by what is happening round him. Our century, as it takes its frantic course, seems barely habitable by humans: we have to learn to survive while we learn to write. (emphasis added)48

Bowen’s parallel arc of survival and learning suggests the modernist need to find new modes of expression to record the ‘vast’ and ‘frantic’ changes of the twentieth century, but, moreover, that last phrase finds its echo in Kristeva’s model of speech. This is particularly pertinent in the broader context of understanding Bowen’s work as the writing of trauma. The first words of Bowen’s first short story ‘Breakfast’ (1923) are: ‘Behold, I die daily’.49 This marks a preoccupation with death that continues throughout Bowen’s career. Not unlike Mansfield, trauma, loss and mourning describe her work, and we might trace this preoccupation with death and absence – particularly as it relates to mothers – to a kind of mourning or working through, a struggle to articulate the loss, or in Kristevan terms, a move from the semiotic to the symbolic. As Beardsworth notes, ‘expulsion, clinging, deprivation, splitting’ are all ‘features of the preverbal infant’s struggle with the symbolic within the bodily exchange between mother and child or, more specifically, within the withdrawal of the mother’s body’.50 And while trauma is often said to produce in speech, in literature, an asymbolic incapability to ­transpose – that is, a lapse into silence – this is not the case in Bowen’s work. On the contrary, Bowen’s prose does not describe a melancholic refusal, but in the final analysis it constitutes a struggle to mourn: it always and everywhere struggles with trauma, seeks to represent the unassimilable, seeks to represent loss, and seeks to work through, to locate the object as missing, as being missed. ‘Where is she?’ is thus Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth Bowen     45

synonymous with the lament, ‘I miss you.’ In other words, it might be possible to see the compulsive return to Mansfield in Bowen’s work to constitute a kind of ‘remembering, repeating and working through’, a move away from the melancholic denial of loss and towards mourning and the recognition of absence in a totalised narrative: ‘We have to learn to survive while we learn to write.’ However, Bowen’s work does not necessarily operate in such psychoanalytically simple terms. Bowen misses Mansfield, and this is not a struggle that is ever resolved within her writing. Indeed, mourning does not only permit Bowen’s writing, but more precisely, constitutes it. In ‘Coming Home’, Rosalind comes to recognise the belatedness of the experience of trauma: She had understood some time ago that nothing became real for her until she had had time to live it over again. An actual occurrence was nothing but the blankness of a shock, then the knowledge that something had happened; afterwards one could creep back and look into one’s mind and find new things in it, clear and solid.51

Bowen’s compulsion to return to Mansfield throughout her career can be seen as a similar kind of ‘living over again’. If Rosalind’s recognition here may be seen to describe a traumatic loss similar to the death of Mansfield, then if the ‘living writer’ is anywhere, she is in the influence she had on those who came after, her literary offspring. Mansfield survives in writing: in her own work, and in the work of those she influenced. However, we might see Mansfield’s innovative modernist work itself as a kind of traumatic disruption to traditional modes of literary representation. In that sense, Bowen and those who came after can be said to ‘creep back and look into [Mansfield’s] mind and find new things in it’. The work of mourning, of recognising and coming to terms with loss, then also becomes a new understanding of the precursor and her writing, and a desire to if not melancholically reanimate the lost object, then to recognise her as perpetual contemporary. Mansfield’s survival, then, is learned in writing. To bring this back to influence, and towards some kind of conclusion, that tension between an anxiety of and a desire for influence should not only be seen as a struggle between a Bloomsian and a Kristevan model of influence, but as a question of mourning or melancholia (recall that, for Bloom, ‘poetic influence is a variety of melancholy or an anxietyprinciple’). That struggle between desire for the precursor, on the one hand, and the anxiety of influence, on the other, describes a similar tension between mourning and melancholia. Thus, when Bowen asks of Mansfield ‘Where is she?’ she enacts a struggle to accept or locate Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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influence, to attempt to come to terms with the absence of the literary foremother, and in some sense, to restore her to life.

Notes   1. Saralyn R. Daly, Katherine Mansfield, p. 116.  2. Elizabeth Bowen, ‘Preface to Encounters’, in Hermione Lee (ed.), The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen, p. 120.   3. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, p. 76.   4. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 14.   5. Ibid. p. 7.  6. Ibid.   7. Ibid. p. 96.   8. Bowen, ‘Coming Home’, in Collected Stories, p. 98.   9. Ibid. p. 99. 10. Bowen, ‘Preface to Encounters’, p. 121. 11. Ibid. pp. 120–1. 12. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, p. 76. 13. Ibid. 14. Bowen, ‘Coming Home’, p. 100. 15. Annette Kolodny, ‘A Map for Rereading’, p. 452. 16. Ibid. 17. Jeffrey Steele, ‘The Call of Eurydice: Mourning and Intertextuality in Margaret Fuller’s Writing’, in Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein (eds), Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History, p. 275. 18. Florence Howe, ‘T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and the Future of “Tradition”’, p. 11. 19. Terry Castle, Boss Ladies, Watch Out! p. xix. 20. Andrew Bennett, ‘Hating Katherine Mansfield’, p. 3. 21. Woolf, Letters, vol. 2, pp. 514–15. 22. Bowen, Letter to Alan Cameron, in Lee (ed.), The Mulberry Tree, p. 193. 23. Bowen, ‘The Short Story in England’, in Phyllis Lassner (ed.), Elizabeth Bowen: A Study of the Short Fiction, p. 139. 24. Julia Kristeva, Black Sun, p. 11. 25. Bowen, ‘A Living Writer’, in Lee (ed.), The Mulberry Tree, p. 80. 26. Ibid. p. 70. 27. Angela Smith, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, p. 29. 28. Bowen, Letter to Charles Ritchie, in Victoria Glendinning and Judith Robertson (eds), Love’s Civil War, pp. 222–3. 29. Bowen, ‘Sources of Influence’, in Lassner (ed.), Elizabeth Bowen, p. 146. 30. Katherine Mansfield, ‘Miss Brill’, Collected Fiction, vol. 2, p. 253. 31. Clare Hanson and Andrew Gurr, Katherine Mansfield, p. 79. 32. Bowen, ‘Daffodils’, in Collected Stories, p. 21. 33. Ibid. p. 27. 34. Ibid. p. 25. 35. Victoria Glendinning, Elizabeth Bowen, p. 42. 36. Bowen, ‘Daffodils’, p. 26.

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Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth Bowen     47 37. Ibid. 38. Sara Beardsworth, Julia Kristeva, p. 107. 39. Mansfield, ‘Miss Brill’, Collected Fiction, vol. 2, p. 228. 40. Ibid. p. 229. 41. Françoise Defromont, ‘Impossible Mourning’, p. 159. 42. Sabine Coelsch-Foisner, ‘Finding a Voice’, p. 99. 43. Defromont, ‘Impossible Mourning’, p. 164. 44. Kolodny, ‘A Map for Rereading’, p. 460. 45. Bowen, ‘A Living Writer’, p. 119. 46. Michael Worton and Judith Still, ‘Introduction’, p. 18. 47. Kristeva, Black Sun, p. 41. 48. Bowen, ‘Sources of Influence’, p. 147. 49. Bowen, ‘Breakfast’, in Collected Stories, p. 15. 50. Beardsworth, Julia Kristeva, p. 100. 51. Bowen, ‘Coming Home’, p. 95.

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Chapter 4

‘[O]ur precious art’: Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and the Gift Economy Kathryn Simpson In her 21 November 1919 Athenaeum review of Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day (1919), Katherine Mansfield states that ‘opinion is united in declaring this [the present time] to be an age of experiment’.1 This artistic context is of vital importance to these two writers, whose work is now acknowledged to have played a key role in reshaping and reconfiguring the literary landscape of the early twentieth century. Both Mansfield and Woolf were aware of their shared goals in testing the boundaries of what was thought possible in literature, and many of their diaries, journals and letters attest to their professional affinity. Critics and biographers have identified important, if sometimes unlikely, parallels and correspondences in their thinking, perspectives and aims; as Angela Smith argues so persuasively, Mansfield and Woolf ‘mirror each other constantly, in spite of their evident differences’.2 As other critics have argued, however, theirs was a fluctuating and volatile relationship, complex and shifting – ‘entirely founded on quicksands’, as Woolf described it.3 It was characterised by intense feelings of personal and professional envy, as well as by intimacy and a sense of being in tune with one another. Woolf recognised that what consolidated their bond was their ‘caring so genuinely if so differently [. . .] about [their] precious art’.4 Although they were rivals in the literary marketplace, both keen to make money and achieve recognition, this idea of their writing as something ‘precious’ and their mutual care for writing as ‘the rarest and most desirable of gifts’5 takes on a more significant resonance in the context of a broader sense of generosity and gift-giving that was so central to their relationship and to their influence on each other. A focus on the gift economy reveals not only the powerful sense of connection Woolf and Mansfield’s reciprocal generosity created, but also the ways in which gifts – given and withheld – worked to exert influence and bring to the fore the intensity of competition, envy and rivalry. The fundamental ambivalence of the gift, its rich possibilities but also its Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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exertion of control, in many ways encapsulates the contradictory nature of their relationship. Both women were generous toward each other, particularly in praising the artistic talents and creative ‘gifts’ of the other, and reference to gift-giving features frequently in their writing. As their French contemporary, Marcel Mauss makes clear in his ground-breaking ethnographic study, Essai sur le don [The Gift] (1925), the exchange of gifts has a social function and works to create and consolidate a sense of solidarity and commitment. Between autumn 1918 and early 1919 Woolf visited Mansfield weekly to talk about writing. Woolf’s later description of their talk as ‘priceless’ and her sense that they were ‘the only women at [that] moment [. . .] with gift enough to make talk of writing interesting’6 suggests an understanding of their bond as being founded on a gift economy. However, this support and encouragement was always conditional. As Mauss makes clear, the gift is always ambivalent: it is both interested and disinterested, effecting the consolidation of social bonds but also exerting power and influence. The receipt of a gift means not only accepting some aspect of the giver but also ‘accept[ing] a challenge’. The gift comes ‘with a burden attached’ not only to reciprocate but, in certain contexts of competition and rivalry, to prove oneself equal to the gift received. Mauss’s theory also refers to the risks and dangers of the gift; the etymological root of the word ‘gift’ is dosis or ‘dose of poison’ in Ancient Greek and Latin.7 A focus on these ideas of the gift sheds new light on the generousrivalrous relationship between Mansfield and Woolf. Reading their relationship as engaging in a gift economy illuminates the attempts made, sometimes direct and deliberate and at others indirect or consequential, to shape their individual work and, particularly, to promote their shared ambitions for the development of modernist writing. Their generosity is double-edged and determined to exert influence: gifts of praise are offered and withdrawn depending on the extent to which each perceives the other as maintaining their collective ideas and representations, and return gifts and ‘thank you’s are strategically deployed to maintain bonds and a complicated power dynamic. The focus in this chapter will be on ideas of influence operating through the gift in relation to the genesis and development of Woolf’s short story ‘Kew Gardens’ (1919). Woolf and Mansfield met in February 1917 in what Woolf describes as ‘a slight rapprochement with Katherine Mansfield’.8 But they had been aware of each other and wanting to meet for some time; as Woolf wrote to Lytton Strachey in July 1916, ‘Katherine Mansfield has dogged my steps for three years.’ This letter also implies Woolf’s sense of Mansfield’s siren-like allure: ‘We go to Cornwall in September, and if Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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I see anyone answering to your account on a rock or in the sea I shall accost her.’9 Perhaps already aware of the dangers of similarity, both were ‘wary’ of meeting and, as Kathleen Jones describes it, ‘[a] period of courtship beg[an]’ whereby ‘[m]utual friends’ conveyed ‘encouraging messages’.10 Throughout 1917 Woolf’s letters and diaries attest to a growing sense of admiration for Mansfield, as well as a sense of shock and curiosity at their differences in experience. As she writes to Vanessa Bell, she had ‘an odd talk’ with Mansfield in which she [Mansfield] revealed ‘hav[ing] gone every sort of hog since she was 17, which is interesting’. Despite obvious differences, Woolf recognised that Mansfield had ‘a much better idea of writing than most’.11 Their shared approach to writing, and particularly an opposition to the increasing commercialisation of literature, is also apparent in the articles Mansfield, John Middleton Murry and Woolf produced. In jointly written articles published in Rhythm, such as ‘The Meaning of Rhythm’ and ‘Seriousness in Art’, both published in 1912, Mansfield and Murry vehemently assert literature as an art and not a trade, countering what they perceived as the increasing commercialisation of literature.12 These attacks in favour of art as an articulation of ‘life’ resonate strongly with Woolf’s essay ‘Modern Novels’ (1919), in which she condemns contemporary realist fiction, notably that of Arnold Bennett, for its materialist approach to literary production that is inadequate for representing ‘life itself’.13 Mansfield’s response to this seems to confirm her sense of its significance. She praises Woolf for ‘writ[ing] so damned well, so devilish well’. Unlike the ‘little others [. . .] dodging & stumbling along, taking a sniff here and a stare there’, Woolf is at ease in this new atmosphere of literary innovation and can ‘take the air in the “grand manner”’. Her letter to Woolf is effusive in its celebration of Woolf’s achievement: ‘To tell you the truth – I am proud of your writing. I read it & think “How she beats them ---.”’14 Mansfield also wrote to Ottoline Morrell that June about the ‘beautiful brilliant creature’ with unique artistic perspective she perceived Woolf to be.15 Mansfield’s review of Woolf’s ‘Kew Gardens’ testifies to this sense of collective vision as it expresses a sense of pride in Woolf’s achievement in challenging conventions. This relatively early moment in their professional relationship can be seen to be a testing ground for their growing bond, but also for their sense of a shared commitment to literary innovation. In her review, published in the Athenaeum in June 1919, Mansfield admires the sense of suspense Woolf’s story creates: ‘Anything may happen; her world is on tiptoe.’ For Mansfield, ‘Kew Gardens’ evokes a sense of anticipation of something new, of life, rich and expansive, ‘filling a whole world’.16 Yet her review of Night and Day, published Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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just five months later, is hard-hitting in its criticism of Woolf’s reluctance to take risks. The novel is a ship ‘sailing into port serene and resolute on a deliberate wind’ and, showing no sign of making ‘a perilous voyage’, its ‘leisurely progression’ ‘in the tradition of the English novel’ ensures the ‘safety’ of both reader and characters; in short, it is ‘Miss Austen up-to-date’.17 It would seem that, in Mansfield’s eyes, Woolf had reneged on their shared goals as expressed in their letters, conversations and critical essays, as well as practised in their creative work. That Mansfield felt Woolf’s second novel to be heavy and unyielding, making the reader ‘feel old and chill’,18 seems a pointed reproach in the light of Woolf’s own modernist manifesto in ‘Modern Novels’, with its emphasis on modern literature’s role in capturing ‘life’. This wider concern about the deadening effect of conformity and the urgent need to break free of constraining literary and social conventions is clear in Mansfield’s enraged response to ‘the disgraceful dishonesty’ she perceived in the glowing review of Woolf’s novel in The Times Literary Supplement.19 Writing to Murry shortly after, Mansfield is keen to assure him of both her commitment to him and to their new vision for the Athenaeum, for which Murry became editor in January 1919. They were striving to ‘be bold’ in their challenge to those wanting to hold back the development of literature, to those ‘cowards’ and ‘traitors’ who sought to deny the impact of the contemporary moment, specifically the Great War and its effects.20 What Mansfield criticises as Woolf’s ‘aloofness’ – an attitude she considers ‘morally wrong’, as Murry reports to Woolf 21 – seems connected to the novel’s ‘absence of any scars’ and ‘unaware[ness] of what has been happening’.22 This is the denial of the war that Mansfield more explicitly terms ‘a lie in the soul’ in a letter to Murry.23 Mansfield is prepared to risk the rupture of her friendship and professional relationship with Woolf, whose sensitivity to perceived criticism was acute, in order to fulfil what she feels it is her ‘duty to perform’: that is, ‘to be sincere’ in her views.24 Woolf’s hope that Mansfield would not review the novel she herself later described to Ethyl Smyth as ‘that interminable Night and Day’25 is expressed in severe terms: she feared ‘the acid in [Mansfield]’.26 In the review itself, Woolf thought she ‘saw spite’ and a mean-minded attitude to her own success. Seemingly in response to this review and to the news that Mansfield was ‘practically cured’, Woolf adds that she ‘need not now spread [her] charity so wide’.27 Woolf’s ‘charity’ here could refer to her sympathy and care for another woman also beset at times by debilitating illness, the ‘welcome’ that she, as a member of the cultural elite of Bloomsbury, extended to the ‘little colonial’ in recognising Mansfield as a friend and fellow writer and, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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perhaps also, the invitation to contribute Prelude (1918) for publication by the Hogarth Press. Woolf also makes clear the ease with which she feels such ‘generosity’ can be withdrawn. The context of gift exchange as it gives rise to this complex interplay of the personal and professional, the generous and critical, bears closer scrutiny. As several biographers and critics have pointed out, Mansfield’s ‘priceless talk’ would seem to have had a positive and inspirational effect on Woolf in relation to her production of her pivotal story ‘Kew Gardens’ – a story literally structured around conversations. This story consolidates the shift to the experimental forms upon which her reputation and success rest, which began with ‘The Mark on the Wall’ (1917). Antony Alpers was the first to note the connection between Woolf’s story and a letter Mansfield sent to Woolf, probably in mid-August 1917.28 This letter to Woolf has not survived, but it seems to have closely resembled Mansfield’s letter to Ottoline Morrell describing her visit to Garsington Manor and the garden, which includes a sketch for a story set in such a garden.29 As Jones outlines, during this visit Mansfield and Morrell cut flowers to make potpourri.30 In a letter to Morrell – written on the same date as Mansfield’s to Morrell – Woolf makes reference to Mansfield’s description of this visit, to ‘the rose leaves drying in the sun, the pool, and long conversations between people wandering up and down in the moonlight’.31 In her letter to Morrell, presumably reiterated in her letter to Woolf, Mansfield both wonders who would write a story to capture this vision and also says that she ‘must have a fling at’ writing it when she has time. The story she envisaged centres around ‘people walking in the garden – several pairs of people’ and the impression to be created is of ‘a slight touch of enchantment’.32 However, a subsequent letter from Mansfield to Woolf praises Woolf’s ‘Flower Bed’ story set not at Garsington but at Kew, though so close to Mansfield’s sketch as to be seemingly beyond coincidence.33 Alpers concludes that ‘[t]he evidence is very strong that Mansfield in some way helped Virginia Woolf to break out of the mould in which she had been working hitherto’.34 Was this plagiarism and exploitation on Woolf’s part? Or was it, as Smith argues, an example of Woolf and Mansfield working collaboratively or co-operatively in a way that contests a competitive, self-seeking motive? Woolf also visited Garsington in July 1918 and her own description of walks around the garden resonates in many ways with aspects of her story, notably the desire to escape down different paths, and Morrell’s ‘discourse upon love’ whilst leaning on her parasol.35 Smith argues that other aspects of Mansfield’s letter suggest that she saw ‘their affinity’ in the production of this story and possibly that Woolf wrote it as ‘an experiment to be discussed Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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during Mansfield’s visit’ to Asheham in August 1917.36 Mansfield’s expression of pleasure in Woolf’s achievement might confirm this. She wrote to Woolf that her ‘Flower Bed is very good’ and created an impression ‘which fascinate[d her]’.37 This is in keeping with other similar encouragements that they gave each other when one writer made a step towards their shared goal. This exchange of ideas, discussion, praise and encouragement can also be read in relation to the gift economy, and as such keeps both the sense of generosity and rivalry at the fore through the operation of the gift’s exertion of power and influence. Alpers implies, and Jones concurs, that Woolf stole Mansfield’s idea.38 But Mansfield’s question regarding who might write such a story could also be read as an act of generosity in the form of an invitation – an offer characterised by the ambiguity typical of the gift – to which Woolf responded. Mauss suggests that, because a gift ‘possesses something’ of the giver, the donor remains the gift’s rightful owner and can exert power through the giving of the gift. This resonates with the particular ambiguity of the ‘exchange’ of ideas between Mansfield and Woolf in that ‘the giver has a hold over the beneficiary just as, being its [the gift’s] owner, through it he has a hold over the thief’.39 Further, in giving (away) her creative idea, Mansfield gives a true gift as Emerson would see it – ‘a portion of thyself’.40 Such a gift, ‘imbued with the identity of its giver [. . .] codifies the giver’s perception of the recipient(s), [so that] to accept a gift is to allow someone else to impose that version of self upon you’.41 Woolf’s profit from Mansfield’s gift, her creative enhancement of Mansfield’s description and sketch, seems to satisfy this idea of influence through the giving and receiving of a gift. As evidenced in Mansfield’s positive review of ‘Kew Gardens’, Woolf had confirmed Mansfield’s influence and ‘version’ of her. This reading also sheds light on Mansfield’s fiercely scathing review of Night and Day: in writing as ‘Miss Austen up-to-date’ Woolf has betrayed Mansfield’s influence and refuted her version of her as the ‘beautiful brilliant creature’ she described to Morrell.42 Woolf’s creation of ‘Kew Gardens’ was, however, also influenced by others. As Hermione Lee argues, this was ‘a period of intense aesthetic exploration for Virginia Woolf’ and there are many other influences on her development alongside Mansfield.43 Most obvious is the influence of Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell, whose ‘pictures’ not only gave Woolf ‘infinite pleasure’ but ‘changed [her] views upon aesthetics’.44 Woolf invited Bell to create the woodcut illustrations for the first edition of ‘Kew Gardens’, and their letters suggest an artistic dialogue that helped to shape Woolf’s story. In contrast to the lack of acknowledgement of Mansfield’s influence, Bell’s illustrations ensure that the sisters’ artistic Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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conversation is made evident on the pages of the story itself. Yet Woolf’s letters and diaries repeatedly attest to the influence that Mansfield exerts not only as a rival ‘after so very nearly the same thing’,45 but as a writer with whom she shares a creative gift and a bond in a gift economy. Woolf sought Bell’s opinions on her story and sent her a copy of ‘Kew Gardens’ at the beginning of July, indicating her doubts about it. Woolf judged it to be ‘very bad now, and not worth printing’, considered rewriting it and expressed her dissatisfaction at not capturing the ‘atmosphere’.46 A few days later she wrote asking Bell if she wanted a copy of Mansfield’s Prelude, also inviting her sister’s opinion on it. At this point Woolf was intensely engaged with Prelude as she laboriously set the type, printed, folded and glued the pages and negotiated ‘[e]very conceivable obstacle [. . .] flung across our road’47 so that comparison between it and ‘Kew Gardens’ was inevitable. In contrast to her assessment of her own progress with ‘Kew Gardens’, Woolf perceives Mansfield’s success in capturing the intangible, elusive qualities she herself strives for: ‘I myself find a kind of beauty about the story; a little vapourish I admit, & freely watered with some of her cheap realities; but it has the living power, the detached existence of a work of art.’48 Woolf’s letter to Bell seeks reassurance about the success of her experimental story by teasingly putting it into competition with Prelude, even as she simultaneously underlines the importance of generosity in her complex relationships with Mansfield, and indeed with Bell: Anyhow tell me what you think of it [Prelude]; and should you say that you I [sic] like it as much as Kew Gardens, I shant [sic] think less highly of you; but my jealousy, I repeat, is only a film on the surface beneath which is nothing but pure generosity.49

It is hard to know to whom Woolf directs her feeling of ‘pure generosity’ here: Bell, if she prefers Prelude and will be forgiven, or Mansfield, who will similarly be treated magnanimously if her story is said to be the best. This playful way of articulating her sense of competition with Mansfield is a recurrent mode in her letters to Bell, simultaneously masking and revealing Woolf’s anxieties and envy, which co-existed with the more positive feelings of admiration and generosity she felt for Mansfield. Their participation in a gift economy created a space in which this paradoxical pull of emotions and the power of reciprocal influence operated. Several of Mansfield’s letters to Woolf not only thank her for her gifts but also indicate Mansfield’s awareness of Woolf’s power and influence. Letters sent early on in their relationship suggest vulnerability and dependence on the more powerful Woolf. Mansfield effusively, even flirtatiously, suggests her desire to be open and honest, granting Woolf Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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‘the freedom of the city without any reserves at all’.50 Mansfield’s letter to Woolf in mid-August 1917 accepting the invitation to visit Asheham conveys both Mansfield’s eagerness to meet with Woolf again, as well as a sense of relief that their friendship is to continue. It also creates an impression of Mansfield’s perceived sense of a power inequality between them, given that Woolf seems at liberty to dismiss and forget her: ‘I thought you had finally dispatched me to cruel callous Coventry, without a wave of your lily white hand. Do let us meet in the nearest future darling Virginia & don’t quite forget Katherine.’51 As Katie Macnamara suggests, Mansfield ‘exaggerates Woolf’s aloofness while presenting herself as a childlike supplicant’, akin to Bertha in ‘Bliss’ (1918); Woolf’s ‘snowy hands’ resemble those of Pearl Fulton in this later story.52 Alpers describes Mansfield’s letter praising Woolf’s ‘Flower Bed’ story as ‘a bread-and-butter letter’.53 Such letters are sent out of courtesy or duty to show appreciation of hospitality and are typically flattering. Mansfield’s letter thanks Woolf for the few days Mansfield spent at ‘wonderful Asheham’ in mid-August 1917 where they discussed Mansfield’s progress on Prelude. Her flattery is an elaboration of her thanks and, like the expression of gratitude, can be seen as a ‘return’ gift in exchange for Woolf’s hospitality and her generosity in publishing Prelude. Mansfield would have been aware of the significance of this, it being only the second story printed by the press following Virginia and Leonard’s joint publication, Two Stories, in July 1917. Mansfield’s reciprocation of Woolf’s generosity indicates her gratitude and her sense of obligation; participation in a gift economy with Woolf is need and necessity. Her letter indicates Mansfield’s desire to maintain the circulation of gifts and also offers Woolf a further gift, ‘a small present’ of ‘the coffee [they] once talked about’.54 In this fluid context of generosity and reciprocation, Mansfield’s unacknowledged gift of her story idea (and/ or her acceptance of its theft) can be read as an act of unspoken generosity on Mansfield’s part, alongside the ‘priceless talk’ and other support for Woolf’s development as a writer. These gifts can be seen as part of a return gift intending to consolidate and continue the bonds between them as well as recognising Woolf’s power and influence. Macnamara’s analysis of this letter, however, offers a very different interpretation that resonates with the idea of the gift as profoundly ambivalent, indeed as ‘poison’. Unlike the majority of critics who read Mansfield’s letter as ‘earnest’, Macnamara detects anger ‘that Woolf had borrowed [her] story idea’ in the ‘insincere protestations’ Mansfield interspersed with the flattering comments about Woolf’s story in her letter.55 Mansfield’s letter advises Woolf to ignore criticisms that she Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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may hear: ‘dont [sic] let THEM ever persuade you that I spend any of my precious time swapping hats or committing adultery.’56 Yet via Garsington-Bloomsbury gossip, if not from Mansfield herself, Woolf would have been alert to Mansfield’s deception here: Mansfield had told Morrell about her marriage to George Bowden in 1916 yet she was living with Murry while still married.57 In this case, Macnamara argues that this ‘may have given Woolf reason to doubt the entire epistle’s honesty’.58 Mansfield’s reference to her own fashionable appearance here, then, can also be seen to be deliberately provocative given that Woolf disliked this ‘superficial’ quality in Mansfield. These elements suggest that Mansfield’s ‘writerly altruism’ toward Woolf at this time was already peppered with ‘poisoned darts of false praise’, which Woolf would have recognised. These ‘poison darts’, Macnamara suggests, take on another form as Mansfield vents feelings of anger and ‘bitter regret’ about her relationship with Woolf in her satirical representation of Woolf as Pearl in ‘Bliss’.59 What might seem to be Woolf’s extreme response to reading Mansfield’s story – she has a bodily need to rinse away the intellectual and emotional effect it has on her (‘I had to rush to the bookcase for something to drink’60) – makes sense in the context of the ‘poison’ of ungenerous representation. Nonetheless, it would seem that both writers benefitted in important ways from their early participation in a gift economy with each other, given the significance of the two publications that came out of this period of their relationship. Woolf gained most from this gift exchange: the publication of ‘Kew Gardens’ marked ‘a decisive step in Virginia’s development as a writer’,61 helping to establish Woolf’s reputation and success as a High Modernist. This story also brought immediate financial rewards, which simultaneously marked a turning point for the Hogarth Press itself: Harold Child’s effusive (unsigned) review in Times Literary Supplement in May 1919 prompted a significant increase in sales and new subscribers to the Hogarth Press, making a reprint of the story viable. As Lee affirms, it was from this time that ‘[t]hey had a business, and Virginia Woolf had a name’.62 This story continued to pay rich dividends in terms of profits and reputation when Woolf repackaged it in the form of a limited deluxe edition in 1927. Mansfield’s immediate gains were less obvious and more qualified. Only 300 copies of her story were printed and, due to very limited marketing, sales were largely to a ‘Bloomsbury’ audience. The running head for several pages was inaccurate and the Woolfs only begrudgingly accepted Mansfield’s choice of cover designed by J. D. Fergusson, reproducing it on only a small number of copies.63 However, critics agree that the process of radically revising her much longer story ‘The Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Aloe’ as Prelude enabled Mansfield to develop her distinctive narrative technique and modernist aesthetic. At this point she also settled on the name ‘Katherine Mansfield’, which was one of a number of pen names Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp had written under, and so established her authorial identity. As Jenny McDonnell persuasively argues, Prelude ‘marks a shift in [Mansfield’s] attitudes to the publication of her fiction and [. . .] a turning point her perception of her role as an author’.64 A section of ‘Kew Gardens’ appearing in the typescript with Woolf’s revisions, and apparently mistakenly not included in the printed version,65 can also be seen to illuminate the intensity of the relationship between these two writers. The description of the exclusive relationship between two women, friends and rivals, captures the conflicting elements of Woolf and Mansfield’s relationship – generosity and urgency, rivalry and wilful miscommunication, rejection and dismissal. The omitted section focuses on two women who are involved in a dynamic creative process amidst static surroundings. A ‘public of two’, they compete with each other with their words, each woman ‘firmly pressing her own contribution’, yet each dismissing the ‘differently coloured fragments so urgently wedged’ into place by the other: They [the two women] made a mosaic round them in the hot still air of these people and these commodities each woman firmly pressing her own contribution into the pattern, never taking her eyes off it, never glancing at the differently coloured fragments so urgently wedged into its place by her friend. But in this competition, the small woman either from majority of relatives or superior fluency of speech conquered, and the ponderous one fell silent perforce. She continued: ­– Nell, Bert, Lot, Cess, Phil, Pa. He says, I says, She says, I says I says I says ­– 66

In the published version of the story, the ‘two elderly women of the lower middle class’ are ‘energetically piecing together their very complicated dialogue’.67 But the omitted section resonates with what Smith identifies as ‘[t]he joint stimulus of jealousy and affinity [which] acted as a spur’ to further creativity for Mansfield and Woolf.68 This omitted section makes clear the creative potential that can be missed or lost when only rivalry for dominance and authority are in focus, or when success is only measured by quantity – the number of words wedged into place or the number of publications already in circulation. As Macnamara notes, Woolf had good reason to envy Mansfield at this stage, who, at thirty, ‘really was making a name for herself in literary London’ with her stories published ‘in the recently reinvented New Age [. . .] the Blue Review and Rhythm [. . .] and feature pieces in four issues of Signature’.69 Here, the silence of the ‘ponderous one’ in the face of the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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energy of ‘the small woman’ may also belie Woolf’s own anxiety about her ability to make an equal contribution to the vibrant, ‘modernist’ mosaic of colour, light and life they were co-creating. The description of the women’s creation of a mosaic of words also resonates with Woolf’s description of what she values and finds ‘priceless’ in her conversations with Mansfield – Mansfield’s ‘disembodied way’ of talking ‘about writing’ that corresponds so exactly to Woolf’s own ideas.70 Lee also comments on Woolf’s feeling about such disembodied talk: ‘This kind of talk, she feels, gets through self-conscious, physical distaste or attraction, and illness, to an essence of intimacy and reality. It is very like what she thinks fiction should do.’71 In her diary Woolf described her friendship with Mansfield as a ‘fragmentary intermittent intercourse [. . . that] seems more fundamental than many better established ones’, stating that what is important is her ‘queer sense of being “like”’ Mansfield and being able to ‘talk straight out to her’.72 What this omitted section of ‘Kew Gardens’ and Woolf’s diary entries suggest is Woolf’s appreciation of the importance of a productive alliance, premised on a new attentiveness to the quality of words exchanged between women and a valuing of the generosity so key to their relationship. Tragically, ‘the small woman’ did not go on to produce more words and beautiful creations than her friend, but the last reciprocated communication between them confirms the centrality of the complex operation of the gift economy to their relationship. Woolf wrote to Mansfield in December 1920 praising Bliss and Other Stories (1920) and expressing her feeling of being ‘glad and indeed proud’ of Mansfield’s achievement.73 Mansfield accepted Woolf’s ‘long generous letter’ as ‘a two-fold gift’, arriving as it did on Christmas day.74 Yet Woolf’s diary records the complicated process of acknowledging both her envy and distaste for Mansfield, alongside her more generous feelings. Woolf complains that Mansfield ‘advertises herself; or Murry does it for her’, but also admits that ‘in [her] heart’ she acknowledges that Mansfield is ‘good, since I am glad to hear her abused’. It is the process of writing what Woolf calls her ‘insincere-sincere letter’ – she admits that she had ‘not read her book’ – that she feels she ‘plucked out [her] jealousy of Katherine’ so that she can genuinely express her ‘revived [. . .] affection’ and her enjoyment of this positive feeling.75 The process of writing her letter to Mansfield can also be seen as a ‘two-fold’ gift for Woolf too, since it allows her to acknowledge her more positive responses to Mansfield and her work, and also to feel the pleasure of her own affection for Mansfield. This last exchange of words, praise and positive feeling encapsulates both the powerful bonds and tensions that, in equal measure, shaped their relationship and their influence on each other. As always, generosity is underwritten Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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with rivalry and suspicion; at times they feel ‘in league together’, yet as Mansfield wrote to Woolf on 27 December 1920, ‘leagues divide’ them too.76 Mansfield here is referring overtly to the geographical distance between them at this point – Mansfield is in Menton and missing her conversations with Woolf – but this implicitly refers to the precarious balance of their personal and professional relationships. Although Woolf’s immediate response to the news of Mansfield’s death was one of bitter regret and a sense that ‘there was no point in writing. Katherine won’t read it. Katherine my rival no longer’,77 Mansfield continued to be an abiding presence and influence on Woolf, who thought and dreamed of Mansfield throughout her life and continued to pursue their shared goals alone.78

Notes   1. Katherine Mansfield, ‘A Ship Comes into Harbour’, Collected Poetry and Critical Writings, p. 532.   2. Angela Smith, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, p. 1.   3. Virginia Woolf, Diary, vol. 1, p. 243.   4. Ibid. p. 258.  5. Woolf, Letters, vol. 2, p. 293.  6. Woolf, Diary, vol. 1, p. 61.   7. Marcel Mauss, The Gift, pp. 12–13, 41, 63, 152–3 fn. 122.  8. Woolf, Letters, vol. 2, p. 144.   9. Ibid. p. 107. 10. Kathleen Jones, Katherine Mansfield, pp. 288, 280. 11. Woolf, Letters, vol. 2, p. 159. 12. Jenny McDonnell, Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Marketplace, pp. 62–4. 13. Woolf, ‘Modern Novels’, Essays, vol. 3, p. 33. 14. Mansfield, Letter to Woolf, c. 10 April 1919, Collected Letters, vol. 2, p. 311. 15. Mansfield, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 27 June 1919, Collected Letters, vol. 2, p. 333. 16. Mansfield, ‘A Short Story’, Collected Poetry and Critical Writings, p. 475. 17. Mansfield, ‘A Ship Comes into Harbour’, pp. 532, 534, 533. 18. Ibid. p. 534. 19. Mansfield, Letter to John Middleton Murry, 9 November 1919, Collected Letters, vol. 3, p. 80. 20. Ibid. pp. 81–2. 21. Mansfield, ‘A Ship Comes into Harbour’, p. 57; Woolf, Letters, vol. 2, p. 403. 22. Mansfield, ‘A Ship Comes into Harbour’, pp. 532, 534. 23. Ibid; Mansfield, Letter to Murry, 10 November 1919, Collected Letters, vol. 3, p. 82.

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Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and the Gift Economy     63 24. Mansfield, Letter to Murry, 15 November 1919, Collected Letters, vol. 3, p. 95. 25. Woolf, Letters, vol. 4, p. 231. 26. Woolf, Diary, vol. 1, p. 257. 27. Ibid. pp. 314–15. 28. Antony Alpers, Life of Katherine Mansfield, p. 251. 29. Mansfield, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 15 August 1917, Collected Letters, vol. 1, p. 325. 30. Jones, Katherine Mansfield, p. 298. 31. Woolf, Letters, vol. 2, p. 174. 32. Mansfield, Letter to Morrell, 15 August 1917, Collected Letters, vol. 1, p. 325. 33. Mansfield, Letter to Woolf, c. 23 August 1917, Collected Letters, vol. 1, p. 327. 34. Alpers, Life of Katherine Mansfield, pp. 251–2. 35. Woolf, Diary, vol. 1, p. 175. 36. Smith, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, p. 137. 37. Mansfield, Letter to Woolf, c. 23 August 1917, Collected Letters, vol. 1, p. 327. 38. Jones, Katherine Mansfield, p. 299. 39. Mauss, The Gift, p. 12. 40. Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Selection from Essays and Lectures’, p. 25. 41. Mark Osteen, The Question of the Gift, p. 18. 42. Mansfield, Letter to Morrell, 27 June 1919, Collected Letters, vol. 2, p. 333. 43. Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf, p. 369. 44. Woolf, Letters, vol. 2, p. 257. 45. Mansfield, Letter to Woolf, c. 23 August 1917, Collected Letters, vol. 1, p. 327. 46. Woolf, Letters, vol. 2, pp. 255, 257. 47. Woolf, Diary, vol. 1, p. 163. 48. Ibid. p. 167. 49. Woolf, Letters, vol. 2, p. 259. 50. Mansfield, Letter to Woolf, 24 June 1917, Collected Letters, vol. 1, p. 313. 51. Mansfield, Letter to Woolf, mid-August 1917, Collected Letters, vol. 1, p. 324. 52. Katie Macnamara, ‘How to Strike a Contemporary’, p. 99. 53. Alpers, Life of Katherine Mansfield, p. 250. 54. Mansfield, Letter to Woolf, c. 23 August 1917, Collected Letters, vol. 1, p. 327. 55. Macnamara, ‘How to Strike a Contemporary’, pp. 94, 96. 56. Mansfield, Letter to Woolf, c. 23 August 1917, Collected Letters, vol. 1, p. 327. 57. Jones, Katherine Mansfield, pp. 287–8. 58. Macnamara, ‘How to Strike a Contemporary’, p. 96. 59. Ibid. pp. 95–6. 60. Woolf, Letters, vol. 2, p. 515. 61. Leonard Woolf, Downhill All the Way, p. 60. 62. Lee, Virginia Woolf, p. 367.

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64     Kathryn Simpson 63. McDonnell, Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Marketplace, p. 103. 64. Ibid. p. 8. 65. As Susan Dick notes in Woolf, Virginia Woolf: The Complete Shorter Fiction, ed. Susan Dick, p. 299. 66. Ibid. 67. Woolf, ‘Kew Gardens’, in Virginia Woolf: The Complete Shorter Fiction, ed. Dick, p. 93. 68. Smith, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, p. 194. 69. Macnamara, ‘How to Strike a Contemporary’, pp. 94–5. 70. Woolf, Diary, vol. 2, p. 45. 71. Lee, Virginia Woolf, p. 396. 72. Woolf, Diary, vol. 2, pp. 45–6. 73. Ibid. p. 449. 74. Mansfield, Letter to Woolf, 27 December 1920, Collected Letters, vol. 4, p. 154. 75. Woolf, Letters, vol. 2, p. 449. 76. Mansfield, Letter to Woolf, 27 December 1920, Collected Letters, vol. 4, p. 154. 77. Woolf, Diary, vol. 2, p. 226. 78. Lee, Virginia Woolf, pp. 399–401.

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Chapter 5

‘The Silence is Broken’: Katherine Mansfield and the ‘Manifesto Moment’ Susan Reid ‘To be thorough, to be honest, I think if artists were really thorough & honest they would save the world.’1

Mary Ann Caws has described the period from 1909–19 as the ‘Manifesto Moment’: ten years of ‘glorious madness’ when instead of demanding art for art’s sake artists began to demand art for change’s sake.2 As Caws explains, the manifesto ‘can start out as a credo, but then it wants to make a persuasive move from the “I believe” of the speaker toward the “you” of the listener or reader, who should be sufficiently convinced to join in’.3 Alex Danchev agrees that the manifesto ‘demands something of us – our attention, a world-view, a programme’.4 His collection of 100 Artists’ Manifestos opens with F. T. Marinetti’s archetypal ‘The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism’ (1909) that for Caws, too, announces the beginning of the ‘Manifesto Moment’. Both collections also include Mina Loy’s ‘Feminist Manifesto’ (1914), sent in a letter to Mabel Dodge Luhan and unpublished in her lifetime,5 which though responding to Futurism and bearing many hallmarks of the m ­ anifesto style, suggests a different, more discursive method of manifesto-writing. How might this concept of a quieter rehearsal of ideas amongst friends and artists – in contrast to Caws’ concept of the noisy ‘high manifesto’ – open up new documents from the archive for consideration?6 In particular, might Katherine Mansfield’s passionate invocations to ‘Art’ and ‘Life’, in her stories, editorials, letters and reviews, form part of the ‘Manifesto moment’ – a call to her fellow artists to ‘save the world’?7 Through most of her writing career Mansfield was closely involved with literary ‘little magazines’, which, as Laura Winkiel notes in her reading of ‘manifestos as a staging of modernist community formation’, were often the vehicles for modernist manifestos.8 In this light, John Middleton Murry’s editorials in Rhythm (1911–13) and D. H. Lawrence’s essay ‘The Crown’, serialised in Signature (1915), can be Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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read as manifestos. But what was Mansfield’s role in these ventures? This chapter will explore how experiences with little magazines at first seem to have shaped Mansfield’s work but later provided her with a platform to influence others in their writing practice. Accordingly, by 1920, her letters bear many of the features that Danchev associates with the manifesto, including deep-seated emotion, semi-scriptural injunctions, utopian impulses, and the desire to form a small community of artist-workers and friends: 9 Oh my stars! How I love to think of you and me as workers, writers – two creatures given over to Art. Not that I place Art higher than Love or Life – I cannot see them as things separate – they minister unto each other. And how I long for us to be established in our home with just a few precious friends with whom we can talk and be gay and rejoice.10

This chapter shows how, through her collaborations with fellow artists, in a progression of magazine stories, editorials, reviews and letters, Mansfield moved beyond what Jenny McDonnell has characterised as a ‘conscious “self-silencing” in her development of narrative voice’.11 Mansfield arrived at a point of view that she sought to persuade others to share, and a manifesto style that urged her to break her silence and to urge others to break theirs. In 1912 Mansfield joined Murry at Rhythm, seemingly in response to the rallying cry of his first editorial, ‘Art and Philosophy’, which insisted that the artist ‘must return to the moment of pure perception to see the essential forms, the essential harmonies of line and colour, the essential music of the world’.12 More particularly, as Angela Smith has argued, ‘[s]he was engaged with Rhythm’s mantra adapted from J. M. Synge’s preface to his poems, “Before art can be human again it must learn to be brutal”, clearly expressed in its Fauvist illustrations’.13 Interestingly, Caws situates the ‘Manifesto Moments’ as following on from ‘the Fauve moment of 1905’.14 The theme of ‘brutality’ and ‘ferocity’ cited in Murry’s opening editorial also shares some kinship with Marinetti’s sentiments in ‘The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism’, which declared that ‘Art, indeed, can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice.’15 Mansfield rose to the challenge of ‘brutality’ in her first story published in Rhythm, ‘The Woman at the Store’ (1912), a tale of abuse and murder in the New Zealand outback, which yet refuses to disclaim or overthrow the past in the manner that manifestos of modernist avant-garde art would dictate. Instead, the story turns on the repressed memory of a child whose drawing vividly evokes the murder of her father and casts a shadow over the future of the man who is left behind with the woman at the story’s end. Similarly, the past drives the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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narrative of ‘Ole Underwood’ (1913), which tells in violent prose of the return of a wife-murderer to the scene of his thirty-year-old crime and the resurgence of ‘the old, old lust’ to kill his wife’s lover.16 The importance of memory and the past in shaping the present, marked in much of Mansfield’s work by a porosity between temporal and spatial boundaries, thus complicates the ‘nowness’ associated with the manifesto. Thus, Caws notes of some modernist manifestos that ‘[h]aunted by nostalgia, they have the feeling of longing rather than constructing, like a post-manifesto moment is a too-lateness’.17 Implicit in any manifesto is the necessity for a different future. The manifestos of the period would have us believe that to be a modernist writer is by definition to break with the past; though we can see that Mansfield is attempting this in her experiments with the short-story form, she remains committed to an awareness of how the past is intertwined with the future. Although she used many pseudonyms, the two Rhythm stories were published under the name ‘Katherine Mansfield’, which she also used in two joint editorials with Murry that experiment with a more direct and directive voice. Indeed, Clare Hanson, who perceives the phrasing as Murry’s and the imagery as Mansfield’s, describes these articles as ‘a first positive manifesto’, noting that Mansfield ‘had satirised writers such as Bennett and Wells for the New Age magazine, but had not suggested any new alternative method or stance for the artist’.18 The first of these articles, ‘The Meaning of Rhythm’ (June 1912) is seen by McDonnell as bearing traces of Mansfield’s influence in its ‘uneasy awareness of art’s existence in relation to a possible reading public’, while the subsequent ‘Seriousness in Art’ (July 1912) ‘displays more obvious signs of her involvement’.19 It is also possible to trace the three ideals of freedom, reality and individuality that underpin both these editorial ‘manifestos’ in Mansfield’s later letters. For example, ‘The Meaning of Rhythm’ culminates in the following statements: Art and the artist are perfectly at one. Art is free; the artist is free. Art is real; the artist is real. Art is individual; the artist is individual. Their unity is ultimate and unassailable. It is the essential movement of Life. It is the splendid adventure, the eternal quest for rhythm.20

Though the insistence on ‘rhythm’ will disappear from her later writing as the concept becomes integrated within her prose style, the urgency to be ‘real’ and to be ‘free’ pervades her late letters. In 1922, advising William Gerhardi on the drafting of his first novel Futility (1922), she writes: You sound so free in your writing. Perhaps that is as important as anything. I don’t know why so many of our poor authors should be in chains, but there

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68     Susan Reid it is – a dreadful clanking sounds through their books, and they never can run away, never take a leap, never risk anything . . . In fact its [sic] high time we took up our pens and struck a blow for freedom.21

This rhetoric of ‘clanking’ chains and ‘a blow for freedom’ (the very stuff of the manifesto) traces a direct line between her early editorials and her last letters, where she too is freer in voice and style, unencumbered by the more ‘portentous’ prose that Hanson attributes to Murry in their joint editorials.22 The years 1915−16 mark a significant turningpoint in this evolution, when her stories for Signature magazine and an unpublished fragment concerning the death of her beloved brother help her to find a new voice in Prelude (1918). The ill-fated Signature, which ran for only three issues, was conceived as a platform for Lawrence, Murry and Mansfield to address a wider public. Mansfield appears to have distanced herself with another pseudonym, Matilda Berry and ‘the development of a more impersonal narrative voice’.23 Her stories for Signature were perceived by Lawrence, and seemingly by Mansfield herself, as lighter notes amidst the more serious content: what she called ‘[t]he jam in the golden pill’.24 However, ‘Autumns I’ can be read in a more subversive, even mischievous light, which sets all three of the ‘Matilda Berry’ stories in a different context. While the other two Signature stories were later collected in Bliss and Other Stories published in 1920 (‘The Little Governess’ and ‘Autumns II’, rewritten as ‘The Wind Blows’), ‘Autumns I’ was first republished posthumously as ‘The Apple-Tree’ in Murry’s edition of the Scrapbook of Katherine Mansfield (1939). Her tale of a ‘Forbidden Tree’, two children and an authoritative father figure (‘Don’t touch that tree! Do you hear me, children!’) is a biblical allegory, but without the overtly biblical language of God and the Holy Ghost deployed by Lawrence in ‘The Crown’.25 Mansfield’s inversion of the Garden of Eden story has the children eat from the tree at the father’s insistence, but his superior knowledge is undermined when the apple turns out to be bitter, unpalatable. Indeed, the value invested in the fruit by the father is that of false pride: ‘his heart swelled to the sight’ of the apple tree because it symbolises a ‘hard bargain’ he has driven to procure ‘an apple-tree that this Johnny from England positively envied’.26 By exposing the false values of the patriarchal figure, then, the story serves to subvert the idea of male authority. It is tempting to speculate that in her critique of a male authority figure, set up in the position of ‘God’, Mansfield is mocking Lawrence himself, whose writing in ‘The Crown’ she perceives to be egotistical.27 Indeed, Mansfield further inverts the myth of the biblical fall by sexualising the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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patriarchal figure rather than her Adam and Eve: a move which may be another tilt at Lawrence and his habit of seeing ‘sex in everything’.28 The ‘swelling’ of the father’s heart when he looks at the ‘Forbidden tree’, which is ‘like the Virgin Mary’, is a tumescence which leads to the deflowering of the tree and suggests the act of original sin.29 His plucking of the apple is described in sexual, proprietorial and transactional terms: ‘There it stood − the accidental thing − the thing that no one had been aware of when the hard bargain was driven.’30 Mansfield suggests here that the sex act is a ‘hard bargain’ and that the ‘price’ paid by the father is marriage and the need to support his family: ‘He still had hours when he walked up and down in the moonlight half deciding to “chuck this confounded rushing to the office every day − and clear out − clear out once and for all”.’31 Mansfield’s other two Signature stories suggest the vulnerability of young women in this world of unspoken sexual bargaining. In ‘Autumns II’, a piano teacher uses his position to flirt with a succession of young pupils, while the eponymous Little Governess is compromised by an old man. Taken together these three stories suggest the disadvantages of being sexually ‘innocent’, with ‘Autumns II’ recording the departure of the same two children from their Garden of Eden and ‘The Little Governess’ describing a fall into sin, through ignorance, if not through performance. Rather than ‘the jam in the golden pill’, then, Mansfield’s stories in Signature provide an incisive parody of Lawrence’s manifesto for regeneration of the world through sex by pointing out the pitfalls for women. In that regard, Mansfield has been linked with writers like Mina Loy who ‘satirise or ironise informing conceptions of femininity’, with Rachel Potter noting the proximity of stories like Prelude that ‘focus on female characters trapped inside social rules or conventions’ to Loy’s ‘Feminist Manifesto’ that gets ‘to the heart of the complicated ways in which women’s freedom is tied to their relationships to men’.32 The expression of Mansfield’s feminism differed in important respects from Loy’s, of course; as Kate Fullbrook observes, Mansfield’s ‘feminism came as a matter of course, so much so that overt discussion of it as a political principle is absent from her writing while its underlying presence is everywhere’.33 Yet both writers make similar use of humour and irony, in ways that are anathema to the ‘high manifesto’ that Caws describes: ‘[h]igh on its own presence, the manifesto is Modernist rather than ironically Postmodernist. It takes itself and its own spoof seriously’.34 Thus in Prelude the self-important Stanley Burnell is frequently ridiculous in his wife’s eyes, ‘like a big fat turkey’ or a ‘Newfoundland dog’,35 while the couple’s marital disunion is to some extent foreshadowed by Loy’s poem ‘The Effectual Marriage’ (1910): Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

70     Susan Reid What had Miovanni made of his ego In his library? What had Gina wondered among the pots and pans? One never asked the other.36

It is unlikely, too, that Mansfield subscribed to Lawrence’s view of the need for transformation through conflict, which reflects the iconoclastic impulses of ‘manifestoists’, who, like Marinetti, believed that change could only be secured through destruction. Loy directly refuted manifestos ‘of violence . . . their energy and their potential for energizing’ when she wrote (again with humour) that ‘[l]ooking back on my life I can observe one absolute law of physics − that energy is always wasted’, and in her manifesto-like pamphlet Psycho-Democracy (1921) she denounced ‘the belligerent masculine social ideal of militarism’.37 Mansfield’s distaste for violent upheaval is also confirmed when, translating Maxim Gorky’s Journal of the Revolution, she writes that ‘[i]t makes you feel – anything anything rather than revolution.’38 Her attitude to the violence of the Great War is summed up in a short piece called ‘Et in Arcadia ego’ that she submitted to Signature after the death of her brother. In a sense, this fragment forms a third and very final instalment to the little series that includes ‘Autumns I’ and ‘Autumns II’, although it was never published since the magazine failed to run to a fourth issue. It is, as Faith Binckes affirms, at once a ‘sweet, sensual, nostalgic, pastoral’ and a ‘vivid and specific meditation on loss . . . evidently personal, but also implicitly national’:39 To sit in front of the little wood fire, your hands crossed in your lap and your eyes closed. To fancy you see again your eyelids all the dancing beauty of the day, to feel the flame on your throat as you used to imagine you felt the spot of yellow when Bogey held a buttercup under your chin . . .40

This text conveys a powerful anti-war message or manifesto and signals a turning point in Mansfield’s writing practice. Two months later, in February 1916, Mansfield writes to her dead brother in her notebook: ‘I have broken the silence.’41 The next day she decides to rewrite ‘The Aloe’ as a memorial to Leslie − ‘the next book will be yours and mine’42 − which finally appeared the following year as Prelude. A further turning point, or breaking of the silence, arises from Mansfield’s role as a regular reviewer for the Athenaeum following Murry’s appointment as editor in 1919. Though Mansfield is not part of the editorial team, she writes impassioned and detailed instructions to Murry from her health-imposed exile in Menton: I positively feel one has no right to run a paper without preaching a gospel. The only sort of paper for the time is an out and out personal dead true, dead sincere paper in which we spoke our HEARTS and MINDS.43

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Even her use of different fonts for emphasis reflects the manifestoist’s desire to persuade, particularly the capitalised words so beloved of the Vorticist magazine Blast. Mansfield found herself somewhat sidelined as a reviewer primarily of contemporary fiction, while Murry argued on the magazine’s pages with T. S. Eliot and others about the future of poetry. Nevertheless, she used her reviews as a platform for honesty in art, which she also felt sure ‘would attract the public’.44 Mansfield’s reviews were ‘sharply analytic’, often ‘acerbic’, fiercely critical of the ‘fuzzy edges’ she deplored, but they also enabled her to hone her own writing.45 Cumulatively, Mansfield’s reviews for the Athenaeum amount to a trenchant summary of all that was wrong with modern literature and all that it should be, often framed as questions designed to engage her reader directly − a move from the ‘I believe’ of the reviewer, toward the ‘you’ of the reader (to paraphrase Caws).46 Collectively, they can be read as a manifesto to resuscitate literature in many of its forms, from the short story to the novel to British drama. In this respect, she may be seen to have occupied what Marinetti, in a critique of a comrade’s projected manifesto, called the ‘half light’ of the review article rather than the ‘full light’ of the manifesto.47 And yet, she also demonstrated many aspects of Marinetti’s ‘art’ of making manifestos: what Danchev describes as ‘a certain rigour, a verve (or perhaps a nerve), and a sense of style, or form, analogous to the work of art itself’.48 Mansfield’s review of Elizabeth Robins’ lacklustre The Mills of the Gods (1908, reprinted 1920) is a case in point, posing the question of literary form ‘in the form of a riddle’: I am neither a short story, nor a sketch, nor an impression, nor a tale. I am written in prose. I am a great deal shorter than a novel; I may be only one page long, but, on the other hand, there is no reason why I should not be thirty. I have a special quality − a something, a something which is immediately, perfectly recognizable. It belongs to me; it is of my essence. In fact I am often given away in the first sentence. I seem almost to stand or fall by it. It is to me what the first phrase of the song is to the singer. Those who know me feel: ‘Yes, that is it.’ And they are from that moment prepared for what is to follow. Here are, for instance, some examples of me: ‘A Trifle from Life’, ‘About Love’, ‘The Lady with the Dog’. What am I?49

The problem as Mansfield perceived it was widespread and deep-rooted, tantamount to a crisis in British writing, and so she laments in her review of George Moore’s Esther Waters (1894, reprinted 1920) that in general ‘[p]resent-day literature consists almost entirely of poetry and the novel’ and that ‘[w]ithout emotion writing is dead’.50 In a series of reviews she criticises Rose Macaulay for holding back ‘the dreadful Truth’;51 she rebukes Catherine Carswell for not giving us all of her heroine Joanna;52 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Rhoda Broughton is condemned because she does not aim, even if ‘she could have’, to ‘put all of herself into anything that she did’;53 and, likewise, Jane Mander is pulled up for her stock descriptions of colonial settings: ‘What picture can that possibly convey to an English reader? What emotion can it produce?’54 She also finds Joseph Hergesheimer sadly wanting, although her meditation on his shortcomings provokes a wonderful image of the writer as a cultivator of the natural (in terms that revitalise the withered fruit of her earlier ‘The Apple-Tree’): If a novel is to have a central idea we imagine that central idea is a lusty growing stem for which the branches spring clothed with leaves, and the birds become flowers and fruits. We imagine that the author chooses with care infinite deliberation the very air in which that tree shall be nourished, and that he is profoundly aware that its coming to perfection depends upon the strength with which the central idea supports its beautiful accumulations.55

Amidst this catalogue of failures a handful of writers succeed because they do not hold back. Usually these are foreigners, since, Mansfield complains, ‘English writers lack experience of Life . . . they are selfimprisoned.’56 So she finds with Louis Couperus that ‘[l]ittle by little, by delicate stages, yet without any preliminary explanations or reserves, we are taken into the very heart of the matter’.57 With Knut Hamsun, too, ‘[i]t is extraordinary, how, while we follow him in his search for the land he wants, the author gives us the man [. . .] nothing is allowed to escape us’.58 And she holds up her beloved Chekhov as a beacon of light to ‘British drama . . . stifled at birth’.59 One review stands out, both for its own beauty and Mansfield’s (almost) unreserved praise. Her review of R. O. Prowse’s autobiographical novel, A Gift of the Dusk (1920), titled ‘The Silence is Broken’, signalled the further breaking of her own silence and the finding of a more assured and insistent voice. Prowse’s now-forgotten novel, set in a sanatorium in Switzerland, tells an unlikely love story of two tuberculosis sufferers that must have resonated with Mansfield’s own medical condition and strained marital relationship. Yet it is the author’s truthtelling that Mansfield particularly admires: ‘He does not spare us; he tells “everything – everything”.’60 While Angela Smith links Mansfield’s reading of Prowse with her story ‘The Stranger’ (1921), written in the following month,61 Vincent O’Sullivan credits Prowse with catalysing a more fundamental shift in her writing: ‘The recurrence of the thought of death, the importance of being straight with herself in what time there was, brings a new tone to Mansfield’s notebooks, a kind of laicized spiritual exercise as she sets herself new ideals, and records her falling short of them.’62 O’Sullivan argues that ‘she quite specifiNot for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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cally imposes this urge to moral regeneration on the stories she would like to write’, citing this letter: ‘You see − life and work are two things indivisible. It’s only by being true to life that I can be true to art. And to be true to life is to be good, sincere, simple, honest.’63 Accordingly, it could be argued that her stories of 1921−2 are manifestos in the way that Winkiel has argued for certain works of fiction in this period.64 But a similar case can be made for Mansfield’s reviews, and particularly ‘The Silence is Broken’, which could sit alongside Lawrence’s critical essay, ‘The Spirit of Place’ (1918) in Caws’ collection of manifestos.65 Mansfield also directly invokes moral regeneration in her late letters to friends. A Gift of the Dusk influences the vocabulary she uses in her letters, circling around ideas of gifts and silence and love, and a new sense of urgency around the present. In the same letter that informs Murry she has read Prowse, Mansfield also writes ‘There is only TODAY.’66 Crucially, she also finds in Prowse a new language that will colour her subsequent writing: ‘I felt that in the intimacy between Stephen and Mary, Prowse was speaking a language which I long in vain to hear spoken. The intimacy of two beings who are essential to each other – who is going to write that?’67 Mansfield explains both her urge to be a moralist and her preference for a subtle style of influence in a letter to S. S. Koteliansky: Why not be a moralist then? But is it to be a moralist – simply to tell someone who does not know what must be done? To share one’s discoveries? Even if they don’t agree it seems to me you are bound to tell them what you have found best to do. But I know there is an objection to this, and I have been called an ‘interfering schoolmistress’ for it. I don’t care; I shall go on being one. Of course there must be no violence and no tub-thumping. The other person must think they are having tea with jam. It is however, all rather difficult.68

Rather like the ‘jam in the golden pill’ that she provided in her Signature stories, her letters bluntly point up the shortcomings of her writerfriends, but they seek to mend rather than to offend. Her belief in the correctability of these shortcomings renders her ‘one of those optimists!’ by her own admission:69 ‘No, I really believe there is no reason civilisation should go. There is still a chance of saving it in spite of everything & I’m against the destroyers.’70 As Danchev writes: ‘There is something of the incorrigible optimist about the manifestoist. To make a manifesto is to imagine or hallucinate the Promised Land . . . In its own way a utopian project.’71 For Mansfield the promised land becomes ‘a small band of decent people’ that would ‘be able to teach each other how to live’, and arguably she found this at times in Murry, in Lawrence, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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but also with Richard Murry, Dorothy Brett, Anne Estelle Rice, and perhaps, ultimately, at the Gurdjieff Institute.72 For Winkiel, the manifesto is the ‘modernist form par excellence poised as it is between action and theory. More so than the work of art or literature that follows [it] seeks to integrate art with life’.73 Mansfield’s writing, which largely coincided with the ‘Manifesto Moment’ of 1909−19, also exhibits many characteristics of the manifesto’s style and drive; not only in her shaping of the short-story form, but in her reviews which helped to hone her point of view and her letters which continued, when her other writing had ceased, to manifest her desire to influence fellow artists. As C. K. Stead has asserted, it is in her letters and journals that ‘the real quality of her critical mind blazes forth most clearly’, and her reviews may be added to this category of documents that attest to a desire not only to integrate ‘Art’ and ‘Life’, but a cogent attempt to influence a generation of writers and thereby to ‘save the world’.74 ‘But’, she wrote to Koteliansky, ‘writing letters is unsatisfactory. If you were here we would talk or be silent – it would not matter which. We shall meet one day, perhaps soon, perhaps some years must pass first. Who shall say. To know you are there is enough. This is not really contradictory.’75 This letter, written six months before her death, encapsulates her love of ‘Life’, the kinship she felt with life-giving artists, whether near or far, and a wish to reach beyond the written word to a shared and companionable silence. On some subjects, the silence must be broken, noisily, in ‘high manifesto’ style, but, on other occasions, ‘[i]f we are to be truly alive there are large pauses in which we creep away into our caves of contemplation. And then it is, in the silence, that Memory mounts his throne and judges all that is in our minds.’76 It is in the constancy of her exhortations ‘to be truly alive’ that Mansfield most resembles Danchev’s manifestoist, who frequently ‘outruns art to embrace life’, and, like the modernist manifesto, her writing, in all its forms, ‘demands something from us’: if not a ‘programme’, then certainly ‘our attention [and] a world-view’.77

Notes   1. Katherine Mansfield, Letter to Richard Murry, 3 February 1921, Collected Letters, vol. 4, p. 173.   2. Mary Ann Caws, Manifesto, p. xxii.   3. Ibid. p. xx.   4. Alex Danchev, 100 Artists’ Manifestos, p. xxvii.   5. Ibid. pp. 92−5.

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Katherine Mansfield and the ‘Manifesto Moment’     75  6. Caws, Manifesto, p. xx. ‘The manifesto is by nature loud, unlike the essay. What I would call the “high manifesto”, on the model of “high modernism”, is often noisy in its appearance, like a typographical alarm or an implicit rebel yell. It calls for capital letters, loves bigness, demands attention.’   7. Mansfield, Letter to Richard Murry, 3 February 1921, Collected Letters, vol. 4, p. 173. As Sydney Janet Kaplan observes, this letter shows that Mansfield had developed a mission ‘by 1921, a purpose in living; but her dedication to it was not a sudden development’. See Kaplan, Katherine Mansfield and The Origins of Modernist Fiction, p. 203.   8. Laura Winkiel, Modernism, Race and Manifestos, p. 5.  9. Danchev, 100 Artists’ Manifestos, pp. xxvi−xxviii. 10. Mansfield, Letter to John Middleton Murry, 2 April 1920, Collected Letters, vol. 3, p. 270. 11. Jenny McDonnell, Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Marketplace, p. 79. 12. Murry, ‘Art and Philosophy’, p. 12. 13. Angela Smith, ‘“As fastidious as though I wrote with acid”’, p. 4. 14. Caws, Manifesto, p. xxii. 15. F. T. Marinetti, ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’, in Danchev (ed.), 100 Artists’ Manifestos, p. 7. Although not translated into English until 1913, Marinetti’s first manifesto had been published in the prestigious French newspaper Le Figaro in February 1909, so Murry may have been aware of it, either through Rhythm’s art director, J. D. Fergusson, who lived in France, or from his own time in Paris in 1910. For the influence of Bergson see, for example, Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson, pp. 160−3 and Smith, ‘“As fastidious as though I wrote with acid”, p. 5. 16. Mansfield, ‘Ole Underwood’, Collected Fiction, vol. 1, p. 321. 17. Caws, Manifesto, p. xxii. 18. Clare Hanson (ed.), Critical Writings, p. 21. 19. McDonnell, Katherine Mansfield, pp. 64−5. 20. Murry and Mansfield, ‘The Meaning of Rhythm’, Collected Poetry and Critical Writings, pp. 729−32. 21. Mansfield, Letter to William Gerhardi, 10 July 1922, Collected Letters, vol. 5, pp. 220−1. 22. Hanson (ed.), Critical Writings, p. 4. 23. McDonnell, Katherine Mansfield, p. 78. 24. Mansfield, Letter to Murry, 19 December 1915, Collected Letters, vol. 1, p. 218. 25. Mansfield, ‘Autumns: I’, Collected Fiction, vol. 1, p. 452. 26. Mansfield, ‘Autumns: I’, p. 453. 27. Hanson and Andrew Gurr, Katherine Mansfield, p. 44 28. Mansfield, Letter to Beatrice Campbell, 4 May 1916, Collected Letters, vol. 1, p. 261. 29. Mansfield, ‘Autumns: I’, p. 452. 30. Mansfield, ‘Autumns: I’, p. 453. 31. Mansfield, ‘Autumns: I’, p. 452. 32. Rachel Potter, Modernist Literature, p. 132. 33. Kate Fullbrook, Katherine Mansfield, p. 22.

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76     Susan Reid 34. Caws, Manifesto, p. xxi. 35. Mansfield, Prelude, Collected Fiction, vol. 2, pp. 67, 87. 36. Quoted by Carolyn Burke, ‘Mina Loy’, p. 234. 37. Caws, Manifesto, pp. xxii, 332. Burke, ‘Mina Loy’, p. 235. 38. Mansfield, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 17 November 1918, Collected Letters, vol. 2, p. 291. 39. Faith Binckes, Modernism, Magazines, and the British Avant-Garde, p. 217. 40. Mansfield, Notebooks, vol. 2, p. 17. 41. Ibid. p. 59. 42. Ibid. p. 60. 43. Mansfield, Letter to Murry, 24 October 1920, Collected Letters, vol. 4, p. 82. 44. Mansfield, Letter to Murry, 5 December 1920, Collected Letters, vol. 4, p. 135. 45. Smith, ‘GUTS – Katherine Mansfield as a Reviewer’, pp. 10–11. 46. Caws, Manifesto, p. xx. 47. Danchev, 100 Artists’ Manifestos, p. xxiv. 48. Ibid. p. xxiv. 49. Mansfield, ‘Wanted, A New World’, Collected Poetry and Critical Writings, pp. 620−1. 50. Mansfield, ‘Esther Waters Revisited’, Collected Poetry and Critical Writings, pp. 641, 643. 51. Mansfield, ‘A Spring to Catch Woodcocks’, Collected Poetry and Critical Writings, p. 612. 52. Mansfield, ‘A Prize Novel’, Collected Poetry and Critical Writings, pp. 619−20. 53. Mansfield, ‘Victorian Elegance’, Collected Poetry and Critical Writings, p. 652. 54. Mansfield, ‘First Novels’, Collected Poetry and Critical Writings, p. 627. 55. Mansfield, ‘The Luxurious Style’, Collected Poetry and Critical Writings, p. 636. 56. Mansfield, Letter to Hugh Walpole, 27 October 1920, Collected Letters, vol. 4, p. 87. 57. Mansfield, ‘The Books of the Small Souls’, Collected Poetry and Critical Writings, p. 616. 58. Mansfield, ‘A Norwegian Novel’, Collected Poetry and Critical Writings, p. 614. 59. Mansfield, ‘The Cherry Orchard’, Collected Poetry and Critical Writings, p. 633. 60. Mansfield, ‘The Silence is Broken’, Collected Poetry and Critical Writings, p. 681. 61. Smith, ‘GUTS’, pp. 10−11. 62. Vincent O’Sullivan, ‘Introduction’, Collected Letters, vol. 4, p. xiii. 63. Mansfield, [addressee unknown], early 1921, Collected Letters, vol. 4, p. 170. 64. See for example Winkiel’s account of Elizabeth Robins’ novel, The Convert (1907) in Modernism, Race and Manifestos, pp. 68−74. 65. Caws, Manifesto, pp. 561–6. ‘The Spirit of Place’ was first published in the

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Katherine Mansfield and the ‘Manifesto Moment’     77 English Review (November 1918) and later collected in Studies in Classic American Literature (1923). 66. Mansfield, Letter to Murry, 1 October 1920, Collected Letters, vol. 4, p. 57. 67. Ibid. p. 99 68. Mansfield, Letter to S. S. Koteliansky, 25 March 1922, Collected Letters, vol. 5, p. 128. 69. Mansfield, Letter to Richard Murry, 2 January 1922, Collected Letters, vol. 5, p. 3. 70. Mansfield, Letter to Violet Schiff, c. 1 April 1922, Collected Letters, vol. 5, p. 139. 71. Danchev, 100 Artists’ Manifestos, p. xxviii. 72. Mansfield, Letter to Koteliansky, 15 March 1922, Collected Letters, vol. 5, p. 110. 73. Winkiel, Modernism, Race and Manifestos, p. 2. 74. C. K. Stead (ed.), Letters and Journals, p. 20. 75. Mansfield, Letter to Koteliansky, 4 July 1922, Collected Letters, vol. 5, p. 217. 76. Mansfield, ‘Three Women Novelists’, Collected Poetry and Critical Writings, p. 446. 77. Danchev, 100 Artists’ Manifestos, p. xxvii.

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Chapter 6

Circles of Influence: Katherine Mansfield, S. S. Koteliansky and Russia Gerri Kimber Katherine Mansfield was influenced throughout her life by Russia and Russian literature, from her adolescent infatuation with Marie Bashkirtseff to her mature engagement with Dostoevsky in her letters and journals, culminating in her death surrounded by émigré Russians at George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff’s esoteric community, the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, at Fontainebleau. As a young writer Mansfield toyed with Russian-sounding pseudonyms: Katya, Katerina, Kissienka, Katoushka and Katharina, wore Russian costume, smoked Russian cigarettes and attended Russian concerts and the ballet.1 Mansfield’s UK census form for 1911 provides a tantalising glimpse into her mindset at that time in her life.2 Under ‘name and surname’ she wrote ‘Katharina Mansfield’, a pseudonym she was using frequently at the time. For example ‘A Fairy Story’, published in the Open Window in December 1910, is signed ‘Katharina Mansfield’, and an unpublished creative piece from January 1911, ‘Sumurun: an Impression of Leopoldine Konstantin’, discovered in a new acquisition by the Alexander Turnbull Library in October 2012, is signed ‘Katharina Mansfield’.3 Her legal name at the time was, in fact, Kathleen Mansfield Bowden, following her marriage to George Bowden on 2 March 1909 at the Paddington Registry Office. She states her occupation as ‘Author’, her birthplace as ‘Wellington, New Zealand’ and declares herself to be a ‘British subject by parentage’. The form is duly signed ‘Katharina Mansfield’. Within three years of arriving in London to become a writer, Mansfield had met John Middleton Murry and become co-editor with him of Rhythm, one of the earliest modernist magazines, published from Summer 1911 to March 1913. She was now able to bring her fascination with all things Russian to the attention of others, and thus influence the contents of the little magazine. Mansfield, Murry and their widening social circle had strong convictions about the singular importance of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Russian literature. Galya Diment notes ‘the intense interest that Great Britain manifested towards Russia prior to the Russian revolution of 1917 and . . . in particular, Bloomsbury’.4 Donald Davie makes an even stronger claim: the awakening of the Anglo-Saxon people to Russian literature – s­ omething which happened, to all intents and purposes, between 1885 and 1920 – should rank as a turning-point no less momentous than the discovery of Italian literature by the generations of the English renaissance.5

Rebecca Beasley and Philip Ross Bullock call this an ‘apparently audacious claim’, but then go on to demonstrate how it ‘in fact simply restates the observations of Rebecca West [who] made the same point, using a more recent comparison, in 1915: “Russia is to the young intellectuals of today what Italy was to the Victorians”.’6 Using a Russian pseudonym, Mansfield placed several of her own poems in various issues of Rhythm, apparently ‘translated from the Russian of Boris Petrovsky’.7 As O’Sullivan notes in his collected edition of Mansfield’s poems, during this period ‘Mansfield’s verse wore a deliberately Slavic air, as she assigned to “Boris Petrovsky” most of the poems she contributed to Rhythm.’8 By the seventh issue of Rhythm in August 1912, the magazine even boasted its own ‘Russian Correspondent’, Michael Lykiardopoulos, who ‘had real literary flair, an excellent Russian prose style, and a quite remarkable knowledge of eight or nine European languages’ and ‘knew most of the great writers of Europe and had translated their best works into Russian’.9 In the late summer of 1914, Mansfield met the Russian émigré Samuel Solomonovich Koteliansky (1880−1955), known to literary London until the end of his life simply as ‘Kot’. He remained devoted to her, despite the occasional period of estrangement, until her death and indeed for the rest of his own life. His influence led to her further receptivity towards Russian literature. Koteliansky was a Russian Jew from the Ukraine, who immigrated to England in 1911 following political harassment by the then Tsarist government. Dorothy Brett would describe him in 1915 as ‘so broad-shouldered that he looks short, his black hair brushed straight up “en brosse”, his dark eyes set perhaps a trifle too close to his nose, the nose a delicate well-made arch, gold eyeglasses pinched onto it’.10 In 1914 he came into the sphere of Mansfield and Murry, having been introduced to them by D. H. Lawrence. On 11 August, Lawrence had written to Koteliansky, mentioning Mansfield and Murry for the first time: ‘Dear Kotilianski [sic], I wonder if you & Horne would care to meet two little friends of ours, with us, at the Café Royal tomorrow night.’11 There is no evidence that the meeting took Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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place, since letters/personal diary information for all involved parties at this time is scarce. It seems, however, entirely probable.12 Although literature was where his real interest lay, Koteliansky was by then working in an office known as the Russian Law Bureau, translating Russian legal documents. As Diment notes, given that he was a ‘seemingly provincial Russian Jew not at all known for any particular talents or achievements, it is truly stunning that he was able to befriend so many by now legendary people’.13 Mansfield brings Koteliansky’s office to life in one of her impressionistic, reminiscing letters, written two years before her death: Where are all the hats from the hatstand. And do you remember for how long the bell was broken [. . .] And your little room with the tiny mirror and the broken window & the piano sounding from outside. [. . .] [. . .] and then [R. S.] Slatkovsky – his beard, his ‘glad-eye’, his sister, who sat in front of the fire and took off her boot. [. . .] And the view from your window – you remember? The typist sits there & her hat & coat hang in the hall.14

In a fascinating counterbalance to this memory, Bertrand Russell had a rather different view of Koteliansky’s office when Mansfield and Murry were there: they were all sitting together in a bare office high up next door to the Holborn Restaurant, with the windows shut, smoking Russian cigarettes without a moment’s intermission, idle and cynical. I thought Murry beastly, and the whole atmosphere of the three dead and putrefying.15

John Carswell describes Koteliansky’s growing influence in Bloomsbury when he notes how, with ‘the growing passion for all things Russian, he was beginning to be recognised not only as a translator but as a finder of new Russian material’.16 Darya Protopopova further underlines his influence in this regard, claiming that Koteliansky was an infinite resource on the whole range of Russian literature; he translated not only the authors who were already well known in England, but also the contemporary Russian writers who left Russia after the revolution, but remained undiscovered by English readers, e.g. Ivan Bunin and Alexander Kuprin.17

This of course would explain how he came into the sphere of the Bloomsbury Group and its fringes, whose ‘fascination with Russia had two major components: the Ballets Russes and Russian literature’.18 Koteliansky’s Russianness would have been attractive to them all. Claire Davison-Pégon notes that

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Katherine Mansfield, S. S. Koteliansky and Russia      81 Koteliansky’s involvement in these circles was not as a bystander but as an active participant, even instigator, and specialist. . . . He informed Lawrence’s dream of a utopian community, ‘Rananim’, Virginia Woolf’s reading of the Russians, Leonard Woolf’s knowledge of the harsher political truths of the Bolshevist regime, Murry’s study of Dostoevsky, and Mansfield’s understanding of the revolution.19

Participant he may have been, but apart from his intimate friendships with Mansfield and Lawrence, Koteliansky’s relationship with Bloomsbury proper remained troubled. Andrei Rogachevskii claims that ‘to most of them he was no more than a casual acquaintance . . . Koteliansky did not wish to remain an outsider all his life and quite desperately wanted to belong, but he finally realised that he had little choice in the matter’.20 Indeed, in a letter to Mansfield written on 9 December 1919, he wrote: ‘there is no one who cares a bit or is to the smallest degree interested in what happens to me. [. . .] But left with myself, quite alone, for very long stretches of time, I feel as if I have already ceased to live.’21 This state of affairs is reinforced by a comment made by Beatrice Campbell (Lady Glenavy), who noted: ‘He was dazzled by them, but with few exceptions they had no real friendship or affection for him.’22 During the winter of 1914, Koteliansky and Murry decided to collaborate together on a series of projects for a publisher called Maunsel, translating Russian works into English for £20 a piece and dividing the fee between them, with Koteliansky doing the initial translation and Murry polishing and perfecting the English; their first such venture was The Bet and Other Stories (1915) by Chekhov. Koteliansky’s working methods were the same with all his collaborators. Discussing these methods using the example of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Victoria Glendinning recounts: Kot would produce a handwritten draft translation, leaving spaces between the lines where Leonard (or Virginia) inserted a revised version. The next stage was to go back to the Russian and scrutinise the translation again, sentence by sentence. Kot was as much a perfectionist as Leonard. ‘We would sometimes be a quarter of an hour arguing over a single word.’23

Over a number of years this method would result in many books of Russian translations, with a variety of collaborators including Murry, Mansfield, the Woolfs and Lawrence. As Davison-Pégon argues, Koteliansky offered his collaborators ‘the opportunity to thrill to the challenge of an unfamiliar language’,24 and this influence ultimately changed the English literary scene. Mansfield herself thrilled at the prospect of these new translations: ‘When you think that the English literary world is given up to sniggerers. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Dishonesty, sneering, DULL DULL, giggling at Victorians inside whiskers and here is this treasure – at the wharf only not unloaded.’25 The collaboration with Koteliansky that influenced Mansfield the most − and also gave her the most pleasure − was the translations of Chekhov’s letters, which appeared as a thirteen-part series in the Athenaeum beginning on 4 April 1919. She wrote to Koteliansky on 6 June 1919: I do my very best always with these wonderful letters & can do no more. Wonderful they are. The last one – the one to Souvorin about the duty of the artist to put the ‘question’ – not to solve it but to so put it that one is completely satisfied seems to me one of the most valuable things I have ever read. It opens – it discovers rather, a new world. May Tchekov live forever.26

In the autumn of 1919, ensconced on the Italian Riviera for health reasons, her first letters home were to Koteliansky about their plan to extend and publish a translation of the Chekhov letters in book form. Koteliansky sent her a huge pile of manuscripts he had been working on with the following note: ‘My ambition is to see our Tchekhov letters in book form [. . .]. I want this book as a token of our perhaps uncommon friendship.’27 However, the edition was never finished in Mansfield’s lifetime − Koteliansky would complete and publish the volume with Philip Tomlinson in 1925. The first recorded letter from Mansfield to Koteliansky is dated 1 February 1915 and the last 19 October 1922, less than three months before her death. Diary entries concerning Koteliansky start at the beginning of 1915. An entry for 29 January 1915 reads: ‘Saw Koteliansky at the station. He was very nice. I rather cling to him. He brought me a skirt and some cigarettes & some chocolates.’28 On 29 March 1915 she wrote to him: ‘Yes, Kotiliansky [sic], you are really one of my people – we can afford to be quite free with each other – I know.’29 As their friendship blossomed, Mansfield, Murry and Koteliansky spent a good deal of time together. In the autumn of 1915, following the death of her brother in the Great War, Mansfield and Murry assigned the lease on their house at 5 Acacia Road in St John’s Wood to colleagues of Koteliansky’s at the Russian Law Bureau. Koteliansky rented a room from them and eventually took over the house himself and lived there until his death in 1955, with a photograph of Mansfield in pride of place and surrounded by several of her personal effects − her brother’s cap, a chair, a walking stick − abandoned when she and Murry left for Bandol or bequeathed to him in her will. An unidentified misunderstanding − one of many which would define their relationship − led to the following note to Murry in December 1915 from the South of France: ‘Is Kot my enemy now? I feel Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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he is.’30 Koteliansky’s close relationship with Lawrence meant that occasionally Mansfield had to be guarded in her comments to others, as in this letter to Beatrice Campbell: ‘I want to talk about the Ls, but if I do, don’t tell Kot and Gertler for then it will get back to Lawrence & I will be literally murdered.’31 Their relationship vacillated over several years, though Leonard Woolf noted, ‘He was perhaps the only person whom she trusted and respected completely. And of Katherine Kot always said: “She is a real person”.’32 Koteliansky himself famously termed their relationship ‘our perhaps uncommon friendship’, and in a letter to Dorothy Brett on 10 August 1921 gave his fullest account of Mansfield’s influence on him: if K. has a real friend, perhaps cruel at times – in the whole universe it is myself. Because inspite of [sic] all defects, she knows I am sincerely fond of her, – not sentimentally, not for her good qualities, but just for herself, for what she is, for that indeed for which all others might be frightened away from K. That K. is unique, perfectly unlike anybody else in existence, and not to be judged in the same way . . .33

On 4 November 1921 Mansfield wrote him a letter that reads as an attempt at a sort of reconciliation, a renewal of their friendship after some unidentified difficulty: I am glad that you criticised me. It is right that you should have hated much in me. I was false in many things and careless – untrue in many ways. But I would like you to know that I recognise this and for a long time I have been trying to ‘squeeze the slave out of my soul’. You will understand I don’t tell you this to prove I am an angel now! No. But I need not go into the reasons; you know them.34

Poignantly, in a diary entry for 12 January 1922, almost exactly a year before her death, she writes: ‘I want to adopt a Russian baby, call him Anton & bring him up as mine with Kot for a godfather and Mme Tchekhov for a godmother. Such is my dream.’35 A week later on 20 January she writes: ‘I suppose it is the effect of isolation that I can truly say I think of W. J. D., [Walter John de la Mare] Tchekhov, Koteliansky, HMT [Henry Major Tomlinson] and Orage every day. They are part of my life.’36 Carswell relates how ‘[i]n November 1921 Gorky himself, in an interview at Stockholm, told the world press that Manoukhine had “at last discovered the remedy” for tuberculosis, and that the actual manuscript of Manoukhine’s work was in Gorky’s luggage.’37 Koteliansky, of course, told the tubercular Mansfield. Dr Manoukhin claimed to be able to cure tuberculosis by irradiating the spleen. Mansfield, by now desperately ill, was influenced by Koteliansky’s recommendation and eager to Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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try the treatment, though within weeks she would come to realise that it was not producing the miracle cure she had hoped for. On 31 January 1922 she writes of her first visit: ‘In the evening I saw Manoukhine. But on the way there, nay, even before, I realised my heart was not in it.’38 However, Manoukhin’s connection to Gorky would go on to influence a translation collaboration between Mansfield and Koteliansky, their last, on the Reminiscences of Leonid Andreyev (1931). Although the treatment was unsuccessful, one benefit of her meeting with Manoukhin was that for a short time Mansfield found herself on the fringes of the Russian émigré community in Paris, which thrilled her deeply. On 8 April, in another letter to Koteliansky, she wrote: ‘In a week or so I am going to meet Bunin and Kuprin at M’s flat. To think one can speak with someone who really knew Tchekhov.’39 This would have been especially exciting since she had helped translate Kuprin’s short story, ‘Captain Ribnikov’, in 1915. As it turned out, the meeting did not take place until the end of May and was somewhat disappointing to her, given Bunin’s connection to Chekhov: I met Bunin in Paris and because he had known Tchekhov I wanted to talk of him. But alas! Bunin said ‘Tchekhov? Ah – Ah – oui, j’ai connu Tchekhov. Mais il y a longtemps, longtemps’. [Ah – Ah – yes, I knew Tchekhov. But a very long time ago.] And then a pause. And then, graciously, ‘Il a écrit des belles choses’. [He wrote some lovely things.] And that was the end of Tchekhov.40

However, this proximity to Russian émigrés during 1922 once more influenced her writing style; for example, on the same day as she wrote the above letter to Koteliansky, she wrote one to Dorothy Brett, in which she called her ‘Brettushka’.41 Mansfield’s last summer in London was dominated by her relationship with Koteliansky as they embarked on two final collaborative translations, Gorky’s Reminiscences of Leonid Andreyev and the translation of Dostoevsky’s letters to his wife. In a flurry of visits before she finally left England on 26 September 1922 she saw Koteliansky four times in eight days.42 Returning to France, she wrote in her last letter to him: The world as I know it is no joy to me and I am useless in it. I have to let you know for you mean so much to me. I know you will never listen to whatever foolish things other people may say about me. Those other helpless people going round in their little whirlpool do not matter a straw to me.43

Trying to justify her resolve to enter Gurdjieff’s esoteric community, she continued: ‘This world to me is a dream and the people in it are sleepers. I have known just instances of waking but that is all. I want to find Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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a world in which these instances are united. Shall I succeed? I do not know. I scarcely care. What is important is to try. . .’44 Just three months later she died in Fontainebleau on 9 January 1923, surrounded by Russian émigrés from whom she was learning Russian songs and dances. More and more in these last months she identified personally with and was influenced by Chekhov: ‘both were tubercular; both attuned to the casual coexistence of violently different inner and outer worlds; both dependent on others although painfully and resolutely alone’.45 She had once written to Koteliansky: ‘If I do die perhaps there will be a small private heaven for consumptives only. In that case I shall see Tchekov.’46 In a notebook taken to Fontainebleau she poignantly made a list of all the words and phrases she needed translating into Russian in order to be able to converse with the mainly Russian community there, including: ‘I am cold’; ‘bring paper to light a fire’; ‘I would like to speak Russian with you.’47 In a cruel twist of fate, Koteliansky was not granted permission by the authorities to leave England in order to attend her funeral in Fontainebleau. In a letter to Sydney Waterlow after her death, Koteliansky once more expressed the influence Mansfield had over him: It is her being, what she was, the aroma of her being, that I love. She could do things that I disliked intensely. Exaggerate and tell untruths, yet the way she did it was so admirable, unique, that I did not trouble at all about what she spoke, but only the way she spoke, it was just lovely . . . Her ‘divisions’ and ‘secret sorrow’ I felt from the very beginning of my meeting her, but the extent of her suffering I realized only a few months before her death.48

In another letter to Waterlow he wrote: ‘I have never been “just” to Katherine the writer. I loved her so much that her writing to me was and reminds one of the non-important manifestations of her being. It is her being, what she was, the aroma of her being, that I love.’49 Beatrice Campbell reveals how Katherine’s image was constantly in his mind, almost as if she had still been alive. ‘Her’ pear tree in the garden, the guilder rose she had planted, the lock of her hair she had once given him, the chair she had used to sit in when she wrote – all were devotedly preserved.50

She further reminisced: Murry used to say that Katherine and I ‘romanticized’ Kot, making him a tower of strength, a moral genius incapable of saying or doing a dishonourable thing . . . To the end of her life [Mansfield] turned to him and valued him as a very rare and faithful friend.51

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Murry’s own relationship with Koteliansky was never an easy one and in fact the tension between the two men contributed to the periods of estrangement between Mansfield and Koteliansky. Murry especially never forgave him for recommending Manoukhin, whose X-ray treatments he felt had precipitated Mansfield towards an early grave. By 1924, Murry and Koteliansky’s quarrelling had led to an intervention by Waterlow, who wrote on 20 November 1924: What has happened between you and Koteliansky (I have read your correspondence with him) [. . .] makes it necessary that [. . .] such relations as there have been should cease. The falsity in our relation, for which you are responsible, can no longer be tolerated.52

Murry’s complicated rift with Koteliansky and others in their literary circle, brought about by his editorship of the Adelphi and use of contributors, together with his constant and sycophantic use of Mansfield material in the paper, would never be properly healed. Koteliansky and Murry in particular had fought over the editorship of the Adelphi, and Waterlow had taken Koteliansky’s side. A week later, on 27 November 1924, Murry’s outraged and bitter response took the form of a letter to Waterlow in which the following words were written on four separate pieces of paper:Boil ⎯⎯⎯→ Your ⎯⎯⎯→ Head ⎯⎯⎯→ Yours ever, J. M. M.53

Relations between the two men remained strained until Koteliansky’s death, following which Murry wrote to Beatrice Campbell in 1955: As a matter of fact Kot’s influence upon her [Mansfield] was quite pernicious. The one chance of saving (or prolonging) her life was in her staying quiet with me in Switzerland. He filled her with the dangerous dream of being completely cured by the Russian Manoukhin, from the inevitable failure of which she reacted into the spiritual quackery of Gurdjieff – and death.54

In turn Koteliansky was critical of Murry’s editorial influence over his publications of Mansfield’s work after her death, stating ‘that when Murry published her letters and diaries after her death he “left out all the jokes”, to make her an “English Tchekov”’.55 Mansfield’s relationship with Koteliansky was not viewed as pernicious by anyone save Murry, whose own personal quarrels and resentments inevitably coloured his attitude. Lawrence also maintained a close and unbroken relationship with Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Koteliansky from 1914 until his death in 1930, most often by letter, since Lawrence was frequently abroad. He too collaborated with Koteliansky on translations from Russian. In an amusing reciprocal concern for each other’s health (Lawrence was recovering from influenza), Mansfield had written to Koteliansky in late February 1919: ‘I am anxious about [Lawrence]: he ought to be kept so quiet and allowed to rest and who will let him? I cannot bear to think of him ill.’56 Lawrence for his part wrote to Koteliansky on 1 March and asked, ‘Do you go & see Katharine [sic]? – I think she’s been very ill too.’57 He wrote again a few days later: ‘Poor Katharine – I’m afraid she is only just on the verge of existence.’58 The Lawrences and the Murrys were estranged for several years, during which time Lawrence vented his spleen about them in Koteliansky’s direction: ‘Two mud-worms, they are, playing into each other’s long mud-bellies.’59 But six months before Mansfield’s death, whilst travelling with Frieda in the South Pacific, Lawrence wrote to Koteliansky from Australia: ‘If you were here you would understand Katharine so much better. She is very Australian – or New Zealand. Wonder how she is.’60 A month before her death, on 4 December 1922, he wrote to Koteliansky from New Mexico: ‘I’ll send word to Katharine, via you. Perhaps. Anyway, greet her from me.’61 In fact, Lawrence and Frieda had already sent Mansfield a postcard from Wellington on 15 August 1922, which she received five weeks later via Ottoline Morrell. Lawrence wrote: ‘Ricordi’ [Memories], to which Frieda appended the words: ‘We thought so hard of you here.’62 When Koteliansky died in January 1955, it was Leonard Woolf who wrote his obituary in The Times, and would later on that year go on to write a personal tribute in the New Statesman.63 Dilys Powell would go on to claim that ‘[t]hose who knew him best may well feel that the most precious gift of all was his personal friendship, at once fierce and incorruptible, demanding always the absolute honesty it offered. Of not many is it said, “I am proud that he liked me”.’64 The last words belong to Mansfield. On 1 February 1922 in Paris, undergoing costly, exhausting and ultimately pointless irradiation at the hands of Manoukhin, Mansfield wrote to Koteliansky: While I was waiting at the clinique tonight the doors were all open and [. . .] people were talking Russian [. . .] I cannot tell you how I love Russian. When I hear it spoken it makes me think of course always of Tchekhov. [. . .] I thought also of you, and I wished you were with me.65

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Notes   1. For a detailed analysis of Mansfield’s Russian obsession see Joanna Woods, Katerina.   2. Gerri Kimber, ‘Katherine Mansfield and the Public Census of 1911’.  3. Mansfield, ‘A Fairy Story’, Collected Fiction, pp. 198−205; ‘Sumurun: An Impression of Leopoldine Konstantin’, Collected Poetry and Critical Writings, pp. 385−7.   4. Galya Diment, A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury, p. 4.   5. Donald Davie, ‘Mr Tolstoy, I Presume?’ p. 276.  6. Rebecca Beasley and Philip Ross Bullock, ‘Introduction: The Illusion of Transparency’, p. 284.   7. Mansfield, ‘Very Early Spring’ and ‘The Awakening River’, Collected Poetry and Critical Writings, p. 72; ‘The Earth-Child in the Grass’, Collected Poetry and Critical Writings, p. 80; ‘To God the Father’, Collected Poetry and Critical Writings, p. 81; ‘Jangling Memory’, Collected Poetry and Critical Writings, p. 84; ‘There was a Child Once’, Collected Poetry and Critical Writings, p. 86.   8. Vincent O’Sullivan (ed.), Poems of Katherine Mansfield, p. xii.   9. R. H. Bruce Lockhart, Memoirs of a British Agent, p. 74. 10. Dorothy Brett quoted in Sean Hignett, Brett, p. 75. 11. D. H. Lawrence, Quest for Rananim, p. 2. 12. Geraldine Conroy, ‘“Our Perhaps Uncommon Friendship”’, p. 356. 13. Diment, A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury, p. 4. 14. Mansfield, Letter to S. S. Koteliansky, 19 February 1921, Collected Letters, vol. 4, p. 183. 15. Bertrand Russell in Ottoline Morrell, Ottoline at Garsington, p. 57. 16. John Carswell, Lives and Letters, p. 131. 17. Darya Protopopova, ‘Virginia Woolf’s Versions of Russia’. 18. Diment, A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury, p. 4. 19. Claire Davison-Pégon, ‘Samuel Solomonovich Koteliansky’, p. 336. 20. Andrei Rogachevskii, ‘Samuel Koteliansky and the Bloomsbury Circle’, p. 380. 21. Koteliansky, Letter to Mansfield, 9 December 1919. Alexander Turnbull Library, MS-Papers-4003-23. 22. Lady Beatrice Glenavy, Today We Will Only Gossip, p. 193. 23. Victoria Glendinning, Elizabeth Bowen, p. 238. 24. Davison-Pégon, ‘Samuel Solomonovich Koteliansky’, p. 342. 25. Mansfield, Letter to Koteliansky, c. July 1919, Collected Letters, vol. 2, p. 341. 26. Mansfield, Letter to Koteliansky, 6 June 1919, Collected Letters, vol. 2, p. 324. 27. Koteliansky, Letter to Mansfield, 26 September 1919. Alexander Turnbull Library, MS-Papers-4003-23. 28. Mansfield, Notebooks, vol. 2, p. 8. 29. Mansfield, Letter to Koteliansky, 4 May 1915, Collected Letters, vol. 1, p. 174.

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Katherine Mansfield, S. S. Koteliansky and Russia      89 30. Mansfield, Letter to John Middleton Murry, 23 December 1915, Collected Letters, vol. 1, p. 225. 31. Mansfield, Letter to Beatrice Campbell, 4 May 1916, Collected Letters, vol. 1, p. 261. 32. Leonard Woolf, Beginning Again, p. 252. 33. Koteliansky quoted in Diment, A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury, p. 67. 34. Mansfield, Letter to Dorothy Brett, 11 November 1921, Collected Letters, vol. 4, p. 312. 35. Mansfield, Notebooks, vol. 2, p. 316. 36. Ibid. p. 318. 37. Carswell, Lives and Letters, p. 179. 38. Mansfield, Notebooks, vol. 2, p. 322. 39. Mansfield, Letter to Koteliansky, 8 April 1922, Collected Letters, vol. 5, p. 148. 40. Mansfield, Letter to William Gerhardi, 14 June 1922, Collected Letters, vol. 5, p. 206. 41. Mansfield, Letter to Dorothy Brett, 8 April 1922, Collected Letters, vol. 5, p. 147. 42. Mansfield, Notebooks, vol. 2, p. 328. 43. Mansfield, Letter to Koteliansky, 19 October 1922, Collected Letters, vol. 5, p. 304. 44. Ibid. 45. www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=81404 (last accessed 29 October 2014). 46. Mansfield, Letter to Koteliansky, 13 December 1919, Collected Letters, vol. 3, p. 161. 47. Mansfield, Notebooks, vol. 2, p. 343. In her transcription, however, Scott omits a fascinating list of Russian words, written as they are pronounced, with their English equivalent. See Alexander Turnbull Library, MS-Papers-4006-10. 48. Koteliansky, Letters to Sydney Waterlow, 27 June 1927 and 12 December 1928, Alexander Turnbull Library, MS-Papers-1157, Folder 5. 49. Koteliansky, Letter to Waterlow, 21 June 1927, Alexander Turnbull Library, MS-Papers-1157, Folder 5. 50. Campbell quoted in Carswell, Lives and Letters, pp. 260−1. 51. Glenavy, Today We Will Only Gossip, pp. 61−2. 52. Waterlow, Letter to Murry, 20 November 1924, Alexander Turnbull Library, MS-Papers-1157, Folder 7. 53. Murry, Letter to Waterlow, 27 November 1924, Alexander Turnbull Library, MS-Papers-1157, Folder 7. 54. Glenavy, Today We Will Only Gossip, p. 192. 55. Koteliansky quoted in Ibid. p. 69 56. Mansfield, Letter to Koteliansky, late February 1919, Collected Letters, vol. 2, p. 304. 57. Lawrence, Quest for Rananim, p. 162. 58. Ibid. p. 164. 59. Ibid. p. 216. 60. Ibid. p. 242. 61. Ibid. p. 249.

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90     Gerri Kimber 62. D. H. and Frieda Lawrence, Postcard to Mansfield, 15 August 1922, Alexander Turnbull Library, MS-Papers-11326-002; Andrew Harrison, ‘The Lawrences’, pp. 149−53. 63. The Times, 4 February 1955; The New Statesman, 18 June 1955. 64. Glenavy, Today We Will Only Gossip, p. 192. 65. Mansfield, Letter to Koteliansky, 1 February 1922, Collected Letters, vol. 5, p. 38.

EDL\JBURGH University Press ,;

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Chapter 7

‘Worms of the Same Family’: Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth von Arnim Juliane Römhild Only one thing, my hand on my heart, I could swear to. Never could Elizabeth be influenced by me. If you knew how she would scorn the notion, how impossible it would be for her. There is a kind of turn in our sentences which is alike but that is because we are worms of the same family. But that is all . . .1

Fondness and admiration as well as jealousy and competition were the leitmotifs of Katherine Mansfield’s friendship with her older cousin Elizabeth von Arnim. Although Jeffrey Meyers noted Mansfield’s ‘personal and literary rivalry with Elizabeth, just as she had with Virginia Woolf’2 in 1978, scholarship has been slow to examine the relationship between the two writers in more detail.3 Yet, the ways in which Mansfield, the young avant-gardist, and von Arnim, the bestselling Edwardian satirist, influenced each other are interesting because they contribute to a research area still under construction: the connections between modernism and the middlebrow. The idea of a mutual influence between two contemporaries and friends sits uneasily with Harold Bloom’s theory of influence. Although very popular during her lifetime and still a much-loved author today, von Arnim is not one of Bloom’s ‘strong’ writers, whose shadow should loom large over Mansfield’s literary production. Nor would it be possible to construct an Oedipal constellation between two female cousins. Bloom’s theory of influence cannot account either for the fact that in different ways both cousins were inspiring to each other. The word ‘inspire’ already indicates a different conceptualisation of influence. In Patterns of Intention (1985), Michael Baxandall argues that we need to ‘reverse the active/passion relation’ indicated by the verb ‘to influence’.4 He points out that verbs like ‘to draw on’, ‘to absorb’, or ‘to adapt’ shift our focus from the source to the artist responding to it. They add precision to the term ‘influence’, which, apart from its strong connotations of power and domination, says little about the different processes involved Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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in the actual creative process.5 Inspired by Baxandall, this chapter will focus on the enabling, nurturing and stimulating aspects of the literary and personal relationship between the cousins. Von Arnim’s eponymous protagonist of Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1898) and its sequels can in many ways be considered as the godmother of Mansfield’s nameless first-person narrator of In a German Pension (1911). Mansfield arguably modelled her holidaying heroine on Elizabeth and adapted several of the thematic and structural characteristics of von Arnim’s Elizabeth novels to write about her own experiences in Germany. In later years, von Arnim’s admiration for Mansfield inspired her own letters, which are clearly influenced by Mansfield’s lively epistolary style. However, reading Mansfield’s relationship with von Arnim through the lens of a productive rivalry means that power dynamics certainly need to be taken into account. After all, even the most enthusiastic advocates of a ‘positive influence’ like Mary Orr agree that ‘influence . . . connotes power(s) and empowerment, or their denial’.6 As we will see, Andrew Elfenbein’s application of the psychological term ‘reactance’ offers a more nuanced and less loaded framework for understanding Mansfield’s ambivalence about her successful cousin than Bloom’s assertions of literary hierarchies.7 To a young aspiring writer from New Zealand with a hunger for the wide world von Arnim’s life must have appeared like a dream. Von Arnim’s father, Henry Beauchamp, was a brother of Mansfield’s grandfather and had made his fortune in Sydney. A few years after von Arnim’s birth as Mary Annette Beauchamp in 1866, the family moved back to England. In 1891 Mary married Count Henning von ArnimSchlagenthin and began a new life as a Prussian countess in Berlin before persuading her husband to move to his Pomeranian country estate, Nassenheide, near the Baltic Sea. There she wrote her runaway success Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1898) and its equally popular sequels The Solitary Summer (1899) and Elizabeth’s Adventures in Rügen (1904). At the turn of the century von Arnim was a literary star. Her strongly autobiographical protagonist proved to be so popular that friends, including Mansfield, began calling her by the name of Elizabeth. In order to maintain the distinction between life and fiction, this chapter will refer to von Arnim by her last name and reserve the name Elizabeth for the literary character. Seen from the distance of New Zealand and the perspective of an alienated teenager with literary ambitions, von Arnim must have seemed to have it all: literary success, money, an impressive title, and a privileged life in the romantic wilderness of northern Germany. Von Arnim’s books found their way back to New Zealand. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Antony Alpers speculates that Mansfield’s parents, Harold and Annie Beauchamp, who visited Europe and stayed with von Arnim’s parents in 1899, ‘brought a copy [of Elizabeth and Her German Garden] from London with them’.8 Although Alpers wonders, ‘what effect . . . this may have had upon Kass Beauchamp’s future, one can only guess’,9 and notes that ‘of her reading’ at the time ‘almost nothing is known’,10 subsequent biographers are certain that von Arnim’s book made an impression on Kass Beauchamp, who had just had her first story published and wanted to become a writer.11 We know for certain that Mansfield read Elizabeth’s Adventures in Rügen because as a teenager she set one of her stories, ‘Die Einsame’, in Rügen, and we may safely assume that she had read Elizabeth and Her German Garden as well. Mansfield also wrote a story about Felicitas, one of von Arnim’s little daughters, whom she had met when staying with the parents of her famous cousin in England.12 Both von Arnim’s writing and her person obviously fired Mansfield’s imagination, and in this sense we may count von Arnim among Mansfield’s early literary influences. Following Baxandall’s lead and considering von Arnim’s book as a stimulus to ‘Die Einsame’ rather than dismissing the story as an immature imitation, we can now see the enabling function von Arnim’s works had for Mansfield at this early stage. However, although Mansfield met her famous cousin when she returned to England in 1908, no closer contact was established. Mansfield was already breaking away from her family, and von Arnim, for her part, had no interest in cultivating her colonial connections, particularly not when they turned out to be a runaway bride carrying an illegitimate child. Although their circumstances in Germany could not have been more different, the literary depiction of Mansfield’s and von Arnim’s experiences with the inhabitants of the Fatherland show surprising similarities in both content and narrative perspective. ‘In fact’, as Isobel Maddison points out, ‘reading Mansfield’s first collection of stories through the lens of von Arnim’s early novels creates a curious and occasionally disconcerting sense of déja vu.’13 Yet, instead of casting a Bloomian ‘shadow’ over Mansfield’s own literary ambitions, in the Elizabeth novels Mansfield found a very successful model for writing about several difficult subjects: the terrifying experience of an unwanted pregnancy, her feelings of alienation as a young English woman in Germany, and her political antipathies against the Fatherland. The way von Arnim had worked the harrowing experience of serial pregnancies into her writing showed Mansfield a way of expressing her own terror of childbirth and babies after her traumatic miscarriage. Although the April, May and June babies, as they are called in the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Elizabeth novels, are a source of much delight on the page, von Arnim’s resentment of her husband’s unrelenting desire for an heir is reflected in caustic comments on the plight of women in the diary novels. She uses a technique she would later perfect in The Caravaners (1909), namely to let unlikeable characters unwittingly expose their chauvinism in direct speech. In The Solitary Summer Elizabeth remembers the zeal of her local pastor, whose wife died after giving birth to her twelfth child, and ‘in dying had turned her face with a quite unaccountable impatience away from him and to the wall . . . and . . . he had said, as he closed her eyes, “It is the Will of God.” He was a missionary’.14 Mansfield adapted this literary device to voice her own anger, for example in ‘A Birthday’ (1911), in which Andreas, who has exhausted his wife by three pregnancies in as many years, is exposed as insensitive and devoid of all understanding of his wife’s plight. Both Mansfield and von Arnim were outraged by the habitual chauvinism they encountered in German men. Mansfield’s Frau Fischer fondly remembers how her husband would sometimes join her in the kitchen, saying, ‘“Wife, I would like to be stupid for two minutes.” Nothing rested him so much then as for me to stroke his head.’15 In a similar fashion, Elizabeth had mused that, should she lose her grace and wits and begin resembling a German sausage, she would not be ‘any the less precious’ to her husband.16 Von Arnim’s equation of obesity with a mental and sexual lack of independence was adapted by Mansfield to write about her own terror of childbirth and emotional dependence. The Solitary Summer offers a poignant description of an overweight and helpless woman who pants up a hill behind her husband: And however fat and helpless she was, and however steep the hill, and however much dinner she had eaten, the idea that her husband might have taken her cloak and her umbrella and her basket and carried them for her would never have struck either of them.17

This wife’s panting is transformed into the piercing cries of Mansfield’s obese and heavily pregnant Frau Lehmann, who is banished to the upper floor because her husband considers her too unappetising to serve customers in the café downstairs. That Elizabeth seems to have acted as godmother to Mansfield’s own first-person narrator is evident in the fact that Mansfield’s narrator, like Elizabeth and unlike Mansfield herself, is cold towards the other sex. Mansfield’s narrator considers ‘child-bearing the most ignominious of all professions’ and staunchly declares that she likes ‘empty beds’.18 She also does not know which kind of ‘meat’ her husband prefers. In ‘Germans at Meat’ (1910) and ‘Frau Fischer’ (1910) Mansfield’s Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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­ arrator boldly admits to being vegetarian, a diet on which according n to Teutonic beliefs one cannot raise a family. Here, the narrator echoes Elizabeth’s fond memories of the forty ‘salad days’19 she had once spent without her family. Vegetarianism was, of course, a fashionable diet at the time, but ‘it is von Arnim who introduces the subject . . . and it is Mansfield who follows,’ as Maddison points out.20 However, in order to counter any suspicions that Mansfield simply ‘borrowed’ from her famous cousin, vegetarianism also offers a good example of how Mansfield adapted themes for her own purposes. By 1909 the times and political climate had changed since the turn of the century. Europe was preparing for war and the political tones on either side of the channel became shriller. In Mansfield’s stories, a moderate appetite for vegetables indicates not only sexual but also political moderation as well. Mansfield employs the German love of meat as ‘an extended metaphor for increasingly avaricious militarism’,21 for example, in ‘The Baron’ (1910) and ‘Germans at Meat’. In ‘Germans at Meat’ and other stories of In a German Pension, Mansfield’s first-person narrator withdraws when the discussion of her eating habits becomes unbearable. The physical and verbal withdrawal tactics essential to social survival had first been perfected by Elizabeth. Differences with neighbours or her husband are not resolved, but evaded: While he is deploring in one part of the house, I have slipped out at a door in the other, and am gone before he can catch me, and have reached and am lost in the shadows of the forest by the time he has discovered that I am nowhere to be found.22

Here, she can meditate on the beauty of the sparse Pomeranian landscape and regain a sense of equilibrium. Elizabeth is equipped with a defiant sense of independence and her pleasures usually involve violating the code of conduct for a Prussian countess in one way or another. Her escapes from her family culminate in a trip to the island of Rügen. Mansfield adapts Elizabeth’s childlike sense of freedom and her appreciation of natural beauty to suit the more modest means of her own narrator, who escapes a persistent acquaintance by taking a ride on the swing and admiring the clouds in ‘The Luftbad’ (1910).23 More importantly, von Arnim also offered a model for the narrative perspective Mansfield uses in In a German Pension. This is perhaps the most interesting aspect of von Arnim’s influence on Mansfield’s early writing because Mansfield draws on von Arnim’s skilful use of double irony and satire in her first attempt at creating the particular sense of narrative distance she would later develop in stories like ‘Je ne parle pas Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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français’ (1918), in which ‘the narrator literally becomes the story he or she tells’.24 Mansfield’s fascination with guises and different forms of self-representation is already visible in In a German Pension. This was an interest she shared with von Arnim, whose works are also preoccupied with questions of feminine identity and masquerade. Von Arnim had perfected the art of ironic double play in Elizabeth’s Adventures in Rügen (1904). When Elizabeth is cornered by a philosophically-minded young English man, she complains: I can’t think what I have done that I should be talked to for twenty minutes by a nice young man who mistook me for a Fräulein about the Absolute. . . . A real Fräulein would have looked as vacant as she felt . . . Being a matron and artful, I simply looked thoughtful – quite an easy thing to do.25

Mansfield equips her first-person narrator with a similar sense of ironic self-awareness. Like Elizabeth, Mansfield’s narrator remains a spectator who, in spite of her best intentions, never quite fits in with her German company as, for example, in ‘The Sister of the Baronness’ (1910). While the narrator self-ironically admits, ‘we positively scintillated. Anecdotes of the High Born were poured out, sweetened and sipped: we gorged on scandals of High Birth generously buttered’,26 she later withdraws again into her role of amused bystander when it turns out that the sister of the Baronness was, in fact, her maid only. As a foreigner in a new country without the support of family and friends, Mansfield draws on von Arnim’s self-conscious, ironic narrative perspective that made it possible to express both a desire for acceptance as well an innate feeling of cultural superiority. D’hoker also observes that the ‘alternation between “I” and “we” shows the narrator’s uneasy oscillation between a sense of superiority and the desire to belong’.27 Although In a German Pension has not fared well with critics and Mansfield herself later called it ‘a lie’,28 Elke D’hoker sees the enigmatic first-person narrator as an early example of Mansfield’s experiments with narrative perspective that ‘prepares the way for further developments in the short story’ by enlarging the possibilities of first-person narratives.29 That her narrator should have been inspired by the works of Elizabeth von Arnim raises questions about whether reading Mansfield in a modernist context alone is sufficient. The aesthetic kinship between the avant-garde and the middlebrow is also apparent in Mansfield’s appreciation of von Arnim’s keen eye for the surreal, which resonated strongly with Mansfield’s own satirical talent. Their shared delight in the absurd is perhaps the strongest similarity between their two protagonists. Elizabeth compares her patronising spouse, who doubles up as a husband and a sage, to an Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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absurdly over-practical sofa bed.30 Mansfield, too, repeatedly relies on the comical effect created by objectifying humans. In ‘The Modern Soul’ (1911) she finds that the married ladies in evening dress look ‘like upholstered chairs, and the unmarried ladies like draped muslin dressing-table covers’.31 Later, in Prelude (1918), Linda Burnell compares Kezia and Lottie to pieces of furniture standing upside down on the lawn: ‘“Stand on your heads, children”’, she is tempted to say, ‘“and wait for the storeman.”’32 Passages like these not only confirm Mansfield’s claim that ‘there is a kind of turn in our sentences which is alike . . . because we are worms of the same family’, they are also indicative of the close family ties between modernist and non-modernist writing, highlighting in this case a shared concern with reality and identity. However, Mansfield’s family ties were strained. Her personal choices had caused a rift that was never fully mended. Von Arnim in her furs and pearls was part of a world that Mansfield was quickly leaving behind. The cousins would not meet again until 1919, when von Arnim renewed the contact with Mansfield in the wake of the publication of Bliss and Other Stories (1920). By then, Mansfield had a clearer idea of her own talent, as had von Arnim, who told Mansfield that ‘Virginia Woolf . . . is bracketed in my mind with you.’33 Accordingly, the personal and artistic dynamics between the writers change. Contrary to her assumption, Mansfield did have the power to influence von Arnim’s writing as we can see in von Arnim’s letters. Yet she was also hoping ‘to write one story really good enough to “offer”’ her famous cousin.34 Von Arnim’s role in Mansfield’s life, on the other hand, changed from distant literary inspiration to supportive friend.35 And although their age difference inevitably generated a mother-daughter aspect to their relationship − von Arnim felt ‘fearfully proud’ of Mansfield as if she ‘had hatched her’36 − von Arnim’s ‘success and independence must have seemed most enviable to Katherine’.37 This underlying sense of personal and commercial competition influenced their relationship and put a strain on their friendship. Their acquaintance deepened into a friendship when Mansfield and Murry decided to spend time in Switzerland in order to improve Mansfield’s health in 1921 and 1922. They rented a house close to von Arnim’s chalet where she usually entertained a large party of interesting houseguests. Mansfield was largely housebound at this stage, so von Arnim’s visits were one of the few diversions from her daily routine. Mansfield described one of these visits to Dorothy Brett: She appeared today behind a bouquet – never smaller woman carried bigger bouquets. She looks like a garden walking – of asters, late sweet peas, stocks,

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100     Juliane Römhild & always petunias. She herself wore a frock like a spider’s web, a hat like a berry and gloves that reminded me of thistles in seed. . . . Oh dear I do hope we shall manage to keep her in our life. . . . But no doubt Elizabeth is far more important to me than I am to her. She’s surrounded, lapped in lovely friends.38

One of these lovely friends was John Middleton Murry, who was a daily guest at the chalet and held its châtelaine in high esteem. Like many men, he was attracted to von Arnim’s wit and powerful personality. In his view, she ‘was the only woman exc. Katherine worth talking to’.39 Mansfield was, of course, aware of Murry’s fascination with the dazzling Elizabeth, who, once again, seemed to have it all: friends, fame, money, health and a new admirer, Mansfield’s husband. Although Mansfield ‘was in fact really fond of her cousin’,40 her comments on von Arnim’s personality and writing remained mercurial. At times, she felt ‘a real tendre’41 for her and described von Arnim as the ‘most fascinating small human being’ and ‘a real enchantress’.42 On another occasion she found that the enchantress was nothing but ‘a little bundle of artificialities’43 and possessed a ‘vulgar little mind’.44 Together with Murry she warmly admired von Arnim’s best and bleakest novel Vera (1921), which Murry aptly described as a ‘Wuthering Heights written by Jane Austen’.45 Von Arnim’s next novel, however, the lighthearted fantasy The Enchanted April (1922), Mansfield found ‘dreadfully tiresome and silly’. She compared it to ‘a sad tinkle from an old music box’.46 Yet, when she wrote to her cousin, she praised the book beyond what diplomatic discretion would have required: ‘It is a delectable book; the only other person who could have written it is Mozart. . . . How do you write like that? How? How?’47 Mansfield’s ambivalence about von Arnim can for a good part be explained as a form of reactance, as Elfenbein describes it: Reactance [is] an individualized form of backlash. . . . It arises if individuals believe that they should control a particular outcome and if their threatened freedom is important. . . . Reactance grows in proportion to the number of threatened freedoms, and implied threats of limitation may be as important as real limitations in creating reactance.48

Von Arnim’s success was a threat to the validity of Mansfield’s own artistic vision, particularly since there really was ‘a kind of turn’ in their sentences that was ‘alike’. To see her own words taken out of her mouth, so to speak, and transformed into a bestselling literary product of, in Mansfield’s eyes, doubtful artistic integrity must have been irksome. When von Arnim called ‘At the Bay’ (1922) a ‘pretty little story’, 49 Mansfield was very upset. She had finished her retaliation, ‘A Cup of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Tea’ (1922), a story which caricatures her cousin as a cultured but insincere society lady, before von Arnim even had a chance to apologise the next day. Murry’s undoubtedly well-meant speculations on the financial prospects of The Garden Party (1922) were perhaps not helpful either: I feel that it’s going to have a great success. I don’t mean that you’ll sell as many as Elizabeth – your mind & your art are so much finer that we can’t expect that – but I shall be really disappointed & surprised if you don’t sell between 3 and 4 thousand.50

The fact that Mansfield felt personally and artistically challenged by von Arnim made her at times a difficult friend, ‘whose hyper-sensitive reactions often made her lash out at those who cared for her most’.51 Von Arnim, too, felt challenged by the intimidating Mansfield, and she later confessed to Murry, ‘I always came away feeling as if my skin were off, and miserable with the conviction I must have bored and repelled her. Yet I adored her.’52 Von Arnim’s desire to entertain inspired her to some of her loveliest and most charming letters. Von Arnim’s letters to Mansfield are imaginative, poetic, playful, and, in their open expression of affection and admiration, clearly written with the intention to delight and please. They are quite different from her other correspondence and are obviously stimulated by Mansfield’s own special gift for letter writing. In her letters from London von Arnim repeatedly described visions of her friends in Sierre or Paris: I feel as if I were with you in your sitting room and Katherine and I talking and John silent and presently both of us turning on him because he is silent – and the room full now of the white light from the snow making everything look dingy. But perhaps you’ve not got enough snow yet. Here it is raw and dark and the wind howling along the river. I ought to be depressed, and I am happy. The very terrifyingness of life interests me desperately that I tingle with enjoyment of it.53

In typically self-deprecating tones she sends a report of a visit from their mutual friends, Bertrand and Dora Russell, at the chalet: Last night she [Dora] and I – can you picture it – danced a pas de quatre, to the joy of the others, so you see she has her moments – and so, deplorably, have I! I’ve read nothing, thought nothing, done nothing, all this time – but I’ve been, and that’s about as much as I can say.54

The charm of von Arnim’s letters was felt by Mansfield and Murry: ‘I do think she writes the most fascinating letters’, Mansfield confessed. ‘If I were a man I should fall in love every time I had one.’55 We can read von Arnim’s letters as a response to her cousin’s freer or more ‘modern’ expression of her feelings.56 They are reminiscent of the way Mansfield Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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herself ‘apprehended’ experience ‘at its rare best, a quality (as it were) of elation through simply being open to things as they occurred’.57 The influence Mansfield and von Arnim had upon each other is a useful reminder to remain open-minded not just about the personal but also the artistic contacts between modernist and non-modernist writers. If we frame our discussion of influence around the more positive terms of stimulation, inspiration, and exchange, we may perceive connections that could help us contextualise literary texts more comprehensively. Following Woolf’s famous advice to ‘think back through our mothers’ does not preclude a sense of personal and artistic competition, but this competition may take different forms than the ones Bloom once imagined. In order to understand the works and lives of Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth von Arnim more fully, we do well to heed T. S. Eliot’s statement that ‘No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. . . . You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.’58 Or, as is often the case, among the living.

Notes   1. Katherine Mansfield, Letter to Dorothy Brett, 22 December 1921, Collected Letters, vol. 4, p. 346.   2. Jeffrey Meyers, Katherine Mansfield, p. 223.   3. While von Arnim is mentioned in most of Mansfield’s biographies, there are few detailed accounts of their relationship. See Usborne, ‘Elizabeth’; Walker, Elizabeth of the German Garden, pp. 237−56; Isobel Maddison, Elizabeth von Arnim, pp. 85−105.  4. Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention, p. 59. See also Mary Orr, Intertextuality, p. 83; Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Victorian Afterlives, p. 5; Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein, Influence and Intertextuality, p. 6.  5. Baxandall, Patterns of Intention, p. 59.  6. Orr, Intertextuality, p. 66.   7. Andrew Elfenbein, ‘On the Discrimination of Influences’, pp. 481−507.   8. Antony Alpers, Life of Katherine Mansfield, p. 16.   9. Ibid. p. 16. 10. Ibid. p. 32. 11. See Claire Tomalin, Katherine Mansfield, p. 11; Kathleen Jones, Katherine Mansfield, p. 60. 12. Mansfield, Letter to Sylvia Payne, 26 December 1904, Collected Letters, vol. 1, p. 346. 13. Maddison, Elizabeth von Arnim, p. 101. 14. Elizabeth von Arnim, Solitary Summer, p. 148. 15. Mansfield, ‘Frau Fischer’, Collected Fiction, vol. 1, p. 196. 16. von Arnim, Solitary Summer, pp. 73−4.

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Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth von Arnim     103 17. Ibid. pp. 138−9. 18. Mansfield, ‘Frau Fischer’, Collected Fiction, vol. 1, p. 197. 19. von Arnim, Elizabeth and Her German Garden, p. 11. 20. Maddison, Elizabeth von Arnim, p. 94. 21. Ibid. p. 96 22. von Arnim, Elizabeth and Her German Garden, p. 188. 23. Mansfield, ‘The Luftbad’, Collected Fiction, vol. 1, pp. 175−8. 24. Elke D’hoker, ‘The Development of Katherine Mansfield’s First-Person Narratives’, p. 162. 25. von Arnim, The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen, p. 62. 26. Mansfield, ‘The Sister of the Baronness’, Collected Fiction, p. 190. 27. D’hoker, ‘The Development of Katherine Mansfield’s First-Person Narratives’, p. 153. 28. Mansfield quoted in Alpers, Life of Katherine Mansfield, p. 129. 29. D’hoker, ‘The Development of Katherine Mansfield’s First-Person Narratives’, p. 162. 30. von Arnim, Elizabeth and Her German Garden, p. 95. 31. Mansfield, ‘The Modern Soul’, Collected Fiction, vol. 1, p. 217. 32. Mansfield, Prelude, Collected Fiction, vol. 2, p. 57. 33. von Arnim, Letter to Mansfield, 27 October 1920, Countess Russell Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. 34. Mansfield, Letter to von Arnim, 21 February 1922, Collected Letters, vol. 4, p. 177. 35. Walker, Elizabeth of the German Garden, pp. 237−56. 36. von Arnim, Letter to A. S. Frere, 1 March 1922, quoted in Leslie de Charms, Elizabeth of the German Garden, p. 233. 37. Claire Tomalin, Katherine Mansfield, p. 197. 38. Mansfield, Letter to Dorothy Brett, 1 October 1921, Collected Letters, vol. 4, p. 287. 39. Murry, Letter to Countess Russell, 9 May 1922, Countess Russell Papers. 40. Ida Baker, Katherine Mansfield, p. 132. Murry gave Mansfield’s edition of Shakespeare to von Arnim after his wife’s death as a keepsake. Mansfield’s posthumous collection of poetry is dedicated to von Arnim. 41. Mansfield, Letter to Murry, 5 November 1920, Collected Letters, vol. 4, p. 101. 42. Mansfield, Letter to Brett, 25 July 1921, Collected Letters, vol. 4, p. 254. 43. Mansfield, Letter to Violet Schiff, 20 May 1920, Collected Letters, vol. 4, p. 13. 44. Mansfield, Notebooks, vol. 2, p. 273. When von Arnim read this comment in Mansfield’s Journal she was understandably very upset. 45. Murry quoted in de Charms, Elizabeth of the German Garden, p. 224. 46. Mansfield, Letter to Murry, c. 24 November 1922, Collected Letters, vol. 5, p. 327. 47. Mansfield, Letter to von Arnim, 31 December 1922, Collected Letters, vol. 5, p. 346. 48. Elfenbein, ‘On the Discrimination of Influences’, p. 495. 49. de Charms, Elizabeth of the German Garden, p. 230. 50. Murry, Letter to Mansfield, 12 February 1920, in Hankin (ed.), Letters between Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry, p. 285.

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104     Juliane Römhild 51. Walker, Elizabeth of the German Garden, p. 242. 52. von Arnim, Letter to Murry, 8 September 1927, Countess Russell Papers. 53. von Arnim, Letter to Mansfield and Murry, 2 November 1921, Countess Russell Papers. 54. von Arnim, Letter to Mansfield, September 1922, Countess Russell Papers. 55. Mansfield, Letter to Murry, 14 October 1922, Collected Letters, vol. 5, p. 297. 56. Maddison goes even further and attributes the psychological acuity of Vera to von Arnim’s contact with Mansfield, Murry and their modernist friends. The idea of such a reciprocal influence is intriguing, but may be difficult to substantiate. By the time their contact intensified in Switzerland, Vera had already gone to print. Maddison, Elizabeth von Arnim, pp. 111−14. 57. Vincent O’Sullivan, ‘Introduction’, Collected Letters, vol. 3, p. ix. 58. T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in Selected Essays, p. 15.

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Chapter 8

‘Objectless Love’: The Vagabondage of Colette and Katherine Mansfield Deborah Pike ‘I don’t care a fig for anyone I know except her’,1 wrote Katherine Mansfield in her journal in November 1914. She was referring to Colette, one of France’s most risqué and popular women writers of the time. Mansfield had just finished rereading, in French, L’Entrave (1913) [The Shackle], a novel about the afflictions of love and a woman’s irresistible need for freedom, and it resonated deeply. Colette’s intimacy of tone, her chatty, audacious heroines and impressionistic style had much to offer Mansfield, presenting her with a template for both life and art. The nature of Colette’s influence on Mansfield can be described as a kind of performative mimicry in terms of style and theme. This chapter explores the way in which ‘vagabondage’ becomes a legitimate and desirable mode of life for a modern woman artist, an idea with which Mansfield strongly identifies and takes up in her own life and writing. To live as a Colettean vagabond entails a shift in identity: the turning away from a circumscribed identity, which includes coupledom or married life, and the embracing of solitude and the vagaries of ‘the moment’. Such a mode of life enables freedom of movement, opening up to the world, loving without possession and, importantly, the making of art. Mansfield absorbs Colette’s ideas of vagabondage, uses them in her writing, and makes them her own. Despite their different backgrounds, Colette and Mansfield led parallel lives. Both women began publishing their work just after the turn of the twentieth century: Colette in 1900 and Katherine Mansfield in 1907.2 Each writer straddled the transition from the belle époque and Edwardian eras into the early twentieth-century world of modernist experiment and subjective uncertainty. Both writers came from small towns, which they left at a young age, and were drawn to an artistic metropolis. Both lived a life of relative independence, which involved travel, ‘masquerading’ and sexual and artistic experimentation. Both enjoyed forays into the music hall world. Like the character of Renée Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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in Colette’s La Vagabonde (1910) [The Vagabond],3 Mansfield led a nomadic life, which took her to England, France, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and Italy. Colette and Mansfield were both married to talented literary editors and connected to the Noumean-born French author, Francis Carco. John Middleton Murry observed the associations between the two women. In November 1915, he wrote to Mansfield: ‘You is a type – the wonderful type . . . Colette Vagabonde, and you above all moderns.’4 Simone de Beauvoir was the first to draw literary comparisons between these two women in her monumental work, Le Deuxième Sexe (1949) [The Second Sex]. In a discussion of female writers of her century, de Beauvoir draws upon Colette and Mansfield, discussing their literary style, which she says entails ‘close and loving observation’5 of nature and objects, as well as portraits of young, married and independent women. Both writers addressed the darker aspects of married life. For Colette, the ultimate emancipation for women was not through heterosexual marriage, but through the pursuit of solitude, creativity, bliss and bisexuality, or as she wrote in Le Pur et L’impur (1932) [The Pure and the Impure], a certain mental hermaphroditism.6 The ultimate love for Colette becomes not love towards an object or man but an objectless love − a certain kind of bliss − which one gives to the world. De Beauvoir refers to these moments as ‘revelations’ in which women ‘discover their accord with a satisfied, self-sufficient reality’.7 These ideas and themes are strongly reverberant in the writings of Mansfield. In her book Katherine Mansfield: The View from France, Gerri Kimber considers French literary influences on Mansfield, drawing attention to similarities between Colette and Mansfield’s style and lack of conventional plot. She points out that both Colette and Mansfield were seeking ‘a new style of writing’, one which would ‘captur[e] . . . the transitory nature of life, bring . . . ordinary moments and commonplace people into sharp relief. Reject . . . formal literary conventions, rely . . . instead on direct and indirect narrative, and produc[e] . . . constantly shifting focuses of perspective.

Kimber concludes that ‘it is clear that Mansfield not only read Colette but had assimilated various ideas and techniques and incorporated them into some of her own fiction’.8 Ruth Parkin-Gounelas also explores the connection between Colette and Mansfield in her essay, ‘Katherine Mansfield Reading Other Women: The Personality of the Text’. She maintains that the two writers draw richly from childhood experiences, and that it was Colette’s Claudine novels that provided Mansfield with a model for writing about childhood that was ‘redemptive’.9 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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According to her journals and letters, Mansfield was reading Colette’s La Vagabonde and L’Entrave in 1910 and 1913. These novels deal with the conflict for women between marriage and autonomy, also strong themes in Mansfield’s life and works. The explicit reference to Colette in her journal began in November 1914: ‘Colette Willy is in my thoughts tonight.’10 In early October 1916 she wrote in a letter to Mary Hutchison, a member of the Bloomsbury group whom Mansfield befriended a year before, ‘What you will think of Colette, I wonder – – – and you will find her “sympathetic”. For me she is more real than any woman Ive [sic] ever known.’11 For Tomalin, it was no surprise that Colette should appeal to Mansfield, with her glittering stage career, ‘bisexuality’ and ‘her acquaintance with the demi-monde’.12 Mansfield also knew about the 1902 stage production of Colette’s schoolgirl novel, Claudine à Paris (1901), which had been adapted from the novel by Colette herself. In a letter to Murry, she recounts a fanciful daydream she has had of appearing at a circus dressed as Colette’s identical twin sister: ‘I should like to be dressed beautifully, beautifully down [to] the last fragment of my chemise, & I should like Colette Willy to be dressed just exactly like me & to be in the same box.’13 Evidently Colette’s theatrical imagination inspired her enough to dream she was her twin, a wishful fantasy that suggests influence through identification. Colette’s lively depictions of travelling heroines who renounce love and security and reclaim their suffering and solitude offered Mansfield a particular model for writing about and for women. Like Colette, Mansfield was interested in conveying a new mode of expression, one that could accommodate complex characters, shifting points of view, symbols and lyricism − in a sense, a modern female subjectivity. Colette left her husband, the famous literary giant and notorious womaniser, Henri Gauthier-Villars, in 1910. Colette thereafter made a life for herself in the theatre and through her writing. She lived a life of what she termed ‘vagabondage’ − the life of a lone woman who writes, performs and tours with her fellow actors and dancers. Despite the fact that she remarried twice, Colette never fully accepted conventional heterosexual coupledom. For Colette in La naissance du jour (1928) [Break of Day], marriage and motherhood are banal and close off the multiplicity of the world.14 Colette flagrantly ignored the sexual mores of her time, had affairs with a number of famous men and women, including the painter and descendant of Empress Josephine, Mathilde de Morny, the American writer Natalie Barney and even her own stepson, Bertrand de Jouvenel. In addition to her status as a prolific novelist and music hall performer, Colette became a journalist and a beautician, and, among other activities, took up boxing lessons to acquire ‘the most Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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vicious punch possible’.15 Much loved in France for her novels Cheri (1920) and Gigi (1944), which later became smash-hit musicals, Colette received the greatest of literary accolades by becoming part of the jury for the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary award and was the first woman in France to ever be given a national funeral. Colette’s life and works, which were so inextricably bound up, show a revolutionary spirit that disturbed the structures of family and marriage, and called for an emphasis on pleasure, in particular, bodily pleasure. Lian de Pougy claims that Colette’s words exude ‘the odour of an infernal wickedness’.16 For psychoanalytic critic Julia Kristeva, to read Colette is to study ‘an alphabet of feminine pleasure’, to navigate ‘the embroidery between flesh and words’. It is ‘through her hymn to feminine jouissance’, she writes, ‘that Colette dominated French literature in the first half of twentieth Century’.17 In Colette’s The Vagabond we are introduced to Renée Néré, who is thirty-three and divorced from a domineering unfaithful husband who is a painter, a character based on Willy. Renée is earning her living as a music hall mime artist and dancer, and has published one novel, to modest acclaim. She laments her state of loneliness and longs for the fullness of her childhood days, conversing with her reflection in the mirror of her backstage dressing room: ‘How clearly one sees . . . that I am already used to living alone!’18 She perceives her ageing appearance and bemoans that she is ‘a woman of letters who turned out badly’.19 Time is running out for her stage career, and this encounter with her reflection marks a turning point. Simone de Beauvoir writes, ‘All sincere women writers have noted the melancholy in the heart of “the woman of thirty”; it is a trait common to all heroines of Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Parker, Virginia Woolf.’20 To this list Colette must be added. Renée tries to camouflage herself under make-up, so much so that she does not recognise her own reflection. It is not her youth she wishes to recover in the mirror, but her freedom. It is a difficult freedom to define, a freedom not only from an identity constrained by an unhappy marriage, but also by society and show business, which require women to be always young and attractive to possess value. For Renée, performing is double-edged. On the one hand, the make-up and masquerading only serve to disguise her sadness underneath; on the other hand, they save her from her broken-heartedness. In a moment alone, Renée contemplates her melancholic state, and in so doing reaffirms the resilience of women: It is only in pain that a woman is capable of rising above mediocrity. Her resistance to pain is infinite . . . A woman can never die of grief . . . She is

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The Vagabondage of Colette and Katherine Mansfield     109 such a solid creature, so hard to kill . . . You think the grief eats into her? She grows supple in the practice of suffering.21

Suffering and solitude become for Renée the gateway to a major shift in subjectivity. Colette’s heroines suggest that after this grief and heartbreak comes a firm sense of self-possession and steely determination, which is swiftly followed by the production of art; a retreat from love is necessary in order to write. Grief remakes Renée. She is born again each time she recovers from the pain of loving. Indeed, the breaks from the passionate engagements in her life become more passionate than that life itself. Maxim, an aristocratic admirer, interrupts Renée’s world. He watches her perform on stage and falls in love with her at first sight. Renée is sceptical that he should love her simply by looking at her, and rejects his overtures. He pursues her nonetheless, attending her performance each night and visiting her backstage, armed with flattering words and flowers. For Renée, being watched by him each night transforms her into his sexual object and entails a loss of self as well as a depletion of her artistic capabilities. Renée admits, however, to letting Max into her life; while his gaze may be appropriating, and while he may have fallen in love with her image on stage rather than her ‘real’ self, she requires the recognition he provides as a ‘witness’. Max’s desire for her is symbolic of social approval: ‘I admit, I yielded, in permitting this man to come back next day to desire to keep him not a lover, not a friend, but an eager spectator of my life and person.’22 The lovers are forced into four weeks’ separation when Renée’s company goes on tour. While she is touring, they exchange letters. Her letters reveal fear of his infidelity and extraordinary feelings of vulnerability, which being in love provokes in her. Over the month, however, Max recedes into unimportance, and through her travels and her meditations looking out of the train window, she changes her mind about him and decides against the relationship. Unlike the dialogues with her mirror, looking outward through the train window provides a moment of hopeful insight. While passing the seaside in Sète, Renée is stirred by a strong sense that she must discover the world on her own terms. She remembers her passionate interior life as a child, her jardin secret, when she belonged to no one but herself. She returns to the village of her childhood, which is significant as it seems to hold for her some longlost authenticity and clarity she has been searching for. The theme of the novel becomes apparent: love must be renounced. In a declarative letter, Renée writes to Max:

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110     Deborah Pike For I reject you and I choose . . . all that is not you. I have met you before, and I recognise you. Are you not he who, thinking he is giving, takes for himself? You came to share my life. To share, yes: to take your share! To be a partner in everything I do, to insinuate yourself at every moment into the secret temple of my thoughts, isn’t that it? Why you, more than another? I have barred it to everyone.23

Renée realises that Max cannot truly love her as he loves in a way that entails possessing her; he must have her for himself, rather than commune with her on equal terms. With Max, there is nothing left of herself for herself. Being subject to masculine desire curtails her freedom and suffocates her. Rejecting him is an act of self-definition. Renee rejects not only Max but all that Max stands for: male desire, female subjugation, the possibility of family and conventional ‘security’. For Renée, freedom is more important than love − without Max, she can travel, perform, earn a living and write; in short, she can live the unique life of an artist. As Erica Eisner writes, Renée thus ‘refuse[s] the security of love and choose[s] the awful freedom of vagabondage’.24 Mansfield’s heroines also experience dissatisfaction and identity crises. Like Colette, Mansfield figures this through mirrors and performance. Mansfield’s story, ‘Pictures’ (1920) strongly echoes the beginning sequences of The Vagabond. Actress Ada Moss is unable to find a job as her youth is fading and her powder puff is insufficient to keep the years at bay. As Ada inspects her reflection in the looking glass, she sees only an unattractive frown and not the glamorous starlet she once was. These selfinterrogations are highly reminiscent of Colette. Other Mansfield heroines gaze into mirrors either to express a longing to be seen or to search for an authentic self, or self-affirmation. In ‘At “Lehmann’s”’ (1910) young Sabina longs for a mirror to look at her body to confirm her transition into a woman. In Prelude (1918) Beryl gazes in the mirror: ‘How beautiful she looked, but there was nobody to see, nobody.’25 For Beryl, being seen becomes an integral part of her self-recognition. Later, aware of feeling trapped within her sister’s family and sensing that her social self is inconsistent with her internal world, Beryl says, ‘I’m always acting a part. I’m never my real self for a moment.’26 So too in ‘Miss Brill’ (1920), in which a middle-aged English teacher living by the Jardins Publiques observes the world around her as if she were in a play: ‘She was on the stage. An actress! . . . “Yes . . . I have been an actress for a long time”.’27 The reader senses the split self and a lonely emptiness underneath the performance. For Renée in The Vagabond, the theatre itself becomes a refuge; it is by performing on stage that she is able to be with herself, as it safeguards her: ‘only on the stage was I really alone and safe from my fellow creatures protected from the whole world by a barrier of light’.28 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Colette’s The Vagabond and Mansfield’s stories both convey the darker aspects of marriage and partnership. Colette’s work indicates a rejection of the couple. In this sense she is a kindred spirit with Mansfield, who expresses distaste for the limits it puts on freedom and expression. On 10 November 1919 she wrote to Murry: ‘It is really fearful to me the “settling down” of human beings.’29 It is not only marriage Mansfield and Colette’s heroines reject but also motherhood. In ‘At the Bay’ (1922) we learn that Linda ‘did not love her children’30 and in ‘At “Lehmann’s”’ young Sabina is repelled by Frau Lehmann’s baby. Deep ambivalence and conflict about childbirth and childrearing, and children in general, is also evident in ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’ (1910) and ‘A Birthday’ (1911). Despite the clear picture of unhappy coupling, Mansfield nonetheless longed for togetherness with her long-term lover, Murry, and shared with him a fantasy of living at the ‘Heron’, documented in her letters. In The Vagabond, the love relationship for Renée becomes a routine of suffering and sadomasochism, with couples only held together by this war between the sexes. In La naissance du jour Colette laments the suffering and poison of couple life.31 True pleasure for Colette lies outside the heterosexual union. In Mansfield’s story ‘Psychology’ (1920), the couple (or ‘pseudo-couple’) engages in a seemingly continuous cycle of undermining power games. ‘The Stranger’ (1921), too, is an illustration of an unhappy marriage. When Mr Hammond’s desire for his wife is ‘to make . . . [her] so much part of him that there wasn’t any of her to escape’, he metaphorically devours her; she is unable to love him in the same way, and relishes in her freedom when she travels away, similar to Maxim and Renée.32 In ‘All Serene!’ (1921), Hugh and Mona Rutherford live out an artificial and deceptive marriage: ‘He was pretending . . . He was pretending to be feeling.’33 De Beauvoir writes: ‘It has been said that marriage diminishes man, which is often true, but almost always it annihilates woman.’34 While both Colette and Mansfield are interested in how marriage impacts female characters, Mansfield, in particular, expresses a stark disillusionment with marriage and coupling in her portraits of married men in her stories. In ‘A Married Man’s Story’ (1921) the narrator, cynical about his marriage and its empty repetitions, observes that his wife is willingly playing a part in a deception: ‘And yet, being a woman, deep down, deep down, she really does expect the miracle to happen; she really could embrace that dark, dark deceit, rather than love – like this.’ The two are bound together in an unconscious union, ‘Dimly – dimly – or so it has seemed to me – we realise this, at any rate to the extent that we realise the hopelessness of trying to escape.’35 The narrator experiences momentary calm when he recalls that his father ‘escaped’ the prison of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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marriage by poisoning his mother in order to remain with his mistress. Similarly, in ‘The Man Without A Temperament’ (1920) Mr Salesby waits in hopeful anticipation for his sick wife to die. In ‘A Birthday’, Andreas Binzer is a chauvinistic man whose wife bears the brunt of family labour: ‘Marriage certainly changed a woman far more than it changed a man’, he observes.36 In these examples, no husband is attentive to his wife’s needs, and each focuses on his own egotism, which Mansfield renders with dark pathos. While more nervous and edgy than Colette’s brazen heroines, Mansfield’s heroines nonetheless find epiphanic moments of joy on their own, and not in couples. Parkin-Gounelas has pointed out that ‘much of the energy of . . . [Mansfield’s female characters] is expended in seeking solitude, even if the solitude, when found, is torturous’.37 This tendency to seek a moment of solitude is also expressed in Mansfield’s personal writings. In Paris in 1915, Mansfield writes: The amount of minute and delicate joy I get out of watching people and things when I am alone is simply enormous – I really only have ‘perfect fun’ with myself . . . I laugh and enjoy . . . as I never would with anybody. . . . And marvelous when I’m alone, the detail of life, the life of life.38

Solitude in this instance buoys her up, brings her into a moment of presence, observation, and celebration, which is necessary for the production of her art. Similarly in The Vagabond, when tormented by thoughts of her lover, Renée takes refuge in ‘one of her perfect moments’ in which she tastes the wonders of the earth she calls her ‘kingdom’: ‘All this is still in my kingdom, a small portion of the splendid riches which God attributes to passers-by, to wanderers and to solitaries. The earth belongs to anyone who stops for a moment, gazes and goes on his way.’39 In this space of solitude, a woman can experience the bliss of a world, which gives itself to her in a private moment on her own. This moment also provides a link to the reverie of childhood and the sense of being connected to life and living things. Mansfield, too, uses the word ‘kingdom’ to articulate the richness of this kind of interior space. In ‘Revelations’ (1920) her heroine, Monica, leaves her marriage and, in doing so, experiences an ecstatic moment where she returns to her self: Monica sat down before the mirror . . . oh, the strangest, most tremendous excitement filling her slowly, slowly, until she wanted to fling out her arms, to laugh, to scatter everything, to shock . . . to cry: ‘I’m free. I’m free. I’m free as the wind’. And now all this vibrating, trembling, exciting, flying world was hers. It was her kingdom. No, no, she belonged to nobody but Life.40

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The Vagabondage of Colette and Katherine Mansfield     113

The idea of belonging to ‘nobody but life’ is akin to Colette’s ‘objectless love’ − the love without ego, love without an object − which is transformed into the world: ‘As for me, I love! I love everything I love so much! If you knew how I embellish everything I love, and what pleasure I give myself in loving!’ writes Colette’s heroine in Les vrilles de la vigne (1908) [The Tendrils of the Vine].41 In both Colette and Mansfield, the love story happens not during a love affair, but in the spaces between, when a woman can offer herself to the world. Mansfield’s jardin secret is a space where a communion with nature can take place as well as erotic passion. This erotic passion involves sublimating sexual desire for another, and, rather, transferring it to the world. When the woman is open to the world, she experiences an ecstasy where no man or thing can be its object. This ‘openness’ is connected to the sensuality of pre-adolescence, as can be seen at the beginning of ‘Bliss’ (1918): Although Bertha Young was thirty she still had moments like this when she wanted to run instead of walk, to take dancing steps on and off the pavement, to bowl a hoop, to throw something up in the air and catch it again, or to stand still and laugh at – nothing – at nothing simply . . . Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?42

In ‘Bliss’ Bertha experiences a childlike pleasure in her surroundings, such as the fruit bowl, or the pear tree. Patricia Dunbar notes that, in Mansfield, ‘[f]emale sexuality . . . is shown to be multidirectional, and more complex than any simple scheme of attraction between binary opposites would allow’.43 Certainly the story ‘Bliss’ reveals this complexity of attraction and sexuality among men and women, as well as between them. After a dinner party, Bertha shares her experiences of bliss with her friend Pearl, to whom she is irresistibly drawn. Bertha’s ‘bliss’, however, becomes ironic, as Pearl and Bertha’s husband Harry are having an affair. Ignorant, Bertha nonetheless, ‘[f]or the first time in her life . . . desire[s] her husband’.44 The heroines of Colette and Mansfield are artists of a mode and feeling that transcends objects and humans. Part of this transcendence comes in the form of an ‘epiphanic moment’. De Beauvoir referred to these as ‘luminous moments of happiness’,45 moments of heightened perception, revelation and self-possession. The seemingly spontaneous and random quality of ‘the moment’ is very much a feature of modernist writing; rather than a specific external event occurring, it is the fruit of inner experience, which is pivotal. In her essay ‘Modern Fiction’ (1925), Virginia Woolf says that the novelist’s project is to ‘record the atoms as they fall’ and to ‘convey this varying, this unknown and u ­ ncircumscribed Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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spirit’.46 This word ‘uncircumscribed’ is significant here, as ‘the moment’ is ascendant and contains a newness and an ineffability, where subjectivity dissolves and identity is given over. This giving over of identity, however ephemeral, is an experience of bliss. In her journal of February 1920, Mansfield writes: What is it that happens in that moment of suspension? It is timeless. In that moment (what do I mean?) the whole life of the soul is contained. One is flung up – out of life – one is ‘held’, and then down, bright, broken, glittering on to the rocks, tossed back, part of the ebb and flow.47

These words foretell the language of Woolf describing Clarissa Dalloway walking through London struck by the timeless ‘ebb and flow of things’.48 Luminescent moments such as this come in times of solitude, away from interactions with others, and arise from a self that engages with a precocious interiority. An old self is shed and the subject becomes more nuanced. Such a disposition is one that can make itself available to the atomistic stream of unique moments, an integral part of being a Colettean vagabond. The life of the vagabond is also the life of art. The Collettean vagabond transfigures the woman, whose previous life was one of enslavement, subject to an ‘other’ and to the obligations of bourgeois society. In a state of vagabondage, the female subject is finally emancipated − her love goes ‘outward’ into the world, and into writing and art. While vagabondage is a life that entails much suffering and solitude, it is significant for both Colette and Mansfield because it is through suffering and solitude that they turn to the act of writing to reclaim a sense of self. Mansfield saw very clearly the imperative for selfrealisation and liberty: it was her definition of ‘health’. Mansfield turns to the image of a child in nature to express her dream, to become ‘a child of the sun’. The act of writing recalls her imaginative life as a young girl; love, and her expenditure of energy goes outward. In a journal entry towards the end of her life, while struggling with her illness and living alone, she writes: By health I mean the power to live a full, adult, living, breathing life in close contact with what I love – the earth and the wonders thereof – the sea – the sun. All that we mean when we speak of the external world. I want to enter into it, to be part of it, to live in it, to learn from it to lose all that is superficial and acquired in me and to become a conscious, direct human being. I want, by understanding myself, to understand others. I want to be all that I am capable of becoming so that I may be (and here I have stopped and waited and waited and it’s no good – there is only one phrase that will do) a child of the sun. About helping others, about carrying a light and so on, it seems false to say a single word. Let it be at that. A child of the sun.

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The Vagabondage of Colette and Katherine Mansfield     115 Then I want to work. At what? I want so to live that I work with my hands and my feeling and my brain. I want a garden, a small house, grass, animals, books, pictures, music. And out of this, the expression of this, I want to be writing . . . But warm, eager, living life − to be rooted in life − to learn, to desire to know, to feel, to think, to act. That is what I want. And nothing less. That is what I must try for.49

Notes   1. Katherine Mansfield, Notebooks, vol. 1, p. 284.   2. Strictly speaking, Mansfield’s first published story appeared in 1898 in her school magazine. Her first paid publication was in The Native Companion in 1907.  3. Colette, La Vagabonde.  4. John Middleton Murry, Letter to Mansfield, 25 March 1915, in C. A. Hankin (ed.), The Letters of John Middleton Murry to Katherine Mansfield, p. 54.   5. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. 711.  6. Colette, Le Pur et L’impur, p. 51.   7. de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. 632.   8. Gerri Kimber, Katherine Mansfield: The View from France, p. 122.   9. Parkin-Gounelas, ‘Katherine Mansfield Reading Other Women’, p. 38. 10. Mansfield, Notebooks, vol. 1, p. 284. Colette began publishing under her married name, ‘Willy’. 11. Mansfield, Letter to Mary Hutchison, early October 1916, Collected Letters, vol. 1, p. 282. 12. Claire Tomalin, Katherine Mansfield, p. 24. 13. Mansfield, Letter to Murry, 14−15 December 1915, Collected Letters, vol. 1, pp. 212−13. 14. Colette, La naissance du jour, p. 285. 15. Claude Pichois and Alain Brunet, paraphrased in Julia Kristeva, Colette, p. 44. 16. Lian de Pougy, in Kristeva, Colette, p. 6. 17. Kristeva, Colette, pp. 7, 10. 18. Colette, The Vagabond, p. 11. 19. Ibid. p. 12. 20. de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. 496. 21. Colette, The Vagabond, pp. 26−7. 22. Ibid. p. 95. 23. Ibid. p. 191. 24. Erica Eiseinger, ‘The Vagabond: A Vision of Androgyny’, p. 97. 25. Mansfield, Prelude, Collected Fiction, vol. 2, p. 77. 26. Ibid. p. 91. 27. Mansfield, ‘Miss Brill’, Collected Fiction, vol. 2, p. 253. 28. Colette, The Vagabond, p. 27. 29. Mansfield, Letter to Murry, 10 November 1919, in Collected Letters, vol. 3, p. 82.

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116     Deborah Pike 30. Mansfield, ‘At the Bay’, Collected Fiction, vol. 2, p. 355. 31. Colette, La naissance du jour, p. 281. 32. Mansfield, ‘The Stranger’, Collected Fiction, vol. 2, p. 247. 33. Mansfield, ‘All Serene!’ Collected Fiction, vol. 2, p. 395. 34. de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. 496. 35. Mansfield, ‘A Married Man’s Story’, Collected Fiction, vol. 2, p. 383. 36. Mansfield, ‘A Birthday’, Collected Fiction, vol. 1, p. 212. 37. Ruth Parkin-Gounelas, ‘Katherine Mansfield Reading Other Women’, p. 49. 38. Mansfield, Notebooks, vol. 1, p. 56. 39. Colette, The Vagabond, p. 172. 40. Mansfield, ‘Revelations’, Collected Fiction, vol. 2, pp. 214−15. 41. Colette quoted in Kristeva, Colette, p. 255. 42. Mansfield, ‘Bliss’, Collected Fiction, vol. 2, pp. 141−2. 43. Patricia Dunbar, Radical Mansfield, p. 88. 44. Mansfield, ‘Bliss’, Collected Fiction, vol. 2, p. 150. 45. de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. 632. 46. Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’, Essays, vol. 4, p. 160. 47. Mansfield, Notebooks, vol. 2, p. 209. 48. Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, p. 9. 49. Mansfield, Notebooks, vol. 2, p. 287.

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Chapter 9

‘God forgive me, Tchehov, for my impertinence’: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Copying Melinda Harvey This chapter returns to the most discussed relationship of literary influence in Mansfield studies: Mansfield and Chekhov. Critics began comparing Mansfield to Chekhov as early as April 1920.1 By 1980 Antony Alpers could claim that ‘it has long been standard practice for anthologists and writers of reference books to state without inquiry that Katherine Mansfield was “influenced by Chekhov”, and even for respected critics to assume that the statement is true’.2 Many of the early comparisons to Chekhov were intended to promote Mansfield’s reputation as a short-story writer. Once that reputation began to grow, these comparisons began contrasting her deficiencies with his perfections. In 1956, for example, Gilbert Phelps acknowledged that Chekhov authenticated aspects of Mansfield’s ‘temperament and sensibility’ but maintained that ‘of course’ she did not possess the ‘comprehensive vision’, ‘fundamental sanity’, ‘objectivity’ or ‘self-discipline’ of her master − that these things soured to become ‘sentimentality’, ‘parochialism’, ‘coyness’ and ‘preciosity’ in her writing.3 Some commentators didn’t just accuse Mansfield of being an inferior talent − they accused her of being a thief. Keith Sagar in his 1980 illustrated biography of D. H. Lawrence writes that Mansfield ‘unscrupulously accelerated her acceptance as a shortstory writer by lifting stories from Chekhov’ as if it were universally acknowledged.4 Elisabeth Schneider was the first critic to suggest that the Chekhovian qualities of Mansfield’s stories were of too specific a kind to be described as mere homage. Schneider itemises the similarities of structure, mood and detail between ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’, first published in The New Age on 24 February 1910, and ‘Spat’ khochetsia’ (1888), or ‘Sleepyhead’ as it is known in English,5 to conclude that Mansfield’s story ‘amounts almost to a reproduction of the Chekhov original’. She Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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refuses to call the ‘very close parallel’ a plagiarism, however, on the grounds that ‘[i]t seems more probably a case of ­unconscious memory’.6 The issue of Mansfield’s plagiarism of ‘Sleepyhead’ reared its head most fiercely in the Letters pages of The Times Literary Supplement, where it was debated over six weeks from October to November 1951. It was the Russo-English novelist E. M. Almedingen who levelled the charge, supplying what John Middleton Murry would a week later admit was ‘a strong prima facie case’ of plagiarism.7 Since then critics have noted similarities between additional Mansfield and Chekhov stories: ‘Life of Ma Parker’ (1921) and ‘Misery’ (1886); ‘Marriage à la Mode’ (1921) and both ‘Not Wanted’ (1886) and ‘The Grasshopper’ (1892); ‘At the Bay’ (1921) and ‘The Steppe’ (1888); ‘The Garden Party’ (1921) and ‘The Party’ (1888); ‘Taking the Veil’ (1922) and ‘The Looking-Glass’ (1885); and ‘The Fly’ (1922) and ‘Small Fry’ (1885).8 Over sixty years on, this chapter revives the memory of the once embarrassing episode of the plagiarism case against ‘The Child-WhoWas-Tired’ to see what it reveals about Mansfield’s writing practice. There are at least three reasons why now is a good time to revisit this. Firstly, the larger critical interest in transnationalism has prompted a recent flurry of scholarly activity about nineteenth-century Russian literature’s influence on English-language modernism in general, and Mansfield’s own partiality to and associations with people and things Russian in particular.9 That the fictions of Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov helped, amongst others, Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and Mansfield herself ‘Make It New!’ is not an original claim. Current research resumes work pioneered in the 1950s in Dorothy Brewster’s East-West Passage: A Study in Literary Relationships (1954) and Phelps’ The Russian Novel in English Fiction (1956) and pursued again in the 1980s to 1990s by, amongst others, Anthony Cross, Patrick Waddington and Peter Kaye.10 These scholars were, themselves, responding to the modernists’ own diagnoses of their ‘Russian fever’11 in such essays as Rebecca West’s ‘The Barbarians’ (1915), Murry’s ‘The Significance of Russian Literature’ (1922) and Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ (1924), ‘Modern Fiction’ (1925) and ‘The Russian Point of View’ (1925). Scrutiny of the similarities between Mansfield’s ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’ and Chekhov’s ‘Sleepyhead’ spikes at the time of the two ‘waves’. Interestingly, very little of the current third wave of scholarship on modernism’s Russophilia has returned to the scene of Mansfield’s alleged plagiarism. There is an explanation for this lack of critical interest in the plagiarism case today. Contemporary attitudes to copying are taking a more tolerant turn, meaning that Mansfield’s appropriation of Chekhovian Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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elements in ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’ troubles us less. In the past few decades cultural movements such as hip-hop and technological developments stemming from the invention of the computer including the digitisation of artworks and the dissemination capabilities of the Internet are problematising Romantic literary values such as originality, spontaneity, isolation and genius − values that informed Murry’s fashioning of Mansfield the writer for the reading public after her death in 1923. It is no coincidence that Murry was working on his two books on Keats and selectively editing Mansfield’s private papers for publication at precisely the same time. Sydney Janet Kaplan has described Murry as ‘one of the most significant perpetuators’ of ‘the romantic myth of the author as solitary genius’ in his role as a literary critic.12 But Kenneth Goldsmith has argued recently that the artful redeployment of the work of others without attribution is the calling card of good ‘uncreative’ writing today, that the writer’s art is becoming increasingly curatorial.13 In short, we no longer see Mansfield’s alleged plagiarism to be the crisis − to be as much of an assault on her literary standing as − we once did. This is precisely the reason why we must revisit the ‘Sleepyhead’ − ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’ episode now: freed from having to defend Mansfield against the charge of plagiarism, we are better positioned to see how she copies Chekhov and why she chose him. On closer inspection, pot shots were being taken at the Romantic conceptualisation of authorship early in the twentieth century, in essays such as T. S. Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919) and ‘Philip Massinger’ (1920). Which brings us to the third reason why we should return to the Mansfield-Chekhov plagiarism case: modernist creative practices were, largely, based on the recycling, recontextualisation and reconstitution of other texts. For instance, The Waste Land is a collage of attributed and unattributed allusions, Marianne Moore’s poetry foregrounds quotations from often very obscure and unliterary texts, and Ulysses relies heavily on Homer’s The Odyssey for its structure and its comedy. As Michael North has reminded us recently, even Ezra Pound’s famous modernist slogan, ‘Make It New!’ is a borrowed phrase that he incorrectly attributes intentionally.14 The admission of Mansfield into a more inclusive version of modernism − thanks largely to Kaplan’s pioneering study Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction (1991) − means that we must now understand her writings in the context of these experiments. But, of course, imitation and quotation were for the longest time acceptable freedoms for, even expected duties of, writers of the past. This is not to mention the role scribal copying played in knowledge acquisition and transfer since antiquity. This chapter contends that Mansfield’s plagiarism of ‘Sleepyhead’ Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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− which will not be disputed − should not be written off as merely an embarrassing but isolated episode in the life of a naïve young writer but part of a continuum. Copying was central to Mansfield’s writing process and, ultimately, artistic and personal vision. Mansfield did not − perhaps did not live long enough to − publish explicitly on her writing practice. As Kaplan has noted, she was ‘less programmatic than Woolf or [Dorothy] Richardson’;15 all we have to go on are her reflections upon such matters in her letters, notebooks and book reviews. While Murry’s treatment of his wife both prior to and after her death has been almost unwaveringly critiqued, his construction of Mansfield as an intuitive writer − a writer ‘distinguished by the peculiar gift of spontaneity’16 whose work proceeded directly and quickly from ‘the Imagination’, ‘total self-­surrender’ and ‘sensation rather than thought’17 − remains largely unchallenged.18 But the publication of Margaret Scott’s complete edition of The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks in 2002 made it clear that Mansfield’s writing practice involved as much note-taking, sketching, drafting and revising as the next person’s. Even more striking is the amount of attributed and unattributed transcription of other people’s texts in between these compositional forays. Mansfield’s compositional practice was, in a nutshell, conscious, conscientious and, crucially, relational, and copying of one form or another was an indispensable part of it. Mansfield’s imitation of Chekhov in ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’, then, was an extreme example of what Mansfield did to ready herself for writing habitually: that is, she brought herself into contact with another author’s work and used it to create something of her own. The exact manner of Mansfield’s copying of Chekhov changed throughout her short life. This chapter identifies three main modes of copying, which roughly correspond with the early, middle and late periods of Mansfield’s career: (1) appropriation; (2) translation; and (3) emulation. Each of these modes challenge a foundational idea we have about literary influence, namely that it is always an unequal relationship, one that operates according to the principle of priority that is dominant/submissive in character. The linking of Mansfield and Chekhov seems to have been initiated by Murry. In a letter dated 10 March 1920 Mansfield asked Murry to have his friend and deputy editor at the Athenaeum, J. W. N. Sullivan review the unexpurgated version of her story ‘Je ne parle pas français’, which the Heron Press − namely Mansfield and Murry − had published in November 1919.19 That review appeared in the 2 April 1920 issue of the journal. Called ‘The Story-Writing Genius’, the piece makes strong claims for the story and Mansfield herself by way of a comparison with Chekhov:

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Mansfield and the Art of Copying      123 The critic [. . .] speedily becomes aware of the fact that there are two kinds of literature: there is the kind that, with considerable plausibility, he can account for on his methods, and there is another kind whose essence seems to be quite unanalysable. It is, of course, this latter kind for which the critic has the most respect: he refers to its ‘genius’, a word indicating the complete breakdown of his critical apparatus. The essence of a good Tchehov story has this kind of elusiveness, and so has this story by Miss Katherine Mansfield.20

Sullivan’s claim here is that a writer’s worth can be measured by the difficulty a critic has to account for his or her work. The good Chekhov story is elusive, and ‘Je ne parle pas français’ is too. Mansfield had not attracted significant attention by April 1920 − that came with the publication of Bliss and Other Stories in December that same year. Sullivan manages to turn the critical neglect of Mansfield’s writing into evidence of her greatness, and Chekhov’s own example supports his case. Sullivan is likely to have known that making the Mansfield-Chekhov connection would please his boss, mainly because it was one he was apt to employ himself. In a letter to Mansfield dated 19 January 1920 Murry mentions a visit to H. G. Wells’ house during which Jane Wells ‘warmed [his] heart’ by ‘speaking enthusiastically’ of her and Chekhov in the same breath: ‘The association of the two, as you know, will always seem to me to show real insight.’21 Just under three weeks later Murry wrote to her again: ‘You are a big writer. You are a classic as Tchehov in your way.’22 Murry appears to have hit upon the Mansfield-Chekhov connection as early as March 1918. In a letter to Mansfield he counsels her against using the name ‘Eddie Wangle’ for Bertha’s husband in the story ‘Bliss’: ‘It is a Dickens touch & you’re not Dickens – you’re Tchehov – more than Tchehov.’23 Sullivan’s review of ‘Je ne parle pas français’ may have irked some more eagle-eyed literary insiders − Virginia Woolf, for one, cried nepotism in her diary24 − but to everybody else the MansfieldChekhov comparison must have looked like one made at arm’s length. Critics read and are influenced by other critics; Chekhov was invoked for comparison with Mansfield eight months later by Desmond MacCarthy in the New Statesman and Nation, Conrad Aiken in the Freeman and Malcolm Cowley in The Dial when Bliss and Other Stories appeared.25 A seed sown soon became too much pollen on the wind; it became a critical reflex to associate Mansfield with Chekhov so quickly that Richard Church began his 1927 review of Murry’s posthumous edition of Mansfield’s Journal by noting that ‘[i]t is usual to compare her with Tchekov, and indeed the likeness is obvious’.26 It was enough to make Murry − the very man who had, according to S. S. Koteliansky, turned Mansfield into an ‘English Tchehov’27 − attempt to check its spread. In the ‘Introduction’ to the Journal Murry recalibrates the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Mansfield-Chekhov relationship to accentuate the disparities between them: In fact, Katherine Mansfield’s technique is very different from Tchehov’s. She admired and understood Tchehov’s work as few English writers have done; she had a deep personal affection for the man, whom, of course, she never knew. But her method was wholly her own, and her development would have been precisely the same had Tchehov never existed.28

As Ihab Hassan notes, influence is generally thought to entail two things: both ‘points of contact between the “lives” and “minds” of two writers’ as well as points of similarity between their works.29 But Murry makes a distinction between content and technique here, enabling him to deny influence on the basis that the similarities between their stories are merely ‘superficial’. Mansfield was an intimate of Chekhov’s writings and had a great love of the man himself but there is no resemblance to be discerned in terms of literary method. It would seem that Murry felt that to acknowledge that Mansfield had ‘learned her art’ from Chekhov, or indeed anybody else, would compromise his claims for her as a genius. In Jeffrey Meyers words, ‘Murry, as usual, wanted to have it both ways: to affirm Katherine’s spiritual affinity and greatness by association with Chekhov and, at the same time, to deny any direct influence which might compromise her absolute originality.’30 To damp down future claims of Chekhovian influence Murry erased many of Mansfield’s references to the Russian writer in his editions of her letters and notebooks.31 Koteliansky, conversely, did not make any attempt to deny the influence of Chekhov on Mansfield’s writing as Murry did, calling it ‘most formative and important’ in a letter to biographer Ruth Elvish Mantz dated 5 May 1932.32 He did, however, rule the scrutinising of the link between the writers out of bounds for literary scholarship in a letter dated 13 May 1933, a point he reiterated seventeen days later: But, you know, those ‘scholarly’ researches into literary predecessors are not very important. It is all right for a busybody to occupy oneself with such trifles. A good reader or critic says: there is this or that influence on a given writer, and leaves it at that.33 It’s quite right what you say that there is no need whatever to establish the influence of Tchekhov on K.M. That sort of ‘spying’ investigation always seemed to me a bit indecent. Tchekhov was a help, a great help, and that is all it should be, and that is all the public is entitled to know.34

It is tempting to understand Koteliansky’s response to Mantz in these letters as protectiveness towards Mansfield. It was an attitude he was disposed to even when she was alive, and he is strongly critical of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Murry’s failure to keep Mansfield’s pregnancy to Garnet Trowell in 1908−9 out of the Mantz biography, labelling it in a letter to her his ‘final treachery’.35 Arguably, the subsequent plagiarism charge against ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’ − a tale that would eventually lift the lid on Mansfield’s sometimes sordid history with the Polish translator Floryan Sobienowski in Claire Tomalin’s 1987 biography of Mansfield36 − revealed what Koteliansky was hoping to keep hidden. The fact is that Mansfield’s imitative tendencies were apparent not only in the first story she published professionally in England, which was ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’, but also in the first stories she published professionally, full stop. ‘Vignettes’, ‘Silhouettes’, ‘In the Botanic Gardens’ and ‘In a Cafe’ were published in late 1907 in a short-lived Australian-based literary journal called the Native Companion. The journal’s editor, Edwin James Brady queried the originality of these vignettes, and Mansfield responded this way: With regard to the ‘Vignettes’ I am sorry that [they] resemble their illustrious relatives to so marked an extent – and assure you – they feel very much my own – This style of work absorbs me, at present – but – well – it cannot be said that anything you have of mine is ‘cribbed’ – – – Frankly – I hate plagiarism.

The statement sounds unequivocal, but on closer inspection it smacks of facetiousness. Mansfield says she ‘hates plagiarism’ and at the same time reworks a phrase by Oscar Wilde without acknowledgement, the very author she was accused of ‘“cribb[ing]”’ by Brady. Two sentences later Mansfield writes: You ask for some details as to myself. I am poor – obscure – just eighteen years of age – with a rapacious appetite for everything – and principles as light as my prose –37

The phrase ‘principles as light as my prose’ riffs on a line or two from the first pages of The Picture of Dorian Gray − the very same sentence that Mansfield had copied into her notebook only six months earlier on 30 March 1907: ‘Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know − − − I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.’38 It’s possible Mansfield is just having some fun here, that the ‘poor – obscure’ teenage girl is testing Brady, a literary editor in the Antipodean capital of the publishing industry, Melbourne, by trying to get one past him. But the episode points to the fact that Mansfield was, by even this early stage in her writing career, developing a habit − one that she would maintain throughout her short life − of expressing her own thoughts and Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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feelings using other people’s words. The contradiction that is struck by the riposte, ‘Frankly – I hate plagiarism’, and the reworking of Wilde’s phrase puts the emphasis on an earlier part of the letter: the vignettes, Mansfield writes, ‘feel very much my own’. It is, surely, a common experience: you come across another person’s words and ‘feel’ their resonance so strongly that they might very well have sprung directly from yourself − indeed, you recognise on some level that these words are even more perfectly true for you than anything you might have come up with on your own. In the years following the publication of ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’ the baton was passed from Wilde to Chekhov; from January 1914 we begin to see Mansfield quote from, refer to and ventriloquise him in her private writings, with the rate of mention significantly increasing from 1919.39 A late example of the phenomenon is a notebook entry dated 13 November 1921 in which Mansfield complains of her laziness and lack of inspiration in a way that is uncannily similar to Chekhov in a letter written to his close friend, the journalist-publisher A. S. Souvorin on 4 May 1889.40 We can say for certain that Mansfield knew this letter because she herself translated it with Koteliansky; it was published in the 8 August 1919 issue of the Athenaeum in what would turn out to be a thirteen-part series running from 4 April to 31 October 1919. It has been called a plagiarism, but one might argue that what Mansfield does with ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’ is a work of translation. In a literal sense it would seem to have been so; the best guess of Saralyn R. Daly is that Mansfield read − or had read to her − Wladimir Czumikow’s 1902 German translation of ‘Spat’ khochetsia’ called ‘Schlafen’ from Anton Tschechoff’s Die Bauern as a 21-year-old at the Pension Müller in Bad Wörishofen in 1909.41 In ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’, to pursue this line of thinking, Mansfield merely copies to the page what has been already converted into English inside her head. Furthermore, the changes Mansfield makes to ‘Schlafen’ are translations in the sense that they transport the story out of one culture and into another. The Russian details are ‘Germanified’: the Russian ‘mistress’ is now a German ‘Frau’; the journeyman Athanasius turns into the neighbour ‘Old Frau Grathwohl’; tea and herring become coffee and sauerkraut. Mansfield would continue to complicate the distinction between what is a translation and what is not in her future literary career. In the pages of Rhythm magazine in 1912, for example, she posed as the translator of a Russian writer by the name of Boris Petrovsky, who was fictional and whose poems she had composed herself.42 She also agreed to have her 1916 translation of Aleksandr Kuprin’s ‘Captain Ribnikov’ with Koteliansky attributed to Murry instead. Even the project with Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Koteliansky on Chekhov’s letters, which Mansfield dearly hoped would ‘ultimately be published in book form in America’,43 was understood by her as beneficent burglary. In a letter to Koteliansky from July 1919 Mansfield encourages to him race Constance Garnett, who was also translating the letters at this time, to publication thus: here is this treasure – at the wharf only not unloaded – – – – I feel that [Chekhov’s] Art is like a sick person, left all alone in a house where they are having a jazz party downstairs and we have at least something of what that sick person needs to be well again. Cant [sic] we thieve up the back staircase and take it?44

There were other more conventional translation projects planned, begun and completed; for instance, in a letter to Ottoline Morrell dated 17 November 1918 Mansfield mentions working on an English version of Maxim Gorky’s Journal of the Revolution that is now lost.45 Translation continued to be a priority for Mansfield to the end; she was working with Koteliansky on Reminiscences of Leonid Andreyev and offering her assistance to him on Dostoevsky: Letters and Reminiscences as late as October 1922.46 Mansfield, then, can be understood to have been involved in the work of translation − and, indeed, an inquiry into what precisely translation is − long before her collaboration with Koteliansky on Chekhov’s letters began in 1919. Copying was the word Mansfield used to describe her contribution to the translation of Chekhov’s letters for the Athenaeum. In a letter from Mansfield to Koteliansky from mid-August 1919 she wrote: ‘The [Chekhov] letter arrived safely; I am copying it for this week’s issue of the paper.’47 Mansfield’s letter to Koteliansky upon arrival in Ospedaletti dated 1 October 1919 indicates that copying entailed typing up Koteliansky’s handwritten translations of Chekhov’s letters: ‘I shall start immediately on the manuscript, and if there is such a thing as a typewriter here they shall be typed.’48 It is interesting to note that, in this respect, Mansfield’s translation work resembled her creative practice. As W. H. New has observed, she would routinely produce up to two typed versions of her handwritten stories, which were themselves fair copies of early drafts.49 Hannah Sullivan notes that this kind of copying work is typical of the modernist writer, who seldom typed directly on to a machine. This is why she argues that revision is a central principle of modernist writing: these authors used both the pen and the typewriter in sequence to compose.50 This copying out of Chekhov was occurring at the same time that Mansfield was expressing a desire to do another kind of copying − committing Chekhov to memory. In a letter to Koteliansky dated 21 August 1919 she writes: ‘I have re-read “The Steppe”. What Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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can one say. It is simply one of the great stories of the world – a kind of Iliad or Odyssey – I think I will learn this journey by heart.’51 But copying also meant copy-editing, which Mansfield often did at Koteliansky’s side with them both speaking the sentences aloud in order to make their final adjustments. One of Mansfield’s tasks was, according to Geraldine Conroy, to choose the best synonym for Koteliansky’s conscientious but jarring over-literal translations,52 a task that required, by her own admission, changes that ‘look[ed] very drastic’.53 Leonard Woolf, who collaborated with Koteliansky on Gorky’s Reminiscences of Leo Nicolayevitch Tolstoi immediately after the work with Mansfield, tells us that if Koteliansky ‘was in doubt about a word, he sometimes looked it up in the dictionary and put all the variants into his translation, and occasionally with mixed results, e.g. “he looked in the glass at his mug, dial, face”’.54 Mansfield’s task, then, was to ‘Anglicise’55 Chekhov in much the same way as she had ‘Germanified’ ‘Spat’ Khochetsia’. Again, this task of selection had a parallel in Mansfield’s own manuscript practice. She often went back over a first draft of a story and made synonymic modifications throughout her career. New notes that, for example, ‘the adjective “tired” changed to “weary” to describe the faces of primroses in [the] early vignette called “My Potplants” [and] the word “oily” replaces “gleaming” to characterise the spinach green paint on the doll’s house in “The Doll’s House”’.56 The best copyists reproduce what is already in the original, without additions, subtractions, judgement or other kinds of imposition. Certainly, Mansfield’s principles of translation seem to be in keeping with this. In the midst of her translation project with Koteliansky, Mansfield criticised Constance Garnett for the smoothing out effect of her translations: ‘She seems to take the nerve out of Tchekhov before she starts working on him, like the dentist takes the nerve from a tooth.’57 Mansfield was also working with somebody who was committed to the idea that a translation attempts to copy a text in a new language with great fidelity, even literality, as the sensitivity to the connotative power of words in the listing of synonymic alternatives demonstrates. Woolf again corroborates the uncompromising ‘integrity and intensity’ of Koteliansky as a translator: After I had turned his English into my English, we went through it sentence by sentence.[. . .] He would pass no sentence unless he was completely convinced that it gave the exact shade of meaning and feeling of the original, and we would sometimes be a quarter of an hour arguing over a single word.58

We know that Mansfield worked with Koteliansky in the same tireless fashion when circumstances allowed them to. A letter dated 14 April Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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1919 has Mansfield arranging a time for them to meet so that she may read aloud to him the new letters she has copied.59 We also know that she bewailed the fact they weren’t doing so when ill-health and distance intervened: ‘I dislike IMMENSELY not going over the letters with you. [. . .] I have long ago finished all that you gave me – But I feel Tchekov would be the first to say we must go over them together.’60 This kind of speaking for Chekhov − which intensifies at various times to become a speaking as Chekhov − is a feature of Mansfield’s private writings in the last years of her life. A particularly striking example of this tendency appears in a letter dated 10 July 1922 to the novelist William Gerhardi. Gerhardi had grown up in St Petersburg, spoke perfect Russian and was at the time of the correspondence with Mansfield writing a critical study of Chekhov that was eventually published in 1923. Yet the letter shows Mansfield asserting her authority over his, as far as Chekhov is concerned: People on the whole understand Tchekhov very little. They persist in looking at him from a certain angle & he’s a man that won’t stand that kind of gaze. One must get round him − see him, feel him as a whole . . . – – And when you say you don’t think T. was really modest. Isn’t it perhaps that he always felt, very sincerely, that he could have done so much more than he did. He was tormented by Time, and by his desire to live as well as to write. ‘Life is given us but once.’ Yet, when he was not working he had a feeling of guilt; he felt he ought to be. And I think he very often had that feeling a singer has who has sung once & would give almost anything for the chance to sing the same song over again – [. . .] But I must not write about him; I could go on and on and on . . .61

Mansfield intimates her intuitive understanding of Chekhov trumps Gerhardi’s intellectual and experiential one. There is an air of condescension and a willingness to gainsay evident here, and Gerhardi, very graciously, later affirmed Mansfield’s right to these things in his 1931 book Memoir of a Polyglot, noting that he ‘had never known anywhere, Russia not excepted, two souls more sensitively appreciative of Chekhov’s work than Katherine Mansfield and Middleton Murry’.62 Certainly, translating the letters in 1919 had expedited her connection to − and sometimes merging with − Chekhov. For nearly a year Mansfield spent several hours of each week and sometimes ‘all day’, even in periods of serious debilitation and depression,63 not only copying out his private words in the first person but also attempting to enter into his consciousness in order to render them truly. The implication of the letter to Gerhardi is that Mansfield’s special bond with Chekhov was not born of mere readerly enthusiasm, their shared writerly vocation or even the work of translation − though those things abetted it − but Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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mortal illness. At least ten months prior to the translation project with Koteliansky Mansfield wrote Murry a heart-rending account of her ‘AGONIES from loneliness and illness’ from Looe in Cornwall. It ends this way: ‘But Tchekhov has known just EXACTLY this that I know. I discover it in his work – often.’64 The ultimate bridge between them, then, was tuberculosis. Mansfield came to believe that serious illness was requiring her to enact what appropriation and translation had, all along, been allowing her to trial: an extinction or a dissolution of the self − or as Mansfield described it in a notebook entry dated 27 January 1920, ‘the defeat of the personal’.65 In a letter to Murry dated 28 September 1920 she says she ‘dare not keep a journal’ for ‘[t]he only way to exist is to go on and try and lose oneself – to get as far as possible away from this moment’. The letter continues: ‘Once I can do that all will be well. So it’s stories or nothing.’66 Writing stories was, indeed, offering an escape from illness because they were making a cognate demand upon her. She had, in short, become aware that for her stories to improve, for her to be what she called a ‘true’ rather than ‘a false writer’,67 she needed to learn to disappear from them. In the late private writings Mansfield voices her growing distaste for her own tendency to impose herself in her fiction − by being judgemental and cruel, and by telling not showing. Absenting herself from the stories became a priority because if the object was to copy ‘Life’, then to do that she must avoid egoism and its effects, as Mansfield explains to Sydney Schiff in a mid-February 1921 letter: ‘And then [the writer] must accept Life, he must submit, give himself so utterly to Life that no personal quâ personal self remains.’68 Mansfield is at her most ecstatic as a writer when she could claim to have entered into and become the people and things she was describing: a man, a woman, a seagull, a hotel porter, a duck, an apple, Natasha in War and Peace.69 In a late notebook entry dated 21 November 1921 she prays to become a mere scribe for ‘Life’: ‘May I be found worthy to do it! Lord make me crystal clear for Thy light to shine through.’70 This aspiration to cease interfering in her stories found its ­authorisation − indeed, its inspiration − in Chekhov’s thoughts on writing. Chekhov’s now famous dictum that it is the task of fiction writers to ask questions, not answer them71 − discussed in two letters to Souvorin that were translated by Mansfield and Koteliansky in 1919 − is repeated in letters not only to Koteliansky but also to Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Brett.72 To Woolf, Mansfield asserts that ‘the dividing line between the true and the false writer’ could be drawn according to this idea, that the former puts the question and the latter solves it.73 To Brett, she explained it was the secret to accessing Life for the writer: Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Mansfield and the Art of Copying      131 Tchekhov said over and over again, he protested, he begged, that he had no problem. [. . .] The artist takes a long look at Life. He says softly, ‘So this is what Life is, is it?’ and he proceeds to express that. All the rest he leaves.74

Quotations, acknowledged and unacknowledged, from Chekhov are also copied out in Mansfield’s notebooks as if they were mantras. Chekhov’s lessons were for writing, but they were also for existence. It was a fact Murry avowed in his essay ‘The Significance of Russian Literature’: Russian literature asked the question, ‘How shall we live?’ That it did so might explain the popularity of writers like Chekhov, but also Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, in the traumatised post-World War I environment. What we may call, in the widest sense, the technical influence of Russian literature has been already considerable, and is only beginning. But the significance of Russian literature, as I understand it, is far greater, far more direct, and far simpler than that. The selves for which it has importance are the simplest, most naked, and most essential selves, those elements in our nature, let us say, though it is rather unfashionable, which desire before all things to be good. Russian literature is absolutely permeated, saturated through and through, with a sense of the problem of conduct.75

As Mansfield’s illness progressed it was Chekhov who helped her prepare for Life’s only certainty − death: ‘It is hard − it is hard to make a good death! [. . .] To live − to live − that is all − and to leave Life on this earth as Tchekhov left Life.’76 Their disease and their vocation were the same, so Chekhov provided Mansfield with a model to emulate as her condition deteriorated. When Mansfield imagines her way into Chekhov’s experiences − as she does in the letter to Gerhardi − it is impossible not to believe that she is also speaking for her own. For example, in one of her very last letters to Murry she writes: About being like Tchekhov and his letters [. . .] if one reads ‘intuitively’ the last letters they are terrible. What is left of him. [. . .] All hope is over for him. [. . .] Its [sic] true he had occasional happy moments. But for the last 8 years he knew no security at all. We know he felt his stories were not half what they might be. It doesn’t take much imagination to picture him on his deathbed thinking ‘I have never had a real chance. Something has been all wrong . . .’77

The engagement with Chekhov as a man who suffered was so intense that Mansfield routinely talks of him as if he were living in her private writings from this period. In her notebooks she names Chekhov, alongside her London gynaecologist, Dr Victor Sorapure, as one of the ‘two good men’ she had known.78 Mansfield also names him in a list of five friends to whom her thoughts turn daily on 20 January 1921 − the only person on the list she had not actually met in person: ‘I suppose it is Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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the effect of isolation that I can truly say I think of W. J. D. [Walter de la Mare], Tchekhov, Koteliansky, HMT [H. M. Tomlinson] and [A. R.] Orage every day. They are a part of my life.’79 The last book Mansfield asked to be sent to her before she left for Gurdjieff’s Institute in Fontainebleau was Constance Garnett’s translation of Chekhov’s Love, and Other Stories.80 Mansfield might have had reservations about Garnett’s translations but we have no reason to doubt that she was speaking the truth when she wrote to her to thank her for her translations from the Russian this way: ‘These books have changed our lives, no less. What would it be like to be without them!’81 To conclude, it is worth noting that all three modes Mansfield employs to copy Chekhov that have been considered in this chapter − appropriation, translation and emulation − reveal something quite significant about how influence works. Firstly, we have tended to think that influence works in a linearly causal fashion, that it is a precursor who has an influence upon a descendant; that is, it is the precursor who suffers from, Harold Bloom’s words, ‘Influenza – an astral disease’,82 and not the other way around. But something strange happens to this temporal order when Mansfield copies Chekhov. It is most clearly seen in the mode of translation: Mansfield’s rendering of Chekhov into English makes her his precursor in the sense that it is she who makes his texts accessible to a new readership. The inversion of priority is even more arresting in the case of ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’, as Mansfield was disseminating Chekhov − albeit in a clandestine way − before the ‘Russian Fever’ really began in earnest. Charles W. Meister has made the claim that Chekhov’s reputation started to grow around June 1911 when The Cherry Orchard was performed on the London stage.83 As far as Chekhov’s stories are concerned, they were not widely known until Chatto & Windus published Constance Garnett translations of The Tales of Tchehov in thirteen volumes from 1916 to 1923. This means, of course, that Chekhov and Mansfield were also literary contemporaries; Mansfield’s major stories appear and were reviewed in precisely this period. As far as the English public was concerned, then, Mansfield and Chekhov were emerging and gaining critical attention at more or less the same time. There is another sense in which Mansfield is Chekhov’s precursor: if she had never chosen to write stories in the plotless, atmospheric and subjective way that she did − a decision that numerous commentators, including Murry and Alpers think had nothing to do with copying Chekhov84 − we might never have traced the lineage of the modern short story back to him. Mansfield, in fact, conjures her own lineage by recognising the value of Chekhov’s writing and helping to promulgate it. It is Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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the descendant who serves a canon-making function by nominating for herself and for modern short-story writers a potential precursor before that tradition was established. Chekhov becomes that precursor because Mansfield’s own stories made his stories look contemporary. Indeed, Mansfield went as far as to state that Chekhov made the likes of Eliot and James Joyce look old-fashioned. In a letter to Koteliansky in early August 1919 she writes: I wonder if you have read Joyce and Eliot and these ultra-modern men? It is so strange that they should write as they do after Tchekhov. For Tchekhov has said the last word that has been said, so far, and more than that he has given us a sign of the way we should go. [. . .] My God, if I am sitting on the back bench A. T. is my master.85

Chekhov is Mansfield’s ‘master’ here because he is so in advance of his − and her − own time, because he reveals the future possibilities of literature. Chekhov can be said to be Mansfield’s influence only in the sense that he shows the way, not because her work is passively endebted to or is a merely dutiful development of his.

Notes   1. Sylvia Berkman claims that ‘[f]rom the time of the publication of Bliss in [December] 1920 the relationship of Miss Mansfield’s technique to that of Chekhov has been emphasised’. See Berkman, Katherine Mansfield, p. 150. Yet J. W. N. Sullivan’s article ‘The Story-Writing Genius’ in the 2 April 1920 edition of the Athenaeum, which mentions Mansfield in relation to Chekhov, predates this by eight months.   2. Antony Alpers, Life of Katherine Mansfield, p. 111.   3. Gilbert Phelps, The Russian Novel, pp. 189−90.   4. Keith Sagar, The Life of D. H. Lawrence, p. 76.   5. Anton Chekhov, ‘Sleepyhead’, pp. 179−88.   6. Elisabeth Schneider, ‘Katherine Mansfield and Chekhov’, p. 396.   7. E. M. Almedingen, Letter to the Editor, Times Literary Supplement, p. 661; John Middleton Murry, Letter to the Editor, Times Literary Supplement, p. 677.   8. Ronald Sutherland, ‘Katherine Mansfield’; Don W. Kleine, ‘The Chekhovian Source of “Marriage à la Mode”’.   9. Anthony Cross (ed.), A People Passing Rude; Rebecca Beasley and Philip Ross Bullock (eds), Russia in Britain, 1880−1940; Caroline Maclean, The Vogue for Russia. 10. Cross, The Russian Theme in English Literature; Patrick Waddington (ed.), Turgenev and Britain; Peter Kaye, Dostoevsky and English Modernism 1900−1930. 11. Dorothy Brewster, East-West Passage, p. 110. 12. Sydney Janet Kaplan, Circulating Genius, p. 10.

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134     Melinda Harvey 13. Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing, p. 1. 14. Michael North, Novelty, pp. 162−3. 15. Kaplan, Circulating Genius, p. 11. 16. Murry, Katherine Mansfield and Other Literary Studies, p. 72. 17. Murry, ‘Introduction’, in Ruth Elvish Mantz and John Middleton Murry, Life of Katherine Mansfield, p. 9. 18. Eileen Baldeshwiler and W. H. New have been lonely voices in this regard. See Baldeshwiler, ‘Katherine Mansfield’s Theory of Fiction’, p. 421; New, ‘Mansfield in the Act of Writing’, p. 54. 19. Mansfield, Letter to Murry, 10 March 1920, Collected Letters, vol. 3, p. 244. 20. Sullivan, ‘The Story-Writing Genius’, p. 447. 21. Murry, Letter to Mansfield, 19 January 1920, in The Letters of John Middleton Murry to Katherine Mansfield, ed. C. A. Hankin, p. 254. 22. Murry, Letter to Mansfield, 9 February 1920, in The Letters of John Middleton Murry to Katherine Mansfield, p. 279. 23. Murry, Letter to Mansfield, 10 March 1918, in The Letters of John Middleton Murry to Katherine Mansfield, p. 127. 24. Virginia Woolf, Diary, vol. 2, p. 28. 25. Desmond MacCarthy ‘A New Writer’, New Statesman and Nation, 16:450 (15 January 1921); Conrad Aiken, ‘The Short Story as Poetry’, Freeman (11 May 1921), p. 210; Malcolm Cowley, ‘Page Dr Blum’, The Dial, 71:365 (September 1921), p. 365. 26. Richard Church, ‘The Sensitive Plant’, Spectator, 20 August 1927, p. 288. 27. S. S. Koteliansky, in Lady Beatrice Glenavy, Today We Will Only Gossip, p. 69. 28. Murry, ‘Introduction’, in Mansfield, Journal, pp. xiii−xiv fn.1. 29. Ihab H. Hassan, ‘The Problem of Influence’, p. 68. 30. Jeffrey Meyers, ‘Murry’s Cult of Mansfield’, p. 29. 31. Rachel Polonsky, ‘Chekhov and the Buried Life’, p. 202. 32. Koteliansky, Letter to Mantz, 3 May 1932, Katherine Mansfield Collection, Container 3.8, Harry Ransom Center, Austin, TX. 33. Koteliansky, Letter to Mantz, 13 October 1933, ibid. 34. Koteliansky, Letter to Mantz, 30 October 1933, ibid. 35. Koteliansky, Letter to Mantz, 30 October 1933, ibid. 36. Claire Tomalin, Katherine Mansfield, pp. 72−3; 208−11. 37. Mansfield, Letter to E. J. Brady, 23 September 1907, Collected Letters, vol. 1, p. 26. 38. Mansfield, Notebooks, vol. 1, p. 99; Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, pp. 26, 32. 39. Tomalin, Katherine Mansfield, p. 72. Sutherland notes thirty-three separate passages and sentences in the notebooks in the summer of 1920. See Sutherland, ‘Katherine Mansfield’, pp. 60−2. 40. Mansfield, Notebooks, pp. 290−1; Chekhov, Letter to A. S. Suvorin, 4 May 1889, in Avrahm Yarmolinsky (ed.), Letters of Anton Chekhov, pp. 114−15. 41. Saralyn R. Daly, Katherine Mansfield, p. 3 fn. 8. 42. Maclean, ‘Russian Aesthetics in Britain’, p. 148.

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Mansfield and the Art of Copying      135 43. Mansfield, Letter to Murry, 2 October 1919, Collected Letters, vol. 3, p. 6. 44. Mansfield, Letter to Koteliansky, July 1919, Collected Letters, vol. 2, p. 341. 45. Mansfield, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 17 Nov 1918, Collected Letters, vol. 2, p. 291. 46. Mansfield, Letters to Koteliansky, 4 and 9 October 1922, Collected Letters, vol. 5, pp. 287, 292. 47. Mansfield, Letter to Koteliansky, mid August 1919, Collected Letters, vol. 2, p. 349. 48. Mansfield, Letter to Koteliansky, 1 October 1919, Collected Letters, vol. 3, p. 4. 49. New, ‘Mansfield in the Act of Writing’, pp. 53−4. 50. Sullivan, The Work of Revision, p. 8. 51. Mansfield, Letter to Koteliansky, 21 August 1919, Collected Letters, vol. 2, p. 353. 52. Geraldine Conroy, A Study of the Life and Works of S. S. Koteliansky, pp. 171, 179. 53. Mansfield, Letter to Koteliansky, 4 October 1922, Collected Letters, vol. 5, p. 287. 54. Leonard Woolf, Beginning Again, p. 248. 55. Conroy, A Study of the Life and Works of S. S. Koteliansky, p. 183. 56. New, ‘Mansfield in the Act of Writing’, pp. 57−8 57. Mansfield, Letter to Koteliansky, mid August 1919, Collected Letters, vol. 2, p. 349. 58. Woolf, Beginning Again, p. 248. 59. Mansfield, Letter to Koteliansky, 14 April 1919, Collected Letters, vol. 2, p. 312. 60. Mansfield, Letter to Koteliansky, 7 April 1919, Collected Letters, vol. 2, p. 309. 61. Mansfield, Letter to William Gerhardi, 10 July 1922, Collected Letters, vol. 5, pp. 221−2. 62. Gladys Coles, ‘Katherine Mansfield and William Gerhardie’, p. 35. 63. Mansfield, Notebooks, vol. 2, p. 187. 64. Mansfield, Letter to Murry, 9 June 1918, Collected Letters, vol. 2, pp. 229−30. 65. Mansfield, Notebooks, vol. 2, p. 190. 66. Mansfield, Letter to Murry, 28 September 1920, Collected Letters, vol. 4, p. 55. 67. Mansfield, Letter to Woolf, c. 27 May 1919, Collected Letters, vol. 2, p. 320. 68. Mansfield, Letter to Sydney Schiff, c. mid February 1921, Collected Letters, vol. 4, p. 181. 69. For example, Mansfield, Letter to Murry, 3 November 1920, Collected Letters, vol. 4, p. 97. 70. Mansfield, Notebooks, vol. 2, p. 290. 71. Chekhov, Letters to Suvorin, 30 May 1888 and 27 October 1888, in Letters of Anton Chekhov, pp. 71, 88−9. 72. Mansfield, Letter to Koteliansky, 6 June 1919, Collected Letters, vol. 2; p. 324.

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136     Melinda Harvey 73. Mansfield, Letter to Woolf, c. 27 May 1919, Collected Letters, vol. 2, p. 320. 74. Mansfield, Letter to Dorothy Brett, 11 November 1921, Collected Letters, vol. 4, p. 317. 75. Murry, ‘The Significance of Russian Literature’, in Discoveries, pp. 47−8. 76. Mansfield, Notebooks, vol. 2, p. 202. 77. Mansfield, Letter to Murry, 15 October 1922, Collected Letters, vol. 5, p. 299 78. Mansfield, Notebooks, vol. 2, p. 202. 79. Mansfield, Notebooks, vol. 2, p. 318. 80. Mansfield, Letter to Murry, 11 October 1922, Collected Letters, vol. 5, p. 295. 81. Mansfield, Letter to Constance Garnett, 8 February 1921, Collected Letters, vol. 4, p. 176. 82. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 95. 83. Charles W. Meister, ‘Chekhov’s Reception in England and America’, pp. 112, 114. 84. See Murry, Letter to Eileen Duggan, 5 November 1938, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, 77-067-8/28: ‘I think that even the influence of Tchekoff on her work is exaggerated. The first stories she wrote (at the age of 9 or 10 in Wellington Girls High School magazine) were in the Tchekoff style.’ 85. Mansfield, Letter to Koteliansky, early August 1919, Collected Letters, vol. 2, p. 345.

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Chapter 10

‘[A]ctively making one feel’: Katherine Mansfield, Evolving Empathy and Intimate Influence in Virginia Woolf’s Writings of the 1920s and 1930s Katie Macnamara In 1925, more than two years after Katherine Mansfield’s death at the age of thirty-four, her friend and rival Virginia Woolf published an essay about the early nineteenth-century memoirist Harriette Wilson.1 It is an essay that might well have been inspired by Mansfield’s memory. It was written during a period when Woolf was, as she put it herself, haunted by Mansfield’s ‘ghost’.2 Wilson was a woman who not only resembled Mansfield in spirit, but who had also inhabited an ‘underworld’ much like the one Woolf had semi-privately associated with her late competitor in a less empathetic vein years earlier. Although Woolf had begun to describe Mansfield and John Middleton Murry disparagingly as denizens of ‘the underworld’ in 1917,3 her changing uses of this subterranean signifier in diaries, letters, essays and fiction throughout the 1920s and 1930s suggest that her empathy towards Mansfield only increased as she came to regard her as an artist independent of Murry, as she continued to imagine alternative ‘underworlds’ of interpersonal empathic immersion in her fiction, and as Mansfield herself continued to ‘actively ma[k]e’ Woolf ‘feel’ her presence in future encounters with similarly path-breaking women.4 The evolving empathy that Woolf felt toward Mansfield has long been underestimated by biographers and critics of both writers, primarily because a great majority of them have readily accepted the claim made by Woolf’s first diary editor, Ann Olivier Bell, that she consistently used the word ‘underworld’ to dismiss Murry and Mansfield jointly as an unscrupulous pair of ‘“Grub Street” . . . hacks’.5 Yet even among the many scholars who have more recently identified Woolf’s own deep ties to ‘Grub Street’ and the few who have at least indirectly acknowledged Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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the Dostoevskian origins of Woolf’s ‘underworld’ epithet, the distinction Woolf gradually made between Murry and Mansfield’s attitudes toward these socially and psychologically subterranean spaces continues to be overlooked. Thus while Jenny McDonnell astutely accepts Hermione Lee’s explanation that the ‘“literary underworld” of bohemian café culture’ Woolf critiqued was ‘populated’ by men like Murry whose idealisation of a ‘submerged world’ Mansfield would likewise critique in ‘Je ne parle pas français’ (1918), she fails to see how Woolf’s terminology signals her awareness not only of Murry’s ongoing over-identification with the nameless hero of Dostoevsky’s Letters from the Underworld (1864), but also of Mansfield’s gradual rejection of that hero exactly as Murry had romanticised him both in his 1916 book-length study of Dostoevsky and in his daily life.6 As a result, McDonnell is also unable to see, like many critics before her, how Mansfield’s own early view of Woolf as ‘one of those Dostoievsky women whose “innocence” has been hurt’7 had actually been an empathetic one that intimately and ultimately urged Woolf towards empathy as well. Woolf would gradually come to see how Mansfield’s resemblance to Lisa, the heroine of Letters from the Underground, overshadowed any likeness she may have temporarily shared with the novella’s more famous ‘underworld man’. Angela Smith has acknowledged that Woolf may have realised how Mansfield experienced a genuine internal ‘underworld’ of illness and despair that mirrored Woolf’s own more than it did Murry’s. But in doing so Smith misses the Dostoevskian connection between the social ‘underworld’ Woolf had originally linked to Mansfield and Murry and the psychological one Woolf would later associate with Mansfield alone. Indeed, even as she echoes nearly every other critic’s discussion of the ‘rivalry, malice’ and ‘hostility’ that existed between Bloomsbury and what Woolf had called ‘the underworld’,8 Smith acknowledges more independently and incisively elsewhere that both Mansfield and Woolf used ‘writing itself as a way of exploring the ambiguous liminal state’ Woolf often described as a ‘dark underworld’ ‘between life and death’.9 This chapter re-examines the Dostoevskian connection that Smith overlooks not only to affirm her tentative speculations about the increasing depth of Woolf’s posthumous sense of affinity with Mansfield, but also to show, more broadly, how evolving empathy can ultimately function as intimate authorial influence. By further ‘explor[ing] the creative consequences of their interaction[s]’, this chapter challenges many of the more cursory characterisations of Woolf’s response to Mansfield that ‘overemphasize their competition’ and rely on a rudimentarily re-gendered Bloomian Oedipal model to describe their complex association in essentially antagonistic terms.10 As Sandra Gilbert and Susan Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Gubar argue, the Anxiety of Influence-inspired ‘monolithic pattern’ they ‘traced’ in nineteenth-century women writers’ attitudes towards their male predecessors broke down into a ‘multiplicity of stances toward the past’ for twentieth-century female authors who entered into complicated ‘dialogue[s]’ with both ‘male and female precursors’.11 This was especially true for Woolf who, according to Pericles Lewis, ‘was perhaps more conscious of the question of her literary influences than any major novelist’ during a period when the ‘necessary struggle with one’s precursors’ that ‘underlies all literary creation’ seemed ‘ever more intense with regard to one’s contemporaries or near contemporaries’.12 Furthermore, in emphasising evolving empathy rather than semiintentional or accidental affinity, this chapter permits consideration of the ethical and aesthetic influence Mansfield’s life and work had on Woolf and hers while acknowledging how the very act of detecting the ‘intangible’13 impact one contemporary might have on another effectively involves the ‘imaginative reconstruction of another person’s experience’ that Martha Nussbaum calls empathy itself.14 While Woolf never used the word ‘empathy’ in her writings, this chapter challenges modernist scholarship that pits empathy against abstraction.15 It also lends credence to claims made by both Hermione Lee, a champion of Woolfian empathy, and Suzanne Keen, one of its more sceptical theoretical supporters, that Woolf was an ‘empathiser of extraordinary powers’ who saw this emotion’s nurturance not just as the reader’s task, but in keeping with Mansfield, as the writer’s task as well.16 Like Katherine Mansfield, Harriette Wilson was a ‘dark[-] hair[ed]’, ‘dark[-] eye[d]’ woman who had escaped in her teens from what she felt was a ‘truly uncomfortable’ household tainted by the ‘unhappiness of her parents’ married life’. Wilson had ‘shocked’ the teachers at her school for young ladies by living ‘outside the pale of ordinary values’, proclaiming herself ‘free . . . from any restraint but that of [her] own conscience’, and ‘run[ning] up’ a ‘fabric of lies’ so thick that even her closest friends lacked any ‘certain knowledge of her character’.17 But Wilson, unlike Mansfield, had lived into her fifties to become, in Woolf’s words: a fat good-humoured disreputable old woman who never doubted the goodness of God or denied that the world had treated her well, or regretted, even when the darkness of obscurity and poverty blotted her entirely from view, that she had lived her life on the shady side of the sword.18

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impossible. As her diaries show, Woolf noticed how bitterness about this fate had not only ‘twisted’ Mansfield’s semi-private writings but had also ‘warped’ much of her fiction.19 While Woolf had gossiped freely about Mansfield’s ‘underworld’ rebellion earlier in their acquaintance, she acknowledges in this later essay on Wilson the injustice of a society − persisting into the twentieth century − in which men could wander between ‘under-’ and ‘upper-’ worlds with an immunity utterly denied to women. For just as a great bar-like ‘letter “I”’ will overshadow the twentieth century narrator’s page as she tries to read in A Room of One’s Own, the ‘shadow’ of a mighty masculine ‘sword . . . falls . . . [a]cross’ the ‘broad continent of a woman’s life’ in the England of Wilson’s day, much as it still did in Woolf and Mansfield’s day as well.20 On one side of this imperial phallus, Woolf explains, ‘all is [so] correct, definite, [and] orderly’ that a woman ‘has only to walk demurely from cradle to grave . . . escorted by gentlemen, protected by policemen, wedded and buried by clergymen’ and ‘no one will touch a hair of her head’.21 On the other side, however, a romantic ‘underworld’ landscape especially dangerous for women prevails, though Byron or a twentiethcentury counterpart like Murry can wander there in ‘perfect safety’.22 Yet Wilson had somehow managed to triumph over such circumstances bolstered by her belief in a benevolent God. An only intermittently faithful Mansfield had failed to do so, Woolf clearly recalled, despite having been a better writer.23 Woolf would also channel Mansfield on an even deeper level that same June of 1925 when she reflected in her diary on her recent ‘navigat[ion]’ of a certain mental ‘underworld’ where she knew Mansfield had often dwelled; she had retreated from society after a garden party and confessed that she felt that she did ‘not love [her] kind’. Echoing excerpts from Mansfield’s journal that she had read in which her friend had lamented how ‘life’ often ‘brought [her] no flow’, Woolf wrote that she felt incapable of ‘summon[ing] the energy’ to ‘infuse’ the ‘dry little sponges’ of humanity around her with her spirit as she, like Mansfield, ‘[o]nce . . . had a gift’, even ‘a passion . . . for doing’.24 Woolf found herself ‘slipping’ off into her ‘own thoughts’ during the day, before ‘replenish[ing] [her] cistern at night’ through reading.25 Unlike Mansfield, who Woolf knew had often turned to Russian writers as models in her efforts to ‘feel things deeply’, to ‘pur[ify]’ her soul’26 and to explore what Woolf had called in an early essay on Dostoevsky ‘the dim and populous underworld of [her] mind’s consciousness’,27 Woolf herself turned in this subterranean mood to the work of an Irishman: Jonathan Swift.28 Descended from the same ‘ancient civilisation’ as Woolf, Swift seemed Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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to offer her a better model than any Russian writer could to combine − as she had put it in ‘Modern Novels’ (1919) − both ‘comedy’ and ‘protest’ with her ‘gloom’.29 This did not mean, however, that Woolf rejected the Russian literature she knew Mansfield prized. After all, when she first read Crime and Punishment in French in 1912, Woolf had impulsively declared that it was ‘directly obvious that [Dostoevsky] was the greatest writer ever born’.30 But by 1917 she had begun to emphasise how the ‘point of view’ Dostoevsky represented was fundamentally ­‘different . . . from that to which’ English readers ‘[were] accustomed’, as she identified a distinctly Russian attitude toward ‘human suffering’ that contrasted with the ‘instinct’ to revolt against ‘sorrow’ so commonly ‘express[ed]’ in the literatures of ‘France and England’.31 Nevertheless, Woolf would eventually be inspired by Dostoevsky via Mansfield to evoke in her fiction a kind of semi-Slavic subterranean spirituality that she felt overly ‘materialist’ English writing typically lacked during the decade after Mansfield’s death. Back in the early 1920s, however, in contrast to more ardently Russophilic contemporaries like Mansfield and Murry, Woolf remained wary of the ‘fanaticism’ of her generation’s ‘admiration’ for the Russians.32 In fact, she may well have been responding to Murry’s impressionistic 1916 survey of Dostoevsky’s work and Mansfield’s Chekhovian early stories when she wrote in 1918 that even ‘tolerable imitations[s] of the Russians’ by English-speaking writers risked ‘becom[ing] awkward and self-conscious’, since by ‘denying their own’ native ‘qualities’ these authors tended to write with ‘affectation[s] of simplicity and goodness’ that often ‘turn[ed] to mawkish sentimentality’.33 But if Murry’s Slavophilic influence on Mansfield’s work merely annoyed Woolf in 1918, the impact of his world view on Mansfield’s tragic life came to trouble her more deeply by 1925. Striking Woolf as ‘one of those Dostoevsky relics’34 or ‘despairing young who have worked out philosophies & describe them’,35 Murry could often be found ‘snarl[ing]& scowl[ing] with the misery of his lot’, or sitting ‘pale as death, with gleaming eyes & a crouching way that seemed to proclaim extreme hunger or despair’.36 Like Dostoevsky’s ‘underworld’ narrator, Murry, Woolf noted, often appeared ‘anxious for effect’ − whether he was confessing at a dinner party in 1918 how he had recently been ‘near suicide’ before ‘worr[ying] out a formula’ involving ‘2 layers of conscience’ that ‘serve[d] to keep [him] going’ or ‘promulgating doctrines’, ‘channel[ling] . . . his miseries’, or ‘quest[ing] for a scheme’ through ‘columns’ of periodical print.37 All the while, Mansfield, by contrast, was privately experiencing a real and internal ‘underworld’ of ‘loneliness chiefly’ as she convalesced abroad ‘in a Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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house with caverns beneath into which the sea rushed’38 that she would describe on at least one occasion to Woolf and that Woolf would never forget. When Woolf first began regarding both Murry and Mansfield as Dostoevskian ‘underworld’ types, however, the gendered and geographical distance between the couple’s subterranean statuses was not yet clear to her. But by the summer of 1925, after Woolf published her Wilson essay and reflected semi-privately on her recent ‘navigation’ of the ‘underworld’ of illness, her epithet had taken on at least two related meanings. On the one hand, the underworld was a ‘shadowy’ and often urban landscape where rootless rebels challenged conventions, both social and sexual, as so many of Dostoevsky’s anti-heroes memorably had. On the other hand, it was an interior space of consciousness in which solitary individuals grappled with their darkest emotions, as Dostoevsky’s most alienated had also done. While Woolf had initially used the term in its first sense to dismiss both Mansfield and Murry, she would eventually explore its potential as a spiritualistic signifier of interpersonal empathy in her fiction before applying it in a variety of senses to fictional personae and (f)actual people who would remind her of her late friend in the years to come. If Leonard Woolf’s posthumous characterisation of his wife as an apolitical ‘animal’ in the 1960s has led scholars to underestimate her activist commitments decades after her death, then his brief suggestion that her ‘underworld’ label referred to ‘what [their] ancestors called Grub Street’ has encouraged a misunderstanding of the term that has persisted even longer.39 It is Leonard’s hasty gloss, after all, that appears to have shaped Quentin Bell’s view that his Aunt Virginia ‘snobb[ishly]’ associated the word with fellow authors who functioned as ‘critics and commentators’ rather than as ‘artists’ and Ann Olivier Bell’s gloss of the term after that. Both Leonard and the Bells accurately note that the presiding presence in Woolf’s imagined ‘underworld’ was, in fact, Murry himself. But their retrospective explanations of the designation’s meaning appear to have been influenced more by Murry’s reputation as a ‘literary entrepreneur’ than by Woolf’s actual reflections on either Murry or Mansfield when she started using her epithet in the late 1910s.40 Furthermore, their definitions fail to account for the degree to which Woolf was actively seeking to establish herself as a critic alongside Murry and Mansfield when she initially observed their ‘underworld’ tendencies. Perhaps the clearest indication that Woolf’s ‘underworld’ designation initially had more to do with Murry and Mansfield’s Dostoevskian affectations than with their journalistic aspirations is the fact that Woolf’s earliNot for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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est employments of the epithet are consistently and conspicuously free of any references to London’s periodical-publishing marketplace.41 Moreover, two of the very first individuals Woolf associated with the ‘underworld’ − Mansfield’s Burma-born and Rhodesia-raised former schoolmate ‘L.M.’ and Murry’s Polish-Jewish painter friend Mark Gertler − clearly resembled Dostoevsky characters more than they did Grub Street hacks. Like Dostoevsky’s St Petersburg’s underworldlings, both were obvious outsiders in a rapidly modernising city, and neither at that time had published a single word of literary journalism. Although Woolf’s next two underworld ‘targets’, Murry and Mansfield, had, of course, worked in journalism, they apparently ‘seemed’ to Woolf to be ‘too much of the underworld’ because they shared ‘all sorts of nostrums of their own’ while they constantly ‘talk[ed]’ quite self-consciously ‘about being artists’. Trying to better ‘express what [she] mean[t]’, Woolf added that they seemed − much like Dostoevsky’s underworld narrator − ‘not at all sure of themselves’ and ‘anxious for appreciation’. After autumn of 1918, however, Woolf’s links between the Murrys and the ‘underworld’ became more fleeting as she primarily used the term to remark upon their failures to follow conventions that she admitted her recent migration to the suburbs had perhaps dubiously led her to respect.42 It would be in a similar way that Woolf would use the word again in 1925 when she associated T. S. Eliot with the ‘dodges & desires’ of ‘The Underworld’ when he deliberately deceived her about his republication plans for The Waste Land.43 Like this later application of her ‘underworld’ epithet to Eliot, Woolf’s next two uses of the label in 1921 and 1922 referenced not the Murrys but other figures in their social milieu. Thus we find her in late 1921 disturbed to hear their mutual friend S. S. Koteliansky ‘talk[ing]’ like a denizen of the ‘underworld’ about ‘despis[ing] women’ while in the company of men who exhibit ‘no faith’ even ‘in each other’.44 In the following spring, troubled by an ‘outburst of spite’ Wyndham Lewis had unleashed on Clive Bell in the Daily Herald, Woolf wondered about the ‘psychology of the underworld’ in which individuals ‘afflicted’ by some ‘scurvy of the soul’ felt compelled to ‘scratch’ themselves ‘in public’.45 As all these references show, Woolf first used her ‘underworld’ epithet not to ridicule her acquaintances for engaging many of the same journalistic pursuits she had, but to express discomfort with the characteristics they often seemed to share with Dostoevsky’s most famous anti-heroes. It was not where the Murrys, or Eliot, or ‘Kot’, or Lewis published their writings or pronounced their disbeliefs that bothered Woolf so much as it was the degree to which they betrayed what the eponymous heroine of Mrs Dalloway would call the ‘privacy’ of their ‘soul[s]’ when Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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they did so.46 Though Woolf felt that English-speaking writers still needed to find ways to depict their own and their characters’ souls as the Russians had, she believed that her fellow countrymen and women had long been culturally indoctrinated to keep the tumult of those souls in check in ways their Slavic counterparts simply had not been. While Dostoevsky’s novels might be ‘composed purely and wholly of the stuff of the soul’, the English-speaking author’s works could not be − even if a similarly soulful sympathetic spirituality among Anglo-Saxons was something Woolf felt empathetically inspired to represent in the years after Mansfield’s death.47 Even as Woolf persisted in semi-privately decrying the ‘underworldly’ public behaviour of her peers throughout the 1920s, she could not avoid plunging into a private ‘underworld’ of illness in 1921. Yet in reflecting on her own depressive descent while employing the same Dostoevskyderived epithet, Woolf appears to have been registering increasing empathy for a friend whose suffering she would again recall in 1925. Just a year before Woolf’s own 1921 breakdown, Mansfield had recounted to her a battle she had waged with depression the previous winter with such honest intensity that Woolf immediately felt they had a ‘common certain understanding’ between them.48 Woolf slowly came to see how illness had forced Mansfield to play an increasingly feminised role in the real-life Dostoevskian drama Murry seemed to be directing in the few years Woolf had known her.49 When her own subterranean symptoms returned in 1921 Woolf could not help noticing how much more ‘fundamental security’ she had than Mansfield when facing comparable emotional ‘storms’.50 After enduring two months of illness with Leonard, servants, and friends around her, Woolf recalled how Mansfield had told her of suffering from both tuberculosis and severe depression for four months on the Continent with only L.M. to care for her.51 Reflecting on how she had been able to see ‘more people than normally even’ as she recovered, Woolf remembered how Mansfield had described receiving few familiar callers in Italy as she spent ‘entire days alone’ with only ‘a pistol by her’ side.52 But the most disturbing aspect of Mansfield’s narrative for Woolf appears to have been her account of how she had written to her absent husband Murry for ‘assurance’ in her darkest hours only to receive a ‘balance sheet of his accounts’ in reply. Accustomed to Leonard’s unflagging support during her own illnesses, Woolf confessed that she could only ‘vaguely’ understand ‘what [Mansfield] mean[t]’ about never looking to Murry for assistance ever again.53 Realising as she recovered from her own depression a year later how crucial Leonard’s support had been, Woolf finally began to appreciate how her own underworldly Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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‘condition’ brought ‘fascinations’ that mediated its ‘terrors’ since it was not as ‘fearfully random’ as Mansfield’s had so recently been.54 Of course, it is impossible to know exactly what Mansfield told Woolf about her experience of ‘the most overwhelming depression’ in Italy in late 1919 during their ‘2 hours priceless talk’ the following June.55 But details from that time set down in Mansfield’s journal and letters resurface not only in the conversations Woolf recorded in her diary but also, at times, in flashes of her future fiction. Thus, even though Woolf knew how the tremendous spite Mansfield’s suffering produced often made her resemble a Dostoevskian underworld ‘man’ in relation to L.M., she came to see how Mansfield’s increasing weakness in relation to Murry had turned her into just the kind of tragic Dostoevskian ‘woman’ Mansfield feared she might become. As Mansfield was to write in a late 1919 diary entry, she had started her relationship with Murry as the ‘man’ while ‘he had been the woman’.56 But when Mansfield’s body began to give way her spirit had as well, such that she frequently found herself ‘play[ing] at life’ and ‘play[ing] up’ her role as a consumptive victim, largely in response to Murry’s absurdly idealistic obsession with the ‘romantic appearance’ of her disease.57 In letters to him, therefore, Mansfield would imagine that she was living in a temporary prison from which she would emerge eventually to do her finest writing, just as the famous Russian novelist had. Although Mansfield tried to identify with Dostoevsky, for whom Murry himself would famously claim in 1935 to have served as an ‘amanuensis’ while writing his 1916 book,58 she knew now she resembled a ‘Dostoievsky wom[a]n’ more than her friend Woolf ever had, would or even could. Much like Dostoevsky’s own subterranean heroine Lisa, who initially mocks the underworld man for deriving a picture of domestic bliss from books before conceding that she would give anything to live inside that very picture, Mansfield herself came to ‘cling’ to the romantic narrative Murry perpetuated despite her better judgement because she was ultimately haunted, she admitted, ‘by the fear of death’.59 Although she had already satirised Murry for abandoning her in ‘Je ne parle pas français’ − and surely knew that Dostoevsky’s underworld man himself never followed through on the promises he made to Lisa − Mansfield did not finally declare her independence from Murry until the moment in late 1919 she would describe at length for Woolf the following spring. It was not until Murry responded to Mansfield’s most miserable letters to him with the ‘balance sheet of accounts’60 Woolf had written of and the report of ‘his suffering, his nerves’ and his ‘heavy debts’ that Mansfield recorded she at last resolved to put an end to ‘his play’ once and for all, and envision a future without him.61 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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In the end, however, Mansfield would never fully disentangle herself from Murry. Nor would she free herself entirely from the kind of Russophilic semi-religion that she gradually adopted in desperation, and that Woolf considered debilitating. But back in the summer of 1920 Mansfield simply seemed to Woolf to have ‘[g]ot through something’ so that her subterranean ‘subterfuges were no longer so necessary’.62 If she had been released from some sort of externalised pseudo-underworld presided over by Murry, however, she remained trapped, Woolf had come to understand, in a very real internal one. Thus Woolf herself would feel compelled to continue exploring both of these realms further through her own writing in various genres during the productive years ahead. Just one month before the Nation printed the Harriette Wilson essay in which Woolf had evoked a ‘shadowy’ social ‘underworld’ of nascent bohemian culture in early nineteenth-century Europe, the Hogarth Press published Mrs Dalloway, in which the word ‘underworld’ appears at two distinct points. In one brief episode during Clarissa’s party, Woolf’s narrator swiftly sketches an external social underworld inhabited by outwardly unkempt but philosophically astute ‘rebels’, ‘ardent young people’ and ‘would-be geniuses’63 who clearly resemble the ‘unshaven, uncombed’ and ‘uncompromising . . . genius[es]’64 in Murry’s milieu that Woolf herself had described as ‘underworld’ types in her diary in late 1921. In an earlier scene set in Westminster Abbey, however, Woolf also uses the word to suggest an internal psycho-spiritual landscape of transient communal empathy that offers potential refuge from what might have become disconnected Dostoevskian despair. There, in one of London’s central ‘habitation[s] of God’, Woolf’s narrator quickly introduces us to two upper-class characters − Mr Fletcher and Mrs Gorham − temporarily ‘divested of social rank’ as they ‘sympathetically’ imagine the prayerful governess Doris Kilman’s ‘soul haunting’ the same ‘underworld . . . territory’ their own souls have just visited.65 Thus Woolf cursorily shows how common beliefs may actually serve to unite alienated individuals − even if only momentarily − in an ‘underworld’ realm that had previously seemed to offer nothing but desolation. Although this shared soul-space within involves a suspect Christianity in Woolf’s fourth novel, she goes on in her fifth and seventh novels − To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931) − to imagine specifically secular realms in which certain empathetic individuals accept more readily the permeability of boundaries between themselves and others. These later figures have found unorthodox ways to recognise their ‘kinship’ with others and avoid faithless fixation on their own unbearable loneliness. When we find a teenaged Cam Ramsay near the end of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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To the Lighthouse ‘cut[ting] a trail in the sea’ with her hand, therefore, we see her mind ‘wander[ing]’ freely rather than fearfully in the ‘underworld of the waters’ as her ‘body’ seems to shine as if ‘enveloped in a green cloak’.66 Thus Cam optimistically imagines herself being embraced by a translucent underworld rather than engulfed by a dark one. But when we come upon Bernard in The Waves envisioning ‘the underworld’ as a sort of natural place of worship among ‘pendant currants’ that hang ‘like candelabra’, and ‘leaves’ form the ‘domes of vast cathedrals’,67 the mood is more tentative. While To the Lighthouse comes to a close with Cam on the verge of youthful self-discovery as she locates her physical position between land and lighthouse and her psycho-social place in empathetic relation to both her brother and her father, The Waves is just beginning to follow Bernard along the tumultuous course of nearly an entire lifetime of self-exploration as he continually considers the attributes and emotions he does and does not share with his dearest childhood friends. Though Bernard will go through a phase during which he romantically fancies himself to be a solitary sufferer like Byron or ‘that hero in a book by Dostoevsky whose name [he has] forgotten’68 he ultimately realises that his childhood impulses toward empathic human connection are ultimately valid ones when he re-invokes the ‘canopy of currant leaves’ outside the ‘nursery’ in his final ‘sum[ming] up’.69 Thus he decides that he must not go ‘to poetry’ or ‘to priests’ − as Woolf knew Mansfield often had late in life − for clarity when he is troubled or confused, but to his ‘friends’ and ‘own heart’ to find whatever meaning he can in the world he uncertainly inhabits.70 It is through Bernard rather than Cam, then, that Woolf is able to imagine more fully an alternative to the Dostoevskian underworld that Mansfield so often occupied, that Woolf herself had repeatedly glimpsed, and that Bernard’s own friends Louis and Rhoda languish in as well. While Bernard is the only character in The Waves who actually utters the word ‘underworld’, Louis and Rhoda are the pair most consistently associated throughout the text with more sobering subterranean imagery. And they are the characters who most resemble Dostoevsky’s underworld man and his fleeting companion Lisa, as sometime lovers who consider themselves eternal outsiders even among their closest friends. Thus isolated, Louis and Rhoda fix themselves fatalistically to their subterranean stations as ‘vagrant’, ‘transient’ attic dwellers without true ‘lodgment’, and fail to accept Bernard’s ‘childhood intuition’ of an ‘underworld’ where empathetic individuals might commune socially, psychologically and spiritually.71 When Rhoda eventually kills herself, Bernard appears to secularly assume the wisdom of Russian ‘village Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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priests’ that Woolf had repeatedly taken note of in various essays on fiction throughout the 1910s and 1920s as he wishes that Rhoda could have seen her peers as ‘brothers’ who were ‘akin’ to her in ‘mind’ and ‘heart’.72 If she had, Rhoda might have seen how her own friends had, similarly, had to ‘[f]ight’ against the same underworldly terrors she had by relying on ‘humour and comedy’ [Louis], ‘the beauty of the earth’ [Susan], ‘the activities of the intellect’ [Neville], and the ‘splendour of the body’ [Jinny] − as Woolf herself once suggested that Englishspeaking characters, in contrast to their suffering Russian counterparts, ‘natural[ly]’ and inevitably should.73 In fact, Woolf may even have imagined how much Mansfield, too, could have avoided her dismal fate if she could have just believed in Bernard’s de-Slavicised underworld vision, as Woolf herself continually tried to do. If memories of intimate exchanges with Mansfield helped Woolf gradually develop her empathic skills as a writer during the 1920s, they would continue to strengthen her empathic skills more fundamentally as a woman during the 1930s when she began to consider writing about women’s ‘sexual li[v]e[s]’74 beyond the bounds of fiction. When she came to associate the author Rebecca West and the Hogarth Press’s managerpublicist Norah Nicholls with an external ‘underworld’, Woolf did so with less wariness than before as her own worldliness increased, as the term’s Slavophilic connotations waned in her mind after The Waves and her empathetic feminist perspective deepened and broadened. By the late 1930s, therefore, we can find Woolf admitting how the fact that West had ‘battered about’ in the ‘underworld’ and ‘dillydall[ied] in the world of the flesh’ helped make her the ‘tenacious and masterful . . . good company’ that she was.75 Like the vivacious young Mansfield Woolf had met in the late 1910s − whose ‘knock[ing] about with prostitutes’ had given her a ‘sharpness and reality’ Woolf would only later confess she had ‘adored and needed’ at the time − West had ‘qualities’ Woolf realised she had once ‘lack[ed] & fear[ed]’, yet had to come to admire as she continued developing a more expansive feminist sensibility.76 Though West could occasionally seem ‘suspic[ious]’ and ­‘distrustful’ − Woolf suspected she ‘gnaw[ed]’ a ‘bone . . . in secret’ about having borne H. G. Wells’ illegitimate son − she made no apologies for her behaviour as Mansfield often had.77 Unlike Mansfield, who repeatedly tried to convince Woolf that the gossip she had heard about her was false, West ‘talk[ed] openly about her son’ born ‘out of wedlock’ as if she had nothing to be ashamed of.78 Thus, where an ailing Mansfield or Clarissa Dalloway or even a younger Woolf might have been repelled by West’s ‘great hairy arms’, Woolf found that she ‘rather liked’ the ‘painted woman’ and ‘hardened old reprobate’.79 Rather than Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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sinking, as Mansfield ultimately seemed to, in her struggle to survive in a masculine professional underworld where a sexual double standard prevailed, the ‘broad[-]browed . . . buffeter & battler’ West had clearly succeeded, Woolf was to reflect in 1935, in forging a sense of sisterhood with other women, and thus ‘tak[ing] the waves’.80 Though we know less about Woolf’s attitude toward Nicholls than we do about her view of West, a hint of admiration shines through in her semi-private comments about this ‘flashy’ woman who had ‘kept underworld company’ as well.81 Indeed, Woolf wrote almost proudly to her sister about her employee’s determination to keep working in the Woolfs’ London home when air raids seemed imminent in the autumn of 1938. She also expressed frustration in both her diary and letters when Nicholls was refused access to the ‘trench that was being dug’ in Tavistock Square by some city authority because she was not an official resident of the house.82 While Woolf did make somewhat flippant references to Nicholls’ ‘shoddy contacts’ in her diary, she clearly came to appreciate how valuable these contacts ultimately proved to be in marketing Three Guineas.83 Thus Nicholls, like West, struck Woolf as a woman whose external ‘underworld’ experiences ultimately strengthened her as a professional. Nevertheless, as the continued return of Mansfield’s ‘ghost’ to her in dreams indicates, Woolf could not forget how Mansfield’s public underworld adventures had been much less salutary, or how her private subterranean struggles had hampered her work. But it was through her relationships with later feminists like West and Nicholls that Woolf would gain insights that helped her explore the professional and sexual lives of women with greater empathy from the mid twenties to the late thirties than she could have during Mansfield’s life.84 And it was through this writing that Woolf would eventually develop a greater understanding of Mansfield than either friend or rival could have imagined back in 1917.

Notes   1. Virginia Woolf, ‘Harriette Wilson’, Essays, vol. 4, p. 259.  2. Woolf, Diary, vol. 33, pp. 50, 187.  3. Woolf, Diary, vol. 1, p. 58.  4. Woolf, Diary, vol. 3, p. 187.  5. Woolf, Diary, vol. 1, p. 156 n. 8. See, for instance, John Carswell, Lives and Letters, pp. 137, 271; Antony Alpers, Life of Katherine Mansfield, p. 109; Patricia Moran, Word of Mouth, p. 12; Leila Brosnan, Reading Virginia Woolf’s Essays and Journalism, p. 74; Michael Whitworth, Virginia Woolf, p. 148; Sydney Janet Kaplan, Circulating Genius, p. 106.

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150     Katie Macnamara  6. Dostoevsky’s novella, Записки из подполья, is generally better known today as Notes from Underground, which is a slight variation of the title it assumed in Constance Garnett’s 1918 translation, Notes from the Underground.  7. Katherine Mansfield, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 3 July 1917, Collected Letters, vol. 1, p. 315.   8. Angela Smith, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, p. 35.   9. Ibid. pp. 25, 13. 10. Kaplan, Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction, p. 146. 11. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land, pp. 168−9. 12. Pericles Lewis, ‘Proust, Woolf, and Modern Fiction’, pp. 78, 82. 13. Kaplan, Katherine Mansfield, p. 149. 14. Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, p. 301. 15. The opposition between empathy and abstraction in art was first theorised by Wilhelm Worringer in a 1908 dissertation, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, which influenced T. E. Hulme and other modernist writers. For more on Worringer and modernism, see Michael Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism, pp. 94−101; Moshe Barasch, Modern Theories of Art, 2, pp. 171−87; Jesse Matz, Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics, pp. 145−54. For works that ‘continue to suggest’ that ‘a distrust of empathy’ was ‘central to modernism’, see Kirsty Martin, Modernism and the Rhythms of Sympathy, p. 12 n. 50. 16. Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf, p. 6; Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel, p. 59. Keen’s study, like most dealing with literature and empathy, focuses primarily on readerly empathy rather than the writerly empathy this chapter explores. 17. Woolf, ‘Harriette Wilson’, pp. 256−8. 18. Ibid. p. 258. 19. Woolf, Diary, vol. 4, p. 315. 20. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, p. 90; Woolf, ‘Harriette Wilson’, p. 254. 21. Woolf, ‘Harriette Wilson’, p. 254. 22. Ibid. For more on the Murry/Byron connection in Woolf, see Anne E. Fernald, Virginia Woolf: Feminism and the Reader, p. 121. 23. Ibid. pp. 257−8. 24. Woolf, Diary, vol. 3, p. 33. 25. Woolf, Diary, vol. 3, p. 33. 26. Mansfield, Notebooks, vol. 2, pp. 278, 277; Woolf, Diary, vol. 2, p. 248. 27. Woolf, ‘More Dostoevsky’, in Essays, vol. 2, p. 85. 28. Woolf, Diary, vol. 3, p. 33. 29. Woolf, ‘Modern Novels’, in Essays, vol. 3, p. 36. 30. Woolf, Letters, vol. 2, p. 5. 31. Woolf, ‘More Dostoevsky’ and ‘The Russian View’, in Essays, vol. 2, pp. 86, 341−3. 32. Woolf, ‘The Russian Point of View’, in Essays, vol. 4, p. 182. 33. Woolf, ‘The Russian View’, in Essays, vol. 2, p. 343. 34. Woolf, Letters, vol. 3, p. 80. 35. Woolf, Diary, vol. 1, p. 156. 36. Ibid. p. 129; Woolf, Letters, vol. 3, p. 80.

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Evolving Empathy and Intimate Influence in Virginia Woolf’s Writings     151 37. Woolf, Diary, vol. 1, p. 156 and vol. 2, pp. 74, 87; Woolf, Letters, vol. 3, p. 52. 38. Woolf, Diary, vol. 2, p. 45. 39. Leonard Woolf, Beginning Again, p. 103; Woolf, Downhill All the Way, p. 27. 40. Carswell, Lives and Letters, p. 271. 41. Woolf does associate the word ‘underworld’ once with ‘hack writers’ (Letters, vol. 5, p. 259) and with a criminal element (Diary, vol. 3, pp. 339−40) like that which Thomas Holmes had described in the 1912 book London’s Underworld (with which Woolf may or may not have been familiar). 42. Woolf, Diary, vol. 1, p. 358. 43. Woolf, Diary, vol. 3, p. 41. 44. Woolf, Diary, vol. 2, pp. 149−50. 45. Woolf, Letters, vol. 2, pp. 520, 522. 46. Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, pp. 126−7. 47. Woolf, ‘The Russian Point of View’, Essays, vol. 4, p. 186. 48. Woolf, Diary, vol. 2, pp. 45−6. 49. For more on the Dostoevskian dramatics of Murry and Mansfield’s milieu, see, for instance, Alpers, Life of Katherine Mansfield, p. 173. 50. Woolf, Diary, vol. 2, p. 126. 51. Ibid. p. 45. 52. Ibid. pp. 126, 45. 53. Ibid. p. 46. 54. Ibid. p. 126. 55. Mansfield, Letter to Murry, 31 October 1919, Collected Letters, vol. 3, p. 61; Woolf, Diary, vol. 2, p. 45. 56. Woolf, Diary, vol. 2, p. 62; Mansfield, Notebooks, vol. 2, p. 180. 57. Ibid. p. 180. 58. Murry, Fyodor Dostoevsky, p. 368. 59. Mansfield, Notebooks, vol. 2, p. 180. 60. Woolf, Diary, vol. 2, p. 46. 61. Mansfield, Notebooks, vol. 2, pp. 179, 181. 62. Woolf, Diary, vol. 2, p. 45. 63. Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, p. 176. 64. Woolf, Diary, vol. 2, pp. 149−50. 65. Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, p. 134. 66. Woolf, To the Lighthouse, p. 183. 67. Woolf, The Waves, p. 14. 68. Ibid. pp. 184, 187, 201. 69. Ibid. pp. 177, 176. 70. Woolf, To the Lighthouse, p. 197. 71. Woolf, The Waves, pp. 46, 66, 47, 94, 14. 72. Ibid. p. 208; Woolf, ‘The Russian View’, in Essays, vol. 2, p. 341; ‘Modern Fiction’ and ‘The Russian Point of View’ in Essays, vol. 4, pp. 163, 183. 73. Woolf, The Waves, p. 200; Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’, in Essays, vol. 4, p. 163. 74. Woolf, Diary, vol. 3, p. 6. 75. Woolf, Letters, vol. 5, p. 529 and vol. 6, p. 352.

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152     Katie Macnamara 76. Woolf, Letters, vol. 4, p. 366; Diary, vol. 4, p. 277. 77. Woolf, Letters, vol. 3, p. 501 and vol. 6, p. 521. 78. Woolf, Letters, vol. 5, p. 259 and vol. 3, p. 501. 79. Woolf, Diary, vol. 4, p. 167 and vol. 3, p. 184. 80. Woolf, Letters, vol. 4, p. 327. 81. Woolf, Diary, vol. 5, p. 138. 82. Woolf, Diary, vol. 5, p. 178; Letters, vol. 6, pp. 276, 284. 83. Woolf, Diary, vol. 5, p. 236. 84. Woolf, Diary, vol. 4, p. 6.

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Chapter 11

Mansfield eats Dickens Michael Hollington

In a letter to Arnold Gibbons of July 1922, Katherine Mansfield remarks that ‘we all, as writers, to a certain extent, absorb each other when we love . . . Anatole France would say we eat each other’.1 This chapter is about the extent to which Mansfield ‘ate’ Dickens, absorbing above all essential aspects of his humour, made manifest not only in the presence of numerous Dickensian stylistic devices in her writing but also in many shared satiric emphases, especially their critiques of the societies in which they lived. It will focus in particular on the wholesale deliberate humorous confusion of people and things, which substantiate the claim that Mansfield ‘ate’ at Dickens’ table, with a partial emphasis on hats and other fashion accoutrements as reified satiric metonymies and synecdoches for the actual living person. It is not feasible in a chapter of this length to offer anything like a full account of Mansfield’s relationship to Dickens. Such a task would necessarily start out from Edward Wagenknecht’s 1929 essay ‘Dickens and Katherine Mansfield’, which first alerted us to the relationship, and then consider Angela Smith’s much more recent ‘Mansfield and Dickens: “I am not reading Dickens idly”’ in the 2011 volume edited by Gerri Kimber and Janet Wilson entitled Celebrating Katherine Mansfield.2 But this chapter begins with a brief look at the point of its implantation − which probably occurred in Mansfield’s childhood − and then at the role of Dickens in Mansfield’s adulthood, as well as to some extent at the role of Mansfield in the re-establishment of Dickens’ reputation after World War I. Taking these things all in all, it aims to show how important − perhaps more important than is commonly realised − some central Dickensian motifs and associations became for her at an early age, and how they remained with her throughout her writing life. It is useful to begin with the move to ‘Chesney Wold’ in Karori, named after the ancestral seat of Sir Leicester Dedlock in Bleak House (1852−3). This took place at Easter 1893, when Mansfield was only four Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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and a half,3 but during the five and a half years of her life spent there, one might speculate, she began to wonder about the name and how her home acquired it. The house was built in 1866 by Stephen Lancaster, the first mayor of Karori. But why was it named after the Dickens text? It is certainly not unique in the then colonies in this respect: there is the poet Adam Lindsay Gordon’s cottage in South Australia, for instance, to bear it company, named ‘Dingley Dell’ after the happy home of Mr Wardle in Pickwick Papers (1836). But aristocratic pile that it is, ‘Chesney Wold’ in Bleak House, with its ghosts and secrets, is not a happy home. One might speculate again that the name made ironic reference to the isolation of Karori at that time, or, self-mockingly, to the grand pretensions of its founding mayor.4 A third speculation might concern how Mansfield reflected on this overtly inappropriate choice of name after she became a Dickens aficionado. Her first reference to Dickens is in ‘The Great Examination’, written at the age of twelve in 1901 when she had left Chesney Wold and was a pupil at Miss Swainson’s school in Wellington. It is a piece that displays signs of a gift for satire, highlights sibling rivalries and emphasises Dickens as a family tragedian rather than comedian. After sitting an exam, the three Mahony sisters − who are clearly the Beauchamp sisters − are given the rest of the day off school to enjoy themselves. For the youngest, the 13-year-old literary swot Bessie (presumably Katherine herself), the chosen pastime is an ambivalent one. ‘I shall enjoy myself with “Paul Dombey”, in the hammock’, she declares, whereupon her sister Kitty acts as a telltale to destroy her pleasure, revealing what it will be by denouncing it to their mother: ‘Mother, only think, the other day I found Bessie sitting under the apple tree, crying over the death of Paul.’5 Dombey and Son (1846−8) became a leitmotiv for Mansfield throughout her career. Harold Beauchamp, after all, was no gouty Sir Leicester proud of his ancient lineage. He was born on a goldfield in Australia, the son of a feckless father ‘whose example he did not intend to follow’.6 The Dickens character he resembled to a rather greater extent was Dombey senior, as an all-conquering, upwardly mobile businessman devoutly wishing for a son and heir to carry on the business. There are several stories that configure this expectant father pattern, including ‘A Birthday’ (1904), part of In a German Pension (1911), but manifestly set in New Zealand. This story climaxes with the ‘exultant’ Andreas Binzer ‘staggering forward when he hears Doctor Erb pronounce ‘she’s hooked a boy this time!’ − childbirth for these male bystanders being apparently a species of angling.7 In ‘The Aloe’ (1915) and Prelude (1918) Stanley Burnell, who is clearly Harold Beauchamp, sits down to dinner with a cast of females only, but reserves in his mind a space at Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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the top of the table for the future Paul Dombey of the household: ‘that’s where my boy ought to sit’.8 It is not surprising that in such an atmosphere Mansfield − third in a succession of girls and felt equally as a redundancy by her mother, who wished to avoid innumerable pregnancies − should have identified with Florence Dombey, and taken to heart the chilling dismissal of daughters in Chapter 1 of Dombey and Son: ‘what was a girl to Dombey and Son! In the capital of the House’s name and dignity, such a child was merely a piece of base coin that couldn’t be invested – a bad Boy – nothing more.’9 Indeed, it is tempting to argue that this archetypical example of the Dickensian reification of the other − the reduction of the living daughter to the status of counterfeit coin, an item of exchange not even worth its face value − is the catalyst for much of Mansfield’s sharpest satire. Be that as it may, when the longed-for boy eventually arrived, and was named after a family relative, the painter C. R. Leslie (who had known Dickens and had even painted him in 1846, acting the part of Captain Bobadil in Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour),10 Mansfield seems to have developed the kind of relationship with him that the ‘base coin’ Florence enjoys in the novel with her brother Paul. But Florence is the sister of a sickly boy destined to die, and perhaps the multiple fragments and stories about sick and dying children in early Mansfield − and about loving sisters − can be seen as having their origin in her adolescent reading of Dombey and Son. In any event, the school Mansfield attended in this period of her life was thoroughly imbued with Dickens. During these years, Miss Swainson the headmistress got up a charity performance of Mrs Jarley’s Waxworks from The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), at which it was discovered that Mansfield, presumably playing the part of Little Nell, another sick child in Dickens, had a great gift for impersonation.11 At sewing lessons on a Wednesday afternoon, when the girls were again engaged in charitable activities (making flannelette chemises for Maoris, for example), Miss Swainson is remembered later by Mansfield in caricature style ‘with her long peaked nose that has such funny little red veins in the end of it’ as she read Dickens aloud to entertain them. In the fragment ‘The Beautiful Miss Richardson’ (1915), she is reading David Copperfield (1850) to them, and pauses to pass round an illustration from the novel. In this text, Mansfield herself seems bent on employing Dickensian habits of minute physiognomic observation as she remembers the headmistress’s nose, figure (‘so tiny, so spry’) and totemic affiliation: ‘she reminds me of a bird and a donkey mixed’.12 Miss Swainson seems, thus, to have had a hand in fostering Mansfield’s own thoroughly Dickensian desire to ‘revolutionise and revive the art of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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elocution’: ‘I would like to be the Maud Allen of this Art’, she said at the age of twenty in November 1908.13 The urge may have begun as she herself took on the role of Dickens’ reader in the sewing class, moving from being Bessie in tears to inflicting tears on others by reading the death of Paul Dombey aloud: ‘I could make the girls cry when I read Dickens in the sewing class’,14 she recalls in her journal. As late as 30 April 1922 she announces plans to follow in Dickens’ footsteps and read her own writing aloud: I intend, next spring, to go to London, take the Bechstein Hall and give readings of my stories. I’ve always wanted to do this, and of course it would be a great advertisement. Dickens used to do it . . . he knew his people just as I know old Ma Parker’s voice and the Ladies Maid.15

Thus, just over a year after leaving Miss Swainson’s for Queen’s College in London, Mansfield already felt able to adopt in one of her letters the pose of the maturely seasoned and discriminating Dickensian, evident in the ever so slightly comical ‘always’ and ‘so sinful’ as well as the ever so slightly pretentious French tag from Maeterlinck in her denunciation of the crime of undervaluing Dickens and overvaluing pulp fiction in a golden age of the book as a fine art object: ‘I always think it is so sinful to publish Bloody Hands by Augusta St John, in green leather, and Bleak House in paper for 6d. “Tout marche de travers”.’16 In her adult years, Mansfield did as much as she could to reaffirm Dickens as a consummate artist both of tragedy and comedy in a period during which his reputation had suffered at the hands of Naturalists and Aesthetes alike.17 When, in his 1922 Athenaeum essay ‘Dickens’, Murry proclaims that Dickens is back in vogue − that, with the ‘imprimatur’ of T. S. Eliot and others ‘the offense against art and intellect is no longer to know Dickens but to be ignorant of him’18 − Mansfield’s tireless personal advocacy is a considerable behind-the-scenes force, evidence of which is found in her letters to him. Mansfield was an acute literary critic, as anyone who has read her remarks on George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) will concur. ‘When Maggie Tulliver’s lover walks with her up & down the lane & asks her to marry, he leads his great horse and the beast is foaming – it has been hard ridden and there are dark streaks of sweat on its flanks – the beast is the man one feels SHE feels in some queer inarticulate way’ offers as sharp an insight into the Victorian representation of sexual desire as one could wish for.19 Her critical acumen is, likewise, on display on many occasions when she comments on Dickens’ art, which often come with tacit or explicit recognition of its importance for her own. Here, for example, are some remarks on Our Mutual Friend Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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(1864−5) that show her frequent urging of Dickens’ novels on Murry’s attention: Boge have you read Our Mutual Friend – Some of it is really damned good. The satire in it is first chop – all the Veneering business par exemple – could not be better. I never read it before & am enjoying it immensely – & Mrs Wilfer is after my own heart. I have a huge capacity for seeing ‘funny’ people, you know, and laughing. Dickens does fill it at times quite amazingly.20

Yet sharper and more memorable are her comments on the death of Merdle in Little Dorrit (1855−7), wrongly transcribed by Murry in his edition of the Journal, as Margaret Scott notes, as ‘Cheedle’: there are moments when Dickens is possessed by this power of writing – he is carried away – that is bliss. It certainly is not shared by writers today. For instance the death of Merdle – dawn fluttering on the edge of night. One realises exactly the mood of the writer and how he wrote as it were for himself. It was not his will he was the fluttering dawn and he was Physician going to Bar.21

We have here one of the keys to Mansfield’s response to Dickens’ writing, to be explored more fully a little later. What she seems to have responded to intensely, and highlights here, is a hyperbolic version of metonymy in which the writer literally becomes the object or attribute on which he or she focuses. There is the case of George Eliot becoming the horse, or, tragically, what Mansfield wrote to Dorothy Brett in the last months of her life: ‘I am a cough – a living walking or lying-down cough.’22 Closer to home, Mansfield paid Dickens the compliment of regularly assuming his voices and ‘becoming’ his characters in her writing and correspondence. After a dutiful evening of writing in July 1917, for instance, she feels ‘like Mrs Jellaby [Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House] who spent her life, you remember, staring at the ink spots on the wall and writing tomes about some mission that need never have existed’.23 Later, at the end of her life, enthusing about Gurdjieff, she uses the same reference to pause to worry about having her eye fixed too much on distant chimera: ‘Dear dear Bogey, I hope I don’t sound like Mrs. Jellaby.’24 Ill in Bandol in January 1918 she laments how her ‘lovely gay shawl lies upon a chair & I gaze at it feeling rather like David Copperfield’s Dora, and wondering when I shall wear it again’.25 Later that same year, suffering in Cornwall in June from what she calls ‘spinal rheumatism’, she tells Murry, ‘I walk like little Nell’s grandfather.’26 On innumerable occasions she throws herself into the part of Sarah Gamp from Martin Chuzzlewit (1843−4), adopting her language and ungrammatical speech cadences, as in a letter intended to cheer up Frederick Goodyear, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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addressed here as Betsy Prig, at a time when he was close to a nervous breakdown at the front: ‘Never did cowcumber lie more heavy on a female’s buzzum than your curdling effugion which I have read twice and wont again if horses drag me.’27 And Mansfield is forever asking Murry to send her more Dickenses. Cutting her cloth according to the couple’s finances, she read him, not in expensive leather-bound versions but in the cheapest available versions. From Bandol, where her need always seems at its height, Mansfield asks for ‘a shilling Dickens that I haven’t read – or one I don’t remember – but which is it? Oh I’d like to read Oliver Twist for one.’28 At this point in time she is conscious that even the cheapest Dickens might be a drain on Murry’s finances: ‘when you feel you can afford it would you send me Nicholas Nickleby?’29 She mildly chides him when he sends the same title twice: ‘Did you know you sent me 2 copies of Master Humphrey’s Clock? It was in the back of Edwin Drood as well as in the separate volume.’30 Reading Dickens became something of a necessity for her as her illness progressed. There is poignancy in some of her pleas from Bandol: ‘I suffer so frightfully from insomnia here and from night terrors. That is why I asked for another Dickens; if I read him in bed he diverts my mind.’31 But at times even Dickens didn’t work: ‘I came up to my room & took a hot bath & then curled up in bed & smoked & tried to read a new Dickens. No use.’32 The letter continues with the remark that ‘the sea was very loud’, and we remember that Mansfield’s brother Leslie had been killed at the front two months previously. On the Mediterranean she may have been hearing what the wild waves were saying, as the dying Paul Dombey does in Dombey and Son. It would be fruitful to conduct a thorough stylistic comparison of Mansfield and Dickens, especially in the sphere of verbal humour, for instance in the use of ‘cockney’ hypocorism or speech distortion of words by presumed illiterates. It would need to be done, of course, with a recognition that although Mansfield indeed ‘ate’ some of Dickens’ comic mannerisms she also drew upon a separate tradition of ‘New Zealing’ cockneyisms that are all her own.33 There is no space to do that here, however, so the focus will be on only one shared aspect of their imaginations: the extent to which both writers seek tragicomic effects from the wholesale deliberate confusion of persons and things. This trademark habit − Mrs Wilfer’s ‘presenting a cheek to be kissed, as sympathetic and responsive as the back of the bowl of a spoon’34 one of a thousand examples − is a commonplace of Dickens criticism.35 Mansfield would have been exposed to it at first hand as Nell in any representation of Mrs Jarley’s waxworks, for the running joke there is that Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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she and the waxwork figures are interchangeable commodities equally designed to pull in the crowds: ‘Mrs Jarley . . . lest Nell should become too cheap, soon sent the Brigand out alone again, and kept her in the exhibition room.’36 Appropriately enough, we find the same habit emerging at roughly the same time as Mansfield appeared in Miss Swainson’s charity charade. In a flaneurial letter written from London in June 1903 when she was only fourteen we find an early example of a particular Dickens favourite, the comparison of persons with items of food: ‘A place I am very fond of going to is Hyde Park. The carriages, horses and babies are most lovely, especially the last named. In their perambulators they remind me of little bits of wedding cake tied up with white ribbons.’37 The same technique is extensively employed in In a German Pension, where the consumption of food is a major focus of satire. Frau Brechenmacher (whose onomastic surname can be translated as ‘vomit-maker’) attends a wedding where the bride has the appearance ‘of an iced cake all ready to be cut up and served in neat little pieces to the bridegroom beside her’.38 Hans, the son of the butcher in ‘At “Lehmann’s”’ (1910), is ‘a mean, undersized child very much like one of his father’s sausages’.39 Later, in ‘The Aloe’, when the servant-girl serves up supper, ‘it was hard to tell which of the two, Alice or the duck, looked the better basted’.40 It is this kind of wit in her work that helps one realise the truth of Leonard Woolf’s unforgettable tribute to her: ‘I don’t think anyone has ever made me laugh more than she did in those days.’ But he adds that he thought her ‘a very serious writer’41 − taking us back to an interjection in the middle of one of her pleas to Murry for more Dickens novels: ‘I am not reading Dickens idly.’42 For the humorous voice highlighted thus far in the handling of persons and things interacts with a different, more disturbing ‘approach from the other side’, as it were, where objects take on a sinister life of their own. In a very early fragment, ‘My Potplants’ (1906), the Gothic origins of such figures are apparent in the shape of childhood memories, of having ‘lived in the queer old rambling house that has long since been removed’.43 A not dissimilar effect surfaces in ‘The Swing of the Pendulum’ (1911) when the landlady who harasses Viola for the rent she owes storms out of the room at the end of their exchange, ‘banging the door so that it shook and rattled as though it had listened to the conversation and sympathised with the old hag’.44 But another early piece from May 1908, ‘Vignette: They are a ridiculous company’, plumbs some of the psychological depths that writing that endows objects with metaphorical life can explore. It is a prose poem about twilight reverie, and how in a candlelit room with brown holland blinds objects come alive. ‘Tonight I sat in a low chair, smoking, and Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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by and bye I was so silent they forgot me and took life’ − that is to say, ‘an elephant, a white poodle playing the ’cello, a gnome in a red cap, a handkerchief [box], a box of matches’. These things start to speak. The blue jug ‘with a compressed spout’ asks them ‘to conduct themselves as gentleman’ but the gnome merely laughs, ‘stuffing his red cap, leering at the dog in a Quilp-like manner’.45 Mansfield’s direct reference to The Old Curiosity Shop here makes it plain that we are once more in a familiar Dickensian mode − the psychological probing of Paul Dombey’s imaginings about the patterns in the wallpaper in his room, for example. To be alone in a dark room, a prey to fantasies concerning the surrounding objects, is a stock-intrade of both Dickens and Mansfield. Take the story ‘Such a Sweet Old Lady’ (1921), where old Mrs Travers wakes up at half past four, and Mansfield tracks her mind in interior monologue: Three and a half hours before Warner came in with her tea. Oh dear, would she be able to stand it? She moved her legs restlessly. And staring at the prim, severe face of the watch, it seemed to her that the hand – the minute hand especially – knew that she was watching them and held back – just a very little – on purpose . . . Very strange, she had never got over the feeling that watch hated her.46

And everywhere the sea, and with it, the wind . . . At Ospedaletti in January 1920, as Mansfield records: ‘Worked from 9.30 a.m. to a quarter after midnight, only stopping to eat. Finished the story. Lay awake then till 5.30 too excited to sleep. In the sea drowned souls sang.’47 Then, in a letter to Richard Murry: ‘I have seen hardly any people at all since I’ve been here – nobody to talk to. The one great talker is the sea. It never is quiet; one feels sometimes as if one were a shell filled with a hollow sound.’48 And in the fine 1920 story ‘The Wind Blows’: ‘the wind, the wind. It’s frightening to be here in her room by herself. The bed, the mirror, the white jug and basin gleam like the sky outside. It is the bed that is frightening. There it lies, sound asleep.’ The same story tells us what she hears in the sound of the waves: ‘she can hear the sea sob: “Ah! . . . Ah! . . . Ah-h!”’49 Mansfield does indeed from time to time, like Paul Dombey, appear to be listening to what the wild waves were saying. Wind is the great enemy of hats, and Wellington is well supplied with it. Hats blown off by the wind, and the subsequent humiliating comic chase to recover them, are a staple of comedy. For a relevant example, we need look no further than Chapter 4 of Pickwick Papers: There was a fine gentle wind, and Mr Pickwick’s hat rolled sportively before it. The wind puffed, and Mr Pickwick puffed, and the hat rolled over and

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Mansfield eats Dickens     163 over as merrily as a lively porpoise in a strong tide, and on it might have rolled, far beyond Mr Pickwick’s reach, had not its course been providentially stopped, just as that gentleman was on the point of resigning it to its fate. Mr Pickwick, we say, was completely exhausted, and about to give up the chase, when the hat was blown with some violence against the wheel of a carriage, which was drawn up in a line with half-a-dozen other vehicles on the spot to which his steps had been directed. Mr Pickwick, perceiving his advantage, darted briskly forward, secured his property, planted it on his head, and paused to take breath.50

But this is genial Biedermeier-style humour; the comedy of hats we get in Mansfield is generally rather sharper and more probing from a psychological point of view. She depicts being without a hat as a symbol for nakedness, exposure, vulnerability, and explores in her writing the conventions and prohibitions that enforce this association as well as the effects of various mishaps involving hats. In ‘The Wind Blows’ she follows Matilda’s consciousness in Sekundenstil monologue as she figures out what to do when a disastrous wind blows just as she is about to leave for a music lesson: ‘And now her hat-elastic’s snapped. Of course it would. She’ll wear her old tam and slip out the back way.’ But, alas, it appears that ‘Mother has seen’, and calls out: ‘Matilda. Matilda. Come back im-me-diately! What on earth have you got on your head. It looks like a tea cosy.’ Whereupon Matilda inwardly rebels: ‘she won’t. She won’t. She hates Mother. “Go to hell,” she shouts, running down the road.’51 So much, for the moment at least, for one of the many forbidding mother figures in Mansfield, with their characteristic privileging of things over people and frequently rigid views on items of fashion, especially hats. It is most frequently their daughters who suffer the consequences, but let us now turn briefly to a couple of male examples of the consequences of hatlessness, or of wearing the wrong headpiece. The first has a positive result. It occurs in ‘Something Childish but Very Natural’ (1914) where Henry, feeling uncomfortable in his straw hat takes it off and puts it in the rack of the railway carriage compartment he gets into. But then he decides to buy a book and gets out again and almost misses his train. He has to jump at the last second into a different carriage, where a young girl is sitting alone, and is at first mightily embarrassed. Finally he plucks up courage enough to apologise: ‘I can’t go on sitting in the same carriage with you and not explaining why I dashed in like that, without my hat even’, and a courtship begins, expressed in the language of hats. It leads to Henry getting bolder still: ‘he said, very shyly, “Would you – would you take off your hat?”’52 And so a ‘childish but natural’ intimacy is born between the pair of innocents. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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There is a very different outcome, however, in the playlet story ‘The Black Cap’ (1917). A married woman is about to embark on a sexual adventure with an admirer when, to her horror, he turns up for their rendezvous at the station without a hat. Her interior monologue records her immediate revulsion: Who is this? That’s not him! It can’t be – yes, it is. What on earth has he got on his head? A black cap. But how awful! He’s utterly changed. What can he be wearing a black cap for? I wouldn’t have known him. How absurd he looks, coming towards me, smiling, in that appalling cap!53

It transpires that he has lost his hat in the hotel where the tryst is to take place, and borrowed this substitute headpiece. The consequence is that nothing happens – the woman refuses his advances, and returns home to husband and normality later that day. In these stories, it is evident, Kleider machen Leute, or ‘Clothes make people’, to borrow the title of a story by Gottfried Keller. The verbal device that signals this satiric perspective on a society ruled by fashion and appearance is synecdoche, used as frequently in Mansfield as in Dickens and with equally penetrating effect; its deployment seems to signify that the person in question becomes a hat. A convenient example is offered by ‘Bains Turcs’ (1913), which introduces amongst the clients of the Turkish Bath ‘a short stout little woman with flat, white feet and a black mackintosh cap over her hair’. She is dressed otherwise only in a chemise, and offers the sight of herself fully naked to the narrator in the vapour, from which the latter flees in horror. After her first introduction she becomes simply ‘Mackintosh Cap’: ‘The Mackintosh Cap sat down on the edge of a chair . . . I discovered Mackintosh Cap staring at me over the top of her fashion journal . . . Mackintosh Cap followed after and planted herself in front of me.’ She remains trapped in such caricature for the rest of the story, to metamorphose only once, when she is fully dressed and sports ‘a terrible bird nest, which Salzburg doubtless called Reise Hut on her head’54 − a headpiece that obviously belongs with the ‘black velvet toque, with an incredibly surprised looking seagull camped on the very top of it’ on the head of a woman train passenger in ‘An Indiscreet Journey’ (1915).55 The model for this satiric privileging of things over humans is generally taken, of course, to be Mansfield’s own mother, who appears, like Max in the story ‘The Education of Audrey’ (1908), to have been ‘intensely critical about clothes’.56 Alpers recounts how Mansfield prepared for her mother’s 1909 arrival in London by buying a ‘large, expensive hat’ costing ‘the enormous sum of twenty-seven shillings’, which nevertheless received a pretty frosty reception: ‘Why, child! What are you wearing? Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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You look like an old woman in that. As if you were going to a funeral.’57 And thus all roads lead to ‘The Garden Party’ (1921), which offers the most memorable critical perspective on hats of any in Mansfield’s oeuvre. Everyone will remember how Laura brings the news of the death of the carter Scott to her mother in her room, trying on a new hat. She expects the garden party to be annulled out of respect, but her mother is determined to go ahead with it. So she seizes opportunistically on a weapon close to hand, the hat: ‘Darling!’ Mrs Sheridan got up and came over to her, carrying the hat. Before Laura could stop her she had popped it on. ‘My child!’ said her mother, ‘the hat is yours. It’s made for you. It’s much too young for me. I have never seen you look such a picture. Look at yourself!’ And she held up her hand-mirror.

Laura is momentarily seduced. The mother is attempting to manipulate her in the most callous, insidious way, targeting her adolescent vulnerability. For the girl on the verge of womanhood, the invitation to wear an adult hat − to step into the shoes of her mother, so to speak − has obvious appeal. Yet the story will contrast a real rite de passage − Laura’s serene encounter with the corpse of the dead man − against the sham initiation offered here. In the one she is treated as a human being, in the other as a thing, the equivalent of a mere hat, a mere encumbrance in the encounter ‘with the real’. ‘Forgive my hat’, she must say in the workman’s cottage.58 Commenting on the real life experience that gave rise to the story, Katherine’s sister Vera − who claims that it was she who went to take down the leftovers to the stricken family − remembers ‘how absurd she had felt in “one of those enormous hats we used to wear in those days”, and how she had had to tilt it sideways to get through the cottage door’.59 Mansfield preferred her Burnsian tam-o’-shanter, or making a hat for herself, as at Bandol or Rottingdean on one of those sleepless nights again, when ‘I made myself a hat out of pins and fury & it was the hat of my life.’60

Notes   1. Katherine Mansfield, Letter to Arnold Gibbons, 13 July 1922, Collected Letters, vol. 5, p. 223.   2. Edward Wagenknecht, Dickens and the Scandalmongers and Angela Smith, ‘Mansfield and Dickens’. See also Holly Furneaux’s ‘(Re)writing Dickens Queerly’.   3. Antony Alpers, The Life of Katherine Mansfield, pp. 10, 400.  4. Janet Doyle, a descendant of Stephen Lancaster, has also suggested in a

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166     Michael Hollington letter to the author that the landscape around the Karori house resembles that represented in Phiz’s Chesney Wold illustrations in Bleak House.  5. Mansfield, ‘The Great Examination’, Collected Fiction, vol. 1, pp. 7−9, p. 8.  6. Alpers, Life of Katherine Mansfield, p. 2.   7. Mansfield, ‘A Birthday’, Collected Fiction, vol. 1, p. 213.   8. Mansfield, ‘The Aloe’, Collected Fiction, vol. 1, p. 497.  9. Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 3. 10. The painting is best known nowadays through the contemporary engraving by T. H. Maguire, reproduced in Pat Rogers, Oxford Illustrated Guide to English Literature, p. 346. 11. Alpers, The Life of Katherine Mansfield, p. 19. 12. Mansfield, ‘The Beautiful Miss Richardson’, Collected Fiction, vol. 1, pp. 433−5. 13. Mansfield, Letter to Garnet Trowell, 2 November 1908, Collected Letters, vol. 1, p. 84. 14. Mansfield, Notebooks, vol. 2, p. 24. 15. Mansfield, Letter to Ida Baker, 30 April 1922, Collected Letters, vol. 5, p. 160. 16. Mansfield, Letter to Sylvia Payne, 24 January 1904, Collected Letters, vol. 1, p. 11. 17. The best account of the historical ups and downs of Dickens’ reputation is provided by George Ford, Dickens and His Readers. 18. John Middleton Murry, ‘Dickens’, p. 36. 19. Mansfield, Letter to John Middleton Murry, 25 November 1919, Collected Letters, vol. 3, p. 118. 20. Mansfield, Letter to Murry, 27−28 January 1918, Collected Letters, vol. 2, pp. 45−6. 21. Mansfield, Notebooks, vol. 2, p. 209. 22. Mansfield, Letter to Dorothy Brett, 9 October 1922, Collected Letters, vol. 5, p. 290. 23. Mansfield, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 3 July 1917, Collected Letters, vol. 1, p. 315. 24. Mansfield, Letter to Murry, 19 September 1922, Collected Letters, vol. 5, p. 267. 25. Mansfield, Letter to Ida Baker, 1 August 1918, Collected Letters, vol. 5, p. 262. 26. Mansfield, Letter to Murry, 16 June 1918, Collected Letters, vol. 2, p. 243. 27. Mansfield, Letter to Frederick Goodyear, 4 March 1916, Collected Letters, vol. 1, p. 248. 28. Mansfield, Letter to Murry, 19 December 1915, Collected Letters, vol. 1, p. 218. 29. Mansfield, Letter to Murry, 1 February 1918, Collected Letters, vol. 2, p. 52. 30. Mansfield, Letter to Murry, 1 March 1918, Collected Letters, vol. 2, p. 101. 31. Mansfield, Letter to Murry, 3−4 December 1918, Collected Letters, vol. 2, p. 55.

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Mansfield eats Dickens     167 32. Mansfield, Letter to Murry, 27 December 1915, Collected Letters, vol. 1, p. 235. 33. ‘New Zealing’ is a frequent Mansfield joke and representative example of the figure hypocorism. See for instance her letter to Dorothy Brett of 29 August 1921: ‘M. says he won’t stir from 5 years from this spot. Then we say we will sail for New Zealing. But I don’t know’, Collected Letters, vol. 4, p. 270. 34. Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, p. 278. 35. See Michael Hollington, ‘The Voice of Objects’. 36. Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop, p. 223. 37. Mansfield, Letter to Marion Tweed, 16 April 1903, Collected Letters, vol. 1, p. 5. 38. Mansfield, ‘Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding’, Collected Fiction, vol. 1, p. 186. 39. Mansfield, ‘At “Lehmann’s”’, Collected Fiction, vol. 1, p. 178. 40. Mansfield, ‘The Aloe’, p. 508. 41. Alpers, The Life of Katherine Mansfield, p. 249. 42. Mansfield, Letter to Murry, 1 February 1918, Collected Letters, vol. 2, p. 52. 43. Mansfield, ‘My Potplants’, Collected Fiction, vol. 1, p. 32. 44. Mansfield, ‘The Swing of the Pendulum’, Collected Fiction, vol. 1, p. 243. 45. Mansfield, ‘Vignette: They are a ridiculous company’, Collected Fiction, vol. 1, pp. 122−3. 46. Mansfield, ‘Such a Sweet Old Lady’, Collected Fiction, vol. 2, p. 310. 47. Mansfield, Notebooks, vol. 2, p. 188. 48. Mansfield, Letter to Richard Murry, 12 January 1920, Collected Letters, vol. 3, p. 176. 49. Mansfield, ‘The Wind Blows’, Collected Fiction, vol. 2, pp. 228, 227. 50. Dickens, The Pickwick Papers, pp. 62−3. 51. Mansfield, ‘The Wind Blows’, pp. 226−7. 52. Mansfield, ‘Something Childish but Very Natural’, Collected Fiction, vol. 1, p. 377. 53. Mansfield, ‘The Black Cap’, Collected Fiction, vol. 2, p. 29. 54. Mansfield, ‘Bains Turcs’, Collected Fiction, vol. 1, pp. 338, 340. 55. Mansfield, ‘An Indiscreet Journey’, Collected Fiction, vol. 1, p. 442. 56. Mansfield, ‘The Education of Audrey’, Collected Fiction, vol. 1, p. 103. 57. Alpers, The Life of Katherine Mansfield, p. 93. 58. Mansfield, ‘The Garden Party’, Collected Fiction, vol. 2, pp. 409, 413. 59. Alpers, The Life of Katherine Mansfield, p. 46. 60. Mansfield, Letter to Murry, 14−15 December 1915, Collected Letters, vol. 1, p. 212.

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Chapter 12

Katherine Mansfield, Nettie Palmer and Critical Influence Sarah Ailwood

This chapter untangles threads of influence between Katherine Mansfield and the Australian writer and literary critic, Nettie Palmer. Palmer first read Mansfield’s work as it was published in The New Age and remained enchanted with her fictional and personal writing until her death in 1964. Unpacking Nettie Palmer’s substantial literary archive presents new ways of locating Mansfield in Australian literary culture of the interwar period, beyond the relationships of literary inheritance that have been identified between Mansfield and other writers of the era, including Eleanor Dark, Henry Handel Richardson and Eve Langley.1 Palmer’s archive reveals that it was less Mansfield’s stories, and more her personal and critical writing published by John Middleton Murry between 1927 and 1933,2 that was especially influential, both on Palmer herself and, through her, on her network of correspondents and the Australian public more broadly. This influence is evident in three aspects of Palmer’s work: her literary reviews and commentaries in mainstream newspapers and literary magazines; her correspondence, particularly with leading literary figures of the day; and in her diaries and notebooks. In using personal and critical writing by Katherine Mansfield and Nettie Palmer to explore relationships of literary influence this chapter does not, as Anna Jackson notes in Diary Poetics, seek to deploy personal writing ‘to support a larger project of interpretation of the work of the life of the writer’.3 Rather, it traces connections between one writer’s personal and critical writing, specifically that which was published posthumously, and the personal and critical writing of another. Jackson argues that as a literary genre, ‘the diary shares more of that “dialogic energy” than might be expected of a form without an addressee’,4 and this sense of ‘dialogic energy’ is evident between Mansfield and Palmer. Locating Mansfield in Palmer’s archive reveals a rich and complex afterlife for Mansfield, as Palmer responds to her letters, journal and other personal writing in different literary genres, with different purposes. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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In her published reviews Palmer’s purpose is to proselytise: Mansfield is deployed as an example of a successful colonial writer in exile to bolster Palmer’s own ideological goals regarding the development of Australian literary culture. In her correspondence with her literary network Palmer’s dialogue with Mansfield registers as admiration mixed with melancholia: a kind of mourning not only for Mansfield’s absence, but for her public exposure through posthumous publication. Finally, Palmer’s notebooks and ‘commonplace’ books, in which she transcribed extracts from Mansfield’s personal and critical writing, expose a deeply contemplative response, in which Palmer reflects on her own role as literary critic and journalist. Mansfield and Palmer shared a number of parallel life experiences. Both were born in the 1880s in the Antipodean reaches of empire (Mansfield in Wellington in 1888, Palmer in Bendigo in 1885); both journeyed to England, Germany and France in their formative years to pursue educational opportunities and a literary life; and both were living and working in London in the early years of World War I. Palmer’s husband Vance knew Mansfield through their work with The New Age and their association with A. R. Orage and his literary and artistic circle,5 and it is probable but not certain that Mansfield and Palmer crossed paths. Palmer was, at the very least, a contemporary reader of Mansfield’s stories. She later recorded that she read Mansfield’s early work ‘as it appeared in The New Age’, describing it as ‘hard, smart, clever’,6 and recounted Vance reminiscing about his days at the magazine: ‘At night round the fire V. went over some memories of the New Age in the days before the War . . . Katherine Mansfield, with her dark eyes brooding secretly over some alterations in a proof.’7 Yet despite (or perhaps because of) their close colonial origins, the Palmers do not appear to have made any impression on Mansfield whatsoever; none of her extant letters or other personal writings were addressed to or mention them. The same cannot be said, however, for the Palmers, particularly Nettie, who was deeply impressed by Mansfield’s stories, her literary journalism, her modernist artistic philosophies and her status as a successful colonial woman writer in metropolitan London. In a review of Mansfield’s Journal Palmer commented, ‘It is easy to return often to the work of Katherine Mansfield’,8 which is precisely what she did throughout her career. Unlike Mansfield, Palmer left England with the outbreak of war, and returned to a life of comparatively settled domesticity and motherhood in Australia. She was a committed cultural nationalist who has been described as ‘the most important non-academic critic working in Australia in the interwar period’,9 whose work as a literary journalist Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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and prolific correspondent established a wide sphere of influence over the development of Australian literary culture. As Drusilla Modjeska argues: she was of central importance to the cultural history of the period as a critic, sponsor and correspondent of many writers . . . it was largely through her efforts that an impressive network developed which was committed to a concept of progressive and nationalist cultural evolution.10

Modjeska notes that Palmer ‘placed herself at the centre of an expanding literary network from which she could oversee, even direct, literary politics’ and that her project was ‘to break down the isolation of scattered writers and to provide a channel for literary news and discussion’.11 According to Modjeska, Palmer’s correspondence ‘was at its height between 1926 and 1935, years in which she put the development of a literary intelligentsia at a premium’.12 These years largely coincide with John Middleton Murry’s posthumous publication of Mansfield’s Letters and Journal, as well as the biography co-authored with Ruth Elvish Mantz. Palmer’s reviews and correspondence reveal not only that she sought to bring Mansfield into the Australian public eye, but that she exploited her example as a colonial writer in exile − and one conveniently from across the Tasman Sea − to pursue her own political goals in terms of the development of a modern, authentic national literature. In August 1926, Palmer published several journal articles in which she lamented the limitations placed on Australian writers and literary culture. Palmer seized on Mansfield as an iconic example of a brilliant colonial writer who, she argued, was forced into exile by the lack of local opportunities for publication and artistic development in the antipodes. In the Bulletin she outlined the challenges to Australian authors, particularly story writers, in achieving publication: I cannot help being struck by the growing tendency to order the nameless author about. He is told, in effect, to produce a smart, mechanical story, such as is featured chiefly in glossy magazines in the States or in England. He is asked to produce something alien, in both style and matter. Having done all this, he will then, oddly enough, be recognised as a Distinguished Australian Author.13

Palmer went on to analyse Mansfield as an example of a story writer who would have struggled to achieve publication in Australia: Two things have made it hard to write the Australian story: the ingrained smallness of the pay, and the limitation as to length, which means that many a story, needing the length of ‘At the Bay’, for instance, has to be compressed almost into the bald form of a diagram. Putting up with these two serious and

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Katherine Mansfield, Nettie Palmer and Critical Influence     171 chronic difficulties, though, the author is now confronted with a third: he is bidden to abandon any style he has painfully and gradually acquired, and to write in a slick ‘magazine’ style.14

Palmer later commented of Mansfield in the Illustrated Tasmanian Mail: It is unfortunately true . . . that her remarkable talents could hardly have developed here. Her sketches were nearly all first published in English reviews, not in magazines: they were not ‘magaziney,’ and the niches for such stories in Australia hardly exist.15

While this remark is no doubt accurate as to the wider range of publications Mansfield could target in England, and demonstrates keen awareness of the imperial politics that hampered the development of local literary culture, Palmer seems to be drawing on her own experience of Mansfield associated with The New Age. As Jenny McDonnell has shown, Mansfield’s willingness and ability to write stories for a broad range of publications, and for different audiences, ensured her success and enabled her to perfect her craft.16 Palmer’s exposure of the limitations of the Australian literary scene provide a relevant context for her later commentaries on Mansfield, which appear to have been fired by Murry’s publication of the Journal in 1927. Her diary entry of 5 October 1927 records the arrival of the Journal while she was living in Caloundra in Queensland: ‘McKinnon sent me Katherine Mansfield’s Journal, delightful for us both.’17 She began writing articles on the Journal on 12 October and published no less than three reviews in mainstream Australian newspapers. The first appeared in the Illustrated Tasmanian Mail on 2 November, in which she described the Journal as ‘badly needed’ and the ‘fulfilment of what we expected and a revelation of something more’.18 She is clearly enchanted with the Journal, celebrating Mansfield’s ‘keen impressionism’: The journal gives, in quantity, the keen impressionism that was Katherine Mansfield’s special power. Of this we can never have enough. We delight in it always, but when we are reading the stories, we cannot let ourselves dwell on the details for fear of spoiling the general effect and not seeing the wood for the trees. In the journal we can surrender to one vivid picture or sharply edged comment after another, for its own sake, as each one is detached.19

Palmer describes the process of reading the Journal as a meditation-like experience, through which the ‘vivid pictures’ and ‘sharply edged comments’ provide new insight into the brilliant but elusive woman who lay beyond. Palmer returned to her advocacy for Australian literary culture, noting that Mansfield’s access to publication was largely dependent on Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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her and Murry’s editorship of reviews and magazines, and commenting on the necessity of this to promote literary creativity: Her best stories were produced at a time when she could take for granted that they would be published and read. For the enormous task of writing, an author does need that small spur of certainty. I have emphasised all this, because it supports what some people will not believe. It supports the fact that good work can be ignored over a long period of years, since only a narrow margin has saved Katherine Mansfield’s stories from being lost to the world. It is only persistent faith that makes it possible for any of the arts to survive.20

Palmer appears to accept Murry’s representation of Mansfield as a solitary artistic genius dependent on him for access to publication; as has been demonstrated by Jenny McDonnell and by Melinda Harvey in Chapter 9,21 neither of these constructions is true. Yet Palmer’s comment reveals the influential power of the image of Mansfield created by Murry in the late 1920s. Claiming that Mansfield’s stories would be ‘lost to the world’ certainly bolsters Palmer’s argument for the development of literary institutions in Australia, lest the same fate befall a similarly gifted colonial genius. Palmer’s own access to the press means that her enchantment with Mansfield − and specifically with the image of Mansfield Murry projected − could have real effects in terms of influence, as Mansfield assumes an iconic status as a successful writer in exile, deployed to enhance Palmer’s drive for local literary innovation and creativity. Palmer returned to the Journal in December 1927. Focusing less on literary politics, she shifted her attention to critical analysis and evaluation of the Journal itself, a task her diary reveals to have been much more challenging: ‘Tried to write article on Katherine Mansfield. Too humpish.’22 She later commented: ‘My article also not brilliant but heavy going − hard to know what to leave out.’23 Despite this she revisited the material again in January 1928 for a piece in the Brisbane Courier: ‘I [illegible] at article on Katherine Mansfield for next week’s Courier: finished it in afternoon.’24 In the Courier review Palmer theorised the ‘keen impressionism’ she had identified earlier into the concept of ‘sincerity’: What Katherine Mansfield really desired was the attainment of sincerity in expression and in life. Her books of short stories, completed and fragmentary both, leave the reader with an impression of vividness without exaggeration, and of courage without bravado.25

According to Palmer, this meant that Mansfield was ‘devoted to a search for the absolute in character and word’: ‘No matter how terrible her struggles were against disease, they were less than those she had with the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Katherine Mansfield, Nettie Palmer and Critical Influence     173

intractable word and the elusive phrase; and as time went on she was more and more the conqueror.’26 In a review published in the Bulletin the following month, Mansfield has become a literary heroine, described as ‘a brave and vivid woman, aiming above all else at personal and artistic sincerity’ whose Journal offers ‘a thorough insight into her workshop and character, which were one’.27 This unification of Mansfield’s craft and self − rendered explicit in the Journal − allows Palmer the illusion of direct access to the genius she so admired. Nettie Palmer’s Journal reviews have the tone of an enchanted admirer more than a literary critic. Interestingly, Palmer herself identified this conflict between the devoted reader and the shrewd commentator when she saw her Bulletin review in print: ‘Bulletin came: had my article on Katherine Mansfield − not good. Somehow I was too near the object.’28 Palmer’s feeling of being ‘too near the object’ may explain why she does not appear to have reviewed any subsequent Mansfield-related publications − the Letters, Novels and Novelists or The Life of Katherine Mansfield − until her article ‘Katherine Mansfield Returns’, reviewing three new publications, appeared in Book News in 1947. Nevertheless, she continued to include Mansfield in her literary criticism, particularly in discussions of New Zealand literature and of colonial writers in exile, and references her as a fellow literary critic.29 Correspondence between Palmer and other Australian literary figures of the day, particularly between women writers, reveals that Palmer was by no means alone in her engagement with Mansfield’s personal writing and other publications. In her 1928 diary Palmer records her anticipation regarding Mansfield’s Letters: ‘Essie Levy wrote saying she was going to send Katherine Mansfield’s Letters: wish someone would send them to me: must see them soon’,30 a need she followed up: Some day you’re going to lend me K. M.’s letters (I have her journal). Meanwhile I’m going to lend you her favourite philosopher, Ouspensky. A friend of mine who was at Fontainebleau when she died, studied Ouspensky in the same society and had been promising to send me the ‘Tertium Organum’ for years. It came this Christmas & I’ve been revelling in it, like a fish in a bowl, this last month. I’ll post it off to you before we leave here next week.31

This ‘revel’ is also recorded in her diary, which notes that she had been reading it ‘with a steady delight in the first third’.32 Palmer’s correspondence with other women writers also reveals Mansfield’s status as a touchstone of literary excellence. Yet in their correspondence, the dialogic response to Mansfield is enchantment mixed with melancholia, registering Mansfield’s absence as a missing contemporary and reflecting on her public exposure. In 1934 Eleanor Dark commented Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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to Palmer that the ‘letters sounded to me as if she were so ill mentally as well as physically’,33 and in the same year Marjorie Barnard wrote: Am reading Mantz and Murry’s memoir of Katherine Mansfield’s youth. It’s scrappy but of course interesting because she is. What with this ‘life’ and the journal and the letters she is rather dissected and pinned out − like a frog at the medical school − poor darling. The anatomy of a writer’s mind, worse still nerves and feelings.34

Miles Franklin’s response to the posthumous publications of Mansfield’s autobiographical writing reveals a more critical eye regarding Murry than that demonstrated by Palmer, and is particularly telling as she reflects on her own literary legacy: I too have Katherine Mansfield’s letters . . . I wonder did she love M M or was the fascination that she knew he would give her letters immortality and she lived only for that bit of creative work.35

Following Murry’s 1951 publication of Mansfield’s Letters to John Middleton Murry, Franklin wrote: ‘The reviews indicate that these last are very painful. I’d hate to be exposed like that after death. Must destroy stuff, tho there is one good thing in being obscure and ungeniassed, I’ll be of no profit to visceral scribblers.’36 The influence of these publications on Palmer and other Australian literary women is twofold: while enchanted with their admired predecessor, they are also appalled by her public exposure, prompting reflections on their own positions as literary artists. Palmer herself came to see this paradox later in her career, noting in 1947 that a Mansfield publication was to be valued more if it ‘helps to establish her as a writer than if it contributes merely to the story of her difficult life’,37 quite a contrast to her earlier eagerness to get her hands on Mansfield’s personal writing. Like Mansfield, Palmer’s archive includes a range of notebooks, commonplace books and other miscellaneous personal papers that contain a variety of writing, including structured, reflective entries, translations, transcriptions of poems and passages, engagements and appointments and other notes. Her diary records the daily events of family life as well as her work-related activities. It is in her notebooks that Palmer finds what Jackson describes as ‘a space for experiment, free of the critical judgment that could make writing for publication so difficult’38 and, perhaps, the self-imposed purpose of her ‘diary’ itself. Dirk Van Hulle and Wim Van Mierlo argue that ‘reading notes’ such as those in Palmer’s notebooks ‘are honest about themselves and their composers; in the private sphere of notebooks or the margins of books, the reader Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Katherine Mansfield, Nettie Palmer and Critical Influence     175

is not apt to lie to himself’. This honesty, they argue, is greater than in ‘published criticism or printed commentaries’.39 If Van Hulle and Van Mierlo are correct in stating that reading notes provide us with a ‘direct link to the mind of the reader’,40 then Nettie Palmer’s notebooks, particularly her commonplace book for 1929,41 are particularly revealing in terms of Palmer’s enchantment with Mansfield and the depth of her influence. Palmer did obtain the copy of Mansfield’s Letters she sought from Esther Levy, as well as Novels and Novelists. Rather than publishing reviews and commentaries on these works, she chose instead to copy passages from them into her commonplace book. Palmer is, in Paul Ferrar’s lexicon, an ‘extractor’, one who: cut[s] up the text they read and store[s] it, in what is supposed to be a concentrated and quintessential form but is de facto a mutilated state; notebooks or notesheets play the part of a maturing cellar in which the harvested fragments are left to rest, to mellow and ripen together for some time in order to be turned into suitable ingredients, or serve the function of a decontamination chamber in which they are quarantined before they are admitted into the work.42

Palmer clearly selects extracts in which Mansfield is reflecting on her work as a literary critic rather than a creative writer, pointing to a thread of influence from Mansfield to Palmer that is specifically concerned with their work as literary journalists. From a 1920 letter from Mansfield to Murry, Palmer copied: If I did not review novels I’d never read them. The writers (practically all of them) seem to have no idea of what one means by continuity. It is a difficult thing to explain. Take the old Tartar waiter in Anna who serves Levin and Stepan − Now, Tolstoy only has to touch him and he gives out a note and this note is somehow important, persists, is a part of the whole book. But all these other men − they introduce cooks, aunts, strange gentlemen, and so on, and once the pen is off them they are gone − dropped down a hole.43

Given Palmer’s commentaries on the state of Australian literary culture at the time, it is possible that, in this passage, Mansfield is giving voice to either her frustration with the novels being produced by Australian writers, or perhaps to her own difficulties in explaining her literary philosophy in her correspondence and reviews. Palmer also records Mansfield’s identification of ‘the problem’ of the literary artist as being ‘the invention of the 19th century’: ‘The artist takes a long look at life. He says softly, “So this is what life is, is it?” And he proceeds to express that. All the rest he leaves.’ In an extract that clearly resonates with Palmer’s resistance to imperial literary politics, she records Mansfield’s oftenquoted passage ‘I love this place more and more. One is conscious of it Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

176     Sarah Ailwood

as I used to be conscious of N.Z. . . . Why I don’t feel like this in England Heaven knows.’ In a further extract from Novels and Novelists, Palmer’s motivation for the transcription is revealed through her own emphasis: Perhaps a novel is never the novel it might have been, but there are certain books which do seem to contain the vision, more or less blurred or more or less clear, of their second selves, of what the author saw before he grasped the difficult pen. ‘The Dark River’ is one of these. Very often, when Mrs. Millin just fails to make her point, we feel it is not because she does not appreciate the point that is to be made, but because she is so aware of it herself that she takes it for granted on the part of the reader.44

Clearly this idea resonated with Palmer, and she may be drawing from Mansfield a concept that she could herself deploy in her own reviewing. How can we interpret the presence of Mansfield’s personal writing in the personal writing of a later writer and critic, and what does this tell us about literary influence? Anna Jackson argues in relation to Mansfield’s diaries that ‘much of the authority comes from the location of each diary entry in a “moment of writing” belonging at once to the diarist and the diary entry’.45 A similar approach − considering the relevance of each extract in a moment of writing, or reading − may be applied to Palmer’s notebooks. Palmer copied extracts that resonated with her literary work, transcribed for private contemplation and, it turned out, to become a condensed version of her own library when in 1932 she packed up her house in suburban Melbourne and moved to Green Island on the Great Barrier Reef: What made me transcribe these fragments of prose, odd poems, into this rather big exercise book during the last year or two? I’ve just found urgent use for the little collection. It’s as if we were getting ready for a march across a desert and found food and drink ready packed, miraculously condensed − portable.46

To take up Ferrar’s terminology, the ‘harvested fragments’ have matured and become ‘suitable ingredients’ to inspire Palmer in her writing and reviewing in a remote location: And there’s this exercise book. Some things in it must have been written down quickly, to be considered in some freer future – now in sight? . . . There’s no table of contents for this Emergency Ration; but glancing through it I see the kind of thing that has accrued . . . some paragraphs of literary brooding from Katherine Mansfield’s Journal.47

Palmer concludes: ‘Well, if we can’t live on concentrated nourishment like this, as well as on our own accumulated literary fat, then we must be in worse condition than I think we are.’48 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Katherine Mansfield, Nettie Palmer and Critical Influence     177

Locating Katherine Mansfield in Nettie Palmer’s archive reveals the power of personal writing to continue a writer’s influence across time and place − from England to Melbourne to Green Island and beyond − well after the writer’s death. Published personal writing makes possible a unique form of literary influence, enabling writers and critics to reflect on the author themselves (or the image of the author constructed posthumously) as well as on their work. Palmer’s archive reveals that Mansfield’s published personal writing prompted a complex, multifaceted relationship of literary influence that extended beyond literary inheritance. The range of literary genres with which Palmer worked − the review, the letter, the diary and the notebook − chart separate but related points of influence between Palmer and Mansfield, taking different forms for different audiences, contexts and purposes. In her published articles and reviews, Palmer actively seeks to influence writers, readers and the direction of Australian literary culture by valuing and celebrating a great writer entangled in imperial literary politics. Palmer’s private correspondence reveals enchantment tinged with melancholia, as women writers contemplate their missing contemporary and reflect on her public exposure. In her commonplace book, Palmer exposes a deep level of contemplation and reflection with Mansfield regarding their mutual roles as literary journalists. Palmer’s devotion to Mansfield throughout her career reveals the influential potential of enchantment, as Mansfield assumed an iconic status as an internationally successful colonial woman writer, an example for emulation.

Notes   1. See Sarah Ailwood, ‘Anxious Beginnings’, Carol Franklin, ‘Mansfield and Richardson’ and Bonny Cassidy, Chapter 13 in this collection.  2. These publications include Katherine Mansfield, Journal; Mansfield, Letters; Mansfield, Novels and Novelists, and Ruth Elvish Mantz and John Middleton Murry, Life of Katherine Mansfield.   3. Anna Jackson, Diary Poetics, p. 4.   4. Ibid. p. 10.   5. Vivian Smith, Vance and Nettie Palmer, p. 4.   6. Nettie Palmer, ‘Readers and Writers: Katherine Mansfield’s Journal’.  7. Palmer, Fourteen Years, p. 87.   8. Palmer, ‘Readers and Writers: Katherine Mansfield’.   9. Deborah Jordan, ‘Written to Tickle the Ears’, p. 92. 10. Drusilla Modjeska, Exiles at Home, p. 7. 11. Ibid. pp. 86, 88. 12. Ibid. p. 88. 13. Palmer, ‘Why Authors Leave Home’.

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178     Sarah Ailwood 14. Ibid. 15. Palmer, ‘Readers and Writers: Some of Our Exiles’. 16. Jenny McDonnell, Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Marketplace. 17. Palmer, 1927 Diary, 5 October, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, National Library of Australia, MS 1174/16/10. Here Palmer’s use of ‘us’ probably refers to Vance. 18. Palmer, ‘Readers and Writers: Katherine Mansfield’s Journal’. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. See McDonnell, Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Marketplace. 22. Palmer, 1927 Diary, 2 December, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, National Library of Australia, MS 1174/16/10. 23. Ibid. 24. Palmer, 1928 Diary, 20 January, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, National Library of Australia, MS 1174/16/11. 25. Palmer, ‘Katherine Mansfield: A Study in “Success”’. 26. Ibid. 27. Palmer, ‘The Sincerity of Katherine Mansfield’. 28. Palmer, 1928 Diary, 3 February 1928, ‘Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer’, National Library of Australia, MS 1174/16/11. 29. See for example Palmer, ‘A Reader’s Notebook’, p. 119. 30. Palmer, 1928 Diary, 31 December 1927, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, National Library of Australia, MS 1174/16/11. Here Palmer refers to the Australian librarian, writer and literary reviewer Esther Levy. 31. Palmer, Letter to Esther Levy, 29 January 1929, Papers of Esther Levy, National Library of Australia, MS 2035. 32. Palmer, 1928 Diary, 24 December 1928, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, National Library of Australia, MS 1174/16/11. 33. Eleanor Dark, Letter to Palmer, 14 December 1933, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, National Library of Australia, MS 1174/1/4332. 34. Marjorie Barnard, Letter to Palmer, 26 April 1934, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, National Library of Australia, MS 1174/1/4419. 35. Miles Franklin, Letter to Mrs F. E. Hobson, 30 April 1933, in Jill Roe (ed.), My Congenials, pp. 287−8. 36. Franklin, Letter to Florence James, 2 November 1951, in Carole Ferrier (ed.), As Good As A Yarn With You, p. 3. 37. Palmer, ‘Katherine Mansfield Returns’, p. 21. 38. Jackson, Diary Poetics, p. 14. 39. Dirk Van Hulle and Wim Van Mierlo, ‘Reading Notes: Introduction’, p. 3. 40. Ibid. p. 3. 41. Palmer, Commonplace Book 1929, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, National Library of Australia, MS 1174/26/13. 42. Paul Ferrar, ‘Towards a Marginalist Economy of Textual Genesis’, pp. 7−8. 43. Mansfield, Letter to John Middleton Murry, 25 September 1920, Collected Letters, vol. 2, p. 51; quoted in Palmer, Commonplace Book 1929. 44. Mansfield, Novels and Novelists, quoted in Palmer, Commonplace Book 1929. Here Mansfield refers to The Dark River (1919), the first novel by the popular South African novelist Sarah Millin. The words from ‘not because . . . reader’ are given emphasis by a vertical line adjacent to the text.

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Katherine Mansfield, Nettie Palmer and Critical Influence     179 45. Jackson, Diary Poetics, p. 8. 46. Palmer, Fourteen Years, pp. 77−8. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid.

EDL\JBURGH University Press ,;

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Chapter 13

The Meeting of Katherine Mansfield and Eve Langley Bonny Cassidy

Influence is a bushfire: it jumps and lands, and may be extinguished as abruptly as it flares into momentum. In this story, influence skipped the Tasman Sea and a decade or more; travelling between pages and beings with a heat capable of fusing two writers who had never met: I just ACHE when I read her. Theres just the stillness when I read . . . the light curtain blowing back and forth and my eyes flitting quick, lightly and between my breasts . . . an ache . . . and that startled hurt that genius gives . . . I should like to put little boots on her feet and hold her in my hand and stroke her very lightly, very deliciously [sic].1

Australian poet and novelist, Eve Langley, wrote these words in 1959 in Wanganui, New Zealand. She was reading and describing Katherine Mansfield, whilst attempting ten manuscripts for novels plus poems and short stories for little magazines and newspapers in Auckland and Sydney. She had been living in New Zealand for twenty-seven years. Nineteen years before, Langley had won the 1940 Prior Prize for her first novel, The Pea-pickers (1941), now considered an Australian classic. Just two years after that, however, she had been committed to the Auckland Psychiatric Hospital, and in 1954 changed her name by deed poll to Oscar Wilde. By 1959, when Langley was cherishing the ‘hurt’ of Mansfield’s ‘genius’, she was also living in penury, divorced, removed from her three children, and repeatedly rejected by her Australian publisher. Langley read Mansfield’s letters − possibly those to John Middleton Murry in the 1951 edition − and her stories, although it is unknown which collection. Indeed, Langley’s biographer, Joy L. Thwaite notes that Langley attempted to persuade her sister June to read Mansfield’s letters.2 Whilst she literally saw herself as a reincarnation of Wilde, Langley’s ‘ACHE’ for Mansfield demonstrated a similarly intimate feeling, and one directly related to him. As she describes in her story Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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‘The Old Mill’, Langley wanted to absorb not only Mansfield’s words but also her person: I was in a mood for [Auckland] Writers’ Week and languished about the city in my newly acquired tailorings . . . the navy blue coat, au Napoleon, and the chaste black fur hat bemedalled within suited me, and my long flowing auburn brown and vivid hair . . . and I cultivated to look as much like Katherine Mansfield as I could during the week, for I felt really imbued with genius and haply placed after a winter, almost, of the black coffee and figs and cakes and other pastries beloved of de Balzac whom I was then imitating sedulously.3

The nature of Langley’s perspective − the self as a collage of influences − was almost undoubtedly schizophrenic, but there is a close relationship between Langley’s and Mansfield’s written expression that reflects a very real source in literary influence. The intense quality of Langley’s response to Mansfield may be traced through the common influence of Wilde on both writers. Despite their separation by time and place, as readers Mansfield and Langley were weaned on a common literature of the 1890s and particularly the Decadent and Aestheticist movements. Like many other writers of their pre-war generation, they were both overcome by the luminous figure of Wilde. Mansfield’s early devotion to Wilde is evident in The Urewera Notebook (1907) and 1906−7 notebook where she lists aphorisms by him that speak of freedom and limitlessness: Realise your Youth while you have it. Don’t squander the gold of your days listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, or the vulgar, which are the aims, the false ideals of our Age. Live! Live the wonderful Life that is in you. Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always reaching for New Sensations . . . Be afraid of nothing.4

Was it through Mansfield’s letters and perhaps her journal that Langley first appreciated − if not discovered − Wilde? More than any other aspect of her work and life, Langley is infamous for her identification with him. Langley’s novels and stories refer to her formative and abiding understanding of ‘Oscar’, as both writers refer to him. At one point in ‘The Old Mill’ she describes how she met her husband in Auckland and ‘from start to finish, without meaning to do, conducted the entire affair on the lines of [Wilde’s] “The Decay of Lying”’.5 Oscar Wilde symbolised literary and personal independence for both Mansfield and Langley. Looking at Langley’s work and her comments about it presents a scenario of ‘doubled’ influence, whereby Mansfield acts as a medium for the values Wilde represented. These values are Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

182     Bonny Cassidy

evident in their writings; not only to explain Langley’s feelings for Mansfield and her work, but also as a way of understanding how they both seek to re-imagine gender and identity in their writing lives. Mansfield’s journal entries suggest that Wilde articulated for her a spirit of restlessness and a hunger for its satiation. She attempted to express this need for independence as well as clarity in her own words: ‘what I need – power, wealth and freedom. It is the hopelessly insipid doctrine that love is the only thing in the world . . . which hampers [women] so cruelly.’6 She is echoed in The Pea-pickers by Langley’s narrator and alter ego, Steve: ‘I knew that I was a woman but I . . . longed above all things to be a serious and handsome man . . . a desire for freedom . . . a desire, mounting to an obsession, to be loved . . . and to be famous.’7 The sense of licence and agency described by Wilde spoke to the desires and conflicts that Mansfield and Langley had already experienced as young, Australasian women in the early twentieth century. On the one hand, they grew out of circumstances radically different from one another. Having finished her education in London, by the time she wrote the entries that became The Urewera Notebook Mansfield had already in her short life cultivated a formal sophistication by attending galleries and concerts at home and abroad. Langley, however, moved around run-down country towns in New South Wales and Victoria, with access to an old violin, ha’penny prints and whatever literature she was able to get her hands on (which, if we are to believe The Peapickers, was a surprising amount − from Homer to Rupert Brookes). By the time Langley moved from Victoria to Auckland, Mansfield had been dead some ten years. On the other hand, both Mansfield and Langley chose to leave their parental homes at nineteen years of age. They were both also acutely aware of isolation from the popular centres of modernism in Europe and North America − Mansfield ambivalently within it, and Langley painfully without it. As they matured they expressed a search for independence while struggling to attain what they also claimed were its enemies − love and motherhood. ‘Oscar’ represented not only their comparable struggles for independent artistic voices, but also their cultural and psychosexual otherness. As Aorewa McLeod writes, Wilde was both ‘at the centre of metropolitan culture’ and ‘the man who became the outcast, the marginal, alien and different’.8 He was ‘seized on by Langley . . . to create her sense of otherness as woman and colonial’; an act that would seem to have been influenced by Mansfield’s own ‘seizing’ of Wilde as a psychological and aesthetic beacon.9 Because their writings deal with these kinds of otherness, it is difficult to separate Wilde’s influence on Mansfield’s and Langley’s Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

The Meeting of Katherine Mansfield and Eve Langley     183

literary styles from his impact on their private selves. The impact of Wilde’s neoclassicism can be deduced in their prose, however, in these ways: first Mansfield then Langley absorbed the self-aware tone of his drama, its arch judgments of contemporary society and its reflection on the purpose of art itself. A self-dramatising tone is first rendered by Mansfield in The Urewera Notebook, where she appears as a young woman sensitively alive to landscape, character and the grand themes of ‘Life . . . and Death’, yet one also carried away by a self-confident swagger: Has there ever been a hotter day – the land is parched – golden with the heat – The sheep are sheltering in the shadow of the rocks – in the distance the hills are shimmering in the heat – M. and I sitting opposite each other – I look perfectly charming.10

Setting off on adventures to remote areas of her own country while still in her late teens, each writer composed accounts of domestic travels that she carried into her writing overseas: Mansfield, from Wellington to London; and Langley, from Gippsland to Auckland. Mansfield’s adolescent voice above anticipates that of the young Langley − captured in her 1925−8 journals as she wandered rural Gippsland with her sister June, and then transferred to the autobiographical fiction of The Pea-pickers: Thankfully, we left the flat dry town, and the train took us through country silent and glassy with the heat . . . As we undressed, we stared at ourselves in the long spotted mirror; two wild-looking, stalwart young fellows with broad chests, black and gold hair and crooked brilliant faces.11

In both accounts the authors express a tension between parochialism and self-determination (which emerges as autoeroticism, addressed below). The train allows Mansfield and Langley to detach from companions and fellow travellers while descending into a deeply internal experience. This enacts Wilde’s Aestheticist statement in ‘The Decay of Lying’ (1891), that ‘Art . . . is not to be found in Nature herself. It resides in the imagination, or fancy, or cultivated blindness of the man who looks at her.’12 Through the train window, vistas of rolling landscape become animated by surrealism. ‘I lean out the window’, writes Mansfield: and the child spirit – hidden away under a thousand and one grey City wrappings bursts its bonds – and exults within me – I watch the long succession of brown paddocks . . . in the distance – grey whares – two eyes and a mouth – with a light petticoat frill of a garden . . . Everywhere on the hills – great masses of charred logs – looking for all the world like strange fantastic beasts: a yawning crocodile, a headless horse – a gigantic gosling – a watchdog – to be smiled at and scorned in daylight – but a veritable nightmare in the darkness.13

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This Mansfield is a young collagist of metaphor and simile, exploiting these effects for the fluid continuity of expression she associates with a childlike ‘spirit’ of the imaginary. Is it simply coincidental that The Pea-pickers echoes the young Mansfield’s embellished style; or did Langley rewrite her teenage journals after the Wilde-inspired Mansfield? Mansfield’s girlhood travels around the farms, logging tracks, rivers, lakes, springs and bays of north-west New Zealand are embedded in Langley’s adolescent journey into Gippsland’s windblown marshes, meandering orchards and alpine foothills: Outward it shuffled, deeply sighing and, picking up speed, fled grinding through the short green grass, and in its singing, lilting, grumbling, bumbling, knocking, rocking theatre we flew forth . . . The sight of the wild dogs (warrigals) flying across this country, is given only to children and poets . . . They looked up, showing the whites of their eyes, as they rushed along with the train. Sometimes, they turned into tall men leaning on shovels . . . ‘Whee!’ they turned into white gates.14

Their journals from these trips share aliveness to rural and fringe lives, what Mansfield called, ‘The life they lead here’.15 Moreover, both were instantaneously aware of this material’s literary potential. Ian A. Gordon notes that when Mansfield returned from her camping trip through the north-west of the North Island, she performed its characters to her female lover, Edie Bendall. She gave ‘comic imitations of her travelling companions and of fat old Maori women’ before sitting down to her notebook.16 Racial mimicry included, the tone of this scene reappears years later in Langley’s The Pea-pickers, when Steve and Blue return to their mother after many months of itinerant adventures, for whom they ‘put on beards and moustaches of black rabbit-skin and performed before her until morning, acting the parts of all those we had met’.17 Years after she and June gave these performances, Langley, too, would ‘sit down’ to render these characters in her prose. Reflecting Mansfield and Langley’s shared reading, Claire Tomalin identifies in the former’s writing a ‘post-impressionist’ quality, ‘grotesquely peopled and alight with colour and movement’.18 The similarly grotesque modes of their early travelogues emerge from enthusiastic characterisations of local place and culture mixed with the uneasiness of colonial identity. The unhinging experience of domestic travel prepared Mansfield and Langley for writing with a Wildean sense of social critique. In a German Pension (1911) shows the young Mansfield polishing her satirical skill using the subjects of travel, chiefly ‘the crassness, affectations and chauvinism’ of Continental society, and the character of fellow wanderers or outsiders:19 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

The Meeting of Katherine Mansfield and Eve Langley     185 I looked at the First of the Barons. He was eating salad – taking a whole lettuce leaf on his fork and absorbing it slowly, rabbit-wise – a fascinating process to watch . . . The Herr Oberlehrer, who sat opposite me, smiled benignantly. ‘It must be very interesting for you, gnädige Frau, to be able to watch . . . of course this is a very fine house. There was a lady from the Spanish Court here in the summer; she had a liver. We often spoke together.’ I looked gratified and humble.20

In Mansfield’s later stories, this bemused and almost derisive tone is distilled to a far cooler voice, and yet she continues to use vernacular and dialogue to sketch her keen portraits of Anglophile class and gender in stories such as ‘The Lady’s Maid’ (1920), ‘Miss Brill’ (1920) and ‘The Garden Party’ (1922). Whilst Langley’s later writing retains the early romantic and symbolist style, she emulates Mansfield’s notes of satire and irony. Picking up on the latter’s often unforgiving sense of detail and ridicule, Langley combines relentless self-parody with her playful examination of local characters found on the road: The footwarmers felt like discarded hot-water bottles, a trifle indecent, from someone else’s bed. We sat on first-class seats with second-class tickets in our pockets, looking out of the window and mumbling and trembling in awful mutual conversation whenever a guard passed the door. A richly dressed young man, heavy with suitcases, came in and made himself comfortable in the corner opposite, and we felt from this intrusion that the scene was ready for our unveiling and our humiliation. ‘Tickets please’, said the guard . . . And a few minutes later, with much scrambling of effects and defects, the richly dressed young gent followed us down to limbo . . . . The man from Mount Bulla sat in his corner, second class . . . ‘Bunkum’, he said. ‘Bunkum’, again. ‘Bunkum’, forever.21

Mansfield’s ‘addiction to mimicry’, which never leaves even her most sombre stories, surely piqued Langley’s strong sense of absurdity, which amplifies mimicry to caricature of Australian types, particularly bush characters.22 According to Wilde, otherness is not something to be escaped, but to be found: this is evident in the uncanny epiphany that happens time and again in Mansfield’s and Langley’s narratives. This valuing of otherness seems to open up for them an aesthetic reality in which the limitations of their societies could be examined, ridiculed and even dispelled. Beyond their formative experiences as Antipodeans, Mansfield and Langley further pursue the representation of otherness, fixated upon the outsider character. For instance, The Urewera Notebook is haunted by Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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a mysterious mood that Mansfield discovered at the Rangitaiki Hotel: a ‘Woman and daughter – the man – their happiness – forgive Lord – I cant – [sic]’.23 This compulsion to the almost unbearable − a quality of atmosphere as much as language − drew Mansfield to later explore that experience in ‘The Woman at the Store’ (1912). In this story and several others, Mansfield reiterates an outsider figure, which Anita Segerberg identifies as the ‘Woman Alone’. Resembling Wilde’s own dual social status, the Woman Alone rejects her social world and is also its victim. She has local significance as the correlative to the ‘Man Alone’ in the landscape: a trope widely represented in New Zealand and Australian art and a context with which Langley frames her narratives.24 The Woman Alone is a character who sings up the presence of myth and possibility, and specifically the modernist themes of ‘displacement, restlessness, mobility, impermanence’.25 The influence of Wilde’s neoclassical sensibility provides Mansfield with a combination of high/ low and tragicomic registers to create tension between this character’s parochial setting and modern needs. A melodramatic scenario may be muted by materiality. For example, so many of Mansfield’s heroines are morbidly preoccupied with a particular object, or lead stories that turn uncannily on the existence of a seemingly petty or valueless item. In ‘Miss Brill’, the heroine is attached to the fur collar that is her single feminine luxury and also the object of her social disgrace; while in ‘The Garden Party’ Laura’s awareness of class is focused on a multitude of handled items − a buttered piece of bread, a basket of old sandwiches, her mother’s hat. Laura sees these items as if in relief, with sudden and acute focus. On the other hand, Mansfield’s downtrodden cleaning lady in ‘Life of Ma Parker’ (1921), is immersed − even submerged − in the trappings of her profession: ‘the old fish bag that held her cleaning things and an apron and a pair of felt shoes . . . the two jetty spears out of her toque . . . her worn jacket . . . her apron . . . her boots . . . the pail, too, and the washing-up bowl’; and in the things of her employer, ‘the literary gentleman’, his ‘floor littered with toast crusts, envelopes, cigarette ends . . . The piles of dirty cups, dirty dishes’.26 For Mansfield, objects are both profane and sacred: enchanting yet disappointing; intimate yet treacherous; possessed yet metonymically independent as unending chains of memory, feeling and burden. Langley imitates this sense of ironic distance and taste for horror channelled through things. Thwaite writes of how Langley ‘shared with Mansfield an intense concentration on and love of the details of tiny inanimate objects’, and particularly savoured Mansfield’s ‘How Pearl Button was Kidnapped’ (1912) for this reason.27 Langley’s narrator, Steve, hoards collections of items that are faulty, useless or otherwise Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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dysfunctional: broken rifles and found topees; ill-fitting or ill-suited garments (including a pneumatic girdle and a hat tied on with a leather strap). While these collections are begun with the help of her sister, Blue, they are claimed and nurtured by Steve, and become particularly precious when she is left alone in her worker’s hut in White Topee (1954), the sequel to The Pea-pickers.28 For Steve, objects are outward manifestations of her desires for masculinity, freedom and glamour, however confused those may be. They are also material storehouses of the past, never to be discarded.29 Objects, perhaps, offer a symbol of fragility under the pressure of social expectation. If the young Mansfield and Langley conjured up autoerotic fantasies against confining social encounters, in their later work a source of combined comfort and revelation is found in female characters whose conventional gender roles have been reshaped by modern situations. Frequently, Mansfield’s and Langley’s interest in how modern women cope (or do not) is revealed through relationships between younger women and older female mentors, such as Mansfield’s Mrs Harry Kember and Langley’s Mrs Buccaneer; relationships which shimmer in a fleeting moment from sisterly to sexually scintillating. In the combined feelings of familiarity, eroticism and literary intensity with which Langley describes her, Mansfield comes to accompany Wilde as both intimately close to Langley and unreachably distant from her. Thwaite highlights how Langley saw her own sister, June, as comparable in character to Mansfield; and, at the same time, how she viewed Mansfield’s literary talent as almost sublime: ‘just like a big blue wave of water with a little drop of foam on top’.30 This suggests that Langley not only felt admiration for a literary role model but that she also identified with Mansfield’s life as a Wildean figure of permissive alterity. It seems that Mansfield accepted her bisexuality, in that she explored it frankly through her early relationship with Bendall and her lifelong ‘relationship’ with Ida Baker, ‘a kind of surrogate sisterhood, or even marriage’.31 In her stories, however, Mansfield conveys a muted, persistent scepticism about monogamy, trust and communication between men and women. In ‘Bliss’ (1918), for instance, Bertha’s belief in a rich experience of marriage turns out to be hollow, based on deceit. In ‘At the Bay’ (1922), Mansfield presents a series of familial vignettes that confuse the entire notion of a conventional marriage. Like Mansfield, Langley married (unhappily) and attempted motherhood, although for both women it was truncated: for Mansfield, by miscarriage and subsequent infertility; and for Langley, by her husband’s and the law’s intervention to have her three children removed from her care. While it is uncertain whether or not Langley’s sexuality was defined Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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or explored through physical relationships with women, the drama of The Pea-pickers is driven by Steve’s conviction that she is, internally, a man; and that only the abstraction of romantic love is desirable. For her, heterosexual sex is frightening and emotionally dangerous, too closely linked to the mutability of the body and youth. Indeed, Eve’s relationship with her actual sister, June, resembled Mansfield’s partnership with Baker. Represented in Langley’s fiction, that relationship is perfect because it promises pure companionship, trust and romantic admiration without corporeality. It is unclear whether or not in reality this feeling was mutual; certainly June instigated their teenage experimentation with transvestism, suggesting they change their names to Steve and Blue and that they travel in the costumes that earned them the moniker of ‘the Trouser Women’.32 Despite her miscarriage and inability to bear further children, unhappy affairs, illness, complicated marriage and her early and protracted death, Mansfield seems to have steered a way through to gender and sexual agencies that Langley never achieved. Eve followed June and her husband to New Zealand and only married once June had begun a family there. Is it possible that Langley transferred her devotion between June and Mansfield, with whom she compared her sister; that she let June stand in for Katherine and the Wildean liberation she represented? Anita Segerberg proposes that: In her writing Eve Langley reveals the low self-esteem and deep need of love so common in women writers. She felt basically unloved, insecure of who she was or what role she should play, and she craved to be the recipient of a constant and unselfish love to be able to live. By writing she created a feeling of being loved. Loving and writing were connected in her mind as aspects of the same matrix. Other women writers, such as Christina Stead, Sylvia Ashton-Warner, Robin Hyde and Katherine Mansfield have all expressed similar thoughts.33

There is something compelling about Segerberg’s understanding of the act of writing as a reaching toward understanding and empathy, if not love. After all, Mansfield described Wilde’s ‘stronghold on my soul’; and Langley’s imagining of Mansfield as a child, a lover, and a force of nature, treated her literary ‘sister’ in the same way as Wilde − as one who moved and touched Langley specially, and who could be touched and moved by her alone.34 Both of them knew influence as sympathy and as ownership. In the best outcome of this relationship, words are still-warm garments. They are worn as imbued layers of homage, inspiration and knowing. And they are flammable: passing heat through one another, not decimating the body that wears them but shaping it and prompting it to seed. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Langley departs from Mansfield’s ‘big blue wave’ at the point where their mutual investment in nineteenth-century literary tradition eventually forks between European and local influences. Indeed, there is an almost mutual exchange in this relationship, as Sage explains: ‘it’s as though [Mansfield] is trying out [voices] that didn’t exist in literature yet, but turned out to belong to other adventurers and colonials’.35 Where Mansfield draws on realist and naturalist traditions of ostranenie, Langley steeps her writing in a different legacy of ‘Weird Melancholy’.36 This is reflected not least by Steve’s growing desire to return to a golden age of colonial frontiers. The form of Langley’s writing enacts her attempt to do so, effectively creating a mash-up of 1890s European and Australian traditions: symbolist poetics woven through Australian gothic. This formal innovation is itself a literary grotesquerie or a queering of local realist tradition. Paradoxically, the ‘doubled’ influence of Wilde channelled through Mansfield created the consuming momentum of Langley’s writing life, which flashed and burned out far away from its elements. When Mansfield first arrived in Europe, she lived ‘rather like a character in a book . . . the heroine of a picaresque novel, “modern” and “episodic” to excess’.37 As she matured, however, she placed the influence of Wilde amongst that of others, thus developing a sense of her original creative life: I feel that I do now realise, dimly, what women in the future will be capable of achieving. They truly, as yet, have never had their chance . . . We are firmly held in the self fashioned chains of slavery. Yes – now I see that they are self fashioned and must be self-removed . . . does Oscar still keep so firm a stronghold in my soul? No! Because now I am growing capable of seeing a wider vision . . . To weave the intricate tapestry of one’s own life it is well to take a thread from many harmonious skeins . . . the realisation that Art is absolutely self development.38

By contrast, Langley’s world of influence did not provide a safe release to self-development. Rather, it was distorted by the excessive identity that she herself described as pathological; issues that worsened once she settled in New Zealand: ‘In this country where there is not much work, like Australia, I had a hell of a time living on the sale of poetry and sorrow . . . That is the story.’39 Thwaite remarks that, ‘In the thirties, it did not seem impossible that [Langley’s] short stories might be as famous as those of Mansfield. But Langley’s literary horizons were to close in on her.’40 Rather than broadening its scope of influences, ambition and subject matter, her writing increasingly reflects a mind in descent. Its discontinuity can be starkly contrasted to the careful crystallisation that takes place in Mansfield’s stories − even the early drafts Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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in her journals. Langley’s tendency toward picaresque parataxis and a kind of fiercely purist originality is represented by the epic structure and the sprawling, circuitous narrative of The Pea-pickers. In Mansfield’s stories, on the other hand, the significance of the unspoken − ‘implying a shared world of meanings without exactly mapping it out’ − cannot be underestimated.41 Eve Langley both creatively and literally followed Katherine Mansfield, due to the master-influence of Wilde upon them both. Langley believed in Wilde as a part of herself; a delusional autobiography that she explains in her second and last published novel, White Topee. Squared by her love for Mansfield’s ‘genius’, Langley’s desperate need for the possibility of otherness ultimately provided her with an unreliable influence: her self.

Notes   1. Eve Langley, ‘Demeter of Dublin Street’, p. 215.   2. It is possible that Langley, given her preoccupation with Mansfield and the date of its publication, also read the 1954 edition of Mansfield’s Journal. Joy L. Thwaite, Importance of Being Eve Langley, p. 215.   3. Langley, ‘The Old Mill’, p. 101.   4. Katherine Mansfield, Notebooks, vol. 1, p. 97.   5. Langley, ‘The Old Mill’, p. 77.  6. Mansfield, Notebooks, vol. 1, p. 88.  7. Langley, The Pea-pickers, pp. 4−6.   8. Aorewa McLeod, ‘The New Zealand novels of Eve Langley’, p. 169.  9. Ibid. 10. Mansfield, The Urewera Notebook, p. 90. 11. Langley, The Pea-pickers, pp. 218−19. 12. Oscar Wilde, ‘The Decay of Lying’, Corpus of Electronic Texts, available at (last accessed 29 October 2014). 13. Mansfield, The Urewera Notebook, p. 34. 14. Langley, The Pea-pickers, pp. 12−13. 15. Mansfield, The Urewera Notebook, p. 51. 16. Mansfield, The Urewera Notebook, p. 20. 17. Langley, The Pea-pickers, p. 69. 18. Claire Tomalin, Katherine Mansfield, p. 69. 19. Ibid. 20. Mansfield, ‘The Baron’, Collected Fiction, vol. 1, p. 173. 21. Langley, The Pea-pickers, p. 53. 22. Lorna Sage, ‘Notes’, in Mansfield, The Garden Party, p. 155 fn. 6. 23. Mansfield, The Urewera Notebook, p. 46. 24. Anita Segerberg, ‘“Strangled by a bad tradition”?’ p. 57. For a discourse on this tradition see Pound, The Invention of New Zealand, pp. 210–13.

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The Meeting of Katherine Mansfield and Eve Langley     191 25. Sage, Moments of Truth, p. 72. 26. Mansfield, ‘Life of Ma Parker’, Collected Fiction, vol. 2, pp. 292−5. 27. Thwaite, Importance of Being Eve Langley, p. 215. 28. Langley, White Topee. 29. Lucy Treep, ‘Archive of the Everyday’, conference paper, Association for the Study of Australian Literature, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 8 July 2010. 30. Langley, ‘Demeter of Dublin Street’, p. 215. 31. Sage, ‘Introduction’ in Mansfield, Garden Party, p. xi. 32. Thwaite, Importance of Being Eve Langley, p. 39. 33. Segerberg, ‘“Strangled by a bad tradition”?’, p. 56. 34. Mansfield, Notebooks, vol. 1, p. 110. 35. Sage, Moments of Truth, p. 79. 36. Marcus Clarke, ‘Adam Lindsay Gordon’, p. 647. 37. Sage, ‘Introduction’, in Mansfield, Garden Party, p. xiii. 38. Mansfield, Notebooks, vol. 1, p. 110. 39. Langley, Letter to Nettie Palmer, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, National Library of Australia, MS 1174/1/5961. 40. Thwaite, Importance of Being Eve Langley, p. 215. 41. Sage, Moments of Truth, p. 70.

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EDL\JBURGH University Press ,;

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Chapter 14

Mansfield, Shakespeare and the Unanxiety of Influence Mark Houlahan

Surely the most piercing of Mansfield’s citations of Shakespeare comes in her journal entry of 19 February 1918: I woke up early this morning and when I opened the shutters the full round sun was just risen. I began to repeat that verse of Shakespeare’s: ‘Lo here the gentle lark weary of rest’ and bounded back into bed. The bound made me cough. I spat – it tasted strange – it was bright red blood.1

The majesty of the rising sun, and the surging rhetoric of Shakespeare’s early narrative poem Venus and Adonis2 play here against the rising, mortal, tubercular symptoms which, as those familiar with Mansfield’s letters and notebooks know all too well, are such a striking and sad feature of the last years of her life. Despite her constant travel Mansfield could not, in the end, escape tuberculosis nor the other physical ills her flesh may have been heir to. Throughout those travels Shakespeare was a constant, consoling presence. She read Shakespeare, both to herself and aloud with John Middleton Murry. She quotes Shakespeare in her notebooks and letters, as well as using him in her fiction. What we should make of this ‘Shakespearosity’ is the main subject of this chapter. Highlighted will be four key aspects of Mansfield’s Shakespearean engagements: (1) the interplay with Antony and Cleopatra, in particular used in her journals and letters to evoke a supercharged version of her life (real and imagined) with Middleton Murry; (2) Shakespeare citations used by characters within her fictions; (3) Mansfield’s own use of the epigraph, ‘For I tell you my Lord fool’ from Henry IV, Part I in her late story ‘This Flower’ (1920); and (4) the hauntology of that phrase’s presence on her gravestone in Fontainebleau, which ensures that Mansfield and Shakespeare are enigmatically yoked together, even beyond death. Mansfield’s intertextual relationships with other writers have often been studied. While her links with writers such as Virginia Woolf and Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Anton Chekhov are barbed, defensive and at times secretive, her engagements with Shakespeare are quite different. Here she is always bold, unafraid and explicit. She uses Shakespeare’s words and is aware of the aura of Shakespeare’s rhetoric, but she is not trying, in any direct sense, to emulate Shakespeare. Hence the intertextuality between Mansfield and Shakespeare illustrates a form of unanxiety of influence, quite free of the Freudian paranoia Harold Bloom so famously marked out two generations ago as the founding principle of writers working with (by striving against) each other. In the Preface to the second edition of his influential book The Anxiety of Influence, Bloom marks the centrality of Shakespeare as influence for English-language writers: ‘One cannot think through the question of influence without considering the most influential of all authors during the last four centuries.’3 He details the treacherous terrain of poetic misprision, which he defines as a ‘mode of melancholy . . . the dark and daemonic ground upon which we now enter’.4 It is possible to think of Mansfield’s evasive relationship with Chekhov’s stories in these terms, with Chekhov operating as a kind of oppressive force. Bloom, however, also allows for other ways of relating to prior writers, ‘the transmission of ideas and images from earlier to later poets. This is indeed “just something that happens”.’5 This process is exactly what seems to have happened between Mansfield and Shakespeare. Bloom makes it clear that this is precisely not what he meant by the ‘anxiety’ of influence, so it is called ‘unanxiety’ where the later writer, Mansfield, joyously explores her links with Shakespeare, forging direct and open connections. In her personal writings those links are part of the way she makes sense of her world. In her fictions, those links work to distance Mansfield from her characters, part of her many strategies for encouraging readers to regard her fictional creations unsentimentally, with scepticism and irony. That Mansfield did access Shakespeare frequently is well attested in Mansfield scholarship. As Vincent O’Sullivan reminds us, for example: ‘We know from a notebook kept precisely for that reason how she responded to reading Shakespeare, and the plays are often there in her letters.’6 In their five-volume edition of Mansfield’s letters, O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott assiduously gloss the many brief allusions to Shakespeare. And in fact there are three ‘Shakespeare notebooks’, as notebooks 6, 10 and 44 in the John Middleton Murry papers in the Alexander Turnbull Library are labelled.7 Notebooks 6, 10 and 44 are all quite small and fragile; notebooks 6 and 44 are the shape of small exercise books (the kind of exercise book in which students are still asked to write during examinations), while notebook 10 is the shape of an oblong rectangle (the format sometimes used for writing shopping Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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lists). Its pages, in particular, are beginning to come away. The monumentalising format of Scott’s edition, useful as it is, belies the notebooks themselves. Reading the originals evokes quite a different experience, for these notebooks, as Anna Jackson explains, are not solid texts, gathered together by the author for posterity, like Samuel Pepys’ self-bound diary, lodged by him at Magdalen College, Cambridge, or Woolf’s yearly diaries preserved at Monk’s House in Sussex.8 Mansfield’s notebooks were cheap, light and highly portable. They could be picked up and put down at will. For such an obsessive traveller, all three have the clear advantage of portability. You could carry them anywhere and write in them in a train or a hotel room as Mansfield must often have done. Mansfield’s notebooks are creatures of the impermanence and transience to which she was given. The notebooks suggest that Mansfield would write a series of entries at a given time; months or even years later, she might take up the same notebook, turn it upside down and begin writing from the back. The three notebooks present fragments of Mansfield’s Shakespeare reading, a modernist version of a Renaissance commonplace book. Notebook 6, for example, is a small anthology of quotations written out from Antony and Cleopatra, to which Mansfield appends her writerly reactions, noting that the ‘short scene between Anthony and the soothsayer is very remarkable’ or that ‘the adjectives seem part of the nouns when Shakespeare uses them. They grace them so beautifully, attend and adorn so modestly and yet with such skill . . . I suppose it was instinctive.’9 The notebooks record a professional process as well as a personal one. Murry clearly describes this in his note, dated 1924, on the inside card cover of notebook 10: These Shakespeare quotations copied sometimes by K.M. & sometimes by me, were made at Villa Pauline Jan 1916. We used to read part of a play of S[hakespeare’s] every night. And the one who was not reading aloud would copy the lines which particularly struck us.10

Scott helpfully marks which of the quotations is in Mansfield’s hand and which Murry’s, though Murry’s recollection of the copying of ‘lines which particularly struck us’ renders inextricable the issue of lines which struck either one of them separately. Murry’s ‘us’ surely implies a collective process. Here in 1916 we find the first reference to the lines from Henry IV Part I. The intimacy of the reading process Murry describes in notebook 10 suggests also that sharing Shakespeare was a way of rekindling their own relationship, part of the haven Mansfield and Murry imagined between them. Mansfield describes this Shakespeare bond to him this way in a Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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letter of 5 March 1918: ‘I feel there is a great golden loop linking . . . to Shakespeare’s time and that our Heron life will be a sort of Elizabethan existence as well.’11 Ruth Mantz and Murry record the Villa Pauline as ‘months of real joy – of the self – abandonment of love, in living and in writing’;12 it is apt to frame Shakespeare as part of that experience. In the 1916 notebook we thus find a brace of quotations from Antony and Cleopatra. They are a feature also of notebook 6 from 1920, where the entries are clearly in Mansfield’s own hand. These quote the following lines from the play: Like to a vagabond flag upon the stream Goes to, and back, lackeying the varying tide To rot itself with motion.13

Mansfield had a keen ear for Shakespeare’s gift for phrase-making, lighting here in particular on Shakespeare’s talent for framing a dynamic verb from a noun − the Oxford English Dictionary gives 1568 as the first usage in print of ‘lackey’ as a verb (‘to do service as a lackey . . . dance attendance’).14 Here she can be observed sharpening her talent against his: ‘Marvellous words! I can apply them. There is a short story.’15 Throughout her notebooks and letters, Mansfield disperses this kind of commentary, epitomising the linkage between professional writing and professional reading. There is a strong, yet underexplored link here with Virginia Woolf’s distinctive reading practice, as described throughout her published diaries of reading freely (as her father Leslie Stephen had encouraged her to do), obsessively mingling the contemporary and the classical. Woolf’s diaries are more extensive than Mansfield’s personal writings, but both show with great clarity the link between a writer and her reading practice.16 The personal desire that drives strong readers to seek out yet one more book is linked to the professional practice of writing. The comments of both show them sharpening their own craft by reading against the best available examples. In Mansfield’s case there are phrases like the one above from Antony and Cleopatra, used as springboards, much as writing prompts would be used in a creative writing class. Mansfield continues inventing the possible scenario: it seems the weed gets caught up and one night it is gone out to sea and Lost. But comes a day, a like tide, a like occasion and it reappears more sickeningly rotten still! Shall we? Will he? Are there any letters? No letters? The post? Does he miss me? No. Then sweep it all out to sea. Clear the water for ever! Let me write this one day.17

Here it is impossible to miss the personal overlaying of her story with Cleopatra’s, with Murry doing duty as the far away, non-communicating Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Antony. This notebook entry is private, one of many where the praising of lines from Shakespeare opens out to wider territory. Shakespeare’s language clearly functioned as a kind of shared code, intermingling the professional concerns of two writers with more directly personal matters. In 1921, for example, Murry writes to Mansfield: ‘I think Antony & Cleopatra is one of the things that is completely worked out.’18 At times Mansfield’s awareness of their doubly coded use of Shakespeare, as lovers who are also professional critics, is acute. From Menton on 7 April 1920 she writes to Murry: ‘we must read more – you & I – read together. I nearly know the sheep shearing scene from A Winters Tale [sic] by heart.’ She then quotes a passage from Twelfth Night: ‘Oh how that does all ravish me. I think I could listen to that for a small eternity. My dear we must read together, read aloud to each other.’19 The ‘small eternity’ is death-marked, like the soaring lark from Venus and Adonis, for she ends the quotation with Duke Orsino calling for music, and the Clown beginning his tremulous song: ‘Come away, come away, death etc’. In Twelfth Night the song continues thus, as presumably Mansfield assumes Murry would readily recall: And in sad cypress let me be laid. Fie away, fie away breath, I am slain by a fair cruel maid. My shroud of white, stuck all with yew, O prepare it.20

Angela Smith comments astutely on Mansfield’s predilection for small turns of phrase with a Shakespearean ring to them.21 Perhaps here the ‘ravish . . . for a small eternity’ has taken Mansfield back across the Mediterranean from Illyria (where Twelfth Night takes place) to Alexandria, where Cleopatra attempts to rekindle her love for Antony: Eternity was in our lips and eyes, Bliss was in our brows bent; none our parts so poor But was a race of heaven.22

‘[I]f I had not loved you’, Mansfield writes later to Murry in October 1920, ‘I should never have understood Shakespeare as I do. His “magic” is the same magic as our love.’23 These two loves form, as Shakespeare’s Cleopatra puts it, a ‘heavenly mingle . . . sad or merry’ at once.24 Mansfield’s comments come in the middle of a long, diary-like letter, which closes in a playful spirit. Here is her sign off:

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Figure 14.1  ‘Egypt sketch’, Katherine Mansfield letters, 10 October 1920; reference number C- 20789-1/2; MS-Papers-4000-35 from the John Middleton Murry Papers, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

Mansfield spies an asp, and this leads her to think of the asp Cleopatra is brought in Act V, with which she suicides, yoking herself in death with the Nile so crucial to Egyptian life: Ill [sic] catch this one for you & put it in your Shakespeare for a marker at the scene where the old man carries in the basket of figs. You will have to hold your Shakespeare very firmly to prevent it wriggling, Anthony darling.25

In the quick sketch you can see the asp wriggling around the signature ‘Egypt’, as Antony calls Cleopatra in the play. Mansfield’s relish for the play, however, suggests a deeper engagement, identifying herself as Cleopatra and Murry as Antony. We hear that relish in notebook 6 when she recalls the phrase ‘Salt Cleopatra’, which Pompey uses of her.26 Like Cleopatra, Mansfield is often playful with her more serious lover. Ten months earlier, Mansfield made more cutting use of the Antony analogy in the privacy of a diary entry for 29 December 1919. She mocks Murry’s headache − ‘Jack was furious at my lack of sympathy. He was dying Egypt dying’27 − jeering at his pain by referencing the famous Liebestod of Antony’s death in Cleopatra’s monument, where Antony grandiloquently announces: ‘I am dying, Egypt, dying.’28 The effect is to acknowledge their connection as lovers and at the same time to tenderly mock him. Mansfield quotes Shakespeare, or she and Murry would read him together, then, to access a fullness of life, a rich expressiveness that she clearly admires. That very expressiveness is then evidently denied those of her characters who directly show a knowledge of Shakespeare. For it seems that fictional quoters of Shakespeare (as opposed to Mansfield herself) are seen as bogus, foolish or treacherous, or all three. This is clearest in Mansfield’s first published collection In a German Pension (1911). The narrator of ‘Frau Fischer’ (1910), for example, wants to Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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condemn the Frau for her obsessions over food and German waiters, and voices one of Hamlet’s famous sarcasms: ‘I had rather wanted to ask her if the young friend had gone to England in the capacity of waiter to attend the funeral baked meats, but decided it was not worth it.’29 The narrator tries to play with Hamlet’s bitter retort about his mother’s second marriage to his uncle Claudius30 but withdraws the remark. A year later in 1912 we find Mansfield herself using Hamlet’s remark to vent sour-eyed disdain upon ‘perfectly respectable dead ladies and gentlemen eating perfectly respectable funeral bakemeats with all those fine memories of what British beef and blood has stood for’.31 Here the effect of the glancing quotation is powerful yet rancorous, analogous to the tone Mansfield strikes often in the fictionalised recollections which form the basis of her first book. How vehemently the narrator despises Herr Echardt, for example, in ‘The Advanced Lady’ (1911). Not only is he a pretentious fool, he is a pretentious Shakespearean fool: ‘Nu,’ cried Herr Echardt. ‘Fancy that! What a bond already! I have made up my mind to know Shakespeare in his mother tongue before I die, but that you, Frau Professor, should be already immersed in those wells of English thought!’32

It comes as no surprise that, after a bracing group tramp, Herr Echardt ecstatically proclaims lines from Polonius, arguably the most loquacious peddler of clichés in Shakespeare: ‘What is it your Shakespeare says? One moment, I have it. The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried − grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel!’33 Echardt’s tendentious groping for the required phrase is a nice extra signal of his folly. These observations of Polonius, fragments from a Renaissance commonplace book where such banal thoughts would be recorded, are often quoted beyond Shakespeare’s play as if they were prima facie true. In the figure of Herr Echardt we glimpse the forceful witlessness which is intrinsic to Shakespeare’s presentation of Polonius as a ‘wretched, rash, intruding fool’.34 Mansfield occasionally lamented her lack of formal education, but in this instance the implied reading of Polonius suggests an acute critical intelligence at work. Herr Echardt is, merely, noisily, tedious. Raoul Duquette, the narrator of ‘Je ne parle pas français’ (1918) is much more unpleasant, a classically unreliable storyteller, mendacious and morally dubious. With his writerly ambitions, Duquette is keen to pay homage to Shakespeare as a way of enhancing his appeal to the narratee he addresses throughout: ‘That’s rather nice, don’t you think, that bit about the Virgin? It comes from the pen so gently; it has such a “dying fall”. I thought so at the time and decide to make a note of it.’35 Rather nice, he would like us to think, Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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to embed two Shakespeare references in the same thought. The phrase flows ‘gently’ from his pen just as ‘mercy . . . / . . . droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven/Upon the place beneath’;36 and his self-regarding ‘dying fall’ comes from Orsino’s famously self-absorbed opening monologue in Twelfth Night.37 Again we may note the dichotomy between the quoting of Shakespeare by fictional characters, which is presented as facile, dangerously glib, and the presentation of such material in her notebooks, where Mansfield relishes her absorption in Shakespeare’s texts, and is clearly something to be validated. A crucial variation on this citation practice comes in ‘This Flower’, where Mansfield directly uses Shakespeare to guide readers, an unavoidable yet cryptic clue. She began this story on 5 January 1920, called in draft ‘Late Spring’ and then, in its final form, ‘This Flower’, as it was published in the posthumous collection Something Childish and Other Stories (1924). The first draft can be found in the Mansfield archives at the Newberry Library in Chicago and the later version in notebook 26, amongst the manuscripts Murry gifted to the Turnbull Library. Kimber and O’Sullivan quite rightly print both versions side by side in volume two of their Collected Fiction, noting that this makes accessible ‘the subtle differences between the two versions, with the emphasis on the female character’s reaction in one, and on the male’s in the other’.38 Mansfield titles her short diary entry for 5 January ‘Henry IV’ (which we know she read with Murry in 1916), and notes for 19 January ‘Alls Well that Ends Well. Comedy of Errors’ and for 20 January ‘Twelfth Night’.39 Presumably this was to remind herself that she read from these plays on those days. Whether it means she read the whole of each play is uncertain, for even a confirmed bardolater might quail at reading two whole plays on a winter’s day. If she only read part of Henry IV Part I on 5 January, it is likely that this included the scene with her favourite Hotspur sound bite, for the Newberry manuscript is headed with the words, ‘But I tell you my lord fool, out of this nettle danger, we pluck this flower, safety.’40 The quotation stays with the story through its final revision and publication in 1924, when Mansfield’s final title ‘This Flower’ links the story closer to its Shakespeare referent and, in so doing, makes sense of the connections Mansfield seems to be drawing upon here. In the story an unnamed woman has just received a medical examination by a doctor who resides in a ‘rather shady Bloomsbury’ address.41 The reason why the woman needs a doctor is never specified, and readers are thus invited to over-read for a range of possible female complaints. The shady doctor, complicit with the woman, tells her ‘partner’ Roy that she simply needs ‘a bit of a rest’.42 Relieved, Roy breaks out the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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brandy and soda: ‘I thought we were in for it this time. I really did. And it would have been so fatal – so fatal!’43 Roy’s ‘this time’ suggests that he feared pregnancy, and that, yet again, the couple had had a lucky escape. ‘This flower, safety’, which the story’s epigraph promises, ironically, would be the unfruitful state of not having conceived or, more luridly, miscarrying or aborting. Roy’s relief is palpable as he plucks, as it were, at this reassurance. Yet the narrator coolly observes him, making him a comical kind of juvenile lead. The second version of the story expands the core scene in the doctor’s rooms. In particular, two opening paragraphs use free indirect discourse to voice the woman’s thoughts in a highly empathetic third person. The focus is reversed; where the first version lets us overhear Roy, in the second we enter the story via the woman’s point of view. The woman, too, is relieved. Her relief blossoms into floral imagery: ‘She was part of her room – part of the great bouquet of southern anemones, of the white net curtains that blew in stiff against the light breeze, of the mirrors, the white silky rugs . . . ’44 The light-flooding anemones are a later development of the aloe which flowers at the end of the long story of that name and its final published version, the famous Prelude (1918). Here the flower safety morphs into the white light of freedom. Escape and flight from entrapment are key themes both in Mansfield’s fictions and in the travelling life her letters and journals record in such detail. Here the flight into safety (as guaranteed by the Henry IV epigraph) ironically is underpinned by the implied sterility and infertility, in which Roy takes comfort. Remarkably, it is then this quote that pursues Mansfield beyond her death, on the gravestone in Fontainebleau. As O’Sullivan and Kimber remark in their note on ‘This Flower’: It seems curious that JMM later chose this quotation, which KM placed at the head of her enigmatic story about the fear of pregnancy, and possible abortion, to have inscribed on her grave in Avon cemetery, Fontainebleau.45

As we can track the quotation through the iterations of the story and in several notebook entries, its appeal to Mansfield is undeniable. But how did these lines resonate for her, and what did Murry think they signified? Who might we take the ‘Lord Fool’ to be? What is to be secured by the flower safety? What is the nettle of danger a metonym for? It is easier to cite the evidence for these lines than to say confidently how they signify. Mansfield was notoriously both direct and ambiguous in her instructions to Murry as to what he should do with her estate. He was to have all her manuscripts, and he was to ‘go through them one day’ destroying everything he did not use.46 No matter how private or hurtful her Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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remarks might be, then, he was to be their first and perhaps only reader. The Henry IV epitaph resonates on this level as well. In Shakespeare’s play it is Henry Percy, Hotspur, who says these words, voicing them to a correspondent urging caution in the face of imminent rebellion. Hotspur has a silent, loving wife. Her name is Kate. ‘Kate’ Mansfield is no less loving, but seldom silent. Her fondness for the quotation suggests that, among her many aliases, she became at times a kind of Hotspur, impulsive, daring and, in the end, death-haunted. Perhaps it is relevant that, in these lines, Hotspur is commenting on a letter he has been reading aloud, responding to his offstage, unseen correspondent; in like manner we can hear Mansfield talking back to Murry in her letters, and chastising him in her journals and diaries. We know of course that Murry read every word: how else could he have known what to publish and what to leave? Did he think that, from within the grave, she spoke reassurance to ‘My Lord Fool’, John Middleton Murry? Though Mansfield did leave Murry instructions, they did not go so far, evidently, as to dictate the wording on her tombstone. Do the lines grant Murry reassurance, or, on some secondary level, did he choose them hoping to grant himself some measure of this posthumous comfort? Does Murry seek to speak doubly on his own behalf and on Mansfield’s as well through the gravestone? Did he perversely choose her grave as a site where he could cheer himself up? The lines remain beguiling yet enigmatic. Ma Parker, in the story from The Garden Party (1922) that bears her name, grew up in Stratford-upon-Avon. Nevertheless, as a child, she knew nothing of its famous son: At sixteen she’d left Stratford and come up to London as kitching-maid. Yes she was born in Stratford-on-Avon. Shakespeare, sir? No, people were always asking about him. But she’d never heard his name until she saw it on the theatres.47

Likely Mansfield herself read Shakespeare long before she came to London. In 1907 in the Ureweras she noted Johanna Warbrick as being ‘rather silent---reads Byron and Shakespeare and wants to go back to school’.48 The ‘fat well made child with a blue pinafore’ Mansfield describes so evocatively sounds like a figure for Mansfield herself, so self-absorbed in reading English and European writers from a precociously early age. She knew far more Shakespeare than she ever allows any of her characters to know. She was an obsessive reader as well as an obsessive writer. Theodore Leinwand’s description of Virginia Woolf as ‘by turns a passionate common reader and an intensely selfconscious professional reader’49 might aptly frame Mansfield’s practices as well. Her immersion in Shakespeare, fitful yet intense, underpins both Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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aspects of her writerly life. Shakespeare brought solace and escape. He brought her closer to Murry, even when they were countries apart. Hers is a post-romantic Shakespeare, a golden world of glancing quotations and half-line references. This chapter has sampled some of these, but the approach could clearly be extended further, in particular marking Mansfield’s relationship to Hamlet, the Sonnets and the narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. Though we prize Mansfield for the innovative nature of her fiction we can see in these links how she, like her modernist contemporaries, established connections (as Eliot famously insisted all writers should) between the literary tradition she inherited and her highly individual talent.

Notes   1. Katherine Mansfield, Notebooks, vol. 2, p. 125.   2. The verse from Venus and Adonis continues: From his moist cabinet mounts up on high And wakes the morning, from whose silver breast The sun ariseth in his majesty, Who doth the world so gloriously behold The cedar tops and hills seem burnished gold Shakespeare, ‘Venus and Adonis’, II, 854−8, Complete Works, p. 232.   3. Harold Bloom, ‘Preface: The Anguish of Contamination’, p. xiii.  4. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 25.  5. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 71.   6. Vincent O’Sullivan, ‘Signing Off’, p. 13.  7. Respectively listed in the John Middleton Murry papers as Notebook 6 (1921), qMS [1280]; Notebook 10 (1914−1916) qMS [1250]; Notebook 44 (1921) qMS [1281].  8. Anna Jackson, ‘The Notebooks, Journal, and Papers of Katherine Mansfield’, pp. 84−5.  9. Mansfield, Notebooks, vol. 2, p. 257. 10. Mansfield, Notebook 10, John Middleton Murry Papers, Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand, qMS-1280. Quote transcribed directly from the inside cover of this notebook. 11. Mansfield, Letter to John Middleton Murry, 5 March 1918, Collected Letters, vol. 2, p. 108. 12. Ruth Elvish Mantz and Murry, The Life of Katherine Mansfield, p. 6. 13. Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, I, iv, 45−7. 14. Oxford English Dictionary, online edition: (last accessed 11 June 2014). 15. Mansfield, Notebooks, vol. 2, p. 256. 16. See in particular Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary. Leonard Woolf’s selections are designed to emphasise the writerly in Woolf’s reading, but the

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206     Mark Houlahan pattern is evident in the comprehensive editions both of Woolf’s diaries and letters. 17. Mansfield, Notebooks, vol. 2, pp. 256−7. 18. Murry, Letters of John Middleton Murry to Katherine Mansfield, p. 343. 19. Mansfield, Letter to Murry, 7 April 1920, Collected Letters, vol. 3, pp. 274−5. 20. Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, II, ii, 51−5. 21. Angela Smith, Katherine Mansfield, p. 34. 22. Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, I, iii, 35−7. 23. Mansfield, Letter to Murry, 10 October 1920 Collected Letters, vol. 4, p. 64. 24. Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, I, v, 57. 25. Mansfield, Letter to Murry, 10 October 1920, Collected Letters, vol. 4, pp. 65−6. 26. Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, II, ii, 21; Mansfield, Notebooks, vol. 2, p. 257. 27. Mansfield, Notebooks, vol. 2, pp. 185−6. 28. Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, IV, xvi, 19. 29. Mansfield, ‘Frau Fischer’, Collected Fiction, vol. 1, p. 196. 30. Shakespeare, ‘The funeral baked meats/Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables’, Hamlet, I, ii, 179−80. 31. Mansfield, ‘Sunday Lunch’, Collected Poetry and Critical Writings, pp. 404−7. 32. Mansfield, ‘The Advanced Lady’, Collected Fiction, vol. 1, p. 241. 33. Ibid. Here Mansfield quotes Shakespeare, Hamlet, I, iii, 63−4. 34. Shakespeare, Hamlet, III, iv, 29. 35. Mansfield, ‘Je ne parle pas français’, Collected Fiction, vol. 2, p. 114. 36. Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, IV, i, 182−3. 37. Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, I, i, 4. 38. Kimber and O’Sullivan (eds), Collected Fiction, vol. 2, p. 190 fn. 1. 39. Mansfield, Notebooks, vol. 2, p. 189. 40. Shakespeare, Henry IV Part I, II, iv, 10. 41. Mansfield, ‘This Flower’, Collected Fiction, vol. 2, p. 191. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. p. 192. 44. Ibid. pp. 190−1. 45. Kimber and O’Sullivan, Collected Fiction, vol. 2, p. 190. 46. Katherine Mansfield: Manuscripts in the Alexander Turnbull Library, p. 104. 47. Mansfield, ‘Life of Ma Parker’, Collected Fiction, vol. 2, p. 294. 48. Mansfield, Urewera Notebook, p. 74. 49. Theodore Leinwand, ‘Virginia Woolf Reads the Great William’, p. 101.

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Chapter 15

The ‘Burden’ of the Feminine: Frank Sargeson’s Encounter with Katherine Mansfield Janet Wilson Katherine Mansfield had an ambivalent posthumous reputation in the country of her birth in the decades following her death. Despite her international fame as a literary modernist within a decade she was being treated with suspicion by the cultural nationalists of the 1930s and 1940s: the poets, Allen Curnow, Dennis Glover and A. R. D. Fairburn, and Frank Sargeson, who pioneered the Kiwi vernacular in prose and saw Mansfield as a rival to his own precedence in the national shortstory tradition. These writers considered her modernist, impressionist style as inimical to their ambitions for a cultural nationalism, which were grounded in a preoccupation with the local and which valued realism for its capacity to authenticate the project of mapping the cultural landscape. C. K. Stead attributes this to the ‘burden’ of influence Mansfield represented at a time when the new Dominion was aiming to develop its literary prose traditions independent of England and Europe. To them, she represented a ‘problem requiring a strategy’.1 Sargeson, in particular, needed to clear a space for his own voice to assume its place in the nationalist prose tradition. From the 1930s to the 1950s, his prose style was indelibly linked with social realism, leading to the critical orthodoxy that it represented an unrivalled representation of New Zealandness.2 This chapter is situated in relation to the critical commonplace that the contrasting literary modes and prose styles of Frank Sargeson and Katherine Mansfield − of hard-edged realist writing and the miniaturist ‘subjectivist’ writing of impressionism − laid the foundation for the two traditions in New Zealand prose. By contrast to the typology outlined by Lawrence Jones in 1987 and following on from critics like W. H. New, Mark Williams and Joel Gwynne,3 it identifies similarities in Mansfield and Sargeson’s artistic orientation, traceable to their critique of colonial culture and society: namely, an aesthetics of fragmentation, resistance to normative gender constructions of colonial society and their use of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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symbolic modes of representation. These aesthetic values suggest some alignment of their styles, but Mansfield can also be traced as an intertextual presence in Sargeson’s work, alongside an implied gendered critique of her female voice and attitudes. This chapter further argues that Sargeson developed his stylistic repertoire by adapting Mansfield’s techniques of impressionism and impersonation to his ambivalently gendered viewpoint in order to nuance masculine vulnerability and unrequited love. This specific influence of Mansfield upon Sargeson, which has not been remarked upon until now, will be illustrated with reference to his story, ‘A Man and his Wife’ (1939),4 in which he surreptitiously draws on Mansfield’s last story, ‘The Canary’ (1923),5 ‘writing back’ in a rural colonial context and voice to her metropolitan female discourse. The Mansfield ‘problem’ for Sargeson was the influence of her gendered style of writing on younger women writers, namely Robin Hyde and Gloria Rawlinson,6 as well as Mansfield imitators in Australia such as the novelist Eleanor Dark and the New Zealand-born novelist, Jean Devanny.7 He implied that such imitation would misrepresent both New Zealand and its literary traditions: ‘Mansfield . . . imposed a pattern on our writing and . . . hosts of young women wrote Mansfield stories.’8 In a radio talk on Mansfield broadcast on 28 July 1948 he spoke of her as writing in the ‘feminine tradition’, specifically ‘the minor tradition’, whose aesthetic reflects the ‘tendency to be concerned with the part rather than the whole . . . to make your story depend for its effectiveness on isolated details and moments of life’.9 What he and his circle denigrated as the fussy, miniaturising stylistic traits of Mansfield and her followers is not mentioned.10 In order to ensure the continuing fashion for raw realism, the prose style of the literary movement that included writers like John Mulgan and Dan Davin and, by implication, to protect his own sexual proclivities under the cover of heternormative masculinity, Sargeson distanced himself from Mansfield’s impressionism. By 1970, however, Sargeson was identifying himself with Mansfield by claiming his influence to be equivalent to hers. In stating that ‘there were two tragedies in New Zealand literature – one was Katherine Mansfield and the other was Frank Sargeson’11 − he appeared to subscribe to the two traditions theory including its subsequent simplifications. Yet his view of himself as more of a symbolic realist than ‘a realist or even a naturalist writer’12 also seems to gesture towards Mansfield and the ‘feminine’ tradition. W. H. New develops this, claiming that ‘there is more Mansfield in Sargeson that at first seems apparent’;13 and Joel Gwynne and Mark Williams also argue that Sargeson’s demotic, colloquial style and discursive construction of a social order belie his use of techniques associated with impressionism such as symbol, image and Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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epiphany in order to capture individual moments of intensity, intimacy and transcendence.14 Gwynne identifies in Sargeson’s first-person story, ‘I For One . . .’ (1952), similarities of aesthetic practice;15 that Sargeson’s ventriloquising of a female voice borrows from Mansfield appears in the sly allusion to the speaker, named as Katherine, who sees as ‘a stranger, [. . .] one set apart’.16 Simon During also implies Sargeson was extending his realism into modernism, to distance himself from provincial society and its heterosexual norms, just as modernism did in opposition to bourgeois culture and associated forms of literary realism.17 Finally, recent scholarship on Sargeson as a gay writer who introduces veiled homoerotic subtexts and a ‘butch laconic realism’ argues that his inarticulate drifting characters mask yearning and unfulfilled desire, and are vulnerable to social bias and discrimination. John Newton, for example, exposes the liminality of Sargeson’s place as a closet gay writer who ensured his continued acceptance in New Zealand’s homophobic society as its representative voice.18 These literary and cultural critiques have prepared the ground for an intertextual reading of Sargeson in relation to Mansfield by identifying his balancing of contradictory roles, identities and expectations, to give covert representation to the marginalised gay man under the guise of a virile, rugged style, as evidenced in the homoerotic subtexts of stories like ‘Good Samaritan’, ‘White Man’s Burden’ and ‘The Hole that Jack Dug’, that depend on pun, word play and innuendo. By 1940, when his second collection A Man and His Wife was published, Sargeson looked to Mansfield to develop moral and stylistic complexity, while simultaneously critiquing her through a realist lens; he adapted as a strategy of concealment her symbolist method in ‘The Canary’ to the narrative technique of indirection and the subtext of unfulfilled desire of the collection’s disingenuously titled, eponymous story, ‘A Man and his Wife’. The overlapping features of Mansfield and Sargeson’s practice can be traced to their colonial origins and critical responses to the limitations of provincial culture. Both dealt with white-settler dislocation by positioning themselves at odds with its existing cultural frames and developing a voice of resistance to its philistinism, materialism and puritanism. Their decision to write in genres such as the sketch and story, often with first-person narrators, suggests a wish to speak of the experience of colonial life in semi-autobiographical form. Yet both felt a need to move beyond the limitations of short fiction and wrote longer stories like Mansfield’s Prelude (1918) or Sargeson’s novella, That Summer (1938−40). Furthermore, despite their very different literary modes of symbolic realism and modernist impressionism they shared an aesthetic preoccupation with symbolism and epiphany, which draws on the Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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sounds and cadences of the spoken voice, and displays the fragmented or fractured narrative structures, forms of which are found in all the avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century. ‘The Canary’ exemplifies Mansfield’s symbolist and impressionist techniques: a plotless situation, the dispensing of the external narrative voice in order to focus on the speaker’s thoughts and feelings; extended impersonation of her speaking voice through dramatic monologue and verisimilitude. Sargeson also developed the stylisation of his first-person narrator’s voice for his brand of realism. His representations of virile yet inarticulate masculinity, so favoured by his contemporaries, drew on entrenched stereotypes of the colony as the stronghold of the athletic man, shaped by the Great Depression, physical labour and war, an ideology of physical strength and pragmatism that was central to a national narrative of self-sufficiency. Other shared aesthetic preferences appear in the way both adopted and transformed inherited modes and genres − the yarn, sketch and anecdote, associated with the oral traditions of early colonial cultures − in order to give voice to outlaw figures and social outsiders, waifs, misfits and itinerants.19 Mansfield was probably familiar with the frontier stories of Henry Lawson,20 while Sargeson introduces intertexts from Lawson, Sherwood Anderson and Mark Twain, literary precursors who mediate and inform his conversational stylisation of the colonial encounter. Mansfield’s deracinated characters in her three ‘outback’ stories, ‘The Woman at the Store’, ‘Ole Underwood’ and ‘Millie’, are adaptations of her earlier observations of New Zealand outback life to the modernist demand for the primitive and savage. Both writers feature underdeveloped, psychologically disconnected characters who lack insight into their motives and whose behaviour reflects the cruelty of life and thinness of civilisation. The stories recapitulate similar pioneering characteristics: arbitrary death, irrational behaviour, the loss of moral order. A murder lies at the heart of Mansfield’s; her structures of psychological disorder are mirrored in the violent deaths and explosive climaxes of Sargeson’s stories like ‘A Great Day’, ‘I’ve Lost My Pal’, ‘A Good Boy’ and ‘Sale Day’. They also share a critique of normative gender structures. Mansfield’s stories like ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, which interrogate and reframe images of women as oppressed and exploited, are comparable to Sargeson’s attempts to create more representational space for the covert, frustrated homosexual in a homophobic society. Mansfield’s resistance to patriarchy finds an echo in Sargeson’s concealed alienation from bourgeois values and heterosexual norms. The restlessness and mobility of their protagonists constitute a shared reproach to and Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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apparent rejection of family life. Sargeson embraces drifters, wanderers, the rootless. In That Summer, the hero has ‘itchy feet’, a casual lifestyle, money slips through his fingers and he moves about in search of love. Mansfield’s female protagonists in stories like ‘An Indiscreet Journey’ and ‘The Little Governess’ are solitary, seeking experience as travellers who enter new spaces and dream or improvise alternative versions of their identities. Also reflecting the emphasis on marginal and socially disparate individuals are their characters’ transient living arrangements and alternative types of accommodation. Boarding houses, hotels and pensions, often with alienating impersonal officials, feature in Mansfield’s stories, while Sargeson’s drifting, unemployed men dwell in makeshift spaces: converted barns and stables, old washhouses in people’s backyards. Narrative fracture, discontinuity, disjunction and interruption, which illustrate the tentativeness of national discourses then, therefore, are vehicles of social critique, but also mirror contemporary social realities: Mansfield’s restlessness reflects the mobility of single women in the early twentieth century; Sargeson’s stories like ‘I’ve Lost my Pal’ and ‘A Man and his Wife’ draw on the domestic upheaval of working-class men during the 1930s slump. Both writers in different ways sought new narrative positions to articulate the individual’s experience in a manner that might inflect and interpret nation formation. Mansfield was motivated to write stories about her New Zealand childhood by nostalgia and a longing for reconnection from a distance. Sargeson, aiming to establish a discourse of alienation and critique from within to create the illusion of collective belonging, adapted European and American literary models to local conditions, and engaged with the orthodoxies of canonical writing as in ‘The Making of a New Zealander’.21 Being positioned tangentially or outside national social norms made both conscious of the gaps in cultural consciousness represented by fundamental instabilities in categories of fiction. Their narratives offer in a form of ambivalent identification, a sense of what it might be to become a nation. In Homi Bhabha’s terms, they function as representations that ‘move between different cultural formations and social processes without a “centred” causal logic’.22 An awareness of dominant social exclusions, limited linguistic structures and categories contribute to their shared sense of approximation and tentativeness in positioning their gendered difference from national hegemonies. These parallel images of doubt, reticence and disconnection illustrate Bhabha’s point, drawing on Erich Gellner, that questions of the nation as narration can only be posed in that impasse between ‘the shreds and patches of cultural signification’, the arbitrary historical inventions and ‘the certainties of national pedagogies’.23 Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Similarities between Mansfield and Sargeson − of the questioning or denial of self in fiction, and the hesitation over familiar categories of national self definition − therefore suggest an embryonic formative positioning, enabling the possibility of writing that embraces the idea of the nation. Sargeson’s writing, with its multi-layered allusions and associations, represents the uncertainty and inconclusiveness of literary inventions of the nation by implying that more than one cultural model of New Zealandness could be incorporated into the realist mode. By the late 1930s there was sufficient cultural distance from Mansfield for him to redeploy her tropes and values to interrupt and complicate its monocultural emphasis. Although Mansfield’s ‘outback’ stories are read in relation to New Zealand regional fiction,24 it was her ‘feminine’ metropolitan themes that Sargeson turned to, implicitly counterpointing their different registers, styles and modes to his rural, realist settings. The contrast between the middle-class narrator’s effusion of grief in ‘The Canary’, uttered in an affective register, and the laconic voice of the displaced male narrator of ‘A Man and his Wife’ is so striking as to confound any suggestion of direct influence. The canary in Sargeson’s story, as a symbol of ‘Perfect company’,25 worshipped by Ted, the narrator’s working-class mate, recalls Mansfield’s lamenting narrator’s worship of her pet. The bird’s narratological function, however, is to bridge competing social-sexual motivations − the narrator’s latent homosexual desire for Ted, Ted’s decision to return to his wife after the bird flies off and the wife’s willingness to resume heteronormative sexual relations after her husband had seemingly adapted to the comradeship of single-man Depression life. Sargeson develops Mansfield’s interweaving of voice, death and loss in ‘The Canary’ in order to deepen his thematic preoccupation with acts of communication and to foreground the oblique exchanges between the narrator and his mate Ted, and between Ted and his wife, dog and canary.26 His pioneer models of outback writing, Sherwood Anderson, Mark Twain and Henry Lawson, would not have provided the symbolic frame or techniques of impersonation required to elevate his art above that of parable or sketch. But if ‘The Canary’ is read as a concealed intertext of ‘A Man and his Wife’, then Sargeson’s transposition of Mansfield’s female narrator’s pleasure in her canary to Ted’s enjoyment in his, and of her lament at the bird’s death to Ted’s decision at his bird’s flight and then the narrator’s unvoiced disappointment at Ted’s departure, reinvigorates his social realism and helps assert the ontological priority of his own universe. W. H. New notes that ‘it is this control over speech – developing a voice with which to represent the voiceless sensibility – that Sargeson works out his own artistic medium’; 27 yet it has not been Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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observed how much this voice excludes and supplants other voices and styles, such as Mansfield’s, even mocking them indirectly in order to gain its prominence. ‘A Man and his Wife’ is a Depression story set in the North Island. Sargeson’s working-class narrator, living with other relief workers in sheds and washhouses, speaks a colloquial Kiwi idiom. Male bonding comes from social egalitarianism and the destabilising of gender distinctions: the narrator says ‘in bad times . . . people’s habits aren’t quite the same’, that odd kinds of living arrangements caused by the slump create a ‘certain sort of comradeship’.28 The story turns on the fact that the narrator’s mate, Ted, seems to prefer the company of ‘our gang’ to that of his wife, while the canary represents a new level of communication. But in the end, despite considerable badinage and mocking of women, Ted returns to his marriage, implying that women are essential for social normality and stability. Mansfield’s story, by contrast, despite its Wellington background, is set in a European pension. Her middle-class narrator, with an uninflected accent but sentimental tone, is at odds with her three male boarders who call her ‘the Scarecrow’,29 isolated in her grief at the bird’s death. Despite these differences in style, mode and setting, significant contiguities of theme and character hint at Mansfield’s influence. Both stories are told in the first person by vulnerable, lonely narrators whose devotion to a canary separates them from other company. ‘A Man and his Wife’ overlaps with its precursor by focusing on the canary’s heightened meaning for its owner due to its entertaining antics, communicative capacities and human-like voice. The tragedy of the bird’s death inspires Mansfield’s narrator’s lament at being left alone, while the bird’s flight in ‘A Man and his Wife’ catalyses the anticlimactic denouement, following Ted’s decision to abandon the narrator (as the latter sees it) and return to his wife.30 The narrator’s sorrowful realisation of the lost opportunity to articulate his latent attraction to Ted, his repressed desires, leads to his role in the renewed marriage in which as a third presence he opens up a new space for heterosexual and homoerotic relations to coexist:31 ‘it wasn’t long before I was going round regularly twice a week for a game of cards with the pair of them’.32 The loss of the canary as the medium of ideal communication and symbol of perfect union marks an irreversible change in the scheme of things. Mansfield’s canary symbolically represents her intertwined art and life; her identification with the bird’s imprisonment, for example, appears in the analogy in a letter to her cousin, Elizabeth von Armin, to her ‘little stories like birds bred in cages’.33 The bird’s lifeless body signifies the narrator’s mortality (‘something seemed to die in me’), yet Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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her invocation of its presence − the hook on which his cage hung, and the words, ‘I feel he is not quite forgotten’ − constitute some redemption from silence and apparent oblivion, hinting at art’s capacity to immortalise. The comment, ‘I should like to think it was there always after my time’, also implies perpetuation beyond the textual present.34 In Sargeson’s story, the canary, at first a neutral figure of companionship, comes to symbolise for the narrator the undeveloped, untested male relationship and the possibility of love, which ends when the bird flies away. Ted’s laconic explanation for returning to his wife, because she ‘never let me down’, articulates the core value of Sargesonian mateship.35 Ted verbally attributes to her the comradeship he shared with the narrator, even appropriating the idiom that the latter would have used of himself, so ‘betraying’ the narrator’s desire. The concluding exchange in Sargeson’s tautest, most enigmatic style constitutes a failed epiphany. The narrator’s disappointment at the dashing of his aspirations in this cross-wired reversal of expectation remains unexpressed: ‘I’ve still got the wife, he said. Yes, I said. The wife never let me down he said. No. I said. It was all I could think of to say.’36 In this oblique conclusion which the reader must decipher, Sargeson demonstrates how he is Mansfield’s disciple, that he has learnt from her ‘art of inferential narrative’, the value of absence or silence to fix ‘attention on the inarticulate (or at least inarticulated) sources of people’s motivation’.37 Both stories demonstrate a preoccupation with reciprocity in communication by recording the limits of the bird’s transient presence and ability to articulate, entertain, bestow and receive love. The canary symbolises the power of the voice, of song-making as an emblem of tonal, sonic harmony. In this context, and as performer and mimic of the human voice, it offers a kind of intimacy between different versions of the self that exceeds that offered by human relationships. Ted refuses food and the company of the narrator’s gang because ‘he’d sooner just sit there and kid to the bird’;38 Mansfield’s narrator details her bird’s ‘little entertainment’, acclaiming his performance with ‘You’re a regular little actor.’39 This is all the more poignant because of the bird’s associations with enslavement and constraint through being caged and its instinct for liberation and freedom. Sargeson’s narrator, for example, observes that after Ted’s bird flies away ‘in the tree it sounded as though it was singing better than ever before’.40 The greatest contrast between the stories is in their mode of address. The dramatic monologue of Mansfield’s final story, her impersonation of an emotional, middle-aged woman whose intense endearments − ‘There you are my darling’ − suggest excessive attachment and affection, is widely appreciated as her farewell to her art.41 Conversation Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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is emulated, as with attribution of ‘Missus! Missus!’ to the canary’s notes.42 The fading out of her voice and its re-emergence from silence is implied typographically by the use of ellipses at the beginning of some paragraphs, and of dashes, especially in the conclusion, arguably symbolising the flickering of the consciousness in its last moments. These typographically marked elisions and omissions can be read as hinting at death in the midst of life, and the concluding rhetorical questions − ‘But isn’t it extraordinary that under his sweet joyful little singing, it was just this – sadness? − Ah, what is it? – that I heard’43 − implies the beginning of an unbroken silence after voice disappears, just as the presence of the voice listening is a reminder that the sounds and cadences of speech carry farther than words into that silence. Sargeson’s narrator, by contrast, is an anecdotist whose laconic, casual mode of talking about ‘my cobber . . . on relief work like myself’44 is the story’s trademark. Narrative fracture and fragmentation point to the suppression of the narrator’s uncertain affections and his hesitations and aspirations concerning Ted, in contrast to the expressive function of the breaks and interruptions in the textual surface of Mansfield’s narrator’s monologue, which are correlated to her linked themes of silence, death and loss. What is unsaid and what the conclusion points to in hinting at the narrator’s perplexity about the renewed marriage, make this a narrative of repressed love, to which the sparse title, ‘A Man and His Wife’, is a provocative counterpoint. The degree to which Sargeson was borrowing from Mansfield and the subtlety of his appropriation of her text can be inferred from specific details. In both stories the owner’s elevation of the canary above a highly prized predecessor in their affections confirms its unsurpassable value. Ted had a dog which ‘was nothing special . . . but Ted was certainly fond of it’;45 he talked to the dog more than to his wife, causing their separation. In ‘The Canary’ the predecessor is the unlikely entity of the evening star but ‘after he came into my life I forgot the evening star; I did not need it any more’.46 Sargeson’s close reading of Mansfield’s story and transposition of its middle-class concerns into a socialist-realist mode, overruling and displacing the ‘feminine’ voice in an act of curtailment, can be inferred from other details. The ‘nice fox terrier’47 that the washerwoman in Mansfield’s story recommends as an alternative pet is echoed in the role of Ted’s dog. The single reference to a Chinaman when the cobbers ‘had to raid a Chinaman’s garden after we’d spent all our money in the pubs’,48 recalls the Chinaman in Mansfield’s story who comes to the door with the canary and other birds to sell. Finally, ‘A Man and his Wife’ can be read as a rural, realist recasting of Mansfield’s middle-class narrator’s values, a provincial ‘writing back’ to and implicit Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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mocking of her metropolitan voice. Her hyperbolic lament at the bird’s death, with its intimations of mortality − ‘When I found him, lying on his back, with his eye dim and his claws wrung, when I realised that never again should I hear my darling sing, something seemed to die in me’ − is juxtaposed with Sargeson’s narrator’s unemotional reflection on birds who die as parasites trapped in the fur or wool of other animals: ‘once on a sheep farm I found a little skeleton tangled in the wool on a sheep’s back’.49 Mansfield’s narrator’s image of the death of a pampered, piteous pet is subverted by this rural recasting in which death is represented as arbitrary, cruel and utterly anonymous. With these likely intertextual allusions to ‘The Canary’ Sargeson acknowledges Mansfield as rival and predecessor, and repositions her concerns in the context of more democratic, egalitarian working-class values, deliberately masculinising them. He ‘nationalises’ her interior monologue by a middle-aged bourgeois woman as a New Zealand yarn told by a working-class male. Moreover, he suggestively picks up and reframes her theme of perfect communication in order to give new voice to his anxieties about the possibility of effective and fulfilling male relationships. The canary’s voice adds a new dimension to the story’s thematic preoccupation with communication; for the idea of complete fulfilment in conversations with the canary, a pet with a near-human voice, which Mansfield initiates, is thematically enriching. It brilliantly elevates the implications of the outcome and the inability to communicate implied in the narrator’s inarticulate comment − ‘It was all I could think of to say’ − as the meaning of his repressed feelings about Ted dawns on him. A Man and his Wife was reprinted three times in less than four years and by the standards of the day was a bestseller.50 The eponymous story, however, has attracted very little critical attention. To argue that Sargeson’s place in New Zealand literary history might partly be due to covert intertextual borrowings from Mansfield, despite the disjunctive relationship usually constructed of their fictions, is to suggest continuity across the decades of New Zealand’s emerging cultural nationalism. Even as his influence defined the era of the 1930s to the 1950s (the ‘age of Sargeson’) − he may also, at least in ‘A Man and His Wife’ − have found ways of transcending it by appropriating and even mocking elements of Mansfield’s techniques of impersonation. These confer density and depth on his representations of moments of intensity, enabling the culturally approved discourse of masculine reticence to be informed by the occluded ‘feminised’ subtext of vulnerability, volubility and desire. Finally, the layered narrative and disparate viewpoints in ‘A Man and his Wife’, when read alongside ‘The Canary’, confirm the complexity of Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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the 1930s cultural nationalism that Sargeson did so much to shape: for his singular focus directed at its monocultural and largely homophobic society in fact consisted of more multiple literary and cultural formations and borrowings than he was prepared to concede in his lifetime, as indicated by his comment in the interview published in 1970: ‘I was never conscious of writing in the shadow of Katherine Mansfield or reacting from her.’51

Notes   1. C. K. Stead, ‘Meetings with “the Great Ghost”’, pp. 214, 226; W. H. New, Dreams of Speech and Violence, pp. 139−40, comments that irrational criteria continued the case against Mansfield into the 1950s.   2. Lydia Wevers, ‘The Short Story’, p. 222.   3. Lawrence Jones, Barbed Wire and Mirrors, p. 6; New, Dreams of Speech and Violence; Joel Gwynne, The Secular Visionaries; Mark Williams, ‘Frank Sargeson: Apostle of Love’.   4. First published in Tomorrow, 20 December 1939; see Janet Wilson (ed.), Frank Sargeson’s Stories, p. 368.   5. Katherine Mansfield, ‘The Canary’, Collected Fiction, vol. 2, pp. 511−14.   6. Gerri Kimber and Wilson, ‘Reconfiguring the National Canon’.   7. Sarah Ailwood, ‘Anxious Beginnings’.   8. Sargeson, ‘Conversation with Frank Sargeson’, p. 153.   9. Sargeson, ‘Katherine Mansfield’, p. 29. He stresses that this tradition is not inevitably associated with women writers. 10. Stead, ‘Meetings with “the Great Ghost”’, p. 214, notes the ‘undertone of irritation with Mansfield’; see also Kai Jensen, Whole Men, pp. 78–9. On Sargeson’s negativity towards Hyde, see Sarah Shieff (ed.), Letters of Frank Sargeson, pp. 12, 14−15. 11. Sargeson, ‘Conversation with Frank Sargeson’, p. 153. 12. Ibid. pp. 149, 172−4. 13. New, Dreams of Speech and Violence, p. 145; Gwynne, Secular Visionaries, p. 7. 14. Williams, ‘Frank Sargeson: Apostle of Love’, p. 232; Gwynne, Secular Visionaries, p. 59; Jensen, Whole Men, p. 172, on ‘the secret alliance between feminism and masculinism’ in New Zealand literature; Trevor James, ‘Towards an Appropriate Language’, pp. 46−7 on Sargeson’s symbolism. 15. Gwynne, Secular Visionaries, pp. 55−8; Williams, ‘Frank Sargeson: Apostle of Love’, pp. 215−16. 16. Frank Sargeson, ‘I for One. . .’, p. 140. 17. Simon During, ‘Towards a Revision of Local Critical Habits’, pp. 85−8. 18. John Newton, ‘Homophobia and the Social Pattern’; see Michael King, Frank Sargeson; Chris Brickell, Mates and Lovers, pp. 118−20. 19. King, New English Literatures, p. 141. 20. See Jenny’s McDonnell’s reading of ‘The Drover’s Wife’ and ‘The Woman

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218     Janet Wilson at the Store’, in Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Marketplace, pp. 48−9. 21. See Stuart Murray, Never a Soul at Home, pp. 157−63; Wevers, ‘The Sod Under my Feet’ p. 42, identifies the ‘nation as metaphor’ in Mansfield. 22. Homi Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation’, p. 293. 23. Ibid. p. 294. 24. Stead, ‘Katherine Mansfield’, p. 32; Jones, Barbed Wire & Mirrors, p. 6; Wevers, ‘How Kathleen Beauchamp was Kidnapped’. 25. Mansfield, ‘The Canary’, Collected Fiction, vol. 2, p. 513. 26. New, ‘Frank Sargeson as Social Story-Teller’, p. 345. 27. New, Among Worlds, pp. 149−50. 28. Sargeson, ‘A Man and his Wife’, p. 115. 29. Mansfield, ‘The Canary’, Collected Fiction, vol. 2, p. 513. 30. New, ‘Sargeson as Social Story-teller’, pp. 343−6, on the ‘act of communication’. 31. Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires, p. 105. 32. Sargeson, ‘A Man and his Wife’, p. 118; Wilson (ed.), Sargeson’s Stories, p. 13. 33. Mansfield, Letter to Elizabeth von Armin, 31 December 1922, Collected Letters, vol. 5, p. 346. 34. Mansfield, ‘The Canary’, Collected Fiction, vol. 2, p. 511. 35. In That Summer, in Wilson (ed.), Sargeson’s Stories, p. 162, this phrase is used of male relationships. 36. Sargeson, ‘A Man and his Wife’, p. 118. 37. New, Dreams of Speech and Violence, p. 137. 38. Sargeson, ‘A Man and his Wife’, p. 117. 39. Mansfield, ‘The Canary’, Collected Fiction, vol. 2, p. 512. 40. Sargeson, ‘A Man and his Wife’, p. 118. 41. Patricia Dunbar, Radical Mansfield, p. 72; Anne Mounic, ‘“Ah, What is it? − that I Heard”’, pp. 155−6. 42. Mansfield, ‘The Canary’, Collected Fiction, vol. 2, p. 512. 43. Ibid. p. 514. 44. Sargeson, ‘A Man and his Wife’, p. 115. 45. Ibid. p. 116. 46. Mansfield, ‘The Canary’, Collected Fiction, vol. 2, p. 512; see Mansfield, Notebooks, vol. 2, p. 291. 47. Ibid. p. 513. 48. Sargeson, ‘A Man and his Wife’, p. 112. 49. Mansfield, ‘The Canary’, Collected Fiction, vol. 2, p. 513; Sargeson, ‘A Man and his Wife’, p. 118. 50. King, Frank Sargeson, pp. 200−1. 51. Sargeson, ‘Conversation with Frank Sargeson’, p. 153.

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Chapter 16

Writing from the Cellar: Revisiting the Villa Isola Bella Brigid Magner

[. . .] your harsh breathing and impatient face, bright with consumption, must have left a trace held in the air. Fleur Adcock, ‘Villa Isola Bella’1

Katherine Mansfield lived and worked at the Villa Isola Bella in Port de Menton Garavan from September 1920 until May 1921. To commemorate Mansfield’s brief stay in Menton, the cellar of the villa was transformed into a Memorial Room, and an associated New Zealand writer’s residency was inaugurated in 1969. A rather haphazard reproduction of Mansfield’s original writing space transposed to the basement of the Villa Isola Bella, the Memorial Room prompts intriguing questions about the heritage practices associated with New Zealand’s most celebrated woman writer. This chapter will consider the ways in which Isola Bella continues to function as a ‘sacred site’ that, despite the many obstacles to entry, attracts pilgrims hoping to apprehend Mansfield’s absent-presence. Virginia Woolf used this term in relation to Shakespeare’s seeming omnipresence in Stratford-upon-Avon, which she visited in 1934. Woolf observes that Shakespeare is present in Stratford ‘not exactly in the flesh’ but ‘absent-present; both at once’.2 This is a useful description of the emotional experience of sensitive literary pilgrims. For Woolf, Shakespeare is a ‘spirit’, an evanescent ‘radiation’ that is barely perceptible. Nicola Watson calls the presence of an absence ‘tourist gothic’, a haunting, anti-realist experience.3 Mansfield herself was not immune to the lure of literary tourism, at least as a young woman. In 1903, at the age of fourteen, she was taken on a ‘cultural tour’ of England with her family. One of the objectives was to visit Shakespeare’s birthplace, a normal stop on the literary tourist’s itinerary.4 Later in life, Mansfield felt ambivalent about the memorialisation of writerly relics, as expressed in a letter to her husband, John Middleton Murry, dated 29 November 1920: Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

220     Brigid Magner Did you read in the Times that Shelley left on his table a bit of paper with a blot on it and a flung down quill? Mary S. had a glass case put over same and carried it all the way to London on her knees. Did you ever hear such rubbish!5

Given her ambivalence about the fetishisation of dead writers, Mansfield may have been dismayed by the ways in which she herself has been posthumously celebrated. Nonetheless, literary monuments such as the Memorial Room enable the apprehension of Mansfield’s absent presence in powerful and surprising ways. Although the Fellows working in the room do not tend to produce writing that is directly influenced by Mansfield, they have invariably found that the cellar of her former home has a potent atmosphere. It might be argued that tenancy in the Memorial Room is a challenging, sometimes confronting, rite of passage for New Zealand writers. They are encouraged to ‘channel’ the spirit of Katherine, to partake of her greatness, in order to write their own books. The various accounts of Mansfield’s ghostly possession of authors-in-residence only contribute further to the intriguing miasma of myth and fabulation surrounding her life and works. However, hauntings do not necessarily result in the transmission of literary influence from Mansfield to her putative successors; literary genealogy is a far more complex business. Mansfield’s ‘haunting’ of New Zealand literature has been registered by innumerable commentators. Marilyn Duckworth has argued that Mansfield is a ‘gloomy ancestral ghost’ who again and again haunts overseas reviews of New Zealand writers.6 In a sense, Mansfield presides over all literary production, prompting writers to continually imagine and reinvent her. As Roger Robinson observes, ‘No other New Zealand figure has troubled or challenged so many writers to irreverent, defiant or merely exploitative responses.’7 There is a persistent temptation to focus on Mansfield’s illness and death, therefore she is often figured as a suffering, mystical tubercular. In Ian Wedde’s Symme’s Hole (1986) Mansfield is seen as a figure of death, distracting from a more intimate connection with Pacific culture, while C. K. Stead’s The End of the Century at the End of the World (1992) features his character Katya faking her death and returning to New Zealand. Mansfield’s early demise and her complex legacy have inevitably spawned a wide range of irreverent and provocative incarnations of her in poetry and prose including Rachel McAlpine’s Fancy Dress (1979), Patricia Grace’s ‘Letters from Whetu’ in The Dream Sleepers (1980), Bob Orr’s ‘K.M.’ in Breeze (1991), Vincent O’Sullivan’s Jones and Jones (1989), Alma de Groen’s The Rivers of China (1988), Witi Ihimaera’s Dear Miss Mansfield (1989) and Chris Orsman’s ‘Another Country’ in Ornamental Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Gorse (1994). These textual tributes and provocations run parallel with the three major institutional forms of remembrance: the Mansfield Prize, the Memorial Room and the Katherine Mansfield Birthplace in Wellington. Despite Mansfield’s enormous contribution to New Zealand letters in the early twentieth century, the memorialisation of specific sites related to her began relatively late. In 1938, when Robin Hyde wrote her landmark essay ‘Singers of Loneliness’, plans were afoot to commemorate Mansfield’s birthplace: They have cut down all the pine-trees in the street where she lived, in order to give her a memorial consisting of flat grass garden beds and a red brick waiting-shed. Running away from that sort of thing is the most understandable policy in the world.8

Hyde noted a certain reluctance to celebrate Mansfield due to the fact that she had escaped from a ‘sham England, unsuccessfully transplanted to New Zealand soil’.9 Since she was a fugitive from colonial New Zealand, New Zealanders have found it difficult to understand her writing and have felt unsure about how to celebrate her memory. As Hyde asserts: ‘We claimed Katherine as a New Zealander, because we knew she was, and we knew that larger lands would have been exceedingly proud of her. But we’ve never exactly hung her portrait on the drawing room wall.’10 This ambivalence was made more evident when there was significant resistance to centennial celebrations in 1988. As Bridget Orr notes, Mansfield’s role as the first, perhaps even the only, peacock in the New Zealand literary garden, coupled with her expatriate status, has predictably provoked a discussion at least partly concerned with the question, ‘Is she one of us or just the one that got away?’11 Mansfield’s expatriation makes her a problematic figure in terms of literary heritage. For this reason, Linda Hardy argues that Mansfield simply cannot function as a sign of priority and pre-eminence in the national literature, despite the desire of nationalists to find a transcendent origin through celebration of her memory.12 Mansfield’s legacy is often understood to be a burden by subsequent writers, particularly if they have been Fellows in residence in Menton. The perceived pressure to address Mansfield through their literary production is either translated into works of homage or more often sidestepped. In 1920 Katherine Mansfield temporarily relocated to Menton on the Côte d’Azur in an effort to find a better climate for her advanced tuberculosis. Before moving into the Villa Isola Bella Mansfield stayed at the Clinique L’Hermitage, a private nursing home in Menton and afterwards at the Villa Flora with Connie Beauchamp, her elderly cousin and Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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her friend Jinnie Fullerton. Connie and Jinnie then bought a large house called the Villa Louise at Garavan, with a small house at the bottom of the garden called the Villa Isola Bella, which they rented to Mansfield and Ida Baker (L.M.). Described as a small house rather like a gardener’s cottage or a gatehouse, Isola Bella was for Katherine: ‘A dolls house with a verandah, garden, everything complete.’13 Mansfield’s descriptions of the Villa Isola Bella provide us with a detailed picture of what it was like to inhabit during her time there. Isola Bella was a grand stone house with a stucco roof, surrounded by tangerine and palm trees with a view down to the sea. On 13 November 1920, Mansfield wrote to Murry about Isola Bella: I hope when you have seen it you will be happy to think its our pied-à-terre. I cant expect you to feel about it as I do. For me its for some reason the place to work in. Found at last. Its the writing table. But I only want to sit and write here until May 1922.14

She did not stay until 1922, when her lease was due to expire, as she was forced to seek further medical attention elsewhere. In a letter to Murry dated 14 September 1920 she offered details about the joys of the villa: This villa is – so far – perfect. It has been prepared inside and out to such an extent that I don’t think it will ever need a hand’s turn again. The path from the gate to the two doors has a big silver mimosa showering across it. The garden is twice as big as I imagined. One can live in it all day . . . Upstairs are four bedrooms . . . The others have balconies & again are carpeted all over & sumptuous in a doll’s house way.15

Despite her extremely poor health, the peaceful atmosphere at Isola Bella contributed greatly to her productivity. The early months of Mansfield’s stay were the most prolific. The three months to December 1920 produced an incredible spate of stories from Mansfield. In addition to weekly reviews for the Athenaeum, she sent Murry copies of ‘The Young Girl’, ‘The Stranger’, ‘The Ladies’ Maid’ and ‘Poison’ all before Christmas. ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, a caricature of Ida Baker and Mansfield’s cousin Sylvia Payne, was finished in midFebruary 1921 after a period when Mansfield was confined to her room by illness. She completed the draft of the story ‘through yet another sleepless night’ and she and Ida celebrated at 3 a.m. over a cup of tea ‘with the pale morning light gleaming through the golden sprays of the mimosa trees’.16 Some of her writing came to her in dreams as she slept at the villa; ‘The Young Girl’, for example, was inspired by one of her ‘queer hallucinations’ there.17 While Mansfield was living at the villa, she often reflected on her early life in New Zealand. Her journal and letters from this period frequently Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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feature comparisons between Menton and New Zealand. In a letter dated 22 October 1920, she compares the two places: In fact I think Menton must be awfully like N.Z. – but ever so much better . . . What silly little things to tell you – but they make a kind of Life – they are part of a Life that – Bogey – I LOVE. If you were here you’d know what I mean. Its a kind of freedom – a sense of living – not enduring – not existing – but being alive.18

Mansfield had sought respite from England, a country she began to see as depressing and soul-destroying once her health dramatically worsened. Judging by her letters and journal entries, she appears to have found a degree of peace at the Isola Bella, albeit briefly: I love this place more and more. One is conscious of it as I used to be conscious of New Zealand . . . Why I don’t feel like this in England heaven knows. But my light goes out, in England, or its a very small & miserable shiner.19

She saw Isola Bella as the first home she had ever loved and wished, perhaps unrealistically, to buy it: This little place is and always will be for me the one and only place, I feel. My heart beats for it like it beats for Karori . . . Am I a little mad? You will find ISOLA BELLA in poker work on my heart.20

These words are now on the plaque outside the entrance to the Memorial Room, welcoming Fellows and sightseers alike. The Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship − now known as the Mansfield Prize − and the associated Memorial Room in Menton were officially established in 1970. The Fellowship originated with Cecil and Cecilia Manson, authors who wrote on early pioneers in New Zealand, and at least one children’s historical story, The Lonely One, set in New Zealand of the 1960s. After visiting the derelict basement of the Isola Bella in 1967, the Mansons formed a committee with arts benefactor Sheilah Winn to raise funds for an overseas bursary to enable writers to live and work in Menton. The house was zoned by the local government as a site of historic interest and subsequently transferred to the Winn-Manson Menton Trust with maintenance to be overseen by the City of Menton. Support for the Fellowship has consistently come from the Winn-Manson Trust but some funds have also been contributed by the French government, as well as sponsorships from companies such as New Zealand Post and the now defunct Electricity Corporation of New Zealand (ECNZ). The award is currently being administered by Creative New Zealand. A small room below the terrace of the villa is provided for Fellows, since the house itself is now divided up into Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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separate ­apartments. The Memorial Room is granted to Fellows for the period of one year for use as a study, although early Fellows such as Michael King and Marilyn Duckworth were known to have slept there, despite the lack of amenities.21 The room has evolved organically rather than being strictly ‘curated’, as many writers’ houses have been.22 The City of Menton originally provided the furnishings for the Mansfield Memorial Room and has kept it maintained adequately since the Fellowship began. Since this space was not actually inhabited by Mansfield, it is only an approximation of what her writing room upstairs looked like, based on photographs. It contains furnishings such as bookshelves, tables and a single bed. However, these are not the real items that Mansfield herself owned.23 It is not known precisely which space Mansfield used for her writing in the house, and given the current inaccessibility and remodelling of the upstairs floor, this is difficult to ascertain. However, there are suggestions in her letters to Murry that she worked in different locations inside and outside the house. In a letter dated 10 October 1920 she says, ‘I’ve got a HUGE umbrella lashed to the Terrace in place of that tente which was too expensive, of course – The umbrella does just as well. Oh, that you were here, just at this moment, sharing this sky and this gentle breeze!’24 L.M. remembers that a chaise longue and large striped umbrella on a stand were put on the terrace. The chaise longue was spread with ‘a big karosse of flying squirrel skins’, which L.M.’s father had brought back from Africa. Katherine would sit on the terrace and read or write most of the day, when the weather was warm enough.25 This location on the terrace was probably directly above the space where the Memorial Room is located today. In a letter dated 14 September 1920, Mansfield wrote that in the garden there were three large ‘caves’ and a lapinière or rabbit hutch on the grounds of Isola Bella.26 These caves were quite likely to have been wine cellars and one of them might have been later converted into a gardener’s shed (used during Mansfield’s time) before being transformed into the Memorial Room in 1970. Winn-Manson Trust board member Richard Cathie believes that the present Memorial Room was almost certainly used by the gardener at the time of Mansfield’s residence.27 When I first entered the Mansfield Memorial Room in 1998, I found it hard to believe that the tubercular author could have worked in such a dank, dingy space. I went there relatively ignorant of the circumstances of her stay in the house. It was only after some research that I realised Mansfield actually occupied the house above, along with L.M. and a servant named Marie. The location of Isola Bella on the Côte d’Azur summons up images of ease and luxury, but when you visit the house Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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itself you discover that the railway platform is directly in front of it, with trains passing by every fifteen minutes in summertime, rendering it a less than idyllic haven for writing. As a visitor to the Memorial Room, I felt keenly my role as a sightseer, seeking connection with one of the sites of Mansfield’s literary production. Although curious about what I would find at the Isola Bella, I also felt uncomfortable about being part of Mansfield’s cult following, which struck me as rather mawkish. I had previously been reluctant to undertake research on Mansfield’s writing at school and university. Given her towering presence within New Zealand literary studies, I felt she had already been ‘done to death’ as an object of study. Despite my sense of unease, I took photos of the Memorial Room like any other tourist as proof of my visit. I am grateful for these now as I attempt to describe the room, which would otherwise be little more than a vague recollection. The floor of the room was laid with brown tiles and featured a small floral carpet. The furnishings included an old single bed with sateen coverlet, a low table beneath the window, a small writing desk with a lace tablecloth, reading lamp and small pot of ink and a fountain pen. There were also a few framed pictures, one of which was sitting on the floor, awaiting restoration to its proper place. Two bookcases, with a messy arrangement of books suggested an ad hoc accumulation over time. Through the barred window I could see a glimpse of palm frond from the garden beyond. After a brief survey, I felt an impulse to escape the stuffy air and the inexplicably heavy atmosphere in the room. My central impression was one of confinement and claustrophobia, partly due to the small scale and darkness of the space. Lacking a guide with local knowledge, or a frame through which to see the room, I was inevitably disappointed. Jonathan Culler argues that a place must be marked as ‘authentic’ and ‘sight-worthy’ for it to make sense to the tourist.28 This ‘authentication’ is partly achieved by the plaques outside the Memorial Room, the Rue Katherine Mansfield nearby, along with the listing of Mansfield sites in a few publications and on selected tourist publications and web pages. Compared with many other tourist attractions in the region, the Memorial Room is not well promoted since it functions primarily as a private writing space. For this reason, it is mainly literary people, writers and devotees of Mansfield who choose to seek it out. One of the most celebrated visitors to the room was Nobel laureate Patrick White in 1976. According to Michael King, his first words on entering this ‘revered cultural shrine’ were, ‘Where’s the dunny?’29 As White observed, the amenities in the room were basic, to say the least. Since my own visit, I have discovered that other visitors also Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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exhibited disappointed responses, particularly if they had been denied entry to the interior. In the Katherine Mansfield Society Newsletter from December 2009, Riemke Ensing writes about the poet Helen Shaw’s visit to Isola Bella, which generated a poem entitled ‘Today At the Villa Isola Bella’ (1985).30 On 6 September 1984, at the age of 71, Shaw made the ‘fairly arduous’ journey up the ‘steeply climbed’ memorial drive only to be excluded from the room by a locked gate. Even though the villa was inviting with its ‘orange stone’ and ‘open windows’, there was no entry for the poet from New Zealand. Failing to gain entry, Shaw takes a scrap of cypress ‘to take up the memory of the place’, which she sends in her letter to Ensing. Shaw suggests that Mansfield herself is also shut out. As Ensing puts it, ‘Mansfield herself is now perhaps as excluded and alienated from this house as the poet herself feels herself to be.’31 Anne French’s poem ‘A visit to Isolla Bella’ [sic] also registers a sense of exclusion, as she was intimate with a Fellow who no longer inhabits the room: The villa is empty, and the room Unlived in − the new fellow has left His name on the letter-box, but he Doesn’t write here, and the shutters Are closed. Nothing to do but take photographs. I pose in front of The locked gate.32

The common thread of alienation woven through these accounts suggests that although tourists routinely seek places ‘off the beaten track’ with an aura of ‘authenticity’, this desired sense of ‘real-ness’ is elusive. Dean MacCannell observes that many sites only allow tourists to access spaces of ‘staged authenticity’.33 This is true of the Memorial Room, which is basically a renovated gardener’s shed containing a few accoutrements reminiscent of Mansfield. Although the Villa Isola Bella was not the house where she died, Mansfield was only two years away from her final illness at the Gurdjieff Institute in Fontainebleau and this fact lends a certain gravitas to the site itself. Like the ‘doomed’ Brontë sisters, Mansfield appeals to readertourists partly because of her tragically shortened life and the intense and passionate way she lived it. A ‘necromantic’ impulse, characterised by a quest for intimacy with the dead,34 propels tourists towards Mansfield’s final resting place in Fontainebleau. Former Fellow Stephanie Johnson was greatly disappointed to find that Mansfield’s grave identifies her only as Middleton Murry’s wife:

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Revisiting the Villa Isola Bella     227 I fumed at how her headstone reads Katherine Mansfield – Wife of Middleton Murry. No mention of her genius. We had no flowers so I left her a rollie, mindful of the begging letters to Middleton Murry to bring her cigarettes and books.35

As Michael Taussig writes in relation to Walter Benjamin’s grave: ‘Death is an awkward business. And so is remembrance.’ Taussig observes that the awkwardness of the visitor to Benjamin’s gravesite suggests a fundamental inability to deal with death and the need to reinvent procedures acknowledging it.36 Precisely because Mansfield’s headstone does not refer to Mansfield’s authorial identity in any way, the Villa Isola Bella assumes more significance for pilgrims wishing to connect with one of the final locations for Mansfield’s writing. The Mansfield Fellows’ impressions of the room have been recorded in two books, which provide insight into their varied experiences.37 For the Fellows staying in Menton, the Mansfield room could be either a source of frustration or inspiration. In their recollections about their time at the Memorial Room, some Fellows felt the spirit of Mansfield strongly while others could not connect with her presence at all. Former Fellow Stephanie Johnson describes her time at Isola Bella as being utterly transformative. Initially immune, and even resistant, to the Mansfield ‘cult’ as a young woman, Johnson embraced the opportunity to engage with Mansfield’s work when she was awarded the Fellowship in her late thirties. She remembers feeling Mansfield around her as she worked, along with the presence of former Fellows whose books were left behind in the room. In a speech reflecting on her residence at Isola Bella, Johnson claims that the Fellowship had an ‘incalculable effect’ on her life and work and that she sometimes still dreams of her time there.38 Fleur Adcock’s poem ‘Villa Isola Bella’ suggests that she was deeply affected by sleeping in the Memorial Room with her sister Marilyn: Your villa, Katherine, but not your room, and not much of your garden. Goods trains boom a dozen metres from the bed where tinier tremors hurtle through my head. The ghost of your hot flat-iron burns my lung; My throat’s all scorching lumps. I grope among Black laurels and the shadowy date palm, made Like fans of steel, each rustling frond a blade, Across the gravel to the outside loo Whose light won’t wake my sleeping sister.39

In this passage Mansfield’s ‘haunting’ produces bodily symptoms: burning lungs and scorching lumps in the throat of the poet. Adcock Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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drags on Silk Cut filters while imagining Mansfield smoking ‘shameless Turkish’ throughout her stay. She observes that ‘disease is portable’; her pink throat-gargle reminds her of Mansfield’s ‘spat scarlet’.40 This image recurs in Marilyn Duckworth’s recollections: ‘In Garavan in 1980 you came closer and haunted my sleep until I woke, my mouth “bubbling with idiot fear, like your own dark blood”, as I put it in a poem.’41 Harry Gill, the central character in Janet Frame’s posthumously published In the Memorial Room (2013), falls asleep in the garden outside the ‘Rose Hurndell Memorial Room’ and dreams that wine-coloured squashy berries began to rain on him like ruby-stones, ruby-fruit, filling his eyes with red juices, echoing the way Rose Hurndell died; ‘a sudden overflowing of life-blood into the brain’.42 Frame wrote the story of Harry Gill, writer and recipient of the ‘Armstrong-Watercress Fellowship’ while she resided at the Memorial Room in 1974. Frame did not allow publication during her lifetime due to the portraits of members of the Fellowship committee it contains, who are depicted unflatteringly as vampiric figures ‘nourishing themselves with the power of permanence which death has and which they so much desire’.43 The Hurndell room is also described in Frame’s novel Living in the Maniototo (1979), which appeared after a silence of seven years. In both books, the space is associated with death: There was an air of desolation in the room and beyond it. The water-spotted plaques, giving once again details of Rose Hurndell’s career, were scarcely legible. There was a desk, a bookshelf, a few straight-backed vicarage type chairs and a layer of cold along the bare tiled floor . . . Here, I thought, if one were a spirit or dead, is a sanctuary . . . A unique memorial, to pay a writer to work within a tomb!44

For Frame, the room exudes a kind of eerie peacefulness, but is essentially unsuited for human habitation. Harry Gill is encouraged to ‘just feel it all’ on his first visit to the Memorial Room as if Hurndell’s spirit permeates the place.45 Harry feels intensely sad while sitting at her desk but does not experience any sense of the transcendence promoted by her admirers. Connie Watercress tells Harry that they are planning improvements to the Memorial Room including ‘a glass case in the room, with two of her notebooks (one has no writing in it but it’s the kind she always bought, from Woolworths) and a handkerchief, some early photos, a copy of a certificate won at primary school for the best long jump − Long Jump Champion, just imagine!’46 In this way, Frame parodies the obsessive literary memorialisation of the Hurndell groupies in Menton and their seemingly absurd practices of remembrance. C. K. Stead notes the irony in the fact that ‘a novel about the memorialising of a dead writer, which is in part a satire on Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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such pieties, should be posthumously published as itself an act of memorialisation of (as the jacket reminds us) “one of New Zealand’s greatest writers”’.47 Frame’s direct use of her experience of the Memorial Room in her fiction is fairly unusual amongst past Fellows. Fellows frequently claim that they were deeply affected by their use of the Memorial Room, yet their work does not generally reveal traces of Mansfield, showing that literary influence usually fails to occur where it might be most anticipated. Russell Haley, however, claims that the establishment of the Memorial Room in a cellar space enables writers to access Mansfield’s ‘unconscious’, arguing that an appreciation of her morbid thoughts and recurrent dreams of death became more vivid for him when writing from this underground space. Haley was possessed of thoughts of death both awake and asleep during his Fellowship, which followed the death of his own daughter Katherine. For months in that underground room at the Villa Isola Bella I was willingly in Katherine Mansfield’s shadow. And having gone through her deaths, dreaming her dreams, finally accepting my own deaths, I emerged from the shadows in January and began to write my own stories.48

For Carl Jung, the cellar could be read as the basement of a person’s psyche. In fact the notion of the collective unconscious emerged from a dream about cellars that Jung had in 1909 on board a ship returning from the United States with Freud. The dream depicted a house that had a cellar below the normal cellar and below that a repository of prehistoric pottery, bones and skulls. The descent into the cellar may, then, signify the dark journey into one’s stored (and perhaps repressed) past. Gaston Bachelard describes the cellar as ‘the dark entity of the house, the one that partakes of subterranean forces’. Whereas attics are associated with rationality, the cellar is forever aligned with the irrational aspects of human nature.49 The latent symbolism of the Memorial Room located in the cellar of the Villa Isola Bella has been a subject of contemplation for many, if not all the Fellows who have inhabited it. The memorialisation of Mansfield that officially commenced in 1959 with the establishment of the Katherine Mansfield Awards began as a side effect of cultural nationalism. With the emergence of the national literary canon, Mansfield was institutionalised as part of a nascent national mapping. The practice of preserving literary heritage serves to link tourists imaginatively with a sense of national identity through the medium of literature. One of the main effects of literary tourism is to expand intellectual property both within and beyond national ­boundaries − as in the case of the Memorial Room. Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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Although the Wellington birthplace has been carefully restored with close attention paid to historical detail, it does not generate as much attention − or literary tributes − as the Memorial Room at Isola Bella, which is a far poorer replica of Mansfield’s original dwelling. As Linda Hardy observes, ‘the well-established institutional priority of Isola Bella over Tinakori Rd has the effect of displacing the national shrine to Katherine Mansfield from New Zealand to France’. The place where Mansfield might ‘most walk’, Hardy argues, is from the point of view of national discourse problematically elsewhere.50 Others would argue that the Mansfield Fellowship actually encourages confluence between France and New Zealand, adding a cosmopolitan dimension to local literary culture. Mansfield herself connects Menton and Wellington in her letters and journal entries, as Anne French does in her poem ‘A Visit to Isolla Bella’ [sic]: The terraced hillside The ochre-pink shuttered villas The cypresses Speak of Wellington The palms The olive groves The sea All speak of Wellington.51

With few exceptions, birthplaces are not usually where writers do their best work, therefore the site of Mansfield’s later residence in Menton is seen as more powerfully resonant than the house where she spent some of her early years. With its inaccurate location and amateurish recreation of Mansfield relics, the Memorial Room at once celebrates and compromises Mansfield’s reputation. The paucity of the room’s execution effectively encourages visitors to see her as a tubercular wraith confined in a dark enclosure rather than imagining her as an acclaimed modernist author at the peak of her powers. Opinions about the Memorial Room may be divided, yet there is no doubting the fact that it has generated substantial literary production by Fellows and visitors alike, however tenuously connected to Mansfield’s oeuvre.

Notes   1. Fleur Adcock, ‘Villa Isola Bella’, pp. 110−11.   2. Virginia Woolf, Diary, vol. 4, p. 219.   3. Nicola Watson, The Literary Tourist, p. 7.   4. Claire Tomalin, Katherine Mansfield, pp. 18−19.

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Revisiting the Villa Isola Bella     231   5. Katherine Mansfield, Letter to John Middleton Murry, 28 November 1920, Collected Letters, vol. 4, p. 126.   6. Marilyn Duckworth, in As Fair as New Zealand to Me, pp. 45−7.   7. Roger Robinson, ‘Katherine Mansfield’, p. 342.   8. Robin Hyde, ‘The Singers of Loneliness’, p. 355.   9. Ibid. p. 355. 10. Hyde, ‘The “Great N.Z. Novel”’, p. 217. 11. Bridget Orr, ‘Reading with the taint of the pioneer’, p. 447. 12. Linda Hardy, ‘The Ghost of Katherine Mansfield’, p. 417. 13. Kathleen Jones, Katherine Mansfield, p. 384. 14. Mansfield, Letter to Murry, 12 November 1920, Collected Letters, vol. 4, p. 109. 15. Mansfield, Letter to Murry, 14 September 1920, Collected Letters, vol. 4, p. 36. 16. Ida Baker (L.M.), Katherine Mansfield, p. 153. 17. Mansfield, Letter to Murry, 11 October 1920, Collected Letters, vol. 4, p. 66. 18. Mansfield, Letter to Murry, 22 October 1920, Collected Letters, vol. 4, pp. 78−9. 19. Mansfield, Letter to Murry, 28 October 1920, Collected Letters, vol. 4, p. 89. 20. Mansfield, Letter to Murry, 12 November 1920, Collected Letters, vol. 4, pp. 106−7. 21. In her speech at the Auckland Writers & Reader’s Festival on 16 May 2010, Stephanie Johnson referred to former Fellow Marilyn Duckworth cooking her dinner on a camp-stove in the Memorial Room. 22. For instance, Virginia Woolf’s former residence ‘Monk’s House’ in Rodmell, East Sussex has been completely refurbished and maintained by the National Trust, as are many other writers’ homes, especially in the United Kingdom. 23. A small selection of Mansfield’s relics − including her shawl − are occasionally exhibited at the Menton central library. 24. Mansfield, Letter to Murry, 10 October 1920, Collected Letters, vol. 4, p. 65. 25. Baker, Katherine Mansfield, p. 152. 26. Mansfield, Letter to Murry, 14 September 1920, Collected Letters, vol. 4, p. 36. 27. Richard Cathie, personal communication with the author, 10 January 2012. 28. Jonathan Culler, Framing the Sign, pp. 153−5. 29. Michael King, Letter to the Editor, Quote Unquote, December 1996/ January 1997 issue, (last accessed 29 October 2014). 30. Helen Shaw, ‘Today At the Villa Isola Bella’, pp. 38−9. 31. Shaw, in Riemke Ensing, ‘A memory of place’, p. 5. 32. Anne French, ‘A visit to Isola Bella’, pp. 435−7. 33. Dean MacCannell, ‘Staged Authenticity: Arrangements of Social Space in Tourist Settings’.

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232     Brigid Magner 34. Paul Westover, Necromanticism, p. 8. 35. Stephanie Johnson, Speech delivered as part of a Katherine Mansfield event at Auckland Readers & Writers Festival, 16 May 2010. 36. Michael Taussig, Walter Benjamin’s Grave, p. 7. 37. See Michael Gifkins (ed.), From A Room of Their Own and As Fair as New Zealand to Me. Short recollections from Fellows are archived on the Mansfield Prize website: www.mansfieldprize.org/quotes.html (last accessed 16 January 2015). These quotations are provided for promotional purposes and are, without exception, glowingly positive. 38. Johnson, Speech at Auckland Readers & Writers Festival, 16 May 2010. 39. Adcock, ‘Villa Isola Bella’, pp. 110−11. 40. Ibid. 41. Duckworth, in As Fair as New Zealand to Me, p. 47. 42. Janet Frame, In the Memorial Room, pp. 46−7. 43. Ibid. p. 65. 44. Ibid. pp. 44−5. 45. Ibid. p. 42. 46. Ibid. pp. 50−1. 47. C. K. Stead, Review of In the Memorial Room, p. 178. 48. Russell Haley, ‘In Katherine Mansfield’s Shadow’, p. 78. 49. Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space, pp. 17−18. 50. Hardy, ‘The Ghost of Katherine Mansfield’, p. 421. 51. French, ‘A visit to Isola Bella’, pp. 435−7.

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Notes on Contributors

Sarah Ailwood is Assistant Professor in the School of Law and Justice at the University of Canberra, Australia. She is Secretary of the Katherine Mansfield Society and has published articles on Mansfield in Katherine Mansfield Studies and Kunapipi. She has broad interests in modernist and eighteenth-century women’s writing, and in the intersections between law, literature and culture. She is currently working on projects tracing Australia’s copyright history and women’s autobiographical responses to the justice system. Bonny Cassidy is a poet and essayist. She has authored a libretto of Eve Langley’s The Pea-pickers and, most recently, her second poetry collection, Final Theory (2014). Bonny lectures in Creative Writing at RMIT University and is feature reviews editor for Cordite Poetry Journal. Jessica Gildersleeve is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Southern Queensland. She is the author of Elizabeth Bowen and the Writing of Trauma: The Ethics of Survival (2014), as well as essays on writers including Agatha Christie, Jean Rhys and Rosamond Lehmann. Jessica serves as Marketing Secretary of the Katherine Mansfield Society and her current projects include the edited collection, Elizabeth Bowen: Innovation, Experiment, and Literary Reputation (with Patricia Juliana Smith) and a critical study of the work of Christos Tsiolkas. Melinda Harvey is Lecturer in English at Monash University, Australia. She is on the Editorial Board of the journal, Katherine Mansfield Studies and on the Executive Committee of the Australian Modernist Studies Network. Her essay on Mansfield and animals − called ‘Katherine Mansfield’s Menagerie’ – appeared in the edited collection, Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism (2011).

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Michael Hollington is Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Kent, Canterbury, having held chairs prior to retirement in Australia (University of New South Wales), France (Toulon, Toulouse) and elsewhere. He is a Dickens specialist − author of Dickens and the Grotesque, editor of Charles Dickens: Critical Assessments (4 vols), The Reception of Charles Dickens in Europe (2 vols), etc. − but has also published widely on a variety of authors in early modern and modern British and comparative literature, including Milton, Mansfield and Grass. Mark Houlahan teaches Shakespeare and Critical Theory in the English Programme at the University of Waikato, Hamilton New Zealand. He is also the President of the Australia and New Zealand Shakespeare Association. His edition of Twelfth Night was recently published in the Broadview/Internet Shakespeare series, and he has edited a collection of essays, Shakespeare and Emotions: Histories, Enactments, Legacies (2015). Gerri Kimber is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Northampton. She is co-editor of Katherine Mansfield Studies, the peer-reviewed yearbook of the Katherine Mansfield Society, of which she is also Chair. She is the deviser and Series Editor of the four-volume Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield (2012−15). She is the author of Katherine Mansfield: The View from France (2008), Katherine Mansfield and the Art of the Short Story (2015) and Katherine Mansfield’s Early Years (forthcoming, 2016). In 2014, Gerri was runner-up for the title UK New Zealander of the Year for her services to New Zealand culture. Additionally, she was awarded a Harry Ransom Research Fellowship at the University of Texas in Austin, 2014−15, and a Society of Authors, Authors’ Foundation Award, in 2014. Katie Macnamara teaches English Literature, Composition and Communications courses at John Abbott College in Montreal, Quebec and Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario. With research interests in modernism, periodical studies and global genre, she has published essays in two volumes of Selected Papers from the Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf (2006, 2007), contributed a chapter to Jeanne Dubino’s Virginia Woolf and the Literary Marketplace (2010), and written several short introductions to the polemical and personal writings of authors from various periods and places (including seventeenth-century England, early twentieth-century Japan, and late ­twentieth-century Belarus) for two college-level literary anthologies (2013). Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

Notes on Contributors     235

Brigid Magner is a lecturer in literary studies at RMIT University in Melbourne. She is currently writing a book on literary tourism in Australia. Naomi Milthorpe lectures in English in the School of Humanities, University of Tasmania. Her research interests centre upon interwar literary culture and late modernist satiric fiction, with recent and forthcoming papers examining bad feelings in novels by Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell and Carl Van Vechten. Research undertaken for ‘The Twilight of Language’ was made possible by a Hobby Family Fellowship granted by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Deborah Pike is Senior Lecturer in English literature at the University of Notre Dame Australia, Sydney campus, and has published in the areas of cultural studies, postcolonial, and modernist literatures. She previously held posts at the University of Paris VII, Denis-Diderot and the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po). She is co-editor of Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Play from Early Childhood and Beyond (with Sandra Lynch and Cynthia a’Beckett, forthcoming 2015) and On Happiness (with Camilla Nelson and Georgina Ledvinka, forthcoming 2015). Susan Reid was a founding board member of the Katherine Mansfield Society and a co-editor of three volumes of Katherine Mansfield Studies (2010−12) and the essay collection Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism (2011). She is currently Editor of the Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies and Reviews Editor for the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and has published several articles and book chapters on modernist writers. Juliane Römhild holds the position of Lecturer, Future Ready, at La Trobe University. She has a background in English and German literature. Her research interests are women’s writing, middlebrow fiction and the literary relationships between Germany and Great Britain. She has published on Elizabeth von Arnim, Katherine Mansfield and W. G. Sebald. Her book Authorship and Femininity in the novels of Elizabeth von Arnim: At Her Most Radiant Moment was published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press in 2014. Kathryn Simpson is Senior Lecturer in English at Cardiff Metropolitan University. Her main research interests are in modernist writing, particularly the work of Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. Other interNot for distribution or resale. For personal use only.

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ests include the work of contemporary writers, Sarah Waters, Ali Smith and David Mitchell. She is author of Gifts, Markets and Economies of Desire in Virginia Woolf (2008) and co-edited Virginia Woolf: TwentyFirst-Century Approaches (2014). She is currently working on Woolf: A Guide for the Perplexed (2015) and a project focused on Woolf and her female contemporaries. Janet Wilson is Professor of English and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Northampton. She has published widely on Australian and New Zealand writing and cinema, as well as on the diaspora writing of white settler societies. She has co-edited three volumes of essays on Katherine Mansfield, most recently Katherine Mansfield and the (Post) colonial (2013). Her current research interests are in diaspora writing and memory. She is Vice-Chair of the Katherine Mansfield Society and co-editor of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

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Bibliography

Adcock, Fleur, ‘Villa Isola Bella’, Katherine Mansfield Studies, 3 (2011), pp. 110−11. Aiken, Conrad, ‘The Short Story as Poetry’, Freeman, 11 May 1921, p. 210. Ailwood, Sarah, ‘Anxious Beginnings: Mental Illness, Reproduction and Nation Building in “Prelude” and Prelude to Christopher’, Katherine Mansfield Studies, 2 (2010), pp. 20–38. Alexander Turnbull Library, Katherine Mansfield: Manuscripts in the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington: National Library of New Zealand, 1988. Alpers, Antony, The Life of Katherine Mansfield, London: Jonathan Cape, 1980. Antliff, Mark, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian AvantGarde, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. As Fair as New Zealand to Me: New Zealand Writers in Katherine Mansfield’s Menton, Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2000. Bachelard, Gaston, Poetics of Space, Maria Jolas (trans.), Boston: Beacon Press, 1994. Baker, Ida (L.M.), Katherine Mansfield: The Memories of L.M., ed. Georgina Joysmith, London: Virago, 1985. Baldeshwiler, Eileen, ‘Katherine Mansfield’s Theory of Fiction’, Studies in Short Fiction, 7: 3 (Summer, 1970), pp. 421−32. Barasch, Moshe, Modern Theories of Art, 2: Impressionism to Kandinsky, New York: New York University Press, 1998. Baumann, Uwe, ‘Katherine Mansfield and Witi Ihimaera: A Typology of Reception’, in Heinz Antor and Kevin L. Cope (eds), Intercultural Encounters: Studies in English Literatures: Essays Presented to Rudiger Ahrens on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday, Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitatsverlag, 1999, pp. 563−88. Baxandall, Michael, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. Beach, Joseph Warren, ‘Katherine Mansfield and her Russian Master’, Virginia Quarterly Review, 27: 4 (Fall 1951), pp. 604–8. Beachcroft, T. O., ‘Katherine Mansfield’s Encounter with Theocritus’, English, 23 (1974), pp. 13−19. Beardsworth, Sara, Julia Kristeva: Psychoanalysis and Modernity, New York: State University of New York Press, 2004.

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238     Bibliography Beasley, Rebecca and Philip Ross Bullock, ‘Introduction: The Illusion of Transparency’, Translation and Literature, 20: 3 (November 2011), pp. 283−300. Beasley, Rebecca and Philip Ross Bullock (eds), Russia in Britain, 1880– 1940: From Melodrama to Modernism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Bell, Alan, ‘Waugh drops the pilot’, Spectator, 7 March 1987, pp. 27−31. Bennett, Andrew, ‘Hating Katherine Mansfield’, Angelaki, 7: 3 (December 2002), pp. 3–16. Berkman, Sylvia, Katherine Mansfield: A Critical Study, London: Oxford University Press, 1952. Bhabha, Homi, ‘DissemiNation’, in Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration, London and New York: Routledge, 1990, pp. 291−322. Binckes, Faith, Modernism, Magazines, and the British Avant-Garde: Reading ‘Rhythm’, 1910−1914, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Bloom, Harold, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, London: Oxford University Press, 1973. Bloom, Harold, ‘Preface: The Anguish of Contamination’, in Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence. A Theory of Poetry, 2nd edn, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Bowen, Elizabeth, The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen, ed. Angus Wilson, London: Vintage, 1999. Bowen, Elizabeth, The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen, ed. Hermione Lee, San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986. Bowen, Elizabeth and Charles Ritchie, Love’s Civil War: Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie, Letters and Diaries, 1941–1973, ed. Victoria Glendinning with Judith Robertson, London: Simon & Schuster, 2008. Brewster, Dorothy, East-West Passage: A Study in Literary Relationships, London: Allen & Unwin, 1954. Brickell, Chris, Mates and Lovers: A History of Gay New Zealand, Auckland: Godwit, 2008. Brosnan, Leila, Reading Virginia Woolf’s Essays and Journalism, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997. Brown, Erica, ‘Introduction’, Working Papers on the Web: Investigating the Middlebrow, 11 (July 2008), (last accessed 31 October 2014). Burke, Carolyn, ‘Mina Loy’, in Bonnie Kime Scott (ed.), The Gender of Modernism, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990, pp. 230−8. Burke, Seán, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992. Carswell, John, Lives and Letters: A. R. Orage, Beatrice Hastings, Katherine Mansfield, John Middleton Murry, S. S. Koteliansky, 1906−1957, London: Faber & Faber, 1978. Castle, Terry, Boss Ladies, Watch Out! Essays on Women, Sex, and Writing, New York: Routledge, 2002. Caws, Mary Ann, Manifesto: A Century of Isms, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2001.

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Bibliography     239 Chekhov, Anton, Letters of Anton Chekhov, Avrahm Yarmolinsky (ed.), London: Jonathan Cape, 1974. Chekhov, Anton, ‘Sleepyhead’, in The Black Monk and Other Stories, trans. R. E. C. Long, London: Duckworth, 1903, pp. 179−88. Church, Richard, ‘The Sensitive Plant’, Spectator, 20 August 1927, p. 288. Clarke, Marcus, ‘Adam Lindsay Gordon’, in Michael Wilding (ed.), For the Term of His Natural Life, Short Stories, Critical Essays and Journalism, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1997, pp. 643−7. Clayton, Jay and Eric Rothstein (eds), Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Coelsch-Foisner, Sabine, ‘Finding a Voice: Women Writing the Short Story (to 1945)’, in Cheryl Alexander Malcolm and David Malcolm (eds), A Companion to the British and Irish Short Story, Blackwell Reference Online, 2008. Available at (last accessed 24 April 2014). Coles, Gladys, ‘Katherine Mansfield and William Gerhardie’, Contemporary Review, 229: 1326 (July 1976), pp. 32−40. Colette, La Naissance du Jour [1928], in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3, Paris: Flammarion, 1948−50. Colette, Le Pur et L’impur [1932], in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 9, Paris: Flammarion, 1948−50. Colette, The Vagabond [1910], trans. Enid McLeod, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. Conroy, Geraldine, A Study of the Life and Works of S. S. Koteliansky, with Particular Reference to Unpublished Correspondence at the Alexander Turnbull Library, MA (Hons) Thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 1977. Conroy, Geraldine, ‘“Our Perhaps Uncommon Friendship”: The Relationship between S. S. Koteliansky and Katherine Mansfield’, Modern Fiction Studies, 24: 3 (1978), pp. 355−69. Cowley, Malcolm, ‘Page Dr Blum’, The Dial, 71: 365 (September 1921), p. 365. Cross, Anthony (ed.), A People Passing Rude: British Responses to Russian Culture, Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2012. Cross, Anthony, The Russian Theme in English Literature: From the Sixteenth Century to 1980, Oxford: W. A. Meeuws, 1985. Culler, Jonathan, Framing the Sign: Criticism and its Institutions, Oxford: Blackwell, 1988. Daly, Saralyn R., Katherine Mansfield, New York: Twayne, 1994. Danchev, Alex, 100 Artists’ Manifestos, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2011. Davie, Donald, ‘Mr Tolstoy, I Presume? The Russian Novel through Victorian Spectacles’, in Davie (ed.), Slavic Excursions: Essays on Russian and Polish, Manchester: Carcanet, 1990, pp. 271−80. Davis, Robert Murray, Evelyn Waugh, Apprentice: The Early Writings, 1910−1927, Norman: Pilgrim, 1985. Davison-Pégon, Claire, ‘Samuel Solomonovich Koteliansky and British Modernism’, Translation and Literature, 20: 3 (2011), pp. 334−47. de Beauvoir, Simone, The Second Sex [1949], trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley, London: Picador, 1988.

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240     Bibliography de Charms, Leslie, Elizabeth of the German Garden: A Biography, London: Heinemann, 1958. Defromont, Françoise, ‘Impossible Mourning’, in Paulette Michel and Michel Dupuis (eds), The Fine Instrument: Essays on Katherine Mansfield, Sydney: Dangaroo, 1989, pp. 157–65. D’hoker, Elke, ‘The Development of Katherine Mansfield’s First-Person Narratives’, Journal of Narrative Theory, 42: 2 (2012), pp. 149−65. D’hoker, Elke, ‘Theorising the Middlebrow. An interview with Nicola Humble’, Interférences littéraires/Literaire interferenties, 7 (2011), pp. 259–65. Dickens, Charles, Dombey and Son [1848], London: Oxford University Press, 1950. Dickens, Charles, Our Mutual Friend [1865], London: Oxford University Press, 1952. Dickens, Charles, The Old Curiosity Shop [1841], London: Oxford University Press, 1957. Dickens, Charles, The Pickwick Papers [1837], London: Oxford University Press, 1987. Diment, Galya, A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury: The Life and Times of Samuel Koteliansky, Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011. Dostoevsky, Fyodor, Letters from the Underworld, The Gentle Maiden, The Landlady, trans. C. J. Hogarth, New York: Everyman’s Library, 1913. Douglas-Fairhurst, Robert, Victorian Afterlives: The Shaping of Influence in Nineteenth Century Literature, New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Dunbar, Pamela, Radical Mansfield: Double Discourse in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997. Dunbar, Pamela, ‘What does Bertha Want? A Re-reading of Katherine Mansfield’s “Bliss”’, in Rhoda B. Nathan (ed.) Critical Essays on Katherine Mansfield, New York: Macmillan, 1993, pp. 128−39. During, Simon, ‘Towards a Revision of Local Critical Habits’, AND (1983), pp. 85−8. Eiseinger, Erica, ‘The Vagabond: A Vision of Androgyny’ in Erica Mendelson Eiseinger and Mari Ward McCarty (eds), Colette: The Woman, The Writer, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1981, pp. 95−103. Elfenbein, Andrew, ‘On the Discrimination of Influences’, Modern Language Quarterly, 69: 4 (December 2008), pp. 481−507. Eliot, T. S., Selected Essays, London: Faber & Faber, 1932. Elliott, Robert C., The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, ‘Selection from Essays and Lectures’, in Alan D. Schrift (ed.), The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity, London and New York: Routledge, 1997. Ensing, Riemke, ‘A memory of place’, Katherine Mansfield Society Newsletter, 4 (2009), p. 5. Fernald, Anne E., Virginia Woolf: Feminism and the Reader, New York: Palgrave, 2006. Ferrar, Paul, ‘Towards a Marginalist Economy of Textual Genesis’, in Dirk Van Hulle and Wim Van Mierlo (eds), Variants: Reading Notes, 2/3 (2003), pp. 7−18. Ferrier, Carole (ed.), As Good As A Yarn With You: Letters between Miles

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Bibliography     241 Franklin, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Jean Devanny, Marjory Barnard, Flora Eldershaw and Eleanor Dark, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Ford, George, Dickens and His Readers: Aspects of Novel-Criticism Since 1836, New York: Gordian Press, 1955. Frame, Janet, In the Memorial Room, Melbourne: Text, 2013. Franklin, Carol, ‘Mansfield and Richardson: A Short Story Dialectic’, Australian Literary Studies, 11 (1983), pp. 227–33. French, Anne, ‘A visit to Isola Bella’, Landfall, 172 (1989), pp. 435−7. Frost, Lucy (ed.), Wilde Eve: Eve Langley’s Story, Sydney: Vintage, 1999. Fullbrook, Kate, Katherine Mansfield, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1986. Furneaux, Holly, ‘(Re)writing Dickens Queerly: The Correspondence of Katherine Mansfield’, in Ewa Kujawska-Lis (ed.), Reflections on/of Dickens, Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2014, pp. 121−35. Gifkins, Michael (ed.), From A Room of Their Own: A Celebration of the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship, Auckland: Whitcoulls, 1993. Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Volume 1: The War of the Words, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988. Glenavy, Lady Beatrice, Today We Will Only Gossip, London: Constable, 1964. Glendinning, Victoria, Elizabeth Bowen, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977. Goldsmith, Kenneth, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age, New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Gopinath, Gayatri, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures, Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Gorki, Maxim, Reminiscences of Leonid Andreyev, trans. Katherine Mansfield and S. S. Koteliansky, London: Heinemann, 1931. Greenberg, Jonathan, Modernism, Satire, and the Novel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Guilhamet, Leon, Satire and the Transformation of Genre, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987. Gwynne, Joel, The Secular Visionaries: Aestheticism and New Zealand Short Fiction in the Twentieth Century, New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010. Haley, Russell, ‘In Katherine Mansfield’s Shadow’, in Michael Gifkins (ed.), From A Room of Their Own: A Celebration of the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship, Auckland: Whitcoulls, 1993. Hankin, Cherry, ‘Katherine Mansfield and the Inner Life’ in Cherry Hankin (ed.), Critical Essays on the New Zealand Short Story, Auckland: Heinemann, 1982. Hanson, Clare and Andrew Gurr, Katherine Mansfield, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1981. Hanson, Clare (ed.), The Critical Writings of Katherine Mansfield, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987. Hardy, Linda, ‘The Ghost of Katherine Mansfield’, Landfall, 172 (1989), pp. 416–32. Harrison, Andrew, ‘The Lawrences, Katherine Mansfield and the “Ricordi” Postcard’, Katherine Mansfield Studies, 6 (2013), pp. 149−53.

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242     Bibliography Hassan, Ihab H. ‘The Problem of Influence in Literary History: Notes Towards a Definition’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 14: 1 (September 1955), pp. 66–76. Hignett, Sean, Brett: From Bloomsbury to New Mexico, A Biography, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1984. Hilliard, Christopher, ‘Modernism and the Common Writer’, The Historical Journal, 48: 3 (2005), pp. 769−87. Hollington, Michael, ‘The Voice of Objects in The Old Curiosity Shop’, Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies, 14: 1 (2009), pp. 1−8. Holmes, Thomas, London’s Underworld, London: J. M. Dent, 1912. Howe, Florence, ‘T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and the Future of “Tradition”’, in Florence Howe (ed.), Tradition and the Talents of Women, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991, pp. 1–33. Humble, Nicola, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity and Bohemianism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Hyde, Robin, ‘The “Great N.Z. Novel”’, in Gillian Boddy and Jacqueline Matthews (eds), Disputed Ground: Robin Hyde, Journalist, Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1991. Hyde, Robin, ‘The Singers of Loneliness’, in Gillian Boddy and Jacqueline Matthews (eds), Disputed Ground: Robin Hyde, Journalist, Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1991. Jackson, Anna, Diary Poetics: Form and Style in Writers’ Diaries 1915−1962, New York: Routledge, 2010. Jackson, Anna, ‘The Notebooks, Journal, and Papers of Katherine Mansfield: Is Any of this her Diary?’ Journal of New Zealand Literature, 18/19 (2000/1), pp. 83−100. Jackson, H. J., Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001. Jaillant, Lise, Modernism, Middlebrow and the Literary Canon: The Modern Library Series, 1917–1955, London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014. James, Trevor, ‘Towards an Appropriate Language: Frank Sargeson and New Zealand (1903−1982)’, London Magazine, (October 1982), pp. 46−54. Jensen, Kai, Whole Men: The Masculine Tradition in New Zealand Literature, Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1996. Jensen, Margaret M., The Open Book: Creative Misreading in the Works of Selected Modern Writers, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Jones, Kathleen, Katherine Mansfield: The Story-Teller, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Jones, Lawrence, Barbed Wire and Mirrors: Essays on New Zealand Prose, Dunedin: Otago University Press, 1987. Jordan, Deborah, ‘Written to Tickle the Ears of the Groundlings in the Garden Cities: The Aesthetic of Modernity: Vance and Nettie Palmer and the New Age’, in Robert Dixon and Veronica Kelly (eds), Impact of the Modern: Vernacular Modernities in Australia 1870s−1960s, Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2008, pp. 91−108. Kaplan, Sydney Janet, Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. Kaplan, Sydney Janet, Circulating Genius: John Middleton Murry, Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010.

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Bibliography     243 Katherine Mansfield Collection, Container 3.8, Harry Ransom Center, Austin, TX. Kaye, Peter, Dostoevsky and English Modernism, 1900−1930, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Keen, Suzanne, Empathy and the Novel, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Kimber, Gerri, ‘Katherine Mansfield and the Public Census of 1911’, www. katherinemansfieldsociety.org/assets/SiteContentImages/KMS-CENSUS-OF1911-Gerri-Kimber.pdf (last accessed 5 November 2014). Kimber, Gerri, Katherine Mansfield: The View from France, Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008. Kimber, Gerri and Janet Wilson (eds), Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary Volume of Essays, London: Palgrave, 2010. Kimber, Gerri and Janet Wilson, ‘Reconfiguring the National Canon: The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield’, in Rod Edmond and Janet Wilson (eds), New Zealand’s Cultures: Histories, Sources, Futures, special issue of Journal of New Zealand Literature, 31: 2 (2013), pp. 122−44. Kime Scott, Bonnie (ed.), The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990. King, Bruce, New English Literatures: Cultural Nationalism in a Changing World, London: Palgrave MacMillan, 1980. King, Michael, Frank Sargeson: A Life, Auckland: Viking, 1995. King, Michael, ‘Letter to the Editor’, Quote Unquote (1996/97), (last accessed 5 November 2014). Kleine, Don W., ‘The Chekhovian Source of “Marriage à la Mode”’, Philological Quarterly, 42: 2 (April 1963), pp. 284−8. Kolodny, Annette, ‘A Map for Rereading: Or, Gender and the Interpretation of Literary Texts’, New Literary History, 11: 3 (1980), pp. 451–67. Kristeva, Julia, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. Kristeva, Julia, Colette, trans. Jane Marie Todd, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Langley, Eve, ‘The Old Mill’, in Lucy Frost (ed.), Wilde Eve: Eve Langley’s Story, Sydney: Vintage, 1999, pp. 75−106. Langley, Eve, ‘Demeter of Dublin Street’ [1959], in Joy L. Thwaite, The Importance of Being Eve Langley, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1989. Langley, Eve, The Pea-pickers [1942], Sydney: Harper Collins, 1994. Langley, Eve, White Topee, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1954. Lassner, Phyllis (ed.), Elizabeth Bowen: A Study of the Short Fiction, New York: Twayne, 1991. Lawrence, D. H., The Quest for Rananim: D. H. Lawrence’s Letters to S. S. Koteliansky, 1914−1930, ed. George J. Zytaruk, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1970. Lee, Hermione, Virginia Woolf, London: Chatto &Windus, 1996. Leinwand, Theodore, ‘Virginia Woolf Reads the Great William’, Yale Review, 93: 2 (2005), pp. 101−22. Levenson, Michael, A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English

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244     Bibliography Literary Doctrine 1908−1922, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Lewis, Pericles, ‘Proust, Woolf, and Modern Fiction’, Romantic Review, 99 (2008), pp. 77−86. Lockhart, R. H. Bruce, Memoirs of a British Agent, London: Putnam, 1932. Loss, Archie, ‘Vile Bodies, Vorticism and Italian Futurism’, Journal of Modern Literature, 18: 1 (1992), pp. 155−64. MacCannell, Dean, ‘Staged Authenticity: Arrangements of Social Space in Tourist Settings’, American Journal of Sociology, 79: 3 (1973), pp.  589−663. MacCarthy, Desmond, ‘A New Writer’, New Statesman and Nation, 16: 450 (15 January 1921). Maclean, Caroline, ‘Russian Aesthetics in Britain: Kandinsky, Sadleir, and Rhythm’, in Rebecca Beasley and Philip Ross Bullock (eds), Russia in Britain, 1880−1940: From Melodrama to Modernism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 145−61. Maclean, Caroline, The Vogue for Russia: Mysticism and Modernism in Britain, 1900−1930, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015. Macnamara, Katie, ‘“How [to] Strike a Contemporary”: Woolf, Mansfield, and Marketing Gossip’, in Jeanne Dubino (ed.), Virginia Woolf and the Literary Marketplace, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, pp. 91–106. Maddison, Isobel, Elizabeth von Arnim. Beyond the German Garden, London: Ashgate, 2013. Mansfield, Katherine, The Collected Fiction of Katherine Mansfield, ed. Gerri Kimber and Vincent O’Sullivan, 2 vols, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. Mansfield, Katherine, The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, ed. Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott, 2 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984−2008. Mansfield, Katherine, The Garden Party and Other Stories, ed. Lorna Sage, London: Penguin, 1997. Mansfield, Katherine, The Journal of Katherine Mansfield, ed. John Middleton Murry, London: Constable, 1927. Mansfield, Katherine, The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, ed. Margaret Scott, 2 vols, Canterbury and Wellington, NZ: Lincoln University Press and Daphne Brasell Associates, 1997. Mansfield, Katherine, The Letters of Katherine Mansfield, ed. John Middleton Murry, London: Constable, 1928. Mansfield, Katherine, Novels and Novelists, ed. John Middleton Murry, London: Constable, 1930. Mansfield, Katherine, Poems of Katherine Mansfield, ed. Vincent O’Sullivan, Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1988. Mansfield, Katherine, The Poetry and Critical Writings of Katherine Mansfield, ed. Gerri Kimber and Angela Smith, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Mansfield, Katherine, The Urewera Notebook [1907], ed. Ian A. Gordon, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978. Mansfield, Katherine and John Middleton Murry, Letters between Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry, ed. Cherry A. Hankin, London: Virago, 1988.

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Bibliography     245 Mantz, Ruth Elvish and John Middleton Murry, The Life of Katherine Mansfield, London: Constable, 1933. Martin, Kirsty, Modernism and the Rhythms of Sympathy: Vernon Lee, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Masgrau-Peya, Elisenda, ‘Towards a Poetics of the “Unhomed”: The House in Katherine Mansfield’s “Prelude” and Barbara Hanrahan’s The Scent of Eucalyptus’, Antipodes (June 2004), pp. 60–6. Matz, Jesse, Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Mauss, Marcel, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies [1925], trans. W. D. Halls, New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1990. McDonnell, Jenny, Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Marketplace: At the Mercy of the Public, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. McLeod, Aorewa, ‘The New Zealand novels of Eve Langley’, Southerly, 55: 2 (1995), pp. 160−9. Meister, Charles W., ‘Chekhov’s Reception in England and America’, American Slavic and East European Review, 12: 1 (February 1953), pp. 109−21. Meyers, Jeffrey, Katherine Mansfield: A Biography, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978. Meyers, Jeffrey, ‘Murry’s Cult of Mansfield’, Journal of Modern Literature, 7: 1 (February 1979), pp. 15−38. Miller, Tyrus, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction and the Arts between the World Wars, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Modjeska, Drusilla, Exiles at Home: Australian Women Writers 1925−1945, Angus & Robertson: Sydney, 1981. Moran, Patricia, Word of Mouth: Body Language in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996. Morrell, Ottoline, Ottoline at Garsington: Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell 1915−1918, London: Faber, 1974. Mounic, Anne, ‘“Ah, What is it? − that I Heard”: The Sense of Wonder in Katherine Mansfield’s Stories and Poems’, in Gerri Kimber and Janet Wilson (eds), Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary Volume of Essays, London: Palgrave, 2010, pp. 144−57. Murray, Stuart, Never a Soul at Home: New Zealand Literary Nationalism and the 1930s, Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1998. Murry, John Middleton, ‘Art and Philosophy’, Rhythm, 1: 1 (1911), pp. 9−12. Murry, John Middleton, ‘Dickens’ [1922], in Pencillings, London: Books for Libraries Press, 1925, pp. 29−40. Murry, John Middleton, Discoveries: Essays in Literary Criticism, London: W. Collins, 1924. Murry, John Middleton, Fyodor Dostoevsky: A Critical Study [1916], Boston: Small, Maynard & Co, 1924. Murry, John Middleton, ‘Introduction’ [1932], in R. O. Prowse, A Gift of the Dusk, Milton Keynes: Lightning Source, 2011. Murry, John Middleton, Katherine Mansfield and Other Literary Studies, London: Constable, 1959. Murry, John Middleton, Letter to the Editor, Times Literary Supplement, 26 October 1951, p. 677.

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246     Bibliography Murry, John Middleton, The Letters of John Middleton Murry to Katherine Mansfield, ed. C. A. Hankin, Auckland: Hutchinson, 1988. New, W. H., Among Worlds: An Introduction to Modern Commonwealth and South African Fiction, Erin: Procepic Press, 1975. New, W. H., Dreams of Speech and Violence: The Art of the Short Story in Canada and New Zealand, Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 1987. New, W. H., ‘Frank Sargeson as Social Story-Teller’, Landfall, 36: 3 (1982), pp. 343−6. New, W. H., ‘Mansfield in the Act of Writing’, Journal of Modern Literature, 20: 1 (Summer, 1996), pp. 51−63. Newton, John, ‘Homophobia and the Social Pattern: Sargeson’s Queer Nation’, Landfall, 199 (2000), pp. 91−107. Nieland, Justus, ‘Editor’s Introduction: Modernism’s Laughter’, Modernist Cultures, 2: 2 (October 2006), pp. 80−6. North, Michael, Novelty: A History of the New, Chicago: University of Chicago, 2013. Nussbaum, Martha C., Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Orr, Bridget, ‘Reading with the taint of the pioneer: Katherine Mansfield and settler criticism’, Landfall, 172 (1989), pp. 447–61. Orr, Mary, Intertextuality: Debates and Contexts, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003. Osteen, Mark, The Question of the Gift: Essays Across Disciplines, London and New York: Routledge, 2002. O’Sullivan, Vincent, ‘The Magnetic Chain: Notes and Approaches to K.M.’, Landfall, 29: 2 (1975), pp. 95−131. O’Sullivan, Vincent, ‘Signing Off: Katherine Mansfield’s Last Year’, in Gerri Kimber and Janet Wilson (eds), Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary Volume of Essays, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, pp. 13−27. Palmer, Nettie, ‘A Reader’s Notebook’, All About Books, 19 May 1930. Palmer, Nettie, Commonplace Book 1929, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, National Library of Australia, MS 1174/26/13. Palmer, Nettie, Diaries 1927−8, Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer, National Library of Australia, MS 1174/16/10-11. Palmer, Nettie, Fourteen Years: Extracts from a Private Journal 1925−1939, ed. Vivian Smith, Melbourne: Meanjin Press, 1948. Palmer, Nettie, ‘Katherine Mansfield: A Study in “Success”’, Brisbane Courier, 24 January 1928. Palmer, Nettie, ‘Katherine Mansfield Returns’, Book News, July 1947. Palmer, Nettie, ‘Readers and Writers: Katherine Mansfield’s Journal’, Illustrated Tasmanian Mail, 2 November 1927. Palmer, Nettie, ‘Readers and Writers: Some of Our Exiles’, Illustrated Tasmanian Mail, 26 October 1927. Palmer, Nettie, ‘The Sincerity of Katherine Mansfield’, The Bulletin, 1 February 1928. Palmer, Nettie, ‘Why Authors Leave Home’, The Bulletin, 5 August 1926. Parkin-Gounelas, Ruth, ‘Katherine Mansfield Reading Other Women: The Personality of the Text’, in Roger Robinson (ed.), Katherine Mansfield: In

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Bibliography     247 From the Margin, Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1994, pp. 36−52. Peterson, Richard F., ‘The Circle of Truth: The Stories of Katherine Mansfield and Mary Lavin’, Modern Fiction Studies, 24 (1978), pp. 383−94. Phelps, Gilbert, The Russian Novel in English Fiction, London: Hutchinson, 1956, pp. 189−90. Polonsky, Rachel, ‘Chekhov and the Buried Life of Katherine Mansfield’, in Anthony Cross (ed.), A People Passing Rude: British Responses to Russian Culture, Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2012, pp. 201−14. Potter, Rachel, Modernist Literature, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. Pound, Ezra, ‘Drunken Helots and Mr. Eliot’, Egoist, vol. iv (1917), pp. 72−4. Pound, Francis, The Invention of New Zealand: Art and National Identity, 1930−1970, Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2010. Primeau, Ronald (ed.), Influx: Essays on Literary Influence, New York: Kennikat Press Corp, 1977. Protopopova, Darya, ‘Virginia Woolf’s Versions of Russia’, Postgraduate English, 13 (2006), www.dur.ac.uk/postgraduate.english/DaryaProtopopovaArticle. pdf (last accessed 29 October 2014). Robinson, Roger, ‘Katherine Mansfield’, in Roger Robinson and Nelson Wattie (eds), The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 342. Roe, Jill (ed.), My Congenials: Miles Franklin & Friends in Letters, Pymble: State Library of New South Wales and Angus & Robertson, 1993. Rogachevskii, Andrei, ‘Samuel Koteliansky and the Bloomsbury Circle (Roger Fry, E. M. Forster, Mr and Mrs John Maynard Keynes and the Woolfs)’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 36: 4 (October 2000), pp. 368−85. Rogers, Pat, The Oxford Illustrated Guide to English Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Sagar, Keith The Life of D. H. Lawrence: An Illustrated Biography, London: Chaucer Press, 2003. Sage, Lorna, Moments of Truth: Twentieth Century Women Writers, London: Fourth Estate, 2002. Sargeson, Frank, ‘Katherine Mansfield’ [1948] in Frank Sargeson, Conversation in a Train and Other Critical Writing, ed. Kevin Cunningham, Auckland: Auckland University Press and Oxford University Press, 1983, pp. 28−33. Sargeson, Frank, ‘I for One. . .’, Landfall 5: 2 (1952), pp. 89−140. Sargeson, Frank, ‘Conversation with Frank Sargeson: An Interview with Michael Beveridge’ [1970], in Frank Sargeson, Conversation in a Train and Other Critical Writing, ed. Kevin Cunningham, Auckland: Auckland University Press and Oxford University Press, 1983, pp. 147−85. Sargeson, Frank, ‘A Man and his Wife’ [1939], in Frank Sargeson’s Stories, ed. Janet Wilson, Auckland: Cape Catley, 2010. Sargeson, Frank, Letters of Frank Sargeson, ed. Sarah Shieff, Auckland: Vintage, 2012. Schneider, Elisabeth, ‘Katherine Mansfield and Chekhov’, Modern Language Notes 50: 6 (June 1935), pp. 394−7. Segerberg, Anita, ‘“Strangled by a bad tradition”? The work of Eve Langley’, Journal of New Zealand Literature, 10 (1992), pp. 55−73.

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248     Bibliography Shakespeare, William, The Complete Works: Second Edition, ed. John Jowett, William Montgomery, Gary Taylor and Stanley Wells, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005. Shaw, Helen, ‘Today At the Villa Isola Bella’, in Helen Shaw, Time Told from a Tower, Christchurch: Nag’s Head Press, 1985. Smith, Angela, ‘“As fastidious as though I wrote with acid”: Katherine Mansfield, J. D. Fergusson and the Rhythm Group in Paris’, Katherine Mansfield Studies, 3 (2011), pp. 4−20. Smith, Angela, ‘GUTS – Katherine Mansfield as a Reviewer’, Katherine Mansfield Studies, 1 (2009), pp. 3−18. Smith, Angela, Katherine Mansfield: A Literary Life, London: Palgrave, 2000. Smith, Angela, ‘Katherine Mansfield and Rhythm’, Journal of New Zealand Literature, 21 (2003), pp. 102−21. Smith, Angela, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. Smith, Angela, ‘Mansfield and Dickens: “I am not reading Dickens idly”’, in Gerri Kimber and Janet Wilson (eds), Celebrating Katherine Mansfield, London: Palgrave, 2011, pp. 189−201. Smith, Vivian, Vance and Nettie Palmer, Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1975. Snyder, Carey, ‘Katherine Mansfield and the New Age School of Satire’, The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, 1: 2 (2010), pp. 125−58. Stannard, Martin, Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years 1903−1939, London: J. M. Dent, 1986. Stead, C. K., ‘Katherine Mansfield: The Art of Fiction’, in C. K. Stead (ed.), In the Glass Case: Essays on New Zealand Literature, Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1981, pp. 29−46. Stead, C. K. (ed.), The Letters and Journals of Katherine Mansfield: A Selection, London: Penguin, 1977. Stead, C. K., ‘Meetings with “the Great Ghost”’, in Gerri Kimber and Janet Wilson (eds), Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary Volume of Essays, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, pp. 214−28. Stead, C. K., Review of In the Memorial Room, Katherine Mansfield Studies, 5 (2014), pp. 171−8. Sullivan, Hannah, The Work of Revision, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Sullivan, J. W. N., ‘The Story-Writing Genius’, Athenaeum, 2 April 1920, p. 447. Sutherland, Ronald, ‘Katherine Mansfield: Plagiarist, Disciple, or Ardent Admirer’, Critique, 5: 2 (Fall 1962), pp. 58–76. Taussig, Michael, Walter Benjamin’s Grave, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Thomas, Sue, ‘Revisiting Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and the Aesthetics of Respectability’, English Studies, 94: 1 (2013), pp. 64−82. Thwaite, Joy L., The Importance of Being Eve Langley, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1989. Tomalin, Claire, Katherine Mansfield. A Secret Life, London: Viking, 1987. Usborne, Karen, ‘Elizabeth’: The Author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden, London: Bodley Head, 1986. Van Hulle, Dirk and Wim Van Mierlo, ‘Reading Notes: Introduction’, in Dirk

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Bibliography     249 Van Hulle and Wim Van Mierlo (eds), Variants: Reading Notes, 2/3 (2003), pp. 1−6. von Arnim, Elizabeth, Elizabeth and Her German Garden, London: Macmillan, 1898. von Arnim, Elizabeth, The Solitary Summer, London: Macmillan, 1899. von Arnim, Elizabeth, The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen, London: Macmillan, 1904. Waddington, Patrick (ed.), Turgenev and Britain, London: Berg, 1995. Wagenknecht, Edward, ‘Dickens and Katherine Mansfield’ [1929] in Edward Wagenknecht, Dickens and the Scandalmongers: Essays in Criticism, Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 1965, pp. 99−108. Walker, Jennifer, Elizabeth of the German Garden: A Literary Journey, London: Book Guild, 2013. Watson, Nicola J., The Literary Tourist, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Waugh, Arthur, ‘The New Poetry’, Quarterly Review, October 1916, p. 226. Waugh, Evelyn, A Handful of Dust, London: Chapman & Hall, 1950. Waugh, Evelyn, ‘The Balance’ [1926], in The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Ann Pasternak Slater, London: Everyman, 1998, pp. 3−38. Waugh, Evelyn, The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Michael Davie, Boston: Little, Brown, 1976. Waugh, Evelyn, The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Mark Armory, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980. Waugh, Evelyn, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, London: Chapman & Hall, 1957. Waugh, Evelyn, Vile Bodies, London: Chapman & Hall, 1949. Westover, Paul, Necromanticism: Traveling to meet the dead 1750−1860, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Wevers, Lydia, ‘How Kathleen Beauchamp was Kidnapped’, Women’s Studies Journal, 2: 4 (December 1988), pp. 5−17. Wevers, Lydia, ‘The Short Story’ in Terry Sturm (ed.), The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature, 2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991, pp. 203–68. Wevers, Lydia, ‘“The Sod Under my Feet”: Katherine Mansfield’, in Mark Williams and Michele Leggott (eds), Opening the Book: New Essays on New Zealand Writing, Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1995, pp. 31−48. Whitworth, Michael, Virginia Woolf, New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Widiss, Benjamin, Obscure Invitations: The Persistence of the Author in Twentieth-Century American Literature, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. Wilde, Oscar, (1891) ‘The Decay of Lying’, Corpus of Electronic Texts, http:// www.ucc.ie/celt/online/E800003-009/ (last accessed 29 October 2014). Wilde, Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Gray, London: Penguin, 1985. Williams, Mark, ‘Frank Sargeson: Apostle of Love’, Landfall, 192 (1996), pp. 209−21. Wilson, Janet, Gerri Kimber and Susan Reid (eds), Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism, London and New York: Continuum, 2011.

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250     Bibliography Winkiel, Laura, Modernism, Race and Manifestos, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Woods, Joanna, Katerina: The Russian World of Katherine Mansfield, Auckland: Penguin, 2001. Woolf, Leonard, Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911−1918, London: Hogarth, 1964. Woolf, Leonard, Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919 to 1939, London: Hogarth Press, 1967. Woolf, Virginia, Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. Leonard Woolf, 4 vols, London: Hogarth Press, 1966−7. Woolf, Virginia, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie, 5 vols, London: Hogarth, 1978–84. Woolf, Virginia, The Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. Andrew McNeillie and Stuart N. Clarke, 5 vols, London: Hogarth, 1986−2009. Woolf, Virginia, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, 6 vols, London: Hogarth, 1975–80. Woolf, Virginia, Mrs Dalloway [1925], New York: Harcourt, 1981. Woolf, Virginia, A Room of One’s Own [1929], London: Penguin, 2000. Woolf, Virginia, To the Lighthouse [1927], New York: Harcourt Brace & Co, 1989. Woolf, Virginia, Virginia Woolf: The Complete Shorter Fiction, ed. Susan Dick, London: Triad Grafton Books, 1991. Woolf, Virginia, The Waves [1931], New York: Harcourt, 2006. Woolf, Virginia, A Writer’s Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Leonard Woolf, London: Hogarth Press, 1972. Worringer, Wilhelm, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style [1908], trans. Michael Bullock, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953. Worton, Michael and Judith Still (eds), ‘Introduction’, Intertextuality: Theories and Practice, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990.

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Index

Index

Katherine Mansfield’s works are gathered under: Mansfield, Katherine, works KM: Katherine Mansfield JMM: John Middleton Murry abandonment, 38 Adcock, Fleur, ‘Villa Isola Bella’, 227–8 Adelphi, 86 Alexander Turnbull Library, 78, 196, 202 Alpers, Antony, 2, 55–6, 58, 94–5, 119, 132, 164 ambivalence, 39 about literary predecessor, 9 as impetus to literary production, 8 engaged, 22 KM and von Arnim, 94, 100 of the gift, 51–2 to object of mourning, 40 Argus, literary plebiscite, 1927, 14 Athenaeum, 158 editorship by JMM, 54 KM reviews for, 51, 53, 70–1, 222 ‘Story-Writing Genius, The’, 122–3 translation of Chekhov’s letters, 126–7 Austen, Jane, 36 authorship, Romantic conceptualisation of, 121 avant-garde, 15, 22, 24, 32, 66, 98, 210 Baker, Ida (‘L.M.’), 143–5, 187–8, 222, 224 Barnard, Marjorie, 174 Baynton, Barbara, 14 Bell, Ann Olivier, 137, 142 Bell, Clive, 143 Bell, Quentin, 142 Bell, Vanessa, 53, 56–7 Bennett, Arnold, 27, 53, 67

Blast, 71 Bloom, Harold, 43, 102 Anxiety of Influence, The, 3, 36, 139, 196 feminist responses to, 36, 38 influence and, 7, 22, 23 Oedipal model of influence, 36, 38, 39, 40, 45, 93, 138, 196 Bloomsbury, 54, 138 importance of Russian literature to, 10, 79–80 influence of Koteliansky in, 80–1 Blue Review, 60 Bowden, George, 59, 78 Bowen, Elizabeth ambivalence about KM’s literary presence, 39 anxiety of influence and, 36–7 Austen and, 36 ‘Breakfast’, 44 ‘Coming Home’, 37, 38, 45 ‘Daffodils’, 41–2, 43 desire for dialogue with KM, 36 Encounters, 35, 37, 39, 43 influence of male writers on, 36 juxtaposition of writer and community and, 42 literary relationship with KM, 9, 15, 35–7, 40, 41, 43 ‘Living Writer, A’, 40–1, 43 maternal loss and, 43 mourning and, 36, 43–5 response to death of KM by, 39 ‘Short Story in England, The’, 39–40

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252     Index Bowen, Elizabeth (cont.) ‘Sources of Influence’, 44 Time in Rome, A, 40 trauma and loss and, 44–5 Brady, Edwin James, 125 Brett, Dorothy, 74, 79, 83, 84, 99–100, 130–1, 159 Brisbane Courier, 172 Britain, literary and cultural engagement with Russia, 15–16 Bulletin, 170, 173 Cambridge, Ada, 14 Campbell, Beatrice, 81, 83, 85, 86 Caws, Mary Anne ‘high manifesto’ and, 9, 65, 69 modernist manifestos and, 67 see also ‘Manifesto Moment’ Chekhov, Anton, 11, 72, 85 as contemporary of KM, 132 Bet and Other Stories, The, 81 Cherry Orchard, The, 132 ‘Doll’s House, The’, 128 ‘Grasshopper, The’, 120 influence on KM, 119, 195 letters, translations by KM and Koteliansky, 126–7, 129, 130 ‘Looking-Glass, The’, 120 Love, and Other Stories, 132 ‘Misery’, 120 ‘Not Wanted’, 120 ‘Part, The’, 120 ‘Small Fry’, 120 ‘Spat’ khochetsia’ [‘Sleepyhead’], 2, 119–20; see also ‘Sleepyhead’–‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’ plagiarism episode ‘Steppe, The’, 127–8 thoughts on writing, KM and, 130–1 Colette Cheri, 108 Claudine à Paris, 107 Claudine novels, 106 L’Entrave [Shackle, The], 105, 107 Gigi, 108 heroines, 105, 107–9, 112–13 heterosexual coupledom and, 107, 111 KM’s identification with, 11, 107 life and achievements of, 107–8 literary relationship with KM, 10–11, 105–15 marriage and, 106, 111

motherhood and, 111 La naisance du jour [Break of Day], 107, 111 Le Pur et L’impur [Pure and the Impure, The], 106 ultimate love and, 106 vagabondage and, 105, 107, 110, 114 La Vagabonde [Vagabond, The], 11, 106, 107, 108–11, 112 Les vrilles de la vigne [Tendrils of the Vine, The], 113 Connolly, Cyril, Unquiet Grave, The, 25, 27 Creative New Zealand, 223 cultural nationalism memorialisation of KM and, 229 New Zealand, 13, 207, 216–17 Czumikow, Wladimir, ‘Schlafen’, 126 Danchev, Alex, 65, 71, 73 Dark, Eleanor, 15, 168, 173–4, 208 Davin, Dan, 208 de Beauvoir, Simone, 108 Le Deuxième Sexe [Second Sex, The], 106 literary comparison, KM-Colette, 106 marriage and, 111 Devanny, Jean, 208 Dial, 123 Dickens, Charles Bleak House, 155–6, 159 David Copperfield, 157 Dombey and Son, 156–7, 160 literary relationship with KM, 12, 155, 160–1, 162–3 Little Dorrit, 159 Martin Chuzzlewit and, 159 metonymy by KM and, 159 Old Curiosity Shop, The, 158, 162 Our Mutual Friend, 158–9 Pickwick Papers, 156 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 143 Crime and Punishment, 141 engagement of KM with, 78, 120 identification of KM with, 145 influence on Virginia Woolf, 138, 140–5 KM translation of letters by, 84, 127 Letters from the Underworld, 138 popularity in postwar environment, 131 Duckworth, Marilyn, 220, 224, 228

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Index     253 Eliot, George, 159 Mill on the Floss, The, 158 Eliot, T. S., 24, 102, 133, 143, 158, 204 future of poetry argument with JMM, 71 ‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The’, 26 ‘Philip Massinger’, 121 ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, 6, 121 Waste Land, The, 22, 28, 121, 143 empathy modernist scholarship on, 139 Virginia Woolf for KM, 137, 139 emulation, 11, 122, 132, 177 enchantment, 8, 12, 166 influential possibilities of, 13 KM with Wilde, 2–3, 12, 181–3, 188–90 Palmer with KM, 172–3, 175 exchange, 102 as unequal mode of influence, 10 Bloomsbury and Russian literature, 10 interpersonal, 9 KM and Langley, 189 KM and Virginia Woolf, 148 of gifts, 51–2, 55, 56–9, 62 power dynamics and, 9 see also gift-giving Fontainebleau, 78, 85, 132, 173, 226 gravestone at, 195, 203 Frame, Janet, 229 In the Memorial Room, 228 Franklin, Miles, 14, 174 Freeman, 123 French, Anne, ‘Visit to Isolla Bella, A’, 226, 230 futurism, 65 Garnett, Constance, 127 KM’s reservations about translations by, 127, 128, 132 Love, and Other Stories, 132 Tales of Tchehov, The, 132 Gerhardi, William, 129 Futility, 67–8 Memoir of a Polyglot, 129 gift ambivalence of, 51–2 power dynamics and, 52 risks and dangers of, 52 ‘gift economy’, 9, 52, 56, 57–9, 61

gift-giving, 9, 51–2; see also exchange Gilbert, Sandra, 36 Gilmore, Mary, 14 Gorky, Maxim Reminiscences of Leo Nicolayevitch Tolstory, 128 Reminiscences of Leonid Andreyev, 84, 127 Great War see World War One Grub Street, 137, 142, 143 Gubar, Susan, 36 Gurdjieff Institute, 74, 78, 84, 226 Hanrahan, Barbara, 15 Hassan, Ihab, 124 ‘Problem of Influence in Literary History, The’, 6–7 Hogarth Press, 28, 55, 59, 146 Hyde, Robin, 208, 221 ‘Singers of Loneliness’, 221 identification ambivalent, 211 double, 2 KM-Colette, 11, 107 recognition of writer’s self in another and, 10 through opposition, 11 Illustrated Tasmanian Mail, 171 imitation, 11, 121 Evelyn Waugh and, 27, 32 see also ‘Sleepyhead’–‘The ChildWho-Was-Tired’ plagiarism episode influence ‘agents’ of, 7 as battle, 23 as coterie, 4 as creative source, 9 as ‘influenza’, 41, 132 as unequal relationship, 122 author- and text-focused approach to charting of, 4 author-centeredness of, 7 between literary correspondents, 12 between literary critics, 12 definition of, 3 desire to, 41 difficulties of proving, 6–7 ‘doubled’, 12, 181, 189 early feminist models of, 40, 43 empathy and, 11 exchange and, 10

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254     Index influence (cont.) female literary tradition and, 36–7, 208, 212 female mode of, 8 ‘forms’ of, 7 gift-giving with Woolf, 51–2, 55, 56–9, 62 idea of, KM’s contemporaries and, 6 kinship and, 10 mainstream literary discussion and, 7–8 manner of memorialisation of legacy and, 14 modernist movement and, 22 mourning and, 8–9, 36, 40, 44–5 movement through time and place, 5 Oedipal model of, 36, 38, 39, 93, 138, 196 power inequality and, 9 problem of for women writers, 37 productive rivalry and, 94 protean variety of, 2 psycho-critical theory of, 7 reversal of active/passive relation in, 93 satirical potential of, 8 significance of literary antecedents and, 22 studies, applicability of, 7 theoretical considerations of, 3–4 unanxiety of, Shakespeare and, 196 via exchange see exchange woman-to-woman, 36, 38, 40 see also literary relationships Institute of Harmonious Development of Man see Gurdjieff Institute intertextuality, 7, 43, 196 Jackson, Anna, 174, 176, 197 Diary Poetics, 168 Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship see Mansfield Prize Kolodny, Annette, 36, 43 Oedipal model of influence and, 38 Koteliansky, S. S., 133, 143 collaboration with JMM, 81 descriptions of office of, 80 Dostoevsky: Letters and Reminiscences, 127 friendship with KM, 82–5 influence of in Bloomsbury, 80–1 influence of KM on, 85

linking of KM to Chekhov and, 124–5 literary relationship with KM, 10, 73, 74, 86 meeting with KM and JMM, 79–80 obituary, 87 relationship with JMM, 86 relationship with Lawrence, 79, 83, 87 Reminiscences of Leo Nicolayevitch Tolstory, 128 Reminiscences of Leonid Andreyev, 84, 127 translation of ‘Captain Ribnikov’ with KM, 84, 126 translation of Chekhov letters with KM, 126–7, 129, 130 translation process of, 128 Kristeva, Julia, 36, 45 mourning and, 40, 44 movement from semiotic to symbolic, 44 transposition and, 43–4 Langley, Eve autoeroticism and, 183, 187 ‘doubled’ influence and, 12, 181, 189 enchantment with Wilde by, 12, 180, 188–90 identification with Wilde, 181–3 influence of KM on, 12, 168, 180, 189 motherhood and, 187 objects and, 186–7 ‘Old Mill, The’, 181 otherness and, 185 Pea-pickers, The, 180, 182, 183, 184, 187, 190 sense of absurdity in writing of, 185 sexuality of, 187–8 shared reading with KM, 184 tension between parochialism and self-determination and, 183 ‘Weird Melancholy’ and, 189 White Topee, 186–7, 190 Lawrence, D. H., 9 ‘Crown, The’, 65, 68 KM and, 68–9, 70, 73 relationship with Koteliansky, 79, 83, 87 ‘Spirit of Place, The’, 73 Lawson, Henry, 210, 212 legacy, 14 as literary motivator, 13

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Index     255 literary imitation and, 11 manner of memorialisation and, 14, 219–29 of KM, 5–6, 13, 14, 207–8, 221 Lewis, Wyndham, external method of satire of, 28 literary culture, Australia location of KM in, 168, 175 Palmer and, 169, 170–1, 175, 177 literary influence see influence literary modernism, 4 literary predecessors, 124 ambivalence about, 9 literary realism, 27 literary tourism, 14, 219, 225–6 Loy, Mina ‘Effectual Marriage, The’, 69–70 ‘Feminist Manifesto’, 65, 69 Psych-Democracy, 70 ‘Manifesto Moment’, 74 beginning of, 65 description of, 65 Fauve moment of, 1950 and, 66 manifestos, 73–4 ‘little magazines’ and, 65–6 Manoukhin, Dr Ivan, 83–4, 86–7 Mansfield, Katherine abandonment of by JMM, 145 as literary critic, 71, 158–9 Athenaeum and, 51, 53, 66, 70–1, 222 attribution of ‘Captain Ribnikov’ translation to JMM, 126 birthplace, 221, 230 Blue Review and, 60 celebration of memory of by New Zealanders and, 13–14 centennial celebrations, 221 chauvinism of German men and, 96 ‘Chesney Wold’ and, 155–6 cinematic visual effects in fiction of, 29 Clinique L’Hermitage, 221 commercialisation of literature and, 53 committing others’ works to memory, 127 creativity and, 2 crisis in British writing and, 71–2 cure-guest, 1, 2 death of, 85 death of brother in World War One, 70, 82, 160

depression and, 144 dream, Colette’s twin, 107 engagement with ‘middlebrow’ culture, 15 exchanges with Virginia Woolf, 148 failed pregnancies, 43 Fontainebleau and, 78, 85, 132, 172, 226 friendship with Koteliansky, 82–5 gift for impersonation, 157 gifts, exchange of with Virginia Woolf, 51–2, 55, 56–9, 61–2 gravestone: identification as JMM’s wife, 226–7; inscription, 195, 203–4 Gurdjieff Institute and, 74, 78, 84, 226 illness, reading of Dickens in, 160 illness, reading of Shakespeare in, 195 impersonation and, 157 independence from JMM, 145–6 influence of Russia and Russian literature on, 78, 120 instructions to Murry for estate, 203–4 Lawrence and, 68–9, 70, 73 legacy, 5–6, 14, 221; see also legacy literary tourism and, 219 ‘little magazines’ and, 65–6 ‘Manifesto moment’ and, 65 Manoukhin and, 83–4, 86–7 marriage to Bowden and, 59, 78 Memorial Room see Memorial Room memorialisation of, 219–20, 229 Menton and, 70, 199, 219, 221, 223 middlebrow culture and, 15 miscarriage, 95, 187, 188 Miss Swainson’s school, 156–7, 158, 161 modernism and, 4, 99 motherhood and, 187 name of childhood home, 155–6 Native Companion and, 14, 125 New Age and, 27, 60, 67 nomadic life of, 106 posthumous reputation of in New Zealand, 207 pregnancy to Trowell, 125 Prowse and, 72–3 pseudonym, ‘Boris Petrovsky’, 79, 126 pseudonym, ‘Matilda Berry’, 68 pseudonyms, Russian, 78, 79

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256     Index Mansfield, Katherine (cont.) pseudonyms, use of, 67 Queen’s College and, 2, 158 regrets for early transgressions, 139–40 relationship with JMM, 72, 145 relationships with contemporaries, scholarship on, 4 reservations about translations by Garnett, 127, 128, 132 revival of Dickens’ reputation and, 12, 155, 157, 158 Rhythm and, 60, 66–7, 78, 79, 126 Russian costume and, 78 selection of pen name, 60 sexuality, 187 sidelined from reviewing, 71 Signature and, 60, 68, 69, 70, 73 strained marital relationship, 72 struggle between romantic coupledom and solitude and selfrealisation, 11 Switzerland and, 99–100 terror of childbirth, 95–6 tuberculosis and, 72, 83, 130 vagabondage and, 105 vegetarianism and, 97 Villa Flora, 221 Villa Isola Bella see Villa Isola Bella Villa Louise, 222 Mansfield, Katherine, works short stories and collections

‘Advanced Lady, The’, 201 ‘All Serene!’, 111 ‘Aloe, The’, 59–60, 70, 156, 161 ‘Apple-Tree, The’, 68, 72 ‘At “Lehmann’s”’, 110, 161 ‘At the Bay’, 100, 187 ‘Autumns I’, 68, 70 ‘Autumns II’, 68, 69, 70 ‘Bains Turc’, 164 ‘Baron, The’, 97 ‘Beautiful Miss Richardson, The’, 157 ‘Birthday, A’, 96, 111, 156 ‘Black Cap, The’, 164 ‘Bliss’, 8, 21, 22, 30–1, 58, 59, 113, 123 Bliss and Other Stories, 23, 25, 29, 35, 61, 68, 99, 123 ‘Canary, The’, 13, 208, 210, 213–16 ‘Child-Who-Was-Tired’, 2, 11, 111, 118, 132; see also ‘Sleepyhead’–

‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’ plagiarism episode ‘Cup of Tea, A’, 100–1 ‘Daughters of the Late Colonel, The’, 210, 222 ‘Die Einsame’, 95 ‘Education of Audrey, The’, 2, 164 ‘Et in Arcadia ego’, 70 ‘Fairy Story, A’, 78 ‘Festival of the Coronation, The’ 2 ‘Fly, The’, 120 ‘Frau Fischer’, 2, 96, 200–1 ‘Garden Party, The’, 120, 165, 185, 186, 204 Garden Party, The, 101 ‘Germans at Meat’, 2, 96, 97 ‘Great Examination, The’, 156 ‘How Pearl Button was Kidnapped,’ 186 ‘In a Café’, 125 In a German Pension, 1, 2, 10, 94, 97, 98, 156, 161, 184–5, 200 ‘In the Botanic Gardens’, 125 ‘Indiscreet Journey, An’, 164, 211 ‘Je ne parle pas français’, 97–8, 122–3, 138, 145, 201–2 ‘Lady’s Maid, The’, 185, 222 ‘Life of Ma Parker’, 120, 186, 204 ‘Little Governess, The’, 68, 69, 21 ‘Luftbad, The,’ 97 ‘Marriage à la Mode’, 120 ‘Married Man’s Story, A’, 111–12 ‘Millie’, 210 ‘Miss Brill’, 41, 42–3, 110, 185, 186 ‘Modern Soul, The’, 1–2, 9 ‘My Potplants’, 128, 161 ‘Ole Underwood’, 67, 210 ‘Pictures’, 29, 30, 110 ‘Poison’, 222 Prelude, 55, 57, 58, 60, 68, 69, 70, 99, 156, 203, 209 ‘Psychology’, 111 ‘Revelations’, 112 ‘Silence is Broken, The’, 72, 73 ‘Silhouettes’, 125 ‘Sister of the Baroness, The’, 98 Something Childish and Other Stories, 202 ‘Something Childish but Very Natural’, 163 ‘Stranger, The’, 72, 111, 222 ‘Such a Sweet Old Lady’, 162 ‘Sumurun: an Impression of

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Index     257 Leopoldine Konstantine’, 78 ‘Swing of the Pendulum, The’, 161 ‘Taking the Veil’, 120 Thirty-Four Short Stories, 40 ‘This Flower’, 13, 202–3 ‘Vignette: They are a ridiculous company’, 161–2 ‘Vignettes’, 125–6 ‘Wind Blows, The’, 68, 163 ‘Woman at the Store, The’, 66, 186, 210 ‘Yellow Chrysanthemum, The’, 2 ‘Young Girl, The’, 222 translations

‘Captain Ribnikov’, 84, 126 Chekhov’s letters, 82, 126–7, 129, 130 Dostoevsky’s letters, 84 ‘Journal of the Revolution’, 70, 127 Reminiscences of Leonid Andreyev, 84, 127 critical writing

‘Meaning of Rhythm’, 53, 67 Novels and Novelists, 173, 175–6 review of Esther Waters, 71 review of ‘Kew Gardens’, 53, 56 review of Mills of the Gods, The, 71 ‘Seriousness in Art’, 53, 67 personal writing

Journal of Katherine Mansfield, The, 123–4, 159, 169, 170, 171, 173 Letters of Katherine Mansfield, The, 170, 173–5 ‘Shakespeare notebooks’, 196–8, 200 Urewera Notebook, The, 181, 182, 183, 185–6 writing

absenting herself from stories, 130 ‘addiction to mimicry’, 185 anti-war message in, 70 Antony and Cleopatra and, 195, 197, 198, 199–200 appropriation and, 11, 121, 122, 130, 132 Australian literary culture, and, 14–15, 168–9, 208 autoeroticism and, 183, 187 Chekhov’s thoughts on writing and, 130–1 childbirth and, 111 citation of Shakespeare, 195, 200–1, 202 clothes and, 164–5 cockneyisms and, 160

communion with nature, 113 compositional practice of, 11 copy-editing, translations and, 128 copying and, 11, 122, 127, 132 critique of colonial culture, 208, 209–10 critique of normative gender structures by, 210–11 deliberate confusion of persons and things and, 160–1 delight in absurd, 98 desire to write, 2 development of New Zealand national literature and, 13, 207 ‘dialogic energy’ with Palmer, 168 Dickensian stylistic devices in, 12, 156–7, 159, 162–3 Dombey and Son as leitmotiv for, 156–7 double irony and, 97 ‘Egypt sketch’, 199–200 enchantment with Wilde, 2–3, 12, 181–3, 188–90 erotic passion and, 113 experiments with short story form, 67 expression of feminism in, 69 expression through words of others, 125–6 female discourse of, 208 French literary influences on, 106 ‘haunting’ of New Zealand literature by, 220 Henry IV, Part I and, 195, 197, 202, 203–4 heroines, 108, 110, 112–13 humour and, 163 identification of other work to emulate, 2 identification with Dostoevsky, 145 image of a child and, 114–15 imitation of Dostoevsky’s ‘underworld’, 11, 138 impressionism and impersonation techniques, 13, 208, 216 influence of gendered style on younger women writers, 208 influence of prior literary texts on, 2–3 influence of Russia and Russian literature on, 78, 120 influence on Australian literary culture, 14–15 influence on contemporaries, 9–10

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258     Index Mansfield, Katherine, works writing (cont.) influence on development of New Zealand national literature, 13, 207–8, 220 insistence of rhythm in, 67 irony and, 185 ‘kingdom’ and, 112 legacy as burden to later writers, 14, 221 ‘Life’, desire to copy and, 130 literary landscape of early twentieth century and, 51 literary relationship with Bowen, 9, 15, 35–7, 40, 41, 43 literary relationship with Chekhov, 11, 85, 119, 130–3, 195–6 literary relationship with Colette, 10–11, 105–15 literary relationship with Dickens, 12, 155, 159–61, 162–3 literary relationship with Langley, 12, 168, 181, 184, 189 literary relationship with Koteliansky, 10, 73, 74, 82, 86 literary relationship with Palmer, 12, 168, 169–71, 175, 177 literary relationship with Sargeson, 207, 208, 209–17 literary relationship with Shakespeare, 13, 196–205 literary relationship with von Arnim, 10, 15, 93, 95, 97–102 literary relationship with Evelyn Waugh, 8, 15, 21, 23, 24–28, 32 literary relationship with Virginia Woolf, 9, 39, 51–2, 53–62, 195 manifesto style and, 66, 71, 73 marriage and, 106, 107, 111 meat as metaphor for militarism, 97 metonymy, 159 middlebrow and, 15, 98 modernist writing and, 52 motherhood and, 111 myth of biblical fall and, 68–9 narrator as spectator, 98 nation formation and, 211–12 New Zealand Writing Fellows and, 13–14, 220, 221, 223–4 notebooks, 2, 72, 122, 125, 126, 130, 195, 196–8, 202 otherness and, 185–6 plagiarism and see plagiarism practice, 11, 122

reading practices of, 198, 204 reviews as platform for honesty in art, 71 Russian émigré community and, 84 satire and, 31, 97, 98, 156–7, 185 scepticism about relationships between men and women, 187 self-representation and, 98 serious illness and, 130, 131 similarities with Sargeson, 209–17 speaking for/as Chekhov, 129 tension between parochialism and self-determination and, 183 translation process and, 126–8, 130 translations, 11, 81–2 Twelfth Night and, 199, 202 typed versions of handwritten stories, 127 urge to be moralist, 73 urgency to be ‘real’ and ‘free’ in, 67–8 use of epiphany, 208 vagabondage and, 105, 114 violent upheaval and, 70 wit and, 161 ‘Woman Alone’, 186 Mansfield Prize, 221, 223–4 Manson, Cecil and Cecilia, 223 Lonely One, The, 223 Mantz, Ruth Elvish, 124–5, 170 Life of Katherine Mansfield, The, 125, 173 Marinetti, F. T., 70, 71 ‘Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism, The’, 65, 66 Mauss, Marcel, 9, 56 Essai sur le Don [The Gift], 52 Memorial Room, 13–14, 219, 230 amenities in, 225–6 City of Menton and, 224 denial of entry to, 226 establishment of, 223 Fellows and, 223–4, 227–9 see also Villa Isola Bella middlebrow avant-garde and, 98 modernism and, 15, 26, 93, 98 modernism Bloomsbury, relationship to modern literature, 10 High, 15, 22, 26, 28, 32, 59 inclusive version of, 121 middlebrow and, 15, 26, 93, 98 Russophilia of, 120 Waugh and, 8, 21–2, 26, 28, 32

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Index     259 modernist writing, 23, 25, 32, 52 revision and, 127 Moore, George, Esther Waters, 71 Morrell, Ottoline, 55, 59, 127 Mowers, Ellen, 36 Mulgan, John, 208 Murry, John Middleton, 9, 59, 61, 168 ‘Art and Philosophy’, 66 attraction to von Arnim, 100 collaboration with Koteliansky, 81 construction of KM as intuitive writer by, 122 ‘Dickens’, 158 editorials in Rhythm, 65 editorship of Adelphi, 86 editorship of Athenaeum, 54, 70 engagement with Shakespeare by, 13 estate instructions from KM, 203–4 future of poetry argument with Eliot, 71 KM notebook 10 and, 197 KM plagiarism allegations and, 120 Life of Katherine Mansfield, The, 125, 173 linking of KM to Chekhov by, 122–4 ‘Meaning of Rhythm, The’, 53, 67 mythologising of KM by, 11, 121 perpetration of myth of author as solitary genius by, 121, 124, 172 relationship with Koteliansky, 86 Scrapbook of Katherine Mansfield, 68 ‘Seriousness in Art’, 53, 67 Shakespeare as shared code with KM, 199 ‘Significance of Russian Literature, The’, 120, 131 Murry, Richard, 74, 162 Native Companion, 14, 125 New Age, 27, 60, 67, 119, 168, 169, 171 New Statesman, 87 New Statesman and Nation, 123, 146 New, W. H., 127, 207, 208, 212 New Zealand Writing Fellows, 13–14, 220, 221, 223–4 Nicholls, Norah, 148–9 Open Window, 78 Orage, A. R., 83, 132, 169 O’Sullivan Vincent, 4, 72–3, 79, 196, 202–3 Jones and Jones, 220

Palmer, Nettie, 14 as contemporary reader of KM, 169 as ‘extractor’, 175–6 Commonplace Book for 1929, 175, 177 correspondence of, 168, 177 correspondence with other women writers about KM, 173–5 development of Australian literary culture and, 169, 170–1, 175, 177 diaries and notebooks of, 168, 174–5, 176 enchantment with KM, 172–3, 175 influence of posthumously published writing of KM on, 12, 168, 177 JMM representation of KM’s genius and, 172 ‘Katherine Mansfield Returns’, 173 literary reviews by, 168, 169, 171–3, 177 parallel life experiences with KM, 169–70 reading of Journal by, 171–2 Palmer, Vance, 14, 169 Pater, Walter, ‘Child in the House’, 2 plagiarism accusations of, 6, 11 current scholarship and, 120–1 hatred of, 125–6 unconscious memory and, 120 see also ‘Sleepyhead’–‘The ChildWho-Was-Tired’ plagiarism episode Pound, Ezra Egoist, 26 ‘Make It New!’, 4, 6, 120, 121 Praed, Rosa Campbell, 14 Prowse, R. O., 72–3 Gift of the Dusk, The, 72, 73 Rawlinson, Gloria, 208 Rhythm, 53, 60, 65, 66–7, 78, 79, 126 Rich, Adrienne, 36 Richardson, Henry Handel, 15, 168 Robins, Elizabeth, Mills of the Gods, The, 70 Russell, Bertrand, 80, 101 Russian Law Bureau, 80, 82 Russian literature Bloomsbury and, 80 cultural engagement with Britain and, 15–16, 79 influence on KM, 78, 120

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260     Index Russian literature (cont.) KM’s translation process for, 126–8, 130 translations of, 10, 11, 81–2; see also specific Russian authors Virginia Woolf and, 11 Sargeson, Frank, 13 adaptation of KM’s techniques of impressionism and impersonation by, 208, 216 ‘age of’, 216 as gay writer, 209 claim of equivalent influence with KM, 208 critique of colonial culture by, 207, 209–10 critique of normative gender structures by, 210–11 cultural nationalism and, 13, 217 ‘feminine’ tradition of KM and, 208, 212 ‘Good Boy, A’, 210 ‘Good Samaritan’, 209 ‘Great Day, A’, 210 ‘Hole that Jack Dug, The’, 209 ‘I For One’, 209 ‘I’ve Lost My Pal’, 210, 211 KM ‘problem’ of, 208 ‘Making of a New Zealander, The’, 211 ‘Man and His Wife, A’, 13, 208, 211, 212, 213–16 Man and His Wife, A, 208, 216 nation formation and, 211–12 rivalry with KM, 207, 216 ‘Sale Day’, 210 similarities with KM, 209–217 social realism and, 207 That Summer, 209, 211 use of epiphany by, 208 ‘White Man’s Burden’, 209 satire, 8, 23 external method of, 28 use of by KM, 31, 97, 156, 161, 185 Scott, Margaret, 122, 159, 196 Shakespeare, William Antony and Cleopatra, 195, 197, 198, 199–200 centrality of for writers, 196 citation of by KM, 195, 200–1, 202 Hamlet, 204 Henry IV, Part I, 195, 197, 202, 203–4

influence of legacy on KM, 13 KM gravestone inscription and, 195, 203–4 Rape of Lucrece, 204 Sonnets, 205 Twelfth Night, 199, 202 use of as shared code between KM and JMM, 199 use of epigraph ‘For I tell you my Lord fool’ by KM, 195, 202, 203–4 Venus and Adonis, 195, 199, 205 Shaw, Helen, “Today at the Villa Isola Bella’, 226 Showalter, Elaine, 36 Signature, 60, 65, 73 ‘Sleepyhead’–‘The Child-Who-WasTired’ plagiarism episode accusation of ‘lifting’ of Chekhov stories, 119 appropriation and, 122 as part of a continuum, 122 emulation and, 122 Koteliansky and, 124–5 lack of critical interest in, 120–1 reasons to revisit, 120–1 ‘Schlafen’ and, 126 translation and, 122, 126 Smith, Angela, 4, 23–4, 40, 51, 55, 66, 72, 138, 155, 199 Stead, C. K., 74, 207, 228–9 End of the Century at the End of the World, The, 220 Strachey, Lytton, 52 Swift, Jonathan, 140–1 Sydney Morning Herald, 14 Theocritus, Adoniaszusae, XVth Idyll, 2 Times Literary Supplement, 6, 23, 54, 59, 120 Villa Isola Bella absent-presence of KM and, 219–20 approximation of writing room of KM, 224 as sacred site, 219 contribution to productivity of KM, 222 description of by KM, 222, 224 KM’s reflections on New Zealand while at, 222–3 love of KM for, 223 Winn-Manson Menton Trust, 223 see also Memorial Room

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Index     261 von Arnim, Elizabeth Caravaners, The, 96–7 chauvinism of German men and, 96 Elizabeth and Her German Garden, 94, 95 Elizabeth novels, 10, 94 Elizabeth’s Adventures in Rühen, 94, 98 Enchanted April, 100 equation of obesity to lack of independence, 96 KM’s ambivalence to, 90, 94 letters to KM, 101–2 literary relationship with KM, 10, 15, 93, 95, 97–102 literary stardom of, 94 physical and verbal withdrawal tactics, 97 resentment at husband’s desire for an heir, 96 Solitary Summer, The, 94, 96 Switzerland and, 99–100 vegetarianism and, 96 Vera, 100 Waterlow, Sydney, 85–6 Waugh, Alex, 28 Waugh, Arthur, 26 Waugh, Evelyn absence of KM from critical readings of, 23 advocacy of cinematic techniques by, 29–30 ‘Balance, The’, 28, 29–30 ‘cure’ and, 26–7 Decline and Fall, 22, 27 derision of lady novelists by, 24–6 Handful of Dust, A, 8, 22, 28, 30, 31 humour at KM’s ill health by, 24 imitation and, 27, 32 marginalia, 25, 27 misreading of KM by, 21 misspelling of KM’s name by, 32 modernism and, 5–6, 8, 21–2, 28, 29, 32 Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, The, 21–2 parody of KM by, 23, 32 shared stylistic traits with KM, 30–2 ‘Twilight of Language, The’, 8, 22–6, 28, 29, 32 verbal repetition of KM and, 27–8 Vile Bodies, 22, 28, 31 Wedde, Ian, Symme’s Hole, 220 Wells, H. G., 27, 67

West, Rebecca, 79, 148–9 ‘Barbarians, The’, 120 Wilde, Oscar, 2, 4, 12, 125–6, 180–3, 187, 188–90 ‘Decay of Lying, The’, 181, 183 Duchess of Padua, The, 2 enchantment of KM for, 2–3, 12 otherness and, 185 Picture of Dorian Gray, The, 2–3, 125 Salome, 2 Winn-Manson Menton Trust, 223 Woolf, Leonard, 81, 83 obituary of Koteliansky, 87 on Koteliansky as a translator, 128 posthumous characterisation of wife as apolitical ‘animal’ by, 142 Reminiscences of Leo Nicolayevitch Tolstoy, 128 Two Stories, 58 wit of KM and, 161 Woolf, Virginia, 55, 81, 93, 99, 108, 122, 123, 130 consciousness of literary influences by, 139 diaries of, 197 effect of death of KM on, 40 essay inspired by memory of, 137 evolving empathy for KM by, 137, 139, 144 first meeting with KM, 52 ‘Flower Bed’, 55–6, 58 gifts, exchange of with KM, 51–2, 55, 56–9, 62 ‘Harriette Wilson’, 139, 142 High Modernism and, 59 illness, ‘underworld’ of, 142, 144–5 injustice of society and, 140 ‘Kew Gardens’, 9, 52, 55, 56–7, 59–61 ‘Leaning Tower, The’, 22 literary pilgrimage to Stratford, 219 literary relationship with KM, 9, 11, 39, 51–2, 53–62, 195 ‘Mark on the Wall’, 55 ‘Modern Fiction’, 27, 113–14, 120 ‘Modern Novels’, 53, 54, 141 ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, 120 Mrs Dalloway, 143, 146 Night and Day, 51, 53–4, 56 reading practices of, 198, 204 Room of One’s Own, A, 37 Russian literature and, 11 ‘Russian Point of View, The’, 120

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262     Index Woolf, Virginia (cont.) Russian writers and, 141, 144 sense of affinity with KM by, 138 support of husband through illnesses, 144–5 Swift and, 140–1 ‘think back through our mothers’, 36, 102

Three Guineas, 149 To the Lighthouse, 146–7 Two Stories, 58 ‘underworld’ and, 11, 137–8, 140–3, 146–8 Waves, The, 146, 147–8 World War One, 54, 70, 82

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