Katherine Mansfield and Modernism: Katherine Mansfield Studies, Volume 2 9781474465854

Citation preview

October 1, 2010

Time:

04:26pm

kms020.tex

Published with the support of the Edinburgh University Scholarly Publishing Initiatives Fund.

October 1, 2010

Time:

04:26pm

kms020.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 2 · 2010

Katherine Mansfield and Modernism Edited by

Delia da Sousa Correa, Gerri Kimber and Susan Reid

Edinburgh University Press

October 1, 2010

Time:

04:26pm

kms020.tex

Portrait of Katherine Mansfield by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, 1891–1915. With kind permission: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund. B1982.26.60

October 1, 2010

Time:

04:26pm

kms020.tex

Subscription rates for Volume 3 (2011) UK

Rest of World

N. America

Institutions

Print Online Print and online Back issues/single copies

£38.00 £34.00 £47.00 £38.00

£41.00 £34.00 £51.00 £41.00

$76.00 $63.00 $95.00 $76.00

Individuals

Print Online Print and online Back issues/single copies

£20.00 £20.00 £25.00 £20.00

£23.00 £20.00 £28.00 £23.00

$43.00 $37.00 $53.00 $43.00

How to order Subscriptions can be accepted for complete volumes only. Print prices include packing and airmail for subscribers in North America and surface postage for subscribers in the Rest of the World. All orders must be accompanied by the correct payment. You can pay by cheque in Pound, Sterling or US Dollars, bank transfer, Direct Debt or Credit/Debt card. The individual rate applies only when a subscription is paid for with a personal cheque, credit card or bank transfer. To order using the online subscription form, please visit www.eupjournals.com/kms/page/subscribe Alternatively you may place your order by telephone on +44 (0)131 650 6207, fax on +44 (0)131 662 3286 or email to [email protected] using your Visa or Mastercard credit card. Don’t forget to include the expiry date of your card, the security number (three digits on the reverse of the card) and the address that the card is registered to. Please make your cheque payable to Edinburgh University Press Ltd. Sterling cheques must be drawn on a UK bank account. If you would like to pay by bank transfer or Direct Debit, contact us at [email protected] and we will provide instructions. Advertising Advertisements are welcomed and rates are available on request, or by consulting our website at www.eupjournals.com. Advertisers should send their enquiries to the Journals Marketing Manager at the address above.

October 1, 2010

Time:

04:26pm

kms020.tex

Contents

Foreword C. K. Stead: Honorary Vice-President, Katherine Mansfield Society Introduction Delia da Sousa Correa, Gerri Kimber, Susan Reid – co-editors Articles Modern Tastes in Rhythm: The Visual and Verbal Culture of Advertisements in Modernist Magazines Andrew Thacker Anxious Beginnings: Mental Illness, Reproduction and Nation Building in ‘Prelude’ and Prelude to Christopher Sarah Ailwood

vii

1

4

20

Katherine Mansfield and the Gardens of the Soul Maurizio Ascari

39

Surrounded by Beasts: Bertha Young’s Thwarted Fairy Tale Christine Butterworth-McDermott

56

Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence: A Parallel Quest Linda Lappin

72

D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and Happiness Kirsty Martin

87

Creative Writing Bugger the Skylarks: Lawrence and Mansfield at War. A Battle in Ten Scenes Robert Fraser The Little House Kirsty Gunn

100

163

October 1, 2010

Time:

04:26pm

kms020.tex

The Not Knowing Ailsa Cox Poetry Fiona Kidman: ‘Wearing Katherine Mansfield’s shawl’ ‘Working in the Katherine Mansfield Room Menton’ Vincent O’Sullivan: ‘Believe me’ Anne Mounic: ‘Croyez-moi’ (trans.) C. K. Stead: ‘Cornwall, May 1916’

171

180 181 181 182 182

Report J. D. Fergusson’s Painting Rhythm Angela Smith

184

Double Portrait: Katherine Mansfield and S. S. Koteliansky in the Garden Penelope Jackson

188

Review Article John Attridge: The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume I, Britain and Ireland 1880–1955

196

Reviews Angela Smith: Modernism, Magazines, and the British Avant-Garde Reading Rhythm, 1910–1914 Susan Reid: New D. H. Lawrence Patricia Rae: The Persistence of Modernism Rishona Zimring: Too Much Happiness: Stories

202 204 206 208

Notes on Contributors

212

Acknowledgements

216

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:36pm

kms021.tex

FOREWORD

Honorary Vice-President of the Katherine Mansfield Society C. K. Stead ‘Modernism’, our theme for this issue, is a term so broad it is difficult to know where it begins and ends. It belongs to the early years of the twentieth century, is brought into sharper definition by the psychic shock of World War I, and reaches certain literary peaks in works like The Waste Land and Ulysses, both 1922, the year also of The Garden Party which represents Mansfield at the height of her powers. Parallel developments in music and the visual arts make it possible to see composers and painters as co-workers with the poets and fiction writers in a grand inter-European experimentalism that aimed to shake off tired conventions in favour of renewal across the whole spectrum of the arts. Modernism, one might say, was to the early twentieth century what Romanticism had been to the early nineteenth. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was. . . to be deeply troubled. This is the social, intellectual and literary context in which Katherine Mansfield began to write. She suffered directly, in her soul, the trauma of the war, and was brought by it to a quicker recognition of where her primary material was to be found, and how she was to deal with it. Mansfield’s achievement is not only in the art of the short story in English, but on a broader front in her influence (especially by the effect of her writing on Virginia Woolf) on fictional techniques. She liberated fiction from story without abandoning narrative. She showed, in discovering it, how narrative can grow by accretion around a focal point rather than by chronological sequence. She discovered how much can (and even should) be left unstated; and how attention to detail, to the play of words on the ear as well as on the comprehending intellect, can make sentences say more and mean more. She linked fiction in English with modern French and Russian work, thus profiting Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 2 (2010): vii–viii DOI: 10.3366/E2041450110000211 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

vii

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:36pm

kms021.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies early from, and making herself part of, a literary internationalism that was an essential part of modernism. Finally she lived (though at dire cost) the life of the ‘free’ woman, asserting her right to it, and setting an example for those who came after. ‘We owe to [Mansfield]’, Elizabeth Bowen says, ‘the prosperity of the “free’’ story: she untrammelled it from conventions. [. . . ] She was to alter for good and all our idea of what goes to make a story’. Mansfield loved the process of writing, and continually recorded, in journals, letters and experimental drafts, what went on in her workshop. She did not, of course, intend that what she called her ‘camping ground’ should ever be open to the public; but thanks to John Middleton Murry, it has been preserved and, over time, made available to scholars, so that we are able to trace inner self-discovery becoming literary development, and how the two interacted. Not intending to, Mansfield let us into her studio, into her ‘life of the mind’, the very place post-modernism has craved access to, and has come to value as much as, sometimes even more than, the finished product. Mansfield belonged to the zeitgeist of the early twentieth century; but she has moved imperceptibly into that of the twenty-first. The Journal of the Katherine Mansfield Society is an on-going record of how much there is still to be learned from the study of her work, and what an international enterprise it has become. The present issue offers some new examples of the many ways in which the words ‘Mansfield’ and ‘Modernism’ belong together and can be spoken in the same breath.

viii

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:37pm

kms022.tex

Introduction Delia da Sousa Correa, Gerri Kimber, Susan Reid

For this second volume of the Katherine Mansfield Studies journal the theme is ‘Katherine Mansfield and Modernism’, a challengingly broad topic, as C. K. Stead observes in his foreword. It is a theme given a distinct focus in this volume by our highlighting the relatively unexplored relationship between Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence, to whom, both as artist and person, Mansfield felt herself uncannily alike. Mansfield’s literary and biographical relationship with Lawrence is investigated in two essays which are the joint winners of the Katherine Mansfield Society’s first essay prize. Linda Lappin reflects on the similar life-pilgrimages undertaken by Mansfield and Lawrence and Kirsty Martin traces close linguistic affinities between the ways in which the two writers treated the subject of happiness. The Editors are immensely grateful to the judging panel of the essay competition, C. K. Stead, Andrew Harrison, and their chair, Susan Reid, for their generous expenditure of time and careful assessment of the entries. The emphasis on Mansfield’s relationship with Lawrence which the entries to the competition have made possible is not only overdue but also timely: the publication of this volume coincides with that of a new book, Circulating Genius: John Middleton Murry, Katherine Mansfield, and D. H. Lawrence by the eminent Mansfield scholar Sydney Janet Kaplan: we look forward to reviewing it in our next volume. Other essays for this volume of Katherine Mansfield Studies examine richly varied aspects of Mansfield and modernism. Christine Butterworth-McDermott discusses Mansfield’s modernist revision of Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 2 (2010): 1–3 DOI: 10.3366/E2041450110000223 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

1

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:37pm

kms022.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies fairy-tale motifs (also a theme of Kirsty Martin’s essay) whilst Maurizio Ascari explores the aesthetic, psychological and political contexts for Mansfield’s 1907 sketch ‘In the Botanical Gardens’, finding in the movement from garden to bush a key text for her modernist transgression of social and aesthetic conventions as well as parallels with D. H. Lawrence, among other writers. Two further essays place Mansfield within a wider international and cultural modernist framework. Sarah Ailwood’s analysis of Mansfield’s influence on the Australian writer Eleanor Dark, and the colonial contexts for both writers’ work, places Mansfield’s contribution to modernism in an Antipodean context, a vivid demonstration of how artists from outside Europe such as Mansfield and Dark formed and developed literary modernism. Andrew Thacker illuminates the wider story of publishing ‘little magazines’ such as Rhythm by examining the presence of advertisements in this journal and several contemporary publications, so revealing the somewhat uneasy accommodations between modernist aesthetics and the commercial realities involved in the production and distribution of print. The relationship between Mansfield and Lawrence is given dramatic form in our extended creative section for this volume where we publish Robert Fraser’s play Bugger the Skylarks. This presents the inherently dramatic situation existing during the time that Mansfield, Murry, Frieda and D. H. Lawrence shared a pair of remote cottages at Zennor in Cornwall during 1916. A stage set representing the two cottages with a privy in their midst frames the playing out of tensions between the characters. This is high comedy with an elegiac undertone, troubled by the continuing havoc of the war that has killed Mansfield’s brother, and by the impending descent into ill-health of both Mansfield the lyrical satirist and Lawrence the impassioned seer. New short stories by Kirsty Gunn and Ailsa Cox also appear in this volume, both of which, in different ways, evoke Mansfield. A finely calibrated and haunting contemporary tribute to ‘The Doll’s House’ and ‘Prelude’ is palpable in Gunn’s ‘The Little House’, whilst Cox’s ‘The Not Knowing’ makes us aware that present-day anxieties are likely to invert the narrative of ‘How Pearl Button was Kidnapped’. As in our first volume, we have poetic contributions from distinguished New Zealand poets, Fiona Kidman, C. K. Stead and Vincent O’Sullivan, whose poem ‘Believe me’ appears here alongside a translation into French by Anne Mounic. The first volume of the important new Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines is the subject of a review article by John Attridge for this volume, with the reviews section that follows picking up on key works of relevance to the subject of Mansfield

2

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:37pm

kms022.tex

Introduction and modernism. Faith Binkes’s monograph, Modernism, Magazines, and the British Avant-Garde Reading Rhythm, 1910–1914, receives praise from Angela Smith. In keeping with our special focus on Mansfield and Lawrence, Susan Reid reviews New D. H. Lawrence, a valuable collection of essays edited by Howard J. Booth (albeit this does not examine his relationship with Mansfield). Patricia Rae reviews Madelyn Detloff’s thought-provoking study The Persistence of Modernism which examines the work of Mansfield’s female contemporaries Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and H. D. We round off with a review by Rishona Zimring of the latest collection of stories by Alice Munro, Mansfield’s successor as ‘doyenne’ of short-story writers in our own day, whose title for her latest collection, ‘Too Much Happiness’ echoes Mansfield and her fellow modernists’ articulations of the fragile exorbitance of happiness, a topic that threads across so many of the contributions to this volume. Our cover image is J. D. Fergusson’s painting Rhythm (1911). Angela Smith’s report on this painting emphasises the extent to which Katherine Mansfield belonged to the same dynamic aesthetic world. Two practically unknown portraits of Mansfield are discussed in this volume, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s 1912 line drawing of Mansfield and Beatrice Campbell’s double portrait of Mansfield and her close friend the Russian translator Koteliansky, painted in 1920. Penelope Jackson provides a report on the context for Campbell’s painting, which, like the much better-known portrait by Anne Estelle Rice which appeared on the cover of Volume 1 of Katherine Mansfield Studies, is now housed at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. The vital role played by translators such as Koteliansky in the transmission of different modernisms, and by his collaborations with writers like Woolf and Mansfield, has recently obtained belated recognition; the international authorship, reach and provenance of the contents of this journal are a modest testimony to the extent to which Mansfield’s own contribution to modernism continues to extend beyond cultural boundaries.

3

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:39pm

kms023.tex

Modern Tastes in Rhythm: The Visual and Verbal Culture of Advertisements in Modernist Magazines 1

Andrew Thacker

Abstract This article analyses the role of advertisements in the visual and verbal culture of modernist ‘little magazines’, and focuses upon Rhythm (1911–13), the magazine edited by Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry. It traces how advertisements are implicated in the culture of the ‘little magazine’ as much as in commercial magazines, and indicates how Rhythm provides an interesting casestudy for demonstrating how modernism engages critically with the commodification represented by the discourse of advertising. The article analyses how the visual ‘look’ of Rhythm as an avant-garde magazine, as applied in the illustrations to poems by Mansfield, also extends to the design of advertisements for commercial organisations such as the department store Heals. Rhythm thus demonstrates a dilemma over the relation between art and commercial culture that runs throughout modernism, one which is noticed most acutely in modernist magazines. Key words: Modernist magazines, advertisements, visual culture, modernism, Mansfield, Middleton Murry, Rhythm The story told of modernism has, until recently, been one whereby the culture of modernism bravely resisted advertisements and the commodification that they represented, and where art and advertising Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 2 (2010): 4–19 DOI: 10.3366/E2041450110000235 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

4

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:39pm

kms023.tex

Modern Tastes in Rhythm were not combined. This might also be thought to be the story of modernist magazines, the ‘little magazines’, such as Rhythm, or the European petits revues that thrived from the 1880s onwards, and which could be placed firmly on the side of art against commerce, if we view them through Andreas Huyssens’s theorisation of the ‘great divide’ in modernism.2 But this story is more complicated if we consider a wider range of publications in which modernism emerged, wider than simply those magazines in which no advertisements are found. Recent trends in modernist studies have begun to see modernism as much more deeply imbricated within structures of publicity and advertising.3 Following such work, we can notice that alongside the avant-garde and the experimental on the space of the page in modernist periodicals, are products designed to support the budding artist, such as that for a ‘Rowney’s Sketching Case’, images which jostle alongside a rather more mundane advert for ‘internal bathing’; we also find many adverts for popular or quack products (‘brainy diets’ and ‘bust enlargement’) and some for the downright peculiar: ‘scientific hair brushing’ available from the Parma Rooms (run by Katherine Mansfield’s friend, Ida Baker). Whereas the advertisements for internal bathing and bust enlargement come from an American magazine, Current Literature (1888–1912), that could hardly be termed modernist (it was a large circulation monthly that covered current affairs, fashion, science as well as cultural matters),4 the advertisements for the Rowney’s sketching device and the scientific hair brushing are from, respectively The Dome (1897–1900), an English magazine of literature, music, architecture, and the graphic arts that is characterised by an interest in the symbolist movement, and Rhythm (1911–13), a classic modernist periodical edited by John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield. This article examines the broader relationship between the visual cultures of advertising and modernism in periodicals, outlining some of the key cultural contexts that are important for an understanding of Rhythm. Advertising and magazine publication have always co-existed. The appearance of advertising in its modern format has been traced to the late seventeenth century, locating its emergence in a newspaper where the distinction between ‘news’ and advertisements is hard to disentangle. Typographical distinctions between news and adverts were only really refined in the nineteenth century, along with separate columns for advertisements. A vast number of textual advertisements in the eighteenth century were for literary works – the practice of prefacing a book with a short leaflet describing the qualities of the book and labelled ‘Advertisement’ was very common.5 From the middle of

5

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:39pm

kms023.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies the nineteenth century, the use of advertisements expanded greatly in British periodicals, prompted by the abolition of advertising duty in 1853, and the proliferation of newspapers engendered by the end of newspaper stamp duty in 1855.6 A number of other factors fuelled the expansion of advertisements: the development of magazines targeting women; new patterns of consumption amongst the working-class from the 1880s onwards; and technological developments in lithography and poster production in the late nineteenth century. Finally, there was the massive growth in retailing and department stores at the turn of the century, with one of the most interesting examples in early twentiethcentury Britain being that of Selfridges, which opened in 1909.7 Gordon Selfridge, for example, spent £36,000 on advertising prior to opening his Oxford Street store. As Erika Rappaport argues, ‘Selfridge’s opening significantly tightened the already close relationship between mass retailing and mass journalism’.8 Since the 1880s commercial artists had been employed by the periodical press, but only sparingly by retailers. It was only in the early years of the twentieth century that ‘advertising managers of the newer and cheaper papers began to court the big shop’s custom, attempting to dismantle what had long been a prejudice against newspaper advertising’.9 Gordon Selfridge’s campaign employed a number of well-known graphic artists (including Walter Crane) to produce colourful illustrations for many publications. The Selfridge cartoons, wrote one commentator, were ‘the most complete attempt to combine art with advertising that has been made in this country’.10 As Rappaport argues, Selfridge’s tactics were part of a wider cultural transformation in patterns of consumption at this time, one in which ‘magazine readers already associated the process of reading with shopping and looking’. By the 1890s professional advertising was well aware of the role of visual culture as spectacle, and of the psychology of ‘eye appeal’.11 It is not surprising, therefore, to find that the visual culture of advertising permeates periodical culture from the end of the nineteenth century, a tendency that is also evident in the supposedly anti-commercial form of the modernist ‘little magazine’. Indeed, it is relatively rare to find instances of modernist periodicals that do not contain advertising of some form. BLAST (1914–15), edited by Wyndham Lewis, and the paradigm of the oppositional, avant-garde ‘little magazine’ in Britain, has advertisements for John Lane, the publisher; Wyndham Lewis’s later The Enemy (1927–9) had more pages of adverts, albeit for publishers and art galleries. Classic American ‘little magazines’ such as The Little Review or The Dial also, in varying degrees, contain advertisements. Only through generous

6

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:39pm

kms023.tex

Modern Tastes in Rhythm patronage could magazines reject all advertisements, for example, Poetry magazine has relatively few adverts in early issues, but did have a list of subscribers who supported the magazine in lieu of advertising.12 The simple point to make is that although certain modernist writers and artists perceived advertisements to be inimical to aesthetic experiment, the economics of magazine production forced their hands. In this respect, the publishers of modernist magazines were subject to the same economic forces that dominated all periodical publications. Richard Ohmann has argued that the end of the nineteenth century witnessed a new phenomenon in the relations between magazines and advertisements, where mass-circulation publications (such as Munsey’s or McClure’s) sold advertising rates based on high circulations and then sold the magazine at very low prices (such as 10 cents) that did not even cover the cost of production: profit was thus made by the sale of advertisements, rather than on circulation sales.13 Such strategies were not obviously employed by modernist magazines, since their circulations were, typically, too low for the tactic to appeal to advertisers. However, the idea that advertising revenue could subsidise the costs of publication was well-established by the early years of the twentieth century, even amongst so-called minority magazines. Of course many of these advertisements were for booksellers or artistic reproductions, and so editors could argue that such products were suitable for their desired readership, or at least not as aesthetically offensive as adverts for ‘internal bathing’ or ‘brainy diets’. But such a stance was very hard to maintain, especially as advertisements for other magazines or for publishers were often accepted on a ‘no cost’ or mutual basis, and thus did not bring in revenue as such. Take The Little Review (1914–29), an exemplary magazine of avantgarde experimentation and one which used to run a masthead pronouncing that it was ‘making no compromise with public taste’ in its commitment to the new. Its first issue, however, of sixty-four pages, contained seventeen pages of advertising.14 Many of its advertisements in an issue for January 1918 are for other ‘little magazines’ such as The Pagan, The Quill, and a back page advertisement for The Egoist, alongside others for artistic related themes – pianos, concerts, theatres. But also advertised are the following: Strunsky’s Restaurants and a tea shop, Web Van Dam, albeit establishments in the bohemian quarter of Greenwich Village. Incidentally, it is not noted whether brainy diets were catered for at these establishments. Such a combination of art and commerce is not only found in the use of actual advertisements in many modernist magazines, but in

7

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:39pm

kms023.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies the adoption of strategies drawn from the practices of commercial publicity to promote the periodical. Mark Morrisson’s The Public Face of Modernism argues that certain modernist magazines often aped the strategies of publicity, advertising and circulation associated with mainstream publications. Far from wanting only to reach a coterie readership, Morrisson asserts that a magazine like The Egoist wished to intervene and help shape a more widely conceived public sphere in which questions of politics and aesthetics were paramount topics for debate. Modernists sought to adapt the institutions and practices of mass-circulation publishing for their own ends, and hoped to make their own voices and opinions heard by a new public seemingly eager to read widely about contemporary culture and society.15 In December 1913, Richard Aldington suggested to the editor of The Egoist that they employ two sandwich board men to publicise the magazine, a practice adopted and continued from 1914 to 1918.16 Some magazines not only employed similar strategies to that of product advertising but also functioned as advertising houses for individual modernists, as well as modernism itself. Ezra Pound, for example, in his first contact with James Joyce indicates that he can try to get the Irish writer published in various magazines with which he is connected. Some American magazines pay well, others less so, but, notes Pound, ‘Appearance in the Egoist may have a slight advertisement value if you want to keep your name familiar’.17 After Joyce’s work became established we can see how his name comes to possess its own ‘advertisement value’, as is shown in the following ‘announcement’ for Ulysses inside the front page of The Little Review: I have just received the first three instalments of James Joyce’s new novel which is to run serially in The Little Review, beginning with the March number. It is called ‘Ulysses’ [. . .] It is, I believe, even better than the ‘Portrait’. So far it has been read by only one critic of international reputation. He says: ‘It is certainly worth running a magazine if one can get stuff like this to put in it’ [. . .] This announcement means that we are about to publish a prose masterpiece.18

Essentially this is a discourse drawing upon that of advertising. It is worth ‘running a magazine’ if we get to publish this kind of work is the message of the advertisement, which trades upon the ‘value’ of Joyce’s name as an avatar of the modernist novel. There is thus a circulation of discourses here, from the advertising value of a magazine to that of an author and back.19 Advertising as a discourse runs throughout modernist magazines, even when there

8

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:39pm

kms023.tex

Modern Tastes in Rhythm is little or no advertising of the conventional sort for products or services. Sometimes the discourses of advertising and literary value coalesce, as is seen in an advertisement for The Smart Set. Edited by H. L. Mencken from 1914, The Smart Set (1900–24) was not a smallcirculation ‘little’ magazine, but was at the forefront of introducing American authors to the work of writers such as Eugene O’Neill, Djuna Barnes, D. H. Lawrence, F. Scott Fitzgerald and many others.20 A fullpage advertisement from 1912 addressed ‘TO ADVERTISERS’ tries to attract advertising revenue not on the basis of high circulation figures (indeed they say that ‘SOME PAPERS have miraculous circulations [. . .] Ours is good but not miraculous’) but on the basis of the inherent quality of the magazine and its readers: THE SMART SET IS THE MAGAZINE THAT’S DIFFERENT It is published to provide Lively Entertainment for Minds that are Not Primitive. ADVERTISERS find that The Smart Set is a medium through which they can reach a particular class of readers with money and leisure; Who, by paying a shilling for the magazine they want, show that they are ready to give a fair price for a distinctive article. People read the advertisements in American publications because they are artistically displayed. Very often their advertisement pages are as interesting as their literary contents – if not more so. The Smart Set contains literature that is different and in a class by itself. Our readers tell us so. We desire that the advertisements in the magazine should attract for the same reasons. Then they will help to sell it.21

This demonstrates the imbrication of advertising and culture, with readers, we learn being as interested in the advertisements as the literature in the magazine. Notions of quality and value float between the realms of literary culture and that of the commercial images of advertising, a fact emphasised in another appeal to advertisers in a different issue, which states that the pages of The Smart Set ‘are restricted to the highest class of advertising’. A similar appeal is found in The Crisis (1910–34), W. E. B. du Bois’s important magazine of politics and culture, and published by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. A note to advertisers in March 1911 proclaims: People who read The Crisis find it intensely interesting because it is different from the ordinary. When a magazine is so interesting that the

9

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:39pm

kms023.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies reader says ‘I was sorry because there was no more to read’ it is very valuable as an advertising medium, because, when ‘there is no more to read’, the advertisements are invariably read with the same zest and enthusiasm as the reading matter [. . .] Let us tell you WHY the CRISIS is different as an advertising medium.

This suggests, as with The Smart Set, that there is no essential difference between the advertisements and the other content of the magazine. Such strategies, brazen but innovative we might say, might be taken as more distinctive of American rather than European magazines in this period. There is some truth to this, but the circulation of value between culture and commodity (even a cultural commodity) and the blurring between discourses of literature and advertising is evident even in publications seemingly devoted to upholding the values of modernist experimentation. Seed (1933) was a British magazine of experimental poetry, influenced by surrealism, and containing work by Mary Butts and H. D. Seed lasted for merely two issues, but a poetic plea by Roger Burford in the first issue employs a rather ironic discourse to possibly try (and evidently fail, given the imminent closure of the magazine) to attract advertisers: You can fight, Advertisers, with GREAT BIG GUNS, but also with little slick slim rapiers [. . .] Because there are different ways of advertising different things. OUR SO EXCLUSIVE PAGES GIVE CACHET, AND PERHAPS YOU WILL REALISE THAT EACH COPY IS CURRENT NOT FOR DAYS OR WEEKS BUT FOR MONTHS AND MONTHS. [. . .] Above and beyond, because of our beauty we are studied page by page Our public includes evidently arbiters of taste and elegance, setting fashions in everything from books to bathrooms, and these are people who are deaf to the big guns and the battalions. Circulation figures and direct results are not always indices of advertising value, certainly not where luxury and cultural products are concerned, and not always for staples.22

Like Crisis and The Smart Set, the claim here is that these publications are directed at a certain kind of readership, one marked by an interest in ‘different’ kinds of products. Clearly such magazines could not

10

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:39pm

kms023.tex

Modern Tastes in Rhythm compete with the circulation figures of the mass publications, so an appeal to a select readership, interested in ‘luxury and cultural products’ seems a sensible strategy to utilise in gaining advertising revenue. This strategy also coalesced with the appearance and marketing of certain magazines (The Yellow Book or The Dial, for example) as luxury objects with a collectible value. The magazine Rhythm presents an interesting case of this movement between the discourses of culture and the commodity. Advertisements for binding cases for the magazine suggested that the editors conceived it as something perhaps akin to a deluxe edition of a book. Another interesting place to start is with an advertisement for the magazine itself. The back cover of Poetry Review for January 1912 has a half-page advertisement for ‘RHYTHM: The UNIQUE MAGAZINE OF MODERNIST ART’ and a brochure for Rhythm in a later issue proclaims: ‘Thus a unique attempt will be made to unite within one magazine all the parallel manifestations of modernism in every province of art, education and philosophy’. This is interesting, not only since it is very early in the English-speaking world to use the term ‘modernism’ in this way, but also in the sense that it would signify to a reader, perhaps not quite a brand, but at least a sign of a certain attitude to the contemporary world of art. Rhythm’s approach towards modernism was outlined in Murry’s manifesto, ‘Art and Philosophy’ in the first issue, which proclaims an art directed towards the future that is influenced by Bergson’s notion of intuition over intellect: The artist attains to the pure form, refining and intensifying his visions till all that is unessential dissolves away [. . .] He 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. Modernism is not the capricious outburst of intellectual dipsomania. It penetrates beneath the outward surface of the world, and disengages the rhythms that lie at the heart of things, rhythms strange to the eye, unaccustomed to the ear, primitive harmonies of the world that is and lives.23

Again the use of the term ‘modernism’ is striking, with Murry linking it to the notion of some essential internal rhythm ‘at the heart of things’, clearly an idea influenced partly by Bergson’s élan vital, but also by artistic movements upholding ‘primitive’ human forces, such as Fauvism. However, by the third issue (December 1911), the magazine finds itself on the defensive. Murry responded to anonymous criticism of

11

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:39pm

kms023.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies the magazine by defending the ‘creative’ impulse behind what seemed to the critic to be the ‘vagueness’ of their position, as expressed in the manifesto ‘Art and Philosophy’. The magazine and its contributors desired to revitalise art, he argues, expressing ‘a saner attitude towards life in art’. Murry then moves to a defence of the methods by which this might be achieved: The men who try to do something new for the most part starve. They can only win to success by unity, by helping their best friends and neglecting petty differences. If we all have the same idea of revitalizing art, it matters not one straw against the great question whether we deal with the same tailor, or use our colours a little differently. And so it is always with unessentials. Advertisements are unessentials. There may be some who will say that the admission of advertisements is a degradation of an artistic magazine. These are the people who are in love with the print and the paper. We have no use for them. We believe we have something to say that no other magazine has ever said or had the courage to say. It is a thousand times more important that we should live to say such things, than that we should bow before the cries of artistic snobbery. Those who are really for us, listeners or doers, know that the life of art depends on free expression, not on the methods by which that freedom is secured.24

This is a fascinating instance of the dilemmas facing the modernist artist in the cultural marketplace of the early twentieth century, and of how magazines and movements functioned to address these problems. In contrast to, for example, The Smart Set’s notion that its advertisements are somehow linked to the contents of the magazine, Murry attempts to draw something of a distinction between the two discourses. Murry mounts a defence of the coterie, of a group of ‘best friends’ engaged in creating new art, who are forced to group into a unity, overcoming ‘petty differences’ to present a new ism, or movement. Of course, many such isms never overcame their ‘petty’ or grand differences, and thus became either the mouthpiece of an individual (Vorticism and Wyndham Lewis; Marinetti and Futurism) or the subject of divided loyalties and factions (the respective Imagist movements of Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell, for example). And at least in the pages of a magazine such quarrels and schisms over the usage of different colours or tailors can be dispersed or obscured. The pages of a magazine are thus the place for the fiction of a unified creative front. However, Murry also voices an acute sense of the economic as a determining pressure of how ‘the new’ can only appear with, we might say, old money, or any money, behind it. Rejecting those purists in love with print and paper (and perhaps Murry has

12

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:39pm

kms023.tex

Modern Tastes in Rhythm in mind certain aesthetic magazines associated with the arts and crafts revival of printing, such as The Dial),25 Rhythm must ‘degrade’ itself by printing advertisements. Clearly, advertisements are, for Murry, not related to the ‘essential forms’ or modernist rhythms that his magazine sought to represent in its pages. We can, however, note the difficulty, the contradictions of the position stated here: advertisements are artistically unessential, but economically an absolute necessity, and without them those who strive to create the new modernist rhythms will starve. Hence, advertisements, or at least the revenue they generated, are an essential for a modernist magazine and, as we will see, these contradictions are displayed in the very visual style of Rhythm. The importance of advertising for periodical publication was clearly something Murry realised by the time he began editing The Adelphi in 1923. Advertisements are found in abundance in this magazine: ranging from 10% to 25% of the total page contents.26 Not only the back and front inner pages but also the front and back covers were given over to advertisements, and although many were for publishers and booksellers, others were for department stores, like Harvey Nichols and Debenhams, and products, such as chocolates and typewriters. But what kind of advertisements do we find in Rhythm, and do they tell us anything about an implied reader of the magazine, or about how the magazine appealed only to certain kinds of advertiser, along the lines of the strategies employed by The Smart Set and others? The percentage of advertisements contained in Rhythm is, overall, less than that of The Adelphi. There are no adverts in the first two issues, and then only three pages from forty-two in the next issue. With Rhythm’s change of publisher to Stephen Swift, in 1912, we notice a modest growth in the placement of advertisements, with them now occurring in the initial pages as well as towards the end of the magazine. They never average more than around 10% of the total, however, which testifies either to a reticence by the editors to swamp the pages with them or, as seems more likely given the parlous state of Murry and his publisher’s finances, an inability to attract more extensive custom.27 The majority of the advertisements are for cultural products – publisher’s lists; galleries; other magazines (Poetry Review, or the important Berlin magazine, Der Sturm, for example); or art suppliers. A number of advertisements are from friends (the Parma Rooms where hair was scientifically brushed was run by Ida Baker, under the name of ‘Lesley Moore’, who was a friend of Mansfield) or professional colleagues (the Paris Ashnur Galleries run by Horace Holley, a friend of Rhythm artists, Anne Estelle Rice and J. D. Fergusson).

13

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:39pm

kms023.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies What we find in the visual culture of Rhythm is a blurring of the images between art and advertisement, so that the visual style and design of the magazine runs throughout all of its pages and blurs the distinction between essential and non-essential that Murry had tried to articulate. Perhaps one reason for this was the background of a number of the artists, especially the women artists, in the commercial arts. For example, Anne Estelle Rice’s background was in commercial art, and while living in Philadelphia her illustrations had appeared in an impressive range of mainstream, popular periodicals: Collier’s, Harper’s Bazaar, The Ladies Home Journal, Metropolitan Magazine, and three cover designs for the Saturday Evening Post. Rice had travelled to Paris in 1905, commissioned by another paper, the North American, to create drawings to accompany fashion commentary and was later commissioned to produce a mural for Wanamaker’s department store in Philadelphia.28 In the pages of Rhythm, we frequently notice a crossover, or rhythmic interchange, between the visual images used for articles and those for advertisements. In the following images, all taken from the same issue for January 1913, the same woman’s face is used as a decorative border for an article on The Savoy Theatre and then for a London art gallery (figs 1 and 2). The border image of fruit at the bottom of the advertisement is then utilised once again to illustrate an article upon Post-Impressionism (fig. 3).

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

Fig. 1. ‘The Savoy Theatre’, Rhythm 2:12 (Jan. 1913). These images are reproduced with the kind permission of the Modernist Journals Project. See http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/journals.html Fig. 2. Advertisement for Hanfstaengl Gallery, Rhythm 2:12 (Jan.1913). Fig. 3. ‘Post-Impressionism’, Rhythm 2:12 (Jan.1913).

14

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:39pm

kms023.tex

Modern Tastes in Rhythm These illustrations are by Jessica Dismorr, soon to become part of Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticist group at the Rebel Art Centre. At this stage, Dismorr’s work demonstrates her interest in Fauvism, having worked in Paris with Fergusson, Jean Metzinger and Dunoyer de Segonzac.29 Another instance of the deliberate crossover between the two visual discourses is found in the Fauvist motif of a tiger and monkey, designed by Margaret Thompson, and which is utilised both to illustrate a poem by John Harvey, ‘In the Cool of the Evening’, and an advertisement for the Hanfstaengl Gallery.30 One interesting feature here is that the use of the image for John Harvey’s poem seems as purely decorative as that used in the advertisement for the gallery. There is no obvious way in which the image illustrates the text of Harvey’s poem, which contains no animals as such. Another example of this occurs in certain works published by Mansfield in the magazine. Katherine Mansfield’s first appearance in Rhythm occurred in the fourth issue (Spring 1912) with the murder story ‘The Woman at the Store’. This brought her to the attention of Murry, who then published two translations by Mansfield of the Russian poet Boris Petrovsky in the same issue. Mansfield rapidly became assistant editor of the magazine in June 1912, and co-editor from February 1913, and she contributed many poems, stories, reviews and critical articles to the magazine and its successors The Blue Review (1913) and The Signature (1915).31 Although there are times when Mansfield’s work is not displayed with visual material, an interesting illustration of the visual culture of Rhythm is found in the images that accompany two poems by Mansfield in the December 1912 issue.32 ‘The Opal Dream Cave’ and ‘Sea’ are two short free verse fantasies, that are perhaps more experimental than much of the Georgian style verse published in Rhythm. One might be tempted to link these works with the early Imagist poetry of H. D., but these had not yet been published.33 In the first, the poet captures a fairy discovered in the cave of the poem’s title and holds her in her hands. Once out of the cave, the protagonist opens her hands and the fairy escapes, with the poem concluding ‘Empty now is my opal dream cave’. The poem is perhaps an allegory of the perils of creativity whereby the space of the ‘opal dream cave’ is the proper space for the delicate dreams of the poet, which flee once brought away from this secret place. Equally cryptic is ‘Sea’, a dialogue between the protagonist and the sea, where the poet announces that she has followed the sea’s call and come to see it. The sea, also figured as female, rejects this appeal – ‘ “Never have I uttered your name,’’ snarled the Sea’ – but then alarmingly asks the poet to ‘Come closer’. Again we might be tempted

15

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:39pm

kms023.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies to view the sea as representing creativity or the intuitive Bergsonian rhythm that Murry and Mansfield believed animated artistic work. However we interpret the poems, it is difficult to see how the two images here, both by the Russian avant-garde artist Natalie Gontcharova (Natalia Goncharova), help illuminate the meanings of the text.34 Both offered head and shoulder images of two men (accompanying ‘Sea’) and two women (with ‘The Opal Dream Cave’), with hands touching hats of some sort. The line work here definitely creates a rhythmical effect, that perhaps echoes J. D. Fergusson’s cover image for the magazine, but there is no obvious link to the texts below.35 The use of stark black and white in the images only recalls the styles of Dismorr and Thompson in their borders and although the size of Gontcharova’s pictures are larger, in effect they act as yet another kind of visual border, illustrating what we might call the handcrafted modernism of Rhythm as a magazine. This disjuncture between text and image runs throughout Rhythm and indicates an allegiance to traditions in the decorative arts, such as the ‘book beautiful’, from the late nineteenth century. It is interesting in this context that the most persistent advertiser in Rhythm is the retailer Heals, the London furniture store whose founder sought to implement the arts and crafts ideals of Ruskin and Morris in his designs. That the first advertisement in the issue containing the Mansfield poems was for a four poster bed available at Heals was, therefore, in keeping with the visual display of the poems alongside Goncharova’s art. It is interesting to compare two very similar advertisements for Heals, the first a photographic style image from The Studio for 1907, and the second from Rhythm (figs 4 and 5). The use in the Rhythm advert of the decorative border, the placement of the image above the text, and the usage of a heavy line drawing and not a photographic reproduction add to the signifying of the image as artistic and blurs the division between the visual arts and the commercial advertisements in the magazine.36 It is, one might say, an almost hand-crafted advertisement exemplifying modern taste. In such images Rhythm anchored its ‘modernism’ within older traditions of aestheticism and that of the arts and crafts movement. Of course it is difficult, without clear evidence, to discover whether the reason for this style of advertisement appearing is due to the designer, the retailer, or even the editor of the magazine. However, my point is simply to note the homogeneity of the visual appearance of Rhythm and that the ‘essential forms’ of the modernism that Murry sought to demonstrate in the pages of the magazine encompasses the world of commerce as much as that of poetry or the visual arts.

16

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:39pm

kms023.tex

Modern Tastes in Rhythm

Figure 4

Figure 5

Fig. 4. Advertisement for Heals, The Studio (1907). Fig. 5. Advertisement for Heals, Rhythm 2:6 (July 1912).

A magazine like Rhythm demonstrates a dilemma over the relation between art and commercial culture that runs throughout modernism, one which is noticed most acutely in modernist magazines. The attempt, by the use of visual design, to blur the distinction between art and advertisements is an intriguing one, since it seems to suggest that modernist ‘taste’ can somehow temper the odour of commerce and the commodity that comes with advertisements. That this strategy should fail – and Rhythm closed after some fourteen issues – should perhaps come as no surprise. For, as Walter Benjamin understood, musing upon the modernity of the shopping arcades of nineteenth century Paris, the disintegration of the aura of the work of art – what Murry might call the ‘life of art’ – was inevitable once the essentials of life became more embodied in advertisements than in the tastes of the ‘new’.37 Notes 1. This article is a revised version of ‘Les goûts modernes: la culture publicitaire visuelle et verbale dans les revues modernistes’, originally published in Évanghélia Stead and Hélène Védrine, eds, L’Europe des revues (1880–1920): Estampes, photographies, illustrations (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2008). 2. Andreas Huyssens, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).

17

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:39pm

kms023.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies 3. See, for example, Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1998) and Kevin J. H. Dettmarr and Stephen Watt, eds, Marketing Modernism: Self-Promotion, Canonization, Rereading (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996). 4. Though Current Literature had been a slightly more adventurous review of American literature, by 1910 (when these images occur) it had become more of a current affairs miscellany or digest, with less literary material. Under the editorship of Edward J. Wheeler, its circulation at this point was around 100,000. For a sketch of the magazine’s history see Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, Vol. IV 1885–1905 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), pp. 506–10. 5. The newspaper is Nathan Tyler’s 1647 Intelligencer. This account draws on Jennifer Wicke, Advertising Fictions: Literature, Advertisement, and Social Reading (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), pp. 22–5 and Raymond Williams, ‘Advertising: The Magic System’ in his Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980). 6. T. R. Nevett, Advertising in Britain: A History (London: Heinemann, 1982), p. 67. 7. For an account of the growth of French department stores in this period see Rosalind Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 8. Erika Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); excerpt in Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski, eds, The Nineteenth Century Visual Culture Reader (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 152. 9. Rappaport, Shopping, p. 153. 10. Newsbasket, May 1909, quoted in Rappaport, Shopping, p. 153. 11. Rappaport, Shopping, p. 154. 12. Certain earlier magazines associated with the arts and crafts movement and the ‘book beautiful’ tradition, such as The Dial (1889–97) of Charles Ricketts and Roger Shannon, contained no advertisements as a matter, it seems, of aesthetic principle. 13. Richard Ohmann, Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century (London: Verso, 1996), p. 25. 14. Clarence Major, ‘The Little Review’, in Edward E. Chielens, ed., American Literary Magazines: The Twentieth Century (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1992), p. 182. 15. Mark Morrisson, The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception 1905–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), pp. 10–1. There are a number of other instances of how modernism appeared in masscirculation magazines, particularly in American magazines such as Vanity Fair or New Yorker: see Michael Murphy, ‘One Hundred Per Cent Bohemia: Pop Decadence and the Aestheticization of the Commodity in the Rise of the Slicks’, in Kevin J. H. Dettmar and Steven Watt, eds, Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization, Rereading (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996). The British example of Vogue is explored in Christopher Reed, ‘Design for Queer Living: Sexual Identity, Performance, and Décor in British Vogue, 1922–1926’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12.3 (2006), pp. 377–403. 16. Mark Morrisson, Public Face, p. 102. 17. Forrest Read, ed., Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, with Pound’s Essays on Joyce (New York: New Directions, 1967), p. 18. 18. The Little Review 5:9 (Jan. 1918), inside cover. 19. Joyce himself also drew upon the discourses of advertising in Ulysses; see Wicke, Advertising Fictions. 20. See Sharon Hamilton, ‘The First New Yorker? The Smart Set Magazine, 1900–1924’, The Serials Librarian 37:2 (1999): pp. 89–104.

18

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:39pm

kms023.tex

Modern Tastes in Rhythm 21. The Smart Set, Vol. 36 (1912). 22. Roger Burford, ‘damn big guns’, Seed no. 1 (1933), p. 14. 23. John Middleton Murry, ‘Art and Philosophy’, Rhythm, 1 (Summer 1911), p. 12. A digital edition of Rhythm is available on the website of the Modernist Journals Project at http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/journals.html 24. ‘The Editor’ [John Middleton Murry], ‘What we have tried to do’, Rhythm, 3 (Winter 1911), p. 38. 25. See, for example, the chapters by David Peters Corbett and Imogen Hart in Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, eds, The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Vol. 1, Britain and Ireland, 1880–1955 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 26. For example, 11:2 for 1924 has 90 pages, with around 101/2 full pages devoted to advertisements; 1:7 for 1923 has 110 pages in total, with 23 devoted to advertisements. 27. Murry was almost bankrupted by the collapse of the paper on two occasions; see Antony Alpers, The Life of Katherine Mansfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), chapter VII, for details. 28. See Carol A. Nathanson, The Expressive Fauvism of Anne Estelle Rice (New York: Hollis Taggart Galleries, 1997). 29. For discussion of Dismorr see Jane Beckett and Deborah Cherry, ‘Reconceptualizing Vorticism: Women, Modernity, Modernism’, in Paul Edwards, ed., BLAST Vorticism 1914–1918 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000). 30. See Rhythm 1:2 (Sept. 1911), p. 15. 31. For a discussion of these three magazines see Peter Brooker, ‘Harmony, Discord, Difference: Rhythm (1911–13), The Blue Review (1913), and The Signature (1915)’ in Brooker and Thacker, eds, Vol. 1, pp. 314–36. 32. Rhythm 2:11 (Dec. 1912), pp. 306–7. 33. H. D.’s first Imagist verse was published in Poetry magazine for January 1913. 34. Goncharova was later linked to the Russian Futurist movement, but her earlier work was influenced by the primitivism of Russian folk-art, along with Fauvism and Cubism. She also exhibited at the Der Blaue Reiter in Munich in 1912. 35. See Brooker, ‘Harmony, Discord, Difference’ for a discussion of this image. 36. A similar point on the modernity signified by the advertisements in Rhythm is made by Faith Binckes in ‘Lines of Engagement: Rhythm and Early Modernism’, in Suzanne W. Churchill and Adam McKible, eds, Little Magazines and Modernism: New Approaches (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), p. 29. 37. See Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

19

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:40pm

kms024.tex

Anxious Beginnings: Mental Illness, Reproduction and Nation Building in ‘Prelude’ and Prelude to Christopher Sarah Ailwood

Abstract This article explores relationships between Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Prelude’ (1918) and Eleanor Dark’s Prelude to Christopher (1934). Mansfield’s presence in Australian literary culture of the interwar period, together with Dark’s knowledge of her writing, indicates that Dark was influenced, perhaps directly, by ‘Prelude’ when she wrote Prelude to Christopher. Both texts use modernist literary techniques to explore relationships between mental and physical illness and reproduction in the context of emerging feminist politics. The colonial contexts of ‘Prelude’ and Prelude to Christopher impact the treatment of modernist themes by interrogating the socially-prescribed role of woman as childbearer in the nation-building politics of the new colonial nation and its cultural, economic and scientific ideologies. Investigating links between Mansfield and Australian modernist women writers points to the possibility of a regional response to modernism. Key words: Katherine Mansfield, Eleanor Dark, Australia, modernism, feminism, colonialism, reproduction Katherine Mansfield’s 1918 story ‘Prelude’ and Eleanor Dark’s 1934 novel Prelude to Christopher are regarded as signature texts of literary modernism in their respective New Zealand and Australian national Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 2 (2010): 20–38 DOI: 10.3366/E2041450110000247 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

20

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:40pm

kms024.tex

Anxious Beginnings literatures. This article explores aesthetic and thematic relationships between these texts in the context of Mansfield’s impact on Australian literary modernism, particularly among women writers of the interwar period. By considering what Katherine Mansfield, as a New Zealand modernist, may have offered Eleanor Dark that was different to more exclusively metropolitan writers such as Virginia Woolf, this article takes up recent ideas concerning relationships between regionalism and modernism. ‘Prelude’, published by the Hogarth Press in 1918, is widely regarded as key to Mansfield’s development as a modernist writer. Sydney Janet Kaplan argues that the development of The Aloe into ‘Prelude’ ‘demonstrates Mansfield’s intensified process of technical and conceptual experimentation, the true beginning of her conscious sense of a new shape for prose fiction’.1 She describes Mansfield’s innovations in the short story genre, demonstrated in ‘Prelude’, as ‘the “plotless’’ story, the incorporation of the “stream-of-consciousness’’ into the content of fiction, and the emphasis on the psychological “moment’’’.2 Prelude to Christopher was Eleanor Dark’s second published novel and won the Australian Literature Society’s Gold Medal in 1934. It is considered one of the earliest works of Australian literary modernism. As Nicole Moore argues, the novel is ‘in some ways the most recognisably modernist of Australia’s predominantly realist canon of women’s writing from the period’.3 Helen O’Reilly states that Prelude to Christopher ‘upset conventional canons of narrative in the 1930s’ and that Dark’s rendering of time and memory and her extensive use of visual imagery ‘is the associative world of modernism where objects, often trivial or commonplace are used to evoke deeper meaning or messages, or to release floods of memory’.4 She notes the novel’s distinctly modernist themes and techniques, arguing that it reflects ‘a strain of European modernism creeping into Australian writing; its abstract patterning and fractured time series made it strikingly different from Australian novels of social realism’.5 The few scholars who have critically examined Prelude to Christopher have traced Dark’s modernist themes and techniques to Virginia Woolf and James Joyce.6 However, significant parallels between ‘Prelude’ and Prelude to Christopher, together with Mansfield’s place in Australian literary culture of the 1920s and 1930s, suggest that Mansfield’s work also had an impact, and perhaps a direct influence, on Dark’s writing. In Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction, Sydney Janet Kaplan remarks that her argument for Mansfield’s significance in modernist literary history ‘would not have surprised critics during the

21

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:40pm

kms024.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies 1920s or 1930s, when Mansfield was widely imitated, discussed, and revered’.7 This was certainly the case in Australian literary culture of the interwar period, where Mansfield’s fiction, personal writing and notoriety had a considerable presence. An article published in the Australian Women’s Mirror in 1925, for example, provides a lengthy discussion of Mansfield as among the foremost women fiction writers.8 The following year a further article in the same periodical describes her as among the greatest masters of the short story genre and, in what may be considered an early instance of Australia’s penchant for claiming New Zealand talent as its own, argues that ‘all who were born under the Southern Cross should remember with both gratitude and pride the name of Katherine Mansfield’.9 In January 1930 E. J. Brady reflected on his editorship of The Native Companion, the Melbourne periodical in which Mansfield first published, and described her as ‘a genius who died all too young!’10 Mansfield’s presence in Australian literary culture was due chiefly to the work of Nettie Palmer, Australia’s foremost literary critic of the era, and her enthusiasm for Mansfield’s writing in all its forms. Palmer lived in London in 1910–11, and then in 1914–15, and her husband Vance worked with A. R. Orage on The New Age. Vance and probably also Nettie knew Mansfield through their association with Orage and the guild socialist movement.11 Palmer’s reviews of Mansfield’s Journal, published some years later, demonstrate a thorough knowledge of her stories and an early and insightful appreciation for her determined artistry, her achievement and her impact on the short story genre. Palmer wrote in the Brisbane Courier, for example: ‘No matter how terrible her struggles were against disease, they were less than those she had with the intractable word and the elusive phrase; and as time went on she was more and more the conqueror’.12 She strongly praised Mansfield’s drive for ‘sincerity’, describing her in The Bulletin as ‘a brave and vivid woman, aiming above all else at personal and artistic sincerity’13 and writing in the Brisbane Courier: ‘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’.14 Palmer’s discussion of her stories focuses particularly on ‘Prelude’, ‘The Garden Party’ and ‘At The Bay’, supporting her argument that Mansfield ‘found her youth in expression and theme [. . . ] by deciding to base her stories on her own childhood in Maoriland’.15 She also references Mansfield as a fellow literary critic, valuing her critical insights into modern literature.16

22

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:40pm

kms024.tex

Anxious Beginnings In addition to laudatory reviews of her writing in literary and other periodicals and public lectures and readings of her work,17 Mansfield has an interesting presence in the writing of Australian women writers of the interwar period. In a letter to a London correspondent in April 1933, it is clear that Miles Franklin had a strong knowledge of Mansfield’s fictional and personal writing, and her relationship with John Middleton Murry: K M’s pear tree (or the inspiration for that story) is in a friend’s garden in Chelsea. K M’s life was a sad struggle. 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. [words illegible] was a flickering flame that persisted heroically. She was a minute and sensitive observer.18

Mansfield also figures as a touchstone of literary excellence in an essay by M. Barnard Eldershaw,19 in Jean Devanny’s lectures in the early 1930s,20 and in her reflective account of working in the Wellington library in the 1920s: Katherine Mansfield! the exquisite adored. Ah! Here was something different, something close to me, of my own! Perhaps at this same desk, in this same library, this ardent ethereal soul had sat, moved even then, in the green temperate light, to dreaming of the immortal stories which some day she would tell.21

Mansfield’s life and work were also well known to Eleanor Dark. In a letter to Palmer regarding her completion and publication of Prelude to Christopher, Dark discusses Mansfield’s letters in the context of illness and isolation: I can quite understand how worried you must feel about your friend in Switzerland. To be ill quite alone in a strange country must be very dreadful. I’ve thought sometimes that necessary as I suppose the complete idleness is as a part of the cure, it must be only the very hardiest mentalities that can come through it undamaged – I was thinking then of Katherine Mansfield whose letters sounded to me as if she were so ill mentally as well as physically.22

Dark’s reference to Mansfield’s letters and her health, in a letter to Palmer about isolation, illness and Prelude to Christopher, suggests, at the very least, that Mansfield and her work were contemplated by Dark when she was writing her novel, which addresses these same themes.

23

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:40pm

kms024.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies Mansfield’s modernist literary techniques and themes, particularly as they are developed in ‘Prelude’, are reflected in Prelude to Christopher. A clear parallel between these texts is the title, the word ‘prelude’ in each connoting a series of episodes or events leading to the birth of a male child: in ‘Prelude’ this child is the son that Linda Burnell knows she already carries, and who has been born in the later story ‘At The Bay’; in Prelude to Christopher the child is the baby Christopher who will be born to Dr Nigel Hendon and his nurse Kay following the suicide of Nigel’s wife Linda.23 In both texts the action takes place over the course of four days. Both writers use dream sequences, moments of semi-consciousness and interior monologue narrative techniques to move their characters back and forward in time, allowing a more comprehensive development of personal histories and thematic concerns. The episodic structure of the texts renders time as fluid and fragmented: ‘Prelude’ is a series of vignettes, narrated through the consciousness of different characters, the relationship between which is not immediately clear; Prelude to Christopher, while more rigidly structured into four individual parts representing the four separate days, similarly refutes linear story-telling in favour of a polyvocal free indirect discourse.24 At the centre of ‘Prelude’ and Prelude to Christopher is a woman named Linda in whom physical and mental illness and anxiety over reproduction converge. In ‘Prelude’ Mansfield dwells on Linda Burnell’s physical weakness and psychological instability, which are linked to her reproductive role and her inability to perform her maternal responsibilities. Linda’s physical incapacity is evident during and after the Burnell family’s move to the new house, and later in the story is closely linked to her reluctance to have another child, the son her husband Stanley desires: “‘You know I’m very delicate. You know as well as I do that my heart is affected, and the doctor has told you I may die any moment. I have had three great lumps of children already . . . ’’’.25 Linda’s illness also has a psychological dimension, which Mansfield again ties to reproductive anxiety through a dream sequence in which a small bird grows into a baby: As she stroked it began to swell, it ruffled and pouched, it grew bigger and bigger and its round eyes seemed to smile knowingly at her. Now her arms were hardly wide enough to hold it and she dropped it into her apron. It had become a baby with a big naked head and a gaping birdmouth, opening and shutting. (24)

Linda’s reflection on ‘this coming alive of things’ (27) and Mansfield’s repetition of images of growth and swelling reinforce the

24

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:40pm

kms024.tex

Anxious Beginnings troubled relationship between Linda’s psychological condition and reproduction: They listened, they seemed to swell out with some mysterious important content, and when they were full she felt that they smiled. But it was not for her, only, their sly secret smile; they were members of a secret society and they smiled among themselves. (27)

Linda’s fears of ‘they’ are evident throughout the story, and Mansfield leaves open the question of whether ‘they’ represent an ‘othering’ of fears in a form of paranoia or are instead located within Linda herself. Several critics have noted the range of external pressures on Linda’s mind and body, over which she has little control: her physical decline; her husband Stanley’s desire for more children, and particularly a son; fear of pregnancy and childbirth; and her dread of the unborn children she knows she will bear.26 All relate to Linda’s socially-prescribed role as woman, wife and mother. In Prelude to Christopher, anxiety over reproduction is similarly played out in the physical and mental health of the central character, Linda Hendon. The novel opens with a car accident in which Linda’s husband Nigel is critically injured, then charts Linda’s mental decline over the four days of his hospitalisation until her eventual suicide. Mental illness in the form of ‘homicidal tendencies’ runs in Linda’s family history. Raised by her uncle after her father’s certification, Linda is brought up to constantly doubt her own sanity: she had lived out her stormy, haunted childhood with her uncle’s gentlyspoken promise of ultimate lunacy peering at her from every shadow, lying in wait for her at every corner; the family tree which he had so painstakingly compiled and so beautifully set out on a great sheet of yellowish parchment, with the names of the ‘afflicted’ in red ink, appearing like plague-spots here and there . . . 27

Dark writes that her uncle ‘had ruined her nerves and her sleep, filled her childhood with terror and mistrust, pushed her frantically-resisting brain a little further along its darker road’ (32). The result is that Linda is “‘always watching herself, always afraid of any impulse that comes to her – mistrustful of her very thoughts before they’re formed’’’ (45). Nigel’s role as Linda’s anchor to mental stability and safety is revealed in a moment of self-doubt shortly after his accident: She stared at her reflection and her reflection stared back at her, a white mask of hatred and fear. She flung round desperately and faced the empty room. Nigel! Why wasn’t Nigel here? Always, always when this fear came choking her, he had been there to act as . . . As anything she needed. (29)

25

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:40pm

kms024.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies Nigel’s solution is long periods of rest, linking Linda’s mental instability with physical weakness: Sleep for her after storms like that. Long sleeps of exhaustion, her black hair damp round the temples, her cheeks wet and stained with tears, his hand clutched tightly, as though even into sleep she dared not go without him. (46)

In Nigel’s absence Linda’s self-doubt becomes acute, leading to her conviction of her madness and her suicide. It is unclear, however, whether her mental decline results from her genetic inheritance or has instead been triggered by her self-doubt. As Nicole Moore argues, Prelude to Christopher: opens the question of whether her eventual mental instability, leading to suicide, has a genetic cause, or has been provoked and reinforced by the very identity given to her by science. She is mad either because of a gene, or because of the fear of this gene.28

Linda’s mental instability is tied to reproduction through the theme of eugenics that Prelude to Christopher explores. Nigel, a doctor, and Linda, a biologist, are a childless couple in their forties. Dark uses dream sequences and moments of semi-consciousness to move the narrative back in time to the colony of Hy-Brazil that Nigel founded on eugenic principles soon after their marriage. Despite Nigel’s eugenicist beliefs, Linda revealed her genetic history only after their marriage: Nigel began to tremble. He was seeing further; his colony where no one might come who had not been passed by himself and Pen as mentally and physically sound. His children, who were to have grown up with the other children of the colony, learning simple, logical rules of health and conduct, hearing of the world they had left behind as if it were history, a legend of bad days long past . . . (43)

Bound by his love and faith in her essential sanity, Nigel agrees to take Linda to the island colony on the condition that they remain childless. Despite her physical and mental strength on the island, Linda is unable to change his resolution: “‘I will not carry on a – tainted stock. You’re the last; it dies out with you’’’ (91). Nigel later reflects on the wisdom of this choice, suggesting that enforcing Linda’s childlessness may itself have driven her mental instability: when Linda’s body, beleaguered by her tormented mind, cried out for a saving maternity; when it asserted its primeval right to bear a child, to feel ruthless lips and fingers like fallen raindrops on its breasts; when

26

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:40pm

kms024.tex

Anxious Beginnings it promised to yield her, on those completely absorbing emotions, forgetfulness and peace – he had denied it, and turned it back upon itself in helpless pain and frustration. (91)

Linda’s interior monologue, which dwells increasingly on suicidal thoughts, confirms the role that childlessness has played in her mental illness: To be born a woman with a woman’s urge for creation – and to have nothing to give to life but sterility and death! You saw yourself before some fantastic judgment-seat, following women who had lived long and fruitfully and left behind them a train of lusty posterity; you saw yourself, a figure of fun with your angular barren body, a figure vaguely repellant with your starved and haunted eyes. (181)

In both texts, Linda’s psychological instability and reproductive anxiety are exposed through the image of the house itself, and particularly domestic spaces and interior furnishings. In ‘Prelude’ the house is configured not as a feminine space but instead as a fiefdom purchased and controlled by the family patriarch, Stanley Burnell. For Linda, the space triggers her fear of things ‘coming alive’, revealed in the ‘curtains and the patterns of stuffs and the fringes of quilts and cushions’: How often she had seen the tassel fringe of her quilt change into a funny procession of dancers with priests attending [. . . ] How often the medicine bottles had turned into a row of little men with brown top-hats on; and the washstand jug had a way of sitting in the basin like a fat bird in a round nest. (27)

Following the dream sequence with the bird, Linda’s contemplation of the wallpaper next to her bed similarly uses the language of natural imagery and growth to reinforce her psychological instability and its relationship to her reproductive role: She turned over to the wall and idly, with one finger, she traced a poppy on the wall-paper with a leaf and a stem and a fat bursting bud. In the quiet, and under her tracing finger, the poppy seemed to come alive. She could feel the sticky, silky petals, the stem, hairy like a gooseberry skin, the rough leaf and the tight glazed bud. (27)

In a strikingly similar passage, Linda Hendon in Prelude to Christopher traces the linoleum of her kitchen floor as she contemplates her approaching death: On the kitchen floor there was a linoleum with a strange and complicated pattern. Circles and triangles lay scattered with apparent aimlessness

27

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:40pm

kms024.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies among jagged lines of green and sinuous lines of black. And yet there was an order, a definite scheme. Linda, lying on the floor with her head pillowed on one arm, was tracing the green lines idly with one finger [. . . ] Her tracing finger moved faster over the maze of lines, a faint trembling began to shake her, she found her teeth hard together as they will shut under the strain of some freezing nervousness. (168–9)

In Prelude to Christopher the house is the site of Linda’s mental decline. A social outcast in the small rural town of Moondoona, there is no place for Linda besides the house and her visits to Nigel’s hospital ward. Yet, as with Linda Burnell, it does not have the domestic association of ‘home’; she tells Nigel’s colleague, Dr Marlow, “‘I don’t like that house’’’ (101). The climax of both texts is Linda’s moment of self-knowledge – of understanding relationships between gender and social performance, and her own inability to fulfil them – that is mediated through contemplation of a powerful image of the self. In ‘Prelude’ this image is the aloe that grows on the island in the Burnells’ driveway, and in Prelude to Christopher it is the artist d’Aubert’s painting of Linda: both images are simultaneously portrait and landscape, reinforcing the alignment of the natural world with femininity throughout both texts. Linda’s first encounter with the aloe repeats the imagery of growth that characterised her dream sequence: ‘Linda looked up at the fat swelling plant with its cruel leaves and fleshy stem. [. . . ] The curving leaves seemed to be hiding something; the blind stem cut into the air as if no wind could ever shake it’ (34). Observing it later at night, Linda sees the strength and detachment she herself desires: Looking at it from below she could see the long sharp thorns that edged the aloe leaves, and at the sight of them her heart grew hard . . . . She particularly liked the long sharp thorns . . . . Nobody would dare to come near the ship or to follow after. (53)

Linda and the aloe share a need for protection and self-preservation: for the aloe, it is provided by thorns and leaves; for Linda by her emotional detachment from her family. Yet Linda realises that for all their self-defence measures, neither she nor the aloe are able to escape their reproductive role: the aloe has buds, and Linda is already aware of her new pregnancy (54). In Prelude to Christopher Linda Hendon experiences a similar moment of clarity when revealing d’Aubert’s painting to Dr Marlow. The painting, Portrait of Linda, is both a highly coloured, abstract

28

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:40pm

kms024.tex

Anxious Beginnings landscape of Hy-Brazil and a portrait of Linda, who watches Dr Marlow’s disturbed response: His heart gave, again, that little thud of shock and revulsion; his eyes remained, only half-believing, on the right background of the picture where, in a tangle of shadow, Linda had suddenly appeared. There like a part of the shade itself she stood; the dim whiteness of her face and hands seemed only other gleams of half-vanished light. Something that might be a tree-trunk partially obscured her so that behind the rioting foreground of crude joy and colour she looked incredibly furtive and apart. Never in his life had anything given him so strong a conception of evil, not as an active malevolence but as an outcast uncleanliness. (106)

The painting reveals Linda’s isolation on the island and presents her as a force of disruption, of degeneration. After Dr Marlow flees, she sits down to contemplate the painting: ‘Queer, she thought, that in this mood she could look at the thing all day long without the quiver of an emotion!’ (118). This vision of herself triggers her decision to end her life: ‘You painted the prison and the torture, d’Aubert, but you didn’t know about the escape’ (118). Both Lindas contemplate escape, both from their socially-prescribed roles as women and from their lives completely. As she lies in bed while Stanley prepares for the working day, Linda Burnell fantasises about leaving the house and family behind: Her clothes lay across a chair – her outdoor things, a purple cape and a round hat with a plume in it. Looking at them she wished that she was going away from this house, too. And she saw herself driving away from them all in a little buggy, driving away from everybody and not even waving. (25)

Stanley throwing a wet blanket – or towel – on her clothes does not prevent her dreaming of escape again in the evening: She dreamed that she was caught up out of the cold water into the ship with lifted oars and the budding mast. Now the oars fell striking quickly, quickly. They rowed far away over the top of the garden trees, the paddocks and the dark bush beyond. Ah, she heard herself cry: ‘Faster! Faster!’ to those who were rowing. (53)

As she realises her inability to escape her social role or to effect change in her life, Linda resigns herself to performing her function as childbearer, regardless of the consequences to her physical and mental health: ‘How absurd life was – it was laughable, simply laughable. And why this mania of hers to keep alive at all? For it really was a mania, she thought, mocking and laughing’ (54). To Linda, ‘mania’ has become

29

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:40pm

kms024.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies not a desire for escape through death, but instead a willingness to continue living: “‘What am I guarding myself for so preciously?’’ ’ (54). For Linda Hendon, thoughts about escape result in her actual suicide. Her suicide is prompted not only by her belief that she is declining into madness, but also by her conviction that she has nothing to offer Nigel: She rose quietly, and as she moved to one side the light fell dimly on his face. She bent and peered at it. She thought that her real passing out of his life was now when she saw him for the last time. She limped softly to the door, saying to herself that nothing of any worth at all went with her out of this room. (161)

Linda interprets her decision to take her own life as a victory: to her it had always been there, comforting like the feel of a revolver in a dangerous moment, the smell of an anaesthetic in pain, the knowledge of the ace of trumps in her hand! Enemy, this is my life – mine! And when I can’t protect it from you any longer, I destroy it. I, not you . . . (119)

Mansfield’s ‘Prelude’ and Dark’s Prelude to Christopher illustrate different modernist treatments of relationships between illness, anxiety and reproduction, reflecting the passage of time between the texts and Dark’s own interest in eugenics and family experience of mental illness.29 Yet their interrogation of women’s socially-prescribed roles and their use of domestic spaces and powerful images of the self suggest the development of a female modernist aesthetic and politic. Moreover, as a writer who shared a colonial heritage from such a geographically and culturally near place as New Zealand, Mansfield offered Dark insights into modernist aesthetics and ideas that were different from her British and European counterparts and particularly pertinent to her Australian context.30 The colonial contexts in which anxieties over illness, gender and reproduction are played out in these texts are significant because they respond to the colonial politics of ‘nation building’ in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. In both texts there is a strong sense that New Zealand and Australia are new nations focused on growth and development, in which women’s social role as childbearer is prescribed not only by the domestic ideology exported by Britain throughout its empire, but also by closer economic and scientific imperatives. By foregrounding relationships between physical and mental illness and reproduction, both ‘Prelude’ and Prelude to Christopher register resistance to roles assigned to women in masculine imperial and national projects.

30

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:40pm

kms024.tex

Anxious Beginnings The narrative of ‘Prelude’ clearly takes place in a context of aggressive capitalist socio-economic growth. The Burnell family moves to a larger house further away from town, suggesting an increase in income and prestige and a parallel between the growth of the house and the urban area. Stanley’s conversation repeatedly turns on his purchase of the house, revealing pride in his commercial prowess and his view of the house as both commodity and status symbol: “‘land about here is bound to become more and more valuable . . . in about ten years’ time’’’ (23). Photographs of Stanley’s office ‘before and after building’, together with ‘the signed photos of his business friends’ adorn the new house (30); his pride in the purchase arises from his perception of gaining a competitive edge over his business associates and friends. Mark Williams argues that Stanley’s ‘speculative streak is based on his confidence in the colony’s future’31 and likens him to Mansfield’s father, Harold Beauchamp, who was ‘representative of a new class of people who were moving rapidly up the scale toward wealth and an affected gentility’.32 As Williams argues: ‘In the Burnells’ Wellington everything is expanding: houses, property values and, thanks to Stanley’s healthy appetites, both Stanley and his wife Linda’.33 In ‘Prelude’ the reproductive imperative that accompanies this socioeconomic climate – in which men like Stanley thrive – is presented as threatening to women such as Linda. Mary Paul argues that ‘one of the important rhetorics of settlement (from the 1840s on) was the exhortation to marry and create a family. Only out of this would national prosperity develop and good habits be inculcated in the citizens of the new nation’.34 Women such as Linda Burnell were expected to bear children for the economic and social improvement of the nation. While Paul argues that ‘Prelude’ can be seen as an act ‘of participation in the emerging discourse about sex in marriage and fertility’ among women beginning to take control of their reproductive lives,35 the violent, animal-like imagery Mansfield uses to characterise Stanley exposes the danger of ideologies of capitalist growth and national progress for women. The first time we meet Stanley he is eating a dish of fried chops and praising the meat before he ‘pushed back his plate, took a tooth-pick out of his pocket and began picking his strong white teeth’ (19). Throughout the story he also devours a bag of cherries – ’delicious, so plump and cold, without a spot or a bruise on them’ (35) – and carves the Sunday roast: Burnell ran his eye along the edge of the carving knife. He prided himself very much on his carving, upon making a first-class job of it [. . . ] he took a real pride in cutting delicate shaves of cold beef, little wads of

31

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:40pm

kms024.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies mutton, just the right thickness, and in dividing a chicken or duck with nice precision. (50)

Stanley’s appetite for food reflects his appetite for power, property and progeny. His voraciousness and latent violence is revealed through his likening by Linda to several animals, including a Newfoundland dog: ‘If only he wouldn’t jump at her so, and bark so loudly’ (54). Mansfield dwells on his physical strength: He was so delighted with his firm, obedient body that he hit himself on the chest and gave a loud “Ah’’’ (25); later, on the drive home, he ‘stretched out his right arm and slowly bent it, feeling the muscle. (36)

Stanley’s physicality is specifically linked to his desire for a son and Linda’s reproductive role. On his arrival home he observes his daughters eating dinner:’ “That’s where my boy ought to sit’’, thought Stanley. He tightened his arm around Linda’s shoulder’ (38). His sexual dominance of Linda is explicitly revealed: He was too strong for her; she had always hated things that rush at her, from a child. There were times when he was frightening – really frightening. When she just had not screamed at the top of her voice: “You are killing me’’.’ (54)

As Williams argues, ‘Stanley’s expansion is associated with bourgeois vulgarity and crude masculine force, behind which lie both vanity and threat’ (14) and ‘his desire [. . . ] visits constant anxiety on his shrinking wife’ (15).36 Linda Burnell’s moment of self-realisation as she observes the aloe reveals her understanding of the inevitability of her role as procreator in an expanding colonial society: ‘I shall go on having children and Stanley will go one making more money and the children and the gardens will grow bigger and bigger, with whole fleets of aloes in them for me to choose from’ (54). Linda has a highly developed understanding of the sexual, social and economic politics of her situation. Despite her evident reluctance to fulfil her sociallyprescribed role, she realises that she is both physically and practically incapable of refusing. Mansfield’s exposition of the relationship between Linda’s predicament and her psychological torment registers a voice of resistance to masculine ideologies of economic and social progress in the new colonial nation. In Prelude to Christopher, Dark interrogates culturally dominant ideologies of nationhood and women’s nation-building role as childbearer through the eugenic principles Nigel implements in his

32

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:40pm

kms024.tex

Anxious Beginnings colony and his marriage. As Nicole Moore argues: ‘All of Dark’s earlier novels [. . . ] in some way connect a scientific sexuality, or eugenics, with nation building’.37 By presenting Linda’s madness as in part the result of her enforced childlessness Dark resists scientific control of reproduction, particularly through eugenics. Dark pitches a masculine, rational science against a feminine, instinctive drive as Linda becomes pregnant to the painter d’Aubert: So much, Uncle Hamlin, for your scientific training. So much, Nigel, for the austerities of your idealism. You were right, and all your rightness failed before a child’s mystical superstition and a biological need [. . . ] She had gone farther back, to a picture of tiny arms waving in the air, of hands open, seeking, exploring, of bright eyes watching them, solemn with the concentration of the awakening brain. There she had found peace, her hope, the fantastic promise in whose fulfilment she most fantastically believed . . . (120)

After she miscarries, and through Nigel’s absence during the war, Linda has a series of affairs but does not conceive again. Whereas in ‘Prelude’ Mansfield’s exposition of Linda Burnell’s unhappiness resists social pressure to bear children, in Prelude to Christopher Dark reveals the consequences of the scientific control of reproduction emerging in the 1920s and 1930s for women such as Linda Hendon. Dark also links Linda’s childlessness with her mental instability by characterising her in relation to culturally normative conceptions of the desirable woman. The sense of isolation and futility Linda experiences in the colony – captured in d’Aubert’s painting – is a heightened expression of her alienation from the mainstream Australian society to which she returns. Linda’s difference from dominant constructions of desirable femininity is exposed as she is rejected by several characters throughout the text for numerous reasons – including her childlessness, her appearance, her lack of domesticity, her educated intelligence and her direct and forthright manner – rather than her genetic family history. This is clearly illustrated through the young nurse Kay: “‘She’s a beast, she’s a beast, she isn’t fit to be married to anyone, let alone Nigel. She can’t love him, she can’t know a bit what he’s like.’’’ (24). Dr Marlow recognises the social cause of Linda’s isolation, and illness: ‘His mad wife!’ One said it automatically – thought it automatically. And for what reason? Because she came of what they called ‘tainted stock’? Half the people who called her mad so glibly didn’t even know of that. Simply because, like her husband, she stood a little from the ruck. Because she had a queer, cold manner, and a certain outre kind of beauty.

33

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:40pm

kms024.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies It was, too, incomprehensible to them that though her temper was bad, though she was childless and lame, though she had, notoriously, not one solitary domestic virtue, her husband, quite obviously, never wavered in his devotion, his faithfulness. (63)

Like the New Zealand of ‘Prelude’, the Australia of Prelude to Christopher is focused on nation-building, which demands not only the scientific management of reproduction but also the reproduction of the idealised domestic family.38 As a woman who is married but childless, Linda’s life is, by contemporary standards, void of meaning because she has not fulfilled her social role of childbearer in the reproductive politics of the new nation. Linda is effectively trapped between a scientific imperative that denies her children and an economic and social imperative that demands she reproduce. Dark exposes the tragic consequences for women caught between such competing agendas, asserting the importance of women’s self-determination regarding pregnancy and motherhood: ‘Was she nothing at all but a parasite, feeding now on Nigel, but just as likely, some day, if her host were to die, to fasten on to something less wholesome?’ (30). Mansfield and Dark also link resistance to women’s role as childbearer prescribed by national, economic and scientific ideologies to World War One. Both ‘Prelude’ and Prelude to Christopher were written in the shadow of World War One and reflect an acute consciousness of (and resistance to) the nationalist meanings invested in that event in Australia and New Zealand in the wartime and postwar period. ‘Prelude’ and Prelude to Christopher can be read as counter-stories to the mythologising of World War One as signifying colonial heroism in defence of empire and national pride on the international stage. The ‘prelude’ in Mansfield’s text is to the birth of her brother Leslie, who was killed in France on 7 October 1915, shortly before she began revising The Aloe into ‘Prelude’. As Gerri Kimber notes, ‘Prelude’ ‘delineates the “prelude’’ to the birth of her now-dead brother, a homage to the natural world, steeped in plant and nature symbolism’.39 Mansfield’s comment on writing the story that she wished ‘to make our undiscovered country leap into the eyes of the Old World’ – written not only after her brother’s death, but also after the Gallipoli campaign of April 1915 that was so devastating to New Zealand and Australian troops – potentially has specific meanings in the context of New Zealand’s contribution to the British Imperial Force in World War One.40 Mansfield uses the language of colonial resistance: a sense that the ‘Old World’ needs to understand and appreciate its colonies, and New Zealand in particular, lies behind her comment.

34

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:40pm

kms024.tex

Anxious Beginnings At a time when the sacrifices of New Zealand and Australia for the sake of Britain and Empire were being lauded, and World War One was entering the mythology of both nations as a milestone in terms of national identity and progress, ‘Prelude’ registers a voice of resistance, specifically from a woman’s perspective. While Kaplan comments that in ‘Prelude’ her ‘brother is the absent center, the son whose meaning to his parents is still incipient, in potential’, by the time Mansfield wrote ‘Prelude’ that potential had been extinguished. The tragic end for the sons of women like Linda Burnell – evident by the time ‘Prelude’ was published – make her personal torment in the colonial politics of reproduction and ‘nation-building’ all the more acute.41 World War One is also revealed in Prelude to Christopher as a central cause for the failure of Nigel’s eugenicist colony. War breaks out five years after the colony is founded, and Nigel is unable to convince the colonists that their project of raising a new, superior form of humanity is more important than defending king and country. The departure of the colonists to a war that does not involve the colony symbolises the mass enlistment of Australians to take part in a European war that did not threaten Australia. Nigel is tormented by what he sees as the destruction of human posterity on a mass scale: All the world damning its posterity – with cheers! Who was doing this thing? Weeding out the youngest, the strongest, the bravest – for what? Honour and responsibility? Work and propagation? No – just death. ‘Here, you’re the best we have – go and be killed.’ (150)

In Prelude to Christopher, World War One is figured as an Australian national tragedy rather than the heroic birth of the nation on the international stage. Considering ‘Prelude’ in relation to Prelude to Christopher highlights Mansfield’s impact on later modernist women writers and illustrates the value of examining modernism’s non-metropolitan spaces and the important role of place in the development of modernist aesthetics and politics. Scott Herring argues in relation to American regionalism and modernism that non-metropolitan spaces ‘have often been treated as geographic curiosities removed from larger global impulses’.42 Clearly, ‘Prelude’ and Prelude to Christopher are anything but ‘removed from larger global impulses’; on the contrary, they present a culturallyand geographically-specific response to the global forces of empire and world war one. These texts illustrate what Herring describes as ‘the importance of locality to modernism’s world-imaginary’ by addressing common modernist themes – feminist politics and World

35

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:40pm

kms024.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies War One – in a manner that is specific to the colonial contexts of Australia and New Zealand. ‘Prelude’ and Prelude to Christopher are both determinedly modernist and determined to present a feminist resistance to colonial ideologies of reproduction and nation building.43 Katherine Mansfield was a significant predecessor for Australian modernist women writers in terms of both her artistic achievement and her New Zealand colonial heritage. Mansfield’s presence in public culture of the interwar period suggests that her literary influence may extend well beyond parallels that can be drawn between ‘Prelude’ and Prelude to Christopher. The treatment of illness, anxiety and reproduction in these texts illustrates a specifically colonial response to relationships between emerging feminist politics and the politics of economics, science and reproduction in the new colonial nations of Australia and New Zealand. These texts suggest that further exploration of Mansfield’s influence on Australian modernist women writers may elucidate broader regional treatment of modernist themes and aesthetics. Notes 1. Sydney Janet Kaplan, Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction, p. 104. 2. Kaplan, Katherine Mansfield, p. 3. 3. Nicole Moore, ‘The Rational Natural: Conflicts of the Modern in Eleanor Dark’, Hecate, 27: 1, 2001, 19–31. 4. Helen O’Reilly, ‘Linda’s Linoleum: Visual Imaging in Eleanor Dark’s Prelude to Christopher’, Southerly, 68: 1, 2008, 95–103, p. 97. 5. O’Reilly, ‘Linda’s Linoleum’, p. 96. 6. Barbara Brooks with Judith Clarke, Eleanor Dark: A Writer’s Life (Sydney: Macmillan, 1998), p. 132; Helen O’Reilly, ‘Time and Memory in the Novels of Helen O’Reilly’, PhD thesis (University of New South Wales, 2009), p. 71. 7. Kaplan, Katherine Mansfield, p. 1. 8. Warren Graves, ‘Women as Novelists’, The Australian Woman’s Mirror, 22 September 1925, pp. 8–9. 9. Gerald Dillon, ‘Katherine Mansfield’, The Australian Woman’s Mirror, 28 December 1926, p. 18. 10. E. J. Brady, ‘Notes on Australian Writers’, All About Books, 20 January 1930, p. 26. 11. Geoffrey Serle, ‘Palmer, Edward Vivian (Vance) (1885–1959)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 11 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1988), pp. 126–8. 12. Nettie Palmer, ‘Katherine Mansfield: A Study in “Success’’’, Brisbane Courier, 28 June 1928, p. 20. 13. Nettie Palmer, ‘The Sincerity of Katherine Mansfield’, The Bulletin, 1 February 1928, p. 2. 14. Palmer, p. 20. 15. Palmer, p. 2. New Zealand was often referred to as ‘Maoriland’ in public culture of the period. The term was coined by The Bulletin to distinguish New Zealand

36

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:40pm

kms024.tex

Anxious Beginnings

16.

17.

18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

27. 28. 29.

writers from Australia. See Mark Williams, ‘The Pa Man: Sir Harold Beauchamp’, in Katherine Mansfield’s Men, Charles Ferrall and Jane Stafford, eds (Wellington: Katherine Mansfield Birthplace Society Inc in association with Steele Roberts, 2005), p. 19. See for example Nettie Palmer, ‘A Reader’s Notebook’, All About Books, 19 May 1930, p. 119. Palmer also reviewed works about Mansfield in ‘Katherine Mansfield Returns’, Book News, July 1947, p. 21. In June 1934 the meeting of the Australian Literature Society was dedicated to the short story and featured a lecture on Mansfield. ‘The Short Story’, All About Books, 12 July 1934, p. 147. In April 1936 a meeting of the Australian Poetry Lovers’ Association in Melbourne featured a discussion of Mansfield’s work and readings of her poems. ‘Australian Poetry Lovers’ Association’, All About Books, 12 May 1936, p. 78. Miles Franklin to Mrs F. E. Hobson, letter dated 30 April 1933, in Jill Roe, ed., My Congenials. Miles Franklin & Friends in Letters, 2 vols, (Pymble: State Library of New South Wales and Angus & Robertson, 1993), pp. 287–8. M. Barnard Eldershaw, ‘Two Women Novelists: Henry Handel Richardson and Katharine Susannah Prichard’, in Maryanne Dever, ed., M. Barnard Eldershaw: Plaque with Laurel, Essays, Reviews & Correspondence (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1995), p. 195. The essay was first published in Essays in Australian Fiction in 1938. Jean Devanny, Point of Departure: the autobiography of Jean Devanny, Carole Ferrier, ed. (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1986), pp. 94–5. Devanny, Point of Departure, p. 82. Eleanor Dark to Nettie Palmer, 14 December 1933, ‘Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer’ (National Library of Australia, MS 1174). It is interesting that despite her knowledge of Mansfield’s stories and Prelude to Christopher, Nettie Palmer did not note the similarities between the texts in her correspondence with Dark when she read and reviewed the novel in May and June 1934 (‘Papers of Eleanor Dark’, National Library of Australia, MS 4998 and ‘Papers of Vance and Nettie Palmer’, National Library of Australia, MS 1174). Several critics have noted the role time plays in rendering the narrative in both texts. In relation to ‘Prelude’ see for example Mary Paul, Her Side of the Story, p. 44; regarding Prelude to Christopher see O’Reilly ‘Time and Memory’, pp. 73–4. Katherine Mansfield, ‘Prelude’, The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield (London: Penguin, 1981), p. 54. All further references are to this edition and placed parenthetically within the text. See for example Kaplan, Katherine Mansfield, p. 114; Paul, Her Side of the Story, pp. 57–9; Heather Murray, Double Lives: Women in the Stories of Katherine Mansfield, pp. 45–53; Kate Fullbrook, Katherine Mansfield (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986), pp. 77–84; Angela Smith, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Eleanor Dark, Prelude to Christopher (Rushcutters Bay: Halstead Press, 1999), p. 30. Moore, ‘The Rational Natural’, p. 27. Indeed, Dark had several motivations in writing Prelude to Christopher. Her mother died in an asylum when Dark was a teenager, giving her first-hand and very personal experience of mental instability and illness. Her aunt was also a pioneering eugenicist and sex reformer in Sydney. These personal experiences are evident in Prelude to Christopher. See O’Reilly, ‘Time and Memory’ Chapter 2.

37

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:40pm

kms024.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies 30. Mary Paul similarly argues that the shared colonial context between Mansfield and contemporary women writers in Australia and New Zealand needs to be explored, particularly in the context of Miles Franklin’s 1901 novel My Brilliant Career, p. 61. 31. Williams, ‘The Pa Man’, p. 13. 32. Williams, ‘The Pa Man’, p. 14. 33. Williams, ‘The Pa Man’, p. 14. 34. Paul, Her Side of the Story, p. 59. 35. Paul, Her Side of the Story, p. 62. 36. For other discussions of relationships between masculinity, commerce and sex in ‘Prelude’ see Kaplan, Katherine Mansfield, p. 114; Paul, pp. 68–73. 37. Moore, ‘The Rational Natural’, p. 21. 38. Nicole Moore argues that Prelude to Christopher needs to be interpreted in ‘the context of an anxiously modernising white Australia, aggressively managing the racial identity of its population while birth rates fell and economic crises fomented social protest’, p. 21. 39. Gerri Kimber, Katherine Mansfield: The View from France (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008), p. 104. 40. Margaret Scott, ed., The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, 2 vols (Canterbury NZ: Lincoln University Press and Daphne Brasell Associates, 1997). Vol. 2, p. 32. 41. Kaplan, Katherine Mansfield, p. 111. 42. Scott Herring, ‘Regional Modernism: A Reintroduction’, Modern Fiction Studies, 55: 1, Spring 2009, 1–10, p. 3. 43. Herring, ‘Regional Modernism’, p. 3.

38

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:40pm

kms025.tex

Katherine Mansfield and the Gardens of the Soul Maurizio Ascari

Abstract Despite the recent revival of critical interest in Mansfield’s ‘In the Botanical Gardens’ (1907), much remains to be said concerning this brief story in terms of textual analysis and also of contextualisation, notably with regard to Mansfield’s other early – and often fragmentary – attempts at writing fiction, but also to her mature works. This article focuses on this 1907 sketch in an attempt to explore its aesthetic contexts and political implications. It considers Mansfield’s invocations of subjectivity and her pursuit of psychological insight, within a pattern that counterpoints nature and culture, rationality and the unconscious, individuality and wholeness, civilisation and the primitive, Europe and its others. A comparison with works by Walter Pater, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence completes the analysis of this story, which arguably played a pivotal role in Mansfield’s literary development, and which offers us a vantage point to reassess the transition from aestheticism to impressionism and modernism. Key words: Katherine Mansfield, fantastic, psyche, aestheticism, modernism, Pan

Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 2 (2010): 39–55 DOI: 10.3366/E2041450110000259 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

39

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:40pm

kms025.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies

Loneliness and fusion in Mansfield’s investigation of the self As Rosemary Jackson writes in her seminal study on fantasy, ‘One of the central thrusts of the fantastic is an attempt [. . . ] to resist separation and difference, to re-discover a unity of self and other’.1 We know that Western thought is based on the so-called principle of non contradiction (A cannot be equal to not-A). This basic law – on which logic and rationality rest – has much to do with Western individualism, which entails a sense of separation from surrounding reality, or more generally with the reductionist approach which is opposed to the holistic attitude of Eastern thought. No wonder fantasy is frequently associated with children’s literature. Children have a different conception of ‘self’, and blend their inner life with reality more freely than adults, who are conversely more alert to the objectivity of facts and the potential distortions deriving from perceptions and inferences. Mansfield’s representation of children is marked by an ‘animistic’ view of reality. At the beginning of ‘Prelude’ (1918), Kezia senses an indeterminate presence in the Burnells’ deserted house as darkness falls – a mysterious ‘IT’2 which concentrates her fears, conveying the inexplicable terrors we all experienced in our childhood.3 Less predictably, Mansfield’s adult characters are also afraid of darkness,4 and are also caught in the act of ‘animating’ the objects that surround them, as in the case of Linda Burnell, in whose mind sexual desire and fear of maternity conflate with irony, as is shown by this day-dream: She turned over to the wall and idly, with one finger, she traced a poppy on the wall-paper with a leaf and a stem and a fat bursting bud. In the quiet, and under her tracing finger, the poppy seemed to come alive. She could feel the sticky, silky petals, the stem, hairy like a gooseberry skin, the rough leaf and the tight glazed bud. Things had a habit of coming alive like that. Not only large substantial things like furniture but curtains and the patterns of stuffs and the fringes of quilts and cushions. How often she had seen the tassel fringe of her quilt change into a funny procession of dancers with priests attending.5

An exuberant imagination typifies Mansfield’s female characters, who often rely on fantasy to escape from the monotony and constraints of domestic life, and who also long for a condition of truthfulness and empathy with the reality that surrounds them, sometimes achieved in a privileged epiphanic moment. In stories such as ‘Prelude’, ‘Bliss’ and ‘Taking the Veil’, to name but a few, that ‘blazing moment’6 takes place against the backdrop of a garden, which, as Andrée-Marie Harmat observes, Mansfield repeatedly utilises as a site of revelation.7

40

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:40pm

kms025.tex

Katherine Mansfield and the Gardens of the Soul These recurring features of Mansfield’s characters are rooted in the writer’s own fear of loneliness and darkness, in her own desire for closer contact with nature, and in her tendency to perceive reality through the filter of a playful imagination that delights in surprising and potentially creative forms of distortion. Moreover, although Heather Murray underlines the contrast between Mansfield’s rebellious life and the condition of her female characters – whom the author ‘leaves locked into frustrating domesticity, or hopelessly adrift and doomed to fail’ – Mansfield herself actually spent a large part of her life leading a ‘double life’ in the realm of the imagination, largely because of her complex sexuality.8 Notebook 39, spanning the time between the summer of 1906 and the end of 1908, enables us to observe this process. In these pages, where many an aphorism by Oscar Wilde is copied, Mansfield famously implies that she is sensitive to ‘the complete octave of sex’.9 In a passage dated 1 June 1907 Mansfield investigates her own feelings for her friend Edith Bendall, contrasting the love she had lived ‘in imagination’ with the ‘reality’ of ‘18 barren years’.10 This confessional passage interestingly culminates in a night scene, during which the narrator leans out of the window and reality ‘translates’ into a threatening fantasy: ‘In the yard the very fence became terrible. As I stared at the posts they became hideous forms of Chinamen – most vivid and terrible. They leant idly against nothing, their legs crossed, their heads twitching’.11 During this period, Mansfield explores similar techniques in early stories, such as ‘Vignettes’ (1907) and ‘Silhouettes’ (1907), where objects ‘assume human characteristics’, as Cherry Hankin remarks, becoming ‘projections of the observer’.12 Another interesting instance of the connection between fantasies and alienation from reality is the even earlier ‘Die Einsame’ (‘The Lonely One’, 1904), which shows a young girl who is terrified by solitude and darkness, and who is unable to envisage any release from her condition excepting annihilation: the story ends with her death by drowning.13 As Hankin writes, ‘Kathleen’s conflicts and fears are expressed deviously, in symbolism; only if we perceive that the story conveys psychological states which were not fully understood by the author is its meaning comprehensible’.14 Hankin argues that the heroine lives in two worlds: the ‘outer’ life she leads in the daylight is thus contrasted with the inner life she experiences during the night, which stands for ‘the realm of the unconscious’.15 Here the alternative to loneliness – ‘All alone she was. All alone with her soul’ (3)16 – is a self-destructive fusion with the ocean, which is ‘a site both of danger and desire, of liberation and extinction’, as Pamela Dunbar explains.17

41

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:40pm

kms025.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies It was not until a quarter of a century after Mansfield’s description of drowning as a desperate cure for solitude that Freud, in Civilization and its Discontents (1930), explored what he aptly defined as the oceanic feeling, ‘a feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole’.18 We know that Mansfield participated, like many other writers, artists, thinkers and scientists, in that collective process of exploration of inner life that took place at the turn of the century, pivoting on the creation of disciplines such as psychology (William James) and psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung), but also drawing on the psychical research of F. W. H. Myers and the other members of the English and American branches of the Society for Psychical Research. Although Mansfield’s direct experience of works produced within these fields of research may not have been extensive, she moved in a circle of people – such as the Lawrences and the Woolfs – who were already in touch with developments in psychoanalysis before the war.19 In the last few months of her life, Mansfield herself was inspired by P. D. Ouspensky’s lectures in London, and found refuge in George Ivanovich Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleau.20 Although I am not advocating a retrospective strategy of reading – for example the idea of interpreting Mansfield’s early production in the light of her subsequent life – I wish to draw the reader’s attention to the seminal role an early story plays within the literary development of the writer, namely ‘In the Botanical Gardens’, which Mansfield published on 2 December 1907 in the Melbourne periodical The Native Companion, under the pseudonym of Julian Mark.21 While in ‘Die Einsame’, Mansfield dramatises her alienation from the surrounding world and the danger of succumbing to her fear of loneliness and darkness (a subject she would address again in ‘The Canary’, the last story she completed), ‘In the Botanical Gardens’ transcends the barrier between I and not-I in a very different direction, for the climax of this sketch coincides with the main character’s experience of a deep communion with nature, which anticipated Mansfield’s use of the epiphanic moment in her mature works.

In – and out of – the botanical gardens Mansfield was inspired to write this ‘prose poem’ – as Sydney Janet Kaplan terms it, reminding us of the fin-de-siècle Franco-British tradition of aesthetic prose – by the botanical gardens of her native

42

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:40pm

kms025.tex

Katherine Mansfield and the Gardens of the Soul Wellington, a real place that she turned into the setting of a story bordering on fantasy, enriching it with a wealth of cultural and psychological implications.22 The story is told in the first person by a character of whom we know nothing and whose very gender becomes problematic if we consider that Mansfield published it under a male pseudonym. This text resulted from a stage of apprenticeship in which Mansfield’s imagination drew from her early experiences. In the opening lines, the young writer cannot resist the temptation to reveal her aesthetic sources, compiling a manifesto of poetics: They are such a subtle combination of the artificial and the natural – that is, partly, the secret of their charm. From the entrance gate down the broad central walk, with the orthodox banality of carpet bedding on either side, stroll men and women and children [. . . ] They seem as meaningless, as lacking in individuality, as the little figures in an impressionist landscape.23

The first paragraph pivots on the contrast between nature and artifice that marked the fin-de-siècle aesthetic paradigm, which inspired Mansfield mainly through Oscar Wilde. Against this backdrop, the human element takes on a decorative role akin to that of figures in an impressionist landscape painting. Hankin relates this passage to a technique that marks the whole of Mansfield’s production, calling it ‘the mental distortion which depersonalises human beings’, but I am more interested in underlining the aestheticising gaze of the narrator.24 In the following lines, a ‘green hedge’ metamorphoses into a stave and a long row of ‘cabbage trees, now high, now low’, becomes ‘an arrangement of notes – a curious, pattering, native melody’ (18). The gardens’ flowerbeds, bushes and trees are all charged with flowers, which recur in Mansfield’s stories with symbolic values often associated with sexuality. We should not forget that flowers are indeed sexual organs and that Mansfield was obsessed both with their beauty and with their transitory but powerful vitality, to the extent that throughout her life she surrounded herself with flowers, purchasing them even when she had barely enough money to buy food. While the people who walk in the botanical gardens all look alike in the eyes of the narrator, each kind of flower is described in detail as if it had its own personality. Thus while the scent of cowslips is evocative of ‘hay and new milk and the kisses of children’ (18–19), anemones appear ‘a trifle dangerous, sinister, seductive, but poisonous’ (19). The tone of the narrative suddenly changes when the protagonist leaves the ‘enclosure’ and passes ‘a little gully, filled with tree ferns,

43

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:40pm

kms025.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies and lit with pale virgin lamps of arum lilies’ (19), crossing the barrier between the gardens and the neighbouring wilderness: I turn from the smooth swept paths, and climb up a steep track, where the knotted tree roots have seared a rude pattern in the yellow clay. And suddenly, it disappears – all the pretty, carefully tended surface of gravel and sward and blossom, and there is bush, silent and splendid. (19)

This section of the story can be interpreted within two related frameworks. The first is related to the encounter between European settlers and the local population of New Zealand, while the second is associated with a psychoanalytic view of the story. As somebody who belonged to the white Anglo-Saxon community, the ‘Pakeha’, Mansfield enjoyed a position of social privilege. As Saikat Majumdar has recently claimed, although Mansfield’s ‘biographical and artistic relation with indigenous culture was marginal and episodic’,25 she variously articulates her impatience with the banality and boredom of colonial life as well as the desire to cross the line between the settlers’ way of life and the surrounding world. This is proved both by her friendship with Maata Mahupuku and by the journey the author relates in The Urewera Notebook (1978).26 In the course of this trip Mansfield built up a reserve of impressions concerning people and places on which she would subsequently draw to write some of her New Zealand stories. The best example of Mansfield’s desire to cross the line between Pakeha and Maoriland is probably ‘How Pearl Button was Kidnapped’ (1912).27 The ‘House of Boxes’ where the young protagonist of this story lives is contrasted with the perfect day the child spends with the indigenous women who take her to a hilltop overlooking the sea, until ‘little blue men’ break the spell and take her back.28 ‘In the Botanical Gardens’ also contrasts Pakeha New Zealand with its native counterpart, but it does so by focussing on nature rather than on people. As soon as the narrator abandons the Botanical Gardens, which are marked by an artificial order of European origin, she finds herself in the bush, where despite colonisation, the genius loci retains its power. The narrator approaches this fearful yet hypnotic dimension by degrees. At first his/her perceptions are still filtered by sight and by eurocentric aesthetic coordinates. Yet, it is the deeply instinctive sense of smell that subsequently brings the narrator into contact with this space of alterity, which has not been marked by the presence of Europeans: ‘And everywhere that strange indefinable scent. As I breathe it, it seems to absorb, to become part of me – and I am old with the age of centuries, strong with the strength of savagery’ (19).

44

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:40pm

kms025.tex

Katherine Mansfield and the Gardens of the Soul The narrator approaches the primitive even more closely when, after reaching ‘a little stream idly, dreamily floating past’, he/she puts his/her hands in the water and is seized by an ‘inexplicable, persistent feeling’ to ‘become one with it all’, actually experiencing a panic fusion with nature: ‘Remembrance has gone – this is the Lotus Land’ (19). Like the crew of Ulysses in the land of lotus-eaters, the narrator is granted the gift of oblivion, but this is just the beginning of his/her initiation, since by drinking the water of the stream the narrator enters the realm of visions, coming into contact with arcane forces that cross the dimension of time: Bending down, I drink a little of the water, Oh! is it magic? Shall I, looking intently, see vague forms lurking in the shadow staring at me malevolently, wildly, the thief of their birthright? Shall I, down the hillside, through the bush, ever in the shadow, see a great company moving towards me, their faces averted, wreathed with green garlands, passing, passing, following the little stream in silence until it is sucked into the wide sea . . . (19–20)

Despite the protagonist’s desire to be at one with the surrounding nature, the role he/she plays in this ritual is that of the intruder, and the attitude of these ‘presences’ is hostile. The scene conveys Mansfield’s sense of guilt as a descendant of the white people who have taken the land from the Maoris. This instant of revelation is soon over, but the sound of the wind that suddenly shakes the trees ‘is like the sound of weeping . . . ’ (20), as if the spirit of place was lamenting the colonisers’ violence. Angela Smith has previously discussed Alfred Tennyson’s ‘The Lotus-Eaters’ as a source for this sketch.29 Mansfield’s fantasy of regression into a primeval world certainly evokes the torpid and liquid melancholy of that poem, which abounds with references to water (‘And like a downward smoke, the slender stream / Along the cliff to fall and pause and fall did seem. / A land of streams!’),30 and ultimately describes the colonial temptation to forget one’s link to the Fatherland.31 Yet, while Smith’s reading of ‘In the Botanical Gardens’ is based on the idea that here Mansfield ‘engages obliquely with the nature of colonialism, its repression and its guilt’,32 Jane Stafford and Mark Williams regard Mansfield’s attitude in a different light: Mansfield’s sense of being colonial as a condition of cultural disadvantage means that she is apologising to her European addressee for having no background and no history, rather than that she is

45

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:40pm

kms025.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies aware of having a history tainted by colonisation. ‘In the Botanical Gardens’ is concerned with subtleties of emotion in a young bourgeois woman. The poetic heightening, the use of colour and imagery, are directed at conveying a particular kind of sensibility: that of a young woman vaguely dissatisfied with the restraints her life has imposed upon her [. . . ].33

At the end of the story, we accompany the narrator back to the enclosure, where visitors are intent on admiring the gardens and on ‘spelling aloud the Latin names of the flowers’ (20), pursuing a rational appreciation of nature that leaves the emotional channels untouched. We are back in the world of the settler, of social conventions, of good manners – a world where the individual is characterised by selfconsciousness and where fusion with nature is denied. And yet, we should pay attention to the parting sentence of the story, for ‘the bush lies hidden in the shadow’ (20). These words lead us to the second interpretative framework I mentioned, that is to a complementary reading of the story as a metaphor of the psyche. Within this framework the formal section of the gardens – where everything has been tamed and labelled – is our conscious psyche, while the bush, lying in the shadow, stands for the unconscious.34 As we can see, in this skilful story the young Mansfield not only elaborates on her cultural coordinates, from pictorial impressionism to music, but also experiments with techniques that will become the defining features of her mature stories, from symbolism to the epiphanic moment. Instead of a traditional plot, the story offers a tightly-woven symbolic texture, which prepares a deeply meaningful and personal moment of revelation. Thus, already in 1907, Mansfield is working at the intersection of autobiography, fiction and poetry to rejuvenate literary tradition along lines that would fully ripen in the modernist period. ‘In the Botanical Gardens’ also provides Mansfield with a model for the garden in which Linda’s epiphany takes place in ‘Prelude’. The contrast between the Botanical Gardens and the adjacent bush recurs in the Burnell garden, which is divided into two halves – surrounding the ‘island’ where the aloe grows – and clearly stands as a metaphor of the psyche. Adopting Kezia’s point of view, Mansfield contrasts the ‘frightening’ side of the garden – where ‘a tangle of tall dark trees and strange bushes’ is inhabited by buzzing insects, while the wet and narrow paths are crossed by roots resembling ‘the marks of big fowl’s feet’35 – with the sunny side, with its trimmed box and omnipresent

46

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:40pm

kms025.tex

Katherine Mansfield and the Gardens of the Soul flowers. Moreover, Mansfield’s story anticipated Virginia Woolf’s ‘Kew Gardens’ (1919). According to a letter now lost, but whose existence is recorded, it was Mansfield who advised her friend Woolf to deal with this subject.36

Death and resurrection of the great God Pan If we wish fully to contextualise this story within the transition that led from aestheticism to impressionism and modernism, we should also relate ‘In the Botanical Gardens’ to that body of early twentiethcentury fiction that utilises references to paganism – notably to the god Pan – to criticise the technological and social development of Western societies, and also to express a longing for a less artificial way of life, in closer contact with nature.37 The uncanny strength of the genius loci of southern Italy – with its power to unsettle the balance of hyper-civilised northerners – is at the heart of E. M. Forster’s ‘The Story of a Panic’ (1911). Although Mr Sandbach – an English curate who has travelled to Italy in search of good health – proclaims that ‘The great God Pan is dead’,38 Pan actually reveals himself to young Eustace, who is still relatively untainted by civilisation. Being ‘possessed’ by the forces of nature, the boy feels unable to spend the night within the narrow confines of his hotel room and wishes to wander in the woods, to commune with nature. Only Gennaro, a poor Italian boy, understands that Eustace will lose his life unless he is allowed to join the living world he belongs to, but the English community does everything it can to restrain Eustace, and it is only thanks to Gennaro’s sacrifice that his friend is finally saved. The message of the story is clear: while people like Sandbach are crippled both in their body and in their soul, contact with nature is the only source of regeneration for humankind. As Forster later recounted, the first chapter of the story sprang vividly into his imagination in 1902 while he was taking a walk near Ravello, resulting from a quasi preternatural visitation: ‘I received it as an entity and wrote it out as soon as I returned to the hotel’.39 Pan in America (1926) – which D. H. Lawrence wrote while living in Taos, New Mexico – is another case in point, since in this essay the author deplored, in David Ellis’s words, ‘the way machinery has alienated people from the realities of their physical environment’.40 While Christianity had managed to turn Pan into a devil, chasing him away from the coasts of the Mediterranean he once haunted, the god reappeared in the American territory, where he became ‘the Oversoul, the Allness of everything’41 of Whitman’s Song of Myself. After hinting

47

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:40pm

kms025.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies at Whitman’s pantheism, Lawrence recounted his own meeting with the god in the wilderness of New Mexico: Here, on this little ranch under the Rocky Mountains, a big pine tree rises like a guardian spirit in front of the cabin where we live. [. . . ] It is a great tree, under which the house is built. And the tree is still within the allness of Pan. [. . . ] Our two lives meet and cross one another, unknowingly: the tree’s life penetrates my life, and my life the tree’s. [. . . ] It vibrates its presence into my soul, and I am with Pan.42

Instead of regarding the individual as a self-contained entity, Lawrence insisted on the interpenetration of all beings within a holistic paradigm. The writer’s criticism of the mechanical development of civilisation and of the pressure society exerts on people to conform is apparent also in those stories where Lawrence portrayed pseudo-mythological beings, such as Count Dionys Psanek (that is to say Dionysus),43 in ‘The Ladybird’, which he drafted in 1915 and published in 1923. This aristocrat of Bohemian origin describes England with words that reveal Lawrence’s stance on civilisation (and incidentally conjures up an image of Mansfield’s ‘House of Boxes’): ‘Ah, England! Little houses like little boxes [. . . ]. Little fields with innumerable hedges. Like a net with an irregular mesh, pinned down over this island and everything under the net’.44 In Lawrence’s eyes, the British Isles are contrasted in this respect with peripheral parts of Europe such as Sardinia (Sea and Sardinia, 1921), whose insulation had preserved it from the contaminating influx of the hyper-civilised neighbouring continent. This tradition is partly rooted in those imaginary portraits – ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’ (1886), ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’ (1887), ‘Apollo in Picardy’ (1893) – where Walter Pater traced the mythical biography of classical gods that had migrated to Western Europe, according to the paradigm Heinrich Heine had expounded in ‘Les Dieux en Exile’ (1853).45

Aestheticism and holism in Mansfield’s New Zealand stories (1906–8) As we know, Mansfield herself was familiar with Pater, and had almost certainly read his imaginary portraits.46 We should also keep in mind that the oft-quoted journal entry dated December 1908 where she mentioned ‘The Child in the House’ actually conflates her interest for

48

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:40pm

kms025.tex

Katherine Mansfield and the Gardens of the Soul Pater with that for her own country, not in terms of social life but of nature: I should like to write a life much in the style of Walter Pater’s ‘Child in the House’. About a girl in Wellington; the singular charm, the barrenness of that place, with climatic effects – wind, rain, spring, night, the sea, the cloud pageantry. [. . . ] A story, no, it would be a sketch, hardly that, more a psychological study of the most erudite character. I should fill it with climatic disturbance, & also of the strange longing for the artificial.47

Actually, Mansfield had already explored the tension between natural and artificial in the story she had published the year before and whose seminal role is therefore reasserted. It is precisely by exploring Mansfield’s Notebooks that we can understand the labour of creativity that was tormenting Mansfield’s imagination in those formative years, when the cultural influences she had absorbed while studying in London strangely combined with the intense nature she had rediscovered after returning to New Zealand. Various threads could be followed, either leading to Mansfield’s revisitation of myth,48 or to the contrast between nurture and nature.49 What I wish to focus on, however, are the various versions of a story Mansfield called at one point ‘The New Zealander’, which bears an uncanny resemblance both to ‘Die Einsame’ and ‘In the Botanical Gardens’, weaving them together in a sort of rewriting. The story – which is part of a bigger project for a novel that Mansfield intended to call ‘The Youth of Rewa’50 – portrays the female protagonist in the act of writing a letter from New Zealand to a male correspondent in Great Britain.51 This fascinating sketch not only dramatises Mansfield’s longing for her London life, but it also reveals her awareness of the transitional stage of development she was experiencing after her return to her homeland: ‘The Future is quite in darkness but I know now that I am on the road again, back again, and that [this] time I journey with a fuller knowledge – a child no longer’.52 Rewa is painfully aware of the ‘miles upon miles of leaden water’,53 that separate her island from the rest of the world and from her friend/beloved, but she is able to turn this awareness into a deeper reflection on the cyclical nature of things: Ebb and flow maybe, light & darkness, calm & storm, yet always such depths to discover, such treasures to find – – – And nothing is ever lost – cast up on the beach one moment, thrown on the barren rocks, but taken back again with the tide turning, surely, surely, into its great bosom.54

49

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:40pm

kms025.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies If we compare this sketch with ‘Die Einsame’, we realise how extraordinary the inner growth of Mansfield had been in the intervening years. In the following lines, the heroine – whose autobiographical character is apparent – discovers her calling, coinciding with the representation of local nature, which she regards as being close to her true self: ‘I am going to dedicate myself to my own, to my trees, my mountains, my solitary places, my little rivers – for in them it seems, I have my being’.55 The subsequent paragraphs are beaten by a strong sea wind, drenched with rain and salt water. While Rewa is writing her letter, the storm increases in intensity and the wail of the wind takes on preternatural undertones, since ‘it gathered together the voices of all those who had died, and the crying of all those who were not yet born’.56 Despite – or rather because of – the weather, Rewa is irresistibly attracted outside, towards a place readers of ‘In the Botanical Gardens’ may feel familiar with: She did not [know] exactly where she was going but held to the fence a moment & looked up and down the road. Nothing to be seen. She suddenly started almost running in the direction of the yellow clay bush path that so many years ago she had found and loved. Once in the bush it was easier – she was more sheltered, though the sound was more violent. It seemed that every tree had found voice.57

Rewa – whose name coincides with that of a red-flowered New Zealand tree – is at home. At the end of the path, she lies down amidst big clumps of manuka, the sea raging at her feet, and she is seized again by the need to blend with nature that permeates both ‘Die Einsame’ and ‘In the Botanical Gardens’: “‘You must satisfy me now, Oh my Mother’’ she said, “I have come back to the heart of Nature – take me, take me’’’.58 Against this sublime backdrop, Rewa enters into a dialogue with the natural elements, who speak in turn. The sea is desire, wind is nature’s breath, the earth holds her seeds, while the rain is a principle of healing and the bush coincides with love, ‘for I am blown hither by the breath of the wind, conceived in the womb of the earth, roused by the rain. And I bloom in great waves like the waves of the sea’.59 It is the sea, however, which fully embodies the cyclic principle of nature, since it changes all the time and yet it is always the same. In the concluding paragraph of the story, the fall of darkness is followed by a sound of footsteps which terrifies Rewa: But he came forward & caught her in his arms. ‘You’ she said, ‘you’. Their voices were carried away by the wind; the bush & sea seemed to thunder all that [they] said. ‘I have come for my own’ he said, holding

50

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:40pm

kms025.tex

Katherine Mansfield and the Gardens of the Soul her, her long braids of hair blown across his face. She clung passionately. ‘I am desire’ said the sea, ‘I crave all, insatiably I long, untiringly I hold’.60

This story is a little masterpiece due to Mansfield’s ability to combine microcosm and macrocosm, evoking those intertwining principles of change and permanence that rule both individual life and the forces of nature, starting from the sea. Both ‘In the Botanical Gardens’ and ‘The New Zealander’ show that Mansfield – thanks to her double perspective as a colonial girl who had studied in London – was giving voice as early as 1907–8 to a set of issues which would be at the heart of modernist writings in the following years, such as the contrast between rationality and the unconscious, individuality and wholeness, civilisation and the primitive, Europe and its others. In the light of such works, the period Mansfield spent in New Zealand after studying in London should be reassessed in order fully to grasp its importance as a formative stage in the writer’s life. This would probably help us fill what Saikat Majumdar describes as ‘an especially significant lacuna in Mansfield studies’, that is to say the issue of her relationship with the colonial history and landscape of her native country, doubly complicated by her own attachments to metropolitan Europe and her ambiguous distance from her country of origin. Traditional Anglo-American criticism has tended, often rather simplistically, to construct a European Mansfield with little or no relationship to her colonial roots.61

Mansfield’s early works – where she combined the New Zealand landscape with eurocentric aesthetic categories – are an ideal observatory to study the transition that led from aestheticism to impressionism and modernism, both in its female and male versions. ‘In the Botanical Gardens’ played a major role within this process of literary growth, since it encapsulates both the basic coordinates of Mansfield’s early formation and the main techniques and concerns that would ripen in her mature works. Smith recognised the pivotal role of this vignette when she commented that its content as well as its form ‘show an originality and complexity of vision in its young writer’.62 Yet, by focusing solely on Mansfield’s aestheticising attitude and critique of colonialism, scholars have actually obliterated another aspect of ‘In the Botanical Gardens’, where the narrator’s movement from garden to bush, mirrors that from conscious to unconscious. Describing the action of this story as ‘negligible’63 – as Stafford and Williams did – is an easy option, but only by regarding this text also as

51

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:40pm

kms025.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies the metaphor of an inner journey can one truly sound its depths and reinstate it to its position within Mansfield’s process of self-inquiry. In a letter she wrote in October 1920, Mansfield asks Murry: Does your soul trouble you? Mine does. I feel that only now. [. . . ] I realise what salvation means and I long for it. Of course I am not speaking as a Christian or about a personal God. But the feeling is . . . I believe (and very much) Help thou my unbelief. But its to myself I cry – to the spirit, the essence in me – that which lives in Beauty. [. . . ] The soil (which wasn’t at all fragrant) has at last produced something which isn’t a weed but which I do believe (after Heaven knows how many false alarms) is from the seed which was sown. But Boge its taken 32 years in the dark . . . Without our love it never would have come through at all. And I long for goodness – to live by what is permanent in the soul.64

These moving words, and the inchoate thoughts they convey, resonate with the stories we have read, proving that Mansfield’s long and painful itinerary of self-discovery, her spiritual quest for wholeness, was actually in progress many years before. ‘In the Botanical Gardens’ depicts a nineteen-year-old girl who is not afraid of exploring the gardens of the soul, venturing beyond the shadow-line that delimits the unconscious. This story testifies to Mansfield’s fascination for beauty and life, to her vibrant empathy with circumambient reality, but also to her courage and to her irrepressible desire to go beyond those aesthetic and social conventions that frame a person within an invisible box, in search of those forces that vibrate in nature and connect being to being.65 Due to her poor health, Mansfield spent a large part of her adult life confined to indoor spaces, but her mind was never prevented from roaming about, communing with her essence, responding to the calling that impelled her to walk beyond the enclosure, in search of what is deepest, most vital and least transient in human experience, paradoxical though this may seem for a post-impressionist artist who excelled in capturing the fleeting moment. Notes 1. Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London and New York: Routledge, 1981), p. 52. 2. Antony Alpers, ed., The Stories of Katherine Mansfield (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 226. 3. Jackson defines the presentation of ‘nameless things’ as a central feature of fantasy. Jackson, p. 38. 4. Celeste Turner Wright maps Mansfield’s references to darkness in ‘Darkness as a Symbol in Katherine Mansfield’, Modern Philology, 51: 3, February 1954, 204–7.

52

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:40pm

kms025.tex

Katherine Mansfield and the Gardens of the Soul 5. Alpers, Stories, p. 235. 6. Katherine Mansfield, ‘A Novel without a Crisis’, in Novels and Novelists, ed. by J. Middleton Murry (London: Constable, 1930), p. 30. 7. See Andrée-Marie Harmat, ‘Bliss Versus Corruption in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories’, in Commonwealth: Essays and Studies, Special Issue, no. SP 4, 1997 (62–71), p. 70. Nature also provides the writer with the semantic area from which much of her figurative language originates. See Toby Silverman Zinman, ‘The Snail under the Leaf: Katherine Mansfield’s Imagery’, Modern Fiction Studies, 24: 3, Autumn 1978, 457–64. 8. Heather Murray, Double Lives: Women in the Stories of Katherine Mansfield (Dunedin, NZ: University of Otago Press, 1990), p. 1. 9. Margaret Scott, ed., The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, 2 vols (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), Vol. 1, p. 98. Hereafter referred to as Notebooks 1, Notebooks 2. 10. Notebooks 1, p. 100. 11. Notebooks 1, pp. 100–1. 12. Cherry Hankin, Katherine Mansfield and Her Confessional Stories (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), p. 45. In cultural terms, we can relate Mansfield’s attitude to that of the Romantics, who tended to project their emotions onto natural phenomena, according to a dynamic that John Ruskin disparagingly labelled as ‘pathetic fallacy’. John Ruskin, Modern Painters, 4 vols (New York: Wiley and Halsted, 1859), Vol. III, pp. 156–72. 13. See Cherry Hankin, ‘Fantasy and the Sense of an Ending in the Work of Katherine Mansfield’, in Modern Fiction Studies, 24: 3, Autumn 1978, 465–74. 14. Hankin, Confessional Stories, p. 10. 15. Hankin, Confessional Stories, p. 10. 16. Hankin draws a parallel between this story and the earlier story ‘His Ideal’, which likewise ends with the death by water of the young (male) protagonist. (Hankin, Confessional Stories, pp. 8–9.) While in ‘His Ideal’ the hero is attracted toward a river by a destroying mother figure, in ‘Die Einsame’ it is a father figure who lures the heroine into the ocean. Mansfield’s ambivalent attraction for the sea is also proved by a poem entitled ‘The Sea’ (1903). Notebooks 1, p. 17. 17. Pamela Dunbar, Radical Mansfield: Double Discourse in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories (London: Macmillan; New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 1997), p. 60. 18. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents [1930], transl. and ed. by James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1962), p. 12. 19. See Angela Smith, Katherine Mansfield: A Literary Life (London: Palgrave, 2000), p. 117. 20. As we know, it was A. R. Orage who acted as a bridge between Mansfield and this world. 21. See Jean E. Stone, Katherine Mansfield. Publications in Australia 1907–09 (Sydney: Wentworth Books, 1977). 22. Sydney Janet Kaplan, Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 56. 23. Katherine Mansfield, ‘In the Botanical Gardens’, in New Zealand Stories, selected by Vincent O’ Sullivan (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 18. Further references placed parenthetically in the text. 24. Hankin, Confessional Stories, p. 45. 25. Saikat Majumdar, ‘Katherine Mansfield and the Fragility of P¯akeh¯a Boredom’, in Modern Fiction Studies, 55: 1, Spring 2009 (119–41), p. 123.

53

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:40pm

kms025.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies 26. Katherine Mansfield, The Urewera Notebook, ed. with an introduction by Ian A. Gordon (London: Oxford University Press, 1978). 27. This story is described by Alpers as Mansfield’s ‘only portrayal of the Maori people in fiction’ (Alpers, Stories, p. 552), but the word ‘Maori’ is not actually used in this text. 28. Alpers, Stories, p. 120. To fully grasp the intensity of this story we should keep in mind that at the end of Notebook 39 (1907–8) we find an early version of this story (‘The Story of Pearl Button’) from which it is apparent that Mansfield projected herself onto this child of humble origin, whose mother is a washerwoman and whose birthday is 14 October. See Notebooks 1, pp. 112–13. 29. See Smith, Katherine Mansfield, pp. 26–7. 30. Alfred Tennyson, ‘The Lotus-Eaters’, in The Collected Poems, Introduction by David Rogers (Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 1995), p. 81. 31. Smith, Katherine Mansfield, pp. 26–7. 32. Smith, Katherine Mansfield, p. 25. 33. Jane Stafford and Mark Williams, Maoriland: New Zealand Literature 1872–1914 (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2006), p. 150. Online source http://www. nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-StaMaor.html [accessed 20/02/2010]. 34. Commenting on Mansfield’s experimentation with the sketch form in stories such as ‘In the Botanical Gardens’, W. H. New discusses the potential of the ‘subjective sketch’, which ‘formally dramatized not external behaviour so much as the state of mind that develops when the pressure to choose and the character of the available choices counteract each other, interfering with both creativity and self-reliance.’ W. H. New, Reading Mansfield and Metaphors of Form (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999), p. 46. 35. Alpers, Stories, p. 239. 36. See Antony Alpers, The Life of Katherine Mansfield (New York: The Viking Press, 1980, p. 251 and Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott, eds, The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984–2008), Vol. 1, pp. 327–8. Hereafter referred to as Letters 1, Letters 2, etc., followed by the page number. 37. Pan also features in Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan (London: John Lane, 1894). 38. E. M. Forster, ‘The Story of a Panic’, in Collected Short Stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954), p. 13. 39. E. M. Forster, ‘Introduction’ [1947], in Collected Short Stories, p. 5. 40. David Ellis, D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game 1922–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 184. 41. D. H. Lawrence, ‘Pan in America’, in Edward McDonald, ed., Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence (London: Heinemann, 1936), p. 23. 42. Lawrence, ‘Pan in America’, pp. 24–5. 43. The mythological scheme that Lawrence developed in this story, under the influence of Nietzsche, was analysed by James F. Scott in ‘Thimble into Ladybird: Nietzsche, Frobenius and Bachofen in the Later Works of D. H. Lawrence’, in David Ellis and Ornella De Zordo, eds, D. H. Lawrence: Critical Assessments (Mountfield, East Sussex: Helm Information, 1992), Vol. 3, pp. 282–308. 44. D. H. Lawrence, Collected Stories, with an Introduction by Craig Raine (London: Campbell, 1994), p. 605. 45. See Heinrich Heine, ‘Les Dieux en exil’, in Revue des deux mondes, Vol. 2, April–June 1853, 5–38. 46. Mansfield had probably read The Renaissance at Queen’s College, and – as Kaplan comments – knew Pater also indirectly via Symons. See Kaplan, pp. 53–8.

54

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:40pm

kms025.tex

Katherine Mansfield and the Gardens of the Soul 47. Notebooks 1, p. 112. 48. See Notebooks 1, p. 216. 49. ‘The Green Tree: A Fairy Tale’ and ‘The Thoughtful Child’ (two unbound papers which were presumably written around 1907–8) are emblematic of this theme. In the former sketch the ‘mean and tumble-down house’ (Notebooks 1, p. 114) where the protagonist’s parents live is an ‘objective correlative’ of their identity, while the young hero is driven by the mysterious need to commune with the tree he has sown. The latter sketch likewise contrasts the young heroine’s family life – when she plays at “‘paying calls’’’, like Kezia and her sisters in Prelude, visiting ‘all the houses in Box Hedge Street’ (Notebooks 1, p. 127) – with her other life in the woods, where she plays with the ‘Shadow Children’ (Notebooks 1, p. 128) and listens to the trees talking. 50. See Letters 1, p. 46. A fragment featuring Rewa is included already in Notebook 2, where Mansfield claims: ‘Now it would be colossally interesting if I could only write a really good novel’ (Notebooks 1, p. 161.) 51. The object of Mansfield’s romantic fantasy might well be Tom Trowell, the son of her music teacher, who moved to London with his family in 1908, a few months before Mansfield herself. In the intervening period, Mansfield felt even lonelier in Wellington, and this story possibly dates back to that difficult time. 52. Notebooks 1, p. 222. 53. Notebooks 1, p. 222. 54. Notebooks 1, p. 222. 55. Notebooks 1, p. 222. 56. Notebooks 1, pp. 222–3. 57. Notebooks 1, p. 223. 58. Notebooks 1, p. 223. 59. Notebooks 1, p. 223. 60. Notebooks 1, p. 223. The ending of this fragment resembles the beginning of another fragment dated April 1907 whose protagonist is Pearl [Button] (see note 20). See Notebooks 1, p. 119. 61. Saikat Majumdar, ‘Katherine Mansfield and the Fragility of P¯akeh¯a Boredom’, p. 122. 62. Smith, Katherine Mansfield, p. 27. 63. Stafford and Williams, p. 150. 64. Letters 4, pp. 82–3. 65. The inner abyss of the individual and the panic dimension of nature as a complex and interrelated planetary being coalesce within this perspective, which is not Christian, but which can possibly be defined as mystical. As the young writer wrote around 1907: ‘Although there were no God, God would remain the greatest notion man has had. Evolution is eventually God – nicht?’ Notebooks 1, p. 122.

55

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:41pm

kms026.tex

Surrounded by Beasts: Bertha Young’s Thwarted Fairy Tale Christine Butterworth-McDermott

Abstract This essay reads Katherine Mansfield’s short story ‘Bliss’ as a modernist fairy tale in which Bertha, like a typical heroine of that genre, is on an identity quest. The complex fissure in Bertha’s psyche is not between heterosexuality and homosexuality, as many critics claim, but between the world of her fantasy and the reality that surrounds her, between her idealised ‘bliss’ and the actual, physical way that ‘bliss’ must be attained. Bertha perpetuates her fairy-tale state by forcing the world around her to conform to her vision. Harry, Pearl, Mug and Face Knight, and Eddie Warren all reflect the adult world which Bertha does not understand; they invade her home much like cats invade her garden. Like a Snow White or Little Red Riding Hood, Bertha is unwilling to see that the creatures who cross her path are wolves; however, their presence forcibly removes Bertha’s veil of bliss. Mansfield’s story, with its subversive fairy tale plot, characters, and themes, forces the reader to reassess how a Victorian childhood and patriarchal expectations might repress the sexuality of the modern woman. Key words: Katherine Mansfield, ‘Bliss’, fairy tale, Victorian childhood, sexuality, identity

Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 2 (2010): 56–71 DOI: 10.3366/E2041450110000260 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

56

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:41pm

kms026.tex

Surrounded by Beasts: Bertha Young’s Thwarted Fairy Tale Since the appearance of Helen Nebeker’s analysis of Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’ in 1972, assessments of the story have predominantly centred on Bertha Young’s sexual desire for Pearl Fulton.1 Nebeker’s supposition is strongly substantiated by textual evidence; thus, Bertha’s homosexuality as the psychological focus of the story has remained a common interpretation, as shown in the work of W. E. Anderson and Pamela Dunbar.2 However, Bertha’s movement from innocence to experience, while sexual, is also psychological – and an obvious literary predecessor that could serve as an inspiration for that movement is the fairy tale. Although C. A. Hankin has looked at Mansfield’s allusions to ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, ‘Cinderella’, and ‘Hansel and Gretel’, in ‘The Little Girl’, ‘Her First Ball’, and ‘The Doll’s House’ respectively, her analysis of ‘Bliss’, while noting the contrast between fantasy and reality, does not make a direct comparison.3 Clearly, it is difficult to link ‘Bliss’ to one specific fairy tale, but the story does borrow general plot structure, characterisation, and psychological resonance from that genre. While this correlation does not preclude the idea of Bertha as homosexual, it offers another level on which to read Bertha’s responses to Pearl, her husband Harry, and her reactions to the pear tree in her back garden. In From the Beast to the Blonde, Marina Warner explains how fairy tales often ‘encipher concerns, beliefs and desires in brilliant, seductive images that are themselves a form of camouflage, making it possible to utter harsh truths, to say what you dare’.4 In ‘Bliss’, Mansfield deliberately manipulates Bertha’s quest for happily-ever-after to call attention to how a Victorian childhood and patriarchal expectations might repress the sexuality of the modern woman. Fairy tale scholar Jack Zipes claims that during the late Victorian period, ‘the use of the fairy tale as commentary was pervasive in high and low culture’, and that this trend continued into the early twentieth century.5 Literary fairy tales produced during the latter part of the Victorian period often show an ‘intense quest for female self’ and are meant to ‘expose oppression and hypocrisy and challenge fixed categories of gender’.6 Mansfield seems to be working in this tradition. ‘Bliss,’ written in 1918, has the general trajectory of a fairy tale as detailed by Bruno Bettelheim: the novice ‘must leave the security of childhood, which is represented by getting lost in the dangerous forest; learn to face up to [her] violent tendencies and anxieties, symbolized by encounters with wild animals or dragons; get to know [her]self, which is implied in meeting strange figures and experiences’.7 It is only through this process that the ‘adolescent loses [her] previous innocence suggested by [her] having been [. . . ] merely somebody’s child’.8 While

57

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:41pm

kms026.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies Bertha doesn’t literally go ‘into the woods’; on a symbolic level, the events of her dinner party force her to acknowledge a new world in which her old modes of operation no longer work. Her confrontations with the ‘wild animals’ – Bettelheim’s ‘strange figures’ transformed by Mansfield into socialites – function to disturb her vision of the status quo. Like the Others in gothic literature, they disrupt the need ‘for order, classification, matching and grouping [. . . and violate] a sense of appropriate categories’.9 These characters, who stand outside traditional society, show an ‘abhorrence of restriction’, break ‘sexual, political or religious taboos’,10 and reject ‘the symbolic disguise that covers lustful or violent desires along with the ethical restraints’.11 As a novice, Bertha courts wolves and witches yet is simultaneously terrified of being devoured by them. In The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault elaborates on how childhood sexuality was viewed in the Victorian age: Everyone knew [. . . ] children had no sex, which was why they were forbidden to talk about it, why one closed one’s eyes and stopped one’s ears whenever they came to show evidence to the contrary, and why a general and studied silence was imposed. These are the characteristic features attributed to repression [. . . which operate] as a sentence to disappear, but also as a injunction to silence, an affirmation of nonexistence, and, by implication, an admission that there was nothing to say about such things, nothing to see, and nothing to know.12

Bertha continually makes reference to her frustration with such ‘civilisation’ that shuts up and locks things away. She is aware enough to ask the question, ‘Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?’,13 but too frightened to open the lock that keeps her own body from sexual pleasure. Although they have a child, Bertha’s relationship with her husband is not sexual, but instead centres on how they get ‘on together splendidly’ (342), which is the ‘best of being modern’ (348). For a time, ‘it worried her dreadfully to find that she was so cold’, but Bertha consoles herself with the thought that ‘after a time it had not seemed to matter’ for they were such ‘good pals’ (348). Nebeker and others have argued that this lack of interest is a sign of Bertha’s repressed homosexuality, however the source of Bertha’s lack of sexual emotion could easily be caused by the environment in which she was raised. Dennis Allen suggests that the Victorians employed ‘an insistence less on the absolute opposition of civilized man and savage sexuality than on civilization as precisely the restraint of the sexual’.14 According to Allen, this caused the conflict to become internalised, ‘transposed onto the cultivated

58

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:41pm

kms026.tex

Surrounded by Beasts: Bertha Young’s Thwarted Fairy Tale individual who must then confront the savage impulses within’.15 This split invades Bertha, the ‘Victorian child’ who is consciously choosing to be a ‘modern’ woman, and becomes the driving psychological impetus in her story. Nina Auerbach explains that the ‘very emphasis in Victorian iconography on female placidity and passivity, on exemption from mobile and passionate energy, expands into dreams of metamorphosis’.16 In this way, it makes sense then that Bertha’s conflict would be expressed in the symbolic language and plot of fairy tales. Mansfield clearly wants us to see Bertha as a child heroine, a ‘young’ protagonist. Besides the overt clue of her last name, Bertha also believes her ‘bliss’ would be ideally expressed in youthful activities: she wants ‘to run instead of walk, to take dancing steps on and off the pavement, bowl a hoop’ (337). Although thirty, Bertha is childishly giddy, wanting to ‘stand still and laugh at – nothing – at nothing, simply’ (337). Her lack of adult behaviour is evidenced further by her forgetting her house key ‘as usual’ (338) and the distant relationship with her infant daughter. In the description of Bertha watching Little B. with the Nanny, Bertha ‘stood watching them, her hands by her side, like the poor little girl in front of the rich little girl with the doll’ (339). Cinderella, Briar Rose, Rapunzel and Beauty of ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ are all adolescents when their stories begin.17 Similarly, Mansfield correlates Bertha’s hopes for metamorphosis, her views of sexuality, and of adult relationships with those of an immature young woman. Psychologically, as Bettelheim puts it, in childhood, ‘all is becoming. As long as we have not yet achieved considerable security within ourselves, we cannot engage in difficult psychological struggles unless a positive outcome seems certain to us, whatever the chances for this may be in reality’.18 Bertha, although vaguely aware that her bliss is somehow unacceptable to civilisation, still seeks its validation, blinding herself to reality in order to have happily-ever-after. Bertha deliberately envisions herself in enchanted or magical surroundings, despite tangible information to the contrary. As she steps into her dining room to arrange the fruit for the party, she is overwhelmed by how ‘the dark table seemed to melt [. . . ] and the glass dish and blue bowl to float in the air. This [. . . ] was so incredibly beautiful. . . . She began to laugh’ (339). Bertha’s description is in sharp contrast with the reality of the room, which is ‘dusky’ and ‘quite chilly’ (338). This continual need to see things as ‘beautiful’ while denying the darkness that surrounds them is echoed again and again throughout ‘Bliss’, but most immediately in the description of the story’s primary symbol:

59

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:41pm

kms026.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies the pear tree in the back garden. Bertha sees the pear tree ‘in fullest, richest bloom; it stood perfect, as though becalmed against the jadegreen sky’ (341). Bertha feels ‘even from this distance, that it had not a single bud or faded petal [. . . ] and she seemed to see [. . . ] the lovely pear tree with its wide open blossoms as a symbol of her own life’ (341–2). To impress upon the reader Bertha’s naïveté regarding the tree, and by extension her own life, Mansfield adds an insidious element to the observation: A grey cat, dragging its belly, crept across the lawn, and a black one, its shadow, trailed after. The sight of them, so intent and so quick, gave Bertha a curious shiver. ‘What creepy things cats are!’ she stammered and she turned away from the window. (341)

Bertha refuses to see that things in her life could be sexually or animalistically charged. Anderson states, ‘Mansfield offers in the cats a generalized floating symbol of sexuality and animality [. . . ] which expresses Bertha’s ambivalence towards sexuality’.19 Dunbar concurs: ‘the tree, beautiful and inviolate, stands for her own desired self-image. [. . . ] the cats form an instinctual sexuality which she herself perceives as bestial, and emphatically rejects’.20 Although both Anderson and Dunbar claim that Bertha is denying her homosexuality, their analyses of Bertha’s reaction to the cats seem plausible even if she is heterosexual. Her real quest is to civilize the passion within herself, which threatens, in her mind, to be bestial. She wants to express her feelings in a thoroughly adult and modern way, but not in a way that is ‘drunk and disorderly’ (337–8), ‘absurd’ (338), or ‘hysterical’ (339). As Chantal Corunte-Gentille D’Arcy claims, these comparisons ‘indirectly suggest that, as opposed to drunkenness and disorderliness, the accepted (and endorsed) norms of behaviour for the main female character are dignity and propriety’.21 Psychosexually, Bertha is expected to restrain herself. Consequently, Bertha willfully continues to imagine that her life is as rich and full as the blooms of the tree. ‘Really – really – she had everything. She was young. Harry and she were as much in love as ever [. . . ]. She had an adorable baby. [. . . ] modern, thrilling friends [. . . ] just the kind of friends they wanted. And then there were books, and there was music’ (342). Bertha tries to convince herself of her own wealth by enumerating her possessions, much as children enumerate toys. But by maintaining the view that those who surround her are ‘objects’ defined by her perception of them, rather than real people with their own desires and designs, Bertha shows herself to

60

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:41pm

kms026.tex

Surrounded by Beasts: Bertha Young’s Thwarted Fairy Tale be ‘a pathetically fallible and unreliable narrator’.22 The surprisingly complex tear in Bertha’s psyche is not between heterosexuality and homosexuality, but between the world of her fantasy and the reality that surrounds her, between her fairy tale ‘bliss’ and the actual, physical way that ‘bliss’ must be attained. To perpetuate her idealised state, Bertha forces the world around her to conform to her vision. By grasping at things that seem to ‘float’ or are infused with a sort of ‘beauty’ or ‘purity’ as exhibited in these early scenes, she maintains her fragile enchantment. Humphrey Carpenter explains that the ‘fantastic strain of writing’ found in Victorian children’s literature, ‘dealt largely with utopias and posited the existence of Arcadian societies remote from the nature and concerns of the everyday world’.23 At the same time, he contends, authors who did this were ‘often satirically and critically’ commenting on real life.24 Similarly, Mansfield shows that Bertha’s ‘anxieties and repressions are not merely a woman’s personal malaise but the logical result of the way in which the social climate of her time causes her to repress (‘to shut up’) her own desires’.25 Warner contends that the ‘central narrative concern’ of women-centered fairy tales is for the heroine to ‘turn [her] eye on the phantasm of the male Other and recognize it, either rendering it transparent and safe, the self reflected as good, or ridding themselves of it (him) by destruction or transformation’.26 Bertha, in this case, must move ‘from [a] terrifying encounter with Otherness, to its acceptance’ or ‘its annihilation’.27 Realistically, the sex act is always, on some level, as Mansfield’s description of the cats indicates, an animal act. Bertha must find a way to recognise the sex act for what it is, despite her inexperience with it and her childish way of envisioning it. From the moment the party begins, ‘Bliss’ is structured with a rising tension. The dinner guests symbolically reflect the adult world which Bertha does not understand; they invade her home much like the cats invade the garden. Her reaction to the cats is echoed as she turns away from the mysterious ‘creepiness’ which surrounds many of the people in her life. Like Charles Perrault’s heroine encountering ‘Neighbour Wolf’ in ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, Bertha refuses to see that those who cross her path are wolves.28 As the story progresses, Mansfield radically shifts her character’s world – from one of supposed bliss to an exposure to the dichotomies (positive/negative, light/dark, civilised/bestial) which surround her. The figures of Face and Mug Knight, Eddie Warren, Pearl Fulton, and Harry all represent Bertha’s ‘encounters with wild animals’ and ‘strange figures’ in the dark forest of her psyche.29 Their threat is a necessary plot device which forces

61

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:41pm

kms026.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies Bertha to remove her veil of ‘bliss’. Although Judith S. Neaman ties the Youngs’ guests to Biblical characters, she also sees ‘that innocent Bertha and her hairy mate, an emotional primate if ever there was one, have opened their house and garden to beasts’.30 The character of Face enters in an ‘orange coat with a procession of black monkeys round the hem’, (342) explaining how the appearance of her coat ‘upset the train’, a fact which the Knights laugh off as ‘absolutely creamy’ (343). Animal description is also in Face’s habit of ‘tucking something into her bodice – as if she kept a tiny, secret hoard of nuts there’ (346) and Harry’s cannibalistic passion for ‘the green of pistachio ices’ which remind him of ‘the eyelids of Egyptian dancers’ (345). Mansfield uses such imagery to remind us of the cats that slink around the pear tree and to show how the real – and brutal – world exists despite Bertha’s fantasies. The guests’ banter also increases the tension between Bertha’s make-believe security and the harsh truths that encroach upon it. As Marilyn Zorn points out, the ‘talk of the party is a continuous barrage of horror stories’.31 Eddie Warren immediately starts recounting ‘a dreadful experience with a taxi-man; [. . . ] this bizarre figure with the flattened head crouching over the lit-tle wheel’ (343). Perversity also appears in Face’s description of ‘the weirdest little person. She’d not only cut off her hair, but she seemed to have taken a dreadfully good snip off her legs and arms and her neck’ (345), and Eddie’s description of ‘A dreadful poem about a girl who was violated by a beggar without a nose in a lit-tle wood’ (347). The guests, with their bestial ‘social chatter, threaded through as it is with images of rape, mutilation, and sexual predation, [reveal] their obsessions’.32 Yet, once again, Bertha refuses to acknowledge the horror of these statements, dismissing them as ‘amusing’ (347). Like Little Red, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty, she is too trusting, believing that the disguised witches and wolves are really the good people they claim to be. This is exemplified further by her misinterpretations of Harry and, most especially, Pearl. Bertha’s inability to see her husband clearly is shown by her insistence that they are ‘good pals’ and ‘in love’ several times in the story. Harry, despite Bertha’s claims for his charm, is an obviously cold character. When he calls Bertha to delay dinner and Bertha tries to ask him a question, he ‘[raps] out in a little voice’ the harsh demand, ‘“What is it?’’’ (340). His descriptions of other people are equally abrupt and excessively cruel. Miss Fulton is ‘“cold like all blonde women, with a touch, perhaps, of anæmia of the brain’’’ (341), and while this could be Harry’s attempt to hide their affair, Bertha notes he continually ‘[catches her] heels with replies of that

62

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:41pm

kms026.tex

Surrounded by Beasts: Bertha Young’s Thwarted Fairy Tale kind . . . “liver frozen, my dear girl’’, or “pure flatulence’’, or “kidney disease’’, . . . and so on’ (341). Combined with his comment about the pistachio ices, Harry’s personality is unlikable at best and threatening at worst. Hankin shows how Harry’s ‘gross delight in food points to the strength of his carnal appetite, even as the language used to describe it conveys the impression that for him sexual love and eating are virtually interchangeable’.33 While many critics have identified Bertha’s homosexual passion for Pearl, there seems to be a great deal of evidence that her focus is actually on physical consummation with Harry. She is attracted to his carnality, but fears being completely subsumed. Although his behaviour repels her, she consistently tries to make it attractive. Throughout the story, Bertha describes Harry in the most flattering terms, usually immediately after noting his ‘creepy’ side. For instance, after his vulgar descriptions, Bertha notes that for ‘some strange reason [she] liked this, and almost admired it in him very much’ (341). In a similar way, she dismisses his lateness as a ‘zest for life’ which ‘she appreciated in him’ and admires his ‘passion for fighting’ even when it is misplaced (344). His compliment regarding her soufflé, which makes her almost weep with ‘child-like pleasure’, occurs right after he wants to devour the green ices (345). The juxtaposition of the descriptions of Harry fits in thematically with Bertha’s consistent denial of the dark forces at work around her. She tries to mask the ‘Other’ without confronting it. Her need to see Harry as good, for him to participate in her enchantment, is quite compelling and later leads to her shock. In many ways, this ties in with Foucault’s ideas about the complications of repressed sexuality, which can create an unnecessary dichotomy between ideals of ‘sexuality’ and ‘sex’, the physical act.34 The ‘vision’ of sexual unity is more powerful and appealing to Bertha than Harry’s actual willingness to consummate the act. Foucault maintains that the ‘rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire but bodies and pleasure’;35 in contrast, Bertha’s insistence on romanticising and intellectualising sex keeps her repressed and child-like, continually frozen in a state of fantasy. Jungian literary critic David H. Rosen suggests that by ‘incorporating one’s “inner other’’, the person’s soul is in a healing relationship with the “outer other’’ and the world soul’.36 This incorporation is usually facilitated by ‘[an] archetype of transformation’.37 Once the heroine accepts the archetype, she becomes ‘balanced, in harmony and at peace with the natural order of things’.38 Only then can the heroine integrate the socially-denied parts

63

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:41pm

kms026.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies of herself – sexual, foreign, outsider – by accepting them in someone else. In Bertha’s case, the menace of the shadow is personified by civilisation, Harry, and the guests at the party while the ‘archetype of transformation’ exists in the character of Pearl Fulton. Viewed in this light, Bertha’s relationship with Pearl, although it can be read as lesbian, could also be seen as an attempt to accept her own sensuality. Pearl, with her nearly angelic countenance, makes ‘civilisation’ or ‘adulthood’ far less ‘idiotic’ to Bertha. Indeed, Pearl offers a solution to Bertha’s problem: how to be an adult with her husband while there is a ‘prevailing social and moral aversion to anything related to baser, animal instincts’.39 Standing outside the others in the room with her ‘sleepy smile’ (345), Pearl becomes enormously appealing to Bertha, for whom adult sexuality/sex is ‘on the one hand a matter of innocence and spirituality in which bodily impulses play no part; on the other an affair of crude lust that denies the ‘higher’ aspects of the personality’.40 Torn between her feelings of bliss, connected with childhood and purity, and the actual physical sex it requires, Bertha needs a way out of the situation. The cool, self-possessed Pearl appears ‘as a devotee of the goddess of chastity’.41 Like the fruit which dreamily floats in the dining room, Pearl, in Bertha’s mind, is above the dark wood. Pearl, a ‘beautiful woman [with] something strange about [her]’ (341) is as close to an embodiment of her bliss, next to the pear tree, as Bertha can get. Pearl is also a creature, however, that Bertha is ‘unable to make out’; although ‘wonderfully frank’, there’s a certain point which Pearl will not go beyond (341). Once again, Bertha is unable to negotiate between how she wants to see Pearl and how Pearl really is. Mansfield surrounds Pearl in ‘an aura of coldness and lifelessness, while her aloofness and, although not articulated as such, her unnaturalness are greatly emphasized’.42 Yet, for Bertha, Pearl seems to shine, dressed all in silver with ‘slender fingers that were so pale a light seemed to come from them’ (346). When Pearl smiles at her, Bertha makes the leap that Pearl will understand the pear tree and, by extension, herself. She hopes that Pearl will ‘give a sign’, although ‘what she meant by that she did not know, and what would happen after that she could not imagine’ (346). This is the moment of risk for Bertha: a moment of exposure to the very negative ‘civilisation’ she fears. Will it be the base, perverse civilization of Eddie, Face, and Mug, or will Pearl show her how to express her bliss in a dignified way? When Pearl asks Bertha if she has a garden, images of transformation are apparent in Bertha’s response: ‘She crossed the room, pulled the curtains apart, and opened those long windows. “There!’’ she breathed’ (347). In Bertha’s mind this is

64

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:41pm

kms026.tex

Surrounded by Beasts: Bertha Young’s Thwarted Fairy Tale a moment of union. In it, her relief at being able to share both her platonic and erotic feelings is palpable. [The] two women stood side by side looking at the slender flowering tree. Although it was so still it seemed, like the flame of a candle, to stretch up, to point, to quiver in the bright air, to grow taller and taller as they gazed – almost to touch the rim of the round, silver moon. (347)

Earlier allusions have connected Bertha with the tree and Pearl with the moon, so here, Bertha seems to receive validation from another person regarding her blissful vision. ‘How long did they stand there? Both, as it were, caught in that circle of unearthly light, understanding each other perfectly, creatures of another world’ (347). For Bertha, time stops, and she and Pearl are now in what could be described as a fairyland. One of the crucial aspects of romance, according to Anthony Giddens, is the idea that through a joint experience, a couple creates a world of their own. In this new space, the outside world which has judged them by their appearances and/or forced them into certain gender roles, is seen as null and void. This shared exception from society and inclusion in an alternate world encourages spiritual and sexual consummation because it creates a new discourse that exists solely between the couple. Giddens asserts, ‘[t]he telling of a story is one of the meanings of ‘romance’ but this story now [becomes] individualized, inserting self and other into a personal narrative that [has] no particular reference to wider social processes’.43 This romance, the exchange of ideas, the building of shared experience, redefines conventional terms as the relationship is ‘separated out [. . . ] from other aspects of family [or social] organisation and given special primacy’.44 In Bertha’s mind, this is what she and Pearl experience together as they look at the pear tree. Their world exists outside the company that doesn’t share Bertha’s feelings of bliss although the earthy Face, Mug, and Eddie are ‘dears – dears – and she loved having them there’ (345). Much has been made of what seems to be the penetration of the tree into the moon. Dunbar claims ‘[m]ost critics now accept that the episode centers upon lesbian desire.’45 She explains how ‘the tree, taking on the aspiring quality of flame, and striving to reach (and presumably to penetrate) the virginal moon, both expresses and encodes the sexual attraction Bertha feels for her friend’.46 However, it seems equally possible that the tree is ‘aspiring’ to the moon. Bertha believes that if she can be like Pearl Fulton, her sexual self does not need to be ‘creepy’ and close to the earth. Thrilled by this confirmation from

65

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:41pm

kms026.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies Pearl, Bertha imagines that she can now share her bliss with the most important person in her life, Harry – ‘I shall try to tell [him] in bed tonight what has been happening. What she and I have shared’ (348). Although many critics have used this passage to show ‘the homosexual urges within [Bertha]’47 and her deflection of them to Harry, the statement could also be read as ‘I shall try to tell him what bliss has been happening’. This reading would fit with Bertha’s objective to make the vulgar Harry part of her fairy tale world. Neaman suggests ‘[Bertha] imagines this conversation will promote the spiritual understanding that will culminate in their first passionate physical union’.48 That this is subversive on Bertha’s part, a movement away from her assumed Victorian upbringing towards a more actualised self, is shown in her desire to speak. Foucault maintains that ‘if sex is repressed, that is condemned to prohibition, nonexistence, and silence, then the mere fact that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate transgression’.49 Perhaps, in this moment, Bertha feels she can now ‘utter truths and promise bliss, to link together enlightenment, liberation, and manifold pleasures’ although she might not articulate it as such.50 Nebeker is right in asserting that Bertha’s ‘unsaid’ thoughts here may be ‘[Pearl’s] silver and pure and special and I’m drawn to her and she is drawn to me with none of the ugly sexual overtones that men must experience’.51 However, rather than exclude Harry, and heterosexuality, Bertha seems to want to draw him into what is ‘silver and pure’. It is through her supposed transformation with Pearl that Bertha believes she can assimilate the ‘Other’ that is Harry. Given Harry’s personality and Bertha’s sexual reticence, as she contemplates his response, Bertha is aware of her vulnerability. Yet, rewarded by Pearl, there is also a level of excitement in her thoughts. [S]omething strange and almost terrifying darted into Bertha’s mind. And this something blind and smiling whispered to her: ‘Soon these people will go. The house will be quiet – quiet. The lights will be out. And you and he will be alone together in the dark room – the warm bed. . . . ’ [. . . ] For the first time in her life Bertha Young desired her husband. (348)

There is no doubt that this sexual desire is new, for Bertha notes, ‘she’d been in love with him, of course, in every other way, but just not in that way’ (348). Suddenly, sexuality is a viable way for Bertha to connect with her husband. She believes that, in their bedroom, she and Harry will also enter a private other-world: ‘“these people will go’’’ and she and Harry ‘“will be alone together in a dark room’’’ (348).

66

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:41pm

kms026.tex

Surrounded by Beasts: Bertha Young’s Thwarted Fairy Tale Her desire for him ‘[aching] in her ardent body’ (348) is worlds away from the woman who was ‘so cold’ in the past (348). At this point, Bertha is overwhelmed to think that she can bring sex itself into her transcendent beliefs regarding sexuality. If it is possible that Pearl can stand outside baser things, perhaps so can Harry and, by extension, the sexual act. Bertha’s desire to have sex with Harry connotes a final enchantment. Like her view of her dining room, she imagines she can ‘warm’ up the relationship with Harry, despite its obvious chilliness. She completely neglects to consider Harry’s motivations and desires. Bertha’s next question of ‘Was this what that feeling of bliss had been leading up to?’ is followed by ‘But then, then – ’ (348). This section of the story has typically been used as proof that Bertha is wondering why ‘then’ she would have an attraction to Pearl, which can be seen in Anderson’s analysis of the scene. Here Bertha attempts to transfer her unconscious feelings for the woman onto her relationship with the man, according to what she knows her feelings for him conventionally ought to be [. . . ] ‘But then, then –’ why Harry? Or if Harry, what has Miss Fulton had to do with her excitement? Bertha breaks off, not pursuing the implications even this far.52

However, the passage ‘But then, then –’ can instead be read as Mansfield’s indication that there is a ‘turn’ in the action of the story. In other words, it is a verbal notation of the start of climatic action: this is what happened next to thwart Bertha’s bliss. Controlled sexual intercourse with Harry is ‘what that feeling of bliss had been leading up to’ since it seems it will give Bertha the happily-ever-after ending of her fairy tale. ‘But then, then –’ just at the moment when Bertha might actually achieve connection, her own blindness to the reality of Harry’s need for sex betrays her. When Harry pushes past his wife to help Pearl with her coat, Bertha at first thinks he is ‘repenting his rudeness [. . . ]. What a boy he was in some ways – so impulsive – so simple’ (349). Bertha seems, at this point, to have gained the sense of cool power she coveted in Pearl. Her ability to see with ‘adult eyes’ is about to show her, however, that a bliss rooted in spiritual communion with Harry is a complete delusion. [She] saw . . . Harry with Miss Fulton’s coat in his arms and Miss Fulton with her back turned to him and her head bent. He tossed the coat away, put his hands on her shoulders and turned her violently to him. His lips said, ‘I adore you’, and Miss Fulton laid her moonbeam fingers on his cheeks and smiled her sleepy smile. Harry’s nostrils quivered; his lips curled back in a hideous grin while he whispered: ‘To-morrow’, and with her eyelids Miss Fulton said: ‘Yes’. (349)

67

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:41pm

kms026.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies The supposed union Bertha shared with Pearl over the scene in the garden is purposefully mocked here in Mansfield’s description: Pearl’s ‘moonbeam fingers’ show she is not the pure moon of Bertha’s vision and Harry’s nostrils ‘quiver’ hungrily towards her, a deliberate contrast to the still tree ‘quiver[ing . . . ] to touch the rim of the round, silver moon’ (347). As Bertha sees Harry truly for the first time, her new perception destroys her fairy tale. His violence and ‘hideous grin’ show he is indeed an animal, nearly monstrous, and the harsh contrast to her idealised view of him seconds before means that she can no longer deny his physical, rather than spiritual, interest in sex. As Harry says ‘extravagantly cool and collected’, that he will ‘shut up shop’ (350), Bertha no longer attempts to see him in a positive or warm light. Her fantasy world is also ‘shut up’ as she says goodbye to her guests. That Bertha now sees Pearl as newly negative is shown in her description of the woman’s departure. ‘And then she was gone, with Eddie following, like the black cat following the gray cat’ (350). This image of Pearl solidifies her position as one of the ‘creepy things’ in Bertha’s life. Now knowing the falsity of the world she has imagined, Bertha runs to expose the pear tree. ‘“Oh, what is going to happen now?’’ she cries’ (350). Bertha understandably expects an outward sign of her disenchantment, however the tree remains ‘as lovely as ever and as full of flower and as still’ (350). The ending of ‘Bliss’ seems ambiguous for Bertha, but with this ambiguity, Mansfield achieves something similar to the fairy tale tellers of the late Victorian period. As Zipes explains, ‘all the formal aesthetic changes made in the tales are connected to an insistence that the substance of life be transformed, otherwise there will be alienation, petrification, and death’.53 The image at the end of ‘Bliss’ shows the death of the possibility of Bertha’s transformation since it at once echoes and contrasts how the tree appeared earlier when ‘it seemed, like the flame of a candle, to stretch up, to point, to quiver in the bright air, to grow taller and taller’ (347). The pear tree, though ‘beautiful’, is definitely ‘still’, devoid of the bliss that Pearl verified, which could show Bertha’s ‘powerlessness [. . . ] at this moment.’54 What Foucault would call the ‘dark shimmer of sex’ is static here;55 ‘bliss’ is thwarted and petrified. Bertha remains where she started, a fiddle shut up in a case, a woman with a baby kept in another woman’s arms. Rosen explains that when a woman lives in ‘a false self’ which is ‘a manifestation of one’s parents [and/or] society’s wishes’ – here, represented by the repressive ‘civilisation’ Bertha is surrounded by – rather than her ‘true self,’ she may become ‘severely depressed [. . . ] frozen in a masked smiling depression’.56 Certainly, Bertha has now been made aware

68

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:41pm

kms026.tex

Surrounded by Beasts: Bertha Young’s Thwarted Fairy Tale of how sex actually exists beyond the fantasy she envisioned, and, symbolically older and wiser, will be able to recognise the beasts that lurk underneath the trees. Yet, because the reader engages with Bertha’s mindset, believes in her fairy tale even as it is mocked, and invests in her resolution, the story’s ending is particularly and intentionally frustrating. It is also enlightening. Fairy tale scholar Maria Tatar suggests that rather than ‘simply reproduce the constructs of a culture’, fairy tales can be ‘retold so that they challenge and resist’ cultural restrictions.57 In the thwarting of Bertha’s fairy tale, Mansfield creates vivid social commentary regarding how the repression of desire splits the idea of sexuality from the sexual act, creating false worlds of domestic bliss, where sleeping beauties lie unawakened. Mansfield, like many fairy tale tellers before and after her, is less concerned about her protagonist’s happy ending and more with what Warner notes is an essential function of the fairy tale: uncovering the context of the tales, their relation to society and history [which] can yield more of a happy resolution than the story itself delivers with its challenge to fate: ‘They lived happily ever after’ consoles us, but gives scant help compared to ‘Listen this is how it was before, but things could change – and they might’.58

In ‘Bliss’, Mansfield borrows the fairy tale’s ability to encode this idea of change, its reliance on the idea of transformation both in its plot and in its characters, in order to make her audience contemplate Bertha Young’s next step. As Zipes notes, for many late-Victorian authors, ‘[t]o write a fairy tale was considered a social symbolic act that could have implications for [. . . ] the future of society’, it was ‘a process of creating an other world, from which vantage point they could survey conditions in the real world and compare them to their ideal projections’.59 While Bertha may not be able to decipher what will happen to her next, Mansfield allows the reader to engage in the possibilities of what could: Bertha could realize that it is Harry who is cold; she could leave Harry; she could pursue her sexuality with others; she could decide not to be confined to definitions given to her by ‘civilisation’; she could remove herself from the shut case. In the world of the story, Bertha’s fairy tale is thwarted by the liaison of Harry and Pearl, but Mansfield’s criticism of Victorian confinements offers her audience a beginning in terms of reassessing modern gender roles. The true power of ‘Bliss’ rests not in deciding whether or not Bertha’s desire for Pearl is or is not homosexual, but in Mansfield’s manipulation of the reader’s desire to have Bertha reach, move, and stretch away from the stillness of her pear tree into greater self awareness, to imagine for her a new once upon a time.

69

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:41pm

kms026.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies Notes 1. Helen Nebeker. ‘The Pear Tree: Sexual Implications in Katherine Mansfield’s “Bliss’’’ in J. F. Kobler, ed., Katherine Mansfield: A Study of the Short Fiction (Boston: Twayne, 1990). 2. Both Anderson and Dunbar make convincing arguments for Bertha’s homosexual attraction to Pearl; see W. E. Anderson. ‘The Hidden Love Triangle in Mansfield’s “Bliss’’’, Twentieth Century Literature, 28 (Winter 1982), pp. 397–404 and Pamela Dunbar, Radical Mansfield (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997). 3. C. A. Hankin, Katherine Mansfield and Her Confessional Stories (London: Macmillan, 1983). The analyses appear on p. 84, p. 217 and p. 220 respectively. 4. Marina Warner, From The Beast To The Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994), p. xxi. 5. Jack Zipes, When Dreams Came True: Classical Fairy Tales and Their Tradition (New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 159. 6. Zipes, p. 161. Zipes explains how fairy tale tellers in the Victorian Age move away from the tradition of Charles Perrault’s artistocratic tales (1697) and the folk tales gathered by the Brothers Grimm (1812), toward original manuscripts which use fairy tale themes, characters, and plot devices to discuss contemporary life and/or critique Victorian society – for example, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Laurence Housman’s ‘The Rooted Lover’ (1894), and J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1904). 7. Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Knopf, 1976), p. 226. 8. Bettelheim, p. 226. 9. Linda Bayer-Berenbaum, The Gothic Imagination: Expansion in Gothic Literature and Art (London: Associated University Press, 1982), p. 29. 10. Bayer-Berenbaum, p. 28. 11. Bayer-Berenbaum, p. 35. 12. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), p. 4. 13. Katherine Mansfield, ‘Bliss’, The Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield (New York: Knopf, 1937), p. 338. Page numbers to all further references to this volume are placed directly after each quotation. 14. Dennis W. Allen. Sexuality in Victorian Fiction. (Norman, OK: Oklahoma State University Press, 1993), p. 15. 15. Allen, p. 15. 16. Nina Auerbach. Romantic Imprisonment: Women and Other Glorified Outcasts. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 163. 17. One trait of Victorian fairy tales was to take the traditional passive adolescent heroines of classic narratives like ‘Snow White’ and give them more active roles. In ‘Bliss’, Mansfield writes a ‘modern’ fairy tale with a heroine whose behaviour is traditionally passive, but whose attempts are to move toward activity. 18. Bettelheim, p. 39. 19. Anderson, p. 404. 20. Dunbar, p. 109. 21. Chantal Cornut-Gentille D’Arcy. ‘Katherine Mansfield’s “Bliss’’: The Rare Fiddle as Emblem of the Political and Sexual Alienation of Women’, Papers on Language and Literature, 35 (1999), pp. 244–69, p. 250. 22. D’Arcy, p. 257.

70

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:41pm

kms026.tex

Surrounded by Beasts: Bertha Young’s Thwarted Fairy Tale 23. Humphrey Carpenter, Secret Gardens: A Study of the Golden Age of Children’s Literature, (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1985), p. 16. 24. Carpenter, p. 16. 25. D’Arcy, p. 254. 26. Warner, p. 276. 27. Warner, p. 276. 28. Charles Perrault, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ in Maria Tatar, ed., The Classic Fairy Tales (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), pp. 11–13. 29. Bettelheim, p. 226. 30. Judith S. Neaman, ‘Allusion, Image, and Associative Pattern: The Answer in Katherine Mansfield’s “Bliss’’’, Twentieth Century Literature, 32 (Summer 1986), pp. 242–54, p. 244. 31. Marilyn Zorn. ‘Visionary Flowers: Another Study of Katharine Mansfield’s “Bliss’’’, Studies in Short Fiction. 17.2 (1980), pp. 141–49, p. 147. 32. Dunbar, p. 110. 33. Hankin, p. 148. 34. Foucault, p. 157. 35. Foucault, p. 157. 36. David H. Rosen. ‘Archetypes of Transformation: Healing the Self/Other Self Through Creative Active Imagination’ in Brett Cooke, George E. Slusser, Jaume Marti-Olivell, eds., The Fantastic Other: An Interface of Perspectives (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), pp. 221–42, p. 240. 37. Rosen, p. 223. 38. Rosen, p. 240. 39. D’Arcy, p. 259. 40. Dunbar, p. 111. 41. Dunbar, p. 111. 42. D’Arcy, p. 261. 43. Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 50. 44. Giddens, p. 45. 45. Dunbar, p. 107. 46. Dunbar, p. 107. 47. Nebeker, p. 156. 48. Neaman, p. 249. 49. Foucault, p. 6. 50. Foucault, p. 7. 51. Nebeker, p. 156. 52. Anderson, p. 402. 53. Zipes, p. 161. 54. Zorn, p. 147. 55. Foucault, p. 157. 56. Rosen, p. 225. 57. Maria Tatar, Off With Their Heads! Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 237. 58. Warner, p. xxi. 59. Zipes, pp. 150, 165.

71

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:41pm

kms027.tex

Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence: A Parallel Quest Linda Lappin

Abstract Near the end of their lives, Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence embarked upon spiritual adventures inspired by ancient or extraEuropean religious and philosophical beliefs. Mansfield’s adventure unfolded at G. I. Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleau where she died in January 1923. Lawrence’s ‘savage pilgrimage’ took him from Taos, New Mexico, then back to Italy to investigate the Etruscans in his travelogue, Etruscan Places. Drawing on their letters and Lawrence’s travel writings, this essay explores the similarities between their experiences in these very different cultural contexts. Mansfield’s responses to Gurdjieff’s sacred dances are compared to Lawrence’s thoughts on the sacred dancing of the Southwest American Indians and of the Etruscans as portrayed in their frescoes. It is shown that both writers believed that in those ritual gestures and movements, they had found a trace of an ancient science of life-enhancement. Key words: Katherine Mansfield, D. H. Lawrence, Etruscan Places, G. I. Gurdjieff, Sacred Dance, Taos In October 1922, Katherine Mansfield was welcomed at G. I. Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 2 (2010): 72–86 DOI: 10.3366/E2041450110000272 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

72

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:41pm

kms027.tex

Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence: A Parallel Quest Fontainebleau, housed in a former Carmelite monastery known as the Prieuré, where she would die in January 1923. The letters she wrote from there were recently published in Volume V of the Collected Letters.1 In those pages, the long list of her correspondents has dwindled to an essential few: her husband, John Middleton Murry; her companion, Ida Constance Baker; her father, Harold Beauchamp; and her friends, Dorothy Brett and the Russian translator S. S. Koteliansky (known simply as ‘Kot’). After her death, unsent missives were also found addressed to her sisters and her cousin. ‘I have so little time to write’, she apologised to Brett on 28 October 1922.2 ‘I am fearfully busy’, she informed Murry on 10 November, for the schedule at the Prieuré was particularly demanding.3 The letters she did write were scribbled, partly, in stolen time, with the knowledge of transgressing a rule, as she confided to Murry on 24 October: ‘I am writing this on the corner of the table against orders for the sun shines and I am supposed to be in the garden’.4 But it was not only her need for rest or the lack of leisure that explained her reticence with former friends. She felt a widening gulf with her previous life. ‘People are almost nonexistent’, she confessed to Kot on 19 October.5 ‘All the people I have ever known, don’t matter to me’, she reiterated to Murry.6 There was, however, one former friend whom she did think of fondly at this time: D. H. Lawrence, although the volatile relationship that had bound Mansfield and Murry to the Lawrences since 1913 had evolved through several explosive phases in the previous two years. Lawrence was furious with Murry’s denigrating reviews of his recent work. Nor could he bear reading praise of Mansfield’s work in the English press. ‘Vermin’, he would later write of the Murrys.7 Writing to Mansfield in February 1920 while she recuperated in a French sanatorium not far from where he would die, he had fumed, perhaps in a moment of self-projection: ‘You revolt me stewing in your consumption. You are a loathsome reptile – I hope you will die’.8 To this vituperation, Mansfield gallantly replied in her last months of life by remembering Lawrence in her will, leaving him a book of his choice from her library. On 13 October, before going to the Prieuré, she clarified in a letter to Murry that, despite all, ‘I care for Lawrence’.9 She would elucidate further on 24 November: ‘I should like very much to know what he intends to do – how he intends to live. He and E. M. Forster are the two men who could understand this place if they would. But I think Lawrence’s pride would keep him back’.10 ‘This place’ was the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. From her letters, it was clear that Mansfield was anxious that the

73

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:41pm

kms027.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies people closest to her should understand why she had gone there. She even urged Murry to join her, ‘[s]uppose you throw up every single job in England, realize your capital & come over here to work for Gurdjieff!’, she proposed on 27 October.11 Twice she suggested he meet Ouspensky for a talk, a recommendation she also made to Ida Baker: ‘[i]f you are in London why do you not write and ask if you may attend his lectures?’.12 On Christmas Eve, she gave Ida some pointers on how to begin self-observation, one of the first steps in Gurdjieff’s method:13 ‘Why don’t you begin taking photographs of yourself, take them all day’.14 In unfinished letters to her sisters and cousin, she tried to explain the spiritual crisis which had led her there, while to her father, she masked her true intention, claiming she was there for a ‘medical cure’. Her most soulful revelations were made to Murry and Koteliansky, stating that what brought her to the Prieuré was a ‘private revolution’:15 ‘I am a divided being [. . . ] I am always conscious of this secret disruption in me [. . . ] and I mean to change my whole way of life’.16 That change was in part inspired by the teachings of Gurdjieff, which offered a method of ‘work on oneself’ for ‘balancing the centres’ – head, heart and body – and for learning to live in a state of ‘presence’ or enhanced awareness, to which one must first awaken in order to distinguish one’s essence or true self from more superficial personality which is prey to mechanical laws.17 This language resonated for Mansfield, who adopted it in her letters and diary: It seems to me that in life as it is lived today the catastrophe is imminent; I feel this catastrophe in me [. . . ] 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 a world in which these instances are united.18

‘I really cant go on pretending to be one person and being another any more’.19 Her chief aim was to escape the mechanicalness of life around her and also in herself: ‘I want to be REAL’ was her heartfelt cry to Murry on 26 December 1922.20 In these same months, a parallel quest for authentic sensations had drawn Lawrence to another destination in his ‘savage enough pilgrimage’ far from industrial, mechanised Europe,21 namely the New Mexican desert, where after some hesitation he had accepted Mabel Dodge Luhan’s invitation to reside at her compound in September 1922. To their new patron, Frieda Lawrence remarked that Taos corresponded to Lawrence’s need for ‘something genuine’.22 Lawrence himself once summed up his philosophy of the genuine in ‘Why the

74

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:41pm

kms027.tex

Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence: A Parallel Quest Novel Matters’ as the striving to become a ‘whole man alive’.23 It was a goal that would have made sense to Gurdjieff’s pupils at the Prieuré, but Lawrence would have none of them.24 The search for the wholeness of an authentic self was only one of the many points of similarity linking the lives of Mansfield and Lawrence, for they died of the same illness on French soil, felt sexually or emotionally drawn to some of the same people (Murry, Brett, Koteliansky) and espoused similar philosophies of daily life, which might best be defined in the words of Lawrence’s biographer, L. D. Clark, as ‘a constant state of delight with the world’,25 while suffering from debilitating periods of illness and despondency. Among the minor passions they shared were a love of flowers, as attested by the rich plant imagery in their writings, and a horror of cities. Mansfield herself admitted the similarity between them in terms of a temperament prone to black moods and outbursts, perhaps linked to their disease. ‘I am more like L. than anybody. We are unthinkably alike, in fact’, she confessed to her journal on 20 September 1918.26 Lawrence’s unflattering and sometimes spiteful portraits of her in his fiction suggest an obsession aggravated by his refusal to accept her growing literary success. Both are recognised among the innovators of English modernism and both later became cult figures whose reputations rest not only upon their considerable literary merit, but on the myths that have arisen inspired by their nonconformist lifestyles. Mansfield’s quest for wholeness led her to a cloistered retreat outside Paris; Lawrence’s compelled him to undertake a series of sea voyages – Australia, Ceylon, the Pacific rim, America, Mexico. Mansfield strove to follow a method of inner transformation, or ‘work on oneself’, through which she might strengthen her ‘real I’ from within, while Lawrence eschewed the very idea of ‘conscious endeavour’,27 which he interpreted as a perverse form of self-control.28 He sought instead a location or culture where a new way of life might be founded, untouched by modern society. At first, that location seemed to him within physical range – the Andes, a Pacific island, Florida, or simply a community of his own making in a faraway place. Towards the end he situated it in what Clark terms ‘the Minoan distance’,29 a primordial dimension to which one must return in order to recapture a sense of the sacred that once illuminated every aspect of human life. Only after having ‘perfected oneself in the great past’ was it possible to move forward to spiritual renewal.30 It is in this shared eagerness to cross the ‘Minoan distance’ in order to discover their essential natures that Mansfield and Lawrence most closely resemble each other. In the twilight of their lives,

75

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:41pm

kms027.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies both believed they had found the source of an ancient, regenerative science of life. For Mansfield this science was epitomised by the philosophy of Gurdjieff; for Lawrence, by his idealised interpretations of Native American and Etruscan culture. Their parallel quest led through similar stages: isolation from England and their intellectual communities; relocation in an exotic locale; rejection of urban life and a return to basics comprising self-expression through manual skills and greater contact with nature; attempts at new modes of socialisation, and interest in art forms, philosophies or religions remote from modern European culture. In both quests, sacred dance appeared to be a vehicle for a deeper knowledge of self and of the divine.

Fontainebleau and Taos When Mansfield arrived at Gurdjieff’s Institute, his pupils were readying the place for the grand opening scheduled for January 1923. ‘The plumbing, the lighting & so on done by our people’, she boasted to Murry on 27 November.31 As she sat in the crisp autumn air, admiring the feverish efforts to complete two annexes, the Turkish Bath and the Study House, Lawrence had just finished settling into an adobe house Mabel Dodge Luhan had prepared for him over the summer of 1922. His journey had been much more adventurous than Mansfield’s excursion by train to Fontainebleau, for he had sailed from Australia on a ship that put in at Wellington and Tahiti before docking in San Francisco. From there, he had travelled by train to Lamy, New Mexico, and then by car to Taos along a ‘narrow dirt road full of ruts and rocks’.32 Both locales were satisfyingly exotic and un-European, so that one felt one had travelled far. The Turkish bath had a small room ‘hung with carpets which looks more like Bokhara than Avon’.33 The Study House was decorated with hand painted designs and inscriptions in a mysterious script, and equipped with a fountain illuminated by coloured lights. ‘In three weeks here I feel I have spent years in India, Arabia, Afghanistan, Persia’, she wrote to Murry on 10 November, ‘oh how one wanted to voyage like this – how bound one felt’.34 On the other side of the globe, Lawrence’s adobe residence was: ‘[a] long, low house with thick walls, and portal between two wings that project at either end, the portal supported by twisted columns chiselled out of trunks from pine trees [. . . ] painted sky-blue’,35 furnished with Mexican rugs and village furniture. ‘In front the desert, with grey yellow-flowering sage bushes’,36 a sacred mountain and an Indian pueblo nearby.

76

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:41pm

kms027.tex

Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence: A Parallel Quest The charm of handmade, sun-dried adobe bricks, as opposed to industrially manufactured ones, was emphasised by Luhan: ‘it looked [. . . ] as it had been made with hands’, with ‘uneven surfaces, irregular lines, as true as hand and eye could make them’.37 Lawrence himself later wrote of adobe constructions that: ‘the naked human hand with a bit of new soft mud is quicker than time, and defies the centuries’.38 Lawrence exulted in the touch of the naked human hand in his essay, ‘Why the Novel Matters’: ‘[m]y hand is alive. It flickers with a life of its own. It meets all the strange universe in touch’.39 For him, the tender touch – the transmission of nurturing human energies upon both living and inert matter – was the greatest human value, and the key to the transformation of society and to individual spiritual rebirth. In Lawrence’s fiction, from The White Peacock to Lady Chatterley’s Lover, touching a lover or a flower, kneading bread dough, or drawing a thread of lace all partake of this sacred tenderness and transforming power of the naked human hand. At the Prieuré, Mansfield had been discovering her own hands from a new perspective while peeling mountains of carrots. For the first time in her life, those lovely hands were chafed by housework. Practice of all kinds of manual skills was an essential part of life at the Prieuré as a means to self-awareness and Mansfield warmed to the challenge: ‘I mean to learn to work in every possible way with my hands, looking after animals, and doing all kinds of manual labour’,40 she explained to Koteliansky on 19 October, later expressing hopes that she might learn carpentry.41 She had no doubt that the modern emphasis on intellectual development, on ‘the head’, was partly to blame for her inner distress: ‘I see no hope of escape except by learning to live in our emotional & instinctive being as well and to balance all three’, she wrote to Murry on 26 December 1922.42 In an earlier letter on 15 October, she had encouraged him to take up gardening instead of chess in order to balance his centres: ‘Sweep leaves. Make Fires. Do anything to work with your hands in contact with the earth [. . . ] chess only feeds your already over developed intellectual centre’.43 This was a change for her. Months earlier she had admonished Brett for wasting time on housekeeping: ‘[d]on’t work anymore than you can possibly help!’.44 In her own household, such tasks were always entrusted to Ida. Contact with animals was also an important part of life at the Prieuré. Gurdjieff advised pupils to practice love on plants and animals before trying people.45 Mansfield’s daily routine involved visits to cows, pigs, and rabbits. ‘Why don’t you get some animals?’, she suggested to Murry, ‘I’m not joking’.46

77

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:41pm

kms027.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies Lawrence, for his part, took pride in his manual skills. ‘We are very practical’, he wrote to Luhan from Sicily on 5 November 1921, making arrangements for their arrival in Taos, ‘do all our own work, even the washing, cooking, floor-cleaning’.47 His friend Catherine Carswell shows us a man who embroidered baby clothes for gifts and sometimes made his own clothes (including matching suits of blue linen for himself and Frieda).48 According to Aldous Huxley, Lawrence could darn stockings and milk cows.49 In New Mexico, he also baked bread, mended fences, and made shelves.50 Such versatility would have been much prized at the Prieuré. After three months, Lawrence’s relations with Mabel Dodge Luhan grew strained, and he moved north to the Del Monte ranch. Out there, the great ‘unbroken spaces’ stimulated him, as did contact with horses, a symbolic animal in Lawrence’s personal mythology. Caring for them became part of his daily routine after moving to the ranch, where at times he experienced extreme isolation. The letters from this period describe long rides on horseback to fetch fresh provisions, and contain requests for supplies of meat, eggs, medicine, to be brought or sent. The isolation suited his mood, for like Mansfield, he desired a break from society and from the people he had known. ‘To ride alone – in the sun – in the forever unpossessed country – away from man. That is a great temptation because one rather hates mankind nowadays’.51

Self and Others Lawrence tried over the years to cajole his acquaintances into helping him found a commune, a project he would call Rananim, but these plans never amounted to much more than living near a friend or two. His relations with his neighbours tended to become overwrought, for he could not help becoming involved in their personal affairs. ‘I get mixed up in people’s lives’, he confessed to Rolf Gardiner in July 1926.52 Aldous Huxley and Catherine Carswell have recorded episodes in which Lawrence urged them, and other friends, to escape with him; yet all these projects fell through and his isolation weighed upon him: ‘I should love to be connected with something, with some few people [. . . ] As far as anything that matters I have always been very much alone and regretted it’.53 Yet he believed that Mansfield and Murry could assuage the stark aloneness he felt. They had first met in 1913, when he and Frieda paid a call on the offices of Rhythm. He later remarked that he found them daft but nice, and when asked if Mansfield was pretty replied: ‘[i]f you

78

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:41pm

kms027.tex

Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence: A Parallel Quest like the legs of the principal boy in the pantomime’.54 It was to Murry that both he and Frieda were most strongly attracted. Mansfield and Murry later served as witnesses at the Lawrences’ wedding, during which Frieda gave her old ring to Mansfield, the same ring Murry would push upon her finger four years later when they married. Mansfield believed it was a gift; Carswell claims Frieda meant it only as a loan.55 The uncertain status of this gift suggests the difficulties involved in interpreting the Lawrences’ offers and demands. Their intimacy deepened as the First World War progressed with its horror, distress, and grief. Lawrence found himself suspected of espionage and harassed by the military police. Mansfield’s loss of her beloved brother Leslie triggered a depression which dogged her for months. Lawrence comforted her at that time with a moving letter on 20 December 1915, promising joyous rebirth of a new self. The imagery of the letter prefigures his late poem ‘The Ship of Death’, inspired by Etruscan symbols. Yet this resurrection was also bound to his desire for a closer bond with them: ‘I want so much that we should create a life in common [. . . ] that we should add our lives together to make one tree’.56 Within months, he had convinced them to follow him to Cornwall. So anxious was he to oversee the domestic arrangements, that he dictated to the landlord the colour scheme for the Murrys’ new abode: ‘dining room red, as it is, downstairs tower room cream; large bedroom, pale pink’.57 Despite such solicitude, proximity to the tempestuous Lawrences was too much for Mansfield and after witnessing several dramatic rows, the Murrys opted out.58 They were later appalled to see themselves portrayed as the destructive, arid Gudrun and Gerald of Women in Love (1920). Although some of his letters to Mansfield reveal genuine affection, Lawrence viewed her as secondary to Murry, a foil to Murry’s manliness, to which he felt attracted and with which he was in keen competition. It was Murry not Mansfield that Lawrence regarded as his intellectual equal. He did not think highly of her work.59 Mansfield, though she disliked Lawrence’s treatment of sex, admired him and felt an affinity with his work.60 Lawrence’s wanderlust took him far from Europe after 1920 and from this point his fiction largely focuses on journeys to distant settings where a new life may arise. He kept in contact with Murry during this period, though his attitude remained critical and deprecating. In 1923, hearing of Mansfield’s death, he wrote a consolatory letter to him and, upon returning to England, begged Murry and other friends to join him in Taos. Murry promised he would, but never did. Dorothy Brett

79

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:41pm

kms027.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies was the only one willing to undertake this adventure and stayed on long after the Lawrences had moved on. Except for these brief experiments, Lawrence never experienced real communal living. Rather it was the more retiring Mansfield who uncharacteristically embraced collective life at the Prieuré,61 together with forty other people, mostly Russians.62 The Prieuré, however, was not a commune in the sense that Lawrence intended Rananim to be. Not a utopian experiment based on a shared ideological vision, inspired by a mission to change society, it was rather a school in which to reside for a time in order to receive a special training, after which pupils returned back to their ‘normal’ lives. Although Mansfield felt estranged from many former friends while at the Prieuré, she was enthusiastic about the new people she had met there, who were mostly artists, intellectuals, and musicians. ‘There is another thing here. Friendship. The real thing that you and I have dreamed of. Here it exists between women & women & men & women & one feels it is inalterable’.63 The human warmth she received at the Prieuré must have seemed welcome compensation for her previous solitude. Since the winter of 1918 she had spent months away from home, in rented rooms, often ill, worried about money; with only letters and her work for stimulation and Ida Baker for companionship. At the Prieuré, she was free from major preoccupations: domestic and financial details were mostly seen to by others and two resident doctors were always on call. Stimulating company surrounded her and two charming young women had been assigned to assist her. Orage and Ouspensky, whom she held in high esteem, were also present. Above all, she was putting into practice a psychological training which she believed offered remedy for her inner state of fragmentation.64 Mansfield was a guest, not a ‘pupil’, and as such had a much less stringent routine:65 ‘And yet I feel I can’t enter into it as I shall be able to; I am only on the fringe’.66 For everyone else the pace of life at the Prieuré was more demanding. From her letters, we may assume that after entering the gates of the Institute, she never left the premises again. She referred to the world beyond the Prieuré as ‘la-bas’.67 In fact she tells Ida that she could not even get to Fontainebleau to shop for the most necessary personal items, and showered her with requests for stockings, mouth antiseptic, tooth powder, and warm underwear, which she had no way of procuring for herself. Not all guests or pupils at the Prieuré chose such a sequestered existence, as we know from other accounts of life there, such as the letters of Jane Heap, co-editor with Margaret Anderson, of the Little Review. Heap mentions that the composer

80

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:41pm

kms027.tex

Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence: A Parallel Quest Carole Robinson, a pupil at the Prieuré, travelled to Paris for concerts; she herself describes weekends away from the Prieuré, drinking too much at her favourite cafes, and visiting Brancusi’s studio.68 In his memoir, C. S. Knott recounts his experience at a cabaret party and the peculiar impression it made on him after having spent a month at the Prieuré. Pupils were free to spend time away. Contact with the outside world was even necessary. But Mansfield’s physical condition was such that it probably precluded even short excursions. In October she had written to Brett, ‘I am a cough – a living walking or lying down cough’.69 Yet she did not intend to stay forever at the Prieuré. ‘And of course I shall not be here all my life. Connected with this work and these ideas, yes, but that is different. As soon as I am cured I shall leave here and set up a little place in the South and grow something’.70 She considered her sojourn there as a revitalising stop on a longer quest.

Dancers in the Twilight In New Mexico, Lawrence investigated the religious rituals of Native Americans, attending several ceremonies, including a performance of sacred dancing during the Christmas holidays of 1922. Though initially he was not impressed, his appreciation of the symbolism matured as we read in his essays ‘Dance of the Sprouting Corn’ and ‘The Hopi Snake Dance’ published in Mornings in Mexico. He came to believe that the art of primitive peoples was based not on imitation but participation in the ongoing creation of the cosmos. Ritual gestures could summon cosmic energies from natural forces into human actions: ‘And when he eats his bread at last, he [. . . ] partakes again of the energies he called to the corn from out of the wide universe’.71 The dancing he was learning to appreciate was a means of circulating this great energy. While Lawrence sat round the ceremonial fires musing on the Indians’ ‘effort to gather into their souls more and more of the creative fire, the creative energy which shall carry their tribe throughout the year’,72 Mansfield contemplated the huge logs burning in the great stone hearths of the Prieuré, meditating, perhaps, on a lesson from Gurdjieff: ‘fire is condensed sunlight’.73 The culmination of each day at the Prieuré was the sacred dance class held after dinner. Though she had never cared for dancing, this dancing, she explained to Murry, was something different: it appeared to her as ‘the key to a new world within one’.74 ‘I have no words with which to describe it. To see it seems to change one’s whole being for the time’.75

81

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:41pm

kms027.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies A photograph from this period shows her sitting in a highbacked chair, her eyes trained on the dancers who with uncanny synchronisation, whirled to eerie melodies in a minor key and moved their limbs to contrapuntal rhythms.76 Mansfield ‘watched so eagerly she seemed mentally to do the movements with all the rest’.77 Her favourite was ‘The Initiation of the Priestess, a Fragment of a Mystery’: ‘[i]t taught me, it gave me more of women’s life than any book or poem’.78 This may have been one of the dances she witnessed just before her death, which occurred a few hours after the class concluded. These dances were believed by some pupils to have ancient origin, deriving from such diverse cultures as Assyria, Afghanistan, or Tibet79 – transmitted across the dark abysm of time, from a dimension akin to Lawrence’s Minoan distance. Henri Thomasson, a French pupil of Gurdjieff, described practice of the movements as follows: When all thoughts and imagination drop away and only the vibrations of the living body are the centre of attention, the other world becomes accessible. Here all accustomed motives of desire and curiosity become completely unreal and a new kind of thought, liberated from form and composed of a pure but very fragile energy, appears. [. . . ] the body is the instrument of a new source of life [. . . ] we see the possibility of [. . . ] opening up channels for those other, higher influences which are always flowing through us.80

What is important is not the outer form, dexterity or control but the dancer’s attempt to engage a special energy for which the dance itself becomes a vehicle. Through the Gurdjieff movements, the dancer became an intermediary between forces above and below, sky and earth, which Gurdjieff defined as influences: ‘Influence A’ from the earth, ‘Influence C’ from the planets.81 It was such an intermediation of forces that Lawrence saw in the dancing of the Southwest Indians: The sky has its fire, its waters, its stars, its wandering electricity, its winds, its fingers of cold. The earth has its reddened body, its invisible hot heart, its inner waters and many juices and unaccountable stuffs. Between them all, the little seed: and also man, like a seed that is busy and aware. And from the heights and from the depths man, the caller, calls: man, the knower, brings down the influences and brings up the influences.82

He would find an even more refined vision of such sacred dancing in the Etruscan tomb-frescoes of Tarquinia. In 1927, his tuberculosis far advanced, Lawrence travelled to Italy to complete a book about the Etruscans. The return to the archaic Mediterranean where the gods wore a human semblance was a

82

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:41pm

kms027.tex

Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence: A Parallel Quest homecoming after the faceless gods of Mexico. In Etruscan civilisation, Lawrence believed he had found a culture of ‘phallic consciousness’, in which men and women were equal, where religion taught man that ‘by vivid attention and subtlety and exerting all his strength could draw more life into himself, more life and more and more glistening vitality till he became shining in the morning, blazing like a god’,83 and where immortality might be achieved through the eternal renewal of natural cycles. ‘The treasure of treasures is the soul [. . . ] in every creature, every tree or pool [. . . ] in death it does not disappear but is stored in the egg, in the jar, or even in the tree which brings it forth again’.84 The figures in the Etruscan frescoes celebrated these cycles with a rich display of feasting, drinking, hunting, fishing, playing music and games; all rituals by which cosmic energies could be absorbed into the self. But above all, it was through their dancing and through the dancers’ attention or ‘alertness’ – that divine energy was captured and transmitted by the human body, every limb permeated with godlike energy ‘to the tips’.85 To Lawrence’s eyes those fading human shapes dancing on in a ‘field of obliteration still know the gods and make it evident to us’ – still transmit the electricity of divine knowledge.86 A dying man, he looked to them for revelation. The Etruscans, he stressed, were, above all ‘an experience’.87 These two writers, obsessive perfectionists in regards to their craft, reached similar conclusions: the focalising of attention in bodily movement is a timeless art through which extraordinary states of being may be experienced and transmitted without the encumbrance of words. Dance, more than any other art, opened the door to the Minoan Distance. Mansfield longed to join the dancers,88 Lawrence to tap into a well spring of eternal renewal. Their journeys rewarded them with a vision of a life-transforming boon, but neither one lived long enough to put the gift to use. We have only their testimonies – Mansfield’s letters, Lawrence’s Etruscan writings – suggesting the fulfilment brought, or only promised, by dancers in the twilight at the end of their parallel quest. This essay is dedicated to James Moore. Notes 1. V. O’Sullivan and M. Scott, eds, The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield. Vol.1 (1984), Vol 2 (1987), Vol 3 (1993), Vol 4 (1996), Vol 5 (2008) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984–2008). Vol. 5. Hereafter referred to as Letters 5, followed by the page number. 2. Letters 5, p. 312. 3. Letters 5, p. 319. 4. Letters 5, p. 309.

83

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:41pm

kms027.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies 5. Letters 5, p. 304. 6. Letters 5, p. 308. 7. James Boulton, ed., Selected Letters of D. H. Lawrence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 195 [D. H. Lawrence to Mary Cannan, 12 February 1921]. 8. Mansfield recounted the episode in a letter to Murry on 7 February 1920. J. M. Murry, ed., Letters of Katherine Mansfield to John Middleton Murry, 1913–1922 (London: Constable, 1951), pp. 469–70. 9. Letters 5, p. 296. 10. Letters 5, p. 326. 11. Letters 5, p. 311. 12. Letters 5, p. 312. 13. See P. D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950), for a detailed study of Gurdjieff’s teaching. 14. Letters 5, p. 340. Taking ‘mental photographs’ was a first phase of self-observation; see Ouspensky, pp. 146–7. 15. Letters 5, p. 303 16. Letters 5, p. 304. 17. See Ouspensky, pp. 140–9. 18. Letters 5, p. 304. 19. Letters 5, p. 305. 20. Letters 5, p. 341. 21. Boulton, ed., Selected Letters, p. 251 [Letter to John Middleton Murry, 2 February1923]. 22. Mabel Dodge Luhan quotes Frieda’s letter in Lorenzo in Taos (New York: Knopf, 1933), p. 19. 23. Michael Herbert, ed., D. H. Lawrence: Selected Critical Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 209. 24. Lawrence had a very negative view of Gurdjieff’s Institute. Writing to Mabel Dodge Luhan on 9 January 1924, he described it as ‘a rotten, false, self-conscious place of people playing a sickly stunt’. Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos, p. 128. 25. L. D. Clark, The Minoan Distance, The Symbolism of Travel in D. H. Lawrence (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1980), p. 232. 26. J. M. Murry, ed., Journal of Katherine Mansfield (New York: Knopf, 1927), p. 99. 27. See Luhan, p. 128. 28. Lawrence’s advice to Mabel Dodge Luhan about Gurdjieff was:‘[m]y I, my fourth centre, will look after me better than I will look after it. Which is all I feel about Gurdjieff. You become perfect in the manipulation of your organism and the I is in such perfect suspension that if a dog barks, the universe is shattered’. See Luhan, p. 265. 29. The phrase is from a late poem by Lawrence. See Clark, p. 356. 30. D. H. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 117. 31. Letters 5, p. 328. 32. See Luhan, p. 43. 33. Letters 5, p. 328. 34. Letters 5, p. 319. 35. Luhan, p. 20. 36. Richard Aldington, ed., D. H. Lawrence, Selected Letters (London: Penguin, 1950), p. 142 [Letter to Catherine Carswell, 29 September 1922].

84

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:41pm

kms027.tex

Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence: A Parallel Quest 37. Luhan, p. 20. 38. D. H. Lawrence, ‘Dance of the Sprouting Corn’, in Mornings in Mexico (New York: Knopf, 1927), p. 122. 39. Herbert, p. 204. 40. Letters 5, p. 304. 41. Letters 5, p. 315. 42. Letters 5, p. 341. 43. Letters 5, p. 298. 44. Letters 5, p. 150. 45. G. I. Gurdjieff, Views from the Real World: Early Talks of Gurdjieff (New York: Dutton, 1975), p. 244. 46. Letters 5, p. 298. 47. Luhan, p. 17. 48. Catherine Carswell, Savage Pilgrimage: A Narrative of D. H. Lawrence (London: Secker & Warburg, 1951), pp. 108, 117. 49. Aldous Huxley, ‘Introduction’, in Richard Aldington, ed., D. H. Lawrence Selected Letters, p. 27–8. 50. James Boulton, ed., The Cambridge Edition of the Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol 5, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 75 [Letter to Earl Brewster, 15 July 1924]. 51. Aldington, p. 144 [ Letter to Catherine Carswell, 29 September 1922]. 52. Aldington, p. 158 . 53. Aldington, p. 158. 54. Carswell, p. 11. 55. Carswell, p. 23. 56. Aldington, p. 91. 57. Boulton, ed., Selected Letters, p. 123 [Letter to Captain John Short, 25 March 1916]. 58. See John Middleton Murry, The Autobiography of John Middleton Murry: Between Two Worlds (New York: Julian Messner, 1936), pp. 403–17 for his version of this living experiment. 59. Carswell records overhearing a conversation between Lawrence and Murry in which Lawrence insisted that Mansfield’s work was little more than a charming gift (p. 207). 60. Letters 5, p. 225. 61. In his autobiography, Murry claims that Mansfield ‘distrusted the very idea of a community’. Murry, p. 402. 62. See C. S. Knott, The Teachings of Gurdjieff: A Pupil’s Journal (London: Routledge, Kegan Paul, 1961). 63. Letters 5, p. 319. 64. See James Moore, Gurdjieff and Mansfield (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980). 65. C. S. Knott gives a fuller picture of the bustling Institute in Knott, p. 45. 66. Letters 5, p. 312. 67. Letters 5, p. 310. 68. Holly Baggett, ed., Dear Tiny Heart: The Letters of Jane Heap and Florence Reynolds (New York: New York University Press, 2000), p. 98. Heap later became a transmitter of Gurdjieff’s ideas in England. Among her pupils was the theatre director Peter Brook who describes his work with her in Brook, Threads of Time (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint Books, 1998), pp. 60–1; 70–1. 69. Letters 5, p. 290. 70. Letters 5, p. 335.

85

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:41pm

kms027.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies 71. D. H. Lawrence, ‘Dance of the Sprouting Corn’, p. 132. 72. D. H. Lawrence, ‘Indians and Entertainment’, Mornings in Mexico, p. 117. 73. Ida Baker, Katherine Mansfield: The Memories of LM (New York: Taplinger, 1972), p. 214. 74. Letters 5, p. 310. 75. Letters 5, p. 319. 76. See Moore, pp. 143–160. 77. Olgivanna (Mrs Frank Lloyd Wright), ‘The Last Days of Katherine Mansfield’, Bookman LXXIII (March 1931), p. 12. 78. Letters 5, p. 322. 79. See Knott, p. 8. 80. Henri Thomasson, The Pursuit of the Present (Avebury: Avebury Publishing Co., 1980), pp. 53–8. 81. Influence B instead is connected to philosophy, religion, and art. See G. I. Gurdjieff, Views from the Real World: Early Talks of Gurdjieff (New York: Dutton, 1975), pp. 254–65 for a general discussion. See also Henriette Lannes, Retour à Maintenant (Lyon: Editions Tournadieu, 2003), pp. 56–65. 82. ‘Dance of the Sprouting Corn’, p. 132. 83. D. H. Lawrence, Etruscan Places (London: Secker, 1932), p. 90. 84. Etruscan Places, p. 100. 85. Etruscan Places, p. 74. 86. Etruscan Places, p. 86. 87. Etruscan Places, p. 194. Emphasis mine. 88. Letters 5, p. 310.

86

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:42pm

kms028.tex

D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and Happiness Kirsty Martin

Abstract This essay identifies an allusion contained in a remark made by D. H. Lawrence about the similarity of Katherine Mansfield’s work to that of Dickens. It traces the origin of Lawrence’s allusion, arguing that Lawrence specifically links Mansfield’s writing with Dickens’s Christmas book The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), in which a lively, speaking kettle plays a key part in emphasising the comforts of domesticity, offering an image of well-being set against the harshness of winter. Lawrence linked Mansfield to this scene because it highlighted notions of happiness that were central to their literary relationship as explored by this article. Working from this allusion, parallels emerge in the way that both writers were preoccupied with the transience of happiness (as in a Christmas tale), but also in that they sought similar means of overcoming this transience. Echoes between Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’ (1918) and Lawrence’s Women in Love (1920) reveal close linguistic affinities between the two writers: each emphasises ‘stillness’, attempting to pause narrative and to dwell on moments of contentment. The essay highlights a coincidence of concerns between Mansfield and Lawrence, offering new insights into their friendship and their closeness as writers.

Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 2 (2010): 87–99 DOI: 10.3366/E2041450110000284 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

87

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:42pm

kms028.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies Key words: Lawrence, Mansfield, Dickens, happiness, Christmas writing, transience, stillness In a letter to John Middleton Murry, Frieda Lawrence repeated a remark which sheds light on what Katherine Mansfield meant to D. H. Lawrence. She told Murry: ‘Lawrence said Katherine had a lot in common with Dickens, you know when the kettle is so alive on the fire and things seem to take on such significance’.1 The particular image Lawrence evokes, of ‘the kettle [. . . ] so alive on the fire’ is especially redolent of the opening scene of Dickens’ Christmas book The Cricket on the Hearth: A Fairy Tale of Home (1845) – here one finds one of the liveliest kettles in Dickens’s writing. The story seems propelled by the kettle from the opening exclamation: ‘The kettle began it!’;2 the kettle is stubbornly alive: ‘[i]t was quarrelsome, and hissed and spluttered morosely on the fire’, and it even begins to speak: ‘I won’t boil. Nothing shall induce me!’3 The allusion demonstrates how closely Lawrence studied Mansfield’s style, since Dickens uses techniques in his novella that are echoed in Mansfield’s fiction. The speaking kettle prefigures the way in which things and animals talk in Mansfield’s short stories – for instance, in ‘At the Bay’ (1922), Florrie the cat comments disparagingly on the old sheep-dog, and the sea is given a voice: ‘AhAah! sounded the sleepy sea’.4 Moreover, Dickens’ Fairy Tale of Home resonates with many of Mansfield’s stories which, as Pamela Dunbar has noted, are frequently reminiscent of fairy tales.5 Most importantly for this essay, however, Lawrence’s observation hints at the philosophical concerns that underlie his very close attention to Mansfield’s work. Dickens’s story describes a man who returns to his home village and marries a childhood sweetheart, thus saving her from a marriage to a cruel toy-merchant. The tale ends on a note of domestic happiness, and seems, like Dickens’s other Christmas books, to offer an affirmation of life and warmth that contrasts with the bitterness of winter. The lively, vocal kettle is a key part of this effect, driving the plot by calling the wandering man into the house of his lover’s friend, and providing a classic image of comfort, set against the harshness of the winter, with its ‘song of invitation and welcome to somebody out of doors’.6 However, whilst the kettle conveys a promise of hope and warmth which contrasts with the darkness, it also draws attention to that very darkness: It’s a dark night, sang the kettle, and the rotten leaves are lying by the way; and, above, all is mist and darkness, and, below, all is mire and clay; and there’s only one relief in all the sad and murky air; and I don’t know

88

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:42pm

kms028.tex

D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and Happiness that it is one, for it’s nothing but a glare; of deep and angry crimson, where the sun and wind together; set a brand upon the clouds for being guilty of such weather [. . . ] you couldn’t say that anything is what it ought to be; but he’s coming, coming, coming! –

The kettle suggests happiness, exuding the ‘strong energy of cheerfulness’. Yet in the above description its song seems almost a parody of comfort. Its consolation is grudging – ‘there’s only one relief [. . . ] and I don’t know that it is one’ – and its song is sung to a maddening, desperate rhyme: ‘lying by the way’, ‘all is mire and clay’. The frantic song of the kettle encapsulates the paradoxical nature of the Christmas story genre, in which tales of bliss contrast with winter bleakness, but at the risk of highlighting that very bleakness and thereby revealing the precariousness of the consolation they offer. In linking Mansfield with this Dickens story, Lawrence pinpoints Mansfield’s close attention to happiness, and her anxious awareness of the fragility of happiness – concerns which are also present in his own writing. He connects her work with writing which draws its energy from a conjunction between light and darkness, and where happiness shivers on the brink of destruction. Both Mansfield and Lawrence explored whether there might be other, less precarious ways of writing about happiness, or whether contentment might only be shown in fleeting glimpses. This essay therefore traces some of the ways in which Mansfield and Lawrence dealt with this problem, looking especially at Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’ (1918), and Lawrence’s Women in Love (1920), and highlighting the similarity of their concerns in thinking about happiness. This approach reveals a new aspect of the mutual fascination of Lawrence and Mansfield for each other as writers and as individuals, and reveals how they strove to capture happiness.

Christmas Letters The connections between Mansfield and Lawrence have often been noted, yet the nature of the bond between them has not been extensively explored. Mansfield scholars have frequently dwelt on their mutual hostility: Lydia Blanchard has described the professional tensions between them, while Carol Siegel has suggested that Mansfield saw Lawrence as ‘a rival with whom she was compelled to struggle and a powerful thinker whose dangerous philosophy she must refute’.7 Meanwhile, Mansfield has not been recognised as having any particular importance for Lawrence’s work; F. R. Leavis

89

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:42pm

kms028.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies despised her ‘tiny talent’, and Mansfield is not often mentioned in studies of Lawrence.8 However, a further investigation of the importance of Lawrence’s Christmas story allusion suggests new ways of understanding their closeness as individuals, and of identifying similarities between their literary and philosophical preoccupations. In the winter of 1918–19, Lawrence sent Mansfield a series of letters which demonstrates and affirms their friendship. Lawrence wrote out of great concern for Mansfield, fearing that, following an arterial haemorrhage earlier in 1918, she might be ‘only just on the verge of existence’.9 As Mark Kinkead-Weekes has noted, Lawrence hoped his letters would provide ‘a gift of liveliness against the snow and the spectre’.10 Mansfield received them appreciatively, commenting that a letter she had received on 7 March 1919 was ‘very nice I think’.11 It is striking that in his attempts to reach and comfort Mansfield, and to sustain her by affirming life against winter and darkness, Lawrence turned to the Christmas story genre. In a letter of 27 December 1918, he described his Christmas meal, providing a Dickensian list reminiscent of the meal in A Christmas Carol (1843): ‘turkey, large tongues, long wall of roast loin of pork, pork pies, sausages, mince pies, dark cakes covered with almonds’.12 In a later letter of 9 February 1919, he echoed the whimsical, almost fairytale quality of The Cricket on the Hearth, describing his small niece: ‘Peggy, with her marvellous red-gold hair in dangling curl-rags, [. . . ] darting about sorting the coloured wools and cottons’.13 Peggy’s ‘red-gold hair’ contrasts with Lawrence’s descriptions of the snow ‘white like silver’, thus resembling the Christmas writing genre in setting warmth and colour against winter tones. Besides providing another example of Lawrence’s sense of the importance of Christmas writing, these letters begin to reveal more about why the genre was so important to him. Lawrence and Mansfield sent each other gifts that Christmas, gifts which show that both had, as Mark Kinkead-Weekes notes, ‘chosen the same lifeaffirming symbolism’.14 Lawrence gave Mansfield a yellow-gold bowl, described in a letter of 20 December 1918 as providing an alternative world, a ‘golden underworld, with rivers and clearings’.15 Mansfield, Lawrence recorded in a letter of 27 December 1918, sent him orange tangerines.16 These gold-orange gifts recall the warmth and light of the sun, which Lawrence frequently mentioned in his letters, describing the ‘slow sunshine’ on 20 December 1918, and how the countryside was lit up with ‘such pure sun [. . . ] sunny as Italy in its snow’ on 9 February 1919.17

90

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:42pm

kms028.tex

D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and Happiness This emphasis on the sun shows Lawrence and Mansfield reaching after happiness at a time when, as Paul Fussell has recorded, the power of the sun to promote happiness and health was being much publicised.18 Moreover, through letters and gifts which evoke sunshine, Lawrence and Mansfield seem to be attempting (as in a Christmas tale) to compensate for the winter by focusing on images of light. What emerges from the use of a Christmas style of writing, and an emphasis on light, is an interest in how happiness fluctuates – how it might be seasonal, and how celebrations of happiness might be fleeting. Lawrence’s letters aim to talk Mansfield through the winter, emphasising the turning of the seasons in a letter of 20 December 1918: ‘tomorrow is the shortest day, and then the tide turns’.19 In a letter of 27 March 1919 he writes, ‘I wish it was spring for us all’, a wish that would have particular appeal for Mansfield – Ali Smith, for example, has recorded how frequently the coming of spring is described in Mansfield’s stories.20 The letter exchange suggests that Lawrence and Mansfield were united at this time by a sense that joy might be transient, inevitably connected to the movement of the sun, and perhaps only to be known and celebrated in time-bound festivals. But Lawrence also shows some concern with this tendency to situate the ‘life-affirming’ in sunshine, and with a focus on combating the winter. In a letter of 9 February 1919, he takes delight in the present season – ‘life itself is life – even the frost-foliage on the window’ – suggesting that even the snow is life-affirming.21 While Lawrence and Mansfield were drawn together by a sense of the seasonality of happiness, dependent on the changing light, it also seems that Lawrence tried to look beyond the Christmas writing genre to celebrate beauty in the very conditions of the winter. Indeed, while both writers were concerned with the seeming transience of happiness, as encapsulated in the Christmas genre, they also explored methods of moving beyond mere seasonal moments of celebration.

Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’ Mansfield’s writing offers a powerful exposition of the difficulties of writing about joy. In particular, her story ‘Bliss’, published earlier in 1918, focuses on the problems of understanding and expressing intense happiness. Bertha, the central character, experiences great satisfaction with her life until she realises, at the end of the story, that her husband is having an affair with her friend, Miss Fulton. This reversal makes Bertha’s earlier joy seem ironic, and, as critics have noted, there may be something slightly hysterical in Bertha’s happiness from the

91

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:42pm

kms028.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies beginning.22 J. F. Kobler has argued that Bertha provides a ‘potpourri of false reasons’ for her bliss, one of the most absurd being her pleasure in how ‘their new cook made the most superb omelettes’ (96).23 It could be argued that the reversal at the end of the story – the revelation that Bertha’s bliss is founded on deception – points to the futility of happiness itself, aligning bliss with a blindness to reality. However, ‘Bliss’ does not seem unequivocally to reject happiness and it has been noted that the portrayal of Bertha is ‘sympathetic, if ironic’.24 Whilst Mansfield was interested in the seasonality of happiness, as we have seen in her exchange of letters with Lawrence, this need not imply that she conceived of happiness as only a brief, mistaken perception. Part of the problem with Bertha’s bliss is simply that it is difficult to express; as she inwardly exclaims: ‘Oh, is there no way you can express it without being “drunk and disorderly’’?’ (92).25 This would seem to make happiness specifically a literary problem – a difficult thing to write about, but perhaps still to be desired. Writers have often suggested that happiness is difficult to write about. Adam Potkay, writing recently about ‘joy’ has argued that ‘happiness has no story to tell’.26 This, he explains, is because happiness is associated with ‘inner integrity, constancy and wisdom over external mutability, loss, and death’.27 The association of happiness with ‘constancy’ implies a lack of passion or drama, thus rendering it, perhaps, an insufficiently fertile subject for literature. Moreover, the idea of ‘constancy [. . . ] over external mutability’ indicates a lack of change, a condition which seems to halt storytelling – itself a conclusion, a state of things standing still. This account of writing about happiness seems relevant for exploring a new approach to Mansfield, since it has been asserted that she draws her literary energy from the thwarting of happiness. Andrew Bennett has claimed that Mansfield’s stories are inspired by unhappiness, claiming that ‘disappointment was for Mansfield what daffodils were for Wordsworth’, that her stories are ‘impelled by irresolution, inconsequentiality, and a lack of disclosure’.28 It could even be argued that happiness is a particular challenge for the short story genre, which might seek to avoid absolute endings, continuing to suggest more than can be said briefly – or as Ali Smith puts it, fusing form and feeling, ‘[a]ll short stories long’, where ‘long’ seems to link wistful yearning with the desire to make short stories transcend their brevity.29 Mansfield’s fiction, then, hints at some problems with the recognition and expression of happiness, and suggests that stories might derive literary interest and energy from joy being fleeting. However, Mansfield’s stories occasionally reach for a more settled

92

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:42pm

kms028.tex

D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and Happiness writing of happiness. In ‘Bliss’, during the scene in which Bertha and Miss Fulton stand staring at the pear tree, Mansfield attempts something complex in her depiction of happiness: And the two women stood side by side looking at the slender, flowering tree. Although it was so still it seemed, like the flame of a candle, to stretch up, to point, to quiver in the bright air, to grow taller and taller as they gazed – almost to touch the rim of the round, silver moon. How long did they stand there? Both, as it were, caught in that circle of unearthly light, understanding each other perfectly, creatures of another world, and wondering what they were to do in this one with all this blissful treasure that burned in their bosoms and dropped, in silver flowers, from their hair and hands? (102)

This passage can also be read as ironic, reflecting Bertha’s lack of knowledge of Miss Fulton’s affair with her husband – the words ‘as it were’, in particular, hint that the description is only provisional, that they might not be ‘understanding each other perfectly’. However, it seems that Mansfield lavishes too much attention upon this moment for it not to convey some gravity, carefully tracing the silver light falling ‘in silver flowers, from their hair and hands’. She tries to convey at once a sense of pausing – they are both ‘caught in that circle of unearthly light’ – and also of movement, stating that ‘[a]lthough it was so still it seemed, like the flame of a candle, to stretch up, to point, to quiver in the bright air’. The word ‘still’ recurs throughout ‘Bliss’: indeed, it is the final word of the story, in the ambiguous, poignant reflection that ‘the pear tree was as lovely as ever and as full of flower and as still’ (105). The subtle bivalency of ‘still’ hints at what Mansfield might be attempting in this moonlit scene with Bertha and Miss Fulton. ‘Still’ conveys both motionlessness, and a sense of continuation, of something ongoing.30 It both forecloses happiness and lends it a form of constancy – it seems not simply to say that happiness is fugitive and evanescent, but to stretch out these fleeting moments. In this way, Mansfield’s work strives to move beyond the Christmas story model of time-limited, seasonal happiness.

Women in Love, Snow and Stillness Lawrence started writing Women in Love before he could have read ‘Bliss’, but his thoughts on happiness nevertheless seem to owe something to Mansfield. It is well known that Lawrence’s portrayal of Gudrun was partly based on Mansfield (she herself recognised this – writing to Ottoline Morrell on 24 July 1921 she asked ‘You know

93

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:42pm

kms028.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies I am Gudrun?’); but it also seems that in this novel, he considers happiness specifically in relation to Mansfield.31 In some respects, Gudrun adds glamour and life to the novel. In the chapter ‘Snow’, she is described wearing bright colours, tobogganing over the snow: ‘Gudrun was all scarlet and royal blue – a scarlet jersey and cap, and a royal blue skirt and stockings. She went gaily over the white snow, with Gerald beside her, in white and grey, pulling the little toboggan’.32 Gudrun’s stockings and clothes – one of the features which Lawrence is thought to have borrowed from Mansfield – contrast with the snow, like the bright colours of the Christmas letters.33 Gudrun’s delight in the toboggan makes the scene joyful. Women in Love has been seen as a novel born out of ‘profound despair’, but these touches continually belie this impression, lending the novel spirit.34 The importance of Gudrun, in her red and blue, is also conveyed by way of a contrast with the inhospitable landscape of the mountains: They came forth at last in a little high table-land of snow, where stood the last peaks of snow like the heart petals of an open rose. In the midst of the last deserted valleys of heaven stood a lonely building with brown wooden walls and white-heavy roof, deep and deserted in the waste of snow, like a dream. It stood like a rock that had rolled down from the last steep slopes, a rock that had taken the form of a house, and was now half buried. It was unbelievable that one could live there uncrushed by all this terrible waste of whiteness and silence and clear, upper, ringing cold. Yet the sledges ran up in fine style, people came to the door laughing and excited, the floor of the hostel rang hollow, the passage was wet with snow, it was a real, warm interior. (400)

Lawrence counters inhuman abstraction, ‘all this terrible waste of whiteness’, with people, warmth, and excited admiration: ‘the sledges ran up in fine style’. The depiction of Gudrun in the snow extends this contrast, adding spirited, human touches to abstract snowy whiteness. However, Gudrun (and therefore Mansfield) is also implicated in a questioning of the sufficiency of such moments of gaiety. The novel seems to suggest that moments such as Gudrun’s brightly cheerful tobogganing may not amount to true happiness, and instead indicate a form of desperation. As Jack Stewart has noted, the novel is engaged in ambivalent dialogue with Futurism: on the one hand Lawrence seems delighted by speed and energy while, on the other, he sees how the Futurist celebration of power can blur boundaries between human energy and mechanism.35 These concerns are particularly evident in his description of the artist Loerke, and his plan for a frieze depicting a ‘frenzy of chaotic motion’ (423).36 This frieze, however, not only

94

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:42pm

kms028.tex

D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and Happiness focuses concerns about energy but about happiness. The frieze, like the painting Lawrence based it upon (Mark Gertler’s The Merry-GoRound), depicts scenes from fairs, images connected with gaiety, with times of celebration, and in a way is akin to the type of Christmas story excitement on which I began.37 Yet both are also visions of people driven mad – Lawrence shows a deep anxiety about forms of frenetic joy. When Gudrun is drawn to Lorke’s frieze, Lawrence associates her joyfulness with this kind of restless, hysterical pleasure-seeking, with a desire for an ‘orgy of enjoyment’ (423). Lawrence, then, considers Mansfield in thinking about both moments of happiness and also of hysteria. These concerns correspond with the way in which Mansfield’s writing records brittle, passing happiness – indeed, Virginia Woolf compared Mansfield’s writing to the drama of a fairground.38 Lawrence, it seems, associated Mansfield with a type of frenetic joyfulness. He is thus, perhaps, partly offering a contrast to Mansfield when, in describing Ursula and Birkin, he tries to create moments of stillness – and yet his writing here chimes with that of Mansfield. As Birkin kisses Ursula in ‘Excurse’, he is described as kissing her with a ‘soft, still happiness’, which is repeatedly emphasised through their lovemaking (311). Ursula is described as she ‘went very still’, an oxymoronic construction implying at once action and stasis, following Mansfield in using the word to suggest motion and a lack of motion (310). Birkin is described as ‘not heeding her motion, only her stillness’, and it is said that the moment is ‘so still and frail’ (311). After their lovemaking, Lawrence strains the word further: After a lapse of stillness, after the rivers of strange dark fluid richness had passed over her, flooding, carrying away her mind and flooding down her spine and down her knees, past her feet, a strange flood, sweeping away everything and leaving her an essential new being, she was left quite free, she was free in complete ease, her complete self. So she rose, stilly and blithe, smiling at him. (314)

‘Stilly’ as an adverb pointedly fuses motion, stasis and happiness. With the words ‘stilly and blithe’, Lawrence, like Mansfield, at once admits the evanescence of happiness, and tries to stretch out the moment. By contemplating questions of happiness in relation to Mansfield, he seems to reach similar conclusions. In Women in Love, then, Lawrence, like Mansfield in ‘Bliss’, at once embraced gaiety and feared that continually chasing brief moments of happiness might lead to an endless, mechanistic frenzy. He, like her, strained language to extend moments, to still narrative and to depict happiness.

95

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:42pm

kms028.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies But Lawrence’s thinking about Mansfield also involves some misreading. To associate Mansfield purely with a type of edgy, brittle pleasure is, as I have suggested, a simplification – Mansfield tries as Lawrence does to achieve a form of stillness. At one point, however, Lawrence does place Gudrun in an analogous moment of ‘still happiness’. When Gudrun and Ursula eat tea by the lake during the party at Shortlands, Lawrence again draws attention to happiness: They sat on the northern side of the grove, in the yellow sunshine facing the slope of the grassy hill, alone in a little wild world of their own. The tea was hot and aromatic, there were delicious little sandwiches of cucumber and of caviare, and winy cakes. ‘Are you happy, Prune?’ cried Ursula in delight, looking at her sister. ‘Ursula, I’m perfectly happy,’ replied Gudrun gravely, looking at the westering sun. (165)

Lawrence thus locates Gudrun in a scene of fairytale happiness (‘in the yellow sunshine [. . . ] in a little wild world of their own’), of the type that has been seen as crucial to Lawrence and Mansfield’s literary relationship. Here he does not dwell on the word ‘still’ but he does still the narrative by creating a ‘world of their own’, rather as Mansfield made Bertha and Miss Fulton ‘creatures of another world’.

Katherine Mansfield’s Response to Lawrence Writing to Ottoline Morrell on 24 July 1921, Mansfield gave her verdict on Women in Love: ‘Lawrence’s Women in Love. Really! Really!! Really!!!’.39 This looks like a protest – the building exclamation marks seem scathing. Yet the terms of Mansfield’s response speak against such an interpretation. ‘Really!’ is Gudrun’s favourite exclamation in Women in Love, used frequently to tinge remarks with a tone at once sardonic and strangely oblique. The novel dwells on her use of the word. In particular, Gudrun responds to a remark of Gerald’s thus: “‘Really!’’ she said, with grave laughter in her voice’, and here Gudrun’s reply seems oddly significant – Birkin feels that she had ‘killed Gerald, with that touch’ (396). Thus in her very act of protest Mansfield uses Gudrun’s words, implicitly acknowledging her likeness to Lawrence’s portrait and her closeness to Lawrence. Lawrence’s understanding of Mansfield was entangled with his thinking about how to manage joy in literature. Exploring Mansfield’s response to Lawrence after Women in Love indicates that his emphasis on ‘still happiness’, similar to the moment she strove for in ‘Bliss’, was something that she, in turn, cherished in Lawrence. Writing later

96

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:42pm

kms028.tex

D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and Happiness about Aaron’s Rod (1922) she reflected on what it was she loved about the novel. She described how she had enjoyed reading Lawrence after other modern writers (‘what a relief it is to turn away from these little pre-digested books written by authors who have nothing to say’) and expanded on what it was like to read Lawrence: It is like walking by the sea at high tide eating a crust of bread and looking over the water. I am so sick of all this modern seeking which ends in seeking. Seek by all means, but the text goes on ‘that ye shall find’. And although of course there can be no ultimate finding, there is a kind of finding by the way which is enough, is sufficient.40

Mansfield’s letter seems to touch exactly on the quality which her work shares with Lawrence, and which Lawrence worked out in relation to thinking about her: the quality of pausing, of ‘finding by the way’. Indeed, Mansfield’s image, of ‘looking over the water’, echoes Gudrun’s moment of happy observation, ‘looking at the westering sun’, and it shares a common quality of contentment with the other literary scenes discussed in this essay. Mansfield’s attention to the moonlight falling on Bertha’s hair in ‘Bliss’ and Lawrence’s sense of the still delight between Ursula and Birkin in Women in Love provide further examples of finding happiness ‘by the way’. Lawrence’s realisation that Mansfield’s work might be likened to the frenetically lively kettle in Dickens’s story recognised the importance of happiness to her work. In her letter Mansfield in turn seems to recognise, in Lawrence, the type of writing that both writers employed in order to portray a more secure version of happiness. A concern for happiness was a crucial part of Mansfield and Lawrence’s friendship (as demonstrated in their 1918–19 letters) and it was also a crucial part of their literary relationship. Both Mansfield and Lawrence were troubled, and driven by, the provisionality and transience of happiness – and their writing echoes in moments when they still their narratives to try to repair this transience. Notes 1. E. W. Tedlock, ed., Frieda Lawrence: The Memoirs and Correspondence (London: Heinemann, 1961), p. 347, letter from Frieda Lawrence to John Middleton Murry (undated). Claire Tomalin notes this remark, but does not trace the allusion, in Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life (London: Penguin, 1988), p. 244, n. 3. 2. Charles Dickens, The Cricket on the Hearth: A Fairy Tale of Home in A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Books, ed. and intro. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 165. 3. Dickens, p. 166.

97

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:42pm

kms028.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies 4. Katherine Mansfield, ‘At the Bay’ in Katherine Mansfield: The Collected Stories, intro. Ali Smith (London: Penguin, 2007), pp. 207, 205. All subsequent quotations from Mansfield’s stories are taken from this edition and the page numbers are incorporated in the text. 5. Dunbar notes, to give just one example, that ‘Sun and Moon’ has echoes of ‘Hansel and Gretel’: Pamela Dunbar, Radical Mansfield: Double Discourse in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 150–1. 6. Dickens, p. 167. 7. Lydia Blanchard, ‘The Savage Pilgrimage of D. H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield: A Study in Literary Influence, Anxiety, and Subversion’, Modern Language Quarterly, 47 : 1 (1986), pp. 48–65; Carol Siegel, ‘Virginia Woolf’s and Katherine Mansfield’s Responses to D. H. Lawrence’s Fiction’, D. H. Lawrence Review, 21 : 3 (Autumn, 1989), pp. 291–311, p. 299. 8. F. R. Leavis, D. H. Lawrence, Novelist (London: Chatto and Windus, 1955), p. 295. 9. James T. Boulton et al, eds, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, 7 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979–1993). Vol. 3, p. 335, letter to S. S. Koteliansky [11 March 1919]. 10. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, D. H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile 1912–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 496. 11. Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott, eds, The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield. Vol.1 (1984), Vol 2 (1987), Vol 3 (1993), Vol 4 (1996), Vol 5 (2008) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984–2008). Vol. 2, p. 304, letter to J. M. Murry [7 March 1919]. Hereafter referred to as Letters 1, Letters 2, etc., followed by the page number. 12. Boulton, Vol. 3, p. 313. See Dickens’s description of the meal in A Christmas Carol: Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol in Prose: Being a Ghost Story of Christmas in A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Books, ed. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, p. 43. See Douglas-Fairhurst’s comments on the ‘extended shopping-list’ feel of the scene: ‘Introduction’, A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Books, p. x. 13. Boulton, Vol. 3, p. 328. 14. Kinkead-Weekes, p. 491. 15. Boulton, Vol. 3, p. 309. 16. Boulton, Vol. 3, p. 312. 17. Boulton, Vol. 3, pp. 308, 328. 18. Paul Fussell, ‘The New Heliophily’, in Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 137–41. 19. Boulton, Vol. 3, p. 309. 20. Boulton, Vol. 3, p. 343. Ali Smith, ‘Introduction’, Collected Short Stories, p. xxiii. 21. Boulton, Vol. 3, p. 328. 22. See, for instance, Martin Magalaner, The Fiction of Katherine Mansfield (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971). Magalaner argues that the story can be seen as ‘a psychological case study of an hysterical woman’, p. 74. 23. J. F. Kobler, Katherine Mansfield: A Study of the Short Fiction (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990), p. 97. He notes that the ‘superb omelettes’ reference ‘caps the whole thing off’. 24. C. A. Hankin, Katherine Mansfield and Her Confessional Stories (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 147. 25. See also Gardner McFall, who argues that the irony of the tale ‘resides [. . . ] in Bertha’s inability to express herself’: Gardner McFall, ‘Poetry and Performance in

98

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:42pm

kms028.tex

D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and Happiness

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

Katherine Mansfield’s “Bliss’’, Critical Essays on Katherine Mansfield, ed. Rhoda B. Nathan (New York: G. K. Hall and Co, 1993), pp. 140–50, p. 146. Adam Potkay, The Story of Joy: From the Bible to Late Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 20. Potkay, p. 3. Andrew Bennett, Katherine Mansfield (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2004), p. 80. Ali Smith, ‘The Third Person’, The First Person and Other Stories (2008; London: Penguin, 2009), p. 57. For more thoughts on the bivalency of ‘still’ see Sophie Ratcliffe, On Sympathy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008), p. 73. Letters 4, p. 252. D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, eds David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 420. All quotations from Women in Love are from this edition, and page references are incorporated in the text. Kinkead-Weekes notes that Gudrun’s ‘stylish dress’ was based on Mansfield, p. 337. H. M. Daleski, The Forked Flame: A Study of D. H. Lawrence (London: Faber and Faber, 1965), p. 127. Jack Stewart, The Vital Art of D. H. Lawrence: Vision and Expression (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), pp. 117–30. See Stewart’s discussion of the ‘frenzy of chaotic motion’, pp. 124–5. For further discussion of Loerke’s fairground frieze and its relation to Futurism see Stewart, p. 126. Anne Olivier Bell, ed., The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 5 vols (London: The Hogarth Press, 1977–1984), Vol. 1, p. 268. Virginia Woolf, 24 April 1919. Letters 4, p. 252. Letters 5, p. 225.

99

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

CREATIVE WRITING

BUGGER THE SKYLARKS Lawrence and Mansfield at War A Battle in Ten Scenes Robert Fraser

To a Skylark Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! Bird thou never wert, That from the heaven, or near it Pourest thy full heart In profuse strains of unpremeditated art. Higher still and higher From the earth thou springest Like a cloud of fire; The blue deep thou wingest, And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest. . . . Percy Bysshe Shelley

O come, o come, Adonai, Who in thy glorious majesty From that high mountain clothed in awe Gavest thy folk the elder law. . . 18th century French hymn

Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 2 (2010): 100–162 DOI: 10.3366/E2041450110000296 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

100

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Bugger the Skylarks. Lawrence and Mansfield at War

BACKCLOTH February, 1916. Europe was locked in the throes of the Great War. To D. H. Lawrence, trapped in England with a German wife, it seemed as if everything that had sustained the old Europe was dead. Christianity, Industrialism, romantic love; all had burnt themselves out in the crucible of the Western Front. From the carnage, however, would, Lawrence hoped, emerge a New Covenant, a fresh kind of human relationship, like the fabled Phoenix arising from the ashes of its own dead self. Such a Covenant, comparable to those forged by the patriarchs Noah and Moses with a vengeful God, would replace the former dispensation which had upheld Western Civilisation since the Renaissance and which now appeared to have destroyed it. A Covenant, however, required a physical context. Throughout his life Lawrence made repeated attempts to found a model community, named, incorrectly as it happens, after the opening phrase of the Hebrew text of the thirty-third psalm. For this ‘Rananim’ to succeed he had to find both a beautiful setting and a group of sympathetic pioneers. In 1916 his hopes were fastened on Zennor, a remote Cornish hamlet four miles from St Ives, sufficiently far from the centres of government for him to attempt to establish a way of life based on a refreshing emotional honesty. To Cornwall he brought his wife Frieda, whose nationality soon attracted suspicion, and two fellow writers: the critic John Middleton Murry, with whom Lawrence had briefly co-edited the review Signature, and the New Zealander Katherine Mansfield who lived with Murry, and who had recently embarked on her brief but brilliant career as a short story writer. The community lasted for only two months. From it, nonetheless, Lawrence carried away a lasting impression of the difficulty of human relationships, and also the text of Women in Love, most of which he wrote in Zennor and which contains a shadowy portrait of that unlikely human quartet. The story of those Zennor months suggested by surviving letters and journal entries is, however, somewhat different. . . . . .

DRAMATIS PERSONAE David Herbert Lawrence Frieda Lawrence (née von Richthofen) John Middleton Murry Katherine Mansfield (née Kathleen Beauchamp) The Setting: Higher Tregerthen, Zennor, Cornwall, February – September, 1916.

101

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies

PART ONE 1: 2: 3: 4: 5:

Early February Mid-April Mid-morning, two weeks later Several nights later, in the small hours The following morning

PART TWO 6: 7: 8: 9: 10:

A Saturday afternoon late May Six o’clock the same evening Two hours later The following morning Autumn of the same year

THE SET Placed at right angles to one another, the ends of two adjacent cottages are separated by a space of some twelve yards. In the background a suggestion of gorse-covered mountain strewn with crumbling granite rocks. The area occupied by the audience will be presumed to represent the sea. The cottages themselves need be but barely represented. For practical purposes each façade will be a hollow frame allowing the action within to be viewed. Only the bottom storeys need, in fact, be used. The house stage left is a plain one-up-one-down with a staircase jutting into the living room, a downstairs door leading to a concealed lean-to scullery at the back, one sash window on each floor, and a front door facing downstairs. The right hand house, placed slightly upstage of its neighbour but with its porch facing left towards it, is dominated by a large, square castellated tower which occupies the entire exposed section of the building. It too has sash windows on each floor and a door leading off to a scullery: it would also help if there were some indication of a kitchen range to the far right. Between the two houses is a latrine hut constructed of rough planks painted green, and, above that, a simple domestic washing line.

1. Early February Overcast, slatey sky

(Round the corner of the L.H. house emerge the travel-worn figures of Lawrence and Frieda. Lawrence carries a key)

102

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Bugger the Skylarks. Lawrence and Mansfield at War Frieda: Ach! Seagulls! Right in my eye. Lawrence: It was quite a haul across the fields. We should have taken the cliff path. Frieda: The cliffs, no. A cliff top’s no place for a Winterreise. So here we are. Higher Tregerthen did they call it? Why, we’re right under the hill. Lawrence: The farm’s lower down still. These were outhouses for seasonal hands. I suppose this cottage must be ours. Frieda: Lorenzo, oh please. The other’s got that lovely tower. I could love a tower. Lawrence: Then you can live in your tower and look down on me for sixteen pounds. I’m for ground level and five pounds rent a year. And the key fits. Frieda: Oh, but my tower I must have it. Lawrence: Then don’t expect me to serenade you. (Lawrence enters the L.H. house and surveys the interior, with mild disapproval at its mess. During Frieda’s next remarks he searches the recesses of the living room for cleaning materials, eventually discovering an ordinary household mop and bucket which he then presents to her.) Frieda: You could not in any case. You do not play the violin. Lawrence, you love your peasant songs, but it is sad to have so little skill in making music. Schade! Schade! We shall live close enough together to make a lovely soiree in summer. It would be like my home again. A little Mozart, a bit of Bach, a few friends. What a pity Katherine sold her cello! I’m sure she plays well, even with those stumpy fingers. When we women play, and you and Jack would wander through the gorse and discuss how the world is. There were times when my mother had twenty-five in our garden in Metz. . . wine. . . a cold supper. . . and once the whole Schubert Octet by the flower bed. Lawrence, are you listening? What is this? Lawrence: (Coming out of L.H. house) A mop. Frieda: Why ever did I marry the most prosaic novelist in Europe? He lures me to his very own Utopia, and, when I arrive, he sets me to skivvying!

103

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies Lawrence: If you want to rebuild the world, start with the floor. This one’s three inches deep in dirt. There’s water in the well at the back. It’s drawn off the mine addits on the hill. Frieda: But we have not yet unpacked. The cases are still lying in the lane. Lawrence: Fetch them then. Frieda: Bitte? Was sagst Du da? Lawrence: Tu was ich Dir gesagt habe. (Submitting, Frieda hands Lawrence the mop and exits. Meanwhile Lawrence carries the bucket round the back of the house and fills it, and, returning, starts swabbing the door step.) Lawrence: Oh, it’s all so old, so gloriously, savagely old. (Re-enter Frieda, humping two bags, a brief case and a framed tapestry.) Ah Frieda, the splendour of it. Somewhere older than any of us: the first Christians, the first Celts, the first banal, civilised gesture! Not a tree in sight. A wilderness of pure stone! Do you see those twin granite pillars on the crest of the next hill? They’re bending westwards as if in some fervent Stone Age rite. They’ve been staring down on our futility for five thousand years, dwarfing all our busy certainties, our petty squalid business. Centuries even before the first farm settlement, the first inching tin mine. Frieda: These cases are like a lot of gloomy thoughts. I am sure that half of it is unnecessary. What’s in this bag? Lawrence: Paper mostly. There’s a shortage. Frieda: And we have come all the way to Cornwall to stare at stones and hump around reams of paper? This is the way to let a little light into our four lives? We could have stayed in London and dodged the Zeppelins. It would have been more amusing. Lawrence: I had to leave London, had to. I’m so weary of the social world, so sick of it. After a while it all seemed to smell of me. It was the smell of men at their ingenious worst, the smell of the school room, of ammonia fumes drifting along corridors, the science lab, the press, Lady Ottoline’s salon. I want to breathe now. (Taking a deep chest-filling breath) Oh Frieda, just think. The sheer wonder of it; nobody to call on, nobody to know! Frieda: Then how happy you will be. No Mr Yeats, no Bertie Russell, no Mrs Woolf, and no Ottoline to play hostess. Lorenzo will have a

104

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Bugger the Skylarks. Lawrence and Mansfield at War feast of loneliness in his Rananim. He will pluck his flowers, write his books and stare accusingly into the sea. He will gather him humble friends from the four corners of the earth. Jack and Katherine will come from le Midi – if they arrive – Solomonovich Koteliansky from Russia, his peasant lads from the Dolomites and from the Black Forest my father with a great rifle to shoot off his head. He will spurn the whole world of literature, and to the Ottoline next Christmas he will send his apologies and a neat little bomb. Oh my dear darling rebel, my poor perplexed prophet. (They embrace) But it will at least be jolly won’t it? Lawrence: Oh darling, it can only be better. There’s no going backwards. I simply can’t play their stupid parlour games a day longer. Do you see that bare fuschia bush in the border? Stark now, but soon it will be covered with flame-red flowers. Our Phoenix will make his nest there. He’s sleeping now, but wait ‘til this ghastly war is over and he will rise up lordly as an eagle. Kiss me. Do you know, when I last left Garsington Lady Ottoline shook my hand as I was leaving and said ‘Keep in touch.’ And as she held out her palm I reached to grasp the thin, outstretched fingers, and, there and then, I was suddenly chilled to the bone. The sheer cold coming off that woman, the sheer smiling stench of death! Like all the slim, white stem-perfect English aristocrats she seemed, roots in the peat and the dung. Frieda: Then we had better send her back her tapestry. I did not know you so hated your well-born friends. Lawrence: Oh, they make the coal seams clean! Frieda: (Carrying the cases inside) The couple at the store were very kind. They say the postman will call every morning. We can order our News Chronicle from the Post Office, and any mail for Jack and Wig will be sent us, if they come to be written to. Lawrence: Oh, they’ll come! Frieda: Lawrence, for a visionary your sight is sometimes cloudy. Jack will come yes, but, as for Katherine, she has only just lost a brother. She will want to stay in France and write her stories. Lawrence: Don’t worry. If Jack sets out alone, she’ll wait six weeks, have a fling with a sailor from Marseilles, smoke the village shop right out of Gitanes and then step on the next express. I don’t give a fig for her independence. There’s no time to unpack now.

105

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies Frieda: (Coming out) Poor darling. With that red beard you look more than ever like Moses staring from his old mountain. Still searching the horizon for your milk and honey, ja? Lawrence: There’s no Promised Land from where I’m standing, just gorse and cringing water. Will it ever be spring? This whole war’s been one continuous February. One can scarcely believe that there was ever such a thing as sitting in the sun. All along the hedgerows just now I was on the lookout for buds and, when I found one, just the pertest little tendril, I just had to stare at it to console myself that nature hadn’t quite broken down. Frieda: ‘Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?. . . ’ Lawrence: It’s very English this longing, but very human too. I like to think of it as the birth pangs of a New Creation infinitely extended. Will we ever be free, we say? Sometimes Frieda, I can even understand religion. Not the pokey, parish God-in-the-hole variety, but the sharp, age-old craving that I can understand: the endless, heart-felt cry ‘Adonai! Adonai!’, old as these boulders. Is that a mist gathering? We must get on. Frieda: Give me the mop now. You must dust the windows. We can scarcely see through them. (Whereupon Lawrence fetches dusters and sets to cleaning the outside of the bottom window, while Frieda tackles the floor inside) If Kass writes that they are coming, we ought to clean their house too. If they are to be contented here, we must make their new home gemütlich. Lawrence: I hope they’ll think we’ve struck a good bargain for them. They’ve certainly got the bigger cottage. Just as well perhaps. Murry can fill it up with critical wind. Frieda: ‘Oh wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being. . . ’ Lawrence: Jack’s a good sort, but he’s fast becoming the most flatulent critic in England. His pen is beginning to spout pure gas. And it’s not coal gas, mind, that I’d recognise. More like some infernal compound of sulphur. We’d better be careful. If Katherine lights up a fag over there, I don’t give much for any of our chances. Frieda: Lawrence, you like Jack; you know that you do. Lawrence: Oh, Jack I may love: It’s his theories I suspect. I sometimes think that John Middleton Murry is a perfectly lovely person trapped

106

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Bugger the Skylarks. Lawrence and Mansfield at War in a cage of ideas. When the gate’s shut, he has to perform like some zoological specimen, a rather wiry species, sort of half machine and half spider. Or worse still he just sulks in the corner and spins airy propositions like these damned cobwebs. Real whoppers! This place can’t have been occupied for years. (Looking right over his shoulder) Jack will love it here. He loves deserted buildings, great draughty shells of cathedrals where he can squat spinning his morbid fantasias. He’s already occupied the great ruined choir of the Western mind and, look, there are bright spindly threads all over the clerestory, layer upon layer, ’til you grow quite giddy looking at them, but he’s a very vain, rather bad-tempered spider, so, when you’ve tired of his tricks he’ll tear his little excretion to pieces and start all over again. Another shiny speculation, another showy web. Oh this dust: it’s choking me. (A coughing fit) Frieda: Then you must sit down and rest. You should not exert yourself so. You think that you are strong, but you are not, and look at your clothes now! You should have worn an apron. I will have to wash your trousers. Lawrence: Frieda, I possess only one pair of trousers. Frieda: Then tomorrow you will have to write indoors, or else shock the good Methodists of Zennor. (Noticing for the first time latrine but upstage centre) And what is this? Another primitive burial shrine, I suppose? Lawrence: The outside privy. We share it with next door. Frieda: The English are remarkable. They build a row of handsome cottages, and place them next to the only lavatory for miles and miles. Lawrence: I think that you’ll find that they put the privy next to the cottages. It is why such facilities are commonly referred to as a Convenience. Frieda: And look, there is a drying line already. Then I can wash your trousers straightaway. Give them to me. (Obediently Lawrence withdraws inside L.H house to remove his trousers, coyly retreating into the wooden lean-to at the back of the house, out of sight of the audience) Frieda: Lawrence sometimes you will behave like a Pharisee for all your fire. You want us to bare our souls, you want to set our bodies free, and yet you are ashamed to show your good legs to your own wife in daylight. Ah me. I like them, all white and slender with the tiny fair hairs standing up so fine on them. We have come so far from

107

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies Nottingham days you and I. I have left husband and children and plighted my whole trust in you. It is not easy, Lorenzo. Those anxious watches with the church steeple sounding the hours, one, two. And now we have come together to Cornwall, almost to the world’s end. Look at the waves: they are so steamy they almost envelope the rocks. Do not fail me, Lawrence. Lawrence do not fail me. Fade

2. Mid-April (Late afternoon with a stiff breeze blowing. On the washing line hangs a pair of Lawrence’s pyjamas. Round the corner of the R.H. house appear Katherine with a scarf round her head, and Murry rolling with his bandy walk.) Murry: (Indicating pegged-out trouser bottoms) Ah look, essential man. The ‘bare, forked creature’ itself. Katherine: They must be Lawrence’s. Where’s he got to? Murry: He’s backing up the cart. There’s a lay-by at the side of the lane. Katherine: Which cottage is ours? His letter said granite house facing the sea. Murry: They’re both constructed of granite. They both face the sea. Katherine: No, they don’t. This one with the tower’s side on. What a lark! I can scarcely see a chink of light inside. ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’. I’ll say it’s dark. Murry: Lawrence did say he’d painted the living room. Katherine: It looks like oxblood or something. Honestly, as if this place wasn’t intense enough as it is. Murry: Blood for sacrifice, I take it. He’s certainly grown very fond of the blood motif in his recent work. Oh, you do look so lost. Don’t be. I’ll go round and help him unload. (Exit) (Left to herself, Katherine looks round her disconsolately.) Katherine: ‘Oh to be in England now that April’s here’. Poor homesick Browning. I know where I’d rather be. They’ve even slated over the sun. (Enter Frieda from the L.H. house)

108

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Bugger the Skylarks. Lawrence and Mansfield at War Frieda: (Holding out her arms in a stocky embrace) Welcome. Katherine: (Insincerely effusive) Frieda, my dear. (Pecks her on the cheek) So you got our letter? Frieda: Yes, I knew you’d come, Lawrence had his doubts, but I had none. Katherine: So this is his Rananim. I can’t see a Phoenix. Frieda: He’s asleep by the fuchsia bush. But he’ll wake up, you wait. You looked ever so sweet perched on top of that old car. Was the train late? Katherine: A few minutes. We got off right by the sea, and there was Lorenzo at the end of the platform clutching his hat and looking ever so apprehensive with this awful fixed grin on his face. He’d parked the horse and cart right beneath the station, so he drove us straight here yelling at the top of his voice all the way and trying to get us to sing these rounds. But Jack’s got a larynx like a congested crow, and in the end we just dried up and watched the granite immerse us. A mile out of St. Ives the sky seemed to collapse in thick drifts of indigo and purple, and suddenly everything seemed to be made out of boulders. I shall never like it, never. The house looks quite empty. Frieda: Lawrence has painted the walls. Katherine: Yes, we noticed. I’m afraid we haven’t brought much furniture. Frieda: Never mind. You can pick up some cheap pieces in the showrooms at St Ives. Meanwhile you’ll have to stay at the Tinner’s Arms in the village. It’s very small, but. . . . There’s no need to look so sad. (Enter Murry with two cases and some framed pictures under his arm. He puts them down, and, in trying to steady one of the prints, manages to cut his thumb) Murry: Damn. Oh damn and blast. Katherine: This happens all the time. Murry: I appear to have cut my thumb on the cord. We seem to take these Turners everywhere. Hello, Frieda. Katherine: Yesterday he dropped a set of his Dostoevsky proofs under the train at Paddington. I called a porter who climbed onto the line to retrieve them, but several pages were frightfully fouled. Useless. Then he started gesticulating and shouting that he simply had to have

109

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies a clean set to send back to Capes by Thursday. Empty gestures, he loves them. Murry: (Coming over to Frieda) Hello, Frieda. Frieda, my little Frieda. Frieda: Not so little any more. Murry: My spreading Frieda then. Generous, like the apple tree. Oh, it’s good to be here. I heard the call. I heard the call and yes, I came. I couldn’t let you down really. And Katherine loved France. She very nearly didn’t accompany me. It was a terrible journey. Blacked out trains and an awful crossing. At Dieppe Wig just closed her ears and read Browning all the way across. We held off Newhaven for hours. Lawrence doesn’t know what he puts his friends through. But it was worth it, yes. (Sucking his thumb) Got a bandage at all? (Enter Lawrence with a small trunk) Lawrence: What in heaven’s name’s in here? Murry: Notes on Dostoevsky. Several drafts too, of course. I’ve finished the book by the way. I’ve even half corrected the proofs. Kept me busy on the train across France. Lawrence: One prefers not to think about France. Did you notice the lines? Murry: Oh, about six thousand, I should think. It’s difficult to tell. Lawrence: I did mean the trenches. Murry: Ah no. There was no fighting near us. Bit of dull thudding in the distance. They’ll be bogged down for years yet I dare say. The world’s finished, Lawrence. Lawrence: You may well be right, but, in the meantime, might there just be time for a cup of tea? (Lawrence, Frieda and Murry now enter the L.H. house, where Lawrence prepares tea. But Katherine stays outside and once more looks around her) Katherine: Rananim. Well, well. (Then as the conversation inside continues, she makes several vain attempts to light a cigarette against the prevailing south westerly before joining the others) Lawrence: They’re dreadfully suspicious of us in the village of course. The other evening Frieda and I called in for a drink at the Tinners, and when we stooped through the entrance the conversation just froze. If we walk up the Pendeen road we can sense the curtains twitching all the way up the hill. It’s not as if we’d done anything.

110

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Bugger the Skylarks. Lawrence and Mansfield at War Frieda: You have done something. You have married a German wife. Lawrence: Jack, I ask you, is this a crime? Frieda: In a state of war to breathe freely is a crime. To marry one of the enemy is a sin against humanity. Lawrence: I can’t understand it, Jack, can you understand it? Frieda: But we do have the sweetest, how do you say, bobby. He always beams at me on his bicycle, German or no German. Murry: Human kindness is not quite dead then. Lawrence: Not quite. The outer husk is there. The core’s rotten. It’s been decaying for years and years and, plop, it’s just fallen into the mud of Flanders. Katherine: (entering the house). . . where it will sprout up into a gorgeous plum tree, I suppose, and we’ll all be eating plum cake by Christmas. Lawrence: No, it will take much, much longer. The soul must lie in the mud and stink first. We want none of the old fruit; we want an entirely fresh stock. Cake? Frieda: We’ve been scrounging rations. Eggs from the farm, flour from the village, and a few precious lumps of sugar from the doctor at St Ives. It has risen well, yes? Murry: Mmm. Lawrence: (Continuing his train of thought) Every morning I walk along the cliff tops, I stand amid the bluebells, I look out towards that wall of rock and I think, what are we hatching in this lively prison of England? We have been toiling for centuries, reading books, painting pictures, loving, dying, giving birth, and what in the end are we but vermin writhing in England’s decaying body, clawing, biting, but never a shimmer of daylight, never a breath of dawn. Just a mess of worms oozing from England’s hollow stump. What will become of us I do not know. And our ears are closed. We’ve shut them to every wholesome breath. We’ve even closed them to one another. We’re like obscene deaf little creatures riddling our own smug sickly burrow. Katherine: You exaggerate. Frieda: No. He speaks truly. Do you not believe it? Murry: I believe it. Now I do.

111

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies Katherine: But you feed on the sickness, Lawrence. Without it you’d have nothing to write about. Lawrence: Oh but I want us all to be whole in the end. You do not know how ardently I wish it, Katherine. Katherine: I’m tired. I’ve had a hard day. I’m exhausted with all these explanations. The world’s. . . as it is. It’s the place I live in. Frieda: (Laying her hand on Katherine’s) He wants you to understand. Katherine: Oh, it’s all too . . . final, too absolute. It’s all a kind of religion without God. It’s the great male panacea again. The evenings are darker here. The spring’s nowhere so advanced. I did so love our little piece of France. Look at you now, drooling over the dead corpse of your England, pawing at it with your regret. Look at Lawrence hoarding his sinister wisdom, and poor Jack quite dripping with discipleship. Lawrence: A bandage quickly. Whatever do we think of? Frieda: (As Lawrence attends to Murry) Do not fret. There’s plenty of time. There’s all the time in the world for us four now; the war has buried us all together. Katherine: (Standing wearily) I don’t want to share anybody’s tomb. I just want a place to lay my head until tomorrow. The night’s closing fast, and we’ve no idea how to get to the inn. Jack, are you coming? (Katherine walks outside, but Murry stays where he is, while Lawrence finishes the bandaging) Murry: Thanks, old friend. Sometimes I think that I hardly know that malevolent little angel outside at all. Ever since Chummie was killed at the front she’s held a kind of wand of shadow that spreads sadness over everything and leaves me quite untouched. Virgin almost. I find Lawrence much easier to understand. Frieda: There, there. You must not give yourself over to worrying. We are always here. Come, I must point you out the upper road to the tavern. Lorenzo will sleep soon. (They join Katherine outside) Katherine: I’m sorry, Lawrence was upset. Frieda: He’s been brooding for weeks. You mustn’t let him down. He has lived for your coming, I think. They suppressed The Rainbow. Murry: No. . . But how?

112

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Bugger the Skylarks. Lawrence and Mansfield at War Frieda: Yes, yes. They came with their boots and their cruel hands and they kidnapped his youngest child, his softest, beautifullest baby. It’s not easy to live after that. Katherine: (Who once lost a child) I do know. Murry: Are there still copies? Frieda: Oh yes, but no ears to hear. He talks of the deafness of England. It is because they will not listen to him. Katherine: (As the dusk deepens, and the cry of gulls is dimly heard) He should not expect it. Listen to the seabirds instead. The cliffs are full of little voices lamenting. Do they expect to be heard? To each his nest of rock, to each his trembling song. There are no great schemes, no overarching heaven. Look up now: the zenith is quite, quite blotted out. All we have in the dark is our little heap of bracken, our thin insistent cry. Who will help us now? Only the song will. It caws on and on, and morning is so very far away. How cold it is here; how very, very chill. Fade

3. Mid-morning, two weeks later. (In the R.H house Katherine is revealed standing by the all-purpose table. She takes a sheaf of papers out of the drawer, places them on top, lights a cigarette, and then, pulling up the room’s only chair, pensively sucks her pen. Then hesitantly she starts writing.) Katherine: ‘The Morning Hen Session’, with apologies for a late start. (Suddenly the door of the L.H. house opens and Frieda appears. She walks determinedly across R. and knocks on Katherine’s door.) Frieda: Hello. Can I come in? Katherine: If you like. I was starting a story, the first for absolutely weeks. But you might as well stay as you’re here. You’ll have to stand though. We’ve still only got one chair. I’d make you some tea if only I could find the kettle. Frieda: Never mind. We’re in a jumble too. Well, a relative jumble. Katherine: There’s always the dresser. (Removing a pile of books) Squattyvous. (Frieda climbs up awkwardly to squat on the dresser top)

113

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies Frieda: How I love this morning peace. The quiet is so thick you could almost eat it. If it wasn’t for the scratching of Lorenzo’s pen and the scuffling under the eaves you’d hardly think you were alive. Like a Nottingham Sunday. Katherine: Don’t I know it. Now that the postman comes straight to us his arrival seems positively indecent. When I got up this morning I was convinced that I heard Wellington church bells, but it was the blood in my ears. It makes you long for London. Frieda: We could go and pick some primroses. Katherine: Oh let’s! There’s plenty along the cliff tops. Anything seems exciting here. Well, bye bye story. And I’ve no walking boots. Frieda: You won’t need them. I’ve only got one pair of shoes, and my clothes are all in tatters. If Lorenzo’s trousers keep on shrinking they’ll reach his knees. You learn to make do. Katherine: You’re one of those people who never seem to need good clothes. Oh, you know what I mean; you’re sort of . . . half aristocrat and half foundling. Where is my key? I lose the key of this cottage simply by trying to find. Frieda: That’s a lovely skirt, Kass. How much material is in it? Katherine: I can’t find my key! Frieda: Jack must have it. Katherine: I suppose that he must. They left for St Ives so early. They’ve gone to buy some more chairs. Heaven knows we need some. Jack never notices of course. It was Lorenzo who had to point out that during their interminable duologues one of them was always propped up against the stove. Jack just gawped and went on talking in that odd mechanical way of his about the individuality of the soul. I’ve had it all. What do the English say? ‘When a man looks through the window, he sees the sky. A woman sees the dust on the curtain rail!’ Well, I just see the dust. It’s hard not to. We’ve got enough of it. (She starts coughing) Oh dear. (She gets out her handkerchief and coughs convulsively into it) Oh dear! Frieda: You need some fresh air. Come. You can leave the door on the latch quite safely here. If they come for anybody it won’t be Jack and you: it will be me and poor Lorenzo (They walk through door) Oh this war! Jack hates it as much as Lawrence, doesn’t he?

114

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Bugger the Skylarks. Lawrence and Mansfield at War Katherine: What, Jack? (Her coughing turns to laughter) Oh, that’s funny. That’s very funny. Frieda: Well, isn’t that so? Katherine: I remember the night hostilities were declared. It was when we were camping off the Fulham Road. Jack got wind of what was happening and rushed round to the German Embassy. He stood there all night with a little jingoistic mob yelling ‘A bas les allemands! A bas les allemands!’ Frieda: (Genuinely dismayed) Why ever such a thing? Katherine: Oh he soon changed his mind. Liberal conscience and all that. One morning he arrived full of beans and announced that he’d joined up in a bicycle battalion, you know, pedaling for the motherland. He’d even invested in a pair of clips. But the very next day he suddenly got into a funk because he discovered that all the advanced set are pacifists and that he’s been caught with his trousers down, or rather up. So he limped off to the doctor and started wittering on about his pleurisy. Croft-Hill gave him a little explanatory note for the bicycle brigade which read ‘Query T.B.’ The relief! (Another racking cough) Query T.B.! Frieda: But I thought your Jack had more courage. Katherine: That’s what everybody thinks when they read his articles. They don’t realise that he’s just following the nearest cart down the newest-cut track which he’ll follow doggedly ‘til he notices that it’s petering out and that all the smarter carts are rumbling off in quite a different direction. Then he about turns and joins the pack. It would be pathetic if it weren’t so damn amusing. Frieda: You find this amusing? Katherine: For the most part. Do I shock you? Well, it’s a way of surviving. You know I’ve never really met Jack. People don’t meet him, they just talk to him. Sometimes with him if he’s in one of his windbag moods. Otherwise there’s just this wall of silence. And when they’ve gone away, do you know, I don’t think he even notices that they’ve left. Have you ever really looked at him? There’s a sort of glassy hollow sheen about his eyes, like those Roman heads with no pupils. At first I thought he might be suffering from astigmatism or something, so I sent him off to the opticians, but no. Then I thought that when we got to know one another better it might be different, but there’s still

115

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies the same blank expression. Ugly! He doesn’t see anybody. He doesn’t see me. Frieda: How is this? Katherine: Oh, it ought not to surprise us. Jack is the quintessential European. Listen to him and you’ll hear the pitiless western male mind churning on in its usual unfeeling way: forces; ideas; words; alliances. And not a thought for what it all means, I mean for the real flesh of all of us. You think Jack’s opposed to this war. Sometimes I think Jack is this war. Come on! (Exeunt left) (After a brief pause, enter Lawrence and Murry humping four pine chairs.) Lawrence: Beat you! Christ, am I tired. (Collapses on one of the chairs and looks left) Are those the ladies retiring? Ah well, we men should stick together. What are you thinking? Murry: That for a revolutionary you possess some oddly old-fashioned ideas. Lawrence: Do you see that patch out in the bay? On bad days it’s called a mist. On good days they call it The Carracks. Actually it’s a low clump of rocks colonised by lordly, indolent seals. Reality doesn’t change, Jack. It’s the way we look at it changes. This chair’s got square legs and a straight back. It doesn’t pretend to be a chaise-longue. Murry: Sometimes, Lawrence, I wonder why you ever gave up school mastering. You must have been simply marvellous at it. Lawrence: Ever been down a coal-mine? Murry: Love to, but no. Lawrence: You wouldn’t last half a shift. But you’d know what turned me into a teacher. I was shrugging off a crafty little demon called dirt. And another little demon called self-contempt. There isn’t much choice when the pit lies at the back of you and in front something at least approaching dignity. My father hadn’t a shred of it. You’d look into his eyes of an evening and see an animal cringing in fear. Oh yes, I’ve smelt it, the stench of the machine-torn man, the hounded, fear-crazed animal. Murry: Ah but you’re free now Lawrence, and masterful. You’ll master us all! Lawrence: Oh, don’t let the seer’s staff confuse you, Jack. I’m just another of those fear struck creatures that happens to have torn itself

116

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Bugger the Skylarks. Lawrence and Mansfield at War free of the trap. I’m all cut to the bone, and my strut’s a sort of jaunty limping. Can’t you see? Can’t anybody see, but especially you. Don’t you recognise the morning strut of the newly released prisoner? You remember St Paul? To each man his trade: let he who will teach, teach; let he who may console, lend consolation. Let the tent-maker stitch his tents. Well I don’t know what my gift is, Jack, but you’ve a talent for belief. And you come and you cringe and you buckle to the cause and shout ‘All hail the teacher! All hail the prophet, especially if he’s a crippled prophet. All the better. Let us plunge our hands into his side. Blood and water; vinegar mixed with gall.’ Anything provided it’s contrary and it stings. (A tense pause. Lawrence’s affectionate mockery has made Murry feel belittled: he won’t be bought that easily) Murry Did you ever read Still Life? Lawrence: I beg your pardon? Murry: You may recollect that I published a novel of my own – quite recently really. Lawrence: Ah yes. You sent me a copy. The inner travails of a literary cub? Garrets and soul-arranging. All that’s got to go, Jack. We are facing the abyss. Murry: And what am I expected to do? Just leap off that cliff for you? Lawrence: Don’t worry. You’ll hang on. Murry: One sees the intellectual need for affirmation, of course. The imperative to plunge in and have done with it. It’s much the same as Kierkegaard’s leap. But if one has the slightest sense of spiritual responsibility, one has to test one’s footing first. I’m not sure what lies at the foot of the rocks, do you see? Lawrence: Well, isn’t that peculiar? I’m not sure either. Murry: Do you recall a letter which you wrote to me about two years ago, just after we’d seen you and Frieda hitched? Oh, you were very much the married man in those days, full of a feeling of rightness. Your words really took me by the scruff of the neck then: ‘If you are disintegrated, then get integrated again. You’re not well. Then have the courage to get well. If you are strong again and a bit complete, Katherine will be the more satisfied with you.’ Lawrence: Yes, I remember it. Well?

117

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies Murry: That’s just it, do you see? One’s been struggling with one’s inner health for some time. It’s a long process really and these clouds keep on drifting across one’s vision, blocking the way through. One tries to argue oneself into a state of decision, but it’s pretty hard. What one needs in the end, I suppose, is pure nerve. Lawrence: It isn’t simply you that’s lost your nerve; it’s the whole of Europe. Don’t you see that’s why we’re stuck in the mire. Come on then man, pull yourself out! It’s the only hope for any of us now. If someone doesn’t make an effort soon, we’ll all go under. Murry: I’ll have to draw Kass along pretty gently, I’m afraid. She’s still pretty smashed up. Lawrence: Ah is that it? The ladies are returning. You can always go away, you know. But I did think that in the middle of all that indifference there was one fellow I could rely on. (Shouting off right) Did you collect any furze? Katherine’s Voice (off ): What did you say? Lawrence: We’re right out of tinder! (To Murry) They’re coming up the farm track. (Enter Katherine exultant) Katherine: Oh, did you ever see such shapes. The whole headland’s like some satanic grotto. Lawrence: You should wait until high tide. The water gushes through the boulders like the lava of Hades. Standing on top you’d think some Neolithic giant was hissing for blood. Katherine: The wind is in my hair. Oh, whoopee, chairs! Lawrence: Jack got them up a little side street for ninepence apiece. The lady wanted a shilling but we told her we were a Home Front support committee. Katherine: (Trying one, and mimicking Lawrence’s barely disguised northern accent) Bit rough on t’e bum. (Lawrence laughs) Lawrence: Where’s Frieda? Katherine: Oh, you’d never guess. We managed to clamber onto a group of rocks just beyond the point, and she lost her balance and fell in right up to her knees. You should have seen her expression, like Queen Victoria at a Maori shindig. She’s coming up now dripping like

118

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Bugger the Skylarks. Lawrence and Mansfield at War a seal and trying to wring her smock out. I’m sure she thinks it was my fault. Lawrence: And was it? Katherine: (Mocking the schoolmaster in Lawrence) Oh no sir, honestly Mr Lawrence sir. I was merely encouraging the inspection of marine life. Lawrence: And if you urged her to step out a little further. . . Katherine: It was simply to confirm our observations. Lawrence: Quite, quite. Nevertheless she’ll need to dry out. I’d better collect some gorse for that fire. Jack, do you want these chairs or shall I chop them up for firewood? Murry: (Emerging from a depressed silence) They need painting. Katherine: Oh yes, let’s do it now. All different colours. One for each of us. Let’s see. . . I’ll be sky blue, Lawrence will have to be red, Frieda can have a dingy brown for her grumpiness, but whatever shall we do for Jack? Murry: (Still sulky) We didn’t buy any paint. Lawrence: Jack Murry was in an honest-to-goodness mood this morning. Katherine: Well how careless. I don’t know how I shall deal with you both. (Enter Frieda) Frieda: I have been walking the whole way on bare feet. Katherine: Poor Frieda. Frieda: I did not come nearly to the Land’s End to be water-logged. Murry: We should have stayed in France. It’s a disaster. Frieda: (To Lawrence, employing his rarely heard Christian name) David! Murry: I’ve got just the colour. It’s in the scullery. (Walks determinedly into R.H. house) Katherine: Look at her! (Frieda dissolves into tears and runs to Lawrence’s arms) Lawrence: There there my darling. My poor bird.

119

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies Katherine: Oh aye, it’s a queer sort of aviary we’ve cum to and no mistake. Lawrence: Wig will make you some cocoa darling. You shouldn’t take on so. Frieda: It’s all spoiled. Everything. And I wanted us to be so gemütlich. Lawrence: We will be. You just wait and see. (Re-enter Murry with a paint-pot and an expression of fierce nihilistic determination) Katherine: Why, whatever’s that? Murry: A paint-pot. You said you wanted the chairs painted. Katherine: Well, I did. (In fury at Murry’s momentary hesitation) Oh get on with it! Murry: I dedicate these chairs to Rananim. A New Heaven and a New Earth. Frieda: What’s he doing? (Murry starts painting) Katherine: Oh Jack, not black! (Murry continues grimly) Lawrence: (Shielding his eyes) No! No! Katherine: Well it’s been a funny sort of morning. Fade

4. Several nights later, in the small hours. (A full moon and a suggestion of starlight. The noise of coughing alternates between the two houses. Then the door of the L.H. house opens and out comes Lawrence in his dressing-gown. He walks over to the outside toilet C., goes in and closes the door. Several seconds afterwards the door of the R.H. house opens and out comes Murry and saunters to the lavatory C. He tries the door, but, finding it locked, stands waiting. He looks at the moon, re-ties his dressing gown cord, and then inspects the stars more closely. Then the R. door opens again and Katherine appears. She too walks centre) Katherine: Oh hello. I thought you were asleep.

120

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Bugger the Skylarks. Lawrence and Mansfield at War Murry: I was. Oh sorry, you first. (Pause. They get into an oh-so-British queue, and stand pathetically for some time avoiding looking on one another) Katherine: Is there anybody in there? Murry: I think so. Why? Katherine: It’s just that the door sometimes locks by itself. Frieda told me. Murry: Ah. I’m not exactly sure. Katherine: Don’t you think you’d better tap? You know. Murry: Ah. Yes. (He taps so gently that the audience can only just hear. There is no response, so he shrugs and carries on moving his weight from one foot to the other) Murry: Did you read the letter which came this morning? From Garsington. Lady Ottoline Morrell. I think she’s given up on Russell and this stop-the-war-thing. She’s always been much more interested in gossip and friends. She enclosed a letter which Frieda had sent to her, full of the most ferocious abuse. Accusing her of trying to maim Lawrence’s soul or something. Quite extraordinary. Katherine: I know. It was delivered next door by mistake. Frieda told me all about it at obscene length. Are you positive someone’s in there? They’re being the most awfully long time. Murry: It’s probably a poacher hiding. Or a deaf goblin or something. Katherine: Do you think that you could bring yourself to just peek? Murry: Oh really, old girl. Do you think that’s quite the thing? Katherine: Old girl’s a bit shivery, Jack. Murry: It really goes against the grain, you know. Oh very well. (He kneels down gingerly on one knee, and is about to apply his eye to the keyhole when from inside issues a strange Hebraic wailing, the words of which go something like this) Ranani Sudekin Bandanoi. . . ..ooo. Katherine: Whatever’s that? Murry: It’s Lawrence. He can’t sing for tuppence. Katherine: Is it an Eastwood dialect or something?

121

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies Murry: No; Hebrew. I think it’s supposed to be the opening verse of the Thirty Third Psalm: ‘Rejoice in the Lord, oh ye righteous’. He learnt the text from our Jewish lawyer friend Solomonovich Koteliansky. Lawrence used to practise it in the garden at Acacia Road. But he’s got the words muddled up rather. It’s meant to go ‘Ranenu Sadekim’. Hence Rananim. Lawrence is a bit weak on the Semitic languages. Katherine: Yes. Oh well, at least I know where we’ve landed up now. A spiritual Utopia based on incorrect Hebrew. What time is it? Murry: I dropped my watch down that mine shaft when we were timing the echo. Katherine: Oh yes. I forgot. Come on, Lorenzo. (The latrine door opens and Lawrence emerges) Lawrence: Why, Murry old man. Nice evening. It’s free, I think. In you go. (Murry enters the latrine and closes the door behind him. Katherine and Lawrence stand without speaking for some time. They are very wary of one another) Lawrence: I know you didn’t want to join us here. It’s obvious, so you needn’t bother to pretend. I hear you’ve been writing some more. I shouldn’t let it go to your head. Remarkable chap in his way Jack, you know. But he’s like a creeper. He’ll blossom in time, but he needs a wall to climb up. It’s got to be the right wall, and its got to face the sun. Sometimes I hate the moonlight. Look at it riding the sea there. Pointless. (The door of the L.H. house now opens to reveal Frieda, wearing a shawl over her nightdress. She walks C. in the direction of the latrine but then notices Lawrence standing downstage L staring out into the audience.) Frieda: There you are! You will catch your death in your silly dressing gown. Do you know what time it is, Lorenzo? It is nineteen minutes past two, and not even wearing your vest. See, your arm is all goose pimples. You must borrow my shawl. Take it. No, take it now. (Addressing Katherine) Why did you not tell him? You are all killing him inch by inch. Lawrence is a very strong man, but weak sometimes. Are you coming to powder your nose? Katherine: Jack’s in there. Frieda: Lawrence will go inside soon, only he loves the vista. We used to have these nights in Metz. Very clear, even sometimes in winter. You could see the stars every one. The Crab; the Great Bear, but in different

122

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Bugger the Skylarks. Lawrence and Mansfield at War positions. We used to walk in the forest to see them. Sometimes with a hamper. To observe such majesty is like listening to Mozart, the Linz symphony, very sad but happy. Kathleen Beauchamp, why are you laughing. That is your name? Katherine: I’m sorry. (But she continues laughing as Murry emerges from the latrine hut.) Murry: Oh, hello Frieda. How nice. Wig, your turn old fruit. Why, what on earth’s the matter? (Katherine continues tittering softly, as Murry and Frieda stare at her in astonishment. Then Lawrence resumes his strange Hebraic chant, over which the lights fade.) Fade

5. The following morning (Frieda is busy plying the fuchsias to the R. of the L.H. house with a watering can. From the house itself an enormous sneeze suddenly explodes.) Frieda: There you are. I warned you about it last night. You will never listen. Are you not ashamed, a man of your sense: sneezing inside when the day is so bright? (Lawrence appears in the L.H. doorway still wearing his dressing gown and holding his nose in a handkerchief ) Frieda: Why are you standing in the doorway? You look perfectly ghastly, like a werewolf, yes. You must go straight back to bed in your condition, seedy as you are. The fuchsias don’t want your germs. Lawrence: Good morning, Frieda dear. Frieda: Lawrence, you are an incomprehensible person. You go on writing pages after pages about – what is it? – loins? And yet you have not the faintest connection with your own body. Not even with your nose. (Lawrence lowers the handkerchief ) Look how red it is. Like Pistol. Anybody would think that you had been drinking. Lawrence: It is perfectly common to contract a cold in the spring. Where are my trousers? Frieda: I washed them first thing this morning. They are not yet dry. (Frieda goes round the back of the cottage)

123

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies Lawrence: So it seems as if I am a prisoner after all. (Katherine opens the door of the R.H. house) Lawrence: Good day, fair creature. You are Beauty come to save the Beast. I am apparently trapped within my lair. Katherine: Just as well, Beasty. The Home Front will be a lot safer without you. Whom have we to thank? Lawrence: Frieda. Whenever she wishes to incarcerate me she simply washes my trousers. It’s simpler than bolts and chains, and a lot more effective. Katherine: (pointing upstage C) They’re hanging on the line. Lawrence: But yet awash, it would seem. Katherine: (looking around for Frieda) Just a tick. I’ll check for you. (Tiptoes over to the line and feels trousers) Nonsense. Psst! Here! Catch! (She unpegs the garment and flings it across to Lawrence L.) Lawrence: My guardian angel! Oh my deliverer! (Lawrence disappears into L.H. house. Enter Murry from R.H. house.) Murry: At last some genuine sunlight. Suddenly this place begins to resemble somewhere earthly. Katherine: Oh that it would! It doesn’t even resemble England. It’s more like some sinister Celtic fastness. Oh Jack, remember that dear little terrace? Murry: On which we toasted each Gallic morn? Well, what could be simpler? Provided we wrap up. There’s coffee on the stove. Katherine: I’m told make-believe is just the teeniest bit bad for you. All the same . . . under the circumstances . . . Then you’d better help me out with the table, and your dingy old chairs. (Lawrence appears at the L.H. door again, dressed now in a sweater and his trousers.) Lawrence: Morning. Murry: We’ve elected to take our morning refreshment outside in the French manner. Would anybody care to join us? Lawrence: I say, what a perfectly delicious idea! I’ve only got a primus stove over here. Limits one rather. (Murry and Katherine disappear back into R.H. house. Enter Frieda from behind L.H. house.)

124

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Bugger the Skylarks. Lawrence and Mansfield at War Frieda: Why are you standing there blocking the doorway? Why are you wearing your trousers? Lawrence: I believe passionately in wearing my trousers. It is the sole purpose of my existence. Frieda: They are wringing wet! Lawrence: Good. Frieda: You will go back upstairs and eat your food. I left your tray on the washstand. Lawrence: I have unfortunately been invited by our neighbours to join them for what the English are pleased to call continental breakfast. I am fed up of milk and wurst. Frieda: David Herbert Lawrence, you are the most God Almighty fool. (She bustles past him into L.H. house. Enter from R.H. house Katherine and Murry with table and chairs.) Murry: I’ll swear these chairs are each four pounds heavier since I painted them. Or else the processes of suggestion are a great deal more tenacious than reason leads one to suspect. Lawrence, never give full rein to your despair. You are stuck with the evidence for weeks afterwards. Are we to have the honour of Frieda’s company? Lawrence: She has taken umbrage in the scullery. ‘Dicky Denches’ won’t take his paps. Murry: Dicky who? Lawrence: ‘Dicky Denches’. My sorry nickname at elementary school. They had a rhyme: ‘Dicky Dicky Denches/Plays with the wenches.’ It’s what happens when you are seen to possess a Middle Class mother. Katherine: I also have a Middle Class mother. Lawrence: But then you, Kass darling, are Middle Class. Katherine: Granted. I’m afraid we’ve no croissants by the way. Rationing and all that. You’ll have to make do with toast. Murry: I’ll see to it. (Exit into R.H. house) Katherine: (Recalling previous night) He’s sometimes remarkably agile for a creeping plant. Lawrence: Gladiator!

125

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies Katherine: Oh, I think we’re well matched you and I. Watch out, though. I can love my enemies to death. Lawrence: There’s nothing new in that. It used to be known as Christianity. Katherine: I’m afraid that I can’t remember. They tell me God’s moved and living in Cornwall. Lawrence: Oh, I’d make a fairly skinny incarnation, I’m afraid. (Re-enter Murry with a tray of coffee and some cups) Lawrence: Ah what have we here then? Agape, the brotherly feast? It’s a wonder I still have an appetite. According to your friend I’ve been eating you alive, Jack. Murry: In that case I should watch for your digestion. (Katherine is laying the table) I’m reputed to be somewhat sinewy. Lawrence: (Coming across R) True, there’s not a lot of flesh on you. You’d be rather like a flayed hare. Murry: Careful now. Wig’s mined the path. You don’t take sugar do you? Lawrence: I take three heaped teaspoons. Murry: Sorry. This air makes one rather forgetful. I thought I’d be able to work here. But do you know, I’ve scarcely got anywhere with my thoughts on a new Christology. It’s such a vital task: revitalising the old ideals of love and sacrifice, fusing them with all our modern awareness and complexity. I’m filled with such an immense sense of what needs to be done, yet I’m quite hopeless in the wrong atmosphere. I honestly believe that to think profoundly you have to be either hectically happy or else hysterically miserable. Plain moroseness won’t do, or even vague contentment. Your mind and soul should simply have to pulsate in a sort of rapturous, heedless unison. (Handing cup to Lawrence) What do you say, Lawrence? What are the essential requirements? Lawrence: A pen. Katherine: And some paper. Lawrence: Paper helps. Could I have a saucer? (Jolted out his complacency, Murry hands him one) Lawrence: (Beckoning Murry) Look. I will show you something. Do you see that clump of rocks just to the East of the headland?

126

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Bugger the Skylarks. Lawrence and Mansfield at War Murry: I can’t quite see which you mean. The knoll at the edge of the bay? Lawrence: No, not Seal Island. Further out, about three quarters of a mile: that cluster of granite humped rather like a New Moon. Katherine: . . . bent like a boomerang. Yes, I know which one you mean. Lawrence: You’d think those offshore islands ever so cut off, quite remote from man and his civilisation. But no, dig down into the cliff face not four miles from here and you’d meet the mouth of a tunnel. It starts just beyond St Just, and radiates outward into the seabed well beyond that point. When a man reached the foot of the shaft he would walk for an hour before he reached the mine face, and as he worked he’d hear the sea bowling boulders like so many millstones above him. This whole coastline is riddled with such passages. If you took a crosssection it would look much like a sheep’s guts. That’s where the real work lies, Jack, deep down. Murry: Well I never. Do they smelt the stuff locally too? Lawrence: Not now. It’s taken inland, or over to South Wales. But in its hey-day there was enough ore to support a furnace out on the headland. You can see the ruins to this day. People want steel in this war, not tin. But there was a time when I’m told you could smell the fumes as far as the village. Katherine: (Suddenly freezing) Jack. The toast! (Exit Murry R. hurriedly) There’s no point talking to Jack about industry. I don’t think he’s talked to a real working man all his life, and yet his head is just full of notions about Equity and Justice. It simply doesn’t occur to him that the words have anything to do with actual people. To him the working classes are just a sort of fine poetic essence. (Frieda appears to R. of the L.H. house) Hello Frieda. Frieda: And was this invitation extended to all? Katherine: You’d better ask Jack. He’s always been very prolix with his promises. O, sit down. (As Frieda joins them, Murry emerges with a toast-rack.) Murry: I managed to save three. The outside ones are a bit burnt, I’m afraid.

127

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies Katherine: You could never save anything very effectively, darling. You’re not even very convincing as one of the Saved. (Handing Lawrence the toast-rack) Lawrence? Lawrence: I think that perhaps the cooks deserve one slice apiece. Frieda and I will have to share. (He picks out one piece of toast, and, holding it above the table, breaks it rather in the manner of the Host) Katherine: Wake up, Frieda. Lawrence is offering you his body. Lawrence: It’s on the thin side, I’m afraid. Frieda: (Missing the double allusion) It is so rare that one has this pleasure nowadays. Lawrence and I have been so frugal. Murry: (Buttering his toast in clumsy earnestness) I’m so glad we all seem to be hitting it off at last. I really thought you know that our Rananim was drifting up the creek. But when you come down to it, it’s just a matter of adjusting to one another isn’t it? Of thinking oneself into a state of almost universal sympathy. In the end one simply has to learn to make sacrifices. Lawrence: Bunkum. Murry: Oh dear, I rather took that as the driving idea. Katherine: Jack thinks we’re another primitive Christian sect, waiting for the Second Coming or something. Lawrence: (Straight to Murry) I spit on your sacrifice! I execrate your sympathy! I thought you at least understood. What do you hold in veneration, really? The cross with its heart of worms, the brooding, sticky Christian denial? We have sacrificed ourselves too long. We have given over too much of ourselves. Oh, if only it were real sacrifice, and not this moping and mincing in borrowed tatters. Haven’t we all seen them, the Bourgeois Christians, hatless heads bent in prayer, mumbling their rote incantations: ‘We have erred and strayed from our ways like lost sheep’. Like sheep, yes, with their polite and pitiful bleating, the muling of the crippled spirit. I don’t want you to give up anything! I don’t want you to think or feel yourselves into any mental condition at all. When will we learn? Our salvation does not lie here (Pointing at his forehead) It lies here! (Pointing at his flies) Katherine: Piss-water! Murry: Lawrence has a point.

128

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Bugger the Skylarks. Lawrence and Mansfield at War Katherine: No, he hasn’t. There’s absolutely nothing there. (To Murry, pointing to Frieda) Well, ask her. It’s all talk. Oh don’t you men love to preach. That chair might be a pulpit, or leather-plush in the Athenaeum. And the absoluteness of it all. It’s either Jack’s ‘universal sympathy’ or Lawrence’s trousers. It comes down to the same thing: my solution is everybody’s solution; give ear to the Gospel According to Me. Where is there a place where we can just rest and be? Lawrence: Nowhere, not on this earth. Not now. We need to build. Murry: But where do we begin? I’m very confused, Lawrence. Lawrence: We might just begin by touching. Katherine, give me your hand. Katherine: It’s messy. It’s got butter all over it. I’d really much rather not. Lawrence: Jack. (Murry consults Katherine, who shrugs. Then he complies.) Right, now just the fingertips. First place them against mine. Good. Now close your eyes, useless otherwise. Then feel you way forward and see if you can make out the moulding on my face. Like a blind man. So. . . so. . . (Katherine titters) Frieda: (Snappishly) Katherine! So foolish. Katherine: But it’s just like Yeats’ silly seances: ‘Now close your eyes’. Murry: Is that your ear? (Which sets Katherine off again) Lawrence: It’s no good. Kass has ruined it. (To Katherine) Do you rail against everything? Katherine: But honestly. Men touching. (She shudders) Lawrence: Is it so inconceivable? Don’t you see? Everything else has failed. Katherine: I’ve touched lots of people. It’s just flesh! Lawrence: Listen! Listen! Do you remember the outbreak of war two years ago? Jack had great need of you then, but, instead of staying in London to comfort him, you borrowed ten pounds from that pert interfering brother of yours and stepped on the Night Mail to Paris, didn’t you? Well, after he’d waved his pathetic little handkerchief to your vanishing figure, your husband came home and collapsed with ‘flu and dejection. Mostly dejection. So Frieda and I took him down to Sussex with us. There was nobody else, you see. We couldn’t afford a

129

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies doctor, no more than we could now. But I nursed every speck of that man back to health with these hands. I know more about the power of touch than you know about your own body. Katherine: I’ve had enough of my body and its paltry needs. Sometimes I just wish I could shrug it off like a garment and bathe in an endless cooling stream. Lawrence: But it’s all we’ve got left. All the ideas have exhausted themselves. Frieda, tell her. Katherine: I don’t know how she puts up with it. Why don’t you just re-name your cottage The Phallus and have done with it? Or is the chimney the wrong shape for you? (Jumping up and rushing L. to shout up at the Lawrences’ roof ) Phallus! Phallus! Lawrence: Do you think I’m talking about that! About a man and a woman snug in their den, glorying in their little union? No! I’m talking about people across an immense distance, separate, holy, utterly themselves, discovering one another in an utterly new way, a way as old as these boulders. I’m talking about the freedom to be oneself and damn the consequences, yes damn them! (Rising to arrest Katherine, who has turned aside in impatience.) Wait. There was once a mad old man called Moses who climbed up a mountain. There he met a presence, a voice, a flash in the dark, something. And when he returned to his people he had no patience left with anything else. It’s time we tried again. It’s time to throw off the old muffles – master-and-servant; touching the forelock, moping at my mistress’s elbow – everything false, muddled and pummelled – and started completely afresh. Is it so very difficult? Katherine: I don’t know what you mean. I’m sorry. I’ve tried, I’ve honestly tried. Lawrence: (In mad triumph) But there are those who will understand. Katherine: Oh yes, your children. The fruit of your touch. Where are they then Lawrence? Show them to me. Are they lining the hedgerows? Have they gone forth to preach the glad tidings or have they hanged themselves behind the kitchen door ‘because we are too many.’ (A horrified pause) Murry: That was quite extraordinarily unkind. (Frieda has gone quite rigid. Now she stands up and walks downstage to hold the attention for the rest of the scene)

130

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Bugger the Skylarks. Lawrence and Mansfield at War Frieda: I hear them even now. Even in the night-time I hear them calling to me. When the wind disturbs the bracken and the tiles slither in the roof, I have their lonely voices pawing at my ears. I try to shut them out, but it is no use. Why don’t they let me in? Why don’t they listen to their mother? I saw them in the street and they ran from me. I called to them in the schoolyard and then they turned their backs. Why do they shrink away when I reach out my hand? What is there to grasp when the anger tears at your chest and your own tenderness stiffens? I close my fingers and yet everything falls through, all love, all certainty. Lawrence, why have you brought us out so far? There is nothing between us and the sea but heather, and its blossoms are so long appearing. How the grey sea weights on us and even the green is as dark as death. We cannot make do with these tiny yellow gorse flowers forever. There is so little time left for any of us now. Lawrence, mein Mann, take us away from here. Fade END OF PART ONE *******

PART TWO 6. A Saturday afternoon late May A typically changeable Saturday afternoon in late May. (The actors will already have grouped themselves around the Murrys’ kitchen table which remains in position C. Astride it sits Lawrence clutching an antique hunting horn with which he is paddling an imaginary boat. Very softly at first the four of them are singing the round ‘Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream’ in this order: Lawrence, Katherine, Murry, Frieda. The volume gradually increases until at the conclusion of the last verse, fortissimo, Lawrence stands up on the table and gives a resounding blast on his horn.) Lawrence: In the name of all outlaws and vagrants of the spirit, I thus defy tyranny, mechanism, the meddling mind, and all that keeps men down! (Loud applause from the others, whereupon Frieda steps forward and helps him down like a returning hero.)

131

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies Frieda: Tristan, mein Tristan! Lawrence: Ah yes, this is Tristan’s coast alright. He might have landed with his Isolde down in that very bay. Might I too not aspire to be one of those old warriors? On afternoons such as this I feel I could slay every dragon and brave every rock in Christendom. Murry: (who is staring out towards what, as the audience should gradually realise, is a Spanish coal-ship grounded in the cove below them) Then I hope you fare better than that coal vessel down below there. Lawrence: Any sign of progress? Murry: Some more vessels seem to have joined her. Tugs as far as I can make out. They’re throwing across some kind of a line. Katherine: I don’t fancy much for their chances. It’s pretty choppy still. She’s lost most of her cargo. The sea’s black! Murry: Oh, they’ll manage I dare say. Pretty hardy chaps these Cornishmen, I’m told. Lawrence: Look, they’ve attached another hawser. Will they ever get a purchase? The bow section’s almost totally submerged. Frieda: Oh, the poor ship, they must save her. Lawrence: They’ll be alright if they can ease her off by nightfall. The next storm, she’ll come clean to pieces. Look, one of the smaller boats is standing off. They’re pulling. My God, what magnificence! Murry: There’s two of them at it. Look there’s another little blighter on the other side. She’s damned securely wedged from the looks of things. They’ll be straining for hours yet. Lawrence: There’s something about the sight of men working together. Wouldn’t you just love to help? Murry: There’s not much we can do old fellow. With the best will in the world, we’re useless up here. Lawrence: (Kindling nonetheless) Oh but the vigour of sheer movement! Come on, who’s for a tug of war? Katherine: Lawrence, you’re joking. Lawrence: (Striding upstage to the washing line) No, I’m most certainly not. Jack help me down with this sheet. Come on!

132

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Bugger the Skylarks. Lawrence and Mansfield at War Frieda: Lorenzo, those are our only bedclothes. I have only just taken them from the tub. Lawrence: (Ignoring this) Jack behind me. Frieda over there with Katherine. I insist on absolute parity. Katherine: That’s not very Tristan-like. You’ve put both of the women on one side. Lawrence: Are you hiding behind your weakness now? Well are you? Katherine: No, but – there has to be an equilibrium at least. Lawrence: Then Jack must stand at the head over there with Katherine immediately behind him. Frieda, put you arms round my waist. Now, with all your might and main. Pull! (As they take up the strain, the two women fall away and collapse on the ground laughing, leaving Lawrence and Murry battling it out. Lawrence, who is the stronger, begins to haul Murry towards him. As he does so, he takes in the sheet, winding it round his forearm until the other man is close enough for Lawrence to grasp him in a stranglehold.) Katherine: Have you any idea how absurd you look? Like two grubby little boys in a schoolyard with rolled down socks and bitten nails, have a beano. Jack’s frightfully out of practice anyway. He can’t have horsed around like this since Oxford. Lawrence: You’re mine now. (Grabbing Murry) Got you! Murry: Alright, old man, I capitulate. I was never much cop at a scrum. Lawrence: (Collapsing on his front, panting, his arm still on Murry’s) Nonsense. You could beat me if you wanted easily. You simply lack practice. You know there’s something rather exquisite about actual bodily exhaustion. Frieda: Lorenzo, why are you wearing your shirt? It is so warm now. Lawrence: I have my sleeves folded back to the elbow. Isn’t that enough for you? Frieda: But there’s a big patch of sweat just at the small of your back. It is so silly to cover yourself up when you are so hot and exhausted. And I like to see that bit of chest where it peeps between your buttons. Come now. Let me. (She endeavours to help him off with the shirt.)

133

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies Lawrence: (Standing up, and violently repulsing her) No! I will not be treated like a child or a pet animal. Would you deal thus with a creature in the wild? Would you paw a weasel, or a fox? Katherine: No, you’d ask its permission first, I suppose before skinning it. Careful Frieda. Lawrence thinks he’s a wolf. But we’ll all know he’s a house-trained puppy really! Frieda: Lorenzo, for the last time. Lawrence: You shan’t have the shirt off my back! You shan’t! If you’re feeling so restless, go and hang this sheet back on the line, or, yes, go and pick some tulips from the garden at the farm. We were promised a bunch. But you will leave my neck alone! (Reluctantly, and with obvious hurt, Frieda slowly walks off R, alone) Katherine: (Calling after her) And make sure they’re red tulips. Tristan’s calling for blood! Lawrence: (Glad at Frieda’s departure) Did I ever tell you two about Ezra Pound and the tulip blooms? Did I? Well, I will. It was when I was teaching in London not long after The White Peacock, my first novel, came out. I’d made a small ripple of success, so Maddox Ford the editor took me along to a select literary gathering in Hermitage Lane. Over dinner Yeats the poet was whining on in his usual mystical vein about the influence of the Zodiac on the love-play of birds when I suddenly hear this impatient growl in my left ear. Turning round I saw Pound staring down the table with a sort of malevolent gleam in his eye. Well, there was this elegant thin-stemmed vase in the middle of the table holding red tulips. Yeats had just mentioned the geometry of the spheres when to my astonishment I saw Pound reach out and take one of the nearer blooms and place it between his lips. There was a sort of impertinent crunch and gradually the whole flower disappeared petal by petal into his mouth. Yeats of course hadn’t noticed a thing, so Pound picked out another flower and attacked that, and so on all the way through the remainder of the monologue. It was hilarious to watch. Kass, you’re good at Yeats. Come on now! Katherine: (Imitating Yeats’ cultivated drawl) ‘Were the forces Malkuth and Kether in the same cosmic plane or world, the transmission of these forces from the one to the other would proceed more or less in a straight line. In this case, seeing that Malkuth and Kether be in different planes or worlds, the lines of transmission of these forces are caught and whirled about the cone or hourglass into the vortex where through passeth the thread of the unformulated, that is to say the Ain

134

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Bugger the Skylarks. Lawrence and Mansfield at War of Soth. . . (Throughout which parodic speech Lawrence contorts himself into a grotesque mimicry of growling, munching and spitting and has Murry in stitches of laughter.) Lawrence: . . . so by the time the lecture was over there was just this absurd and very empty vase which Pound then handed to the hostess before loudly belching. I’d have given my hind legs to have been quite so untameable. Katherine: Instead of which you were a good little novelist I suppose and spent the whole evening keeping your cuffs out of the soup. (Re-enter Frieda with a neat bunch of cut tulips which she hands to Lawrence without a word. She is not interested in what follows, and wanders downstage where she peers out towards the ship in distress, occasionally giving a nonchalant wave out to sea.) Lawrence: Well, I was rather on trial. Murry: You needn’t stand in awe of that coterie, Lawrence. You have more fire in your belly than Pound, Yeats and Russell put together. Katherine: Oh don’t you believe it. When he’s not playing at Tristan, Lawrence prefers to think he’s some kind of savage. But actually he’s just the sort of pathetic Indian they display in side-shows to frighten the children. Look into your eyes and you’ll see he’s miles from home, and gelded by the management I shouldn’t wonder. Jack thinks himself a wolf-hunter. That’s his trade. But, when he’s tied the wolf in knots and brought him home, he unties the cord and out steps a woolly poodle. Murry: Now look here! That’s pure tommy-rot and you know it. What in God’s name have I been doing all of these years but rescuing the natural imagination from the ravages of this syphilitic civilization of ours? What have I sweated all that love and thought for unless to make a clearing where men and women of talent can live and work in freedom? (Lawrence has started eating the first of the tulips) Katherine: Men and women? Murry: Yes: real, unstunted, unfettered animals like Lawrence and you and – well, Frieda. Frieda: Can I be included? I am so honoured. (She has started waving out to sea in earnest.)

135

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies Katherine: (Who has noticed what Lawrence is doing, and is egging Murry on) Oh, Jack, you’re absurd. It’s not a clearing at all. It’s a circus and you’re a bandy-legged ring master. Murry: Now look here! I resent that, Katherine, and I contest it. A critic’s not a ring master. He hasn’t that power. He’s more like a gamekeeper, warning off poachers and helping the artist to live and grow. A writer needs his critics, else how is he to be understood? You and Lawrence accuse me of losing my head in a cloud of abstractions, but they’re abstractions based on experience, Katherine; they’re reactions to Life. It’s a job you can’t do without picking up your feelers and being alert to everything that’s happening around you. There’s an element we all share, the critic as much as the artist, and if we wish to survive in it we must learn to kick out and swim together, or else by Jove, we’ll all drown. Lawrence: I’m afraid I couldn’t manage the stems. Katherine: Perhaps you can save them and boil them up for supper. Like rather thin leeks. Murry: (Coming to his senses) Goodness. Lawrence: I’m sorry. Murry: Did you eat those? Lawrence: Yes, I was rather hungry. (Belches loudly) Now I feel just a little sick. Murry: Sea air’s what you need. A walk? (Looking round) Why Frieda, whatever are you doing? Frieda: There’s some poor men in those dinghies. They’ve been rowing round and round for hours. Lawrence: Stop it at once! You little fool. Don’t you see what they’ll think? A German waving from the cliffs?! Katherine: They’ll have a hell of a job jolting her off by night time now. Who are those fellows in the dinghies? Salvage people? Lawrence: (Suddenly subdued) No, they’re the crew poor devils. They might as well catch what flotsam they can before the wreckers arrive. Have you ever seen a stag beetle when the ants get at it? I surprised one in the heather on the hill the other afternoon. I squashed it with my heel by mistake. It lay there quite gutted with a little ooze of death coming out of it. I was about to offer it Christian burial when

136

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Bugger the Skylarks. Lawrence and Mansfield at War I noticed this little delegation of worker ants from a near-by mound. They gathered round her in a great swirl and then homed in, picking her to pieces, affectionately almost. In the end there was no more than a trace of her outline. (Turning away) I can’t watch any more. Katherine: (Who has caught the mood) There’s nothing else to do. There’s not even anywhere left to explore. The cliff top stretches for miles and miles, and yet did you ever feel so trapped, so hemmed in by mere space? I saw a skylark plummet yesterday. There’s a little colony of them along the coast. It was drifting along in the most flawless blue and then suddenly for no apparent reason it just dipped its wings and dropped straight into a breaker. There’s no point in going forward. Frieda: Tristan has lost all of his gay spirits. He does not like the heat, though he says he does. In Nottingham it is very gloomy and the spring does not come until May time. We will buy him a large, rimmed hat and then he will sit in his own shade all day and scribble at his Sisters. Lawrence: I can’t work with that title any more. I was thinking of Women in Love. Katherine: (Dreamily) I’ve never been in love. Neither of course has Jack, only Jack has never noticed. I think he’s probably more in love with Lawrence than with anybody. Though I’m not sure if Lawrence left, that he’d even notice that. Jack is in love with Jack. . . in love with Jack in love with Lawrence. (Whereupon, very softly and dreamily, she resumes the ‘Row, row your boat’ round, to be followed at the repetition by Frieda. But when Frieda has concluded the words ‘Life is but a . . . ’ they both stop with simultaneous abruptness) Katherine: (Putting out her hand) It’s raining! Lawrence: Did somebody mention leeks? Fade

7. Six o’clock the same evening In the background, a steady patter of rain.

(In the R.H. house, Katherine is arranging terracotta pitchers around the floor to catch drips while Murry is hunched over his notebook in a state of complete

137

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies absorption. In the L.H. house, Lawrence stares dejectedly out of the window while Frieda busies herself behind.) R.H. house

Katherine: We’re running out of pitchers. The water’s everywhere. Jack, look! Oh, never mind. I shall have to run across and beg for a bucket. Or one of us will. Jack, it’s raining! Murry: (Looking up) You know, I’m sure Lawrence terribly exaggerates the importance of the penis. It’s essential, of course, but the point is to get beyond it. You do agree? Katherine: I’ll go then. And I’ve no mackintosh. Oh botheration. (Exit L) L.H. house

Lawrence: I suppose that coal boat will have gone down by now, just when we could all do with it. All four of us could use an Ark this evening. Two by two we’d fit in quite nicely. Of course, it’s a judgement on us, this storm. ‘And the earth was also corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence’. With violence yes, and malice and trench mortars. It certainly sounds like a bombardment anyway. No sign of a break in the cloud. Well, let it rain. I’m sick of rainbows (Katherine has made her way over to the door of the L.H. house, which she now enters without knocking.) Katherine: Sorry. Can’t stop. Roof’s leaking all over the place. Big patch on the wall. Puddles everywhere. Need buckets. Got any? Lawrence: Young woman, do you invariably communicate in the style of a Post Office cable? Katherine: In emergencies, yes. Need buckets, two for preference. Frieda: (Coming from back) We have only our new chamber pot. Or the large frying pan, but we were going to use that this evening for our omelette. Lawrence: Then the young lady will simply have to make do with the chamber pot. Or else volunteer to cook us dinner herself later on. Katherine: Couldn’t manage that. Doesn’t at the moment appeal.

138

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Bugger the Skylarks. Lawrence and Mansfield at War Lawrence: Frieda! Fetch the chamber pot. Frieda: Would you like some tea while I look? Lawrence: Frieda! It’s on the washstand. (Exit Frieda L) (Quizzical pause) Katherine: Oh alright then. If it’s a very large frying pan. And if you want an omelette you’ll have to bring your own egg; we’re down to our last. You know you don’t conquer at all gracefully. And you should get Frieda to clip those eyebrows of yours. They make you look quite disgustingly patriarchal. Ooh I should just hate to have been born into the same family as you. You must have been so exasperating at times. Lawrence: I think that maybe my surviving relatives would agree with you there. (Shouting off, to Frieda) On top of the English Review. Or under the bed or something. I’m sorry for this slight delay. The receptacle in question is a recent acquisition. We have unfortunately been obliged to forsake the external sanitary arrangements on account of unforeseen nocturnal encounters. (Enter Frieda with plain white chamber pot) My relatives if you recall were nonconformist folk reared to a rugged independence. An Englishman’s chamber pot is his castle. (Handing it to Katherine) There. Katherine. Dear. Katherine: But it’s cracked. Lawrence: The whole world is cracked, my little darling. In your hands you hold a replica of us all. ‘Look on my works ye mighty and despair’. Et cetera. Et cetera. Katherine: I fail to see what Shelley has to do with chamber-pots. Lawrence: He had everything to do with them. Except that, like your precious Jack, he preferred to think of himself as composted of pure ether. Oh the sublimity of it: ‘Hail to thee, blithe spirit/Bird thou never wert’. The dear skylark. So intellectual, so fine. I wonder what his name can have been now? I suspect it was Bertie, like our friend Russell. And if he’d have had a modicum of sense in his noodle, he’ll have opened up his bladder and given silly old Shelley a good squodge in the eye. Good old Bertie. Bertie-squirty! Katherine: Bertie-dirty. Frieda: Lorenzo and I do not like Shelley. Lorenzo loves to quote poetry: ‘Break, break, break’; ‘On First Looking into Homer’s Chapman’. I have learned to love them all too. But as for Shelley’s

139

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies poem to the skylark, it aspires to nobility, but all of its sentiments are just footle. Lawrence: (In sudden exasperation) Futile, woman, futile. Well, don’t look quite so alarmed. You only said it to show off. It’s the only thing of Shelley’s that you know. Frieda: Lorenzo, that is not just. I know also his ‘West Wind’, and his ‘Stanzas written in Dejection Near Florence’! Lawrence: Naples!! Naples!! If you must quote a title, then in God’s name get it right. Frieda: Now I have had enough. Out of my house, you little God Almighty you. Lawrence: Your house. Your house. You couldn’t afford the rent for half a gable. You’re as witless and as vague as poor Shelley. You float in a sea of Teutonic fog. Frieda: Are you going to keep your mouth shut or aren’t you? Or do you want to bring the whole police force here? Lawrence: You say that just once more and I’ll give you a dab on the cheek to quieten you, you dirty hussy! Katherine: Well, thanks awfully for the pot and the pan. Jolly useful. Must dash now. The cottage will be in floods by now I expect, and it’s got enough damp as it is. Lawrence: Now look what you’ve done, you and your gut-rotting verse. Step one foot closer and I’ll ram the Golden Treasury down your stupid Saxon throat. Katherine: Well, bye bye. Must be off and all that. See you a bit later then. (Rapid exit R, and over to R.H. house, where she slams the door behind her and collapses behind it panting.) Frieda: (Starting to back upstairs) Lorenzo now. Take your tea and your biscuits. The kettle will be boiling over. (Upon which the steady crescendo of a whistle kettle is heard rising in pitch over their concluding threats which lead inexorably upstairs towards the bedroom.) Lorenzo: Then let it boil over. Let it flood both houses for all that I care! We have reached the end of ourselves. There’s no hope or consolation left to any of us! Frieda: Lawrence. I must see to the stove. Leave me now. Leave me.

140

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Bugger the Skylarks. Lawrence and Mansfield at War Lawrence: I’ll have your eyelashes, you poeticising slug you. I’ll hang you by the ears, come Hell or high water! (Frieda’s scream joins the kettle’s. Exeunt L) R.H. house

Murry: (At last roused from his abstraction, to Katherine) Sorry. Did you say something? Fade

8. Two hours later. It is still light, and, if possible, an immense ironic rainbow stretches across the sky.

(In the L.H. house, Frieda sits alone, knitting with aggrieved deliberation. In the R.H. house the following scene is set. Katherine stands at the large table in an apron. On the table is a large frying pan into which she is about to break an egg. Meanwhile Lawrence is lounging with his feet on one of the black chairs, while Murry lolls on his heels with his hands deep in his pockets. The atmosphere is one of cultivated male camaraderie at Katherine’s expense.) Lawrence: Observe the mysteries of the Omelette. (Katherine breaks the egg into the pan) You know I can somehow never quite manage that. One always seems to end up with bits of shell in the mixture, or else a gruesome mess in the bottom of the pan. Mother of course was always fearsomely competent at it, even when harassed, even on washing days. Pancake Tuesday was pure revelation. I can see myself now, a little boy with a snub nose, peering over the broad table top in sheer wonderment. Katherine: We’ve still only got two eggs. We cadged ours from the farm. I’m afraid it’s going to be a rather lean concoction. Murry: You could add some herbs. There’s thyme down on the cliffs. Katherine: He was invited to supper, not to a feast. Lawrence: Never fear. Frieda’s not coming, thank the Lord. That makes point six of an egg recurring each. Murry: Katherine’s cooking is always recurring. That is its essential charm. (Katherine moves R. towards the stove) Katherine: Has anyone seen a wooden spoon?

141

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies Murry: It’s propping up the draining board. (To Lawrence) I’m afraid we’ve a case of slight internal subsidence to add to the damp. Katherine: Oh honestly. And we’ve no whisk, of course. Lawrence: Try a fork. And plenty of wrist. (Katherine resentfully fetches a fork and starts beating the eggs, her tense back to the men) Lawrence: That’s a sight I love to see. Takes one back to the halcyon days of one’s youth. Just listen to that lovely clatter. (Pause, filled by whisking sound) Katherine: It’s going to be much too thick. Lawrence: The trick is to add water. Milk if you have it, but lactation I would not advise. The attraction of an omelette consists in its plainness. Ask even the Italians. Murry: Ask more especially the French. In my experience the French are a very simple people disguised beneath many layers of deviousness. The Parisian restaurateur takes you in by offering you a great procession of courses, sometimes up to seven. But on inspection each course is very elementary. It is only with the greatest difficulty that the credulous English visitor disabuses himself of his habit of culinary awe, and discovers that what he has been offered is in effect an English dinner stretched out. Lawrence: That is perfectly true. They get nothing right. Even their sex is all frilly undergarments and lascivious longeurs. Take them off, and there’s the same old horseflesh underneath. No wonder the war’s got bogged down in Flanders. It takes those chaps ages to get to the point. Give me the healthy British appetite any time. Katherine: What do I do now? Lawrence: Transfer the mixture to the pan. Katherine: It’s in the pan. Lawrence: Then you should have mixed it in the chamber pot, shouldn’t you? Unless of course you have a basin. (Katherine bangs the fork resolutely on the side of the pan and carries on.) Katherine: And what would Jack’s restaurateur advise as to frying the omelette when one has used up one’s butter ration? Murry: Use lard, I suppose. It’s all we’ve got.

142

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Bugger the Skylarks. Lawrence and Mansfield at War Lawrence: You should acquire some of that new stuff. Margarine it’s called. It’s really awfully convenient in summer. It’s like the modern sex life in essence: easy, quick spreading and utterly tasteless. Kathleen, do not wave your fork at me in that horrendously suggestive manner. Katherine: It’s just a fork you realise, a fork? There are one or two things left which remain mercifully just themselves. Lawrence: Nonsense. It’s a weapon in the sex war. Katherine: Do you want some of this omelette? Lawrence: My dear, I think that you are performing wonderfully. (Suddenly he jumps up with renewed vigour and peers through the little window.) Thank God the rain’s stopped. There’s the most revoltingly full rainbow. This Cornish air reeks of holiness. It makes one want to rejoice with Solomon: ‘The flowers appear upon the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land. The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the wines with the tender grape give a good smell’ (He inhales in mock ecstasy.) Bravo! And what do we have? Omelette fried in lard? (Frieda has put down her knitting in the L.H. house, and, noticing that the rain has finally stopped, ventures outside, where she begins pacing the space between the cottages) Katherine: I’m not surprised Frieda is not joining us. Life for her must be rather like cohabiting with a blunderbuss. Murry: Exciting though. I’m not sure that Frieda always gives Lawrence his due. He lives a life at the very extremity of things. An existence conducted at the very limits of perception will always be prone to disturbance – even downright cataclysm. Lawrence: Don’t worry. I’m only at half cock yet. When I see the dinner, you can count on me discharging. Murry: Remember what the General said: ‘Wait ’til you see the whites of their eggs’. (Lawrence shares this weak joke. They have simply aligned, men against women.) Katherine: I don’t suppose that either of you two would care to assist by setting the covers? Lawrence: In my own house, I invariably do. But am I not a guest? How about you, Murry old man? Shall we show willing? (They set about laying three places.) You know, I’m not sure how atavistic this is, but there still are some tasks I associate with men or with women. Chopping wood,

143

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies for instance: I love chopping wood, especially on a cold morning, the colder the better. Mending fences, plumbing drains, grinding very bitter coffee. Now I ask you is there anything intrinsically less servile in such tasks than beating eggs or darning an apron? I only want people to be sure of themselves. I want no confusion in our Rananim. Murry: Tell that one to the suffragettes. Lawrence: And I don’t want people shrieking at the tops of their voices. Salvation doesn’t come from the head. I want a sort of mutually sustained equity, a true separateness, a diversity in fulfilment. When we are confident and apart, then we’ll come together. Murry: Knives and forks? Lawrence: Well, at any rate distinct, and proud, proud! I wonder if we have any use for spoons? Murry: I don’t expect so. There’s only fruit. Katherine: Well such as it is then, à table! (They settle. Murry places his book on the table. Frieda is timidly peering in at the window.) Katherine: Jack, you’re not going to read? Murry: I don’t need to. I have Lawrence. Well, I can’t anyway. There’s scarcely enough light. Katherine: It hasn’t clouded over again. I thought now we had an extra hour since this Preservation of Daylight Act. Murry: I agree it ought to be lighter. But there’s evidently something louring out there. Katherine: What was that? . . . unless . . . why, good grief, if it isn’t Frieda. Lawrence: Just let her set one foot inside that door and I’ll beat her black and blue. Katherine: But we must ask her in. (Then, hoping that gallantry might prevail where compassion foundered) It’s only manners. Lawrence: Do you want me to leave? (Katherine and Murry exchange nervous glances.) Katherine: Jack’s read at table for as long as I’ve known him. Under all that learning he’s just a swot from the slums trying to catch up.

144

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Bugger the Skylarks. Lawrence and Mansfield at War Every evening in France it was the same; munch, munch, munch; read, read, read. The bookcase in the Villa Pauline was a kind of coloured catalogue of our meals. I don’t know why he didn’t just classify Dostoevsky’s novels according to spillage. He’d got bouillabaisse all over Notes from the Underground. Crime and Punishment was coated in this rather piquant aioli garni. And The Brothers Karamazov were simply drenched in soupe au pistou, poor darlings. Oh, I do feel for her. She must be miserable out there. Lawrence you’ve dropped your fork. Lawrence: I don’t need a fucking fork. (Whereupon he stabs the rest of his omelette with his knife and downs it in one gulp) Katherine: Lawrence, you’re impossible. It was you who started the quarrel. Lawrence: Nobody quotes Shelley in my house, and lives. Katherine: Lawrence, you quoted Shelley, Frieda merely implicated the skylarks. Lawrence: Bugger the skylarks. Katherine: Poor things. Lawrence: Do you see this knife? It’s quite sharp enough. I’ll cut her throat from ear to ear if she comes within a yard of this table. I’ll give you manners. Murry: She must be hungry at least. Come on Lawrence, play the gentleman, there’s a good sort. (At which Lawrence suddenly leaps up from his place, flings open the door and makes a frenetic lunge at Frieda, on whom he rains a shower of blows with both fists, most of which miss.) Lawrence: I’ll give you gentility – top hats – waistcoats – pony tails – grandfather clocks – coming out balls – chaperones – chefs d’orchestre – afternoon tea – and the very best china! Murry: Gracious! (Then Frieda breaks loose and, rushing into the R.H. house, runs round and round the table, hotly pursued by Lawrence.) Frieda: Jack! Kathleen! Protect me! Save me from this abominable man! Lawrence: I’ll give you mink coats and feather boas – peacock tails – duckdown pillows – I’ll give you skylarks and set them up stuffed, see if I won’t.

145

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies Frieda: Erbarme dich meiner! Hab Ebarmen! Lawrence: I’ll scalp you my lady and you’ll look the smarter for it. Get thysen’ a nice wig and plenty of dancing partners. I’ll give you lace and eau de cologne. How about a splash of lavender water to finish you off, my lovely? Frieda: Nein! Nein! (At which he thumps her good and proper. They both drop exhausted into chairs. A long pause, punctuated only by their exhausted breathing.) Katherine: I’d give anything for an olive. . . A green olive. (Another pause) Lawrence: Which Frenchman was it wrote a poem about Christ before his trial, praying in the Olive Grove? Alfred de Vigny was it? Murry: ‘. . . Il se prosterne encore, il attends, il espère. Mais il renonce et dit, ‘Que votre volonté Soit faite et non la mienne, et pour éternité’. Lawrence: That’s it; ‘thy will not mine be done unto Eternity’. Don’t you find that unctuous attitude of Christian resignation rather terrifying? I’m reminded of those Tyrolean wayside crucifixes along the alpine road to Italy. There they hang in naked horror, wills quite sapped, bodies utterly broken. Give me the Old Testament any time; clouds of incense, cedar wood, burnt offerings and good strong anger. Frieda: Lawrence is very often angry with me. . . But you must try to understand him. He is not reasonable as some other men. He is like Moses when the clouds parted. Lawrence: I want clean feelings, none of your mush. You must take it or leave it. (Pushes his plate away.) That was a horrible omelette. Katherine: Do you remember that dinner party we held in Acacia Road, the year before the war? You’d not long returned from San Gaudenzio bringing us a packet of that very fine macaroni one somehow only seems to find in continental shops. Thin and flaky, and quite, quite mild. I had a piece of the very best Wensleydale in the larder, just right for the slyest of white sauces. We even, if I recall correctly, poured in half a pint of cream. I carried it out of the kitchen in style. Then we all sat round the breakfast room table and . . . Frieda: I have had nothing to eat since half past eleven. (At which, slowly, in her schoolgirlish, slightly airy voice, Katherine takes up the Negro spiritual) Go down, Moses,

146

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Bugger the Skylarks. Lawrence and Mansfield at War Way down in Egypt’s land, Tell old Pharaoh To let my people go. . . . Lawrence: (Snapping out of the song-induced reverie) Did anybody say something about fruit? Katherine: It’s only an apple. You can take it with you if you want. Go carefully, though. It’s well past curfew, and we dare not show a lamp. Lawrence: (Making to leave) Come on then, Frieda. (But she is still slumped in pain) So you will stay now? Stay then. I’ll give you half an hour. After that you climb the stonework. Katherine: (Throwing him an apple) Catch! Lawrence: (Surveying it) Such temptation. (Biting meticulously) Did you know that long after death your bite survives? Even in the fossil stage. They could fit homo erectus with dentures. Send her over when you are ready. (Lawrence goes to the door, opens it, and, retaining the bottom corner with his foot, gives Jack a long, inviting stare before retreating to stand outside, left centre, where he remains staring out into the audience. Meanwhile, inside, Katherine lights a hurricane lamp and then starts to wash the plates.) Murry: Remarkable chap, Lawrence in his way. Sometimes I think he’s got the man-woman relation all wrong, but then I look at us all, I look at the whole world we are in retreat from, and I say there must be another solution. He’s very cruel of course, almost thoughtless at times. But then the real harbingers have always had to chop a path. People get hurt. I get hurt, Katherine gets hurt, Frieda. If a man feels strongly, then he feels everything strongly: faith, doubt, resentment, pettiness, everything that there is. Even the way you lay a table. It’s all a kind of grasping out towards a future wholeness the rest of us can’t even see. (Frieda gets up slowly, hugging herself, and, walking to the still open door, exits without speaking. Then, crossing above Lawrence without a word, she retires into the L.H. house.) Katherine: (To Murry) Was all that strictly necessary? Murry: I beg your pardon? Katherine: The little speech. You find a wounded animal, and then you preach to it about some future condition of wholeness. Do you think that Frieda doesn’t know any of the usual excuses? They’re all she’s got to cling on to for pity’s sake. Never mind. I don’t know why I bother.

147

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies Words, words, words. I might as well be living with a scarecrow, all sticks and straw, and up top a swede riddled with wriggling, maggoty ideas. The great abstractions: love, life, suffering, wholeness. And what’s it all mean? You couldn’t frighten a sparrow still less a raven. You can’t even frighten Lawrence, and that is something. Even Frieda can frighten him. Look at you now, our faithful, bandy scarecrow. Except that there is a little flaw somewhere. Somewhere inside all the old clothes one of the sticks is crooked, so with one puff of the wind you’re down; or more likely swaying in quite a different direction. What with one thing and another, you really do give all the little birds quite a thrill, you and your bombast and your patches. (Murry has gone gloomy) Ah, the veil has descended. Well, I’ll leave you. I’ll take the lamp, you can find your own way up. I think that you’ll find that Lawrence is waiting for you out there. (Exit, R.) (Murry walks outside to join Lawrence C. It is by now very dark. The two men remain silent, assessing one another for several seconds.) Lawrence: No moon, just a flicker of stars. I knew you were a night creature. What are you: an owl, a badger? No, no a fox. A lithe, stealthy bastard, a sly thieving . . . and all the hens have fled, they’ve scuttled off to roost and left our sad little foxy to such a spray of loquacity, such tightness of control, but inside just a slugging mess of shingle, an echoing crypt full of tinkering pieties. And what have to guide you but your damp foxy little muzzle, your shy little brush and the tight nibble of your teeth? Fox, foxy. Little critic. Other men’s livelihood, other men’s toil, anything provided you can creep up on it and bloat yourself with wind. What is it, Jack? Do you want to escape, do you? Do you want to scamper over the fields to your cosy hole? Or will you take a stand with me and redeem yourself? Murry: Well, the world needs redeeming. I’ve never doubted that. You had my word, Lawrence. Lawrence: Oh you were never short of words, Jack. But what will our subtle fox do when the words run out? Murry: You had my letters. There’s nothing in them I retract. Lawrence: No, but just a flick of the pen was it, or did you think our actions might bind us together? Look, do you see what I brought away from the supper table? Murry: A knife? You’re welcome to it, Lawrence. We bought a whole set.

148

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Bugger the Skylarks. Lawrence and Mansfield at War Lawrence: Do you remember when we were hiking over the fields last month and I told you something of the old German knights? Long before Germany was Germany, before the rebirth of learning or even the Crusades, they used to take this oath of eternal friendship. They might face all manner of danger, seas might divide them but they’d always share this lasting bond, this Blutbruderschaft, everlastingly. It was quite a simple ritual. Each would bare his arm to the shoulder, and make on little incision just above the wrist. Then they’d clasp hands, mingle blood, and swear loyalty ‘til death. From that moment on they’d be blood brothers, Blutsbruder, always. So quick, so neat, yet so final. It hardly need sting at all. Well, my arm’s bare. Murry: Don’t come near me! Lawrence: Jack. So squeamish? Murry: I’m not a man’s man, Lawrence. Lawrence: Oh, Katherine will fend for herself. She’s strong. Murry: Strong, yes. Unreachable, maybe. But unbreakable, no. You may not believe this, Lawrence, but she has great need of me now. Lawrence: She used not to have. She’s like a glacier, man! Murry: Oh, there was a time when she seemed invincible. I dare say. I always used to think that there was even something a little splendid about her bouts of cruelty. But since last year her very callousness seems like a cry for help. You remember Chummie, don’t you? ‘An unreasonable young man’ I recall your saying. When he first arrived from New Zealand the two of them used to sit under the pear tree at Acacia Road swapping childhood memories, rather like lovers. ‘Do you remember sitting on our pink garden seat?’, she’d say. ‘I shall never forget that seat’, he’d reply. ‘Where is it now? Shall we be allowed to sit on it in heaven?’ It was then for the first time in my life that I felt a tight knot of jealousy under my diaphragm that grew and grew ‘til it seemed to fill my whole chest. What in God’s name for? Chummie? A New Zealand I’d never seen, childhood? Then two weeks after Chummie took up his commission, a thin black-edged cable was delivered at our door. She didn’t utter a sound as she read it. But that very evening we held a dinner party in the front room. Kass was all boisterous gaiety until, just before the dessert was brought in, somebody asked after her brother. ‘Oh’, she said, in a queer, hard way, ‘blown to pieces’, and carried on eating. I thought I’d lost her forever then. When we set out for Provence she appeared perfectly contained, but one evening on the

149

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies rocks at Cassis with a stiff breeze blowing off the sea, something quite remarkable happened. I was facing away from her when suddenly the wind seemed to intensify into a high-pitched shriek. I turned round and saw that her whole, dear face had collapsed into such a torrent of grief as I couldn’t hope to reach. She’s not over it yet. The cynicism’s a pose, of course. Lawrence: Why are you telling me this? Murry: To let you know that there are certain places to which even you can’t follow us, Lawrence. Not yet, anyway. Lawrence: I used to wonder what you ever saw in Wig. She can’t write, you know. Murry: Oh, but she can now. Lawrence: You intrigue me. All those cheap emotions in German hotels? That cosmopolitan pot pourri. Murry: You haven’t read the recent stuff. She’s started to recreate New Zealand inside her head. I’ve only heard fragments, mind, and hasn’t done a thing since she’s been here. But she did read me the beginning of a long story by the fireside in Bandol. It’s all very vague now, but I distinctly recall these clamouring childish voices and then suddenly a great hush descending so that you could hear the great antipodean emptiness brooding at the back of them, a sort of immense, untempted chaos. She hasn’t perfected it yet, but it’s coming. I tell you, something’s given in that girl. Lawrence: Well I never. Wig. (Suddenly passionate) Oh, but we can do without them. Damn it, we’re finer than them! Murry: Than who exactly? Lawrence: Women, women. In love or out of love. The delicious intimacy, the lace and the soul baring. It’s so obtuse. You’re such a Victorian, Jack. Murry: And you I suppose are a Georgian. Lawrence: No, yes . . . Well, at least I’m a man. Jack, I need you. Murry: Now, look here! I can’t explain now. Perhaps your Blutbruderschaft is too much for me. I told you, I need to think things through.

150

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Bugger the Skylarks. Lawrence and Mansfield at War Lawrence: Think! Think! Do you ever let that cursed front slide? Even your confessions are a sort of hurdy-gurdy. All I ever get is that cold glance of introspection and the odd meaningful shudder. Sometimes one would think from the look of you that you were a man possessed, but, no, it’s just the old, tight cerebrum looking into itself. You’re too cold for a fish. . . You’re ice, man! Murry: Now look here! I’m sorry. I came here in good faith. Lawrence: Ach! Listen to it. The croaking British honour: ‘good faith’. Murry: If I love you, you know that I love you. Isn’t that enough? Lawrence: No, no, no. I hate your love, hate it. You’re an obscene bug sucking my life away. Murry: It’s all I’m prepared for, don’t you see? We can discuss it in the morning. (Turning towards R.H. house.) Lawrence: Oh, run away and play. Run away to your woman and sob into her skirts for all I care. You’re not anchored, man, you’re drowning. Murry: Look, that’s scarcely fair. Goodnight. Sorry. (Murry makes for the door of the R.H. house, and, finding it locked, bangs loudly at it.) (In reply, we can just hear Katherine’s voice singing across the night) Go down, Moses, Way down in Egypt’s land, Tell old Pharaoh, To let my people go. . . (Meanwhile, Lawrence has entered L.H. house, and, as Murry stands outside helpless, his voice resounds in accusation.) Lawrence’s Voice: Jack is killing me! Jack is killing me! (Murry just stands, pulled between the two voices.) Fade

9. The following morning (In the living room of the L.H. house Lawrence is sitting alone. Carefully, and with immense dexterity, he is engaged in sewing a wine-coloured band onto the rim of a lady’s wide-brimmed straw hat. In the R.H. house, Murry stands disconsolately holding an opened letter. Meanwhile Katherine is dragging at the end of a cigarette and simultaneously berating him.)

151

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies Katherine: The country’s far lusher on the leeward side. We can’t stay here forever. Look, I’ve smoked through fifty packets of Woodbines, stomped across this little floor ‘til I’m dizzy, washed up, done my hair, quarrelled endlessly with Lawrence, worn out ten pairs of stockings and ruined an omelette nature. Does that strike you as a writer’s diary? Murry: A writer’s journal is full of blank entries. That is part of the pattern. Katherine: Bosh! Oh look at that jacket. It’s got marmalade all down it. And you’re missing a button. Come here. You can put that letter down. I’ll answer it. (She gestures and Murry removes his jacket, holding it out to her. Then she sits down, takes out her workbox and begins to sew, her movements as far as possible syncopating with Lawrence’s in the other house.) I suppose that this is what he would call women’s work. Murry: You didn’t honestly believe in all that twaddle last night? Domestically Lawrence is the most competent man I know. Much better than myself. Katherine: That wouldn’t be difficult. Murry: Ask Huxley. Ask anybody who’s ever stayed with them. I’ll tell you one of your problems, my girl. You bait all of your friends everlastingly, including me. Then you totally fail to notice when one of them happens to bait you back. Are you sure that button’s the right size? Katherine: It’s one of mine. It will have to do. I’m not sewing a uniform. Murry: Sometimes I could almost wish that you were. This war’s fast turning into the most glorious opportunity for simply kicking one’s heels. One could write, of course, were one minded to. But soon there’ll be nobody left to read. I’ve half a mind to take a job. Something’s just come up in Civvy Street by the way. Katherine: In where? Murry: In Whitehall. Intelligence to be more precise. (Katherine stares at him uncomprehendingly, and then laughs.) Go on, mock. I do possess my share of intelligence, you know. One could have been a don, one realises, had one so chosen. Katherine: Well, why didn’t one then? All that high-sounding nonsense about ‘not wanting to sit for the schools’. You’d have been perfect.

152

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Bugger the Skylarks. Lawrence and Mansfield at War Terrifying poor little boy undergraduates out of your rooms, and then sidling up to one of your softer female charges over a Variorum Edition of Ovid. If it wasn’t for your poor sailor’s legs you’d even look the part. Oh so cosy, so lecherously safe. Murry: I have to go up to London soon in any case, to discuss possibilities. Katherine: Could that possibly be after we’ve seen the house? Murry: We’re not moving? Katherine: We most surely are. I’ll write back and confirm the appointment this morning. (In the L.H. house Lawrence rises, inspects his handiwork with some satisfaction, then, placing it devilishly on a tray, carries it upstairs to exit L.) Murry: Isn’t that just a bit precipitate? Katherine: I can’t stomach this Rananim idea a moment longer. Can you imagine what it might be like if Lawrence really got his way? Full of pink, freckled angular young men with red beards roaming the countryside in dressing gowns – ’Brother, how are your loins of darkness?’ Like a sort of secular seminary. (In the L.H. house Lawrence reappears and busies himself preparing a snack for Frieda.) I just can’t carry on listening to it all. There was a time, not so long ago, when I flattered myself into believing that I possessed, if not talent, then at least a tiny habit of observation, that behind all the clouds of chatter I could sometimes see things just as they were: the sun jumping at dawn, the collusion of trees, the net of all this natural loveliness. I shall never see sex in plants, sex in running brooks, sex in stones, sex in everything. Aren’t the stones enough? I remember a small girl awake once at five in the morning by a stream in New Zealand. She was watching the sunrise and listening to a symphony of light. First a trembling flute, then a flight of oboes, a desolate violin, a stalking ’cello, a sobbing horn – all the instruments one by one until the very pebbles at her feet were singing. She thought: now I’ve utterly lost myself, and of course she was quite, quite right. That rapture wasn’t sexual, Jack. It wasn’t even her. This is ready by the way. (She hands the jacket to Murry, who begins awkwardly to try it on.) Murry: Lawrence only calls it sex. It’s just his way of explaining the web of sensation at the very base of life.

153

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies Lawrence: (Calling off to Frieda, L) Do you want some of these kidneys. . . . What was that? (Receiving no answer, he shrugs. During Murry’s next speech, he finishes preparing the snack, takes up a tray L. and returns.) Murry: You know sometimes you quite take me aback with your darned colonial naïveté. You almost talk as if you’d spent the major part of your existence floating in pure space. Don’t you ever feel the weight of social life around you? Did you never sense the sheer oppressiveness of England? Where’s the other sleeve? Look, we’ve been running away from ourselves these three hundred years. Ever since Cromwell blundered in with his bullies, banishing images, banishing dancing, flirtation, every shred of mere fun. And now where are we? Tied to a treadmill that pulls us round and round and round and into the very jaws of death eventually. Do you know how many hours a day Lawrence’s father had to work? Dragging a Davy Lamp and pickaxe through choking corridors not much wider than this sleeve, if only I could find it. When he came out of a winter evening it must have been like a badger emerging from blackness into blackness. What chance did he ever have to hear your symphony? Don’t you see his son has just switched on a torch in the dark? Drat this sleeve! For Christ’s sake we need him. Katherine: Let me help. Well, I don’t need him. I don’t need any of your hectoring voices. I just need to sit still and be me. I’ll tell you where the real weight is. It’s here in this room with me. It’s next door in that factory of sex logic. It’s the churning of the male mind on and on ’til you grow sick of the very sentences. What are we crouching inside for anyway? It’s the most gorgeous day for once. That rainstorm must have cleared the air. (She goes to the door and wearily opens it.) Oh for a little peace and true emptiness. This place seemed deserted when we came – when was it? – six weeks ago. Now the very silence is ringing like a rusty tin can. (In the L.H. house Frieda has come downstairs, still huddled in her shawl. She does not speak to Lawrence.) Lawrence: You said that you’d eat it in bed. (No response) So you’ll take it outside now? The tray is still on the washstand upstairs. (He goes off far L. to fetch it. She opens the door and stands on the threshold, opposite Katherine.) Frieda: It’s a pity about the foxgloves. They used to stand so proud. Now they’re bowing to the sun.

154

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Bugger the Skylarks. Lawrence and Mansfield at War Katherine: It won’t put off the bees. They’re still foraging. Bzz, bzz. Is one supposed to find that sound soothing? Suddenly everything seems to torture me. (Shouting back into the house) Are you coming? Jack? Murry: No, I think I’ll just answer that letter. You know. Katherine: Do then. It’s better that way, I think. Frieda: Lawrence has made me some lamb’s kidneys and some coffee. He seems to think that I’m an invalid. Lawrence is so practical when one is out of sorts. I shall eat my sorrow away. We left the chairs out overnight. They’re still damp after the downpour. This one is not too bad. (Sits. Then to Katherine.) It’s not the bees’ fault. They are simply collecting their nectar. They are not responsible for your feelings. (Lawrence brings a tray with a plate of grilled kidneys and two cups and places it on a second chair, which he then pulls up for his wife.) Lawrence: I’ve put a cup for your friend. Sorry I can’t join you. I think I’ll just take my work up the hillside. It’s pleasant there, and one can enjoy the ocean so much more without the obstruction of people. (Exits through L.H. house.) Katherine: Lawrence is under a cloud again. Frieda: Do not concern yourself. He will join us when the spirit moves. We are not all so gregarious. Do you want some coffee? (Pours) Sometimes Lawrence will write in the upstairs room, sometime behind us on the hill, sometimes along the cliffs or in a field, his fountain pen just flying over the paper, and always alone. Then he will come down and tell us what he has written. Katherine: How is Lawrence’s book? Frieda: I never know. He carries on. It is a strange title: Women in Love. Katherine: Has Lawrence suddenly become an expert on that subject? Frieda: Well, he has me. Katherine: Really. I thought that you had him. (Accepting coffee) It’s a matter of control isn’t it. Essentially? Or a matter of freedom, depending on your end of the telescope. Sometimes I think that Lawrence diminishes you. It has driven me almost wild with anger. But then I think again and I see that in a way you too diminish Lawrence. There are times when he seems to shrink a couple of inches every time

155

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies you look at him. If it wasn’t for his famous trousers, you’d think him smaller every day. Frieda: You say many harsh things. Katherine: I think . . . that maybe it’s because I’ve begun to see people just a little bit more clearly. Really see them. A person’s as individual as a cloud – or a flower. Somehow I can’t think of anyone in relation to anybody else no . . . at least not yet. Did Jack ever talk to you about Chummie? You know it wasn’t until he came over to Europe that time that I had any sense of him at all. When I’d left Wellington last he was just an obscene little boy with a runny nose, a real gamin. Then suddenly two years ago into our house in St John’s Wood strode this slightly impertinent young man with a sparkle in his eye and a spring in his step. I was almost attracted to him before I perceived – the relation. And no sooner had I adjusted myself than he was packed off to the front and blown to pieces in this hideous war. While instructing troops for hand grenade practice . . . The obscenity of it. Frieda: And then? Katherine: So I thought . . . Here’s only one thing to do. I’ve only just discovered him and it’s too early for farewells. I’ll just have to create him again, build up him and everything we shared in every half-remembered detail: the sun on the playroom table, the rustle of Granny’s skirts, the odd silences of thwarted aunts. And if I can do that honestly, then perhaps I can restore that brief time of togetherness, sort of gather it together and fold it in like a pastry. It’s something I’ve only just begun to learn, I think. Frieda: I think. Katherine: Yes? Frieda: That there are moments when you are really very beautiful. (An affectionate pause. A fragile intimacy has been formed. The two women smile at one another, cautiously. This is their last chance.) Katherine: Possibly. It really is the most beautiful day. Just feel the sun on your face. I love the summer. Everything else is so dreary. Oh, the smell of the grass. Frieda: But people can hold together. They can even with difficulty learn to love. I do believe that. Katherine: Hold together, yes. Learn to love one another, yes. But not in Lawrence’s way. If intimacy comes at all, it will come naturally, like

156

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Bugger the Skylarks. Lawrence and Mansfield at War a summer day. No struggle, no stress, no need to plan or argue or conspire. Lawrence is like a megalomaniac gardener; he thinks that he can force the flowers to grow. People will love one another or not as may be – there’s no point in trying to make them. (Pause. They are still assessing one another. It is the very last chance.) Frieda: Look, here is a butterfly. Butterfly, butterfly, such a very odd word. This one’s the colour of marmalade. Katherine: It’s a Red Admiral. We have them in New Zealand too. Frieda: Such logic, a marmalade butterfly, and an Admiral? See, he’s landed on your saucer. The poor confused creature. Stretch out your hand. Sometimes you can make them walk up your arm. Try. Katherine: What a perfectly possessed little gentleman. Like a miniature Alderman in all his finery. Oh yes, we’re quite the strutting potentate aren’t we my pretty darling? I wonder how a drop of coffee would suit you. (Tipping her tea-spoon against her forearm) You could do with a drink now couldn’t you, my lovely? Frieda: Don’t! (Realising one important fact about Katherine.) You’re merciless. Katherine: Oh you needn’t worry yourself. I don’t torment human beings. Only Jack sometimes, and he’s not really human. (Pause. Katherine has destroyed the truce beyond any possibility of redemption.) Frieda: Why did you have to come across to us last night? I did not think it so necessary. Katherine: I told you. We needed a bucket. Sorry, I needed a bucket. Frieda: We were going early to bed. Katherine: Is that so? Frieda: So you did know. Yes. (Unnoticed to either of them, Lawrence appears upstage between the two houses, carrying an immense manuscript, the first draft of Women in Love. He just stands there, like Moses bearing the tablets.) Katherine: Is the poor little Hausfrau accusing me of something? Frieda: Oh, you. You play too many games. I don’t understand what you want. The English are so deceitful. Katherine: But, dear I’m a colonial, don’t you know.

157

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies Frieda: As I said, the English. (Murry has now finished the letter, and moves to the open door. He can see Lawrence, and Lawrence can see him. The women are still unconscious of their presence.) Katherine: (Rising, restless) I could never abide winter games. At my London school they played hockey, hacking at one another’s ankles with sticks. It’s not for me. Give me the summer, and swimming! Frieda: Are your ankles so frail? You hurt so easily? I am very surprised. Katherine: Jack likes my ankles. He says they remind him of a faun: a very tawdry faun, it must be said. I’m not really at all beautiful you know, thanks for the compliment. Were you ever beautiful? (Pause) Really, you’re quite impossible to talk to. I wonder Lawrence puts up with you. It must be like trying to lift a hundredweight sack of potatoes every day of your life. So heavy, so earth-bound. Oh, this silence. I seem to be kicking my heels against it every day. Your butterfly’s gone. (She looks at Frieda’s stiff indignant figure and snorts.) To think we all ever planned to be cosy and live together as friends. The thought is too ridiculous. I’m going for a walk. No, I’m not. There isn’t anywhere left to see. I’m going inside. (Making for the R.H. house she sees Jack.) Hello. (Then following his gaze, she sees Lawrence and realises he must have overheard the conversation.) Oh God! Lawrence: So you are leaving. (Silent pause.) Katherine: Tell him, Jack. Murry: Awfully sorry, old man. Katherine dislikes the damp. (Lawrence drops the entire manuscript.) Lawrence: Well, that’s alright then, isn’t it? Perfectly acceptable. As long as I know. It’s quite convenient really. It’s hard to build a house when you’ve people constantly trampling through the foundations. It’s apt to give one the impression that one is working on an archaeological site. We are not yet Pompeii quite, I think. Frieda: (On her hands and knees, gathering pages) What a mess you have made Lorenzo. Lawrence: Where are you moving to, if I might be permitted to ask? Katherine: There’s a house on the South side, near Mylor. It’s dryer than this. We may take it, at least until the autumn. Jack’s applied for a sinecure in Civvy Street, as he calls it.

158

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Bugger the Skylarks. Lawrence and Mansfield at War Lawrence: Doing your bit for the war effort, Jack? Keeping the home fires burning, and all that. Murry: Somebody has to do it. Frightfully sorry. Lawrence: As the executioner said to Lady Jane Grey at the block, I suppose. Be sure that you test the edge of your axe first, Jack old man. I’d hate to put you to the trouble of taking a second swing. It might at least look better if you performed an action cleanly for once. Murry: If you’ll excuse me, I feel a little poorly. (He dashes for the privy, and bolts the door after him.) Frieda: These pages are in no order. Lawrence, you have not even numbered them. What is this chapter now: ‘Gladiatorial’? Lawrence: (Coming to latrine door) Go on then. Puke your life away. And make sure you empty the can. Oh, you’ll bury yourself, you’ll bury yourself in the dung and the snow. The good earth’s too pleasant for you, you must rot after your kind, ice-resistant, ice-perfect. You’re not a man, you’re an obscene sort of machine – endless cycles, endless fluctuations, energy locked into itself, blue, cold, beyond any true intimacy. Pooh, how you weary me! Katherine: There are different kinds of loyalty, Lawrence. Lawrence: Are there really? And to whom, pray, are you loyal, to what are you bounden? To your little talent. To your frail independence, to your pocket handkerchief soul. I wanted the earth to rise and exult! Katherine: Well, it hasn’t. Isn’t that just amazing? Something for once resists the will of Mr. D. H. Lawrence. The earth remains rock solid. The clouds blow aloft regardless. The flowers stir in their beds, they have their season, and then they keel and die. And it was all here before anyone cared to describe it, and it will outlast us all for ever so long. Lawrence: It is not the seeds that I am worried about. It is us. This smudge on the hill-side, this toiling ugliness. (He breaks down in helpless weeping with his head against the side of the latrine hut.) I didn’t want it to be like this. I didn’t want. . . Katherine: There’s no time to talk now. Jack’s written off to the landlady, and we’re to see the cottage tomorrow. We’ll have to go into

159

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies St. Ives and see if we can get rid of some of that furniture. We don’t want to have to carry it up hill and down dale. Unless you want it? Frieda: No, no. It would be too much like a funeral. You had better go and post your letter. (Katherine calls briefly into R.H. cottage to collect letter, and then exits C.) (Walking over to Lawrence, and cradling his sobbing head against her thigh.) Oh, mein Herz, mein Herz!. Lay your head on my lap now. Take a deep breath, yes? Blow all the terrible tears away. You must not disturb our poor Phoenix lying in his nest so softly. Perhaps he knows in his dreaming what mother can tell, that inside each and every Tristan lies a baby. Others will come to your Rananim, and they too will fly away. When the rain descends and the storms tear across the sun they will pick up their wings and seek new breeding grounds. Only our poor Phoenix will stay with us and slumber all his days away. Oh mein Lieber, mein kleiner lieber Dummkopf ! Fade

10. Autumn of the same year (On the washing line hang Lawrence’s trousers once again. A sound of hacking comes from behind the R.H. house. Out of the R.H. door emerges Frieda with a basketful of breadcrumbs which she starts shedding on the ground.) Frieda: Lorenzo! Whenever will you finish that fence? (More hacking) It is time for elevenses now. Are you coming? (Round the end of the R.H. house lopes Lawrence, bare to the waist, below which he wears a very threadbare pair of corduroys. He is sweating profusely.) Lawrence: This is what I call work. Only fit for light tasks indeed! Bugger the Germans. I’ve got my hands full with these cursed Cornish sheep. Do you know we had a good two beds of purple runners before those bleaters got at them. And they’ve devoured every one of the broad beans. Blackthorn and gorse won’t keep them out. It needs an armed battalion. Frieda: But the poor little lambs. They are so sweet in the spring. I could cuddle them close to me, the dear little things. (She goes into R.H. house.) Lawrence: They’d scratch your eyes out, make no mistake. I’ve no patience with their meekness. They’re the stupidest, greediest, most persistent creatures in the whole animal dominion. Lamb of God

160

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Bugger the Skylarks. Lawrence and Mansfield at War indeed! If I’d have been that Jesus fellow, I’d as soon as been called the little Pig of God. Then at least I’d have been served up decently smoked. Frieda: (Coming out and handing Lawrence a plate and cup) Lorenzo. Still so fond of breakfast? Lawrence: Oh, I’ll not participate in the feast, mind. I’d as soon be eaten. Then at least I could sit on the plate and grin at you like any true suckling pig. Oh wouldn’t I just love to smirk at the lot of you from between my trotters! Frieda: Then Lawrence I would tweak you by the snout, just watch me! Lawrence: You would and all. I’d trust you. I’d trust you to serve my tongue up cold. Well, I’d better be getting on. These new corduroys are torn, by the way. Frieda: Never mind. Now that you grow all our vegetables, see how flourishing we are. You have two pairs of breeches now. (Points to the washing line and as she does so, notices the L.H. house which they have abandoned.) How desolate our old cottage looks. It is full of cobwebs all over again. It must think we’ve forgotten all about it. Lawrence: It was only sense to move in over here. They’d paid the rent. Besides, you wanted this one. Frieda: Oh but Lawrence, I thought I could have the tower all to myself. And now you have moved in with your typing. Tappity tap all day and you even lock the door. There are so many piles of paper on the floor I couldn’t even get inside. Lawrence: The book’s finished by the way. Nobody will publish it. Frieda: Then couldn’t you move out now and let me have my tower? I could climb right up inside and, when you were gardening out at the back I could stand and wave to all the ships. Then nobody would float onto the rocks, and no poor boats would drown. Lawrence: . . . And you’d get arrested for signalling to enemy shipping. I’ll stay right where I am. (Exit) Frieda: Oh, but I could love my own tower, my very own. I could stand on top of it and watch the clouds elbowing past, all tangleweed. I could stand above this mess forever. When the policemen came and went, I could ignore them, just ignore them. And there’d be no more wars; all the soldiers would be toy ones, so upright and so tiny. There’d be

161

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms029.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies no need for rainbows then. I’d reach across the whole earth myself, so steadfast and bright. And if Mr. Shelley’s skylark chose to come and call on me, I wouldn’t mind him. I’d just watch him soaring aloft ’til he lost himself in the broad blue forever. Silly, silly skylark! (To Lawrence) They never collected their moody chairs. . . People come and go, feelings, mysteries. Adonai! Adonai! How long, oh Lord, how long? Slow Fade THE END

162

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms030.tex

CREATIVE WRITING

The Little House Kirsty Gunn You could see right inside the little house. Coming down the street and stopping at the gate, there it was, set off to the side of the garden beside a big rhododendron bush covered with shocking pink blooms the size of a man’s fist. That might have prevented some people looking. But, Kassie realised, straight away, you could still easily see through the windows just by standing there. The flowers only made it seem at first that you might be private. She saw everything from the street that first day when she arrived – before she even opened the gate. There was the sitting room with the table and its vase of twigs and blossom, and the sofa with the needlepoint cushions that someone long ago had sat down and stitched, point by point, a pattern of hydrangeas and pansies and roses on a background of dark blue wool. There too was the tiny hall with the fanlight front door and the bedroom just beyond it. . . And that bedroom! It was like a doll’s house bedroom, perfectly square with a double bed set right in the middle, just like the bed she and Nani and Little Si used to snuggle up into at night. Goodnight, honey. Shhh. Not a word. ‘You’ll settle in quickly’ the neighbour had said when Kassie had gone around next door to get the key. ‘You do this kind of thing a lot, I hear.’ The woman looked at her closely but Kassie had turned away. ‘The McKays told me about you’ the woman continued. ‘They’re not the first people whose house you’ve looked after, so I understand. You’ll be used to keys and how the washing machine works’ she said, ‘all that. . . ’ Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 2 (2010): 163–170 DOI: 10.3366/E2041450110000302 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

163

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms030.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies Though Kassie hadn’t replied she just carried on talking. ‘But if there’s anything I can do, or anything –’ ‘Don’t worry’ Kassie turned back to her then, smiled, putting her hand out for the key. ‘I’ll be fine. You’re right. I am used to strange places. House-sitting, looking after people’s cats. . . It is a kind of a job for me.’ And in a way that was true. She’d done this a few times maybe – when friends were away and didn’t want their home left empty – moved in for a couple of weeks, kept the heating running, had lights going on and off to show outsiders that there was somebody there. People liked their houses lived in that way, didn’t they? When they couldn’t be there themselves? Especially in the winter months. It would be bad for the house, they often said, talking about it as though it was a child or someone else who needed protecting. A house shouldn’t get damp or dark or lonely and often, yes, there were cats or birds or fish or guinea pigs that needed looking after as well. But there was no cat at the little house. And the next door neighbour really was right next door, and it would have been quite easy for her, like looking over a part of her own house and garden, to keep an eye on things at the McKays. So there was no reason, really, for Kassie to be there – and in a part of her, deep inside where she kept all her secrets, she knew that too. But Sandra McKay had told her a couple of weeks ago that she’d be going abroad with her daughters and Kassie was someone who needed – what was that old fashioned phrase – a bolthole? A port in a storm? So she’d just asked, point blank, hadn’t she? If she could come? Asking straight out if, for a while, it would be possible for her to stay. Hardly a career then, though she may as well let the woman next door believe that, but something else, something she – that word again from before – ‘needed.’ So she’d taken the key and let herself in. And the place was charming. Despite it being all onto the street like that. It was exactly as Sandra had described it in her email – tiny, absolutely. With everything you might need but in miniature, it seemed – even the fireplaces with their dainty little iron grates were dressed out with kindling that looked like matchsticks, and with small evenly sized balls of coal that sat tidily in a pile like black fruit in a wicker basket all ready to be added to the fire and lit by elves or fairies

164

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms030.tex

The Little House in the middle of the night. Truly, that was how it felt, and just like being at her grandmother’s again, when she and her little brother used to have holidays in that house of hers up north – because hadn’t that house always seemed magic, too? That it was somehow shrunk to the size of a dolls house with everything perfect and small? That you might close your eyes and – puff! The whole room would come alive with the tinkling sound of a toy piano, the fire leaping in the grate and a tiny party taking place in the little sitting room, all the dolls dressed up in their finest clothes and arranged around the room as though they were talking together, dancing, having fun. They used to play those games at Nani’s all the time, the dolls house games. Her and Little Si pretending they were tiny and lived in a tiny house and other children, big grown up children, were there to play with them, tell them what they had to do. They’d be waking up in the morning and everything would be laid out like a dolls house morning – with little bowls and little plates and a wardrobe full of dolls house clothes. Then laid down in a dolls house bed at night and some nights not snuggling with Nani but, just like a doll, lying very, very still . . . Goodnight, honey. Eyes wide open in the dark because dolls eyes don’t shut. But enough of that silliness. All that was a long time ago, when she and her brother were small, before their parents had moved abroad and then they never saw Nani again. And just because, Kassie thought, this house now reminded her of those far away game-playing days, it didn’t necessarily mean she would feel at home here, did it? Didn’t necessarily mean she would plan to stay so long? It was simply a bolthole, remember – and that was exactly the phrase she would use with people if they asked her. ‘This is just somewhere for me to live for a bit while I take stock’ she would say. ‘Get myself sorted out. No reason to make any more of it than that.’ Because how many times had she done that in her life anyway? Picked herself up from one place and gone on to the next? You could say that it had started when she was a child, with all her parents’ moving about, that house of her grandmother’s, the last place where she and her brother had ever stayed for any length of time – and even that hadn’t lasted very long. So yes, moving on, moving away. . . What she was doing now was just the same as all those other times. She didn’t even need to commit to

165

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms030.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies the whole winter here, either, if she didn’t want to – Sandra had said that too. It wasn’t as though the place would disintegrate into a pile of kindling if Kassie were to leave before she and the girls got home again. ‘You just make it work for you, darling’ Sandra had said. ‘As long as you want. The house is empty. And sure, I don’t want it getting lonely. But if it doesn’t suit you or you want to do something else I can always get the Ryans next door to pop in every now and then. I don’t want you to feel that you have to be there. God forbid. You do exactly what you want.’ But what did she want? Kassie? That was the problem. For it seemed harder and harder to make decisions, to make any plans at all. And life wasn’t exactly full of other people helping her along the way. So where would she go next? What would she do? Of course she’d got rid of the lease on the last place, after what had happened it was obvious she could no longer stay there – but now? After this? Really, she didn’t know, she didn’t have the first idea. And perhaps people like Sandra McKay understood that, too, and even the next door neighbour talking on at her the way she had. . . Because everyone could see by now, everyone could. . . That somehow she had become, Kassie had, the sort of woman who would always be unsure – the reason she couldn’t talk much to people because of that, because there were no decisions, no thoughts about her life and therefore there was nothing much to say. Because. . . Who was she in the end? It was as if she had never known. Only that she needed someone, perhaps, to tell her, like playing a game, that now she was to go here, then here and here. Just like in a game, you tell the playthings what to do. Goodnight, honey. . . But not that. Shhh. Not ever that. Even so, she’d walked through the rooms that day, hadn’t she, when she’d moved in, as though this house at least may make her feel settled for a time. For there was something here. . . Something. . . About the familiarity of it meant that those other things that had happened. . .

166

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms030.tex

The Little House To her, to her brother. . . Well, just let the tiny rooms here remind her of just how easy it could be to forget about all that. Because look, she wanted to tell Little Si now if only he was here for her to tell him: Remember how easy it used to be to forget what happened in the dark when you just wake up the next morning and play? With the house around us and the light coming in so beautifully through all dollhouse-size windows. Of course we can forget! Of course! If only, Kassie had thought, she could send him a picture, to show him how much this place she was staying in now really was like Nani’s, how she’d seen it from the first moment when she’d looked in, looking clear through the sitting room and hall into that big double bed. . . Because he would have understood, of course. Her little brother would have. That feeling of the window looking though to the bed. He would have had the feeling too, right down to the doors and mantelpieces and the kinds of windows and blinds. . . That everything was known here, that it was familiar. They would have all been built at the same time, she would have told him, these workmen’s houses – and no different whether they were in the country or the town, up north at their grandmother’s or down here. . . They would all have the same arrangement of practical little rooms with heavy doors to shut tight against the drafts and the outside weather. They would all have the same sized kitchens with a lean to roof and the cast iron coal stove in the corner, the window to the vegetable patch beyond. And that could be a lovely feeling, couldn’t it? That feeling of being home again? In Nani’s lovely house that could be shrunk to a doll’s house size house if you made yourself believe it, so you shut the front of it closed when you were finished playing, and no one knew what the games were. . . Shhh. . . And you would never tell. Kassie wondered how Sandra managed, actually, with the place being so very small – to keep everything tidy the way she did, living there with all her books and papers and with the two girls. Even the children’s room, when she looked into it, had the appearance of ordered composure that marked the rest of the house, the arrangement of toys on the pink and white bedspread and on the shelves as though they’d just been played with – as if, Kassie thought, just before going off to Europe with their mother, Alexandra and Elizabeth had set out all their things in such a way so that someone might peep their head in the door exactly as Kassie had done and see everything set out and lovely, and everything in its place.

167

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms030.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies It had never been like that at Nani’s anyway. That part was different at least, Kassie thought. When she and Little Si had been playing there would be a line of untidiness going from one room to the next. . . Everywhere you looked, toys and crayons and glue. . . Because they didn’t care about it, did they? Nani didn’t care? Where she left her sewing or her gardening things. . . She didn’t care about that any more than where they had last left their scissors and tape and all their cutting up papers and their paints. Everything could just be found anywhere in that house of hers. Kassie remembered once a bowl of flour in the bathroom where their grandmother had started making scones in the kitchen but had carried the bowl through with her to reply to something Si had called out from the bath. Could she come in now? Because he was crying. There was something he couldn’t stop thinking about, he said, a scary thing, and couldn’t she just get into the bath with them now? Make it better? And hadn’t she just done that, too? Put the bowl down by the hand basin, taken off her clothes and let herself down into the warm sudsy water with them? ‘It’s alright, darling’ she had said, saying it to both of them. Though she hadn’t been able to change what had happened, take the thing in his mind away. Still. . . ‘You’re safe now’ she had said. ‘Nobody can hurt you now.’ That had happened on a winter’s afternoon not unlike the winter afternoon when Kassie had moved in. Three o’clock and a grey sky close to the windows and the rain starting down. . . And as she had stood, Kassie had, in the borrowed room and the past with all its games and tiny rooms was big around her and there was nothing she could do to stop it coming for her, nothing, she was so quiet and so still that she could have been a little dainty smiling dressed up doll herself, not speaking, not moving her body or her face at all. Keeping that secret part of herself deep in, so it wouldn’t leap out and spoil things, wouldn’t cry out. No wonder she never saw her brother now, hadn’t seen him such a long, long time. Everyone needs to find their own way of keeping the secrets safe and he couldn’t do it then, little boy – it’s how their parents found out in the end, what used to happen up there in Nani’s house those nights with wide awake eyes and the window looking in and Nani not in bed to snuggle up with them. . . But he had done it by now, hadn’t he? Little Si? Now that he was married and had children of his own and had gone somewhere to live that he would never have to see Kassie or anyone who could remind him of anything that happened all those years ago. So how crazy for her to be thinking of sending him a picture of this place. As if he would ever want to know – about the little rooms and the gaping bed. He probably would have made

168

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms030.tex

The Little House himself forget in the way she too might have forgotten were it not for that thing happening last month, what happened then and the way he said shhh too afterwards, that man, like the other man used to say when they were children, the one who came and stood outside the bedroom window and tapped on the glass, enormous, with enormous hands, and Nani would get up from bed and let him in. . . It all came back to Kassie, all these thoughts, when she was in the bed in the little house at night, how there were things here that were the same, but not the same. The rhododendron bush banging against the side of the house in a high wind at night while she read or tried to sleep. The colours of those fierce blooms at the window by day, as though wanting her to notice them and remember. It was like all the past was back – about children and houses and being safe, about how you could be inside and snuggled up but the house itself would be open to the elements – to anything that could happen. The windows looking out into the dark garden, or there might be someone out there looking in. Night after night it came back to her. All exposed through the windows of the little house and, as her time staying there went on and though Kassie thought she was getting used to it, of being so open to the world and not protected, still she could feel the secret part of herself becoming more and more afraid, crouched in the corner of herself as though she herself was a little house trying to protect herself but the windows could see into all the insides of the rooms so there was nowhere to hide. Sometimes at night, as she lay in the bed, she felt as though it was her outside in the dark garden amongst the thrashing bushes in all the rain and looking in at herself like at a doll that’s been left inside the dolls house at night. One night she had a dream. It would have been after she had been in the house for two weeks – but the weather still wintry and unchanged, the wind blowing up hard out of the hills every night. She dreamed her brother was there again, all of them together in the kitchen at Nani’s and there was an awful thump and everything went dark and Kassie woke up then – with a terrified feeling, her heart clutched like it had stopped. Someone was there, had come right into the house, into the room where she was sleeping. He was standing behind the door, just like that man had come in last month to the house where she’d been living then and the police said they’d caught him but he was right here, he was in the room right now. She sat straight up in bed this time, open completely to the dark, straining in the sightless room to hear. . .

169

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:43pm

kms030.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies There was creaking from the old wood underpinning the house, from its door jambs and rafters, the sound of it exactly, the awful sound, like that man, and the other one as well that her grandmother used to let in, who always called her Honey, whispered Ssssh to her and her little brother afterwards in the dark. . . And her heart fell, and fell away from her, as she sat up in bed, listening for him again. . . For the same awful sound, the hand closing over her face. . . Someone come in, someone always come in. . . The same awful, terrifying bump. . . But no. It was just the bush hitting up against the glass she’d heard, the rhododendron at the window banging against the glass. A bush with great flowers upon it. . . That was all. And slowly she let out her breath, her eyes getting accustomed second by second to the dark. For there was nobody there. Nobody to harm her. She was completely alone. Though it was cold she got out of the bed then and went over to the window. The sky was a dark violet colour and full of whitened clouds that had been whipped by the wind, no stars at all but as she looked out through the glass she could see there was a moon, half obscured by the clouds, and that it wasn’t dark at all, but that the moon was there. And it was the moon that had been looking in, while she was sleeping, filling up all the rooms of the house with its pale light so you could see anywhere, Kassie realised, even in this wind, anywhere. It had filled up the inside of the house and was outside too, outside into the street and beyond it, and the garden by the door, all black at the edges with bush and little trees, looked calm and open and empty, as though the lawn had been painted with milk. *

170

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:45pm

kms031.tex

CREATIVE WRITING

The Not Knowing Ailsa Cox The little girl in pink ran round in circles, round and round and round in her pink and white spotted hoodie and her cerise-coloured socks and trainers, round and round outside the family tent. Christian and Eva saw her from their VW traveller, as they sat in the front seats watching the sun go down, and Eva wondered what it would be like to have a family one day. Not long afterwards, Christian caught sight of her again, hand-in-hand with another child, the pair of them in pink pyjamas, prancing between the tents and camper vans. He was tempted to take a photograph. Later he wished that he had. People didn’t like you taking photographs of children. He had been warned off several times, on the strand at Brandon Bay and once in Murphy’s Italian ice cream parlour. Okay. No problem. Christian photographed the full moon swathed in black clouds, mirroring the big white globes illuminating the campsite. Eva lit candles and played her guitar, and, not for the first time on their holiday together, her heart lifted with the music and the whisky and with longings she could never put a name to. ‘We’ll come back again, won’t we?’ she said, as they were bedding down. ‘Maybe when we’re old and grey.’ ‘We’ll come back soon.’ She dreamt that she was back in Switzerland, and Christian was helping her move – for some reason she couldn’t quite fathom she had to move urgently – and to get into the new flat she had to lower herself into something like a mineshaft, or large rabbit hole, but look, said Christian, you can try the back way – and then she woke briefly, to the sound of rain rattling on the roof. But in the morning the sky was clear again. There was no predicting the weather in Ireland. You just had to take your chances. They decided Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 2 (2010): 171–179 DOI: 10.3366/E2041450110000314 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

171

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:45pm

kms031.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies to stay two more nights before heading for Cork and back towards inland Europe. When Eva came back from paying, she saw Christian looking troubled. ‘There’s a little girl gone missing,’ he said. ‘A little girl?’ ‘She hasn’t been back all night.’ ‘What little girl?’ ‘That woman there – she told me. She asked me had I seen a little girl in pink.’ Eva saw a woman standing amongst the trees, a little overdressed for the summer’s morning, in jumper and jeans, hair tied back in a long ponytail, smoking and watching the children in the playground. Jessica had palled up with a little girl her own age, from Belgium. Her parents didn’t get the family’s name, but they could describe them exactly – mother and father and a chocolate lab called Pixi; the anxious-looking father with close-cropped hair, gilded beard and blonde bushy eyebrows – a type they had seen everywhere – the woman patiently correcting his English. ‘Neutered,’ she said, ‘not neutralised, the dog is neutered.’ They got out the map to show Jessica’s parents how far they’d travelled, over the channel and cutting a straight line in pink highlighter pen through southern England and across the Irish sea. They spoke Flemish, they said. ‘And French?’ asked Jessica’s dad. The woman pulled a face. ‘We are a small country,’ said the father. ‘Small country, many problems.’ They handed out chocolate bars from their home town. They seemed very nice. All of these details, they went over them again and again, in their own minds, with the gardai and later to each other, and Jessica’s mother gave yet another version to Eva and Christian. Tom and Linda didn’t think there would be any danger in allowing their child to roam freely round the camp. This was not England. They were the only English people there. Crossing over to the shower block, Linda found it all so re-assuring – the gentle lullaby of Dutch and German voices; the shadows moving inside tents and camper vans, assembling, unpacking, folding away, a place for everything. Everywhere they stopped, the showers were clean and the water hot, and the rubbish invisibly disposed of. There were no fat people here, no one loud or anti-social. And she hadn’t wanted a cigarette once. How about that? ‘I don’t want a cigarette,’ she said to herself, in the

172

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:45pm

kms031.tex

The Not Knowing cod-Irish voice they affected in private, ‘I wouldn’t take it if you offered, no I certainly would not!’ When she came out she found Tom sitting in the camp kitchen, drinking wine with a couple of cycling types, handsome with the bloom of the outdoors upon them. ‘This is – Diana? And Pete’. ‘Dee-anna.’ The girl smiled at her as she sliced up a chicken breast into neat cubes and cooked them over a fold-away primus. A salad of tomatoes, avocado, sweetcorn and spring onions was laid out already, and the noodles bubbled underneath. ‘Where’s Jessica?’ ‘She’s off with her pal. The little Belgian girl.’ Pete thrust something towards her, a plastic bottle top or something, and Linda nodded her admiration. ‘Your turn to put her to bed,’ she told Tom. ‘Look,’ said Pete, flipping open flower petal compartments in the cork-sized thing – ‘salt, pepper, curry . . . .’ flicking them over the simple and nutritious meal, done in a jiffy. Nothing had ever looked so appetising. ‘Would you share some wine with us, Linda?’ Jessica had not gone missing. She was missing. Sie ist verloren, Eva explained the complicated English tenses to Christian, es ist ein Jahr. A year ago, almost. It was another beautiful day, a rare day that you could tell was going to be unbroken, and the bay was silvered with sunshine. A day for catching a boat to the Blaskets or cycling round Slea Head or surfing at Inch. But no one was leaving the campsite that day. Instead they joined the search parties, and later on, into the evening, they sat around discussing the case – the Bavarians and Parisians and Walloons and one or two Irish from Dublin or Limerick – commiserating in their shared tongue. ‘Not this night? Since one year?’ Christian kept repeating, his English all over the place. In no time at all, the child’s disappearance became a major incident, and within twenty-four hours it became the leading item not just in the Kerry news but throughout Ireland, displacing the matter of the Taisoeach’s bank account and the deportation of the Roma on the Dublin roundabout. Jessica’s image was flashed across the world. ‘You don’t remember?’ said her mother, handing them a photocopy. HAVE YOU SEEN JESSICA? ‘That was taken a few days before. This was the last one.’

173

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:45pm

kms031.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies Fetching out a slim silver camera, she showed them the grainy image of a bar. Just behind where the band was playing, framed in a sort of cubicle where you could sit and eat, a child was standing, mesmerised or very tired, the protective hand of some one – her father? – on her shoulder as he chatted to his neighbour. ‘The light was very poor. I was trying to get the musicians.’ She spoke in a calm, measured way, more slowly than was necessary for them to understand. She looked them straight in the eye – even when she was showing them the photos, she kept her gaze fixed – and round her wrist she wore a pink ribbon. These were the essential props – the photographs, the ribbons and the dangly monkey she was clutching in the picture. She was convinced the Belgians had something to do with it. As soon as she saw the empty patch in the grass where their car had been parked, next to the giant beige pupa of a tent and the flatpack assembly of table and chairs where the Belgian family ate their meals – as soon as she realised they had gone, she knew that her child had been stolen. Why else would they creep away in the night? Those Belgians, she said. They were crafty. A strange sort of people, the Belgians, something sly and shifty about them, because you never know who they are or where they belong. Remember Dutroux, those girls in the cellar? And that other case, the woman who kept her boyfriend’s body in the freezer. They were all Belgians. ‘It should be easy,’ said Christian, slowly combining the English verbs, ‘to find this family since one is required to enter one’s car registration on arrival.’ Unless they gave a false one – you wrote in the details yourself. Who’s going to check? ‘Yes, they found the car.’ The woman paused. Eva was dreading what would come next. She knew this story didn’t have a happy ending. ‘The weather was so lovely, they just decided to drive off and find somewhere quiet to park up for the night, just a little beach somewhere off the beaten track. You know it’s so nice waking up to the sound of the waves. Just on the spur of the moment. That’s what they said. And they were completely clean. What’s the expression? Clean skins. The gardai had no reason to keep them.’ That was when the tide turned. What were the Barretts up to, sitting there getting pissed, not a clue what their child was up to? It turned out that Tom Barrett was not the child’s father, and though Linda’s exhusband kept silent, the grandparents spoke bitterly about the divorce. Tom Barrett was a former client of Linda’s, though she maintained

174

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:45pm

kms031.tex

The Not Knowing their relationship began long after he left the care of social services. ‘If we’d have known,’ the grandmother said, ‘we would have stepped in ourselves.’ The tide turned and turned again, and the waves beat back and forth on the shore. The moon waxed and waned. And Linda was steady. She didn’t weep, she didn’t blame herself, or Tom neither. Tom could go home. But she wasn’t leaving Ireland until she found her child. ‘That’s why I’m telling you all of this. I’m telling everyone. I want Jessica to stay in your thoughts, and that way I can be sure she’s still alive.’ Now they saw the notice in Foxy John’s and the Super Valu, and the Old Forge Internet Café – right under their noses, everywhere, right by the posters advertising the races and the lottery and the folk concerts down at the church. HAVE YOU SEEN JESSICA? The face gazed wideeyed at the camera, the face of any five year old being photographed, a knowing cherubim. Christian insisted: ‘That’s her, we saw her, don’t you remember? The little girl running round.’ ‘They all look the same at that age.’ ‘It was her.’ ‘Then we saw a ghost.’ They were in Murphy’s again, eating pink champagne sorbets. Close by, a little girl was finishing a strawberry milkshake, her hair tied with pink ribbons and gripped by pink butterfly slides. A little basket, patterned with pink straw and sequins, lay on the table. She might easily have been the child they saw at the campsite. So could every other little girl on the streets of Dingle. There was a global traffic in children these days. If Jessica had been spirited away, she could be far across the ocean, in another continent, a sexual plaything or a surrogate for some wealthy childless couple. What the thieves didn’t know when they took her, was that their acquisition was defective. Jessica was partially deaf. She covered it up – she chattered, Linda said, nineteen to the dozen. And that was probably why her daughter was such a tempting target; she could make friends with anyone. As soon as she heard that, Eva saw a hand clamped over a child’s mouth; she saw a little girl’s body twist and collapse; she heard something hit the water, she heard digging. She didn’t want to know these things – she wanted to leave the story unfinished – but she thought the child was probably dead. And if she was dead she was never coming back, not even as a ghost, because such things did not exist.

175

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:45pm

kms031.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies The campsite was set in the grounds of an eighteenth century hunting lodge which at some time in the twenties or thirties had been extended and turned into a hostel. A discreet distance away, and well hidden from the road, there was a cul de sac of brand new holiday homes. The gardai searched every corner, indoors and out. They looked along the roadside; could she have wandered off and been struck by a car? But there was no trace of the little girl, ever. Eventually the story faded out of the news, and by the next season, the new staff, fresh out of Poland and Hungary, had no memory of ever hearing about it. Bookings might have been a little bit down this year, but without Linda’s persistence Jessica would have stayed locked away in the past Eva said, ‘It must be awful, not knowing . . . ’ Linda gave a rueful smile. ‘Oh, but I do know,’ she said. ‘I do know . . . ’ Eva couldn’t get the child out of her mind. She kept thinking, how could it happen? How could she just vanish like that, and nobody see anything? She thought over what Linda had said the next day, as she studied the old photographs on the kitchen walls – crowds milling outside a neoclassical building; figures huddled round a cannon, a smudge of smoke rising like ectoplasm. Scenes from Irish history, she supposed. It was going to be another lovely day, the sun already sharp as a knife, and the sky an intense pale violet – a day for the beach, but Christian would not be hurried. He was looking through his pictures on the laptop, his face so close to the screen he was almost inside it. Didn’t he know that time was running out? Their holiday had reached that turning point where everything slows down and stills. This will be the last time, and this and this . . . And they’d never have this day again, ever. ‘Christian’, she said, ‘you know what, I think I’m going to take the bike. I feel like swimming’. ‘It’s only seven. If you just wait we can drive to Brandon Bay.’ ‘I want to get out of here.’ ‘Okay’. He did not raise his eyes. ‘I won’t be long. We can go to Brandon later.’ ‘Okay, fine. I’ll be here.’ She’d planned to nip down to the little cove at the foot of the hill, but once the breeze was behind her, something made her go on, and she sped further along the main road till she spotted the sign for a beach. Cycling down a dusty track, lined with fuchsia hedges and orange monbretia, she reached a place where the land finished, and the sea stretched out below. The glittering white sand, the ruined castle on the

176

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:45pm

kms031.tex

The Not Knowing promontory, the misty mountains on the far side – you couldn’t believe such a view existed, that it wasn’t some composite rigged up by the tourist board. And it was all hers. There was not a soul around – just a rusty old van left in the car park. She sat down on the headland to take it all in, mentally framing the pictures Christian would have taken. She thought of texting to let him know, but she’d left her mobile on charge in the kitchen. Never mind. No one would steal it. Eva was a strong, confident swimmer. No tiptoeing round the edges for her, no preliminary splashes. The instant she was changed, she headed straight for the water, plunging into the oncoming waves like a seal. The first icy slap faded quickly, and soon her body was beating with the warm pulse of the sea. She forgot all about Christian and the campsite and the little girl in pink. She stopped for a moment, glancing back towards the strand, checking – though it wasn’t really necessary – that her bike was still lying there next to the white boulders where she’d draped her towel. She could make out a couple of people gathering mussels, and another figure closer to the shoreline. She wouldn’t have the place to herself for much longer. Rolling over to bask in the sun, she savoured once more that view of the mountains cradling the bay. She’d get out soon – but not yet – not yet – she swam in circles for a while, and then on impulse she struck out towards the promontory, eyes closed against the sunshine blazing through the ruins. But she couldn’t get close. The currents pushed her away; she struggled like a fly trapped behind glass. Suddenly her leg was gripped by cramp. Stupid stupid stupid – she breathed slowly – Christian – mustn’t panic – Christian – the worst thing you could do – a wave roared over her, dragging her under, and the salt water filled her eyes and nostrils – and then somehow she was out of the water, thank God, because she thought for a second that it was all over, how very very stupid to die in this way. But she wouldn’t have died. She was being extremely stupid. Now she would find her things and go home. Still shivering, she towelled herself down. Against her damp skin, her clothes felt stiff as cardboard. She struggled to get herself dressed. Christian would be worried. She really should not have spent so much time here. But where were her shoes? She must be going crazy. Her trainers, they had vanished. Into thin air. She searched all round the boulders thinking she just had to look harder. The rest of her stuff was all here, they could hardly have drifted out to sea, and they were old, hardly worth stealing. A thief would take the bike. She scrabbled around in the sand. If she didn’t find the damn things she’d have to try cycling barefoot.

177

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:45pm

kms031.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies Suddenly something landed right by her, the rubber sole of the shoe hitting her hand. She heard giggling and saw a little figure scurrying away. A child, no more than six or seven, running over the sand. A little girl in a pink bikini, running with the other shoe. ‘Jessica? This is not funny! Jessica!’ But of course she couldn’t hear. Christian was furious when, at last, Eva came cycling back towards the van. ‘What were you doing? I had no idea where you were. Why did you turn your phone off?’ He was angry because he’d been worried. By lunchtime, the new arrivals were already taking up the empty spaces, children spilling from the cars while their parents unpacked the elaborate equipment. He fancied going into town for a plate of smoked salmon and a pint of Guinness, but of course he was stuck here because he’d told her he’d be waiting. Everything always revolved around Eva, she had to have a swim, just like she wanted to spend the extra two nights when they could have moved on, and now he was anxious because she was late. He went back to the krimi he started at Tralee, but still could get no further than page twentythree. Finally, he picked up his camera and went wandering round the campsite. He kept a lookout for the mother of the child who was lost. He wondered what she’d think of the portrait he made surreptitiously – the typical expression – the faint knowing smile – the tired eyes gazing out at a space beyond the frame. What was it that she saw? He did a full circuit but there was no sign of the mother; they might not see her again before they drove off in the morning. Tomorrow he’d get up at dawn, and take a picture of the hundreds of rooks roosting in the tops of the tall trees behind the hostel. Tomorrow if all was well, if only it was. He shouldn’t have let Eva go to the beach on her own. He made another futile attempt to reach her, feeling the world tilt around him as he reeled from the sudden image of Eva’s blonde hair matted with blood. And then Eva was there, everything okay, just some complicated tale about a little girl, was it, and the child disappearing into the sea. At first he thought Eva was joking; but she was not. ‘It was her,’ she insisted. ‘I know it was her.’ ‘I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts.’ ‘She was so far away . . . .’ As they sat on the folding chairs, drinking tea, Eva kept stretching out her legs, and staring at her feet as if the ordinary trainers were a pair of magic shoes. ‘She ran so fast – incredible – and then all of a sudden, pff, she was gone.’

178

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:45pm

kms031.tex

The Not Knowing ‘And she left the shoe? Like Cinderella?’ ‘She was just a kid, you know . . . I can’t really describe it.’ They sat for a while without speaking, intoxicated by the heat of the afternoon sun. On the pitch next to theirs, a family was busy setting up a barbecue outside their tent. A little girl in a pink safety helmet rolled past on a bike with pink and white marshmallow tyres. ‘Watch me!’ she called out to her parents. ‘Watch me!’ But nobody did.

179

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:45pm

kms032.tex

POETRY

Wearing Katherine Mansfield’s shawl Seventy years on, shut in a cardboard box in the basement of City Hall, you might think the shawl would have lost its force to charm, the airy fragrance of its wearer departed, threads stripped bare as bones, yet here it is, another short story: it felt like love at the Hôtel d’Adhémar the moment you placed the silk skein around my shoulders, the dim red and rusty green fabric and a fringe gliding like fingertips over my arm, a draught of bitter scent – Katherine’s illness, Virginia’s sarcasm – and yes, a trace of wild gorse flowers and New Zealand, not to mention the drift of her skin and yours during the photograph, the stately walk through the town. FIONA KIDMAN Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 2 (2010): 180–183 DOI: 10.3366/E2041450110000326 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

180

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:45pm

kms032.tex

Poetry

Working in the Katherine Mansfield Room Menton You will find Villa Isola Bella in pokerwork on my heart. Katherine Mansfield. Katherine, you may or may not have stepped into this basement room, I don’t really care whether you lived upstairs or down, it’s all pretty academic. We have looked at the same sea heard the trains whistle past placed the key in the same jagged lock for the garden gate. Above me you stand at the window dressed only in a black paper fan to cool the trembling body, pale as a paper nautilus shell. The white-hot fever-bright flames of your words eat through my ceiling.

FIONA KIDMAN

Believe me ‘Life is either too empty, or too full,’ wrote Virginia Woolf on a blustery day, ‘a detestable day’ as she crabbily called it, no green, no blue, as days usually filled in for millions of women on the same morning, countless, now we’re counting, yet are grateful this singular woman whatever the season wrote spritely, ‘It is much like this, exactly.’

181

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:45pm

kms032.tex

Poetry

Working in the Katherine Mansfield Room Menton You will find Villa Isola Bella in pokerwork on my heart. Katherine Mansfield. Katherine, you may or may not have stepped into this basement room, I don’t really care whether you lived upstairs or down, it’s all pretty academic. We have looked at the same sea heard the trains whistle past placed the key in the same jagged lock for the garden gate. Above me you stand at the window dressed only in a black paper fan to cool the trembling body, pale as a paper nautilus shell. The white-hot fever-bright flames of your words eat through my ceiling.

FIONA KIDMAN

Believe me ‘Life is either too empty, or too full,’ wrote Virginia Woolf on a blustery day, ‘a detestable day’ as she crabbily called it, no green, no blue, as days usually filled in for millions of women on the same morning, countless, now we’re counting, yet are grateful this singular woman whatever the season wrote spritely, ‘It is much like this, exactly.’

181

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:45pm

kms032.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies The brute fact of conclusion, inexorable dredging, yet at each page it is not quite yet, eyes gifting an ordinary world this clarity, this colour: never clichéd as she does so in the law that compels each story, Believe me. Believe as a river carries through its source, tells at each turn its widening arrival, inevitable yet how sudden. Sudden too was delight.

VINCENT O’SULLIVAN

Croyez-moi « La vie est ou bien trop vide, ou bien trop pleine, » écrivit Virginia Woolf, un jour de tempête, « détestable journée » ainsi qu’elle la qualifia, de méchante humeur, ni vert, ni bleu, comme s’emplit, ordinaire, la journée pour des millions de femmes ce même matin, innombrables, maintenant que nous les dénombrons, reconnaissants [toutefois que cette femme, elle, quelle que fût la saison eût écrit, esprit : « Il en est bien ainsi, exactement. » Le fait brut de la conclusion, inexorable dragage, encore qu’à chaque page il ne soit pas tout à fait encore, les yeux douant le monde ordinaire de cette limpidité, cette couleur-ci : jamais un cliché tandis qu’elle œuvre suivant la loi qui impose chaque histoire, Croyez-moi. Croyez comme un fleuve coule de source, comme à chaque méandre il annonce l’évasement de son terme, inévitable et pourtant si soudain. La soudaineté elle aussi vous ravit.

ANNE MOUNIC (traduction inédite de ‘Believe me’, avec l’aimable autorisation de Vincent O’Sullivan).

182

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:45pm

kms032.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies The brute fact of conclusion, inexorable dredging, yet at each page it is not quite yet, eyes gifting an ordinary world this clarity, this colour: never clichéd as she does so in the law that compels each story, Believe me. Believe as a river carries through its source, tells at each turn its widening arrival, inevitable yet how sudden. Sudden too was delight.

VINCENT O’SULLIVAN

Croyez-moi « La vie est ou bien trop vide, ou bien trop pleine, » écrivit Virginia Woolf, un jour de tempête, « détestable journée » ainsi qu’elle la qualifia, de méchante humeur, ni vert, ni bleu, comme s’emplit, ordinaire, la journée pour des millions de femmes ce même matin, innombrables, maintenant que nous les dénombrons, reconnaissants [toutefois que cette femme, elle, quelle que fût la saison eût écrit, esprit : « Il en est bien ainsi, exactement. » Le fait brut de la conclusion, inexorable dragage, encore qu’à chaque page il ne soit pas tout à fait encore, les yeux douant le monde ordinaire de cette limpidité, cette couleur-ci : jamais un cliché tandis qu’elle œuvre suivant la loi qui impose chaque histoire, Croyez-moi. Croyez comme un fleuve coule de source, comme à chaque méandre il annonce l’évasement de son terme, inévitable et pourtant si soudain. La soudaineté elle aussi vous ravit.

ANNE MOUNIC (traduction inédite de ‘Believe me’, avec l’aimable autorisation de Vincent O’Sullivan).

182

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:45pm

kms032.tex

Poetry

Cornwall, May 1916 Below the road two cottages crouch against gales up the cliff-face off a violent sea. On good days they walk together and talk of death and show one another wildflowers and name them. She’s seen him beat his wife, he’s watched her emasculate her husband. Between them there’s no need of lies or pretence. They walk in the wind and talk of important things – death and flowers. C. K. STEAD

183

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:46pm

kms033.tex

REPORT

J. D. Fergusson’s Painting Rhythm Angela Smith Anne Estelle Rice, who painted the portrait of Katherine Mansfield that appeared on the cover of the first issue of Katherine Mansfield Studies, wrote of Mansfield long after her death: ‘She smoked far too much; the box of cigarettes was rarely out of her hands’.1 J. D. Fergusson however gave up smoking for good during the time that he and Mansfield were friends as he wanted to see better and more clearly. As the cover of this issue of the journal suggests, he particularly wanted to see vibrant colour unclouded by smoke. He had moved to Paris from Edinburgh in 1907 because he found the conservatism of the Scottish art world constricting. Before he moved he was painting portraits that resembled James McNeill Whistler’s work, sensitive realistic renderings of the subject, often in full figure and using a muted palette. In Paris he was dazzled by the adventurousness he found, especially in the work of the Fauvist, Henri Matisse. The colours in Matisse’s picture Bonheur de vivre, for instance, are raw and wild, and the image has an overt and seductively erotic sensuousness. The scene is mythological, not the Garden of Eden but a vision of unregulated and partly at least homoerotic sexual pleasure. Fergusson immediately responded to the stimulus of postimpressionist radicalism and altered his palette, his conception of the picture plane and his subject. Though Fergusson is now usually identified as a Scottish Colourist, together with S. J. Peploe, G. L. Hunter and F. C. B. Cadell, his work differs significantly from theirs. In Paris in the first decade of the twentieth century he began to paint nudes, often inviting a mythological interpretation, whereas the work of the other Colourists lacks this dimension. His impetus came partly from an interest in the work of Henri Bergson which was the subject of his and Anne Estelle Rice’s first conversation with John Middleton Murry, in the Café Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 2 (2010): 184–187 DOI: 10.3366/E2041450110000338 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

184

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:46pm

kms033.tex

J. D. Fergusson’s Painting Rhythm d’Harcourt in 1910. Murry writes of it: ‘I found myself plunged into an exposition of Bergson’s distinction between Time and Duration’.2 An immediate rapport was established between Fergusson and Murry, and the genesis of the magazine Rhythm arose from it: One word was recurrent in all our strange discussions – the word ‘rhythm’. We never made any attempt to define it; nor even took any precaution to discover whether it had the same significance for us both [. . . ] For F- it was the essential quality in a painting or a sculpture; and since it was at that moment that the Russian Ballet first came to Western Europe for a season at the Châtelet, dancing was obviously linked, by rhythm, with the plastic arts. From that it was but a short step to the position that rhythm was the distinctive element in all the arts, and that the real purpose of ‘this modern movement’ – a phrase frequent on F-’s lips – was to reassert the pre-eminence of rhythm.3

Fergusson had by this time been elected a sociétaire of the Salon d’Automne and he taught at the Academie de la Palette. He was at the heart of a lively group of Anglo-American artists who became known as the second wave of Fauvists. He was thus well placed to become the art editor of the little magazine Rhythm, which was edited by Murry and prioritised the attitude to the arts expressed by Murry above.4 Murry articulated the Bergsonian impetus towards modernism that drove the writers and artists who published in Rhythm in the first issue of the magazine in 1911: Modernism is not the capricious outburst of intellectual dipsomania. It penetrates beneath the outward surface of the world, and disengages the rhythms that lie at the heart of things, rhythms strange to the eye, unaccustomed to the ear, primitive harmonies of the world that is and lives.5

These rhythms are expressed most clearly in the magazine in Mansfield’s fiction and in the work of the artists who worked regularly for it: What appears to have been a non-hierarchical atmosphere within Fergusson’s circle would have made women artists feel especially comfortable. The core group, which included practitioners of both the fine and applied arts, contained a number of women: Scottish artists Jessie King and Dorothy ‘Georges’ Banks, both illustrators; American painter Bertha Case; and, of course, Rice. Fergusson treated women artists no differently than his male peers.6

The women artists whose work appeared regularly in Rhythm were Rice, Jessica Dismorr, Georges Banks and Marguerite Thompson. There was

185

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:46pm

kms033.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies a Bergsonian element as well as a human one for this inclusiveness, as Mark Antliff explains: Any of the élan vital’s gendered manifestations could possess varying amounts of female or male élan, and Fergusson, in his decorative works, conflated the signs of male and female sexuality in an attempt to grasp durée at its pansexual origin. On the same basis the Rhythm critics could assert that a female artist was in possession of a male gendered artistic ‘will to power’, a claim they in fact made for Anne Estelle Rice. [. . . ] In Bergson’s monistic theory of creative evolution, the élan vital transcends its gendered manifestations, both male and female.7

The oil painting named Rhythm (1911) is a huge work and can be said to conflate signs of male and female sexuality. The figure is emphatically outlined in dark red in the Fauvist manner, and green brushwork indicates the shadows under the thighs and breasts. The face is mask-like and the colour is vibrant. The woman is often described as Eve because of the apple that she holds; Elizabeth Cumming writes that she is a summer goddess of nature, and that there is a sense of calm and conclusion in the painting.8 I disagree with this reading as I find contradictory rhythms in the picture. The shape of the aggressively jutting breasts is repeated in the apple, in the other fruits and in the patterns behind the figure. The curving fecundity of line in the tree on the left is countered by the harsh vertical line on the right – the buttocks are mysteriously chopped off and the shoulders and arm are more like a builder’s than a seductive woman’s. The monumental figure is on tiptoe as if dynamically poised to leap up and it appears to have cloven hooves. In the version used for the cover of the magazine, the line is simplified which gives the figure an even greater dynamism. She does not belong in the Garden of Eden but in the challenging artistic world of Nijinsky, Matisse, Stravinsky, and Mansfield. Notes 1. Anne Estelle Rice, Catalogue for the ‘Katherine Mansfield in Her Letters and Works’ exhibition, 25 April–16 May 1958, New Zealand House, p. 5 2. John Middleton Murry, Between Two Worlds, an Autobiography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1935), p. 135. 3. Murry, pp. 155–6. 4. For more detail about the genesis of Rhythm, see Angela Smith, Katherine Mansfield: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000). 5. Rhythm, 1 : 1, Summer 1911, p. 12. 6. Carol A Nathanson, The Expressive Fauvism of Anne Estelle Rice (New York: Hollis Taggart Galleries, 1997), p. 10

186

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:46pm

kms033.tex

J. D. Fergusson’s Painting Rhythm 7. Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Avant-Garde (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 99–100. 8. Colour, Rhythm and Dance: Painting and Drawings by J D Fergusson and His Circle in Paris (Edinburgh: Scottish Arts Council, 1985), p. 9.

187

Time: 01:49pm

Katherine Mansfield and S. S. Koteliansky in the Garden, c. 1920, by Beatrice Campbell. Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (1997-0010-1). © The Hon. Brigid Campbell & the Estate of William Holden.

October 1, 2010 kms034a.tex

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:46pm

kms034.tex

REPORT

Double Portrait: Katherine Mansfield and S. S. Koteliansky in the Garden Penelope Jackson The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington has two portraits of Katherine Mansfield, painted at about the same time and both by women who were friends of Mansfield, Anne Estelle Rice and Beatrice Campbell. The stylistic difference between them highlights the spectrum of aesthetic possibility of the period which led in one of its manifestations to the radicalism that excited the Rhythm group. We all know one of the portraits – ‘the great painting’, as Mansfield called it, by Rice – 1 which appeared on the cover of the first issue of this journal.2 The other, Katherine Mansfield and S. S. Koteliansky in the Garden by Beatrice Campbell, was acquired by Te Papa in 1997 for NZ$15,000 from the London art dealers The Bloomsbury Workshop. Since its acquisition by Te Papa, the painting has never been on public display there.3 This is not entirely surprising as Campbell’s painting is of biographical rather than artistic interest. Katherine Mansfield and S. S. Koteliansky in the Garden was painted from a photograph taken at 24 Norfolk Road, London, in 1916. A photograph of the identical scene appears in Campbell’s autobiography,4 and in Gillian Boddy’s biography of Mansfield.5 Another photograph, featured in Antony Alpers’ The Life of Katherine Mansfield (1980), of Mansfield and Koteliansky on deck chairs in a garden, is documented as being in the Campbells’ garden, St John’s Wood, London, and mistakenly dated by Alpers as having been taken a year earlier, in 1915. The two photographs were clearly taken on the same occasion as the figures’ clothing, deckchairs and relative positions are identical in both, and Mansfield’s letters confirm that she stayed with the

Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 2 (2010): 188–195 DOI: 10.3366/E204145011000034X © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

189

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:46pm

kms034.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies Campbells in July 1916 and invited Koteliansky to visit her there. The photograph which features in Campbell’s autobiography is the closest compositionally to the Te Papa painting, the only minor difference being the nanny and the Campbell children, repositioned in the background, making for a more balanced composition, and possibly gesturing towards a preoccupation in Mansfield’s fiction. The main figures in the painting, or double portrait, are engaged in conversation while the nanny occupies herself with the children. The subject itself documents a time and place; two friends – the writer Mansfield and the translator and man of letters Koteliansky – enjoying each other’s company. Campbell’s ability to capture a likeness is evident here. What the double portrait offers is perhaps a glimpse of a relaxed Mansfield sharing a quiet moment in a garden, with her close friend, Koteliansky. The painting inflects the photographic image in a manner that is open to interpretation; Koteliansky is leaning further forward than he is in the photograph, and Mansfield looks more sceptical. In the photograph Mansfield’s feet and ankles show, and her left hand holds a cigarette, whereas her dress in the painting looks Edwardian, with a long skirt or shawl trailing on the grass and no glimpse of her ankles. The cigarette, a marker of modernity in the photograph, is not as visible – if it’s there at all – in the painting. The children in the background seem to have strayed in from an Impressionist picture, giving the whole a nostalgia that is totally absent from Rice’s portrait, and from the photograph. In the painting, Campbell positioned Koteliansky in profile in his deckchair. This pictorial device meant that the artist could depict the sitter’s distinctive hairstyle. Jeffrey Meyers provides the following description of Koteliansky: ‘Dorothy Brett remembers him 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’’ ’.6 Mark Gertler painted a portrait of Koteliansky in 1917.7 Depicted in full face, the subject’s hairstyle certainly has volume. Meyers describes Gertler’s S. S. Koteliansky as capturing his unusual combination of hieratic integrity, moral authority and gentle benevolence. Murry writes that Kot ‘looked like some Assyrian king [. . . ] with an impressive hooked Semitic nose, a fine head of coarse hair, and massive features: very dark eyes with pince-nez.8

Koteliansky’s dark suit is set apart from the rest of the painting which otherwise has a summer palette. The painting’s finish is problematic;

190

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:46pm

kms034.tex

Double Portrait areas of broad, flat, smooth brushwork and visible pencil squaring suggest the painting is unfinished. On close inspection, Koteliansky’s jacket is far from completed. A dark outline suggests where his jacket tails would fall over the deckchair. The area’s transparency shows a work in progress. In addition, the lack of detail in, for example, Koteliansky’s face also implies that the painting is unfinished. This is not a stylistic trait; Campbell was usually exemplary in her attention to detail. As this unfinished appearance is not in keeping with Campbell’s usual technique, we can reasonably conclude that the ‘blocked-in’ areas were awaiting further painting. Further evidence of the painting’s incomplete state is the lack of the artist’s signature. Campbell was normally diligent in signing her work, either as Beatrice Elvery or Beatrice Glenavy.9 The painting’s date is also questionable; though it is given as 1920, the work is actually undated. The label attached to the painting by The Bloomsbury Workshop was c.1920, so the date is an estimate. By the early 1920s Beatrice Campbell was distanced from her London friends, having returned to her native Ireland in 1918. The painting’s provenance is sketchy, with only a few details available from the artist’s file in the Te Papa museum’s archives. Katherine Mansfield and S. S. Koteliansky in the Garden was apparently owned at one time by an anonymous Sydney businessman, who had purchased it from an exhibition. His wife was a New Zealander, which might have explained the appeal of the picture. Correspondence from the Bloomsbury Workshop held in Te Papa’s file lists two earlier possible owners, John Bowering and Lady Epstein,10 but this information has to be considered anecdotal given the lack of evidence, though Campbell did know the sculptor Jacob Epstein, Lady Epstein’s husband. The painting was reframed at some stage prior to its arrival in New Zealand in 1997, or, given its unfinished state, perhaps it was not framed until recent times.11 Beatrice Campbell recorded her association with the two sitters in a long and detailed essay entitled ‘I Remember’. The document was provided by Campbell’s niece at the time Katherine Mansfield and S. S. Koteliansky in the Garden was acquired for Te Papa’s collection. Campbell begins: ‘After Katherine Mansfield’s death, Kot said to me “you must write down your memories of Katherine’’. Somehow my memories of her were all confused with memories of him, of Murry and Gertler, Frieda and Lawrence’.12 Campbell goes on to relate how she was introduced to Mansfield and Murry, whom her husband-to-be had befriended, and describes a Christmas excursion to Paris in 1912

191

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:46pm

kms034.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies with Murry, Mansfield, Gilbert and Mary Cannan and Raymond Drey (later married to Anne Estelle Rice) thus: Anne Rice gave us a wonderful Christmas party in her studio. I think at this time Katherine was very happy. I remember her gaiety: the way she would flounce into a restaurant, and sweep her wide black man’s hat from her bobbed head and hang it among the men’s hats on a hat-stand.13

Campbell’s detailed notes provide a primary source for an insight into Mansfield’s life in the years 1912–18. They are rich in anecdotal detail; the Campbells mixed with many writers and artists who later would be recognised for their significant contributions within their individual genres. Beatrice Campbell’s notes provide a first-hand account, together with a social context for this group of writers and artists. The portrait of Mansfield by Campbell will be of interest to readers and scholars of Mansfield’s work, for it is relatively unknown. Katherine Mansfield and S. S. Koteliansky in the Garden has featured in two previous publications: Paper Darts: Selected Letters of Virginia Woolf, edited by Frances Spalding, and Jan Marsh’s Bloomsbury Women.14 As suggested above, it is not of great artistic merit. The work is relatively small at 330 × 540 mm (height before width) suggesting it was made for a domestic audience, rather than a public one. When compared with Campbell’s other work, and in particular her designs for stained glass windows, it is of a lower standard both technically and conceptually. Nevertheless, housed with the painting in Te Papa is a file of ephemera; correspondence and essays by the artist in which she writes about her social circle, all adding to the pool of knowledge about Mansfield and her circle. The detective puzzles which the painting poses for the art historian, unfortunately remain unsolved, for it was the subject matter alone that lured Te Papa into acquiring Katherine Mansfield and S. S. Koteliansky in the Garden. We can, however, position the artist in relation to her friend and fellow portraitist Anne Estelle Rice (1877–1959). Beatrice Moss Campbell (née Elvery) (1883–1970) was born in Dublin and demonstrated artistic ability from an early age; from the age of thirteen she studied at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art. Taught by John Hughes, Campbell was awarded the first studentship for modelling, taking her to the National Art Training School, South Kensington, and subsequently the Académie Colarossi in Paris which J. D. Fergusson and S. J. Peploe also attended. In 1909 William Orpen (1878–1931), who taught her in Dublin and contributed a drawing to the final number of Rhythm, painted a portrait of her in a Whistlerian style,

192

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:46pm

kms034.tex

Double Portrait Portrait of Miss Elvery; she is depicted as being provocatively beautiful, red-haired and wearing a glamorous feathered hat. Campbell excelled at sculpture, winning annual prizes at the Royal Dublin Society between 1900 and 1908. In 1904 an example of her work was included in the Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland exhibition in Dublin. From that time up until 1911 she concentrated on making twenty-six stained glass windows, in the tradition of the English Arts and Crafts movement, for churches throughout Ireland. The production of the windows added to her income derived from illustration work and teaching. Her work was not devoid of humour, for example The Virgin Ironing of c.1910 is a delightful image of the Christ child sleeping peacefully while his mother goes about the ironing.15 She studied at London’s Slade School of Art under the tutelage of Henry Tonks, like Mark Gertler, Tonks was a traditionalist; he told C. R. W. Nevinson, the brilliant British Futurist who was also taught by him, that he had no future as a painter. Gertler and Nevinson clearly succeeded as modernists but Beatrice Elvery was more conservative. In 1912 she married the barrister Gordon Campbell (1885–1963), who in 1931 became the second Baron Glenavy. The couple’s social circle, described as the ‘magic circle’, included Mark Gertler, D. H. Lawrence, George Bernard Shaw, John Middleton Murry, S. S. Koteliansky and Katherine Mansfield.16 In 1918, the Campbells, with their two young children, returned to Ireland. Beatrice Campbell continued to practise as an artist exhibiting up until to 1969, the year prior to her death, at the Royal Hibernian Society, of which she was an academician. Her autobiography, Today We Will Only Gossip, was published in 1964. As an artist she was criticised for her reliance on photography to aid her painting. Her biographer, Nicola Gordon Bowe, presents evidence for this criticism noting that Campbell specifically tried to debunk this notion with works such as her 1932 painting ‘entitled Motherhood (or Birth Control), showing two women burying a baby by the light of a kitchen lamp, to dispel her RHA critic’s accusations that she painted from photographs’.17 While studying at the Slade, Campbell had been criticised for not working directly from life models. She argued that stained glass windows did not require such practice. Whereas Rice enthusiastically embraced both J. D. Fergusson, the art editor of Rhythm, and his conversion to Fauvism, Campbell continued to work in a nineteenthcentury tradition. The effect of what young painters encountered in Paris in the first decade of the twentieth century, and of Roger Fry’s two Post-Impressionist exhibitions in London, does not resonate in her work as it does in that of Fergusson and Rice’s circle. Rice’s

193

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:46pm

kms034.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies portrait of Mansfield expresses Bergsonian élan vital, with a rhythmic iteration of shapes and colour, drawing inspiration from Matisse’s use of intense colour but creating her own aesthetic as she does in her illustrations for Rhythm. William Orpen however was of the opinion that there was a ready market for Campbell’s work and thus for her to innovate stylistically was neither important, nor relevant, to her own practice. Campbell was comfortable working in the manner of the hybrid English Arts and Crafts and in a representational manner. What Katherine Mansfield and S. S. Koteliansky in the Garden captures is a moment of intimacy, whatever its mood, between two friends whom the painter recognised as being crucial to each other’s personal and intellectual life. Katherine Mansfield and Samuel Solomonovich Koteliansky (1882–1955) met in 1914 at the Lawrences’ Chesham home, becoming firm friends and colleagues. Koteliansky was a Russian Jew who collaborated with Mansfield in translations of Russian writers such as Chekhov and Dostoevsky. Living in London, both Mansfield and Koteliansky were outsiders, sometimes seeing themselves as misfits. Though only six years her senior, Koteliansky has been perceived, both at the time and later, as a paternal figure.18 Mansfield simply referred to her Russian friend as Kot, and as Alpers notes she had trouble spelling Koteliansky’s name.19 Initially a friend of the Lawrences, Koteliansky became a close confidante to Mansfield and was referred to by Alpers as her ‘secret friend’.20 One of Mansfield’s last and most self-searching letters was written on 19 October 1922 to Koteliansky: ‘I am always conscious of this secret disruption in me’. She explains why she feels that she must confide in him, and trust him to ignore the gossip of their group: ‘I have to let you know for you mean much to me. I know you will never listen to whatever foolish things other people may say about me’.21 Reciprocating Mansfield’s feeling for him with greater intensity, Koteliansky wrote to Sydney Waterlow in 1927: I loved her so much that her writing to me was and remains one of the non-important manifestations of her being. It is her being, what she was, the aroma of her being, that I love. She could do things which 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.22

Koteliansky’s stylistic awkwardness and shift into the present tense four years after Mansfield’s death accentuate the depth of emotion. Campbell’s painting invites us to remember the significance of the bond between Mansfield and one of her most honest critics and trusted friends, Koteliansky.

194

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:46pm

kms034.tex

Double Portrait I would like to acknowledge Gerri Kimber for locating this painting and Angela Smith for editing my article. Notes 1. Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott (eds) (1984–2008), The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield. Vol.1 (1984), vol. 2 (1987), vol. 3 (1993), vol. 4 (1996), vol. 5 (2008) (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Vol. 2, p. 245. Hereafter referred to as Letters 1, Letters 2, etc. 2. See my report: ‘The Great Painting’, Katherine Mansfield Studies, vol. 1 (2009), 112–19. 3. Katherine Mansfield and S. S. Koteliansky in the Garden was exhibited in ‘Turning Points’, New Zealand Portrait Gallery, Wellington, 1 May–22 September 2001. 4. Beatrice Lady Glenavy, Today We Will Only Gossip (London: Constable, 1964) p. 65. Campbell was also known, after her husband became the second Baron Glenavy, as Lady Glenavy or Beatrice Glenavy. For the purposes of this article she is referred to as Beatrice Campbell, the name Te Papa uses and by which Mansfield and Koteliansky knew her. 5. Gillian Boddy, Katherine Mansfield: The Woman and the Writer (Ringwood: Penguin Books Australia, 1988), p. 57. 6. Jeffrey Meyers, Katherine Mansfield: A Biography (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978), p. 108. 7. Collection of M. M. Michael Campbell. Mark Gertler painted a later work, Portrait of Kotelianski [sic], signed and dated ‘Mark Gertler/1930’ (upper right), oil on canvas, as seen in Christies of London auction catalogue, Lot 40, June 2007. 8. Meyers, p. 108. 9. Te Papa has always referred to the artist as Beatrice Campbell, as did The Bloomsbury Workshop, London. 10. Correspondence from Tony Bradshaw of The Bloomsbury Workshop, 12 Galen Place, London, 1997, in the artist’s file at Te Papa. 11. Reframing information retrieved from a letter written by Paul Ackroyd (painting restorer) in the artist’s file at Te Papa. 12. Beatrice Campbell, ‘I Remember’ (unpublished manuscript). Wellington: Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa Archives, undated, p. 1. 13. Campbell, p. 2. 14. Frances Spalding (ed.), Paper Darts: Selected Letters of Virginia Woolf (London: Collins, 1990); Jan Marsh, Bloomsbury Women (London: Pavilion, 1995). 15. The Virgin Ironing, hand-printed by the Cuala Press, private collection. 16. The phrase ‘magic circle’ was used in Campbell’s obituary written by T. de V. W., unknown newspaper, 1970. 17. Nicola Gordon Bowe, ‘The Art of Beatrice Elvery, Lady Glenavy (1883–1970)’, Irish Arts Review Yearbook, 11 (1995), p. 174. 18. See Antony Alpers, The Life of Katherine Mansfield (New York: Viking, 1980), p. 168. 19. Alpers, p. 168. 20. Alpers, p. 208. 21. Letters 5, p. 304. 22. Boddy p. 57.

195

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:46pm

kms035.tex

REVIEW ARTICLE

Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, eds, The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume I, Britain and Ireland 1880–1955 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 976 pp., £95.00. ISBN 978 0 19 921115 9. The first wave of scholarly interest in ‘little magazines’ occurred in the 1960s. During that decade ‘Reprint Corporations’ like Kraus and Johnson issued complete sets of many modernist journals, and F. R. Leavis’s Scrutiny benefited from a slightly more dignified reincarnation by Cambridge University Press in 1963. In 1968 the Times Literary Supplement ran a supercilious special section of nine essays on this ‘curious new publishing phenomenon’.1 Pioneering scholarly monographs also appeared, such as Nicholas Joost’s Scofield Thayer and the Dial: An Illustrated History (1964) and Wallace Martin’s The New Age Under Orage (1967). After that initial burst of scholarly activity, however, and excepting a smattering of books on individual journals or editors, the field lay dormant for some three decades, resembling what Brooker and Thacker describe in their general introduction as ‘an unexplored place on the map, or more prosaically the library shelves and basement archives of modernism, rather than a new intellectual territory busy with students and researchers’ (3). Busy this territory certainly has become, so that Mark S. Morrisson’s influential The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905–1920 (2001) has been joined on the periodical studies shelf by Suzanne W. Churchill’s The Little Magazine ‘Others’ and the Renovation of Modern American Poetry (2006), Churchill and Adam McKible’s co-edited collection Little Magazines and Modernism: New Approaches (2007) and Benoît Tadié, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Céline Mansanti and Christopher Bains collection Revues modernistes anglo-americaines: lieux d’exil, lieux d’échange (2006). The invaluable Modernist Journals Project (as opposed to the Modernist Magazines Project, with which Brooker Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 2 (2010): 196–201 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

196

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:46pm

kms035.tex

The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines and Thacker’s volume is associated), meanwhile, which publishes journals and related materials on-line, serves as a Kraus Reprints for the twenty-first century. Oxford’s monumental Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, a three volume work of which two are forthcoming, promises to be a comprehensive and indispensable almanac to this busy terrain, as well as setting a new benchmark for empirical scholarship on modernist periodicals. The forthcoming volumes will deal with American and European magazines respectively; this one confines itself to the British Isles. The ‘historicising and materialist approach’ that Brooker, Thacker and their contributors bring to bear on modernist magazines involves the dismantling of many conventional ideas about modernism (9). In particular, it aims to put the traditional modernist canon ‘under erasure’, and to overturn any cohesive narrative or unitary conception of the modern movement (10). ‘At every point’, the editors write in their general introduction, ‘a study of the magazines renders a seemingly homogenous and linear history back into the miscellaneous initiatives, fluid mergers, contentious factions, and strongly alternative partis pris which have composed it’ (25–6). Readers of the thirty-seven chapters assembled here may find it hard to imagine how the idea of a ‘homogenous history’ ever came to be accepted in the first place, and, indeed, the bad old ‘monolithic’ reading of modernism evoked by some contributors sometimes takes on the exaggerated features and imprecise identity of a straw man (241). The sheer bulk of the volume and the presence on its contents pages of many unfamiliar titles are themselves enough to unsettle any such monologic version of the modernist tradition. Already generous in its longitudinal scope, which reaches from the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s Germ (1850) to Cyril Connolly’s Horizon (1940–50), the volume is also commendably latitudinarian in its definition of a modernist magazine, covering not only well known titles like BLAST, The Egoist and Coterie, but also more mainstream ventures like Desmond MacCarthy’s Life and Letters, backward-looking oddities like The Decachord, and anti-modernist products of the political thirties like the Left Review. The myth that comes in for the most remorseless buffeting in this volume is that of the stridently partisan modernist review, polemical organ of one or another aesthetic movement. In a 1964 essay cited by several contributors, Cyril Connolly used the term ‘dynamic’ to describe this kind of magazine, contrasting these short-lived, explosive entities with their ‘eclectic’ counterparts: magazines that could not ‘resist good writing from opposing camps’ (647). The impression that emerges from the detailed studies of individual magazines assembled

197

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:46pm

kms035.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies here, however, is that reputedly ‘dynamic’ magazines frequently reveal themselves to be ‘eclectic’ on closer inspection. Thus, whereas John Middleton Murry considered the Athenaeum to be free from the dogmatic cliquishness of magazines like Art and Letters and Coterie (369), Rebecca Beasley’s discussion of the former title reveals that it was ‘striking’ for ‘its gathering together of almost all the pre-war and wartime modernist cliques’ (488), while Andrew Thacker shows that the latter ‘is not the mouthpiece of any ism’ (478). And if Wyndham Lewis’s one-man magazines The Enemy and The Tyro did attain a certain expressive homogeneity, the same cannot be said of his first editorial venture, BLAST, which declaimed the doctrines of Vorticism even while publishing such irretrievably un-Vorticist pieces as Ford Madox Ford’s ‘The Saddest Story’ and Rebecca West’s ‘Indissoluble Matrimony’ (allegedly happened upon by Lewis in a drawer). As for Lewis’s fellow bombardier Ezra Pound, ‘[w]ith the exception of “The Game of Chess,’’ Pound’s poems in BLAST aren’t Vorticist at all’ (303). Even the classicism that T. S. Eliot promoted in The Criterion, Jason Harding observes, ‘was not intended as a doctrinaire “line’’ or as the rallying cry of a coterie’ (357). Against Eliot’s own belief, expressed in his 1926 Criterion essay ‘The Idea of a Literary Review’, that a journal’s heterogeneous contents ‘resolve into order’ for the ‘intelligent reader’, Harding quotes Denis Donoghue’s remark that ‘There is no evidence that readers hold the articles together in their minds, like discordant images in a metaphysical poem’ (12, 357). Nor did this norm of unresolved heterogeneity change when literary culture became galvanised by political crisis in the 1930s. As Peter Marks writes of The European Quarterly, Left Review and Poetry and the People, ‘the three magazines this chapter considers reflect diversity rather than standardisation’ (625). In the midst of all this diversity and eclecticism, Ann Ardis’s fervent insistence on ‘The New Age’s unwillingness to identify exclusively with any given periodical community’ sounds a little overstated; weren’t all modernist magazines, in fact, dialogic and diverse (220)? The answer seems to be yes, but that some were more dialogic than others. It is the inevitable effect of what Michael Levenson calls the ‘micro-sociology of modernist innovation’ (qtd 9) to atomise modernist formations into their constituent particles, but this does not mean that BLAST was as ‘eclectic’ as The English Review, or that The Athenaeum was as ‘dynamic’ as Rhythm. Donoghue puts his finger on the nub of this problem, and the history of modernist periodical reading is yet to be written. As well as assembling an unprecedented database of facts and critical perspectives on modernist periodical culture, the Oxford Critical

198

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:46pm

kms035.tex

The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines and Cultural History offers a showcase of current methodologies in periodical studies. In terms of broad approach, few chapters consent to stay within the bounds of Andreas Huyssen’s ‘great divide’ topography of modernism and mass culture – a view that has enjoyed flat-earth status in modernist studies for at least a decade, but which is still ritualistically renounced. More congenial to Brooker and Thacker’s contributors are adaptations of Jürgen Habermas’s idea of the public sphere, such as those undertaken by Morrisson and Lawrence Rainey, or Robert Scholes’s notion of modernist ‘paradoxies’ (830, 863). This refusal of the distinction between high and popular culture is notably manifest in an attention to the advertisements carried by modernist magazines, which can provide clues to a journal’s readership as well as jolts of historical flavour. Stephen Rogers’s droll analysis of ‘Ash’s Patent “Perfect’’ Leg-Rest’ in The Decachord, for example, delivers both these satisfactions (583). As Sean Latham and Robert Scholes have pointed out, these advertisements were omitted from the bound reprints of the 1960s, effectively occluding one of the most visible signs of complicity between modernist and commercial print cultures.2 Advertisements form part of what Jerome McGann calls the bibliographic code, a non- or para-linguistic semiotic channel that also encompasses typeface and other physical characteristics, and most chapters include some account of this code in the magazines they discuss, even where they do not invoke McGann’s terminology. This tendency is reflected in the volume’s own bibliographic code, which is handsomely ornamented with reproductions of front covers, illustrations, and other matter. Apart from this general book-historical interest in questions of price, format and circulation, approaches to the journals tend either to trace the networks of friendship and patronage that grew up around, or gave birth to, modernist magazines; to give detailed, diachronic readings of their contents, often in counterpoint with other tenants of the ‘interlocking field of periodical networks’ (347); to clarify the precise shape of their aesthetic programs; or, most often, to undertake a mixture of some or all of these tasks. Andrew Thacker sums up the first of these procedures in his chapter on Coterie, New Coterie and The Owl: The initial reaction upon viewing the contents of any typically heterogeneous modernist magazine is to seek to make connections between the various contributors, in terms of either personal relationships or contacts, or to discover whether a group of some form pre-existed the actual publication of the magazine. (464)

199

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:46pm

kms035.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies Retracing these webs provides the volume with much of its anecdotal richness, for the history of modernist magazines necessarily involves a chronicle of supper clubs and at-homes, pacts, alliances and fallingsout. We are reminded of the ‘Criterion gang’ who congregated at the Grove Tavern in Knightsbridge and the Ristorante Commercio in Soho ‘for convivial lunches and dinners’ (354) and the evening parties hosted by John Middleton Murry and attended by Athenaeum contributors (373), and we also learn of other, less well known institutions like the Half-Yearly Gathering of Subscribers and Friends organized by Voices editor Thomas Moult, attended in spring 1920 by May Sinclair, Anne Estelle Rice and Arthur Quiller-Couch, inter alia (416). Similarly, it is instructive to learn that owing to the location of his editorial address at the Arts Café, 1 Parton Street, Contemporary Poetry and Prose editor Roger Roughton was brought into ‘daily contact with [the] political activists’ who frequented the nearby offices of the Workers’ Theatre Movement, the Student Labour Federation and the Left Review (691). In this project of reconstructing personal relationships, the new periodical studies plays to one of its strengths: archival research. The back issues of many a modernist magazine are themselves only available in the special collections of large research libraries, but several of Brooker and Thacker’s contributors have also industriously mined unpublished correspondence and other sources to unravel the complex connections between editors, backers, publishers, contributors and rivals. Close readings of modernist periodicals allow for particularly nuanced accounts of aesthetic position-takings, sensitive to doctrinal niceties and factional fissures. Thus, for example, Brooker’s chapter uses the pages of Rhythm to position the Fauvist aesthetic of the Scottish colourist painter J. D. Fergusson and his circle in contrast to the protoabstractionism of Lewis’s Vortex (324–32). Likewise, Rod Mengham’s chapter on the British Surrealist magazines Contemporary Poetry and Prose, the London Bulletin, and Arson: An Ardent Review draws out ‘the fundamental disagreement between Herbert Read and Humphrey Jennings over the appropriate cultural genealogy for Surrealism’ (692). These close readings can also offer new perspectives on classic modernist documents by plucking them from the anthologies and reinserting them in the pell-mell of periodical polemics. Thus Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, published in two parts in The Egoist in September and December, 1919, receives no less than two makeovers in this volume, once when Jean-Michel Rabaté reads it as one half of a conversation with Dora Marsden’s Egoist editorials (285–8), and again when Cairns Craig connects it to Eliot’s rejection

200

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:46pm

kms035.tex

The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines of a regional Scottish tradition in ‘Was there a Scottish Literature?’, published in The Athenaeum a month before (760). Perhaps even more exciting than this displacement of venerable modernist landmarks, however, is the impression of a lost continent of other, competing statements: the alternative criteria and different canons that thronged the pages of a thriving periodical culture. As Brooker and Thacker point out in their general introduction, this continent is no longer an undiscovered country, but is, rather, well on its way to being mapped, mined and developed. Its vastness, however, ensures that plenty of work remains to be done, and the value of this volume and its two companions lies not only in the immense wealth of scholarship they contain, but also in the suggestive possibilities and methodological framework they offer to current and future researchers of modernist magazines. John Attridge University of New South Wales DOI: 10.3366/E2041450110000351 Notes 1. TLS, Thursday 25 April 1968, Issue 3452, p. 409. 2. Sean Latham and Robert Scholes, ‘The Rise of Periodical Studies’, PMLA 121 : 2, pp. 519–20.

201

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:54pm

kms036.tex

REVIEWS

Faith Binckes, Modernism, Magazines, and the British Avant-Garde Reading Rhythm, 1910–1914 (Oxford English Monographs Series, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) 260 pp., £55. ISBN 978 0 1992 5252 7 Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s ‘Head of a Girl’ scowls challengingly at the reader from the cover of Faith Binckes’s book. The contents are not aggressive but they are demanding, offering readers a subtly textured and nuanced counterpart to the monumental first volume of The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, published last year. In an essay in the History, Peter Brooker describes the ‘little magazines’ Rhythm, The Blue Review and The Signature, focusing particularly on the Bergsonian impetus behind Rhythm, on its interest in music and dance, and on the strength of what J. D. Fergusson called ‘the logic of line’ in its illustrations. Binckes’s project does not engage significantly with Bergson, music, or dance, but positions Rhythm, and to a lesser extent The Blue Review and The Signature, in a complex web of artistic, intellectual, commercial and personal relationships. Nothing is simplified apart from the aesthetic line characteristic of the magazines’ best images and writing. The biographical details of the contributors are sketched in but this is not their story. The protagonist is Rhythm itself. The cumulative effect of the book is to give a multi-dimensional insight into a publishing project that failed commercially, caused its editors intense anxiety and hardship, and offered a group of young artists and writers opportunities within a collaborative venture that gave a dynamic boost to their careers. As Binckes shows, the Rhythmists’ inflection of modernism, the British avantgarde, depended on their internationalism, and particularly on their awareness of the vitality of painting, poetry and design in Paris. The fact that, unlike most other groups such as the Futurists, they had no manifesto was, like many aspects of their venture, both a limitation and a liberation. They lacked definition in comparison with the Vorticists Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 2 (2010): 202–211 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

202

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:54pm

kms036.tex

Reviews but the vagueness of ‘Rhythmist’ as an umbrella term gave its members freedom to cross boundaries, experiment with forms, and challenge their cultural competitors. Binckes’s analysis makes clear what a competitive world they were part of. Using Jerome McGann’s formulation, she offers a ‘radial reading’ of the context in which Rhythm appeared, including ‘concern with the material condition of these texts, and their role in financial and publishing networks’ (13). In the first chapter, ‘Textual Investments and Publishing Fields’, Binckes counters the common assumption that Mansfield gave her allowance to Rhythm for purely ideological reasons by suggesting that it was also an investment in her professional future as ‘little magazines’ were one of the few areas in which women could extend the boundaries of avant-garde writing. Rhythm’s particular sparring partner was of course the New Age; their vitriolic attacks on one another are dissected revealingly in the chapter entitled ‘Networks of Difference’. Strategies of asserting difference, and affirmations of experimentalism versus traditionalism, bounced backwards and forwards between Orage at the New Age and Murry at Rhythm, but in satirising and attacking each other they bolstered each other’s position as readers were provoked to engage with both sides of the argument. Occasionally the size of the footnotes threatens to overwhelm the text in the earlier part of the book, but the trajectory becomes increasingly engaging. A chapter that is likely to be of particular interest to the readers of this journal is the one subtitled ‘Murry, Mansfield, Modernism’. Its readings of Mansfield’s contributions to Rhythm which focus on children place them within their specific publishing context as they ‘can be read as exercises in mobility, both of literary technique, authorial position, and textual strategy, their subtly shifting proximities to their readers being reinforced not only by the images that accompanied them, but by Mansfield’s use of pseudonym’ (124–5). Mansfield’s contribution to Rhythm’s ‘opposition to the notion of an authentic, masculinized, textual culture’ (133) was reinforced by the artists whose work appeared in the magazine. In a particularly well researched and enlightening chapter Binckes explores their vigorous inflection of modernism, sustaining a trenchant argument by reproducing two drawings by Derwent Lees in the Blue Review and inviting the reader to compare them with Jessica Dismorr’s illustration for ‘Le Petit Comptable’ in Rhythm. Dismorr’s image is playfully provocative whereas Lees returns to conventional gender relations by depicting a languid naked woman gazing at a man with a book in his hand. Binckes also succinctly settles the question of whether

203

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:54pm

kms036.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies Fergusson’s painting Rhythm (on the cover of this issue) preceded the line drawing for the magazine’s cover by summarising Antliff’s research proving that the line drawing came first. Though there are some errors, such as giving page references for Murry’s 1928 edition of the letters where the source is actually the Collected Letters, and an occasional omission from the comprehensive bibliography, this is a significant book. It ends with a moving evocation of a ‘brief, haunted, text’ by Mansfield – read the book yourself to discover which it is. Angela Smith University of Stirling DOI: 10.3366/E2041450110000363

Howard J. Booth, ed., New D. H. Lawrence (Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press, 2009) 200 pp., £55.00. ISBN 978 0 7190 7836 1 As promised by its title, New D. H. Lawrence delivers a range of innovative readings. But this outstanding collection also represents a welcome return to ‘old’ D. H. Lawrence, in that it seeks to situate the writer in his own time as well as in the current critical moment. As Howard Booth states, in an introduction that astutely summarises the field of study, ‘Lawrence is not our contemporary [. . .]. There is a need to know where Lawrence came from as a writer, his relationship to his own time’ (3). This is a common theme throughout the volume, but particularly in the early chapters, which begin with Andrew Harrison’s re-discovery of Lawrence as ‘a professional writer in a commercial context’ (17). This is followed by Booth’s own re-reading of The Rainbow in the context of the English Radical tradition, which opens up into ‘the consequences of late-colonialism for provincial England’ (40). Holly Laird then discusses suicide in Women in Love, a novel which requires ‘a historical moment comparable in bleakness to the First World War to gauge the seriousness of [its] dimensions’ (75). There are a further two contributions that also deal with the War. Hugh Stevens explores the idea that ‘Psychoanalysis shares with Women in Love an interest in the relationship between individual aggression and war between nations’ (81). And Stefania Michelucci reads ‘The Ladybird’ as a response to the damaging effects of the War and an important turning point in Lawrence’s writing towards the so-called ‘mythic method’ (117), which aligns Lawrence’s story with T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses.

204

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:54pm

kms036.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies Fergusson’s painting Rhythm (on the cover of this issue) preceded the line drawing for the magazine’s cover by summarising Antliff’s research proving that the line drawing came first. Though there are some errors, such as giving page references for Murry’s 1928 edition of the letters where the source is actually the Collected Letters, and an occasional omission from the comprehensive bibliography, this is a significant book. It ends with a moving evocation of a ‘brief, haunted, text’ by Mansfield – read the book yourself to discover which it is. Angela Smith University of Stirling DOI: 10.3366/E2041450110000363

Howard J. Booth, ed., New D. H. Lawrence (Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press, 2009) 200 pp., £55.00. ISBN 978 0 7190 7836 1 As promised by its title, New D. H. Lawrence delivers a range of innovative readings. But this outstanding collection also represents a welcome return to ‘old’ D. H. Lawrence, in that it seeks to situate the writer in his own time as well as in the current critical moment. As Howard Booth states, in an introduction that astutely summarises the field of study, ‘Lawrence is not our contemporary [. . .]. There is a need to know where Lawrence came from as a writer, his relationship to his own time’ (3). This is a common theme throughout the volume, but particularly in the early chapters, which begin with Andrew Harrison’s re-discovery of Lawrence as ‘a professional writer in a commercial context’ (17). This is followed by Booth’s own re-reading of The Rainbow in the context of the English Radical tradition, which opens up into ‘the consequences of late-colonialism for provincial England’ (40). Holly Laird then discusses suicide in Women in Love, a novel which requires ‘a historical moment comparable in bleakness to the First World War to gauge the seriousness of [its] dimensions’ (75). There are a further two contributions that also deal with the War. Hugh Stevens explores the idea that ‘Psychoanalysis shares with Women in Love an interest in the relationship between individual aggression and war between nations’ (81). And Stefania Michelucci reads ‘The Ladybird’ as a response to the damaging effects of the War and an important turning point in Lawrence’s writing towards the so-called ‘mythic method’ (117), which aligns Lawrence’s story with T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses.

204

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:54pm

kms036.tex

Reviews While each chapter offers a fresh approach, there is a subtle shift around the middle of the volume towards new theoretical ground. This is a gap in Lawrence studies, which the introduction identifies somewhat cautiously, since in the past ‘theory was imposed onto Lawrence’s writing anyway, whatever the accuracy of the results’ (3). The accuracy of this volume, however, is impeccable, and two chapters stand out as sufficiently ground-breaking to engage the interest of a wider scholarly readership as well as Lawrence enthusiasts. Jeff Wallace, who has previously challenged our preconceptions about Lawrence and the binary division of nature and science, here examines Lawrence’s apparently contradictory views on abstraction in his essay ‘Democracy’.1 Drawing on Robert Tressell, Walt Whitman, Deleuze and Guattari, among others, Wallace masterfully demonstrates the possibility of the simultaneous existence of both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ abstraction and Lawrence’s aspiration towards ‘ “the perfect absence of abstraction’’ ’ which is founded on difference and otherness (114). Fiona Becket’s pioneering chapter also challenges a human-centred view of Lawrence, in a different but complementary way, as she deploys green cultural critique to argue ‘a metaphysic of interconnectedness’ between Lawrence and the non-human world, which ‘goes beyond the human to redeem nature’s others from the margins’ (166). The remaining two chapters help to define some of the gaps which inevitably remain in the wake of this brilliant, but relatively slim volume. Bethan Jones makes excellent use of recently edited and collected stories and fragments from Lawrence’s final years in her chapter on gender and comedy (itself the subject of a notable edition).2 Those familiar with Mansfield’s stories will find surprising resonance in Jones’s comments about Lawrence’s writing, not least when she describes ‘the delicate poise between stylistic lightness of touch and the darker material stirring just beneath the surface’ (144). However, there is not a single reference to Mansfield in the entire volume and only a handful to Eliot, Joyce and Woolf, or ‘lesser’ figures such as Tressell. The contextualisation of Lawrence among his contemporary writers and artists, which might contribute to a better understanding of Lawrence within modernism, remains a woefully neglected dimension of Lawrence scholarship. The final chapter of New D. H. Lawrence is a fascinating reading by Sean Matthews of the Lady Chatterley trial, as ‘the climax of a drama of class, criticism and culture which had begun in the 1940s’ (170). And so this thought-provoking volume finishes in the 1950s – a mid-point between the old and new Lawrence the collection evokes – without fully resolving the question of our preconceptions as

205

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:54pm

kms036.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies readers and critics today, but framing rewarding parameters for future research. Susan Reid University of Northampton DOI: 10.3366/E2041450110000375 Notes 1. Jeff Wallace, D. H. Lawrence, Science and the Posthuman (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005). 2. Paul Eggert and John Worthen, eds, Lawrence and Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

Madelyn Detloff, The Persistence of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 213 pp., £64. ISBN 978 0 521 89642 9 This fine new book establishes Madelyn Detloff as a powerful voice in modernist literary studies. Focusing on the writings of Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and H. D., it is the latest in a growing body of criticism aimed at recuperating modernist literature from accusations of conservatism, quietism, elitism, and irrelevance. For Detloff, it is what these writers have to teach us about nationalism and war, loss and mourning, suffering and empathy, that establishes them as politically progressive and, more importantly, instructive for our post 9/11 world. They show modernism to be ‘a resistant, even resilient cultural formation’ (4). We can look to modernist writers’ responses to catastrophe, Detloff contends, because our world is ‘patched’ by the same viral ‘codes’ (2): xenophobic nationalism, state-sponsored homophobia and interethnic violence. Woolf, Stein, and H. D. have special insight into these matters because, as queer women, they were ‘metics’: that is, subjects who ‘belong, but not quite fully, to a culture’, who are ‘not quite [. . .] citizen[s] of the world, and not quite [. . .] citizen[s] of a nation’ (7). Their own vulnerability to exclusionary practices makes them especially perceptive about how such things work, and deeply invested in framing alternatives. Detloff’s project is to show how these writers challenge the inevitability of retributive war, or ‘think peace into existence’, as Woolf put it in ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’ (1940). This essay, along with Woolf’s Three Guineas (1938) and Between the Acts (1941), is a prominent example of this effort. Detloff’s analysis of Between the Acts, and particularly of the subversive pageant with which Miss La Trobe exposes the construction of British national identity, is particularly illuminating. She reminds us of La Trobe’s metic status as a lesbian,

206

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:54pm

kms036.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies readers and critics today, but framing rewarding parameters for future research. Susan Reid University of Northampton DOI: 10.3366/E2041450110000375 Notes 1. Jeff Wallace, D. H. Lawrence, Science and the Posthuman (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005). 2. Paul Eggert and John Worthen, eds, Lawrence and Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

Madelyn Detloff, The Persistence of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 213 pp., £64. ISBN 978 0 521 89642 9 This fine new book establishes Madelyn Detloff as a powerful voice in modernist literary studies. Focusing on the writings of Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and H. D., it is the latest in a growing body of criticism aimed at recuperating modernist literature from accusations of conservatism, quietism, elitism, and irrelevance. For Detloff, it is what these writers have to teach us about nationalism and war, loss and mourning, suffering and empathy, that establishes them as politically progressive and, more importantly, instructive for our post 9/11 world. They show modernism to be ‘a resistant, even resilient cultural formation’ (4). We can look to modernist writers’ responses to catastrophe, Detloff contends, because our world is ‘patched’ by the same viral ‘codes’ (2): xenophobic nationalism, state-sponsored homophobia and interethnic violence. Woolf, Stein, and H. D. have special insight into these matters because, as queer women, they were ‘metics’: that is, subjects who ‘belong, but not quite fully, to a culture’, who are ‘not quite [. . .] citizen[s] of the world, and not quite [. . .] citizen[s] of a nation’ (7). Their own vulnerability to exclusionary practices makes them especially perceptive about how such things work, and deeply invested in framing alternatives. Detloff’s project is to show how these writers challenge the inevitability of retributive war, or ‘think peace into existence’, as Woolf put it in ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’ (1940). This essay, along with Woolf’s Three Guineas (1938) and Between the Acts (1941), is a prominent example of this effort. Detloff’s analysis of Between the Acts, and particularly of the subversive pageant with which Miss La Trobe exposes the construction of British national identity, is particularly illuminating. She reminds us of La Trobe’s metic status as a lesbian,

206

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:54pm

kms036.tex

Reviews and of what her subversive, parodic production owes to drag. Her wonderful analysis of Stein yields another strategy for challenging exclusionary nationalist discourse. Stein’s famous refusal to transform a rose into something else (‘a rose is a rose is a rose’) becomes aligned with the refusal of the substitutive logic involved in the construction of national identity: a refusal of what we see, for example, in patriotic war elegies. It is in this context that Detloff reminds us of striking passages in Stein recalling the anti-elegiac war poets of World War I: ‘ “Dead is dead. To be dead is to be really dead said one man and there are very many men who really feel this in them, to be dead is to be really dead and that is the end of them’’ ’ (70, quoting from Stein’s The Making of Americans). Detloff’s last modernist metic, H. D., also strikes out against redemptive wartime rhetoric. In her novel Pilate’s Wife (1924–34; published 2000), Christ does not die on the cross but is rescued through the cooperative efforts of an ethically varied group of people, united in their abhorrence of suffering. With this radical rewriting of one of the myths most essential to the ‘ideology of sacrifice’, H. D. perhaps goes farthest among Detloff’s writers in ‘imagining peace into existence’. In the book’s second part, Detloff considers the modernist ‘patch’ in contemporary literature and film. Her focus here is mainly on how the iconic figure of Woolf haunts the work of Hanif Kureishi and Michael Cunningham, Pat Barker and Susan Sontag. Kureishi weaves Woolf’s metic perspective admirably into representations of post-imperial, multicultural London, in texts such as Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1988) and The Buddha of Suburbia (1990). Other appropriations of her image, though, are more problematic. Cunningham’s portrayal of Woolf’s suicide, in The Hours (2000), and of the AIDS victim whose story he intertwines with hers, is suspiciously redemptive. Sontag’s prominent use of Woolf in Regarding the Pain of Others (2004) – her attack on Woolf’s apparent endorsement of atrocity photographs in Three Guineas – also does her an injustice, for all evidence suggests that Woolf was far from naïve about either the rhetoricity of photographs or the problematics of empathy. While beautifully written, this book is not an easy read. Its chaptersections are self-contained essays that sometimes seem to digress from the advertised subject of the book: a lengthy section detailing Woolf’s flirtation with the Argentinian feminist Victoria Ocampo, for example, or another on the curious sense of ‘shame’ (53) dogging critics of Stein, owing partly to her incomprehensible associations with collaborators in Vichy France. Patience with those apparent digressions, though,

207

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:54pm

kms036.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies is amply rewarded. By reminding us that it is not easy to make Stein ‘culturally legible’ (59), Detloff may pre-empt complicity with some of the more problematic parts of Stein’s work. In her paratactic method and her attentiveness to the writers’ individual stories, Detloff resists either lionising her subjects or flattening moral and human complexities. Her writing challenges us to think hard and ethically; it does not preach. Detloff writes that modernist writers provide valuable ‘conceptual resources’ for living in the midst of loss and violence. Her book offers useful definitions and illustrations for many of these: the ‘ideology of death’ (110), the ‘logic of sacrifice’ (110), the ‘performativity of nation’ (43) and ‘structural violence’ (134); ‘postmemory’ (54) and belatedness (89); ‘compassionate imagination’ (120) and ‘compassionate fatigue’ (119); the strategies of ‘backshadowing’ and ‘sideshadowing’ (55); ‘the gendering of melancholia’ (156) and ‘the politics of Orpheus’ (154), and of the meaning of a ‘grievable death’ (168). To these Detloff adds her own memorable coinages: ‘metics’ (4) and the modernist ‘patch’ (2), ‘outrage fatigue’ (119), the ‘battle’ of commemoration (167), a ‘postAntigonean politics of mourning’ (169). Detloff is a fine teacher. Her careful explications of these concepts may be, in the end, the book’s greatest gift, for much remains to be said about what interwar writers teach us for our time. Late in her study Detloff asks: ‘[h]ow [. . .] might a particular act of remembrance shape the meanings we give to the past, and how does that construction of the past shape our possible futures?’ (170). The writers she discusses were far from alone in pondering this question, as they stared, Janus-faced, backward to one World War and forward to another. Woolf, H. D. and Stein were just a few of many modernist writers who thought carefully about how to respond to violence and to prevent it from happening again. Thanks to this remarkable book, we will now be much better equipped to understand, and to benefit by, that rich legacy. Patricia Rae Queen’s University, Canada DOI: 10.3366/E2041450110000387

Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness: Stories (New York: Knopf, 2009) 304 pp., $25.95. ISBN 978 0 3072 6976 8; (London: Chatto and Windus, 2009) 306 pp., £17.99. ISBN 978 0 7011 8305 9 Devotees of Mansfield will welcome the arrival of a new collection of short stories by the esteemed Canadian writer Alice Munro, who might be regarded as the inheritor of Mansfield’s mantle as doyenne of the

208

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:54pm

kms036.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies is amply rewarded. By reminding us that it is not easy to make Stein ‘culturally legible’ (59), Detloff may pre-empt complicity with some of the more problematic parts of Stein’s work. In her paratactic method and her attentiveness to the writers’ individual stories, Detloff resists either lionising her subjects or flattening moral and human complexities. Her writing challenges us to think hard and ethically; it does not preach. Detloff writes that modernist writers provide valuable ‘conceptual resources’ for living in the midst of loss and violence. Her book offers useful definitions and illustrations for many of these: the ‘ideology of death’ (110), the ‘logic of sacrifice’ (110), the ‘performativity of nation’ (43) and ‘structural violence’ (134); ‘postmemory’ (54) and belatedness (89); ‘compassionate imagination’ (120) and ‘compassionate fatigue’ (119); the strategies of ‘backshadowing’ and ‘sideshadowing’ (55); ‘the gendering of melancholia’ (156) and ‘the politics of Orpheus’ (154), and of the meaning of a ‘grievable death’ (168). To these Detloff adds her own memorable coinages: ‘metics’ (4) and the modernist ‘patch’ (2), ‘outrage fatigue’ (119), the ‘battle’ of commemoration (167), a ‘postAntigonean politics of mourning’ (169). Detloff is a fine teacher. Her careful explications of these concepts may be, in the end, the book’s greatest gift, for much remains to be said about what interwar writers teach us for our time. Late in her study Detloff asks: ‘[h]ow [. . .] might a particular act of remembrance shape the meanings we give to the past, and how does that construction of the past shape our possible futures?’ (170). The writers she discusses were far from alone in pondering this question, as they stared, Janus-faced, backward to one World War and forward to another. Woolf, H. D. and Stein were just a few of many modernist writers who thought carefully about how to respond to violence and to prevent it from happening again. Thanks to this remarkable book, we will now be much better equipped to understand, and to benefit by, that rich legacy. Patricia Rae Queen’s University, Canada DOI: 10.3366/E2041450110000387

Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness: Stories (New York: Knopf, 2009) 304 pp., $25.95. ISBN 978 0 3072 6976 8; (London: Chatto and Windus, 2009) 306 pp., £17.99. ISBN 978 0 7011 8305 9 Devotees of Mansfield will welcome the arrival of a new collection of short stories by the esteemed Canadian writer Alice Munro, who might be regarded as the inheritor of Mansfield’s mantle as doyenne of the

208

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:54pm

kms036.tex

Reviews genre. Munro’s collection, Too Much Happiness, winner of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize, brings to mind affinities with Mansfield’s work in myriad instances, beginning, of course, with a title reminiscent of ‘Bliss’. Is there such a thing as too much happiness? Munro issues a warning with her title: just wait, the other shoe is bound to drop. Connoisseurs of modern short fiction, though, are well acquainted with the delicacies of dread-filled suspense. If the short story enjoyed a surge of energy from its particular suitability to expressing modernist disillusionment and irony, its ability to combine sudden revelations with indirection and indeterminacy continues to seduce readers in this, our postmodern era. What comes through when reading Munro’s work in comparison with Mansfield’s is a shared preoccupation with female experiences of vulnerability, endangerment, and isolation, a stripping away, if you will, of the illusion of domestic comfort under the glare of both authors’ close scrutiny of familial and romantic psychodramas and fantasies. Both Mansfield and Munro tend to withhold triumph or a sense of well-being fostered in connectedness, yet both create worlds where glimmers of humanising contact do occasionally grace lives defined by customary isolation; those glimmers, so fragile, offer us a chance to celebrate anew the modernist affirmation of the ordinary, the mundane, the everyday, and the random. At times, Munro’s stories seem rather unremitting in their bleakness. Her gothic imagination is forcefully adept at creating alarming and anxiety-provoking situations. In ‘Fiction’ and ‘Free Radicals’, marriages fall apart through adulterous affairs. The threat of adultery lingers over ‘Some Women’, while ‘Face’ and ‘Child’s Play’ expose us to the vulnerability, fear, and rage of children. Family life bristles with danger, Munro warns us. Houses are hotbeds of quiet, often unnoticed, secretive emotional tensions; behind closed doors or hidden in plain sight on sunny, noisy, summer days, lurk horrendous acts of violence. In the story ‘Deep-Holes’, a mother on a picnic, for example, realises her young son has fallen into a crevasse; though his life is saved, his injuries, both physical and emotional, will never be healed completely. Is it her fault that he fell? Is it the fault of her husband, a geologist whose expertise has led them to this particular spot in nature for their ‘innocent’ picnic? The holes are a metaphor for the pitfalls of parental dreams of protecting their children from calamity and of receiving gratitude for providing care. Readers of these stories may well be reminded of some of the darker elements of Mansfield’s, and take note of their shared sense of fascination with precipitous edges, with the danger of falling. Mansfield, of course, resists the temptation, in her culture and ours,

209

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:54pm

kms036.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies to romanticise childhood as innocent and free. Think of ‘The Woman at the Store’, ‘At the Bay’, and especially ‘Prelude’. When Mansfield ventures into the territory of the grotesque, showing us the waddling figure of a headless duck, she brings us extremely close to the hysterical laughter of the amazed children who witness its decapitation, so that the sound of their screams rings in our ears. Kezia’s interlude with her grandmother in ‘At the Bay’ similarly involves an encounter with a sudden death, that of her uncle, whom she imagines ‘fallen over like a tin soldier by the side of a big black hole’; sudden death is the raison d’être of ‘The Garden Party’, and murder (and yet another hole) are revealed in ‘The Woman at the Store’. Men die; young women, shocked, bear witness. The shock of adultery defines ‘Bliss’, it haunts ‘Marriage à la Mode’, indirectly, it lurks in ‘At the Bay’. When we linger over these elements of Mansfield’s fiction, we are brought closer to the writer sharply described by the novelist and critic Brigid Brophy, who celebrated Mansfield for her ‘fierceness’, her ‘cannibal imagination’, and her ability to show ‘the world glimpsed by an assassin’.1 Brophy’s Mansfield is so fierce that ‘her impulse towards the helpless and unprotected was not solely help and protection’, as revealed in ‘The Little Governess’ (258). Brophy writes of that story that ‘the imagination which devised it was Neronic; and because she for once did not slobber over the ambiguity of her own feelings it is a masterpiece’ (259). If ‘The Little Governess’ is one of Mansfield’s best stories, it is because it criticises its protagonist for her naiveté with a mixture of sympathy and repulsion. Like Mansfield, Munro is a harsh taskmaster when it comes to educating women that yes, they are endangered by predatory males, and no, they are not to be treated as innocent victims. Several of the stories in Too Much Happiness involve women falling prey: ‘Wenlock Edge’ (in this story, which contains a wickedly explicit appearance of the Houseman poem invoked in its title, the edge also reminds us of the danger of falling), ‘Free Radicals’, and ‘Dimensions’ all show us women threatened by dangerous men; in the case of ‘Dimensions’, the bleak vision of marriage and motherhood far exceeds the Mansfieldian nightmare of ‘Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding’. Both Mansfield and Munro provide a welcome antidote to fantasies of romantic rescue and domestic comfort, for which a considerable market exists when it comes to female readership. We immerse ourselves in the literature of disillusionment to return strengthened to the world when it confronts us with some of its harsher realities. But Mansfield and Munro also know how to heighten our awareness and appreciation of the world as it is, and not only in its bleaker

210

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:54pm

kms036.tex

Reviews aspects. Both are masters of the delicate gesture: in ‘Feuille d’Album’, Mansfield’s Ian French hands an egg to the girl he has a crush on, and a balance is restored to us, our faith restored in the human touches that bridge the chasm of isolation. Such transactions occur in Munro’s stories, too: chance works in harmony with human agency and resilience to create good fortune. The title story of Munro’s collection, ‘Too Much Happiness’, pays moving tribute to a historical figure, a female mathematician, Sophia Kovalevsky. The late-nineteenth-century Russian and European setting evokes the world of Mansfield and Chekhov. In this story of an intellectual woman’s passionate dedication to a profession dominated by men, Munro celebrates the struggles and achievements of pioneers – such as Mansfield – who came before her. Rishona Zimring Lewis & Clark College Portland, Oregon DOI: 10.3366/E2041450110000399 Note 1. Brigid Brophy, ‘Katherine Mansfield’, in Don’t Never Forget: Collected Views and Reviews (New York: Holt, Rhinehart, and Winston, 1966), p. 261.

211

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:55pm

kms040.tex

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Sarah Ailwood is a lecturer at the University of Canberra. Her interest in Katherine Mansfield focuses on issues of gender and empire in her stories. Her other research interests include Jane Austen, men in women’s writing and women’s life narrative and the law. Maurizio Ascari is a senior lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bologna (Italy). His publications include books and essays on crime fiction, the formation of the literary canon, world literature and travel writing. He has also edited and translated works by Henry James, Katherine Mansfield, William Faulkner, Jack London and William Wilkie Collins. John Attridge is a lecturer in English at the University of New South Wales. His essays on Conrad, Ford and James have appeared or are forthcoming in Modernism/modernity, ELH, The Times Literary Supplement and The Henry James Review. He is completing a book on literary impressionism and the rise of professional society. Christine Butterworth-McDermott is an assistant professor at Stephen F. Austin State University, where she teaches courses in modernism, fairy tales, and creative writing. Her critical work has been published in American Transcendental Quarterly, The Henry James Review, The Critical Companion to Henry James, and Twice-Told Children’s Tales (Routledge). Ailsa Cox is a Reader in English and Writing at Edge Hill University in the UK. Her books include The Real Louise and Other Stories (2009), Writing Short Stories (2005) and Alice Munro (2003). She has also written

Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 2 (2010): 212–215 DOI: 10.3366/E2041450110000405 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

212

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:55pm

kms040.tex

Notes on Contributors essays on short story writers including Katherine Mansfield, and edits the forthcoming journal, Short Fiction in Theory & Practice. Delia da Sousa Correa is Senior Lecturer in English at the Open University and is the editor of Katherine Mansfield Studies. She was educated in New Zealand, London and Oxford. Her published research centres on connections between literature and music in the nineteenth-century and modernist periods. Robert Fraser is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and currently Professor of English at the Open University. His staged plays include life portraits of Byron, Dr Johnson and the composermurderer Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa. His published books include studies of Proust, Sir James Frazer, Victorian quest romance and international print history. Following his full-length biography of the British poet George Barker, a Spectator Book of the Year in 2002, his life of the poet David Gascoyne will appear with Oxford University Press during 2011. Kirsty Gunn is the author of several works of fiction, as well as 44 Things, a collection of memoirs, essays, short stories and poetry. She is the current Randell Cottage Resident in New Zealand, where she is working on a book called Thorndon, with Katherine Mansfield at its centre. She has a Chair in Writing at the University of Dundee. Penelope Jackson is the curator of the Tauranga Art Gallery, New Zealand. Recent publications include Edward Bullmore: A Surrealist Odyssey (2008) and The Brown Years (2009), about artist Nigel Brown. She has contributed to the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, Art New Zealand, UNO and Bravado magazines and recently submitted her PhD to the University of Queensland. Fiona Kidman has written novels, short stories, memoirs and poems. A former librarian, her writing career spans nearly fifty years. Her most recent book is Where Your Left Hand Rests: A Collection Of Poems (2010). She was knighted in 1998 for her services to literature. In 2006, she was the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellow in Menton. The French government awarded her the Legion of Honour in 2009. Gerri Kimber is an Associate Lecturer at The Open University. She is Chair of the Katherine Mansfield Society and co-editor of Katherine Mansfield Studies. She is the author of Katherine Mansfield: The View from France (2008), and A Literary Modernist: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of the Short Story (2008). She is co-editor of two essay

213

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:55pm

kms040.tex

Katherine Mansfield Studies collections: Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism (2011) and Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary Volume of Essays (2011). Linda Lappin teaches American language at the University of Rome La Sapienza. She is the author of three novels: The Etruscan (Wynkin deWorde, 2004) inspired by Lawrence’s Etruscan Places; Katherine’s Wish (Wordcraft of Oregon, 2008) based on Mansfield’s life; and Signatures in Stone, (forthcoming), inspired by Mary Butts’ theory of signatures. Kirsty Martin is a Junior Research Fellow at Linacre College, University of Oxford. Her research focuses on literature and emotion and she is currently writing a book on ideas of sympathy in the modernist novel, as well as working on a project on happiness in the novel. Anne Mounic is maître de conference/lecturer at the University Paris 3 – Sorbonne nouvelle. She is co-editor of the on-line literary review Temporel. Recent publications include Quand on a marché plusieurs années (a novel). Among her critical essays are ‘Psyché et le secret de Perséphone: Prose en métamorphose, mémoire et création (Katherine Mansfield, Catherine Pozzi, Anna Kavan, Djuna Barnes)’ (2004), and ‘Jacob ou l’être du possible’ (2009). Vincent O’Sullivan, Professor Emeritus, Victoria University of Wellington, has edited, with Margaret Scott, the five volume edition of Katherine Mansfield’s Collected Letters, published by Oxford University Press. He is also widely published as a poet, fiction writer, playwright, and biographer. His most recent work is Further Convictions Pending: Poems 1998–2008. Patricia Rae is Professor of English at Queen’s University in Ontario. She is the author of The Practical Muse: Pragmatist Poetics in Hulme, Pound and Stevens (1997) and the editor of Modernism and Mourning (2007). She has published widely on modernist literature and is currently completing a book, Modernist Orwell which explores George Orwell’s relationship to literary modernism. Susan Reid is a founding board member of the Katherine Mansfield Society, guest editor of the scholarly journal Katherine Mansfield Studies (vol. 2), editor of the online ‘Katherine Mansfield Blog’, and reviews editor for the Journal of Postcolonial Writing. Her published work includes articles on Mansfield, Lawrence and Woolf, with a particular focus on masculinity, but also engaging broader questions of gender and identity, such as Englishness, the pastoral, and the utopian.

214

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:55pm

kms040.tex

Notes on Contributors Angela Smith is Professor Emeritus of the Department of English Studies at the University of Stirling. Her books include East African Writing in English (1989), Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two (1999), Katherine Mansfield: A Literary Life (2000) and editions of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1997), and Katherine Mansfield Selected Stories (2002). C. K. Stead, Professor Emeritus, University of Auckland, is known as a critic of twentieth-century modernism, and of New Zealand literature, including Mansfield. He is the author of a dozen novels, and as many volumes of poems recently gathered in Collected Poems, 1951–2006. He was awarded a CBE in 1985, and in 2007 his country’s highest award, the ONZ. Andrew Thacker is Professor of Twentieth Century English and Director of the Centre for Textual Studies at De Montfort University, Leicester. He has published widely on modernism and recent publications include the co-edited The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines volume 1 (2009) and The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms (2010), and the forthcoming monograph The Imagist Poets (2010). Rishona Zimring is Associate Professor of English at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, where she teaches courses on modernist and postcolonial literature. She has published essays on Conrad, Rhys, Woolf, Gissing, Rushdie, film and dance, and was the 2005 organizer of the annual conference on Virginia Woolf.

215

October 1, 2010

Time:

01:56pm

kms041.tex

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The poems ‘Wearing Katherine Mansfield’s Shawl’ and ‘Working in Katherine Mansfield’s Room’ by Fiona Kidman, first appeared in Where Your Left Hand Rests, a Godwit publication (2010). The poems are published with kind permission of Godwit /Random House New Zealand. The Editors are grateful to the Open University’s Arts Faculty which has provided generous support for the development of the journal. The poems ‘Wearing Katherine Mansfield’s Shawl’ and ‘Working in Katherine Mansfield’s Room’ by Fiona Kidman, first appeared in Where Your Left Hand Rests, a Godwit publication (2010). The poems are published with kind permission of Godwit/Random House New Zealand. Jenny Kinnear at the Fergusson Gallery in Perth, Scotland, and Maria Singer at the Yale Center for British Art were particularly helpful in obtaining image reproductions for this volume. Professors Angela Smith and J. Lawrence Mitchell were kind enough to suggest the front cover and frontispiece images, respectively. In addition, the Editors would like to thank everyone who worked so tirelessly to obtain the necessary permissions to enable us to reproduce Beatrice Campbell’s little known painting featuring Katherine Mansfield, which accompanies Penelope Jackson’s report. Special thanks to Penelope Jackson herself who paid for the reproduction, Victoria Leachman and Becky Masters at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Felicity O’Mahony and Jane Maxwell at the Manuscripts and Archives Library, Trinity College Dublin, the Hon. Brigid Campbell and Ian Smyth for copyright permissions, and finally Ann Vinnicombe, Jackie Jones and Sarah Edwards at Edinburgh University Press, together with Angela Smith, for unerring advice and generous support. Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 2 (2010): 216 DOI: 10.3366/E2041450110000417 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

216