The Diaries of Katherine Mansfield: Including Miscellaneous Works 9781399504164

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The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield Volume 4

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The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield Volume 1: The Collected Fiction of Katherine Mansfield, 1898–1915, edited by Gerri Kimber and Vincent O’Sullivan Volume 2: The Collected Fiction of Katherine Mansfield, 1916–1922, edited by Gerri Kimber and Vincent O’Sullivan Volume 3: The Poetry and Critical Writings of Katherine Mansfield, edited by Gerri Kimber and Angela Smith Volume 4: The Diaries of Katherine Mansfield: Including Miscellaneous Works, edited by Gerri Kimber and Claire Davison

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The Diaries of Katherine Mansfield Including Miscellaneous Works

Edited by Gerri Kimber and Claire Davison

Editorial Assistant Anna Plumridge

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: www.edinburghuniversitypress.com © Introduction, Arrangement and Editorial matter, Gerri Kimber and Claire Davison, 2016 © The Estate of Katherine Mansfield for copyright in materials held by the Estate © Margaret Scott and Daphne Brasell Associates for copyright in The Notebooks of Katherine Mansfield not otherwise held by the Estate of Katherine Mansfield Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun - Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10.5/12 Adobe Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 8505 9 (hardback) The right of Gerri Kimber and Claire Davison to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Published with the support of the Edinburgh University Scholarly Publishing Initiatives Fund.

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Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Abbreviations and Textual Note Chronology: Katherine Mansfield 1888–1923

vi viii x xii

Introduction 1901 1903 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909 1910 1911 1912 1913 1914 1915 1916 1917 1918 1919 1920 1921 1922 1923 Miscellany

1 9 10 15 19 20 28 84 102 118 119 122 124 125 146 182 222 237 261 296 340 396 453 459

Appendix: Errata for Volumes 1–3 General Index

488 490

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List of Illustrations

Figure 1. Portrait of Katherine Mansfield, PAColl–6826–1–20–2, John Middleton Murry Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

xx

Figure 2. The Beauchamp children’s dolls, c. 1903. Notebook 40, qMS–1239. John Middleton Murry Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

14

Figure 3. Reading notes, apparently from Edmund Parish’s Hallucinations and Illusions: A Study of the Fallacies of Perception, dated 2 May 1907. Notebook 1, qMS–1242. John Middleton Murry Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

43

Figure 4. Illustrated diary entry, c. 1914. Notebook 10, qMS–1250. John Middleton Murry Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

141

Figure 5. Diary entry, 11 January 1915. Notebook 4, qMS–1251. John Middleton Murry Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

151

Figure 6. Everyday accounts, December 1915. Notebook 33, qMS–1246–1. John Middleton Murry Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

181

Figure 7. Beryl Fairfield and the second self, early 1916. Notebook 45, qMS–1253. John Middleton Murry Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

185

Figure 8. Lists, plans and accounts, May 1916. Notebook 33, qMS–1246–2. John Middleton Murry Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

213

Figure 9. ‘Miss Mose’, c. 1917. Notebook 32, qMS–1256. John Middleton Murry Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. 232 vi

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list of illustrations

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Figure 10. Doodles and illustrations (1), c. 1916–17. Notebook 17, qMS–1255–1. John Middleton Murry Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

234

Figure 11. Doodles and illustrations (2), c. 1916. Notebook 17, qMS–1255–2. John Middleton Murry Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

236

Figure 12. Accounts and note to JMM, early autumn 1922. MS–Papers–4006–10–1. John Middleton Murry Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

430

Figure 13. Russian vocabulary lessons, winter 1922. Notebook 5, qMS–1283. John Middleton Murry Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

449

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Acknowledgements

First and foremost, we would like to record our gratitude to Margaret Scott, her family and her publisher, Daphne Brasell, for so generously allowing us to make full use of her transcriptions of KM’s notebooks for this volume. Sadly, Margaret Scott passed away on 6 December 2014, while the editing of this volume was still under way. It is impossible to over-emphasise how indebted all KM scholars are to her patient and painstaking labours in transcribing KM’s notebooks. We would also like to thank Margaret's family, and especially Rachel Scott. Our warm thanks go to Anna Plumridge, the volume’s Editorial Assistant, whose own transcription of Notebook 2 (the Urewera Notebook) is used here. Anna is a fine KM scholar in her own right and has given of her own time freely and generously, making innumerable trips to the Alexander Turnbull Library when we could not do so ourselves, in order to follow up on manuscript queries. Without her intellectual energy and incisive comments on problematic manuscripts, and her constant goodwill and responsiveness, this volume would be very much the poorer. The editors would like to thank the following people and organisations, for making this edition of KM’s diaries possible: Jackie Jones, our editor at Edinburgh University Press (EUP), for having the vision and foresight to commit wholeheartedly to taking this massive project on, and whose practical and emotional support has been unwavering throughout; the editorial team at EUP, including James Dale, Adela Rauchova, Rebecca Mackenzie and Carla Hepburn, for their friendly professionalism; Wendy Lee, our copy editor, for her good-natured efficiency; the Society of Authors, as the literary representatives of the Estate of Katherine Mansfield, and especially Sarah Burton, for granting permission to reproduce copyright material; the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, and especially Chris Szekely, Fiona Oliver, Jocelyn Chalmers, Jenni Christoffells, Gillian Headifen and Kirsty Willis; the Newberry Library in Chicago, USA, and especially John Powell, Alex Teller and viii

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acknowledgements

ix

Martha Briggs; the volume’s Advisory Board – Professor Sydney Janet Kaplan, Professor J. Lawrence Mitchell, Emeritus Professor Angela Smith and Professor Janet Wilson, together with Kevin Ireland, for their generosity in reading and assessing material presented to them; Ralph Kimber, who patiently collated all the individual texts which have been brought together here, and who provided invaluable technical support; and various wonderful friends and colleagues who responded to specific queries with much-appreciated expertise and goodwill during the preparation of this volume – Iain Britton, Galya Diment, Michael Forrest, Gilles Freyssinet, Andrew Harrison, Kevin Ireland, Joseph Spooner and C. K. Stead. Claire Davison gratefully acknowledges the financial and professional support of Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3, and her colleagues in the research team PRISMES; she also extends her fondest thanks to her parents, Peter and Mary Davison, not only for a lifetime’s steadfast support, but also for their memories and material preservation of so many articles of everyday life in the early decades of the twentieth century which could illuminate KM’s oblique references and analogies here. Gerri Kimber would like to record her gratitude to the University of Northampton for so generously supporting her research as well as the Friends of the Turnbull Library (FoTL), and especially Rachel Underwood, Kate Fortune and Sheila Williams, for granting her the 2015 FoTL Research Grant; Susan Price and Beverley Price for their generous hospitality and friendship, which knows no bounds; the New Zealand Society of Great Britain, especially Tania Bearsley; finally, Dr Sarah Sandley, Dame Jacqueline Wilson, Trish Beswick and Ali Smith for precious KM conversations. And finally, both editors would like to thank their families and friends for so willingly bearing with them during the creation of this volume.

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Abbreviations and Textual Note

Alpers

Antony Alpers, The Life of Katherine Mansfield (London: Jonathan Cape, 1980) ATL Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington BJK B. J. Kirkpatrick, A Bibliography of Katherine Mansfield (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989) CLKM The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, ed. Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984–2008) CW1/2 The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield. The Collected Fiction, ed. Gerri Kimber and Vincent O’Sullivan, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012) CW3 The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield. The Poetry and Critical Writings, ed. Gerri Kimber and Angela Smith (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014) DHL D. H. Lawrence JMM John Middleton Murry Journal, 1927 Katherine Mansfield: Journal, ed. J. Middleton Murry (London: Constable, 1927) Journal, 1954 Katherine Mansfield: Journal, Definitive Edition, ed. J. Middleton Murry (London: Constable, 1954) KM Katherine Mansfield KMN The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, ed. Margaret Scott, 2 vols (Canterbury, New Zealand, and Wellington: Lincoln University Press and Daphne Brasell Associates, 1997) MS Manuscript NLC Newberry Library, Chicago It is appropriate to note again how much the editors are indebted to the monumental work on KM’s notebooks by Margaret Scott, which we have so constantly drawn on in this volume with her kind permission. x

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abbreviations and textual note

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Textual points: • This volume contains none of the fiction and poetry from the notebooks published in Volumes 1–3 of the Collected Edition. It does contain fiction extracts and poetry not included in Volumes 1–3 because of its fragmentary nature. • We have not amended incorrect foreign spellings since we believe they are a testimony to KM’s evolving language acquisition. • All uncommon foreign words and phrases are glossed and sections of prose in a foreign language are translated and footnoted. • We have made the editorial decision to silently emend missing apostrophes and stops, to avoid the repetitive use of [sic], as well as avoiding unnecessary ambiguity. • Spelling idiosyncrasies and syntactic irregularities have been respected. • We are in complete agreement with Scott regarding the retention of the ampersand in this volume, ‘for no very good reason other than that it helps to convey the breathlessly shorthand nature of the early jottings without obstructing their readability’ (KMN, p. xvi). • As a result of KM’s inconsistent and random use of underlining, we have made the editorial decision to keep the original presentation rather than attempt to harmonise this using italicisation. • Manuscript origin is indicated in square brackets immediately before each change of source. • Footnotes have been used in preference to endnotes to facilitate a smoother reading of the text. • The organisation of KM’s notebook entries in this volume is strictly chronological. Readers who wish to focus on the contents of any specific notebook (since the contents of many of these were not ordered chronologically by KM) should refer to Scott’s edition. • For this volume we have decided to retain KM’s deleted words and passages because of the indications they provide of her evolving textual practice. As a result, we have retained Scott’s practice of indicating deleted words or passages with angle brackets.

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Chronology: Katherine Mansfield 1888–1923

1888

14 Oct: Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp (KM), third daughter of Harold and Annie Burnell Beauchamp, born at 11 Tinakori Road, Wellington.

1893

Easter: Beauchamp family move to ‘Chesney Wold’, Karori, a village six miles from Wellington.

1895–8

Attends Karori village school.

1898–9

At Wellington Girls’ High School.

1898

Nov: Beauchamp family move back to Wellington, now residing at 75 Tinakori Road. Dec: Harold Beauchamp appointed director of the Bank of New Zealand.

1899–1902

At Miss Swainson’s School, Fitzherbert Terrace, Wellington. During this time begins friendship with Maata Mahupuku.

1902

Meets the Trowell family for the first time.

1903

29 Jan: Beauchamp family sail for London on S. S. Niwaru.

1906

Spring: Commences education at Queen’s College, Harley Street; meets Ida Baker (LM). Easter: In Brussels with Aunt Belle Dyer and sisters Vera and Chaddie to see the Trowell twins perform. 18 Oct: Beauchamp family sail for New Zealand on S. S. Corinthic. KM begins spasmodic journal. 6 Dec: Arrives back in Wellington, once more living at 75 Tinakori Road. 31 Dec: Granny Dyer dies – KM has not visited her since her return to New Zealand. During this summer, xii

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chronology

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Harold Beauchamp rents a small cottage overlooking the beach at Day’s Bay. 1907

Mar: Annie Beauchamp holds a garden party at 75 Tinakori Road, on the same day that a povertystricken neighbour is killed in a street accident. Apr: Harold Beauchamp becomes Chairman of the Directors of the Bank of New Zealand. May: Beauchamp family move to 47 Fitzherbert Terrace. Oct–Dec: First published stories in the Native Companion (Melbourne). 15 Nov–18 Dec: With camping party in the ‘King Country’ of the North Island.

1908

6 Jul: Sails for London alone, on the S. S. Papanui, via Montevideo and Tenerife. 24 Aug: At Beauchamp Lodge, Warwick Crescent, a single women’s hostel in Paddington. Sep: Begins love affair with Garnet Trowell, and is probably pregnant by the end of the year.

1909

2 Mar: Marries George Bowden at Paddington Register Office, leaving him the same day. c. 10–28 Mar: Joins Garnet Trowell on tour in Glasgow and Liverpool with the Moody-Manners Opera Company. 29 Apr: In Brussels alone for several days. 27 May: Annie Beauchamp arrives in London and takes Kathleen to Bad Wörishofen. Returns to London a few days later and back in Wellington on 13 August, she cuts KM out of her will. Jun to Dec: Miscarries in ?late June. Meets Polish writer Floryan Sobienowski, a devotee of Stanislaw Wyspianski, Polish artist and writer. They begin a love affair.

1910

Jan: Returns to London, living briefly with George Bowden at 62 Gloucester Place, Marylebone. 24 Feb: First ‘Bavarian Sketches’ published in the New Age. Mar–?Jul: At Rottingdean, Sussex, with LM, after operation for ‘peritonitis’, possibly the termination of another pregnancy.

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chronology 29 Jul: Staying with A. R. Orage and Beatrice Hastings at 39 Abingdon Villas, Kensington. Autumn: At 131 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. Commences friendship with William Orton and has an affair with Francis Heinemann.

1911

Jan: Moves to 69 Clovelly Mansions, Gray’s Inn Road. Will live here until Sep 1912. May: Beauchamp family minus Harold arrive in London for the coronation of King George V. KM’s sisters presented at court. Aug: KM travels to Bruges and then Geneva. Possible termination of another pregnancy. Dec: Meets John Middleton Murry (JMM), editor of Rhythm, at W. L. George’s house. In a German Pension published by Stephen Swift & Co.

1912

Feb: Again in Geneva. Invites JMM to tea on her return. Apr: JMM her lodger, and shortly thereafter her lover; she is assistant editor of Rhythm. May: Travels with JMM to Paris; meets Francis Carco. Summer: Brief friendship with Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Sep: Couple move to Runcton Cottage, near Chichester. Oct–Nov: Rhythm’s publisher absconds, leaving JMM responsible for its debts. KM and JMM now live in office-cum-flat at 57 Chancery Lane. Dec: Couple in Paris for Christmas with Campbells and Cannans. Meets J. D. Fergusson and Anne Estelle Rice.

1913

Mar: Move to The Gables, Cholesbury, Bucks. May–Jul: Last three issues of Rhythm, renamed the Blue Review. Jun: meets D.H. Lawrence (DHL). 1 Jul: Couple move to Chaucer Mansions, Barons Court. Dec: Couple move to Paris, where they take a flat at 31 rue de Tournon.

1914

Feb: JMM declared bankrupt. 26 Feb: They return to London. Move to 119 Beaufort Mansions, Chelsea.

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chronology

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Apr: Move to 102 Edith Grove, where KM has an attack of pleurisy. Jul: Move to 111 Arthur Street, Chelsea. 13 Jul: DHL and Frieda are married, with JMM and KM as witnesses. Frieda gives her old wedding ring to KM, who wears it for the rest of her life. 26 Oct: Move to Rose Tree Cottage, The Lee, Great Missenden. Oct/Nov: First meeting with S. S. Koteliansky during this time. Dec: Unhappy in relationship with JMM. Starts receiving love letters from Carco in Paris. 1915

15–25 Feb: Travels to France, with money given by her brother Leslie, who is over in England to enlist. Joins Carco at Gray (Saône et Loire) for four days; in Paris en route. 25 Feb: Returns to Rose Tree Cottage and JMM. 18–31 Mar: In Paris, staying alone at Carco’s flat on the quai aux Fleurs. 31 Mar: Lives with JMM at 95 Elgin Crescent. Has begun to write The Aloe. 5–19 May: Back in Carco’s flat in Paris. Jun: With JMM, moves to 5 Acacia Road, St John’s Wood. Autumn: JMM and DHL begin the Signature. 6 Oct: Leslie Beauchamp killed in France. Nov: KM and JMM leave for the South of France, staying first at Cassis, then at Bandol. 7 Dec: JMM returns to England; KM alone at Hôtel Beau Rivage, Bandol. 31 Dec: JMM rejoins KM at Villa Pauline, Bandol.

1916

Jan–Mar: With JMM at the Villa Pauline. Rewrites The Aloe. 7 Apr: They return to England, and join the Lawrences at Higher Tregerthen, near Zennor, Cornwall. Jun: Move to Sunnyside Cottage, Mylor, near Penrhyn. Jul: KM’s first visit to Garsington Manor, home of Lady Ottoline Morrell.

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chronology Aug: KM stays with Dorothy Brett at 4 Logan Place, Earls Court. 31 Aug: In Café Royal with Gertler and Koteliansky. Snatches copy of DHL’s Amores from mocking group. 4 Sep: JMM begins work in the War Office as a translator. 29 Sep: Couple move to 3 Gower Street, Bloomsbury, sharing the house with Brett and Dora Carrington. Autumn: KM meets Virginia Woolf (VW); is meeting and corresponding with Bertrand Russell. 25 Dec: Christmas at Garsington.

1917

Feb: KM moves to a studio at 141A Old Church Street, Chelsea; JMM nearby at 47 Redcliffe Road. 26 Apr: VW and Leonard Woolf ask KM for a story to publish on their new printing press. Summer: Works on The Aloe for the Woolfs. Nov–Dec: JMM ill from overwork; KM falls ill with ‘pleurisy’. 12 Dec: KM’s tuberculosis (TB) diagnosed; advised to go abroad.

1918

7 Jan: KM leaves alone for Bandol, where LM joins her. 19 Feb: First lung haemorrhage. 21 Mar: KM and LM leave for England; detained three weeks in Paris, at the Select Hôtel, place de la Sorbonne, under bombardment. 11 Apr: KM joins JMM at 47 Redcliffe Road. 3 May: Her divorce from Bowden final, KM and JMM are married at South Kensington Register Office. J. D. Fergusson and Brett are witnesses. May–Jun: KM at Headland Hotel, Looe, in Cornwall. c. 1 Jul: Returns to 47 Redcliffe Road. 10 Jul: Prelude (formerly The Aloe) published by the Hogarth Press. 8 Aug: KM’s mother dies in Wellington. Late Aug: KM and JMM move to 2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead, known as ‘The Elephant’. Sep: KM first consults Dr Sorapure. 14 Oct: Two TB specialists tell KM that she has, at the outside, four years left to live unless she immediately enters a sanatorium.

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chronology

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Dec: Learns from Sorapure that what she always thought was her ‘arthritis’ is, in fact, the effects of a long-term gonorrhoea infection. 1919

Feb: JMM appointed editor of the Athenaeum; KM begins reviewing fiction for it. Aug: KM so ill she decides to enter sanatorium for the winter. Sorapure advises against such a move. 11 Sep: Travels with JMM and LM to San Remo, Italy. With LM at Casetta Deerholme, Ospedaletti, JMM having returned to England. 16 Dec–2 Jan: Joined by JMM.

1920

21 Jan: Goes with LM to Menton to stay at L’Hermitage, near to a cousin, Connie Beauchamp. 15 Feb: Moves into Villa Flora to be with Connie Beauchamp and her companion, Jinnie Fullerton. c. 27 Apr: Leaves Menton with LM and returns to Hampstead. May to Aug: At 2 Portland Villas. 11 Sep: Returns to Menton with LM, now renting the Villa Isola Bella. 16 Sep: Arranges for payment of £40 to Sobienowski, for the return of letters written to him by KM in 1909. 18 Dec: JMM leaves London for Menton. Dec: Bliss and Other Stories published by Constable. 10 Dec: Last review for the Athenaeum.

1921

11–19 Jan: JMM returns to London. 5–20 Feb: JMM in London winding up his affairs. 4 May: KM leaves for Switzerland with LM whilst JMM returns to Oxford to deliver a series of lectures. 21 May: Leaves Montreux for Sierre, close to the home of her cousin, the novelist Elizabeth von Arnim. 9 Jun: JMM leaves London and joins KM at Hôtel Château Belle Vue, Sierre. c. 23 Jun: Couple move to Chalet des Sapins, Montana-sur-Sierre. LM living nearby. 29 Nov: Writes to Koteliansky, asking for information about Manoukhin’s TB treatment. 4 Dec: Writes to Manoukhin. 24 Dec: Manoukhin’s reply arrives.

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chronology

1922

1 Jan: Reads Cosmic Anatomy, by ‘M. B. Oxon’, sent by A. R. Orage, who has been seeing Ouspensky. 30 Jan: Leaves for Paris with LM, to begin treatment with Dr Manoukhin, staying at the Victoria Palace Hotel. 31 Jan: Sees Manoukhin and begins treatment the next day. 9 Feb: Joined by JMM. 23 Feb: The Garden Party and Other Stories published by Constable. 29 Mar: Couple have tea with James Joyce at their hotel. Apr: Still undergoing Manoukhin’s radiation treatment, which leaves her exhausted. 4 Jun: Couple return to Switzerland, staying at the Hôtel d’Angleterre, Randogne-sur Sierre. 8 Jun: Writes to LM, now back in England, asking her to return. 29 Jun: Rift between JMM and KM – she moves alone to Hôtel Belle Vue, Sierre. 5 Jun: Brett staying with KM in Sierre. 14 Aug: Makes her will at Sierre. 16 Aug: Returns to London with JMM and LM, to stay with Brett at 6 Pond Street, Hampstead. 30 Aug: Meets Orage at Pond Street and discusses Gurdjieff. Sep: JMM in Sussex. KM has further discussions with Orage and attends lectures by Ouspensky. 2 Oct: Returns to Paris with LM, staying at Select Hôtel. 14 Oct: Orage arrives in Paris. 16 Oct: Goes to Le Prieuré, Avon, Fontainebleau, for treatment by Gurdjieff. 20 Oct: LM leaves her for the last time, to work on a farm at Lisieux.

1923

9 Jan: JMM arrives at Fontainebleau to visit KM; that evening at around 10.30 pm, whilst climbing the stairs, she has a massive haemorrhage and dies. 11 Jan: Buried at the communal cemetery in Fontainebleau.

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This volume is dedicated to the memory of Margaret Scott (1928–2014). Without her pioneering work deciphering Katherine Mansfield’s notebooks, this edition would not have been possible.

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Figure 1 Portrait of Katherine Mansfield, PAColl–6826–1–20–2, John Middleton Murry Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

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Introduction

You do not necessarily get to your destination by taking the right turning at the beginning of the journey KM (p. 99), citing Symons

The above quotation, taken from Arthur Symons’s book, Plays, Acting and Music: A Book of Theory (London: Constable, 1903, p. 137), and copied down assiduously by a twenty-year-old KM in one of her notebooks, exemplifies her state of mind towards the end of 1908, having recently arrived in England from New Zealand, in her determination to become a professional writer. It would prove highly appropriate for an entire lifetime. KM’s journey through life, recorded in the personal writing presented in this fourth and final volume of the Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield, indeed attests to the many wrong turnings she would take, and the ensuing consequences. Much of the material in this volume has been published before, but never in this present unexpurgated and chronologically ordered version. JMM was the first editor of some of this material in his various edited volumes pertaining to be either KM’s Journal (1927), her Scrapbook (1939) or her Definitive Journal (1954). The very misleading impression given was that KM had assiduously kept such things as a journal or a scrapbook during her lifetime and that JMM had simply published what she had written. As Philip Waldron noted as early as 1974: ‘The [manuscript] material consists of four diaries which, like most diaries, are copious in early January but quickly peter out; some thirty notebooks and exercise books; and several hundred loose sheets of paper.’1 JMM must have known that one day his clever patchwork-quilt methodology for these volumes would be revealed, yet was seemingly not deterred. In the 1954 Definitive 1. Philip Waldron, ‘Katherine Mansfield’s Journal’, Literature, 20: 1 (January 1974), pp. 11–18 (p. 11).

Twentieth-Century

1

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2

introduction

Journal, his preface states: ‘In this edition of Katherine Mansfield’s Journal, passages have been restored which for various reasons were suppressed in the original edition of 1927’ (p. ix). Former careful editing had resulted in a severely expurgated first version, which did not reflect what KM had written. The 1954 edition had purportedly set out to restore the balance. A useful example of JMM’s editorial principles can be seen in one of the most significant and well-documented episodes in KM’s adult life: her brief love affair with Francis Carco in February 1915. In her notebooks of the time, KM, having temporarily suspended her love affair with JMM, recounts the journey she undertook to the occupied war zone at Gray in order to visit Carco, using the pre-arranged excuse of an aunt’s illness to get her through the checkpoints. (She would make use of these notes in her semi-autobiographical story ‘An Indiscreet Journey’, written in May 1915.) In the 1927 Journal, the Carco episode fills four pages, in the form of a couple of unposted letters, together with a long description of her arrival in Gray and initial meeting with Carco. It was not until 1954, when the Definitive Journal was published (the ‘Carco’ episode now extending to six larger-formatted pages), that it was possible to see how much had been expurgated by JMM from the original edition. Details of a sexually explicit nature, anything which would have revealed that KM had journeyed illegally to a war zone for a brief sexual liaison with a Frenchman she barely knew, the calculating tone of this ‘experience’ – all this had been removed from the 1927 edition, including the following: Beside me on a chair is a thick leather belt and his sword. He left at nearly eight o’clock. I am just up. [. . .] We spent a queer night [. . .] F. quite naked making up the fire with a tiny brass poker – so natural and so beautiful. (p. 75) We stayed together a little, but always laughing. The whole affair seemed somehow so ridiculous, and at the same time so utterly natural. There was nothing to do but laugh. (p. 77) The sword, the big ugly sword, but not between us, lying in a chair. The act of love seemed somehow quite incidental, we talked so much. It was so warm and delicious lying curled in each other’s arms. (p. 78)

A misrepresentation of words occurs when the 1927 Journal had stated ‘where they had taken a room for me’ (p. 75). In 1954, JMM restored his original expurgation ‘where he had taken a room for me’ (p. 25, our italics). The use of the word ‘they’ implies a much more impersonal, innocent reason for a journey and is much less difficult to explain than

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introduction

3

the word ‘he’, with its attendant notion that KM is a ‘femme seule’. Of course, this was no mere typing error on JMM’s part, but was, rather, a deliberate misrepresentation and falsification of what KM had actually written, in order to protect her posthumous ‘reputation’, while also enhancing the image of their own perfect romance. These loose manuscripts were later used by JMM to create the volume known as The Scrapbook of Katherine Mansfield in 1939, an ‘intermediary’ edition of the Journal. In the introduction to the volume he writes: It is possible that I attach an exaggerated importance to these [fragments]. But [. . .] European opinion has received her [Journal] as a minor classic [. . .]. There are now many people in many different countries [. . .] who take a peculiar personal and loving interest in all that pertains to Katherine Mansfield. In their eyes, I know, this book needs no apology. (pp. v–vi)

In fact, much of the book is filled out with extracts of unfinished stories, which would normally have no place in a ‘journal’, but which still create the idea of KM owning and writing in a specially designated ‘scrapbook’ of ideas. The second editor of all this material was Margaret Scott, who, in 1997, produced her magisterial two-volume edition of the notebooks. On publication, these volumes revealed just how selective JMM’s editorial principles had been. In nearly 700 pages of text, Scott painstakingly transcribed all the extant notebooks and loose manuscripts from which JMM had created his editions of the Journal and Scrapbook. KM scholars were at last able to ascertain how disparate these various documents were, and how false was the sense that KM had ever really written a ‘journal’ as such, intended for publication. Of course, it is to JMM’s credit as an editor that he was able to create such a seamless text from so many bits and scraps, but this should not detract from the essentially duplicitous nature of his endeavours, which allowed for a false impression of the legacy of KM’s personal writing that lasted for over three-quarters of a century. Scott’s editorial policy focused on the transcription of the existing notebooks; in a number of places, however, JMM’s version included passages that proved absent from her Complete Edition. Scrupulous verifications in the ATL and Newberry Library archives failed to trace many of these passages, leaving us to suppose that they had been written on loose pages that have since been lost, or sold off before the collection arrived in various library archives. Maybe they will reappear some day in an auction; meanwhile, we have reproduced them as they appear in JMM’s version, while being conscious that we were perhaps unwittingly perpetuating a silent editorial decision from

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the past. This choice, however, seemed unquestionably preferable to leaving the untraced passages out altogether. There were other editorial features of the two-volume Scott edition that we chose to tackle differently. She uses footnotes, for example, quite sparingly, and they tend to offer insights into biographical and cultural details, rather than intertextual parallels, which we have favoured here. Her volumes also present the contents of each notebook in succession; the downside of this approach, however, is that chronological ordering frequently became less apparent, which presents difficulties when attempting to locate specific passages. It also leaves readers uncertain about where and when certain passages were being written, since KM certainly did not progress methodically from beginning to end of each notebook or diary in turn when she made her various notes and records. She clearly seized whatever was closest to hand at the time (and this was frequently determined by her various travels), and would sometimes start from the back, sometimes the front, and sometimes turn a book on its side or upside down, or reread an entry and comment on it years later.1 One final important difference between Scott’s editorial policy and ours is that her Complete Edition also included the entire contents of each notebook – fiction writing and poems, as well as personal entries. In the Edinburgh Edition, the fiction has been removed and can now be found in Volumes 1 and 2, while the poetry is to be found in Volume 3. This leaves KM’s personal writing, which we have carefully attempted to order chronologically, with no textual omissions. There are remaining blanks, unfortunately, indicated throughout by square brackets and ellipses. In such cases, one or two words have remained illegible despite all our efforts, even when aided by magnifying software not available to Scott when she was painstakingly transcribing. In such cases, time has sometimes been against us too – over the years, the ink has faded, so that KM’s infamously erratic scrawl was sometimes disappearing into a yellowing page. Close readers will nonetheless observe a large number of passages that have now been retrieved from obscurity, or where alterations have been made to Scott’s transcriptions when re-examination and magnification have confirmed that initial interpretations were mistaken. This is particularly true of passages in foreign languages, which, as many scholars have observed, are strikingly characteristic of KM’s personal writing. It is equally true of fascinating personal records, admittedly quirky at times. Take the immensely elliptical entry, ‘Then 1. The most striking example is a 1920 entry, re-read and annotated later in the same year and again in 1921. See below, page 317.

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there is Teague [?] and his worms,’1 for instance, especially in view of the series of homeopathic remedies that follows. An enlarged view of this page of the manuscript showed without a doubt that KM had written ‘Then there is Deepa and his worms.’ At this point everything became clearer: this was not some alarming health remedy after all. Deepa was KM’s affectionate nickname for her paternal great-uncle, Henry Herron Beauchamp, a keen agriculturalist – in fact, he and his worms had already figured in the diary records during the Urewera camping trip years before (see p. 70). Such biographical details, sporadic or idiosyncratic as they may be, clearly mattered to KM. Her distance from home meant she relied heavily at times on memories of the past to animate the present, and dispel her loneliness. She also kept certain records and sketches with a view to a future publication of some kind of personal writing, as her comment early in 1916 attests: ‘And lastly I want to keep a kind of minute note book – to be published some day. That is all. No novels, no problem stories, nothing that is not simple, open. Any of this I may start at any moment’ (p. 192). There are glimpses in this volume of what such a notebook might have been like, but KM’s peripatetic life did not encourage such an endeavour; nevertheless, what she did do – and constantly – was write. As Alpers notes of KM’s return to London in 1920: Soon KM was back [. . .] having written to Murry since September some 110,000 words in letters, or twice as many words as are in her whole Collected Stories. Some passages in those letters are more worthy to endure than many of her stories, and the same might be said of the Journal. (p. 314)

We do not have all of this material because she kept destroying chunks of it throughout her life, and even today one can see notebooks with pages roughly cut out – by JMM, or possibly by KM herself. These omissions most likely reflect personal crises, or potentially embarrassing discussions of individuals. And it is worth recalling that despite his modest reference to the ‘fragments’ later valued as a ‘minor classic’ quoted above, JMM could be high-principled when it came to which scraps and remnants of a writer’s diary deserved to come beneath the public gaze. As his mostly scathing review of Chekhov’s notebooks, translated by S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf, makes clear, [w]hen they have a bookful of an author’s fragments and scraps in front of them, people give themselves up to the metaphorical fancy that they are ‘in

1. KMN, vol. 2, p. 173.

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introduction his workshop’. It looks so very intimate. They must be near to the centre of things, and that delusion is gratifying to their vanity. But in reality a workshop without the workman in it is generally a dull and unedifying affair of frozen gluepots and shavings and oiled rags.1

Times have thankfully changed, as have editorial and academic perspectives and expectations. We have certainly never had the impression we might be dealing with gluepots, shavings and oiled rags, and hopefully readers will not either. On the contrary, what has been particularly exciting for us as editors is to witness the development of KM’s personal writing chronologically – and without expurgations – for the first time. One particular feature that emerges is the intensity and high level of KM’s intellectual life. Month after month, we see her recording her thoughts on books she has read, copying out quotations, adding comments, developing thoughts. A particularly difficult editorial decision for us was whether to include KM’s pencil annotations on books that she had owned and read. JMM included many of them in the 1954 Journal, although Margaret Scott did not include all of these in her edition of the Notebooks – either by choice, or for the material reasons evoked earlier. Yet, going through these annotations, it seemed to us that these comments play the same role of illustrating how KM read and interacted with authors – therefore providing a valuable glimpse of her mind at work, as if we were reading over her shoulder. Frequently, her compilations of memorable quotations and her pencil annotations open up our understanding of her literary apprenticeship and her voracious reading habits, whilst bearing witness to her attentive scrutiny of texts. Meanwhile, they shed invaluable light on her hugely eclectic reading habits; she was what Woolf – in the footsteps of Johnson – would celebrate as a common reader, clearly darting from some of the greatest classics in literature and philosophy to best-sellers, popular publications on psychology, travel writing and musicology, to name but a few of the genres and fields she was exploring. Furthermore, it reveals how she read, as much as what she read, and this in turn opens up new perspectives on her own creative imagination. The reading notes show that she barely ever records the main critical features of a text, or the most important events in terms of plot and character when reading fiction – her copious reading notes from Dostoevsky’s The Idiot are a case in point. On the contrary, she observes idiosyncratic 1. John Middleton Murry, ‘The Notebooks of Tchehov’, Nation and Athenaeum (4 June 1921), pp. 365–6.

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details – a memorably bemusing throw-off line, a minor character’s unexpected intervention, an ironic turn of phrase – in other words, the surprises and delights of approaching fiction-writing at a tangent. Nevertheless, this personal writing is very much more than a record of her intellectual engagement. Here we find KM at her most ordinary – and most extraordinary – making bitchy asides about people who have offended her, or baring the anxieties of her soul in her desperate search for health and happiness. Trivial as they may appear at first sight, for example, her shopping lists and (often inaccurate) accounts provide fascinating gateways into the daily economics of shoestring budgets, whether as an artist struggling to survive, an expatriate trying out local products or a civilian looking for basic produce in wartime. In passing, such lists record the arrival and availability of new brands and industrial products, the price, in proportional terms, of rent, bread and cigarettes, or the sheer difficulty of ensuring there is enough left to buy the newspaper once you have done the cleaning or cooked a cheap dessert. We have tried to reflect this very kaleidoscopic feature of the notebooks by including a number of pages reproduced here. These are not mere illustrations; they are intended as the closest contact possible with the materials now preserved in the archives. We see her densely packed note-taking during wartime, when paper was particularly expensive and hard to come by in Paris. We can appreciate the doodles that suddenly interrupt a page of thoughtful notes about a fictional character in the making, or the mass of calculations going on before she can write to JMM or her friend Dorothy Brett and arrange a money transfer. In short, these passing glimpses offer us nothing less than the poetry of everyday life – the poetics of materiality interacting with intertextuality, encompassing art, music, contemporary history, personal finances, observation, memory, testimony, imagination and emotion. KM’s diaries are not composed of one single voice, but rather are to be read like an orchestral score – interweaving themes, threads, patterns, parts and styles. What do emerge are the byways of an author’s creative imagination, encompassed in the quirkiness of style or the meandering patterns of thought. When read alongside her polished published stories, and illuminated by biography, the personal writing reads as a testimony to KM’s other life – when her aspirations to authorship, creative and economic autonomy, imaginative and stylistic originality, her keen ear for the material world around her, all attest to the brilliance of a pioneering proto-modernist and modernist voice, often well in advance of the heavyweights and highbrows with whom she has tended to be compared. This volume also contains the complete manuscript of Mansfield’s

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poetry collection, The Earth Child, published in its entirety for the first time, and containing twenty-six previously unknown poems. The collection was unearthed by Gerri Kimber following a research trip to the Newberry Library in Chicago in May 2015. Their importance is outlined in the introduction to the poems on page 459. Gerri Kimber and Claire Davison

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1901

[MS–Papers–4006–01]

A pleasant surprise ‘Do suggest something that we can do these holidays Arthur’ said Phoebe, ‘of course [we] want to be home for Christmas and here we are waiting till it comes.’ Arthur thought for a moment, and then a bright idea struck him. ‘Why not go on a bicycling tour, you three?’ he said. ‘Bravo’ they all shouted, ‘we’ll go to the same place as you and Bert went last holidays.’ ‘And I’ll chaperone you girls’, continued Bert, ‘we’ll have a ripping time.’

9

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[Notebook 40, qMS–1239]

1. 2.

His Ideal. Concerning Cornet players. ‘In Sobriety and Otherwise’

Contents –/8/03

By Kass His Ideal1 Concerning Cornet players. (of the average type.)

1. 2.

The man that I really have a great admiration for in a Brass Band, is a cornet player. There is such a stern and sober air of reality about himself and his instrument, and I really think that the way in which he has his feelings under control is marvellous!! For instance, I have watched, (and heard, alas) a cornet player emit wails and sobs of anguish from his cornet, which have well nigh torn my heart out, while he sits in stolid silence never moving a hair. The patience that the man has, is another matter of great wonder to me. Often ‘when on my couch I lie in vacant or in pensive mood’, I have heard a man next door, play ‘Way down upon the Swannee River’,2 with various other tunes, I believe, called variations, twenty times without stopping. Then he has only ceased because I have threatened to have him evicted if he does not change his tune. Frequently, after a dose of this kind, I have had nothing but the ‘Swannee River’ on the brain, for weeks. I wake up with the ‘Swannee River’, eat it 1. See ‘She’ (CW1, pp. 14–15). 2. ‘Swannee River’ was a popular ballad (often known as ‘Old Folks from Home’) composed in 1851. The lyrics, written in dialect, express the singer’s nostalgia for his ‘ol’ plantation’ and the song was bitterly criticised for this. Mansfield is quoting the first line of the chorus.

10

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with every meal I take, and go to bed eventually with ‘all de world am sad and weary’ as a lullaby. Now, if I played that tune myself, as my neighbour does, I am confident that after a time I should become insensible to anything else. Players of the cornet should never attempt anything approaching what is commonly termed ‘light’ music. They should steadily stick to ‘Funeral Marches’, ‘Lamentations’ and a few of the average ‘Coronation Odes’. In the course of ages they may become quite proficient in these, and give a certain degree of almost pleasure to the public. But when they attempt ‘Silvery Waves’,1 ‘The Maiden’s Prayer’,2 or the ‘Honeysuckle and the Bee’,3 then O public, put your respectable fingers to your ears, and depart in haste. Dear cornet players, long may I hear your thrilling strains. You keep us in touch with the old world melodies. Good luck to the Swannee River, & to you!!! Kathleen K. Kathleen M. Beauchamp K.M. Beauchamp Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht Das Leben ist der schwüle Tag Es dunkelt schon, mich schläfert Der Tag hat mich müd gemacht. Über mein Bett erhebt sich ein Baum Drin singt die junge Nachtigall Sie singt von lauter Liebe Ich hör es sogar im Traum.4

1. Late nineteenth-century song by American composer Addison P. Wyman. 2. Originally a composition for piano by the Polish composer Tekia BadarzewskaBaranowska, published in 1856; the music became popular in the late nineteenth century when the American writer, John Stowell Adams (1823–93), wrote lyrics for it. 3. Song from the musical Bluebell in Fairyland (1901) by William Penn and Albert Fitz. 4. Poem by German poet Heinrich Heine (1797–1856). Much of his lyrical poetry was popularised by being set to music in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In literal translation, it reads: ‘Death, which is the cooling night / Life, which is the sultry day / Night falls already and I am sleepy / Daylight has made me tired. Over my bed grows a tree, Where a nightingale sings / It sings boldly of love / I can hear it in my dreams.’ KM owned a small volume of Heine’s poetry in the original German, given to her by Arnold Trowell.

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1903 KKK Isobel M. Dyer. Isobel M. Dyer.1 Annie Annie B. Beauchamp. Twilight Twilight is gathering round us, dearest, It is the end of this short day And our lives have come to the twilight, dearest, You and I have not long to stay. Come, stand by me at the window, dearest Look out at the calm, quiet sky.

Ober kind too kind

Annie B.Beauchamp Your loving Mother Annie. Harold Annie Harold Harold

12 people who would receive – – – if – – – Gladys Father & Mother Diddy Gran Aunt Li Myself Tommy Maude Marion Sylvia Uncle Val Uncle Syd2

1. Isobel Marion Dyer was the full name of KM’s Aunt Belle, the main inspiration behind Beryl Fairfield in ‘Prelude’. She was the sister of Annie Burnell Beauchamp, KM’s mother. 2. This list of family members and school-friends includes Marion Ruddick (or possibly Creelman), Sylvia Payne, her uncle Valentine Waters (the inspiration for Jonathan Trout in ‘Prelude’) and uncle Sydney Beauchamp.

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1903 My dear Mr Mason,

13

I am writing to beg a

Deutsch sentences for Conversation I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X

Wo sind wir stehen geblieben? = when did we leave off? Ein junges Blut = a young thing. Auf dem Boden schlafen = to sleep on the floor. Der Flug macht einen Bogen = the river makes a bend. Er war sehr böse auf mich = he was very angry with me. Er meinte es nicht böse = he meant no harm. Man brauchte es nicht = it was not needed. Thränen brachen auf ihren augen = tears flowed from her eyes. Es brennt in der Stadt! = there is a fire in the town! Er ist hoch ambretto! = he is at the top of the tree! ich unterschweide nicht = I do not know. nicht von Bedeutung = nothing to speak of. ich sah ihn, konnte ihn aber nicht sprechten = I saw him but could not speak to him. Es thut mir leid = I am sorry. Das Violoncell = the ’cello.

If only human nature would be more forbearing not [Notebook 37, qMS–1240]

27/xii/03 New Year’s Eve. It is 12.30. All the bells in the village Churches are pealing. Another year has come. Now at the entrance of this New Year, my dearest,1 I propose to begin my book. It will not be at all grand or dramatic, but just all that I have done. You, who are so far away, know so little of what happens to me, and it is selfish of me not to tell you more. I have just returned from a Midnight Service. It was very very beautiful & solemn. The air outside was cold and bracing and the Night was a beautiful thing. Over all the woods & the meadows Nature had tenderly flung a veil to protect from the frost, but the trees stood out, dark and beautiful, against the 1. As in many of her diary entries, KM addresses an imaginary listener here. She and her sisters had arrived in England in April 1903 to attend Queen’s College in Harley Street, where they remained until July 1906. At this time, they were in Kent for the Christmas vacation, staying with their greatuncle, Henry Herron Beauchamp.

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1903

clear starry sky. The church looked truly very fit to be God’s House, tonight. It looked so strong, so invincible, so hospitable. It was only during the Silent Prayer that I made up my mind to write this. I mean this year to try and be a different person, and I want, at the end of this year, to see how I have kept all the vows that I have made tonight. So much happens in a year. One may mean so much good and do so little. I am writing this by the light of a wee peep of gas, and I have only got on a dressing gown – so decollete. I am so tired, I think I must go to bed. Tomorrow will be the 1st of January. What a wonderful and what a lovely world this is. I thank God tonight that I am.

Figure 2 The Beauchamp children’s dolls, c. 1903. Notebook 40, qMS–1239. John Middleton Murry Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

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[Journal, 1954, p. 2]

April 1 Today the weather has been very dull and gray. I woke this morning at four and since then I have heard nothing save the sounds of traffic, and feel nothing except a great longing to be back in the country, among the woods and gardens and the meadows and the chorus of the Spring orchestra. All day during my work, I have found myself dreaming of the woods, and the little secret nooks that have been mine, and mine only, for many years. A girl passed under my window this morning, selling primroses. I bought great bunches of them, and untied their tight chains, and let them stretch their little poor tired clamped selves in a sky-blue dish that had been filled with primroses every year. But they were not like country primroses. As I bent over them, their weary, pale faces looked into mine with the same depth of wondering, strange, fearful perplexities that I have sometimes seen on the face of a little child. It was as though Spring had entered my room, but with her wings broken and soiled and her song quiet – very quiet. This evening I have sat in my chair with my reading lamp turned low, and given myself up to thoughts of the years that have passed. Like a strain of minor music they have surged across my heart, and the memory of them, sweet and fragrant as the perfume of my flowers, has sent a strange thrill of comfort through my tired brain. [Notebook 29, qMS–1241]

Holiday Work and Reading. _________________________

Kathleen M. Beauchamp.

(Private!) Begun July 13th 1904.

15

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1904

Books I have read. Name Author * Life & Letters of Byron v.I Thomas Moore1 * Aftermath J. Lane Allen2 * Dolly Dialogues Anthony Hope3 Poems Jean Ingelow4 * Life & Letters of Byron v.II Thomas Moore * How Music Developed Henderson5 * The Choir Invisible J. Lane Allen The Captain’s Daughter Gwen Overton6 * Life of Romney Rowley Cleve7

Date B. J.14th F. J.17th B. J.17 F. J.17th B. J.17th F. J.18th B. J.13th F. J.14th B. J.17th F. J.19th B. July 16th F. B. July 18th F. 20th B. July 20th E J.20th B. J.19th F. J.20th

1. The poet and song writer Thomas Moore (1779–1852) was Byron’s executor, and in 1830 first published his two-volume Life of Lord Byron, With his Letters and Journals. George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) was one of the leading English Romantic poets, who cultivated his own flamboyant, romantic air and lifestyle. KM’s three-volume version of the biography was a later edition of the same work. 2. James Lane Allen (1849–1945) was an American novelist and short-story writer famous for his vivid renderings of Kentucky in the vernacular. Aftermath (1895) was the sequel to his very popular 1894 novel, A Kentucky Cardinal. The notes indicate that KM read the two works in reverse order. His later novel, The Choir Invisible (1897), cited further down in the list, was his most popular work. 3. Anthony Hope (1863–1933) was a prolific, best-selling English author and playwright whose adventure novels, The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) and its sequel Rupert of Hentzau (1898), both of which figure later on KM’s list, gave rise to the genre known as Ruritanian romance. The Dolly Dialogues (1894) were a collection of his sketches first published in the Westminster Gazette. The volume was illustrated by Arthur Rackham (see p. 28). This entry in the diary is the first reference to KM reading short pieces in satirical dialogue form, not unlike those she would try writing herself some years later. 4. Jean Ingelow (1820–97) was an English poet and novelist who began her career writing in magazines under the pseudonym of ‘Orris’. She wrote many children’s stories, the most popular being Mopsa the Fairy, whose hero is a little boy who discovers a nest of fairies. 5. William James Henderson (1855–1937) was an American music critic and music historian. This work, a major guide to music history published in 1898, offers a chapter-by-chapter summary of musical development from Roman and Greek songs through to Wagner. 6. Gwendolen Overton (1876–?) was a Californian novelist whose works focus on military life in remote, frontier regions. According to a Spectator review published on 21 May 1904, The Captain’s Daughter is about a ‘self conscious, one may almost say forward young woman’ (p. 20) not yet out of finishing school. 7. Rowley Cleeve’s biography of the English portraitist George Romney (1734–1802) was published in 1901.

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* A Kentucky Cardinal J. Lane Allen B. J.23rd F. J.23rd Life & Letters of Byron v.III Thomas Moore * Rupert of Hentzau Anthony Hope B. J.24th F. 24th My Japanese Wife Clive Holland1 A Japanese Marriage Douglas Sladen2 Captain Pamphile Alexandre Dumas3 Vilette Charlotte Bronte4 * Poems E.A. Poe5 The Heart of Rome F. Marion Crawford6 N.B. All books which I have enjoyed are marked thus:– * Music I have studied Caprice Noel Johnson7 Warum David Popper8 Le Désir (part only) Servais9 Variations Symphoniques (part 2) Boëllman10 1. Clive Holland (the pseudonym of Charles James Hankinson, 1866–1959) published several novels telling of life in the Far East, including My Japanese Wife in 1895. 2. Douglas Sladen (1856–1947) was an English academic and writer who lived for many years in Australia. A Japanese Marriage was published in 1895. 3. Alexandre Dumas (1802–70) was a very popular French novelist, most famous for his Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. Le Capitaine Pamphile was published in 1839. A new translation by Alfred Allinson of Dumas’s major works, including Captain Pamphile, was published in 1904. 4. Villette, by Charlotte Brontë (1816–55), the English novelist and poet, was published in 1853. It tells the story of an independent-minded schoolteacher, Lucy Snowe, battling for self-fulfilment. 5. The American writer, poet and critic Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49) was best known for his Gothic-inspired tales of mystery and imagination. His most famous poems include ‘Annabel Lee’ and ‘The Raven’. 6. Francis Marion Crawford (1854–1909) was a prolific American writer and novelist. The Heart of Rome was a novel published in 1903. 7. ‘Caprice for Violoncello and Pianoforte’ (1892) was composed by William Noel Johnson (1863–1916), a British composer and cellist, whose lyrical music was popular in the early years of the century, and often used by song-writers. 8. David Popper (1843–1913) was a Czech-born cellist and composer. ‘Warum’ (‘Why’) comes from an early work: Op. 3, Scenes from a Masked Ball, for cello and piano. 9. Adrien-François Servais (1807–66) was a Belgian cellist and composer. Mansfield is referring to his Fantasy and Brillant Variations on a Waltz by Schubert, ‘Le Désir’, Op. 4. 10. Léon Boëllmann (1862–97) was a French composer. His Variations Symphoniques (Op. 23) is for cello and orchestra.

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1904

Father Mother Aunt Li Grannie Gwen Rouse Gwen Rouse Marion Creelman Gwen Rouse Fraulein Petschtes

Letters I have written.

Writing I have done Granz [?] (Prose) Poem ‘Alone’ (Poetry)

B.J.13th F.J.13th(?) B.J.16th FJ.16th B.J.14th FJ.14th

18.viii.04 Dear old George – I’m going to write you a letter. I guess you have forgotten all about me, and the times I had with you. Well, I haven’t. I’ll tell you who I am. Do you mind the red-haired boy with the big freckles who was in your form at school. One day you stuck wet varnish on his seat. God! how my Mother swore, and how you fellows laughed. Have you forgotten how you taught me to swim in the old bathing hole down in the 3rd meadow? Don’t say you have, old man – I mind it all as though it were yesterday.1

1. This short entry, even if possibly inspired by her school life, is an early instance of Mansfield using pastiche, trying out borrowed personae and creating vivid voices for them.

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1905

[Notebook 39, qMS–1243]

I am that which is. No mortal man dare lift the veil. He is alone of himself & to him alone do all men owe their being. Religion of Beethoven – August 1905.1

1. The first three lines, written on a framed piece of paper and kept on Beethoven’s writing table, are three maxims found in an Egyptian temple and written down by Champollion-Figeac. The scene is recounted by Arthur Symons in Studies in the Seven Arts, but the lines are quoted in French. Symons’s book appeared the year after the date in the notebook, although the essays had been previously published in reviews (Symons, Studies in the Seven Arts, London: Duckworth, 1906). Arthur Symons (1865–1945) was a poet and literary critic largely credited with introducing the British reading public to the French symbolists. He published a number of very influential essay collections, including The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), Plays, Acting and Music (1903) as well as Studies in the Seven Arts, all of which had a powerful influence on KM.

19

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1906

[MS–Papers–4006–16]

The Students’ Room.1 In the students’ room the plain & simple beds The pictures that line the walls, of various excellence thrown together And the students with heads bent low, silent over their books. ii.iii.06 K.B. [Notebook 29, qMS–1241]

French Thème 51.2 Cette chambre est longue de douze pieds, et large de six pieds. La rivière est profonde de dix pieds. Cette jeune fille a l’air très industrieuse. Cette princesse a l’air très fier. Je suis prêt à partir et j’en suis content. Soyez fidèle à et respectueu envers vos maitres. Ma maison est longue de soixante pieds, large de vingt pieds et haute de trente pieds. Mon oncle fut respecté et aimé de tout le monde. Soyons généreux pour nos semblables et bienveillant envers eux. Thème 52. Il avait son chapeau sur la tête le temps il était dans la chambre. Sa petite main et son petit pied sont d’un forme très aristocratique. J’etudie la langue française et toutes ses particularités, j’ai déjà parcouru les élements de sa grammaire. Ses amis et ses parents font fait visit hier à l’occasion l’anniversaire de sa naissance. C’est mon bon ami et mon meilleur conseilleur. Que tenez-vous dans la main – 1. KM and her two older sisters were students at Queen’s College in Harley Street, London, from April 1903 to July 1906. 2. The following exercises are based on a school manual for learning French. ‘Thème’ is a translation and grammar exercise – translating structured sentences into the foreign language being studied.

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Thème 53. II me donnez pas les mêmes livres – Leurs amis eux mêmes les blâment de leur conduite. Mêmes les hommes les plus entreprenants hésitent à prendre part à cette entreprise. Tout est en sa faveur. Toute la maison fut brûlée. Toutes mes connaissances le bonté. II eut quelques difficultés à être admis, en sa présence. Quelque patient qu’il soit, il fut obligé de mettre un terme à une telle ensolence. Quel qu’ils soient ces seront désappointés dans leur expectation (attente) Thème 56. Ils s’ennuient beaucoup dans cette petite ville – II se flatte qu’il réussira. Elle se brûla. Tout le monde devrait parler de soi avec la plus grande modestie. Cette nouvelle a en soi, quelque chose de si extraordinaire qu’il est presque impossible d’y croire. Mon père parla toujours d’eux avec louange. II en parle souvent, mais, je ne le croix pas. Je n’aime pas qu’on parle seulement de soi. Il alla dans sa chambre s’habiller pour nous accompagner au théâtre. Ce poème a en soi quelque chose qui touche et charme tous ceux qui le lisent. Thème Est-ce que je parle très vite? Est-ce que vous croyez je le reconterai? Est-ce que je le convirai? Est-ce que vous aimeriez à faire la connaissance de cet homme fameux? Est-ce que je le [. . . .] Est-ce que je sais ma leçon bien? Est-ce que je pars à sept heures ou huit heures le matin demain? Est-ce que vous parterai à la compagne loin sans connâitre une personne? Est-ce je pars avec vous ou avec votre cousin? Est-ce que je perds beaucoup Box Corner Fast to kill remote witty yard youth walnut witty To win worthy To wipe wing widow weigh (to)

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= boîte (f) = coin (m) = vite = teuer = éloigné = spiritual = cour = jeunesse = noix = spiritual = gagner = Digne = essuyer = aile = veuve = peser

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1906 Unless Use (to) Violet (c) Violet (f) Voice Tear to throw Truth Tablecloth Tap Threshold Trust Tear Thorn

= à moins que = employer = violet = Violette = voix = Larme = jeter = vérité = nappe = Robinet = Seuil = Se fier à = Larme = épine

[Notebook 1, qMS–1242]

jug and box for sweets for Godmother. There are a more or less large number of weak minded looking females waiting here – the slightly mushroom hat type, the flannel coat & skirt type. I feel rather self-conscious so doubtless look arrogant. Not a man to be seen. What must the feelings of Kreisler be.1 In two hours he will be playing. Does that excite him – is he too blasé for excitement. Is he looking at his fiddle calling to it, lifting the lid of the case – you know how – or he is eating the proverbial sausage with his Frau2 – Pour quelque raison3 I am interested. It is because one day Caesar4 shall be in the same position. Inside at last, we ate apples & chocolate while waiting & I read the book of the lady in front. Flat to let opposite. Programs now. Quelque chose.5 1. The Austrian virtuoso violinist and composer Fritz Kreisler (1875–1962) had been an acclaimed concert performer since his American début in 1901 and spent much of his time in England from 1902 until 1906. KM was probably attending one of Kreisler’s many recitals given in London, frequently accompanied by the pianist Hamilton Harty. 2. (Ger.) ‘wife’ or ‘woman’. 3. (Fr.) ‘for some reason’. 4. Caesar was the nickname for Tom (Arnold) Trowell. 5. (Fr.) ‘something’. At the top of this page KM tries out various spellings of the word ‘rhythm’, which occurs, along with the French word ‘Quelque’, in the vignette-style diary entry ‘At Sea’, just below.

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[Notebook 39, qMS–1243]

To Kathleen Beauchamp from Clara F. Wood1 In very affectionate remembrance of 41 Harley Street July 14th 1906 Ka nui taku aroha ki a quoi2 [Notebook 1, qMS–1242] i.x.06. I walk along the broad almost deserted street. It has a meaningless forsaken careless look, like a woman who has ceased to believe in her beauty. The splendid rhythm of Life is absent. With tired white faces the people pass to and fro, silently, drearily. All colour seemed to have lost its keenness. The street is as toneless as a great stretch of sand. And soon I pass through the narrow iron gate, up the little path and through the heavy doors into the church. Silence hung motionless over the church, the shadow of her great wings darkened everything. Through the gloom the figures of the Saints showed dimly. The High Altar shone mystical – vision-like. Then I noticed there were many people kneeling in the pews – their attitude strangely pathetic, almost old world. A nun came & sat beside me. She raised a passionless expressionless face, & the Rosary shone like a thread of silver through the ivory of her fingers.

At Sea.3 Swiftly the Night came. Like a great white bird the ship sped onward – onward into the unknown. Through the darkness the stars shone, yet 1. Miss Clara Wood had been looking after the girls from Queen’s College who boarded with her at 41 Harley Street, since 1841. She was considered quite an institution – a now elderly lady who always wore purple, except when she went to the opera, when she wore lavender. This inscription is written by Miss Wood; the notebook was her leaving present to KM. 2. KM’s slight mistranscription of the Maori phrase, ‘Ka nui taku aroha ki a koe’: ‘my love for you knows no bounds.’ Her inaccurate spelling suggests that she may have picked the phrase up by ear. The same inscription figures on the inside back cover of the same notebook. 3. This piece was written either during, or immediately after, the voyage back to New Zealand, when KM became briefly infatuated with R., the cricketer from the England team going to tour the country.

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the sky was a garden of golden flowers, heavy with colour. I lay on the deck of the vessel, my hands clasped behind my head, and, watching them, I felt a curious complex emotion, a swift mysterious realisation that they were shining steadily & ever more powerfully into the very soul of my soul. I felt their still light permeating the very depths, and fear & ecstasy held me still, shuddering. There is some fearful magic in their shining, I thought. As the power of the sunlight causes the firelight to become pale & wasted so is the flame of my life becoming quenched by this star shining. I saw the flame of my life as a little little candle flickering fearfully & fancifully, and I thought before long it will go out and then. Even as I thought I saw there where it had shone – darkness remained. Then I was drifting, drifting – where – whence – whither. I was drifting in a great boundless purple sea. I was being tossed to and fro by the power of the waves, and the confused sound of many voices floated to me. A sense of unutterable loneliness pervaded my spirit. I knew this sea was eternal – I was eternal – this agony was eternal. So, smiling at myself, I sit down to analyse this new influence, this complex emotion. I am never anywhere for long without a like experience. It is not one man or woman that a musician desires – it is the whole octave of the sex, & R. is my latest. The first time I saw him I was lying back in my chair & he walked past. I watched the complete rhythmic movement, the absolute self confidence, the beauty of his body, & that Quelque1 which is the everlasting & eternal in youth & creation stirred in me. I heard him speaking – he has a low full, strangely exciting voice, a habit of mimicking others, a keen sense of humour. His face is clean cut like the face of a statue, his mouth absolutely grecian. Also, he has seen much & lived much and his hand is perfectly strong and cool. He is certainly tall, & his clothes drape the lines of his figure. When I am with him a preposterous desire seizes me. I want to be badly hurt by him. I should like to be strangled by his firm hands. He smokes cigarettes frequently & exquisitely fastidiously. Last night we sat on deck. He taught me picquet. It was intensely hot. He wore a loose silk shirt under his dress coat. He was curiously excitable, almost a little violent at times. There was a suppressed agitation in every look, every movement. He spoke French for the greater part of the time with exquisite fluency, and a certain extreme affectation – he has spent years in Paris. The more hearts you have the better, he said, leaning over my hand. I felt his coat sleeve against my bare arm. O one heart is a very pinched affair, I answered – in these days one must possess many. We 1. (Fr.) ‘something’.

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exchanged a long look and his glance inflamed me like the scent of a gardenia. Yesterday afternoon a game of cricket was in progress on the deck. R began bowling – I stood & watched. He took a few slow steps & then flung the ball at the wicket with the most marvellous force. Time & again he did it – each ball seemed to be aimed at my heart. I panted for breath – – – We deny our minds to the extent that we castrate our bodies. I am wondering if that is true? & thinking that it most certainly is. Oh, I want to push it as far as it will go. Tomorrow night there is to be a ball. Thank Dieu I know that my dancing is really beautiful. I shall fight for what I want yet I don’t [know] definitely what that is. I want to upset him, stir in him strange depths. He has seen so much, it would be such a conquest. At present he is – – I do not know – I think intensely curious & a little baffled. Am I to become eventually une jeune fille entretenue.1 It points to it. O God, that is better far than the daughter of my parents. What tedious old bores they seem. They are worse than I had even expected. They are prying & curious, they are watchful & cat-like, they discuss only the food. They quarrel between themselves in a hopelessly vulgar fashion. My Father spoke of my returning as damned rot, said look here he wouldn’t have me fooling around in dark corners with fellows. His hands, covered with long sandy hair, are absolutely evil hands. A physically revolted feeling seizes me. He wants me to sit near, he watches me at meals, eats in the most abjectly blatantly vulgar manner that is describable. It is like a constant long offense, but I cannot escape from it. And it wraps me in its atmosphere. When I pass him the dishes at table, or a book, or give him a cushion, he refrains from thanking me. He is constantly suspicious, constantly overbearingly tyrannous. I watch him walking all the deck, his pale hideous speckled trousers, his absurdly antediluvian cap. He is like a cat sometimes I think, except that his eyes are not like a cat’s eyes – they are so pale, so frightfully offensive. When he is astonished or when he eats anything that pleases him I think they must start from his head. He watches the dishes go round, anxious to see that he shall have a good share. I cannot be alone or in the company of women for five minutes – he is there, eager, fearful, attempting to appear unconcerned, pulling at his long drooping red-grey moustache with his hairy hands. Ugh! She is completely under his influence, suggestible & easily upset. Tells him what he must & must not do, looks constantly uneasy. They are both so absolutely idealistic – they are a constant offense to me. 1. (Fr.) ‘a kept woman’, ‘a mistress’.

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The sight of them causes me to feel utterly changed – I hesitate in my manner, appear constrained. They have no idea of the fitness of things. I shall never be able to live at home – I can plainly see that. There would be constant friction. For more than a quarter of an hour they are quite unbearable, & so absolutely my mental inferiors. What is going to happen in the future. I am full of a restless wonder, but I have none of that glorious vitality that I used to have so much. They are draining it out of me – – – I attend a lecture of Thomas Moore.1 Mrs Lightband2 – a woman a little over freely inclined to embonpoint. She has exceeding fair hair which bears evidence of much crimping & much back combing & many pads. It is poor [. . .] hair, all confined in a broad net. In the evening she wears extremely decollete frocks, two tight rows of pearls. If Tom Moore was aboard the Corinthic3 I fancy his Muse would be inspired to sing: [Journal, 1954, p. 7]

Of in the stilly night Ere slumbers chains have bound me My sleep is put to flight By all the noise around me. Along the corridor Strange gurgles, many a sound.4 1. Possibly a reference to the highly respected poet, dramatist, art critic and artist Thomas Sturge Moore (1870–1944), who was a key figure in intellectual and literary circles in early twentieth-century London. He was a post-symbolist, who highlighted the shift from late nineteenth-century aestheticism to modernism. He gave frequent talks and readings, notably at the Poetry Recital Society. However, the pastiche of Irish poet Thomas Moore’s ‘Oft in the stilly night’ below suggests the lecture might have been about Thomas Moore, rather than ‘of’ Thomas Moore. 2. The Lightbands were a prominent family from Nelson, New Zealand, who had a keen involvement in politics. The father, George Wales Lightband, arrived from London in 1842. 3. S. S. Corinthic was the ship on which the Beauchamp family returned to New Zealand in October to December 1906. 4. This poem is one of the earliest examples of Mansfield’s talent for pastiching. The first two lines are from Thomas Moore’s ‘Scotch Air – Oft in the stilly night’, but the three lines that follow are her own. Thomas Moore (1779–1852) was an Irish poet. His Irish Melodies provide many of the intertextual echoes, including the title, of Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ in Dubliners. Stephen’s brother sings the opening lines of ‘Oft in a stilly night’ in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).

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[Notebook 1, qMS–1242]

Edgar Allan – Atmosphere – untidiness of landscape – Height, river, small boat, Italy, colour purple – the result of fire – manuka – Ai. Hotel man with daughter – willows the yellow transparent effect.1 When N[ew] Z[ealand] is more artificial she will give birth to an artist who can treat her natural beauties adequately. This sounds paradoxical but is true. A long strand of rope attached to a railway carriage flapped forlornly in the rain. Three men in blue shirts all lifting the strong plank [?], the dull horses standing by. toi toi grass.2 Copper colour & black, bracken – dead valley of bracken.

1. At this time, KM was composing verse strongly inspired by Poe’s poetry, which she enjoyed (see p. 17). Alpers dates her interest in Poe to just after her return to Wellington (Alpers, p. 45). Poe’s evocation of landscape in bold strokes seems to be in her mind. The key words and effects recorded here all echo vignettes and descriptions made during the Urewera trip (see pp. 59–77). See ‘The [. . .] Child of the Sea’ in CW3, pp. 27–8. 2. The toi toi or toetoe is a tall grass with feathery plumes, which grows throughout New Zealand.

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[Notebook 1, qMS–1242]

Feb. 26th. Kathie Schonfeld. Twilight walkers with sand – out building roof tops 5. 22 Poets Cottage – sombre – mysterious – good colouring. 2. From Lambeth Bridge – London Atmosphere – Every object in smoke – Street scene St Ive’s superb colouring – bright – lustrous [?] signboard. 10. Distance – Immensity & age – London. 19. Chelsea & [. . .] by Whistler – composition pleasing. English Village The absolute effect. St Ives Rackham-like colour – almost grotesque – grey day – English Village – – 9 St Ives – water so good – stones gorse colouring. 25. Sympathy.1 1 2 1 4 1

drawers vest night blouses stockings

1. These appear to be notes inspired by an art exhibition or a book of paintings. The American-born painter James Whistler (1834–1903) spent much of his adult life in London and Paris. He visited and painted London and St Ives, accompanied by his then assistant, Walter Sickert. Arthur Rackham (1867–1939) was a highly successful illustrator of children’s books, notably fairy tales and folk legends. After her return to Wellington, KM wrote to her cousin, Sylvia Payne: ‘There is nothing on earth to do – nothing to see – and my heart keeps flying off to Oxford Circus – Westminster Bridge at the Whistler hour’ (CLKM, 1, pp. 20–1) (8 January 1907).

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2 hand. 1 pill bot. [Notebook 39, qMS–1243]

March 30th 1907.

Selections from Dorian Gray. Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know. – – – I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world. The worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic. Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love; it is the faithless who know love’s tragedies! All influence is immoral – immoral from the scientific point of view. Nothing can cure the soul but the senses – just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.1 Die Wege des Lebens.2 To be premature is to be perfect. O.W.3 Greek dress was in its essence inartistic. Nothing should reveal the body but the body itself. O.W.4 Genius in a woman is the mystic laurel of Apollo springing from the soft breast of Daphne. It hurts in the growing and sometimes breaks the heart from which it springs. M.C.5 1. A series of quotations from Wilde’s novel A Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). In each case, the words are spoken by Lord Henry Wotton. 2. (Ger.) ‘the paths of life’. 3. Epigram from Oscar Wilde’s Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young (1894). As a novelist, short-story writer, prominent intellectual, decadent aesthete and iconoclast, Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) was a major influence in KM’s years of apprenticeship. In the following quotations and observations, ‘K.M.’, ‘A Woman’, often abbreviated to ‘A.W.’ are all KM herself. 4. Oscar Wilde, Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young. 5. From Marie Corelli’s The Treasure of Heaven: A Romance of Riches (1906). The British-born writer, Marie Corelli (1855–1924), was one of the bestselling authors of the late nineteenth century. Corelli lived for four years in Paris to complete her education, studied as a musician and later became known for her non-conformist writing and lifestyle, features that may have appealed to the young KM. It was not unusual in literary reviews and writings in the early twentieth century to find the names of Marie Corelli and Marie Bashkirtseff associated (see p. 30, n. 2 below).

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Through the tense silence came floating a long sweet passionate cry of pain – a shivering moan that touched the edge of Joy. The ceaseless craving of the finite for the infinite which is and ever shall be – the great chorale of Life. M.C.1 To acknowledge the presence of Fear is to give birth to Failure. K.M. Me marier et avoir des enfants! Mais quelle blanchisseuse – je veux la gloire. Marie Bashkirtseff. Russian.2

1. From Marie Corelli’s The Treasure of Heaven: A Romance of Riches. 2. (Fr.) ‘Get married and have children! But what a washerwoman – I want fame.’ From Le Journal de Marie Bashkirtseff, published in 1887. The full quotation reads, ‘Me marier et avoir des enfants! Mais chaque blanchisseuse peut en faire autant. A moins de trouver un homme civilisé et éclairé ou faible et très amoureux. Mais qu’est-ce que je veux? Oh! vous le savez bien. Je veux la gloire’ (3 July 1876) (Get married and have children! But any washerwoman can do that. Unless you find a refined and enlightened man, or one who’s weak and very much in love. But what do I want? Oh, you know full well. I want fame). Marie Bashkirtseff (1858–84) was a Russian-born writer, artist and diarist who lived mostly in France, where she was a respected intellectual figure. Her outspoken artistic ambitions and defiant lifestyle were admired by KM, and her premature death from tuberculosis would later encourage analogies between the two. Mansfield may well have taken this abbreviated quotation not directly from the diary, but from Marie Corelli’s novel God’s Good Man: A Simple Love Story (1904), where the following exchange takes place between Cicely Bourne and Julian Adderley, two of the secondary characters: ‘Goblin, you are delicious!’ he averred – ‘But the ghastly spectre of matrimony does not at present stand in my path, luring me to the frightful chasms of domesticity, oblivion and despair. What was it the charming Russian girl Bashkirtseff wrote on this very subject? Me marier et –?’ ‘I can tell you!’ exclaimed Cicely – ‘It was the one sentence in the whole book that made all the men mad, because it showed such utter contempt for them! “Me marier et avoir des enfants? Mais – chaque blanchisseuse peut en faire autant! Je veux la gloire!” Oh, how I agree with her! Moi, aussi, je veux la gloire!’

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It is one of Nature’s general rules – and part of her habitual injustice – that ‘to him that hath shall be given – but from him that hath not shall be taken even that which he hath.’ J.S.M.1 ‘The dark lantern of the Spirit which none see by, but those that bear it.’2 The mere cessation of Existence is no evil to anyone; the idea is only formidable through the illusion of imagination which makes one conceive oneself as if one were alive and feeling oneself dead.3 J.S.M. It is possible to have a strong self-love without any self-satisfaction, rather with a self-discontent which is the more intense because one’s own little core of egoistic sensibility is a supreme care. G.E.4 Genius itself is not en règle; it comes into the world to make new rules.5 G.E.

1. From John Stuart Mill’s essay, ‘On Nature’, written in 1874. The biblical quotation is from Matthew 25: 29. J. S. Mill (1806–73) was a highly influential philosopher, economist and political theorist, many of whose writings focus on ‘liberty’. His book, The Subjection of Women (1869), was an inspirational text for the early suffragette movement. 2. Quoted in J. S. Mill’s essay, ‘Theism’. The quotation comes from Samuel Butler’s satirical poem, Hudibras (Part 1, Canto 1), published between 1663 and 1678. Samuel Butler (1835–1902) was an English writer and philosopher, who spent the years 1860–4 in New Zealand. He is best remembered for the novels Erewhon and The Way of All Flesh, and also for his iconoclastic literary criticism. 3. From J. S. Mill’s essay, ‘The Utility of Religion’, written in 1855 but withheld from publication until after his death. The three essays here (notes 1, 2 and 3) were published together in a volume entitled Three Essays on Religion, in 1874. 4. The British author, George Eliot (1819–80), had a lasting influence on KM, in terms of both her literary achievements and her independent lifestyle (see Alpers, p. 145). The quotation is taken from her novel Daniel Deronda (1876). The passage records the inner thoughts of Gwendolen Harleth in Chapter 2. 5. From George Eliot, Daniel Deronda. Words spoken by Mrs Arrowpoint in Chapter 10.

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A man who speaks effectively through Music is compelled to something more difficult than parliamentary eloquence.1 G.E. Among the heirs of Art – as at the division of the Promised Land – each has to win his portion by hard fighting. The bestowal is a matter of prophecy – and is a title without possession.2 Any great achievement in acting or in music grows with the growth. Whenever an artist has been able to say ‘I came, I saw, I conquered’ it has been at the end of patient practise. Genius is at first little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline. Your muscles, your whole frame must go like a watch – true, true, true, true to a hair.3 G.E. II est plus aisé de connaître l’homme en général que de connaître un homme en particulier. 4 La Rochefoucauld. If anyone should importune me to give a reason why I loved him, I feel it could not otherwise be expressed than by making answer ‘Because it was he; because it was I.’ There is beyond what I say, I know not what inexplicable and inevitable power that brought on this union.5 Montaigne. 1. From George Eliot, Daniel Deronda. Words spoken by the musician Herr Klesmer in Chapter 22. 2. From George Eliot, Daniel Deronda. Opening words of Chapter 23. 3. From George Eliot, Daniel Deronda. Words spoken by Herr Klesmer to Gwendolen Harleth in Chapter 23. KM omits part of the full quotation and plays up the emphasis; Eliot’s text reads: Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline. Singing and acting, like the fine dexterity of the juggler with his cups and balls, require a shaping of the organs toward a finer and finer certainty of effect. Your muscles – your whole frame – must go like a watch, true, true to a hair. 4. (Fr.) ‘It is easier to know man in general than to know one man in particular.’ Maxim 436, from La Rochefoucauld’s Maximes et réflexions morales (1665). François de la Rochefoucauld (1613–80) was a prolific French writer, now remembered mostly for his Maxims. 5. From Montaigne’s essay, ‘De l’Amitié’ (1592), written to honour his close friend and fellow writer, Etienne de La Boétie. Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) was a major philosopher and writer of the Renaissance, with a lasting influence on Western European writers and philosophers.

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The strongest man is he who stands most alone.1 Henrik Ibsen. It is only men who can hear of death without thinking of mourning and the blinds.2 Merriman. Happy people are never brilliant. It implies friction. K.M. Be as one that knoweth, and yet holdeth his tongue.3 In nature there are no rewards or punishments; there are consequences.4 The future comes not from before to meet us, but streams up from behind – over our heads!5 Sound can create colour and atmosphere. 6 H.V. 1. Words spoken by the principal character, Dr Stockman, in Ibsen’s Enemy of the People (1882). Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) was a Norwegian playwright, best remembered for his plays A Doll’s House (1879) and Hedda Gabler (1890). 2. Narrator’s commentary from Merriman’s novel, From One Generation to Another (1892), Chapter 12. Henry Seton Merriman was the pseudonym of the English novelist Hugh Stowell Scott (1862–1903), an esteemed author in his day. KM’s underlining here is gender-specific, and makes sense when the quotation is set in context. The full passage reads: ‘Before he reached the great house he was aware that the grim pleasure of imparting bad news was not to be his, for all the blinds were lowered – a detail likely to receive early attention in a feminine household, for it is only men who can hear of a death without thinking of mourning and the blinds.’ 3. From Ecclesiastes 23: 8. The full verse begins: ‘Let thy speech be short, comprehending much in few words.’ 4. From Robert G. Ingersoll’s essay, ‘Some Reasons Why’ (1895). R. G. Ingersoll (1833–99) was an American social activist and essayist. 5. Attributed to Rabelais in an 1862 compilation of quotations, frequently reedited until the early twentieth century, entitled Many Thoughts of Many Minds, edited by Henry Southgate. 6. Untraced quotation, possibly by Henry Vaughan (1621–95), a Welsh metaphysical poet whose works were often anthologised in the late nineteeth century.

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What mankind thinks venial it is hardly ever supposed that God looks upon in a serious light – at least by those who feel in themselves any inclination to practise it.1 J.S.M. It is not naturally, or generally, the happy who are most anxious for a prolongation of this present life – or for a life hereafter; it is those who have never been happy.2 J.S.M. – – – it is no unnatural part of the idea of a happy life that life itself is to be laid down, after the best that it can give has been fully enjoyed through a long lapse of time, when all its pleasures, even those of benevolence, are familiar, and nothing untasted & unknown is left to stimulate curiosity and keep up the desire of prolonged existence.3 J.S.M. Push everything as far as it will go.4

O.W.

The old despise everything – the middle aged believe everything – The young know everything.5 O.W. To love madly, perhaps, is not wise, yet should you love madly it is far wiser than not to love at all.6 M.M. 1. From John Stuart Mill’s essay, ‘On the Utility of Religion’ (see p. 31, n. 3 above). 2. From John Stuart Mill’s essay, ‘On the Utility of Religion’ (see p. 31, n. 3 above). 3. From John Stuart Mill’s essay, ‘On the Utility of Religion’ (see p. 31, n. 3 above). 4. However characteristically ‘Wildean’, this epigram would not appear to be a direct quotation from a work by Oscar Wilde. 5. Slightly inaccurate quotation from Wilde’s Epigrams: Phrases and Philosophies for the Young. Wilde’s text reads ‘The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything’ (Epigrams, London: Keller, 1907, p. 144). 6. Epigram from Maeterlinck’s Wisdom and Destiny, first published in English translation as Thoughts from Maeterlinck in 1903. Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949) was a Francophone Belgian poet, playwright and essayist, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1911. He is mostly remembered as a symbolist, although his later works are more influenced by occultism and existentialism.

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People who learn only from experience do not allow for intuition. A.H.H.1 No life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested.2

O.W.

We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices. If you want to mar a nature you have merely to reform it. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.

O.W O.W O.W

Conscience and cowardice are really the same things. Conscience is the trade mark of the firm. That is all. O.W. The value of an idea has nothing whatever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it. O.W. To realise one’s nature perfectly – that is what each of us is here for. O.W. The mind of the thoroughly well informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-a-brac shop – all monsters and dust & everything priced above its proper value. O.W Let us bathe – on our brows let us twine The roses. & sup No water to temper the wine Though deep be the cup. For Desire is a pleasure that ends And when it’s past

1. Untraced quotation, possibly by Arthur Henry Hallam (1811–33), an English poet and close friend of Tennyson; Hallam’s early death inspired one of Tennyson’s most famous poems, ‘In Memoriam A.H.H.’. 2. This epigram and the seven that follow are all from Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. In each case, they are words spoken by Lord Henry Wotton, the novel’s hedonistic dandy, whose libertine principles fascinate Dorian.

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1907 Old age & the parting from friends And Death at last. From the Greek of Paton1 ‘That which lies deepest is the longest sought, ‘That which lies highest is the latest found, ‘That which lies dearest is the dearest bought, ‘That which is truest is the hardest taught ‘That which is noblest has the widest bound. 1907.2

Realise your Youth while you have it. Don’t squander the gold of your days listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common or the vulgar, which are the aims, the false ideals of our Age. Live! Live the wonderful Life that is in you. Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always reaching for New Sensations . . . Be afraid of nothing.3 O.W. Ambition is a curse if you are not armour-proof against everything else, unless you are willing to sacrifice yourself to your ambition. A Woman. It cannot be possible to go through all the abandonment of Music – and care humanly for anything human afterwards. A Woman. All Musicians, no matter how insignificant, come to life emasculated of their power to take life seriously. It is not one man or woman but the complete octave of sex that they desire . . . A.W. You feel helpless under the yoke of creation. A.W. 1. From Anthologicae Graecae Erotica: The Love Epigrams or Book V of the Palatine Anthology, trans. and ed. W. R. Paton (London: Nutt, 1898). William Roger Paton (1857–1921) was a Scottish-born author and translator of classical Greek texts, whose works are still in common use today. 2. From M. M. Scott’s Violin Verses, no. 4. Marion Margaret Scott (1877–1953) was a violinist, musicologist and writer, and also a pioneering feminist figure in the world of musicology and music criticism. 3. Words spoken by Lord Henry Wotton in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.

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Nature makes such fools of us! What is the use of liking anyone if a washerwoman can do exactly the same thing? Well, this is Nature’s trick to ensure population.1 A.W. To have the courage of your excess – to find the limit of yourself! A.W. Most women turn to salt, looking back.2 A.W. Big people have always entirely followed their own inclinations. Why should one remember the names of people who do what everyone else does? To break a law with success is to be illustrious. A.W. And wealth is for brains & the brave; for those who can get it its there to be got. Those who haven’t got it are – generally speaking – fools. O.W3 I do not want to earn a living, I want to live. O.W. You suspend yourself from the heights of an inspiration and rebound in sickening jolts from cathedral pinnacles to the mud on the street. A.W. It will be a hideous world when everything is permitted. Our nerves can’t supply all the dynamics. We need laws to break in order to give our vitality exercise. A.W. 1. Signed ‘A.W.’ (A Woman), referring to KM herself. The maxim echoes feelings and imagery in the Marie Bashkirtseff quotation above (see p. 30, n. 2). 2. Indirect reference to Genesis 19. Forewarned by an angel of the imminent destruction of their city, Lot and his wife escape. Despite the angel’s warning, Lot’s wife looks back at Sodom, however, and is turned into a pillar of salt. See Genesis 19: 16–26. 3. As the initials ‘O.W.’ imply, Mansfield attributes this and the following two O. W. quotations to Oscar Wilde, but the source text has not been identified.

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A woman really cannot understand Music till she has had the actual experience of those laboriously concealed things which are evidently the foundation of them all . . . A.W The translation of an emotion into act is its death – its logical end . . . But [. . .] this way isn’t the act of unlawful things. It is the curiosity of our own temperament, the deliberate expression of our own tendencies, the welding into an Art of act or incident some raw emotion of the blood. For we castrate our minds to the extent by which we deny our bodies. O.W. Comme une fleur que le vent chasse Et qui vient à nos pieds mourir, Aussi tout passe – tout s’éfface Excepté le souvenir.1 [Notebook 29, qMS–1241]

April 1907 Enough 1 to 6 [?] Very Faible By dint of hiding from others the self that is in us we may end by being unable to find it ourselves. (Act ii Scene ii)2 The things that we really wish to say can never be put into words. (Act ii Scene iii) Les hommes ont je ne sais quelle peur etrange de la beaute (Maurice Maeterlinck)3 1. (Fr.) ‘Like a flower carried by the wind, / Which falls to our feet and dies, / So everything passes, everything fades away, / Except memory.’ Very conventional images in French romantic verse; the exact origin of the poem has not been traced. 2. The two following quotations are from Maeterlinck’s play, Aglavaine and Selysette, A Drama in Five Acts, trans. Alfred Sutro (London, 1897). Symons discusses the play briefly in ‘Three Problem Plays’, Plays, Acting, Music (London: Duckworth, 1903, p. 154). The first quotation is a line spoken by Aglavaine, the second by Meleander. 3. From Maurice Maeterlinck’s essay, ‘La Beauté intérieure’, in his 1896 essay collection, Le Trésor des humbles. Symons refers to this collection in the article cited above.

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There danced before his eyes a vision of the wonderful Spring of 1893, marching through the city in green robes, with nodding plumes of lilac and a great retinue of laburnums bearing lanterns, and chestnuts swinging tapers in their hundred arms.1 I have read enough for this afternoon. Now I want to write. Shall I be able, I wonder? Here is the attempt. It was late in the afternoon of an Autumn day. I stood at the street corner waiting for a tram car. The rain was falling, and the houses were like the sudden fearful eye of Fear. Wind in the town, and the cold wet rain This is just a little song That a child once sang to me. (O the bitter years and long Since she sat upon my knee.) Mother when we take a walk, you and I along the Shore I can scarcely ever talk. I can write nothing at all. I have many ideas – but no grip of any subject. I want to write verses – but they won’t come. I cannot rhyme but that is not all. I cannot get a charming effect any way. It is hatefully annoying, and disheartening. Still there is nothing like trying so I shall make a further attempt. I should like to write something just a trifle mysterious – but really very beautiful and original. O Mother Mine, O mother mine Snuggle me close and hold me fast When will the weather again be fine Shall I really get well at last? In the room next to mine a little boy is ill. He is a strange little fellow – very quick, very forward, with the intense curiosity of childhood strongly developed. I met his Mother on the stairs this afternoon and she told me he had burnt his hand in the fire. All through the evening as I have sat here alone, studying, I have heard the steady creak of a rocking chair, and each time that the sound came – a little voice crying O Mother, 1. From John Davidson’s ‘Parks and Squares’ in A Random Itinerary (London: Elkin Matthews and John Lane, 1894, p. 68). The book recounts the walks of a single figure, ‘the itinerant’, as he walks about London. John Davidson (1857–1909) was a prolific poet, dramatist and essayist of Scottish origin, living in London. He was one of the ‘Rhymers’.

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O Mother. She is holding him in her arms, maybe, rocking him to sleep. His face is pillowed against her, his tangled curls against her cheek. Vignette. I groped my way up the dark stairs and down the stone passage into my little room. Lights from the street outside streamed across the floor and showed the great piles of books in common dull bindings on the table, and a small pile of letters, and a tray with tea and bread. Outside the wind called, shrieked. The rain flung itself over everything, furiously, passionately. I looked out of the window. Below me in the shining street was mirrored another London – a drowned city – and I shuddered and drew the curtains. There was much work to be done – proof sheets to be corrected, letters to look over and answer. I lit my candle and sat down at the table. Deep in my work then – but a curious persistent sound kept coming to me – The Growing of Wings. Try & make some sort of sketch of the whole – it will be far simpler, so to speak, block it in. For instance place your characters carefully and completely. Yvonne is born in New Zealand. At the death of her Father she is sent to London to Miss Pitts who keeps a boarding house for young girls who wish to study at the various Colleges. Here is the opportunity for sketching in, say, Opal Vedron, Constance Foster, and Mrs Manners. She is taken by Mrs Manners to see her nephew Paul Harding – author. Although there were no God, God would remain the greatest notion man has had. Evolution is eventually God – nicht?1 Vulgarity is the affectation of the manners of a class to which one does not belong.2 1. This series of five entries is from John Davidson’s The Rosary (London: Grant Richards, 1903, p. 84). The work is a collection of eighty musings and anecdotes on subjects as varied as ‘At Cross-Purposes with Life’, ‘The Power of the Pen’ and ‘Life and Death’. The full quotation here, from section LXIX, entitled ‘God’, reads: Although there were no God, God would remain the greatest notion man has had. It is a question, however, whether this notion will be permanent in the mind of the race. If it should be permanent, and there be any truth in Evolution, who can say that God may not yet be evolved? (p. 191) 2. From John Davidson’s The Rosary, section XXIV, ‘Vulgarity’, p. 58.

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– – – Browning. Prophet of the morbidly healthy all-inquiring intellect that never quite grasped the idea of intelligence. ‘I was ever a fighter.’1 Is Hope only the subtlest form of cowardice?2 deletion The first stage of the passionate pilgrimage to intelligence is ennui3 Personality.4 Mummy’s Garden Frock Songs from Fairy land. Daddy’s Picture.5 There is, I think, Mr Trowell. Definitely I have decided not to be a musician – it’s not my forte, I can plainly see. The fact remains at that – I must be an authoress. Caesar is losing hold of me. Edie is waiting for me – I shall slip into her arms, they are safest. Do you love me? [Journal, 1954, pp. 8–9]

Oh, this monotonous, terrible rain. The dull, steady, hopeless sound of it. I have drawn the curtains across the windows to shut out the weeping face of the world – the trees swaying softly in their grief and dropping silver tears upon the brown earth – the narrow, sodden, mean, draggled wooden houses, colourless save for the dull coarse red of the roof—and the long line of grey hills, impassable, spectral-like. 1. From John Davidson’s The Rosary, section XXX, ‘Portraits and Romance’, which is written in dialogue form between two men. The full quotation reads: The pallid, almost expressionless profile of Browning may be rightly symbolic of the morbidly healthy all-inquiring intellect that never quite grasped the idea of intelligence – ‘I was ever a fighter’; but a suggestion of the joy of strength rather than of its apathy would have been helpful. (p. 77)

2. 3. 4. 5.

The poet and dramatist Robert Browning (1812–89) was one of the foremost late Victorian poets, whose use of dramatic monologues was highly influential on later poetic and prose styles. The single one-line epigram in section XXXI, ‘Hope’, also from John Davidson’s The Rosary (p. 84). From a dialogue in section LVI, ‘Ennui’, in John Davidson’s The Rosary. The full quotation reads, ‘At the back of your mind you feel that the first station of the passionate pilgrimage to intelligence is ennui’ (p. 175). ‘Personality’ is also a section in The Rosary (p. 185). These single-line entries appear to be ideas for titles.

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So I have drawn the curtains across my windows, and the light is intensely fascinating. A perpetual twilight broods here. The atmosphere is heavy with morbid charm. Strange, as I sit here, quiet, alone, how each possession of mine – the calendar gleaming whitely on the wall, each picture, each book, my ’cello case, the very furniture – seems to stir into life. The Velasquez Venus moves on her couch1 ever so slightly; across the face of Manon a strange smile flickers for an instant and is gone,2 my rocking chair is full of patient resignation, my ’cello case is wrapt in profound thought. Beside me a little bowl of mignonette is piercingly sweet, and a cluster of scarlet geraniums is hot with colour. Sometimes, through the measured sound of the rain comes the long, hopeless note of a foghorn far out at sea. And then all life seems but a crying out drearily, and a groping to and fro in a foolish, aimless darkness. Sometimes – it seems like miles away – I hear the sound of a door opening and shutting. And I listen and think and dream until my life seems not one life, but a thousand million lives, and my soul is weighed down with the burden of past existence, with the vague, uneasy consciousness of future strivings. And the grey thoughts fall on my soul like the grey rain upon the world, but I cannot draw the curtain and shut them out. [Notebook 1, qMS–1242]

association of ideas. 24.v.073 General Analysis of the Mind. F.P. analysis. F.P. synthesis. First beauty – then [. . . .] Heredity – inherent physical tendencies when a certain tendency [?] comes – the mind has its tendency to act in like manner. consciousness. Bundle of Habits. 1. Velázquez’s ‘Venus at her Mirror’ is one of the Spanish painter’s most famous oil paintings, depicting Venus seen from behind, lying on her couch and looking at a mirror held by cupid. Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) was the foremost artist of the Spanish Golden Age. 2. Probably referring to Jean-Marc Nattier’s ‘Manon Baletti’ (1757). Jean-Marc Nattier (1685–1766) was an a French classical miniaturist, particuarly renowned for his portraits of women in court dress. His ‘Manon’ is a poised figure with just a hint of an enigmatic smile. 3. See Figure 3 (p. 43) for KM’s manuscript and accompanying doodles.

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Figure 3 Reading notes, apparently from Edmund Parish’s Hallucinations and Illusions: A Study of the Fallacies of Perception, dated 2 May 1907. Notebook 1, qMS–1242. John Middleton Murry Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

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1907 Seeing the object in perspective – cognisance of an object. Pass from image to language – Illusion hallucination delusion.1

In these – illusion – the thing to be [. . .] if your nerve is set going – when the object is there. Byron & Scott. the danger of hallucination. It is a step from the [. . .] From sensation to Perception – mental image of the thing – the after image – then from an image into an idea – –2 I am full of Ideas, tonight. Now they must, at all costs, germinate. I have seen enough to make me full of fancy. I should like to write something so beautiful and yet modern and yet student-like – & full of Summer. Here is a shot. Now truly I ought to be able, but I don’t feel by any means confident. De ta tige détachée. Pauvre Feuille séchée Ou va tu?3 To a White Rose. Biddi-biddis4 Oh, do let me write something really good, let me sketch an idea & work it out. Here is silence and peace and splendour, bush and 1. These appear to be reading notes, reflecting Mansfield’s habit of noting down key ideas or impressions as she went. An abundance of books dealing with the nature and psychology of perception and hallucination were published in the 1890s and early 1900s. All the key words and references here suggest the notes were taken from Edmund Parish’s Hallucinations and Illusions: A Study of the Fallacies of Perception, published in 1897, with KM’s shorthand ‘F. P. analysis’ and ‘F. P. synthesis’ standing for Fallacies of Perception. This work was published in Scott’s Contemporary Science series in London, ed. Havelock Ellis, in 1897. 2. This passage likewise backs up the hypothesis that these may be reading notes from Parish’s work. On page 38, we find a passage on ecstasy beginning, ‘It is but a step from hallucinations of this description to those of ecstasy.’ Page 92 discusses the externalisation of latent ideas, and how this can awaken images by word association. On page 81, discussing hallucinations and delusions when the senses are over-stimulated, Parish recounts how, ‘After receiving news of Byron’s death, Walter Scott suddenly saw his friend’s image before him. Astonished at the natural appearance of the clothes, he approached the phantom and discovered that it was an illusion, and that the clothes of the figure consisted of the folds of a curtain.’ 3. (Fr.) A literal translation reads: ‘Taken from your stem / Poor dry leaf / Where are you going?’ 4. Biddi-biddies (Maori: piripiri) are New Zealand burrs of the genus Acaena.

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birds. Far away I hear builders at work upon a house, and the broom sends me half crazy. Let it be a poem. Well, here goes. I’m red hot for ideas. More power to your elbow, my dearest Kathie. That is so, and I shall do well. Fitful sunshine now – I am glad, it will be a beautiful afternoon. But I pray you, let me write. Lying there, with her face buried in her hands, shuddering from head to foot with grief & rage at this Inexplicable Something which seemed to guard the door to Everything, Kathie had her terrible hour. She could not think connectedly. Outside in the fierce wind she heard the [. . . .] sound of the I feel passionate & mad. Why not write something good. Here’s a thought. Of course it may be nothing. My hands clasped idly in my lap. Sitting in my room I watch the window curtains blow to & fro. ‘The Romance of Woman’s Influence’ Alice Corkran.1 Coninsby Disraeli.2 And London is calling me the live long day. Dear Dr Tudor-Jones3 – I want to write you a few words only – of thanks Macdowell4 ====== 1. Study by Alice Corkran published by Blackie and Son in 1906. The book’s subtitle reads ‘St. Monica, Vittoria Colonna, Madame Guyon, Caroline Herschel, Mary Unwin, Dorothy Wordsworth and Other Mothers, Wives, Sisters and Friends who have helped Great Men’. 2. Coningsby, or the New Generation, by Benjamin Disraeli (1844). Disraeli (1804–81) was a major Tory politician, twice prime minister of Great Britain, as well as a prolific writer. 3. William Tudor Jones (1865–1946), a Presbyterian minister in Wales, was posted to New Zealand in 1906, where he became a preacher at the Unitarian Free Church in Wellington. He wrote prolifically on liberal religious issues and the philosophy of religion. KM did not always appreciate him, judging by a letter to her sister Vera on 17 January 1908 (see CLKM, 1, pp. 37–8). 4. Edward Alexander MacDowell (1861–1908), an American composer and pianist, whose late Romantic works were popular at the time, and appreciated by KM during her musical studies. He was famous for his tone-poems, and his Woodland Sketches (1896), Forgotten Fairy Tales (1897) and Sea Pieces (1898) may well have inspired some of KM’s early writings.

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Everybody spoke of the dark man as a crank. Some went even so far as to say he followed a cult, and that is sufficiently damning for an archangel in these days. His entire establishment consisted of the terracotta plastered room.1 Poems of the Apostle of Youth. 1. Late in the night. I lie in my bed & press my face into the pillow. Oh, how strong I feel – like a giant even, and far too happy to sleep. 2. Now is the Winter gone, and the first crocus lights its wan lamp upon the barren earth. 3. Kneeling by the stream I watch a brown leaf float down the shining water. Oh, little brown leaf – whither – whither? 4. Often at midnight I open my window and there wanders in my room many a ghostly visitant’s welcome. I love to feel your icy kisses upon my hot mouth. 5. A briar rose is swinging in the blue day. But a wind comes & the blossom is shattered. Strange that it should be far more beautiful as it trails in the dust. Here, then, is a little summary of what I need – power, wealth, and freedom. It is the hopelessly insipid doctrine that love is the only thing in the world, taught, hammered into women from generation to generation which hampers us so cruelly. We must get rid of that bogey, and then they come – the opportunity of happiness and freedom. Cher Monsieur, J’ai recu une lettre de mon ami Mere St Joseph Aubert.2 Elle me dit que, quand vous I shall never I shall never be able to change my handwriting. Cigarettes. In the room below me a man is smoking a cigaret. The perfume floats through my window, and I am besieged by so many memories that for a little space – I forget – to remember. Outside in the evening sky there is a wide lightness – in the garden next door the 1. Lines to be found in nearly identical wording in KM’s unfinished story, ‘The Man, the Monkey and the Mask’ (see CW1, pp. 100–1). 2. Mother Mary Joseph Aubert (1835–1926), of French origin, lived in New Zealand from 1860 and worked there as a Maori missioner. The letter reads, ‘Dear Sir, I have received a letter from my friend, Mother St Joseph Aubert. She tells me that when you –.’

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lawn is being mowed. I hear the sharp monotonous clattering sound of the machine. [Notebook 39, qMS–1243]

June 1st 1907. Day’s Bay.1 And another change. I sit in the small poverty stricken sitting room – the one and only room which the cottage contains with the exception of a cabin like bedroom fitted with bunks, and an outhouse with a bath, and wood cellar, coal cellar, complete. On one hand is the sea stretching right up the yard, on the other the bush growing close down almost to my front door. Sunday night. I am here, almost dead with cold, almost dead with tiredness. I cannot sleep because the end has come with such suddenness that even I who have anticipated it so long and so thoroughly, am shocked & overwhelmed. She is tired.2 Last night I spent in her arms, and tonight I hate her – which being interpreteth meaneth that I adore her, that I cannot lie in my bed and not feel the magic of her body. Which means that Sex seems as nothing to me. I feel more powerfully all those so termed sexual impulses with her than I have with any men. She enthrals, enslaves me, and her personal self, her body absolute, is my worship. I feel that to lie with my head on her breast is to feel what Life can hold. All my troubles, my wretched fears, are swept away. Gone are the recollections of Caesar & Adonis,3 gone the terrible banality of my life. Nothing remains except the shelter of her arms. And of course a week ago I could have borne all this because I had never known what it truly was to love & be loved, to adore passionately – but now I feel that if she is denied me I must – the soul of me goes into the streets and craves love of the casual stranger, begs & prays for a little of the precious poison. I am half mad with love. She is positively at present – above my music even – everything. And now she is going. Anticipation 1. The Beauchamps owned a cottage in Day’s Bay, across the harbour from Wellington, where they went for holidays. 2. ‘She’ refers to KM’s friend, Edith K. Bendall. Edith Bendall (1879–1985) was an art-school student. KM admits to having travelled using Edith Bendall’s name (see CLKM, 1, p. 91) and also uses the family name in her planned novel, ‘Maata’ (see CW1, pp. 344–65). 3. KM’s secret names for previous romantic fantasies. ‘Adonis’ was the English cricketeer on the boat to England (see above, p. 23) and Caesar was a nickname for Arnold Trowell. In the manuscript drafts of ‘Juliet’, KM sometimes refers to the character David as Caesar (see CW1, pp. 37–61).

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has become Realisation – the Bubble has proved its fairy origin. And this is really my last experience of the kind – my last – I cannot bear it any longer. It really kills my soul, each time I feel it more deeply, because each time the wound is stabbed afresh and the knife probes new flesh and reawakens tortures in the old. Beside me burns the steady flame of the candle – golden and like a blossom – but if I sit here long enough it will shrink down and flicker & die. And so is Life, and so, above all, is Love – a vague transitory fleeting thing, & Pessimism gaunt & terrible stares me in the face, & I cling to old illusions. I am in love with rainbows & crystal glasses. The rainbow fades & the glass is splintered into 1000 diamond fragments. Where are they scattered – in the immensity of the sky, to the four winds of heaven – gone – – – In my life – so much Love in imagination, in reality 18 barren years. Never pure spontaneous affectionate impulse. Adonis was – dare I seek into the heart of me – nothing but a pose. And now she comes, and pillowed against her, clinging to her hands, her face against mine, I am child, woman, and more than half man. Outside the sea is washing fully with the sound of perfect harmony the barren waste of grey sand & heavy rock. So she has done. I have felt the cool healing flowing on the water, the smoothing of the rough parts, the white foam, the green coolness, and now again blazing sun & a frantic barrenness. I cannot sleep, I shall not sleep again. This is madness, I know, but it is too real for sanity, it is too swiftly incredible to be doubted. Once again I must bear this changing of the tide – my life is a Rosary of Fierce Combats for Two, each bound together with the powerful magnetic chain of Sex. And, at the end, does the emblem of the crucified hang – surely – – – I do not know & I do not wish to look, but I am so shocked with grief that I feel I cannot continue my hard course of loving and being unloved – of giving loves only to find them flung back at me, faded, worm eaten. Bah! What is the next move I wonder – my death, my resignation, or my Passivity. It will not last. I snap my fingers at Fate. I will not dance to the Music of the Marionettes. Damn it all! I suppose it ends. I cannot remain tragic? And then, noises began to creep so close that I went back to the bedroom, & in the darkness leaned out of the window. She slept peacefully. I could not wake her – I tried to but without avail, and each moment my horror of everything seemed to increase. In the yard the very fence became terrible. As I stared at the posts they became hideous forms of Chinamen1 – most vivid and terrible. They 1. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Chinese were frequently portrayed in Anglophone literature as ‘bogeymen’ or figures of evil.

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leant idly against nothing, their legs crossed, their heads twitching. It was fearfully cold. I leaned further out and watched one figure – he bent & mimicked & wriggled, then his head rolled off & under the house – it rolled round & round: a black ball – a cat perhaps – it leapt into space. I looked at the figure again – it was crucified, hung lifeless before me, yet sneering. Silence profound – this was too awful. I took off my dressing gown & slippers & sat on the edge of the bed, trembling, half crying, hysterical with grief. Somehow silently she woke, & came over to me, took me again into the shelter of her arms. We lay down together still silently, she every now & then pressing me to her, kissing me, my head on her breasts, her hands round my body, stroking me lovingly, warming me, [. . .]-ing to give me more life again. Then her voice whispering ‘Better now darling?’ I could not answer with words. And again ‘I suppose you could not tell me. . .’ I drew close to her warm sweet body, happier than I had ever been than I could ever have imagined being, the Past once more buried – clinging to her wishing that this darkness might last for ever – — Never is the feeling of possession so strong I thought. Here there can be but one person with her. Here by a thousand delicate suggestions I can absorb her – for the time. What an experience, & when we returned to town small wonder that I could not sleep but tossed to & fro, & yearned, & realised – a thousand things which had been obscure – – – O Oscar! Am I peculiarly susceptible to sexual impulse? I must be I suppose, but I rejoice. Now each time I see her I want her to put her arms round me & hold me against her. I think she wants to too, but she is afraid, & Custom hedges her in, I feel. We shall go away again & more weekend [. . .] i.vi.07. This afternoon a man is coming to see me, to bring his ’cello, to hear me play, and now that the moment est arrivé I do not want to see him. He is bloated, lover of a thousand actresses, roamer of every city under the sun, wealthy, bachelor, and yesterday when I met him I behaved like a fool – simply – for no reason. He hinted by asking to call today – now he comes. Kathie you are a hideous lunatic. He has such a miserably unintellectual head. No – I’m glad about the whole affair. I shall pervert it – – – make it fascinating. June 25th. I hate everybody, loathe myself, loathe my Life and love Caesar. Each week – sometimes every day, tout depends – when I think of that fascinating cult which I wish to absorb me I come to the conclusion that all this shall truly end. Liberty – no matter

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what the cost, no matter what the trial. I begin hideously unhappy, make God knows how many resolves – and then break them! One day I shall not do so – – – I shall ‘strike while the iron is white hot’ – and praise Myself and my unconquerable soul. From the amethyst outlook my situation is devilishly fascinating, but it cannot be permanent – the charm consists mainly in its instability. It has existed long enough – I must wander. I cannot – will not – build a house upon any damned rock. But money – money – money is what I need and do not possess. I find a resemblance in myself to John Addington Symonds.1 The day is white with frost – a low blue mist lingers daintily among the pine avenue. It is very cold, and there is a sharp sound of carts passing. Quite early, too. A train whistle sounds, a tram passes at the end of the street, the maids are putting away crockery. Downstairs in the Music Room the ’cello is dreaming. I wonder if it shall be under the hand of its Maestro. I think not. Well a year has passed. What has happened. London behind me, Mimi behind me,2 Caesar gone. My music has gained, become a thing of 10000 times more beauty & strength. I myself have changed – rather curiously. I am colossally interesting to myself. One fascinating Day has been mine. My friend sent me Dorian. And I have written a book of child verse – how absurd. But I am very glad – it is too exquisitely unreal. And while my thoughts are redolent of Purple Fancies and the white sweetness of gardenias, I present the world ‘with this elegant thimble’ – – I have been engaged to a young Englishman for three weeks because his figure was so beautiful. I have been tediously foolish many times – especially with Oscar Fox and Siegfried Eichelbaum3 – but that is past. This year coming will be memorable. It will celebrate the culmination of the cult – the full flowering of the Gardenia. This time next year I shall have been [with?] Mimi again.

1. John Addington Symonds (1840–93) was an English poet and literary critic. Although he is now an acknowledged advocate of male homosexuality, as attested in his poetry, his memoirs and his literary criticism, Symonds’s unexpurgated works were not in public circulation in the 1900s. 2. Mimi was the nickname of Vere Bartrick-Baker, a school-friend from Queen’s College. 3. Oscar Fox has not been identified. Siegfried Eichelbaum (1886–1952) was a student at Victoria College, Wellington, noted for his gift of witty repartee.

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Evening. All the morning I played – very difficult music – & was happy. In the afternoon came Caesar’s Father1 & Mother & Sister. Caesar’s Father & I played. I was unhappy. I did not play well – my hand & wrist hurt me horribly and I did not feel that glorious hidden well of Music deep in me. I was – too – sad – Caesar’s Father depressed me. I felt that something was making him suffer, & I knew what it was, so I suffered too, but thought of, spoke of this strange Master of me, all the time. I gave them a great bouquet of camelias to take home. I played a whole Bach concerto by sight, and Mr T. had copied for me something beautiful. I am glad that it came into my life today. Then in the Abenddammerung2 I went out in to the streets. It was so beautiful – the full moon was like a strain of music heard through a closed door – mist over everything, the hills mere shadows tonight. I became terribly unhappy, almost wept in the street, and yet Music enveloped me – again – caught me, held me, thank Heaven. I could have died. I should be dead but for that, I know. I sent Mr T. a beautiful book – something that I truly treasure. It is just eight o’clock. Perhaps, somewhere in the world, he is waking or dressing, or playing or eating breakfast – and I am here. Well, greetings, Caesar, and a happy day to you. A letter from me arrives in London today. It is extraordinary to live so far away from ones other self, and yet each day to feel nearer – so I feel. Everything about him seems to be made plain – now. I think of him in any every situation, and feel that I understand him too. He must always be everything to me – the one man whom I can call Master and Lover too, and though I know I shall have many fascinating connections in my Life none will be like this – so lasting, so deep, so everything – because he poured into my virgin soul the Life essence of Music – – Never an hour passes free from his influence. I love him – but I wonder, with all my soul – And here is the kernel of the whole matter – the Oscar-like thread. I want to practically celebrate this day by beginning to write a book. In my brain, as I walk each day, as I dress, as I speak, or even before playing my ’cello, a thousand delicate images float and are gone. I want to write a book – that is unreal yet wholly possible because out of the question – that raises in the hearts of the readers 1. Thomas Trowell senior was the father of Thomas (whose stage name was Arnold) and Garnet Trowell, and the music teacher from whom KM took cello lessons. 2. (Ger.) ‘dusk’. The term is a romantic one, and is frequently found in late nineteenth-century poetry and songs. One of Brahms’s Lieder – Op. 49, for example – sets to music a famous poem, ‘Abenddämmerung’, by Adolph Friedrich von Schack.

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emotions, sensations too vivid not to take effect, which causes a thousand delicate tears, a thousand sweet chimes of laughter. I shall never attempt anything approaching the histrionic, and it must be ultra modern. I am sitting right over the fire as I write, dreaming, my face hot with the coals. Far away a steamer is calling, calling, and – God God – my restless soul. Here, my Friend it is Winter. June 29th. I do not think that I shall ever be able to write any Child Verse again. The faculty has gone – I think. What a charming morning I have passed! with the Violinist & the Singer. She has a curious resemblance to Mark Hambourg1 – the completely musical face — We sat in the Violinist’s room – the curtains blew in and out the window, & the violets in a little glass, blue & white, were beautiful. And I am sure they both loved me. But this afternoon has been horrible. E.K.B. bored me. I bored her. I felt unhappy, and I think so did she – but she never took the initiative. And now E.K.B. is a thing of the Past, absolutely, irrevocably. Thank Heaven! It was, I consider retrospectively, a frantically maudlin relationship, & one better ended – also she will not achieve a great deal of greatness. She has not the necessary impetus of character. Do other people of my own age feel as I do I wonder so absolutely powerful licentious, so almost physically ill. I alone in this silent clock filled room have become powerfully — – I want Maata.2 I want her as I have had her – terribly. This is unclean I know but true. What an extraordinary thing – I feel savagely crude, and almost powerfully enamoured of the child. I had thought that a thing of the Past. Heigh Ho!!!!!!!!!!! My mind is like a Russian novel. Sunday 11.viii.07.3 Beloved – tho’ I do not see you know that I am yours – every thought, every feeling in me belongs to you. I wake in the morning and have been dreaming of you, and all through the day while my outer life is going on steadily, monotonously, even drearily, my inner life I live 1. Mark Hambourg (1879–1960) was a Russian pianist who grew up in London after his parents fled Tsarist repression. He was championed by Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, among others. 2. Maata Mahupuku was a Maori school-friend, who KM had first known in Wellington before meeting her again in London. She inspired several of KM’s early stories and the unfinished novel, ‘Maata’, is named after her. 3. This appears to be a draft of a letter to Arnold Trowell, although it may also be a diary entry addressed to him, a regular feature in Mansfield’s diaries.

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with you – in leaps and bounds – I go through with you every phase of emotion that is possible – loving you. To me you are man, lover, artist, husband, friend – giving me all, & I surrendering you all – everything. And so this loneliness is not so terrible to me because in reality my outer life is but a phantom life – a world of intangible meaningless grey shadow. My inner life pulsates with sunshine and Music & Happiness – unlimited vast unfathomable wells of Happiness and You. One day we shall be together again and then – and then only – I shall realise myself, shall come to my own. Because I feel – I have always felt – that you hold in your hands just those closing final bars which leave my life song incomplete – because you are to me more necessary than anything else. Nothing matters, nothing is while you usurp my life. O let it remain as it is. Do not suddenly crush out this one beautiful flower. I am afraid, even while I am rejoicing. But whatever happens – tho’you marry another, tho we never meet again – I belong to you, we belong to each other. And whenever you want me, with both my hands I say – unashamed, fiercely proud, exultant, triumphant, satisfied at last – ‘take me’. Each night I go to sleep with your letters under my pillow & in the darkness I stretch out my hands & clasp the thin envelope close to my body so that it lies there warmly, & I smile in the darkness and sometimes my body aches as though with fatigue – but I understand. Katherine Schonfeld. August 20th 1907. Rain beating upon the windows, and a windstorm violent & terrible. I came up into my room to go to bed and suddenly, half undressed, I began thinking & looking at Caesar’s portrait, and wondering. And I felt that I could have written: Beloved, I could bury my face in the pillow & weep & weep & weep. Here it is night & winter rain. You are in a glory of Summer and daylight, the thunder of traffic, the call of life. I must possess it too. I must suffer & conquer. I must leave here – I cannot look ahead into the long unutterable grey vastnesses of Misty Future years. Do you know that you are all in all – you are my Life. I am tired & miserable tonight, so forgive me – I am sick of Winter darkness & I want to laugh & I want to listen.’ Words will not be found, but how I felt – & now to bed, hopefully to lie & look into the darkness & think & weave beautiful scarlet patterns, & hope to dream. My ’cello is better, but I fancy Mr Trowell is annoyed with me. That must not happen. What is to become of us all. I am so eager – & yet – that is all. Buon riposo.1 1. (It.) ‘Rest well.’

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August 27th. A happy day. I have spent a perfect day. Never have I loved Mr Trowell so much, or felt so in accord with him, and my ’cello expressing everything. This morning we played Weber’s Trio1 – tragic, fiercely dramatic, full of rhythm and accent and close shade. And then this afternoon I became frightened. I felt that I had nothing to play, that I could not touch the Concerto, that I had not improved. How horrible it was – yet the sunlight lay on the music room floor, and my ’cello was warm to touch. He came, and in one instant we understood each other and I think he was happy. O joyous time – it was almost inhuman, and to hear that ‘Bravely done – you’ve a real good grip of it all – very good.’ I would not have exchanged those words for all the laurel wreaths in existence. And to end with a Weber Fugue passage for first violin and then ’cello. It bit into my blood. Apres we had tea and currant buns in the Smoking Room and ate to the accompaniment of the Fugue. And discussed – Marriage and Music – the mistake that a woman makes ever to think that she is first in a musician’s estimation – it must inevitably be first His Art. I know I understand. And also – talk of sympathy. If I marry Caesar – and I thought of him all the time – I think I could prove a great many things. Mr Trowell said she must share his glories and always keep him on the heights. Curiously Christian[?] [. . .] came before me – – – and Adelaida2 & edelweiss. He could not infuse enough Love into his voice this afternoon, nor I for him – – – Good evening, my beloved – tonight I shall speak through your Music. Aug 28th. I had a letter from Adelaida today about Arnold Trowell, and at present I have no idea how I felt. First, so sorrowful, so hurt, so pained, that I contemplated the most outrageous things; now only old and angry and lonely, & as though everything except my ’cello had lost its interest for me. Now which is it to be. Shall I applaud him in his manner of living. Shall I say – do as you please, live as you like, see Life, gain Experience, increase your outlook. Or shall I condemn it. This is how I think – it’s a great pity that Artists do live so, but as they do – well – but I shall not.

1. Carl Maria von Weber (1786–1826) was a German romantic composer, whose Op. 26, ‘Trio for Flute, Cello and Piano’, was arranged as a string trio by Hans Sitt (1850–1922). 2. ‘Adelaida’ was one of KM’s names for her school-friend and lifelong companion, Ida Constance Baker (1888–1978), who was later best known by her nickname Lesley Moore (LM).

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Talk of Art!! Ah! I am in Heaven. I have been with Fritz Rupp the Opera Singer.1 He has played, sang, acted, spoken. My sadness is gone, is a thing of the past. While such men live I am happy. O Man you give me life. I felt my body vibrate to his singing. He is a true Musician. His eyes, his face, his look, he plays everything – Rigoletto, Wagner, Walkure, Saint-Saiens.2 Life – Life – it is playing past me in a torrent of divine melody. Keep me at it. Keep me at it. Let me too become a great Musician. They are my people, by a glance we understand each other. There is fresh impetus. I adore them. 2nd Sep. O let me lift it – even ever so slightly. It hangs before me – even, heavy, motionless – this curtain, this which holds the Future. Let me just hold a corner up & peep beyond, then maybe I shall be content to let it fall. They3 leave N.Z., all of them my people, my Father – it has come of course. I used to think – as long as they are here I can bear it – & now? I shall somehow or other go too. You just see! 6th. I am frightened and trying to be brave. This is the greatest and most terrible torture that I have ever thought of enduring, but I can have courage, face him bravely with my head high, and fight – for Life, absolutely. O what can happen. Help, support. Here at least I am standing terribly absolutely alone. What can I do. O what can happen. Shall it be Heaven or shall it be Hell. I must win – but I first must face the guns resolutely. It is no good shrinking behind these hedges and great stones, remaining in the shadow. In the full glare I must go to Death or life. Now is the time to prove myself. Now is the fulfilment of all my philosophy and my knowledge. Think only what it means for a moment, think of that and then do not mind if the enemy fire and fire again. You have the magic suit of mail. Belief in the outcome clothes you but be firm and rational and calm – & at last

1. George Musgrove’s Royal Grand Opera Company toured Australia before giving a series of twelve concerts in Wellington from 19 August 1907. Fritz Rupp was one of the baritones. 2. Rigoletto is an opera by the Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901). Die Walküre (The Valkyrie) is the second of the four-opera cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen, by the renowned German composer Richard Wagner (1813–83). Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921) was a French romantic composer and organist. His most famous operatic works are Hélène and Samson and Delilah. 3. ‘They’ refers to the Trowell family, about to return to London to further Arnold and Garnet’s careers.

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learn that you must go forth into the great battle with a strong heart. I cannot longer stay in the shadow tho. My heart is hurting me with FEAR. Here is the supreme crisis – here is the 9th wave. If it goes over my head I must rise & shake the water out of my eyes and hair – and plunge in. O – Victory must be mine. With both hands I embrace the thought. Help Help – stand firm & let the music crash & deafen. It cannot hide the beating of my heart. O Kathleen, I pity you, but I see that it had to come, this great wrench. In your life you are always a coward until the very last moment, but here is the greatest thing of your Life. Prove yourself strong. Dearest I hold your two hands & my eyes look full into yours – trustingly, firmly, resolutely, full of supreme calm, hope, and illimitable Belief. You must be a woman now & bear the agony of creating. Prove yourself. Be strong, be kind, be wise, and it is yours. Do not at the last moment lose courage – argue wisely & quietly. Be more man than woman. Keep your brain perfectly clear. Keep your balance!!!! Convince your Father that it is ‘la seule chose’. Think of the Heaven that might be yours, that [is] before you after this fight. They stand & wait for you with outstretched hands, & with a glad cry you fall into their arms – the Future Years. Good luck my precious one – I love you. We really must. O I have a glorious subject for a Vignette. Have you the Smart Set, asked the girl in the bookshop.1 My dear Mr Trowell,2 I cannot let you leave without telling you how grateful I am, and must be all my life, for what you have done for me, and given me. You have shown me that there is something so immeasurably higher and greater than I had ever realised before in Music, and therefore, too, in Life. Do you know – so many times when you have been with me I have felt that I must tell you that when I came from England, friendless and sorrowful, you changed all my life – – – And Music which meant much to me before in a vague desultory fashion, is now fraught with inner meaning. Please I want you to remember that all my life I am being grate1. The Smart Set (subtitled ‘A Magazine of Cleverness’) was a fashionable American literary journal founded in 1900. Its peak year of circulation and popularity was 1906. 2. See CLKM, 1, p. 25.

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ful & happy and proud to have known you. Looking back I have been so stupid and you so patient. I think of that little Canon of Cherubini’s1 as a gate – opened with so much difficulty & leading to so wide a road. I wish you – Everything with both hands and all my heart, & what I look forward to as the greatest joy I can imagine is to share a program with you at a London concert. 21.x.07. Damn my family – O Heavens, what bores they are. I detest them all heartily. I shall certainly not be here much longer – thank Heaven for that! Even when I am alone in a room they come outside the door and call to each other – discuss the butchers orders or the soiled linen, and, I feel, wreck my life. It is so humiliating. And this morning I do not wish to write but to read Marie Bashkirtseff.2 But if they enter the room & find me merely with a book their tragic complaining looks upset me altogether. Here in my room I feel as though I was in London. O London – to write the word makes me feel that I could burst into tears. Isn’t it terrible to love anything so much. I do not care at all for men – but London – it is Life. These creatures, May N. & E. K.3 who try to play with me, they are fools and I despise them both. I am longing to consort with my superiors. What is it with me? Am I absolutely nobody but merely inordinately vain. I do not know – but I am most fearfully unhappy, that is all. I am so unhappy that I wish I was dead – yet I should be mad to die when I have not yet lived at all. Well, I have sat here for two hours and read – my right hand is quite cold. She is a young fool, and I detest her. As she comes into the room I put down Marie & seize my pen. She leans against the door rattling the handle and says – are you writing a colossal thing or an ordinary thing or anything exciting. How completely inane! I tell her to leave the room at once. Now if this door would open & Mimi walk in – Mimi or Ida or my charming Gwen4 – how happy I should be – with all three I can be myself. Outside the window there is a lumbering sound of trams and an insipid sound

1. Luigi Cherubini (1760–1842) was an Italian composer, who settled in France. His sacred music, choral works, string quartets and works for keyboard were greatly admired in his time. 2. See above, p. 30. 3. JMM identifies ‘May N.’ as May Newman, a school-friend. ‘E. K.’ was doubtless Edith K. Bendall (see above, p. 47). 4. Gwen Rouse was a London school-friend.

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of birds song. Now here comes tea & I yield to the temptation – as usual. I am so eternally thankful that I did not allow J – to kiss me – I am constantly hearing of him, and I feel to meet him would be horrible. But why? It is ridiculous – I used him merely for copy. I am always so supremely afraid of appearing ridiculous. The feeling is fostered by Oscar who has so absolutely the essence of savoir faire. . I like to appear in any society entirely at my ease, conscious of my own importance – which in my estimation is unlimited – affable, and very receptive. I like to appear slightly condescending, very much of la grand monde, & to be the centre of interest. Yes, but quelque fois to my unutterable chagrin, unmistakable shyness seizes me. Isn’t it ludicrous – I become conscious of my hands and slightly inclined to blush. 22nd. I thank Heaven that at present, though I am damnable, I am in love with nobody – except myself. [Notebook 2, qMS–1244]

Vignette. Outside, the carts rattled past through the hot street. Some woman outside my window was talking loudly, shrieking with laughter. A little breath stirred the window curtains – they moved languidly to & fro. The pursuit of experience is the refuge of the unimaginative.1 In the pocket of an old coat I found one of Ariadne’s gloves – a cream suede glove fastening with two silver buttons. And it has been there two years. But still it holds some exquisite suggestion of Carlotta2 – still when I lay it against my cheek I can detect the sweet of the perfume she affected. O, Carlotta – have you remembered. We were floating down Regent Street in a hansom, on either side of us the blossoms of golden light, and ahead a little half hoop of a moon.3 1. Although Wildean in character, this epigraph was the subtitle to Crackanthorpe’s collection of prose-poems, Vignettes: A Miniature Journal of Whim and Sentiment (1896). Hubert Crackanthorpe (1870–96) was a British writer, editor and critic, who published mostly short stories and prose fragments. Symons devotes a short chapter to him in Studies in Prose and Verse (1904). 2. ‘Ariadne’ and ‘Carlotta’ were both names KM gave to Maata Mahupuku. 3. These are early drafts of KM’s vignette, ‘Summer in Winter’ (CW1, pp. 66–7).

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‘Rien n’est vrai que le beau’1 K. Mansfield – November 1907 He huruhuru te manu ka rere –2 K Mansfield – 4 Fitzherbert Terrace Wellington NZ. Rough Note Book A woman never ever knows when the curtain has fallen OW.3 ‘Urewera – Kaingaroa Plains’.4 On the journey the sea was most beautiful– a silver point etching – and a pale sun breaking through pearl clouds – There is something inexpressibly charming to me in railway travelling – I lean out of the window – the breeze blows, buffetting and friendly against my face – and the child spirit – hidden away under a thousand and one grey City wrappings bursts its bonds – & exults within me – I watch the long succession of brown paddocks – beautiful with here, a thick spreading of buttercups – there a white sweetness of arum lilies – And there are valleys – lit with the swaying light of broom blossom – in the distance – grey whares5 – two eyes & a mouth – with a bright petticoat frill of a garden – creeping round

1. (Fr.) ‘Nothing is true except beauty,’ attributable to the poem, ‘Après une lecture’, by French Romantic playwright and poet Alfred de Musset (1810– 57), but recognised as an Aesthetic aphorism by 1907. Introduced into English literary circles by A. C. Swinburne in Essays and Studies (1876), it was further popularised as a signature statement of Oscar Wilde. 2. (Maori) ‘a feathered messenger – a bird’. The words are from the Maori proverb, ‘He ao te rangi ka uhia, he huruhuru te manu ka tau’ or ‘As clouds deck the heavens, so feathers adorn the bird.’ It is credited to the famous Wairoa chief Tama-te-rangi, who refused to lead his men into battle until given a chieftan’s garments appropriate to the occasion. 3. From Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray. The actual words spoken by Lord Henry are: ‘But women never know when the curtain has fallen.’ KM uses the same phrase as the epigraph to the short story, ‘The Little Episode’, from 1911 (CW1, pp. 538–44). 4. From this diary entry until page 77, KM is relating events from her camping trip to the Urewera, to the east of the central volcanic plateau of the North Island, at that time largely uncharted Maori territory. The party set off on about 23 November and KM returned to Wellington on 17 December 1907. 5. (Maori) ‘a house or hut’.

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them – On a white road once a procession of patient cattle – wended their way, funereal wise – and behind them a boy rode on a brown horse – something in the poise of his figure – in the strong sunburnt colour of his naked legs reminded me of Walt Whit.1 Everywhere on the hills – great masses of charred logs – looking for all the world like strange fantastic beasts a yawning crocodile, a headless horse – a gigantic gosling – a watchdog – to be smiled at and scorned in the daylight – but a veritable nightmare in the darkness – and now & again the silver tree trunks – like a skeleton army, invade the hills – At Kaitoki the train stopped for ‘morning lunch–’ the inevitable tea of the New Zealander2 The F.T.3 and I paced the platform – peered into the long wooden saloon – where a great counter was piled with ham sandwiches & cups & saucers – soda cake and great billys of milk – We did not want to eat – & walked to the end of the platform – & looked into the valley – Below us lay a shivering mass of white native blossom – a little tree touched with scarlet – a clump of toi-toi waving in the wind – & looking for all the world – like a family of little girls drying their hair – Later in the afternoon – we stopped at Jakesville – How we play inside the house while Life sits on the front door step & Death mounts guard at the back. After brief snatches of terribly unrefreshing sleep – I woke – and found the grey dawn slipping into the tent – I was hot & tired and full of discomfort – the frightful buzzing of the mosquitos – the slow breathing of the others seemed to weigh upon my brain for a moment and then I found that the air was alive with birds’ song – From far and near they called & cried to each other – I got up – & slipped through the little tent opening on to the wet grass – All round me the willow still full of gloomy shades – the caravan in the glade a ghost

1. The American poet Walt Whitman (1819–92) is generally credited with having given American poetry its first epic-scale voice in Leaves of Grass (1855). Images of lithe, healthy-bodied individuals with sinewy, sunburnt legs figure in this book. 2. At this point in the notebook, an additional line reads: ‘Blue gigi for tatooing –’. The date is unclear. 3. Fellow Traveller. This was KM’s affectionate nickname for Millie Parker, a friend from the musical world who had secured KM’s invitation on the trip. She was a relative of the expedition’s organisers, George Ebbett and his wife, who were well versed in the Maori language, history and ethnology, and doubtless passed their knowledge on to KM.

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of itself – but across the clouded grey sky the vivid streak of rose colour – blazoned in the day – The grass was full of clover bloom – I caught up my dressing gown with both hands & ran down to the river – and the water – flowed in – musically laughing – & the green willows – suddenly stirred by the breath of the dawning day – sway softly together – Then I forgot the tent – and was happy – – – –––––––– So we crept again through that frightful wire fence – which every time, seemed to grow tighter & tighter – and walked along the white – soft road – On one side the sky was filled with the sunset – Vivid – Clear yellow – and bronze green & that incredible cloud shade of thick mauve – Round us, in the dark-ness, the horses were moving softly – with a most eerie sound – Visions of long dead Maoris – of forgotten battles and vanished feuds – stirred in me – till I ran through the glade – on to a bare hill – the track was very narrow & steep – And at the summit a little Maori whare was painted black against the wide sky – Before it – two cabbage trees stretched out phantom fingers – and a dog, watching me coming up the hill, barked madly – Then I saw the first star – very sweet & faint – in the yellow sky – and then another & another – like little holes – like [?pin holes] And all round me in the gathering gloom the wood hens called to each other with monotinous persistence – they seemed to be hurt and suffering – I reached the whare – and a little Maori girl and three boys – sprang from nowhere – & waved & beckoned – – in the door a beautiful old Maori woman sat cuddling a cat – She wore a white handkerchief round her black hair – and vivid green & black cheque rug wrapped round her body – Under the rug I caught a glimpse of a very full blue print dress – with native fashion the skirt of over the bodice – Petane Valley – Monday morning – Bon jour – Marie1 dearest – Your humble servant is seated on the very top of I know not how much luggage – so excuse the writing – This is a most extraordinary experience – Our journey was charming – a great many Maoris on the train – – in fact I lunched next to a great brown fellow at Woodville – That was a memorable meal – We were both starving – with that dreadful silent hunger – Picture to yourself a great barn of a place – full of pink papered chandeliers and long tables – decorated with paper flowers – and humanity most painfully en évidence you could cut the atmosphere with a knife. 1. KM is addressing her sister Chaddie (Charlotte Mary).

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Then the rain fell, heavily drearily – on to the river & the flax swamp & the mile upon mile of dull plains – In the distance – far and away in the distance – the mountains were hidden behind a thick grey veil. Monday – The manuka1 and sheep country – very steep & bare – yet relieved here and there by the rivers & willows – and little bush ravines – It was intensely hot – we were tired & in the evening arrived at Pohui where Bodley has the accomodation House – and his fourteen daughters grow peas – We camped on the top of a hill mountains all round & in the evening walked in the bush – A beautiful daisy pied creek – ferns, tuis & we saw the sheep sheds – smell & sound – 12 Maoris – their hoarse crying – dinner cooking in the homestead the roses – the Maori cook – Post letters there – see Maoris Tuesday morning start very early Titi – o Kiura2 – the rough roads & glorious mountains & bush – The top of Taranga Kuma3 – rain in the morning – – then a clear day – the view mountains all round & the organ pipes4 – We laugh with joy all day – we lunch past the Maori pah – & get right into the bush – In the afternoon more perfect bush & we camp at Tarawera Mineral baths – the old man the candle in a tin – the scenery – the old shed – the hot water the feeling – the road – how we sleep – Next day walking and bush – clematis & orchids – meet Mary – by the ploughed field – & at last come to the Waipunga falls – the fierce wind – the flax & manuka – the bad roads – camp by the river – & then up hill – the heat to Rangitaiki – Post letters – came on a peninsula – the purple – the ferns – the clean house – evening – the cream – the wild pigs Woman and daughter – the man – their happiness – [?Discern] – Word – [. . .] Thursday the plains – rain – long threading – purple mountains – river ducks – the clump of broom – wild horses – the great pumice fire – larks in the sun – orchids – fluff in the manuka – snow berries – After a time manuka & a tree or two – more horses – it rains – violently – the fearful road – No water – Night in the tent – the rain – climbing 1. Manuka (Leptospermum scoparium) is a hardy flowering bush native to New Zealand, and typical of scrub regions. 2. A mountain linked to the mutton bird, a kestrel, regarded by the Maori as a great delicacy for eating. 3. The name of a mountain road. 4. Probably a reference to ‘The Organs’, a type of badlands rock erosion near the Mohaka River.

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to see where anything is – the quivering air – the solitude – Early bed – the strange sound – the utter back blocks – Fear as to whether this was the rain – the store’s breakfast – the kitchen – at night & at morning – in wet clothes – In the morning – rain first – the chuffing sound of the horses – we get up very early indeed – and at six o’clock – ready to start, the sun breaks through the grey clouds – There is a little dainty wind – and a wide fissure of blue sky. Wet boots – wet motorveil – torn coat – the dew shining on the scrub – No breakfast – We start – the road grows worse & worse – we seem to pass through nothing but scrub covered valleys – and then suddenly comes round the corner a piece of road – Great joy but the horses sink right into it – the traces are broken – it grows more & more hopeless – The weather breaks & rain pours We lose the track again and again – become rather hopeless – when suddenly far ahead we see a man on a white horse – The men leave the trap & rush off. By and by through the track we met two men Maoris in dirty blue ducks – one can hardly speak English – They are surveyors – We stop – boil the billy & have tea & herrings Oh! how good – Ahead the purple mountains – the thin wretched dogs – we talk to them – thin. We drive the horses off but there is no water – the dark people the conversation – E ta – Haeremai te kai1 – it is cold. the crackling fire of manuka – walking breast high through the manuka. lily of the valley – the ti tree – we approach Galatea2 – We lunch by the Galatea River. There is an island in the centre – and a great clump of trees – the water is very green and swift. I see a wonderful huge horsefly – the great heat of the sun – and then the clouds roll up. ‘Mother’s little lamb, isn’t ’e’ she said – tossing the baby up in the air – ‘When ’e’s asleep’, cried the girl – bringing a clean pinafore and a little starched bib – ‘Hold the horses or they’ll make a bolt for the river –’ My fright Encounter one man surveyor on white horse – his conversation – raupo whare in distance Picture – At the city gates we pull up, & walk into the ‘city’. There is a store – an Accomodation House – and a G.P.O.3 Mrs Prodgers is here – with the Baby – and other Englishmen – it is a lovely river – the Maori women are rather special – the Post-boy – the children – an accident to the horses – very 1. (Maori) ‘Come and eat’ – a formal form of address. 2. A remote rural settlement on the volcanic plateau in the centre of the North Island. 3. General Post Office.

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great – the Maori room – the cushions. Then a straight road in a sort of basin of stony mountains – Far away in the distance a little c. cloud shines in the sunlight – Through the red gate there were waving fields – [Murupara] a fresh flax swamp – the homestead in the distance – tree encircled – a little field of sheep – willow and cabbage trees & away in the distance the purple hills in the shadow – sheep in for shearing – Here we drive in and ask for a paddock – Past the shearing sheds – past the homestead – to a beautiful place – with a little patch of bush – tuis – magpies –cattle – and water running through – But I know from – bitter experience that we shall be eaten with mosquitos Two Maori girls are washing – I go to talk with them – they are so utterly kids – While the dinner cooks I walk away – and lean over a giant log. Before me a perfect panorama of sunset – long sweet steel like clouds – against the faint blue – the hills full of gloom a little river with a tree beside it, is burnished silver – like the sea the sheep – and a weird passionate abandon of birds – the bush birds’ cries – the fanciful shapes of the supple jacks – – – – – Then the advent of Bella, her charm in the dusk, the very dusk incarnate. Her strange dress – her plaited hair & shy, swaying figure – The life they lead here – In the shearing sheds – the yellow dress with huia1 feathers on the coat & a skirt with scarlet rata blossom – the speed – heat – – new look of the sheep – Farewell – The road to Te Whaiti – Meet the guide. wild strawberries. the pink leaved ferns matai – Lunched at a space in the bush cut through a tree – and then by devious routes we came to the pah2 – It was adorable – Just the collection of huts, the built place, for koumara3 & potato – We visit first the house – no English then a charming little place roses & pinks in the garden – Through the doorway the kettle & fire – & bright tins – the woman the child in the pink dress & red sleeves in all this black grey How she stands gathering her pleats of dress – she can say just ‘Yes’ – Then we go into the parlour – photos – a chiming clock – mats – kits – red table cloth – horse hair sofa – The child saying “nicely 1. The tail feathers of the huia, a large, black, long-tailed wattlebird, were prized treasures, particularly since the large bird was practically extinct by this time. 2. (Maori) ‘settlement’. 3. (Maori) a New Zealand variety of sweet potato.

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thank you” the shy children – the Mother & the poor baby – white & naked – the other bright children her splendid face & regal bearing – Then at the gate of the P.O. a great bright coloured crowd – almost threatening looking – a follower of Rua1 with long Fijian hair & side combs – a most beautiful girl of 15 – she is married to a patriarch, her laughing face, her hands playing with the children’s hair – her smiles – across the bad river – the guide the swimming dogs – it flows on he stands in the water a regal figure then his ‘alight’ & we are out – the absolute ease of his figure – so boneless he speeds our parting journey his voice is so good – He speaks most correctly and yet enunciates each word. We see him last stopping to rest his horses – then a mound of tutu2 – amazingly emerald in colour the sun is fearfully hot – We camp by the guide’s whare the splendour of the night – the late fire – those [?insights] Then the birds calling through the night. Sunday A splendid morning – washing in the creek – Leave early – leaving some luggage – on the way to Matatua – the silver [?tree]. The white flower that Elysian valley of birds – the red tipped ferns – the sound of the shots – then almost a bare hill [. . .] green [?hills] winter bare tree trunks & a strong blue sky We saw a little flock of white sheep such a whare on a hill & carved too, but no one is at home, though there is a suggestion of fire, lately. From this saddle we look across mile upon mile of green bush then brown bush russet colour – blue distance – and a wide cloud flecked sky – All the people must doubtless have gone shearing. I see none – – – – Above the whare there is a grave a green mound – looking over the valley – the air – the shining water – then sheep – quiver & terror stricken flee before us. Once at the head of a great valley – the blazing sun uplifts itself – like a gigantic torch to light the bush – it is all so gigantic – and tragic – even in the bright sunlight it is so passionately secret and it has the entirely [?frightful] [. . .] look. We begin to reach the valley-road A green-red & brown butterfly, the green hill in vivid sunlight & then a vault of green bush the sunlight slanting in to the tree – an island in the river decked with tree fern – And always through the bush – this hushed sound of water running – on brown 1. Rua Kenana, who claimed the name Te Mihaia Hou (the New Messiah), was a visionary Maori prophet who became an inspirational figure in the early 1900s. He led his people to Maungapohatu in the Urewera region to found a new, strong community after the Te Kooti War (1868–72). Rua founded his community in 1907, the exact year KM entered Te Urewera, some forty years after the large-scale military battles of the New Zealand Wars, and Te Kooti’s admission into the King Country and protection by Tawhiao. 2. A flowering shrub (Coriaria arborea) native to New Zealand.

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pebbles – it seems to breathe the full deep – bygone essence of it all – a fairy fountain of golden rings – then rounding a corner we pass several little whares – deserted – & grey – they look very old – and desolate – almost haunted – on one door there is a horse collar on a torn or scribbled notice – flowers in the garden one clump of golden broom – one clump of yellow irises – Not even a dog greets us – all the whares look out upon the river & the valley & the bush gloried hills. These trees smothered in cream blossom Oh, what a comfort. Blue skirt – great piece of greenstone black hair, beautiful bone ear rings – We plunge back into the bush & finally reach a village – several whares – deserted now but showing signs of recent habitation a white cow & her calf are tethered to the side of the road & a brown cow & a brown calf – a grey mere & a preposterous looking little foal are the sole inhabitants – – there is a great open clearing here – and we decide to pitch the tents – [?Below us] e Early. The wet bushes brush against my face – like sunflecked avenues The new bracken is like H. G. Wells dream flowers,1 like Strings of Beads the sky in the water is like white swans in a blue mirror. We pleach ‘nga moui’2 with the Maori children – in the sunshine – Their talk & their queer, droll ways. They laugh very much at us, but we learn, too, – tho it is difficult – and tedious, too, because our hands are so stiff – One girl is particularly interesting with auburn hair and black eyes. She laughs with an indescribable manner and has very white teeth. Also another Maori in a red & black striped flannel jacket – the small boy is raggedly dressed in brown – his clothes are torn in many places – he wears a brown felt hat with a – ‘koe-koea’3 feather placed rakishly to the side – Here, too, I meet Prodgers, it is splendid to see once again – real English people – I am so tired & sick of the third rate article – Give me the Maori and the tourist – but nothing between – Also this place proved utterly 1. H. G. Wells’s (1866–1946) scientific novels make memorable use of rich flower and forest imagery. KM may have in mind the traveller’s descriptions in The Time Machine (1895), either of the fern trees or of the strange white flowers he is given by Weena. 2. String games reminiscent of ‘cat’s cradle’. 3. (Maori) ‘a long-tailed cuckoo’ (Eurdynamis taitensis).

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disappointing after Umuroa, which was fascinating in the extreme – the Maoris here know – some English and some Maori – not like the other natives – Also these people dress in almost English clothes compared with the natives here – and they wear a great deal of ornament in Umuroa & strange hair fashions – I found nothing of interest here – Monday. Monday. Kaitoki. Well Mother – I posted your letter at the Rangateiki Hotel – On the way out I saw the land-lord’s wife – and knowing that she was a happy Mamma, questioned her as to her offspring. Johanna Hill Warbeck.1 Galatea. Longfellow – We lunch and begin to decide whether to go to the Wharepuni – the men folk go – but eventually come back and say that the walk is too long – also the heat of the day – but there is a great pah – 1½ miles away – There we go – The first view – a man on the side of the road – in a white shirt and brown pants – waits for us – opposite is a thick bark Maori fence – in the distance – across the paddock several whares clustered together like snails upon the green patch – And across the paddock a number of little boys come straggling along from the age of twelve to three – out at elbow – bare footed – indescribably dirty – but some of them almost beautiful – none of them very strong – There is the great fellow Iariri – who speaks English – Black curls clustering around his broad brow – rest almost languor in his black eyes – a slouching walk & yet there slumbers in his face – passion might and strength. Also a little chap in On Monday night we slept outside Warbrick’s whare – rather sweet Mrs Warbrick is such a picture in her pink dressing gown her wide elastic hat her black fringe the hands are like carving – She gives us a great loaf of bread – leans swaying against the wire fence – in the distance I see the niece Johanna – watering her garden with a white enamel teapot – She is a fat wellmade child in a blue pinafore – her hair plaited & most strange eyes. Then she milks the cows – & Wahi brings us a great bowl of milk & a little bowl of cream – Also a cup of curd – She dines with us – teaches me Maori & smokes a cigaret 1. The camping party visited the Warbrick family while at Rangitaiki Te Whaiti. KM befriended the grand-niece who lived with the family, and talked with her about literature she studied at school (see below, p. 68). Mr Warbrick was the guide for some of the trip.

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Johanna is rather silent – reads Byron & Shakespeare & wants to go back to school – W teaches her fancy work. At night we go & see her – the clean place – the pictures – the beds – Byron & the candle – the flowers in a glass – sweet – the paper & pens – photos of Maoris & whites – too – Johanna stays by the door we see her jewellery, her Mother’s – Tuesday I got a Maori kit.1 [?WW] thinks the old people at Umuroa so dirty – yes – Would I like to sleep there? Hot water – Home in the dark – Johanna more silent – there is something sad about it – all – she is so lovely. Next day they see us off – I hear the guide’s horse going in the night. She has been up very early – J. is shyer today – she talks to the little boy from over the road – And the boy’s Mother comes – a worn but rather beautiful woman who smiles delightfully, Yes – she has five children tho she looks so young & the girl is shearing now – It is in winter that it is so cold – all snow – & they sit by the fire – never go out at all – just sit with many clothes on & smoke – Farewell Johanna again waters the flowers – soon she will go to milk the cow – & then begin again – I suppose – So we journey from their whare to Waiotapu – a grey day & I drive – long dusty thick road & then before us Tarawera – With the great white cleft – The poverty of the country. But the gorgeous blue mountains all round is a great stretch of burnt manuka – On the journey to Waiotapu – In the distance these hills to the right, almost violet, to the left grey with rain – Behind a great mount of pewter colour and silver. And then as we journey a little line of brilliant green trees – and a mound of yellow grass. We stop at a little swamp to feed the horses – and there is only the sound of a frog – Tense stillness – almost terrible – Then the mountains are more pronounced – they are still most beautiful and by and bye a little puff of white steam – we pass the Prison Tree Plantations and by turns & twists the road pass several steam holes – Perfect stillness – and a strange red tinge in the cliffs – the baked ribbing of the earth showing through. We passed over oily thick green lake – round the sides the manuka clambered in fantastic blossoming – The air is heavy with sulphur – more steam – white & fine – Camp by a great sheet of water here the frogs croak dismally – it is a grey evening – Bye & bye we go to see the mud volcano – meet Maoris – oh, so different – mount these 1. A ‘kit’ (probably from the Maori ‘kete’) is a basket made from flax.

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steps – all slimy & grey & peer in – It bulges out of the bowl in great dollops of loathsome colour like a boiling filthy sore upon the earth in a little boiling pool below – a thin coating of petroleum – black ridged – Rain began to fall – she is disgusted & intrigued Coming back the horrible roads the long long distance & finally – soaking wetness & hunger – Bed – & wetness again – The morning is fine but hot – the nearer they get to the town the more she hates it – perhaps it is smell. It is pretty hot a rise to see the blue lake – They pass Whaka – ugly suburban houses – ugly streets old shaking buses crowds of the veiled tourists – But letters are good – & they camp in a paddock behind the puffing trains – How nice the old lady is next door – & her flowers – her white peacotes & briar roses – that evening she has a bath – Thursday the loathsome trip – Friday so tired that she sits in the sanatorium grounds all the morning and that evening –horrid – the people – bowls – & [?Morning T –] Afternoon in Whaka – the geyser good & the cerise handbags – Also the little naked boys and girls but the coy airs bah! Rain again Saturday letters – far more – & lunch with Tom, & the quiet afternoon – fearful rain – up to the ankles – The wet camp the fear of having to move – She thinks Rotorua is loathsome & likes – only – that little Hell. Sunday morning the early start, & it seems at each mile post her heart leaps – But as they leave it the town is very beautiful – & Whaka – full of white mist – strangely fanciful. She almost wishes – no – oh, it is too hot where they lunch – she feels so ill – so tired – her headache is most violent – she can hardly open her eyes – but must lean back – each jolt of the cart pains her – but the further they go – the load begins to lighten – Then meet a Maori again – walking along – barefooted and strong – she shouted Te nokoto1 – and Kathie’s heart is warm again – there is no maudlin affectation – Thursday – on the lake – A beautiful day – the people – Rotorua is not what I expect. Friday – A quiet day in the grounds – raining – [. . .] afternoon – baths – Priest & Rachael – Felt fearfully low – Saturday Rain – letters – [?Tom] Hotel – rain – bad night – Sunday leave – fine day.

1. KM’s slight mistranscription of ‘Tena koutou’ – a Maori greeting said to three or more people.

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Rotorua Friday Mother dearest – Thank you for your wire which I received today and for Chaddie’s lovely letter So Vera has definitely gone I can hardly realise it – What a strange household you must be feeling – As to me: – I have been bathing twice a day – the Rachael and the Priest Baths they are delightful, but they take it out of you to a very Rotorua – Friday Mother dearest Thank you for your wire which I received today and for Chaddie’s lovely letter – So Vera has definitely left, I can hardly realise it – What a strange household you must be feeling – You sound most gay at home – I am so glad – I wrote to Chaddie on Wednesday Yesterday was very hot indeed – A party of us went a Round Trip to the Hamurana Spring – the Okere Falls across Lake Rotoitii, to Tikitere, and then back here by coach – I confess, frankly that I hate going trips with a party of tourists – they spoil half my pleasure – don’t they yours? You know one lady who is the wit of the day and is ‘flirty’, and the inevitable old man who becomes disgusted with everything, and the honey moon couples – Rotorua is a happy hunting ground for these – We came back in the evening grey with dust – hair and eyes and clothing, so I went and soaked in the Rachael bath – The tub is very large – it is a wise plan to always use the public one – and there one meets one sex very much ‘in their nakeds’ – Women are so apt to become communicate on these occasions that I carefully avoid them – I came home, dined, and went into town with Mrs Ebbett – We ended with a Priest Bath – another pleasant thing, but most curious – At first one feels attacked by Deepa’s1 friends – the humble worms – The bath is of aerated water, very hot, and you sit in the spring – But afterwards you Sunday – Nowhere. Dear Mr Millar – I have to thank you for keeping my none too small amount of correspondence – I went to the Bank yesterday afternoon – foolishly forgetting that it was closing day. Would you kindly address any letters that may arrive for me c/o Bank of New Zealand – Hastings – I shall be there on Saturday –

1. ‘Deepa’ refers to KM’s paternal great-uncle, Henry Herron Beauchamp, a keen agriculturalist, with whom she stayed in England periodically during 1903–6.

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This paper is vile, but I am once more on the march, Once more thank you – Sincerely yours K.M. Beauchamp Sunday. I am tired to death with a headache, & a thoroughly weary feeling The stones [. . .] blue hills. The great basins the birds – the wonderful green flax swamp, and always these briars – Mist over the distant hills – the fascinating valleys of toi toi swayed by the wind. Silence again, and a wind full of the loneliness and the sweetness of the wild Places – Kathie in the morning in the manuka paddock saw the dew hanging from the blossoms – & leaves – put it to her lips – & it seemed to poisen her with the longing for the sweet wildness of the plains – for the silent speech of the Silent Places – the golden sea of tussock Rotorua The first evening – the yellow sky – she lies in the grass tired – & hears the X bell – It sounds across the darkness – ineffably tender and touching like the touch of a child’s hand in the dark – The Hamurana Spring the still rain – the colour – the tangle of willow & rose & thorn – like Millais’ Ophelia1 the undergrowth – & then the spring – like Maurice Maeter linck2 – Monday. All Sunday the further she went from Rotorua the happier she became – Towards evening – they came to a great mountain Pohataroa – it was very rugged & old & grim – an ancient fighting pah3 – Here the Maoris had fought – and at the top of this peak – a spring bubbled – In the blue evening it was grim, forbidden silent – towering against the sky – an everlasting monument – Then rounding a corner they saw the Waikato river – turbulent muddy – rushing below them – & in a little hollow – girt about with pine & willow tree the Atiamuri Hotel – As they neared the house the persistent barking of dogs – the people hanging over the fence – the old sedately – ridiculous turkeys – They camp – in a paddock by the river a wonderful spot – On the side of the river on the opposite bank – great scrub covered mountains – Before them a wide sheet of swift smooth water –

1. A reference to the famous painting Ophelia (1852) by J. E. Millais, with its lush undergrowth on the banks of the river. John Everett Millais (1829–96) was one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. 2. Golaud meets Mélisande by a stream in the woods in Maurice Maeterlinck’s symbolist play Pelléas and Mélisande (1893). The dramatic climax of the tragedy likewise takes place beside a fountain in the park (see below, p. 99). 3. A Maori homestead.

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and a poplar tree – & a long straight guerdon1 of pines – The willow tree – shaggy and laden dips lazily luxuriously in the water – Just upon the bank ahead of them – a manuka tree in full flowers leans toward the water – The paddock is full of manuka – two grey horses are outlined against the sky – After dinner – they are [?hungry] & tired – the man comes from the hotel – Yes there are rapids to be seen – and a ford track – They are not very far – he is gloomy and fidgety – they start – go through the gates – always there is a thundering sound from afar off – down the sandy path – & then branch off into a little pine avenue – the ground is red brown with needles – great boulders come in their path – the manuka has grown over the path – with head bent – hands out – they battle through – Then suddenly a clearing of burnt manuka – and they both cry aloud – There is the river – savage grey – fierce – rushing tumbling – madly sucking the life from the still placid flow of water behind – like waves of the sea – like fierce wolves – the noise is like thunder – & right before them the lonely mountain outlined against a vivid orange sky. The colour is so intense that it is reflected in their faces in their hair – the very rock on which they climb is hot with the colour – They climb higher – the sunset changes – becomes mauve – & in the waning light all the stretch of burnt manuka is like a thin mauve mist around them. A bird – large and widely silent – flies from the river right into the flowering sky – There is no other sound except the voice of the passionate river – They climb onto a great black rock & sit huddled up there – alone – fiercely almost brutally thinking – like Wagner.2 Behind them – the sky was faintly heliotrope & then suddenly from behind a cloud a little silver moon – shone through one sudden exquisite note in the night terza.3 The sky changed – glowed again, and the river sounded more thundering – more deafening. They walked back slowly – lost the way – and found it – took up a handful of pine needles – & smelt it – greedily – & then in the distant paddock – the tent shone like a golden poppy – washing outside the stars – & the utter spell – magic

1. A reward. 2. A number of momentous scenes in Wagner’s four-part opera cycle The Ring are set on the mountain tops and rocky plateaux; the Rhinegold is first perceived, lit up by the sun, on the summit of a rock, and Wotan and Freia survey the valleys and Valhalla through the mists from a mountainous plateau. The scenes KM probably has in mind here are from the end of Siegfried and the beginning of Götterdämmerung, when the dramatic action is centred around the Valkyrie Brünnhilde’s Rock. 3. KM prolongs her musical analogies here. A terza is a work in three movements or for three voices.

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Next morning – mist over the whole world1 – Lying – her arms over her head – she can see – faintly like a grey thought the river & the mist – they are hardly distinct she is not tired now only happy – Goes to the door of the tent – all is very grey – there is no sun – first thing – she can see the poplar tree mirrored in the water – The grass is wet – there is the familiar sound of buckets – As she brushes her hair a wave of cold air strikes her – lays cold fingers about her heart it is the wizard London – Gradually the sun comes – the poplar is green now – the dew shines on everything – a little flock of geese and gosling – float across the river – the mist becomes white – rises – from the mountain ahead – there are the pines – & there, just on the bank the flowering manuka is a riot of white colour against the blue water – a lark sings – the water bubbles [orakei Koraka] – she can just see, ahead the gleam of the rapids – The mist seems rising & falling here comes the theme again for the last time – & now the day fully enters with a duet for two oboes – you hear it – Sunshine had there ever been such sunshine – they walked down the wet road – through the pine trees the sun gleamed golden – locusts crunched in the bushes – through her thin blouse she felt it scorching her skin and was glad – Monday on the road to Orakei – Koraka2 – The rainbow Falls in a great basin – We [?surmount] the hills – at the summit we look below at mile on mile of brown river – winding in and out among the mountains – the bank – fringed with toi-toi – All the plains & hills are like a mirror for the sky – we 3 climb to a great height. Then there came rapids – great foaming rushing torrents – they tore down among the mountains – thundering – roaring – We drew rein – & there was a wide space of blue forget-me-nots – The quiet bush – sunshine on the golden moss – The silent river – the ducks, the mint – the quiet & then through the leaves & trees – the water. Then the climb – the rocks – the uncertain foot walk – higher and higher – clinging to the trees – the shrubs till at last – on the grey rock we fling ourselves – blue as the tropical sea where the rapids commence – & then a tumultuous – foaming torrent of water – leaping crashing, snow white – like lions fighting – thundering against the green land – & the land stretches out ineffectual arms to hold it back – It seems there is nothing in the world but this shattering sound of water – it casts into the air a shower of silver spray – it is one gigantic battle – I watch it and am one with it.

1. KM is extending the analogies with Wagner’s Götterdämmerung. 2. A geothermal area in the centre of the North Island.

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Ara tia tia Rapids the almost purple 1 nightdress 3 petticoat bodices 2pr. drawers, dress shields handkerchiefs 2pr. stockings 3 vests 2 blouses – Then through more bush – the ferns are almost too exquisite – gloomy shades – sequestered deeps – & out again – another rock to climb – another view – here the colouring is far more intense the purple the blue – the great green lashed rock – the water thunders down foam rushes – then pours itself through a narrow passage – & comes out in a wide blue bay – Also floating on the water are the canoe remains – more rushing white & wider passage – more eddy – & at last – far in the distance – a wide shining stretch of shadowed sweetness – Peace We plunge back again – there is a last view – very near the water – the sound is far louder & under it all I hear the dull booming sound – it rises half a tone about each minute but that is all – it never ceases – – – & where the water catches the light – there is a rainbow pink, blue and white – But it is all too short – Monday Night I am a vagrant – – a Wanderer, a Gypsy tonight In Bed Monday Night Dearest Baby – This will, I think be my last letter to you – before I reach home – I wrote last to Chaddie from Rotorua – I must say I hated that town – it did not suit me at all – I never felt so ill or depressed – It was, I Leslie Heron Beauchamp Orakei-korako Round a bend of the road & the river – we see poplars – tall & strong, and a suggestion of a fence – Then more poplars – & then in the distant – a great patch of flowering potatoes – mauve, blue & white – There is no sign of people – not the sound of a dog – but we hear from among the manuka – the deathlike thudding – like a paddle wheel – We go down to the dragon’s Mouth1 – it is a 1. The Dragon’s Mouth was the name of one of the Wairakei geysers.

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most difficult walk – down a scrambling path – holding on by bushes and trees – then there is one fierce jump & we are there. It belches filthy steam and smoke – there is green slime – and yellow scale like appearance – infinitely impressive – and, always that curious thudding engine like sound. We walk on a broad flat terrace & there is so thin a crust that one would thought it almost dangerous to move – we see a very small geyser in the river & mud & sulphur holes – Across the road & in the manuka is a pink mud pool. The other side of the river are many steam holes – & signs where geysers have been – And signs where terraces might be – it is too brazenly hot for words – we hear the whole time the noise – Tuesday – We drove through Weiraki1 through the hot day to the Huka (huga Falls) here the river is the colour [. . .] peacock [?blue] – the falls utterly superb – frothing and foaming – the foam drops for a long way down the water – again the sound two great poplars at the side – in the distance the gleaming river – But I was not so impressed at first sight. We drove into the bush – then got on to a bridge – stood there – and went [?silent] – all the shuddering wonder was below us! In the afternoon we climbed down the bank first a ladder then rough steps – another ladder – catching swaying laughing bush to one side – and a fern grotto –pale green – like Tannhauser2 – green ferns – hang from the top all round us – dampness & beauty – and we are below the falls – the mountain of water the sound – the essence of it – a peculiar green So we drove – –Wai–otapu wai raki = hot water – wai – tapu wai raki - - hot water – Waitapu – sacred water Wairaki – [?steaming] water We come over the hill to Taupo – Before us the lake – – in the foreground blue, then purple then silver – On this side the pines – the gum trees – the clustering houses – and a fringed yellow meadow – In the lake the little Motetaika3 – and beyond that silver water mountains – until at last Ruapehu snow covered – majestic – God of it all – towers

1. Wairakei – another geothermal area in the centre of the North Island. 2. The first act of Wagner’s opera, Tannhäuser, portrays the minstrel-knight Tannhäuser’s struggles to free himself from amorous captivity in the grotto of Venus. When he finally succeeds, he finds himself in a beautiful green valley. 3. A small island in Lake Taupo.

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against the sweet sky – already behind us Tohara1 is under a cloud all the clouds are so vivid white – grey blue – On one side there is a little jutting promontory of free flat land – In the track the broom – We approach Taupo – across a white bridge – the peacock blue river along a white road – to the Lake Hotel – there are the Maoris lounging in the sun one in a black & white blazer – blue pants – In the shade an old Maori – drunk – & a little child is crouched – soon other Maoris come out – help the old man into a ramshackle cart where a white boney horse is very lamed – The child cries & cries – the old man sways to and fro – she holds on to him with a most pathetic gesture. They drive out of sight – hiko rere – blouse2 pare kote = shirt te mata kuru = boots te puti potai = hat te ata = breakfast Te awatea – dinner Te Ina = the [?lunch] – Taupo 10 The road winds by the lake – then we mount through great avenues of pines & acacias – to the Terraces Hotel – Here are lawns and cut trees – little corners long hidden walks – shady paths – all the redbrown pine needle carpet – the house is not pretty but poppies grow round it – All is harmonious & peaceful & delicious – We camp in – a pine forest – beautiful – there are chickens – cheeping – the people are so utterly benevolent – We are like children here with happiness – We dine – then the sunset – then supper at the Hotel – and the night is utterly perfect – We go to the mineral baths – the walk there down the hill – is divine – the suggestion of running water – and cypresses – it is very steep – And a fine bath – though very hot & a douche – so pleasant – Then home tired – hot – happy – blissfully happy – We sleep – in the tent – the wind is our lullaby – We wake early – and wash and dress – & go down to the bath again – Honeysuckle – roses pink & white – periwinkles syringas – red hot pokers – those yellow flowers – the ground is smothered – Fruit trees 1. Tauhara – a volcanic mountain. 2. In this list, as elsewhere (see below, p. 78), KM is transcribing Maori words that she was trying to learn with Warbrick, their guide. The spelling and word associations are not always reliable.

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with promise of harvest – the hot lake & pools – even – the homely clothes prop in the lush grass – & more mimosa – – The birds are magical – I feel I cannot leave but pluck the honeysuckle & the splashes of light lie in the pine wood – Then good bye Taupo and here are more plains I feel quite at home again – & at last we come to Opipi – the scene of a most horrible massacre1 – only 2 men were saved – one rushed through the bush – one was cutting wood – We stop to look for water and there are 2 men – one [. . .] one most perfect Maori – like bronze the new pink shirt printed images – his horrible licensed walk his cigaret – Then we are in a valley of broom – such colour – it is strewn everywhere – I have never dreamed of such vivid blossom – then lunch at Rangateiki, the store is so noisy – they do not seem glad or surprised to see us – give us fresh bread, all seems so familiar and they seem [?troubled] And afar the plain – We say goodbye to [. . .] – and at night fall rounding the road, reach our copse. It is a threatening evening – the farm child – the woman her great boots – she has been digging – How glad she is to see us – her garrulous ways and the child’s thoughtful fascination Then at night among the tussocks Then the pumice hills – river – and rain pours – Wound in [. . .] tarpaulin like a kitten – sheltering – [?young thing] in wet clothes – bathing face & neck & hands in a bucket of water Then in the full glory of the morning – the dew on the grass & manuka – a lark thrilling madly – drinking a great pannikin of tea and a whole round of bread and jam – December 14th My last morning – Oh! what a storm last night – and a crimson dawn – with the willows lashing together – the [?lilies] December 15th 1907. Baby send for my camera –

Albert Mallinson2

Timetable – 6–8 technique 9–1 practise 2–5 write – Freedom

1. A violent clash between British troops and Maori followers of Te Kooti had taken place in Opepe (Opipi) in June 1869. 2. Albert Mallinson (1870–1946) was a popular song writer and composer.

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In the train – December 17th Has there ever been a hotter day – The land is parched – golden with the heat – The sheep are sheltering in the shadow of the rocks – in the distance the hills are shimmering in the heat – M. and I sitting opposite each other – I look perfectly charming. And I read a little book called The Book of Tea1 – it is wholly adorable en oho ra = good bye to you who are staying – tamaiti = child – tangata man e ta haeremai te kai = I say come to eat en ohora = good bye to you (staying) Haere ra = goodbye to you (leaving) tamaiti = child ta mariki tangata = man – raupo = flax In this part of the island ‘wh’ is ‘f’.2 Te whaiti – Te f a i t i – [?cuoa] = k u i f a = where that’s right Hau-Hau paimarere = peace & goodwill pipi wharuroa3 = pipi wharuroa – a bird of good tidings – and good news. size of a skylark – it has a green striped head – te hoi ho = horse te hipi = sheep te rori = the road – [. . .] [ai ke ki] = [. . .] korero pakeha i akoi – do you speak English – kapai te wera – hot day te rangi pai = fine day4 taha = [. . .] rewi = potato – 1. The Book of Tea, published in London in 1906 by Okakura-Kakuzo, is a study of the tea ceremony, and more broadly of the customs and rituals of traditional Japanese life. 2. A note showing KM’s sensitivity to regional differences in Maori pronunciation. 3. The pipiwharauroa, commonly known as the shining cuckoo, is an Australian warbler that migrates to New Zealand in spring and summer. 4. Coincidentally, KM may perhaps have known that Te Rangi Pai was a famous New Zealand contralto singer in 1906 – almost the same time that KM was touring through the centre of the North Island.

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2

5 2 1

79

0 3 0 6 0 6 7½

½ lb flour ¼ lb sugar ¼ lb walnuts 2 eggs 1 teaspoonful baking powder ¼ lb of butter – Bake in a moderate oven for about 20 minutes. Mrs Webber1 – 3 0 6 1 0 6 7½ 6½ 12 0 1 6 1 3 1 6 1 0 9 1 0 7½ 3 9 3 4 2 0 3 0 2 £ 1. 17. 7½ 2

12|79 6+7

K. Mansfield Julian Mark2

1. Mrs Webber was a member of the camping party. 2. ‘Julian Mark’ was one of KM’s pseudonyms at that time.

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[MS–Papers-4026–1]

Waipunga Riverside Wednesday –

Dear my Mother – I wrote you my last letter on Monday – and posted it at Pohui in the afternoon – I continue my doings – We drove on through sheep country – to Pohui that night – past Maori ‘pahs’ and nothing else – and pitched our camp at the top of a bare hill above the Pohui Accomodation House – kept by a certain Mr Bodley – a great pa-man with 14 daughters who sit & shell peas all day! Below the hill – there was a great valley – and the bush I cannot describe – It is the entrance to the Ahurakura Station – and though we were tired & hungry Millie, Mrs Webber & I dived down a bridle track – and followed the bush – The tuis really sounded like rivers running – everywhere the trees hung wreathed with clematis – and rata and miseltoe – It was very cool & we washed in a creek – the sides all smothered in daisies – the ferns every where, and eventually came to the homestead – It is a queer spot – ramshackle & hideous, but the garden is gorgeous – A Maori girl – with her hair in two long braids, sat at the doorstep – shelling peas – & while we were talking to her – the owner came & offered to show us the shearing sheds – You know the sheep sound like a wave of the sea – you can hardly hear yourself speak. He took us through it all – they had only two white men working – and the Maoris have a most strange bird like call as they hustle the sheep – When we came home it was quite dark & how I slept – Next morning at five we were up & working – and really looking back at yesterday I cannot believe that I have not been to a prodigious biograph1 show – We drove down the Titi – o ’Kura –and the road is one series of turns – a great abyss each side of you – and ruts so deep – that you rise three feet in the air – scream & descend as though learning to trot – It poured with rain early – but then the weather was very clear & light – with a fierce wind in the mountains – We got great sprays of clematis – and Konini, and drove first through a bush path – But the greatest sight I have seen was the view from the top of Taranga – Kuma – You draw rein at the top of the mountains & round you everywhere are other mountains – bush covered – & far below in the valley little Tarawera & a silver ribbon of river – I could do nothing but laugh – it must have been the air – & the danger – We reached the Tarawera Hotel in the evening – & camped in a 1. The biograph was one of the very early names for cinema films.

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little bush hollow – Grubby, my dear, I felt dreadful – my clothes were white with dust – we had accomplished 8 miles of hill climbing – So after dinner – (broad beans cooked over a camp fire and tongue & cake and tea –) we prowled round and found an “agèd aged man” who had the key of the mineral baths – I wrapt clean clothes in my towel – & the old man rushed home to seize a candle in a tin – He guided us through the bush track – by the river – & my dear I’ve never seen such a cure1 – I don’t think he ever had possessed a tooth & he never ceased talking – you know the effect? The Bath House is a shed – three of us bathed in a great pool – waist high – and we of course – in our nakeds – The water was very hot – & like oil – most delicious – We swam – & soaped & swam & soaked & floated – & when we came out each drank a great mug of mineral water – luke warm & tasting like Miss Wood’s eggs2 at their worst stage – But you feel – inwardly & outwardly like velvet – – This morning we walked most of the journey – and in one place met a most fascinating Maori – an old splendid man – He took Mrs Webber & me to see his ‘wahine’ – & child – It is a tropical day – the woman squatted in front of the whare – she, too, was very beautiful – strongly Maori – & when we had shaken hands – she unwrapped her offspring from under two mats – & held it on her knee – The child wore a little red frock & a tight bonnet – such a darling thing – I wanted it for a doll – but in a perfect bath of perspiration Mother couldn’t speak a word of English & I had a great pantomime – Kathleen – pointing to her own teeth & then to the baby’s – ‘Ah!’ Mother – very appreciative ‘Ai’! Kathleen – pointing to the baby’s long curling eyelashes ‘Oh!’ Mother – most delighted ‘Aii’ – And so on – I jumped the baby up & down in the air – and it crowed with laughter – & the Mother & Father – beaming – shook hands with me again – Then we drove off – waving until out of sight – all the Maoris do that – Just before pulling up for lunch we came to the Waipunga Falls – my first experience of great waterfalls – they are indescribably beautiful – three – one beside the other – & a ravine of bush either side – The noise is like thunder & the sun shone full on the water – I am sitting now on the bank of the river – just a few bends away – the water is flowing past – and the manuka flax & fern line the banks –

1. An odd or eccentric person (Oxford English Dictionary). 2. Miss Woods looked after the boarding house at Queen’s College, London (see above, p. 20).

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Must go in – goodbye – dear – Tell Jeanne I saw families of wild pigs & horses here – & that we have five horses – such dear old things. They nearly ate my head through the tent last night. I am still bitten & burnt – but oil of camphor – Solomon solution – glycerine & cucumber – rose water – are curing me – & I keep wrapt in a motor veil. This is the way to travel – it is so slow & so absolutely free – and I’m quite fond of all the people – they are ultra-Colonial but thoroughly kind & good hearted & generous – and always more than good to me – We sleep tonight at the Rangitaiki & then the plains & the back blocks – Love to everybody – I am very happy – Your daughter Kathleen. Later Posting at country shed – can’t buy envelopes – Had wonderful dinner of tomatoes – Ah! he’s given me an hotel envelope. K. [Notebook 2, qMS–1244]

December 28th. Once more I am in the train with May Gilmer this time. I am rather amused and very happy. I know or rather feel that I shall have a good day, and that is worth travelling 5000 miles. But I wonder how May Newman will feel. I rather have a suspicion that she is ‘off’ me, but I like me so I am happy. I have spent since returning an idle week full of nothingness. Now before next Sunday we must be absolutely definite. Oh, the sea and Wagner together – O thank God that I have written five poems. Evening. So I spent it in the bush with her. She is extremely graceful, dressed in white – she floats along. We sit in the bush, she with the sunshine making her brown hair a lovely auburn – how fascinating. But I feel quiet – there are poppies & sweet peas, faded coves and broken walls, poppies in the grass – tainui1 and cabbage trees lining the path. Salmon & potatoes and cherries – & later – sitting in a brown tree trunk – milk & thin slices of pale yellow cake. It is like a dream. The sea is tropically blue – there is a little island Mana Island. At whiles through the bush we see a flax swamp, burnt to a red black & then beyond it the sea. In the bush there is a great deal of fern. My little pipi-wharoua is heard again and again. How hot the sand is – it burns my feet through my brown shoes. I take off 1. Tainui, or Pomaderris apetala, is a shrub with lime-green flowers that is native to Tasmania, where it is commonly known as the dogwood.

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my hat & put on, rather like a Spanish lady, a little brown veil. We talk MUSIC. Chiefly Macdowell1 & Chopin,2 and I, alas, feel a little superior. And that one solitary tree – how aged. I ought to make a good author. I certainly have the ambition and the ideas but have I the power to carry it all through? Yes – if I get back but not unless I do – but after all why not. [Notebook 1, qMS–1242]

It is the 31st of December – very cool and quiet. The sounds of the lawn mower emphasise my rustic surroundings. And that cigaret! When They Met After Parting. At Gravesend she received a letter from

1. See above, p. 45. 2. The Polish virtuoso pianist and composer known mainly by his gallicised name, Frédéric Chopin (1810–49). Although associated with high Romanticism, his music also opened the way to the experimental music of the early twentieth century.

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1908

[Notebook 2, qMS–1244]

The year has dawned. My Year. 1908 And a Happy New Year to you. O the sky, the great star, the light, the sound, the little Xes, the drunkards, the cool air, the hootings.1 Well – I have the brain and also the inventive faculty! What else is needed? 23rd January. I wait for Clara Butt and Kennedy Rumford.2 Now there is Kathleen Smith’s sister – a pale slender girl with long black hair brushed back from her face – a most childish figure. She is with her Mother & sister. She wears a cream satin opera coat with long lace in the sleeves. The dull quiet house, the arum lilies on the balcony, the heavy furniture, the library full of dust, the faded photographs of her Father, her Mother’s feebleness, her quaint manners, insufficient food & no daylight. Such is the life to this Althea.3 Dickens of course. Thackeray & Stevenson. Some letters, a great many old diaries. So she grows older, put into all this silence. The old servant & two 1. ‘Xes’ is KM’s shorthand for churches. New Year’s Eve in Wellington is celebrated to this day with the ringing of ‘the little Xes’ – church bells – and ‘hootings’ – the midnight horns and salutes of the ships in the harbour. 2. Clara Butt (contralto) and her husband, Kennerly Rumford (baritone), undergoing an Australasian concert tour, gave three concerts in Wellington on 21, 23 and 25 January 1908, which were described in the New Zealand Free Lance of 1 February 1908 as ‘the greatest events in our musical history so far’. 3. Richard Lovelace’s poem, ‘To Althea, from Prison’, contains the memorable lines ‘Stone walls do not a prison make, / Nor iron bars a cage.’ The name Althea was also taken by Charlotte Smith for the female protagonist of her novel Marchmont (1796).

84

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decrepit terrible dogs with impossible names, the walks – very sedate – occasional rides in a tram car, & the feeble music – she plays on the piano – it has pleated satin let in at the rosewood back. Meagre fires, no visits, and a small bedroom with a little white china angel holding holy water. The church, the romantic influence. How one day she puts two roses in her hair and stands in front of a mirror and sees that she is beautiful. January 23rd. Morgen habe ich sehr viele Glück gehabt, auch Herr Weston hätte Mittagessen mit uns gehabt.1 Nau i waka ana te kakahu he taniko taku.2 You wove the garment, I put the border to it. Outside the Town Hall January 23rd Mein lieber Freund –3 Die letze woche hat Dr Crosby mir – Ihre ‘Reverie du Soir’4 – mitgebrocken – So muss ich etwas schreiben – Iche finde diese Werk so wunderbar schön – so träumerisch – und auch so sehnsuchtsvoll. Hoffenlich, diese Jahre – höre ich Ire die Reverie du Soir in einer 1. (Ger.) ‘Today I had lots of luck, as Mr Weston came and had lunch with us.’ 2. KM is trying to quote a whakatauki, a Maori proverb – ‘Nau i whatu te kakahu, he taniko taku,’ which means ‘yours is the useful work, mine is ornamental/artificial.’ 3. Draft of a letter to Arnold Trowell. A literal translation (allowing for passing grammatical slips) reads: My dear friend – This last week, Dr Crosby brought me your ‘Rêverie du Soir’. I must write you a few lines about it. I find this work so wonderful and lovely – so wistful – and so fervent. Hopefully this year I will hear you play your Rêverie du Soir in a concert! My good friend Ida Baker has given me several pages from the newspapers. What a success merveille it was. Often in my thoughts I have congratulated you. I am coming to England in early March – I hate Wellington – and naturally I am yearning for London. Have you had more Journaux from me? And what do you think of them? Why haven’t you spoken about them to me? How is your father? – and your mother too, and also your dear worthy little sister. The house –18 Buller Street – stands so lonely! With greetings for this year 1908. Your friend, K. 18 Buller Street was the former home of the Trowell family in Wellington, where KM used to go for her music lessons. 4. ‘Rêverie du soir’ was a piece for cello and piano (Op. 12, no. 1), written by Arnold Trowell in 1907.

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Konzert spielen! Meine gute Freundin Ida Baker hat mir mehrerere Blätter von den Zeitunge gegeben – Was für eine succès merveille. Oftenmals in meinen Gedanken habe ich Ihnen kongratuliert. Ich komme nach England früh in March – Ich hasse Wellington – und – naturlich sehne ich nach London – Haben sie mehrere Journaux von mir gehabt? Und was denken sie von dieser? Warum haben sie mir nicht erzählt! Wie geht Ihren Vater – und auch die Mutter und auch Ihren liebe würdige Schwesterchen? Das Haus – achtzehn Buller Strasse – steht so einsam aus! Mit vielen Grüssen fur diese Jahre 1908. Ihre Freundin K. Muss aber Deutsch schreiben. Es giebt so vielen Leuten – der gar nicht diese Sprache kennen!1 January 28th 1908. Books selected for study: – Charles Dickens G.K. Chesterton2 Literary Geography William Sharp.3 Charles Dickens 1812.4 egalitarian – the egalitarian French Rev. idea – tends to produce great men. Our meals, our manners and our daily dress are random symbols of the soul. p.16. By simply going on being absurd a thing can become godlike; there is but one step from the ridiculous to the sublime! p.21. Dream for one mad moment that the grass is green. 23. It is from the backs of the elderly gentlemen that the wings of the butterfly should burst, p.35. His soul was a shot silk of black and crimson, not a mixed colour of grey and purple.5 Youth is almost everything else but original.6 pragmatical = 1. (Ger.) ‘Must write German. There are so many people – who know nothing of this language at all!’ 2. The British novelist, art critic and poet, G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936), published his Life of Dickens in 1906, a work considered to have helped spark a revival of interest in Dickens in the early twentieth century. 3. William Sharp’s Literary Geography was published in London in 1904. 4. The following notes are taken from or inspired by Chesterton’s Life of Dickens (1906). On page 14, Chesterton discusses the tendency of the ‘egalitarian idea’ of the Revolution to create great men. 5. Chesterton’s text reads, ‘His soul was not a mixed colour like grey and purple, caused by no component colour being quite itself. His soul was like a shot silk of black and crimson, a shot silk of misery and joy’ (p. 44). 6. Chesterton’s text reads, ‘Youth is almost everything else, but it is hardly ever original’ (p. 56).

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de minimus non amat lex =1 Manners those grand rhythms of the social harmony, p.1272 [Notebook 39, qMS–1243]

Feb 10th. I shall end of course – by killing myself. [Notebook 2, qMS–1244]

– – – great white hungry lions, tumbling over each other, screaming, roaring, shaking back their long manes, fighting, foaming to reach the long stretch of sweet warm sand. They are full of an eternal desire, they are miserable with the Misery of Eternity. Have I ever been so happy before. Across the blue sea floated a boat with an orange sail, a butterfly on a blue blossom. Now the Italian fishermen are sailing in, their white sail bellying in the wind. Far away a man is rowing in a little boat. On the beach a group of fishermen in blue jerseys, thick blue trousers rolled to the knees. The sun shines on their crisp black hair, it shines on their faces so that their skins are the colour of warm amber, it shines on their bare legs & firm brown arms. They are drawing shoreward a little open boat – the Napoli – the long black wet rope running through their fingers & falling in a mystic pattern on the foam blown sand. And there are long delicate golden brown sprays of beautiful seaweed, a The partisans of analysis describe minutely the state of the soul, the secret motive of every action as being of far greater importance than the action itself. The partisans of objectivity give us the result of this evolution sans describing the secret processes. They convey the state of the soul through the slightest gesture – i.e. realism, flesh covered bones, which is the artists method for me. In as much as art seems to me pure vision I am indeed a partisan of objectivity. Yet I cannot take the simile of the soul and the body for the bone is no bony framework. Supposing ones bones were not bone but liquid light – which suffuses 1. Discussing Dickens’s alleged hyper-sensitivity and literary quarrels, Chesterton claims he would turn people into his ‘mortal enemies’ if they found fault with him, because he ‘did not understand the principle of de minimis non curat lex’ (p. 58), i.e. ‘the law cannot be concerned by trivia.’ By replacing curat with amat, KM implies ‘the law has no love of trivia.’ 2. Discussing the type of poet who recites his poetry ‘with the tears rolling down his face’, Chesterton claims such habits reveal a ‘“lack of sensibility”’ to those grand rhythms of the social harmony, crudely called manners’.

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itself, fluctuates – well and good, but the bones are permanent and changeless – . . – – that fails.1 Thursday. I am at the sea – at Island Bay2 in fact – lying flat on my face on the warm white sand. And before me the sea stretches – miles, after all, the horizon looks. To my right, shrouded in mist like a fairy land, a dream country, the snow mountains of the South Island. To my left, fold upon fold of splendid golden hills, two white lighthouses like great watching birds perched upon them. A huge yellow dog lies by me; he is wet & ruffled, and I have no boots or stockings on. A print dress, a panama hat, a big parasol. Adelaida I wish that you were with me. Where the rocks lie their shadow is thickly violet upon the green blue. You know that peacock shade of water. Blue it is with the blueness of Rossetti,3 green with the greenness of William Morris.4 Oh, what a glorious day this is. I shall stay here until after dark, walking along the beach, the waves foaming over my feet, drinking a great deal of tea & eating a preposterous amount of bread & apricot jam at a little place called The Cliff House. Across the blue sea a boat is floating with an orange sail. Now the Maori fishermen are sailing in, their white sail bellying in the wind. On the beach a group of them, with blue jerseys, thick trousers rolled to their knees. The sun shines on their thick crisp hair, & shines on their faces, so that their skins are the colour of hot amber. It shines on their bare legs & firm brown arms. They are drawing in a little boat called ‘Te Kooti’, the wet rope running through their fingers and falling in a mystic pattern on the foam blown sand. Evening. By the sea. Lying thus on the sand, the foam almost washing over my hands, I feel the magic of the sea. Behind the golden hills 1. KM is here paraphrasing Maupassant’s detailed account of the novelist and his craft in terms of the ‘partisans of analysis’ and ‘the partisans of objectivity’, in his ‘Introduction: The Novel’, published as a preface to the novella Pierre and Jean (1888). Guy de Maupassant (1850–93) was a major French naturalist writer and is considered a master of the short story genre. Symons evokes the introduction in Studies in Prose and Verse (pp. 103–4), but does not quote from it; nor does he refer to the concepts KM is clearly pondering on here. 2. Island Bay in Wellington. 3. Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–82) was an English artist, illustrator and poet, and one of the three founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. 4. William Morris (1834–96) was an English designer, poet, novelist and social reformer, who was closely linked to the Arts and Crafts movement and the early socialist movement in Great Britain.

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the sun is going down, a ruby jewel in a lurid setting, and there is a faint flush everywhere over sea & land. To my right the sky has blossomed into vivid rose but to my left the land is hidden by a grey blue mist lightened now here now there by a suggestion of the sun– colour – it is like land seen from a ship a very long way away – dreamland, mirage, enchanted country. Two sea birds high in the air fly screaming towards the light. It beats upon their white breasts, it flames upon their dull wings. Far away a little boat is sailing on the sweet water, a golden butterfly upon the dainty bosom of a mystic blossom. And now the Italian fishermen are sailing in, their white sail bellying in the breeze – several come rowing in a little boat. They spring ashore. The sun shines on their crisp black hair. It shines on their faces, so that their skin is the colour of hot amber, on their bare legs & strong brown arms. They are dragging towards them the boat, the long black wet rope running through their fingers & falling in a mystic pattern on the foam blown sand. They call to one another. I cannot hear what they say but against the long rhythmic pulsing of the sea their voices sound curiously insignificant, like voices in a dream. And there are exquisite golden brown sprays & garlands of seaweed set about with berries, white and brown. Are they flowers blown from the garden of the sea-King’s daughter – does she wander through the delicate coral forest seeking them, her long hair floating behind her, playing upon a little silver shell? And near me I see a light upon the blue coast – steadily tenderly it beams – a little candle set upon the great altar of the world. The glow pales in the sky, on the land, but the voice of the sea grows stronger. Oh, to sail & sail into the heart of the sea. Is it darkness and silence there or is – a Great Light. So the grey sand slips – sifts through my fingers. Night comes swiftly. February. [Notebook 39, qMS–1243]

March 15th. I purchase my brilliance with my life. It were better that I were dead, really. I am unlike others because I have experienced all that there is to experience – but there is no one to help me. Of course Oscar – Dorian Gray has brought this S.S. to pass.

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[Notebook 2, qMS–1244]

A wet afternoon in the Library – in March.1 I have read most strange books here – one on the Path to Rome, one of Maori Art – – – Through the long avenue of pine trees, where the shadow of Night crept from tree to tree. The Autumn afternoon it really would be better to call it so. This is what I want – the little asphalt path like a mauve ribbon, the great fragrant warm sweetness of the pine needles massed & heaped together, ruddy with perfume. Then the trees – hundreds there seem in the dull light, a vast procession of gloomy forms. Now here, now there, the shades of night are trooping softly, the air is heavy with a faint uneasy sound, a restless beating to & fro, a long unceasing sigh, & far away in the distance there is a dreary waste of grey sea – a desert of heaving water. Grey, grey – there is no light in it at all, & the autumn air is cold with the coldness of drowned men. And Night is rising out of the sea – a ghastly broken form, & the autumn world sinks into that broken embrace, pillows its tired head upon that pulseless heart. There is a little asphalt path like a mauve ribbon, and it is fringed with a vast procession of pine trees. In this dull light there seem to be hundreds of them. They are huddled together and muffled in their gloomy shadows. On the earth a fragrant sweetness & pine needles, massed & heaped up, ruddy with perfume. And through the black lace-like tracery of trees a pale sky full of hurrying clouds. Far away in the distance a dreary waste of grey sea, a desert of heaving water. Grey, grey . . . there is no light at all, and the autumn air is cold with the coldness of traceless spaces. Out of the grey sea creeps the ghastly, drowned body of Night. Her long dark hair swam among the branches of the pine trees, her dead body walks along the little mauve ribbon of an asphalt path. She stretches out her arms and the autumn world sinks into that frozen embrace, pillows its tired head upon that pulseless heart. And the long procession of pine trees, huddled together, are ghostly fearful snowmen at the wedding with Death.

1. KM is here referring to the New Zealand Parliamentary Library in Wellington. Her father, through his political connections, had obtained reading cards for KM and her two older sisters.

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[Notebook 1, qMS–1242]

April 1908.

Criticism of Pure Reason1 Life of Kant. Hegel.2

257. Kant.

[Notebook 29, qMS–1241]

Rosamind Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch. Mrs Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch by an American author. Poor unfortunate. Rosamind.3 [Notebook 39, qMS–1243]

May 1st. I am now much worse than ever. Madness must Be this way. Pull yourself Up. May 1908. I have just finished reading a book by Elizabeth Robins ‘Come & Find Me’.4 Really a clever, splendid book; it creates in me such a sense of power. I feel that I do now realise, dimly, what women in the future will be capable of achieving. They truly, as yet, have never had their chance. Talk of our enlightened days and our emancipated country – pure nonsense. We are firmly held in the self fashioned chains of slavery. Yes – now I see that they are self fashioned and must be self removed. Eh bien – now where is my ideal and ideas of life? Does Oscar – and there is a gardenia yet alive beside my bed – does Oscar still keep so firm a stronghold in my soul? No! Because now I 1. More often translated as The Critique of Pure Reason, this 1781 work by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) is considered one of the most influential texts in post-Renaissance philosophy. 2. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), an influential German philosopher. 3. Best-selling novel by the American author Alice Hegan Rice (1870–1942), Mrs Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch was published in 1901. 4. Elisabeth Robins (1862–1952) was an American-born actress, playwright and novelist, who settled in London, where she was an active member of the Women’s Social and Political Union. Her best-remembered works today are those committed to the suffragettes’ cause, such as the play Votes for Women (1907). Come and Find Me (1908) was the sequel to her popular 1904 novel, The Magnetic North.

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am growing capable of seeing a wider vision – a little Oscar, a little Symons,1 a little Dolf Wyllarde,2 Ibsen,3 Tolstoi,4 Elizabeth Robins, Shaw,5 D’Annunzio,6 Meredith.7 To weave the intricate tapestry of one’s own life it is well to take a thread from many harmonious skeins, and to realise that there must be harmony. Not necessary to grow the sheep, comb the wool, colour and brand it, but joyfully take all that is ready and with that saved time go a great way further. Independence, resolve, firm purpose and the gift of discrimination, mental clearness – here are the inevitables. Again, Will – the realisation that Art is absolutely self development. The knowledge that genius is dormant in every soul, that that very individuality which is at the root of our being is what matters so poignantly. 9 p.m. Sunday Night. May 17th. Full Moon. Now to plan it. O, Kathleen, do not weave any more of these fearful meshes. You have been so loathsomely unwise. Do take wisdom from all that you have and must still suffer. I really know that you can’t stay as you are now. Be good – for the love of God – be good, & brave and do tell the truth more & live a better life. I am tired of all this deceit – and the moon still shines, and the stars are still there. You’d better go & see the Doctor tomorrow about your heart, and then try & solve all the silly drivelling problems. Go anywhere – don’t stay here – accept work – fight against people. As it is, with a rapidity unimaginable, 1. See p. 19. 2. Dolf Wyllarde (1871–1950) was a British journalist and a prolific novelist. In the early years of the century, her works were influenced by the struggle for women’s rights, a notable example being The Pathway of the Pioneer: Nous Autres (1906). 3. See above, p. 33. 4. Renowned as the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Lev Nikolaevitch Tolstoy (1828–1910) was not only one of the most important novelists of the nineteenth century, but also a moral philosopher, social reformer and iconoclastic religious leader. 5. George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) was a major Irish playwright, journalist and essayist who lived in London, where he was actively involved with the Fabian Society. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925. 6. Gabriele d’Annunzio (1863–1938) was an Italian writer, poet and playwright with close links to the Decadents, French Symbolism and British Aestheticism. 7. George Meredith (1828–1909) was a British novelist and poet, famous for works such as The Egoist (1879) and Diana of the Crossways (1885). His works feature memorable, independently minded heroines; his style is elevated, favouring complex, extended metaphors. His sonnet cycle, Modern Love (1862), tracing the painful disintegration of a marriage, was very widely read.

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you are going to the Devil. PULL UP NOW YOURSELF. It is really most extraordinary that I should feel so confident of dying of heart failure – and entirely Arthur’s fault.1 October 12th. This is my unfortunate month. I dislike exceedingly to have to pass through it – each day fills me with terror. [MS–Papers–4006–15]

It cannot be possible to go through all the abandonment of Music and care humanly for anything human afterwards. K. Mansfield. 1908. [Notebook 8, qMS–1245]

Kathleen M Beauchamp Beauchamp Lodge2 Warwick Crescent Maid Hill London N.W October 1908. How tired I am. It is I think because this Aunt3 of mine has been talking and talking until she has dragged all the vitality out of me – endless conversation about endless families & dead people – twelve children but seven were carried away. And then the men & the long long pieces of ugly linen & ugly thread. Oh how tired I was!!! October 17th Came here at Forest Row pour un tour in a motor. Feel damned tired and more than damned hungry. Have an appetite that I would not sell for £1000. It is damp and misty. I walked into the village & bought pencil & paper & postcards. Saw what especially attracted me, a square, the church in the centre, le Swan hotel à l’autre coté – the little village houses – it was very sweet. These people amuse me to the very last degree – they are shriekingly funny – tho’ happy lives I’m 1. Murry suggests KM was referring here to her grandfather, Arthur Beauchamp. 2. Beauchamp Lodge was a hostel in Paddington for music students, where KM lived on her return to London. 3. KM’s aunt, Belle Dyer, who stayed in England to be near the Beauchamp girls during their schooling at Queen’s College. She married an Englishman, Harry Trinder, and settled in southern England. KM visited her in Surrey from 14 to 19 October 1908.

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sure – wealthy people and every possible wish gratified – they look so funny & dear. Miss A. the cigaret lady smokes all the time – plays a rattling good game – Cursed old women here. Do you know they object to my smoking – showing [. . .] on you – fool women they can’t stand the smoking. The R. S. L. I was [. . .]. Oct 19th. Feel frightful & can’t think why. Met Martin today. Feel awful, shocking, terrible. What is to be done, I wonder. Naturalising the Supernatural. Frank Podmore.1 The highly [. . . .] attitude of the world – to ask what is the ‘commercial use’ of everything. Sir William Crooks declares that Chaddie – stocks. But Mrs Rayner V – picture. Maata – light coat & skirt. Rippy2 – Doris. Eric – Music. Jeanne – books. Martin [?] P.C.s. Doris In a bus outside Victoria Station. Left Belle today – very happy & well for her home & child are delightful. She seems I wonder if I will ever be happy again – that’s the question sans solution. It seems my brain is dead. My soul numbed with horrid grief. A man in the bus is blushing – a vivid purple hue. This Hand on my Heart again. The Shadow of the Hand. 3 o’clock this afternoon. Wednesday 21st. 20 after three.3 Well, after a day of most turbulent packing Margaret and I drove off to Victoria4 20 after seven. London looked garish, festive, alluring, 1. Frank Podmore (1855–1910) was a respected writer on psychical research and also a founding member of the Fabian Society. His reference work, The Naturalisation of the Supernatural, was published in 1908. Podmore’s introduction makes frequent reference to prior publications and claims by Sir William Crookes, possibly the ‘Sir William’ mentioned here. 2. Walter Rippmann was Professor of German at Queen’s College from 1896 to 1916. He was a brilliant language scholar with degrees in classics, medieval and modern languages, and Indian languages. He was an admirer of Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater, and used to invite pupils, including KM, to his home, sharing with them, among other things, his love of Japanese art. 3. Like many of KM’s diary entries, this detailed account has a direct addressee, as if in letter form. It may indeed have been intended, in part, as a draft letter to Garnet Trowell, to whom she had now transferred her affections. 4. KM set off from Victoria Station travelling to France, accompanying her Beauchamp Lodge friend, Margaret Wishart, to a wedding (see Alpers, p. 75).

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only in the Park there were vapour thin crowds huddled together at the Marble Arch – a body of Police waited by their horses. Victoria – the huge station seemed alive with police and passengers. Already by the Continental train strange foreign types of people gathered – a Pole, tall, thin, smoking a long narrow cigar, a Turk, scarlet fez topping his sombre face. We four filled a compartment. There were wide fat English seats with a neat little white antimacassar buttoned across the top. And the doors were slammed – a last view of the wide platform and we had rushed our way into the country. I read a little and then huddled up in the corner, half sleeping, half waking. I thought of you. To open my eyes and find you beside me – if it was we two together going abroad. I felt, mainly, wrapped in a great cloak of thought. And so on and on. Every now & then, out of the window peering, I saw a signal box loom up in the darkness. We shattered through the tunnels – then a halt at Lewes, ten minutes off Newhaven.1 Packets of corn beef sandwiches were produced and black grapes in frilled white paper – we have one of those extraordinary little meals that English people indulge in travelling. And then Newhaven: all change. Tired sleepy people, children crying fretfully, the Pole again – and again the cigar – the Turk weighed down with huge white wicker baskets, stream along the platform up the damp gangway to the damper boat. I have a confused impression of rain and [. . .] lights and sailors in greatcoats & boots, like Flying Dutchman mariners.2 We go aft to the Ladies Cabin where a little French woman is in attendance, her white face peering curiously at us over billows & billows of apron. Such wide blue velvet couches, such hard bolsters for tired heads. We slip off boots and skirts & coats, wash, and wrapped round in my big coat & a rug tucked round my toes I settled down for the night. It was amusing, you know, all round these same huddled figures, smothered in the same little brown rugs, like patients in a hospital ward. And the little French woman sits in the middle knitting a stocking. Beside her on a red table a lamp throws a fantastic wavering light. All through the hours, half sleeping, half waking I would open my eyes and see this little bowed figure & the wavering light seemed to play fantastic tricks with her – the stocking in my fancy grew gigantic, enormous. It seemed almost symbolical – the sleeping figures and in the light 1. The train to the port of Newhaven, from where boats sail for Dieppe, stops on the way in Lewes in Sussex. 2. The legend of the Flying Dutchman recounts the fate of a ghost ship that can never reach port. The crew were said to call out to passing ships in the hope of finding a way back to land. Richard Wagner’s opera (1849) is one of the many dramatisations and adaptations of the tale.

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the little quiet woman knitting an eternal stocking. At last I really slept only to be wakened – deux heures et demi.1 My shoulder & hip ached, my hand had gone to sleep. I stretched wearily – still the strong thudding vibration of the boat, the swishing of the water. Then suddenly – how can I describe it, beloved – it was as though I lay in your arms. For a moment I turned my face to the wall, could not look at people feeling as I did. I was strong, refreshed, waked to such full life that I got up laughing, plunged my face into the glad cold water – & booted & spurred – ran up on deck to find Dieppe – the landing stage like the mouth of some giant monster, and a little crowd of officials groaning a gangway on board.2 We disembark, hustle up the sanded stairs to the luggage room where the flaring posters on the walls – Normandy, Bretagne, Paris, Luxembourg – are like magic hands stretched out in invitation. See what I hold – come here. In the buffet we have rolls and strong coffee out of thick white cups. In the centre of the table there is a little flat strong peasantware bowl of berries. I think – dear me, he wouldn’t believe that. Next table to me a honeymoon couple – she with a new wedding ring, and all blatantly new luggage. I look at them and think dear me how much happier we should be, how at ease we would feel where these two only look nervy, ashamed & apologetic to the waiters. And again into the high padded carriage. A porter runs along the platform shaking up the darkness with a jangly bell, shrill whistles sound, & now we are finally to Paris. At first on one side the street of rain-washed cobblestones, on the other the harbour full of lights – the darkness. I slept but woke at Rouen – it was bitterly cold. An official with a bell about the size of a 3d bit3 dashed along the platform. Opposite in a buffet 2 gens d’armes4 were drinking. We started again and next I remember blue light flooding the windows of the carriage. I rubbed one – a little peephole for myself – and saw green trees white with frost. Then little by little dawn, a sky like steel – on both sides of us quaint small grey blue villages, houses, [. . .], fields girt with Noah’s Ark trees. And now and again the moon, like steel, slipped through the streets. At last Dawn came – in the sky hung a 1. (Fr.) ‘half past two’. 2. There are striking echoes in this account with KM’s later prose piece, ‘His Sister’s Keeper’ (see CW1, pp. 150–7). 3. A ‘threepenny bit’. In 1908 this was a very small silver coin, worth three old pence. Its diameter was just over 16 mm. 4. The ‘Gens d’armes’ (literally, ‘men-at-arms’) were pre-revolutionary armed forces. The word was modernised into its present usage, ‘gendarmes’, after the French Revolution in 1791, when the troops were made into a modern police force. KM is presumably playing with the etymology here.

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pink banner of cloud. It grew and widened until at last it touched the houses & fields – peered into the mirror. Dawn sat up in bed with a pink fascinator1 round her head. At the station sleepy officials shouted French French French, & then St. Lazare2 at last – a great platform – cold with the coldness of more than Winter. Observe me then dearest on the Newhaven platform wrapped in two coats and wooly gloves & furs, and eating a sugar bun as big as myself almost with the joy of the world. A rough sea journey is a strange conglomeration of sensations. I, in a moment seem caught by a thousand memories – am a child again, sitting on the deck in my Grandmother’s lap – and me in a red riding cloak – going over to Nelson, to Picton,3 to England for the first time & the second – – – It was frightfully rough. I lay still, perished with cold, & felt dreadful. Eventually Margaret & I succumbed to the fearful agonies of mal de mer, & the few hours seemed an eternity of time. What joy to reach Newhaven, to come up into the air & see the pale shadowed town, the lights shivering in the cold harbour, the gangway leading to land. I began to laugh & observe. Thursday week. Sylvia4 to tea with me. October 29th. Went to Mrs Charley Boyd5 & at last put my mind at rest. Now I must more definitely arrange my life. I’m being bad. Must send Sidney’s books. Must write Woodie.6 Kiwi 1. A fine but easily overlooked example of KM’s parodic talents. The dawn goddess Eos is traditionally referred to as having rosy fingers, a feature which is formulaic throughout Homer’s Odyssey. A fascinator is a decorative hair band or small hat. 2. The railway station in central Paris where trains from Dieppe and the other Normandy ports arrive. 3. KM is here recalling childhood boat trips to Nelson and Picton, the two northernmost ports of the South Island of New Zealand, to which ferries from Wellington sailed. See ‘The Voyage’ (CW2, pp. 372–9). 4. Sylvia Payne was a distant cousin, who became friendly with the Beauchamp sisters at Queen’s College, where she studied at the same time. 5. KM’s diary entries at this time reflect her fear that she might have become pregnant after a brief liaison with an unnamed man in Montevideo in early July 1908, following a stopover on her sea voyage back to England. It was clearly a relief to discover she was not in fact pregnant at this time. 6. ‘Woodie’ refers to Miss Clara Woods, the boarding house mistress (see above, p. 81).

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Arthur Symons. I wish to make a little selection for future reference – – –1 He drew the melody from the violin as one draws the perfume from a flower, with a kind of slumbrous ecstasy.2 Misunderstood isolation reading them like a cryptogrammatist he shuts me in upon a house of dreams, full of intimate & ghostly voices.3 In the music of Wagner there is that breadth & universality by which emotion ceases to be personal & becomes elemental.4 He stood, as the music seemed to foam about him, as a rock against which the foam beats.5 The music of Wagner has human blood in it. What Wagner tried to do is to unite mysticism and the senses, to render mysticism through the senses. That is what Rossetti tried to do in painting – that insatiable crying out of a carnal voice6. And that trilling of Chopin – the dew as well as the rain has a sound for him7. 1. The following passages are KM’s reading notes inspired by reading Arthur Symons’s essay collection, Plays, Acting, and Music (London: Duckworth, 1903). 2. Describing a performance by the violinist Eugène Ysaÿe of Beethoven’s ‘Kreutzer Sonata’, Symons comments: ‘As the music came, an invisible touch seemed to pass over it; but the eyelids and the eyebrows began to move, as if the eyes saw the sound, and were drawing it in luxuriously, with a kind of sleepy ecstasy, as one draws in perfume from a flower’ (‘Technique and the Artist’, p. 6). 3. From Symons’s ‘A Reflection at a Dolmetsch Concert’. He reflects that Arnold Dolmetsch, a specialist of ancient music, ‘has worked at misunderstood notations and found out a way of reading them like a cryptogrammatist’ (p. 13). Symons later observes, ‘this music seems to carry one out of the world, and shut one in upon a house of dreams, full of intimate and ghostly voices’ (p. 14). 4. In ‘A Reflection at a Dolmetsch Concert’, Symons compares the effects of listening to ancient music to those of listening to Wagner, ‘because it seems to me that Wagner, alone among quite modern musicians, and though indeed he appeals to our nerves more forcibly than any of them, has that breadth and universality by which emotion ceases to be merely personal and becomes elemental’ (p. 16). 5. In a separate chapter reviewing the actor Henry Irving’s theatrical performance in Coriolanus, Symons comments, ‘With every opportunity for extravagant gesture, he stood, as the play seemed to foam about him, like a rock against which the foam beats’ (p. 52). 6. KM is slightly condensing Symons’s comments in ‘Parsifal and the Pathetic Symphony’ (p. 66). 7. Describing the pianist Pachmann’s performances of Chopin, Symons notes, ‘The dew, as well as the raindrop, has a sound for him’ (p. 69).

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Parsifal – light Tristan – sea Ring – fire1 It is a sea change – the life of the foam on the edge of the depths.2 Caress you like the fur of a cat.3 We have blind vengeance, aged and helpless wisdom, we have the conflict of passions fighting in the dark, destroying what they desire most in the world.4 Strauss. Don Juan – passion & loneliness. All the notes of the music evaporated like bubbles.5 Oscar was a philosopher in masquerade. K.M.6 Memory is a garden and the flowers in it are imitation immortelles7 – everlasting flowers – dry as dust & leafless. K.M. It seems that every S. evening at nine o’clock I must go & meet you, my beloved. The sea cry is the desire of more abundant life, of unlimited freedom, of an unknown ecstasy.8 You do not necessarily get to your destination by taking the right turning at the beginning of the journey.9 Even the American daughter might take her Mother to see it without compromising the innocence of old age.10 1. In ‘Parsifal and the Pathetic Symphony’, Symons notes, ‘Wagner takes his rhythms from the sea, as in “Tristan,” from fire, as in parts of the “Ring”, from light, as in “Parsifal”’ (p. 67). 2. From ‘Pachmann and the Piano’ (p. 69). 3. Describing Chopin’s music, Symons says, ‘The notes sob and shiver, stab you like a knife, caress you like the fur of a cat; and are beautiful sound, the most beautiful sound that has been called out of the piano’ (p. 70). 4. Symons, describing Pelléas and Mélisande in the chapter ‘Maeterlinck’ (p. 72). 5. Symons, in ‘Music, Staging, and Some Acting’ (p. 80). 6. Despite what the initials suggest, this comment too is from Symons, in the chapter ‘Literary Drama’ (p. 95). 7. From Symons’s essay, ‘Some Plays and the Public’, reviewing Memory’s Garden, by Albert Chevalier and Tom Gallon. Symons says, ‘There was a queer sentence in it somewhere, rather to this effect: “Memory is a garden and the flowers in it are immortal”. Well, in the play we get the weeds along with the flowers’ (Symons, p. 106). The comment that follows is KM’s. 8. The first sentence is KM’s but the entry then shifts into indirect quotation. In the chapter ‘An Actress and a Play’, Symons discusses a memorable performance of Ibsen’s Lady of the Sea, observing, ‘The sea calls to the blood of this woman, who has married into an island home; and the sea-cry, which is the desire of more abundant life, of unlimited freedom, of an unknown ecstasy, takes form in a vague Stranger’ (p. 129). 9. Symons, in ‘Drama: Professional and Unprofessional’ (p. 137). 10. Symons, in ‘M. Capus in England’ (p. 140). KM has added ‘old’ before ‘age’.

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The thought had taken fire & become a kind of passion.1 Mozart music sans le désir, content with beauty. It has the fine lines of a Durer picture or of Botticelli, compared with the Titian splendour of Wagner.2 There is the romantic suggestion of magic in this beauty.3 ––––––––––––––––––––––– Maeterlinck4 Was this the face that launched a thousand ships And burnt the topless towers of Ilium.5 Mes mains dans les votres.6 Les Lettres Mortes7

[Notebook 39, qMS–1243]

December 21st 1908. I should like to write a life much in the style of Walter Pater’s ‘Child in the House’.8 About a girl in Wellington; the singular charm and barrenness of that place, with climatic effects – wind, rain, spring, 1. Symons, evoking the music of Brahms in ‘The Meiningen Orchestra’ (p. 184). 2. Describing Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Symons says it is ‘music without desire, music content with beauty, and to be itself. If has the firm outlines of Dürer or of Botticelli, with the same constraint within a fixed form, if one compares it with the Titian-like freedom and splendour of Wagner’ (‘Mozart in the Mirabell-Garten’, p. 191). 3. Symons, in ‘An Apology for Puppets’ (p. 196). 4. As well as including two reviews of his works, Symons’s volume is dedicated ‘To Maurice Maeterlinck, in friendship and in admiration’. 5. These words are spoken by Faust in Christopher Marlowe’s (1564–93) Doctor Faustus (1589), when he is first presented by Mephistopheles to Helen; they are quoted by Symons in his review ‘Faust at the Lyceum’ (p. 115). 6. (Fr.) ‘My hands in yours’. In her book, Katherine Mansfield: The Memories of LM (London: Michael Joseph, 1971), Ida Baker provides the context for this quotation. KM and her sisters had gone to Brussels with their Aunt Belle, where they met up with the Trowell brothers and their friend Rudolph. Baker writes, ‘Katherine had a charming post-card photograph taken there, of which she sent me a copy, inscribed ‘mes mains dans les vôtres’; a little flourish of French to convey the taste of the journey’ (p. 32). 7. (Fr.) ‘Dead Letters’. 8. Walter Pater (1839–1903) was a highly influential essayist, art critic and writer, whose works were revered by the Aesthetic Movement, and notably Oscar Wilde. The Child in the House: An Imaginary Portrait (1894) is thought to be mostly autobiographical.

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night, the sea, the cloud pageantry. And then to leave the place and go to Europe, to live there a dual existence – to go back and be utterly disillusioned, to find out the truth of all, to return to London, to live there an existence so full & so strange that Life itself seemed to greet her, and, ill to the point of death, return to W & die there. 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. I should call it ‘Strife’, & the child I should call – Ah, I have it – I’d make her a half caste Maori & call her Maata. Bring into it Warbrick the guide.1 Expenses. Tarts Luggage carrier Buns Luggage carrier bread & buns

£

s 6

2

0

d 6 6 9

1. Warbrick was the guide on the Urewera camping trip, which took place in 1907. (See above for KM’s notes taken during the trip.)

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[Notebook 8, qMS–1245]

P.A. Vaile, 29a Charing Cross Road, W.C. 6–6.30 130 Fleet Street. Friday – Bath [?] Saturday – Sunday 3, Albert Hall.1 Monday Tuesday – Aunt Annie [?] Wed: Thursd: Friday: Saturd: Dr Saleeby.2 Sunday: Write Mrs Galloway, and Edith [. . .] letters. Send one copy. Veronal.3 It was the freedom of those days – the knowledge that an she would she could shake from her all the self-forged chains & banish all, & pillow her head in her Mother’s lap. All that irretrievably gone now. Song of the Cabbage Tree.4 The knot of Flax.5 1. The Royal Albert Hall in London. 2. It was at the home of Dr Caleb Saleeby, a well-known popular-science writer, that KM first met George Bowden, whom she married on 2 March 1909. 3. Veronal was a commonly used, powerful sedative that was introduced in the early 1900s. 4. There are various types of cordyline shrubs or trees, commonly known as cabbage trees in New Zealand. See KM’s poem, ‘Song of the Little White Girl’ (CW3, p. 47). 5. See KM’s poem, ‘She has thrown me the knotted flax’ (CW3, p. 89).

102

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Then [. . ..] Eta Eta Eta.1 I have a perfectly frantic desire to write something really fine, and an inability to do so which is infinitely distressing, as you may imagine. However let’s make the attempt even though it should come to nothing at all great . . .To long for chains, and once securely bound This woman calls the March 14th This almost mad hunger to work is gnawing at me. It was as though some insidious & terrible worm ate & ate at my heart – a frightful & intolerable agony overcomes me. I feel that I must be alone or die, that a book has got to be conceived & written. But the difficulty is that I am not yet free enough to give myself uninterrupted hours. Oh how damnable it is – for at last I shall be able to write quelque chose worth writing. I want to realise a far Horizon – it’s not so tremendously difficult, & I could surely do it excellently well. [Notebook 2, qMS–1244]

1799–18502 Balzac. ‘La passion est toute l’humanité.’ In him, as in all great artists, there is something more than nature – a divine excess, an over plus.4 His supreme passion is the passion of Will. His creations are full of fire – each man & each woman called by name responds as does King Lear or Hamlet. He is concerned with the senses through the intellect. His style is by no means perfect – the stylist sees life through coloured 3

1. (Maori) an address or greeting. 2. KM is noting the lifespan of Balzac here. All the following entries are taken from or inspired by Arthur Symons’s Studies in Prose and Verse (1904) or The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899). 3. Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) is considered one of the masters of the French novel, excelling in historical romances and realism. He was also a renowned art critic, literary critic and playwright. This quotation is given twice by Symons in the same chapter, once in French, once in English. Symons notes, ‘All Balzac is in that phrase’ (p. 9). 4. In the chapter on Balzac, Symons notes, ‘And so in him, as in all the great artists, there is something more than nature, a divine excess. This something more than nature should be the aim of the artist.’ The note ‘an over plus’ is added by KM.

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glasses.1 Balzac deals in the elemental passions & desires, and money is with him a symbol, not an entity. Here is the thesis of the Human Comedy.2 First effects Second causes Third Principles3 Essai sur les forces humaines.4 Filled with the joy of creation he lived most vividly. He loved 2 women, the second whom he married, Madame de Hanska, was the Beatrice to his Dante.5 Balzac is colossal. Prosper Mérimée. attendrissement une fois par an.6 ‘In history I care only for anecdotes.’7 There is always with him this union of curiosity with indifference – student curiosity; the indifference of the man of the world.8 De Quincy – a tangled attempt to communicate the incommunicable – his narrative like a worm turning back upon itself as it moves. His prose is shouted from the platform.9 1. These notes summarise some of Symons’s lavish praise of Balzac, rather than quote him. Here, for example, Symons states, ‘A novelist with style will look at life with an entirely naked vision. He sees through coloured glasses’ (pp. 17–18). 2. Symons writes, ‘He realised, as the Greeks did, that human life is made up of elemental passions and necessity; but he was the first to realise that in the modern world the pseudonym of necessity is money. Money and passions rule the world of the “Human Comedy”’ (p. 13). On page 23, he notes, ‘In the modern world, as he himself realised more clearly than any one, money is more often a symbol than an entity, and it can be the symbol of every desire.’ 3. Symons writes, ‘Then, after the effects and the causes, come the Etudes analytiques, to which the Physiologie du mariage belongs, for, after the effects and the causes, one should add the principles’ (p. 9). 4. Discussed by Symons (p. 9). 5. Paraphrased from Symons (p. 23). The final note, although very much in keeping with Symons’s thesis, is KM’s addition. 6. (Fr.) ‘emotionally moved once a year’. 7. From Symons’s chapter on Prosper Mérimée (pp. 29–30). Prosper Mérimée (1803–70) was a French novelist who gradually moved from literature to history and archaeology. He described his literary technique as ‘une esthétique du peu’, i.e. aesthetics on a slight scale, or with small means. 8. Symons, ‘Prosper Mérimée’ (p. 37). 9. Symons, from the chapter ‘A Word on De Quincey (pp. 48, 49). ‘Shouted from the platform’ is Mansfield’s summary. Symons’s words for the final reference are, ‘as if it were delivered from the pulpit’ (p. 49). Thomas de Quincey (1785–1859) was a British writer commonly associated with the early Romantics. He is best remembered now for his Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1822).

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Nathaniel Hawthorne – he is with Tolstoi the only novelist of the soul. He is concerned with what is abnormal– ‘was plucked up out of a mystery and had its roots still clinging to him.’ His people are dreams, sometimes faintly conscious that they dream. He too often substitutes fancy for imagination. ‘His feeling for flowers was very exquisite & seemed not so much a taste as an emotion.’ Writes with his nerves – White Magic.1 Walter Pater – an exquisite fineness, ‘reve le miracle d’une prose poetique musicale sans rhythme et sans rime.’ ‘Philosophy is a systematic appreciation of a kind of music in the very nature of things’ (Plato & Platonism)2 R.L.S. A literary vagrant. True style is not the dress, but the flesh of the thought. ‘He awakens the eternal spirit of romance even in the bosom of the conventional.’3 Flaubert. Nous ne suivons plus la meme route, nous ne navignons plus dans la même nacelle. Moi je ne cherche pas le port, mais la haute mer.4 [Notebook 39, qMS–1243]

Now it would be colossally interesting if I could only write a really good novel. Something unusual that would surely catch on – a trifle 1. Symons, from the chapter ‘Nathaniel Hawthorne’ (pp. 52, 58 and 62). Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–64) was an American short-story writer and novelist. 2. From the chapter ‘Walter Pater’. The quotation in French is inserted by Symons, quoting Baudelaire (‘He dreams of the miracle of musically poetic prose without rhythm and rhyme’) (p. 65). KM abbreviates Symons’s quotation from Pater’s Plato and Platonism, which reads, ‘Philosophy itself indeed, as he [Plato] conceives it, is but the systematic appreciation of a kind of music in the very nature of things’ (p. 74). (For note on Pater, see above, p. 100.) 3. From Symons’s chapter, ‘Robert Louis Stevenson’ (pp. 77, 80, 81). R. L. Stevenson (1850–94) was a Scottish writer and novelist, best known for Treasure Island (1883), Kidnapped (1886) and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). 4. Extract from Flaubert’s letter to his formerly close friend, Maxime du Camp, announcing the separation of their ways, made inevitable by Du Camp pursuing his writerly ambitions in literary journalism while Flaubert wished to pursue his aesthetic projects with the novel. The full extract reads, ‘We are no longer heading in the same direction, we are not in the same vessel anymore. May God lead each of us where he wishes to go. I am not seeking the port, I want the high seas. Should I end up getting ship-wrecked, you have my permission not to mourn’ (Correspondence, II, p. 122).

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outré in the main – something that would make me really famous. Let’s see!!! K sat on the rug. High in the dingy tenement house the sick lay So my poor Aunt Harriet is dead with Bright’s disease and heart failure. I am so sorry, but what is to be done? In the train. Liverpool. I am in a carriage with fier männe.1 An old [. . .] with a look of a Will Owen2 bargee, a blue & white striped necktie – he is stamped with the impress of labor. Opposite, a younger one – great square ears, a stupid receding chin, a nose like an ill-bred dog. Both men carry baskets covered down with black American cloth. One is quite talkative, the other relegates his conversational powers to ‘ay’. At Hereford a man & a woman enter & sit opposite me & never do I see them without bundles [of] violets & maiden hair and a little asparagas fern. What I notice most of them is their unfinished look, a half formed look, a lack of curse or grace. His enormous tan boots & purple hands, a cut finger bound with a soiled cloth. His tiepin a horseshoe with a racing whip through the centre. The woman blushes – her hair is shockingly overdressed; he has presumably suffered from boils on the neck. Both have very bad [. . .] What can she talk of – they are to me hardly human. I know I repel them – I feel it. Now they go out & a woman comes in with two children, a plain woman with scraped back hair & a pink silk scarf. The boy is Jo. The little girl, her face burnt red in the sun – she has hand knitted socks & little leather boots & smiles – such a merry face. She bosses & drives the little boy. And a man enters the carriage, very fair & full blooded – he reads a book of Meat Inspection, I the poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti – the Fleshly School of Poetry.3 Night. J’attends pour la premiere fois dans ma vie le crise de ma vie.4 As I wait, a flock of sheep pass down the street in the moonlight. I 1. (Ger.) ‘four men’. 2. Will Owen (1869–1957) was an illustrator and cartoonist, who contributed regularly to the Strand magazine. He was renowned for his comic renderings of life on the ports and docks: fishermen, ‘old salts’ and barge workers. 3. The Fleshly School of Poetry was a scathing label used in 1871 by the Scottish poet Robert Buchanan, to castigate the sensual aesthetics of late-nineteenthcentury decadent poets. 4. (Fr.) ‘For the first time ever, I await the crisis of my life.’

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hear the cracking [of] the whip & behind the dark heavy cart – like a death cart, il me semble. And all in this sacrificial light. I look lovely. I do not fear, I only feel. I pray the dear Lord I have not waited too long for my soul hungers as my body all day has hungered & cried for him. Ah come now – soon. Each moment, il me semble, is a moment of supreme danger, but this man I love with all my heart. The other I do not even care about. It comes. I go to bed. It is the evening of Good Friday; the day of all the year surely the most significant. I always always feel the nail prints in my hands, the sickening thirst in my throat, the agony of Jesus. He is surely not dead and surely all whom we love who have died are close to us – Grandmother and Jesus & all of them. Oh, lend me your aid – I thirst too, I hang upon the cross. Let me be crucified so that I may cry ‘it is finished’. [Journal, 1954, p. 39]

I cannot say it now. Maybe I shall be able to, much later. In an agony I shall suddenly express myself. It is the joy of self-expression. [Notebook 39, qMS–1243]

In the train to Harwich. I am afraid I really am not at all myself – so here I am – I took a drug this afternoon & slept until after five – then Ida woke me – Still half asleep & terribly tired I packed – had some supper – M. most excited at the prospect of me going away again & still on the spur of the moment, I take the train to Liv. S.S.1 bought a 2nd class ticket & here I am – tired out still but unable to sleep. The carriage is full – but Garnie I feel that I am going home.2 To escape England it is my great desire – I loathe England. It is a dark night full of rain. There is a little child opposite me in a red cloak sleeping. She shakes her hair much as Dolly3 did when I was a girl in Brussels so many years ago4 – Everybody sleeps but I – The train shatters through the darkness. I wear a green silk scarf & a dark brown hat with a burst of dull pink velvet. I travel under the name of Mrs K. Bendall – Morning in the Bruxelles – I have slept splendidly – taken a small brandy & soda before turning in – and now feel almost better, though 1. 2. 3. 4.

Liverpool Street Station in London. Directly addressing Garnet Trowell, Thomas Trowell’s brother. Dolly was the Trowell brothers’ younger sister. Here KM is recalling another journey to Brussels in April 1906 where the Trowell twins were studying music. The Beauchamp sisters were accompanied by their aunt, Belle Dyer.

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I have still that intolerable headache which has haunted me – I sit in the ladies cabin on my hat box washed & dressed & very evidently amused – at everybody – I have just washed & brushed my hair. The people. Oh the fat lady in pink wool – ye Gods – & the other pious old English governess – who intends staying at a convent just outside Brussels – Everybody thinks I am French – I must go to Cooks & see about everything. 29th April – In this room. Almost before this is written I shall read it from another room and such is Life. Packed again I leave for London. Shall I ever be a happy woman again. Je ne pense pas, je ne veux pas.1 Oh to be in New York. Hear me, I can’t rest – that’s the agonizing part. ’Tis a sweet day, Brother, but I see it not. My body is so self conscious – Je pense of all the frightful things possible – ‘all this filthiness’ – Sick at heart till I am physically sick – with no home – no place in which I can hang up my hat – & say here I belong – for there is no such place in the wide world for me. But attendez – you must not eat, & you had better not sleep! No good looking ‘fit’ & feeling dead. In the train to Anvers. I love Belgium for I love green & mauve. I wonder when I shall sit & read aloud to my little son. [MS–Papers–4006–01]

Just as she was making some tea he came in & she called, going to the door & seeing him standing in the passage. ‘Hullo’ they said – he came in. She said, like some tea? Yes he would: he’d met Joe Simpson out – she must meet Joe.2 They drank tea out of bowls & started talking & smoking. He told her his life – she told him hers. She went over to the window & leaned out. Come over here. He saw the sea & a ship – yes, so did she – it moved: with sails. They leaned from the window & talked – a great deal. Then she said – I’m going to bed – goodnight. Goodnight. You would like a big coat? No, thanks – at any rate I’ve got mine. But how charming he looked! With his great umbrella furled – and walking like a God.

1. (Fr.) ‘I don’t think so, and I don’t want to.’ 2. This entry is on a loose sheet of paper that Murry has dated 1911 in the Journal.

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[Notebook 2, qMS–1244]

‘Whatever actually occurs is spoiled for Art’. Wilde – in his essay on Wainwright says ‘It is only the Philistine who seeks to measure a personality by the vulgar test of production. Life itself is an Art’.1 ‘A truth in art is that which [is] contradictory is also true.’ Wilde, as Symons so aptly says, was the ‘supreme artist in intellectual attitudes’.2 To the Italian, Love ‘comes from a root in Boccaccio, through the stem of Petrarch, to the flower of Dante.’ And so he becomes the idealist of material things, instead of the materialist of spiritual things – like Wilde – and after Beardsley the spirit is known only through the body – the body is but clay in the shaping or destroying hands of the spirit. ‘Soul & senses, senses & soul’ – here is the innate spirit of Henry Wotton, here is the quintessence of Wilde’s life,3 of Dowson,4 and of Arthur Symons two most vitally interesting books of Poems. To Pater this did not so exactly apply, yet there is a very real sensuousness in his earliest Portraits – a certain voluptuous pleasure in garden scents. ‘Well, nature is immoral. Birth is a grossly sexual thing – – – Death is a grossly physical thing’.5

1. Notes from Symons’s chapter, ‘An Artist in Attitude: Oscar Wilde’, in Studies in Prose and Verse (pp. 125, 126, 127–8). 2. The closing statement of Symons’s chapter on Wilde in Studies in Prose and Verse (p. 128). 3. Notes and summaries from ‘Gabriele d’Annunzio’ in Studies in Prose and Verse. The comparisons (with Wilde, Beardsley, Henry Wotton, Wilde) are all added by KM. 4. Symons’s Studies in Prose and Verse includes a detailed chapter on Ernest Dowson (pp. 261–78), which starts by noting ‘The death of Ernest Dowson will mean very little to the world at large, but it will mean a great deal to the few people who care passionately for poetry’ (p. 261). Towards the end, Symons claims that ‘Dowson could never have developed; he had already said in his first book of verse all that he had to say’ (p. 278). 5 Notes from Symon’s essay on D’Annunzio, including the slightly misquoted claim, after discussing the beauty, ugliness and unrestrained physicality of his verse This is one of the things which people mean when they say that d’Annunzio’s writing is immoral. Well, nature is immoral. Birth is a grossly sexual thing, death is a brutally physical thing, the ending, certainly, of the animal, whatever may remain over, inside that white forehead in which the brain has stopped working. (p. 130)

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The Renaissance cultivated personality as we cultivate orchids – striving after a heightening of natural beauty which is not nature – a perversity which may be poisonous –1 – ‘K.M. says the intensity of an action is its truth’. ‘Not everyone can become the artist of his own life, or have the courage to go his own way’. D’Annunzio cannot imagine beauty without a pattern.2 Is a thing the expression of an individuality?3 Mallarmé. ‘La chair est triste, hélas! et j’ai lu tous les livres.’4 For the principles of Art are eternal – the principles of Morality ebb and flow even with the climate. Whatever I find in Humanity is part of the eternal substance which nature wears for Art to combine into a beautiful pattern.5 The Moods of Men. Whatever has existed has achieved the right to artistic existence. But experience is not everything. Much depends on the experimentalist. Formal art is so apt to be the enemy of artists – Symons.6 Mérimée has les idées très arrêtées.7 The artist becomes an artist by the intensification of Memory8 – extraneous. It is the clear sighted sensitiveness of a man who watches human things closely, bringing them home to himself with the deliberate essaying art of an actor who has to represent a particular passion in movement!9 1. Slightly truncated quotation from the same essay on D’Annunzio (p. 130). 2. Symons’s chapter reads, ‘In a monk’s cell, or with dim eyes, he would have created nothing; he would never have been able to imagine beauty without a pattern’ (p. 136). The other jottings here are not in Symons. 3. Symons’s text reads, ‘Is a thing beautiful? [D’Annunzio] asks; is it the expression of an individuality?’ (p. 139). 4. The closing words of the chapter on d’Annunzio are ‘It is only at the end of a long day fully enjoyed, that an uneasy thought comes to him, and that he seems to say with Mallarmé: “La chair est triste, hélas! et j’ai lu tous les livres”.’ (Fr.) ‘Flesh is sad, alas, and I have read all there is to read.’ 5. From Symons’s ‘Preface to the Second Edition of London Nights’, included as the penultimate chapter in Studies in Prose and Verse (p. 284). 6. Ideas developed at the end of Symons’s ‘Preface’, quoted above. The final paragraph begins ‘The moods of men!’ and its closing words are ‘whatever has existed has achieved the right of artistic existence’ (p. 285). The reflection that ‘formal art is the enemy of the artist’ is from the chapter ‘Conclusion: The Choice’ (p. 290). 7. (Fr.) ‘very strong views’. From Symons’s chapter on Prosper Mérimée (p. 28). 8. ‘Prosper Mérimée’ (p. 32). 9. ‘Prosper Mérimée’ (p. 37).

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Now I really do want to write. Here is silence – peace – save for the dull murmur of the sea – the sea, almost as Little Paul knew it.1 There is the island – the sea ripples up against the beach so passive, so beautiful. Ah! Quelle joie. Zola defines Art as nature seen through a temperament (drives in a victoria to see the peasants).2 Maupassant – his abundant vitality. Great artists are those who can make men see their particular illusion. (That is true with limitations.)3 Balzac. The partisans of analysis describe minutely the state of the soul – the secret motives of every action – as being of infinitely greater importance than the action itself. The partisans of objectivity give us the result of the evolution without describing the secret processes. He makes his characters so demean themselves that their slightest gesture shall be the expression of their souls. So there is more colour. It is a portrait, but the flesh covers the bones.4 He was trained under the severe eye of Flaubert.5

1. In Charles Dickens’s novel, Dombey and Son, the sickly child Paul is sent to the coast with his beloved sister in the hope that this will restore him to full health. The lull of the sea remains one of Little Paul’s most cherished memories. 2. From ‘A Note on Zola’s Method’ in Symons’s Studies in Prose and Verse (pp. 161, 162). The French novelist and journalist Emile Zola (1840–1902) was one of the leading figures of French naturalism, and a best-selling author in France in the 1880s–1890s; many of his works were censored in Great Britain at the time, however. His fame spread when he published his famous ‘j’accuse’ article in 1898, denouncing the blatant anti-Semitism, judicial corruption and political connivance that had surrounded the trial and condemnation of Alfred Dreyfus, wrongly accused of espionage. 3. Notes inspired by the chapter ‘Guy de Maupassant’ in Symons’s Studies in Prose and Verse (pp. 97–107). 4. Reading notes inspired by Maupassant’s ‘Introduction: The Novel’ (see above, p. 88), and the two chapters on Balzac and Maupassant. Symons’s chapter, ‘Guy de Maupassant’, includes the reflections, ‘Trained under the severe eye of the impeccable Flaubert, he owed infinitely, no doubt, to that training’ (p. 282). 5. Gustave Flaubert (1821–80) was one of the foremost French novelists of the nineteenth century, and is deemed one of the champions of realism. His most lasting contributions to the evolution of the novel were in his intricate attention to psychological realism and introspection, and his craftsmanship as a literary stylist, notably in the use of inner monologue and shifting centres of consciousness.

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‘The light soul of the champagne flew off in tiny bubbles.’1 Philosophy of George Meredith2 Memoirs of the 18th Century. Paston3 I wish indeed that I had a fountain pen. I won’t be able to write anything else all day because I feel like an exhausted being. As though all the energy has left me after that one splendid burst of it. [Notebook 8, qMS–1245]

Why can I not write a happy story, very much in the style of The Love Episode4 or The Soul of Milly Green.5 Let me think out a really fine plot and then slog at it and get it ended today. It would do me worlds of good & Sidney would be so delighted. Come, surely that is not hard! Something a little sonoro,6 for, why I cannot tell, I’m rather good at that style of thing. Have a child in it – a wunderkind. Have a coffee stall in it. ‘sleepy eyes and a poisonous voice.’

1. Slightly abridged quotation from Maupassant’s novella, Pierre et Jean, which Symons does not discuss. The full sentence reads, ‘He sat looking at his glass full of the clear and luminous liquor while its light soul, its intoxicating soul, flew off in tiny bubbles mounting from its depths in hurried succession to die on the surface.’ 2. Possibly a reference to G. M. Trevelan’s Poetry and Philosophy of George Meredith, published in 1906. 3. George Paston’s Little Memoirs of the Eighteenth Century was published by Grant Richards in 1910. George Paston was the pseudonym of the British writer and literary critic Emily Morse Symonds (1860–1936). 4. Probably a reference to Zola’s A Love Episode, translated by Vitezelly in 1895. At the same time that KM was thinking of Zola’s novel, and at the height of her misery over her pregnancy, she wrote her short story, ‘A Little Episode’ (see CW2, pp. 538–44). The narrative conveys KM’s bitterness and disillusion following the musician Garnet Trowell’s abandoning of her when pregnant, and her brief relationship with George Bowden, her husband of convenience. 5. The Soul of Milly Green is a novel by Mrs Harold E. Gorst, published in 1907. Mrs Nina C. F. Gorst (1869–1926) was a novelist and playwright, who published under the name of her husband, a song-writer, journalist and conservative educationalist. 6. (It.) ‘sonorous, resounding, grandiose’.

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Now I really must continue with this. It’s not so hard as it first sight appears, at least I don’t think so. Come let me start.1 Golden Tulips.2 It is only interesting in that I make it psychological & place the school say at Harley Street.3 Oh, Käthe, je veux ecrire quelque chose d’immense mais c’est bien difficile4 – even so. Death is preferable to barrenness. Much in your idea of a good book. Born in New Zealand in Wgtn, describing the storm, the esplanade, the bedroom, then old Mrs Macpanaty[?] the M. dies at birth so the child is brought up by the grandmother. The Father a shrewd man of busines – no other children. The journey to the country & cousins, Aunt Miriam. Private school life, and journey to England with the Father. Left there at college, meeting with Beatrice. His Mother’s house in Carlton Hill and he lives there alone with an old servant, a man who knows them both. I must really formulate some more of this plan – it seems that I can go no further which is manifestly absurd. [MS–Papers–4729 ts]

Whit Monday. Hotel Marquardt, Stuttgart. Dearest,5 There is so much to tell you of, and yet all my impressions seem to be put into a lolly bag and jumbled up together – sticking together, even, yet – the yellow against the green! You know. Take one? And here is Holland green with meadows gilt-edged with buttercups, with children 1. These words appear in the middle of the story, ‘He met her again on the Pier at Eastbourne’ (CW1, pp. 143–6). The phrase above it appears just before the beginning of the story. 2. On the same page of the original manuscript is a poem called ‘Scarlet Tulips’ (see CW3, p. 89). 3. The school KM attended in London, Queen’s College, was in Harley Street. 4. (Fr.) ‘Oh, Käthe, I want to write something immense, but it’s so difficult.’ 5. Another diary entry in the form of a letter, or indeed a draft of a real letter, the final version of which has not been traced. It would appear to be addressed to Garnet Trowell and was apparently written during KM’s journey to Bavaria, accompanied by her mother.

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in wooden shoes, with cows, with windmills, and Rotterdam – full of canals and bridges – of light and sweetness. And even arriving – this is one on the top – at the Hook of Holland, seeing the dawn break into the sky in a wave of gold. Take another – Wiesbaden 4.30 p.m. We are at the station. I am remembering Rudy.1 Ah, how hot it is! We drink something red that foams out of a bottle in an ice-pail. And did you realise that to arrive here one must pass through the Rhine valley – see the castles – river – Lorelei2 – all – all. I have heard many people cry their disappointment over the Rhine. Maybe that accounted for my joy in it – in vineclad hills – in pink Nussbaüme3 – in the castles high up on the rocks, and the river seeming to unroll before you like an old faded tapestry – all set in and wrought with medieval charm. It was ‘beautiful beyond compare’ – the villages at the river-side – you see the patterned roofs – you see a certain painstaking patching of the hills – mauve, green, dully blue. You see the woods – the rivers – the gardens, blossomful – you hear the people. And here is Frankfort – Mainz – Coblenz – Coin (Nach Kevlaar) – Bonn and Heidelborg, where a real live Carl Heinz boarded our train – all sword-slashed and be-ribboned and feeling very lovely. At the German frontier, where all the baggage was examined – after it was done I went out of the station and ran down a little path and looked over a fence. Lilac filled the air – it seemed almost smudged with lilac, washed in with it – laburnum tantalizing, fairy purses of it – may – and a child with a brown neck and a little blue overall – so checked that I felt he must have some connection with a railway official and, on account of his size, got muddled with the railway tickets – Oh, but a beautiful child! – peeked through the railings. [MS–Papers–4006–01]

A.C.F. Letter.

Night

It is at last over – this wearisome day, and dusk is beginning to sift in among the branches of the drenched chestnut tree. I think I must have caught cold in my beautiful exultant walk yesterday, for today I am ill. After I wrote to you I began to work but could not – and so

1. Rudolph was a musician and one of Arnold Trowell’s friends, whom KM met in Brussels. He committed suicide in the same year. The unfinished story, ‘Juliet’, includes a cynical character called Rudolph (see CW1, pp. 37–62). 2. The Lorelei is a rocky outcrop above the Rhine near St Goarshausen. In German folklore, it is also the name of a water nymph, or Nixe, whose songs distract those who navigate in the river waters and lead them to their peril. 3. (Ger.) ‘walnut tree’.

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cold. Fancy wearing 2 pairs of stockings and 2 coats – & a hot water bottle in June and shivering . . . I think it is the pain that makes me shiver and feel dizzy. To be alone all day, ill, in a house whose every sound seems foreign to you – and to feel a terrible confusion in your body which affects you mentally, suddenly pictures for you detestable incidents – revolting personalities – which you only shake off – to find recurring again as the pain seems to diminish & grow worse – Alas! I shall not walk with bare feet in wild woods again – not until I have grown accustomed to the climate . . . The only adorable thing I can imagine is for my Grandmother to put me to bed – & bring me a bowl of hot bread & milk & standing, her hands folded – the left thumb over the right – and say in her adorable voice:– ‘There darling – isn’t that nice’. Oh, what a miracle of happiness that would be. To wake later to find her turning down the bedclothes to see if your feet were cold – & wrapping them up in a little pink singlet softer than a cat’s fur . . . Alas! Some day when I am asked – ‘Mother where was I born’ and I answer – ‘In Bavaria, dear’, I shall feel again I think this coldness – physical mental – heart coldness – hand coldness – soul coldness. Beloved1 – I am not so sad tonight – it is only that I feel desperately the need of speech – the conviction that you are present . . . that is all. Sunday morning. Yet another Sunday. What has this day not brought us both. For me it is full of sweetness and anguish. Glasgow – Liverpool – Carlton Hill – Our Home.2 It is raining again today – just a steady, persistent rain that seems to drift one from one memory to the other. When I had finished my letter to you I went down to supper – drank a little soup, and the old Doctor next me – suddenly said ‘Please go to bed now’ & I went like a lamb & drank some hot milk. It was a night of agony & when I felt morning was at last come I lighted a candle – looked at the watch & found it was just a quarter to twelve! Now I know what it is to fight a drug – Veronal was on the table by my bed – oblivion – deep sleep – think of it! But I did not take any. Now I am up and dressed – propping [Journal, 1954, p. 42]

Wörishofen: Bayern: July 4, 1909. Far in a western brookland That bred me long ago

1. Diary entry addressed to Garnet Trowell, even though he had by now ended their relationship. 2. All places associated with Garnet Trowell.

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1909 The poplars stand and tremble By pools I used to know. . . .

He hears: long since forgotten In fields where I was known, Here I lie down in London And turn to rest alone.1 Ich muss streiten um vergessen zu können; ich muss bekämpfen, um mich selbst wieder achten zu können. Ich muss mich nützlich machen, um wieder an das Leben glauben zu können. Ich will arbeiten, ich will mit dem Glück, um die Zufriedenheit kämpfen. Wir mussen jeder allein sein – allein arbeiten, allein kämpfen, um unsere Kraft, unsere Opferwilligkeit zu beweisen.2 [NLC]

Being the list of Virtues & Vices appertaining to Miss Bartrick-Baker3 I.

a supreme sense of justice gained by careful and unbiased reflection on all things. II. A capacity for feeling very deeply. III. A tendency to be a little too hard on the average faulty creature. IV. A great tendency to underestimate her merits. 1. Stanzas one and three of sequence 52 in A. E. Housman’s best-known poem, ‘A Shropshire Lad’ (1896). The third stanza is slightly misquoted: line one reads, ‘He hears: no more remembered.’ Alfred Edward Housman (1859–1936) was an English poet and classics scholar, whose romantic portrayals of the countryside and lyrical pessimism were particularly popular in the 1910s. 2. (Ger.) ‘I must fight back so as to forget. I must struggle to be able to respect myself again. I must make myself useful so as to believe in life again. I want to work, I will with luck strive for satisfaction. We must each be alone – work alone, struggle alone, to prove our strength and our sacrifice.’ 3. Vere Bartrick-Baker, also known as Mimi, was one of KM’s close friends at Queen’s College. She is generally believed to have inspired the character ‘Pearl’ in KM’s unfinished novel, ‘Juliet’ (see CW1, pp. 37–61). It was to Vere that KM turned, towards the end of her time in Bavaria, asking for advice about her relationship with Floryan Sobieniowski, a Polish émigré, with whom she was having an intense affair; hence her appearance in KM’s notebooks at this time.

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She is a little too inclined to taking so great an interest in the truly Great of the World that she forgets to be great herself, & she would be if she had determined to. She is jealous, yes very jealous. She is broad minded, very, & decidedly clever. She is sympathetic, very much so in theory & practise, but the theory is greater than the practise. She is altogether very different to this old Black Sheep of a creature, who breaks promises & is altogether a great bore!!

Here endeth this list. Que pensez-vous? Moi, je ne sais pas.1 Kathie.

1. (Fr.) ‘What do you think? I really don’t know.’

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1910

[Journal, 1953, pp. 45–8]

Along the Gray’s Inn Road.1 Over an opaque sky grey clouds moving heavily like the wings of tired birds. Wind blowing: in the naked light buildings and people appear suddenly grotesque – too sharply modelled, maliciously tweaked into being. A little procession wending its way up the Gray’s Inn Road. In front, a man between the shafts of a hand-barrow that creaks under the weight of a piano-organ and two bundles. The man is small and greenish brown, head lolling forward, face covered with sweat. The piano-organ is bright red, with a blue and gold ‘dancing picture’ on either side. The bundle is a woman. You see only a black mackintosh topped with a sailor hat; the little bundle she holds has chalkwhite legs and yellow boots dangling from the loose ends of the shawl. Followed by two small boys, who walk with short steps, staring intensely at the ground, as though afraid of stumbling over their feet. No word is spoken; they never raise their eyes. And this silence and preoccupation gives to their progress a strange dignity. They are like pilgrims straining forward to Nowhere, dragging, and holding to, and following after that bright red, triumphant thing with the blue and gold ‘dancing picture’ on either side.

1. Gray’s Inn Road is in Camden, in central London.

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1911

[Journal, 1954, pp. 45–8]

September 6, 1911, Wednesday1 Michael came yesterday afternoon and asked me for Black Opal.2 I quickly took Black Opal off my finger. He was dressed in pale grey with that delightful vivid tie. I promised to see him later at Queen’s Hall – yes, yes, I wished to go. When the bells were striking five the Man came to see me. He gathered me up in his arms and carried me to the Black Bed. Very brown and strong was he. . . . It grew dark. I crouched against him like a wild cat. Quite impersonally I admired my silver stockings bound beneath the knee with spiked ribbons, my yellow suède shoes fringed with white fur. How vicious I looked! We made love to each other like two wild beasts. Very late at night we sat under a tree in the Park. The moon shone under the branches of fast-withering trees. The grass smelled of earth. In deep shadow lovers lay entwined. But all about me was Michael. He came towards me – passed me by, paused, lighting a cigarette – I saw him far in the distance – his footsteps were lightly passing on the road behind me – I wanted to spring to my feet and cry to the moon ‘je veux mourir, je veux mourir’3 – I wanted to wring my hands and rock to and fro and weep – and then I grew quite calm and still. . . . He came home with me for one moment. I lit a candle – the world faded away. I acted. He tore my clothes from my shoulders. I laughed – bent forward – graceful and lithe – blew out the candle and 1. JMM’s note in the text at this point, reads: ‘The following entries are derived from the late William Orton’s The Last Romantic. There is no reason to doubt their authenticity. Orton is Michael; Lais is a girl with whom he was in love. Whether Katherine actually spelt her name Catherine at this time I cannot say.’ KM had many aliases at this time and was spelling her name in a variety of experimental ways. 2. JMM’s note in the text here reads, ‘a ring she had given him that they shared as a sort of talisman’. 3. (Fr.) ‘I want to die, I want to die.’

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stood naked to the waist in the moon-lit room. ‘My beautiful, my wonder!’ He knelt before me, his arms round my body. I crushed him against me – shook back my hair and laughed at the moon. I felt mad with passion – I wanted to kill. . . . By and by he left me. This morning I spread the pictures of St. Malo on the writing desk; I turned the leaves of his sketch book. My love for Michael has changed: it is become more imperative and compelling. Sometimes I think hopelessly that we will never be together – yet if there is any truth left in me I know that only together shall we two create and be fulfilled the one in the other. Michael and myself alone are truthful. . . . I want to begin another life; this one is worn to tearing point. . . . I am very lonely and ill today. Outside my window the buildings are wreathed in mist. There is a sharp rapping sound and the cry of voices from the timber yard – drowned men are building a raft under the sea. I lie face downwards in the green water, idly swinging, but they do not see and only my shadow touches them. The year is drawing to a close. The world is beautiful tonight So many stars shine in the sky, And homeward, lightly hand in hand The happy people pass me by I lose my way down every path I stumble over every stone And every gate and every door Is locked ’gainst me alone. K. M. 6 Sept, 1911. Lais has just been. She is so beautiful that I see no other beauty, and content myself with the sweet Lais. Her slim body in the grey frock – her hands cradling her vivid hair – she lay on the yellow pillows. When her voice speaks in laughter and her eyes shine, and a pink colour floods her cheeks, and her mouth is red as berries, I understand all the millions of reasons why God set the sun in the sky – that it might shine one day through closed curtains and light the beauty of Lais. We are the three eternities – Michael and Lais and I. For Michael is darkness and light and Lais is flame and snow and I am sea and sky. O, what a pity she is not a princess – with little white boots tipped with ermine and a silver shirt and a blue petticoat embroidered with pink apple blossom and a long flowing gown of pale green velvet worked with golden dragons and lined with vivid orange. A live snake for her girdle with eyes made of diamond-shaped

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emeralds – her hair flowing and caught at the ends with tassels of pink corals. She would ride in an ebony sleigh lined with the feathers of wild parrots – flamingoes would fly over her head for a canopy. One day she shall be my inspiration for fairy tales. Midnight Après tout I live merely from day to day – taking, in everything apart from my work, the line of least resistance for the sake of my work. Do other artists feel as I do – the driving necessity – the crying need – the hounding desire that [will] never be satisfied – that knows no peace? I believe there was a time when I might have stopped myself, and days even weeks would have drifted by – but now there is not an hour. I breathe it in the air. I am saturated with it. Then Catherine what is your ultimate desire – to what do you so passionately aspire? To write books and stories and sketches and poems. October 29 The Miracle of Miracles has happened: my life is over and I am at Peace. I am writing in Michael’s book; it is late night – tomorrow I shall be far away. Look upon me, Michael – for it is not enough I make these statements; I have a fancy that it might be interesting to you to see in blinding light your Catherine. I am become a little child again. I know not the world, the flesh and the devil. I live only, only in my imagination. All my feelings are there and my desires and my ambitions. It is not that I wish so much to renounce the world – it has gone. I have left it – one little step – I did not even look or know – and now where I am in my secret unseen place I shall abide.

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1912

[Notebook 8, qMS–1245]

February 29th 1912. I left in daylight. Biggy B1 came as far as the muddy part of the road in her brown blanket, then I sang & saw the cottagers – got skeered and half ran – very nasty. Now for it. Gypsies have been here: there’s a bit of colour they have left hanging to a thorn hedge, and a broken pail, and the bracken trodden. We passed a farm – five asses in a green field, and a boy with a pink dusky face gave us a glass of water to drink. At the bottom of a field there was a tree with curiously interlaced boughs & branches, they very black, the tree silver against a sky that was silver and folded with a strange blue. In the tree sang a bird. The feeling of dark strength in pictures, like the pull of savage hair[?]– damp, [. . .] I crush it against my breast as I would hold a lost love – with passion & terror & the melancholy of memory Memory is the rain in the mirage of the desert. ‘Ooh er there’s the pond, isn’t it nice but very dutch looking.’ It was a round basin of water with shallow banks bright green & set with young willows. ‘Um – Holland – very’ said B, and balanced herself on a fence rail. A cart lumbered past driven by an old man with a face like a tree stump, thought K. She smiled at him. ‘Maand them [. . .]’ said the old man. ‘There’s a fearful lot of them thar aboot.’ ‘Look’ cried B, pointing with her stick, and then they saw the pond was alive with frogs – with frogs at their nuptials – too revolting a sight – they were like Nietzsche with the lid off. B. found five glued

1. ‘Biggy B’ was one of KM’s nicknames for Beatrice Hastings (1879–1943), a writer and critic whom KM met at the New Age. Her partner, the New Age’s editor, A. R. Orage, did much to encourage KM’s early writing.

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together and try though she would she found it impossible to separate the horrors. K. screamed every moment. ‘Pot of tea please and a penny bun’. her thrills in the memory. I am like a harp – if one listens eyes shut and deeply enough one hears that strange ringing which with years of sweeping waves grows fainter and more forlorn, and yet is there. I am like a shell murmuring of the restless tides and the troubled passion of the deep sea.

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19131

[NLC Notebook 2]

(24 pages per day i.e. 5,000 words for 15 days – 75,000 words.) Day 1st. Across the pale grey sky above the houses there floats a grey cloud shaped like a poodle, and now it is a mountain and then it is a bird with wings outspread, flown away. What is this strange white light that comes from the street & from the pavement? This story2 seems to me to lack coherence and sharpness. That’s the principal thing: it’s not at all sharp. It’s like eating a bunch of grapes instead of a grain of caviar . . . I have a pretty bad habit of spreading myself at times, of overwriting and understating – it’s just carelessness. Now there is this novel – of Valentine by Grant Richards.3 A novel which is constructed with fastidious care and excellent taste is bound by its own nature to be something of a charming rarity for it requires a skill and lightness of touch [MS–Papers–11326–025]

Dry Land By Katherine Mansfield (1913.)

1. The personal papers from 1910–13, what she called her ‘huge complaining diaries’ (see below, p. 203), were systematically destroyed by KM herself. These were troubling years, when she was experimenting with ‘life’. The only source materials that have survived are some letters and her creative writing from this period. 2. KM is here commenting on her story in progress, ‘Rose Eagle’ (see CW1, pp. 371–2). 3. Best known as an influential British publisher, Grant Richards (1872–1948) was also the author of novels and memoirs. Valentine was published in 1913.

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1914

[Notebook 33, qMS–1246]

WEEKLY ACCOUNT January 17th 1914 31 Rue de Tournon, Paris. Frcs centimes In hand 101 50 17th _ _ _ _ __________________________________________ cakes 40 eggs 40 stamp 25 ironmongery 1 15 wood 1 50 butter & bread 80 dinner 1 85 cigarettes 65 _______________ 6 80 _______________ jug and basin 7 50 enamel jug 5 90 curtain material 4 5 bill with sewing woman 3 00 ham 55 eggs 80 bread 20 felt 2 50 fares 20 _______________ 25 75

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1914 Tea, the chemist & marmalade Far indeed today I’ve strayed Through paths untrodden, shops unbeaten And now the bloody stuff is eaten The chemist the marmalade & tea Lord how nice & cheap they be!

tea chemist marmalade eggs cake honey ham bread butter sardines cigarettes screws oranges biscuits

1 1

75 50 85 1 10 40 45 55 40 55 35 6 5 10 40 30 _______________ 8 35

Tips and fares and silly femmes Have skipped about my day like lambs And great their happiness increased Since I am the one who has been fleeced! Femme de ménage1 fares coffee veal cake tips

13

00 30 95 55 40 40 _______________ 15 50

To M.O.P.2 Blast you for a mingy churl You stop a baiting of a girl! Just you try and pick my pocket I’ll put you into Hell & lock it! 1. (Fr.) ‘cleaning lady’. 2. Possibly Master of the Purse.

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1914 bread butter eggs veal & ham cake slippers

40 85 80 80 65 1 95 _______________ 4 75 _______________

Total

6 80 25 75 8 35 15 50 4 75 _______________ 62 25

127

frc. cens. 62 25 _______ cake ham eggs bread butter sugar eggs liqueur oranges cake glasses sardines & tea

Jack 3.25 1.40 1.0 2.90 ____ 8.55

40 80 80 40 1 10 65 40 6 50 50 60 1 00 1 50 ______ 14 65

liqueur petit fours cigarettes coal

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honey bread eggs ham cigarettes stamp

65 40 50 65 65 ____ 3.35

Monday eggs Montmartre dinner laundry

milk hair eggs café

80 3 00 2 10 7 50 _____ 13 40

8 85 30 50 50 _____ 10 15

eggs butter sugar Femme de ménage

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1 90 12 00 13 90 10 15 13 40 3 35 14 65 62 25 _______ 117 70

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1914

129

[Journal, 1954, p. 49]

‘“In Russia”, Tchehov said to Gorky, “an honest man is a sort of bogey that nurses frighten children with”. It is wonderful how like Gorky Tchehov talked when he talked to Gorky’ (George Calderon).1 I’d like to follow that ‘lead’. [Notebook 19, qMS–1247]

Notes. February 1914. There is in genius itself an unconscious activity: there is genius in the man of genius. S.T.C.2 dumbell poetry.

1. KM is quoting a footnote in Calderon’s translation of The Cherry Orchard, referring back to Gorky’s Reminiscences. Calderon’s translation was published in 1912. George Calderon (1868–1915) was an English writer and translator, widely acknowledged in the early twentieth century as a leading authority on Russian literature. Chekhov’s name was frequently transliterated as Tchekov or Tchekhov in the early twentieth century, and such fluctuations have been respected in the transcription of the notebooks. The Russian playwright and short-story writer Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) trained and worked all his life as a doctor, but published short stories to make extra money and support his family. He went on to make his name as a playwright, although his mixture of cryptic irony, benevolent tenderness and deep melancholy left many contemporary audiences perplexed. His mastery of the short-story form, his dramatic style and restrained theatricality, and elements of his biography, notably his death from tuberculosis, had a huge impact on KM. 2. In the essay, ‘On Poesy or Art’, from the 1818 collection, A Course of Lectures, Coleridge declares, ‘Hence there is in genius itself an unconscious activity; nay, that is the genius in a man of genius.’ Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) was a poet, literary critic and philosopher, and one of the main figures in the Romantic movement.

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‘A calm irresistible well-being – almost mystic in character, and yet doubtless connected with physical conditions.’1 I am going to read Goethe. Except for a few poems I know nothing of his – well. I shall read Poetry & Truth immediately.2 ‘When all is done human life is at its greatest and best but a little froward child to be played with and humoured a little, to keep it quiet until it fall asleep, and then the care is over.’3 Temple. That’s the sort of strain, not for what it says and means but for the ‘lilt’ of it that sets me writing. ‘Will you touch me with the child in my arms’ is no mere pleasantry. Change the ‘will’ into ‘can’ and its tief, sehr tief!4 I was thinking just now . . that I hardly dare give rein to my thoughts of Jack and to my longing for Jack. And I thought – if I had a child I would play with it now, and lose myself in it and kiss it and make it laugh. I’d use a child as my guard against my deepest feeling. When I felt – no I’ll think no more of this, its intolerable and unbearable – I’d dance the baby. That’s true I think of all all women – and it accounts for the curious look of security that you see in young mothers – they are safe from 1. From Walter Pater’s review of a recently published book of William Wordsworth’s poetry, included in a collection of essays Pater wrote for the Manchester Guardian, republished in collected form in 1901. At this point in the notebook is KM’s pastiche poem, written as though by Dorothy Wordsworth, describing her brother. See ‘William (P.G.) is very well’ in CW3 (pp. 91–2). William Wordsworth (1770–1850) was one of the four champions of English Romanticism, along with Coleridge, and a little later, Shelley and Keats. His long autobiographical poem, The Prelude, with its focus on the foundational years of childhood, the interaction between lyrical persona and the natural environment, and the gentle simplicity of the spoken voice, had a lasting impact on the evolution of poetic composition. Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy (1771–1855) kept detailed, highly evocative accounts of their daily life. Published in 1897, her diary became a popular classic in its own right. 2. Goethe’s autobiographical essay, Truth and Poetry: From My Own Life, covering his early years, was published in 1811. The German writer and statesman, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), was one of the foremost novelists, essayists and men of letters of his time. 3. Sir William Temple (1628–99) was an English essayist and statesman. Rather than reading his works, which were extremely hard to find, KM may well have encountered this passage in Charles Lamb’s The Essays of Elia, where her exact quotation provides the concluding words of his essay, ‘The Genteel Style in Writing’. 4. (Ger.) ‘profound, very profound’.

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any ultimate state of feeling because of the child in their arms. And it accounts also for the women who call men ‘children’. Such women fill themselves with their men – gorge themselves really to a state of absolute heartlessness. Watch the sly, satisfied smile of women who say ‘men are nothing but babies’ ‘The irritable refinement of her mind’.1 ‘They were neither of them quite enough in love to imagine that £350 a year would supply them with all the comforts of life.’ Jane Austen’s Elinor and Edward.2 My God! say I. I went into Jack’s room and looked through the window. It was evening, with little light, and what there was very soft – the Freak Hour when people never seem to be quite in focus. I watched a man walking up the road – he looked like a fly walking up a wall, and some men straining up with a barrow – all bottoms and feet. In the house opposite at a ground floor heavily barred window sat a little dark girl in a grey shawl reading a book. Her hair was parted down the middle & she had a small oval face. She was perfectly charming so set in the window with the shining white of the book. I felt a sort of Spanish infatuation . . . It is as though God opened his hand and let you dance on it a little and then shut it up tight – so tight that you could not even cry. The wind is terrible tonight. I am very tired – but I can’t go to bed. I can’t sleep or eat. Too tired. ‘It was the touch of art that P. was suffering, the inexorable magic touch that still transforms in spite of us; that never hesitates to test & examine the materials it has to transmute, but never fails to transmute them.’3 1. From Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811). The words are Elinor’s, musing about her sister Marianne’s character. Sense and Sensibility was the first novel published by Jane Austen (1775–1817) and appeared under the pseudonym ‘A Lady’. 2. From the penultimate chapter of Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, in which the common-sense arrangements behind the marriage and future life of the heroine Elinor and her husband, the clergyman Edward Ferrars, are discussed. 3. From Ethyl Sidgwick’s novel, Succession: A Comedy of the Generations (1913), the story of a violinist, Antoine, and his rise to maturity. ‘P.’ refers to Philip, a family cousin and friend of Antoine. Ethyl Sidgewick (1877–1970) was a novelist and playwright.

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to ‘lay the child at the right door.’1 [NLC Notebook 2]

119 Beaufort Mansions Feb 28th In hand 1 Odd stores Fruit & vegetables & eggs steak ordered rib coal and wood Butter cheese cigarettes Veda bread Soap and senna Cullens2 stores Fares & postage bacon

0 4 6 4 3

0 7 3 2 6 11½ 6 3 1 1 4 8 10 7 ___________ £1 1 4

119 Beaufort Mansions Chelsea March 1st In hand 2 10 0 _________ Bacon 6 eggs 9 O.W 1 0 bread 2 Bacon 1 0 butter 6½ bread 5 boot polish 6½ butchers bill 4 6½ safety pin for Jack 9 hat pins 6 lunch 1 6 Fares 8

1. KM was doubtless reading Charles Lamb’s letters and poems here, as the variety of disparate references show. An 1827 letter to Patmore includes the reflection, ‘Besides you will have discharged your conscience and laid the child at the right door, as they say’ (p. 265). Charles Lamb (1775–1834) was an English poet, author and essayist, best remembered for his Essays of Elia. He was associated with the Romantic poets. 2. ‘Cullens’ was a chain of grocery stores in London.

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6 30 _____ 16 4½

Brought forward

16 4½ ______ servants wages 10 6 grater (9d) steel (1/–) 1 9 Biscuits & cigarettes (Thursd.) 1 0 Fresh canterbury eggs 1 3 Flowers 6 spats 26 stockings & handkerchief 29 _______ £1 16 8½ [Notebook 19, qMS–1247]

To change habitations is to die to them. Cut off in the flower of – – – To KMM & JMM of a flat 31 Rue de Tournon – stillborn –1 But they adopted [an] infant, with all its pretty wardrobe & previously warmed toes takes kindly to us. We hope to keep it some months. Lamb on country:– In the ruins of Palymyra I could gird myself up to solitude, or muse to the snoring of the [. . .] – sleepers, but to have a little teasing image of a town about one; country folks that do not look like country folks, shops 2 yds square, half a dozen apples & 2d of overcooked gingerbread for the worthy fruiterers of Oxford Street2. My flesh tingles at such caterpillars. 1. One of the poems from Charles Lamb is entitled ‘On an infant dying as soon as born’ (p. 408) and may well have provided the frame and references for KM’s parody of an obituary here. 2. From Charles Lamb’s letter to William Wordsworth, written in 1830, and deploring the boredom of life in Enfield. The full quotation reads: Oh! never let the lying poets be believed who ’tice men from the cheerful haunts of streets, or think they mean it not of a country village. In the ruins of Palmyra, I would gird myself up to solitude, or muse to the snoring of the Seven Sleepers; but to have a little teazing image of a town about one; country folks that do not look like country folks; shops two yards square, half a dozen apples, and two penn’orth of overlooked gingerbread for the lofty fruiterers of Oxford-Street [. . .]

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[Notebook 23, qMS–1248]

The Toothache Sunday. Ah, why can’t I describe all that happens! I think quite seriously that L.M. and I are so extraordinarily interesting. It is not while the thing is happening that I think that but the significance is near enough to bite its heels & make me start, too. Have I ruined her happy life – am I to blame? When I see her pale and so tired that she shuffles her feet as she walks when she comes to me – drenched after tears – when I see the buttons hanging off her coats & her skirt torn – why do I call myself to account for all this, & feel that I am responsible for her. She gave me the gift of her self. Take me Katie. I am yours. I will serve you & walk in your ways, Katie. I ought to have made a happy being of her. I ought to have ‘answered her prayers’ – they cost me so little & they were so humble. I ought to have proved my own worthiness of a disciple – but I didn’t. Yes, I am altogether to blame. Sometimes I excuse myself. ‘We were too much of an age. I was experimenting & being hurt when she leaned upon me. I couldn’t have stopped the sacrifice if I’d wanted to –’ but its all prevarication. Tonight I saw her all drawn up with pain & I came from Jack’s room to see her crouched by my fire like a little animal. So I helped her to bed on the sofa & made her a hot drink & brought her some rugs & my dark eiderdown. And as I tucked her up she was so touching – her long fair hair, so familiar, remembered for so long, drawn back from her face, that it was easy to stoop & kiss her – not as I usually do, one little half kiss, but quick loving kisses such as one delights to give a tired child. ‘Oh’ she sighed ‘I have dreamed of this’ (All the while I was faintly revolted.) ‘Oh’ she breathed, when I asked her if she was comfortable, ‘This is Paradise, beloved.’ Good God! I must be at ordinary times a callous brute. It is the first time in all these years that I have leaned to her & kissed her like that. I don’t know why I always shrink ever so faintly from her touch. I could not kiss her lips. Ah, how I long to talk about It, sometimes – not for a moment but until I am tired out and I have got rid of the burden of memory. It is ridiculous in me to expect Jack to understand or to sympathise and yet when he does not & is bored or hums I am dreadfully wretched – mainly perhaps because of my own inability to enchant him. The view from my window this morning is so tremendously exciting. A high wind is blowing & the glass is dashed with rain. In the timber

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yard beside the cemetery there are large pools of water and smoke blows from The workmen came in to the middle of my thinking [. . . .] lighted a fire in the yard. I really have a faint idea that it might send me mad . . . lifted her poor face all stained and patched with crying. Her body was obedient but how slowly and gravely it obeyed as though protesting against the urge of her brave spirit. There was no sound in the room but her quiet breathing & the fluttering rush of the fire and the sting of rain on the glass. Outside lights appeared at one and then another window. The sky was grey and folded except for one lane of pale red fringed with little clouds. Content to stand outside & bathe & bask in the light that fell from Katie’s warm bright windows, content to listen to the voice of her darling among other voices and to look for her darlings gracious shadow. The Last Friday. Today the world is cracking. I’m waiting for Jack & Ida. I have been sewing as Mother used to with one’s heart pushing in the needle. Horrible! But is there really something far more horrible than ever could resolve itself into reality and is it that something which terrifies me so? In the middle of it I looked out & saw the workmen having lunch. They had lighted a fire & sat on a board balanced by 2 barrels. They were eating & smoking & cutting up sandwitches. Raven [Notebook 18, qMS–1249]

Katherine Mansfield Murry. Private use. MARCH 19 THURSDAY Dreamed about N.Z. Very delightful. 20 FRIDAY Dreamed about N.Z. again – one of the painful dreams when I’m there & hazy about my return ticket. 21 SATURDAY Travelled with 2 brown women. One had a basket of chickweed on her arm, the other a basket of daffodils. They both

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carried babies bound, somehow, to them with a torn shawl. Neat spare women with combed and braided hair. They slung talk at each other across the bus. Then one woman took a piece of bread from her sagging pocket & gave it to the baby, the other opened her bodice & put the child to her breast. They sat and rocked their knees and darted their quick eyes over the bus load, busy and indifferent they looked. 22 SUNDAY Went to Albert Hall with B.C.1 A bad dull concert. But I thought all the while that I’d rather be with musical people than any others and that they’re mine, really. A violinist (miles away) bent his head & his hair grew like Garnie’s: that made me think so, I suppose. I ought to be able to write about them wonderfully. A.M.2 23 MONDAY Mother and Jeanne. When I get by myself I’m always more or less actively miserable. Nobody knows or could know what a weight L.M. is upon me. She simply drags me down & then sits on me, calm and huge. The strongest reason for my happiness in Paris was that I was ‘safe’ from her. If it were not for Jack I should live quite alone. It’s raining. I have a cold and my fire has gone out. Sparrows outside are cheeping like chickens. Oh heavens what a different scene the sound recalls, the warm sun and the tiny yellow balls, so dainty, treading down the grass blades, and Sheehan3 giving me the smallest chick wrapped in a flannel to carry to the kitchen fire. 24 TUESDAY Mother’s birthday. I woke at 2 o’clock and got up & sat on the box by the window thinking of her. I would love to see her again & the little frown between her brows and to hear her voice. But I don’t think I will. My memory of her is so complete that I don’t think it will be disturbed. The Polinsons[?] dined with us last night. It was dull. They are worthy and pleasant but Mrs P is a weight and P makes me feel old. He only likes me because of what I used to be like, and he thinks the ‘normal’ me abnormally quiet and a bit lifeless. I don’t want to see them again. Thank God! Theres a sprinkle of sun today. The river tonight was low and the little walls and 1. Possibly Beatrice Campbell. Gordon and Beatrice Campbell, later Lord and Lady Glenavy, were close friends of JMM and KM at this time. 2. A. M. or Aunt Martha, one of many popular euphemisms for menstruation. 3. Patrick Sheehan was the handyman at Chesney Wold, Karori, in KM’s childhood. He features as the fictional Pat in KM’s ‘Prelude’ (see CW2, pp. 80–2).

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towers & chimneys on the opposite bank black against the night. I keep thinking of Paris and money. I am getting all my spring out of the sunsets. 25 WEDNESDAY Ida and I travelled miles today, we sat in a bus talking and now and again when I looked up I kept seeing the squares with their butterfly leaves just ready to fly. We met near the old haunts – Queen Anne Street1 – and walked in one of the little lanes and short cuts that we know so well– side by side, talking. Let me tie your veil, & I stop, & she ties it and we walk on again. In the persian shop she leaned against a red and black silk curtain. She was very pale & her black hat looked enormous, and she kept wanting to buy me ‘these things – feel how soft they are’ and smiling & speaking just above her breath for tiredness. 26 THURSDAY New Moon 6h 9m p.m. (I didnt see it, though.) Ida & I took the tram to Clapham. She left at about 9 p.m. having dressed me. When I leave her hands I feel hung with wreaths. A silly unreal evening at Miss Royde Smith’s.2 Pretty rooms & pretty people, pretty coffee & cigarettes out of a silver tankard. A sort of sham Meredith atmosphere lurking. Amber Reeves3 has a pert, nice face – that was all. I was wretched. I have nothing to say to ‘charming’ women. I feel like a cat among tigers. The ladies left to themselves talked ghosts & childbeds. I am wretchedly unhappy among everybody – and the silence . . . 27 FRIDAY Jack’s P. Exam. He went off half crying because he’d not sent the urgent work that kept him all yesterday to the post. I am waiting for Ida to come. She’s very late. Everything is in a state of suspense – even birds and chimneys. Frightened in private. At the last moment Ida never said goodbye at all but took the fiddle and ran. I walked away down some narrow streets, large drops of rain fell. I reached some packing warehouses and the delicious smell of fresh wood and straw reminded me of Wellington. I could almost fancy a saw mill. In the evening the Campbells4 & the little parrot swinging on a wire. 1. Queen Anne Street crosses Harley Street in London, where her school Queen’s College was situated. 2. Naomi Royde Smith (1875–1964), literary editor of the Westminster Gazette from 1912 to 1922, was also a novelist, playwright and biographer. 3. Amber Reeves, daughter of William Pember Reeves, a prominent New Zealand politician. 4. Gordon and Beatrice Campbell (see p. 136, n. 1).

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28 SATURDAY Put my clothes in order. The crocuses in B.P.1 reminded me of autumn in Bavaria. The ground is wet and it looks as though winter were dying – the grass long and green among the trampled flowers. Birds are far more savage looking than the wildest beasts. Think of a forest full of wild birds – or if the birds ‘turned’ even here. I want to get alone. The magnolia conspicua is in bud. 29 SUNDAY Jack would really think me important if I brought him L.S.D.2 He thinks he’s far and away the first fiddle. How he’d love to boast of what I got out of a play. That’s why I’m going to start one today. I’ll sweat my guts out till I bring it off too. A hideous day. 30 MONDAY ‘I am afraid you are too psychological Mr Temple’.3 Then I went off and bought the bacon. 31 TUESDAY A splendid fine morning but as I know I have to go out and change the cheque & pay the bills I can do nothing & I feel wretched. Life is a hateful business, there’s no denying it. When G. & J.4 were talking in the park of physical wellbeing & of how they still could look forward to ‘parties’ I nearly groaned. And I am sure J. could get a great deal of pleasure out of pleasant society. I couldn’t. I’ve done with it & can’t contact it at all now. I had so much rather lean idly over the bridge & watch the boats & the free unfamiliar people & feel the wind blow. No, I hate society. The idea of the play seems perfect tripe today. APRIL l WEDNESDAY Spent another frightful day. Nothing helps or could help me except a person who could guess. And Jack is far too absorbed in his own affairs poor dear to ever do so. Also, he doesn’t consider the people within his reach, psychologically speaking. As long as one’s mood isn’t directed towards or against him he’s quite unconscious and unsuspicious. Very sane, but lonely and difficult for me to understand. Saw Campbell and talked L.S.D. Went for a walk & had some vague comfort given by some children and the noise of the water, like rising waves.

1. Battersea Park. 2. Pounds, shillings and pence. 3. Maurice Temple is the protagonist of JMM’s largely autobiographical novel, Still Life (published 1916), which he had just begun writing. 4. Gordon (Campbell) and JMM.

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2 THURSDAY I have begun to sleep badly again and I have decided to tear up everything that I’ve written and start again. I am sure that is best. This misery persists and I am so tired under it. If I could write with my old fluency for one day the spell would be broken. It’s the continual effort – the slow building up of my idea and then before my eyes and out of my power, its slow dissolving. 3 FRIDAY Written to L.M. and to Mother & Father. Went for walk by the river this evening and watched the boats. Two had red sails and one had white. The trees are budding almost before ones eyes in this warm weather – big white buds like birds in the chestnut trees, and round trees just sprinkled with green. The world is exceedingly lovely. My letter to L.M. was a great effort – she seemed somehow ‘out of the running’ but then so does everybody. I feel a real horror of people closing over me. I could not bear them. I wish I lived in a barge with Jack for a husband and a little boy for a son. 4 SATURDAY Won a moral victory this morning to my great relief. Went out to spend 2/11 & left it unspent. But I have never known a more hideous day. Terribly lonely. Nothing that isn’t satirical is really true for me to write just now. If I try to find things lovely I turn pretty pretty. And at the same time I am so frightened of writing mockery for satire that my pen hovers and wont settle. Dined with Campbells & Drey.1 Afterwards to Café Royal. The sheep were bleating and we set up a feeble counterpart. Saw a fight. One woman with her back to me, her arms crooked sharp at the elbows, her head thrust out like a big bird. Drey is frightened. 5 SUNDAY No bird sits a tree more proudly than a pigeon. It looks as though placed there by the Lord. The sky was silky blue & white and the sun shone through the little leaves. But the children pinched and crooked made me feel a bit out of love with God. I realised last night, more than ever, when I tried to explain myself to Jack and saw his incredulity, how profoundly I love him. Not for what I’d have him & in spite of himself sometimes he is really my mate. I love him to the inmost. 6 MonDAY I went out with Jack to find a shop but instead we came to Swan Walk and passed and remarked the delightful houses, white 1. Raymond Drey (1885–1976) was a journalist, drama critic and art critic. In 1913, he married the American artist, Anne Estelle Rice, a close friend of KM’s, who would go on to paint the celebrated portrait of her, now in the National Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa.

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with flowering pear trees in the gardens and green railings and fine carved gates. I want a little house very much. I am afraid this house is haunted. At any rate trouble [?] is embedded in it like a lump of fat. And after dark the kitchen crawls. Drey came tonight. He’s evidently in some kind of trouble with Anne:1 I don’t know what. Hes a silly fellow in talk, uneasy and Kosherheaded. J x KW L2 last night and I deceived. My mind is full of embroidery but there isn’t any material to hold it together or make it strong. A silly state! Lesley Moore seems to be simply fading away. I can hardly remember her objectively – subjectively she is just the same. 7 TUESDAY The heavens opened for the sunset tonight. When I had thought the day folded and sealed came a hint of heavenly bright petals. I sat behind the window pricked with rain, and looked until that hard thing in my breast melted and broke into the smallest fountain murmuring of aforetime, and I drank the sky and the whisper. Now who is to decide between let it be or force it. Jack believes in the whip – he says his steed has plenty of strength but it is idle and shies at such a journey in prospect but I feel if mine does not gallop and prance at free will Im not riding at all, but swinging from its tail. For example today . . . & tonight he’s all sparks. [Notebook 10, qMS–1250]

Today is Sunday. It is raining a little and the birds are cheeping. There’s a smell of food & a noise of chopping cabbage. Oh, if only I could make a celebration & do a bit of writing. I long & long to write & the words just won’t come. Its a queer business, yet when I read people like Gorky,3 for instance, I realise how streets ahead of them I be . . .4 Cigarettes butter bread

6d 3½ 1 ____ 10 ½

KMM 23.v.14. 1. Anne Estelle Rice. 2. ‘Jack and Katherine Were Lovers’. 3. Maxim Gorky (1868–1936) was a hugely popular Russian author, who became one of the founders and champions of socialist realism. 4. See Figure 4 (p. 141) for KM’s manuscript and accompanying illustration.

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Figure 4 Illustrated diary entry, c. 1914. Notebook 10, qMS–1250. John Middleton Murry Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

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July 22nd [1914] curtains Bread Spirits salts1 Salmon beans vinegar hairpins stud bread tomatoes tips

petits fours flowers kidneys currants Fares Dairy & Cullen[?] bath tray Braid fares cigrets bread ½ lb steak

3.6 .2 .3 .6½ .6½ .3 .1 .2 .2 .3 .2 ___ 6.1 .6 .6

9 5 4 10.0 1.6 3.10 5 ___ £1.4.1

I wish I could have a second family three boys to match the girls – all to go back just at the age when they are most handsome – with strong round heads & bright eyes & hands & feet much too big for them. August 17, 1914. I simply cannot believe that there was a time when I cared about Turgenev.2 Such a poseur! Such a hypocrite! It’s true he was 1. Spirits of salts was a former name for hydrochloric acid, commonly used as a cleaning agent. 2. Ivan Turgenev (1818–83) was a Russian playwright and novelist, who spent much of his life in Western Europe. His novels focus largely on the disintegrating, restless lifestyles of the alienated gentry, and the conflicts between generations. On the Eve, a story of secret love and revolutionary unrest during the build-up to the Crimean War, was written in 1860.

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wonderfully talented but I keep thinking what a good cinema film On the Eve would make. To Beauty. Why should you come tonight when it is so cold & grey and when the clouds are heavy, the trees troubled in their swinging? Paul Moorhouse George Coorie[?] John Long 6/– & winter a peacock blue

[?]

[?]

Then I put my hand over it & felt for a latch & then through the bars. I suppose one isn’t expected to vault over it, I thought – or to ride a bicycle up this side & dive into a fountain of real water on the other. [Notebook 18, qMS–1249]

AUGUST 30 SUNDAY We go to Cornwall tomorrow, I suppose. I’ve reread my diary. Tell me, is there a God! I do not trust Jack. I’m old tonight. Ah, I wish I had a lover to nurse me – love me – hold me – comfort me – to stop me thinking. NOVEMBER 3 TUESDAY It’s full moon with a vengeance tonight. Out of the front door a field of big turnips and beyond a spiky wood with red bands of light behind it. Out of the back door an old tree with just a leaf or two remaining & a moon perched in the branches. I feel very deeply happy and free. Colette Willy1 is in my thoughts tonight. I feel my own self awake and stretching – stretching so that Im on tip toe; full of happy joy. Can it be true that one can renew oneself. Dear dear Samuel Butler!2 Just you wait. I’ll do you proud. Tomorrow at about 10.30 I go into action. 15 SUNDAY It’s very quiet. I’ve reread L’Entrave.3 I suppose Colette is the only woman in France who does just this. I don’t care a fig at 1. Better known by her publishing name, Colette, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (1873–1954) was a French novelist and stage performer, whose novels, especially the ‘Claudine’ series, shocked public opinion but sold well. She was briefly married to Henri Gauthier-Villars, known as ‘Willy’. 2. See p. 31, n. 2. 3. L’Entrave [The Shackles] is a novel by Colette published in 1913.

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present for anyone I know except her. But the book to be written is still unwritten – I can’t sit down & fire away like Jack. 16 MONDAY A letter from Carco.1 I had not expected it and yet when it came it seemed quite inevitable – the writing – the way the letters were made, his confidence and his warm sensational life. I wish he were my friend – he’s very near me. His personality comes right through his letters to Jack – & I want to laugh and run into the road. [MS–Papers–4006–02]

I have not told Jack that I have heard again from Francis. Jack is not really interested in fact – when after that struggle I showed him a letter which had given me such a shock he thought it funny & wasn’t sure that it was a love-letter. I decided that I made a fool of myself by running to Jack with quelqu’un m’a donné ça.2 So, though it’s been hard, I’ve refrained. F. may be leaving Besancon soon for the front, he told me, & he said – je vous aime chaque jour davantage3 – & he told me that all the while we had been in Paris he had loved me. Well, he thinks so now, and that he would like to love in a little hut on the edge of the world where no one would ever come, and that at times now he has merely an awful sensation of emptiness, he would like to lie in the road & let the world pass over him et quand je m’endors je vous prends dans mes bras et j’eprouve ma triste affreuse4 – and – ever so much more. The day after this letter he sent me another, very short – Chere Katherine je ne veux que vous. Vous êtes et vous serez toute ma vie. Je suis5 December 18th. That decides me – that frees me. I’ll play this game no longer. I created the situation – very well – I’ll do the other thing with moderate care, & before it is too late. That’s all. He has made me feel like a girl. I’ve lived, loved just like any girl – but I’m not a girl, & these feelings are not mine. For him I am hardly anything except a gratification & a comfort. Of course Gordon doesn’t know 1. Francis Carcopino-Tusoli, better known as Francis Carco (1886–1958), was a writer and poet from New Caledonia living in France, who belonged to the group known as the ‘Fantaisistes’. JMM introduced him to KM, and he and KM had a brief affair in 1915. 2. (Fr.) ‘someone gave me this’. 3. (Fr.) ‘I love you more each day.’ 4. (Fr.) ‘When I fall asleep, I take you in my arms, and feel my awful sadness.’ 5. (Fr.) ‘Dear Katherine I want no one but you. You are and will ever be my whole life. I am.’

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me through him. He doesn’t know me himself – or want to. I submit – thats true – but I’m not Colette not even Lesley. Jack – Jack – we are not going to stay together. I know that as well as you do. Don’t be afraid of hurting me. What we have got each to kill is my you & your me. That’s all. Let’s do it nicely & go to the funeral in the same carriage & hold hands hard over the new grave, & smile & wish each other luck. I can. And so can you. Yes – I have already said ‘adieu’ to you now. Darling, it has been lovely. We shall never forget – no never. Goodbye. When once I have left you I will be more remote than you could imagine. I see you & Gordon discussing the extraordinary time it lasted. But I am far away & different to what you think. Given the [. . .] Henry in the K[?] Sixpence Farkey Anderson1 The Aloe Mother’s Guitar December 28th. The year is nearly over. Snow has fallen and everything is white. It is very cold. I have changed the position of my desk into a corner. Perhaps I shall be able to write far more easily here. Yes, this is a good place for the desk, because I cannot see out of the stupid window – I am quite private. The lamp stands on one corner & in the corner. Its rays fall on the yellow & green indian curtains & on the strip of red embroidery. The forlorn wind scarcely breathes. I love to close my eyes a moment & think of the land outside white under the mingled snow and moonlight – white trees, white fields, the heaps of stones by the roadside white, snow in the furrows. Mon dieu how quiet & how patient! If he were to come I should not even hear his footsteps.

1. See KM’s poem in CW3, p. 106.

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[Notebook 4, qMS–1251]

Katherine Mansfield. I shall be obliged if the contents of this book are regarded as my private property. What a vile little diary. But I am determined to keep it this year. We saw the old year out and the new year in. A lovely night, blue and gold. The church bells were ringing. I went into the garden and opened the gate and nearly – just walked away. Jack stood at the window mashing an orange in a cup. The shadow of the rose tree lay on the grass like a tiny bouquet. The moon and the dew had put a spangle on everything. But just at 12 o’clock I thought I heard footsteps in the road & got frightened & ran back into the house. But nobody passed. Jack thought I was a great baby about the whole affair. The ghost of Lesley ran through my heart her hair flying – very pale, with dark startled eyes. And I thought of Francis. Deja dans la petite piece de l’hotel de Cluny j’etais sur de vous etre attaché – and then je suis jaloux de vous comme un avare.1 I live within sound of a rushing river that only I can hear. It is a curious sort of life . . . more real than this three year idyll, more natural to that which I suppose I really am. For this year I have two wishes to write to make money. (Yesterday I heard someone discussing Laura Grey.)2 Consider. With money we could go away as we liked, have a room in London, be as free as we 1. (Fr.) ‘Already in the little room in the Hotel de Cluny I was sure I was getting attached to you [and then] I am as jealous of you as a miser.’ In this French sentence, KM is speaking in the masculine, either remembering Carco’s own words or speaking with his voice. 2. Possibly a reference to the heroine of Sheridan Le Fanu’s popular Gothic romance, Willing to Die (1872).

146

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liked and be independent & proud with nobodies. It is only poverty that holds us so tightly. Well, J doesn’t want money & won’t earn money. I must. How? First, get this book finished – that is a start. When. At the end of January. If you do that you are saved. If I wrote night & day I could do it. Yes I could. Right O. I feel the new life coming nearer. I believe just as I have always believed. Yes it will come. All will be well. 1 FRIDAY A LETTER. To London. It was raining and very cold. I posted my letter at the G.P.O. Saw Kotilianski.1 The setting was very good for a story some time. I felt depressed et inquiete a cause de ses2 . . . Hardly slept at all and dreamed a terrible dream about Mother. J. read me some of his book. He must beware of a kind of melodramatic intellectual sentimentality. ‘A little crack’ 2 SATURDAY A horrible morning and afternoon. Je me sens incapable de tout3 and at the same time I am just not writing very well. I must finish my story tomorrow. I ought to work at it all day – yes, all day & into the night if necessary. A vile day. J’ai l’envie de prieur au bon Dieu comme le vieux pere Tolstoi.4 Oh Lord make me a better creature tomorrow. Le coeur me monte aux levres d’un gout de sang. Je me deteste aujourd’hui.5 Dined at Lawrences and talked the island.6 It is quite real except some part of me is blind to it. Six months ago I’d have jumped. The chief thing I feel lately about myself is that I am getting old. I don’t feel like a girl any more, or even like a young woman. I 1. Samuel Solomonovitch Koteliansky (1880–1955) was a Jewish Ukranian, who arrived in London in 1911; he soon became closely involved with various intellectual, political and publishing circles, including the Bloomsbury Group and the Hogarth Press. He was a staunch, close friend of KM. His work as a translator led him to embark on a series of co-translations with a number of the most prominent writers and intellectuals of the times, including KM (see CW3 for their collaborative translations). 2. (Fr.) ‘worried because of his / her . . .’. 3. (Fr.) ‘I do not feel capable of anything.’ 4. (Fr.) ‘I feel like praying to God, like the good father Tolstoy.’ 5. (Fr.) ‘My heart rises to my lips and leaves a taste of blood. I loathe myself today.’ 6. During the war, DHL made plans to set up a community in a distant land or on an island, so as to escape the horrors of the modern world. The community was to be called ‘Rananim’, a name inspired by one of the Hebrew songs Koteliansky would sing.

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feel really quite past my prime. At times the fear of death is dreadful. I feel so much older than Jack and that he recognises it I am sure. He never used to but now he often talks like a young man to an older woman. Well, perhaps, it’s a good thing. 3 SUNDAY A cold ugly day. It was dark soon after 2. Spent it trying to write, and running from my room into the kitchen. I could not get really warm. The day felt endless. Read in the evening and in bed read with J. a good deal of poetry. If I lived alone I would be very dependant on poetry. Talked over the island idea with J. For me I know it has come too late. Wrote & posted Mother. 4 MONDAY V.A.F.1 Woke early and saw a snowy branch across the window. It is cold, snow has fallen & now it is thawing. The hedges & the trees are covered with beads of water. Very dark, too, with a wind somewhere. I long to be alone for a bit. I make a vow to finish a book this month. To write all day & at night too & get it finished, I swear. Told Jack who understood. But did not start that night for we were lovers & at 12 o’ clock I was dead tired and what Anatole calls ‘seche’.2 Dreamed of Lilian Shelley’s legs.3 5 TUESDAY Saw the sun rise. A lovely apricot sky with flames in it and then a solemn pink. Heavens how beautiful! I heard a knocking & went downstairs. It was Benny cutting away the ivy. Over the grass lay the fallen nests – wisps of hay & feather. He looked like an ivy bush himself. I made early tea & carried it up to Jack who lay half awake with crinkled eyes. I feel so full of love today after having seen the sun rise.

1. Possibly a private notebook code referring to Francis Carco (F), with whom, at this time, KM believed herself to be in love. 2. Anatole France (1844–1924) was one of the most respected French authors in the late nineteenth century and an influential literary critic. He went on to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1921. In several novels he refers to unrefined female characters as ‘sèche’ (literally, ‘dry’), but meaning harsh and lacking in sympathy. 3. Lilian Shelley was a popular performer in the music halls in the early 1900s, who went on to pose for artists such as Augustus John and Jacob Epstein.

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Eve. Have written a good deal. He is very near today.1 I suppose he has got my letter for I keep thrilling to the thought of him. 6 WEDNESDAY A LETTER, rather 2. We went to London. I took the letters. He has haunted me all day. I have seen for him and with him all day long. As I went to Piccadilly in the evening on top of a bus I nearly got up & called out his name. I longed for him so, & yet I dare not push my thoughts as far as they will go. Had my hair washed & hands done. Went to Hippodrome. The audience – their heads & hands – were the only things worth watching. In the gloom they seemed so remote, so infallible in movement. Went to Pantomime. Very interesting. Began to think of Panto tradition. Would like to write in it. Had my photo taken for him. 7 THURSDAY Out with Jack in the morning. A wet day. Saw a cinema in the afternoon. Tea with Kot. at the Russian Law Bureau. He was quiet & unhappy. He cut his finger. There was something very desperate about him. Jack sat & plucked his fingers. On the way home in the carriage he put his hand in my muff & the other between us I started talking about Love. How sensible Jack was. Yes I love Jack, but all the while my heart says Too late Too late. Adieu. I know I shall go. I thought of him all day again. Mrs Hearn had made the house clean and nice. Dreamed of Lesley. 8 FRIDAY Had letter from Lesley. She has been ill. Worked a little this morning. Less this afternoon (Oh God a train is passing) Will sit up all night & work. It is windy, dark and soul-killing sunless weather. He is like poison in my blood. Jack and I were lovers after supper in my room. I nearly ‘cut across his line of male’2 by talking of Francis.3 After I worked & wasted time and went to bed wretched with myself. It was terribly cold. Jack interrupted me all day with my work. I did practically nothing. Wrote and sent a piece of my hair. 1. Again, the ‘he’ refers to Francis Carco. 2. Rather than being a formal quotation, this is possibly KM citing a phrase from a recent conversation with DHL, or their circle, to refer to JMM’s hurt male pride and defensiveness at this time. DHL had recently been theorising male and female impulses in his ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’ in the context of the war, so the issue was a frequent source of debate. 3. Francis Carco (see above, p. 144).

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9 SATURDAY Jack went to town. I worked a little – chased the fowls – one brown fowl refused to leave the garden. Long after it knew there was no gap in the wire netting it kept on running up and down. I must not forget all that, nor how cold it was nor how the mud coated my thin shoes. In the evening Lawrence & Kot. They talked plans but I felt very antagonistic to the whole affair. After they had gone Jack & I lay in bed, deeply in love – strangely in love. Everything made plain between us. It was very wonderful. We gave each other our freedom in a strange way. I had such a longing to kiss Jack and say Goodbye Love – I don’t know why exactly. I pressed his cheek against mine & he felt small & I felt an anguish of Love. Then I said suddenly what are you thinking and he said I was thinking that you had gone away & Campbell & Frieda1 came to tell me – & I was not a bit upset or surprised. (When Lawrence mentioned F’s name by chance tonight it cut me like a knife.) 10 SUNDAY Windy & dark. In the morning Frieda, suddenly. She had had a row with Lawrence. She tired me to death. At night we went to L’s leaving her here. It was a warm night with big drops of rain falling. I didn’t mind the going but the coming back was rather awful. I was not well & tired and my heart could scarcely beat. But we made up a song to keep going. The rain splashed up to my knees & I was frightened. L. was nice, very nice, sitting with the piece of string [in] his hand, on true sex. 11 MONDAY No letter. I had counted on one. I got up in the dark to be ready for my little maid & watched the dawn coming. It wasn’t up to much though. I am wretched. It is a bright winking day. My God My God let me work. Wasted Wasted.2 12 TUESDAY Quarrelled with J. in bed. A letter written in pencil, when he was wet to the skin. I have sent an answer today, rather written it. Now I can get on. I am determined to take a flat in Surrey Lodge. Have been in more of a state of virtue today. Actually finished the story Brave Love3 1. Frieda Freiin von Richthofen (1879–1956) married DHL in 1914. She and KM had moments of close kinship but these were short-lived, and they were mostly highly wary of each other. 2. See Figure 5 (p. 151) for the manuscript with accompanying illustration. 3. See CW1, pp. 398–422.

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Figure 5 Diary entry, 11 January 1915. Notebook 4, qMS–1251. John Middleton Murry Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand

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and I don’t know what to think of it even now. Read it to Jack who was also puzzled. Violent headache but rather happy. 13 WEDNESDAY Sent it. From today Jack has got his own room. The coal has come. I set great store by that. (So far my little maid is simply excellent.) A vile & misty day with a cold wind. 14 THURSDAY I had a letter from F1 asking me to come – the most wonderful letter he has ever sent me. I carried it with me to London. I thought of nothing else all day – it tired me out & refreshed me & then I was tired again. Saw Palliser2 & saw Gordon. The day was far too short. Bought Jack’s banjo. Came home in the carriage. I imagined he was with me. Yes, I was in love all the day long and in the night too & tired out. Jack kicked the banjo. 15 FRIDAY Heard from Lesley and Lawrence. Today it was worse. A tremendous wind blew. The sky was like zinc. I tried to write to him but my letter broke the bounds of my letters & I couldnt. So I told Jack a little. In the evening we went to the Lawrences. Frieda was rather nice. I had a difficulty in not telling her so dreadful did I feel. Came home busy & tired with thought but could not work so went to bed immediately & dreamed of N.Z. Heard from Clayton3 & Palliser. 16 SATURDAY A letter. He has left Besancon. He had left the [. . .]. Oh, God, let me work today. Its all I beg. I must write today & post it. He has my money. Raining & pouring with wind as usual. A dreadful depressing day. My hands are like ice. (And now Jack has gone to Chesham4 & Rose has taken his letter to the post.) Now, Ah bliss, I am alone for a little. I can write. What shall I write. What is there to say. Just to somehow to tell him that I love him and that I am his for life. That is all there is to say. If I stop loving him before the year is out what shall I do with his book. I do not mean stop loving it. I mean if our love should be wounded and should die or be lost or taken prisoner. When I think of him at the front I am simply numb. It has no meaning for 1. The F referred to here is Francis Carco. 2. Charles Palliser was a New Zealand banker friend of Harold Beauchamp, then living in London. 3. Douglas Clayton was a professional typist, whom DHL recommended to KM. 4. Chesham is a town in Buckinghamshire where DHL and Frieda had a cottage.

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me at all. While we were waiting for tea Gordon came – we were glad. A moment when we were alone Gordon asked about him. Jack was in the kitchen cooking. I felt bitterly ashamed. Walked to Lawrences. They were horrible & witless and dull. 17 SUNDAY Jack told me about Queenie. A fine day. Went for a walk & saw some plovers in a field. But the wind was dreadful. I could have walked a million miles. Yesterday I read Gordon Brave Love. He gave me an enormous kick about my work. Was far away from J all day with the other. At night we were lovers in his room. When I shut my eyes & leaned my cheek against his for a moment I dreamed. It was horrible. I felt I betrayed F & slept hardly at all. 18 MONDAY MSS & letter from Cooks. It is morning and a new week. I have my work to do. I am very unhappy – life feels so poor. I tried to write, but it came scrappy and dreary. All day I was possessed by my hate of England. It is after him my one passion – a loathing for England. At night we took the fur rug down in front of the fire & I tried, quite vainly, to forget. I told Jack a lot about him. Jack was rather amused than otherwise. He said he’d have to tell Gordon! 19 TUESDAY No letter – the morning a sheer waste. Got on slowly with Cinema,1 but badly. Sat on the divan & saw rather than wrote. Still it all was better. Lawrences to dinner. They came late. Jack made a currant pudding. Lawrence arrived cross but he gradually worked round to me. We talked of the war and its horrors. I have simply felt building in me my unhappy love and all to no purpose. Wrote to him just a little note. Jack was horrid at times. Letter from Mary.2 20 WEDNESDAY No letter. A man outside is breaking stones. The day is utterly quiet. Sometimes a leaf rustles and a strange puff of wind passes the window. The old man chops chops as though it were a heart beating out there. I waited for the post as of old today – but no letter. In the afternoon there came a violent storm, but we walked over to Cannans,3 dined 1. A story draft that was finally given the title ‘Pictures’ (see CW2, pp. 178–85). 2. Probably Mary Cannan. See the entry for the following day. 3. Gilbert Cannan (1884–1955) was a novelist, dramatist and translator. He and his wife, Mary (née Ansell, formerly married to J. M. Barrie), were close friends with many of the literary and intellectual figures in the 1910s.

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with them & the Lawrences & the Smiths & had a play after. Later we went to the L.s to sleep – very untidy – newspapers & faded mistletoe. I hardly slept at all, but it was nice. 21 THURSDAY Proofs rec. & sent back. Letter Mr Polinson[?]. No letter. A stormy day. We walked back this morning. J. told me a dream. We quarrelled all the way home more or less. It has rained & snowed & hailed & the wind blows. The dog at the inn howls. A man is far away playing the bugle. I have read and sewed today but not written a word. I want to tonight. It is so funny to sit quietly sewing while my heart is never for a moment still. I am dreadfully tired in the head & body. This sad place is killing me. I live upon old, made up dreams, but they do not deceive either of us. 21st Jan. I am in the sitting room downstairs. The wind howls outside but here it is so warm & pleasant. It looks like a real room where real people have lived. My sewing basket is on the table, under the bookcase are poked J’s old house shoes. The black chair, half in shadow, looks as though a happy person had sprawled there. We had roast mutton & onion sauce & baked rice for dinner. It sounds alright. I have run the ribbons through my underclothing with a hairpin in the good home way – but my anxious heart is eating up my body, eating up my nerves, eating up my brain, now slowly, now at tremendous speed. I feel this poison slowly filling my veins – every particle becoming slowly tainted. Yes love like this is a malady, a fever, a storm. It is almost like hate, one is so hot with it & never, never calm – never for an instant. I remember years ago saying I wish I were one of those happy people who can suffer so far & then collapse, or become exhausted – but I am just the opposite. The more I suffer the more of fiery energy I feel to bear it. Darling Darling! 22 FRIDAY No letter. Weather worse than ever, culminating at teatime when I surprised myself by breaking down. I simply felt for a moment overcome with anguish & came upstairs & put my head on the black cushion. After that I deliberately drugged myself with Jack and made it the more bearable by talking french. In the evening read & pretended to write but did not write a fine worth a 1d.1 Reread Jésus la Caille.2 My longing for cities engulfs me. 1. 1d – one penny. 2. Jésus-la-Caille was Francis Carco’s second novel, published in 1914. It is one of his ‘Apache’ novels, famous for their lurid descriptions of nightlife in the Parisian underworld, focusing on pimps, prostitutes and café-goers.

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23 SATURDAY A LETTER. No letter. The old man breaking stones is here again. A thick white mist reaches the edge of the field. I have spent hours waiting for the post. Jack went to Chesham. I did nothing. After tea Rose went out & came back with a letter and a photograph. I came up here & simply felt my whole body go out to him as if the sun had suddenly filled the room, warm and lovely. He called me ‘ma petite cherie’– my little darling. Oh, God save me from this war and let us see each other soon. I talked with Jack, playing with the fringe of his lamp. But he refused to take it at all seriously. The dinner was good, the fire burned. The rain stopped. I sat after in the corner by the fire on a black pillow and dreamed. His photograph I put in the corner of the landscape picture, leaning against a wattle tree, his hands in his pockets. 24 SUNDAY Washed my hair and worked and read a little. In the evening came the Smiths, a pleasant little pair, if only just something in him did not remind me of Bowden.1 Jack was nice to them. They were 10000000 of miles away. After J talked to me of the early days. Yes, it is all in the past. It was a rainy indefinite day, a silly shivery sort of day, not worth seeing. 26 TUESDAY Went to London. We found Beatrice C. had arrived so Drey put us up. Drey’s flat looked lovely to me. Had tea at the Criterion with Campbell & Drey. Had my hands done. In the evening went to the Oxford and saw Marie Lloyd2 who was very good. Slept on the big divan in Anne’s3 Rooms. In the afternoon it was very foggy in London but the relief to be there was simply immense. Thought of Francis all day. He haunted me. Drey had a shiny bonnet. 27 WEDNESDAY To Chancery Lane with J. to the bank. Saw in the Strand a man in a blue coat who walked like F. Ever since, I can’t get him out of my mind. Met a woman who’d been in the cinema with me – with the yellow teeth & pink roses in her hat & really lovely eyes & 1. George Bowden was the singer to whom KM had been briefly married in 1909 (see above, p. 102, n. 2). 2. Marie Lloyd (1870–1922) was an English music-hall performer. 3. Anne Estelle Rice.

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fastened hair. I shall not forget her – no no. She was wonderful.1 Kot for lunch at the Dieppe cafe among the singing canaries. Posted F. my photograph. Had supper with Kot and went to Pavillion after. Mlle Devanter [?] sang. She is very good. 28 THURSDAY A LETTER. He is as wretched as I. I wrote and posted to him at this new address. I read & reread the letter until it was all crumpled. Bridget half ate it in her mouth.2 I loved her for that. She is the only person who has come anywhere near us just like that. I sat on the sofa & watched her little hands crunching the letter and felt she understood all about us and found us delicious! Went to dinner and to the Chelsea Palace. 29 FRIDAY A cold day. Still at Dreys. Looked for rooms all the morning but found none. Lunched with Jack and then met Drey and went to Curtis Brown.3 He was nice but I feel so extremely ugly that I couldn’t even be intelligent. But I like him and the woman there too. Campbells again. Dadda Hallo. Saw Koteliansky at the station. He was very nice. I rather cling to him. He brought me a skirt and some cigarettes & some chocolates. Then went home with Anne and drink in milky moonlight. 31 SUNDAY Jack rode over to Mary’s to get my work. I read all day. I felt rather ill. It came on to rain in the evening and the wind was furious. We talked of London. Jack understands that I want to live there and apart from him. It is time. I felt quite impotent to write all day and I read and smoked, feeling ill physically a bit and dreadfully ugly. I shall not speak of him. FEBRUARY 1 – MONDAY No letter. I had expected one. A slight attack of flue is bowling me over. There is a glimpse of sun – the trees look as though they were hanging out to dry. My cold gained on me all day. I read the tiring 1. An annotation at this point by JMM reads, ‘She was probably the original of Miss Moss in “Pictures”’. In the early 1910s, KM had worked occasionally as an extra in silent films. 2. Brigid (Beatrice) Columbine, daughter of Gordon and Beatrice Campbell, was then an eight-month-old baby. 3. One of the oldest literary agencies in Europe, founded by Albert Curtis Brown in 1899.

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Nietzsche1 but I felt a bit ashamed of my feelings for this man in the past. He’s, if you like, ‘human all too human’. Read until late. Felt wretched simply beyond words. Life was like sawdust and sand. Talked short stories to Jack. 2 TUESDAY V.A.F. A Letter. He is very unhappy. His letter did not bring us nearer, but I feel a bit more cheerful today because I don’t look quite so revolting as I have done. No the day ended in being as bad as ever. For one thing my illness is really severe & I am worried beyond endurance by the length of time that letters take and by the silence. I have been embroidering my kimono with black wool. Bah! What rot! What do I care for such rubbish. Francis Francis I cannot stand the war any longer. 3 WEDNESDAY A cold day with a strong wind. I can do nothing. Have tidied my desk and drunk some quinine and that is all. But I know I shall go because otherwise I’ll die of despair. My head is so hot but my hands are cold. Perhaps I am dead & just pretending to live here. There is at any rate no sign of life in me. I can’t write to him either. I want another, a warmer letter. 4 THURSDAY A.M. Today the sun began to shine & my cold is better – only my cough remains. Gilbert & Mary came to tea and supper. Mary looked very sweet but we were dull. Rose did everything very well. I sent her in the afternoon to beg a letter for me from the post but none came. I felt anxious all yesterday for a letter. Finished C & P.2 Very bad I thought it too.

1. The Lonely Nietzsche was the second volume of Elisabeth ForsterNietzsche’s two-volume Life of Nietzsche, published in English translation in 1915. 2. Dostoevsky’s 1866 novel, Crime and Punishment, which became well known in Britain after the publication of Constance Garnett’s English translation in 1914. Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–81) was, along with Tolstoy, one of the two most important Russian novelists of the nineteenth century, with an immense influence on the evolution and conceptualisation of realism. His novels probe the inner workings and the darker secrets of the mind, while also engaging directly with the acute political and religious upheavals of his era. The widespread vogue for his works in Britain in the early twentieth century was one of the major factors behind the era’s ‘Russian fever’.

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5 FRIDAY A LETTER. It is morning. The men are ploughing through the green hills. Far away a dog barks. It’s still & clear. And a little photograph – very like. God I am happy!! Now to read it again. 6 SATURDAY Today I had an urgent letter. He1 had just got my photograph – and he wants me to come immediately. This is going to be a very difficult business I can see that. 15 MONDAY Went to London with Jack. 16 TUESDAY Came to Paris. 19 FRIDAY Came to Gray.2 One night. 20 SATURDAY I am waiting for my dejeuner. Beside me on a chair is a thick leather belt and his sword. He left at nearly eight oclock. I am just up. It is a quite clear day: my heart feels rather heavy. I’ve got a feeling about this prison business which frightens me. I can’t bear to think of him in prison – and another feeling, very profound, that he does not love me at all. I find him wonderful. I don’t really love him now I know him, but he is so rich and so careless – that I love. We spent a queer night. The room – the room. The little lamp, the wooden ceiling, the bouquets of pink daisies that unfolded at dawn, the picture of the man bringing the rabbit. And F. quite naked making up the fire with a tiny brass poker – so natural and so beautiful. F. again dressing – en petit soldat – his shirt, knickers, socks, little tie, jersey, black puttees, jacket. Washing & brushing his hair with my ivory hair brush, & then just for a moment I saw him passing the window – & then he was gone. That is a terrible moment for a woman. I seem to have just escaped the prison cell, Jaggle3 dearest, because I 1. Francis Carco. 2. Gray is a small town in eastern France. It was in the Zone of the Armies during the war, where Francis Carco was stationed. KM’s journey to Gray and her short stay were to inspire the story, ‘An Indiscreet Journey’ (see CW1, pp. 439–51). 3. One of KM’s diminutives for JMM.

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find this place is in the zone of the armies, and therefore forbidden to women. However, my Aunt’s illness pulled me through.1 I had some really awful moments. Outside the station he was waiting. He merely sang (so typical) ‘Follow me but not as though you were doing so’ until we came to a tiny toll house by the river against which leant a faded cab. But once fed with my suitcase and our two selves it dashed off like the wind – the door opening and shutting to his horror as he is not allowed in cabs. We drove to a village nearby, to a large white house where he had taken a room for me – a most extraordinary room furnished with a bed, a wax apple and an immense flowery clock. It’s very hot. The sun streams through the blind. The garden outside is full of wallflowers and blue enamel saucepans. It would make you laugh, too. _________________________________ England is like a dream. I am sitting at the window of a little square room, furnished with a bed, a wax apple and an immense flowery clock. Outside the window there is a garden full of wallflowers and blue enamel saucepans. The clocks are striking five and the last rays of sun pour under the swinging blind. It is very hot – the kind of heat that makes one cheek burn in infancy. But I am so happy I must just send you a word on a spare page of my diary, dear. I have had some dreadful adventures on my way here because the place is within the zone of the armies and not allowed to women. The last old pa-man who saw my passport, ‘M. le Colonel’ – very grand with a black tea cosy and gold tassel on his head and smoking what lady novelists call a ‘heavy Egyptian cigarette’ nearly sent me back. But Frieda, its such wonderful country – all rivers and woods and large birds that look blue in the sunlight. I keep thinking of you and Lawrence. The French soldiers are ‘pour rire’.2 Even when they are wounded they seem to lean out of their sheds and wave their bandages at the train. But I saw some prisoners today – not at all funny – Oh I have so much to tell you. I had better not begin. We shall see each other again some day, won’t we, darling. ‘Voila le petit soldat joyeaux et jeune’3 he has been delivering letters. It is hot as summer – one only sits and laughs. Your loving Katherine. 1. KM was travelling with a letter supposedly from a sick aunt, inviting her to visit. According to Beatrice Campbell in Today We Will Only Gossip (1964), the original plan – wisely abandoned – was to pretend she was Carco’s pregnant wife. 2. (Fr.) ‘always laughing’. 3. (Fr.) ‘Here’s the little soldier, young and joyful.’

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The curious thing was that I could not concentrate on the end of the journey. I simply felt so happy that I leaned out of the window with my arms along the brass rail & my feet crossed and watched the sunlight and the wonderful country unfolding. At Chateaudun where we had to change I went to the buffet to drink. A big pale green room with a large stove jutting out and a buffet with coloured bottles. Two women, their arms folded, leaned against the counter. A little boy very pale running from table to table taking the orders. It was full of soldiers sitting back in their chairs swinging their legs & eating. The sun shone through the windows. The little boy poured me out a glass of horrible black coffee. He served the soldiers with a kind of dreary contempt. In the porch an old man arrived with a panier of brown spotted fish. Large fish – like the fish one sees in glass cases swim through forests of beautiful pressed seaweed. The soldiers laughed and slapped each other. They tramped about in their heavy boots. The women looked after them & the old man stood humbly waiting for someone to attend to him, his cap in his hands – as though he knew that the life he represented in his torn jacket with his basket of fish – his peaceful occupation – did not exist any more & had no right to thrust itself here. The last moments of the journey I was very frightened. We arrived at Gray & one by one like women going in to see a doctor we slipped through the door into a hot room completely filled with 2 tables & two colonels, like colonels in comic opera. Big shiny grey whiskered men with a touch of burnt red in the cheeks, both smoking, one a cigarette with a long curly ash hanging from it. He had a ring on his finger. Sumptuous & omnipotent he looked. I shut my teeth. I kept my fingers from trembling as I handed the passport & the ticket. It wont do, it wont do at all, said my colonel, & looked at me for what seemed a long time in silence. His eyes were like 2 little grey stones. He took my passport to the other colonel who dismissed his objection, stamped it & let me go. I nearly knelt on the floor. By the station stood F. terribly pale. He saluted, smiled, and said turn to the right & follow me as though you were not following. How fast he went towards the suspension bridge. He had a postmans bag on his back and a paper parcel. The street was very muddy. In the toll house by the bridge a scraggy woman, her hands wrapped in a shawl, peered out at us & against the toll house leaned a very faded cab. Montez vite vite,1 said F. He threw my suitcase, his letter bag, the parcel & the rack on the floor. The driver swung into activity, lashed the bony horse & we tore away, both doors flapping & banging. Bonjour ma cherie said F. 1. (Fr.) ‘Get in quick.’

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and we kissed one each very quickly & then clutched at the banging doors. They would not keep shut & F. who is not supposed to ride in cabs had to try to hide. Soldiers passed all the time. At the barracks we stopped a moment & a crowd of faces blocked the window. Prends ca mon vieux1 said F. handing over the paper parcel. Off we flew again. By a river, down a long strange white street with houses on either side very gay & bright in the late sunlight F. put his arm round me. I know you will like the house. Its quite white & so is the room, & the people are. At last we arrived. The woman of the house with a serious baby in her arms came to the door. It is alright. Yes alright. Bonjour Madame. It was like an elopement. We went into a room on the ground floor & the door was shut. Down went the suitcase the letter bag the rack again. Laughing & trembling we pressed against each other a long long kiss – interrupted by a clock on the wall striking five. He lit the fire. We sighed together a little, but always laughing. The whole affair seemed somehow so ridiculous and at the same time so utterly natural. There was nothing to do but laugh. Then he left me for a moment. I brushed my hair and washed & was ready when he came back to go out to dinner. To dinner. The wounded were coming down the hill. They were all bandaged up. One man looked as though he had 2 red carnations over his ears, one man as though his hand was covered in black sealing wax. F. talked & talked & talked. When I was little I thought this sin was the most terrible thing in the world but now it is quite pale. The restaurant nearby, the soldier with the strange eyes. We ordered sausages & cotelettes and fried potatoes. The cigarettes at the little Vive la Belgique2 shop. Then the long lazy dinner. I hardly said a word. When we came out stars were shining, through wispy clouds, and a moon hung like a candle flame over the ponte church spire. There was a fire in our room and a tiny lamp on the table. The fire flickered on the white wood ceiling. It was as though we were on a boat. We talked in whispers overcome by this discreet little lamp. In the most natural manner we slowly undressed by the stove. F. swung into the bed. Is it cold, I said. ‘No, not at all cold. Viens ma bébé,3 don’t be frightened. The waves are quite small.’ His laughing face & his pretty hair, one hand with a bangle over the sheets, he looked like a girl. But seeing his puttees,4 his thin black tie & the feel of his flannelette shirt – & the sword, the big ugly sword, but not between us, lying in a chair. 1. 2. 3. 4.

(Fr.) ‘Here you go, old chap.’ (Fr.) ‘Long live Belgium.’ (Fr.) ‘Come, my baby.’ A covering for the lower part of the leg in a soldier’s uniform.

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The act of love seemed somehow quite incidental, we talked so much. It was so warm & delicious lying curled in each others arms, by the light of the tiny lamp le fils de Maeterlinck, only the clock & the fire to be heard. A whole life passed in the night: other people other things, but we lay like 2 old people coughing faintly under the eiderdown, and laughing at each other and away we went to India, to South America, to Marseilles in the white boat & then we talked of Paris & sometimes I lost him in a crowd of people & it was dark & frightening, & then he was in my arms again & we were kissing. (Here he is. I know his steps.) I remember how he talked of the sea in his childhood, how clear it was: how he used to lean over the pier & watch it & the fish and shells gleaming – and then his story ‘Le lapin blanc’.1 At last the day came & birds sang & again I saw the pink marguerites on the wall. He was tres paresseux.2 He lay on his stomach & would not get up. Even at my 1.2.3 and then he shivered & felt ill and had fever and a sore throat and shivers. All the same he washed scrupulously and dressed & finally I had the blue & red vision again over mon bébé – & then a blurred impression of him through the blind. I did not feel happy again until I had been to the cabinet and seen the immense ridiculous rabbits. By the time he came at 12.30 I felt awfully happy. We went off to lunch at the same little restaurant & had eggs we dipped the bread in & peas and oranges. The soldiers there. The garden full of empty bottles. Saw the little boy – the same boy who had smoked the long cigarette the night before. (It is just struck three. He cannot be here before five.) 18 March. Came to Paris again. 19 March. In Paris. 24 March. Kick off.3 Cet heros aux cheveux longs qui des heures entieres, gratte avec son canne dans le sable, or, ayant besoin de vivre crache un peu de sang, 1. Francis Carco never wrote a story called ‘Le Lapin blanc’ (‘The White Rabbit’). However, he could have been telling her about an immensely famous cabaret in Montmartre, Paris, called ‘Le Lapin Agile’, which Carco frequented regularly from 1910 onwards. There had formerly been in Paris a cabaret called ‘Le Lapin Blanc’ but this was demolished in 1860. One other possible explanation might be a little white enamel rabbit that sat in the window of a cake shop in the rue de la Gaité, Carco’s favourite district in Montparnasse. In one of his notebooks from this period, he remarks on the presence of this little white rabbit, and may have talked about it to KM. 2. (Fr.) ‘very lazy’. 3. It was at this point that KM started writing ‘The Aloe’, which would eventually become ‘Prelude’.

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et avec un long regard larmoyant mais satisfie ecrit le mot finis sur le meme sable gratte.1 [NLC, Unbound papers]

The brilliant sunny weather, & spring weather. The pansies in the Kasino grounds, the lilac bushes. I see her walking under a parasol. The little sick boy. His death. The whole peasant family in mourning – that night Peter goes to see her & they kiss.2 Paul Deroulede. J & Jean Tharaud.3 le pêle mêle the armenian sunshine, the black jolly man in a fez, the traders of silk flocking into the street, with cards of braid, the large pictures of his brother & the armenian dressed like Prussian princes sitting on little carpets. His teeth under his moustache & the rings on his podgy fingers. Boris is in love with Jacques. That terrible walk home when they did not touch each other – the horror of it, the wonder of it & then the shadows mingled. While he talked he put his hand upon the back of her neck. She tilted back her head & smiled at him. When I was a very little girl, she said, my nurse used to put me to bed very early – before sunset – & I never could sleep. I used to lie with my eyes closed & the sun & the flowers still danced on my eyelids. Now, she said, when I go to bed & shut my eyes it is your smiles that dance on my eyelids, your image that floats & dances. Oh, I long, as I used to long then, to spring out of bed & run back into the brightness – I love you – I love you.

1. (Fr.) ‘This long-haired hero who spends hours scratching in the sand with his walking stick, but, needing to get on with life, spits out some blood, and with a long, tearful but satisfied gaze, inscribes the words finis directly into the scratched sand.’ 2. This is a note about an incomplete story written by KM in 1914 (see CW1, pp. 392–7). 3. Paul Déroulède (1846–1914) was a French poet, playwright and novelist. His active political commitments led him from pacifism to active anti-German military action, the founding of the Patriotic League and staunch opposition to the Paris Commune. In his later years, he was to become a firm figurehead for French right-wing nationalists, despite his defence of Dreyfus in the famous Dreyfus affair. The brothers Jérôme and Jean Tharaud wrote introductory essays to two of his works, and were his first biographers. Their jointly authored short biography, Paul Déroulède, was first published in 1914.

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One night when Jack was with Goodyear1 & I had gone to bed and he said that what he really wanted was a woman who would keep him – yes, that’s what he really wanted – & then again, so much later, with Campbell, he said I was the one who submitted. Yes I gave way to him & still do, but then I did it because I did not feel the urgency of my own desires. Now I do and though I submit from habit now it is always under a sort of protest which I call an adieu submission. It always may be the last time. Mais pourquoi faites vous ca? Pour moi-meme d’abord et puis pour vous.2 on the torn web of the old dream the new dream began silently to spin. envelloppée enveloppée I cannot get a move on today. I feel rather horribly dry. Elena Bendall Peter Bendall3 1. 0.0 bed 10.6 chair 8.6 washstand 6.11 screen 10.0 table 5.0 lamp 5.0 crocks 10.0 stain floor 5.0 shelves -----------£4. 0.11 mirror 3.0 chair 4.6 7.6

1. JMM’s Oxford friend, Frederick Goodyear (1887–1917), became close to KM and his death at the front, in 1917, shocked her. 2. (Fr.) ‘But why are you doing this? For myself first of all, and then for you.’ 3. KM had already used the surname Bendall for a character in ‘Maata’, and is possibly planning here to use the name again (see above, p. 47, n. 2). The name, of course, is taken from Edith Bendall (see above, p. 107).

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To be without books and to be alone are the 2 essentials to my writing – endless time no fires to attend to, no-one to wait for – days and nights on end. I’d better find a room in London quickly – and £5 with which to furnish it. I’m simply dreaming this afternoon and all the while I know that my dream can come true only by Balzacian methods – that is by the absolute sticking to work. j’ecris j’ecrivai1 What idiocy! The only one who sang ill was the cripple. One would think it were rather his crutches that sang and not he for the voice was so hard and wooden, it dragged so, it swung so heavy. There were 2 blind men with lean shanks and red noses. One of them had a spotted snake-like stick with a sharp end, the other walked with his hand on the fiddler’s shoulder. The cripple was a little short [?] fellow with a tiny round head, broad shoulders, long arms, & legs that seemed to end in a couple of big knots. He wore black spectacles too, that tied to his head by a black cord fastened in a bow behind. All the more difficult pieces of money – the sous2 that dropped down the drains or over the palings, or were lost – he it was who swung to find them & this seemed to be agreed between them for the fiddler & the leader made no effort to help. The sweet small notes of the robin sang in Out popped the beads & down rained the ha’pennies. Round them in a ring stood the small audience. Little girls in black pinafores with their hair tied up in ribbons, little boys in blue pinafores that buttoned on their shoulders [?], their hands behind their backs, their legs wide. Below the terrace there is a great pother. Four men are engaged with a long tangled rope. They are stretching it across the road – for what reason I do not know & I am sure they don’t – & tying one end to a blue gum tree, the other to a large palm by the shore. There are four sacks of grain one side of the road & a cart upturned, and beside the palm a bundle of green peas[?]. Some tiny white & blue boats are drawn up to the shore.

1. (Fr.) ‘I write, I wrote’. 2. A ‘sou’ was the popular name for the smallest unit of currency in France until the 1940s.

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[Journal, 1954, pp. 98–101]

Notes for The Aloe.1 In the scurrely, as Lottie says. Look out now, Rags! Don’t you touch that when I’m not here. If you put the tip of your finger into that, it ’ud wither your hand off! ‘We came over with Mum on the bus and were going to stay to dinner. What time is dinner at your new place?’ ‘The same time as we always used to have it,’ said Lottie. ‘When the bell rings.’ ‘Pooh! that isn’t what time,’ said Pip. ‘We always have our dinner hal’ pas’ twelve. Let’s go round to the kitchen and ask your servant what time yours is.’ ‘We’re not allowed to go into the kitchen in the morning,’ said Isabel. ‘We have to keep away from the back of the house.’ ‘Well, Rags and I can, because we’re visitors. Come on, Rags!’ But when they had passed through the side gate, opening with a big iron ring, that led into the courtyard, they forgot all about asking the servant. ‘What do you have for dinner?’ ‘The same as we always used to have,’ said Lottie, ‘except we have cold milk instead of water to drink.’ Mrs. Trout, she was a widow. Her husband had died five years before, and immediately upon his death, before he was cold, she had married again, far more thoroughly and more faithfully than she ever had married him. The Journey Home. The Aloe. . . . Stanley Burnell: Beryl plays the guitar. The Samuel Josephs; the Journey and Supper; Bed for all. Dan; Burnell courting Linda; Mrs. Burnell and Beryl; Kezia; The Aloe. Stanley Burnell drives home; the Nursery; Beryl with a guitar; Children; Alice; The Trout sisters; Mrs. Trout’s latest novel; Cribbage; Linda and her Mother. Really thirteen chapters. They cut down the stem when Linda is ill. She has been counting on the flowering of the Aloe.

1. KM began working on drafts of ‘The Aloe’ in March 1915 (see CW1, pp. 467–519).

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That Woman. Sitting astride the bow window ledge, smelling the heliotrope – or was it the sea? – half of Kezia was in the garden and half of her in the room. ‘Have you put down the Harcourts?’ ‘Yes, Mrs. Phil and Mrs. Charlie.’ ‘And the Fields?’ ‘Mrs. and the Misses Field.’ ‘And Rose Conway?’ ‘Yes, and that Melbourne girl staying with her.’ ‘Old Mrs. Grady?’ ‘Do you think – necessary?’ ‘My dear, she does so love a good cackle.’ ‘Oh, but that way she has of dipping everything in her tea! Iced chocolate cake and the ends of her feather boa dipped in tea. . . . ‘How marvellously that ribbon has lasted, Harrie! Marvellously!’ That was Aunt Beryl’s voice. She, Aunt Harrie and Mother sat at the round table with big shallow teacups in front of them. In the dusky light, in their white puffed-up muslin blouses with wing sleeves, they were three birds at the edge of a lily pond. Beyond them the shadowy room melted into the shadow; the gold picture frames were traced upon the air; the cut-glass doorknob glittered; a song – a white butterfly with wings outspread – clung to the ebony piano. Aunt Harrie’s plaintive, singing tones: ‘It’s very faded, really, if you look into it. I don’t think it can possibly stand another ironing.’ ‘If I were rich,’ said Aunt Beryl, ‘with real money to spend – not save’. . . ‘What about – what about asking that Gibbs woman?’ ‘Linda!’ ‘How can you suggest such a thing!’ ‘Well, why not? She needn’t come. But it must be so horrid not to be asked anywhere!’ ‘But, good heavens, whose fault is it? Who could ask her?’ ‘She’s nobody but herself to blame.’ ‘She’s simply flown in people’s faces.’ ‘And it must be so particularly dreadful for Mr. Gibbs.’ ‘But Harrie, dear, he’s dead.’ ‘Of course, Linda, that’s just it. He must feel so helpless, looking down.’ Kezia heard her mother say: ‘I never thought of that. Yes, that might be . . . very maddening!’ Aunt Beryl’s cool little voice gushed up and overflowed: ‘It’s really nothing to laugh at, Linda. There are some things one realy must draw the line at.’

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[MS–Papers–4006–03]

I did not tell you that I dreamed all night of Rupert Brooke.1 And today as I left the house he was standing at the door, with a rucksack on his back & his broad hat shading his face. So after I had posted your letter I did not go home. I went a long very idle sort of amble along the quais. It was exquisitely hot – white clouds lay upon the sky like sheets spread out to dry. In the big sandheaps down by the river children had hollowed out tunnels and caverns. They sat in them stolid and content, their hair glistening in the sun. Now and then a man lay stretched on his face, his head in his arms. The river was full of big silver stars, the trees shook faintly, glinting with light, and I found delightful places – little squares with white square houses – quite hollow they looked with the windows gaping open. Narrow streets arched over with chestnut boughs – or perhaps quite deserted with a clock tower showing over the roofs. The sun put a spell on everything. I crossed and recrossed the river & leaned over the bridges & kept thinking we were coming to a Park when we weren’t. You cannot think what pleasure my invisible, imaginary companion gave me. If he had been alive it would never have possibly occurred, but – its a game I like to play – to walk and to talk with the dead who smile and are silent – and free quite finally free. When I lived alone I would often come home, put my key in the door, & find someone there waiting for me. ‘Hallo! have you been here long?’ I suppose that sounds dreadful rubbish to you. I am sitting on a broad bench in the sun hard by Notre Dame. In front of me there’s a hedge of ivy. An old man walks along with a basket on his arm pinching off the withered leaves. In the priests garden they are cutting the grass. I love this big cathedral. The little view I have of it now is of pointed narrow spires, fretted against the blue, and one or two squatting stone parrots balanced on a little balcony. It is like a pen drawing by a Bogey. And I like the Saints with their crowns on their collars and their heads in their hands. Like the old saints in some cathedral, découpé but with their crowns hanging over their collars. . . . England that I wrote twice I should return on Tuesday. I nearly told the concierge – I was half ready. Today it does not seem to matter. Perhaps the fact that Jack never says once that he longs for me, is

1. The English poet Rupert Brooke (1887–1915) is best remembered today for his poem ‘Grantchester’ (1912), as well as his early war poetry. He was a friend of many members of the Bloomsbury group, as well as KM and JMM.

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desolate without me, never calls me – He has been to me the being that in a solitary world held my hand, and I his, was real among shadows. And ready to laugh and to run, but tonight he is not quite so real. Pour sur1 he is very well without me. My impatience et mon douleur2 must seem exaggerated to him. Shall I go back? It depends entirely on him. I will not write so often or so much. I have been a little absurd. (This old habit of ‘jotting’ has come back.) Yes I am a widow, said Miss Edith Barnet sadly laying down the P.D.M.3 My husband died just one month before my little one came. Evening. October 19154 they are walking up and down the garden in Acacia Road. It is dusky; the michaelmas daisies are bright as feathers. From the old fruit-tree at the bottom of the garden – the slender tree rather like a poplar – there falls a little round pear, hard as a stone. Did you hear that, Katie? Can you find it? By Jove – that familiar sound. Their hands move over the thin moist grass. He picks it up, and, unconsciously, as of old, polishes it on his handkerchief. Do you remember the enormous number of pears there used to be on that old tree. Down by the violet bed. And how after there’d been a southerly buster we used to go out with clothes baskets to pick them up. And how while we stooped they went on falling, bouncing on our backs & heads. And how far they used to be scattered – ever so far, under the violet leaves, down the steps, right down to the Lily Lawn we used to find them trodden in the grass. And how soon the ants got to them – I can see now that little round hole with a sort of fringe of brown pepper round it. Do you know I’ve never seen pears like them since. They were so bright – canary yellow, & small. And the peel was so thin and the pips jet – jet black. First you pulled out the little stem & sucked it. It was faintly sour & then you ate them always from the top – core & all. The pips were delicious. 1. 2. 3. 4.

(Fr.) ‘for sure’. (Fr.) ‘and my pain’. The Paris Daily Mail. KM’s brother Leslie was killed on 6 October 1915 in Ploegsteert Wood, near Armentières, whilst giving hand-grenade training sessions. In early official correspondence, his death was mistakenly dated 7 October. The news reached KM on 11 October.

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Do you remember sitting on the pink garden seat. I shall never forget that pink garden seat. It is the only garden seat for me. Where is it now. Do you think we shall be allowed to sit in it in Heaven. It always wobbled a bit & there was usually the marks of a snail on it. Sitting on that seat, swinging our legs & eating the pears. But isnt it extraordinary how deep our happiness was – how positive – deep, shining, warm. I remember the way we used to look at each other & smile – do you? Sharing a secret – what was it? I think it was the family feeling. We were almost like one child. I always see us walking about together, looking at things together with the same eyes, discussing. I felt that again – just now – when we looked for the pear in the grass. I remembered ruffling the violet leaves with you. Oh that garden! Do you remember that some of the pears we found used to have little teeth marks in them. Yes. Who bit them. It was always a mystery. He puts his arm round her. They pace up and down. A thin round moon shines over the pear tree & the ivy walls of the garden glitter like metal. The air smells chill, heavy, very cold. We shall go back there one day, when its all over. We’ll go back together. And find everything. Everything. She leans against his shoulder. The moonlight deepens. Now they are facing the back of the house. A square of light shows in a window. Give me your hand. You know I shall always be a stranger here. Yes, darling, I know. Walk up & down once more & then we’ll go in. It’s so curious – my absolute confidence that I’ll come back. I feel its as certain as this pear. I feel that too. I couldn’t not come back, you know that feeling. Its awfully mysterious. Their shadows on the grass are long & strange. A puff of strange wind whispers in the ivy and the old moon touches them with silver. She shivers. You’re cold. Dreadfully cold. He puts his arm round her. Suddenly he kisses her. Goodbye darling.

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Ah why do you say that! Darling goodbye – goodbye – – –1 October 20th 1915: Awake awake! my little boy. A misty, misty evening. I want to write down the fact that not only am I not afraid of death – I welcome the idea of death. I believe in immortality because he is not here, and I long to join him. First, my darling, Ive got things to do for both of us and then I will come as quickly as I can to you. Dearest heart, I know you are there and I live with you – and I will write for you. Other people are near, but they are not close to me – to you only do I belong just as you belong to me. Nobody knows how often I am with you. Indeed I am always with you and I begin to feel that you know – that when I leave this house and this place it will be with you & I will never even for the shortest space of time be away from you again. You know I can never be Jack’s lover again. You have me, you’re in my flesh as well as in my soul. I give Jack my ‘surplus’ love but to you I hold and to you I give my deepest love. Jack is no more than – – anybody might be. Brother. I think I have known for a long time that life was over for me, but I never realised it or acknowledged it until my brother died. Yes, though he is lying in the middle of a little wood in France and I am still walking upright, and feeling the sun and the wind from the sea, I am just as much dead as he is. The present and the future mean nothing to me: I am no longer ‘curious’ about people; I do not wish to go anywhere and the only possible value that anything can have for me is that it should put me in mind of something that happened or was when we were alive. ‘Do you remember, Katie?’ I hear his voice in trees and flowers, in scents and light and shadow. Have people, apart from those far away 1. This powerful passage was probably one of the first things KM wrote on hearing of her brother’s death. She seems to compress three scenes into one: their last evening together at Acacia Road under the pear tree in the back garden, before Leslie set off for France; childhood memories of Wellington, and finally haunting comparisons between a boy eating a pear and a soldier picking up a hand grenade and removing the pin. The story ‘Autumns 1’ (CW1, pp. 451–4), set in an apple orchard and published on 4 October, just two days before Leslie’s death, also shows KM remembering a moment from their childhood in New Zealand, undoubtedly as a result of his stay at Acacia Road. See also the poem ‘To L. H. B’ (CW3, p. 96), KM’s poetic obituary to her dead brother, which also mixes childhood scenes of sharing, coupled with images of deadly fruit.

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people, ever existed for me? Or have they always failed me, and faded because I denied them reality? Supposing I were to die, as I sit at this table, playing with my indian paper knife – what would be the difference. No difference at all. Then why don’t I commit suicide? Because I feel I have a duty to perform to the lovely time when we were both alive. I want to write about it and he wanted me to. We talked it over in my little top room in London. I said: I will just put on the front page: To my brother – Leslie Heron Beauchamp. Very well: it shall be done. The wind died down at sunset. Half a ring of moon hangs in the hollow air. It is very quiet. Somewhere I can hear a woman crooning a song. Perhaps she is crouched before the stove in the corridor, for it is the kind of song that a woman sings before a fire – brooding, warm, sleepy and safe. I see a little house with flower patches under the windows and the soft mass of a haystack at the back. The fowls have all gone to roost – they are wooly blurs on the perches. The pony is in the stable with a cloth on. The dog lies in his kennel, his head on his forepaws. The cat sits up beside the woman, her tail tucked in and the man, still young and careless comes clinking up the dark road. Suddenly a spot of light shows in the window and in the pansy bed below & he walks quicker, whistling. But where are these comely people? These young strong people with hard healthy bodies and curling hair. They are not saints or philosophers. They are decent human beings – but where are they? Sunday: 10 minutes past 4. I am sure that this Sunday is the worst Sunday of all my life. I’ve touched bottom. Even my heart doesn’t beat any longer. I only keep alive by a kind of buzz of blood in my veins. Now the dark is coming back again – only at the windows there is a white glare. My watch ticks loudly and strongly on the bed table, as though it were rich with minute life while I faint – I die. It is evening again, the sea runs very high. It frets, sweeps up and over, hangs, leaps upon the rocks. In the sharp metallic light the rocks have a reddish tinge, above them a broad band of green mixed with a rich sooty black, above it the cone of a violet mountain, above the mountain a light blue sky shining like the inside of a wet sea shell. Every moment the light changes. Even as I write it is no longer hard. Some small white clouds top the mountain like tossed up smoke. And now a purple colour, very menacing and awful is pulling over the sky. The trees tumble about in the unsteady light. A dog barks. The gardener, talking to himself, shuffles across the new raked paths, picks up his weed basket and goes off. Two lovers are walking together by the edge of the sea. They are muffled up in coats. She has a red handkerchief

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on her head. They walk, very proud and careless, hugging each other and bearing the wind. I am ill today. I cannot walk at all & in pain. Wednesday. Today I am hardening my heart. I am walking all round my heart and building up the defences. I do not mean to leave a loophole even for a tuft of violets to grow in. Give me a hard heart, oh Lord. Lord harden thou my heart. This morning I could walk a little. So I went to the Post office. It was bright with sun. The palm trees stood up in the air, crisp and shining. The blue gums hung heavy with sun as is their wont. When I reached the road I heard a singing. A funny thought. . ‘the english have come’– but of course it was not they. Et in Arcadia ego.1 To sit in front of the little wood fire, your hands crossed in your lap and your eyes closed. To fancy you see again upon your eyelids all the dancing beauty of the day, to feel the flame on your throat as you used to imagine you felt the spot of yellow when Bogey2 held a buttercup under your chin . . . When breathing is such delight that you are almost afraid to breathe – as though a butterfly fanned its wings upon your breast. Still to taste the warm sunlight that melted in your mouth, still to smell the white waxy scent that lay upon the jonquil fields and the wild spicy scent of the rosemary growing in little tufts among the red rocks close to the brim of the sea . . . The moon is rising but the reluctant day lingers upon the sea and sky. The sea is dabbled with a pink the colour of unripe cherries, and in the sky there is a flying yellow light like the wings of canaries. Very stubborn and solid are the trunks of the palm trees. Springing from their tops the stiff green bouquets seem to cut into the evening air and, among them, the blue gum trees, tall and slender with sickle shaped leaves and drooping branches half blue, half violet. The moon 1. (Latin) ‘Even in Arcadia, there I am.’ The phrase is usually thought to be spoken by Death, recalling that even in pastoral paradise, mortality is close at hand. Initially evoking an idyllic pastoral land in classical Greece, the term ‘Arcadia’ usually implies an imaginary Utopia. JMM’s pencilled note beside this title reads ‘Bandol Dec. 24 1915’. In a letter to Koteliansky sent at this time, KM presents Bandol as an Arcadian paradise (see CLKM, 1, p. 238). 2. ‘Bogey’ was KM’s nickname for her brother when they were children. She later adopted it as a nickname for JMM.

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is just over the mountain behind the village. The dogs know she is there; already they begin to howl and bark. The fishermen are shouting and whistling to one another as they bring in their boats; some young boys are singing in half-broken voices down by the shore, and there is a noise of children crying, little children with burnt cheeks and sand between their toes being carried home to bed. I am tired, blissfully tired. Do you suppose that daisies feel blissfully tired when they shut for the night and the dews descend upon them? This afternoon I did not go for a walk. There is a long stone embankment that goes out to the sea. Huge stones on either side and a little rough goat path in the centre. When I came to the end the sun was going down so, feeling extremely solitary and romantic, I sat me down upon a stone & watched the red sun which looked horribly like a morsel of tinned apricot sink into a sea like a huge junket. I began, feebly, but certainly perceptibly, to harp ‘Alone between sea & sky etc.’ But suddenly I saw a minute speck on the bar coming towards me. It grew, it granded. It turned into a young officer in dark blue, slim, with an olive skin, fine eyebrows, long black eyes, a fine silky moustache. You are alone, M. Alone M. You are living at the hotel, M. At the hotel, M. Ah, I have noticed you walking alone several times. It is possible M. He blushed & put his hand to his cap. I am very indiscreet, M. Very indiscreet, M.1 [MS–Papers–4006–04]

Afternoon in Spring2 It is raining. Big soft drops splash on the people’s hands and cheeks; immense warm drops like melted stars. ‘Here are roses. Here are lilies’ caws the old hag in the gutter – but the lilies, bunched tight in a frill of green look more like faded cauliflowers. Up and down she drags the creaking barrow. A sad, sickly 1. The letter ‘M’ here refers alternatively to Mademoiselle and Monsieur as she imagines a gallant conversation between herself and the young officer. 2. This passage, and the one below called ‘Femme Seule’, together form an early incomplete draft of the story ‘Spring Pictures’ (see CW1, pp. 435–8).

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smell comes from it. Nobody wants to buy. You must walk in the middle of the road; there is no room on the pavement, for every single shop brims over: every shop shows a tattered frill of soiled lace and dirty ribbons to charm and entice you. And there are tables set out with toy cannons and soldiers and zeppelins and photograph frames complete with ogling beauties, and hideous tin brooches with bebe or cherie written on them, and strings of Femme Seule.1 Hope! you misery – you sentimental faded female. Break your last string and have done with it – I shall go mad with your monotonous plucking. My heart throbs to it – every little pulse beats in time. It is morning. I lie in the empty bed, the huge bed – big as a field and as cold and unsheltered. Through the shutters the sunlight comes up from the river and flows over the ceiling in trembling waves. From outside comes the noise of a hammer tapping and down below in the house a door opens and shuts. But all about me I hear the solitude spinning her web. Is this my room. Are these my clothes folded over the arm chair. Under the pillow – sign and seal of a lonely woman – ticks my watch. The bell jangles. Ah, at last. I leap out of bed and run to the door in my chemise. ‘Voici votre lait Madame’2 says the concierge gazing severely at my knees. ‘Merci bien Madame’ I cry, smiling gayly & swinging the milk bottle. ‘Pas de poste pour moi.’3 ‘Rien Madame.’4 Shut the door, stand in the hall a moment & listen listen for her hated twanging. I implore her once again to play you that charming little thing for one note only – coax her – court her Ninon de Long Clothes.5

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

(Fr.) ‘Woman on her own’. (Fr.) ‘Here’s your milk, Madame.’ (Fr.) ‘No letters for me.’ (Fr.) ‘Nothing, Madame.’ A popular pun on the name Ninon de l’Enclos (1620–1705), a courtesan, writer and patron of the arts, who remains well known in France. In 1915, Beatrice Hastings published several articles in the New Age under this pseudonym.

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[Journal, 1954, p. 79]

‘Perhaps it is only upon the approach of an outside soul that another’s soul becomes invisible, and if she be caught unawares she will not have time to disappear’ (Leon Shestov). That is what Tchekhov aimed at. ‘Sooner or later in all probability this habit will be abandoned. In the future, probably, writers will convince themselves and the public that any kind of artificial completion is absolutely superfluous’ (Leon Shestov). Tchehov said so.1 [Notebook 45, qMS–1253]

Saunders Lane. Our house in Tinakori Road stood far back from the road. It was a big white painted square house with a slender pillared verandah and balcony running all the way round. In the front from the verandah edge the garden sloped away in terraces & flights of concrete steps – down – until you reached the stone wall covered with nasturtiums that kept us so ‘beautifully private’ had three gates let into it – the visitors’ gate, the Tradesman’s gate, and a huge pair of old iron gates that were never used and clashed and clamoured when Bogey & I tried to swing on them. Tinakori road was not fashionable, it was very mixed. Of course there were some good houses in it – old ones like ours for instance, hidden away in wildish gardens, & there was no doubt that land there would become extremely valuable, as Father said, if one bought enough & hung on. It was high, it was healthy, the sun poured in all the windows all day long, and once we had a decent tramway service, as Father argued But it was a little trying to have one’s own washerwoman living 1. Quotations (with KM’s additional comments) from two essays: ‘Penultimate words XI: I and Thou’ and ‘Creation from the Void: Anton Tchekhov’. Both essays figure in Anton Chekhov and Other Essays, first published in English translation in 1916, and translated by S. S. Koteliansky and JMM. JMM’s dating of this extract seems to imply that KM had been reading the essays in draft form; she may even have taken a part in co-translating them, since in the months that followed she and Koteliansky co-translated at least one story by Kuprin. Lev Shestov (1866–1938) was a Russian philosopher who settled in Paris after the Bolshevik revolution. His aphoristic style, poised existentialism and ecstatic asceticism attracted numbers of adepts and admirers, including DHL, who, also with Koteliansky, later co-translated Shestov’s All Things are Possible and wrote an engaging introduction to the work (see below, p. 436).

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next door who would persist in attempting to talk to Mother over the fence – & then just beyond her ‘hovel’ as Mother called it there lived an old man who burnt leather in his back yard whenever the wind blew our way. And then, just opposite our house, across the road, there was a paling fence & below the paling fence, in a hollow, squeezed in almost under the fold of a huge gorse-covered hill, was Saunders Lane. And further along there lived an endless family of halfcastes who appeared to have planted their garden with empty jam tins and old saucepans and black iron kettles without lids.1 T.B.M.R:2 Jinnie Moore was awfully good at elocution. Was she better than I? I could make the girls cry when I read Dickens in the sewing class – and she couldn’t, but then she never tried to. She didn’t care for Dickens. She liked something about horses and tramps and shipwrecks and prairie fires – they were her style, her reckless, redhaired dashing style. My dear they are like the bunches that stewards arrange in water bottles on second class salon tables of coastal boats. I keep waiting for the postman. Every step in the road I feel is his step. Who is he whom I seek? It is a warm, loving, eager companion in whose soul there are no horrible dark gulfs, none of those terribly beltling cliffs and thin peaks that frighten me in my dreams. Neither shall he shut at evening like a jealous flower. He will be open all night long to me – but he is not. [Notebook 33, qMS–1246]

Hotel Beau Rivage Bandol Var. vii.xii.1915. I shall keep a strict account of all monies while I am here. In hand oranges biscuits stamps cigarettes matches paper. stamp

90 francs. .20 cent. .40 .35 .75 .10 5 .25

1. This is the house featured in KM’s story, ‘The Garden Party’ (see CW2, pp. 401–14). 2. ‘T.B.M.R.’ – ‘The Beautiful Miss Richardson’ (see CW2, pp. 433–5).

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writing paper paper.

casserole methylated

.30 5 ____ 2.45 .60 .95

as soon as we reach home. I am too cold to move a pen. (The old man could not get over the fact that he was still strong enough to lift such a lump of a boy. He wanted to do it again and again. Even when the little boy was awfully tired of the game the old man kept putting out his arms and smiling foolishly and trying to lift him still higher. He even tried with one arm . . .)1 (In the scurely as Lottie says.)2 Hotel Beau Rivage, Bandol-sur-Mer, Var.3 December 1915. Frcs In hand 90 _________________________________ paper oranges biscuits cigarettes matches paper stamp writing paper paper casserole methylated spirit stamps exercise book paper

cents 5 20 40 75 10 5 25 30 5 60 95 85 20 5

1. These notes show KM working on the manuscript of ‘The Aloe’ (see CW1, pp. 467–519). 2. Lottie is one of the children in ‘The Aloe’. 3. Distraught following the death of her beloved brother, Leslie Beauchamp, in October 1915, KM escapes from London to the South of France, ending up in Bandol.

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50 ___________ 5 30

Brought forward 5 30 ______________________________________ stamps 35 tips 30 paper 5 25 borax1 laundry (!) 3 15 paper 5 __________ 9 45 Hotel Bill for J.& me Tip to maidservant stamps

stamps matches stamps

62 50 3 0 1 10 __________ 76 05 1

10 10 35 __________ 86 60

December 20th 1915 In hand 349.55 ______________________________________ 20th cigarettes 75 stamp 25 telegrams (!) 6.60 _____ 7.60 In hand 341.95 ______________________________________ 21st stamp 25 [. . .] 75 22nd stamps 85 _____ 1.85 In hand 340.10 ______________________________________ 1. Borax was a widely used cleaning and laundering product.

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23rd letter paper + envelopes stamps tip 24th stamps bill

In hand 25th roses 26th stamps 27th cigarettes

276.751

55 85 2.0 50 59.80 _____ 63.35 276.75 35 75 75

28th telegrams stamps material

9.0 75 3.50 ______ 15.5

In hand 30th apartement

261.40 105.0

cristaux lion d’or brun & noir [Notebook 45, qMS–1253]

belgian dress purple coat and skirt

a dark blue a flowered one or check

black silk dress chinese Belts [?] for occasional travelling coat and skirt (2)

russian blouse blue jacket red jacket bulgarian jacket

well say this [?] I love you I love you. The words are like flowers. The more often I run into the garden & pluck them for you the more plentifully they grow.

1. See Figure 6 (p. 181), with KM’s minute (although not always accurate) daily accounts.

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Figure 6 Everyday accounts, December 1915. Notebook 33, qMS–1246–1. John Middleton Murry Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

I’ve just got the idea of being run down or over à la the good soul in Lady Frazer’s book.1

1. Doubtless a reference to the writings of Lady Lilly Grove Frazer (1854/5–1941), the wife of Sir James Frazer, whose book, The Golden Bough, had a great influence on the early twentieth-century literary imagination. Lady Frazer was a Frenchwoman, and the author of language-learning manuals, stories for children, popular historical studies and translations from French.

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[Notebook 45, qMS, 1253]

Nastasya Filippovna Barashkov.1 page 7. She is first mentioned by Rogozhin in the train and she is immediately ‘recognised’ by a man with a red nose and pimpled face who ‘knows all about her.’ ‘Armance and Coralie & Princess Patsy2 & N.F.’ ‘We’ll go and see N.F.’ Prophetic words. page 9. Why did she accept the earrings from a man she never had seen? She was not greedy for jewels. She had plenty & she was extremely particular in her conduct towards other men. Is that a kind of russian custom? To accept the earrings as a kind of recognition of her beauty. Then you get a glimpse. She flung them at him, you old grey beard. 26–27. The portrait ‘dark & deep, passionate & disdainful.’ 33. Her face is cheerful but she has passed through terrible suffering, hasn’t she? . . . Its a proud face, awfully proud, but I don’t know whether she is goodhearted. Ah! if she were! That would redeem it all. 1. The heroine from Dostoevsky’s novel, The Idiot, the story of Myshkin, a young, gentle-natured and fragile man of noble descent, who finds himself caught between two powerful female figures, Nastassya Filippovna Barashkov and Aglaya Yepanchina, with devastating consequences for them all. Nastassya Filippovna, the former mistress of a figure of some consequence, and an acknowledged beauty, nearly marries the Prince, Myshkin, but finally escapes with another admirer, Rogozhin, only to be brutally murdered by him. The novel was translated by Constance Garnett in 1913. JMM’s critical study of Dostoevsky was published in late 1916. 2. The three figures are named as acquaintances in the same social circles but do not play a role in the story.

182

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page 37 The story of Nastasya. That change in her when she appears at Petersburg – her knowledge almost ‘technical’ of how things are done in the world is not at all impossible. With such women it appears to be a kind of instinct. Maata was just the same – she simply knew these things from nowhere. Her action, when Dostoievsky says ‘from spite’, is to show her power, & now that he has jerked out the weapon with which he wounded her she feels the dreadful smart. [Journal, 1954, pp. 110–12]

Page 366. Myshkin to Rogozhin. ‘Do you know that she may love you now more than anyone, and in such a way that the more she torments you, the more she loves you? She won’t tell you so, but you must know how to see it. When all’s said and done, why else is she going to marry you? Some day she will tell you so herself. Some women want to be loved like that, and that’s just her character. And your love and your character must impress her! Do you know that a woman is capable of torturing a man with her cruelty and mockery without the faintest twinge of conscience, because she’ll think every time she looks at you: “I’m tormenting him to death now, but I’ll make up for it with my love later.”’ [Notebook 45, qMS–1253]

It is a strange fact about Madame Allegre.1 She walks very well – quite beautifully. I saw her just now go down to the bottom of the garden with a pail in one hand & a basket in the other. Prepare charcoal fire every night before turning in. Then one has only to go down, put a match to it, stick on the funnel, & its ready by the time you’re dressed! How clever! I must break through again. I feel so anxious and so worried about the Sardinia2 that I can’t write. What I have done seems to me to be awfully, impossibly good compared to the STUFF I wrote yesterday. I believe if I had another shock (!), if for instance Mlle Marthe turned up,3 I might manage but at present je veux

1. Monsieur and Madame Allègre owned the Villa Pauline in Bandol, where KM and JMM lived in early 1916. 2. The Sardinia was the ship on which KM’s sister Chaddie was travelling to Marseille, where KM was to meet her. 3. Contemporary slang for a woman’s menstrual cycle (also called ‘tante Marthe’).

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mourir.1 I ought to write a letter from Beryl to Nan Fry. This is all too laborious!2 Beryl Fairfield.3 What is it that I’m getting at? It is really Beryl’s ‘Sosie’.4 The fact that for a long time now, she really hasn’t been even able to control her second self: it’s her second self who now controls her. There was [a] kind of radiant being who wasn’t either spiteful or malicious of whom she’d had a glimpse whose very voice was different to hers who was grave who never would have dreamed of doing the things that she did. Had she banished this being or had it really got simply tired and left her. I want to get at all this through her just as I got at Linda through Linda. To suddenly merge her into herself Robin sends to Beryl

Lives like logs of driftwood5 Tossed on a watery main Other logs encounter Drift, touch, part again And so it is with our lives On life’s tempestuous sea We meet, we greet, we sever Drifting eternally.

Shatov & his wife.6 There is something awfully significant about the attitude of Shatov to his wife, & it is amazing how, when Dostoievsky at last turns a soft but penetrating full light upon him, how we have managed to gather a great deal of knowledge of his character from the former vague sidelights and shadowy impressions. He is just what we thought 1. (Fr.) ‘I want to die.’ 2. See Figure 7 (p. 185), showing a particularly decorative page from the manuscript version. This confirms that music was never far from KM’s mind, even when ostensibly she had very different preoccupations on her mind. 3. KM’s notes on ‘The Aloe’, later to become ‘Prelude’ (see above, p. 166). 4. A ‘sosie’ is French for a double, or a complete look-alike. 5. KM noted a plan for a short story of the same title (see below, p. 386). 6. Reading notes from Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, translated by Constance Garnett in 1913; it is a grimly political story of proto-revolutionaries, fanaticism and obsession. Shatov belongs to the revolutionary circle that gathers around Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky, but tries to break away after a change of heart. He is murdered for his treachery, soon after welcoming home his repentant wife, who had left him for Stavrogin, but returns about to give birth.

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Figure 7 Beryl Fairfield and the second self, early 1916. Notebook 45, qMS–1253. John Middleton Murry Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

him – he behaves just as we would expect him to do. There is all that crudity & what you might call shock[?]-headedness in his nature & it is wonderfully tragic that he who is so soon to be destroyed himself should suddenly realise – & through a third person, through a little squeaking baby – the miracle just being alive is.

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[Journal, 1954, p. 111]

‘There were two and now there’s a third human being, a new spirit, finished and complete, unlike the handiwork of man; a new thought and a new love . . . it’s positively frightening. . . . And there’s nothing grander in the world.’1 [Notebook 45, qMS–1253]

Every time I read these chapters about his new born happiness I cherish a kind of tiny hope that this time he will escape – he will be warned – he won’t die. [Journal, 1954, p. 111]

Page 237. Shatov to Stavrogin. ‘You married from a passion for martyrdom, from a craving for remorse, through moral sensuality.’ Moral sensuality Page 545. “Surely you must see that I am in the agonies of childbirth,” she said, sitting up and gazing at him with a terrible, hysterical vindictiveness that distorted her whole face. “I curse him before he is born, this child!” ’ This vindictiveness is profoundly true. [Notebook 45, qMS–1253]

How did Dostoievsky know about that extraordinary vindictiveness, that relish for bitter laughter that comes over women in pain? Its a very secret thing but its profound, profound. They don’t want to spare the one whom they love. If that one loves them with a kind of blind devotion like Shatov did Marie, they long to torment him & this tormenting gives them real positive relief. Does this resemble in any way the ‘tormenting’ that D. describes so often in his affairs of passion? Are his women ever happy when they torment their lovers? No. They too are in the agonies of labour – they are giving birth to their new selves, and they never believe in their deliverance.

1. This additional quotation, only to be found in the 1954 Journal, extends the notes KM was taking from Dostoevsky’s The Possessed. The same is true of the quotations from pages 237 and 545, and from pages 343 and 554.

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[Journal, 1954, pp. 111–12]

Page 343. ‘ “Ha ha!” Karmazinov got up from the sofa, wiping his mouth with a table-napkin, and came forward to kiss him with an air of unmixed delight – after the characteristic fashion of Russians if they are very illustrious.’ Not only Russians! Page 554. Kirillov to Shatov. ‘There are seconds – they come five or six at a time – when you suddenly feel the presence of the eternal harmony perfectly attained. It’s something not earthly – I don’t mean in the sense that it’s heavenly – but in the sense that man cannot endure it in his earthly aspect. He must be physically changed or die. This feeling is clear and unmistakable; it’s as though you apprehend all nature and suddenly say, “Yes, that’s right.” God, when he created the world, said at the end of each day of creation, “Yes, it’s right, it’s good.” It . . . it’s not being deeply moved, but simply joy. You don’t forgive anything because there is no more need for forgiveness. It’s not that you love – oh, there’s something in it higher than love – what’s most awful is that it’s terribly clear and such joy. If it lasted more than five seconds, the soul could not endure it and must perish. In those five seconds I live through a lifetime, and I’d give my whole life for them, because they are worth it. To endure ten seconds one must be physically changed.’ I know that. [Notebook 45, qMS–1253]

Having read the whole of the Idiot1 through again, & fairly carefully, I feel slightly more bewildered than I did before as regards Nastasya Philippovna’s character. She’s really not well done – she’s badly done, & there goes up as one reads on a kind of irritation, a balked fascination which almost succeeds finally in blotting out those first & really marvellous impressions of her. What was Dostoievsky really aiming at? Why won’t he go once more to the door to look for something from the post. It really is rather absurd to be in such a position with anyone: I am ashamed of myself. I’ll go alone. And now he comes asking me what the time is. how cross Grandmother was – green lichen moss. 1. The Idiot is a novel by Dostoevsky, published in 1869 (see above, p. 182).

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1916 The trees will toss their little leaves To mourn the loss of the new goldfinch.

Jack’s application is a perpetual reminder to me. Why am I not writing too? Why, feeling so rich, with the greater part of this to be written before I go back to England do I not begin? If only I have the courage to press against the stiff, swollen gate all that lies within is mine. Why do I linger for a moment. Because I am idle, out of the habit of work and spendthrift beyond belief. Really it is idleness, a kind of immense idleness – hateful and disgraceful. I was thinking yesterday of my wasted wasted early girlhood. My college life, which is such a vivid and detailed memory in one way might never have contained a book or a lecture. I lived in the girls, the professor, the big lovely building, the leaping fires in winter & the abundant flowers in summer. The views out of the windows, all the pattern that was – weaving. Nobody saw it, I felt, as I did. My mind was just like a squirrel. I gathered & gathered & hid away for that long ‘winter’ when I should rediscover all this treasure – and if anybody came close I scuttled up the tallest darkest tree & hid in the branches. And I was so awfully fascinated in watching Hall Griffin1 & all his tricks – thinking about him as he sat there – his private life, what he was like as a man (he told us he & his brother once wrote an enormous poem called The Epic of the Griffins) etc etc. Then it was only at rare intervals that something flashed through all this busyness – something about Spenser’s Faery Queene2 or Keats Isabella & the Pot of Basil.3 Those flashes were always when I disagreed flatly with H.G. & wrote in my notes – this man is a fool. And Cramb – wonderful Cramb!4 The figure of Cramb was enough, he was ‘history’ to me. Ageless & fiery, eating himself up again & again, very fierce at what he had seen but going a bit blind because he had looked so long. Cramb, striding up & down, filled me up to the brim. I couldn’t write down Cramb’s thunder. I simply wanted to sit & eat him. Every gesture, every shifting of his walk, all his tones 1. Hall Griffin was a teacher of English Literature at Queen’s College when KM studied there. 2. Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene is an allegorical epic poem, published in 1590. 3. ‘Isabella or the Pot of Basil’ is a narrative poem by John Keats, dating from 1818. It is set in the Middle Ages and is based on a story told in Boccaccio’s Decameron. 4. John Adam Cramb was Professor of History at Queen’s College from 1893 until his death in 1913.

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and looks are as vivid to me as though it were yesterday – but of all he said I only remember phrases – ‘he sat there & his wig fell off’. ‘Anne Bullen a lovely pure creature stepping out of her quiet door into the light and clamour’,1 & looking back & seeing the familiar door shut upon her with a little click as it were – final. But what coherent account could I give of the history of English Literature? Or what of English History? None. When I think in dates & times the wrong people come in – the right people are missing. When I read a play of Shakespeare I want to be able to place it in relation to what came before & what comes after. I want to realise what England was like then – at least a little – & what the people looked like (but even as I write I feel I can do this at least the latter thing) but when a man is mentioned, even though the man is real I don’t want to set him on the right hand of Sam Johnson2 when he ought to be living under Shakespeare’s shadow. And this I often do. Since I came here I have been very interested in the Bible. I have read the Bible for hours on end & I began to do so with just the same desire – I wanted to know if Lot followed close on Noah or something like that. But I feel so bitterly I should have known facts like this: they ought to be part of my breathing. Is there another grown person as ignorant as I? But [why] didn’t I listen to the old Principal3 who lectured on Bible History twice a week instead of staring at his face that was very round, a dark red colour with a kind of bloom on it & covered all over with little red veins with endless tiny tributaries that ran even into his forehead & were lost in his bushy white hair. He had tiny hands, too, puffed up, purple, shining under the stained flesh. I used to think looking at his hands – he will have a stroke & die of paralysis. They told us he was a very learned man, but I could not help seeing him in a double-breasted frock coat, a large pseudoclerical pith helmet, a clean white handkerchief falling over the back of his neck staring and pointing out with an umbrella a probable site of a probable encampment of some wandering tribe – to his wife, an elderly lady with a threatening cerebral tumour who had to go everywhere in a basket chair arranged on the back of a donkey, & his 1. Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII. Since Tudor times, the name had commonly been spelt in its anglicised form, including in Shakespeare’s play, Henry VIII. 2. Samuel Johnson (1709–84) was one of the most important and influential men of letters of his times. He was a writer, poet, essayist, editor and lexicographer, appreciated for his wit and erudition. 3. The school principal from 1904 to 1912 was Canon G. C. Bell, former Master of Marlborough College.

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two daughters in thread gloves & sand shoes smelling faintly of some anti-mosquito mixture. As he lectured I used to sit, building his house, peopling it, filling it with curious ebony & ivory furniture, cupboards like tiny domes & tables with elephants legs presented to him by grateful missionary friends . . . I never came into contact with him but once when he asked any young lady in the room to hold up her hand if she had been chased by a wild bull & as nobody else did I held up mine (though of course I hadn’t). Ah, he said, I am afraid you do not count. You are a little savage from New Zealand – which was really a trifle exacting – for it must be the rarest thing to be chased by a wild bull up & down Harley Street, Wimpole Street, Welbeck Street, Queen Anne, round & round Cavendish Square. And why didn’t I learn French with M. Huguenot.1 What an opportunity missed! What has it not cost me! He lectured in a long narrow room that was painted all over – the walls, door & window frames a charming shade of mignonette green. The ceiling was white & just below it there was a frieze of long looped chains of white flowers. On either side of the marble mantelpiece a naked small boy staggered under a big platter of grapes that he held above his head. Below the windows, far below, there was a stable court paved in cobblestones – one could hear the faint clatter of carriages coming out or in, the noise of water gushing out of a pump into a big pail, some youth clumping about & whistling. The room was never very light & in summer M. H. liked the blind to be drawn half way down the window . . . He was a little fat man Congreve2 Addison Steele Gay Swift Pope Defoe Richardson 1715–1780 Walpole

Dryden Thomas Moore Marvel Milton

Donne Boswel Beau & Fletcher Webster

Shakespeare Marlowe Peel

1. In KM’s story, ‘Carnation’ (see CW2, pp. 160–3), there is a vivid fictionalised description of a French class at Queen’s College, with a ‘M. Hugo’, clearly harking back to her school-days. 2. This list of key English authors from the pre-Victorian era is written on the page facing the one where KM wonders how much she knows about English Literature.

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Greene Nash Surrey Wyatt Spenser

Spring comes with exquisite effect in England. A.B.B.1 Now, really, what is it that I do want to write? I ask myself: Am I less of a writer than I used to be. Is the need to write less urgent? Does it still seem as natural to me to seek that form of expression. Has speech fulfilled it? Do I ask anything more than to relate to remember to assure myself? There are times when these thoughts half frighten me and very nearly convince. I say: You are so fulfilled now in your own being, in being alive, in loving, in aspiring towards a greater sense of life and a deeper loving that the other thing has gone out of you. But no, at bottom I am not convinced for at bottom never has been my desire so ardent. Only the form that I would choose has changed utterly. I feel no longer concerned with the same appearances of things. The people who lived or who I wished to bring into my stories don’t interest me any more. The plots of my stories leave me perfectly cold. Granted that these people exist and all the differences complexities and resolutions are true to them. Why should I write about them? They are not near me. All the false threads that bound them to me are cut away quite. Now – now I want to write recollections of my own country. Yes I want to write about my own country until I simply exhaust my store – not only because it is a ‘sacred debt’ that I pay to my country because my brother & I were born there, but also because in my thoughts I range with him over all the remembered places. I am never far away from them. I long to renew them in writing. And the people, the people we loved there. Of them too I want to write – another ‘debt of love’. Oh, I want for one moment to make our undiscovered country leap into the eyes of the old world. It must be mysterious, as though floating – it must take the breath. It must be ‘one of those islands’. . . I shall tell everything, even of how the laundry basket squeaked at ‘75’2 – but all must be told with a sense of mystery, a radiance, an after glow because you, my little sun of it, 1. KM is here remembering something her mother had said, the initials standing for Annie Burnell Beauchamp. 2. The Beauchamp family lived at 75 Tinakori Road, Wellington, from 1898 until 1907.

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are set. You have dropped over the dazzling brim of the world. Now I must play my part – – Then I want to write poetry. I feel always trembling on the brink of poetry. The almond tree, the birds, the little wood where you are, the flowers you do not see, the open window out of which I lean & dream that you are against my shoulder, & the times that your photograph ‘looks sad’. But especially I want to write a kind of long elegy to you perhaps not in poetry. No, perhaps in Prose – almost certainly in a kind of special prose. And lastly I want to keep a kind of minute note book – to be published some day. That is all. No novels, no problem stories, nothing that is not simple, open. Any of this I may start at any moment. K.M. 22.1.1916. [Notebook 10, qMS–1250]

Henry IV1 Henry V O sovereign mistress of true melancholy2 And there is nothing left remarkable Beneath the visiting moon.3 So find we profit by losing of our prayers.4 ––––––– The April’s in her eyes: it is love’s spring And these the showers to bring it on.5 ––––––– Enobarbus: Yet he that can endure To follow with allegiance a fallen lord Does conquer him that did his master conquer And earns a place i’ the story.6 ––––––– 1. A note added by JMM when he was editing this notebook reads, ‘These Shakespeare quotations, copied sometimes by K.M. & sometimes by me, were made at Villa Pauline, Jan 1916. We used to read part of a play of S. every night. And the one who was not reading aloud would copy the lines which particularly struck us. (Jan. 1924, JMM).’ Since most of the notes are in JMM’s hand, we know that KM would more frequently read out the texts. Quotations actually noted down by KM are indicated by her initials immediately after the quoted passages. 2. Domitius Enobarbus in Antony and Cleopatra, IV, 9. 3. Cleopatra, A & C, IV, 13. 4. Menecrates, A & C, II, 1. 5. Mark Antony, A & C, III, 2. 6. Enobarbus, A & C, III, 13.

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And then what’s brave; what’s noble Let’s do it after the high Roman fashion And make death proud to take us. Come away: this case of that huge spirit now is cold. Ah, women, women, come we have no friend But resolution & the briefest end.2 ––––––– Nay, it is but the finer part of love . . .3 ––––––– Eno. The tears live in an onion Should water this sorrow. . .4 ––––––– On the Alps It is reported thou didst eat strange flesh Which some did die to look on – and all this Was borne so like a soldier that thy cheek So much as lanked not.5 ––––––– Cleo: If thou with Caesar Paragon my man of men6 ––––––– The demi-Atlas of the earth, the arm And burgonet of men7 ––––––– Great Pompey Wd stand & make his eyes grow in my brow.8 ––––––– Our courteous Antony Being barbered ten times o’er, goes to the feast

1. Enobarbus, A & C, IV, 2. 2. Cleopatra, A & C, IV, 15. 3. A slightly miscopied rendering of Enobarbus’s words, ‘Alack, sir, no, her passions are made of nothing but the finest part of pure love’ (A & C, I, 2). 4. Enobarbus, A & C, I, 2. 5. Caesar, A & C, I, 4. 6. Cleopatra, A & C, I, 5. 7. Cleopatra, A & C, I, 5. 8. Cleopatra, A & C, I, 5.

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And, for his ordinary pays his heart For what his eyes eat only.1 ––––––– A rarer spirit never Did steer humanity; but you gods give us Some faults to make us men.2 ––––––– Worth many babes and beggars.3 ––––––– Or I shall show the cinders of my spirits Through the ashes of my chance.4 ––––––– I have immortal longings in me.5 ––––––– The stroke of death Is as a lover’s pinch That hurts & is desired6 ––––––– Now from head to foot I am marble constant; now the fleeting moon No planet is of mine.7 ––––––– As You Like It. Touchstone. Or by destinies decreed. Well said that was laid on with a trowel.8 ––––––– Thus men grow wiser every day (the rib–breaking sport.)9 ––––––– (K) When I was at home I was in a better place But travellers must be content.10 –––––––

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Enobarbus, A & C, II, 2. Agrippa, A & C, V, 1. Cleopatra, A & C, V, 2. Cleopatra, A & C, V, 2. Cleopatra, A & C, V, 2. Cleopatra, A & C, V, 2. Cleopatra, A & C, V, 2. As You Like It, I, 2. The second line is spoken by Celia. Touchstone, AYLI, I, 2. The lines in the play read: ‘Thus men may grow wiser every day. It is the first time that ever I heard breaking of ribs was sport for ladies.’ 10. Touchstone, AYLI, II, 4.

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(K) I like this place And willingly would waste my time in it.1 ––––––– I can suck melancholy out of a song As a weasel sucks eggs.2 ––––––– ‘dry as the remainder biscuit after a voyage.’3 Touchstone on Country Life. Act III.ii ––––––– I was seven of the nine days out of the wonder.4 ––––––– When I was an Irish rat and that I can hardly remember.5 ––––––– But all’s brave that youth mounts & folly prides6 ––––––– III.iii. When a man’s verses cannot be understood, nor a man’s good wit seconded with the forward child Understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.7 ––––––– It is good to be sad & say nothing.8 ––––––– But men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them – but not for love.9 –––––––– 24 Jan. 16. Henry IV. Part 1. as much grace as wd go before an egg with butter.10 ––––––––

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Celia, AYLI, II, 4. Jaques, AYLI, II, 5. Jaques, AYLI, II, 7. Rosalind, AYLI, III, 2. Rosalind, AYLI, III, 2. Celia, AYLI, III, 4. Touchstone, AYLI, III, 3. Jaques, AYLI, IV, 1. Rosalind, AYLI, IV, 1. Falstaff and Prince Henry in Henry IV, Part I, I, 2. The exchange reads: Fals. God save thy grace, – majesty I should say, for grace thou wilt have none, – Prince Hen. What, none? Fals. No, by my troth, not so much as will serve to be prologue to an egg and butter.

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Thou hast the most unsavoury similes.1 –––––––– The poor abuses of the time want countenance2 –––––––– Oh the blood more stirs To rouse a lion than to start a hare.3 –––––––– It were an easy leap To pluck bright honour from the pale-faced moon.4 –––––––– Henry IV. Out of this nettle danger We pluck this flower safety.5 [KM] –––––––– But a Corinthian, a lad of mettle . . .6 –––––––– Buckram-men7 Falstaff, you carried your guts away as nimbly . . .8 –––––––– I was coward on instinct.9 –––––––– A plague of sighing & grief: it blows a man up like a bladder.10 –––––––– O Jesu – he does it as [like] One of those harlotry players, as ever I see.11 –––––––– (Hotspur and Glendower’s grandiloquence)

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

Falstaff, 1 HIV, I, 2. Falstaff, 1 HIV, I, 2. Hotspur, 1 HIV, I, 3. Hotspur, 1 HIV, I, 3. Hotspur, 1 HIV, II, 3. These are the words that JMM had inscribed on KM’s tombstone in Fontainebleau. Prince Harry, 1 HIV, II, 4. Prince Harry, 1 HIV, II, 4. The full line reads: ‘O monstrous! Eleven buckram men grown out of two!’ Prince Harry, 1 HIV, II, 4. Falstaff, 1 HIV, II, 4. Falstaff, 1 HIV, II, 4. Hostess, 1 HIV, II, 4.

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(mincing poetry) (scimble-scamble stuff)1 –––––––– I had rather live With cheese and garlic in a windmill far Than feed on cates, and have him talk to me In any summer house in Christendom.2 –––––––– Henry IV. III. ii. They began To loathe the taste of sweetness, whereof a little More than a little is by much too much.3 –––––––– Every beardless vain comparative.4 –––––––– Ill.iii I will repent while I have some liking.5 –––––––– I live out of all order, all compass . . .6 –––––––– Theres no more faith in thee than in a stewed prune . . .7 I have more flesh than another and therefore more frailty.8 IV. To set so rich a main on the nice hazard of one mortal hour.9 ii Food for powder – food for powder mortal men, mortal men.10 V. F. I would it were bedtime Hal & all well. 1. Hotspur, in 1 HIV, III, 1, complains bitterly about Glendower’s ‘scimblescamble stuff / As puts me from my faith’. 2. Hotspur, 1 HIV, III, 1. 3. Henry IV, 1 HIV, III. 2. 4. Henry IV, 1 HIV, III, 2. 5. Falstaff, 1 HIV, III, 3. The line reads: ‘Well, I’ll repent, and that suddenly, while I am in some liking.’ 6. Falstaff, 1 HIV, III, 3. 7. Falstaff, 1 HIV, III, 3. 8. Falstaff, 1 HIV, III, 3. 9. Hotspur, 1 HIV, IV, 1. 10. Falstaff, 1 HIV, IV, 1. The full line reads, ‘Tut, tut, good enough to toss, food for powder, food for powder, they’ll fill a pit as well as better. Tush, man, mortal men, mortal men.’

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H. Why thou owest God a death.1 The fox – however cherished & chained up Will have a wild trick of his ancestors.2 But thought’s the slave of life and life’s Time’s fool; And Time that takes survey of all the world Must have a stop.3 F. (met by Harry & Lancaster, with Hotspur on his back) Lord, lord, how this world is given to lying!4 Two stars keep not their motion in one sphere.5 Henry IV. II It was always yet the trick of our English nation; if they have a good thing to make it too common.6 I’ll tickle thy catastrophe!7 Commit the oldest sins the newest kind of ways8 O Westmoreland thou art a summer bird That ever in the haunch of winter sings The lifting up of day.9 I may justly say with the hook-nosed fellow of Rome: I came, I saw, I overcame.10 Under which King, Bezonian, speak or die!11 Henry Vth But that the scambling & unquiet time . . .12 [KM] 1. Falstaff and Henry, 1 HIV, V, 1. 2. Worcester, 1 HIV, V, 2. The full line reads, ‘or treason is but trusted like the fox; / Who ne’er so tame, so cherish’d, and lock’d up, / Will have a wild trick of his ancestors.’ 3. Hotspur, 1 HIV, V, 4. 4. Falstaff, 1 HIV, V, 5. 5. Prince Henry, 1 HIV, V, 4. 6. Falstaff, Henry IV, Part 2, I, 2. 7. Page, 2 HIV, II, 1. 8. King Henry, 2 HIV, IV, 4. 9. King Henry, 2 HIV, IV, 4. 10. Falstaff, 2 HIV, IV, 3. 11. Pistol, 2 HIV, V, 3. 12. Canterbury, Henry V, I, 1.

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But when he speaks The air a chartered libertine is still.1 [KM] The law Salick that they have in France2 –––––––– That make such waste in brief mortality.3 –––––––– Surveys The singing masons building roofs of gold.4 –––––––– if you would walk off Id prick your guts a little in good terms as I may; and thats the humor of it.5 [KM] Why the devil should we keep knives to cut one another’s throats.6 [KM] Holdfast is the only dog, my duck.7 Nym: I cannot kiss; that’s the humour of it, but adieu.8 [KM] And that’s the plainsong of it.9 –––––––– (For Nym he hath heard that men of few words are the best men.)10 –––––––– I have built Two chantries, where the sad & solemn priests Sing still for Richard’s soul.11 –––––––– IV v. But I had not so much of man in me And all my mother came into mine eyes And gave me up to tears.12 –––––––– 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Canterbury, Henry V, I, 1. Henry, HV, I, 2. Henry, HV, I, 2. Canterbury, HV, I, 2. Nym, HV, II, 1. Bardolph, HV, II, 1. Pistol, HV, II, 3. Nym, HV, II, 3. Nym, HV, III, 2. Boy, HV, III, 2. Henry, HV, IV, 1. Exeter, HV, IV, 7.

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For there is figures in all things.1 –––––––– For maids well summered & warm kept, are like flies at Bartholomew-tide, blind, though they have eyes: and then they will endure handling, which before would not abide looking on2 –––––––– Twelfth night, the whole. IV Clo. What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild fowl. Mal. That the soul of our grandam might happily inhabit a bird. Clo. What thinkest thou of his opinion. Mal. I think nobly of the soul & no way approve his opinion.3 This is the air, this is the glorious sun This the pearl she gave me.4 This to give a dog & in recompense desire my dog again.5 That very envy & the tongue of loss Cried fame upon him.6 A very devil incardinate.7 Nor can there be that deity in my nature Of here and everywhere.8 Finish his mortal act.9 That orbed continent of fire Doth sever night from day.10 I was one sir in this interlude One Sir Topas sir; but that’s all one.11 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

Fluellen, HV, IV, 7. Burgundy, HV, V, 2. Feste and Malvolio, Twelfth Night, IV, 2. Sebastian, TN, IV, 3. The full line reads, ‘This is the air, that is the glorious sun. / This pearl she gave me, I do feel’t and see’t.’ Fabian, TN, V, 1. Duke, TN, V, 1. Sir Andrew, TN, V, 1. Sebastian, TN, V, 1. Sebastian, TN, V, 1. The full line reads, ‘He finished indeed his mortal act / That day that made my sister thirteen years.’ Viola, TN, V, 1. Feste, TN, V, 1.

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Troilus & Cressida. Feb. 4. 1916. Ajax. I.ii. Porridge after meat.1 [Notebook 34, qMS–1252]

Appartenant à: Katherine Mansfield Commencé le: Toujoursième Fini le: Jamaisième2 I bought a book by Henry James3 yesterday and read it, as they say, ‘until far into the night’. It was not very interesting or very good, but I can wade through pages and pages of dull, turgid James for the sake of that sudden sweet shock, that violent throb of delight that he gives me at times. I don’t doubt this genius: only there is an extraordinary amount of pan and an amazingly raffiné flash. One thing I want to annotate. His hero, Bernard Longueville,4 brilliant, rich, dark, agile etc. though a witty companion is perhaps wittiest and most amused when he is alone, and preserves his best things for himself. All the attributive adjectives apart I am witty, I know, and a good companion – but I feel my case is exactly like his – the amount of minute and delicate joy I get out of watching people and things when I am alone is simply enormous. I really only have ‘perfect fun’ with myself. When I see a little girl running by on her heels like a fowl in the wet and say ‘My dear there’s a Gertie’ I laugh and enjoy it as I never would with anybody. Just the same applies to my feeling for what is called ‘nature’. Other people won’t stop & look at the things I want to look at or if they do they stop to please me or to humour me or to keep the peace. But I am so made that as true as I’m with anyone 1. Pandarus, Troilus and Cressida, I, 3. 2. The notebook was clearly bought in France, and KM has filled in the inscription page on the inside cover. The printed headings read: ‘Belongs to’, ‘Begun on’, ‘Completed on’. KM completes the second and third lines with invented words meaning ‘the alwaysest’ and ‘the neverest’, as if they were dates. Winter 1915–16. 3. The prolific author, critic and essayist, Henry James (1843–1916), was originally from the United States, but after shifting between America and Europe, he finally settled in Britain. His novels likewise make acute studies of the restless, often alienated lifestyles of those living in adopted countries. His experimental narrative technique had a great influence on the modernist generation of writers. 4. The hero of Henry James’s novel, Confidence, published in 1879; the book is a witty study of social relations through romantic entanglements.

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I begin to give consideration to their opinions and their desires – & they are not worth half the consideration that mine are. I don’t miss Jack at all now. I don’t want to go home. I feel quite content to live here in a furnished room & watch. Its a pure question of weather – though that aside I believe. (A terrific Gertie has just past.) Life with other people becomes a blur: it does with Jack, but its enormously valuable & marvellous when I’m alone – the detail of life – the life of life. Carco feels that too – but nobody else. Perhaps in a negative way, Lesley does. Yes, she does. [Notebook 34, qMS–1252]

February 13th I have written practically nothing yet & now again the time is getting short. There is nothing done. I am no nearer my achievement than I was 2 months ago & I keep half doubting my will to perform anything. Each time I make a vow my demon says at almost the very same moment: ‘Oh yes, we’ve heard that before!’ And then I hear R.B.1 in the Cafe Royale ‘Do you still write?’ If I went back to England without a book finished I should give myself up. I should know that, whatever I said, I was not really a writer & had no claim to ‘a table in my room’. But if I do go back with a book finished it will be a profession de foi pour toujours. Why do I hesitate so long? Is it just idleness? Lack of will power? Yes, I feel that’s what it is & that’s why its so immensely important that I should assert myself. I have put a table today in my room, facing a corner, but from where I sit I can see some top shoots of the almond tree & the sea sounds loud. There is a vase of beautiful geraniums on the table. Nothing could be nicer than this spot & its so quiet & so high, like sitting up in a tree. I feel I shall be able to write here, especially towards twilight. Ah, once fairly alight how I’d blaze and burn! Here is a new fact. When I am not writing I feel my brother calling me & he is not happy. Only when I write or am in a state of writing – a state of ‘inspiration’ do I feel that he is calm. Last night I dreamed of him and of Father Zossima.2 Father Zossima said ‘do not let the new man die.’ My brother was certainly there. But last evening he called me while I sat down by the fire. At last I obeyed and came upstairs. I stayed in the dark & waited. The room got very light. There were stars 1. Possibly Rupert Brooke. 2. Father Zossima is the wise, compassionate and much-respected monk in Dostoevsky’s novel, The Brothers Karamazov, whose life story and teachings form a lengthy narrative within the book.

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outside – very bright twinkly stars that seemed to move as I watched them. The moon shone. I could see the curve of the sea & the curve of the land embracing & above in the sky there was a round sweep of cloud. Perhaps those 3 half circles were ‘very magic’. But then when I leaned out of the window I seemed to see my brother dotted all over the field – now on his back, now on his face, now huddled up, now half pressed into the earth. Wherever I looked there he lay I felt that God showed me to him like that for some express purpose & I knelt down by the bed – but I could not pray. I had done no work – I was not in an active state of grace. So I got up finally & went downstairs again. But I was terribly sad. The night before when I lay in bed I felt suddenly passionate. I wanted Jack to embrace me. But as I turned to speak to him or to kiss him I saw my brother lying fast asleep – and I got cold. That happens nearly always. Perhaps because I went to sleep thinking of him I woke & was he – for quite a long time. I felt my face was his serious, sleepy face. I felt that the lines of my mouth were changed & I blinked like he did on waking. This year I have to make money & get known. I want to make enough money to be able to give Lesley some. In fact I want to provide for her. That’s my idea & to make enough so that Jack and I shall be able to pay our debts & live honourably. I should like to have a book finished & numbers of short stories ready. Ah, even as I write, the smoke from my cigarette seems to mount in a reflective way & I feel nearer that kind of silent crystallized being that used to be almost me. 14th. I began to think of an unfinished memory which has been with me for years. It is a very good story if only I can tell it right, and is called ‘Lena’. It plays in New Zealand and so would go in the book. If only I can get right down to it. Dear brother, as I jot these notes I am speaking to you. To whom did I always write when I kept those huge complaining diaries? Was it to myself? But now as I write these words and talk of getting down to the New Zealand atmosphere I see you opposite to me, I see your thoughtful seeing eyes. Yes it is to you – We were travelling – sitting opposite to each other & moving very fast. Ah, my darling, how have I kept away from this tremendous joy. Each time I take up my pen you are with me, you are mine. You are my playfellow, my brother, & we shall range all over our country together. It is with you that I see & that is why I see so clearly. That is a great mystery. My brother I have doubted these last few days. I have been in dreadful places. I have felt that I could not come through to you. But now, quite suddenly, the mists are rising and I see and I know you are near me. You are more vividly with me now this moment than if you

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were alive & I were writing to you from a short distance away. As you speak my name, the name you call me by that I love so – Katie – your lip lifts in a smile. You believe in me, you know I am here. Oh Chummie1 – put your arms round me. I was going to write – let us shut out everybody, but no – it is not that. Only we shall ‘look on’ at them together. My brother, you know with all my desire, my will is weak. To do things, even to write, absolutely for myself and by myself is awfully hard for me. God knows why when my desire is so strong. But just as it was always our delight to sit together – you remember? – & talk of the old days, down to the last detail, the last feeling, looking at each other & by our eyes expressing when speech ended how intimately we understood each other – so now, my dear one, we shall do that again. You know how unhappy I have been lately? I almost felt – perhaps ‘the new man’ will not live. Perhaps I am not yet risen . . . But now I do not doubt. It is the idea (it has always been there but never as it is with me tonight) that I do not write alone. That every word I write & every place I visit I carry you with me. Indeed that might be the motto of my book. There are daisies on the table and a red flower, like a poppy, shines through. Of daisies I will write, of the dark, of the wind – & the sun & the mists, of wharves – ah! of all that you loved & that I too love and feel. Tonight it is made plain. However often I write & rewrite I shall not really falter, dearest – and the book shall be written & ready. 15. I have broken the silence. It took long. Did I fail you when I sat reading. Oh, bear with me a little. I will be better. I will do all all that we would wish. Love, I will not fail. Tonight it is very wild. Do you hear? It is all wind and sea – you feel that the world is blowing like a feather, springing and rocking in the air like a baloon from Lindsays. I seem to hear a piano sometimes but that’s fancy. How loud the wind sounds! If I write into my diary faithfully a little record of how I have kept faith with you – that is what I must do. Now you are back with me – you are stepping forward, one hand in your pocket. My brother, my little boy brother. Your thoughtful eyes! I see you always as you left me. I saw you one moment alone – by yourself, & quite lost, I felt. My heart yearned over you then. Oh, it yearns over you tonight & now! Did you cry? I always felt he never never must be unhappy. Now I will come quite close to you, take your hand, and we shall tell this story to each other. 16th. I found The Aloe this morning. And when I had reread it I knew that I was not quite ‘right’ yesterday. No, dearest, it was not just the 1. ‘Chummie’ was the Beauchamp family’s nickname for Leslie, KM’s brother.

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spirit. The Aloe is right. The Aloe is lovely. It simply fascinates me, and I know that it is what you would wish me to write. And now I know what the last chapter is. It is your birth – your coming in the autumn, you in Grandmother’s arms under the tree, your solemnity, your wonderful beauty, your hands, your head, your helplessness – lying on the earth, & above all your tremendous solemnity. That chapter will end the book. The next book will be yours and mine. And you must mean the world to Linda & before ever you are born Kezia must play with you. Her little Bogey. Oh Bogey – I must hurry. All of them must have this book. It is good, my treasure, my little brother – it is good and it is what we really meant. 17th. I am sad tonight. Perhaps it is the old forlorn wind. And the thought of you spiritually is not enough tonight. I want you by me. I must get deep down into my book for then I shall be happy. Lose myself, lose myself to find you, dearest. Oh, I want this book to be written. It must be done. It must be bound and wrapped and sent to New Zealand. I feel that with all my soul. It will be. My head is full of only one thing. I can’t begin writing or even thinking because all my thoughts revolve round le seul sujet. It is a real vice avec moi au present. I keep thinking round and round it, beating up and down it and still it stays in my head and won’t let me be. I keep figuring it out, making other plans, feeling sure I still haven’t got enough wits. How maddening it is! I despise myself. I must begin to think of other things. The thing is that today for some maddening reason I simply can’t concentrate. Mais c’est joli. C’est joli comme un coeur. II y a une cabinet aisance de l’eau courante, vous savez. Je vous dis Madame, c’est une affaire de toute beaute.1 Sunday Morning. Five minutes to eleven. F.G.2

1. (Fr.) ‘But it’s pretty. As pretty as a heart. There’s a lavatory with running water, you know. I can assure you, Madame, it’s a handsome offer.’ 2. Frederick Goodyear (1887–1917) was a friend of JMM’s from Oxford, who had accompanied JMM and KM when they first visited Paris together, and became involved in the founding of Rhythm. He made his beginnings as a writer but was killed in the war. This is a pastiche of Mrs Gamp in Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–4). She addresses her friend, the day-nurse Betsy Prig, who is just as addicted to cucumbers and alcohol as Mrs Gamp, a midwife and night-nurse. Hence, ‘Betsy love’. As this draft letter shows, Goodyear and KM were close friends and shared the same exuberant pleasure in pastiche.

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1916 Never did cowcumber lie more heavy on a female’s buzzum that [sic] your last letter to me is as you might say dying and curdling and setting up sich an explogion Villa Pauline Bandol (Var) Sunday Mr F.G. Never did cowcumber lie more heavy on a female’s buzzum than your curdling effugion which I have read twice and won’t again if horses drag me. But I keep wondering, and can’t for the life of me think, whatever there was in mine to so importantly disturb you. (Henry James is dead. Did you know?) I did not, swayed by a resistless passion say that I loved you. Nevertheless I’m prepared to say it again looking at this pound of onions that hangs in a string kit from a saucepan nail. But, Betsy love, what has that got to do with the Kilner Idea? I recognise the Kilner Idea, I acknowledge it and even understand it, but what’s it got to do with me? Nothing. I don’t want to rob you of it. . . And why should you write to me as though I’d got into the family way with H.G.W.1 and driven round to you in a hansom cab to ask you to make a respectable woman of me? Yes, you’re bad tempered, suspicious and surly. And if you think I flung my bonnet over you as a possible mill[?], my lad, you’re mistook. So shut up about your Five Whores and a Hedgehog and send me no more inventories of those marbil halls wherein of aforetime they did delight to wander. In fact, now I come to ponder on your last letter I don’t believe you want to write to me at all & I’m hanged if I’ll shoot arrows in the air. But perhaps that is temper on my part; it is certainly pure stomach. I’m so hungry, simply empty, and seeing in my mind’s eye just now a surloin of beef, well browned with plenty of gravy and horseradish sauce and baked potatoes I nearly sobbed. There’s nothing here to eat except omelettes and oranges and onions. It’s a cold, sunny windy day – the kind of day when you want a tremendous feed for lunch & an armchair in front of the fire to boaconstrict in afterwards. I feel sentimental about England now – English food, decent English waste! How much better than

1. H. G. Wells.

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these thrifty french whose flower gardens are nothing but potential salad bowls. There’s not a leaf in France that you can’t ‘faire une infusion avec’,1 not a blade that isn’t bon pour le cuisine.2 By God, I’d like to buy a pound of the best butter, put it on the window sill and watch it melt to spite ’em. They are a stingy uncomfortable crew for all their lively scrapings. For instance, in their houses – what appalling furniture – and never one comfortable chair. If you want to talk the only possible thing to do is to go to bed. It’s a case of either standing on your feet or lying in comfort under a puffed up eiderdown. I quite understand the reason for what is called french moral laxity – you’re simply forced into bed – no matter with whom – there’s no other place for you . . . Supposing a young man comes to see about the electric light & will go on talking and pointing to the ceiling, or a friend drops in to tea and asks you if you believe in Absolute Evil. How can you give your mind to these things when you’re sitting on four knobs and a square inch of cane. How much better to lie snug and give yourself up to it. Later Now I’ve eaten one of the omelettes and one of the oranges. The sun has gone in; its beginning to thunder. There’s a little bird in a tree outside this window not so much singing as sharpening a note. He’s getting a very fine point on it; I expect you would know his name. Write to me again when everything is not too bunkum. Goodbye for now. With my ‘strictly relative’ love ‘K.M.’ March 4th Dear Frieda The new house sounds very nice and I am glad to think we shall be there – all of us together – this Spring. Thank you for your letter, dear, but you really haven’t been right in judging us first the kind of traitors that you did. Jack never would hear a word against Lawrence

1. (Fr.) ‘make herbal tea with’. 2. (Fr.) ‘good for cooking with’.

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[Journal, 1954, pp. 118–19]

‘When we had finished with the album, Von Koren took a pistol from the whatnot, and screwing up his left eye, took deliberate aim at the portrait of Prince Vorontsov, or stood still at the looking-glass and gazed a long time at his swarthy face, his big forehead and his black hair, which curled like a negro’s. . . .’ (Tchehov: The Duel.)1 [Notebook 45, qMS–1253]

I must not go on thinking like this. My thoughts are all of Chaddie – of our meeting on Monday, of what we shall [say] & how we shall look. I keep wondering what I shall do if the boat arrives in the middle of the night or what I shall do if someone robs me while I am there. A thousand different thoughts. And what she will say & if she will expect me. These things fly through my head like mad things. They never finish and then there is always the idea that I may by some awful error miss her. It isn’t possible. And what we shall do when we do meet. This is sheer sin for I ought to be writing my book & instead I am pretending here – But all these various things are really, really very difficult to keep up the fight against. And the desire for midday and an omelette is really awful. I’m hungry beyond words. An omelette –hot coffee – bread & butter and jam. I could cry at the very thought. Only you see, fool who is reading this, I went out awfully early– before eight o’clock. I was down in the village with my filet2 in my hand agetting of the lunch & the dinner. |3 And although it pleuvéd4 cats and dogs | I marched about the land | and came back home a kind of hardened sinner. | For the petit pois5 | I really must confess | were sinfully expensive | & I couldn’t have bought less. | I had to buy a demi-livre6 | and that’s by no means ample | By the time that they’ll be shelled and cooked | Il ne reste plus qu’une sample7 | Twenty to twelve says our old clock. | It seems to talk and slyly mock | My hunger and my real distress | At giving way to wickedness. | Oh say a 1/4 | say ten to – | Whirr in the whirring way you do | before you strike. | But no, as I’d 1. From Chekhov’s ‘The Duel’, in the version translated by Constance Garnett, first published in 1916. 2. (Fr.) ‘a string shopping bag’. 3. The line break here and those that follow mark the passage out in verse. Here is KM’s daily life rendered almost as a popular ballad. 4. KM conjugates the French verb ‘pleuvoir’ as an English verb: ‘rained’. 5. (Fr.) ‘peas’. 6. (Fr.) ‘half a pound’. 7. (Fr. except for the final word, ‘sample’) ‘There won’t be more than a sample.’

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have oft observed – | All clocks are deaf – this hasn’t heard. | And as it is | – grace à my doigt1 | the brute is fast | beyond all divining. | It is really only seven | minutes past a pale eleven. | Now Jack has got up &| made a move. | But only to the shelves above – | he’s settled again – | Oh what a blow | I’ve still a good | fifteen to go. | But once the brute has chiméd well | I may be dead and gone to hell. But it wasn’t as bad as all that after All. I struck work and we had no end of a good feed and now it is 2 (by our clock). So I’ll knock off this rubbish & really settle down. [MS–Papers–11326–010]

frcs In hand Thursday

25

cents 0

Thursday evening 2 eggs

50

stamp

10

biscuits

50

spinach

25

coffee

30

G.C.

1

65 15

Friday

Lunch

1

80

1

35

GC & paper

30

metro

30

oranges

40

skirt

1

0

eggs

50

stamps

35

cigarettes

75

candles

1

45

coffee

30

milk

15

1. (Fr.) ‘thanks to my hand’.

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Thurs

6

85

1

80

8

75

Jeudi Saturday

95

lunch

9

65

1

35

coffee

45

G C. & paper

30

stamps

35

dinner

1

15

coffee

15

handkerchief

50 4

35

cakes

20

milk

15 70

Sunday

March 21st

In hand

frcs

cs

25

50

Sunday March 21st In hand

frcs

cs

25

50

metro

30

paper

5

cigarettes & matches lunch / tip lunch cigarettes

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75 1

50

2

55

1

10 65

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35

cake

1

50

Siphons [?]

30

metro

60

paper

5

milk

30

dinner the night before

7

25

1

70

metro

Paper stamps coffee lunch

30

1.

9

25

2

55

11

75

1 8 3 5

5 5 0 0

stamps

25

metro

15

linge

3

0

dinner

1

45

lunch

1

10

1

paper & GC

20

coffee

40

oranges

40

lunch

6

95

11

75

18

45

1

10

cigarettes stamps biscuits

211

75 1

0 50

1. (Fr.) ‘laundry’.

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eggs

50

veg

25

[?]

20

milk

15

paper & GC

20 4

95

18

45

5

0

23

45

oranges

jam

salad

milk

salad

2 sugar

[. . .]

eggs

potatoes

tea

cristaux

butter

apples

coffee cocoa

cheese

lemons

salt pepper rice [. . .] toilette farine

bread biscuits [Notebook 33, qMS–1246]

Higher Tregerthen, Zennor, St Ives.1 May 8th 1916. 1 pkt self-rising flour 20 cigarettes ½ lb lard May 24th 3 lbs potatoes bread 3. standard [. . .] 1. The address in Higher Tregerthen, Zennor, is where DHL and Frieda lived from March 1916 until October 1917. KM and JMM lived in a neighbouring cottage for some weeks in late spring and early summer 1916. See Figure 8 (p. 213) for the notebook page conserving these lists and accounts.

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Figure 8 Lists, plans and accounts, May 1916. Notebook 33, qMS–1246–2. John Middleton Murry Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

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bacon 1/– potatoes onions ½ lb butter 1.40 milk .55 butter 1.25 bread 2.00 eggs 3:50 meat & sundries 2.10 mirror .70 tea .30 sugar .70 coffee ------------13.30 2 francs a day 300 in 12 weeks at 25 frcs a week. jug and basin curtains see about policies see about tables

Vera Marie Kay Mother Gibson Gilbert [. . .] Vere

LEMON PUDDING 6 ozs bread crumbs 3 ozs moist sugar ½ pint milk 2 eggs 4 ozs stoneless raisins 1 oz flour 4 ozs ‘Atora’1 Strained juice & grated rind 2 lemons Pinch of salt 1 teaspoonful Baking Powder Ornament a well greased basin with the raisins. Mix dry ingredients together, add lemon juice, milk and eggs. Steam 2½ hrs. 1. The brand name of a pre-shredded suet, commercialised in the early 1890s and still sold today. Boxes of Atora were sold with an accompanying recipe leaflet.

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MARMALADE PUDDING 4 ozs bread crumbs 3 ozs Atora 1 egg ½ lb marmalade 2 ozs flour Shred Atora. Put it in a basin with the flour and breadcrumbs. Beat the egg, add it to the marmalade. Pour on to the dry ingredients & mix thoroughly. Put into a greased basin, cover with greased paper, and steam for 2 hours. FIG PUDDING 4 ozs Atora 4 ozs flour ¾ lb figs 1 large apple 4 ozs brown sugar 4 ozs Bread crumbs 1 egg 1 teaspoonful baking powder. Chop figs and apple fine. Mix flour & baking powder, add all the dry ingredients & then the egg well beaten, with enough milk to moisten. Pour in greased basin and steam 2½ hours CHILDREN’S PUDDING 4 ozs flour 2 ozs sugar 1 egg pinch of salt 1 teaspoonful Baking Powder 3 tablespoons milk 4 // jam 2 ozs ATORA Mix dry ingredients together with egg and milk. Put jam at bottom of basin, pour in mixture and steam 1½ hours [Notebook 13, qMS–1254]

The Telegraaf of November 11 states that during the night of October 1–2 smugglers attempted to take to Germany 120 cows near the Dutch village of Koolip [?]. Each cow wore a white linen bonnet [?] a pair of

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sabots, a woollen shirt and an embroidered apron. Forty were seized by the Dutch customs officials who were amazed when they discovered their true prize. The others walked unharmed into Germany. ____________________ Egg cards at Munich The Munchener Neueste Nachrichten1 states that the Bureau Committee for the food supply has decided that eggs shall be obtained under the following conditions: Cards will be issued for heads of families, single persons, those intending to marry. Each holder must write his name, description and address (not forgetting to state whether Mr, Mrs, Reverend or Tide) you know, occupation, copy of birth & marriage certificates, this officer of the supreme menace to sometime pass a short note of not more than ten lines on the subject of [one line illegible] together with the name and address of the shop at which it is proposed (unofficially) to use the vouchers. But cards will only be valid for certain shops (other than those suggested by the intending egg-consumer) holding vouchers approved by the Food Bureau. Each of these will be given a form for his list of customers on which intending customers must inscribe themselves. Each entry is numbered and these numbers must be listed on the egg-card, hen, counterfoil and egg (if laid) of customer. The next procedure is to collect the counterfoils from customers (who retain vouchers) and forward them to the Egg Distributing Department of the Municipal Food Bureau which will inform the merchant how many eggs he will receive and the hen how many eggs and with what regularity she is expected to lay. People entitled to a medical certificate will be given special and slightly more complicated advantages. _______________ November. It is so strange! I am suddenly back again, coming into my room and desiring to write. Knock goes Chappers2 at the door. A man has come to clean the windows . . . I might have known it! And so death claims us. I am sure that just at that final moment a knock will come & Somebody Else will appear to ‘clean the windows’.

1. These journalistic reports have not been traced back to any real newspaper accounts, and are KM’s own pastiches. She submitted a series of pastiches to the New Age, a selection of which were published in 1917 (see CW3, pp. 410– 13), and further unpublished examples can be found below (pp. 221–2). 2. Transcribed by JMM as ‘Miss Chapman’.

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Johnnie1 has given me his fountain pen. The room is full of smoke tonight and the gas bubbles as though the pipes were full of water. It’s very quiet. I have rather a cold but I feel so absolutely alive after my experience of this afternoon. [Notebook 17, qMS–1255]

Fractures A bone may be broken by: a. direct violence b. indirect violence c. muscular contraction d. ‘spontaneous’ fracture as in the case of disease. 1 A direct fracture is a fracture by a blow, a fall, the wheel of a vehicle or a bullet. 2 An indirect fracture is due to an impact applied at some distance from the spot at which the bone is broken. 2 Transverse fracture i.e. when a bone is snapped directly across its length. This is [a] very infrequent occurrence. More common is 3 Oblique fracture where the bone is broken on a slant & the edges are jagged. Overlapping of the broken ends of the bone is caused by the contraction of the muscles which pull the lower fragment upwards. These two simple fractures are attended by haemorrhage, swelling & discoloration. 4 A Comminuted Fracture is a more complicated form of simple fracture. It happens when a heavy weight crushes the bone and between the two pieces there are a number of crushed fragments. Complicated fracture i.e. when a jagged end of bone tears an artery, a vein or a nerve or penetrates an internal organ. If the main artery is torn all pulsation below the seat of injuries will cease. When a large vein is torn the pulsation continues. When a nerve is torn the muscles are paralysed & the skin loses all sensation. (ex:‘drop-wrist’ in a soldier when the spiral nerve of the arm is torn.) A compound fracture is compounded of an injury to the skin. (Tetanus.) An impacted fracture e.g. When the two ends of the broken bone are driven into each other & can only be separated with great effort. In 1. Almost certainly J. D. Fergusson (1874–1961), a highly influential Scottish painter who was the Art Editor of Rhythm from its inception in 1911. He met KM in 1912 and they became good friends. He was living nearby in London at this time.

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this case crepitus is absent, the deformity is slight, no gap can be felt and movement is possible. Note: In all cases of accident there is a sudden fall of temperature. The normal temperature (98.4) may possibly fall to 92. It is therefore urgent that the patient should be immediately covered. Signs and symptoms of Fracture: (Signs are what you can hear, feel and see. Symptoms are what the patient can tell you.) 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

unnatural position of the foot. one leg longer than the other. mark on clothing. pain. deformity. swelling. discoloration by blood irregularity of outline of the bone. uselessness of limb. crepitus.

The first thing to do in the case of a fractured thigh is to take hold of the injured limb and pull it down to the right length. Then tie the feet firmly together. Put a long splint from under the armpit to beyond the heel and bandage. The great thing is to keep the part above and below the fracture quiet. In the case of a man another small splint is inserted on the inner side of the thigh. Lecture II Fractured clavicle. Signs and symptoms are: (a) the limb is helpless. (b) on passing the fingers along the collar bone a gap may be felt. The outer fragment will be found on a lower level than the inner with its end projecting forward. The principles of treatment are to keep the shoulder back and to support the elbow so that the outer fragment may be pulled backwards and raised. Treatment: Place a large pad under the armpit on the injured side. Pull the shoulder back. Bend the elbow to a right angle. Support the limb while a sling is applied. Lay an unfolded triangular bandage on the front of the chest, the apex over the elbow. Gather up the lower part of the bandage, carry it below the limb over the back & tie off on the sound shoulder, slightly to the front. (This is known as a St. John Sling.) Take a broad fold bandage, place the middle of it over the injured elbow as low as possible, carry the ends one in front and one behind the body & tie off below the hand of the injured side.

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A common fracture is that of the upper part of the arm – the Surgical Neck. Treatment. (A tiny pad of cotton wool may be placed under the armpit to avoid friction.) Apply a broad fold bandage round the top of the injured arm, carry it round the body, cross the ends under the sound arm & tie on the top of the sound shoulder. Put the hand in a small arm sling & tie in the hollow over the collar bone bringing the 2 ends forward. The length of this bandage over the hand should be from the first joint of the little finger to 2 inches of the forearm. In a fracture of the upper and the middle of the humerus a small arm sling is applied; for the collar bone a large sling. Fracture of the arm bone. Take 4 splints, different size, and place Size I in the front II inside the arm III outside IV behind. Great care must be taken that these splints do not reach so low as to interfere with the vein in the elbow. The Brain. At the back of the skull there is a large bone called the occiput. The brain consists of a large mass called the cerebrum and a smaller mass called the cerebellum. There are two brains. The inside of the brain is pearly white, the outside is of grey matter 1 ½ thick, covered with convolutions. The white stuff is nerve fibres and the surface consists of nerve cells. If the nerve cells are destroyed one becomes paralysed. The two brains are held together by bands of nerves. These nerves cross as they knit over the brain. The set which convey information to the brain are known as the sensory nerves, those which transmit information from the brain are called the motor nerves, the effluent & the affluent. Ethel May:1 [. . .]

1. On this page of the notebook, JMM has written, ‘This is quite illegible.’ He also used this same notebook to write his verse play, Cinnamon and Angelica (published in 1920). One page bears the following annotation in his hand: ‘even though, as I now fear, to others it may be only an obscurity shed over things transparently clear’. Under this KM wrote: ‘Even though, as now I fear, It may to others make obscure Things that aforetime have been clear Transparent.’

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Ooh la la – I feel as though I had been walking [. . .] across the ceiling and as though I have been asleep most of the time – soundly profoundly asleep – ooh la la. [. . .] But Ethel May & her young man then I had better phone them in the morning make quite perfectly sure I’ve got 8.xii.16 I thought and thought this morning but to not much avail. I can’t think why but my wit seems to be nearly deserting me when I want to get down to earth. I’m alight – sky high and even in my brain, in my head I can think and act and write – wonders – wonders – but the moment I really try to put them down I fail instantly [?]. Tchehov makes me feel that this longing to write stories of such uneven length is quite justified. Geneva1 is a long story & Hamilton is very short, & this ought to be written to my brother really, and another about the life in New Zealand. Then there is Bavaria: ich liebe dich, ich liebe dich2 floating out on the air. Then there is Paris! God! When shall I write all these things & how! Is that all? Can that be all? That is not what I meant at all. Tchehov is right about women. Yes, he is quite right. These fairies in black and silver, & then tearing down the road, her long brown fur blowing behind her, brushing the leaves with her trailing skirt & crying; of course he was awfully sorry that she did not get satisfaction, just as he would have been awfully sorry if she had not liked strawberries and cream.3 Friday – Friday – he could not get the word out of his head – and before him stood the little man with his hair neatly combed, saying ‘Please take something to eat!’ But I cannot believe that at this stage of the proceedings something pretty extraordinary did not happen. I sat with my back to no-one. Teddie Fisher. Muriel Fisher. This woman I know v. well – vain, eager, beautiful, desenchantee, an ‘actress’. I can put a little child’s bed into 1. See CW2, pp. 10–12 and footnote. 2. (Ger.) ‘I love you, I love you.’ 3. This passage does not appear to be referring to any one particular Chekhov story.

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the corner. Which do you like best Daddie – cats or dogs? Well, I think I like dogs best, old chap. I don’t. I’d like to have a kitten about as big as a little teapot. The character of the man rather beats me. I want a very quiet man absorbed in his work, who once he realised, really realised that his wife had married him for her own ends, had no more to do with her, but still loved her and simply adored the child. It is all a bit difficult to write but awfully fascinating. And should not be at too great length. His extraordinary thrilling sense of well being [?] ‘passionate little devil!’ Does this pen write? Oh, I do hope so. For it is really beastly to have a pen that doesn’t. And then a clergyman goes up to him & says he’s lost the tails off of his sheep. Well, its a comic! You see? The most important wireless message of yesterday consists of an account of an interview with Hinterdem Berg sent by Karl von Wegain to the Klokuk Cuspidor. Hinterdem Berg is a man of very few words. Terse and laconic as befits one who is ‘all soldier’ he seldom pronounces the full stops or the commas and his ‘connectives’ are conspicuously absent. He makes it a rule never to speak an entire sentence at a time, but here a bit and there a bit and everywhere a bit must be snapped up and reverently relished by the rare foreign correspondent whom he will deign to see. I, like every other foreign correspondent had been begging an interview ever since he succeeded, but upon one plea or another he declined much to my surprise. At my last request that he would say something he replied that he would see me next time I was in, out or passing but would say nothing whatever. I arrived at dusk accompanied by Captain Sidelights von Sidelights of the famous Sidelight Sidelight von Sidelight Sidelight family of the time of Frederick the Great. The concentrated central combined Brain is located in a ‘Dorf’, or small town, township, hamlet, or village, which is a small place of 300 inhabitants in the centre of a vast estate unflown over by fliers. The Field Marshal received me in a room in a building. The furniture consisted of a desk, a table, a chair and a picture of the Kaiser (the last named hung suspended from the wall).1

1. This passage is one of her unpublished pastiches of the style later found in the New Age. See pp. 216 and 222.

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[Notebook 24, qMS–1257]

Bloc Notes 1917. In these notes, so help me Lord I shall be open and above board. 141a Church Street Chelsea London S.W.3. Alors, je pars:1 It is astonishing how violently a big branch shakes when a silly little bird has left it. I expect the bird knows it and feels immensely arrogant. The way he went on, my dear, when I said I was going to leave him. He was quite desperate. But now the branch is quiet again. Not a bud has fallen, not a twig has snapped. It stands up in the bright air, steady and firm, and thanks the Lord that it has got its evenings to itself again.2 A Shilling gone bust: A knock at the door. Two sisters of Nazareth3 – one, rather pretty and meek, in the background, attending; the other, very voluble and fluent, her hands in her sleeves. When she smiled, showing her pale gums and big discoloured teeth I decided that I had quite got over my sentimental feeling about nuns. She was collecting for their home for 1. (Fr.) ‘And so I leave.’ 2. The 19 April 1917 issue of the New Age includes ‘Pastiche’ by KM, a series of six ‘fragments’, under the headings: ‘Alors je pars’, ‘Living Alone’, ‘E. M. Forster’, ‘Beware of the Rain!’, ‘L. M.’s Way’ and ‘Cephalus’ (see CW3, pp. 410–13). 3. The Sisters of Nazareth was a Catholic congregation of nuns, founded in London in the 1850s.

222

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little children. All sorts of little children were admitted except those suffering from infectious diseases or subject to fits. I wondered what would happen if one developed fits after admittance and decided that I should have the most realistic fit the moment the Nazarene door shut on me. I remember you well from last year, said the nun. But I wasn’t here last year. Ah, people change so quickly, said she. Yes, but perhaps their faces don’t, said I seriously, giving her the shilling I was just going to put into the gas meter. I wish I had put it into the gas meter five minutes before. Living Alone: Even if I should, by some awful chance, find a hair upon my bread and honey – at any rate it is my own hair. Beware of the Rain: Late in the evening after you have cleared away your supper, blown the crumbs out of the book that you were reading, lighted the lamp and curled up in front of the fire, that is the moment to beware of the rain. E. M. Forster: Putting my weakest books to the wall last night I came across a copy of Howard’s End and had a look into it. But its not good enough. E.M. Forster never gets any further than warming the teapot. He’s a rare fine hand at that. Feel this teapot. Is it not beautifully warm? Yes, but there ain’t going to be no tea. And I can never be perfectly certain whether Helen was got with child by Leonard Bast or by his fatal forgotten umbrella. All things considered I think it must have been the umbrella.1 L.M.s Way New Age 19.4.17.2 Cephalus. // // // // // 1. E. M. Forster (1879–1970) was an English novelist, critic, short-story writer and essayist, whose literary writings mark the bridge from Edwardian realism to early modernism, while exploring the social tensions and cultural politics of the times. His novel, Howards End, was published in 1910. It is both a late Edwardian and early modernist work, showing the complex mesh of tensions between social classes, the sexes, England and Germany, and the traditional intelligentsia and the new powerful oligarchs in London and the Home Counties. Leonard Bast is a self-educated clerk aspiring to work his way into society through learning and the arts. The published version of KM’s pastiche does not include the last two sentences here. 2. This records the date when several versions of these pastiches were published in the New Age.

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Love and Mushrooms: If only one could tell true love from false love as one can tell mushrooms from toadstools. With mushrooms it is so simple – you salt them well, put them aside and have patience. But with love, you have no sooner lighted on anything that bears even the remotest resemblance to it than you are perfectly certain it is not only a genuine specimen, but perhaps the only genuine mushroom ungathered. It takes a dreadful number of toadstools to make you realise that life is not one long mushroom. Babies and the dear Old Queen: Whenever I see babies in arms I am struck again by their resemblance to the dear old Queen. They have just the same air of false resignation, the same mournful, regal plumpness. If only her Majesty had deigned to be photographed in a white woolen bonnet with a little frill of eiderdown round it there’d be no telling the–difference. Especially if she could have been persuaded to sit on G’ampa G’adstone’s knee for the occasion. Dreams and Rhubarb. My sticks of rhubarb were wrapped up in a copy of the Star1 containing Lloyd George’s last, more than eloquent speech.2 As I snipped up the rhubarb my eye fell, was fixed and fastened on that sentence wherein he tells us that we have grasped our niblick3 and struck out for the open course. Pray Heaven there is some faithful soul ever present with a basket to catch these tender blossoms as they fall. Ah, God! It is a dreadful thought that these immortal words should go down into the dreamless dust uncherished. I loved to think, as I put the rhubarb into the saucepan, that years hence – P.G. many many years hence – when, in the fulness of time, full of ripeness and wisdom, the Almighty sees fit to gather him into His bosom, some gentil stonecutter living his quiet life in the little village that had known great David as a child, would take a piece of fair white marbil and engrave upon it two niblicks crossed, and underneath: In the hour of England’s most imminent Peril he grasped his Niblick and struck out for the open course. But what does rather worry me, I thought, turning the gas down to a pinch as the rhubarb began to boil, is how these mighty words are to be translated so that our Allies may taste the full flavour of them. Those crowds of patient russians, waiting in the snow, perhaps, to have 1. A daily newspaper. 2. The British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George (1863–1945), gave this speech to the American Lunch Club on 12 April 1917. 3. The niblick was a type of iron golf club. Lloyd George’s exact words were: ‘In golfing phraseology, we have gone through every bunker; but we have a good niblick stroke’.

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the speech read aloud to them – what dreadful weapon will it present to their imagination? Unless the Daily News suggest to Mr Ransome1 that he walk down the Nevsky Prospekt with a niblick instead of an umbrella for all the world to see. And the French – what espece de Niblickisme2 will they make of it? Shall we read in the french papers next week of someone qui manque de niblick3. Or that ‘Au milieu de ces evenements si graves ce qu’il nous faut c’est du courage, de l’espoir et du niblick le plus ferme4 –’ I wondered, taking off the rhubarb. A Victorian Idyll. Yesterday Matilda Mason In the Parlour by Herself Broke a Handsome China Basin Placed upon the Mantelshelf. You picture Matilda in a little check dress, puce shoulder ties, muslin pantalettes, black sandals, and a pound of rich glossy curls like a pound of the good old fashioned fried sausages, held in place by a velvet band. She tiptoes about the parlour, among the whatnots and anti-macassars and embroidery frames and Mamma’s work-box with the ivory fittings and Papa’s music stand with the pearl studded flute lying across it . . . How did she come to be in the parlour by herself. May 30th. To be alive and to be a ‘writer’ is enough. Sitting at my table just now I saw one person turning to another smiling, putting out his hand – speaking – and suddenly I clenched my fist & brought it down on the table and called out – there is nothing like it. 1 Stay laces. 2 The Coronation. 3 Two 2d ones please. 4 Late at Night. 5 The Black Cap. 6 In Confidence. 7 The Common Round. 8 A Pic-nic.5 It’s good in a way because one’s hand gets sure. The Musician’s Daughter – Kissing in the hall. What should he have done – put the books down or kept them in his hand – or – or She plays the accompaniments, very serious. She stands at the piano 1. Better known now as a children’s author, Arthur Ransome (1884–1967) was a reputed journalist who worked as the foreign correspondent in Russia for the Daily News until 1918. 2. (Fr.) ‘sort of Niblickisme’. 3. (Fr.) ‘who lacks Niblick’. 4. (Fr.) ‘in the midst of such serious events, what we need is courage, hope and the firmest of niblicks.’ 5. These are all stories published in the New Age between 1911 and 1917 (see CW1, pp. 221–4; CW1, pp. 458–61; CW2, pp. 22–48).

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striking A with one finger – her head bent a little on one side, and she dresses like a child in frocks that button up the back and slippers with no heels. The old man rumbles. Father is a ‘Tolstoi’ character. He has just the point of vision of a Tolstoi character. I always felt that Stepan in Anna Karenina1 reminded me of someone – and his well nourished, fresh body was always curiously familiar to me – of course – it is my Papa’s even to the smell of the whiskers. Things happened so simply then, without preparation and without any shock.2 They let me go into my mother’s room (I remember standing on tiptoe using both hands to turn the big white china doorhandle) & there lay my mother in bed with her arms along the sheet and there sat my grandmother before the fire with a baby in a flannel across her knees. My mother paid no attention to me at all – perhaps she was asleep for my Grandmother nodded & said in a voice scarcely above a whisper ‘Come & see your new little sister’. I tiptoed to her voice across the room & she parted the flannel and I saw a little round head with a tuft of goldy hair on it and a tiny face with eyes shut – white as snow. ‘Is it alive’ I asked. ‘Of course’ said Grandmother – ‘look at her holding my finger’. And yes a hand scarcely bigger than my doll’s in a frilled sleeve was wound round her finger. Do you like her, said the grandmother. Yes. Is she going to play with the doll’s house? By & bye said the grandmother – & I felt very pleased. Mrs Heywood had just given us the doll’s house. It was a beautiful one with a verandah & balcony & a door that opened and shut and two chimneys. I wanted badly to show it to somebody else. Her name is Gwen, said the grandmother. Kiss her. I bent down & kissed the little goldy tuft – but she took no notice. She lay quite quite still with her eyes shut. Now go & kiss Mother said the grandmother. But Mother did not want to kiss me. Very languid, leaning against the pillows she was eating some sago. The sun shone through the windows & winked on the brass knobs of the big bed. After that Grandmother came into the nursery with Gwen and sat in front of the nursery fire in the rocking chair with her. Meg & Tadpole3 1. Stepan Arkadyevich Oblonsky, a hearty man about town, is the brother of Anna Karenina in Tolstoy’s novel (first published 1878). 2. This long descriptive passage presages images from several of KM’s most famous New Zealand stories, including ‘Prelude’ and ‘The Doll’s House’, and also contains important biographical memories, including the birth of her younger sister Gwendolyn in 1891, who died of infantile cholera at the age of four months. 3. Presumably Vera Margaret and Charlotte Mary (Chaddie), KM’s older sisters.

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were away staying with Aunt Harriet Beauchamp, and they had gone before the new doll’s house arrived so that was why I so longed to have somebody to show it to. I had gone all through it myself from the kitchen to the dining room up into the bedrooms into the drawing room with the doll’s lamp on the table heaps & heaps of times. When will she play with it? I asked Grandmother. By & bye darling. It was spring – our garden was full of big white lilies. I used to run out & sniff them & come in again with my nose all yellow. Can’t she go out. At last one very fine day she was wrapped in the new shawl & Grandmother carried her into the cherry orchard & walked up and down under the falling cherry flowers. Grandmother wore a grey dress with white pansies on it. The doctor’s carriage was waiting at the door & the doctor’s little dog Jackie rushed at me & snapped at my bare legs. When we went back to the nursery & the new shawl was taken away little white petals like feathers fell out of the folds – but Gwen did not look at them. She lay in Grandmother’s arms, her eyes just open to show a line of blue, her face very white & the one tuft of goldy hair standing up on her head. All day & all night grandmother’s arms were full. I had no lap to climb into, no pillow to rest against – they belonged to Gwen. But Gwen did not notice this. She never put up her hand to play with the silver brooch that was a moon with five little owls sitting on it. She never pulled Grandmother’s watch out of her bodice & opened the back by herself to see Grandfather’s hair. She never buried her head close to smell the lavender water or took up Grandmother’s spectacle case & wondered at it being really silver. She just lay still & let herself be rocked. Down in the kitchen one day old Mrs McElvie came to the door & asked Bridget about the poor little mite. Bridget said ‘Kept alive on bullock’s blood hotted in a saucer over a candle.’ After that I felt frightened of Gwen. I decided that even when she did play with the dolls house I would not let her go upstairs into the bedrooms – only downstairs & then only when I saw she could look. Late one evening I sat by the fire on my little carpet hassock & Grandmother rocked, singing the song she used to sing me, but more gently. Suddenly she stopped & I looked up. Gwen opened her eyes & turned her little round head to the fire & looked & looked at it & then – turned her eyes up to the face bending over her. I saw her tiny body stretch out & her hands flew up. Ah! Ah! Ah! called the grandmother. Bridget dressed her [i.e. me] next morning. When I went into the nursery I sniffed. A big vase of the white lilies was standing on the table. Grandmother sat in her chair to one side with Gwen in her lap, & a funny little man with his head in a black bag was standing behind a box of china eggs. ‘Now’ he said and I saw my grandmother’s face change as she bent over little Gwen. Thank you said the man

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coming out of the bag. The picture was hung over the nursery fire. I thought it looked very nice. The doll’s house was in it too – verandah & balcony and all. Gran held me up to kiss my little sister.1 ____________________ I have a lovely idea for a story. Yelski & his wife the children the cinema actor. Plays in Geneva. ____________________ Elena Brave Love X The German Governess X Cinema The Party Woman at the Store X The Fern Tree.2 [Journal, 1954, pp. 123–4]

August 21 141A Church St., Chelsea. I came home this afternoon and Fergusson came in. I was standing in the studio, someone whistled on the path. It was he. I went out and bought some milk and honey and Veda bread. By and by we sat down and had tea and talk. This man is in many ways extraordinarily like me. I like him so much; I feel so honest with him that it’s simply one of my real joys, one of the real joys of my life, to have him come and talk and be with me. I did not realise, until he was here and we ate together, how much I cared for him – and how much I was really at home with him. A real understanding. We might have spoken a different language – returned from a far country. I just felt all was well, and we understood each other. Just that. And there was ‘ease’ between us. There is a division: people who are my people, people who are not my people. He is mine. I gave him for a pledge my little puddock.3 When we walked out I saw the sky again after all the day’s 1. In this scene, KM recalls the morning after baby Gwen had died when, in keeping with Victorian tradition, a photographer came to take a picture of a family member holding the deceased child. This photograph is now in the collection of the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington. 2. A group of story titles collected together, possibly with a view to anthologising them. Although there is no story entitled ‘Elena’, this is the name of the main character in ‘New Dresses’ (CW1, pp. 291–300); ‘There is always something wonderfully touching’ (CW1, pp. 392–7); ‘Brave Love’ (CW1, pp. 398–421); ‘The Little Governess’ (‘The German Governess’ here) (CW1, pp. 422–32); ‘The Common Round’ (‘Cinema’ here) (CW2, pp. 36–42) and ‘The Woman at the Store’ (CW1, pp. 268–76). ‘The Party’ and ‘The Fern Tree’ are untraced and unmentioned in BJK. 3. (Scots) ‘a toad’. KM is referring to a brass knick-knack that she treasured.

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blindness – little clouds and big clouds. We said good-bye at Vinden’s. That is all. But I wanted to make a note of it. I. They meet and just touch. II. They come together and part. III. They are separated and meet again. IV. They realise their tie. Summer. ‘Et pourtant, il faut s’habituer à vivre, Même seul, même triste, indifférent et las, Car, ô ma vision troublante, n’es-tu pas Un mirage incessant trop difficile à suivre?’1 1. The final stanza of Francis Carco’s poem, ‘Province’, published in La Bohème et mon cœur, in 1912. ‘And yet one must get used to living, / Even alone, even sad, indifferent and weary, / For, oh my troubling vision, are you not / A constant mirage, too hard to follow?’ Since no manuscript version of this entry has survived and we have to rely on Murry’s transcription, selection and ordering, it is impossible to know whether the three entries here – the passage about Fergusson, the recapitulative story-structure in four parts, and the Carco quotation – are interlinked and intended to comment differently on the same underlying event, or whether they were assembled in this order by JMM. However, it is tempting to read the nostalgic note in the Fergusson sequence from the perspective of the melancholy note in Carco’s lines, or even to wonder whether the ‘he’ refers consistently to Fergusson, or to other acquaintances of the past. Carco certainly chose to believe that the lines referred in part to him. In his Souvenirs sur Katherine Mansfield (1933), he writes, ‘Quelque vers, transcrits de mémoire dans son Journal et empruntés à La Bohème et mon cœur, en sont garants. Je le dis tout de suite: ces vers ne valent rien et je suis justement étonné qu’avec toute sa finesse la jeune femme ait fait un pareil choix, qu’elle ait moins aimé le rythme d’autres poèmes que l’idée de « mirage » dont celui-ci n’exprime qu’imparfaitement la hantise et la déception [. . .]. En tout cas, deux années après n’avoir plus rien su d’elle, il me prouve que mon souvenir n’était pas tout à fait éteint chez Katherine Mansfield et que, si nous avions fini par nous perdre de vue, il lui restait encore assez de gentillesse pour me faire une petite place, dans ses cahiers, entre son triste retour à Londres en novembre 1916, et une note sur Tchékhov’ (Francis Carco, Souvenirs sur Katherine Mansfield, pp. 31–2.) (Some lines of poetry, written from memory in her Journal and taken from La Bohème et mon cœur, prove this to be true. Let me make things clear: as poetry, these lines are worthless, and I am indeed surprised that a young woman with so much finesse was less struck by the rhyming patterns in some of the other poems than by the idea of a ‘mirage’ which is only an imperfect impression of being haunted by fear and disappointment. [. . .] In any case, although I heard nothing from her for two years, I believe this proves that Katherine Mansfield hadn’t entirely forgotten about me, and even if we had lost sight of each other, she still cared about me enough to find me a little place in her journal, between the sad return to London in 1916 and a note about Chekhkov.’)

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[MS–Papers–4006–05]

A Victorian Idyll. Yesterday Matilda Mason In the Parlour by Herself Broke a Handsome China Basin Placed upon the Mantelshelf. You picture Matilda in a little check dress, puce shoulder-ties, muslin pantalettes, black sandals and a pound of rich glossy curls held in place by a velvet band. She tiptoes about the parlour, among the what-nots and antimacassars and embroidery frames, and Mamma’s workbox with the ivory fittings and Papa’s music stand with his pearl studded flute lying across it. How did she come to be in the parlour by herself – rash, foolish child! Why was she not sitting upon a bead hassock up in the nursery conning over one of those amiable little tomes for infants from one and a half to three years . . (Charles: Pray, dear Papa! What is the Solar System? Papa: Wipe your nose, Charles, and I will tell you.) Or embroidering God is Love in red thread upon a nightdress case for her dear Mamma! She had parted her Papa’s ‘piccadilly weepers’1 had been strained to his flashing bosom before he dashed off to that mysterious place, the City, where ladies feared to tread; her Mamma, having seen the doctor’s gig draw up at number twelve had put on her second best pair of jet earrings, wrapped herself in her second best cashmere shawl and taken a flash of eau de cologne. Life is not gay. but at last she was conscious that a choice had to be made – that before dawn these shadows would appear less real making way for something quite different. There was no hesitation now. She simply knew that she wanted him near her, that he was to her the meaning of love and of others, that without him all the world was a little ball rolling over a dark sky. Dawn broke, long in coming. She lay in the bed on her back, one arm behind her head, one hand on the counterpane – the window became blue, then suffused with gold light, but when she looked at her watch she was horrified to find that it was only half past five

1. Piccadilly weepers: ‘Long flowing side-whiskers’ (Oxford English Dictionary). Linda, in ‘The Aloe’, keeps a photograph of her father with ‘piccadilly weepers’ (see CW1, p. 486).

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o’clock. Hours had to [be] got through somehow – hours and hours – and you must remember that time was not the sort of thing you could count on at the last to be faithful or to be just. No, it behaved as it liked – it had infinite capacities for lengthening out, for hanging on like a white ribbon of road under your too tired feet. Oh, to have done with it. To run like a little child over the long white places, to be there and in his arms! x x x She went over to the mirror, took off her cap, shook her hair – and once, adorably seeing his eyes watch her, she glanced over her shoulder & smiled. Carefully she powdered her face, rouged her lips, traced with the tip of her finger her eyebrows. This was our Kezia1 at work, this being with [Notebook 32, qMS–1256]

as though she expected to hear those hollow bursts [?] roaring like shells – – – E.M.F.2 and that even if we had swung from the roof of one rushing train on to the roof of another rushing train, or allowed ourselves to be chloroformed & snatched away in sinister taxis with the blinds pulled down, and Miss Mose,3 pluming & preening herself & clucking to herself her heart tucked well in behind her big smooth bosom – those light glaring eyes – & thin legs and narrow high heeled boots gave them the look of hens stepping across the wet dark yard, ugly & perplexed that no one appeared to fling the light grain among them & shoo them this way and that – – – he stared at his watch, & then still holding it in his hand he stared into the air, [. . .] over [. . .] as though counting the [. . .] of the ugly day. 1. Again, the name ‘Kezia’ confirms the semi-fictionalised nature of the passage, as KM drafted out her ideas for ‘The Aloe’. 2. E. M. Forster. See Figure 9 (p. 232) for the manuscript version of these jottings, giving a particularly extreme example of her sometimes erratic handwriting, as if the notes were made during the night, or during a journey. 3. ‘Miss Mose’ does not appear in ‘The Aloe’, although there is a Miss Moss in ‘Common Round’ and ‘Pictures’. Various visual details in this paragraph, however, make their way into ‘The Aloe’.

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Figure 9 ‘Miss Mose’, c. 1917. Notebook 32, qMS–1256. John Middleton Murry Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

It’s weird he doesn’t see us isn’t it said the [. . .]. My dear, isn’t she weird, said the [. . .]. I believe she is an alien. But she’s too weird for words! Have you often worked for Mr Alexander, asked the Fat girl. Oh, you would like to work for him. What a nice man he is. Oh what a nice man is that Mr Alexander, & she lifted her head

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as the [. . .] started to [. . .] herself on the [. . .] – like hot coffee cakes of her childhood. Large heavy limbs & a neck like a turkey. piece of doormat. Oh, she cried, flinging the tail of that little dead animal yet again round her fat neck. [nLC, Unbound papers]

with the half opened buds in her bosom through the great? green? bushy? garden went G. seeking her mate. Widowed! Married or unmarried married or unmarried Gerhardi1 Ottoline2 Orton3 Moults4 Mrs Montgomery Delamare5 Yoi Maraini6 1. Presumably William Gerhardi (1895–1977), the English novelist, literary critic and essayist, who spent much of his formative life in Russia. When KM first met him, he was still a young aspiring writer, and she warmly encouraged his ambitions. She reviewed his first novel, Futility, in 1922 (see CW3, pp. 725–6). He spent the war years in Russia, so possibly came to KM’s attention in England after publishing articles in the press. 2. Ottoline Morrell (1873–1938) was an important London patroness of the arts in the early twentieth century and an influential go-between for various literary circles in London, most notably the Bloomsbury group. Her house at Garsington, near Oxford, which KM and JMM visited frequently, became a refuge and place of work for several conscientious objectors during World War 1. 3. William Orton (1889–1952), a writer and schoolmaster, and KM met in 1910, and for two years enjoyed an intense, creative friendship based on a mutual passion for the Decadents and a keen interest in writing – indeed, sharing a diary and writing for each other for some months. Orton’s 1937 novel, The Last Romantic, includes a chapter based on their relationship. 4. Thomas Moult was a contributor to Rhythm. 5. Walter John de la Mare (1873–1956) was an English poet, short-story writer and novelist, who also wrote much-appreciated works for children. He was an early contributor to Rhythm and became a trusted friend and admirer of KM towards the end of her life. 6. Cornelia Edith Yoi Pawlowska Crosse (1877–1944) was a Hungarianborn writer of English–Polish descent, married to the Italian sculptor Antonio Maraini.

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Figure 10 Doodles and illustrations, c. 1916–17. Notebook 17, qMS–1255–1. John Middleton Murry Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

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[MS–Papers–4006–07]

Charming! thought Frances, smiling, as she pushed her way through the glass doors into the hairdresser’s shop. What she meant by ‘charming’ was her little hand in a white kid glove with thick black stitching pressed flat on the pane of the swing door a moment. . Madame, behind the counter, smiled back at her, and ‘charming, charming’ re-echoed in her smile and in her quick brilliant glance which flew over Frances from top to toe. ‘Georges is quite ready’ she cried. ‘If you will sit down one moment I will tell him.’ And while she spoke her smile widened & deepened until even her black satin dress, her rings, her locket, her jewelled combs seemed to catch a ripple and to flash with it. Even the bottles & jars and high mirrors in the hairdresser’s shop gave it back again. [NLC, Unbound papers]

(What luck? Any luck? Here is L.M. home from the Post. No luck.) December 31st 4.45 p.m. Fly: Oh, the times when she had walked upside down on the ceiling, run up glittering panes, floated on a lake of light, flashed through a shining beam. And God looked upon the fly fallen into the jug of milk and saw that it was good. And the smallest Cherubims & Seraphims of all who delight in misfortune struck their silver harps & shrilled: How is the fly fallen fallen. Jack came to bed at ten minutes to twelve. Said he: don’t go to sleep before the New Year. I lay holding my watch. I think I did go to sleep for a moment. The window was wide open, & it looked out and over a big soft hollow. Far away there were shapes of trees, serpents and fans – with a sprinkle of lights between. Then the hour struck – the bells rang, hooters, sirens, horns, trumpets sounded. The church organ peeled out (reminding me of Hans Andersen)1 & an Australian 1. In Hans Andersen’s story, ‘The Red Shoes’ (1845), the pealing notes of the organ mark the epiphanic moment when the little protagonist Karen is released from the malicious power of the dancing red shoes, which punished her for her vanity. The story ends, ‘The organ played and the children’s voices in the choir sounded soft and lovely. The bright warm sunshine streamed through the window into the pew where Karen sat, and her heart became so filled with it, so filled with peace and joy, that it broke. Her soul flew on the sunbeams to Heaven and no one was there who asked after the Red Shoes.’

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Figure 11 Doodles and illustrations (2), c. 1916. Notebook 17, qMS–1255–2. John Middleton Murry Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

called Cooee. (I longed to reply.) I wanted L.M. to hear & to see. I called loudly to her ever so many times but she had ‘chosen’ to take a bath. Jack was very chagrined because I had thought of her & not only of him. That rather spoiled his New Year. We ought to have clasped

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[MS–Papers–4066]

January 1st 1918

£. s.d In hand 13. 0.0 _________________________________________ dairy 18.3¼ Jack 1. 0.0 laundry 5.8½ passport 5.0 ticket 10.7 _______ 2. 19.7¾ 8.6¾ telegrams 3.11 taxi 1.0 porter 6 papers & cigarettes 6 13. 0.0 2.19.7¾ ________ 10. 4.5¾

[MS–Papers–4067]

12.1.18. I shall certainly be able to write in a day or two – if this goes on. I am not quite so wretched tonight!

237

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[Notebook 14, qMS–1259]

But Lord! Lord! how I do hate the french. With them it is always rutting time. See them come dancing and sniffing round a woman’s skirts. Mademoiselle complains that she has the pieds glacés.1 Then why do you wear such pretty stockings & shoes Mademoiselle, leers Monsieur. Eh – oh la – c’est la mode. And the fool grins well content with the idiot answer. When I am sitting above the rocks near the edge of the sea I always fancy that I hear above the plash of the water the voice of two people talking somewhere I know not where. And the talking is always broken by something which is neither laughter nor sobbing but a low thrilling sound which might be either and is a part of both. How immensely easier it is to attack an insect that is running away from you rather than one that is running towards you. The scuttling tribe. Spiders as big as half crowns with long gooseberry hairs. (February 7th) I have been a worm this morning & read poetry when I should have worked. Note – A muff like a hard nut. [MS–Papers–4066]

Katherine [on cover] Watson Mrs Maufe Aunt Belle 1.18.9. Saintsbury ________________ Take train midday Friday Arrive Saturday. Travel Monday. __________________ There is as much of the ______________________ Mother is well. I am preparing for the journey. I doubt it. and am thinking over other places, other plans. But Katherine, don’t live apart again or without a servant again. Phone [. . .] and [. . .] 1. (Fr.) ‘frozen feet’.

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– phone Murry. the shawl is a good omen Suggest that Gertler come and travel with us.1 Better be imprudent movables than prudent fixtures. Keats to Fanny.2 But I must admit the russians bore me – they are not couched enough in the bones of Art. fish lettuce rhubarb carrots apples account book ______________ salad eggs bread cakes rhubarb turnips potatoes onions _____________ salad onions rhubarb artichokes veg alors bread rock cakes 1. Mark Gertler (1891–1939) was an important British artist of the early twentieth century, born to Jewish–Polish parents. He associated at times with the Bloomsbury Group and was a close friend of Koteliansky, DHL and KM; like DHL and KM, he suffered from tuberculosis. 2. In a letter to Fanny Brawne, the woman he loved but did not marry on account of his tuberculosis, Keats wrote, ‘We might spend a pleasant Year at Berne or Zurick – if it should please Venus to hear my “Beseech thee to hear us O Goddess” And if she should hear God forbid we should what people call, settle – turn into a pond, a stagnant Lethe – a vile crescent, row or building. Better be imprudent moveables than prudent fixtures – Open my Mouth at the street door like the Lion’s head at Venice to receive hateful cards Letters messages an[d] wither at tea parties; freeze at dinners; bakes at dance[s], simmer at routs. No my love, trust yourself to me and I will find you nobler amusements; fortune favouring’ (The Letters of John Keats, Vol. 2, ed. Hyder Edwards Rollins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), p. 138).

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braid paper envelopes wrapping paper Knickers vests I can’t remember who the woman on the back of the book was – Mrs Hardwick or Mrs Jenkins, & the moral[?] Mrs H. is just like a frenchwoman. Met Lizzie Flegg today – Chestnut Lodge is all over long long ago & I have an apartment. It doesn’t matter which bus I catch. She reeked of carnations. Newberry Lodge Combe Martin N. Devon. I never feel so comfortable or at ease as when I am holding a pencil. Note that & if you have an embarrassing moment see that you meet it armed! Madame Hunt 1 Great Woodstock St Off Mary-le-bone High Street. hairpins needles coat buttons cushion stuff The window was broken. II faut acheter un arreignée1 ¼ prunes ¼ figs Wrote Ottoline and Geoffroi.2 Posted. The woman with the white fan of wool over her bosom, the toddling baby and the little boys – like the untidy children in Italian painting. I want to say something about a milk tooth or two missing. _________________________________________________ A woman who is un peu agé and has a youngish man in France shows very plain her jealousy and her desire to keep his attention from wandering. Even if he wants to sleep she takes his eye.

1. KM appears to be playing with words here. The French word ‘poignée’ meaning ‘handle’, sounds similar to the word ‘araignée’, meaning ‘spider’. 2. Ottoline Morrell and M. Geoffroi. The latter, it is claimed by Alpers (p. 266) and by O’Sullivan and Scott (CLKM 2, p. 9), was Mayor of Carpentras, although his name has not been traced on any mayoral state archives. KM became acquainted with a M. Geoffroi and his wife, Régine, when she was living in Bandol.

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[MS–Papers–4006–7]

February 19th 1918. I woke up early this morning and when I opened the shutters the flail round sun was just risen. I began to repeat that verse of Shakespeare’s: ‘Lo here the gentle lark weary of rest’1 and bounded back into bed. The bound made me cough. I spat – it tasted strange – it was bright red blood. Since then I’ve gone on spitting each time I cough a little more. Oh, yes, of course I am frightened. But for two reasons only. I don’t want to be ill, I mean ‘seriously’ away from Jack. Jack is the 1st thought. 2nd I don’t want to find this is real consumption, perhaps its going to gallop – who knows – and I shan’t have my work written. That’s what matters. How unbearable it would be to die, leave ‘scraps’, ‘bits’, nothing real finished, but I feel the first thing to do is to get back to Jack. Yes my right lung hurts me badly but it always does more or less. But Jack & my work they are all I think of (mixed with curious visionary longing for gardens in full flower). L.M. has gone for the doctor. I knew this would happen. Now I’ll say why. On my way here, in the train from Paris to Marseilles I sat in a carriage with 2 women. They were both dressed in black. One was big, one little. The little spry one had a sweet smile and bright eyes. She was extremely pale, had been ill – was come to repose herself. The Big One, as the night wore on wrapped herself up in a black shawl, so did her friend. They shaded the lamp & started (trust ’em) talking about illnesses. I sat in the corner feeling damned ill myself. Then the big one, rolling about in the shaking train, said what a fatal place this coast is for anyone who is even threatened with lung trouble. She reeled off the most hideous examples, especially one which froze me finally, of an american belle et forte avec un simple bronchite2 who came down here to be cured & in three weeks had had a severe haemorrhage and died. ‘Adieu mon mari, adieu mes beaux enfants. . .’3 This recital, in that dark moving train, told by that big woman swathed in black had an effect on me that I couldn’t own and never mentioned. I knew the woman was a fool, hysterical, morbid, but I believed her: and her voice has gone on somewhere echoing in me ever since. . . 1. From Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. The full verse makes the splendour of the verse, in contrast with the horror of the first haemorrhage, even more striking: ‘Lo, here the gentle lark, weary of rest, / From his moist cabinet mounts up on high, / And wakes the morning, from whose silver breast, / The sun ariseth in his majesty’ (ll. 853–8). 2. (Fr.) ‘beautiful and strong, with simple bronchitis’. 3. (Fr.) ‘Farewell, my husband, farewell, my lovely children.’

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Juliette has come in and opened the windows;1 the sea is so full of ‘little laughs’ and in the window space some tiny flies are busy with their darting, intricate dance. [Notebook 12, qMS–1260]

Paris. March 1918. Inside and Outside. 25.iv.18. ‘Well sit down Mansfield, and reposez-vous’2 said Ferguson,3 ‘and I’ll get on with my dressing.’ So he went into his bedroom & shut the door between, and I sat on the end of the sofa. The sun came full through the two windows, dividing the studio into four – two quarters of light and two of shadow. But all those things which the light touched seemed to float in it, to bathe and to sparkle in it as if they belonged not to land but to water; they even seemed, in some strange way, to be moving. When you lean over the edge of the rock and see something lovely and brilliant flashing at the bottom of the sea it is only the clear, trembling water that dances – but – can you be quite sure? . . . No, not quite sure, and that little Chinese group on the writing table may or may not have shaken itself awake for just one hundredth of a second out of hundreds of years of sleep. Very beautiful, oh God is a blue teapot with two white cups attending, a red apple among oranges addeth fire to flame – in the white bookcases the books fly up and down in scales of colour, with pink and lilac notes recurring until nothing remains but them, sounding over and over. There are a number of frames, some painted and some plain, leaning against the wall, and the picture of a naked woman with her arms raised, languid, as though her heavy flowering beauty were almost too great to bear. There are two sticks and an umbrella in one corner, and in the fireplace – a kettle, curiously like a bird. White net curtains hang over the windows. For all the sun it is raining outside. The gas in the middle of the room has a pale yellow paper shade and as Ferguson dresses he keeps up a constant whistling. Reposez-vous. Oui, je me repose4 . . . 1. Juliette was a servant at the Hotel Beau Rivage in Bandol and a particular favourite of KM. 2. (Fr.) ‘have a rest’. 3. The artist J. D. Fergusson. 4. (Fr.) ‘Get some rest’ / ‘Yes, I’ll rest.’

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26.iv.1918. If I had my way I should stay in the Redcliffe Road until after the war. It suits me. Whatever faults it has it is not at all bourgeois. There is ‘something a bit queer’ about all the people who live in it; they are all more or less ‘touched’. They walk about without their hats on and fetch and carry their food and even their coal. There are nearly four bells to every door – the curtains are all ‘odd’ and shabby. The charwomen, blown old flies, buzz down each other’s basements . . . ‘No 50 ’ad a party last night. You never seen anything like the stite of is rooms this morning.’ ‘. . . ’Igh time ’e did get married, I say. ’Is fiangse spends the night with ’im already. E says she ’as ’is bed and ’e sleeps on the table. You don’t tell me a great stick of a fellow like ’im sleeps on ’is table!’ ? But do you like this sort of talk? This kind of thing? What about the Poets and – flowers and trees? Answer: As I can’t have the perfect other thing – I do like this. I feel, somehow, free in it. It has no abiding place, and neither have I. And – and – oh well, I do feel so cynical. [MS–Papers–4006–06]

KM’s Notebook no good Pulmonary Tuberculosis.1 The man in the room next to mine has got the same complaint as I. When I wake in the night I hear him turning. And then he coughs. And I cough. And after a silence I cough. And he coughs again. This goes on for a long time. Until I feel we are like two roosters calling to each other at false dawn. From far-away hidden farms. Hotels. I seem to spend half my life arriving at strange hotels. And asking if I may go to bed immediately. ‘And would you mind filling my hot water bottle?. . . Thank you; that is delicious. No; I shan‘t require anything more.’ The strange door shuts upon the stranger, and then I slip down in the sheets. Waiting for the shadows to come out of the corners and spin their slow, slow web over the Ugliest Wallpaper of All.

1. Second versions of these prose pieces, written in verse, are included in CW3 (see ‘Malade’, CW3, p. 119; ‘Pic-nic’, pp. 119–20; ‘Arrivée’, p. 120; ‘Dame Seule’, pp. 120–1; ‘Strawberries and a Sailing Ship, pp. 118–19).

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Pic-Nic.1 When the two women in white came down to the lonely beach – She threw away her paintbox – and She threw away her notebook. Down they sat on the sand. The tide was low. Before them the weedy rocks were like some herd of shaggy beasts huddled at the pool to drink and staying there in a kind of stupor. Then She went off and dabbled her legs in a pool thinking about the colour of flesh under water. And She crawled into a dark cave and sat there thinking about her childhood. Then they came back to the beach and flung themselves down on their bellies, hiding their heads in their arms. They looked like two swans. Dame Seule.2 She is little and grey, with a black velvet band round her hair, false teeth, and skinny little hands coming out of frills like the frills on cutlets. As I passed her room one morning I saw her ‘worked’ brush-andcomb bag and her Common Prayerbook. Also, when she goes to the ‘Ladies’, for some obscure reason she wears a little shawl. . . At the dining table, smiling brightly:– ‘This is the first time I have ever travelled alone, or stayed by myself in a Strange Hotel. But my husband does not mind. As it is so Very Quiet. Of course, if it were a Gay Place And she draws in her chin; and the bead chain rises and falls on her vanished bosom. Grownupedness. Four o’clock. Is it light now at four o’clock? I jump out of bed and run over to the window. It is half-light, neither black nor blue. The wing of the coast is violet; in the lilac sky there are dark banners and little black boats manned by black shadows put out on the purple water. Oh! how often I have watched this hour when I was a girl! But then – I stayed at the window until I grew cold – until I was icy – thrilled by something – I did not know what! Now I fly back into bed, pulling up the clothes, tucking them into my neck. And suddenly my feet find the hot water bottle. Heavens! it is still beautifully warm. That really is thrilling. Remembrance. Always, when I see foxgloves, I think of the Lawrences. Again I pass in front of their cottage and in the window, between the 1. KM also wrote a dramatic sketch called ‘A Pic-nic’ (see CW2, pp. 42–9). 2. (Fr.) ‘single woman’, ‘woman on her own’. As this repeated use of the title underlines, the single or lonely woman was clearly a recurring figure in KM’s mind.

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daffodil curtains with the green spots – there are the great, sumptuous blooms. ‘And how beautiful they are against whitewash’ cry the Lawrences. As is their custom, when they love anything, they make a sort of Festa. With foxgloves everywhere. And then they sit in the middle of them, like blissful prisoners, dining in an encampment of Indian Braves. Strawberries and a Sailing Ship. We sat on the top of the cliff overlooking the open sea. Our backs turned to the little town. Each of us had a basket of strawberries. We had just bought them from a dark woman with quick eyes – berry-finding eyes. ‘They’re fresh picked’ said she, ‘from our own garden.’ The tips of her fingers were stained a bright red. But what strawberries! Each one was the finest – the perfect berry – the strawberry Absolute – the fruit of our childhood! The very air came fanning on Strawberry wings. And down below, in the pools, little children were bathing, with strawberry faces . . . Over the blue, swinging water, came a three masted sailing ship – with nine, ten, eleven sails. Wonderfully beautiful! She came riding by as though every sail were taking its fill of the sun and the light. And ‘Oh how I’d love to be on board!’ said Anne. (The captain was below, but the crew lay about, idle and handsome. ‘Have some strawberries!’ we said, slipping and sliding on the rocking decks, and shaking the baskets. They ate them in a kind of dream. . .) And the ship sailed on. Leaving us in a kind of dream, too. With the empty baskets. . . Jour Maigre.1 On Wednesday mornings Mrs Honey2 comes into my room as usual and pulls up the blinds and opens the big french windows. Letting in the dancey light and the swish of the sea and the creak of the boats lying at anchor out in the Roads, and the sound of the lawn mower and the smell of cut grass and syringa and the cheeky whistle of that same blackbird. Then she comes back to my bed and stands over me, one hand pressed to her side, her old face puckered up as though she had some news that she didn’t know how to break gently. ‘Tis a meatless day’ says she. 1. (Fr.) ‘a day of fasting’. 2. Mrs Honey was an elderly woman who worked at the hotel in Looe where KM stayed in 1918 and whose gentle attentiveness was much appreciated by KM.

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[MS–Papers–4006–07]

What happens is that I come in absolutely exhausted, lie down, sit up & sit in a daze of fatigue – a horrible state until 7 o’clock. I can barely walk, can’t think, don’t dare to go to sleep because if I do I know I’ll lie awake through the night & that is my horror. Oh, for a sofa or a very comfortable armchair – this is always the longing at the back of my mind & except for that and a feeling of despair at wasting the time I am simply a blank. The pain continues in my left shoulder and is vile. That adds of course for finally it becomes intolerable & drives me to lie on the bed covered over to support it. But these are, Hard Lines. [Notebook 12, qMS–1260]

Scenes from The Ladies Club in Wartime. Ladies to the Centre: A round hall very dim, lighted from above. A loud reluctant (swing glass) door that can’t bear people trying to burst their way in and loathes people trying to burst their way out. To one side of the door the porter’s cave dotted with pigeon holes, and a desk, a telephone, with usually a big tea-stained china tea cup crowned with its saucer. In front of it a squeaking revolving chair with a torn imitation leather seat. If the fire burns bright your maän is in a good temper. butter? paper? April 2nd. I am not doing what I swore I would at Bandol. I must again write the word DISCIPLINE and under that W H I C H D O Y O U P R E F ER ? And from day to day after this keep a strict account of what it is that I fail in. I have failed very badly these last few days & this evening was a ‘comble’.1 This to the uninitiated would appear great rubbish. They’d suspect me of G. knows what. If only they knew the childish truth. But they won’t know, blast their curious eyes. Now, Katherine, here goes for tomorrow. Keep it up, my girl. Its such a chance now that L.M. is not i spy i. April 3rd. A good day. 1. (Fr.) ‘the last straw’.

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He woke, but did not move. Warm and solemn he lay, with wide open troubled eyes, pouting a little, almost frowning for one long moment. In that long moment he sprang out of bed, bathed, dressed, reached the wharf, boarded the ferry boat, crossed the harbour and was waving – waving to Isabel and Maisie who stood there, waiting for him on the pier. A tall young sailor standing near him threw a coil of tarred rope and it fell in a long loop over a landing post. Beautifully done . . . And all this moment, vision, was so clear and bright and tiny, he might with his flesh & pout and solemn eyes have been a baby watching a bubble. I’m there – I’m there. Why do I have to start and do it all so slowly all over again. But as he thought he moved and the bubble vanished and was forgotten. He sat up in bed smiling, pulling down his pyjama sleeves. [Notebook 12, qMS–1260]

21.v.18. I positively feel, in my hideous modern way, that I can’t get into touch with my mind. I am standing gasping in one of those disgusting telephone boxes and I can’t ‘get through’. ‘Sorry. There’s no reply’ tinkles out the little voice. ‘Will you ring them again, exchange? A good long ring. There must be somebody there.’ ‘I cant get any answer.’ Then I suppose there is nobody in the building – nobody at all. Not even an old fool of a watchman. No, it’s dark and empty & quiet, above all – empty. Note: A queer thing is that I keep seeing it – this empty building – as my father’s office. I smell it as that. I see the cage of the clumsy wooden goods lift & the tarred ropes hanging. 22. The sea here is real sea. It rises and falls with a loud noise, has a long, silky roll on it as though it purred, seems sometimes to climb half up into the sky and you see the sail boats perched upon clouds – like flying cherubs. Hallo: here come two lovers. She has a pinched in waist, a hat like a saucer turned upside down – he sham panama, hat guard, cane etc., his arm enfolding. Walking between sea and sky. His voice floats up to me: ‘Of course occasional tinned meat does not matter but a perpetual diet of tinned meat is bound to produce . . .’ I am sure that the Lord loves them and that they and their seed will prosper & multiply for ever and ever . . . Are you really, only happy when I am not there? Can you conceive of yourself buying crimson roses & smiling at the flower woman

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if I were within 50 miles of you? Isn’t it true that then, even if you are a prisoner, your time is your own, even if you are lonely you are not being ‘driven distracted’. Do you remember when you put your handkerchief to your lips & turned away from me. In that instant you were utterly, utterly apart from me – and I have never felt quite the same since. Also – there was the evening when you asked me if I still believed in the Heron.1 Isn’t it perhaps true that if I were ‘flourishing’ you would flourish – ever so much more easily and abundantly without the strain and wear of my presence. And we should send each other divine letters and divine ‘work’– & you would quite forget that I was 29 and brown-eyed. People would ask – is she fair or dark & you’d say in a kind of daze – oh I think her hair’s pale yellow. Well – well – it’s not quite a perfect scheme. For I should have to hack off my parent stem such a branch – oh such a branch that spreads over you & delights to shade you & to see you in dappled light and to refresh you and carry you a sweet (though quite unrecognised) perfume. But it is not the same for you. You are always pale, exhausted, in an anguish of set anxiety, as soon as I am near. Now, I feel in your letters, this is going and you are breathing again. How sad it is! Yes, Ive a shrewd suspicion Of course L.M. will keep us one remove from each other; she’ll be a ‘help’ that way. Did you realise that when you were so anxious to keep her. For of course, as you know, I’d have chucked her finally, after the Gwynne2 night if it hadn’t been for your eagerness. . . . to meet, on the stopping of the chariot, the august emergence.3 . . . the jewel wrapped up in a piece of old silk and negotiable one day in the market of misery.4 . . . luxuriant complications which make the air too tropical..5 1. ‘The Heron’ was the imaginary farm that JMM and KM dreamed of owning, named after KM’s brother, whose middle name was ‘Heron’. 2. Mr Gwynne was the foreman at the munitions factory where Ida Baker worked during the war. 3. From Henry James’s novel, The Golden Bowl (1905), a powerful study of false appearances and dissimulation. Maggie Vervor is musing on how, to unsuspecting bystanders, she and Prince Amerigo would look as if they were awaiting the visit of royalty. 4. From The Golden Bowl, part 6. Maggie is thinking about separation, comparing last words to ‘some benefit that might be carried away into exile like the last saved object of price of an the emigré, the jewel wrapped up in a piece of old silk’. 5. From The Golden Bowl, part 5. Husbands and wives, in Maggie’s mind, are ‘luxuriant complications’ from which it is delightful to escape.

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That sense of folded flowers – as though the night had laid its hand upon their hearts & they were folded and at peace like folded flowers. KM1 . . . plucked her sensations by the way, detached, nervously, the small wild blossoms of her dim forest.2 the high luxury of not having to explain. .3 the ostrich burying its head in the sand does at any rate wish to convey the impression that its head is the most important part of it. KM (Good) though she did in a way, simply offer herself to me she was so cold, so rich, so splendid that I simply couldn’t see a spoon silver enough to dare help myself with . . KM if there were going to be large freedoms she was determined to enjoy them too. She wasn’t going to be perched, swaying perilous in the changing jumble like a little monkey dropped from a tree on to an elephant’s head, & positively clinging to some large ear. KM a cold day – the cuckoo singing and the sea like liquid metal. Everything feels detached, uprooted, flying through the hurtling air or about to fly. There’s almost a sense of having to dodge these unnatural rudderless birds . . . To use a homely image – imagine the world an immense drying ground with everything blown off the lines. . . It is very nervously exhausting. And the day spent itself. The idle hours blew on it & it shed itself like seed. She was the same through & through. You could go on cutting slice after slice & you knew you would never light upon a plum or a cherry or even a piece of peel. Our friends are only a more or less imperfect embodiment of our ideas. Feature Extraordinary: Shoes that have never squeaked before start up a squeaking. 1. KM is musing here on an image from The Golden Bowl, part 5: ‘One felt they were folded flowers, and their vague sweetness made the whole air their medium.’ 2. From The Golden Bowl, part 4, describing how the Princess is ‘perversely preferring’ to dissemble in public. 3. From The Golden Bowl, part 4.

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Later. Mrs Honey explains. She has been crying. Madame spoke to her ‘awful crool’ about a cracked tumbler. Lied. Bullied. And the poor old creature, who has had 15 rooms to do lately & three flights of stairs to scrub (age 68) ‘couldn’t help but cry’. . . I wish Madame would develop a tumour during the night, have it cut out tomorrow and be dead, buried and a’ before the Sunday dinner. She is exactly like a large cow in a black silk dress – and she will never never NEVER die. [Journal, 1954, p. 136]

‘If the fire turns bright, your māān is in a good temper.’ (Mrs. Honey.) [Notebook 12, qMS–1260]

Later. I went into John’s room just now to put a book there, and turned down the pink bed cover to see if he had enough blankets. As I did so I thought of John – as a boy of about 17. I had a sort of prophetic vision of doing just the same thing for my son. . . in years to come. The moment had no emotional value at all – especially as it was all drowned in the smell of roast mutting. There goes the gong: it sounds like a timid fire alarm. But I wait until the 1st course is done. I wait until the chimpanzees have lapped up their little pool before I start a nut-cracking wiv ’em. Later. The table was laid for two. I dined opposite a white serviette shaped like a hand with spread fingers. Now I have dressed & am waiting for the motor. I rubbed some Genêt Fleuri1 on my collar just now: I look different – as though I were meant to be played on & not just to lie in a corner with the bow in that slot opposite which fastens with two buttons. No. Now the bow is hanging from the peg – at least. Looe2 (To be read after IT has happened.) June. Paralysis as idea. A pleasant one. Spinal disease. A stroke. Failure of the Heart’s Action. Some ‘obscure’ Horror. Dead before Friday. A cripple – unable to speak. My face all deformed. But the top and bottom of this sanwick is a paralytic stroke – the important

1. A French perfume that KM was particularly fond of. 2. A small fishing town in Cornwall, where KM spent the months of May and June in 1918.

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middle – heart failure. Well I’ve cut it for myself and eaten it day after day – day after day. Its an endless loaf. And I’d like to put on quiet record that the physical pain is just not unbearable – only just not. At four 30 today it did conquer me & I began, like the Tchekov students, to ‘pace from corner to corner’,1 then up and down, up and down and the pain racked me like a curse and I could hardly breathe. Then I sat down again & tried to take it quietly. But although I’ve an armchair and a fire & little table all drawn up comfortable I feel too ill to write. I could dictate I think p’raps – but write, no. Trop Malade.2 I have been, in addition, waiting for Anne3 all this afternoon. I thought, even in this storm, she’d ‘blow over’. ‘Hillo!’ And about 100 Annes with quick deliberate steps have walked up this brick path but got no further. Plus that I have nothing to read. Hurray!!! One ‘salvation’ would I think be music. To have a cello again. That I must try . . . . . . June 20th the twentieth of June 1918 C’est de la misère.4 Non, pas ça exactement. II y a quelque chose – une profonde malaise me suive comme un ombre. Oh why write bad French. Why write at all. 11500 miles are so many – too many by 11449¾ for me.5 Now the day was divine – warm soft sunshine lay upon her arms & breast like velvet – tiny clouds, silver ones shone upon the dazzling blue. The garden trees were full of gold light, and a strange brightness came from the houses – from the open windows with their flaring[?] curtains & flower pots . . . the white steps & the narrow spiked railings. 1. Several Chekhov stories feature students pacing up and down their rooms. However, the story KM was thinking of here is possibly ‘Anyuta’, which features a medical student revising his anatomy lesson on the chest and the lungs. The story was included in Garnett’s 1916 collection, The Darling and Other Stories. 2. (Fr.) ‘too sick’. 3. Anne Estelle Rice (married to Raymond Drey in 1913). 4. (Fr.) ‘It’s misery. No, not exactly that. There’s something – a profound uneasiness follows me like a shadow.’ 5. The distance between England and New Zealand.

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Knock! Knock Whenever I have a conversation about Art which is more or less interesting I begin to wish to God I could destroy all that I have written & start again: it all seems like so many ‘false starts’. Musically speak[ing] it is not – has not been – in the middle of the note – you know what I mean? When, on a cold morning perhaps, you’ve been playing & it has sounded alright – until suddenly you realise you are warm – you have only just begun to play. Oh how badly this is expressed!. How confused and even ungrammatical. 4.45 Friday. Williams 15 Callon Street. On these summer evenings the sound of the steps along the street is quite different. They knock knock knock along but lightly and easily, as if they belonged to people who were walking home at their ease, after a procession or a picnic or a day at the sea. The sky is pale and clear: the silly piano is overcome and reels out waltzes – old waltzes, spinning, drunk with sentiment – gorged with memory. This is the hour when the poor underfed dog appears, at a run, nosing the dry gutter. He is so thin that his body is like a cage on four wooden pegs. His lean triangle of a head is down, his long straight tail is out, and up & down up and down he goes, silent and fearfully eager. The street watches him from its creeper covered balconies, from its open windows – but the fat lady on the ground floor who’s no better than she should be comes out, down the steps to the gate, with a bone. His tail as he waits for her to give it him bangs against the gate post like a broomhandle, and the street says she’s a fool to go feeding strange dogs. Now she’ll never be rid of him. (What I’d like to convey is that at this hour, with this half light and the pianos and the open empty sounding houses, he is the spirit of the street, running up & down, poor dog, when he ought to have been done away with years ago.) Fresh Tea. I ought to write something brief for the Nation1 today & earn a bit more money: a little lunch at the Club or something of that kind. It’s not difficult, in fact it is too easy for me because if I do err more on one side than t’other – I’m over fluent. 1. The Nation was a British weekly newspaper that focused mainly on political events and debates. It merged with the Athenaeum in 1921.

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This view from the window is simply superb – the pale sky & the half-bare trees. Its so beautiful it might be the country – russian country as I see it. No, Lawrence & Murry will never hit it off. They are both too proud & M. is too jealous. He is like a hawk over his possessions. I never connected until today sang froid with cold blood. This is a word which is one of New Zealands queer ’uns like calling the Savoy the Sävoy, or talking of the aeryeighted bread shops. (I am very greatly surprised that on the first day of the New Regime I.C.B.1 should be late.) rig-marole rag-a-muffin sang froid sang frêûd. 21.vi.18. What is the matter with today? It is thin, white, like lace curtains are white, full of ugly noises (e.g. people opening the drawers of a cheap chest and trying to shut them again.) All food seems stodgy and indigestible – no drink is hot enough. One looks hideous, hideous, in the glass – bald as an egg. One feels swollen, and all one’s clothes are tight. And everything is dusty, gritty – the cigarette ash crumbles and falls, the marigolds spill their petals over the dressing table. In a house nearby someone is trying to tune a cheap cheap piano. If I had a ‘home’ and could pull the curtains together, lock the door, burn something sweet, fast, walk round my own perfect room, soundlessly, watching the lights & the shadows, it would be tolerable, but living as I do in a public house – it’s très difficile. A few of its enormities: 1. I decided to faire les ongles de mes pieds avant mon petit dejeuner2 – and did not – from idleness. 2. The coffee was not hot, the bacon salt and the plate showed that it had been fried in a dirty pan. 3. I could not think of any small talk for Mrs Honey, who seemed silent & distrait – burning with a very feeble wick. 4. John’s letter telling of all his immense difficulties – all the impossible things he must do before he could start his holiday left me luke warm. It had somehow a flat taste – and I felt rather I’d read it curiously apart, not united. 5. A vague stomache in my bath. 6. Nothing to read & too rainy to go out. 1. Ida’s full name was Ida Constance Baker. 2. (Fr.) ‘to do my toe-nails before breakfast’.

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7. Anne came – & did not ring. I felt she had enough of our friendship for the present. . . 8. Very bad lunch. A small tough rissole which was no use to the functions & some rather watery gooseberries. I despise terribly english cooking. 9. Went for a walk & was caught in the wind & rain. Terribly cold and wretched. 10. The tea was not hot. I meant not to eat the bun but I ate it. Oversmoked. [Notebook 11, qMS–1258]

I think the only thing which is really ‘serious’ about me, really ‘bad’ really incurable, is my temper. 25th June [Notebook 12, qMS–1260]

July 5th. Today, this evening, after I have come home (for I must go out & buy some fruit) commence encore une vie nouvelle.1 Turn over & you’ll see how good I become – a different child. July 5th. I have read – given way to reading two books by Octave Mirbeau2 – and after them I see dreadfully and finally (1) that the French are a filthy people. (2) that their corruption is so puante3 – I’ll not go near em again. No, the english couldn’t stoop to this. They aren’t human; they are in the good old english parlance – monkeys. I must start writing again. They decide me. Something must be put up against this. Ach, Tchekov! Why are you dead! Why can’t I talk to you – in a big, darkish room – at late evening – where the light is green from the waving trees outside. I’d like to write a series of Heavens: that would be one.

1. (Fr.) ‘a new life begins again’. 2. Octave Mirbeau (1848–1917) was a French novelist, critic and journalist, whose lurid realism, radical and anarchist political commitments, and provocative lifestyle brought him to the public eye. His Journal d’une femme de chambre (translated in 1900 as A Chambermaid’s Diary) was one of his outspoken works that shocked public opinion. 3. (Fr.) ‘their corruption stinks’.

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I must not forget my timidity before closed doors. My debate as to whether I shall ring too loud or not laugh enough. . . . Its deep deep deep: in fact it is the ‘explanation’ of the failure of K.M. as a writer up to the present, and Oh! what a good anfang zu einem Geschichte!1 I pose myself yet once more, my Eternal Question: What is it that makes the moment of delivery so difficult for me? If I were to sit down – now – & just to write out, plain, some of the stories – all written, all ready in my mind twould take me days. There are so many of them. I sit & think them out & if I overcome my lassitude & do take pen they ought (they are so word perfect) to write themselves. But its the activity. I havent a place to write in or on, the chair isn’t comfortable – yet even as I complain this seems the place & this the chair. And don’t I want to write them? Lord! Lord! its my only desire – my one happy issue. And only yesterday I was thinking – even my present state of health is a great gain. It makes things so rich, so important, so longed for . . . changes ones focus. . . . When one is little and ill and far away in a remote bedroom all that happens beyond is marvellous. . . Alors, I am always in that remote bedroom. Is that why I seem to see, this time in London – nothing but what is marvellous – marvellous & incredibly beautiful? C’est très ennuyeux, maintenant, parce que je sais que cette femme arriverait chez moi et je ne2 Elle n’est pas arrivée! The ‘tide’ is full in the Redcliffe Road.3 One by one the doors have opened, have slammed shut. Now, in their blind way, the houses are fed. That poor little violin goes on, tearing up note after note – there is a strange dazzling white cloud over the houses and a pool of blue. All my virtues – all my rich nature – gone, she said – grown over, tangled, forgotten, deserted like a once upon a time garden. She smiled & pulled down her hat & pulled her coat together as though making ready to stumble out into it & be lost too. A dark place, said 1. (Ger.) Anfang einer Geschichte: ‘beginning for a story’. 2. (Fr.) ‘It’s very annoying now, because I know that woman will be coming to my house and I don’t. . . She hasn’t come!’ 3. In 1917, Murry had taken lodgings at 47 Redcliffe Road.

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she, wavering to her feet. And then she smiled again. Perhaps there is just left my – my –1 about myself. Evening Primrose . . . . She half shut her eyes, stooping forward, curiously as though the plant sprang up at her feet. I always did hate evening primroses. They sound such darlings, but when you see them they’re such weedy – shabby – flower on the grave without a gravestone sort of thing . . . I don’t mean anything symbolical by that, said she – God forbid! And was gone! The Redcliffe Road – Maisie – the student – other lodgers – she risks anything. The little leaf that blew in – her memory of the park & crocodile. Then there must be her cat called Millie. That quiet hook on dear girl – & the view[?] so great that she almost sobs. But nothing happens. Nay though my heart should break I would not bind you. Miss Ruddick2 who always plays with her music propped against the towel rail & whenever she pulls out her handkerchief out comes an end of resin gummed on a flannel, as well. The English Review The Continental Times Nation Hogarth Press3 [Notebook 11, qMS–1258]

July 14th 18.13.6 [Notebook 12, qMS–1260]

August 2nd 1918. Her heart had not spoken. . . When it does – too late – the pain of it. I ought to have felt like this – often often. . .

1. KM leaves a blank space for a single word in her notebook here. 2. Marion Ruddick was a school-friend from Wellington, whose family returned to Canada in 1900. KM records meeting her again in London in 1922, but here the name seems to be part of a fictional draft drawing on memories. 3. Leonard and Virginia Woolf had founded the Hogarth Press in 1917. KM’s ‘Prelude’ was one of their early publications.

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September 20th(?) My fits of temper are really terrifying. I had one this (Sunday) morning & tore a page up of the book I was reading – and absolutely lost my head. Very significant. When it was over J. came in and stared. What is the matter? What have you done? ‘Why?’ You look all dark. He drew back the curtains and called it an effect of light but when I came into my studio to dress I saw it was not that. I was a deep earthy colour, & was green with pinched eyes. Strangely enough these fits are Lawrence and Frieda over again. I am more like L. than anybody. We are unthinkably alike, in fact. It is a dark reluctant day. The fire makes a noise like a flag, & there is the familiar sound from below of someone filling buckets. I am very stiff, very unused to writing now and yet, as I sit here, its as though my dear one, my ONLY one came & sat down opposite me and gazed at me across the table. And I think suddenly of the verses which seemed so awfully good in my girlhood Others leave me – all things leave me You remain. L.M. in her turban with her one big eye & one little un – do I love her? Not really. And then, just now I mounted to J’s room, and opened the door. He was sitting at the table, working. All was in indescribable disorder & the air was thick with smoke. He held out his hand to me but it was not my place. Oh no – I came away. I came away back into my room – which really has for me a touch of fairy. Is there anything better than my room? Anything outside. The kitten says not, but then its such a hunting ground for the kitten. The sun throws the shape of the window on to the carpet, & in these four little square fields the silly flies wander, ever so spied upon by the little lion under the sommier frill1 . . . I don’t like Jack’s family. I could never bear to have them live with us – – We’ll come to blows about them one day. The young brother – so witty that J. choked over his tea, the father who found half a sovereign in his hip pocket, the mother – jam or marmalade2 and Aunt Doll. . . . Oh dear, oh dear – where are my people! With whom have I been happiest? With nobody in particular. It has all been mush of a mushness.3 1. (Fr.) ‘bed valance’. 2. KM’s underlining, emphasising the final syllable of the word, appears to be an imitation of slightly contrived pronunciation on the part of JMM’s mother. 3. KM deliberately changes the spelling here from ‘much of a muchness’.

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Later That kitten took sick, was taken away, lived two weeks in great torture, then for 2 days it lost the will to live & it became just a cotton reel of fur with two great tearful eyes ‘Why has this happened to me.’ So the vet. killed it. It had gastric trouble, acute constipation with a distended belly and canker in both ears. The two days before it went away it suffered here. I bought it a ball & it tried to play a little – but no, it couldn’t even wash itself. It came up to me, stood on its hind legs, opened its little jaws & tried to mew. No sound came; I never saw anything more pitiful. I hope this pen works. Yes, it does. The last day in September – immensely cold – a kind of solid cold outside the windows. My fire has played traitor nearly all day & I have been, in the good, old fashioned way, feeling my skin curl. Don’t read this. Do you hear that train whistle & now the leaves, the dry leaves & now the fire, fluttering & breaking? Why doesn’t she bring the lamps? So it is to be a baked meat pudding with a caper or twain and then the rusks cooked in milk with blackberry sauce. Talking of it made us quite friendly after the Fight of the Lamps. 21.x.1918. This is simply the most Divine Spot.1 So remote, so peaceful: full of colour, full of autumn, the sunset is real and the sound of somebody splitting small wood is real, too. If only one could live up here for really a long time and not have to see anybody. It might very well be France – it’s much more like France than it is like England. The place – remote – the dresses & scarves old. The year – fruitful: their talk and laughter gay. Cheery! And once again the door opened & she passed, as it were, into another world – the world of night – cold, timeless, inscrutable. Again she saw the beautiful fall of the steps, the dark garden ringed with glittering ivy – on the other side of the road the huge, bare willows – & above them the sky big & bright with stars. Again there came that silence that was a question – but this time she did not hesitate. She moved forward, very softly & gently, as though fearful of making a ripple in that boundless pool of quiet. She put her arm round her friend. 1. At this time, KM was back in England, living at 2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead, NW3, overlooking Hampstead Heath.

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The friend is astonished, murmurs it has been so nice. The other – Goodnight dear friend. A long tender embrace. Yes, that was it – of course that was what was wanting. __________________ Like a blow on the heart. I – I have come – for – She leaned against the door, quite faint. Yes? said she. This. Tightly, quickly he caught her up into his arms. 24.x.1918. Ida is going to town. I must take some of my dear money out of the Bank & give it her. I am in bed; I feel very sick. Queer altogether – decomposing a bit. Its a pale, silent day. I should like to be walking in a wood, far away. Health seems to me now more remote than anything – unattainable. Best to stay in bed & be horrid from there. This sky in waves of blue & cream and grey is like the sky overhanging a dead calm sea, when you hear someone rowing, from far away & then the voices from the boat & the rattle of a chain & the barking of the ship’s dog all sound loud. There is as usual a smell of onion & chop bones in the house. Perhaps L.M. is just frying something in the pan ‘for the sake of the nice savoury smell’ while she washes up – – – What do I want her to buy for me? When it really becomes an urgent matter I want nothing – waste of money – I feel [like] that Mdlle Seguin who wouldn’t hang the pictures in her new flat because Life is such a breath, little Dolly.1 25.x.1918. She has large appetites but they can be satisfied – except when we’ve really got her – herself somehow or other in the soup tureen. Then she could – oh! she would eat for ever, and Try this little bit Jones? Don’t you like it? What’s the matter with it? Hasn’t it got enough flavour –

1. Mlle Marie Séguin was an immensely popular teacher of French at Queen’s College from 1878 until 1911. She had grown up in Paris and delighted her pupils with stories of life during the insurrectional weeks of the Paris Commune (1871). She frequently called her students ‘Dolly’; the French expression ‘ma poupée’ was a genteel, conventionally affectionate way of addressing young girls.

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[MS–Papers–11326–010]

November 28th 1918. L. M. and I are really the bitterest enemies imaginable. I stand for all that she hates in Life and she for that I detest. When I leave her this time we must see each other no more.

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[Notebook 46, qMS–1262]

[1]

Criticism:1 Not good enough. Uneven, shallow, forced. Very thin, pocket muslin handkerchief vocabulary! K.M.2 [2] This is jerky & the second review is thoroughly bad. It never gets there! The C. & C. is smart somehow, ‘after the model’.3 April 18th 1919. [3] Too vague. Too much in the air. Un-telling. Rebecca West beat me to a frazzle on the same subject. She got in my school 98 marks.4 I got 44. 1. Each of the following entries gives KM’s succinct impression of reviews or journalistic pieces she is writing or of the work she is reviewing. 2. KM’s first reading notes for her review of three novels, ‘Three Women Novelists’ (see CW3, pp. 444–7). It covers Patience Worth’s Hope Trueblood, Mrs Victor Rickard’s The House of Courage and Dorothy Richardson’s The Tunnel. Patience Worth was allegedly a spirit from the seventeenth century, who dictated her novels, poems and proverbs to an American spiritualist author, Pearl Lenore Curran (1883–1937). Mrs Victor Rickard was the publishing name of Jessie Louisa Rickard (1876–1963), who became a prolific and popular Irish novelist in the 1920s and 1930s. The Tunnel is the fourth volume of Richardson’s innovatively modernist, feminist epic Pilgrimage, the final and thirteenth volume of which was published in 1938. Dorothy Richardson (1873–1957) was an English modernist writer, who spent most of her life in Bloomsbury. 3. Preparatory notes about KM’s review of Elizabeth von Arnim’s Christopher and Columbus and Rose Macaulay’s What Not (see CW3, pp. 447–50). Elizabeth von Arnim (née Beauchamp) (1866–1941) was a commercially successful and prolific novelist, whose works focus mostly on female protagonists and marriage plots. She was KM’s Australian-born cousin. 4. Notes on her review of H. M. Tomlinson’s Old Junk (see CW3, pp. 450–2). Henry Major Tomlinson (1873–1958) was a prolific British author, travelwriter and journalist, and a friend of JMM’s, working for H. W. Massingham’s Nation at this time. KM kept the letter he wrote thanking her for such a sensitive review. Rebecca West was the pseudonym of Cicely Isabel Fairfield (1892–1983), a respected and engaged British author, critic and intellectual figure. She contributed numerous reviews and articles to The Times, the Freewoman and Clarion, among others, in the 1910s.

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[4]

I did not say what I set out to say. It is not close knit enough. No, it won’t do.1 [5] Top verses far too facile. I like the lower ones.2 [6] You seem to have a mania for ‘such’ a detestable word & the weakest of links in a chain & ‘so’. You’d better stop playing that particular tune now, nous avons assez entendu sonner.3 [7] Nothing like good enough. Too big an avenue; practically no house at the end of it – at any rate no solid house & no firm hold. Very very bad.4 [8] Shows traces of hurry, & at the end, is pompous!5 [9] I think this is too short. It wants expanding & developing. Also the last sentence is inadmissable. It is not complete – not a whole specimen.6 [10] Not bad. Touch of my gran’pa in it.7 [11] Fish: The day had been endless without him – endless – endless.8

1. KM’s notes on her review of S. Macnaughtan’s My War Experiences in Two Continents ([1919] see CW3, pp. 452–5). Sarah Broom Macnaughtan (1864–1916) was a Scottish-born novelist and diarist, who kept detailed accounts of her volunteer work for the Red Cross during the Boer War and World War I. She died as a result of an infection contracted in Persia. 2. Referring to KM’s own poems published in the Athenaeum under the pseudonym Elizabeth Stanley (see CW3, pp. 125–33). 3. Notes on KM’s pastiche, ‘Perambulations’ (see CW3, pp. 413–15). (Fr.) ‘Nous avons assez entendu sonner’: ‘We’ve heard that note enough.’ 4. Notes on KM’s review of Sir Harry Johnston’s The Gay-Dombeys (see CW3, pp. 455–7). Henry Hamilton Johnston (1858–1927) was an explorer, botanist and colonial administrator, who wrote fiction and non-fiction based on his voyages, expeditions and colonial missions. The Gay-Dombeys was a sequel to Dickens’s Dombey and Son. 5. Notes for KM’s review of W. S. Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence (see CW3, pp. 457–60). William Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) was a highly popular British novelist and playwright. 6. Notes referring to KM’s review of Arnold Lunn’s Loose Ends (see CW3, pp. 460–2). Arnold Henry Moore Lunn (1888–1974) was a prolific Anglo-Indian writer and professional ski champion. 7. Notes referring to KM’s review of Gilbert Cannan’s Pink Roses (see CW3, pp. 464–6). Gilbert Cannan (1884–1955) was a critic, dramatist, novelist and translator, and a friend of KM and JMM’s. 8. Although included in the section of the notebook covering KM’s reviews, this entry does not appear to be linked to any ongoing work of hers.

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[MS–Papers–4006–7]

One was out of draughts. That is too true. The French and the Italians never appear to reckon on living indoors at all. One is either out, eating, or in bed. This may (if I may allow myself to be wicked) account for the proverbial laxity of French morals. Once indoors there is no place where one can conduct a comfortable conversation except in Lame Ducks:1 It is seldom that lame ducks are seen together. As a rule, so profoundly unaware do they appear to be of one anothers existence one is almost tempted to believe that a lame duck to a lame duck really is invisible. They may frequent the same cafes for years, attend the same studio parties, feed at the same restaurants, even sit with the same group round a table, but when the others get up to go one lame duck’s way is with these – to the right, and the other with those, to the left. [MS–Papers–4006–8]

May 19th 1919. 6 p.m. I wish I had some idea of how old this notebook is. The writing is very faint & far away. Now it is May 1919. Six o’clock. I am sitting in my room thinking of Mother. I want to cry. But my thoughts are beautiful & full of gaiety. I think of our house our garden us children – the lawn – the gate, & Mother coming in. Children! Children! I really only ask for time to write it all – time to write my books. Then I don’t mind dying. I live to write: the lovely world (God how lovely the external world is!) is there and I bathe in it and am refreshed. But I feel as though I had a DUTY, someone has set me a task which I am bound to finish. Let me finish it: let me finish it without hurrying, leaving all as fair as I can . . . My little mother, my star, my courage, my own – I seem to dwell in her now. We live in the same world. Not quite this world, not quite another. I do not care for ‘people’, and the idea of fame, of being a success – that’s nothing – less than nothing. I love my family, as few others, dearly, and I love, in the old – in the ancient way, through & through, my husband. But I want no one more. She is quite solitary. 1. According to Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (15th edition), the expression originated in the eighteenth century, and referred to ‘a stockjobber or dealer who will not, or cannot, pay his losses, so that he has to “waddle out the alley like a lame duck”. [. . .] In general, the expression can be used of any person or thing that is disabled or ineffectual.’

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Not a soul knows where she is. She goes slowly, thinking it all over, wondering how she can express it as she wants to – asking for time and for peace. [MS–Papers–4006–7]

It’s what you might call indoo weather, said the little man. Oh really – why that, said I, vague. He did not answer. The two polished knobs of his behind shone as he leaned over feeding the black seams of the boat with a brown twist. The day was dull, steaming. There was a blackness out at sea; the heavy waves came tolling. On the sea grasses the large bright dew fell not. The little man’s hammer went tap-tap. L.M. snorted, threw up her head, stamped her foot on the wet sand, scrambled to a boulder, tore at some sea poppies, dug them in her hat, held the hat away, looked, scornful, wrenched them out again. I looked and felt vague as a wing. ‘Spades & buckets is round the point with the lobster catch.’ The hammer tapped. He explained that all the lobsters would be sent away alive in sacks if they were not given a sharp stang with one of these. It was an ordinary grey & red garden trowel. L.M. went off to save their lives, but not joyfully. She walked heavy, her head down, beating the trowel against her side. We were alone. The watcher appeared. He stood always in profile, his felt hat turned up at the side, a patch on the eye nearest us. His curved pipe fell from his jaws. ‘Hi Missy,’ he shouted to me, ‘why don’t you give us a bit of a show out there.’ The little man remonstrated. The sea was like a mass of half-set jelly – on the horizon it seemed ages fell. Come on Missy, bawled the watcher. I took off my clothes, stepped to the edge & was drawn in. I tried to catch the stumps of an old wharf but slime filled my nails & I was sucked out. They watched. Suddenly there came, winnowing landward, an enormous skinny skeleton of a hindoo, standing upright. A tattered pink & white print coat flapped about his stiff outstretched arms; he had a cloth of the same with a fringe of spangles over his head. He stood upright because of the immense sweeping broom of wood growing waist high. Help Help! I called. The noise of the hammer came & I felt the watcher’s patched profile. A huge unbreakable wave lifted him, tipped him near. His shadow lay even on the surface of the dusty water – a squat head and two giant arms. It broadened into a smile. | It’s what you might call, said the little old man, indoo weather. Oh, really, why that, I asked.

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The day was dull but steaming. There was a blackness out at sea – like fog, like smoke. In the silence you could hear the dew splash from the sea poppy flower onto the sea poppy leaf. [NLC, Unbound papers]

(Rough Sketch only) Charing X1 Travelling 1st with 2nd class ticket. Pay 3d. Buy bun with nail in it. Miss a turn. Lose your hat out of window. Back to Charing X. Folkstone. Rough sea. Stay 1 turn at Marine Hotel. Seasick. Stay at Y.W.C.A. one turn. Hit sailor with your umbrella. Pay 1d. Boulogne. Lost ticket. Miss a turn. Passport out of order. Back to Charing X. No sleeper. Miss a turn. Paris. Threw bottle out of window. Pay 1d. Miss a turn. Dijon – Loop line to Lyon-Geneva. Frasne: Kissed in tunnel. Miss 2 turns. Vallorbe: Carrying gold out of France. Pay 3d. Lost keys. Lose two turns. Lausanne Loop line to Geneva. Miss connection. Lose a turn. Swallow marble in lemonade bottle. Back to Lausanne. Wearing False Nose. Back to Vallorbe. Sion. Lose your galoshes. Miss a turn. Sierre. Asleep. Miss 2 turns. Give Cigarette Picture for Ticket. Back to Sion. Chateau Belle Vue Read and give to Brett Sion to Sierre Step on Passenger’s dog. Hornet Flys into Carriage. Cow puts its head in Window = go on to Sierre Buy puppy [in another hand] Madman enters carriage.

1. Charing Cross. The following plan for a sketch or pastiche is structured like a game of snakes and ladders, with forfeits on certain squares. The towns are train stations on a journey from London to Montana-sur-Sierre and the Château Belle Vue.

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[Notebook 42, qMS–1261]

Saturday. Peaceful and gay. The whole house takes the air. Athenaeum1 is asleep & then awake on the studio sofa. He has a silver spoonful of my cream at lunch time, then hides under the sofa frill & plays the Game of the Darting Paw. I gather the dried leaves from the plant in the big white bowl; they are powdered with silver. There is nobody in the house and yet whose is this faint whispering? On the stairs there are tiny spots of gold – tiny footprints . . . . The red geraniums have bought the garden over my head and taken possession. They are ‘settled in’, every leaf & flower unpacked & in its place & never do they mean to move again! Well – that I could bear. But why because I’ve let them in should they turn me out? They won’t even let me lie in the grass without their shouting: ‘Impudence.’ J. digs the garden as though he were exhuming a hated body or making a hole for a loved one. The ardent creature spent more than half her time in church praying to be delivered from temptation. But God grew impatient at last & caused the door to be shut against her. ‘For Heaven’s sake,’ said he ‘give the temptation a chance!’ Cook to see me.2 As I opened the door I saw her sitting in the middle of the room, hunched, still. . . She got up, obedient, like a prisoner when you enter a cell. And her eyes said, like a prisoner’s eyes say: ‘Knowing the life I’ve had I’m the last to be surprised at finding myself here.’ It’s raining but the air is soft, smoky, warm. Big drops patter on the languid leaves, the tobacco flowers lean over. Now there is a rustle in the ivy. Wingley has appeared from the garden next door; he bounds from the wall. And delicately, lifting his paws, pointing his ears, very afraid that a big wave will overtake him, he wades over the lake of green grass.

1. Athenaeum was the kitten that KM and JMM adopted in 1919. His brother was the better-known Wingley. 2. The cook at 2 Portland Villas, Hampstead Heath, London.

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B.1 loves the louse for its own sake. He has pedigree lice & keeps them in tiny boxes. They feed from his arm. And he spends his life dissecting them & finding their glands and so on. As he stood at the door he said, quietly: ‘Nothing is incurable. It is all a question of time. What seems so useless today may just be that fink which will make all plain tomorrow.’ We had been discussing hydatids, the egyptian parasite that begins its new cycle of being in a water snail & the effects of hydrophobia. He smiled gently. There was nothing to be alarmed or shocked or surprised at. It was all a question of knowing these things as they should be known and not otherwise. But he said none of this & went off to his next case. At breakfast time a mosquito and a wasp came to the edge of the honey dish to drink. The mosquito was a lovely little high stepping gazelle, but the wasp was a fierce roaring tiger. Drink, my darlings. When the coffee is cold L.M. says: These things have to happen sometimes. And she looks mysterious & important, as if as a matter of fact she had known all along that this was a cold coffee day. What I felt was, he said that I wasn’t in the whole of myself at all. I’d got locked in, somehow, in some little . . . top room in my mind, and strangers had got in – people I’d never seen before were making free of the rest of it. There was a dreadful feeling of confusion, chiefly that, and . . . vague noises – like things being moved, changed about, in my head. I lit a candle & sat up & in the mirror I saw a dark, brooding, strangely lengthened face. ‘The feeling roused by the cause is more important than the cause itself.’ That is the kind of thing I like to say to myself as I get into the train. And then, as one settles into the corner ‘For example’ or ‘Take, for instance. . .’ It’s a good game for one. She fastens on a white veil and hardly knows herself. Is it becoming or is it not becoming? Ah, who is there to say. There is a lace butterfly on her left cheek and a spray of flowers on her right. Two dark bold eyes stare through the mesh – surely not hers. Her lips tremble; faint, she sinks on her bed. And now she doesn’t want to go. Must she? She

1. Bateson. Probably a reference to William Bateson (1861–1926), a biologist and dedicated evolutionist, whose work on genetics and heredity in plants and animals was being discussed in the press at the time.

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is being driven out of the flat by those bold eyes. Out you go. Ah, how cruel! (Second Violin)1 But her hand is large & cold with big knuckles and short square nails. It is not a little velvet hand that sighs, that yields – faints dead away and has to be revived again only to faint once more. (S.V.)2 What do I want? she thought. What do I really want more than anything in the world? If I had a wishing ring or Ali Baba’s lamp – no, it wasn’t Ali Baba, it was – oh, what did it matter! Just supposing someone came . . . ‘I am here to grant your dearest wish.’ And she saw, vaguely, a fluffy little creature with a silver paper star on a wand – a school fairy . . . What should I say? It was cold in the kitchen, cold & dim. The tap dripped slowly, as tho’ the water were half frozen . . . Miss Todd and Miss Hopper were second violins. Miss Bray was a viola. Midday strikes on various bells – some velvety soft, some languid, some regretful, and one impatient – a youthful bell ringing high and quick above the rest. He thought joyfully: ‘That’s the bell for me!’ . . . Cinderella: Oh, my sisters – my beautiful Peacock-proud sisters – have pity on me as I sit with my little broom beside the cold ashes while you dance at the Prince’s party. But why – is the Fairy Godmother, the coach, the plumes and glass slipper just – faery – and all the rest of the story deeply, deeply true? Fate I suppose – Fate. It had to be. These things happen so. La reponse: Poor old girl – of course one is awfully sorry for her, but she does become a bore, doesn’t she. There’s no getting away from it. When they got into bed together her feet rushed to greet his like little puppies that had been separated all day from their brothers. And first they chased one another and played and nudged gendy. But then they settled down, curled up, twined together under the edredon3 (like puppies on a warm hearth rug) and went to sleep. 1. There is an unfinished story, ‘Second Violin’ (CW2, pp. 391–4), which does not contain this fragment. The central character, Miss Bray, is the second violinist in a small string ensemble. 2. ‘Second Violin’. 3. (Fr.) ‘eiderdown’.

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Dark Bogey is a little inclined to jump into the milk jug to rescue the fly. Fairy like the fire rose in two branched flames like the golden antlers of some enchanted stag. [Journal, 1954, pp. 171–4]

The Letters of Anton Tchehov.1 ‘Here, as usual, he met with severe weather’. ‘Purely external causes are sufficient to make one unjust to oneself, suspicious and morbidly sensitive’. ‘Better say to man “My angel” than hurl “Fool” at his head – though men are more like fools than they are like angels’. ‘I have always felt strange when people whose death was at hand talked, smiled, or wept in my presence; but here, when I see on the verandah this blind woman who laughs, jokes, or hears my stories read to her, what begins to seem strange to me is not that she is dying, but that we do not feel our own death, and write stories as though we were never going to die’. ‘My business is merely to be talented – i.e. to know how to distinguish important statements on the characters, and to speak their language’. ‘It is better to put your colour on too faint than too strong’. ‘An incomprehensible impulse of defiance mastered me – that impulse which made me bathe from the yacht in the middle of the Black Sea and has impelled me to not a few acts of folly’. ‘There is no greater enjoyment in life than sleep when one is sleepy’. ‘When one is travelling one absolutely must be alone. To sit in a chaise or in a room alone with one’s thoughts is much more interesting than being with people’ ‘So you like my story? Well, thank God! of late I have become devilishly suspicious and uneasy. I am constantly fancying that my trousers 1. With the exception of the second quotation here, to be found in the letters of Chekhov co-translated by KM and Koteliansky and published in the Athenaeum in 1919 (see CW3, pp. 201–42), these extracts from Chekhov’s letters were not published until Garnett’s Letters of Anton Tchehov appeared in 1920, and Koteliansky and Tomlinson’s Life and Letters of Anton Tchekhov appeared in 1925. In both cases, the translations are noticeably different, while certain excerpts here figure in neither published volume. There are therefore good grounds for supposing that these quotations come from the drafts of letters Koteliansky sent Mansfield, and which she mislaid, causing tension, resentment and a rift between the two friends.

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are horrid, and that I am writing not as I want to, and that I am giving my patients the wrong powders. It must be a special neurosis’. ‘Tolstoy denies mankind immortality, but my God! how much that is personal there is in it! The day before yesterday I read his “Afterword”. Strike me dead! but it is stupider and stuffier than “Letters to a Governor’s Wife”, which I despise’. ‘Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japhet. Ham only noticed that his father was a drunkard, and completely lost sight of the fact that he was a genius, that he had built an ark and saved the world. Writers must not imitate Ham, bear that in mind’. ‘A public confession “I am a sinner, a sinner, a sinner” is such pride that it made me feel uncomfortable’. ‘Tolstoy! In these days he is not a man but a super-man, a Jupiter’. ‘From here, far away, people seem very good, and that is natural, for in going away into the country we are not hiding from people but from our vanity, which in town among people is unjust and active beyond measure. Looking at the spring, I have a dreadful longing that there should be paradise in the other world. In fact, at moments I am so happy that I superstitiously pull myself up and remind myself of my creditors, who will one day drive me out of the Australia I have so happily won’. ‘When you depict sad or unlucky people, and want to touch people’s hearts, try to be colder – it gives their grief, as it were, a background, against which it stands out in sharper relief’. ‘I haven’t a halfpenny, but the way I look at it is this: the rich man is not he who has plenty of money, but he who has the means to live now in the luxurious surroundings given us by early spring’. ‘You may weep and moan over your stories, you may suffer together with your heroes, but I consider one must do this so that the reader does not notice it. The more objective, the stronger will be the effect’. ‘When one thinks of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina all these young ladies of Turgenev’s, with their seductive shoulders, fade away into nothing’. ‘The descriptions of nature are fine, but I feel that we have already got out of the way of such descriptions and that we need something different’. ‘Something in me protests: reason and justice tell me that in the electricity and heat of love for man there is something greater than chastity and abstinence from meat’. ‘I, too, want “something sour”, and that’s not a mere chance feeling, for I notice the same mood in others round me. It is just as if they had all been in love, had fallen out of love, and now were looking for some new distraction’. ‘The thought that I must, that I ought to, write never leaves me for an instant’.

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‘I think that nearness to Nature and idleness are essential elements of happiness; without them it is impossible’ . . . ‘I should like to meet a philosopher like Nietzsche somewhere in a train or steamer, and to spend the whole night talking to him’. So should I, old boy! ‘The object of the novel [one of Sinkiewicz’s] is to lull the bourgeoisie to sleep in its golden dreams. Be faithful to your wife, pray with her over the prayer-book, save money, love sport, and all is well with you in this world and the next. The bourgeoisie is very fond of so-called practical types and novels with happy endings, since they soothe it with the idea that one can both create capital and preserve innocence, be a beast and at the same time be happy’. ‘A man can deceive his fiancée or his mistress as much as he likes, and, in the eyes of a woman he loves, an ass may pass for a philosopher; but a daughter is a different matter’. ‘They tell me to eat six times and are indignant with me for eating, as they think, very little’. ‘You complain that my heroes are gloomy – alas! that’s not my fault. This happens apart from my will, and when I write it does not seem to me that I am writing gloomily’. ‘I am going to build so as to have a place in which to spend the winters. The prospect of continual wandering with hotel rooms, hotel porters, chance cooking, and so on, alarms my imagination’. ‘The most important screw in family life is love, sexual attraction, one flesh; all the rest is dreary and cannot be reckoned upon, however cleverly we make our calculations. To marry is interesting only for love; to marry a girl simply because she is nice is like buying something one does not want at a bazaar solely because it is of good quality’. Compare: ‘I made some cheap purchases: if anything not wanted can be cheap’. (Crabb Robinson: June 26,1820.)1 ‘You must once and for all give up being worried about successes and failures. Don’t let that concern you. It’s your duty to go on working steadily day by day, quite quietly, to be prepared for mistakes, which are inevitable, for failures – and let other people count the calls before the curtain’. ‘The immense majority of people are nervous: the greater number suffer, and a small proportion feel acute pain; but where – in streets 1. Best known as a diarist, Henry Crabb Robinson (1775–1867) worked as a journalist, notably as a foreign correspondent, before training as a lawyer and becoming one of the founders of London University. His Diaries, Reminiscences and Correspondence (1869) contains memorable portraits of key political, social and literary figures of his day.

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and in houses – do you see people tearing about, leaping up, and clutching at their heads? Suffering ought to be expressed as it is expressed in life – that is, not by the arms and legs, but by the tone and expression; not by gesticulation, but by grace’. [Notebook 42, qMS–1261]

So he sat there, burning the letters & each time he cast a fresh packet in the flame his shadow, immense, huge, leapt out of the wall opposite him. It looked, sitting so stiff and straight, like some horrible old god toasting his knees at the flames of the sacrifice. Two Climates. I’d always rather be in a place that is too hot rather than one that’s too cold. But I’d always rather be with people who loved me too little rather than with people who loved me too much. ‘She has made her bed’ said Belle. ‘She must lie on it.’ I reflected thankfully that in this case that would be no hardship. On the contrary indeed, I hoped it was what they were both longing to do . . . North Africa. The whole valley is smothered in little white lilies. You never saw such a sight! They make me feel so wretchedly homesick. They smell just like dear old Selfridges.1 I saw S2 as a little fair man with a walrus moustache, a bowler much too small for him and an ancient frock coat that he keeps buttoning & unbuttoning. D.B.3 saw him as a grave gentleman with long black whiskers. Anyhow, there he was, at the end of a dark tunnel, either coming towards us or walking away . . . That started us on a fascinating subject. There are the people in D.B.’s life I’ve never seen (very few) and the immense number in mine that he has only heard of. What did they look like to us? And then, before we meet anyone, while they are still far too far off to be seen we begin to build an image . . . how true is it? It’s queer how well one gets to know this stranger; how often you’ve watched him before the other comes to 1. Selfridges is the fashionable department store on Oxford Street, London, which opened in 1909. KM sometimes used the reading room there to write her letters. 2. Possibly KM is referring here to Victor Sorapure, her Hampstead doctor, whom she had come to trust implicitly in medical matters. She had first consulted him in September 1918 (see below, p. 284). 3. ‘Dark Bogey’ – another of KM’s nicknames for JMM.

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take his place . . . I can even imagine someone keeping their ‘first impression’ in spite of the other. For a long time she said she did not want to change anything in him, and she meant it. Yet she hated things in him & wished they were otherwise. Then she said she did not want to change anything in him and she meant it. And the dark things that she had hated she now regarded with indifference. Then she said she had not wanted to change anything in him. But now she loved him so that even the dark things she loved, too. She wished them there; she was not indifferent. Still they were dark and strange but she loved them. And it was for this they had been waiting. They changed. They shed their darkness – the curse was lifted and they shone forth as Royal Princes once more, as creatures of light. She sat on the end of the box ottoman buttoning her boots. Her short fine springy hair stood out round her head. She wore a little linen camisole and a pair of short frilled knickers. ‘Curse these buttons’ she said, tugging at them. And then suddenly she sat up & dug the handle of the button hook into the box ottoman. ‘Oh dear’ she said. ‘I do wish I hadn’t married. I wish I’d been an explorer.’ And then she said dreamily ‘The Rivers of China, for instance.’ ‘But what do you know about the rivers of china, darling’ I said. For Mother knew no geography whatever; she knew less than a child of ten. ‘Nothing’ she agreed. ‘But I can feel the kind of hat I should wear.’ She was silent a moment. Then she said ‘If Father hadn’t died I should have travelled and then ten to one I shouldn’t have married.’ And she looked at me dreamily – looked through me, rather. Souvent j’ai dit à mon mari: ‘Nous en prenons un?’ Et il me dit Ah, non, non, ma pauvre femme. Notre petit moment pour jouer est passé. Je ne peux rien faire que rester dans ma chaise en faisant les grimaces, et ça fait trembler plus que ça fait rire un petit enfant.1 At The Bay.2 At last the milk white harbour catches the glitter and the gulls floating on the trembling water gleam like the shadows within a pearl. 1. (Fr.) ‘I often said to my husband, “Shall we take one?” And he replied, “Oh no, my poor wife. Our little moment of playfulness has passed. I can do nothing but sit in my chair pulling faces, and it makes a young child tremble with fear rather than laugh.”’ 2. An early draft, presumably for the opening section of ‘At the Bay’ (see CW2, pp. 342–72).

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The house dog comes out of his kennel dragging the heavy chain and kalop kalops at the water standing cold in the iron pan. The house cat emerges from nowhere & bounds on to the kitchen window sill waiting for her spill of warm morning milk. Children children! Oh no. Not yet. Oh, it can’t be time. Go away. I won’t. Oh, why must I. Children! children! They are being called by the cold servant girls. But they simply can’t get up. They simply must have one more little sleep – the best sleep of all – the warm, soft, darling little rabbit of a sleep . . . Just let me hug it one minute more before it bounds away. Soft little girls rolled up in rounds, just their bunch of curls showing over the sheet top; little long pale boys stretching out their slender feet; other little boys lying on their bellies pressing their heads into the pillow; tiny little fellows with fresh cut hair sprouting from a tuft, little girls on their backs, their fists clenched, the bedclothes anyhow, one foot dangling; girls with pigtails or rings of white paper snails instead of hair . . . And now there is the sound of plunging water, & all those youthful, warm bodies, the tender exposed boy children, and the firm compact little girls. He down in the bath tubs and ruffle their shoulders scattering the bright drops as birds love to do with their wings . . . Squeech! Squeech! Tehee. Quee! Little boys with plastered hair, clean collars & brand new boots squeak from the nursery to the lobby to the cupboard under the stairs where the school kits are hung. Furious young voices cry: ‘Who’s stolen my ink eraser that was in the well of my pencil box.’ They hiss through their teeth at the stolid servant girls carrying the porridge pots: ‘You’ve been at this! Thief! Spy!!’ Have you noticed how very smug those mountains look that are covered with snow all the year round. They seem to expect one to be so full of admiring awe. It never seems to enter their silly tops to wonder whether it isn’t rather dull to be so for ever & ever above suspicion. Such a cultivated mind doesn’t really attract me. I admire it. I appreciate all ‘les soins et les peines’1 that have gone to produce it, but it leaves me cold. After all, the adventure is over. There is now nothing 1. (Fr.) ‘care and efforts’.

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to do but to trim & to lop and to keep back – all faintly depressing labours. No, no the mind I love must still have wild places – a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two (real snakes), a pool that nobody’s fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with those little flowers planted by the wind. It must also have real hiding places, not artificial ones – not gazebos and mazes. And I have never yet met the cultivated mind that has not had its shrubbery. I loathe & detest shrubberies. When I read Doctor Johnson I feel like a little girl sitting at the same table. My eyes grow round. I don’t only listen; I take him in immensely. Let me remember when I write about that fiddle how it runs up lightly and swings down sorrowful; how it searches. ‘You merely find yourself in the old position of trying to change me. And I refuse to change. I won’t change. If I don’t feel these things I don’t feel them and there’s an end of it.’ For a moment he stood there, cold, frigid, grasping the doorhandle, staring not at her but over her head. He looked like a stranger who had opened her door by accident, and felt it necessary, for some reason or other to explain the accident before he closed it again and went out of her life for ever. I have just partaken of that saddest of things – a cup of weak tea. Oh, why must it be weak! How more than pathetic it is to hear someone say as she puts it down before you: ‘I am afraid it is rather weak.’ One feels such a brute to take advantage of it until it is a little stronger. I grasp the cup; it seems to quiver, to breathe – ‘Coward!’ I confess, I can never hear a person at a tea party say (in that timid whisper, you know, as though they were shamefully conscious) ‘Very weak for me, please’ without wanting to burst into tears. Not that I like desperately strong tea. No, let it be of a moderate strength – tea that rings the bell. Very strong tea does seem to give you your penny back – in the teapot from the taste of it. Now and again Fred talked in his sleep. But even then you could say he was quiet. . . She would wake up and hear him say suddenly: ‘it wants a couple of screws’ or ‘try the other blade’, but never more than that. In the white lace, the spreading veil and the pearls she looked like a gull. But a quick hungry gull with an absolutely insatiable appetite

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for bread. ‘Come feed me! Feed me!’ said that quick glare. It was as though all her vitality, her cries, her movements, her wheelings depended upon the person on the bridge who carried the loaf. But the champagne was no good at all. She turned the glass in her fingers. But there was something positively malicious in the way the little bubbles hurled themselves to the rim, danced, broke . . . They seemed to be jeering at her. No, no, said Miss P. That really isn’t fair. I love serious books. Why I don’t know when I’ve enjoyed a book as much as – as – dear me! How silly! It’s on the tip of my tongue. Darwin’s – one moment – its coming – Darwin’s Decline & Fall. No, no. That wasn’t the one. That’s not right now. Tchuh! Tchuh! You know how it is. I can see it quite plainly and yet . . . I’ve got it! Darwin’s Descent of Man! . . Was that the one, though? Do you know now I’m not certain? I feel it was and yet somehow its unfamiliar. This is most extraordinary. And yet I enjoyed it so much. There was a ship. Ah! That’s brought it back. Of course. Of course! That was the one. Darwin’s Voyage of the Bugle!1 ‘La mère de Lao-Tse a conçu son fils rien qu’en regardant filer une étoile’.2 [Notebook 16, qMS–1263]

May 21st 1919 She was sure I would be cold & as usual tried to make of my departure une petite affaire serieuse:3 I always try to thieve out, steal out. I should like to let myself down from a window, or just withdraw like a ray of light. ‘Are you sure you won’t have your cape . . . etc etc etc?’ 1. A superb example of KM’s comic verve and satire, aimed here at the literary pretensions of a young lady visibly trying to impress, but muddling her titles and citing works more likely to offend conventional society than impress. Edward Gibbon’s six-volume History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88) was considered essential to any gentleman’s education, but shocked readers when it was first published. Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) was the more controversial extension of his On the Origin of Species, which included his theories on racial difference and women’s inferiority. The Voyage of the Beagle (1839) was his account of his travels as a naturalist to South America, New Zealand and Australia. 2. (Fr.) ‘Lao Tse’s mother conceived her son just by watching a shooting star.’ This is a Taoist legend. 3. (Fr.) ‘a little bit of serious business’.

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Her attitude made me quite sure. I went out. At the corner the flying, gay, eager wind ran at me. It was too much to bear. I went on for a yard or two, shivering – then I came home. I slipped the yale key into the lock, like a thief, shut the door dead quiet. Up came old L.M., up the stairs. ‘So it was too cold after all!’ I couldn’t answer or even look at her. I had to turn my back & pull off my gloves. Said she: ‘I have a blouse pattern here I want to show you’. At that I crept upstairs, came into my room & shut the door. It was a miracle she did not follow . . . What is there in all this to make me HATE her so? What do you see? She has known me try & get in and out without anyone knowing it dozens of times – that is true. I have even torn my heart out & told her how it hurts my last little defences to be questioned – how it makes me feel just for the moment an independent being to be allowed to go & come unquestioned. But that is just Katie’s ‘funniness’. She doesn’t mean it, of course . . . We hardly spoke at lunch. When it was over she asked again if she might show me the pattern. I felt so ill, it seemed to me that even a hen could see at a side glance of its little leaded eye how ill I felt. I don’t remember what I said. But in she came & put before me – something. Really I hardly know what it was. ‘Let the little dressmaker help you . . .’ I read. But there was nothing to say. She murmured ‘purple chiffon front neck sleeves’ I don’t know. Finally I asked her to take it away. ‘What is it, Katie? Am I interrupting your work?’ ‘Yes, we’ll call it that’. He is so inclined to cast himself into the milk jug after the fly. Saturday: This joy of being alone. What is it? I feel so gay and at peace – the whole house takes the air. Lunch is ready. I have a baked egg, apricots & cream, cheese straws & black coffee. How delicious! A baby meal. Mother shares it with me. Athenaeum is asleep & then awake on the studio sofa. He has a silver spoon of cream – then hides under the sofa frill & puts out a paw for my finger. I gather the dried leaves from the plant in the big white bowl & because I must play with something I take an orange up to my room & throw it & catch it as I walk up & down . . . The red geraniums have bought the garden over my head. They are there, established, back in the old home, every leaf and flower unpacked and in its place – and quite determined that no power on earth will ever move them again. Well, that I don’t mind. But why should they make me feel a stranger? Why should they ask me every time I go near: ‘And what are you doing in a London garden?’ They burn with arrogance & pride. And I am the little colonial walking

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in the London garden patch – allowed to look, perhaps, but not to linger. If I lie on the grass they positively shout at me. Look at her lying on our grass, pretending she lives here, pretending this is her garden & that tall back of the house with the windows open & the coloured curtains lifting is her house. She is a stranger – an alien. She is nothing but a little girl sitting on the Tinakori hills & dreaming: I went to London and married an englishman & we lived in a tall grave house with red geraniums & white daisies in the garden at the back. Im–pudence! **** Sometimes I glance up at the clock. Then I know I am expecting Chummie. The bell peals. I run out on to the landing. I hear his hat & stick thrown on to the hall table. He runs up the stairs, three at a time. ‘Hullo darling!’ But I can’t move, I can’t move. He puts his arm round me, holding me tightly & we kiss – a long, firm family kiss. And the kiss means: We are of the same blood; we have absolute confidence in each other; we are proud of each other; we love; all is well; nothing can ever come between us. We come into my room. He goes over to the glass. ‘By Jove, I am hot.’ Yes, he is very hot. A deep childish colour shows in his cheeks, his eyes are brilliant, his lips burn, he strokes the hair back from his forehead with the palm of his hand. I pull the curtains together & the room is shadowy. He flings himself down on the sommier1 & lights a cigarette, and watches the smoke rising so slowly. ‘Is that better?’ I ask. ‘Perfect, darling – simply perfect. The light reminds me of – – –’ And then the dream is over & I begin working again. **** The two brothers were on one side of the room – I on the other. Arthur sat on the floor inclined towards Jack.2 Jack lay on the stickleback, very idly. ‘If you could have your wish where would you be?’ First he thought a café in some foreign town – in Spain – Grenoble perhaps, sitting listening to music & watching the people. We are just passing through . . . There is a lake or a river near . . . But then NO. A Farmhouse in Sussex, some good old furniture, knocking about 1. (Fr.) ‘bed base’. 2. Arthur was the first name of JMM’s younger brother, better known as Richard Murry (1902–84). He was an artist and KM grew to be very fond of him.

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in my garden, rolling the lawn perhaps – yes, rolling the lawn. An infant, two good servants. And then when it grew dark – to go in, have some milk, then I to go to my study & you to yours – work for about an hour & a half & then trundle off to bed. I would like to earn my living but not by writing. I feel that my talent as a writer isn’t a great one – I’ll have to be careful of it. Yes, that’s what I’d like – no new places, no new things – I don’t want them. Would you like that? I felt his brother was with him. The brother inclined towards him, understanding & sharing that life – the homestead on the Downs, the English country, the sober quiet. ‘Would you like that?’ No, I don’t want that. No, I don’t want England. England is of no use to me. What do I mean by that? I mean there never has been, there never will be any rapprochement between us – never. There is the inexplicable fact that I love my typical English husband for all the strangeness between us. I do lament that he is not warm, ardent, eager, full of quick response, careless, spendthrift of himself, vividly alive, high spirited. But it makes no difference to my love. But the lack of these qualities in his country I HATE – these & others – the lack of its appeal – that is what I chiefly hate. I would not care if I never saw the English country again. Even in its flowering I feel deeply antagonistic to it, & I will never change. Arthur, I believe, through his sensitive love for Jack, felt this. They were of one nation, I of another, as we sat talking – I felt Arthur offered himself to his brother – in my stead. [Journal, 1954, p. 159]

‘Tom was literally rolling in wealth. He had, besides the things I have mentioned, twelve marbles, part of a jew’s harp, a piece of blue bottle-glass to look through, a spool-cannon, a key that wouldn’t unlock anything, a fragment of chalk, a glass stopper of a decanter, a tin soldier, a couple of tadpoles, a kitten with only one eye . . .’ (Mark Twain: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.) Not true!1 [Notebook 16, qMS–1263]

**** 1. Added by JMM in Journal, 1954, p. 159. A truncated quotation from Mark Twain’s classic novel (1876), taken from the end of Chapter Two, listing the treasures Tom accumulates by allowing his friends to take his place painting the fence. Given JMM’s italicising, KM would appear to be objecting to the one-eyed kitten being included in this list of bartered objects.

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Jack digs the garden as though he were exhuming a hated body or making a hole for a loved one. 30th First comes Ida. I give her orders. Ask her to supervise the maid until Monday. Be gentle with her, help her to make the bed & just tell her how everything must be. Then in detail I sketch out the maid’s programme. ‘Send Ralph, please’. Ralph arrives. I arrange the food. Then settle all that must be done – coercing Ralph, putting her mind in order if I can, making her see the bright side of things, sending her away (I hope) feeling important & happy. I go upstairs to see Maud – to say ‘good morning’, to hope ‘she will be happy’. ‘Just take things gently; I’ll quite understand you can’t get into our ways at once. Ask Miss Baker and the cook for what you want. But if you wish to see me don’t hesitate to come in. I was so glad you were early’. She was very reassured. Her eyes shone (she’s only a little girl), she said it was like the country. As she walked up from the tram the birds sang ‘something beautiful’. This instead of the long drag up the hill was very cheering. I left her happy. I know I did. Downstairs just to say good day to Mrs Moody & to say there were some flowers for her to take home. The good creature was on her knees polishing & saying it was such a fine day. Bless her 60 years. We had a little joke or two & I came away. Ida again – just for a moment to say: As you have a machine don’t hem dusters by hand as I see you are doing. Keep your energies for something important. Then I sit down to work & there comes a steady, pleasant vibration from the ship. All goes well for the moment. If only I could always control these four women like this. I must learn to. Work. Shall I be able to express, one day, my love of work – my desire to be a better writer, my longing to take greater pains. And the passion I feel. It takes the place of religion – it is my religion – of people – I create my people – of ‘life’ – it is Life. The temptation is to kneel before it, to adore, to prostrate myself, to stay too long in a state of ecstasy before the idea of it. I must be more busy about my master’s business. Oh God – the sky is filled with the sun, and the sun is like music – the sky is full of music. Music comes streaming down these great beams. The wind touches the harp-like trees, shakes little jets of music – little shakes, little trills from the flowers. The shape of every flower is like a sound. My hands open like five petals. Praise him! Praise him! No, I am overcome; I am dazed; it is too much to bear. A little fly has dropped by mistake into the huge sweet strong cup of a magnolia. Isaiah (or was it Elisha) was caught up into Heaven in

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a chariot of fire once.1 But when the weather is divine & I am free to work such a journey is positively nothing. The cook is evil. After lunch I trembled so that I had to lie down on the sommier, thinking about her. I meant, when she came up to see me, to say so much that she’d have to go. I waited, playing with the wild kitten. When she came I said it all and more & she said how sorry she was & agreed & apologised and quite understood. She stayed at the door, plucking at a d’oyley. ‘Well I’ll see it doesn’t happen in future. I quite see what you mean.’ So the serpent still slept between us. Oh! why won’t she turn & speak her mind. This pretence of being fond of me! I believe she thinks she is. There is something in what Ida says: she is not consciously evil. She is a FOOL, of course. I have to do all the managing and all the explaining. I have to cook everything before she cooks it. I believe she thinks she is a treasure . . . no, wants to think it. At bottom she knows her corruptness. There are moments when it comes to the surface, comes out, like a stain, in her face, & then her eyes are like the eyes of a woman prisoner – a creature looking up as you enter her cell and saying: if you’d known what a hard life I’ve had you wouldn’t be surprised to see me here – – – It’s raining, but the air is soft, smoky, warm. ‘Mr Despondency’s daughter, Muchafraid, went through the water singing’.2 The day the housemaid had to leave because her husband didn’t want her to work no more and to consolidate his authority had punched her so hard in the neck that she had a great red swelling under her ear, the cook became a kind of infallible being – an angel of mercy. Nothing was too much for her – stairs were rays of light up which she floated. She wore her cap differently – it gave her the air of a hospital nurse – her voice changed. She suggested puddings as though they were compresses, whiting because they were ‘so delicate & harmless’. Trust me! Lean on me! There is nothing I cannot do! was her attitude. Every time she left me she left me for her mysterious reasons – to lay 1. In 2 Kings 2: 11, Elijah the Tishbite is walking with Elisha when ‘there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, and parted them both asunder; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven.’ 2. Two minor characters from John Bunyan’s Christian allegory, The Pilgrim’s Progress, whom the pilgrims encounter at Doubting Castle, where Giant Despair lived. John Bunyan (1628–88) was an English preacher and writer.

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out the body again & again, to change the stiffened hand, to pull the paper frill over the ominous spot appearing. She said: ‘I don’t feel in the least afraid. I feel like a little rock that the rising tide is going to cover. You won’t be able to see me – – big waves – – but they’ll go down again & I shall be there – winking bright.’ (Oh what sentimental toshery.) 10.xi.1919. I have discovered that I cannot burn the candle at one end & write a book with the other – – – – Often I reproach myself for my ‘private’ life – which after all, were I to die, would astonish even those nearest to me. Then, (as yesterday) I realise how little Jack shares with me. Last week I had no idea what was going in the paper, no copy of the paper and J. hadn’t the smallest curiosity as to whether I had seen or had not seen it. He never even asked. It might have been a report for the Home Office. I found from Milne1 that he still goes to Somerset House. I found from him today that he is paid £250 a year for it. Knowing my agony if anyone is late – having shared it with me a dozen times, saying he knows the difficulties of our domestic arrangements, he was 25 minutes late yesterday, and when he realised how he had hurt me he sulked because he could not do as he liked – was always driven, ALL his pleasure spoilt, even at St Albans, by worrying about my ‘complex’ about the time. He went to St. Albans yesterday & stayed until four & never told me a thing of the journey – had nothing to tell. Today he is with his brother. We met for lunch & he discovered for me afterwards (when I asked) a number of new books which he has brought into the house & never shown me – just put away. He knows I can seldom go out, he knows I can never get to a bookshop, he knows how I love books – love dipping into them, love just a moment’s chat about them, but all the same, he has never thought to share these finds with me – never for a moment. All this hurts me horribly, but I like to face it and see all round it. He ought not to have married. There never was a creature less fitted by nature for life with a woman. And the strange truth is I don’t WANT him to change. I want to see him and then adjust my ways & go on alone & WORK.

1. Herbert John Mansfield Milne was a friend of JMM, who worked in the British Museum as an Egyptologist. He published numerous articles and scholarly works.

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Life without work – I would commit suicide therefore work is more important than life. Bateson and his love of the louse for its own sake.1 Pedigree lice. £100 a year from the Royal Institute; a large family – desperately poor, but he never notices. The lives he saved in the Balkan War with shaving & Thymol. Cases reduced from 7000 to 700. No reward, not even an O.B.E. He dissects them, finds their glands and so on. Keeps them in tiny boxes; they feed on his arm – the louse & the bed bug. Hydatids – the australian who got them – handfuls of immature grapes. They attack the liver. In the human body they reproduce indefinitely. When they are passed and a sheep is attacked by them they develop hooks & become long worms. The Egyptian disease – a parasite which attacks the veins & arteries & causes fluxion – constant bleeding. It is another egg drunk in water. After it has been in man the only thing it can affect is a water snail – it goes through an entirely new cycle of being until it can attack man again. Dysentery – another parasite. Hydrophobia. The virus from the dog is taken and a rabbit is infected. That rabbit is used to infect another rabbit, the 2nd a third & so on till you get a rabbit who is practically pure virus. The spinal chords are then taken from these rabbits, & dried by a vacuum. The result is pounded up fine into an emulsion – 1st rabbit 2nd rabbit 3rd etc. and the patient is injected progressively till at last he receives a dose which, if he had not been so prepared to resist it would kill him outright. The disease develops very slowly; the treatment is very expensive. Symptoms are a profuse shiny bubbly saliva and gasping & groaning as in gas poisoning. No barking – no going on all fours. In lockjaw the jaw does not lock. Pasteur2 was a very dreamer of dreamers. Human beings are a side line to science.3 Science. 1. See p. 267, n. 1. 2. Louis Pasteur (1822–95) was a French scientist, chemist and physicist, and one of the pioneers of microbiology. 3. Journal, 1954, adds these last two words.

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All this I talked over with Sorapure June 21st.1 His point of view about medicine seems to me just completely right. I’d willingly let him take off my head, look inside & pop it on again if he thought it might assist future generations. Quite the right man to have at one’s dying bedside – he’d get me at any rate so interested in the process – gradual loss of sensitiveness, coldness at the joints etc. I’d lie there thinking: this is very valuable to know – I must make a note of this. As he stood at the door talking – nothing is incurable, its all a question of time, what seems so useless today may just be that link that will make all plain to a future generation . . . I had a sense – of the larger breath – of the mysterious lives within lives, and the egyptian parasite beginning its new cycle of being in a water snail affected me like a great work of Art. No, that’s not what I mean: it made me feel how perfect the world is, with its worms & hooks and ova. How incredibly perfect. There is the sky & the sea & the shape of a lily & there is all this other as well. The balance how perfect. (Salut, Tchekov.) I would not have one without the other. The clocks are striking ten. Here in my room the sky looks lilac, in the bathroom it is like the skin of a peach. Girls are laughing – Jack & Sullivan2 are down in Somerset – happy, I feel – if they are warm enough – enjoying each other. I have consumption. There is still a great deal of moisture (& pain) in my BAD lung. But I do not care – I do not want anything I could not have. Peace, solitude, time to write my books, beautiful external life to watch & ponder – no more. O, I’d like a child as well – a baby boy – mais je demande trop.3 July 20th Beware! August 1st Beware!! It is pleasant to plant cuttings of futurity if only one in ten takes root.

1. Dr Victor Edgar Sorapure (1874–1933) was a consultant physician and KM’s doctor in London from September 1918 until the end of her life. Both his intellectual manner and very unconventional life endeared him to his patient and she never lost her trust in him. 2. J. W. N. Sullivan (1886–1937) was a writer, journalist and editor, much admired for his ability to popularise maths and science. He was assistant editor of the Athenaeum during Murry’s editorship. 3. (Fr.) ‘but I ask too much’.

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Psychologie Féminine It is said that the turtle dove never drinks clear water but always muddies it first with its foot so that it may the better suit its pensive mind. Then there is Deepa and his worms.1 for a sprain or pains arnica mix arnica aconite for a fever ephecaquahua for colds2 Tuesday night. May 21st. [1919] Temperature 101.2. Severe pain in lung. Had a prolonged coughing attack & brought up blood. Slept very little on account of cough; expectoration streaked with blood. Wednesday morning. Temp 100.2. Cough troublesome. Signs of blood persist until noonday. Severe pain in the lung & feel very cold and nauseated. Shivered all the afternoon but temperature 101. Lung still very painful at each breath. B.L. of J. page 350.3 The insolence of wealth is a wretched thing but the conceit of parts has some foundation . . .4 M: A temporary poem always entertains us. J: So does the account of the criminals hanged yesterday entertain us.5 Criticism: Nobody has the right to put another under such a difficulty that he must either hurt the person by telling the truth or hurt himself by telling what is not true . . . Therefore the man who is asked by an author what he thinks of his work is put to the torture, and is not obliged to speak the truth; so that what he says is not 1. See above, p. 70. 2. KM is listing popular homeopathic remedies here. The accepted spelling for ‘ephicaquahna’ is ‘ipecacuanha’. 3. Boswell’s Life of Johnson. James Boswell (1740–95) was a Scottish writer, now principally remembered for his biography of Samuel Johnson. 4. From Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Johnson continues, ‘To be sure, it should not be, but who is without it?’ 5. From Boswell’s Life of Johnson. M. refers to Dr Musgrave.

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considered as his opinion; yet he has said it and cannot retract his opinion.1 352: All censure of a man’s self is oblique praise. It is in order to show how much he can spare. It has all the invidiousness of self-praise, and all the reproach of falsehood. B: Sometimes it may process from a man’s strong consciousness of his faults being observed. He knows that others would throw him down & therefore he had better lie down softly of his own accord . . .2 . . . It is thus that mutual cowardice keeps us in peace. Were one half of mankind brave & one half cowards, the brave would be always beating the cowards. Were all brave they would lead a very uneasy life; all would be continually fighting; but being all cowards we get on together very well . . .3 S: So, sir, wine is a key which opens a box & this box may be either full or empty? J: Nay, sir, conversation is the key; wine is a pick-lock which forces open the box & injures it. A man should cultivate his mind so as to have that confidence & readiness without wine, which wine gives.4 baum analgysèphe5 Bergeré Paris Parke Davis 10 teaspoonsful.

mulled ale.

Old Court House. callous, pariah p’riah. philoprogenitive. The Arrow of Gold6 59 the childlike stamping 75 the old old story7 1. From Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Johnson has been asked for his opinion of a lady’s translation from Horace. 2. From Boswell’s Life of Johnson. The passage begins with Johnson announcing, ‘A man cannot with propriety speak of himself, except he relates simple facts.’ 3. From Boswell’s Life of Johnson. The discussion bears on the French, and their equal fears of invasion. 4. From Boswell’s Life of Johnson. S. refers to Mr John Spottiswoode, a fellow guest at an evening reception. 5. Since this does not refer to any French medication, KM is probably transcribing by ear the name of an ointment she has heard of. 6. The Arrow of Gold. A Story between Two Notes is a novel by Joseph Conrad, published in 1919. KM reviewed the novel for the Athenaeum (see CW3, pp. 492–5). 7. Quoted from Conrad’s The Arrow of Gold.

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I wouldn’t judge you. What am I before the knowledge you were born to? You are as old as the world. She accepted this with a smile, gd. the vulgar old tricks – upsetting boxes and so on.1 Then what will I do for one? [KM] buy another [J] I will sell you my watch for 2 quid [KM] perfect! [J] but a male [KM] All right. [JM] Here reigned Lydia and herself worked at a lattice with the rest. its disintegration as rag and its apotheosis as paper – apotheosis. 2 It is extremely pleasant work because there is really such a deal of wholesome life in it. Of the two stories that run side by side in Mr Philpott’s new novel we prefer that which deals with the process by which handmade paper is made. The scene is a small village on the river Dart. Of the two stories that run side by side in Mr Philpott’s new novel we confess we prefer that which describes the process by which handmade paper is made – – This little village [Notebook 26, qMS–1264]

17.xii.19.

The Walking Stick.

When I had gone to bed I realised what it was that had caused me to ‘give way’. It was the effort of being up with a heart that wouldn’t work. Not my lungs at all. My despair simply disappeared – yes, simply. The weather was lovely, every morning the sun came in & drew those squares of golden light on the wall. I looked round my bed on to a sky like silk. The day opened slowly slowly like a flower & it held the sun long long before it slowly, slowly folded. Then my homesickness went. I not only didn’t want to be in England, I began to love Italy – and the thought of it – the sun – even when it was too 1. The quotation from The Arrow of Gold ends ‘with a smile’. The rest of the sentence is KM’s own commentary. 2. Preparatory notes for a review of Eden Phillpotts’s novel Storm in a Teacup, published in 1919. The first sentence is a direct quotation from Chapter 5, ‘The Rag House’. Eden Phillpotts (1862–1960) was a prolific English author, poet and playwright, whose Dartmoor cycle of novels in particular were highly popular (see CW3, pp. 499–500).

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hot always the sun – and a kind of wholeness which was good to bask in. After a few days J’s letters in response to my depressed letters began to arrive. There were a series of them. As I grew depressed he grew depressed but not for me. He began to write (1) about the suffering I caused him: his suffering, his nerves, he wasn’t made of whipcord or steel, the fruit was bitter for him. (2) a constant cry about money. He had none: he saw no chance of getting any, ‘heavy debts’, ‘as you know I am a bankrupt’, ‘I know it sounds callous’, ‘I can’t face it’. These letters, especially the letters about money bit like a knife through something that had grown up between us. They changed the situation for me, at least, for ever. We had been for 2 years drifting into a relationship different to anything I’d ever known – we’d been children to each other, openly confessed children, telling each other everything, each depending equally upon the other. Before that I’d been the man and he had been the woman & he had been called upon to make no real efforts. He’d never really ‘supported’ me. When we first met, in fact, it was I who kept him and afterwards we’d always acted (more or less) like men friends. Then this illness – getting worse & worse & turning me into a woman and asking him to put himself away & to bear things for me. He stood it marvellously. It helped very much because it was a ‘romantic’ disease (his love of a ‘romantic appearance’ is immensely real) and also being ‘children’ together gave us a practically unlimited chance to play at life – not to live. It was child love. Yes, I think the most marvellous, the most radiant love that this earth knows: terribly rare. We’ve had it. But we were not pure. If we had been he’d have faced coming away with me. And that he would not do. He’d not have said he was too tired to earn enough to keep us here. He always refused to face what it meant – living alone together for 2 years on not much money. He said – & ¾ of him believed – I couldn’t stand the strain of it with you ill. But it was a lie & a confession that all was not well with us. And I always knew it. Nevertheless I played up & truly even in October I clung to him still – still the child – seeing as our salvation a house in the country in England not later than next May & then never to be apart again . . . The letters – ended all of it. Was it the letters? I must not forget something else. All these 2 years I’ve been obsessed by the fear of death. This grew & grew & grew gigantic & this it was that made me cling so, I think. Ten days ago – it went – I care no more. It leaves me perfectly cold. Well it was that & the letters perhaps. Gone is my childish love, gone my desire to live in England. I don’t particularly want to live with him. I’d like to if it could be managed, but no sacrifices please. As to leaning, as to being a ‘little lovely darling’ it’s not conceivable. I want to work – travel – get a good maid in place of L.M. – & that’s

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all. Quite all? Yes, all. I am become Mother. I don’t care a rap for ‘people’. I shall always love Jack & be his wife, but I couldn’t get back to that anguish – joy – sweet madness of the other years. Such love has gone for me. And Life either stays or goes. I must put down here a dream. The first night I was in bed here – i.e. after my first day in bed I went to sleep. And suddenly I felt my whole body breaking up – it broke up with a violent shock – an earthquake, & it broke like glass. A long terrible shiver, you understand, & the spinal cord & the bones and every bit & particle quaking. It sounded in my ears – a low confused din, and there was a sense of flashing greenish brilliance, like broken glass. When I woke I thought there had been a violent earthquake. But all was still. It slowly dawned upon me – the conviction that in that dream I died. I shall go on living now – it may be for months, or for weeks or days or hours. Time is not. In that dream I died. The spirit that is the enemy of death & quakes so & is so tenacious was shaken out of me. I am (15.xii.1919) a dead woman & I don’t care. It might comfort others to know that one gives up caring but they’d not believe any more than I did until it happened. And oh – how strong was its hold upon me – how I adored Life & dreaded Death. I’d like to write my books & spend some happy time with Jack (not very much faith in that) and see Lawrence in a sunny place & pick violets – all kinds of flowers. Oh, I’d like to do heaps of things really, but I don’t mind if I do not do them. That quiet simplicity, that deep simple love is not. It only existed until we put it to the test. Then, when I cried out, Jack beat me – because it hurt him to hear me – I stopped his play, I made the house all wrong . . . How clear it all is. Immediately I, as a tragic figure, outfaced or threatened to outface him (yes, that’s exactly the truth) the truth was revealed. He was the one who really wanted all the tragedy. It must have been a fearful blow to spare at all . . . I am glad it is over. I wouldn’t call it back. Honesty – (why?) – is the only thing one seems to prize beyond life, love, death, everything. It alone remaineth. Oh those that come after me – will you believe it? At the end truth is the one thing worth having – it’s more thrilling than love, more joyful, & more passionate. It simply cannot fail. All else fails. I, at any rate, give the remainder of my life to it & it alone. (15.xii.1919) I’d like to write a long long story on this & call it ‘Last Words to Life.’ One ought to write it, and another on the subject of HATE. It often happens to me now that when I lie down for sleep at night instead of getting drowsy I feel wakeful and lying here in bed I begin to live over little scenes from real life or imaginary scenes. It’s not too much to say they are almost hallucinations: they are marvellously vivid. I lie on my right side & put my left hand up to my forehead

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as though I were praying. This seems to induce the state. Then for instance it’s 10.30 p.m. on a big liner in mid ocean . . . People are beginning to leave the Ladies Cabin. Father puts his head in & asks if one of you would care for a walk before you turn in. It’s glorious up on deck. That begins it. I am there. Details – father rubbing his gloves, the cold air, the night air rather he brings to the door, the pattern of everything, the feel of the brass stair rail & the rubber stairs. Then the deck. The pause while the cigar is lighted, the look of all in the moonlight, the steadying hum of the ship, the 1st officer on the deck, so far aloft the bells, the steward going into the smoking room with a tray, stepping over the high brass-bound step. All these things are far realer, more in detail, richer than Life. And I believe I could go on until – there’s no end to it. I can do this about anything. Only there are no personalities. Neither am I there personally. People are only part of the silence, not of the pattern – vastly different to that – part of the scheme. I could always do this to a certain extent – but it’s only since I was really ill that this shall we call it ‘consolation prize’ has been given me. My God, its a marvellous thing! I can call up certain persons – Doctor Sorapure for instance. And then I remember how I used to say to J & A1 ‘he was looking very beautiful today.’ I did not know what I was saying. But when I so summon him & see him ‘in relation’ he is marvellously beautiful. There again he comes to tiny detail to the shape of his thumbs, to looking over his glasses, his lips as he writes & particularly in all connected with putting the needle into a syringe – I relive all this at will. But my life with Jack I’m not inclined to. It doesn’t enter my head. Where that life was there’s just a blank. The future – the present life with him is not. It has got to be lived. There’s nothing in it. Something has stopped – a wall has been raised and its too recent for me to wish to go there even. Wait till it looks a little less new . . . . is the feeling. I’m not in the least curious either – & not in the least inclined to lament. If one wasn’t so afraid – why should I be – these aren’t going to be read by Bloomsbury et Cie2 – I’d say we had a child – a love child & it’s dead. We may have other children but this child can’t be made to live again. J. says forget that letter. How can I? It killed the child – killed it really & truly for ever as far as I am concerned. Oh, I don’t doubt that if I live there will be other children but there won’t be that child. Any children? he asked, taking out his stethoscope as I struggled 1. JMM and Arthur (JMM’s brother Richard). 2. The French shortened form of ‘et Compagnie’, meaning ‘and Company’.

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with my nightgown. No, no children. But what would he have said if I’d told him that until a few days ago I had had a little child, aged five & ¾ – of – – indeterminate sex. Some days it was a boy. For two years now it had very often been a little girl . . . Alone with W. She took his [. . .] boyish look & like the little girl with her [. . .] loaf in the Hans Andersen story she flung it on the mud & used it as a stepping stone. She will go out and buy the vegetables and take our heavenly father’s hat & stick when he goes to visit his father . . . Sitting up in bed she put a pink fascinator over her head and shoulders, drew the spectacles out of the case & looked through the album – After tea it was her habit to play patience until the evening paper came. Surely I do know more than other people. I have suffered more, endured more. I know how they long to be happy and how precious is an atmosphere that is loving, a climate that is not frightening. Why do I not try to bear this in mind and try to cultivate my garden? Now I descend to a strange place among strangers. Can I not make myself felt as a real personal force. (Why should you) Ah, but I should. I have had experience unknown to them. I should by now have learnt Campbell’s obiter dictum1 – how true it might be. It must be. [Journal, 1954, pp. 188–90]

‘My cough is considerably better, I am sunburnt, they tell me I am fatter, but the other day I almost fell down and I fancied for a minute that I was dying. I was walking along the avenue with the prince, our neighbour, and was talking, when all at once something seemed to break in my chest, I had a feeling of warmth and suffocation, there was a singing in my ears, I remembered that I had been having palpitations for a long time and thought – “They must have meant something, then.” I went rapidly towards the verandah, on which visitors were sitting, and had one thought – that it would be awkward to fall

1. An incidental remark, or a statement in passing during judicial proceedings. Probably referring to a favourite comment of Gordon Campbell, himself a barrister at the time.

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down and die before strangers; but I went into my bedroom, drank some water and recovered’. (Tchehov’s letters: April 21, 1894.)1 ‘I am in the condition of a transplanted tree which is hesitating whether to take root or begin to wither’. (Tchehov’s letters: February 10, 1900). So am I exactly. ‘I can’t eat the butter here. Evidently, my digestion is hopelessly ruined. It is scarcely possible to cure it by anything but fasting – that is, eating nothing – and that’s the end of it. And the only remedy for the asthma is not moving’. (Tchehov’s letters: June 28, 1904.) Who reads between the lines here? I at least. K.M. I wish he would cross his legs and rest his hands on his knee. But no, he sprawls, his shoulders hunched, his hands stuffed in his pockets, staring at his feet. They do look very curious, pressed so flat against the curved floor of the cab; the toes turned in and the shoes appear for some reason to be made not of leather, – of gun-metal. ‘I dream that the dearest I ever knew Has died and been entombed. I am sure it’s a dream that cannot be true. . . . Yet stays this nightmare too appalling, And like a web shakes me, And piteously I keeep on calling, And no-one wakes me.’ (Thomas Hardy.)2

1. These three quotations are from Constance Garnett’s Letters of Anton Tchehov, published in 1920. In each case, KM is focusing on those letters that give details of Chekhov’s fast-declining health as his tuberculosis worsened. The third quotation she cites, from a letter to his sister, is not only from the final letter in Garnett’s collection, but also from the last letter Chekhov is thought to have written before his death four days later. Such biographical contextualising inevitably adds additional pathos to KM’s comment. 2. The opening and closing lines of Hardy’s poem, ‘Bereft, She Thinks She Dreams’. Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) was a major British novelist and poet, whose works and style reflect the clear movement of English literature from the later Victorian to the early modernist era. Despite the clear sentimental note reflected in these excerpts, this poem was first published in Hardy’s 1914 Satires of Circumstance. Lyrics and Reveries, and features in a poem-cycle written from a woman’s point of view.

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‘Whenever there is someone in a family who has been long ill, and hopelessly ill, there come painful moments when all, timidly, secretly, at the bottom of their hearts long for his death’. (Tchehov, Peasants).1 And even write poems. . . [Notebook 26, qMS–1264]

A Lost Love. By Ashword Owen. John Murray 3/6 net.2 The tone is too low. This is a very interesting monograph. Browning, Swinburne & Tennyson [. . .] to this little book. Published London 1854. Show Georgy London [?] Lord Erskine. His winning ways. Constance Everett & the nightcaps. All good. My Neighbours. By Caradoc Evans. 6/– Melrose.3 Short [. . .] Welsh [?] Life. Mrs Warren’s Profession. By Sir Harry Johnson. 7/6 net.4 Chatto &Windus. Honoria Frazer. Michael [?] Rossiter Villa Beau Sejour. Too garrulous. [Notebook 22, qMS–1265]

Miss Smith c/o Constable & Co. grey silk stockings Mrs Beaumont 7 Oriel Terrace Lower Church Road Western S. Mare.5 Mrs P’s sister 4 Lanks Terr. [?] Leads in Sloane [?] Street. Love Birds at 47B Male and female. 1. Chekhov’s ‘Peasants’ was included in Garnett’s 1918 collection, The Witch and Other Stories. KM is quoting from Garnett’s translation here. 2. Ashword Owen was the pseudonym of Anne Charlotte Owen, whose novel, A Lost Love, was published in 1855. Georgy (Georgina) Sandon is one of the main female protagonists, and James Erskine her cousin. Constance Everett is a married woman who looks after Georgy for a while. 3. My Neighbours (1919) was a novel by Marguerite Caradoc Evans (1878–1945), subtitled ‘Stories of the Welsh People’. 4. Mrs Warren’s Profession (1893) is a play by George Bernard Shaw, a harsh portrayal of social hypocrisies concerning prostitution, built around the main characters, Kitty Warren and her daughter, Vivie. Harry Johnston wrote the sequel to it, Mrs Warren’s Daughter: A Story of the Woman’s Movement, in 1920. 5. Weston-super-Mare, a seaside town in Somerset.

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male green underbody, wings mole tipped with yellow, broad at base, gradually growing smaller until the head feathers as close as can be, yellow faces, a touch of pale blue on the chops and the top of the beak. On the male exquisite black spots, points of jet under the beak. Tail of male bird blue. Female yellow with overbody of pale green in delicate pencil lines. The bird is yellow but a green yellow. Male bird burrows in its back, finds 7/6.

Friday.

193.17.0 30. 0.0 20.13.9 £244.10.9

Dinner Blunden. Hotel d’Angleterre Beau Rivage Bellevue de la Paix Quai du Mont Blanc How’s Hotel, 37 Queens Gate Gdns, South Ken. 3268 Ives. Rising above all pain and all infirmity – rising above everything – the child trying on gloves banging Robinson Crusoe Pilgrims Progress Coleridge Biographia Literaria [Coleridge] Lectures on Shakespeare One or Two Jane Austen Shakespeare and the O.B.E.V.1 The Sea and the Jungle2 Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales Spenser’s Faerie Queen. sachets (2) pocket mirror comb poudre milde3 1. Oxford Book of English Verse. 2. A vivid travelogue (1920) by Harry Johnston, describing a voyage by steamship from Swansea to Brazil, an upriver expedition through the Amazon forest and the return via Barbados and Florida. 3. Presumably KM’s personal ‘franglais’, referring to a powder of some sort.

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sponge bag toothbrush case & soap sotol tablets1 Kolynos2 Floss silk Powder veils shoes Name Katherine Middleton Murry Address c/o Bank of New Zealand, 1 Queen Victoria St, London E.C.4. Motor Car No. 0194 Bicycle No. Stores 109750 Height 5 feet 4½ inches Size of Gloves 6 Size of Boots 4 In case of serious accident or other urgent need please notify John Middleton Murry, Athenaeum, 10 Adelphi Terrace W.C., London. 29 MONDAY3 Catherine brought maid. Jack returned exhausted from San Remo. Bathed his head. In the afternoon played demon. Jack was furious at my lack of sympathy. He was dying Egypt dying.4 But he could laugh heartily at the Smallwood family. ‘That’s first chop.’ 30 TUESDAY Calm day. In garden. Read early poems in Oxford Book. Discussed our future library. In the evening read Dostoievsky. In the morning discussed the importance of ‘external life’. Played our famous Stone game (Cape Sixpence and Cornwall). But something is wrong. 31 WEDNESDAY Long talk over house. Michael Foster5 said I could walk. Sea sounded like an island sea. Happy. Lovely fire in my bedroom. Succès éclatant avec demon before dinner.6 Listened to Wingley’s fiddle. The wooden bed. 1. 2. 3. 4.

Sotol tablets were effervescent, antiseptic mouthwash tablets. An early brand of toothpaste in a tube. These are entries for December 1919. In Antony and Cleopatra, IV, 15, the dying Antony says, ‘I am dying, Egypt, dying.’ 5. Dr Foster was an English doctor who worked in San Remo. 6. (Fr.) ‘Outstanding success at demon’. Demon is a variety of patience, a card game for one player.

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[Notebook 22, qMS–1265]

1920. 1 JAN. THURSDAY Jack prepares to go. Drying figs on the stove, & white socks drying from the mantelpiece. A dish of oranges & rain-wet leaves, a pack of cards on the table. It rains but it is warm. The jonquil is in bud. We linger at the door. L.M. sings. 2 FRIDAY A.M. Jack left for London. The house very empty and quiet. I was ill all day – exhausted. In the afternoon fell asleep over my work & missed the post. My heart won’t lie down. No post. Cashed cheque for 1,089 lire: Y. During the night the cat picture became terrifying. 3 SATURDAY A load of wood. Sent review. Letters from Marie and Clara. Cold day. Miss K.S.1 called – deadly dull. Her yawn and recovery. Storm of wind and rain. I had nightmare about Jack. He and I ‘separated’. M.K.S. talked about tulips but she makes all sound so fussy, the threads of her soul all ravelled. 4 SUNDAY Cold, wet, windy, terrible weather. Fought it all day. Horribly depressed. Dickinson2 came to tea but it was no good. Worked. Two wires from J. According to promise. I cannot write. The jonquils are out, weak and pale. Black clouds pull over. Immediately the sun goes 1. Miss Lionel Kaye-Shuttleworth, a distant family acquaintance (and related by marriage to J. A. Symonds) who called to visit. In a letter to JMM dated 23 November 1919, KM describes her as ‘Elderly, typical, good family, dowdy gentlewoman with exquisite greenish ermine scarf, diamond ear rings & white suede gloves’ (CLKM, 3, p. 112). 2. An English acquaintance living in the area.

296

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in I am overcome – again – the black fit takes over. I hate the sea. There is nought to do but WORK, but how can I work when this awful weakness makes even the pen like a walking stick. 5 MONDAY Henry IV. Nuit blanche.1 Decided at 3 a.m. that Dickin was a homicidal maniac. Certain of this. Started my story ‘Late Spring’.2 A cold bitter day. Worked at Tchekhov all day3 and then at my story until 11 p.m. Anna came. We talked about her to her face in English. No letters. Post Office strike. Anna’s bow & velvet blouse. 6 TUESDAY E.A.M.4 Black day. Winter’s Tale. Dark – no sky to be seen, a livid sea; a noise of boiling in the air. Dreamed the cats died of anti-pneumonia. Heart attack 8 a.m. Awful day. No relief for a moment. Couldn’t work. At night changed the position of my bed but it was no good: I did not sleep. At five o’clock I thought I was at sea tossing – for ever. N.B. 7 WEDNESDAY On the verandah. I don’t want a God to praise or to entreat but to share my vision with. This afternoon looking at the primula after the rain. I want no-one to ‘dance & wave their arms’. I only want to feel they see too. But Jack won’t. Sitting out there in the sun – where is my mate. He wants neither external life nor depression?!!! 8 THURSDAY BLACK. Wrote to Jinnie.5 A day spent in Hell. Unable to do anything. Took brandy – determined not to weep – wept. Sense of isolation 1. (Fr.) ‘Sleepless night.’ Literally, the expression means ‘white night’, which provides a playful contrast with the following day’s entry, ‘Black day’. 2. See CW2, pp. 118–90. The short story has the epigraph: ‘But I tell you, my lord fool, out of this nettle danger, we pluck this flower, safety’ (Henry IV, part 1, II, 3, 11). She used this epigraph for two separate story drafts, and had previously included it in her lists of quotations of Shakespeare’s plays. Strangely, considering the implications of the Shakesperean text, JMM chose this quotation to go on KM’s gravestone in FontainebleauAvon. 3. KM was co-translating a series of Chekhov’s letters and biographical sketches with Koteliansky, published in the Athenaeum from April 1919 to April 1920 (see CW3, pp. 201–64). 4. Possibly ‘Exit Aunt Martha’ (see above, p. 136, n.2). 5. Jinnie Fullerton, a friend of her father’s cousin, Connie Beauchamp, living in Menton, both of whom looked after KM when she moved from Ospedaletti to Menton.

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frightful. I shall die if I don’t escape. Nauseated, faint cold with misery. Oh I must survive it somehow. 9 FRIDAY BLACK. Another of them. In the afternoon Foster came and agreed that I must leave here. I somehow or other wrote a column. Broke my watch glass. In the evening L.M. and I were more nearly friendly than we have been for years. I couldn’t rest or sleep. The roaring of the sea was insufferable. Posted to Jinnie. 10 SATURDAY Father’s marriage: news from Marie.1 Spent the evening writing another column. Help me God! and then L.M. came in to say I was ½ an hour slow. Just did it in time. Had talk with L.M. our friendship is returning – in the old fashion. Thought out The Exile.2 Appalling night of misery deciding that J. had no more need of our love. 11 SUNDAY N.B. Worked from 9.30 a.m. to a quarter after midnight only stopping to eat. Finished the story. Lay awake then till 5.30 too excited to sleep. In the sea drowned souls sang all night. I thought of everything in my life and it all came back so vividly – all is connected with this feeling that J. and I are no longer as we were. I love him but he rejects my living love. This is anguish. These are the worst days of my whole life. 12 MONDAY Last day I heard from Jack. Posted the story and a telegram. Very tired. The sea howled and boomed and roared away. When will this cup pass from me? Oh misery! I cannot sleep. I lie retracing my steps – going over all the old life before . . . . The baby of Garnet’s love.3 13 TUESDAY Bad day. A curious smoky effect over the coast. I crawled crept about the garden in the afternoon. I feel terribly weak and all the time on the verge of breaking down. Tried to work could not work. At six o’clock went back to bed. Had a dreadful nightmare. Wrote Jack and Marie. 1. Charlotte Mary (Chaddie), KM’s sister, also known in the family as Marie. 2. This was the initial title of the story, ‘The Man Without a Temperament’ (see CW2, pp. 199–210). 3. KM is referring to the child conceived with Garnet Trowell: the pregnancy that prompted her hasty marriage to Bowden in 1909, but ended in a stillbirth in 1910.

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14 WEDNESDAY Foster came. Says my lung is remarkably better but must rest absolutely for 2 months & not attempt to walk at all. I have got a ‘bigger chance’. Bell rang at night. My life pains me. Cannot get a move on. Dreamed about Banks.1 She gave me her baby to look after. Heard from Jinnie. 15 THURSDAY Sat in my room watching the day change to evening; the fire like a golden stag. Thinking of the past always dreaming it over. The cotton plant has turned yellow. Tonight the sea is douce. P.O. strike. No, no letters. [Journal, 1954, p. 193]

‘But I was called from the earth – yea, called Before my rose-bush grew; And would that now I knew What feels he of the tree I planted. And whether, after I was called To be a ghost, he, as of old, Gave me his heart anew.’ (Thomas Hardy.)2 16 FRIDAY Wrote & sent reviews. Stayed in bed worked. Had a bath. The day was very lovely. I had to work hard. In the evening began my new story A Strange Mistake.3 P.O. strike for letters and telegrams. At night I could not sleep. My life in London seems immeasurably far and all like a dream. L.M. talked of herself as a child. 17 SATURDAY Postal strike no letters no wires. Tearing up and sorting the old letters. The feeling that comes – the anguish – the words that fly out into one’s breast my darling my wife. Oh what anguish! Oh will it ever be the same! Lay awake at night listening to the voices. Two men seemed 1. Dorothy (known as ‘Georges’) Banks, an illustrator and associate of the French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska; both artists contributed to Rhythm. Gaudier-Brzeska’s relationship with JMM was abruptly terminated after a violent disagreement. 2. Like the Hardy poem quoted above (see p. 292), this extract from ‘The Spell of the Rose’ is taken from Hardy’s Satires of Circumstance. 3. Eventually published as ‘The Wrong House’ (see CW2, pp. 210–12).

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to sing – a tenor and a baritone. Then the drowned began. Love’s Labours Lost. 18 SUNDAY No letters strike still on. A fine day. But what is that to me. I am an invalid. I spend my life in bed. Read Shakespeare in the morning. I feel I cannot bear this silence today. I am haunted by thoughts of Jack perpetually. Dickinson’s flowers & dog. And then little Flock and dark-eyed Catherina!! All the flowers & the two dogs. They seem to be running in and out among the daisies and jonquils. Flock puts his paws on the bed ‘Oh that monkey’ the sky & sea behind him, and the chill, smoky air. 19 MONDAY All’s Well that Ends Well. Comedy of Errors. No letters or papers. Vince1 came & Mrs V. and Mr T. and Miss Sheila [?] in white. The trouble I’ve had with you Mrs Murry & the expense it’s put to me – more fuss than if you had died there. The women against the flowers were so lovely – even Miss S. I had a dreadful crying fit about ‘noise & cleanliness’. It was horrible. 20 TUESDAY Twelfth Night. Washed my hair. L.M. out nearly all day. Here alone on a perfect day. I wandered in the garden & the flowers blew in the wind. There was a ship white & solid on the water. Overcoat disappeared. The fire in my room and the double light. All was exquisitely beautiful. ‘Goodbye.’ It now believes we are going and it is safe. 21 WEDNESDAY2 Measure for Measure. A day like a dream. Vince’s hair, stick, jacket, teeth, tie – all to be remembered – to use a volgarism I’m fed up. The journey, the flowers, & these women here. Jinnie’s black satin neckcloth & pearl pin. This exquisite cleanliness turns me into a cat. Dreamed of Jeanne, Marie and Violet. 22 THURSDAY Saw the doctor – a fool. Thinking of the Casetta left to itself – the little winds blowing, the shutters shut, the cotton plant turning yellow. 1. Thomas Vince was the English manager of the Villa Flora, San Remo, where KM first stayed on this particular trip, and also the agent for the Casetta Deerholm in Ospedaletti, where she was currently residing. 2. On this day KM finally left Ospedaletti and was taken to her cousin Connie Beauchamp’s house in Menton, just across the border in France.

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Heard from J. wire & letter. Spent a day recovering. My heart tires me. The meals downstairs are a fearful strain. But the people newly risen [?]. 23 FRIDAY Saw two of the doctors – an ass, and an ass. Spend the day at my windows. It was very lovely & fair. But I was trying to work all day and could not get down to it. In the night had appalling nightmare. 24 SATURDAY Cousin Connie brought the tiny dog to see me – a ravishing animal. The same despairing desire to work and could not work. I suppose I started reviewing T. nine or ten times. Felt very tired as a result of this. 25 SUNDAY A year has passed away . . . and that’s all. Missed J. Connie & Jinnie came. She is a really wonderful creature. Her gaze, her hands, her quietness. Both have this quiet, restful air. L.M. came très embarrassée1 – I don’t know why. I grudge L.M. money – it’s very dreadful. The meals here are a horror. I seem to be sitting hours & hours there & the people are ugly. Nevertheless thank God I am here, in sound of the train, in reach of the post. Italian letters came today. 26 MONDAY Posted Kay2 two cheques. Felt ill with fatigue and cold & my lungs hurt. It is because I am not working. All is a bit of a nightmare for that reason. My temper is so bad! I feel I am horrid and can’t stop it. It’s a bad feeling. 27 TUESDAY The woman who does the massage is not really any good. My life is queer here. I like my big airy room but to work is so hard. At the back of my mind I am so wretched. But all the while I am thinking over my philosophy – the defeat of the personal. Received advice from Kay that my account is HH.F.E.3 28 WEDNESDAY I shall not remember what happened on this day. It is a blank. At the end of my life I may want it, may long to have it. There was a new 1. (Fr.) ‘very embarrassed’. 2. Alexander Kay was the manager of the Bank of New Zealand’s main London branch. 3. According to JMM, this is KM’s code in letters for figures, and represents £88.6.5 in pounds, shillings and pence.

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moon – that I remember, but who came or what I did, all is lost. It’s just a day missed, a day crossing the line.1 29 THURSDAY I have received an abominably selfish letter from Jack – telling me about Sussex.2 It has hurt me so much. I wrote back, but won’t post it. I feel it must be a mistake. ‘Drunken with the magnificence’ ‘pure sheer spring’. 30 FRIDAY No letter from him today – other letters came. I tried all day to work and feel dog tired. Perhaps it’s the massage. Jinnie came to see me & brought me a present from her little dog. 31 SATURDAY Changed my room for this other – I prefer it. It is more snug & there is only one bed. I sent the reviews off today & a letter to Jack. W.G.3 sent a little [?]. Wrote to several people. Father. [Journal, 1954, pp. 196–7]

January Women walking across the fields to their men, idling in the swooning light, the sun trembling in the lemon-trees. In the stillness the sound of the birds. Why hath the Lord not made bun trees? Grey houses, red blinds, white mousseline curtains, and Oh! the replica within! When the soldiers bent to strip, their hair blew in the wind. This gave them such a defenceless, innocent appearance. I realised that I had been here before. There came a smell of wood and something dark, burnt out, and yet with a kind of glow still. The street so smooth and arched like the curves of thought, and up

1. When ships cross the equatorial date-line travelling from the northern to the southern hemisphere, the calendar date shifts ahead, creating the sensation of losing a day. 2. Two letters from JMM, dated 25 and 26 January 1920, describe his pure physical pleasure at walking vast distances in the exquisite Sussex Downs, looking for a house for them to live in. The first of the two letters, includes the sentence: ‘I haven’t found the house, but I am more & more drunk with the magnificence of the English down country, more & more determined to find something’ (C. A. Hankin, ed., The Letters of John Middleton Murry to Katherine Mansfield (London: Constable, 1983), p. 256). 3. Possibly the Westminster Gazette.

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there walked sailors with their bundles, very like flies carrying their eggs in the hot sun. The trees at this hour look so full of leisure and inclined to the earth as though they were in love with the shape of their own shadows. ‘How do you know, deep underground. Hid in your bed from sight and sound, Without a turn in temperature, With weather life can scarce endure, That light has won a fraction’s strength, And day put on some moment’s length, Whereof in merest rote will come, Weeks hence, mild airs that do not numb; O crocus root, how do you know, How do you know?’1 (Thomas Hardy.)

[Notebook 22, qMS–1265]

1 FEB. SUNDAY No F. No G.2 A.M.3 My room is horrible. Very noisy. A constant clatter & a feeling as though one were doorless. French people don’t care a hang how much noise they make. I hate them for it. Stayed in bed. Felt very ill but didn’t mind because of the reason. The food was really appalling. Nothing to eat. At night old Casetta feelings. Like madness. Voices and words & half visions. No F No M. 2 MONDAY F only. C & J came & the Times notice of my book.4 Sent to the bank. J. brought me more flowers. Saw the lovely palm. Work will win if only I can stick to it. It will win after all & through all.

1. The final stanza of Hardy’s poem, ‘The Year’s Awakening’ (1910), first published in book form in his Satires of Circumstance (1914). 2. JMM’s marginalia here reads, ‘No friction, no goûter [i.e. afternoon tea].’ This becomes clearer in the following entries. The use of vigorous friction and light massage in the treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis dates back to Roman times. 3. Aunt Martha. 4. Bliss and Other Stories, published by Constable in 1920.

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3 TUESDAY F only no goûter. No letter from John today. Went for a little walk in the garden & saw all the pale violets. The beauty of palm trees. To fall in love with a tree. Heard the ladies in the Harem talking. Japonica is a lovely flower, but people never grow enough of it. 4 WEDNESDAY Paid bill. Gouter F. & M. A letter card obscure and later a telegram & another card obscure. Horrible day. I lay all day & half slept in this new way, hearing voices, drifting off. Heard from Ottoline. The attendance here is really abominable. Wrote to Jack about the G. Pension.1 No good. 5 THURSDAY M. No F. Sent wire. Letter re Constable. Replied. Went for a drive. All way gay. The house & the girl. Couldn’t work – slept again – dreadful pain in joints. Jack talks of insurance & ideas far from reality. Fearfully noisy house! Saw an orange tree, an exquisite shape against the sky. When the fruit is ripe the leaves are pale yellow. 6 FRIDAY Received Lawrence’s last letter & reply from J. Determined to review 2 books today and to get on with Second Helping.2 Saw the fool of a doctor today, diddle–dum dum de! Cod is the only word! Badin–ag–e! Flat–ter–ie! Gallan–ter–ie! Frogs!!! Vous pouvez vous promenez.3 Liar. The palm tree. Did not finish review but no matter, it goes. 7 SATURDAY Exit A.M. 2.55 laundry. Wrote & sent reviews. House in a perfect uproar. Dreadfully nervous. Dressmaker came & her little apprentice who gave me the flowers. Had a bath – but all was in a tearing hurry & clatter. Had a strange dream. ‘She is one with the moonlight.’ Georges Sand – ma soeur.4

1. In a German Pension, KM’s first short-story anthology, published by Stephen Swift in 1911. KM did not approve of having a new edition published, claiming the stories were too immature. 2. See below, p. 309. 3. (Fr.) ‘You can get lost.’ 4. (Fr.) ‘Georges Sand – my sister.’ George Sand was the pseudonym of Amantine-Lucile Aurore Dupin (1804–76), a novelist and journalist, who became a major figure in French Romanticism.

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8 SUNDAY To Villa Flora. In the garden with the unhappy woman lying on the hard bench. Seeing them all at tea in their beauty. The Spanish brocade cloth, the piece of heliotrope. Jinnie’s plan that I shall go and live there. Came back & wrote it all to Jack in delight. Then a nuit blanche, dreadful nightmare. I think I should like to join the Roman Catholic Church. I must have something! 9 MONDAY Hell. Letter from Jack. It was too much. I wept all the morning. In the afternoon sitting in the sun – alas alas! The sun is so warm – like summer. All’s over then. My dream was right. 11 WEDNESDAY Mrs Dunn1 came in the afternoon & squeezed up on the chair or crouched on the floor. 12 THURSDAY A lie is the unjust denial of the truth. She stood here. Yes, 64 dear, sat & raised her hands. Can I help her? I want to. Here is a woman whom I would love to make just a little happy – a great woman. 13 FRIDAY Dressmaker 11 a.m. [Notebook 38, qMS–1266]

29.ii.1920. Life’s a queer thing. I read this today and in my mind I heard it sung in a very pure voice to a piano and it seemed to me to be part of the great pain of youthful love. Twelfth Night. Viola. If one should be a prey how much the better To fall before the lion than the wolf!2

1. Bonnie Dunn, an American living in Menton, was a close friend of KM’s cousin, Connie Beauchamp. 2. In Twelfth Night, III, 1, Viola and Olivia meet in Viola’s garden, where Viola exclaims ‘Why, then, methinks ’tis time to smile again. / O, world, how apt the poor are to be proud! / If one should be a prey, how much the better / To fall before the lion than the wolf!’

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Some are born – – some achieve – – and some have – – thrust upon them.1

[Notebook 22, qMS–1265]

4 APRIL SUNDAY Easter eggs in the folded napkins. A Happy Easter. I am given the Mass for the day to read. We drink to absent friends, but carelessly – not knowing whether to bow or no. 9 FRIDAY Schiffs3 are coming to tea. Cold and windy. Out of the window the writhing palms – the dust – the woman with a black veil. Mrs D. knowing nothing of England ‘I’m an Imperialist.’ Jinnie in bed ‘I like to be fair.’ Connie lies on the couch and reads. I feel I must live alone alone alone – with artists only to come to the door. Every artist cuts off his ear & nails it on the outside of the door for the others to shout into. 11 SUNDAY I never can remember what happens. It is so without outline. ‘Yesterday’ pales into the general shade. But all the same one looks back & there are wonders. There is always Miss Helen stretching her hands out to the great defiant bouquet, crying with a kind of groan Oh – the darlings. She flushed. That remains for ever. And then one must never forget the dog which gets all the love of children. Going nice ta-tas with Missie, my ducksie pet!

1. Snippets from the letter craftily left for Malvolio to find in Twelfth Night, II, 5, encouraging him to believe Olivia loves him. The full sentence reads, ‘In my stars I am above thee; but be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.’ 2. (Fr.) a temporary resident’s permit. 3. Sydney and Violet Schiff were Anglo-American friends living in Roquebrune, near Menton. Sydney Schiff (1868–1944) published novels under the pseudonym Stephen Hudson; he was also a generous patron of the arts.

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12 MONDAY Went to the fish museum at Monaco. Must remember the bubbles as the man plunged the rod into the tanks. The young girl. How naice! Young girls make me feel 40. Well one certainly doesn’t want to look 21. The woman with her three little children at Monte . . . 16 FRIDAY Send passports to Genoa. Travelling Toilet paper & hand towels. Zotos. Soap Cold chicken, wine like marsala, coffee In. 201.4.6 In. 170.10.6 P.i. today 22.14.0 8. 0.0 Date

Received

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2. 2. 0

Jan 2

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Jan 4

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inquire re A. cheque which is entered as 10.11.6 by the Bank & entered by me as 11. 0. 0 In hand

100. 16. 5

allowance paid in

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3 Living[?] exes

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Ida gave me

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paid in

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allowance paid in

25. 0. 0

25. 0. 0

2nd

Self

10. 0. 0

20. 0. 0

Jack

11. 9. 6

10. 0. 0

179. 11. 6

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Athenaeum 24th

Self

55. 0. 0 124. 11. 6 79 95 eau

72

Marie

3. 50 5. 01 95

April 1st

12th

In hand

124. 11. 6

25. 0. 0

a. paid in

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10. 0. 0

Kot cheque

1. 4. 9

15. 0. 0

drew out

5. 0. 0

Constable

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5. 0. 0

Ath.

3. 0. 6

5. 0. 0

G&S

2. 5. 0

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196. 2. 1

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25. 0. 0 8. 0

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7. 7. 0 Must buy a decent account book. [Notebook 38, qMS–1266]

Second Helping by Katherine Mansfield1

Imp. Oh to be a writer a real writer given up to it and to it alone! Oh I failed today I turned back, looked over my shoulder and immediately it happened I felt as tho’ I too were struck down. The day turned cold & dark on the instant. It seemed to belong to summer twilight in London – to the clang of the gates as they close the garden – to the deep light painting the high houses to the smell of leaves & dust, to the lamp light, to that stirring of the senses to the languor of twilight – the breath of it on one’s cheek – to all those things which (I feel today) are gone from me for ever . . . I feel today that I shall die soon – & suddenly but not of my lungs. Colour. Pink. 5 petalled flower with seed purse darker colour, thick reddish stem, small leaf like a bramble leaf. The seed purse is highly glazed, it is – in 3, one long wing & 2 little ones. Attached to it is the 5 petalled flower. It always falls in delicate clusters. marquetterie – which they make here. The design style [. . .] – made into paper cutters boxes servers, brushes – style for the writing tables – the large pieces. All is the design for the writing table – all the pieces are mounted on bois d’ochré2 – the cutting of it is done in erable naturelle3. [. . .] in rose wood – the wood which is [. . .] in white is on cypre or orange wood – for the mosaique one takes one long piece of wood, adds the design of both sides to the middle designs, cuts all out in long fine strips, puts the solid piece underneath one on top and then makes each small piece coloured. The effect is of small tiny designs in red and white & green. The father is 68 and at 8 years they learn – it goes from father to son. The travail 1. Title of a story of which just a few lines are extant (see below, p. 311). 2. (Fr.) ‘ochre-coloured wood’. 3. (Fr.) local sycamore.

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is Italian and it comes from Sorrento, it is handed from father to son. They are du pays.1 One gets the pattern from one hole to another by a very fine saw – perfectly [. . .] a design of leaves roofs, birds and a [. . .] It is pressed into a small movable frame – and two pieces of white [. . .] or lemon wood are then entered into the dark wood – and then it is varnished added to the well polished. The boxes are made by the women. The whole family works and it is all made by hand. The Persones Tale he is a jabere and a gabbere2 And yet one has these ‘glimpses’before which all that one ever has written (what has one written) all (yes, all) that one ever has read, pales . . . The waves, as I drove home this afternoon – and the high foam, how it was suspended in the air before it fell . . . What is it that happens in that moment of suspension? It is timeless. In that moment (what do I mean) the whole life of the soul is contained. One is flung up – out of life – one is ‘held’ – and then, down, bright, broken, glittering on to the rocks, tossed back – part of the ebb and flow. I don’t want to be sentimental. But while one hangs, suspended in the air – held – while I watched the spray I was conscious for life of the white sky with a web of torn grey over it, of the slipping, sliding, slithering sea, of the dark woods blotted against the cape, of the flowers on the tree I was passing – and more – of a huge cavern where my selves (who were like ancient seaweed gatherers) mumbled, indifferent and intimate . . . and this other self apart in the carriage grasping the cold knob of her umbrella thinking of a ship, of ropes stiffened with white paint & the wet flapping oilskins of sailors . . . Shall one ever be at peace with oneself, ever quiet and uninterrupted – without pain – with the one whom one loves under the same roof? Is it too much to ask? There are moments when Dickens is possessed by this power of writing – he is carried away – that is bliss. It certainly is not shared

1. (Fr.) ‘born and bred here’. 2. ‘The Persones Prologue and the Persones Tale’ (‘The Parson’s Prologue’ and ‘The Parson’s Tale’, which is not so much a tale as a lengthy sermon in prose on ‘the right way to Jerusalem the Celestial’) feature at the end of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. Quoting Saint Ambrose and Saint Isidore, the Parson contrasts the truly repentant sinner and ‘a japer and a gabber’ (i.e. a trifler and foolish talker), who continues to commit sins he ought to repent.

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by writers today. For instance the death of Merdle1 – dawn fluttering upon the edge of night. One realises exactly the mood of the writer and how he wrote as it were for himself. It was not his will he was the fluttering dawn and he was Physician going to Bar. And again when the [. . .] maugre2 Second Helping. At mid-day the Walking Club streamed through the ancient beautiful gates and clattered over the cobblestone of the inn courtyard. They disturbed a great ring of blue and white pigeons pecking among the stones; away they flew with a soft clapping. Catherine Magnaldi Joseph Vigliecca Andre Botton Laure Blanchard. ‘Something to do with lilacs’ – an old air of France. Le temps des lilas et le temps des roses Ne reviendra plus ce printemps-ci Le temps des lilas et le temps des roses Est passé – le temps des oeillets aussi. Le vent a changé les cieux sont moroses Et nous n’irons pas couper et cueillir Les lilas en fleurs et les belles roses Le printemps est triste et ne pût fleurir. Oh, joyeux et doux printemps de l’année Qui vînt, l’an passé, nous ensoleiller Notre fleur d’amour est si bien fanée Las! que ton baiser ne peut l’éveiller. Et toi, que fais-tu? Pas de fleurs écloses Point de gai soleil ni d’ombrages frais; 1. Mr Merdle is Edmund Sparkler’s stepfather in Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1855–7). Formerly commanding a fortune and a thriving banking institution, Merdle’s unscrupulous investments lead to ruin, and he commits suicide. At the end of Chapter 25, when the physician travels at daybreak to the Merdles’ house to announce the news to Mrs Merdle, we read, ‘They walked there, the better to recover self-possession in the air; and the wings of day were fluttering the night when Physician knocked at the door.’ 2. An incomplete transcription or conjugation of the French verb ‘maugréer’: ‘to grumble’.

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1920 Le temps des lilas et le temps des roses Avec notre amour est mort à jamais.1

[NLC Notebook 4]

K.M.M. i.v.1920 The Baby by Katherine Mansfield Call for him once a week! with worn black button boots, like squashed fruits. ‘No’ he said, lowering his withered legs from the sofa & rubbing his knee joints, ‘I’ll wait a bit yet before I’m called for.’ She was pinning on her hat in the mirror above the mantelpiece, but when he said that she turned round & stared, a long pin in her hand. ‘I’m sure I don’t know what you mean’ she said loftily. Hansbury Mansions He sucked in his cheeks & rubbed away, blinking. Even as he thought this he collapsed, he fell sideways on the pillows, and suddenly . . . in a voice that he’d never heard before, a high queer rasping voice that got louder, angrier, shriller every moment, he began to cry . . . you know we’ve got you, she hissed. And he nodded his quick nod in queer approval. This pen simply must not get crossed. 1. An extremely precise transcription of the lyrical poem, ‘Le Temps des lilas et le temps des roses’ (The time of lilacs and the time of roses), by the French poet and musician, Maurice Boucher (1855–1929). The verses were made famous in France when they were set to music by Ernest Amadée Chausson (1855– 99), and included in his song-cycle, Poèmes de l’amour et la mer (Poems of Love and the Sea), Op. 19, no. 2. The gentle melancholy and wistfulness of the lyrics and music of ‘Le Temps des lilas’ made it an everyday favorite. A literal, non-rhyming translation runs as follows: The time of lilacs and the time of roses, / will not return this spring; / The time of lilacs and the time of roses / Has passed, and carnation time has too. // The winds have changed, the skies are drab, / And we will no longer run to pick / The flowering lilacs and the beautiful roses; / Spring is sad, and will flower no more. // Oh! joyous, sweet spring of the year / That came, last year, to bring us the sun, / The flower of our love has faded since then, / Weary, your kiss can no longer awaken it. // And what about you now? No blossoming flowers, / No gay sun or cool shadows; / The time of lilacs and the time of roses / And our love too are dead and gone.

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thereby the way we should eke it out would be by sharing it with those who need it less. The Pen Corner, Kingsway. J. Middleton Murry J. Middleton Murry Miss Katherine Mansfield There is no doubt that this is an excellent pen and I congratulate you on your choice. Hour £1 Waterman’s Font 9 carat. So enormous A Penny. A Writers Cramp. Katherine Mansfield Lady Ottoline Morrell John Middleton Murry Ça marche seule1 Have I made a mistake. Yes! Darling Bogey, Yes, there is more to be said for Sorley than I admitted to you, but until I began to talk about him to my enemy I wasn’t antiSorley as you thought. Really, really not. That’s the curse: you’re not Dear Darling, Forgive me, too. Letters to L.H.B. How beautiful little children are. Yes, I shall kneel before them and [Journal, 1954, p. 206]

‘Beside old Semyon he looked graceful and vigorous, but yet in his walk there was something just perceptible which betrayed in him a being already touched with decay, weak, and on the road to ruin’. (Tchehov: The Schoolmistress.)2 two jumpers crepe de chine skirt white stockings

1. (Fr.) ‘It works by itself.’ 2. From Chekhov’s ‘The Schoolmistress’, included in The Schoolmistress and Other Stories (1920), and translated by Constance Garnett.

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grey stockings blue dress pink camisole black knickers pink nightgown jacket handkerchiefs i.vii.1920. 2 Portland My dear Sydney,

Tuesday lunch Schiffs Sydney to dinner Tuesday Virginia Wed. afternoon Blundens dine Friday Monday. Boulestin1 [Notebook 25, qMS–1267]

9.vii.20. I should like to have a secret code to put on ‘record’ what I feel today. If I forget it may my right hand forget its cunning . . . the lifted curtain . . . the hand at the fire with the ring & stretched fingers . . . no, its snowing . . . the telegram to say he’s not . . . just the words arrive 8.31. But if I say more I’ll give myself away. B.O.C. 412.2 I must ask Doctor Sorapure what is the immediate treatment for and what are the symptoms of fractured base. 12.vii.20. More beautiful by far than a morning in Spring or Summer. The mist – the trees standing in it – not a leaf moves – not a breath stirs. There is a faint smell of burning. The sun comes slowly, slowly the room grows lighter. Suddenly, on the carpet there is a square of pale red light. The bird in the garden goes ‘snip – snip – snip’– a little 1. The French chef and writer, Marcel Boulestin (1878–1943), settled in London, where he ran a fashionable home decorating shop and wrote successful recipe books. He later became a highly reputed restaurateur. 2. At this point, KM returns to her diary and annotates her earlier entry, thus: ‘I wrote this because there is a real danger of forgetting that kind of intensity, & it won’t do. No, there is no danger of forgetting. 8.xii.1920.’

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wheezy like the sound of a knife grinder. The nasturtiums blaze in the garden; their leaves are pale. On the lawn, his paws tucked under him, sits the black and white cat. As he sits, dumb, staring, there comes that weak light – autumn. I cough and cough and at each breath a dragging boiling bubbling sound is heard. I feel that my whole chest is boiling. I sip water, spit, sip, spit. I feel I must break my heart. And I can’t expand my chest – it’s as though the chest had collapsed. Life is – getting a new breath. Nothing else counts. And Murry is silent, hangs his head, hides his face with his fingers as though it were unendurable. ‘This is what she is doing to me! Every fresh sound makes my nerves wince.’ I know he can’t help these feelings. But oh God! how wrong they are. If he could only, for a minute, serve me, help me, give himself up! I can so imagine an account by him of a ‘calamity’. . . I could do nothing all day. MY hands trembled. I had a sensation of UTTER cold. At times I felt the strain would be unbearable, at others a merciful numbness and so on. What a fate to be so self imprisoned!! What a ghastly fate. At such times I feel I never could get well with him. It’s like having a cannon ball tied to one’s feet when one is trying not to drown. It is just like that. Brett1 in her letters to Murry is unbalanced. This morning when she wrote how she wanted to rush into the cornfield – horrified me. And then he must smack her hand and she threatens to cry over him until he’s all wet. Poor wretch! She’s 37, hysterical, unbalanced, with a ghastly family tradition – and he had ‘awakened’ her. Her face is entirely changed: the mouth hangs open, the eyes are very wide, there is something silly and meaning in her smile which makes me cold. And then the bitten nails – the dirty neck – the film on the teeth! Whatever he may feel about it now the truth is she flattered him and got him! She listened and didn’t criticise & sat at his feet and worshipped and asked for the prophet’s help and he told her the old old tragedy. If Murry hadn’t met me which would have won? His vanity & self absorption would have delivered him into the arms of countless INFERIOR females (it’s always the 5th rate who play this ‘game’.) At the same time his honesty and his faith in Art might have saved him. It would have been a rare toss up. Look what happened last winter, par example, while I was away. X ‘thought him very distinguished’, Y ‘said she was frightened of him’ – and so forth. 1. Dorothy Brett (1883–1937) was an artist of aristocratic descent, who studied at the Slade School of Art and became associated with many members of the Bloomsbury Group; she was at times a close friend and regular correspondent of both KM and JMM.

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He was puffed up tremengous – and wouldn’t hear one single word contrary to his opinions. I’ll never forget it. He was furious at a sign of criticism. I wonder if the whole thing will be repeated this winter. I suppose so . . . . [Notebook 22, qMS–1265]

12 JULY MONDAY 4 p.m. injection at Harley Street. why ink in an actresses hand? Most unlikely. pass quite unregarded. your book isn’t re-al poetry. There was no need for you to trouble . . . We know you so well by reputation . . . Young precisians older hands Once again so pleased about Boston Agreeing on the subject of Miss Bison. Niagara in a barrel. Too sudden. Once a month – too definite. The letter. He had read it much later – – – It fascinated him to read it over – – – A flush forced [?] high on her cheek [Notebook 25, qMS–1267]

19.vii. Murry let fall this morning the fact that he had considered taking rooms with Brett at Thurlow Road this Winter. Good. Was their relationship friendship? Oh, no! He kissed her and held her arm and they were certainly conscious of a dash of something far more dangerous than l’amitié pure.1 And then he considered taking rooms with her . . . He said ‘Doesn’t Gertler live there too?’ But Gertler never had the very beginnings of such a relationship with Brett as Murry knows. I suppose one always thinks the latest shock is the worst shock. This is quite unlike any other I’ve ever suffered. The lack of sensitiveness as far as I am concerned – the selfishness of this staggers me. This is what I must remember when I am away. Murry thinks no more of me than of anybody else. I mean I am the same: the degree of his feeling is different but it’s the same feeling. I must remember he’s one of my friends – no more. Who could count on such a man! To plan all this at such a time and then on my return the first words I must 1. (Fr.) ‘pure friendship’.

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be nice to Brett. How disgustingly indecent. I am simply disgusted to my very soul!1 By Moonlight August 1920. [Journal, 1954, p. 206]

August 8 A. B. B.2 died August 8, 1918. ‘How she would have loved A party to-day! – Bright-hatted and gloved, With table and tray And chairs on the lawn! Her smiles would have shone With welcomings . . . But She is shut, she is shut From friendship’s spell In the jailing shell Of her tiny cell.’

(Thomas Hardy.)3

[Notebook 25, qMS–1267]

I hate this book so awfully!! ‘And if a man will consider life in its whole circuit, and see how superabundantly it is furnished with what is extraordinary 1. This essential passage, where KM reviews the deterioration of her relationship with JMM, has three additional comments in the margins, as she returned to the notebook and reread her entry. The annotations are dated thus: I’ve read this over today (8.xii.1920). And now I wouldn’t mind a straw if he went & lived at Thurlow Road. Why on earth not? I don’t love him less but I do love him differently. I don’t aspire to a personal life; I shall never know it. I must remind him to do so at Christmas. And again I read this over (9.vi.1921) and it seemed to me very stupid and strange that we should have hidden from each other. By stupid I mean of course stupid in me to write such stuff. And again (24.vii.1921). Neither stupid nor strange. We both failed. 2. KM’s mother, Annie Burnell Beauchamp. 3. The first stanza of Thomas Hardy’s ‘Lament’ (1912), in Satires of Circumstance. See above, p. 292.

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and beautiful and great, he shall soon know for what we were born.’1 Glenshwa [?] blushed I should hate to die ugly. He would go in and asking for a cup of tea He had an impulse to put his hand on the gate. But would he have? Why not? 1 choux fleur un morceau de veau 4 eggs 1 kilo de pommes de terres. [Journal, 1954, pp. 209–11]

‘Then the train rattled among the housetops, and among the ragged sides of houses torn down to make way for it, and over the swarming streets and under the fruitful earth. . . . A little more, and again it roared across the river, a great rocket: spurning the watery turnings and doublings with ineffable contempt, and going straight to its end, as Father Time goes to his. To whom it is no matter what living waters run high or low, reflect the heavenly lights and darknesses, produce their little growth of weeds and flowers, turn here, turn there, are noisy or still, are troubled or at rest, for their course has one sure termination, though their sources and devices are many. Then a carriage ride succeeded, near the solemn river, stealing away by night, as all tilings steal away, by night and by day, so quietly yielding to the attraction of the loadstone rock Eternity. . . (Our Mutual Friend.) Dickens on Death. It’s always the same gesture. What does it imply?2 The Wordsworths. ‘All the Journals contain numerous trivial details, which bear ample witness to the “plain living and high thinking” of the Wordsworth 1. From Longinus’ essay, ‘On the Sublime’. This is the only known work of the Greek master of rhetoric, whose name may not even be Longinus, and who lived in the first or second century AD. 2. From Book IV, Chapter 11, of Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, recounting Lightwood and Headstone’s journey to Wrayburn’s bedside when he is thought to be close to death.

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household – and, in this edition, samples of those details are given – but there is no need to record all the cases in which the sister wrote, “To-day I mended William’s shirts”, or “William gathered sticks”, or “I went in search of eggs”, etc. etc.’ (W. Knight: Introduction to Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journal)1 There is! Fool! ‘I went through the fields, and sat for an hour afraid to pass a cow. The cow looked at me, and I looked at the cow, and whenever I stirred the cow gave over eating’. (Dorothy Wordsworth.)2 ‘I have thoughts that are fed by the sun.’ (Dorothy Wordsworth.)3 It was Southey who made the charming remark that no house was complete unless it had in it a child rising six years and a kitten rising six months. Charles Lamb. ‘Dear Manning, – Certainly you could not have called at all hours from two till ten, for we have been only out of an evening Monday and Tuesday this week. But if you think you have, your thought shall go for the deed. We did pray for you on Wednesday night: Oysters unusually luscious – pearls of extraordinary magnitude formed in them. I have made bracelets of them – given them in clusters to ladies. Last night we went out in despite, because you were not to come at your hour. This night we shall be at home, so shall we certainly both Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Take your choice, mind I don’t say of one, but choose which evening you will not, and come the other four. Doors open at five o’clock. Shells forced about nine. Every gentleman smokes or not as he pleases. O! I forgot, bring the £10, for fear you should lose it. C. L.’4 A ‘darling’ letter!

1. William Knight wrote the prefatory note to the two-volume edition of Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journal, first published in 1897. His commentary on such voluntary omissions, which clearly inspire KM’s scorn, continues, ‘Nothing is omitted of any literary or biographical value’ (p. viii). 2. From Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journal (vol. 1, p. 102). 3. Dorothy Wordsworth is here quoting a line from a poem of her brother’s, ‘called to his mind by the dying away of the stunning of the waterfall when he got behind a stone’ (p. 111). 4. A letter from Charles Lamb to Thomas Manning, dated 15 November 1805.

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[Notebook 22, qMS–1265]

After the talk with Dunning1 there is a change. He woke and still with his eyes closed he turned & kissed her shoulder. That’s a good beginning? I believe that D. has the secret of my recovery and of J’s awakening. All that he spoke of yesterday . . . the terms were strange, but what he said was what she had known for a long time. He made the Casetta story plainer: I saw how it could be made to ‘fit’. But this short sketch for Boulestin2 must be extremely simple and yet decisive . . . It must not be in even the slightest degree ‘thin’. If I can include the glittering sheep, the pond, the At the Queen’s Hotel. The last Thursday. I am very tired. One must write a story about a doctor’s waiting room. The glass doors with the sun from outside shining through, the autumn trees pale and fine, the cyclamen – like wax. Now a cart shakes by. Think of the strange places that illness carries me into, the strange people one passes from hand to hand, the succession of black coated gentlemen, the men to whom she’d whispered 99, 44, 1–2–3, the servants she’d smiled at. The last waiting room, all before had been so cheerful. Then you don’t think my case is hopeless? The disease is of long standing but certainly not hopeless. This one, however, leaned back & said You really want to know? Yes of course. Oh you can be quite frank with me. Then I DO! The carriage came & drove her away, her head buried in her collar. Oh Bogey I can’t help laughing at the hymns & prayers at your lecture! Did YOU sing? I feel you were (I’d truly swear to it) specially 1. Miller Dunning was a friend of JMM’s, and a follower of Eastern religions and mysticism. 2. Marcel Boulestin (see above, p. 314) was compiling a de luxe anthology of short stories and sketches in French and English, which was published by Chelsea Book Club as New Keepsake in 1920. Rather than ‘At the Bay’, which KM seems to be alluding to here, he included her sketch, ‘The Black Cap’ (see CW2, pp. 27–31).

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mentioned in a prayer. Did you kneel down? And all those rubber tikis showed on your shoes.1 Oh dear me. Did you have a hymn book of your own or the parson’s? Signes cabalistiques. I often used to [think] what a horror they would have given Crusoe. The little heads were like pink fondants in a gilt lined chocolate box. It’s something I know. I must have heard it. Her head was wound with old purple grapes. The introductory music raking the hard soil of one’s heart & preparing it for fairy seed. The voices of the singers were like celestial gargling.2 Scene I. Housekeeper in the worst tradition. The Australian soldier – rattles on the stairs. His whole manner – & the loud voices. They should have been all vague & remote. The light should have been dim. (He’s very complicated Barrie but charming oh so charming!)3 Modern – quite modern. The same author married 16, married twice. Boy about 8 Very handsome – awfully sweet beautiful woman. Robert Loraine – splendid – terrible Fantasy – delightful. I like New York better it’s more noisy London so quiet I like plenty of Life. Act I Scene I. The clergyman is a little fantastic – the other man overacts. We’ll be good won’t we. Fantastic. 1. JMM’s note explains that ‘tikis’ refer to designs on the rubber soles of his shoes. KM would presumably have made the comparison, since the tiki is a carving in Maori culture, referring back to Tiki, the first man. 2. In this entry and the following lines, KM is referring to a performance of J. M. Barrie’s play, Mary Rose. These are followed by an extract from 1954, when KM appears to be reworking her spontaneous reactions as part of a review. J. M. Barrie (1860–1937) was a Scottish author and playwright, best remembered today for creating Peter Pan. Mary Rose premiered in London in April 1920. It tells the story of a child, Mary Rose, who disappears mysteriously while on a visit to a Scottish island, and then reappears three weeks later. As an adult, she returns to the island and disappears again, returning home decades later but showing no signs of having changed in the interim. 3. The parenthetical comments and those that follow would seem to be KM recording snippets of the audience’s conversations around her, rather than recording events on stage, in a manner reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s short story, ‘The String Quartet’, for example.

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The scene on the island is terrific. It is a terrible idea.1 And as soon as it was over the tea the maid of the mountains – quick quick quick – & the heads The old heads & the young heads. ‘How he ever thought of it is beyond me.’ [Journal, 1954, p. 214]

A few days ago I went to see Mr. Barrie’s as-successful-as-ever play Mary Rose, and what impressed me chiefly were the extraordinary efforts considered necessary to prepare the audience for something strange, something out of the common, something which does not happen every day in that block of residential flats over the way. To begin with, while the lights still glared, the orchestra banged the good old ‘Gondoliers’2 about our heads, to such good effect that the lady in front of me did pause, did say to her friend: ‘My dear, don’t I know that? Isn’t it Carmen?’3 And then, before the curtain rose, the shaded lights, one by one, fainted, failed, gave up their little souls, and left us in the dark exposed to a kind of emotional raking process by the violins and violas, whereby the hard stony soil of our reluctant hearts was broken up and prepared for the magic seed the wizard should scatter. Voices joined the instruments, wordless, rising and falling in what sounded to be celestial gargling. . . . [Notebook 22, qMS–1265]

£50 for something worth about 2d. I bought things for £1000 – about 2d for 10d. But they don’t progress do they. They don’t go out into the world. Is that good for a country. Oh a lovely life I should love my husband to be a farmer! But the natives are nice aren’t they when they are young. First it was the linnet & then the sea. 1. Act II of Mary Rose is set on an island in the Outer Hebrides. 2. The Gondoliers is an opera by Gilbert and Sullivan, first performed in 1889. The rousing music would often be used by orchestras warming up or creating an atmosphere. W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911) and Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900) were the most popular writers of Victorian light operas, Gilbert providing the libretto and Sullivan the music. 3. Carmen (1875) is an opera by Bizet based on a story by Mérimée. The music is memorably stirring, particularly the famous ‘Toreador Song’, which is doubtless what the comic confusion here is alluding to. Georges Bizet (1838–75) was one of the nost popular composers of French opera and orchestral suites in his era.

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Trench no. 30. The day of the attack. I got the orders by phone & scrambled off with them to my officer – putting a 2 franc piece down my collar, inside my shirt for luck. We all set [off] together. I knew it was all up with me. So did another. Our number was up. The feeling of waste. My hand on the hilt of a revolver. You can always turn it on yourself. Some people are really. The man who keeps improving his charwoman is 30 francs to the good. It’s always the nearest man who’s killed. I chose a safer position. If I could get back the little grave should have what he wanted . . . But I shan’t get back. They suggest a slight wound – but not for me. Act I. Scene II. King Richard III. Vouchsafe to wear this ring. To take is not to give.1 I don’t want you to be other than yourself. But if I am myself I won’t do what you ask me to do. . . I feel it’s forcing me. It’s not me; it’s not my geste. They looked at each other & for some reason they smiled – actually smiled. I really & truly don’t know what I want to do. Life isn’t so simple as all that, you know . . . And the music went on, gay, soothing, reassuring. All will be well, said the music. Life is so easy – – so easy – why suffer . . . He shivered faintly & held up a paw – but he seemed to smile . . . But if you knew. I am looking out of a dark dark net. It is only accident that it’s I sitting beside him. This is the music where the elephants come in & drink out of bottles. The clown comes in & takes the bottles away & drinks himself. Smith Allabon House, Highway Cres. [?] J. Lewin Payne, 18 Portland Place. [Notebook 25, qMS–1267]

Bought and Paid for. A bouquet – all her expenses – sometimes only vegetables to bring away. Fortune teller & crystal gazer. Can’t you help me? Can’t you? But even while she asked him she smiled as if it didn’t matter so much whether he could or couldn’t. My nature . . . my nerves . . . the question is whether I shall change 1. From an exchange between Gloucester and Lady Anne in Richard III, I, 2.

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or not. Personally . . . you see him? And he has a friend, a confidant, an old schoolfellow, small, shabby, with a wooden leg whom he has rediscovered. He’s married. The friend enters the new menage. Little by little he gets to know the wife. No tragedy. He feels like a onelegged sparrow. Talking together in the house before she comes in. ‘Is that you Beaty? Can we have some tea?’ Let the sparrow – let the sparrow. Suffer the sparrow to . . .1 Charades. Roger of course commits suicide cuts his throat with a paper knife & gurgles his life away. Listen to me. I have been married to you for 15 years . . . The Dud. This is in Society. We know it all. Then Wyndham is his friend & in his trouble appeals to him – in vain. One mustn’t forget his writing table, so exquisite, and his graceful style of reply. To write a letter was a little act of ritual . . . His rooms are off Baker Street – Upper Gloucester Place, in fact. The daughter of the watch smith. Her piano playing. Her weak heart, queer face, queer voice, awful clothes. The violets in their garden. Her little mother & father – the scene at the baths – the coldness, the blueness of the children, her size in the red twill bathing dress trimmed with white braid. The steps down to the water – the rope across. Edie has a brother Siegfried. 17. You never know whether he has begun to shave or not. He and Edie walk arm in arm . . . Her Sunday hat is trimmed beyond words. Oh that tree at the corner of May Street.2 I forgot it until this moment. It was dark and hung over the street like a great shadow. The father was fair & youthful to look at. He was a clockmaker. Lindsey . . Swaith . . Charlie Sinclair . . Page . . Edie Bengel Duncan . . Harcourt . .

1. KM is possibly mixing two echoes from the Gospels here – the invitation to look at the sparrows and so understand God’s love for his creatures, and the injunction to ‘suffer the children to come unto me’. See Matthew 6: 26 and 19: 4. 2. A street in Thorndon, Wellington, close to KM’s family home at 75 Tinakori Road.

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[MS–Papers–4006–8]

. . . I kissed her. Her flesh felt cold, pale, soft. I thought of nuns who have prayed all night in cold churches . . . All her warmth and colour and passion she had offered up in prayer in cold, ancient churches . . . She was chill, severe, pale; the light flickered in her raised eyes like the light of candles – her skirt was worn shiny over her peaked knees: she smelt faintly of incense. ‘No, Father. Yes, Father. Do you think so, Father?’ (But still haven’t said what I want to say.) The Doll: Well, look, muttered Miss Sparrow – I’ve nothing to be ashamed of. Look as much as you like – I defy you. It’s what I’ve wanted all my life. She cried brokenly – and now I’ve got it. I defy you. I defy the world! And she drew herself up in front of the window, proudly, proudly, her eyes flashed, her lips gleamed, pressing the doll to her flat bosom. She was the Unmarried Mother. 18.x.1920. Of course I can’t write that: I’m surprised to have made such a crude note. That’s the raw idea as they say. What I ought to do, though is to write it, somehow, immediately, even if it’s not good enough to print. My chief fault, my overwhelming fault is in not writing it out. Well, now that I know it (and the disease is of very long standing) why don’t I begin at least to follow a definite treatment? It is my experience that once an ‘evil’ is recognised any delay in attempting to eradicate it is fatally weakening. And I who love order, with my mania for the ‘clean sweep’, for every single thing being ‘ship-shape’ . . . I to know there’s such an ugly spot in my mind! Weeds flourish in neglect. I must keep my garden open to the light and in order. I must at all costs plant these bulbs and not leave them (oh shameful!) to rot on the garden paths! Today (October 18th. 20) is Monday. I have raised my right hand & sworn. Am I ever happy except when overcoming difficulties? Never. Am I ever free from the sense of guilt, even? Never. After I had finished that slight sketch The Young Girl1 wasn’t there a moment which surpasses all other moments? Oh, yes. Then – why do you hesitate? How can you! I take my oath – not one day shall pass without I write something – original.

1. See CW2, pp. 230–5.

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[Journal, 1954, p. 180]

A Recipe: Wingley pudding. Fill a glass dish with cream. Put it on the floor and go out, shutting the door, with me left in the room. Wing [MS Papers 4006–7]

A Dream. November 1st. Walking up a dark hill with high iron fences at the sides of the road and immense trees over. I was looking for a midwife, Mrs Nightingale. A little girl, barefoot, with a handkerchief over her head pattered up and put her chill hand in mine; she would lead me. A light showed from a general shop. Inside a beautiful, fair, angry young woman directed me up the hill & to the right. ‘You should have believed me’ said the child and dug her nails into my palm. There reared up a huge wall with a blank notice plastered on it. That was the house. In a low room sitting by a table a dirty yellow and black rug over her knees an old hag sat. She had a grey handkerchief on her head. Beside her on the table there was a jar of onions and a fork. I explained. She was to come to Mother. Mother was very delicate: her eldest daughter was 31 and she had heart disease: so please come up at once! ‘Has she any adhesions?’ muttered the old hag & she speared an onion, ate it & rubbed her nose. ‘Oh yes,’ I put my hand on my breast, ‘many many plural [sic] adhesions’. ‘Ah that’s bad that’s very bad’ said the crone, bunching up the rug so that through the fringe I saw her square slippers. ‘But I can’t come. I’ve a case at four o’clock’. At that moment a healthy, bonny young woman came in with a bundle. She sat down by the midwife & explained ‘Jinnie has had hers already’. She unwound the bundle too quickly – a new born baby with round eyes fell forward on her lap. I felt the pleasure of the little girl beside me – a kind of quiver. The young woman blushed and lowered her voice. ‘I got her to . . .’ and here she paused to find a very medical private word to describe washing: ‘to navigate with a bottle of English water,’ she said ‘but it isn’t all away yet’. Mrs Nightingale told me to go to her friend, Madame Léger, who lived on the terrace with a pink light before her house. I went. The terrace of houses [was] white & grey blue in the moonlight with dark pines down the road. I saw the exquisite pink light, but just then a clanking sound behind me & there was the little girl, bursting with breathlessness, hugging in her arms a huge black bag. ‘Mrs Nightingale says you forgot this.’

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So I was the midwife. I walked on thinking: I’ll go and have a look at the poor little soul but it won’t be for a long time yet. [MS–Papers–11326–025]

The pages suffer from overloading as if he was sent on the production of some vast pageant. We are deafened with the clamour of the construction. His imaginative invention stops there when he comes to the characters. A shredding of the historical cabbage into the pot. – sensuous vision– being The landscape never quietens – hard extravagance of style – a fusion of intrigue with historical inventions.1 [MS–Papers–11326–007]

Sir

Dec 9 1920

re abatement and the questions in that clause claimant does not remember when it was or where it was or to what office her claim was sent. I advised her therefore to leave all unanswered Was that right? KM

(Bet I don’t get one shill of that £7. She’s furious with me!!!!!) [Journal, 1954, pp. 221–6]

Coleridge’s Table Talk.2 ‘It is intolerable when men, who have no other knowledge, have not even a competent understanding of that world in which they are always living, and to which they refer everything’. 1. The tone and certain expressions in this paragraph suggest that these are rough notes inspired by KM’s reading of DHL’s The Lost Girl (1920). The finished review was published on 17 December 1920 (see CW3, pp. 707–9). 2. The following quotations (interspersed with comments by KM) are taken from Specimens of the Table Talk of the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 1, first published in 1835.

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Hear! Hear! ‘Although contemporary events obscure past events in a living man’s life, yet, so soon as he is dead, and his whole life is a matter of history, one action stands out as conspicuously as another’. Totally wrong! ‘Intense study of the Bible will keep any writer from being vulgar in point of style’. In point of language. ‘I, for one, do not call the sod under my feet my country. But language, religion, laws, government, blood – identity in these makes men of one country’. The sod under my feet makes mine. ‘“Most women have no character at all”, said Pope, and meant it for satire. Shakespeare, who knew man and woman much better, saw that it, in fact, was the perfection of woman to be characterless. Everyone wishes a Desdemona or Ophelia for a wife – creatures who, though they may not always understand you, do always feel you and feel with you’. Now you are being silly. Coleridge’s Lectures on Shakespeare.1 Stage Illusion. ‘Not only are we never absolutely deluded – or anything like it, but the attempt to cause the highest delusion possible to beings in their senses sitting in a theatre, is a gross fault, incident only to low minds, which, feeling that they cannot affect the heart or head permanently, endeavour to call forth the momentary affections. There ought never to be more pain than is compatible with coexisting pleasure, and to be amply repaid by thought’.2 That is superb. Tchehov v. Barrie. Think here of The Cherry Orchard, where orchard, birds, etc., are quite unnnecessary. The whole effect of dawn is produced by blowing out the candle. An author should ‘have felt so deeply on certain subjects, or in consequence of certain imaginations, as to make it almost a necessity 1. The following quotations (interspersed with comments by KM) are taken from Coleridge’s Essays and Lectures on Shakespeare and Some Other Old Poets and Dramatists, first published as a collected edition in 1907. 2. From the chapter, ‘Progress of the Drama’, in which a lengthy section deals with stage illusion, imagination and delusion.

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of his nature to seek for sympathy – no doubt, with that honourable desire of permanent action which distinguishes genius’.1 ‘It is to be lamented that we judge of books by books, instead of referring what we read to our own experience’. ‘The second . . . distinct cause of this diseased disposition of taste [i.e. perceiving strangeness in the language of the poetic drama where we should feel exultation] is. . . the security, the comparative equability and ever-increasing sameness of human life’. No! No! No! ‘In his very first productions, Shakespeare projected his mind out of his own particular being, and felt, and made others feel, on subjects no way connected with himself, except by force of contemplation and that sublime faculty by which a great mind becomes that on which it meditates’.2 Thou hast said it, Coleridge! ‘Or again imagination acts by so carrying on the eye of the reader as to make him almost lose the consciousness of words, – to make him see everything flashed, as Wordsworth has grandly and appropriately said, – Flashed upon that inward eye. Which is the bliss of solitude.3 And this without exciting any painful or laborious attention, without any anatomy of description, (a fault not uncommon in descriptive poetry) – but with the sweetness and easy movement of nature’. ‘There are men who can write passages of deepest pathos and even sublimity on circumstances personal to themselves and stimulative of their own passions; but they are not, therefore, on this account poets’. Oh, Coleridge! ‘It is my earnest desire – my passionate endeavour – to enforce at various times and by various arguments and instances the close and 1. This quotation and the two that follow are from the chapter ‘The Drama Generally and the Public Taste’. Coleridge is here comparing the dramatic effects of elegant, highly ornamental language and less elevated but more deeply felt spoken words. 2. This quotation and the three that follow are from the chapter, ‘Shakespeare, a Poet Generally’. 3. Coleridge is here quoting from the final stanza of Wordsworth’s 1807 poem, ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’: ‘For oft when on my couch I lie / In vacant or in pensive mood, / They flash upon the inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude; / And then my heart with pleasure fills / And dances with the daffodils.’

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reciprocal connexion of just taste with pure morality. Without that acquaintance with the heart of man, or that docility and childlike gladness to be made acquainted with it, which those only can have who dare look at their own hearts – and that with a steadiness which religion only has the power of reconciling with sincere humility; – without this, and the modesty produced by it, I am deeply convinced that no man, however wide his erudition, however patient his antiquarian researches, can possibly understand, or be worthy of understanding the writings of Shakespeare’. Thou – thou art the man with whom I would speak. Should we mean the same by religion? We should not quarrel. (October 21, 1920.) ‘Hamlet’s wildness is but half false; he plays that subtle trick of pretending to act only when he is very near really being what he acts’.1 Profound. ‘Banquo: The earth hath bubbles, as the water has And these are of them: – Whither are they vanished? Macbeth: Into the air; and what seemed corporal, melted As breath into the wind. – Would they had staid! 2 Is it too minute to notice the appropriateness of the simile “as breath”, etc., in a cold climate?’ No; it’s perfect. Coleridge on Hamlet. ‘Anything finer than this conception and working out of a great character is merely impossible. Shakespeare wished to impress upon us the truth, that action is the chief end of existence – that no faculties of intellect, however brilliant, can be considered valuable, or indeed otherwise than as misfortunes, if they withdraw us from, or render us repugnant to action, and lead us to think and think of doing, until the time has elapsed when we can do anything effectually. In enforcing this moral truth, Shakespeare has shown the fullness and force of 1. From the chapter, ‘Notes on Hamlet’. 2. From the chapter, ‘Notes on Macbeth’. Coleridge’s full sentence reads, ‘Compare [Macbeth’s] eagerness, – the keen eye with which he has pursued the Witches’ evanishing “Speak, I charge you!” with the easily satisfied mind of the self-uninterested Banquo: [. . .] and then Macbeth’s earnest reply [. . .].’

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his powers; all that is amiable and excellent in nature is combined in Hamlet, with the exception of one quality. He is a man living in meditation, called upon to act by every motive human and divine, but the great object of his life is defeated by continually resolving to do, yet doing nothing but resolve’.1 Who could understand that better than thou, Coleridge? I have no doubt that thou wert accusing thyself. . . And yet I wonder whether all great men, however developed their power of action, do not always think thus of themselves. They are ridden by the desire to act, and the performance is only the step to another . . . In another sense Fleance always escapes. (Or was that because Macbeth merely employed his murderers?) Be that as it may, Macbeth holds this phrase which has in it every faintest atom of the feelings of a writer: This restlessness of ecstasy. This book is certainly a great treasure. But I like to ‘record’ that there is much in it which was suited only to its time. I feel we have advanced very far since the days of Coleridge, and that he (because he is so restrained and handicapped by his audience) would have been far more enlightening about Shakespeare to-day. Keats’s Letters. ‘When I have been, or supposed myself in health . .’.2 ‘How astonishingly (here I must premise that illness, as far as I can judge in so short a time, has relieved my mind of a load of deceptive thoughts and images, and makes me perceive things in a truer light), – how astonishingly does the chance of leaving the world impress a sense of its natural beauties upon us! Like poor Falstaff, though I do not “babble”, I think of green fields; I muse with the greatest affection on every flower I have known since my infancy – their shapes and colours are as new to me as if I had just created them with a superhuman fancy. It is because they are connected with the most thoughtless and the happiest moments of our lives. I have seen foreign flowers in hot-houses, of the most beautiful nature, but I do not care a straw for them. The simple flowers of our Spring are what I want to see again’. (February 16, 1820.) ‘Nothing is so bad as want of health – it makes one envy scavengers and cinder-sifters’. (August 23, 1820.)3 1. This is the closing section of ‘The Twelfth Lecture’, which is the final chapter of the book. 2. This quotation and the one that follows are from a letter written in London to John Rice. 3. From a letter written in London to his sister, Fanny Keats, whose previous letter recounted her recent health problems.

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‘Well may you exclaim, how selfish to wish me to be unhappy. You must be so if you love me. Upon my soul, I can be contented with nothing else. If you would really what is call’d enjoy yourself at a Party – if you can smile in people’s faces, and wish them to admire you now – you never have, nor ever will love me . . . I wish you seriously to look over my letters kind and unkind and consider whether the Person who wrote them can be able to endure much longer the agonies and uncertainties which you are so peculiarly made to create’. (May, 1820.)1 ‘They talk of my going to Italy. ’Tis certain I shall never recover if I am to be so long separate from you’. (July 5, 1820.) Oh, hear it! [MS–Papers–4006–8]

14:XII:1920.

Singing

Madame Lavena

kissed & kissed the dark, sweet smelling hand with the silver ring. Pa-pa! Pa-pa! the baby became covered with inkspots & served her as a little reminder for days & days of the things she had forgotten to say and the things she might have said so differently! (here he used to sit & sometimes on the path below there sat a small white & yellow cat with a tiny flattened face. It sat very still & its little peaked shadow lay beside it . . . This little cat never ran straight. It wound its way along the path, skirting the tufts of grass, crept now by the fence, now to the side of a rubbish heap & its little paws seemed to touch the ground as lightly as possible as though it were afraid of being followed – traced.) I shan’t say it like that. It’s only a note. But Ah my darling how often I have watched your small silent progress. I shall not forget you, my little cat, as you ran along your beat on this whirling earth. When Jean-Paul was undressed his breast was like a small cage of bent bamboos. And she hated to see it. ‘Cover yourself!’ & he shot his small arms into his woollen shirt.

1. Both this letter and the one that follows are from a series of very tormented letters from Keats to Fanny Brawne in 1820, in which he ardently desires her love yet renounces it, knowing that he would soon die of tuberculosis.

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[Journal, 1954, pp. 226–7]

December 16 ‘As soon as you speak of male and female – for instance, of the fact that the female spider, after fertilization devours the male – his eyes glow with curiosity, his face brightens, and the man revives in fact. All his thoughts, however noble, lofty or neutral they may be, have all one point of resemblance. You walk along the street and meet a donkey, for instance. . .. “Tell me, please,” he asks, “what would happen if you mated a donkey with a camel?” And his dreams! Has he told you of his dreams? It is magnificent! First, he dreams that he is married to the moon, then that he is summoned before the police and ordered to live with a guitar’. (Tchehov: The Duel.)1 Oh, darling Tchehov! I was in misery to-night – ill, unhappy, despondent, and you made me laugh . . . and forget, my precious friend! The Stranger. ‘You merely find yourself in the old position of trying to change me. And I refuse to be changed. I won’t change. If I don’t feel these things, I don’t feel them, and there’s an end of it’. For a moment he stood there, cold, frigid, grasping the doorhandle, staring not at her, but over her head. He looked like a stranger who had opened her door by accident, and felt it necessary for some reason or other, to explain the accident before he closed it again and went out of her life for ever. [MS–Papers–4006–11]

The courier was so late. She rang and asked the eternal déjà passé & heard the eternal ‘pas encore Madame’.2 At last Armand appeared with a letter from him & the papers. The letter. She read – she read to ‘don’t give me up entirely’. When she read those words it happened again – again there seemed to be a dreadful loud shaking & trembling, her heart leaped, she sank down in the bed. She began to weep and could not stop. What was he made of – to talk of them giving each other up. The cruel – the ghastly ice-cold cruelty. Never say again you have imagination – never say you have the capacity to love and that you know pity. You have said things to me that have wounded me for ever. I must go on but I’m wounded for ever by you. 1. From a long speech by Samoylenko, the gruff but compassionate doctor in ‘The Duel’. KM is quoting from the translation by Constance Garnett in the 1916 collection, The Duel and Other Stories. 2. (Fr.) ‘not yet, Madame’.

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The first bell rang. She got up. She began to dress, crying & cold. The second bell. She sat down & steeled herself – her throat ached, ached. She powdered herself thickly & went downstairs. In the ascenseur: Armand cherchez-moi une voiture pour deux heures juste.1 And then 1 hour and a quarter in the brilliant glaring noisy salle, sipping wine to stop crying & seeing all the animals crack up the food. The waitress kept jerking her chair offering food. It was no good. She left & went upstairs but that was fatal. Have I a home? A little cat? Am I any man’s wife? Is it all over? He never tells me a thing – never a thing – just all those entirely self-absorbed letters and now just these notes. What will come next? He asks if I believe he loves me & says ‘don’t give me up’ but as though perfectly prepared for it. She wrote out the telegram. He is killing me, killing me. He wants to be free – that’s all. She dressed & went downstairs into the horrible hall because there with the monde2 drinking coffee & cigarettes she dare not cry. A little brougham drove up with an old dragging man. She got in. A la poste.3 Oh these little broughams, what I have gone through in them – the blue buttoned interior the blue cords & ivory tassels, all, all. She leaned back & lifted her veil & dried her tears. But it was no use. The post office was full. She had to wait in a queue for the telegrams among horrible men who shouted over her shoulder – horrible men. And now – where? A dose of sal volatile4 at the chemist. While he made it up she walked quickly up & down the shop twisting her hands. There was a box of Kolynos. It said Jack. Jack in her room, talking about the foam, saying he’d leave his. Four francs seventyfive. She bought and drank the mixture, & now – where. She got into the cab, the old man hung at the door. She couldn’t speak. Suddenly down the road on the opposite, looking very grave, came Jinnie. She crossed over & taking her hand said ‘Deo gratias’.5 And then was silent a moment. Then she said suddenly ‘Come along & see Rendall now. Let’s fix it now this moment.’ They waited in a very quiet room rich with books and old dark coloured prints & dark highly polished furniture. Jinnie went out for a preliminary talk & then came back for her and they entered the doctor’s room. He was short, dry, with a clipped beard & fine 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

(Fr.) ‘In the lift: Armand, get me a carriage for two o’clock on the dot.’ (Fr.) ‘people’. (Fr.) ‘To the post office.’ (Fr.) ‘smelling salts’. (Latin) ‘Thanks be to God.’ The terms are used as an expression of thanksgiving towards the end of the Catholic mass.

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shrewd eyes. A fire burned, there were books everywhere – German books too, reminding her of Croft Hill.1 Jinnie stayed while the long familiar careful examination went on again. The doctor took infinite pains. When he had done she dressed & Jinnie said ‘Doctor it’s the desire of my life to cure this – little friend of mine. You must let me have her – you must let me do it’. And after a pause which the other thought final he said ‘I think it would be ideal for her to be with you. She ought not to have to suffer noise and the constant sight of repellent people. She is highly sensitive & her disease – of such long standing – has increased it a thousandfold’. He was quiet, grave, gentle. Oh, if they could have known or seen my heart that had been stabbed & stabbed. But she managed to smile & thank the doctor & then Jinnie put her back into the brougham & it was arranged she would leave in a week. All that afternoon she had been seeing wallflowers. Let me never have a sprig of wallflowers if ever I have a garden. Oh anguish of Life! Oh bitter bitter life! He just threw her away – well ‘don’t give me up entirely.’ That reminded her of wallflowers & Shakespeare. Yes how in A Winter’s Tale Perdita refused gillyflowers in her garden. ‘They call them nature’s bastards’.2 She came back into her room & lay down, it was like Bavaria3 again – but worse worse – & now she could not take a drug – or anything. She must just bear it and go on. [MS–Papers–4006–8]

I should like this to be accepted as my confession. Suffering. There is no limit to human suffering. When one thinks: ‘now I have touched the bottom of the sea, now I can go no deeper’ – one goes deeper. And so it is for ever. I thought last year in Italy any shadow more would be Death, but this year has been so much more terrible that I think with affection of the Casetta! Suffering is boundless – it is eternity. One pang is eternal torment. Physical suffering is – child’s play. To have one’s breast crushed by a great stone – one could laugh! 1. JMM identifies Croft Hill as their doctor in London. 2. When living at the shepherd’s cottage in IV, 4, of A Winter’s Tale, Perdita describes autumn flowers in the following terms: ‘the fairest flowers of the season / Are our carnations and streak’d gillyvors, / Which some call nature’s bastards.’ 3. KM is here referring to her stay in Bavaria in 1909, where she was taken by her mother and where she subsequently gave birth to a stillborn child.

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I do not want to die without leaving a record of my belief that suffering can be overcome. For I do believe it. What must one do? There is no question of what Jack calls passing beyond it: this is false. One must submit. Do not resist. Take it. Be overwhelmed. Accept it fully – make it part of Life. Everything in Life that we really accept undergoes a change. So suffering must become Love. This is the mystery. This is what I must do. I must pass from personal love which has failed me to greater love. I must give to the whole of Life what I gave to him. This present agony will pass – if it doesn’t kill. It won’t last. Now I am like a man who has had his heart torn out – but – bear it – bear it. As in the physical world so in the spiritual world – pain does not last for ever. It is only so terribly acute now. It is as though a ghastly accident had happened. If I can cease reliving all the shock and horror of it, cease going over it, I will get stronger. Here, for a strange reason, there rises the figure of Doctor Sorapure.1 He was a good man. He helped me not only to bear pain but he suggested that perhaps bodily ill health is necessary, is a repairing process – and he was always telling me to consider how man plays but a part in the history of the world. My simple kindly doctor was pure of heart as Tchekhov is pure of heart. But for these ills one is one’s own doctor. If ‘suffering’ is not a repairing process I will make it so. I will learn the lesson it teaches. These are not idle words. These are not the consolations of the sick. Life is a mystery. The fearful pain of these letters – of the knowledge that Jack wishes me dead – and of his killing me – will fade. I must turn to work. I must put my agony into something – change it – ‘sorrow shall be changed into Joy.’ It is to lose oneself more utterly – to love more deeply – to feel oneself part of Life – not separate. Oh Life! accept me – make me worthy – teach me – I write that. I look up. The leaves move in the garden, the sky is pale, I catch myself weeping. It is hard – it is hard to make a good death! And the horrible vulgar letters of this woman about ‘John’s fou rire’2 and so on, and his cruel insulting letter about ‘no physical attraction’ (!!) ‘I think she is in love with me’ and so on – were they necessary? He now claims his right not to suffer on my account any more. Oh God! How base in its selfishness. But no no. I must not blame him any more and I must not go back. Thus was it. Let it be. To live – to live – that is all – and to leave Life on this earth as Tchekhov left Life and Tolstoi. 1. Dr Victor Edgar Sorapure (see above, p. 284). 2. (Fr.) ‘irrepressible laughter’.

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After a dreadful operation I remember that when I thought of the pain of having stitches out I used to cry. Every time I felt it again & winced & it was unbearable. That is what one must control. Queer! The two people left are Tchekhov – dead – and unheeding indifferent Doctor Sorapure. They are the two good men I have known. Katherine Mansfield 19.xii.1920. [Notebook 35, qMS–1269]

Notes: Personal Isola Bella. December 27th. When I stuck the small drawing to the side of the mirror frame I realised that the seal – the mark – the cachet rouge1 – had been set on the room. It had then become the room of those two – and not her room any more. It is not that the room was dead before, but how it has gained in life! Whence has come the tiny bouquet of tangerine fruits, the paste pot on the writing table, the fowl’s feather stuck in Ribni’s hair,2 the horn spectacles on the Chinese embroidery. The ‘order’ in which I live is not changed, but enriched – in some strange way it is enlarged. This is en effet3 just the effect of Jack’s mind upon mine. Mysterious fitness of our relationship! And all those things which he does impose on my mind please me so deeply that they seem to be natural to me. It is all part of this feeling that he and I, different beyond the dream of difference, are yet an organic whole. We are, as I said yesterday, the two sides of the medal – separate, distinct, and yet making one. I do not feel that I need another to fulfil my being and yet having Jack I possess something that without him I would lack. In fact we are – apart from everything else – each other’s critic in that he ‘sees’ me – I see myself reflected as more than I appear and yet not more than I AM and so, I believe, it is with him. So to be together is apart from all else an act of faith in ourselves. . . . I went out into the garden just now. It is starry and mild. The leaves of the palm are like down-drooping feathers; the grass looks soft, unreal, like moss. The sea sounded, and a little bell was ringing, and one fancied – was it real, was it imaginary – one heard a body 1. (Fr.)’the red wax seal’. 2. KM had a Japanese doll named ‘Ribni’, after the hero of the short story, ‘Captain Ribnikov’, by Alexander Kuprin. KM and Koteliansky translated the story in 1916. 3. (Fr.) ‘in effect’.

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of sound, one heard all the preparations for night from within the houses. Someone brings in wood from the dark, lamp-stained yard, the evening meal is prepared, the charcoal is broken, the dishes are clattered, there is a soft movement on the stairs & in the passages & doorways. In dusky rooms where the shutters are closed the women, grave & quiet, turn down the beds and see that there is water in the water jugs. Little children are cheeping. Does it always happen that while you look at one star you feel the other stars are dancing, flickering, changing places – almost playing a game on purpose to bewilder you. It is strange that there are times when I feel the stars are not at all solemn: they are secretly gay – I feel this tonight. I sat on the cane chair and leaned against the wall. I thought of Jack contained in the little house against which I leaned – within reach – within call. I remembered there was a time when this thought was a distraction. Oh it might have been a sweet distraction – but there it was! It took away from my power to work . . . I, as it were, made him my short story. But that time belongs to the Past . . . One has passed beyond it. . . . I thought also of the Princess B.1 It’s a bit bewildering – her unlikeness to the faces ‘we’ recognise or would recognise. She has a quick rapacious look – in fact she made me think of a gull with an absolutely insatiable appetite for bread, and all her vitality, her cries, her movements, her wheelings depend upon the person on the bridge who carries the loaf. This would of course be hidden. But this is what she is when she is really she and not ‘enchanted.’ . . . But the champagne was no good at all. It might have been writing water. I had to drink it because it was there, but there was something positively malicious in the way the little bubbles hurled themselves to the rim, danced, broke – they seemed to be jeering at me. . . . Does one ever know? One never knows. She realised how it would be to ask the question: ‘What are you thinking of?’ And yet if she did not ask the question she would never be sure he was not thinking of . . . Even if she asked it how could she be certain he did not make up the answer. Peace of mind. What is peace of mind? Did I ever have it. It seems ‘yes’ and yet perhaps that is only deception. But at Bandol for instance or 1. Princess Elizabeth Bibesco (1897–1945) was a writer, who met JMM when she submitted a story to the Athenaeum, and subsequently made advances to him. She was the daughter of Margot Tennant and Henry Asquith (Prime Minister of Great Britain, 1908–16), and was married to a Romanian diplomat, Prince Antoine Bibesco.

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even Hampstead – Ah – who knows? Peace of mind. The other will not give up his secret. What is it? He evades the answer. ‘I swear on my honour’, ‘look here I’m absolutely in the dark’. She cannot believe and yet she has to believe – she does not believe. The letters disappear. All the other letters are left on the table but not those. Why? I am to forget everything – to behave as though everything has not been. But I can’t. Because I don’t know what has been. I only know he denies a wrong (not an obvious wrong) which was committed. It must have been committed. People don’t write like that pour rien – de l’amitié pure.1 So whenever I look at him and whenever I am with him there is that secret and I can’t give him all I long to give him nor can I rest in him because of it. I have no abiding place. Peace of mind. Yes, I had it when I was first here. Yes, I had it fully when I wrote Miss Brill. No, I’ve been poisoned by these ‘letters’. How can he know someone so ‘strange’ to me? To us? Not only know her but cherish her? Accounts with Jack (temporary) [Journal, 1954, pp. 230–2]

In the white lace, the spreading veil and the pearls, she looked like a gull. But a quick hungry gull with an absolutely insatiable appetite for bread. ‘Come, feed me! Feed me!’ said that quick glare. The Change. For a long time she said she did not want to change anything in him, and she meant it. Yet she hated things in him, and wished they were otherwise. Then she said she did not want to change anything in him and she meant it. And the dark things that she had hated she now regarded with indifference. Then she said she did not want to change anything in him. But now she loved him so that even the dark things she loved, too. She wished them there; she was not indifferent. Still they were dark and strange, but she loved them. And it was for this they had been waiting. They changed. They shed their darkness – the curse was lifted and they shone forth as Royal Princes once more, as creatures of light.

1. (Fr.) ‘for nothing – from pure friendship’.

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[Notebook 7, qMS–1270]

1. The Pessimist. 2. The New Year.

When she reached home the New Year was there already, pale, mysterious, gentle and so timid. It hung in the folds of the curtains, in the shadows of the stairs, it waited for her on the landing. She undressed quickly making as little noise as possible & quickly she plaited her hair. But as she parted the sheets it seemed to her that another hand – the hand of the New Year – drew them down too and after she was in bed that gentle hand helped to cover her. The last day of the old year was dull and cold. All day the light was weak and pale and smoky like the light of a lamp when the oil is all but finished & the wick begins to burn. Everything looked shabby – even the trees, even the sky with its big grey patches. The church bells seemed never to stop ringing, the trams groaned, dragged past as if they expected every journey to be their last and when there was no other sound a little dog, tied up somewhere, began to yelp like young dogs yelp when they are frightened . . . The Cat Today passing the kitchen the door was open. Charles sat up to the table darning socks. And there sat beside the ball of wool a large black cat with a red bow round its neck. When he took up the scissors the cat squeezed up its eyes as if to say that’s quite right & when he put the scissors down it just put out its paw as if to straighten them but then it drew its paw back, deciding it wasn’t worth it. Sunday Janvier 2d. This afternoon is dreary it is growing dark, but I am waiting for somebody. Somebody will come in & not go again. He will stay to supper, sleep here & be here when I wake in the morning . . . 340

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I thought, a few minutes ago that I could have written a whole novel about a Liar. A man who was devoted to his wife but who lied. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t write a whole novel about anything. I suppose I shall write stories about it. But at this moment I can’t get through to anything. There’s something like a great wall of sand between me and the whole of my ‘world’. I feel as though I am dirty or disgusted or both . . . Everything I think of seems false. [Journal, 1954, pp. 236–7]

An unposted letter Your letters sounded insincere to me; I did not believe them. People don’t write such things; they only think they do, or they read them in books. But real life is on quite another plane. If I were not ill, I still would have withdrawn from ‘the world’ because of my hatred of insincerity. It makes me dreadfully uncomfortable and unhappy. I could have answered your letter just in your vein and ‘accepted’ it, you knowing how I accepted it and I knowing that you knew – but it wouldn’t have lasted. It would have been another cul de sac relationship. What good would that have been to either of us? You see – to me – life and work are two things indivisible. It’s only by being true to life that I can be true to art. And to be true to life is to be good, sincere, simple, honest. I think other people have given you a wrong idea of me, perhaps. I only like to love my friends. I have no time for anything less ‘precious’. Friendship an adventure; but do we agree about the meaning of the word ‘adventure’? That’s so important! That’s where I feel we would quarrel. If you came on to our boat should we have understood one another? You must not think I am ‘prejudiced’ or unfair. I am not. I still wish it were possible; but I cannot, and I won’t pretend. Let us really and truly know where we are first. Let us be open with each other and not concealing anything. January 8. I would like to hear J. saying ‘We’ll have the north meadow mowed to-morrow’, on a late evening in summer, when our shadows were like a pair of scissors, and we could just see the rabbits in the dark. January 14. ‘To be happy with you seems such an impossibility. It requires a luckier Star than mine . . . The world is too brutal for me’. (Keats to Fanny Brawne: August, 1820)1 1. From a letter dated August 1820 to Fanny Brawne (addressed in this letter as ‘My dear girl’), written from London. Like the letters KM refers to in the following entry, these are heart-wrenching letters written just before Keats’s final departure for Rome.

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Keats’s Letters to Fanny Brawne. These letters written during his fatal illness are terrible to one in my situation. It is frightening that he too should have known this mental anguish. And to read his letter to Fanny on page 1801 – nay worse, that in which he says she has no right to that kind of happiness if she loves him . . . ‘If you can smile in people’s faces, and wish them to admire you now . . . My God, does another soul on earth understand his torment as I do? That kind of thing – which she couldn’t see was impossible . . . What would he have said and felt at B.’s letters? He would have felt what I felt. Let no man suffer so again! For mingled with all the known suffering is the anguish of despair because one is ill. How could anyone let such a thing happen to me at such a time? Or is it my ‘fate’ because I am ill? Do they treat me as posthumous already? Oh, the agony of life! How does one endure it? Oh, I have suffered too greatly. Nothing can take it away but one thing, and that I am – I feel in my soul – to be denied. (January, 1921.) January 30. J. accused me of always bagging his books as soon as he had begun to read them. I said: ‘It’s like fishing. I see you’ve got a bite. I want your line. I want to pull it in’. [Notebook 44, qMS–1281]

Shakespeare The First Lord in All’s Well that End’s Well is worth attending to. One would have thought that his speeches & those of the Second Lord would have been interchangeable; but he is a very definite, quick-cut character. Take, for example, the talk between the two in Act IV Scene III. S.L. asks him to let what he is going to tell dwell darkly with him. F.L. ‘When you have spoken it, ’tis dead, and I am the grave of it.’2 And then his comment: ‘How mightily sometimes we make us comforts of our losses.’3 And this is most excellent: ‘The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together; our virtues would be proud if our faults whipped them not; and our faults would despair if they were not cherished by 1. KM is referring to the letter written on 5 July 1820. 2. All’s Well That Ends Well, IV, 3. The opening exchange between the first and second lords includes these lines: (Second Lord) ‘I will tell you a thing, but you shall let it dwell darkly with you.’ (First Lord) ‘When you have spoken it, ’tis dead, and I am the grave of it.’ 3. Second Lord in AWTEW, IV, 3.

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our virtues.’1 I like the temper of that extremely – and does it not reveal the man? Disillusioned and yet – amused – worldly – and yet he has feeling. But I see him as quick, full of Life, and marvellously at his ease with his company, his surroundings, his own condition, and the whole small, solid earth. He is like a man on shipboard who is inclined to straddle just to show (but not to show off) how well his sea-legs serve him . . . The Clown – ‘a Shrewd Knave and an unhappy’2 comes to tell the Countess of the arrival of Bertram and his soldiers. ‘Faith, there’s a dozen of ’em, with delicate fine hats and most courteous feathers, that bow and nod the head at every man.’3 In that phrase there is all the charm of soldiers on prancing, jingling, dancing horses. It is a veritable little pageant. With what an air the haughty (and intolerable) Bertram wears his two-pile velvet patch, with what disdain his hand in the white laced French glove tightens upon the tight rein of his silver charger. Wonderfully sunny, with a little breeze. And the Clown, of course, sees the humour of this conceit . . . Parolles is a loveable creature, a brave little cock sparrow of a ruffian. . . . ‘I am now sir, muddied in Fortune’s mood, and smell somewhat strong of her strong displeasure.’4 I must say Helena is a terrifying female. Her virtue, her persistence, and disguised as a pilgrim – so typical!, her pegging away after the odious Bertram and then telling the whole story to that good widowwoman! and that tame fish Diana. As to lying in Diana’s bed and enjoying the embraces meant for Diana – well, I know nothing more sickening. It would take a respectable woman to do such a thing. The worst of it is I can so well imagine Vera for instance acting in precisely that way, & giving Diana a present afterwards. What a cup of tea the widow and D. must have enjoyed while it was taking place, or did D. at the last moment want to cry off the bargain. But to forgive such a woman! Yet Bertram would. There’s an espèce de mothersboyisme in him which makes him stupid enough for anything. The old King is a queer old card – he seems to have a mania for bestowing husbands. As if the one fiasco were not enough Diana has no sooner explained herself than he begins: ‘If thou be’st yet a fresh uncropped flower Choose thou thy husband, and I’ll pay thy dower.’5 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Second Lord in AWTEW, IV, 3. Lafew in AWTEW, IV, 5. Lavatch (the Clown) in AWTEW, IV, 5. Parolles in AWTEW, V, 2. King to Diana in AWTEW, V, 3.

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I think Shakespeare must have seen the humour of that. It just – at the very last moment in the play, puts breath into the old fool. Coleridge on Hamlet. ‘He plays that subtle trick of pretending to act only when he is very near being what he acts.’1 . . . So do we all begin by acting & the nearer we are to what we would be, the more perfect our disguise. Finally there comes the moment when we are no longer acting: it may even catch us by surprise. We may look in amazement at our no longer borrowed plumage. The two have merged; that which we put on has joined that which was; acting has become action. The soul has accepted this livery for its own after a time of trying on and approving. To act . . . to see ourselves in the part – to make a larger gesture than would be ours in life, to declaim, to pronounce, to even exaggerate, to persuade ourselves (?) or others (?) To put ourselves in heart? To do more than is necessary in order that we may accomplish ce qu’il faut. And then Hamlet is lonely. The solitary person always acts. But I could write a thousand pages about Hamlets. Mad Scene. If one looks at it with a cold eye is really very poor. It depends entirely for its effect upon wispy Ophelia. The cardboard King & Queen are of course only lookers on. They don’t care a ½d. I think the Queen is privately rather surprised at a verse or two of her songs . . . And who can believe that a solitary violet withered when that silly fussy old pomposity died. And who can believe that Ophelia really loved him, & wasn’t thankful to think how peaceful breakfast would be without his preaching. The Queen’s speech after O’s death is exasperating to one’s sense of poetic truth. If no-one saw it happen – if she wasn’t found until she was drowned how does the Queen know how it happened? Dear Shakespeare has been to the Royal Academy . . . for his picture. Tempest. To say that Juliet & Miranda might very well be one seems to me to show a lamentable want of perception. Innocent, earlymorning-of-the-world Miranda, that fair island still half dreaming in a golden haze, lapped about with little joyful hurrying waves of love . . . And small, frail Juliet, leaning upon the dark – a flower that is turned to the moon & closes, reluctant at chill dawn. It is not even her Spring. It is her time for dreaming: too soon for love. There is a Spring that comes before the real Spring & so there is a love – a false Love. It is incarnate in Juliet. Romeo & Juliet. When the old nurse cackles of leaning against the dove-house wall it’s just as though a beam of sunlight struck 1. From Coleridge’s 1818 lecture on Hamlet, later published in his Lectures and Notes on Shakespeare and Other English Poets.

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through the centuries & discovered her sitting there in the warmth with the tiny staggerer – one positively feels the warmth of the sunny wall . . .1 Malvolio ‘or . . . play with some rich jewel.’2 There speaks the envious servant heart that covets his master’s possessions. I see him stroking the cloth with a sigh as he puts away his master’s coat – holding up to the light or to his fingers the jewel before he snaps it into its ivory case. I see the servant copying the master’s expression as he looks in the master’s mirror. And that ‘having risen from a day bed where I have left Olivia sleeping.’3 Oh, doesn’t that reveal the thoughts of all those strange creatures who attend upon the lives of others! Vaihinger.4 Die Philosophie des Als Ob: How comes it about that with consciously false ideas we yet reach conclusions that are in harmony with Nature & appeal to us as Truth? It is by means of and not in spite of these logically defective conceptions that they obtain logically valuable results. The fiction of Force. When two processes tend to follow each other to call the property of the first to be followed by the other its ‘force’ and to measure that force by the magnitude of the result (Force of character). In reality we only have succession and co-existence & the ‘force’ is something we imagine. Dogma: absolute and unquestionable truth. Hypothesis: possible truth (Darwin’s doctrine of descent). Fiction: is impossible but enables us to reach what is relatively truth. The myths of Plato have passed through these three stages & passed back again i.e. they are now regarded as fiction. 1. See the old nurse’s evocation of her memories in Romeo and Juliet, I, 3, which includes the words, ‘For I had then laid wormwood to my dug, / Sitting in the sun under the dove-house wall.’ 2. In Twelfth Night, II, 5, Malvolio’s dreams of grandeur, having married Olivia, include the following: ‘Seven of my people, with an obedient start, make out for him: I frown the while; and perchance wind up watch, or play with my – – some rich jewel.’ 3. Malvolio in Twelfth Night, II, 5. 4. Hans Vaihinger (1852–1933) was a German philsopher and renowned Kantian specialist. His Die Philosophie des Als Ob, published in 1911, defends the idea that, not being able to know the world as it really is, mankind builds models and narratives, and then behaves as if these constructions were real. The first complete English translation (by the linguist C. K. Ogden) was published in 1924: The Philosophy of the As If: A System of the Theoretical, Practical, and Religious Fictions of Mankind.

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? Why must thinking and existing be ever on two different planes? Why will not the attempt of Hegel to transform subjective processes into objective world-processes not work out? ‘It is the special art & object of thinking to attain existence by quite other methods than that of existence itself.’ That is to say, reality cannot become the ideal, the dream, and it is not the business of the artist to grind an axe, to try and impose his vision of Life upon the existing world. Art is not an attempt to reconcile existence with his vision: it is an attempt to create his own world in this world. That which suggests the subject to the artist is the unlikeness of it to what we accept as reality. We single out, we bring into the light, we put up highe [Notebook 26, qMS–1264]

January 27th Received invoice from K now my account is HH.F.E1 Hotel Belle Vue William Eliot of Auckland & Syd Phillipps. ’Tis a morning to tempt Jove from his ningle2 ‘magnificio’ The inaudible and noiseless force of Time.3 The word which haunts me is egocentric. [Journal, 1954, p. 212]

‘You can invent anything you like, but you can’t invent psychology’. (Tolstoy to Tchehov.)4 [Notebook 25, qMS–1267]

It always happens to me near midi and demi5 to simply expire of hunger. 1. In the original notebook, JMM has converted KM’s coded figures into pounds, shillings and pence: 88.6.5. 2. In the opening scene of Dekker and Middleton’s The Honest Whore, Part 2 (1605), the beau Lodovico declares, ‘O, a morning to tempt Jove from his ningle Ganymede; which is but to give dairy-wenches green gowns as they are going a milking.’ 3. From Shakepeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, V, 2. 4. From a letter from Chekhov to Gorky, dated 25 April 1899, describing a visit to Tolstoy’s. Tolstoy is commenting on Gorky’s literary technique. 5. (Fr.) ‘half past twelve’.

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This isn’t bad, but at the same time it’s not good.1 It’s too easy . . . I wish I could go back to N.Z. for a year. But I can’t possibly just now. I don’t see why not in two years’ time, though. I am stuck beyond words – and again it seems to me that what I am doing has no form! I ought to finish my book of stories first and then when it’s gone really get down to my novel Karori. Why I should be so passionately determined to disguise this I don’t quite know. But here I lie pretending, as Heaven knows how often I have before, to write. Supposing I were to give up the pretence & really did try? Supposing I only wrote ½ a page in a day – it would be ½ a page to the good, and I would at least be training my mind to get into the habit of regular performance. As it is every day sees me further off my goal, and once I had this book finished I’m free to start the real one. And it’s a question of money. But my idea, even of the short story, has changed rather, lately. That was lucky! Jack opened the door softly & I was here apparently really truly engaged . . . And – no, enough of this. It has served its purpose. It has put me on the right lines. A moment later and there was nothing left of Netta Skeritt but a dent in the pillow and one long – much too long – blue black hairpin gleaming on the pale carpet.2 Mrs M. knows Ernestine3 well. She was there while her servant was away for holiday. Excellent! Clean, reliable, and very kindly. But not what you’d call a good cook. However most willing & anxious. About coal & wood. 150 francs – and she suggests 30 francs for the 30lbs of jam! But that I said I’d pay her when I had found from L.M. just how much jam was there – she was not sure. Masses of wood there. In November there is 6 foot of snow!! Elizabeth4 is FEARFULLY keen on your work. She reads it all. Never has known anyone develop so. It seems to her each week somehow freer. She says: Do you think he likes me? I am a dog-like nature & can’t 1. This note and the one beneath figure in KM’s draft for the story, ‘By Moonlight’ (see CW2, pp. 398–401), and show her commenting on her writing in progress. 2. The closing lines of KM’s sketch, ‘On her way back to the garden’ (see CW2, pp. 436–7). 3. Ernestine was the maid at the Chalet des Sapins, in Sierre, Switzerland. 4. Elizabeth von Arnim. See above, p. 261.

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live if people don’t whistle to me & give me a strictly spiritual little pat occasionally. Mrs D. her talk is so bad, Katherine. She has such a big big remnant basket & I don’t like remnants. Ida. What a joy it must be to get rid of a perfect friend. That’s what is so very difficult. [MS–Papers–4006–8]

Mon pauv’mari rolled over and said ‘Tu as peur. Que tu est bête. Ce sont des rats. Dors encore.’1 I thought after she’d told me these words kept rippling & rippling through my mind. Something had disturbed the long silent forgotten surface. How many of his words were remembered. Did anybody ever quote the living words he’d spoken? Tu as peur – que tu es bête. Words spoken at night in the dark – strangely intimate, reassuring. He turned over & lifted himself in his grave as Marie spoke. Mournful, mournful – – – What about a cauliflower, I said. A cauliflower with white sauce. But they are so dear Madame, wailed Marie, so dear – one little cauliflower for 2.50. It’s robbery – it’s – Suddenly through the kitchen window I saw the moon. It was so marvellously beautiful that I walked out of the kitchen door through the garden & leaned over the gate before I knew what I was doing. The cold bars of the gate stopped me. The moon was full, transparent, glittering. It hung over the sighing sea. I looked at it for a long time. Then I turned round & the little house faced me – a little white house quivering with light, a house like a candle shining behind a feather of mimosa tree. I had utterly forgotten these things when I was ordering the dinner. I went back to the kitchen. Let us have the cauliflower at any price, I said firmly. And Marie muttered, bending over a pot (could she have understood), en effet, the times are dangerous! Does nobody want that piece of bread & butter says L.M. You really think from her tone that she was saving the poor little darling from the river or worse, willing to adopt it as her own child & bring it up so that it never should know that it was once unwanted. She cannot bear to see solitary or little pieces of bread & butter or a lonely little cake or even a lump of sugar that someone has cruelly, heartlessly left in his saucer. And when you offer her the big cake she says resignedly – Oh well my dear I’ll just try a slice – as though she knows 1. (Fr.) ‘My poor husband’ rolled over and said, ‘You’re frightened. How foolish you are. It’s rats. Go back to sleep.’

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how sensitive & easily hurt the poor old chap’s feelings are, if it’s passed by. After all it can’t hurt her. L.M. is also exceedingly fond of bananas. But she eats them so slowly, so terribly slowly. And they know it somehow: they realise what is in store for them when she reaches out her hand. I have seen bananas turn absolutely livid with terror on her plate – or pale as ashes. [MS–Papers–4006–11]

. . . particularly large olive or standing whistling for a taxi like a forlorn rooster piping before break of day – – or that, although you did talk so amazingly about Stendhal1 your hat was too small. Enfin, you are ridiculous in some way and I am hurt I am hurt.’ I have not said a bit what I mean to say – it’s so difficult to explain – I’ve only hinted – – Do you ever feel like that about the world? Of course this sensitiveness has its reverse side, but that, for some extraordinary reason has never anything to do with present people but is nearly always connected with ‘things’. Today, for instance, in my search for a lovely coloured rug, very bright and silky to touch, with perhaps a pattern of wild fruit trees growing on the borders of a lake and gay coloured beasts standing on the brink – – for not more than fifteen shillings at the outside – I found myself in a carpet shop. [MS–Papers–4006–8]

When autograph albums were the fashion – sumptuous volumes bound in soft leather, the pages so delicately tinted that each tender sentiment had its own sunset sky to faint, to die upon – the popularity of that most sly, ambiguous, difficult piece of advice: ‘To thine own self be true’ was the despair of collectors. How dull it was, how boring, to have the same thing written six times over. And then, even if it was Shakespeare that didn’t prevent it – oh, l’âge d’innocence! – from being dreadfully obvious! Of course it followed as the night the day that if one was true to oneself. . . True to oneself! Which self? Which of my many – well, really, thats what it looks like coming to – hundreds of selves. For what with complexes and suppressions, and reactions and vibrations and reflections – there are moments when I feel I am nothing but the small clerk of some hotel without a

1. Stendhal was the pseudonym of Marie-Henri Beyle (1783–1842), a major French novelist best remembered for his romantic realist classics, Le Rouge et le noir (1830) and La Chartreuse de Parme (1839).

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proprietor who has all his work cut out to enter the names and hand the keys to the wilful guests. Nevertheless, there are signs that we are intent as never before on trying to puzzle out, to live by, our own particular self. Der mensch muss frei sein1 – free, disentangled, single. Is it not possible that the rage for confession, autobiography, especially for memories of earliest childhood is explained by our persistent yet mysterious belief in a self which is continuous and permanent, which, untouched by all we acquire and all we shed, pushes a green spear through the leaves and through the mould, thrusts a sealed bud through years of darkness until, one day, the light discovers it and shakes the flower free and – we are alive – we are flowering for our moment upon the earth. This is the moment which, after all, we live for, the moment of direct feeling when we are most ourselves and least personal. [Notebook 25, qMS–1267]

Marie.2 She is little and grey with periwinkle – I feel inclined to write peritwinkle – blue eyes and swift sweeping gestures. Annette said she is ‘une personne très supérieure – la veuve d’un cocher’, and ‘qu’elle a son appartement à Nice . . . Mais que voulez-vous, la vie est si chère, on a forcée.’3 But Marie does not look like any of these imposing, substantial things. She is far too gay, too laughing, too light to have ever been more than a feather in the coachman’s hat. As to an appartement I suspect it was a chair at a window which overlooked a market. [MS–Papers–4000–36]

Dream I. I was living at home again in the room with the fire escape. It was night: Father & Mother in bed. Vile people came into my room. They were drunk. Beatrice Hastings led them. ‘You don’t take me in old dear’ said she. ‘You’ve played the Lady once too often, Miss – coming it over me.’ And she shouted, screamed Femme marqué4 and banged the table. I rushed away. I was going away next morning so I decided to spend the night in the dark streets and went to a theatre in Piccadilly Circus. The play a costume play of the Restoration had 1. (Ger.) ‘Mankind must be free.’ 2. KM’s maid at the Villa Isola Bella, Menton. 3. (Fr.) ‘a very superior type of person’, ‘the widow of a coachman’, ‘she has a flat in Nice,’ ‘But what do you expect, life is costly, they went too far.’ 4. (Fr.) ‘marked woman’.

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just begun. The theatre was small and packed. Suddenly the people began to speak too slowly, to mumble: they looked at each other stupidly. One by one they drifted off the stage & very slowly a black iron curtain was lowered. The people in the audience looked at one another. Very slowly, silently, they got up and moved towards the doors – stole away. An enormous crowd filled the Circus: it was black with people. They were not speaking – a low murmur came from it – that was all. They were still. A whitefaced man looked over his shoulder & trying to smile he said: ‘The Heavens are changed already; there are six moons!’ Then I realised that our earth had come to an end. I looked up. The sky was ashy-green; six livid quarters swam in it. A very fine soft ash began to fall. The crowd parted. A cart drawn by two small black horses appeared. Inside there were salvation army women doling tracts out of huge marked boxes. They gave me one. ‘Are you Corrupted?’ It got very dark and quiet and the ash fell faster. Nobody moved. What is milk a metre now? L.M. Dream II. In a cafe. Gertler met me. ‘Katherine you must come to my table. I’ve got Oscar Wilde there. He’s the most marvellous man I ever met. He’s splendid!’ Gertler was flushed. When he spoke of Wilde he began to cry – tears hung on his lashes but he smiled. Oscar Wilde was very shabby. He wore a green overcoat. He kept tossing & tossing back his long greasy hair with the whitest hand. When he met me he said ‘Oh Katherine!’ – very affected. But I did find him a fascinating talker. So much so I asked him to come to my home. He said would 12.30 tonight do? When I arrived home it seemed madness to have asked him. Father & Mother were in bed. What if Father came down & found that chap Wilde in one of the chintz armchairs? Too late now. I waited by the door. He came with Lady Ottoline. I saw he was disgustingly pleased to have brought her. Dear Lady Ottoline & Ottoline in a red hat on her rust hair ‘hounyhming’ along.1 He said ‘Katherine’s hand – the 1. In the fourth adventure in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), the narrator finds himself in the land of the Houyhnhnms, where horses are at the peak of the hierarchical ladder. The name Houyhnhnms echoes the neighing of a horse, which KM makes into a verb form here.

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same gentle hand!’ as he took mine. But again when we sat down – I couldn’t help it. He was attractive – as a curiosity. He was fatuous & brilliant! ‘You know Katherine when I was in that dreadful place I was haunted by the memory of a cake. It used to float in the air before me – a little delicate thing stuffed with cream and with the cream there was something scarlet. It was made of pastry and I used to call it my little Arabian Nights cake. But I couldn’t remember the name. Oh Katherine it was torture. It used to hang in the air and smile at me, and every time I resolved that next time they let some one come and see me I would ask them to tell me what it was but every time, Katherine, I was ashamed. Even now . . .’ I said ‘mille feuilles à la crème?’1 At that he turned round in the armchair and began to sob, and Ottoline who carried a parasol opened it and put it over him . . . [Notebook 36, qMS–1272]

Le travail – même mauvais – vaut mieux que la réverie.2 1. Baby 2. Thief 3. Snow But I can’t see why you should mind so much, she said for the hundredth time. I can’t see what it is you object to. It isn’t as though people would notice you even. Goodness me! I’m always meeting them since – since – she broke off. And it seems such a waste, too. There it is standing in the hall, doing nothing. It seems so ungrateful after it’s been lent to you not to give it a trial, at least. Why don’t you say something? She was pinning on her hat in front of the mirror in the sitting room. Her outdoor jacket & gloves lay across a chair. And when he still didn’t answer she made a little weary hopeless face at the mirror 1. (Fr.) a vanilla or custard slice, also known as a Napoleon. 2. (Fr.) ‘Work – even bad work – is worth more than day-dreaming.’ This is a slightly truncated quotation from Baudelaire’s journal, Mon cœur mis à nu (1864), which reads ‘Travail immédiat, même mauvais, vaut mieux que la rêverie.’ Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) was a French Romantic poet, whose Les Fleurs du mal (1857) had a determining influence on French symbolism and fin-de-siècle decadence, and even on emerging trends in early European modernism. KM’s early poetry and prose-poems show clear Baudelairean influences, and the following diary entries suggest she was now returning to Baudelaire to read his journal years later.

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which meant: ‘Oh dear, we’re in one of our moods again!’ If it’s me you’re thinking of by any chance, she said quickly, snatching at the jacket – Here is M. with the supper. And I shall have to endure her jawing until it is over. But that is not important. What is is that I have not written anything today worth a sou. I have passed the day in a kind of idleness. Why? Does it take so long to begin again? Is it my old weakness of will? Oh, I must not yield! I must, this evening, after my supper, get something done. It’s not so terribly hard after all. And how shall I live my good life if I am content to pass even one day in idleness. It won’t do. Control – of all kinds. How easy it is to lack control in little things. And once one does lack it the small bad habits – tiny perhaps – spring up like weeds & choke one’s will. That is what I find. My temper is bad; my personal habits are not above reproach. I am ungracious, mentally untidy. I let things pass that I don’t understand (unpardonable) and I excuse myself – invent pretexts for not working. Yet is my desire to be idle greater than my desire to work. Is my love of reverie greater than my love of action. Treacherous habit! Habit above all others evil & of long standing. I must give it up at once or lose my self-respect. . . It is only by making myself worthy of Jack that I shall be worthy of what I mean our relationship to be. He that faileth in little things shall not succeed in great things. Even my handwriting. From this moment it too must change. After supper I must start my journal & keep it day by day – a record of my progress towards spiritual health. . . But can I be honest? If I lie it’s no use. [Journal, 1954, pp. 240–1]

February 18. ‘They say philosophers and the truly wise are indifferent. It is false: indifference is the paralysis of the soul; it is premature death’. (Tchehov: A Dreary Story)1 Never were truer words spoken! K.M. Amiel. ‘La liberté intérieure serait donc la plus tenace de mes 1. The short story is from Chekhov’s The Wife and Other Stories, quoted here in the translation by Constance Garnett (1918). It is one of Chekhov’s longer stories, written just after his brother Nikolai had died of tuberculosis. It is told from the point of view of an elderly doctor looking back over his life and his decline into ill health. Interestingly, KM is not quoting from the translation by KM and Koteliansky, published in The Bet and Other Stories in 1915.

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passions, et peut-être ma seule passion’. Poor little beetle! What a give away!1 ‘L’univers n’est que le caléidoscope qui tourne dans l’esprit de l’être dit pensant, lequel est lui-même une curiosité sans cause, un hasard qui a conscience de tout le grand hasard et qui s’en amuse pendant que le phenomène de sa vision dure encore’.2 This is the kind of writing which leaves our generation dead cold. March 9 ‘I chucked the thing behind the fireplace. It wasn’t even clever’. Mr. Harold Beauchamp on Je ne parle pas français.3 March 26. ‘A poem should not be something which the maker spins out of himself, but something external which he renders in verse as faithfully as possible. When Tennyson, for instance, wrote A million emeralds break from the ruby-budded lime, he did not make it at all. The lime-tree made it; he just saw it’. [From an anonymous review.]4 Hénorme!5 April 3. ‘Her face was like a marigold that insisted on keeping open too long’.6 April 6. ‘ She looked about as big as a cottage loaf in a pinafore’. April 15 I said to Dr. Bouchage, when he wanted to examine my abdomen: ‘Oh, Doctor . . . isn’t there anything that I can keep to myself?’ And he didn’t even smile. 1. ‘Interior freedom would therefore be the most enduring of my passions, and perhaps my only passion.’ KM is quoting from the published diary of the Swiss idealist philosopher Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821–81), who is known chiefly for this 17,000-page opus, a selection of which was published in two volumes in 1882. Fragments d’un journal intime, which spans the years from 1839 until 1881, is a work of intense, detailed introspection that influenced many late nineteenth-century thinkers. This extract is from 8 March 1868. 2. (Fr.) ‘The universe is but the kaleidoscope which turns in the mind of the socalled thinking being, who is himself a curiosity with no cause, a fluke who is conscious of the vast fluke around him and who amuses himself with it while the phenomenon of his vision still lasts.’ Extract from 19 March 1868. 3. KM started writing ‘Je ne parle pas français’ in 1918, and it was first published in 1919 (see CW2, pp. 112–36). 4. The quoted verse is from Tennyson’s Maud: A Monodrama IV (1855). 5. KM’s playful transcription of ‘énorme’: ‘enormous’. 6. JMM notes: ‘The following five entries are scraps of Katherine’s conversation recorded in my diary.’

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April 17. H. J. Massingham has got a bird in his bonnet. April 19. Grin and Bear it: names for two comedians. Faint the light shines in the little window; it is easily put out. [Notebook 36, qMS–1272]

This story won’t do. It is a silly story.1 I took them last just after you & Dent went. Do you think I dare take another dose. I feel as tho’ I am suffocating. But that star – that green star that shines so brightly! Aah! Baah! Aaah! Baah! like thousands of tired sheep in the shearing pens at evening time. and the gum leaves, like tufts of cock’s feathers ruffled in the faint breeze. The cafe was all but deserted. Over in the corner there sat a poor little creature with two loops of velvet in her hat that gave her the look of a rabbit. She was writing a letter. First she wrote a little, & then she looked up & the two bows of ribbon seemed to pout, to listen. Then she hunched down again & scribbled another sheet. Again she looked up. The grey waiter had his eye on her . . . Over in the corner there sat a stout man with a swollen shabby black leather bag at his feet. He was yawning over a timetable but occasionally he stopped & gave the black bag a little dig, a kick, as if to warn it that it was no good falling too fast asleep – they’d have to be off soon. I kissed her. Her cheek felt cold white, and somehow moist. It was like kissing a church candle. I looked into her eyes, they were pale, flickering with dim far off lights. She smelled faintly of incense. Her skirt was rubbed and bulged at the knees. But how could you say that about the Blessed Virgin! said she. It must have hurt Our Lady so terribly. And I saw the B.V. throwing away her copy of Je ne Parle pas français & saying ‘Really this K.M. is all that her friends say [of] her to me.’ By night and at early morning I love to listen to my darling roosters crowing to one another from lonely yards. Each one has a different note. I have never heard two roosters crow alike. But the hens who seem from their cackle to be laying eggs all day long sound as like one another as – as – – In fact there is no possible distinguishing between them. L.M. says they are not all laying eggs. Some of them 1. See ‘After a Succession’ (CW2, pp. 297–300).

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are frightened, surprised, excited – or just – playful. But this seems to me to make the affair even more – – – humiliating. Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy1 [Notebook 6, qMS–1280]

Shakespeare Anthony [sic] and Cleo: Act I. Scene I. ‘The triple pillars of the world . . .2 The wide arch of the ranged empire . . .3 ‘Tonight we’ll wander through the streets and note The qualities of people.’4 (That is so true a pleasure of lovers.) Sc. II. ‘A Roman thought hath struck him . . .’5 A: Ah then we bring forth weeds When our quick minds lie still . . .6 Enobarbus constantly amazes me. i.e. his first speeches with A. about Cleo’s celerity in dying.7 ‘Your old smock brings forth a new petticoat.’8

1. Robert Burton (1577–1640) was a scholar and clergyman, now remembered for his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), an encyclopedic, anthology-type collection that sets out as a medical treatise but expands into a literary, scientific and philosophical text. 2. From the opening speech of Antony and Cleopatra. Philo’s full sentence reads: ‘The triple pillar of the world transform’d / Into a strumpet’s fool: behold and see’ (I, 1). 3. From Mark Antony and Cleopatra’s dialogue (I, 1). Mark Antony says, ‘Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch / Of the ranged empire fall!’ 4. Mark Antony to Cleopatra in A & C, I, 1. 5. Cleopatra in A & C, I, 2. The full sentence reads, ‘He was disposed to mirth; but on the sudden / A Roman thought hath struck him.’ 6. Mark Antony in A & C, I, 2. 7. Enobarbus in A & C, I, 2. The full sentence reads, ‘Cleopatra, catching but the least noise of this, dies instantly; I have seen her die twenty times upon far poorer moment: I do think there is mettle in death, which commits some loving act upon her, she hath such a celerity in dying.’ 8. Enobarbus in A & C, I, 2. The full sentence reads, ‘your old smock brings forth a new petticoat: and indeed the tears live in an onion that should water this sorrow.’

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Scene III like Scene II. 1. Saw you not my lord? Where is he? The married woman. There’s jealousy! And then her fury that he’s not more upset at Fulvia’s death! Now I know how you’ll behave when I die.1 These are beautiful lines of Anthony’s ‘Our separation so abides and flies That thou, residing here, goes yet with me. And I, hence fleeing, here remain with thee.’2 Scene IV ‘Like to a vagabond flag upon the stream Goes to and back, lackeying the varying tide To rot itself with motion.’3 Marvellous words! I can apply them. There is a short story. And then it seems that weed gets caught up and one night it is gone out to sea and lost. But comes a day, a like tide, a like occasion and it reappears more sickeningly rotten still! Shall we? Will he? Are there any letters? No letters? The post? Does he miss me? No. Then sweep it all out to sea. Clear the water for ever! Let me write this one day. . . . thy cheek so much as lanked not.4 The economy of utterance.5 Scene V Now I feed myself With most delicious poison.6 An arm-gaunt steed?7 Oh yes, of course. Act II. Sc. I. Salt Cleopatra . . .8 Scene II Every time Serves for the matter that is then born in it.9 1. These lines are not quotations from the play but KM’s musings, apparently interpretations of her own life and JMM’s diminishing affection for her in the light of Shakespeare’s play. 2. Antony in A & C, I, 3. 3. Octavius Caesar in A & C, I, 4. 4. Caesar to Antony in A & C, I, 4. 5. KM’s own comment. 6. Cleopatra to Charmian in A & C, I, 5. 7. Alexas in A & C, I, 5. The Shakespearian text reads, ‘And soberly did mount an arm-gaunt steed’. The commentary is KM’s. 8. Pom in A & C, II, 1. The full sentence reads, ‘But all the charms of love, / Salt Cleopatra, soften thy waned lip!’ 9. Enobarbus in A & C, II, 2. The full sentence reads, ‘Every time / Serves for the matter that is then born in’t.’

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Caesar: You praise yourself By laying defects of judgement to me but You patched up your excuses.1 Enobarb: That truth should be silent I had almost forgot.2 – – – The short scene between Anthony and the soothsayer is very remarkable. It explains the tone of Caesar’s remarks to Anthony . . . And Anthony’s concluding speech shows his uneasiness at the truth of it. He’ll go to Egypt. He’ll go where his weakness is praised for strength. There’s a hankering after E. between the lines. Scene V ‘tawny finned fishes’ ‘their slimy jaws’3 and the adjectives seem part of the nouns when Shakespeare uses them. They grace them so beautifully, attend and adorn so modestly and yet with such skill. It so often happens with lesser writers that we are more conscious of the servants than we are of the masters, and quite forget that their office is to serve, to enlarge, to amplify the powers of the master. ‘Ram thou thy fruitful tidings in my ears That long time have been barren’.4 Good lines! And another example of the choice of the place of words. I suppose it was instinctive. But fruitful seems to be just where it ought to be to be resolved (musically speaking) by the word ‘barren’. One reads fruitful expecting barren almost from the ‘sound’ sense . . . Cleo: Thou shouldst come like a fury crowned with snakes, Not like a formal man.5 ‘But yet’ is as a jailer to bring forth Some monstrous malefactor.6 There’s matter indeed! Does not that give the pause that always follows those hateful words. ‘But yet’ and one waits – and both look towards the slowly opening door. What is coming out? And

1. Caesar in A & C, II, 2. 2. Enobarbus in A & C, II, 2. 3. Cleopatra in A & C, II, 5. The full phrase reads, ‘I will betray / Tawny-finned fishes; my bended hook shall pierce / Their slimy jaws.’ 4. Cleopatra to messenger in A & C, II, 5. 5. Cleopatra to messenger in A & C, II, 5. 6. Cleopatra to messenger in A & C, II, 5.

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sometimes there’s a sigh of relief after. Well, it was nothing so very awful. The gaol mouse, so to speak, comes mousing through & cleans his face with his paw. ‘I am pale, Charmian’:1 Reminds me of Mary Shelley.2 ‘Byron had never seen anyone as pale as I’.3 Something of John too. I can’t remember what. Was he as pale as she? He must have been for he felt the blood creeping back into his cheeks. I don’t know whether Bogey wrote creeping or whether that’s caricature. It makes me smile. It’s so like him. ‘Since I myself Have given myself the cause’.4 What does that mean exactly? That she sent Anthony away? Or let Anthony go? Cleo: In praising Anthony I have dispraised Caesar? ––– I am paid for’t now.5 A creature like Cleopatra always expects to be paid for things. [Notebook 21, qMS–1271]

Household: 6:iii:1921 7th

Notebooks

8

House

28.20

9

"

30.25

Wed.

"

1.50

Jeudi.

"

22.65

Ven.

"

18.05

S.S.

"

42.10

th th

3.20

1. Cleopatra to Charmian in A & C, II, 5. 2. Mary Shelley (1797–1851) was a novelist, short-story writer and essayist, whose lasting fame was secured by the publication of her Gothic-inspired novel Frankenstein (1818). 3. Byron was with Mary Shelley in Switzerland when they had the famous storywriting competition, which resulted in her writing Frankenstein. They left several accounts of this now well-known evening in literary history. 4. Cleopatra in A & C, II, 5. 5. Cleopatra to Charmian in A & C, II, 5.

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3.40 Laundry

21.20 170.55

March 26th: Saturday

42.15

Sunday

26.

Monday

52.40

Tuesday

5.40

Wednesday 30.65

30.65

Friday

34.90 191.50

It is remarkable how much there is of the ordinary man in J. For instance, finding no towels in his room tonight his indignation, sense of injury, desire so to shut his door that it would bring the house down – his fury, in fact in having to look for the blarsted things – all was just precisely what one would have expected of his Father. . . . It makes one think again of the separation of the ARTIST and the MAN. It’s like his Why is lunch late? As tho’ I had but to wave my hand and the banquet descended. But doesn’t that prove how happy he would have been with a real WIFE! ‘Tis thus: Who tells me true, though in his tale lay death I hear him as he flattered.’1 Act I. Scene II ‘If I were to follow all your instructions and advice I don’t think I should have any pleasures in Life at all.’ [Notebook 15, qMS–1273]

5.V. Genève, Salle d’attente.2 The snow lay like silver light on the tops of the mountains. In the chill, greenish light the wide motionless rivers looked as though they were solid, and the pale furrowed earth with white fruit trees like coral branches looked as it were water. Later. The station clock. 1. Antony in A & C, I, 2. 2. (Fr.) ‘waiting room’.

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[NLC Notebook 7]

For the moment only: Hotel Beau-Site Baugy-sur-Clarens La Suisse. Bele Beatrice1 I can’t tell you how glad I am to hear you are dancing again – albeit ‘delicately’ as you say. Lo! how sweetly the Graces do it foot To the instrument! They dauncen deftly and singen sooth In their merriement.2 That means you are really better. Don’t get ill again. Isn’t it awful – being ill. I lie all day on my old balcony lapping up eggs and cream & butter with no-one but a pet goldfinch to bear me tompanëë. I must say the goldfinch is a great lamb. He’s jet tame & this morning, after it had rained he came for his Huntley & Palmer crumb3 with a little twinkling raindrop on his head. I never saw anyone look more silly and nice. Switzerland is full of birds but they are mostly stodgy little German trots flown out of Appenrodt’s catalogue.4 (Which reminds me of Bertha K. ma chère.) But all Switzerland is on the side of the stodges. [NLC Notebook 7]

10.v. 1921. Montana.

A Sweet Old Lady

1. A draft letter to Beatrice Campbell. 2. From Edmund Spenser’s ‘Elisa’ in The Shepherd’s Calendar – April Eclogue (1579). The first line actually reads ‘Lo, how finely the Graces can it foot,’ while the previous stanza includes the lines, ‘So sweetly they play, / And sing all the way.’ 3. Huntley and Palmers was a well-known biscuit-making company. 4. ‘Appenrodts’ started as a fashionable restaurant in London, but by 1920 had developed into a chain of delicatessens and restaurants, including a branch in Paris.

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The Tig Courier, Sir is a weekly paper that pays you £950 a year for an article, personal as possible, the more intimate the better. For three days the editor has been waiting for your copy. Tonight she got a p.c. written in a train; but that was all. Will you tell her (a) your reasons for withholding it (as subtle as you like) or (b) when she may expect it. Address: Tig Stillin Bedfordshire. Switzerland. May 1921. One thing I am determined upon. And that is to leave no sign. There was a time – it is not so long ago – when I should have written all that has happened since I left France. But now I deliberately choose to tell no living soul. I keep silence as Mother kept silence. And though there are moments when the old habit ‘tempts’ me – I may even get so far as to write a page – they are only moments & each day they are easier to conquer. [Journal, 1954, pp. 251–2]

May 19 ‘Lone women like to empty houses perish’. (Marlowe: Hero and Leander.)1 ‘Far from the town (where all is whist and still, Save that the sea playing on yellow sand, Sends forth a rattling murmur to the land) My turret stands’. (Marlowe: Hero and Leander.)2 Lovely! Autobiography.3 My literary career began with short-story writing in New Zealand. I was nine years old when my first attempt was published. 1. From the first Sestiad of Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander (1598). Christopher Marlowe (1564–93) was an Elizabethan poet, translator and playwright, mostly remembered as the foremost tragedian of his era. 2. From the first Sestiad of Hero and Leander. KM has cut out two lines that fall between the third and fourth lines of her quotation: ‘Whose sound allures the golden Morpheus / In silence of the night to visit us.’ 3. JMM’s note states, ‘Written, I think, in answer to a request from a literary magazine, but probably neither sent nor published.’

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I have been filling notebooks ever since. After I came to London I worked for some time for The New Age, and published In A German Pension in 1912. It was a bad book, but the press was kind to it. Later, I worked with my present husband, Mr. John Middleton Murry, editor of The Athenaeum, but at that time editor of Rhythm and The Blue Review. In the past two years I have reviewed novels for The Athenaeum, and I have written more short stories. Such a prolonged exercise ought to have produced something a great deal better than Bliss; I hope the book on which I am now engaged will be more worthy of the interest of the public. It is a collection of stories – one with a New Zealand setting in the style of ‘Prelude’. Several are character sketches of women rather like poor Miss Ada Moss in the story ‘Pictures’. Station Climatérique.1 ‘How much the knowledge that one is alive for other people helps one to feel alive oneself’. ‘That constant taking of leave which has haunted my secret thought.’ ‘One tries still to fancy that one is here by some chance of travel, to flavour the experience with some lingering taste of adventure. One tries to fancy one is a little different from the others. They belong to the place; they are a part of it; they are an essential part of the intense impression it conveys; they could not really belong anywhere else! But oneself. . . .’ (R. O. Prowse: A Gift of the Dusk.)2 [Notebook 15, qMS–1273]

June 8th 1921. For the first time since the war I talked German to a German. Wollen Sie fragen ob man warten kann?3 And so on. It was simply extraordinary. Why?

1. (Fr.) ‘health resort’. 2. R. O. Prowse’s novel, A Gift of the Dusk (1920), tells the story of a tubercular patient in a Swiss sanatorium. KM reviewed the work in the Athenaeum and was clearly moved by what she called ‘a memorable novel’ (see CW3, pp. 679–82). Richard Owen Prowse (1862–1949) was a British author and playwright, whose attention to intricate detail was often compared to that of Henry James in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century reviews. His name and address figure in KM’s address book (see below, p. 458). 3. (Ger.) ‘Would you like to ask if one can wait?’

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Lenz Lens

Grillon not too high. Villa near Sierre.

7.30.

A.M. Hotel Beau Site. My precious Bogey, I keep walking & walking round this letter, treading on my toes & with my tail in the air; I don’t know where to settle. There’s so much to say & the day is so fine – Well here goes, darling. The journey to Geneva took no time. My watchet seemed to be racing the train. We arrived some time after one & I went & sat in a green velvet chair while L.M. saw to things. I suppose we had a long wait there; it did not seem long. Ever since early morning those mountains that I remembered from last time had been there – huge, glittering, with snow like silver light on their tops. It was absolutely windless, and though the air was cold, it was cold like Spring. In fact (perhaps you realise I’m putting a terrific curb on myself) it was delicious. Only to breathe was enough. Then we got into an omnibus train & it waddled slowly round the lake, stopping at every tiny station. Germans were in the carriage; in fact I was embedded in Germans, huge ones, Vater und die Mama und Hänsl.1 Every time we saw a lilac bush they all cried schön.2 This was very old world. There was also a notice in the carriage to say that the company had thoughtfully provided a cabinet. This they read aloud (1) Vater – then die Mama & then little Hänsl. We arrived at Clarens just as the station clock (which was a cuckoo clock: that seems to me awfully touching doesn’t it to you?) struck seven & a motor car, like a coffee mill, flew round & round the fields to Baugy. Oh dear, you realise Im just telling you facts. The embroidery I’ll have to leave for now. The hotel is simply admirable so far. Too clean. Spick is not the word nor is span. Even the sprays of white lilac in my salon were fresh from the laundry. I have two rooms and a huge balcony, and so many mountains that I haven’t even begun to climb them yet. They are superb. The views from the windows, Betsy love, over fields, little mushroom-like chalets, lake, trees, & then mountains are overwhelming. So is the green velvet & flesh pink satin suite in the salon, with copper jugs

1. (Ger.) ‘the Father and the Mother and Hansl’. 2. (Ger.) ‘lovely’.

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for ornaments & a picture on the wall called Jugendidyle.1 More of all this later. I am posing here as a lady with a weak heart & lungs of Spanish leather! It seems to ‘go down’ for the present. Well, I had dinner in my room – consommé, fish, cream sauce, roast turkey new potatoes braised laitue2 & two little tiny babas smothered in cream. I had to send the turkey & trimmings away. Even then . . . Saint Galmier is superseded by Montreux which the label says is saturated with carbonic acid gas. But my physiology book said this was deadly poison & we only breathed it out – never unless we were desperate took it in. However according to Doctors Ritter, Spingel and Knechtli it’s marvellous for gravel and makes the urine sparkil like champagne. These are the minor mysteries. Sierre. The room with seven doors. Each door is different & the 7th is a very tiny little door. It opens into a cupboard painted white with an arched top, sky blue, sprinkled with stars. The furniture stern & dark. [Notebook 25, qMS–1267]

Darling Veen,3 It’s like this. It’s no good her being here any more – it’s too hot & the food has gone off. Also I must tackle my affair seriously, you know. So I am going to Montana. Stephani says that he would far rather I went to him for a month at least so that he could keep my heart under his eye or ear. Good. I agree. But there’s my Bogey. Will he go to a pension 5 minutes away for a month & visit me? As soon as I find out how the place suits me we can get a little chalet. I send you a p.c. of your pension. Stephani’s place is not a real live – or dead – Sanatorium. He of course thinks you would like to be with me there. Why not? It is quite usual. But I sang No to that & I’m sure you agree. You’d hate it. So would I. Throttling strangling by the throat a helpless exhausted little black silk bag. But one says not a word & to the best of one’s belief gives

1. (Ger.) ‘childhood idyll’. 2. (Fr.) ‘lettuce’. 3. One of KM’s nicknames for JMM, the origin of which is unknown.

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no sign. I went out into the gentle rain & saw the rainbow. It deepens, it shone down into the sea & then it faded: it was gone. The small gentle rain fell on the other side of the world. Frail – Frail – I felt Life was no more than this. Look here my love & my dear, I’m not really up to chalets yet. This is what would be BEST of all. Do you agree? We go to Montana.1 I go to Stephani’s2 for a month at least – you have a room at this pension du lac. Stephani then can keep his eye & his ear on my heart & I can lie absolutely low for that month. Then in the meantime, we have looked around & we take a chalet. [Does] that seem possible to you? and she flung back her head, sucked in her underlip and half shut her eyes, just as she had seen Grace Palotta3 do at the Theatre Royal, the week before. ‘And you call yourself’ she mocked in a low quivering voice, ‘you dare to call yourself a married man’. But Potts was far too crushed to act his part properly. Besides at that moment there was a sound of wheels & the yellow-painted butcher’s cart rattled round the bend of the road & drew up sharp close by. Then the hearty, common young butcher leapt off the seat, unhooked the back of the cart & let it down with a bang & began in a reckless, careless, horribly indifferent manner to sharpen his long knives. avant c’était un jardin de Paris il y a rien a faire que de mourir Madame.4 They fatten, Madame, they fatten – – – She is the kind of woman who if she did eat raisins she would fatten.

1. KM went to Montana, Switzerland, in June 1921, where she stayed first at the Palace Hotel, then at the Chalet des Sapins, in rented accommodation close to her cousin Elizabeth’s Chalet du Soleil in Randogne-sur-Sierre. 2. Dr Stephani treated KM in Sierre, Switzerland. 3. Grace Palotta (1870–1959) was a Viennese-born actress who became one of the best-loved stage performers at London’s Gaiety Theatre in the 1890s to 1910s. 4. (Fr.) ‘It used to be a garden in Paris’ / ‘there was nothing left but to die, Madame.’

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[Notebook 9, qMS–1268]

July 21st Conrad review.1 Bad [?] ditto. The lift boy & the bread tray. Sweetness of home Life. Isola Bella.2 How shall I buy it? Lying facing the window I woke early. The blind was half pulled down. A deep pink light flew in the sky and the shapes of the trees, ancient barns, towers, walls, were all black. The pools & rivers were quicksilver. Nearing Avignon the orchard in the first rays of sunlight shone with gold fruit – apples flashed like stars. L.M.’s legs dangled. She dropped down, slowly waving her big grey legs, as though something pulled her, dragged her – the tangle of rich blue weeds on the red carpet. Avig –avig – avignon she said. One of the loveliest names in the world done to death, said I. A name that spans the ancient town like a delicate bridge. She was very impressed. But then, George Moore would impress her!3 Woman & woman. What I feel is she is never for one fraction of a second unconscious. If I sigh I know that her head lifts – I know that those grave large eyes solemnly fix on me. Why did she sigh. If I turn she suggests a cushion or another rug. If I turn again then it is my back. Might she try to rub it for me? There is no escape. All night a faint rustle, the smallest cough and her soft voice asks did you speak. Can I do anything. If I do absolutely nothing then she discovers my fatigue under my eyes. There is something profound & terrible in this eternal desire to establish contact. Stove brushes. Mysterious is man and woman. She sat on the flat seat in the corridor & he stood above her while the dark fat man beat them up a couple of beds. She looked sulky, stubborn and bored. But it was plain to see she 1. KM’s detailed review of Conrad’s novel, The Rescue, was published in the Athenaeum in July 1920 (see CW3, pp. 620–3). 2. Villa Isola Bella is the house in Menton that KM first visited in 1920, and subsequently rented in May 1921. 3. Possibly a reference to the Irish novelist, short-story writer and critic George Moore (1852–1933), whose naturalist style bears the influence of French literature in the late nineteenth century. He travelled extensively in France, and his vivid prose descriptions may well have influenced KM and LM’s conversation here. KM disliked his novel, Esther Waters (1894) (see CW3, pp. 641–4).

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suited him. Bang on the door when you’re ready old girl, and the door slammed. He sat on the flap seat, smoothed his thin smooth hair, folded his bony hands, a neat foot dangled from a thin ankle. The light shone on his glasses. Seeing him thus one could not imagine a man who looked less like a woman’s man. But I admired him immensely. I was proud of them as ‘made in England.’ It grew hot – everywhere the light quivered green-gold. The white soft road unrolled with plane trees casting a trembling shade. There were fields of pumpkins & gourds – outside the house the tomatoes were spread in the sun. Blue flowers & red flowers & tufts of deep purple flared on the roadside edges. A young boy carrying a branch stumbled across a yellow field followed by a brown high-stepping little goat. We bought figs for breakfast, immense thin-skinned ones. They broke in one’s fingers & they tasted of wine and honey. Why is the northern fig such a chaste fair-haired virgin – such a soprano. The melting contraltos sing through the ages. The great difference. England so rich – with the green bowers of the hops & gay women & children with their arms lifted pausing to watch the train. A flock of yellow hens led by a red rooster streamed across the edge of the field. But France – an old man in a white blouse was cutting a field of small clover with an oldfashioned half-wooden scythe. The tops of the flowers were burnt. The stooks (are they stooks) were like small heaps of half burned tobacco. The pale [. . .] sun [?] swam on a grey lake like some lone sere-breasted bird. potage – oeufs sur le plat fromage.1 Veal2 haricots,3 meat vegetables entremets fromage fruits. soap

Isola Bella 4.60

soda

85

carried forward vanilla

50.80 2.25 15.

torelion[?]

1.30

Saint Galmier

powder

I.50

ink

1.20

T paper

2.25

telegram

5.

sanitas

2.50

oil

1.20

3

2

1. (Fr.) ‘soup, fried eggs, cheese. Green beans [. . .] light dessert’. 2. (Fr.) a brand of naturally sparkling mineral water. 3. (Fr.) a household disinfectant.

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2

5

lettuce

25

Annette

18.05

tomatoes

80

voiture

10.

onions

60

potatoes

70

garlic

50

rice

112.40

2.50

flour

90

oatmeal

1.50

oil

14.

vinegar

2.60

mustard

2.40

nutmeg

20

chocolate

1.30 _____ 50.80

Four little boys. One minute, three larking. When the three ran on to the lines & tried to dash themselves to death the little one obviously suffered torture & did his best to drag them back again. I realised this would have been just the same if it had been deep water. 1

2

An old man, an old woman, a tiny boy in a cape. When the old woman disappeared, the ancient took the little boy with such tender care. He had a little pipe in his beard – it looked as though his beard were curling . . . Poplars springing in green water – red willows. The luxury of trees! – – – For a story little boys [. . .] and a yard paved with hard little stones [?]. Heirloom [?] homes. Why are the town doors all guarded with bars and tines of iron. Hideous shapes. Villas oleanders & birches & pretty with lead pencil spires. Beau Séjour – with dim lights, Belle Bague, Pension des Amis.

1. (Fr.) a cleaning fluid. 2. (Fr.) petrol or kerosene for household use.

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Bague. The lake very cold with little diving steps pegged out into the water. Leçons de piano & behind a pair of trousers hanging out to dry. Why do people always put on such airs when they are saying goodbye. They smile – [. . .] They seem so exquisitely glad to be staying. Are they? Or it is envy? This is John’s Fountain pen and I don’t think much of it. It’s all on one side! Wallington, Grange Road, Lewes. She has lids on all the chamberpots. taxis

5.50

vests

“

6.50

oranges

1.20

apples

1.50

milk

55

hat

9.

milk

tip

1.

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3.75

supper

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3.25

“

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[. . .]

4.75

44.

55 1. 50 48.75

[. . .]

1.75 1.25

milk

55

oxo

oranges

70

fares

60

metro

60

DN

30

milk

55

ink

2.

stamps

5.

milk

1.90

cakes

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butter

1.45 36.85

mail trams

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48.75 28.50 77.25 Swiss: changed 50 francs for 115 fr tickets 15. water

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porters 2.50 voiture 5. ticket

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porter

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French

supper

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8.50

envelopes

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porter

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fares

1.30

stamps

5.

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wire

4.35

cakes

fares

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milk

fruit

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cream

flowers

5.50

doctors

paper oil milk

55 1. 55 1.10 100.

30

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taxis

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[NLC Notebook 7]

Chalet des Sapins. Just as now I say scarcely a word about my treacherous heart. If it is going to stop it is going to stop & there’s an end of it. But I have been in this little house for nearly two days & it has not once quietened down. What dread to live in. But what’s the use of saying aught? No, my soul, be quiet . . . July 10th. And now, just as I felt a little better and less worried about my HEAD and my heart, the gland has become inflamed & all the surrounding tissue too. It looks as tho’ an abcess were forming. So here is another scare. And with it I’ve one of my queer attacks when I feel nauseated all the time & can’t bear light or noise or heat or cold. Shall I get through this, too? It is not easy to still find the courage to cope with these onslaughts . . . July 13th. Went to the Palace & had the gland punctured. It is very unlikely that they will save the skin. I am sure, from the feeling, that they won’t & that this affair is only beginning. I shall be back at the Palace before the week is out. In the meantime I am exhausted & can’t write a stroke. Well I must confess I have had an idle day – god knows why. All was to be written but I just didn’t write it. I thought I would but I felt tired after tea and rested instead. Is it good or bad in me to behave so? I have a sense of guilt but at the same time I know that to rest is the very best thing I can do. And for some reason there is a kind of booming in my head – which is horrid. But marks of earthly degradation still pursue me. I am not crystal clear – above all else, I do still lack application. It’s not right. There is so much to do and I do so little. Life would be almost perfect here if only when I was pretending to work I always was working. But that is surely not too hard? Look at the stories that wait and wait just at the threshold. Why don’t I let them in? And their place would be taken by others who are lurking just beyond out there – waiting for the chance.

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Next day. Yet take this morning, for instance. I don’t want to write anything. It’s grey; it’s heavy and dull. And short stories seem unreal & not worth doing. I don’t want to write; I want to Live. What does one mean by that? It’s not too easy to say. But there you are! Queer this habit of mine of being garrulous. And I don’t mean that any eye but mine should read this. This is – really private. But I must say nothing affords me the same relief. What happens as a rule is, if I go on long enough I break through. It’s rather like tossing very large flat stones into the stream. The question is, though, how long this will prove efficacious. Up till now, I own, it never has failed me . . . One’s sense of the importance of small events is very juste here. They are not important at all . . . ! ? Strange! I suddenly found myself outside the library in Worishofen. Spring – lilac – rain – books in black bindings. And yet I love this quiet clouded day. A bell sounds from afar. The birds sing one after another, as if they called across the tree tops. I love this settled stillness, and this feeling that, at any moment, down may come the rain. Where the sky is not grey it is silvery white, stroked with little clouds. The only disagreeable feature of the day is the flies. They are really maddening and there is nothing to be done for them: I feel that about hardly anything. Mon seul désir ici c’est dieu1 Besfe [?] Feel appeased [?] to the distance. The barmaid. She wore an immense amount of fuzzy hair piled up on top of her head, & several very large rings which from their bright flashing look you were certain were engagement rings. Above all cooking smells I hate that of mutton chops. It is somehow such an ill-bred smell. It reminds me of commercial travellers & second class N.Z. I’ll stand in front of the house & knock & when the door is opened run in, past the maid, & call for whoever is there. Should you say wasted? No – not really. Something is gathered. This quiet time brings one nearer. 1) 2) 3) 4) 5) 6) 7)

The Daughters of the Colonel The Stranger The Young Girl The Lady’s Maid Miss Brill Ma Parker Sixpence

1. (Fr.) ‘I desire nothing but God here.’

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8) The Music Lesson 9) Mr & Mrs Dove 10) An Ideal Family [Notebook 28, qMS–1275]

The New Baby. It is late night, very dark, very still. Not a star to be seen. And now it has come on to rain. What happiness it is to listen to rain at night; joyful relief, ease, a lapping round and hushing and brooding tenderness, all are mingled together in the sound of the fast-falling rain. God, looking down upon the rainy earth, sees how faint are these lights burning in little windows – how easily put out. Suddenly quick hard steps mount the stone staircase. Someone is hurrying. There is a knock at my door and at the same moment a red beaming face is thrust in and Ernestine announces ‘He is born!’ Born! ‘He is born!’ Oh, Ernestine, don’t turn away. Don’t be afraid. Let me weep too. You ought to keep this my girl, just as a warning to show what an arch-wallower you can be! It is a curious fact that once a writer has attained to a certain eminence we English cease to bother ourselves about him. There he is, recognized, accepted, labelled. Keith and Isobel Among the passengers by the afternoon boat was Keith Kember. He had his bicycle on board. Reste toi ici – tu es mort.1 children are marvellous! and all the while the little girl sat in the railway train & nursed her baby. ‘Do you think that marriage would be of any use to me?’ His friend considered gravely. He frowned, knocked his pipe against his heel & thrust out his underlip. ‘It depends’ said he, ‘very much on the woman.’ ‘Oh but of course’ said Archie, eagerly.

1. (Fr.) ‘You stay here – you are dead.’

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‘Granted the right woman’ said Wyndham largely, ‘I can imagine it might immensely benefit you’. The problem is two friends and a woman enters. One marries. [NLC Notebook 7]

July. I finished Mr and Mrs Dove1 yesterday. I am not altogether pleased with it. It’s a little bit made up. It’s not inevitable. I mean to imply that those two may not be happy together – that that is the kind of reason for which a young girl marries. But have I done so? I don’t think so. Besides it’s not strong enough. I want to be nearer, far, far nearer than that. I want to use all my force even when I am tracing a fine line. And I have a sneaking notion that I have, at the end, used the doves unwarrantably. Tu sais ce que je veux dire.2 I used them to round off something, didn’t I? Is that quite my game? No, it’s not. It’s not quite the kind of truth I’m after. Now for Susannah.3 All must be deeply felt. But what is one to do with this wretched cat and mouse act? There’s my difficulty! I must try and write this afternoon, instead. There is no reason why I shouldn’t! No reason except the after-effects of pain on a weakened organism. [Journal, 1954, pp. 256–7]

July 18 The noise in this house this morning is sheer hell. It has gone on steadily since shortly after six o’clock, and for some reason the maid seems to have completely lost her head. It’s now nearly ten, and she hasn’t cleared the breakfast away. I have to go again to the Palace at 11, and the consequence is I’m rather nervous anyway. And I’ve had the flowers to do and various things to see to like – laundry. I can hardly bear it. Now she plods up. Bang! She will be at the door in a moment. I don’t know how to stand it if it goes on. She’s here. She’s about to put the things in the lift. What are her thoughts? I don’t know or care. But I bitterly long for a little private room where I can work undisturbed. The balcony is not good enough; neither is this salon. Here again, J. has beaten me. And it’s not half so important for him. . . .

1. See CW2, pp. 300–7. 2. (Fr.) ‘You know what I mean.’ 3. See CW2, pp. 307–9.

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[NLC Notebook 7]

23rd. Finished An Ideal Family1 yesterday. It seems to me better than the ‘Doves’ but still it’s not good enough. I worked at it hard enough, God knows & yet I feel I didn’t get the deepest truth out of the idea, even once. What is this feeling? I feel again that this kind of knowledge is too easy for me; it’s even a kind of trickery. I know so much more. This looks & smells like a story but I wouldn’t buy it. I don’t want to possess it – to live with it. NO. Once I have written two more I shall tackle something different – a long story – At the Bay with more difficult relationships. That’s the whole problem. Out of the pocket of the mackintosh she took an ample bag which she opened & peered into & shook. Her eyebrows were raised, her lips pressed together. And a very long shining blue-black hairpin gleaming on the faded red carpet. She shuddered. And now when she looked at his photograph even the white flower in his button-hole looked as though it was made of a curl of mutton fat. And she saw Mr. Bailey in a blue apron standing at the back of one of those horrible shops. He had one hand on his hip, the other grasped the handle of a long knife that was stuck into a huge chopping block. At the back of him there hung a fringe of small rabbits, their feet tied together, a dark clot of blood trembling from their noses. [Journal, 1954, pp. 257–8]

A Welcome. And because, when you arrive unexpected, there is so often a cold gleam in the hussif’s eye which means: ‘I can manage the sheets perfectly, but the blankets are certainly going to be a problem’, I would have you met in the doorway by a young creature carrying a not too bright lamp, it being, of course, late evening, and chanting, as you brush under the jasmine porch: Be not afraid, the house is full of blankets, Red ones and white ones, lovely beyond dreaming. Key-pattern, tasselled, camel-hair and woolly, Softer than sleep or the bosom of a swan. 1. See CW2, pp. 317–22.

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[NLC]

Montana 23.vii. 1921. ‘Hat With a Feather.’ The Boy Who Couldn’t Stand Girls. The train stopped. When a train stops in the open country between two stations it is impossible not to put one’s head out of the window and see what’s up. But when it stops and shunts and clanks about & whistles and you know for a fact that two extra engines are being added to it surely no human being worth anything (except a silly woman) would go on sitting in his corner as though nothing had happened. But that is what Smith did. But it is an intensely difficult story to write! It is difficult to get going ... Unruffled sea, the gulls moved like the lights within a pearl [Journal, 1954, pp. 257–8]

July 25 All this! All that I write – all that I am – is on the border of the sea. It’s a kind of playing. I want to put all my force behind it, but somehow, I cannot!1 Ful gay was al the ground, and queynt, And poudred as men had it peynt With many a fresh and sondry flour That casten up ful good savour.2 From an unposted letter. It’s a chill, strange day. I can just get about. I decided this morning to write to S. about the Swiss Spahlinger treatment: whether it would be suitable for me, etc.3 And I shall wire you to-morrow, asking you to go and see S. Say what you like. But let him know that I am 1. Inserted into the middle of the manuscript of ‘Her First Ball’. 2. From Geoffrey Chaucer’s Romaunt of the Rose (c. 1360), his translation of the French medieval allegory, Roman de la rose. 3. The Spahlinger method for treating tuberculosis had been in its exploratory stages since 1910, and was just beginning to be discussed in the press in the early 1920s. Henri Spahlinger (1882–1965) was a Swiss bacteriologist, who devoted his life and personal resources to the development of serums and vaccines that would help prevent and cure tuberculosis.

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practically a hopeless invalid. I have tried to explain about money to him; why I haven’t paid him, and I have promised to pay the first moment I can. . . . ‘Mistress, I dug upon your grave To bury a bone, in case I should be hungry near this spot When passing on my daily trot. I am sorry, but I quite forgot It was your resting place’.1 (Thomas Hardy) Wing would do this. [Notebook 43, qMS–1274]

Katherine Mansfield. 1921 Ah, that was she! That was his wife, bending out of the dark porch, half hidden by the over-hanging passion vine that drooped sorrowful, mournful even, as though it understood. Small warm arms were round his neck, a face little & pale lifted to his and a voice breathed: goodbye my treasure! My treasure! Goodbye my treasure. Which of them had spoken – whose voice was it he heard? Many thanks for your stuffy letter. As for the candlestick dear – if you remember I gave it to you on your last birthday. No wonder it reminded you of me. I have kept it in its paper & intend to return it to you with a pretty little note on your next. Or shall I first send it to you as an early Christmas present & do you return it as a late one or a New Year’s gift? Easter we shall leave out. It would be a trifle excessive at Easter. I wonder which one of us will be in possession of it at the last. If it is on my side I shall leave it to you in my will, all proper, and I think it would be nice of you, Camilla, to desire that it should be buried with you. Besides, one’s mind faints at the idea of a candlestick whirling through space and time for ever. Fliegende2 candlestick, in fact! I have been suffering from wind round the heart. Such a tiresome complaint but not dangerous. Really, for anything to be so painful 1. Final stanza of Thomas Hardy’s ‘Ah, Are You Digging On My Grave?’ (1913), a poignant poem whose speaker is a dead young woman. The final stanza, however, is written from the point of view of her dog. 2. (Ger.) ‘flying’.

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I think I would prefer a spice of danger added. The first act was brought on by a fit of laughing. Flaubert Notes. [NLC Notebook 5]

xi.viii.1921 I don’t know how I may write this next story. It’s so difficult. But I suppose I shall. The trouble is I am so infernally cold! Oh! Oh!! Oh!!! je meurs de quelque chose1 ‘I have been writing a story about an old man’ She looked vague. ‘But I don’t think I like old men, do you’ said she. ‘They exude so’. This horrified me. It seemed so infernally petty and more than that . . . it was the saying of a vulgar little mind. Later: I think it was shyness. Widoed by Katherine Mansfield Jimmy! His boots! How can a person be dead when their boots look like that. When Geraldine Cullen lost her husband it all happened so quickly, so unexpectedly, and she was called upon for such a display of courage and2 exhausted angry quick The panting of the saw

1. (Fr.) ‘I’m dying of something.’ 2. Draft versions of the story ‘Widowed’ (see CW2, pp. 338–42).

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[Journal, 1954, p. 261]

‘I was in the first stage of consumption, and was suffering from something else, possibly even more serious than consumption. . . . I was, day by day, more possessed by a passionate, irritating longing for ordinary everyday life. I yearned for mental tranquillity, health, fresh air, good food. I was becoming a dreamer, and like a dreamer, I did not know exactly what I wanted’. (Tchehov: An Anonymous Story.)1 [NLC Notebook 5]

. . . constitutes a serious menace to health . . . 29.viii.1921. ‘If I could only sweep all my garden up the hill to your doors’. her perfect little gesture as she said this. ‘Two women – and both Beauchamps!’2 A sudden idea of the relationship between ‘lovers’. We are neither male nor female. We are a compound of both. I choose the male who will develop & expand the male in me; he chooses me to expand the female in him. Being made ‘whole’. Yes, but that’s a process. By love serve ye one another . . . And why I choose one man for this rather than many is for safety. We bind ourselves within a ring, and that ring is as it were a wall against the outside world. It is our refuge, our shelter. Here the tricks of Life will not be played. Here is safety for us to grow. Why I talk like a child. (3) A smell of thyme startled the silence as the scream of a hawk. (7) the hot sheet between her teeth, as she lay there damp & shivering. It is impossible to ‘take in’ all these views and changes of light. The innocent girl who barely knew the word ‘obscene’ could not think in this fashion: Was it merely as a potentiality that he obsessed her thoughts?

Dear Ida Thank you for your letter. I would have written a card before but I have been – am – ill, & today’s the first day I’ve taken a pen even so far. I’ve had an attack of what Doctor H. calls acute enteritis. I think it was poisoning. Very high fever & sickness & dysentery and so on. Horrible. I decided yesterday to go to the Palace but today makes me feel I’ll try & see it out here. Jack is awfully kind in the menial offices of nurse & I have not been able to take any food except warm milk so E. can’t work her worst on me. She seems poor creature to be much more stupid than ever! Burns everything! Leaves us without eggs & went off for her afternoon yesterday without a word. We didn’t even know she was gone. In fact you are awfully in request. My very soul revolted though at your letter about your pension again. How can you have such a passion for people to hold up their hands & tell you over & over & over that they need you!! Or are you simply insincere when you take on a job? You don’t ever mean to make anything your job – you’re just a kind of vaccuum. I don’t know. It’s difficult. It’s maddening. I suppose it gives you a trumpery sense of power. But no-one wants a slave, you know. There’s your mistake. One only wants to feel sure of another. That’s all. A pity you can’t resist the female in you. I like people to be ‘gay’ & to be happy but I can’t bear flirts . . . 20. The Biblical quote. Is it right?1

1. Here and in the series of numbered comments directly below, KM is noting passing ideas or phrases from JMM’s The Things We Were, his second novel, published in London by Constable in 1922. KM is clearly reading a draft or typescript. The details that caught KM’s attention are indicative of her own attention to narrative poetics and heightened significance, particularly in such an autobiographically inspired text; hence the cross-referencing here. Page numbers indicated in the footnotes here are those of the first published edition, and explain the differences in numbering. Biblical quotation: ‘He that loseth his life for My sake shall save it’ – found in Boston’s musings as he wanders through London contemplating ‘the threadbare texture of his life’ (TTWA, p. 46).

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27. remembering something nice to compare you to1 29. big as a postage stamp2 61. why count the handkerchiefs3 72. Birds don’t fit [?]4 86. I think you’re a v. unhappy man5 94. Let’s get married6 96. grey veil7

1. From Boston’s dialogue with Dorothy, a waitress in a café. These words pass through her mind as she observes him: ‘But then what nice eyes he had, that looked at you gently –though not sloppily – and seemed to smile as though . . . as though he were remembering something nice to compare you to’ (TTWA, p. 56). 2. From the scene after their chance encounter, when Dorothy and Boston walk back together. They observe two children with cabbage leaves on their heads, who shrink back into a hedge when a cart drives past. The girl then wipes mud from the boy’s shoe ‘with a handkerchief as big as a postage stamp’ (TTWA, p. 59). 3. From a scene where Bettington and Felicia look through Boston’s flat in his absence. Self-conscious about doing ‘intimate things without intimacy’, Felicia ‘began to count the handkerchiefs’, with a growing sense of being ‘gently watched’ (TTWA, pp. 112–13). 4. From the scene where Boston waits apprehensively for Bettington to arrive and listens attentively to the world around him, even as he examines his own inner feelings. In one such passage of his inner monologue, we read, ‘He heard a deep steady pulse like a mighty engine in the incessant murmur of the trees, the sudden drone of the swooping bees, the grave and serious note of a man whistling, the faint impatient jigging of a grasshopper, the tweet-tweet-tweettudle-ludle-tudle-ludle of a distant, domineering bird saying “Listen to me. I can do it; I can do it”’ (TTWA, p. 131). 5. From a conversation between Boston and Felicia, where she presses him to reveal his inner secret and he assures her it is nothing but ‘a dead cabbage [. . .] with a faintly unpleasant smell’. These words are Felicia’s reaction to Boston’s scathing metaphor (TTWA, pp. 154–5). 6. These words are part of a particularly intense scene when Boston and Felicia grow ever more intimate, but only as they discuss the possibility of Felicia and Bettington being in love. Felicia admits that ‘if you had said, ten minutes ago, let’s go away together, let’s get married, I would have done it. I would have been wrong’ (TTWA, p. 169). 7. From a departure scene when Boston accompanies Bettington and Felicia to the station. Felicia is wearing ‘a little grey straw hat, with a bunch of yellow rosebuds. A grey veil covered her face’ (TTWA, p. 172).

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101. Does it hurt?1 123. passion of love for HIM?2 An Outing

30.viii.1921

Emily Plack. The Garden-Party.3 At the Bay. Prelude The Daughters of the Late Col. The Stranger Miss Brill. Miss Moss

Je ne parle.

1. This indicates KM’s reaction to an episode in the narrative rather than a direct quotation. The most likely point of reference is to the epigraph to Chapter 7, ‘Felicia’s Departure’, which reads: ‘Hé, Dieu du ciel, je n’eusse pas pensé / Qu’un seul départ eust causé tant de peine. – Ronsard’ (TTWA, p. 174). The translated text reads, ‘Oh God in heaven, I would never have thought that one single departure might hurt so much.’ Despite his initial sense of loss, Boston quickly enters into a warm conversation with a Mrs Kennington, who lives in the village, and his pain dwindles into the background. 2. KM is responding here to Bettington’s growing awareness of the love he feels for Boston, intimately entwined with his love for Felicia: ‘The pleasure of getting a letter from Boston was so great that he would sharpen the point of it by delaying. It was a fat letter too. How fond he was of Boston! Boston’s strangeness only added to his love. Sometimes he felt that he would give more for a sudden gesture of affection from Boston than for anything else in the world, and that he was hungering for some final acknowledgement by Boston of his place in his life’ (TTWA, p. 221). 3. KM’s list of a number of major stories includes two that have not, to date, been traced: ‘Barrington’ and ‘The Golden Birds’.

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The Young Girl. Feuille The Ladies Maid. The Wind blows Life of Ma Parker Sixpence Mr and Mrs Dove An Ideal Family Her First Ball Marriage à la mode The Singing Lesson The Voyage Bank Holiday. Widowed Barrington The Golden Birds Second Violin. 100 Bedford Park [MS–Papers–11326–025]

At precisely the right moment, neither too early, nor too late, their large blue car, which was exactly like all the other cars turned in at the iron gates, scrunched over the small gravel and came to a stop under an immense glass porch. Their behaviour then and the moment after was perfect. Unhurried, but a little reluctant, they got out. She stood staring with no expression whatever in her blue eyes over the heads of those who were already elsewhere on the garden tables, and he looked faintly contemptuous [. . .] and as if determined to have no nonsense from any little fancy waiters. [Notebook 25, qMS–1267]

September is different to all other months. It is more magical. I feel the strange chemical change in the earth which produces mushrooms is the cause, too, of this extra ‘life’ in the air – a resilience, a sparkle. For days the weather has been the same. One wakes to see the trees outside bathed in green-gold light. It’s fresh – not cold. It’s clear. The sky is a light pure blue. During the morning the sun gets hot. There is a haze over the mountains. Occasionally a squirrel appears, runs up the mast of a pine tree, seizes a cone & sits in the crook of a branch, holding it like a banana. Now and again a little bird, hanging upside down, pecks at seed. There is a constant sound of bells from the valley – it keeps on all day from early to late.

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Midday – with long shadows. Hot and still. And yet there’s always that taste of a berry rather than scent of a flower in the air. But what can one say of the afternoons? Of the evening. The rose, the–gold on the mountains – the quick mounting shadows. But it’s soon cold. Beautifully cold, however. It’s nothing short of loathsome to be in my state. Two weeks ago I could write anything. I went at my work each day and at the end of each day so much was written. Whereas now I can’t say a word! [Journal, 1954, p. 263]

Why did she put his chair in the window always? Sun or no sun, she stuck him in the window as if he had been a canary! ‘“That’s how it is, old girl. . . . Kuzma Ionitch is gone . . . He said goodbye to me . . . He went and died for no reason . . . Now, suppose you had a little colt, and you were own mother to that little colt . . . And all at once that same little colt went and died . . . You’d be sorry, wouldn’t you?”’ The little mare munches, listens, and breathes on her master’s hands. Iona is carried away and tells her all about it’. (Tchehov: Misery.)1 I would see every single French short story up the chimney for this. It’s one of the masterpieces of the world. [Notebook 30, qMS–1276]

Katherine Mansfield ‘Lives like Logs of Driftwood’.2 Etc. Begun September 27th 1921. [Notebook 41, qMS–1277]

27.x.1921. Stories for my new book.3 1. ‘The Misery’, translated by Constance Garnett (from which KM quotes here), is included in The Schoolmistress and Other Stories (1918). It is one of Chekhov’s most moving tales, in which an old coachdriver seeks a sympathetic soul to whom to confide his grief after the death of his son. Since no human ear is responsive, he finally talks to his horse. KM is here quoting the final lines of the story. 2. See above, p. 184. 3. KM was clearly planning a compilation that would intercalate stories set in New Zealand and London.

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N.Z. Honesty: The Doctor, Arnold Cullen & his wife Lydia, and Archie the friend.1 L. Second Violin: Alexander and his friend in the train. Spring – spouting rain. N.Z. Six Years After: A wife & husband on board a steamer. They see someone who reminds them.2 L. Lives Like Logs of Driftwood: This wants to be a long, very well written story. The men are important, especially the lesser man. It wants a great deal of working . . . newspaper office.3 N.Z. A Weak Heart: Ronnie on his bike in the evening, with his hands in his pockets doing marvels by that dark tree at the corner of May Street.4 L. Widowed: Geraldine & Jimmie, a house overlooking Sloane Street & Square. Wearing those buds at her breast. ‘Married or not married . . .’ From Autumn to Spring.5 N.Z. Our Maude: Husband & wife play duets and a one a two a three a one a two three one! His white waistcoats. Wifeling & Ma hub!6 N.Z. At Karori: The little lamp. I seen it. And then they were silent. Finito 30.x.217 Mr Kelvie was the scandal of the neighbourhood. He drove a fish cart, when he was out of prison or out of the hospital. For he was such a hopeless drunkard that the wonder is he could sit in the cart at all – he never did for long. Horses have scent [?] of the Devil’s plan – if he [. . .] one he was pitched out at the other – & there he lay angry & swearing until the police came round to remove him. Happily there were only two little Kelvies. Lil, a stout plain child with big freckles and a high forehead and her little sister whom her mother & everyone called ‘our Else’. Our Else was so small that people said there was something wrong with her; she was nearly a dwarf. A little wishbone of a child with cropped hair, enormous 1. See CW2, pp. 444–7. 2. See CW2, pp. 421–5. 3. This story has never been traced. In ‘At the Bay’, the unconventional Mrs Harry Kember is described as lying on a beach ‘stretched on the stones like a piece of tossed-up driftwood’ (see CW2, p. 352). See KM’s early poem with the same title, p. 184. 4. See CW2, pp. 426–9. In the draft form of this story, Ronnie has become ‘Roddie’. 5. See CW2, pp. 338–42. 6. This story does not appear to have survived, or to have been written. 7. ‘At Karori’ was KM’s first working title for the story that became ‘The Doll’s House’ (see CW2, pp. 414–21).

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eyes in a pale solemn little face. No one had ever seen her smile, she could scarcely be made to speak. The teachers gave her up after two days & she had a [. . .] little bench by herself and looked on during lessons. Out of school she did not seem to exist except as a part of Lil. It seemed to be her one idea that if she let go of Lil she let go of Life altogether. And so in the playground, or down the road, going to and from school Lil marched in front & our Else tagged behind holding on to her sisters dress with one hand like a claw. When she wanted anything or when she was out of breath she gave Lil a tug or twitch, & Lil stopped dead & turned round. She never failed to understand.1 2 [NLC Notebook 6]

13.xi.1921 It is time I started a new journal. Come, my unseen, my unknown, let us talk together. Yes, for the last two weeks I have written scarcely anything. I have been idle; I have failed. Why? Many reasons. There has been a kind of confusion in my consciousness. It has seemed as though there was no time to write. The mornings, if they are sunny, are taken up with sun-treatment; the post eats away the afternoon. And at night I am tired. But it all goes deeper. Yes, you are right. I haven’t felt able to yield to the kind of contemplation that is necessary. I have not felt pure in heart, not humble, not good. There’s been a stirring up of sediment. I look at the mountains and I see nothing but mountains. Be frank! I read rubbish. I give way about writing letters. I mean I refuse to meet my obligations, and this of course weakens me in every way. Then I have broken my promise to review the books for the Nation.3 Another bad spot. Out of hand? Yes, that 1. A draft version of ‘The Doll’s House’. In the final version, Mr Kelvey is the noticeably absent father, rumoured to be in jail. 2. Draft paragraph for an earlier version of ‘Widowed’. 3. The Nation was a weekly political newspaper that incorporated the Athenaeum in 1921, when falling readership figures increased the financial strain on the literary magazine.

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describes it – dissipated, vague, not positive, and above all, above everything, not working as I should be working – wasting time. Wasting time. The old cry – the first and last cry. Why do ye tarry! Ah, why indeed? My deepest desire is to be a writer, to have a ‘body of work’ done, and there the work is, there the stories wait for me, grow tired, wilt, fade, because I will not come. When first they knock how fresh and eager they are. And I hear & I acknowledge them & still I go on sitting at the window playing with the ball of wool. What is to be done. I must make another effort, at once. I must begin all over again. I must try and write simply, fully, freely, from my heart. Quietly, caring nothing for success or failure, but just going on. I must keep this book so that I have a record of what I do each week. (Here a word. As I re-read At the Bay in proof it seemed to me flat, dull, and not a success at all. I was very much ashamed of it. I am.) But now to resolve! And especially to keep in touch with Life. With the sky and this moon, these stars, these cold candid peaks. Katherine Mansfield Murry Katherine Mansfield Murry1 [Notebook 41, qMS–1277]

Finished and sent to put into my book.2 B This is a moderately successful story – and that’s all. It’s somehow, in the episode at the lane, scamped. 16.xi.1921. To go to Sierre if it goes on like this . . . or to – or to – Ka It happened that Alexander and his friend missed the Sunday morning train that all the company travelled by. The only other for them to catch so as to be at their destination in time for the rehearsal on Monday morning was one that left London at midnight. The devil of a time! And the devil of a train, too. It stopped at every station. Must have been carrying the London milk into the country said Alexander bitterly, and his friend, who thought there was no one like him said ‘That’s good, that is. Extremely good. You would get a laugh for that in the Halls I should say.’ They spent the evening with their landlady 1. Both signatures in JMM’s hand. 2. KM is here referring to ‘The Garden Party’ (see CW2, pp. 401–14).

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in her kitchen. She was fond of Alexander: she thought him quite the gentleman.1 oh, my hatred! Don’t reply to this. Dear Friend2 I like your criticism. It is right you should have hated those things in me. For I was careless and false. I was not true in those days. But I have been trying for a long time now to ‘squeeze the slave out of my soul’3 . . . I just want to let you know. Oh, Koteliansky, I am in the middle of a nice story. I wish you would like it. I am writing it in this exercise book & just broke off for a minute to talk to you. Thank you for the address. I cannot go to Paris before the Spring, so I think it would be better if I did not write until then. I feel this tight treatment is the right one. Not that I am ill at present. I am not in the least an invalid, in any way. It’s a sunny, windy day – beautiful. There is a soft roaring in the trees and little birds fly up into the air just for the fun of being tossed about. Goodbye. I press your hand. But do you dislike the idea we should write to each other from time to time? Katherine. It’s queer how even when the need is removed she waits in a fury of impatience for the post. I wonder why it should be so difficult to be humble. I do not think I am a good writer; I realise my faults better than anyone else could realise them. I know exactly where I fail. And yet, when I have finished a story & before I have begun another I catch myself preening my feathers. It is disheartening. There seems to be some bad old pride in my heart; a root of it that puts out a thick shoot on the slightest 1. Draft version of a paragraph from ‘Second Violin’ (see CW2, pp. 391–4). 2. Draft of a letter to Koteliansky. 3. KM is quoting Chekhov here, an expression he uses in a letter to the Russian publisher and journalist, A. S. Suvorin (1834–1912), dated 7 January 1889. The letter is not among those KM and Koteliansky co-translated and published in the Athenaeum, but may have been in the collection of translations KM lost before getting it back to Koteliansky for revisions. Koteliansky also used the expression when urging his friends to be sincere and true to themselves.

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provocation . . . This interferes very much with work. One can’t be calm, clear, good as one must be while it goes on. I look at the mountains, I try to pray, & I think of something clever. It’s a kind of excitement within one which shouldn’t be there. Calm yourself. Clear yourself. And anything that I write in this mood will be no good; it will be full of sediment. If I were well I would go off by myself somewhere & sit under a tree. One must learn, one must practise to forget oneself. I can’t tell the truth about Aunt Anne unless I am free to enter into her life without selfconsciousness. Oh God! I am divided still. I am bad. I fail in my personal life. I lapse into impatience, temper, vanity & so I fail as thy priest. Perhaps poetry will help. I have just thoroughly cleaned & attended to my fountain pen. If after this it leaks then it is no gentleman! And the friend opposite gazed at him thinking what an attractive mysterious fellow he was. And the train sped on. flashy and mean – It was spouting with rain yet there was that feeling of spring in the air which makes everything bearable. The big sprays of flowers. What on earth He shot out his legs, flung up his arms, stretched, then sat up with a jerk & felt in his pocket for the yellow paper of cigarettes. As he felt for them a weak strange little smile played on his lips. His friend opposite was watching it. He knew it. Suddenly he raised his head; he looked his friend full in the eyes. That was a queer thing to happen, he said softly & meaningly. What? asked the friend, curious. Alexander kept him waiting for the answer. Practised liar that he was, the1 N.Z. Honesty. The Doctor & his wife, Arnold Cullen, Lydia & Archie. L. One Kiss. Arnold Alexander & his friend in the train. Wet lilac. N.Z. Six Years After. The wife & husband in the steamer. The cold buttons. N.Z. Aunt Anne. Her life with the Tannhauser Overture. L. Lives Like Logs of Driftwood. N.Z. A Weak Heart. Edie & Ronnie. L. Widowed. Geraldine and Jimmie. 1. A draft paragraph from ‘Second Violin’.

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N.Z. Our Maude. ‘What a girl you are!’ The Washerwoman’s Children. I wish that my silence was only a two minute one! . . . fallen out of the nest, without wings or feathers to help them bear the cold. [MS–Papers–4006–8]

I seem to have lost all power of writing. I can think, in a vague way, and it all seems more or less real and worth doing. But I can’t get any further. I can’t write it down. Sometimes I think my brain is going. But no! I know the real reason. It’s because I am still suffering from a kind of nervous prostration caused by my life in Paris. For instance, those interviews with the dentist. If anyone else – anyone with imagination had realised what I suffered they would have known I was really at the end of my strength. And then the strain of keeping going; of brushing my clothes, making the constant renewed effort, talking to Brett, coughing . . . Bogey was perfectly marvellous. But watching him do everything was really nearly as tiring as doing it oneself. And then, on other journeys, look at the care I had taken of me – everything was spared. There was nothing to do but to keep still. This time I felt at the mercy of everything. Tchekhov, by the way, felt this disenchantment exactly. And who could not feel it who lives with a pessimist. To keep another going is a million times more tiring than to keep oneself going. And then there is always the feeling that all falls on stony ground. Nothing is nourished, watched, cherished. He hears. It gives him a vague sense of life, and then it passes away from him as though it never had been and he [MS–Papers–4006–10]

[MS–Papers–4006–9]

Bowing deeply as though bitterly ashamed the little girl crept out after her grandmother.

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When they were gone old Mr Rendall lay down on the horsehair sofa. He felt better altogether – easier and lighter now he had torn the lily from its stem. Hm! the wan blood tingled in his veins. He threw his handkerchief over his face, thinking with almost a chuckle there was life in the old dog yet! Well, said Janet, sighing – she always sighed at moments of leave taking – if we are to catch that tram we must be going. And lifting her chin she began to retie her bonnet strings. Get down Susannah. Susannah slid over the slippery chair. She was glad to go. I’ll look in again when I’m passing, said Janet. Shake hands Susannah & say goodbye. No, not that hand child, the other.1 By great good fortune the tram was empty. The sisters had it all to themselves. Feeling grand, down they sat in one of the small wooden pens. The conductor blew his whistle, the driver banged his bell, the fat small horses started forward and away they swung. Merrily danced the pink bobbles on the fringes of the cotton blinds and gaily the sunlight raced under the arched roof. ‘But what on earth am I to do with this’ cried Gertrude, gazing with exaggerated scorn and horror at the bouquet that old Mr Phipps had cut and bound together so lovingly. Agnes screwed up her eyes and smiled at the unearthly white and gold arum lily and the dove blue columbines. ‘I don’t know’ said she. ‘You can’t possibly cart it about with you. It’s like a barmaid’s wedding bouquet.’ And she laughed and put her hand to her glorious coil of thick hair. Gertrude tossed it on to the floor & kicked it under the seat. Just in time, as it happened.2 And smiling faintly he looked into his wife’s faintly smiling face. Wherever the house happened to be he added, softly.3 1. Draft paragraphs related to two stories: ‘The Lily’, which includes the character of old Mr Rendall, and ‘Susannah’, which features a child called Susannah but no ‘Janet’ (see CW2, pp. 503–4 and 307–9). 2. Draft paragraphs for ‘The Sisters’ (see CW2, pp. 442–3). 3. Lines that reappear in modified form in the story ‘Honeymoon’, but which have an intertextual ring echoing the closing sentence of James Joyce’s novella, ‘The Dead’ (1914): ‘His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead’. James Joyce (1882–1941) was an Irish novelist and short-story writer, whose unceasing literary experimentalism had an immense influence on the emergence, definition and evolution of literary modernism. His choice of an uprooted lifestyle, mostly in continental Europe, and his consequent cultural and linguistic outsidedness, reinforce his image as the quintessential modernist.

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[MS Papers 4006/9]

A very small railway train came along with a wooden whistle. First it stopped, blew the whistle & then moved slowly forward with a wonderfully expressive motion of the right arm. People mattered not at all. It went through them, past them – skirted them. Then down it fell, full length. But two gentlemen picked it up, patted its behind and in a minute it whistled (rather longer than usual) and started off again . . . A little bird-like mother with a baby in her arm, and tugging at one hand a minute little girl in a coat made out of a pleated skirt & a pink bow – it looked like pink flannel – on her bobbed hair. A very rich child in a white beaver hat passed & fell quite in love with the pink flannel bow. When its nurse was not looking it hung back & walked beside its little poor sister, looking at her wonderingly & very carefully keeping step. A little person in a pink hat passed very carefully dragging a minute doll’s pram. It was so minute she had to drag it on a thread of cotton. Naturally once she stopped looking & her hand gave a jerk down fell the pram & for about 2 minutes she pulled it along on its side. Then she discovered the accident, rushed back, set it up & looked round very angrily in all directions, certain some enemy had knocked it over on purpose. Her little dark direct gaze was quite frightening. Did she see someone? And then suddenly the wind lifts and all the leaves fly forward so gladly – so eagerly as if they are thankful it is not their turn yet to1 [MS–Papers–4006–9]

Poor Auntie B! On Sunday mornings as early as half past ten, and in spite of the fact that the kitchen arrangements in the Tindalls’ large luxurious flat were cut off by baize doors and a passage, there was a whiff, a discreet whiff but an unmistakable one, of the very finest roast surloin. Priscilla and Betty who were too young to recognise the smell as roast beef – unless the roast beef was actually there before them – called it the Sunday smell. They had a dim idea – at least Betty had – that it came from Heaven and that little children who did not go to church with [a] bright 6d in their gloves were not allowed to smell it. 1. This paragraph, and those that follow, are clearly preparatory studies for stories that were never written.

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Bring them straight back across the park Mam’selle, please, said Mrs T. who liked to go into the day nursery and survey Priscilla & Biddy when they had been through the maid’s and Mam’selle’s Why should Sunday be so different to every other day? Why should the air, the sky, the clouds be different. Why should the dew take so much longer to dry on the bluish grass and how do the birds know it’s Sunday? One can understand it in the town where all the shops are shut and the trams don’t run until church time, but in the country – that stillness, that brightness, that sense of joyful ease . . . where does it come from. ‘Ting-a-tan! Ting-a-tan! Ting-a-tan-tan-tan’ rang very faint from the little tin church over the hill. It sounded rather charming from a distance. The Skeritts never dreamed of going any nearer. She washed her hair on Sunday mornings if the weather was fine; if it was wet she cleaned her white kid gloves. And he lay in a long chair on the verandah & read something or other. There had been a time when she had always come to dry her hair in the sun on the verandah. She stood in her white kimono against the big blue plumbago, looking solemn & fanning that flag of hair until he put down his book & drawled lazily ‘I say what a lot. How jolly it looks.’ There had been a time when she had always pinned the helpless exhausted-looking gloves to the verandah poles to air while he murmured ‘They look like absurd little mice.’ But that was over. Nothing had been said but both of them understood why.1 [MS–Papers–4006–10]

I do not think I have the right to criticise any of this. Please ignore the pencil marks & the comments. I am sure I should have left your work as it is. It is you. K.M. [MS–Papers–4006–9]

But this is not expanded enough or rich enough.2 I think still a description of the house and the place should come first and then the 1. A girl from the Skeritt family features in the sketch, ‘On her way back to the garden’ (CW2, pp. 436–7). 2. KM is referring to ‘It was the late afternoon’ (CW2, pp. 493–5), where this digression interrupts the narrative. The Sheridan family is also the focus of ‘The Garden Party’.

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light should fall on the figure of Mrs S. on her way home. Really I can allow myself to write a great deal – to describe it all – the baths, the avenue, the people in the gardens, the chinaman under the tree in May Street. But in that case she won’t be conscious of these things. That’s bad. They must be seen and felt by her as she wanders home. That sense of flowing in and out of houses – going and returning like the tide. To go and not to return – how terrible! The father in his dressing room, the familiar talk. His using her hair brushes, his passion for things that wear well. The children sitting round the table, the light outside, the silver. Her feeling as she sees them all gathered together, her longing for them always to be there. (Yes, I’m getting nearer all this. I now remember S.W. and see that it must be written with love – real love. All the same the difficulty is to get it all within focus, to introduce that young doctor & bring him continually nearer and nearer until finally he is part of the Sheridan family, until finally he has taken away Meg . . . That is by no means easy . . .) I have been thinking over this story this morning. I suppose I know as much about it now as I shall know. So it seems. And if just the miracle happened I could walk into it and make it mine. Even to write that brings it all nearer. It’s very strange, but the mere act of writing anything is a help. It seems to speed one on one’s way. But my feet are so cold.

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[Notebook 20, qMS–1282]

ai écrit à1 Richard Anne Brett Ottoline Sydney Manoukhine Kot Drey Vere Sadleir .......... Cousin Lou E.B. Marie Jeanne Roma Sydney Elizabeth 1. To escape from the prison of the flesh – of matter. To make the body an instrument, a servant. 2. To act and not to dream. To write it down at all times and at all costs. What is the universal mind? OM. ‘Kratu smara Kritam smara Kratu smara Kritam smar.’

1. (Fr.) ‘have written to’.

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From the Isha Upanishad.1 [Journal, 1954, p. 283.]

The Little Frog. ‘Presently in the scale of complexity we find a higher power in charge which coordinates the activity of a mass of cells, moving one and stopping another for ‘reasons’ beyond the cognizance of the individual cells. A very extraordinary demonstration of such higher control can be made in the case of the frog. If part of the brain of a frog be removed he goes on living, but has become an automaton. Placed on a level board he sits there until he dries up. But if the board is gradually lifted, so that his position becomes unstable, he walks up the board and at length sits on the end, climbing down the other side if the lifting is continued beyond the vertical’. (Cosmic Anatomy.) Poor little frog! He breaks my heart. [Notebook 20, qMS–1282]

SUNDAY, JANUARY I dreamed I sailed to Egypt with Grandma, a very white boat. Cable Cold, still. The gale last night has blown nearly all the snow off the trees, only big, frozen looking lumps remain. In the wood where the snow is thick bars of sunlight lay like pale fire. I have left undone those things which I ought to have done and I have done those things which I ought not to have done e.g. violent impatience with L.M. Wrote The Dove’s Nest2 this afternoon. I was in no mood to write; it seemed impossible, yet when I had finished three pages they were 1. Reading notes from Cosmic Anatomy or the Structure of the Ego (see below, p. 435). The quotation from the Upanishads is a mantra recommended during meditation, entreating the mind to remember its former acts. The author of the book, Lewis Alexander Richard Wallace (1866–1951), was an associate of Orage in the early days of the New Age. Cosmic Anatomy is a philosophical, theosophical work that attempts to interweave Indian and Egyptian mysticism with contemporary physics and psychoanalysis. It was also to have a considerable influence on Yeats. The pseudonym M. A. Oxon indicates Wallace’s acknowledgement of Spirit Teachings (1883) by a nineteenth-century spiritualist, William Stanton Moses, who also published under this name. 2. See CW2, pp. 448–61.

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‘alright’. This is a proof (never to be too often proved) that once one has thought out a story nothing remains but the labour. Wing Lee1 disappeared for the day. Read W.J.D.’s poems.2 I feel very near to him in mind. I want to remember how the light fades from a room – and one fades with it, is expunged, sitting still, knees together, hands in pockets . . . MONDAY, JANUARY 2 Letters from Marie & J.3 Little round birds in the fir tree at the side window, scouring the tree for food. I crumbled a piece of bread but though the crumbs fell in the branches only two found them. There was a strange remoteness in the air, the scene, the winter cheeping. In the evening for the first time for – – I felt rested. I sat up in bed and discovered I was singing within. Even the sound of the wind is different. It is joyful, not ominous, and black dark looks in at the window and is only black dark. In the afternoon it came on to pour with rain, long glancing rain falling aslant. I have not done the work I should have done. I shirk the lunch party. This is very bad. In fact I am disgusted with myself. There must be a change from now on. What I chiefly admire in Jane Austen is that what she promises she performs i.e. if Sir T. is to arrive we have his arrival at length and it’s excellent and excels our expectations.4 This is rare; it is also my very weakest point. Easy to see why . . . TUESDAY, JANUARY 3 I dreamed I was at the Strand Palace,5 W.L.G.6 having married Marie Dahlerup – big blonde – in quantities of white satin . . . There was a great deal more snow this morning; it was very soft, ‘like wool’. The coconut was bought and sawn in half and hung from J’s balcony. The milk came tinkling out of the nut in brightest drops – not white milk. This was a profound surprise. The flesh of the nut is very lovely – so pure white. But it was that dewy, sweet liquid which made the marvel. Whence came it? It took one to the island.

1. 2. 3. 4.

Wingley, one of the Murrys’ cats. See p. 233, n. 5. KM’s sisters, Chaddie and Jeanne. Sir Thomas Bertram is the uncle by marriage of Fanny Price, the heroine of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814). The arrival KM is alluding to here is his unexpected return home during rehearsals for a play of which he disapproves. 5. The Strand Palace Hotel is on the street called the Strand in London, and was fashionable at the time. 6. Walter Lionel George (1882–1926) was an English novelist, critic and progressively minded journalist, who had been born and raised in Paris. He befriended KM when In a German Pension first came out in 1911.

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I read The Tempest. The papers came. I over-read them. Tell the truth. I did no work. In fact I was more idle and hateful than ever. Full of sin. Why? ‘Oh self oh self wake from thy common sleep’.1 And the worst of it is I feel so much better in health. It is strange! The Tempest seems to me astonishing this time. When one reads the same play again it never is the same play. WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 4 Dreamed of Michael Sadleir.2 An important dream, its tone was important. That gallery over the sea and my ‘isn’t it beautiful’ and his weary ‘no doubt’. His definition of the two kinds of women. A.M. which served as one excuse not to do any creative work. But I was not so wicked today. I have read a good deal of Cosmic Anatomy – understood it far better. Yes, such a book does fascinate me. Why does Jack hate it so? To get even a glimpse of the relation of things, to follow that relation & find it remains true through the ages enlarges my little mind as nothing else does. It’s only a greater view of psychology. It helps me with my writing for instance to know that hot + bun may mean Taurus, Pradhana,3 substance. No, that’s not really what absorbs me, it’s that reactions to certain causes & effects always have been the same. It wasn’t for nothing Constantia4 chose the moon & water – for instance! Read Shakespeare. The snow is thicker, it clings to the branches like white newborn puppies. THURSDAY, JANUARY 5 A long typical boat dream. I was, as usual, going to N.Z. But for the first time my stepmother was very friendly – so nice. I loved her. A 1. This would not appear to be a specific quotation, but relates to a number of works KM was interested in or likely to be reading at the time. In The Tempest, Prospero can put characters to sleep and then return them to wakefulness with his magic, although he never uses these words. Gurdjieff’s philosophy (see below, p. 437) was based on the idea that human beings lived in a state of ‘common sleep’ which he usually referred to as ‘waking sleep’ or ‘relative consciousness’, from which he urged his disciples to awaken so as to achieve a fuller, more objective level of consciousness. The same ideas were to be found in contemporary literature such as Ibsen’s play, When We Dead Awaken (1899), for example, and H. G. Wells’s novel, The Sleeper Wakes (1910). 2. Michael Sadleir was director of publications at Constable, KM’s publisher. He and JMM had become friends when at Oxford together, and had co-founded Rhythm. 3. In certains trends of Indian philosophy, ‘Pradhana’ suggests ‘the creative principle of nature’ or ‘the matter of which the world is made’. These ideas are developed in Cosmic Anatomy. 4. Constantia in ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ (see CW2, pp. 266–83).

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tragic dream as regards Ida. She disappeared & it was too late to find her or tell her to come back at last. Read Cosmic Anatomy. I managed to work a little. Broke through. This is a great relief. Jack & I put out food for the birds. When I went to the window all the food was gone, but there was the tiny print of their feet on the sill. J. brought up the ½ coconut, and sprinkled crumbs as well. Very soon, terrified, however one came, then another, then a third balanced on the coconut. They are precious little atoms. It still snows. I think I hate snow, downright hate it. There is something stupefying in it – a kind of ‘you must be worse before you’re better’ and down it spins. I love, I long for the fertile earth. How I have longed for the S. of France this year! So do I now. Soundly rated Ida about food & clothing. She has a food ‘complex’. J. & I read Mansfield Park with great enjoyment. I wonder if J. is as content as he appears? It seems too good to be true. FRIDAY, JANUARY 6 First Quarter of the Moon. Jour de Fête.1 The Tree is dismantled. I had a v. bad night & did not fall deeply asleep enough to dream. In the morning all white all dim and cold and snow still falling. While waiting in my room I watched the terrific efforts of a little bird to peck through the ice and get at the sweet food of the nut. He succeeded but why must he so strive? My heart is always bad today. It is the cold. It feels congested and I am uneasy, or rather my body is. Vile feeling. I cough. Read Shakespeare, read C.A., read the Oxford Dictionary. Wrote. But nothing like enough. In the afternoon Woodyfield2 came to tea. I suspect he is timid, fearful and deeply kind. Deep within that vast substance lurks the seed. That is not sentimental. He wished me sun as he left. I felt his wish had power and was a blessing. One can’t be mistaken in such things. He is in his stockings – pea green and red! J. came up after skiing, excessively handsome – a glorious object no less. I never saw a more splendid figure. I am wearing my ring on my middle finger as a reminder not to be so base. We shall see. No letters. Picture of Anna Wong.3 It asked for a story.

1. The sixth of January is traditionally celebrated as the Epiphany in France, when the Christmas tree is dismantled. 2. A fellow sufferer of tuberculosis being treated at the Palace Clinic in Montana. 3. Anna May Wong (1905–61) was a Chinese–American film actress, making her début in silent films in the early 1920s. Her first engagement as an extra dated from 1919, and she featured on the cover of the magazine Picture Show in 1921 in acknowledgement of her role in Bits of Life.

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SATURDAY, JANUARY 7 It ceased snowing and a deep, almost gentian blue sky showed. The snow lay heaped on the trees, big blobs of snow, like whipped cream. It was very cold but I suppose beautiful. I cannot see this snow as anything but hateful. So it is. A letter came from Violet & one from Brett. Answered Brett. My birds have made a number of little attacks on the coconut but it is still frozen. I read Cosmic Anatomy, Shakespeare & the Bible. Jonah. Very nice about the gourd & also on his journey paying the fare thereof.1 I wrote at my story but did not finish the lunch party as I ought to have done. How very bad this is! Had a long talk with Ida, and suddenly saw her again as a figure in a story. She resolves into so many. I could write books about her alone! I dreamed a long dream. Chummie was young again, so was Jeanne – Mother was alive. We were going through many strange rooms – up in lifts, alighting in lounges. It was all vaguely foreign. SUNDAY, JANUARY 8 All night dreamed of visiting houses, bare rooms, no. 39, going up & down in lifts etc. Heavily, more heavily than ever falls the snow. It is hypnotising. One looks, wonders vaguely how much has fallen & how much will fall and – looks again. Bandaged Jack’s fingers. The Mercury came with A.T.B.2 I am v. unsatisfied. In the afternoon J. and I played cribbage, with nuts for counters. I recalled the fact that I used to play so often with such intense – heavens with what feelings! – in the drawing room at Carlton Hill while Tommy3 played the piano. But it meant absolutely nothing. J. giving me a bad nut & me paying him back the bad nut again was all that really mattered. After tea we knitted and talked and then read. We were idle – snow-bound. One feels there is nothing to be done while this goes on. Had a letter from The Sketch4 asking for work. I must obey. J. & I talked Paris yesterday and he quite understood. This 1. In the Book of Jonah (King James Bible), Jonah first tries to escape from God’s command to go to Ninevah by taking a boat to Tarshish, ‘so he paid the fare thereof’ (Jonah, 1: 3). Having spoken to the city, Jonah sits outside the city wall in despair, and God ‘prepared a gourd, and made it to come over Jonah, that it might be a shadow over his head, to deliver him from his grief’ (Jonah, 4: 6). 2. ‘At the Bay’ was first published by the London Mercury in January 1922 (see CW2, pp. 342–71). 3. Thomas Trowell, who lived with his family at 52 Carlton Hill in London when KM first arrived back in London in 1908. 4. The Sketch was a weekly illustrated magazine that published one short story in each issue.

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is a proof that one must be calm & explain and be TRUE. Remember that! MONDAY, JANUARY 9 Snow. The vegetable fence was all but gone. Hudson1 came & said there was between six & seven feet of snow. He was very cheerful and friendly. Off his guard. Speaking of Miss S. he declared ‘Well the fact is she is not normal. And anyone who is not normal I call mad. She is unconventional, that is to say, and people like that are no good to anyone except themselves.’ When he said ‘mad’ a look came into his eyes – a flash of power and he swung the stethoscope, then picked up my fan and rattled it open. Read and knitted and played cards. A long letter from Sydney [Schiff]. I want to believe all he says about my story. He does see what I meant. He does not see it as a set of trivial happenings just thrown together. This is enough to be deeply grateful for – more than others will see. But I have this continual longing to write something with all my power – all my force in it. TUESDAY, JANUARY 10 Dreamed I was back in New Zealand. Got up today. It was fine. The sun shone and melted the last traces of snow from the trees. All the morning big drops fell from the trees, from the roof. The drops were not like raindrops, but bigger, softer, more exquisite. They made one realise how one loves the fertile earth and hates this snowbound cold substitute. Two men worked outside in the snowy road trying to raise the telegraph pole. Before they began they had lunch out of a paper sitting astride the pole. It is very beautiful to see people sharing food. Cutting bread & passing the loaf, especially cutting bread in that age old way – with a clasp knife. Afterwards one got up in a tree & sat among the branches working from there while the other lifted. The one in the tree turned into a kind of bird as all people do in trees – chuckled, laughed out, peered from among the branches, careless. At–tend! Ar-ret! Al-lez.2 WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 11 In bed again. Heard from Pinker the Dial3 has taken the Doll’s House. Wrote & 1. Dr Hudson attended KM in Switzerland. 2. (Fr.) ‘Wait. Stop. Go on.’ 3. The Dial was an American monthly magazine that actively promoted modernist literature in the 1920s.

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finished A Cup of Tea.1 It took about 4–5 hours. In the afternoon Elizabeth came. She looked fascinating in her black suit; something between a Bishop and a Fly. She spoke of my ‘pretty little story’ in The Mercury. All the while she was here I was conscious of a falsity. We said things we meant; we were sincere but at the back there was nothing but falsity. It was very horrible. I do not want ever to see her or to hear from her again. When she said she would not come often I wanted to cry Finito. No, she is not my friend. There is no feeling to be compared with the joy of having written and finished a story. I did not go to sleep but nothing mattered. There it was new and complete. Dreamed last night of a voyage to America. THURSDAY, JANUARY 12 A short note from Johnny,2 a card from ‘Meg’.3 A vile cold day. The parcel came from Elizabeth. But when one compares it with Anne’s exquisite coat . . . Jack and I ‘typed’. I hate dictating but the story still seems to me to be good. Is it? All the whole time at the back of my mind slumbers, not now sleeps, the idea of Paris and I begin to plan what I will do when – Can it be true? What shall I do to express my thanks? I want to adopt a Russian baby, call him Anton & bring him up as mine with Kot for a godfather and Mme Tchekhov for a godmother. Such is my dream. I don’t feel so sinful this day I think because I have written something and the tide is still high – the ancient landmarks are covered. Ah, but to write better. Let me write better, more deeply, more largely. Baleful icicles hang in a fringe outside our window panes. FRIDAY, JANUARY 13 Full Moon. Heard from Mimi.4 Her letter was almost frightening. It brought back the inexplicable Past. It flashed into my mind too, that she must have a large number of letters of mine which don’t bear thinking about. In some way I fear her. I feared her at Chancery Lane.5 There was a peculiar recklessness in her manner and in her tones which made me feel she would recognise no barriers at all. At the same time of course, one is fascinated. 1. See CW2, pp. 461–7. 2. Almost certainly the literary journalist and writer J. W. N. Sullivan. 3. ‘Meg’ is the fictional name KM gives to certain literary portrayals of her sister, Vera Margaret. 4. KM’s nickname for Vere Bartrick-Baker, a schoolfriend from Queen’s College, who later married J. W. N. Sullivan. 5. KM and JMM had lodgings in Chancery Lane, London, in 1912–13.

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Wrote to Koteliansky. Began a new story but it went too slowly. M. typed for me. I am again held up by letters to write. Letters are the real curse of my existence. I hate to write them. I have to. If I don’t there they are like great guilty gates barring my way. Hudson came and suggested my heart condition was caused by the failure to expand the diaphragm. Then why in that case not learn to expand it? SATURDAY, JANUARY 14 Posted my story to Pinker.1 Heard from China2 and from Michael Sadleir. I got up today & felt better. It was intensely cold. Elizabeth came in the afternoon. She and I were alone. She wore a little blue hood fastened under the chin with a diamond clasp. She looked like a very ancient drawing. She suggested that if I did become cured I might no longer write . . . Dreamed last night I was in a ship with the most superb, unearthly, in the heavenly sense, seas breaking. Deep, almost violet blue waves with high foaming crests & this white foam bore down on the blue in long curls. It was a marvellous sight. The dream was about C.3 He had married a girl without permission and Father & Mother were in despair. I ‘realised’ it was to be what had happened if he had not died. Wingley made a dash at the bird window today. SUNDAY, JANUARY 15 Dreamed I was shopping, buying underclothes in Cooks and then in Warnocks. But the dream ended horribly. Wrote to China, Anne, Sydney. Another chill, bloodless day. I got up but all was difficult. In the afternoon J. went to the Chalet & came back in the evening with a letter for me from Elizabeth, so generous, so sweet a letter that I am ashamed of what I said or thought the other day. I have worked today but in discomfort – not half enough. I could have written a whole story. Saw for the first time an exquisite little crested bird. Its call is a trill, a shake, marvellously delightful. It was very shy, though, and never had the courage to stop and eat. Saw people in sleighs & on luges. Snow is very blue. The icicles at dawn this morning were the colour of opals – blue, lit with fire. E. lent us Will Shakespeare. Really awful stuff. I had better keep this for a sign.

1. J. B. Pinker was DHL’s literary agent, who, in 1920, agreed to act for KM too. 2. KM’s covert nickname for Orage. 3. KM’s dead brother, Leslie, known to the family as Chummie.

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MONDAY, JANUARY l6 A wonderfully pleasant dream about Paris. All went so well. The doctor and his friends all had the same atmosphere. It was good, kind, quietly happy. I don’t know when I have had a dream more delightful. But the day has not been delightful. On the contrary. It snowed heavily, it was bitter cold & my congestion worse than ever. I have been in pain & discomfort all day. My functions won’t work normally either. My lung creaks. I have done no work. After tea I simply went to sleep out of sheer inertia. I am in a slough of despond today and like everybody in such an ugly place I am ugly, I feel ugly. It is the triumph of matter over spirit. This must not be. Tomorrow at all costs (here I swear) I shall write a story. This is my first resolution pour un date fixe in this journal. I dare not break it. H.M.T.’s letter to M.1 came yesterday. It was a beautiful letter – not to be forgotten. But why am I so bad? TUESDAY, JANUARY 17 Tchekhov made a mistake in thinking that if he had had more time he would have written more fully, described the rain & the midwife & doctor having tea.2 The truth is one can get only so much into a story; there is always a sacrifice. One has to leave out what one knows & longs to use. Why? I haven’t any idea but there it is. It’s always a kind of race, to get in as much as one can before it disappears. But time is not really in it. Yet wait. I do not understand even now. I am pursued by time myself. The only occasion when I ever felt at leisure was while writing The Daughters of the Late Col. And then at the end I was so terribly unhappy that I wrote as fast as possible for fear of dying before the story was sent. I should like to prove this, to work at real leisure. Only thus can it be done. WEDNESDAY, JANUARY l8 Hudson is a man to remember. At tea that day. Mrs M. before the huge silver kettle and pots and large plates. The ornate cake. One 1. See above, p. 261. 2. KM is referring to a particularly detailed letter sent by Chekhov to A. S. Suvorin on 27 October 1888, and which she co-translated with Koteliansky. The passage in question reads, ‘Gladly, with pleasure, with relish and gusto, I should love to describe my whole hero; I would describe his soul during his wife’s travail, the verdict pronounced on him, his rotten feeling after acquittal. I would describe how the midwife and the doctors drank tea during the night, I would describe the rain . . . . This would give me nothing but pleasure, because I love rummaging about and having time to turn round. But what can I do? I begin the story on the 10th of September with the knowledge that I am bound to finish it by the 5th of October – the final date’ (see CW3, p. 221).

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must remember that cake. ‘It seems such a pity to cut it’ and the way the old hand, so calmly, grasped the knife. Hudson leaning back, slapping two pieces of bread and butter together. ‘More tea, Tim.’ ‘No thanks. Yes. Half a cup.’ Pouring from the kettle to the teapot, the fat finger on the knob. ‘And how is he?’ ‘Bleeding like a pig!’ ‘Oh dear,’ gathering her scarf into her lap, ‘I’m sorry to hear that’ H. always collects something – always will. China, silver, ‘any old thing that comes along’. He’s musical & collects fiddles. His feeling for his children is so tender that it’s pain. He can’t understand it. One must remember too his extraordinary insecurity. The world rocks under him and it’s only when he has that stethoscope that he can lay down the law. Then lay it down he does. ‘What I say is – she’s mad. She’s not normal, and a person who isn’t normal I call mad – barmy.’ And you hear pride in his voice, you hear the unspoken ‘I am a plain man you know’ . . . I imagine there is a vein of tremendous cynicism in him too. He feels sometimes that all is ashes. He likes to go to church, to take part, to sing when others sing, to kneel, to intone the responses. This puts his heart at rest. But when it is over and he is at home & there is a smell of beef there comes this restlessness. When he was little I imagine he pulled the wings off flies. And I still see suicide as his end – a kind of melancholia, & nobody wants me & damned if I won’t. FRIDAY, JANUARY 20 Last Quarter of the Moon. Wrote to WJ.D. Why it should be such an effort to write to the people one loves I cannot imagine. It’s none at all to write to those who don’t really count. But for weeks I have thought of DelaMare, wanted to – longed to write to him, but something held back my pen. What? Once started, really started, all goes easily. I told him in this letter how much I thought of him. I suppose it is the effect of isolation that I can truly say I think of W.J.D., Tchekhov, Koteliansky, HMT and Orage every day. They are part of my life. I have got more or less used to pain at last. I wonder sometimes if this is worse or better than that has been. But I don’t expect to be without. But I have a suspicion like a certainty that the real cause of my illness is not my lungs at all. But something else & if this were found and cured all the rest would heal. [MS–Papers–11326–005]

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My dear Orage Whether I shall ever be able to say I have read your new book I do not know. I can foresee no change in my present condition of reading it and reading it. [Notebook 20, qMS–1282]

SATURDAY, JANUARY 21 Grandma’s birthday. Where is that photograph of my dear Love leaning against her husband’s shoulder, with her hair parted so meekly and her eyes raised. I love it. I long to have it. For one thing Mother gave it to me at a time when she loved me. But for another – so much more important – it is she, my own grandma, young and lovely. That arm, that baby sleeve with the velvet ribbon – I must see them again. And one day I must write about Grandma at length, especially of her beauty in her bath – when she was about sixty. Wiping herself with the towel. I remember now how lovely she seemed to me. And her fine linen, her throat, her scent. I have never really described her yet. Patience! The time will come. SUNDAY, JANUARY 22 My feeling about Ernestine is shameful. But there it is. Her tread, her look, the way her nose is screwed round, her intense stupidity, her wrists, revolt me. This is bad. For she feels it, or I am sure she does. When we speak together she blushes in a way that doesn’t seem to me natural: I feel that her self-respect is shamed by my thoughts. Lumbago. It is a very queer thing. So sudden, so painful. I must remember it when I write about an old man. The start to get up, the pause, the slow look of fury – and how lying at night one seems to get locked. To move is an agony. Finally one discovers a movement which is possible. But that helpless feeling about with the legs first. MONDAY, JANUARY 23 Paris? To remember the sound of wind – the peculiar wildness one can feel while the wind blows. Then the warm soft wind of spring searching in the heart. The wind I call The Ancient of Days which blows here at night. The wind that shakes the garden at night when one runs out into it. Dust. Turning one’s back on a high tearing wind. Walking along the Esplanade when the wind carries the sea over. The wind of summer – so playful that rocked and swung in the trees here. And wind moving through grass so that the grass quivers. This moves me with an emotion I don’t even understand. I always see a field, a young

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horse, and there’s a very fair Danish girl telling me something about her stepfather. The girl’s name is Elsa Bagge. TUESDAY, JANUARY 24 Wrote and finished Taking the Veil.1 It took me about 3 hours to write finally. But I had been thinking over the decor and so on for weeks – nay – months, I believe. I can’t say how thankful I am to have been born in N.Z., to know Wellington as I do and to have it to range about in. Writing about the convent2 seemed so natural. I suppose I have not been in the grounds more than twice. But it is one of the places that remain as vivid as ever. I must not forget the name of Miss Sparrow nor the name Palmer. WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 25 Received cheque from Mercury for 25.0.0. Wrote Pinker & sent 2.10.0. Played cribbage with Bogey. I delight in seeing him win. When we play he sometimes makes faces at me – the same kind of faces that Chummie used to make. I think I am never so fond of him as when he does this. We were talking of the personality of the cat today & saying that we ought to write it down. It is true he has become as real as if he could talk. I feel he does talk and that when he is silent it is only a case of making his nettle [?] shirt and he will begin. Perhaps the most engaging glimpse of him is playing his fiddle with wool for strings or sitting up to the piano & playing Nelly Bly.3 But his love Isbel, his whole complete little life side by side with ours, ought to be told. I shall never tell it though. THURSDAY, JANUARY 26 Wrote Bank Manager, Brett and Anne. Heard from Hotel. Pinker writes to say The Nation has taken The Doll House. A letter from Vera and Jeanne. I felt these two letters had nothing whatever to do with me. I would not care if I never saw Vera again. There is something in her assumed cheerfulness which I can’t bear. I’d never get on with her. And J. – is it fancy – just a touch of carelessness. I feel they are so absolutely insincere. What on earth would I do at Woodhay? It doesn’t bear thinking about. I am much nearer Brett for instance. I am sure that meditation is one cure for the sickness of my mind 1. See CW2, pp. 467–72. 2. The convent close to where KM had lived as a child in Thorndon, Wellington. 3. ‘Nelly Bly’ is a minstrel song written by the American songwriter, Stephen Foster, in 1850, which, unlike most songs in the genre, is noted for its lyrical charm, uplift and positive domestic setting.

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i.e. its lack of control. I have a terribly sensitive mind which receives every impression and that is the reason why I am so carried away and borne under. FRIDAY, JANUARY 27 New Moon. Posted to Pinker the story. Got the tickets from Cooks.1 Heard from Pinker. Wrote to Massingham. Long letter from Ottoline. Elizabeth came wearing her woolly lamb. A strange fate overtakes me with her. We seem to be always talking of physical subjects. They bore and disgust me for I feel it is waste of time and yet we always revert to them. She lay back on the pillows talking. She had an absent air. She was saying how fine women were – – – and it was on the tip of my tongue to be indiscreet. But I was not. Thank Heaven! I have been in pain, in bad pain all day. I ache all over. I can barely stand. It seems impossible that I am going away on Monday. ‘Every umbrella hides a warm bud of life.’ SATURDAY, JANUARY 28 These preparations for flight are almost incredible. The only way to keep calm is to play crib. J. and I sit opposite each other. I feel we are awfully united. And we play and laugh and it seems to keep us together. While the game lasts we are there. A queer feeling . . . The N.A.2 came. I have a deep suspicion of Bechhofer.3 He is horrid and I feel he is going to attack me. It’s a prophetic feeling. There was an article of psychoanalysis so absurd, ugly and ridiculous that it’s difficult to understand how any editor could let it pass. J. read me his review of Orage. It seemed to me brilliant. He has improved out of all knowledge. I don’t think he has any idea how he has found himself lately. All sounds so easy, so to flow off his pen, and that hard dogmatic style has quite gone. He is a real critic. SUNDAY, JANUARY 29 Hudson came. He says my R lung is practically all right. Can one believe such words. The other is a great deal better. He thinks my heart 1. Cook, or Thomas Cook and Son, was (and still is) a British foreign and domestic travel agent. 2. The New Age. 3. Carl Eric Bechhofer Roberts (1894–1949) was a British journalist, literary critic and writer with a keen interest in mysticism and the supernatural in the late 1910s and early 1920s. He contributed a number of articles to the New Age, notably on Russian cultural and political themes. In an article published on 5 January, he voiced his doubts about contemporary literary talents in England, which doubtless explains KM’s apprehension here.

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will give me far less trouble at a lower level. Can this be true? He was so hopeful today that TB seemed no longer a scourge. It seemed that one recovered more often than not! Is this fantastic. Tidied all my papers. Tore up and ruthlessly destroyed much. This is always a great satisfaction. Whenever I prepare for a journey I prepare as though for Death. Should I never return all is in order. This is what Life has taught me. In the evening I wrote to Orage about his book. It has taken me a week to write the letter. J. and I seemed to have played cribbage off and on all day. I feel there is such love between us. Tender love. Let it not change! MONDAY, JANUARY 30 There was a tremendous fall of snow on Sunday night. Monday was the first real perfect day of the winter. It seemed that the happiness of Bogey and of me reached its zenith that day. We could not have been happier; that was the feeling. Sitting one moment on the balcony of the bedroom for instance, or driving in the sleigh through the masses of heaped up snow. He looked so beautiful too, hatless, strolling about, his hand in his pocket. He weighed himself. 10 stone. There was a harmonium in the waiting room. Then I came away after a quick but not hurried kiss . . . I had letters from Pinker, Richard, Galsworthy.1 Pinker told me the Westminster2 has taken The Garden Party. It was very beautiful on the way to Sierre, but I kept wondering if I was seeing it all for the last time. The thorn bushes, the leafless trees. ‘I miss the buns’. TUESDAY, JANUARY 31 Travelling is terrible. All is so sordid and the train shatters one. Tunnels are hell. I am frightened of travelling. We arrived in Paris late, but it was very beautiful – all emerging from water. In the night I looked out and saw the men with lanterns. The hotel all sordid again, fruit pies, waste paper, boots, grime, ill temper. In the evening I saw Manoukhine.3 But on the way there, nay, even before, I realised my

1. John Galsworthy (1867–1933) was a British novelist, playwright and shortstory writer, remembered chiefly today for his roman fleuve, The Forsythe Saga (1906–30). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932. 2. The Westminster Gazette was a Liberal daily newspaper that also published short stories and sketches. 3. KM travelled to Paris in January 1922 to consult the Russian doctor, Ivan Manoukhin (spelt ‘Manoukhine’ in French). Ivan Manoukhin (1866–1949) was an acknowledged medical practitioner in Russia, whose revolutionary methods for tackling tuberculosis included submitting the spleen to X-ray radiation. Manoukhin achieved a certain international prestige after treating the writer Maxim Gorky and his wife for tuberculosis.

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heart was not in it. I feel divided in myself and angry and without virtue. Then L.M. and I had one of our famous quarrels & I went to the wrong house. Don’t forget, as I rang the bell the scampering & laughter inside. M. had a lame girl there as interpreter. He said through her he could cure me completely. But I did not believe it. It all seemed suddenly unimportant and ugly. But the flat was nice – the red curtains, marble clock & picture of ladies with powdered hair. WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 1 At 5.30 I went to the clinique & saw the other man Donat.1 I asked him to explain the treatment and so on. He did so. But first. As I approached the door it opened & the hall, very light, showed, with the maid smiling, wearing a little shawl, holding back the door. Through the hall a man slipped quickly carrying what I thought was a cross of green leaves. Suddenly the arms of the little cross waved feebly and I saw it was a small child strapped to a wooden tray. While I waited voices came from another room. Very loud voices – M’s over and above them. Da. Da, and then an interrogatory Da?2 I have the feeling that M. is a really good man. I have also a sneaking feeling – I used that word sneaking advisedly – that he is a kind of unscrupulous imposter. Another proof of my divided nature. All is disunited. Half boos half cheers. THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 2 Yes, that is it. To do anything, to be anything, one must gather oneself together and one’s faith make stronger. Nothing of any worth can come from a disunited being. It’s only by accident that I write anything worth a rusk and then it’s only skimming the top – no more. But remember The Daughters was written at Menton in November when I was not as bad as usual. I was trying with all my soul to be good. Here I try and fail & the fact of my consciousness makes each separate failure very important – each a sin. If, combined with M’s treatment I treated myself, worked out of this slough of despond,3 lived an honourable life, and above all made straight my relations with L.M. I am a sham. I am also an egoist of the deepest dye – such a one that it was very difficult to confess to it in case this book should be found. Even my being well is a kind of occasion for vanity. There is nothing worse for the soul than egoism. Therefore . . . 1. Dr Donat was Manoukhin’s French colleague at his consulting rooms in Paris. 2. (Rus.) ‘Yes’. ‘M’ here refers to Manoukhin, the Russian doctor KM consulted in Paris, although ‘M’ more typically refers to JMM. 3. A desolate bogland that Christian, the protagonist, has to cross in John Bunyan’s allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress.

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FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 3 I went [at] 3 for a treatment. A curious impression remains. M’s beautiful gesture coming in to the room was perfect. But D. shouted so, pushed his face into mine, asked me indecent questions. Ah, that’s one horror of being ill. One must submit to having one’s secrets held up to the light and regarded with a cold stare. D. is a proper frenchman. ‘Etesvous constipé?’1 Shall I ever forget that & his face pushed into mine & the band of his tie showing over his white coat. M. sits apart, smoking, and his head, which is a curious shape – one is conscious of it all the time as of an instrument – hangs forward. But he is deeply different. He desires to reassure. ‘Pas de cavernes’.2 Had palpitations from the moment of getting on to the table until 5 o’clock. But when I felt them coming on while the rays were working I felt simply horribly callous. I thought well if this kills me – let it. Voilà! That shows how bad I am. [NLC]

At The Bay.3 At the Bay The Daughters of the Late. Mr and Mrs Dove The Young Girl Life of Ma Parker Marriage à la Mode The Voyage Miss Brill Her First Ball The Singing Lesson The Stranger Bank Holiday Sixpence An Ideal Family The Ladies Maid. Thursday

In hand

15.75

metro

30

lunch

1.85

1. (Fr.) ‘Are you constipated?’ 2. (Fr.) ‘No cavities.’ 3. KM’s list of stories for a volume initially conceived as At the Bay and Other Stories, subsequently published as The Garden Party and Other Stories.

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45

cigarettes

65

stamps

50

books supper

413

3.20 65 7.60

Friday

candles

1.20

papers

30

tea

20

lunch

1.95

stamps

35

milk

15 4.15

Coffee

50

Stamp

25

cigarettes

65

matches

10

Bread

20

Paper

15

oranges

40

eggs

50

butter

20

stamp

25

1.85 Milk

15 2.0

Eggs

30

Butter

60 2.90

Paper

30

Coffee

50

dejeuner

1.75

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Stamp

25

Milk

15 2.95

[Notebook 20, qMS–1282]

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 4 Massingham accepts the idea of a regular story. Heard from Koteliansky about ‘people’. It was rather a horrible day. I was ill, and at night I had one of my terrible fits of temper over a pencil. Is it possible one can be so unruly! Heard from M. saying he prefers to remain in Montana. All his letters now are the same. There breathes in them the relief from strain. It is remarkable. He does not believe a word about Manoukhine & talks of coming to ‘fetch’ me in May. Well, if I am any better there will never be any more fetching. Of that I’m determined. The letter kept me awake until very late, and my sciatica! Put it on record in case it ever goes, what a pain it is. Remember to give it to someone in a story one day. Ida is a very tragic figure. Remember her eyes – the pupils dark-black, and her whiteness. Even her hair seems to grow pale. She folded the quilt & held it in her arms as though it was a baby. SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 5 First quarter of the moon. Wrote at my story, read Shakespeare. Read Goethe, thought, prayed. The day was cold and fine but I felt ill and could do nothing but be still all day. This going to Paris has been so much more important than it seemed. Now I begin to see it as the result, the ending to all that reading. I mean that even Cosmic Anatomy is involved. Something has been built – a raft, frail and not very seaworthy, but it will serve. Before, I was cast into the water when I was ‘alone’. I mean during my illness, and now something supports me. But much is to be done. Much discipline and meditation is needed. Above all it is important to get work done. Heard from Pinker that Cassells1 had taken a Cup of Tea.2 Wrote giving my change of address to various people. Thought about French women and their impudent confidence in the power of sex. MONDAY, FEBRUARY 6 Letters from Brett and M. Brett’s letter was the most beautiful I have ever received. It gave me a strange shock to find M. never even asked 1. Cassells & Co. was a London-based book and magazine publisher. 2. See CW2, pp. 461–7.

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how things were going. A boyish letter like so many I have had but absolutely impersonal. It might have been written to anyone. True, he was anxious for the post. But. . . that was because he is alone. Do I make M. up? Is he thankful to sink into himself again? I feel relief in every line – there’s no strain, nothing that binds him. Then let it continue so. But I will not take a house anywhere. I too will be free (I write exactly as I feel). I do not want to see M. again just now. I shall beg him not to come here. He is at present just like a fish that has escaped from the hook. A bad day – I felt ill in [an] obscure way – horrible pains and so on and weakness. I could do nothing. The weakness was not only physical. I must heal my Self before I will be well. Yes, that is the important thing. No attention is needed here. This must be done alone and at once. It is at the root of my not getting better. My mind is not controlled. I idle, I give way, I sink into despair. And tho’ I have ‘given up’ the idea of true marriage now (By the way what an example is this of the nonsense of time. One week ago we never were nearer. A few days ago we were fast – and now I feel I have been away from M. for months. It’s true I cannot bear to think about the things I love in him . . . little things. But if one gives them up they will fade.) I am not complete as I must be. WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 8 Heard from Gerhardi,1 Sara Millin,2 Pinker. Sketch has taken T.T.Veil and wants more. A day passed in the usual violent agitation such as Jack only can fling me into. Now he will come. There is no stopping him. But it’s put down to my wanting him. He is absolutely entangled in himself as usual. First my novel wouldn’t then it would. Never was such a (coin a word) shellfish! I hate this in him. It’s low to put it all down to me, too. And when he chooses to find tears – he’ll find them. There wasn’t a suspicion of a tear. In fact this whole horrible devastating affair which nearly kills me – revolts me, too. His very frankness is a falsity! In fact it seems falser than his sincerity. I’ve often noticed that. Went to that flat with the ‘girls and Uncle’. The view outside, the stockings like snakes in the bath. Con showing off the bedroom – voilà la CHAMBRE.3

1. See above, p. 233. 2. KM had reviewed Millin’s first novel, The Dark River, for the Athenaeum in February 1920 (see CW3, pp. 569–72). Sarah Gertrude Millin (1889–1968) was a South African novelist, who went on to enjoy immense popularity. 3. (Fr.) ‘here’s the bedroom’.

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THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 9 Walk to Cox’s. Drew 2000 francs. Gave them a cheque on B.N.Z. for £25. Wrote Barclay’s manager asking them to transfer my £100 deposit to Cox’s here. Sent cheques from Pinker 12.2.11 and J. 3.3.0 to Barclays. Heard from Naomi R-S. Jack, Richard, press, Pinker, Swin[?]. Have got a bad chill. Find [?] I have in the Bank at this moment £103 odd. Ida has been noble about this looking for flats for she is worn out and she absolutely does not complain once. Just goes and does it all. I have fever and feel as though I’ve got a very bad attack of chill coming on. Nothing makes me ill like this business with Jack. It just destroys me. Wrote Cox, N.R. Smith, Pinker, Barclays, Richard. It was a miserable day. In the night I thought for hours of the evils of uprooting. Every time one leaves anywhere something precious which ought not to be killed is left to die. FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 10 5 o’clock at the clinique. I did not go to the clinique because of my chill. Spent the day in bed reading the papers. The feeling that someone was coming towards me was too strong for me to work. It was like sitting on a bench at the end of a long avenue in a park and seeing someone far in the distance coming your way. She tries to read, the book is in her hand, but it’s all nonsense and might as well be upside down. She reads the advertisements as though they were part of the articles. I must not forget the long talk Ida & I had the other evening about hate. What is hate? Who has even described it? Why do I feel it for her? She says: It is because I am nothing, I have suppressed all my desires to such an extent that now I have none. I don’t think. I don’t feel. I reply: If you were cherished, loved for a week you would recover. And that is true, and I would like to do it. It seems I ought to do it. But I don’t. The marvel is that she understands. No one else on earth would understand. All that week she had her little corner. I may come into my little corner tonight, she asks timidly. And I reply – so cold, so cynical – if you want to. But what would I do if she didn’t come! . . . Jack arrived early in the morning with a letter for me – never to be forgotten. In half an hour it seemed he had been here a long time. I still regret his leaving there for his sake. I know it is right for our sake. We went together to the clinique. Bare leafless trees, a wonderful glow in the sky – the windows flashed fire. Manoukhine drew the picture of my heart. I wish he had not. I am haunted by the hideous picture,

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by the thought of my heart, like a heavy drop in my breast. But he is good. SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 12 Full moon. We put the chessmen on the board & began to play. It was an unsettled day – Ida in and out with no home, no place, whirled like leaf along this dark passage and then out into the raw street. Jack read the Tchekhov aloud. I had read one of the stories myself & it seemed to me nothing. But read aloud it was a masterpiece. How was that? I want to remember the evening before. I was asleep. He came in – thrust his head in at the door & as I woke I did not know him. I saw a face which reminded me of his mother and Richard. But I felt a kind of immediate dread confusion. I knew I ought to know it and that it belonged to him, yet he was as it were not present. I think this is what people who are going out of their minds must feel about the faces that bend over them and old old people about their children, and that accounts for the foolish offended look in their faces sometimes. They feel it’s not right they should not know. MONDAY, FEBRUARY 13 A.M. Felt ill all day. Plenty of violent congestion in my body & head. I feel more ill now than ever, so it seems. Jack went out and bought teapot and so on, also a game of chess & we started playing. But the pain in my back and so on make my prison almost unendurable. I manage to get up, to dress, to make a show [of] getting to the restaurant & back without being discovered. But that is literally all. The rest is rather like being a beetle shut in a book, so shackled that one can do nothing but lie down – and even to lie down becomes a kind of agony. The worst of it is I have again lost hope. I don’t & can’t believe this will change. I have got off the raft again and am swept here and there by the sea. TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 14 Brett sent me a nice wire and [. . .] a little grubby book. Another hellish day. But Jack found some pastilles which help my throat & it seemed to me they had a calming effect on my heart. I had one of my perfect dreams – was at sea, sailing with my parasol open to get a ‘freshet’ of wind. Heavenly blue sea, blue sky, blue land, parasol pink, boat pale pink. If I could only get over my discouragement. But who is going to help with that! Now that Ida is away I have more to do, all my clothes and so on to put away & pull out, as well as a bowl or two to wash. The effort uses what remains of my strength. By 5 o’clock I am finished & must go to bed again. It is a very dull day. The canaries

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sing. I have been reading Bunin’s stories.1 He’s not a sympathetic soul but it is good to read him . . . he carries one away. Heard from Cox. FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 17 Went to the clinique. I felt that all was wrong there. Manoukhine was distrait and a little angry. Donat as usual sailed over everything. But that means nothing. It seemed to me there had been some trouble or some trouble was brewing. The servant there is a very beautiful plump woman with a ravishing smile. Her eyes are grey. She curls her hair in a small fringe and she wears a little grey shawl, an apron and a pair of rather high boots. Stepping lightly with one small plump hand holding the shawl she opens the door. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 18 Last quarter. MONDAY, FEBRUARY 20 Finished ‘The Fly’.2 SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 26 New Moon. MONDAY, MAY 1 Oh what will this beloved month bring! [Notebook 31, qMS–1278]

Paris. May 3rd 1922 I must begin writing for Clement Shorter3 today. 12 ‘spasms’ of 2000 words each. I thought of the Burnells but no, I don’t think so . . . Much better the Sheridans – the three girls and the brother and the

1. Ivan Bunin (1870–1953) was a poet, short-story writer and novelist, who settled in Paris after the Russian Revolution. He was the first Russian writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, awarded in 1933. KM came into contact with the émigré circles he moved in during her time in Paris and Fontainebleau, but also discovered his work through Koteliansky and DHL, who had co-translated his renowned story, ‘The Gentleman from San Francisco’. The story was often anthologised alongside Kuprin’s ‘Captain Ribnikov’. 2. See CW2, pp. 476–80. 3. Clement Shorter was the founder of, and commissioning editor for, the Sphere, a British weekly newspaper.

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Father and Mother and so on, ending with a long description of Meg’s wedding to Keith Fenwick. Well, there’s the first flown out of the nest. The sisters Bead who come to stay. The white sheet on the floor when the wedding dress is tried on . . . Yes, I’ve got the details all right. But the point is – where shall I begin? One certainly wants to dash. Meg was playing. I don’t think I ought to begin with that. It seems to me the mother’s coming home ought to be the first chapter. The other can come later. And in that playing chapter what I want to stress chiefly is: which is the real life – that or this – late afternoon, these thoughts, the garden, the beauty, how all things pass . . . and how the end seems to come so soon . . . And then again there is the darling bird. I’ve always loved birds. Where is the little chap? What is it that stirs one so? What is this seeking – so joyful, ah, so gentle. And there seems to be a moment when all is to be discovered. ‘Yes, that is the feeling. The queer thing is I only remember how much I have forgotten when I hear that piano. The garden of the Casino, the blue pansies. But oh, how am I going to write this story! Dear Ida, Just a line to say – Jack and I both have so much work to do this summer that we have decided when we leave here (end of this month) to go to the Hotel d’Angleterre, Randogne.1 Does that make you open your eyes! But in the summer June and July that place was so lovely & I know it. It would only take a day to settle and a look at the mountains before one could work. All other arrangements are too difficult – Germany & so on. We have not, literally, the time to discover a new place and take our bearings. Then we shall be near Elizabeth, too. The winter we are going to spend in Bandol at the Beau Rivage.2 I am going to get a maid now at once. I can’t do without one. I simply have not the time to attend to everything and I can’t bear as you know ‘untidiness’. I shall advertise in the Daily Mail. Jack may be going to lecture in England this autumn too, so I should like to have a really trustworthy person to post letters and so on and be with me. By the way it may interest you Jack is really very

1. Randogne-sur-Sierre is close to Montana in Switzerland. 2. KM and JMM had already stayed at the Hotel Beau Rivage in Bandol (Var, France) in the winter of 1915.

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1922 successful now. His reputation is at least double what it was. He has a new job with The Times for which [he] is being enormously successful. Don’t speak of our plans, by chance – will you? There is a really superb professional pianist here. He plays nearly all day & one writes to his music. Au revoir. K.M.

[Journal, 1954, pp. 314, 316]

May 28 It seems so much more real now than when I last wrote. Then I felt that at any moment I would be whisked back into my cage; and every time I went out, I wondered if I should have to turn back. But it’s marvellous how soon one accepts blessings. Curses one never gets used to. An unposted letter. I feel as though I have become embedded in this hotel. The weeks pass and we do less and less, and seem to have no time for anything. Up and down in the lift, along the corridors, in and out of the restaurant – it’s a whole, complete life. One has a name for everybody; one is furious if someone has taken ‘our table’, and the little gritty breakfast-trays whisk in and out unnoticed, and it seems quite natural to carry about that heavy key with the stamped brass disk 134. I am 134, and Murry is 135. Oh, dear – I have so much to tell you, so much I would like to write about. Your last enchanting letter has remained too long unanswered. I wish you could feel the joy such letters give me. When I have finished reading one of your letters, I go on thinking, wishing, talking it over, almost listening to it. . . . Do feel, do know how much I appreciate them – so much more than I can say! I must reply about Ulysses.1 I have been wondering what people are saying in England. It took me about a fortnight to wade through, but on the whole I’m dead against it. I suppose it was worth doing if everything is worth doing . . . but that is certainly not what I want from literature. Of course, there are amazingly fine things in it, but I prefer to go without them than to pay that price. Not because I am shocked (though I am fearfully shocked, but that’s ‘personal’; I suppose it’s unfair to judge the book by that) but because I simply don’t believe . . . . 1. James Joyce’s novel, Ulysses, was first published in Paris in February 1922, although it had circulated in serialised format in the Little Review in 1918–20.

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[Notebook 5, qMS–1283]

I find the rapture at being alone hard to understand. Certainly when I am sitting out of sight under a tree I feel I would be content to never return. As to ‘fear’, it is gone. It is replaced by a kind of callousness. What will be will be. But this is not a very useful statement for I’ve never put it to the test. Should I be as happy with anyone by my side? No. I’d begin to talk, & it’s far nicer not to talk. Or if it were Jack he’d open a little blue book by Diderot, Jacques le Fataliste,1 & begin to read it & that would make me wretched. Why the devil want to read stuffy sniffy Diderot when there is this other book before one’s eyes . . . I do not want to be a book worm. A worm burrows everlastingly. If its book is taken away from it the little blind head is raised, it wags, hovers, terribly uneasy, in a void until it begins to burrow again. Loneliness: ‘Oh Loneliness of my sad heart is Queen’.2 It isn’t in the least that. My heart is not sad except when I am among people & then I am far too distracted to think about Queens. (Oh dear. Here is a walking tragedy – Madame with a whole tray of food!) when I begged for a bastick,3 only a bastick! She came, wandered afield while I sat and then sat beside me, covering her white stockings with her big limp bouquet. And she talked of the womb, worms in eggs & the horrors of Stephani. The irate husband. I have watched this big heavy woman, moving so sullen, plodding in and out with her pails and brushes, coming to the door at midday and evening to look for her husband and child.4 She looks neither sad nor happy; she looks resigned and stupified. Sometimes when she stops and stares round her she is like a cow that is being driven along a road, & sometimes when leaning out of the window she watches her quick husband, so jaunty, cutting up logs of wood, I think she hates him. The sight of her suffocates him. But today, it being the first fine day since the lodgers have come,

1. Jacques le fataliste (1778–80) is a classic French picaresque novel, characterised by its jaunty ironical tone and strong philosophical underpinnings. It was inspired to an extent by Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Voltaire’s Candide. Denis Diderot (1713–84) was one of the foremost French writers, critics and philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment. 2. KM is presumably playing with the French expression ‘la solitude est la reine de mon cœur’: ‘solitude reigns over my heart.’ 3. KM’s playful word for a basket, other occurrences of which can be found in her letters from 1921. 4. JMM notes here that KM is describing a scene from the window of the chalet in Randogne. See Journal, 1952, p. 317.

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they went off for a walk & left the nurse girl in charge of the baby. A ‘cradle’ made of two straw baskets on trestles was brought out into the sun and the baby heaped up in it. Then the nurse girl disappeared. Round the side of the house came my woman. She stopped. She looked round quickly. No one was in sight. She leaned over the cradle & held out her finger to the baby. Then it seemed she was simply overcome with the loveliness and the wonder of this little thing. She tiptoed round the cradle, bent over, shook her head, shook her finger, pulled up a tiny sleeve, looked at a dimpled elbow. Her little girl in a white hat (in honour of the lodgers) danced up. I imagine my woman asked her how she would like a little brother. And the little girl was fascinated as small creatures are by smaller. ‘Kiss his hand’ said my woman. She watched her daughter, very serious, kiss the tiny hand, and she could hardly bear that anyone should touch the infant but herself. She snatched her daughter away . . . When finally she dragged herself away she was trembling. She went up the steps into the house, stood in the middle of the kitchen, & it seemed that the child within realised her love & moved. A faint timid smile was on her lips. She believed & she did not believe. Gyp their dog is the most servile creature imaginable. He is a fat brown & white spaniel with a fat round end of tail which wags for everybody at every moment. His passion is for the baby. If anyone throws him sticks he dashes off & brings them back to lay at the foot of the cradle. When his mistress carries the baby he dances round them so madly in such a frenzy of delight that one doesn’t believe in him. He feels himself one of the family – a family dog. The master is a very stupid conceited fellow with a large thin nose, a tuft of hair, and long thin legs. He walks slowly, holding himself perfectly rigid. He keeps his hands in his pockets always. Yesterday he wore all day a pair of pale blue woolen slippers with tassels, and it was obvious he admired himself in these slippers tremendously. Today he is walking about in his shirt sleeves, wearing a sky blue shirt. He wears black velvet trousers and a short coat. I am sure he thinks he is perfectly dressed for the country. Ah, if he only had a gun to carry over his shoulder! When he came home he walked stiff, rigid, like a post, hands in pockets up to the front door & stood there. Did not knock, gave no sign. In less than a minute the door opened to him. His wife felt he was there. (What a passion one feels for the sun here.) The friend is a dashing young man in a grey suit with a cap always worn very much on one side. This cap he does not like to take off. He is the kind of man who sits on the edge of tables or leans against the counter of bars with his thumbs in his waistcoat. He feels a dog. He is

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sure all the girls are wild about him & it’s true each time he looks at one she is ready to titter. For all his carelessness he’s close with money. When he & his ‘friend’ go up to the village for stores he lounges in the shop, smells things, suggests things, but turns his back & whistles when it comes to adding up the bill. He thinks the friend’s wife is in love with him. (When the dog is tied up it cries pitifully, sobs. The sound, so unrestrained, pleases them.) The wife is small, untidy, with large gold rings in her hair. She wears white canvas shoes & a jacket trimmed with artificial fur. She is the woman who is spending a day at the seaside. She looks dissatisfied – unhappy. I am sure she is a terrible muddler. (The dog is really very hysterical.) They have a little servant maid of about 16 with a loose plait of dark steely hair & silver-rimmed spectacles. She walks in a terribly meek but self-satisfied way, pushing out her stomach. She is meekness itself. How she bows her head & walks after her master! It is terrible to see. She wishes to be invisible – to pass unseen. Do not look at me & she effaces herself. (This must be written very directly.) She it is who holds the baby. When the others are gone she rather lords it over the baby, turns up his clothes and exclaims with quite an air. The baby is at that age when it droops over a shoulder. It is still a boneless baby, blowing bubbles, in a little blue muslin frock. When it cries it cries as though it were being squeezed. Its feet, in white boots, are like two little cakes of dough. (The dog’s enthusiasm is enough to make you want to kick it. When they come out, cold, damp, depressed, there he is leaping, asking when the fun’s going to begin. It is sickening.) Queer bit of psychology. I had to disappear behind the bushes today in a hollow. That act made me feel nearer to normal health than I have felt for years. Nobody there. Nobody wondered if I was all right, i.e. there was nothing to distinguish me at that moment from an ordinary human being. Each little movement of this bird is made so ostentatiously as if it were trying to show itself as much as possible. Why?1 But to continue with this alone-ness. To follow it up a little. Could I . . .? It seems to me to depend entirely on health in my case. If I were well & could spend the evenings sitting up writing till about 11. (Do look up through the trees to the far away heavenly blue.) Now it’s

1. In the following diary entries, it is interesting to trace the passing observations of birds, since, as KM notes below (see p. 428), she was planning ‘The Canary’ at the time (see CW2, pp. 511–15).

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getting late afternoon and all sounds are softer, deeper – the sough of the wind in the branches is more thoughtful. This – this is as great happiness as I shall ever know. It is greater happiness than I had ever thought possible. But why is it incompatible with – only because of your weakness. There is nothing to prevent you living like this. In fact don’t you yet know that the more active & apart you make your own life the more content the other is. What he finds intolerable is the lack of privacy. But so do you. It makes him feel as though he were living under a vacuum cap. So it does you. You hang on thinking to please him while he burns for you to be gone. How badly how stupidly you manage your life. Don’t you realise that both of you have had enough contact to last you for years. That the only way for each of you to be renewed and refreshed is for you to go apart. Not necessarily to tear apart but to go apart as wisely as possible. You are the most stupid woman I have ever met. You never will see that it all rests with you. If you do not take the initiative nothing will be done. The reason why you find it so hard to write is because you are learning nothing. I mean of the things that count – like the sight of this tree with its purple cones against the blue. How am I to put it that there is gum on the cones – gemmed? no beaded? no they are like crystals. Must I? I am afraid so . . . Ida is going to find it. a pump at 2 in the morning? an arrival What are you going to do? [Notebook 20, qMS–1282]

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 3 Selsfield.1 MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 4 Tea with Papa. TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5 O.2 Dinner with Mrs Richmond. 1. Selsfield, in Sussex, was where JMM’s friend, Vivian Locke-Ellis, lived. 2. Orage.

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WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 6 Webster. 12 o’clock.1 THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 7 Tea with Papa & the children. FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 8 Lunch with Edward Garnett.2 SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 9 The Search for the Cardigan. Gave Minnie notice. SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 10 Orage 7.30 here. TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 12 Children to tea. THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 14 Lunch with Papa. Saw Marion Ruddick.3 Lecture at 28 Warwick Gardens. FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 15 Webster at 12. Saw doctor Sorapure. Wrote Roma Webster. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 16 Orage 8.30. Kot at 2.

1. A radiographer working in central London, who continued Manoukhine’s radiation treatments for KM. 2. Edward Garnett (1868–1937) was an English writer, whose work as a critic and literary editor had a huge influence on the shaping of early Anglophone modernism. He was married to Constance Garnett, the renowned, prolific translator of all the major Russian classics into English from 1890 to 1930. His astute introductions to many of these played an essential role in their reception in Great Britain. 3. See above, p. 256.

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SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 17 Lunch with Sydney &Violet. Odious. Children to tea. MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 18 Kot at 2. TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 19 Flower show with Mrs Richmond. Lunch 1.30 Belgravia Restaurant, Grosvenor Gardens. Vivian Locke Ellis & Sullivan to dinner. Dull. Cough very troublesome. Saw Webster. WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 20 Lunch with Beresford at 1 p.m.1 Richard to tea Sullivan to dinner. THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 21 Charlotte to tea. 146 Harley Street 8 p.m. Kot in afternoon. FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 22 Lilian. Lunch with Anne. Richard to tea. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 23 Kot 3 p.m. SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 24 Charlotte to tea. [MS–Papers–4006–9]

September 30th 1922. Do you know what individuality is? No.

1. J. D. Beresford (1873–1947) was a writer and critic, who had contributed to Rhythm. His work in the late 1910s and 1920s was influenced by mystical and theosophical ideas.

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Consciousness of will. Conscious that you have a will and can act. –––––– Yes it is. It’s a glorious saying. [Notebook 20, qMS–1282]

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 3 Cashed a cheque for 100 francs Arrived Paris. Took rooms in Select Hotel, Place de la Sorbonne, for 10 francs per day per person. What feeling? Very little. The room is like the room where one could work – or so it feels. I have been a perfect torment to Ida who is pale with dark eyes. I suspect my reactions so much that I hardly dare say what I think of the room and so on. Do I know? Not really. Not more than she. I have thought of M. today. We are no longer together. Am I in the right way, though? No. Not yet. Only looking on – telling others. I am not in body and soul. I feel a bit of a sham . . . And so I am. One of the K.M. is so sorry. But of course she is. She has to die. Don’t feed her. [Notebook 5, qMS–1283]

Lunches and Dinners & Teas etc. Octr 3rd

Lunch

14.0

dinner

12.15

lemon

40 26.55

4th

Lunch

12.80

supper

14.70 27.50

5th

Lunch

12.75

dinner

10.40

Fruit

1. 5 24.20

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6th

Lunch

13.75

supper

11.80 25.25

7th

lunch

11.60

supper

15.50 27.10

8th

lunch

15.0

supper

11.50 26.50

[Notebook 3, qMS–1284]

This is a damning little note book, quite in the old style. How I am committed! Today is Tuesday.1 Since leaving M.2 I have written about a page. The rest of the time I seem to have slept! This of course started all the Old Fears, that I could never write again, that I was getting sleeping sickness and so on. But this morning I nearly kicked off & this evening I feel perhaps a time of convalescence was absolutely necessary. The mind was choked with the wrack of all those dreadful tides. I wrote to Kot today. It seems to bring things nearer. It’s only now I am beginning to see again & to recognise again the beauty of the world. Take the swallows today – their flitter flutter, their delicate forked tails, their transparent wings that are like the fins of fishes. The little dark head & the breast golden in the fight. Then the beauty of the garden, and the beauty of raked paths . . . Then, the silence. I should like to write the Canary story tomorrow. So many ideas come and go. If there is time I shall write them all, if this uninterrupted time continues. The story about this hotel would be wonderful if I could do it. . . If there is a book to be read, no matter how bad that book is – I will read it. Was it always so with me? I don’t remember. Looking back, I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was, too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all. 1. JMM notes at the beginning of this notebook that the date of these entries is July 1922. 2. KM had been in Montana, Switzerland.

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Rebecca is a mixture of W.L. George, Disraeli, and Mrs Henry Dudeney.1 I wage eternally a war of small deceits. Tear this book up! Tear it up, now. But now I am pretending to be taking notes on a book I have already read & despise . . . What dreadful awful rot! [NLC, Unbound papers]

‘Room 135’ Well! – who could have believed it – who could have imagined it! What a marvellous what a miraculous thing to [have] happened! I’m trembling; I feel quite . . . But I mustn’t get too excited; one must keep one’s sense of proportion. Be calm! I can’t, I can’t! Not just for the moment. If you could feel my heart! It’s not beating very fast, not racing, as they say, but it’s simply quivering – an extraordinary sensation – and if I am quite sincere I feel such a longing to kneel down. Not to pray. I scarcely know what for. To say Forgive me! To say my darling. But I should cry if I said it. My darling! My darling! Do you know I’ve never known anyone well enough to call them that. It is a beautiful word, isn’t it. And one puts out one’s hand when one says it & just touches the other . . No, no. It’s fatal to think such things. One mustn’t let oneself go. Here I am back in my room. I should like to go over to the window and open it wide. But I daren’t yet. Supposing he were looking out of his and he saw; it might seem marked. One can’t be too careful. I will stay where I am for the present until my – my excitement dies down a little. No. 134 That is the number of my room. I only realised at that moment that I am still holding my big flat door-key. What is his number? Oh, I have wondered that so often. Shall I ever know. Why should I? And yet after what has just happened If a flash-light photograph had been taken at that moment, or if a fire had broken out & we had been unable to move and only our charred bodies found it would have been the most natural thing in the world for people to suppose we were – together. We must have looked 1. Mrs Henry Dudeney was the publishing name used by Alice Dudeney (1866– 1945), an English novelist whose works tended to blend social questions and romance, while favouring a lyrical, sometimes sentimental style. The British politician and writer, Benjamin Disraeli (1804–81), who was twice prime minister, wrote a number of popular novels characterised by their detailed, descriptive realist style and their concern with current social issues.

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Figure 12 Accounts and note to JMM, early autumn 1922. MS–Papers– 4006–10–1. John Middleton Murry Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

exactly like the other couples. Even his reading the newspaper & not speaking to me seemed to make it more natural. This tenderness this longing. This feeling of waiting for something. What is it. Come! Come! And then one goes out and there are new leaves on the trees, the light shakes in the grass and everywhere there

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is a gentle stirring. I have never been very good at imagining things. Some people have so much imagination. They make up long stories about the future. [MS–Papers–4006–10]

Darling one, Please send Wig an immediate note + say what she ought to receive for an English money order for 9.18.6 – which is my 10.0.0 minus ‘the charges’ just arrived. Here are a few fruits of my calculations – but only a few.1 Luncheon. eggs. scrambled, poached, fried, omelette, baked, dutch eggs, curried eggs, on mashed potatoes, boiled, sauce tomate. Welsh rarebit, chestnut curry, stuffed tomatoes, potatoes in jackets, sardines on toast, potted meat, jam, cheese, biscuits, chocolate. Fresh fruit. Dinner. Hors d’oeuvres, radishes, tomatoes, anchois, hareng, sardines, mayonnaise, salade suisse, cold vegetable, chicken, rabbits, pâte, potatoes fried, sauté, boiled with butter, whisked, mixed with egg, rice with saffron, meat liquor, watercress, coffee cream, orange salade of slices, baba cakes, crème caramel, baked apples. nightdresses

underclothes

blue

2 heavy combin.

pink

2 medium

mauve

2 light

small flower

2 vests

large flower

2 silk vests

18th century

2 chemises & knickers 1 crepe de chine top & knickers 1 white silk

"

"

1 white lawn

"

"

Stockings about 1 dozen _______________________________ 1. See Figure 12 (p. 430) for the manuscript version of this entry, along with the various additions and subtractions that made up KM’s final calculations.

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Coats & skirts

dresses

Black flannel

2 black dresses

mole face cloth

1 blue evening

beige jersey cloth

1 purple silk

black cloth

1 russian linen 2 silk jumpers 1 crepe de chine skirt 1 panne velvet skirt 1 jaegar1 wooly little coats various 1 crepe de chine jumper

_________________________________1 1 overcoat 1 cape 1 scarf 1 silk shawl 1 fur _________________________________ 1 brown hat 1 grey hat 1 black fruit 1 shiny black 1 small chiffon 4 pairs gloves 6 lace handkerchiefs 4 large coloured silk handkerchiefs about 1 dozen ordinary handkerchiefs _________________________________ 2 pairs mules 1 black suede shoes 1 grey cloth 1 pair slippers 1 black walking shoes. _________________________________ 1 blue silk kimono 1 dressing gown with fur. _________________________________ veils, ribbons, boxes, powder, scent, amethyst brooch 2 rings _________________________________ 1. The firm Jaegar was renowned for its knitwear, and later moved into more general fashion in the 1960s.

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[Notebook 30, qMS–1276]

14.x.1922.1 I have been thinking this morning until it seems I may get things straightened out if I try to write . . . where I am. Ever since I came to Paris I have been as ill as ever. In fact yesterday I thought I was dying. It is not imagination. My heart is so exhausted and so tied up that I can only walk to the taxi and back. I get up at midi and go to bed at 5.30. I try to ‘work’ by fits and starts, but the time has gone by. I cannot work. Ever since April I have done practically nothing. But why? Because, although Manoukhin’s treatment improved my blood & made me look well and did have a good effect on the lungs it made my heart not one scrap better, and I only won that improvement by living the life of a corpse in the Victoria Palace Hotel. My spirit is nearly dead. My spring of life is so starved that it’s just not dry. Nearly all my improved health is pretence – acting. What does it amount to? Can I walk? Only creep. Can I do anything with my hands or my body? Nothing at all. I am an absolutely hopeless invalid. What is my life? It is the existence of a parasite. And five years have passed now, and I am in straighter bonds than ever. Ah, I feel a little calmer already to be writing. Thank God for writing. I am so terrified of what I am going to do. All the voices out of the ‘Past’ say – ‘don’t do it.’ Bogey says ‘Manoukhin is a scientist. He does his part. It’s up to you to do yours.’ But that is no good at all. I can no more cure my psyche than my body. Less it seems to me. Isn’t Bogey himself, perfectly fresh and well, utterly depressed by boils on his neck? Think of five years’ imprisonment. Someone has got to help me to get out. If that is an expression of weakness – it is. But it’s only lack of imagination that calls it so. And who is going to help me? Remember Switzerland. ‘I am helpless.’ Of course he is. One prisoner cannot help another. Do I believe in medicine alone? No. Never. In science alone? No. Never. It seems to me childish and ridiculous to suppose one can be cured like a cow if one is not a cow. And here, all these years I have been looking for someone who agreed with me. I have heard of Gurdjieff who seems not only to agree but to know infinitely more about it. Why hesitate? Fear. Fear of what. Doesn’t it come down to fear of losing Bogey? I believe it does. But good heavens! Face things. What have you of him now! What is your relationship. He talks to you – sometimes – and then goes off. He thinks of you tenderly. He dreams of a life with you some 1. Next to this entry, KM has written: ‘These pages from my journal. Don’t let them distress you. The story has a happy ending – really & truly.’

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day when the miracle has happened. You are important to him as a dream. Not as a living reality. For you are not one. What do you share? Almost nothing. Yet there is a deep sweet tender flooding of feeling in my heart which is love for him and longing for him. But what is the good of it as things stand? Life together, with me ill, is simply torture with happy moments. But it’s not life. I have tried through my illness (with one or two disastrous exceptions) to prevent him facing wholly what was happening. I ought to have tried to get him to face them. But I couldn’t. The result is he doesn’t know me. He only knows Wigwho-is-going-to-be-better-some-day. No. You do know that Bogey and you are only a kind of dream of what might be. And that might be never never can be true unless you are well. And you won’t get well by ‘imagining’or ‘waiting’or trying to bring off that miracle yourself. Therefore if the Grand Lhama of Thibet promised to help you – how can you hesitate! Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinions of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth. True, Tchekhov didn’t. Yes, but Tchekhov died.1 And let us be honest. How much do we know of Tchekhov from his letters. Was that all? Of course not. Don’t you suppose he had a whole longing life of which there is hardly a word? Then read the final letters. He has given up hope. If you de-sentimentalize those final letters they are terrible. There is no more Tchekhov. Illness has swallowed him. But perhaps to people who are not ill all this is nonsense. They have never travelled this road. How can they see where I am? All the more reason to go boldly forward alone. Life is not simple. In spite of all we say about the mystery of Life when we get down to it we want to treat it as though it were a child’s tale . . . Now, Katherine, what do you mean by health? And what do you want it for? Answer: By health I mean the power to live a full, adult, living breathing life in close contact [with] what I love – the earth and the wonders thereof, the sea, the sun. All that we mean when we speak of the external world. I want to enter into it, to be part of it, to live in it, to learn from it, to lose all that is superficial and acquired in me and to become a conscious, direct human being. I want, by understanding myself, to understand others. I want to be all that I am capable of becoming so that I may be – (and here I have stopped and waited and waited and it’s no good – there’s only one phrase that will do) a child of the sun. About helping others, about carrying a light and so on it seems false to say a single word. Let it be at that. A child of the sun. 1. Anton Chekhov died of tuberculosis in 1904.

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Then I want to work. At what? I want so to live that I work with my hands and my feeling and my brain. I want a garden, a small house, grass, animals, books, pictures, music. And out of this – the expression of this – I want to be writing. (Though I may write about cabmen. That’s no matter.) But warm, eager living life – to be rooted in life – to learn, to desire to know, to feel, to think, to act. That is what I want. And nothing less. That is what I must try for. I wrote this for myself. I shall now risk sending it to Bogey. He may do with it what he likes. He must see how much I love him. And when I say ‘I fear’– don’t let it disturb you, dearest heart. We all fear when we are in waiting rooms. Yet we must pass beyond them and if the other can keep calm it is all the help we can give each other. Suppose if this worries you, you show it to Dunning?1 I trust Dunning in spite of my thinking he did not really solve your problem. Let him see that, too. He will understand. And this all sounds very strenuous and serious. But now that I have wrestled with it it’s no longer so. I feel happy – deep down. May you be happy, too. I’m going to Fontainebleau on Monday & I’ll be back here Tuesday night or Wednesday morning. All is well. Doctor Young2 the London man who has joined Gurdjieff came to see me today & told me about the life there. It sounds wonderfully good & simple and what one needs. My first conversation with Orage3 took place on August 30th 1922. On that occasion I began by telling him how dissatisfied I was with the idea that Life must be a lesser thing than we were capable of ‘imagining’ it to be. I had the feeling that the same thing happened to nearly everybody whom I knew and whom I did not know. No sooner was their youth, with the little force and impetus characteristic of youth, over, than they stopped growing. At the very moment when

1. W. J. Dunning was a mystic and yoga teacher based in Ditchling, Sussex. 2. Dr James Carruthers Young (d. 1950) was a fellow guest at Gurdjieff’s Institute and performed a medical examination on KM ahead of her acceptance into the community. 3. KM had been close to Orage in the early 1910s, when he was editor of the New Age and publishing her first stories. After a major rift, she renewed contact with him in 1921 and they met and corresponded throughout the following year. Orage had become interested in mysticism and spiritual development, and sent JMM a copy of M. A. Oxon’s Cosmic Anatomy and the Structure of the Ego (1921), which was covertly meant for KM, and which had a considerable impact on her own outlook and life choices from then on.

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one felt that now was the time to gather oneself together, to use one’s whole strength, to take control, to be an adult in fact, they seemed content to swop the darling wish of their hearts for innumerable little wishes. Or the image that suggested itself to me was that of a river flowing away in countless little trickles over a dark swamp. They deceived themselves of course. They called this trickling away greater tolerance, wider interests, a sense of proportion so that work did not rule out the possibility of ‘life’. Or they called it an escape from all this mind probing and self consciousness – a simpler and therefore a better way of life. But sooner or later, in literature at any rate, there sounded an undertone of deep regret. There was an uneasiness, a sense of frustration. One heard, or one thought one heard, the cry that began to echo in one’s own being. ‘I have missed it. I have given up. This is not what I want. If this is all then Life is not worth living.’ But I know it is not all. How does one know that? Let me take the case of K.M. She has led, ever since she can remember, a very typically false life. Yet, through it all, there have been moments, instants, gleams, when she has felt the possibility of something quite other. Important When we can begin to take our failures non-seriously, it means we are ceasing to be afraid of them. It is of immense importance to learn to laugh at ourselves. What Shestov calls ‘a touch of easy familiarity and derision’ has its value.1 What will happen to Anatole France2 and his charming smile? Doesn’t it disguise a lack of feeling – like M’s weariness . . . Life should be like a steady, visible light. What remains of all those years together? It is difficult to say. If they were so important how could they have come to nothing. Who gave up and why? 1. From Shestov’s All Things are Possible, Part XII (1905). The full paragraph, which sheds light on KM’s state of mind at the time and the sort of reading matter she was turning to for consolation, reads: ‘The best way of getting rid of tedious, played-out truths is to stop paying them the tribute of respect and to treat them with a touch of easy familiarity and derision. To put into brackets, as Dostoevsky did, such words as good, self-sacrifice, progress, and so on, will alone achieve you much more than many brilliant arguments would do. Whilst you still contest a certain truth, you still believe in it, and this even the least penetrating individual will perceive. But if you favour it with no serious attention, and only throw out a scornful remark now and then, the result is different. It is evident you have ceased to be afraid of the old truth, you no longer respect it. And this sets people thinking.’ 2. Anatole France. See above, p. 148.

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Haven’t I been saying, all along, that the fault lies in trying to cure the body and pay no heed whatever to the sick psyche. Gurdjieff claims to do just what I have always dreamed might be done.1 The sound of a street pipe hundreds & hundreds of years old. c/o Mme Dubois, Val Richer, Lisieux (Calvados).2 [Notebook 20, qMS–1282]

January 1st

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1. George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (1866?–1949) was a Greek–Armenian mystic and spiritual teacher, who had embarked on a quest for spiritual truth across Central Asia, India, Tibet and the Middle East as a young man, and then travelled widely around Western Europe in the immediate post-war years, lecturing and promoting his visionary teachings. He founded the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at the Prieuré des Basses Loges in Fontainebleau-Avon, where KM settled from October 1922 until her death the following January. 2. The address of LM, who found employment on a farm in Normandy, in order to stay in France, while KM was in the Institute.

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Denn jeder sieht und stellt die Sachen anders, eben nach seiner Weise.1 [MS–Papers–4006–8]

(Stupefaction) total. I feel unable to do anything. It is a proof of the horribly soporific nature of the codeine mixture. [Journal, 1954, pp. 245–7]

A little book: Knockings at the Door. When she managed to blow the tissue-paper from the frontispiece, the author, with his hair parted down the middle, wearing a buttoned frock-coat and a turned-down collar, smiled at her almost too confidingly. War and Peace. ‘“Ho, ho, ho! ha ha! ha ha! Oh! oo!” the soldiers burst into a roar of such hearty, good-humoured laughter, in which the French line too could not keep from joining, that after it seemed as though they must unload their guns, blow up their ammunition, and all hurry away back to their homes. But the guns remained loaded, the port-holes in the houses and earth-works looked out as menacingly as ever, and the cannons, taken off their platforms, confronted one another as before’.2 This is great art – this book. This is the real thing. It is a whole created world. The Little Princess in labour. ‘Inform the Prince that the labour has commenced’, said Marya, looking significantly at the messenger. Tihon went and gave the Prince that information. ‘Very good’, said the prince, closing the door behind him, and Tihon heard not the slightest sound in the study after that. After a short interval Tihon went to the study, as though to attend to the candles, seeing the prince lying on the couch, Tihon looked at him, looked at his perturbed face, went up to him humbly and kissed him on the shoulder, then went out without touching the candles or saying why he had come. The most solemn mystery in the world was being 1. (Ger.) ‘Everyone sees and arranges things differently, in their own fashion.’ From Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe, 18 September 1823. Goethe is talking about the way every writer will work the same storyline according to their own style and perception of things. 2. From Constance Garnett’s 1903 translation of Leo Tolstoy’s epic masterpiece, War and Peace (1869), Book Two, Chapter 15.

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accomplished. Evening passed, night came on. And the feeling of suspense and softening of the heart before the unfathomable did not wane, but grew more intense. No one slept’.1 Compare this beautiful gravity of feeling with our modem ‘birth’ scene. It’s not what I am suffering – it’s the ‘mystery’. The Thaw. ‘It looked as though the sky were melting, and without the slightest wind sinking down upon the earth. The only movement in the air was the soft downward motion of microscopic drops of moisture or mist. The bare twigs in the garden were hung with transparent drops which dripped on to the freshly fallen leaves. The earth in the kitchen garden had a wet, black look like the centre of a poppy, and at a short distance away it melted off into the damp, dim veil of fog’.2 ‘Life is everything. Life is God. All is changing and moving, and that motion is God. And while there is life there is the joy of the consciousness of the Godhead. To love life is to love God. The hardest and the most blessed thing is to love this life in one’s sufferings, in undeserved suffering’.3 ‘A spiritual wound that comes from a rending of the spirit is like a physical wound, and after it has healed externally, and the torn edges are scarred over, yet, strange to say, like a deep physical injury it only heals inwardly by the force of life pushing up from within’.4 That is true, master. ‘And Pierre had won the Italian’s passionate devotion simply by drawing out what was best in his soul and admiring it’.5 That is love. Pierre and Natasha. ‘When on saying good-bye, he took her thin, delicate hand he unconsciously held it somewhat longer in his own’.6 This is just what I understand, and so is this: – ‘A joyful, unexpected frenzy, of which Pierre had believed himself incapable, seized upon him. The whole meaning of life, not for him only, but for all the world, seemed to him centred in his love and the possibility of her loving him’.7 ‘She only talked because she needed to exercise her lungs and her tongue. She cried like a child, because she needed the physical relief of 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

From Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Book Four, Chapter 8. From Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Book Seven, Chapter 3. From Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Book Fourteen, Chapter 15. From Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Book Fifteen, Chapter 3. From Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Book Fifteen, Chapter 13. From Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Book Fifteen, Chapter 18. From Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Book Fifteen, Chapter 19.

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tears, and so on. What for people in their full vigour is a motive, with her was obviously a pretext’.1 Like Polonius. | Petya. ‘“Ah, you want a knife?” he said to an officer, who was trying to tear off a piece of mutton. And he gave him his pocket-knife. The officer praised the knife. “Please keep it, I have several like it,” said Petya, blushing’. 2 ‘Perhaps, though, it’s my own music. Come, again. Strike up my music. Come! . . .’ My music!3 ‘I’m fond of sweet things. They are capital raisins, take them all’.4 Petya’s death. ‘And again in the helpless struggle with reality, the mother, refusing to believe that she could live while her adored boy, just blossoming into life, was dead, took refuge from reality in the world of delirium. . .’.5 All this is so true of Chummie. . . that. . . ‘For him only that is important to which he, Tolstoi, has set his hand; all that occurs outside and beside him, for him has no existence. This is the great prerogative of great men. And sometimes it seems to me – perhaps it is only that I would have it seem so – as though there were in that prerogative a deep and hidden meaning’. (Leon Shestov.)6 [Notebook 20, qMS–1282]

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 14 Orage goes to Paris.

1. From Tolstoy’s War and Peace, First Epilogue, Chapter 12. 2. From Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Book Fourteen, Chapter 7. 3. From Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Book Four, Chapter 8. This is an interesting break in the sequence of quotations. The phrase that follows is a direct continuation of the scene from which KM was quoting above (see p. 441, n. 1). Here, however, she slips out of sequence to record the elation of Petya when he first rides out with the troops. He is the little brother of the family, and had run away to go to war despite his mother’s opposition; KM is clearly reading this account in the light of her brother’s own death, as her comments below confirm. 4. From Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Book Fourteen, Chapter 7. 5. From Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Book Fifteen, Chapter 2. 6. From Leon Shestov’s essay, ‘The Gift of Prophecy’ (1906), in Penultimate Words and Other Essays.

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SUNDAY, OCTOBER 15 Nietsche’s Birthday. Sat in the Luxembourg Gardens. Cold, wretchedly unhappy. Horrid people at lunch, everything horrid from angfang bis zum ende.1 [Notebook 31, qMS–1278]

Oct. 16th. Another radiant day. J. is typing my last story The Garden Party,2 which I finished on my birthday. It took me nearly a month to ‘recover’ from At the Bay.3 I made at least three false starts. But I could not get away from the sound of the sea and Beryl fanning her hair at the window. These things would not die down. But now I am not at all sure about that story. It seems to me it’s a little ‘wispy’– not what it might have been. The G. P. is better. But that is not good enough, either. The last few days, what one notices more than anything is the blue. Blue sky, blue mountains, all is a heavenly blueness! And clouds of all kinds – wings, soft white clouds, almost hard little golden islands, great mock-mountains. The gold deepens on the slopes. In fact, in sober fact, it is perfection. But the late evening is the time of times. Then with that unearthly beauty before one it is not hard to realise how far one has to go. To write something that will be worthy of that rising moon, that pale light. To be ‘simple’ enough as one would be simple before God . . . [Notebook 20, qMS–1282]

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 17 Laublatter. The Four Fountains. The Red Tobacco Plant. English dog. The funeral procession. Actions & Reactions. The silky husk, like the inside of the paw of a cat. ‘Darling’. Ida! Ida! waving the tambourines. Fire is sunlight & returns to the sun again in unending cycle. One shakes the tambourine with the base of the hand. He looks exactly like a desert chief. I kept thinking of Doughty’s Arabia . . .4 To be wildly enthusiastic, or deadly serious – both are wrong. Both pass. One must keep ever present a sense of humour. It depends entirely on 1. 2. 3. 4.

(Ger.) ‘from beginning to end’. See CW2, pp. 401–14. See CW2, pp. 342–72. Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888) was a highly popular travel narrative by Charles Montagu Doughty, an English poet and writer.

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yourself how much you see or hear or understand. But the sense of humour I have found true of every single occasion of my life. Now perhaps you understand what to be indifferent means. It’s to learn not to mind, and not to show you mind. WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER l8 In the autumn garden leaves falling. Like footfalls, like gentle whispering. They fly, spin, twirl, shake. Addresses of Teeth Snatchers à Paris. Dr Holly Smith, 22 Place Vendôme Dr W. S. Davenport, 6 Avenue de l’Opéra Dr Wilson, Bd Hausmann (?) Dr Hipwell, 91 Avenue de Champs Elysées. Hotel Paradis Diano Marino, Italian Riviera. A place to remember IF List of people to whom I must send copies: H.G., Koteliansky, Galsworthy, Ed. Street, Mrs B. Lowndes, Sydney, (Tom), Orage.

Galsworthy, Grove Lodge, The Grove, Hampstead N.W.3. Roma, Piessa Broom [?], 68 Via Seccosa, Roma (9). Charles Gallup, Overlook, Coxsackie on Hudson, New York. The Major & the Lady1 The Mother The Fly An unhappy Man Lucian Down The Sounds A Visit (The Lily) Sisters The New Baby Confidences The Dreamers Aunt Fan Honesty Best Girl

1. A list of stories KM was planning to write and in some cases had written.

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{A Cup of Tea {Taking the Veil {The Doll’s House [Notebook 31, qMS–1278]

Nov. 21st. Since then I have only written The Doll house.1 A bad spell has been on me. I have begun two stories but then I told them and they felt betrayed. It is absolutely fatal to give way to this temptation . . . Today I began to write, seriously, ‘The Weak Heart,’2 a story which fascinates me deeply. What I feel it needs so peculiarly is a very subtle variation of ‘tense’ from the present to the past & back again. And softness, lightness, and the feeling that all is in bud, with a play of humour over the character of Ronnie, and the feeling of the Thorndon Baths,3 the wet, moist, oozy . . . no, I know how it must be done. May I be found worthy to do it! Lord make me crystal clear for Thy light to shine through. The woman from upstairs has just been down to put her milk can out. She was furious when she found me in the hall. She simply – rounded on me – there’s no other word for it. Told me I ought to be ashamed of myself for waiting up for him, that it served me right if he came in later and later, that she’d be ashamed at my age, not to know better. Little spitfire. I’m still trembling! And what right has she to say anything at all. She has none. She can’t understand. She’s a hard little thing. The very way she shut the door on the milk can just now showed she had no feeling for anyone else. It’s a long time now since he started going out every evening. I can’t stop him – I’ve tried everything but it is useless – out he goes. And the horrible thing is I don’t know where it is he goes to – who is he with? It’s all such a mystery, that’s what makes it so hard to bear. Where have you been. I’ve asked him and asked him that. But never a word, never a sign. I sometimes think he likes to torture me. But then I’ve got nobody else. I suppose that sounds strange. But I can say as truly as a girl in love: He is all the world to me. The deep grudge that L.M. has for me really is fascinating. She keeps it under for a long time at a stretch but oh – how it is there! Tonight,

1. See CW2, pp. 414–21. 2. See CW2, pp. 426–9. 3. Thorndon was a district in Wellington where the Beauchamp family lived.

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for instance, in the salon we hated each other – really hated in a queer way. I felt I wanted her out of my sight; she felt that she must insult me before she went. It was very queer. It was peculiarly horrible. When she said I hope you are satisfied I had a real shrinking from her – something I never feel at other times. What is it? I don’t understand, either, why her carelessness or recklessness should be so repellent to me. When she tosses her head and says in a strange voice, at ease, ‘Oh a lot I care’ I want to be rid of the very sight. These last days I have been awfully rebellious. Longing for something. I feel uprooted. I want things that Jack can so easily do without, that aren’t natural to him. I long for them. But then, stronger than all these desires is the other which is to make good before I do anything else. The sooner the books are written, the sooner I shall be well, the sooner my wishes will be in sight of fulfilment. That is sober truth, of course. As a pure matter of fact I consider this enforced confinement here as God-given. But on the other hand, I must make the most of it quickly. It is not unlimited any more than anything else is. Oh, why – oh why isn’t anything unlimited. Why am I haunted every single day of my life by the nearness of death and its inevitability! I am really diseased on that point! And I can’t speak of it. If I tell J. it makes him unhappy. If I don’t tell him it leaves me to fight it. I am tired of the battle. No one knows how tired. Tonight when the evening star shone through the side window and the pale mountains were so lovely I sat there thinking of death, of all there was to do – of Life which is so lovely – and of the fact that my body is a prison. But this state of mind is evil. It is by acknowledging that I, being what I am, had to suffer this in order to do the work I am here to perform – it is only by acknowledging it, by being thankful that work was not taken away from me, that I shall recover. I am weak where I must be strong. 24.XI.1921. And today, Saturday, less than ever. But no matter. I have progressed – a little. I have realised what it is to be done – the strange barrier to be crossed from thinking it and writing it . . . Daphne.1 Aunt Fan. No.

1. See CW2, pp. 429–33.

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[Notebook 5, qMS–1283]

Scheya = neck1 Pletsche = shoulders Kis’t = hand only Paltse = fingers Nogkti = nails Groost = chest Jebot = stomach Talliir = waist Noge = legs Spina = spine [back] Bork = baka = ribs Korȷ˜a = skin, leather Cvertl˜ıe kreseky [light colours] Sine blue Krasni = red Jolte = yellow Zelorne = green Rozovy = pink Serey = grey Sibertlie = clear blue Tiumimo ti’omnaya tsvert [dark colours] Plātsie [clothes] Jentscheena = woman mooschina = man Ribionork = child djervortschka = girl 1. In the vocabulary lists that follow, which reflect KM’s endeavours to master basic Russian vocabulary while at Gurdjieff’s Institute, her transliterations have been carefully reproduced, alongside her own translations. Where KM does not note a translation herself, a straightforward rendering has been added in square brackets to facilitate reading. The phonetic transcription method is of her own devising, but proves remarkably accurate in terms of Russian pronunciation. A number of residents mention her desire to learn Russian; the two that helped her most appear to be ‘Olgivanna’ (Olga Ivanovna Lazovich), one of Gurdjieff’s associates, and Adele Kafian, a young Lithuanian woman, also staying at the Prieuré (see above, p. 437). Both were appointed by Gurdjieff to look after KM. Olga Ivanovna Lazovich (1898–1985) was a dancer from Montenegro, whose theosophical inclinations brought her into contact with Gurdjieff when she wanted to study sacred dance patterns. She married Frank Lloyd Wright, the American architect, in 1928, but when KM knew her was married to a Russian architect, Vlademar Hinzenberg.

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Malchik = boy dietsche = children Lioodi = people stari = old maladoi = young Maladietz = good boy Mat = mother atierts = father brat = brother Sestra = sister sin = son dertsch = daughter Gariatsche malakõ [hot milk] Chaske = cup Auchen slebe malako [very weak milk] Lorschke menie [my spoon] Sol [salt] Gordigtse [to be proud, pleased with oneself] Pearitz [?drink] U yer hetz journey to travel Kuda where Apasdaht to be late1 Ja pas dahtie patamusta I was late because – ja bull noy [apple trees] ogom ne gereel [the fire didn’t burn] Pagoda [weather] Utrem bouil silne maross [In the morning there was a heavy frost] trãva bouillie biailaya [the grass was white] nerbe bouill sinyee kak leitom [the sky was as blue as in summer] Sima = winter vesna = spring aussin [autumn] Na de re vor = tree jechau astalis ja blöki [there were still apples] Jabloko = apple Ja dahla klep [I gave bread] Kasim [to the goat] Ja daya ja. Karamiela [I gave Karamel] kos [goats] Ja yem = I eat ana koushet [she eats] Pringjeste = to bring Pringjeschitie meny [bring me] Dolgo = long Gouliats = to walk Ja na magoo vas [vam?] slietz [I cannot come down to you] Katerina Chastor [often] Svey minootei [2 minutes] Mesetz = month Ne˜diele = week Vokrisenier = Sunday 1. See Figure 13 (p. 449) for the manuscript version of these Russian vocabulary lists, which also offer passing insights into daily activities at the Institute.

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Figure 13 Russian vocabulary lessons, winter 1922. Notebook 5, qMS–1283. John Middleton Murry Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

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Pornierdielñik = Monday V’tornik Tuesday Siradah = Wednesday Siredrēũ Tschiwerk = Thursday Piatnitse = Friday Soubot = Sunday Dyen nocche utrem [in the day; at night, in the morning] Veccher [in the evening] Pulden = half day1 Pul nocc = midnight Saftrack [breakfast] God = year ahdeen [one] Verk = century Galava [head] rooke [arms] noge [legs] Glaza = eyes Nos = nose Rot = mouth Volossy = hair U chor = one ear ushey = ears Tierlo = body Lop = forehead Schorkey = cheeks padbarodak [chin] Baradar = la barbe pod = under Gooboui: lips zooboui = teeth broyve = eyebrows Resnietse. Eyelashes. Jack Brett Kot Violet S. Richard Marie Jeanne Orage Gurdjieff Sto ya sdielaya [what did I do] Ja niet galodnaya [I am not cold] 1. This is an interesting example of KM’s linguistic alertness, in slipping between languages. The Russian ‘Pulden’ [полдень] does literally mean ‘half day’, although it would usually be translated as ‘midday’.

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Oogol Oogela [coal] Ya ne paieu spatz Ya ne paido spatz [I cannot sleep]1 Stchastlevi [happy] Estchaslelevaya estchasleliva estchaslelivaya estchaslelevaya2 booitz [to be] [MS–Papers–4006–10]

I was late because my fire did not burn, weather this morning was a heavy frost The grass was white The sky was blue as in summer Winter – spring – autumn. The trees still have apples. Apple. I fed the goats I eat – she eats Bring me long I go for a walk What is the time. Time month – week Days of the week day – night – morning midday – midnight year – one year – century. 1. This appears to be an interesting reflection of linguisitic apprenticeship with an attempt at self-expression. KM’s transliterated words are a literal rendering of the English ‘to fall’ and ‘to sleep’. The expression in Russian, however, is not literally ‘to fall’. KM therefore appears to be trying to combine two verbs she has learned to create meaning. 2. KM is trying out various transliterations of the Russian adjective for ‘happy’ (счастливый). As wary as one must be before ascribing direct biographical significance to any of the Russian terms, since much vocabulary was clearly being learnt in a relaxedly pedagogical context and was not automatically selfreferential, it is difficult not to interpret these repeated transcriptions of the adjective ‘happy’, mostly in the feminine, as reflections of her own feelings.

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neck

waist

blue clear

woman

mother

shoulders

legs

red dark

man

father

hand

back

yellow

child

brother

fingers

rib

green

girl

sister

nails

ribs

pink

boy

son

chest

skin

grey

children

daughter

colours

people

costumes

old young good boy

stomach

bed

divan

window

wash table

armchair

fireplace

table

floor

chair

walls

carpet

ceiling door

head

lips

arms

teeth

legs

eyelashes

eyes

eyebrows?

nose mouth hair ears body forehead cheeks chin pod=under

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[MS–Papers–4006–10]

Krovatz = bed ymivalnik = ymmevatse = to wash wash table Stol table kavior = carpet. Divan kariaslo = armchair Stul = chair floor = pol. Sterna (e) = walls potalok = ceiling Dver = door Oknor = window Kamin = fireplace [NLC Notebook 3]

1) balshoï dom = big house1 harashaw = well pa˜ȷalesta daïje mñe vāda, hlep, saccer, chi, kaufee [please give me some water, bread, sugar, tea, coffee] dobré utra [good morning] " d˜ȷen [good day] " veccher [good evening] spacoinay nocce. [good night] izdrastvui˜ȷe [hello] rooka [arms] noge [legs] galava [head] rooke verrch [raise your arms] " stawrone [arms by your sides]

1. As the increasing use of diacritics indicates, KM was clearly trying to record as clear an indication as possible of precise pronunciation, and developed her own phonetic scheme to do so.

453

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~ estor [in place] na m nazad [ago] karopka [box] yah gah tofa [I’m ready] 2) stol [table] stul [chair] kravatz [bed] de˜tze egrayut ve sadū [the children are playing in the garden] ma goo na pietse v kuch nuy [I can drink in the kitchen] pa˜ȷalesta da ditjies [please give] ya siyna [bright] vui saditje na stole [you sit on the chair] v stantse! [To the station!] nad dietse [to / with children] **** ya hac˜hu rabortetz [I want to work] vasshe komnatsa siplanie [your room bedroom] Janka et sdjes janka [and here is Janka] 3) mñjeu holon pringji jistse boomagah mor zap ãidel agoiné [bring paper to light the fire] boomagah [paper] pepel [cinders] drava spitchki [matches] flamya flame dyim [smoke] silnõ [strong] sila = force jag˜eyietze agonie! [Light the fire!] agone pa tuch [The fire has gone out] patamushta on patuch [because it has gone out]

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bieilie boomagar [white paper] chorney " [black paper] katori chas [what time is it] n’jai posna [it’s not late] jeschau rano [it’s still early] koué [some] ya hidu govaruts svami pa rooski [I shall speak in Russian with you] mn jeh lootche1 [I prefer] autchen sina sivoyne [very blue today] ya polochila peesmai sivoydne [I received a letter today] " " " v’chera [ " yesterday] ya polochu " zaftrerr [ " tomorrow] ya dalo˜ȷna piesatz peesmai [I must write a letter] gdeh voubiile sivoydne? [where were you today?] ya bila sadu rabortala [I was working in the garden] bou˜ela autchen holodna [I was very cold] ya viediela karov [I saw the goats] ah nay autchen krasivouiya [they are lovely] vam nreivitse? [do you like it?] mnej nreivitse [I like it] ja ustaler pata mushta sivoydner mnorga rabortela [I’m tired because I worked a lot today] rabortela [worked] breakfast

zahftrack

etar dom eeiva brata = This is their brother’s house gdieh ka˜sa = Where is the booking office? vot vasha telegramma = Here is your telegram Bagaȷ˜ dami tam = The lady’s luggage is there Gdeh gasteunitsa yayevau drooki = Where is his friend’s house? Etar nomerr eeui domà = this is the number of their house. Vot address yeyau doctora = Here is his doctor’s address Nasha ylitsa tam. = Our street is there Vot stahkahn venau = There is a glass of wine 1. Many lists are noted down twice, suggesting KM was practising and learning by heart set expressions.

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Ya rahd, vui pravi, on ne gotov. I am glad; you are right; he is not ready Ya buil, ona buil-e, moui bouile. = I was, she was, we / you were On nhei bouill, voui nyeh bouille, aneie ne bouillée = he was not, you were not, they were not Vouille lee on; nyeh bouilela lee ona; Was he? Was not she? We were not, they were not. mouie ne vouille, ne bouille lle voui? nebouille lee on= was he not? [Notebook 11, qMS–1258]

Katherine Mansfield Murry.1 Station is Stresa. Take mountain railway to Guiese. Hotel Bel Alpino. Aitken, 37 Great Ormond St, Russell Square. Dr Achkner, 47A Welbeck Street. Marie Albera, 28 Rue Dabrey, St. Etienne. Doctor A. Bouchage, 27 Avenue de Verdun Menton. Summer: Port-Blanc, Cotes-du-Nord. Bartrick-Baker, Vere, Paradise Farm, Cobham, Surrey. Brett, 28 Thurlow Road, Hampstead N.W.3. Beauchamp, Miss C., Villa Flora, Menton. Mrs Beaumont, 41 Upper Church Road, Weston Super Mare. Widow Jumper! Miss A.L. Beauchamp, Marywell, Blackboys, Sussex. 3 Hurlingham Gardens S.W Cannan Mary, Pension Mirasole, Roquebrune. Colonial Wine Company, 20 Denham Street, London Bridge, S.E. 1 Special hock 45/– dozen Muscat Ex special hock 69/– Ex special claret 69/– 1908–1909 Cramer, 96 Victoria Street, S.W.1 H.J. Cave & Sons, 81 New Cavendish Street. Constable telegraphic, Drayola Westrand (10-12 Orange St) London. Dunn, Coombe Cottage, Kingston Hill, Surrey. Delamare, 14 Thomsett Road, Averley S.E. 1. The following lists are from a small address book.

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Dahlerup, Pension Coupier, Rue des Alpes 3–5, Geneva. Carl van Direu, Lit Editor, The Nation, 20 Vesy Street, N.Y. Drey, 80 Church [?] St, Kensington. Eliot, T.S., 18 Crawford Mansions, Baker Street, London. Fullerton, Miss E.J., Ladywell, Hampstead Heath. Foster, Doctor Michael, Villa San Giovanni, San Remo. Galsworthy John, Grove Lodge, The Grove, Hampstead N.W.3 G.I. Gurdjieff, 74 Rue de Miromesnil, Paris. Hudson, Doctor, Palace Hotel, Montana. Kotelianski, 5 Acacia Road, St Johns Wood, N.W.8 5038 Bull Kay (tel. add. Bank Zealand, Logocracy, London.) Kaye-Shuttleworth, Miss J., Villa Luna, San Remo. Knopf, Alfred A.. 220 West Forty-Second Street, New York. Publisher. Lowndes Mrs Belloc, 9 Barton Street, Westrim Stn[?], Londres Lynd Sylvia, 32 Queens Gate, S.W.7 Lynd Mrs Robert, The Stone House, Steyning, Sussex. Langdale Major Charles, Hotel Farant, Peira Cava sur Nice, A\M Doctor F.E. Larkins M.D., 75 Harley Street W.1, Padd 5042 & Brampton Grove, Hendon N.W.4, Finchley 249. Harry Leggett Esq., c/o Curtis Brown Ltd, 6 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden WC. 2. Moult, 3 Milton Park, Highgate 6. Macdermot G., 34 Half Moon Street, W.1. Mayne Violet, The New House, Winchester. Mrs A. Montgomery, Grey Abbey, County Down, Ireland. Yoi Maraini, 29 Via Benedetto Fortini, Ricorboli, Firenze. Monendi [?] Hotel and English Pension, San Remo. Moody, 21 Alfred Terrace, Hampstead. Maufe, 139 Church St, Chelsea. Morrell, Lady Ottoline, The Manor House, Garsington. Morgan Hon Evan, 48 Grosvenor Street, London 1., 2170 Gerr [?] Moult, 44 Foxley Lane, Purley. Mitchell Stewart, 152 West Thirteenth Street, New York City. (The Dial) Millin S.G., Rhodes Avenue, Parktown West, Jo’Burg. Susan Mills, Ursula Roberts, 19 Woburn Square, W.C.1 Miller, 276 Earls Court Road, S.W.5. Murry, Richard, 10 Mecklenburgh Square, W.C.1 Ocrum, Edith, 32 Winchester Road N.W.3. Orage, 59 Chancery Lane.

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Perkins 14–19 July, c/o Mrs Morley, Savile Cottage, Aldeburgh Suffolk. Porter, William A., 11 Welbeck Street W. Palmer, Clara, Miss, 2oVicolo S. Nicolo da Tolentino, Roma. Pinwick, Market Square, Romily. Lady Greenaway. R.O. Prowse, 47 St Quintin Avenue, SW10. Rebandi Caterina, Ospedaletti, Ligure. Richards Grant, 8 St. Martins Street W.C.2 Mrs Richmond, 3 Sumner Place, SW7. Sorapure, 47 Wimpole Street W.I., 1556 Padd. Doctor Sorapure, 58 Montague Square until 11 May. Mayfair 3146. Sullivan, 16 Oppidans Road, Chalk Farm, N.W Small, Gertie Miss, 5 Golden Square, Hampstead N.W.3 Sinclair, May, 1 Blenheim Road, NW8. Sydney Schiff, 18 Cambridge Square, Hyde ParkW2. 6690 Paddington The Knole, Crowborough, Sussex. Till the 3rd. Grand Hotel, Eastbourne. After, Barrow, Oaren Road. Trinder, Mrs W.H., Northernwood Park, Lyndhurst, Hants. Mrs F. Temple, The Pond House, Chobham. Trench Herbert, United Universities Club, Pall Mall, SW1 de Villamus, House Agent, San Remo. (Turton). Vine (Thomas),Villa Flora, San Remo. Waterlow, Charlotte, 23 St Leonards Terrace, Chelsea S.W.3. Williams, E, 29 Regent St, Waterloo Place. Woolf, Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond. H.G. Wells, Easton Glebe, Dunmow, Essex. Williams Oslo, 4 Campden Hill Gardens W. Webster, Roma, Sanatorio Hagana, Milan[?] Webster Roma, Chez Broom, 68 Via Leccosa, Roma (9) 4.x. 1922 Youspenski, 146 Harley Street W.

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Miscellany

The Earth Child (1910) Introduction This selection of poems was compiled by KM in 1910 and sent to the London publisher Elkin Mathews in the second half of that year. It was bequeathed to the Newberry Library in Chicago, USA, by the estate of Jane Warner Dick (1906–97) in 1999, where it remained unnoticed until discovered by Gerri Kimber in May 2015, as she worked her way through the rich holdings of KM materials held at the library. On opening a thick folder and leafing through the contents, she realised that she had uncovered a large number of previously unknown poems by KM, dating from 1909/10, when she was just twenty-two. This is a time of her life when biographical information is at its most scant, since KM systematically destroyed all her personal papers from this difficult, youthful period. The folder contains the following: the original auction catalogue description of the contents; two handwritten letters by KM; KM’s calling card; and thirty-five typewritten poems, of which only nine have been previously published. The others are unknown and are mostly of the very best quality, arguably representing some of the finest poems Mansfield ever wrote, and, moreover, containing information about people, places and events for which almost no other biographical evidence is available. Furthermore, read as a poemcycle, rather than as individual poems, the sequence acquires a very different literary style and shape. It shows the development of KM’s lyrical voice and poetic persona as she moved away from the influence of Wilde and fin-de-siècle symbolism, towards the more complex neoRomanticism and early modernism of continental Europe. In addition, it provides a fascinating bridge from her earliest poems, sketches and vignettes through prose-poetry to narrative, offering new insight 459

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into her evolution and apprenticeship as a writer. It reveals that just when KM’s stories were beginning to be accepted for publication in London journals, she was also taking herself seriously as a poet. A couple of years earlier, when in New Zealand, together with her friend Edith Bendall she had also tried to publish a little illustrated book of children’s verse, but that venture came to nothing. Those poems, however, which are all now published in volume 3 of the Collected Edition, have no great literary merit, whereas the unknown collection in the Newberry shows KM to be at the height of her poetic powers. According to the two handwritten letters that accompany the poems, it appears KM sent the collection in the autumn of 1910 to the London publisher Elkin Mathews for possible publication. The original first letter accompanying the submission is not in the collection. Having heard nothing from the publisher, she sent a follow-up letter in November 1910, asking if the publisher would like to see more of her poems. She sent a final letter in early January 1911, written in an amusing style, explaining her frustration at not having received a response and asking that Mathews put her out of her misery. The manuscript was clearly never accepted for publication, but if she did receive a rejection note, it no longer survives. Evidently, the publisher retained two of KM’s letters, together with her original manuscript. Many years later they found their way into an auction (the cut-out auction listing is also to be found in the folder, but with no date) and subsequently, in 1999, were bequeathed to the Newberry Library by the estate of Jane Warner Dick, a prolific collector of materials related to KM. The folder also contains a small calling card, which must have been attached to either the manuscript or one of the letters, inscribed with the name ‘Katharina Mansfield’ and her address at 132, Cheyne Walk, London. This was KM’s selfstyled nom-de-plume towards the end of 1910/early 1911, deliberately made to sound vaguely East European. It was also the name she (illegally) used on the official U.K. National Census for April 1911. No example of this calling card would appear to have survived except for the one in the Newberry Library. Volume 3 of the Collected Edition – The Poetry and Critical Writings of Katherine Mansfield (Edinburgh University Press, 2014) – presented all of KM’s extant poetry, brought together for the first time. When the volume was being compiled, the Newberry holdings were consulted, but the finding aid grouped the newly discovered poems under the title ‘The Earth Child’, and as ‘The Earth-Child in the Grass’ was already included, it was assumed – wrongly, as we now learn – that the same held for the others in the collection. The editors have decided to republish this manuscript and associated miscellany

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in its entirety, as together they comprise both a fascinating record of KM’s literary endeavours in 1910, and an incisive illustration of her ability to forge a new literary voice made from personal memory, intercultural experimentation and contextual echoes.

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34 MANSFIELD (KATHERINE).1 THe oRiginAL TYpeSCRipT of A CoLLeCTion of 36 poeMS, of which no fewer than 27 are unpublished and were previously unknown to exist. [c. 1910.] £50 Although there are only one or two MS. corrections in the typescript, there is no possible doubt of its genuineness as: (a) there are two A.L.S. from the Author, signed Katherina Mansfield2 and contemporarily dated, both of which refer to this typescript, submitting it for publication; (b) seven of the poems appear in the small collection of her poems published by Constable.3 It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of this unpublished typescript. The poems constitute a sequence entitled ‘The Earth Child’, a title which is used in Constable’s volume. They appear there, however, as isolated fragments torn from their context and dated 1911, whereas the fact is that they were written in 1910 or earlier, before the visit to Bavaria4 which produced In a German Pension. They belong to the period of her life about which least is known. She destroyed the journal which she kept of these years of her life, and with the exception of some fragments of the Bavaria period, nothing exists before 1914.5 The ‘Letters’ begin with 1915.6 This newly discovered typescript is, therefore, of major importance.

1. Original auction catalogue listing, cut out and deposited with the folder. The date and auction house are yet to be fully established, but must postdate 1959, when Jane Warner Dick gifted her original KM collection to the Newberry Library; otherwise, this collection would have been deposited at that time. 2. KM has, in fact, signed both letters ‘Katharina Mansfield’ not ‘Katherina Mansfield’, as indicated here. 3. This refers to JMM’s second edition of KM’s poems, published in 1930. 4. Another error, as KM was in Bavaria from May to December 1909. The poems were written during her stay in Bavaria and her return to London in 1910. 5. This is no longer the case, as the five-volume Oxford University Press edition of KM’s letters begins in 1903, and the Scott Notebooks date from 1898. 6. This must refer to JMM’s 1951 edition of KM’s letters.

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132, CHEYNE WALK CHELSEA, S.W.

Dear Mr. Elkin Mathews2 – I have sent you only half of my verses – that little typewritten number. And now – I feel that those I have not sent you are the ones that perhaps would give you the better idea of my work. Shall I send them along? Would it be any use? Sincerely Katharina Mansfield

15 i ii3

132, CHEYNE WALK CHELSEA, S.W.

Dear Mr. Mathews May I hear from you soon the fate of my poor ‘Earth Child’ Poems – I really am worrying about her immediate future – yea or nay. Love her or hate her, Mr. Mathews, but do not leave her to languish! Sincerely yours Katharina Mansfield

1. Handwritten letter by KM. The following words are written vertically in pencil next to this date: ‘Write to Miss M next week.’ It is clear that the first letter, which accompanied the original manuscript submission, is missing from this collection, since this letter is a follow-up to the first. 2. KM’s choice of publisher is revealing. Elkin Mathews was a well-established figure, with strong contacts with the Irish Literary Society, Rhymers Club and the Arts and Crafts Movement. His catalogue included names such as Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons and John Davidson, and in the 1890s he had published the Yellow Book. The volumes were also renowned for their handsome layout and bindings. 3. Handwritten letter by KM. The following is written vertically in ink next to this date: ‘LBY/Jan 27/11’, indicating that KM’s letter was responded to, presumably with a final rejection, on 27 January 1911.

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miscellany KATHARINA MANSFIELD.1 132, CHeYne wALk CHeLSeA

ELKIN MATHEWS, LTD., 78 GROSVENOR STREET, LONDON, W12

D E D I C A T I O N: ‘I nest in the tree of your soul Without me you are dark and silent Without you I homelessly wander’.3 I.4 It has rained all day. A tree grows outside my window Heavily droop the boughs The leaves smother closely 1. KM’s printed calling card, now loose, but which must have been appended to one of the items sent to Elkin Mathews. 2. Publisher’s stamp on a plain, separate sheet of the manuscript. 3. First sheet of the MS, with KM’s dedication. In pencil above it, not in KM’s hand, is written ‘The Earth Child’. In the top right-hand corner, the following is written in the same hand, in pencil: ‘Brown paper wrapper same as Symons’ Baudelaire’. 4. The poems that follow are all typed on separate sheets. However, as the numbering indicates for the first twenty-eight, they do invite reading as a poem-cycle, rather than as a compilation of individual works. This feature strengthens a striking comparison with Heine’s poem-cycle, ‘The North Sea’, included in his Book of Songs (a translation of which had been published by Elkin Mathews), of which KM had at least one copy. See above, p. 11, and CW3, pp. 114–16, for her own translation–adaptations of verses by Heine. KM’s poem-cycle shares with Heine’s the mixture of elfin and human characters, fairy-tale elements in setting and event, the lyrical first-person voice, reflections on childhood, pastoral memories and a sometimes ironical distance. Heine’s poetry was much in vogue in early twentieth-century Germany and Central Europe on account of its romantic anti-authoritarianism. Although KM possibly owed her discovery of Heine’s works to Garnet Trowell, she may well have encountered them anew through Sobienowski and his circle.

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As though to protect the frail tree body Mournfully swaying in the quiet air . . . A grey bird alights on a branch And lifts her throat and sings in the sighing tree. O branch and bough and dusky, smothering leaves Have you forgotten your summer fragrance? Do you remember the time when you shook your blossom Into the living air. . . . . laughing and trembling? The grey bird does not forget: She holds your secret And sings in her little wild heart to your mournful swaying II. In the very early morning Long before Dawn time I lay down in the paddock And listened to the cold song of the grass. Between my fingers the green blades And the green blades pressed against my body. ‘Who is she leaning so heavily upon me?’ Sang the grass. ‘Why does she weep on my bosom, Mingling her tears with the tears of mystic lover? Foolish little earth child! It is not yet time One day I shall open my bosom And you shall slip in – but not weeping. Then in the early morning Long before Dawn time Your lover will lie in the paddock. Between his fingers the green blades And the green blades pressed against his body . . My song shall not sound cold to him In my deep wave he will find the wave of your hair In my strong sweet perfume, the perfume of your kisses. Long and long he will lie there . . Laughing – not weeping’.1 1. Beyond the ‘child-within-the adult voice’ that both Coleridge and Blake explored in their early Romantic works, there are striking echoes in image and tone between these closing lines and early sequences from Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’ in Leaves of Grass. Whitman’s lyric poem also adopts the loose poem-cycle as a way to bring together different facets of a lyrical ‘I’ persona and a kaleidoscope of settings, themes and tones. See above, p. 60.

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Through the dark forest we walked apart and silently1 Only the dead leaves beneath our feet kept up a ghostly conversation. As we touched them – they cried out: ‘It is all over you are killing us’. Yet with swift steps and joyfully, we walked through the muffled forest. A wild scent burst from the ground and broke over us in waves The naked branches2 stiffened against the black air. Behind us an army of ghosts mimicked our steps They caught at the trailing shadows and fashioned them into cloaks. And pretended that under their cloaks, like us, they were trembling and burning. On the brow of the hill we stopped – the ghosts forsook us The forest drew back and the road slipped into the plains. A moon swung into the sky – we faced each other . . He said! ‘Do not fly away’. I said: ‘Are you a dream’ . . We touched each other’s hands. IV.3 The Sea called4 – I lay on the rocks and said; ‘I am come’.

1. The lyrical ‘I’ takes the reader into an eerie, fantasy world more reminiscent of much late Romantic German and Central/East European poetry – Goethe, Heine, Lermontov, Kuprin and Mickiewicz, for instance. KM’s familiarity with such works can be traced back to London, where, since the 1830s, translations of Russian and Central European poetry had circulated, to discussions in the New Age, or to Sobienowski’s circle in Germany. 2. KM had written ‘brances’ here, clearly a spelling mistake. 3. ‘Sea p. 33 (1911)’, written at the top of this poem in pencil, referring to Poems 1930, published by JMM, who erroneously dates it to 1911. See also CW3, p. 82, for details of its earlier publication in Rhythm. 4. Sea-songs, including a powerful voice given to the sea, were frequent in late nineteenth-century poetry, particularly from Central and Eastern Europe. Müller’s and Heine’s sea-cycles are striking examples. The theme and episodic structure of seascape verse were frequently taken up by late Romantic composers, from Liszt to MacDowell, whose works KM had discovered through the Trowells (see above, p. 51). Sea vignettes and memories of the sea, of course, form a leitmotif in much of her early fictional writing, including a poem ‘Sea Song’ (CW3, pp. 84–5) which recalls the themes, tone and intertextual echoes in many of the sections in this cycle.

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She mocked and showed her teeth Stretching out her long green arms. ‘Go away’, she thundered. ‘Then tell me what I am to do’, I begged, ‘If I leave you, you will not be silent But cry my name in the cities And wistfully entreat me in the plains and forests All else I forsake to come to you – what must I do?’ ‘Never have I uttered your name’ snarled1 the Sea ‘There is no more of me in your body Than the little salt tears you are frightened of shedding. What can you know of my love on your brown rock pillow . . Come closer’. V.2 In an opal dream cave I found a fairy Her wings were frailer than flower petals Frailer far than snow flakes. She was not frightened, but poised on my finger Then delicately walked into my hand. I shut the two palms of my hands together And held her prisoner. I carried her out of the opal cave Then opened my hands. First she became thistledown Then a mote in a sunbeam Then – nothing at all . . Empty now is my opal dream cave.

1. The typed word ‘smiled’ is crossed out here, and KM’s handwritten ink emendation ‘snarled’ written above it. 2. ‘Opal Dream Cave Fairy 32 (1911)’ is written at the top of this poem in pencil, referring to Poems 1930, where this poem was published by JMM, who erroneously dates it to 1911. See also CW3, pp. 82–3, for details of its earlier publication in Rhythm. The poem deserves to be read alongside the fairy sequences in Heine’s ‘Lyrical Intermezzo’, included in his Book of Songs. See above, p. 11.

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miscellany VI.1

The fields are snowbound no longer There are little blue lakes and flags of tenderest green. The snow has been caught up into the sky So many white clouds – and the blue of the sky is cold. Now the sun walks in the forest He touches the boughs and stems with his golden fingers2 They shiver, and wake from slumber. Over the barren branches he shakes his yellow curls. . .3Yet is the forest full of the sound of tears. . A wind dances over the fields Shrill and clear the sound of her waking laughter Yet the little blue lakes tremble And the flags of tenderest green bend and quiver. VII. My belovéd rose out of the river4 Her body was fashioned of moonlight Shining weed was her hair. She clung with both hands to my boat Laughing and mocking. . As for me I sat silently weeping I was afraid of the river. . She flung in my face a lily with five, white petals But the heart of the water flower Was choked with the river sand. . .5Mocking and laughing My belovéd rose out of the river.

1. ‘Very Early Spring. 25 (1911)’ is written at the top of this poem in pencil, referring to Poems 1930, where this poem was published by JMM, who erroneously dates it to 1911. See also CW3, p. 78, for details of its earlier publication in Rhythm. 2. Read within the poem-cycle, this image is striking in the way it bridges between the literal magic of fairy worlds, and the metaphorical magic of memory. 3. This ellipsis is added in ink by KM on the typed page. 4. This poem offers another classic image from high Romantic German poetry – the River Sprite or River Goddess. 5. This ellipsis is added in ink by KM on the typed page.

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VIII.1 The tassels of the broom swept the long hillside The fern trees built in the blue air Their canopy of silver and green. Little Brother lay with his head in my lap Tired and happy. I knew he was happy – yet I asked: ‘Are you happy Little Brother?’ Then he sat up and shook back his hair Laughing at my silly question . . The gold of the broom is fairy treasure And the fern trees have built a magic house. I wish I were your fairy sister I would make you live with me on this green hillside And long for nothing else,2 Little Brother. IX. In a narrow path of a wood I met a witch She had a bag over her shoulder; she was gathering pine needles I questioned: ‘For what could you need so many needles?’ ‘Hng, hng’, laughed the witch, ‘Under the tallest tree in the world My hundred sisters and I are stitching a garment3 Big as the world and small as a baby’s thimble. It is woven from that which grows in the hidden places It is frilled with the Ocean and bound with the poison weed. We stitch and stitch but the garment never is finished If it were you would not be asking ‘Hie, hie’, laughed the witch.

1. This poem offers a splendid example of KM blending her own or classic memories from childhood with fairy-tale styles, themes and motifs. The figure of Little Brother is, of course, recurrent in many of her more markedly autobiographical poems, although in each case, the use of capitals gives a more allegorised or fairy-tale tone to the verses. See CW3, pp. 104–8. 2. The comma is a pen emendation by KM. 3. The motif of the crone or witch spinning or weaving the story of the world is extremely common in mythology and fairy tales, from the Fates in ancient Greek myth to Andersen and Grimm.

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miscellany X.

When my plant grew too big for the flowerpot I carried it into the garden I buried it deep in the mould. Now it grows strongly among the other flowers. . I can hardly distinguish between them But there is an empty space in my room And broken pieces strewn over the flower beds XI. The door of your room is never opened. Some times I stand before it, on tip toe, like a child And wonder. ‘Shall I knock?’ But my wise heart answers: ‘No, Perhaps he is working’. Sometimes when my room is flooded with blue light – The blue light that you love – And I look out over the1 snow – I wonder: ‘Shall I call to him?’ But my wise heart answers: ‘No, Perhaps he is sleeping’. Sometimes, still as a mouse I crouch on the floor, finger on lip And lean my head against the door panel Trying to hear your pen move Or the quick rustle of book leaves In vain – my sad heart ventures: ‘Perhaps he has gone away’. XII.2 Across the red sky two birds flying3 Plying with drooping wings 1. ‘The’ is added as a pen emendation by KM. 2. ‘Across The Red Sky 24 (1911)’ is written at the top of this poem in pencil, referring to Poems 1930, where this poem was published by JMM, who erroneously dates it to 1911. See also CW3, p. 110. O’Sullivan (p. 90) and the editors of CW3 mistakenly dated this poem from 1915/16, as its appearance in this collection clearly dates it to 1909/10. 3. This poem is an interesting example of KM mixing classic features from myth and fairy tale, evocative high Romantic imagery and a strident, expressionist voice.

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Silent and solitary, their ominous flight . . All day the triumphant sun with yellow banners Wooed and warred with the earth and when she yielded Stabbed her heart; Gathered her blood in a chalice Spilling it over the evening sky – Where the dark plumaged birds go flying, flying. Quiet the earth lies, wrapt in her mournful shadow Her sightless eyes turned to the evening sky And the restlessly seeking birds. XIII.1 I ran to the forest for shelter Breathless, half sobbing I put my arms round a tree. ‘Protect me’, I said, ‘I am a lost child’. But the tree showered silver drops on my face and hair. A wind sprang up from the ends of the earth It lashed the forest together A huge green wave thundered and burst over my head. ‘I pray you,’ I implored ‘Take care of me’. But the wind snatched at my cloak and tugged at my tumbled hair. Little rivers tore up the ground – swamping the bushes. A frenzy possessed the earth: I felt that the earth was drowning In a bubbling cavern of space, I alone Smaller than the smallest fly was alive and terrified. Then – for what reason I know not – I grew triumphant ‘Well, kill me’, I cried, and ran out into the Open. But the storm ceased: The sun spread his wings And floated serene on the silver pool of the sky I put my hands over my face: I was blushing But the trees swung together and delicately laughed. 1. ‘The Storm 22 (1911)’ is written at the top of this poem in pencil, referring to Poems 1930, where it was published by JMM, who erroneously dates it to 1911. See also CW3, p. 109. Again, O’Sullivan (p. 90) and the editors of CW3 were mistaken when they suggested this poem dated from 1915/16, as its appearance in this collection clearly dates it to 1909/10. Read within the poem-cycle, and in sequence with Poems XII and XIV, possible autobiographical associations are less striking than intertextual echoes – German high Romanticism, Goethe and Heine. KM’s epigraph to the overall collection sets the theme of a lost child and a sheltering tree from the outset, in tones reminiscent of Blake, as well as Goethe and Heine. See, for example, Heine’s ‘Homeward Bound’ and Goethe’s ‘The ErlKing’, as well as Blake’s ‘Little Girl Lost’ and ‘Little Boy Lost’.

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miscellany XIV.

A little wind crept round the house1 It rattled the windows and door handles ‘Let me in – let me in’, it lamented. But I pulled the curtain and lighted my lamp. ‘O, how can you be so cruel’, sobbed the wind My wings are tired: I want to go to sleep in your arms There is peace in your heart, and a soft place for a tired child’. I bent low over my books ‘The night is so dark and the shadows are hurting me’. I opened my window, leaned out and took the wind to my bosom For a moment he lay silent Then drew a long breath and opened his eyes Maliciously smiling. He sprang from my arms – blew out the lamp Scattered the book leaves, leapt and danced on the floor ‘Did you know’, he sang, ‘There was a spark in your heart I have kindled it into flame with my breath – Now rest if you can’. XV. Why are you smiling so? Girl face in the shadow Your open brow, your smoothly banded2 hair The painful shadow under your eyes, These do not speak of joy – Yet your mouth is tremulously smiling, Is it a dream that makes you so happy? Have you been promised a lover? Has the Dawn given you a flowering branch? Answer me in your dream speech Girl face in the shadow I shall quite understand and keep your secret. ‘I smile’, said the girl face in the shadow, ‘Because I lie asleep on the quiet heart of Oblivion – 1. KM’s reworking of classic fairy-tale motifs in a modern voice in this poem bears comparison with later writers who went on to make such intertextual rewritings a key feature of their writing – Stevie Smith or Angela Carter, for example. 2. The word ‘tender’ is crossed out here and ‘banded’ written above it in ink by KM.

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With no dreams at all and no treacherous promises, And because I know that never any more Shall I see the flowers of the night sky Plucked by the cold hand of Dawn’. XVI. From a far distant land My friend is coming to me, To-day or to-morrow I shall see the white sails of his boat1 And the gay flags of greeting Blowing out in the wind Under the weight of such treasure The sea moves restlessly Each shy wave is crowned with magic blossom Each rain bow shell sings of the melody of his voice. Alone on the desolate strand I keep my vigil I have built a fire of dried boughs and scented heather Come quickly from the far distant land My friend and brother – The fire burns low Let us break up your ship and cast it on to the burning So that you may never go sailing any more. XVII.2 You put your hands behind your back ‘Which one will you have?’ – you said We laughed like happy children. ‘The right’, I said – But your right hand was empty. ‘Then the left’. That too, held nothing at all – I put my hands behind my back – 1. The image of the lover keeping vigil for the white sails of the ship announcing the return of a loved one recalls ‘Tristan and Isolde’, even if, in this poem, the lyrical voice would appear to be feminine, and the addressee might be a brother, friend or lover. 2. Poems XVII–XIX offer further examples of verses that, read alone, can sound essentially autobiographical, but which, read in sequence, gain a strong mytho-poetical force, particularly in the closing lines of XVII, which prepare for the powerful, passionate idiom of XVIII and XIX.

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‘It is your turn to choose’. ‘Both’, you said, gravely. I stretched out my empty hands. You laughed and held them against your face. We were playing a childish game no longer. Our gift was too big for one pair of hands to hold, Could my hands span the world? Yet I gave you the world. Could your hands sound the depths of the sea? Yet you gave me the sea. If we joined hands, the miracle was so simple, But apart it was quite impossible. XVIII There are days when the longing for you Floods my heart – my veins are full of tears, My hair seems to hold something of your wild scent, I fancy my voice becomes as your voice, And my slightest gesture shows my dependence on you. There are days – O, they are many – when I am possessed by you. Their shape and colour and sound – above all sound (The voice of rain and wind Leaves in a tree – the lapping of water, The noise of cart wheels on a wet road The barking of a dog heard from miles away Children running softly on light feet – A builder building a house and whistling as he works – ) All these simple things sink into the deep storm sea of my being Where you are drowned and yet live – – Yes, secretly, and in the deep water you cry to me. ‘You who are born of me, to me you return Did you fancy yourself a woman? – I know you a child You were a child when you drowned me in this deep well, Crying ‘I have rid myself of a bogey – now I am free But instead – O youngest of my children You keep me within yourself . . . until the tide shall rise The woman will be drowned and the child return to me Through the dark water. The storm sea That beats about the island where you were born’.

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XIX. Night came – I opened my eyes Outside the land was dark and dark the flowing river. There were no stars to measure the sky vault No pale moon floating on her cloud pillow. It was all dark. I walked abroad and lifted my head: ‘If I choose I can stretch out my arms and dance over the whole world. Not a hand can pluck at my sleeve, nobody can call after me Nobody can find me’. Through the long grass, I ran with naked feet I plunged breast high among the bracken I lost my way among the forest trees. ‘Listen! The leaves are falling – they are falling all over me Do you want to bury me under your leaves – then I am content’. ‘No, dear child, we are decking you out in your holiday gown’. I found a little cave powdered thickly with moss I curled up inside it, pretending it was my home. ‘O my hands and my feet have regained their power They tell me just what it is they are touching, and that it is good’. I wanted to sing a triumphant song that the war was over. But my joy was too great – I smiled, shaking the tears from my eyes. A little breeze, half scent, half mist, flew among the forest It pulled the branch at the door of my cave . . I lifted the branch and it floated in We played a game without any words, like two shy children . . Suddenly it shivered and flew away. That frightened me I left my green home and wandered deeper into the forest I found a pool set about with sweet bushes. From the cup of my hands I drank some of the water Bitter and warm to taste – like the blood of the earth. ‘Now, I can never go back!’ But the trees sang: ‘Listen, a stranger is among us, Listen, a robber is hunting our paths, Light! Protect us!’ Dawn fastened the sky with his great red hands And the battle began again.1 1. The mytho-poetical, epic and high Romantic ‘Stürm und Drang’ echoes at the end of this sequence, linking it back to the powerful images of poem XII, recall many of the more allegorical, mystical tones of late symbolist poems by Maeterlinck – see his derhythmatised sequences in Serres chaudes (1889), for example.

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miscellany XX.1

There was a child once. He came to play in my garden He was quite pale and silent. Only when he smiled I knew everything about him I knew what he held in his pockets And I knew the feel of his hands in my hands And the most intimate tones of his voice I led him down each secret path Showing him the hiding place of all my treasures I let him play with them, every one, I put my singing thoughts in a little silver cage And gave them to him to keep. . . It was very dark in the garden But never dark enough for us On tip toe we walked among the deepest shades We bathed in the shadow pools beneath the trees Pretending we were under the sea Once – near the boundary of the garden We heard steps passing along the World-road O how frightened we were! I whispered ‘Have you ever walked along that road?’ He nodded, and we shook the tears from our eyes . . . There was a child once He came – quite alone – to play in my garden He was pale and silent When we met we kissed each other But when he went away, we did not even wave. XXI. A jar of daffodils stood on the piano In the half light, the leaves were thickly green And the blossoms faintly luminous. I leant over the piano and put my arms round the flower bowl ‘Please play’, I said. .. .. .. .. The flowers quivered and shone The leaves evermore thickly green pushed up 1. ‘There Was A Child Once’ 35 (1912)’ is written at the top of this poem in pencil, referring to Poems 1930, where it was published by JMM, who erroneously dates it to 1912. See also CW3, p. 86, for details of its publication in Rhythm, and its apparent connection to William Orton.

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Until they smothered the ceiling and the flowers were set in them like a pattern Then there was no ceiling, but the floor of the sky Spilt over with gold. The moon lay on the green floor Her face shrouded in an opal veil ‘Why are your wings folded?’ I asked.1 ‘Hush’, answered the moon, ‘Some one is playing’ Be quiet! A child of mine is crying for me. Her tears are falling into the smallest flower cups But her heart is so sad, she fancies she is quenching the fire of the stars’. XXII In the swiftly moving sleigh2 We sat curled up under the bear skin rugs And talked of the dangers of life The afternoon froze into a twilight, profounder than night The trees in the forest, through which we passed, Were patterned like monstrous weeds on a lake of ice . . You told me all your adventures And though they were very terrible and violent I could not help laughing, sometimes you ceased speaking Turned to me with a funny gravity ‘I just escaped being killed’. Then our laughter rang over the snow I told you of three wrecks I had been in Of a fire – and the time I was all-but-drowned in a river . . Ever faster galloped the horses 1. Motifs found in this poem, which already figured in poems I, II, V and X, reinforce the thematic unity of the collection and its narrative coherence as a poem-cycle. This particular poem offers a fine example of how a single framed image, which appears referential and may be a memory, is suddenly transformed into myth as the natural world is animated and objects come to life. 2. Unlike the sequences whose Central and Eastern European influence can be felt in the high Romantic and mythological resonances, the Russian intertextuality in this section is more explicitly referential: the theme of the sleigh-ride and the bearskin rugs. Tolstoy’s memoirs of childhood, for example, include fine descriptions of winter outings by sleigh under bearskin rugs, as do famous episodes in War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Beyond such obvious classics, the image is, of course, recurrent in Russian literature.

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The moon rose, touching the fantastic land with her silver fingers How eloquently we described our adventures! But it was useless. They flew into space on the wings of our laughter . . Curled up under the bear skin rugs. We drove – it seemed – through the foam that breaks over the world edge. On the one great adventure That held us in silence and gravity. XXIII. Round me in a ring Finger on lip and sweetly silent My shadow children. We smile at one another Then they stretch out their hands and pluck at my gown ‘It is our turn to play. The shortest little hour of the day is here – the hour before bedtime’. I shake my head at them like a happy distracted mother ‘You are really almost too old . .’ But with glad cries they fling themselves upon me ‘. . What have you got for me in your pocket . .’ ‘. . Let me have the flower you are wearing . .’ ‘. . I shall take down your hair and turn you into a little girl . .’ ‘. . What have you been doing without us . .’ ‘. . Tell me about “A long – time – ago” . .’ Their hands, their hair, their flower faces, I cover with kisses. Through the dusk of the very shortest hour We play our magic games. Then in obedience, they slip away. Only the very youngest shadow of all is loathe to go He lies pillowed on my heart Quiet, and so faintly breathing That I am almost afraid.

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XXIV.1 How quiet the Grandmother’s hands Folded in her lap, In the lap of her dark gown Her hands – faintly shining. The firelight touches her silver hair All else is in shadow. Tenderly I watch her. Are your thoughts folded so, little Grandmother In the dark lap of the world Are they faintly shining? . . . I think your hands are asleep They lie so still. I think they are tilling over In most secret sleep The gifts they have held And the kisses enfolded. No, I am not weeping And if my tears fall on your hands It is but dew from my eyes That opened under your smile.2 XXV. In the purple heather We lay like two gods on sun-flushed cloud pillows. We could not see each other – so deep and thick our beds, And therefore we talked heart-to-heart, like lovers on a night journey. A pleasant, warm sweetness curled up in my hair. And now, it seemed, we floated on a green river That bore us high above the dark rocks of the world Above those horrible caverns where we lost our way and were prisoned. Serene delight floated through the green and purple waves Our words took wings and flew like birds above us. We did not demand or protest. They were very small birds 1. Erroneously labelled XXIII, the same as the previous poem. 2. This poem contrasts strikingly with the tones of Blake and Grimm’s tales in the sections just before, although the shift to a ‘little Grandmother’ figure maintains the fairy-tale tone and motifs. It also recalls the ‘Little Brother’ in earlier poems. Its tone and gentle lyricism are reminiscent of KM’s ‘The Grandmother’ (CW3, p. 104).

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And shy – glad to find resting place In the warm nests from which they sprang, Yours into my heart, and mine into yours . . .1 We were floating towards some ineffable Birth land Where Peace – our new Mother, sat on the shore Weaving the radiant sails of her boat That would bring us home again. XXVI.2 THE CHILD:

THE CLOUD:

THE CHILD:

THE CLOUD:

THE CHILD:

How far have you come (O little cloud, heavy with rain) Where did you gather these tears That you weep so sadly? From the creek where you washed your dolls’ clothes From the pool where you sailed your paper boats. That was much too far (O little cloud heavy with rain) For such a small thing to travel Why did you come? Your dolls are all battered and broken And your paper boats have blown away. But supposing I bought a new doll (O little cloud heavy with rain) And a most expensive sailing boat What should I do then?

1. Like poem II, the sensual imagery of this poem bears comparison with Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’, but the ‘bird and nest’ motif reintroduces the structural metaphor announced in the initial epigraph. This reinforces a sense of the poem-cycle’s unity, in the same way as musical themes reintroduced towards the end of a composition announce the move towards resolution and conclusion after thematic and lyrical developments. 2. The stylised dialogue form in this sequence reinforces the structural counterpointing that characterises the poem-cycle overall, as it interweaves strong biographical features and marked intertextual echoes.

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The creek and the pool have disappeared You must play your game by the Big Sea.

XXVII. In the savage heart of the bush The tui lifts her white throat1 Three bell-like notes – then the answer she knows so well And sings for herself – the love answer of laughter. Her children – wreathed with the green garlands of sorrow Answer her call. They troop from the valleys and plains From the stupid cities they never have fashioned From the wharves where the strangers ships find mooring. From the green isles they pass in procession, They kneel at altars white with clematis flower, At brackish pools they drink their sacrament. Now they are like giants walking And their gestures are like the swaying movements of trees The men call ‘h a e re mai’2 And the women answer with the love answer of laughter – O bird of the bush, Spread your wings And shelter your dusky children! XXVIII.3 I had company tonight. An old woman – some chrysanthemum flower – and a little child We greeted each other politely. Then the old woman took the rocking chair The chrysanthemum shook out her petals And the child lay on the floor, ‘baking his bones’! 1. The tui (also known as Koko or Parson-Bird) is a striking, black-and-white, tufted bird native to New Zealand, highly valued by the Maori. In myths and folklore, it is often presented as a spirit that protects the forest. As this reference and the men’s call later in the poem make clear, the setting here has clearly shifted to New Zealand. KM probably encountered these thematic elements during the Urewera trip, since the group leader was specialised in Maori language and customs. See above, pp. 59–87. 2. (Maori) ‘welcome!’ 3. Erroneously numbered XXVII, as the previous poem.

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We said the days were growing very short And the nights very cold – But in the sun it was still warm. ‘Warm as warm’, laughed the child, kissing the chrysanthemum flower. The old woman and I nodded and smiled. By and bye we had supper – Milk for the child from his special cup But the chrysanthemum preferred water in a blue china bowl. And we grew so festive and gay that the rain outside Sounded like dance music; the wild wind Swept round the house like a friendly watch-dog. . To the child the chrysanthemum flower Gave a little of her most delicious perfume. He laughed with joy like any Spring baby And his eyes shone like wood hyacinths.1 TO GOD THE FATHER2 To the little, pitiful God I make my prayer The God with the long grey beard And flowing robe fastened with a hempen girdle Who sits nodding and muttering in the all-too-big throne of Heaven What a long, long time, dear God, since you set the stars in their places Girded the earth with the sea, and invented the day and night. And longer the time since you loosed through the blue window of Heaven To see your children at play in a garden . . . . . Now we are all stronger than you and wiser and more arrogant In swift procession we pass you by. ‘Who is that marionette nodding and muttering In the all-too-big throne of Heaven? Come down from your place, Grey Beard, We have had enough of your play-acting! 1. Wild flowers more commonly known as bluebells, but frequently referred to as ‘wood hyacinths’ in folk tales and legends. 2. This poem is untitled, but is well known as ‘To God the Father’. The pencil note at the top records: ‘To God the Father p. 30. Given as 1911’, referring to Poems 1930, where it was published by JMM, who erroneously dates it to 1911. See also CW3, p. 81, for details of its publication in Rhythm, and its depiction of a stained-glass window by Stanislaw Wyspianski in Krakow.

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It is centuries since I believed in you But today my need of you has come back. I want no rose-coloured future No books of learning – no protestations and denials – I am sick of this ugly scramble, I am tired of being pulled about – O God, I want to sit on her knees In the all-too-big throne of Heaven. And fall asleep with my hands tangled in your grey beard. YESTERDAY IN AUTUMN. When you spoke of ‘yesterday’ you smiled Half closing your eyes – you shook from your brow The beating wings of your dreams But tenderly. Their caress as delicate as the wings of white butterflies. You breathed slowly the memory of some enchanting perfume . . . (We were crouched in front of the fire. My hands full of chrysanthemum flower: I sat biting the tattered petals). ‘Yesterday’ . . . so you whispered the name of your lover Her kisses pressed that sweetness into your face Her laughter thrilled your throat as you spoke her name . . . A silent third – she crept between us, Tentatively took your hand and stroked it . . . I saw your fingers stir and the palm of your hand turn outwards. She was the only reality in the room. With parted lips I watched her draw more closely. ‘Yesterday’ . . . . . Grave and cold I stared at the autumn flowers in my hands. Then threw them on to the flames . . . . . . shivering.

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miscellany VIOLETS.

The room is full of violets1 – And yet there’s but this little bowl Of blossoms on the mantel-piece. You stood beside them – ran your hands Through the grey leaves – then bent your head Over the flowers and breathless colour. And elfishly you pulled the stems All damp and shining, through your fingers . . . Decorated our Tête de mort.2 Splendid he looks with violets Round his brow in a mazy tangle A bud and a leaf behind one ear. But if we admire him any longer (It’s close on midnight: time you went home) I’m afraid he will burst into Mendelssohn’s Spring Song3 Boo – Bam – Boo! What an awful thought! Quite dead drunk is our Tête de mort In a room so full of violets.

1. The violet was commonly used as a symbol of remembrance and tenderness in Victorian literature, and violet perfumes were very popular towards the end of the century. In this poem, however, KM subverts the sentimental Victorian associations of the flower by having the characters use violets to decorate a skull. She thus creates a macabre interplay within the still-life tradition of the memento mori. 2. (Fr.) ‘death’s head, skull’. 3. ‘Spring Song’ is from Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words, Op. 62. It is the sixth in a lyrical, seven-piece cycle for piano, sometimes referred to as ‘Camberwell Green’, since it was composed there during one of Mendelssohn’s trips to London. KM also uses Mendelssohn’s music as thematic reference and ironic narrative commentary in ‘The Singing Lesson’ (CW2, pp. 235–40).

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JANGLING MEMORY.1 Heavens above! Here’s an old tie of yours – Sea green dragons stamped on a golden ground Ha! Ha! Ha! What children we were in those days. Do you love me enough to wear it now – Have you the courage of your pristine glories? Ha! Ha! Ha! You laugh and shrug your shoulders. Those were the days when a new tie spelt a fortune We wore it in turn – I flaunted it as a waist belt. Ha! Ha! Ha! What easily satisfied babies. I think I’ll turn it into a piano duster, Give it to me, I’ll polish my slippers on it! Ha! Ha! Ha! The rag’s not worth the dustbin. Throw the shabby old thing right out of the window Fling it into the faces of other children! Ha! Ha! Ha! We laughed and laughed till the tears came! THE CHANGELING. ‘Why are you prisoned in these four walls What the use of these tiny pictures and books? Your feet are asleep in that patterned carpet Your body faints in these yellow cushions. What is this light shut up in a glass case? And what those dark things hanging before the windows?’ . . . She opened the door and escaped . . . She pressed her way through the garden hedges And ran and danced in the dew drenched paddock. A shrill cold wind blew above the stars,

1. ‘P. 34 Given as 1911’ is written at the top of this poem in pencil, referring to Poems 1930, published by JMM, who erroneously dates it to 1911. See also CW3, p. 84, for details of its earlier publication in Rhythm.

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She felt her arms were changing into wings.1 ‘O, please I should like to fly above the stars, And fill my throat with your shrill-cold laughter. I cannot go back to my four wall prison I yearn and yearn to be free again. I am wild and cold! I have no love heart My beating wings have lost their feathers’. .

.

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‘You cannot fly – weeping your laughter’. THOUGHT DREAMS. A passion vine2 twists over the fence, Like white birds3 the blossoms among the leaves O, no, they are like white shells Afloat on the crest of a sea wave. The passion vine trembles as though it will break Just like a wave – spilling its shining treasure Over the desolate shores of my darkened garden. . . A passion vine twists over the fence Like faint thoughts the blossoms among the leaves. O, yes, they are like faint thoughts A float on the crest of my sorrow.

1. The theme of the girl transforming into a bird is not only reminiscent of various tales of metamorphosis from Greek mythology, but also recalls the denouement of KM’s short story, ‘A Suburban Fairy Tale’ (CW2, pp. 170–3), in which Little B. is transformed from his mundane setting to become one with the birds. 2. Passion vine, also referred to as Passiflora or passion flower, is a genus of flowering, climbing plant with strong symbolical or allegorical associations. It is named after the Passion of Christ, on account of the flower’s resemblance to the crown of thorns. In non-Christian cultures, it is often colloquially known as the clock plant, again on account of the strikingly shaped flower. 3. Here KM has crossed out ‘thoughts’ and written ‘birds’.

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The passion vine trembles as though it will break Just like my sorrow – spilling its fainting treasure Over the desolate shores of my darkened heart. TO K.M.1 She is a bird. Green is her body and her wings are tawny. She is the strange sport of her wild sea mother Who fell in love with a bit of bracken Wind wrenched – and flung into her bosom. Her body cries out in weariness – but her wings never tire. Her body quivers under a single rain drop She is frightened to death of the wind in the keyhole; The smallest bramble thorn pierces its heart; It is seared by the sun and frozen by the moon. It laughs and weeps with the wind changed. ’Tis bruised by a floating bubble – The shadow of a cloud stifles its breath. ‘Set me free; let me be’, cries her body. Up and down beat her wings Over the roofs of cities Over the tops of mountains Over the desert shifting sands Over the scornful face of her lawless mother Over the turbulent forests where bracken is wind wrenched. ‘A moment – a moment . . . I die’. Up and up beat her wings.

1. Although outside the numbered poem-cycle, this closing piece, with its self-asother address and the Romantic, poet-as-bird theme, is clearly linked in tone, frame and motif to the lyrical part-autobiographical, part-mytho-poetical cycle. As with the opening sections here, it bears comparison with the closing farewell sequences of Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’. Read alongside the epigraph and first poem of the series, ‘K.M.’ also forms a striking framing device for the whole volume as it was submitted to Mathews.

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Errata: Volumes 1–3

Volume 1 xvi xxii 28

15 4 After n. 2

59 75

Text note 4 lines from bottom

132 157

n. 4 Note under text

168 205 221 336

Top line n. 10 n. 4 n. 5

For ‘Penrhyn’, read ‘Penryn’. Emend ‘Dorothy’ to ‘Dorothey’. Add ‘See also p. 175, 8 lines from bottom.’ Emend line to read ‘KMN, I, pp. 48–69.’ Add new note after ‘The Lord is my shepherd’ to read ‘Psalm 23:1’. For ‘Days Bay’, read ‘Day’s Bay’. Add ‘The title is an allusion to Genesis 4: 9, ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ For ‘Father’, read ‘Pfarrer’. For ‘Stockman’, read ‘Stockmann’. For ‘1827’, read ‘1822’. For ‘Ode to a Skylark’, read ‘To a Skylark’.

Volume 2 162 208 209 425

17 lines from bottom Emend Nation text ‘cluttering’ to ‘clattering’. bottom, 209 Emend ‘Boogies’ to ‘Boogles’. 18 and 20 Emend ‘Boogies’ to ‘Boogles’. 10 lines from bottom Emend AA’s reading ‘warm’ to ‘uniform’.

488

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errata: volumes 1–3

489

Volume 3 46

After text

502 655 656

11 up After Anon After text

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Note should read: ‘Text: Dominion, Wellington, 11 June 1908, p. 5, published under the name Kathleen Beauchamp. Also Poems, 1923, p. 73’ (with thanks to Jim Traue). Emend to reads. Insert ‘1’. Insert new note: ‘1. KM clearly knows that the author of In the Mountains is her father’s cousin, Mary Beauchamp (1866–1941), better known by her pen name, ‘Elizabeth’, whose Christopher and Columbus is reviewed on pages 447–50. In the Mountains was published anonymously. From June 1921 until August 1922, KM lived mainly in the Swiss Alps, close to Elizabeth’s house at Randogne.’

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Index

Page numbers in italic indicate illustrations.

accounts of expenditure, 125–8, 132–3, 140–2, 164, 177–81, 209–14, 237, 294, 307–9, 359–60, 368–72, 412–14, 427–8, 430, 437–9 Adams, John Stowell, 11n addresses, 456–8 ‘After a Succession’, 355n Aftermath (Lane), 16n ageing, 148, 240n Albert Hall, 136 All Things are Possible (Shestov), 176n, 436n All’s Well that Ends Well (Shakespeare), 300, 342–3 ‘The Aloe’, xv–xvi, 162n, 166–7, 177n, 184n, 204–5, 230n Alpers, Antony, 5, 27n, 31n, 94n, 240n Amiel, Henri-Frédéric, 354n Amores (Lawrence), xvi Andersen, Hans, 235, 469n Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare), 192–4, 356–9 Appenrodt’s, 361 archangel, 46 Arnim, Elizabeth von, xvii, 261n, 347n, 380n, 403–4, 409, 419 The Arrow of Gold (Conrad), 286–7 arthritis, xvii As You Like It (Shakespeare), 194–5 ‘At Karori’, 386 ‘At the Bay’, 273–6, 386n, 443 Athenaeum, xvii, 284n, 363 Aubert, Mother Mary Joseph, 46

‘Aunt Anne’, 390 Austen, Jane, 131 Mansfield Park, 398, 400 Sense and Sensibility, 131 autobiography, 362–3 autumn, 90 ‘Autumns I’, 171n babies, 63, 65, 81, 136, 156, 161, 224, 240, 284, 290, 298, 299, 326, 393, 403, 422–3 death of KM’s sister, 227–8 ‘The Baby’, 312 Baker, Ida (LM, Adelaida, Lesley), xii–xviii, 54n, 85n, 140, 202, 259, 264, 267, 299, 300, 348–9, 401 friendship and support for KM, 57, 88, 134–5, 236, 248, 257, 280, 298, 416, 437n KM’s dislike of and quarrels with, 136, 260, 277, 397, 411, 416, 445–6 letters to and from KM, 54, 139, 149, 381 memoir, 100n travels with KM, 107, 137, 364 work and finances, 203, 248, 259, 301 Balzac, Honoré de, 103–4, 111 Bandol, xv–xvi, 173n, 177–8, 183, 206, 240, 242, 246, 338, 419 bankruptcy, 288 Banks, Dororthy (Georges), 299 Barrie, J. M., 322, 328

490

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index ‘Barrington’, 383n Bartrick-Baker, Vere (Mimi), 50, 57, 116, 403 Bashkirtseff, Marie, 29n, 30, 37n, 57 Bateson, William, 267n, 283 Battersea Park, 138 Baudelaire, Charles, 105n, 352n, 464n Bavaria, 462 ‘Bavarian Sketches’, xiii Beardsley, Aubrey, 109 Beauchamp, Annie Burnell (KM’s mother), xii, 11, 177, 191n, 263, 317, 407 Beauchamp, Arthur, 93n Beauchamp, Chaddie (Charlotte Mary, Marie, KM’s sister), xii, 61n, 70, 74, 94, 183, 208, 298, 398 Beauchamp, Connie, xvii, 301 Beauchamp, Gwendolyn, 226–7 Beauchamp, Harold, xii Beauchamp, Harriet, 227 Beauchamp, Henry Herron (Deepa), 5, 70n Beauchamp, Jeanne, 136, 300, 401, 408 Beauchamp, Leslie (Bogey, Chummie, KM’s brother), 74, 176, 191, 278, 404n killed in France, xv, 69n, 171–3, 203–5 Beauchamp, Sidney, 11n Beauchamp, Vera (Meg), xii, 403n, 408 Beauchamp family, KM ‘detests them all’, 57 Beauchamp Lodge, London, 93n Beaufort Mansions, 132–3 Bechhofer Roberts, Carl Eric, 409 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 19 Bell, G. C., 189–90 Bendall, Edith K. (EKB), 47n, 52, 57 name used as alias by KM, 107 Beresford, J. D., 426 Bibesco, Princess Elizabeth, 338 The Bible, 33n, 37n, 189, 327, 401 birds, 138, 294, 400 birth, 109 Blake, William, 465n, 471n, 479n Bliss and Other Stories, xvii, 303, 363 The Blue Review, 363 bluebells, 481n

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491

body, as a prison, 446 Boëllmann, Léon, 17 Boétie, Etienne de la, 32n The Book of Tea, 78 Boswell, James, 285–6 Boucher, Maurice, 312n Boulestin, Marcel, 314n, 321 Bowden, George, xiii, 101n, 112n, 155, 298n brain, 216–18 brass bands, 9–10 ‘Brave Love’, 150, 228n Brawne, Fanny, 239, 333n, 341n, 342 Brett, Dorothy, xv, xvi, xviii, 7, 315–16, 336, 401, 408, 414, 417 Brontë, Charlotte, 17 Brooke, Rupert, 168, 202n The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky), 202n Browning, Robert, 41 Brussels, 107–8 Bunin, Ivan, 418 Bunyan, John, 281n Burton, Robert, 356 Butler, Samuel, 31n, 143 Butt, Clara, 84 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 16–17 Café Royal, 139 Calderon, George, 129 Callon Street, 252 Campbell, Beatrice, 136n, 137, 139, 155, 158, 361 Campbell, Gordon, 138n, 139, 150, 152–3 Cannan, Gilbert, 153n, 157, 262n Cannan, Mary, 153, 157 Capitaine Pamphile (Dumas), 17 The Captain’s Daughter (Overton), 16 Carco, Francis, xiv–xv, 202 love affair with KM, 2–3, 144, 146, 149n, 152–63 memoirs, 229n poetry, 229 ‘Carnation’, 190n Carrington, Dora, xvi Carter, Angela, 472n Cassells & Co., 414 ‘The Cat’, 340–1 cats, 257–8, 266, 315, 398, 408 cello playing, 49–50, 51n, 53–4 Chancery Lane, 403

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492

index

‘The Change’, 339 ‘Charades’, 324 ‘Charing X’, 264 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 310n Chausson, Ernest Amadée, 312n Chekhov, Anton (Tchehov), 5, 129, 176, 403, 406 The Cherry Orchard, 129n, 328 ‘The Duel’, 208n, 333n illness and death, 254, 336–7, 434 letters, 269, 292, 346, 405n ‘The Misery’, 385 stories, 208, 220, 251, 294, 313, 328, 333, 353, 380, 385 The Cherry Orchard (Chekhov), 129n, 328 Cherubini, Luigi, 57 Chesham, 155 Chesney Wold, xii, 136 chess, 417 Chesterton, G. K., 86, 87n The Child in the House (Pater), 100 children, 130–1, 139, 290 chill, 416 Chinese people, portrayed as bogeymen, 48–9 Cholesbury, xiv Chopin, Frédéric, 83, 98, 99n Christmas, 9, 13n, 317n, 378, 400n churches, 13–14, 23, 84, 93, 143, 235, 266, 325, 340, 394 cigarettes, 24, 46, 94, 159, 160–2, 203, 253, 278; see also accounts of expenditure Cinderella, 268 cinema, 143, 149 Clayton, Douglas, 152 Cleeve, Rowley, 16 clothes, 22, 29, 61, 64, 66–7, 86, 88, 94, 95, 120, 119, 134, 138, 154, 225–6, 230, 250, 418 lists of, 74, 180, 313–14, 431–2 clouds, 124 coal, 243 codeine, 440 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 129n, 327, 329–31, 465n Colette, 143–4 Columbine, Brigid, 156 Come and Find Me (Robins), 91 The Comedy of Errors (Shakespeare), 300

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‘The Common Round’, 228n, 231n Confidence (James), 201 Coningsby (Disraeli), 45 Conrad, Joseph, 286–7 conscience, 35 consumption see tuberculosis convents, 408 Corelli, Marie (MC), 29–30n Corkran, Alice, 45 cornet players, 9–10 Cornwall, xv, xvi, 143, 250n Cosmic Anatomy (‘Oxon’), xviii, 397, 399–401, 414, 435n cotton plant, 299, 300 coughing, 241, 243, 285, 291, 315 The Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas), 17n Crackanthorpe, Hubert, 58n Cramb, John Adam, 188–9 Crawford, Francis Marion, 17 Creelman, Marion, 11n, 18 cribbage, 408 cricket, 25 Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky), 157 Croft Hill, Dr, 335 Crookes, William, 94 Crosse, Cornelia Edith Yoi, 233n ‘A Cup of Tea’, 403, 414 Curtis Brown (literary agency), 156 ‘Dame Seule’, 243, 244 Daniel Deronda (Eliot), 31n, 32n d’Annunzio, Gabriele, 92, 109n, 110 Darwin, Charles, 276n ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, 399n, 405, 411 Davidson, John, 39–41, 463 Day’s Bay, 47 de la Mare, Walter (WJD), 233, 406 de Quincey, Thomas, 104 ‘The Dead’ (Joyce), 392n death, 90, 109, 171–2, 263, 336, 362, 410 fear of, 288–9 depression, 288, 296–8, 415, 433 Déroulède, Paul, 163 Desdemona, 328 despair, 415 The Dial, 402 Dick, Jane Warner, 459, 462n

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index Dickens, Charles, 86, 87n, 111n, 311 Little Dorrit, 311n Our Mutual Friend, 318 Diderot, Denis, 421 Dieppe, 95n, 96, 97n discipline, 246 Disraeli, Benjamin, 45, 429 ‘The Doll’, 324 dolls, 14 ‘The Doll’s House’, 226n, 386n, 402, 408, 445 The Dolly Dialogues (Hope), 16 Dolmetsch, Arnold, 98n Donat, Dr, 411–12, 418 Dostoevsky, Fyodor The Brothers Karamazov, 202n Crime and Punishment, 157 The Idiot, 6, 182–3, 187 The Possessed, 184–7 Doughty, Charles Montagu, 443n The Dove’s Nest, 397 Dowson, Ernest, 109 dreams, 135, 168, 296, 326, 350–2, 398–9, 401, 404 Drey, Raymond, 139–40, 155 Dreyfus, Alfred, 111n du Camp, Maxime, 105n Dudeney, Mrs Henry, 429 ‘The Duel’ (Chekhov), 208n, 333n Dumas, Alexandre, 17 Dunn, Bonnie, 305 Dunning, Miller, 321 Dunning, W. J., 435 Dyer, Belle (Isobel), xii, 11, 93n The Earth Child discovery and background to, 8, 459–63 poems, 464–86 Easter, 306 Ebbett, George, 60n eggs, 216 Egyptian disease, 283–4 Eichelbaum, Siegfried, 50 Eliot, George (GE), 31–2 Daniel Deronda, 31n, 32n Eliot, T. S., 457 Ellis, Vivian Locke, 426 England, 1, 279, 288 epigraphs, 297n Epiphany, 400n Evans, Marguerite Caradoc, 293n

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493

The Faerie Queene (Spenser), 188 fairy tales, 469n, 471n ‘Femme Seules’, 174n, 175 Fergusson, J. D., xiv, xvi, 216n, 228, 242 ‘The Fern Tree’, 228n fighting, 139 Fitz, Albert, 10n Fitzherbert Terrace, xiii Flaubert, Gustave, 105, 111n flowers, 15, 76, 335 ‘The Fly’, 418 flying, 409 Fontainebleau, xviii, 297n, 435 food rationing, 216 Forster, E. M., 223, 231 Foster, Dr Michael, 295, 299 Fox, Oscar, 50 fractures, 216–18 France, Anatole, 148, 436 Frazer, Lady Lilly Grove, 181 freedom, 46 French people, 254, 303 ‘always rutting time’, 238 frost, 50 Fullerton, Jinnie, xvii, 297–8, 299, 301–2, 334–5 Futility (Gerhardi), 233n Galatea, 63, 67 Galsworthy, John, 410, 444 games, 295 ‘The Garden Party’, 177n, 394n, 410, 443 The Garden Party and Other Stories, xviii gardens, 241, 266, 277–8, 300, 304, 315, 337 Garnett, Constance, 157n, 292n, 293n Garnett, Edward, 425 Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri, xiv, 299n Genêt Fleuri, 250 Geneva, 364 ‘Geneva’, 220 genius, 31, 32 George, W. L., xiv, 398, 429 George V, King, xiv Gerhardi, William, 233, 415 German language, 13, 85–6, 116, 364 Germany, 114 Gertler, Mark, xvi, 239, 316

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494

index

geysers, 74–5 Gibbon, Edward, 276n gillyflowers, 335 Gilmer, May, 82 God, 139, 143, 203 God’s Good Man (Corelli), 30n Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 130, 414, 466n, 471n ‘The Golden Birds’, 383n The Golden Bowl (James), 248n, 249n gonorrhoea, xvii Good Friday, 107 Goodyear, Frederick, 164, 205–6 Gorky, Maxim, 129, 140, 346n, 410n Gorst, Mrs Harold E., 112 gravestone, 297n Gray (France), 2, 158 Grays Inn Road, 118 Great Missenden, xv Griffin, Hall, 188 Grimm’s fairy tales, 469n, 479n ‘Grownupedness’, 244 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 351n Gurdjieff, George Ivanovich, xviii, 435, 437, 447n gypsies, 122 Hallam, Arthur Henry, 35n Hallucinations and Illusions (Parish), 43–4n Hambourg, Mark, 52 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 103, 328, 330–1, 344 Hampstead, 258n, 339 Hamurana Spring, 70–1 handwriting, 46, 141, 151, 181, 185, 213, 232, 449 happiness, 33–4, 94, 424 Hardy, Thomas, 292, 299, 317, 378 Harley Street, 13n, 316 Hastings, Beatrice (‘Biggy’), xiv, 122, 175n, 350 hate, 47, 154, 277, 289, 416 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 105 ‘He met her again on the Pier at Eastbourne’, 113n health see illness The Heart of Rome (Crawford), 17 heart problems, 93, 410, 416, 433 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 91, 346

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Heine, Heinrich, 10n, 464n, 466n, 467n, 471n Heinemann, Francis, xiv Henderson, William James, 16 Henry IV, Part I (Shakespeare), 195–8, 297n Henry V (Shakespeare), 192, 198–200 Hero and Leander (Marlowe), 362 ‘The Heron’, 247 ‘His Sister’s Keeper’, 96n Hogarth Press, xvi, 256 Holland, 113–14 Holland, Clive, 17 home, 253 homeopathy, 5, 285 homosexuality, 50n The Honest Whore (Decker and Middleton), 346 ‘Honesty’, 386, 390 Honey, Mrs, 245, 250 ‘Honeymoon’, 392n ‘Honeysuckle and the Bee’ (song), 10 Hope, Anthony, 16 Hotel Beau Rivage, 242n, 419 Housman, A. E., 116 Howard’s End (Forster), 223 Hudson, Dr, 402, 405, 409 humility, 389 hydatids, 283 hydrophobia, 283 Ibsen, Henrik, 33, 92 The Idiot (Dostoevsky), 6, 182–3, 187 idleness, 188 illness, 259, 277, 283–4, 300, 315, 342, 365, 372, 381, 416 exhaustion from, 296, 301, 433, 440 fears about, 241 and pain, 173, 251 see also tuberculosis impatience, 169, 390, 397 In a German Pension, xiv, 304, 363, 462 ‘An Indiscreet Journey’, 2, 158n Ingelow, Jean, 16 Ingersoll, Robert G., 33 Irving, Henry, 98n Island Bay, 88–9 Italy, 295, 296

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index Jacques le Fataliste (Diderot), 421 Jakesville, 60 James, Henry, 201, 206 Confidence, 201 The Golden Bowl, 248n, 249n A Japanese Marriage (Douglas), 17 Jesus Christ, 107 Jésus-la-Caille (Carco), 154 Johnson, Samuel, 189 Johnson, William Noel, 17 Johnston, Harry, 262n, 293 Jones, William Tudor, 45 jonquils, 296 ‘Jour Maigre’, 245 Journal, different editions of, 1–3 Joyce, James, xviii, 26n, 392n Ulysses, 420 ‘Juliet’, 116 Kaitoki, 60 Kant, Immanuel, 91 Karori, 347 Kay, Alexander, 301 Kaye-Shuttleworth, Miss Lionel, 296 Keats, Fanny, 332n Keats, John, 188, 239, 331–2, 341n, 342 Kenana, Rua, 65n A Kentucky Cardinal (Lane), 16n, 17 Kimber, Gerri, 459 King Lear (Shakespeare), 103 kittens, 257–8, 266 Koraka, 73–4 Koteliansky, S. S. (Kot), xv–xvi, 5, 147, 149–50, 389, 404, 406, 414, 444 Kreisler, Fritz, 22 Kuprin, Alexander, 337n La Rochefoucauld, François de, 32n Lamb, Charles, 132n, 133n, 320 Lane, James Allen, 16–17 lawn mowers, 47, 83 Lawrence, D. H. (DHL), xv–xvi, 147, 149n, 150, 152–4, 158, 244–5, 257, 304 Lawrence, Frieda, xv, 150, 152–4, 158, 207 Lazovich, Olga, 447n ‘Lena’, 203 lice, 267, 283 licentiousness, 52

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495

Life of Johnson (Boswell), 285–6 light, 90, 242 Lightband, Mrs, 26 ‘The Lily’, 392n Little Dorrit (Dickens), 311n ‘The Little Governess’, 228n Liverpool, 106 ‘Lives Like Logs of Driftwood’, 184, 385–6, 390 Lloyd, Marie, 155 Lloyd George, David, 224 locusts, 73 loneliness, 139, 421 Longinus, 318n Looe, 245n, 250 love, 46, 47–8, 107, 149, 288–9, 336 love affairs with Arnold Trowell, 52–3 with Edith K. Bendall, 47–9, 52 with an English cricketer, 24–5, 47n with Floryan Sobieniowski, 116 with Francis Carco, 144, 146, 152–63 Lovelace, Richard, 84n Love’s Labours Lost (Shakespeare), 300 Lowndes, Mrs B., 444 lumbago, 407 Lunn, Arnold, 262n Lynd, Sylvia, 457 Macauley, Rose, 261n Macbeth (Shakespeare), 330–1 MacDowell, Edward Alexander, 45, 83 Macnaughtan, Sarah Broom, 262n madness, 91 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 34n, 38, 71, 100, 162, 475n Mahupuku, Maata (Ariadne, Carlotta), xii, 52, 58n, 94 ‘The Maiden’s Prayer’ (song), 10 maids see servants Mallarmé, Stéphane, 110 Mallinson, Albert, 77 ‘The Man, the Monkey and the Mask’, 46 manners, 87 Manning, Thomas, 320 Manoukhin, Dr Ivan, xvii, 410–12, 414, 418, 425n, 433 Mansfield Park (Austen), 398, 400

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496

index

manuka, 62, 71, 72 Maori, 23, 44, 59n, 60, 63, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69n, 76, 78, 85n, 103, 481 Marble Arch, 95 Mark, Julian, 79 Marlowe, Christopher, 362 marquetterie, 309–10 marriage, 54, 139, 328, 360, 415 Marseilles, 241 Mary Rose (Barrie), 322 Massingham, H. J., 355, 414 Mathews, Elkin, 459–60, 463 Maugham, William Somerset, 262n Maupassant, Guy de, 88n, 111–12 Measure for Measure (Shakespeare), 300 memory, 122 Mendelssohn, Felix, 484n menstruation, euphemisms for, 136n, 183 Menton, 411 Meredith, George, 82, 112 Mérimée, Prosper, 110 Merriman, Henri Seton, 33 metamorphosis, 484n Mill, John Stuart, 31n, 34 Millais, John Everett, 71 Millin, Sara, 415 Milne, Herbert John Mansfield, 282n Mirbeau, Octave, 254 ‘The Misery’ (Chekhov), 385 Miss Swainson’s School, xii Monaco, 307 money, 7, 46, 50, 137, 138, 139, 146–7, 203, 259, 288, 301, 346, 416; see also accounts of expenditure Montaigne, Michel de, 32n Moody, Mrs, 280 Moody-Manners Opera Company, xiii Moore, George, 367n Moore, Lesley see Baker, Ida (LM, Adelaida, Lesley) Moore, Thomas, 16–17, 26n Morrell, Ottoline, xv, 233, 240, 304, 351, 409 Morris, William, 88 Moult, Thomas, 233 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 100 ‘Mr and Mrs Dove’, 375 Mrs Warren’s Profession (Shaw), 293n

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Murry, John Middleton (JMM, Bogey, Jack), 130–1, 272n attitude to KM’s relationship with Carco, 2–3, 144 bankruptcy, xiv, 288 dependence on KM, 288 deterioration of relationship with KM, 144–5, 156, 168–9, 171, 288–9, 302, 315–17, 336–9, 360, 416, 445 editing of KM’s journals and notebooks, 1–3, 5–6 ‘exhausted’, 295 family, 257, 278–9 KM’s fear of losing, 433–4 KM’s love for, 139, 149–50, 279, 435, 445 life with KM, xvi, 134–5, 139–40, 148, 153, 282, 408–11, 417 relationship with Dorothy Brett, 316, 336–9 selfishness and insensitivity, 302, 315–17, 336 writing and career, 137, 138n, 419–20 Murry, Richard (Arthur), 278–9, 290n Musgrove, George, 55n mushrooms, 224 music, 9–10, 17, 22, 32, 38, 54–6, 72, 83–4, 93, 98–100, 184n, 251, 280, 321–3, 480n, 484n musicians, 9–10, 22, 46, 49, 52, 55, 136, 225, 420 Musset, Alfred de, 59n My Japanese Wife (Holland), 17 Nation, 252, 387, 408 Nattier, Jean-Marc, 42n Nature Companion, xiii New Age, xiii, 122n, 222, 362, 409 ‘The New Baby’, 374 ‘New Dresses’, 228n New Year, 13–14, 84, 146, 236, 340 New Zealand, KM’s wish to visit, 251, 347 Newberry Library, 459, 462n Newman, May, 57, 82 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 157, 271, 443 objectivity, 87, 111 ‘Oft in the stilly night’ (Moore), 26 Okakura-Kakuzo, 78n

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index Okere Falls, 70 ‘On Nature’ (Mill), 31n On the Eve (Turgenev), 143 ‘One Kiss’, 390 Opepe, 77n opera, 55 Ophelia, 71, 328 Orage, A. R. (‘China’), xiv, xviii, 122n, 404n, 406–7, 410, 435 Orakei, 73–4 Orton, William, xiv, 119–21, 233, 476n Othello (Shakespeare), 328 ‘Our Maude’, 386, 390 Our Mutual Friend (Dickens), 318 Ouspensky, P. D., xviii Overton, Gwendolen, 16 Owen, Ashword, 293 Owen, Will, 106 pain, 251, 335–6, 414 Palliser, Charles, 152 Palotta, Grace, 366 pantomime, 149 paralysis, 250 Paris, 7, 97–8, 125–8, 158, 168, 427, 433 Parish, Edmund, 43–4n Parker, Millie, 60n ‘The Party’, 228n passion flowers, 486n Pasteur, Louis, 283 pastiche, 18n, 130n, 205n, 216n, 222–3, 262n Paston, George, 112 Pater, Walter, 100, 101, 105, 130n Paton, William Roger, 36n Payne, Sylvia, 11n, 97 Penn, William, 10n ‘Perambulations’, 262n perfumes, 15, 250 Phillpott, Eden, 287n Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young (Wilde), 29n ‘piccadilly weepers’, 230 ‘Pic-Nic’, 244 picquet, 24 The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde), 29, 35n, 36n, 59n, 89 ‘Pictures’, 153n, 156n, 231n, 363 pigeons, 139 The Pilgrim’s Progress, 281n

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497

Pinker, J. B., 404, 408–9, 410, 414 pipiwharauroa, 78n, 82 Plays, Acting and Music: A Book of Theory (Symons), 1, 98n, 99n pleurisy, xv Podmore, Frank, 93–4 Poe, Edgar Allan, 17, 27 ‘Poems of the Apostle of Youth’, 46 poetry by KM ‘child verse’, 50, 52 KM’s Earth Child poems, 459–87 Pohui, 80 Polinson, Mr, 154 Pope, Alexander, 328 Popper, David, 17 The Possessed (Dostevsky), 184–7 postal strike, 299 power, 46 Pradhana, 399 prayer, 414 pregnancies, xiii, 97n, 112n, 290, 298, 335n ‘Prelude’, xvi, 11n, 226n, 256n, 363 primroses, 15 The Prisoner of Zenda (Hope), 16n ‘Province’ (Carco), 229n Prowse, R. O., 363 Queen’s College, xii, 12n, 20n, 23n, 113n, 188–9 quinine, 157 Rabelais, François, 33 Rackham, Arthur, 16n, 28 rain, 39, 42, 53, 62–3, 69, 95, 96, 98, 107, 115, 150, 152, 155, 174, 208, 223, 254, 266, 296–7, 366, 373–4, 398, 405 Rananim, 147n Randogne, 419 Ransome, Arthur, 225 reading, 16–17, 428 recipes, 214–15 ‘The Red Shoes’ (Andersen), 235 Redcliffe Road, 243, 255–6 Reeves, Amber, 137 remembrance, 484n Renaissance, 110 resolutions, broken, 50 rhyme, 38 Rhythm, xiv, 299n, 363 Rice, Alice Hegan, 91n

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498

index

Rice, Anne Estelle, xiv, 140, 155, 251, 254 Rice, John, 332n Richard III (Shakespeare), 323 Richards, Grant, 124 Richardson, Dorothy, 261n Rickard, Mrs Victor, 261n The Ring (Wagner), 72n River Sprite image, 468n Robins, Elizabeth, 91, 92 Robinson, Henry Crabb, 271 Roman Catholic Church, 305 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 344–5 Romney, George, 16n ‘Room 135’, 429–31 ‘Rose Eagle’, 124n roses, 46 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 88, 106 Rotorua, 69–71, 74 Rouse, Gwen, 18, 57 Ruddick, Marion, 11n Rudolph (‘Rudy’), 114 Rumford, Kennerly, 84 Runcton Cottage, xiv Rupert of Hentzau (Hope), 16n, 17 Rupp, Fritz, 55 Russell, Bertrand, xvi Russian novels, KM’s ‘mind like’, 52 Russian lessons, 447–56 Sadleir, Michael, 399, 404n St Ives, 28 Saleeby, Dr Caleb, 101 San Remo, 295, 306 Sand, Georges, 304 sang froid, 253 ‘Scarlet Tulips’, 113n Schiff, Sydney and Violet, 306, 314, 402, 426 school days, 188–9 Scott, Marion Margaret, 3–4, 36n Scrapbook (KM, 1939), 1–4 sea, 247, 298 ‘Second Helping’, 309, 311 ‘Second Violin’, 268n, 386, 388–9 Séguin, Marie, 259 Selfridges, 272 Sense and Sensibility (Austen), 131 Servais, Adrien-François, 17 servants, 150, 152, 179, 280–1, 288, 347, 350, 419

KIMBER V4 9780748685059 PRINT.indd 498

sewing, 135 sex, 47–9, 140, 149, 153, 158, 162 Shakespeare, William, 189, 300, 328–31, 342–5, 349, 399–401 quotations, 192–201, 241, 335, 342, 356–9 All’s Well that Ends Well, 300, 342–3 Antony and Cleopatra, 192–4, 356–9 As You Like It, 194–5 The Comedy of Errors, 300 Hamlet, 103, 328, 330–1, 344 Henry IV, Part I, 195–8, 297n Henry V, 192, 198–200 King Lear, 103 Love’s Labours Lost, 300 Macbeth, 330–1 Measure for Measure, 300 Othello, 328 Richard III, 323 Romeo and Juliet, 344–5 The Tempest, 399 Troilus and Cressida, 201 Twelfth Night, 200, 300, 305–6, 345 Venus and Adonis, 241n A Winter’s Tale, 335 Sharp, William, 86 Shaw, George Bernard, 92, 293n ‘She has thrown me the knotted flax’, 101n Sheehan, Patrick, 136 Shelley, Lilian, 148 Shelley, Mary, 359 Shestov, Lev, 176, 436, 442 All Things are Possible, 176n, 436n Shorter, Clement, 418, 444 ‘A Shropshire Lad’ (Housman), 116 shyness, 58 Sickert, Walter, 28n Sidgwick, Ethyl, 131n Signature, xv ‘Silvery Waves’ (song), 10 sincerity, 341 ‘The Sisters’, 392n ‘Six Years After’, 386, 390 Sketch, 401 Sladen, Douglas, 17 slavery, 91 sleep, 428 The Smart Set, 56n

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index Smith, Charlotte, 84n Smith, Naomi Royde, 137 Smith, Stevie, 472n smuggling, 215–16 snow, 148, 401–2 Sobieniowski, Floryan, xiii, xvii, 116 ‘Song of the Little White Girl’, 101n Songs without Words (Mendelssohn), 483n Sorapure, Dr Victor, xvi–xvii, 272n, 284, 290, 314, 336, 425 The Soul of Milly Green (Gorst), 112 Southgate, Henry, 33 Souvenirs sur Katherine Mansfield (Carco), 229n Spahlinger treatment, 377 Spenser, Edmund, 188, 361n spiders, 333 ‘Spring Pictures’, 174–5 Stanley, Elizabeth, 262n Stendhal, 349 Stephani, Dr, 366 Stephen Swift & Co., xiv Stevenson, Robert Louis, 105 Still Life (Murry), 138n stillbirth, 298, 335n Strand Palace Hotel, 398 ‘A Strange Mistake’, 299n Strauss, Richard, 99 ‘Strawberries and a Sailing Ship’, 245 Stürm und Drang, 475n Stuttgart, 113 The Subjection of Women (Mill), 31n ‘A Suburban Fairy Tale’, 486n suffering, 335–6 suffragettes, 91n suicide, 87, 172, 324 Sullivan, J. W. N., 284, 403n, 426 ‘Summer in Winter’, 58n Sussex Downs, 302n Sutro, Alfred, 38 Swan Walk, 139 ‘Swannee River’ (song), 9–10 Swift, Jonathan, 351 Swinburne, A. C., 59n Switzerland, 364–6, 419 Symonds, John Addington, 50 Symons, Arthur, 1, 19n, 92, 98–9, 103, 109–11 tainui, 82 ‘Taking the Veil’, 408

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499

Tarawera, 62, 68 Tauhara, 76 Tchekhov, Anton see Chekhov, Anton telephones, 247 temper, 257, 353 The Tempest (Shakespeare), 399 Temple, Sir William, 130n Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 35n, 354 Tharaud, Jean, 163 The Things We Were (Murry), 381–3 The Three Musketeers (Dumas), 17n Tikitere, 70 The Time Machine (Wells), 66n Tinakori Road, xii–xiii, 176 Tolstoy, Lev Nikolaevitch, 92, 105, 226, 270, 336, 477n War and Peace, 440–2 Tomlinson, H. M. (HMT), 261n, 405 The Treasure of Heaven (Corelli), 29–30n Trevelan, G. M., 112n Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare), 201 Trowell, Garnet, xiii, 51n, 55–6, 107, 113n, 115n, 136, 298 abandonment of KM, 112n Trowell, Thomas (senior), 51n, 53–4, 56–7, 401 Trowell, Thomas (Arnold, Caesar), 10n, 47n, 52n, 55–6, 85n Trowell family, KM meets, xii Truth and Poetry (Goethe), 130n tuberculosis, xvi, 243, 299, 301, 315, 333n, 342, 353n, 410 coughing, 241, 243, 285, 291, 315 ‘romantic disease’, 288 treatments for, 284–5, 291, 377n, 410n, 411–12, 418, 433 Turgenev, Ivan, 142–3, 270 Twain, Mark, 279 Twelfth Night (Shakespeare), 200, 300, 305–6, 345 ‘Twilight’, 11 Ulysses (Joyce), 420 Umuroa, 67 Urewera, camping trip 1907, 59–77 Vaihinger, Hans, 345 Valentine (Richards), 124 Vaughan, Henry, 33

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500

index

Velázquez, Diego, 42 Venus and Adonis (Shakespeare), 241n Veronal, 101, 115 Victoria Station, 94–5 Villa Flora, 305 Villa Isola Bella, 367 Villette (Brontë), 17 Vince, Thomas, 300 Vintimille, 306 violets, 484n von Arnim, Elizabeth, 261n vulgarity, 25, 40 Wagner, Richard, 72–3, 75, 82, 98–9, 100 Waiotapu, 68–9 Wairakei, 74 Waldron, Philip, 1 Wallace, Lewis Alexander Richard (‘Oxon’), 397 wallflowers, 335 War and Peace (Tolstoy), 440–2, 477n Warbrick, Johanna Hill, 67–8 wartime economies, 7 ‘The Washerwoman’s Children’, 390 Waters, Valentine, 11n ‘The Weak Heart’, 386, 390, 445 wealth see money Webber, Mrs, 79–80 Webster, Roma, 425n Wellington Girls’ High School, xii Wells, H. G., 66n, 458 West, Rebecca, 261 Westminster Gazette, 410 Whaka, 68–9 Wharepuni, 67 Whistler, James, 28n Whitman, Walt, 60, 465n, 480n, 487n ‘Widowed’, 379n, 387n, 390 Wilde, Oscar, 29n, 89, 92, 99, 109 epigrams and quotations from, 34–7, 59n

KIMBER V4 9780748685059 PRINT.indd 500

The Picture of Dorian Gray, 29, 35n, 36n, 59n, 89 Winter, 51 A Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare), 335 Wishart, Margaret, 94, 97 ‘The Woman at the Store’, 228n women, 328 emancipation of, 91 taught that love is the only thing, 46 Wong, Anna May, 400 Wood, Clara F., 23, 97n wood hyacinths, 481n Woolf, Leonard, xvi, 5, 256n Woolf, Virginia (VW), xvi, 256n Wordsworth, Dorothy, 319–20 Wordsworth, William, 130n, 320 Worishofen, 373 World War I, 7, 155, 157, 323 KM visits Carco in France, 158–63 Worth, Patience, 261n Wotton, Henry, 109 writing, 51, 112, 152, 165, 252, 309, 347, 404–5 and idleness, 188 importance to KM, 102, 191, 280, 283 KM unable to write, 139, 140, 391 KM’s plans to be a writer, 41 for money, 146–8 ‘The Wrong House’, 299n Wyllarde, Dolf, 92 Wyman, Addison P., 10n Wyspianski, Stanislaw, xiii, 482n Young, Dr, 435 youth, 86 Ysaÿe, Eugène, 98n Zennor, 212n Zola, Emile, 111, 112n

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