The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, Volume 2: Letters to Correspondents K – Z 9781399504027

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The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield

The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield This new four-volume edition of the complete correspondence of Katherine Mansfield has been designed to enable readers to explore the psychological, cultural and socio-economic range of Katherine Mansfield’s epistolary craft. Thanks to extensive archival research, the series offers new transcriptions of all extant correspondence, hitherto unpublished materials, detailed biographical surveys of all Mansfield’s correspondents, meticulous explanatory notes and a rich contextual background that reflects the most up-to-date biographical and critical scholarship in the field. Organised by recipient rather than chronologically, this edition is entirely innovatory in its conception, foregrounding the different degrees of self-portraiture and self-invention that the writer adopts according to her addressee, thereby giving a rich sense of the dialogic nature of correspondence compared to all other forms of intimate writing; at the same time, it reassesses the importance of her personal correspondence and life writing in the context of the dynamic expansion of Modernist Studies over the past twenty years. The letters offer a detailed exposé of Mansfield’s life: from exile and emigration, intimacy and betrayal, and the traumas of war and disease, to nature and the environment, and fashions and food. Nor are Mansfield’s letters merely supplements in terms of her creative life. As the four volumes in the Collected Letters show, letter writing is an essential part of her literary production; many letters are as finely written and crafted as the stories, as a number of scholars have noted. There are a good number that illustrate the stylistic, imaginative and expressive scope of Mansfield as a writer even better than certain stories composed with the publishing market and commercial readerships in mind. This four-volume series works from the principle that the letters double Mansfield’s œuvre, and thus constitute an essential body of work for today’s readers. Volume 1 Recipients A–J Volume 2 Recipients K–Z Volume 3 Letters to John Middleton Murry, 1912–1918 Volume 4 Letters to John Middleton Murry, 1919–1923

The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield Volume 2 Letters to Correspondents K–Z

Edited and annotated by Claire Davison and Gerri Kimber

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: edinburghuniversitypress.com © The Estate of Katherine Mansfield for copyright in materials held by the Estate © editorial matter and organisation Claire Davison and Gerri Kimber, 2022 © the chapter Introductions their several authors, 2022 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10.5/12 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1474445481 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 3995 0402 7 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 3995 0403 4 (epub) The right of Claire Davison and Gerri Kimber 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).

Contents

Acknowledgementsx Textual Note and Abbreviations xii Letters Chronology: Volume 2xv Introduction: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Epistolarity Claire Davison and Gerri Kimber The Collected Letters K–Z Edmond Xavier Kapp Introduction by Gerri Kimber

1

11

‘Cousin Kate’ Introduction by Redmer Yska

13

Alexander Kay Introduction by Gerri Kimber

18

Hugh Kingsmill (Lunn)  Introduction by Claire Davison

22

Alfred A. Knopf Sr Introduction by Claire Davison

25

Samuel Solomonovich Koteliansky Introduction by J. Lawrence Mitchell

34

Frieda Lawrence Introduction by Aimée Gasston

109

Robert Lynd Introduction by Gerri Kimber

114

Sylvia Lynd Introduction by Gerri Kimber

116

vi   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 (Edward Montague) Compton Mackenzie  Introduction by Claire Davison

131

Maata Mahupuku Introduction by Anna Plumridge

135

Dr Ivan Ivanovitch Manoukhin Introduction by Claire Davison

138

Sir Edward Marsh Introduction by Gerri Kimber

142

Charles Elkin Mathews Introduction by Gerri Kimber

146

Robert B. T. Miller Introduction by Gerri Kimber

149

Sarah Gertrude Millin  Introduction by Claire Davison

151

Julian Ottoline Morrell Introduction by Claire Davison

157

Lady Ottoline Morrell Introduction by C. K. Stead

161

Thomas Moult and Bessie Moult Introduction by Gerri Kimber

311

(Arthur) Richard Murry Introduction by Kathleen Jones

315

The New Age  Introduction by Chris Mourant

376

(Mary) Edna Nixon Introduction by Gerri Kimber

392

Alfred Richard Orage Introduction by Chris Mourant

395

William Orton Introduction by J. Lawrence Mitchell

401



contents  vii

Clara Palmer Introduction by Gerri Kimber

407

Herbert Palmer Introduction by Claire Davison

410

Sylvia Payne Introduction by Gerri Kimber

414

John Campbell Perkins Introduction by Gerri Kimber

436

Eric Pinker Introduction by Chris Mourant

437

James Brand Pinker Introduction by Chris Mourant

445

Martha Putnam Introduction by Gerri Kimber

466

Ribnikov (‘Ribni’)  Introduction by Claire Davison

472

Anne Estelle Rice Introduction by Aimée Gasston

476

Daniel J. Rider Introduction by Claire Davison

520

Viscountess Rothermere Introduction by Claire Davison

524

Berta Ruck Introduction by Gerri Kimber

527

John Ruddick Introduction by Gerri Kimber

529

The Hon. Bertrand Russell Introduction by Claire Davison

531

Michael Sadleir Introduction by Chris Mourant

544

viii   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Sydney Schiff Introduction by Helen Rydstrand

561

Violet Schiff Introduction by Helen Rydstrand

588

Martin Secker Introduction by Claire Davison

626

Clement Shorter Introduction by Jenny McDonnell

629

Dr Victor Sorapure Introduction by Gerri Kimber

632

Sir John Collings Squire Introduction by Claire Davison

637

Lytton (Giles) Strachey Introduction by Claire Davison

643

Frank Swinnerton Introduction by Claire Davison

649

Lilian Trench Introduction by Gerri Kimber

652

Robert Calverly Trevelyan Introduction by Claire Davison

654

(Thomas) Arnold Trowell Introduction by Martin Griffiths

657

Garnet Trowell Introduction by Martin Griffiths

662

Thomas Luigi Trowell Introduction by Martin Griffiths

706

Marion Tweed Introduction by Gerri Kimber

713

Hugh Walpole Introduction by Claire Davison

716



contents  ix

Sydney Waterlow Introduction by Claire Davison

721

Orlo Williams  Introduction by Claire Davison

733

Wingley and Athenaeum Introduction by Gerri Kimber

737

Leonard Sidney Woolf Introduction by Claire Davison

739

Virginia Woolf Introduction by Claire Davison

743

Unidentified recipients

775

Omission from Volume 1

778

Appendix Works Consulted Index

780 783 797

Acknowledgements

As with the first volume in this edition, the editors would like to thank many organisations and individuals for their help in the creation of this volume. Firstly, we would like to thank 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 for being ever enthusiastic of our endeavours. The editorial team at EUP are simply the best, and our thanks go to all staff members who have been involved in this volume, including Assistant Editor Susannah Butler, Managing Desk Editor Fiona Conn, Caitlin Murphy, Rebecca McKenzie, and our copyeditor, Wendy Lee, for her meticulous and sensitive investment in this challenging project, together with her good-natured patience throughout. Immense thanks are also due to the Society of Authors, as the literary representatives of the Estate of Katherine Mansfield, for granting permission to reproduce all copyright material, and especially Sarah Baxter, who has been so generous with her time throughout this project. We would also like to take this opportunity to thank the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris III, for their generosity in funding the compilation of the large and complex indexes for this entire edition. Gerri Kimber would also like to record her heartfelt thanks to Susan Price and Beverley Randell, who generously offered her a flat for the entire duration of her stay in Wellington in early 2020, enabling her to undertake most of the research necessary for this and subsequent volumes. Thanks are also due to the following organisations and individuals: our Editorial Assistant, Anna Plumridge; Moira Taylor, who gave up a considerable amount of her own time to read through the proofs of this volume, and whose knowledge and insights have proved invaluable; Todd Martin, who undertook extensive research at the Newberry Library in Chicago on our behalf, and who is one of the unsung heroes of this entire edition; the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington and its incredibly efficient and helpful team of librarians, particularly Chief Librarian Chris Szekely, Audrey Waugh, Joan McCracken, Fiona Oliver and Oliver Stead; the British Library, and especially Janet Portman, Manuscripts Reference Service, for her kindness above and beyond the call of duty; the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, and especially

    x



acknowledgements  xi

Rick Watson and Elizabeth Garver for their unfailing help and generosity; the Newberry Library, Chicago; the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, and especially Joshua Mckeon; the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries [M0121, British collection, box 3, folder 8] and especially the kindness of Leif Anderson; Smith College Special Collections, and especially Kate Long, for her support and generosity; The Bertrand Russell Archive, McMaster University Library, and especially Rick Stapleton for his kindness and generosity; Marielle O’Neill, for devoting her own precious time to sourcing images of letters for us in our hour of need; The Keep, University of Sussex Library, and especially Philippa Murnaghan; Peter Murry, for his kind assistance concerning Mansfield’s letters to his father, Richard Murry; the University of Windsor Leddy Library Archives and Special Collections [F 0067 Katherine Mansfield fonds], and the incredible kindness of archivist Sue Fader; Queen’s University Archives, Kingston, Ontario, and the diligence and helpfulness of archivist Heather Home; Rachel Scott, for kindly allowing us to use her mother, Margaret Scott’s, personal transcriptions of the very few letters we were unable to locate; Stephen Barkway, for alerting us to the letter written to Francis Xavier Kapp, and Stuart Clarke; Redmer Yska, for alerting us to the letters written to ‘Cousin Kate’; Richard Cappuccio and Ann Herndon Marshall for kindly supplying an image of the letter to Edward Marsh in their possession; Jean Saunders of the Richard Jefferies Society for the letter to Michael Sadleir in their possession; our talented and enthusiastic ‘Introduction’ compilers: Aimée Gasston, Martin Griffiths, Kathleen Jones, Jenny McDonnell, J. Lawrence Mitchell, Chris Mourant, Anna Plumridge, Helen Rydstrand, C. K. Stead, and Redmer Yska; Joseph Spooner, for his impeccably thorough linguistic advice and musical insights, which were invaluable for some of the more obscure annotations, and for photographing letters for us when we were unable to travel; Giles Whiteley for pointing out the significance of Chekhov’s ‘sleeping sheep’; Louise Edensor; Shalini Sengupta; and last, but not least, Ralph Kimber, index-and-chronology-compiler extraordinaire, as well as for his invaluable and constant technical support. The editors and publisher will be pleased to correct any errors in this volume in future editions. Claire Davison and Gerri Kimber

Textual Note and Abbreviations

N.B. KM’s personal writing throughout this edition has been transcribed verbatim, with all errors included, and without the use of editorial ‘[sic]’. For reasons of concision, Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry are referred to as KM and JMM in the various Introductions and annotations, thereby adopting the abbreviated forms of their names which they themselves so often used. Alpers Antony Alpers (1980), The Life of Katherine Mansfield, New York: The Viking Press ATL Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington Baker [Ida Baker] (1971), Katherine Mansfield: The Memories of L.M., London: Michael Joseph Berg The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations BL British Library, London BTW John Middleton Murry (1935), Between Two Worlds: An Autobiography, London: Jonathan Cape Cappuccio and Marshall Richard Cappuccio and Ann Herndon Marshall CL1 Claire Davison and Gerri Kimber (eds) (2020), The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, Vol. 1, Letters to Correspondents A–J, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press

    xii



textual note and abbreviations   xiii

CP Gerri Kimber and Claire Davison (eds) (2016), The Collected Poems of Katherine Mansfield, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press CW1 and CW2 Gerri Kimber and Vincent O’Sullivan (eds) (2012), The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield, Vols 1 and 2 – The Collected Fiction, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press CW3 Gerri Kimber and Angela Smith (eds) (2014), The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield, Vol. 3 – The Poetry and Critical Writings, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press CW4 Gerri Kimber and Claire Davison (eds) (2016), The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield, Vol. 4 – The Diaries of Katherine Mansfield, including Miscellaneous Works, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press DHL D. H. Lawrence DVW (1–5) Anne Olivier Bell and Nigel Nicolson (eds) (1977–84), The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 5 vols, London and New York: Houghton Harcourt EVW (1–4) Andrew McNeillie and Stuart Clarke (eds) (1986–2011), The Essays of Virginia Woolf, 6 vols, London: Hogarth Press Glenavy Beatrice, Lady Glenavy (1964), Today We Will Only Gossip, London: Constable Hankin C. A. Hankin (ed.) (1983), The Letters of John Middleton Murry to Katherine Mansfield, London: Constable HRC Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin JMM John Middleton Murry KM Katherine Mansfield

xiv   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Letters 1928 John Middleton Murry (ed.) (1928), The Letters of Katherine Mansfield, 2 vols, London: Constable LDHL (1–8) James T. Boulton, George J. Zytaruk, Andrew Robertson, Warren Roberts, Elizabeth Mansfield, Lindeth Vasey, Margaret Boulton, Gerald M. Lacy and Keith Sagar (eds) (1979–2001), The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vols 1–8, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press LVW (1–6) Nigel Nicolson and Joanna Trautmann (eds) (1975–1980), The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 6 vols, London and New York: Houghton Harcourt m. Married name McMaster McMaster University Library, Hamilton, Ontario N Newberry Library, Chicago Queen’s Queen’s University Archives, Kingston, Ontario RJS Richard Jefferies Society SoA Society of Authors Smith Smith College Special Collections, Northampton, Massachusetts Stanford Stanford University Libraries, California Sussex The Keep, University of Sussex Library, Brighton TLS Times Literary Supplement tr. Translated by Windsor University of Windsor Leddy Library, Windsor, Ontario Witwatersrand University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

Letters Chronology: Volume 2

* indicates letters not collected in previous editions of KM’s letters. + indicates substantial additions to letters published in previous editions of KM’s letters. Date Name 17 November 1900 8 June 1901 16 April 1903 25 August 1903 23 December 1903 6 January 1904 24 January 1904 25 March 1904 1 April 1904 before 10 July 1904 10 July 1904 26 December 1904 15 February 1905 24 April 1906 8 January 1907 10 April 1907 22 July 1907 11 August 1907 26 September 1907 10 October 1907 October 1907 14 November 1907 1 December 1907 late December 1907 January 1908 10 January 1908 23 January 1908 4 March 1908

    xv

Cousin Kate* Cousin Kate* Marion Tweed Sylvia Payne Sylvia Payne Sylvia Payne Sylvia Payne Sylvia Payne Sylvia Payne Sylvia Payne Sylvia Payne Sylvia Payne Sylvia Payne Sylvia Payne Sylvia Payne Maata Mahupuku Martha Putnam Arnold Trowell Thomas Trowell* Martha Putnam Martha Putnam Thomas Trowell Robert B. T. Miller Martha Putnam Martha Putnam Thomas Trowell* Arnold Trowell Sylvia Payne

xvi   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 10 September 1908 16 September 1908 17 September 1908 23 September 1908 2 October 1908 3 October 1908 5 October 1908 6 October 1908 7 October 1908 12 October 1908 13 October 1908 15 October 1908 16 October 1908 19 October 1908 21 October 1908 24 October 1908 25 October 1908 29 October 1908 2 November 1908 4 November 1908 8 November 1908 28-30 April 1909 31 May 1909 June 1909 11 August 1910 25 August 1910 late summer 1910 autumn 1910 8 November 1910 3 December 1910 15 January 1911 25 May 1911 September 1911 5 October 1911 11 October 1911 February 1912 6 April 1912 September–October 1912 mid-September 1912 12 October 1912 late October 1912 November 1912 16 December 1912 5 or 6 May 1913 23 September 1914 1 February 1915

Garnet Trowell Garnet Trowell Garnet Trowell Garnet Trowell Garnet Trowell Garnet Trowell Garnet Trowell Garnet Trowell Garnet Trowell Garnet Trowell Garnet Trowell Garnet Trowell Garnet Trowell Garnet Trowell+ Garnet Trowell Garnet Trowell Garnet Trowell Garnet Trowell Garnet Trowell Garnet Trowell Garnet Trowell Garnet Trowell Garnet Trowell* Garnet Trowell New Age New Age William Orton William Orton Charles Elkin Mathews* Sylvia Payne Charles Elkin Mathews* New Age Edna Nixon New Age J. B. Pinker William Orton William Orton Hugh Kingsmill* Sylvia Payne Edward Marsh Martin Secker Compton Mackenzie E. X. Kapp* John Campbell Perkins Sylvia Payne S. S. Koteliansky



letters chronology: vol. 2   xvii

4 February 1915 S. S. Koteliansky 5 February 1915 S. S. Koteliansky 20 February 1915 Frieda Lawrence 26 February 1915 S. S. Koteliansky 1 March 1915 S. S. Koteliansky 8 March 1915 S. S. Koteliansky 10 March 1915 S. S. Koteliansky mid-March 1915 S. S. Koteliansky 22 March 1915 S. S. Koteliansky 29 March 1915 S. S. Koteliansky 4 May 1915 S. S. Koteliansky 17 May 1915 S. S. Koteliansky 30 June 1915 Leslie Beauchamp* 19 November 1915 S. S. Koteliansky 28 November 1915 S. S. Koteliansky 8 December 1915 Anne Estelle Rice end 1915 S. S. Koteliansky Winter 1915–16 Ribnikov 21 January 1916 Ottoline Morrell 26 February 1916 Ottoline Morrell 4 March 1916 Frieda Lawrence 7 April 1916 Ottoline Morrell 11 May 1916 S. S. Koteliansky 17 May 1916 Ottoline Morrell 24 June 1916 S. S. Koteliansky 27 June 1916 S. S. Koteliansky 27 June 1916 Ottoline Morrell 3 July 1916 S. S. Koteliansky 4 July 1916 Ottoline Morrell 10 July 1916 Ottoline Morrell 27 July 1916 Ottoline Morrell August 1916 Lytton Strachey mid-August 1916 Ottoline Morrell early September 1916 Ottoline Morrell 12 September 1916 Ottoline Morrell 3 October 1916 Lytton Strachey 27 October 1916 Ottoline Morrell 13 November 1916 Bertrand Russell 24 November 1916 Bertrand Russell 1 December 1916 Bertrand Russell 7 December 1916 Bertrand Russell 8 December 1916 Bertrand Russell 17 December 1916 Bertrand Russell 2 January 1917 Ottoline Morrell 14 January 1917 Ottoline Morrell 16 January 1917 Bertrand Russell

xviii   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 21 January 1917 Bertrand Russell 22 January 1917 Bertrand Russell 24 January 1917 Bertrand Russell late January 1917 Lytton Strachey 30 January 1917 Bertrand Russell late January 1917 Ottoline Morrell 31 January 1917 Bertrand Russell 6 February 1917 Ottoline Morrell 13 February 1917 Ottoline Morrell 24 February 1917 Bertrand Russell 3 April 1917 Ottoline Morrell 24 April 1917 Ottoline Morrell 22 May 1917 Ottoline Morrell early June 1917 Ottoline Morrell 16 June 1917 Ottoline Morrell 21 June 1917 Virginia Woolf 24 June 1917 Ottoline Morrell 10 July 1917 Ottoline Morrell 13 July 1917 Ottoline Morrell+ after 22 July 1917 Ottoline Morrell 25 July 1917 Virginia Woolf 30 July 1917 Ottoline Morrell 11 August 1917 Ottoline Morrell 15 August 1917 Ottoline Morrell mid-August 1917 Virginia Woolf 19 August 1917 R. C. Trevelyan 23 August 1917 Virginia Woolf late August 1917 Lytton Strachey late August 1917 Leonard Woolf* 23 September 1917 Ottoline Morrell 22 October 1917 Ottoline Morrell 23 October 1917 Anne Estelle Rice 16 November 1917 Daniel J. Rider 20 November 1917 Ottoline Morrell 7 December 1917 Ottoline Morrell mid-December 1917 Virginia Woolf 18 December 1917 Ottoline Morrell 22 December 1917 Anne Estelle Rice 24 December 1917 Julian Morrell 24 December 1917 Ottoline Morrell 4 January 1918 Ottoline Morrell 8 January 1918 Ribnikov 18 January 1918 Ottoline Morrell early March 1918 Ottoline Morrell 4 March 1918 Ribnikov 12 May 1918 Ottoline Morrell



letters chronology: vol. 2   xix

14 May 1918 Virginia Woolf 24 May 1918 Ottoline Morrell 29 May 1918 Virginia Woolf 6 June 1918 Virginia Woolf 14 June 1918 Ribnikov 16 July 1918 Ottoline Morrell 23 July 1918 Virginia Woolf 30 July 1918 Ottoline Morrell 2 August 1918 Virginia Woolf 3 August 1918 Ottoline Morrell 11 August 1918 Ottoline Morrell 15 August 1918 Ottoline Morrell mid-August 1918 Virginia Woolf 19 August 1918 Ottoline Morrell September 1918 S. S. Koteliansky 1 September 1918 Ottoline Morrell 5 September 1918 Ottoline Morrell September 1918 Virginia Woolf 8 October 1918 Ottoline Morrell 15 October 1918 Anne Estelle Rice mid-October 1918 Ottoline Morrell* 22 October 1918 Ottoline Morrell October 1918 Ottoline Morrell 1 November 1918 Virginia Woolf 4 November 1918 Ottoline Morrell 7 November 1918 Virginia Woolf 10 November 1918 Virginia Woolf mid-November 1918 Anne Estelle Rice mid-November 1918 Virginia Woolf 17 November 1918 Ottoline Morrell 27 November 1918 Virginia Woolf 2 December 1918 Ottoline Morrell mid-December 1918 Anne Estelle Rice 19 December 1918 Anne Estelle Rice 30 December 1918 Clara Palmer 13 January 1919 Anne Estelle Rice 20 February 1919 Virginia Woolf 21 February 1919 Ottoline Morrell end February 1919 S. S. Koteliansky 10 March 1919 Ottoline Morrell 7 April 1919 S. S. Koteliansky 11 April 1919 S. S. Koteliansky 11 April 1919 Virginia Woolf 14 April 1919 S. S. Koteliansky mid-April 1919 Ottoline Morrell late April 1919 Anne Estelle Rice

xx   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 late April 1919 early May 1919 5 May 1919 7 May 1919 12 May 1919 mid-May 1919 27 May 1919 late May 1919 4 June 1919 4 June 1919 6 June 1919 7 June 1919 early June 1919 10 June 1919 11 June 1919 18 June 1919 21 June 1919 22 June 1919 27 June 1919 July 1919 1 July 1919 13 July 1919 mid-July 1919 19 or 26 July 1919 August 1919 early August 1919 13 August 1919 13 August 1919 13 August 1919 15 August 1919 17 August 1919 21 August 1919 21 August 1919 5 September 1919 8 September 1919 19 September 1919 1 October 1919 21 October 1919 14 November 1919 23 November 1919 23 November 1919 13 December 1919 20 December 1919 12 January 1920 20 January 1920 25 January 1920

Virginia Woolf Ottoline Morrell Virginia Woolf Anne Estelle Rice Virginia Woolf Ottoline Morrell Virginia Woolf Ottoline Morrell Ottoline Morrell Virginia Woolf S. S. Koteliansky Ottoline Morrell Lytton Strachey Ottoline Morrell Ottoline Morrell Ottoline Morrell Ottoline Morrell S. S. Koteliansky Ottoline Morrell S. S. Koteliansky Ottoline Morrell Ottoline Morrell Virginia Woolf Ottoline Morrell Lilian Trench S. S. Koteliansky Ottoline Morrell Anne Estelle Rice Virginia Woolf S. S. Koteliansky Ottoline Morrell S. S. Koteliansky Ottoline Morrell S. S. Koteliansky Frank Swinnerton S. S. Koteliansky S. S. Koteliansky Richard Murry Richard Murry Wingley and Athenaeum Wingley and Athenaeum S. S. Koteliansky Richard Murry Richard Murry Ottoline Morrell Richard Murry



letters chronology: vol. 2   xxi

31 January 1920 14 February 1920 mid-February 1920 24 February 1920 mid-March 1920 29 March 1920 1 April 1920 7 April 1920 mid-April 1920 mid-April 1920 early May 1920 2 May 1920 4 May 1920 4 May 1920 9 May 1920 10 May 1920 11 May 1920 14 May 1920 21 May 1920 21 May 1920 25 May 1920 10 June 1920 18 June 1920 22 June 1920 28 June 1920 1 July 1920 11 July 1920 16 July 1920 25 July 1920 late July 1920 July–August 1920 7 August 1920 9 August 1920 10 August 1920 August 1920 mid-August 1920 18 August 1920 23 August 1920 29 August 1920 30 August 1920 19 September 1920 September 1920 21 September 1920 24 October 1920 27 October 1920 4 November 1920

Sylvia Lynd Sylvia Lynd* Anne Estelle Rice Richard Murry Anne Estelle Rice Richard Murry Sydney Schiff Sydney and Violet Schiff Richard Murry Violet Schiff Ottoline Morrell Sydney and Violet Schiff Sydney and Violet Schiff Violet Schiff Sarah Gertrude Millin Sydney and Violet Schiff Sydney and Violet Schiff Sydney and Violet Schiff Anne Estelle Rice Violet Schiff Virginia Woolf Anne Estelle Rice Anne Estelle Rice Richard Murry* Violet Schiff Sydney Schiff Virginia Woolf Violet Schiff Sydney Schiff Sydney Schiff Violet Schiff Violet Schiff Violet Schiff Violet Schiff Virginia Woolf* Violet Schiff Violet Schiff Sydney and Violet Schiff Violet Schiff Violet Schiff Richard Murry Richard Murry Sydney Schiff Sydney and Violet Schiff Hugh Walpole Sydney Schiff

xxii   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 4 November 1920 14 November 1920 15 November 1920 15 November 1920 20 November 1920 late November 1920 1 December 1920 1 December 1920 8 December 1920 9 December 1920 mid-December 1920 26 December 1920 27 December 1920 late December 1920 1 January 1921 early 1921 7 January 1921 early January 1921 early January 1921 9 January 1921 10 January 1921 12 January 1921 January 1921 January 1921 17 January 1921 17 January 1921 19 January 1921 27 January 1921 29 January 1921 2 February 1921 3 February 1921 6 February 1921 6 February 1921 7 February 1921 9 February 1921 9 February 1921 15 February 1921 mid-February 1921 mid-February 1921 17 February 1921 19 February 1921 26 February 1921 late February 1921 14 March 1921 16 March 1921 late March 1921

Hugh Walpole Michael Sadleir Richard Murry Sydney Schiff Alfred A. Knopf* Richard Murry Sydney Schiff J. C. Squire Michael Sadleir Unidentified Recipient* Richard Murry Anne Estelle Rice Virginia Woolf Herbert Palmer Richard Murry Unidentified Recipient Ottoline Morrell Richard Murry Sydney Schiff Anne Estelle Rice Alfred A. Knopf Sydney Schiff Anne Estelle Rice Anne Estelle Rice Richard Murry Orlo Williams Violet Schiff Sydney Waterlow Sydney Schiff Ottoline Morrell Richard Murry Alexander Kay Sylvia Lynd Michael Sadleir A. R. Orage Sydney Waterlow Alfred A. Knopf* Sylvia Lynd Sydney Schiff Richard Murry S. S. Koteliansky Edward Marsh Violet Schiff Ottoline Morrell Sydney Waterlow Sydney Waterlow

10 April 1921 18 April 1921 30 April 1921 late April 1921 12 May 1921 12 May 1921 mid-May 1921 16 May 1921 19 May 1921 22 May 1921 24 May 1921 24 May 1921 late May 1921 20 June 1921 24 July 1921 30 July 1921 9 August 1921 August 1921 16 August 1921 26 August 1921 early September 1921 5 September 1921 early September 1921 12 September 1921 13 September 1921 14 September 1921 17 September 1921 24 September 1921 24 September 1921 29 September 1921 3 October 1921 3 October 1921 4 October 1921 5 October 1921 10 October 1921 10 October 1921 10 October 1921 18 October 1921 18 October 1921 18 October 1921 24 October 1921 1 November 1921 2 November 1921 4 November 1921 4 November 1921 4 November 1921

letters chronology: vol. 2   xxiii J. C. Squire Sydney Schiff Michael Sadleir Violet Schiff Anne Estelle Rice J. C. Squire Victor Sorapure Ottoline Morrell Anne Estelle Rice Ottoline Morrell Alfred A. Knopf* Violet Schiff Ottoline Morrell Richard Murry Ottoline Morrell John Ruddick Richard Murry Richard Murry* J. B. Pinker J. B. Pinker Sylvia Lynd Richard Murry J. B. Pinker Richard Murry J. B. Pinker J. B. Pinker Richard Murry+ Sylvia Lynd Michael Sadleir J. B. Pinker J. B. Pinker Michael Sadleir Richard Murry J. B. Pinker J. B. Pinker Michael Sadleir J. C. Squire S. S. Koteliansky J. B. Pinker Michael Sadleir* Violet Schiff Richard Murry J. B. Pinker Sydney Waterlow S. S. Koteliansky S. S. Koteliansky

xxiv   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 7 November 1921 9 November 1921 11 November 1921 12 November 1921 23 November 1921 27 November 1921 29 November 1921 29 November 1921 2 December 1921 3 December 1921 3 December 1921 4 December 1921 4 December 1921 8 December 1921 13 December 1921 17 December 1921 20 December 1921 20 December 1921 20 December 1921 21 December 1921 23 December 1921 24 December 1921 24 December 1921 25 December 1921 25 December 1921 26 December 1921 26 December 1921 27 December 1921 31 December 1921 2 January 1922 early January 1922 8 January 1922 11 January 1922 12 January 1922 13 January 1922 15 January 1922 18 January 1922 20 January 1922 24 January 1922 26 January 1922 26 January 1922 27 January 1922 29 January 1922 31 January 1922 1 February 1922 3 February 1922

Michael Sadleir J. B. Pinker Michael Sadleir J. B. Pinker Robert Lynd Richard Murry S. S. Koteliansky Michael Sadleir J. B. Pinker Sydney Schiff Sydney Waterlow S. S. Koteliansky Ivan Manoukhin Sydney Schiff S. S. Koteliansky Clement Shorter* Thomas and Bessie Moult J. B. Pinker* Ottoline Morrell Alfred A. Knopf* S. S. Koteliansky Anne Estelle Rice S. S. Koteliansky Michael Sadleir Sydney Schiff Richard Murry Anne Estelle Rice Ottoline Morrell Sydney Schiff Richard Murry A. R. Orage* Violet Schiff J. B. Pinker Sydney Schiff S. S. Koteliansky Anne Estelle Rice Anne Estelle Rice Alfred A. Knopf Ottoline Morrell J. B. Pinker Anne Estelle Rice J. B. Pinker Michael Sadleir J. B. Pinker S. S. Koteliansky S. S. Koteliansky

4 February 1922 5 February 1922 5 February 1922 8 February 1922 9 February 1922 12 February 1922 22 February 1922 26 February 1922 March 1922 1 March 1922 3 March 1922 3 March 1922 4 March 1922 5 March 1922 7 March 1922 early March 1922 9 March 1922 11 March 1922 15 March 1922 16 March 1922 16 March 1922 18 March 1922 18 March 1922 21 March 1922 late March 1922 22 March 1922 24 March 1922 25 March 1922 25 March 1922 25 March 1922 29 March 1922 29 March 1922 30 March 1922 1 April 1922 2 April 1922 4 April 1922 8 April 1922 11 April 1922 13 April 1922 16 April 1922 22 April 1922 27 April 1922 end April 1922 1 May 1922 3 May 1922 7 May 1922

letters chronology: vol. 2   xxv Anne Estelle Rice J. B. Pinker Michael Sadleir J. B. Pinker J. B. Pinker Michael Sadleir J. B. Pinker Michael Sadleir Sarah Gertrude Millin Michael Sadleir Richard Murry J. B. Pinker Ottoline Morrell+ J. B. Pinker Clement Shorter Violet Schiff Michael Sadleir Orlo Williams S. S. Koteliansky Richard Murry J. B. Pinker* Alfred A. Knopf J. B. Pinker Michael Sadleir Violet Schiff* J. B. Pinker Berta Ruck S. S. Koteliansky J. B. Pinker Michael Sadleir Richard Murry Eric Pinker Eric Pinker Violet Schiff Eric Pinker Violet Schiff S. S. Koteliansky Unidentified Recipient Violet Schiff Eric Pinker Thomas and Bessie Moult* Eric Pinker S. S. Koteliansky Anne Estelle Rice Eric Pinker+ Eric Pinker

xxvi   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 11 May 1922 14 May 1922 25 May 1922 26 May 1922 26 May 1922 28 May 1922 29 May 1922 31 May 1922 5 June 1922 June 1922 17 June 1922 4 July 1922 16 July 1922 17 July 1922 24 July 1922 late July 1922 2 August 1922 9 August 1922 11 August 1922 14 August 1922 20 August 1922 21 August 1922 22 August 1922 23 August 1922 24 August 1922 25 August 1922 28 August 1922 28 August 1922 28 August 1922 30 August 1922 late August 1922 3 September 1922 6 September 1922 September 1922 September 1922 19 September 1922 19 September 1922 29 September 1922 30 September 1922 3 October 1922 4 October 1922 9 October 1922 19 October 1922 10 December 1922

Violet Schiff Violet Schiff S. S. Koteliansky Ottoline Morrell Ottoline Morrell Richard Murry S. S. Koteliansky S. S. Koteliansky Eric Pinker Michael Sadleir S. S. Koteliansky S. S. Koteliansky Richard Murry S. S. Koteliansky Eric Pinker Richard Murry S. S. Koteliansky Violet Schiff Alfred A. Knopf Richard Murry Ottoline Morrell Violet Schiff Sydney Waterlow S. S. Koteliansky Violet Schiff Ottoline Morrell Ottoline Morrell Anne Estelle Rice Sydney Schiff S. S. Koteliansky Richard Murry Ottoline Morrell S. S. Koteliansky S. S. Koteliansky S. S. Koteliansky Sylvia Lynd Violet Schiff Sylvia Lynd Anne Estelle Rice Richard Murry S. S. Koteliansky S. S. Koteliansky S. S. Koteliansky Viscountess Rothermere

Introduction: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Epistolarity Claire Davison and Gerri Kimber

The letters of born letter writers provide their own continuity. They make us feel soon that we have our seat at the centre of the pageant, in the depths of [her] mind, which unfolds itself page by page as we read. For she possessed indisputably the gift which counts for more in letter writing than wit or brilliance or traffic with great people; she gave herself away merely by being herself without a word of emphasis or analysis, and thus envelop all these odds and ends in the mesh of her own personality.1

Woolf was writing about what she would call one ‘of the obscure’,2 the seventeenth century’s long-forgotten epistolary craftswoman, Dorothy Osborne. And like all great letter writers, Osborne didn’t just write letters, she wrote about them, keenly aware that their material presence, style, voice and craftsmanship were not mere accessories, too often dispensable, but desirable and essential testimonies whose lives and afterlives would always escape writer and reader, all the more so when they circulated across Europe in times of diplomatic tension, religious conflict and inter-state war as Osborne’s did. Nor could they be too beholden to conventions. As she wrote to her husband, William Temple, great Schollers are not the best writer’s (of letters I mean, of books perhaps they are) [. . .] all letters, mee thinks, should be free and easy as one’s discourse, not studied as an oration, nor made up of hard words like a charm.3

It is impossible not to see Katherine Mansfield in her rightful place as one of the artists of letter writing resonating within Dorothy Osborne’s and Virginia Woolf’s words. As this second volume shows, we are indeed here at the centre of the pageant of her mind, as she envelops a host of odds and ends in the mesh of a personality which is her own precisely because it is at the same time a chorus of selves, personae and voices, performing the everyday freely and easily into existence to delight the reader. Not that every word that Woolf says here fits the volume to come. Words of emphasis will be found in abundance, for Mansfield rarely wrote long

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2   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 letters without a whole spectrum of emphatic markers: small capitals, large capitals, words and sentences underscored up to five times, underlinings which could be straight lines, wiggly lines, zig-zags, or a line of dashes beneath words like a translation into morse code. So intensely does she feel such key words that the nib of her pen visibly bifurcates, thickening the ink to almost double that of the previous flow of words. Likewise, if Osborne ‘gave herself away by being herself’, the same cannot always be said of Katherine Mansfield – as was seen in Volume 1, when she enclosed within a letter to Ida Baker a letter for Ida to copy out as if she were the writer, send back to her and Murry, and thereby stage a little escape from home for herself.4 Letters here, like all those written by ‘born letter writers’, are never mere exchanges of confidence or outpourings of personality. Not only does this volume attest to the full range of practical functions served by Mansfield’s letters – tokens of friendship, gestures of reparation, intermediaries for business correspondence, regrets for missed opportunities, records of medical care, laboratories for creative writing – they also document how she read letters and how they mattered to her, almost becoming stories of letters in epistolary form at times. The finest example is her correspondence with Koteliansky, devoted for weeks on end to the task of reading and translating Dostoevsky’s and Chekhov’s letters, enabling her to eke out some of the finest examples of their own lives, minds, personalities and writerly praxis, and adopt them as benchmarks by which to define and compare her own, or, in the case of Chekhov, to take as models to live by: ‘Wonderful they are. The last one – the one to Souverin about the duty of the artist to put the ‘question’ – not to solve it but so to put it that one is completely satisfied seems to me one of the most valuable things I have ever read. It opens – it discovers rather, a new world (p. 62).’ Meanwhile, if, like all published editions of a single person’s correspondence, this volume attests the sheer wealth of Mansfield’s letterwriting skills – the huge scope and bulk of letters criss-crossing back and forth across the Channel, western Europe, the Atlantic and down to New Zealand, across languages and war-zones, and from hotels, borrowed lodgings, short-term homes, trains and clinics – they inevitably remind us of all those that were lost on the way, or were never sent in the first place. ‘This is just a note,’ she scribbles to Sydney Schiff. ‘My letters to you – the ones that remain unwritten would fill volumes’ (p. 581). Perhaps we should admit as editors, however, that there were moments when we were almost relieved that these volumes of unwritten epistles did stay speculative. We were, of course, constantly thrilled to be returning to her postcards, pages hastily torn from exercise books, headed paper from hotels and cafés, impeccable sheets boldly typed out on the old faithful Corona, and airmail vellum so fine and diaphanous and so often folded that in places writing has half faded, and in others there is little to distinguish the flow of words on either side of the paper. But then came the gruelling part – how much of the fascinating materiality of letters, envelopes, postmarks and stamps could we possibly account for? How do you turn



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the infamous, sometimes near-illegible scrawl with its doodles, marginal annotations, postscripts and post-postscripts (even on the envelopes) into printable, meticulously edited, readable text? Here, too, what must inevitably be lost on the way as the hundreds of surviving letters are packaged anew into four hefty volumes? Our introduction to the first volume of this edition of Katherine Mans­ field’s letters spells out our rationale: rather than following the linear sequence of the life of ‘one’ Katherine Mansfield, from her first surviving correspondence – a letter to ‘Cousin Kate’ of the New Zealand Graphic in 1900 – to the last – a longish, detailed letter to Ida Baker, written before she died but not posted – which is what all the editors of previous editions of her letters have chosen to do, this new edition of Mansfield’s letters has been arranged by correspondent, in A–Z sequence. The exception to this rule are the letters to John Middleton Murry, which, due to their sheer number, constitute two separate volumes, 1912–18 and 1919–23. Following the publication in 2020 of Volume 1, the response to this rationale has been overwhelmingly positive, confirming that our original decision was the right one, in terms of allowing Mansfield’s ‘hundreds of selves’,5 as she herself termed it, and their individual voices to shine through, as the author puts on one mask, and then another, and yet another, depending on whom she is writing to. As a review in the Times Literary Supplement noted: ‘By choosing to tell their story of Mansfield’s life through her relationships, Davison and Kimber transfer the emphasis normally given to her terminal illness to the extraordinary range of the relations she kept alive.’6 The first volume, correspondents A–J, is heavily weighted towards the Beauchamp family and associated correspondence: Mansfield’s mother, father and four siblings, as well as a rich collection of letters to her cousin, the writer Elizabeth von Arnim. Aside from these letters, the bulk of the letters in the volume are addressed to two individuals: Ida Baker, possibly Mansfield’s one ‘true’ and constant friend, steadfast in her devotion from the age of fifteen to the very end, and the Hon. Dorothy Brett, with whom Mansfield had a much more complicated relationship, as Aimée Gasston’s Introduction reveals.7 This second volume, quite by chance, puts the emphasis far more on Mansfield’s literary and intellectual friendships, especially with members of the Bloomsbury Group, as well as those individuals who gathered around Lady Ottoline Morrell (herself the recipient of one of the largest number of letters in this volume) at Garsington Manor. Indeed, the names of some of the correspondents read like a Who’s Who of early twentiethcentury literary fame: Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, the Hon. Bertrand Russell, Hugh Walpole and Compton Mackenzie, to name but a few. With over thirty new letters not published in previous editions, as well substantial revisions and additions to a number of other letters, this volume, as with its predecessor, offers fresh insights into a number of Mans­ field’s epistolary relationships. Indeed, the very first letter, to Edmond

4   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Xavier Kapp, offers yet another tantalising glimpse into Mansfield’s coeditor role at the little magazine Rhythm during the years 1912–13. Kapp was a British portrait painter and caricaturist, who became well known for his depictions of famous politicians and musicians of the day. As a then young, almost unknown artist, Kapp had submitted a caricature of the celebrated conductor Sir Henry Wood (1869–1944) for publication in Rhythm, and indeed, his ‘Sir Henry Wood. An Impression’ appeared in the January 1913 issue.8 Mansfield’s response to his artistic submission is business-like, yet friendly, whilst at the same time confirming her own important role. This is not a dictated letter sent by a submissive secretary, but a confident response to a fellow creative by a working co-editor. In addition, and equally coincidentally, agents, editors and publishers also feature far more prominently in this second volume, with letters addressed to Robert Lynd, Elkin Mathews, Alfred A. Knopf, A. R. Orage, Eric Pinker, J. B. Pinker, Michael Sadleir, Clement Shorter and J. C. Squire, attesting to Mansfield’s busy life as a successful professional writer. Indeed, whilst researching annotations for Mansfield’s letter to Robert Lynd, dated 23 November 1921, we uncovered a previously unknown book review she had written for the Daily News (where Lynd was literary editor), on 28 November 1921. It is presented as an Appendix at the end of this volume. Even as a young girl aged just twelve, Mansfield’s desire to see her name in print is already present. The two letters the twelve-year-old Kathleen Beauchamp writes to ‘Cousin Kate’ at the New Zealand Graphic in 1900 and 1901, recently discovered by Redmer Yska, present an assured, even cocky, young writer, pushing her own talents. Having had the thrill of seeing her first ever story published,9 she now presses for more publication glory: ‘Might I write another story for the Children’s Page? I was very pleased to see mine in print’ (p. 16). Fast-forward ten years to 1910, now in London and pursuing her dream of becoming an author: Mansfield’s two letters to Elkin Mathews reveal how committed she is, from the outset of her professional writing career, to being published. She is also not afraid of promoting herself and her work, and is both self-assured – and witty – in her desire to receive a response to her book submission: 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! (p. 148)

And yet another ten years on, four previously unpublished letters to Mans­ field’s American publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, reveal a now well-known author adept at promoting herself and her work, with a flattering turn of phrase when she thinks it will advance her cause. Knopf’s American Borzoi imprint produced high-quality books with attractive covers, and Mansfield was clearly impressed that her collection Bliss and Other Stories was to appear in America under the banner of this prestigious publishing house. On 20 November 1920, she writes to Knopf: ‘May I say how much



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I admire the appearance of your books? I have just seen a copy of Miss Willa Cather’s ‘Youth & the Bright Medusa’. Before one opened it one was interested – more than attracted. One felt a positive sympathy for the work of an unknown author’ (p. 28). Two further new letters, to English literary agent James Brand Pinker, written in early 1922, in the last year of her life, uncover a female author in total control of her literary output, firm and business-like, even from the confines of her sickbed: I am v. glad to know The Dial has accepted The Dolls House . . . It makes a start, at any rate. A few days ago I received this letter from The Sketch. The story they refer to is one of a series which Mr Clement Shorter asked me to write for him and he paid me ten guineas a story. I am enclosing ‘A Cup of Tea’ which I think would suit The Sketch. But do you think they would be willing to pay me the same amount? I think they ought to. It might be worth while sending a second copy to The Nation, New York. Ive an idea the editor asked for some of my work, but I am not sure – (p. 458)

In the second letter, written two months later, she discusses accounts; her financial needs were at their most pressing at this period of her life, Dr Manoukhin’s X-ray treatment being hugely expensive, and she therefore suggests avenues for Pinker to investigate with regards to selling her work: ‘The last account I had covered to June ’21, so that there may be a little money due to me now. Might it not also be possible to make the same arrangement with Collins for a continental edition’ (p. 464). She is clearly not shy about selling herself and her work, and making sure she is suitably recompensed in a timely fashion. Finally, in a letter to Michael Sadleir, director of the publishing house Constable & Co., who published Mansfield’s last two collections of short stories, we see Mansfield fully in control of her creative work and the way it is presented to the public: Here is The Garden-Party. Would you see that it follows directly after At the Bay. i.e. that it is second in the contents. I hope this can be managed. I feel its place in the book is a little important . . . Those readers who may not understand the form of At the Bay, will be, I hope, reassured by this. I am very glad you approve of the change of title. Yes, I’m much better, thanks. (p. 552)

Mansfield had recently changed the title of what was to be her last collection of stories from At the Bay and Other Stories to The Garden Party and Other Stories. Not only that: she had carefully thought out the positioning of each story in the volume. Eight days earlier, in explaining her rationale for the book’s title change, she had told Sadleir: I received yesterday two letters about the story At the Bay & in both cases the title was wrong: i.e. In the Bay & On the Bay. That seemed to me a bad lookout. The other name is – am I right? – more solid. Its harder to forget & would look more attractive in the bookshops. Or so I imagine. (p. 551)

6   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Matter-of-fact and business-like, she is clearly an author who knows her own mind, and for whom detail is as important as the bigger picture. Two new letters to her brother-in-law, Richard Murry, show Mansfield in a lively and good-humoured mood, yet still with glimmers of the ‘professional writer’ shining through. She writes in August 1921: ‘Clement Shorter – of the Sphere is my master at present. Ive still 3 stories to do for him. He pays me more than anyone else – six stories – sixty guineas & a story takes me a week. That’s not bad pay’ (p. 352). The financial rewards of story writing, especially at this time, are a frequent feature of her letters to family and close friends. Constant medical bills as a result of her ever-worsening tuberculosis, the burden of which would increase hugely as she commenced her expensive, and ultimately useless, X-ray treatment in Paris with Dr Manoukhin in early 1922, necessitate a constant flow of stories from her pen, sold to papers and magazines in England, and especially America, where the financial rewards are even greater. This volume also contains an unpublished letter to Clement Shorter himself, from 17 December 1921, one of only two of Mansfield’s extant letters to the publisher of the Sphere, in which she conveys gushing thanks: ‘I cannot tell you how gratified I am that my stories met with your approval. It was happiness to write them – double happiness that they gave pleasure’ (p. 630). Shorter offered generous terms to writers of short stories and Mansfield is clearly keen to maintain and enhance this avenue of financial reward. One aspect of Mansfield’s supremely playful nature that this volume is able to foreground are her little postcards and notes to her precious cats, Wingley and Athenaeum, and to her Japanese doll, Ribni, all three anthropomorphised into miniature humans with very distinct personalities. When collected as two little groups of notes, Mansfield’s humour also reveals a touch of poignancy, as she imbues in these little beings all her maternal feelings for the children she never had, signing herself ‘ta maman’ [your mummy] to Ribni, and ‘Gran’ma’ to the cats. As with Volume 1, there are of course letters to correspondents that we can only regret have not survived the passage of time, and which therefore cannot be present in this volume. Mansfield’s missing voluminous correspondence with both D. H. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, over a number of years – two of the most important personal friendships in her adult life – are two such disappointing lacunae. The itinerant Lawrences, who travelled light with few possessions, kept only a small number of the letters they received, and Mansfield and Murry, following a bitter rupture of this friendship in 1920, destroyed many of the letters sent to them. All that remains of Mansfield’s correspondence with the couple are two letters drafted to Frieda in personal notebooks (which thankfully themselves survived), written at the height of their friendship. Other regrettable groups of missing letters include those to close literary friends J. W. N. Sullivan and H. M. Tomlinson, and of course those to Floryan Sobieniowski, Mansfield’s Polish lover in Bavaria in 1909; in 1920 she paid £40 to recover and subsequently burn all her letters to him. Arnold



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Trowell, whom Mansfield called ‘Tom’ or ‘Caesar’, was her first teenage crush, in whom she imbued all her burgeoning schoolgirl romantic feelings which had no outlet elsewhere. The number of passion-filled, emotionally charged letters Mansfield must have written to him, between the years 1903 and 1908, would have run to many dozens, but sadly all that remains is a single letter written in German and a notebook draft (pp. 659–61). As for A. R. Orage, possibly the most important influence – both literary and personal – in Mansfield’s entire life (other than Murry), from their first meeting in 1910 until the very end of her life, almost no epistolary evidence remains. Orage, like Lawrence, famously never kept letters sent to him, and so the letter from Mansfield dated 9 February 1921, which he kept all his life, and which clearly meant a good deal to him, is all the more precious. An unpublished, unfinished draft of another letter, found in Mansfield’s papers after her death (p. 775), merely tantalises and frustrates with the sad realisation of all those that were sent but which no longer exist. Possibly the most poignant collection of letters in the volume are those written to Garnet Trowell, the twin brother of Arnold, to whom Mansfield transferred her affections in the autumn of 1908, having arrived in London from New Zealand, and following the realisation that Arnold did not – and never would – return her affection. From this prosaic decision arose one of the defining emotional relationships of Mansfield’s entire life, with a catastrophic and unforgettable outcome: the birth of a still-born child, in June 1909, whilst she was alone in Bavaria. The fact that so many of her letters to Garnet survive also points to the emotional attachment he himself had to this correspondence, which accompanied him on his travels around the world, before he ultimately settled in Canada. The raw, emotive, deeply felt – and at times sexual – passion which Mansfield describes in these letters is sometimes hard to read. It is too personal, and because the reader knows how the love story ends, too painful. One wants to avert one’s gaze. Mansfield, too, like Garnet, never forgot this relationship or her dead baby; as late as 1920 she was writing in her diary: ‘Oh misery! I cannot sleep. I lie retracing my steps – going over all the old life before. . . . The baby of Garnet’s love.’10 This volume contains a substantial new addition to her letter of 19 October 1908, more than doubling its size, with an overtly sexual suggestiveness: ‘tonight your kisses burn my lips – my mouth is hot – my hands tremble – I shake with passion’ (p. 684). And in a newly collected letter, dated 31 May 1909 but not sent, Mansfield records for Garnet her impressions, as she travels from London to Bavaria with her mother (p. 703). This volume also contains a letter written by Ida Baker to Garnet on 29 July 1910, well over a year after the romance between Mansfield and Garnet had ended, in which she attempts, clearly at Mansfield’s bidding, to see Garnet, with a view to reconnecting the ex-lovers. As Baker poignantly notes at the end of her letter, there was much ‘to hear & say’ – on both sides (p. 673). This letter offers tantalising biographical evidence that just as Mansfield was, in a professional sense, becoming well connected

8   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 in the London literary scene via Orage and the New Age, her emotional life was still complex, and the rawness of the previous year’s experiences still fresh in her mind and seemingly unresolved. Two of the most exciting new discoveries in the entire volume are letters to both Leonard and Virginia Woolf. The letter to Leonard is the only one known to exist, and yet again points to Mansfield’s goodnatured efficiency in her business dealings with her publishers, in this case the Hogarth Press and its edition of Prelude: To be business-like. I agree, of course, to your conditions but do not think that you will sell 300 copies? It sounds a very large number and I should not think there would be any fear of a 2nd edition. [. . .] If I can help, later on, with addressing envelopes etc – you realise that I am at your service. (p. 742)

As for our newly discovered letter to Virginia, it offers a particularly fine example of Mansfield’s epistolary prose, revealing how much of her creative energy Mansfield invests in letters to certain individuals, especially those fellow writers, like Virginia, whom she wants very much to impress: Have you been looking at the moon tonight? I have been reading the letters of Dante and I found the moon a positive comfort after them – a warm, youthful light – a lamp almost friendly. Do many people really read Dante? I wonder – He seems to me dead beyond compare. I feel as though his writings were written in Eternity and for Eternity. He does not write for men but for certain types of angels. (p. 772)

In much of this volume, as in this entire edition, the genius of Mansfield the professional writer is revealed through her at times enchanting and evocative epistolary style. Notes  1. EVW4, p. 555.  2. EVW4, p. 118.  3. Moore-Smith, p. 90.  4. CL1, pp. 157–9.  5. CW4, p. 349.  6. Carver.  7. CL1, pp. 339–41.  8. Kapp, p. 347.  9. ‘His Little Friend’ (17 October 1900). 10. CW4, p. 298.

The Collected Letters K–Z

Edmond Xavier Kapp (1890–1978)

Introduction Born in London to a German Jewish family, Edmond Xavier Kapp was a British portrait painter and caricaturist, brother of the artist Helen Kapp (1902–78), and well known for his depictions of famous politicians and musicians of the day. At Cambridge, where he studied Medieval and Modern Languages, his caricatures started to be published in magazines such as Granta, and a one-man exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum swiftly followed. After Cambridge he set up a successful small studio in 1912, producing caricatures for a variety of publications. After serving in World War One as a lieutenant with the Royal Sussex Regiment, and later working in Intelligence, his reputation as an artist continued to grow, with a variety of exhibitions both in the UK and abroad, as well as a number of books of his drawings and caricatures, including a series of lithographs of diplomats at the League of Nations produced for both the British Museum and the National Portrait Gallery. Kapp was married to his first wife, the writer and activist Yvonne Mayer (1903–99) from 1922 to 1930. He married his second wife, the Russian artist Polia Chentoff (1896–1933) in 1932, but she sadly died of a cerebral tumour the following year. Kapp was commissioned as an official war artist in World War Two, and his series of drawings, ‘Life under London’, depicting people sheltering in the London Underground and in the crypt of St Martin-in-the-Fields during the Blitz, became particularly well known. There was a major retrospective exhibition of his work at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1961, following which Kapp embraced abstract painting. His work is held in several important British collections, notably the National Portrait Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Barber Institute in Birmingham. It is clear from KM’s letter below that Kapp was offering a caricature of the celebrated conductor Sir Henry Wood (1869–1944) for publication in Rhythm, and indeed, his ‘Sir Henry Wood. An Impression’ appeared in the January 1913 issue.1 Gerri Kimber

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12   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Note 1. Kapp, p. 347.

[16 December 1912] [Maggs catalogue, 2011] RHYTHM 57, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON, W.C.

16 Dec 1912

Dear Mr Kapp, We’ll do our best about your Henry Wood.1 Come just as you like on Saturday. Its not ‘dress’ – a jersey if you like. Do get the December ‘Rhythm’2 – & tell us what you think of it. Katherine Mansfield. Notes 1. Henry Joseph Wood (1869–1944) was Britain’s most pioneering and influential musical director, conductor and music teacher from the late nineteenth century until his death during World War Two. He studied at the Royal Academy of Music before becoming a composer and conductor, first for a number of touring opera companies, and then in London. The great turning point of his career was the founding of the Promenade Concerts (‘The Proms’) in 1895, initially held at the Queen’s Hall, the success of which led to his being knighted in 1911. It was both the recent knighthood and his striking public image that Kapp sought to capture in the caricature published in Rhythm. 2. KM was, of course, an established co-editor of Rhythm by now, even if the cover only ever acknowledged her as the editor’s ‘assistant’. The December issue (2: 11) was particularly rich, including contributions by Anne Estelle Rice, Raymond Drey, J. D. Fergusson, Natalia Goncharova, Lord Dunsany, Yone Noguchi, and KM and JMM themselves. There was also a self-portrait by Stanislaw Wyspianski alongside a biographical study of the great Polish artist, designer, playwright and stage-manager by Floryan Sobieniowski.

‘Cousin Kate’ (1855–1931) (Elizabeth ‘Lizzie’ Frost Rattray)

Introduction In 1900, Kathleen Beauchamp, aged twelve, posted off a letter to the children’s page of the New Zealand Graphic and Ladies’ Journal, earning herself a red satin badge for publication, and membership of the ‘cousinhood’. She was henceforth called ‘Cousin Kathleen’. In 2016, this writer discovered the letter – and another from 1901 – in the azurecoloured bound volumes of the Graphic, held at Wellington Central Library.1 The children’s page editor, a mysterious eminence known as ‘Cousin Kate’, is now distinguished as the first known recipient of KM’s letters. At twelve, Kathleen was on the cusp of adolescence, immersed in family and school, her centre of gravity the fine-pillared, two-storey wooden mansion she would later immortalise as ‘75’ (Tinakori Road, Thorndon), with its lily lawn, tennis court and sweeping views out to sea. She was keeping notebooks, scratching out poems, helping on a magazine at her school a few streets away. She was a great reader, poring through the pages of the Graphic, the Auckland broadsheet she found in the spacious drawing room at 75, aimed at the elites of colonial society, including her own extended family’s privileged world. When her Uncle Frank married the Premier’s daughter, for example, the paper splashed photographs of the event, even calling it ‘THE society wedding of 1897’.2 Annie Beauchamp’s glittering parties, too, routinely graced the Graphic’s society pages; at one, the handsome hostess was caught in ‘a pretty gown of soft cream voile, tucked, and the bodice softened with lace and pale blue silk’.3 Daughter Kathleen’s interest, however, was the inside back pages, to which Cousin Kate invited her community of young and literate ‘cousins’ to contribute stories, poems, letters and drawings. The first of these two letters (17 November 1900) is chatty and effusive, the handiwork of a twelve-year-old gushing with news. Cousin Kate praised it as ‘splendidly long and interesting’.4 She was right. We learn that Father (Harold Beauchamp) has just had the tennis court at 75 built. There is more: postcard collecting, school activities (she is playing

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14   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Tweedledum in ‘Alice in Wonderland’). We hear of a family visit to the South Island, plagued by spring gales. She has just finished The Lady of the Forest by L. T. Meade, author of rollicking stories for Victorian girls. There is an echo of the South African War, presently being fought by Britain, with the help of loyal New Zealand troops. The stated names of the four Beauchamp canaries (Buller, ‘Bobs’, Kitchener and Major Robin) recognise British and New Zealand military heroes. Oh, and ‘the birds sing beautifully’.5 So what do we know of Cousin Kate, the object of this correspondence? More than a century later, she can be revealed as Elizabeth (Lizzie) Frost Rattray, a vigorous and pioneering woman journalist, prize-winning short-story writer and New Zealand suffragist. Thanks to adult editors like Rattray, Cousin Kathleen was already a beneficiary of a popular culture of children’s writing that flourished in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British ‘family’ newspapers, then closely copied in colonial New Zealand weeklies. Born Elizabeth Frost Fenton in Dunedin in 1855, she was educated in England and France. At twenty-five, she moved to Auckland and began an involvement in welfare organisations, such as the Young Women’s Institute, a forerunner of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA). She married prominent Auckland draper William Rattray in 1883, becoming an active fundraiser for good causes. In 1892, she was elected to the committee of the Auckland branch of the Women’s Franchise League, seeking votes for women. Star owner William Brett hired Rattray that same year to co-edit the New Zealand Graphic and Ladies’ Journal, a stylish new weekly notable for its lithographs and woodcuts. Part of the Star stable of newspapers based in Shortland Street near Auckland’s bustling waterfront, the paper endorsed the reforming Liberal administration. Despite the editorial focus on colonial ‘society’, Rattray worked hard for women’s causes: her biography records that [she] was able to use her position to influence the lives of women . . . not only were there pages on fashion and social etiquette, but also discussions concerning controversial feminist issues such as the franchise and the involvement of women in a wider range of occupations and sporting activities.6

Rattray even harnessed the children’s page for fundraising, encouraging ‘cousins’ to contribute to the Graphic’s ‘Cot Fund’, a charitable enterprise furnishing some NZ$5,000 a year in today’s money to maintain a bed in Auckland Hospital for economically deprived children. Another side of the Graphic was its strong literary bent: serialised British novels and short stories by Rudyard Kipling and others. The package succeeded: a New Zealand newspaper historian calls it ‘the most outstanding illustrated journal of the Victorian era’.7 What is notable about Cousin Kathleen’s second letter (8 June 1901) is its confident, playful tone. KM is eight months older, but by



‘cousin kate’  15

mid-1901, nearing thirteen, she seems grown up. Firstly, she shamelessly flatters Cousin Kate (‘what beautiful competitions you are now having’), working hard to ensure publication.8 Here are early flashes of KM’s lifetime knack, noted by JMM, of taking on a personality to please a correspondent.9 A hilariously egotistical side emerges, as she makes up stories of her garden: ‘The border is double purple primroses, and my initial “K” is in white primroses in the centre.’10 The letter then takes a personal turn with an intriguing aside: ‘I was very pleased that my mother met you in Auckland.’11 Was this linked to the pair’s enduring interest in the franchise? In 1893, the year New Zealand women got the vote, Mrs Beauchamp played a little-known activist role, galvanising a group of fellow Karori suffragettes to have women registered on the electoral rolls for that year’s election.12 It is more likely, however, that in 1901 she encountered Rattray at an Auckland function while accompanying husband Harold on his extensive travels with the highpowered Royal Commission investigating New Zealand’s federation with Australia. Cousin Kathleen, meanwhile, was more interested in talking about Jimmy, her cat, and plans to make ‘toffy’. She asks Cousin Kate if she might write another story for the Christmas Page. She had already contributed one story, ‘His Little Friend’ (17 October 1900), also discovered in 2016.13 But a search of the relevant Graphic for 1901 yields nothing. It seems that after the brief glory of publication, she had graduated from the cousinhood. But this precious sheaf of juvenilia from the dawn of a new century, laden with rare biographical detail, makes a striking, even indelible, contribution to our understanding of her Thorndon childhood. Thanks to Cousin Kate, Kathleen Beauchamp, published writer, was already on her way. Redmer Yska Notes  1. Yska 2017.  2. New Zealand Graphic and Ladies’ Journal, 23 January 1897.  3. New Zealand Graphic and Ladies’ Journal, 7 June 1902.  4. New Zealand Graphic and Ladies’ Journal, 17 November 1900.  5. Ibid.  6. Graham, n.p.  7. Tye, pp. 203–43.  8. New Zealand Graphic and Ladies’ Journal, 8 June 1901.  9. Quoted in Stead 1977, p. 16. 10. New Zealand Graphic and Ladies’ Journal, 8 June 1901. 11. Ibid. 12. Yska, p. 111. 13. Ibid., pp. 220–6.

16   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [17 November 1900] [‘Children’s Page’, The New Zealand Graphic, p. 950.] Dear Cousin Kate, – I must apologise for not writing to you for so long. When are you going to have another story competition? I should very much like to go in for one. We have been having very bad weather, raining, or else a howling gale of wind. I have just finished ‘The Lady of the Forest’, by L. T. Meade.1 I have enjoyed it very much. We are having a play at school called ‘Alice, in Wonderland’. I am to be Tweedledum.2 Might I write another story for the Children’s Page? I was very pleased to see mine in print.3 We are having an asphalt tennis court made. Do you play tennis? I do not collect stamps, but postcards. I know cousin Zaidie very well. She has a splendid collection. My sister collects also. We have a museum at school, and a society called the Natural History Society, and on fine Saturdays this society goes for expeditions to the seaside and collects shells, etc. It is very interesting. We have four canaries at home. Their names are Buller, ‘Bobs’, Kitchener and Major Robin. They (the birds) sing beautifully. I think that ‘Jungle Jinks’ in the ‘Graphic’, are very comical.4 I went for a trip lately to Timaru.5 We were two days outside the harbour waiting for calm weather. When we were there we went for a drive and both horses fell down in the middle of the road. However, nothing very terrible came of it, for the driver touched them with his whip and they went on again perfectly all right. I must close now. – Hoping to see my letter in the ‘Graphic’, and with much love to the cousins, I remain your loving Cousin Kathleen. Notes 1. L. T. Meade was the pseudonym of the popular and hugely prolific Irish writer and magazine editor Elizabeth Meade (1844–1914), known mostly for her writing for girls, although she also successfully co-authored a range of novels in different genres. Her active public engagement in the promotion of women’s emancipation can also be felt in her novels, notable for their keen attentiveness to proactive, industrious female protagonists with broadranging psychological depth and public activities. It is easy to see why her 1902 novel The Lady of the Forest, listed as ‘A Story for Girls’, appealed to the young KM: not only does it mix the genres of enchanted forest fantasy life, fairy tale, romance and an adventure enjoyed by two sisters, but the elder of the two, and the main focaliser, is a very appealing, spirited and vividly imaginative girl named Kitty. 2. KM was a pupil at ‘Miss Swainson’s’, a private ‘finishing’ school for girls (see Kimber 2016, pp. 82–92). The school play was clearly an amalgamation of Carroll’s two masterpieces, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871), since the memorable Tweedledee and Tweedledum duo feature in the latter novel. 3. ‘His Little Friend’ (17 October 1900). See Yska’s Introduction, above. 4. ‘Jungle Jinks’ was a long-running cartoon story first created by the British illustrator Arthur White in 1898; it recounted the adventures of a group of children and their schoolteacher, metamorphosed into animals. It began as a



‘cousin kate’  17

feature in a supplement for children, distributed by an associated magazine or newspaper, before becoming a comic magazine in its own right in 1923. It lasted in this format until 1947. The New Zealand Graphic was advertised in the New Zealand press as ‘an ideal weekly magazine and newspaper combined’ that endeavoured to provide ‘something of special and particular interest to every individual reader’. See, for example, Auckland Star, 1903, XXXIV: 66, p. 7. It is not, unfortunately, available via the extensive ‘Papers Past’ database provided by the National Library of New Zealand. 5. Timaru, originally a Maori settlement, as the name implies, was a port town south of Canterbury on the South Island, New Zealand.

[8 June 1901] [‘Children’s Page’, The New Zealand Graphic, p. 1098.] Dear Cousin Kate, – What beautiful competitions you are now having. My great chum, Irene Jameson,1 is staying with me for the term holidays, and is now, as you see, writing to you. We have a dear little kitten called ‘Jimmy’, pure black except for a white tip to his tail. Every morning he comes upstairs with the morning tea, and expects to be rewarded with a piece of bread and butter. This dear little puss is on the table beside me now, and is playing with the blotting-paper. He had pulled over the ink, so excuse this smudge. I have such a pretty garden. The border is double purple primroses, and my initial ‘K’ is in white primroses in the centre. We have been having good weather, which is most unusual for the May holidays. Might I write another story for the ‘Christmas Page’? I was very pleased to hear that my mother met you in Auckland. I really must conclude now as Irene and myself are going to make toffy. Love to all the cousins and the same to yourself. – I am, your loving cousin, Kathleen Beauchamp. P.S – We are sending the pictures which we coloured. Note 1. KM’s ‘great chum’ and schoolmate Eadgyth Irene Jameson (known as Irene) was five months older – born on 27 May 1888. Like the Beauchamps, the Jamesons shone bright in Wellington ‘Society’: father James ran an insurance company, devoting his life to good works including the SPCA. Irene married John Burns in 1912, but died a widow aged 35. (With thanks to Redmer Yska for supplying this information.)

Alexander Kay (1854–1932)

Introduction Once KM left New Zealand for England in July 1908, it was Alexander Kay, manager of the London branch of the Bank of New Zealand from 1910 to 1921, whom her father entrusted with her monthly allowance (which she frequently referred to as her ‘Kay money’),1 together with his request that Kay keep an eye on his wayward daughter and forward any information about her that he felt her father should know. Harold Beauchamp’s Reminiscences state: Arrangements were made through the London manager of the Bank of New Zealand [. . .] for a yearly allowance of £100, payable monthly in London. This was ample to make her secure against want, and I know that it did. Mr. Alexander Kay, the London manager [. . .] acted as both father and trusted advisor.2

Indeed, as Alpers notes, following KM’s arrival in London in August 1908, ‘Once a month she was entitled to visit Mr. Kay, at the Bank of New Zealand in Queen Victoria Street, to collect her £8 6s 8d (plus a wink or two, for he was man of the world).’3 According to Ida Baker, Kay occasionally overstepped the bounds of propriety in his initial dealings with KM, ‘extending his protection to an invitation to visit one of his private haunts, where he gave her a glass of sherry and chatted of his latest amatory adventures’. She then adds, however, that ‘He could not help himself and was basically a very kind man.’4 Whenever she was abroad, KM’s monthly allowance was sent to her by Kay. Occasionally he would inform her that her father had raised her allowance, as KM explains here, in a letter to her father dated 6 March 1916: He [Kay] wrote me today, telling me the good news . . ‘Extremely generous of your father’. He is awfully kind in sending on all my letters promptly and always with a cheering little note and a very large, powerful signature.5

Not just her father’s ‘spy’, however, Kay would play an important role in KM’s adult life. He was nearly always reliable, and Mansfield

    18



alexander kay  19

at times used him as a poste restante, an occasional purveyor of family gossip and an avuncular shoulder to cry on, always believing him to be someone who could be counted on in times of distress or anxiety. In March 1910, for example, ill with she what thought was ‘rheumatism’ in Rottingdean (in fact the side effects of the gonorrhoea she had unknowingly contracted from Floryan Sobieniowski in Bavaria in 1909), and being looked after by Baker, according to Tomalin, ‘they were forced to turn to Mr Kay, who took the trouble to come down and see the Sussex doctor, assuring him that all the bills would be settled’.6 When KM left for Italy in September 1919, she was so ill that she wrote a letter to JMM setting out her instructions regarding her belongings, should she die. She left the letter with Kay at the bank, and it was passed on to JMM after her death.7 Letters were frequently sent to Kay to forward to the constantly itinerant KM, as she notes here in a letter to her sister Vera: ‘all my letters etc. go to our good Mr Kay at the bank and he sends them on to me’.8 She would occasionally be summoned to the bank ‘by a mysterious note’, as, for example, on 15 December 1914, when Kay handed her five sovereigns as a Christmas present from her father, telling her to ‘Run away and buy yourself some fish and chips for your Christmas dinner.’9 Kay’s office at the Bank of New Zealand was the scene of the first meeting between KM and her brother Leslie in London in February 1915, the latter having just arrived in England to join the war effort. Both siblings had, quite by chance, gone to Kay’s office at exactly the same time. It was Kay, who, just a few months later, on 11 October 1915, would send KM a telegram breaking the terrible news that her brother had died on 6 October in Belgium in a hand grenade accident. And Kay it was who cabled her parents in Wellington in April 1918, to announce the grave tidings that KM had been confirmed as having tuberculosis, and who was given immediate authority by them to cover any future medical expenses that might arise. In a letter to Harold Beauchamp dated 18 April 1918, he recounted in graphic detail the state of KM’s health following her return from Paris, having been confined there during the German bombardment of the capital, whilst trying desperately to return to London. It is worth quoting at length for the information it offers as to his duty of care of KM at all times, and the trust both father and daughter placed in him: Her arrangements for coming back from Bandol went smoothly until she reached Paris, where, unfortunately, she was held up for nearly three weeks, no civilians beyond Couriers and King’s Messengers being allowed to travel. Meantime, the Germans large long range guns were battering the city at intervals of a quarter of an hour by day and night. In addition to this dreadful experience the French ration scheme brought her almost to the brink of Starvation. Butter at 12/6d. per lb. and other articles of food correspondingly high. I appealed to my friend, Sir Thomas Mackenzie, High Commissioner for New Zealand, to use his influence in every possible direction with the view

20   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 of Kathleen being allowed to proceed to London by the earliest opportunity. Whether it is due to Sir Thomas’s efforts or not, Kass got over here a few days ago and I have seen her twice. As you know, I would be the last one to send you depressing news, but I really feel it is my duty to inform you that she is looking very ill indeed and has lost as much as two stone in weight. This of course, may be partly due to the trying time she had in Paris, but to-day she told me that her Doctor has ordered her to live either at Hampstead or Highgate as her lung trouble has developed, and she is threatened with Consumption. When I say threatened, I fear it is stating the case mildly. She recognises that she must take the greatest care of herself.10

However, some time in the spring of 1921, Kay had – either by accident or deliberately – sent KM’s bank passbook to her father in New Zealand, who subsequently sent it back to his daughter. This breach of protocol, and subsequent fear that her financial matters were no longer private, led JMM to write to KM: It’s very nice of your Pa to return it as sent apparently in error – I mean that’s a gentleman’s behaviour – but by what earthly right does Alex. Kay send a copy of your private account to New Zealand? If I were you, Tiggy, I would bank all other moneys except the allowance with another bank.11

This action was carried out, the trust having been broken. Nevertheless, until he left the bank in 1921, the importance of Kay in KM’s daily life cannot be understated. Gerri Kimber Notes  1. See, for example, her letter to JMM, 26 January 1918.  2. H. Beauchamp, pp. 200–1.  3. Alpers 1980, p. 71  4. Baker, p. 37.  5. CL1, p. 229.  6. Tomalin, p. 78.  7. KM to JMM, 9 September 1919.  8. CL1, pp. 300–1. 26 February 1916.  9. KM to Harold Beauchamp, CL1, p. 229. 10. ATL, MS-Papers-3985-06, Harold Beauchamp – Correspondence. 11. Hankin, pp. 337–8. 26 May 1921.



alexander kay  21

[6 February 1921] [Parker]

6 ii 1921

VILLA ISOLA BELLA GARAVAN MENTON A/M

Dear Mr Kay, May I please have my pass book sent to me as soon as is possible?1 I am not quite certain what monies I have in the Bank & I must pay out a large amount this month. I am sitting up proper for the first time today – in bed, still, however. Jack has been over with me. He returned to London this morning, but only to fix up things preparatory to his coming out here permanently. My health is so precarious just now that it seems the only way to make sure he won’t be late for the funeral! But one never knows. I feel I shall tire my audience out & last for goodness knows how many rounds more. I hope so. With very best wishes & love               Yours ever                 Cathy. Note 1. The passbook was a bound and printed ledger issued by a bank to each account holder. It was used to identify customers at the counter of a branch, and to record all transactions.

Hugh Kingsmill (Lunn) (1889–1949)

Introduction In the memorable words of his life-long friend, William Gerhardi, Hugh Kingsmill was made for open spaces. His voice would carry well across a prairie. He would do well as Wotan summoning his vassals to his side in a loud persistent war cry. All the Lunns have resonant voices, said to be the result of rounding up tourists. For Hugh Kingsmill Lunn (to give him his full name) is the second son of Sir Henry Lunn, while George Lunn is his uncle.1

Kingsmill was born in Bloomsbury, the second son of the founder of Lunn’s Tours, the pioneering travel agency and ski-holiday company which, in March 1922, would invite KM and her cousin Elizabeth von Arnim to stay at one of their mountain resorts in Switzerland and give a series of lectures as part of their arts and health-promoting summer programme. The invitation was declined.2 Kingsmill would not appear to have masterminded the invitation, and, as the early adoption of his middle name in preference to ‘Lunn’ suggests, tended to evolve outside his family’s more illustrious, wealthier and Methodist–philanthropist circles. Preferring the ‘lesser’ path was almost a leitmotif throughout his life. After a promising early start at Harrow and an exhibition to New College, Oxford, he gave up his studies and registered anew, much more happily and more successfully, at Trinity College, Dublin. It was in the early 1910s, at the beginning of the Rhythm era, that Kingsmill crossed paths with JMM and KM. Frank Harris had quickly lionised him, as he did a number of young writers and artists, particularly if they had private means, and they would all congregate at Dan Rider’s bookshop.3 They remained on warm terms after the major fall-out with Harris, and when Kingsmill enlisted in the war as a cyclist in early 1915, he tried, and almost managed, to incite JMM to follow suit.4 Their ways then parted; Kingsmill received a commission in 1916, but hardly had he arrived in France than he was captured and spent the rest of the war as a prisoner in Germany. His fellow officers remembered him most for his overwhelming clumsiness in word as much as gesture, as

    22



hugh kingsmill  23

well as ‘a certain ebullient naturalness’;5 if these traits hardly boded well for a soldier, they would later prove the key to his subtlety as a writer, in Gerhardi’s opinion, able to trample on everything ‘in mere inadvertency’, and perceive ‘exactly what forces, what interests were implicated in life’,6 all with the sensitivity of Beethoven. Kingsmill lived as a writer, literary editor and man of letters throughout his life, but excelled in the marginal and secondary genres which afforded him little acclaim beyond specialised circles. It was as an essayist, biographical critic and biographer that he made his mark, often experimenting in quirky, imaginative and maverick modes for these writings: for instance, The Return of William Shakespeare (1929) has a hypothetical, time-capsule element which left readers perplexed. His demythologising but acutely perceptive biography of Frank Harris offers a potted psychological study that possibly captures Harris’s rumbustious and inventive ways better than a balanced, objective study.7 He also collaborated with Gerhardi on a very inventive biographical study of Casanova, written in the form of a defence lawyer’s case in court.8 As in his essays, critical writings and other biographies, such formal play fascinates and can often be found brilliant, but it has tended to have a dissuasive effect on more mainstream readers. Only Kingsmill’s biographies of Dickens and D. H. Lawrence were held up as being landmark contributions to their field.9 Claire Davison Notes 1. Gerhardi, pp. 327–8. 2. See the exchange of letters between KM and her cousin in CL1, pp. 49–50. 3. See Introduction to Frank Harris in CL1, pp. 607–9, and Introduction to Dan Rider below, p. 520. 4. See BTW, p. 296. 5. Gerhardi, p. 328. 6. Ibid. 7. See Kingsmill 1932. 8. See Gerhardi and Kingsmill 1934. 9. See Kingsmill 1934 and 1938. See also Holroyd 1964.

[September–October 1912] [BL] Runcton Cottage Runcton Near Chichester Dear Lunn,1 Thanks awfully. We read your essay last night – rather, Tiger read it aloud while I sat and admired. . . . . . . But quite seriously, I liked

24   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 it – ’cept when it felt ‘mannered’ – the emotion – the faltering throughout throughout I liked immensely, I think that was admirably done. Come & see us one day I mean for a weekend. I think it is lovely and delightful here – there are endless fields and little rivers and green and silver trees & we are growing in all manner of graces + working + walking + eating + finding all the funny simple things that dance in this delicious2 world. Yours ever ‘KM.’ Notes 1. The extant manuscript, although signed ‘KM’, is a copy transcribed by JMM, suggesting quite how interchangeable they could be in their early co-editorial work. 2. JMM notes ‘oblivious’ in a pencil-added annotation, implying doubts when transcribing the original (untraced) letter.

Alfred A. Knopf Sr (1892–1984)

Introduction ‘I love books physically’, wrote Alfred Knopf in his 1917 catalogue, ‘and I want to make them beautifully.’1 He was then a young, intrepid entrepreneur who, in partnership with his soon-to-be wife, Blanche Wolf, had founded his own New York-based publishing company just two years previously. Their partnership was to prove one of the most eminent, visionary and pioneering American book publishers of the twentieth century. After initially reading law at university and following in a family tradition of marketing, the young Alfred soon veered towards his real passion, reading, and determined to make a career of it. If the impressive list of authors he was publishing within the first years bears witness to his flair and efficiency, he gradually focused on the business and executive side of the company, entrusting his wife with the more literary side of things: relations with authors, manuscripts, editing and production. In the letters they exchanged, KM’s regular inclusion of greetings to ‘Mrs Knopf’ doubtless acknowledges the true balance of power and responsibility at the company, even though it bore the name of only one partner: Alfred A. Knopf. They were to be the only American publishers of her works during her lifetime, publishing Bliss and Other Stories in 1921 and The Garden Party and Other Stories in 1922; they brought out The Doves’ Nest and Other Stories following her death, in August 1923. Also the American publisher of JMM, Knopf continued as the publisher of KM’s poetry, stories and journals in the posthumous editions edited by JMM. Professional dealings notwithstanding, it is clear that KM and Alfred Knopf had much in common, even though the closest contact they ever had would appear to be attending the same party in London in 1912, via the intermediary of Frank Harris, who was then JMM’s mentor.2 Knopf had made the trans-Atlantic journey to meet John Galsworthy, with whom he had been exchanging letters; once in London, he proved keen to meet and acquire new works by as many established and emerging British-based authors as he could, many of whom he later recommended for publication in the States. He and KM thus shared a striking passion for London’s literary world and English literature. Knopf’s Anglophilia

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26   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 indeed riled some of his contemporaries, even if he later became the champion and publisher of many of the most outstanding American authors of the twentieth century. They would also have shared a sharp sense of being, in the eyes of many, outsiders. Knopf did not encounter colonial snobbery, but throughout his career, coming from a family of Polish Jewish emigrants, he was to come up against the prejudices of antisemitism, even from the authors he published. Another passion that Knopf and KM had in common – whether they had the opportunity to discuss it or not – was European literature. The company’s very first publication, in fact, was a translation of four French plays, which at the time was quite risky, with little guarantee of commercial success. However, Knopf clearly knew how to create a niche in the market. Like KM’s, his literary sights were fixed further east: Czech, Polish and above all Russian literature. A 1916 advert for the company, published less than a year after its foundation, announces: Alfred A. Knopf, 220 West 42nd Street, New York specializes in the publication of translations from the Russian and books about Russia. Ten volumes were published last Fall. Six will be ready this Spring, the first two of them being: Great Russia, by Charles Sarolea [. . .] and A Hero of our Time.3

Like KM in her London days, Knopf was also renowned for sometimes eccentric dress and bold style. Aesthetics and design would also become a trademark of his books. While the iconic Borzoi colophon had not yet appeared (it was first used in 1925), the Russian wolfhound was already part of the company’s idiom in KM’s day. Having started as Alfred and Blanche’s chosen pet, it became, in 1921, the official name of the company’s annual yearbook, a stylish blend of catalogue and literary sampler, in a handsome binding. As KM’s first letter to Knopf shows, she wrote thanking him for ‘the perfectly charming Borzoi book’ which she read ‘with great interest and pleasure’ (pp. 27–8). The Borzoi 1920 is, as the subtitle indicates, ‘a sort of record of five years’ publishing’; a sleek woodcutting of a running Borzoi hound completes the title page. A brief perusal of the contents page confirms that KM’s words of thanks are no idle gesture. A moving introduction by Maxim Gorky (first published in the Athenaeum and translated by S. S. Koteliansky),4 and especially written contributions by writers such as Willa Cather (‘On the Art of Fiction’) and H. M. Tomlinson (‘A Memory of Ypres’) are likely to have caught her eye; another notable feature is Joseph Hergesheimer’s ‘Note on the Chinese Poems by Arthur Waley’, which KM had also read and enjoyed.5 As for the volume’s ‘selected passages from Borzoi books’, authors listed include a great many of KM’s friends, associates and contemporaries: Conrad Aiken, Louis Couperus, Walter de la Mare (a page from ‘The Three Mullar Mulgars’, which she particularly liked), T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, W. H. Hudson and J. C. Squire.6 Design and typography remained at the forefront of Knopf’s publishing ideals throughout his career, and this visual appeal and material quality, combined with a dazzling ability to pick up on emerging writers and launch



alfred a. knopf   27

their careers, are what assured the company’s financial success and intellectual prestige, which could also go hand in hand with spotting potential bestsellers and pioneering novelties. Although his name was always the one that caught the reading and editing public’s eye, his own later testimonies, plus eye-witness accounts over the decades, suggest that much of the literary flair was Blanche’s, and a recently published biography of his wife insists heavily on this disparity.7 Whatever the case, the couple’s personal and professional dissensions gradually weakened the company in the more ruthlessly competitive years of the later twentieth century. By the time Alfred Knopf died in 1984, their son had broken away to found a publishing company of his own, and Alfred A. Knopf Ltd had been incorporated into a larger New York business – Random House. Claire Davison Notes 1. Quoted by McGrath, p. vii. 2. For KM’s letters to Harris and a biographical portrait, see CL1, pp. 607–10. See also the biography of Harris by Hugh Kingsmill, the opening scene of which depicts the fraught emotional entanglements surrounding JMM’s early admiration of his mentor: 1932, pp. 9–12. 3. New York Times, 20 February 1916, p. 58. 4. The extract was part of the great Russian writer and publisher Maxim Gorky’s Preface to the first catalogue of the Moscow publishing house ‘World Literature’, founded by Gorky himself to propagate both Russian and new Soviet literature abroad and foreign literatures in the immediate post-Revolution era. Its more pressing purpose was to provide work for impoverished writers and intellectuals. The Athenaeum had published the extract on 11 June 1920. 5. See KM’s letter to Elizabeth von Arnim in CL1, pp. 28–9. 6. Knopf 1920. See in particular pp. i–xiv. 7. See Claridge 2016.

[20 November 1920] [HRC]

20 xi 1920

Villa Isola Bella Garavan Menton France.

Alfred A. Knopf, Esq. Dear Sir, I am very happy to know that you have decided to publish ‘Bliss’ – my book of short stories which Constable is bringing out in England.

28   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 I hope it may find a little favour with American readers and that you will not regret your decision. May I say how much I admire the appearance of your books? I have just seen a copy of Miss Willa Cather’s ‘Youth & the Bright Medusa’.1 Before one opened it one was interested – more than attracted. One felt a positive sympathy for the work of an unknown author. And after one had read it one turned with fresh appreciation to your delightful ‘introduction’ – in the widest sense of the word.2 She is an extremely interesting writer – Yours faithfully Katherine Mansfield. Notes 1. The stylish appeal of Knopf publications quickly drew successful authors to entrust their forthcoming works to the new publishing house. The American novelist, poet, short-story writer and journalist Willa Cather (1873–1947), famous for her depictions of farming life and pioneer settlements in her native Nebraska, was one such example. Since she was still under contract to her former publishers for her novels, Knopf suggested that he could take on an anthology of short stories; her Youth and Bright Medusa collection became one of the highlights of his 1920 catalogue. 2. Knopf had not, of course, written the Introduction to Cather’s short stories; KM presumably refers here to the 1920 chapbook, which she also admired immensely. See above, p. 26.

[10 January 1921] [HRC]

10 i 1921

Villa Isola Bella Garavan, Menton France

Dear Mr Knopf, Very many thanks for your letter and for the perfectly charming Borzoi book.1 I have read it with great interest & pleasure. Its a delightful idea – to give a party for your authors & invite their readers to come, too, and just what the readers long to have happen – – – I hope you are a little bit unduly pessimistic about my book.2 If I may say so – it has had a very good press indeed over here – and there is every sign that it is a biggish success. Would it be worth while my sending you a few of the particularly favourable notices?



alfred a. knopf   29

I must say frankly I don’t think ‘Bliss’ deserved so much notice. I hope my next one will be a different affair altogether. I wish ‘Bliss’ were better – for all that. With Best Wishes to you for the New Year            Yours faithfully            Katherine Mansfield. Alfred A Knopf, Esq 220 West Forty Second Street New York. Notes 1. Knopf had sent KM a copy of the first of his company’s stylish chapbooks, The Borzoi 1920. See above, p. 26. 2. Knopf’s letter to KM about the manuscript of Bliss and Other Stories and the forthcoming publication would unfortunately not appear to have survived.

[15 February 1921] [HRC]

15 ii 1921.

VILLA ISOLA BELLA GARAVAN MENTON A/M.

Dear Mr Knopf, Very many thanks for your letter. The copy of Bliss style Borzoi has not fetched up yet.1 I shall like to see it. I hear from my publishers its still full of life & is in a third edition. There has even been a joke about it in The Pink ’Un.2 After that no one can ever call me a high brow! With kind regards Yours sincerely Katherine Mansfield. Notes 1. The design, typography, page layout and overall stylishness of Knopf editions was emblematic from the earliest days. 2. ‘Pink ’Un’ was the popular name for the Sporting Times. A number of mainstream newspapers featured a weekly supplement for sports coverage, printed on coloured paper, a practice that dates back to the late nineteenth century.

30   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [24 May 1921] [HRC] Permanent address c/o The Nation & The Athenaeum 10 Adelphi Terrace W.C.2 London

}

Hotel Beau Site Clarens-Montreux La Suisse.

24 v 1921

Dear Mr Knopf, Thank you for your letter. I am very sorry I shall not have the pleasure of seeing you and & Mrs Knopf in London. But Im here, on a Swiss balcony, taking my temperature in the sight of such immense mountains that its like taking one’s temperature in the eye of The Lord. And I shall not be able to escape for a year at least. My new book has been ‘held up’ but I hope to have it ready by the end of this month of May. . . . I should immensely have enjoyed a talk. With my best wishes for your happy visit Yours sincerely Katherine Mansfield.

[21 December 1921] [HRC] [illegible] is my permanent address for the present.

21 xii 1921

Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre Valais

Dear Mr Knopf, I have just had the pleasure of signing my agreement with you for the publication of The Garden Party. I am very happy that you have cared to take this book and I hope (for my American publisher’s sake first) it will do a little better than the other. ‘Bliss’, on this side of the water, was rather a success. In my opinion it was far too well received. It still breathes and is at present in Paris with Rose Macaulays Dangerous Ages and Brett Young’s Black Diamond,1



alfred a. knopf   31

these three books having been chosen to compete for the Femina Prize. But all my pennies are on Miss Macaulay – who deserves it May I take this opportunity of wishing you a Happy New Year Yours sincerely Katherine Mansfield. Note 1. KM’s Bliss and Other Stories had been shortlisted for the prestigious French ‘Prix Femina – Vie heureuse’, awarded annually for an ‘imaginative’ work in English by a jury made up exclusively of women writers and intellectuals. As she indicates, the jury’s final choice was between F. Brett Young’s The Black Diamond and Rose Macaulay’s novel, Dangerous Ages (both 1921). Her prediction here was well founded – Macaulay was indeed declared the prize-winner. Francis Brett Young (1884–1954) had started out as a doctor who had served in the medical corps during the war. As a result of injuries sustained overseas, he relied on the second passion in his life, writing, becoming a respected novelist, poet and playwright, and also a composer. Most of his works reflects his travels and the various places in Britain he knew well; The Black Diamond is one of the Mercian series, depicting life in the Midlands. Like Brett Young, Rose Macaulay (1881–1958) came from the Midlands, but travelled widely in her youth and grew up in part in Italy. Her interest in travel writing was to inflect on her fictional style too, but wit and satire quickly became her characteristic touch, the classic examples being Potterism (1920), which depicts popular culture and contemporary mindsets with incisive irony, and Dangerous Ages, a wickedly wry portrayal of fashionable psychoanalysis.

[20 January 1922] [HRC] Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre Valais 20 i 1922 Dear Mr Knopf Very many thanks for your letter. I am sending you by today’s mail a set of corrected proofs of The Garden Party.1 I think they are in good order. I am only sorry that I did not know before that these proofs could be useful to you; I could have sent them six weeks ago. My reason for wanting proofs was that the London typist to whom I sent typed copies of M.S.S. for her to duplicate only, took terrible pity on my spelling, and on the bad grammar used by my little children.2 I only discovered this

32   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 when I received my English proofs; the original M.S.S. had gone off to The Mercury.3 I fully appreciate all you say about the advisability of English and American editions of the same book appearing at the same time. But I am a little bit helpless personally. If Constable4 were to delay my book after February it would be swamped in the spring floods. Its only chance is to appear before March, and it has been announced so often that I don’t feel I can even suggest a postponement this time . . . They are bringing out a limited edition of signed copies, too. But that wont affect American sales . . . I shall see that my next book is submitted to you at the earliest possible moment. But that does not help this one – does it? I am truly sorry. It seems to me the best idea would be to have the American edition published before the English one. I hope this can be arranged with my third book. With kind regards to you and Madame in which John Murry joins me Yours sincerely Katherine Mansfield. Notes 1. The American edition of The Garden Party and Other Stories was published on 26 May 1922. 2. The ‘little children’ are the endearing Burnell and Samuel Joseph children from ‘At the Bay’, whose idiosyncratic language is represented very naturally throughout. See in particular Section IX, CW2, pp. 361–4. 3. ‘At the Bay’ was published by J. C. Squire in the London Mercury on 27 January 1922, pp. 239–65. 4. Constable & Company were KM’s London publishers, then based jointly in Westminster and Edinburgh.

[18 March 1922] [HRC]

18 iii 1922

Victoria Palace Hotel 6/8 rue Blaise Desgoffe Rue de Rennes Paris

Dear Mr Knopf, Many thanks for your letter and for the copy of your Spring list which looks delightful. What a fine blue you have used for the cover; one cannot look away from it when it is on the table.



alfred a. knopf   33

I am sending you a few of my first reviews of The Garden Party.1 It has been successful so far. I think its possible the tide has turned in favour of short stories. But perhaps thats the optimism of one who loves that form. With kind regards Yours sincerely Katherine Mansfield Note 1. By early March, the volume had been positively reviewed in journals such as the Daily Chronicle, Daily News, TLS and Observer. A memorably crushing review by Mary Hamilton was published in Time and Tide on 3 March.

[11 August 1922] [HRC]

ii viii 1922

c/o The Nation & The Athenaeum 10 Adelphi Terrace London W.C.2.

Dear Mr Knopf I wonder if you would be good enough to send me a copy of The Garden Party. I should very much like to see it in its American Dress. It would be nice to know whether it has been successful at all. I have seen three or four reviews which were fairly favourable, & one from the New York World by a man who hated me so much that I felt quite friendly.1 With my kind regards to Mrs Knopf & yourself Yours v. sincerely Katherine Mansfield. Note 1. The New York Times had published a short but glowing review on 4 June 1922, and the New York Tribune listed the volume among its ‘Ten Best Sellers’ (23 July, p. 5). The ‘New York World’ man has unfortunately not been traced.

Samuel Solomonovich Koteliansky (1880–1955)

Introduction Samuel Solomonovich Koteliansky (‘Kot’ to his friends) was a Ukrainian Jew, born and raised in Ostropol, a shtetl within the Pale of Settlement. After four years (1906–10) at the Kiev Commercial Institute, he left for London in July 1911, never to return home. ‘I came for three months, and I stayed for ever,’ he recalled.1 By 1912 he had found work as a translator at the Russian Law Bureau in High Holborn. Had he not met and been befriended by D. H. Lawrence in 1914 on a walking tour of the Lake District, he might have had far fewer opportunities to exercise his self-proclaimed capacity for friendship. He had certain temperamental affinities with DHL – not least an Old Testament moral absoluteness – and became one of his most frequent correspondents, and perhaps his most trusted. Leonard Woolf, who also worked with Kot on a number of translations for the Hogarth Press, recalled, soon after Kot’s death in 1955, lengthy arguments over a single word in search of ‘the exact shade of meaning’ and admitted ruefully: ‘You only learned to the full Kot’s intensity and integrity by collaborating with him in a Russian translation.’2 There is some uncertainty about the circumstances of KM’s first meeting with Kot. However, the dramatic account by Beatrice, Lady Glenavy, in Today We Will Only Gossip (1964) is widely cited. In October 1914, while Kot was staying with DHL and Frieda in their cottage (The Triangle, Bellingdon Lane) near Chesham, Buckinghamshire, Frieda quarrelled with DHL and fled on foot some three miles to the Murrys’ Rose Tree Cottage in The Lee, Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire. Some time later, a rain-soaked young woman in Wellington boots with her skirt tucked up (KM) appeared at DHL’s door to announce that Frieda would not be returning.3 Though this version of events – whose source was almost certainly KM herself – does not specify that Kot was introduced at the time, he soon became an important figure in her life, and one whose influence JMM would come to regret and later deemed ‘quite pernicious’ because ‘Kot fed what was false in her’.4 We know that by 29 January 1915 KM admitted that ‘I rather cling to him’,5 and that he had begun giving her

    34



s. s. koteliansky   35

presents – usually a reliable sign of a burgeoning romantic interest. He first bought her chocolates, cigarettes, and even a Russian skirt or dress, gifts she acknowledged in her first letter to him [undated, but from 1 February 1915], signed ‘My love to you’. John Carswell goes further than most commentators in asserting that thereafter, for Kot, KM became ‘the great, unrequited and often regretted passion of his life’.6 Responding to the flirtatious tone of some letters, C. K. Stead suggests that her letters to Kot ‘seem designed to make him feel their relationship was potentially sexual, even when it wasn’t’.7 Antony Alpers, however, stresses Kot’s importance to KM ‘not as a lover, but in an oddly paternal way as a sort of father-figure, admirer-from-afar, and frowning disapprover’.8 This may, of course, have been a grudgingly accepted alternative role. Joanna Woods, on the other hand, sees their joint translation projects –especially the initial focus on the letters of Chekhov – as effecting nothing less than ‘a spiritual watershed in Mansfield’s life’,9 while Claire Davison sees it in more concrete terms as what she felicitously dubs ‘an exercise in strategic otherness’ that directly shaped KM’s best work, such as ‘the richly polyphonic drafts of “The Aloe” (later to become “Prelude”)’.10 KM’s letters to Kot, of course, help us understand their relationship and its vicissitudes; but among them we also find a wonderfully vivid – and much-cited – account (the letter of 11 May 1916) recording the tempestuous DHL–Frieda marriage in all its blow-by-blow detail. Indeed, so specific and well crafted is this as a composition that one is tempted to interpret it as a clever embellishment upon the facts. And there are undoubtedly places where the lines between fact and fantasy can be shown to blur. For example, in her letter of 28 November 1915, an evocative description of the landscape around her hotel in Cassis (‘high mountains covered with green pine trees. Tufts of rosemary [. . .] among the rocks and a tall flower with pink bells’) dissolves easily into a scene from Russian folklore: ‘Yesterday, in the middle of a forest, I found the hut on chicken legs [. . .] But I did not hear the spinning wheel.’ Here KM is signalling her familiarity with Slavic culture – the hut being the home of the wicked witch Baba Yaga – for an audience of one. KM’s first letter to Kot from Marseille (19 November 1915), soon after her abrupt departure from 5 Acacia Road, is more problematic, in large part because it pertains to her brother’s death the previous month. She asks Kot to keep one of her brother’s military caps for her, mentions his photograph on her mantelpiece, and receiving a second letter from the friend (James Hibbert) who was an eye-witness to the grenade accident that took her brother’s life. Apparently citing Hibbert’s letter, she tells Kot ‘and just before he died he said “Lift my head, Katy, I can’t breathe”’. For many years, it was believed by scholars that the friend’s

36   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 letter had not survived and the information in the letter to Kot was accepted as authoritative. Indeed, the belief that ‘his last words were addressed to her’ was taken by Antony Alpers as prima facie evidence of the ‘strong affinity’ between brother and sister.11 In fact, the letter from Hibbert survived in JMM’s archive of unpublished material that went to the ATL after his death, where it was read and cleverly incorporated by Stead into his novel, Mansfield (2004b): ‘But Leslie had not named her. He had asked his friend to lift his head – that was all. The “Katie” [sic] was invention.’12 The Café Royal incident in late August 1916, when KM, in the company of Kot and painter Mark Gertler, ‘rescued’ a copy of DHL’s Amores, might be construed as a high point in the KM–Kot–DHL relationship, and it was famously written into DHL’s Women in Love on the strength of Kot’s letter to DHL. Then, mysteriously, there was no contact, epistolary or otherwise, between September 1916 and September 1918. ‘The twoyear estrangement between Katherine and Koteliansky has never been fully explained,’13 writes Joanna Woods, and there seems, in fact, to have been a multiplicity of factors – DHL’s growing impatience with, and Kot’s long-standing dislike of, JMM; Kot’s bouts of depression and his dashed hopes that KM would leave JMM for good (as seemed likely in July); and the petty mistakes and misunderstandings on all sides that were inevitably amplified through gossip and epistolary repetition. By 7 November 1916, DHL assured Kot, with characteristic vehemence, ‘I have done with the Murries, both, for ever – so help me God,’14 and thus the former friends lapsed into self-imposed silence. Kot’s own puzzlingly inexplicit account of the causes of their disaffection was prompted by Gertler’s suggestion that the four of them meet in Hampstead. In response, Kot complains about ‘the wrong attitude that they had towards me’, and adds ‘it is not so easy to meet again those who have been something to you, and ceased, of their own individual faults, to be’.15 Yet, some time in September, when KM in effect summoned Kot from 2 Portland Villas with a cryptic telegram – ‘Come tonight, Katherine’, he complied and their friendship was quickly restored. They began their collaboration on the Chekhov letters for the Athenaeum, of which JMM had become editor in February 1919, and published the first batch on 4 April 1919. The last batch appeared at the end of October. While many of the relevant letters to Kot are businesslike, KM’s growing appreciation of Chekhov’s artistry in his ‘wonderful letters’ is also much in evidence. For her, one letter on the duty of the artist ‘opens – it discovers rather, a new world’ (6 June 1919); another excitedly proposes trying to publish their selection of Chekhov letters before Constance Garnett completes hers and sets the dullness and dishonesty of the English literary world against Chekhov’s body of work: ‘here is this treasure – at the wharf only not unloaded’ (? July 1919); and finally, in early August, she exclaims ‘A[nton]. T[Chekhov]. is my master!’ Increasingly unwell, KM drafted a will and moved first to the Italian, then to the French, Riviera. Her correspondence with Kot diminished



s. s. koteliansky   37

and became more strained at times, especially after she lost three of the manuscripts he sent her; but the surviving letters show her working hard to maintain their friendship: conjuring up details of his former office at the Russian Law Bureau; asking to be remembered as Kissienka or Katerina; sending him an inscribed photograph; and, crucially, soliciting his help in securing treatment by Dr Ivan Manoukhin, a Russian tuberculosis specialist in Paris. Despite his struggles with depression, Kot was unequivocally committed to their joint project, and had long wanted ‘a book bearing both our names [. . .] as a token of our perhaps uncommon friendship’.16 While she was living abroad, KM expressed her desire to see and talk with Kot, sometimes in long reflective letters, and suggested that he visit her. That never happened but, during her last stay in England, beginning in mid-August 1922, she met with her former editor, Orage, attended lectures by Ouspensky, and was able to enjoy ‘long talks over Russian tea at Kot’s kitchen table’.17 Yet she appears not to have broached her still crystallising plans with this best of friends: she hopes her letter of 19 October 1922 from Le Prieuré ‘will not surprise you too much’, and announces that she has ‘gone through a kind of private revolution’. When she died on 9 January 1923 in Gurdjieff’s Institute, surrounded by Russian speakers, Kot, the ‘Russian’ who mattered most to her, was unable to attend the funeral because he could not get a passport. J. Lawrence Mitchell Notes  1. Glenavy, p. 59.  2. L. Woolf 1955.  3. See Glenavy, p. 191.  4. Cited in Glenavy, p. 192.  5. CW4, p. 156.  6. Carswell, p. 101.  7. Stead 2004a, pp. 124–40 (p. 140).  8. Alpers 1980, p. 168.  9. Woods 2004, p. 55. 10. Davison 2014, pp. 172–3. 11. Alpers 1980, p. 186. 12. Stead 2004b, p. 80. 13. Woods 2001, p. 138. 14. Alpers 1980, p. 218. 15. Carrington, p. 161, 19 July 1918. 16. 26 September 1919. Cited in Woods 2001, p. 178. 17. Glenavy, p. 111.

38   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [1 February 1915] [BL] ROSE TREE COTTAGE, THE LEE, GT. MISSENDEN. Monday. Dear Kotilianski, When I opened the parcel I found your presents – The cigarettes in the charming little box and the chocolates. Thank you very much indeed for them. I am smoking one of the cigarettes now and the russian skirt fits well – I like it. Next Monday I am coming up to London for several days. I shall phone you and give you my address – That was a good idea of yours about Notting Hill; I am sure something will come of it.1 It is almost warm here today and there is at least threepenny worth of sun shining on my walls; in the field outside the window new grass lifts its myriad shining spears – We had a letter from Lawrence this morning2 – He sounds really very happy – and full of hopes – So there is one person at least for whom the war is over – Goodbye, My love to you Katherine. Notes 1. Koteliansky’s lodgings in London were unstable until he moved into KM’s house at 5 Acacia Road in November 1915; he had lived temporarily in the Notting Hill area in the first years of his arrival in London. Extant correspondence after September 1914 was addressed to him mostly at his work address, the Russian Law Bureau at 212 High Holborn, although he did also occupy lodgings there for a time. For a detailed account of these years, see Diment 2011, pp. 41–86. 2. After living close by, in the village of Chesham, DHL and his wife, Frieda, had moved to a cottage in Pulborough, Sussex, in January 1915; they stayed there until July, and by August had temporarily settled in London. Unfortunately, few of DHL’s letters to JMM from these years, and none to KM, have survived.

[4 February 1915] [BL] [Postcard] [Rose Tree Cottage, The Lee, Great Missenden] Will you be at the Bureau1 next Monday afternoon at about 4? Katherine



s. s. koteliansky   39

Notes 1. In the words of Koteliansky’s biographer, Koteliansky had put his bilingual skills to work at the Russian Law Bureau, or ‘Ruslabu’, as it was listed in the commercial section of the 1914 Post Office London Directory. Located at 212 High Holborn, the Bureau was run by a fellow Russian Jew, Ruvin (or Ruvim) Solomonovich Slatowsky, who is listed in the same directory as ‘Russian advocate’ (Diment 2011, p. 50).

[5 February 1915] [BL] [Rose Tree Cottage, The Lee, Great Missenden] Kotiliansky No, it is next Monday that I shall be in London – next Monday morning. I am sorry there has been a misunderstanding. Did I say so or did I write so – I don’t remember. Anyhow next week you can tell me yourself. I know I shall find good rooms next week with flowers growing on the window sills. Katherine. [On back of envelope] If you care to come down for the weekend – come, and we can go back to town together on Monday morning.

[26 February I915] [BL] [Rose Tree Cottage, The Lee, Great Missenden] Friday I shall not be in town until Monday. I have got such severe rheumatism that I can hardly move.1 What a stupid creature! Last night I wore my dress.2 You cannot think how much I like it. It is very lovely and there is something almost fairy in it. It makes me feel that wonderful adventures might happen if only one is dressed and ready – I did not realise until I reached home how many cigarettes you had given me. Kotiliansky, it is my turn to give presents, I am beginning to feel. Tell me – what shall I give? One thing if you want it is yours to keep. Don’t forget, among your many employers your loving friend                       Kissienka.3 Notes 1. This is one of KM’s first open avowals of what would gradually become crippling symptoms, which she first put down to rheumatic fever (an ailment her mother suffered from), rheumatism or arthritis, and later linked to her

40   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 tuberculosis, and which initially seem to have been triggered by prolonged flu (see CW4, pp. 156–8). Biographers have since linked the symptoms to undiagnosed gonorrhoea (Alpers 1980, p. 115; see also Baker, pp. 55; 115). 2. See KM’s diary records of her early 1915 meetings with Koteliansky and, in the context of war, his often lavish gifts, including a Russian skirt and Russian cigarettes (CW4, pp. 149–65). 3. This is doubtless the most intimate, and the most intimately Russian, of the nicknames that KM invented for herself at the time. This one was reserved for Koteliansky alone, and reflects the tenderness and sometimes flirtatious persona she fashioned for him, as well as her growing passion for things Russian.

[1 March 1915] [BL] [Rose Tree Cottage, The Lee, Great Missenden] Monday My dear Kotiliansky I hope you are not waiting for me today – for I am unable to come to come to London. My rheumatism1 still makes walking an impossibility – and I suffer very much. However I am in hopes that it will leave me suddenly and then I shall come. We are going to shut up this house and live in London until the summer. Jack has seen some rooms (rather, they were my idea) in Fitzroy Street & as soon as I am able to move I am going to see them. So we shall be in London quite soon & more or less permanently. This cottage is too cold & too depressing. Will you post the enclosed letter to Beatrice Hastings for me?2 And will you buy a postal order for 2 francs 50 for me and put it in the letter to Madame Masquelier3 – I will pay you when next we meet, but I can’t get foreign money orders here & this money must be paid. I hope I am not worrying my very busy friend. When we are settled in London we must have some good times together. Make up a little basket of dreams – will you – and I will, too, and we shall be ready, then. I feel about 800, Kotiliansky, for I can hardly walk at all – nor turn in my bed without crying out against my bones. Kissienka. Notes 1. See above, p. 39, n. 1. 2. Beatrice Hastings (1879–1943) remains to this day one of the shadowy, little researched and yet multi-faceted figures implicated in various strands of Anglo-French Modernism, but is often referenced as someone else’s muse, model or lover of little individual, independent importance. ‘Beatrice Hastings’ was but the best known of the many pseudonyms and pen-names she adopted in the course of her life, ‘Hastings’ supposedly being a first, hastily married and discarded, husband. Born Emily Alice Haigh in London, she was



s. s. koteliansky   41

raised in South Africa and spent much of her adult life in France. When KM met her, she was A. R. Orage’s lover, as well as literary assistant – or perhaps co-editor – on the New Age, which published nearly 400 of her contributions of the seven-year period of their collaboration; she and KM also co-authored a number of memorable satirical pieces (see CW3, pp. 387–92). By 1915, Hastings was settled in Paris, writing a regular column of war letters from the perspective of a civilian, under the pseudonym ‘Alice Morning’. In the eyes of various critics, this historically valuable and insightful collection constitutes some of her best writing. See also p. 40, n. 2. 3. KM was using Koteliansky as an extra go-between to send money via Beatrice Hastings to the Parisian Mme Masquelier, although the sum owed and the explanation are unclear. A curious French literary and biographical portrait of KM focusing on the last decade of her life records that Madame Masquelier was Francis Carco’s concierge at the flat on the Ile de la Cité, where KM had stayed just weeks earlier, before setting off on her memorable trip to Gray to meet Carco (see CL1, pp. 512–16). The author, Roland Merlin, claimed to have traced and interviewed a number of her contacts in France, including Mme Masquelier and the tenant from upstairs, both of whom had fond and insightful memories of the enigmatic ‘English’ woman who had come to stay. His investigations also took him to the UNESCO headquarters, where he interviewed Juliette Huxley, the French–Swiss wife of Julian Huxley. See Merlin 1950.

[8 March 1915] [BL] [Rose Tree Cottage, The Lee, Great Missenden] Monday. My dear Kotiliansky. I have wanted to write to you; you have been in my mind several days. Thank you for doing those things for me – the english money does not really matter. I am in bed. I am not at all well – Some mysterious pains seem to like me so well that they will not leave me . . All the same I am grateful to your Ancestral Grandfathers – for – for some curious reason I can work.1 Im writing quite quickly – and its good – Send me a little letter when you have the time. I have an idea that Lawrence will be in London today. It is very cold here. It is winter and the sky from my window looks like ashes. I hear my little maid go thumping about in the kitchen and when she is quiet I listen to the wind. My God, what poverty! So I write about hot weather and happy love and broad bands of sunlight and cafés – all the things that make life to me. Yes, you are quite right. I am wicked. Would it be very rude if I asked you to send me a few cigarettes? If it would – do not send them. Today I had a most lovely postcard sent me from my concierge in Paris2 – hand painted roses as big as cabbages – and so many of them they simply fall out of the vase!                   Always your friend                       Kissienka.

42   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Notes 1. Like many of his close friends – who were to include DHL, Leonard Woolf and H. G. Wells, KM was fascinated by Koteliansky’s immediate and distant family roots, both real and exoticised. He retained a firm belief in some of the age-old, popular wisdom and remedies that were part of his East European Jewish and Ukrainian heritage, and had clearly been passing some of this on to KM. 2. Madame Masquelier was the concierge at Francis Carco’s flat, 13 Quai aux Fleurs, in Paris, where KM had stayed earlier that month. See above, p. 41, n. 3.

[10 March 1915] [BL] [Rose Tree Cottage, The Lee, Great Missenden] Wednesday late afternoon. Your parcel came at midday. You cannot think in what dramatic circumstances. I was ‘up’ for the first time and downstairs and because of my hideous wickedness I had begun to cry dreadfully – that is quite true – when in walked the cigarettes – the chocolates and the thrice blessed little bottle of whiskey.1 So I drank some whiskey & smoked a cigarette and dried my eyes & sent you a very superior form of blessing – which I hope you caught safely. I have asked Frieda2 if she can put me up this weekend – I am coming to London on Friday, mon cher ami,3 and I will come then and see you a moment – But if you go to the Lawrences on Saturday and if Frieda will have me it will be – to quote Kotiliansky, a russian friend of mine – ‘very very nice’ – I am glad that you liked the Little Governess4 – but wait. Ive written such different things just lately – much much better – and I am going on writing them. Jack sends you his kindest regards. He also is coming to see you on Friday but he is not going down to the Lawrences. Yes, I have a special disease. Pray your Ancestors for my heart –5 Till Friday Kissienka. Notes 1. Koteliansky’s generosity towards his friends and family was unstinting throughout his life, irrespective of the fact that he often had little income and few material comforts himself. The generosity of his gift here is highly representative: given wartime restrictions, the whisky and chocolates would have been hard to come by. Tobacco, especially his preferred Russian blend, never appears to run short, however.



s. s. koteliansky   43

2. Frieda and DHL had married in 1914. Koteliansky retained a life-long antipathy towards Frieda (as he did towards many of the partners of the friends he loved most deeply), but the letters they exchanged over the years show the extent to which they would admit and analyse their mutual animosity, and also find strains of a common understanding within it. See Introduction to Frieda Lawrence below, p. 109. 3. (Fr.): My dear friend. 4. See previous letter, p. 41. See also CW1, pp. 422–32. 5. See above, p. 42, n. 1.

[mid-March 1915] [BL] [Rose Tree Cottage, The Lee, Great Missenden] Kotiliansky I can’t find the english address of the Smart Set1 – so would you look it up in a telephone book or literary year book2 (there is one in the Holborn Library) and send this story for me as soon as possible.3 I have enclosed an addressed envelope – Stick a stamp on it for me – will you? I hope you don’t mind this fractious invalid – but I will do the same for you when we’re in Russia.4 K. Read the story if you care to. Notes 1. Under the inspirational editorship of H. L. Mencken and George Lathan (since 1914), the Smart Set had become one of the flagship literary reviews and was constantly on the look-out for new authors. Its broad readership and high circulation figures also made it attractive to aspiring authors. It was based in New York but also had offices in London. 2. The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook is a book for writers and illustrators, listing literary agents and publishers. 3. KM’s subsequent letter to Koteliansky suggests that she had sent him her story ‘The Little Governess’. No stories by her appeared in the Smart Set. 4. The evocation has international as well as personal resonance. The years 1915–16 were ‘The peak years for the wartime love affair between England and Russia’ (Diment 2011, p. 64). Moreover, since meeting Koteliansky, KM cherished dreams of visiting Russia with him. Nothing came of the plans, and Koteliansky himself never returned to the country he had left in June 1911.

44   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [22 March 1915] [BL]

22 III 1915

Katy Mansfield my address   13 Quai aux Fleurs La Cité1 Paris

}

Dear Kotilianski, Write me a letter when you feel inclined to – will you? I am staying here for a while instead of at the rooms in London.2 I understood you that weekend at the Lawrences for I have been like that myself.3 It is a kind of paralysis that comes of living alone & to oneself and it is really painful . . I was silly and unsympathetic for Lawrence could not understand it because he has never felt it and I should have been wiser. But come quite alive again this spring – will you? I do not know how it is in London just now but here the very fact of walking about in the air makes one feel that flowers and leaves are dropping from your hair and from your fingers. I would write you a long letter but I am afraid you cannot read my handwriting. Tell me if you can and then I will. Yes, write to me here – The nights are full of stars and little moons and big Zeppelins – very exciting.4 But England feels far far away – just a little island with a cloud resting on it. Is it still there?       With love to you          Kissienka. Notes 1. ‘La Cité’ is a shortened reference to ‘Ile de la Cité’, the larger of the two islands in the Seine at the heart of Paris. Carco’s flat on the Quai aux Fleurs is on the eastern end of the island, at the back of Notre Dame cathedral. 2. Considering the wartime restrictions on – and rudimentary conditions of – travel, KM’s cross-Channel to-and-fros in early 1915 were quite an exploit. She was in France in 16–25 February, 18–31 March and 5–19 May. She would likewise travel via Paris to the South of France at the end of the year. 3. KM and Koteliansky had stayed with the Lawrences in Sussex over the weekend of 13–14 March. 4. Airship raids by Zeppelins (named after the German general who first championed their use) on the coastal zones and cities of northern Europe began within days of the first war assault on Belgium in 1914, and in Britain in January 1915. Although less extensively used in France, there were two major Zeppelin attacks by night on Paris from 20 to 21 March 1915, and 29 to 30 January 1916.



s. s. koteliansky   45

[29 March 1915] [BL] [13 Quai aux Fleurs] Monday. Kotiliansky, dear friend I am extremely fond of you this afternoon. I wish you would walk into this café now and sit opposite me and say – ‘do not look at these people; they are extremely foolish’. But no, you will not; you are dancing on the downs with the fair Barbara1 and Kissienka is forgotten. No, I won’t come to any of your weddings. You will marry some woman who will show me the door – because I come and sing in the street you live in my beautiful russian dress (given me by my anonymous friend) and you dare to look out of the window. I have just finished Two Frightful Hours trying to buy a corset – not really a corset but a kind of belt – I have spent every penny that I haven’t got upon an affair of violet silk which is so exquisite that I lament my lonely life . . Now Frieda would say that I was being very wicked, but you understand – don’t you? All the while I write I am looking at you and laughing a little and you are saying to me, ‘really, you are a deplorable creature!’2 Your letter was given to me and I read it while I was half awake – when in bed – and after I had read it I lay smoking and watching the sun dance on the ceiling – and I wondered why on earth I had fled away and could not find any answer. At any rate I can tell you frankly that the illness that I had in England and longed to be cured of – is quite gone for ever – – I believe it was my ‘heart’ after all, you know, but not the kind of heart that Dr Eder3 punches . . . Shut your eyes a minute, do you feel frightfully happy – just now – just a this minute. I do – I should like to lie in the grass beside a big river and look up at the sun until the sun went down – and then go slowly home to a little house hidden in a ring of poplar trees – carrying a large bunch of daisies. Do you see this house? It is a new one – just built at this moment – it is in some place very far away and there are woods near, and this river. A tiny little balcony has a table on it with a red and white cloth and a jar of clovers – and we sit there in the evenings, smoke and drink tea. Now you can build a little of it. To tell you the absolute truth a friend of mine is coming to London at the end of this week. (Do not tell anybody.) Her name is Katherine Mansfield and if she should ring up the Bureau on Friday – answer her. Will you? Yes, Kotiliansky, you are really one of my people – we can afford to be quite free with each other – I know. . . My dear, it is so hot in this café that if Mrs Edar4 were here she would have taken half a dozen sun baths! Yours with love Kissienka.

46   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Notes 1. Barbara Low (1874–1955) was a close friend of Koteliansky’s, even if KM’s (feigned or genuine) jealously would appear entirely unwarranted. She was part of the wealthy, intellectual Anglo-Jewish émigré community in Hampstead, and the daughter of a Hungarian radical (Maximilien Loewe). She went on to become a pioneering psychoanalyst. She was also good friends with DHL and Frieda at the time, and sometimes bridged tensions between them. She had been introduced to their circles by her niece, the writer and translator Ivy Low (1889–1977), then engaged to Maxim Gorky’s associate Maxim Litvinov, who Koteliansky would appear to have first met in Kiev in the early 1900s. 2. As his prolific letter writing and translations attest, Koteliansky’s English was generally subtle and accurate, but his delight in idioms often amused his entourage, as did his accent. Many of his friends – including Leonard and Virginia Woolf – would quote his memorable turns of phrase from time to time. 3. Dr David Eder (1865–1936) gravitated in the same Eastern European and Jewish émigré circles as Barbara and Ivy Low (see above, n. 1). He was a pioneering psychoanalyst and paediatrician, who served as a highly respected military doctor in World War One, during which he published a groundbreaking study of neurological and traumatic damage suffered by frontline troops. He was also active in the Independent Labour Party and the Fabian Society. Both the grave, impressive personality of Eder and his visionary work on welfare and psychoanalysis found their way into DHL’s 1911 novel, The White Peacock. 4. Edith Eder (1872–1944), née Low, was the sister of Barbara Low and the wife of David Eder. She was a teacher and writer on child psychology, and in 1920 went on to become a founding member of the Women’s International Zionist Organisation.

[4 May 1915] [BL] [95 Elgin Crescent, Notting Hill] Kotiliansky, my dear, I did not tell you all the truth last night. When you asked me if I was writing and I said ‘yes’ it was not quite true. I cannot write my book living in these two rooms. It is impossible – and if I do not write this book I shall die. So I am going away tomorrow to finish it. Then I promise to come back shorn of all my wickedness, dear friend – It is agony to go, but I must go. Jack wonderfully understands. Write to me, will you? You can address the letters to ‘Mansfield’ – the concierge knows that name – Tell me about your eyes; tell me you are not so depressed; let me hear any more news that you have of Olga1 – I will write to you often – write to me often often – for I shall be very lonely I know – Goodbye, just for now. I press your hands tightly2 – Goodbye. You are so dear to me – Kissienka



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Notes 1. The one-off reference is too obscure to allow identification but there were no Olgas in Koteliansky’s immediate family. Nevertheless, in the context of the early years of the war, Koteliansky received little news of his friends and relatives in Ostropol; when information arrived it was out of date and often highly distressing. An alternative interpretation here is that, since Koteliansky had already started translating stories by Chekhov, he had begun evoking the biography of Anton Chekhov and referring to the fate of his wife, the actress Olga Knipper, in the difficult war years. KM’s overriding passion for Chekhov began later, however, once she began detecting in herself the first ominous symptoms of tuberculosis. 2. KM here uses a final greeting that she was particularly fond of, a literal translation of a courteous Russian formula that Koteliansky regularly employed.

[17 May 1915] [BL] [13 Quai aux Fleurs] Monday Night. Kotiliansky, dear friend, I will not wait any longer for a letter from you. Jack tells me about you, but that is not enough; it is too remote. I had wanted a letter from you to say that you ‘understood’ – not to reassure me, you understand, but just because – I always want you to understand. . . It is a rainy evening – not at all cold, rather warm, but rainy, rainy. Everything is wet; the river is sopping, and if you stand still a moment you hear the myriad little voices of the rain. As you walk the air lifts just enough to blow on your cheeks. Ah! how delicious that is! It is not only leaves you smell when you stand under the trees today; you smell the black wet boughs and stems – the ‘forest’ smell. This evening I went walking in a park. Big drops splashed from the leaves and on the paths there lay a drift of pink and white chestnut flowers. In the fountain basin there was a great deal of mixed bathing going on among some sparrows – A little boy stood just outside the park. He thrust one hand through the railing among the ivy leaves and pulled out some tiny snails, arranging them in a neat row on the stone wall. ‘V’la! Mes escargots!’1 But I was rather frightened, that, being french, he’d take a pin out of his jacket and begin eating them! And then they locked the park up. An old caretaker in a black cape with a hood to it locked it up with a whole bunch of keys. There is a wharf not far from here where the sand barges unload. Do you know the smell of wet sand? Does it make you think of going down to the beach in the evening light after a rainy day and gathering the damp drift wood (it will dry on top of the stove) and picking up for a

48   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 moment the long branches of sea weed that the waves have tossed and listening to the gulls who stand reflected in the gleaming sand, and just fly a little way off as you come and then – settle again. This evening a mist rose up from the river and everything looks far away – Down below, two nuns went by, their ample skirts gathered in one hand, the other holding an umbrella over their white hoods. And just below – there is a court where the market men take their barrows for the night – their palms, and their rose trees and china blue hydrangea bushes.2 You see the barrows with waving shining leaves float by like miraculous islands. Very few people are out. Two lovers came and hid behind a tree and put up an umbrella – then they walked away, pressed against each other. It made me think of a poem that our german proffesor used to read us in class.3 Ja, das war zum letzenmal Das, wir beide, arm in arme Unter einem Schirm gebogen . . . . . Alles war zum letzenmal . .4 And I heard again his ‘sad’ voice (so beautiful it seemed, you know!) and I saw again his white hand with a ring on it, press open the page! But now I know the perfect thing to do on a night like this. It is to ride in a little closed cab. You may have the windows open but you cannot keep out the smell of leather and the smell of upholstered buttons. The horse makes an idle klipperty klopperting. When we arrive at the house there is a big bush of lilac in flower growing over the gate and it is so dark that you do not stoop low enough and drops and petals fall on you. The light from the hall streams down the steps. Scene II K: ‘Tell me frankly. Does it not feel damp to you?’ Visionary Caretaker: ‘Ive had fires in all the rooms, m’m. Beautiful fires they were too. It seemed a pity to let them out; they burned that lovely’. ‘M. or N’: ‘It feels as dry as bone to me, I must say’. The Visionary Caretaker beams at ‘M or N’. Her little girl puts her head round the door. In her pinafore she has rather a wet kitten. Visionary C: ‘And if you should like a chicken at any time, m’m, or a few greens I’m sure my husband and I would be only too pleased etc etc etc etc . . . . . . I am laughing, are you? The queer thing is that, dreaming like that it can’t help living it all, down to the smallest details – down to the very



s. s. koteliansky   49

dampness of the salt at supper that night and the way it came out on your plate, the exact shape of the salt spoon . . . Do you, too feel an infinite delight and value in detail – not for the sake of detail but for the life in the life of it. I never can express myself (and you can laugh as much as you please –) But do you ever feel as though the Lord threw you into eternity – into the very exact centre of eternity, and even as you plunged you felt every ripple that flowed out from your plunging – every single ripple floating away and touching and drawing into its circle every slightest thing it touched. No, I shan’t write any more. I see you, my wise one, putting down this letter and saying – ‘no. I must go to Barbara to explain this . . .’ I feel a little bit drunk. Its the air, and the noise the real waves make as the boats, with long fans of light, go dancing by. We shall see each other again soon. But I can’t deny that I feel a little neglected. I had counted on a reply to my letter, after all. Don’t forget me – don’t go far away. As I write I hear your voice and I see you swing out into the hall of the bureau as though you were going to beat to death the person who had dared to come in. With this letter I send you big handfuls of very ‘good’ love.5                  Kissienka – Notes 1. (Fr.): ‘Here they are! My snails!’ 2. As the appropriately named ‘Quai aux Fleurs’ [Wharf of Flowers] implies, the immediate areas behind the cathedral and to the east of the island were renowned for their flower markets; there were also flower stalls along the Right Bank, visible from the window of Carco’s flat. 3. The inspirational German teacher (the pronunciation of whose German title ‘Herr Professor’ is perhaps suggested in KM’s spelling here) was Walter Rippmann (1869–1947), a multi-lingual scholar and literary connoisseur. A stimulating teacher, he also had quite unusual teaching practices, which included inviting the students in groups to his home, and sharing his own art collections and bohemian lifestyle with them. See Kimber 2016, pp. 111–12. 4. Writing from Paris, KM is clearly citing from memory, which is inevitably inaccurate at times; her objective, moreover, is less to cite perfectly than to foreground the details from the poem which came back to mind as she watched the lovers. Quite how fitting the lines are can be appreciated by reading the eight-stanza-long poem itself, entitled ‘Erinnerung’, i.e. ‘Memory’, and dedicated to C. N., who was the cousin of the poet Eduard Mörike (1804–70), a German Romantic poet and novelist, a great many of whose lyric verses were later set to music. Both his eye for everyday idiosyncrasies and his gently humorous, sometimes mocking tone explain why KM might have been drawn, even as a schoolgirl, to his poetry, as would his love of folk and fairy tales. The first and second stanzas, from which KM takes the lines, run as follows (followed by a literal translation):

50   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Jenes war zum letztenmale, Dass ich mit dir ging, o Claerchen! Ja, das war das letztemal, Dass wir uns wie Kinder freuten.

That was the last time I walked with you, dear Clara! Yes, that was the last time that we expressed our joy as children do,

Als wir eines Tages eilig Durch die breiten, sonnenhellen, Regnerischen Strassen, unter Einem Schirm geborgen, liefen; Beide eingeschlossen Wie in einem Feenstuebchen, Endlich einmal Arm in Arme! (1822)

when we were hurrying, one day, along the broad, sunlit, rainy streets, sheltered beneath an umbrella, both secluded cosily as if in a little fairy chamber, and finally – at last – arm in arm!

5. While given to moments of playfulness, party antics and lyricism, Koteliansky was always a stern, inflexible moralist, and would exhort KM – and his other close friends – to shun makeshift, superficial, slavish passions and remain scrupulously honest. ‘Good’ love was thus one of his ideals, and this clairvoyant, faithful sincerity certainly defined his lasting, and much-tried, affection for KM. See Diment 2011, pp. 66–8.

[19 November 1915] [BL] GRAND BAR DE LA SAMARITAINE F. BOULANJON 1, RUE DE LA REPUBLIQUE, 1 & QUAI DU PORT, 2 MARSEILLE1 Marseille le 19ieme Novembre 1915 Koteliansky dear, I have been on the point of writing to you several times but – just not had the time or the place or something. Business first. I left one of my brother’s caps in a drawer upstairs in his room.2 Would you get it and keep it safely for me – Also, I meant to give you for your room the fur rug in my sitting room – you know the one. I don’t want the Farbmans’ to use it3 – and I do want you to keep it for me. Put it on your bed. It is so warm and it looks and feels so lovely. Tell Sarah4 that I have written to you and asked you to send it to me – Please do this. That is all – except that our address is c/o Thomas Cook & Sons, Tourist Agency, Rue de Noailles, Marseille – We shall call there for letters under the name of either Bowden5 (when Ill get them) or Murry, for Jack. If I started to tell you about all that has happened I never would end – Indeed, I have been gathering a big bouquet for you, but it has become too big to hold and it has dropped out of



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my arms. You will have to believe me, darling, that the flowers were there and were for you – I am glad that I came. Many times I have realised that Acacia Road and all that it implied is over – for ever.6 This is a confused and extraordinary place – It is full of troops – – In fact there are ‘types’ from all over the world and all walking together down narrow streets choked with tiny carriages painted yellow, white mules with red fringes over their eyes – – – all those kinds of things you know. The port is extremely beautiful. But Ive really nothing to say about the place until I write to you for weeks – for all my observation is so detailed as it always is when I get to France. On the mantelpiece in my room stands my brother’s photograph. I never see anything that I like, or hear anything, without the longing that he should see and hear, too – I had a letter from his friend again. He told me that after it happened he said over and over – ‘God forgive me for all I have done’ and just before he died he said ‘lift my head, Katy I can’t breathe –’7 To tell you the truth these things that I have heard about him blind me to all that is happening here – All this is like a long uneasy ripple – nothing else – and below – in the still pool there is my little brother. So I shall not write any more just now, darling. But I think of you often and always with love – Katy8 Notes 1. JMM and KM had been in transit for about three days, and broke their journey in the city of Marseille before continuing along the coast to the fishing village Cassis. At the time, Marseille was a thriving port, as well as a hectic, sprawling and industrial city. The port where they were staying, however, is the far more picturesque Old Port, at the end of the city’s main boulevard, the Canebière. The ‘Samaritaine’, whose headed note­ paper KM uses here, was a chic Parisian-style brasserie giving directly on to the port. 2. Leslie Beauchamp (1894–1915) had stayed with his sister at 5 Acacia Road, St John’s Wood, just before setting off to take up service with the 8th Battalion, South Lancashire Regiment. His service on the Western Front was painfully brief: on 6 October 1915 – a mere three days after reaching Ploegsteert Wood, Flanders – he died demonstrating an unfamiliar type of hand grenade. See his Introduction in CL1, pp. 268–71. 3. No longer wanting to live in a house that contained so many memories of her brother’s visit, KM and JMM had ceded the lease to Koteliansky’s close friends and compatriots, Michael (Grisha) and Sonia Farbman. Koteliansky moved in as their lodger and remained in the house for the rest of his life, treasuring it in part for all the memories it retained of KM. In the words of

52   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2

4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

his biographer, ‘This would prove to be a very important and lasting relationship in Kot’s life, for by the end of 1915 and for many years to come, Grisha and Sonia Farbman, as well as their daughter Ghita, would function as Kot’s housemates and, in many ways, a surrogate family’ (Diment 2011, p. 79). Michael S. Farbman (1880–1933) was a professional journalist and writer, originally from Odessa, who worked for his wife’s brother, Zinovy Grzhebin, a publisher who, with Max Gorky, went on to found the ‘World Literature publishing house’. Sonia Grzhebin was from Kharkov; all three came from the at-the-time still large Jewish settlement in the Ukraine. Sarah would appear to be a domestic help originally employed by JMM and KM, and kept on, at least for a time, by the Farbmans and Koteliansky. George Bowden was the singer and voice teacher KM had married rather rapidly in March 1909, having found herself pregnant. It was only ever a marriage of convenience, given the disgrace attached to unmarried mothers. Although they hardly lived together, they remained officially married until 29 April 1919. See his Introduction in CL1, p. 141. KM had lived happily in Acacia Road since June, when she and JMM had moved in, and it was in the garden that stood the magnificent pear tree that she immortalised in ‘Bliss’ (CW2, pp. 141–52). However it was henceforth too much associated with memories of Leslie Beauchamp’s death, especially since the telegram announcing his death was addressed to her there. Perhaps to assuage her own intense grief, KM invented Leslie’s use of her name in his dying moments. For a full account of Leslie’s death, see J. Lawrence Mitchell 2011, p. 35. KM recounts vivid dreams of them together for JMM’s benefit (26 May 1918); and as late as 1919, she is still reminding him of some of Leslie’s dying words: ‘God forgive me for what I have done. Those words Chummie spoke as he died’ (11 December 1919). Given the intimacy and poignancy of the scene just described, as well as the rush of memories, it is striking that here KM signs using the name her brother used for her, ‘Katy’.

[28 November 1915] [BL] [Hôtel Firano, Cassis, Bouches-du-Rhone] Sunday. My darling friend Today, for the first time since leaving England I had news of you. I am glad you have taken the fur. Thank you for sending the letters: Jack talks ‘business’, but I need not – So I will not. Is everything ‘just the same’? It feels to me far away. Not that I long for it or anything like that but all that rather false life of the last few months seemed to dissolve utterly when I left it. I don’t even think of it. But you remain and you are still with me here. I am glad to be away from Marseilles. Murry does not like this place but in many ways I do. For one thing, and its



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awfully important, the sea is here – very clear and very blue. The sound of it after such a long silence is almost unbearable – a sweet agony, you know – – – like moonlight is sometimes. And then there are high mountains covered with bright green pine trees.1 Tufts of rosemary grow among the rocks and a tall flower with pink bells which is very lovely. Yesterday, in the middle of a forest, I found the hut on chicken legs – Two white pigeons sat on the roof and on the doorstep a tiny cat slept in the sun. But I did not hear the spinning wheel.2 I shall be able to write here in a day or two. My room is nice, darling. The walls are blue, with small flowers standing on their feet at the bottom of the wall and the same flowers standing on their heads at the top. Outside the window there are trees. Jack has just read to me what he wrote to you – I believe the conjugal ‘we’ – Its not worth protesting but its not really true of me – never – In my heart I am happy – because I feel that I have come into my own. You understand me? Goodbye for now I am always lovingly yours. Notes 1. While not, strictly speaking, mountainous, the coastal area and surrounding inland region from Marseille to Cassis is ruggedly hilly, the limestone bedrock making the hillsides and cliffs starkly white and barren. 2. KM is fondly recalling details from Russian folk tales that Koteliansky had recounted to her. The little hut in the forest standing on chicken’s legs belongs to the legendary figure Baba Yaga and features in a number of tales, such as ‘The Three Kingdoms’, ‘Ivan the Cow’s Son’, ‘Prince Danila Govorila’ and ‘Tereshichka’. A more complex figure than the traditional ‘witch’ in many classic fairy tales, Baba Yaga can be wicked and spiteful, or benevolent and gentle. The pigeons and cat in KM’s rendering are her own additions.

[end 1915] [BL] [Hôtel Beau Rivage, Bandol] Nearly the end of the year. My extremely wicked and neglectful and utterly faithless friend! At last you have sent me a letter and although it only arrived a few moments ago and you certainly do not deserve an answer I will just write two words to prove once and for all my complete superiority of nature over you. You need not bother to write me letters if it is a trouble to you; its enough if, occasionally you send me a little card and tell me that you have not forgotten. For I shall not forget you. I often

54   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 think of you. I wish you would come into my room now & smoke a cigarette with me. It is very quiet here and outside the window the sea is trembling under the moon. My room smells faintly of wood from the fire – – you would like it. I am very happy here. The place is so beautiful and the sun shines – or it doesn’t – There is the sea and a wild beautiful coast – and behind the village there are woods and mountains – Already I have so many ‘secret’ places – The people are awfully nice too. They are honest one can be oneself with them – You know, you can lean over the fence and talk to the old man who is cutting flowers or you can sit on a rock and talk to the old old woman who is cutting heather – and you are ‘at home’. There are many fishermen, too; fishermen are always very true. Oh, my God! I am very happy – When I shut my eyes I cannot help smiling – You know what joy it is to give your heart – freely – freely – Everything that happens is an adventure. When the wind blows I go to the windiest possible place and I feel the cold come flying under my arms1 – When the sea is high I go down among the rocks where the spray reaches and I have games with the sea like I used to years ago. And to see the sun rise and set seems enough miracle. When I first came here I was really very ill and unhappy but that is over now – and London, you know seems remote – remote – as though it did not exist. Those last hateful and wasted months are blotted out. Next time we see each really we will be happy. I always remember the ‘wicked’ me2 – But one day, darling, we shall see each other again and be frightfully happy – Let us promise each other. I want to tell you all about the people here (but that would fill books) and all about the place (and that would not interest you) So pretend I have told you. At any rate it is too dark to see anything or anybody now. My brother is here often, laughing, and calling ‘do you remember, Katy?’ It is a beautiful night – so beautiful that you are half afraid to take it into your breast when you breathe – This is not a letter at all, darling – only a message – Take care of yourself. I do not know why but just this moment I see awfully clearly the elephant on your big inkstand.3 And I want a reply immediately but you won’t send me one – You will be wise and severe with me as you always are –         Goodnight               Katiushka. Notes 1. Although not published until 1920, KM’s story ‘The Wind Blows’ may well have begun to take shape in the Mistral-swept town as she mourned for her recently killed brother and remembered their childhood. Set essentially in Wellington, the story features a girl called Matilda who, at the end, is seen first on a windswept esplanade watching a ship with her brother, aptly named



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Bogey (KM’s nickname for her brother Leslie), and then on the ship’s deck watching the shore with her little brother remembering the windswept day. 2. Koteliansky could be as unsparing with his true friends, when he suspected them of being insincere or fickle, as he could be unfailingly steadfast. The American poet May Sarton spoke of his ‘imaginative genius for understanding people’s inner directions’, to the extent that ‘he had, in fact, elected himself a despotic conscience for his writer friends’ (pp. 180, 184), and she cites KM and details of her letters to him as a case in point. See also KM’s letter of 19 February 1921 below, pp. 73–4. 3. Koteliansky’s inkstand was one of KM’s lasting memories of his lodgings above the Russian Law Bureau in High Holborn. She describes it in greater detail in a later letter, in which fond memories and nostalgia are even more prominent. See Glenavy, p. 75, Diment 2011, pp. 50–1, and below, pp. 73–4.

[11 May 1916] [BL] [Higher Tregerthen, Zennor, Cornwall] Thursday. I am quite alone for all the day so I shall write to you. I have not written before because everything has been so ‘unsettled’; now it is much more definite. I wish I could come and see you instead of writing; next month I shall come to London probably for a little time and then we shall be able to meet and to talk. You may laugh as much as you like at this letter, darling, all about the COMMUNITY. . 1 It is rather funny. Frieda and I do not even speak to each other at present. Lawrence is about one million miles away, although he lives next door. He and I still speak but his very voice is faint like a voice coming over a telephone wire. It is all because I cannot stand the situation between those two, for one thing. It is degrading – it offends ones soul beyond words. I don’t know which disgusts one worse – when they are very loving and playing with each other or when they are roaring at each other and he is pulling out Frieda’s hair and saying ‘I’ll cut your bloody throat, you bitch’ and Frieda is running up and down the road screaming for ‘Jack’ to save her!!2 This is only a half of what literally happened last Friday night. You know, Catalina,3 Lawrence isn’t healthy any more; he has gone a little bit out of his mind. If he is contradicted about anything he gets into a frenzy, quite beside himself and it goes on until he is so exhausted that he cannot stand and has to go to bed and stay there until he has recovered. And whatever your disagreement is about he says it is because you have gone wrong in your sex and belong to an obscene spirit. These rages occur whenever I see him for more than a casual moment for if ever I say anything that isn’t quite ‘safe’ off he goes! It is like sitting on a railway station with Lawrence’s temper like a big

56   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 black engine puffing and snorting. I can think of nothing, I am blind to everything, waiting for the moment when with a final shriek – off it will go! When he is in a rage with Frieda he says it is she who has done this to him and that she is ‘a bug who has fed on my life’. I think that is true. I think he is suffering from quite genuine monomania at present, through having endured so much from her. Let me tell you what happened on Friday. I went across to them for tea. Frieda said Shelleys Ode to a Skylark was false.4 Lawrence said; ‘you are showing off; you don’t know anything about it’. Then she began. ‘Now I have had enough. Out of my house – you little God Almighty you. Ive had enough of you. Are you going to keep your mouth shut or aren’t you.’ Said Lawrence: ‘I’ll give you a dab on the cheek to quiet you, you dirty hussy’. Etc. Etc. So I left the house. At dinner time Frieda appeared. ‘I have finally done with him. It is all over for ever.’ She then went out of the kitchen & began to walk round and round the house in the dark. Suddenly Lawrence appeared and made a kind of horrible blind rush at her and they began to scream and scuffle – He beat her – he beat her to death – her head and face and breast and pulled out her hair. All the while she screamed for Murry to help her. Finally they dashed into the kitchen and round and round the table. I shall never forget how L. looked. He was so white – almost green and he just hit – thumped the big soft woman. Then he fell into one chair and she into another. No one said a word. A silence fell except for Frieda’s sobs and snifs. In a way I felt almost glad that the tension between them was over for ever – and that they had made an end of their ‘intimacy’. L. sat staring at the floor, biting his nails. Frieda sobbed . . Suddenly, after a long time – about a quarter of an hour – L. looked up and asked Murry a question about French literature. Murry replied . . Little by little, the three drew up to the table . . Then F. poured herself out some coffee. Then she and L. glided into talk, began to discuss some ‘very rich but very good macaroni cheese.’ And next day, whipped himself, and far more thoroughly than he had ever beaten Frieda, he was running about taking her up her breakfast to her bed and trimming her a hat. Am I wrong in not being able to accept these people just as they are – laughing when they laugh and going away from them when they fight? Tell me. For I cannot. It seems to me so degraded – so horrible to see I cant stand it. And I feel so furiously angry: I hate them for it. F. is such a liar, too. To my face she is all sweetness. She used to bring me in flowers, tell me how ‘exquisite’ I was – how my clothes suited me – that I had never been so ‘really beautiful’ – Ugh! How humiliating! Thank Heaven it is over. I must be the real enemy of such a person. And what is hardest of all to bear is Lawrence’s ‘hang doggedness’. He is so completely in her power and yet I am sure that in his heart he loathes his slavery. She is not even a good natured person really; she is evil hearted and her mind is simply riddled with what she calls ‘sexual symbols’.5 Its an ugly position for Lawrence but I cant be sorry for him just now. The sight of his humiliating dependence makes me too furious.



s. s. koteliansky   57

Except for these two, nothing has happened here. A policeman came to arrest Murry the other day, & though M. staved him off he will have to go, I think.6 I am very much alone here. It is not a really nice place. It is so full of huge stones, but now that I am writing I do not care for the time. It is so very temporary. It may all be over next month; in fact it will be. I don’t belong to anybody here. In fact I have no being, but I am making preparations for changing everything. Write to me when you can and scold me. Goodbye for now. Don’t forget me. I am always Kissienka. Notes 1. DHL had been floating the idea of living in a community of like-minded fellow writers and friends since the beginning of the war. It was to be called ‘Rananim’ – which has long since become a watchword in Lawrence Studies, and was a direct allusion to a Hebrew song that Koteliansky used to sing, ‘Ranani Sadekim Badanoi’. The latest implementation of his project was in Higher Tregerthen, Cornwall, to which he hoped to invite his closest friends, and where they would live in peace, far away from the devastating realities and jingoism of war. The account of domestic violence that follows makes DHL’s dream all the more delusional. For more background on the Hebrew song, its connotations and Koteliansky’s surviving manuscript transcription, see Diment 2011, pp. 74–6. See also Kinkead-Weekes, pp. 309–25. 2. The scene that follows was clearly harrowing. The accounts KM wrote, not just to Koteliansky but also to Ottoline Morrell (see below, pp. 168–9) are strikingly devoid of the pithy story-telling devices which so often characterise her letters – as if the sheer physicality and power of so much violence had petrified her. More indicative still, KM later looked back on this scene with devastating clairvoyance when she was seeing in her own diseased self comparable upsurges of uncontrollable destructive passion. See CW4, p. 257. 3. This is the only instance of KM addressing Koteliansky as ‘Catalina’; although essentially inexplicable, it is interesting to note the softening, feminising affect on his name, as if making her solid, reliable friend into a more intimate addressee as a way to confide in him, and perhaps even to distance the destructive masculinity that she had witnessed. Since Koteliansky would sometimes address KM with Russian diminutives of her name, there is something endearing about her using the same device to address him as a form of soul-sister. 4. The taunt is no off-the-cuff, arbitrary reference to Percy Shelley’s emblematic Romanticpoem, written in 1820. While wholly critical of DHL’s blazing outburst, DHL’s biographer interprets the scene as a response to Frieda’s own demonstration that DHL’s friendship with Ottoline Morrell, JMM and KM was a betrayal of himself, and of her. He insists that Frieda was the ‘aggressor’, and she ‘knew what she was doing and what effect it might have’. The poem ‘occupied a crucial role in his dialectic thought [. . . the skylark’s “blithe spirit” representing] – the extreme of mental and spiritualism consciousness as opposed to the life of the body and the blood’ (KinkeadWeekes, pp. 322–3.

58   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 5. Both Frieda and DHL’s espousal of Freudian symbolism and the links they drew between psychoanalytical interpretations and ‘phallicism’ were to be the source of amusement, bewilderment and despair in the eyes of their contemporaries, highlighting the very ambivalent responses to Freud’s writings in Modernist circles. 6. Like the other young men of serviceable age (in itself a variable notion at the time), JMM lived in fear of being called up for active military service, despite an initial disqualification on account of health worries. As the war dragged on, an increasing number of previous grounds for exemption were waved aside.

[24 June 1916] [BL] [Sunnyside Cottage, Mylor, Cornwall] Saturday. I have been wanting to write to you for days. But I am too sad, my dear one. I hope to be in London within a fortnight and then we can meet. Life is so hateful just now that I am quite numb. Do not let us forget each other . . You are so often in my thoughts – especially just lately.

[27 June 1916] [BL] [Sunnyside Cottage, Mylor, Cornwall] Dearest friend Your note came this morning. I have arranged to come to London on the 8th (a Saturday) I will send you the time of the train and you will come and meet me – will you? I have asked Beatrice C.1 to put me up for a few nights. I have felt that you were very depressed. But don’t be sad. Let us be happy when we see each other – if only for a minute of time. I will tell you my plans then & you will tell me all yours. Until then I am always Kissienka. Note 1. Beatrice Elvery Campbell (1883–1970) was a professional artist and writer, and one of KM’s close friends during the war years. See her Introduction in CL1, pp. 501–3.



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[3 July 1916] [BL] [Sunnyside Cottage, Mylor, Cornwall] My train arrives at Paddington at 4.45 on Saturday – I am going to stay with the Campbells for a little1 – then I want to find some rooms & perhaps to go to Denmark for September – – – but I am not quite sure – Life feels wonderful and different for at last I am free again – Till Saturday – Note 1. Gordon and Beatrice Campbell, later Lord and Lady Glenavy, had been close friends of JMM and KM since the Rhythm years in the early 1910s. Gordon Campbell (1885–1963) was an eminent lawyer, and his wife Beatrice a highly respected member of the Irish artistic world; both were outspoken defenders of Home Rule. While often based in Ireland, they were part of DHL and S. S. Koteliansky’s intimate circle whenever visits to London made socialising possible. Beatrice Campbell’s memoirs of these years, Today We Shall Only Gossip, published once she had become Lady Glenavy, evokes their lives and social interactions with detail and great affection.

[September 1918] [Alpers, p. 286] [Telegram] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] Come tonight, Katherine.

[end February 1919] [BL] 2 Portland Villas East Heath Road Hampstead, N.W.3 My dear Koteliansky Is not this letter a Meisterwerk1 of unselfish love. But I am thankful Lawrence is at his sister’s.2 I am anxious about him: he ought to be kept so quiet and allowed to rest and who will let him? I cannot bear to think of him ill. Are you better.3 Please get better. Thank Heaven spring is coming. When one remembers the light on Spring Evenings, just before it grows dusky – and that warm strange breeze blowing from nowhere – – – – –        KM.

60   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Notes 1. (Ger.): Masterwork. 2. Lettice Ada Lawrence (1887–1948) was DHL’s younger sister, and a close companion throughout childhood. Her biography of his childhood, Young Lorenzo: Early Life of D. H. Lawrence, co-authored with G. Stuart Gelder, was published in Florence in 1931. She had married W. E. Clarke in 1913 and they lived in Ripley, Yorkshire; DHL visited regularly, becoming especially close to his nephew, John Lawrence Clark. His novel The White Peacock (1911) contains a moving fictional portrait of Ada. 3. Koteliansky had suffered severe bouts of depression and anxiety in the late war and early post-war years, which, although recurrent throughout his life, were severely aggravated by the news arriving irregularly from Russia and Ukraine. His entire family was in danger in the complex context of civil war, antisemitic raids, acute food shortages, pillaging and rampant disease. On several occasions he felt impelled to return, hoping to help protect his surviving relatives, and especially his mother, Beila, but for political and practical reasons the journey was never possible.

[7 April 1919] [BL] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] Murrys telephone number is 9712 central Dear Kotelianski I was as much surprised as you to find we were nameless.1 No reason was given. I shall ask M. on your behalf tonight; I shall also mention the question of a cheque. I do not know how they pay. I gave my letter to you with several others to the new maid to post. I presume she ‘lost’ the stamp money; there is really nothing that she has not lost. I dislike IMMENSELY not going over the letters with you.2 I dont want you to rely on me and M. I have long ago finished all that you gave me – But I feel Tchekov would be the first to say we must go over them together.3 However, dear Kotelianski, I dont want to worry you. And you are depressed. I am so sorry. I wish you would come in now, this moment, & let us have tea and talk. There is no one here except my cough – It is like a big wild dog who followed me home one day & has taken a most unpleasant fancy to me. If only he would be tame! But he has been this last week wilder than ever. It is raining but its not winter rain. – – This early spring weather is almost too much to bear. Its wrings ones heart. I should like to work all day & all night. Everything one sees is a revelation in the writing sense. Have you ever owned a cat who had kittens? Or have you ever watched them from the first moments of their life? On April 5th Charlie was delivered of two4 – He was so terrified that he insisted on my being there and ever since they have lived in my room. Their eyes are open



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already. Already they smile and smack the spectator in the face (the spectator being their mother.) One is like a minute tigress, very beautiful and the other is like a prehistoric lizard – in very little. Their tiny paws are pink & soft like unripe raspberries. I am keeping a journal of their first days. It is a pity that human beings live so remote from all animals . . . Frieda writes me that there is a ‘rumpus’ between me and – them I suppose. I see this ‘rumpus’ – dont you? A very large prancing, imaginary animal being led by Frieda – as Una led the Lion.5 It is evidently bearing down upon me with Frieda for a Lady Godiva6 on its back. But I refuse to have anything to do with it. I have not the room now-a-days for rumpuses. My garden is too small and they eat up all ones plants – roots and all. Goodbye. Katherine. Notes 1. That week’s issue of the Athenaeum (then, of course, under the editorship of JMM), dated 4 April 1919, had published the first in a thirteen-part series of letters by Chekhov, co-translated by KM and Koteliansky. No mention is made of the translators’ names. 2. Their working practice in all previous co-translating work had been actively collaborative. Koteliansky would produce a deliberately literal first translation, writing it up by hand and leaving generous space between each line. Then he and his co-translator would sit down and debate each segment one by one, shaping the translation to fit questions of rhythm, sonority, syntax and connotation. For a detailed analysis of their methods, and the results – in qualitative and creative terms – see Davison 2014. 3. As examples like this attest, ‘in the last five years of [KM’s] life, in a dialogue with Chekhov that runs through her letters and notebooks [. . .] Mansfield worked at (rather than worked out) her thoughts on the writer’s vocation, literary form, illness, life, death, and times’ (see Polonsky, p. 203). 4. Charlie [Charles Chaplin], the Murrys’ cat, had just given birth to the two kittens, Wingley (initially April) and Athenaeum, whose lives and personalities were to prove a great source of delight, concern and anecdote, as many letters hereafter affirm. See Baker, p. 224, n. and the Introduction below, p. 737. 5. In Edmund Spenser’s verse epic The Faerie Queen (1590–96), Una, one of the explicitly allegorical figures, is the beautiful young daughter of a king and queen who have been imprisoned by a ferocious dragon. She embarks on a quest with the Redcrosse Knight to save the family home and free her parents, but on her journey she encounters a fierce lion. The lion is so captivated by Una’s innocence and beauty that he loses all desire to eat her, and vows instead to become her protector and companion. 6. According to legend, Lady Godiva, wife of the ruthless Earl of Mercia, was moved to tears by the oppression he meted out to the people of Coventry. When she appealed to him to show mercy, he agreed contemptuously, on condition that she ride naked through the streets of the town. She took him at his word, but asked the people to respect her modesty by not looking.

62   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [11 April 1919] [BL] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] My dear Koteliansky Would you come to tea on Wednesday? And would you go to Murry’s office on Monday to see the Tchekov – & correct it to your wish. His office is 5–7 Red Lion Court, Fleet Street. I write this because we are both engaged tomorrow (Saturday) when we might have had the pleasure of seeing you.        Katherine.

[14 April 1919] [BL] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] Koteliansky, I forgot to arrange with you a time for us to meet that I may read you the new letters. I read them last night. They might have been written yesterday. Particularly valuable is the one on solidarity; I should almost like to publish that every week.1 Could you come on Thursday afternoon? If this suits you – do not bother to answer. Without bouquets, Koteliansky – I must tell you how very excellent I think your translations.        Katherine. Note 1. As above, Koteliansky and KM had been working together to translate a selection of Chekhov’s letters for publication in the Athenaeum. The one she picks out, on the theme of solidarity, is from a series to the writer and playwright Shcheglov-Leontyev, dated 3 May 1888. Chekhov has challenged what he believes is the spurious concept of writers’ unions and associated solidarity in outlook and aesthetic creed. See CW3, pp. 210–11.

[6 June 1919] [BL] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] Friday. I do not feel that all that money should be mine, and I WISH our collaboration were closer. However, I do my very best always with these wonderful letters & can do no more. Wonderful they are. The last one – the one to Souverin about the duty of the artist to put the



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‘question’ – not to solve it but so to put it that one is completely satisfied seems to me one of the most valuable things I have ever read.1 It opens – it discovers rather, a new world.        May Tchekov live for ever.           Katherine – Note 1. The letter KM cites was addressed to Chekhov’s one-time mentor, the writer and publisher A. S. Souvorin, in October 1888. It is indeed both an eloquent statement of Chekhov’s belief in the writer’s ethical responsibilities, and a credo that KM was fast adopting as her own (see her letters to Brett and Woolf on the same point – CL1, p. 418 n. 8, and below, p. 767, n. 1): I do sometimes preach heresy, but I have never yet gone so far as to say there must be absolutely no questions about artistic work. When talking with fellow-writers, I insist always that it is not the business of an artist to solve highly technical questions. [. . .] An artist observes, selects, divines, relates – these activities alone presuppose a question. If from the very first one has not put a question to oneself, then there is nothing to divine or to select. [. . .] You are right in asking from an artist a conscious attitude to his activity, but you are mixing up two things: the solving of the question and the correct putting of the question. It is the latter only which is obligatory upon the artist. There’s not a single question solved in ‘Anna Karenina’ or ‘Onyegin’, but they satisfy completely, because all the questions are correctly put. (CW3, pp. 220–3)

[22 June 1919] [BL]

22 vi 1919

2 Portland Villas East Heath Road NW3.

Dear Koteliansky I have received from you this morning a cheque for £2. 3. 0 being my share of the translation money: thank you very much. The M.S. – both used & unused I will forward you tomorrow evening so that you may expect to receive it on Wednesday morning.        K.M.

64   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [July 1919] [BL] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] The manuscript came today. In Heavens name why do we not prepare the book immediately & race Mrs G?1 It is the only thing to do. If you are satisfied with my small labours I can devote some hours of EACH day to it. When you think that the Russian literary world is given up to sniggerers, dishonesty, sneering, dull dull giggling at Victorians inside whiskers and here is this treasure – at the wharf only not unloaded – – – – – I feel that Art is like a sick person, left all alone in a house where they are having a Jazz party downstairs and we have at least something of what that sick person needs to be well again. Cant we thieve up the back staircase & take it? If you have the time only to do it roughly I will do my utmost.                    Yours K.M. Here is the little pin on the letters, again. Please let us not lose it. It is important. Perhaps it is the smallest pin in the world & will make our fortunes.* * Attached to the letter here is a tiny safety pin. Note 1. Constance Garnett was known to be translating a selection of Chekhov’s letters, which were published in 1920. Although KM here echoes some of Koteliansky’s own opinions on the Garnett translations, she later came back on this hasty judgement (which said more about practical competition than it did reasoned assessment), writing Garnett a warm and vibrant letter of thanks, in the name of herself and her generation, for all they owed the pioneering and prolific translator. See CL1, pp. 556–7.

[early August 1919] [BL] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] Dear Kotilianski, Thank you for the cheque for £2. 10. 6. I hate money. Yes, thank you I did receive the Tchekov & have already dealt with it. I hope there will be more letters published this month: it is a pity there cannot be.1 I wonder if you have read Joyce and Eliot and these ultra-modern men?2 It is so strange that they should write as they do after Tchekov. For Tchekov has said the last word that has been said, so far, and more than that he has given us a sign of the way we should go. They not only ignore it: they think Tchekov’s stories are almost as good as the ‘specimen cases’ in Freud.3 My God, if I am sitting on the back bench A.T. is my master!4            K.M.



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Notes 1. The rhythm of publication had slowed down, for reasons that are not clear. It resumed in September–October, with another three sequels, and then stopped. A second series was planned and translation begun, but the copybooks were lost in transit between London and KM’s temporary residence in the South of France. The loss, or neglect, prompted one of their most pained misunderstandings. 2. The Irish-born James Joyce (1882–1941) and American-born T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) were two of the writers sometimes acknowledged for encapsulating the pulse of the times, and for their pioneering poetic iconoclasm, even if critical reception was decidedly divided. By this date, Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) had been published, as had Eliot’s Prufrock, and Other Observations (1917), but another three years were to pass until the retrospectively more monumental publications, Ulysses and The Waste Land. 3. KM seems to critique both the current tendency to reduce Chekhov’s fictional works to the secondary activities of a medical doctor, and the disparagement of his narrative short forms, which might be compared to the psychoanalyst’s case studies. It is interesting to note that the revisioning of Freud in terms of his use of ‘narrative’ and ‘plot’, despite purportedly writing up medical studies, did not really begin until the 1980s. Contemporary discussions of the works, teachings and methods of the Austrian-born Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) were particularly prolific, reflecting the increased availability of his works in translation, and high-profile dissensions within the International Psychoanalytical Association, leading to the historic break with Alfred Adler and Gustav Jung. Discussions for the British Psychoanalytical Society were then under way after the break-up of the London Psychoanalytical Society; it was founded just two months later in October 1919. KM would gradually become more interested in what psychoanalysis had to offer in terms of alternatives to allopathic medicine. See her 1922 letter to her sister Vera in CL1, pp. 305–6. 4. ‘A.T.’ refers of course to Anton Chekhov; the English transliteration of Russian names at the time was extremely variable, tending to reflect both phonetic approximation and French usage, since in the nineteenth century Russian literature had frequently arrived indirectly translated in English via prior translations into French.

[15 August 1919] [BL] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] My dear Koteliansky The letter arrived safely; I am copying it for this week’s issue of the paper. It is an extraordinarily illuminating letter.1 But I feel that ‘Ivanov’ although he is a typical russian is also exactly true of many of this generation. The glimpse he gives of Sasha the female – how good that is . .2 And then, particularly I like the postscript.3 That is typical Tchekhov. Koteliansky. Would it not be possible to prepare a book for the American4 & say that you will give it to him for £50 down on delivery of manuscript? It is an unheard of bargain. If I help – I do not want to be paid. You have the £50 and let him have the book. It is quite simple. Can’t you suggest this to him?

66   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 I am going away the third week in September, I think – to the Italian riviera. Then I shall have unlimited time to work. I do not want at present to start a new life in a new country, like Lawrence – but to be alone and to work – really that is preferable to going to Heaven. I have just read Mrs G’s last volume ‘The Bishop’ – which includes the Steppe.5 She seems to take the nerve out of Tchekov before she starts working on him, like the dentist takes the nerve from a tooth.6 My new kitten, ‘Wing Lee’ is lying on his back on the sofa waving his legs and arms.7 He runs like a rabbit. I am longing to write a story where a kitten shall play an important role. Are you worried about money? Then do not send me my half of the translation-money this month. My dear friend, simply keep it. Katherine. Notes 1. ‘This week’s issue’ was not in fact published until 24 and 31 October. It consists of an extensive extract from a single letter to Souvorin, in which Chekhov discusses his play Ivanov at great length. See CW3, pp. 239–45. 2. First staged in 1887, Chekhov’s first long play, Ivanov, was an essential landmark for him, bringing the writer and playwright into prominence, but also staging the keynotes of his sensibility. Its eponymous protagonist, Nikolai Ivanov, sums up the dilemma of his late nineteenth-century ‘hero’, born too late to be a Romantic ‘superfluous man’, too caring to be a radical, too disillusioned to be a reformer, too early and too well mannered to be absurd or even Prufrockian. A ‘Russian Hamlet’ type without the madness, he is clear in thought yet mistaken in calculations. Sasha meanwhile reflects the psychological complexity and proto-modernity of many of Chekhov’s female characters, independent of mind, and yet ultimately incapable of breaking the slow but relentless momentum of decline and dismay. Both Woolf and KM expressed a particular interest in the peculiar mindset and energies of Chekhov’s women – as they did other female figures from the Russian literary canon. See Davison 2014, pp. 94–105. 3. Unfortunately, the postscript was actually cut for publication in the Athenaeum. This may have been for purely practical reasons, since it is three paragraphs long. Koteliansky reinstated it when he published a book-length selection of Chekhov’s letters in 1925, with Philip Tomlinson as the co-translator. See Koteliansky and Tomlinson, pp. 141–2. 4. Both Koteliansky and KM were keen to bring out a fuller selection of Chekhov’s letters than the Athenaeum series had allowed. Kot was in contact with a number of American editors and publishers at the time, and envisaged Huebsch and Knopf as likely targets (see above, p. 26). As he stated in a letter the following month, ‘It is not sentimentalism, but a real desire that a book, bearing both our names, should see the light. Perhaps, if you should like, that will not be the only one. I want this book as a token of our perhaps uncommon friendship’ (26 September 1919 – ATL: MSPapers-4003-23). 5. Constance Garnett’s translation of The Bishop and Other Stories had just been published. ‘The Steppe’ is indeed an impressive and lengthy short story, the



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poetic power of which was singled out by Woolf in ‘The Russian Background’, her review of the collection, published in the TLS (EVW3, pp. 83–6). KM also returns to the story in her next letter to Koteliansky, below. 6. As mentioned above (p. 64), professional rivalry can account for some of KM’s dismissive responses to Garnett’s translations, especially since her cotranslating experience, however insightful in cultural and stylistic terms, had not given her any intimate understanding of Chekhov’s Russian. She came back on her own judgements in later years. See CW1, p. 456. 7. KM’s wordplay with the kitten’s name gives Wingley a more Chinese-inflected name, Lee, or Lì being one of the most common surnames.

[21 August 1919] [BL] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] Dear Koteliansky, I hate to think that you must give up your serene existence. If I were a wealthy woman you should not. I should find a perfectly secure way so that the money you wanted was there – and that was the end of it . . . Will you send me the biographical notes?1 What shall I do with them? Tell Fox to come & explain to me.2 Murry gave me the Five Pages yesterday. Yes, I am sure your explanation of Ivanov is right.3 It is like Tchekov to have done this. I have re-read ‘The Steppe’4 – what can one say? It is simply one of The great stories of the world – a kind of Iliad or Odyssey – I think I will learn this journey by heart. One says of things: they are immortal. One feels about this story not that it becomes immortal – it always was. It has no beginning or end. T. just touched one point with his pen . __________ . and then another point – enclosed something – which had, as it were, been there for ever. I always miss you when I am away, and often there comes the illogical nonsensical certainty you will be at a station. Never-the-less – I go gladly with all my heart –                     Katherine. Notes 1. The biographical notes had been adapted by Koteliansky from a memoir written by Chekhov’s brother, Mikhail Chekhov. They were published in two instalments in the Athenaeum in January and February 1920, but without mention of the author or translators’ names. See CW3, pp. 250–7. 2. ‘Fox’ was Koteliansky’s much-loved dog. 3. Ivanov was Chekhov’s first four-act play to be staged. See above, p. 66, n. 2. 4. ‘The Steppe’ was Chekhov’s novella-length short story, an impressive account of a journey and a landscape through the eyes of a child. See above, p. 66, n. 5.

68   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [5 September 1919] [BL] → Disappeared on September 11th 1919.

2 Portland Villas East Heath Road N.W.3.

My dear Koteliansky, I leave here for Italy next week – on Thursday morning – under a sworn promise to my doctor not to remain there a shorter time than 2 years. As soon as I am there I shall send you my address and any work you forward me will be done immediately. Do you think it will be possible in 2 years time to go to Yalta?1 These last days are hideous. It is not being ill that matters; it is the abuse of one’s privacy – one’s independence – it is having to let people serve you and fighting every moment against their desire to ‘share’. Why are human beings so indecent? But soon it will be over, and I shall be at work. Forgive my complaining – I love the sea. But not now. It is too cold and I cannot bear it should look angry. Goodbye. Note 1. Yalta, on the southern coast of the Crimean peninsula, was where Chekhov settled in 1898, making the most of a small inheritance and the commercial success of The Seagull to take up residence in a region whose warmer climate attracted many of Russia’s sufferers of tuberculosis. The ‘White Datcha’ that he had had built was then occupied and carefully preserved by his sister, Masha, and soon after became a museum.

[19 September 1919] [BL] (The cheque came safely; thank you)

Poste Restante San Remo Italy.

Koteliansky This is the first day I am able to answer your letter. We were at the last moment forced to travel a day in advance. This I telegraphed you on the Tuesday but Lesley Moore1 forgot to send the wire, she says. I hate to think you came & there was nobody there – We had a dreadful journey and this place is terribly hot and swarming with insects and



s. s. koteliansky   69

hotel profiteers. But I am better today and I have found a small solitary little house2 away from everybody, hidden by olive trees, overlooking the sea. In 8 days I shall be there. Please send me as soon as possible some more Tchekhov – as much as you can. I will work fast here – and anything else – This address is quite safe, but for legal reasons I must add ‘Murry’ to Katherine Mansfield as I have to show my passport before I can get letters.3 I will write again when I am stronger. This is just to let you know I am thinking of you. Goodbye. Katherine. Notes 1. ‘Lesley Moore’ was the name Ida Baker and KM chose for Baker, when in 1906 the schoolgirl Kathleen Beauchamp decided on her own professional name – Katherine Mansfield. Baker’s name was usually shortened to L. M., although KM also gave a number of other nicknames to her steadfast friend over the years. KM’s use of the full form here reflects Koteliansky’s own life-long affection for Baker, who notes, in her memoirs, ‘Koteliansky had written to me in December 1926: “To me you are Katherine’s sole and only friend”, and he and others have insisted that I should write all I knew of Katherine, saying it was my duty to correct the many false impressions of her’ (Baker, p. 20). 2. JMM, Baker and KM stayed first at the Villa Flora, before moving to the Casetta Deerholm at Ospedaletti; neither unfortunately proved the idyllic site for which KM had been hoping. 3. KM and JMM were married at Kensington Register Office on 3 May 1918.

[1 October 1919] [BL]

October 1st

Casetta Deereholm, Ospedaletti Portomaurizio.

My dear Koteliansky, The box arrived today, with your letter and the manuscripts and the cheque – all safe.1 It was very nice, somehow, opening the box . . . I, too, am sorry to have missed you, but we shall meet another day – a happier one . . . I shall start immediately on the manuscript, and if there is such a thing as a typewriter here they shall be typed.2 But my impermanent home is remote and the small town, Ospedaletti, has nothing but a laundry, a flower market and a wine shop. So I expect I shall have to send the MSS. To England. You shall have your copy back I as soon as I have done . . . Let the book be a ‘token’ of our friendship.3 This idea pleases me so – very very much.

70   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 I wish you could pick up a hundred pounds. It has just begun to rain – immense drops. If they were only gold I would send you an envelope full. You would not object to receiving an act of God, would you? I have taken this little villa for the winter, perhaps for longer. It is nice, Koteliansky; you would like it. It is on a wild hill slope, covered with olive and fig trees and long grass and tall yellow flowers. Down below is the sea – the entire ocean – a huge expanse. It thunders all day against the rocks. At the back there are mountains. The villa is not very small. It has a big verandah on one side where one can work and an overgrown garden. No hideous riviera palms (like Italian profiteers); everything very simple and clean. Many lizards lie on the garden wall; in the evening the cicada shakes his tiny tambourine. I have often pictured you here. We walk up and down, smoking. If only the mosquito were not like roaring lions –– but they are. On the 14th is my birthday. Please send me a letter for that day if you are in the mood. I am working. I wish your eyes were better; I wish you had good news.   Goodnight Katherine M. is back in London. Notes 1. Koteliansky had written on 26 September sending ‘A. Tchekhov Biographical Notes, V. I, II and III’, the volumes being another extended series of letters for publication. 2. In his letter, he asks her specifically to safeguard his originals, sending back her own rewritten version, ideally typed up by an Italian typist, in the hope of saving money. 3. As mentioned above (p. 64), Koteliansky had explicitly expressed his ‘ambition [. . .] to see our Tchekhov letters in book form’, despite ‘damn[ing] old Garnett who spoilt my chances of getting rich’. It was this book – for which he had practical plans too in terms of the American market – that he wanted as ‘a token of our perhaps uncommon friendship’ (ATL MS-Papers-4003-23).

[13 December 1919] [BL] [Casetta Deerholm, Ospedaletti] Saturday Night. Koteliansky Your letter has made me very happy.1 Thank you for it. You know, it is still here, in my room, sounding like music that has been played. ‘Be well’. And I am ashamed that I broke down in my last letter. That night I went to bed with pneumonia. That was why I was so depressed. Of course I am still in bed but it does not matter. All is well. We are quite alone here tonight. It is so far away and still. Everything is full of silent life – complete with its shadow. From the sea there comes a



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soft ruffled sound and its beat is regular and soft like the beat of mowers cutting through a deep meadow. Yes, one day when we have the money we shall meet somewhere and talk quietly for as long as we wish – It will happen, I think . .2 Your loneliness is precious to you, I know.3 Does it disturb it to know you are dear to me. Do not let it. It is such a quiet feeling. It is like the light coming in to a room – moonlight – where you are sitting. I shall try and get well here. If I do die perhaps there will be a small private heaven for consumptives only. In that case I shall see Tchekov. He will be walking down his garden paths with fruit trees on either side and tulips in flower in the garden beds. His dog will be sitting on the path, panting and slightly smiling as dogs do who have been running about a great deal. Only to think of this makes my heart feel as though it were dissolving – a strange feeling. But the Knipper4 . . . You know Koteliansky, I cannot like her. There is a kind of false brightness about her – Perhaps I am very wrong. Lawrence wrote from Florence.5 Frieda had arrived – thinner – but very well. This thinness will not last. He said Florence was lovely and full of ‘extremely nice people’. He is able to bear people so easily. Often I long to be more in life – to know people – even now the desire comes. But immediately the opportunity comes I think of nothing but how to escape. And people have come to see me here – What are they? They are not human beings; they are never children – they are absolutely unreal – mechanisms. And those people in England – when one goes away the memory of them is like the memory of clothes hanging in a cupboard. And yet the beauty of life – Koteliansky – the haunting beauty of ‘the question’6 – Sometimes when I am awake here, very early in the morning, I hear, far down on the road below, the market carts going by. And at the sound I live through this getting up before dawn, the blue light in the window – the cold solemn look of the people – the woman opening the door and going for sticks, the smell of smoke – the feather of smoke rising from their chimney. I hear the man as he slaps the little horse and leads it into the clattering yard. And the fowls are still asleep – big balls of feather. But the early morning air and hush . . . And after the man and wife have driven away some little children scurry out of bed across the floor and find a piece of bread and get back into the warm bed and divide it. But this is all the surface – Hundreds of things happen down to minute, minute details. But it is all so full of beauty – and you know the voices of people before sunrise – how different they are? I lie here, thinking of these things and hearing those little carts . . . It is too much. One must weep. Forgive a long letter. I shall send you the letters. I do not know if Murry is coming. I have sent him several wires asking him not to come. It is not at all a good idea. Goodnight. When you think of me call me by my other name –

72   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Notes 1. Koteliansky’s long, detailed and very affectionate letter written on 9 December is one of the few letters to KM that have survived. It includes a whole paragraph of advice ‘from an old man’ about how to think herself well by steering clear of negative thoughts, and never losing sight of the fact that ‘you are so elegant and life-joyous that no sad or melancholic thoughts should dare remain with you’. The closing words are, ‘Now, be well, really quite well’ (ATL, MS-Papers-4003-28). 2. The letter to which KM is responding reads, ‘I should so much like to see you and talk to you – quietly, friendly, intimately [. . .] Wait a while, get well, and perhaps after all I’ll make myself to earn some money, and then we will meet.’ 3. In quite an extended passage of self-analysis, Koteliansky had admitted, ‘In a strange way I feel so strong and rooted in my loneliness, that I cannot give it up, even for the sake of earning a living, because that would mean having to see people and do their thing.’ 4. Olga Knipper (1868–1959) was a professional actress of Russian and Austrian descent, who had grown up in Moscow. She had studied at drama school, having determined to make acting her career – as well as the sole source of income for herself and her widowed mother. Knipper was one of the original members of the Moscow Art Theatre and met Chekhov during rehearsals for The Seagull. He wrote Three Sisters for her and shaped the character Masha around Knipper’s personality. They were married in 1901, just three years before Chekhov’s death; Knipper remained with the Moscow Art Theatre from then on. 5. DHL set off from London on 14 November, and on 19 November arrived in Florence where Frieda was to meet him, arriving from Germany via Switzerland. His letter to JMM and KM has not survived. But to Emily King, he wrote on 4 December announcing, ‘Frieda arrived last night quite safely – a good bit thinner for her stay in Germany, but very well in health’ (LDHL3, p. 427). In Koteliansky’s letter to KM, he reassured her that ‘When Lawrence was here before going to Italy he was not like his best. I do not know why [. . .] But I do not think that he is angry with you.’ 6. By ‘The Question’ KM refers more to the works of Tolstoy than to Chekhov and his notion of the writer’s ethical commitment to questions, not answers (see above, p. 63, n. 1). Tolstoy was the ultimate benchmark for Koteliansky, whom Sarton quotes as saying, ‘In the hierarchy of creation there is God Almighty and Leo Tolstoy’ (see Sarton, p. 177). The ‘Question’ is the central transcendent moment of understanding at the heart of Tolstoy’s fiction, when the precarious tension between human suffering and the beauty of the world is momentarily relaxed. It was to provide the concluding synthesis of Virginia Woolf’s ‘Russian Point of View’ in her 1925 essay: Or is it not that the very intensity of our pleasure is somehow questionable and forces us to ask, with Pozdnyshev in the Kreutzer Sonata, ‘But why live?’ Life dominates Tolstoy as the soul dominates Dostoevsky. There is always at the centre of all the brilliant and flashing petals of the flower this scorpion ‘Why live?’ (EVW4, p.189).



s. s. koteliansky   73

[19 February 1921] [BL] VILLA ISOLA BELLA GARAVAN MENTON A/M. What has happened to the inkstand with the elephants on it – motherof-pearl, inlay – or was it ivory. Some of the inlay had begun to come off; I fancy one of the elephants had lost one eye.1 And that dim little picture of a snowy landscape hanging on the wall in your room. Where is it now? And where are the kittens and the children and Christ, who looked awfully like a kitten, too, who used to hang in the dining room. And that leather furniture with the tufts of horsehair stuffing coming out. Where are all the hats from the hatstand. And do you remember for how long the bell was broken. Then there was the statue on the stairs, smiling, the fair caretaker, always washing up, the little children always falling through her door. And your little room with the tiny mirror and the broken window & the piano sounding from outside. Those were very nice teacups – thin – a nice shape – and the tea was awfully good – so hot. ‘At the Vienna Cafe there is good bread.’ And the cigarettes. The packet done up in writing paper you take from your pocket. It is folded so neatly at the ends like a parcel from the chemists. And then Slatkovsky2 – his beard, his ‘glad eye’ – his sister, who sat in front of the fire and took off her boot. The two girls who came to see him the Classic Day his Father died. And the view from your window – you remember? The typist sits there & her hat & coat hang in the hall. Now an Indian in a turban walks up that street opposite to the British Museum quartier. It begins to rain. The streets are very crowded. It is dusky. Now people are running downstairs. That heavy outer door slams. And now the umbrellas go up in the street and it is much darker, suddenly. Dear friend – do not think evil of me – forgive me.3                    Kissienka. Notes 1. KM looks back nostalgically to the era when she and Koteliansky had first met, and he was lodging above the Russian Law Bureau in High Holborn, London. 2. Ruvin Solomonovich Slatkowsky (?–1917) was the lawyer in charge of the Russian Law Bureau. Little is known about him, except that neither Koteliansky nor any of his friends had anything positive to say about him; DHL refers to him as ‘the obscene Slat’ (LDHL2, p. 623), who would definitely have been

74   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 counted among the ‘blighters’ of the world – a term Koteliansky was fond of using to dismiss anyone into his hierarchised category of worthless people. (See Diment 2011, p. 59) 3. After months of estrangement KM had been trying to patch up their friendship, which had been strained since 1918; occasional bitter quarrels were instantly exacerbated by the interventions of DHL and Frieda. Koteliansky had disapproved bitterly of KM’s reconciliation with JMM; he had also felt betrayed and infuriated by her loss of three volumes of his translations of Chekhov’s letters. See above, p. 65, n. 1. Virginia Woolf, who at this point had taken up KM’s role as co-translator, notes in her diary: Kot, poor honest somehow wounded man let out by chance that Katherine lost 3ms books he [word missing] of Tchehov’s letters. He patiently sets to work to write them out again. Unless she has some very good excuse this seems to me wanton cruelty on her part. She is a tidy methodical woman. How could one lose 3 books lent one by a man who gets his bread by writing? But she never abused Kot; as he does them. (DVW2, pp. 99–100) Meanwhile Brett’s intervention appears to have gradually helped seal the rift, but not until months later. See CL1, pp. 390, 393, 405.

[18 October 1921] [BL] Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre (Valais) Switzerland. Dear Koteliansky, my enemy, Can you tell me anything about that Russian doctor?1 If there was a chance of seeing him and if he was not too expensive I would go to Paris in the Spring and ask him to treat me . . . Not a day passes but I think of you. It is sad that we are enemies.2 If only you would accept my love. It is good love – not the erotic bad kind. But no. You wont answer my letters. When my name is mentioned you cross yourself and touch wood. It is sad for me Katherine. Dont return the postcard. If you hate me too much – burn it in a candle. Notes 1. The Russian doctor was Ivan Manoukhin, whose medical clinic was in the 16th arrondissement of Paris. See below, pp. 138–9.



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2. The letters that KM had previously sent Koteliansky trying to make amends had met with silence, or been returned to her. See above, p. 74, n. 3.

[4 November 1921] [ATL] [Draft: Notebook 41] [Chalet des Sapins, Montana-sur-Sierre, Valais] Dont reply to this. Dear Friend 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’1 . . . 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 light 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. Notes 1. KM is quoting from a letter Chekhov addressed to A. S. Souvorin, dated 7 January 1889, and which she and Koteliansky had co-translated for publication in the Athenaeum. He incites Souvorin to write a story in which a young man, the son of a serf, errand-boy, a chorister, high-school pupil, student, brought up to venerate his superiors and kiss the hand of the priests, to worship borrowed ideas, who is grateful for each bit of bread, flogged often [. . .] drop by drop, squeezes the slave out of himself, until, waking one fine morning, he feels that in his veins there runs no longer the blood of a slave, but real human blood. (CW3, p. 230) Koteliansky clearly approved of the young man’s spirit: he uses the expression often when urging his friends to be sincere and true to themselves.

76   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [4 November 1921] [BL]

4 xi 1921

Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre Valais Switzerland

Thank you for your letter, dear Koteliansky. As I cannot go to Paris until the spring I shall not write to the doctor until then. But I am very glad to have his address. I am glad that you criticised me. It is right that you should have hated much in me. I was false in many things and careless – untrue in many ways. But I would like you to know that I recognise this and for a long time I have been trying ‘to squeeze the slave out of my soul’.1 You will understand that I dont tell you this to prove I am an angel now! No. But I need not go into the reasons; you know them. Its marvellous here just now, my dear. The first snow has fallen on the lower peaks, and everything is crystal clear. The sky is that marvellous transparent blue one only sees in early spring and autumn – It looks so high and even joyful – tender . . . And an exciting thing has happened today. My ancient geranium which is called Sarah has been visited by the angel at last. This geranium has real personality. It is so fearfully proud of this new bud that every leaf is curling.        Farewell.            I press your hand               Katherine. Note 1. In her moving portrait of Koteliansky, May Sarton cites this extract of KM’s letter to illustrate her point that ‘One did not write to Kot as to other friends; one wrote to one’s conscience’ (Sarton, p. 180). As noted above, the expression ‘squeeze the slave out of one’s soul’ is one Koteliansky took from Chekhov, for example in a letter to Souvorin, 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 sending it back to Koteliansky for revisions, making her use of it here even more telling.



s. s. koteliansky   77

[29 November 1921] [BL] Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre Valais My dear Koteliansky If I trouble you with this request please simply tell me so. Do you know where I can obtain any information about Doctor Manoukhine’s treatment?1 I mean – has it appeared in any possible papers or journals that I can get hold of? I ask for this reason. I cannot possibly go to Paris at present. I have no one to send. In fact I have not mentioned this idea to anyone except my doctor here.2 Such things I prefer to do alone. It is not just a whim. My doctor here says he will very gladly consider any information I can get him about this treatment and as he has a very good X ray apparatas it could, if it is not the ‘professional patent’ of Doctor Manoukhine, be tried here, immediately. What should you advise me to do? My difficulty about writing direct is the language. It is one thing to explain ones case by speech, it is another to write it in a foreign tongue. I should simply antagonise him . . . But the doctor here is quite intelligent and very honest. He is interested sincerely. And I have such faith in this ‘unknown’ treatment. I feel it is the right thing. And I want to stop this illness, as soon as possible. Dear precious friend, forgive me for worrying you. It is a beautiful, still winter day. There is the sound of a sawmill. The sun shines like a big star through the dark fir trees. How are you? Katherine. Notes 1. Although sometimes dismissed as a charlatan, Ivan Ivanovitch Manoukhin (1882–1958), the Russian doctor whom KM travelled to Paris to consult, was a respected medical practitioner in Russia, whose reputed, revolutionary methods for treating tuberculosis included submitting the spleen to X-ray radiation. Manoukhin achieved a certain international prestige after treating the writer Maxim Gorky and his wife, a feat acknowledged by the press worldwide. The Lancet, the oldest and most reputable weekly medical journal of the time, had published an article by Manoukhin describing the methods and results of his pioneering X-ray treatment on 2 April 1921; see Manoukhin, pp. 685–7. For an essential understanding of the chronology and interactions between KM, Koteliansky and their peer group in terms of how information about Manoukhin’s treatment circulated, see Diment 2016, pp. 40–57. See also the Introduction to Manoukhin below, pp. 138–9. 2. Her doctor was Théodore Stephani (1868–1951), the Swiss director of the English clinic of Montana, a sanatorium for English tuberculosis patients.

78   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Being at high altitude, the Montana area (just below the modern ski resort of Crans-Montana) had developed in the late nineteenth century on account of the ideal conditions it offered as a health resort. Unlike some of his more conventional colleagues, Stephani showed a pragmatic interest in a number of the more controversial treatments of the time (including the Spahlinger treatment that KM also tested), many of which were to prove deluded. See Galofaro, pp. 52–5.

[4 December 1921] [BL] Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre Valais Dear Koteliansky Thank you. I have written to M. today. Whatever he advises that will I do. It is strange – I have faith in him. I am sure he will not have the kind of face one walks away from. Besides – think of being ‘well’.1 Health is as precious as life – no less. Do you know I have not walked since November 1920? Not more than to a carriage and back. Both my lungs are affected there is a cavity in one and the other is affected through. My heart is weak, too. Can all this be cured. Ah, Koteliansky – wish for me! But I am selfish, dear friend. No, I should not ask even a wish. Yet to be uprooted is terrible. Why are things so bad with you?2 It is a mystery why this must be so. I press your hand. Katherine. Notes 1. The interplay of psychological outlook and ‘wellness’ returns frequently in KM and Koteliansky’s exchanges, as it does in his letters to other friends whom he regularly urges to resist a negative, defeatist response to adversity. The advice is all the more poignant coming from someone who waged a lifelong battle against depression. 2. The news from his family in Ostropol, always long awaited and out of date by the time it reached Koteliansky in London, was particularly bleak at this time, reporting the combined chaos of the post-revolutionary civil war, savage killings and typhoid fever. The distress of his mother, as appalled eyewitness, vulnerable survivor and recently bereaved wife and mother, amplified his despair no end. In letters to DHL, Brett and Gertler he insists that he does not want to ‘infect’ others with his misery.



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[13 December 1921] [BL] Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre Valais Dear Koteliansky – All I meant by a ‘mystery’ was that one so good and so precious as you should have sorrows . . .1 I have written a second time to Paris. If I do not hear from this letter I will try the secretary of the institut. There is nothing else to be done. Katherine. Note 1. See previous letter, p. 78.

[23 December 1921] [BL] [Postcard] [Chalet des Sapins, Montana-sur-Sierre, Switzerland] I heard from M. today. A good letter – very. As soon as I am well enough to get up I shall go to Paris. He says the treatment takes 15 weeks if one is not much advanced. But no matter. It is fearfully exciting to have heard! K.

[24 December 1921] [BL] Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre Valais Koteliansky, I want to write to you at this time in memory of that other Christmas when Lawrence gave his party in the top room of Elsie Murray’s cottage.1 Thank you again for the Vienna café chocolates and the cigarettes. I see the boxes now. But far more plainly I see you, as if I could put out my hand and touch your breast. Wasn’t Lawrence awfully nice that night. Ah, one must always love Lawrence for his ‘being’. I could love Frieda too, tonight, in her Bavarian dress, with her face flushed as though she had been crying about the

80   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 ‘childeren’.2 It is a pity that all things must pass. And how strange it is, how in spite of everything, there are certain people, like Lawrence, who remain in one’s life for ever, and others who are forever shadowy – You, for instance, are part of my life like that. One might say ‘immortal’. I mean, just supposing there were immortality it would not be at all strange if suddenly a door opened and we met and sat down to drink tea. Thus it will always be with me . . It is no idle pretence. If it is in the least atom a comfort to you to know there is one who loves you and thinks of you (without a shadow of responsibility involved or of anything that is not perfectly ‘simple’) please remember you have     For ever     Katherine. And no answer is required, dear friend. I mean that. Notes 1. The party, held to celebrate Christmas 1914, took place at the Lawrences’ cottage, The Triangle, in Chesham, Buckinghamshire, when KM and JMM were living in the neighbouring village of Great Missenden. 2. While her friends were frequently impatient with her lamentations, Frieda Lawrence’s despair was immense, and very understandable; it reflects the inhumanity of divorce laws in England at the time, and their ingrained moralising, patriarchal values. In 1913, following her separation from her husband, Ernest Weekley, who filed for a divorce, Frieda was prevented from seeing her children, then aged thirteen, ten and eight. The divorce settlement entrusted custody to Weekley, and Frieda never saw them for more than brief, mostly clandestine periods before the early 1920s, by which time they were young adults. See Introduction to Frieda Lawrence below, p. 109.

[13 January 1922] [BL] Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre Valais Dear Koteliansky, What a supremely good piece of translation is this story by Bunin in The Dial.1 One simply cannot imagine it better done & I am, with everybody else, deeply grateful for the opportunity of reading it. Bunin has an immense talent – That is certain. All the same – – – there’s a limitation in this story, so it seems to me. There is something hard, inflexible, separate in him which he exults in. But he ought not to exult in it. It is a pity it is there. He just stops short of being a great writer because of it. Tenderness is a dangerous word to use, but I dare use it to



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you. He lacks tenderness – and in spite of everything, tenderness there must be . . . I have been in a horrible black mood lately, with feelings of something like hatred towards ‘everybody’. . I think one reason was I wrote a story – I projected my little people against the bright screen of Time – and not only nobody saw, nobody cared.2 But it was as if the story was refused. It is bitter to be refused. Heaven knows one does not desire praise. But silence is hard to bear. I know one ought not to care. One should go on quietly. But there it is. I am leaving for Paris in a fortnight. A chill and the weather and money have kept me back. But I shall go then: Shall I write to you from there? Koteliansky – I HATE snow and icicles and blizzards. It is all such mock mystery and a wrestling with the enemy. I love the fertile earth – spring – Wouldn’t you like to be now this instant, in a beech forest with the new leaves just out?                I press your hands                 Katherine. Notes 1. Ivan Bunin or Bounine (1870–1953) (conventionally transliterated Bunin in English: KM tended to use French transliterations for the names of Russians she met in Paris) was the foremost Russian writer amongst the émigré circle in Paris, where he had arrived just one year before; his prolific writings include chronicles, novels and short stories. He would become the first Russian writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded in 1933. His acclaimed short story, ‘The Gentleman from San Francisco’, had been published in the American monthly magazine the Dial that month, translated by Koteliansky and DHL. For DHL’s account of their work on the translation, and publication, see LDHL4, pp. 24–58. 2. KM is evoking the story ‘At the Bay’, which was published later that month. For her intense emotional effect of writing the story from distant childhood memories, see her letter to Brett, 12 September 1921, in CL1, pp. 403–5.

[1 February 1922] [BL]

February 1st

Victoria Palace Hotel 6 Rue Blaise Desgoffe Rue de Rennes.

Koteliansky I have seen Manoukhine.1 Yes, one has every confidence in such a man. He wishes me to begin the treatment at once – I am taking steps

82   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 to try to do so, but it is not quite easy to arrange. It will cost me much money.2 I have £100 saved but I must make not only another £100 but enough to live on here and for special food and so on. Also I have Ida Baker to keep as well until I am strong enough to walk about and so on. It is all difficult, and for some reason I find it hard to accept all its difficulties, as one must. Perhaps for one thing, it is not nice in a city. I had forgotten how women parade about, idle and unworthy, and how ignoble are the faces of men. It shocks me to see these faces. I want more than anything simply to cry! Does that sound absurd? But the lack of life in all these faces is terribly sad. Forgive me, my dear friend. Let me speak of something else for a moment. While I was waiting at the clinique tonight the doors were all open & in the doctor’s cabinet people were talking russian. They talked all together. Doctor M’s voice was above the other voices, but there was a continual chorus – all speaking. I cannot tell you how I love Russian. When I hear it spoken it makes me think of course always of Tchekhov. I love this speech. I thought also of you, and I wished you were with me. Send me a note here. Not a letter. I don’t expect you to write. If I get well you will let me help you with the people you help – won’t you? Now a bell is striking as though it turned over in its sleep to strike. Its very late.       Goodnight.            I press your hands Katherine. Notes 1. For KM’s diary notes about the first meeting, and consequent reflections, see CW4, pp. 410–16. 2. Manoukhin’s clinic was privately run, and expensive. The business management, however, was entirely in the hands of his collaborator and fellow practitioner, Louis Donat. In his (unpublished) autobiography, Manoukhin noted that he had no idea whether Donat was charging too much or not (he kept assuring me that it was similar to the average Paris price for services of that kind) and, to be honest, at first I stayed away from these financial matters, especially because, legally, according to the contract I signed, I could not have changed anything anyway. I only managed to convince him to allow the impoverished Russian émigrés to get my treatment for free. (tr. Galya Diment – Diment 2016, p. 47) For KM’s most explicit account of conditions at the clinic and her exchanges with the doctors, see letters to JMM, 31 January to 1 February 1922.



s. s. koteliansky   83

[3 February 1922] [BL]

iii Fevrier 1922

Victoria Palace Hotel 6 Rue Blaise Desgoffe Rue de Rennes Paris

Koteliansky There is no answer to this letter. But I wanted to tell you something very good that happened today. Yesterday I decided that I must take this treatment and I telephoned M. I was sitting alone in the waiting room of the clinique reading Goethes conversations with Eckermann1 when M. came in. He came quickly over to me, took my hand and said simply. ‘Vous avez decidé de commencer avec la traitment. C’est très bien. Bonne sante!’2 and then he went as quickly out of the room saying ‘tout de suite’3 (pronounced ‘toot sweet’ for he speaks very little French.) But this coming in so quickly and gently was a beautiful act, never to be forgotten, the act of someone very good. Oh, how I love gentleness, Koteliansky, dear friend. All these people everywhere are like creatures at a railway station – shouting, calling, rushing, with ugly looks and ways. And the women’s eyes – like false stones – hard, stupid – there is only one word corrupt. I look at them and I think of the words of Christ ‘Be ye therefore perfect even as your Father in Heaven is perfect’4 – But what do they care? How shall they listen? It is terribly sad. Of course, darling Koteliansky, I don’t want them to be all solemn or Sundayfied. God forbid. But it seems there is so little of the spirit of love and gaiety and warmth in the world just now. Why all this pretence? But it is true – it is not easy to be simple it is not just (as ATs friend used to say) a sheep sneezing.5 It is raining. There is a little hyacinth on my table – a very naive one – Heaven bless you. May we meet soon.          Katherine. Notes 1. Johann Peter Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe, first published in German in 1836–48 and translated into English in 1839–50, is a detailed account of the last years of Goethe’s life, as recorded by his secretary and friend, Eckermann. It is as much a model of eighteenth-century biographical writing as Boswell’s Life of Johnson. See CW4, pp. 414 and 440. 2. (Fr.): You have decided to begin the treatment. That’s very good. Good health to you! 3. (Fr.): Right away.

84   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 4. From ‘The Sermon on the Mount’, Matthew 5: 48. 5. In a long letter to Souvorin, Chekhov underlines that ‘from the point of view of usefulness and so on, to write a fairly good story and give the reader ten to twenty interesting minutes – that, as Gilyarovsky says, is not a sheep sneezing’ (Garnett 1920, p. 292). Vladimir Alexeyevich Gilyarovsky (1853–1935) was a traveller, poet, actor and prolific chronicler, writing hundreds of sketches and memoirs about his daily life and observations. He was as renowned for his boisterous energy as he was for his sparkling good humour. Chekhov frequented him mostly in his early days, when he was struggling to publish to supplement his income. For an extended discussion of the image and its repercussions, see Whiteley, pp. 135–7.

[15 March 1922] [BL] [Victoria Palace Hôtel, Rue Blaise Desgoffe, Paris] Dear Koteliansky – A delicate question. Is it not possible for Gertler1 to be made to understand that when Brett2 is without a servant he must make his own bed and carry his own water jug. To do less is to be an uncivilised being. Brett never complains to me but the facts show through her letter tonight, and they are not pleasant. Could you tell Gertler (in the form of a good solid parable) that such things must not be. Please do not think I am impertinent, dear friend. But it is sad when there is such a small band of decent people in the world that they should not be able to teach each other how to live. I have read recently a book by Merezkroski and Hippius and another by Bunin (stories with a preface.)3 All were about present day conditions in Russia. They are so terrible that there is nothing to be said. It is strange. I fear Lenin,4 even personally, to such an extent that I am frightened to look at a picture of him. It is not simply the head of a devil – No, better not to speak about it.      I wish I could be with you for a little.            I press your hands               Katherine. Notes 1. Mark Gertler (1891–1939) was an important British artist of the early twentieth century, born to Polish Jewish parents, and a close friend of Koteliansky, DHL and KM; like DHL and KM, he suffered from tuberculosis. Also something of a maverick at times, he had close – often hot-headed and passionate – ties with many of the Bloomsbury Group and other London Modernist circles. See CL1, pp. 594–8, for an Introduction and KM’s one surviving letter to Gertler (although very many were written over the years). 2. KM wrote to Brett the same day, saying ‘I cant bear to think you make Gertler’s bed & carry water jugs. It is very ugly and wrong of him. It is shocking that



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he should be so uncivilized. It gave me a pang of horror. Don’t do it for him’ (CL1, p. 455). 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. For an Introduction and KM’s extended and richly detailed letters to Brett, see CL1, pp. 339–498. 3. The Russian writers Dmitry Merezhkovsky (1865–1941) and Zinaida Gippius (sometimes transliterated as Hippius, 1869–1945) had co-authored two works dealing specifically with the late Tsarist years and the tentative Menshevik and Bolshevik regimes in the immediate post-revolutionary era: The Tsar and the Revolution (1907) and The Reign of the Antichrist (1922). Husband and wife, they had emigrated in 1919 and settled in Paris in 1921. KM had encountered their works already, via Koteliansky, who helped circulate them in London. 4. Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (1870–1924), who adopted the pseudonym Lenin as part of his clandestine political agitation after being exiled to Siberia, was the founder of the Russian Communist Party and the dominant force behind its more radical Bolshevik wing. Since emerging as the inspirer and leader of the October Revolution in 1917 he had become one of the chief architects and implementers of the Soviet state, of which he was the first head. KM’s awareness of his image and the mythology already building around him reflects both the intense animosity of the Russian exiles and émigrés she was meeting (a mixture of pre-revolutionary old Russian aristocracy and pro-reformist Mensheviks), and a contemporary surge of interest now that western politicians and media had begun coming to terms with the defeat of White Russian forces in the civil war, and the pragmatics of how to contend with the former radicals who were henceforth the representatives of state.

[25 March 1922] [BL] [Victoria Palace Hôtel, Rue Blaise Desgoffe, Paris] 25 iii 1922

Paris.

Dear Koteliansky No – no – hara-kiri is wrong. Why not be a moralist then? But is it to be a moralist – simply to tell someone who does not know what must be done? To share one’s discoveries? Even if they don’t agree it seems to me you are bound to tell them what you have found best to do. But I know there is an objection to this, and I have been called an ‘interfering schoolmistress’ for it. I dont care; I shall go on being one. Of course there must be no violence and no tub-thumping. The other person must think they are having tea with jam. It is however, all rather difficult.1 Manoukhin says that after this week I shall begin to get better. You know there is a grosse reaction after the 5th seance which lasts for about

86   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 3 weeks when one is worse in every way.2 I am at the end of the 2nd week. I long to be better. 8 weeks in a hotel bedroom – never going out once except to the clinic is very deadly. He won’t even let me go for a little drive yet. But its not long now. Yes I knew M. & H. were liars about Gorki.3 There was a black stain of malice on every page that had his name. Hippius, too, for a woman of imagination, told awful bangers about her ‘cahiers’.4 She only had the one, you remember, and after it was filled she wrote on the cover and the lining and under the lining and so on. But no cahier on earth could have been big enough for all she wrote. She would say ‘I have just found a place for a few lines more’ and then followed pages and pages with even quotations of poetry! This is very inartistic. Goodbye dear precious friend. Yours ever Katherine. Notes 1. The subtext of KM’s observations here reflects the intensity of Koteliansky’s political quandary at the time, and her renewed role as listener and confidante. As a staunch Menshevik, who had embraced the 1917 February Revolution as the political turning-point for Russian reform, Koteliansky’s distress had grown exponentially over the past two years as western policy had served inadvertently not only to reinforce Bolshevik power, but then to accommodate the emerging leadership, irrespective of the ruthless repression needed to defeat popular opposition. He was furthermore acutely aware of the bloody wave of pogroms that were taking place, instigated and stoked by all the contending forces in the civil wars. He had been tirelessly campaigning to bring these issues to the attention of Whitehall and the press, but in the emerging narrative of post-war peace this ‘tub-thumping’ went largely unheeded. See BL Add MS–49074 for archive documents relating to his political activism. 2. The Manoukhin treatment consisted of fifteen weeks of X-ray irradiation, with a three-month break midway when the patient’s immune system was expected to react in a particularly forceful way: the so-called ‘grande [or ‘grosse’ – that is, strong] réaction’. As KM explains in a letter to Ida Baker (see CL1, p. 124), midway through the series of X-ray sessions Manoukhin expected the patient to feel much weaker; once this was past, the patient could hope to recover their strength quickly. See also Diment 2016, pp. 43–8. 3. Koteliansky had responded to her previous letter, warning her not to trust Dmitry Merezhkovsky and Zinaida Hippius. The alleged lies concerned questions of copyright and the circulation of published books outside Russia, blaming Grzhebin and Gorky for their key role, via the World Literature Publishing House circuits (see below, p. 92, n. 2). Koteliansky was implicated as both intermediary and translator. As Koteliansky’s biographer underlines, the core of the dispute actually reflected international relations: ‘Since the Bolshevik regime was not yet recognised as legitimate by the West, there was, indeed, no binding copyright agreement’ (Diment 2011, p. 127). 4. (Fr.): Notebooks.



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[8 April 1922] [BL] [Victoria Palace Hôtel, Rue Blaise Desgoffe, Paris] Saturday. My dear Koteliansky I feel better. I went to the clinic yesterday and Manoukhin says all is going according to plan. The reaction is practically over. I have gained 5 pounds! If this ‘succeeds’ really I hope and believe I shall be able to do much for Manoukhin. It is extraordinary: he is simply not known. In a week or so I am going to meet Bunin and Kuprin1 at M’s flat. To think one can speak with somebody who really knew Tchekhov. You know Koteliansky darling, when I write about myself I feel it is selfish and heartless, because of all that is happening to the world that you have known. Forgive me! I press your hands. Do you remember ‘God sent the crow . . . a piece of cheese’.2 Yours ever Katherine. Notes 1. Alexander Kuprin (1870–1938) was a Russian writer and former Menshevik supporter who had arrived in Paris in 1920, quickly aligning with the recently arrived Russian émigré circle, mostly based in the Montparnasse area of Paris. Unlike Bunin, Kuprin was desperately homesick and creatively unproductive once outside his homeland, and eventually decided return to the Soviet Union. A selection of his short stories had been co-translated by Koteliansky and JMM, KM, DHL and Leonard Woolf. 2. The words recall Aesop’s famous fable ‘The Fox and the Crow’, best known in the west in the translation by La Fontaine (‘Le Corbeau et le renard’). The bestknown Russian adaptation / translation by the fabulist Ivan Krylov explains the crow’s rather unexpected possession of a piece of cheese as a gift from God – thereby adding a more parabolical resonance to the moral. However, KM’s punctuation points clearly to the source of her literary allusion here: in Chekhov’s short story ‘An Artist’s Story’, the narrator looks back on his attachment to the Voltchaninov family, and in particular the two daughters, Lidia, the high-principled teacher and reformer, and Genya, the dreamer. He falls in love with Genya, who, although reciprocating his love, obeys her sister’s injunction to break their attachment. Just before he receives Genya’s note, he overhears Lidia dictating a text to her pupil: ‘God . . . sent . . . a crow’, she said in a loud, emphatic voice, probably dictating – ‘God sent a crow a piece of cheese. . . . A crow . . . a piece of cheese . . . Who’s there?’ she called suddenly, hearing my steps. ‘It’s I’. ‘Ah! Excuse me, I cannot come out to you this minute; I’m giving Dasha her lesson’. ‘Is Ekaterina Pavlovna in the garden?’

88   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 ‘No, she went away with my sister this morning to our aunt in the province of Penza. And in the winter they will probably go abroad’, she added after a pause. ‘“God sent . . . the crow . . . a piece . . . of cheese”. . . . Have you written it?’ I went into the hall, and stared vacantly at the pond and the village, and the sound reached me of ‘A piece of cheese. . . . God sent the crow a piece of cheese’. (Garnett 1916, p. 188)

[end April 1922] [BL] [Victoria Palace Hôtel, Rue Blaise Desgoffe, Paris] Koteliansky I am terribly angry. What a swindle! There, on my breakfast tray was the thick envelope. There inside, two miserable letters for Mr and Mrs!! And why bother you with such a stupid affair. I shall write immediately to the Manager & ask them if they have another sixpence for me to send it c/o The Nation.1 I flashed about in bed like a fish in a net with rage. Basta!2 Ever since Easter I have been thinking of you. Easter was wonderful this year. It reminded me of how Tchekhov used to spend the night walking about listening for the bells.3 And then I always remember this story Easter Eve about the monk at the ferry.4 It is one of my favourites; it is a marvellous story. And I don’t know why, I am so often imagining that you will come to Paris. Do not contradict this imagining. If you do not come – there it is. But let me go on thinking that one day we shall sit in the Bois5 and talk. It is such a pleasant dream. It was dangerous to write to you as I did while the Antagonist was still living with me.6 He immediately started another réaction, then a chill, then influenza. What a fearful lodger! But all this will pass. It is strange. I feel perfectly well in spirit but my body will not obey. I do not see how this can be. But there it is. It is very good to know you have translated Bunin.7 I look forward to this book immensly. Now I must put off seeing Bunin again for a week or two. How nice it will be to leave this hotel. Not to see any more wings of hotel chickens, or any more gritty little trays whisking in and out of the room. Yet, in spite of everything, I am glad to have been here. But I long to go into the country, a little village near a river, with fields and orchards. I think I shall go to Germany. Besides there is so much work to do. I have sold every story of my new book in advance, to pay for this treatment, and I have not written one!8 Six must be ready in June. It is raining. It always rains now, every day. I notice a change in people’s voice a kind of ‘quack-quack’, and there is a terribly frog-like look about the men. Umbrellas are growing enormous too. It is marvellous growing weather for them. Goodbye, my precious friend. Katherine.



s. s. koteliansky   89

Notes 1. One surviving envelope and a note from Koteliansky suggests that a manuscript had been sent to KM at Acacia Road, forwarded, and while in transit, became lost. The Nation, a weekly news and political analysis magazine founded in 1907 noted for its radical political outlook, had merged with the Athenaeum, a leading literary magazine of which JMM had been editor until 1921, just the year before. 2. (It.): That’s enough. The interjection is found frequently in letters by DHL, Koteliansky and KM. 3. In his extended memoir of his brother, Mikhail Chekhov writes, He always delighted in bells. Sometimes in earlier days he had gathered together a party of friends and gone with them to Kammeny Bridge to listen to the Easter bells. After eagerly listening to them he would set off to wander from church to church and with his legs giving way under him from fatigue would, only when Easter night was over, make his way homewards. (Garnett 1920, p. 14) 4. ‘Easter Eve’ was published in The Bishop and Other Stories, translated by Constance Garnett, in 1919. 5. (Fr.): The wood. The reference here is to the Bois de Boulogne, the extended park and woodland to the west of Paris, then an easily accessible, fashionable and popular destination for Parisians. 6. Although not an expression she tended to use, KM’s implication here is quite biblical in resonance, suggesting the devil within, with which one needs to grapple: in her case, ill health. The image may well have been Koteliansky’s, given his tendency to speak like an Old Testament prophet. 7. The Hogarth Press had just published Bunin’s The Gentleman from San Francisco and Other Stories, co-translated by Koteliansky, DHL and Leonard Woolf. 8. KM’s agent, Eric S. Pinker, had written on 22 April confirming details of her next planned volume of stories, to contain ‘about 60,000 words, of which the English serial rights of 24,000 are already sold to “The Sphere”’. See below, p. 441. Constable was planning to publish the work.

[25 May 1922] [BL] [Victoria Palace Hôtel, Rue Blaise Desgoffe, Paris] Dear Koteliansky I feel you ought to know this. I met Bunin last Tuesday evening he seemed very surprised that he had received nothing for this story in The Dial1 and that he had not been consulted in anyway about the English translation of his stories. He realised that there is no law by which a Russian author can claim any sum of money for the translation rights of his stories. But it was evident that he felt, in the existing circumstances, when he ‘receives’ no money at all from Russia and finds it terribly difficult to live at all, he was entitled to a share of whatever profits there may be. I don’t know. Perhaps you have a scheme by which he

90   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 may benefit later. But if that is the case would you write to him and explain? I think it would relieve him greatly. You see they do not know you and poverty has made them resentful. Zinaida Hippius (whom I detest) chipped in with the fact that you had received 500 dollars for the American acting rights of her play and that you had told her she was not entitled to a penny.2 But it is Bunin who matters. He is a very decent man – awfully decent, and both he and Manoukhin believe Hippius’ story. You understand why I write this? Yours ever Katherine. Notes 1. Bunin’s story, ‘The Gentleman from San Francisco’, had appeared in the Dial in January. See above, p. 81, n. 1. 2. The misunderstanding and consequent clash between Koteliansky and Hippius again arose over questions of copyright, translator’s fees and international law. The feud lasted for most of the year. The play in question, The Green Ring, had been staged with mixed reviews in Moscow in 1915 and 1916, its Aestheticism and its plot (a father-and-son clash) having been found dated and out of keeping with the contemporary climate.

[29 May 1922] [BL] Victoria Palace Hotel Rue Blaise Desgoffe Rue de Rennes. Dear Koteliansky You cannot have believed for one moment that I was taken in by the Hippius tale. Whoever spoke to me unfavourably about you would speak in vain – But that you know, of course; it is absurd to write it. My only reason for telling you of the affair was that I considered you had a right to know. Such things should not be said behind your back. I am going to see Manoukhin today and I shall tell him the facts of the shameful, revolting story. It is hard to understand how anyone can be taken in by her who has seen her. I have never felt a more complete physical repulsion for anyone. Everything about her is false – her cheeks, glowing softly with rouge. Even her breath – soft and sweet – She is a bad woman, and it is simply infernal that she should worry you. In one evening I saw enough of her to write a whole book about. And little Dmitri M1 who listens to every word, leaning forward with a hand to his ear like a shady little chemist leaning over his counter – They will live for ever, though. Nothing could kill Hippius. If there were a wreck at sea she and Dmitri would be in the first boat. In fact she thrives on disaster.



s. s. koteliansky   91

That evening she attacked me. I could not get rid of her. She followed me; sat by me always gently laughing, and I felt her power of hatred was supra-normal – like the hate felt by a hunchback. I shall never forget her. This week I shall see Bunin if possible and write to you. I don’t want to see any of them ever again. To be with them is exactly like being with women who excite themselves by talking about internal complaints . . Just as it is indecent to talk about illness or to describe one’s symptoms (and it is an unpardonable thing to do) so it seems indecent to hear them talking of ‘les cadavres’, and Gorki’s cutlets.2 I hope that does not sound heartless. Manoukhin is absolutely different; Tchekhov would have liked him very much. I wonder if Bien Stock was the young man, a kind of spy who sat behind Hippius and never spoke a word, but listened.3 He had a head like this.* Hippius gave him a cigarette during the evening; I think it was his month’s wages. Away with them! What is worst of all is that they should have made it necessary for you to write this long letter. I am leaving Paris on Saturday for the Hotel Angleterre, Montanasur-Sierre (Valais) Suisse, where I shall be for the next two months. It will be a relief to get away from this city. Paris is beautiful to look at but it is nothing. It has nothing to give. If one is rich one can buy things. But who really wants the things that money can buy? There is not enough feeling to cover a threepenny bit.4 To live in Paris one must have one’s soul removed exactly as the dentist takes the nerve out of a tooth; then it would not matter. Midday is striking. It is so hot, fine, still. I wish we were spending the afternoon together somewhere far away – As I write, now, this moment, I feel so near you.      I am      Yours ever      Katherine. * At this point in the letter KM has drawn a small, potato-looking head, with large ears. Notes 1. Zinaida Hippius was married to Dmitry Merezhkovsky, the Symbolist poet and literary critic. See above, p. 85, n. 3. 2. (Fr.): Corpses. Although Merezhkovsky, Hippius and Gorky had welcomed the February Revolution, and outspokenly deplored the October Revolution from the outset, and despite having worked together for some time at the World Literature Publishing House, the émigrés had since taken very different courses, for political and religious reasons. Then in exile in Sorrento, the Russian writer Maxim Gorky (1868–1936) was possibly Russia’s most outspoken and politically engaged intellectual in the very early years of the Soviet Union, but far more pragmatic than the fervent theosophists Merezhkovsky and Hippius. Gorky established compromises by which to work with the new regime, notably securing better conditions for writers and artists whose livelihoods had been devastated by the ruined economy of the

92   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 post-war, the revolution and the civil wars. His most pioneering undertaking was the founding of the World Literature Publishing House, which sought to employ writers as translators, and thereby disseminate contemporary and classic Russian literature abroad, and also translate foreign classics into English. It was via Gorky’s extensive network of contacts throughout the Russian diaspora that Koteliansky came to acquire the new publications that he then took to the Hogarth Press, the popular success of which helped secure the future of the Woolfs’ publishing house. 3. Vladimir Lvovitch Bienstock (1868–1933) was a French–Ukrainian journalist, chronicler and biographer, who had converted from Judaism to Christianity in the early 1890s, at about the same time as he settled in Paris. He was to become one of the most respected translators of Russian literature and philosophy into French in the first decades of the twentieth century. 4. In 1922, the British coin worth 3d and known as the threepenny bit was a very small silver coin.

[31 May 1922] [BL] VICTORIA PALACE HOTEL 6 & 8, RUE BLAISE-DESGOFFE (RUE DE RENNES) TÉLÉPHONE: SAXE 62-46 ADR. TÉLÉG: VICTORPAL-PARIS1 May 31st Dear dear Koteliansky I am writing to you in the hall of the hotel; the doors are open and a warm, light wind blows through. It is nine o’clock but the evening seems just to be beginning. People pass walking slowly and talking in low tones. I went to Manoukhin. I found him alone at the clinic. It was nice. But he simply would not hear the Hippius story – He understood only ‘trop bien’2 as he said. He was disgusted with her. And he begged me – but in such a very simple awfully nice way to write to you and to tell you how extremely sorry he would be to think you did not know how he regretted all the trouble you had had with the Hippius. ‘Please, please write! Please do this for me!’ he said over and over again. Please say to Koteliansky ‘je comprends, je comprends absolument’.3 I said I would. Manoukhin is really a good man. It is pleasant to be with him. He thinks of coming to Switzerland during the summer with Bunin. I hope they come. But I am afraid that on the top of every mountain there would be Hippius and Dmitri always on the skyline. Do you imagine I shall forget you in Switzerland, my dear precious friend? . . When I come back here in August, after my next 10 séances I have decided to come to London for a week to see my doctor4 there & let him examine my lungs and so on for an ‘advertisement’ for Manoukhin. It is the least I can do. Brett says I may have a room in her



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little house for this week. Let us meet then! But what I would like most of all would be if you would ask me to come to Acacia Road – to that top room that used to be mine – To sit there and talk a little and smoke. How happy I should be! Its getting dark. How I love to watch the dark coming. Even a city is beautiful then. But I must get away from all this and work. I have a terrible amount to do. Do you dislike my work? I wonder very often. I wanted to send you The Garden Party5 and yet I feel it would seem arrogant of me. For there is so little in it which is worth reading. When I write a book as well as I possibly can I should send you a copy. However – it is foolishness to talk about my ‘w o r k’. One must simply go on quietly and hope to do better. It has been strange to see Brett. There is something very real and true in her. Her secret self is too deeply buried, though. I wish I could make her happier. I feel she has been ignored, passed by. No one has ever cherished her. This is sad. Goodnight. I press your hands Katherine. Why are you not here – ? Notes 1. The letter is written on the hotel’s own writing paper; ‘Victorpal Paris’ was its telegram address. 2. (Fr.): Too well. 3. (Fr.): I understand. I understand perfectly. 4. Victor Sorapure (1874–1933), a consultant at Hampstead General Hospital, was KM’s much trusted doctor, whom she first consulted in September 1918. See his Introduction below, p. 632, and also CW4, pp. 272, 282, 336. 5. The Garden Party and Other Stories had been published by Constable in February that year.

[17 June 1922] [BL] Hotel d’Angleterre Randogne-sur-Sierre (Valais) Suisse. Koteliansky Would you care for a cat?1 I have a cat who is at present in England and I cannot have him with me. It is too cruel to make cats travel. He is a beautiful animal, except for a scratch on his nose, one ear badly bitten and a small hole in his head. From the back view however he is lovely for he has a superb tail. In all his ways he can be trusted to behave like a gentleman.

94   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 He is extremely independent and, of course, understands everything that is said to him. Perhaps Mademoiselle Guita would like him?2 But this is not urgent. At present he is with Ida Baker.3 She would hand him over to anyone in a basket. But I dont want you to have him – I mean I am not for one moment asking you to have him. Of course not. Simply, it occurred to me that you might find it a not unpleasant idea . . . I must confess he will not catch mice. But mice do not know that and so the sight of him keeps them away. He has a fair knowledge of French. It is very nice here, remote, peaceful, but not remote enough. It is difficult to manage one’s external life as one would wish. I have been working towards one thing for years now. But it is still on the horizon. Because I cannot yet attain to it without ‘misunderstanding’ it cant be mine yet. But it comes nearer – much nearer. But I do not like to talk ‘prudently’ – In fact it is detestable. To change the subject. I saw something awfully nice the day after I got here. Behind this hotel there is a big stretch of turf before one comes to the forest. And in the late afternoon as the herds were driven home when they came to this turf they went wild with delight. Staid, black cows began to dance and leap and cut capers, lowing softly. Meek, refined-looking little sheep who looked as though buttercups would not melt in their mouths could not resist it; they began to jump, to spin round, to bound forward like rocking horses. As for the goats they were extremely brilliant dancers of the highest order – the Russian Ballet was nothing compared to them.4 But best of all were the cows. Cows do not look very good dancers – do they? Mine were as light as feathers and really gay – joyful. It made one laugh to see them. But it was so beautiful – too – It was like the first chapter in Genesis over again. ‘Four footed creatures created He them’.5 One wanted to weep as well. Goodbye my precious friend Katherine. Notes 1. KM was trying to find an adoptive family for her beloved cat, Wingley. 2. Ghita was the daughter of Michael and Sonia Farbman, who lived at 5 Acacia Road with Koteliansky. 3. See letters to Baker in CL1 for more extended insights into the saga. ‘Our dear, brave little cat Wingly’ finally found ‘a permanent loving home’ with Baker’s aunt, Mrs Scriven (CL1, p. 197). 4. Since their first tours in the western capitals (1909 in Paris and 1911 in London), Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes had transformed the image and reputation of ballet with their stunningly renewed repertoire, often avant-garde music, vibrant costumes, bold set designs and broad palette of dance techniques. 5. As is so often the case when KM’s punctuation implies a quotation, this is not a citation from Genesis but a blend of echo and pastiche, imitating the heightened lyricism, idiom and syntax of the King James Bible or the Victorian pulpit.



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[4 July 1922] [BL] Hotel Chateau Belle Vue Sierre (Valais) Tuesday Dear Koteliansky I want to write to you before I begin work. I have been thinking of you ever since I woke up, thinking how much I should like to talk to you. Today for instance is such an opportunity. Brett is staying here for a week or so but she has gone up the mountains for the day. And I am the only guest left in this big, empty, dim hotel. It is awfully nice here, my dearest friend. It is full summer. The grasshoppers ring ring their tiny tambourines, and down below the gardener is raking the paths. Swallows are flying; two men with scythes over their shoulders are wading through the field opposite, lifting their knees as though they walked through a river. But above all it is solitary. I have been feeling lately a horrible sense of indifference; a very bad feeling. Neither hot nor cold; luke-warm, as the psalmist says.1 It is better to be dead than to feel like that; in fact it is a kind of death. And one is ashamed as a corpse would be ashamed to be unburied. I thought I would never write again. But now that I have come here and am living alone all seems so full of meaning again, and one longs only to be allowed to understand. Have you read Lawrence’s new book?2 I should like to very much. He is the only writer living whom I really profoundly care for. It seems to me whatever he writes, no matter how much one may ‘disagree’ is important. And after all even what one objects to is a sign of life in him. He is a living man. There has been published lately an extremely bad collection of short stories – Georgian Short Stories.3 And ‘The Shadow in the Rose Garden’ by Lawrence is among them.4 This story is perhaps one of the weakest he ever wrote. But it is so utterly different from all the rest that one reads it with joy. When he mentions gooseberries these are real red, ripe gooseberries that the gardener is rolling on a tray. When he bites into an apple it is a sharp, sweet, fresh apple from the growing tree. Why has one this longing that people shall be rooted in life. Nearly all people swing in with the tide and out with the tide again like heavy sea weed. And they seem to take a kind of pride in denying Life. But why? I cannot understand. But writing letters is unsatisfactory. If you were here we would talk or be silent – it would not matter which. We shall meet one day, perhaps soon, perhaps some years must pass first. Who shall say. To know you are there is enough.x                       Goodbye for now               Katherine. x

This is not really contradictory.

96   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Notes 1. The reference is to the Book of Revelation rather than to Psalms. ‘So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth’ (Rev 3: 14). 2. DHL’s novel Aaron’s Rod had been published just the month before. 3. The first annual anthology in a series of five, Georgian Stories had just been published, edited by Arthur Lunn, who announced in his Preface that ‘Georgian Stories is published in the hope that the art of the short story is once again coming into its own, for the short story, like other forms of Art, has its periods of prosperity and its periods of decline’ (p. xi). There was no clear identity of a Georgian movement in prose as there was in poetry; the only criterion for inclusion that the editor refers to is that contributors in the main are ‘younger writers, [. . .] who began to publish in the Georgian period’ (p. xii). Twenty-two different authors are represented (of which eight are women); given KM’s disparaging opinion, it is interesting to note that their names include Mary Butts, E. M. Forster, Violet Hunt, W. Somerset Maugham, May Sinclair, Roland Pertwee and KM herself, who had contributed ‘Pictures’. 4. DHL’s ‘The Shadow in the Rose Garden’ had been published in The Prussian Officer and Other Stories in 1914.

[17 July 1922] [BL]

17 vii 1922

Chateau Belle Vue Sierre (Valais) Suisse.

Dear precious Koteliansky, After all, I shall not have the money to come to England for a week this autumn. I must be in Paris on August 20th and then for about 10 days I must attend to my Father who is coming to see me there on his way back to New Zealand. After that, I shall be alone for the autumn, and for 10–12 weeks I must go to the clinique once a week. But I tell you all these tedious details simply because, in spite of my Spartan feelings in my last letter, I wonder again if there is any possibility of your coming across during that time. I do – I long to see you and for us to talk. Do not think I am trying to infer or to make demands. It is not that at all. But it would be so nice, so awfully nice to look forward to such happiness. I want to talk to you for hours about – – Aaron’s Rod, for instance. Have you read it? There are certain things in this new book of L’s that I do not like. But they are not important or really part of it. They are trivial, encrusted, they cling to it as snails cling to the underside of a leaf. But apart from them there is the leaf, is the tree, firmly planted, deep thrusting,



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outspread, growing grandly, alive in every twig. It is a living book; it is warm, it breathes. And it is written by a living man with conviction. Oh, Koteliansky, what a relief it is to turn away from these little pre-digested books written by authors who have nothing to say. It is like walking by the sea at high tide eating a crust of bread and looking over the water. I am so sick of all this modern seeking which ends in seeking. Seek by all means, but the text goes on ‘that ye shall find’.1 And although of course there can be no ultimate finding, there is a kind of finding by the way which is enough, is sufficient. But these seekers in the looking glass, these half-female, frightened writers – of – today – you know, darling, they remind me of the greenfly in roses – they are a kind of blight. I do not want to be hard. I hope to God I am not unsympathetic. But it seems to me there comes a time in life when one must realise one is grownup – a man. And when it is no longer decent to go on probing and probing. Life is so short. The world is rich. There are so many adventures possible. Why do we not gather our strength together and live. It all comes to much the same thing. In youth most of us are, for various reasons, slaves. And then, when we are able to throw off our chains, we prefer to keep them. Freedom is dangerous, is frightening. If only I can be a good enough writer to strike a blow for freedom! It is the one axe I want to grind. Be free – and you can afford to give yourself to life! Even to believe in life. I do not go all the way with Lawrence. His ideas of sex mean nothing to me2 – But I feel nearer L. than anyone else. All these last months I have thought as he does about many things. Does this sound nonsense to you? Laugh at me if you like or scold me. But remember what a disadvantage it is having to write such things. If we were talking one could say it all in a few words. It is so hard not to dress ones ideas up in their Sunday clothes and make them look all stiff and shining in a letter. My ideas look awful in their best dresses – (Now I have made myself a glass of tea. Every time I drop a piece of lemon into a glass of tea I say ‘Koteliansky’. Perhaps it is a kind of grace.) I went for such a lovely drive today behind a very intelligent horse who listened to every word the driver and I said and heartily agreed.3 One could tell from his ears that he was even extremely interested in the conversation. They are thinning the vines for the last time before harvest. One can almost smell the grapes. And in the orchards apples are reddening; it is going to be a wonderful year for pears. But one could write about the drive for as many pages as there are in Ulysses.4 It is late. I must go to bed. Now the train going to Italy has flashed past. Now it is silent again except for the old toad who goes Ka-ka – ka-ka – laying down the law.      Goodnight.       Yours         Katherine.

98   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Notes 1. See Luke 11: 9: ‘And I say unto you, Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.’ 2. DHL’s interest in ‘sex theory’, especially in the wake of his discovery of Freudian psychoanalysis, had amused, exasperated and bewildered a number of his friends and fellow writers – including JMM and Virginia Woolf. See, for example, JMM’s review ‘The Decay of Mr D. H. Lawrence’, in the Athenaeum, 17 December 1920, p. 836, and Woolf’s review in EVW3, pp. 271–3. See also KM’s letter to Beatrice Campbell, CL1, pp. 505–6. 3. KM is probably echoing a particularly poignant story by Chekhov, ‘Misery’, in which a sledge-driver converses with his horse, who listens and, so the sledge-driver believes, understands. 4. James Joyce’s Ulysses – the twentieth century’s most famous transposition of Homer’s The Odyssey into contemporary Dublin, and (in its first edition) 732 pages long – was first published by Sylvia Beach at the famous ‘Shakespeare and Company’ bookshop in Paris on 2 February 1922. The London Egoist Press edition, also printed in Paris, was not released until the following October.

[2 August 1922] [BL] [Hôtel Château Belle Vue, Sierre] My dear Koteliansky, I hope you are better. If you need a doctor Sorapure is a good man – intelligent and quiet. He does not discuss Lloyd George1 with one, either. This is a great relief. All the other English doctors that I know have just finished reading The Daily Mail2 by the time they reach me. It is a pity that Lawrence is driven so far. I am sure Western Australia will not help.3 The desire to travel is a great, real temptation. But does it do any good? It seems to me to correspond to the feelings of a sick man who thinks always ‘if only I can get away from here I shall be better.’ However – there is nothing to be done. One must go through with it. No one can stop that sick man, either, from moving on and on. His craving is stronger than he. But Lawrence, I am sure, will get well. Perhaps you will be seeing Brett in a few days? She goes back to England tomorrow. I feel awfully inclined to Campbell4 about her for a little. But it would take a whole book to say all that one feels. She is a terrible proof of the influence ones childhood has upon one. And there has been nothing stronger in her life to counteract that influence. I do not think she will ever be an adult being. She is weak; she is a vine; she longs to cling. She cannot nourish herself from the earth; she must feed on the sap of another. How can these natures ever be happy? By happy I mean at peace with themselves?) She is seeking someone who will make her forget that early neglect, that bullying and contempt. But the person who would satisfy her would have to dedicate himself to curing all the results



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of her unhappiness – her distrust, for instance, her suspicions, her fears. He would have to take every single picture and paint it with her, just as a singer, by singing with his pupil can make that weak voice strong & confident . . . But even then, she would not be cured. I believe one can cure nobody, one can change nobody fundamentally. The born slave cannot become a free man. He can only become free-er. I have refused to believe that for years, and yet I am certain it is true – it is even a law of life. But it is equally true that hidden in the slave there are the makings of the free man. And these makings are very nice in Brett, very sensitive and generous. I love her for them. They make me want to help her as much as I can. I am content – I prefer to leave our meeting to chance. To know you are there is enough. If I knew I was going to die I should even ask you definitely to come and see me. For I should hate to die without one long, uninterrupted talk with you. But short of it – it does not greatly matter. I press your hands Katherine. Notes 1. David Lloyd George (1863–1945) was a British Liberal statesman, who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer during Asquith’s premiership (1908– 15), was Minister of Munitions in the wartime coalition government, and Prime Minister from 1916 until 1922 after Asquith’s resignation. Although he was heralded as a great leader once the Armistice was signed, the Independent Labour Party, British pacifist movements and conscientious objectors held him to account for his ‘knock-out blow’ belligerence (Interview, The Times, 29 September 1916) in response to Germany’s 1916 offer of a negotiated peace settlement, which had prolonged the war and camouflaged its aims. Koteliansky and fellow supporters of the February Revolution blamed Lloyd George and the War Office for the pressure they put on the already fragile Kerensky government to maintain Russia’s war effort, thereby paving the way for the October Revolution. The Allied Intervention in Siberia (1919–22), likewise promoted by the Lloyd George government, also had the effect of strengthening the Bolshevik stronghold within Russia, where they were seen to be defending the country from foreign intervention. 2. Founded in 1896 by two brothers, who went on to become Viscount Northcliffe and Viscount Rothermere, the Daily Mail was already one of Britain’s populist broadsheets, noted for its imperialist outlook, marked patriotism and war-mongering stand, even before World War One had begun. 3. Since October 1921, when they had left Italy, DHL and Frieda had been travelling extensively, first in Ceylon and then, from May 1922, in Australia. 4. Gordon Campbell’s close friends, among whom KM, JMM, DHL and Koteliansky coined the verb ‘to Campbell’ to refer to his characteristic banter, a mixture of fantasy and mockery.

100   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [23 August 1922] [BL] [6 Pond Street, Hampstead] Dear Koteliansky I have been sitting in the empty house, thinking, since you left, chiefly about Murry and Lawrence’s review.1 I do not see that he was to blame. How could he, being himself, act otherwise? The first book he hated and said so. (The manner of saying it was wrong.) The second book he immensely admired and said so. He praised it because he thought it was a good powerful book. I dont see what personal motive or interest he could have had in such a change of front. On the contrary. Surely he risked being called a turn coat . . . You know I am deeply sorry for Murry; he is like a man under a curse. That is not melodrama. That is why I am determined to remain his friend and to make him free of his own will. Special cases need special methods. There is no general treatment for all. But, dear precious friend, I must not speak against him to you. I feel we both know too much for that to be necessary. It is better to be silent about him. In these last months away from all his associates here I think he has got much more like he used to be. I can’t help wishing, for the sake of the people you know in common, that you could just accept him – knowing him as you do. Now that I am no longer in a false position with Murry, now that I am, in the true sense of the word ‘free’ I look at him differently. His situation is very serious. But who am I to say anyone is beyond hope – to withdraw my hand if there is even the smallest chance of helping them. Will you think this all very wrong – I wonder?       Yours ever       Katherine. Notes 1. In a recently published review of Aaron’s Rod (considered alongside Gerhardi’s Futility – see CL1, p. 655), JMM is positively exuberant about DHL’s literary prowess, noting that: Mr. Lawrence is now, indisputably, a great creative force in English literature. We have always believed he was that potentially; even when we crusaded against him, we have merely been paying tribute to his power. No other living writer could drive us to a frenzy of hostility as he has done; no other fills us with such delight. ‘Aaron’s Rod’ is the most important thing that has happened to English literature since the war. To my mind it is much more important than ‘Ulysses’. (JMM 1922, p. 655) Given the extent of JMM’s self-avowed ‘hostility’ only two years previously (notably in reviews of The Lost Girl and Women in Love), and the hurt and rancour it caused, Koteliansky had inevitably underlined what he saw as a glaring contradiction.



s. s. koteliansky   101

[30 August 1922] [BL] [6 Pond Street, Hampstead] Kotiliansky, I am so unsettled this week that I would rather we did not meet until next week when I shall be able to ask you to my new flat. Will you come then? I will telephone you on Monday and ask you what day will suit you. But at the moment practical details like gas rings and teapots dot my path. I don’t want to talk to you about them or to hear them knocking at the door when you are there. Added to this I am arranging a splendid scheme by which Murry shares a country house with a man called Locke Ellis,1 who will live with him for ever and ever, I hope. This is a truly magnificent idea. I shall have to go there later on with Ida Baker to wind up the works and start the toy going. But then I do not think it will ever run down again. It will be a relief when these rooms here are finished and we can meet. Will you come in the evenings then? It is the time I like best of all. The other evening when Brett went to Acacia Road and I was in this house by myself I thought so much of you. It was very quiet here – still – and I had a fire. I felt it would have been so nice to talk or not to talk, then.     I press your hands.    Katherine. Note 1. Vivian Locke Ellis (1878–1950) was one of the ‘Georgian’ poets, who also translated classical Greek plays, had a small publishing press and ran an antique shop. His home and estate cottages at Selsfield House, Ditchling, near East Grinstead in Sussex, where KM and JMM were to spend the following weekend (1–3 September 1922), offered accommodation to a number of his friends in those years. KM’s plan did work for a while: JMM moved in later in September.

[6 September 1922] [BL] [6 Pond Street, Hampstead] My dear Koteliansky I could not ring you up. I was too tired. I had been out seeing the X ray specialist & having my lungs photographed and so on and so on . . . Please forgive me. Will you come here on Friday afternoon or evening – whichever suits you best? I have not been alone till now. Workmen have been in the house, noises of hammering, ringing of bells and so on. But by Friday all will be over.        I long to see you.               Katherine.

102   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [September 1922] [BL] [6 Pond Street, Hampstead] My dear Koteliansky Where you query children may I suggest ‘little ones’, ‘small people’, ‘youngsters’ (not tender enough, I feel). ‘Small people’ is nicest. But does he say that?1 ––– I have received the 2nd part of The Possessed & your note.2 1) Leporine ideas – jumpy ideas is very good, I think. Hare leaps.3 (2) Let us then, keep vertu.4 Criticise my translation unsparingly as you would the work of a business enemy. Then I feel ‘free’. I will get on with the plan of The Possessed this next week. For ‘biliousness’, Granowsky complaint I think ‘summer sickness’ is best.5 There are some uncomfortable words and phrases, but one must give them. I see that.               Yours,                 K.M. (I was not fair to dear ‘Dosty’               Your Collaborator.) Notes 1. Since KM’s return to London, she and Koteliansky had been working together on a number of literary documents he had recently acquired, which were being translated and prepared for publication. These included a collection of unpublished biographical sketches and unpublished writings and letters by the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–81), best known for the great nineteenth-century classics Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1868), The Possessed (or The Devils) (1871) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880), which had greatly impressed the London literary scene when they were published in translation by Constance Garnett (1912–20). KM refers here to the difficulty in translating Dostoevsky’s use of a diminutive form to refer to his children, a mark of tender affection in Russian but which easily sounds cloying in English. In the published version of the letters in question, the solution ‘the little ones’ is retained. See below, p. 103, n. 1. As this and the next three letters attest, their working method was only slightly modified compared to their earlier collaborative work on Chekhov. In autumn 1922, they worked on at least four different texts: letters from Dostoevsky to his wife; Dostoevsky’s annotated plans and drafts for The Possessed; a prose-poem by Tolstoy; and Gorky’s reminiscences of Andreyev; comments in the letters also imply that Koteliansky began consulting KM on manuscripts linked to The Possessed and the ‘Life of a Great Sinner’, on which he was also working with Virginia Woolf. See CW3, pp. 141–51, 264–378; S. Clarke, pp. 55–71, and Davison 2014, pp. 87–94, 133–4.



s. s. koteliansky   103

2. The documents consist of two texts by the Russian critic N. I. Brodsky, discussing the evolution of ‘The Devils’ (The Possessed in the Garnett translation, of which Koteliansky was critical), plus Dostoevsky’s extensive notes for the novel, planned scene by scene, and a ‘psychological analysis’ of the Great Sinner’s mind. See CW3, pp. 306–10, and S. Clarke, pp. 94–107. 3. A small but indicative hint of how their collaborative method was working. Koteliansky is seeking an adequate translation for an adjective describing the abrupt, nervy mindset of his revolutionary hero, whose mind advances in leaps and bounds at moments of great lucidity. 4. (Fr.): Virtue. Granovsky and the Princess in the manuscript often break into French – which was conventionally the dominant language among the upper classes in nineteenth-century Russia, often used by Dostoevsky to signal effeteness or cultural alienation. See CW3, p. 318. 5. In these draft versions of the novel, the character who would be named Stepan Tromimovich Verkhovensky in the finished novel is called Timofey Nicolayevich Granovsky. He suffers from ‘summer sickness’, as KM had already noted in her review of Dostoevsky’s An Honest Thief and Other Stories. See CW3, p. 536.

[September 1922] [BL] [6 Pond Street, Hampstead] Dear Koteliansky, I enclose the first half of D’s letters which I have gone through three times.1 I think they are ‘smooth’. It would be a good idea, wouldn’t it, to get it published in England as well. I will send the plan of The Possessed as soon as possible. It is hard. I have read it far more often than twice.2 Business plans don’t tire me at all. I read them with my business side. I, too, hope the book will be published soon. The letters really are awfully interesting.       Yours ever, Katherine. Notes 1. KM had been checking drafts of Dostoevsky’s letters to his wife, Anna Gregoreyvna, dating from 1880, when he had spent time away from home attending the Pushkin anniversary celebrations (at which he was to be one of the speakers) in Moscow. Sadly, her hopes to see the letters published in book form never materialised in her lifetime. The volume appeared the following year, naming JMM as Koteliansky’s co-translator. While JMM doubtless took over and checked second drafts, the first drafts (now in the Harry Ransom Center) are annotated only by KM.

104   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 2. Dostoevsky’s plans for The Possessed / The Devils are indeed complex; the abbreviated form and telegraphic style of the 115-page-long manuscript further hinder a reader’s progress. See CW3, pp. 306–47.

[4 October 1922] [BL] I had to pay 7 francs for my cigarettes & because I said it seemed a lot I was just not clapped into prison.

Select Hotel Place de la Sorbonne Paris.

My dear Koteliansky, Has the weather changed in London too? Here it is simply beautiful – clear, warm, still, so warm one can sit at the open window late at night, smoking a good cigarette. It is late summer, not autumn at all. I saw Manoukhine today – It was real happiness to meet even though we cant talk, hardly. It doesn’t seem to matter. One talks as Natasha would say ‘just so’.1 And thats enough. I don’t think he has any more patients but he seems much happier. As I knew would happen Hippius came flying to him with my ‘insulting’ letter – showed it to everybody! Manoukhine sees her no more. She is living in an immense CHATEAU2 (can’t you see Dmitri going for rides on a dragon?) And the Bunins share the ménage. Im sorry for that. Manoukhine knew all about the money from America. ‘Comme elle est mauvaise, très très mauvaise’.3 I think he is a bit disappointed though, he has not heard from Mr Farbman. He wondered if later you and I would do some translation for him. I said for my part ‘yes’ & that I would write to you. It is not just yet. I hope we can help him. He is a most awfully nice man, in every way. It was like coming home to go back there. The same voices, the same dark room, the sparks, the table, Doctor Donats4 halting step, Doctor Manoukhine’s cigarettes. Even the servant was an old friend. It was impossible to love everything too much. Paris is better this time. I have a little room on the 6th floor overlooking the roofs of the Sorbonne.5 Stern marble gentlemen in marble peignoirs wander over the roofs and point a finger at one. There is also rather a silly, coy looking eagle. My room has sloping roofs like an attic. It is very simple and clean. One can work here. A little thoughtful, regretful sounding bell chimes from the Sorbonne tower – a highly romantic bell.



s. s. koteliansky   105

Do you like green and black figs, Koteliansky? Here they are so cheap, about Id a thousand. I shall send the MS on Friday – as much as I have done. Now that I do not go over it with you first I feel the changes look very drastic in ink. But you will understand. Its a queer thing that in spite of the fact that to judge by the faces de-civilisation is going on far more rapidly here than in England – in spite of that there is a ‘feeling’ in France which makes everything far more vivid. The English channel is such a big carving knife. I press your hands Katherine. Notes 1. Countess Natalya Rostova, or ‘Natasha’, is the captivating heroine of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, a figure whose keen eye for detail and rich, sensuous, spontaneous zest for everyday life made her a model both for Tolstoy himself and for KM, as so many of her reading notes and life-long engagements with the great Russian novel attest. The passage she has in mind occurs in Part Six, Chapter 13, when the sparkling sixteen-year-old Natasha discusses her feelings for Boris Drubetskoy with her mother: ‘Well, I won’t marry him, so let him come, if he enjoys it and I enjoy it.’ Natasha looked at her mother, smiling. ‘Not to be married, but – just so,’ she repeated. ‘How so, my dear?’ ‘Oh, just so. I see it’s very necessary I shouldn’t marry him, but . . . just so.’ ‘Just so, just so,’ repeated the countess, and shaking all over, she went off into a good-natured, unexpectedly elderly laugh. ‘Don’t laugh, stop,’ cried Natasha; ‘you’re shaking all the bed. You’re awfully like me, just another giggler’. (1904, p. 421) 2. Hippius and Merezhkovsky were then living in the Avenue Mercedes in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, but they frequently travelled to the French Riviera to stay with Bunin at the Villa Montfleury in Grasse, which, while not a ‘château’, was quite a large country property with extensive grounds. 3. (Fr.): How malicious she is, really malicious. 4. Louis Donat was the French pulmonologist who was Manoukhin’s working colleague and business partner in the private tuberculosis clinic they ran in Paris. 5. The Sorbonne is the oldest university in France, the ‘Collège de Sorbonne’ having been officially founded in 1257 by Robert de Sorbon, backed by Saint Louis. The Select Hôtel where KM was staying still exists today, its rooms giving on to the Place de la Sorbonne and the Rue de la Sorbonne. Her room on the sixth floor gave on to the main cupola of the Sorbonne chapel.

106   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [9 October 1922] [BL]

9 x 1922

Select Hotel Place de la Sorbonne Paris

My dear Koteliansky I have finished the Letters; here they are.1 They are, the more one looks into them, a remarkable revelation of what goes on behind the scenes. Except for ‘Kiss the foal’ & ‘buy the children sweets; even doctors prescribe sweets for children’, there is hardly one single statement that isn’t pure matter-of-fact.2 The whole affair is like the plot of a short story or small novel by himself; he reacts to everything exactly as he would react to a written thing. Theres no expansion, no evidence of a living man, a real man. The glimpse one has of his relationship with Anya3 is somehow petty and stuffy, essentially a double bed relationship. And then ‘Turgenev read so badly’; they say he (D) read so superbly – oh dear, oh dear, it would take an Anna Grigorevna to be proud of such letters.4 Yet this was a noble, suffering, striving soul, a real hero among men – wasn’t he? I mean from his books . . . The one who writes the letters is the house porter of the other. I suppose one ought not to expect to find the master at his own front door as well as in his study. But I find it hard to reconcile myself to that. I do not think these deep divisions in people are necessary or vital. Perhaps it is cowardice in me. It is very queer that the Rem. have not sold.5 Perhaps it is because Andrejev is very little known over here. The Gorky on Tolstoi book would have fetched a big price anywhere because people would want to know what he said about Tolstoi.6 I may be wrong but I think that in England Gorki qua Gorki is not ‘popular’ – (with editors of course I mean.) Letters from Brett are of course as thick as migratory swallows. But she will soon get over this particular feeling. Many things in me she does not like. For instance – that I treat her explanations ‘lightly’ that when she is going to cry I say ‘what a pity you are going to cry. It is so tiring’. She wants romance, she wants above all yearning. For unattached women love is that. It is unlimited, heavy, soft yearning. It is seaweed, under the water forever, pushing out against nothing, waving, flowing, terribly heavy, terribly strong, but weed. Write to me about the letters Darling Koteliansky dear Katherine. Notes 1. KM was returning the full sequence of thirteen letters from Dostoevsky to his wife, along with a Preface (see above, pp. 102, n.1 and 103, n.1).



s. s. koteliansky   107

2. See Dostoevsky’s final letter: ‘I kiss your little feet. I embrace the children, I kiss them, – bless them. I kiss the foal. I bless you all’ (1929, p. 376); letter 9 includes the injunction, ‘Kiss the children hard for their lovely messages at the end and buy them some sweets, without fail. Do you hear, Anya? – Even doctors prescribe sweets for children’ (pp. 365–6). 3. Anna Grigorievna Dostoevsky (1846–1918) had trained as a shorthand typist and was engaged by Dostoevsky to type up his novel The Gambler. She and the writer were married four months later and they had four children. Throughout his career, Anna Grigorievna played the double role of secretary, publishing assistant and literary agent, plus mother and carer. After Dostoevsky’s death in 1881, she worked unstintingly to look after his literary estate, preserving all his manuscripts, drafts, letters, press cuttings and photographs. 4. The letters Anna received from her husband begin and end with exclamations of love and endearment, but the bulk of each letter narrates in almost documentary detail the celebratory proceedings and Dostoevsky’s reception. Reread today, they convey above all a vulnerable man’s fears of social and literary exclusion, and his almost childish delight when officials and fellow writers acknowledge him. Dostoevsky (1923) compares his reception to Turgenev’s (‘Turgenev, who read shockingly, was called out more often than I’, pp. 372–3). However, the parallel was not mere ego-building: Turgenev was associated with a literary faction that inclined more to western literary tradition than to Russia’s own, Slavic, literature, of which Pushkin was considered the figurehead, and each side was keen to be seen to its best advantage during the anniversary celebrations. 5. KM refers here to their co-translation of Gorky’s ‘Reminiscences of Leonid Andreev’, a long and endearing memoir, which nevertheless failed to attract readers, doubtless because, in the west, Andreev was far less known at the time than his near-contemporaries Chekhov and Gorky. Leonid Nikolaevich Andreev (or Andreyev) (1871–1919) was a Russian-born writer who had suffered from extreme poverty and ill health throughout his youth, and went on to write memorably of the shabby and sordid backcloth behind the modern city. In the early years of the twentieth century, he was one of Russia’s most popular prose writers, celebrated for his vivid, expressionist style, the emotional lucidity of his character sketches and the biting irony of his narrative voice. 6. Gorky’s Reminiscences of Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy, translated by Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf, had proved immensely popular, even marking a financial and intellectual turning point for the Hogarth Press. See L. Woolf 1980, pp. 178–80. The book was memorably reviewed by Virginia Woolf in the New Statesman (see EVW3, pp. 252–5).

[19 October 1922] [BL] [Le Prieuré, Fontainebleau-Avon] My dear Koteliansky I hope this letter will not surprise you too much. It has nothing to do with our business arrangements. Since I wrote I have gone through a kind of private revolution. It has been in the air for years with me. And now it has happened very very much is changed.

108   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 When we met in London and discussed ‘ideas’ I spoke as nearly as one can, the deepest truth I knew to you. But even while I spoke it I felt a pretender – for my knowledge of this truth is negative, not positive, as it were cold, and not warm with life.1 For instance all we have said of ‘individuality’ and of being strong and single, and of growing – I believe it. I try to act up to it. But the reality is far far different. Circumstances still hypnotise me. I am a divided being with a bias towards what I wish – to be, but no more. And this it seems I cannot improve. No, I cannot. I have tried. If you knew how many notebooks there are of these trials, but they never succeed. So I am always conscious of this secret disruption in me – and at last (thank Heaven!) it has ended in a complete revolution and I mean to change my whole way of life entirely. I mean to learn to work in every possible way with my hands, looking after animals and doing all kinds of manual labour.2 I do not want to write any stories until I am a less terribly poor human being. It seems to me that in life as it is lived today the catastrophe is imminent; I feel this catastrophe in me. I want to be prepared for it, at least. The world as I know it is no joy to me and I am useless in it. People are almost non-existent. This world to me is a dream and the people in it are sleepers. I have known just instances of waking but that is all. I want to find a world in which these instances are united. Shall I succeed? I do not know. I scarcely care. What is important is to try & learn to live – really live – and in relation to everything – not isolated (this isolation is death to me). Does this sound fabulous? I cannot help it. I have to let you know for you mean much to me. I know you will never listen to whatever foolish things other people may say about me. Those other helpless people going round in their little whirlpool do not matter a straw to me. I will send you my address this week. In the meantime all is forwarded from the Select Hotel by Ida Baker, with whom I must part company for a time. I press your hands – dear dear friend         Katherine. All this sounds much too serious and dramatic. As a matter of fact there is absolutely no tragedy in it, of course. Notes 1. The complex about-turns and new beginnings that characterised KM’s poignant last months can be heard in this announcement of a new state of mind and self-awareness. Greatly influenced by eastern philosophy and theosophy, KM had been reading various works recommended by Ouspensky, Gurdjieff and Orage, including M. A. Oxon’s influential Cosmic Anatomy. See CW4, pp. 397–435. See also Kimber 2017, pp. 41–65. 2. The spiritual healing promoted at Gurdjieff’s Institute gave great importance to living in harmony with animals, animal husbandry, manual labour and traditional agricultural practices. For a rich study of her interest in cows, and the rhythms and rituals of the Institute’s cowshed, see Ryan, pp. 33–51.

Frieda Lawrence (1879–1956)

Introduction KM’s feelings toward Frieda Lawrence are characterised by fieriness but, while her relationship with D. H. Lawrence balanced ire with love, KM’s attitude toward Frieda tended overwhelmingly toward fury. How unforgettable is her searing outburst to JMM of 11 May 1915 – ‘What a great fat sod she is – I should like to send a pig to kill her – a real filthy pig’ – which precedes the conclusion ‘Lawrence has got queer blind places, hasn’t he?’ The two couples met as a group in June 1913 in the Chancery Lane office where Rhythm’s brief reincarnation as the Blue Review was breathing its last gasps.1 The summer after, KM and JMM acted as witnesses at the Lawrences’ wedding in Kensington, and Frieda gifted KM the wedding ring from her first marriage to Lawrence’s professor at University College, Nottingham.2 Frieda had three young children with her first husband and, as an adulteress, she was obliged by law to relinquish her care of them – they had to stay with their father. In 1916, Mansfield, JMM and the Lawrences lived together in Cornwall in separate cottages at Higher Tregerthen, near Zennor, Cornwall. The social experiment, an early incarnation of the Rananim community, was inharmonious and therefore unsuccessful. KM and JMM were poor and found the behaviour of the Lawrences increasingly barbaric and graceless; as KM wrote to Beatrice Campbell on 4 May 1916: ‘They are both too rough for me to enjoy playing with.’ (See CL1, p. 505.) KM brings their violent quarrels to vivid life in her letters from Zennor. KM disliked Frieda’s influence on DHL, and compared her suffocating effect on him to that which she experienced in Ida Baker’s presence (see letter of 25 February 1918 to JMM). However, it should be said that DHL felt Frieda’s effect upon him to be largely beneficent, believing that she helped him to ‘let go a bit’ (the importance of this is underlined by his belief that the ‘inability to let go’ to be what was ‘killing the modern England’),3 and helping him to explore and extend his personal philosophies The surviving correspondence from KM to Frieda exists only in draft form and is extremely limited, with KM’s first letter warm and open, and

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110   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 the second more guarded, brief and alluding to misunderstandings ahead of the Zennor venture. Despite their intrinsic difficulties, KM does seem to have retained at least some tender feelings for Frieda, as demonstrated by her warm (yet realistic) reminiscences to Koteliansky in late 1921 (letter of 24 December, see above, p. 79). The pair sit together in the canon of Lawrence’s fiction at least – with Frieda celebrated in the character of Lady Chatterley and KM in Gudrun Brangwen from Women in Love. Correspondence from Frieda Lawrence can be found at the Nottinghamshire Archives, with an extensive collection including manuscripts, correspondence and items such as address and guest books available at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin. A letter there from Frieda to Dorothy Brett is decorated lavishly with a painted cockerel, flowers, pines and sunbeams, full of colour and suggestive of an innocent eye. Aimée Gasston Notes 1. Carswell, p. 84. 2. Carswell, p. 89. 3. Moore, vol. 1, p. 225.

[20 February 1915] [ATL] [Draft] [Gray, Haute-Saône] England is like a dream.1 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 wall flowers 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.2 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.3 The last old pa-man4 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.5 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.’6 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.



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[‘Voila le petit soldat joyeux et jeune’7 he has been delivering letters.8 It is hot as summer – one only sits and laughs – Your loving Katherine.] Notes 1. This draft of a letter to Frieda – or at least, what appears to be the draft of a letter – is one of the finest illustrations available to KM readers and scholars today of the tenuous, porous boundary between her finely tuned creative idiom and the living, writing, fictionalising and self-fictionalising self. To an extent that we can only surmise more than one hundred years on, the ‘like a dream’ of memory blends here with the defamiliarised realities of France in wartime and KM’s intrepid ‘journey over the border’ to meet Francis Carco. The letter needs to be read alongside her elusive journal entries made at the same time (CW4, pp. 158–62) and the 1915 story ‘An Indiscreet Journey’ (CW1, pp. 439–51) to gauge the extent to which the lives (actual and fantasised) of the author, the narrating voices and personas of fiction, and the parallel imaginings and roads-not-taken of fictional creation interweave. Whether the draft was ever intended to be sent in letter form to Frieda, and how far (dated only the day after KM’s arrival) it deliberately invents a dream-world to contrast with the harsh conditions back home to tantalise its reader, are again issues open to critical debate. 2. See her diary record in CW4, p. 159. In his second edition of KM’s Journal (1954), JMM indicates, as a brief introductory note: ‘An unposted letter to Frieda Lawrence written in the diary’ (p. 74). 3. The ‘zone des armées’ was a buffer zone, that, depending on where hostilities were centred, came to extend along the frontline from Belfort to Calais, and was approximately one hundred kilometres in width. This army zone itself was strictly divided into three bands, to prevent all access to the frontline. The whole territory was a strictly controlled area in which all state and civic power was concentrated in the hands of the general and commander-in-chief. This included transport, communication, provisions, materials and medical supplies, as well as ammunition depots. Field hospitals were installed in the outer band from where injured soldiers not in a critical condition were then transferred. Most civilians were evacuated for the entire duration of hostilities; those that remained lived within tightly controlled curfew hours, and could circulate only with special permits, issued once the train bringing them into the zone stopped at the first control post in the station. Once within the zone, no civilian was allowed to ride a bicycle (this means of transport was reserved for the military); motorised transport was allowed only in specially designed vehicles on carefully established circuits. Any person coming in from the unoccupied zone was considered a potential spy, and their papers and transit documents were controlled systematically at various control posts. Married women could obtain permission to enter, within strictly defined times and sectors, and female medical personnel were of course present. As social historians have shown, in practice the borders were more porous than official discourse admitted. See Antier, pp. 48–72, Guicheteau and Simoën, pp. 97–132, and Kaluzco et al., pp. 53–8. 4. A ‘Pa-man’ was an idiom frequently employed by the Beauchamp family to designate male members of the family who were celebrated for their larger-than-life personalities and pioneering spirit, and by extension any

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5.

6. 7. 8.

stereotypically active, virile male leader, whether self-appointed or socially acknowledged. Although the tasselled hat formed part of the uniform worn by certain French colonial forces, this detail, in the context of the army zone near Gray, is just one example of playful misrepresentation. The heavily exoticised purveyor and smoker of Egyptian tobacco, often a literary euphemism for various opiates, and the smoking dens where such activities could take place were indeed coded representations in fin-de-siècle literature. See, for example, Kate Chopin’s 1897 short story ‘An Egyptian Cigarette’, first published in Vogue in 1900, which is potentially an intriguing literary intertext here. (Fr.): Just for fun. See the literary representation of soldiers gaily waving from trains and Red Cross sheds in ‘An Indiscreet Journey’, CW1, p. 440. (Fr.): Here’s the little soldier, young and merry. Francis Carco’s first role when posted to Gray at the beginning of his military service was delivering mail once it had passed the scrutiny of military censorship. See also CW1, p. 444.

[4 March 1916] [ATL] [Draft] March 4th Dear Frieda1 The new house sounds very nice and I am glad to think we shall be there – all of us together – this spring.2 Thank you for your letter, dear, but you really haven’t been right in judging us first the kind of traitors that you did.3 Jack never would hear a word against Lawrence Notes 1. Like the only other extant letter to Frieda, this extract exists only in draft form in a notebook. See CW4, p. 207. 2. The Lawrences had been in Cornwall since late December 1915, so as to be as far away as possible from the hostile, bellicose climate of London and the home counties. They had set off from Padstow the previous week, to find peaceful accommodation near St Ives. DHL’s letter, written at about the same time as KM’s, from the Tinners Arms in Zennor, where they had been staying temporarily, announces: We have been here nearly a week now. It’s a most beautiful place: a tiny granite village nestling under high, shaggy moor-hills, and a big sweep of lovely sea, such a lovely sea, lovelier even that the Mediterranean. [. . .] What we have found is a two-roomed cottage, one room up, one down, with a long scullery. But the rooms are big and light, and the rent won’t be more than 4/-. [. . .] The place is rather splendid. It is just under the moors, on the edge of the few rough stony fields that go to the sea. (LDHL2, p. 563) He proposes that they should found a little colony in the little blocks of buildings nearby. (See above, p. 109.)



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3. While in-fighting and accusations of treachery and betrayal frequently interrupted periods of intense friendship and intimate association in the circles around DHL, this particular episode relates to disagreements about the publication, and suppression, of Lawrence’s The Rainbow, and his recent association with Philip Heseltine on a joint project, ‘Rainbow Books and Music’, of which KM and JMM were very wary. See below, p. 167, and LDHL, vol. 3, pp. 542–9.

Robert Lynd (1879–1949)

Introduction Robert Wilson Lynd was an Irish writer, essayist, journalist and nationalist. Born in Belfast, he studied at Queen’s University, before moving to London in 1901 to further his career as a journalist, initially writing drama criticism for Today, then edited by Jerome K. Jerome, before starting his journalistic career at the Daily News (later the News Chronicle), where he was literary editor from 1912 to 1947. In addition, his popular weekly essay for the New Statesman, using the pseudonym Y.Y. (Ys, or wise), ran from 1913 to 1945. He also contributed to the Athenaeum. Lynd married KM’s friend, the writer Sylvia Lynd (née Dryhurst), on 21 April 1909, the pair having first met at Gaelic League meetings in London. The couple became well-known London literary hosts, in a circle that included J. B. Priestley, Hugh Walpole and James Joyce. Joyce and his wife, Nora Barnacle, would eventually hold their wedding lunch at the Lynds’ Hampstead house, following their marriage at Hampstead Town Hall on 4 July 1931. The Lynds came to the attention of KM and JMM in 1915 when, in early October, their friend DHL showed them Lynd’s hostile review in the Daily News of his latest novel The Rainbow. As JMM relates, he and KM ‘had nothing to say. We neither of us liked The Rainbow, and Katherine quite definitely hated parts of it’.1 Lynd’s scathing review contributed to the demise of The Rainbow, for DHL was prosecuted in an obscenity trial in London on 13 November 1915, whereupon over 1,000 copies were seized and burned. It was subsequently unavailable in Britain for eleven years, although various editions remained available in the USA. In addition, the now famous anonymous review of Virginia Woolf’s novel Night and Day, titled ‘A Tragic Comedienne’, which some critics attribute to KM herself, is also attributed by others to Robert Lynd.2 Gerri Kimber Notes 1. BTW, p. 351. 2. See CW3, pp. 599–602.

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[23 November 1921] [ATL]

23 xi 1921

Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre Valais

Dear Mr Lynd, Your letter was rather a relief. I thought my reviews had displeased you or that they were illegible.1 Very many thanks for your note. I shall type the next ones I do for you. Yes, I gathered from your pickpocket adventure that you had been in Italy. I hope you both enjoyed it. How excelentissimo Sylvia was on W.L. George’s novel!2        Yours sincerely        Katherine Middleton Murry Will you give her my love? Notes 1. In September, KM had told Lynd’s wife, Sylvia Dryhurst Lynd, that she would be ‘most awfully grateful’ to take on paid reviewing work, in part to help cover escalating medical bills. See below, p. 126. She had duly received three new novels to review for the Daily News: John Galsworthy’s To Let, Stephen McKenna’s The Secret Victory and F. Brett Young’s The Red Knight. For the former, see CW3, pp. 719–22. Her rather acerbic review of The Secret Victory and The Red Knight, published in the Daily News the next month, was not included in CW3. See Appendix at the end of this volume, p. 780. 2. Sylvia Lynd’s review of W. L. George’s latest novel, The Confession of Ursula Trent, was published in the ‘Books and Authors’ section of the Daily News, 28 October 1921, p. 6.

Sylvia Lynd (1888–1952) (née Dryhurst)

Introduction For nearly half a century, Sylvia Lynd has, at best, been relegated to the footnotes of literary history, where she features mostly as a popular novelist and writer, or as the wife of the slightly less marginalised journalist, Daily News editor and co-founder of the New Statesman, Robert Lynd. Fortunately, a recent awakening of interest in literary networks, cultural hubs and the intermediaries of cultural exchange have enabled her to emerge as a fascinating ‘inter-war middlewoman’ in her own right.1 Born in London to Irish parents, both committed nationalists, Sylvia Lynd grew up in a stimulating, book-loving and warmly hospitable family, where the central role was played by her mother, Nora Dryhurst, a very independently minded, politically engaged writer, linguist and suffragette. Her father, Alfred Dryhurst, worked at the British Museum. Sylvia was educated at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and at the Slade School of Art, where she became friends with Dorothy Brett and, as both their intellectual circles and their social networks overlapped, with KM and JMM. Beginning their literary careers in the same years and based (some of the time in KM’s case) in the same neighbourhood in Hampstead, the two women found themselves fellow contributors to various newspapers and magazines, working as critics and reviewers. Sylvia’s first novel, The Chorus: A Tale of Love and Folly, was published in 1915; her later fictional writing was warmly received by KM, as the letters below show. Also an evocative, keenly observant poet, Lynd contributed poetry to the Athenaeum, some of which formed part of her collection Goldfinches, published in 1920. She also worked in the publishing industry as a publisher’s reader, experience that would help open up her career in later years when she became a literary adviser in New York and London. The height of Sylvia Lynd’s career, both individually and in association with her husband, Robert Lynd, came in the 1920s and 1930s, when she worked as part of, and later as chair of, the ‘Prix Femina – Vie Heureuse’,2 became an active committee member of the English Book Society, alongside Hugh Walpole, and was a loved and influential literary salon

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hostess, attracting an enviable variety of writers, journalists, publishers, broadcasters and musicians to her Hampstead home at 5 Keats Grove: Rose Macaulay, J. B. Priestley, James Joyce, Mark Gertler and William Gerhardi, to name but a few. Her warmth and hospitability, and the bold, generously intellectual environment drew the friends in, all responding to her natural vitality and keenly observant sensitivity. A small but poignant example is noted by Alpers, who records a visit Sylvia made to the Murrys’ Hampstead home in September 1919 – the last time she ever saw KM – where she ‘noticed that her rings slid up and down her fingers as she poured tea’,3 indicating how thin KM had now become. Lynd was a positive reviewer of KM’s story collections,4 and wrote a touching article following her friend’s death in the Weekly Westminster Gazette: ‘Remembering has always been the larger part of my affection for Katherine Mansfield. [. . .] A few books, a photograph pasted inside the cover of one of them, these only remain – and remembering remains.’5 However, in the years which followed, she spoke for most of literary London when, in the late 1920s, she decried JMM’s posthumous hagiography of his dead wife, together with his constant new editions of her work, famously claiming he was ‘boiling Katherine’s bones to make soup’.6 Gerri Kimber Notes 1. For the richest coverage to date of Lynd’s career, see N. Wilson, pp. 49–65. 2. KM was shortlisted for the prize in 1921; Sylvia Lynd’s close friend Rose Macaulay, however, won, as KM herself predicted. See above, pp. 30–1. 3. Alpers 1980, p. 316. 4. See her review of Bliss and Other Stories, in Daily News, 29 December 1920. 5. Lynd, p. 12. 6. Tomalin, p. 241.

[31 January 1920] [ATL]

31 I 1920

Hermitage Menton

My dear woman I can’t tell you how pleased I was to get your letter – how sorry to know that you’ve been so ill.1 You’re better now? Its a cursed thing to have – I had an attack once ten years ago above a grocers shop in Rottingdean2– no more than ten years ago or less – the year our great Edward the

118   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Peace Maker died3 – He died when I was in the very thick of it. But its an absolute mistake that you should be ill – you’re not at all the person to be ill – I always see you in my minds eye – sitting up and laughing – but sitting up in a way that few people have any idea of – delightfully – Look here – Im coming back to England in May for a few months at least. Let us meet. Let us arrange it now. Will you come & spend the whole day? That is not half long enough but my plans are so vague. I don’t know where we shall be living – John seems to be either camping in a waste paper basket at Adelphi Terrace or walking the country looking for a real country house, far from station church & post office – But I don’t want to miss you – so spare a day for me. Ill look for review of Night & Day.4 I did it badly – very badly – The trouble with the book is its over ripe. Its hung in the warm library too long; its gone soft. But thats the trouble with that whole set of people & with all their ideas, I think.5 One gets rather savage living in a little isolated villa on a wild hillside & thinking about these things. All this self examination – this fastidious probing – this hovering on the brink – its all wrong! I don’t believe a writer can ever do anything worth doing until he has – in the profoundest sense of the word – accepted Life – Then he can face the problem & begin to question, but not before: But these people wont accept Life; they’ll only accept a point of view or something like that. I wish one could let them go – but they go on writing novels and Life goes on being expensive – so poor little K.M goes on lifting up her voice & weeping, but she doesn’t want to! Ive left Italy (Italy is a thoroughly bad place at present) and as you see Im in France – Its lovely weather – warm – mild – the air smells of faint far off tangerines with just a touch of nutmeg. On my table there are cornflowers & jonquils with rosemary sprigs – Here they are for you – The flowers are wonderful – How lovely the earth is – Do you know I had fifteen cinerarias in Italy & they grew against the sea? I hope one will be able to call these things up on one’s Death bed – This is not a letter. Its only to say I have yours which arrived today – Its only to greet you – and to send my love & to beg you to get better quickly – All those things. Good Night                K.M. Notes 1. KM had learnt that Sylvia Lynd was in hospital with gynaecological problems. These, in fact, turned out to be the premature birth of a child who did not survive. As the letters below show, KM learned the details over the course of their correspondence in the ensuing weeks. 2. KM and Ida Baker had stayed briefly in some rooms over a grocer’s shop in a little street leading to the shore at Rottingdean. Here Katherine could hear the sea sometimes and smell it always. She continued to suffer pain and the local doctor was sent for.



sylvia lynd  119 After a long time she was patched up, although the trouble was not correctly diagnosed until many years later in 1918. (Baker, pp. 55–6)

This was in April 1910, following KM’s return from Bavaria; she was suffering from both the after-effects of a still-birth (and another possible abortion), plus a form of ‘rheumatic fever’ that was not corrected diagnosed until Dr Sorapure made the link between her inflammatory joints and untreated gonorrhoea (see Alpers 1980, p. 115). 3. Edward VII had died in May 1910. Although short, his reign was marked by a return of celebratory, pageantesque public events at home and abroad, one of the most elaborate being the celebration of the Entente Cordiale in 1907. Ceremonial festivities of this sort led newspapers of the time to refer to him as both the ‘Peace-Maker’ and the ‘Uncle of Europe’. See Rivington Holmes, pp. 510–19. 4. KM refers here to ‘A Ship Comes into the Harbour’, her review of Woolf’s second novel, Night and Day (1919). Published in the Athenaeum in November 1919, this article triggered a protracted misunderstanding and tension between the two hyper-sensitive writers, who both struggled to understand the true aesthetic and emotional intentions of the other (see CW4, pp. 532–5). As KM’s passing exchange with Sylvia Lynd suggests, there are other complicating factors which remain unresolved to this day. A second review of the novel appeared in the Nation in May 1920, discussing ‘the faults and virtues of Mrs Woolf’s novel’, the main fault being that the earnest-minded heroine is out of place in ‘a delightful comedy’. Woolf attributed the slighting review to Robert Lynd (DVW2, p. 41); it has also been attributed by Woolf and Mansfield scholars to either KM or JMM. See CW4, pp. 599–602. 5. Although KM deliberately steers clear of naming the ‘whole set’ who have inspired her impatient dismissal of them all, this passage is one of her clearest rejections of what she perceived as a ‘Bloomsbury’ mindset and outlook, and from which she so often felt excluded. Although her emphasis here is on a sometimes aloof, over-intellectualised, rational approach to life and art, which she condemns, her involvement with the Bloomsbury Group collectively and via close friendships with a number of key figures, including Woolf herself, was inevitably much richer, and more mitigated in the years 1917–22. See Martin 2017.

[14 February 1920] [Postcard] Villa Flora Menton.

My dear S.L. This is my permanent address until May. I do love to hear you were better – would you send me even a card?    Yours ever K.M.

120   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [6 February 1921] [ATL]

February 6th 1921

VILLA ISOLA BELLA GARAVAN MENTON A/M.

My dear ‘Sylvia Lynd’, I was simply horrified today to open a copy of last week’s Athenaeum & to read that disgusting review of your novel.1 What can I say? I had to give up all my reviewing work weeks ago – in November – but nevertheless I feel I must apologise that a paper which Ive anything to do should treat a delicate sensitive artist in such a way. Murry had to come over here suddenly a short time ago on account of my health; he only returned to-day. He was with me when the post arrived and shared my dismay and anger.2 He begged me to include him in my telegram. I scarcely know Mr Lynd, but I felt that a telegram to him might reach you sooner & I wanted to reach you at once. My dear fellow-writer, I would give anything for this not to have happened. I long to read your novel . . . Don’t bother to answer this, but please accept my admiration and love. Katherine Mansfield. Notes 1. ‘Stagery’, a full-column-long review of Sylvia Lynd’s second novel, A Swallow Dive, featured in the Athenaeum on 4 February 1921. KM’s detailed comments on the novel in the following letter show her seemingly trying to make up for the Athenaeum reviewer’s scornful, condescending comments. Entirely overlooking the novel’s playful, poised satire of the backstage world of the London theatrical scene and its ‘bright young things’, the reviewer picks up only on an ‘infinity of sordid detail’, ‘a poverty of imaginative stuff’, ‘mechanical’ characters and ‘tawdry or unreal’ emotions; the one potentially positive note is that the author apparently has a ‘clever brain’ (p. 127). It is interesting to note that, possibly to make amends, the newly launched Nation and Athenaeum published a second review of the novel, ‘A Swallow Flight’, on 19 February, in which the reviewer draws attention to its fine balance of lyricism and irony, and the elusive psychological depth of the central character (p. 709). 2. Timing was particularly delicate for JMM here. The offending article appeared in the penultimate issue of the Athenaeum before it merged with the Nation; although in the process of withdrawing from editorship, JMM was nominally editor until 11 February 1921, making him answerable for articles published. Intellectual honesty and publishing ethics, however, would have required him to publish commissioned reviews, whatever his private opinion might have been.



sylvia lynd  121

[mid-February 1921] [ATL] VILLA ISOLA BELLA GARAVAN MENTON A/M. My dear Sylvia Lynd Your letter and your book made a sort of Fête de Saint Sylvie1 of yesterday. Your lovely little letter brought you back to me so clearly – very radiant, in air blue and primrose, sitting for a moment in time on my small sofa – the one which in private life is known as ‘the stickleback’ . . . Thank you very much-indeed-please for The Swallow Dive.2 It is full of the most beautiful things. You turn to Beauty like a flower to the light – (I must put it in the third person. Its easier to say) She fills and glows with it and is like a shining transparent cup of praise . . . Early morning light, I feel, with the grass still pearled, and long, slender shadows . . . If you were here I should like to say . . . ‘Caroline crying after she had heard of Ethel’s engagement’, . . ‘her moment of leaving her Aunt Mildred’s house for ever’, . . ‘her top of the bus ride’ – her pink cotton frock drifting through July in London . . As to The Fall of Antioch,3 I hear it, smell it, know it as if I had played in it – But above all Ashleem! Your early morning description of Ashleem, Miss, took away my breff. Forgive an impudent woman. Shes very very serious really. And because we are fellow workmen may I say I think you sometimes know more than you say & sometimes you say less than you know . . . Does that convey anything? I find my great difficulty in writing is to learn to submit. Not that one ought to be without resistance – of course I dont mean that. But – when I am writing of ‘another’ I want so to lose myself in the soul of the other that I am not . . . I wish we could have a talk about writing one of these days. Was there really a new baby in your letter?4 Oh dear, some people have all the babies in this world . . . And as sometimes happens to us women just before your letter came I found myself tossing a little creature up in the air and saying: ‘Whose boy are you?’ But he was far too shadowy, too far away to reply. So tell me about your baby – will you? And when I do get out of this old bed I shall drive to the lace shop & buy a cobweb to make a cap for himher. Farewell. May the Fairies attend you. No, dear woman, it is grim work – having babies. Accept my love and my sympathy.      Yours ever Katherine Mansfield

122   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Notes 1. Saint Sylvia, a Roman of noble origins, is honoured for being the devoted mother of the future pope, Gregory the Great. The attentive education she bestowed on him extended not just to his social and spiritual graces, but to his nourishment – which included growing their own fruit and vegetables. Her feast day in Catholic countries is 5 November. 2. The Swallow Dive was Lynd’s second novel; she was better known, however, as a poet. Caroline is the central character, whose thoughts and perceptions shape much of the reader’s own perspective, but whose inner life remains elusively veiled. 3. ‘The Fall of Antioch’ is the fictional play being rehearsed and then performed within Lynd’s novel; the embedded melodrama of the play frequently resonates with the off-stage plot. 4. See above, p. XXX.

[early September 1921] [ATL] Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre (Valais) Switzerland. My dear Sylvia Lynd, Forgive me. I hardly dare to say why I havent written. Its so dreadfully the same old reason. And I waited until I was ‘free’ again because I wanted to send you more than a little note. I was so happy to see your handwriting again. But your news was sorrowful, dear woman.1 That must have been terribly hard to bear. But one can say nothing to help. Id like you to feel though how I appreciate your lovely courage – how I wish with all my heart that you are ‘well again’. I often think of you here – Its such a perfect place – ever so much nicer than the South of France. There are no casinos, no motorcars, no richan’-great – instead there are mountain tops & forests & little hoarse streams & small flowery lawns, & troops of white goats, and innocent rainbows. Would it be impossible for you and your husband to come & stay with us next summer? It isn’t a hard place to find either. One takes the train direct from Paris to Sierre – the valley town – & then one winds up the mountain like a spider eating its web – As to the flowers – they are so many and so fair that J.M.M. and I have both ‘taken’ to botany. He does all the hunting though which is unfair. If only the Lord would leave off loving me –‘chastening’ love is a horrid kind! I feel far away from London just now. Things sound so queer by the time they reach us. What did you think about the Lawrence book?2 I agreed with what John wrote in The Nation.3 It seems to me there is



sylvia lynd  123

something hopelessly wrong with Lawrence now – & don’t you feel, too theres a kind of devilish exasperation & even as he would say PURE stupidity? It makes me groan. I wish I could find a really good book for a change. Is Romer Wilson a great person?4 It is tiring not to be able to admire things; I always long to though my enemies don’t believe me. Are you at work on a new novel? I have just finished six stories and am imbedded in the seventh, at that stage, when one is frightened of the story flying away before you really have caught it. Dear knows how long these have taken me, though . . . I wish I knew what you were feeling about your work. J.M.M. and I seem to be starting a small boarding school for 2 boarders only with a little mixed dormitory with our two beds setting to corners. One feels awfully not grown up in Switzerland. Do you know that feeling? Its the kind of place – or perhaps it is this house – where one sits on stairs & where the window on the landing becomes really important again not only a bowing acquaintance – Our servant too,5 wears a yellow velvet bodice with black stripes on Sunday & every day she is wreathed in positive beams. And for Socierty Gossip . . . Mr Hugh Walpole has been staying in the neighbourhood6 – on (most strangely!) his way to Venice. I mean, it seems such an out-of-the-way leap. If only I could think you would come next year!                 Goodbye for now.                    I am your loving K.M. Notes 1. Sylvia Lynd was recovering from complications following the premature birth of a third child; the baby did not survive. See above, p. 117, n. 1. 2. Women in Love, Lawrence’s follow-up to The Rainbow, had been published at the end of 1920. It was very quickly acknowledged among his peer group to be something of a roman-à-clef, reflecting the intense months in Cornwall when the Murrys and the Lawrences were living in neighbouring cottages. See above, p. 109. 3. JMM’s vehement, impassioned review of the novel, ‘The Nostalgia of Mr. D. H. Lawrence’, vented much of the pent-up hostility between the two men, deploring the waves of ‘turgid exasperated writing’, the characters’ ‘frenzy of sexual awareness’, ‘convulsive raptures’ and ‘oozy beatitudes’. Claiming DHL had been ‘deliberately, incessantly, and passionately obscene in the exact sense of the word’, JMM’s sense of outrage derives above all from the ‘nostalgia’ evoked in his title, the ‘nostalgie de la boue’ that the protagonist Birkin evokes, which JMM sees as a primeval, primitive regression of literature itself. See JMM 1921a, p. 713. 4. Romer Wilson (the pen-name of Florence Roma Muir Wilson) was a British writer with a keen interest in portraying the conflicts between traditional realms and post-war social realities; she was awarded the Hawthornden Prize for her The Death of Society: Conte de Fée Premier in 1921. KM had reviewed her war novel, If All These Young Men, in 1919 (see CW3, pp. 529–32). A fellow tuberculosis sufferer, Wilson died in Switzerland in 1930.

124   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 5. Ernestine Rey was the Swiss maid employed at the Chalet des Sapins. According to Walker, she was ‘the sister of the founder of the tourism industry in the area, Louis Rey. His daughter, Rose, still possesses Katherine’s desk and many photographs’ (Walker, p. 240). 6. The prolific and very versatile novelist Hugh Walpole (1884–1941), a former contributor to the short-lived Blue Review, was a close friend of the Lynds; he and Sylvia Lynd went on to be close collaborators at the English Book Society in the 1930s. Equally a life-long friend of KM’s cousin, Elizabeth von Arnim (and a former tutor to her children), he visited her on numerous occasions at her nearby Chalet Soleil, Randogne, staying for most of summer 1921.

[24 September 1921] [ATL]

24 IX 1921

Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre Valais Switzerland

Most dear Sylvia Lynd, I have been waiting to talk to you – to have you to myself, no less – until I could chase my new book out of the house. I thought it never would go. Its last moments lingered on and on. It got up, turned again, took off its gloves, again sat down, reached the door, came back, until finally JMM marked it down lassooed it with a stout string & hurled it at Pinker.1 Since when there’s been an ominous silence. True, I haven’t had time to hear yet, but one has a shameful feeling that it ought to have been ‘recognised’ even at the bottom of the first mountain and a feeble cheer – a cheer left over from Charlie C2 – might have been raised . . . No, that sounds proud. Its not really pride but FEAR! But its gone. May I give you a small hug for your marvellous letter. It really is a heavenly gift to be able to put yourself, jasmine, summer grass, a kingfisher, a poet, the pony, an excursion and the new sponge bag & bedroom slippers all into an envelope. How does one return thanks for a piece of somebody’s life? When I am depressed by the superiority of men I comfort myself with the thought that they can’t write letters like that. You make me feel, too, that whatever star they were born under it wasn’t the dancing one.3 Keep well! Never be ill again! About ‘plans’. (Have you a passion for making plans? I have. Its a vice with me, like strong drink. When I am by myself, out comes the bottle and glass so to say, & I begin to sip at the idea of a winter in



sylvia lynd  125

Spitzbergen,4 a summer in Spain, a cruise in a tramp steamer, a little house remote . . . remote until the servant comes in and catches at my flying head with the laundry bill or a parcel from the chemist.) But about Montana and pensions. The idea that you should come here with your daughters & your novel is fearfully tempting. It makes me want to hide the truth about the between season fogs and cost of living. Let me be ‘resolute and calm’. Montana is a small village (one street of new & ugly shops) on a plateau surrounded by mountains. Its 5000 feet high. Except for that street its all fir and pine forests, little lawny pastures, ice cold streams and air like old wine. Its expensive. A pension costs about 16 francs a day, per persing.5 That seems to me terrible. There is, about ½ an hour’s climb down from here an hotel in a forest clearing which I have heard is extremely comfortable in every way. Its not a horrid palace with waiters on the lawn but a ‘simple’ place managed by two comfortable parties who take an interest in your sanwiches if you want to go off for the day. I will send my (what is she? Friend? Not quite. Housekeeper? No. Invaluable Person?) Invaluable Person6 to examine it thoroughly and to photograph it if you would like me to. The position is – in the sun’s eye & facing huge snow covered allmighty ones. Its forests are real forests – almost fairy ones. But facts are, that in either October or November the weather changes here. We are in the clouds, in a fine thick white drizzle for about 6 weeks before the winter begins. Then, so everybody says it is nothing but bright sun, calm, snow, ice, sleighs, little bells, tame squirrels and fir trees like polar bears rampant. But the interval? Could you bear it? . . And again theres the question of advantages. I don’t know if a Mademoiselle could be found. I imagine it wouldn’t be safe to count on finding one here. That, too, I’ll ask my I.P. to inquire into. Its ‘lovely’ here, as they say. There is a winter season though which of course we have never seen. I think for a place to work, its ideal. It will be very cold. One must be wool without & wool within. One must count the Swiss franc as a shilling. The post is superb, absolutely reliable. You can buy everything in that little village and I suggest a weekly toffee party here for your daughters to be allowed to make the toffee themselves – But I really must refrain from saying ‘do come!’ as I’d like to. There it is. I will tell you more at a hint, at a sign from you . . . I lapped up the gossip . . . What is happening to ‘married pairs’? They are almost extinct. I confess, for my part I believe in marriage. It seems to me the only possible relation that really is satisfying. And how else is one to have peace of mind to enjoy life and to do ones work? To know one other seems to me a far greater adventure than to be on kissing acquaintance with dear knows how many. It certainly takes a lifetime and its far more ‘wonderful’ as time goes on. Does this sound hopelessly oldfashioned? I suppose it does. But there it is – to make jam with JM.M., to look for the flowers that NEVER are in the Alpine Flora

126   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 book, to talk, to grow things, even to watch JM.M. darning his socks over a lemon seems to me to take up all the time one isn’t working. People nowadays seem to live in such confusion. I have a horror of dark muddles. Not that life is easy, really, or that one can be ‘a child all the time’, but time to live is needed. These complications take years to settle, years to get over. I wish you’d write a novel about married happiness. It is time for one . . . It is time for a good novel on any subject, though. Perhaps we don’t see them here. Ive only just read Virginia Woolfs Monday or Tuesday stories.7 1 didn’t care for them. She’s detached from life – it won’t do – will it? Nothing grows. Its not even cut flowers, but flower heads in flat dishes. I don’t think one can ‘scrap’ form like that. In fact I suspect novelty as novelty – don’t you? Was Romer Wilson very superb? Ah, my dear S.L. I shall never have a silver medal. I don’t expect such exotics. For long now my garden has only produced Doctors’ bills. And chemists pills And hot bottils all in a row . . .8 The bills persist & flourish. The rest I am determined to root out. They are going . . . And speaking of ones poverty reminds me I would be most awfully grateful for any work Mr Lynd cared to try me with.9 I immensely enjoy his articles in the D.N., and I rejoiced in his letter in The Nation this week about Wordsworth & Abrahams bosom.10 One thing one does miss here, and that is seeing people. One doesn’t ask for many but there come moments when I long to see & hear and listen – – that most of all. Otherwise this September has been perfect. Every day is finer. Theres a kind of greengage light on the trees. The flowers are gone, all except flat starry yellow & silver ones that lie tight to the turf. JMM. is a fierce mushroom hunter. He spares none. Little mushroom ‘tots’ swim in the soup & make me feel a criminal. The mountain ash is brilliant – flashing bright against the blue. And the quince jam is boiling something beautiful, M’m, as I write. I love autumn. I feel its better than summer even. Oh, the moss here! Ive never seen such moss – & the colour of the little wild strawberry leaves that are threaded through. They are almost the only leaf that turns, here, so turn they do with a vengeance. I hardly dare mention birds. Its rather hard Harold M.11 should have had such a very large bird in his bonnet; it makes all the rest of us go without. There are some salmon pink ones here just now, passing through, which but for Harold M. I should enjoy. . . . But this letter is unmercifully long. Goodbye for now, dear S.L. ‘May Good Fortune fall ever deeper in love with thee’.        Katherine.



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Notes 1. KM’s literary agent in London, James B. Pinker (1863–1922), was one of the foremost literary go-betweens and reference points in the British publishing world at this time. He began his career as a journalist, becoming a notable foreign correspondent, then moved into magazine editing before setting up as an enterprising, sensitive and highly efficient literary agent, who accompanied an impressive number of Modernist and mainstream writers, as well as playwrights. When he died unexpectedly in 1922, his son Eric took over as KM’s literary representative. See Introduction below, pp. 437–8. 2. Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977) was well acquainted with various Bloomsbury personalities, both the central and the peripheral figures, having been introduced to Lytton Strachey, Augustus John and Aldous Huxley at a special lunch party hosted by Ottoline Morrell. He was also acquainted with H. G. Wells. 3. See Beatrice’s dialogue with Don Pedro in Much Ado About Nothing: D. Pedro: ‘to be merry best becomes you, for out o’ question, you were born in a merry hour. Beatrice: No, sure, my lord, my mother cried, but then there was a star danced, and under that was I born. (II, i, 315–16) 4. The Spitzbergen islands had been in the news since the mid-war years on account of their strategic interest, and again in 1920 when the Spitsbergen Treaty acknowledged full Norwegian sovereignty over the Arctic archipelago – of which Spitzbergen is the largest island. With their disputed sovereignty settled, the following months saw a growth of interest in terms of tourism and trade. In a letter written at the same time to Brett, KM announces, ‘But its impossible to describe this place. It has so brought back my love of nature that I shall spend all the rest of my life – – trekking. A winter in Spitzbergen is an ambition of ours after some photographs in The Sphere’ (see CL1, p. 407). 5. (KM’s wordplay): person. 6. ‘Invaluable Person’ is one of KM’s kinder, and remarkably accurate, nicknames for Ida Baker. 7 . Woolf’s only anthology of short stories to appear in her lifetime, Monday or Tuesday, was published by the Hogarth Press in 1921; it included two compositions that are largely acknowledged as pioneering masterpieces in the genre: ‘Kew Gardens’ and ‘The Mark on the Wall’. The title later became an epigrammatic short form in itself, a synthetic aesthetic creed, when Woolf revised her 1919 essay ‘Modern Novels’ into the better known ‘Modern Fiction’ (1924): Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions – trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday. (EVW4, p. 160) Even without this explicit prompt, the resonance between Woolf’s short stories, her 1919 essay and KM’s own writing is so rich and complementary that, to this day, critics remain bemused by KM’s disinterest expressed here. See below for KM’s correspondence with Woolf.

128   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 8. In a manner that is recurrent in her letters and poetry, KM reworks her lines to fit the rhythm and images of an English nursery rhyme, in this case ‘Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary’. 9. Robert Lynd did indeed respond to this barely veiled hint, sending volumes for review the next month. See above, p. 126. 10. Lynd’s letter was published in the Nation, 17 September issue, vol. 25, p. 854, referring to Wordsworth’s sonnet ‘It is a beauteous evening, calm and free’ (1802). 11. Harold Massingham, the current editor of the Nation and Athenaeum, had not yet published one of Sylvia’s bird poems that had been submitted for publication; the reason for the delay is not clear. ‘In this deserted garden’ finally appeared in the issue for 31 December 1921, p. 530.

[19 September 1922] [ATL]

Tuesday

6 Pond Street Hampstead NW3

My dear Sylvia, Its the most miserable news to know you are in bed again and that again such bad sorrowful things have been happening to you . . . What can one say – I had so hoped and believed that your lean years were over. May they be over now! Id love to come and see you. But stairs are unclimbable by me. I am better but I can’t walk more than a few yards. I can walk about a house and give a very good imitation of a perfectly well and strong person in a restaurant or from the door across the pavement to the taxi. But thats all. My heart still wont recover. I think I shall be in England 2–3 months, as there is a man here who can give me the X ray treatment Ive been having in Paris. After that I shall go to Italy. But all is vague. Im seeing the specialist today. I may have to go back to Paris almost immediately. What it is to be in doctors hands! If I stay I do hope we shall be able to meet later on perhaps. Let us arrange some easy place for both of us then. It would be most awfully nice to have a talk. Im living in two crooked little rooms here in a little crooked house. Its a relief to be away from hotels after five months in Paris in a hotel bedroom overlooking a brick wall. John is going to live for a time in Sussex with Locke-Ellis (do you know him?) at a place called Selsfield – a very lovely house on a hill top. Shall you be going back to Steyning in October?1 Ill never be able to knock any spots off this city, my dear. It frightens me. When Im with people I feel rather like an unfortunate without a racquet standing on the tennis court while a smashing game is being played by the other three. Its a rather awful and rather silly feeling.



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Don’t forget how much I’d love to see you! Or how sorry I am for everything.       Lovingly yours. Katherine M. Notes 1. During the years 1917–22, the Lynds lived occasionally in cottages in Dorset and West Sussex, including the village of Steyning, although they also spent much of the year in Hampstead, London.

[29 September 1922] [ATL]

29 IX 1922

6 Pond Street Hampstead NW3

My dear Sylvia Lynd, How glad I should have been to have seen you next week. But I am being swep’ away again to Paris next Monday, to go on with my X ray treatment. Why do I always have to write to you about complaints! It is a horrid fate. But there it is. The bad weather here these last few days (its fine, of course, since I bought my ticket) has brought my cough back again, stronger than ever for its small holiday. And my Paris doctor threatens me with a complete return to the sofa if I don’t go through with his course. I thought I could manage to have the same thing done here. But it’s not the same, and its frightening to play with these blue rays. So there are my steamer trunk and hatbox on the carpet, eyeing each other, walking round each other, ready to begin the fight all over again. And I shant see you or talk to you or give you tea or hear about anything. Im so very very sorry! Are you really better? Its good news to know you are able to come as far as Hampstead. I have been staying in a tiny little house here, behind a fan of trees, with one of those green convolvulus London Gardens behind it. Its been beyond words a rest to be in a private house again with a private staircase and no restaurant, nobody in buttons, no strange foreign gentleman staring at your letters in the letter rack. Oh, how I hate Hotels! They are like permanent railway stations without trains. There’s the dinner bell. I must go down into the hold and eat. I have doing the house keeping here. It was very home like to hear the

130   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 sole domestic say ‘I know a Party, m’m, as is a nice and with mouse oles. Having them in the kitchen something dreadful!’ So unlike pert Susanne and jolie Yvonne.1 Fare well; we shall meet some day? I shall go on looking forward. Keep well dear Sylvia Lynd. Even if you dont write to me for another year I am Yours ever with love Katherine Note 1. Yvonne is the name of one of the two servants in KM’s story ‘The Doves’ Nest’; the adjectives ‘pert’ and ‘jolie’ (Fr.: pretty) suggest that the French names indicate servant stock-types in French literature rather than precise references.

(Edward Montague) Compton Mackenzie (1883–1972)

Introduction While a prolific and successful author and broadcaster in his later years, as well as a meticulously detailed raconteur of his own life (including fifteen volumes of autobiographical writings), it would have been Compton Mackenzie’s high profile as one of ‘les jeunes’ in the English Review circle1 and as a name in the theatrical world that first prompted KM and three colleagues to contact him when they were trying to raise subscriptions for Rhythm. Mackenzie was the eldest son of Edward Compton, a successful actor– manager, and Virginia Bateman, an American actress, who were themselves both born into families connected to the theatrical world. His younger sister, Fay Compton, was, by the early 1910s, also an emerging actress, who went on to star in a number of London productions of plays by J. M. Barrie. Mackenzie initially set out to maintain the family tradition. He recounts in his memoir, Literature in My Time (1933), that by the age of thirteen, he had read ‘every play of major and minor importance written and produced by the year 1830. In my mind dialogue and action were thus firmly fixed as the dominant expression of the imagination.’2 Despite the positive reception of his early plays and a proposed contract as an actor, he nevertheless preferred fiction, and gave up professional training as a lawyer to devote himself to his craft. He published his first novel, The Passionate Elopement, in 1911. Theatricality, however, remained the keynote of his best-loved writing, and he had a widely acknowledged gift for comic repartee, sparkling social satires and fictional comedies of manners – as KM herself noted in her review of his Poor Relations in 1919.3 It was just this that ensured the success of his later Whisky Galore (1947), now remembered as one of the best films produced by Ealing Studios. One striking exception to this comic vein was his 1913–14 novel Sinister Street, an evocative, sometimes brooding, semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman (initially conceived as one in a series to be called ‘the Theatre of Youth’) that reflected Mackenzie’s life-long admiration for Hardy, and which Ford Madox Ford deemed ‘a work of real genius’.4

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132   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 KM and Mackenzie appear never to have met, although they had a number of common acquaintances (including W. L. George) and frequented various interlocking circles in pre-war London that formed around the theatre, new fiction and little magazines. In fact, the one letter KM did send him was co-signed; the sender’s address is that of W. L. George, and the businesslike tone and style suggest the letter was cowritten – or even largely inspired by circulars of this type, which were a staple part of the life of a new review. However, while the letter has little to reveal about either KM or Mackenzie, it does prove a precious archive piece for scholars today retracing the lives and fortunes of the early Modernist periodical press, showing quite how precarious their funding, business management and practical administration were, but also how far an inspired dream could take them: however tenuous Rhythm’s fortunes were then, it now has a secure place in the history of early Modernism. Despite Mackenzie’s privileged and artistically stimulating background and education, his fine social graces and Edwardian aura, it is tempting to think the two writers would have appreciated each other’s company, had they had the opportunity to meet. Beyond a mutual passion and talent for writing sharp, witty comedy and an irrepressible sense of humour and the absurd, KM and Mackenzie shared a taste for the outsider’s viewpoint: both would, sometimes almost compulsively, embrace masks, obscurity and remote places despite the lure of social visibility and the city, and likewise maintained a wariness of – if not pronounced hostility towards – certain suffocating aspects of English life and society. After serving in the war as both an officer at the Front and a Military Intelligence attaché, Mackenzie withdrew into voluntary exile on the island of Capri, bringing him into the orbit of D. H. Lawrence and Frieda, as well as Gorky and other figures from the European avantgarde. Unlike the shorter-lived expatriate communities, however, Mackenzie retained emotional ties and a home on the Italian island for the rest of his life. His other spiritual home was Scotland – where he went on to pursue an active political and academic career, while never losing his momentum as a novelist. Claire Davison Notes 1. ‘Les jeunes’ was the affectionate nickname given by Ford Madox Ford to the emerging literary talents and then bohemian artistic figures of the Edwardian era who contributed enthusiastically to his trail-blazing, very pro-European English Review, founded in 1908. The group included Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Rebecca West, Violet Hunt and W. L. George – co-signatory of the letter below. 2. Compton Mackenzie, p. 34. 3. See CW3, pp. 517–19. 4. Ford, p. 354.



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[November 1912] [HRC] TEL.5157 PADDINGTON.

3, PEMBRIDGE CRESCENT, W.

Dear Mr MacKenzie It is proposed to float as a Limited Liability Company the wellknown publication, ‘RHYTHM’,1 which is the organ of the advanced artists of this country and, to a certain extent of the Continent. We are of opinion that, apart from its artistic chances, the property appears to be capable of supporting itself and, eventually, of earning profits. To this effect we wish to place it on a sound financial basis by supplying it with working capital not exceeding £500. This sum will, we believe, suffice to wipe out all the liabilities incident on the foundation of the paper and leave in hand a balance which will be used for advertising. We are glad to be able to say that Mr. Martin Secker2 has agreed to act as the publisher of ‘RHYTHM’. The shares will be of a nominal value of £5 or £10, as may be decided at the meeting: it is understood that you are in no wise committed by attendance. A certain amount of money has already been subscribed, and this appeal goes out to none save those who are interested in the movement. We are not inviting immediate subscriptions: we wish to lay the whole proposal and all the figures before you, and, to this effect, beg to invite you to a meeting, which will be held at this address, on Thursday, 7th November, at 3 p.m. If, however, the paper is already known to you and you feel able to promise to take up shares, we shall be greatly obliged if you will communicate with W. L. George,3 at this address. Faithfully yours, GILBERT CANNAN,4 W. L. GEORGE, KATHERINE MANSFIELD, JOHN MIDDLETON MURRY. R.S.V.P. SHORT FINANCIAL STATEMENT. The total liabilities to be met, incident upon the foundation of the paper and the early part of its career amount approximately to – – – – – £118 Against this there is a credit to be collected of –  £51 On the current circulation the publication shows a small monthly balance of profit, at present inadequate for the accumulation of funds for advertising and for the advance expenses of publication. The money required should not, therefore, be looked upon as necessary for the support of the publication, but as working capital.

134   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Notes 1. Now largely acknowledged as a pioneering early Modernist magazine, Rhythm was founded as a quarterly review of the arts, with its first issue published in summer 1911. It was triggered by a chance meeting of JMM (when visiting Paris for the first time in 1910 and overwhelmed by the heady pulse of the capital), J. D. Fergusson, the Scottish post-Impressionist and Fauvist painter, and Anne Estelle Rice, the American sculptor and artist. JMM returned to Paris the year after with his Oxford friend, Michael Sadler, to concretise the project. His editorial in the first issue includes a statement of belief which encapsulates pre-World War One Modernism: Modernism is not the capricious outburst of intellectual dipsomania. It penetrates beneath the outward surface of the world, and disengages the rhythms that lie at the heart of things, rhythms strange to the eye, unaccustomed to the ear, primitive harmonies of the world that is and lives. (Murry 1911, p. 12) After submitting a story, upon W. L. George’s recommendation, KM joined the staff as an assistant editor in June 1912 when the review became a monthly, becoming co-editor in the issue of February 1913. Exactly a year later, after grappling with debts and an untrustworthy publisher, the magazine closed. This letter reflects both the aesthetic aspirations and credentials of the magazine, and its precarious financial basis. The idea of floating Rhythm as a limited company appears to have been W. L. George’s; although the letter was widely circulated, only six people responded as potential share-holders. See Binckes, pp. 15–41. 2. Martin Secker (1882–1978) was just beginning his career as a distinguished London publisher, whose foresight and backing, along with the well-crafted, elegant design of his books, were to prove central in the evolution of British Modernism. See Introduction below, p. pp. 626–7. 3. Walter Lionel George (1882–1926) was a French-born British journalist and novelist, whose mixed cultural roots, Anglo-French literary heritage and commitment to radical political ideals and political engagement alienated him from various strands of mainstream and Modernist British literary life, as well as literary history. It was at a dinner party at his London home that KM and JMM first met; despite their collaborative investment in Rhythm and a shared interest in fin-de-siècle French literature, KM and George’s friendship tended to be tenuous, as reflected by some of her merciless literary cameos inspired by his lifestyle and manner. See Marshall, pp. 125–43. 4. Gilbert Cannan (1884–1955) was a prolific writer and translator, as well as a talented linguist with a passionate interest in the complex European heritage of British literature. He was heralded in his years of apprenticeship as one of the brightest upcoming authors of his time, but fragile health and an unstable domestic life left him marginalised and vulnerable, finally prompting a breakdown from which he never fully recovered. He was nevertheless a close and reliable friend of all KM’s circle of friends, including Ottoline Morrell, DHL, Koteliansky, Gertler and members of the Bloomsbury Group.

Maata Mahupuku (1890–1952)

Introduction The sole surviving communication from KM to Maata dates from the acme of their friendship in 1907. The two girls had known each other for at least seven years, as their increasingly elite educations had led them through similar patterns of relocation between New Zealand and Europe, and their relationship had become – for KM at least – intense. The short birthday telegram reveals little, however, of the ardour that KM was expressing for Maata in other personal and creative writing of the same period. KM met Maata at Miss Swainson’s Fitzherbert Terrace school, probably around 1900.1 Maata had access to the elite, fee-paying institution through family connections and inherited wealth: she was born to Emily Sexton, whose sister was then a student at Miss Swainson’s school, and Richard Mahupuku, whose family included wealthy and prominent members of Ngati Kahungunu, the iwi2 located along the east coast of the North Island.3 Maata’s uncle, Hamuera Tamahau Mahupuku, left a considerable estate (amassed through the farming and leasing of land) in trust for her when he died in 1904. Even after part of this estate was embezzled in 1906, Maata was still heiress to considerable wealth and vast land holdings. From 1904 Maata ‘finished’ her education in Paris, where she became fluent in French and pursued her interest in singing, and in London, where KM was enrolled at Queen’s College. While in London, KM introduced Maata to Ida Baker, who in later life remembered Maata as a ‘very beautiful young Maori princess’, who was simultaneously exotic, hailing from ‘wild, unknown plains’, and yet more sophisticated than the ‘simple, English girl-students’ of Queen’s College.4 Ida’s memories encapsulate something of the charm that Maata seems to have held for KM: she was seen by both girls to embody a blend of Maori exoticism with the reassuring refinement of European high culture. This was a direct result of her unique circumstances: Maata’s Uncle Hamuera had done much to invigorate Papawai, the site which became the focus of the Kotahitanga Parliamentary movement. Yet while he was engaged in a project that gave strength to Maori culture and politics, Hamuera also

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136   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 supported the Liberal government’s paternalistic land policies, repeatedly siding with the government’s interests over those of Maori.5 These family politics and the wealth that Maata inherited afforded her entrée into the upper echelons of colonial society (including KM’s family home), but distanced Maata from most other Maori. One journalist who met Maata in later life felt that ‘[i]f she had any knowledge of Maori it can only be fragmentary. The other Maoris always considered her a Pakeha6 in outlook and ways.’7 While in England, KM and Maata had agreed to keep diaries for each other: after returning to New Zealand in 1906, the exchange of diaries and letters continued. The surviving textual records of this exchange suggest that KM’s interest in Maata intensified once the girls returned to New Zealand. On her seventeenth birthday – the same day that she received KM’s telegram – Maata wrote in her diary: ‘I had a letter from . . . K this morning . . . dearest K. writes “ducky” letters. I like this bit. “What did you mean by being so superlatively beautiful just as you went away? You witch; you are beauty incarnate.”’8 KM also wrote of Maata as if of a lover in her diary entry for June 1907: I want Maata. 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.9

KM’s claim to have ‘had’ Maata is often cited as evidence that the relationship had become a sexual one, but KM’s words should be read with an awareness that such diary entries may have been exercises in selffashioning, influenced by her enthusiasm in the period for Decadent sensibilities. Yet KM’s attraction to Maata was undeniably powerful, and further references to her recur in KM’s diaries and fiction. She served, for instance, as muse for ‘Summer Idylle’, a 1906 short story that Stafford and Williams have described as ‘a cross-cultural fantasy [. . .] with homoerotic suggestions’.10 The story, in which a Pakeha heroine has a Maori name, and the Maori heroine has a Pakeha name, is further evidence of KM’s interest in the model of cultural exchange that Maata embodied. The extent to which KM’s fervour was reciprocated is moot. Maata’s friendship with KM was increasingly sidelined by her interest in the young man she married in December 1907. From the time of Maata’s marriage – and certainly once KM departed finally for England – contact between the girls declined. Maata was to live the rest of her life in the central North Island, remarrying in 1914 and raising six children. While she spent some of her early life supporting Liberal politics, she became known later chiefly for the opulence of her lifestyle, which included expensive clothes and lavish parties. Nevertheless, for both women their early friendship seems to have had an enduring impact. Maata’s influence on KM’s fiction can be traced definitively to 1916, when KM drew upon memories of Maata for the story ‘Kezia and Tui’. It also emerged after KM’s death that she



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had begun a novel entitled Maata in 1913; this work was largely autobiographical but called too on features of Maata’s life experiences. Maata seems also to have treasured memories of KM. She provided an array of anecdotes involving KM when interviewed by a journalist in the early 1940s, and claimed to have in her possession the manuscript of Maata and a quantity of KM’s letters.11 There is much evidence, then, for concluding that the birthday telegram is the only extant relic of a much bigger body of correspondence between KM and Maata, but these letters will probably never be recovered: those who knew Maata believed she was buried with her collection of KM’s letters, as well as a manuscript of Maata, when she died in 1952.12 Maata apparently treasured these records of KM so much that she chose to take them, and the intimacy they contained, with her – quite literally – to the grave. Anna Plumridge Notes  1. For a lengthier discussion of their meeting, see Kimber 2016, pp. 84–5.  2. (Maori): A Maori community or tribe.  3. These details of Maata’s life are drawn from Barbara Angus’s thorough research (1996).  4. Baker, p. 27.  5. See also Ballara.  6. (Maori): A white New Zealander, as opposed to a Maori.  7. Wellington, ATL, MS-Papers-6498, Eric Ramsden to Pat Lawlor, 1949.  8. The original diary does not survive but a typescript does: Texas, HRC: Katherine Mansfield Collection, 3.6, Maata Mahupuku journal typescript.  9. CW4, p. 52. 10. Stafford and Williams, pp. 153–4. 11. See Lawlor 1946. 12. Wellington, ATL, OHInt-0005/07, Interview with Mita Carter, 1982.

[10 April 1907] [HRC] [Telegram] [Wellington] Birthday greetings to my sweetest Carlotta K

Dr Ivan Ivanovitch Manoukhin (1882–1958)

Introduction The extent to which the life and works of Ivan Ivanovitch Manoukhin have been completely absorbed within Katherine Mansfield’s biography can be appreciated by the simplest Google search in English: entering nothing but his own name will produce results that are almost exclusively linked to KM’s treatment for tuberculosis, usually charging him with ‘bombarding’ her spleen with X-rays, with no source cited beyond Mansfield’s critics or biographers. Fortunately, the rare exceptions, reflecting medical research or source materials in French or Russian, are enabling recent cultural and medical historians to piece together Manoukhin’s life with more accuracy and insight.1 Ivan Manoukhin grew up in the St Petersburg area and completed his studies in medicine at the St Petersburg Academy of Military Medicine, the country’s most prestigious school of military medicine, founded by Peter the Great in 1715, and the leading centre for medical research. His doctoral thesis, on leucocytolysis, was awarded the Akhmatov Prize in 1911, a distinction that earned him an essential post-doctoral research scholarship in Paris, where he studied and trained at the Pasteur Institute, in the laboratories of the pioneering zoologist, bacteriologist and immunologist, the Russian–Ukrainian Elia Metchnikoff. Metchnikoff had by then retired but he remained an eminent presence at the Institute,2 where he had worked for over twenty years, and together with his fellow researcher, Paul Erlich, had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1908. Metchnikoff’s interest in the research of Manoukhin was personally motivated as well as professional, his first wife having died of tuberculosis in 1873. He thus encouraged the young and gifted scholar to pursue his work on radiation treatment, his writings about which are held in the Pasteur library to this day. After this stay in Paris, Manoukhin returned to Russia, where he worked as a respected medical practitioner, specialising in the treatment of tuberculosis. Among the dozens of patients he treated were his own wife, Tatiana Tamanin, and celebrated Russian author Maxim Gorky, both

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dr ivan ivanovitch manoukhin   139

of whom were consequently cured. Gorky recounted his experience to H. G. Wells during the latter’s 1920 visit to Russia, and then introduced the writer to the exceptional doctor. When Wells returned to London, he brought back abstracts of some of Manoukhin’s publications in Russian and entrusted them to S. S. Koteliansky for translation, which Koteliansky’s biographer, Galya Diment, supposes Koteliansky did himself. Unsurprisingly, when KM spoke despairingly to Koteliansky of her unsatisfactory medical treatments so far, he in turn evoked Manoukhin’s pioneering work, referring her also to articles and discussions about this radiation treatment published in The Lancet.3 By then, Manoukhin and his wife had left the post-revolutionary upheavals behind them and returned to Paris, arriving in 1921. There, Manoukhin had begun working in a private medical clinic on Rue Lyautey, in the 16th arrondissement, in partnership with the French doctor Louis Donat. It was there that KM headed to consult him, after writing to explain her case and waiting anxious weeks for a response – as the letters below reveal. She finally obtained first appointments on 31 January and 1 February.4 Revealingly, she felt intuitively that ‘M[anoukhin] is a really good man’, but that Donat was ‘a kind of unscrupulous imposter’, adding, ‘Another proof of my divided nature. All is disunited. Half boos half cheers.’5 Her intuitions were founded in financial terms, sadly, more than in medical expertise. As Diment’s publication of extracts from Manoukhin’s diary reveal, the clinic’s finances – including the exorbitant price of treatment – were set by Donat, who was legally in charge of the clinic; the only concession Manoukhin obtained was that they should treat ‘impoverished Russian émigrés [. . .] for free’.6 When KM realised despairingly that the X-ray treatment was having no lasting effect, and that Manoukhin’s prediction of a ‘petite réaction’ before improvements would be felt were not proving true,7 she opted, despite Manoukhin’s marked opposition, to move on to another muchheralded East European spiritual healer – G. I. Gurdjieff. The rest of her sad quest for medical treatment is only too well known. Manoukhin, however, remained for the rest of his life a consultant in Paris, where he and his wife – by far the better French speaker of the two – were even interviewed by a ‘biographical detective’, Roland Merlin, when he set out to trace KM’s final years in the late 1940s.8 Despite his promising medical career, Manoukhin of course failed to cure Mansfield, and the X-ray treatment did indeed prove to be useless as a treatment for tuberculosis. He later embarked on research on other pathogenic agents, his publications including a 1941 study of the Spanish flu.9 He did, however, play one other small part in her final months, the morale-boosting thrill of which she treasured. He could speak to her of his memories of the Russia of the past, not only as the country that she so dearly longed to visit, but as the homeland of Chekhov – whom he claimed to have met in Odessa. He also arranged for his Russophile patient to meet other Russian émigrés in Paris: Zinaida Gippius and Dmitry Merezhkovsky,

140   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 a meeting which, however ultimately disappointing, could at least help her to feel that she had at last begun meeting ‘her people’.10 Claire Davison Notes  1. See, for example, Diment 2011, pp. 114–21, and 2016, pp. 40–57. Diment (2016) points to key works by Tatiana Tamanin, and Manoukhin’s unpublished autobiography, now at the Bakhmeteff Archive, Columbia University. See also Vilaplana, pp. 283–5; Manoukhine 1913.  2. At the time of his death in 1916, Metchnikoff was working on gerontology and probiotics, the visionary and trail-blazing power of which was not acknowledged until the mid-1990s.  3. Manoukhin 1921, pp. 685–7. Further discussions and letters to the editor are to be found in the next six issues of the journal.  4. See her day-by-day account of the first visit and the subsequent consultations in CW4, pp. 410–14.  5. CW4, p. 411.  6. Diment 2016, p. 47.  7. See CW4, p. 433, and letters to Ida Baker, Elizabeth von Arnim and Brett in CL1, pp. 48–52; 124; 137–41; 441–3.  8. Merlin 1950.  9. Manoukhine 1941. 10. See her letters to Koteliansky above, p. 45; see also pp. 495–6 and letter to JMM, late November 1922.

[4 December 1921] [ATL]

4 xii 1921

Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre Valais

Cher Docteur Manoukhine,1 Suivant le conseil de mon ami, M. Koteliansky,2 de Londres, je vous ecris pour vous demander si vous voulez bien m’accepter comme sujet de votre traitement de tuberculose aux rayons X. Je suis malade depuis quatre ans. Les deux poumons sont attaqués et le coeur en est embarrassé. Tout de même je ne suis pas une grande malade. Je sens qu’il y a toujours de la santé en moi et j’ai le désir le plus vif d’avoir assez de forces pour accomplir le travail – je suis écrivain – que j’ai encore à faire. Je serai heureuse de vous envoyer tous les renseignements dont vous aurez besoin. Si vous préferez que je vienne à Paris pour vous voir, je m’y rendrai.



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Je vous prie de me pardonner de vous approcher si brusquement – que je fais sur l’avis exprès de M. Koteliansky – et me croire votre sincèrement dévouée               Katherine Mansfield Murry. Notes 1. (Fr.): Dear Doctor Manoukhin, I am writing to you on the recommendation of my friend Mr Koteliansky in London to ask if you would be kind enough to agree to take me as a patient to be treated for tuberculosis using your X-ray method. I have been ill for four years. Both lungs are infected, and it also affects my heart. All the same, I am not an invalid. I sense that there is still health in me, and I ardently desire to have the strength to complete the work – I am a writer – I have yet to get done. I would be happy to provide you with all the information you might require. Should you rather I came to Paris to meet you in person, I shall come. Please forgive my rather blunt approach – which is exactly what Mr Koteliansky advised – and accept my sincerely expressed respects. 2. This letter was long held to be the proof that KM’s somewhat reckless espousal of ‘quack’ medical remedies, followed by transcendental theosophical beliefs, both of which precipitated her untimely death, were ultimately to be held to Koteliansky’s account. However, a detailed investigation, both of Koteliansky’s own sources and of Manoukhin’s medical training and credentials, has recent underlined the extent to which this rather expeditive sequence of ‘Russian’ influences has been misleading. It was probably H. G. Wells who provided Koteliansky with details of Manoukhin’s treatment, which was being taking seriously in London and Paris alike; Manoukhin, meanwhile, disapproved bitterly of the Greco-Armenian mystic Gurdjieff’s institute in Avon. See Diment 2016, pp. 40–57.

Sir Edward Marsh (1872–1953)

Introduction Sir Edward (‘Eddie’) Howard Marsh, KCVO, CB, CMG, was a British polymath, translator, arts patron and civil servant. Marsh was educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied classics, became a Cambridge Apostle and befriended, amongst others, R.C. Trevelyan, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore and Maurice Baring. His civil service career saw him work as Private Secretary to a number of Britain’s most powerful ministers, including Winston Churchill. He was the main benefactor of the Georgian school of poets and a friend to many more, including Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon. (Following Brooke’s death in 1915, Marsh became his literary executor, and in 1918 edited his Collected Poems.) Marsh edited five anthologies of Georgian Poetry between 1912 and 1922; the sales of the first three volumes in particular were impressive, selling between 15,000 and 19,000 copies. A discreet homosexual, Marsh was nevertheless a quietly influential figure within Britain’s homosexual community. He was a notable collector and supporter of several avant-garde artists, including Duncan Grant, David Bomberg, Paul Nash and especially Mark Gertler. As David Boyd Haycock notes: ‘Marsh’s keenness for painting was matched only by his passions for poetry and handsome young men.’1 Gertler, in fact, lived with him during the period 1914–15. It was through Rupert Brooke that Marsh came to know JMM and KM, for in the spring of 1912 Brooke had received a letter requesting a contribution for the little magazine Rhythm, edited by JMM. Brooke set up a lunch meeting in Soho, invited Marsh to attend, ‘and in this way Eddie Marsh became Rhythm’s best friend and most generous helper’.2 D. H. Lawrence wrote a very positive review of the first Georgian Poetry anthology in the March 1913 issue. Marsh provided much-needed financial support by guaranteeing JMM’s overdraft when Rhythm collapsed, paving the way for its successor, the Blue Review, which sadly ran for just three issues from May to July 1913. When JMM and KM fled to Paris in December 1913, Marsh provided further financial support, but nothing could prevent JMM from eventually having to declare himself bankrupt.

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On 5 December 1919, as editor of the Athenaeum, JMM – his integrity as a critic at stake – knew he could not write a positive review of the fourth Georgian Poetry anthology; it was weak, its pre-war attitudes seemed unaltered by the ravages of World War One, and it failed to include any contributions from the increasingly important Modernist poets. He had written about his reservations to KM on 25 November, in a strongly worded tirade of anger and frustration: Oh, the fake of this Georgian Poetry! It really is a terrible condition of affairs that these people – Eddie M. and J. C. Squire – should have got such a stranglehold of English poetry. They are spreading a miasma of sickening falsity. Page after page of the Georgian book is not merely bad poetry – that would be a relief – but sham naïve, sham everything. Good god. I don’t set up to be much of [a] poet myself, but I’m worth 17 out of the 19 put together. That gang has tried to crab us long enough. I begin to feel angry. I want to lash out, & kick their heap of dry bones into the gutter. But I mustn’t lose my temper. I get very upset, thinking about it.3

KM wrote a supportive letter back to him on 30 November 1919, saying: ‘I hope you do have a whack at the Georgians.’ In JMM’s long article (which also discussed the Sitwells’ fourth anthology of poetry, Wheels), he likened the latest volume of Georgian Poetry to the Coalition government, out of which issues ‘an indefinable odour of complacent sanctity’.4 Marsh was naturally hurt, and indignant on behalf of those poets whom he had so assiduously promoted. He wrote to JMM, who replied: Nothing in my literary career has given me greater pain than being compelled to fight against you. I want you to believe that I hold you one of the kindest friends I ever had; that it is an agony (no less) to me to be driven to fight one of whom all personal memories are fragrant with generosity and loving-kindness.5

Nevertheless, JMM’s review had the result of denting the reputation of the Georgian Poetry anthologies, which never recovered their former popularity, and paved the way for the ascendancy of Modernist poets such as T. S. Eliot in the 1920s. Contact between JMM, KM and Marsh remained, however, and it was through the auspices of Marsh that KM became acquainted with Marie Belloc-Lowndes, meeting her for the first time on 26 February 1921. Following KM’s death, Marsh wrote affectionately to JMM, as the latter recalled in a letter to Marsh’s biographer, Christopher Hassall: [W]hen Katherine died, he wrote to me from Raymond Buildings: ‘Though it is so long since I had seen Katherine I have never forgotten old days here and in Chancery Lane, and her courage, gaiety, and lovableness made me so very fond of her, and admiring of her even before I knew what a wonderful writer she was to become’. It ended: ‘Ever your affectionate friend’. And I knew it was true.6

Gerri Kimber

144   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Notes 1. Haycock, p. 160. 2. Alpers 1980, p. 148. 3. Hankin, p. 227. 4. JMM 1919, pp. 1283–5 (p. 1283). 5. Quoted in Hassall, p. 475. 6. Quoted in Hassall, p. 476.

[12 October 1912] [Cappuccio and Marshall] Runcton Cottage, Runcton, Near Chichester. Please dear Eddie Marsh will you try & lunch with us at the Moulin dor1 on Monday at 1.15. War has been proclaimed & Tiger & I2 are going into action against the High Courts of Justice.3 We badly want the counsel of our friends – Yours Tiger. Notes 1. The Moulin d’Or was a fashionable but homely French restaurant, at 27 Church Street in Soho. 2. ‘The Two Tigers’ was a joint nickname and editorial pseudonym that Gilbert Cannan first coined for KM and JMM in the early co-editorship days of Rhythm, and which was quickly taken up by their friends (BTW, p. 243). KM and JMM adopted the sobriquet to co-sign one theatrical review, while KM also signed another ‘The Tiger’. Although easily sentimentalised, the image also reflects the bolder ‘primitivist’ character of some of Rhythm’s woodcuts (such as the tiger catching a monkey by its tail, beneath the first editorial), especially the headers and footers provided by artist and designer Marguerite Thompson (1867–1968). 3. KM and JMM were facing court action after the publisher of Rhythm, Charles Granville, the manager of Stephen Swift and Company, absconded, leaving them with debts to be repaid to their printer. See below, p. 628, n. 3. For a detailed unravelling of the embezzlement scandal, as well as its significance in terms of how the Modernist marketplace functioned, see McDonnell, pp. 56–9, and Binckes, pp. 23–9.

[26 February 1921] [Berg]

26 ii 1921.

sir edward marsh   145 VILLA ISOLA BELLA GARAVAN MENTON A/M.

Dear Eddie Marsh, I feel I must write and thank you for the delight of meeting Mrs Belloc Lowndes this afternoon.1 I can hardly believe that I met her for the first time today for she is one of those rare loveable women whom ones heart goes out to. Visits from the ‘outside world’ are small events here. The memory of them, long after they are past, goes on reverberating . . . Its late evening, now & there is nobody here but the fire, but the little salon is still sounding faintly with those warm, sincere, generous tones. I loved seeing her. It was so nice hearing of you from Jack. With kindest remembrances, Yours ever Katherine Mansfield. Note 1. Marie-Adelaide Belloc (1868–1947) was a prolific and highly popular novelist and playwright in the early twentieth century. She married Frederick Sawrey A. Lowndes in 1896, a journalist then at the beginning of what went on to be an illustrious career at The Times. It was as ‘Mrs Belloc-Lowndes’ that she published her first work, a biography of the then Prince of Wales, and she enjoyed literary approval and public success from then onwards. Although many of her works – and the list is impressively long, amounting to over fifty novels and short-story collections as well as plays – have since been forgotten, she is still acknowledged as a major and influential contributor to the emerging genre of the thriller. For KM’s correspondence with her, see CL1, pp. 312–16.

Charles Elkin Mathews (1851–1921)

Introduction In 2015, Gerri Kimber uncovered a collection of poems at the Newberry Library in Chicago, titled The Earth Child, which KM had sent to the London publisher Elkin Mathews in the second half of 1910 at the age of twenty-two, representing her second serious attempt at publishing poetry.1 All knowledge of The Earth Child manuscript’s existence had been forgotten until 1999, when it was bequeathed by the estate of Jane Warner Dick (1906–97) to the Newberry Library, where its importance remained unnoticed by scholars until the 2015 discovery. Of the thirty-six poems in the collection, only nine had previously been published. Thus, the period 1909–10 is now considered as perhaps the most fruitful of KM’s poetic writing career, in terms of both quality and quantity. KM’s choice of publisher is revealing. Charles Elkin Mathews was a British publisher and bookseller who played an important role in the literary life of London in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, having strong contacts with the Irish Literary Society, the Rhymers Club and the Arts and Crafts movement. His catalogue included names such as Oscar Wilde and Arthur Symons, and later on volumes of poetry by W. B. Yeats, Lionel Johnson, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Robert Bridges, among others. From 1892 to 1894 he worked in partnership with the publisher John Lane, culminating in the publication of The Yellow Book in 1894, which had exerted a deep fascination for KM during her late teenage years. Death, love, decay, extreme emotion: all were expressions of KM’s late-teenage mindset, resulting in the first of her stories written in dialogue form, ‘The Yellow Chrysanthemum’,2 at the height of her fascination with Wilde and the Decadents. This important manuscript discovery revealed how, at the very moment when KM, now back in Europe, was starting to have stories accepted for commercial publication, she was also taking herself seriously as a poet. Indeed, had the collection been published, perhaps she might now be celebrated as much for her poetry as for her short stories. Some of the poems in the collection had been referred to by JMM in

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charles elkin mathews   147

the introductory note from his first posthumous edition of her poems in 1923, where he comments: ‘I remember her telling me when first we met, that the beautiful pieces now gathered together [. . . in the section] “Poems, 1911–1913” had been refused, because they were unrhymed, by the only editor who used to accept her work’3 (these poems having been erroneously dated by himself). He was referring, of course, to A. R. Orage, the editor of the literary weekly the New Age, who published a good deal of KM’s work, especially during 1910–12, before she met JMM and changed her allegiance to his own little magazine, Rhythm. The two letters below accompanied the Earth Child manuscript. Dated 8 November 1910 and 15 January 1911, they chronicle KM’s failed efforts to persuade Elkin Mathews to publish the poems. The second letter is written in a tongue-in-cheek style, pleading with the publisher to put her out of her misery as to whether her material will be accepted or not. If Mansfield did eventually receive a note of rejection, it has not survived. Gerri Kimber Notes 1. The first was in 1907, following her return to New Zealand after her schooling in London; it comprised a collection of children’s verse and little tales, with illustrations by her friend, Edith Bendall. The manuscript was eventually sent off to a publisher in America. Nothing came of the project; the poems were returned but sadly not the illustrations. 2. See CW1, pp. 116–19. 3. Murry 1923, pp. xi–xii.

[8 November 1910] [N]

8 XI 101

132, CHEYNE WALK, CHELSEA, S.W.

Dear Mr Elkin Mathews – I have sent you only half of my verses2 – 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.

148   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Notes 1. In pencil, next to the date and in a different hand, is written: ‘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. The full poetry cycle, ‘The Earth Child’, is a sequence of twenty-eight thematically interrelated poems in different metres and voices, and merits attention as an example of some of KM’s finest poetry writing. See CP, pp. 108–25.

[15 January 1911] [N]

151 i ii

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. Note 1. 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.

Robert B. T. Miller [n.d.]

Introduction Sadly, all that is known of Robert B. T. Miller is that he was the manager of the Rotorua branch of the Bank of New Zealand, when Mansfield visited the town in December 1907. During her month-long Urewera camping trip she used the various branches of the Bank of New Zealand in the towns where the party stopped at (her father being Chairman of the Board), as a poste restante for her mail. Gerri Kimber

[1 December 1907] [ATL] [Draft] Sunday – 

Nowhere.1

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.2 Would you kindly address any letters that may arrive for me c/o Bank of New Zealand – Hastings3 – I shall be there on Saturday – This paper is vile, but I am once more on the march.    Once more thank you – Sincerely yours K.M. Beauchamp Notes 1. KM’s indication of an address is not mere playfulness. She and the party she had set off with on a camping trip to the North Island had been travelling through the Rangitaiki Valley in the Urewera country, where she was to make the notes in a notebook now known as the ‘Urewera Notebook’. They had

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150   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 reached Rotorua, the northernmost point of the trip on 27 November, and after a short break, had set off that day to make their way slowly back to Wellington. The sense of being ‘off the map’ was therefore quite literal. 2. The previous day had been a Saturday, hence the fact that KM found the bank in Rotorua closed. Her muddle reflects the fact that, now on her way back from the month-long camping trip, she had clearly lost her sense of time. 3. The party arrived back in Hastings in Hawke’s Bay, on the east coast of the North Island, on 15 December.

Sarah Gertrude Millin (1888–1968) (née Liebson)

Introduction Born into a modest Jewish family in Lithuania in 1888, Sarah Gertrude Liebson was a five-month-old baby when she arrived in what would prove to be, in every sense but the literal one, her native land. In the words of her biographer, she was ‘above all a white South African’,1 her ardent love for her country, and her passionate espousal of the lifestyle and mindset of the community she was brought up in, ultimately leading her to relinquish the liberal and progressive ideas she had cherished as a young woman and adhere unquestioningly to apartheid. Her early years were spent living in a settlement by the River Vaal, where her father set up as a trader; the area owed its wealth to the burgeoning diamond-digging industry. Despite securing the family’s economic security, he also exposed his wife and large family to the crude lives and attitudes of the diggers, the harshness of which made a strong impact on Gertrude as a child – as powerful as the inspirational and formative role her education at the local schoolhouse had. Similarly, her direct experience of the ruthlessness and violence of troops (from both the British and the Dutch Transvaal sides) during the Boer wars marked her imagination and hardened the attitudes of those around her. As she and KM would acknowledge during their sporadic correspondence, they had a lot in common – at the heart of which was the complex white colonial heritage, which had enabled them to experience childhood and their early growing-up years in the cocoon of white social privilege, only to find that, from the vantage point of the metropolis, they were instinctively considered more lowly and more uncouth than their London-born contemporaries. Their education was in many ways comparable, with music playing a key role, avid reading taking up much of their free time, and leading to an instinctive, unshakeable belief from an early age that they would become writers. More poignantly, both experienced the shattering effect of losing a dearly loved younger brother in the war, a calamity that greatly heightened their initial, instinctive pacifism when fighting began. It was also the distress of bereavement that incited

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152   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Gertrude, by then married to her Johannesburg-based English husband, Philip Millin, to complete her first novel, having previously written only essays and short stories. The Dark River was published in 1920; like Adam’s Rest, which followed in 1922, it drew largely on her direct experience of the harsh lives and lifestyles of the Transvaal diggers, the plot built around the social stigma and shame experienced by children from mixed-race families. While often criticised in her own adopted country, Millin’s novel was well received in London, and amongst her first readers and reviewers was KM herself. Her warm review in the Athenaeum2 incited Millin to make contact, thanking the reviewer for a degree of praise that ‘made her feel like a fumbling child to whom a teacher kindly says, “Isn’t this the thing you mean?”’,3 and expressing her thrill at feeling understood by a fellow writer she esteemed. It was an inspired decision not only for Millin herself but for KM scholars today. As the second letter KM wrote to her shows, it was this mutual, instant sense of a meeting of minds which compelled KM to write in an exceptionally unguarded manner of her enduring, evolving but inescapably complex sense of unbelonging and nostalgia in relation to New Zealand. The letter is important too because (as her extended correspondence with William Gerhardi at the same time confirms), it reveals KM’s instinctive generosity when reading and responding to her contemporaries’ own works. The keen, detailed and perceptive advice she offered Millin ‘seems to be reflected in the follow-up’, according to Millin’s biographer, helping to ensure that Adam’s Rest proved ‘by far the best of [her] early novels, by virtue of its mature style, competent technical construction, introspective irony, and evocative descriptions’.4 As promised, she sent KM a copy, looking forward anxiously to reading her opinion. Millin was also planning her first trip to Europe, and more specifically London, a visit largely motivated by her desire to meet KM in person. Had their planned meeting ever taken place, it is easy to imagine it would have been a success. Sadly, by the time Millin arrived in London in 1923, now the author of what would prove her first best-seller, God’s Stepchildren, it was too late. She had written from Johannesburg announcing her arrival; in reply, she received a letter from JMM announcing KM’s death. The letter of commiseration she instantly sent back says much about the importance to her of KM’s letters, and their spontaneous offers of friendship. She writes, ‘You will not be able to understand how anyone so far away could have felt for your wife as I did, but I loved her.’ In the same letter, she cites KM’s own portrayal of her life in Paris, the X-ray treatment with Manoukhin and the poignant beauty of spring in the Luxembourg Gardens, which inspired Millin ‘to look for a jackal-skin kaross for her. I thought she might like it for the winter, but afterwards when I got no more letters from her I hadn’t the courage to send it.’5 The warmth of the letter prompted JMM to respond in turn, and gradually a lasting friendship and correspondence grew up between



sarah gertrude millin   153

them, inspired by a very successful first meeting in London. It was during this first trip that JMM introduced Millin to DHL and Frieda, and also to Brett, who later described how inspired DHL had been by Millin’s exquisite evocations of life in Africa. When Millin returned to Britain, JMM was one of the first people she contacted; he had by then remarried, and she was highly disconcerted by the experience of meeting his second wife, Violet Lemaistre, ‘who looked like Katherine Mansfield, and wrote like her, and also had her illness’, as she later noted in her autobiography.6 The strain of distance, along with changing opinions and political engagements, gradually played on their friendship, however. They met again in 1929, but would appear to have drifted apart after that. Millin was then about to set off to the United States for her first lecture tour, and at the zenith of her career and public success. The 1930s was a decade of extensive travelling – including an extended visit to Palestine as she looked further into questions of Zionism that had fascinated her since her childhood – but also of consolidation, as her firm, unquestioning and always fervent involvement in South African politics attested. She also continued to write extensively – novels, short stories, biographies and social histories. Her war diaries were greatly admired, but by the 1960s her literary reputation and public profile were waning. Claire Davison Notes Rubin, p. 11. See CW3, pp. 571–4. Quoted by Rubin, p. 61. Rubin, pp. 68–9. See Rubin, p. 91; letters exchanged between JMM and Millin are held at Edinburgh University Library: MS2515-Murry-ALS 1923; and Witwatersrand University Archives, SGMC/UML-A539-1923. 6. Millin 1941, p. 93. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

[9 May 1920] [Witwatersrand] 10 Adelphi Terrace London W.C.2. Dear Mrs Millin, I am just returned from abroad and the editor has handed me your letter. Please forgive me for not replying to it sooner. It gave me such very great pleasure. I wished I had said more about your book.1 I have felt ever since the notice appeared that I didn’t really do it justice – didn’t express as

154   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 I should like to have expressed, how ‘original’ it was – how different from the many novels, how anxious it made the reader feel to know more of this author’s work. It had some wonderfully good moments – I kept feeling: if she can keep this up – if she does keep this up in her next book – if she goes on ‘freeing’ herself and exploring her own gift this woman is going to be a rare writer! Im very interested to hear you write short stories. I want to ask you, on behalf of the editor, if you would send us some to see – would you? We are going to publish one short story a week in the Athenaeum, starting in June2 – And I shall look out for your new novel – all success to it. Your delightful letter makes me so happy. I like to think of us writers, scattered far, and making a gesture of friendship towards each other. Yours sincerely ‘K.M.’ Notes 1. KM included a restrained but subtly warm appraisal of Millin’s novel The Dark River in ‘Orchestra and Solo’, a review published in the Athenaeum on 20 February that year (see CW3, pp. 571–4). 2. Millin responded to this invitation. Her short story ‘A Pair of Button Boots’, later anthologised in her collection Two Bucks Without Hair and Other Stories (1957), was included in 20 September issue, pp. 294–5.

[March 1922] [Witwatersrand] permanent address c/o The Nation and The Athenaeum 10 Adelphi Terrace W.C.2 London March. Dear Mrs Sarah Gertrude Millin Your letter makes me want to begin mine with ‘Do write again. Don’t let this be your last letter. If ever you feel inclined for a talk with a fellow-writer summon me’. I cannot tell you how glad I am to hear from you, how interested I am to know about your work. Are you really going to send me a copy of Adam’s Rest1 when it comes out? It would give me great pleasure to read it. Now I am walking through the third page of your letter. Yes I do think it is ‘desolate’ not to know another writer. One has a longing to talk about writing sometimes, to talk things over, to exchange impressions – to find out how other people work – what they find difficult, what they



sarah gertrude millin   155

really aim at expressing – countless things like that. But there’s another side to it. Let me tell you my experience. I am a ‘Colonial’. I was born in New Zealand, I came to Europe to ‘complete my education’ and when my parents thought that tremendous task was over I went back to New Zealand. I hated it. It seemed to me a small petty world; I longed for ‘my’ kind of people and ‘larger’ interests and so on. And after a struggle I did get out of the nest finally and came to London, at eighteen, never to return, said my disgusted heart. Since then Ive lived in England, France, Italy, Bavaria. Ive known literary society in plenty. But for the last four – five years I have been ill and have – lived either in the S. of France or in a remote little chalet in Switzerland – always remote, always cut off, seeing hardly anybody, for months seeing really nobody except my husband and our servant and the cat and ‘the people who come to the back door’. Its only in those years Ive really been able to work and always my thoughts and feelings go back to New Zealand – rediscovering it, finding beauty in it, re-living it. Its about my Aunt Fan who lived up the road I really want to write, and the man who sold goldfinches, and about a wet night on the wharf, and Tarana Street2 in the Spring. Really, I am sure it does a writer no good to be transplanted – it does harm. One reaps the glittering top of the field but there are no sheaves to bind. And there’s something, disintegrating, false, agitating in that literary life. Its petty and stupid like a fashion. I think the only way to live as a writer is to draw upon one’s real familiar life – to find the treasure in that as Olive Schreiner did.3 Our secret life, the life we return to over and over again, the ‘do you remember’ life is always the past. And the curious thing is that if we describe this which seems to us so intensely personal, other people take it to themselves and understand it as if it were their own. Does this sound as though Im dogmatising? I don’t mean to be. But if you knew the numbers of writers who have begun full of promise and who have succumbed to London! My husband and I are determined never to live in cities, always to live ‘remote’ – to have our own life – where making jam and discovering a new bird and sitting on the stairs and growing the flowers we like best is – are – just as important as a new book. If one lives in literary society (I dont know why it is so but it is) it means giving up one’s peace of mind, one’s leisure – the best of life. But Im writing as if to beg you to unpack your trunk, as if you were on the very point of leaving South Africa tomorrow. And that’s absurd. But I am so awfully glad you have Africa to draw upon – I am writing this letter in Paris where we are staying at May. I am trying a new X ray treatment4 which is supposed to be very good for lungs. Its early spring, weather very lovely and gentle, the chestnut trees in bud, the hawthorn coming into flower in the Luxembourg Gardens. I can’t go out, except to the clinic once a week but my husband is a very faithful messenger, He reports on it all for me, and goes to the Luxembourg Gardens every afternoon. We work hard – we are

156   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 both very busy – and read a great deal. And both of us are longing to be back in the country. If this treatment succeeds at all we’ll be gone in May – But its hard to write in a hotel. I can only do short things and think out long stories. Do you have anemones in South Africa. I have a big bowl of such beauties in this room. I should like to put them into my letter, especially the blue ones and a very lovely pearly white kind – It is late – I must end this letter. Thank you again for yours. I warmly press your hand – Katherine Mansfield. Notes 1. Adam’s Rest, published in 1922, was arguably Millin’s most masterful early work, marking a clear technical and stylistic shift in terms of the earlier Dark River that KM had reviewed. It tells of life in a small diggings village, as seen principally through the eyes of the protagonist, Miriam Lincoln, an introspective young woman caught in the stifling environment of domestic life and marriage, and yearning for greater freedom without knowing how it can be attained. Although forward-thinking in terms of its nascent feminist poetics, the work is characteristic of Millin’s life-long ambivalence in terms of colonial settlements, and class and racial hierarchies. 2. As far as can be ascertained, Aunt Fan is a fictitious name, as is Tarana Street, which KM uses to refer to Tinakori Road in Wellington, where the Beauchamps lived for several years, in two different houses. 3. KM’s mention of Schreiner in this letter to Millin points to an interesting awareness of their collective ‘colonial women’s writer’ identity. Olive Schreiner (1855–1920) was born into an Anglo-German missionary family and brought up on South African mission stations. From early youth, however, she rebelled against her traditional Evangelical upbringing, and embraced various mystical ideas. She then went on to rebel far more openly against the stifling class consciousness and gender imbalance among colonial settlers, and the imperialist, racist policies they willingly implemented. Although best known today for her partly autobiographical novel The Story of an African Farm (1883), her later non-fictional work is more radical and representative; her 1911 Women and Labour, for example, is an impressive interconnected reading of gender, class and ethnic identities that was truly pioneering for its time. 4. KM’s radiation treatment at Manoukhin’s clinic was under way at this point. See above, p. 77, n. 1.

Julian Ottoline Morrell (1906–89)

Introduction Virginia Woolf enjoyed telling Ottoline Morrell that she was going to write ‘the Great Garsington novel’,1 thus implying that some of the secrets and gossip behind the scenes would be made public. While we inevitably regret that the promised roman à clef never materialised, it is even more unfortunate that Garsington’s most easily overlooked, intimately involved bystander and eye-witness, Julian Morrell, never wrote hers. She willingly cooperated with biographers and editors exploring her mother’s life, or reconstructing the life and times of the famous manor house where she lived from the age of seven, even contributing prefaces when incited to do so.2 Similarly, she generously shared the pictures from her extensive family photo albums,3 but for herself, throughout her life, she preferred a more effaced profile. It must be said that it was the role to which she was used. Julian Morrell, the only child of Ottoline and Philip Morrell, was born one of twins, and named after a nun whom Ottoline had loved and admired in her youth. She was a weakly child, a mere three pounds in weight, and not expected to survive; her brother, the bonnier, beautiful baby both parents instantly doted on, died abruptly just three days later. In the words of one of Ottoline Morrell’s biographers, ‘a clear picture emerges of a child being accommodated on the fringe of her mother’s life’.4 Julian likewise figures on the sidelines and in the margins of all her mother’s extended social circles; she crops up in passing in their letters, memoirs and even photographs, but she is rarely to be found at the centre or as the speaking subject. One of the rare records of Julian actually speaking is when she recites T. S. Eliot’s long poem ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ by heart, a feat for which she was admired by her parents, as Woolf noted.5 Meanwhile, she looked on, whether in the London flat in Bedford Square or at Garsington, while the foremost figures in British politics, the British and European artistic avant-garde, and a whole host of composers, socialites, dancers, refugees, exiles, conscientious objectors, journalists and highprofile philanthropists flitted in and out of her world. Nijinsky whirled her in the air; Yeats admired her; Gide told her stories; Koteliansky lent a wise

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158   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 ear; Gertler adored her and enjoyed playing the big boisterous brother – until she reached an age when he found her sparkling intimacy troubling, and kept away; Sassoon found her sulkiness exasperating when it spoilt his holiday in Italy . . .6 A host of eminent artists painted, or promised to paint, her: the National Portrait Gallery records that she is ‘associated with 411 portraits’, most of which are photographs.7 Clearly, she would have had volumes to write, telling of those years, from her privileged and yet off-centre child’s vantage point. Like most children born into the upper classes at the time, she was not expected to feature dominantly in her parents’ daily lives. At the age of seven she spent eight months in a Swiss sanatorium in an attempt to solve the dilemma of her weak health. Before she went to school, she was entrusted to a series of nannies and governesses; the most successful and beloved of these was Juliette Baillot, a Swiss-born tutor who arrived at Garsington in 1915 and remained as governess until Julian went into fulltime education. Baillot went on to marry Julian Huxley, but the couple extended their sense of a family circle to include Julian Morrell, and the two women remained close friends and confidantes for life. Julian was also entrusted for a shorter period to Brett, when Brett herself was most passionately attached to Ottoline. This responsibility was less successful. Brett initially found the child ‘wretched’ and complained vigorously;8 she later took her under her wing and mothered her affectionately – another attachment that would last for life.9 Brett’s guidance was not, however, the wisest. In 1922, when she found out Julian was unhappy at her convent school in Roehampton, she devised an escape plan that involved sending her a rope ladder in a hamper; Julian was to climb out of her window and come to the edge of the grounds, where Brett would be waiting in a car to drive her away. The nuns forestalled the plans before any risks were taken.10 It was during one of her visits to Garsington Manor, the Oxfordshire home of the Morrells, that KM first met Julian. The very fact that Julian kept KM’s Christmas letter, however, having previously sent on a gift when ill health had prevented her joining them for the seasonal parties, suggests that even if they rarely met, they took fondly to each other. This comes as no surprise when we bear in mind the utter delight that KM took in observing children, listening to them, taking care of them, and tuning in to their language and make-believe worlds. Likewise, the warmth and playfulness of the short letter itself attest to how easily she could discursively and imaginatively engage with a child, creating a tender, gentle bond which is utterly devoid of condescending or affected airs. After the war years and the Garsington focus KM and Julian Morrell met rarely – in London, during KM’s irregular stays in Britain, and later in France, when the Morrells called in on their way to Italy, where Julian was being taken to improve her education.11 It was on another such expedient trip that Julian met Victor Goodman, the future parliamentarian and senior civil servant, whom she married in 1928. On this occasion, mother



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and daughter had travelled off to the Alps to take Julian’s mind off a dashing Oxford undergraduate of whom Ottoline and Philip disapproved fervently: Igor Vinogradoff (1901–87), the son of an eminent Oxford professor, the exceptional and esteemed Russian-born jurist and historian Paul Vinogradoff. Retrospectively, this example of the mother prioritising what she believed to be her daughter’s greater interests suggests that neither taking Julian’s upbringing to heart nor overlooking it was salutary. After Ottoline’s death, Julian Morrell and Goodman divorced, and she married her initial choice, Vinogradoff, a less well-known historian and researcher who had grown up in his father’s shadow. The couple remained based in Banbury, Oxfordshire, for the rest of their lives, however, as if the thwarted dreams and whirlwind memories of Garsington remained as an anchorage where they felt they belonged. Claire Davison Notes  1. See LVW2, p. 50.  2. See biographers’ Prefaces and Acknowledgements in Seymour, pp. 433–5, and Darroch, pp. 11–12.  3. See, for example, Heilbrun, p. vii.  4. See Seymour, pp. 67–8.  5. See DVW2, p. 183.  6. See Seymour, pp. 67–8; 349–51; Koteliansky, letter to Gertler Add MS48973:47 BL; MacDougall, pp. 185–6; 190–3, 238–9; Gide, pp. 91–2.  7. See (last accessed 11 September 2020).  8. MacDougall, pp. 171–2; the interview is reported in Hignett, p. 279.  9. Hignett, pp. 101–2. 10. Seymour, pp. 311–12. 11. According to Seymour, these laudable pedagogical aspirations failed to pay dividends. Julian ‘preferred pug-dogs to painting, and dancing to Dante’ (p. 335). Given that Julian was still only in her mid-teens, her attitude was perhaps less philistine than mother and biographer imply.

[24 December 1917] [HRC]

Christmas Eve.

141A Church Street Chelsea SW3.

Dearest Julian, It really is quite monstrously kind of you to have sent me the little book and the card.1 The little book is Enchanting. I keep turning over

160   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 the pages and wondering what is gay enough to catch ones life after all those lovely twirling lines on the cover – I think I shall have to keep it for a pocket drawing book to use in the South of France. Its a perfect little trap to catch a sunbeam! Was the little boy on the card meant to be Murry? It was very like him about the feet. I shall have to send you my present for the New Year for I am still in my cage2 – Its a great bore. I hope you have a very happy Xmas – and if there should be crackers pull one with Murry for me – will you? Much love, dear Julian from        Katherine. Notes 1. As KM explained in a letter the same day to JMM, ‘Julian has sent me a dear little Kalendar Buch [Ger.: Diary]. I shall write her and H.L’ (See letter to JMM, 24 December 1917). 2. JMM was spending Christmas at Garsington, but KM had been too sick to travel, and stayed behind in London, with Ida Baker to look after her. Just the day before, her doctor had confirmed ‘a SPOT in my right lung which “confirms in his opinion that it is absolutely imperative that I go out of this country & Keep out of it all through the future winters”’, as she likewise reported to JMM (23 December 1917). The doctor also insisted that she should not join JMM in Oxfordshire, as had initially been planned.

Lady Ottoline Morrell (1873–1938)

Introduction When KM was buried in the graveyard of Fontainebleau-Avon just outside Paris, her coffin was covered in the beautiful shawl of Spanish silk given to her by Lady Ottoline Morrell. Ottoline was not there for the funeral; and both the presence and the absence seem to represent how the great lady was and was not significant in the life of the writer. KM’s first letter to Ottoline was written in January 1916 and her last in September 1922 five months before her death. Over most of this period Ottoline was at Garsington and KM somewhere else, usually London, but also Paris, Bandol, Cornwall, Ospedaletti, Menton and Switzerland. She did get to Garsington at rare intervals, the first in July 1916, and there were times when Ottoline visited her in London, where she sent KM flowers in profusion from her beautiful gardens. In the manner of a grand English lady and society hostess, Ottoline was inclined to gush in her letters, and KM gushed back. KM’s was gush of the highest calibre; but I suspect Ottoline’s was of the kind meant to put her interlocutors at ease. To gush back might have been a mistake. In any case it was not good for the prose. Claire Tomalin says, ‘The flattery and “charm” of Katherine’s letters to Ottoline are among her grosser effects.’ But Tomalin adds, ‘nevertheless, Ottoline was charmed. It was not simply that she was gullible; she also perceived something of her own rebellious spirit in Katherine and found it sympathetic’.1 KM among ‘the Blooms Berries’, as she called them, was frequently spoken of with admiration. Her conversation, when she was not being enigmatic and silent ‘like a Japanese mask’, was witty; she was a clever mimic, had a nice singing voice, read poetry beautifully, and made Leonard Woolf laugh as no one else could.2 But the admiration was always mixed with uncertainty and suspicion, and more than a pinch of snobbery. ‘An interesting creature’, Lytton Strachey observed, ‘very amusing and sufficiently mysterious’ with ‘a sharp and slightly vulgarly fanciful intellect’.3 Virginia Woolf thought her perfume ‘cheap’.4 Ottoline (whose own clothes were extravagant and peculiar) was snobbish about the way she dressed: ‘rather a cheap taste, slightly Swan & Edgar’5 – in other

    161

162   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 words, however nice, ‘off the peg’ rather than tailored. These people prided themselves on being intellectuals, writers and artists, and yet their daily dealings and exchanges with one another reeked of class and competition. Much of the talk in the KM–Morrell letters was of flowers and gardens, of a yearning to get back to the world of growing things, and of ‘embracing Life’. But the frequent and usually fluent flow of their exchanges was disturbed at intervals. The first of these disturbances was KM’s flirtation with Bertrand Russell, which, late in 1916, blew up like the beginnings of a serious affair, and then mysteriously (as Russell saw it) came to nothing. Russell had an ongoing affair with Ottoline, which was for her more (though not solely) of the mind than the body, and therefore to him, despite his love for her, not entirely satisfactory. Ottoline allowed him his ‘freedom’, but on the understanding that if he should choose to take another mistress she would no longer fulfil that role. They would be friends and intellectual companions, not lovers. How much of this KM knew is uncertain; but if she had continued to be serious about Russell, as she appeared at first to be, it would have been unlike her to let concern for Ottoline’s feelings stand in her way. Certainly she did not consider them on her Christmas 1916 visit to Garsington, when she and Russell sat talking intimately together in the Red Room, while Ottoline lay awake in the room directly above, listening but not able to decipher what was said. Something else intervened to end the incipient affair. It might have been Russell’s intellectual arrogance, which Ottoline found deeply troubling; or possibly it was no more than Bertie’s famously bad breath.6 The second such episode occurred the following August when KM’s de facto husband, JMM, visiting Garsington without her, attached himself emotionally to Ottoline and, sitting with her in the same Red Room where KM and Bertie had had their ‘significant’ conversations, asked whether he could ‘come into her heart’. There was a good deal of calling up and down to one another’s windows in the night, the gift of a handkerchief, and serious walking and talking in the moonlit garden, all of which left JMM in such a state on his return to London that KM questioned him closely, was shown the handkerchief, and was told – what was quite untrue – that Ottoline had fallen passionately in love with him.7 A peculiarly strained note now enters KM’s letters to Ottoline. The one of 30 July 1917, immediately following these revelations, declines the offer of a cottage at Garsington, which had previously been welcomed. It is full of mysteriousness, hints at a farewell (‘How beautiful Garsington is [. . .] I shall never forget it, never, never’) and concludes, ‘How strange life is! Goodbye. One taps upon the counter & pays the waiter – pulls down ones veil & – goes – ’8 The next (11 August) is, KM explains, a fourth attempt, which had been preceded by three (‘one even five pages long’) she had rejected because they had been in the ‘mocking mechanical voice’ which she ‘loathed’ in herself. But those attempted letters failed because the Ottoline who has been ‘so near, so thrilling and enchanting’ has ‘vanished from



lady ottoline morrell   163

me’. Having made nothing clear, KM adds, ‘There now I have told you “all”.’ The letter then continues with an assurance that ‘my friendship for you couldn’t end. There it is – I feel for all time, whatever may happen.’ In case there is any doubt about what lies behind this confusing message, she writes that JMM ‘showed me the handkerchief you gave him. I took it in my hands and the scent of it shook my heart – Yes, just as if I had been a young person in love with you.’ Is this a hint that Ottoline was John’s senior by seventeen years? It is at the very least telling her that John has confessed. The next letter (15 August) seems elaborately evasive. She declines suggestions of meetings and ends with the calls other people are making on her time and energy – but none the less asks for more of Ottoline’s ‘adorable letters’, which are by now perhaps arriving in profusion like the Garsington flowers. By 23 September there seems something like a normal tone in what KM writes to Ottoline; but in late October there is a strange letter in which she describes waiting unsuccessfully for Ottoline as agreed, outside the Hippodrome theatre where they were to attend a show. But as the letter goes on it becomes (more or less) apparent that this is a fiction; and this is confirmed by Ottoline’s memories of KM, which make it clear it was she who waited outside the theatre, and KM who did not appear. This letter also contains a frank reminder which seems like a rebuke, that on a previous theatre visit KM had felt she ‘was playing Cook to your Duchess in Alice in Wonderland’.9 Another episode disturbing to the waters of this correspondence was a year later again, when JMM, sent by Ottoline Siegfried Sassoon’s new collection of poems, wrote about them in the Nation, saying frankly how little he liked them and why he believed they failed. JMM was not to know that Ottoline at this time was enamoured of Sassoon, nor that the poet–soldier had recently returned to the battle front and had just sustained a head wound. Ottoline wrote to JMM, suggesting extravagantly that the review might end Sassoon’s life. She also urged her husband Philip to write a letter to the paper protesting at the injustice JMM’s review had done; and she appealed to Russell, currently in prison for his ‘seditious’ opposition to the war, for comfort about it. KM’s response to all this was more amused than upset. In a letter to Ottoline she regrets the ‘misunderstandings’, in a tone that suggests it is all outside her realm of concern and control, not long afterwards telling Ottoline, Oh, I long for gaiety – for high spirits – for gracious ways and kindness and happy love. Life without these is not worth living. But they must be. We have – the few of us – got wings – real wings – beauties – to fly with and not to always hide under.10

So if there was blame it was JMM’s again, and she and Ottoline were back on their old high-toned footing. In one of KM’s despairing letters from Ospedaletti we find, ‘Ottoline, I adore Life. [. . .] Life is marvellous.

164   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 I want to be deeply rooted in it – to live – to expand – to breathe in it – to rejoice – to share it.’ However sincere and deeply felt, and however awful her circumstances in that place at that moment, this is hardly KM at her best. But in the same letter there is this: Other people are such shadows – The day you wore your blue dress & stood outside the gate in the sun with all those delicate willows moving behind you – Do you remember – you said the day was so lovely – and there was deep delight in your eyes – darkening them. I never forget that – IT IS YOU.

It is the particularity of the memory that makes this seem so true, and truly felt – the kind of tribute that Ottoline, with her tangled and absurd love affairs and the scorn she encountered in the books of writers (most notably DHL and Aldous Huxley) whom she had encouraged and fostered, must have clung to and felt grateful for. After KM’s death in 1923, when Ottoline tried to sum up the KM she had known, what emerged was full of uncertainties and contradictions. KM was ‘a precocious child’, simple like a child and yet capable of clever mockery and cynicism. She was the ‘artist’ who was never ‘off duty’, never forgot it or let Ottoline forget. ‘She was as aware of herself as a writer as Queen Victoria was of being a Queen.’11 She was adventurous and her behaviour was unpredictable: ‘She would be shocked by something or someone that I should take for granted as part of ordinary life, and on the other hand she would say something that gave one a slap in the face from its queer want of taste.’12 But Ottoline remembered especially an occasion when KM was ‘extraordinarily sympathetic and charming, and most loving and lovable’. They attended a balalaika concert together, and were both ‘swept away, away from London, the horror of the war – [. . .] for the wild music seemed to emanate from the earth’.13 It must have been a moment of full accord between them because KM also remembered it and wrote of it vividly. But she was finally a New Zealander, whose country, ‘a lovely harbour of refuge for her thoughts and imagination [. . .] perhaps prevented her from mixing with ease and friendliness among us here’.14 That ‘us here’ marks out the space between. C. K. Stead Notes Tomalin, p. 155. See L. Woolf 1980 [1964], vol. 2, p. 147. L. Woolf and Strachey, p. 61. The judgement is noted by L. Woolf 1980, p. 148. See Morrell’s letter to Rosamond Lehmann, largely quoted, for example, in Meyers 1978, p. 133.  6. Russell was treated for pyorrhoea in 1914; Ottoline also blamed his moustache. Russell himself later attributed some of the difficulties of their relationship to his dental problems. See Russell 1967, vol. 2, p. 215.  1.  2.  3.  4.  5.

 7.  8.  9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

lady ottoline morrell   165 See Moorehead 1974, pp. 214–16. See below, p. 205. See below, p. 212. See also DVW1, p. 75. See below, p. 231 See H. Shaw, p. 120. Ibid., p. 119. Ibid., p. 122 Ibid., p. 118.

[21 January 1916] [HRC] [Villa Pauline, Bandol] Friday Night. I have been wanting to write to you for nearly three weeks – I have been writing to you ever since the day when Murry came and said: ‘there’s a perfectly wonderful woman in England’ and told me about you.1 Since then I have wanted to send you things, too – some anemones, purple and crimson lake2 and a rich, lovely white, some blue irises that I found growing in the grass, too frail to gather, certain places in the woods where I imagine you would like to be – and certain hours like this hour of bright moonlight, when the flowering almond tree hangs over our white stone verandah a blue shadow with long tassels. So please take, if you care for them, all these things from me as well as the letters I have not sent but have written and written to you. All that Murry tells of you is quite wonderful and perfect – but its strange – I feel that I knew it (although I denied the knowledge over and over) from the first time that I heard of you – and I felt it, even through the atmosphere of that evening at your house – when you were ever so far away –3 I long to meet you. Will you write to us again? But until we do see you – will you remember that you are real and lovely to us both and that we are ever grateful to you because you are.       Goodnight           Katherine. Notes 1. JMM had stayed at Garsington over the Christmas and New Year period, a visit organised by DHL, who was concerned by his friend’s health. In his autobiography, JMM describes this particularly painful period of separation, when KM was alone in the South of France, he was ill and hard up in London, and their daily letters could be held up for days by the tenuousness of communication networks in war-torn France. See BTW, pp. 389–93. 2. The term ‘crimson lake’ is used by artists and art historians to refer to the rich colour of a deep red pigment, more particularly found in Italian Renaissance

166   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 painting. KM is clearly appealing to Morrell’s passion for and rich interest in the Quattrocento artists. 3. KM doubtless refers here to their first brief encounter at a party to which DHL took her, given by Ottoline in the Morrells’ Bloomsbury flat. In BTW, JMM remembers that she had returned ‘very indignant with [DHL] for making himself cheap, and confessed that she had reacted by behaving icily to Lady Ottoline’ (p. 292). JMM dates this just before the beginning of the war.

[26 February 1916] [HRC]

February 26th 1916.

Villa Pauline Bandol (Var)

Dear Lady Ottoline The days go by so quickly and I have wanted to write to you on nearly every separate day – and just not written – to say how glad we were to have a lovely letter from you and to tell you how much we both long to come and see you when we are back in England – Thank you for letting us see Frieda’s letter, too. I am thankful that the Armenian is gone but I wish he had taken Haseltine with him.1 I suspect Haseltine. I did from what Jack told me of him before I knew that he had ‘confided’ in Frieda. What a pity it is that dear Lorenzo sees rainbows round so many dull people2 and pots of gold in so many mean hearts. But he will never change – We have decided to spend the summer with them in a farmhouse somewhere near the sea – Lawrence seems to be much better – I am glad – One hates to think of him being ill. We are leaving here at the end of April – Jack is very busy at present with his book on Dostoievsky.3 And I have a book on my hands too; we feel they won’t be old enough to travel until then. I am awfully anxious for Jack’s book to be published. It is really brilliant – – The weather has changed. All the almond flowers are gone – A cold wind blows the sea makes a loud roaring and at night it rains. Our walks and climbs are over – We sit by the fire and work nearly all day – Only in the late afternoon we put on our hats and run into the wind and go down to the sea and wish that the waves would be still bigger – they’re never high enough – In the evenings we read and talk and ‘make plans’ – – We are awfully happy – and I know that we always shall be wherever we are together. Katherine. [The letter continues for two more pages in JMM’s hand, and includes the now celebrated sentence: ‘We are going to stay with the Lawrences



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for ever and ever as perhaps you know; I daresay eternity will last the whole of the summer.’4] Notes 1. DHL had only recently met the composer Philip Heseltine (Peter Warlock), who, as a younger man in good health, was living in fear of imminent conscription. They quickly became friends as they worked together on a joint publishing venture (see above, p. 113) and, as DHL’s letters of the time attest, Heseltine was co-habiting quite peacefully with DHL and Frieda in Cornwall. Heseltine’s ‘Armenian’ friend had left at the end of January: this was Dikran Kouyoumdjian (1895–1956), a Bulgarian-born writer, who was naturalised as a British citizen in 1922, before settling in the United States. He went on to publish novels under the pseudonym Michael Arlen. He inspired little enthusiasm in the circles around Ottoline Morrell and DHL, but Ottoline’s memoirs suggest their hostility was racially as much as psychologically inflected. She notes, ‘Kouyoumdjian is a fat dark-blooded tight-skinned Armenian Jew, and though Lawrence believes that he will be a great writer, I find it hard to believe. Obviously he has a certain vulgar sexual force, but he is very coarsegrained and conceited’ (Moorehead 1974, p. 77). 2. KM refers cryptically here to DHL’s short-lived project ‘Rainbow Books and Music’, conceived with Heseltine; see above, p. 113, and LDHL, vol. 3, p. 542. ‘Lorenzo’ was Frieda’s affectionate name for DHL but it was quickly taken up by their friends and his family: Young Lorenzo was the title his sister Ada Lawrence chose for her biography of his childhood and formative years, published in 1966. 3. JMM’s Fyodor Dostoevsky: A Critical Study was due to be published the next month, in March 1916. He had discussed the project at length with DHL, but the latter’s growing aversion to Dostoevsky put an end to these exchanges. See LDHL2, p. 542, and BTW, pp. 368–9. 4. ‘Eternity’ was even shorter than JMM predicted. They joined DHL and Frieda in Zennor, and then Higher Tregerthen, in north Cornwall, on 4 April 1916; two months later, they moved to Mylor, on the south coast. Both the harshness of the climate on the northern coast and the intensity of the Lawrences’ domestic brawls prompted them to find somewhere else to live.

[7 April 1916] [HRC]

Friday –

Higher Tregerthen Zennor St. Ives Cornwall –

I cannot say how sorry I am that we have not yet been able to come to you. For I do want to meet you. Dear Lady Ottoline, I hope you

168   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 understand why we did not come immediately. Jack has really been ill and he is still very thin and pale: I was thankful when he left London for we had so much to do and it was all so trying. But we may come later – mayn’t we? We are making a house – but everything seems to be made of boulders – We shall have to eat off stones as well as have them for our pillows. Money is dreadful: we’ve none – We wondered this morning whether you could lend us a chair or a table or a piece of stuff or anything that could be made into something. They have got a needlework picture of yours and a lovely lovely bed cover but we’ve nothing and we really love you. Now we are begging – handing round Jacks big black 3 francs 50 hat. But of course if you haven’t we do understand – I want to write again. I am writing on my knee – between scrubbing a floor and cleaning paint. It is all going to be nice and perhaps later you really will come?        With both our loves           Katherine –

[17 May 1916] [HRC]

A Tuesday Night. No, its Wednesday –

Higher Tregerthen Zennor, St. Ives.

Dear Lady Ottoline, I felt from your letter that you really did understand quite wonderfully what was happening here. Murry has a way, too, of making things plain – a kind of sobriety of vision that I haven’t. That is really one reason why I have not written of it all before: I felt about it all so ‘violently’ but now I do want to talk with you – for a little. It really is quite over for now – our relationship with L. The ‘dear man’ in him whom we all loved is hidden away, absorbed, completely lost, like a little gold ring in that immense German Christmas pudding which is Frieda. And with all the appetite in the world one cannot eat ones way through Frieda to find him. One simply looks and waits for someone to come with a knife and cut her up into the smallest pieces that L. may see the light and shine again. But he does not want that to happen at all. And that is the really hopeless part. Every day they seem to suit each other better; they seem more at home. I don’t know which is the more distasteful – L. sitting in his kitchen and trimming a hat for Frieda while she sits smoking a cigarette and telling him (quite uncontradicted) that her first husband ‘really was an artist’ – (Frieda, you know dandling her little Nottingham Nietsche1 on her knee and tossing him over to



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L. who really considers him gravely) or open proclaimed warfare when they throw each other in and out of the window and declare . . ‘This is the end’. But it never is the end and it never will be. I only realised this finally about a fortnight ago . . Frieda asked me over to their cottage to drink tea with them. When I arrived for some unfortunate reason I happened to mention Percy Shelley. Whereupon she said: ‘I think that his Skylark thing is awful Footle’.2 ‘You only say that to show off’, said L. ‘Its the only thing of Shelley’s that you know’. And straightway I felt like Alice between the Cook and the Duchess.3 Saucepans and frying pans hurtled through the air. They ordered each other out of the house – and the atmosphere of HATE between them was so dreadful that I could not stand it; I had to run home. L. came to dinner with us the same evening, but Frieda would not come. He sat down and said: ‘I’ll cut her throat if she comes near this table’. After dinner she walked up and down outside the house in the dusk and suddenly, dreadfully – L. rushed at her and began to beat her. They ran up and down out on to the road, scuffling. Frieda screamed for Murry and for me – but Lawrence never said a word. He kept his eyes on her and beat her. Finally she ran into our kitchen shouting ‘Protect me! Save me!’ I shall never forget L. how he stood back on his heels and swung his arm forward. He was quite green with fury. Then when he was tired he sat down – collapsed and she, sobbing and crying, sat down, too. None of us said a word. I felt so horrified – I felt that in the silence we might all die – die simply from horror. L. could scarcely breathe. After a long time I felt: ‘Well, it has happened. Now it is over for ever’. And though I was dreadfully sorry for L. I didn’t feel an atom of sympathy for Frieda. It was awfully strange: Murry told me afterwards he felt just the same – He just didn’t feel that a woman was being beaten . . . Then Frieda stopped crying and drank some coffee. Still they stayed in our kitchen and by and bye Lawrence turned to Murry and began to talk . . . In about half an hour they had almost recovered – they were remembering, mutually remembering a certain very rich, very good, but very extravagant macaroni cheese they had once eaten – – And next day Frieda stayed in bed and L. carried her meals up to her and waited upon her and in the afternoon I heard her (I can’t think it wasn’t intentional) singing and L. joined in . . Its not really a laughing matter – in fact I think its horribly tragic, for they have degraded each other and brutalised each other beyond Words, but – – all the same – I never did imagine anyone so thrive upon a beating as Frieda seemed to thrive. I shall never be persuaded that she did not take some Awful Relish in it – For she began to make herself dresses and to put flowers in her hair and to sustain a kind of girlish prattle with L. which left Murry and me speechless with amazement and disgust – disgust especially! – – But I cannot help it – I hate them for it – I hate them for such falsity. Lawrence has definitely chosen to sin against himself and Frieda is triumphant. It is horrible. You understand – don’t you – that I could not write like this to anyone but you . . .

170   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 We are going to leave here as soon as we can. We are at present, looking for a little cottage where we can put our pieces of furniture, for we must have a tiny home and a garden and we must be alive again. Murry and I are so happy together – its like a miracle. When we have found our cottage we both shall love to come to you for a little while. Dear Lady Ottoline, I long to know you. I love you in your letters. We read your last letter sitting with our feet in a little stream, all among primroses and wild flowers – and dreadfully like the Overture to the Penny Whistle chapter in Richard Feverel.4 But your letter saved us from piping . . . and, at any rate, Im never Lucy and Murry is never Dick5 – But oh! we do look forward to seeing and speaking with you.     He sends his love – and I mine.         Katherine. Notes 1. As well as being the closest city to DHL’s home town of Eastwood, Nottingham was where he studied at university; it was also the city where he and Frieda met when she was married to Ernest Weekley, a respected professor of Philology. KM’s sardonic image of their offspring, a baby ‘Nottingham Nietsche’, is more complex, however, than meets the eye. DHL was clearly fascinated by certain works by and concepts associated with the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), whose rich output ranged from philology and the decline of tragedy via moral philosophy and epistemology to political and philosophical speculation, and whose powerful influence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can be traced from atheism to Aestheticism, and from existentialism to German militarism. Jessie Chambers records that DHL first began reading Nietzsche when in Croydon, in an era when the philosopher’s intellectual influence and impact were at their zenith (Chambers, p. 158). The extent to which DHL actually read, or engaged in any great depth with, actual works remains a moot point among critics, however, despite clear Nietzschean resonances, especially in Women in Love. Frieda, however, had been an ardent champion of Nietzschean teachings in her youth, as had so many of the young intellectuals and students of her day. (For details of Frieda’s youth and education, see, for example, Green, pp. 39–49). According to JMM and Ottoline Morrell, Nietzsche regularly fuelled the violent battles between DHL and his wife, prompting one critic to conclude that, for DHL, ‘to preserve his independence from Nietzsche was to preserve it from his wife and to defeat Nietzsche was to defeat a rival in more senses than one’ (Montgomery, pp. 74–5). 2. For the veiled significance of Shelley’s emblematic Romantic poem ‘To a Skylark’ in the context of DHL and Frieda’s domestic warfare, see above, p. 56. 3. KM alludes to the memorable scene in Chapter 6, ‘Pig and Pepper’, in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The literary reference also illuminates the image of Frieda dandling her ‘Nottingham Nietsche’, turning Frieda into the Duchess and DHL into the Cook – a particularly vivid allusion when set in parallel with John Tenniel’s famous illustration of the scene. 4. ‘A Diversion Played on a Penny-Whistle’ is the title of Chapter 19 in George Meredith’s first fully-fledged ‘Victorian’ novel, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859). KM uses the same images and analogy to describe the idyllic setting to



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Beatrice Campbell (see CL1, pp. 504–6). 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, with an engaging, dialogic narrative voice building an often ironically playful, self-consciously conspiratorial intimacy with the reader. 5. Chapter 19 of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, referred to above, consists in one of Meredith’s most sustained purple passages to describe the enraptured beginning of the love affair between the eponymous hero, Richard, and Lucy Desborough, an innocent country maid and farmer’s niece. The lovers first declare their love while ‘out in the world there, on the skirt of the woodland, a sheepboy pipes to meditative eve on a pennywhistle’ (p. 150); the sweet pipings, an ironic herald of the tribulations to come, sound on throughout the idyllic chapter.

[27 June 1916] [Smith]

June 27th

Sunnyside Cottage Mylor Nr Penryn

Dear Lady Ottoline – I was so glad of your letter. We have moved at last; that is why I have not written to you before for I have wanted to. May I come and stay with you on the 13th of July for a few days? I have to go to London on the 8th and I should so love to come to you. Only I don’t know whether you will have me – for I’ll be alone – Murry can’t be with me. I feel as though I have so much to tell you and to talk over – Even though we have barely met – its strange – With my love to you always Katherine.

[4 July 1916] [HRC]

Tuesday –

Sunnyside Cottage Mylor Nr Penryn.

Dear Lady Ottoline. It is lovely to think that I really can come on the 13th I am going up to London on Saturday (the 8th) and my address will be: – 24 Norfolk Road St. John’s Wood N.W.

172   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 I will send you a little note from there. This morning I had a long letter from Lawrence – but we will talk about him when I see you – With my love A bientôt1 Katherine. Note 1. (Fr.): See you soon.

[10 July 1916] [HRC]

Monday –

24 Norfolk Road St. Johns Wood

Thank you so much for your card – I shall come by the 2.30 train which arrives at Wheatley at 4.30 – on Thursday afternoon. Carrington1 said she might travel down with me – which would be delightful – I really long to come. I do hope that you will like me – London is meaningless – Katherine Note 1. Dora de Houghton Carrington (1893–1932) was an English-born artist and designer, invariably known as Carrington. She had studied at the Slade before the war, where she became friends with Barbara Bagenal, Dorothy Brett and Mark Gertler, who fell passionately in love with her. His love was unreciprocated, Carrington being desperately in love with Lytton Strachey. This first unhappy love triangle was renewed after the war, when Ralph Partridge moved into the house shared by Strachey and Carrington, whom he also fell in love with. Carrington committed suicide after Strachey’s death. Professionally, her works – which experimented broadly in woodblocks, surrealist-inspired landscapes and collage – attracted little attention during her lifetime; this neglect has been partially redeemed since the end of the twentieth century.

[27 July 1916] [HRC]

Thursday –

Sunnyside Cottage Mylor Near Penryn.

I loved hearing from you this morning, and I had intended to write to you today and tell you that Lawrence has gone home again. We walked



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with him as far as the ferry and away he sailed in a little open boat pulled by an old old man. Lawrence wore a broad white linen hat and he carried a ruck sack on his back. He looked rather as though the people of Falmouth had cried to him as the Macedonians did to Paul1 and he was on his way over to help them. He is really very happy just now but Murry is dreadfully depressed. The thought of this military service is haunting him and he cannot forget it or put it from him for a moment.2 Also Lawrence’s description of his night at Bodmin3 didn’t shed a milder light upon its horrors. Has Lawrence told you fully about his time there? Even to the pillow he slept on which was like ‘an old withered vegetable marrow tied up in a bag’? I am thankful that he has escaped but I wish that I could help Murry in some way – He feels almost too hopeless to try and help himself . . That journey with Fatty!4 I built myself a bower of newspapers and sat in it until the train reached Paddington but Fatty talked over and round it and kept pointing to little financial paragraphs . . leaping upon them, you know, with a shout of excitement – with the ardour of a young man discovering mountains and torrents. Fancy thrilling to the fact that Pig Iron is nominal and Zinc Sheets are unchanged . .5 Thank you a thousand times for my three days with you; they were quite wonderful. With love from us both I am always Katherine. Notes 1. ‘The Macedonian Cry’ is a renowned scene inspired by a vision recounted by St Paul in Acts 16: 9. In his dream he saw a man from Macedonia calling out ‘Come over into Macedonia and help us,’ an appeal supposedly from heathen to Christian, which went on to be largely cited as the basis of the missionary’s calling. JMM uses the same image in BTW: ‘Lawrence, in his white linen sun-hat and his rucksack, as we crossed on the ferry from Penrhyn, seemed to show something of an apostolic contempt for our soft south and us’ (p. 423). 2. JMM had initially been exempted from active service on the grounds of suspected tuberculosis, but conscription became tighter and less selective as the war advanced. He narrates his growing apprehension and the resulting deterioration of his own mental health in BTW, pp. 418–52. 3. Victoria Barracks in Bodmin, Cornwall, was one of the major army recruitment centres and training grounds in the south-west. DHL, who had been called up in late June, recounts the experience with poignant detail in a letter to Dollie Radford. See LDHL2, pp. 618–19. 4. KM’s travelling companion has not been identified. 5. However trivial in KM’s anecdote, the reference was highly topical. As a brief article, ‘Metal for Munitions’, in The Times reports on 11 July 1916, ‘The Minister of Munitions has issued an order applying Regulation 30 (A) of the Defence of the Realm (Consolidation) Regulations to metallurgical coke and

174   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 pig iron of certain descriptions; bar iron: steel of certain descriptions and high-speed tool steel’ (p. 3). Weekly reviews of commodity trading prices and stock tables featured The Times each Friday.

[mid-August 1916] [N] Sunnyside Mylor Near Penryn. Dearest Lady Ottoline, I will send back The Voyage Out tomorrow;1 I hope that I have not kept it too long – I am afraid I have – Murry is away in London. He left last Tuesday morning & since then I have had no news from him. I am very anxious. He went because of a letter from The Military Intelligence Department2 who asked him to call with reference to interpreterships – I hope very much that he is successful. Being here alone in rather an ugly little house with no news of what has happened is damnable. I sit up at night with all the doors and windows locked and wait for daylight with a hammer on the table by my side to beare me companie. What the hammer would do in an hour of need I really don’t know, but I feel that to come upon a woman armed with a hammer might be damping to the spirits of the most Hardened Fiend . . . The frightening thing about this little house is its smugness – an eternal, a kind of Jesus-Christ-yesterday-today-and-forever3 quality of smugness which is most sinister. It is a perfect setting for a De Quincey murder.4 I do not know in the least when Murry will be home but if I am not done to death before I’ll gladly write something for the Garsington Chronicle.5 With very much love Katherine. Notes 1. The Voyage Out, published by Duckworth on 26 March 1915, was the first novel by Virginia Woolf. Like her later Night and Day (1919), it conceals beneath the surface veneer of a relatively conventional story a richly experimental novel of apprenticeship – the apprenticeship being that of the writer, and that of the protagonist Rachel Vinrace, a highly talented pianist who travels out to ‘the new world’, a fictional setting in South America. 2. JMM had been put in touch with the Military Intelligence section of the War Office by a local MP in Cornwall, acting on the recommendation of the



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examining Colonel at Bodmin. He was interviewed for an interpretership, only to learn the position had already been filled (BTW, p. 425). 3. ‘Yesterday, today, forever’ was a popular evangelical hymn, written c. 1890 by the prolific Canadian writer and preacher Albert B. Simpson, also the founder of the Missionary Alliance. The lyrics are taken from a passage in Hebrews 13: 8. KM refers more specifically here to the rather exalted, pious tendencies of Pentecostalism that his missionary movement inspired in the early twentieth century. 4. The late Romantic English writer Thomas de Quincey (1785–1859) published a collection of miscellaneous essays all dealing with the themes of murder and ‘sudden death’, as he puts it. The most famous essay in the collection is ‘On Murder, Considered as One of the Fine Arts’ (1827). De Quincey is best known for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821). 5. The idea of a ‘Garsington Chronicle’, recounting the parties and social gossip linked to the Morrells’ wartime haven for artists, writers, conscientious objectors and soldiers on furlough, appears to have been floated by Carrington and Ottoline Morrell that summer, to amuse the guests. Lytton Strachey declined an invitation to contribute, having received an issue on 2 August, written in green ink, which he criticised scathingly. See Levy, pp. 315–16.

[early September 1916] [N] [4 Logan Place, Earls Court] Monday – Dearest Lady Ottoline – It was a good thing I came.1 For Murry has had an appaling attack of influenza. I suppose he caught it at that wretched cheap hotel2 – I imagine it must have been included with the radiator & the hot bath and London’s largest rifle range – Poor child! I kept him in bed all yesterday & fed him on milk and Oxo3 and this morning he has crept to the War Office – wispy and wan – like a moth after a shower of rain – But he is certainly better. It is Autumn in London and the streets smell of leaves – and the barrel organs sound as they never do at any other time of the years – – If you are in London this week – shall we see you? The memory of Garsington is so entrancing – Thank you for all, dearest – – It was so lovely – I am always         Katherine Notes 1. KM stayed at Garsington over the last weekend of August and returned for the first weekend of September.

176   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 2. JMM had been up to London to interview for a position as translator at the War Office (MI7) on 22 August. He began work on 4 September. 3. ‘Oxo’ – the brand name of a meat extract which dates back to the midnineteenth century – was initially a luxury item, sold in liquid form. From 1910, a cheap solid form was marketed, in what became iconic foil-wrapped cubes. These became staple army food and a regular source of basic nourishment in wartime Britain.

[12 September 1916] [HRC] [4 Logan Place, Earls Court] Tuesday. Dearest Ottoline        What am I to make of this? Of course if the coloured gentleman with the young party with pink hair was Suhrawadi – then indeed I do know the ‘reverse of the story’.1 I am a little hazy about Suhrawadi – – was he one of Lawrence’s Bing Boys last winter?2 At any rate, Huxley’s languid letter3 doesn’t tempt me dreadfully to tell him – to satisfy even his ‘very idlest curiosity’ and ‘merest inquisitiveness’. I am afraid I am not young enough to dance to such small piping. Heavens! his letter makes me feel so old – and inclined to dress up, alone in the studio here – Tie up my head in a turban, make myself fat, don a fur coat with lace frills slightly spotted with tea, and act Lady Mary Wortley Montagu4 receiving a morning leg from – Swift,5 perhaps (played by the charwoman, Mrs Squeaks.) But again, this little note may only be the prettiest way of asking me which I prefer – pistols or – – – indian clubs. Frieda sent Murry a tremendous ‘biff’ yesterday. ‘Now I am going to have my say’ – It was just the same ‘Ach du hässliche Augustine’6 as usual – Sooner or later all Frieda’s friends are bound to pop their heads out of the window and see her grinding it before their door – smoking a cigarette with one hand on her hip and a coloured picture of Lorenzo and Nietzsche dancing ‘symbolically’ on the front of the barrel organ. Murry, yesterday, very wisely slammed the window down and refused to listen, but I hung on every note – – Murry is much better, but he does not yet seem to be out of the wood – Yesterday the Colonel said that he could only stay in the office on the condition that he received a special permit from the Home Office – or the War Office – I forget which. He is writing to ask Philip7 about it – Thank you for sending the little bundle of remnants – Your note was quite hidden but so lovely to discover – – Please give our love to Philip and salutations to Clive Bell8 – I think of you constantly       Yours ever Katherine.



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Notes 1. ‘The reverse of the story’ refers to the famous ‘Café Royal scene’, which DHL later transformed into a Bloomsbury legend in the famous ‘Gudrun in the Pompadour’ chapter (28) of Women in Love. On 31 August, KM and Koteliansky had dined with the artist Mark Gertler at the Eiffel Tower restaurant before moving on to the Café Royal. Seated at the neighbouring table was ‘a long thin white Woman with an immensely high bush of crimson hair’ (Gertler, in MacDougall, p. 137) and two young Indians, immersed in an intense conversation about literature. One of the party began reading aloud from DHL’s most recent book of poetry, Amores, while the others expressed their scorn. KM smiled sweetly at them and asked to see the book, which they passed to her; she then left the café, beckoning to Kot and Gertler to follow suit. The incident was inevitably recounted with glee amongst their friends. Aldous Huxley heard of the scene from ‘Suhrahadi’, one of the two Indians present, and instantly wrote to Ottoline to tell her. At the time, Hasan Shahid Suhrawardy (1890–1965), a Bengal Muslim, was a law student at Oxford and a close friend of Philip Heseltine, with whom he shared a house; he had published a first book of poetry, Faded Leaves, in 1910. In autumn 1916 he settled temporarily in Russia, teaching literature at Moscow University and after the Revolution touring with Moscow Art Theatre; he also worked for a while in Paris, notably in connection with the League of Nations. He returned to India in 1932, where he became a distinguished poet, art critic and diplomat; he was also an exceptional linguist. His younger brother, Husein Shahid Suhrawardy, with whom he is frequently mistaken, was also reading law at Oxford in the same years; he went on to become a senior Bengal politician and in 1956 Prime Minister of Pakistan. 2. The Bing Boys Are Here was a stage revue that had opened in April 1916 at the Alhambra Theatre in London; it proved hugely popular, and was followed up by two sequel versions, which ran throughout the war years. Subtitled by the main designers and song writers ‘A Picture of London Life in a Prologue and Six Panels’, it included the famous song ‘If You Were the Only Girl (in the World)’. The Bing Boys, named after their native town of Binghampton, yearn for the high life and so set off for London, where a series of hilarious adventures and misadventures await them. 3. Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) had just graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, where he read English, and as a committed pacifist spent long periods of the war years at Garsington, where he became a close friend of Ottoline Morrell and a great many of the Bloomsbury Group then in her orbit; memories of these years fuelled a number of social satires that he published in the early 1920s. Huxley went on to become a highly respected writer, novelist and philosopher, moving in 1937 to the United States, where he became increasingly interested in mysticism and Upanishad philosophy. Sadly, none of his correspondence with KM survives. 4. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762) was an English poet, essayist and letter writer, who had strong literary and social ties with the key intellectuals of her time, amongst whom were William Congreve, Joseph Addison, John Gay and Alexander Pope. When her husband, Edward Wortley, was appointed as ambassador to Turkey, she accompanied him, taking her six-year-old son with her. Life in Constantinople inspired her Turkish Embassy Letters, which upon publication the year after her death, were instantly acclaimed, and KM’s

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5.

6. 7. 8.

representation of their author in lace and turban pays homage to this chapter in her life. The letters’ attentive focus on the everyday lives of women was pioneering for the time, as was the independent life Lady Mary set up for herself upon return to Great Britain, thereby resisting the domestic oppression exercised by her own husband and son. While Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando is essentially a playfully veiled revision of the lives of the Sackvilles, and especially Vita Sackville-West, there are striking resonances to be found in the Constantinople and eighteenth-century London chapters (Chapters 3 and 4) between Orlando and Lady Mary. Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) was an Irish-born satirist, essayist and poet, and also a staunch Anglican clergyman who wrote extensively on the religious questions of his time. He is best known today for his prodigiously inventive work, Gulliver’s Travels (1776). He doubtless owes his mention here to his overtly misogynistic satirical quips at times, which prompted Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (whom Pope had already held up to ridicule as the ‘Sappho’ of her day) to respond with one of her incisive satires, ‘Reasons that Induced Dr. S[wift] to write a Poem call’d the Lady’s Dressing Room’ (1734). (Ger.): Ah, you hateful Augustine. KM is playing with a popular seventeenthcentury ballad, ‘O du lieber Augustin’ (O, you dear Augustin), attributed to the Viennese ballad singer and minstrel Marx Augustin (1643–?1685). Philip Morrell (1870–1943) was a Liberal MP, an outspoken pacifist and the husband of Ottoline Morrell. He retired from politics immediately after the war, and worked henceforth as an occasional writer and committee member. Like his one-time mentor Roger Fry, Clive Bell (1881–1964) would become one of the Bloomsbury Group’s foremost art critics, having moved from the rural gentry into vibrant intellectual circles during his years at Cambridge, where he soon established links with Saxon Sydney-Turner, Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey and Thoby Stephen. Bell is best remembered today for Art (1914), his essential appraisal of modern art and significant form, and his marriage to the post-Impressionist artist Vanessa Bell, sister of Virginia Woolf. KM had met Bell in 1915.

[27 October 1916] [HRC] The Ark1

Friday. Dearest Ottoline I want to explain to you why I have kept silent for so long – and why I have written to you and simply not posted the letters. It is only because I have been so frightfully wretched and distracted – and for weeks and weeks I have not been myself at all – hardly for an instant – but just living on a kind of quaking crust with blackness underneath which has paralysed – paralysed me – I have known this state of mind before but never as ‘violent a melancholy’ as this and the diabolical thing about it is that I cant break through and tell the one whom I want to tell ‘it is like this and this with me’.2 All the while I realise how incomprehensible it



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must seem and I know with a kind of anguish that its out of my power to lift a finger. Forgive this dull explanation. But I have to tell you that I am like this, and all the while I love you and think of you and long to see you. Dearest friend, can you forgive me? I have been erratic and unstable to the outward eye, but I long to have you for my close friend. If I have not been too infernally wicked – tell me and I will write you all I long to ‘talk over’ with you. For I love you and I am always     Yours Katherine. Notes 1. The Ark was nickname given to a house belonging to John Maynard Keynes at 3 Gower Street in Bloomsbury, which Brett rented, taking as her lodgers KM and JMM, and Carrington. See below, p. 769, n. 2. 2. Although KM did not yet recognise the symptoms, the extreme mood disorders – to which DHL was also prone – were frequently noted in patients suffering from tuberculosis.

[2 January 1917 [N] [3 Gower Street, Bloomsbury] Tuesday Morning. Ottoline dearest I have just had a letter from you about Lawrence’s Book.1 I do hope that you will be able to persuade him not to publish it. Another book even anything like The Rainbow – (is it like The Rainbow –) would be a disaster for him.2 I think that living alone engenders in him a real form of madness. I would love to come & see you and talk about it and read it. But I am busy every day this week & in any interval I am searching desperately for a studio which I must find this month. May I come for a couple of days next week – dearest? From Monday until Wednesday for instance? I would come by an early afternoon train instead of that late one. Our journey back to town3 must be told, not written. I felt simply weak from trying not to laugh all the way to Paddington – For one thing we all seemed to change so incredibly on the journey – Lytton4 grew older & older & more & more feeble, sitting in a corner with his scarf over his mouth reading ‘The Celebrity’s Daughter’ by Violet Hunt5 and just lifting up his feet occasionally to have them tucked in by Carrington who grew rounder & rounder & younger & younger and seemed to be

180   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 turning into a little boy of about five, blowing over a picture book and asking her wa wa6 what the words meant, please. And Bertie7 became almost distracted, snapping open and shut the green attaché case & bringing out sheaf after sheaf of letters relating to persons forbidden to enter certain restricted areas & scattering them over my lap. My purple coat & skirt got thicker & thicker & my veil blacker & blacker until I looked like a Norwegian lady of 45 on her way to a Peace Conference.8 Is this heavenly weather descended upon Garsington, too? It is so lovely here that just to be alive is a kind of bliss almost too great to be borne. Oh, to love the sun so!       Yours ever          Katherine .  . Notes 1. DHL had entrusted Ottoline with the near-final manuscript of Women in Love, after she had written expressing concern about rumours going around that she was the novel’s ‘villainess’ (LDHL3, p. 41). Recognising the figure of Hermione Roddice as a spiteful caricature of herself, Ottoline was indeed both furious and bitterly hurt. Fearing libel trials as well as renewed attacks for indecency, publishers proved reluctant to take on the novel, and it did not appear until 1920. 2. The Rainbow had been published on 30 September 1915. After complaints of indecency, largely on account of the representation of the character of Anna dancing naked when she was pregnant, the book was banned and Bow Street Magistrates Court issued a warrant to seize all copies from the publishers, Methuen, who duly complied. DHL was not informed directly of the decision – W. L. George wrote telling him the devastating news. Already undermined by ill health and financial worries, and dismayed by the draining daily realities of the war, DHL determined to leave the country after this final blow. As he reported to his friend Edward Marsh, ‘I am so sick, in body and soul, that if I don’t go away I shall die’ (LDHL2, p. 429). He and Frieda quickly made plans to leave for Florida, but restrictions on civilian travel made this escape impossible. As part of his preparations before departure, he entrusted the manuscript of his novel to Ottoline – a fine testimony of their friendship at the time. 3. KM and JMM had celebrated Christmas at Garsington; the large gathering of friends that year included Lytton Strachey, Brett, Carrington, Bertrand Russell and Aldous Huxley. They left before the New Year. 4. Lytton Strachey (1880–1932) was a central Bloomsbury figure and a respected critic, already noted for his Landmarks in French Literature (1912). He had joined the group of conscientious objectors at Garsington during the war, becoming an intimate, albeit sometimes treacherous, friend of Ottoline and Phillip Morrell’s. See below, p. 643. 5. Violet Hunt (1862–1942) was then an established British author and literary hostess, intimately connected with both the fin-de-siècle and Aestheticist literary circles, and the socially engaged New Woman’s genre. She was an active champion of women’s emancipation, in terms of lifestyle and political and artistic commitments, notably founding the Women Writers’ Suffrage League



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in 1908. Her passionate liaison with the married Ford Madox Hueffer (Ford) also brought her to public notice in the pre-war and war years. Her 1913 novel, The Celebrity’s Daughter, drew on scenes from Ford’s own tumultuous life at the time, including financial tussles with his wife and imprisonment for non-payment of maintenance. 6. The term ‘wa-wa’ or ‘wah-wah’ is onomatopoeia referring to a young child’s wailing; KM uses it by association to designate a nursery maid or nanny. 7. Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) was a philosopher, mathematician and Bloomsbury intimate who had moved into the forefront of politics as a highprofile, crusading pacifist in the war years. He and Ottoline Morrell had been involved in a passionate affair since 1913, which, over the years evolved into a stormy but tender friendship. For his burgeoning relationship with KM at this time, see his Introduction below, p. 531. 8. From late 1915, a number of major international and diplomatic endeavours had been gaining momentum in search of a peace settlement; these included President Wilson’s ‘fourteen-point scheme’, Germany’s ‘Peace Note’ (1916) and various League of Nations-led negotiations. There were also a number of often less publicised but visionary paradiplomatic and humanitarian undertakings, such as Red Cross conferences, and the International Congress of Women – a peace congress held in The Hague in 1915. Norway was a ‘Neutral Ally’ in the war, whose trading policies and sea defences had immense strategic importance for Britain and Germany. In such a context, the engagement of a number of Scandinavian women figureheads caught the press attention, sometimes inspiring cartoons reminiscent of the image KM draws of herself here; these included Louise Ottesen-Keilhau, Norway’s delegate at the congress in The Hague, and the Swedish pacifist Anna Kleman.

[14 January 1917] [HRC] [3 Gower Street, Bloomsbury] Sunday Night. Ottoline dearest, I have been passing through crisis after crisis last week and do not seem to have had my head out of hot water even for a moment long enough to utter a cry of sympathy or natural feeling. The morning of the day when I had so wanted to come down to Garsington my Rhodesian Mountain was injured in her munition works1 (which sounds like a part of her anatomy: Im not sure that it isn’t –) And I had to tend her and take her to hospitals and tuck her up – At the same time the studio flat which I had just taken was snatched from me by the most perfidious Pole2 and indeed a perfect little Dostoievsky novel3 raged for days on this subject dressed out with such a deal of impossible complications that even now I am not sure what happened and I have not an idea why. The only fact which remained was

182   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 that Pan Polak had pinched my studio for his fair and I had to begin my desperate search all over again. Aided by an appaling cold. But I think I have found a refuge in a tiny flat in Grays Inn. So quiet and delightful, looking over gardens and very remote, ideal for writing. I want Brett to take a top flat there when she comes back from Borneo,4 rather than move to Fitzroy Street or Chelsea. I don’t think that one can afford to live in dreadful surroundings – and climb flights of dirty stairs & shiver past pails containing dead tea leaves & bitten ends of bread and marmalade outside other people’s doors – The trace of those places seems to cling round the hem of ones skirt for ever. It is better to live in some very quiet place, where there are trees and sunken lawns and porters with brass buttons between you and empty bottles. Besides oh, I want to work so – and this year I must finish at least two books. Would you care for a copy of my wretched old book?5 It is young and bad, but I would like to send you one. It might amuse you a little. Dearest I hardly know what to write about Lawrence. Brett has told me a great deal about the book & I can imagine how bad it is. There is no doubt about it: left to himself Lawrence goes mad. When he is with people he expands to the warmth and the light in them – he is a darling and often very wonderful, but left to himself he is cold and dark and desolate. Of course Frieda is at the bottom of it. He has chosen Frieda and when he is with real people he knows how fatal that choice is. But his cursed obstinacy eggs him on in his loneliness with her to justify his choice, by any means – by even the lowest methods. I feel I understand him so well and the whole huge unreal fabric that he builds up as his ‘house’ against the world. And I am sure there is only one way to answer him. It is very cruel, but its the only weapon to prick his sensitive pride. It is to laugh at him – to make fun of him – to make him realise that he has made a fool of himself. Anything else will only make him feel like Christ whipping out the templemongers.6 I have always realised that he needs to be laughed at more than anything. It cures his madness. At the time it makes him furious but then quite suddenly he sees himself spinning round on one toe and he laughs, too. But he ought not to be allowed to go on. He must be stopped. I think it is really fatal that such books should be published. By the end of this week I hope to have the affair of this little flat settled & then I shall be a nicer woman – and dearest, such a much better friend. You cannot imagine how dead I feel in this false existence – Would you be a reference for me? Just to say I am a desirable tenant? It is a quite formal affair and Id be infinitely grateful. I have a dream that you will come & stay with me when I am ‘settled’ & we shall talk and hear singing – & really have time together – My tenderest love – but my fingers are so frozen that the pen only dances. Always your devoted Katherine.



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Notes 1. The ‘Rhodesian Mountain’ is just one of KM’s numerous nicknames for her most faithful friend, Ida Baker (L.M.), whose family lived in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), for a number of years. See Baker’s letters and Introduction in CL1, pp. 65–176. Without mentioning her own injury, Baker evokes the recent living arrangements in her memoirs: [W]omen with some college background were being recruited to work as charge hands in the factories. I was taken on for an intensive six weeks’ training in metal work, and then became a tool setter in an aeroplane factory in Chiswick. [. . .] Katherine had found a home for me on Holly Mount in Hampstead [. . .] She considered looking after me her ‘war work’, and she performed it most efficiently. (p. 100) 2. Having driven KM and JMM to distraction in 1912, Floryan Sobieniowski, KM’s former lover when in Bavaria in 1909, had re-emerged, this time with plans that KM should work with him on a co-translation of a play, The Judges, by the outstanding Polish playwright and intellectual figurehead Stanislaw Wyspianski. See CW3, pp. 182–96. 3. In the context of British Russian fever (which had evolved in the context of the war but remained as potent), ‘the Dostoevsky novel’ encapsulated a tumultuous, excited whirlpool of passions interrupting any semblance of staid daily life. This tenacious and ultimately harmful, misleading image is well summed up in Virginia Woolf’s ‘The Russian Point of View’ (EVW4, pp. 181–9). 4. In 1916–17, Dorothy Brett made various plans to travel to Borneo to visit her younger sister, Sylvia Leonora Brooke (1885–1971), who had married Charles Vyner de Vindt Brooke (future Raja of Sarawak) in 1911; the visit never materialised. 5. KM’s first collection of stories, In a German Pension, inspired by her 1909 stay in Germany, had been published by Swift in 1911. She later regretted its false tone and ‘juvenile’ themes’, and opposed republication. See KM’s letter on this subject to her agent Eric Pinker, below, p. 442. 6. See Matthew 21: 12–13, which recounts how Jesus turns the stall-holders and money-lenders from the temple, one of the many occasions on which Pharisees and false worshippers are castigated.

[late January 1917] [HRC] [3 Gower Street, Bloomsbury] Ottoline my dearest – I have been thinking of you all this week. I seemed to see nothing of you while you were in town – simply nothing except a party which was no real party at all1 – and the divine moment when we heard that trembling glittering italian music shake out into the air from the old barrel organ – And then last weekend I had to go to the silly sinema2 – and this I would be fatal – among so many and so many and such

184   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 glee. But I have so much to tell you and to talk over that I do hope we shall meet soon. I really believe we ought to join together against The Deaders3 and – all of us who are alive – live so happily and so thrillingly that they are left like the men on the mountain – gazing up at us – while we fly in the air. It is such a perfect day – For the last two days and nights I have felt that winter was over for ever and that my breast could not contain my heart. Such air – full of little lilac flowers and new grass and the first butterflies – What can one do with this intolerable love of almost sensational life – of the outsides of houses half moonlight and half black shadow – of the sounds of music and the shapes of people standing in those round pools of light that the street lamps shed. I wish we had spent one long evening together – here – but perhaps next time you are in London I shall have a studio – This is only a note I am giving to Murry – I shall write you a long letter tomorrow night. It is a kind of endless miracle to know that you exist and that you are you. Ever your Katherine. Notes 1. Ottoline had briefly visited London from 21 to 23 January, when she and KM attended a lunch party together. 2. The allusion is to one of KM’s most intriguing sources of short-term employment at the time, working as a walk-on extra in an American-produced film. The details have unfortunately never come to light, despite much research by scholars. See also below, p. 538. For the ‘contact zone’ between this hands-on involvement with cinematography and her own writing, see also Ascari, pp. 6–12; 40. 3. KM’s own term for any purveyor of a stale or arid aesthetic mode or mindset, although not one she uses often. Her implications are made very clear in a later letter to Anne Estelle Rice: ‘As to the people in this hotel, it is like a living – cemetery. I never saw such deadness. I mean belonging to a by gone period. Collar supports (do you remember them?) are the height of fashion here & hairnets and silver buckles and button boots. Face powder hasn’t been invented yet’ (see below, p. 505).

[6 February 1917] [HRC] [3 Gower Street, Bloomsbury] Dearest Ottoline, I could not find the house, but beat round the Square trying 38 & 28 all to no avail – that was why I did not come back.1



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I sold last nights tickets by great good luck to a man as was wanting some & bought 4 more for tonight. But I am afraid I can’t possibly go tonight for my furniture is arriving in fits & starts today & I shall be a black wreck by tonight. I am just starting off for the Great Beyond & the Edge of Things now – very thankfully. I will write to Brett from there. I am so sorry we only saw each other for such an interrupted moment; it was like a cinema! And I do hope you will some day find your way to 141A Church Street Chelsea, which is the address of my nunnery. I wish you were well of your headaches. They are the Devil – & in England too Ever so much love Katherine Note 1. The exact nature of the lost or mistaken address and missed appointment has not been traced. These were weeks of quite hectic life-changes for all the former inhabitants of the ‘Ark’. See Hignett, pp. 88–9.

[13 February 1917] [HRC]

Tuesday –

141A Church Street Chelsea SW3.

My dearest – A letter from you, unopened, has been lying on my writing table for days & days. At first I had not the heart to open it and then I hadn’t the courage – only tonight I read it through. Ah, my lovely friend, it was such an enchanting letter. It was so wise and so perfect that it took my breath away. It ‘went to my heart’ like Music – and I seemed to see, in the dark pool of silence that lies between us, our wonderful friendship that we so very nearly achieved, shining, gleaming, heavenly, and longed for, like the moon in the trembling water of the pond1 – I stretched out my arms to it – I feel I must have it: it could not be gone – Who, among women, loves you as I love you? Who appreciates you and understands you more nearly than I? I want you – I want you so immensely and so utterly for my friend – There is no one like you – and now I am terrified that I have lost you – – – Shall I explain why I wrote like that and ran away?2 Yes I shall explain, but not now. I will tell you or I will write at length – I tried, this evening, to explain to Brett – perhaps she did ‘understand’ –

186   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 But until I do – know that whatever you may feel for me, I can never feel for you anything but love and deepest friendship. Do let us meet if it is possible & be really together & talk and talk – endlessly – I feel that if I were with you all would be plain between us – until I do I am yours for ever Katherine. Notes 1. See KM’s evocative poem ‘Night-Scented Stock’, sent to Ottoline Morrell as a ‘thank-you’ gesture after a party at Garsington, during which the milky white moonlight heightens the already magical feel of the evening (CP, pp. 156–7). 2. A complex web of attraction, flirtation and cynical manipulation had built up between KM and Bertrand Russell, and had stoked Bloomsbury gossip and misunderstandings. While Ottoline was sadly aware that Russell’s affections were waning, she was as yet unaware of his dalliance with KM; her and KM’s friendship nevertheless felt the strain of the ambient conspiracies and vulnerability.

[3 April 1917] [N]

Tuesday. Midnight

141A, CHURCH STREET, CHELSEA, S.W.

Ottoline dearest, When the postman handed me a letter from you this afternoon I felt as though it had come from a far country – – It is so long since I have heard from you and so much seems to have happened. It is so dear of you to ask me to Garsington for Easter. But I cannot come. I am working fearfully hard just now and simply dont dare to court any interruption. Here I stay in my home, and except for the most occasional alarum and excursion to my dentist I don’t go out at all. Ive a play half written1 and God knows how many long short stories and notes and sketches for portraits. And to tell you the truth I have hugged my shelter so long, not daring to issue forth & pick my way over the stones and rocky spikes to the edge of the sea where the impatient muse or fury in a quivering bonnet waits to drag me in and duck me, that I dont dare delay a moment longer. So until I can come to you with a lovely infant on each arm I’d better stay away (which last sounds like an extract from an unwritten play by Gilbert C.)2 How are you? Are you writing? Have you read anything ‘good’ lately? I wonder what you think of the new Conrad book now that it is com-



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plete.3 I feel there is something wrong with it – that it doesn’t get any further than he has got before – and no artist has any right to be able to afford to let it happen again. But perhaps I am quite wrong. I am sitting writing to you with my feet in the fire. Its very quiet except for the clock that gallops away like a lonely rider with a long plume in his hat beating along a dark road – Sometimes I can hear the trains hoot or a strange mysterious tapping starts – and I am frightened. Only it is devilishly cold. I must go to bed. If I knew you were not offended with me I should love to write you – one page. Yours ever Katherine – Notes 1. The play, initially titled ‘A Ship in the Harbour’, was later given the title ‘Toots’, after one of the characters. Only unfinished drafts of this playful pastiche sketch have survived, which seems to weave Bloomsbury drawing room, eighteenth-century social comedy and family memories into an oddly modern, absurd spoof, with throwaway lines such as, ‘PIP: I can’t think why it is but I always feel the need of a sweet toothful on Sunday afternoons – do you? Have you got a chocolate button tucked away in the drawer of the sewing machine or do you think there is by any chance an odd, rather gritty jujube at the bottom of your workbag, darling?’ (CW2, p. 20). 2. The novelist and translator Gilbert Cannan (1884–1955) and his wife, former actress Mary Ansell (1861–1945, previously married to J. M. Barrie), lived at the Mill House, Cholesbury. It was at the Cannans’ Christmas party in 1914 that another memorable playlet was acted out amongst guests, in which KM and JMM ended up portraying their own domestic squabbles, leading to tears and melodrama which were, as Cannan gleefully told Ottoline Morrell, ‘like a chapter out of a Dostoievsky novel’ (see Alpers 1980, p. 173). See also above, pp. 79–80. 3. Joseph Conrad (1857–1924), the adopted name of Jozef Konrad Korzenowski, was a Ukraine-born Polish citizen who joined the British Navy, and was naturalised British in 1886. In 1896, he married and settled in Ashford, Kent, where he became a close friend of Edward and Constance Garnett, and a friend and writing associate of Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford). As well as being the author of essential pre- and early-Modernist fictions – such as Heart of Darkness (1902), he was also a prolific and commercially successful writer of political thrillers and short stories. Like much of his fiction, The Shadow Line draws on Conrad’s sea-faring experience, notably his days as shipmaster on the Bangkok–Singapore voyage, but the metaphorical ‘shadow’ also invites contemporary and supernatural interpretations. It was serialised in the English Review from September 1916 until March 1917, in which month the novella was published as a book.

188   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [24 April 1917] [Queen’s]

April 24th 1917

141a Church Street Chelsea S.W.

My dearest Ottoline, I would love to have a talk with you – a long talk to ourselves. I will come as soon as I can – just sending you a note beforehand to ask if you can have me. I was so glad to hear from you this morning. Heavens! What an exquisite early morning it was with little Poussin cherubs1 climbing up & down the budding tree outside my window! I have so many trees to watch from here – two in my front garden and three graceful young bushes and a big fig tree at the back. It is so hard to be patient with them; one feels inclined to stamp and say: come into leaf immediately! But no, they unfold in their beautiful reluctant way & I suppose one wouldn’t have it otherwise – if one were a saint. But I am not & I wish the Lord were a little more like a Chinese conjuror.2 I have been reading this past week the poems of Mistral and of his young friend Aubanel.3 I wonder if you know a book called La Miougrano – the Pomegranates by Aubanel – Dans les preaux il y a des violettes; voici, de nouveau des hirondelles; de nouveau voici le soleil plus roux, plus beau. II y a des feuilles aux plantanes, l’ombre est fraiche dans les allees, et tout tresaille. La rive est verte; sur la rive je suis couché; cependant me viennent des grands arbres et des buissons, chants et parfums. Toutes les branches sont en fleurs; tout chante, tout rit, car la vie est si charmante!4 – – – These men write with such lovely ease. But oh they make one feel what madness it is to live out of the sun. My play, which is called ‘A Ship in the Harbour,’ is at its Third Act.5 I hope it will be good; I know the idea is good. But there is an unthinkable amount of pruning to be done before one can liberate one’s people in a play. I hadn’t realised it before. It is very hard work. I wish I could see what you are writing.6 I am sending you some snippets of mine. I heard that Lawrence was in London or expected to arrive. I wonder if you have heard from him. I found some of his letters the other day – and re-reading one I set to wishing that he hadn’t ‘Changed’. Lawrence was one of the few real people – one cannot help loving the memory of him.7 One can just see darling Murry’s toes sticking out from under the immense umbrella that he sits under and which is the war. I walk all round the umbrella very often and talk to the toes and a small voice answers me – but that is nearly all, one is tired of wondering when this infernal war will end, and tired of being buoyed up by false hopes one moment and crushed down again the next. But it cannot go on long, can it?



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If ever you come to London you will come here? Really it is not quite in the wilds, and you know I should love to welcome you.       My love        Katherine Notes 1. The image is one of KM’s characteristically tight-packed metaphors. The French classicist painter Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) was born in Normandy, and took painting lessons there before running away to Paris to pursue his apprenticeship. Even his early works bear the trademarks of the great works to come – a vivid mixture of meticulously realistic, story-telling detail, an abundance of mythological allusions and a rich abundance of sensual appeal. In technique and design his works reflect the powerful influence of the Italian master Raphael, whose works Poussin travelled to Rome in 1624 to admire; so great was the impression that he stayed until the end of his life. Ottoline’s passion for Italian gardens, architecture and High Renaissance art would have made her susceptible to KM’s tender description here, which suggests works such as the 1624–30 series The Inspiration of the Poet with cherubs in the trees. However, ‘poussin’ in French also means ‘chick’, which, in the context of a bright spring morning looking on to a budding tree, also suggests the chirruping and fluttering of birds. 2. The most famous Chinese conjuror in western Europe at the time was a Beijing-born performer and traditional magician known as Ching Ling Foo, the stage-name of Chee Ling Qua (?–1922), who had become immensely popular as a stage and vaudeville performer in Paris and London. His renown had been given extra publicity at the time by the arrival in London of another supposedly Chinese conjuror, Chung Ling Soo, who was actually an American vaudeville and circus performer, William Hutchinson. Both conjurors were firm stage favourites, particularly among troops on furlough in London, in the years 1915–17; the pair were also sworn enemies and rivals. 3. Frédéric Mistral (1830–1914) and Théodore Aubanel (1829–86) were Provence-born writers and poets, and two of the founding members of the Félibrige movement, created in 1854 to preserve the rich literary traditions of the Provençal language (a variety of Occitan) and notably the arts formerly transmitted by the southern Troubadour poets. Their stance was political as well as aesthetic at the time, when the policy of the Republican state had been to impose centralised control via a single language across France, gradually eradicating regional languages and dialects. The name of the movement derived from the Provençal word ‘félibre’, meaning ‘doctor of law’. Mistral was the most successful of the group and was quickly acknowledged as their figurehead. Although KM may well have discovered the Félibrige poets herself when in Provence, it is more likely that Francis Carco introduced her to them, for their influence can be felt in some of his early poetry (such as the prose-poem ‘Aix-en-Provence’, published in the first issue of Rhythm in summer 1911, p. 20). Mistral also gained in public visibility outside France after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1904, for his outstanding work as a poet, lexicographer and defender of regional culture and history. His dictionary of the Occitan language, Lou Tresor dóu Felibrige, remains unrivalled to this day.

190   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 4. ‘La Miougrano’ (Provençal): Pomegranate. A literal translation of the prosepoem by Aubanel runs as follows: ‘In the courtyards there are violets; here, the swallows are back again; here again, the russet sun, more beautiful. The plane-trees are in leaf, in the shade along the path it’s cooler, everything tremors. The banks are green; on the bank, I lie reclining; yet from the tall trees and bushes, songs and perfumes come my way. The branches are covered in blossom; there is song and laughter in everything, for life is so enchanting!’ 5. See above, pp. 186–7, n. 1. 6. As well as keeping a detailed journal each day, Ottoline would sometimes experiment with various forms of auto-fiction and life writing; she also wrote a number of sketches and prose-poems. KM was one of the rare friends at the time to show an interest in her friend’s own creative life; however, posterity, likewise, has shown more interest in Morrell as hostess and mediator than as a woman in her own right. 7. DHL arrived in London from Nottingham, and stayed with Koteliansky at 5 Acacia Road between 20 and 25 April. The visit was prompted mainly by publishing concerns to be settled with J. B. Pinker, his agent, but DHL was ill during the stay and ventured out little. He had had no great desire, however, to renew contacts with his former friends, feeling the rift between them as acutely as they did. In a note sent to Koteliansky once he had arrived in Berkshire, on his way back to Cornwall, he wrote: As for the others, vile ones, Campbells and Murrys etc, they are being carried their own separate way to their own separate end. It is as if the current of life was dividing now, and carrying some definitely one way, others definitely in a quite different direction. And the Murrys Campbells etc, the whole crew, are being borne off away from me, but you and I, we bob about tipsily like two vessels in the same stream. (LDHL3, p. 117)

[22 May 1917] [N]

Tuesday.

141A Church Street Chelsea SW.3.

The lovely flowers and the piece of sweet scented geranium have brought all your garden into my studio. A thousand thanks for them. I was rather wondering when I was going to hear from you again. You did have a long letter from me a little while ago – didn’t you? This month I must simply slave. I don’t dare to go away again even for a night just now. I click away on the typewriter all day & in the evening rush to the Queens Hall1 & get back my nerves. But I do hope that Brett will come and see me; Murry told me so little about Garsington this time . . What wretched little bones has Clive been stealing from grubby little plates & tossing to his friends2 – now – I wonder. Let them pick



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them clean if they will – and snigger and crack them up as they please. He is an appaling creature – but I cannot bear to look in his direction. I re-read some poems by Walt Whitman this week.3 He is tremendously good at times – don’t you think? And I am rereading that wonderful, wonderful War and Peace.4 I could talk about that for ever. I am so sorry about B. R.5 Yes I saw him once; he was awfully kind about my work, and I enjoyed talking to him. He was ‘in the mood’. We didn’t talk about present people and present affairs but of all kinds of ‘odd’ things – like Flattery and Praise and what is it one really wishes to convey in writing – you know. . . . . . . If you do come to London you will let me know – Yes I’d like a talk with you here and now. There is a great deal to say – I am always Katherine. Notes 1. The Queen’s Hall, in Langham Place, Westminster, opened in 1893 and quickly rose to prominence as Britain’s leading concert hall and the foremost musical venue after becoming the home of the Promenade Concerts, the August to October music season founded by Henry Wood, in 1895. It was destroyed in the Blitz of 1941. 2. Clive Bell (1881–1964) was one of the Bloomsbury Group’s foremost art critics, especially since publishing Art in 1914, his essential appraisal of modern art and significant form. He was married to the post-Impressionist artist Vanessa Bell, sister of Virginia Woolf. KM had first met Bell in 1915, and their paths crossed quite regularly at Garsington during the war years. In the words of Morrell’s biographer, Miranda Seymour, Bell was ‘one of the chief mischief-makers of Bloomsbury’, taking a marked delight in gossip. He had seized on, but also misconstrued, JMM’s sudden infatuation for Ottoline the year before, reporting to friends that she was pursuing him; the recent rumours, more hurtful and causing far more lasting damage, concerned DHL’s caricature of Ottoline in the figure of Hermione Roddice in Women in Love. Her supposed grief and rage, however, were far milder than Bell liked to imply. See Seymour, pp. 275–82. 3. 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), celebrated for its near-pagan celebration of physical earthly energy, whilst communing with the down-to-earth lives of the common people. KM had been particularly impressed by his poetry during her formative years, when he featured in her own private pantheon. See CW4, p. 60; CL1, pp. 283–4. 4. As Morrell recorded in her journal at the time and in her retrospectively constructed memoirs, she and KM shared the same enchanted admiration for Tolstoy’s greatest work – the epic novel set in the era of the Napoleonic Wars, published in Russian in 1869, War and Peace, admirably translated by Constance Garnett (1904). See Moorehead 1974, p. 186. Renowned today essentially as the author of two of Russia’s greatest nineteenth-century novels, Lev Nikolaevitch Tolstoy (1828–1910) was not only one of the most

192   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 important novelists of his day, but also a moral philosopher, social reformer and iconoclastic religious leader. As well as fuelling the era’s ardent ‘Russian fever’, Tolstoy’s influence as a moral philosopher had gained in public visibility during the war years, on account of his outspoken, life-long pacifism. 5. KM and Russell’s ambivalently flirtatious or predatory relationship had blown over by this time, but relations between Ottoline and Russell remained strained. He was by now preoccupied by a new love interest in his life (Colette Malleson), as well as deeply engrossed in pacifist actions; he was also struggling with stress and depression, and confided his distress to Ottoline as a friend, even when their love affair was at a low ebb.

[early June 1917] [N] 141A, CHURCH STREET, CHELSEA, S.W. Dearest Ottoline, I gave up trying to telephone you in despair this morning; and sent a telegram instead: I wish I could have come, but I have promised to go to Margaret Morris’ Theatre1 – and I cannot not go. Tomorrow I’m free until 7.15. I shall try again in the morning to see if I can get through to you by phone. It would be so lovely to see you: yes, my dear friend, I enjoyed myself immensely this weekend. I enjoyed talking to you. I hate to think that you have been feeling so unhappy, though. Virginia came to tea this afternoon . .2 How hot it has been. The birds are making such a loud chatter & everybody from far and near is on the point of having dinner the air is all gongs and tinkles. How wonderfully beautiful Garsington was this time. There were even two white petals in my water jug the night I arrived. Can they have been Milly?. . . . !3 I tried to make Chili talk about Chili on the way up4 – but it seemed Most Mysterious. Full of tea shops ‘like Rumpelmeyers’5 and people in lovely french clothes walking up and down boulevards by the side of a dashing sea, eating water melons to the sound of large permanently playing brass bands! My fond love Katherine. . . . If only something wonderful would happen. . . . Notes 1. The dancer, choreographer and pioneering dance teacher Margaret Morris (1891–1980) was one of Britain’s most influential pioneers of new dance technique and theory, having trained with ballet masters from Britain and the United States. With generous financial backing from John Galsworthy, she had opened her own dancing school and formed her own dancing company,



2.

3.

4.

5.

lady ottoline morrell   193 and in the immediate pre-war years opened her own small theatre in Chelsea, which gave pride of place to ballet seasons for children. Morris was also the life-long partner of KM’s close friend John Fergusson, the Scottish postImpressionist artist and co-founder of Rhythm. KM had first met Leonard and Virginia Woolf towards the end of 1916; her and Virginia Woolf’s friendship became increasingly warm and intimate during the months that followed, even though it was always tempered by varying degrees of caution, vulnerability and misunderstanding. For KM’s correspondence with Woolf, see below, pp. 743–74; see also LVW1 for closer insights into their exchange of letters. For extensive coverage of their friendship and creative associations, see Froula et al. 2018. Millie Ellis and her sister Edith were Ottoline’s maids at Garsington; they began working for her after the death of their father, the coachman of Lady Bolsover, Ottoline’s mother. The two sisters became pillars of the Morrell household, eventually occupying the positions of housekeeper and cook. ‘Chili’ was the nickname given to Alvaro Guevara (1894–1951), a Chilean artist of distant Spanish aristocratic origin; he entered Garsington company via Brett, whom he had first met at the Slade. He had arrived in London from Valparaiso in 1910, working for his father’s immense and very lucrative textile company, but quickly drifted away from business into the artistic and avant-garde circles of London. His closest friends were Mark Gertler, Isaac Rosenberg and David Bomberg. ‘Rumpelmeyer’s’ was a small, elite chain of cafés and coffee shops, which began as a confectionery store and café in the South of France, founded by the Austrian confectionist Anton Rumpelmeyer (1832–1914). The highly popular London branch, with its own home delivery service, was on St James Street.

[16 June 1917] [HRC] 141A, CHURCH STREET, CHELSEA, S.W. Saturday afternoon. In the garden. My dearest Ottoline, I would love to have lunch with you on Tuesday at 12.30 on the second floor of Lyons.1 But, darling, which Lyon do you mean – they are thick as violets everywhere. I imagine you mean the ragtime band2 one nearly opposite Bond Street Tube Station. Do you? If you do don’t bother to let me know, but if you mean another – just let me have a card – and I will attend it – I have been thinking of you ever so often these last days & Murry has seen a lovely blue vision of you – at least twice. Oh, Ive felt so near you and so much your friend ever since my last time at Garsington – I wish you were here – no, that we were together now this very instant.

194   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 I would tell you that I loved you and you would believe me – Do let us meet on Tuesday: there is so much to say that no earthly letter could hold. I want to talk to you about Sassoon3 (who seems to me at present, in the Dostoievsky sense, ‘delirious’) I want to make you laugh about my dinner with Rasputin & Aldous & his Khaki brother4 & French Polish Elliot5 – And I want to ask you if I may come to Garsington at the end of next week perhaps & stay for some days. Is there a corner? And we shall sit in a field and walk in your heavenly garden – I am writing to you in my backyard, now – The tree makes a wavy pattern on the table and a ‘sad number’ (as the Early Vics.6 would say) of green beetles are walking on my neck – The fig leaves look tremendously tough, like metal. A pair of white stockings is hanging to dry on the back of the garden roller – Now and again I offer up an ave7 to Our Mother of Joy that they may be dry by this evening. But as far as I can make out she replies: ‘the legs which are of silk shall be dry but the tops and bottoms which are of cotton – yea, even of “lisle”;8 they will not be dry’ . . . Hail Mary!9 Alas! Poor Murry! I shall see him this evening & see how soon he can get his holiday. I have never seen anyone look more ill: he horrifies me. But he is so cheerful – – – a straw hat now – I will make him send your books. Yes, I must tell you about my meeting with Murry & Sassoon in Murry’s room – And walking along with them, very late at night, down the dark shiny road – Sassoon said: ‘How lovely she looked today’. ‘Yes’, said Murry, airily, blinking at the stars ‘it was that blue dress with scallops’. . . . . If this weather goes on we shall all of us be angels. Only at the back of my mind there is that dark place – the war – but I cant feel it I cant get through to it just now. I feel as if I had got drunk to drown a sorrow – do you know what I mean – Tuesday then – & until Tuesday – my love Katherine. Notes 1. Lyons’ Corner Houses were a small chain of fashionable teashops launched in 1909 following the success of the original Lyons teashop in Piccadilly. 2. Ragtime music, which originated in the collective songs of African American slaves in the southern plantations, had been acknowledged as an identifiable and highly influential musical style in the early years of jazz. Its official introduction into Britain was in 1912 in a sentimentalised and depoliticised mode, brought by the white American singer Peter Bernard and his Ragtime Octet, and it quickly became one of the fashionable and popular musical styles of the times; composers such as Claude Debussy, however, had already introduced the European ear to the pulse and rhythm of ragtime in works such as Children’s Corner (1908) and its ‘Golliwog’s Cake-Walk’. Ragtime’s true, historicised, African American roots, often associated with the wistful, syncopated lyricism



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of the composer and pianist Scott Joplin (1868–1917), had been given renewed topical appeal in 1917, the year of Joplin’s death. 3. The English poet Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967) was serving as an army officer on the Western Front. He and Morrell became firm friends after she wrote expressing her admiration for his poetry and inviting him to visit Garsington during his leave. His increasingly outspoken denunciation of the war in public and in his poetry, and especially his ‘Finished with the War: A Soldier’s Declaration’, published in 1917, led to his admission to Craiglockhart, the military hospital in Edinburgh where he met his fellow war-poet Wilfred Owen. 4. Grigori Yefimovitch Rasputin (1869–1916) was the reputedly demonical Russian mystic preacher and healer, renowned for his evil influence over the Tsarina of Russia. His high-profile assassination in December the previous year indicates that KM is using the name to refer to another devilish schemer in their entourage; critics presume this to be Floryan Sobieniowski (1881– 1964), although there is no record of his having met Aldous Huxley and his brother Julian, referred to here. Julian Huxley (1887–1975), the future biologist and the first Director-General of UNESCO, had begun training as a commissioned officer just the month before, having interrupted his term of office as a lecturer in Texas and returned to Britain to join the war effort. 5. KM had met the American-born poet T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) during the war years; he had settled in Britain in 1914 after coming to study at Oxford, and married an English woman, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, in 1915. He was later naturalised British. This year, 1917, was a key year in his personal evolution: it was when he started working in Lloyds Bank (where he stayed until he joined the publishing company Faber and Gwyre in 1925), took up an appointment as assistant editor of The Egoist, and also published his first book of poetry, Prufrock, and Other Observations, quickly acknowledged as a key early Modernist landmark. Eliot and KM had an irregular and lukewarm friendship, he faulting her for ‘vulgarity’, she being irritated by a certain aloofness and excessively old-fashioned gentility – hence the ‘French Polish’ here. Furniture treated with a process of French polish has a highly glossy, lacquered finish, which had been highly fashionable in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. 6. KM would appear to be evoking a certain taste for wistfulness, melancholy states and romantic solitude then associated with the sentimentalism of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century art and literature, rather than any specific Early Victorian contribution to number theory. In mathematical terms, a ‘sad’ or ‘unhappy’ number is one that, despite repeated iterations, will never reach the figure one. 7. (Latin): Hail, or Salutations. It is the first word of the Angelical Salutation, ‘Hail Mary’, appealing for intercession to the Virgin Mary. 8. ‘Lisle cotton’ is a very finely spun, soft cotton thread used traditionally for highquality underwear for reasons of both great comfort and hygiene. The name comes from the city in France reputed for spinning yarn of this category – Lille. 9. KM’s talent for pastiche, ranging from the elevated and biblical to the demotic and vernacular, is clearly at work here, blending and subverting conventional terms of reference to the Virgin Mary (Our Lady of Sorrows), prayers for intercession and appeals for indulgences.

196   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [24 June 1917] [N] [141A Church Street, Chelsea] Sunday. Dearest Ottoline ‘They’ tell me that you are coming to town this week. I do hope that you are, so that we shall have a laugh and a frisk together. Of course I longed to tell you of my meeting with Greaves1 – Mary Hutch2 gave a dinner party at her new house – Robby Ross,3 Roger Fry,4 Greaves, Elliot,5 Jack Hutch,6 she and I . . . Oh God! Those parties. They are all very well in retrospect but while they are going on they are too infernally boring. Mary, of course went all out for Roger Fry and Robby Ross, with an eye on Greaves and an eyebrow on Elliot. From Marys end of the table whiffs of George Moore7 and Max Beerbohm8 and Lord Curzon9 and Duhamel10 floated – while Jack tied a white apron round himself and cut up, trimmed and smacked into shape the whole of America and the Americans. So nice for poor Elliot who grew paler and paler and more and more silent. In the middle sat Greaves chat chatting incessantly of what I told my sergeant and what my men said to me and how I brought them back at the point of my revolver. etc. etc. I did not like that young man at all. In fact I longed to snub him and to tell him that one does not talk unless one has something to say. He seemed to me, too, to be so stupidly callous about the war and he was so frightfully boring about how the beer was diluted at La Bassée.11 Roger Fry looked like an undiscovered unauthentic portrait by Jimmy Whistler12 and Robby Ross’ teeth rang so false. And in and out among us all Mary moved like a spilt liqueur. I came away with Elliot and we walked past rows of little ugly houses hiding behind bitter smelling privet hedges; a great number of amorous black cats looped across the road and high up in the sky there was a battered old moon.13 I liked him very much and did not feel he was an enemy. Its so late: I must continue this tomorrow. Goodnight, my dearest friend. Always your                    Katherine. Notes  1. KM refers here to her first meeting with the British poet and novelist Robert Graves (1895–1985), who had been serving as an officer in the army since 1914, and had been seriously injured in 1916. Both he and Siegfried Sassoon were already acknowledged ‘war poets’, although Graves never took up the defiantly antiwar stance – politically or poetically – that his close friend Sassoon did. His retrospective Goodbye to All That was published in 1929. Both men had been staying with Ottoline Morrell in Garsington, who noted in her diary at the time that ‘Robert Graves is an odd fellow with the face of a prize fighter. He is very possessive of Siegfried, and I think he resents any friendship between us’ (Moorehead 1974, p. 152).



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 2. Mary Hutchinson (née Barnes; 1889–1977) was a writer, model and cousin of Lytton Strachey, who introduced her to the Bloomsbury Group. In 1910 she had married the London-based barrister St John (Jack) Hutchinson, and the couple were soon renowned for their hospitality and open-house lifestyle. She was then involved in a passionate and publicly acknowledged liaison with Clive Bell, and was a life-long friend of T. S. Eliot. See also CL1, pp. 613–17.  3. Robert Ross (1869–1918) was a French-born Canadian journalist who settled largely in Britain after studying in Cambridge. He had been the close friend and literary executor of Oscar Wilde, and from the 1890s onwards was a respected art critic and collector who moved easily within a number of different intellectual and artistic circles. Morrell had great affection for him, cherishing his presence in Garsington for the wit and good humour he never failed to bring with him, even when he was also serving in the army; Ross meanwhile maintained that Garsington was ‘one of the few places left where conversation still existed’ (Moorehead 1974, pp. 110–11). A close friend of a number of emerging poets at the time, it was Ross who first brought Siegfried Sassoon to Garsington. See Moorehead 1974, pp. 107; 121.  4. Roger Fry (1866–1934) was one of the most renowned art critics of his times, and also an artist in his own right. He is best remembered in the cultural history of early Modernism as one of the earliest and most influential advocates of avant-garde French art, the organiser of the first postImpressionist exhibition in London in 1910 (coining the term itself), and the founder of the Omega Workshops in 1913. His extensive publications on art and formalist theory have remained essential landmarks to this day.  5. KM’s spelling was notoriously imprecise, reflecting both expeditive disinterest and inveterate wordplay. Her persistent misspelling of T. S. Eliot’s name may well be wilful, whatever the implied intention.  6. ‘Jack’ was Mary Hutchinson’s husband, the London-based barrister and Liberal politician St John Hutchinson (1884–1942). He was also a keen champion of modern art.  7. George Moore (1852–1933) was an Irish-born poet and art critic as well as a prolific novelist, who was respected and renowned at the time both for his role in the Celtic Revival, and for his leading role in the aesthetic shift from fin-de-siècle Aestheticism to new forms of experimental realism, often inspired by French literary Modernism.  8. Max Beerbohm (1872–1956) was a renowned critic, essayist and parodist, who was particularly well known at the time for his cartoon-like caricatures, simply signed ‘Max’, in key periodicals such as the Strand and Punch. His only novel, the playfully satirical Zuleika Dobson (1911), was an early and highly popular send-up of the Edwardian era.  9. George Curzon (1859–1925) was a British statesman, Conservative politician and extensively well-travelled writer, who had served as Viceroy of India from 1899 until 1905, and been granted a peerage when he took up the appointment. He was a member of the War Cabinet and Leader of the House of Lords in 1917. 10. Georges Duhamel (1884–1966) was a French novelist and poet, then serving as a military surgeon, having studied medicine in Paris prior to the war. His devastating and profoundly humanist novel Civilisation, published in 1918, is now acknowledged as one of the key war novels, eye-witness testimonies and artistic contributions to literary pacifism, recounting life at the front in 1915–17. It was awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1918.

198   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 11. Robert Graves had served on the extended campaign from October 1915 to regain the northern French sector of the frontline from Béthune to Cambrin, which included the region of La Bassée, whose logistic interest included a major canal link. The successive assaults and military disorganisation entailed high Allied losses, and also widespread civilian deaths and damages. The town of La Bassée was almost entirely razed during the eighteen-monthlong campaign. Graves later recounted the episode in Chapters 15–16 of Goodbye to All That. 12. The American-born Impressionist artist and art critic James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) lived most of his life in Britain, but also travelled widely in both Europe and North and South America. Renowned for his impressionistic landscapes, and evocative – and often misleading – titles (such as Arrangement in Grey and Black no. 1, the very famous 1871 picture of his mother, and Symphony in White (1862) – a picture of a young woman in a long white dress), he was also a reputed and highly skilled portraitist. 13. KM pastiches Eliot’s own poetic style in this depiction of their walk home through the London streets, notably ‘Conversation Galante’ and ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’, which had just been published in the collection Prufrock, and Other Observations.

[10 July 1917] [HRC] [141A Church Street, Chelsea] Tuesday. My dearest Ottoline I have just received a card from Philip telling me that it really is measles.1 How utterly cursed! What can I say . . . sympathy is no good at all – and rage against the Lord more futile still. The weather is heavenly again too. I hate to think of you missing it: it must be divine down at Garsington. Last night, sitting under my fig tree, half of it was gold in the sunset and half silver in the rising moon . . But all the figs have fallen off before their time: the sound of them falling in the grass reminds me of all the autumns that I have ever really lived through and heard the fruit falling in the long grass – which is not a cheerful thought for July . . I had to go down to the City today and found Baby Week in the fullest of full blasts.2 Really, I believe I was the only woman with her quiver empty between Charing X and Victoria Station. I walked along crossing myself and saying the Spanish Nuns Hail Mary3 terrified lest this fruitfulness should be contagious. And the horrible thing was that I didn’t see one couple who weren’t more or less revolting – flushed untidy women with their hats on one side carrying little miniature Queen Victorias – ugh! What an appalingly bad job human beings have made of themselves. I kept wondering if they were all like this all over the world, or if it was only in England that we bred such monsters – but I am afraid not. I suppose that all the babies in Samoa have rubber comforters and all the mothers aspire to owning perambulators far too big to go through their front doors.4



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I wonder if you have heard from Virginia. I had a mysterious little postcard from Leonard on Saturday saying that Virginia was ill – but since that nothing.5 I think that she is still very delicate – and I shouldn’t imagine she was ever well enough to leave her own home and surroundings. I dined with her one evening last week – and she was charming – I do like her tremendously – but I felt then for the first time the strange, trembling, glinting quality of her mind – and quite for the first time she seemed to me to be one of those Dostoievsky women whose ‘innocence’ has been hurt6 – Immediately I decided that I understood her completely – – – I wonder if you agree at all. Murry came to see me late last night, very gay after a dinner at the House with your brother.7 I had spent a very dull solitary evening finishing a story about a woman who goes to see a friend of hers who has entered a convent8 – and when Murry came in, twinkling with champagne and smelling of the fleshpots I felt like Mrs Jellaby who spent her life, you remember, staring at the ink spots on the wall and writing tomes about some mission that need never have existed.9 What does one do when one is not writing? Does one read and lie on the sommier10 and smoke – Yes, that is all there is to do – well – why can’t one accept that and quench for ever this last spark which remains? But one cant. I fan and fan it & warm myself at it and never give up – Aldous came to see me last Wednesday. He told me more news in half an hour than I have heard for months. At present he seems to be a great social success and ‘incredible’ things happen to him at least every evening. He spoke of the Isola Bella11 as though it were the rendezvous of Love and High Adventure – and then his description of Mary Hutch’s party to celebrate the rebirth of Gilly after his own private revolution – Gilly with his face to the dawn and Gwynnie Wilson upon his arm!12 . . . Very powerful indeed. I felt my mind flutter over Aldous as if he were the London Mail . .13 There was a paragraph about simply everybody – Dearest, this dull letter must fade away. Do make Brett let me know how you are. I wish I were not so helpless. If you should want a new nurse and would like to try me – I am really rather an admirable one –      Goodnight, my lovely friend            Katherine. Notes  1. Ottoline notes in her memoirs, On July 7th 1917 I developed measles, which I caught from Julian [her daughter, then aged 11] and was very ill for a fortnight. I really found the isolation very restful, and I lay in bed in my white panelled bedroom and felt too weak even to read or write. (Moorehead 1974, p. 183) Although various vaccinations had been tried, measles in the early years of the twentieth century remained a feared and often life-threatening virus,

200   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 with a particularly high mortality rate among the under-fives. A report commissioned by the London County Council in 1938, reviewing the spread and control of measles epidemics over the past fifty years, underlines the endemic and epidemic prevalence of the virus in British cities in the 1910s, pointing in particular to wartime conditions as a grave aggravating factor. See Brinker, pp. 807–28.  2. ‘National Baby Week’ was organised for the first time that year in Britain, following a model launched earlier in the century in the United States to promote welfare protection of mothers and children as part of a far wider programme of social reform. In the context of war, patriotic uplift also became part of the programme. ‘Baby Week’ was officially launched on Sunday, 1 July, under the patronage of Queen Mary, and involved a number of pageantesque and ceremonial events celebrating ‘The Children of the Empire’, as an especially commissioned hymn announced. A ‘Mothercraft’ exhibition at Central Hall, Westminster, excited vivid public interest; The Times reports the arrival of crowds of competitive mothers with their infants, in the belief that a ‘baby exhibition’ would be organised. See Bryder, pp. 2–11.  3. The Spanish mystic and Carmelite nun Teresa of Ávila (1515–82) devoted much of her life and writing to questions of reform of the Catholic faith – notably in terms of pervasive laxity in doctrinal and moral questions, and to ascetic and contemplative spiritual practice. Her extensive writings include meditations and prayers honouring the ‘Blessed Virgin Mary and the Immaculate Conception’.  4. The Samoan Islands, an archipelago in Polynesia, had been the focus of tense territorial, colonial and commercial disputes since the nineteenth century. In the pre-war years, the islands had been divided between Germany and America, thereby exacerbating civil unrest; since 1914, key German sites had been occupied by New Zealand forces, in response to a British request that they perform this ‘great and urgent imperial service’. See Watson, pp. 48–62.  5 Virginia Woolf and KM had had dinner together on 26 June, after which Woolf famously reported to her sister, Vanessa Bell, that ‘She seems to have gone every sort of hog since she was 17, which is interesting; I also think she has a much better idea of writing than most. She’s an odd character’ (LVW2, p. 159). Woolf had had a breakdown in March 1915, following which, for over a year, her mental and physical health were fragile. From the end of 1916 she ‘very slowly returned to normal life, shaken, olderlooking and heavier’ (DVW1, p. 39). Since spring that year, she and Leonard Woolf had been preparing the launch of their own printing press, but at the slightest signs of returning exhaustion immediate rest became essential. One of the saddest features of KM and Woolf’s intense but irregular intimacy was that neither woman was ever truly aware of how precarious the other’s health was.  6. Both KM and Virginia Woolf shared an acute appreciation of the female centre of consciousness, and women’s perspectives in Dostoevsky’s fiction, their sensibility being all the rarer for its tangential, decentred role in his dominantly male-centred plots. See CW4, pp. 182–7, and Davison 2014, pp. 34–6; 95–6.  7. About his meeting with Ottoline Morrell’s elder brother, the MP Henry Cavendish-Bentinck (1863–1931), JMM noted:



lady ottoline morrell   201 I came into contact, which I sought deliberately, with politicians who were ‘interested’ in peace: the present Prime Minister among them. And I was heart-sickened by them. The only one of those I met who cared for ‘Europe’ – in this transcendental sense – was a Conservative: Lord Henry Bentinck, in whom I learned to admire what an aristocrat might be. He cared for Europe because he represented it, because he was by instinct what I was coming to be by thought. (BTW, pp. 430–1)

 8. If completed, the story would not appear to have survived. A short scene partly related to KM’s description here is included in the unfinished draft ‘Love Lies Bleeding’, dated 1917 (see CW2, pp. 103–11); in 1922, she wrote ‘Taking the Veil’, in which the centre of consciousness is that of the novice entering a convent, rather than that of the friend visiting a cloistered friend. See CW2, pp. 467–72.  9. Mrs Jellyby is one of Dickens’s incisively satirical cameo portraits, from the 1853 novel Bleak House; she is the landlady of the protagonist Esther Summerson, and the mother of an endearing daughter, Caddy. She neglects her daughter with great self-righteousness, however, being entirely taken up with ‘Telescopic Philanthropy’: masterminding schemes to improve the lot of a native tribe in Africa. See Chapter 4. 10. (Fr.): Bedstead. 11. The Isola Bella was a restaurant on Frith Street in Soho, London, where many of the central and satellite figures of the Bloomsbury Group would meet for dinner. 12. Gilbert Cannan (see above, p. 187, n. 2) had only recently recovered from a mental breakdown, largely related to the appalling stress of being a pacifist and conscientious objector in the war, along with the breakdown of his marriage. He was then involved in a complicated affair with the artist’s model and artist, Amy Gwen Wilson. 13. The London Mail, or Daily Mail, was already renowned for its society pages offering titillating tales about the lives of London’s high-profile socialites and glamorous upper classes.

[13 July 1917] [N] [141A Church Street, Chelsea] Friday. My dearest Ottoline, I am thankful to know that you are better and that we shall soon be able to see each other again. What a dreadful time you have had – I had no idea that the measles were so formidable and overwhelming. I envy you going to the sea – even for a few days. Oh, I have such a longing for the sea as I write – at this moment. To stand on the shore long enough to feel the land behind one withdraw into silence and the loud tumbling of the waves rise and break over ones whole being – – But the English summer sea is not what I mean. I mean that wild untamed water that beats about my own forlorn island. Why on earth do I call it ‘forlorn’. My Bank Manager assures me that its a perfect little

202   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 gold mine and whenever I go down to the Bank of New Zealand I turn over a heap of illustrated papers full of pictures of electric trains and American buildings and fashionable ladies and gentlemen who might have walked out of the Piccadilly Grill . .1 But all that sham and vulgarity is hard to believe in: I don’t believe in it all. There is another side that you would believe in too. Ah, my dear, I know the most heavenly places that cannot be spoiled – and that I shall go back to as surely as if they were ‘Dixie’.2 And I shall think of you dearest, and wish to God I expect that I were sitting opposite to you at the maison Lyons! Life is a queer a damn queer business! Its a golden day. The blinds are down. I have some big yellow lilies in the studio. The garden door is open and the fig tree throws a wavy pattern on the floor and walls among big soft spots of sunlight. Four oclock in the afternoon. Ive been sitting at this table since morning, writing and smoking. And somewhere quite near someone is playing very old fashioned dance tunes on a cheap piano – things like the Lancers3 – you know – Some minute part of me not only dances to them but goes faithfully through – Ladies in the Centre – Visiting – Set to Corners – and I can even feel the sensation of clasping young warm hands in white silk gloves – and shrinking from Maggie Owens hand in Ladies Chain because she wore no gloves at all – –4 Talking about dancing reminds me of last Saturday night, when I really ‘saw’ Augustus John for the first time.5 It was at a show at Margaret Morris’s theatre.6 He was there with two very worn and chipped looking ladies – the saddest looking remnants of ladies – in fact they reminded me of those cups without saucers that you sometimes see outside a china shop – all-on-this-tray-one penny. But John was really impressive looking. I seemed to see his mind – his haggard mind like a strange forbidding country full of lean sharp peaks and pools lit with a gloomy glow and trees bent with the wind and vagrant muffled creatures tramping their vagrant way – Everything exhausted and finished – great black rings where the fires had been – and not a single fire even left to smoulder. And then he reminded me of that man in Crime & Punishment who finds a little girl in his bed in that awful hotel the night before he shoots himself – in that appaling hotel.7 But I expect this is all rubbish – and he’s really a happy man and fond of his bottle and a goo-goo eye. But I don’t think so. Whenever I begin writing to you comes this ardent desire to talk with you quite – for ever. Dont let THEM spoil our friendship: they will do their best. I have seen very little of Murry lately & he has been so tired. He has heard from Sassoon, but that is all I know. I must dress and go out. Shall I really live with Brothers Murry? I should love to.8     Goodbye for now            I am yours               Katherine.



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Notes 1. Many of the fashionable, larger London hotels and restaurants had separate Grill Rooms, more typically reserved for lunch, and with more affordable prices than the main dining rooms, the Savoy Hotel’s being a famous example. The Piccadilly Grill was attached to the Piccadilly Hotel, a luxury hotel with entrances on Regent Street and Piccadilly, London. 2. ‘Dixie’ or ‘I wish I was in Dixie’s land’ was probably the best-known minstrel song from the southern United States, composed in 1859 by the composer and lyricist Daniel Decatur Emmett. Written in the sentimental, pseudo-dialect which became associated with blackface performers, the song became popular during the Civil War. Although bitterly criticised for its part in sentimental and nostalgic representations of slavery, it also went on to be remembered as an expression of nostalgia for home, as expressed in the refrain: I wish I was in Dixie, Hooray! Hooray! In Dixie Land I’ll take my stand to live and die in Dixie. Away, away, away down south in Dixie. Away, away, away down south in Dixie’.

3.

4. 5.

6. 7.

For KM and the cultural context of minstrel and blackface concerts, see Thomas, pp. 77–80. See also below, p. 212 ‘Lancers’ was a quadrille dance, which originated in France in the eighteenth century as an elegant, formal dance performed by cavaliers in uniform, bearing lances. It later lost its military associations but remained a ritualised, graceful and very poised dance-form, in which a line of dancing partners advanced and drew apart in a chain. It was frequently taught in dance academies and girls’ schools on account of its coordinated, courteous rituals. As a literary trope, ‘Lancers’ were memorably represented by James Joyce in the short story ‘The Dead’, in which the surface elegance of the dance serves as a veil behind which political and intellectual tensions run high. KM’s depiction here seems to imply a memory of dance classes at school and one particular classmate called Maggie Owen, the identity of whom remains unresolved. Augustus John (1878–1961) was a Welsh-born artist who studied in Paris and London, where for a while he was considered one of the most talented painters of his generation. He was associated for a time with the post-Impressionists, but withdrew from the more marked avant-garde art movements, and remained best known for his portraits and his more turn-of-the-centurystyle pictures of Romany gipsy life. During the war he was attached to the Canadian forces as a war artist. See above, pp. 192–3, n. 1. Arkady Ivanovich Svidrigailov is the corrupt, depraved and malevolent character in Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment, whose occasional acts of kindness lend a troubling psychological depth to his character. It is he who overhears the protagonist Raskolnikov confessing his crime, and thereafter sets out to torment and threaten him. His suicide in a sordid hotel room, after a disturbing dream of a child he finds, occurs towards the end of the novel. For the full episode that KM alludes to here, see Part 6, Chapter 6.

204   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 8. JMM was planning for his younger brother, Richard (Arthur), to come and lodge with them in London. Richard was then an art student, and also a frequent visitor to Garsington.

[after 22 July 1917] [HRC] [141A Church Street, Chelsea] I purposely refrained from speaking of your work – One cant mention it with an ‘oh, by the way’, and I felt shy. I left it in the schoolroom in Murry’s charge (who swore an oath not to read without express permission.)1 There are lovely things in all three – flying glimpses, flowers tossed one knows not whence – a perfume from hidden bushes – shadows moving, gleaming, mysterious – In all three I think the opening is the best – the ‘attack’ – musically speaking – of Desire is wonderfully free and passionate – In all three I think the endings are rather too much ‘to form’ – rather consciously rounded off and finished. . . . I hope you don’t think me an upstart to criticise like this. God knows I am only a baby scholar myself in the beginner’s class – But one feels that you haven’t quite the courage of your intentions – that you don’t perhaps quite fulfil the promise of that first passionate gesture – And one wishes you would be a million times more intimate – a million times more revealing – more absolutely, unmistakeably you. No, I don’t feel that you have kissed her yet, or wakened the sleeping palace, or set the music leaping and playing. But there you are outside the wild hedges and I pray you may break through. Katherine. Notes 1. As Ottoline’s unpublished papers reveal, she tried her hand at a number of semi-fictional prose-sketches and prose-poems in these years. KM had shown interest in them earlier that year. See letter above, pp. 189; 190, n. 6.

[30 July 1917] [N]

Monday afternoon.

141A Church Street Chelsea SW.3.

Ottoline dearest Ever since I came back to my studio I have been thinking over the idea of the cottage & trying to make it appear more practical and less



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impossible.1 But it wont. No. I am afraid I shall have to give it up before I take it. When I was down there with you it all seemed so easy and the question of ‘money’ no question at all. I utterly forgot how hard up I am – utterly ignored the fact that I really havent an extra sixpence to spend on an egg timer. And as I really must be in London a great deal it would mean railway fares – No, I will not plague you with details. I will only entreat you to forgive my thoughtlessness and thank you for your lovely generous gesture. So it is no use my coming down to see about it: I must learn to be wiser and to realise my circumstances more. I never do. I am afraid Murry will be dreadfully disappointed but – – you will let him come to you sometimes? He is dining with me tonight. I saw Virginia last night but she was not alone – so I thought it wiser not to mention the story at all – if she did not.2 Clive had been there before me – I rather fancied that he had told all there was to tell. That dreadful Mrs Galloway3 keeps floating into my minds eye – She is a muddy little object. How beautiful Garsington is. When I think of it my inward eye is a succession of flashes! I shall never forget it, never, never. But I cannot get into my stride today – you feel that – don’t you? No, I’m mysteriously uneasy & walking painfully over awfully unfamiliar country – Why is that? God knows. But do not turn against me for being so changeable – that I couldn’t bear. It feels like years since I have seen Murry – Did he persist in writing endlessly about Péguy4 or could you sometimes lure him away? I couldn’t, you know: every time I went near him I felt like an interruption. How strange life is! Goodbye. One taps upon the counter & pays the waiter – pulls down ones veil & – goes –     I am ever         Katherine. Notes 1. The Garsington Estate included several cottages and a Bailiff’s House, which were fitted out to accommodate extra guests as the war dragged on and an increasing number of visitors extended their stay, in particular artists and conscientious objectors. The Morrells had offered to rent one of these cottages to KM and JMM, but even modestly priced, it proved too costly. See Seymour, pp. 235–6. 2. Woolf makes no mention of this meeting in her letters and diary; the yoking of her and Clive [Bell]’s names suggests Bloomsbury gossiping had been particularly fervent. Ottoline was juggling with distressing domestic worries at the time which she hoped to screen from view – including the recent discovery of her husband Philip’s philandering and the birth of an illegitimate child (see CL1, pp. 619–20), and the deterioration of her own relationship with Bertrand Russell. It is not clear to what extent KM was a confidante in these troubles.

206   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 3. The Galloways were a couple who stayed for a short time in one of the cottages; see Moorehead 1974, p. 125. 4. Charles Péguy (1873–1914) had been a highly respected French intellectual, poet and journal editor, remembered for his incisive socialism and highly mystical Catholic faith. He had moved into the forefront of public debates at the turn of the century after his outspoken championing of Alfred Dreyfus, the French army officer who, in 1894, had been found guilty of espionage in a trumped-up court case during the famous ‘Dreyfus Affair’, which revealed the endemic antisemitism at the heart of the French military hierarchy. Murry alludes briefly to Péguy’s writings in his Evolution of an Intellectual and Aspects of Literature.

[11 August 1917] [HRC] [141A Church Street, Chelsea] Saturday Night: There are three unfinished letters to you in my writing case – one is even five pages long. I could not reread them but I know why they were not sent. They seemed to me (and they were) as I wrote them hopelessly superficial and fatiguing – fatiguing like a conversation by telephone can. I heard my own little mocking, mechanical voice, loathed it, and chose silence. Quite suddenly, just after you had been so near, so thrilling and so enchanting – for no reason that I can explain away – it was as if the light changed, and you vanished from me. I wandered about in the wood among the wild smelling bushes and sometimes I thought I saw the dark plume of your hat, or your lips or your hands but when I went towards you – you were not – The strangest part was that my memory of the days we had just spent together was as perfect as ever – as bright as untroubled. I still saw the blue spears of lavender – the trays of fading, scented leaves, you in your room, and your bed with the big white pillow – and you coming down in the garden swinging the gay lantern – But between these lovely memories and me there opened a deep dark chasm – it trembled open as if by an earthquake – and now it is shut again and no trace of it remains There – now I have told you ‘all’. For my part, my friendship for you couldn’t end.1 There it is – I feel for all time, whatever may happen. I cannot tell you how gloriously sure I am of it and how I trust it. Not all the ‘little people’ in the world could destroy so fine a bridge. No, until you decide that you do not care to cross any longer, there it stands.           –                – Thank you for your wonderful letters. I long to see you again now. Do you remember this time last year? It feels years away.



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Murry came to see me this evening. He showed me a handkerchief you had given him. I took it in my hands and the scent of it shook my heart – yes, just as if I had been a young person profoundly in love with you. Do make Murry show you his ‘Poems of Remembrance’2 – I cant write about them calmly. Ever since I came back except for two hellish days when the Rhodesian Mountain3 came out of her factory & filled every inch of my horizon, I have been ‘at home’ and working. It is the only life I care about – to write to go out occasionally and ‘lose myself’ looking and hearing and then to come back and write again. At any rate thats the life Ive chosen – But as soon as this bloody war is over I shall flee the country. Today has been so strange, very sunny, with a loud wind blowing & the sky a bright dazzle. One simply wanted to run about and be blown about & if I dare quote Meredith to cry like Diana: ‘I am like a leaf’.4 I am dying for something to read, but there is nothing. Every time my longing eye searches my shelves it sees Horace for English Readers, or Petit Larousse . .5 Where are the books? Goodnight;        I am ever             Katherine. Notes 1. KM and Ottoline’s relationship had been severely strained by a complex misunderstanding, for which JMM would appear responsible. He had returned from his stay at Garsington ‘exceedingly distraught’, telling KM that Ottoline had declared her passion for him. It would, in fact, appear that the very contrary was true: he had abruptly announced his love to Ottoline. Brett was the main go-between, for gossip as well as pacifying mediation. See Moorehead 1974, pp. 191–2. 2. These poems were published in JMM’s Poems: 1916–1920. The one KM liked most was ‘To my Dead Friends’, which she cites to him in a letter written just the previous day, saying ‘Now, my dear friend for you poems of Remembrance. I’ll not take them separately. To say that they are the only poems that have come out of this war isn’t enough. They are wonderful – wonderful – wonderful’ (10 August 1917). See also Murry 1921b, pp. 15–17. 3. The Mountain, and Rhodesian Mountain, were amongst the many nicknames KM reserved for Ida Baker; although inevitably double-edged and ironic in its ponderous, overbearing inflections, the metaphor does also reflect the steadfast, solid foundations that Baker represented in KM’s life. 4. George Meredith’s novel Diana of the Crossways (1885) is one of his most outstanding works in terms of poetic craft and its sensitive portrayal of the complex social and psychological depth of the ‘new woman’ in the late nineteenth century. As is so often the case when KM quotes by heart, the quotation is only partly accurate, but it comes from a particularly beautiful passage in Chapter 31, when the protagonist, Diana Warwick, is inspired by exhilarating political news; she exclaims, ‘Oh! A high wind will make a dead leaf fly like a bird. I soar’ (p. 363), words which later resound in the mind of her interlocutor, the politician Dacier.

208   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 5. Horace for English Readers: Being a Translation of the Poems of Quintus Horatius Flaccus into English Prose was published in 1903, by the Oxford don E. C. Wickham. It was designed to offer a solid introduction to the life and work of the Latin poet Horace to ‘the modern reader without distress’ (p. v). The Petit Larousse is a single-volume dictionary of the French language and culture, designed as a practical everyday source of reference, but without the specialised detail of the authoritative, multi-volume Dictionnaire Larousse.

[15 August 1917] [HRC] [141A Church Street, Chelsea] Wednesday. Dearest Ottoline, I am engaged on Saturday and on Sunday – tied by both legs – and though I should love to – I feel that I mustn’t escape. Your glimpse of the garden – all flying green and gold made me wonder again who is going to write about that flower garden. It might be so wonderful – do you see how I mean? There would be people walking in the garden – several pairs of people – their conversation their slow pacing – their glances as they pass one another – the pauses as the flowers ‘come in’ as it were – as a bright dazzle, an exquisite haunting scent, a shape so formal and fine, so much a ‘flower of the mind’ that he who looks at it really is tempted for one bewildering moment to stoop & touch and make sure. The ‘pairs’ of people must be very different and there must be a slight touch of enchantment – some of them seeming so extraordinarily ‘odd’ and separate from the flowers, but others quite related and at ease. A kind of, musically speaking – conversation set to flowers.1 Do you like the idea? I see the Pig of the Party – Mrs Galloway, rooting in her little dark mind. And I see Bertie, who hasn’t the remotest idea of getting them into harmony. Perhaps thats not fair. But its full of possibilities. I must have a fling at it as soon as I have time. I am sitting writing to you in the kitchen. I cannot bear at present, my studio with its great Thou-God-Seest-Me window. It is far* more tolerable to sit up here with the saucepans & the nutmeg grater & the big swinging tree so close against the pane. Confound my poverty! How I long to buy an exquisite room, absolute privacy, a devoted black woman, and some ravishing perfume. And Ive been groaning for half an hour at having to pay the window cleaner four and sixpence! And all the ugly makeshift furniture in the studio seems to be scrawled over with 1/11¾. ––––––––––––––– At that moment, appropriately enough the window cleaner caught at my feet which weren’t by any means flying and asked if it would be



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convenient to have ’em done again now. And since then a whole day has gone by – and I have read a long letter from Lawrence – He has begun to write to me again and quite in the old way – all about the leaves of the melon plant ‘speckled like a newt’, and all about ‘the social egg which must collapse into nothingness, into non being’.2 I am so fond of him for many things – I cannot shut my heart against him and I never shall. I had also a most urgent letter from Virginia reminding me that Id sworn to go to Asheham tomorrow.3 My God, it is true. I shall have to go some time and another from Sydney Waterlow asking me to Marlborough4 & another from Anne Rice and ‘Eve’ asking me to Cromer Sands5 – How desperate it is! I shall have to run fresh ribbons in the legs of my petits pantalons6 & leap in and out of holiday trains – when all I want to do is to sit in a dark, warm, dusky room and write – – Virginias letter, more or less says that she & Lytton sit all day surrounded by hawks and mushrooms. Also S.F.7 is there too: I wish she were a little less anthracite. To Hell with the Blooms Berries. Dont you think one really must run away as soon as possible and as far as possible –     Goodnight, dearest dearest     Yours        Katherine. Do write if you feel inclined – – Your adorable letters . . *Original underlined four times for emphasis.

Notes 1. As critics have observed, there is a fascinating tripartite exchange running beneath this hypothetical ‘animated garden narrative’, bearing witness to the intensity and fruitfulness of Bloomsbury and Garsington conversations. Just as KM and Ottoline Morrell’s letters and prose sketches at the time explore the decentred fictional perspective of flowers and flower beds in a public space, so too do letters and exchanges between Morrell and Virginia Woolf, and KM and Woolf. The lyrical and defamiliarised point of view was captured by Woolf in her short story ‘Kew Gardens’ (1919). Morrell notes in her memoir of KM that, [w]hen I was cutting the lavender and rosemary, or picking the herbs and roses for potpourri, she would linger around now and then bending down and helping me, or just wandering about talking as if she were turning the scene into a story. She really loved that garden and often returned to it in her thoughts and her letters. (quoted in H. Shaw, p. 122) 2. Like so much of the correspondence between DHL and KM, the letter has not survived. DHL was still living in Cornwall at this time, and had just completed a collection of poems which had been submitted to both his American and his British publishers. See LDHL3, pp. 147–50. 3. Asheham House was the Woolfs’ first country home in Sussex, which they leased from 1911–12 until 1919. The legend that it was haunted is widely supposed to have inspired Woolf’s experimental short story, ‘A Haunted House’. KM was a guest there from 18 to 22 August that year.

210   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 4. The brilliant classicist Sydney Waterlow (1878–1944) had been one of Clive Bell’s close friends at Trinity College, Cambridge, and remained a peripheral figure of the Bloomsbury Group thereafter, although he pursued a career in diplomacy which involved extended periods abroad. Waterlow was also the nephew of KM’s cousin, Elizabeth von Arnim, and therefore related to KM herself. The family home of Waterlow and his second wife, Helen Margery Eckhard, was in the village of Oare, near Marlborough. 5. For KM’s letters to the American expatriate artist Anne Estelle Rice, see below, pp. 476–519. Their letters from mid-1917, however, which would doubtless illuminate the sketchy details here, do not appear to have survived. ‘Eve’ is clearly a nickname but there are no further details. Rice and her husband, Raymond Drey, stayed temporarily in Cromer, on the east Norfolk coast, before moving to Looe in Cornwall that autumn, both on account of the light – as part of Rice’s artistic quest – and to escape the growing threat of air raids on the east coast. 6. (Fr.): Bloomers. 7. The future psychoanalyst and translator Alix Sargant-Florence (1892–1973) was the companion of Lytton Strachey’s brother James; they married in 1920. Sargant-Florence had known Woolf since the early war years, when the impression she gave was that of deep-seated melancholy and ‘sepulchral despair’ (DVW1, p. 63). She was employed for just two hours in the Woolfs’ newly launched Hogarth Press before leaving, finding the work too dull, and went on to work intermittently for Leonard Woolf as a research assistant.

[23 September 1917] [Stanford] [141A Church Street, Chelsea] Sunday Night. I feel as though I have returned from the seaside with one hot cheek and a feeling of sand between my toes, as I sit down to write to you, my dearest Ottoline. Your wonderful letter which seemed with its spray of verbena to come flying through the gold and green September air dropped in my lap and I read it and sniffed and sniffed the sweet spray and put it at the bottom of a blue jar. Murry has had a holiday this last week and we’ve been so immensely occupied that I have had no time ‘to myself’ at all. I havent been able to shut a gate or a window or a door – and now at the end of these exquisite days I feel that it is High Time to lie down & be covered with these fresh fallen yellow leaves – But – to discover that it still is possible to laugh so much, to linger, to gaze in at shop windows and burn so ardently for that lovely mirror, to walk under these bright trembling trees and high, tumbling clouds, to watch children, and to lean over bridges. Ottoline: ‘But dear Katherine. This is like Walt Whitman too dreadfully in the home!’1 Yes, I feel it is. But what am I to do, dearest? I am hung about with memories like these and cannot move for them – Next week I must be abominably sober but this week is still here –and no, I cannot be calm –



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(A dreadful, cold thought: can this be all hypophosphites?)2 Ah well! I must think that over carefully, ‘profoundly question it’ (as B. R. might say)3 and if I feel it is true do not be surprised upon opening the daily Mirror to find a picture of me with my hair parted down the middle & a black velvet band round my neck: Portrait of Katherine Mansfield, 141A Church Street. . . . . You may make what use you like of this letter. . . . But I had rather think that it was something quite, quite different – I am so glad to think that Mrs Galloway is to be uprooted and flung over the wall – I hated to think of her; she was a poisonous little weed – Clive, that plump marrow, hiding under the leaves, and every leaf an ear, cant be taken seriously – Do you think? In fact none of those people ought to be ‘considered’; it is only consideration which makes them swell so huge and loom so large. They cannot spoil September – Ah, Ottoline, will there really be winter again after all this rich beauty? Cold and rain again, dark little days, dingy little days gripping one with frigid fingers like those hateful little dressmakers of my childhood. Must one really stand passive to them and be draped and pleated and folded into a kind of awful mackintosh parcel again? . . London has a lap so full of pears and plums that every mean child hath a bellyful – But B. and H.4 says in the Evening News: Now is the time to think of those cosy bloomers . . What Can One Do? Dearest, forgive a fool of a girl tonight. I long to talk to you – I should not be half so silly if you were here – Are you coming to London – – soon?               I am always your               Katherine ––– Notes 1. Walt Whitman’s epic poem, Leaves of Grass (1855), includes powerful images that resonate with the scene KM evokes here; it is doubtless their intensely sensuous, earthly physicality and energy that might seem out of place in the respectable home in KM’s ironic aside here. 2. Hypophosphite, also referred to as phosphonate, is a poisonous chemical compound. Since the mid-nineteenth century, however, medical research was pointing to its therapeutic use, in various diluted forms, for the treatment of phthisis and as a general tonic, in the form of syrup of phosphates. 3. True to his training in analytical philosophy with the Cambridge philosopher G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell had a keen interest in the ‘open question’ which prompted ‘profound’, and paradoxical, analysis. 4. The department store Bourne & Hollingsworth, then on Oxford Street, had begun advertising its new woollen undergarments for that autumn and winter in a number of daily newspapers.

212   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [22 October 1917] [HRC] [141A Church Street, Chelsea] Monday. I waited until the policeman said: ‘five minutes to three’, and then I fainted by the way. I could not have borne Shirley Kellog’s grin or George Robey’s leer a moment longer.1 How can I have missed you? For I was there at twenty-five minutes past two, with my outward eye upon the ticket office and my inward one upon the wonderful clouds sailing over the Charing X2 road upon ‘a solemn breath’. They bore me away at last. Yes, I must confess what you already know. I am no longer a fit companion for any sort of a fling . . . Even the Bangos were only really lovely once and last time I felt that I was playing Cook to your Duchess in Alice in Wonderland.3 How plainly I realised as we sat in that tumble of music the dull dog you thought me! But the Bangos were more dividing than seas and I could not even hail across them – – – No, I saw myself whirling away from you like a twig upon the Swanēē River,4 and I saw you standing on the bank with the cotton fields behind you saying: ‘It is a pity that K. did not learn to dance when she was a child!’ May I try to explain?. The truth is that every time I return from one of my voyages I feel less ‘sociable’ and less able to take an interest in Guten Morgan5 and Company. No, no, I don’t altogether want solitude, but I do long, when I am in ‘port’, as it were, to seek out my few friends and to take my ease with them and they with me – a kind of mutual refreshment and a renewing of a precious compact and an exchange of what treasure we have discovered. Does that sound to you a pompous arrogant programme? I don’t mean it so. God knows I have sharpened as keen a tooth upon the old Gossip Bone as any, in my time; but I cannot make even the feeblest snap at it again. Nor am I in the least tempted to taste of the pleasures of the Town. No, I still love to watch people, to observe and remark and try to understand, but not ‘in the spirit of a jaunt’. . You picture me writing this, of course, in a hair net and dress improver, with my elbow leaning upon a Life of George Eliot.6 But in very truth, life seems to me so thrilling, so intensely wonderful that I feel quite hopelessly ardent before it. But you see I cannot be content with anything less. I’d rather be entertained by a fallen leaf than by George Robey7 and I cannot feel amused by Teddie Gerard8 when my mind is so full of Natasha’s singing. . .9 I am confessed –      Goodnight.          K.



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Notes 1. A very popular music hall revue, Zig-Zag, starring American actress and variety singer Shirley Kellogg (1887–1954?) and the English comedian and singer George Robey (1869–1954), was then playing at the London Hippodrome; a poster outside presumably faced KM as she waited for Morrell to arrive. 2. The London Hippodrome is situated at the corner of the Charing Cross Road and Cranbourne Street in London’s West End. It opened in 1900 and gained lasting credentials amongst the early twentieth-century theatre-going public when it hosted the Ballets Russes in 1910. 3. A misunderstanding had arisen, the exact nature of which Morrell details in her memoir of KM. She had waited for KM until the concert was about to begin, and then gone inside: A day or two afterwards, I received a letter from her saying that she ‘had come but found the pink clouds outside so lovely that she couldn’t face coming into the theatre’. This of course was a mere fabrication [. . .] I heard afterwards that Mrs D. H. Lawrence had laughed at her for going out with me, and said ‘You look like a maid going out with a grand lady when you are with her. So Katherine determined to humiliate the grand lady. (quoted in H. Shaw, p. 119)

4.

5.

6.

7.

The letters Morrell mentions receiving do not appear to have survived. KM’s metaphor here, taken from Chapter 6 of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, was later noted as some of the latest ‘Garsington gossip’ by Virginia Woolf, which had supposedly ended in a breach between KM and Morrell. The rest of KM’s letter and Morrell’s own memoirs suggest the breach was largely exaggerated. KM’s sense of being an outsider, however, exactly like Alice when she walks into the Duchess’s kitchen, was obviously lasting. She uses the same image to describe other scenes in which she had the feeling of being an awkward interloper. See above, p. 169, and CL1, pp. 346–7. ‘Swanee River’, also known as ‘Old Folks at Home’, is a minstrel song evoking fond nostalgia for the slave plantations, composed by the white American composer Stephen Foster. Quite coincidentally, the song features in one of the first extant notebooks of the young KM, dated 1903. See CW4, pp. 10–11. One of the regular Garsington visitors in the late war years was Evan Frederic Morgan (1893–1949), a wealthy poet, painter and socialite then working as an unpaid private secretary to the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Labour, W. C. Bridgeman, after serving in the Welsh Guards on the Western Front; he retained professional and social links with Robert Graves during these years. Woolf describes him and his group of friends as ‘speckled & not prepossessing young men’, and Morgan himself as ‘a little red absurdity, with a beak of a nose, no chin, & a general likeness to a very callow but student Bantam cock’ (DVW1, p. 78). George Eliot was the pseudonym of the renowned British nineteenth-century novelist and reformist journalist Mary Ann Evans (1819–80). The first substantial biography of the author had been written by Mathilde Blend; Virginia Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, had also published a life of George Eliot in 1902, in the series ‘English Men of Letters’. KM doubtless alludes here to one of the popular songs from the revue ZigZag, ‘When Autumn Leaves are Falling’.

214   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 8. The Argentinian actress and stage performer Teresa Cabre (1890–1942), whose stage name was Teddie Gerard, had featured in the revue Cheep, which played in the Vaudeville Theatre in the West End from spring 1917. 9. Countess Natalya Rostova, or ‘Natasha’, is the captivating heroine of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, a figure whose keen eye for detail and rich, sensuous, spontaneous zest for everyday life made her a model for both Tolstoy himself and KM, as so many of her reading notes and life-long engagements with the great Russian novel attest. In her memoirs, Ottoline Morrell also recalls discussing Natasha at length with KM (see Moorehead 1974, p. 186). The specific episode referred to here occurs when Nikolai Rostov and his friend, Vasily Denisov, temporarily on leave, are both entranced by the incomparable beauty of Natasha’s singing voice, which, however untrained, had a transfigurative effect on her listeners. See Tolstoy 2007, pp. 342–3. Inevitably, the popular entertainer Gerard appeared decidedly second-rate compared to Tolstoy’s illustrious heroine. The benchmark obviously did the rounds of the Bloomsbury gossipers: in a letter to Morrell written later that year (November 1917) Gertler remarked: ‘Ah! Hah! Hem! Hem! as George Robey would say. But I forget, we must not talk of George Robey “whilst Natasha still sings!”’ See Mourant, in CL1, p. 597.

[20 November 1917] [Stanford] [141A Church Street, Chelsea] Ottoline, my dear one – Murry is very ill. The doctor says he must go away for at least five weeks and perhaps for longer. One of his lungs is slightly affected, but the principal thing is fever, complete exhaustion – a collapse at last after this appalling depression and over work – The doctor says his mental condition (his depression) has been caused absolutely by his weakness which is very great – He has been really wasting away. I simply turn to you –1 Would you have him at the cottage for a little while? And let him get better there? I feel that if he is there and you are near all will be well but if he has to go away to a strange place I dare not think what might happen. He longs to come. It is his idea that if he could just have the room he could arrange with Mrs Trench (or Miss Crozier) to look after him and give him his food2 – Brett is also writing to explain,3 and what he wants is quiet without solitude: you understand?  Do you feel that you could have him? That he has not been too draped in gloom? Now that I realise that he has had fever, pain and infernal weakness for so long I understand why the poor creature has been so utterly gloomy. He is as pale as a moth and his great gaunt eyes have reproached me – & terrified me all these days. I shall send you a telegram tomorrow4 – & ask you – See how I believe believe – and yet I have no right to – perhaps – Katherine.



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Notes 1. JMM recounts this difficult episode – a mixture of physical and nervous exhaustion plus a pulmonary infection in his autobiography: [O]ur generous and faithful doctor [. . .] came, sounded me, pulled a long face, took me off in a taxi to have me weighed, discovered that I was under eight stone instead of my normal nine stone and a half – [. . .] declared once again that I was in imminent danger of tuberculosis, and that I must go into the country. (BTW, pp. 443–4) 2. The initial idea was to return to the plan Morrell herself had offered earlier that year: JMM would stay in the Bailiff’s Cottage, with domestic help to relieve him and the Morrells from any extra responsibilities. In the end, he stayed at the Manor itself. See BTW, p. 446. 3. For KM’s cry of help and arrangements with Brett, see CL1, pp. 347–8. 4. Ottoline’s reply (apparently scrawled in haste if the mistakes are hers, rather than the transmitter’s) came by telegram the next day: ‘Of course delighted have you both dearest Kathrine come soon why not today Ottolin’ [N].

[7 December 1917] [Stanford] [141A Church Street, Chelsea] Dearest Ottoline, My beastly cough and general feeling as though I had been shot in the wing will I am afraid, tie me to my fire side this weekend. I don’t dare to make the journey again while I feel like this and am trying to stay in one temperature until my water wings will bear me swimming again.1 I am so sorry. But I do hope that when you are in town you will come here – It is just round the corner from Ethel Sands2 and I should love to see you and have a talk over my fire. I am in a furious working mood which always happens to me when the flesh is weak – but it is such superb fun to sit here and write and write and think stupid things like: I burn to call her Lillah, but I cant because of that MacCarthy woman. What shall I do? Kill the MacCarthy woman’ . . .3 I am sending you a few of the Morris notices in case you care to go.4 Perhaps you would put one in Clive’s way or Fredigondes.5 And I wish Brett would stick a pin in little Tommy Earp and make him go.6 I wonder what you think of the drawing. Do write to me dearest Ottoline and let me know if I may expect to see you – I hope little Murry is being good, & is not prolonging the war. It has been such a divine day – – Katherine.

216   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Notes 1. KM’s description of her physical state provides a clear example of how she developed the term ‘wings’ as a metaphor to refer to her lungs. 2. Ethel Sands (1873–1962) was an American-born painter, and a former pupil of the Paris-based artist Eugène Carrère. She was also a wealthy socialite and generous patroness of the arts, who remained a life-long friend of Ottoline Morrell and a number of the artists and writers in the Bloomsbury Group. 3. Lillah McCarthy (1875–1960) was a British-born actress and theatre manager, often associated with figures of the New Woman on stage in the early years of the century, especially after successfully playing principal roles in plays by G. B. Shaw. She also played a key part in the suffrage movement, contributing generously to various theatrical activities organised to raise funds and support for the cause. It is not clear what inspired KM and Morrell’s apparent animosity towards her, although disagreements between her and Margaret Morris may have been the cause. 4. Morris’s ‘Christmas Season for Children’ – featuring dancers she had trained herself – had begun at the King’s Road Theatre. These were intended to encourage child audiences to become interested in the pursuit of ballet lessons, but also to raise money for the theatre and the troupe of dancers. 5. Fredegond Maitland (1889–1949) was a poet with family and artistic ties to the Bloomsbury Group, being a cousin of Virginia Woolf’s. She and her husband, the British economist Gerald Shove, a former Cambridge friend of Clive Bell’s, were then living at the Bailiff’s Cottage at Garsington, where Shove, a conscientious objector, was employed as a farm labourer. 6. Ottoline Morrell had been introduced to Thomas Earp (1892–1958) by Aldous Huxley in early 1916, when they were planning the launch of a new magazine, the Palatine. They had met while at Oxford, and rapidly formed a circle of Oxford poets along with Wilfred Childe and Robert Graves. Although he continued to publish his poems, Earp went on to be better known as a critic and literary journalist.

[18 December 1917] [Stanford] [141A Church Street, Chelsea] Dearest Ottoline I am so sorry. But I shall not be able to come to Garsington for Christmas. My medicine man simply refuses to let me travel, under any circumstances, anywhere.1 So I shall have to stay here under the shadow of the Rhodesian Mountain. He is an awfully sane and unalarming person but he says definitely that I may be very seriously ill if I catch a chill, and that even if I could catch a train from this door to that I must not ‘risk the air’. It is too maddening. For I had so looked forward to being with you. Do, if you feel inclined write me one of your heavenly letters dearest, for just at this moment with the shock fresh I feel horribly low. The trouble is my left wing2 which is still so inclined to be a C.O. He has it up before the



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tribunal every other day but no – no – no – it is firm in its wickedness for the moment. However all this is quite temporary, and I cannot be too grateful to you for appealing to me through my vanity – and making me go to him – I feel the greatest fraud imaginable – little cart horse that I am writing to you like this. What you told me about your dreadful headaches has been at the back of mind ever since. I do hope that you will give Maurice Craig a serious trial.3 It is impossible to go on like that especially with these black English months ahead. Do tell me how you are – I am so dull but I have not really un cafard4 – Only I am tired of counting the stairs and the stair eyes. With fondest love,              Ever  Katherine. Notes 1. KM and JMM’s doctor at the time was William Bradshaw Ainger (1878– 1931), a New Zealand-born doctor who had remained based in London after studying at St Bartholomew’s Hospital. He served in France as an army surgeon for extended periods during the war. 2. From the first signs of tuberculosis onwards, KM would increasingly refer to her diseased lungs as her wings. Given the World War One context, KM is probably referring to her troublesome left lung as a Conscientious Objector, refusing to do active service despite being brought regularly before the military (or medical, in her case) tribunal. 3. Maurice Craig (1866–1935) was a consultant in psychiatry and neurology at Guy’s Hospital in London who became interested in shell shock in the later war and immediate post-war years. The co-author of one of the major references in psychological breakdown in the early twentieth century (Psychological Medicine, 1905), he was also one of Virginia Woolf’s most trusted medical advisers. Ottoline Morrell was consulting him after increasingly debilitating headaches and neuralgia. 4. (Fr.): [literally] A cockroach; [figuratively] to feel depressed.

[24 December 1917] [ATL]

Christmas Eve.

141A Church Street Chelsea SW3

Dearest Ottoline, I was quite staggered by your lovely present to me this morning.1 It is exquisite – as sweet as balm as soft as air – as gentle – – – – You cannot imagine how I have enjoyed curling up under it today, instead of

218   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 under my old travelling plaid – a vile object which always reminds me somehow of a beach and a bun and a band. I have sent you nothing – for I am still tied by the wing2 to my studio, and I expect Murry has told you that as soon as I am ‘fit to travel’ I must go off to the South of France and stay there – Then I shall send you flowers or a flat yellow basket of oranges and leaves . . . Life has given me such a strange cuff and a kiss since I saw you that I feel really bewildered – rather – Now that I know that I must never stay in England between September and April, and though perhaps after the war I wouldn’t have done so – a command and a real live danger signal is a very different affair – – – I am longing to hear from you? Did you have a letter from me a little while ago. I sent one – And how are you dearest – Please let me know. I think of you so much.         My fondest love             Yours ever               Katherine. Notes 1. Ottoline’s gift that Christmas was KM’s treasured ‘Spanish’ shawl, ornately embroidered in Chinese silk. It was one of the few items that she would take with her on her travels from then on, and is now conserved at the ATL. For KM’s detailed description of it, see her letter to her mother, Annie Beauchamp (CL1, p. 133), the following January. 2. KM’s poignant metaphor for her diseased lung became an increasingly frequent figure in her correspondence after the medical diagnosis of tuberculosis had been confirmed.

[4 January 1918] [N] Friday.

141A

Dearest, I was so more than glad to hear from you yesterday . . . Yes, indeed I appreciate what Xmas cares are yours and I didn’t really expect a letter (though I longed for one.)1 Murry & the Mountain have just gone off to the Foreign Office, armed with medical certificates enough to ensure one a State Burial – The Mountain has to come, too and knock down the English and French policemen on the way.2 She has a months leave from her factory for the purpose – and by the end of that time I really shall be well enough to



lady ottoline morrell   219

run about the farmyard & pick up grain for myself again. Its an absurd situation – I shall miss you. I shall be awfully lonely at times – wanting a talk with you and wanting to have you there in the sunlight away from this hideous, evil England – If it would not be too much trouble may I come down to Garsington on Tuesday for a few days?3 The doctor wants me to go away before I ‘make the journey’ and my flat has to be dismantled and done with you next week. I should hate to go anywhere except to you – if you will have me – and then I thought my passport will be ready in a few days time and I could come up to London just for one night with M. before I go away. I am not an invalid really – I am up and ‘bobbish’. Would I worry you too much? It’s extraordinary how changed life feels to me now that I know that this life in England will not be mine, even as little as it has been. I simply don’t feel that I shall ever come back again if only they let me go. But perhaps that is partly because it is winter and because I have sat so long in this studio listening to the rag-and-bone man and the man crying coals . . . M. seems a changed being. He has so immensely enjoyed himself, too. I think he is very much better and as well as he ever will be. What you have done for him – it is past telling. I am so happy that he and Mark have come together.4 He talked of Mark so much last night and wants to be a friend of his – I wish I could see him again it is years since I have. Brett has evidently painted me out out of her picture – Dearest this is not a letter – I am still gasping rather after trying to move the Mountain in time –     Always         Yours           Katherine. Notes 1. Hospitality at Garsington was increasingly a massive upheaval in logistic and economic terms, especially once a broad spectrum of guests became so regular a feature and the Morrells tried to cope with the growing financial burden of upkeep. They had also been through a severe domestic crisis of their own. Christmas 1917 was a memorably low point in terms of the parties themselves; a number of guests contracted food poisoning, and vicious, very treacherous gossiping about Ottoline herself was also rife. As Morrell records in her diary, moreover, she tried desperately hard to camouflage her own private distress (Moorehead 1974, pp. 232–3). See also Darroch, pp. 192–3. 2. It was initially planned that KM and Ida Baker should travel down to the South of France together; however, Baker’s first travel permit was refused. It took tears and determined lobbying to acquire the necessary papers early the following year, enabling Baker to join KM in Bandol. See Baker, pp. 107–8.

220   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 3. KM left for France on 7 January 1918. The hoped-for trip to Garsington before her big departure did not materialise. 4. Although tender and affectionate at times, the relations between KM, JMM and Mark Gertler never consolidated into a firmer friendship. As a result of personal and domestic upheavals, professional projects and lingering misunderstandings since Christmas 1914, they had met rarely, despite Gertler being a regular lodger at Garsington.

[18 January 1918] [HRC] my official name and address.

January 18th

{

Madame Bowden Hotel Beau Rivage Bandol (Var)

My dearest Ottoline, My note from Paris has mocked me ever since I threw it so gaily into the letter box by the Gare de Lyon.1 That action was indeed the end of the movement – the end of the allegro – the end of anything inclining ever so faintly towards the major.2 No, no, never come to France while this bloody war is on. It is tolerable as far as Paris but after that it is the most infernal weariness and discomfort and exasperation. Unendurable! The trains are not heated, they are hours upon hours late, one can obtain nothing to eat or what is much more, nothing hot to drink – they are packed to overflowing; the very lavatories refuse to work. In such a case I crawled to Marseilles, and caught the most plaguey chill, stiff neck, sore throat, streaming cold that ever I had. Staggering out of the train, carrying my luggage, a pimp in white canvas shoes, eager to reserve a place for a super pimp, swung up the steps and dealt me such a blow on the chest that I am still blue with it. This thought I is joliment Marseilles,3 and it was indeed very typical, in a mild way, of the hours I spent there. Finally when I had thrown myself into the 2 hours late Bandol train there was a fight between the soldiers and civilians. The soldiers rushed the train, commandeered it and threw the civilians out, bag & baggage on to the platform – Not in any hightiddly-i-ty take me back to Blighty4 spirit but in a very nasty temper indeed – in fact as ugly a crowd as I ever wish to see. They crawled into and over the carriages like apes, banged on the windows, wrenched open the doors – This seemed to me the comble.5 But I had happily got into a carriage with 8 serbian officers & their two dogs and they put up a fight against the soldiers. They took off their dogs leather leads and held up the doors, barricaded the entrance to the next carriage and



lady ottoline morrell   221

generally behaved as though their eight mothers had born and bred them in the most expensive, rare and exclusive cinema de luxe. Finally after complications innumerable, in the midst of which I became, for the railway officials a serbian, too, and the wife of one of them, they gained the day. It only needed that I should arrive here to find I was not expected, that the hotel had changed hands, was far more expensive and was not heated. No, I lay down my weapons after that. Since then I have been getting into bed and out of bed and doing very little else, in no gay fashion, dearest. As soon as I have recovered from this cursed chill Ill write again. But at present my jaundiced eye would as lief gaze on the Fulham Road as on this lilac sea and budding mimosa. As the night wears on I grow more and more despondent, and my thoughts walk by with long black plumes on their heads while I sit up in bed with your pink quilt round my shoulders & think it must be at least 4 o’clock & find it is just a quarter to 2! My lovely gay shawl lies upon a chair & I gaze at it feeling rather like David Copperfield’s Dora,6 and wondering when I shall wear it again. But I suppose all this will pass. Its just another little hell that must be gone through . . I simply long for a letter from you. Forgive a dull dog who loves you truly and take pity on your Katherine. Notes 1. The Gare de Lyon, in the 12th arrondissement of Paris, is the train station from which all trains heading in the direction of the south-east and the French Riviera depart. 2. A musical leitmotif runs through this sentence. ‘Allegro’ (It.: Lively) is the term traditionally given to the first or last movement of a work in sonata or symphonic form with a well-marked, spirited tempo. The ‘major’ refers to a musical mode in which bright, euphonic intervals between notes, especially at the end of a musical phrase or cadence, were traditionally interpreted as optimistic and cheerful – unlike the contrasting ‘minor’ mode. 3. (Fr.): Delightfully characteristic of Marseille. Marseille was then a major port with essential trade connections with North Africa and the Levant. Like any major port, its inhabitants were far more varied in origin than those of cities inland. To this day, the name evokes somewhat clichéd associations with a rough-and-ready, brusque and rather volatile population. 4. ‘Take me back to good old Blighty’ was a music-hall song written in 1916 composed by Fred Godfrey, with lyrics by Bennett Scott and A. J. Mills. Its catchy theme music, topical account of three soldiers in the trenches and its nostalgia for ‘Blighty’ – a term of Urdu origin, meaning ‘district’, that was coined by Anglo-Indians to refer to Britain before being taken up as soldiers’ slang in World War One – quickly ensured it became a popular hit at the time. As KM’s quote attests, she clearly knew the words. The refrain runs as follows: ‘I should love to see my best girl / Cuddling up again we soon shall

222   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 be (Whoa!) / Tiddley-iddley-ighty, hurry me home to Blighty / Blighty is the place for me.’ The singer’s yearning to be put ‘on a train for London Town’ adds an extra note of contrast to KM’s feelings as a she alights from a train. 5. (Fr.): The last straw. 6. Dora Spenlow is the adoring, rather hapless first wife of David Copperfield, the eponymous hero of Charles Dickens’s partly autobiographical novel of apprenticeship, first published in serial form in 1849–50. She dies after a miscarriage and resulting infection that leave her frail and cough-ridden.

[early March 1918] [HRC]

March.

Bandol (Var)

Dearest Ottoline I have taken this tiny piece of paper in the slender hope that I may still be able to hide behind it and try (ah! try) to explain my inexplicable silence without falling into too dread a panick at sight of your stern looks of anger and dismay . . Would to God I were not this fickle, faithless, intolerable, devilishly uncomfortable creature whom you must, a thousand times, have whistled down the wind! But Lady? Pity her – Alas – poor soul! Katherine is curst! All goes well. She makes merry. She delights in sweet talk and laughter. She runs in the fields with her darling companions filling their wicker arks and hers with a thousand pretties – She hugs the ‘black but beautiful’ fire with her dearest and is not last in gossip of those who are not there – And then, quite suddenly, without a wing shadow of warning, without even the little moment in which to tie up the door knocker with a white kid glove or a chaste crepe bow she is shut up in her dark house, and the blinds are pulled down, and even the postman who hangs upon the doorbell might hang there like fruit, my soul, till the door rot – she could not answer him. The real, tragic part of the affair is that what happens to her while she is so wickedly out yet dreadfully in she cannot tell or explain. And though her enemies may see her at those times dressed in a little snake wesket and supping off toads livers with friends wild and slee, she dares sometimes to dream that her friends (can she hope for friends – accurséd one!) will perhaps be kinder, and even beckon her to her stool by the chimney corner – and even hand her the custard cup of Hot Purl or Dogs Nose that was her share aforetime1 – – – A curse on my pen! It twing-twangs away but my heart is heavy. Why aren’t I true as steel – firm as rock? I am – I am – but in my way Ottoline – in my way – And yes I agree. It is no end of a rum way – – –



lady ottoline morrell   223

I wish you were here. Dark England is so far and this room smells spicy and sweet from the carnations – pink and red and wonderful yellow. The hyacinths, in a big jar are put on the window sill for the night for my little maid says they give you not only sore throats but dreams as well! It is very quiet. I can just hear the sea breathe – a fine warm night after a hot day – Spring, this year, is so beautiful that watching it unfold one is filled with a sort of anguish – Why – oh Lord why! I have spent days just walking about or sitting on a stone in the sun and listening to the bees in the almond trees and the wild pear bushes and coming home in the evening with rosemary on my fingers and wild thyme in my toes – tired out with the loveliness of the world. It has made the War so awfully real – and not only the war – Ah Ottoline – it has made me realise so deeply and finally the corruption of the world – I have such a horror of present day men and women that I mean never to go among them again – They are thieves, spies, janglours2 all – and the only possible life is remote – remote – with books – with all the poets and a large garden full of flowers and fruits – And a cow (kept for butter only!) What have you been reading lately? Shelley? Have you read ‘The Question’ lately? I dreamed that as I wandered by the way Bare winter suddenly was changed to spring.3 Oh, do read – this moment – its so marvellous –––– Why aren’t I talking to you instead of writing. I shall come back to dark England soon – Its a trouble you know to have two Souths of France, as I have. But a sweet trouble – and Id not be without it. No, there is nobody to talk to – I have written a great deal – I think the Woolfs must have eaten the Aloe root and branch or made jam of it –4 Goodnight dearest Katherine. Notes 1. These two paragraphs offer one of the finest examples of KM’s creative delight in pastiche, mixing idioms and styles from Shakespeare’s plays, Dickens’s novels, old wives’ tales, medieval witches’ remedies, and traditional ballads and folk songs in a playful medley of her own. The Six Jolly Fellowship-Porters tavern in Our Mutual Friend specialises in ‘those delectable drinks, Purl, Flip, and Dog’s Nose’, which are warm, ale-based drinks with added gin and spices (Chapter 6, p. 57). 2. Derived from the medieval French word ‘jongleur’, the ‘jangler’ or ‘janglour’ is a scurrilous jester or tale-taler. 3. ‘The Question’ was one of the last poems by the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), written in Italy, and recounting a lyrical dream

224   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 of childhood on a perfect English spring morning in the countryside. KM quotes the opening two lines of the five-stanza poem, which finishes on a closing question wondering to whom a gift of a beautiful bunch of fragrant flowers was to be given. 4. At the Woolfs’ invitation, KM had submitted her short story ‘Prelude’, initially titled ‘The Aloe’, to be published by the Hogarth Press. See CW2, pp. 56–93.

[12 May 1918] [N] [47 Redcliffe Road, Fulham] Sunday. Dearest Ottoline It never was a secret; and certainly not from you. It is true – what you so perfectly say – I am always renewing a marriage with Murry. This last and really ‘funny’ one was – more than Id tell anyone – because I loathed and abominated my other legal name.1 Whenever it smote up at me from a passport or a police paper I hated it again. Now it’s gone. But perhaps the chief reason was my hatred of the Human Snigger – and in fact, of human beings generally – of the ‘Bloomsbury element’ in life – enfin.2 I do feel now more hidden from it somehow – though perhaps that sounds far fetched and absurd. But we were a funny party. Brett, like some delightful bird who had flown in, laughing through the bright anemone flowers – I am so sorry – we cannot come down to Garsington. I am leaving London again on Friday for – I don’t know in the least how long – and Murry is tied by every leg to his office stool. The country must be divine. I am going to Looe which is full of pigs and bluebells, cabbages & butterflies and fishermen’s orange shirts flung out to dry on pink apricot trees.3 It sounds un printemps bien solide!4 Life feels to me so full at present – simply charged with marvellous exciting things. Is it the Spring that won’t be denied even at my age? Yes, I know that God is a monster and there are moments when one realises the war but there are other moments when one rebels in spite of oneself and then – the floodgates are open and one is swept away on this heavenly tide. Do you feel that – or do you think Im too heartless? But what is to be done? How can one remain calm when even the barrel organ seems to put forth new leaves and buds and laburnum is in full flower on the Redcliffe Road. It is all – as M. would say – too difficult. Yours ever with Love Katherine. Notes 1. KM and JMM had finally married on 3 May at Kensington Register Office, with Brett and Fergusson as their witnesses, just days after her divorce from George Bowden had been confirmed.



lady ottoline morrell   225

2. (Fr.): Anyway. 3. KM was travelling to Looe, on the south coast of Cornwall, to join Anne Estelle Rice. 4. (Fr.): A really stable spring.

[24 May 1918] [HRC] Headland House Looe (LOOE) Cornwall. Dearest Ottoline, Yes, its you I want to write to – yes – you – For you alone will not only ‘keep my secret’ – oh – I feel you will so beautifully, so fully understand and respond – – – I have been walking up and down this huge, bright, bare hotel bedroom, really, if one had looked through the ‘spiritual’ keyhole – wringing my hands – quite overcome, for the nth time by the horror of life – the sense that something is almost hopelessly wrong. What might be so divine is out of tune – or the instruments are all silent and nobody is going to play again. There is no concert for us. Isn’t there? Is it all over? Is our desire and longing and eagerness – quite all that’s left? Shall we sit here for ever in this immense wretched hall – waiting for the lights to go up – which will never go up? Heavens! the hysterical joy with which Id greet the first faint squeakings of a tuning up – the lovely relief with which one would lean back and give oneself up and up to it. But no – I don’t hear a sound – Its all very well to say like Koteliansky: ‘I am dead’ but what the devil is the good of that with all this fury of living burning away in my bosom – with God knows nothing to feed it or fan it – just burning away – But the ugliness – the ugliness of life – the intolerable corruption of it all – Ottoline. How is it to be borne? Today for the first time since I arrived, I went for a walk – Anne Rice has been telling me of the beauty of the spring – all the hedges one great flower – of the beauty of these little ‘solid’ white houses set in their blazing gardens – and the lovely hale old fishermen. But – the sea stank – great grey crabs scuttled over the rocks – all the little private paths and nooks had been fouled by human cattle – there were rags of newspaper in the hedges – the village is paved with concrete and as you passed the ‘tiny solid white houses’ a female voice yells: ‘you stop it or Ill lay a rope end across ëe’. And then – hotels, you know, strange hotels! The horror of them – The grimace for service rendered – the perpetual ‘would you please bring up my letters as soon as the post arrives?’ – another strange bed – and the mysterious people whom one always passes going to or coming from the lavatory. . . .

226   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Oh – how I loathe hotels. I know I shall die in one. I shall stand in front of a crochet dressing table cover, pick up a long invisible hairpin left by the last ‘lady’ and die with disgust. Its almost funny – loving as I do, loving passionately, beautiful rooms, the shapes of furniture, colours, quiet, I find myself wandering eternally in rooms papered with birds, chrysanthemums in urns & bunches of ribbons, and furnished with fumed oak and lace curtains – and that glare from the windows – that dreadful gape which reaches to every corner – that sense of nowhere to hide! But all that is only part of the other, greater curse which is upon life – the curse of lonliness – I am quite certain that it is all wrong to live isolated and shut away as we do – never exchanging and renewing and giving AND receiving – There ought to be something fine and gay that we tossed about among us – and kept ever so thrillingly in the air, as it were, and never let fall – a spirit – But where is it, Ottoline, and who wants it? . . . I am in despair. In such despair, that sometimes I begin weeping like a green girl – but that is no use, either. My tiny world tinkles: ‘Of course with all that sea and air outside and all that butter, milk and cream in you’ll be as fit as a fiddle in no time’.1 Which is altogether too simple. Write to me – will you? I shall be here another week at any rate. Then I must wander somewhere else I think. This place is grotesquely expensive, too – But write to me – if you can –       I am always your very loving                 Katherine – Note 1. A substantially milk-enriched diet was one of the most frequent recommendations to patients suffering from tuberculosis. Wartime restrictions had, however, significantly increased prices, as well as making such commodities harder to obtain.

[16 July 1918] [HRC]

Tuesday.

47 Redcliffe Road, S.W.10.

Dearest Ottoline, It was with infinite pleasure that I read your letter this morning. I had thought that my stupid cry from Cornwall had really disgusted you and I was to be banished, but then I heard from Brett how ill you were and I realised only too well why you had not written to me.



lady ottoline morrell   227

It is simply dreadful that you should suffer so much & that doctors should be such useless fools . . What can one say? I know so devilishly well the agony of feeling perpetually ill and the longing – the immense longing – just to have what everybody else takes so easily as their portion – health – a body that isn’t an enemy – a body that isn’t fiendishly engaged in the old, old ‘necessary’ torture of – breaking ones spirit – – – ‘Why wont you consent to having your spirit broken?’ it wonderingly asks. ‘Everybody else yields without a murmur. And if you’d only realise the comfortable, boundless numbness that you would enjoy for ever after – – –’ I wonder sometimes how it will end. One will never give in and so – – All the same, it would be more tolerable if only people understood – ever so little – but subtly – not with a sort of bread jelly sympathy – but with exquisite, rare friendship. (Oh, dear, I still believe in such a thing and still long for it.) You see, I cannot help it – My secret belief – the innermost ‘credo’ by which I live is – that although Life is loathesomely ugly and people are terribly often vile and cruel and base, nevertheless there is something at the back of it all – which if only I were great enough to understand would make everything everything indescribably beautiful – One just has glimpses, divine warnings – signs – Do you remember the day we cut the lavender? And do you remember when the russian music sounded in that half empty hall?1 Oh, those memories compensate for more than I can say ––– ––– This is all vaguely, stupidly written, but I want to be in touch with you somehow: I would so have loved seeing you today – I imagine we might have talked. There is always so much to say – Dearest Ottoline, you are so real to me – always. And now Ill confess. I was hurt a little bit that you didn’t answer my letter. But only for a moment. After all – I had written and I have enough faith in you for ever to know that you do – respond – There is my feeling for you – whatever you may think of me – grown into my heart, as it were – and never to be uprooted – – – But this you know. Thank you dearest friend, for all that you so beautifully say about my tiny book.2 And do please let me know when you are in town again – With my love Katherine. Notes 1. In her memoir of KM, Morrell recalls: I happened to see in the papers that there was to be a Russian ‘Balalaika’ Concert at the Grafton Gallery, and I asked her to come with me. We wandered in, I feeling nervous, anticipating that she would not like it, but at once we felt that it was perfect and we were both swept away, away from London, the horror of the war – out on to wild steppes, into forests,

228   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 caught up by winds into the clouds and swept over lovely fields where larks were singing – for the wild music seemed to emanate from the earth, the winds – as if Nature was herself singing and moaning, telling the story of earth, of storms and roughness, and above all of its wildness and tenderness and its entrancing spring beauty and the mystery of its rebirth. (quoted in H. Shaw, p. 122) 2. The tiny book was Prelude, hand-set by Virginia Woolf, which was published by the Hogarth Press on 11 July.

[30 July 1918] [Stanford]

Tuesday.

47 Redcliffe Road SW.10

Dearest Ottoline – Its a divine morning, quiet and hot. The watercart has just gone down the road and now the piano opposite is braiding its hair in swift, intricate braids. I cannot help feeling, today, that the world, at any rate, is the ‘friend of man’ and longs for us to walk upon lawns and idle in gardens and wear shady hats & dabble our feet in pools, and lie in grass and lose ourselves in forests and watch the light and the air shaking tall trees . . Oh – these misunderstandings! Great ones & little ones – do let us drive them all into the sea. Why do we allow them to rush at us and snap and hurt us all so horribly. God knows we have all of us had reason enough to suspect and to mistrust . . . but ‘is it too late?’ Thank you for letting me see this letter. I am awfully glad that he has written a new poem.1 I don’t know if Murry sent his letter to him or not – I hope he did. For I should hate S. S. to think ill of Murry – Siegfried Sassoon – Sullivan2 came in on Saturday: he was positively merry – and we sat, four of us, laughing. Cant we all laugh one day? I do hope your headaches are better – It is vile that they should plague you so. With love from Katherine. Notes 1. The letter and the new poem (‘Letter to Robert Graves’) were written by Siegfried Sassoon, while recovering in the American Red Cross Hospital for Officers in London from a head injury sustained while he was at the Front. 2. The science writer, journalist and biographer John William Navin Sullivan (1886–1937, frequently referenced by KM and JMM simply as JWN) was a close friend of JMM’s and KM’s, and was also deputy editor of the Athenaeum, alongside Aldous Huxley, during JMM’s editorship.



lady ottoline morrell   229

[3 August 1918] [Letters 1928, 1, pp. 207–8] [47 Redcliffe Road, Fulham] Saturday afternoon I was simply enchanted with your letter. It came, after a dreadfully bad night, an age-long night which leaves one at the mercy of first impressions next morning. You know the feeling? One lies in a kind of daze, feeling so sensitive – so unbearably sensitive to the exterior world and longing for something ‘lovely’ to happen. The something lovely did happen to me – with your letter. I longed to get up and send you a telegram to your Hotel – just to say how wonderful it had been – but could not get up all day. So, tied to the sofa leg, I thought about it and you. I am so thankful that the raid is over and that we shan’t have another. Oh, don’t let us! They are so exhausting, and so wretched, and then when outsiders come in and start boasting on their own account I want to fly into the wilderness and like the dove in that hideous anthem ‘Buiild me a ne-e-est and remain there for Ever at rest’.1 But otherwise I hate the idea of perpetual wilderness and the dove idea of rest don’t appeal to me at all. We are supposed to have fought our way over to Asheham today – hung with our own meat and butter, but I couldn’t face it. There seemed to have been so many things to catch and so many changes to make – a sort of government controlled game of musical chairs without any music, very grim. No, I couldn’t. So instead I am sitting squeezed up in a corner of this formless room while a man cuts new pinnies for the armchairs and the sommier2 – lemon yellow ones with dashes of palm trees on them and parrots simply clinging to the branches. The parrots have, I think, a quite extraordinary resemblance to M. The tide is very low – at the ebb – in the Redcliffe Road and the sky is the colour of weak cocoa. I wish I could simply disappear – become invisible and find myself somewhere where the light was kinder with a superb new book to read by someone I’d never heard of before. But these are dreams and I must, when this scissor man goes – take my filet3 to the Fulham Road and do shopping. Oh! Oh! Why hasn’t M. £2,500 a year? It would be so lovely to bask in money for a little. I have a story called ‘Bliss’ in this month’s English Review.4 If you should see it will you really tell me what you think? Is that terre dangereuse?5 No, not really. I will send you a cardboard box. I’d adore some flowers. But I think I have several boxes, so I shall send them all – in case they are still as rare at Garsington. Notes 1. ‘O for the Wings of a Dove’, also known by the title directly translated from German, ‘Hear my Prayer’, was a popular nineteenth-century anthem, the music of which was composed by the German composer Felix Mendelssohn;

230   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 the lyrics were by William Bartholomew. The best-known verse, to which KM refers here, runs as follows: ‘O for the wings, for the wings of a dove! Far away, far away would I rove! In the wilderness build me a nest, and remain there for ever at rest.’ 2. (Fr): couch. 3. (Fr.): String shopping bag. 4. ‘Bliss’ was published in the English Review, 27, August 1918, pp. 108–19. See CW2, pp. 141–53. 5. (Fr.): Dangerous ground.

[11 August 1918] [N] We move to Hampstead on the 25th

Sunday.

47 Redcliffe Road S.W.10.

Dearest Ottoline Will you pass through London on your way to the Sea? If you do – please let me know. I long to see you. I was so glad to hear from you yesterday – I wish I were with you now – not on the lawn but sitting under some tree with all dazzling, silent brightness just beyond – where we could talk & be alone. I heard the infinitely sad news yesterday that my darling little mother is dead.1 She was the most exquisite, perfect little being – something between a star and a flower – I simply cannot bear the thought that I shall not see her again – Always your loving Katherine. Murry has ‘absolutely forgotten it’ Note 1. After a decade of fragile health, exacerbated by the trauma over the death of her only son in the war, Annie Beauchamp had died in Wellington on 8 August 1918.



lady ottoline morrell   231

[15 August 1918] [HRC]

Thursday.

47 Redcliffe Road S.W.10

Dearest Ottoline How am I to thank you for your letter and for these exquisite flowers? They are both so perfect – they are like one gift – and its strangely true – how just as your letters are you – so the flowers you send couldn’t have been sent by anybody else – I feel I could single out this bright sweet bouquet in Eternity & say – they came from Ottoline. You have such a lovely way of gathering flowers as you talk – or of suddenly handing one a piece of verbena or a scented geranium – almost, as it were, unconsciously – Yes, my mother’s death is a terrible sorrow to me – I feel – do you know what I mean – the silence of it so. She was more alive than anyone I have ever known – How are you – dearest Ottoline? And are you going to the sea? Brett said you thought of it. Garsington must be divine in this weather, though. I hope that we shall see each other soon. I am longing to be in my new house – out of this common passage way – common door. I sit in front of these three windows and feel that I am sitting in a shop – with nothing whatever to sell. Murry is, as usual, working a hundred times too hard – but he cannot stop himself and I cannot stop him. I can only look on and deplore it. However, like a little forlorn Ibsen hero the ‘miracle’ is going to happen for him when he gets into his new house.1 His study has lemon yellow walls and orange curtains. I have an idea that I shall hang a parrot in it. . . . as well. Oh, I long for gaiety – for a high spirit – for gracious ways and kindness and happy love. Life without these is not worth living. But they must be. We have – the few of us – got wings – real wings – beauties – to fly with and not to always hide under – Very much love dearest friend Katherine. Note 1. The main objective in life for Torvald Helmer, the petty bourgeois protagonist of Ibsen’s most famous play, A Doll’s House (1878), is to own a comfortable little home in which he and his wife, Nora, can live a perfectly contented family life, with no debts or extraneous worries. This safe, enclosed, very average dream is what stifles the heroine, Nora, who cannot play the part of the doll in this tepid scenario, and finally breaks free. Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) was a hugely influential Norwegian playwright, whose international reputation was secured by the play Peer Gynt (1866). He regarded his historical dramas

232   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 as his essential contribution to the history of the theatre, but his fame rests more on his ruthlessly poised, visionary social dramas, which also include Ghosts (1881) and Hedda Gabler (1890).

[19 August 1918] [Stanford]

Monday.

47 Redcliffe Road S.W.10.

Dearest Ottoline I have been condemned to the sommier1 for the last few days & not able to walk at all. There is nothing I should have loved more than to walk in your garden – otherwise – Thank you, dearest friend, for asking me. But the King of the Hanky-Pankies is coming this morning to electrify me and I hope to have new legs – arms – wings – everything – in a week or two.2 I can’t go on like this; even a caterpillar would turn. We leave here next Monday for:      2 Portland Villas        East Heath Road           Hampstead. Portland Villas! – it sounds like one of those houses where a ‘few guests are taken slightly mental not objected to – Firm home-like treatment’. But inside it is going to be a vision – a sort of spring perpetual with delicate little flowery poems on to top floor window boxes and short stories, very rich and gay on the first floor sills. In the garden ‘the Mountains’ dreams of african trees – violet trees covered with bunches of violets and assegai trees with leaves like spears.3 But I don’t believe in them. And how shall I lure you there? I have thought of that several times . . . Its such a strange morning here – puffs of silver cloud blowing over the roofs and indian gentlemen in mustard coloured turbans prancing up and down the pavement. And now heres the electric man with his little box – He has a waxed moustache & we are beginning to ask if it is lumber or ribs – Oh dear! My warm love to you Katherine. Notes 1. (Fr): couch. 2. Forms of electrotherapy had been in use in Britain since the mid-eighteenth century and became widespread during the nineteenth century, recommended



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for ailments that ranged from neurasthenia and hysteria to paralysis, rheumatism and digestive disorders. KM’s description here suggests she was treated with the portable faradisation machine. See McWhirter et al., p. 1117. 3. Ida Baker was very much a colonial misfit, as KM’s irony suggests. British by birth and Anglo-Indian by upbringing, she had spent part of her life in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). The Assegai tree is the popular name for the evergreen Curtisia tree which is common in the forests of southern Africa; its strong wood was traditionally used by tribesmen to forge their spears, or assegai.

[1 September 1918] [HRC]

Sunday,

2 Portland Villas East Heath Road Hampstead. NW3.

Dearest Ottoline – They are superb jewels in its crown – Lovely lovely flowers – and the first that we have had – The Mountain is sending back the Box tomorrow – I wish you would come into the studio & see these bright bouquets – Thank you – dearest for them – It seems so long since I have heard from you – I long for a letter – The builders are still here up & down the staircase – more builders than stairs. If it were not for these monsters the Elephant would be a delightful creature –1 But oh I am ill and sad – I want so to be well & I have to go dead slow carrying a pain that I cant send away –––– My warm love,        Katherine. Note 1. ‘The Elephant’ was the nickname given to their Hampstead house, on account of its grey brick and tall, imposing style.

[5 September 1918] [HRC] It is Portland Villas Thursday. Dearest Ottoline I am most fortunate and infinitely happy to have you for my friend – You do know how much you are in my thoughts and how I always

234   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 long to share the things I love to hear and to see – with you. Yesterday afternoon – when the flowers came I felt quite overwhelmed – I felt as I took them out of the box: ‘unless I mention every single flower to her how can I tell her how I saw them’ – the black poppy – the two pale sunflowers – all the ‘different’ yellow ones – and then, above all these round bright beauties. My seaside lodging is a bower and even M. who is, at the moment, like the bathing dress perpetual hanging out to dry after a sad sad wetting – gave a great gasp of delight – Oh, but like you I sigh for happiness – for a world which isn’t always ‘out of joint’.1 This constant living on the defensive – how tiring it is! Why wont people live more freely and more wildly. But no – there they are – smug – like little plants in little pots – that ought to have been put out in a garden years ago – years ago. But they prefer their life on a shelf – out of the ‘full force’ of the sun and wind – each one tight in itself and away from its companions. But Fear, Distrust, Cowardice, Smugness – surely they are more Horrid Worms than one would find in any garden – But I don’t give up hope – I can’t – And here is this divine, cloudless day waiting for something more to flower – Dearest Ottoline – remember me when you lean over the tobacco plant – I can see it & breathe it now – how exquisite it is! There must be fields of tobacco plant in the moon – – Isn’t David Copperfield adorable. I like even the Dora part – & that friend of Dora’s – Julia – somebody – who was ‘blighted’. She is such a joy to me. Yes – doesn’t Charley D. make our little men smaller than ever – and such pencil sharpeners –2 I have discovered nothing to read – and do not know how the days pass. The electric man is still filling me with sparks – every day for 3/4 of an hour.3 It is very comforting, and I think it is going to beat the rheumatiz. How are your headaches? I shall send back the box today – Goodbye for now dearest friend – Ever your loving        Katherine. Notes 1. ‘The time is out of joint’ is Hamlet’s memorable commentary on the state of affairs in Denmark, after the encounter with his father’s ghost. See Hamlet I, v, 186–90. 2. KM and Morrell shared an abiding love for three of Europe’s great nineteenth-century writers: George Sand, Leo Tolstoy and Charles Dickens. In David Copperfield, Dickens’s landmark Bildungsroman, Dora Spenlow is the young wife of the protagonist, who wastes away and dies in a characteristically meek, rather sentimentalised way; her friend, Julia Mills, is initially a self-righteous but faithful friend with a certain psychological depth; after her



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marriage to a wealthy businessman, however, her values shift to focus on little but wealth. KM refers here to one of Julia’s earnest speeches to her friends before their marriage, when she insists: ‘Do not allow a trivial misunderstanding to wither the blossoms of spring, which, once put forth and blighted, cannot be renewed,’ adding, ‘I speak [. . .] from experiences of the past – the remote, irrevocable past. The gushing fountains which sparkle in the sun, must not be stopped in mere caprice; the oasis in the desert of Sahara must not be plucked up idly’ (p. 662). See above, p. 221. 3. For KM’s electrotherapy treatment, see above, p. 232, n. 2.

[8 October 1918] [ATL] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] Tuesday. Dearest Ottoline, I have been thinking of you so much since you went back to Garsington, and realising over & over again how more than dear it was of you to have come so dreadfully far to see me & to have given me so much of your time. Oh, but I loved seeing you – & when ever I feel the biting cold beginning I wrap up warm in the memory of our last ‘talk’. Such strange actual things seem to have happened. Fancy Robbie Ross dying1 – that was surely very odd in him. He must have been, poor fellow, greatly surprised himself – to be, so suddenly, nipped into Eternity on a Saturday night. I expect he still feels that it is a mistake, simply a mistake. He has gone behind the wrong curtain, found the Wrong Exit – is wandering down a passage for Artists Only – Death, how dreadful a thing is Death!! I have such a horror of it; it ought not to be. We should simply go from star to star – – – But no – even that is not good enough. Id arrive & find Frieda swooping down upon me, with meringue wings & a marzipan wand, a real German angel. Speaking of Frieda. Gertler came to supper on Sunday night & told us that the Lawrences are coming to live in London indefinitely – They are come, in fact, yesterday & are staying just round the corner in Well Walk.2 This really horrifies me. I am sure they will turn up here, & though I have armed M. with every possible weapon & warned him against L. I have a terrible idea that they will fight – and it will be hideous and lacerating. L. has come up to look for work in an office – which of course he’ll never do for more than three days. But altogether, I feel they are better as many miles away as there are miles. Everytime the bell goes I hear Frieda’s ‘Well Katherina – here we are!’ and I turn cold with horror. I had such a depressed, fish-out-of-water back-to-the-nursery little letter from poor Brett. Her father won’t speak, her mother treats her as though she were a vase, the children are charming with vile nurses and mademoiselle has a well developed bosom and is fat.3 There is

236   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 very little to eat and she is always hungry & bitterly cold. It sounds too forlorn. Julian Huxley4 has been and impressed her as throbbing with fire, ambition and attainments. In fact it read like some unfinished novel by Turgenev, with Brett for the heroine & J.H. for a sort of Bazarov-Rudin.5 Oh – I wish we could find a new country . . . There is a vine outside my windows & all the little grapes are purple & down below in the yard a lady is pegging a pair of gents, woven underpants . . . Gissing in Italy6 – it looks to me . . . This letter is too dull – But I feel I must just write to you. With very much love dearest Katherine. Mrs Hamilton is coming to tea next week. I am jingling my political threepenny bit already!7 Notes 1. Robert Ross had died suddenly on 5 October, just before leaving for a longplanned trip to Australia to see the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, for whom he had worked as a collections and purchasing adviser since the previous year. 2. The Lawrences were living temporarily at 32 Well Walk, in Hampstead. 3. Brett had been staying with her extended family on their country estate, Roman Camp, near Callander in Scotland; Juliette Baillot had become the governess for Brett’s sister’s children, now that Julian Morrell had gone back to school. She was also modelling for Brett, who had been asked by Huxley to illustrate his poem ‘Leda’ (see Hignett, p. 94). KM responded to Brett’s letter on 5 October, saying, ‘Dont stay in Scotland too long, dearest. Just draw Ma’amselle and then come back – Its too far – And take care of yourself. Don’t turn into a pixie or a fairy or a gnome or a water nymph’ (CL1, p. 365). 4. Julian Huxley was still serving as a commissioned officer in the British Army Intelligence Corps, but yearning to return to his work and research as a zoologist – thereby earning the literary comparison that KM makes in the next sentence. 5. 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. KM refers here to two of his best-known protagonists: Bazarov, from Fathers and Sons (1862), the medical student, biologist and ‘Nihilist’ as he termed himself, although without the anarchist inflexions that the term later acquired; and Rudin, the eloquent intellectual and social misfit from Turgenev’s first novel, Rudin (1856). 6. The Yorkshire-born novelist and short-story writer George Gissing (1857–1903) was a pioneering and unjustly marginalised Victorian writer and critic, with an acerbic eye for entrenched social injustice and privilege, which he depicted with unflinching precision and a rare absence of either sentimentality or comic stereotyping. His major volume of travel writing, By the Ionian Sea (1901), recounts his extensive sojourns in Italy.



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7. Mary Agnes Hamilton (née Adamson, 1882–1966) was a committed feminist, militant socialist activist, translator, writer and researcher, then working as a part-time journalist for Time and Tide. An economist by training, she was associated with a number of London’s key intellectual circles at the time, including the Bloomsbury Group. She went on to have a prestigious career in politics and broadcasting.

[mid-October 1918] [N] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] Very well, my dear You think you are right & I think I am right. But Im not angry and you are. So I shall understand if you keep away from me! I suppose its still about the old breakfast tray. Im not allowed to hate having trays carried up to me by my female friends. I must pretend I don’t mind – why? Its like begging for no more pudding and having more pudding on ones plate! Its nice to be certain you are angry with me; I felt sure you were – even though you said you weren’t.1 Note 1. This is a short note written in pencil on a piece of paper, after Ottoline’s visit to 2 Portland Villas, where, for much of the time, KM was an invalid. It would appear that Ottoline, to KM’s embarrassment, had brought her up a breakfast tray, causing a short-term misunderstanding between the pair.

[22 October 1918] [HRC] 2 Portland Villas East Heath Road N.W.3. Dearest Ottoline I was so happy to hear from you today but I wish you had not a cold. Its such appaling ghastly weather to fight; one needs double strength and double health. I wish I were near – I wish I could tap at your door. I simply long for a talk – just with you – nobody else – a long talk – in which we can really let fly. Oh, my dearest woman friend – how vivid you are to me – how I love the thought of you; you cannot know. And it is such a ‘comfort’ to feel that we are in the same world – not in this one. What has one to do with this one? I feel that winter, cruel forbidding winter is content to leave nothing unfrozen – not one heart or one bud of a soul to escape! If only

238   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 one did not feel that it is all so wrong – so wrong – It would be much happier if one could feel – like Murry – mankind is born to suffer – But I do feel that is so wrong – so wrong. It is like saying: mankind is born to walk about in galoshes under an umbrella. Oh dear – I should like to put a great notice over England – closed during the winter months. Perhaps if everybody were shipped off to blue skies and big bright flowers they would change – But I don’t know – The miracle is that one goes on hoping and believing through it all just as passionately as ever one did – It is a grey grim, pavement of a day, with slow dropping rain. When the Mountain brought me my early morning tea this morning she whispered, tenderly: Do you think it would be a good idea to change one ton of coal for two of large anthracite? I don’t think we require a special permit and even if we do I think it is worth it’. My bed turned into a railway truck, shuffled off to the pit head, and two tons of large anthracite were tumbled on it . . . a very lourd paquet1 to begin the day with . . Lawrence has been running in and out all this week. He is gone off to the Midlands today2 – still without Frieda. He seems to have quite forgotten her for the time – merely saying: ‘she wants me to become a german and Im not a german’ – and so dismisses her. But I wonder why he is taken in by the most impossible charlatans – I am afraid he will never be free of them. Perhaps his whole trouble is that he has not a real sense of humour – He takes himself dreadfully seriously now-adays: I mean he sees himself as a symbolic figure – a prophet – the voice in the wilderness crying ‘woe’. And what is amusing is his opinion of Murry as a flipperty-gibbet – ‘play on, ye mayflower’3 kind of figure who never will take Life or himself seriously enough! This is a dull letter – a rattling old withered leaf of a thing – not what I want to send you – Forgive it and me – – Do you think – one day – we might go abroad together? That is always a dream of mine – –                 Forever                   Your loving                       Katherine. Notes 1. (Fr.): Heavy load. 2. Intriguingly, KM’s claim that DHL had travelled alone is contradicted by his own letters at the time. Frieda Lawrence had been advised by her doctor to leave London while she recovered from flu-like symptoms; she and DHL travelled to Berkshire to stay once more at Maitland and Dollie Radford’s cottage, Chapel Farm, in Hermitage, near Newbury. See LDHL3, pp. 292–3. 3. The quotation marks would appear to reflect KM’s pastiche of stirring epics and songs about the first Puritans on their Mayflower voyage, such as Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s 1905 classic, ‘The Pilgrim Fathers’, rather than a specific quotation.



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[October 1918] [HRC] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] Dearest dearest Ottoline This is just a note – just to say I love to think you are going to the Ballet & I wish I were with you – in that warm light place where there’s music and dancing. (It sounds as though I were meaning Heaven; except that I am sure Heaven will be infernally chilly.) I am lying in my basket with a spiritual flannel round my chops. Occasionally the Mountain (8000 feet high) swoops over me & says: ‘shall I steam it & put the custard round or – – – –’ and occasionally Murry drops an Evening News on to me – as a sort of ‘sign’ from the great world beyond – I have read War & Peace again1– and then War & Peace again – & now I feel inclined to positively sing to it: ‘If You were the Only Book in the World!’2 Dearest dearest Friend. You I love. Forgive this clipped cut off DULL       Katherine. Notes 1. It is unclear when KM first read Tolstoy’s masterpiece, the epic War and Peace, set in the era of the Napoleonic Wars and published in Russian in 1869, the translation of which, by Constance Garnett, was first published in 1904. When she returned to it in 1921–2, she made quite copious reading notes, which reflect her state of mind at the time as much as her intimate engagement with the novel. See CW4, pp. 440–2. 2. KM creates an echo in pastiche of the popular love song ‘If You Were the Only Girl (in the World)’, by Nat Ayer and Clifford Grey, from the 1916 musical revue The Bing Boys Are Here, first performed by George Robey and Violet Loraine. See above, p. 177, n. 2.

[4 November 1918] [HRC]

4 xi 1918.

2 Portland Villas East Heath Road N.W.3.

My dearest Ottoline, Thank you for your adorable letter – I simply fell on it – – I shall simply love to see you this week if you have time to climb up to this eyrie – I always hate the idea that it is so far for you. Virginia

240   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 is coming on Wednesday1 – If only M. & I might see you on another Thursday – It did make me so happy before. I really felt that the Past had blown away – We talked so much about you after you had gone – You were, you know, quite dispassionately speaking so marvellous that afternoon. Come again – do come again – Let us three laugh & talk again – I have been quite unable to write these last days – with acute neuritis in my arm and shoulder – Another New Dish – Thats the worst of illness – If one could only choose ones dish à la carte – eat it – make a grimace over it & throw the plate away – But its this infernally boring table d’hote with all these little side dishes & kickshaws that you’re simply not allowed to refuse – It is distracting and sometimes I feel it never will end – I have felt so cut off from the world without a pen. I lay and read The Egoist.2 It seemed to me marvellously good in its way – and I had quite forgotten how much Meredith enjoyed writing – Its delightful how this enjoyment comes through – he shares your laugh – catches your eye ––sees the point just as you do. But really a very difficult book for englishmen to read without twinging – But then I read Rhoda Fleming,3 & that seemed to me so false so preposterous – one could only groan for it – & its so odious. All this lingering over the idea of a lily white white as snow jeune fille4 in the embrace of an ugly vicious little old man made me want to cry like Lawrence that ‘his sex was all wrong’ – But he is a big man – and he can write wonders. These strange, wild evenings shaken with wind & rain have something of spring in them. One cant help feeling that tomorrow the first green will be there, & perhaps you will meet a little child with a fist of wan daffodils – It does not matter dreadfully that it is not true – If Peace comes I really do feel that the winter will not be real winter – it cant be cold and dark & malignant – A miracle will happen – But I wish the horrible old knitting women at Versailles would hurry hurry5 – Do you see that President Wilson6 is coming to attend the Conference in Person – Already – I fondly dream of – – – oh such a meeting! A sort of glorified Christina Pontifex7 interview between us – I am afraid I am staying in bed too long . . Lawrence has sent me today a new play of his8 – very long – just written – I must read it. I have glanced inside and it looks black with miners – – the frenzied miners that he felt on his spine so in the Midlands – Poor dear man! I do wish he could come up up out of the Pit for ever – But he wont – I long to see you – Oh what shall we do to celebrate the end of the war – With fondest love I am ever your Katherine.



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Notes 1. Giving a very good idea of the ongoing exchanges between herself, KM and Ottoline Morrell at the time, Virginia Woolf likewise recorded their meeting on 6 November: The general state perhaps is one of dazed surfeit; here we’ve had one great relief after another; you hear the paper boys calling out that Turkey has surrendered, or Austria given up, & the mind doesn’t do very much with it; was the whole thing too remote and meaningless to come home to one, either in action or in ceasing to act? Katherine Murry, whom I saw on Wednesday, inclines to think that most people have grasped neither war nor peace. Two or three weeks ago I heard a citizen holding forth to a lady in the train, who asked whether he thought there would be peace. ‘I hope not. . . . We’re giving them everything they want & getting nothing’. Since then it is difficult to see how the most bloodthirsty citizens can get anything more out of Germany. (DVW1, p. 215) 2. The novelist George Meredith published his comic masterpiece, The Egoist, in 1879, the intricate plot of which revolves around the outmoded, selfadmiring buffoon Sir Willoughby Patterne, and the efficiently organised, wilful ‘new heroine’ Clara Middleton. 3. Rhoda Fleming is an earlier, much less well-remembered novel by Meredith published in 1865, in the mode of the ‘fallen-girl’ narrative, although portraying the victim of seduction with characteristically Meredithian understanding, and with considerable focus on the economic realities determining sexual choice. It focuses on ‘two Kentish damsels’ (p. 1), Dahlia and Rhoda Fleming, the former being the one to ‘fall’, the latter the intransigently pure one. The terms ‘lily white’ and ‘white as snow’ are KM’s interpretation, rather than Meredith’s. 4. (Fr.): Maiden, young lady. 5. The Central Axis had sustained a wave of defeats, surrenders and mutinies over the previous months, forcing the German government to seek a peace treaty. The terms were still under negotiation in Versailles, however, determining conditions of the armistice to which the German government and the Allied Powers could agree. 6. Thomas Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) was the Democrat politician and flagship reformer who had been President of the United States since 1913. His ‘Fourteen-Point’ peace proposals had been under discussion since January 1918, including a new map of Europe, and a League of Nations to protect territorial independence. 7. Christina Pontifex is a character from the radical novel The Way of All Flesh (1903), by the outspoken and often controversial Victorian novelist Samuel Butler (1835–1902), which, at the author’s request, was published posthumously. Mrs Pontifex is the mother of the protagonist, Ernest Pontifex, and the epitome of paradoxical matriarchy – a once forward-thinking young woman drilled into submission on the day of her wedding, and henceforth ruling her home with sometimes manipulative ruthlessness. KM alludes in particular to her blueprint for negotiations: Whenever [Ernest’s] mother wanted what she called a confidential talk with him she always selected the sofa as the most suitable ground on

242   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 which to open her campaign. All mothers do this; the sofa is to them what the dining-room is to fathers. In the present case the sofa was particularly well adapted for a strategic purpose, being an old-fashioned one with a high back, mattress, bolsters and cushions. Once safely penned into one of its deep corners, it was like a dentist’s chair, not too easy to get out of again. (Butler, p. 188) 8. The play DHL had just completed was Touch and Go, which he described to Amy Lowell as follows: ‘not wicked but too good is probably the sigil of its doom. Que m’importe! I go my own way, regardless. By good I mean “sage”: one of my unspotted “sagesses”’ (LDHL, vol. 3, p. 296).

[17 November 1918] [HRC] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] Sunday, Dearest Ottoline, My thoughts flew to you immediately the guns sounded.1 I opened the window and it really did seem – just in those first few moments that a wonderful change happened – not in human creatures hearts – no – but in the air – there seemed just for a breath of time – a silence, like the silence that comes after the last drop of rain has fallen – – you know? It was so wonderful – and I saw that in our garden the lilac bush had believed in the South wind & was covered in buds – – – I thought of my brother and of you. And I longed to embrace you both – I shall always feel that you have understood all that this war has meant to the world in a way nobody else has – just because of your wonderful ‘feeling’ for life – If one thinks deeply about people really one is not at all certain whether they are turned towards Life or towards Death – or they are divided – or they are afraid – But you ––one can’t hesitate for a moment. One can only curse people that they are not alive enough to see your lovely gesture – (Don’t think I am mad. I mean what I say deeply deeply.) Oh, Ottoline, why is the world so ugly – so corrupt and stupid. When I heard the drunks passing the house on Monday night, singing the good old pre-war drunken rubbish, I felt cold with horror: They are not changed – & then the loathsome press about Germany’s cry for food2 – My baby longing for people to ‘kiss & be friends’ –– –– –– How horrid they are not to – why don’t they fly at each other kiss & cry & share everything – One feels that about nations – but alas! about individuals, too. Why do people hide & withdraw & suspect – as they do? I don’t think it is just shyness. – I used to – I think it is lack of heart: a sort of blight on them which will not let them ever come to full flower –



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And the worst of it is I can’t just accept that, calmly, like Murry, for instance – & say ‘very well – let them go then’. No, still I feel full of love – still I desire lovely friends – & it will always be so I think – But Life is so short – I want them here now at once before Next Christmas – radiant beings – bursting open my door –– I suppose its great nonsense. While I write Murry is having a Tea party downstairs – Sullivan, sa femme,3 Arthur,4 and the Mountain – I keep wishing that they never need climb so high as this little bedroom – I hope the rock cakes will sit very heavy on them – Murry has written two heavenly short poems5 – I would like you to see them. I have been translating Maxim Gorki’s Journal of the Revolution all last week.6 I find Gorki wonderfully sympathetic – This journal is dreadful. It makes you feel – anything anything rather than revolution – Here comes the ‘party’ creaking up the stairs – Oh – where can I hide – With love love my tenderest love dearest Ever your Katherine. Notes 1. The maroons (sound bombs) that had been used to signal air-raid warnings in London from 1916 onwards sounded the signing of the Armistice at 11am on 11 November 1918. The noise was interpreted by many as a renewal of fighting, and newspapers reported people running to take cover before realising that it was the ‘sound of peace’ rather than war that they could hear. 2. In the days following the Armistice, the Supreme War Council at Versailles agreed unanimously to assure food supplies to Germany, to relieve the widespread civilian distress and growing famine. The agreement was widely reported in the press, some applauding the ‘very conciliatory spirit’ of the Allied Nations, others deploring the favours granted to the enemy when populations at home were hungry too. See, for example, ‘Victors’ Policy: Allies to Relieve Famine’ and ‘Germans’ Food Supply’, The Times, 13 November 1918, p. 8, and ‘Hun Food Snivel’, Daily Mail, 16 November 1918, p. 1. 3. (Fr.): His wife. Sullivan’s wife was Sylvia Mannooch (1896–1976?), a passionate lover of music. 4. Arthur was JMM’s younger brother, who was renamed Richard by KM and JMM. He had also been a guest on several occasions during the war years at Garsington. See his Introduction below, pp. 315–16. 5. JMM wrote three short poems in 1918: ‘Loneliness’, ‘Surmise’ and ‘Serenity’, all included in his Poems: 1916–1920, published in 1921. 6. Maxim Gorky was the pseudonym of the Russian writer Aleksey Maksimovich Peshkov (1868–1936), doubtless Russia’s most outspoken and politically engaged intellectual in the very early years of the Soviet Union. Although he had initially supported the Mensheviks (like his fellow Russian and acquaintance Koteliansky), Gorky preferred to work with the new regime, towards securing better conditions for writers and artists whose

244   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 livelihoods had been devastated by the ruined economy which followed the Great War, the revolution and the civil wars. His most pioneering undertaking was the founding of the World Literature Publishing House, which sought to employ writers as translators, and thereby disseminate contemporary and classic Russian literature abroad, and also to translate foreign classics into English. It was via Gorky’s extensive network of contacts throughout the Russian diaspora that Koteliansky came to acquire the new publications he then took to the Hogarth Press, the popular success of which helped secure the future of the Woolfs’ publishing house. KM’s evocation of her co-translating endeavours is fascinating, given how rapidly the eye-witness text must have been brought over from Moscow, but unfortunately no trace of this work has been found. Koteliansky likewise never signed or co-signed any of Gorky’s autobiographical writings, although he did co-translate Gorky’s Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreev, the latter in collaboration with KM.

[2 December 1918] [HRC] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] Monday Night. My dearest Ottoline, I simply devoured your letter – If you know how I furiously long to talk. You are so part of my life – I am always seeing the things I want to share with you. Do, do let us one day go for a little saunter through some exquisite part of the world – all the ninnies and heavyweight champions forgotten; it would be heavenly – I wish I could have gone to Welbeck with you as your maid1 – That would have been fun – nicely disguised with black thread gloves, button boots and a veil too tightly tied. It must have been portentous – like entering another Kingdom – God – isn’t it a joy really to have a world of one’s own – into which all the unreal people never can come – even if the real ones tarry dreadfully – too – At any rate – its there – its ready – there are moments even now when all its thrilling beauty is almost discovered – – – – Is it just because it is not so terribly cold just now that I feel everything – deep down all the spiritual bulbs of the earth – are beginning to stir to push up towards the light. All this unfolding is so secret and mysterious and yet I feel it is going on. Is it only because a darling wind blows today – one longs to run and embrace it – to feel it on one’s lips and under ones arms – If it is gone tomorrow – will one be hopeless again? I had to send you flowers today; it was so nearly spring. Oh, why cant one live passionately – fully – Why must there be so much of this half life – this life in the waiting room – turning over the old familiar pages –



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These last few days I have been writing hard. Even the Mountain could not sit on me – Would it bore you to read a very long story?2 It is long. But I would so love to know what you think of it if you have the time to read it. I shall perfectly understand if you would rather not – I want to show it to you – because it is more the way I want to write than anything else – and I want to know from you whether it is too obscure! The printing press is printing away – Alas! for me the Fly in the Ointment is that I have to swallow such a very large dose of ‘young Art’ – in shirt sleeves, with a grubby face – eating everything – How horrid I am! Every time he comes I have to restrain my longing to rush to the kitchen stairs & call: ‘Gertie – Mr Arthur is here. Put a quantity of potatoes in the oven and hide everything else!’ He and the Mountain agree beautifully about food – She asks him whether he has ‘ever had enough ham’ & he considers – – – – – – Life is ruined for the Mountain. Nobody wants her. What she had built her whole life on (me) has failed – and now she’d rather be a spirit. ‘I don’t want to be independent’ says she – ‘I want to just live near you – in case you may need me!’ My hair rises stiff with horror – I shall have to send her to Rhodesia in the spring. I loathe female, virgin love. Its so false – so degrading, somehow – Oh, I wish I could throw her into the sea and make her sink or swim – This perpetual hovering on the brink really revolts me! Brett, too, really is a problem. I so understand your feeling. She is too bird-like altogether. She wants your life to be her tree – where she can sun herself and sing and hide and never have to fly. Gertler was talking about her on Sunday afternoon – He says he doesn’t think she ever will change. And I agree. How sympathetic Gertler can be; he was such a dear on Sunday! – Tuesday – Your letter and parcel have just come – Thank you a thousand times dearest. I shall rejoice in these woolies – It is too good of you to send them to me. I shall ‘gird my heavenly armour on’ tomorrow. . . . Yes, why did L. W. come with Desmond?3 L. W. is so extremely worthy, but I find him terribly flattening. When he says ‘Oh thanks’ my whole mind seems to turn into something like a penny – I felt with Desmond one might wander down such delightful little paths but there was L. W. with his don’t you think we had better keep in sight of the house in case it rains’ attitude . . I was dished. M. and I have been for a walk on the Heath today – The gorse is in bud. I have taken such a turn that I feel inclined to turn Catherine wheels at least – It would be lovely to come to Garsington for Christmas – but I am afraid Id better not – dearest. I might be such a nuisance – infernal – My cough is such a bore. Murry sends his love – you know you have mine –             Ever                Katherine.

246   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Notes 1. The former monastery Welbeck Abbey, in the Dukeries, Nottinghamshire, had been the home of John Bentinck, fifth Duke of Portland, and second cousin of Ottoline Morrell’s father Arthur Bentinck, who inherited the manor and the title upon the Duke’s death in 1879. It was a vast, imposing estate, but Ottoline always found the rigid formality of life there suffocating, and rarely visited for extended periods. 2. The only ‘long’ short story from 1918 was ‘Je ne parle pas français’, written mostly that spring. JMM and his brother were printing it on the hand press installed in the basement of their house in Hampstead, which they had set up as part of a dream to print and publish their own work, along the lines of the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press. JMM named their version the Heron Press in memory of KM’s brother, Leslie Heron Beauchamp. See BTW, p. 460. 3. Leonard Woolf and Ottoline Morrell never established more than evasively courteous relations; in his later autobiography, however, he affirms a certain affection for, and appreciation of, KM’s company (see L. Woolf 1980, pp. 146–9. Desmond MacCarthy was a more intimate friend, but clearly the two men together made a less successful combination of guests. See Seymour, pp. 232–3; 307, and Moorehead 1974, pp. 249–50; 275.

[21 February 1919] [HRC] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] Friday – Dearest Ottoline I am so very sorry to hear you have another cold. How devilish these colds are. I do hope you will not spend another winter in this infernal climate – It is unfit for human beings – unless we could simply live in beds on wheels – never get out of them at all – I have spent a week of torture just not writing farewell letters, parting my raiment1 and giving myself into LM’s eager hands to be laid out. I took an overdose of a sleeping drug, which first sent me into a kind of indefinite odious sleep & then left me SO depressed that to speak was to weep & my heart refused to go. But today I can just ask Gertie2 to make up the fire without, what the artists call ‘a fresh burst of tears’.3 This was roast meat and drink to the Mountain. It made me realise more than ever that she is the born Layer Out. If ever a Village Flower Show had a prize for the Most Beautiful Corpse L.M. would not only get it – all the other competitors would withdraw. She would become known & called for all over the countryside – And she would keep little midget models of her favourite designs in her cottage, to be inspected by motorists for 6d – ‘If you would care to order one now I can do this model in your favourite colouring with flowers according to season, at a very moderate figure!’ ––––– Its very horrible. But I begin to feel that every man or woman has his murderer – or perhaps more truly that the idea of ‘the poisoners’ in the



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Milan plague was a real one.4 There are people going about who do desire to dab you with a touch of poison whenever they get the chance. For no real reason except that they are poisoners. Are there the opposite kind of people – too? People who for equally no reason do desire to fling you a flower, an embrace, a greeting, whenever they get a chance? . . . I send you the story I mentioned, dearest Ottoline. I hope you will not hate it. But you will tell me.5 I do not know about the new Barbusse, but I will ask M.6 Have you seen Blackwells new Anthology ‘Coloured Stars’? There are one or two poems by a Chinese born in America which I think very interesting,7 but on the whole, read in England, in February by rather a small fire – conscious of being neat but not lovely in woven underclothing it makes a very rude impression. One feels, sniffing ones eucalyptus hanky that these poor black people are sadly in want of self control. Lawrence sent me the Le Marquis de Villemer to read.8 ‘Et le duc, encore fort agile malgré un peu d’embonpoint et quelques avaries dans les articulations sortit en gambadant comme un jeune ecolier’.9 What a gulf divides us from that but Georges Sand is obviously fascinated. I hope, dearest, you will soon be better. Oh, before I end I must tell you . . . M. wrote to Santayana who replied today10 – that Murry’s letter had made so lively and profound an impression on him that he had positively rushed into the street & snatched a copy of the A.11 But having read it most carefully & thoroughly he did not feel that it & he were perhaps after the same ideals. It was more concerned with units he with unities it with masses he with individuals – The dreadful truth is, of course that for the last 2 years the A. has not been literary at all but a journal of reconstruction concerned especially with problems such as: Why should not every Working mans Cottage have its P.WC?12 Oh! I can see Santayana so plainly, sitting in the ‘George’– white kid gloves, cigarette held in special manner and all, turning the pages with a ‘mais – chèr – chèr – mais – enfin – –’ expression. . . .14 I wrote to Frieda to ask how Lawrence is. She replied that She was feeling a little stronger & more able to cope with him.15 She had past through 100 years of agony in the past fortnight but last night she went to a cinema! Forgive this spider scrawl.          With fondest love               Katherine. Notes  1. In a particularly rich letter in terms of KM’s delight in literary pastiche, this mention is revealing in terms of vivid biblical allusion, especially as the portrait of Ida Baker as undertaker unfolds. After the crucifixion, the soldiers were to divide up Christ’s clothes among themselves, but the seamless shirt

248   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 confounded the division. ‘They said therefore among themselves, Let us not rend it, but cast lots for it, whose it shall be: that the scripture might be fulfilled, which saith, They parted my raiment among them, and for my vesture they did cast lots’ (Matt. 27: 35; Mark 15: 24; Luke 23: 34). The passage is discussed at length by Saint Augustine in Tractate CXVIII.  2. Gertie was a maid who worked as a daily domestic in the house at Portland Villas in Hampstead; Baker refers to her as ‘a tall Cockney girl’. See Baker, p. 129. She would appear to be the Gertie Small who figures in KM’s address book, living at 5 Golden Square, Hampstead (CW4, p. 458).  3. The idiom is indeed to be found in a striking number of rather sentimental or uplifting fictions of the mid-nineteenth century, such as Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of the Present Time by Fanny Fern (1854), Tregarvon by Amy Key (1879) and Cecil May: A Tale of the Village by Fanny E. Lacy (1848).  4. The 1827 historical novel, thriller and love story I promessi sposi (It.: The Betrothed) by the Italian writer and poet Alessandro Manzoni (1785–1873), set in the 1620s to 1630s, memorably evokes the plague of Milan in 1630, and rumours of a link to a poison spread by smearing an infected yellow ointment on door handles. DHL had sent her the novel on 9 February, along with the American historian William Hickling Prescott’s Conquest of Peru; in his accompanying letter, he evokes novels by George Sand. See below, n. 8, and LDHL, vol. 3, p. 327.  5. KM was probably sending Morrell her story ‘Je ne parle pas français’; see above, p. 246.  6. As literary reviewer of French works for the TLS, JMM was particularly well informed of recent and forthcoming publications from France. The French writer Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) was one of the most influential French authors of the early twentieth century, and a committed early Marxist intellectual. His stark evocations of frontline action and life in the trenches, in the 1916 prize-winning novel Le Feu, were widely discussed in artistic and pacifist circles in Britain and France at the time. Barbusse was then rallying friends and associates to join him in the founding of the Clarté [Light] movement, with its own journal of the same name, conceived as a progressive, intellectual, non-partisan network committed to constructive post-war reflexion. The movement, and the first issue of the journal, appeared later that spring.  7. The anthology Coloured Stars: Versions of Fifty Asiatic Love Poems, edited by the translator and poet Edward Powys Mathers (1892–1939), was published in autumn 1918. It offered an eclectic compilation of Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Persian and Arabic poetry, much of it retranslated from the Anthologie de l’amour asiatique, compiled by the poet and playwright Adolphe Thalasso (1858–1919), to whom Mathers pays tribute in his Preface. The ‘one or two’ poems KM singles out were ‘English Girl’, ‘Song’ and ‘Being Together at Night’, which an endnote in the anthology refers to as ‘thought in a Chinese brain, yet in form very wide of modern Chinese tradition’, written by ‘an American-born Chinese, a valet by profession, and by instinct an artist both in words and colour’ (Mathers, p. 63). The poet has unfortunately not been identified.  8. DHL’s letter (see above, p. 6) evokes three of Sand’s novels, including Les Maîtres sonneurs (1853), which he preferred and Le Marquis de Villemer (1860), a historical novel written partly in epistolary mode and set in provincial,



lady ottoline morrell   249 pre-revolutionary France. George Sand, the pseudonym of Amantine-Lucile Aurore Dupin (1804–76), was a militant and pioneering journalist, intellectual, author and playwright, whose sexual and vestimentary non-conformism scandalised mid-nineteenth-century French society. Besides publishing more than seventy novels, she was also a radical political campaigner, notably defending the rights of factory workers, rural labourers and prisoners, as well as working- and middle-class women. As well as appealing to KM (see also CW4, p. 304), her writings were much appreciated by various members of the Bloomsbury Group, including Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf. Recollecting her tender friendship with KM, Morrell later noted: One of [KM]’s heroines was George Sand, and I can see and hear her now, describing George Sand getting up very early in the morning and putting a little white shawl round her shoulders and creeping down to the room where she wrote, kneeling down to light the fire and start her writing before anyone was awake. She seemed to identify herself with this woman, who had the same passion for writing as she had, and the love of independence, and the romance of her lovers in the background. (Moorehead 1974, p. 186)

 9. (Fr.): ‘And the duke, who was still remarkably supple despite having grown rather stout and become a little stiff in the joints, came bounding out as briskly as a schoolboy.’ KM is quoting verbatim here from the closing sentences of Chapter 9. 10. Jorge Agustín Ruiz de Santayana (1863–1952) was a philosopher, poet and writer who was born in Madrid and educated at Harvard, where he was worked as Professor of Philosophy from 1907 until 1912. He then moved to Europe and spent the war years in Oxford, at which point he was introduced by Huxley to Morrell and her husband, and invited to a number of Garsington weekends. In later years, he settled in Rome. 11. JMM had been appointed editor of the Athenaeum that April and was busy commissioning literary contributions, including ‘Soliloquies in England’, a six-part series of short prose pieces by Santayana, ranging from first-hand musings and observations to literary sketches and social critique. Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies – fifty-five in all – was published in 1922, bringing together his contributions over six years to the London Mercury, Nation, New Republic, The Dial and the Journal of Philosophy, as well as the Athenaeum. 12. (Genteel euphemism): Private Water Closet. 13. (Fr.): But – my dear – my dear – but – come now – –. 14. ‘The George’ was a small restaurant and tea room in Oxford, where Ottoline records meeting friends at the university, or guests on their way to and from Garsington. See Moorehead 1974, pp. 224, 225, 261. 15. Having nursed Frieda through a long flu-like infection, DHL had been bedridden with similar symptoms, which, given his diseased lungs, were more debilitating. As he told Koteliansky one week later, ‘I am getting better – shall get out of bed on Sunday for ½ hour – still have the cough and the heart pains, but not so much’ (LDHL3, p. 329).

250   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [10 March 1919] [HRC] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] Monday. Dearest Ottoline, Very many thanks for sending me back the story. After I had posted it I reproached myself for having inflicted such an ill typed MSS on you when you were ill.1 I only hope your cold is better. If you knew (small comfort) how truly I sympathise with your ill health. It is an agony to live by oneself in that strange world that rude healthy creatures have no inkling of. The only consolation is that spring is before us – it cant be January again – though I feel with you that its difficult to ‘believe’. This has been an endless eternal winter. How can Nature remain so remote from ugly man – so blind and deaf to all his horrid ways – and just – calmly and wonderfully – act as though for angels! Will the sun really shine from morning till night again – Will it be warm enough for ‘us lizards of convalescence’ (as Nietzche says) to really bask. . . .2 I was thinking the other day of the beauty of Garsington in summer – your flower garden, your exquisite house – the windows and doors open and the light and shadow wandering through – the ‘group’ on the lawn – the ilex tree – and the bathers in the pool.3 What an achievement – what a creation it is! It is unforgettable – the beauty of it and the never to be felt anywhere else – the sense that Art is the important thing there – that one does not apologise for ones passion! I shall always be haunted by the memory of Garsington. Thinking of it is like thinking of another Age – – I have been so enjoying my holiday – (I am a horrible woman!). I have had the old dogs to see me in the evenings – but they – I confess have been awfully difficult and my stock of bones, sticks and stones is very low . . . Why won’t they ever bring their own bone? Why does one always find them sitting on the mat, with a mild roll of the eye & a thump or two of the tail – waiting for you to look for and find – something to fling before they’ll move. And even then – oh, that one had a longer reach! – that they weren’t back in two bounds – and again ready! – – But the sense of Freedom has been lovely. Oughtn’t one to live alone, really? I think one ought to but – – – With love, dearest Ottoline         Yours ever           Katherine. Notes 1. Morrell’s health was always fragile, but that spring, she had suffered particularly badly from debilitating headaches and a painful form of eczema. See Seymour, pp. 306–7.



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2. The convalescing lizard is an operative image in Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human (1878), where he links convalescence and alchemical regeneration, contrasting the human loss of a finger with the lizard’s power to regrow a lost digit. In preparation for this account, in the Preface, he underlines the essential complementarity of knowledge and convalescence before true recovery begins: Only now does he see himself – and what surprises he experiences as he does so! What happiness even in the weariness, the old sickness, the relapses of the convalescent! How he loves to sit sadly still, to spin out patience, to lie in the sun! Who understands as [the lizard] does the happiness that comes in winter, the spots of sunlight on the wall! They are the most grateful animals in the world, also the most modest! These convalescents and lizards again half turned towards life. (Nietzsche, pp. 276; 5). 3. The ‘great ilex tree’ in Garsington’s garden marks a focal spot in the recollections of KM and a vast number of Morrell’s friends of their times there. It was sitting in its shade that she first conceived the dream of building a haven for her friends, family and vulnerable artists during the war (Moorehead 1974, pp. 3–5). It was also in the magical context of the moonlit garden, the ilex tree and the ‘steel-dark pond’ that Morrell recalls a party that inspired KM’s most memorable evocation of the Garsington parties (pp. 186–7; see also CP, pp. 156–7).

[mid-April 1919] [HRC] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] Ottoline dearest, I know I have not written for shamefully long, and my heart troubles me about it. It is always the same – if once I don’t write – I fall into this dismal silence – and am nothing but a sorry wretch – the most graceless friend alive. Your exquisite letter made me feel the horror I am. And this weather – these first thrilling days of real spring always bring you before me so visibly. I know you love them as I do; I know you have the same Horror of that endless winter – – ––– over at last. Will you come & see me when you are in town again? There are so many things I long to talk over with you. So much seems to have happened and changed – I suppose it hasn’t really – It is only the lifting of that appaling cold, dark wing that has hidden everything for what feels to me – an eternity – I really can hardly remember what happened before the winter. But I must not speak of it – The trees are trees again & one can face the light without shuddering. Garsington must be very lovely just now & your garden – It has been a miracle to watch the roots & bulbs buried by M. last October burst out of their little graves and put on beauty – rather meagre London beauty – but reinforced by nine immense dandelions the garden is to a kind eye – quite gay – – –

252   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 The Mountain is still with me until I am ‘suited’! with a housemaid – It requires a very special kind of faith to remove Rhodesian mountains. M. and I seem to work like niggers at the Athenaeum – I wonder if you really like it. I feel rather like the pink icing butterfly on the dark sumptuous tragic cake – very unworthy. I thought the first numbers were too depressed but it is sitting up and taking more exciting nourishment now, I think. It is great fun – We both enjoy it. Its such a funny company to be sitting at Athene’s tea board ––– But I do wish the other guests would arrive – the gay unexpected ones – Oh this spring – It makes me long for happiness – That is so vague. Each year I think – this year I shall not feel it so keenly – but I feel it more – Why are human beings the only ones who do not put forth fresh buds – exquisite flowers and leaves. I cannot bear to go among them – I sit here or take small walks & there seems a blessing fallen upon the world just as long as one does not see the people or know of their ways. We have all been wintry far too long – Really – on some of these days one is tired with bliss – I long to tell someone – to feel it immediately shared – felt without my asking ‘do you feel it?’ – – – Do you know what I mean? No, dearest I am not Henry King.1 I do not even know him – This is only the beginning of a letter – I could not let another day go by –        I am always always with         love           Your             Katherine. Note 1. A renewed interest in the poetry of Henry King (1592–1669), a contemporary and close friend of John Donne’s who served as Dean of Rochester before becoming Bishop of Chichester, had been sparked in 1915, when a new anthology of his poems and a study of his life and works were published, and then reviewed in the Athenaeum. However, in the first months of JMM’s editorship of the Athenaeum, a poem entitled ‘Sublunary’, signed ‘Henry King’, appeared which was not by the Jacobean forebear but a contemporary poet; it was followed by another contribution, ‘Who Are These’, the following month. As Michael Whitworth reveals, after consulting marked copies of the journal, JMM received payment for these poems, paid ‘c/o Arthur Murry’, JMM’s brother (in Brooker and Thacker, pp. 366–7). JMM later used the pseudonym for critical reviews in the Adelphi.

[early May 1919] [N] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] Dearest Ottoline I am simply overjoyed at the thought of seeing you on Wednesday. I shall keep it free for us. If only the day will be still and warm; then my



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room is so remote from all the London horrors that distract one – I am so near to you in spirit all these days. But why is there this division between humanity & the lovely external world – With all this beauty why cant we all come forth radiant? Just at first – one is overcome by the beauty & the divine relief of Spring and it is enough – but after it makes one feel more solitary than ever – It seems so much less natural to rejoice alone rather than to grieve alone – I’d so much rather share my joy. But nobody wants it. M. comes into my room sometimes as though the Athenaeum were edited down a coal mine – I ought not to write this. It is no use – no use expecting miracles. The only consolation is work. But why is one always met with the gape, the stare – or silence. Sometimes I feel one lives among automatic pianos – & I hate them so much while I am fumbling for that penny to start them going – – – ––– Forgive me dearest – Life is particularly unpleasant today. Young Arthur is here also, eating up the loaves & jam pots & saying ‘I don’t know how it is I’m hungry’. His mother never ought to let him leave the house without a pudding in a basin. People ravage one – & yet – – – – one longs for them so. What can be done? How I look forward to Wednesday – If you knew! Yours ever with love Katherine. [mid-May 1919] [HRC] 2 Portland Villas Dearest Ottoline, The exquisite tulips & some sprigs of rosemary & verbena have brought your flower garden into my room. How I love them! Each time I get up from the writing table I go over to them and take a long long look – And oh – I want to say to them: live for ever! Don’t fade – dont die. If you knew how we have longed for you you would not have the heart to be one petal less perfect than you are – at any rate not for a long time – Thank you for them, dearest friend. How very delightful it sounds – a driving tour. I look at your postcard & wonder where you wrote it – what was happening just at that time – I felt the sudden little pang of strange cold as you went into the church where the lovely windows are. God be praised – the weather is divine. I sit in my room, writing or reading; it is like being on a ship that has at last found a fair harbour. Even if I cant put out to sea just now or even share the pleasures of the shore – it is enough to be out of the cruel weather – I was very disappointed – not to come. But my doctor would not let me. There is a kind of small fire at present in my left lung which mustn’t be fanned or fed.1 What a cursed thing – But its no use lamenting.

254   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 I wonder if you feel too, this year more than any other year, a longing for the Spring to stay Spring. The flowers have fallen from the pear tree outside my window – just a few little silver petals are still spinning down – & the green is darker. I grudge it so. My Lotus Land2 would be an eternal first spring day when everything is in full leaf and the buds just unfolded. If only we could meet more often and for longer. When* Brettie’s house is finished perhaps you will come and stay with her & we can sit on the Heath – uninterrupted. (There is a gramophone playing ‘Wie Einst in Mai’3 – overpowering –) Goodbye dearest friend. Do not forget how much I love you. Katherine. *Original underlined three times for emphasis.

Notes 1. KM’s diary offers a rare, explicit mention of her precarious health just two days previously: ‘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’ (CW4, p. 285). 2. In Homer’s The Odyssey, the Land of the Lotus Eaters is where Odysseus and his ship land, having been blown off course by adverse winds; the crew set to eating the divine fruit that grow there, but it proves to leave them in such a languid state that they no longer want to leave. It is perhaps less Homer’s account (which says little of the place itself) than Tennyson’s which KM has in mind here. His ‘The Lotus-Eaters’ describes in fine, vivid detail a land of sumptuous colour, music, light and intoxicating natural beauty. 3. Wie einst im Mai (Ger.: Like once in May) is a 1913 operetta by Walter and Willo Kollo, with a libretto by Rudolf Bernauer and Rudolf Schanzer. Its four acts depict the life and fortunes of the two protagonists over seventy-five years, from 1838 until the present day.

[late May 1919] [N] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] Dearest Ottoline, I am awfully sorry you will not be at our Party. Heaven knows it won’t be a thrilling affair but I longed for you to come & for us to exchange a wise glance – About the other Party – well, I think people are mad and bad and so stupid that ones heart grows cold. Dearest – Murry asks me to say he would love to come on the seventh for the weekend – – – Would you have me too? Is that like Julian H – proposing myself so blandly. But if we go down together to Oxford & take a car I know I could manage it by then. I feel much better: it would be such a great joy. If you have not a corner – of course I understand.



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I can’t tell you how I long to see Garsington – to be with you there and walk in the garden & talk – – – Whenever I think of you things to say – rush into my heart – Oh those insufferable stupid little people – I am idiotic from translating. I am turning into English La jeune fille bien elevée for an American publisher,1 and every moment one wants to say: but its so much better in french – do let me leave this little bit in french – Its an exquisite day here but my ‘house party’ is very miserable. I meet them on the stairs, pictures of heavy woe – drear nighted decembers.2 How can one do without them?      Ever your devoted             Katherine. Notes 1. Like other translation work undertaken by KM, this remains a mystery – no details of this commission have been traced. La Jeune Fille bien élevée (1909) is a restrained novel of sentiment by the French novelist and literary essayist René Boylesve, the pen-name of René Tardiveau (1867–1926). A poised, reticent figure and restrained social observer who moved in the same circles as André Gide, Paul Valéry and Anatole France, Boylesve was elected to the prestigious Académie Française in 1918. It was this honour that possibly prompted the interest of the American publisher – who may have been Charles Scribner’s and Sons, who had published another novel by Boylesve the previous year. 2. ‘Drear-Nighted December’ is a poem written by the English Romantic poet John Keats (1795–1821). Written very close to the winter solstice at exactly the same time as Keats’s famous reflections on negative capability, the poem expresses a highly comparable association of ideas as it shifts from observing the steadfastness of a tree and the constancy of a babbling brook to the ephemerality and vulnerability of youth. It was in early 1919 that KM had begun a series of sensitive and detailed readings into the life and work of Keats, whose early death from tuberculosis clearly struck a poignant note in KM’s heart and had possibly first sparked her interest. See CW4, p. 239.

[4 June 1919] [N] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] Wednesday. Dearest Ottoline The East Wind has done its worst with me & Im not allowed a journey. Was there ever so damnable a thing. Why should one’s delights be so snatched away – But my cough is the devil again & I have to keep

256   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 ‘still as a mouse’ – I shall simply have to give up finally my longing to come to you at Garsington – Alls against it. I am cursed like Job.1 The disappointment is really awful: I had set my heart upon those days – & here I am ‘shaking the bottle’ indeed. Added to that – (as if that weren’t enough) M’s printers have declared a holiday. He will have to get an issue of the A. out over the weekend & is simply tied to the office. Nothing can be done: he’s tried everything &* Sullivan’s blackbird2 has called him away into the country so his work too falls on M’s head. We are undone – Please try & forgive us. I feel you would if you knew how we’d looked forward – – – – – The marvellous basket (which I hope has arrived safely) put the party to shame. Such a wealth of beauty! I have never seen such flowers or so many. I half expected to find the infant Moses under the irises3 – – But all through the Infernal Dull Dog of a party I saw the peonies & the delphiniums & the lilac & simply clung to the sight of them. No more parties – no more people – The flowers are so much lovelier. I am glad you were not here. It was too dull, & everybody seemed so preposterous. Clive out-Clived himself. Jack Hutch sitting on a sofa like HumptyDumpty4 but alas! never falling – Roger whom I cant see except as a sheep with knitting needles in his hair5 & the mountain offering sweetness as though she had the head of John the Baptist on a charger6 – When it was over I wanted to lie down and groan. Shall I see you soon? I went one day to see poor Brett. Poor little creature! Like a flea on a ladder in her Victorian jungle.7 She will never be straight. What a ghastly place it is – so huge and so portentous. I felt wretched for her. She is so helpless. One stepped over old curtain fittings and old boxes and ladders – & she kept wondering what one does to floors – Does one stain them? Are boards beautiful? Some one had come & said they were – – – – – I am so disenchantée – I cannot write today – Forgive me. I am tired of the lean years – Ever your loving           Katherine. *Original underlined three times for emphasis.

Notes 1. See Job 3: 3, 1–26. The chapter begins, ‘After this opened Job his mouth, and cursed his day. And Job spake, and said, Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived.’ Job’s lamentation is spoken after enduring a terrible series of trials, evil and suffering which he undergoes when God and Satan are vying to test his uprightness and virtue. 2. As soon as JMM took over the editorship of the Athenaeum he appointed Sullivan sub-editor. As well as taking in hand the demanding editing responsibilities and paperwork, Sullivan wrote extensively for the journal over their years there, particularly on matters of science and music.



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3. See Exodus 2: 2, 1–10. After the Pharaoh of Egypt has decreed that the male children of Hebrew women should be slaughtered at birth, a woman who gives birth to a son hides him in an ark made of bulrushes, and hides him in the irises by the water’s edge. It is here that the Pharaoh’s daughter finds him, feels tender compassion for the child and adopts him as her own, calling him Moses ‘Because I drew him out of the water.’ 4. The image, taken from the children’s nursery rhyme ‘Humpty Dumpty Sat on the Wall’, is above all reminiscent of Tenniel’s famous drawing of the egg-shaped Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, Chapter 6. 5. In Chapter 5 of Through the Looking-Glass, Alice is having a conversation with the White Queen when she starts baa-ing and turning woolly. When Alice next looks, she has turned into a sheep knitting. As in note 4 above, KM refers above all here to Tenniel’s memorable illustration of the sheep in the tea-shop window, wearing a pair of round spectacles perched on the end of its nose and peering genially over them. 6. See Matthew 14: 6 –12, in which Herod’s daughter is asked by her father what present she would like to receive on his birthday, in return for her beautiful dancing. She replies, ‘Give me here John the Baptist’s head in a charger.’ The account has inspired countless artists, especially in the early Renaissance, showing the peaceful severed head of the martyr on a silver platter or dish. KM’s depiction of Ida Baker in the role of the daughter is particularly reminiscent of a series of portraits of Salomé and the head by Giovanni Andrea Sirani. 7. Brett had just moved to her new house and studio, situated at 28 Thurlow Road, Hampstead.

[7 June 1919] [HRC] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] My dearest Ottoline, Today was perfect – perfect – I leaned out of the window after you had gone and watched the willows flying in the sun. Someone was playing the piano – seeking something, lightly, whimsically – & then suddenly there was a great plunge and oh! one was out of one’s depth and breathless with it. How can I tell you what it is to be with you & to enjoy your presence – I feel as though Ive come to another country – where – even to breathe the air is thrilling. Do remember how wonderful you are – how beautiful. This hideous corrupt London has fallen away from me – (It does even mount up here, like a great muddy tide –) I love to think you are away from it – My incredible good fortune to have you for a friend! Katherine.

258   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [10 June 1919] [Stanford] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] Tuesday. Dearest Dearest Ottoline, I have to thank you for a Perfect letter . . If you knew how greedy I am of these glimpses you give me of your life. Its so strange. I positively lead another life with you there – bending over the flowers, sitting under the trees, feeling the delight of the heat and the shade . . . I have written to Frank Prewitt asking him to come & see us on Saturday.1 From his name one sees someone slender, dark, with something of the bird and the Indian in him. I hope he comes. Yes, I know just how you feel about Brett & when I had read your letter I felt tender towards her & sorry for her – for her incompleteness – But alas! yesterday afternoon she came to see me – It was Bank Holiday, hot & fine & in she came in that really grubby wool dress – unfastened down the front, showing the linen buttons. She carried a large bunch of ticklers and her felt hat was covered with paper feathers. The ensemble was like a dream. And I cant leave this unsaid. Is there no tap at Thurlow Road that she can put her toothbrush under? What a vile thing to say – but I was haunted by it all the time she was here – And then her idea to faire menage ensemble2 with Gertler and Nelson3 seems to me madness. She seems to spend her entire time with them, creeping in as she says after twelve oclock at night – and still her rooms in disorder – still paint pots – – – Only to hear of it – only to grin and watch an imitation of Chili4 rolling drunk made me so fatigued I felt I could have died. And she really hadn’t another word to say – not an idea. There she was, poor little creature like a jug on the doorstep of Thurlow Road waiting for Gertler or Nelson or Chili to come by with a little wagon and a rattle of cans – When she ended by saying she must get a little black frock like mine because it doesnt show the dirt, I felt, as Clive would say c’etait la comble!5 It is vile of me to write like that – but – I do feel it. I have been working all the morning, trying to discover why ‘Java Head’ is not a good novel and trying to say it is not a bad one6 – But one always seems to arrive at the same conclusion – nothing goes deep enough – the risk has not been taken – Whenever the crisis is reached they decide to wait until the sea is calmer – How tired one becomes of all these surfaces – Why do not more people live through and through. Must one spend ones life paying calls on the emotions – Why isn’t the dreary fashion obsolete – – – And if it is not this superficial nothingness it is M. au grand serieux,7 throwing himself bodily into the milk jug after the drowning fly! Piffle before the wind – – Dearest I have a plan which is so sweet to think of – – – Is it possible? When I am established in a little villa in San Remo (or near San Remo)



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would you come & stay a month with me – or as long as you wished? I mean to have a little villa and a good maid. Couldn’t you escape a month of this winter and come – You know (but not altogether) what joy it would give me to do all I could. I feel nobody understands how you suffer from these headaches – I do. The change might do you good. Then, at last, there would be time to talk. I am going the first week in September. But oh – if we could have a few weeks Gaierty. The sun burns today and our mysterious plant the anchusa is in bloom.8 But I should like to see whole vast plains covered with it. But instead I must go down to the Laundry Office & ask why they have carried forward 10/8. Why – oh why – and what a mission to take one forth on a golden day. And then Bertie says a woman is incapable of real detachment. But only to think of the things that do catch at our heels if we try to fly! I can imagine a whole rich Hell where the weekly books were always late, always more than one expected and always had unaccountable items. How one grudges the life and huge energy and spirit that money steals from one. I long to spend and I have a horror of spending: money has corrupted me these last years. But oh – dearest what am I doing – writing these wretched things to you – Forgive me: I will not do it again. How lovely the fields must be – I wish we were walking there – at our ease – Those bright silver daisies are in flower and the sorrel is in feather – We should pause and admire and talk until suddenly I felt music come streaming down those great beams of sunlight & little trills, little shakes came from the flowers and the wind ran among the harp like tree & the beauty of Life was almost too great to bear – I am sure if we were together we should be caught up to heaven in chariots of fire innumerable times. Goodbye, my wonderful friend. I am your devoted,                  Katherine. Notes 1. Frank Prewett (1893–1962), widely known in Bloomsbury and Garsington circles as ‘Toronto’, after his home town, was a Canadian poet who had come into contact with a number of his fellow poets and peers during his military service in Europe during World War One. He met Sassoon when the two were in hospital, having been wounded at Ypres. He spent a lot of time at Garsington both during leave in the war years, and immediately after demobilisation, before returning to Canada, in part under suspicion of tax evasion. His friends liked to believe he had Iroquois blood, but going by Graves’s description, which is the most detailed yet traced, their hypothesis was grounded merely on his ‘high cheek-bones, dark colouring, graceful walk, and fiery heart’ (See Graves in Prewett, p. 8). 2. (Fr.): Set up house together. 3. A former Slade School of Art student and fellow painter from Gertler’s circles, Geoffrey Nelson (1893–1943) was a satellite figure in a number of Bloomsbury and bohemian circles in the 1910s. He spent increasingly extended periods of

260   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 time in France, where he settled permanently in the 1920s, and is possibly better remembered now as one of the Brittany artists from the ‘Pont-Aven’ school rather than one of London’s post-Impressionists. 4. Chili was the nickname of Alvaro Guevara. See above, p. 193, n. 4. 5. (Fr.): It was the last straw. 6. Java Head was the latest novel by the American novelist Joseph Hergesheimer (1880–1954), then rapidly emerging as a writer esteemed by the general public and critics; his heyday was, however, followed by a more enduring phase of indifference and neglect. Interestingly, the review KM was then writing for the Athenaeum seems to pick up intuitively on both the clear promise and originality of his descriptive powers, and the more predictable, conventional features of plot which prevailed over any lasting impression. The most striking feature in her article is the seascape she describes by way of an introduction. See CW3, pp. 473–5. 7. (Fr.): At the heights of seriousness. 8 . There are a huge variety of Anchusa, a medium-height borage plant common in rock gardens and memorable for their intense, bluey-mauve flowers, reminiscent of large violets. Their ‘mystery’ for KM and Morrell possibly lay in the use of Anchusa officinalis in a number of traditional and homeopathic remedies, notably for digestive complaints and lung infections.

[11 June 1919] [HRC] 2 Portland Villas Dearest – The flowers! I came in from posting your book and the whole house had a sweet scent. What peonies! And the roses. I am saving the petals to dry. Oh, they are all so wonderfully beautiful. When M. came home we made a solemn journey & reviewed all the gay bouquets. He has such a longing to grow flowers – and when they really do set him alight he glows almost enough to satisfy me. . . . I embrace you for them. While I sit writing here I am conscious of them all the time – I wish I were a poet. I’d so much rather write about them than – the things these poets write about – pompes funèbres.1 The sound of the wind is very loud in this house. The curtains fly – there are strange pointed shadows – full of meaning – and a glittering light upon the mirrors. Now it is dark – and one feels so pale – even ones hands feel pale – and now a wandering broken light is over everything. It is so exciting – so tiring, too – one is waiting for something to happen – One is not oneself at all in this weather – one is a being possessed – caught in the whirl of it – walking about very lightly – blowing about – and deeply, deeply excited . . . Do you feel that, too? I feel one might say anything – do anything – wreck one’s own life – wreck anothers – What does it matter. Everything is flying fast – Everything is on the wing.



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On Bank Holiday, mingling with the crowd a saw a magnificent sailor outside a public house. He was a cripple; his legs were crushed, but his head was beautiful – youthful and proud. On his bare chest two seagulls fighting were tattooed in red and blue. And he seemed to lift himself – above the crowd – above the tumbling wave of people and he sang: ‘Heart of mine – summer is waning’2 Oh! Heavens, I shall never forget how he looked and how he sang. I knew at the time this is one of the things one will always remember. It clutched my heart – It flies on the wind today – one of those voices, you know, crying above the talk and the laughter and the dust and the toys to sell. Life is wonderful – wonderful – bitter-sweet, an anguish and a joy – and oh! I do not want to be resigned – I want to drink deeply – deeply – Shall I ever be able to express it. It is always of you I think when I see & feel these things. I have had such a tragic letter from Brett. Its made me feel a perfect wretch to have written as I did about her. I wrote to her, too, and said I really didn’t like flings unless they were ‘delicate’ flings & drunken Chilis I could not bear. And poor little Brettie said she agreed – she didn’t really enjoy her Bolshies3 and hated the tittle-tattle of Nina Hamnet.4 But what can one do for her? She sounded so helpless. I do not know. Have you seen ‘Mary Olivier’? By May Sinclair.5 It is coming to me for review. It sounds from what I have read – most extraordinary – And the new Quarterly ‘The Owl’ flew into the house the other day6 – What a forlorn old bird – what pickings for a nest! My cat and kitten are fighting and loving on the couch. First the cat devours the kitten & then the kitten eats up the Mother. Lawrence would see an Unholy Meaning in them7 –––– Goodbye for now, dearest Ottoline Ever your devoted Katherine. Notes 1. (Fr.): Funeral parlour / undertakers. 2. If the street performer sang one song with the lyrics cited here, it has not been traced. However, there were two popular American songs at the time which KM and Morrell probably knew: ‘To the Road’ by Paul Laurence Dunbar (whose first line is ‘Cool the wind for the summer is waning’) and ‘Heart of Mine’ by Ariadne Holmes Edwards, both of which the singer might have sung. 3. By 1919, the civil wars in Russia were being waged, and in the context of the Allied Expeditionary Force’s engagement on the side of the Whites, there remained a certain degree of press and public interest in the Red (Bolshevist) counter-attacks. Bloomsbury sympathies were largely with the more moderate, Menshevik wing; there was, however, firm support for the more radical forces among intellectuals and exiles in London. See above, p. 86, n. 1.

262   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 4. Nina Hamnett (1890–1956) was a Welsh-born artist and writer who was closely associated with fellow artists from the Slade and the London School of Art, and also with the Bloomsbury Group artists and intellectuals – Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Roger Fry. She was as renowned for her flamboyant lifestyle as she was for her works, though until recent years, she had faded from histories of the avant-garde movements more quickly than did many of her fellows. 5. May Sinclair was the pen-name of the English poet and novelist Mary Amelia St Clair Sinclair (1863–1946), one of the pioneering experimentalists in early Modernist explorations of psychological realism and consciousness in the context of emerging psychoanalytical theory, as well as a popular and prolific writer. She was also a committed feminist and an active member of the Women Writers’ Suffrage League. Mary Olivier: A Life is a partly autobiographical Künstlerroman that reflects both her feminism and her evolving literary technique. For KM’s review of the novel, now acknowledged as one of the landmarks of early Modernist fiction, see CW3, pp. 475–7. 6. The Owl – A Miscellany was of the extremely short-lived little magazines of the era, running for just two issues in 1919, plus a third, Winter Owl, in 1923. The editor was Robert Graves, whose announcement of purpose in the first Foreword (‘The Owl has no politics, leads no new movement and is not even the organ of any particular generation,’ p. 1) seemed to sum up the generous but unadventurous spirit of the endeavour. Contributors included Max Beerbohm, William Orpen, J. C. Squire and Walter de la Mare; its impressively rich variety of illustrations and aesthetic styles sets its apart from many other reviews of the same era. 7. DHL’s vivid interest in psychoanalytical interpretations, and especially sexual symbolism, was a source of mirth and comment amongst his friends. See above p. 98, n. 2.

[18 June 1919] [HRC] This is such a choppy letter, bumping over the waves. But deep down I am simply rejoicing & rejoicing because we are friends – Wednesday.

2 Portland Villas

Dearest dearest Ottoline, Your letter this morning was Great Joy – There is so much I want to answer. How cursed that you must go to a Nursing Home on Monday.1 Why does one have these complicated internal arrangements when they can be disposed of. I do wish we were more lightly furnished. Its such a waste of energy keeping all these mysterious contrivances in repair – and oh! such an expense!! Murry is on the track of books for you – so am I. I shall get the Mountain to leave a parcel on Monday, dearest. Please don’t attempt to come up here; it is so tiring. When you are well enough to see visitors – may I know. I shall hire a car and have a blessed half-hour with you – even if we don’t talk.



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Oh, Ottoline, surely it is possible that you may come abroad for a month or six weeks in the winter. At any rate, I shall hug the idea. I shall spend my play time seeing the little villa, the garden – the stone verandah, preparing your room, going to the station to meet you – waiting for years before the train is signaled – – – – – – – It must happen! I cannot get five pence out of my sister.2 Somehow, at sight of me, her gold purse vanishes. She is far poorer than I am – I almost offer to pay her fares from Dover Street3 to Hampstead. She shows me her new shoes – ‘seven guineas my dear!’ And her new little frock – ‘sixteen, and only foulard!4 Dont you know the address of some really cheap little woman who would press my tennis skirt for about one and sixpence!’ She and the stockbroker aunt5 come purring up to town in the new Rolls Royce – motoring through the New Forest – – – And last time, for a great treat ‘my dear, we have brought you some Harrods chocolates’.6 Half a pound of Harrod’s chocolates tasting of the Carpet Department!! I hope but don’t believe I will get my own back in Heaven. But after all, one does get ones own back on earth. How dull they are – Their life is really based on food. I always see that easy, smiling approach to the fat table – the drawing in of chairs, the shaking out of napkins. They have the art of it to their finger tips – It is their Ballet – their theatre – their book that they have a perfect right to criticise, dip into, taste and enjoy. – – Did you realise, when you wrote it that exquisite touch about the White Peony – When I read that I saw the whole week-end, as it were. It was perfect. I believe dearest Ottoline, you always take away that ravishing white peony. Every morning I think the rain must come – but it does not come. The adorable sun shines through the silver – I feel I should like it never to rain again. Prewitt – we liked very much. He was extraordinarily nervous, poor boy, but his sincerity was so good. I hope Murry can help him. I felt he could. He told us, in such a charming way what Garsington had ‘meant’ to him. That warmed my heart to him . . . Brettie and Gertler came in on Monday. She wrung my heart again, especially as against Gertler’s external competence. She had taken aspirin and was almost stone deaf. I must be more tolerant and try to help her and be ‘neighbourly’ – Have you seen ‘Mary Olivier’. I reviewed it this week. Will you tell me if you think I am wrong about it? It took me hours to do. I love this little picture of you. . . . M. knows nothing of the new Andre Gide7 – The other books he says are not up to much. Have you seen the New Decameron?8 It is like a canvas suitcase full of travellers samples of canvas shoes ––– awful. Dearest this letter is a scrapbook – but I had to write immediately – yours has made my day so happy. Ever your devoted             Katherine.

264   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Notes 1. According to one of Morrell’s biographers, ‘One evening at the opera she nearly fainted; later tonsillitis was diagnosed and in June [1919] she went into a nursing home for an operation’ (Darroch, p. 208). 2. KM’s recently widowed sister Charlotte (Chaddie) had been living in London and working for the War Graves Registration. As many of KM’s family letters reveal, their financial resources and lifestyles at the time were very different, frequently triggering KM’s acerbic irony. See, for instance, a letter to Ida and the introduction to Charlotte Beauchamp in CL1, pp. 125; 198–200. 3. Chaddie was a member of the Empress Club on Dover Street, close to Piccadilly, London; it was a select ‘ladies’ club’ founded in 1897, offering drawing rooms and dining spaces to its wealthy members, as well as accommodation, study facilities and modern communication systems. 4. (Fr.): Lightweight silk or cotton [also: headscarf]; a number of nineteenthcentury fashion and housekeeping manuals note that ‘foulard’ fabric suits all budgets and all dress styles. 5. The Beauchamp sisters’ Aunt Belle, their mother’s sister, lived in Surrey with her stockbroker husband, Harry Trinder. 6. The fashionable department store Harrods, on Brompton Road in Knightsbridge, London, was – and is still – renowned for its extensive, architecturally imposing site, as well as the variety of its departments and their high-quality stock. 7. André Gide (1868–1951), the French essayist, critic, novelist and highly influential arbiter of the French literary avant-garde of the early twentieth century, was also the editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française. His Symphonie Pastorale had just been published in France; it is a tensely understated confessional novel in which a Protestant pastor recalls, and tries to account for, his passionate love for a young blind girl under his protection. 8. The New Decameron was an anthology series first launched in 1919, as a contemporary revival of Boccaccio’s Decameron and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; stories were presented as contributions from a fictional Hector Turpin and a ‘strange company’ of holiday-makers travelling together – their tale being summarised in the prologue. Each volume was presented as a day on the journey, but the series, which was only moderately successful, was irregularly paced – volume two appeared in 1920, volume three in 1922 and volume five not until 1927. Storm Jameson, W. F. Harvey, Dorothy L. Sayers and Compton MacKenzie were among the first contributors.

[21 June 1919] [Queen’s] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] My dearest Ottoline, I am in the grip of an appalling chill, plastered with Baume Bengué,1 safety-pinned into a wadding jacket with the Mountain over above under and around me. I have been too ill to write until this afternoon. . . . the cold wind caught me in the middle of a quarrel with the cook. Their combined knives I suppose I swallowed. [Section missing]



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Did you enjoy Virginia I wonder?2 She was coming to see me today, but I have not the puff or the brain. Roger dined with us on Thursday; the knitting needles were very large.3 He seemed to have a kind of composite coiffure of knitting needles and cobwebs. There is something almost dreadful in a man of his age, still so naive (!!) still not at all certain what anything else means. He is like a lesser character in one of the hired carriages at a Tourgeniff pic-nic.4 Everything Murry says he appears to write down as a kind of prescription, in a little book – a dose or two of this – a dose or two of that might be helpful. Je crois que non.5 A big bored blackbird is fluting away in the pear tree outside. I am sure he knows a great deal more about the secret of art than these baabaas. He (Roger) thinks that Virginia is going to reap the world. That, I don’t doubt, put on my impatience. After a very long time I nearly pinned a paper on my chest, ‘I too, write a little’. But refrained. Oh, dearest, they don’t matter. But ‘artists’ as Tchechov decides in this week’s Athenaeum are dull dogs.6 At that moment I was interrupted by ‘Elizabeth’ coming in out of the rain,7 hung with fringe, fur and feather. I have not seen her for ten years: it was so queer. We sat, talking across a hollow and saying very much the same things in very much the same way – Notes 1. Baume Bengué, developed by the French doctor Jules Bengué in the late nineteenth century, is an analgesic ointment with warming properties used to relieve pain in inflammatory joints and sprained muscles. 2. Woolf had been on a daytrip to Garsington on 21 June; she notes in a letter to her sister, ‘Eliot is to be there. He and Murry were much abused in the Times for their works, and Murry a good deal depressed’ (LVW2, p. 370). 3. See above, p. 256, for KM’s comparison of Roger Fry and the sheep in spectacles in Tenniel’s illustration for Through the Looking-Glass. 4. The opening scene of Turgenev’s Smoke (1867), as well as a later chapter in the novel set in Baden, depict fashionable crowds in the garden cafés eating picnics in the heady fumes of cigar smoke and listening to a ‘pot-pourri’ of Viennese music. 5. (Fr.): I think not. 6. KM’s selection of letters by Chekhov, which she had co-translated with Koteliansky, were then appearing as an extended series in the Athenaeum. The 27 June issue contains a single letter to Souvorin, in which Chekhov relates an evening reception of the Society of Arts and Literature, attended by the key figures of the day. Having evoked a few memorable moments of the evening, Chekhov comments, ‘If actors, artists and authors are indeed the best element in society, then we are in a bad way. Fine indeed must society be if its best element is so poor in colour, in desires, in intentions, so poor in taste, beauty, initiative’ (CW3, p. 226). 7. This letter marks KM’s reunion with her cousin, the author Elizabeth von Arnim (née Mary Annette Beauchamp), who was then very unhappily

266   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 married to Bertrand Russell’s elder brother, John Francis, 2nd Earl Russell. For biographical details and the cousins’ extensive correspondence in later years, see CL1, pp. 20–64.

[27 June 1919] [HRC] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] Friday. My dearest ever dearest Ottoline – I was so thankful to hear from you. Its dreadful that you should suffer. Operations are such a strange shock to one, too. They are, somehow, mysteries when all the surface activity of them is stripped away. It doesn’t in the least matter if the operation is what they call slight or deadly serious; the effect is the same – I feel. I understand exactly what you say about Virginia – beautiful brilliant creature that she is and suddenly at the last moment, turning into a bird & flying up to a topmost bough and continuing the conversation from there1 . . . She delights in beauty as I imagine a bird does; she has a bird’s eye for ‘that angular high stepping green insect’ that she writes about2 and she is not of her subject – she hovers over, dips, skims, makes exquisite flights – sees the lovely reflections in water that a bird must see – but not humanly. She wrote to me the other day3 telling me that Roger was good enough to be pleased with me – (!!) and also that she considered him a type of almost perfect middle age – what middle age ought to be, enfin. That does make me hold up my hands. I wish there was another ‘Young Visiters’4 called ‘Roger Fry’s Surprise’ – including a visit to Paris . . . I can imagine the fun. This devilish cold persists. I am still in my life jacket, plastered underneath with unguents. Oh – these nights – sitting up in bed, waiting for the black trees to turn into green trees. And yet, when dawn does come, it is always so beautiful & terrible – the coming of the light such a miracle – that its almost worth waiting for. And then, as the hours strike through the night I wander through cities – in fancy – slip along unfamiliar streets, invisible – wonder who lives in these great houses with heavy doors, or, down on some quay side I watch the boats putting out in the dark & smell the night scent of the open sea – until lying awake becomes an ecstasy. Ones own life – one’s own secret private life – what a queer positive thing it is. Nobody knows where you are – nobody has the remotest idea who you are, even. The Brontes – Last night in bed I was reading Emily’s poems. There is one:



lady ottoline morrell   267 I know not how it falls on me This summer evening, hushed and lone, Yet the faint wind comes soothingly With something of an olden tone Forgive me if I’ve shunned so long Your gentle greeting, earth and air! Yet sorrow withers e’en the strong And who can fight against despair?5

The first line – why is it so moving? And then the exquisite simplicity of ‘Forgive me’. . . . I think the Beauty of it is contained in one’s certainty that it is not Emily disguised – who writes – it is Emily. Now-a-days one of the chief reasons for ones dissatisfaction with modern poetry is one can’t be sure that it really does belong to the man who writes it. It is so tiring – isnt it – never to leave the Masked Ball – never – never – The house is full of women, today. The peevish old lying cook in the kitchen who says it is I who make all the work – L. M. bringing my lunch with a ‘Take, eat, this is my body’ air,6 an old ’un sweeping the stairs away & down in the studio a little dwarf sewing buttons & strings on to Murry’s clothes and making immense pale darns in his Hebridean socks . . . M. has moved into his new offices and the burden is a trifle lighter. Tomlinson is in the same building7 & they occasionally have a little gaierty on the stairs – heat pennies, tie them on a string and slip them under Massingham’s door8 – or lean out of the window and angle for passing hats with a bent pin . . . This cheers M. greatly. I keep thinking of Elizabeth’s hands.9 Did you notice them. Tiny and white covered with large pointed rings. Little pale parasites, creeping towards the thin bread and butter as if it were their natural food ––– Oh – how I long* to talk with you – Dearest – are you comfortable in the Nursing Home? Do they give you a fire and enough hot water bottles. Is the pain less today? You will take very great care of yourself – won’t you? It is a joy to think that you may be a great deal better now this is over – I try and console myself with – half a lung is better than no head – but at present I don’t feel Ive too much of the latter.      Ever your devoted              Katherine. *Original underlined three times for emphasis.

Notes 1. Recalling her very extended friendship with Woolf in later years, Morrell notes: Again and again, I felt she was like a great bird sailing by, that alights to parley for a few moments and then resumes her flight. As long as she can

268   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 live in her dream I think she is happy, but I believe at times she realizes her isolation and that life presents an insoluble problem to her. She flies above the earth but has no contact with heaven. These were my impressions of Virginia in 1917 and they seem to me in 1936 to have been true of her then. But as the years have passed I have been able to get into closer touch with her and have found her a very enchanting faithful friend. Her intellect is so highly sensitive, so subtle that it lights up the world to her with a more brilliant light than to most of us. How ruthless she can be! But how much I love her! (Moorehead 1974, p. 245). 2. Woolf’s short story ‘Kew Gardens’, published in a slim volume as a single prose piece by Hogarth Press in May 1919, details the path of a snail in a flowerbed, advancing as if wilfully over the loose earth; the narrator contrasts its course to that of ‘the singular high stepping angular green insect who attempted to cross in front of it, and waited for a second with its antennæ trembling as if in deliberation, and then stepped off as rapidly and strangely in the opposite direction’ (V. Woolf 2003, p. 85). 3. Like most of the letters that Woolf sent to KM, this one has not unfortunately survived. 4. The Young Visiters is a novel by the British writer Daisy Ashford, which she claimed to have written when aged nine. KM reviewed the work, without great enthusiasm, in the Athenaeum (see CW3, pp. 469–70). See also below, pp. 647–8. 5. The novelist and poet Emily Brontë (1818–48) wrote the short poem on 3 June 1831; the third, five-line stanza is separated from the other two, which KM cites here, by a dividing line. Her only novel, the passionately brooding, high Romantic masterpiece Wuthering Heights, is an essential landmark in regional fiction, women’s writing and high Victorian Romantic realism. The poetry published in her lifetime was part of an anthology of poems compiled by the three sisters, which they signed with their pennames Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell; the poem KM cites was first published posthumously in 1910. 6. KM cites the famous lines spoken by Christ at the Last Supper (Luke 22: 19). 7. Henry Major Tomlinson (1873–1958) had been a war journalist posted in France and was now working for the Nation. He became a close friend of both JMM and KM, as a note in her diary in early 1922 confirms (see CW4, p. 406). See also KM’s glowing review of his memoirs published that year in the Athenaeum (CW3, pp. 450–2). 8. Henry William Massingham (1860–1924) was a British journalist and editor, best remembered for his editorship of the Nation from 1907 until 1923. His son, Harold John Massingham (1888–1952), was also a writer and journalist who worked on both the Nation and Athenaeum, and was a key figure in the ruralist movement of the time. 9. Like KM after their first encounter after so many years of separation, Morrell’s first impressions of Elizabeth von Arnim were not particularly warm; she notes in her memoirs: That day I went on to tea with [Bertrand Russell’s] sister-in-law, Elizabeth Lady Russell. I was so tired I could hardly creep there. She spent the time praising Lady Connie [Malleson] and telling me how Bertie adored her. I probably sat rather silent, but I am sure agreeing with everything she said.



lady ottoline morrell   269 The chief desire I had when I went away was to keep clear of those ladies, none of whom I really liked or trusted. (Moorehead 1974, p. 253)

[1 July 1919] [HRC] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] This is M. & me six? seven? years ago – when I had short hair. Tuesday. Dearest You are at home again: I love to think it – I know the relief you will feel in leaving the strange place – It is so horrible to be uprooted, to be in nobody’s bed – It makes me feel like a little child. When the tea comes I want to put the sheet over my head and wail for my own cup and saucer! I can feel, when the moments of arrival are over, how everything that belongs to you will unfold in the stillness and live again for you – come to life at your look and touch. Do not be angry with me if I just flit through . . . There is the delicious delicate perfume I remember – you have a fire; they will bring in the lamps & draw the curtains – heavy rain is falling – your gloves are put away – you are resting – you are bending over the flowers that tremble from the cold, rainy air. Do not trouble to write to me. If I may just know – on a card – how you are. But do* rest. It is a brutal day for travelling. Are they looking after you perfectly? . . . I wish I knew. I, too, am sick and weary of the gossip-mongers. Why should one put up with them. And what have they done that they should dare puff themselves up so. Its ridiculous. I often feel you are far too tolerant of them. The absurdity – the utter absurdity. What in God’s name have they ever given birth to. They are old midwives grouped round the Omega cradle,1 Clive making the woolly bonnet & Roger the bootees and Mary all ready with the rattle – but where – tell me – where is the Baby? . . . I confess that at heart I hate them because I feel they are the enemies of Art – of real true Art. The snigger is a very awful thing when one is young and the sneer can nearly kill. They profess to live by feeling – but why then do they never give a sign of it – and why do they do their very best to ridicule feeling in others? It is all poisonous. No, I have not seen the new James Joyce novel.2 Dearly I should like to – Is it to be had in book form? Lytton came yesterday and said that Mary H. had given a reading of a few chapters to a picked audience. But it might be very good. Such a strange day – a purplish sky – the rain falling – falling – as one imagines the rain falls in China – and through it the thrum thrum

270   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 tinkle tinkle of a little string band. For Mrs De Maurier is giving a Garding Party.3 I have such a funny vision of the party – the vicar’s straw hat, so wet and sticky – Mr G de M.4 blowing his nose in the same charmingly intimate way off the stage as he does on – and Mrs flashing her teeth and her ten fingernails at Socierty. I saw these remarkable hands (I seem to have a ‘hands complex’ at present) hovering over & positively shooting beams of light on to a box of plover’s eggs at the fishmongers, the other day, while she cried, for the pit, gallery, porter at the door and attendant in the Ladies toilet to hear: ‘Are they ripe, Fishmonger? Are you sure they are raipe’. What a world – dearest – what a world! The cook has given notice. How blessed! It is dreadful enough to be without servants but to be with them ––– is far more dreadful. I cannot forget the dishonest hateful old creature down in the kitchen. Now she will go & I shall throw her bits to the dustman & fumigate her room & start fair again – I feel so much more sensitive to everything than I used to be – to people good or bad, to ugliness or beautiful things. Now-adays when I catch a glimpse of Beauty – I weep – yes, really weep. It is too much to be borne – and if I feel wickedness – it hurts so unbearably that I get really ill. It is dreadful to be so exposed – but what can one do?         Here is M. home from school – Goodbye for now, dearest precious friend. My thoughts are with you.   Ever your most devoted       Katherine. * Original underlined three times for emphasis.

Notes 1. Roger Fry founded the Omega Workshops Ltd at 33 Fitzroy Square in Bloomsbury in July 1913; the idea was to sell furniture, fabrics and household accessories of affordable modern design in order to provide a stipend for emerging avant-garde artists. The site included studios where products were designed and made, and public showrooms. During the war, the premises and project were redesigned to offer a home for pacifist resistance, political debate and cultural exchange. 2. The first chapters of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses were then circulating in London, having been published in the Egoist, after first appearing from May 1918 onwards in serial form in the American periodical, the Little Review. 3. Muriel Beaumont (1876–1957) was a retired English stage actress, then married to the actor Gerald du Maurier; she had had a relatively short (eleven years) but successful West End career featuring especially in social dramas, comedies and comedies of manners. One of their daughters went on to become the highly successful novelist Daphne du Maurier. 4. Gerald du Maurier (1873–1934) was a highly successful English stage actor and theatre manager, whose roles in his early days had included that of Theodore de la Farce in the stage play adapted from his father, George du Maurier’s, best-selling novel, Trilby.



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[13 July 1919] [HRC] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] My dearest Ottoline, If I have not written before it is not my fault, really not my fault – it is this confounded weather which puts me so out of tune. I hate to send such a Jangle – Here I sit, staring at the writing-table like some sea sick traveller who dares not lift his eyes to the waves outside but he will be quite undone – If I do – there is the grey cloud chasing the black cloud and the trees in their dark ugly green tossing their branches like old crones at a weak-tea party telling how that Autumn has come back – unexpected and has turned Summer into the Street and Summer has gone off dear knows where without even her flowery shawl poor lamb and Autumn has wired to winter to curtail his journey and start for home – home – This desperate news makes ones flesh creep again. I heard a coal man pass this morning and was half inclined to put a black cross on our door – Do not think I am not grateful for the exquisite sweet scented basket, dearest of my friends – All my flowers this year have come from you – I never shall forget them – Its so strange I feel that I have spent almost a whole summer at Garsington: each of these flowers is a remembrance. I love your garden: I often walk in it invisible. How long is it since we have really walked there together. Why does it seem so long? My heart aches at the thought. I have seen nobody and have not been ‘out’. Brett was my last guest. She is pitiful. I do not think she has any idea of what is to happen to her – she lifts with one wave and is thrown back upon another – I think her only salvation is the WILL to work. Do you think she has it? I have a horror of Nelson1 (whom Ive never seen.) I feel he is a type of the dog eternal – not waiting for the crumbs that fall from the table – but positively sitting up to them – and to those of the largest size. Does he intend to make a meal of Mrs Baker2 who most certainly (if what Ive heard is true is no chicken among the chickens.) What upstarts these creatures are! How dare she sit on your lawn!! These preparations for Festivity are too odious.3 In addition to my money complex I have a food complex. When I read of the preparations that are being made in all the workhouses throughout the land – when I think of all these toothless old jaws guzzling for the day – and then of all that beautiful youth feeding the fields of France – Life is almost too ignoble to be borne. Truly one must hate humankind in the mass – hate them as passionately as one loves the few – the very few. Ticklers, squirts, portraits eight times as large as life of Lloyd George & Beatty4 blazing against the sky – and drunkenness and brawling & destruction. I keep seeing all these horrors, bathing in them again & again (God knows I don’t want to) and then my mind fills with the wretched little picture I have of my brother’s grave – What is the meaning of it all?

272   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 One ought to harden ones heart until it is all over. But oh – Life might be so wonderful – There’s the unforgettable rub! And weve only one life and I cannot believe in immortality. I wish I could – To arrive at the gates of Heaven – to hear some grim old angel cry ‘Consumptives to the right – up the airy mountain, past the flower fields and the boronia5 trees – sufferers from gravel, stone & fatty degeneration to the left to the Eternal Restaurant smelling of Beef Eternal’. How one would skip through! But I see nothing but black men, black boxes, black holes, and poor darling Murry splitting a very expensive black kid glove his Mama had made him buy . . . One must get out of this country Did you read about Mrs Atherton.6 It was a strange peep through the windows. I wanted very much to write to the Earl of March & thank him for his evidence – How queer it all was. There were touches positively Shakespearean. When she said to her maid: ‘this is the last time you will brush my hair’ and ‘please hold my hand a little’ it was like Desdemona & Emilia at 47 Curzon Street.7 Oh God how Id love to talk to you now! Why cannot we just appear to each other without railway trains & hills & cold blasts –          Forgive my black mood. Don’t forget me – And remember how much I love you – & am always your devoted Katherine Notes 1. Geoffrey Nelson was one of Brett’s fellow painters from the Slade. See above, p. 259, n. 3. 2. Mary Dora Baker (1874?–1964) was a friend of the artist Geoffrey Nelson, who frequented the same circles as Gertler and Nina Hamnett, all based at that time in Fitzrovia and Bloomsbury. 3. Often lavish celebrations and pageantry were then under way to mark the end of the peace negotiations at Versailles and the signing of the Peace Treaty (28 June). 4. David Richard Beatty (1871–1936) was a renowned Royal Navy officer who had served as a Commander and then Commander-in-Chief in World War One. He had been promoted to Admiral of the Fleet in May 1919, and thereafter had a prominent role as a political and public figure. 5. The Boronia is an evergreen shrub which was imported into Europe from Australia. It is best remembered for its highly perfumed, four-petalled flowers. 6. The Times on 12 July printed an inquest report following the death of ‘Mrs Arthur Eliot, better known as Mrs Atherton’. Entitled ‘Mrs Atherton’s Death – Suicide while of unsound mind – Jealousy of a step daughter’, the extended, four-column article recounts the proceedings of the court and the coroner’s report, depicting the scene of the death (‘Mrs Eliot, in evening dress, was found shot dead in her flat in Curzon-street, Mayfair soon after midnight on Tuesday’). The forty-seven-year-old woman was identified as Mabel Louise, ‘a society lady’ married to Arthur Eliot after her divorce from Colonel Thomas Atherton. The circumstances leading up to the supposed suicide were reported to be extreme domestic tension and jealously, largely triggered by her



lady ottoline morrell   273

alleged discovery of her husband’s incestuous relations with his step-daughter. These details were reported by the Earl of March, ‘who was wheeled into Court in a bath-chair’; he was a friend of Mrs Atherton’s, to whom she had confided her worries and also addressed a note just prior to her suicide (p. 9). 7. During the inquest reported above, Mrs Atherton’s maid, Edith Lane, was called to give evidence. KM likens her domestic insights into Mrs Atherton’s life to Desdemona’s intimate exchanges with her lady-in-waiting, Emilia, wife of Iago, in the bedchamber scene which forms part of the build-up to the final tragic dénouement in Othello (IV, iii).

[19 or 26 July 1919] [HRC] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] Saturday afternoon. Dearest Ottoline, Murry is taking tea with his family – far away, remote, in Wandsworth.1 I am terrified by thought that he may bring young Art back with him and I shall see him lounging on the sommier2 with his feet turned in. ‘Wont you come for your coffee, Arthur?’ ‘Thanks. Parse it along’ as though it were a penny ticket on a Wandsworth tram. The Mountain, twice the size, dropping myrrh, dropping honey, is attending a very difficult confinement – The cook who goes on Monday is I imagine filling a carpet bag with jam, sugar, and tea – and its raining and I feel lonely and cold and forsaken. Pray for me. How well I know that wraith-like disembodied feeling; it has been mine all last, this week. One lay in bed & felt like a shell and wept & weeping made one cough and summer was over. I asked my doctor the very question. ‘What would one do if one had to cope with life’, & he replied ‘why, you’d be in an institution & paid for by the state’. So there is one horror spared. I am infinitely grateful to you for these chapters of Ulysses. Heaven send the drain that will soon receive them. I think they are loathsome & if that is Art – never shall I drink to it again. But it is not Art; it is not even a new thing.3 Why these young men should lean and lean over the decomposing vapours of poor Jules Laforgue.4 is inexplicable – but there they do. In Joyce there is a peculiar male arrogance that revolts me more than I can say – it sickens me. I dislike his method equally with his mind & cannot see his power of writing. Power? – that beautiful quality that makes one feel a man is at ease among all these difficult and simple & intricate and moving words – and knows their perfect place and meaning – but Joyce gapes before an immensely great rubbish heap & digs in it for his swollen dogs & – – – no, I can’t mention the stuff. Then I glanced at that unspeakable Ezra Pound5 and the rest of em – It only makes one feel how one adores english prose – how to be a writer – is everything. I do believe that the time has come for a ‘new

274   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 word’ but I imagine the new word will not be spoken easily. People have never explored the lovely medium of prose. It is a hidden country still – I feel that so profoundly. Monday – The weather has ‘got me’ completely dearest; I am ill again. I have coughed so much that I feel like a living rattle – Theres nothing to be done. Why won’t the summer come back? What has happened to it? One must drug oneself deeply deeply with work and try and forget. You will take care of yourself this treacherous weather – Forgive me – I cant write – I feel numb with despair – and only want to creep away somewhere and weep and weep – Your*           Katherine *Original underlined three times for emphasis.

Notes 1. JMM’s parents lived at 13 Nicosia Road, Wandsworth Common; although relatively central, lying to the south of the Thames in South London and extending to the Surrey border, the borough of Wandsworth was then associated with working-class housing and lower-middle-class suburbia. 2. (Fr.): Couch. 3. KM’s first, dismissive encounters with Joyce’s form of Modernist prose experimentation were to be substantially revised. Just after Joyce’s death in Zurich, Virginia Woolf recalled her first perusal of the typescript to gauge whether Hogarth could envisage printing it, noting in her diary, ‘One day Katherine Mansfield came, & I had it out. She began to read, ridiculing: then suddenly said, But there’s some thing in this: a scene that should figure I suppose in the history of literature’ (DVW5, p. 353). 4. The French Symbolist poet and editor Jules Laforgue (1860–87) was an influential and visionary poet, and one of the leading lights of the ‘Vers libriste’ movement; he was also a renowned translator of poetry in English into French. His life was tragically cut short by tuberculosis. 5. The American-born Ezra Pound (1885–1972) was a highly influential Modernist poet, editor and critic, who spent most of his adult life in Italy. His influence – creative and professional – on some of the rising literary figures of his generation, and notably T. S. Eliot, was immeasurable.

[13 August 1919] [HRC] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] Wednesday. Dearest Ottoline Forgive me. I have been too ill to write until today. Today I am up & trying my legs again but I have had a bad time that I don’t dare to look back upon. Everything seemed to assail me at once and I could not beat them off.



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It has determined me to go into a Sanatorium next month & to stay there until April. I am not ‘up’ to a villa or to anything. I cant go on ‘like this’ so I am waiting to hear of some more or less human institution where I can read & write & lead my private existence undisturbed. And as soon as I hear of one and am fit to travel – I shall go. There is nothing else to do. In April I hope to be fit to escape & take a small villa and enjoy another summer – But oh – this agony of ill health &* worry is too much. Besides Life – darling Life is still here – waiting to be lived – not merely frowned at from a sofa. So I shall shut myself away – After all, six months hard should be an amazing opportunity for work. I have thought of you continually. I keep seeing myself writing you letters – & waiting – waiting for the post to come with the unmistakeable envelope – You have sent me flowers and Garsington lavender & Ive never said a word – for all that I have loved them – The lavender is in a big sachet. It breathes of that afternoon when we gathered it – of the cool darkened green room where the trays were spread – of the aeroplane high up, glittering above the trees – that looked so lovely – I feel that all waits to be written – its as though something magical drew a circle about that afternoon holding it for ever . . . Has anything happened in the world while I have lain under my dark umbrella? Murry tells me nothing – except that he went to the exhibition of French pictures and liked some very much1 – especially Derain2 & L’hote. He (L’hote) is going to write for us in the Athenaeum on French Art.3 We have not yet told Clive and Roger – I hope they will look to their noses. I long to see these pictures: they sound so radiant. But there is always something fascinating, captivating, about the names of pictures: ‘Woman Drying Herself: Woman in a Hammock: Lady on a Terrace’ – One seems to dip into a luminous life – – unlike this heavy old pudding of a London. Now I understand your headaches – I never knew what a headache was until these last days – a real one – in which ones ears and jaws & eyes & neck & shoulders all ached together – I must lie down again. Ah, my dearest – I do think of you so often – When this curse is taken from me – we’ll be happy together somewhere – for a little? My deepest tenderest love                Katherine. *Original underlined four times for emphasis.

Notes 1. The fashionable London furniture store ‘Heal and Son’, on Tottenham Court Road, had an art gallery noted for the quality and avant-garde inclusiveness of its exhibitions, the best example being the exhibition JMM attended: an ‘Exhibition of French Art 1914–1919’, curated by Sacheverell Sitwell. 2. André Derain (1880–1954) had been cited as a leading post-Impressionist and Fauvist artist in the early 1900s, but he gradually inclined to more classical

276   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 styles in the post-war era. He was also a highly respected stage and costume designer, especially for the Ballets Russes, and an illustrator. 3. Like his friend and compatriot André Derain, André Lhote (1885–1962) was a pioneering post-Impressionist and Cubist painter, as well as a major sculptor and designer. From 1919, he worked as an art critic for the leading French review, the Nouvelle Revue Française, then edited by Jacques Rivière. He responded positively to JMM’s invitation to publish translations of certain NRF contributions in the Athenaeum, from the September 1919 issue on.

[17 August 1919] [HRC] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] Dearest, wonderful Friend, Here’s an absurd situation! My doctor strongly urges me not to put myself away – not to go into a sanatorium – he says I would be out of it in 24 hours and it would be a ‘highly dangerous experiment’. ‘You see’, he explained, ‘there is your work which I know is your Life. If they kept it from you you’d die – and they would keep it from you. This would sound absurd to a german specialist but I have attended you for a year and I know’. After this, I with great difficulty restrained my impulse to tell the doctor what his words did for me. They were breath, life – healing, everything. So it is the Italian Riviera after all, a maid to travel with me and a little villa – Being ill, & bearing all the depression of those round me had I think almost made me insane. I just gave up hope. Now I am full of hope again – and I am ‘off’ the third week in September. M. is going across the first week in September to find me a villa and then I go – It is a blessed relief. And to think there will be the sun and another summer and unlimited time to write – It is next door to Heaven. Your wonderful letter! I walked and talked with you & we were in the garden together and everything but the thrilling wonder of late summer was forgotten – Oh, how I cherish your friendship. It is there – for ever and I come to you so often – to talk – to know you understand just how this and this appears – Life is so strange – so full of extraordinary things . . . Today, this afternoon, waiting for my Father to come to tea1 – I felt I could have made – but only of that waiting – a whole book – I began thinking of all the time one has ‘waited’ for so many and strange people and things – the special quality it has – the agony of it and the strange sense that there is a second you who is outside yourself & does nothing – nothing but just listen – the other complicated you goes on – & then there is this keen – unsleeping creature – waiting to leap – It is like a dark beast – and he who comes is its prey – – – Yes, my Father is here; he arrived yesterday – just as I had imagined, but even fuller of life, enthusiasm, with his power of making all he says vivid, alive, and full of humour. I find him adorable; I could listen to him for hours – But Alas! I had so longed for him and M. to



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meet & like each other – longed for it to happen and M. was in one of his moods when he laughed & looked away – never spoke once to him – paid him not a moments attention. It could not have been more fatal. Why wouldn’t he – just for my sake – make the effort – (You know how one feels?) But no. Though he confessed afterwards how amazing he thought Father was – he treated him as if he was not here – This is dreadful mizery for me. Why will people behave like that? Its so unimaginative – so tactless – Oh, my efforts to get M. into the conversation – I look back on them with dismay – and M. like a fish would not be caught – swam the dark waters and refused – Good good! It was again the spontaneity of father which fascinated me – and it was just that which made M. go dead. How tragic this is. It really does seem to me tragic that M. is (except in his work) so covered with a dark wing. But he is – & will be. I really don’t think he wants anything else; anything else feels false to him – Oh, I long, I long for merriment – joy, excitement – Even though we do work – because we take our work seriously we MUST live*. Not in stupid pleasures, nor in Clives way nor in Chilis, but real warm thrilling life – with music – and light . . . I do hope dearest I see you before you go to Ireland. I want to so tremendously. If you have sold Bedford Square2 does that mean you will spend the winter in the country? Or does it mean you might, perhaps, after all – come out to me for as long as you wished? I want to see the French pictures – M. liked some – I cant bear Roger’s art criticism:3 this patting on the head & chucking under the chin is so tiresome – Everybody has deserted me – I don’t hear from a soul – But oh – I am tired of sorrow – The beautiful earth – your tobacco plants – the scent – dearest dearest Friend. I love you Katherine. * Original underlined three times for emphasis.

Notes 1. Harold Beauchamp made an extended visit to England that summer, accompanied by KM’s younger sister, Jeanne, who was planning to settle there. It was the first reunion between KM and her father since March 1912. For her anxiety about the visit, see her letter to Anne Estelle Rice below, p. 493. 2. Despite largely maintaining appearances, the Morrells’ finances had been dilapidated over recent years; the first obvious and painful sacrifice was the sale of ‘our darling house’ (Seymour, p. 313), as she recorded in her diary: that is, their Bloomsbury flat, at 44 Bedford Square. 3. See Roger Fry’s detailed discussion of the Mansard Gallery’s exhibition of French art in the Athenaeum, 8 August, pp. 723–4, and another by Clive Bell, 15 August, pp. 586–8. See also above, p. 275, n. 1.

278   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [21 August 1919] [HRC] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] My dearest beloved Friend I am going to indulge myself in a letter: I have been thinking about writing it all the while I dressed – and thinking how impossible it is to write one thousandth part of all I want to say. Please forgive the funny writing; my eyes have now turned traitor with the rest of my belongings & until I am equipped with a pair of horn spectacles for reading and writing I dare not strain them at all & have to sit far back – I feel rather as tho’ I were in a valley writing my letter on the side of a hill . . . I can just read enough to keep up my work for the A.1 They will get alright but I have given them an unmerciful dose of about 10 hours a day & so for the last few days I have been lying on my back – such a queer time. You know my insomnia trips into unknown cities – well – they assailed me whenever I lay low – cities and trees & thousands of horses at full gallop & forests – with a violent headache – Brain-fag the doctor says – and advises me when I get to Italy to paint landscape especially tender skies!! Picture me dearest darling Ottoline in the next Allied Show ‘Now Fades the Glimmering Landscape on the Sight’ by K.M. – or ‘Just a Song at Twilight’ –2 My beautiful velvet flowers are still full of life & the carnations and the bell like very mysterious fäery flowers that I dont know – Thinking over it – you have sent me all the year from earliest spring – Who else living would have done such a perfect thing for a friend – I think & think over the gift I want to bring you – the best that I ever write must be yours. But oh! that won’t compare with the flowers you have given me. While I have not been able to see them – I nearly should have forgotten them – Id have despaired of them often – but always at the perfect moment you have said ‘Look – Katherine’ and the Beauty of the world – the undying splendour of the world has been revealed again. M. is seeing about his passport today; that seems to bring the journey nearer. I intend to stay away indefinitely; but one always does – It is divine here today – a brilliant sky and high, brilliant shapes of clouds – M. is lunching with Father; he will have to talk to him then & perhaps all will go well. And Id love you to meet him one day – just for the fun of it.3 He is not tall – very healthy looking – with white hair and a small clipped beard – large blue eyes – an expansive voice. In fact he looks a typical Colonial banker!! And simply full of Life. I see Virginia’s book is announced in todays Literary Supplement.4 I expect it will be acclaimed a masterpiece & she will be drawn round Gordon Square in a chariot designed by Roger after a supper given by Clive – Did you like Lyttons article on Voltaire? And on the Walpole Letters.5 I thought the latter was really a tour de force – & put his imitators in the deepest shade – But this is not all not what I meant at all – – – Would I were sharing this shining day with you – Shall we meet soon again, I wonder? Will you be in town before the third week in September?



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Have you been reading ‘something good?’ How nice a new book would be – Dearest – you have all my love – my friendship. It is joy to know you are in the Same World with me.                Yours                   Katherine. Notes 1. A precise evaluation of KM’s behind-the-scenes contribution to the editing of the Athenaeum is impossible but her input was substantial – not only receiving new publications and reviewing extensively, but also taking part in, or taking over, a number of editorials, plus more thankless but exacting editorial administration when she was in London. For detailed coverage of her and JMM’s activities at the Athenaeum, see Mourant, pp. 181–241. 2. Exhibitions and cultural events had been organised since 1908 by the Allied Artists’ Association (founded by Frank Rutter) to help promote Modernist art in Britain; in the war years, the shows had the additional role of helping to sell works and provide struggling artists with the means to survive. It is worth noting that KM’s pastiche titles suggest popular songs of the music hall era more than they do the masterpieces of French post-Impressionism. 3. KM’s hopes for a meeting between her father and her dear friend did not materialise until years later. Morrell recalls a rather diffident encounter in a later memoir. See H. Shaw, pp. 50–1. 4. Gordon Square was the London square most densely populated by the Bloomsbury Group. After Leslie Stephen’s death in 1904, Vanessa Bell had found a house for herself, Virginia Woolf and their two brothers, Adrian and Thoby Stephen, and it was here that the ‘Thursday Evening’ meetings began that later became synonymous with the early days of the group. John Maynard Keynes had taken over number 46 in 1916; members of the Strachey family also moved into the square during the late 1910s, as did Adrian Stephen and his wife, Karin. Virginia and Leonard Woolf by this time, however, were living between Hogarth House in Richmond and (since August that year), Monk’s House in Rodmell, East Sussex. 5. See Strachey’s extended article, ‘Voltaire’, published on 1 August 1919 in the Athenaeum, pp. 677–8; two weeks later, it carried his review, ‘Walpole’s Letter’, pp. 744–5, and an addition, ‘Suppressed passages in Walpole’s letters’, was included among letters to the editor the following month, on 5 September (p. 853).

[20 January 1920] [HRC] Ospedaletti Porto Maurizio. My dearest Ottoline I am leaving here tomorrow for Menton and that ‘frees’ me to write to you. I have been on the verge or the brink of writing so often – and

280   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 your perfectly angelic letters have been a vile reproach to me – but I could not break through. This experience has been such Hell that really if I took up my pen to describe it the ink would be ashes.1 I have been nearly out of my mind with misery and I don’t feel (one always says this but surely its true this time) that Life can ever be the same again. Its as though one had had smallpox; one could never look in the glass and see the same face. But – to explain? There was no villa or any place to be had in San Remo (a horrid town) so I came to this small cottage on the side of a wild hill just beyond Ospedaletti. It stares, glares, gapes at the sea. It is high up & the noise of the waves beating on rocks & rushing up caverns is never still – At night sitting up one vibrates with the noise, literally. It is a pretty little house – pretty like a doll’s house with a garden & terrace. I could get no maid because of my disease so L.M. & I were alone here. For months I have been unable to walk – or to move at all except from my bed to a sofa or just to crawl down to a tiny room – for the afternoon. Literally not a soul to talk to – L.M. very often out for hours until it is dark – the day fading, fading out here – and the dark hanging over the sea – My heart has been affected by – they say – the fever. It isn’t that. Its by misery. Really, I have simply wept for days – This appaling isolation – deathly stillness – great wind and sea – and this feeling that I had consumption and was tainted – dying here – If I moved – even to the doorstep – my heart beat so hard that I had to lean against the door – and then no sleep – nothing but going over and over ones whole past life – as one will do when one is dead, I suppose. I tried to explain this to M. But ––––– he did not understand at all. Not in the very slightest – Ottoline, I adore Life – What do all the fools matter and all the stupidity – They do matter but somehow – for me they cannot touch the body of Life. Life is marvellous – I want to be deeply rooted in it – to live – to expand – to breathe in it – to rejoice – to share it – To give and to be asked for Love. I know you understand this for you are thrillingly alive – but few people do. Do you realise what it was like to find oneself here – in bed day after day – going grey with misery – utterly alone and ill? Dearest – I don’t want pity – But its been beyond terrible. L.M. fat and rosy, runs to the village, runs to San Remo, comes back with her ‘the woman at the laiterie2 told me –’ and then I hear her upstairs – singing to herself – Well, its over. I go to Menton tomorrow and I shall stay there for some months – L’Hermitage – Menton is the address. In strictest deepest confidence the really horrible thing about all this has been that it has left me quite alone. I thought, until now even, that ‘one’ understood – that superficially perhaps I was alone but that really it wasn’t so. And I find out I was wrong. For nearly six years I have felt loved (you know that feeling?). Now it is gone – It was all just a dream. But one must get over that and gather up Life for oneself and get in



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touch with Life again. One must not mourn or cry out if the sorrow is great – one can’t afford to – – – Mysterious Life! . . . I would give anything for a long long talk with you, uninterrupted and very intimate. Other people are such shadows. – – – The day you wore your blue dress & stood outside the gate in the Sun with all those delicate willows moving behind you – – – Do you remember – you said the day was so lovely – and there was deep delight in your eyes – darkening them. I never forget that. It is you. I have worked here. Some days from nine in the morning until twelve at night – only stopping to eat – just writing on and on – Rutter has one of the stories3 – They’re queer – I shall write again dearest dearest friend – This is just ‘to let you* know.’         Yours for ever                Katherine. * Original underlined three times for emphasis.

Notes 1. After setting off for the South of France the previous September, KM’s letterwriting habits had indeed changed dramatically: she wrote almost daily to JMM but kept up little other correspondence. These increasingly protracted periods of silence were often misconstrued by friends who had not realised quite how ill KM was by this time; Morrell, however, would appear to have been more compassionate and understanding, possibly on account of her being equally accomplished in the art of camouflaging her own fragile health. 2. (Fr.): Dairy. 3. The art critic, curator and journalist Frank Rutter (1876–1937), founder of the Allied Artists’ Association, was then co-editing the journal Art & Letters with his friend and associate, the equally radical-minded Herbert Read. The journal published ‘The Man Without a Temperament’ in spring 1920. See CW2, pp. 199–209.

[early May 1920] [Stanford] 2 Portland Villas East Heath Road Hampstead NW3. Dearest Ottoline – A Thousand Thanks for the lovely Basket of Flowers. They were more than welcome in this cold and sad country after the South. Yes I am home again but only until September. Then I go back into the small mountains until November and then to a flat near Monte1 for the winter. I had to come back; there were so many things to see to and M. had found his domestic worries more than he could bear. It is dreadful to be in England again. I had had a perfect time since January

282   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 and am determined never to live in England again. There – in the South – one regains all ones love of life and people and one walks in Beauty2 – unimaginable beauty this spring. It is simply tragic to meet this reluctant painful England again. I thank Heaven that September is so soon – What ungracious words! But you know how one has always longed to find ones country, ones few friends, climate, way of Life and having found all this & more I feel rather lost at present. I do hope we shall meet when you are in town. Brett came in to tea yesterday – She & M. are grown fast friends. I suppose you have heard the spanish singer Requel Mellar.3 I wish we could go to hear her together; I long to – Yours ever with love Katherine. Notes 1. The picturesque fishing town of Menton on the French Riviera, just before the Italian border, is less than ten kilometres from Monte Carlo. 2. KM quotes the title, or the first words, of the opening line of Byron’s threestanza lyrical poem ‘She Walks in Beauty’, written in 1814. 3. Raquel Meller was the stage name of the hugely popular Spanish singer and actress Francesca Romana Marqués López (1888–1962). She was then starring in Joy Bells at the London Hippodrome. KM went without Morrell, however, to hear her sing the following week: see below, p. 591, n.1 and 2.

[7 January 1921] [HRC] [Postcard] [Villa Isola Bella, Garavan, Menton] Dearest Ottoline, Do come!1 We shall be delighted. But won’t you come before 4; it gets dark so soon. I was only wishing to hear from you this morning when lo! the post came – Yours ever Katherine. Note 1. Ottoline Morrell had taken her daughter Julian, then nearly seventeen, on a six-month European tour, mostly centred on France and Italy; it was her first visit to the Continent since 1914, and she had treasured the prospect. They had set off the previous November and spent Christmas in Rome.



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[2 February 1921] [HRC] VILLA ISOLA BELLA   GARAVAN    MENTON A/M. My dear Ottoline, I am very happy to have your cards & to know that you have found Italy so lovely. I have been wondering where you were & hoping – for selfish reasons – that you would come back here. I did long for one talk . . . But perhaps that was like my impudence. All the same, I must say that on the last afternoon when you & Julian & Murry & I sat together in that little yellow room with the beetle carpet there were moments when I felt it was like being goldfish in a forgotten – cruelly neglected! – goldfish bowl. Was that nonsense? Was it quite all right, really? Oh, surely not. When I think of all we have lived through – the really precious moments and of all that we have felt & seen it was melancholy to be no nearer. It can’t be helped, I suppose. And here’s to the wonderful times we have had – they are unforgettable! This card Il Trono di Venere1 is simply divine. What exquisite grace. What beautiful obedience to the movement of the whole. I wish I could see such things – J.M.M. is still here. He came back, very suddenly, & now he is going to England tomorrow only to arrange to leave for good. – – – I dont know. I hope he will be happy. When he is away yes – I do miss his companionship. I miss talking with a man – and its very lonely here, when he’s in London – for the Mountain & I only agree when we are silent or out of each other’s sight!! But I mean to leave the Riviera as soon as possible. Ive turned frightfully against it & the French. Life seems to me ignoble here. It all turns on money – Everything is money. When I read Balzac2 I always feel a peculiar odious exasperation because according to him the whole of Life is founded on the question of money. But he is right: It is – for the French. I wish the horrid old Riviera would fall into the sea. Its just like an exhibition where every single sideshow costs another sixpence. But I paid goodness knows what to come in – Where can one go, I wonder. Italy? Dear Ottoline, do tell me if you find a lovely place in Italy . . . As to England – I never want to see it again – I read JMM’s letters from Clive and Co. & they horrify me – Did one know all the wrong people? Is that why nobody remains? Not a soul remains to me – not one – except Delamare3 whom I never knew when I was there – – – However, one goes on believing. Life might be marvellous – One keeps faith with that belief in ones work – Ive been writing of a dance this afternoon & remembering how one polished the floor was so thrilling that everything was forgotten . . .

284   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Please give my love to Julian – Goodbye, dear Ottoline – I rejoice to know you are happy – Yours ever with love – Katherine Notes 1. (It.): The throne of Venus. Ottoline and her daughter had been to the Villa Ludovisi in Rome (Museo Nazionale Romano) to see the Ludovisi Throne, one of the finest and best-preserved marble blocks of its era (c. 460 bce) depicting the birth of Venus, and the goddess rising from the sea, attended by exquisitely detailed handmaidens. 2. Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) is considered one of the masters of the French novel, excelling in historical romances and realism – and notably the remorseless depiction of domestic avarice, economic ambition, financial cynicism and the petty calculations of the new merchant classes. He was also a renowned art critic, literary critic and playwright. 3. KM’s friendship with the much-loved author Walter de la Mare (1873–1956) extended from the early days of Rhythm in 1912 until the end of her life. A telling insight into her affection for him is a brief diary entry the following year: ‘I suppose it is the effect of isolation that I can truly say I think of W.J.D. [Walter de la Mare], Tchekhov, Koteliansky, HMT and Orage every day. They are part of my life’ (CW4, p. 406). Regrettably, however, little material evidence of their friendship has survived. See CL1, pp. 523–6.

[14 March 1921] [HRC]

Monday.

VILLA ISOLA BELLA   GARAVAN    MENTON A/M.

Dearest Ottoline, I want to write you a long letter but I know this will only be a mingy scrap. But I must tell you how much I loved hearing from you, and how sorry I am that we are in the same boat! I had been in bed for six weeks with my lungs & heart; then ‘They’ have decided that my heart trouble is caused by a very swollen gland which presses, with intense pain on an artery. This the surgeon tapped on Saturday & intends to tap 2 or 3 times again.1 And so on and so on and so on. The Mountain is in England pendant cette crise2 – But I’ll not go on. The weather is really exquisite. Today was perfection. Radiant, crystal clear, one of those days when the earth seems to pause, enchanted with its beauty, when every new leaf whispers: ‘am I not heavenly fair!’3 The sun is quite warm. It is tame again. It comes & curls up in



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your arms – Beautiful Life! In spite of everything one cannot but praise Life – I have been watching the peach tree outside my window from the very first moment, and now it is all in flowers and the leaves are come, small stiff clusters like linnets wings. Yes, I do understand. But even now I cant explain. Something happened – a kind of earthquake that shook everything and I lost faith and touch with everybody. I cannot write what it was. And perhaps I shall never meet you again so that I can tell you. This is sad. Blame me if you must. How can you do otherwise? I expect this all sounds fantastic. I hate people who hint at secrets in letters. You will hate this. Let me say I was almost out of my mind with misery last year – J.M.M. is here for the moment. He goes back to England at the end of April. His typewriter ticks away here. Yes, I know what you must have felt about Keats.4 I have just been looking at the Keats Memorial Volume. It is simply indescribable in its vulgarity. But theres a letter* by Keats in it, so full of power, gaiety, ‘fun’ that it mocks the book as he would have mocked it! I wish we could meet in Florence, but I have forfeited those happy chances. Would that you were better! At any rate, in that other world, that world which we share, there I meet you – there I know – and sympathise as others cannot. Ill write again if I may – Goodnight dearest Ottoline – With my love, Ever yours Katherine. * The rest of the letter is written in short, vertical lines across the top of the page. Notes 1. The operation, performed at the clinic in Menton by the Swiss surgeon Georges Leblanc, involved puncturing pus-filled glands. KM details the operation in a letter to Ida Baker, dated 11 March 1921. See CL1, pp. 93–4. 2. (Fr.): While this crisis is going on. 3. While this may be KM merely pastiching poetic style, it may also be a direct echo, and very much in character. In Aphra Behn’s 1676 stage comedy, The Town Fop: Or Sir Timothy Tawdrey, the female protagonist Celinda, supposedly intended in marriage to the buffoonish figure Tawdry, becomes the object of Diana, a rival’s, love when she is disguised as a man. During one of their exchanges, Celinda asks, Because I love, is that a Wonder, Madam? Have you not Charms, sufficient at first sight? To wound a heart tender and young as mine? Are you not heavenly fair? Oh – there’s my grief. (IV, i)

286   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 4. The Keats House Committee in Hampstead had just issued a 300-page volume, The John Keats Memorial Volume, published by John Lane, compiling a wide variety of letters, testimonies, commissioned essays and biographical pieces by contributors worldwide. The volume marked both the centenary of Keats’s death, and the successful outcome of a huge fund-raising campaign to save the house in Keats Grove, where he had lived very happily during his last years in England, and make it into a ‘memorial house’ and museum. The piece of correspondence that KM singles out is a long, hitherto lost letter from Keats to Richard Woodhouse, dated 22 September 1819, and introduced by Amy Lowell, who had unexpectedly come into possession of the letter (pp. 115–20).

[16 May 1921] [Stanford] Hotel Beau-Site Clarens-Montreux Switzerland. Dearest Ottoline, I never felt more disappointed than that we should have been so near & yet so far, as they say. I wanted to telephone you, but that was no use. After the journey here my cough was so troublesome that I couldn’t raise my voice at all. Oh dear! It was a melancholy business. I do hope that you are feeling better and that the journey back was not too trying. Did the man really do you good in Lausanne? Is your neuralgia really better? Do let me know! I feel it must be a happiness for you to be at home again – especially after Lausanne! But one cant be really happy if ones body refuses to ‘join in’, if it persists in going its own way and never letting one forget it. But how is one to get cured? As to doctors – there aren’t any. I have just paid little Bouchage1 2000 francs for looking after me & Im 50 times worse than I was at Christmas. They know nothing. I had two really deadly experiences here with perfect fools and after all this long time they depressed me so much that I felt desperate & I motored off to Montana to see the specialist there.2 He’s supposed to be the best man in Switzerland for lungs. He was better than the others and I am going to be under him in future – I dont know for how long. Its very vague. He would not say I can get better. All he would say was I still have a chance & he has known patients with lungs as far gone as mine who have recovered. I really don’t mind a straw. It was a divine day – the day I met him – and the strange ancient room in an old hotel where we talked was so beautiful that the moment was enough. One must live for the moment, that is all I feel now. When he explained how the left lung was deeply engaged but the right was really the dangerous one I wanted to say: ‘Yes, but do listen to the bees outside. Ive never heard such bees. And theres some delicious plant growing outside the window. It reminds me of Africa’.



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But my health is such a frightfully boring subject that I won’t talk about it. Life in this hotel is a queer experience. I have two rooms and a balcony so I am – thank Heaven – quite cut off. They are corner rooms, too. But I descend for the meals – step into the whirlpool – and really one sees enough, hears enough at them, to last one for ever. I have never imagined such people. I think they are chiefly composed of Tours – they are one composite person – being taken round for so much a week. Its hard to refrain from writing about them. But my balcony looks over Montreux and Clarens. Anything more hideous!! I think Switzerland has the very ugliest houses, people, food, furniture in the whole world. Theres something incredible in the solid ugliness of the people. The very newspapers full of advertisements for a ‘magnificent porc’ or a batterie de cuisine3 comprising 75 pieces are typical. And the grossness of everything! I cant stand the narcissi even.4 I feel there are too many and the scent is too cheap. Yesterday L.M., who is staying at a place called Blonay brought me a bunch of lilies of the valley – an immense cauliflower it looked like and smelt like. But I must say the country round Sierre is simply wonderful. Thats where Id like to be. Its so unspoilt, too. I mean there are no Casinos, no tea shops and as far as I could see from my glimpse not a tourist to be seen. I shall go there at the end of June when Murry has joined me. I feel so remote, so cut off from everything here . . . I cant walk at all. I lie all day in the shade and write or read and thats all. Work is the only thing that never fails. Even if people don’t like my stories I don’t mind. Perhaps they will one day – or the stories will be better. Ive been reading Chaucer.5 Have you read his Troilus & Cressid lately? It is simply perfect. I have a passion for Chaucer just now. But England seems to think Miss Romer Wilson is so much the greatest writer that ever was born.6 She does sound wonderful, I must say. Is it all true? Goodbye dearest. Forgive a dull dog. I feel this is infernally dull. Its sent with so much love & real longing to hear you’re better. Ever Katherine. Notes 1. Dr Ambroise Bouchage (1885–1954) was a consultant working at Dr Georges Leblanc’s private clinic in Menton. 2. KM’s consultant, Dr Theodore Stephani, was a pulmonary specialist at the English clinic in Montana; he was one of the doctors in favour of the Spahlinger treatment, and had previously worked alongside the pioneering but controversial Swiss expert, Henri Spahlinger. 3. (Fr.): Battery of saucepans. 4. The annual ‘Fête des Narcisses’ (Narcissus Festival) in Montreux (see below, p. 289) was a major international event held in late May or early June, when the late spring narcissi were in full bloom along the river. Throughout the Belle

288   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Epoque, it was marked by street processions, vast, decorated horse-drawn carriages, concerts, operas and dance events, even attracting the Ballets Russes one year later. 5. Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343–1400) was the first great poet of the English nation, whose work played a decisive role in the emergence of the southern English dialect as the literary language of the country. Little is known of his early life other than that he was a yeoman who went to France with Edward III’s army and was taken prisoner during the siege of Reims in 1359, being ransomed the year after. His elegy on the death of Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster, in the plague epidemic of 1369 established his name as a poet at court, and the rest of his career appears to have been divided between diplomatic and commercial missions for the state, and poetry. It was in the 1390s that he wrote his most famous work, the unfinished Canterbury Tales, an extensive twentyfour-story-long tale of the Canterbury Pilgrims on their journey to the shrine of Thomas à Becket in Canterbury, Kent, the shire in which he was a knight. 6. Romer Wilson, the pen-name of Florence Roma Muir Wilson (1891–1930), was a British writer with a keen interest in portraying the conflicts between traditional realms and post-war social realities; she was awarded the Hawthornden literary prize for her The Death of Society: Conte de Fée Premier in 1921. KM had reviewed her war novel If All These Young Men in 1919 (see CW3, pp. 529–32). A fellow tuberculosis sufferer, Wilson died in Switzerland in 1930.

[22 May 1921] [HRC] Hotel Beau-Site Clarens-Montreux Dearest Ottoline, Are you still in Lausanne?1 Is there a possible chance of our seeing each other? I am sending this letter just in case. If I don’t hear from you I will write to Garsington. I can’t tell you how glad I was to hear from you, and how sorry to know you have been in such pain. It’s devilish! I hope the doctor did find out what was causing it and succeed in really helping you. All news when I hear from you – If you would come here for a night as my guest – – – Would you? Then we could really talk. That is my – I hope it doesn’t sound wild – idear. Yours ever with love,            Katherine. Note 1. Morrell had undergone a form of nasal surgery at a Lausanne clinic in 1912, supposedly to treat nerves, neuralgia and depression; fearing a similar breakdown of her health, she returned to the clinic in April 1921 to consult the same surgeon, Dr Combe.



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[late May 1921] [HRC] Hotel Chateau Belle Vue Sierre (Valais) Dearest Ottoline, I have been hoping to hear from you; I am so glad to know how you are, though the news isn’t at all satisfactory – How horrible to have to undergo another operation! It is simply devastating – The only consolation is you have your lovely home to go to after & will not be in a Swiss hotel. I only hope THEY will do you some real good. I am leaving here tomorrow. If I look down upon Montreux another day I shall fly into pieces with rage at the ugliness of it all. Its like a painting on a mineral water bottle – batiment des Eaux.1 And then along the road that winds through (I must say lovely) vines go these awful, ugly people, & one can’t help looking at them. Never have I seen such ugliness. Father, with a straw hat on the back of his head, coat off, waistcoat unbuttoned & stiff shirt showing, marches ahead & Mother follows with her enormous highly respectable derrière2 & after them tag the little Swisses – Oh! Oh!! Oh!!! Matters have reached a crisis too, as these last 2 days there has been the Fête des Narcisses. Hoards of uglies rushing by on bicycles with prodigious bunches of these murdered flowers on the handlebars, all ready for the fray. Happily, it rained & became a Fete des Ombrelles3 instead. I think from the expressions of the company homeward bound the umbrellas had been thrown as well! To me, though, the symbol of Switzerland is that large middle class female behind. It is the most respectable thing in the world. It is deathless. Everyone has one in this hotel; some of the elderly ladies have two. I think Sierre may be better & there – one is, at least in reach of forests and tumbling rivers. The man from Montana who is going to keep an Eye on me is near too, but thinking him over, (as one does) I believe he’s no better than the rest of them and he overcharged me horribly. I shall pin my faith on forests. Bother all doctors! I was so interested in what you told me about Gertler4 – and Brett. I know I ought to love Brett and she is such a ‘brick’, they say. But when that brick comes flying in my direction – oh, I do so want to dodge it! Why will she so jocose? And why does she have a kind of pet name for everyone? And why does she talk of ‘streaming into pubs’ or ‘tickle and run’? This last phrase is really too awful. And I think she makes such a dreadful mistake in being on her terms with all these men. Its too undignified. I ought not to say a word of this, but – – – – you know the feeling? And I feel she has such an awful idea of me. Im not that person at all. I don’t want to smile when she tells me she has been ‘sick’; I want to hang my head.

290   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 How lovely Garsington must be! The grass, the shadows of the trees – the lemon verbena in the flower garden. I can see it all. And always coming into the house from the garden – the still, delicate beauty of the house . . . It is a memory to keep for ever. I really cannot imagine a house more beautiful. I wish Chaucer had stayed there. . . . I hope you do see Murry but when he gets to England he simply disappears. I never know where he is. I only hear from him that his pursuit of pleasure is very wearying & painful. But once M. is out of sight he is swallowed up. However, other people tell me he is full of gaiety whereas he tells me how he is suffering from the Coal Strike!!5 Isn’t that like Murry! I have just read his review of the Tchekhov note books.6 Did you see the book? It was a dreadful ice bath, & now the last book of stories ‘The Horse Stealers’7 is a cold douche to follow. I thought the note books were in a way almost funny – but its cruel to laugh. Its not fair to glean a man’s buttons & pins & hawk them after his death. But the lack of humour on the part of the translators. Poor Leonard Woolf8 typing out all those Russian names! How absurd it is! Have you read Virginia’s stories?9 I havent – yet – And I haven’t read Queen Victoria either.10 Its so dear to buy – & one cant borrow at this distance – But I mean to read it. I saw a quotation from the death of the Queen – & that sounded very good. But from all the reviews: it seemed to me that Lytton hadn’t really spread his wings. It sounded, all, just a little cramped. I read less and less, or fewer and fewer books. Not because I don’t want to read them. I do – but they seem so high up on the tree – Its so hard to get at them & there is nobody near to help . . . On my bed at night there is a copy of Shakespeare, a copy of Chaucer, an automatic pistol & a black muslin fan. This is my whole little world. Forgive this ‘scrappy’ letter – and the torn page with the great pin in it. I have just finished a new story which Im going to send on spec, to The Mercury.11 I hope some one will like it. Oh, I have enjoyed writing it. With my sincerest good wishes for your health, dearest Ottoline and my warm love Ever yours Katherine. Notes (Fr.): Spa building. (Fr.): Bottom, behind. (Fr.): Umbrella Festival. Gertler had just returned to London after an extended stay of nearly a year in a sanatorium in Banchory, Aberdeenshire, having been diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1920. 5. The coal industry had been nationalised during the war, but the mines were returned in March 1921 to the mine owners, who immediately threatened to

1. 2. 3. 4.



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impose pay cuts and increase working hours to resist foreign competition. Miners appealed to the railway men and transport workers to join them in a strike, starting on 15 April 1921. After initially agreeing, transport and railway workers withdrew their support on the first day of the strike, which became known as ‘Black Friday’. Miners continued with a bitter strike on their own but were eventually forced to return to work, accepting pay cuts. 6. The Notebook of Anton Chekhov, consisting of ‘notes, themes, and sketches which Anton Chekhov intended to write, and are characteristic of the methods of his artistic production’, along with pages of his diary and a separate collection of ‘Themes, thoughts, notes and fragments’, was published in May, co-translated by Leonard Woolf and S. S. Koteliansky. JMM published a largely critical review of the volume for the Athenaeum on 4 June, pp. 365–6. 7. The Horse Stealers and Other Stories, translated by Constance Garnett, was published by Heinemann; it was the final volume in the thirteen-volume series of Chekhov’s complete shorter fiction and the first comprehensive translation of his stories in English. 8. Despite having been largely overshadowed by his wife, Leonard Woolf (1880–1969) was not only a highly accomplished writer, publisher and journalist, but also an influential politician, both nationally and internationally. He co-translated the Hogarth Press’s first best-seller – Maxim Gorky’s Reminiscences of Tolstoy (1919) – with Koteliansky, as well as the autobiography of Countess Sophia Tolstoy, Tolstoy’s wife. 9. Hogarth Press had just released the only collection of Woolf’s short stories to be published in her lifetime, Monday or Tuesday, with four woodcuts by Vanessa Bell. The eight-story selection included ‘The String Quartet’, ‘Kew Gardens’ and ‘The Mark on the Wall’. 10. Lytton Strachey’s immensely readable and archly theatrical biography, Queen Victoria, constructed as a series of chapter-scenes, had just been published to great acclaim. It was dedicated to Virginia Woolf. 11. ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ was published in the May edition of the London Mercury, one of the highly influential monthly periodicals of its time, edited by John Collings Squire. See CW2, pp. 266–83, and below, p. 640.

[24 July 1921] [HRC]

24 vii 1921.

Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre (Valais) Switzerland

Dearest Ottoline, Will you write to me one day & tell me how you are? I should love to know. I think of you so often and wonder how you are passing this lovely summer – It is lovely in England too – isn’t it? The papers groan

292   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 and gasp but thats only in London. Surely its not too hot under the ilex tree – or in the pond – Here it is simply exquisite weather. We are so high up (5000 feet above the sea) that a cool breeze filters through from Heaven – and the forests are always airy . . . I cant imagine anything lovelier than this end of Switzerland. Once one loses sight of that hideous Lac Leman & Co. everything is different. Sierre a little warm, sunripe town in the valley was so perfect that I felt I would like to live there. It has all the flowers of the South and its gay and ‘queynt’ and full of nightingales. But since we have come up the mountains it seems lovelier still. We have taken a small not very small chalet here for two years. It is quite remote – in a forest clearing, the windows look over treetops across a valley to snowy peaks the other side. The air feels wonderful but smells more wonderful still. I have never lived in a forest before. One steps out of the house & in a moment one is hidden among the trees. And there are little glades and groves full of flowers – with small ice-cold streams twinkling through. It is my joy to sit there on a tree trunk; if only one could make some small grasshoppery sound of praise to someone – thanks to someone. But who? M. and I live like two small timetables. We work all the morning & from tea to supper. After supper we read aloud and smoke; in the afternoon he goes walking & I crawling. The days seem to go by faster and faster. One beaming servant who wears peasant ‘bodies’ & full skirts striped with velvet looks after everything,1 & though the chalet is so arcadian it has got a bathroom with hot water & central heating for the winter & a piano & thick carpets & sun blinds. I am too old not to rejoice in these creature comforts as well. The only person whom we see is my Cousin Elizabeth who lives ½ an hours scramble away. We exchange Chateaubriand2 and baskets of apricots and have occasional long talks which are rather like what talks in the afterlife will be like, I imagine – – – ruminative, and reminescent – although dear knows what it is really all about. How strange talking is – what mists rise and fall – how one loses the other & then thinks to have found the other – then down comes another soft final curtain . . . But it is incredible – don’t you feel – how mysterious and isolated we each of us are – at the last. I suppose one ought to make this discovery once & for all but I seem to be always making it again. It seems to me that writers dont acknowledge it half enough. They pretend to know all there is in the parcel. But how is one to do it without seeming vague? Some novels have been flung up our mountainside lately. Among them Lawrence’s Women in Love.3 Really! Really!! Really!!! But it is so absurd that one cant say anything; it after all is almost purely pathological, as they say. But its sad to think what might have been. Wasn’t it Santyana who said: Every artist holds a lunatic in leash.4 That explains L. to me. You know I am Gudrun? Oh, what rubbish it all is, tho’. Secker is a little fool to publish such STUFF.5



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I wish a writer would rise up – a new one – a really good one – M. is engaged in a fat novel.6 He is quite wrapt away in it. I keep on with my short stories. I have been doing a series for The Sphere,7 because it pays better than any other paper I know – But now they are done I don’t believe they are much good. Too simple. It is always the next story which is going to contain everything, and that next story is always just out of reach. One seems to be saving up for it. I have been reading Shakespeare as usual. The Winters Tale again.8 All the beginning is very dull – isn’t it. That Leontes is an intolerable man and I hate gentle Hermione. Her strength of mind, too, in hiding just round the corner from him for 15 years is terrifying! But oh – the Shepherd scene is too perfect. Now I am embedded in Measure for Measure.9 I had no idea it was so good. M. reads aloud in the evening & we make notes. There are moments when our life is rather like a school for two! I see us walking the crocodile for two and correcting each others exercises. But no – not really. Dearest Ottoline – Is this a Fearfully dull letter? Im afraid it is. Im afraid ‘Katherine has become so boring nowadays’. But I send it with much love – very very much – Katherine. Notes 1. Ernestine Rey was the Swiss maid employed at the Chalet des Sapins. According to Walker, she was ‘the sister of the founder of the tourism industry in the area, Louis Rey. His daughter, Rose, still possesses Katherine’s desk and many photographs’ (p. 240). 2. François Auguste René, Vicomte de Chateaubriand (1768–1848), was a French diplomat, politician and writer, one-time favourite as prime minister, who first distinguished himself amongst the men of letters and intellectuals of his time with his Le Génie du christianisme (1802; ‘The Genius of Christianity’). He is best remembered now for his autobiography (and autobiographical method), Mémoires d’outre-tombe (‘Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb’). 3. Women in Love, DHL’s follow-up to The Rainbow, was published in Britain in 1921 but almost instantly banned after a trial for obscenity; it had been published in the United States the previous autumn. The book’s subsequent publication history proved more complicated and passionate than that of the more sexually explicit, thematically provocative Lady Chatterley’s Lover – over the course of the twentieth century, it was hailed as a Modernist masterpiece, whilst also reviled as lewd, patriarchal or misogynistic. In DHL’s immediate social sphere, it was either the book’s debt to Freudian symbolism or its sincerity as a roman à clef that triggered the most impassioned debates. 4. Santayana uses this striking aphorism in his 1905 essay ‘Reason in Common Sense’, later incorporated into the huge five-volume work The Life of Reason: ‘Every animal is somewhat dull and somewhat mad [. . .] The intelligent made known to history flourishes within a dullard and holds a lunatic on a leash [. . .] Thus the best human intelligence is still decidedly barbarous; it fights in heavy armour and keeps a fool at court’ (p. 10).

294   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 5. Martin Secker (1882–1978) was then an emerging London publisher, who went on to publish some of the most distinguished authors of the day. 6. JMM was working on his own, partly autobiographical roman à clef, The Things We Are, which was published the following year. For the intricate interworkings of JMM, KM and DHL’s friendship and the novel’s genesis and plot, see Kaplan, pp. 137–56. 7. A series of KM’s stories had been commissioned by Clement Shorter, to appear in the Sphere over the next six months; they were illustrated by the Cumbrian artist W. Smithson Broadhead, a choice KM deplored, as she would later make clear in a letter to Dorothy Brett (29 August 1921; see CL1, pp. 400–1). The series included ‘Sixpence’, ‘An Ideal Family’ and ‘Mr and Mrs Dove’. See CW2, pp. 300–7; 311–22. 8. The Winter’s Tale (1623) is one of Shakespeare’s late, tragi-pastoral plays, which, like The Tempest, explores the themes of crime, betrayal, redemption and the restorative processes of time. Leontes, King of Sicilia, is one of the male protagonists; Hermione, his beautiful, virtuous wife, is the central but largely absent female protagonist, and mother of Perdita. Some of KM’s reading notes have survived; see CW4, p. 335. 9. Measure for Measure (1603) is considered one of Shakespeare’s more complex and problematic comedies, given its ambivalent, probing plot structure and tone. See KM’s reading notes in CW4, p. 300.

[20 December 1921] [HRC] Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre Valais Dearest Ottoline, I have just found the letter I wrote you on the first of November. I would send it you as a proof of good faith but I reread it. Grim thing to do – isn’t it? There is a kind of fixed smile on old letters which reminds one of the bridling look of old photographs – So its torn up and I begin again. I don’t know what happens to Time here. It seems to become shorter and shorter; to whisk round the corners; to become all tail, all Saturday to Monday. This must sound absurd coming from so remote a spot as our mountain peaks. But there it is. We write, we read, M. goes off with his skates, I go for a walk through my field glasses and another day is over. This place makes one work. Perhaps its the result of living among mountains; one must bring forth a mouse or be overwhelmed. If climate were everything, then Montana must be very near Heaven. The sun shines and shines. Its cold in the shade, but out of it it is hot enough for a hat and a parasol – far and away hotter than the S. of France, and windless. All the streams are solid little streams of ice, there are thin patches of snow, like linen drying, on the fields. The sky is



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high, transparent, with marvellous sunsets. And when the moon rises & I look out of my window down into the valley full of clouds its like looking out of the Ark while it bobbed above the flood.1 But all the same I shall never get over my first hatred of the Swiss. They are the same everywhere. Ugly, dull, solid lumps, with a passion divided between pigs and foreigners. Foreigners are what they prefer to gorge themselves with but pigs will serve. As to their ankles – they fill me with a kind of anguish. I should have an ankle complex if I lived in Switzerland long. But one never lives anywhere long. . . . I wonder if you are going to spend the winter in England? Everybody that one used to know seems to have disappeared. But I suppose they are really all there just as of yore. It is nice to know B. R. is so happy – with an infant Conrad, too!2 How amazing. I so looked forward to his Chinese sketches in the Nation,3 but I wish he told one more of the lakes and mountains – I could dispense with Mrs Dewey4 altogether if I knew the trees were shaped like umbrellas. I was thankful and fell greedily upon the little bonfires he did mention. But oh, when people have seen marvels, I wish they would tell of them! M. and I are reading Jane Austen in the evenings.5 With delight. ‘Emma’ is really a perfect book – don’t you feel? I enjoy every page. I cant have enough of Miss Bates or Mr Woodhouse’s gruel or that charming Mr Knightley. Its such an exquisite comfort to escape from the modern novels I have been forcibly reading. Wretched affairs! I do ask for something that I can’t hand on to my dog to be read by him with relish and much tail thumping. This fascinated pursuit of the sex adventure is beyond words boring! I am so bored by sex qua sex, by the gay dog sniffing round the prostitutes bedroom or by the ultra modern snigger – worse still – that I could die – at least. It has turned me to Proust however at last.6 I have been pretending to have read Proust for years but this autumn M. and I both took the plunge. I certainly think he is by far the most interesting living writer. He is fascinating! Its a comfort to have someone whom one can so tremendously admire. It is horrible to feel so out of touch with one’s time as I do nowadays – almost frightening. Have you read Aldous’ novel?7 I have seen it reviewed but that is all. Is it very good? And did you see ‘Vera’ by my cousin Elizabeth.8 I thought it far and away her best book (though I never said so to Sidney Waterlow. What he meant by saying he had seen me I cant imagine. It is years since I set eyes on him.) Oh, how nice it would be to talk – really at one’s ease – have a long talk with you in your little room. There are so many things I should love to hear. One begins to feel too much of an exile. I am so glad you liked M’s poems. They were very heavily sat on.9 But he is bursting into new books, all the same. His novel is to be published in the spring and two other tomes as well. My infant is to lie in Constable’s bosom until after the New Year.10 I have been longing all

296   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 this last week to snatch it away and bury it. Its not half good enough! I can’t bear to think about it. But this letter must end – Dearest Ottoline, if you would write to us – your letter would be read so ardently – Please don’t punish me for not having written for so long. There are other reasons, too, for my silence – but they are the ancient eternal reasons – fatigue beyond words – ill health. One hardly dares mention it again – I think of you more often than I can say – I wish – how I wish – but thats useless. I am always your warmly loving Katherine. Notes  1. See Genesis 7: 17–24.  2. John Conrad Russell (1921–87) was the first son of Bertrand Russell and his partner, Dora Black, born in November; the choice of his second name was an affectionate tribute to the writer Joseph Conrad. Severe mental health issues would later curtail his illustrious career in the United Nations.  3. From 3 December until that year, the Nation and Athenaeum published a weekly series of ‘Sketches of Modern China’ by Bertrand Russell, depicting his visit to China at the prompting of Liang Qichao, the distinguished journalist, political activist and founder of the Chinese Lecture Association, and officially invited by Fu Tong, Professor of Philosophy at the Government University, Beijing.  4. While in China, Russell had met up and developed a close friendship with the American philosopher John Dewey (1859–1952), and his wife and fellow academic, the pioneering educationalist Alice Dewey, née Chipman (1859–1927), also on an extended stay in the Far East. Her Letters from China and the Far East (1920), extracts from which were also published in the Nation, include extended descriptions of landscapes and local people, such as this evocation of Nanking to which KM probably alludes: I started out to speak of the view – typical China, deforested hills close by, all pockmarked at the bottom with graves, like animal burrows and golf bunkers; peasants’ stone houses with thatched roofs, looking like Ireland or France; orchards of pomegranates with lovely scarlet blossoms and other fruits; some rice fields already growing, others being set out, ten or a dozen people at work in one patch; garden patches, largely melons; in the distance the wall stretching out for miles, a hill with a pagoda, a lotus lake, and in the far distance the blue mountains – also the city, not so much of which was visible, however. (p. 128) This rather distant observation contrasts strikingly with Russell’s vivid account of the eclipse, and the local ceremonies to ward off evil spirits. See ‘The Feast and the Eclipse’, Nation and Athenaeum, 3 December 1921, p. 375.  5. That same month, KM had admitted to her cousin Elizabeth that ‘We long for letters – the kind of letters exiles are supposed to receive, and a copy of The Nation comes instead. In fact, all is very devilish and if it weren’t for Jane Austen in the evenings we should be in despair . . .’ (CL1, p. 38).



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Reading aloud was a favoured evening entertainment when JMM and KM were together, as their notebooks and extensive reading notes attest. Here they are reading Jane Austen’s fourth novel, Emma (1815), a romantic comedy in which the would-be matchmaker, Emma Woodhouse, eventually marries George Knightly after a series of mishaps and misunderstandings. Miss Bates is the affectionate spinster whose social clumsiness and chatter finally exasperate Emma.  6. Like Virginia Woolf, KM was both fascinated and daunted by the figure, reputation and writings of the French novelist Marcel Proust (1871–1922), whose Modernist masterpiece, A la recherche du temps perdu, was an ongoing roman-fleuve, only three of the eight parts having then been published. The first volume in translation, by C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, did not come out until early 1922, but the work was comprehensively and fervently discussed in London’s intellectual circles and little magazines.  7. Aldous Huxley’s first novel, Crome Yellow, had been published in November that year; it was a sharp social satire largely focused on the fashionable set who gathered at the exclusive country house, Crome, in which Ottoline and her friends easily recognised vivid, sometimes cruel caricatures of themselves – Morrell and KM included.  8. Elizabeth von Arnim’s novel Vera (1921) is a grim portrayal of marriage in which a young heroine, Lucy Entwhistle, marries a bullying and narcissistic widower, only to find herself being gradually destroyed by both him and the haunting image of his former wife. The novel is commonly taken to be autobiographical – a feature that did not escape Elizabeth’s second husband, John Francis Russell, 7th Earl Russell, generally called Frank, who threatened to sue for libel.  9. JMM’s Poems: 1916–1920 had been published that autumn by CobdenSanderson. The volume was not very extensively reviewed and opinion was rarely more than half-hearted. Ernest de Selincourt’s review, ‘Buried Treasure’, in the TLS of 13 October 1921, p. 10, is a case in point. 10 KM’s forthcoming collection, The Garden Party and Other Stories, was in the hands of her publisher, Constable and Company, and would be published the following spring.

[27 December 1921] [HRC]

27 xii 1921

Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre Valais

Dearest Ottoline, Isn’t it astonishing how a scent can carry one back – – – When I opened your envelope the delicious strange perfume quite overwhelmed me – and the queer thing was what it took me to was walking

298   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 out into the air after having heard the Balalaika orchestra.1 It was a night in spring – wasn’t it? I know I felt that we had shared something wonderful, and that just for that moment we were walking the earth together and it was happiness. How lovely the little handkerchiefs are with the swans sailing round them. They arrived on Christmas Day its very self too. You know how one watches for that Christmas post at this distance. I was in bed too which made my longing even more fearful. I had to wait until someone crept up the stairs instead of lurking at the door – I really feel I could write an entire book with each chapter beginning ‘The post did not come that day’ or ‘That morning the post was late’. And I at least would thrill and shiver with the horror of it. Its awful to spend such emotions on postmen! But there it is. We had a ‘proper’ Christmas – even to a Tree, thanks to the Mountain who revels in such things and would like all the year to be December. The house whispered with tissue paper for days, a pudding appeared out of the bosom of the air and the sight of that fired even my gentle Ernestine who began, from the sounds, to gambol on the ground floor and toss the iron rings of the stove on to the floor. The crackers however would not pull which cast a little gloom over M. who relishes crackers and the mottoes which were German were very depressing: ‘Mädchen möch ich Frau dir sehn’.2 I am glad it is all over – but the traces, the signs remain for a long time . . . Dearest Ottoline, I think of you in your little room – How well I know that rapture that comes sometimes when one is alone. I think perhaps it is the greatest joy of all. If only it would stay – if only one might live like that, always. I sometimes think that if one were well there is no reason why it should ever go. But that is nonsense. The feeling I mean is – – – its as though the barriers were down and you stepped into another world where even the silence lives and you are accepted, you are received as part of everything. Nothing is hidden – And there is that precious sense of awareness – – – But speaking of this reminds me instantly of De la Mare, who understands it so perfectly. Have you see his new book of poems The Veil?3 I have just ordered it. I do hope you will see it. Do you know him? He is one of the people whom I have most enjoyed meeting in Life. There is no one like him. The snow has fallen at last, here. It looks beautiful. It feels desperately cold. I have been in bed – – lately – – and only see the world from my window. As soon as I can get up I am going to Paris to see a new man there – a Russian who claims to completely cure this disease with applications of X rays.4 I believe him, absolutely, (as one does, you know.) and I dream at night that I am climbing hills covered with little rose bushes and jumping across streams. Will it all come true – I wonder? Do tell me – how you are – when you have time. I wish I knew that you were really better. Do you believe at all – in people like Coué,



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the auto-suggestion man?5 If my Russian fails me I shall try him. It becomes really comic like something out of Rabelais6 – there ought to be pages & pages beginning ‘And then she tried’. . . . We are still reading Jane Austen. M. falls in love with all the heroines, even with Fanny Price but I should be content to walk in the shrubbery with Mr Knightley.7 I remain faithful to him. Its greater fun for M. than for me, for all the engagements come as a complete surprise to him. He almost swoons with anxiety when Mr D. follows Eliza’s father into the library and demands her hand, and once it is all happily settled and a fortune of ten thousand a year bestowed upon them his relief is extreme.8 Poor M! If I were really a generous creature I would make him a widow so that he could have all this himself from the very beginning. A Happy New Year, a New Year of Lovely Weather, dearest Ottoline. With warm love from Katherine. Notes 1. Although the date of the concert has not been ascertained, both friends evoke the evening as one of their most cherished, enraptured times together. See above, p. 227, n. 1. 2. (Ger.): Maiden, would that I could see you as a wife. 3. Walter de la Mare (1873–1956), the acclaimed poet and short-story writer, was also a close friend of the Murrys. His most recent and much-praised poetry collection, The Veil and Other Poems, was published in autumn 1921. 4. For Manoukhin and his X-ray treatment, see above, pp. 138–40; 141, n. 1. 5. The French psychologist and pioneering psychotherapist Emile Coué de la Chataignerie (1857–1926) was a prominent figure in the French world of modern psychology, with strong links to the ‘Ecole de Nancy’ (School of Nancy) that KM read into the following year (see CL1, pp. 305–6). The publication of the English translation of his landmark work, Self-Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion, in 1920 helped popularise him in Britain. The self-help method he defined in the book was later trivialised in the motto ‘Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better’, but his foregrounding of alternative therapies using autosuggestion and meditative healing processes was essential at the time, alerting the public, the press and the medical profession to the clinically proven benefits of modern psychology and psychotherapy, especially in the immediate post-war context. 6. The French satirist, humanist and anticlerical Renaissance monk François Rabelais (c. 1483–1553) is considered by many to be one of the founders of the European novel, and even a certain European mindset; his mock-heroic comic spirit, sprawling quest narratives and self-ironising banter also make him one of the earliest precursors of the modern novel. He is best known for his burlesque, often grotesque, picaresque narratives Pantagruel (1532) and Gargantua (1534), the latter beginning with a hyperbolic prologue in which, by way of endless detours and enumerations, the narrator compares his ideal reader to a dog, tirelessly sucking on bones to find the marrow. It is this style

300   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 and image which KM compares to her own never-ending quest to find the right medicine. 7. Fanny Price is the earnest, dutiful but steadfastly sincere heroine of Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park (1814), often believed to be the author’s selfportrait. For KM’s diary allusions to the novel, see CW4, pp. 398–400. Mr Knightley is the stern but fair and reliable friend of Austen’s earlier heroine Emma, who, after feeling piqued by his forthrightness, realises by the end of the novel that she loves him and so accepts his proposal of marriage. 8. See Pride and Prejudice, vol. 3, Chapter 17. Right at the end of the novel, Mr Darcy follows Elizabeth Bennet’s father to the library and asks for his permission to marry her. Unlike his wife, who has been eager from the outset for her daughters to find wealthy husbands, Mr Bennet is concerned that his daughter may be unduly swayed by Darcy’s fortune of £10,000 a year, and gives his consent only once assured of his daughter’s true affection for the suitor.

[24 January 1922] [HRC] Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre Valais My dearest Ottoline, That is one thing about our solitary existence. When such a letter as your letter today comes it is done the very fullest justice to. It is reread and read – But oh, how I should love a long talk – anywhere, anywhere out of the silly world of London and the white one of Switzerland. Its intolerable that you should have had pleurisy! I tremble to think of the time we spend in bed unhappily. It is out of all proportion. I am fleeing to Paris on Monday next to see if that Russian1 can bake me or boil me or serve me up in some more satisfying way – I suppose the snow is very good for one – But its horrid stuff to take and there’s far too much of it. Immense fringes of icicles hang at our windows. Awful looking things like teeth – And every sunday the Swiss fly into the forest on little sledges shrieking Ho-jé! Ho jé positively makes my blood curdle. So off I go on Monday with the Mountain very breathless carrying two large suitcases & begging the suitcases pardon when she bumps them into things. I shall only go to spy out the land and buy some flowers and wallow in a hot bath. But if the Russian says he can cure me M. and I shall go to Paris in the spring and live there for a time – One writes the word ‘cure’ – but – – but I don’t know – I haven’t seen Aldous book and I do not want to.2 The idea bores me so terribly – that I wont waste time on it. The only reviewer who really realised its dullness was Rebecca West.3 She said just what was right – she shuddered at the silliness of it. But everybody else seems to puff him up. It gets very awkward if young men are forced to feed



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out of their friends inkpots in this way – In fact I confess it downright disgusts me – But oh, Ottoline I must ask you if you have read Congreve lately.4 I have just finished ‘The Way of The World’.5 Do read it! For the sake of the character Mrs Millament. I think she is so exquisitely done when she first appears ‘full sail’ and tells the others how she curls her hair. The maid is marvellous in that little scene too, and the other scene is where is decides finally to have Mirabel. That little conversation between the two seems to me really ravishing in its own way – Its so delicate – so gay – But its much best read aloud. What a brilliant strange creature Congreve was – so anxious not to be considered a writer, but only a plain gentleman. And Voltaire’s shrewd reply ‘If you had been only a gentleman I would not have come to see you’. . . .6 I love reading good plays, and so does M. We have such fun talking them over afterwards – In fact the pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books. It is one of the many pleasures of our solitary life. Pleasures we have – ever increasing. I would not change this kind of life for any other. There are moods of course when we long for people. But they pass, leaving no regret, no disillusionment & no horrid remembrance – And one does have time to work. But I wish my new book was a better one. I am terrified of it – But it can’t be helped now. M. is writing hard, and I am in the middle of what looks like a short novel. I am so glad you liked The Veil. There is one poem: Why has the rose faded and fallen And these eyes have not seen. . . .7 It haunts me – But it is a state of mind I know so terribly well – That regret for what one has not seen and felt – for what has passed by – unheeded. Life is only given once and then I waste it. Do you feel that? Are there snowdrops yet – It will soon be February – and then the worst is over. By March the first flowers emerge, cold, pale as if after the Flood. But how one loves them! And that soft stirring in the trees – in elms especially – and the evening, coming reluctant again – Dearest, I am so glad for your sake that it will soon be spring. I hate winter for you – I wish I could come into your room now and say ‘the lilac is out’. Is it only in winter that your dreaded neuralgia is so painful? There’s no excuse for winter – none! I have given M. your messages. He skis everywhere – and skates no more – He looks awfully well – Elizabeth is here, buried in her chalet at work – She is one creature who never has to think of health. She is always well – never even tired and is as active as if she were eighteen.8 My dull letter creeps after your winged one – But it is sent with so much love. Love from us both, dearest Ottoline – and may we meet again soon!            Ever yours devotedly                 Katherine.

302   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Notes 1. KM and Ida Baker reached Paris on 31 January, in time for KM’s appointment with Dr Manoukhin that same afternoon. 2. Morrell had been bitterly hurt and offended by Aldous Huxley’s slighting and easily recognisable caricature of Garsington life in his novel Crome Yellow. She wrote expressing her distress, to which Huxley responded straightaway, apologising for any pain, and claiming that no references to his friends had been intended in such a ‘puppet-comedy’ of a book. See Moorehead 1974, pp. 214–17. 3. Rebecca West, the pen-name of Cicely Isabel Fairfield (1892–1983), was then an emerging novelist and committed feminist who was largely acknowledged by her contemporaries as a lucid, often brilliant and incisive journalist. From late 1921, her regular column as a literary reviewer for the New Statesman also played a major role in honing her own ideas about the present and future of creative and innovative fiction. Her sceptical, impatient review of Crome Yellow, which she faulted for triviality and outmoded satirical verve, was published on 17 December. 4. The Yorkshire-born playwright William Congreve (1670–1729) was one of the most influential and best-loved of the Restoration dramatists, renowned for his brilliant wit, incisively controlled comic verve and impeccable sense of timing in stagecraft. His memorable stage characters and their sharply defined psychological traits played a large part in defining many of the stock types of the English comedy of manners, within his era and well beyond. 5. The Way of the World (1700) was Congreve’s last comedy, which he and generations to come saw as his masterpiece, although popular reception at the time was more reticent. Following the trials in love of the male and female protagonists, Mirabell and Mrs Millamant, and a series of contenders and opponents, it combines a ruthless presentation of marriage as a cynical battle for wealth and power with a more poised exploration of the deep-seated drive for security and sincere affection. KM singles out the moment in Act II, scene i when – after having been evoked at length – Mrs Millimant first appears. In anticipation of this arrival, Mirabell exclaims, ‘Here she comes I’faith full sail, with her fan spread and her streamers out, and a shoal of fools for tenders – ha, no, I cry her mercy’ (ll. 288–9). Questioned as to the paper she uses to style her hair, she responds, ‘I never pin up my hair with prose. I fancy one’s hair would not curl if it were pinned up with prose’ (ll. 323–4). 6. The French Enlightenment philosopher, playwright and political commentator François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778), known by his pseudonym Voltaire, stayed in England – a country whose democratic traditions he greatly admired – from 1726 until 1728, and later evoked his impressions and conclusions in his Lettre sur les Anglais, or Lettres philosophiques (1733), now regarded as one of the most influential works of its time. Although it ranges freely across subjects as broad as trade and economic exchange, political freedom, religious tolerance and scientific enquiry, it also recalls his visit to Congreve, in the hope of discussing theatrical technique with him. Voltaire explains: Mr Congreve had one defect which was his entertaining too mean an idea of his first profession, that of a writer, though it was to this he owed his



lady ottoline morrell   303 fame and fortune. He spoke of his work as of trifles that were beneath him; and hinted to me in our first conversation, that I should visit him upon no other foot than that of a gentleman, who led a life of plainness and simplicity. I answered that had he been so unfortunate as to be a mere gentleman, I should never have come to see him, and I was much disgusted at so unseasonable a piece of vanity. (p. 149)

Voltaire later admitted, however, that he had not appreciated the great man’s self-deprecating irony. 7. See above, p. 298. KM slightly misquotes the opening line of ‘Awake’, which runs, ‘Why hath the rose faded and fallen, yet these eyes have not seen?’ (De la Mare, p. 36). 8. KM’s cousin, Elizabeth von Arnim, owned a vast, much-loved house, of her own design, named the Chalet Soleil, in the neighbouring commune of Randogne, in the Valais mountains. Twenty-two years older than KM, she was then fifty-six years old.

[4 March 1922] [HRC]

4 iii 1922

Victoria Palace Hotel 6–8 Rue Blaise Desgoffe Rue de Rennes Paris.

Dearest Ottoline Your letter has made me so very very happy. Its a joy to know that the Garden Party has given you pleasure and especially that you like my poor old girls, the ‘Daughters’.1 I shall never forget lying on that wretched little sofa in Menton writing that story. I couldn’t stop. I wrote it all day and on my way back to bed sat down on the stairs and began scribbling the bit about the meringues . . . But dearest Ottoline your beautiful letter is too generous. I can’t pretend praise isn’t awfully nice! And especially as I have not heard one word from anyone whom I know personally since the book appeared. Reviews there have been and a few notes from strangers. But thats not at all the same. I didn’t expect to hear and yet my ‘subconscious mind’ has been intensely interested in whether there are any letters or not! I don’t think its bad pride that makes one feel like that. It’s the ‘you feel that too? you know what I was trying to say’ feeling which will be with one while life lasts. Or so I feel. I treasure your letter, even though my Garden Party doesn’t deserve it. Oh dear – how I should love a long talk. There are so many things to say. Where does one begin? How I know those English pictures. They

304   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 are stifling. And that Tate like an immense hen sitting on them hatching them out. Why be so stern, so stuffy, so portentous. It’s a frightening feeling to be caught in the Tate gallery. I feel just the same in the lift here with English people – Heavens! What a crushing air they have. And the gay little lift-boy, catching sight of a beam of sun on a landing cries ‘Dans un mois il serait pleine Ete!2 I shall always love the French and their art for that quickness, eagerness and a kind of carelessness – or rather a not being careful . . . Brett sent me a couple of pages from Vogue with reproductions of Gertler’s paintings.3 One thing is certain. He will never drop the bone for the shadow. There is a portrait of him, too, which looks as though he was rejoicing in the bone beyond words. What meat there is on it. What beautiful fat! Its very hard to understand how he can be content with all solids – isn’t it? And I can’t see the point of painting those china ornaments. They are amusing to look at but to reproduce them in paint – why? What do they reveal then? I dont understand.Yes, of course he is being very sincere. But oh those apples! Why will they all paint apples – If I bought pictures I should put on my area gate No Bottles No Apples. I am hoping to go to alone with JMM in May and have a small stare at pictures here. But it all depends on my ‘treatment’. I came to Paris for a fortnight but the Russian doctor was so certain he could cure me if I started then that I did not return to Switzerland. (and never shall) It is all very mysterious. He x rays the spleen. I am full of wandering blue rays at present & feel like a deep-sea fish. He says that after 15 séances4 I shall feel perfectly well in every way. Then I go away for 2–3 months & then return for 10 more in the autumn. And that is the end of it. A miracle. I wonder. . . . At present I have only had five and this is the moment when one feels a severe reaction for three weeks – (It always is the moment) So I cannot say what is happening. I believe – just blindly believe. After all illness is so utterly mysterious that I don’t see why one shouldn’t recover as mysteriously. I have a sneaking feeling all the time that Coué is really the man and Coué would only charge 3d where this man squeezes three hundred francs a time out of me.5 Happily I have saved £100 so I can pay. But if it is all my life at the end I shall look awfully silly and dear knows what will happen. But anything, anything to be out of the trap – to escape, to be free. Nobody understands that ‘depression’ who has not known it. And one cannot ever explain it. Its ones own secret. And one goes on rebelling. Yes, I do, too. But don’t you think we do feel it more than other people because of our love of life? Other people really don’t care so much. They have long periods of indifference, when they almost might as well be ill. But this poignant, almost unbearable feeling that all is passing. People who are well do not and cannot understand what it is . . .



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(That is the reason why I wish I could see you sometimes. I would like to make you feel that I understood – – – to give you my love . . . Please believe me – Its hard to write that – – ) We have not seen one French person to talk to. We live here like hermits in our two caves at the end of a long dark passage. We work, play chess, read, M. goes out and does the shopping, we make tea and drink it out of dove-blue bowls. For some reason, its all very nice – I should hate to live in a city – in fact I could not – but this is only to last till May. And out of my window I look on other windows and see the funny things people put on the window sills, a hyacinth, a canary, a bottle of milk, and there’s a large piece of light, pale sky and a feeling of Spring – real Spring. Yesterday on my way to the clinic I saw new leaves on one little tree. Its quite warm too and sunny. We have planned to go to Germany or to Austria this summer if – if – if* . . . I don’t think I ever want to see England again. But I shall have to for JMM’s sake. England means London to me and my memories of London are nearly all horrid. Do you remember one walk we had in the early Spring at Garsington? Primroses were out. I remember you picking them in a little wood – Dearest Ottoline – take me with you if you go for a walk today – Let us at least stand together one moment – This immense letter must end.      My warm love and thanks        Yours ever          Katherine. * Original underlined three times for emphasis.

Notes 1. After first being published in the London Mercury in May 1921, ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ appeared in KM’s collection The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922). See CW2, pp. 266–83. 2. (Fr.): In a month’s time, it will be the height of summer. 3. The latest issue of the British edition of Vogue included a two-page article titled simply ‘Mark Gertler’, with reproductions of five pictures and a short review suggesting his new style marked a welcome break away from more arid, Formalist and Cubist techniques (pp. 68–9). 4. (Fr.): sessions. 5. The French psychologist Emile Coué (see above, p. 299, n. 5) was renowned for promoting group therapy sessions and easily affordable types of psychotherapeutic counselling; Manoukhin’s private clinic was extremely expensive, even by the standards of French private medicine at the time, as Manoukhin himself was later to admit, pretexting his lack of interest in the finances of his joint practice. See Merlin, p. 35.

306   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [26 May 1922] [BL] [Draft]

26 v 1922

Victoria Palace Hotel Rue Blaise Desgoffe Rue de Rennes

Dearest Ottoline, I feel as though I have lived for years – for a whole life time – in this hotel. The weeks pass and I am always hoping for that uninterrupted free time when I may sit down and write to you. I hate writing to you in a hurry. I always want not to be haunted by the idea of Time. But perhaps that is to ask too much. It was just the same when I was with you.

[26 May 1922] [ATL] [Unposted]

26 v 1922

Victoria Palace Hotel Rue de Rennes Paris.

Dearest Ottoline, 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 – its 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’. 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.1 I suppose it was worth doing if everything is worth doing . . . but that is most certainly not what I



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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 Note 1. For KM’s initial reaction to Joyce’s controversial novel and her later, revised, response, see above, p. 273.

[20 August 1922] [HRC] [Postcard] [6 Pond Street, Hampstead] Dearest Ottoline, Its too horrid. Lunch is impossible for me tomorrow. I have a farewell engagement with my Papa that I cant escape, or be free from in the early afternoon.1 If only Belsize Park were nearer Oxford Square I’d love to ask if I might see you here tomorrow morning, for morning 11 o’clock tea. But these distances are so great! I am so very very sorry to miss you. More than I can say.           Ever           Katherine. Note 1. Harold Beauchamp had arrived in England in June and stayed until September; he lunched with his three daughters, KM, Chaddie and Jeanne, on August 21.

[25 August 1922] [Stanford]

25 viii 1922

6 Pond Street Hampstead.

Dearest Ottoline, I have been waiting to write to you until my plans were more settled. Everything has been so much in the air these last few weeks. But

308   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 now that Im staying in London for three months I do so hope I shall be able to see you and really talk. I haven’t written lately for the very same reason – the old reason – that Ive only had external things to say – things that don’t matter. All my other life has been spent in wondering why I felt as I did and whether my heart would go on or stop and why I couldn’t get up stairs . . . You know how horribly absorbing these thoughts are! People who don’t realise them cannot imagine their power; they darken the sun. And though I ‘keep it up’ and ‘pretend’ to others I feel I cannot with you. I suppose the truth is I take advantage of the fact that you understand – and will not imagine it is because I am indifferent that I don’t write. Far far otherwise! But since I have seen Sorapure I feel marvellously better – nearly well for the moment. I have gained pounds and pounds – too many pounds! And I do simply long to see you, dearest Ottoline. Shall you be in London at any time? Its impossible to tell you how sorry I am that you have been ill again. Forgive this illegible note to be put into Murry’s pocket. I will write a real letter this weekend – With so much love Yours ever Katherine.

[28 August 1922] [N] 6 Pond Street Hampstead NW3 Monday Aug. 1922 Dearest Ottoline, I would simply love to meet you at Taylors1 whenever you ask me to come. Or if you would rather I met you anywhere else – I shall be there. I can’t walk yet – absurd as it sounds – only a few puffing paces – a most humiliating & pug-like performance. But once I get my legs back or rather once my heart is stronger I shall not be dependent on Taxis. I live in them since I have come to London. I have got Fat. Wyndham Lewis2 I hear is also fat, May Sinclair has waxed enormous, Anne Rice can’t be supported by her ankles alone – I try to comfort myself with many examples. But I don’t really care – its awful how little one cares. Anything – rather than illness – rather than the Sofa, and that awful dependence on others! I wish you were better. I feel a heartless wretch to run on so glibly . . . But never never shall I forget for an instant what it means –



lady ottoline morrell   309

I rather look forward to these three months in London, once I have got out of my boxes and into a real corner of my own. I dream of brand new friends – not the dreadfully solemn ‘intensive’ ones – not the mind probers. But young ones who aren’t ashamed to be interested. Dear little Gerhardi who wrote Futility is one3 – he sounds awfully nice. And theres another I met in Switzerland4 – so attractive! I don’t think I care very much for the real intelligentsia, Ottoline dearest. And they seem to be so uneasy – so determined not to be caught out! Who wants to catch them? I wish you would come to Italy for part of next winter. Do you know the Lago di Garda? They say it is so lovely. And the journey is nothing. It will be such a real joy to see you again. With love Ever your affectionate Katherine. Notes 1. After the sale of her flat in Bedford Square, London, Ottoline would sometimes rent accommodation in Oxford Square, in the house where Gertler was living, belonging to a kind-hearted patron of the arts and collector, Walter Taylor. 2. The Canadian-born writer and artist Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957), former member of the Camden Town group, co-founder of the Vorticist movement and editor of the short-lived manifesto-magazine Blast, had been based in London since his return from the Front, where for two years he had served as a war artist. The early 1920s saw him excelling as a powerfully avantgarde and successful painter; by the end of the decade, however, and until the late 1930s, he focused more on fiction and essay writing, developing a caustic, satirical vein that in many ways echoes the defiant bold lines and harsh colours of his pictures, but with an explicitly belligerent and proto-fascist viewpoint. 3. The Russian-born writer William Gerhardi (1895–1977) had been in regular contact with KM ever since he had spontaneously contacted her, after hearing JMM lecture in Oxford and evoke the writings of his wife. Gerhardi’s letter, dated 17 June 1921, begins: Dear Miss Mansfield, I hope you won’t mind if I write to tell you how extremely beautiful I think your story is. I am speaking of ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’. I have only just read it, and I have never read anything of yours before. I think it is, and in particular the last long paragraph towards the end, of a quite amazing beauty. (ATL: MS-Papers-4003–37–1) He then sent her the draft of his first novel, Futility – A Novel on Russian Themes, asking for advice in terms of getting it published. Their friendship, although only ever by letter, became rapidly trusting and affectionate, and lasted until the end of KM’s life. For their letters, see CL1, pp. 566–93.

310   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 4. Possibly referring to Romer Wilson, the pen-name of Florence Roma Muir Wilson, an emerging writer then travelling in Switzerland and keen to establish contacts with fellow writers and compatriots. However, the unnamed writer might also have been among the steady flow of summer guests entertained by her cousin, Elizabeth von Arnim, at the Chalet Soleil.

[3 September 1922] [HRC]

Sunday.

6 Pond Street Hampstead NW3

Dearest Ottoline, I simply haven’t known what to answer for it has been as difficult for me to reach 11 Oxford Square as for you to come to horrid Hampstead. Apart from seeing Father last week, I had to rest. I’ve been deadly tired. Its a bore. I cannot walk more than a few yards yet and ‘getting about’ is a great difficulty. How fantastic it seems! The second time you asked me I had an appointment with my X ray man and it took hours of what they are pleased to call overhauling. I am to start the new series of this treatment this week. Variations on an ancient theme – I seem to write to you of nothing else. And I feel you must think me perfectly horrid! Yet the fact is I long to see you and if can still bear the thought of me I will come any time you propose (except Tuesday afternoon.) I ought to have answered your letter immediately! Why didn’t I? I felt I could not refuse again. Do let me come if you can! I hate to appear so odious. But my beastly half-health gets in the way of all I want most to do – I wish I knew how you are. If we did meet I feel I should like to talk for ever. Yours (in spite of my badness) ever        devotedly         Katherine.

Thomas Moult (1885–1974) and Bessie Moult (1887–1974)

Introduction Thomas Moult McKellan (the last name was dropped in 1936), born in Derbyshire, was a poet, critic, editor and novelist, and one of the Georgian poets. He became well known for his annual anthologies, Best Poems of the Year, published between 1922 and 1943, and comprised of popular verse selections taken from periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic. Voices, the short-lived magazine he founded in January 1919 to promote young writers (it folded in the autumn of 1921), featured Sherwood Anderson, A. E. Coppard, Louis Golding, F. V. Branford and Neville Cardus. For ten years, from 1952 to 1962, he was president of the Poetry Society and chairman of the editorial board of Poetry Review. In 1911, Thomas married Bessie Boltiansky, a Russian Jew from Elizabethgrad, who had moved to England in 1901. Just before the outbreak of World War Two, the family moved to the USA, possibly because of Bessie’s Jewish ancestry, arriving in New York on 4 June 1939. Twenty-two days later, however, on 26 June 1939, Thomas sailed back to England on his own. Bessie and their daughter Joy moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where Bessie gave lectures at the university and to local organisations. In 1942, she gave a lecture on KM, in which she claimed a personal friendship with the author. In 1945, all three family members, Thomas, Bessie and Joy, were reunited in Denver, Colorado, although the reunion was short-lived. Thomas returned to England and never saw Bessie again; in 1946, their daughter Joy also moved back to England. Bessie became a US citizen in 1950 and died in America in 1974. Thomas first came to the attention of JMM and KM when he contributed to Rhythm, and subsequently the Athenaeum. JMM had written to KM about Thomas on 9 October 1919, stating how he ‘lunched with Tom Moult to-day. He’s nice, but extraordinarily childish. His conceit of his own work is quite staggering. I couldn’t get out of asking him and Bessie to dinner on Wednesday.’1 In fact, thereafter the Moults seemed to become regular visitors to the Murrys’ Hampstead home in KM’s absence. On another occasion (1 April 1920), JMM wrote: ‘The

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312   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Moults came round in the evening; your ears ought to have tingled at their admiration of your writing. [. . .] it is so delightfully genuine & whole-hearted.’2 On 16 July 1920, KM wrote to Violet Schiff about the Moults, describing them in less than flattering terms: Tom Moult is the editor of Voices, a little, rather childish naive creature who writes poems and has a novel just coming out and Bessie is a smaller quieter creature who is everything that is good and kind but will talk to me about Madame Montessori and persist in telling me it’s not so important to attract the child’s attention as to guide it. This, because I am bad and wicked, bores me.3

Nevertheless, in early August 1920, Thomas met KM for the first time when he and Bessie were guests of the Murrys in Hampstead. He recorded how Katherine Mansfield’s sleeping-room was next to mine, and each morning at the same hour – how I came to dread it for her sake – the woeful sound of coughing, body-racking and relentlessly prolonged, would pierce the walls – and the hearts of those that heard it. Later in the day, though, she showed such sparkling gaiety downstairs, that anyone who had not listened to that coughing must have been utterly deceived and reassured about her.4

He also noticed how KM ‘sat down at her type-writing machine each Tuesday morning and refused to leave it until the task was complete in the afternoon’.5 A few weeks later, on 7 October 1920, KM was again critical – this time of Bessie – in a letter to JMM: Tom Moult’s letter was a most pathetic document, Boge. Poor little chap. He would sweep the very office. I have an idea that Bessie leads him a devil of a life. What was her operation. [. . .] shes just the kind of woman who would have that operation & then trade on poor old T’s sympathies for ever after.

A month later, on 21 November 1920, KM was writing to JMM, worried at the thought of having to write a critical review of Thomas’s novel Snow Over Eden, A Story of Today. However, she was spared having to write the review, for she had made the difficult decision to stop reviewing for the Athenaeum from 10 December and concentrate on her own stories. Nevertheless – and this is the case with numerous recipients of KM’s letters – in the few scraps of letters which survive to the Moults, KM’s tone is warm and friendly, contradicting her covert criticism of them to others. After KM’s death, Thomas published several articles on her, together with reviews of JMM’s editions of her work,6 all of them in a hagiographical vein, celebrating their friendship and viewing KM as a saintly, ethereal figure, too good for this world, as in the following two quotations:



thomas and bessie moult   313 To her friends she has bequeathed a treasure most noble: [. . .] an exalted sense that they have been privileged to sojourn awhile in the presence of one who was among the saintliest of women.7 One of the great values of the ‘Journal’ is that of its revelation of her attitude to writing. Almost an obsession with her was her desire to go on refining and purifying her expression of material existence, until it became a wholly spiritual expression.8

Moult’s angle is that while the life of the spirit is neither attainable nor desired by most individuals, Mansfield desired it with ‘an intensity’ and ‘a hunger’. Why it should be that it has tended to be fellow writers who evince a spiritual dimension to Mansfield’s writing is perhaps a comment on a writer’s need for a ‘muse’ or sacred source of inspiration. Gerri Kimber Notes 1. Hankin, p. 184. 2. Hankin, p. 302. 3. See below, p. 594. 4. Moult 1928a, p. 176. 5. Moult 1928a, p. 176. 6. See, for example, Moult 1923, pp. 227–8 (p. 228); Moult 1927, p. 40; Moult 1928b, p. 184. 7. Moult 1923, p. 228. 8. Moult 1927, p. 40.

[20 December 1921] [Letters 1928, 2, p. 166] [Chalet des Sapins, Montana-sur-Sierre] December 20, 1921 I cannot let Christmas come without sending you both my love and greetings. I love Christmas . . . In that other world where wishes are laws, there would be a great shining wreath of holly on the door knocker, lights at all the windows, and a real party going on inside. We meet in the hall and warmly re-clasp hands. Good Heavens! I’m not above a tree, coloured candles and crackers – are you? Wait. We shall have it all – or something better! I will never despair of a real gay meeting, one of these days, for us all. It’s always only an accident that the day is not fine, that one happens for the moment to be under an umbrella. It will all flash and sparkle, I truly believe that, sooner than we expect. – The very fact that we rebel at our little terms of imprisonment is proof that freedom is our real element.

314   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [22 April 1922] [ATL] [Victoria Palace Hôtel, Rue Blaise Desgoffe, Paris] [Unposted] 22 iv 1922 My dear Bessie and Tom, I can’t say what a delight it was to get your generous – too generous letters. Thank you from my heart. It was like you two not to have mentioned the big holes in the Garden Party. But I know they are there and Ill try and mend them next time . . . Are you both quite well again? Tom, you should refuse all contributions of influenza that come your way – I hope Bessie is feeling stronger now that the winter is over. It is over in England, I hope.

(Arthur) Richard Murry (1902–84)

Introduction As a child, Richard Murry was always known by his first name, Arthur, and did not adopt the name Richard until he was in his teens. He was born in 1902, thirteen years after his older brother, JMM. Their parents lived in South London in what JMM described as a stiflingly respectable middle-class home. One of Richard’s most famous paintings depicts the Victorian parlour with flowers on the table, the crowded overmantel, their mother lifting her eyes from a book to gaze into the artist’s eyes, while their father, in shirt sleeves and braces, smokes a pipe and reads a broadsheet newspaper beside the fire. But the real domestic situation belied the comfortable normality of the portrait. Mr Murry, Snr, a clerk at Somerset House, was ten years older than his wife, ‘obstinate, short in his temper and short in his views’,1 and could, occasionally, be violent. They were all afraid of him. JMM, in his autobiography, Between Two Worlds, described how, being at boarding school and having no friends at home during the school holidays, he devoted his time to his sibling, taking Richard out for walks in his pram, blackberrying in the park in summer and even writing stories for him. When he was at home, Richard would sit in JMM’s study to watch him at work. They had a very close bond. Nine-year-old Richard, still then known as Arthur, first met KM when JMM brought her to his parent’s house in Nicosia Road, Wandsworth, to introduce her to their mother and father. JMM, only twenty-one, had created a scandal by living with KM, who was still married to George Bowden. Richard remembered a ‘curtain of ice’ and an atmosphere so hostile that he was afraid, though he did not understand why at the time. He did not see either KM or JMM for a further three years.2 The relationship with the Murrys improved, after they were led to believe that JMM had married KM, and contact between Richard and his brother resumed. Richard was artistic and, like JMM, unwilling to follow the career path his father wanted him to take. But KM and JMM, impressed by his talent, encouraged him to realise his ambition and helped to persuade his parents that they should not stand in his way, though they

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316   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 were not prepared to support him financially. Richard was drawn towards illustrative art, etching and printing. According to KM’s friend and companion, Ida Baker, Richard ‘was humbly devoted to Katherine and she felt a great, almost motherly affection for him’. He brought her his drawings for discussion and she tried to give him ‘a sense of direction, vision’.3 KM speculated in a letter to JMM that ‘Arthur will draw posters 100 years. Praise him when I’m dead.’4 After the death of her younger brother, Leslie, KM adopted Richard as a favourite, calling him her ‘little brother’, or ‘Petit-Frere’, in affectionate letters. Sometimes she sent him money, stressing that this came from her alone, not from his brother. Although Richard asked for her address, JMM would not allow him to have it until 1918, because that would have given away the secret that she was still ‘Mrs George Bowden’. Letters were passed on to her through JMM. When she was in England, KM took him to theatres, cafés and galleries. They shared a taste for figurative art. KM’s favourite artist was Degas, in line with her love of performance art. Richard recalled that she liked music hall and musical performers generally. He thought that this was because she herself was a performer, a ‘natural entertainer’.5 Richard was a frequent visitor when KM and JMM lived in Hampstead, at the house they called ‘the Elephant’. He enjoyed her company very much and it is to Richard that we owe one of the most vivid descriptions of KM. He recalled that her personality was ‘bubbling’ over with gaiety; she told witty stories, mimicked people they knew, and would, on impulse, ‘drag you to the window to show you things in the street’.6 As a young teenager, Richard found KM very attractive. He described her as a ‘head turner’.7 When he went out with KM everyone looked at her. She wore unusual clothes: a French jacket, short skirts and coloured stockings, high heels and make-up, her hair cut in a Japanese style. The effect was striking.8 But he was also aware of the fragility of her health. In an interview he described witnessing one of KM’s coughing fits when she had to stop in the street and lean against a wall until it passed. When it was over, she carried on gaily as if nothing had happened. In 1917, Richard himself was also ill with tuberculosis and KM and JMM arranged for him to go to their friend, Ottoline Morrell’s, country house at Garsington to work on the land. The outdoor life suited him and he was able to recover. From that time on, KM regarded him as her mascot, proof that recovery was possible. At Garsington Richard was introduced to a group of artists and writers who opened up worlds he would never otherwise have been able to inhabit. He met KM and JMM’s friends, including D. H. Lawrence and Dorothy Brett. He experienced a lively and unconventional style of living. There are photographs of him in the National Portrait Gallery, standing in the garden with Aldous Huxley and Mark Gertler. Ottoline also photographed him sailing naked in a boat on the lake at Garsington.



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He became part of KM and JMM’s ‘Heron’ dream and was nicknamed ‘Arthur of Heronia’ (p. 330). When they talked of the old farmhouse they would buy, with a barn to set up a printing press, Richard was always included: ‘Its just going to [be] the perfect place for us all – our real home’ (p. 328). When they rented the Hampstead ‘Elephant’ and set up the Heron Press in the basement, Richard printed the first edition of Je ne parle pas français, and KM wrote to him that it made her very happy ‘to see your name on the back page’ (p. 326). She talked frankly to him in letters about her lack of religious belief, as well as art and writing, and their similarities – the importance of detail and craft. Between March and September 1920 the addressee’s name at the top of KM’s letters changed. Arthur, encouraged by her, became known as Richard. She asked him how she should address the envelopes from now on: ‘Editor: What is your name? Infant: R or A.’ She encouraged him to be frank with her: ‘I want you to feel I am a real sister to you. Will you?’ (p. 341). Against the wishes of his parents, Richard decided to pursue a career in art, supported financially, in part, by his brother. He was a figurative painter, with a particular interest in etching and illustration. Because of his relationship with JMM and KM he was coached at various times by Dorothy Brett, though he later went in a different direction and was highly critical in letters to KM about both Brett and Gertler. In 1922 he won a London County Council Scholarship, worth £160, to the Central School of Art and Design (later St Martins). Richard was one of the few to receive a farewell letter from KM when she was in Paris, waiting to join Gurdjieff at Fontainebleau. It is addressed to ‘my darling Richard’ and she refers to him as ‘my dear, no longer little brother’. Although KM writes that it is a ‘goodbye for now’, the tone is more final. She makes it clear just how much her young brother-in-law means to her. ‘You know how I have loved seeing you and talking to you again. The fact is you get nicer and nicer and I don’t think you will ever stop’ (p. 374). Richard was deeply affected by her death and designed the lettering on her gravestone. In her will she left him a pearl ring, which she suggested that he might like to give to his future wife. At times in his life when he was under stress, Richard said that he felt KM’s presence with him, giving him support. Because of his close relationship to JMM, Richard was a close observer of his brother’s actions, both before and after KM’s death. In interviews, Richard agreed that JMM had created a ‘Mansfield myth’, but defended his brother on the grounds that JMM had needed to write a ‘simplified version’ of her life and therefore a great deal had been edited out. JMM was, Richard said, a ‘classical writer’,9 with an objective, impersonal style. But, although Richard was close to his brother, he was not uncritical of his behaviour towards KM during their relationship. He told Antony Alpers that ‘my brother simply didn’t have what was needed there. He’d hang around with a bloody awful face, and only make her worse. He couldn’t

318   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 buck her up at all.’10 When asked directly if JMM had been ‘hard-hearted’ towards his sick wife, Richard answered obliquely that he had learned his lesson afterwards and behaved in a much more sympathetic way to his second wife when she, too, developed tuberculosis. Richard went on to say that JMM was the victim of his own temperament because of his lack of empathy. Lawrence had described him as someone who ‘caught everything on the intellect’ rather than using his emotions. JMM was, Richard said, ‘a writer without radar’; when he wrote about KM he ‘left the joy out’.11 And it is joy that most characterises her letters to Richard, putting into words the sheer pleasure of being alive. With him, she was at her most entertaining and the reader catches a glimpse of the playful, witty side of her character that captivated so many people. In 1925, after KM’s death, Richard won a scholarship to the prestigious Slade School of Art. Three years later he became assistant art master at the Architectural Association. He taught at Surbiton Grammar School for five years before returning to the Architectural Association to work as librarian until he retired in 1967. He remained close to his brother, and was a partner in the various community projects they launched after JMM’s conversion to communism. He shared his radical politics and illustrated JMM’s book Community Farm. He continued to paint throughout his life. During World War Two he joined the Royal Marines as a war artist, working with the Royal Naval Film Unit. One of his best-known paintings is A Dogfight over the English Countryside, painted in 1941. As a figurative artist he joined the New English Art Club (NEAC), which had been founded in 1885 as an alternative to the Royal Academy of Arts. Its early members included John Singer Sargeant and Augustus John. He married Edith Poulter after the war and had one son, Peter. Richard died in 1984. Kathleen Jones Notes  1. BTW, p. 17.  2. Alpers 1980, p. 144.  3. Baker, p. 131.  4. KM to JMM, 17 November 1920.  5. Moira Taylor, ‘Her Bright Image’.  6. ‘Her Bright Image’.  7. ‘Her Bright Image’.  8. ‘Her Bright Image’.  9. ‘Her Bright Image’. 10. Alpers 1980, p. 317. 11. ‘Her Bright Image’.



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[21 October 1919] [ATL]

21 x 1919.

Casetta Deerholm Ospedaletti Porto Maurizio.

My dear old Boy, I can’t tell you how pleased I was to recognise your handwriting this morning. I have thought of you often, and was only saying to Jack the other day that I feel you are part of our family. By our family I meant the same band of brothers that you referred to: Jack, Arthur, Athenaeum, Little Wingli and Wig1 – I think we’re an awfully nice Family Tree – don’t you – Jack & you and me underneath & Athenaeum & Wingli in the branches. I wish you would make a woodcut of the subject – with lovely wavy muscles on Athenaeum’s back – Jack sitting under the tree, you, leaning over him with a page of print between you & me somewhere, small, admiring you all – – – Im awfully interested in all you tell me about your job. I agree with you that the production of a book should not assert itself but I think you’re rather too hard on yourself when you say it shouldn’t be noticeable. True, the writing is the important thing, but I think fine production, as it were, sets the seal upon its importance – & do you think its too far fetched to say its an act of faith on the part of the producer in that he considers it worthy of a ‘setting’ and its also his expression of delight in honouring it. I suppose if a thing is really good and sound and honest there’s no need to call attention to it – no need to praise it; but I like to think that people who are rich in life can afford to praise things – in fact, cant help praising them. I dont think any of us will stop at what is necessary – Take a domestick example. I suppose a baby is the important thing and its just as happy and content in a strong banana box. But I can’t help feeling that if Jack & I saw one flying in the direction of the Heron,2 or on the Heron’s back (he looks a safe old bird according to Fergusson) we would make that banana box as marvellous as a banana box could be – Of course the whole difficulty about noticeable production is that if the idea gets into the minds of wrong workmen, vain workmen, there’s no stopping them – and you cant see the great man for the wreaths and banners, so to say. But you and Jack cant afford to worry about that – To be fantastical, I think a book should look like a herald – the author’s herald – and as heralds dont carry trumpets it wouldn’t be assertive but just very fine and on the proud side – (I just then had a vision of Wing as a herald, but he would, in defiance of all the laws have a most awful trumpet to blow in Athenaeum’s ear –)

320   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 I note what you say about Ivor Brown,3 sir, and will take down my harp when it arrives. You make Thavies Inn sound awfully attractive.4 That irregularity of old houses always fascinates me. I am glad to think you are there, and I’m very proud of you, too, as you jolly well know. I expect Jack has told you about this little house – right in the sun’s eye and the sea’s eye – It is built on the slope of a wild hill covered with figs, olives, and tamarisk trees and a thick small shrubbery – and herbs like lavender and thyme and rosemary – There are very small paths winding up it in all directions: I long to follow them – I shall, by next spring. We three could spend a wonderful time in this house. Its a bit fäery – the light trembles on the wall from the water and dances in flecks from the olive trees until you wonder if youre living in a bubble . . Down below – sheer down there is the sea with a fine flat rock for you to walk out on and dive off. Green sea with blue streaks in it and violet shadows – so clear that from here I can pretty nearly count the starfish star-gazing on the floor of it. (Thats nonsense – Its lunch time and Im getting what Jack calls ‘shiny in the head’.) I wish though that the things that bite were not so fierce. They are like the dragons my Papa used to draw – Dragons with Seven Bellies – i.e. never satisfied. They must have had pints of me and you can’t think Id be anything but rather inferior government ale – can you – poor stuff compared to these rich fruity Italians. I spend all day long in the open air, writing, reading, looking at things, eating and – writing again. I am determined to get well this time and take my part as one of the crew henceforward. Tell me how you think Jack is, old boy, will you? And snatch him away from work sometimes. Its so queer – this time I almost feel as if he was with me. That doesn’t make me long for him less, though. However, the ship has weathered the worst of the storm and shes bound for home – Dont ever feel you’ve got to write to me – but when you are inclined to – lets have a talk. Yours ever Katherine. What about Gibbons?5 Has he found a job? Notes 1. Athenaeum and Wingley were KM’s beloved cats – Tig, of course, being JMM’s affectionate nickname for her. 2. JMM and his brother’s recently installed Heron Press was the little publishing enterprise they had set up, so as to be able to typeset and print works of their choosing. See above, p. 246, n. 2. 3. Ivor Brown (1891–1974) was a British writer, biographer and journalist who published prolifically. After graduating from Oxford, he had been a



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conscientious objector in the war, working occasionally for the New Age before taking up a position at the Manchester Guardian, for whom he worked intermittently throughout his life. His novel Lighting-up Time was then in the processes of editing and printing; KM reviewed it in April the following year. See CW3, pp. 590–3. 4. Thavie’s Inn, in Holborn, is a historic site in central London that was once one of the first Inns of Chancery in London. No. 17 was the premises of the publishing house Cobden-Sanderson, for whom Richard Murry had begun working. 5. Arnold Gibbons was a schoolfriend of Richard Murry’s who harboured dreams of becoming a writer. See CL1, pp. 599–603.

[14 November 1919] [ATL]

Friday night.

S.S. Casetta (Homeward Bound) Porto Maurizio Italia.

My dear old Boy, I am at present being stared at by (1) very old winged beetle who is evidently looking in to see if this is his club or not and whether there is an octogenarian or two to have a chat with (2) three white moths with their little moths noses pressed as flat as flat can be (3) an Unknown, with six legs and the appearance of a diminutive lobster? (4) one very large grey moth, apparently in a shawl, who appears by her anxiety to be endeavouring to see if there really is a large barrel of butter hidden behind the counter for regular customers only or not. All these are on the outside of my windy pane drawn to the light because I have not closed the shutters. Its a black night, calm, with a great sweeping sound of sea. Swear no oaths – young fellow – unswear them on the spot. I couldn’t risk your having the penalty exacted – I couldn’t bear you to be in New Guinea1 for six muns or weeks once I get home – This member of the firm is far far too fond of you to have you away – It seems to me that all of us have our work AND our play cut out for years. I see, attached to the country house – The Heron of Herons – a large ‘plain but beautiful’ barn – used for the printing BUT it has an outside staircase (like you have leading to haylofts in the Best Barns) and this staircase does lead to a kind of loft which has been turned into a bedroom and den for Arthur M. Its about four o’clock on an autumn afternoon. I run up the steps, knock at the door. Arthur opens it in his shirt sleeves (I always see you in your shirt sleeves) and says ‘come in. I’ve just put the kettle on for tea’. I say: ‘Oh Arthur this great parcel of books has

322   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 just been sent you by an Italian printer and when we have had tea we’d better go over to the house FOR Thomas Hardy2 has driven over and is having tea with Jack’ – And so on while they live happier and happier ever after . . . Jack sent me a little pen picture of you and he at the top of the house, with Wing exploring, the afternoon he read the play to you. He hardly says a word about Cinnamon and Angelica3 – just wonders if it is good and hopes it is. I think, soberly its a masterpiece. It belongs to a different world to ours. Theres a kind of stillness upon it – something ageless, as though it had always been there waiting for Jack to cause the light to fall upon it and so reveal it – – Difficult to describe quite what I mean. But it seems to me our brother grows more wonderful every week. I do fight like billy-o but I can’t help being homesick for him all the same – Who could? You see we are not divided up into compartments like other human beings seem to be. I haven’t got one nice little door called Jack which I can open when hes here and cheerfully shut when hes away but printed in the largest lettering on all the doors and gates and outposts of my dwelling is ‘This is the House that Jack Built’4 (Decorations by Arthur Murry. Delapidations by Athenaeum and Wingli Murry.) I wish you would come into this room now for a talk – sit before this wood fire with me and agree that one log has a head like a crocodile and one is like a poodle. The smell is good – of pines and blue gums and I have one very large pine cone I would cheerfully sacrifice for a kind of illuminated address of welcome – my dear dear old Boy. Here comes dinner. I must sit up and prepare to attack it – We have funny food here – macaroni in all the most fantastical shapes and devices – in letters and rats tails and imitation lace and imitation penny stamps and triangles and shavings. It must be fun to run wild in the Macaroni Works. I wonder they don’t have an Animal Series, camels, frogs and Nelephants in ones soup would be particularly nice – I am afraid that this letter is not, on the whole, as serious as it ought to be. I trust, sir, by the time it reaches you its demeanour will be composed, reverent, grave, as befits one who is calling upon a young gentleman at a Publishing House in Thavies Inn. Take care of yourself in these storms. Do not go up on deck without your big muffler; do not attempt to stow the top-gallant sail but be certain to let go the fore top-gallant halyards while a squall rages. But here’s to Fair Weather for us all – Yours with as much love as you wish – Katherine. Notes 1. The vast island territory of New Guinea in the south-western Pacific had been in the news as part of the new colonial settlements being defined at the Paris



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Peace Conference; the former German colonial territories, which had been seized by Australian forces during the war, were being formally assigned to Australian administration. Internment camps were widespread to prevent the circulation of former settlers during these territorial negotiations. See Manz and Panayi, pp. 94–108. 2. By then an elderly man, the English poet and novelist Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) was one of the great Victorian writers who remained a figurehead and source of awe and inspiration to the emerging generation of writers. JMM had just published a major review of Hardy’s Collected Poems in the Athenaeum (7 November); he finally got to visit the poet in May 1921. 3. JMM’s Cinnamon and Angelica, a play in verse, would be published by CobdenSanderson in early 1920. 4. ‘This is the house that Jack built’ is a much anthologised, and much pastiched, children’s nursery rhyme dating back to the eighteenth century, famous for its accumulative and rhythmic style.

[20 December 1919] [ATL] [Postcard] [Casetta Deerholm, Ospedaletti] The woodcut of Wing is a masterpiece. I love to have it. And I owe you thanks for a letter and a drawing. Forgive me. Ive been ill with an attack of pneumonia and I couldn’t run after my pen which would run away. It doesnt mean I haven’t thought of you as you know. Jacks book looks awfully well1 – and isn’t the Wordsworth lovely2 – it looks so tall and slender . . . We have been talking about the Heron this afternoon and the Family Tree. You can imagine what its like – having Jack here. He will carry the Third Brother’s Xmas present back with him – its safer than posting it. First – a Happy Christmas. Then May our wishes come true this Year for us all. We shall be thinking & talking of you.                     K. Notes 1. JMM’s The Evolution of an Intellectual, an anthology of essays previously published in the TLS, Athenaeum and Nation, was published in late 1919 by Cobden-Sanderson. The opening piece, ‘The Sign-Seekers’ (1916), attempts to define the mindset of a rising generation of writers caught up in the hopes, betrayals and confusion of the war years. 2. Wordsworth, An Anthology was a collection of Wordsworth’s poetry from the years 1798–1808, introduced and published by T. J. Cobden-Sanderson in early 1920; a first edition of the anthology had been published by CobdenSanderson’s distinguished but short-lived Doves Press in 1911.

324   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [12 January 1920] [ATL] Casetta Deereholm Ospedaletti Porto Maurizio. My dear Old Boy, I owe you letters, thanks – Im in your debt all round and you must be thinking I am an ungrateful creature – to say the very least of it. But I feel as though Ive been in a voyage lately – on the high seas – out of sight of land, and though some albatross post1 has brought your news under its wing Ive never been able to detain the bird long enough to send an answer back. Forgive me. The little book is a rare find.2 Ive not only read every word and stared the pictures (especially the crocodile and the little lamb who doth skip and play always merry always gay) out of countenance I’ve begun a queer story on the strength of it about a child who learnt reading from this little primer – Merciful Heavens! think of all the little heads bowed over these tiny pages all the little hands tracing the letters – and think of the rooms in which they sat – and the leaping light they read by, half candlelight half fire – and how terribly frightened they must have been as they read about this Awful God waiting to pop them into Eternal Flames – to consume them utterly and wither them like grass . . . Did you read the poems? And did your eye fasten upon Mr John Rogers, the first martyr in Queen Marys Reign, laughing, really rather callously as he burned away in sight of his wife and Nine Small Children?3 They certainly were peculiarly hideous children and his wife looks as though she had wasted his substance upon buying hats but all the same its a bit steep to show your feelings as he is doing. I am awfully interested to know about your drawing. It will be very exciting – I think it is a perfectly first-chop idea – and I feel there is something in you that printing doesn’t give expression to and that only drawing could satisfy – I feel you’re one of those rare people who will find the ‘word’ for a thing by a line – by a curve – do you know what I mean? Now, of course with my usual patience I want to see your sketch books – and . . . Text by John Middleton Murry – – – Illustrations by Arthur Murry. Etc. Etc. Etc. It is a fine little tree to have planted to mark the New Year by – I am working very hard just now. I cant walk about or go out. Nearly all my days are spent in bed or if not in bed on a little sofa that always feels like lying in a railway carriage – a horrid little sofa. I have seen hardly any people at all since Ive been here – nobody to talk to – The one great talker is the sea. It never is quiet; one feels sometimes as if one were a shell filled with a hollow sound. God forbid that another should ever live the life I have known here and yet there are moments



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you know, old Boy, when after a dark day there comes a sunset – such a glowing gorgeous marvellous sky that one forgets all – in the beauty of it – these are the moments when I am really writing – Whatever happens I have had these blissful, perfect moments and they are worth living for. I thought, when I left England, I could not love writing more than I did, but now I feel Ive never known what it is to be a writer until I came here – Jack’s book seems to be creating a stir.4 I feel Jack is on the eve of very great success. He’s never looked for success – but then he never does look for anything – it just comes to him. I’m afraid he didn’t have much of a time over here – the journey is so tiring and then he had neuralgia. Goodbye, my dear old boy. And to show you forgive me – write again soon – will you? I love hearing from you.        Yours ever             Katherine Notes 1. The high sea voyage and albatross recall, in playful mode, Coleridge’s atmospheric ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1798). 2. In the early nineteenth century, a number of ‘Catechism in verse’ primers were published, intended for the moral training and religious awakening of children, while also instructing them in basic reading skills. The responses in rhymed verse to questions such as ‘Is there any hope for sinners such as you are?’ or ‘What miracles were wrought by Jesus Christ?’ were intended to assist memorisation and imaginative identification. See, for example, Milk for Babes: A Catechism in Verse intended for the use of Sunday Schools (Unsigned, pp. 11; 15). It was a second-hand book of this sort that Richard Murry had sent KM. 3. John Rogers (c. 1505–55) was a clergyman, scholar, translator of the Bible, and the first English Protestant to be burnt at the stake during the reign of Queen Mary I. His tale is recorded in Foxe’s Book of the Martyrs (1563), and featured frequently in anthologies and manuals for children seeking to teach religious doctrine through exemplary tales of courage and sacrifice. 4. A short unsigned review of JMM’s Evolution of an Intellectual (see above, p. 323, n. 1) had just been published in the Daily News. The promisingly warm reception KM evokes is more likely to refer to the publication of his Poems: 1917–1918, which was more amply mentioned, including a sensitive, attentive review by Walter de la Mare, published in the TLS on 1 January. As mentioned above, however, reception was more mitigated than KM implies here.

326   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [25 January 1920] [ATL] (That catechism in the primer was ‘for infants of 2½* years’!!! Just think of them standing up & saying: my original sin was the sin of Adam.) ((Dont send me any more books or drawings my young Millionaire)) Hermitage Menton. My dear Petit-Frere –1 Here is a letter with an Ominous drawing of yourself in Aids to Eyesight. I hope you won’t have to wear them. You have as you doubtless know, beautiful eyes, very rare, expressive, original and seldomseen eyes, the kind of eyes you might imagine a person having if he’d been born at sea while his wise parents cruised about among the pacific islands and had spent the first days of his natural little life wondering what all that blue was. However if you do have to have em glassed & framed – so do I. Mine – or rather one of mine is not at all the orb it used to be. Im going to wear horn specs ‘those of the largest kind’ for working in. What a trio we shall present at the Heron. Pray make a drawing of us – surprised at our labours & suddenly all at various windows looking out to see who that is coming up the flagged walk – three faces at three windows – six prodigious eyes! Whoever it was faints among the pink peonies . . . Yesterday – no the day before I received a copy of Je ne Parle pas.2 I want to thank you for having printed it so beautifully. It makes me very happy to see your name on the back page. My share doesn’t satisfy me at all – but yours fills me with pride. I hope a little handful of people buys it – for the sake of covering the expense. The page you send me of Cinnamon & Angelica looks very well. Are you going to make a map for the frontispiece with the arms of C. & A. very fairly drawn? or a tiny tiny Durer like drawing of Apricia3 – with a great flowery branch in the foreground – you know the kind of thing I mean? It is somehow most right that you should draw. When I come back you’ll show me your sketches? Another quite small insignificant little half-hour job for you is a stone carving for the garden of the Heron – something that will abide for ever with somewhere about it our names in beautiful lettering saying we lived and worked here – I am out of Italy as you see and in France. I shall stay here until the end of April if I can manage it. That italian villa got pretty dreadful and yet now the time there is over I wouldn’t have it otherwise. I found out more about ‘writing’. . ‘Here’ is a room with the window opening on to a balcony & below the balcony there is a small tree full of tangerines and beyond the tree a palm and beyond the palm a long garden with a great tangled – it looks like – a wood at the Bottom of it. Palms Arthur are superb things – Their colour is amazing. Sometimes they are bronze – sometimes



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gold and green – warm deep tiger-gold – & last night, under the moon in a little window they were bright silver. And plus that the creatures are full of drawing. How marvellous life is – if only one gives oneself up to it! It seems to me that the secret of life is to accept life. Question it as much as you like after but first accept it. People today stand on the outskirts of the city wondering if they are for or against Life – is Life worth living – dare they risk it – what is Life – do they hate or love it – but these cursed questions keep them on the outskirts of the city for ever. Its only by risking losing yourself – giving yourself up to Life – that you can ever find out the answer. Dont think Im sentimental. You know and I know how much evil there is but all the same lets live to the very uttermost – lets live all our lives. People today are simply cursed by what I call the personal . . . What is happening to ME. Look at ME. This is what has been done to ME. Its just as though you tried to run and all the while an enormous black serpent fastened on to you. You are the only young artist I know. I long for you to be rich – really rich. Am I a dull little dog? Forgive me, my dear old boy. I am working awfully hard & that always makes me realise again what a terrific thing it is – our job. Three tons of the best, bright burning love                    Katherine. * Original underlined three times for emphasis.

Notes 1. (Fr.): Little brother. 2. KM’s pioneering short story ‘Je ne parle pas français’ had been printed, bound and published in an exclusive edition (100 hand-printed copies on handmade paper) by JMM’s Heron Press; it was distributed by Cobden-Sanderson who also brought out a stand-alone edition of the story that month. See the press announcement in the TLS, 25 January 1920, p. 9. 3. In JMM’s verse play, Cinnamon and Angelica, Apricia is the remote hill to which Mace (Colonel-in-Command of the Peppercorn Army) is travelling; he evokes it in Act I as follows: No, no, I know the country Far better than the barrack-yard beyond, Each several hill and each estraded garden, Apricia that lies unto the sea Like a dead maiden with her soft hair floating Up on the crystal waves; so do her trees Bow to the water. (pp. 18–19) KM pictures the volume, with its various forms of botanical imagery, illustrated in the style of the Renaissance master Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), hailed as one of the founders of modern botanical art.

328   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [24 February 1920] [ATL]

Tuesday.

Villa Flora Menton.

My dear old Boy Yes I did get your letter written to a place called Hermitage very much called Hermitage, where Russian children stamped overhead & Rumainians roared below & French infants rushed at you in the lift.1 After Italy it seemed alright – at first but then they began feeding us on haricot beans & I hate haricot beans – They have no imagination – What with that & the noise I turned against it & my cousin2 who has taken this villa for le saison3 asked me here – Here is about as perfect as it could be – A great garden, lemon & orange groves, palms, violets in blue carpets, mimosa trees – and inside a very beautiful ‘exquisite’ house in the style of Garsington but more sumptuous but unlike Garsington with a spirit in it which makes you feel that nothing evil or ugly could ever come near. Its full of life and gaierty – but the people are at peace – You know what I mean? They’ve got a real background to their lives – and they realise that other people have, too. I am basking here until I come back – sometime in May. Menton is a lovely little town – small and unreal like all these places are but even here there are real spots – The colour and movement everywhere make you continually happy. Its all ruled by the sun – the sun is King and Queen and Prime Minister and people wear hats like this:* I mustn’t bring one back for Jack or you but they are very tempting! Im not ill any more. Really Im not. Please think of me, dear old boy, as a comfortable cross between a lion and a lamb. I wish you had a quiet spot where you could draw in peace. But your room at the Heron will be your studio. Its such a waste of Life to bark and bite like people do: I think we ought just to ignore them and go our way. Its no good getting mixed up in ‘sets’ or cliques or quarrels. That is not our job. By their works ye shall know them4 is our motto. And Life is so short and there is such a tremendous lot to do and see – we shall never have time for all. Arthur, I wish we could find the house – don’t you? I don’t think Jack will find it before Im back (thats in 9 weeks time) but there will be a lot to do when it is found. Its just going to the perfect place for us all – our real home. You must be down in all your spare time and when youre in London you must always have the feeling its there with the smoke coming out of its chimneys & the hens laying eggs & the bees burrowing in the flowers – I feel we must keep bees, a cow, fowls, 2 turkeys, some indian runner ducks, a goat, and perhaps one thoroughly striking beast like a unicorn or a dragon. I am always learning odd things such as how to light a scientific bonfire – but now you’re



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laughing at me – However just come and see my bonfire one of these days, my lad, & you will turn up your eyes in admiration. Sir, re small sum owing to R. Cobden-Sanderson, the author of tome said he would pay it for me as soon as he got back to England after Xmas.5 Please ask him to settle it – will you? In the Hermitage letter you asked me what were my views about Adam in this great swinging garden.6 Now thats awfully difficult to answer. For this reason. I cant help seeing all the evil and pain in the world: it must be faced and recognised – and I cant bear your sentimentalist or silly optimist. I know it all: I feel it all – and there is cruelty for instance – cruelty to children – how are you going to explain that – and as you say the beauty – yes the beauty that lurks in ugliness that is even outside the pub in the gesture of the drinking woman. I cant explain it. I wish I could believe in a God. I cant. Science seems to make it impossible – and if you are to believe in a God it must be a good God & no good God could allow his children to suffer so. No, Life is a mystery to me. It is made up of Love and pains – One loves and one suffers – one suffers and one has to love – I feel (for myself individually) that I want to live by the spirit of Love – love all things – See into things so deeply and truly that one loves. That does not rule out hate – far from it – I mean it doesn’t rule out anger. But I confess I only feel that I am doing right when I am living by love. I don’t mean a personal love – you know – but – – – the big thing – – Why should one love? No reason; its just a mystery. But it is like light. I can only truly see things in its rays. That is vague enough isn’t it? I do think one must (we must) have some big thing to live by – and one reason for the great poverty of Art today is that artists have got no religion and they are in the words of the Bible, sheep without a shepherd.7 Now what lifts Jack high above them is his faith – which he calls spiritual honesty – that separates him from all the rest of them – just as though he were a priest. We are priests after all. I fail and waver and faint by the way but my faith is this queer Love. One cant drift – and everybody nearly is drifting nowadays – don’t you feel that? Its your fault I have written this.** Theres a picture of me in a previous existence thinking it out. You say you didn’t know what to talk about in the Hampstead days. It doesn’t matter, old boy – and don’t bother to write long letters (tho’ I love your letters) I just feel we are true friends & that we understand each other ‘and thats the humour of it’ as Corporal Nym says.8 When I come back      What Larks!   Always your loving              Katherine. * At this point, KM has drawn a small male figure wearing an equilateral triangular hat that obscures the head and face beneath. ** Here, KM has drawn a tiny little cat.

330   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Notes 1. The Hermitage was a private sanatorium in Menton where KM stayed briefly before finding more congenial lodgings. See Meyers 1978, p. 199. 2. The cousin was Constance (Connie) Beauchamp (1858–?), the daughter of Horatio Beauchamp, the brother of KM’s paternal grandfather, Arthur Beauchamp. She lived with her close friend, Jinnie Fullerton. 3. (Fr.): The season. 4. See Matthew 7: 16–20. The biblical reference is to the metaphorical ‘fruits’, rather than ‘works’. 5. JMM owed a small sum of money to his publisher, Cobden-Sanderson, linked to the publication of his essay collection The Evolution of an Intellectual. 6. KM and Richard Murry’s discussion of the relevance of the Genesis story of Adam, innocence and evil, and the Fall reflects their generation’s struggle to come to terms with the dawning world in the wake of the war and the Paris Peace Conference. More specifically, they are probably referring to JMM’s own use of the figure of Adam before and after the Fall to discuss contemporary writing in The Evolution of an Intellectual, in terms of how realist novelists name the world, and how the ‘old invincible Adam’ lurks in the soldier-to-be’s soul when the call for conscription is made. See Murry 1920b, pp. 106–8, 126–7. 7. See Matthew 9: 35–7. 8. The idiom recurs five times in Shakespeare’s Henry V, used by the mockheroic, poignantly comic Colonel Nym to sum up his conclusions and instinctive philosophy of life. See in particular Act II, scene i.

[29 March 1920] [ATL] Villa Flora To Arthur of Heronia           Greeting! I got your letter today. It was a very special one with lovely printing on top, a darling little drawing & How to Light a Bonfire. Ill lend my hair if you like but I bet I couldn’t make one. I’ll keep the wind off & watch you and Wing will prowl and p r r r owl around. Doesn’t the little small Heron sound fascinating. Yes we must have a pig sitting under the pigtree. Talking about English flowers Bring hither the pink and purple columbine And gilly flowers Bring coronations and sops-in-wine Beloved of paramours Strew me the ground with daffa down dilly With cowslips and kingscups & lovèd lilie The pretty paunce and the chevisaunce Shall match with the faire flower delice –1 I quote from memory – but thats hard to beat don’t you think? But I am all for feathery topped carrots – don’t you love pulling up carrots, shaking them clean and tossing them on to a heap? And feeling the cauliflowers



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to see which one is ready to cut. Then OUT comes your knife. When I was about the height of a garden spade I spent weeks – months – watching a man do all these things and wandering through caves of yellow butter beans and smelling the spotted speckled broad bean flowers and helping to plant Giant Edwards and White Elephants. Oh, dear, I do love gardens! Think of little lettuces and washing radishes under the garden tap. Id better stop. I just saw you climb into a cherry tree and leaning against the trunk of the tree I saw and smelt the sweet sticky gum. But we’ll have all these things. I bought you one of the most exquisite little boxes yesterday Ive ever seen. You know how some things belong to people. It stood on a shelf in the shop and said A.M. so I carried it off and Ill bring it home. Ivor B’s novel has just come.2 I say – I don’t think much of the look of it, do you? The print is alright but the jacket & lettering . . . what is your eggspert opinion? Its not May. Its April 29th. Victoria 9. p.m. thats all the difference. If you knew how she longs to see her brothers! ‘Broomy’ – of Broomies3 Notes 1. From the song of the shepherd Hobbinol in the April eclogue of Edmund Spenser’s The Shepherd’s Calendar (1579). KM’s memory of the verse is nearly perfect; Spenser’s wording in line 4 is ‘worn’ rather than ‘beloved’ of paramours. 2. For Ivor Brown’s novel Lighting-up, see above, p. 320, n. 3. 3. ‘Broomies’ was the nickname for JMM’s recently purchased cottage in Chailey, East Sussex, close to Lewes and Newhaven.

[mid-April 1920] [ATL] Of course I don’t know how to light a fire with damp wood, damp paper and 1 match BUT please reply telling me how to as who knows how soon I may have to do it . . . (Do you see the hint conveyed in these words?) Villa Flora Menton.

Giant Heron Ill get you a corduroy coat if I can & send it packing. Im very very happy to have your letter. Please note: seats is booked in the train if the train goes for April 27th and I do hope, time and tide permitting, you will meet me at the station – will you? Isn’t it gorgeous to think we have 6 months in front of us and whats to prevent you and me from flitting over the heath & while he draws and paints enchanted landscapes she lies on the grass and tells him about the lions & tigers & crocodiles & boa constrictors that she used to feed under the palm trees at Mentone.

332   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Do you know the heron has got beautiful blue legs? I read that the other day. You speak of the sadness of peoples minds being as they are. Yes, it is dreadful – I read Jack’s article on John1 it was very good & its tragic to think a painter can sin against Art – But lets remember the ‘credit side’ – and work for that. I have a real horror of the ‘John crew’ in London and of all those traitors to Life – for that’s what they really are –2 Your little drawings are most awfully nice. Ill draw you some palms, there are so many different kinds. My favourite tree I really think, tho’, is the lemon tree – its far more beautiful than the orange – And then the prickly pear has a lot of drawing: it’s a very queer affair & then there’s the pepper tree hung of course with pepper pots – but I wish you were here to sneeze at it with me . . . Jack seems so very busy that he never has time to write me a real letter. I miss them so! For the Tig you know is an animal which removed from its native soil, however golden the cage & however kind & charming the people who hand it things through the bars or even pat it – longs for fat envelopes to eat and when left without them she finds it an awful effort not to just creep into a corner and pine. But it can’t be helped – I have asked Jack for them so often that Im sure he’d send them if he had them – he just hasn’t – that’s all. Will you be quite changed when I come back – Please carry something that I can recognise you by such as – an emerald green handkerchief printed with a design of pink shrimps or a walking stick* tied with a large bow of pale blue ribbon. No, Heaven bless you I shall know you anywhere and you’ll know me. Here are kinds of palms.** No I cant draw them I must wait until I go out & do them from nature***                      Yours ever                        Katherine. * In the middle of this line is a tiny drawing of wavy stick with a large bow at the top. ** Approximately half the page is taken up with ink drawings of four different sorts of palms, the bottom one having the caption ‘dates in the middle’. *** Here there is a small drawing of a tiny female figure, carrying an umbrella, walking along a path, with two miniature palms and a cat. Notes 1. JMM’s essay ‘The Modernity of M. Augustus John’ was published in the Nation on 6 March 1920, pp. 770–1. 2. Augustus John was then at the height of his fame, and something of a darling in the society life of London. His circle of friends and artists were frequently cited among the ‘Bright Young Things’ for which the decade became renowned. See Holroyd 1987, pp. 444–50.



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[22 June 1920] [Postcard] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] D.O.B.1 This is the end of an imperfect day & thats why I have written the address of baddeley2 – I only mean Ive been fighting the light weight – feather weight Corona3 all day: otherwise it was rather perfect. The sheep on the heath glittered silver this morning: I wanted you to see them. Stay – Im sending this card to answer your query. No, mein Herr,4 I don’t know a soul who can read Swedish nor does Jack. We are verrey sorry. We send our love and praise. K.M. Notes 1. (KM’s shorthand): ‘Dear old boy’. 2. Written in haste, the address on the postcard is rather untidy, with a couple of crossings out. The ‘of baddeley’, which is in fact what KM wrote, makes more sense as ‘so baddeley’, with ‘baddeley’ as a play on the word ‘badly’. 3. KM was the proud owner of a Corona 3 portable typewriter, a very popular model and a technological marvel in its day. It has survived and can now be seen at the Alexander Turnbull Library in New Zealand. 4. (Ger.): My dear Sir.

[19 September 1920] [ATL] Will you tell me what procedure to follow in addressing your envelopes? Editor: What is your name? Infant: R or A.

Villa Isola Bella Garavan Menton

My dear Richard, I was very glad to hear from you. The drawing of the Flight into Menton was really superb; Athy was the spit of himself. Yes, I think you’d find the South of France was good country. I could be content to stay here for years. In fact I love it as Ive never loved any place but my home. The life, too, is so easy. There is no division between ones work and one’s eternal existence – both are of a part. And you know what that means. My small, pale yellow house with a mimosa tree growing in front of it – just a bit deeper yellow – the garden, full

334   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 of plants, the terrace with crumbling yellow pillars covered with green (lurking-place for lizards) all belong to a picture or a story – I mean they are not remote from one’s ideal – one’s dream. The house faces the sea, but to the right there is the Old Town with a small harbour, a little quai planted with pepper and plane trees. This Old Town, which is built flat against a hill – a solid wall, as it were, of shapes & colours is the finest thing Ive seen. Every time I drive towards it it is different. And then, there’s no doubt that the people here – I mean the working people make no end of a difference. My servant Marie is a masterpiece in her way. Shes the widow of a coachman – just a woman of the people, as we say, but her feeling for Life is a constant surprise to me. Her kitchen is a series of Still Lives; the copper pans wink on the walls. When she produces a fish for lunch it lies in a whole, tufted green seascape with a large tragic mouthful of ‘persil’1 still in its jaws. And last night, talking of her desire to buy bananas she explained it wasn’t so much that they should be eaten but they gave ‘effect’ to the fruit dish. ‘A fine bunch of grapes, deux poires rouges, une ou deux belles pommes avec des bananas et des feuilles’2 – she thought worth looking at. You know to live with such people is an awful help. Yesterday, par exemple,3 I had a sack of charcoal & some pine cones delivered. And passing the kitchen I saw the woodman, in a blue overall & yellow trousers, sitting at the table with Marie taking a glass of wine – The wine bottle was one of those wicker affairs. One doesnt (God forbid) want to make a song about these things, but I didn’t realise they went on naturally and simply until I came here. In England one gets the feeling that all is over. Do you know what I mean? And there’s never time for more than a rough sketch of what one wants to do, or what one feels. I hope you don’t think Im running down your country. Its not that. Its Life in any city. How is your work getting on? Let me know whenever you feel inclined. I have such a vivid mental picture of your picture – on the mantelpiece in the studio propped against the clock. I wish you’d send me a small sketch for my walls one day. It can be a Loan Exhibit if you like. Jack told me of the putting to its winter sleep of the lawn-mower, and how Wing looked on. Goodbye dear Richard          With love from your other Brother                     Katherine. Notes 1. (Fr.): Parsley. 2. (Fr.): Two red pears, one or two fine apples with bananas and some leaves. 3. (Fr.): For example.



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[September 1920] [ATL] VILLA ISOLA BELLA    GARAVAN    MENTON A/M. Dear Richard, The painting has come.1 I like it tremendously. I think there is very fine feeling in that landscape seen across water; the house, the trees, the grassy levels all seem to partake of the watery element. Do you know what I mean? . . . It seems to me that not only the water reflects the house and trees but they reflect the water. I’m not trying to be literary – – – Its in your painting. I think, too, the ‘balance’ of water & land is very nicely adjusted. Its awfully good, Richard. Its full of colour. I can look long at it. Merci de tout Coeur;2 I’m very happy & proud to own a ‘Richard Murry’. Katherine. Notes 1. Across the top of this letter, Richard Murry has written: ‘I think this must have been one of my first paintings of Hurlingham House from Wandsworth Park.’ 2. (Fr.): Heartfelt thanks.

[15 November 1920] [ATL] [Villa Isola Bella, Garavan, Menton] Sunday. My dear Richard, Its 7.15 AM and Ive just had breakfast in a room lit with great gorse yellow patches of sunlight. Across one patch there’s a feathery pattern that dances – thats from the mimosa tree outside. The two long windows are wide open – they are the kind that open in half – with wings, you know – so much more generous than the English kind. A wasp is paddling his pettitoes in the honey glass and the sky is a sort of pale lapus lazuli. Big glancing silver ducks of light dive in and out of the sea. This kind of weather has gone on for over a week without one single pause. I take a sunbath every morning – Costume de bain:1 a black paper fan and it has an awfully queer effect on one: I mean all this radiance has. You know those rare moments when its warm enough to lie on your back & bask – its a kind of prolongation of that. One tries to

336   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 behave like a sober sensible creature & to say ‘thank you’ to the postman and no thank you to the umbrella mender but all the time one is hiding broad beams. So I slink away out of sight of everybody, down the steps from the terrace and stand underneath a tree called a datura and there, privately, I gloat. This tree, Sir, is a sight for you. It has small close, grey-green leaves; the buds in their first stage are soft green pods. They open and the flower, tightly folded, springs out and gradually it opens into a long bell-like trumpet about 8 inches long – gold coloured with touches of pale red. But the drawing in the buds and the petals! The gaiety of the edges – the freedom with which Papa Cosmos has let hisself go on them! I have looked at this tree so long that it is transplanted to some part of my brain – for a further transplanting into a story one day. You must come here one day, Richard and live here for a bit. I dont see how you couldn’t be happy. I appreciate your feeling that you would not care to work on a large canvas in England. I feel just the same about writing. Im always afraid my feeling won’t last long enough for me to have expressed all that I wanted to. There’s something in the atmosphere which may blow cold. And there’s always a sense of rush – a strain. If the Muse does deign to visit me Im conscious all the time that shes got her eye on the clock – she’s catching the funicular to Olympus at 5.30 or the special to Parnassus at 5.15. Whereas here, one begins to tell the time by the skies again. I love hearing about your work: you must know I do always. What’s this Christmas Jamboree? Tell’s about it! As for little K.M. she’s agoing it as usual. The more I do the more I want to do: it will always be the same. The further one climbs the more tops of mountains one sees. But its a matter for rejoicing – as long as one can keep the coffin from the door. I don’t care a pin about the old wolf. I must get up & take the earwigs out of the roses. Why should they choose roses? But they do & I go against Nature in casting them forth. Dear Richard – don’t forget your loving – really awfully loving X                         Katherine. Note 1. (Fr.): Bathing costume.

[late November 1920] [ATL] [Villa Isola Bella, Garavan, Menton] Dear Richard Just two lines to thank you for your letters. I wish it wasn’t such a JOB to write to me. Bother it. Why don’t you just send me anything – But



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I want you to know that Im holding thumbs about your new idear. All success to it, my dear old boy. I await the portraits. I bet you’ll do them. What an awful pull you have over us aged flowers at being such a little short of spring yourself – You’re no older than a jonquil for all your big overcoats & Im a kind of late – late – lets see – Ill say marigold because I love them. Thats unblushing; I didn’t mean it to be. Bretts advice to her grandson amused me. If she does give you eggs to suck they might be fresh eggs. But she means well. Shes pathetic, really. Ill never see her as a painter – only as a reflector – Well – Ive got a chill which Ill sell for a handkerchief. My temperature is sitting on a top branch & it wont come down. Its work: Ive done a bit too much. Oh, Richard – dear Richard cant you cut poor little K. a new pair of lungs out of strong untearable impermeable paper and send them over – If you knew what it was to be getting always knocked over. And Im so full of stories that if I was strong they’d come flying out like doves from a tower. Did you ‘note’ my praise of your FIRM just because my little brotherin-law was in it?1 I expected you to commend me for that. I must climb up the stairs & under the eiderdown. Goodnight. This isn’t a letter: Its just a note under the door – or a pebble flung at your window – Yes, come to the S. of France one day and we’ll tame lizards & paint & write and be happy – Love for ever from Katherine* * Underneath her signature, KM has drawn a little scene of trees and a path, and a tiny person with a long stick, trying to tame a lizard. Note 1. In a review of Quiet Interiors, the first novel by the British novelist Emily Beatrix Coursolles (E. B. C.) Jones (1893–1966), KM indirectly praised Jones’s publisher, Cobden-Sanderson, for the company’s policy of combining fine craftsmanship and affordable pricing, compared to some of the drab-looking works coming onto the market: ‘And do some publishers imagine’, she asks, ‘that the reading public really is tempted by paper covers which remind one of the dread platefuls in English teashops known as ‘mixed pastries’? [. . .] Whereas Miss Jones’ novel in a blue linen-faced cover with the title in plain lettering attracts one immediately. It looks like a novel that is well worth reading, and in this case the reader is not deceived after a closer investigation. (CW3, pp. 691–4) Richard Murry’s role was precisely that of book designing.

338   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [mid-December 1920] [ATL] VILLA ISOLA BELLA   GARAVAN     MENTON A/M. Richard About that primitive outlook. It doesn’t need reviving. We’ve got it. It comes with seeing & feeling as deeply and truly as we are capable of. I mean by that nothing self conscious – God forbid – but just a kind of simple acceptance of Life as an artist must see it. The freshness is all there. Everything is to our hand. The whole secret is to give ourselves up to it in the right way. What you quote from Van Gogh is very fine.1 I could give you its twin sentence if I had Tchekhov’s letters here.2 Tchekhov felt just like that. I too, suspect and don’t feel comfortable in this ‘art life’. What I mean is when Brett used to write me endless pages about good & bad art I always wanted to hang my head because I felt she wasn’t working. She wasn’t really getting down to it – (dont misunderstand me) humbly. See dear Richard you show your reverence for your job in the way you approach it. I don’t believe there are any short cuts to Art. Victory is the reward of battle just exactly as it is in Life. And the more one knows of ones ‘soldiers’ the better chance one has. Thats not an absolutely true analogy tho’. The thing is more subtle. But what I do believe with my whole soul is that one’s outlook is the climate in which ones art either thrives or doesn’t grow.* I am dead certain that there is no separating Art & Life. And no artist can afford to leave out Life. If we mean to work we must go straight to Life for our nourishment. There’s no substitute. But I am violent on this subjeck. I must leave it. About your Easter holiday. Just feel as free as air – Come when you like – how you like – Make your Easter at Christmas or your Christmas at Easter. Dont feel bound. I am stuck in bed – by my old doctor who says I must stay here another week at least. Pity poor little K. I hate bed. I shall never go to bed in Heaven or eat anything off a tray. If a cherubim & a seraphim come winging their way towards me with some toast & jelly I shall pop like a chestnut into Hell & be roasted. Look after your baby brother, and be sure he does not fall out of the gocart on to his boko.3 Goodbye my dear Katherine. * At the top of this new page, a line of writing has been scribbled out and KM has written: ‘Sorry but cant was’ [waste] paper.’



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Notes 1. JMM’s 1928 edition of KM’s letters identifies the allusion as a quote from a letter which Van Gogh wrote to his brother, trying to explain how his quest as an artist impelled him to reject the conventional notion of ‘transcript painting’ to capture the hidden voice, movement or formal properties within: Nevertheless I find in my work a certain reverberation of that which fascinated me. I know that Nature told me something, that she spoke to me, and that I took down her message in shorthand. Perhaps my stenographic transcript contains words that are undecipherable; belike there are faults and omissions in it too; still it may possess something that the wood, the beach, or the figures said. And this is never in a tame or conventional language that did not spring from Nature herself. Undated, the letter is believed to date from autumn 1882. See Ludovici, pp. xv, 69. 2. Chekhov compares enquiring creative activity to an observational scientific method of transcription in a letter to Souvorin, dated November 1888. The letter is included in the selection KM and Koteliansky co-translated for publication in the Athenaeum in June 1919. See CW3, pp. 224–5. 3. (Cockney slang): Head.

[1 January 1921] [ATL] [Villa Isola Bella, Garavan, Menton] January 1st 1921. Dear Richard      A Happy New Year. As I made up the fire just now, laid the fresh logs across & neatly disposed of the half consumed ones I found myself sending you a greeting. I hoped this year would be a very special an extra special one for you & that all the milestones dotted through it were canvases by our young painter Richard M. Good luck – dear little brother – now and always – On Xmas day we drank your health in real live champagne. I hope you had a good Xmas. Jack has brought me up to date in your news even down to a description of your new overcoat (which is very powerful for Jack.) I hope he will tell you of this place. He likes it and he looks very well and eats something tremenjous. We spend our time talking, reading Shakespeare, discussing the ‘future’ and what we want to do – and more talking. Its years since we have been quite alone together like this. Everything seems so simple – so easy. Its like being a child and grown up at the same time. The chief feeling is though – that marvellous sense of ease – which seems to me the rarest thing in Life for two people to share. I have written a huge long story of a rather new kind.1

340   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Its the outcome of the Prelude method – it just unfolds and opens – But I hope its an advance on Prelude. In fact I know its that because the technique is stronger – Its a queer tale, though. I hope you’ll like it. Arnold G. sent a story for the paper which I read the other day.2 It interested me very much. One felt he’d been reading Tchekhov but in the good sense – Tchekhov had freed him – given him the courage to be himself – I thought it a remarkable piece of work. But then again it set me thinking of you. For you are the real New Generation to me, and I wondered what you were doing & feeling about ‘this painting business’ – and Life, generally. If you ever feel inclined to – tell me a little – will you? We had a marvellous drive up into the mountains here the other day to a very ancient small village called Castellar. These roads wind & wind higher and higher – one seems to drive through the centuries too – the boy with the oxen who stands on the hillside with a green branch in his hand, the old woman gathering twigs among the olives, the blind peasant with wild violet pinned to his cap – all these figures seem to belong to any time. And then the tiny walled village with a great tree in the cobbled square and the lovely young girl looking out of the window of flower pots in the Inn. Its all something one seems to have known for ever. I could live here for years and years I mean away from what they call ‘the world’. Here’s Jack, back from a walk & here’s old Marie with the tea and honey cake. Fare well. I send you my love. May we meet before this year is ended. Katherine.* *At the end of the letter, KM has drawn a tiny horse and cart, pulling a huge bottle marked ‘Love/Best make’. An arrow points to a sign in the air saying ‘1921 brew’. Notes 1. KM had been working on ‘At the Bay’, which was published 1922. 2. See KM’s letter to Arnold Gibbons in CL1, pp. 600–1. The Athenaeum did not publish his story; neither did the amalgamated Nation and Athenaeum.

[early January 1921] [ATL] VILLA ISOLA BELLA  GARAVAN    MENTON A/M. Cheque enclosed. Dear little Bruvver, It occurs to me that a more reasonable ‘Kick off’ would have been to send you a très1 late Christmas present. I therefore enclose a small



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cheque. Spend it – thats all I ask. Don’t save it. Enjoy yourself, Richard dear. Buy yourself a book you want or take Mam’selle out to dinner or – do what you like. Thats all the bes’.2 And never think any money I send you deprives Jack of anything. As you know we keep our money affairs entirely separate. He doesn’t give me a penny & never has. So feel as free as air. I decided this morn to make my will in case I should go off suddin like. I dont suppose Ill leave more than 4d but after mature consideration Ive pitched on ce jeune peintre3 Richard Murry to be my heir.      Addio, caro mio4        Catterina Notes 1. (Fr.): very. 2. In a later note, Richard Murry explains the expression, tracing it back to his childhood impatience with his elder brother returning home on school vacation; the exasperated child’s protest that ‘You go back to your school – that’s all the best for you’ had amused JMM, and been taken up as a family saying which KM also adopted in her exchanges with Richard. Transcriptions of childlike mispronunciation of words likewise become a recurrent feature of KM’s letters to Richard over the years. 3. (Fr.): This young painter. 4. (It.): Goodbye, my dear.

[17 January 1921] [ATL]

17 i 1921.

VILLA ISOLA BELLA  GARAVAN    MENTON A/M.

My dear Richard, If you knew how I love hearing from you and how honoured I am by your confidence! I want you to feel I am a real sister to you. Will you? Remember that here is your sister Katherine who is not only interested in everything that you do but who wants to be made use of. Treat me as a person you have the right to ask things of. Look here – if you want anything & you haven’t the dibs – come to me bang off and if I have the money you’re welcome to it – without a single hesitation. Ill always be truthful with you, that’s a promise. Ill be dead straight with you in everything. Why I am saying all this is (I see your eyes rolling and your hair rising in festoons of amazement and I dont care!) well, why I am saying it

342   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 is that we ‘artists’ are not like ordinary people and there are times when to know we have a fellow workman who’s ready to do all in his power, because he loves you and believes in you, is a nice comfortable feeling. I adore Life but my experience of the world is that its pretty terrible. I hope yours will be a very different one, dear old boy, but just in case . . . you’d like to shout Katherine at any moment –here she is – See? Having got that off my ches’ (which is at this moment more like a chest of super-sharp edged cutlery) let me say how I appreciate all you feel about craft. Yes, I think youre absolutely right. I see your approach to painting as very individual. Emotion for you seems to grow out of deliberation – looking long at a thing. Am I getting at anything right? In the way a thing is made – it may be a tree or a woman or a gazelle or a dish of fruit – you get your inspiration. This sounds a bit too simple when it is written down & rather like ‘Professor Leonard The Indian Palmist’ – I mean something though. Its a very queer thing how craft comes into writing. I mean down to details. Par exemple.1 In Miss Brill I choose not only the length of every sentence, but even the sound of every sentence – I choose the rise and fall of every paragraph to fit her – and to fit her on that day at that very moment. After Id written it I read it aloud – numbers of times – just as one would play over a musical composition – trying to get it nearer and nearer to the expression of Miss Brill – until it fitted her.2 Don’t think Im vain about the little sketch. Its only the method I wanted to explain. I often wonder whether other writers do the same – If a thing has really come off it seems to me there mustn’t be one single word out of place or one word that could be taken out. Thats how I AIM at writing. It will take some time to get anywhere near there. But you know Richard, I was only thinking last night people have hardly begun to write yet – Put poetry out of it for a moment & leave out Shakespeare – now I mean prose. Take the very best of it. Aren’t they still cutting up sections rather than tackling the whole of a mind? I had a moment of absolute terror in the night. I suddenly thought of a living mind – a whole mind – with absolutely nothing left out. With all that one knows how much does one not know? I used to fancy one knew all but some kind of mysterious core (or one could). But now I believe just the opposite. The unknown is far far greater than the known. The known is only a mere shadow. This is a fearful thing and terribly hard to face. But it must be faced. Well, thats enough at a time for you. I hope you’re not bored. I long to see the landscape. Am I to be allowed to hang it on my walls to bear me company? With my love to you Ever* Katherine. * Here KM has drawn a little heart with an arrow going through it.



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Notes 1. (Fr.): For example. 2. See CW2, pp. 250–4.

[3 February 1921] [ATL]

February 3rd 1921.

VILLA ISOLA BELLA   GARAVAN    MENTON A/M.

My dear Richard, I dont suppose you really realise what your two last letters to me have been like. Well, I must say Ive never had any letters to beat them, and when you are in Paradise I hope the Lord will present you with two brushes of comets hair in token of appreciation for same. Paint brushes, of course I mean. In the meantime je vous serre le main bien fort1 as they say, for them . . . I’ll take em in order. The first, I must say, was what the French newspapers call un espèce de bowl-over!2 Your interview with Fate (not forgetting his Secretary) written on that beautiful leming coloured paper was simply a proof of what you could do at this imaginative short story writing if you really got going. Richard Murry enters the ring & shows Kid Mansfield How to Do it. I leave the drawing of the scene to you – me – in black welvet shorts with a crochet lace collar and you in a kind of zebra tights costume . . . Well, dear old boy you wiped the ring with me. Not only that I do really think that things have taken a Turn and that Jack and I have seen our worst days. Hope so, at any rate. I think your Easter plan is a first rate one. Its down in my diary as a certainty – Do lets bring it off! Dont worry about the fare. When the time comes just put your toospeg brush, pyjames and a collar (for Sundays & fête days) into a handkerchief & Ill send along the ticket & a dotted line for you to follow. Seriously a rucksack is all you’ll need. My grandpa said a man could travel all over the world with a clean pair of socks and a rook rifle.3 At the age of 70 odd he started for England thus equipped but Mother took fright & added a handkerchief or two. When he returned he was shorn of everything but a large watering can which he’d bought in London for his young marrows. I don’t suggest him as a Man to be Followed, however. Already, just with the idea of you coming Ive seen you on the terrace – the three of us, talking – Ive packed the picnic basket & weve gone off for the day. Lunch under the olive trees . . . and so on . . . Richard dear, it will be awful if

344   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 it doesn’t come true! We must make it. Jack has a scheme to meet you in Paris & convey you to and from The Louvre on your way. Well, I now come to your Letter II containing your photograph. I love having it. You have, as Koteliansky used to say, an ‘extremely nice face’, Richard. Being fond of you as I am I read into it all sorts of signs of the future painter . . . I believe they are all there. My honest opinion is that if there is a person going on the right lines – you are he. I can’t tell you how right I feel you are. It seems to me like this. Here is painting – and here is life. We can’t separate them. Both of them have suffered an upheaval extraordinary in the last few years. There is a kind of tremendous agitation going on still, but so far anything that has come to the surface seems to have been experimental or a fluke – a lucky accident. I believe the only way to live as artists under these new conditions in art and life is to put everything to the test for ourselves. We’ve got, in the long run, to be our own teachers. There’s no getting away from that. We’ve got to win through by ourselves. Well, as I see it, the only way to do that honestly – dead truthfully, shirking nothing and leaving nothing out, is to put everything to the test,* not only to face things, but really to find out of what they are composed. How can we know where we are, otherwise? How can we prevent ourselves being weak in certain places? To be thorough – to be honest –I think if artists were really thorough & honest they would save the world. Its the lack of those things & the reverse of them that putting a deadly blight on life. Good work takes upon itself a Life – bad work has death in it. Well, (forgive me if Im dull, old boy) your longing for technical knowledge seems to me profoundly what an artist ought to feel today. Its a kind of deep sign of the times – rather the Zeitgeist – thats the better word. Your generation & mine too has been ‘put off’ with imitations of the real thing and we’re bound to react violently if we’re sincere. This takes so long to write & it sounds so heavy. Have I conveyed what I mean to even? You see I too have a passion for technique. I have a passion for making the thing into a whole if you know what I mean. Out of technique is born real style, I believe. There are no short cuts. Look out! I mustn’t get off the lines. Ive just read your last pages again. An aesthetic emotion is what we feel in front of a work of art one doesn’t feel an aesthetic emotion about a thing, but about its artistic representation. Example: Richard Murry in front of Portrait of Madame Manet.4 Oh Richard! Believe me! I think you’re terribly right to feel as you do and not to pretend. Only, dear old boy, the price you pay for your honesty is you don’t have any false thrills about the pose & the form & the vision. I don’t mean the chaps in your class are insincere, but evidently you are coming to it in a different way. Don’t forget that intellectually you are stages beyond the men you draw with. That makes you critical in a way its very rare to be when one is starting out. But I wish you were not so far away. I wish the garden gate flew open for you often & that you came in & out & we talked – not as in



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London – more easily and more happily. I shall pin the sun into the sky for every day of your holiday and at night I shall arrange for a constant supply of the best moonlight. Well, my fellow worker – lets get on with the job. If its any help to you to know theres someone who believes in you . . . here she is. The House Flag is always flying. Goodbye for now. With a whole mountain of love             Katherine** Jack will be in London on Bunday. * At this point in the letter KM has drawn a stylised X, replicated at the top of the page with the following note: ‘Your desire for technical knowledge is a kind of profound symbol’. ** At the end of the letter KM has drawn a bed on wheels. Notes 1. (Fr): I give you a hearty handshake. 2. (Fr.): A sort of bowl-over. The invented collocation is a fine example of KM’s creative slippage between languages: the phrasal verb ‘to bowl over’, used for example in cricket, is reinvested as a compound noun supposedly taken up in French (and presumably pronounced with an appropriately evocative French accent). See a very similar mock coinage in CW4: ‘And the French –what espece de Niblickisme will they make of it?’ (p. 225). 3. KM’s grandfather, Arthur Beauchamp (1827–1910), was one of the Beauchamp family’s founding ‘Pa-men’. Restless and adventuring by nature, he prompted his family to up and move whenever the prospects seemed right, and generally prospered by his wits and risk-taking spirit. 4. The pioneering early Impressionist master, Edouard Manet (1832–83) painted his wife, the fellow painter and talented musician Suzanne Leenhoff (1829– 1906), in numerous poses, settings and contexts; at least thirteen of these are conserved today in museums worldwide.

[17 February 1921] [ATL] VILLA ISOLA BELLA   GARAVAN     MENTON A/M. Thursday. What’s this Ive been hearing about you Riccardo Murryo. The Big Bear has written to say that he has seen the Little Bear’s drawings & he’s persuaded hes the real thing & hes made very Great and Important Progress.

346   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 If you were here Tiny Bear would have to give you a small hug for that or a piece of wild honey out of a hollow tree. (Little Bear: ‘Yes, thats all the best’.) But it really is thrilling news & I wish I could see them too. A big fat Catholic priest has just been to see me, sitting by my bedside in a red plush armchair1 – I thought, as I listened, and looked meek: Richard would have de faire son portrait2 with cocobutter, lamp black, and a little rich gravy-out-of-the-dish for the cheek bones. But being a perlite little thing, I didn’t say it out loud. (1) Theres a Chinese Magnolia out in the garden. Oh, Sir, you never see such a Beauty. (2) The peach tree is in flower. I noticed it at the same moment as a young bee. The young bee literally fell down about 3 feet of air in its astonishment. As for roman hyacinths & violets & gilly flowers they are just bread and butter here. Im going to get up tomorrow. Please fly the flag.           Goodbye little Painter-Brother                Katherine. Notes 1. KM’s cousin, Connie Beauchamp, and her companion, Jinnie Fullerton, were ardent Catholics, and earnestly encouraged KM to take an interest in, and perhaps draw solace from, their faith. She would at times hearken to this appeal to her religious sensibility. See Alpers 1980, pp. 311–12, and CW4, p. 305. 2. (Fr.): To paint his portrait.

[20 June 1921] [ATL]

20 vi 1921

impermanent address. Ill send the other as soon as we have got there. Chateau Belle Vue Sierre Valais

Riccardo mio,1 I answer your letter bang off. But so many thoughts go chasing through my head (do you see them? the last thought, rather slow, on a tricycle!) and there are so many things Id like to talk over that its not as easy as it sounds . . .



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You know – its queer – I feel so confident about you always. I feel that, the way you are building your boat, no harm can come to it . . It will sail. You’re building for the high seas, and once you do take her out nothing will stop her. About the old masters. What I feel about them (all of them writers too of course) is the more one lives with them the better it is for ones work. Its almost a case of living into ones ideal world – the world that one desires to express. Do you know what I mean? For this reason I find that if I stick to men like Chaucer & Shakespeare & Marlowe2 & even Tolstoi I keep much nearer what I want to do than if I confuse things with reading a lot of lesser men. Id like to make the old masters my daily bread – in the sense in which its used in the Lord’s Prayer; really to make them a kind of essential nourishment. All the rest is well – it comes after. I think I understand exactly what you mean by ‘visionary consciousness’. It fits the writer equally well. Its mysterious and its difficult to get into words. There is this world and there is the world that the artist creates in this world which is nevertheless his world, and subject to his laws – his ‘vision’ – Does that sound high-flown? I don’t mean it to be. Its difficult to get over in a letter a smile or a look or a something which makes it possible to say these things when ones with a person without that person feeling you are a bit of a priglet . . . Jack told me you were working at technique. So am I. Its extraordinarily difficult – don’t you find? My particular difficulty is a kind of facility – which I suspect very much. Its not solid enough. But I go at it every day. Its simply endlessly fascinating. Jack arrived here with the Broomies sun still shining fully in his eyes and on his nose. I heard about your day. For some reason I feel awfully glad you’d drunk some of the well water. It made me feel we had begun to live there. In 2 years time I hope we shall have enough money to really make it a terrific little place. I say – what fun we shall have! Can you imagine it? I can. Jack, you and me down there looking at our cow and the smoke coming out of our chimney. In your second drawing I note that the larder has shelves. I began to fill them with strawberry jam and currant jelly. I think more fruit trees ought to be planted now. Very small cherry trees do amazingly here – I wonder if they would there? Also I do wish one could get in a large bush of lavender at the side of the front door. Ive learnt a lot from these drawings – more than from anything else. How sensible of you to put in sloping field – that gives it one at once and I didn’t know there was a tree by the gate, before. One tree more makes a difference. We are leaving here at the end of this week & creeping by funicular up to Montana. There I hope we shall stay for the next two years. We have our eye on a chalet called Les Sapins which is [in] the midst of the forests – pine forests – theres not even a fence or a bar between it and the trees. So you picture the wolves breathing under the front door,

348   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 the bears looking through our keyhole and bright tigers dashing at the lighted window panes. Montana is on a small plateau ringed round by mountains. Ill tell you more about it when we get there. Jack has been up twice. He says its the best place he’s ever seen. This place, Sierre, is in a valley. Its only 1500 feet high – very sheltered. Fig trees grow big, vines are everywhere; large flowery trees shake in the light. Marvellous light – Richard – and small lakes, bright, clear blue, where you can swim. Switzerland makes us laugh. Its a comic country; the people are extraordinary like comic pictures and they are dead serious about it all. But there is something fine in it, too. They are ‘simple’, unspoilt, honest and real democrats. The 3rd class passenger is just as good as the 1st class passenger in Switzerland and the shabbier you are the less you are looked at. No one expects you to be rich or to spend money. This makes Life pleasant – very. They are not at all beautiful people; the men are very thick, stiff, ugly in the German way, & the women are nearly all dead plain. But seen from afar, in the fields, against mountains, they are all well in the picture. The Spring is a good time here. I arrived just as the field flowers were out; now the hay is gathered and the grapes are formed on the vines. I cant say, Richard, how I love the country. To watch the season through, to lose myself in love of the earth – that is Life to me. I don’t feel I could ever live in a city again. First the bare tree, then the buds & the flowers, then the leaves, then the small fruit forming and swelling – If I only watch one tree a year one is richer for life. Let me take the plunge. I feel, in a way, that you are the same. Does it sound cruel for me to talk like that about country life when you, dear little brother, are in the town? But its only a question of time. Jack & I had a big helping of town. You will have, I hope, a very much smaller one. I am so glad Jack stayed at home this time. Mother must have loved having him, and he was happy. We often and often talk of you. You don’t feel far off – do you? Switzerland feels to me nearer than the S. of France. All the same it isn’t near enough. Goodbye for now  With real love from Katherine. Notes 1. (It.): My Richard. 2. JMM’s edition of KM’s journal records a number of reading notes in May 1921 showing that she was reading Hero and Leander, by the great Elizabethan playwright, poet and translator Christopher Marlowe (1564–93), the foremost tragedian of his times. The pages of the journal, however, have apparently not survived. See CW4, p. 362.



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[9 August 1921] [ATL] I have given your message to Jack.

9 viii 1921

Chalet des Sapins Montana s. Sierre (Valais) La Suisse.

Richard, You sent me a beautiful postcard.1 Yes I agree about the hands & the angle of the head is so lovely – I mean how the chin is tucked in – that gives a kind of little delicate spring to the eyebrows & even the corners of the lips . . . or doesn’t it? A poor ignorant writer asks. We have just been doing the flowers – before we start work. Scene: the salle a manger2 – with windows wide open & pink curtings flapping. The table bare & heaped with petunias, snapdragons & nasturtiums – glass vases & bowls full of water – a general sense of buds and wetness & that peculiar stickiness of fresh stalks – Jack – white shirt with sleeves up to his shoulders, white duck trousers & rope shoes snipping with a large pair of wet scissors – me – blue cotton kimono & pink slippers a filling of the vases . . . Jack is terribly keen on petunias. I wish I could send you a whole great bastick full. They are wonderful flowers – almost pure light – and yet an exquisite starry shape. We have every colour from pale pink to almost blackish purple. And do you know the smell of snapdragons? My dear boy. I must here pause or you will walk away. But tell me – why do people paint forever bottils and onions? A white snapdragon, for instance just for a change would be worth it, surely – Richard – I wish I could unobtrusively give you these things – leave flowers instead of foundlings on your studio doorstep, in fact. Perhaps one day I shall be able to . . . About people. Yes, I meant what you mean. One gets mortally tired of speedometers. But I have been looking at a good deal of modern ‘work’ lately & it almost seems to me that the blight upon it is a kind of fear. Writers, at any rate, are self conscious to such a pitch now-adays that their feeling for life seems to be absolutely stopped – arrested – It is sad. They know they oughtn’t to say ‘driving fast eh’ & yet they don’t know what they ought to say. If I am dead sincere Id say I think it is because people have so little love in their hearts for each other. ‘Love casteth out Fear’3 is one of those truths that one goes on proving and proving. And if you are without fear you are free; its fear makes us slaves – But this sounds so prosy. You know it as well as I do. I hate to bore you.

350   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Jack had a birthday on Saturday.4 His presents were (1) a panama hat (2) some coloured blotting paper (3) a cake (4) a ruler. We had a tea with candles complete & liqueur chocolates that were positively terrifying. The moment of agonising suspense when you had the chocolate in your mouth & had to bite through to the mysterious liqueur. However we survived. The weather is superb, here. There has been a battle of the Wasps. Three hosts with their citadels have been routed from my balcony blind. In the swamps, still white with cotton grass, there are hundreds of grasshoppers. Jack saw an accident to one the other day. He jumped by mistake into a stream & was borne away. Body not recovered. When we thought about it – it was the first real accident to an insect that we remembered. Richard I must start work. Jack’s novel is going along at a fine pace.5 Ill tell you when the old Sphere prints any story of mine that might interest you.6 I still have so much to tell you. Ive only unpacked the little small things on top. All the big heavy ones are underneath. What are you drawing? How are you? Is it still summery? Lovely summer is! Have you had any bathing this year? You always look awfully at home in a ‘watery element’ – Dont bother to answer these questions.     Goodbye for now. Ida Baker, who lives about 2 miles from here, is going to England this month & is going to bring back Wingley.7 Athy is married to an elderly lady in Hampstead, I believe, a widow. She lost her first husband – a lovely tabby – some taime ago. Notes 1. A handwritten note by Richard Murry in the left-hand margin of this letter indicates the painting in question is ‘Rubens’ Elisabeth’, suggesting the picture is either the portrait of Elisabeth of Bourbon (c. 1625) or that believed to be Elisabeth Fourment, usually referred to as Portrait of a Woman (c. 1630), by the Flemish grand master Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640). 2. (Fr.): Dining room. 3. See John 4: 18 – ‘There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love.’ 4. JMM’s birthday was 6 August. 5. JMM was working on his second novel, The Things We Are, published in 1922. 6. As KM indicated in a letter to her cousin Elizabeth that October, ‘Clement Shorter wants me’ (CL1, p. 31). Shorter was the editor of the weekly Sphere magazine, and keen to commission a series of stories. 7. Ida Baker recounts numerous attempts to provide for KM’s beloved cats, Wingley and Athenaeum, so as to avoid the constant upheavals of moving. See Baker, pp. 175–97; see also KM’s letters to Baker in CL1, pp. 94–7. Baker’s aunt, Mrs Scriven, who lived in Lewes near Newhaven, finally adopted Wingley.



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[August 1921] [ATL] [Chalet des Sapins, Montana-sur-Sierre, Switzerland] Riccardo mio, Its Sunday, my day for writing letters. But I don’t write them. You are one of the very very few people whom I want to write to. I think of you & I straightaway long to ‘clasp hands across a vast’1 – – and more. I want to talk and to listen – (that first) and to have a good long look at you. When Im fond of people their appearance is very valuable to me too. Do you feel like that? But the people. Its queer how important they seem to become as one goes on. One feels as tho’ one has seen them enough – got what one wants from them and so – to work. I don’t mean that in a cold blooded way. Perhaps the truth is one has less and less time away from work. It gets more and more engrossing every day here, and we live like a pair of small timetables. The hours away from it we read Shakespeare aloud, discuss what has been written, Jack goes flower finding – then the specimens have to be sorted, pressed, examined. While hes out I play the piano or go for a small snail crawl myself. And before one can say knife its time to go to bed. We get up at 7.30 – both of us – and breakfast on a balcony all windows with a ring of snow mountains to look at across the valley – Come here, one day, little brother. It’s a very good place. I am determined to make enough money to build a small shack here and make it my winter perch for as long as I need perches. The point about this place is it is not spoilt. There never can be a railways line. There is nothing to do except look at the mountains, climb them and explore the forests & paddle in the streams. Motorcars cant do these things so the rich and great will never come. The very flowers seem to know this to me. There is a lightness upon them – and they are careless –even the wild strawberry doesn’t bother to hide – and theres a delicate creature (the Bell Flower, Jack’s favourite) that grows everywhere – as fine as a hairbell and a very clear almost glassy blue. It would not dare to grow in more civilized places. Oh, Richard – I do love the earth! When I go off by myself here – one slips through the tree trunks and one is out of sight at once – hidden from every eye. Thats my joy. I sit on a stump or on the fir needles and my only trouble is that I cant make some small grasshopper sound now and then . . . one wants to praise someone or give thanks to someone. Down below our windows in that rocky clearing before the trees begin there is a flock of goats feeding as I write. The sound of their bells is very pleasant. I look at them & wish I could put one in an envelope (a goat, I mean) for you to draw. Small fine, flattish head, delicate legs, lean springing haunches – Id like also to post you our maid servant Ernestine to paint. She looks like a sunflower – Shes in the kitchen now, shelling peas, and she wears a sunday bodice, yellow with black velvet stripes and rather big sleeves. (She always dresses in the peasant costume) As

352   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 I write it seems to me Ive told you all this before. Have I? Forgive me if I have. Jack is very well. Im much better. Hes hard at work on a novel. Clement Shorter – of the Sphere is my master at present. Ive still 3 stories to do for him. He pays me more than anyone else – six stories – sixty guineas & a story takes me a week. That’s not bad pay. Now what about you? Have the composts burst into pineapples yet? The D. N.2 says the heat is still tremendous & I picture you in a cork helmet & umbereller. ‘Dont be afraid Theres a good maid’ Isnt that one of your poems?       I wish I knew about your work. But that doesn’t mean I want you to bother to write, because I dont. It means I am always interested and always holding spiritual thumbs for you – Dear Richard dear! Tell mother how well Jack is – won’t you & give her my love – – – – – Always Katherine. Notes 1. The quotation marks here would appear to be highlighting KM’s characteristic use of pastiche when using clichés and or imitating literary styles. 2. The Daily News, a London newspaper.

[5 September 1921] [ATL] [Chalet des Sapins, Montana sur Sierre] Jack: ‘Ask the old boy if he has seen Charlie Chaplin in The Kid.1 And tell him to let us know what he thinks of it’. K: ‘I will’. K. to R: ? R: 5 ix 1921 Richard I have been too long in answering your last letter. Forgive me. They varnished the outside of this chalet and the ‘wiff’ gave me white lead



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poisoning & I felt an awful worm with it. The whole world seemed varnish. Everything I ate had varnish sauce. Even Jack was overcome for a day. But its over now, and we appear to be living in a house beautifully basted with the best brown gravy – and the factory is in full blas’ again. I must say we do manage to get through a great deal of work here, and there are always side issues – such as jam making, sewing on our buttings, cutting each others hair which fill up the margin of the days. We try to make it a rule not to talk in bed. Its queer how full Life is once one gets free of wasted time . . . I want to say a word about your new job. I hope it fits in with your scheme of life. Its not much good me saying much, for I don’t really know what you feel about it. It gives you more freedom, though – doesn’t it – and independence – I hope you’re happy and all goes well. My ambition is to make enough money to build a small house here – near where we are – on a grassy slope with a wood behind & mountains before. It will take about five years to do it – get the money together. But it would be a very great satisfaction to design a really good place to work in – down to the last cupboard. But who am I to talk so lofty. When – if – the time comes & you’re not too famous I’ll beg you to lay aside your laurels & do it for us – Ill only look over your shoulder and breathe very hard when you make those lovely little lines that mean stairs – Since I last wrote summer has gone. Its autumn. Now Jack brings home from his walks mushrooms and autumn crocuses. Little small girls knock at the door with pears to sell & blue black plums. The hives have been emptied; there’s new honey and the stars look almost frosty. Speaking of stars reminds me – we were sitting on the balcony last night. It was dark. These huge fir trees ‘take’ the darkness marvellously – we had just counted four stars & remarked a light, high up – what was it? – on the mountains opposite, when suddenly from far away a little bell began ringing. Someone played a tune on it – something gay, merry, ancient, over and over. I suppose it was some priest or lay brother in a mountain village. But what we felt was – its good to think such things still happen – to think some peasant goes off in the late evening & delights to play that carillon. I sometimes have a fear that simple hearted people are no more. I was ashamed of that fear last night. The little bell seemed to say, but joyfully: ‘Be not afraid. All is not lost.’ Do you know – its a year since we have seen each other. How I should like to see you again! But not for an hour or two – thats no good. Id like enough time to get over the novelty so that we really could talk. Id like to hear enough about your work – to begin with – – – But its hardly fair – although its a temptation, to ask you why painters so seldom paint flowers – when you go to the trouble of explaining with a whole lovely little drawing. Oh, why can’t I sweep all these fruits into a bastick & send it flying to you – Its not fair you shouldn’t see these red, gold flecked pears and these greengages. I never set eye on them but I think of you . . .

354   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 All being well as they say, Wingley should arrive this week. He’ll be terrified after the journey. We shall have to get him snow boots for the winter and an airman’s helmet made of mouse’s skin. This letter is all in pieces. Don’t think evil of me for it, brother.                Je vous embrasse2                  Katherine. Notes 1. The Kid, released in 1921, was the London-born film director Charlie Chaplin’s first full-length film. It was an instant success, which also went down in the annals of cinema as a masterpiece of silent cinema. It popularised Chaplin’s role as the Tramp and defined his deft film aesthetic, blending incisive social observation, sharp irony, tender comedy and impeccably choreographed action. The huge commercial success of the film transformed the life of the child Jackie Coogan, who played the Kid; he henceforth left the vaudeville world to become a popular actor. It also affirmed the place of Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977) among the great cinema figures of the time. 2. (Fr.): I kiss you.

[12 September 1921] [ATL] [Chalet des Sapins, Montana-sur-Sierre] Caro Riccardo, Just a note to say that Wingley, our gooseberry eyed one has arrived. Thin – terribly – with the bones sticking out of his rump like a cow’s bones do. A mingy little ruff & fur that has turned brown like an actor’s black overcoat. You can imagine his look after the journey, flashing across the world on the end of a string. But when Jack lay on the floor & rubbed noses with him he turned over & showed off his white weskit in just his old way. He is now quite settled down, reads Shakespeare with us every night & marks the place in his copy with a dead fly. Its awfully nice to have him. He’s like a little anchor, here. We hope later on he may be persuaded to write his reminiscences . . . How are you – my dear old boy? I finished my new book last night – laid down my pen at 10.30 p.m. and wrote Thanks be to God. under the last line.1 Queer! I really felt it, too. Oh Richard I do hope it will give you a little pleasure – the first long story, I mean. Its a continuation of Prelude, but better than Prelude I hope. 60 pages. Ive been at it for seven hours a day all this last week. Your brother is very well. Hes the colour of a superfine apricot through walking in the sun without his hat. He has bought a pair of jaegar2 shoes that come halfway up ones leg and are so large that one could almost sit in one. He also bought a TERRIFIC leather jerkin from Pontings, Kensington for 10/–3 Pontings have a sale of these



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government airman clothes. Its worth knowing. All goes well here. We begin to look towards Christmas: I begin to wonder if that small black dot moving over the snow with 2 Xmas candles in his hair is Richard – With warm love, dear little brother Katherine. Notes 1. KM had just finished writing ‘At the Bay’. See CW2, pp. 342–71. 2. The clothing company Jaeger, founded in 1884, was heralded for its ‘sanitary woollen system’, a feature then incorporated into the company’s full name. They had originally specialised in woollen long-johns for men and became army suppliers during the war. 3. ‘Pontings’ was a vast department store on Kensington High Street, just next door to High Street Kensington underground station; it closed in 1971.

[17 September 1921] [ATL] [Chalet des Sapins, Montana sur Sierre] Sunday Dear little brother, We thought your criticism of The Kid was extremely interesting. At last we got an idea what it really was like. It’s a pity Charles lets these other things creep in – a great pity. I should very much like to see him with the infant. I feel that would be fine. But most of the rest – dear me – no! As to the tabloid of the lady with the cross – such things make one hang one’s head. Don’t Jack’s poems look well? One couldn’t ask for a better looking book.1 I do hope one day you will make a book for me, Richard, with a cover drawn by R.M. . . . I wonder. We have been squirrel-gazing this afternoon through field glasses. They are exquisite little creatures – so intent, preoccupied, as it were, and so careless. They flop softly from branch to branch, hang upside down – just for the sake of hanging. Some here are as small as rats – with reddish coats & silver bellies. The point about looking at birds & so on through glasses is one sees them in their own world – off their guard. One spies, in fact. Id like to send you some moss. Do you like moss? There are many kinds here & just now it is in its beauty. Its nice to sit down and ruffle it with ones hand. Flowers are gone. A few remain but they are flat on the grass without their stalks – dandelions and purple ones. The mountain ash is terrific against the blue.

356   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 There aren’t many leaves here to turn – but the wild strawberry makes up for them. Minute leaves of every colour are scattered over the ground. In fact, if possible, this early autumn is all the bes’ – even better than summer or spring. I mustn’t send you a catalogue, though. I must refrain. Do you read Wordsworth? We read the prologue & then the rest of Peter Bell yesterday.2 This is just a note and heres a postcard of your sister. Is it any good? With my love. Notes 1. JMM’s Poems: 1916–1920 had just been published by Cobden-Sanderson. 2. Peter Bell: A Tale in Verse is an extended narrative poem by William Wordsworth, which he began writing in the late 1790s after walking extensively through the Wye Valley. It tells the tale of a roaming hawker’s transformation after a life of sin, to become a contemplative nature-lover and penitent Methodist. Bell’s homely story provides the answer to the poet’s quest in the ‘Prologue’, in which he travels the world looking for extraordinary feats or events to inspire him.

[4 October 1921] [ATL] [Chalet des Sapins, Montana-sur-Sierre] Dear Richard Drawing came today & is pinned up provisional, on my nut brown walls. Thanks most awfully. I like it Richard, very much indeed. There seems to me such feeling for a back in it, if you know what I mean . . . the roundness, the suppleness, the muskels. I don’t forget the legs which are beautifully drawn but its the back which holds my eye. I regard this drawing as a birfday present. For I am 33 on Friday week.1 So its doubly à propos2 . . . Shouldn’t I have it framed in rather a long narrow frame? Narrow white border? Thanks again, my artist brother. Ive sold my book to Constable who are publishing it this autumn.3 Id like to heave out more than half the stories. But its no good. We’ve just got to go on producing & know for ourselves where we are wrong and how to improve. We’ve got to risk our failures as well as our more or less successes. Good for ones pride, I suppose. There’s a superb sunset here while I am writing. The flocks & herds have just raced down the hill. The trees are as still as still. My boy, there is a village not far from here called Lens which you must see, thats all. Jack & I bounded there the other day in another cart. Its a fearful road, all water courses and upside down mountains. But



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the view all the way there is the best thing Jack says he has ever imagined even. On the way home we stop at the Wolfs Paw4 & have tea and honey and cream & bread. I always think of you when I see anything really ‘fine’, as you’d say. With my love Katherine. You know, Riccardo, it was fearfully nice of you to have sent me the drawing . . . Notes 1. KM was born on 14 October 1888. 2. (Fr.): Appropriate. 3. In the end, Constable did not publish KM’s collection The Garden Party and Other Stories until the following year. Her notebooks reveal she was particularly caught up at the time with which stories to include and which to leave out. See CW4, pp. 383–7. 4. KM is translating the name of a local café, ‘Patte de loup’, which evokes the imprint in the snow left by a wolf – a sign which local villagers were known to look out for, as a number of local myths and legends confirms.

[1 November 1921] [ATL]

1 xi 1921

Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre Valais

Dear Richard I feel a bit overwhelmed by this present. It came this morning. It is exquisite. Ive never seen letter paper I like so well. But its not only the sight – its the feel of it under your hand. I suppose other people do enjoy these things, are as conscious of them as I am. But I feel they can hardly be. I don’t get used to things. It will be a fresh delight to me each time I use this. Thank you my generous little painter brother – most awfully. Jack and I have such a thrill over presents here that we devour them, skin and bone. He immediately appropriated the two neat little wooden boards, which are to ‘come in for something’ – – Wingley’s sleigh, I think. We also read portions of magazine enclosed – It was full of meat. By the way, from a practical point of view this paper is nothing less than a godsend. It will prevent people from sending us letters to Chalet

358   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 des Lapins or Chalet des Savants or once Chalet des Serpents.1 Jack, observing the amount said firmly ‘This makes it out of the question to move for at least two years from now’. I am ignoring that card I sent you as you see. For I have to risk your still being in the mood of your letter. Well, I risk it to the extent of sending you my love, too. Goodbye for now Katherine. Note 1. Chalet des Sapins means ‘Fir-Tree Chalet’; the mistaken names refer to ‘Rabbit Chalet’, ‘Scholars’ Chalet’ and ‘Snake Chalet’.

[27 November 1921] [ATL]

27 xi 1921

Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre Valais

Dear Richard, I have been on the point of writing to you all this week – But the week seems to have walked away with us as usual. Here it is – Sunday – Im alone in the house – Its afternoon, Jack has gone off as usual to the big lake where he skates every afternoon. I went to see him one day. He’s like a very alert careless bird swinging up and down. The lake is beautiful, with lawny slopes on the sides and clumps of dark firs. Snow lies on the grass but thin, in patches, like linen drying. And in the distance there are these huge, high peaks. I like awfully to see these little figures sliding on the ice, it reminds me of very ancient pictures, 14th century in a Munich gallery which I saw one year.1 We are still waiting for Big Snow who tarries out of sight. Its fine every single day. The sun burns in a brilliant, transparent sky – In the shade there is a film of frost over everything and all pools and streams are ice. But from 8.30 until 3.30 you can bask as if it were summer. Pretty good for a climate – dont you think? I suppose one would say our Life goes on much the same – We work and want to work more; we read aloud, we both knit. While Jack skates I sit on my balcony & go for my walk through a pair of field glasses. There is only one real trouble & that is – never enough time. Is there any remedy for that? Its awful!



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How are things looking – Richard? All kinds of things? The world in general? I am afraid that in spite of everything I care for Life so profoundly that I am one of these optimists. The wife of Jack Spratt, in fact.2 Though in sober fact I hate fat. But there it is. We dont quarrel about it – which is queer. We are inclined to laugh at each other! Theres a queer small tapping noise going on while I write, made by the birds hanging upside down eating the fir cones. Now & then a fir cone drops off & I feel another bird who sees this accident happen gives a squeak of joy. Wing is white as snow. His name for Jack is ‘masteranman’,3 his name for me is Gran’ma Jaegar;4 he calls Ida B. the Fostermonger; and for some reason calls the servant our Swede. Muddled it with Swiss, I suppose. We found out these names in his memoirs. Heres Jack and the tea tray is following him up the stairs. This is a dull letter, little brother.        I send my love         Katherine. Notes 1. The permanent collection at the world-acclaimed, richly endowed Alte Pinakothek gallery in Munich includes a number of fourteenth- to eighteenthcentury paintings of Flemish, Dutch and German winter scenes, such as Ice-Skating on the Moat and Winter Landscape by Esaias van de Velde (1587–1630). 2. KM refers to the twin figures Jack and Mrs Sprat in the seventeenth-century children’s nursery rhyme ‘Jack Sprat could eat no fat’. The first stanza runs as follows: Jack Sprat could eat no fat, His wife could eat no lean And so between them both, you see, They licked the platter clean. 3. The double ‘M’ in JMM’s name doubtless earned him this nickname, but it also has a Tolstoyan ring to it that is more than merely playful. ‘Master and Man’ is a powerful parable by Tolstoy in which a Master urges his manservant to set out on a journey with him, despite threats of severe weather. The two men get lost in a blizzard, and when the servant collapses from exhaustion, the Master abandons him by the roadside and makes his way back to safety. Once sheltered, the Master is overcome by love for the man who gave up his life for him. 4. Beneath the comic image of KM knitting, there is a poignant reminder of both KM’s physical vulnerability to the cold, as well as to the fashions and medical practices of the time. The clothing company Jaeger had originally specialised in woollen long-johns, and KM refers to her woollen underwear in general as her ‘Grandma Jaegers’ in a letter to Brett. See CL1, p. 414.

360   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [26 December 1921] [ATL] Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre Valais Richard This letter is a very late lark indeed. It is meant to be for Christmas. Please read it before the New Year, and forgive your erring sister. Thanks most awfully for mine. The size of the pudding put heart into us. Heaven forbid Wingley should eat any for he is enormous already. We weighed him the other day. He was over 12 lbs. You should have seen him sitting in the scales, with a very smug cat – in – a – bastick expression . . . Well, Richard, how are you, I wonder? How is the world? Space? Universe? It begins to seem long since I was in England. Perhaps you are quite changed, with moustaches and a collar I have never seen before. We are the same except that our heads are always in the air – little Johnnies head in air – looking for the snow.1 Which won’t fall and won’t fall. Ice – we can ‘do’ you as much ice as you like – thick and clear, Sir. But ice is only half the fun. However, everybody says it must fall soon so I suppose we haven’t long to wait. It has been shockingly cold here. There are days when one is in the clouds for hours and that damp, heavy strange cold is like nothing on earth. Then just Montana clears at night and looking out of my window on to the milk white valley is like looking out of the Ark when it rested on Mount Lebanon – (wasnt it?)2 I feel like a daughter of Noah, but not one of the Daily News ones.3 You know Richard I feel this next year 1922 is going to be a good one. Better than the ones that went before. There is a kind of stirring when one thinks of it, the feeling that one has on a late March night when the wind is west. Does that seem nonsense to you? I want it to be good for all of us – of course, so that this time next year here we are – rich in happiness, fat in blessings – Jack shall have a crown, you a small sceptre – Whats left for me? There is sure to be something small going. Happy Xmas, dear old Boy. A Happy New Year. With much love from                     Katherine. Notes 1. In Heinrich Hoffmann’s nursery-rhyme book Der Struwwelpeter (1845), which recounts, in a sequence of comic rhymed cautionary tales, the misadventures which befall careless or misbehaving children, there is a boy called Johnny-Head-in-the-Air. Never paying attention to the world around him and looking always at ‘the sky / And clouds that floated by’, Johnny spends his time falling over with a bump.



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2. See Genesis 8: 4 – ‘And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat.’ 3. Genesis makes no mention of Noah having daughters, only the three daughters-in-law of his sons Shem, Ham and Japheth. They all survive the Flood and go on to become the mothers of Noah’s grandchildren. A series of cartoons featuring the Noah family and life in their suburban home (‘The Ark’) had been published by the Daily News all that year; the summer ones were later published in book form by Cassell & Co. with the title The Noahs on Holiday. The series was a success: postcards were on sale at the time, also picturing the Noah family, following up on a previous successful collection Japhet’s Christmas Eve. The Daily News also carries an advertisement for Noah Family mascots available from toyshops, including Japhet, Selina and the dog, Fido.

[2 January 1922] [ATL] Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre Valais Dear Richard, I suppose I am one of those optimists. If I sit down & think, even, it doesn’t remove my conviction (yes, its as strong as that) that the New Year is a most promising infant – I don’t know why. It seemed to smile on us. And although we have (please prepare to roll your eyes) seven feet of snow outside our front door, there is a feeling of warmth within – a New Year feeling. Yes, the snow is terrific. It is like living in the moon. Trees are crashing to earth today & lamp posts are falling & theres no electric light, no little mountain railway – Your brother went forth this afternoon on his immense skis & sped over the tops of fences and walls. I wish you could see him. He wears a blue helmet, you know the kind – airman’s helmet, a leather jacket, huge fingerless gloves (the gloves he used to eat a sponge cake in his Go-cart)1 but of a larger size, breeks, three pairs of stockings, & ski boots. He would earn enormous sums on the pictures in this get up & all covered with snow. I can hear a deep ‘A–Ah’ go round the dark theatre as he leapt on to the screen. Poor little Wingley is quite confused by this snow. Cant understand it, poor little chap. He went out the other day & began to scratch, scratched, scratched away, SCRATCHED, sat up, scratched his ear, took a deep breath, scratched on & was just rescued by the tip of his quivering tail in time. I suppose he won’t come to earth again until next April. When you say you passed Christmas quietly – I see you positively gliding by – We had a real pudding, flaging2 in brandy and even a tree. Jack said he hated trees. But when it came he liked it fearfully. They are curiously

362   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 beautiful things and this little one, with its burning candles, birds with glass tails, coloured stars, spider webs with liqueur chocolate spiders in ’em and presents was a little gem. We are keeping all the decorations for another time, when I hope you will see them, too. After the tree we had snap dragon & then played Beat your Neighbour Out of Doors & Old Maid.3 It’s a good thing this only happens once a year . . . I think I know that Flower Piece by Van Gogh.4 Yellow flowers – aren’t they – full of life. I noted the Degas show was coming.5 I hope its a good one. Tell us more about the pastels WHEN you are in the mood. I am in the middle of a long story & cant see the end. It will be a very little, small novel if it doesn’t stop soon. It is called The Doves Nest.6 I have been in a black mood about my work lately but some furious reading has pulled me out of the hole, I think. Furious reading consisted of (1) Shakespeare (2) Cosmic Anatomy7 (3) The Bible. Its late, dear Richard. I must spare my candle, draw the curtains against the wolves, & go to sleep. Please give my love to Mother – May we meet again before this year is over! With warm love from Katherine. Notes 1. ‘Sponge-cake’, like ‘go-cart’, were words whose sounds and associations they found particularly amusing. See above, pp. 338–9, n. 3. 2. KM’s neologism here is possibly a portmanteau association of ‘blazing’, ‘raging’ and ‘bathing’. 3. ‘Beat your neighbours’ (also known as ‘Beggar-my-neighbour’ or ‘Strip Jack Naked’) and ‘Old Maid’ were both popular card games dating back at least to the early nineteenth century, to be played either with conventional playing cards, or with especially illustrated decks. 4. KM had been hugely impressed by Van Gogh’s masterpiece Sunflowers, which she had seen in Paris. In a letter to Brett in late 1921 she recalls: ‘That picture seemed to reveal something that I hadn’t realised before I saw it. It lived with me afterwards. It still does – that & another of a sea captain in a flat cap. They taught me something about writing, which was queer – a kind of freedom – or rather, a shaking free’ (CL1, pp. 420–1). 5. A series of works by the late Impressionist artist and sculptor Edgar Degas (1834–1917) had been bequeathed to the Louvre gallery in Paris the previous year and were to be shown later that year as part of the newly acquired collection. 6. Although KM reworked the story over the course of the year, it was left unfinished on her death and published posthumously. 7. Cosmic Anatomy is a philosophical, theosophical work that attempts to interweave Indian and Egyptian mysticism with contemporary physics and psychoanalysis; it was to have a tremendous impact on KM’s mindset, and on some of her key decisions taken that year. M. A. Oxon was the pseudonym of Lewis Alexander Richard Wallace, a Scottish theosophist who had been an associate of Orage in the early days of the New Age. The choice of pen-name



richard murry  363 indicates Wallace’s acknowledgement of Spirit Teachings (1883) by a nineteenth-century spiritualist, William Stanton Moses, who published under the same name. See also KM’s reading notes and diary notes, CW4, pp. 397–403.

[3 March 1922] [ATL]

3 iii 1922

address safe till May Victoria Palace Hotel 6–8 Rue Blaise Desgoffe Rue de Rennes Paris

Richard I wrote to you a few days ago and now I cant remember if I sent that letter or if it disappeared. This is very bad. In case it didn’t go I shall send this note for I am thinking of you. I wish you could see the marigolds on our table. They are like little stars in their own firmament – Jack bought them. They are good flowers to buy. Remember them when you set up house. They last well and are always so full of life. There is also, little painter brother, a fine sky this afternoon – big rolling clouds. In fact its spring here – and has been for days. Its quite warm. Once February is over there is no stopping it. All the same it seems almost too good to be true. I hardly dare to look ahead and think of what is in store for all of us – And I always have the feeling that there may have been other springs but wait till you see this one – Think of lying under a tree again or paddling in a sunny river or just feeling the air is enough. Its nice here. It would be splendid if you managed to come across at Easter time. Jack and I seem to have settled down very easily. We have two good rooms and a bathroom at the end of a corridor down a little passage of our own. And its as private as if we were in a flat. We work, play chess, read Jack goes out, we make our own tea and work again . . . and its all easy and pleasant. If this treatment is a success we shall spend the summer in Germany, in some small place. Richard I couldn’t live in a city again, or I feel I could not. There seems no point in it. As for meeting people and so on Id rather see them just now and again; rarely, in intervals of work. Parties, and literary society – I flee from the very idea. And it seems to me one cant write anything worth the name unless one lives – really lives. Talk and all that kind of thing is a kind of frittering away. Perhaps that is old age. But the whole secret of doing anything is to gather oneself together and to live in a way that makes that as easy as it can be made. I don’t see how it is to be done without

364   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 solitude and a simple way of living. Do you agree? Tell me if you think its the beginning of my grey hairs. Jack is very well. I think the change is really deep in Jack since he left London. He really is happier. If you come over I like to think of you both trundling off to look at pictures together. I ought not to be writing this letter. I have a brain like a sawdust this afternoon. But I wanted to just greet you – just wave as you go on your way. Give my love to Mother. Forgive my dullness.       I press your hand         Katherine.

[16 March 1922] [ATL] [Victoria Palace Hôtel, Rue Blaise Desgoffe, Paris] Thursday. 

Paris

Dear Richard, I must have sounded an unsympathetic and selfish creature in my last letter to you. Forgive me! It was too bad of me to crow so loudly being out of the wood (more or less) myself while my little bruvver is still tangled up in the branches. I wish I could help you a bit. Perhaps you and Jack, above a long glass of something cool under a chestnut tree in the Luxembourg Gardens will find out a way. Yes, old boy, I see your point about Art Schools. I can imagine what I should have felt with Max Pemberton telling me to ‘cut the cackle and come to the osses’.1 Which is what would have happened. And I understand too why you would rather not pitch your tent in the camp of Brett and Gertler . . . Its difficult. But I pin my flag on Easter. And by my saying that don’t think I mean to interfere or that I want to solve anything that is after all your own affair. No. I imagine you are like Jack. Jack tells me things because its a relief to tell them. But he knows he doesn’t deliver himself into my hands by doing so. It stops at that and he’s safe and can either tell me more or not mention it again as he likes. This I understand. Shall we really meet next month? Richard, what larks. I can’t realise it. If spring goes on at the rate its going just now it will then be nearly full summer. Everything is coming out. Chestnut buds have burst – its warm – almost hot – and theres such a good sound when I put my head out of the window – the sound of people talking out of doors again – one of the surest signs of spring. Talking at their leisure, you know, in the open, without an enemy ready to pounce – without old winter round the corner. I don’t know – it seems to me that winter is a bad business in every way. There’s no excuse for it. Jack, who is a very fine nose-flattener has bought two old apothecary’s jars which will make you green with envy. They are tall, rather slender jars painted with a device in apple green, pale yellow and a kind



richard murry  365

of ashy pink. One has Absinthii written on it and the other Theriaca in very beautiful lettering.2 They have tops with gold knobs. Fearfully nice!! We mean to keep pot-pourri in them during our life time and to put our ashes in them after our death. I shall be Absinthii – no I can’t even make a joke about Jack not being alive. Lets all live for ever instead. By the way – Look here. I don’t agree with you about women knocking off works of art at thirty or round about and men not until fifty. Or rather I don’t agree personally. I’m 33; I feel I am only just beginning to see now what it is I want to do. It will take years of work to really bring it off. Ive done one or two things, like the Daughters of the Colonel3 which were the right kind. But one or two! Oh Richard, to be sincere I could groan at all there is to do and the tiny beginning I have made. Not a groan of misery but of impatience. Why don’t I get down to it more. I must this year. But if you are right about most women I don’t feel its true about me. I’m one of the slow ones . . . Have you seen Jack’s book on Style?4 I don’t like the squiggles in the lettering. The size and shape are nice, and its well printed – very. Its a highly professional looking book. Im always deeply impressed by ‘see note’. Rather aspire to it myself. I hope it gets a good press. Its time Jack did. The critics have a way of taking him for granted, it seems to me. I am glad you liked my Garding Party.5 I am still waiting for copies as I want to send one to Mother. There’s a strike on (well, of course you know that) but it has put Constable very much out of joint. Ive just sold a continental edition to Collins.6 It seems successful, so far. I am very dissatisfied with it myself. But its no good. One must just go on & try and get nearer the real thing. Our present plans are to stay at this hotel until the end of May and then go to Germany or Bavaria for the summer. Then I have to come back here in the autumn for 8–10 weeks to finish this treatment. At present I am just at the ‘reaction’ stage which is pretty awful. But it will be over in a little over a week and then according to Manoukhin one begins to go up the hill in leaps and bounds. Ida Baker doesn’t live with us any more, and she won’t be living with us again. We live like two hermits here. Only Jack, who goes out every day to the Luxembourg Gardens meets numbers of very small children and has silent conversations with them. He went to a Punch & Judy show last Sunday (Best Seats 2d Worst Seats 2d) in a little theatre with green canvas sides. The audience ranged from about 1 year to 6 years. They screamed frightfully when le voleur came in.7 Jack says he nearly did himself. He had one awful eye – you know the kind* Goodbye for now old boy. This letter is written lying down; thats why (or I like to think thats why) the writing is so bad. Let us know more about your Easter plans when you are able.          Ever your loving            Katherine. *At this point KM has drawn a small diamond shape with a round eye in the middle.

366   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Notes 1. Max Pemberton (1863–1950) was a journalist and the author of at least forty highly popular novels, most of them detective stories, mysteries or often swashbuckling historical epics; he had also been the editor of Chums, the equally swashbuckling adventure magazine for boys. ‘To cut the cackle and get / come to the “osses” [horses]’ is late Victorian slang meaning to stop the chatter and get down to business. As a piece of literary advice, it is one of the finest indications of the uncouth philistine; G. B. Shaw had used the expression when commenting on abridged editions of Shakespeare, a 1919 essay that JMM and KM probably knew (G. B. Shaw, p. 214). 2. Hand-painted pharmaceutical jars were a common feature of the traditional French chemist’s shop (‘pharmacie’), generally displayed in a tall, dark, wooden cabinet that would stock up to fifty such containers. By the 1920s these were frequently kept for decorative purposes, bestowing an aura of traditional know-how. Absinthii was the Latin term for common wormwood, recommended, according to Castle’s 1822 Lexicon Pharmaceuticum, for stomach complaints, jaundice and worms. Theriaca was a compound drug, used for insect and snake bites. 3. KM rarely expresses anything like true satisfaction with her work; ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, written in 1921, was one of the exceptions. See also her letter to Gerhardi in CL1, pp. 568–9. 4. JMM had been invited to give a series of lectures in Oxford in May 1921; these were subsequently published by Oxford University Press as a collection of interrelated essays, under the title The Problem of Style. 5. The Garden Party and Other Stories had just been published by Constable. 6. The Scottish publisher William Collins and Son had been expanding considerably to consolidate its foreign business, and by this time was possibly Britain’s leading publisher overseas, with offices and representatives in North America, the colonies, the Far East and, of course, throughout Europe. Many smaller British-based companies entrusted their overseas trade to the ‘House of Collins’, as it was then known. See Keir, pp. 241–7. 7. (Fr.): The burglar. The Punch and Judy puppet theatre in Luxembourg Gardens, in the 6th arrondissement, was a favourite source of Sunday afternoon entertainment and remains in place to this day; a run-in between the burglar and the gendarme was a staple feature in the story played out by painted hand-puppets.

[29 March 1922] [ATL] 29 iii 1922

Paris.

Dear Richard, Your letter came last night. There’s something extremely good in that drawing. Jack, who pinned it up on the wall, on the wardrobe, against the curtain to get a good light said it was because the head’s



richard murry  367

set so well on the shoulders and there’s a kind of brooding – feeling in it. His remark was ‘Hm! He’s certainly got on with this drawing business’. But you know Jack’s tone when he says that & goes on to say ‘Keep it – won’t you – Don’t lose sight of it’. I have therefore kep’ it and would have done anyway. Yes, I too was very interested in Sullivan’s review, though I didn’t agree with it all.1 For instance his quotation from Tolstoi ‘There are no heroes only people’.2 I believe there are heroes. And after all it was Tolstoi who made the remark who was – surely – a large part of a hero himself. And I don’t believe in the limitation of man; I believe in ‘the heights’. I can’t help it; I’m forced to. It seems to me that very feeling of inevitability that there is in a great work of art – is a proof – a profession of faith on the part of the artist that this life is not all. (Of course Im not talking of personal immortality as we were taught to imagine it.) If I were to agree with Sullivan Id have to believe that the mind is supreme – But I dont – not by a long long chalk. The mind is only the fine instrument its only the slave of the soul. I do agree that with a great many artists one never sees the master; one only knows the slave. And the slave is so brilliant that he can almost make you forget the absence of the other. But it is only really living when one acknowledges both – or so it seems to me – and great art is achieved when the relation between these two is perfected. But its all very difficult. About religion. Did you mean the ‘study of life’ or ‘Christ’s religion Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest’.3 The queer thing is one does not seem to contradict the other – one follows on the other to me. If I lose myself in the study of life and give up self then I am at rest. But the more I study the religion of Christ the more I marvel at it. It seems almost impertinent to say that. But you understand – – – To turn from these subjecks to another. I had a letter from Brett yesterday in which I felt she did not want to come to Paris at Easter. She said it was on account of me (and of course she believed it was) but I think the real truth is she wants to get into her new little house first. Im writing to her to say that as far as I am concerned it is O.K. but she must do as she thinks best. In any case her plans will not affect you – will they? Jack suggests, if she does not come that he meets you at the station, of course and that you stay at our hotel. We are not going to take a flat. We shall stay on here for as long as we’re in Paris. I hope you will come at Easter, dear Richard, not only for my own delight in seeing you again. But Id like to think you took Jack about with you and gave him a rest from K.M. and a change of scene. You know what I mean. Not that we are tired of each other – far from it – we seem always to get happier & happier (on the Coué system)4 but all the same in confidence I’d like Jack to have a good time and a change with his little bruvver. I reread Jack’s novel these last few days. Ever since I first read it I have thought that you will understand it better than anyone else – without exception. Its badly printed – isn’t it – but the jacket is a lovely

368   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 blue. Not like my awful red – dining room red – hateful colour. They have promised to change it for this third impression. Ive been lucky with that book. I suppose Ive had 50 reviews at least and sold the Swedish and Continental rights. But its the letters I get from strangers who don’t care a button about technique but talk about the stories as if they had happened – that I value most. Oh – we are looking forward to cutting away deep into the country at the end of May and getting down to work again! I wish you read German. Goethe’s conversations with Eckermann is one of those books which become part of ones life and whats more enrich one’s life for ever.5 Our edition is in two tomes. We lie in bed each reading one – it would make a funny drawing. Goodbye for now, dearest Richard. With love Katherine. The Constable p.c. is exquisite.6 It



is put into my Shakespeare with the

work?7 Jack wants to go to his

Rubens you sent me before. But you feel in



the Constable the trees are there for the sake of the

book of reproductions: I shall try & get you

cathedral & the cathedral for the sake of the trees.

Do you know Marquet’s studio one time. We have a small one. He seems to me very good.

Notes 1. J. W. N. Sullivan had reviewed a new and extensive biography of Beethoven in the Nation and Athenaeum, published on 25 March (pp. 947–8). The same issue contains a detailed, unsigned review of KM’s The Garden Party and Other Stories, which, in the context of her correspondence with Richard, is particularly interesting for its warm praise of her skill as a landscape painter. 2. Discussing the apparent disconnection between contemporary music criticism and Beethoven’s music, Sullivan pinpoints the present as an age of disillusion, unable to grapple with the uplifting aspiration to heroism one century earlier. He cites Tolstoy’s philosophical deconstruction of heroic endeavour in this relation to Beethoven, commenting: For where our age is out of sympathy with the music of Beethoven is where it is out of sympathy with many great achievements of the past. The criticism to which we are referring springs from the same spirit, we think, which makes dogmatic theology and systems of philosophy incredible, which finds saints exaggerated, mystics foolish, and the New Jerusalem a myth. It can be illustrated by Tolstoy’s impatient remark: ‘Heroes! There are no heroes, there are only people’. (Sullivan, p. 947) Interestingly, Sullivan’s source misrepresents Tolstoy’s intentions here. The comments are found in his 1868 article, ‘A Few Words Apropos of the Book War and Peace’, first published in the Russian Archive, and they attempt to shed more light on the very radical poetics of the end of Tolstoy’s epic novel, War and Peace.



richard murry  369

His choice of a quiet, reflective, gradually diminishing ending, further drawn out by two epilogues exploring the sense of history, had perplexed his critics and readers alike, who could not understand the absence of definitive closure and grandiose rounding off. Tolstoy’s article points to the difference between the historian’s approach and that of the artist, noting, ‘for the artist, considering the correspondence of this person to all sides of life, there cannot and should not be any heroes, but there should be people’ (Tolstoy 2007, p. 1129). 3. See Matthew 11: 28. The words come at the end of a chapter defining the basic principles of Christ’s teaching, after assembling the twelve apostles. 4. For KM’s appreciation of Dr Emile Coué’s psychotherapeutic approach to positive thinking, see above, pp. 304–5. 5. Johann Peter Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe, first published in German in 1836–48) and translated into English from 1839, and in the full three volumes in 1848, is a detailed account of the last years of Goethe’s life, as recorded by his secretary and friend, Eckermann. It is as much a model of eighteenth-century biographical writing as Boswell’s Life of Johnson. See CW4, pp. 414, 440. 6. Richard had sent a picture postcard (‘p.c.’) of Salisbury Cathedral, painted by the English landscape painter John Constable (1776–1837): Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows (1830). Now part of the permanent collection in London’s Tate Gallery, it is acknowledged as one of Constable’s finest blends of detailed realism and literary ekphrasis. 7. Pierre-Albert Marquet (1875–1947) was a French Impressionist artist and one of the original group of Fauvist painters; he was also a close friend of Matisse, with whom he sometimes lived and worked in Paris, notably collaborating on his highly perceptive cityscape techniques. By the early 1920s, he was living between Paris and Algiers.

[28 May 1922] [ATL] Address on and after June 1st Hotel Angleterre Montana-sur-Sierre Valais Suisse. Sunday.Paree. Riccardo mio I have just written as you suggest to Arnoldo.1 I do hope he will send me some of his work. Id very much like to see it. It is most awfully decent of him to have had the idea – don’t you think? I remember that story the Student of his very well. I begin to believe you are as much a little ray of sunshine as I am. Beams appear in your last two letters. It is a relief to think your horrid old chilblains have gone and that you are looking your beautiful self again. But seriously – isn’t it almost frightening the difference fine weather can make? I wish Einstein could find some way

370   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 of shooting a giant safety-pin at the sun and keeping it there.2 It has been tremendously hot in Paris. Like an oven. Jack and I gave up writing altogether. We were overcome and could do nothing but fan ourselves, he with a volume of Anthony Trollope3 (very cool) and me with my black penny paper one. The strawberries and cherries came out in swarms – very big cherries and little wild strawbugs. Finally we found a spot in the Louvre among the sculpture which was cool as a grotto. Jack had an idea of making himself a neat toga, taking the Nation for a parchment roll and standing becalmed upon a Roman pedestal until the weather changed. There are glorious things in that first room in the Louvre – Greek statues, portions of the Parthenon Frieze, a head of Alexander, wonderful draped female figures. Greek drapery is very strange. One looks at it – the lines seem to be dead straight, and yet there is movement – a kind of suppleness and though there is no suggestion of the body beneath one is conscious of it as a living, breathing thing. How on earth is that done? And they seemed to have been able to draw a line with a chisel as if it were a pencil – one line and there is an arm or a nose – perfect. The Romans are deaders compared to them. We had a long stare at the Venus de Milo, too.4 One can’t get away from the fact – she is marvellously beautiful. All the little people in straw hats buzz softly round her. Such a comfort to see something they know. ‘Our Maud has ever such a fine photograph of her over the piano’. But ‘she’ doesn’t care. About Rubens.5 I never can forget his paintings in Antwerp. They seemed to me far more brilliant than the London ones – I mean impressive. He must have enjoyed himself no end a doing of them. But I confess I like his small paintings best. One gets really too much for ones money in the big ones – There’s rather a fat woman wading in a stream in the National Gallery6 – quite a small one. Its very good – isn’t it? I shall have no time to look at pictures here till we get back from Switzerland. Its terrible how Jack and I seem to get engaged. We are pursued by dinners and lunches and telephone bells and dentists. Oh, Richard, do you FEAR the dentist? He reduces me to a real worm. Once I am established in that long green plush chair with my heels higher almost than my head all else fades. What a fiendish business it is! One day I shall write a story that you will have to tie up your face to read: I shall call it Killing the Nerve. Since I last wrote to you a great deal seems to have happened. But that is the effect of living in a city. I long to get away and to work. We are spending June and July at a hotel about 750 feet below Montana. It is a very simple place and isolated – standing in one of those forest clearings. There are big grassy slopes almost like lawns between the clumps of trees and by the time we get there the flowers will all be out as they were last year. Paris is a fine city but one cant get hold of any big piece of work here; the day splits up into pieces and people play the piano below ones window or sing even if one sits with the door locked and the outside world put away –



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There is just a vague idear that Jack may go to England this autumn for a few weeks. I hope he does. We both intend to come over next spring whatever happens and rescue our furniture and make one final tremenjous effort to catch a little house in the country. Forgive this letter – all in bits, all scattered – Ill write a different one when I get to Switzerland. Richard, I wish – but no – things can wait. In the meantime we never see a painting without thinking of you, talking of you. In fact its hard to tell you how much of our life we share with you. The far away one. Wingley, our small enchanted brother, passed through Paris last week: on his way to England with Ida B. who is going to keep him until we can offer him a real home. It wrung my heart to see the poor little chap sitting in his bastick. With love, dear Richard, a special summer line of love.             Katherine. Notes 1. See KM’s letter to Richard’s schoolfriend, Arnold Gibbons, in CL1, pp. 600–1. 2. The great German physicist Albert Einstein (1879–1955), whose General Theory of Relativity had done so much to revolutionise modern science, had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics the year before, notably on account of his latest work on the photon theory of light. Newspapers had given broad coverage to his work, often using practical illustrations – such as the sort KM pastiches here – to provide the intensely abstract theoretical underpinnings with practical, more graspable examples. 3. Anthony Trollope (1815–82) was a popular Victorian novelist, remembered especially for his Barsetshire Chronicles, his perceptive, gently satirical style, and his sensitive portrayal of rural and county life in southern England. The fictional Barchester is supposed to have been inspired by his visits to Salisbury, which suggests a possible resonance here with Constable’s painting of Salisbury Cathedral that Richard had recently sent KM. 4. The statue known as Venus de Milo is one of the most famous works to have survived from Ancient Greece; little is known about it, for the identity of both the sculptor and the represented figure are subjects of debate. It is part of the permanent collection at the Louvre in Paris. 5. Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) was one of the master artists of the Flemish Baroque, a painter, decorator and designer, as well as a respected diplomat of his era. He is renowned for his elaborate, allegorical, often dramatic paintings, excelling in a wide variety of modes from historical and biblical scenes to portraiture and landscapes. The previous year, Richard had sent KM a postcard of a Rubens portrait that she clearly appreciated. See above, p. 350, n. 1. 6. KM appears to be recalling Woman Bathing in a Stream, an oil painting in the National Gallery by Rubens’s near-contemporary, the Dutch painter Rembrandt (1606–69).

372   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [16 July 1922] [ATL] Hotel Chateau Belle Vue Sierre (Valais)

1

Sunday

Caro Riccardo2 I keep on thinking about you. I am tired of having no news from you & now Jack has come down here for the week-end & he has not heard. Send me even a p.c. will you?. I don’t want to ask you for news about things unless you are in the mood to talk about them, but a sight of my dear little brother’s handwriting would be most awfully welcome. Jack, as you know, will be in England for August – September – – – ?      With so much love, Richard dear.          Yours ever         Katherine. Notes 1. Across the top of this letter, a note by Richard Murry states: ‘I had not written because of the suspense of the scholarship. RM.’ As Kathleen Jones notes in her Introduction above (p. 317), in 1922 Richard was awarded a London County Council Scholarship, worth £160, to the Central School of Art and Design. 2. (It.): Dear Richard. 3. ‘p.c.’ is KM’s shorthand for postcard.

[late July 1922] [ATL] [Hôtel Château Belle Vue, Sierre] I enclose a little photo taken in the garden. Do you like it? Brother & sister of the painter, R.M. you observe. Dearest Richard, Just a word to accompany our telegram. It’s superb news1 & I am flying the Heron flag from my window . . . And you deserved it beyond words. Jack sent me a note with your postcard – you can imagine how bucked he is. Now I long to know ‘what nex’?’ But that will have to wait, I suppose until Big Brother comes back from his journey to England. It does not much matter. In the meantime I shall go on seeing you emerging from the river with the Scholarship (like a very friendly crocodile) clasped in your arms & a card round its neck – this size £160. With love, Riccardo mio,2 and ‘May good fortune fall ever more deeply in love with thee’. Yours ever, Katherine –



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Notes 1. Richard had just been awarded a London County Council Scholarship to the Central School of Art and Design. 2. (It.): My Richard.

[14 August 1922] [ATL] [Hôtel Château Belle Vue, Sierre] August 14th 1922 My dear Richard, I did a thing today which it has been in my mind to do for a long time. I made a will, signed it & got it duly witnessed. In it, I left you my large pearl ring. My idea in leaving it to you was that you should give it – if you care to – to your woman whoever she may be. I hope you won’t think this ghoulish. But Jack gave me the ring and I feel it would be nice to keep it in the family. This doesn’t mean, of course, that I am not as large as life and twice as natural. But just in case I was ‘taken sudden’ Id like you to know why the ring is yours. With love, Richard dear Yours ever Katherine. I shall be in London on Thursday staying with Brett. Will there be any chance of seeing you?

[late August 1922] [ATL] If Friday doesn’t suit you suggest a day that does & I’ll keep it free. 6 Pond Street Hampstead. Dear Richard, If you do come up from Brighton it will be my ‘shout’. Then when you are richangreat you can take me to Brighton to pay back. If it won’t disturb your holiday too much it would be a very great pleasure to see you. Jack is here, too. We came over together.

374   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Supposing we wait for you here on Friday. Then we can go off & have lunch together. But I think it would be more satisfactory to meet & have a smoke & talk here first. Its less disturbing than public grottos. I have just seen Charlie in The Kid.1 How old fashioned that must sound to you – as though Id seen my first airy plane. He is a marvellous artist. Its a pity he is tied to the public, even the little he is. I mean its a pity he considers them at all. Until we meet Ever Katherine. Note 1. For contemporary interest in the first full-length film by Charlie Chaplin, see above, p. 354, n. 1. One of KM’s cats, the mother of Wingley and Athenaeum, was also named Charlie, after the music-hall star and film-maker. Charlie Chaplin was well acquainted with various Bloomsbury personalities, both the central and the peripheral figures, having been introduced to Lytton Strachey, Augustus John and Aldous Huxley at a special lunch party hosted by Ottoline Morrell. He was also well acquainted with H. G. Wells, and was an erstwhile guest of KM’s cousin, Elizabeth, in Randogne, Switzerland.

[3 October 1922] [ATL]

3 x 1922

Select Hotel Place de la Sorbonne Paris

Darling Richard, Goodbye for just now. I have come back to Paris to go on with that treatment. I found the London man knew nothing of it really, & it seemed very silly not to go on with it and get quite well. One additional reason, one more little tilt to the scales was the idea of you and me going to dances together. What fun we should have. You know how I have loved seeing you and talking to you again. The fact is you get nicer and nicer and I don’t think you will ever stop. It has been a very real pleasure, too to see your work. I shall think of you often. I shant expect to be written to. But a card now and then – – – when you are in the mood. How marvellous the first movement of the Hammerklavier is!1 I shall try and hear some music this autumn in Paris. And Ill try and see some pictures too.



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Richard I am so sorry I haven’t seen your Mother this time. You see, thinking I was going to be in London for so long I put it off until I was a little more able to get down to Wandsworth. Will she understand and forgive me? I hope all goes well with you, my dear no longer little brother. Even if dragons come along don’t forget that ten to one (the best dragons at any rate) they are guardians of treasure. Its summer still in Paris. Really hot. Everywhere there are grapes for sale – withered old women holding out big satiny baskets of little yellow and purple ones. Theres a man below making a very good song of the fact he wants to mend umbrellas. Yours ever Katherine. Note 1. The ‘Hammerklavier’ is the name by which Beethoven’s sonata no. 29, Opus 106, is often known, ‘Hammerklavier’ (Ger.: Hammer-keyboard) being quite simply one of the terms for the earliest, hammer-action modern pianos. Written in 1819 and therefore one of the composer’s late works, composed when he was completely deaf and increasingly experimental in terms of the physical and tonal breadth of forms and harmonies, it is renowned in the pianist’s repertoire for its complexity. The first movement is an impassioned Allegro.

The New Age

Introduction The New Age was founded in 1894 as a Christian socialist journal, edited by the High Anglican Joseph Clayton before it was purchased in 1907 with money provided by George Bernard Shaw and the Theosophist banker Lewis Alexander Wallace, who each stumped up £500 in order to see A. R. Orage and Holbrook Jackson take up the editorial reins. The new series began in May 1907 under a new subtitle, ‘An Independent Socialist Review of Politics, Literature, and Art’. Shaw hoped that the periodical would provide an organ for socialist debate, and in its first year under the co-editorship of Orage and Jackson the New Age essentially served as a wing of the Fabian Society. However, while the subtitle was changed to ‘A Weekly Review of Politics, Literature and Art’ in November 1907, the New Age maintained its commitment to socialism without ever subscribing to any particular policy, party or faction. By the second volume, and after Jackson’s departure in February 1908, Orage shifted attention away from Fabianism, turning the New Age into a far more motley, diverse and culturally dynamic periodical than Shaw had probably envisaged: over the course of Orage’s fifteen years as editor, the New Age provided one of the most important breeding grounds for the emergence of literary and artistic Modernism in early twentieth-century Britain (for more information about his biography and contemporary standing, please see my introduction to Orage in this volume). The New Age came out every Thursday and was edited from a small office in a courtyard off Chancery Lane, London. Visually, there was nothing eye-catching about the periodical: the New Age was sparse and unassuming, and with its double-column layout and cheap paper quality it looked and felt much like a newspaper, or one of the austere weeklies of the Victorian era. However, such cost-cutting (and the fact that many writers contributed copy for free, earning the periodical the nickname ‘The No Wage’) enabled Orage to keep the New Age priced competitively at one penny. Within months of his editorship, he had established a recognisable format that was maintained consistently across the years with very few alterations: each issue opened with the editorial ‘Notes

    376



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of the Week’ and was then followed by political commentary, with a cartoon or lithograph splitting this section from the second half of the paper, devoted to art and literature. Each issue closed with the ‘Letters to the Editor’ column. These correspondence pages are an important, but often overlooked, section to the New Age that reveal, firstly, the periodical’s wide readership and, secondly, the sheer range of issues that were debated within its pages. The New Age was read not only by the leading political figures and literary lights of the day, such as Shaw, Wells, G. K. Chesterton and Arnold Bennett (who all regularly contributed articles and letters), but also by a legion of working-class and lower-middle-class readers who had benefited from the universal education acts of the late nineteenth century. The ‘rank-and-file readership’ of the New Age, as Ann Ardis has explained, included ‘socialist autodidacts and left-leaning graduates of Mechanics Institutes, working men’s colleges, teacher training colleges, extension lecture programs, and provincial universities’, and this readership extended well beyond London, to the far reaches of the British Isles as well as Britain’s colonies.1 Orage himself had come through a teacher-training programme, and he was committed to fostering a wide and socially diverse audience for the publication. Under his editorship, then, the New Age was transformed from a failing weekly of vaguely radical bent into a widely distributed periodical: by September 1908, circulation had risen from the low thousands to 16,000, before it reached an all-time high of 22,000 by the end of November that year.2 This success can be attributed to the culture of debate and controversy that Orage encouraged and provoked. As Antony Alpers has observed, Orage had a ‘mischievous conception of his job as editor’: ‘If he disagreed with an article from a good contributor he would simply print it, and then attack it himself next week or get another contributor to do so.’3 These conflicts were often played out in the ‘Letters to the Editor’ column. On the political side, readers responded to recent articles and correspondence on a wide range of topics, such as constitutional reform, economic theory, women’s rights, eugenics, imperialism and so on. On the cultural side, readers were afforded the opportunity to comment on and challenge recent developments in art, literature and philosophy. While the New Age did not subscribe to any particular aesthetic credo or affiliation, it was responsible for introducing British readers to the work of Chekhov and Dostoevsky (through Bennett’s regular column, written under the pseudonym ‘Jacob Tonson’); months before Roger Fry’s famous 1910 exhibition, Huntley Carter discussed post-Impressionism, and the periodical reproduced work by the likes of Pablo Picasso and Auguste Herbin; T. E. Hulme provided expositions of Bergson’s philosophy, and engaged in a protracted debate with Walter Sickert about what constituted ‘modern’ art; and Orage printed the Futurist manifesto with the explicit purpose of poking fun at avant-garde pretensions and, thereby, eliciting debate. Much of the appeal and vibrancy of the New

378   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Age was based on this kind of opposition between divergent views, and the ‘Letters to the Editor’ pages became a primary site staging such disagreement. As Carey Snyder and Leif Sorensen have observed, ‘letters were a tool for generating controversy and thus inciting readers to come back week after week’ (with regular staff writers on the periodical, such as Beatrice Hastings, often adopting pseudonyms to take the conversation in new directions or reignite the debate after it had died down), and the ‘elevated status’ of letters in the New Age ‘is evident in the intermittent practice, after 1908, of listing correspondents’ names in the table of contents alongside those of other contributors’.4 The first letter that KM submitted to the New Age, published on 11 August 1910, participated in an ongoing discussion in the periodical’s pages about capital punishment. Since the beginning of the year, Hastings had been writing articles under the pseudonym ‘D. Triformis’ about famous murder cases and the way in which trials were reported in the newspaper press. Dr Crippen, referred to throughout KM’s letter, had become infamous after allegedly poisoning his wife with the calming drug scopolamine before dismembering her body and hiding the remains under his basement floor. The British press avidly followed the details of this gruesome murder case, especially after Crippen attempted to evade arrest by fleeing to America with his lover. In her letter, titled ‘A Paper Chase’, KM writes: ‘the staple joint of the Crippen menu being “off”, [the English nation] demands the scrapings of prison plates which the “Daily Mail” so obligingly heats up for breakfast each morning’ (11 August 1910). This highlights one of the ‘distinguishing features of The New Age’ as identified by Ardis: ‘its meta-commentary on press coverage of the news. It rarely simply “covers” current events: instead, it talks about how other periodicals talk about current events.’5 KM’s second letter, titled ‘North American Chiefs’, responds to a previous letter printed in the New Age. In posing as ‘a respectable citizeness of pagan England’, as I have argued in my book Katherine Mansfield and Periodical Culture (2019), KM disowns her national identity in order to dismiss a recent novel by another colonial writer, glibly observing that if Elinor Glyn is ‘the prophetic woman’s voice crying out of the wilderness of Canadian literature, let her European sister novelists lift shekelled hands in prayer that the “great gulf” may ever yawn more widely’ (25 August 1910).6 This highlights how ‘Letters to the Editor’, as Snyder and Sorensen have observed, ‘allowed readers to “try on” new subjectivities’.7 KM’s use of a neologism here also indicates the creative uses that writers could make of the letters page in helping them to develop an idiosyncratic tone and style. This sense of the letters page of the periodical as a creative space is further reflected in KM’s next letter to the New Age, co-authored with Beatrice Hastings and titled ‘A P.S.A.’ (initials standing for ‘A Pleasant Sunday Afternoon’). This letter is a collection of short parodies mimicking the writing styles and thematic preoccupations of seven contemporary



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writers. By adopting a jocular, breezy tone in the lines which preface this letter, KM and Hastings deflate any association these writers might have in the periodical with the elevated and serious, replicating their prose in a fashion that is both ridiculous and very funny. Almost a decade before Virginia Woolf would take Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy to task in her famous essays ‘Modern Novels’ and ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, therefore, KM and Hastings carved out a place for their own writing by positioning themselves in opposition to the particular aesthetics and gender politics of these male Edwardian writers. This letter not only highlights the important influence of Hastings in helping KM to develop her sardonic writing style, but also the significance of the correspondence page in the New Age as a space in which readers could legitimately challenge establishment figures. KM’s final letter to the New Age is not really a letter. Titled ‘Along the Gray’s Inn Road’, this is a Symbolist prose-poem in the style of Oscar Wilde, made to look absurd by being printed in the ‘Letters to the Editor’ section with a prefatory ‘Sir’ (25 May 1911). Reading her contribution to the periodical published in this way would have been mortifying for KM, and the original print contexts of this text are a clear reflection of her strained relationship with Orage and Hastings at this time, tensions which ultimately resulted in her split from the New Age in 1912. Chris Mourant Notes 1. Ardis, pp. 205–25 (p. 210). 2. ‘To Our Readers’, p. 81. 3. Alpers 1980, p. 110. 4. Snyder and Sorensen, pp. 123–46 (p. 135). 5. Ardis, p. 214. 6. See Mourant, p. 12. 7. Snyder and Sorensen, p. 124.

[11 August 1910] [New Age, VII: 15, 11 August 1910, pp. 354–5] A PAPER CHASE. TO THE EDITOR OF ‘THE NEW AGE.’ A rabbit nibbling a lettuce leaf one moment before it becomes a python’s dinner is hardly a spectacle for universal and ironic laughter – whatever crimes the rabbit may have committed, whatever just hunger the python may feel. And yet if we are to believe the Little Fathers of Fleet Street1 the whole world has been bursting its sides over Crippen stroking a newly-grown beard and Miss Le Neve with her trousers safety-pinned

380   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 on confronted by the Inspector from Scotland Yard and six good men and true snapped into a carefully prepared trap with that quiet air of triumph which doubtless distinguishes the true British sportsman.2 This nation of fair play seems satiated with small game, and in the desire to outdo ‘Teddy’3 is on the warpath for human heads. Captain Kendall, supported by his Kermit4 of a first officer, has become the latest national hero, and I have no doubt but that he will be publicly presented with Miss Le Neve’s outfit of boy’s clothing to grace his pretty little country home in the vicinity of Pinner. Perhaps we have underestimated the peculiar subtlety of the methods employed by Scotland Yard – perhaps full to the brim of that entente cordiale syrup which flowed at the funeral of our late lamented Peace Maker,5 they have banded all the nations of the world together as brothers – invited them down into the cellar to have a look on their own account and chase after the little man with bulging eyes and false teeth and his typist who proved her guilt by wearing another lady’s dresses. I believe that the English nation has the reputation of not being particular with regard to its food – quantity, never mind quality, being the axiom. Certainly the stomach for which the Press caters is a mighty affair indeed, and now the staple joint of the Crippen menu being ‘off’, demands the scrapings of prison plates which the ‘Daily Mail’ so obligingly heats up for breakfast each morning. There can be no question of judging Crippen. He can be bought outright, with a photograph and a book of words, by any street gamin possessed of a halfpenny. Surely we owe a debt of gratitude to all concerned who have shepherded us in this personally conducted tour into the hidden chambers of that machine which separates the wheat from the tares with all the impartiality and infallibility of our Courts of Law. KATHERINE MANSFIELD. Notes 1. Fleet Street in London is traditionally seen as the cradle of the press, being the site where the first printing presses were set up in or around 1500 by William Caxton and his apprentice, Wynkyn de Worde; by the early twentieth century most national newspapers had their head offices there. The Fathers of Fleet Street were the eminent founders of the extended history of British journalism; the little fathers, by extension, were the smaller fry and lesser powers. 2. The Crippen Affair was one of the biggest media sensations of the 1910s, avidly covered by the printed press but also made possible by the then new medium of wireless transmission. Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen (1862–1910) was an American homeopathic doctor who had moved to London with his second wife, the stage actress Corrine Turner (1872–1910). Mrs Turner disappeared in early 1910, having supposedly returned abruptly to the United States, or died – Crippen’s story evolved. Crippen’s secretary, Ethel le Neve (1883–1967), meanwhile moved in with him. Questioned by the police (the



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officers of Scotland Yard), Crippen confessed she had left him for another man, and he had invented the stories to cover his humiliation. The inquiry was dropped, but Crippen and Le Neve decided to leave Britain, sailing for Canada via Antwerp on the Montrose, with Le Neve disguised as a boy. During the voyage, the remains of a body, supposedly Mrs Crippen’s, were discovered, and a warrant for Crippen’s arrest was issued, with headlines and photos making front-page news in the popular press. The ship’s captain, H. G. Kendall, saw the pictures in the Daily Mail and saw the likeness between Crippen and his lover and two passengers on board the Montrose: Mr Robinson and his son. He cabled Scotland Yard to express his suspicions, and the officer in charge of the inquiry, Inspector Walter Dew, set out on a fast ship to meet the suspects on their arrival in Newfoundland. Crippen was tried in London and found guilty; Le Neve was acquitted, charged only with being an accessory. Crippen was hanged later that year in November. 3. Shortly after the end of his presidency in 1909, Theodore (‘Teddy’) Roosevelt (1858–1919) made headline news over his extended ‘Africa Campaign’, a safari in central and eastern Africa, counting among the group’s achievements the vast slaughter on an unprecedented scale of over 11,000 animals, from small herbivores to the largest and rarest elephants and rhinoceros. His son, Kermit Roosevelt, accompanied his father and joined in the hunting – hence KM’s use of his name later in her satirical comparison. 4. The two headline heroes, whose quick thinking and astute questioning had made the spectacular arrest of Crippen possible, were Henry George Kendall, captain of the Montrose, and his trusty telegraphist, Lawrence Hughes. 5. ‘Edward the Peace Maker’ was one of the most popular sobriquets by which King Edward VII was known. From the closing years of the Victorian era, he had followed his mother’s principle of favouring warm relations with his nephew, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, irrespective of regular clashes between the countries over colonial territories. His image as a figurehead of peace and goodwill was reinforced during his own reign by the end of the Boer Wars, and by the signing of the second Entente Cordiale with France (1904), which in turn favoured the signing of the Triple Alliance between Britain, France and Russia (1907).

[25 August 1910] [New Age, VII: 17, 25 August 1910, p. 407] NORTH AMERICAN CHIEFS Sir, – As a respectable citizeness of pagan England I cannot fail to be thrilled by R. B. Kerr’s letter justifying the claims of Canada’s seven millions to a literature pioneered by the ‘two boldest novelists of our time’, Grant Allen and Elinor Glyn.1 Far be it from me to repudiate Mr. Allen’s statement in declaring his own novels rubbish,2 but Elinor Glyn doubtless ‘because she is a woman’, and ‘even more admirable’ has not yet spat upon her inspiration or condemned her feminine fancies as unfit reading for our hardy Colonial children.3 Am I to understand as a result of this very natural and praiseworthy modesty she is to accept

382   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 the precious ointment of the reading public – she is to be provided with a little bower of laurel wreaths sacredly set apart for the production of yet another ‘Three Weeks’? But I think it is ‘hardly fair’ to speak of that exquisite creature in purple draperies who ate so many strawberries and cooed like a dove, and was obviously the slave of her sexual passions, as a ‘real free woman’.4 If Elinor Glyn is the prophetic woman’s voice crying out of the wilderness of Canadian literature, let her European sister novelists lift shekelled hands in prayer that the ‘great gulf’ may ever yawn more widely. As regards the United States it would seem that the only course open to the entire literary world is to make a pilgrimage into those pregnant fastnesses where stories ‘too true to life and too vivid in imagination to be printed in any country’ are ‘handed round in the form of typewritten manuscripts’ (did ever creation take on so novel a disguise) – ‘among a very few select persons’.5 Mr. Kerr has touched America with the wand of romance. Fascinating thought! That your companion on the Elevated Railway may be hiding under a striped chewing-gum wrapper the quivering first fruits of his soul. KATHERINE MANSFIELD. Notes 1. Although playfully sardonic in tone, this letter to the editor actually contributes to an extended exchange over the past weeks, first prompted by a long article published on 7 July, by the New Age ‘foreign affairs’ correspondent, S. Verdad, the pen-name of the writer, journalist and translator John McFarland Kennedy (1886–1918). Having been criticised for excessive smugness and a certain reactionary stance, Verdad issued a form of summary of his cultural and political opinions, which included the observation that as far as North American literature was concerned, ‘Between San Francisco and New York, between the Gulf of Mexico and Hudson’s Bay, all is barren’ (New Age, 7 July, p. 220). From the following week, the ‘Letters to the Editor’ section was largely taken up by protests and retorts. The issue published a week before KM’s letter included a response from a certain R. B. Kerr, citing Grant Allen and Elinor Glyn as counter-examples as far as Canada was concerned, and giving a more conspiratorial, enigmatic explanation about the apparent dearth of literature from the United States (see New Age, 18 August, p. 376). 2. Grant Allen (1848–99) was a science writer, novelist and journalist who was born in Canada but settled in Britain. He published prolifically, acknowledged as much for his pioneering science-fiction writing and ability to explain new scientific theories to the general public as for his popular detective fiction and his interest in contemporary gender issues. He is best remembered now for the outspoken novel The Woman Who Did (1895), which is often compared to Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. The New Age correspondent to whom KM responds, R. B. Kerr, says of Allen:



new age  383 Canada, with only seven millions of inhabitants, has produced the two boldest popular novelists of our time, Grant Allen and Elinor Glyn. Most of Grant Allen’s novels are rubbish, as he said himself, but that does not alter the fact that ‘The British Barbarians’ is a wonderful piece of humour and satire, and was more daring than any novel that ever preceded it. (‘North American Literature’, New Age, 18 August 1910, p. 376)

3. Elinor Glyn (1864–1943) was a popular author and, in later years, successful screenplay writer who was educated in Canada, in her mother’s hometown, where the family settled when she was a child. As a young married woman, Glyn supported the family by her writing, often focusing on the glamour and scandals of high society, which she knew well; she later became renowned for her heroines with ‘It’ – an enticing blend of fascination, charm and sexappeal. Of Glyn, Kerr says she is even more admirable, because she is a woman. There is a great gulf between [her novel] ‘Three Weeks’ and the work of any European woman novelist. All the women writers of Europe are still abject slaves of the ideals men have made for them. Those who cry out loudest against manmade law are the very ones that cringe lowest before man-made morality. In ‘Three Weeks’ Elinor Glyn has given us a real free woman. (p. 376) 4. Glyn’s Three Weeks (1907) is a steamy novel of passion between a young aristocrat and an older woman (referred to simply as ‘the Lady’). Their idyll lasts just three weeks, at which point she vanishes; she turns out to be a Russian princess trying to escape from an abusive marriage – but is murdered by her husband before her lover can save her. The details KM pinpoints (the purple draperies, the strawberries and the woman’s cooing like a dove) all feature amongst a rich profusion of other images and sensations from the novel’s central seduction scene. See Three Weeks, pp. 76–84. 5. Kerr’s letter ends on a long paragraph explaining why ‘the best writers of [. . .] the finest American stories are never printed at all’, being ‘too true to life and too vivid in imagination to be printed in any country’. He attributes this to the fact that the conventional press is ‘so absolutely under the thumb of railway presidents and vice-societies’. As a result, he claims, there are only two kinds of literature in America: ‘the popular literature of America, which is beneath contempt’, and ‘the most original and revolutionary literature in the world, but it is as little known to conventional people as the Christian gospels were to the respectable citizens of pagan Rome’ (p. 375).

[25 May 1911] [New Age, IX: 4, 25 May 1911, p. 95] [. . .with Beatrice Hastings] A P.S.A.1 Sir, – Finding ourselves on Sunday in Ditchling-on-Sea,2 without any literature, we were driven to rely upon memories of our favourite

384   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 authors. We forward our summaries for the benefit of your readers who may sometime find themselves in a similar situation. K. M. and B. H. MR. BART KENNEDY.3 A grim day. Too full and pregnant swelled the sky. I looked out of the window. In at my room. Struck a match – and kindled my pipe. With a sort of bloody anger – fist clenched over knotted hand bones, I dreamed of the world. The world as it is. This place. This stewpot of Fine Endeavour, this melting-pot of Rancid Waste and Fever. Ants. On the floor I observed the greenish whiteness of my Sunday newspaper. Like black ants the letters swarming. I looked deeper. I saw buildings where these ants fashioned this greenish whiteness. I saw the sweat pour from their wizened bodies into the oily maw of the machines. I heard in the clanging crying of these automatic monsters – hand-fed by them – the crying clangour of the inarticulate. Then deeper. And all over the world. Little figures – ants again – yes, strangely ants – sinking their contorted vision – pen-digging in public offal. I plunged. And this greenish whiteness became significant – flew like the flag of England – with a dry crackling over my red thoughts. I looked out of the window. I opened it. I was passionately sick. MR. G. K. CHESTERTON.4 There is a broom-stick in my garden. The bristles shining yellow as ripe corn, and observing from the wadded chair of my Sunday musings the long, pure, unbroken line of the handle, I appreciate, for the first time, most fully and completely, the charm of the witches’ progress – the fascination of broomsticks. Magic in this clean and intimate weapon by day, those yellow bristles turn a dull gold at evening time and change at nightfall to a thick, mysterious darkness. I find myself regretting my complete abandon to my English dinner, and I long to leap from my wadded wrappings and straddle the broomstick for the one, great, simple adventure. For it seems to me that adventure can only be sought after in the near consciousness of very beautiful, homely things. Things which have felt the good grip of our hands, watching and guarding us as the crucifix the fingers of a little nun telling the shining length of her rosary. I want to combine, and call ‘sister’ the broom sweeping the untroubled glory of my Bickensfield hillsides with that plaintive swishing down the London area steps of my lighter – my very much lighter – so my friends tell me – youth. I protest that the one is as romantic as the other. . . . A new broom sweeps clean is fine enough to scroll the spring heavens and thrill the soul with rare, mysterious unity of thought as a barrel-organ grinding out a Catholic chant in a half-forgotten street at evening time. MR. RICHARD LE GALLIENNE.5 Like country children in starched pinafores, soberly and a little tearfully gathered together at Sunday school, the pansies star my garden



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walks. There is long grass in the orchard, lush and thickly green. . . . it swings in sombre rhythm. And over the grass fall the frail, shattering petals of apple-blossom. . . . April Showers came into my study, with a blue ribbon dropped from the amber curls of Shining Feet. She said: ‘Darling, do I disturb you?’ and as I kissed her, she drooped her fragrant bosom over my shoulder. I answered: ‘For your dear question, I shall read you my poem’. April Showers clapped her hands. Lush and thickly green, Ah, why must I think of graves! Of lovers that might have been, Under these swinging waves. My sad soul could not rest Till April knocked my door, Leaning her delicate breast Over me – as of yore. She cried – ‘Beloved, see The apple-blossom fall Like angels’ feathers a-free From winter’s barren pall’.6 From the room above we heard Shining Feet cry out as though in pain. She put her finger to her lips, subtly smiling. . . . Little Feathers! Little Shining Feet! . . . MR. ALFRED AUSTIN.7 Droop ye no more – ye stalwart oaken trees, For mourning time is spent and put away – Red, white and blue unfurls, the morning breeze Bring leaves – strew leaves for Coronation Day. And thrill along your mighty, crusted bark, King George, our Sailor King, goes to be crowned, Your limbs have nursed his navy – the long mark Of his wide Empire by your arms is bound. Bud roses! scatter at the matron feet Of his proud consort, Mary, all your bloom. Let Englishman the bronzed Colonial meet In brotherhood – and weave upon the loom Of this great Empire stronger, deeper ties – Ties that shall hold 11,000 miles. Perhaps in some far Heaven of the skies Edward the Peace-maker looks down and smiles.

386   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 MR. EDEN PHILLPOTTS.8 As usual I was out and about the moor. It ran up misty to the skyline, only the delicate morning petals glimmering between green blades, at the tip of each of which a dewdrop ready to flutter its opalescent upon my umbrous boots . . . and wave upon wave now rising, foaming away like very sea to the empyrean . . . with a shadow where the signpost white and stark on the road below the red-roofed farm led the eye towards Burryzizzer, lying like a maid amid the heather . . . the meaning of the familiar and yet. . . . I saw a gleam of rounded whiteness . . . nay, creamness, milkness. . . . something – a sensation of approaching primevalness. Then I saw that the woman was trying to feed a child which lay cooing and slapping her magnificent breasts. She made no movement though I approached as the crow flies. ‘Tell me your story’, I cried. ‘Fear not; your history will be sacred to the public’. Her great, round, deep, shining, hard eyes searched mine and I blinked, sorry for her. The woman always pays! Still she said nothing, but mechanically buttoned up her dress. ‘Ah, don’t’, I cried; ‘don’t let a mere accident embitter thee so. Thee knows we’m all frail. Confide, poor toad, in me, a stranger, but almost a woman myself. Tell me the fellow’s name and I’ll write a book about him un he’ll marry ’ee or thou’lt have his blood in the end’. Still those luscious lips were sealed. She lifted the child and rose at last, and I saw my next story vanishing. However, one of the old ones with new names would serve (I know my hydropathic public). Suddenly she dealt me a sounding box on the ears. And I recognised her hand. She had done the same thing twice before. ‘Tha’ll feel Tom’s boot if thee stops here a minute’, she murmured, and went towards the farm. MR. ARNOLD BENNETT.9 In Pottinghame High Street, at seventeen minutes past three on a certain Sunday in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and ninetyfive, the fine dust was stirring. It was round, grey, piercing, sandy dust that rose and fell with precocious senility; for the month was June, and June is early for dust. Out of one of the vacant-looking, but actually swarming, two-storeyed houses that run monotonously up one side and down the other, a girl leaned. She threw out faded flowers, violets and a wallflower, and disappeared. Her bedroom expressed a character at once original and passive. The neatness of enforced non-conformity ruled her collars and shoes, but a bright blue petticoat, frilled with dyed lace, betokened a side of its owner’s nature, perhaps unsuspected by Pottinghame, perhaps never to be suspected by Pottinghame, perhaps better never to be suspected by Pottinghame. For Pottinghame is a town whereof someone said somewhere that its influence and its decree were unique. Once a Pottinghammer, always a Pottinghammer. Let Pottinghame pronounce benediction, the Pottinghammer went blessed: but let Pottinghame pronounce malediction, the Pottinghammer went cursed.



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And the influence aforesaid of Pottinghame upon the Pottinghammer lasted just as long. Tinker, tailor, be you, gentleman or novelist, a Pottinghammer never gets away from Pottinghame. The family of the Luke Pilders were below awaiting Susan’s advent to pour out tea. The little parlour bore curiously that same distinctive touch as above signified by the output of stiff cuffs and dyed lace. No house in Pottinghame could be complete of course without. . . . (To be continued until 1950.) MR. H. G. WELLS.10 So we stowed Biology and got to business. ‘Why not?’ she asked. ‘Affairs’, I replied laconically. She understood, and moaned a little. My heart-strings creaked – a man’s heart-strings. ‘Damn!’ I burst out. ‘Do what you will with me’. So we stowed Biology and got to business. ‘England!’ I snarled. ‘Pah – England will have to do the best she can without me. You’re my England now, curse you, bless you’. She fell at my knees, clinging, weeping, smiling: ‘God!’ The epithet seemed to be torn out of her. I wondered. . . . ‘You won’t expect too much, Anthelesia?’ ‘Only three girls and three boys’. ‘Curse the expense’, I said. So we stowed Biology and got to business. Notes  1. ‘A Pleasant Sunday Afternoon’.  2. Ditchling was then a rural village in East Sussex with a rich local history, and was already a firm favourite with artists, arts and crafts associations and a number of early Theosophist communities – all of which grew in strength and identity in the early years of the twentieth century. The Modernist sculptor and designer, and future founder of Ditchling Press, Eric Gill, had recently settled there; the poet Vivian Locke Ellis lived close by; and even JMM would settle there for a while in years to come. Little is known about the trip to Ditchling, supposedly made by Orage in company with Hastings and KM in May 1910, if it took place at all. There is no place called ‘Ditchling-on-Sea’, and Ditchling itself is about 10 km from the coast, although very close to Shoreham-upon-Sea, Lewes and Newhaven. The date cited for the supposed outing (21 May) was exactly one month before the coronation of George V and Queen Mary (22 June), which the Beauchamp family had travelled over from New Zealand to attend, perhaps offering an additional edge to KM’s irony in these pastiches, especially the poem in the style of Alfred Austin, Poet Laureate (see below, n. 6).  3. Bart Kennedy (1861–1930) was an English writer, novelist and intrepid traveller who made a name for himself in the late nineteenth century for taking to the road in the United States and Canada, where he travelled

388   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2

 4.

 5.

 6.  7.

extensively (which he referred to as ‘tramping’), living by his wits and shortterm manual labour. His own direct experience of harsh working-class life in northern England also made him a vividly perceptive observer of social conditions and the lives of the under-privileged, rather like Maxim Gorky in the same years. This short prose pastiche captures his characteristic style exceptionally well; he used a similar relentless accumulation of rough detail and harsh, paratactic syntax in his later war writing, although often with jingoistic results (see, for example, The German Danger, 1907, and Soldiers of Labour, 1917). The New Age published a number of his essays, suggesting that this pastiche – like KM’s earlier letter to the editor responding to Verdad’s journalism – was partly fuelled either by in-journal dissensions, or by a more playful, irreverent vein of parody amongst the contributors. Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936) was one of the British satirists in the Dickens vein that KM read in her youth; he was also a respected essayist and literary journalist, who had initially trained as an artist and illustrator at the Slade School of Art. An early fascination with high Anglicanism and religious art ultimately led to his conversion to Catholicism in 1922. His recently created literary hero, the detective and Catholic priest, Father Brown, had brought him into the public eye in and around 1910, and parodic allusions to his descriptive style and confidential narrative voice can be heard in KM and Beatrice Hastings’s pastiche here. The short prose piece invites comparisons with his tale ‘The Blue Cross’ in particular, first published in Britain in the Story-Teller magazine, in September 1910. Richard Le Gallienne (1866–1947) was a prolific and, at the time, popular poet often linked with the Rhymers; he was initially noted for his highly decadent poetic style, reflecting his association with The Yellow Book and the Aestheticist and Decadent poets of the 1890s. The rather lush, sensuous style and descriptive mannerisms of the fin-de-siècle, however, had come to seem predictable and over-indulgent to the early Modernists and acerbic journalists of the 1910s – as the pastiche piece here suggests. It invites parallels with various verses published in 1909 in Gallienne’s collection New Poems – such as ‘Ballad of the Dead Lover’ and ‘Marjorie and the Spring’, for example, as well as the rather sentimental, mock-childlike prose pieces in Prose Fancies (1904). Despite the co-signature and the surface pastiche effect, there is a clear resonance between these verses and KM’s own poetic idiom in the years 1910– 11; see CP, pp. 133–4. The British novelist and poet Alfred Austin (1835–1910) had been a sharp pasticher and satirist in his day; by the early 1900s, however, his poetry had become more gentle and conservative, rallying to a more traditionalist, protective view of Britain and the rural world. This both reflected and fed into his appointment as Poet Laureate in 1896. The ceremonious last years of Victoria’s rule, the characteristic pageantry of Edward VII’s reign and the pomp surrounding the coronation of George V provided occasions for Austin to compose commemorative verse – amongst which is the 1902 ‘On the Crowning of Kingship’, the heady patriotism and purring lyricism of which had instantly been satirised in Punch and is deftly captured here by KM and Hastings. KM also wrote an extremely deft prose satire of Theocritus’ fifteenth idyll, the Adoniazusae in ‘honour’ of the Coronation, turning the marketplace chatter of two Ancient Greek wives into the trite exchanges



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of two contemporary London housewives, a piece of parody and pastiche which Alpers suggests ‘was eventually to influence her whole development’ (1980, p. 125). It was published in the New Age on 29 June. See CW1, pp. 221–2.  8. Eden Phillpotts (1862–1960) was an immensely prolific English poet, novelist and playwright, born in Rajasthan. Many of his works reflect his deep love of Devon, and the rural lives and idiolect of its local communities. These characteristic features are artfully captured in the pastiche here, the tone and idiom of which invite comparisons with his The Flint Heart (1910), the parodic name ‘Burryzizzer’, for instance, picking up on the naming of local tribespeople, amongst whom Brokotockotick, Bugbears and Bugaboos.  9. Like his near contemporary H. G. Wells, who is the focus – or target – of the last pastiche in the ‘Letter to the Editor’, the best-selling English novelist, playwright and journalist Arnold Bennett (1867–1931) is one of the marginal, hinge figures in the history of literary Modernism, who was long overlooked as a mere pot-boiling scribbler once his years of literary renown had passed. This was in part caused by Virginia Woolf’s famous dichotomy in her essay ‘Modern Fiction’, between the Edwardians and the Georgians being taken too literally – thereby overlooking her own great and life-long affection for Bennett (see ‘Modern Fiction’ in EVW4, pp. 157–60). Engrained class values were also to blame: Bennett’s social origins were considerably more lowly than those of most London-based intellectuals, and he had had to leave school at sixteen to help in his father’s office and thereby alleviate family and financial pressures. He gradually scraped together enough money to allow him to get away from the Staffordshire traditions of his childhood and escape to France. He remained a firm Francophile throughout his life, and his literary writing reflects the bold influence of contemporary French fiction, to which he added a more benevolently understanding, patiently wry touch. In 1910, despite still being based essentially in Paris, Bennett’s reputation in Britain was possibly at its zenith: his novels Old Wives’ Tale (1908) and Clayhanger (1910) in particular had been widely acclaimed. Although by the end of 1911, Bennett’s relations with Orage and Hastings were to sour, they were still firm professional and literary associates when KM and Hastings wrote this piece; Bennett had a regular column as literary reviewer in the New Age, using the pseudonym ‘Jacob Tonson’. Firm links such as these lend weight to an interpretation of at least some of these pastiches as a form of collective mischief and playful irreverence, rather than wilful spite or sharp satire. The excessively exaggerated stylistic traits in the last two pieces likewise invite more of a bantering, collaborative form of mockery. The ludicrous repetition of the transparently Bennettesque ‘Pottinghame’ and its cognates, for instance, makes the allusion to Bennett’s own fictional ‘five towns’ in the Staffordshire Potteries. The telling detailed realism in terms of time and setting, and a rather Dickensian complicity in the narrative voice are also key features of Bennett’s fictional style. 10. Herbert George Wells (1866–1946) was one of the giants of English literature at the time, as noted for his visionary, pioneering science fiction as for his keen social satires; he was also an internationally acknowledged essayist and political commentator, occupying a position of broadly acknowledged influence and authority that would gain in strength in the decades to come.

390   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Like Bennett, referenced above, his origins were noticeably more lowly than those of the vast majority of writers and intellectuals at the time, making his meteoric rise to fame all the more impressive. KM had long been a reader of his works, both pastiching and engaging more shrewdly in his successful but sometimes dogmatic poetics. He also played a part in her social and personal life, being a close friend of Koteliansky and Elizabeth von Arnim, for instance. In this pastiche, KM and Hastings target two of his recent works: Love and Mr Lewisham (1900), which explores the trials of a trainee science teacher in South London, and Ann Veronica (1909), whose protagonist is a modern-minded biology student in a women’s college, trying to find a balance between the often conflicting forces of sexual liberation in relation to predatory patriarchy, and aspirational women’s professionalisation and the risks of pregnancy.

[5 October 1911] [New Age, IX: 23, 5 October 1911, p. 551] ALONG THE GRAY’S INN ROAD.1 Sir, – 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.2 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 pianoorgan is bright red, with a blue and gold ‘dancing picture’ on either side. The big bundle is a woman. You see only a black mackintosh topped with a sailor hat; the little bundle she holds has chalk-white 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 pre-occupation 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. KATHERINE MANSFIELD. Notes 1. Gray’s Inn Road, on the edge of Bloomsbury, central London, runs from King’s Cross to High Holborn; it was traditionally associated with law offices and the Inns of Court. KM had been living at a flat at 69 Clovelly Mansions, Gray’s Inn Road, since January 1911.



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2. Unlike the pastiche pieces published in earlier ‘Letters to the Editor’ in the New Age, in which the ironic mischief-making and stylistic subversion were clear, even if the degree of malicious or mirthful intention is harder to affirm, this prose piece is far harder to classify. Critics have put forward a number of interpretations – suggesting, for example, that KM wrote it in all seriousness but that Hastings popped it into the ‘Letters’ section to poke fun at her erstwhile friend, or that it is a less obvious pastiche of one of a number of socially sensitive Edwardian novelists. However, another possible explanation can be found by reading it in the context of recent articles published in the New Age at that time: for example, that autumn’s extended discussions of the impact of the railway strikes (which included a poem on the theme), or an ongoing exchange in the ‘Letters to the Editor’ section on the question of social reform and a fairer distribution of wealth, first prompted by a review of Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s book, The Prevention of Destitution, published on 7 September 1911 (p. 448). For later discussions in the journal, and images which may well have influenced KM’s composition, see in particular ‘The Prevention of Destitution and the Prevention of Profiteering, – Letters to the Editor’, pp. 476–7, 14 September 1911; ‘Advocatus diaboli’, pp. 487–8, and ‘The Prevention of Destitution – Letters to the Editor’ p. 500, 21 September 1911; ‘Letters to the Editors’, 28 September 1911, p. 524.

(Mary) Edna Nixon (1892–1975) (née Smith)

Introduction Very little is known of Edna Nixon’s life, except for a few scant biographical facts provided by her daughter, Shirley Weber, together with what can be gleaned from William Orton’s autobiographical novel, The Last Romantic (1937). (See the Introduction to William Orton below, p. 401.) She was nineteen-year-old Edna Smith when she met KM in 1910, through her then boyfriend, William Orton. KM entered their orbit like a bright shooting star and hung around in scintillating, sparkling fashion for several months, before disappearing from view, never to return. According to her daughter, Shirley Weber, Edna became fascinated by her [KM’s] totally unconventional way of life – or ‘life style’ [. . .]. She described her to me as beautiful & wearing her dark hair à la Trilby with a fringe & falling over her shoulders, which at the time was rather daring it seems. She would go thus to the Promenade concerts & make the acquaintance of strange men – or rather, men who were strangers. I believe that after about 6 months she tired of my mother & abruptly ended the friendship as they met one day in the street, by telling her they would never meet again. My mother was upset at the time & apparently destroyed all her letters, however one did survive. [. . .] Eventually my mother was to remember her fondly & I quote from a letter she wrote to a friend in 1928: ‘At nineteen my love affair came to an end, for various reasons, one being Katherine Mansfield who rather took a fancy to my lover & myself. She played with us both for a little & then went on her way. She was a beautiful, wonderful creature, and I never bore her any grudge’.1

In The Last Romantic, Orton becomes ‘Michael’, KM ‘Catherine’ and Edna ‘Lais’. Journal entries and letters by ‘Catherine’ were, according to Orton, direct transcripts from KM. Catherine describes Lais thus: Little Lais came. I met her and brought her home. I think she was happy: She made me feel eighteen. What very pretty hair! I expect I shall see her quite often and take her to concerts and I am sure I shall take her to the National Gallery.2

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Later, in a beautifully expressive and detailed journal entry, she seems overcome by Lais’s beauty: 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 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 – flamingos would fly over her head for a canopy. One day she shall be my inspiration for fairy tales.3

Indeed, in the story ‘Something Childish But Very Natural’ (1914), the innocent, childlike characters of Edna and Henry are loosely based on Orton and Edna. Edna married James Nixon in 1916 and the couple moved to Geneva in 1920. According to her daughter, in the late 1950s Edna gave a short talk to the BBC about her relationship with KM. Gerri Kimber Notes 1. Letter from Shirley Weber to Margaret Scott, 22 June 1977. ATL, MSPapers-9733-029, Margaret Scott, Correspondence – W. 2. Orton, p. 275. 3. Orton, pp. 282–3. (See also CW4, pp. 120–1.)

[September 1911] [Weber] 69, CLOVELLY MANSIONS, GRAY’S INN ROAD, W.C. I came home again, Edna. I grew ‘homesick’ – for my yellow pillows – for my rooms – above all for my complete and absolute privacy. The people hurt me all the time – They mined everything. They sprawled over everything – & stared and remarked and would not let me be. I came home & danced for joy. It was sunset light. When I slipped the key

394   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 in the door & closed the door – standing against it a moment – seeing a faint glow from the Buddha room – I felt as though the waters of sweetness and light had flowed over my aching heart – I told over everything and could not say often enough that I was happy. No, it is here only – in these rooms that I wish to live for the present and a long time to come. Are you coming soon? Are you coming one evening? Are we going to a concert together – you & I? Quite soon? Edna, dear? Since I came home I have been wanting to write all the time – the desire drove me away and drove me here again. He is away from London for some time to come – so I am quite alone – But not yet do I know what it is that clamours for utterance at the gates of my heart – rather there are so many – with such richness of spoil in their hands (& the East! quite suddenly) that I still pause – deliberating – terribly grave. I cannot afford anything in the faintest touch unworthy – Edna to write like that! Suddenly stir the wings of a giant and all-powerful desire – one wing stretched over the Future – the other over the past – and the flight of those wings is rapture – Art! Art! Do you too exult in the very word and lift your proud head – It is not an anodyne: it is an elixir. X            X            X I want to talk to you about Zola & ask if you have read the ‘joie de vivre’.1 Emile Zola. Endless are our discoveries – ceaseless our battles – I want one day to write a whole book for you – I think and think about you – my dear and lovely friend. You are so near and vivid – Proschäi,2 my darling. My hand is in yours a moment – & the soft Russian word of farewell. Your Katya x Notes 1. Emile Zola (1840–1902) was one of France’s greatest writers and journalists in the second half of the nineteenth century. He was one of the leaders of the French naturalists, whose acute social conscience and political commitment assured the vital pact between psychological realism and critical sociology. His extensive fictional saga, Les Rougon-Macquart, is an impressive, near-documentary panorama of French social life under the Second Empire, of essential value to social historians as it is to literary scholars. His single most important contribution to intellectual life was doubtless the open letter ‘J’accuse . . . !’, published in L’Aurore, denouncing the entrenched antisemitism within the French state and its armies that had led to the wrongful conviction of Alfred Dreyfus on charges of espionage. His novel La Joie de vivre (1883) was the twelfth volume in the Rougon-Macquart series. 2. (Russ.): Farewell.

Alfred Richard Orage (1873–1934)

Introduction Only one of KM’s letters to A. R. Orage, the influential editor of the British periodical the New Age, survives. As Antony Alpers notes in his biography of KM, Orage ‘was almost violently opposed to the keeping and publication of private letters’.1 The fact that he decided to keep this letter of thanks and ‘love’, sent by KM at a time when she was receiving significant praise in the press following the publication of Bliss and Other Stories, indicates the value Orage attached to the sentiments of ‘admiration and gratitude’ which the letter conveys. Desmond MacCarthy’s review of Bliss, printed on 21 January 1921 in the New Statesman, had opened with the observation: ‘Miss Mansfield’s master in the art of fiction is Tchehov.’2 This is a claim that few critics of KM’s work are likely to dispute, but her letter to Orage below can be seen as a direct riposte to this review, which she knew Orage would have seen. KM writes: ‘My dear Orage, I cannot tell you how often I call to mind your conversation or how often, in writing, I remember my master.’ Orage was not born ‘Alfred Richard’ but, in fact, ‘James Alfred’ (for some reason, his nickname since childhood had always been ‘Dickie’). He was born on 22 January 1873 at Dacre, near Bradford, Yorkshire, the last of four children. Soon after his father’s death in 1875, the young Orage moved with his mother and siblings to his maternal grandparents’ village, Fenstanton, twelve miles outside Cambridge. The son of a widow, Orage grew up in very modest circumstances, but his keen intellect quickly caught the attention of the village schoolmaster, George Hicks, and the local squire’s son, Howard Coote, who gave Orage not only the run of his library but also the financial support which enabled Orage to enrol on a teacher training programme in Oxfordshire. In 1893, at the age of twenty, Orage returned to Yorkshire to take a job at Chapel Allerton elementary school in Leeds. This was also the year in which the Independent Labour Party was formed. As a young man, Orage became a committed socialist, starting his career as a journalist by writing extensively for Labour-supporting publications. In addition to this political commitment, Orage had wide-ranging enthusiasms that encompassed

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396   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 philosophy (particularly Plato), religion, eastern mysticism and esoteric spiritualist beliefs; after reading the works of Madame Blavatsky, for example, he became an active member of the Theosophical Society. In 1896, Orage married Jean Walker, an artist and craftswoman working in the tradition of William Morris. Then, in 1900, he met a young lace merchant named Holbrook Jackson in a second-hand bookshop. This was a defining moment, for two reasons. The men did a book-swap, with Orage lending Jackson the Bhagavad-Gita in exchange for Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. After devouring this book in a single night, Orage became a devout Nietzschean, writing two short books on the philosopher that were published in 1906 and 1907. Secondly, Jackson became a collaborator on two initiatives that helped advance Orage’s name as a prominent thinker, speaker and – ultimately – editor. Together with the architect A. J. Penty, the two men established the Leeds Arts Club in 1903. This proved a huge success. The Leeds Arts Club staged art and craft exhibitions, and attracted prominent guest speakers to the city, such as Edward Carpenter, W. B. Yeats, G. K. Chesterton, Wyndham Lewis and George Bernard Shaw. (While Orage sounded out his surname in an echo of the French for ‘storm’, maintaining that he had Huguenot ancestry, Shaw was one of the few people to insist on always using the Huntingdonshire pronunciation, rhyming Orage with ‘porridge’.) After making these kinds of contacts through the Leeds Arts Club, and now a lecturer in his own right who was much in demand, Orage moved to London at the end of 1905. The following year, he and Jackson established the Fabian Arts Group, with the support of H. G. Wells, as an alternative to orthodox Fabian socialism. Then, with the financial backing provided by Shaw and the Theosophist banker Lewis Alexander Wallace, Orage and Jackson took over the editorship of the New Age in 1907 (for more on the history and significance of this periodical, please see my Introduction to the New Age in this volume, pp. 376–9). It was as the editor of the New Age that Orage met KM in early 1910. After returning from Germany to England in late 1909, KM’s thenhusband, George Bowden, encouraged her to take the semi-autobiographical stories she had penned at the Pension Müller to the editor of the New Age. KM went to the tiny editorial office off Chancery Lane and showed Orage some of her stories (it is likely that Orage’s shadow coeditor and partner, Beatrice Hastings, was also present at this meeting). The first of KM’s stories to appear in the New Age, in the issue printed on 24 February 1910, was ‘Bavarian Babies: The Child-Who-Was-Tired’. This is a free transposition of a story by Anton Chekhov titled ‘Spat Khochetsia’ that had been published in English translation as ‘Sleepyhead’ in 1903. Since Elisabeth Schneider first pointed out the distinct similarities between these two texts in 1935, KM has sometimes been accused of an imitation bordering on plagiarism (which perhaps accounts for her eagerness to quash the notion that Chekhov was her ‘master’ in the letter of thanks sent to the editor who had been duped, to a certain extent, into



a. r. orage   397

publishing the offending tale). The subsequent stories that KM contributed to the New Age over 1910 and 1911 were brought together in her first book, In a German Pension, published by Stephen Swift in 1911. While KM was later to dismiss this story collection in a letter to JMM (4 February 1920) as ‘positively juvenile’, ‘far too immature’ and ‘not good enough’ for republication, the editorial role played by Orage and Hastings in shaping KM into a better, more mature writer is demonstrably evident if we turn our attention to the contributions she was making to other publications at the same time. In contrast to the biting, uncompromising satire of the stories printed in the New Age, ‘Mary’, published in the March 1910 issue of the illustrated magazine the Idler, exhibits the ‘lachrymose sentimentality’ that Hastings cautioned KM against in her review of In a German Pension, a critique which, as Alpers has observed, drew on knowledge of work that had been ‘rejected’ from the New Age.3 In addition to providing a guiding editorial hand, Orage and Hastings were also close friends to KM in the early days of her professional writing career. For a period of time in 1910, KM lived with her mentors at 39 Abingdon Mansions on Pater Street, Kensington, before moving into the Chelsea flat of Orage’s friend, the painter Henry Bishop, and she was a regular visitor at the cottage Orage and Hastings later took at Seaford, Sussex. As John Carswell has observed in his group biography Lives and Letters, ‘Orage’s charm, knowledge, and personal magnetism’, ‘Beatrice’s apparent strength and literary commitment’, and ‘above all, perhaps, their literary and sexual partnership with one another, made them almost unbeatable in Katherine’s eyes’.4 Such affinity was based on shared experience: they had each adopted a pseudonym in an act of selfreinvention, revelling in fluid authorial identities, and all three were in different ways ‘provincial’ writers negotiating a position for themselves within London’s metropolitan literary culture. However, the break in KM’s contributions to the New Age, between August 1910 and May 1911, suggests that some kind of rift had opened up, a rift which only became more pronounced and entrenched when she left the New Age in 1912 to join JMM’s little magazine Rhythm. In the reviews and parodies of Rhythm that they printed in the New Age over several months, Orage and Hastings condemned KM for being ‘wilfully defiant of the rules of art’.5 This attack turned distinctly personal when Orage caricatured KM as the ignorant, uncultured and sexually promiscuous ‘Marcia Foisacre’ in his regular series ‘Tales for Men Only’. Alpers notes that ‘Orage recalled much later that Katherine had been “really hurt” by what he had said about her in this tale,’ and these feelings come across in her letters to JMM, when she writes that she did not want ‘anything of mine in The New Age’: ‘I think Orage is too ugly’ (28 March 1915). Although she did submit one story to the New Age in 1915 and then made a series of contributions to the periodical throughout 1917, things remained decidedly chilly between KM and Orage until her letter of 1921. In this letter, KM underlines the words ‘Thank you for everything’: presumably,

398   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 ‘everything’ included the attacks he had made against both her writing and character almost ten years before, which she could now view with a degree of detachment and the benefit of hindsight. Offered as an olive branch, KM’s letter is significant because it began a thawing in her relationship with Orage; this, in turn, started a chain of events that eventually took her to the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, the commune founded by the Greek–Armenian teacher of esoteric doctrine George Gurdjieff. According to Alpers, KM’s notebooks contain coded references to Orage that indicate that, from January 1922, the two had begun a more sustained correspondence.6 This renewed sympathy is perhaps reflected in the fact that KM left a book to Orage in the formal will she made in August 1922. On Wednesday, 27 September 1922, KM wrote to JMM informing him that she was ‘seeing Orage Saturday or Sunday evening’. The following day, the last issue of the New Age under Orage’s editorship was published, after he had made the bombshell announcement to his staff that he would be leaving England for Gurdjieff’s Institute in Fontainebleau. If the meeting between Orage and KM went ahead that weekend, his travel plans would have been the primary topic of conversation. Now desperately ill, KM was anxious to find a cure, in whatever form, and the teachings of Gurdjieff held out the promise of spiritual healing. KM herself left for France at the beginning of October, ostensibly to receive medical treatment from the Russian doctor Ivan Manoukhin in Paris. When Orage arrived in the city on 14 October, KM’s thirty-fourth birthday, he was met by James Carruthers Young, a resident at the Institute in Fontainebleau. KM told JMM in a letter written the same day (14 October 1922) how she arranged to meet Young ‘on his way to the station’, and the two talked for several hours ‘about Gurdjieff and the institute’, which sounded ‘fabulous and other worldly’. Soon after this, she made the decision to follow Orage to Fontainebleau. In the weeks that passed here before KM’s death in January 1923, Orage was a constant companion. The article that he published two years later, titled ‘Talks with Katherine Mansfield at Fontainebleau’, records something of the tenor and theme of these conversations. It is Orage’s influence as editor that KM’s letter draws attention to, though. Orage was fond of saying that ‘he wrote writers’.7 As well as printing the most pre-eminent, established Edwardian authors of his day, such as Shaw, Chesterton, Wells and Bennett, Orage was responsible for introducing to the reading public for the first time a younger generation that included not only KM but also Ezra Pound, Edwin Muir, T. E. Hulme, Richard Aldington, Herbert Read, the novelist who would write as ‘Michael Arlen’, and the poet Ruth Pitter. In 1932, when he started a new venture titled the New English Weekly, Orage received numerous letters from past contributors to the New Age expressing similar sentiments to KM’s 1921 letter. Ashley Dukes, for example, observed: ‘They were grand years from 1907 to 1914, when so many of us were doing



a. r. orage   399

our apprenticeship under your shrewd direction.’8 Similarly, E. H. Visiak recalled: ‘How well one remembers the enthusiasm of the new writers [the New Age] attracted! How many a name, now famous, it brought to light!’9 These private letters are all now held in the archives at the University of Leeds, but such sentiments received public expression after Orage’s death in 1934, when the New English Weekly published a memorial issue of tributes to its late editor from a range of writers and artists, including Shaw, Pound, Wells, Aldington, Augustus John, Eric Gill, Storm Jameson and JMM. In his contribution to this memorial issue, T. S. Eliot described Orage’s death as ‘a public loss’: he will be remembered ‘as the best literary critic of that time in London’, Eliot wrote, and ‘as the benevolent editor who encouraged merit and (what is still rarer) tolerated genius’.10 Thanking him for his ‘unfailing kindness’ in teaching her ‘to write’, KM’s letter to Orage adds another voice of ‘admiration and gratitude’ to this catalogue of praise. Chris Mourant Notes  1. Alpers 1980, p. 142.  2. Affable Hawk, p. 450.  3. Anon. [Beatrice Hastings] 1911, p. 188; Alpers 1980, p. 135.  4. Carswell, p. 58.  5. Congreve [A. R. Orage], pp. 61–2 (p. 61).  6. Alpers 1980, p. 362.  7. Carswell, p. 36.  8. File 22, BC MS 20c Orage, Alfred R. Orage Archive, Special Collections, University of Leeds.  9. Ibid. 10. Eliot 1934, p. 100.

[9 February 1921] [Alpers, p. 325] [Villa Isola Bella, Garavan, Menton] 9 ii 1921 Dear Orage, This letter has been on the tip of my pen for many months. I want to tell you how sensible I am of your wonderful unfailing kindness to me in the ‘old days’. And to thank you for all you let me learn from you. I am still – more shame to me – very low down in the school. But you taught me to write, you taught me to think; you showed me what there was to be done and what not to do.

400   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 My dear Orage, I cannot tell you how often I call to mind your conversation or how often, in writing, I remember my master. Does that sound impertinent? Forgive me if it does. But let me thank you, Orage – Thank you for everything. If only one day I might write a book of stories good enough to ‘offer’ you . . . If I don’t succeed in keeping the coffin from the door you will know this was my ambition. Yours in admiration and gratitude Katherine Mansfield I haven’t said a bit of what I wanted to say. This letter sounds as if it was written by a screw driver, and I wanted it to sound like an admiring, respectful, but warm piping beneath your windows. I’d like to send my love, too, if I wasn’t so frightened. K.M.

[early January 1922] [ATL] [unfinished letter] Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre Valais My dear Orage, Whether I shall ever be able to say I have read your new book I do not know. I can forsee no change in my present condition of reading it and reading it.

William Orton (1889–1952)

Introduction William Aylott Orton was born in Bromley, Kent, on 9 February 1889. He was the eldest of the five children of William Amor Orton and Emma Orton (neé Aylott). His father was a well-to-do grocer and provision merchant in Greenwich. Though he won a scholarship to University College, London, he left to begin training as an architect, a profession he soon abandoned. He went up to Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1913, but volunteered for the army at the outbreak of war in 1914, serving as an officer, initially with the 7th (Reserve) Battalion of the Dorsetshire Regiment, and then in Gallipoli, Egypt and France. After being wounded at the Battle of the Somme, he was assigned to the intelligence staff of the War Office until 1919. He married Olmen Marlais Moment in 1917, and eventually earned his B.A. from Cambridge University in 1919. He then went to work in the industrial relations department of the Ministry of Labour. In 1922 he left England for the USA to assume a faculty position in Economics at Smith College, Northampton, where he spent his entire academic career. Orton was, however, teaching art and music at the Skinners’ School in Tunbridge Wells (disguised in his fictionalised autobiography, The Last Romantic [1937], as ‘Tanford Hills Grammar School’), when he met KM in the autumn of 1910. They were both attending a weekend tennis party in Hampstead at the home of a German scientist ‘on the research staff of a munitions concern’1 and his Austrian wife (‘Paula Berling’ in The Last Romantic), whom Orton had first met while the couple lived in Tunbridge Wells. KM had spent some seven months in Germany the previous year, and seems to have maintained contacts in the Anglo-German community in London, one of whom might have invited her to the party. Indeed, it was around this time that she had a brief affair with Geza Silberer (1876– 1938), the Austrian journalist and playwright, though she burned all his letters in late 1912 after sharing them with JMM.2 Orton’s account of his intimate relationship with KM – whether it was ever a full-blown ‘affair’ is uncertain – was uniquely recorded in The Last Romantic, in which an entire chapter (XVII, pp. 269–86) is devoted to KM. He told biographer

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402   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Antony Alpers in 1948 that ‘nothing in that book is faked, although the temptation to alter was often very strong. It was meant to be as authentic a document as I could leave.’3 Given how little documentary evidence has survived from the years 1908–12 (thanks in large part to KM’s own ruthless suppression of her ‘long and complaining notebooks’), Orton’s firsthand account deserves careful scrutiny – especially in light of the added credibility of his assurances to Alpers. In addition, ten years earlier, on 18 October 1938, in response to a request for information from Guy N. Morris, a KM enthusiast in New Zealand, he had written: The book is straight autobiography, as frank as I could make it: it is written in the third person because I did not like the effect of the first person, especially in Murry’s autobiography. The publishers in London advertised it as a novel, and I couldn’t stop them; but Farrar and Rhinehart in N.Y. gave it a less misleading description. I need not assure you then that the K.M. material is exactly as transcribed. [. . .] I reproduced what I thought would be a sketch of her without encroaching on ground that will always be too intimate to open up.4

Many of the names, of course, have been changed: Orton becomes ‘Michael’; his capricious girlfriend, Edna Smith (later Nixon), becomes ‘Lais’ (an exotic name of Arabic origin); and KM is barely disguised as ‘Catherine’. At the time of their meeting in late summer 1910 – when ‘a sort of instant recognition passed between them’ (p. 269), KM was temporarily renting painter Henry Bishop’s flat at 132 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. Orton provides a vivid recollection of his first visit there, valuable not least for documenting KM’s taste in dress and decor: She had made the place look quite beautiful – a couple of candles stuck in a skull, another between the high windows, a lamp on the floor shining through yellow chrysanthemums, and herself accurately in the centre, in a patterned pink kimono and white flowered frock. (p. 270)

In one another they recognised kindred spirits – what KM called ‘the you in me and the me in you’ (p. 275) and this prompted a desire to share in a variety of ways, even while separately ‘leading lives of passionate intensity in their private worlds’ (p. 275). Thus ‘Catherine’ is introduced to ‘Lais’ and gets to share her beauty and imagine her as a princess with ‘little white boots tipped with ermine’ (p. 283); and ‘Catherine’ also gives Michael books by the Japanese poet, Yone Noguchi (From the Eastern Sea was one of them), as well as the black opal ring ‘that they shared as a sort of talisman’ (p. 280). Years later, Ida Baker repeats a story that almost certainly began with KM: ‘[the ring] had been given to her by the Maoris, and had some strange significance and occult power’.5 Most importantly, ‘Michael’ allows ‘Catherine’ to share his journal – originally a commonplace book with passages from the likes of W. H. Hudson and



william orton  403

Lafcadio Hearn (p. 272) – by penning a series of self-consciously artful and sometimes provocative entries of her own, often in conversation with his. But what, if anything, was she provoking with her disarmingly frank declaration that ‘A man is coming to spend the evening with me. I don’t feel entirely responsible for my actions’ (pp. 275–6)? The structure of three of these entries in The Last Romantic – specifically their use of a salutation and a closing – allows them to be construed as letters, though there is no surviving documentary evidence that they ever had an independent existence. If they were letters actually posted to Orton, they must have been saved until the novel was written, and then destroyed. Yet they may simply have been entries in letter form embedded in the journal itself. Orton’s assurance to Alpers (cited above) addresses only the authenticity of the contents, not their documentary status. Inevitably, some of KM’s experiences with Orton found their way into her stories. Her enigmatic and tone-setting question to Orton – ‘Do you believe in Pan?’ (pp. 269–70) – was later used in ‘Epilogue II’, published in the Blue Review in June 1913 (but retitled ‘Violet’ by JMM). Edna, the real-life ‘Lais’, reappears as a character, now under her own name (with a passing reference to her Hungarian mother), in ‘Something Childish But Very Natural’ alongside her boyfriend, Henry, who worked in ‘an architect’s office’, just as Orton once did. One needs to peruse The Last Romantic to catch these allusions. When Orton wrote that ‘Catherine [. . .] had published one or two pieces in the New Age [. . .] and Orage had also taken a small essay of Michael’s’ (p. 269), he made the two of them appear to be on an equal footing as contributors to the New Age. In fact, from February to July 1910, she had already published more than half-a-dozen stories there; he could only claim a single modest piece entitled ‘Our Yesterdays’ under the name ‘W. Aylott Orton’ in the issue of 10 November 1910,6 and in fact KM may well have played a role in his essay being accepted. In a later issue, Orton also published a letter, ‘Present-Day Criticism’, that is of particular interest because it shows him defending Rhythm, the upstart journal of which his new friend had become associate editor. He wrote: ‘I doubt whether Mr. Ardsley or the New Age quite appreciated the point of the editor of “Rhythm”, and I am tempted to put the case for decadence a little more fully.’7 Perhaps it was this display of loyalty that earned him a place in the pages of Rhythm itself a few months later, for his poem ‘Nocturne’ appeared in the September 1912 issue, happily positioned on the same page (p. 161) as, and immediately before, KM’s ‘Spring in A Dream.’ The final lines speak directly to their intimacy: Your eyes sought mine in the darkness. We sat quite still for a moment – Rose, and went away homewards.

J. Lawrence Mitchell

404   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Notes 1. Orton, p. 242. All future page references in text. 2. See Tomalin, pp. 92, 249. 3. Alpers 1980, p. 117. 4. ATL: MS-Papers-3981-093. Morris Collection: correspondence with William Orton. 5. Baker, p. 61. 6. W. Aylott Orton 1910, pp. 30–1. 7. W. Aylott Orton 1912, p. 23.

[late summer 1910] [Orton 1937, pp. 276–7] [132 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea] Dear – The windows are wide open and the river so beautiful that I shall stay here watching it for one thousand years. You know, Michael,1 this river. And there is not one star in the sky. The sky is like a shell – I have red and white tulips growing in the centre of the praying mat. The red ones look as though they have fed on brackish blood. But I like the white ones best. They are dying – each petal ever so faintly distorted – and yet such dainty grace. I wish you were here. The barge outside my window is called the Lizzie Rochester. I think she has only got one mate and one sailor. She is showing a green light now. A man is singing outside the Cremorne Arms2 ‘Somebody loves me How do I know Somebody’s eyes ’ave told me so-o’ Do you know that tree of mine believes every word of it – and is wide awake – with excitement. Notes 1. See Introduction above, p. 402. 2. The Cremorne Arms Tavern, at the end of Cheyne Walk, was a historic old public house facing Battersea Bridge.



william orton  405

[autumn 1910] [Orton, pp. 275–6] [132 Cheyne Walk, London] . . . Dear, there is a wreath of vine about the brows of the skull. I made it myself, pricking my fingers. – Little Lais came. I met her and brought her home. I think she was happy: she made me feel eighteen. What very pretty hair! I expect I shall see her quite often and take her to concerts and I am sure I shall take her to the National Gallery. Now you understand. Yes, I own it – I was just as I said I should be – but time and again I was a little confused – recognized the you in me and the me in you – a most married sensation (here we both pause, look at each other and laugh) . . . A man is coming to spend the evening with me. I don’t feel entirely responsible for my actions. I want to smile mysteriously and to run away and work that sewing machine all by myself in the little house at Strand-on-Green. There! I knew that would happen. My soul has just opened the door – come in wrapt up in its fur coat and declares it is about to fly off to Tanford Hills. ‘Please don’t be so inconsiderate. You must stay with me tonight’. ‘No, I refuse. You are too ridiculous. You are behaving like a baby’. ‘Very well. Give Michael my love – please – and take him – a little of this lavender perfume. When will you come home?’ (with reserve) ‘M’m. That depends’. – Please greet my soul kindly. It is very fond of music!                      Katharina.

[February 1912] [ATL] [Postcard] c/o Madame Bieler 8 rue St. Leger Geneva.1 Tell E. where I am. I have nothing at all to say but I think this card is very lovely. And now all the red leaves are thick upon the ground and the mountains are white with snow. I am quite alone. Catherine. Note 1. According to Baker, KM had met the Bieler family, who were Austrian, during her stay in Wörishofen, and paid follow-up visits to them in their Geneva apartment over the next couple of years, this most recent visit being prompted

406   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 by a severe bout of pleurisy (pp. 66–7). She also renewed links with a certain Yelski and his wife, who were East European friends made at the same time (see Alpers 1980, pp. 100–1, 128). Little is known of either friend, nor of the exact times and conditions of the Geneva visits.

[6 April 1912] [Orton, pp. 285–6] [69 Clovelly Mansions, Gray’s Inn Road] Dear: the evening is slipping away and away like the river. Dark it is and warm. My life has been sad lately – unreal and turbulent. You know the absurd unreality of reality and the sense of chaotic grief that overpowers us when we attempt to fuse ourselves. . . . So – blind I have been lately and deaf and frightened. But now I am utterly happy. I am at home again here – my rooms yield me their secrets and their uttermost shadows. I wander alone in them smiling, a silk shawl wrapped round my body, sandals on my feet. I lie on the floor smoking and listening. I look through the windows sometimes – and at night and sunset I watch the sky. Everything is a wonder. Flowers are my joy and water and my Russian village, and Buddha and the toys.1 Then I read poetry and study and begin to write again. Then the spring is coming and from my windows I can see the rich buds of the trees. Ah, how lovely. Beauty is solitude for me – and I am growing in her ways. Yes, the poems – I cannot forget them, and I understand them far better. Many other poems I know – especially poems about rain and fitful winds and stars in dark pools of water. I think of you more often than you think of me. You are always in my heart – even when my heart – my beloved and my dear – has been most like the sand castle and nearest the waves – you have been safe and secret and treasured. I shall always love you. One day perhaps we shall smile again to each other and I shall take your head in my hands and kiss you tenderly. Perhaps and perhaps. Good night. It is Easter Eve. Christ be with you.                         Catherine.2 Notes 1. The Russian village was, according to Alpers, a present from Francis Heinemann, a boyish young man with whom KM discussed going away to Russia. The village was a toy model, made of painted wood (Alpers 1980, p. 119). 2. Although she was signing herself ‘Catherine’ at this point, KM’s dominant pseudonym / persona at this time was ‘Katharina’: a reflection of her passionate engagement with Russian culture and literature, as Orton himself would later attest. Beyond direct references, the closing note of the letter (‘It is Easter Eve. Christ be with you’) suggests an allusion to Chekhov’s short story, ‘Easter Eve’.

Clara Palmer (1877–1956)

Introduction Clara Adeline Palmer was a good friend of the entire Beauchamp family, and had instructed the young Beauchamp girls on the piano when they lived in Wellington. At the time KM was writing the letter below, Palmer was residing in Rome, having been instrumental in setting up a special canteen for British servicemen there during the war. Her efforts were eventually rewarded by the British government with an MBE. Alpers quotes a long letter from KM’s mother, Annie Beauchamp, to Palmer, written on 6 May 1918, just three months before Annie’s own death, in which she relates to Palmer how ill KM has become with her lungs, and how finally, as the renowned black sheep of the family, she ‘has at last learnt to love her Mother and Father’, even though ‘poor poor darling she has missed so much in life, but it was quite her own choosing’. Gerri Kimber

[30 December 1918] [ATL]

30. XII. 1918.

2 Portland Villas East Heath Road Hampstead N.W.3.

My dear Clara, This morning Chaddie sent me your letter to her: I so enjoyed reading it and hearing your news, and I felt I must send you a greeting for the New Year – I have thought of you so often, dear Clara. I have a little photograph of you sitting in your room with little pictures by Greuze1 on the walls and lovely flowers on the table and the corner shelf. It must have been taken just before I left for England – twelve years ago – What changes the years have brought! It is so hard to believe that my

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408   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 precious Mother is no more – In spite of her frailty and delicate hold on Life – one really felt that she was an undying soul. She was such a part of Life – especially these last few years. She seemed to live in everything; and to be renewed with every spring. And it was so extraordinary how close she kept to her children – Her last letters especially were quite uncanny. We seemed to be thinking the same thoughts at just the same time – Rare, exquisite little being – I wish we had not all lived so scattered – and it is dreadful to think of poor old Father without his wife and his ‘Boy’2 – I am so glad that Mother sent you a greeting. I always remember her great admiration and love for you – and her ‘Oh I do envy Clara!’ Will you come to England now that the war is over? – If you do – you will let me know – won’t you? I shall be going abroad in the late Spring for a more or less indefinite time. It will be such a relief to be strong again – I cannot bear an inactive life – and though of course I can do all my writing work just as well with broken wings as with good ’uns – there are so many things besides that one longs to take part in. Have you had a happy Xmas? We had a real, old fashioned one – stockings – a tree – the house decorated – crackers mistletoe and good cheer. ‘We’ means Jack and I, our ‘faithful souls’ and the cat! I could not help thinking what it would have meant to darling old Les – his first Peace Christmas! – As I write I can hear the ‘Old Men’s Chorus from Faust’ – (for which you gave me a prize)3 and Dance Créole Chaminade4 – and a certain Beethoven Sonata with a mineur movement which made one’s knees tremble with joy5 – Those old days are so clear – How Id love to talk them over! This is a disjointed – scrappy letter. But do take out of it a warm warm hug and my love and Best Wishes. And don’t feel that is too effusive after so long – will you?           Yours affectionately          Kass            (Middleton Murry) Notes 1. Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725–1805) was a French artist, renowned for his delicate blend of high classical technique (then associated with grandiose or allegorical scenes) and intimate, domestic scenes. In his exploration of scenes from family and domestic life as a genre, he came to paint a number of fine portraits of children, young country folk and young ladies, often playing instruments or reading. 2. Christmas 1918 would indeed have been particularly desolate for Harold Beauchamp, now grieving not only for his beloved only son, Leslie, but for his wife, Annie, who had died on 8 August that year, just three months after writing to Clara Palmer to express her concern about her daughters.



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3. Act IV of Charles Gounod’s most famous opera, Faust, with a libretto by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré, includes a rousing ‘Soldiers’ Chorus’: ‘Gloire immortelle à nos aïeux’ [Glory be to our forefathers], which KM translates literally with characteristic humour. First performed in 1859, Gounod’s Faust is loosely based on the retelling by Goethe, but with a pronounced foregrounding of the love story between Faust and Marguerite, heightening the theatrical potential of the witches’ scenes. 4. ‘Danse créole’ is a piece for piano by the French composer Cécile Chaminade (1857–1944), an acclaimed performing pianist and wide-ranging composer, and also an eloquent defender of women’s education and civic rights in late nineteenth-century France. Her music was highly appreciated by Queen Victoria, leading to her being frequently invited to perform in Britain in the 1890s. 5. Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) wrote thirty-two piano sonatas, mostly between the years 1795 and 1822; as an œuvre, they are considered one of the most significant contributions to the history and evolution of the piano’s repertoire, reflecting both the fast-evolving capacities of the instrument, and the melodic and harmonic expressivity characteristic of ‘classical’ music from the age of Romanticism up until the borders of musical modernity. While a great number of these sonatas explore the sonorous, often searing appeal of minor keys, there are a number of works that figure more prominently in the apprentice pianist’s progression and with a potential to leave the knees ‘trembling’: the first movement of Beethoven’s sonata no. 14 (the ‘Moonlight’) and the second movement of no. 26 (‘Les Adieux’), both of which are in C minor, a key he always used with particular interest and which early classical composers had little explored, supposedly on account of its intense emotional overtones.

Herbert Palmer (1880–1961)

Introduction Herbert Palmer’s autobiography bears the poetic title The Mistletoe Child (1935), but like JMM and so many men of their generation born into one world, class and social environment but enabled by educational reform and aesthetic inclinations to make the often painful, partial transition into another environment, he could equally well have entitled it ‘Between Two Worlds’. As he explains, I was an imp, an elf, but a good Christian boy for all that, only the Christian in me seemed to have been somewhat poisoned by mistletoe berries. Like the popular spirit of Christmas, I was a sort of pagan compromise.1

The misfit child Herbert was born into a staunchly Methodist family, his father being a Methodist minister whose profession required him and his family to change communities and regions every three years. As a result, the child grew up constantly out of place in mostly painfully poor working-class areas of Staffordshire and Yorkshire, educated in the local mission school but living amongst the local children, from whom he felt painfully estranged by education, mindset, accent and even physique – they were boisterous and physical, he was painfully thin and sickly until adulthood. Only for a brief period in the Lake District did he find relative comfort in his home and surroundings, but was soon taken from there to be put into the grammar school system, where his comparative poverty left him sidelined. Family poverty prevented him from aspiring to a university education; instead, he matriculated and worked as an unsuccessful local journalist and then an elementary schoolmaster, hating his job and mostly disliking the boys. Humiliated by a sense of both professional and economic failure, he fled to Germany – determined at least to improve his modern languages on the Continent, while escaping what seemed to be a personal and professional dead-end. This hot-headed act of rebellion – a very characteristic one, the child having always swung between moods of apprehensive cautiousness and fear, and wild tantrums and physical

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herbert palmer  411

violence – proved the making of him. After teaching and wandering in Germany, France, Sweden and Denmark, and gaining an impressive understanding of contemporary educational standards, ethics and praxis, he took a degree at the University of Bonn before planning the ensuing trip – to Russia. The outbreak of the war, however, prompted his return to Britain. His physical condition saved him from enlistment – to his great relief, since he had no desire to ‘fight against people who [. . .] had been superlatively good to me and nursed me, brain body and spirit’.2 Instead, he took up a teaching position at an English public school, this time working with distinction before leaving to become a full-time ‘man of letters’ – poet, essayist, journalist and occasional university lecturer. His first anthology of poetry, Two Fishers, was quite favourably received, but despite gaining the admiration and friendship of a growing number of poets – amongst whom James Stephens, Robert Bridges, Thomas Moult, Edmund Blunden and John Drinkwater, to name those we also find in KM / JMM circles – his work never quite finds its place amongst the Rhymers, the Georgians or the Poetry Bookshop circles. He meanwhile felt more of an affinity with ‘the Saxon poet Cynewulf’ than any of his contemporaries, while his friend and contemporary Humbert Wolfe saw him as ‘the stormy petrel of twentieth-century poetry’.3 As a result, he hovered, partially integrated, in a number of overlapping literary communities in London, where a growing friendship with Desmond MacCarthy and articles in the New Statesman also brought him into warm contact with a number of the Bloomsbury figures; Leonard Woolf would remain one of his firmer friends. He also established a warm relationship with Robert Graves and John Collings Squire. His work – poems and articles – featured relatively frequently in the Adelphi and the Athenaeum under JMM’s editorship, which also provided the occasion for his exchanges with KM. ‘Strange to say’, as Palmer observes, the three never met, although they corresponded with ease and goodwill’. He notes that JMM, ‘despite his occasional craziness, is, perhaps, next to Dean Inge (or D. H. Lawrence on the opposing bear-pole), the most vitally disturbing voice of his age’.4 The very disparate worlds in which he evolved are reflected in his own output as a poet and writer: his works include a pageant-play in the tradition of Villon and the French troubadours, satires of Modernist poetry (his targets including T. S. Eliot, for whom he maintained staunch disapproval, on aesthetic as much as religious grounds), powerful high Romantic and mystical sonnet sequences, a manual for schoolmasters, The Teaching of English, which remained an authority for over two generations, and a gentle, generous collections of essays, The Roving Angler, devoted to his favourite pastimes: fishing and rural flânerie. Claire Davison

412   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Notes 1. Palmer, p. 165. As well as being a poignantly frank narrative of his childhood, Palmer’s autobiography offers a moving panorama of everyday life in northern England in the ‘high’ Victorian era. His evocations of everyday squalor, destitution and the banal grinding violence of working-class lives, alongside the rigours, energies and mindset of Methodism in its heyday, make insightful reading today. 2. Palmer, p. 295. 3. Wolfe, p. 289. 4. Palmer, p. 298.

[late December 1920] [ATL] [Villa Isola Bella, Garavan, Menton] Dear Herbert Palmer, I am sorry that your letter to me should have been opened at the Office.1 But anything that looks like MSS. suffers the same fate before its sent across to me. Now for your letter. Don’t think me unsympathetic. I am not. But look here! There is one thing you must discover – if you want to do your work in this world – and that is that it is no good crying out. Perhaps it helps us to bear our pain but thats all. It stops the ears of those whom we would have listen to us; they hear nothing but the crying. And that – hard as it sounds – antagonises them. It isn’t wrong this should be so. Its hard but its necessary – Life being what it is. There is a law against letting ourselves go. Warriors must be men as well as warriors, or we shall all be shouting together. Do you know, the line in your poem which makes me feel your suffering more than any other – the powerful line? Its: ‘I want to walk with the sheep & swell the fern . . . All things have their flower and their fruit – Pride, Love, Fear, Sorrow, Hysteria.2 The greater part of your poem seems to me the flower & the fruit of hysteria. Its a fine harvest, but cultivate other ground. Dont waste yourself, don’t spend your manhood. And you must – at whatever cost – rid yourself of these feelings of rage and spite and the idea that every man’s hand is against you. You cant afford to feed such vile guests. If you do they will steal every gift you have and poison you into the bargain. Write to me again. I want you to feel I am your friend; I am anxious for you and I wish I could help you. But understand that I think you must change – I think you must make the effort of your life and throw away all your marks of battle before you are a real poet. I know they are your treasure. But thats just why they must go. You are too proud of them. It is useless to write less than the truth to anyone. Forgive me if I hurt you. Yours ever                J.M.M.3



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Notes 1. The Athenaeum’s offices were then at 10 Adelphi Terrace, London. Palmer’s manuscript (MSS) and covering letter had then been forwarded to Menton by Alice Jones, the much-trusted secretary and administrative assistant. See CL1, p. 619. 2. The poem was not included in the anthology Palmer published soon after (Two Foe-Men and Other Poems, 1920). Palmer also published many of his poems in less conventional reviews: Country Life, for instance, and the Wesleyan Magazine. 3. The signature alone attests to the complex double act during JMM’s editorship of the Athenaeum, and the varying degrees of transparency in terms of KM’s involvement. The letter is written in KM’s handwriting, yet its tone and the angle of criticism (‘Don’t waste yourself, don’t spend your manhood’), recalling JMM’s impatience with the too desolately post-war poetry, suggest that he rather than KM was the author.

Sylvia Payne (1887–1949)

Introduction A dozen or so of the earliest extant letters of KM’s are those sent to Sylvia Payne, who kept them all her life, thus providing us with a unique record of KM as a schoolgirl in London. Sylvia and her older sister, Evelyn, were the daughters of (Joseph) Frank Payne, a prestigious London physician and medical historian, whose mother, Eliza Dyer, was the sister of KM’s maternal grandfather, Joseph Dyer. Frank and KM’s mother, Annie, were therefore first cousins, and KM and the Payne girls second cousins. It was through the recommendation of Frank Payne that KM and her sisters were sent to Queen’s College in Harley Street to be educated, since the Payne sisters (and, coincidentally, Ida Baker and her sister) had all gone to Queen’s College junior school, and then on to the main college. Evelyn had left Queen’s College in the summer of 1903, not long after the Beauchamp girls arrived, in order to study at the all-female Oxford college, Lady Margaret Hall. Towards the end of her life, interviewed by Antony Alpers, she ‘recalled Kathleen, with cousinly good humour, as impossibly conceited and perfectly detestable’.1 KM developed a rather unusual attachment to Sylvia, who, by all accounts, was a strange girl, with long red hair and wire spectacles. Since the Payne family lived just one street away in Wimpole Street, Sylvia was a day girl at the school, not a boarder, and thus her friendship with KM, as Baker notes, ‘was mostly expressed in letters’.2 She left Queen’s College in the summer of 1905 but returned to attend some lectures during 1906. Both girls were members of the ‘Swanwick Society’, the College’s poetry-reading circle. Ida Baker explained KM’s attraction for Sylvia, noting her intelligence and artistic sensibility but also her high spirits and general naughtiness: She enjoyed being naughty. She seemed to revel in gathering ‘conduct marks’, and since she was always in a hurry, she could never be bothered to formulate an explanation to put everything right. When frustrated she would murmur to herself something like ‘jug jug’ or ‘tch tch’, which gave her the name of ‘Jug’.3

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sylvia payne  415

Evelyn, however, described her sister – in direct contrast to Baker’s recollection – as ‘shy and reserved, modest and diffident’.4 In 1920, KM would immortalise both Ida and Sylvia in one of her most celebrated stories, ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’. Its original title was ‘The Non-Compounders’, a term referring to older women who attended some of the lectures at Queen’s College (but which would have meant nothing to anyone else). The two spinsters in the story, Con and Jug, were affectionate caricatures of Ida Baker (whose middle name was Constance) and Sylvia. Gerri Kimber Notes 1. Alpers 1980, p. 28n. 2. Baker, p. 28. 3. Baker, p. 28. 4. Alpers 1980, p. 29.

[25 August 1903] [ATL] P.S. [Written sideways] I am sure your age and discretion could suggest a poem much better than I ever could. Please do so!!! Brompton House Horngold Road Malvern My dearest Sylvia. Thanks ever so much for your postcard which I received this morning. I am so glad that you are enjoying Minehead so much. It looks very pretty. We have been doing a good deal of walking since we came. The peculiar feature of this place seems that one cannot get tired. I earnestly believe that you could walk to, well, London, without feeling the slightest fatigued – I expect to come home quite thin, I am sure I quite deserve it. So far I can see no signs of ‘Skeletonism’, I grieve to say. By the way, what would Evelyn1 say to that word, if she saw it in my notes? We went to an open air concert, held in the Promenade Gardens,2 on Thursday night. I should imagine that only local talent had been employed – One capacious gentleman, who looked as though he had lived all his life on pork, cabbage, and stodgy suet puddings, played, or, strictly speaking, made a great noise on the cornet.3 The effect was most harrowing!!!!! Another small prodigy (which is a type of mankind, that I particularly dislike, as a general rule), played ‘Auld Lang Syne’ on the harp. I had visions of the Pfeiffer Hall,4 in my brain – and so did not particularly enjoy it.

416   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 The last I heard of Marion was from Heidelberg.5 My dear, don’t you envy her? I am greedy enough to do so. I am quite anxious for College to open again, much though I like holidays. I have heard from Cornwall6 twice already. Long, long, letters. Now my dear, I must stop. I can see you politely suppressing a yawn. With love to all, and in particular to yourself I am Ever your loving friend Kathleen – Should I have signed myself as cousin? Notes 1. Evelyn Payne, Sylvia’s older sister, had finished her high-school education that summer, and had been accepted as a student at the all-women’s Oxford college, Lady Margaret Hall. 2. The Promenade Gardens in Malvern were opened in 1880; in 1883 the idea was raised to build Assembly Rooms with a concert hall and theatre for civic and arts activities, which gradually developed into the Festival Theatre complex that thrives to this day. 3. KM captures the absurdity and comic theatricality of this, or a very similar, scene in an early entry in her notebook. See CW4, pp. 9–10. 4. Pfeiffer Hall was the elegant assembly hall at Queen’s College, used for concerts and balls; see Kimber 2016, pp. 118–20. The traditional Scottish song ‘Auld Lang Syne’, with lyrics by Robert Burns and with a memorable ‘Farewell’ chorus, was sung at the close of an evening of dancing. 5. KM is possibly referring to a Canadian girl at Queen’s College, Marion Creelman. 6. Eileen Palliser was another New Zealand girl studying at Queen’s. Her bank manager father, Charles, now working in London and with a second home in Cornwall, had been a friend of Harold Beauchamp’s when young. See Kimber 2016, p. 134.

[23 December 1903] [ATL] The Retreat1 Bexley – Kent. 23/xii/03 Dearest Sylvia – I want to write to you this afternoon, so here I am – I am not at all surprised at myself, I knew that I would not wait till you had written. Why should we lose any time in knowing each other, when we have lost so much already.



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I cannot tell you how sorry I am that I shall not see you again. I like you much more than any other girl I have met in England & I seem to see less of you. We just stand upon the threshold of each other’s heart and never get right in. What I mean by ‘heart’ is just this. My heart is a place where everything I love (whether it be in imagination or in truth) has a free entrance. It is where I store my memories, all my happiness and my sorrow and there is a large compartment in it labelled ‘Dreams’. There are many many people that I like very much, but they generally view my public rooms, and they call me false, and mad, and changeable. I would not show them what I was really like for worlds. They would think me madder, I suppose – I wish we could know each other, so that I might be able to say, ‘Sylvia is one of my best friends’. Don’t think that I mean half I look and say to other people. I cannot think why I so seldom am myself. I think I rather hug myself to myself, too much. Don’t you? Not that it is beautiful or precious. It is a very shapeless, bare, undecorated thing just yet. I have been fearfully cross this morning – It was about my music. Yesterday I got a concerto from Tom2 for a Xmas present and I tryed it over with Vera this morning. She counted aloud and said wrong wrong, called me a pig, and then said she would go and tell Aunt Louie3 I was swearing at her. I laugh as I read this now. At the time I felt ill with anger. So much for my excellent temper!! It is quiet here now. I am alone in my bedroom. O don’t you just thank God for quiet. I do. If only it could last though. Something always disturbs it. There is a bird somewhere outside crying* yet for all this, I am sorry, very sorry, to have left London. I like it so very much. Next term I really shall work hard. I must – I am so fearfully idle & conceited. Why I have written this letter, I do not know. Forgive me dear. I do not dare to read it through. I should burn it if I did. Goodbye for the present. I beg of you write soon to Your very loving Friend Kathleen [On back of last page] Private. If you feel absurd or jolly, don’t read this. Private – * At this point there is a tiny drawing of a treble clef and two notes on a stave. Notes 1. ‘The Retreat’ was the home of Henry Herron Beauchamp (1825–1907), KM’s great-uncle and the father of her cousin, Elizabeth von Arnim. He had settled back in England in 1870.

418   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 2. (Thomas) Arnold Trowell (see below, pp. 657–8) had been in Europe with his parents and siblings since September 1903, an extended visit organised to complete the boys’ musical training and launch their careers as musicians. He composed two cello concertos that year – a striking reflection of his image as a child prodigy – the A minor concerto (later classified Opus 16) and the B minor concerto (Opus 15). Their first public performances were the following year. 3. Elizabeth Weiss Lassetter (1834–1919), known as Louise to the family and Aunt Louey to KM and her siblings, was the wife of Henry Herron Beauchamp and the mother of Elizabeth von Arnim.

[6 January 1904] [ATL] Wortley1 Sheffield 6/i/04. My dearest Sylvia I cannot apologise for not having written before. I have no excuse except, I could not. Chad & I came here last Saturday because Bertha, Aunt Louey’s maid has been very ill, and there were so many in the house – We are staying with cousins. Really, I am not enjoying it at all, but I have to pretend I am. O, I do want to see you so. Chad & I shall be in London on Tuesday at 1.30. Do come and see me that afternoon, if you have nothing else to do. I have written a good deal these holidays, and practised, and worked, but I have grown no thinner!!!! I cannot write today. Please don’t think me a pig! I am tired of the sight of paper and of pens. I have had to write 15 N.Z. letters. At present I am sitting in a small room with a large fire and 3 dogs 1 cockatoo 1 canary. My head is thumping like an engine. I am almost too tired to do anything. O do write to me!!!! I know I deserve no letters at all but I want some. I have had one glorious letter from G.W.2 Sylvia dear, if I did not love you very much I would not dare to write to you like this:– With much love Always your affectionate Kass. O I do want to see you so!!!!!!



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[The letter contains the following poem on a separate sheet] The Old Year and the New Year ––––

31/xii/03 Tonight we pass a Milestone on the road One nearer to the great one and the last Slowly we tread, for heavier grows our load And veils of mist are creeping o’er the Past. –––– One Milestone nearer! do we understand We pass so many; sometimes we forget, We have crept closer to the dear Lord’s hand Are we quite ready to receive it yet? –––– The night is dark; our way is hard to find We stumble and alas! we often fall But we have God to pity and to bind Our wounds, if only we but faintly call. –––– O God, our Father, be with us tonight And listen while to thee we feebly pray Let there be all around us a great Light Turning our darkness into brightest Day. –––– Written on New Years Eve.3 –––– Notes 1. The cousins in Sheffield were the in-laws of KM’s great-uncle, Cradock Beauchamp. 2. Gladys Williams (1885–1975) was a former classmate at Queen’s College who, since October, had been a student at Girton, the all-women’s college in Cambridge. She later became a writer and a poet, publishing under the penname of John Presland. 3. The rather earnest, late Victorian idiom here illustrates one of the stages in KM’s poetic apprenticeship, taking her from careful imitation and stylistic observation to pitch-perfect pastiche in the years to come. See CP, p. 42.

420   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [24 January 1904] [ATL] 41 Harley Street W. 24/i/04. Dearest Sylvia – It was ripping of you to write to me such a long letter! I was very pleased to receive it. I certainly do hate fogs. They are abominable. Yesterday I did nothing but practise and I wrote to Gladys and to Tom. I heard from G. yesterday morning. It was a perfectly lovely letter, but so queer. Just exactly like her. I do wish that people did not think her fast, or empty. She has more in her than almost anyone else I know. She has the most glorious ideas about things, and is wonderfully clever – Her letters are just full of keen originality, and power. Do you understand? Perhaps other people would think them foolish. I don’t. O, how thankful I am to be back at College, but, Sylvia, I am ashamed at the way in which I long for German.1 I simply can’t help it. It is dreadful. And when I go into class, I feel I must just stare at him the whole time. I never liked anyone so much. Every day I like him more. Yet on Thursday he was like ice! By the way, is not this heavenly: – ‘To every man, there come noble thoughts which flash across his heart like great white birds’. (Maeterlinck.)2 O, that is wonderful. Great white birds. Is not that perfect?! I wish there was not a night before College. O, I wish you were a boarder!!! What times we would have together. I do love you so, much more each time I see you. So little goes on here. All the girls are so very dull. Is not the condition of the Poor just now awful. Miss Wood3 told us all about the other afternoon, so I have arranged a Celebrity Evening for next Thursday night. Admission sixpence. Gwen Rouse4 is going to help me, and the money is to be sent to a poor parish – On Friday afternoon I went to Mudie’s.5 What a fascinating place it is!! I had some peeps into most lovely books, & the bindings were exquisite. I always think that it is so sinful to publish ‘Bloody Hands’, by Augusta St. John,6 in green leather, & Bleak House, in, paper for 6d.7 ‘Tout marche de trâvers’.8 That is very true! My writing this afternoon is most erratic. I do not know why. You know you always say that you are not 17, well, pardon me, I think you are quite. I mean to work specially hard, this term. I am taking 19 hours. Dear, I must finish this ‘ego’. You must be tired of it With my love from Your loving Friend Kathleen –



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Notes 1. KM’s yearning for ‘German’ is a veiled reference to Queen College’s dashing professor of German, Walter Rippmann (1869–1947), who taught there from 1896 to 1916. He was a brilliant language scholar with degrees in classics, medieval and modern languages, as well as oriental languages. A forthright defender of educational equality for women and a pioneering educationalist throughout his life, he published widely on phonetics, comparative linguistics and the structuring influences of language-learning. Ida Baker hints at an attempted relationship between KM and Rippmann in around 1911: ‘But Katherine would not start with him the new relationship that he seemed to want’ (p. 62). 2. A reference to Maeterlinck’s philosophical essay ‘The Deeper Life’, in which he discusses the confrontation between the human mind, mortality and the sublime. Read in context, the observation is less uplifting and ennobling that might appear at first encounter. He says: To every man there come noble thoughts, that pass across his heart like great white birds. Alas! They do not count; they are strangers whom we are surprised to see, whom we dismiss with importunate gesture. Their time is too short to touch our life. (Maeterlinck, p. 183)

3. 4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

As KM’s diaries and notebooks attest, she read Maeterlinck’s works, and studies about him, extensively during these years, often responding to recommendations from the inspirational Rippmann. Clara Finetta Wood ran the boarding house in Harley Street where the girls from Queen’s College lodged. She was known as ‘Woodie’ amongst the boarders. See also CW4, p. 23. Gwen Rouse was one of KM’s schoolfriends from Queen’s College; Baker describes her as ‘a tall, languid girl from the Isle of Man [. . . with] a mouth that might have belonged to one of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s damsels’ (pp. 26–7). ‘Mudie’s’ was one of London’s most well-known bookshops, a vast establishment on New Oxford Street that began as a lending library and subscription service in 1840. It played a major role in disseminating fiction in the mid- to late nineteenth century, but also in encouraging novelists to tailor their works to meet the expectations of the bookseller. While detective magazines and shilling-shockers offer a host of stories with this title, no work by an Augusta St John has been traced; the reference is possibly KM’s own pastiche of a sensationalist best-seller. Bleak House (1853) is Charles Dickens’s evocative and memorable satire of the arcane machinations of the legal profession, building its plot around the endless law suits and appeals that make up the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. Like Dickens’s other mid-century masterpieces, it is published in one rather hefty volume, or two to three more slender volumes, which could be purchased at relatively modest prices. (Fr.): Everything’s going awry.

422   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [25 March 1904] [ATL] 41 Harley Street W. 25: iii: 04. I am about to presume on your good nature, my dearest Sylvia. I had to write to Mac Neile1 tonight, and I don’t know her address. Would you be so kind as to address the letter I sent inclosed, and post it as soon as possible. I am afraid this sounds so rude and ‘familiar’ of me, but you are the only person I would dare to ask to do such a thing, so please, dear, forgive me. The letter is about going to Mac Neile on Monday. That is why it is so urgent. Hoping to see you on Monday, and also hoping that this won’t give you any trouble.          Believe me to be        Ever your very loving friend            Kass Note 1. ‘Mac Neile’ has not been identified but refers possibly to a mutual schoolfriend. The idiosyncratic spelling may well be KM’s rendering of McNeil, a more likely – and not untypical – family name.

[1 April 1904] [ATL] 41 Harley Street W. 1: IV: 04 I am rather thankful dearest Sylvia, that the Fates did not give me my cue and bid me enter on the First of April. Though we, of this generation pride ourselves upon non superstition, and many other most delightful qualities that did not belong to our great grand mothers, still I should not like to walk in and make my bow hand in hand with the first of April, however dear and mirthful he may be. And here is my holiday motto: – ‘The world is so full of a number of things I am sure we should all be as happy as Kings’.1 Well known? you say. Yes, very well known. It vies in popularity with the word ‘feeble’ or ‘help!’. Still I think it is very excellent. I have only



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discovered very very lately how absurdly blind I am – I mean, concerning happiness. I shall print a huge advertisement and send a man all round London with it. This is what it shall be: – ‘The way to Happiness. Marvellous invention. Patent Food. Free on Payment of 1d stamp’. Then when I receive countless myriads of letters enclosing 1d stamp I shall send each person a nice dainty little box tied up with red ribbon. Inside they will find a dear little chubby Cupid with a large sized bow and arrows, and the direction shall be: – ‘Apply this to the heart. Money sent back if the result is not accomplished’. Sylvia forgive this nonsense if you can dear. I feel so happy myself. Why not be happy? We have so little time in which to live at all! Write and tell me what you think of this.          Ever yours with love             Kass. Note 1. See ‘Happy Thought’, from A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885) by the Scottish poet, novelist and travel-writer Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94).

[before 10 July 1904] [ATL] [Queen’s College, Harley Street, London] In my bedroom. I am so sorry to hear that you are ill, Sylvia dear. Ida has been in just now to tell me that she called at lunch time! I am sure that Miss Harper1 will miss you in Latin. I am afraid I was very dull and silly last night. To tell you the truth I felt so ‘played out’. College has been as dull as possible today. I suppose it was because of the holidays. I wrote to Gladys last night. I do hope to hear from her soon. Dear, do take care of yourself, and come back to College soon. Much love from Your ‘friend’ (?) Kathleen.

424   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Note 1. Miss Barbara Harper was a dynamic and exciting English teacher at Queen’s College. KM wrote a poem with the following rather bizarre title – ‘An Escapade Undertaken by A Green Raspberry, & A Kidney Bean’ – in tribute to her, possibly as a poetry exercise devised by Miss Harper herself, her name being the refrain of all six stanzas. See Kimber 2016, p. 107, and CP, p. 17.

[10 July 1904] [ATL] 41 Harley St. W. Thursday. I was so glad to receive your P.C.1 tonight, dearest Sylvia. Ridge Cap2 will do you ever so much good – How I envy you seeing country and hills and flowers and all the many good things that just delight my heart in the country. Hills, especially are such dear friends of mine – they are so strong, so noble, and such an example to our wretched selves – if only we would take it. There is someone playing on the violin next door. I can hear them so plainly. The lamp in the Mews below is flickering & moving about restlessly, and my flowers in my window are nodding and talking to me at a great rate. Funny how everything grows to be a friend if you live near it long enough! That lamp in the Mews I feel is an old old comrade of mine. In the evening I just wait to see it lighted, and it so sociable it simply beams all over for the rest of the night. If I had been a Cave Dweller I should have worshipped Light, I think.3 Wouldn’t you? The Portland Square Gardens4 are very beautiful just now though, to my great sorrow the irises are over. I mourned for them very much for a day or two, but now I have transferred my affection to the copper beeches – Gladys comes home on Monday. How I long to see her! I have no news and my letter is dull so I shall not bore you longer. Get strong dear and take care of yourself – Your friend Kathleen. Notes 1. P.C. is KM’s shorthand for postcard.



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2. Ridge Cap was a cottage set in nine acres of grounds in Shottermill, very close to the historic village of Haslemere on the Surrey/West Sussex border. The headmistress (the school term was ‘Lady Resident’) Camilla Croudace (1844–1926) lived there outside term-time and would sometimes have girls to stay. See below, p. 426, n. 3. 3. In Book VII of The Republic, Plato retells one of the most famous Socratean parables, told in dialogue form: the so-called ‘allegory of the cave’. The cavedwellers are shackled in their world of darkness where they see only shapes and shadows cast by screened, indirect firelight; they inevitably take these for ‘the real world’, since it is their only experience of them. When some of the cave prisoners break free and discover the world outside, and the extent of their previous delusions, they become worshippers of the sunlight; they are unable, however, to convince their fellows inside of the truth of their observations and experiences. 4. Portland Square Gardens in the centre of Marylebone, London, were just round the corner from the school’s boarding house; a large, privately owned and gated area, the beautifully tended garden provided a sense of rest and poise in a busy neighbourhood.

[26 December 1904] [ATL] ‘The Retreat’ 26. XII. 04. My dearest Sylvia. I received your sweet little Kalendar by the post this morning. It was dear of you to give it to me, and all the year it will be reminding me of you, wherever I am. So far, I have enjoyed myself immensely. The days have flown past, without one dull moment. There has been so much to do. I have had some good practises too, and my cousin who is staying here has a glorious tenor voice.1 I am so fond of a tenor voice, it is so poetical, I think. It is a very quiet day here. Do you know the kind of day when you can almost hear the grass growing.2 I love days like that. I have been for a long long walk, and the ground was fresh and wet, and the hills, all brown and bare, were covered with a thin veil of mist. Every sound that broke the stillness seemed to come from thousands of miles away. I was thinking of you, too, and of how strange it is that we two, who wish to be friends so much, don’t seem to be able to. I wonder why. It seems as though the Fates did it on purpose. Yet the more I know you the more I want to. College is so full of work, and the days are so short, we don’t seem to find time for talking together. It is only by your letters, that I really feel I know you. Wouldn’t it be glorious if we went to Ridge Cap3 together, and had long long walks down in the copse, and then talks at night, or if in the summer we went away to the same place. Sylvia, we must try to.

426   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Among my Xmas presents I got a photo of the blessed German baby.4 I am longing to show it to you. I was so devoted to her. I have written another little tale about her. It is better than the others, so I am going to send it to the Mag.5 Some people seem to like those ‘baby’ stories, and I love writing them. Your poem in this Mag, was just lovely. I like it more and more. I do hope you will write a lot now, and send one regularly. I am sure that you could. Isn’t there a strange fascination about College? I am always thinking of it. It seems to become quite part of one’s life in time. I don’t know what I shall do when I leave, and think of it going on in the dear old way, and new girls coming, and the old ones all gone away. There is really not much news to tell you today, for little has happened, and as yet I have read nothing. There is another baby here. She is four and a half. Her name is Estherelle.6 She is beautiful, with long gold hair far past her waist, and great blue wonderful eyes. When she kneels in front of the fire with the light on her hair, & the heat flushing her dear little face, she is like a fairy or a little picture child. She sings in a little shaky voice about a black-bird, and says the drollest things. She has been telling me about an ‘“a” gusting mis’able mouse’ all the morning, and is so affectionate. Are you very fond of small children? They always will captivate me – Dear, do write to me soon, and tell me about what you are doing, and about yourself. I am wanting to hear so much. Auf wiedersehen!7 Write soon, and Believe me to be Your very loving Kass. Notes 1. KM’s very musical cousin was Henry Beauchamp (1864–1948), elder brother of Elizabeth von Arnim. He was entrusted with the safety and well-being of KM and her sisters once Harold and Annie Beauchamp returned to New Zealand, a role that earned him the nickname ‘Guardy’. He was a singer and voice teacher at the Royal Academy of Music, and also the conductor of the Academy’s junior choir. 2. In the long ballad-narrative ‘The Idiot Boy’ (1798), by the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth, the distraught female character Betty Foy looks for her vulnerable son, the lost ‘idiot boy’, in the dead of night, where nothing can be heard but the call of owlets, while in the background, ‘The streams with softest sound are flowing, / The grass you almost hear it growing’ (Wordsworth and Coleridge, pp. 92–110, ll. 295–6). 3. Camilla Croudace, by the time the Beauchamp girls arrived, had been the headmistress – or to give her the correct Queen’s College title, the Lady Resident – since 1881. She was a formidable woman and perfect for the institution: firm but fair, with a sense of humour and not easily shocked.



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Favoured girls, both past and present, were invited to weekend at Ridge Cap, her cottage in Haslemere, Surrey, and KM was a visitor on at least one occasion, writing in the visitors’ book: ‘I have never spent happier holidays. Is there anything more beautiful than English woods in spring?’ See Kimber 2016, pp. 107–8. 4. The ‘German’ baby was Felicitas von Arnim (1899–1916), the fourth daughter of KM’s cousin Elizabeth, who was married to the German count Graf Henning von Arnim-Schlagenthin. The April Baby’s Book of Tunes which Elizabeth published in 1900, a playfully part-fictional story of three little girls and their favourite nursery rhymes, may have prompted KM to compose ‘baby tales’ of her own. 5. Three of KM’s tales inspired by the pictures and accounts of her little cousins were published in the school magazine between December 1903 and July 1905. See CW1, pp. 10–2; 22–8. 6. Estherel was the daughter of Henry Beauchamp (‘Guardy’) and his wife, Katharine (Kitty) Helms. 7. (Ger.): Goodbye.

[15 February 1905] [ATL] 9 John Street W 15. II 05. My dearest Sylvia, Many many thanks for my Valentine! It is the first I have ever seen or received, so it is quite an occurrence – It was dear & good of you to have sent it me – Well, here am I in bed propped up with pillows, surrounded with flowers & books and feeling quite ‘perky’1 – Still I long for College, and for 2 whole feet! My first operation is an event that I shall ever look back to with horror and amusement – It is amusing to think of such an old carthorse as I am being in such a condition as not even able to do my hair! The Nurses are all dears – I am quite D.V.2 on the matron – What a day it is! The sparrows are having a Vocal Class outside my window, & the sky is blue – There is a cab stand below my window – I never knew such cheerful souls as cabbies are – they do nothing but shriek with laughter. Sometimes I wake up in the night, and a cab comes, alone – ’Allo, Bill, ’ow are yer? calls a cab man, and straight way the whole number scream & guffaw. What dears they must be. I have had numbers of visitors, and that blessed Ida writes to me every day, & tells me about College. My head is full of plots for stories – I have not written any down yet, because it is so difficult in bed –

428   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Elsa3 came to see me yesterday looking beautiful. She brought me heaps of books, & this house appears to be full of them – I have read Amiel,4 & I am going to be frank – I like him in bits, but I do not think he is always logical – I hope I have not offended you dear. There is no news from me, but I thought I must write & thank you for your dearness –     Much love from your loving friend Kass – Notes 1. KM was writing from a private nursing home, having had minor surgery on one of her feet. 2. D.V. was a Queen’s College idiom meaning to have a crush on someone, derived from ‘the initials of one of Miss Croudace’s infatuation-prone nieces’ (Kimber 2016, p. 107). 3. Elsa Cutler was a fellow boarder at Queen’s College. 4. Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821–81) was a Swiss writer and idealist philosopher, remembered now for his expansive journal, twelve volumes long, in the definitive version first published in French. It had a significant impact on writers of the time (for example, Lytton Strachey and Leo Tolstoy), and was discussed and admired across Europe from Britain to Russia. The poise and clarity of Amiel’s style were frequently cited, but above all his work was praised for its scrupulous introspective honesty, its philosophical depth, and its intimate record of how the mind records the stirring events going on around the contemplative diarist. It thus became a reference for Modernist writers, philosophy scholars and historians.

[24 April 1906] [ATL] 30 Manchester Street W. 24. iv. 06 My dearest Cousin, I was so delighted to get your letter yesterday – and to hear what a fine time you are having. Truth to tell – I am just longing for the country – and especially for pine woods – they have a mystical fascination for me – but all trees have. Woods and the sea – both are perfect. We, have been staying here1 since last Friday with Father and Mother – and have had a very good time – I don’t think I have ever laughed more – They are both just the same and we leave for New Zealand in October. Strange thought – for some things I am very glad, now – but I feel as though all my English life was over – already. Do you know – I have a fancy – that when I am there, we shall write far more



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often and know each other far better than we do now. I do hope it will be so – dear – because I have always wanted us to be friends – and we never seem to pass a certain point – once a Term, perhaps – I feel ‘Sylvia & I really know each other now’, and next time we meet – the feeling is gone – A great change has come into my life since I saw you last. Father is greatly opposed to my wish to be a professional ’cellist or to take up the ’cello to any great extent – so my hope for a musical career is absolutely gone –2 It was a fearful disappointment – I could not tell you what I have felt like – and do now when I think of it – but I suppose it is no earthly use warring with the Inevitable – so in the future I shall give all my time to writing. There are great opportunities for a girl in New Zealand – she has so much time and quiet – and we have an ideal little ‘cottage by the sea’ where I mean to spend a good deal of my time. Do you love solitude as I do – especially if I am in a writing mood – and will you do so – too. Write, I mean, in the Future. I feel sure that you would be splendidly successful – I am so keen upon all women having a definite future – are not you? The idea of sitting still and waiting for a husband is absolutely revolting – and it really is the attitude of a great many girls – Do you know I have read none of the books that you mentioned. Is not that shocking – but – Sylvia – you know that little ‘Harold Brown’ shop in Wimpole Shop3 – I picked up a small collection of poems entitled ‘The Silver Net’ by Louis Vintras4 – and I liked some of them immensely. The atmosphere is so intense. He seems to me to belong to that school which flourished just a few years ago – but which now has not a single representative – a kind of impressionist literature school – Don’t think that I even approve of them – but they interest me – Dowson5 – Sherard6 – School. It rather made me smile to read of you wishing you could create your fate – O, how many times I have felt just the same. I just long for power over circumstances – & always feel as though I could do such a great deal more good than is done – & give such a lot of pleasure – aber7 – – – – – – – – We have not seen a great deal of the Bakers,8 but they are flourishing. Mother asks me if you know a house suitable for a lady two wee children and two maids anywhere near? It is just by the way. I am enjoying this Hotel life. There is a kind of feeling of irresponsibility about it that is fascinating. Would you not like to try all sorts of lives – one is so very small – but that is the satisfaction of writing – one can impersonate so many people – Au revoir – dear friend. Will you give my love to Cousin Ellie & Marjory9 I send you a great deal.         Your friend             K.

430   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Notes 1. Harold and Annie Beauchamp had arrived from New Zealand on 13 April, and the family were now staying at ‘Fripp’s’, an elegant hotel on Manchester Street in Marylebone, from where they could organise their full London and family tour, prior to their departure planned later that year. 2. The turning point was also noted in her diary a few months later. See CW4, p. 41. Harold Beauchamp’s opposition to his daughter’s musical ambitions reflected contemporary, patriarchal disapproval of women earning their living from a career in music – which was only a little better than taking to the stage. The cello was also considered ungainly, and the sitting position of the player was deemed unladylike. 3. ‘Harold Brown’s’ at 1 Wimpole Street was a second-hand bookseller, manuscript and print auctioneer. 4. The Silver Net was a book of poems published in a limited edition by the publishers ‘At the Unicorn’ in 1903. Louis Vintras (1867–1934) was a littleknown Anglo-French poet and novelist of the late Decadent era, whose works in the 1890s and 1910s quickly disappeared from view, having met with little critical success: the Athenaeum on 22 June 1895 describes the fiction as ‘sensational rubbish’, p. 799. Poetry and writing were, however, a hobby; he was better known as an epidemiologist and physician, working at the French convalescent hospital in Brighton and for the French Literary Society [Société des gens de lettres]; he was also attached to the French dispensary and hospital on Shaftesbury Avenue, London. His portrait was sketched by the Anglo-French painter Alphonse Legros in 1904, when he was professor of portraiture at the Slade School of Art. 5. Ernest Dowson (1867–1900) was an English poet and novelist associated with fin-de-siècle Decadence; he was also one of the Rhymers. KM had possibly encountered his work via her German teacher, Walter Rippmann, or the author Arthur Symons – whom she was reading avidly at the time. Symons devotes an entire chapter to Dowson’s poetic craft in his Studies in Prose and Verse (1904). See also CW4, p. 109. 6. Robert Harborough Sherard (1861–1943) was a British writer and journalist, who had been a close friend of Oscar Wilde’s; his Life of Oscar Wilde was published in London that year, a high Romantic portrait that KM would read and evoke later with her contemporaries (see, for example, CL1, pp. 70–1; 282–3). Although writers like Dowson and Sherard did not constitute a school in the strict sense, they were both staunch admirers of Wilde and ardent defenders of a certain fin-de-siècle Anglo-French Aestheticist mindset. Vintras, alluded to above, would appear to have been associated with them, and with Symons, for a while, on both sides of the Channel. 7. (Ger.): But. 8. In the spring of 1903, at about the same time that the Beauchamps arrived in England, Ida Baker’s mother died of typhoid fever. Her father, a doctor in the Indian army, now worked and lived in nearby Welbeck Street. See Kimber 2016, p. 127. 9. Ellie probably refers to Sylvia’s mother, Eliza Dyer, the first cousin of Annie Beauchamp. Marjory has not been identified.



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[8 January 1907] [ATL] 75 Tinakori Rd 8.1.07. My dearest Sylvia – I have to thank you for really charming letters – Please believe that I appreciate your letters really more than I can say – And your life sounds so desirable – also you gave me a sudden illuminating glimpse of chrysanthemums. At that moment you might have known RLS.1 The New Year has come – I cannot really allow myself to think of it yet. I feel absolutely ill with grief and sadness – here – it is a nightmare – I feel that sooner or later I must wake up – & find myself in the heart of it all again – and look back upon the past months as – – – – cobwebs – a hideous dream. Life here’s impossible – I can’t see how it can drag on – I have not one friend – and no prospect of one – My dear – I know nobody – and nobody cares to know me – There is nothing on earth to do – nothing to see – and my heart keeps flying off – Oxford Circus – Westminster Bridge at the Whistler hour2 – London by hansom – my old room – the meetings of the Swans3 – and a corner in the Library – It haunts me all so much – and I feel it must come back soon – How people ever wish to live here I cannot think – Dear – I can’t write anything – Tonight I feel too utterly hopelessly full of Heimweh.4 If you knew how I hunger for it all – and for my friends – this absence of companionship – this starvation – that is what it is – I had better stop – hadn’t I – because I can think of nothing joyous. I have been living too – in the atmosphere of Death – My Grandmother died on New Year’s Eve5 – my first experience of a personal loss – it horrified me – the whole thing – Death never seemed revolting before – This place – steals your Youth – that is just what it does – I feel years and years older and sadder. But I shall come back because here I should die – Goodnight. It is almost frightening to say goodnight across such a waste of waters – but dear – please – think of me always – in silence – or when our letters speak as        Ever your loving friend                  Kass. Notes 1. Sylvia’s evocative mention of chrysanthemums may have triggered a number of associations with Robert Louis Stevenson’s work in KM’s mind, the two most likely being either ‘The Flowers’, from A Child’s Garden of Verses, which starts from the poetic beauty of their names, or a short, more philosophical and very Proustian passage from his extended short story ‘Will O’ the Mill’:

432   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 It is the property of things seen for the first time, or for the first time after long, like the flowers in spring, to reawaken in us the sharp edge of sense and that impression of mystic strangeness which otherwise passes out of life with the coming of years; but the sight of a loved face is what renews a man’s character from the fountain upwards. (Stevenson, p. 83) 2. The lights and cityscape of London around Westminster Bridge, especially at dawn and by twilight, were favourite subjects amongst Impressionist artists in Britain. The most likely reference here is Nocturne: Grey and Gold – Westminster Bridge (1872–4) by the American-born Impressionist artist and art critic James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), who lived most of his life in Britain but also travelled widely in both Europe and North and South America. Many of his most memorable pictures seek inspiration in music and musical forms – inter-art dialogues to which KM would have been sensitive. She gained many of her earliest insights into his inspirational role on the arts from a chapter written by Symons in his Studies in Seven Arts (1897). 3. The Swans, or Swanwick Society, was Queen’s College’s literary society and poetry-reading circle, named after a pioneering feminist and dedicated educationalist, Anna Swanick (1813–99), one of whose last public acts was to read a paper on the study of poetry at the school’s fiftieth Jubilee ceremony in May 1898. 4. (Ger.) Homesickness. 5. KM’s much-loved maternal grandmother, Margaret Isabella Dyer (1839– 1906), had died on 31 December 1906.

[4 March 1908] [ATL] By the Sea

March 4th

My dear Cousin – I am – you see, at last writing you a letter – because I must tell you – here tonight Sylvia – that I love you – far more than I loved you in England – that I would – such an immeasurable great deal – to open wide this door – and welcome you in to the fire – and to the raging sea which breaks & foams against the yard fence. Summer is over with us – there are briar berries in a green jar on the table – and an autumn storm is raging – The sea has never seemed so high – so fierce – It dashes against the rocks with a sound like thunder – Last night I was lying in my bunk – I could not sleep – I was thinking of you – Do you realise – I wonder – Cousin – how your voice charmed me at the Swanick meetings – I cannot exactly define what I mean – but it always made me feel I was very near you indeed – When I slept I dreamed that I came back to visit College – the only girl I knew in the Library was Marjory1 – she was not at all surprised to see me – I see her now – pushing back the ribbon in her hair – you know the way she had – and I asked for you – She said you were with Tudge2 – and then



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I saw you standing by the window in the Waiting room – My dear – I felt I must run and put my arms round you and just say ‘Sylvia’ but you nodded & then walked away – and I did not move – It was a terrible dream – How much has happened since we two walked together to the New Barnet Station – My life has been so strange – full of either sorrow – or excitement – or disgust or happiness – In a year to have lived so much! And I have not made a friend. It is no good I can have men friends – they persist in asking for something else – Do you know Sylvia five men has asked me to marry them – And now you will put down this letter and say ‘Kass is a second Sylvia Gifford’,3 but it is the stupid truth – I have been reading – French & English – writing and lately have seen a great many Balls – and loved them – and dinners – and receptions. They have such a different meaning for me now – and here – I have finished My First Book.4 If it never gets published – you shall laugh with me over its absurdities – Also I hope to leave for London next month – It is not unwise of me – it is the only thing to be done – I cannot live with Father – and I must get back because I know I shall be successful – look at the splendid tragic optimism of youth! One day – you must please know my brother – He knows you very well indeed – and he and I mean to live together – later on. I have never dreamed of loving a child as I love this boy. Do not laugh at me when I tell you I feel so maternal towards him. He is intensely affectionate and sensitive – he reads a great deal – draws with the most delicate sympathetic touch – and yet is a thoroughly brave healthy boy. Do not let me write of him – he is away at school – and if I go back next month we may not meet for years – I hear, constantly, from Ida. You know I love her very much indeed – I am – Sylvia – the most completely unsatisfactory disappointing – dull friend it is possible to conceive – and when we meet again you will think – that is enough – cela suffit5 – Chaddie & I – with our maid – are living alone at this little cottage built on the rocks – It has only three rooms – two bedrooms fitted with bunks – and a wide living room – We had both been feeling wretchedly ill – and bored with Wellington – oh, the tedium vitae of 19 years! so have come here – where we bathe and row and walk in the bush or by the sea – and read – and I write – while she pursues the gentle art of fashioning camisoles. One could not be lonesome here – I seem to love it more each day – and the sea is a continually new sensation with me – Our life is absolutely free – absolutely happy – and our maid is – Sylvia – we just die laughing – She is reading Marie Corelli6 now – needless to remark Miss Corelli is her Messiah – and she treats Chaddie and me like slightly troublesome babies – Oh, do come – my Friend & spend a week with me – Have you received one tenth of my wireless messages? I do not feel that I have been away from you one day. Now I can feel your hand clasping mine – but the wasted years when we might have

434   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 been friends – But I was always afraid then – & I am now – that you do not know me – & when you do – you will hate me – Still – Sylvia – I love you – very dearly – and I shall do so always – Kass Notes 1. Marjorie Wilensky was a fellow schoolfriend at Queen’s. 2. ‘Tudge’ was clearly a schoolfriend at Queen’s, but her exact identity has remained untraced. 3. Like Marjorie and Tudge mentioned above, Sylvia Gifford was a schoolfriend. 4. KM and her close friend at the time, the older Edith Bendall, who was a professional artist, had compiled a book of poetry, A Children’s Book of Verse, probably all written by KM alone, complete with drawings by Bendall. They sent it to a publisher; nothing, however, came of the project. The poems are all in the slightly quaint, sentimental vein that KM used in much of her very early poetry, midway between imitation and more playful pastiche. See CP, pp. 50–79. 5. (Fr.) That’s enough. 6. The British-born writer Marie Corelli (1855–1924) was one of the best-selling 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. For KM’s notes on Corelli, see CW4, pp. 29–31.

[3 December 1910] [ATL]

3 XII 10

132, CHEYNE WALK,     CHELSEA. S.W.

Dearest Cousin – The Bakers were away when your letter arrived, and therefore a delay in forwarding it to me – I wish I could convey to you through the all too slight medium of a letter the sorrow I feel for you and the sympathy and love I would like to give you in your loss. I had no idea that Cousin Frank1 had been ill for so long – Sylvia, darling – Come and see me whenever you feel inclined – just let me know with a card – I am always here – Your loving Cousin Kathleen.



sylvia payne  435

Note 1. Sylvia’s father, the distinguished physician and historian of medicine Joseph Frank Payne (1840–1910), upon whose recommendation the Beauchamp girls had been enrolled at Queen’s College, had died on 16 November that year.

[mid-September 1912] [ATL] Runcton Cottage Runcton Near Chichester. Dearest Cousin, I was glad to hear from you. And we are quite near each other for Selsey is only about five miles from here. A train comes part of the way & then stops and a road leads to Runcton Cottage. Is there any way in which you could come over & spend the day? Id be more than happy, darling, to have you for longer than a few minutes. Do try! I want to talk over heaps of things with you. I want you to see our house – which is just ‘settled’ – for I dont know how many years . . It charms me – perhaps because it feels so much like ‘home’ and there is a garden and trees that I am beginning to know . . . At present I dont care any more for cities. Theres no time to grow in them or to discover the dusk and feel the rain cloud and hear the wind rise and fall. I feel, in the country, sadly lacking in grace. But I feel that true happiness dwelleth not in cities – – Please come if possible – & stay the night – Id like to ask you for a long visit but just now we are so frightfully busy trying to recover from the expense of moving that we’re working too strenuously for time for even the people whom we love –     Yours always          Kathleen [23 September 1914] [ATL] [Postcard] [Rye] Dear Cousin, Dont bother to send me the book. Im coming home on Friday – & there is really no time for reading here. Neither is there even the smell of a cottage at 5/- a week! But the country is pretty – sheep & willows & little streams – pretty, pious country – Come to tea on Sunday will you – if youre not busy –                 Yours                  Kathleen

John Campbell Perkins (1866–1916)

Introduction John Charles Campbell Perkins, D.S.O, who lived in Poona, India, was Auditor General of Military Accounts for the Western Circle, a part of India which today covers the modern states of Gujarat and Rajasthan, together with parts of Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka, as well as Sind in Pakistan. He married Charlotte Mary Beauchamp, KM’s sister (known variously as Chaddie or Marie by the family), on 26 May 1913 in Wellington, and left her a widow just three years later, dying in Mhow, India, on 27 February 1916. Gerri Kimber [5 or 6 May 1913] [HRC] [The Gables, Cholesbury, Bucks] May 5th or 6th Dear ‘John’, Do not think me bold to address you in so informal a fashion but you are going to marry my sister & I cannot feel that her lover could be quite strange to me. I want to send you my sincerest good wishes. And to say I think you are the most fortunate of men to marry so enchanting a woman as Marie – Marie and I were very close to each other when we were little girls – and whole pieces of my memory are planted with her sweet and charming flowers. In fact whenever I think of my sister I see her walking in our garden with a little smile on her lips and a great posy in her arms. I am sure that is how she walks over the world. It is difficult for me to write to you because Im such a conceited and proud creature that I can hardly imagine a man ‘good enough’ for Marie. Forgive my frankness, but I cant explain otherwise my difficulty. I hope that we shall meet one day. Bring her to England – soon – Bless you both – Katherine Mansfield.

    436

Eric Pinker (1891–1973)

Introduction Eric Seabrooke Pinker was born on 29 November 1891 in Chiswick, the eldest of the three children of James Brand Pinker and Mary Elizabeth Pinker (née Seabrooke). After attending St Edmund’s School in Surrey as a boarder, he was a student at Westminster School from September 1905 to December 1908. Pinker enlisted in the army in April 1914, several months before the outbreak of World War One, and he remained in service for nearly five years: in 1915, he served in Egypt, and was then in France from July 1916, receiving the Military Cross in January 1918. Around February 1919, Pinker entered his father’s firm, James B. Pinker and Son (for more information, please see my Introduction to James Brand Pinker in this volume, p. 445). On 19 May 1921, Pinker married Margit Vibege Watney and, after his father’s sudden death in February 1922, took over the business. All of KM’s letters to Eric Pinker were therefore written in the short period between James Pinker’s demise and her own death the following January. These letters, written in the clipped manner of business correspondence, show KM negotiating serial rights for her stories on both sides of the Atlantic, and her loyalty to Constable & Co. as her preferred publisher. After KM’s death, Pinker continued to place her work in magazines across the American market, as evidenced in the extensive correspondence held in the firm’s archives at Northwestern University. In 1925, Eric’s younger brother, James Ralph Pinker, joined the family firm; in 1926, his wife filed for divorce, and Pinker married the American actress Adrienne Morrison the following year. After Pinker emigrated to the United States in 1930, leaving his brother James to run the London office as vice-president, he established a New York branch of the family firm (named J. B. Pinker and Son, Inc., while the London branch remained James B. Pinker and Son). At this point, the agency’s description changed to ‘Literary, Dramatic and Motion Picture (or Film) Agents’, and Pinker’s wife became an active partner in

    437

438   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 the business. The agency was hit hard by the financial depression of the 1930s, however, and both brothers responded by embezzling client funds. In March 1939, Eric Pinker was arrested in New York City on charges of grand larceny. E. Phillips Oppenheim, a celebrated writer of mystery novels, accused Pinker of failing to forward $21,000 as payment. After pleading guilty, Pinker was sentenced to a prison term of up to five years. Following this ignoble turn of events, the family firm was formally dissolved in 1941. Pinker died in New York City in October 1973. Chris Mourant

[29 March 1922] [N]

29 iii 1922

Victoria Palace Hotel 6/8 Rue Blaise Desgoffe Rue de Rennes Paris.

Dear Mr Pinker, I am so very sorry that I did not hear of your father’s death before now.1 Please accept my sincere sympathy. I do trust that my ignorance did not pain you, but I live remote from people at present and I hear little of what has happened. I shall be most grateful if you will continue to look after my work. Yours sincerely Katherine Mansfield. Note 1. The professional literary agent James Brand Pinker (1863–1922, see Introduction and KM’s correspondence with him, below, pp. 445–65) had helped launch the careers of an impressive number of emerging Modernist writers in and around London in the first decades of the century. His essential mediating role between book binders, printers and lending libraries also had an indelible influence on the new book market. He had died suddenly of pneumonia in New York on 8 February.



eric pinker  439

[30 March 1922] [N]

March 30 1922

Victoria Palace Hotel Rue Blaise Desgoffe Paris 6eme

Dear Mr Pinker, Many thanks for your letter. First, in regard to the novel – – I may and I may not write one. But in any case it is so uncertain that I should greatly prefer that it should not be mentioned in any negociations. I know myself well enough to assure you that the only safe moment for mentioning a novel by me is when you have the MS of it actually in your hands. Second, as to leaving Constables. Constables have treated me well enough; but I am under no sort of obligation to them. As I am largely dependent on my work, I naturally wish to go to the publisher who will pay me best. But I should like Constables to be given the refusal of my next book of stories at the best price offered for it by anyone else. Third, with regard to the serial rights of my next book of stories I have already promised the British serial rights of a sequence of twelve short stories to Mr Clement Shorter for the ‘Sphere’.1 This sequence will (according to my present plans) form the principal long story in my new book, and be a third part of the ‘story’ which began with ‘Prelude’ and was continued in ‘At The Bay’. I have already mentioned something of this to you, I believe. I mention it again because it seems that it may be a hindrance to your offering the serial rights and the book rights of my next volume of stories together to the same publisher. I hope this will give you a clear idea of my position. Yours sincerely, Katherine Mansfield. Eric Pinker Esq., London. Note 1. Following the successful reception of many of the stories in The Garden Party first published in The Sphere, KM and Clement Shorter, the editor of the magazine, agreed on the idea of, and the terms for, a follow-up series of stories for developing the lives of the Sheridan family in ‘At the Bay’. See CW2, p. 495, and CW4, pp. 418–19.

440   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [2 April 1922] [N]

2 iv 1922

Victoria Palace Hotel 6/8 Rue Blaise Desgoffe Rue de Rennes Paris.

Dear Mr Pinker, I have received your letter but the forms were not enclosed. As soon as I receive them they shall be signed and returned to you. With regard to my last letter I confess that thinking it over I feel I might do better with a change of publisher. This book on the strength of its reviews (it has been most extensively reviewed) ought to have sold more if it had been more advertised. It had a chance of going really well, I fancy, but it seems to me Constable did not make the use they might of – of their opportunity. I have received numerous letters, too, from the kind of people who comprise the reading public which prove it had a chance of popularity. (I haven’t any desire to be fashionable and exclusive or to write for the intelligenzia only.) But these are of course the opinions of a ‘lay man’. The real point is I shall have to make as much money as I can on my next book – my path is so dotted with doctors. Yours sincerely Katherine Mansfield.

[16 April 1922] [N]

16 iv 1922

Victoria Palace Hotel 6/8 Rue Blaise Desgoffe Rue de Rennes Paris.

Dear Mr Pinker, Please excuse me for not having acknowledged your cheque for £27 . 8 . 2 sooner. Thank you very much. I enclose a second copy of my five-weekly story for The Nation.1 The other copy I sent direct to be in time for next week’s issue. Can you dispose of these second copies in America?



eric pinker  441

And would you kindly send me those forms to sign? I hope they have not been lost in the post. Yours sincerely Katherine Mansfield. Note 1. The Nation and Athenaeum published only three of KM’s stories that year: ‘The Doll’s House’, ‘The Fly’ (which had appeared earlier that year) and ‘Honeymoon’ (included in the 29 April issue. See CW2, pp. 476–9; 488–92.

[27 April 1922] [N]

April 27 1922

Victoria Palace Hotel Rue Blaise Desgoffe, Paris 6eme

Dear Mr Pinker, I thank you for your letter of April 22. You are right in thinking that my next book of stories will contain about 60,000 words, of which the English serial rights of 24,000 are already sold to ‘The Sphere’. In addition to these there are four stories which have already appeared serially, which I intend to include in my next book. This disposes of a further 8000 words, say 30,000 in all, leaving 30,000 words still undisposed of serially. As far as I can foresee – – it is extremely difficult to be definite about work that is still unwritten – – these 30,000 words will be composed of 8 stories, – – 3 of about 5000 words, 3 of 3–4000 words, and 2 short ones of 2000 words. If Messrs Constable enter into this arrangement and buy the serial rights of these unsold 30,000 words at £8 a thousand, I should be content with £100 in advance on the book rights. If, however, the arrangement falls through and they do not buy the serial rights at this price, I should not consider £100 adequate. But, as you say, £8 a thousand is a better price than I have hitherto received for serial rights, and that would compensate for the rather small advance on the book royalties. With many thanks for your care of my interests,     I remain        Yours sincerely,         Katherine Mansfield.

442   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [3 May 1922] [N] PS. I enclose the one and only account I have received with regard to the sale of Bliss.1 Is not another one due?

3 v 1922

Victoria Palace Hotel Rue Blaise Desgoffe Rue de Rennes Paris.

Dear Mr Pinker, Very many thanks for your letter. About In a German Pension.2 I think it would be very unwise to republish it. Not only because its a most inferior book (which it is) but I have, with my last book, begun to persuade the reviewers that I don’t like ugliness for ugliness sake. The intelligenzsia might be kind enough to forgive youthful extravagance of expression and youthful disgust. But I don’t want to write for them. And I really cant say to every ordinary reader ‘please excuse these horrid stories. I was only 20 at the time!’ But perhaps these reasons have too much sentiment in them. As a business proposition it would I am sure be bad. It would, quite rightly provoke all those critics who have been good enough to let byegones be byegones in judging the Garden Party. It is true, in a German Pension had a very good press. But it was that unpleasant thing – a succès scandale.3 Yours sincerely Katherine Mansfield. Notes 1. Bliss and Other Stories was published by Constable in 1920. 2. In a German Pension, KM’s first anthology of short stories, the tone of which was dominated by a wryly ironic narrative voice and a tongue-in-cheek satirical verve, had been published by Stephen Swift in 1911. Although KM came to regret what she saw as their lighter weight, bantering style and comic stereotyping, and while later schools of Modernist criticism also tended to downplay the significance of the volume, more contemporary critical reviews have come to acknowledge their intermedial poetics and observantly socio-cultural and proto-feminist politics. 3. (Fr.) Acclaim based on an excessively sensationalist reception (often misguided) rather than innate merit. The correct French expression is ‘succès de scandale’.



eric pinker  443

[7 May 1922] [N]

7 v 1922

Victoria Palace Hotel 6–8 Rue Blaise Desgoffe Rue de Rennes Paris

Dear Mr Pinker I thank you for your cheque for £43 . 9 . 5 . which I received yesterday. Yours sincerely Katherine Mansfield.

[5 June 1922] [N]

5 VI 1922

Hotel d’Angleterre Montana-sur-Sierre Valais Suisse

Dear Mr Pinker Will you kindly note my change of address – I shall be here until the end of August. I beg to acknowledge your cheque for £16 . 19 . 4 . Very many thanks. Yours sincerely Katherine Mansfield.

[24 July 1922] [N] Hotel Chateau Belle Vue Sierre Valais Switzerland. Dear Mr Pinker, Your letter about Mr Gerhardi only reached me today.1 I should be delighted if I might be the means of putting you in touch with him. His address is 40 Bradford Street, Bolton.2 Please mention my name, if

444   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 you care to do so, in writing to him. I thought Futility a very remarkable first novel3 & highly promising considering the youthfulness of the author. Much better in fact than a great many ‘assured successes’. I am finishing my twelve stories for Shorter. They have turned into a kind of short novel. I hope to send you the typescript in a fortnights time. Perhaps some American magazine would not consider it too long. In the matter of that short story Her First Ball for the American Anthology,4 I am quite willing to let them reprint it. Many thanks for disposing of The Fly for me in America.5 Yours very sincerely Katherine Mansfield. Notes 1. See KM’s letter to William Gerhardi in CL1, p. 588. 2. The address was that of Gerhardi’s parents, Clara and Charles Gerhardi; they had bought the property soon after returning to Great Britain in the wake of the Russian Revolution, having lived in relative luxury on the banks of the Neva river outside Saint Petersburg, in the house next to the Gerhardi family’s mills. 3. Gerhardi termed KM the novel’s ‘godmother’ (a role she happily accepted), in recognition of her help and advice in terms of both revising the manuscript and finding a publisher, and dedicated the work to her. JMM reviewed the novel in the Nation and Athenaeum. See CL1, pp. 590–1. 4. ‘Her First Ball’ was first published in The Sphere in 1921 before being included in The Garden Party and Other Stories. The ‘American Anthology’ has not been identified. 5. The terms ‘disposed of’ are doubtless more weighted than they might first appear; KM told Gerhardi that she ‘hated writing it’, and never spoke well of the story. See CL1, p. 583. ‘The Fly’ appeared in Century Magazine in September 1922.

James Brand Pinker (1863–1922)

Introduction James Brand Pinker was the most pre-eminent literary agent of the early twentieth century: his client list included authors such as Henry James, Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, Jack London, Stephen Crane, George Gissing, Ford Madox Ford, Violet Hunt, George Egerton, Rebecca West, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Dorothy Richardson and James Joyce. The role of ‘literary agent’ was a phenomenon of the late nineteenth century, when authorship was becoming increasingly professionalised and literature ever more commercialised. As Mary Ann Gillies notes: ‘from the beginning, professional literary agents were characterized as middlemen who brokered deals between sellers and buyers of literary property. One consequence of this conception of agenting was the ethical dilemma about where the agent’s primary loyalty resided’: with the author or with the publisher.1 From the beginning of his career, Pinker made it clear that his first allegiance was to the author, and he carved out a unique position for himself within this new literary marketplace by supporting the untried writer and untested work, presenting himself as the champion of new authors and new literature. In this way, Pinker was able to distinguish his firm from competitor agencies such as Curtis Brown and A. P. Watt and Son, and his name became indelibly associated with Modernist literature. Pinker provided experimental writers with the same support and opportunities he afforded to more marketable, commercially viable clients. It is no wonder, therefore, that KM sought his services not once but twice, eventually securing Pinker as her agent in 1921. Not much is known about Pinker’s early life, beyond the fact that he was born to James and Mary Brand Pinker in 1863. After working as a clerk at Tilbury Docks in London for just over a year, Pinker travelled to Constantinople in 1887 to work as a foreign correspondent for the Levant Herald. He married Mary Elizabeth Seabrooke in 1888. From a very modest background, Pinker’s marriage changed his material fortunes; his wife’s family had made money in the brewing business, and it is likely that the marriage enabled Pinker to leave his job in Turkey to pursue his journalistic ambitions in London. In late 1890,

    445

446   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Pinker began reading manuscripts for a London publishing house and working as assistant editor to C. N. Williamson, editor of the illustrated weekly Black and White, which started publication in early February 1891. The 1891 census finds Pinker living in Chiswick and listed as a ‘journalist author’. There is evidence that he briefly edited the journal Woman and that he was responsible for seeing the first issue of the highly popular Pearson’s Magazine into print in 1896. Pinker now had a rich, varied experience working in the world of letters, as a journalist, in a publishing house, and as an editor of high-end ‘literary’ journals, such as Black and White, as well as magazines aimed at an emerging readership seeking entertainment, such as Pearson’s, all of which provided him with the necessary contacts to start his literary agency. In January 1896, Pinker established himself in an office at Talbot House, 9 Arundel Street, off the Strand. This became the permanent home of his agency, with the cable address ‘Bookishly, London’. In an interview published in the Bookman in April 1898, Pinker described his approach as an agent: Any business man can get good prices for a well-known author, but there’s some fun in singling out a youngster from the crowd of unknowns and pushing him to the top. My ambition is to have a few clients, and add to the list each year some of the young writers who want help.2

As this indicates, Pinker was willing to take on significant risk in the hope of gaining greater financial return in the long run, gambling on the hope that an unknown, struggling author would provide his agency with greater symbolic, cultural capital at a future date. As Pinker described in the same interview: ‘in some instances, I have worked for months for a young client without any return, [although] I find that the return always comes sooner or later’.3 This was certainly the case with Conrad: over a twenty-year association, as many of Conrad’s biographers have observed, the writer owed not inconsiderable sums of money to Pinker, who acted as far more than a literary agent to him in times of trouble, serving as personal bank manager as well as patron and friend. This readiness to take a gamble on a writer became particularly important in Pinker’s support of younger, experimental authors. However, for Modernist writers who needed the financial security that Pinker could provide yet also resented their entanglement in the literary marketplace that Pinker represented, the relationship could become particularly tense. D. H. Lawrence, who certainly needed and enjoyed the money Pinker provided, famously referred to the agent as nothing more than a ‘little parvenu snob of a procurer of books’.4 Similarly, Joyce paid this ambiguous tribute to him in the ‘Circe’ chapter of Ulysses: ‘My literary agent Mr J. B. Pinker is in attendance. I presume, my lord, we shall receive the usual witnesses’ fees, shan’t we?’5 These writers procured Pinker’s services precisely because of the financial return that he



james brand pinker   447

promised, though. The tactics that Pinker employed, and which made him so successful, focused on taking advantage of the new international copyright laws that enabled simultaneous publication of the same text in different venues on both sides of the Atlantic: for example, a short story could be sold to a British periodical as well as an American periodical, before republication in a story collection under both a British and an American imprint. In exploiting the trans-Atlantic print trade in this way, Pinker made authorship a far more profitable profession than it had been previously and thereby carved out a niche for himself in the British marketplace. After an initial attempt to secure Pinker as her agent in 1911, KM again tried her luck ten years later. At this time, she had become decidedly frustrated with JMM’s failure to take the time to discuss her work with her and his inability to secure the most advantageous deals with publishers. When she wrote to JMM on 18 November 1920 to float the idea of her approaching Pinker, it was money that KM foregrounded: ‘I want to put my work and publicity into the hands of an agent with whom I shall communicate direct. [. . .] I must have money.’ In subsequent letters to JMM, KM echoed the negative reputation attached to Pinker’s name amongst their immediate circle: ‘You must [not] be my dog any more tho’. Pinker must. He sounds a perfectly horrid dog, doesn’t he: one that runs sideways – do you know the kind?’ (23 November 1920). She was clearly intimidated, though, and delayed writing to Pinker until she had new stories in hand: ‘Ive not written to Pinker yet,’ she wrote to JMM on 6 December 1920, ‘for the reason that I have not any reserve stock to offer him. [. . .] it only confuses things to get into touch with him & not have the goods. Hes bound not to have any interest.’ When she eventually did make contact with Pinker, now able to introduce herself as the author of Bliss and Other Stories, which had ‘attracted a good deal of attention’, KM made it explicit that she was seeking his services because his agency promised access to America, which ‘is so far an untouched market for my work’. Written over the space of just over six months, KM’s subsequent letters to Pinker show the active role he played in trying to make this happen, arranging for the publication of individual stories on both sides of the Atlantic and negotiating a favourable publishing deal with Constable & Co. for The Garden Party and Other Stories, which was released in February 1922. At the beginning of that month, Pinker travelled from London to New York, accompanied by his daughter Oenone. On the journey across, he became ill with influenza and pneumonia-related complications, and after arriving in America on 3 February died five days later. As such, the final nine of KM’s letters included here would not have been read or dealt with by Pinker. Towards the end of March, KM sent a letter of condolence to Pinker’s eldest son, Eric, who had taken over the family firm (for more information, please see my Introduction to Eric Pinker in this volume, p. 437). Although KM never met J. B. Pinker, she wrote to

448   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Dorothy Brett on 5 October 1921 that she felt him to be ‘a good man’: indeed, the way in which he supported her writing career in the period between the publication of Bliss and that of The Garden Party demonstrates the care, attention and business-savvy that he brought to his work as a literary agent. Chris Mourant Notes 1. Gillies, p. 92. 2. A. D. (1898), ‘An Interview with Mr. J. B. Pinker’, Bookman, 14: 79 (April), pp. 9–10 (p. 10). 3. Ibid. 4. LDHL3, p. 262. 5. Joyce, p. 435.

[11 October 1911] [N] 69 CLOVELLY MANSIONS, GRAY’S INN ROAD. W.C. 11 x 19ii James Brand Pinker Esq Dear Sir, Would you grant me a little space of your valuable time in the near Future? I have a good deal of work that I am anxious to send you but I should much like to see you before doing so – Thank you for the return of Hide & Seek1 – yes, the creature was an abnormal size – Faithfully yours    Katherine Mansfield Note 1. This early story has never been traced; it was possibly either abandoned or substantially reworked with a new title.



james brand pinker   449

[16 August 1921] [N]

August 16 1921

Chalet des Sapins, Montana-sur-Sierre, Switzerland.

Dear Sir, I have been advised to ask you to act for me as my literary agent. It is possible that you may already be acquainted with my work, for a collection of my short stories entitled ‘Bliss’ which appeared last winter attracted a good deal of attention. I shall have another volume of stories ready by the end of the present month, and I should be obliged if you would dispose of the volume for me both in England and America. But I am chiefly anxious to have serial publication arranged for my stories in America. I have not had any difficulty in disposing of the English rights, but America is so far an untouched market for my work. I should be most grateful if you would consent to act for me. Yours very faithfully, Katherine Mansfield.

[26 August 1921] [N]

August 26 1921

Chalet des Sapins, Montana-sur-Sierre, Switzerland.

Dear Sir, I thank you for your letter. It is a very great pleasure to know that you will act for me. I note what you say about sending my new volume of stories in duplicate, and I will let you have two copies as soon as possible. In the meantime I am sending you copies of the last three stories of a series of six which were commissioned by the Sphere.1 I am afraid they may be appearing at the time you receive this letter. But would it be worth while sending them to America? In the matter of a publisher for my new book I have promised the first refusal of it to Constable’s. But I am not bound to any publisher. As to America, Alfred Knopf, who bought Bliss in sheets, asked to see my new book. But of course I am not anxious to have it sold in sheets again.   Yours sincerely, Katherine Mansfield

450   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 P.S. Your second letter suggesting that I should write something for the Daily Chronicle2 has just arrived. The subjects I can think of offhand on which I should like to write a thousand words are:– ‘Up the airy Mountains’, ‘Jam’, ‘Stairs’, ‘On discovering Books’.3 I hope these or some of these will be suitable; but I cannot turn my light pen into a sword or a ploughshare. Notes 1. The three stories were ‘Her First Ball’, ‘Marriage à la Mode’ and ‘The Voyage’. See below, p. 631. 2. The Daily Chronicle was a London-based popular newspaper with a strong Liberal identity, especially since the British statesman Lloyd George had become the owner in the immediate post-war years. It included regular, detailed coverage of newly published books and of theatrical events. 3. None of these hypothetical articles materialised.

[early September 1921] [N] Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre Valais Dear Mr Pinker, Thank you for your letter. I am afraid I cannot cut that story. If I took such a dreadfully big snip off its tail there would be no mouse left. I will write another for The Sketch1 as soon as I can the length they want and at the price they mention. Would you try to dispose of A Cup of Tea elsewhere.2 I would far rather it did not go to the Mercury,3 however, as I am writing a long story now in the style of The Daughters of the Late Colonel which they published. I feel pretty certain they would take this new one. It is so difficult to place long stories in England. On the other hand I can’t expect them to want more than a certain amount from me. Is there not a weekly that might take it? I suggest The Nation again. It is not too long for them. As soon as my next book of stories is finished I mean to write a novel. I long to. Its only horrid circumstances that keep me back at present –        Yours sincerely        Katherine Mansfield. Notes 1. The Sketch was a weekly illustrated newspaper, renowned – rather paradoxically – for its broad coverage of the lives of royalty and the aristocracy, and for its showcasing of new short fiction, often accompanied by striking illustrations. It published KM’s ‘Taking the Veil’ in February 1922.



james brand pinker   451

2. ‘A Cup of Tea’ was published the following year in the Story-Teller. See CW2, pp. 461–7. 3. The early 1920s were very much the heyday of the monthly literary magazine, the London Mercury, then edited by J. C. Squire (see below, pp. 637–8). It was then showcasing some of the most lively and innovative short fiction of the early Modernist era, as well as a vast selection of contemporary poets. Quality and coverage, regrettably, declined later in the decade. It had published KM’s extended short story, ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, that May. See CW2, pp. 266–83.

[13 September 1921] [N]

September 13 1921

Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre Switzerland.

Dear Mr Pinker, In case it may help you to dispose of the three stories I lately sent you in America, I now learn that they are not to be published in the ‘Sphere’ until November, so that they will not necessarily have appeared already in England. Yours very sincerely Katherine Mansfield P.S. I hope to let you have the MS of the book by the end of this week.

[14 September 1921] [N]

Sep 14 1921

Chalet des Sapins, Montana-sur-Sierre, Switzerland.

Dear Mr Pinker, Under separate cover I am sending the Ms of my new book ‘At The Bay and Other Stories’. Of the two copies one only is complete. The story that is missing from the other I am having sent round to you immediately. Even now I send only two copies of the first long story, ‘At The Bay’, instead of four. This story has not yet been published serially. Would you try to sell it separately for me in England and America? I hope I am not troubling you too much by asking if you would have two copies typed for me for that purpose. I believe that Mr Squire

452   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 might care to have it for the London Mercury.1 He has asked me for a new story. Naturally I should like to get as large an advance as possible for this book; it has taken me over a year to compose. Of course I am very anxious to sell it separately in America, and not in sheets. When you send me the account for the typing would you charge me with a telegram also, to say the MS has reached you safely.               Yours sincerely              Katherine Mansfield. I enclose two photographs of myself in case the press or the publishers would care for them. Note 1. ‘At the Bay’ was published in the January 1922 issue of the London Mercury. See CW2, pp. 342–72.

[29 September 1921] [N]

29 ix 1921

Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre Valais Switzerland

Dear Mr Pinker, I received the enclosed letter today from Mr Michael Sadleir on behalf of Constable.1 If you are satisfied with their offer, I personally should like to accept it. They treated me very well over ‘Bliss’, and I imagine it is a good idea for a writer to keep with one publisher . . . There is no chance – is there? – of the typist correcting my spelling in the long story At The Bay. There are several words which appear to be spelt wrong – i.e. emeral for emerald, ninseck for insect and so on.2 These words are not in inverted commas, so the typist may just think its wanton ignorance on my part. But my hand on my heart I mean every spelling mistake! It interferes with the naturalness of childrens’ or servants’ speech if one isolates words with commas or puts them in italics. Thats my reason for leaving them plain. Please excuse me for troubling you with this matter.            Yours sincerely            Katherine Mansfield.



james brand pinker   453

Notes 1. Michael Sadleir (1888–1957) had been director of Constable & Co. since 1920; they published The Garden Party and Other Stories in 1922. 2. KM’s representation of childlike speech without ever falling into the mawkishness or coyness of a more conventional form of the infant’s speech defects is one of the outstanding stylistic traits of ‘At the Bay’. See parts IV and IX of ‘At the Bay’, in CW2, pp. 348–50; 361–4.

[3 October 1921] [N]

3 x 1921

Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre (Valais) Switzerland.

Dear Mr Pinker, I am greatly obliged to you for arranging with Constables in the terms of this contract for the publication of my book of short stories. I return the agreement duly signed.            With many thanks             Yours sincerely             Katherine Mansfield. P.S. I note that in this agreement I receive only 3d per copy of the Colonial edition,1 whereas, by the agreement for Bliss I received 6d. Is there a good reason for this? K.M. Note 1. A Canadian edition of The Garden Party and Other Stories was issued in 1923 by the Macmillan Company, Toronto. They had previously published Bliss and other Stories.

454   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [5 October 1921] [N]

5 x 1921

Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre (Valais) Switzerland.

Dear Mr Pinker, Many thanks for your letter. I returned the agreement yesterday. But of course I quite see the point about the date of publication being postponed. Can you agree to that for me? About the other clause – I am willing to do whatever you think best in the matter. It is always pleasanter not to be bound . . . Thank you for reassuring me about the typist. I hope to have four new stories ready by the end of this month. Sincerely yours Katherine Mansfield.

[10 October 1921] [N]

10 x 1921

Chalet des Sapins Montana-s-Sierre (Valais) Switzerland.

Dear Mr Pinker, Thank you very much for letting me know about the story; I am glad the Mercury have taken it.1 It would be nice if we hear from America before December, so that it can be ‘out’ for xmas. But perhaps that’s a little too much to expect. Would you mind – would it be a trouble – if I were to change the title of my new book of stories. What I want very much to do, if its possible, is to add a story Im finishing called The Garden-Party & to have the book called by that rather than At the Bay. I feel the book needs one more substantial story & a title that is solid. At the Bay now seems to me flimsy and vague – One forgets it – it doesn’t carry and the other is a more ‘compelling’ (horrid word) title on a bookstall –



james brand pinker   455

But this change may not be possible. I hope it is. I wrote Michael Sadlier2 a note to the same effect. Will you let me have your opinion, at your convenience? Yours sincerely Katherine Mansfield. Notes 1. ‘At the Bay’ appeared in the January 1922 issue of the London Mercury. 2. See below, p. 544.

[18 October 1921] [N]

18 x 1921

Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre (Valais) Switzerland.

Dear Mr Pinker, I send you the new story The Garden-Party. By the same post I am sending a copy to Constables. Will you try & dispose of the story for me? And in that case would you kindly have another copy typed, as one of these will be needed for the MS. which has gone to America . . .1 I feel reasonably certain The Mercury would print this story, but its doubtful whether they will have time to use both before the book is out. And perhaps I may mention that The Dial gave me a long and pretty favourable review recently.2 I think they are disposed to take my stories. Yours sincerely Katherine Mansfield. Notes 1. The American edition of The Garden Party and Other Stories was published by Knopf in May 1922. 2. Malcolm Cowley’s review of KM’s Bliss and Other Stories had appeared in the Dial, 71, September 1921, pp. 365–7.

456   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [2 November 1921] [N] (2 copies enclosed)

2 xi 1921

Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre (Valais) Switzerland

Dear Mr Pinker, I enclose herewith a story called The Doll’s house. It is very short. I think it is probable that The Nation would print it1 . . . . But I leave the disposal of it in your hands. Yours sincerely Katherine Mansfield. Note 1. See CW2, pp. 414–21. It was indeed published by the Nation and Athenaeum on 4 February 1922.

[9 November 1921] [N] [Postcard]

9 xi 1921

Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre (Valais) Switzerland.

Dear Mr Pinker Do you think it might be as well to let the London Mercury publish At the Bay without waiting for America? I don’t fancy America wants that story. Perhaps they will feel more warmly disposed when my next book is out. I am quite willing to let the story appear if the suggestion is agreeable to you. It is, of course, only a suggestion. Yours sincerely, Katherine Mansfield



james brand pinker   457

[12 November 1921] [N]

xii xi 1921

Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre Valais

Dear Mr Pinker, I return herewith the corrected proofs of the story. I am greatly troubled to find that the typist has made mistakes which make nonsense of the text. She (or he) has also left out words and substituted bath for basin, sole for sour and so on.1 I do not like to think the other uncorrected copy has gone to America. And I tremble to think of my poor Garden-Party. I suppose I cant hope to have proofs of the American copies (just supposing they ever should reach the proof stage.) I trust this does not sound ungracious to you, for your kindness in arranging for them to be typed. I appreciate the fact that I had a risk to run. Im sorry to make a mountain out of what must seem to anyone but an agonised parent such a very small molehill. Yours sincerely Katherine Mansfield. Note 1. The story probably being typed up was ‘At the Bay’, in which both words feature.

[2 December 1921] [N]

ii xii 1921

Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre Valais

Dear Mr Pinker, If you have not sent The Dolls House to the Nation and The Athenaeum – would you kindly let them see it? It does not look as though anybody is eager to print it. And I am a little discouraged that neither this story nor The Garden Party has been accepted. Yours sincerely Katherine Mansfield.

458   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [20 December 1921] [N]

20 xii 1921

Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre Valais

Dear Mr Pinker, I return herewith the agreement duly signed. It seems quite satisfactory. Thank you for your letter respecting the other stories. Yes, I quite understand why The Garden Party cannot be placed. I am hoping to send you some more stories in the course of the next few weeks – Yours sincerely Katherine Mansfield P.S. Would you please ask Mr Knopf1 if I may have proofs. Note 1. See above, pp. 25–6.

[11 January 1922] [N]

11 Jan: 1922

Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre Valais

Dear Mr Pinker, Many thanks for your letter. I am v. glad to know The Dial has accepted The Dolls House1. . . It makes a start, at any rate. A few days ago I received this letter from The Sketch. The story they refer to is one of a series which Mr Clement Shorter asked me to write for him and he paid me ten guineas a story. I am enclosing ‘A Cup of Tea’ which I think would suit The Sketch. But do you think they would be willing to pay me the same amount? I think they ought to. It might be worth while sending a second copy to The Nation, New York. Ive an idea the editor asked for some of my work, but I am not sure – With my Best Wishes to you this year Sincerely yours Katherine Mansfield. I replied to this letter and said I would ask you to let them see this story.



james brand pinker   459

Note 1. Disappointingly for KM, this offer fell through. As Kirkpatrick explains, ‘The Editor of the Dial insisted on first or simultaneous publication and withdrew his offer when he found that the story had already appeared’ (p. 160).

[26 January 1922] [N]

26 i 1922

Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre Valais

Dear Mr Pinker, Today I received, direct from the Mercury a cheque for twenty five pounds. I enclose herewith a cheque for two pounds ten which I believe to be the correct percentage. Will you kindly inform me if this is so? I have written a new story for The Sketch and hope to get it typed tomorrow.1 Yours sincerely Katherine Mansfield. Note 1. ‘Taking the Veil’, the only short story published in the Sketch, appeared on 22 February 1922.

[27 January 1922] [N]

27 i 1922

Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre Valais

Dear Mr Pinker, Thank you so much for letting me know that the Nation has taken my Doll’s House. I enclose the new story for The Sketch. This time I think the number of words is well within the limit of two thousand. Yours sincerely Katherine Mansfield.

460   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [31 January 1922] [N] Victoria Palace Hotel 6 Rue Blaise Desgoffe Rue de Rennes Paris.

31 i 1922

Dear Mr Pinker, I am very glad that The Westminster has accepted The Garden Party.1 Thank you for arranging it. Will it be possible for me to see a proof? I ask because I know there is an error in the typing which makes nonsense of one sentence. In case there is no time for this I enclose a sheet of paper in which I have tried to explain to the proof reader what that error is. I am in Paris for the next fortnight only. After that I return to Montana. Yours sincerely Katherine Mansfield. The Garden Party. At, I think the bottom of page 2 there is a half sentence missed. I have not the mss with me but as far as I remember it ought to run ‘Laura wished now she was not holding that piece of bread and butter. But there was nowhere to put it. . . .2 Will you please accept this very cursory explanation and put my MSS. right for me if there is no time for me to see a proof. Katherine Mansfield. Notes 1. ‘The Garden Party’, published in three separate parts, featured in the Westminster Gazette on 4, 11 and 18 February. See CW2, pp. 401–14. 2. The reference is to the protagonist Laura’s sudden pang of self-consciousness when talking to the ‘impressive’ workmen who come to erect the marquee in the garden, wishing she were more grown-up. The published version reads, Laura wished now that she was not holding that piece of bread-and-butter, but there was nowhere to put it, and she couldn’t possibly throw it away. She blushed and tried to look severe and even a little bit short-sighted as she came up to them.

See CW2, p. 402.



james brand pinker   461

[5 February 1922] [N]

V ii 1922

Victoria Palace Hotel 6–8 Rue Blaise Desgoffe Rue de Rennes Paris.

Dear Mr Pinker, My husband forwarded to me your letter of January 31st telling me he had corrected and returned the proofs of The Garden Party to save time. I hope that will be all right and that my note did not complicate matters. I am glad to hear Cassells have taken A Cup of Tea.1 I shall try and send another story of the same genre to you in the course of a week or so. I enclose a letter from Mr Massingham. I hope it does not matter that I wrote to him without consulting you suggesting I should supply a regular story to the Nation once a month or once every six weeks, at their usual rates of pay. They will take work that it is difficult to place elsewhere and it seems to me a good idea for a short story writer to make a regular appearance in one paper. I hope you agree. I will send you the stories as they are written – if you will kindly send them on. I am not returning to Switzerland for the present. The above will be my address until next May. Yours sincerely Katherine Mansfield. Note 1. ‘A Cup of Tea’ was published first in the Story-Teller in May 1922; Cassell’s Weekly reprinted it on 11 April 1923.

[8 February 1922] [N]

8 ii 1922

Victoria Palace Hotel 6–8 Rue Blaise Desgoffe Rue de Rennes Paris.

Dear Mr Pinker, Many thanks for your letter. I will try and write another story for The Sketch1 as soon as possible. I am undergoing treatment here which will make work rather difficult for the next few weeks.

462   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 I sincerely hope that many of your writers do not give you so much trouble with correspondence. I am ashamed that you should have to write to me so often. Yours sincerely Katherine Mansfield. Note 1. KM’s rapidly declining health by this time meant that plans for later stories in the Sketch never materialised.

[9 February 1922] [N]

9 ii 1922

Victoria Palace Hotel 6–8 Rue Blaise Desgoffe Rue de Rennes Paris

Dear Mr Pinker I beg to acknowledge with my grateful thanks the cheque for £12 . 2 . 11 received by me today. Yours sincerely Katherine Mansfield.

[22 February 1922] [N]

22 ii 1922

Victoria Palace Hotel 6–8 Rue Blaise Desgoffe Rue de Rennes Paris

Dear Mr Pinker, I enclose my new story for the Nation and The Athenaeum. Would you kindly forward it to Mr Massingham?1 I send you a second copy in case you may care to try it in America. Yours sincerely Katherine Mansfield.



james brand pinker   463

Note 1. The enclosed story was ‘The Fly’, published in the Nation and Athenaeum on 18 March.

[3 March 1922] [N] [Postcard] 3 iii 1922

Paris

Dear Mr Pinker Many thanks for your letting me know that the Nation has taken The Fly. If you do not hear from Constable in the course of the next few days would it be possible to remind them of the cheque due on publication? Yours sincerely Katherine Mansfield.

[5 March 1922] [N]

5 iii 1922

Victoria Palace Hotel 6–8 Rue Blaise Desgoffe Rue de Rennes Paris

Dear Mr Pinker, I have to thank you for a cheque for eighty-nine pounds fifteen shillings and sixpence, which I have received yesterday. Yours sincerely Katherine Mansfield.

464   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [16 March 1922] [N]

Thursday.

Victoria Palace Hotel 6/8

Dear Mr Pinker, I return the agreement duly signed. I am glad you have made the arrangement with Collins;1 thank you very much. I should be much obliged if you would look after my interest in Bliss. I confess that I have mislaid my agreement but no doubt Constable would give you a copy. The last account I had covered to June ’21, so that there may be a little money due to me now. Might it not also be possible to make the same arrangement with Collins for a continental edition. Mr Clement Shorter has asked me to write a series of twelve stories for the Sphere for which he has offered me £150. I accepted the offer and will send the first half dozen to you in June.2 I am anxious to send you a copy of my new book but I am still waiting for copies for Constable! Yours very sincerely Katherine Mansfield. Notes 1. Terms had been agreed whereby Collins took over the Continental copyright and distribution of The Garden Party and Other Stories. See above, p. 365. 2. A series of stories was planned for The Sphere, depicting the lives of the characters portrayed in ‘At the Bay’, but these were never completed. See KM’s plans in CW4, pp. 418–19.

[18 March 1922] [N]

18 iii 1922

Victoria Palace Hotel 6/8 Rue Blaise Desgoffe Rue de Rennes Paris

Dear Mr Pinker, Strangely enough I wrote to you yesterday on the subject of Bliss. As far as I know the Scandinavian rights are available.1 I shall be greatly obliged if you will negotiate them for me. Sincerely yours Katherine Mansfield.



james brand pinker   465

Note 1. The complete edition of Bliss and Other Stories, translated by Märta Linquist, was published the same year by the Stockholm-based literary specialists Aktiebogalet Skolunds Bokförlag. The same translator went on to translate The Garden Party and Other Stories and The Doves’ Nest and Other Stories.

[22 March 1922] [SoA]

22 iii 1922

Victoria Palace Hotel 6/8 Rue Blaise Desgoffe Rue de Rennes Paris

Dear Mr Pinker, I have this day written to Constable asking them to address all further communications etc relative to Bliss, direct to you. Yours sincerely Katherine Mansfield.

[25 March 1922] [N]

25 iii 1922

Victoria Palace Hotel 6/8 Rue Blaise Desgoffe Rue de Rennes Paris

Dear Mr Pinker, Thank you for your letter telling me you have sold the Swedish rights of Bliss and The Garden Party. I am delighted – – Yours sincerely Katherine Mansfield.

Martha Putnam (1881–1945)

Introduction Martha (Mattie) Putnam was Harold Beauchamp’s secretary. During the months that KM was in Wellington, following her schooling at Queen’s College from 1903 to 1906, KM befriended Mattie and made full use of her typing skills in the preparation of poem and story manuscripts she was sending to publishers at this time. Mattie also occasionally accompanied KM when the latter played her cello. Interviewed by Ruth Mantz in the late 1920s, Mattie claimed she ‘never saw [KM] laugh’, and that her voice was a low monotone, ‘without inflection or vivacity’.1 According to Isabel C. Clarke, however, Mattie ‘was one of the first to admire [KM], saying she had a “fine proud bearing, magnificent dark eyes, beautifully waved hair, and distinction”’.2 As can be seen from some of the letters below, KM was sometimes indiscreet in her complaints against her parents, and Mattie later destroyed dozens of notes from KM, all of which contained an element of resentment against her environment, which she felt was not quite appropriate, given her own position as Harold Beauchamp’s secretary.3 According to Mantz, after having read In a German Pension, Mattie remarked to Harold Beauchamp, ‘“This would never uplift anybody,” [. . .] returning the book to him. “Her thoughts were always in a minor key, even as a child,” Mr. Beauchamp said diplomatically.’4 Gerri Kimber Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

See Alpers 1980, p. 48. I. Clarke, p. 11. See Kimber 2016, p. 233. Mantz and Murry, p. 271.

    466



martha putnam  467

[22 July 1907] [ATL] 22 vii 07

4 Fitzherbert Terrace

Thank you very much indeed for The ‘Poor child’ – Mattie.1 I am most grateful – Yes – I quite agree that she was – to say the least – rather a morbid little individual – but to write – she was most fascinating. Never mind – soon I shall write some Poems full of cheerfulness – Though to tell you a secret I prefer the others – the tragic pessimism of Youth – you see – it’s as inevitable as measles! I send you the sheet – it ought to read – ‘She & the Boy’ . . . and that is all – It is so fine to see my children in such an abnormally healthy – clean – tidy condition – Thank you for that – Yours sincerely Kathleen Beauchamp. Note 1. As the letter goes on to make clear, Martha Putnam was commenting on one of the prose pieces she had typed for KM, to be submitted to Edwin Brady, editor of the Melbourne-based periodical Native Companion. See CL1, pp. 337–8.

[10 October 1907] [ATL]

4 Fitzherbert Terrace. x 07

Am I asking too great a favour – when I say – ‘could you type this for me – my dear’. I feel – horrid to do so – but really I will make it the last – and conquer my Fox machine if I die in the effort!1 But my Editor wants something for a Summer Number – ∴ the haste – If it’s impossible for you just send it back by Father – & I shall understand – Are you better? I hope so – And here is a man that you will like2 – will you – I wonder? Hm! Yours, a little nervously – Kathleen.

468   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Notes 1. The machine was a Fox Standard, an America-designed and patented typewriter. Its Art Nouveau black-and-gold painted frame has since made it an iconic model. 2. As the next letter to Martha Putnam confirms, the man in question is the dashing, worldly-wise and Aestheticist music student in the vignette ‘In a Café’. See CW1, pp. 86–9.

[October 1907] [ATL] [4 Fitzherbert Terrace, Wellington] Friday. Here is, written specially for you – a sort of continuation of the Café – at least it is the same style – Could you – any time – type it for me – dear? And I do hope that you will like the man, because I think he is a dear. In one place you will see a sign (#) where I left out a sentence – I’ve just written it in on the back of that page – What weather! Winter or Autumn I think. I’d like to go with you to a Concert this afternoon – Mark Hamburg & Gerardy –1 wouldn’t it be fine. Such is Life –     Yours with love        K. Note 1. Mark Hambourg (1879–1960) was a Russian concert pianist who grew up in London after his parents fled Tsarist repression, and who, by the early years of the century, was enjoying worldwide acclaim; he had been acknowledged as a child prodigy in Moscow by the age of ten. He settled in London after extensive studies abroad, where he was championed by Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, among others. KM also refers to him in a 1907 notebook; see CW4, p. 52. The Belgian-born Jean Gerardy (1877–1929) was one of the foremost cellists of his time, who made a hugely acclaimed public début at the age of thirteen. Gerardy had given a season of immensely popular concerts in New Zealand (as part of a ‘colonial tour’) in spring and summer 1902, and Mark Hambourg did the same in 1903. KM here appears to be imagining her and Martha Putnam’s ‘ideal’ concert rather than recalling or referring to any programmed event: while contemporary reviewers and journalists often evoked the two in terms of their maestro performances and concert aura, no records have been traced of a joint recital.



martha putnam  469

[late December 1907] [ATL] [4 Fitzherbert Terrace, Wellington] Sunday Night. My dear – Here is the work – it is written, really in a ‘faire hande’ & will – I hope – not be too much of a bother – I’m afraid you won’t like ‘Leves Amores’1 – – – I can’t think how I wrote it – it’s partly a sort of dream – Castles have been tumbling about my ears since Father came home – Do not mention – I pray you – my London prospects to him – he feels very sensitive – but – willy nilly: I GO – I’m determined. I wish that you were not always so busy – I always feel when I am with you that there’s so much I want to say – Oh, delightful sensation – and so rare – Well – I must go to bed – Shall I build a castle with a spare room for you – Yes I will – so please return the compliment. Thanking You in Anticipation. K. Note 1. ‘Leves Amores’ (Latin: light, or trivial, loves) is a bemusing, mock-sophisticated short prose piece written that year; its intertextual resonances are rich indeed, as is its very canny use of ambivalence and disguise. The foremost allusion is doubtless to Arthur Symons’s verse diptych ‘Leves Amores’, published in 1895 in London Nights, which comprises one extended stanza in rhyming couplets and one five-stanza ballad in alternate rhyme. In both, the persona depicts their thoughts and sensual impressions while spending the night with a ‘delicious and distracting girl’. KM’s prose response recreates the same gender ambiguity in terms of the narrative voice, allowing another poetic persona to recount a supposedly sordid yet tender nighttime encounter with a girl in a cheap hotel, with similarly heightened, fin-de-siècle eroticism. As the Latin title suggests, however, both KM and Symons are also conjuring up the long and rich tradition of classical poetry on the arts of love, especially the verse by Catullus, in which he in turn paid homage to the verse and craft of Sappho. A direct source for Symons may well have been Burton’s retranslation of Catullus’ Carmina, published in a limited, private edition in 1894 and widely circulated in Aestheticist circles.

470   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [January 1908] [ATL] [4 Fitzherbert Terrace, Wellington] Thursday. Thank you, indeed for ‘Audrey’1 – It was most good of you – to bother about her at all – And you have typed it so beautifully for me – Is your room a success? I do hope so – Of course you have been busy lately – and so have I in a very pleasant sort of way – writing – I mean – Am just off to Island Bay2 for a long day – & maybe an evening – I am going to write – and have to go to the sea for ‘Copy’3 – Do bring a book and come – too – dear – and we shall ‘paddle’ and ‘bake’. Don’t you love the two processes? I wonder if you have read ‘Luke Delmege’ by Father Sheehan4 – Father Macdonald5 lent it me – some days ago – and it is very good – Oh, what a beautiful day – Thank you again – dear – I feel most horrid to have bothered you so persistently about my annoying children – – – – – – You have indeed been a Godmother to them – and they – too – are grateful – Lovingly yours          K. Notes 1. KM’s latest typed-up story was the very musical, fin-de-siècle-style ‘The Education of Audrey’ (CW1, pp. 102–7); see also KM’s comments on it to Vera, in CL1, p. 276. 2. The Beauchamps’ house in Tinakori Road was a short walk from the long coast road looking out across Island Bay. KM captures memories of the picturesque view from the esplanade in a number of her New Zealand stories, and in particular ‘The Aloe’. See CW1, pp. 467–519. 3. It is interesting to note KM’s use of ‘Copy’ to refer to her technique of working from nature towards stylisation or aesthetic effect; although the term was commonly used in art schools, it was also the term employed in journalists’ offices to refer to an event which would provide the good base for an article. The opening scene of the novel referred to below, Luke Delmege, focuses precisely on the dramatic announcement of ‘Copy’ over the telephone of a New York press office, the ‘rumbling and muffled thunder’ of the word resounding six times just in the first paragraph (p. 3). 4. Patrick Augustine Sheehan (1852–1913) was a Roman Catholic priest born and based throughout his life in Ireland; he was also an exceptional scholar, who went on to become a popular novelist, a poet, and a politically engaged activist in favour of Irish unity and radical social change within and beyond Ireland. Luke Delmege (1901) tells the story of a highly literary-minded journalist and story-teller, also a vicar, adapting with difficulty to the rural ways and mindset of Ireland after being transferred there from England to take up his appointment.



martha putnam  471

5. Father Alexander MacDonald (1879–1957) was one of the first New Zealand-born priests; he had studied at the Sacred Heart Basilica school and been ordained in 1903. He was then the priest at St Mary’s Boulcott Street, in Wellington; the very next month, he was transferred to a major Marist mission in Timaru.

Ribnikov (‘Ribni’)

Introduction Sylvia Lynd once memorably described KM as being ‘not unlike one of those little dolls that, in Japan’s less commercial days, were among the most precious and transparent treasures of one’s toy cupboard’;1 Virginia Woolf was likewise struck by ‘her look of a Japanese doll, with the fringe combed quite straight across her forehead’.2 Japanese arts and culture had long fascinated KM, nurtured especially in the context of Japonisme at the turn of the century, so it is not so very surprising she KM should have bought two Japanese dolls, and on occasion loved to invest them with names, personalities and, to a certain extent, independent lives of their own. ‘Ribni’, or Ribnikov, the male doll, was one of them, his partner, O Hara San, the female doll.3 The dolls appear to have been purchased just after KM visited the Japan–British exhibition, which was held in London from 14 May to 29 October 1910. As was the case with most such bi-national or international events, the exhibition was a key moment in Anglo-Japanese and Japan– Europe cultural diplomacy. Japan was bolstering its public image in the wake of its military successes against Russia in 1905 and the renewal of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, and both sides were seeking to finalise major trade deals; foregrounding the refinement and elegance of Japanese arts, home decorations and lifestyles was an essential part of the Japanese organisers’ agenda. The image-bolstering impact certainly worked in the case of KM, inspiring her to arrange her home at the time (Cheyne Walk, in Chelsea) along minimalist, Japan-inspired lines, to acquire a number of iconic Japanese daily objects, to adopt a number of oriental effects in her hairstyle and clothing (notably a striking, patterned kimono), and to read a number of Japanese novels, poems and eye-witness accounts. Ribni’s partner, O Hara San, would seem to owe her name to these readings, a combination of two exquisite female portraits in the poetry collection From the Eastern Sea – ‘O Haru’ and ‘O Hana San’.4 O Hara San met with a sad fate after accompanying KM to France in 1915: she was packaged up and sent back to keep JMM company, but her head fell off during the journey, as he sadly reported back.5

    472



ribnikov  473

Ribni’s namesake, however, is more intriguing. It would be safe to presume that he initially had another name, since he owes the name Ribnikov to the central character in Alexander Kuprin’s 1906 short story ‘Captain Ribnikov’, which had not been translated into English when KM first acquired the dolls in 1910. It was a particularly weighted name: Ribnikov (or Rybnikov) is presented initially as a rowdy Russian soldier, given to sentimental excesses when he extolls the fatherland and affirms his devotion to the national cause. An astute local journalist senses he protests too much and sets out to unsettle him. An evening’s revelry fails to do the trick, but that evening they visit a brothel. Ribnikov proves a courteous, attentive, gentle customer, much to the surprise of the prostitute, who is then surprised to hear him muttering Japanese words as he falls asleep. Intending to boast to her companions later of his gentlemanly ways, she unwittingly betrays his secret. Ribnikov is unmasked as a Japanese spy and arrested.6 The story in itself is a minor masterpiece; its fascination for KM appears crystal clear, but gains in intrigue when we learn that it was first translated into English by S. S. Koteliansky in 1916, supposedly working in partnership with JMM. Koteliansky later admitted, however, that it was KM and not JMM who was his co-translator; it had nevertheless been agreed that JMM should be the co-signatory.7 In this light, KM’s emotional attachment to the doll, and the quirky character and voice she lends it, gain in resonance. Whether or not this is so, ‘Ribni’ would appear to be a lately adopted name, Kuprin’s story not apparently having been translated or circulated in Britain or France before the 1916 translation. What is certain is that Ribnikov travelled with KM and decorated her home for a number of years, and was adopted as a form of affectionate go-between and playfully imagined child at times between KM and JMM, and, in this role, he deserves his place in the volume. As well as him receiving two postcards addressed directly to him, with a message to pass on to ‘Papa’, Ribni’s ‘exploits’ also feature in their letters. The doll clearly appealed, aesthetically and symbolically, to KM’s close friend Anne Estelle Rice, as well as her young son David, and would seem to have accompanied KM to Cornwall when she visited Rice in 1918.8 A letter KM sent JMM on 16 June reveals that Rice painted Ribni and gave the portrait to her friend, but it has not, alas, been traced. Fortunately, when Rice came to writing up her own memories of KM, decades later, she remembered first seeing him at the ‘Elephant’, sitting ‘inscrutable in an armchair, smothered in gay cushions’. He thus had his place in the ‘family portrait’ that Rice drew in words, rather than colour: ‘Ribni’ was a Japanese doll, so named after a Japanese Colonel, a spy. He had the usual straight black fringe and black eyes that looked out of a pale oval face. The resemblance was striking and the lonely maternal heart was comforted for the ‘child that never was and never could be’. ‘Ribni’ accompanied her on the numerous voyages.9

474   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 By a strange coincidence, in the same piece, Rice remembers KM in Looe, evoking her in ‘a Monet-like picture on the cliff shaded by a Japanese parasol against the blue-green sea’, like a ship picked up by a sea breeze ‘and blowing her willy nilly to a new place’.10 She accompanies the evocation with an etching of a three-masted schooner which proves to replicate, almost uncannily, the picture on the postcard that KM posted to Ribni from Le Havre in 1918. Claire Davison Notes  1. Quoted in Morris, p. 27.  2. DVW2, p. 226.  3. For a detailed account of KM’s attraction to Orientalism see Kimber 2017.  4. See Noguchi, pp. 34–6; 54–5. The collection invites rich parallels with a number of KM’s own poems from the same years. See also Mitchell 2004, pp. 48–52.  5. See KM’s letter to JMM, 10 December 1915.  6. For a close exploration of the interwoven voices and viewpoints of male and female narrative perspective in KM and Koteliansky’s translation, and traces of KM’s own literary sensibility, see Davison 2014, pp. 42–3; 57–61.  7. See Kirkpatrick, pp. 84–5.  8. See Meyers 2002, p. 171.  9. Rice, p. 82. 10. Rice, p. 81.

[Winter 1915–16] [ATL] Letter written from Ribni to JMM [In caps, each word written vertically, interspersed with little flower motifs] HONOURABLE PARENTCHIK SHE IS ALRIGHT ONLY MISSING YOU SEE? SHE KEEPS SNATCHING ME AND CRYING O RIB I DO WANT HIM FRIGHTFULLY. YOUR SONCHIK RIB. [8 January 1918] [ATL] [Postcard photo of a large sailing ship on the front with ‘Havre’ written in KM’s hand, bottom left.] [Le Havre] Dear Ribni – This is for you but you must let him see it too. It is just what I feel like – Ici il fait si beau1 – & there were ––––––––– Oh Ill tell you all in his letter –                         Ta maman2 – My hotel here was 10.50!!! et les deux lits restent vierges.3



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Notes 1. (Fr.): The weather’s lovely here. 2. (Fr.): Your Mummy. 3. (Fr.) And the twin beds stayed pristine.

[4 March 1918] [ATL] [A birthday postcard – ‘Bon Anniversaire’1 – with a painting of three little birds on a fir branch.] [Hôtel Beau Rivage, Bandol] Mon loup cheri Ta maman revient dans un petit petit moment. Soi sage. Baise ton père – Ta petite Maman.2 Notes 1. (Fr.) Happy birthday. 2. (Fr.) Darling wolf-cub, Your Mummy will be back soon. Be good. Kiss your father from me. Your little Mummy.

[14 June 1918] [ATL] [Headland Hotel, Looe, Cornwall] ‘Yes Rib, dear you should have a taste on your own little dish!. . . .’1 Note 1. Underneath and to the right of this line, KM has written RIB/PRINCIPINO in two columns of letters, next which is a drawing of a spoon. This little note to Ribni appears towards the end of a wonderfully playful letter to JMM, where she instructs him on how to make strawberry jam.

Anne Estelle Rice (1879–1959) (m. Drey)

Introduction Anne Estelle Rice was born in 18791 in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, to a large family, growing up in industrial Pottstown next to the Philadelphia–Reading railway line. She graduated from the School of Industrial Art of the Pennsylvania Museum (now the Philadelphia Museum of Art) with a diploma before undertaking further studies in sculpture and life drawing at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Rice illustrated for a variety of publications including Harper’s Bazaar, Metropolitan Magazine and The Saturday Evening Post before leaving for Paris in 1905, sent by the Philadelphia-based North American magazine to observe and represent the latest fashions, usually with full-page illustrations. It was there that she was exposed to post-Impressionism and Fauvism, also meeting the Scottish post-Impressionist and Fauvist painter J. D. Fergusson at the ParisPlage resort in 1907, who encouraged her to become a painter herself. She exhibited her paintings at the Salon d’Automne the following year (and did so until 1913, also becoming a Sociétaire and serving on its jury), and at the Salon des Indépendants in 1911-12, developing a bold and energetic style which gave daring emphasis to form and colour. Rice’s The Egyptian Dancers (1910, now part of the Brooklyn Museum holdings), inspired by the Ballets Russes’s performance of Cleopatra in Paris the previous year, gained her some notoriety – it was spat upon at the Salon d’Automne and attracted lively and complimentary critical commentary, including that by Huntley Carter in The New Age. Fergusson and Rice had a relationship that lasted six years. It was through Fergusson that Rice met JMM, under whose editorship they together contributed to Rhythm magazine from its first issues in 1911.2 Rice became a key illustrator for Rhythm and produced a wide range of material for the publication, including kinetic designs from the Ballets Russes (and accompanying article);3 deft sketches of natural phenomena in charcoal; striking, stylised life drawings of female figures; and block prints used as headers and footers. It was effectively through Rhythm that KM and Rice met, via JMM, in the year that KM became a fellow

    476



anne estelle rice   477

contributor and partner to JMM. On their ‘honeymoon’ to Paris in 1912, KM was introduced to the Rhythm set, and was particularly taken with both Fergusson and Rice. Rice had been commissioned to produce decorative murals for a Philadelphian department store by John Wannamaker, which she would work on between 1909 and 1913. It was these panels, depicting mostly female figures in garden scenes, which KM would view on visiting Rice’s studio on the rue Denfert-Rochereau and be profoundly moved by. Rice recorded a rich, extended remembrance of KM in a 300th commemorative edition of the Adam International Review, which was accompanied by a pair of maritime-themed drawings. In it, Rice describes the visual aesthetic which permeated KM’s conversation, as well as her stories and her letters: I cannot blot out from memory a Monet-like picture sitting on the cliff shaded by a Japanese parasol against the blue-green sea, the frail body risking a sea breeze picking her up and, like a four o’clock dandelion gone to seed, blowing her willy nilly to a new place.4

As reflected in the surviving correspondence, Rice and KM formed a bond that would last the rest of KM’s life. It was to Rice that she left her beloved ‘Spanish’ shawl, actually made in China out of black silk and embroidered with birds, flowers and butterflies, given to KM by Ottoline Morrell. When KM published ‘Ole Underwood’ in Rhythm in January 1913, she dedicated it to Anne, and when KM received news of her brother’s death whilst living in St John’s Wood in 1915, it was in the presence of Anne and her husband, the art critic Raymond Drey – for they were dining with the Murrys. In London, they also shared the services of the charwoman who would be memorialised in KM’s 1921 story ‘The Life of Ma Parker’. Rice’s lasting tribute to KM is, of course, her resonant Portrait of Katherine Mansfield, which now hangs at Te Papa in Wellington,5 which has become synonymous with KM’s image and has adorned the covers of so many books. It was painted in the summer of 1918 in Looe, Cornwall, where Rice had been working,6 and where she had entreated KM to join her to convalesce in a hotel she had found. In her letter to JMM of 17 June 1918, KM writes excitedly of Anne having begun ‘the great painting’ of her in ‘that red brick red frock with flowers everywhere’, concluding: ‘Its awfully interesting even now.’ Ida Baker appreciatively described Rice’s generosity to KM during this period in Cornwall in her memoir, calling her a ‘wonderful friend’.7 It was a kindness that continued, finding material manifestation in presents such as a bird for cooking, stockings and a blue and yellow coat which KM would refer to as her ‘Anne’ coat, as well as the ‘golden pages’ (18 March 1920) of letters from Rice which KM clearly valued highly. Although at times Rice was subject to characteristic frustrated griping by KM to JMM, the friendship between them was sincere, close and

478   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 deep – one of artists and allies. In a letter of 22 April 1920, KM argues that Rice must be added to JMM’s list of what he calls ‘nice people’, arguing ‘I love her as a “being”’, whilst also questioning his priorities: ‘Im sure they are nice – but thats not enough, is it?’ KM does not ask for Virginia Woolf to be added, suggesting a binding depth to her relationship with Rice that is not always given full recognition. KM’s letters to Rice, often recounting shared experiences centred on that time in Cornwall,8 are characterised by spontaneous joy and simple pleasures – strawberries, the sea, picnics and flowers – and a kindred appreciation of beauty, particularly within the natural world, which they both treated with a beatific reverence. A later letter conveys the warm and lasting equanimity of their relationship (26 December 1920): I am always sending you greetings – always sharing things with you. I salute you in tangerines and the curved petals of roses thé and the crocus colour of the sea & in the moonlight on the poire sauvage. Many many other things. It will always be so with me however seldom I see you.

Rice’s poignant description of the last meal which they shared makes clear the great pains that Rice went to to ensure a memorable time was had, even having a brandy-soaked Christmas pudding in September.9 She succeeded, with KM writing a week later: ‘I shall never forget my LUNCH with you,’ sending her ‘warm love as ever’ (30 September 1922). Rice worked less after the birth of her son David in 1919, to whom KM was briefly godmother, but produced theatrical designs in the 1920s and actively exhibited again in the 1940s with paintings that often depicted maritime or rural scenes. She worked late into her long life. Theatrical costumes and set plans designed by Rice in the 1930s, including Othello and Macbeth as well opera productions, are now held by the Tate Gallery, and her paintings form part of the University of Hull Art Collection. Her correspondence with KM’s biographer, Ruth Mantz, is held at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin, and correspondence with Theodore Dreiser at the University of Pennsylvania. Aimée Gasston Notes 1. There is some (seemingly unacknowledged) debate about when Rice was born – sources cite 1877 or 1879. There are no birth records for Pennsylvania between 1855 and 1892. Her death records state that she died in Islington in September 1959 at the age of eighty-one. I have therefore gone with 1879, presuming she was yet to have that year’s birthday. This date is also used by the University of Hull exhibition catalogue, to which Raymond Drey contributed after Anne’s death, as well as Adam International Review, 300. It could, of course, be that she took a couple of years off her age herself and the correct year is 1877. But based on the death records, it can only be 1879, and not 1877.



anne estelle rice   479

2. The Modernist Journals Project, jointly run by Brown University and the University of Tulsa, offers digitised versions of the magazine. Available at: . 3. In vol. 2, no. 7. 4. Rice, p. 81. 5. Before this portrait, Rice had painted KM and her doll Ribni at the Headland Hotel in Looe (see letters of 29 May and 16 June 1918). 6. At Looe, Rice also produced illustrations for Bay, an anthology of poetry by D. H. Lawrence. 7. Baker, p. 115. 8. The Looe period also colours the miniature biography of Rice’s published by Adam. 9. Rice, pp. 84–5.

[8 December 1915] [ATL] [Fragment] VIII XII

address: Mme Bowden Hotel Beau Rivage Bandol (Var)

Darling Anne, I have been wanting to write to you for days, but this morning is really my first free time and the first time that I have been anything like ‘settled’ since leaving England. My little John Bull Murry1 went back to London yesterday – Perhaps that will tell you a little what kind of a time we have had. I could write books about it until I died and then not finish the telling. It has been so funny and so tragic and so utterly unlike what we had expected and imagined. Marseilles became colder and colder – I got really very ill there with fever & spent my time drinking hot milk with sugar & orange flower water in the cafés & then keeping up my strength! with little glasses of brandy. Both of us got poisoned, I think from eating mussels and pistachio ices at the same time – The red stone floors started my rheumatism again & everybody cheated Murry at sight – Even before he bought anything they put up the price – So we decided to go to Cassis-sur-Mer for at least a couple of months. We found there a very comfortable looking hotel kept by a fat woman called ‘Tante’2 & two nieces. We had a huge room with four windows to get the lovely sun & read with great satisfaction in every single guide book that Cassis was the first station d’hiver sur la côte d’azur3 – The day we arrived the mistral was blowing.4 I put my head out of the train window & it blew the trimming off my hat.

480   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Notes 1. ‘John Bull’ referred originally to a satirical cartoon figure from the late eighteenth century, presented as a stout, rather complacent yeoman-of-England type, who was quickly taken up as the personification of the pragmatic, conservative British gent, both within Britain and abroad. The figure gained in patriotic resonance in wartime, hence KM’s rather sardonic usage here, when JMM was working for the War Office. 2. (Fr.): Aunt. 3. (Fr.): Winter sports resort on the French Riviera. 4. The Mistral is the renowned, bitterly cold and powerful north wind that blows down the Rhone valley and across the south-west of France – with the positive effective of clearing the skies to reinforce the dazzling blue and stark luminosity of the south.

[23 October 1917] [ATL]

23 X 17

141A Church Street Chelsea SW3.

Chère et charmante femme,1 C’est que je regrette infiniment de vous dire que mon projet – de rester a Londres pendant 1’absence de mon ami est, d’une haute necessité – tres modifié. Il m’a demandé, et vraiment je n’ai pas le coeur de lui refuser, d’aller passer un ou deux ‘week ends’ avec lui. Puis, pensant à son état de santé je me suis persuadée que, moi-même, je ne serais pas tranquille de le laisser pour si longtemps seul, et privé de cet coup d’oeil mère. Alors, en ce cas, et bien tristement, je ne vois plus la possibilité charmante de garder chez moi votre delicieuse Madame Blinks2– Pendant mes voyages de samedi a lundi je ne peux pas la laisser toute seule même avec ma gosse japonaise,3 et, bien sur c’est insupportable pour une chatte serieuse de passer les heures trop longues et trop frequentes dans un panier sous les faux coussins d’une compartiment de chemin de fer! Hélas la petite pensionnaire n’est pas pour moi – et j’ai tant esperée! Avez vous songé a Madame Parker4 pour mère de lait? Je sais qu’elle adore les chats; elle m’a souvent parlée de la votre – Mille remerciements, encore, ma chère amie pour mon cadeau de guerre! Je trouve cet beurre bien bon et le blancheur, apres ce jaune sinistre du margarine est tres appetisant! Et les oignons! Ah, ils



anne estelle rice   481

demandent tout un livre! Apres un repas virginal de oignons au lait bouillant, j’ai passé toute une nuit dans les rêves les visions splendides des voyages dans le metro – Boulevard St Michel La Cité Chatelet – Ces mots touchants, mêles aux oignons me fait presque pleurer. Ne voulez vous pas venir prendre une tasse de thé chez moi avant la repetition demain? Je serais enchantée de vous voir – et de feliciter Drey sur son convalescence – Ah ma chère amie, la tête me tourne, tellement je suis fatiguée – Je vous écris dans le salon de Murry, et j’ai un seul desir – c’est de me coucher chez moi avec ma boule de l’eau chaude pour – au moins – la reste de l’hiver. A bientôt    Tres tendrement   Katherine. Notes 1. (Fr): Dear and charming woman, The thing I regret having to tell you is that my project – of staying in London while my friend is away has, from sheer necessity – been largely modified. He asked me, and frankly I haven’t the heart to say no, to go and spend a ‘weekend’ or two with him. Then, thinking of his state of health, I made up my mind that I myself would not be at ease leaving him alone for so long, with no mother’s eye looking over him. As a result, and very sadly, I am no longer able to envisage the charming idea of taking your exquisite Madame Blinks2 into my home and looking after her – While I am away from Saturday to Monday, I can hardly leave her alone, even with my Japanese child,3 and of course it is unbearable for a serious cat to spend long hours too often in a basket beneath the cushioned seats of a railway carriage! Alas, the little lodger whom I had so longed for is not to be mine – Have you envisaged Madame Parker4 as a wet nurse? I know she adores cats; she has often spoken to me of yours. One thousand thanks, again, my dear friend, for the war parcel! The butter is really good, and its whiteness, after the gruesome yellow of margarine, is so appealing. And the onions! Ah, a whole book should be devoted to them! After a maidenly supper of onions in boiled milk, I spent a whole night having splendid dreams about travelling in the metro – Boulevard St. Michel La Cité Chatelet – These endearing words, mixed with the onions, almost make me weep. Would you not like to come round to my place for a cup of tea before the rehearsal tomorrow? I’d be delighted to see you – and to congratulate Drey on his swift recovery –

482   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Ah my dear friend, my head’s in a whirl, I’m that tired. I’m writing from Murry’s lounge, and I have only one wish – to go to bed in my own home with my hot water bottle for – at least – the rest of winter. See you soon Yours tenderly Katherine 2. As the letter makes clear, Madame – or Mrs – Blinks refers to Anne’s cat. 3. ‘La gosse japonaise’ [The Japanese child] refers to Ribni, or Ribnikov, KM’s doll. See Introduction above, p. 472. 4. Mrs Parker was Ann’s charlady. See Introduction to Rice above, p. 476–7.

[22 December 1917] [ATL]

Saturday.

141A Church Street, Chelsea SW3

My dearest Anne, The reason why I have not replied before to your letter & Book & to Drey’s Souvenir of Looe1 has been that I have been strictly in bed for days, nearly weeks, with my left water wing (alias my lung) entirely out of action for the time and strapped up in plaster which gives off waves of smell like new varnish on an inside cabin wall.2 Dry pleurisy, ma chère,3 an old complaint of mine! It has been most hellishly annoying as you know my views on the subject of ill health – Picture me, lying very close to the wall, with my darling Japanese doll4 for an innocent – all too innocent – bed companion, dressed in a pair of pyjamas which look as though they ought to take off and on with a spoon, they are so like a glace neapolitaine,5 with one immense faux nichon6 – i.e. the one that the strapping goes over and that is therefore (fleur delicat)7 mounted in cotton wool, and upon which the eyes of my visitors are immediately rivetted. However the worse is over and I am up today, feeling as light and airy as what Ma Bates8 used to call a gash baloon, and still quite unable to grasp the fact that life really has given me such a cuff and a kiss as this old attack. For the doctor says I must never stay in England for another winter but must leave in September & not come back until April, and at present as soon as I am well enough he has given me a medical certificate for the South of France, and I hope to be able to leave in January. This must sound like an absolute plant to you. It did to me. When I heard the medicine man say: ‘You ought to go to some place like Teneriffe or Madeira, but as you cant go there Spain or the South of France will do –’ I would not have swopped my lung with any man alive. If I stay in England he says I may become consumptive.



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Alors, je m’en vais!9 But I cant really believe that this will happen and I wont until I see a pink house with two cedars in front of it. It is too good luck. But talk about the knock out blow – Ive had it! Why cant you come too? I mean to find a little house somewhere down there with a good garden and really make it a pied à terre10 so that my rare darling friends can camp in it too and always feel that it is there if they want to come. I shall beat along the coast slowly this spring, if if if I ever do get there . . . London has been just lately like a big brimming bowl of the very best pea soup. One looks up at the studio window at a kind of green thick mixture with the tree outside, swimming in it like a bunch of dry herbs. There has not been a breath of wind but if you put your hand out of bed a cold whistling draught from nowhere blows it back again. Through it the rag and bone man has cried up and down the road with quite peculiar relish and just when the fog was at its highest and best some carol singers started: ‘Christians! Awake! Salute the Happy Morn . . .’11 Quelle pays!12 When you are living ‘as you might say three hundred and sixty four days under an umberellar like any dratted mushroom.’ Since the raid the gas supply is almost cut off and the gas man informed me yesterday that if these raids go on there will be no knowing whether London will have any gas at all. So nice plus the coal shortage. Looe sounds a real find. I am thankful you are there and out of this. If you should meet a tall man with a pointed grey beard, irish eyes, and a voice like the sky at evening, salute him from me. His name is Charles Palliser,13 and he was a love of my salad days.14 Murry is still in the country, putting on 3 lbs. a week. I am going down to him for a week before I pack and begin to get ready – A thousand thanks for Nounette.15 My God after a visit from well meaning relatives and friends who assailed me with: ‘Don’t you think Lloyd George is too splendid?’ ‘I do think the King has behaved splendidly during the war. Don’t you?’ ‘It must be too splendid to be a man at a time like this, don’t you think?’ I have simply lain in bed gasping and fanned myself with ce livre charmant.16 It breathes of France. I shall be here until about the second week in January. I’d simply love a poulet17 and its very sweet of you to think of sending me one. I wanted to send you some candies, but they are not to be had, so I shall send dates instead. Quelquechose de bien sucré18 – Forgive a dull dog of a letter. My mind feels so bald – and my faithful Lesley Moore who has all the intentions of an angel has almost made me an imbecile, with this sort of thing. She Which would you rather have. Hot milk or Oxo.19 Me: Oxo, please. She: Oh, don’t you think you’d rather have hot milk? Me: No, thanks. Oxo, please. She: But don’t you think hot milk is more nourishing.

484   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Me: Oxo, please. She: I wish you would have hot milk, just to please me. Me: Oxo, please. She: Very well, dear. But what about having Oxo in the hot milk. Isn’t that a good idea? Me: Plain Oxo, please. She: (from the kitchen) Oh, Katya dear, I find there isn’t any Oxo left. Will you have milk? Me: !!!!!! _________________________ Salute Drey for me. I do hope I shall see you again soon. Ah ma chere et ma charmante, je vous aime bien tendrement – et je vous embrasse bien serré.20 Katherine. Notes  1. Drey had presumably sent KM a picture postcard from Looe, the picturesque fishing town on the south-eastern coast of Cornwall where they were staying. KM would visit them there the following year. For memories of their time together, see Rice, pp. 79–83.  2. The common treatment for dry or fibral pleurisy (typically associated with the early symptoms of tuberculosis) was to strap the thorax tightly to limit movement and reduce pressure, and often to encase the patient’s chest in a plaster cast, believed to restrict lung distension and limit pain and irritation. See Lucas and Vrooman, pp. 285–7, and Hansson and Polianski, pp. 761–5.  3. (Fr.): My dear.  4. KM’s precious Japanese doll was named Ribni after the Japanese spy in Kuprin’s short story ‘Captain Ribnikov’, one of many Russian works cotranslated by Koteliansky, JMM and / or KM. See also Rice, p. 83, evoking the ‘inscrutable’ Ribni, and Introduction and letter to Ribni above, pp. 472–5.  5. (Fr.): Neapolitan ice-cream, i.e. coloured ice-cream frozen in moulds which are either rectangular, or in KM’s image here, pudding basin-shaped, then up-ended to display the impressive dessert.  6. (Fr.): False bosom.  7. (Fr.): Blushing flower.  8. Mrs Bates was the regular housekeeper at 69 Clovelly Mansions, which JMM and KM had rented for a while in 1911. According to Alpers, she ‘was later the original for Ma Parker’ (Alpers 1980, p. 121). See also Introduction above.  9. (Fr.): So off I go. 10. (Fr.): Literally – foot on the ground. As a set expression, it refers to small, self-contained lodgings for short stays. 11. The name of a popular Anglican hymn, the lyrics of which are by the eighteenthcentury English poet John Byrom, with music by John Wainwright. 12. (Fr.): What a country!



anne estelle rice   485

13. Charles Palliser was the father of Eileen Palliser, another New Zealander, and one of KM’s friends from Queen’s College, London. A fellow boarder at the Harley Street boarding house, her bank manager father Charles had been a friend of Harold Beauchamp’s when young. KM adored Charles Palliser; even as late as 1915, she was still meeting and corresponding with him. See Kimber 2016, p. 134. 14. At the time a popular expression, the reference is to Antony and Cleopatra, I, i, the closing words of which are Cleopatra’s wistful evocation to Charmian of her love for Julius Caesar in the carefree days of her youth: My salad days, When I was green in judgment, cold in blood, To say as I said then. ‘Nanette’ was then a popular affectionate form of the name ‘Anne’ in French. (Fr.): This delightful book. (Fr.): Chicken. (Fr.): Something nice and sweet. KM’s comments, of course, reflect the wartime shortages: both sugar and meat were strictly rationed. 19. First marketed in cube form in 1910, the beef extract Oxo has been renowned since the mid-nineteenth century as a reliable stock base and a warming drink; its virtues were much advertised in the war as an ideal substitute for meaty dishes. 20. (Fr.): Ah my dear and delightful one, I love you tenderly and embrace you tightly. 15. 16. 17. 18.

[15 October 1918] [ATL]

15 X 1918.

2 Portland Villas East Heath Road NW3.

Anne darling Your letter went to the cockles of my heart – bless you for it – & curiously enough I had been thinking over the Spring Book only yesterday – seeing it & hoping that we would bring it off.1 Shall us? Lets – I will send you a Bud or a Leaf as they pop out & if you like em – ça ira.2 I have a very definite idea at this distance, at this Temperature & with the willow leaves flying in at the windows what spring felt like – to me – & its so mixed with lobsters, winkles, the smell of the sea – weedy pools, it ought with the help of the Lord to have enough Body – I shall get down to it – bang off – especially as I am Tied to the Sofa leg until Thursday week. That means I cant come and spend the delightful day

486   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 with you until after then – Hélas3 – But ask me again, chèrie,4 wont you & Ill come along with my slippers in a satin bag & my Plain Knitting. I long to see the studio. I love the Quality of your Fine Feeling for Decoration. One feels immensely rested & stimulated at the same time – a sort of fruitful Basking – if you know what I mean. Im sending you today a snippet of home made Cake from my home – Birthday Cake (I was 30 yesterday!) I hope it arrives in good order. You are to eat every crumb yourself! This is the sort of picture I have of you, darling – in my romantic moments. Scene Channel Boat. Anne on deck, carrying un paquet chéri5 who wears a cap with a cerise brim, white ‘petal’ top & black pompadour on the crown6– She points to the coast & says ‘Voilà mon loup chéri, voila la belle France –’ The loup chéri replies – ‘C’est bon à manger?’ Anne replies ‘Furieusement Bon.’7 ____________________________ My house is rather a joy when I can forget that the tooth glass is out of proportion with the lotion bottle. etc etc etc. My Papa sent a specialist to see me yesterday who said that if I didn’t go into a sanatorium I had not a Dog’s Chance – Blast his eyes –je m’en fou8– I feel full of Fire and Buck – I am sure Peace is coming – don’t you? Oh, I have such a longing for France. Can you hear that street cry Marchand d’habits9 – It sounds like ’Chand abi & is said or sung with a sort of jump in the middle – Well – God bless us all – & you especially – Your ‘Hedge’ nods & waves as I write with orange butterflies fanning their wings over the Campions – Always             Katherine. Notes 1. In spring that year, KM, JMM and Anne had discussed ideas for a collaborative book project they would work on, to comprise of poems and short prose pieces with illustrations. She wrote to JMM from Looe on 30 May 1918, giving him updates: I hope I see Anne today for last night, after I came in I wrote 4 of those ‘Poems’ for our book. Ive discovered the form & the style, I think. They are not in verse nor vers libre – I cant do those things – They are in Prose – (1) To a Butterfly (2) Foils (3) Le Regard [Fr.: The gaze] (4) Paddlers You would like them. They are very light – like Heron feathers, so to say.



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

anne estelle rice   487 The four sketches with the titles given here would not appear to have survived intact, but variants are to be found in CW4, pp. 243–5 and CP, pp. 162–6. (Fr.): That’ll do. (Fr.): Alas. (Fr.): Darling. (Fr.): A cherished bundle. The description is of the traditional French sailor boy’s cap: red-brimmed, with a black pom-pom on the top. (Fr.): ‘Look, my darling wolfcub, there’s fair France’ / The darling wolfcub replies, ‘Does it taste good?’ / Anne replies, ‘Devilishly good.’ ‘Mon loup’, literally my wolf, is a conventional French term of endearment for a baby boy or child. (Fr.): I couldn’t care less. (Fr): Clothes vendor.

[mid-November 1918] [ATL] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] Anne darling, I cannot tell you how good your letter made me feel. It was a Pacific coast in itself & my heart is still taking a sun bath in it! Just as soon as it can be arranged I am going off to Switzerland – Jack will come, too – & we shall leave the house to be sublet. I don’t think there will be any great difficulty – Chère – chère cette egg – cette herring – Every time I thought about them I began to laugh again. I saw people saying: ‘You are quite certain this is a controlled egg!’ & the man answering: ‘My dear Madam. That egg has been controlled for months. A child could eat it in perfect safety.’ Of course we are all mad. But isn’t the news marvellous! I keep thinking what Paris must be like. Of course I don’t know what is happening in the great world here, but I feel people have almost forgotten that there was a war – Like Uncle Toby’s advice to young Tristrams mother: ‘Wipe it up & say no more about it!’1 I am out of bed sitting on my aircushion on the sofa. About aircushions. I hear the Chinese are never without them. They make them of rice paper, paint with with lovely designs, fold them up small, – And then whenever you go for a walk or a picnic and want to sit down on a stone or a piece of hard grass you just shake out the little packet, blow it up, sit on it & there you are. A home from home! What a people they are. This last little characteristic, in my present ‘état de genoudefemmedechambreisme’2 makes me long to join their flag. I’d just love to see Drey any time. If he’d let me have a card & say when so that I can make ‘des illuminations et des arcs de Triomphe.’3 Do take care of your darling self – Mille baisers4 & a Big Squeeze from               Katherine.

488   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Notes 1. KM quotes from memory here, from Chapter 63 of The Life and Adventures of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, the innovative, sprawling, comic prose masterpiece by Laurence Sterne (1759–67). Tristram’s father has buoyantly been citing the outstanding intellectual feats of a number of child prodigies; Yorick intervenes to point out his omission of Lipsius, ‘who composed a work the day he was born. – They should have wiped it up, said my Uncle Toby, and said no more about it.’ 2. (Fr.): State of chambermaid’s knee-itus. 3. (Fr.): Illuminations and triumphal arches (referring to the ‘Arc de Triomphe’ at the top of the Champs-Elysées in Paris), the French monument to soldiers killed in battle, officially commissioned by decree, by Napoleon, and completed in 1836. 4. (Fr.): One thousand kisses.

[mid-December 1918] [ATL] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] My dearest Anne, Another Colonial Cake has just been washed ashore –– Here’s a Bite with my love – I have a fancy that my little island is made of this mixture – and the very rocks at low tide are strewn with almonds & raisins. These cakes in size & weight are exactly like small allotments. Marigold sits on the writing table & Penny offers a bunch of her name flowers to her engaging little Posterior ‘This side up – with care’ says he. I shall have the darling little drawings framed and add them to my gallery1 – Let us meet before Xmas. But you are not come all the way up here – its too far. I shall come to you please – one fine afternoon next week Ill phone in the morning as you suggest & then Ill take a little old cab from here to there. I will bring the Spring Onions2 that are ready with me –––––––– With a Big Hug and a Kiss, my precious friend Ever your Katherine Notes 1. These would appear to be sketches Rice had sent to KM; the letter KM sent on 13 January implies that ‘Marigold’ was either the name being considered for the baby Rice was expecting, or a playful nickname for the baby-to-be. 2. As mentioned in the letter above, KM and Rice had started planning a book of poems and prose pieces, to be illustrated by Rice. Whether the cryptic ‘Spring Onions’, along with the pictures of Marigold and Penny evoked here, have anything to do with this never-fulfilled project has not been established.



anne estelle rice   489

[19 December 1918] [ATL] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] Thursday – Dearest Anne – No go. Not a single Peasants Cart will take me. They will neither come for me here nor call for me there – we have ’phoned every garage & stable in the neighbourhood – Its a cursed disappointment, but I shall just have to ‘wait a bit’ –– I wish we were all in France with a real Xmas party in prospect – snow, huge fire, a feast, wine, old old French tunes on a guitar, fancy dresses, a Tree, and everybody too happy for words. Instead we are wondering whether to give the postman 5 shillings, or, since we have only been here since August will 3 be enough? Etc. Etc. Etc. This Cursed Country would take the spirit out of a Brandied Cherry. Mille Baisers, chérie1 Katherine Note 1. (Fr.): One thousand kisses, sweetheart.

[13 January 1919] [ATL] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] My darling Anne After my Plan For New Year’s Day fell through I gave up hope Of catching a rope Which would land me down near you. Since then Ive been (Pulse one sixteen Temperature one o three)1 Lying in bed With a wandering head And a weak, weak cup of tea. Injections, chère In my derrière2 Driven into a muscular wad With a needle thick As a walking stick –

490   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 How can one believe in God! Plus – pleurisy And je vous dis3 A head that went off on its own Rode a circular race That embraced every place I ever shall know or have known. I landed in Spain Went to China by train And rounded Cape Horn in a gale Ate an ice in New York Caught the boat for Majourke4 And went up the Nile for a sail. Light refreshments, bouillon raw eggs and orange juice were served on the journey. Jack M. came in, fell over the screen went out again, came back, dropped a candle, groaned, said ‘Oh God does my love for you matter tuppence?’ and went again, & the Faithful One changed the hot water bottles so marvellously often that you never had a hot water bottle at all. It was always being taken or brought back. All this, Anne darling, is a new treatment that my new doctor has started – a treatment by injections. Hes a wonderful man – He was a doorstep baby, left in Paris with nothing but a shawl on and a paper pinned on his poor little chest with SORAPURE written on it.5 That is what he calls himself. (It always sounds to me like a soap that does your washing for you while you sit in the kitchen all comfortable with your feet in the gas stove and read ‘Freckles’.)6 In April he says I ought to go to a place like Corsica. Switzerland is impossible, tank de Lord. So I think I shall. I cant help wishing we were going to help you produce Marigold et Cie, ma chère. Anne,7 if there are more than two you must give me one. Ill carry it away in my heavenly baby and turn it into a corsican baby for you in a moment.!8 I think twins would be perfect! They would be so self contained – such a pair – you could get such a good balance with one on either side of the fire. Also one could play the piano while the other played the violin, one could hold the basket while the other dropped the peaches into it, one could set the house on fire while the other turned the hose pipe on to it, one could always row to shore and tell you the other had fallen out of the boat, one could pull the communication cord if the other dropped out of the train, one could always hand around the coffee while the other poured. In fact, thinking it over why are children ever born singly? It seems just a waste of time – Do please have the most engaging adorable, mischievous two – Just think of the DECORATION you could make with two? Enfin – – – – – if one is a boy will you call him Valentine – because he is a February chile?



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Well, Anne dearest, Ill keep on thinking & thinking about you – and wishing you all the luck there is. I shall be no good after today until the end of this week for I have another consignment shipped in to me tomorrow – But Ill write again then. Quelle vie!9 Yours with tenderest love & a big warm hug Katherine. Notes 1. A healthy adult pulse rate is 60–80 beats per minute, and a healthy temperature is 98.4 degrees Fahrenheit (37.3 degrees Celsius). 2. (Fr.): Behind, or bottom, ‘derrière’ here creating a rhyming couplet with ‘chère’ (Fr.: My dear). 3. (Fr.): I tell you. 4 . (Fr.): Majorca (KM’s term here being her transcription of the French pronunciation of ‘Majorque’). 5. Rice repeats Dr Sorapure’s Dickens-style tale of origin in her ‘Memories of Katherine Mansfield’, adding the detail that his name was written on a label tied round his neck. See Rice, p. 84. 6. Freckles is an Oliver Twist-style adventure story about an orphan born in Chicago who escapes into the wild, survives despite innumerable encounters with life-threatening dangers, and finishes by discovering his genteel origins and fortune. Published in 1904 by the American novelist Gene Stratton-Porter (1863–1924), it had been brought back to public attention by a film adaptation in 1917. 7. (Fr.): Marigold and Co., my dear Anne. 8. Alexandre Dumas’s 1845 novelette Les Frères corses (‘The Corsican Brothers’) tells the story of twins separated at birth; one becomes a romantic, rugged Corsican countryman and patriot fighting against the imposition of French rule, the other a Parisian gentleman and lawyer. 9. (Fr.): What a life!

[late April 1919] [ATL] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] Anne darling – Your letter gave me so much joy: I can’t tell you what I feel – – – – I simply died this winter; retired underground and was not. I was so continually wretched and ill that at last I gave in and turned into a kind of peculiarly horrible mole – burrowing in bed – not living – I long to see you and to see your wonder-babe.1 Is it possible for you to come up to this Mountain in the first half of next week – or could we meet? The second alternative is a bother because if the day is bad I can’t go out & if Ive a temperature I cant etc etc etc. This week I have not a day free but Monday Tuesday Wednesday I would with such joy keep for you – chère.

492   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 About this house – I am not going away until I have seen my Father who arrives in June & even then Murry is keeping it on for himself – Ive got a cook housekeeper who is reliable (& a char & a daily housemaid.)!!! I don’t think M. will leave it for the next five years –––– Are you bringing your cherub to town? I imagine the drawings you will make of him this spring. I want really to stay here until September & have a Grand Exit then. The idea of travelling & strange hotels fills me with horror. It is like years since I saw you & yet such a little while – I see you as I write – Thank God that bloody winter is over – I remember Drey meeting me one day and calling me a sale chien.2 Yes, I must appear so – & I shall never be able to explain. My heart is always full of love for you, darling and I always think of you vividly – But I have been living with a Black Monkey all this winter – voila3 – All the same I am Ever Your devoted Katherine Notes 1. Anne and Raymond Drey’s only child, David Jerome Russell, was born on 11 February 1919. 2. (Fr.): Dirty (or bedraggled) dog. 3. (Fr.): There you go.

[7 May 1919] [ATL] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] Anne, ma chère Your letter was mislaid and I found I had not your address in my address book. When I asked Murry he was positive it was Church Street Chelsea . . I remembered the Church Street, but I would have sworn it was the other. However he at last convinced me & this morning my letter is returned! La voila.1 Is it too late for us to meet? Would you suggest a day? I just long to see you – Toujours – ma chere amie2 Katherine. Notes 1. (Fr.): Here it is. 2. (Fr.): Always – my dear friend.



anne estelle rice   493

[13 August 1919] [ATL] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] My darling Anne Your letter has been waiting to be answered for nearly a week, but I have been rather badly ill and am only up for the first time today. It was a Thousand Joys to hear from me. I searched the wee photograph for all there possibly was to see of you and David. Ah, que vous avez de la chance!1 He looks a perfect lamb – distinctly as though he were thinking about that blackbird, taking it seriously & making a thorough study of the bird – I hope I shall see him one day. My Pa arrives tomorrow and my plans are still rather en l’air2 until I have seen him. Why, I don’t know. But he seems to me a kind of vast symbolic chapeau3 out of which I shall draw the little piece of paper that will decide my Fate. But that is absurd. For my plans are to go abroad in about three weeks time and there to remain. We are on the track of several different places – and not decided yet – but – c’est tout.4 I shall be more thankful than I can say to be out of it all here – I hate the place and the people always more and more – and I am sure the whole of England is finie – finie.5 Perhaps it isn’t if you have a baby to laugh things over with – but otherwise – and plus Life on a Sofa its just Hell. What wouldn’t I give for one of our laughs, ma chère. As it is, things aren’t funny any more – They only make me feel desperate. ‘It’s time for me to go’ as the song says.6 The only thing I have got out of it all these months is pennies. I have earned quite a few. That gives one a good sense of freedom – Forgive the dullest dog that ever lay beside a cottage door – I will write again darling woman when things is more lively. Kiss your angel for me – just behind his left ear. As I write I see you and love you so much so dearly – Id give a world to hear your Hil-lo – Ever your devoted Katherine. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

(Fr.): How lucky you are! (Fr.): Up in the air. (Fr.): Hat. (Fr.): That’s all. (Fr.): Finished. Given the banality of the words – and KM herself plays up their clichéd effect here – there is no way here to identify the exact song she refers to. In the context of the immediate post-war, a large number of popular and soldiers’ songs on the theme of saying ‘goodbye’ (such as Weston and Lee’s still well-known ‘Good-bye-ee!’, 1917) were still present in the public mind. The same refrain, however, can also be found in music-hall comedies, popular operettas and traditional songs.

494   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [mid-February 1920] [ATL] This is my address until May. Do send me a word! Villa Flora Menton. My darling darling Anne Ive just heard from Murry that Constable has accepted my book & that you may perhaps do some drawings for it.1 This last fact simply fills me with joy. Will you do them? It excites me so – the thought of them. You know how I admire & love your work – you blessed woman – and how proud I am to have your name & mine walking bras dessus bras dessous.2 You know my Bag – It is my chez moi.3 It goes with me like Mary’s lamb wherever I go –4 whenever I get into another Strange Room – out comes the Bag & the Interior Decoration is complete. How many times I have greeted you as I put it on the sofa end or on the wardrobe handle – I don’t believe a day passes but I think of you – It will always be so – There you just are – Whenever I fill the jar with anemones or peel a tangerine or see a tree covered with fruit or pick flowers or throw a stone into the sea – or laugh on the quiet or try on a hat or see a particularly ravishing bébé5 I think ‘ANNE’. Ive been (dont laugh) ill since December 5th with a cursed heart – and I cant walk even yet. But the corner is turned and I shall be a well girl again very soon – You know Anne the ‘art business’ for me is the only Thing that Matters – I cant find a substitute which is ‘both nourishing & satisfying’. I wish you were here – the weather is glorious. Italy is a cursed spot but France – is the old old story. Salutations. Love – a great deal of Love to you & to le petit.6 Heaven bless your loves. I suppose you won’t be in Paris in May by any chance? We might meet and fleet a golden hour together –7       I am always your         Katherine. Notes 1. Constable had just accepted the collection Bliss and Other Stories for publication. 2. (Fr.): Arm in arm. 3. (Fr.): Home. 4. From the classic American nineteenth-century nursery rhyme ‘Mary had a Little Lamb’, the first verse of which reads, Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow; And everywhere that Mary went, The lamb was sure to go.



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5. (Fr.): Baby. 6. (Fr.): The little one – a conventional term of endearment for a child, especially in the South of France, which KM adopts as her preferred term when referring to Rice’s son. 7. The transitive use of the verb ‘to fleet’ was an archaism; to fleet time, or fleet an hour, meaning to pass or while away time. More pastiche here than direct quotation, KM’s mock lyrical style has Shakespearian overtones (such as As You Like It, I, i: ‘They say many young gentlemen flock to him every day and fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world,’ or Sonnet 19, for example); it may also recall the more sanctimonious tones of the late nineteenth-century children’s magazine Golden Hour.

[mid-March 1920] [ATL] Villa Flora Menton. Anne I must reply paid but don’t you bother to. Ive got eight golden pages from you and I have just eaten the perfect infant. Chère Chère!!!1 What a being to have produced. My three new spring hats are off to the darling. There he sits – absolutely confident that the ancient incredible old world is spinning round because he is sitting there and just laughing at the joke of it all. Let me love him when I come home. Bless his fingers and toes. Tell him he has an Aunt Katherine who cant look at him without turning into a kind of rainbow smile. Darling – to use our private, old time language. I think you have absolutely boxed it as far as the baby business is concerned. Tell him Ill turn catherine wheels if hell laugh at me and tell him that his mother has really been whiffling to some purpose! Im leaving here April 27th and coming to England until the fin d’Octobre2 when I return here. Ill be in Hampstead for the summer. We must meet soon. Im ever so much better & can walk and talk but part of my left lung is gone and that means my heart is not a boxers heart & Ill never be able to climb trees or run or swim again. Isn’t that a bit steep of Almighty God. Im always praising him too, but there you are – Im terribly happy all the same and I don’t think the world has lost an athlete, darling – do you? The weather here is simply supreme. Its summer – hot enough for cold chicken un peu de salad,3 champagne & ice cream all of which are very much here! The flowers are marvellous Anne. We go for picnics up among the mountains and long day excursions by motor – We fly into Monte & buy hats for some reason ‘c’est l’heure des chapeaux’4 at present & hats seem to be flying in the air – a whiff of the Rooms gives one civilization encore & the bands the gay frocks the children pelting

496   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 the car with tiny bouquets – all seem part of the spring picture. All the flowers I share with you & the lemon groves & orange trees. I see little houses perched up on the wild hills & dream we are there sur la terrasse.5 I shall always love you like that. When the light is lovely I think ‘Anne’ would see it & when a funny old man stand in the middle of the road cursing at his goats its a drawing by Anne – Tell le cheri he is going to have a lapin niçois6 brought home for him that waggles its ears so beautifully that you have to shriek or die at the sight. I am lying here with ‘relations’ the dearest people only they are not artists. You know what that means? I love them and theyve just been too good & dear to me but they are not in the same world that we are & I pine for my own people my own ‘wandering tribe’. I am so glad you liked my old story. A&L are publishing another:7 I hope you’ll like that. I have done a heap of work here – the sun makes one work & it just shines & shines. Murry seems terribly busy and occupé8 always. I think he has nearly forgotten me by now – My best love, dearest of women & a big big warm hug – Please serre Drey bien le main9 for me & kiss the Joy Baby under his left ear for Your Ever devoted Katherine. me among the Pallums* . . . X * Above this phrase is a small ink drawing of a line of palm trees. Notes (Fr.): Dear darling! (Fr.): The end of October. (Fr.): A little bit of lettuce. (Fr.): The hour for hats, here implying ‘hats are of the hour’, or ‘in fashion’. (Fr.): On the terrace. (Fr.): A rabbit from Nice. KM’s promise of a present is not without playful irony, ‘lapin niçois’ also being a traditional recipe for cooked rabbit, using olives from Nice. 7. KM’s ‘The Man Without a Temperament’ was published in the spring 1920 issue of the supposedly quarterly, but rather sporadically published and shortlived Modernist journal Art and Letters. During its short existence (summer 1917 until winter 1920), it was one of the era’s most striking, beautifully produced magazines, publishing poetry, short stories, arts criticism and highquality drawings and reproductions. See CW2, pp. 199–210. 8. (Fr.): Preoccupied. 9. (Fr.): Shake Drey’s hand from me. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.



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[21 May 1920] [ATL] 2 Portland Villas East Heath Road, Hampstead N.W.3 My darling Anne, Yes, Im back until the end of August – just looking back, as it were – I have been longing to see you – But chère the bother is Im not up to coming to tea and dinner – I cant go anywhere except by car – & I simply can’t afford cars for long times – So, as a rule, Im stranded on my hill top & have to ask people to come to me. This is a great curse – but there you are. Im much better but no good at all at walking or taking public conveyances. In that case would you and Drey come & see me? As for that blessed infant I can’t expect him – the darling. What would be too lovely for words would be if you’d come to tea with me & Drey come onto dine on May 31st. Or if you’d rather just come to dinner or if you would come to tea. Whatever suits you. I should love to see you, my darling Anne – And I want to ask you if you & your baby wouldn’t care to come out to me next winter in the South for a while. I was always thinking it over – Theres so much I’d like to talk about & to hear about –Tell the precious one how sorry I am I cant come & see him in his bye. And fondest, tenderest love. Ever your Katherine

[10 June 1920] [ATL] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] Anne darling Would you come Tuesday of next week. To T and then to dinner + Drey + J.M.M. That would be very perfect. I expect Ill meet David in a railway carriage when he’s about 20 & too lean for words & Im 53. At any rate I shall always carry a gay umbrella from this day I shall have un ombrelle vert fait exprès avec des petits harpes d’or –––1 Heaven keep us until Tuesday –               Votre devouée2               Katherine. Notes 1. (Fr.): An especially made green parasol with little golden harps. 2. (Fr.): Your devoted.

498   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [18 June 1920] [ATL] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] Anne darling, After you had gone I really found your small South Sea Island or Pacific Summer on the blue chair in the fish basket.1 What an ungrateful creature I must have appeared. And Ive been living on the contents ever since. At this very moment my lunch tray has just appeared crowned with the pineapple. Thank you mille mille fois,2 darling, generous woman. If you will let me know your address I will post the basket; they are so useful especially at the bord du mer.3 I cant tell you what joy it was to see you again – and I loved your dress, your hat and the big comb in your hair, and the baby’s photographs and our conversations and I wished more than ever that we lived within more frequent hailing distance – in France – Perhaps one year we shall. Toujours, toujours ton devouée4 Katherine Mille baisers pour le petit.5 Notes 1. As the letter goes on to make clearer, Rice had left a gift of tropical or exotic fruit in a basket. 2. (Fr.): One thousand times. 3. (Fr.): At the sea-side. 4. (Fr.): Your devoted. 5. (Fr.): One thousand kisses for the little one.

[26 December 1920] [ATL]

26 xii 1920

Villa Isola Bella Garavan Menton A/M.

My Precious Friend, The parcel arrived on Xmas morning but it was a separate fête by itself – just your letter & the two enchanting sketches. I love them,



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Anne. They remind me of our spring together & the laburnum seems hung with little laughs. If you knew how often I think of that time at Looe – our pic-nic, the white-eyed Kaffir,1 the midget infant hurling large pieces of Cornwall into the sea on the beach that afternoon! Its all as clear as today. But you know – dont you? – that all the times we have ever spent together are clear like that. And here – I am always sending you greetings – always sharing things with you. I salute you in tangerines and the curved petals of roses thé2 and the crocus colour of the sea & in the moonlight on the poire sauvage.3 Many many other things. It will always be so with me however seldom I see you. I shall just go on rejoicing in the fact of you and loving you and feeling in that family where Monsieur le Beau Soleil est notre père nous sommes des soeurs.4 But all that’s jolly fine. I shan’t be content, darling, unless we do have a real summer together one day with the blessed enfant5 pouring sand down our necks. . . . Murry tells me you are working. I hope it goes very well. I hope there are a whole flock of masterpieces with canvas wings flying towards you from shadowy 1921. Whenever I examine things here – the lovely springing line of flowers & peach leaves, par example,6 I realise what a marvellous painter you are – the beauty of your line – the life behind it. I am still hard at the story writing and still feeling that only now do I begin to see what I want to do. Im sending you my book. Its not a good one. I promise the next will be better but I just wanted you to have a copy. Living solitary these last months with a servant who is a born artist & says ‘un ou deux bananes faisent plus intrigantes le compotier’7 & who returns from market with a basket which just to see on the kitchen table is food for the day – makes work a great deal easier to get at. The strain is removed. At last one doesn’t worry any more. And fancy ones domestique8 having an idea of what work is! She won’t even let a person talk at the front door if Im working. She whispers to them to go to la porte de la cuisine . . . parce que c’est tres enervant pour Madame d’entendre causer quelquun pendant qu’elle travaille!9 Its like being in Heaven with an ange gardienne.10 Murry is here for Christmas. The weather is superb & champagne is only 30 francs a bottle. There is always un feu d’enfer in my chambre à coucher.11 The result is, chère (oh, I can only say these things to you!!) we are continually suggesting to Marie she should go to Vespers, Bénediction, la messe. The poor old creature can’t understand this mania de la pousser vers l’église.12 Its a mystery! But what is one to do? The house is so small. I send her to market, to the poste, out to see her friends – anywhere – – – – – and when she comes back she cries Dieu me garde! Que Madame et Monsieur ont bonne mine!13 Champagne in this air & this sun is unsafe for all people under – say ninety-nine! Queer it is. I believe if I lived in England I could be a eunuch quite

500   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 cheerfully, but. . . . . there’s something in the air of France – – – which is very restorative, lets say. To turn to more serious subjects. How awfully well Drey writes in the Athenaeum.14 I do so immensely enjoy his articles. He’s the only man who seems to write about painting as though it wasn’t first put through the intellectual mincing machine. Will you tell him how awfully I like his work & serre lui le main pour moi?15 I hear that he has been to MY Sorapure. There’s a doctor – and a very fine honest man. Darling – its lunch time – I tremble de faim.16 Bless you for Ever. Take care of your self. Come to France soon. Let us meet one day soon – And until then know you have my deep love & devotion.         Toujours17         Your         Katherine. Notes  1. (Fr.): Now considered totally offensive on account of its racist, colonial connotations, the word ‘Kaffir’ was derogatory even in early twentieth-century usage; it is a word of Arabic origin, meaning ‘unbeliever’, used to refer to black Africans.  2. (Fr.): Tea roses.  3. (Fr.): Wild pear.  4. (Fr.): Mr Sunshine is our father we are sisters.  5. (Fr.): Child.  6. (Fr.): For example.  7. (Fr.): A banana or two made the fruit bowl more intriguing.  8. (Fr.): Servant.  9. (Fr.): The kitchen door . . . because it is very irritating for Madame to hear people talking when she’s working. 10. (Fr.): Guardian angel. 11. (Fr.): A blazing fire in my bedroom. 12. (Fr.): Vespers, Benediction, Mass [. . .] This obsession with pushing her off to church. 13. (Fr.): The Lord protect me! Madame and Monsieur are looking well. 14. Having written for Rhythm and the Blue Review, Rice contributed regular to the Athenaeum as an art – and, more rarely, a theatre – critic. 15. (Fr.): Shake his hand from me. 16. (Fr.): Tremble with hunger. 17. (Fr.): Always.



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[9 January 1921] [ATL] Isola Bella Garavan Menton A/M.

9 i 1921

Darling Anne May I ask you do to a Vile Deed for me? If you feel that vraiment c’est un peu trop1 just ignore my letter. But you know darling it was through you I first met milanese silk stockings & since then I have used no other. But la belle France or at any rate sur la bord de la Riviera2 doesn’t wear them – & only sells fiendishly dear ladder traps. Would it be a bother for you to send me 3 pairs of grey ones? I will send a cheque by return. Id be more than grateful. If youd put them in an envelope with bas usés written on it.3 The last ones I bought were twenty something & six – but if you would buy me what you buy for yourself, ma chère, ca serait parfait.4 Forgive me for asking this. Ill never do it again. And please dont hesitate to refuse your Darned for the last time Katherine P.S. I take 4’s in shoes! Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

(Fr.): Really a bit too cheeky. (Fr.): Fair France, or at any rate on the Mediterranean coast. (Fr.): Worn-out stockings. (Fr.): My dear, it would be perfect.

[January 1921] [ATL] Villa Isola Bella Garavan Menton A/M. Dearest I have just received your blue & cherry letter. What a perfect colour for a lining – Id rather have one cherry lining than 50 silver ones!

502   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 The stockings are so cheap that I can hardly believe my eyes. I thought theyd be at least 25/6 a pair – which was the price I paid for them at good old Swan & Ed.1 Don’t bother about any more – I know how hateful it is to shop for another – I send my cheque with a thousand thanks. I tremendously enjoyed hearing of the Gwen Otter dinner.2 I could see it & hear it. Gwen in gold trousers & that long long après midi d’un Faune.3 Poor dear! it will never be over for me. I have a warm corner in my heart for that woman always. There’s something very fine in her & yet she has missed Life. Its terrific news to hear you are working. I am in the middle of a new long story called Family Life4 which may surprise people a bit. I try & make Family Life so gorgeous – not hatred and cold linoleum – but warmth & hydrangeas –– Addio, mia bella5 Katherine. Notes 1. ‘Swan & Edgar’ was a London department store at Piccadilly Circus. 2. Gwendoline Ethel Maunsell (1896–1958), whose first husband, Robert John Otter, had been killed in the war, was a London society hostess whose home in Chelsea provided a renowned meeting place for writers, musicians and theosophists. She was a long-standing friend of Aleister Crowley. Crowley (1875–1947) was an English writer and occultist, who grew up in a family of evangelist sectarians whose influence over his future life choices was clearly tangible, even if he broke away quite dramatically and changed his name (‘Aleister’ reflecting the determining influence of Shelley’s poem ‘Alastor’ and its quest for greatness in solitude). Crowley travelled compulsively as part of his life-long quest for intense mystical experience and spiritual epiphanies, but failing to become the guru he aspired to be, ended up more as a social outcast and drug addict. 3. ‘Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune’ is a tone poem for orchestra by the French composer Claude Debussy (1862–1918), composed in 1894. The music provided the main orchestral accompaniment and theme of the famous ‘Aprèsmidi d’un faune’ performed by the Ballets Russes in 1912. KM’s reference here, however, may be to the poem by the French Symbolist Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–98) which inspired Debussy’s music, a heavily sensuous fin-de-siècle eclogue telling of the heady revels and passions of a faun and nymphs – thereby comparing these afternoon indulgences to the atmosphere at Otter’s receptions. 4. This story eventually became ‘An Ideal Family’, published later that year (CW2, pp. 317–22); KM’s abiding preoccupation at the time with literary depictions of warm family love would eventually lead to ‘At the Bay’, published in 1922. See CW2, pp. 343–72. The same year, she also told Marie Belloc-Lowndes she was longing to write about family love (CL1, p. 316). 5. (It.): Farewell, my beauty.



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[January 1921] [ATL] Villa Isola Bella Garavan Menton A/M. My darling Anne I feel just the same about the drawings as le petit does.1 Im sure we should have the same point of view. They are simply ravishing. What must it feel like to have a Maman who can make you pictures like these. That grey horse, par exemple,2 is such a nice horse that you want to give a loud squeak of joy at sight of him and the rabbits, rather coy, as the best rabbits always are make me want to touch em too. Your other two Christmas drawings framed in blue frames hang on the walls. They are a constant delight. Your work gives me always such a deep joy – its all part of my love of you. I mean I have the feeling that I understand your work – without a word spoken – almost fundamentally – or organically – sounds rather funny when I write it . . . . . ––––– ––––– ––––– ––––– ––––– ––––– ––––– ––––– It is indeed good news that stockings are coming down – as they say – In France they are still going up. To make a bad small joke ils montent par les échelles.3 I should have to paint my jambes4 & have done with it if I had to pay these prices. Don’t bother to get me any more tho’. Its such a bore for you. Heres my cheque. The garden is full of double pink stocks. Gorgeous flowers, so strong and so sturdy. I wish I could send you an armful. Say no more about my old book. I must get a new one out – thats what I feel. The others not good enough to stand alone – though its lovely to feel that it gave you a little pleasure. Give the Blessed Infant a butterfly kiss from me & tell him that hes my favourite. I suppose he won’t care a straw; he’s everybody’s favourite. How you must love him to play with. Is he going to be a great laugher? Shall we have a laugh à trois5 one of these days? How I hope so! I feel I shall be away for years from England. I can’t bear the idea of seeing it again. Yet, somewhere there’s always a pinch of feeling for it when one is abroad – never otherwise! I prefer to keep the pinch, however. Once I put my toe on Folkestone Pier it goes. All Blessings be yours darling. Ever your Katherine. Notes 1. (Fr.): The little one. 2. (Fr.): For example.

504   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 3. (Fr.): They’re going up ladders. 4. (Fr.): Legs. 5. (Fr.): As a threesome.

[12 May 1921] [ATL] Hotel Beau Site, Clarens-Montreux La Suisse Suisse Suisse* My Precious Darling Anne, If I were in Paris wouldn’t I fly to where you were! Its so perfect of you even to think Im there. I feel as though I was. Or at least that for two quite inferior pins I could pack up and go. But, chère at the moment I can only walk from the kerridge to the door and from the door to the kerridge. Cant mount a stair – cant do anything but lie in a chaise longue looking at mountains that make one feel one is living in the Eye of the Lord. Its all temporary – I am full of beans and full of fight – but unfortunately darling Im full of Bacilli too. Which is a bother. If you came here Id simply have such a laugh about it that this rotten old chaise longue would break its Swiss legs. Instead Im waiting for docteur Figli (good name that!) and Ive got a very nice little booklet of information to give him about 2 little guineas which have just died for my sake.1 The number of guinea pigs Anne that Ive murdered! So that my precious dear, is that. Paris might be – might very well be la pleine lune for me.2 I left my dear little Isola Bella last week. The South of France is fever to the feverish. Thats my experience. Adorable pays3 – Ill go back there one day but sans un thermomètre.4 Switzerland, which I have always managed to avoid is the very devil. I knew it would be. I mean the people are so UGLY; they are simply hideous. They have no shape. All the women have pear shaped derrières,5 ugly heads, awful feet. All the men wear ready made check flannelette suits, six sizes too small and felt hats another six sizes too small with a little pre-war feather sticking up behind. Curse them. And the food. Its got no nerves. You know what I mean? It seems to lie down and wait for you; the very steaks are meek. Theres no contact between you and it. You’re not attracted. You don’t feel that keenness to meet it and know more of it and get on very intimate terms. The asparagus is always stone dead. As to the puree de pommes de terre6 you feel inclined to call it ‘uncle’. Now I had food in the South that made me feel – should there be a Paradis you and I shall have one lunch cooked by my old Marie which will atone for years of not meeting. And then Anne, Switzerland is revoltingly clean. My bed! Its enough to unmake any man – the sight of it. Dead white – tucked in so tight that you have to insert yourself like a knife into an oyster. I got up the first



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night and almost whimpering like Stepan in The Possessed.7 I put my old wild jackal skin over the counterpane. But this cleanliness persists in everything. Even the bird droppings on the terrasse are immaculate and every inch of lilac is crisp home from the laundry. Its a cursed country. And added to this there are these terrific mountains. I keep saying that about cats looking at Kings but one feels a very small cat, licking ones paw, making a dab or two at ones tail in the face of Immensities. However, darling, I believe it is the only place where they do give one back ones wings8 and I cant go on crawling any longer. Its beyond a joke. I hope you have a perfect time in Paris. Murry has been there. He was very happy. He’s at present lecturing in Oxford on Style. I had a very long story in The Mercury this month9 which I rather hoped you’d see, because you’d see the point of it. I hope you do. Tell me about your work when you have time. The precious babe’s little picture follows me everywhere – The one in the pram – looking out. I shant stay here at this hotel long so my London address is best. The sight of distant Montreux is altogether too powerful. As to the people in this hotel – it is like a living cemetery. I never saw such deadness. I mean belonging to a by gone period. Collar supports (do you remember them?) are the height of fashion here & hair nets and silver belt buckles and button boots. Face powder hasn’t been invented yet. Its a queer world, but in spite of everything, darling, its a rare rare joy to be alive – and I salute you and it & kiss you both together – but you I kiss more warmly – Goodbye for now. Toujours, ma bien-chère10 Ta Katherine. Love please to Drey.11 *Original underlined three times for emphasis.

Notes  1. Since the last decade of the nineteenth century, guinea pigs had been used extensively in medical research into tuberculosis; medical reviews on both sides of the Channel, including the Lancet (which KM was receiving from Alice Jones – see CL1, p. 623), the Bulletin de l’Institut Pasteur and the Revue Médicale, published detailed reports of experimental testing.  2. (Fr.): Full moon.  3. (Fr.): Adorable country.  4. (Fr.): Without a thermometer.  5. (Fr.): Behinds.  6. (Fr.): Mashed potato.  7. In Dostoevsky’s grim political satire The Possessed (also translated as The Devils), published in 1872, Stepan Trifimovich Verkhovensky is the refined liberal idealist whose unshakeable, poised devotion to outdated notions

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 8.  9. 10. 11.

contributes greatly to the final descent into betrayal, anarchy and tragedy. His growing anxiety and nervous agitation are described by the narrator in Chapter 5, when, alone in his rooms at night, he paces up and down disconsolately, puckers his lips, sighs and whimpers. KM here uses her favourite euphemism to refer to her lungs. ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ was published in the May edition of the London Mercury. See CW2, pp. 266–83. (Fr.): Always my dearest. KM here pastiches the genteel affectation of letter endings in French epistolary novels of the eighteenth century. Her P.S. is written diagonally on the bottom left-hand side of the letter.

[19 May 1921] [ATL] Hotel Beau Site Clarens-Montreux I must write to you once again, darling woman, while you are in Paris. Anne, if I were not to hear from you again ever I could live on your last letter. To have taken the trouble – I know what writing means – to have sent me that whole great piece of Paris – complete – with yourself and the traffic (Id love to be somewhere where taxis ran one over) and marble tops, and Louise avec son plumeau,1 and the shops with the flowery saucissons,2 & that getting le petit dejeuner,3 and Wyndham Lewis4 & – well – I walked through your letter once & then I just idled through it again & took my time and stopped to look & admire and love and smell and hear it all. It was a great gift, my dearest Anne – it was un cadeau superbe pour moi.5 How I love you for doing just that. Do you feel I do? You must. Now Ive been to Paris – and even to St. Cloud.6 For your idea of a house there started me dreaming of the house next door. Charming houses – two stories with lilac bushes at the gate. I made a hole in my fence big enough for an eye to flash through – and in the morning I spied through and called to the petit7 who was gardening ‘David’ and he said – rather off hand, ‘Quoi?’8 And I said: ‘Will you come to tea with me today?’ and he turned his back on me & shouted up at his own house ‘She wants me to go to tea’. At that your head appeared at a window & you said: ‘Well do you want to go?’ David replied – ‘Well what have we got for tea here?’ . . . . . It was an awfully sweet dream. I wish it would come true. What fun we should have. In the evening there would be a lamp on the garden table – I see a whole lovely life – and more my life than cafés now-a-days. All the same Paris and London have their appeal. Its very good to talk at times & I love watching and listening. These mountains are crushing table companions. But all the same I lie all day looking at them and they are pretty terrific. . . . if one could get them into the story, you know – get them ‘placé’9. . .



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I saw the biggest specialist in Switzerland on Saturday, Anne.10 Thats what made your letter so wonderfully good just at the moment. It seemed to bring Life so near again. After Id seen this man it was just as if the landscape – everything changed a little – moved a little further off. I always expect these doctor men to say – ‘Get better? Of course you will! We’ll put you right in no time. Six months at the very most & youll be fit as a fiddle again.’ But though this man was extremely nice he would not say more than – I still had a chance. That was all. I tried to get the word ‘guéri’11 but it was no good. All I could wangle out of him was: ‘If your digestion continues good you still have a chance’ – Its an infernal nuisance to love Life as I do. I seem to love it more as time goes on rather than less. It never becomes a habit to me – its always a marvel. I do hope Ill be able to keep in it for long enough to do some really good work. Im sick of people dying who promise well. One doesn’t want to join that crowd at all. So I shall go on lapping up jaunes d’oeufs and de la crème12 . . . Anne will you greet Wyndham Lewis for me and say how I regret not knowing him. Hes one of the few people Id very much like to have had for a friend. You gave the Joyce ménage perfectly. I see them – I suppose he is a very great man. I confess there is a quelque chose13 in his writing which I can’t get on with – it – to speak frankly – disgusts me. It strikes me as unhealthy in a peculiar way. But I believe that Im not as modern as I ought to be. Jack Murry says Im a fearful moralist!!!14 Its evening now. I expect the lights are just out in the streets. I see the round shadows of the trees, the warm white of the pavé.15 I see the people – flitting by. And here in the lake the mountains are bluish – cold. Only on the high tops the snow is a faint apricot colour. Beautiful Life! ‘To be alive and that is enough’. I could almost say that – but not quite. Farewell for now dear precious woman. Toujours à toi16 Katherine. The little photographs are just exquisite. It is his lovely little fearless look which is so remarkable. I think he’s booked for an artist, Anne. Notes  1. (Fr.): With her feather duster.  2. (Fr.): Sausages.  3. (Fr.): Breakfast.  4. The Canadian-born writer and artist Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957), co-founder of the Vorticist movement and editor of the short-lived manifestomagazine Blast, had been based in London since his return from the Front, where for two years he had served as a war artist. The early 1920s saw him excelling as a powerfully avant-garde and successful painter; by the end of the decade, however, and until the late 1930s, he focused more on fiction and essay writing, developing a caustic, satirical vein that in many ways

508   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 echoes the defiant bold lines and harsh colours of his pictures, but with an explicitly belligerent and proto-fascist viewpoint.  5. (Fr.): A superb present for me.  6. St Cloud is an elegant and well-to-do town, built on the banks of the River Seine, just on the western border of Paris.  7. (Fr.): Little one.  8. (Fr.): What?  9. (Fr.): In the right place. 10. KM had been consulting Dr Stephani, the doctor and director of the Montana sanatorium. 11. (Fr.): Cured. 12. (Fr.): Egg yolks and cream. 13. (Fr.): Something. 14. James Joyce’s Modernist masterpiece Ulysses was not published until the following year, but the Little Review had been publishing instalments since mid-1918. The chapters up to and including ‘Nausicaa’ were in circulation by this date. KM makes a very similar confession to her cousin Elizabeth, expressing her ‘moralist’s’ eye in terms of his fiction. See CL1, p. 56. 15. (Fr.): Paving stones. 16. (Fr.): Always yours.

[24 December 1921] [ATL]

Christmas Eve.

Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre Valais

Darling precious Anne, Suddenly, this afternoon, as I was thinking of you there flashed across my inward eye a beautiful poppy that we stood looking at in the garden of the Headland Hotel, Looe.1 Do you remember that marvellous black sheen at the base of the petal and the big purplish centre? Then that took me back to our improvised café – just the same table with a bottle on it and ourselves out of space and time . . . for the moment! And from that I began to think of your très2 blue eyes that I love so and your neck, and the comb you wore in your hair the last time you dined with us and a pink pinny you had on the first time I ever saw you in the studio in Paris. These things are not the whole of my Anne, but they are signs and tokens of her and for them and for a thousand others what wouldn’t I give at this moment to put my arms round her and give her a small squeeze! Well, darling woman, even at this distance its a joy to know that you are you, and I am thankful that we are walking the earth at the same time. I never turn in your direction without giving you an invisible hail. You are one of those rare beings my dear that one praises Life for. Bless you and David this Christmas and a Merry Merry Nouvelle Année3 to you both. Please give him a butterfly kiss from me and blow softly down



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his neck. Why cant I come and see! I am certain there is not one of your friends who would appreciate him more than I could. But I still pin my faith on to a star (I expect David thinks that quite an ordinary feat) and believe that we shall all sit down together under a flowery tree somewhere and laugh. How did you spend the summer? Did you get much work done? But I mustn’t begin asking questions. Its a bother having to answer them. But chère4 I shall be in Paris, I hope, from May on this year. Will you by any chance be there? I am going on a preliminary visit almost at once to see a specialist there – a Rushian & to have some teeth pulled out and pulled in again.5 Then I come back here to save pennies for my flight in May. I believe this Russian cures people with my complaint. He sounds wonderful. Its so long since I have heard of any of the old set. Where are they? New friends are not – never can be the same, and all mine seem to be people I know as a writer not as a common garden human being. Whether they care passionately for the smell of tangerines or not I haven’t the least idea. I cant really care for people who are cut off at the head – I like them to exist as far as their hearts au moins!6 Dont ever come to Switzerland Anne. Its all scenery. One gets the same on a Mountain Railway at 6d a go and get off after the last bumping. But the Swiss!! The size of their ankles!! Their passion for pigs and for cutting down trees – They are always cutting down trees and as the tree falls the house frau7 rushes out of the kitchen to see waving a pig knife and shouting a joyful voilà!8 I believe they are full of virtue, but virtue is a bad boisson9 to be full of. This is serious, though. I wanted to send you a Christmas present. I cant. In the first place I am au lit10 with an attack of congestion and Murry swerves past all shops even if there were shops to swerve by here. So I must put it off & content myself with a cuckoo bird for David. It is only postponed. And will you give my love to Drey. It is so long since I heard from him that he may have forgotten me. Recall me – will you, Anne! ‘Cette petite personne avec les yeux comme les boutons de bottines . . . tu sais’11 – That will bring me back. Id awfully like to see Drey again – Je lui serre la main bien cordialement.12 For the rest – when you have the time can I have un mot13 to know you are well and that all goes? Oh, Anne, do you see Horace Holley’s great Tome on Bahaism is produced.14 I expect it is very powerful! I note that Bertha sells slips, tuniques and cossaques at a li’l shop in New York.15 It being the pantomine season I shall make the joke . . . I expect they are all slips. Have you heard how brutal Lascelles was to the Queen? Pinched her little Mary.16 Perhaps that joke is très vieux17 in London. Ones sense of humour gets very keen on mountain tops – Fare well, dear precious Anne. May good fortune fall ever deeper in love with thee. I am always your devoted Katherine.

510   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Notes  1. KM had stayed at the hotel from 17 May until 29 June 1918; it was here that Anne began her most famous portrait of KM, now in the Museum of New Zealand, Wellington.  2. (Fr.): Very.  3. (Fr.): New Year.  4. The Russian in question is Ivan Manoukhin (see above, pp. 138–9).  5. (Fr.): Dear.  6. (Fr.): At least.  7. (Ger.): Wife.  8. (Fr.): Here it is.  9. (Fr.): Drink. 10. (Fr.): In bed. 11. (Fr.): That little person with eyes like boot buttons – you know. 12. (Fr.): I give him a hearty handshake. 13. (Fr.): A word. 14. Horace Holley (1887–1960) was an American-born poet, playwright and Theosophist after adopting the Baha’ist faith and internationalist creed in 1909. He thus stands as an interesting addition to the various spiritualist and Theosophist movements of the 1910s and 1920s whose works circulated in Orage’s circles and influenced both KM and JMM, albeit in strikingly different ways. Holley’s founding work, Bahai – The Spirit of the Age, was published in 1921. 15. Bertha Case was an American artist who had worked for a number of years with J. D. Fergusson (whose 1908 portrait of her is one of the rare surviving source documents attesting to her life in those years), where she also became friendly with Rice. While living in Paris, she also frequented the artistic circles of Matisse and Picasso. Case had married the Lebanese artist, poet and humanist Ameen Rihani in 1916, after which the couple lived between the Middle East, Paris and New York; uncomfortable with this life of constant exile and emigration, Case soon settled more permanently in New York to pursue her own activities as an artist and curator. 16. The month before, the Viscount of Harewood, Henry Lascelles (1846– 1929), had become engaged to Mary, the Princess Royal (1897–1965), only daughter of King George V and Queen Mary. Court gossip and rumours about the match were rife, given the rather staid reputation of Lascelles, an older man and an unexpected suitor. 17. (Fr.): Dated, hackneyed.

[26 December 1921] [ATL] I wrote to you in Paris. But Im not sure whether I put the right address – rue Odessa. Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre Valais



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Well Darling Anne Words fail me. The parcil came today – It had been detained by the Customs, but it arrived ‘intacte comme un bébé’1 & really when I took out that exquisite garment I felt that wherever you were, you wonderful woman, you must have felt my thrill. It is all, colour, shape, design, perfume, perfect. Anne, will you please realise how I appreciate every stitch. I have looked and looked, really fed on those colours. I felt that in two minutes, so radiant was the little garment it would flap its sleeves and begin to sing. The yellow, ma chère, the blue, ma chère, the beads, the ribbon – the lining – oh, dear, I could say a separate prayer to you for each separate piece. But nothing has escaped my eye, Anne. I feel that this little coat like everything that your hands touch has a life of its own and its precious to me – Please let me put my arms round you & give you the biggest hug for it. ‘David, isn’t she a wonder! Dont we agree about her! What other human being would send such a present?’ In fact, Ive got it on this minute and I feel transported Bless you, precious woman – . Katherine. Notes 1. (Fr.): As intact as a baby. The quotation marks here mark KM’s idiosyncratic word play, rather than a quotation or proverbial saying.

[15 January 1922] [ATL] Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre Valais Anne – Can you tell me the name of a Hotel in Paris that has an ascenseur1 that really does go up & down and isn’t too terribly unsympathetic? I simply don’t know one, now-a-days & shall have to sit on my luggage while someone looks – Last time I stayed at one that Cooks2 recommended with one of those glass-topped beds and strong tea coming out of the hot water tap. They plucked me to my last pin-feather for these luxuries – I don’t mind where it is as long as the lift will go up as well as down – so important that. In Switzerland the lifts only go down. Never up. Its a mystery to me. Id like Fergussons views on it or Blums –3

512   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 K: ‘How does it happen that this lift never goes up?’ Swiss (smiling) ‘It always goes down Madame’. K: ???? Swiss: !!!! Katherine. Notes 1. (Fr.): Lift. 2. The travel company Thomas Cook and Son, founded in the 1870s, was then at the height of its fame as a travel and tour operating company with branches throughout Europe. As well as taking care of the various stages of their customers’ travelling requirements, they provided accompaniment services for travellers in transit, and published respected guides and handbooks. They advertised in many of the glossy reviews of the early 1920s. 3. The American artist Jerome Blum (1884–1956) had first met Fergusson during their Paris years, when both were delighting in the artistic, cultural and transnational vibrancy of the capital. Blum’s student years had included extended studies at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, and his subsequent years travelling extensively and exploring art movements worldwide always retained a vivid sense of how the European vanguard could dialogue with more classical traditions, as well as a bolder American idiom. Over the years, his friendship with Fergusson waned, but he and Rice’s artistic circles overlapped more frequently.

[18 January 1922] [ATL] [Chalet des Sapins, Montana-sur-Sierre] [Postcard showing a photograph of KM. At the bottom of the photograph she has written:] This is called: ‘Dreaming of Paris and Anne’. The photographer has enlarged it & put it in his windy; people cry so frightfully they have to be just led away . . . Darling Precious Anne The curse is I cant possibly start for Paris for 2 weeks from today, and thats only fixed if the weather permits! So this time we shant meet again. But Anne, in the spring we are coming to Paris to be there for at least 4 months. Surely we shall meet then. We must, dearest. I see you and Drey flying over and me with a spyglass on the hotel roof. Oh, Anne, if you knew what I’d give to see you. . . . I shall be too happy for words. All beams! Its in the spring I am going in for this Russian treatment – chasse des Microbes par les Rayons X.1 What I want to do is for us to get a small apartment as I have ma petite tante2 with me – in the shape of my cat and I cant expect him to put up with hotels. So Spring – let us meet in Spring! I shall hold thumbs from now to April. The idea of my coat is very thrilling. We have 6 feet of snow here – I hate snow; I love the fertile earth – and I love Paris – and just love you – Katherine



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Notes 1. (Fr.): Microbes hunted by X-rays. 2. (Fr.): My little aunt.

[26 January 1922] [ATL] [Postcard: ‘Kapellenweg von Saas-Grund nach Sass-Fee’] [Chalet des Sapins, Montana-sur-Sierre] Dearest Anne For the Hotel and the dentists I am deeply grateful. The hotel sounds ‘just the thing’ as they say. What an extraordinary quantity of water seems to gurgle through it. I shall develop fins and a tail if I am there long. Will you please tell Drey how deeply I am his debtor! I hope to have some very fine specimens of the Cruel Art by the spring. I am taking the puffi train from here on Monday, please tell David. He is le Roi des Puffi Trains, j’imagine.1 Bless you Katherine. Note 1. (Fr.): The King of Puffi Trains, I should think.

[4 February 1922] [ATL]

4 ii 1922

Victoria Palace Hotel 6 Rue Blaise Desgoffe Rue de Rennes.

Darling Anne, Just a mot1 to say how grateful I am for the address of this hotel. Its just what I wanted, and it simply flows with hot baths. I have a heaven-kissing room au 6ieme2 with a piece of sky outside and a view into the windows opposite – which I love. Its so nice to watch la belle dame3 opposite bring her canary in when it rains and put her hyacinth out. I have decided to stay in Paris and not go back to that Switzerland. There is a man here – did I tell you about him? (It sounds rather an ambiguous beginning, by the way) But enfin there is a man here who treats my maladie4 with the X rays and I am going to him for this treatment. I had the first yesterday & I feel at this moment full of des rayons bleus5 – rather like a deep sea fish. But he promises to cure me by the

514   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 summer. Its hard to believe it. But if it is true I shall take a puffi to your very door and come and have tea with David out of a very little small teapot . . . The only fly in the ointment is the terrific expense. Its 300 francs a time. However, I have been fortunate with my work lately and Ill just have to do a double dose of it until this is paid off. Money is a bore but I never take it dead seriously, and I don’t care if I haven’t a sou6 as long as I can leap and fly alone. You know darling I really do expect you in the SPRING. I feel the winter is over already and I read in the Daily Mail yesterday that the Dog’s Mercury7 is out. But what is the Dogs Mercury? And does the Dog know? I hope hes very pleased but I expect he just looks at it and bolts it and goes on with a kind of ‘so that’s that’ air. Sad for the Dog’s Mercury – don’t you think? Well dearest, I feel a bit weak in the pen this morning & inclined to laugh at rien8 – you know the feeling? Do send me a little note here when you are not too busy – It’s a fool of a day here – sunny & windy. Fat old men lose their hats & cry houp-là9 as they stagger after them. Heaven bless you                  Your devoted                         Katherine A kiss for David on the pussy’s little derrière.* * Just to the left of these words is a small, childlike drawing of the back of a cat, and a cross drawn in the middle for a kiss. Notes (Fr.): Word. (Fr.): On the sixth floor. These were converted attic rooms with sloping ceilings. (Fr.): The fair lady. (Fr.): At last [. . .] disease. (Fr.): Blue rays. (Fr.): Farthing. The ‘sou’ was the smallest coin, of the smallest value, in old French currency, worth a twentieth of a franc. The word has remained in use to this day to indicate utter poverty or an absence of market value. 7. Dog’s mercury is the common name for Mercurialis perennis, a wild woodland flower often labelled as a weed, which can be toxic for animals. It produces small, green, malodorous flowers from February to March, and was hence used by nature columnists as a first harbinger of spring. KM puts the same question to Brett in a letter written the following day. See CL1, p. 439. 8. (Fr.): Nothing at all. 9. (Fr.): Whoops a daisy (equivalent English exclamation). 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.



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[1 May 1922] [ATL] [Victoria Palace Hôtel, Rue Blaise Desgoffe, Paris] Paris May 1st Dearest Anne, I have just been through that déchirante1 experience – two lovely young creatures from the Chemiserie with little frocks ‘pour essayer seule – ment Madame’.2 Im sitting, fringe straight again at last writing to you in the one they forced on me – a kind of plum grey – tout droit,3 with buttings on the hips and no trimming at all except a large embroidered lobster bien posé sur la ventre4 – !!! Shall I ever wear it again? Its beginning to look extraordinary every moment. The little creatures twittering chic – chic – chic would have made me buy a casserole for a chapeau with two poireaux in the front.5 That is the worst of living as I do far from the female kind: These moments come and Im lost. Yes, darling Ill be here first week in June for sure. Do come then. Otherwise I don’t know where I shall be off to. Ive got a wandering fit on. Anywhere, anywhere but England! The idea would be to have a small permanent nid6 in Paris and another in the South and then a small car, and so on, ma chère. Very nice – only one thing is missing to make it complete. However, I never care much about money. I always feel sooner or later it will turn up – one will find it somewhere, in the crown of ones hat or in the jam pot. I was horrified to realise David is old enough to make jokes. Heavens! Do keep him a nice small little boy for a little bit longer. Does he know about the ‘Three Little Kittens who Lost their Mittens’ and rhymes like that? I think there is nothing to beat those very silly but awfully funny nonsense rhymes and when you are small they have a meaning that we forget later. Oh, Anne I saw such perfect lambs of little boys in the Bois7 the other day. They made me wish wish wish you and David were there too. The Bois is simply too beautiful just now. Jack Murry haunts the Luxembourg Gardens however and is to be seen creeping into the back row of the 2d guignol.8 No one else is there over four. But he says when the VOLEUR9 appears with a most terrific eye – you know the kind* he cant help letting out a yell himself. If only it would stop raining – large spots of rain as big as mushrooms fall every day – Paris would be perfect just now. I dont see much of it for I have still two weeks of my X ray ‘cure’ to go. But after that I shall really begin to prowl. I can’t say much about the cure till its over – I dare not. But I feel very different already. Im so sorry to hear of your servant débacle. If I go to Germany this summer (we’ve almost settled to go) I mean to find a good sober German & keep her attached to me for ever. Shall I look out one for you? Germans are the ideal servants, I think, and they are so lasting.

516   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 They don’t ladder at once like the English kind.10 I want to get a very nice one with a pin-cushion in the shape of a strawberry pinned on her Bûste11 and one who will catch my ribbons when they run out of my chemises and run them in again and be a Comfort. Thats what one really wants. A Comfort. They ought to be bred specially. Im sick to death of this hotel. Ive eaten hundreds of wings of hotel chickens & God knows how many gritty little trays have whisked in and out of my room. But its a marvellous spot to know of. I can never be grateful enough. Its so simple, as they say, and all the servants are pleasant – But I want to be off where I can work more – I can’t work in cities. And Ive already sold every story of my new book in advance – and have 12 to deliver in July. Im afraid I am absolutely ‘booked up’ for this year with work for here and America. But if we could meet next spring, Anne, & do a book then. I mean – make a small spring Tour & write a book on it. I think that would be a perfectly adorable idea. Weve seen nobody in Paris – Joyce came one day for a talk but thats all.12 Im a bit too old, or I feel too old for cafés, even if I were well enough to go to them – I don’t like that crowd – Nina Hamnet and Cos.13 Can’t get on with it. Life is too short. Or perhaps this is old age. J.M. who is an excellent nose flattener has bought two lovely old apothecary jars decorated in green and pink and yellow. I wish you could see them as they are now full of anemones. About my old book, Anne. Yes, it has been a success – more than the other was, on the whole.14 As soon as I get some more copies across I’ll very gladly send you one, dearest. I’d like you to read ‘Ma Parker’ –15 Please give my love to Drey. And kiss darling little David for me. Je vous embrasse, amie, de tout mon coeur16     Darling precious Anne          I am         Katherine. for David.** * At this point in the letter KM has drawn an eye inside a diamond shape. ** Just above these two words, KM has drawn a small heart with a cross inside it. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

(Fr.): Heart-wrenching. (Fr.): From the blouse shop . . . just to be tried on, Madame. (Fr.): Cut straight. (Fr.): Placed squarely on the belly. (Fr.): A saucepan for a hat with two leeks in front. (Fr.): Nest. The Bois de Boulogne to the west of Paris in the 16th arrondissement is a vast park renowned for the beauty and variety of its trees; it was a fashionable and popular destination for walks, rides and outings.



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8. Here, as in letters sent in March, KM refers to the Punch and Judy puppet theatre (known simply as ‘Guignol’) in the Luxembourg Gardens. See above, p. 366, n. 7. 9. (Fr.): Thief. 10. The verb ‘to ladder’ was then in frequent use, referring to the tendency of newly fashionable, industrially produced silk stockings (often woven from recycled parachute yarns) to come apart or unravel downwards when snagged. 11. (Fr. and Ger.): Bust, bosom. KM’s use of an accent here suggests she is mocking the ‘refined’ habit of using a foreign pronunciation as a euphemistic way to make polite reference to intimate body parts. 12. Surely one of the most frustratingly understated mentions in KM’s correspondence. Joyce’s visit to see JMM and KM at their hotel, organised by the Schiffs, took place on 29 March, and was ostensibly to help JMM to prepare the review of Ulysses that he was writing for the Athenaeum (published 22 April 1922). See also KM’s brief report back to Violet Schiff written three days after the meeting, when she explains ‘Joyce was rather . . . difficile’ (see below, p. 608). 13. Nina Hamnett (1890–1956) was a Welsh-born artist and writer who was closely associated with fellow artists from the Slade and the London School of Art, various Bloomsbury Group artists and intellectuals, and more Paris-based artists such as Modigliani, Picasso, Diaghilev and Cocteau. A resolutely crossChannel figure, she was as renowned for her flamboyant lifestyle in both Soho and Montparnasse as she was for her works, and until recent years, faded from histories of the avant-garde movements more quickly than did many of her fellows. 14. The two books in question are Bliss and Other Stories (1920) and The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922). 15. ‘The Life of Ma Parker’ had been published the previous year in the Nation and Athenaeum, before being included in KM’s latest collection of stories. See CW2, pp. 292–7. 16. (Fr.): I kiss you, friend, with all my heart.

[28 August 1922] [ATL]

28 viii 1922

6 Pond Street Hampstead NW3

Anne darling, I am going to ask you to put off our T Party until you return from Dieppe – All is too unsettled; too ugly here. By the time you are back I shall be in my own rooms with my own cups and saucers and able to receive David as he ought to be received – the lamb! If he came here on Wednesday my head would be knocked off at once and pricking with a needle would be too good for me. Its not a bit nice or private. But at the

518   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 end of this week I am moving into my own rooms and Ill be settled – soon after. I shall just simply love to see David and his Mummy then. I can’t tell you what a joy it was to see you yesterday, dear and très très belle amie:1 How I loved looking at you again! And hearing you. And seeing your home – everything. I so look forward to our meeting after this autumn. I do hope we may. Jack Murry sends his love. Hes just had a new suit made & is standing in front of me. J.M. ‘Are the trousers full enough? K.M. Quite full enough! J.M. You’re sure? K.M. Certain! J.M. They’re not too full? K.M. Not in the least! J.M. You’re sure? K.M. Certain! I must run and get a Bible and swear on it. ‘Those trousers are PERFECT!!’ Men are funny – aren’t they? But very nice, too. All my love darling – I hope your holiday is a great success. Ever your devouée.2 Katherine. Notes 1. (Fr.): Very very beautiful friend. 2. (Fr.): Devoted.

[30 September 1922] [ATL]

30 ix 1922

6 Pond Street Hampstead NW3

Darling Anne, Here are the books – So many thanks for them. I think some of the stories in A Hasty Bunch1 are quite extraordinarily good. All of them have interested me immensely. There is something so fresh and unspoilt about the writer, even when he is a little bit self conscious – – – in the youthful way, you know. But he has got real original talent and I think he’ll do awfully good work. He’s much more interesting than these sham young super cultured creatures. I hope he gets on with his job. I feel Id like to help him if I could in some way. But I expect hed scorn that idea.



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Do you know, cherie, Im off back to France on Monday. I want to go on with that treatment there rather than here and for many many reasons I – enfin – well, there is something in England that just pushes me off the nest. Its no good. I shall never ‘settle’ here. But Brett is keeping my two little rooms here for flying visits. Its nice to have them. I am going to try your Hotel Jacob. I hope they will have rooms. Of course, ever since I took my ticket the sun has come out, and theres a kind of blue tinge in the sky, quite a piece of it. But if I tore my ticket up it would be snowing at tea time. I shall never forget my LUNCH with you. I wish I had been nicer to that precious child. Wish I wasn’t frightened of nannies. He is a lovely radiant small being, Anne, and I can imagine faintly your pride and joy in him. Please give my love to Drey. To you, dear darling woman, my warm love as ever. Its been a joy seeing you – May we meet again before too long. I am ever your devouée          Katherine. Note 1. A Hasty Bunch was the first collection of short stories published in 1922 by the American expatriate writer and independent publisher Robert McAlmon, who was then married to the Modernist poet and film critic Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman). At the time, he was considered one of the foremost intermediary figures of the American artistic community in Paris, and at the centre of an impressive network of connections, from Joyce and Sylvia Beach to Duchamp and Stein.

Daniel J. Rider (1869–1940?)

Introduction Were a ‘Companion to Modernist Intersections’ ever to be compiled, Dan Rider and his bookshop would surely be the prototypical entry, the common splicing of the two into a single entity, ‘Dan Rider’s bookshop’, being a case in point. Together, man and place illustrate the crossing point where authors and artists, material production, economics, individual personality, local and international history, anecdote and fluke intersect; they also show up the loopholes and blind spots of academic periodisation and disciplinarity. Precise landmarks in the biography of Daniel J. Rider are hard to come by. He was born and educated in Southwark, London, later claiming that the flagrant disjunct between local working-class slums and the doctrines of late nineteenth-century evangelism prompted him to prefer an apprenticeship in the book industry to a scholarship at Oxford.1 He was trained in various sectors of printing, engraving and binding, before becoming a publisher’s assistant at the Librairie Hachette, on the Strand, while actively engaging in local politics. He was notably an early member of the Fabian Society and the Bermondsey Social Democratic Federation (a ‘fellowship’ that lasted a lifetime), both of which were perceived as radical and hot-headed at the time.2 In Rider’s words, ‘In those days it required some pluck to be a Socialist, as the police force was openly used to stop meetings and imprison speakers upon any trumped-up charge.’3 Rider’s move from employee in the publishing sector to running his own ‘little shop’ at 36 St Martin’s Court, an alley connecting St Martin’s Lane and Charing Cross Road, dates from the 1890s. His activities for the twenty years to come were henceforth organised around second-hand book-dealing, printing and publishing a number of little magazines and catalogues (including The Library World) in the cellars below, which served as a craftsmen’s workshop, and organising small exhibitions of contemporary artworks, including in the ‘den’ itself, as its band of devotees referred to it. These varied activities opened up perspectives of their own: the second-hand trade prompted him to offer his services for house clearance, the most spectacular of which was in Fitzroy Square

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in 1907. He soon found out that the flat in question had been occupied by George Bernard Shaw, who had left behind him huge accumulations of papers, photographs, magazines, press cuttings and notebooks. The ‘junk’ turned out to include a full run of the Pall Mall magazine and some of Shaw’s diaries, plus the manuscript of Shaw’s novel Love Among the Artists. Scholars today thus owe a huge debt to Rider for appreciating the uniqueness of the material, and saving 480 pages of hand-annotated drafts which ‘illustrated Shaw’s methods of work, showing great fluency, rapid composition, and constant correction and search for the exact word. Even the first chapter as written here did not please our author as it was materially altered in the printed text.’4 Rider’s shop was also becoming the meeting place for authors, illustrators and journalists, often first tempted in by the boldly decorated window with its array of sketches, prints, caricatures and etchings. An article by the then much respected and influential literary intermediary Haldane MacFall, published in T.P.’s Weekly, had also ‘resulted in making the little second-hand bookshop in St. Martin’s Court blossom into an art gallery’.5 The early regulars at the convivial gatherings included MacFall, Lovat (Claude Lovat Fraser), Joseph Simpson, Holbrook Jackson, Frank Swinnerton and Huntly Carter – all of whom occupied, with Rider himself, that elusive halfway era that was neither Victorian, Edwardian nor Georgian, neither fin-de-siècle, Aestheticist nor early Modernist, but an idiosyncratic point where borders merged. As MacFall puts it, There the young literary bloods, here and from America, were wont to forgather before the war – the lions den, where the young lions roared and the asses brayed on their way to becoming editors and begetters of limited editions or the like wondrous emprise, the while Dan Rider’s laugh [. . .] rattled the windows of St. Martin’s Lane.5

Among the American figures drawn to the bookshop were Leonard Smithers and Alfred Knopf – a productive encounter which would go on to enable many an emerging writer and translator to access the soon burgeoning American book market. A slightly later phase in the life of bookseller and bookshop was instigated when it was taken up as the favourite haunt of Frank Harris in late 1911. The aura of Harris, ‘fired with the zeal of the reformer’ and self-promoter extraordinaire, boisterously proclaiming ‘he would have written the plays of Shakespeare had Shakespeare had the luck to be he’,6 and yearning for literary and oratorical glory, drew in a new generation of slightly younger ‘bloods’ in year that followed. This circle included names that are far better remembered today – Jo Davidson, J. D. Fergusson, Hugh Kingsmill, Kenneth Hare, Enid Bagnold, Henri GaudierBrzeska, and of course JMM and KM. KM’s first visit was organised by JMM, who had wanted her to encounter the ‘great man’ Harris, to whom he had entrusted his draft essay on Harris’s work (written with what

522   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 now appears as rather juvenile rapture) for the following month’s issue of Rhythm. The evening began as a melodramatic fiasco, but ended with a reconciliation and supper at the Café Royal.7 The short-lived Harris reign at Rider’s bookshop marked both the zenith and the decline of the venue as an iconic meeting point. The war further reduced its bubbling activities to a small circle of valiant workers and public-library suppliers. Too old for military service, Rider took on another fight as ‘knight-errant for tenants, a cavalier reformer fighting landlords’,8 a crusade which would continue, in various guises, for the rest of his life. He was launched on this second phase of his career by wartime economic precarity and civilian distress, which stoked the ardent reforming spirit of his youth. Appalled by the ruthlessness of property owners and subletters who did not hesitate to inflate rents and then evict tenants who could not pay, Rider took up the cause of the homeless, setting up the War Rents’ League, giving legal advice and financial backing to tenants threatened with eviction, drafting their appeals and often representing them in court. The League, under various guises, remained an active part of local political life until the late 1930s, and is memorably evoked in Rider’s own account of their activities.9 It is not clear whether Rider ever officially retired from his role as the ‘Robin Hood’ of the East End, nor even when he died. Similarly, no civil records have been found to identify the wife seen at his wake, but whom no chronicler or biographer appears to have named. Rider, a ‘shrewd little rebel [. . .] small, dusty, quietly obstinate’,10 thus remains to the end rather obstinately off-centre even in the story of his own life. Claire Davison Notes  1. Rider 1929, p. 13.  2. Ibid., p. 14.  3. Ibid.  4. Ibid., pp. 22–3.  5. MacFall, p. 27.  6. MacFall, pp. 28–9.  7. See Kingsmill 1932, pp. 11–12. See also the introduction to Harris in CL1, pp. 607–9. The famous Café Royal, on Piccadilly Street in London’s West End, had been a chic and fashionable but also artistic and bohemian meeting place since the 1890s. It was here that, in August 1916, the notorious scene would take place during which KM snatched some pages of D. H. Lawrence’s poems from the hands of a sarcastic group of students on the next table to hers, a scene later immortalized in the ‘Gudrun in the Pompadour’ chapter of Women in Love.  8. See Matthews, p. 258.  9. See Rider 1927, and review in the TLS on 29 September 1927, p. 658. Archives of the League are now at the Labour History Library in the People’s History Museum, Manchester. 10. Swinnerton 1964, pp. 63–4.



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[16 November 1917] [Stanford] 141A Church Street Chelsea SW3. Dear Dan, Don’t think I have forgotten or grown cold. But the fact is that the lad Murry is down with     Flue +     Fever +     That giddy feeling and I am nursing him and running about with a covered basket trying to buy half a chicken for him and to get on to the bus with it after. Etc. Etc. I cant leave him just for the present, but as soon as he is on his own legs again I want to ‘get busy’. I did so enjoy our talk the other evening. Please remember me to Mrs Rider. Kindest regards from Murry & me Yours ever Katherine Mansfield.

Viscountess Rothermere (1874–1937) (née Mary Lilian Share)

Introduction When Lilian Share married Harold Sidney Harmsworth in 1893, she was the daughter of an industrious London merchant based in Forest Hill. He was the younger brother and business associate of a journalist in the process of buying up a number of newspapers in difficulty. In the words of one press historian, ‘it was a rather lower middle-class match’.1 However, things soon improved after the brothers acquired the London Evening Standard the following year, and two years after that founded the Daily Mail, shortly followed by the Daily Mirror. Within two decades, Lilian’s father was bankrupt, but she was now the titled wife of a press baron and a millionaire, her husband having been raised to the peerage in 1914. The couple were, in effect, estranged by then, after a number of years living between their homes in London and La Dragonnière, near Monte Carlo, and raising three children. After choosing to remain initially in the Monte Carlo home, Lilian settled permanently in France, where she became a close friend and benefactor of a number of French writers, the most prominent of whom was André Gide. This wealthy, diplomatically separated lifestyle would doubtless have continued unhindered, were it not for the devastating tragedy of the war, in which two of their three sons were killed in action. Henceforth, she was noted for becoming withdrawn, unpredictable and rather unreliable in terms of her larger family affections and her substantial arts patronage; he became fervently opposed to war, ultimately espousing the cases of the Black Shirts, Nazi Germany and the British Union of Fascists. Lady Rothermere’s life in France did not stop at endowing arts projects and providing substantial funds and sometimes unpredictable forms of friendly benevolence for a vast number of British, American and French writers. She published a number of translations into English, the most noteworthy of which was a playful literary satire by Gide, Prometheus Ill-Bound (Prométhée Mal-Enchaînée), and established a principle of offering artistic retreats at her home in the Alps to writers in need. This

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was how T. S. Eliot, a friend of Gide’s but also recommended by Sidney Schiff, came to spend a period of rest at her property in 1921, to recover from a form of nervous breakdown after the painful separation from his wife; it was during this stay that he famously wrote the first draft of The Waste Land, published a year later. Following this, Eliot made the most of her desire to endow an arts magazine, along the lines of the American Dial, to suggest she back a publishing ambition of his: this was how the Criterion began, also in late 1922, which she funded until 1927 when it was taken over by Faber. Even before the bereavement during the war, Lady Rothermere had been taking up Theosophist and mystical causes – then very fashionable, but also quite timely when a number of spiritual gurus from Eastern Europe sought refuge and patronage in France or Britain. This was the dimension of her life that enabled her and KM’s spheres to overlap. Her associations with the press brought Orage into her orbit when he was a struggling editor of the New Age. They worked in association to help Ouspensky reach London, where he was given lodgings in Lady Rothermere’s London flat; this became the basis for his reading group, which they both attended, thereby hearing Ouspensky evoke the teachings of G. I. Gurdjieff, his former mentor, then living between Berlin, London and Paris. It was with generous support from Lady Rothermere that Gurdjieff acquired the Prieuré des Basses Loges near Fontainebleau and founded the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. Lady Rothermere herself stayed there occasionally, although living not within the community itself, but in apartments in the main château, known as the ‘Ritz’.2 On at least one occasion she came accompanied by her protégée and unofficially adopted daughter, Dorothy Ireland, also a close friend of the Schiffs, who lived in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés area of Paris (see above, p. 579). In December 1922, Lady Rothermere and KM spent one evening at the Institute in each other’s company, during which, so Vivienne Eliot told Ezra Pound, they indulged in some ‘religious dances naked’,3 a claim which, given the extreme cold weather and KM’s very debilitated health, would appear to be merely malicious gossip. As their one surviving letter attests, Lady Rothermere postponed the visit that might have enabled them to meet again, and just one month to the day after writing it, KM died. Claire Davison Notes 1. Bourne, p. 81. 2. See Alpers 1980, p. 375. 3. See Klaidman, p. 96.

526   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [10 December 1922] [HRC] Le Prieuré 10 xii 1922 My dear Lady Rothermere, I was so glad to hear from you; so sorry to know you are not coming to Fontainebleau until January.1 I have been hoping, for days, to hear of your arrival. We miss you here awfully. Note 1. Lady Rothermere visited Gurdjieff’s Institute on several occasions, as well as helping to promote his ideas and teachings in London. Her next visit did not take place until after KM’s death.

Berta Ruck (1878–1978) (m. Mrs Oliver Onions)

Introduction Amy Roberta (Berta) Ruck (Mrs Oliver Onions) was an Indian-born, Welsh writer who wrote over ninety immensely popular romance novels between 1914 and 1967, in addition to short stories, four volumes of autobiography and a history of her mother’s family. She married the novelist Oliver Onions (1873–1961) in 1909. Ruck was born in Murree, in the Punjab, to a colonel in the British army, and was the eldest of eight children. The family eventually returned to Wales, and Ruck was educated mainly in Bangor. Originally an artist, she studied at a college in Lambeth in London before gaining a scholarship to the Slade, and finally attending the Académie Colarossi in Paris. However, she soon discovered she had a talent for fiction writing and in 1905 her short stories began to appear in various popular periodicals, including Home Chat. Ruck’s first novel, His Official Fiancée, which had previously been serialised in Home Chat, appeared in 1914 under the name Mrs Oliver Onions, as did her next three novels. It was only with Miss Million’s Maid (1916) that she thereafter signed herself Berta Ruck. During World War One, she became a popular romantic novelist with her subject, the lives – and romances – of ‘modern’ young women, set against a contemporary wartime backdrop, all of which provided uncontroversial, much-needed, escapist reading. Her fame quickly eclipsed that of her husband and she became the family’s main breadwinner – the Barbara Cartland of her day. Ruck led a strikingly modern, independent life for the time, spending long periods away from home, travelling or researching for her novels. She was a campaigner for women’s health and freedom, and supported Marie Stopes’s liberal views on sex education and contraception. She also supported unconventional friends such as Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies and Rebecca West in their complicated love-lives. Always physically active, she enjoyed swimming outdoors well into her eighties, and her

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528   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 last novel, Shopping for a Husband (1967), was published when she was almost ninety. Gerri Kimber

[24 March 1922] [Letters 1928, 2, pp. 200–1] [Victoria Palace Hôtel, Rue Blaise Desgoffe, Paris] March 24, 1922 What a letter you have sent me! If I could hope one of my stories had given you one moment of the happiness you have given me I would feel less at a loss how to thank you. I have sat here, looking at the pages, and thinking ‘So she felt like that about The Stranger, she notices Florrie the cat, she understood my poor old Ma Parker and Miss Brill. . . .’1 For it’s not your praise I value most (though, of course, one does like praise) it’s the fact that you have so beautifully, so generously seen what I was trying to express. It is a joy to write stories but nothing like the joy of knowing one has not written in vain. I have lived too remote from people for the last four years seeing nobody except my husband for months on end – And that makes one a little bit frightened sometimes lest one has lost touch with life. But a letter like yours is such encouragement that the only way I can thank you is by trying to write better . . . You say scarcely anything about the big black holes in my book (like the servant’s afternoon out.)2 But I know they are there. I must mend them next time. How glad I am that you did not listen to the person who said you had ‘much better not’. One does not expect such letters – how could one – few people are rich enough to be able to afford to give such presents. Notes 1. Berta Ruck had clearly been reading The Garden Party and Other Stories, which collects all the pieces mentioned. See CW2, ‘The Stranger’, pp. 240–9; ‘At the Bay’, pp. 342–71; ‘Life of Ma Parker’, pp. 292–6; and ‘Miss Brill’, pp. 250–5. 2. See Alice the servant’s visit to Mrs Stubbs in ‘At the Bay’ – VIII, pp. 358–61.

John Ruddick [n.d.]

Introduction John Ruddick was the father of one of KM’s greatest childhood friends, Marion Ruddick. On the return journey home, following a trip to England from March to November 1898, KM’s parents had met a Canadian couple called Ruddick, who were also sailing to New Zealand, John Ruddick being the new representative of the Canadian Dairy Board in Wellington. They had brought with them their young daughter, Marion, who was to be enrolled at Wellington Girls’ High, the same school as the Beauchamp sisters. Marion and KM instantly became friends. In later life, after KM’s death, Marion wrote down her memories of the now celebrated writer in a long article called ‘Incidents in the Childhood of Katherine Mansfield’,1 which remains a rare account of KM as a young girl. Marion recorded her impressions not just of KM, but of the Beauchamp family as a whole. The girls were friends for a few precious months, before Marion was sent to boarding school in Nelson for a short time, and then finally returned to Canada with her parents. The letter below to John Ruddick recalls KM’s many happy memories of her childhood friend.2 Gerri Kimber Notes 1. Marion Ruddick, Incidents in the Childhood of Katherine Mansfield’, unpublished typescript, ATL, MS-Papers-1339. Subsequently published in Chicago Evening Post Literary Review, 20 April 1928. 2. For a detailed examination of the friendship between KM and Marion Ruddick, see Kimber 2016.

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530   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [30 July 1921] [HRC]

30 vii 1921

Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre (Valais) Switzerland

Dear Mr Ruddick, By this afternoon’s post I received from my sister, Chaddie, two old and quaint photographs that you had very kindly asked her to send me. Is that so? Were they really sent to me? Thank you most sincerely. I cannot tell you how I love a glimpse into the past, even if its such a dreadfully unflattering one! But Leslie looks such a darling little fellow, and I think they are both sweet of Marion. (I wonder if she does . . .) I hear often of you all from Chaddie & Jeanne, & I always think lovingly of Mrs Ruddick because she was such a friend of Mother’s. I remember her very well too, & Marion was one of my first ‘great friends’. I wonder if she has forgotten our games at Miss Partridges, or old Miss Partridges way of saying: ‘Oh, Im so tired!’ or the cream buns we were given for tea. I must say I think the cream buns should have been with held from me, though. I always see Marion in a sailor suit with her straight fringe and pretty shoes. Please give her my love. It would be very nice to think we should meet one day and talk over old times . . . Does she remember Island Bay, I wonder, and bathing her doll in the rock pools with me. But perhaps so much has happened since then that these things have faded. My sisters were very happy to see you all again; they wrote most warmly of their visit. I am hoping they may visit me this winter. I have a house in a forest clearing on the mountain tops – 5000 feet high. Its perfectly lovely in this summer weather but they tell us winter is even better. It will be our first experience of real snow as you get it in Canada – – – Thank you again for the photographs. With my love to Mrs Ruddick and my best wishes to you all Yours very sincerely Katherine Middleton Murry ‘Kass Beauchamp’

The Hon. Bertrand Russell (1872–1970)

Introduction ‘Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.’1 These, the opening words of the autobiography of the philosopher, mathematician and pacifist Bertrand Russell, with their strange mixture of desperate poignancy, lucid self-knowledge and rationally analysed compassion, give a startlingly direct synthesis of his own living philosophy. The unexpected admixture can perhaps be attributed to his privileged yet vulnerable and sad childhood: his mother and sister died shortly after his birth and his father, Lord Amberley, less than two years later. Bertrand and his brother, Frank (who would be the second husband of KM’s cousin Elizabeth, whom she later ruthlessly portrayed in the figure of Wemyss in her novel Vera, published 1921), were taken in hand by one of their guardians. Their grandparents, however, were horrified by what they considered to be a godless settlement and fought successfully for custody of the children. The grandfather, Earl Russell, then died when Russell was six, and he was brought up from then on by his grandmother, a devout, principled woman from whom he inherited his passionate love of literature. Russell went up to Cambridge to study Mathematics at Trinity College, where he was soon elected to the Apostles, a society that quickly became his family, offering him the sort of intellectual and emotional intimacy and affection that he had been longing for. He later switched to Philosophy, where he worked with G. E. Moore; together they would later be acknowledged as the greatest contributors to and influences on British philosophy of the first half of the twentieth century. He married his first wife, Alys, the sister of Logan Pearsall Smith in 1894, and began advancing in his career, notably establishing key links with French and Central European philosophers while working on his own philosophical method that owed its rational, logical roots to mathematics as much as classical philosophy. This would eventually lead to his huge work, often referred to as a ramified theory of facts, Principia Mathematica (1910), the title echoing Moore’s 1903 Principia Ethica. Despite his intellectual consecration,

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532   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 however, his life was marred by his unhappy marriage, from which he was unable to free himself, and the mental illness of his wife. His life changed dramatically in the 1910s. He met, and fell desperately in love with, Ottoline Morrell, a passion that finally enabled him to make the decisive break with his wife. In the same year, he met Ludwig Wittgenstein, a prodigious philosophy student whom Russell initially tutored, before Wittgenstein’s own magnum opus, Tractatus Logicophilosophicus (1922), undermined the logical bases of his tutor’s work, prompting Russell to rethink his own method from scratch, henceforth focusing on language rather than abstracts and truths, as the basis of his thinking. Before this intellectual renewal, however, came World War One, which redefined Russell’s life in other ways. From the outset he became a committed pacifist, turning his writing and public-speaking skills to the antiwar case. This led him to be sacked from his lectureship at Trinity College, which in turn left him freer to take up a more defiantly radical political stance, for which he ended up serving a prison sentence that lasted nearly until the end of the war. Both his outspoken antiwar militancy and his liaison with Ottoline – however complicated, tense and unsatisfying, given Ottoline’s lack of physical passion for him – also brought him to Garsington, and it was here that he met KM and JMM; their first encounter took place over the weekend when they all gathered around Lytton Strachey to hear him reading extracts of what would become Eminent Victorians (1918). He and KM took to each other instantly; as he noted in his autobiography, I do not know whether my impression of her was just, but it was quite different from other people’s. Her talk was marvellous, much better than her writing, especially when she was telling of things that she was going to write, but when she spoke about people she was envious, dark, and full of alarming penetration in discovering what they least wished known and whatever was bad in their characteristics.2

As the sequence of letters that follow shows, Russell and KM’s friendship evolved rapidly, often extending to ambivalently impassioned, enigmatically allusive notes, which confirm they found each other’s company thrilling, inspiring and reassuring. Whether this was actually romantically inclined or whether the passionate liaison was merely a mixture of gossip, intrigue, playful flirtation and theatricality is anybody’s guess; certainly, biographers have been inclined to deduce sexual passion from their innuendoes.3 However, their moments of conspiratorial intensity were played out in a context of the despair and outrage of war, KM’s shock and grief following the death of her brother – a tragedy to which Russell proved particularly attentive – the complexities of Russell’s emotional entanglements with Ottoline and Colette Mathieson (to whom he even forwarded one of KM’s letters), KM and JMM’s complicated love affair, Russell’s professional turmoils and KM’s fast-evolving health worries, making it doubtless safest to conclude that no friendship, passion, intrigue or even impression of falling ‘more or less in love’ escaped intact.



bertrand russell  533

Whatever the truth of Russell’s longings for love (to return to the triadic quest evoked above), knowledge and the fate of mankind preoccupied him equally, both throughout the war years and throughout the devastating upheavals of the post-war, the inter-war and World War Two. In 1921, he married the emerging public intellectual, feminist and political campaigner Dora Black, became a father and settled into a far happier and intensely productive career as a writer, journalist, international paradiplomat and political delegate, with extended stays as a guest professor in the Soviet Union, China and the United States, among others, before returning to Trinity College, Cambridge, for the rest of his career. His alternating passions for politics, philosophy and the public good reached new heights in World War Two, the realities of the nuclear threat prompting him to become one of Britain’s most internationally visible and resolute campaigners for nuclear disarmament All his late works, from the most scholarly to the broad array of political and philosophical writings for the common reader, testified to his passionate commitment to his role and responsibilities as a public intellectual. A pacifist ‘fighter’ to the bitter end, even as an old man in the turbulent 1960s, Russell’s modest summary of his life’s works provides as fitting a conclusion to this introduction as the opening words to his autobiography did to the beginning: ‘This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.’4 Claire Davison Notes 1. Russell 1967, vol. 1, p. 13. 2. Russell 1967, vol. 2, p. 21. 3. See, for example, Alpers 1980, pp. 221–3; 233–5; Moorehead 1993, pp. 249, 283, 299; and Chapter 10 of C. K. Stead’s biographical novel (2004b), Mansfield, pp. 167–84. 4. Russell 1967, vol. 1, p. 13.

[13 November 1916] [McMaster] Monday.

3 Gower Street.

I shall be delighted to dine with you on Thursday the 23rd. The talk on Saturday evening was infinitely exciting.1 I wrestled hard with Murry after, but he remained a dark riddle. I wonder how true your party rang!            Yours very sincerely                     K.M.

534   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Note 1. Bertrand Russell embarked on two separate conference tours in Great Britain in 1916 as part of his militant antiwar stand, on the themes of security, liberty and democracy, and on more constructive alternative-to-war prospects. The success and subsequent public scandal surrounding the first three-week tour incited the authorities to impose travelling restrictions, which reduced the scale of the autumn talks. However, KM and JMM would appear to have attended the talk in London on 18 November.

[24 November 1916] [McMaster] [3 Gower Street, Bloomsbury] Friday afternoon. Yes, it was a wonderful evening. The thrill of it stayed with me all night.1 Even after I had fallen asleep I dreamed that we were sitting at the same table, talking and smoking, but all the mirrors of the café were windows & through them I could see big waves of green water gleaming and lifting without sound or break as though we were far out at sea. I shall read your book tonight.2 I have written to my little maid in Cornwall3 to send me the MSS. You know how glad I am – –         Yours             Katherine. Notes 1. Just over one week after their dinner on 23 November, Russell wrote to Ottoline Morrell, announcing that ‘I want to get to know Katherine Mansfield really well. She interests me mentally very much indeed – I think she has a very good mind, and I like her boundless curiosity. I do not feel sure that she has much heart’ (quoted in Griffin, letter 283, p. 93). 2. Although Russell’s publications were already numerous, the work he was most regularly sharing in these months was his pamphlet War: The Offspring of Fear (1914), reissued that summer by publishers ‘The Union of Democratic Control’. 3. KM had lived at Sunnyside Cottage in Mylor, near Penryn, in Cornwall from mid-July until late August. The only maid she refers to during that stay was named May but nothing else is known of her. KM and Russell would appear to have exchanged manuscripts at about this time, but whether this is the MS in question has not been ascertained.



bertrand russell  535

[1 December 1916] [McMaster] [3 Gower Street, Bloomsbury] Friday. I tried to write to you yesterday but there were so many interruptions . . Life seemed to rush in and out of my door like the teller of the tale in a Dostoievsky novel.1 But I thought of you. I re read your letter, sitting on a bench at the top of the steps outside the British Museum. Heavens! the morning was so lovely – a blue sky, and blue and white pigeons tumbling in the bright air, and little grass springing on those sunken lawns. Your friendship was delightful, so delightful to me then that I sat there for a long time with the sun on my hands, almost too happy to move, and I began to call the pigeons to me with all kinds of little endearing names . . . Which left them quite cold . . To feel that we are going to be truthful with each other, quite without reservation – That promises so great an adventure that it is difficult to remain calm. Do please talk to me about your work if you can. I am returning you the letter. Thank you for sending it on to me. I understand perfectly what it made you feel; but at the same time I think it is extremely gratifying and important that you should receive such letters. Curious – isn’t it – how one can trace your direct influence upon the young man’s thought – while he writes. Ottoline has written to me again, begging me to go down. I may go on Monday and stay until Wednesday morning. I should love to have come to tea with you Wednesday but I have an engagement which I must keep. I shall not be ‘free’ before six. Supposing I were to come to your flat then? There is so much to be said, but do not let us hurry it. Only one trembles at the shortness of Life, and all that there is to be done –                    Katherine. Note 1. KM would use Dostoevsky’s fiction as a benchmark for her own life at various times, a comparison that was something of a conventional gauge of social and emotional upheaval in the context of contemporary Russophilia. However, this mention is probably more than a mere passing reference: Russell himself was then rereading The Brothers Karamazov and discussing it with Morrell.

536   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [7 December 1916] [McMaster] [3 Gower Street, Bloomsbury] Thursday Evening. I have just re read your letter and now my head aches with a kind of sweet excitement. Do you know what I mean? It is what a little girl feels when she has been put to bed at the end of a long sunny day and still sees upon her closed eyelids the image of dancing boughs and flowery bushes. To work – to work! It is such infinite delight to know that we still have the best things to do and that we shall be comrades in the doing of them. But on Tuesday night I am going to ask you a great many questions. I want to know more about your life – ever so many things . . There is time enough, perhaps, but I feel devilishly impatient at this moment1 – You have already, in this little time, given me so much – more than I have given you, and that does not satisfy me – But at present, my work simply springs from the wonderful fact that you do stand for Life2 – Adieu until Tuesday – I shall not read your letter again – It ‘troubles’ me too greatly – but thank you – Thank you for it. Katherine. Notes 1. Although their intimacy at the time was clearly of a heightened, emotionally ambivalent sort, their discussions and KM’s impatience for news doubtless extended to Russell’s controversial Birmingham talk on pacifism and alternative political ideals which took place on 8 December. It is, after all, no coincidence that her keen attentiveness to Russell’s engagements and ideas began immediately after her brother’s death, which resonates at a more repressed, lower frequency in the letters to come. 2. Ever since his dismissal from Trinity earlier that year, Russell’s involvement in bold pacifist and antiwar agitation had been particularly intense: his first two speaking tours, as part of the nationwide Stop the War campaign, had taken place that summer and autumn; he had been lobbying the British MP and soon-to-be Prime Minister David Lloyd George; and he had published widely for the No Conscription Fellowship. See Moorehead 1993, pp. 257–60.



bertrand russell  537

[8 December 1916] [McMaster] [3 Gower Street, Bloomsbury] Friday late afternoon. I have been busy all day, and at times your letter of last night has – – haunted me. ‘Write and tell me what you think of it all’. But I cannot just now. I should have to be far away from this house to write freely; it depresses me horribly today and I am only writing you this note just to let you know that your letter came, that I read it: That is all the sign I can give. Ah, but it is not for nothing that we know each other. We shall do great things – great things.                Katherine.

[17 December 1916] [McMaster] [3 Gower Street, Bloomsbury] Sunday evening. I meant to write to you immediately after you left me on Friday night to say how sorry I was to have been such cold comfort and so useless to lift even ever so little the cloud of your fatigue. For a long time I sat before the fire after you had gone feeling that your goodbye had been quite final – was it? And I did not explain myself as I wished to – I left unsaid so much that perhaps you were misled. Its true that my desire is to bring all that I see and feel into harmony with that rare ‘vision’ of life of which we spoke, and that if I do not achieve this I shall feel that my life has been a fault at last, and its my God terribly true that I dont see the means yet – I dont in the least know definitely how to live. But its equally true that life never bores me. It is such strange delight to observe people and to try to understand them, to walk over the mountains and into the valleys of the world, and fields and road and to move on rivers and seas, to arrive late at night in strange cities or to come into little harbours just at pink dawn when its cold with a high wind blowing somewhere up in the air, to push through the heavy door into little cafés and to watch the pattern people make among tables & bottles and glasses, to watch women when they are off their guard, and to get them to talk then, to smell flowers and leaves and fruit and grass – all this – and all this is nothing – for there is so much more. When I am overcome by one of the fits of despair all this is ashes – and so intolerably bitter that I feel it never can be sweet again – But it is – To

538   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 air oneself among these things, to seek them, to explore them and then to go apart and detach oneself from them – and to write – after the ferment has quite subsided – – – – After all youll cry me very vague & dismiss me perhaps as a woman with an ill regulated mind . . But – Goodnight Katherine.

[16 January 1917] [McMaster] [3 Gower Street, Bloomsbury] Tuesday Night. Here is the manuscript and the letter – was so glad to hear from you tonight. I cannot tell you how much I value your friendship . . This isn’t a letter; it is just a little note written rather in prison. Jack Hutchinson rather incredibly refused.1 He did not even take the trouble to let me know until late this evening when Mary phoned & mentioned, incidentally, that he was not willing. Why do such men exist except for such purposes? I shall never take the trouble to recognise him again. Tomorrow I am acting for the movies – an ‘exterior scene in walking dress’.2 Doesn’t that sound awfully strange to you? God! I have been unhappy today – in despair and walking idly over a dreadful world having no hiding place and no cover. Only when it grew dark I lit the candles & read Villon.        And now Goodnight mon ami.                    Katherine. Notes 1. KM had apparently asked Russell to act as a referee for a flat she wished to rent. 2. KM was an avid film-goer, and would clearly have been delighted by the opportunity, even for just a minor role. Unfortunately, despite a number of scholars’ assiduous attempts, no details of the film work have emerged. Whether experienced as a player or a spectator, the influence of cinematic narration and film technique upon her own literary evolution is very tangible. See Ascari 2014.



bertrand russell  539

[21 January 1917] [McMaster] [3 Gower Street, Bloomsbury] Sunday: So many thanks for your letter. I too am looking forward to Tuesday. But please do not expect me too soon – between six and seven – I cannot come before. I have heard from Ottoline; she comes to town tomorrow for one or two days. I expect she will want very much to see you. I shall be the soul of discretion. Marie has really gone – with Brett’s sister1 for chaperone – It must be an infinite relief to Ottoline to have her off her lap. I hope to move at the end of next week, but my cough is so disastrous in this Khaki weather that I can hardly conceive of leaving Gower Street except* feet foremost. Will the sun ever shine again? My last day with the ‘movies’ – walking about a big bare studio in what the American producer calls ‘slap up evening dress’ has laid me low ever since. But I shall be quite well by Tuesday – There is such lovely mimosa in my room – I can see the plumy trees and the brown hand that gathered it – oh, to be there! Such absurd things have happened to me since last I saw you (it feels a very long time ago). But I will tell you about them on Tuesday – I am sorry you are so busy – and I feel that this work makes you so weary – will it go on for very long? And thank you, too for letting me see the letters. I will bring them back with me on Tuesday.          Goodnight                Katherine. *Original underlined three times for emphasis.

Note 1. The mother of Maria Nys (1899–1955) and her sisters was a friend of Morrell’s, and had entrusted her youngest daughter to Morrell’s care at the beginning of the war. Maria had arrived at Garsington from Belgium in October 1914, when she was ‘hardly more than a child, her hair in ringlets and her stout legs in ginger coloured boots and stockings’ (Moorehead 1974, p. 201). Settling into her new life proved more complicated than expected; she was enrolled for a time at Newnham College but absconded, encouraged by Brett, her new confidante. A further worry was suitors and predators, from Anrep’s suspected interest to Aldous Huxley’s growing love for her, an attraction his friends found highly unsuitable. In January 1917, a temporary solution was found, which involved sending Maria to stay for a while with her mother, now lodging in Florence; Brett’s sister, the writer Sylvia Leonora Brooke (1885–1971), married to the Vyner of Sarawak, accompanied her. Boris von Anrep (1883–1969) was a Russian Mosaicist, who had studied and travelled widely in Britain and France in the early 1910s, after studying in St Petersburg. He contributed actively to Roger Fry’s Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition (1912) in London, ensuring that not only major works of his own, but also a

540   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 wide collection of fellow Russian artists were represented. His first solo exhibition also took place in London the following year. In 1916, he was resting in Britain, after serving on the Western Front and before returning to Russia. He settled permanently in Britain after the February Revolution, initially commissioned by the short-lived Kerensky government.

[22 January 1917] [McMaster]

January 22nd

3 Gower St W.C.

I did not at all want to send you that telegram – But what could I do? Nothing else. My cough is so vile that Ill not inflict it on others and I must try & cure it before it lays me quite too finally low. So I am staying in doors & praying for the weather to change – I want to move at the end of this week if possible: then I shall be quite free. But if only it were not so cold & one did not cough so. No, I am too depressed to write even. Please forgive                        Katherine.

[24 January 1917] [ATL] [3 Gower Street, Bloomsbury] Wednesday Night You wrote me such a lovely letter, mon cher ami1 – Yes, let us dine together on Friday evening. I shall be well enough if you will please come for me here. Then we shall talk. I feel there is so much to be said that Im quite quite silent until then; that it is an age since we have seen each other – And yet while I haven’t seen you my ‘friendship’ for you has gone on and grown ever so much deeper and profounder. Let us be very happy on Friday night.       I give you my two hands                Katherine. Note 1. (Fr.): My dear friend.



bertrand russell  541

[30 January 1917] [McMaster] [3 Gower Street, Bloomsbury] January 30th I must tell you the horrid truth at once – I shall not be delivered or anything like delivered by tomorrow night – Please do not be angry for it is not my fault. Indeed I feel that were I not leaving here soon Id despair of ever producing anything of any sort again. It is the Very Devil. And now I am in a state of transition – half here – half in my new flat – If you can bear me tomorrow night, empty handed – do let us dine together. If you feel I am guilty, Ill quite perfectly understand. I had a long letter from Ottoline today. I will tell you about it when we meet again. So you really do quite understand that if you have the faintest feeling writing – – – – Katherine.

[31 January 1917] [McMaster] [3 Gower Street, Bloomsbury] + No, there is nothing to say – I will tell you as soon as I am away from here, and perhaps we can then arrange a meeting – if you are not too offended with me. But for the present I am quite dead – and I could not bear to be with you while I am – – so. Goodbye for now.             Katherine.

[24 February 1917] [McMaster] Please excuse my penmanship: my right hand is out of action at present. 141A Church Street Chelsea S.W. 24 : II : 17 Yesterday I received the Plough Share.1 It is very kind of you to have thought of me & I re read your letter to President Wilson with the liveliest

542   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 interest.2 It is splendid to find a paper that has printed it in full . . more especially because of the hideous journalist habit of quoting ‘extracts’. The other article ‘The World After the War’ I thought admirable until – may I be quite frank? – I came to the last sentence.3 That so surprised me, having climbed so high with you and up such painful & dark stairs to find that there wasn’t any landing at all – so that on your part, at least, the journey had been more or less cynical . . I am not yet recovered. Dear knows you are perfectly free to think that – & to say it – I can hear you saying it. But I don’t think it was the time or the place – Aber nein!4 Unless of course I was mistaken in your ‘tone’ throughout – quite taken in, in fact, like all the other little Plough Shares must have been. Is that what you intended? Were you getting your philosophic own back on us all – or – – – – I really don’t know even now – But very many thanks all the same. I hope you do not think me too rude – I am a recluse at present & do nothing but write & read & read & write – seeing nobody & going nowhere. As soon as I have finished my Geneva story5 you shall have it – London feels to me quite remote & Garsington – over the brim of the world. Addio6 Katherine. Notes 1. The journal of the Quaker Socialists, the Ploughshare, launched in 1912, was redesigned as a monthly magazine subtitled ‘A Quaker Organ of Social Reconstruction’, with a broader circulation in February 1916, edited by former New Age correspondent W. L. Hare, and H. W. Peet. It mixed outspoken pacifist analysis of the war, Christian socialism and new economic theory with literary essays, poetry and woodcuts. Its unreservedly antiwar stand brought it support from a variety of unexpected backers, but the initiative soon declined in the immediate post-war years. 2. The Ploughshare published the first unexpurgated version of Bertrand Russell’s letter to the American President to be published in Britain in its February 1917 issue (pp. 4–6). The moving, ardently eloquent letter-manifesto had been sent to Woodrow Wilson in 1916. He also reworked the letter for wider circulation in the United States. See Frohmann et al., pp. 21–5. 3. The January issue of the Ploughshare published Russell’s essay ‘The Logic of Armaments’, pp. 336–9. After a rousing peroration about the need to rethink history, statecraft and education in order to create conducive conditions for lasting peace, Russell concludes: But nothing can be done without a genuine desire for peace, and the desire for peace will not be permanent unless the truth about war can be brought home to ordinary men and women, and above all to children in the schools. If this is not done, civilized man will perish off the face of the earth. Whether that would be regrettable, I do not venture to determine. (Frohmann et al., p. 36)



bertrand russell  543

The essay was one in an extended series of contributions from key thinkers and public figures of the times, on the theme ‘The World After War’. 4. (Ger.): But no. 5. KM noted in her diary that ‘Geneva is a long story, and Hamilton is very short’, justifying the apparent inconsistency by citing Chekhov’s own practice of alternating short sketches and novellas. See CW4, p. 220. The story was never completed, but fragments have survived. See ‘The Lost Battle’, CW2, pp. 10–12. 6. (It.): Farewell.

Michael Sadleir (1888–1957)

Introduction Michael Thomas Harvey Sadler was born on 25 December 1888, the only child of the educational pioneer and art patron Sir Michael Ernest Sadler (1861–1943), Chancellor of Leeds University and renowned collector of post-Impressionist paintings. The son later adopted an early variant of the family name, Sadleir, as a nom de plume to distinguish himself from the father. Sadleir was educated at Rugby School and then at Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied History and befriended JMM. Having already published a volume of his own poetry in 1907, Lappalien, Sadleir helped JMM establish the little magazine Rhythm in 1911 while they were still undergraduates, bringing to the venture not only his father’s financial backing (£50) but also his connections to the post-Impressionist art world. In 1911, the two men travelled to Paris to ask the artist J. D. Fergusson if they could use his painting Rhythm – which they had seen in the Autumn Salon – as both the title and cover image for the magazine they were planning to publish. Although it was Fergusson who served as art editor for the first year, sourcing visual contributions to Rhythm, it was Sadleir who should be credited with explaining and promoting these trends in modern art to readers in articles that helped to secure the magazine’s place as an important disseminator of Modernism in Britain. In the first issue, published in June 1911, Sadleir praised the work of Anne Estelle Rice in an article titled ‘Fauvism and a Fauve’, admiring her ‘rhythmical’ use of ‘strong flowing line’ and the decorative effect created by ‘massed colour’ (impossible to reproduce in the two-tone printing of the magazine, of course).1 Other modern artists discussed by Sadleir in the pages of Rhythm include Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, André Derain and Wassily Kandinsky, whose Über das Geistige in der Kunst Sadleir translated into English as The Art of Spiritual Harmony, published in 1914. KM’s first contributions to Rhythm were printed in March 1912, and by the next issue, which began a new volume of the magazine, she was listed as an assistant editor alongside Sadleir. This was clearly the cause of some friction: by the following month, in the issue for July 1912, Sadleir’s

    544



michael sadleir  545

name had disappeared from the list of editorial staff, and although he returned as a contributor in the last two issues, he seems to have politely withdrawn from the magazine. As Antony Alpers surmises, Sadleir probably found himself ‘despised by the Mansfield woman as an incorrigible bourgeois [and] was pushed to one side’.2 Such tensions are discernible in much of the correspondence reproduced below: while polite, these letters hardly indicate an intimate friendship (with KM always addressing Sadleir by his full name, for example). In the same year, 1912, Sadleir started working at the publishing firm Constable & Co. This work was interrupted by World War One and Sadleir’s brief diplomatic career: after serving in the war trade intelligence department from 1915 to 1918, Sadleir became a member of the British delegation to the 1919 peace conference at Versailles, and for a brief period the following year served on the secretariat of the League of Nations. In 1919, he also returned to his work at Constable & Co., becoming a director in 1920 and working at the firm for the remainder of his life, reaching the position of chairman in 1954. It is as the publisher of Bliss and Other Stories (1920) and The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922) that Sadleir corresponded with KM from 1920 to 1922. When JMM wrote to KM on 8 February 1920 to tell her that Constable & Co. would publish her new story collection on a 15 per cent royalty and pay £40 in advance on delivery of manuscript, she replied: ‘I suppose I have final say? I couldn’t have The Woman at the Store [her first contribution to Rhythm] reprinted par exemple. If its left to Sadler or if Sadler has a say it would be bad.’ This suspicion of Sadleir was to define KM’s working relationship with Constable & Co. As he was preparing Bliss and Other Stories for publication, Sadleir wrote to JMM insisting that certain passages referring directly to sex in the story ‘Je ne parle pas français’ be cut. When she heard of the excisions that Sadleir was requesting, KM was furious, responding to JMM on 6 April 1920 with a letter that has become one of her most famous articulations of the importance of form in her work: Ive just got your note about Je ne parle pas. No, I certainly won’t agree to those excisions if there were 500000000 copies in existence. They can keep their old £40 & be hanged to them. Shall I pick the eyes out of a story for £40. Im furious with Sadler. No, Ill never agree. Ill supply another story but that is all. The outline would be all blurred. It must have those sharp lines. The Times didn’t object. As to The Wind Blows I put it in because so many people had admired it. (Yes its Autumn II but a little different.) Virginia, Lytton – and queer people like Mary Hamilton & Bertie all spoke so strongly about it I felt I must put it in. But this had better be held over till I get back. Ill never consent. Ill take the book away first. Dont worry about it. Just tell Sadler hes a fool. As to The German Governess it was on my list & I asked you to include it!! (Caught out!) But dont you worry love. It will have to wait. Of course I wont consent.

546   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 The next day, however, KM did, in fact, consent, conceding to JMM’s advice that ‘people like my mother’ who would otherwise admire her stories ‘will be shocked’ if ‘Je ne parle pas français’ were to be published without the excisions Sadleir was requesting.3 This decision had damaging consequences in other ways, though. If the story had been published in its intended form, KM would probably have been recognised sooner as the radical, subversive writer she was. KM’s regret at agreeing to the excisions was reaffirmed in a letter to JMM on 6 December 1920, after she had seen the blurb to Bliss, which told readers that the book ‘will create delight, surprise, alarm and possibly anger. The stories have a wry chic, and tell, with a cruel and detached irony, of sorrows and of sudden brutal joys’ that ‘men will read and talk about and women learn by heart but not repeat’. KM was clearly angered, writing: I suppose you will think I am an egocentric to mind the way Constable has advertised my book & the paragraph that is on the paper cover. Id like to say I mind so much so terribly that there are no words for me. No – Im dumb!! I think it so insulting & disgusting and undignified that – well – there you are! Its no good suffering all over again. But the bit about ‘women will learn by heart and not repeat’ – Gods! Why didn’t they have a photograph of me looking through a garter! But I was helpless here – too late to stop it – so now I must prove – no – convince people ce n’est pas moi. At least if Id known they were going to say that no power on earth would have made me cut a word. I wish I hadn’t. I was wrong – very wrong.

She was also made very upset when JMM, asked by Sadleir for a picture of KM he could use to publicise Bliss, sent a studio portrait, taken about 1913, which he liked but she hated. When KM saw this, she was so outraged that she sent a telegram commanding JMM to burn the offending photograph. This incident provoked KM to write to Sadleir directly and is the subject of the first two letters included here. All of these mistakes, misunderstandings and compromises in her dealings with Sadleir, as mediated by JMM, finally convinced KM to seek the services of a professional literary agent in 1921 (for more information, see my Introduction to James Brand Pinker in this volume, pp. 445–8). KM’s poor opinion of Sadleir, however, is not the full measure of the man. In addition to his work as a publisher, he was also a prolific writer and enjoyed considerable success as a novelist, biographer and bibliographer. After publishing his first novel in 1915, Sadleir’s creative work brought him popular fame and commercial success. Fanny by Gaslight (1940), his most successful novel, sold 150,000 copies in its first five years, was made into a film and was widely translated. Sadleir is perhaps now best remembered, though, as an eminent book collector and bibliographer. As an undergraduate at Oxford, he began to collect works of the 1890s, concentrating on Edgar Allan Poe and the French Symbolists and Decadents, such as Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé. After World War One, Sadleir spent the rest of his life amassing an unrivalled collection of nineteenth-century literature, focusing especially on three-decker



michael sadleir  547

novels, Gothic romances and ‘Tales of Terror’, ephemeral literature about London nightlife, ‘Silver Fork’ novels, and the so-called ‘yellow-backs’. The ‘Silver Fork’ novel was a popular subgenre depicting the glamorous high life of London’s wealthy and aristocratic circles; ‘yellow-backs’ were novels issued in affordable editions to be purchased at railway stations, with easily identifiable yellow-paper covers. Much of this private library later formed important archive collections at the University of Virginia, Princeton University and the University of California. For Sadleir, collecting always supported his endeavours as a scholar and novelist, as he made clear in his introduction to XIX Century Fiction: ‘I have never undertaken the intensive collection of any author or movement without the intention of ultimately writing the material collected into biography, bibliography or fiction.’4 In 1922, Sadleir published biographical profiles of Anthony Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell and Herman Melville, among others, in Excursions in Victorian Bibliography, the ‘delightful book’ to which KM refers in her final letter to him. Sadleir himself later recounted that the book attracted ‘interest as a piece of pioneer research’.5 This exploratory work was followed by Bibliography of the First Editions of the Prose Works of Herman Melville (1923) and two books which can be credited with reviving interest in Trollope’s novels – Trollope: A Commentary (1927) and Trollope: A Bibliography (1928). Following such ground-breaking work in the fields of book history and literary biography, Sadleir was appointed Sandars Reader in Bibliography at Cambridge University in 1937 and served as the President of the Bibliographical Society from 1944 to 1946. He continued to work at Constable & Co. until his death on 13 December 1957. Chris Mourant Notes 1. Sadler 1911, pp. 14–18 (p. 17). 2. Alpers 1980, p. 139. 3. Hankin, p. 309. 4. Sadleir 1951, p. xii. 5. Ibid.

[14 November 1920] [ATL] Villa Isola Bella Garavan – Menton. Dear Michael Sadleir, My press agency posted me today a most AWFUL photograph of myself published in The Sphere.1 It was like a turnip or even a turnip manqué. Where it came from I dont know.

548   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 But only beautiful people can afford to let such frights of themselves be laughed at; plain ones have to be more cautious. So, in case anyone should ask my publishers for a more-or-less likeness would you see they are given this postcard? Its very unlikely the occasion will arise but, after my horrid shock this morning I’d like to be prepared. With all good wishes – Yours sincerely Katherine Mansfield. Note 1. See KM’s more detailed letter to JMM the same day, deploring the fact that ‘I haven’t got such beastly eyes & long poodle hair & a streaky fringe [. . .] Its not me. It’s a HORROR. If its given to anyone please get it back. Fool I was not to have burnt it!’ She likewise sent a telegram. The photo dated back to 1913 and featured in The Sphere on 6 November. The culprit responsible for sending the photo to the editorial staff turned out to be JMM himself. In a letter to Sadleir written the next day (15 November), he enclosed a different photo, eating rather humble pie: ‘I’m sorry to say that my wife is rather upset by my having allowed the photograph of her to be published. She does not like it.’ The rest of the letter seeks reassurance that in future Sadleir will use only the new photo, not the old one. See also KM’s telegram and letter to her publishers, Constable, about the affair (CL1, p. 520).

[8 December 1920] [ATL]

8 xii 1920

Villa Isola Bella Garavan Menton A/M.

Dear Michael Sadler, Thank you so much for your letter. I am sorry I lifted up my voice so loud – and I fully appreciate the position . . . Perhaps I ought to be thankful that J.M.M. didn’t send you a photograph of a complete stranger – by mistake – whom he’d ‘always thought’ was KM! Its awfully kind of you to have bothered to write Yours, Katherine Mansfield.



michael sadleir  549

[7 February 1921] [ATL]

7 ii 1921

VILLA ISOLA BELLA   GARAVAN    MENTON A/M.

Dear Michael Sadleir I am v. sorry not to have answered your letter sooner. I have been – I am ill – & am only just at the sitting up stage. I am glad to hear that Bliss has done fairly well. It has brought me an extraordinary number of letters. One, by the way, I enclose. My new book won’t be ready until the end of this month. When it is I shall give it to my agent with instructions to send it first to you for considearation. It will be long short stories: Ill never write a real live novel. I must congratulate you upon the great success yours is having.1 Yours sincerely Katherine Mansfield. Note 1. Sadleir’s novel Privilege: A Novel of the Transition had been published by Constable in 1921; success was such that a second impression was needed the same year, and a new edition was released in 1923. One striking appraisal in the Edinburgh Review singles out Sadleir’s poised yet ruthless dismantling of the endemic prejudices and necessary decline of aristocracy and upper middle classes, citing him alongside Rose Macaulay, Rebecca West and Robert Keable as the bold pioneers of a new way ahead for fiction in the post-war years. See Tilby, pp. 139–47.

[30 April 1921] [ATL] [Postcard] Dear Michael Sadler Im leaving for Switzerland next week and my address is a little in the vague. If you have cause to write to me will you send the letters to the office below? Yours very sincerely Katherine Mansfield. c/o The Nation & Athenaeum 10 Adelphi Terrace London W.C.2

550   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 30 iv 1921 [24 September 1921] [ATL]

24 ix 1921

Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre Valais Switzerland

Dear Michael Sadleir, Some days ago I sent my new book off to Pinker1 – – at long last. Never have I had my pen so snatched away by The Furies. But I think these mountain tops are too high for them. Works much easier. I have asked Pinker to let you see the book. I hope it will be published by you – – – Is it not time I heard some account of the sales of Bliss. Its nearly a year now since it has been published. I hope all goes well with you. Yours sincerely Katherine Mansfield. Note 1. KM had just sent her agent the manuscript of The Garden Party and Other Stories. It was indeed accepted for publication by Constable.

[3 October 1921] [ATL]

3 x 1921

Chalet des Sapins Montana-s-Sierre Valais Switzerland.

Dear Michael Sadleir, I have waited to write to you until I had heard from Pinker. On receipt of your letter I wrote to him saying I should like v. much to accept your offer. Now, today, he has sent me the agreement to sign . . .



michael sadleir  551

I am delighted that you care to publish the book. I hope it will be successful for ‘my publisher’s sake’ as well as mine – – – Yours very sincerely Katherine Mansfield.

[10 October 1921] [ATL]

10 x 1921

Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre Valais Switzerland.

Dear Michael Sadleir, I have just written to Pinker saying: that (if agreeable to you) I’d v. much like to add one story to my new book.1 In that case, would you mind if I changed the title of the book for the name of the new story which is The Garden-Party. It seems to me a much better title than the other. Also, I received yesterday two letters about the story At the Bay & in both cases the title was wrong: i.e. In the Bay & On the Bay. That seemed to me a bad lookout. The other name is – am I right? – more solid. Its harder to forget & would look more attractive in the bookshops. Or so I imagine. I hope you won’t object . . . I’ll let you have the new story at the end of next week – without fail. My cheque for ‘Bliss’ made me feel an awful rich woman. For the first time in my life I could have bought a motorcar – a German one, at any rate.2 With best wishes Yours ever Katherine Mansfield. Squire has just accepted At the Bay for The Mercury.3 Notes 1. For the related correspondence with Pinker, see above, pp. 448–65. 2. As a result of the complete economic collapse of Germany in the post-war years, especially before any rescheduling or realigning of the war reparations had been defined, German exports were the cheapest on the European market. 3. ‘At the Bay’ featured in the January 1922 issue of the London Mercury, pp. 239–65. For related correspondence with the editor, J. C. Squire, see below, p. 370.

552   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [18 October 1921] [RJS]

18 X 1921

Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre (Valais) Switzerland

Dear Michael Sadleir1 Here is The Garden-Party. Would you see that it follows directly after At the Bay. i.e. that it is second in the contents. I hope this can be managed. I feel its place in the book is a little important . . . Those readers who may not understand the form of At the Bay, will be, I hope, reassured by this. I am very glad you approve of the change of title. Yes, I’m much better, thanks. Yours sincerely Katherine Mansfield. Note 1. ‘Dear Michael Sadleir’ has been heavily crossed out by someone else but his name is just discernible.

[7 November 1921] [ATL] [Postcard] Montana Dear Michael Sadleir, Thank you very much for sending the books to Paris on my behalf.1 But I shall not get the prize. Prizes always pass me by. Which is sad. For they are nice things.       Yours ever         K.M. Note 1. The prediction proved to be founded: KM’s Bliss and Other Stories was shortlisted for the prestigious French Prix Femina – Vie heureuse, awarded annually for an ‘imaginative’ work in English. The jury consists exclusively



michael sadleir  553 of women writers and intellectuals. F. Brett Young’s The Black Diamond was also shortlisted, but first prize was awarded to Rose Macaulay for her novel Dangerous Ages (1921). See above, p. 31, n. 1.

[11 November 1921] [ATL] Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre Valais 11 xi 1921 Dear Michael Sadleir, If anyone should want a photograph of mine before my new book appears it occurs to me that these would reproduce better than the other. They are ‘sharper’. So I send them along just in case – – – – –         Yours ever          Katherine Mansfield.

[29 November 1921] [ATL] Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre Valais Dear Michael Sadleir, Forgive a troublesome author. But if there is still time, if the printers have not got so far would you – could you extract a story called Sixpence1 from near the end of my book & throw it away? I have not a copy by me but I have a horrible feeling it is sentimental & should not be there. I may be asking something impossible. If I am Im very sorry to have worried you. Yours very sincerely Katherine Mansfield. Note 1. Sadleir received the request on time and duly withdrew the story. See CW2, pp. 311–16.

554   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [25 December 1921] [ATL] Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre Valais 25 xii 1921 Dear Michael Sadleir, If you think a small limited edition of the Garden Party would sell – then I think the idea an excellent one.1 My only doubt is whether the small public who read my last book wouldn’t buy the limited edition and there’d be no one left to buy the other! Should you decide, however, to print one I imagine the Oxford booksellers might dispose of some copies. I hope you are having a Happy Christmas & that you are going to have a Happy New Year. Yours ever Katherine Mansfield. Note 1. Nothing would seem to have come of this project. For details of the reprints and bindings, see Kirkpatrick, pp. 22–3.

[29 January 1922] [ATL] Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre Valais 29 i 1922 Dear Michael Sadleir, Just in case my book should be out within a fortnight – might I have the copies sent to me at the        Victoria Palace Hotel        6–8, Rue Blaise Desgoffe        Rue de Rennes        Paris



michael sadleir  555

And I would be very glad to have half a dozen extra copies charged to my account. I go to Paris tomorrow. I hope Ive not done wrong in writing to you about this. Yours very sincerely Katherine Mansfield.

[5 February 1922] [ATL]

V ii 1922

Victoria Palace Hotel 6 –8 Rue Blaise Desgoffe Rue de Rennes Paris.

Dear Michael Sadleir, I am not returning to Switzerland, so the above will be my address until May next. I would be very glad if you would send me a line at your convenience telling me if my book is to appear this month. Its not mere curiosity that prompts the question!      With best wishes       Yours ever,       Katherine Mansfield.

[12 February 1922] [ATL]

Monday.

Victoria Palace Hotel 6 Rue Blaise Desgoffe Rue de Rennes Paris

Dear Michael Sadleir, I hear from Jack, who has just joined me here, that he wrote to you asking you to send the copies of my book to Adelphi Terrace.1 This was a mistake on his part. Will you kindly have them sent to me here? Im so sorry to bother you.      Yours ever        Katherine Mansfield.

556   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Note 1. 10 Adelphi Terrace in central Westminster was the address for the offices of the Nation and Athenaeum.

[26 February 1922] [ATL]

26 ii 1922

Victoria Palace Hotel 6–8 Rue Blaise Desgoffe Rue de Rennes Paris.

Dear Michael Sadleir, Very many thanks for sending the copy of Bliss to Chapman & Hall. I am sorry the moment was an awkward one; I hope your strike will soon be over. My books have come. The printing and general appearance is delightful, I think. I think its a little pity that the jacket is pink and can’t help feeling more hands would have reached it down from the shelves if it had been citron yellow or a good blue. Pink always makes me think of Lives of Napoleon.1 But thats horribly ungracious – and please believe I am very very sensible of the way ‘Constable’ has treated me. I am glad there is to be no large edition. Yours ever Katherine Mansfield. Note 1. No single biography of the French military commander and Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte would appear to have been published with this title, although an imposing tome, A History of Napoleon Bonaparte, Including Lives of Napoleon the Great, of Louis Napoleon and of The Prince Imperial, had been published in 1888 with a deep, cherry-pink cover. However, KM may just be alluding to various biographical publications with the title Life of Napoleon. Whatever the case, her objection to the colour would appear to be based on the rather stately, Victorian appearance of such volumes, when yellow or blue would be more discreet or more modern.



michael sadleir  557

[1 March 1922] [ATL] i iii 1922

Paris

Dear Michael Sadleir, I enclose this letter from the Sketch. By the same post I received one from the literary editor of The Nation saying that he had been sent no review copy but had had to telephone specially for it. This is indeed worrying especially in the case of two papers which, it stood to reason, would give the book a ‘show’. And there is a Miss Evans, London Correspondent of the New Zealand Associated Press 85 Fleet St E.C.4 who has written to me asking for a review copy. I think it would be of the greatest advantage to the book to let her have one –    Yours ever Katherine Mansfield. I think its very important that the weekly illustrated papers like The Sphere, The Tatler, Vogue etc. should have prompt review copies of my book. I fancy they do more good to the sales than any others. They gave me such long reviews last time.1 Note 1. For details of contemporary press reviews of Bliss and Other Stories, see Kirkpatrick, pp. 18–19. KM’s suggestion paid off. The British edition of Vogue published a glowing and aesthetically sensitive review of The Garden Party and Other Stories in May 1922.

[9 March 1922] [ATL]

9 iii 1922

Victoria Palace Hotel 6/8 Rue Blaise Desgoffe Rue de Rennes Paris.

Dear Michael Sadleir, When things are more settled may I have that second half dozen copies of The Garden Party sent to me?

558   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Dont you think an extract from the D. News review coupled with that of Time and Tide would make a good ad?1 I wonder what I have done to the T. and T. lady to make her so fierce. Its frightening.    Yours ever Katherine Mansfield. Note 1. See the warmly positive review by R. Ellis Roberts in the Daily News, 27 February 1922. The future Labour Party politician Mary Agnes Hamilton’s condescending but not wholly hostile review of The Garden Party was published in Time and Tide on 3 March 1922.

[21 March 1922] [ATL]

21 iii 1922

Victoria Palace Hotel 6/8 Rue Blaise Desgoffe Rue de Rennes Paris

Dear Michael Sadleir, The last ½ dozen have turned up safely, thank you. I think the others must have been lost in the post. As Pinker is my agent I have asked him to look after Bliss for me. Would you therefore write direct to him if it should be necessary and pay any monies to him if or when they may be due to me. I am glad the G.P. is selling. I only hope it goes on. Should a 3rd impression be necessary would it be impossible to have a white or a grey or a blue or a yellow jacket instead of the red?    Yours ever Katherine Mansfield.

[25 March 1922] [ATL]

25 iii 1922

Victoria Palace Hotel 6/8 Rue Blaise Desgoffe Rue de Rennes Paris.



michael sadleir  559

Dear Michael Sadleir, Many thanks for your letter. About In a German Pension.1 Even if it did sell moderately well it would antagonise people – and rightly to such a degree that my next book would stand a very poor chance. Its awfully bad. There’s a kind of odious smartness about it which would make any decent critic or reader writhe. No amount of revision would make it presentable. Id much rather sit tight on its grave. – Yes, the curly blue hyacinth blue of Jack’s cover2 made me groan for envy. It is most beautiful. Its very kind of you to say I may have my red jacket changed if the G.P. should reach a third impression.3 What a curse this strike must be!4    Yours Katherine Mansfield. Notes 1. KM’s first anthology, the satirical and sharply witty In a German Pension sketches, had been published by Stephen Swift in 1911. 2. JMM’s novel, The Things We Are, had just been published by Constable. 3. KM’s plea for a change of colour was attentively heard by the publisher. The next edition was in sapphire blue cloth. 4. A London book trade strike was then entering its fourth week, as disputes over wages and working conditions between employers and the National Union of Printing and Paper Workers dragged on. See in particular ‘Book Trade Strike’, The Times, 15 March 1922, p. 10.

[June 1922] [ATL] Hotel d’Angleterre Montana Village (Valais) Dear Michael Sadleir, Would you tell Knopf ‘no’.1 I seem to be haunted by that miserable German Pension. Its bones are always shaking at me from another quarter. Such bad bones, too. May I say how much I enjoyed your delightful book.2 I wish, rather, there had been a longer essay on Mrs Gaskell. But that’s greed – one wants a long essay on everybody – Jack & I owe our ‘discovery’ of Trollope to you3 – We had always avoided him for some reason – Which was shameful.    Yours ever K.M.

560   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Notes 1. After the successful American reception of Bliss and Other Stories, Knopf was keen to obtain the publishing rights for KM’s earlier collection. See above, pp. 29–32. 2. Sadleir’s rich but rather unclassifiable work Excursions in Victorian Bibliography (1922) had been published that year by the London-based company Chaundy & Co. It offers a series of portraits of eight nineteenth-century writers, with scholarly, professional and readerly perspectives, as well as very precise annotations in terms of book history. Elizabeth Gaskell is the only woman writer to be included in the collection, and coverage is decidedly less detailed – the chapter is rich in bibliographical detail but preceded only by a brief prefatory note, rather than a more reader-focused essay, as is the case for the seven other authors. 3. The first chapter of Sadleir’s Excursions in Victorian Bibliography is devoted to the British novelist Anthony Trollope, and makes a firm stand in favour of rereading and reassessing the author in terms of his mastery of characterisation, and his keen alertness to shifts in British social and political workings. KM’s letter to JMM’s brother Richard (see above, p. 370) confirms that her warm words here are heartfelt.

Sydney Schiff (1868–1944)

Introduction KM wrote to fellow writer Sydney Schiff from the Villa Flora in Menton, suggesting they meet for tea. He brought his reply in person the next day, with an invitation for her to visit him and his wife, Violet, at their villa in Roquebrune, the next town along the coast; in a note on that reply, KM described him as the ‘most soigné creature in the world’, whose apparent shock at her ill health dismayed her. This cagey response to her visitor may be the remnants of a scuffle between herself and Sydney the previous year, over a story of hers that was under consideration for publication in Art and Letters, of which he was patron at the time. Nevertheless, KM was quickly captivated by these new friends. She rejoiced particularly in her shared literary path with Sydney, whom she had described as her ‘literary fairy godfather’ before the month was out (to JMM, 24–5 April 1920). But then, by September that year, she told JMM that she was ‘DEAD OFF Schiffs’ after they praised their friend T. S. Eliot’s editorial prowess over her husband’s (21 September 1920). Though KM evidently ran hot and cold about the Schiffs and their connection was to end somewhat abruptly, these wealthy, cultured and attentive companions were of great comfort to KM in her later years. Despite many differences, there are some echoes between KM’s and Sydney’s backgrounds in well-to-do bourgeois families and their youthful rebellions against them. Sydney Schiff was born about 12 December 1868 (the exact date is unknown) to Caroline Mary Ann Eliza Cavell (née Scates), who was from a respectable English country family, and Alfred Schiff, a German–Jewish merchant banker born in Trieste. His parents’ marriage, which took place the year after his birth, was an unhappy one. Close to his mother, Sydney was brought up Anglican, cared for by a series of nannies and mostly home-tutored. By the time he was eighteen, he had developed a strong antipathy towards his father, and having failed to win a place at Oxford University, he went to Canada and the United States after refusing to join the family’s merchant banking firm. In Louisville, Kentucky, Sydney met Marion Fulton Canine, with whom he eloped in August 1889. This was to be a fairly disastrous union,

    561

562   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 which nevertheless lasted for twenty years – Sydney finally left Marion only after his father died, in 1908. In the summer of 1909, his sister Edith (later Countess Gautier-Vignal) took him to a performance of La Bohème at Covent Garden, and there he was introduced to the woman who would become his second wife: Violet Beddington. Sydney and Violet’s connection was immediate, but as he was still married at the time, it was two years before they could be together. Their wedding took place on 10 May 1911, shortly after Sydney’s divorce was finalised. The Schiffs’ was a close, supportive relationship, bolstered by a shared love of the arts and especially literature, and these were some of the qualities that KM most relished in them as friends: she described their home to JMM as ‘the house where lovers dwell’ and was grateful for her sense that ‘they understand ones work’ (24–5 April 1920).1 Sydney had always wanted to be a writer – an aspiration that his family and first wife were dismissive of – but Violet encouraged and assisted him in pursuing this dream. The year they married, he started work on Richard Kurt, the first volume of a series of seven semi-autobiographical novels, all published between 1919 and 1937 under the pseudonym Stephen Hudson. In 1913, he published his first novel, Concessions, under his own name, followed by War-Time Silhouettes in 1916, the first under the Hudson moniker. It was as a fellow writer that KM most connected with Sydney, and along with planning, and then reminiscing over, their meetings, her letters to him particularly ponder the writing life, discussing their literary idols Proust and Chekhov, swapping compliments on each other’s work and trading literary scene gossip. Years after her death, ‘Stephen Hudson’ wrote a reminiscence for The Cornhill Magazine of his ‘First Meetings with Katherine Mansfield’.2 It is a rare extended portrait of KM, one that especially highlights an extreme sensitivity to beauty, a fascination with the psychology of the self and relationships, and a delicate physicality – oddly painted as both morbid and seductive. The piece is fashioned largely from dialogue, giving the reader a vivid impression (however glossed or rearranged the details may be) of KM’s conversation and her literary milieu. It opens with a hint at their Art and Letters scuffle. Later on, Hudson details both a few moments of awkwardness produced when KM critiqued his book, Richard Kurt, without realising that Hudson and Schiff were one and the same,3 and a conversation in which she analysed the flaws in JMM’s personality. The intellectual and emotional intimacy that these conversation topics suggest something of the tenor of KM’s letters to these important friends. Helen Rydstrand Notes 1. For more on the Schiffs’ milieu and KM’s experience of it, see the Introduction to KM’s letters to Violet below, p. 588. 2. Hudson, pp. 202–12.



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3. KM had, in fact, reviewed the book before they met in the Athenaeum of 7 November 1919 (see CW3, pp. 526–9). See also KM’s report on discovering Hudson’s identity in a letter to JMM, 14 April 1920.

[1 April 1920] [BL]

i IV 1920

Villa Flora Menton.

Dear Mr Schiff Last night I had a letter from Mr Grant Richards1 telling me that you were at Roquebrune2 – May I drive over and call on your wife or would you both come & take tea with me here in my room? It would be very pleasant to talk over Art & Letters. With kind regards Yours sincerely Katherine Mansfield. Murry. Notes 1. The British novelist, essayist and pioneering publisher Franklin Thomas Grant Richards (1872–1948), founding manager of the publishing company of the same name, had contacted KM the previous year to float the idea of an anthology of her stories. She toyed with the idea before settling on Constable, directed by JMM’s former Oxford and Rhythm magazine associate, Michael Sadleir. 2. Roquebrune is a picturesque, fortified town on the French Riviera, situated between Monaco and Menton. It was about a four-kilometre drive from the villa where KM was staying.

[1 July 1920] [N] [Draft] 1 vii 1920

2 Portland

My dear Sydney, The idea that we might possibly get that house in your village1 for August is very exciting. Jack is awfully keen. I shall be much beholden to you if you do find time to enquire.

564   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Note 1. The Schiffs’ summer residence was in Eastbourne, Sussex. T. S. Eliot and his wife were also looking for a cottage to rent there, to be closer to the Schiffs, who were firm friends, a detail which becomes more significant as KM’s correspondence with Schiff unfolds.

[25 July 1920] [BL] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] Sunday. I wish I had not given you that book;1 it is too old and too bad. However, the mischief is done. Jones2 has taken rooms for us at a place called Hampton Park. It is three miles distant from Eastbourne – three minutes by train. There’s a taxi at the hotel, too, what is at ones disposition. It was the best she could do. There’s nothing to be had in Eastbourne itself. I do hope we shall meet often. There is a telephone at the hotel, too. We go on Wednesday week. I am still ‘with you’ after our last meeting. Really one could talk for days – for far longer.     With my love Katherine. Notes 1. At Schiff’s request, KM had loaned him a copy of In a German Pension. 2. ‘Jones’ was the pen-name which KM and Ida Baker had chosen for both of them during their schooldays; KM continued to use it as one of her more neutral or affectionate nicknames for Baker.

[late July 1920] [BL] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] I have just read your letter. I want to reply. But it must be at leisure. Jones shall take a reply tomorrow and some work if she can find some. I have read and read your story. It is great happiness that you should be writing – today. I should like to greet you – a special greeting as a fellow-writer. Its raining. No, Ill write tomorrow. I hope you will see M. on Wednesday. If you choose the flowers tomorrow – they will be wonderful. I hope they will make you happy. Your rose is perfect – so strange – so white – without perfume – without thorns. I see it. Goodnight.                 K.M.



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[21 September 1920] [BL]

Tuesday.

Isola Bella Garavan Menton

Very many thanks for your card. I will write as soon as I can. All goes well, but I am tired after that journey. I can’t lift a pen for the moment. But I can let it go about T.S.E.1 For my money is on JMM as THE English Critic.2 I agree, he makes mistakes sometimes; he’s rash, he’s not steady yet; he leaps before he looks. But there is a sign – a something in what he writes which the opaque frigidity of Eliot never has. Thats my opinion. Hurra for JMM. Murry with all thy faults I love thee still.3 And I mean as I critic please. Hes the man of the future, Im sure. He risks himself TSE never. My love to you both            K. Notes 1. Schiff’s esteem and affection for T. S. Eliot was life-long; it was also mutual. However, his championing of Eliot’s finesse as a discerning literary editor clearly rankled in the eyes of KM and JMM. 2. KM’s letter to JMM, written the same day, offers alternative perspectives on her comments here, and suggests that her apparent diplomacy and friendliness were less sincere than the closing note implies. A P.S. appended to the beginning of the letter reads: ‘I constantly dream of the English Critic who’ll (Hurrah for Bogey!) set all these at nought. I feel convinced by the way that Eliot is no good. Hes a dead horse at the races.’ A second P.S. at the end adds, ‘I’m DEAD OFF Schiffs. Had a card from them which for some reason finished them. This I tell you in case they invite you there. Don’t bother to go if you don’t care to. They wrote me a kind of rhapsody on Eliot – idiocy. I’ve had enough. Finito. Now Id run 10 miles to escape them!!’ (21 September 1920). 3. KM reworks William Cowper’s famous lines from The Task (1785), his extended pastoral poem in blank verse, which began as a quip and a playful poetic challenge to write a poem on ‘anything; this sofa’ (Cowper, pp. xii; 1–2): England, with all thy faults, I love thee still, My country! and, while yet a nook is left Where English minds and manners may be found, Shall be constrain’d to love thee. Though thy clime Be’ fickle, and thy year most part deform’d With dripping rains, or wither’d by a frost, I would not yet exchange thy sullen skies, And fields without a flow’r, for warmer France. (Part 2, ll. 206–14). Although witty and slightly provocative here, given that KM was agreeing to differ with Schiff on his championing of Eliot, the echo also has topical resonance. The poem’s stirring, patriotic uplift and underlying rumblings of war had been much cited in the early World War One years, as part of the

566   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 didactic invitation to the young to take up arms for their country. At the same time, Cowper’s more sparkling, ironic note had already incited a host of other pastichers, to whom KM may also be referring here. The most striking in this context is Bryon’s reuse of the line in the overtly sardonic ‘Beppo’, or Samuel Butler’s ‘Jesus! With all thy faults I love thee still’, quoted from his notebooks in H. F. Jones’s memoir Samuel Butler, Author of Erewhon, which JMM had reviewed for the Athenaeum the previous year.

[4 November 1920] [BL]

4 xi 1920

Villa Isola Bella Garavan-Menton

My dear Sydney I cannot tell you how distressed I am to hear of Violet’s illness. My heart goes out to you both. I wish I could know how she was this very minute. Give her my tender love; tell her that my wishes join the wishes of all who know and love her that she’ll be better soon – and soon her beautiful radiant self again. I sympathise with your anxiety, my dear friend. I do appreciate the relief it must be to you to know that she is recovering. Will you let me have – just a note as soon as you can, telling me how she is? I will look for it. As soon I can manage the journey I will go to Roquebrune. I think Id better send Jones instead, and she shall report. Your mentioning the verbena made me think of the lavender bushes last year – and the morning we sat in the garden for a little while. I always see across our conversation those lovely spikes of deep purplish blue, and the bees were busy in them – That and the sound of water and the flight of three swallows – all are ‘important’ to the moment – Yes, there are weak spots in A Gift from the Dusk but compared to the unworthy, stupifying, untruthful rubbish of today it did not do, I felt, to comment on them.1 The worst of it is, nowadays, that the majority of novels is so bad one becomes almost fearful of the strength of one’s feeling for a ‘good’ one. There were touches in that book that moved me tremendously. I felt that in the intimacy between Stephen and Mary – Prowse was, many times, speaking a language which I long in vain to hear spoken. The intimacy of two beings who are essential to each other – who is going to write that? And yet Love that is less than that – one wearies of hearing of it. Im sure Ive read 20 novels this autumn by LADY writers that might all be called How I lost my Virginity! If that wasn’t bad enough – they



sydney schiff  567

never tell the truth – they always tell How I WISHED to lose my Virginity, and in fact I don’t believe they ever did lose it. I wish there were 6 or 7 writers who wrote for themselves and let the world go hang. But where are they? As to critics – to have to print Herbert Read is enough proof of their scarcity.2 I can’t bear Herbert Read; he always sounds so puffed up and so dull. What did you think of Lady O?3 Its difficult to imagine her in rooms at Roquebrune. She’s a queer study – she’s early sixteenth century really & I think she suffers very much in trying to accomodate herself to today. At the same time (and ever to be remembered) she is of the same school as Margot Asquith.4 The weather these last few days is infernal, but my doctor is kind and still tells me I must have courage. It makes work rather a labour, though. How I look forward to seeing you both! Not a day passes but I think of you.           Yours ever                 K.M. Notes 1. R. O. Prowse (1863–1949) studied at Balliol College, Oxford, before deciding on a life as a man of letters, relying initially on private means and a modest lifestyle to do so. His immense respect for Henry James is discernible in his early writings, notably his novels The Poison of Asps (1892) and A Fatal Reservation (1895). Frequently praised for their psychological delicacy and ethical, humanist perspective, his three midlife novels were considered his best. The first of these is the one evoked here, following up on KM’s warm review in the Athenaeum the previous month. Set in a sanatorium, it inevitably had a great imaginative impact on her at the time – as the closing words of her long, detailed review show. The Times’s obituary of Prowse remembers him as ‘a novelist for the discerning reader rather than the multitude’ (27 May 1949, p. 7). See ‘The Silence is Broken’ (CW3, pp. 680–3). 2. The poet, literary critic and art historian Herbert Read (1893–1968) remains a fascinating figure in the overlapping circles of British Modernism. In the immediate post-war period, he was co-editing the journal Art and Letters with his friend Frank Rutter (see above, p. 281, n. 3), collaborating closely with Orage on the New Age, and circulating easily amongst very different Modernist pioneers such as T. S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, Edith Sitwell and Wyndham Lewis, to name but the most prominent. KM’s impatience was probably spurred by his lucidly rational yet passionately engaged journalism rather than his poetry, but she leaves the matter unclear, and any possible compatibility of spirit would not appear to have been put to the test. 3. Ottoline Morrell had travelled via Menton on her way to Italy, presumably meeting the Schiffs on that occasion. They had numerous friends and acquaintances in common, but never struck up any form of friendship. 4. Margot Tennant (1864–1945) was a British writer, suffragist, society hostess and patron of the arts, married to the former Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith.

568   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Their daughter Elizabeth, then married to the Romanian prince Antoine Bibesco, had been the cause of considerable hurt and friction between JMM and KM the previous year, but even prior to that, KM had never had much patience with Margot Asquith herself, as her 1920 review of her biography makes clear. See CL1, pp. 312–14, and CW3, pp. 735–8.

[15 November 1920] [BL] [Villa Isola Bella, Garavan, Menton] My dear Sydney Will you and she forgive me if I do not write a letter just now? I am overworked. C’est un mauvais moment.1 Please accept my love instead. I long to see you both. I rejoice with all my heart that you are better, dearest Violet. May you both be happy! The weather here is divine. It is almost unbearably beautiful. I have taken this villa for two years – for my lifetime, I feel. But dear friends, my friends whom I think of with – how much – love forgive me for just now. Je suis tellement fatiguée.2 Katherine. Notes 1. (Fr.): It’s a difficult period. 2. (Fr.): I’m so tired.

[1 December 1920] [BL]

1 xii 1920

Isola Bella Garavan – Menton A/M.

My dear Sydney, I must answer your letter at once – though Id a thousand times rather talk and talk and talk it over with you and with Violet. First – about Violet. I think you are very wise not to attempt a journey while she has a temperature. This climate, as you know better than do I, is the very devil for a temperature. It is divine, but its changeable – L’autre jour1 the thermometer in my room dropped 10 degrees in 24 hours. II faut avoir de la force2 to combat that. But it is – an adorable climate when



sydney schiff  569

its radiant. Yesterday and today have been supremely beautiful – I think, like one of those mythological ladies,3 Im really married to the sun . . . Im sorry about Ludovici’s book:4 it didn’t come my way. Im tired of extinguishing Benson,5 especially as he shines as bright as ever the moment after. Plague take these books. If it wasnt a question of money – what wouldn’t I give to leave them alone & only do my own work. Its an awful wrench to turn from ones work & take up Stacpoole or Pett Ridge. (What names the fellows have, too!)6 However – Squire has taken my last long story for the Mercury.7 I don’t know when it will appear. Its a study of a man and a woman – People won’t like it. About the Russians. I agree that translations are perfectly terrible. The peculiar flatness of them is so strange and its just that flatness which the story or whatever it is mustnt have – One feels its superimposed. And yet – and yet – though I hate to agree with so many silly voices I confess that Tchekhov does seem to me a marvellous writer. I do think a story like ‘In Exile’ or ‘Misery’ is frankly incomparable.8 (Its years since I read de Maupassant:9 I must read him again) – And then Tolstoi – well, you know, Anna’s journey in the train when she finds Vronsky is travelling to St. Petersburg too10 – and the whole figure of Anna – – –When I think how real, how vital, how vivid she is to me – I feel I cant be grateful enough to Tolstoi – By grateful – I mean full of praise to him for his works. Will you lend me Marcel Proust when you come out this time?11 I don’t feel qualified to speak of him. I wonder what you’ll think of this little Isola Bella. Its very small. The windows have got little cotton velveteen trousers put up by me in place of the dreadful little chemises that hung there on my arrival. And I have an old servant,12 a butter and sugar thief – who is an artist in her way – a joy. Her feeling for hot plates & for what dear Henry James might call the real right gravy is supreme.13 These things are so important. I don’t think I could love a person who liked gravylene or browno14 or whatever they call it.       Heaven bless you both!                 Katherine. Notes  1. (Fr.): The other day.  2. (Fr.): You need to be strong.  3. Goddesses and nymphs married to the sun god feature in mythology worldwide. KM may also have in mind the Heliades, the children of the sun, or the pictorial tradition rather than a particular story, such as Filippo Lauri’s Apollo with Nymphs and Satyrs (c. 1660).  4. Schiff’s detailed letter to KM three days previously included mention of his sharp disapproval of a dismissive critical review of Too Old for Dolls, a novel by the Anglo-Italian author and philosopher Anthony M. Ludovici (1882– 1971). In Schiff’s opinion, Ludovici was ‘one of the “freshest” voices of our

570   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2

 5.

 6.

 7.  8.  9.

10.

day’, as she told JMM in a letter written the same day as this one to Schiff. Whether KM would have been of the same opinion is debatable: like Ludovici’s other fictional writing, the novel stages his contempt for lower races, non-restrained reproduction and women in general, other than the most submissive, demure helpmates, a life-long preoccupation that runs throughout his fictional and non-fictional works. As a schoolgirl, KM had enjoyed some of the novels by the English novelist, writer and archaeologist E. F. Benson (1867–1940), writing enthusiastically to Vera about Sheaves (1907), for instance, which she found ‘delightful’ (see CL1, p. 292). However, as two reviews published in the Athenaeum the previous year attest, she had substantially revised her earlier opinion. She notes in particular that ‘Russia [i.e. Turgenev, Tolstoy and Chekhov] is evidently torn out of Mr. Benson’s atlas,’ which is noteworthy here in the context of her discussions of Russian literature with Schiff. See CW4, pp. 650–1; 694–8. In the same review of Benson’s The Countess of Lowndes Square and Other Stories, evoked above, KM also reviewed Just Open, by the British humourist and popular novelist William Pett Ridge (1859–1930), and A Man of the Islands, by the Irish-born doctor and prolific novelist Henry de Vere Stacpoole. KM’s ‘The Stranger’ featured in the January 1921 issue of the London Mercury. See CW2, pp. 240–50. Both stories are included The Schoolmistress and Other Stories, which had been published by Heinemann, and translated by Constance Garnett, the previous year. KM had read a number of stories by the French naturalist and master of the short story, Guy de Maupassant (1850–93) in the late 1900s. She had also made extensive reading notes from Symons’s critical essays on the writer. See CW4, pp. 88; 110–12. The train as a symbol of social upheaval, restlessness, destiny and destruction is a major trope in Tolstoy’s fictional masterpiece and one of the classic novels of adultery, Anna Karenina (1874). The episode KM refers to here is the intensely romantic, decisive ‘first avowal’, when Anna, returning to Petersburg from her brother’s home, alights from a train during a snowstorm at a station midway and hears Vronsky’s voice: But now at the first instant of meeting him, she was seized by a feeling of joyful pride. She had no need to ask why he had come. She knew as certainly as if he had told her that he was here to be where she was. ‘I didn’t know you were going. What are you coming for?’ she said, letting fall the hand with which she had grasped the door post. And irrepressible delight and eagerness shone in her face. ‘What am I coming for?’ he repeated, looking straight into her eyes. ‘You know that I have come to be where you are’, he said; ‘I can’t help it’. At that moment the wind, as it were, surmounting all obstacles, sent the snow flying from the carriage roofs, and clanked some sheet of iron it had torn off, while the hoarse whistle of the engine roared in front, plaintively and gloomily. All the awfulness of the storm seemed to her more splendid now. He had said what her soul longed to hear, though she feared it with her reason. She made no answer, and in her face he saw conflict. (Tolstoy, tr. Constance Garnett, p. 106)



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11. It is not clear whether KM is interested in reading an essay by Schiff on Marcel Proust or a work by Proust himself, whether essays (such as the 1919 collection Pastiches et mélanges) or a volume of A la recherche du temps perdu, two volumes of which had by then been published. Schiff had first made contact with Proust in 1919, when he wrote expressing his great admiration for ‘Le cote de chez Swann’ [sic], as he wrote in a letter now at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. After corresponding in increasingly friendly terms and finding distinct areas of mutual self-interest, they finally met in August 1920. From the first letter onwards, Schiff became Proust’s self-appointed agent in Britain, giving advice and backing for the English edition; Proust in return drew on Schiff’s character for his writer–diplomat Monsieur de Norpois in the Recherche. After Proust’s death in 1922, Schiff worked tirelessly to promote his work, and also translated the final volume of Proust’s Modernist masterpiece. See Eells, pp. 69–90. 12. KM’s servant at the Isola Bella was called Marie. In a letter to Ida Baker, KM refers to her as ‘the old villain’, who is also capable of being ‘as sweet as sugar’ (CL1, p. 95). 13. KM’s sly wit here – at Marie and ‘dear’ Henry James’s expense – resonates between two intertextual references. His short story ‘The Right Real Thing’ (1899) is one of the uneasy, supernatural stories which James was experimenting with at the time, sounding out the linguistic and atmospheric hints needed to create a disturbing sense of something unspoken and unsayable. In this story, a wife commissions a writer friend of her former husband to write his biography; an ominous sense of the husband’s presence, however, prevents the work – the right real thing so much desired – from ever being written. In an earlier story, ‘The Real Thing’, to which KM may also allude here, an artist tries to instil in an aspiring model, Mrs Monarch, a sense of how to paint or sit for him effectively; his efforts, however, misfire completely, so anxious is she to pose with genteel grace, and so imitate the ‘real thing’ to true perfection. 14. KM would appear to be pastiching typical-sounding brand names for industrially made, instant gravy powder, rather than citing any real ones. These were the days, however, of the first successful quick meat stocks and sauces – ‘Bisto’ powder, first launched in 1908, ‘Royal Gravy Flour’ for brown gravies in the 1910s, and the ‘Oxo’ cube in 1910. KM’s distaste for such readymade, industrially produced alternatives does suggest, however, that Marie’s scrupulous devotion to the ‘real thing’ (see above, n. 13) – that is, genuine, home-made sauces and stocks – has a lot to say for it.

[early January 1921] [BL] VILLA ISOLA BELLA GARAVAN MENTON A/M My dear Sydney, If only you did write the story from Janey’s point of view!1 What wouldn’t I give to see it . . . That my attempt gave you some pleasure

572   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 is a great reward for me. Its such encouragement to know I have a critic. You understand that? And I value every word & suggestion. Let us speak about it, if you please, one time when Violet you and I are together. Murry has changed his opinion. He likes it almost more than my other stories now. But that brings me to the triangle talk of the other evening, about which a book would not be enough. Yes, of course you were right, we were ‘happier’ when you left – rather – the strangest thing happened to Murry. No, I can’t write it. Its so involved. I could only tell it in one of our talks. M: . . . ‘When we started talking, as I listened to Schiff & you I suddenly felt that I was outside it all – that I had been, for months really, a false personality. And when I came out of the corner & sat in the other chair I felt this false personality gradually being shed. Everything began to get simpler . . . . .’ But thats only the beginning. You know those people who with a wand can divine the presence of a spring of clear water – can trace the source of a spring that flows deep underground. Quite apart from all your conscious gifts as a psychologist, I feel you, too, are a diviner in just this way. I thought of the analogy the other day . . . when Violet & I were together in the car. You remember – Violet? – And how are you, today? I know you have exquisite courage – I put it to the test too much. Id love to see you – to know you are really better. I keep looking at my books. Is there one you would care for – one worth sending? But they look dull dogs. Few are the books one really wants to see. Are you in bed still? I should very much like to give you a small quick hug – & say how glad I am you’re better . . . Yours ever with love Katherine. Note 1. Schiff had presumably expressed interest in reworking KM’s short story ‘The Stranger’, the forthcoming publication of which she had mentioned to him weeks before, convinced that ‘People won’t like it’ (see p. 569 above), from the point of view of the wife, Janey. The narrative perspective in KM’s version is elusive but largely that of the husband, who is anxiously waiting for the return of Janey, whose ship is drawing into port, bringing her home after spending ten months in England.



sydney schiff  573

[12 January 1921] [BL]

XII i 1921

VILLA ISOLA BELLA GARAVAN MENTON A/M.

Dear Sydney I promised J.M.M. yesterday before he left that I would without fail write to you & say how sorry he was to have seen so little of you and Violet. ‘I wish to God the others had gone & they had stayed’, said he. ‘I felt we could have talked no end if only we’d been alone’. And: ‘Be sure to give my love to them both’. I am wondering if you are in your Villa yet; I hope you are. And I have a feeling that drive was too long for Violet. It tired her. You were tired, my dear, weren’t you? And not a bit in the mood for Mary C’s quick chatter1 . . . I wish I could have prevented it. Its delightful to know you are both near. I hope we shall meet soon. Yours ever Katherine M. Note 1. The talkative guest has not been identified.

[29 January 1921] [BL] VILLA ISOLA BELLA GARAVAN MENTON A/M. My dear Sydney Our letters crossed. And now Jones tells me she did not post mine but delivered it by hand. First – will you tell me how Violet is? I am so anxious for you both. Thank goodness that cold wind has stopped today. Dear woman! Tell her how I sympathise. There are times when a letter seems to fit the moment almost miraculously. I was . . . tired and not too happy last evening. And the voice of a friend speaking to me so as I understood and reciprocated – was more precious than I can say. Thank you.

574   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 If I can really do what I want to do – it will be because of the way you and Violet have ‘helped’ me. I mean that, I mean by ‘help’, now, something very deep, that would take a lifetime of explanation. But there it is. Its one of the joys of life to be with you and to talk. Murry is terribly tired. He goes back on Tuesday. Its difficult. Its the morning after an earthquake.1 One has to go warily – one does not know what is not going to shake. Your understanding of Murry is of course, simply too amazing. It is your great gift – this ‘finding’ the secret of another’s being. My love to you both Katherine. Note 1. The Menton–Nice–Monte Carlo area is on a geological faultline and seismic tremors are frequent, although usually on a relatively undramatic scale. No mention of earthquakes or damage from seismic movement has been traced in the local press over the course of the week, which lends weight to the idea that these were, indeed, unexceptional tremors. A sense of the potential danger of earthquakes was keen among the local population at the time: many of the old houses of Menton had been seriously damaged in a more dramatic earthquake on 23 February 1887.

[mid-February 1921] [BL] VILLA ISOLA BELLA GARAVAN MENTON A/M. Dear Sydney – dear friend, Let me add one word to our all too brief conversation this afternoon. Alas! what a plague is Time. No sooner has one begun to appreciate what the other is seeing than – its as though, at a turn of the planet – he is whirled away. And just supposing that by some heavenly chance there was Immortality the question of the Artist and his Time – won’t be so pressing, so vital, so infinitely important as it is now . . . It is, I am sure, the Question of Questions. The artist who denies his Time, who turns away from it even as much as the fraction of a hair is false. First, he must be free; that is, he must be controlled by none other than his deepest self – his truest self. And then he must accept Life, he must submit – give himself so utterly to Life that no personal quâ personal self remains. Does that convey anything? Its so hard to state. ‘Bitterness’ is a difficult word for me to disentangle from a sense of personal wrong – a ‘this is what Life has done to me’. But I know you don’t mean that. You mean a bigger thing – the gesture with which



sydney schiff  575

one turns aside today from what might have been – what ought to have been. There is humour in it, of a kind, and inevitable sadness . . . But let me confess, Sydney, I feel something else as well – and that is Love. But thats so difficult to explain. Its not pity or rainbows or anything up in the air – Perhaps its feeling feeling – feeling* Goodbye. Heres my hand in devoted friendship to you and to Violet – May we meet again soon! Katherine. * Original underlined three times for emphasis.

[18 April 1921] [BL] Isola Bella Garavan – Menton Dear Sydney I was more sorry than I can say not to have been able to come on Thursday. Fate is against me in these matters – I wish I knew why. But we shall meet again? Yes, I am sure we shall. My plans, however seem more & more vague. The Swiss doctor maintains his silence,1 & I continue to receive letters for & against his treatment. Jones is going to Switzerland this week – to a little place called Baugy – above Montreux & on to Chateau d’eux2 to ‘spy out the land’. I am simply staggered there’s no other word for it – by your analysis – heaven knows its infinitely more – of Sullivan.3 Perfect! From the first word (oh, how subtle that is!) to the last. And that ‘he has less imagination than he thinks’ – that ‘his future lies in the development of his powers of application’. My dear Sydney. That is divination indeed. I am fond of Sullivan – and I am his friend – but with reservations . . . His lack of what we mean by sensitiveness is hard to bear, so too is his lack of self discipline. I mean that in every sense. I think it is still a toss-up whether he finds his true approach or whether he fritters his Life away. He wants to live somewhere near me for the next few years &, privately, I shrink from the idea. But hes a vague creature. Perhaps Ill never see him again. At the moment this thought is pleasing. How hateful I am! My excuse is he has been staying here – here all day long until 10 o’clock at night – and Sydney – one is so infernally watchful. His habit of going into the dining room, taking an orange, bringing it to the salon, tossing the peel into the fireplace. Oh! Oh! But thats only one ‘obvious’ small horror . . . I want to live among mountains and hide from nearly all mankind – not all – thank God. I shall long to hear how you and Violet fare. This country has been really horrible these last few days. A woman came to tea yesterday & spoke of Switzerland in the spring as though it were a paradise. And outside the window the heavy sky and grey old palm mocked us – I fancy Germany might be the place to live in – No, perhaps not – But its

576   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 wretched to be a wanderer with all this work which waits for a peaceful room – We have not seen the Mercury for April. I shall write for a copy. My long story ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ – comes out next month.4 I hope you will care for it. It means more to me than any other. I wish I could think your next novel would soon be written. One needs it. The two young men were very happy on Thursday – Murry said he was dull but Sullivan was a success. I wonder – M. and I are happy just now. He is quite different after we have been alone together for a time – I hope big, fair Marie Dahlerup5 will not bore you – I have not seen her since . . . I was 16. From her letters she is a dear creature. May you both be happy, dear Sydney. I shall think of you constantly. I press your hand.                  With love from                       Katherine. Notes 1. KM was hoping to contact Henri Spahlinger (1882–1965), a former lawyer who had subsequently trained as a bacteriologist and founded the Genevabased Bacterio-Therapeutic Institute in 1911, specialising in vaccination research. In the immediate pre-war years he gained the backing of a number of respected doctors and clinics in Britain, including Dr Leonard Williams at the French Hospital (‘La Providence’) in Hackney, London, and Dr A. Croucher at the City of London Hospital for Chest Diseases. However, his methods were viewed with scepticism in Switzerland; the one exception was the Montana sanatorium for English patients run by Dr Théodore Stephani. After apparent successes with Spahlinger’s sera, a public campaign in Britain in the years 1918–20 sought ministerial backing to further Spahlinger’s research, and it was doubtless this publicisation that attracted KM’s attention. There were heated debates, reported in the press, in the years 1921–3 between, on the one hand, the Ministry of Health, recommending delays and better trials, and on the other, Spahlinger’s sponsors, public opinion and the British Red Cross. 2. KM’s spelling transcribes the pronunciation of the name of the Swiss town Château-d’Œx, which had been noted in the late war years for its hospitals for prisoners of war and soldiers. 3. Sullivan had been spending his time with KM and JMM while looking for accommodation nearby. His intellectual interests and publications were then increasingly focused on contemporary science research, which his more aesthetically inclined friends found less enticing. 4. See the London Mercury, May 1921, and CW2, pp. 266–83. 5. Marie Dahlerup was a Danish schoolfriend of KM’s from her time at Queen’s College in Harley Street, London, but little further information has been traced about her. She and KM came back into contact some time during 1919, when KM was living in Hampstead with JMM, by which time she would appear to have settled in Geneva.



sydney schiff  577

[3 December 1921] [BL]

3 xii 1921.

Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre Valais

Dear dear Sydney I do beg you to send me a copy of Eleanor Colhouse as soon as possible.1 You do understand how I want one? Pity me! Feel for me up here in these heaven-kissing mountains. One thing I promise you; you will not have a more ardent reader – no, not one. I wish there were some other means of communication except this cursed one of letters. It is not enough. I want to be with you – to listen, talk, look, observe, absorb, remember, rejoice in. It is so awfully nice to laugh at the same things – and then your voice – Violet’s voice – her smile, your way of sitting on the arm of a chair, a black tie that Violet wears sometimes (very important) the lunch table at Big Tree Villa – your cigarettes. But so one could go on for ever, and its all a kind of code, immensely boundlessly significant for those who understand it. I miss you. And the worst of it is I feel you are not coming to Switzerland – that for the time at least Switzerland is over. I am still here to all appearance. But the ‘essential moi’2 as Daudet3 would say is in Paris sitting in a small darkish room opposite a man called Manoukhine. Whether I shall follow this one I don’t know yet. When does one really begin a journey – or a friendship – or a love affair – It is those beginnings which are so fascinating and so misunderstood. There comes a moment when we realise we are already well on our way – dèja.4 I wish you had JM’s real article on Proust.5 It seems to me not only by far the best thing he has ever done – but really first-chop. We lived Proust, breathed him, talked and thought of little else for two weeks – two solid uninterrupted Swiss weeks. I confess I did not know how important he is until then – I did not feel his importance as I do now, and the marvel is that those books go on breathing after you have put them away; one is never at an end with them. But they spoil one – they spoil one fearfully for other things. I have begun a certain amount of novel reviewing again and Oh – the awful rubbish, the shameful stuff they send across! I read it; it seems too bad to blame even – and then I read the reviews and find Shaw Desmond is ‘capable of a masterpiece, and well on the way of writing one’.6 It is profoundly disquieting to be so out of tune with ones times. I mean that very seriously. The only way to bear the horrid truth is by writing oneself – going on . . . I dont intend to live in Switzerland. In spite of the beautiful aspects one cant tolerate the peasants. They are so ugly, such Boors, so heavy.

578   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Never have I imagined such ankles. It has been awfully a faint surprise to me the passion of men for ankles – their desire to kiss them . . and so on. But now! Oh Heavens! I could go down on my knees to a lovely pair. The ankles of my Ernestine are an anguish to me. They haunt me. Physical beauty – how I love it! How I hate grossness. Here is poor good Jones with her passion for buttoning the food into little tight suet jackets. Suet is an abomination! Let us drink champagne when we meet again. Where will that be when? That glimpse of London in your letters – just that lift of the curtain showing lights, big gay rooms, Dorothy Ireland’s mouth,7 the Ballet – a strain, heard from afar – and people round the table and the sound of the bell . . .You took me there for the moment and I turned away from my mountains. I see, from Eliots grave letter in The Lit. Sup. that he is in Lausanne.8 It seemed to me very fitting that Lausanne should be his address. What did you think of Lawrence in The Dial?9 This last month isn’t anything like so good; in fact when he gets on to the subject of maleness I lose all patience. What nonsense it all is – and he must know it is. His style changes; he can no longer write. He begs the question. I cant forgive him for that – its a sin. Santyana on Dickens was a revelation to me10 – of Santyana. It showed how little he is really attached to Life. He has the ideas of a child of ten. Its absurd to pretend at this time of day that we do not know more than children. Anatole France doesn’t tell half enough either in his Vie en Fleur11 – Oh, how I hate Pound – Ezra Pound.12 I always did and always shall – with his new ‘lumps’ or ‘chunks’ of Proust and all his Chinese tub thumping. He is a vulgar fellow. All the same I do think The Dial is by far the most interesting magazine going today. I must stop this letter. Theres my lunch – but no grilled haddock alas! In the afternoon here I go for long solitary drives. It is happiness. Sometimes I pass the lake and hail J.M. who turns glides, whirls on the ice like an alert and careless bird. But winter in the forests is very wonderful – the streams silent –        Farewell. I press your hand warmly. My       love to you both Ever & ever K.M. Notes  1. Schiff’s latest work, published in 1921 under the pseudonym Stephen Hudson, was both a self-contained novel and a sequel in a saga exploring the evolution of his protagonist, Richard Kurt, from a non-linear perspective. KM had reviewed the first volume in 1919 (see CW3, pp. 526–9). For a more detailed response to the novel, see the letter draft below, p. 580.



sydney schiff  579

 2. (Fr.): The essential ‘I’.  3. Schiff and KM’s exchange reflects recent discussions in France between the royalist, antisemitic writer and journalist Léon Daudet (1867–1942, son of the writer Alphonse Daudet), and Marcel Proust, who were close friends despite the glaring differences between them. Their dialogue would have significant repercussions in the evolution and conceptualisation of the French psychological novel, bearing on the question of heredity, atavism, consciousness and selfhood. Part of Proust’s quest in the aesthetic project of the Recherche is to recover the ‘true “I”’ (le vrai moi); Daudet inclined to a slightly different perception of a true inner being, which he termed the ‘atemporal self’ (le soi intemporel).  4. (Fr.): Already.  5. As the reference implies, KM’s immersion in Proust was both feeding into, and drawing from, Schiff and JMM’s own approaches to the pre-eminent French Modernist writer. For JMM’s review of volumes 3 and 4 of A la recherche du temps perdu and his discussion of Proust’s notions of self, the individual and the ego, see ‘Marcel Proust’, Nation and Athenaeum, 12 November 1921, pp. 255–6.  6. Shaw Desmond (1877–1960) was an Irish writer, actor, poet and novelist, who also founded the International Institute for Psychical Research.  7. Dorothy Ireland was the adopted daughter of Viscountess Rothermere, who contributed much of the money needed for Gurdjieff to purchase the Prieuré at Avon in 1922. Ironically, KM met Dorothy when she herself entered Gurdjieff’s Institute in the autumn of 1922. See Taylor, pp. 156–7.  8. T. S. Eliot’s letter to the editor, published in the Correspondence section, was signed from Lausanne. His letter asks specifically to be made public the fact that he had not been consulted about the inclusion of some of his poems in Modern American Poetry, an anthology he would have refused to feature in, had his approval been sought. See ‘Poets and Anthologies’, TLS, 24 November 1921, p. 771.  9. The first half of DHL’s essay ‘Sea and Sardinia’, a curious mixture of social observation and impressionistic travel writing, was published in the Dial, November 1921, pp. 443–51. At various points, the onlooker’s gaze alights on striking-looking travellers and locals, and interprets, via a personal grid of racial typologies and physical attributes, the lives and characters of the southern Italians, Sicilians and Sardinians. 10. See ‘Dickens’, by George Santayana, also in the November issue of the Dial, pp. 537–49, an essay analysing, point by point, what Santayana believes to be the essential flaws and merits of Dickens’s poetics and worldview. 11. The leading article of the October 1921 issue of the Dial was ‘La Vie en fleur’, pp. 379–98, an essay in the form of a prefatory address to readers by Anatole France (1884–1924), the eminent French historian, biographer, essayist, poet and novelist, then considered one of the most distinguished men of letters of his era. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1921; although the honour was not announced until 10 November 1921, he was considered the most likely nominee, which may explain his being given pride of place in the review. ‘La Vie en fleur’ is one in his series of barely veiled self-fictionalising memoirs, reconstructing memorable scenes from childhood and young adulthood, presented as ‘trifles coming from an honest heart [to] give pleasure’.

580   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 12. Also in the October issue of the Dial was ‘Paris Letter’ by the hugely influential and polemical American Modernist critic and poet Ezra Pound (1885– 1972), pp. 456–63, which included some scattered thoughts and assessments of Proust’s ongoing epic novel A la recherche du temps perdu, often read in parallel with a number of English authors of multi-volume works. Pound notably observes that ‘There is work for a major stylist in turning Proust into English, a subtle uncreative temperament might make a career of this translation. We are perhaps less receptive than the French, and less modest’ (p. 461). The passage KM highlights affirms, ‘The new Proust, or the new lump of Proust, being the tail end of one book, and the beginning of another, is good, that is by the supreme test: one picks it up intending to read only enough to do a book-review and one continues the perusal for one’s pleasure’ (p. 458). Her mention of his ‘chinese tub thumping’ alludes to Pound’s current fascination with classical Chinese poetry, poetics and ideograms.

[8 December 1921] [Letters 1928, 2, pp. 161–2] [Chalet des Sapins, Montana-sur-Sierre] December 8, 1921 I have read your Elinor Colhouse more than twice, and I shall read it again. I do congratulate you sincerely from my heart. It’s amazingly good! So good one simply can’t imagine it better. One pushes into deep water easily, beautifully, from the first sentence, and there’s that feeling – so rare – of ease, of safety, of wishing only to be borne along wherever the author chooses to take one. But how you have conveyed the contrast between Elinor and Richard! Am I fantastic in dating it from the moment when Richard leaves her after their first meeting, when he opens the door on to the brilliant light one feels the appeal of his fairness and her darkness in an astonishing way. That moment remains with me throughout the book. Let me dare to say it’s almost a mystical interpretation of their relations. Why aren’t you here – that we might talk it over and over. I’d like to recall so much – scene after scene rises in my mind. But although it is Elinor’s book and a triumph for Elinor it’s your presentation of Richard which I admire so tremendously. I don’t mean only his boyish charm – though Heaven knows that is potent enough – or even his naturalness – which at times takes my breath away. But it’s Richard’s innocence of the wiles and arts of Life! It’s the sight of him, in the midst of all that scheming and plotting and his horror, finally, that this should happen to him. . . . Of course, all the detail, so fastidious, so satisfying, is beyond praise. Elinor lives. I see her, hear her, recognise those fingers with the long pointed brilliant nails, look into that little brain. Yes, I honour you for it. It’s an achievement. I rejoice in your success.



sydney schiff  581

[25 December 1921] [BL]

25 xii 1921

Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre Valais

Sydney This is just a note – not a letter. My letters to you – the ones that remain unwritten would fill volumes. But I feel you know that. I want to tell you something. It is important. It is about your letter to Murry. I don’t, personally, believe in chance. God knows I dont see the plan; I dont see what the ‘authors’ are driving at. But it does seem to me always more and more positive that a design there is. And there is a moment which is the perfect moment. But so often, until it has passed by we dont see it. We only see what we have missed. All is in retrospect. What this all leads up to is one of those moments marvellously realised, marvellously fulfilled was when you wrote to Murry. He needed your letter and you gave it to him. You know how Murry craves friends. But the men whom he knows are too – – – frightened . . . to ever show him more than a kind of head sympathy, which is very little use to him at all. But that precious sense of security that real friendship gives he has asked for in vain until unasked, you gave it him. I believe that you and I think alike about Murry, deep down, deep down. He was in a mood of awful depression just then. I could not help him. He wanted someone who was not KM . . . And I am sure men need men in a way few women understand . . . Well, the simple truth is Sydney, that your comprehension and your generosity are beautiful. One loves you for your gifts. I have chosen today to write because Manoukhine has come a great deal nearer. He has told me that if I go to Paris he will treat me by his new method and there is the word guerison1 shining in his letter. I believe every word of it; I believe in him implicitly. As soon as I am out of bed (the cold has been too cold) Jones will pack the boxes and I shall go to see him and arrange to return to him in May. I want to spend the winter here. But in May I shall go to Paris for the course of treatment which takes 15 weeks. (Manoukhine is not only a doctor. He is a whole new stage on the journey. I hardly know why.) His treatment consists of applications of the Rayons X.2 One word I must say about Joyce. Having re-read the Portrait it seems to me on the whole awfully good. We are going to buy ‘Ulysses’.3 But Joyce is (if only Pound didn’t think so, too) immensely important. Some time ago I found something so repellant in his work that it was difficult to read it4 – It shocks me to come upon words, expressions and

582   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 so on that Id shrink from in life. But now it seems to me the new novel, the seeking after Truth is so by far and away the most important thing that one must conquer all minor aversions. They are unworthy. Christmas – in cold blood – is not an attractive fête. And the English papers bulging with turkeys are disgusting. Its an awful offence to our intelligence to be served with these pages and pages about Father Christmas and ‘Pulling a Cracker with my Kind Daddy’. Dear Jones, of course, revels in it all. The whole house rustles with tissue paper. As to the gentle Ernestine she is quite overcome and there sounds a kind of elephantine gambolling from the kitchen. But I do wish you and dearest Violet a Happy New Year. That is different. With love from us both      Ever        K.M. Forgive this disjointed letter. It is written in bed – prone. Notes 1. (Fr.): Recovery. 2. (Fr.): X-rays. 3. It is not clear whether KM read James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, his self-fictionalising Bildungsroman, immediately upon publication in 1916 or not. In late 1921 the literary world in London and Paris was abuzz with curiosity about the forthcoming Ulysses, sections of which circulated before it was published in Paris in 1922. 4. For KM’s former, now revised, opinion of Joyce’s work, see above, pp. 273, 306–7.

[31 December 1921] [BL] [Chalet des Sapins, Montana-sur-Sierre] The same evening. My dear Sydney I answer your letter, as you suggest, immediately. Yes, I used the word friendship too lightly. I hang my head. It was badly done and you were right to rebuke me. I do understand. I wince, yes I confess its painful to me to read what you write at the bottom of the second page ‘I have not got any friends at all’, and the sentences that follow. At the same time I value the remark immensely. There is a deep separateness in me which responds to it, even though I am for ever without a complete complement – But its a strange truth that the fact of you and Violet is not only a joy; its an extraordinary consolation to believe in you and in her as one does. (Violet dearest, speak to me just one moment, will



sydney schiff  583

you? I feel sometimes diffident of speaking to you directly – I feel there are so many others near you who claim your attention. I count on Sydney telling you whatever there is to tell. No, the truth is nearer. I write to you and to him. But you know that.) I agree absolutely – with what you say when you define the forces that go to make friendship and the part played by knowledge. The more one thinks of the image of knowledge as clothing the more valuable it becomes. It is one of the images that delight the mind so much that almost apart from one’s self one’s mind goes on receiving it, turning it to the light, trying it, experimenting with it. Or that is what my mind has been doing . . . proving the truth of it mathematically speaking. I should like to have friends, I confess. I do not suppose I ever shall. But there have been moments when I have realised what friendship might be. Rare moments – but never forgotten. I remember once talking it over with Lawrence and he said, ‘We must swear a solemn pact of friendship – Friendship is as binding, as solemn as marriage. We take each other for life, through everything – for ever. But its not enough to say we will do it. We must swear’.1 At the time I was impatient with him. I thought it extravagant – fanatic. But when one considers what this world is like I understand perfectly why L. (especially being L.) made such claims . . . I think, myself, it is Pride which makes friendship most difficult. To submit, to bow down to the other is not easy, but it must be done if one is to really understand the being of the other. Friendship isn’t merging. One doesn’t thereupon become a shadow & one remain a substance. Yes, it is terribly solemn – frightening, even. Please do not think I am all for Joyce. I am not. In the past I was unfair to him and to atone for my stupidity I want to be fairer now than I really feel. . . . I agree that it is not all art. I would go further. Little, to me, is art at all. Its a kind of stage on the way to being art. But the act of projection has not been made. Joyce remains entangled in it, in a bad sense, except at rare moments. There is, to me, the great distinction between him and Proust. (Take Swann with Odette for instance.)2 or take Richard in Elinor Colhouse . . .3 Jones is waiting for this letter. I want it to catch the post. I have only begun to say what I want to say. About Paris. I cannot go just at present. Im still in bed & likely to remain there for a time. Congestion is slow affair, especially at this height. The doctor, like all doctors, is a complete fool. I shall try & put off Paris until May – To meet there in May & to stay there (J. & I will be there four months) would be nothing short of wonderful. I hardly dare think of it. Now I know Manoukhin is there I can bear to wait – I think I shall try. Hotels & journeys are a dread prospect in any weather – in this – even more – Forgive this haste and inadequacy – Read much more in my letter than is there – dear Sydney. With my warm love to you both Katherine.

584   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Notes 1. KM and JMM’s complex friendship with DHL was at its most emotionally charged peak during the years 1914–17. 2. The story of Charles Swann’s love affair with the beautiful Parisian courtesan and his future wife, Odette de Crécy, constitutes the main narrative thread of the first volume of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. Swann is the neighbour of the novel’s narrator and focal character, Marcel, in the village of Combray. 3. See above, p. 580.

[12 January 1922] [BL] Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre Valais Thursday. My dear Sydney I am deeply grateful to you for everything in your last letter. Your criticism of my work is most precious to me; there is no other word near enough to describe the feeling – Your understanding, so true and so sympathetic is an encouragement in itself. It would be grief to me to displease you. I hope one day I shall write a book which I may wholeheartedly give to you and Violet – on the title page – But it will be the book after my next – a novel – I look forward most eagerly to your story. I suddenly put my long story aside and wrote a short one1 this week which I am tempted to send you. But perhaps it is not worth sending. I think I do know what you mean by ‘friendship’. It is strange I always silently acknowledge the fact that you have one friend. Its as though you carry him with you, within your breast. I think I never see you without being reminded immediately of that other, even though no word has been spoken. This seems to me inevitable. It is more and more difficult to me to write letters. Once I begin there is so much to say that no letter could contain it. I want to answer, too, not only your letter to me but yours to Jack as well. I am very glad he sent you the proofs of his article;2 I wanted you to see it. I feel you would be in agreement with much he has said. About Joyce, and my endeavours to be doubly fair to him because I have been perhaps unfair and captious – oh, I cant get over a great great deal. I cant get over the feeling of wet linoleum and unemptied pails and far worse horrors in the house of his mind – Hes so terribly unfein;3 thats what it amounts to. There is a tremendously strong impulse in



sydney schiff  585

me to beg him not to shock me! Well, its not very rare. Ive had it before with men and women many times in my life. One can stand much but that kind of shock which is the result of vulgarity & commonness, one is frightened of receiving. Its as though ones mind goes on quivering afterwards . . . Its just exactly the reverse of the exquisite rapture one feels in for instance that passage which ends a chapter where Proust describes the flowering apple trees in the spring rain.4 But at the memory of that I suddenly long to take your hand and say: ‘how marvellous Life can be. How marvellous!’ Ah, Sydney, how can I be thankful enough that Violet and you are on the earth at this time . . . that we have met & shall meet again. Do you remember one afternoon as we were in the car together you said you would like to go to Sweden? Why on earth should that have been so tremendously important – so infinitely delightful. It often comes back to me and always with the same ‘atmosphere’ of happiness and understanding between us. But one could go on with such memories – – – Elizabeth has returned to her chalet.5 In minute black breeches and gaiters she looks like an infant bishop. When she has talked about London and the literary ‘successes’ I am thankful to be out of it. I dont want to hear what Hugh Walpole thinks of Clemence Dane.6 But Elizabeth ‘fascinates’ me, and I admire her for working as she is working now, all alone in her big chalet. She is courageous, very. And for some reason the mechanism of Life hardly seems to touch her. She refuses to be ruffled and she is not ruffled. This is incomprehensible to me. I find it devilish, devilish, devilish. Doors that bang, voices raised, smells of cooking, even steps on the stairs are nothing short of anguish to me at times. There is an inner calm necessary to writing, a sense of equilibrium which is impossible to reach if it hasn’t its outward semblance. But I dont know. Perhaps I am asking for what cannot be. I must end this letter. The sun has been out today and yesterday, and although there is about seven feet of snow and great icicles hang from the window frames it is warm, still, delicious. I got up today and I feel I never want to go to bed again. This air, this radiance gives one a faint idea of what spring must be here – early spring. They say that by April the snows have melted and even before all is quite gone the flowers begin . . .        With warm love to you both –           I press your hands              Katherine. Notes 1. KM had broken off her work on ‘The Doves’ Nest’ (CW2, pp. 448–61) to write ‘A Cup of Tea’ (CW2, pp. 461–7). For her notes about its composition, see CW4, pp. 397–403. 2. See JMM’s ‘Gustave Flaubert’, the leading article in the Dial, December 1921, pp. 625–36, later published in his Countries of the Mind, pp. 210–20.

586   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 3. (Ger.): Uncouth. 4. KM alludes to the closing passage of Chapter 1, in the volume Sodome et Gomorrhe (1919), when Marcel walks home along a lane he had formerly taken regularly in autumn with his grandmother, by a meadow of apple trees; he rediscovers it, in a different season, transfigured by apple blossom and radiant luminosity after a spring shower. 5. Von Arnim’s ‘Chalet Soleil’ in Randogne was, in fact, a vast Alpine villa of her own design. 6. As mentioned above, Walpole was one of von Arnim’s regular summer guests in Randogne. Clemence Dane (1888–1965), the pseudonym of Winifred Ashton, was a prolific journalist, novelist and playwright, as well as an accomplished sculptress and painter; she was keenly attentive in all her works to the social and economic condition of women. Two of her plays had been staged in London the previous year: A Bill of Divorcement and Will Shakespeare (which KM evoked with her cousin Elizabeth; see CL1, pp. 41–2). In 1930, von Arnim published a critical assessment of her friend and occasional coauthor Hugh Walpole: Tradition and Hugh Walpole. See also KM’s 1919 review of her novel Legend, CW3, pp. 540–4.

[28 August 1922] [BL]

Monday

6 Pond Street Hampstead NW3

My dear Sydney, Your letter made me feel angry with myself & very ungracious at having refused your so kind invitation. Please forgive me! I look forward more than I can say to seeing you and Violet in London. By the time you come I hope to be settled in my new rooms (they are at this address) I already dream of no end of a talk before my fire. I shall never be able to say a word to the intelligentsia, Sydney. They are too lofty, too far removed. No, that is unfair. Its simply that they are not in the least interested. Nor do they appear to know what one is driving at when one groans at the present state of English writing. As I see it the whole stream of English literature is trickling out in little innumerable marsh trickles. There is no gathering together, no force, no impetus, absolutely no passion! Why this is I don’t know. But one feels a deathly cautiousness in everyone – a determination not to be caught out. Who wants to catch them out or give them away? I can’t for the life of me see the need of this acute suspicion and narrowness. Perhaps the only thing to do is to ignore it all and go on with one’s own job. But I confess that seems to me a poor conclusion to come to. If I, as a member of the orchestra think I am playing right, try my utmost to play right, I don’t want to go on in the teeth of so many others – not playing at all or playing as I believe falsely. It is a problem. Let us talk it all over.



sydney schiff  587

About Lawrence. Yes, I agree there is much triviality, much that is neither here nor there. And a great waste of energy that ought to be well spent. But I did feel there was growth in Aaron’s Rod1 – there was no desire to please or placate the public, I did feel that Lorenzo was profoundly moved. Because of this perhaps I forgive him too much his faults. Its vile weather here – a real fog. I am alone in the *house – 10.30 p.m. Murry & Brett are both at parties. Footsteps pass and repass – That is a marvellous sound – and the low voices – talking on – dying away. It takes me back years – to the agony of waiting for one’s love – – – I am lunching with Orage on Wednesday. What happiness! Goodnight dear friend. I press your hand. Katherine. * The rest of the letter is written sideways across the left-hand margin. Note 1. DHL’s novel Aaron’s Rod, first published that year, is an intense psychological novel with strong biblical and Dostoevskian leitmotifs. Construed as a form of ‘portrait of the artist’, it focuses on the coming-of-age upheavals of the fundamentally dissatisfied musician Aaron Sisson, who is increasingly drawn to an engagement in radical political action as a means to break a suffocatingly monotonous life.

Violet Schiff (1874–1962)

Introduction KM met Violet Schiff via her husband, Sydney (see Introduction above, p. 561), at their home in Roquebrune in the South of France in early April 1920. Within weeks, the trio was communicating nearly every day, and KM had written to JMM that ‘at present, I love Violet Schiff’ (11 April 1920). Born Violet Beddington, Violet Schiff was the youngest of a large, cultured and well-connected Jewish family. She could boast two luminaries among her ancestors – one is the seventeenth-century Portuguese–Spanish crypto-Jewish medical professor, Baltazar Orobio de Castro. After fleeing the Inquisition in Málaga, De Castro changed his given name to Isaac and established himself as a respected member of the Jewish community in Amsterdam; he is remembered for his theological debates with the likes of Spinoza and Locke. Violet’s maternal grandfather was Sir John Simon (1818–97), the second Jew to be admitted to the English Bar, in 1842, and the first to sit as a judge, from 1858. Simon was elected to Parliament in 1868, in which role he served for twenty years. He was known for his advocacy for oppressed Jews and was knighted in 1886. Her paternal grandfather, Henry Moses, was a successful wool merchant and property investor, who changed his name to Beddington after the town in Surrey. He was so successful that his son Samuel – Violet’s father – did not need to work for his livelihood, though he did also invest in real estate. In December 1861, Samuel married Zillah Simon, a talented pianist who filled their Hyde Park Square home with prominent musical figures of the day, generally setting an empty place at the dinner table in case a famous friend dropped in. Violet was the youngest of eight children, with two of her sisters keeping similarly illustrious company: Sybil was the intimate friend and sometime lover of Giacomo Puccini, while Ada wrote witty articles for Punch as well as six novels, and is remembered for her loyal friendship to Oscar Wilde, who nicknamed her ‘Sphinx’. It was Sybil who, via Sydney’s sister Edith, introduced Violet to her future husband at a performance of La

    588



violet schiff  589

Bohème in the summer of 1909, leading to their marriage two years later, shortly after his divorce was finalised. Together, Violet and Sydney forged a life in the midst of the Modernist art and literary worlds. After a honeymoon in Venice (during the cholera outbreak that inspired Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice), they established a home at Cambridge Square in London, at which Violet’s young cousin later remembered seeing a blue-period Picasso painting and meeting Aldous Huxley (see KM to JMM on going to see the Schiffs and ‘their Gauguins and their Picassos’, 7 April 1920).1 They met and counted as friends many central Modernist figures. Marinetti visited them in 1912 when in London for his infamous Futurist lecture tour. They met and became close friends with T. S. Eliot and his wife, Vivienne, in mid-1919, were long-term friends and patrons of Wyndham Lewis, and enjoyed a long correspondence and friendship with Marcel Proust (many years later, Violet wrote about their first meeting with the latter for London Magazine).2 Throughout their marriage, during which they were barely apart until Sydney’s death in 1944, Violet was Sydney’s most crucial source of encouragement for his writing, and acted as his editor and critic. Their biographer, Stephen Klaidman, notes that it is hard to know the extent of Violet’s contributions to her husband’s published works.3 Violet’s involvement in and insight on matters of literature are clear from the way in which KM frequently included Violet in the discussions of writing, creative work and literature that pepper her letters to both Schiffs during the years of their brief but intense friendship. In addition to these joint letters (discussed in more detail above), KM’s letters to Violet alone demonstrate a sympathetic feminine friendship: KM responds warmly to Violet’s compliments on her writing, asks a clothes shopping favour, and confides about her health, emotional states and intimate relationships. Violet and Sydney included KM in their stable of Modernist friends, introducing her to James Joyce and others, including hosting the fateful lunch with Wyndham Lewis that ended their friendship. Something of the complicated dynamics at play in their social circle is evidenced by Violet’s actions following Sydney’s introduction of Joyce and the Murrys: in April 1922, Violet forwarded to Lewis a letter in which KM expressed feeling out of her depth in discussing Ulysses with Joyce, with the comment that Joyce had himself told the Schiffs that KM understood the novel better than JMM. Yet Lewis was decidedly antipathetic to KM well before they met, at a lunch with the Schiffs on 17 September 1922. KM described this event in her journal as ‘odious’: it seems Lewis verbally attacked her and the Schiffs failed to intervene, which apparently led to the end of her friendship with Violet and Sydney. KM wrote that evening to Violet, in a letter that is now lost, expressing her distress at the experience; Violet promptly forwarded it to Lewis, who responded without any real hint of compunction.4 KM

590   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 wrote a brief note two days later, reassuring Violet that she held no ill will against them for the encounter, but that is her final existing letter to either of the Schiffs. Violet died in 1962 at the age of eighty-six. T. S. Eliot wrote her obituary for The Times, paying tribute to the warmth of her sympathy [. . .] which made one feel that she understood much more than had been, or could be, put into words: that she was aware of, and responded to, that which could not be spoken. In consequence of this sensitiveness she could regard people with a gentle, clear-sighted charity.5

This shared sensitivity, along with their deep mutual interest in modern art and letters, was surely the basis for the valued friendship shared by KM and Violet in the years when her illness was steadily advancing, at the same time as the Schiffs’ desire to be at the centre of that literary world perhaps led to the friendship’s unfortunate break in September 1922. Helen Rydstrand Notes 1. Klaidman, p. 44. 2. V. Schiff, pp. 20–22. 3. Klaidman. 4. Lewis to Schiffs, 7 September 1922. BL, SCHIFF PAPERS. Vol. IV (ff. 205). Add MS 52919: 1920–1957. 5. T. S. Eliot (1962), ‘Mrs. Violet Schiff’, Times, 55438 (9 July), p. 18.

[mid-April 1920] [BL] [Villa Flora, Menton] My dear Mrs Schiff I should love to come on Thursday if I may – The weather looks so unpromising in the morning but Ill come unless the wind is fierce on Thursday – with great pleasure – No I havent changed my tickets. Silly events of no importance – but disagreeable events make me want to leave the Villa Flora as soon as I can –       With love from             K.M. Is your cold better? Im sorry to hear of it.



violet schiff  591

[4 May 1920] [BL]

4 v 1920

2 Portland Villas East Heath Road Hampstead NW3.

Violet dear, If Camelia hasn’t closed her doors if you should happen to pass them would you order another silk jumper for me – a small size with long sleeves yellow or beige or something approaching the strawberry – I will pay you when we meet. But my green one and even my adorable shawl only make me long for more in this sober sober weather. I am going to hear the Spanish singer next week1 – When Murry speaks of her she sounds wonderful.2        Yours ever,            K.M. If this is the least trouble of course you will just ignore it. But it need not necessarily be Camelia – any shop that sells them will serve. Here is a female commission! I feel I should send you at the same time my pattern for a ‘body’ which hooks up from left to right & right to left.* * Below, KM has drawn a female torso wearing a puff-shouldered jacket with high collar and large buttons, gathered in tightly by a belt at the waist. Notes 1. KM had long been hoping to hear the hugely popular Spanish singer and actress Francesca Romana Marqués López (1888–1962), better known by stage name Raquel Meller (see above, p. 282, n. 3). She finally managed to see her in a staging of Joy Bells the following week at the Hippodrome. 2. See JMM’s effusive essay ‘Raquel Meller’, which featured as the lead article in the Athenaeum on 23 April 1920.

[21 May 1920] [BL] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] Violet, my dear woman, Your letter makes me happy; it has your fragrance about it – I read and see – and my heart is warm. Do you know, tho’ – a thousand

592   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 devils are sending Elizabeth without her German Garden1 to tea here tomorrow – her last time before she goes abroad into her Swiss chalet. I expect she will stay, at longest half an hour – She will be Oh, such a little bundle of artificialities – but I cant put her off. I want both of you – I dont want – I hate to give you up. Will you come & stay after she has gone? Stay as long as you like? Come when you like. But if you feel you could not bear her – there is the Flower Show –2 You were going there – weren’t you? If you are inclined – come any time. If not I shall understand absolutely. Im ‘free’ on Wednesday & on Thursday – at any hour – I rejoice to think of you. Be happy – Youre so beautiful – Murry is out. He shall phone you tomorrow. I think he will love to come. I want him to very much.       My love – In haste           K.M. Notes 1. Elizabeth von Arnim’s self-fictionalising novel Elizabeth and her German Garden (1898) had launched her very successful writing career, and to a great extent defined her literary and social persona thereafter: the dividing line between author and fictional protagonist would always be wavy and porous in the eyes of the reading public, the critics and perhaps even the biographical subject herself. 2. The Royal Horticultural Society’s annual Chelsea Flower Show, held in the grounds of the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, opened on 20 May.

[28 June 1920] [BL] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] Will you give this little photograph to Stephen Hudson? Monday Violet dear, I must reply to your card. I would love to lunch with you this week but my only free day is your engaged day: that is Wednesday. Today & tomorrow I am buried alive under the Athenaeum: on Thursday I must attend the first of the lunches1 & we are going away for a weekend on Friday afternoon. This is perfectly devilish. Wednesday Im free all day – but its just Wednesday that won’t do. You would not care to come & see us on Thursday evening? Its so far for you to come – I feel that – – while I propose it. Otherwise – might I come to lunch with you tomorrow (Tuesday) week? That is years away.



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I do hope you will be able to come to the lunches – both of you. I wish you could have been there for the first: it might have been rather fun. Please don’t think about my health. Folkestone or Margate2 (dread places!) wouldn’t give it me back again – No, I shall go away in September – somewhere. I don’t know where – preferably – and here one wants to throw down ones pen (no, to lay it down, carefully & gently) and to dream of some place where nobody says: ‘But, one moment, if you have fish for lunch you won’t want it for dinner will you and I had thought of it for breakfast tomorrow. . . . I’m not interrupting seriously. You’ve not really started work yet, have you?’ Violet: ‘You know I think K.M. is rather ungrateful & exasperating’. Oh, don’t think that. Its only impatience. There is so much to write & there is so little time. Your loving                 K.M. Notes 1. The first of the Athenaeum’s literary lunches took place on 1 July, an event whose intellectual and social distinction Virginia Woolf assessed rather scathingly, yet self-consciously, within the intimacy of her diary (DVW2, p. 52): a little dingy & professional, a glimpse into the scullery where the Sullivans & Pounds & Murrys & Huxleys stand stripped with their arms in wash tubs. I see the obvious retort; yet I can’t rid myself of the feeling that if Lytton, Roger, Desmond, Morgan, Nessa, & Duncan had been there the atmosphere would have been less of the area steps & more of the open air. 2. Folkestone and Margate, both coastal towns in Kent in south-eastern England, were then fashionable and popular seaside resorts, easily accessible from London.

[16 July 1920] [BL] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] Friday. I was on the point of writing to you about tomorrow evening. Conrad Aitken1 cannot come. Instead, Max Bodenheim2 a new American just fresh from New York, having come over steerage with Minna3 his wife to ‘look around and see if he can start roots anyway . . . Say, Mrs Murry, Ive got the goods to hand over if youve got the window space for them’, will be here & Tom Moult and his Bessie.4 Tom Moult is the editor of Voices, a little, rather childish naive creature who writes poems and

594   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 has a novel just coming out & Bessie is a smaller quieter creature who is everything that is good and kind but will talk to me about Madame Montessori5 and persist in telling me its not so important to attract the childs attention as to guide it. This, because I am bad and wicked, bores me. I do not see why you should have to endure such people. If you did come we should be very happy – but I shrink from boring you – while I long to see you. We both enjoyed immensely our evening. The play began so splendidly and – even though it did not keep it up – I for my part was so happy to be there6 – – – – – – We discussed, all the way home, a new Athenaeum – the idea of throwing overboard all the learned societies and ancient men and reviews of Dull old Tomes, and opening the windows to the hurrying sounds outside, and throwing all the old gang into the river. . . After all – is it good enough to be half way between what we really want to do and what we don’t care a pin for. What will the Bishops & the Antiquarians say to the short stories? And just supposing we really told the truth about everything – confidently. The car rushed through St Johns Wood and we decided to do it, but not to use violence – I wonder if it is possible . . . I wish you could see my roses. They are so exquisite that yesterday I made Jones photograph them so that I should be able to show you how they looked – Oh, the devastating cold. I cannot keep warm & all day long people walk up and down the stairs & just don’t knock at my door – Do you ever want to hide, Violet, to be completely hidden so that nobody knows where you are. Sometimes one has a dreadful feeling of exposure – its intolerable. I mustn’t say these things. With love to you both: I think of you constantly                     K.M. Notes 1. The American poet, critic and fiction writer Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) had been invited by JMM to contribute a regular column in the Athenaeum to be entitled ‘Letters from America’. The agreement was very much a pact between counterpacts: Aiken was then a contributing editor on the Dial, while JMM was editor of the Athenaeum. 2. The American poet and novelist Max Bodenheim (1892–1954) was then emerging as one of the cult rebel poets in Chicago; this bohemian image was sealed when he moved to New York’s Greenwich Village later in the 1920s. 3. Minna Schein (1899–1958) was a writer’s secretary working in New York when she first met Max Bodenheim in 1918; they were married the same year. In the words of his first biographer, she was ‘a bright, small, pretty girl with lovely eyes and a fine mind, attracted to Bodenheim’s literary talents but not worshipful of it [. . .] vital enough to match Max’s energy – if not his wildness’ (pp. 26–7). When she came to London she had been working as secretary for the International Workers of the World. She dedicated much of her



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later life to supporting the career and excesses of her husband; she divorced him in 1938 but outlived him. 4. As KM indicates, the English poet and writer Thomas Moult (1885–1974) was the founding editor of the little magazine Voices; his wife Bessie was from Elizabethgrad in Russia’s Pale of Settlement (now in Ukraine), a city her family had fled during the harsh famine of 1901, fearing the hardship would unleash another wave of pogroms – fears that proved all too founded. For a fuller biographical note and their correspondence, see below, pp. 311–14. 5. The pioneering teaching methods and philosophy of the Italian physician and educationalist Maria Montessori (1870–1952) were then being avidly discussed in intellectual and psychoanalytical circles. Her Handbook and teaching manuals were circulating widely in English translation, often complementing contemporary interest in child psychology, alternative lifestyles and the unshackled imagination. 6. They attended a performance of John Galsworthy’s The Skin Game, which had premiered that year at St Martin’s Theatre. See BL-Add-MS-52919.

[July–August 1920] [BL] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] Violet dear, Forgive me for not answering before. I had asked some people for next Sunday: I was hoping they would refuse. But no, this morning they will be ‘so pleased’ to come. So Murry and I regretfully cannot. I do want to see you both soon – and really talk. It seems – I suppose it isn’t, really – so long since we have had time to talk. What I always want to do with you both – is to share the event and then to share the impressions of it – the ‘afterwards’. If only there were more time but it seems to go faster and faster. One is so conscious of it sometimes – I feel as though we were trying to talk against the noise and the speed of the train – trying to hear each other – trying to convey by a look, by a gesture, what we long to talk about for hours – days – What a story one could write about a train journey – not a trip to X – with the Times on ones lap ‘in a crisp square’ but a real journey across strange country – A ‘party’ of people with the carriage to themselves, travelling together – and two of them who have something they must say to each other – Can you imagine it? The impatience, the excitement – the extraordinary nearness of them all to one another – the meals in the restaurant car ‘the new warm plates seemed to come flying through the air’ – & then preparing for the night – those who do sleep – those who don’t – My God! theres such a novel to be written there – will there be time to write it? Yours ever with love K.M.

596   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [7 August 1920] [BL] 2 Portland Villas East Heath Road Hampstead NW3. 7 viii 1920 My dear Violet I would have written before but Ive not been well. The weather has been so terrible. On the day we should have come to Hampden Park I felt I couldn’t face an hotel especially as Jones was not to have come, too. So we are both staying here instead. Murry spends his time playing tennis, playing ‘games’ and I spend mine – in my room. Im simply longing to go away and write. The only reason I mind leaving London is that I shall miss you and Sydney. But – there it is. And you understand. Heavens! How dear you both are to me – Don’t forget our last afternoon together – With my love Yours ever Katherine.

[9 August 1920] [BL] 2 Portland Villas East Heath Road Hampstead N.W.3. Monday. I am writing to say that to our great disappointment we shall not be able to come on Wednesday. It is my fault. I am in bed with a very loudbeating and hateful heart for company. And I can’t walk for the present. I must just keep still . . . Is there any way of removing the wrath of the Lord? It has pursued me for nearly three years – Oh, how I should love to have come! But you know, when I am better perhaps we can go out together again. I wonder what you felt about our talk here. It made Murry very happy – I wish you could know him better. Do not wait for me. Its so useless to ever count on me. At the last moment – I begin to cough and Ive no breath. But I do so immensely wish you could know him – or would ask him to come



violet schiff  597

& see you. Am I impertinent? Please forgive me if I am. I am writing in a little top room. The sun shines, faint, reluctant. But its pleasant here – so still – If only one can get ones stories written – if only one is allowed time enough! I hope you will be happy on Wednesday.      With love to you both         Yours ever            K.M.

[10 August 1920] [BL] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] My dear Violet, Yes, our letters crossed. It was a joy to hear from you and you are too generous in your criticism of my work for the paper. Nevertheless, its immensely stimulating to know that I give you pleasure – – I often say things expressly for you both – Im sure you know I do. This week I had happened to read a really typical article in an imbecile ‘womans paper’ and I threw my three silly novels away and wrote about it instead.1 I am afraid the greater number of readers will think I have gone mad. But oh, they are such dull dogs – sometimes and I am ill – I must be gay – My heart and my cough,2 my dear woman, won’t let me walk up and down stairs, even, at present. Im afraid I cannot come to you. You know how much I would like to. And Im not sure when I can get away to France; Im not ‘up’ to the journey – as they say, at present. It is very cursed; I try not to mind: I mind terribly – But forgive me. You have a right to be disgusted with me for being ill – I know – If I ever am well and strong again Ill try and make up for this unsatisfactory                      K.M. Notes 1. Given the distressing period of ill health she was grappling with, and its more ominous implications, the playful wit and pastiche of KM in this piece, written to dispel the pervading gloom, are all the more endearing. See her ‘A Holiday Novel’, purportedly a review of an unnamed novel (‘***’) by an unnamed novelist (‘***’) in the 13 August issue of the Athenaeum (p. 209), reprinted in CW3, pp. 644–6. 2. See KM’s diary entries in July and August, which add poignant depth and a far less confident tone to the narrative of her physical decline (CW4, pp. 314–20)

598   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [mid-August 1920] [BL] Tel 1277 Ham

2 Portland Villas East Heath Road Hampstead NW3.

My dearest Violet, Forgive my silence – I have been in bed ever since I last wrote to you and having an odious time. But today I am better and shall get up at the end of the week. Down in my writing room there is your last letter unanswered. I have kept thinking about it – thinking about you both, and seeing you out in this marvellous weather (at last) Is Sydney writing? I simply long to know. Hail! my Brother-artist! And Violet, let me clasp you warmly one little moment . . . I shall not be able to leave London until I go away – That will be, I hope, the second week in September. May I know your plans? When do you return to London? I long to go, but I do want to you both first. . . . Lying here in my little top room at night I hear the trains go thrumming round the hollow world and the old longing comes back. Oh what is the use of a letter. I cant write letters – Let us sit together in some corner of a warm quiet café, let us talk endlessly. I could talk about Tolstoy for hours. I burn to talk about Tolstoy. And then – and then – and then – But – one thing. The story for the English Review – is it to be published?1 Today is my first day free from pain and just to be washed up – on the shore and allowed to think about this ‘writing’ is almost too much. I will write when I am, as they say, more sensible.         My love to you both                  Katherine. Note 1. Sydney Schiff had submitted a short story to the review but it was turned down. Founded by Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford) in 1908, the magazine was then under the editorship of the British writer Austin Harrison (1873–1928).

[18 August 1920] [BL] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] Dearest Violet, I shall be delighted to keep Tuesday afternoon free. Im much better. The ‘trouble’ has been Ive had an overdose of vaccine and it laid me low.1 Ten million – oh twenty million – hosts of streptococci attacked and fought one another – I have done with vaccine. . . . The English



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Review is become so degraded that one can expect nothing better of it. All the same it is disgusting; one longs to see such work in print. . . . . . Weren’t those Tchekhov sketches absolute parings.2 But M. was not responsible that time. It was the staff’s choice. My Catholic cousins3 (the Villa Flora ones) have bought a new huge villa in Garavan – the other bay. It has, at its gates, a dolls house with a verandah, garden, everything complete. And this I have taken from them. I shall be in touch with them, still, & they are getting me a maid and so on, but at the same time Im free – Can you imagine the delight of writing to the Villa Violet of telephoning to them (my Isola Bella has a telephone) and asking them if they will come over? Don’t you envy me? By the time you come my garden will be full of flowers – Heavens! What a joy that will be – And we shall ignore Time – trick the wretch just for a little –         Yours ever           Katherine. Notes 1. The Spanish flu pandemic had vastly increased and accelerated scientific research into vaccinations. If KM’s evocation of ‘hosts of streptococci’ is meant literally rather than metaphorically, she received a vaccine intended to prevent pneumonia and designed to match the distribution of the lunginfecting microbes; commercialised in 1919, it mixed strains of pneumococci, diplostreptococcus, streptococci and Bacillus influenzae (now referred to as Haemophilus influenzae). See Eyler, pp. 27–36. 2. The 13 August issue of the Athenaeum published ‘Two Sketches’ by Chekhov, ‘At the Cemetery’ and ‘At the Post Office’ (pp. 198–9), both atmospheric snapshots of village life. 3. KM frequently used this epithet for her cousin Constance Beauchamp and companion, Jinnie Fullerton.

[29 August 1920] [BL] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] Sunday Evening. Dearest Violet I look forward tremendously to seeing you on Tuesday week: it will be great happiness. But I do hope you are not coming up ‘specially’ as they say – I suppose you know – but can you really know – what delight it gives me to feel that you like my work a little. But never bother to acknowledge any – Im sending you one with this – just in case you feel inclined to read it. Its a perfect night – Ive spent the day preparing for flight – sorting papers, burning papers. Now there is nothing to do but

600   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 look at the moon – I wonder what you and S. are doing: I wish you were here or I there.           Yours with love                 Katherine. [30 August 1920] [BL] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] Dearest Violet, It is now decided that we leave on Thursday week. So that if you come on Wednesday it will do just as beautifully well as Tuesday. That ‘Pickle’ comes in my book;1 I wrote it in 1917. But there’s a much longer story to be written about those two – the man and woman – when they were together. S. made me feel in his letter how vital it was to have the full free courage of one’s ideas – Its time told, as Tolstoi says – ‘everything, everything’ –2 I look forward to seeing you both – immensely.     With love      Yours ever        KM. Notes 1. ‘A Dill Pickle’ was first published in the New Age in 1917, and then included in Bliss and Other Stories. See CW2, pp. 97–103. Alpers gives a background story for the fictional characters, affirming that it was autobiographical: a recollection of a short-lived love affair between KM and Francis Heinemann in 1910, Heinemann being the same ‘young man’ that Baker refers to with striking tenderness (Alpers 1980, pp. 62–3). Tomalin, however, insists that Heinemann himself ‘denied this categorically’ (p. 90). 2. An all-embracing apprehension of ‘everything, everything’ is intuited by three of the protagonists in War and Peace: Pierre, Andrey and Natasha. It is most likely the latter’s stream of consciousness and feeling that KM identified with and recalled, since her other reading notes and comments on the novel tend to revolve above all around the novel’s lovable, endearing female heroine. However, she could also be recalling the same idiomatic emphasis in ‘The Death of Ivan Illych’ and ‘Family Happiness’, works with which she was equally familiar. See for example, the exclamation of the husband in ‘Family Happiness’: ‘What do I imagine? [. . .] I imagine that I can’t live without you. In everything, everything, you’re not merely a help to me, but you do everything [. . .] I only live through you. It seems to me that all is well simply because you are here’ (Tolstoy 1904 [1867], p. 130). More indirectly, Koteliansky was also at the origin of her philosophical and poetic reception of Tolstoy: ‘In the hierarchy of creation’, he liked to say, ‘there is God Almighty and Leo Tolstoy’ (quoted by Diment 2011, p. 6).



violet schiff  601

[19 January 1921] [BL]

19 i 1921

VILLA ISOLA BELLA GARAVAN MENTON A/M.

My dear Violet This morning at about ten o’clock Murry arrived. My telegram saying I would send no more work had frightened him & he caught the next train. He felt there was ‘something up’ and that I must be ill. I had to let you know . . . I feel fearfully sorry for him – overwhelmingly so. I suppose my love is the desire to protect a person who is in such need of protection. I didn’t realise, myself, until this morning, the extent of his need. Its strange – so strange that I feel only now I ‘know’ of what human beings are capable – He is staying for a week, then returning for a week with Jones to look after things. Then he comes out here for good. Are you laughing at the idea of ‘accompanied by Jones’? Yesterday was one of those days that only come with Sydney and you. It goes on and on in ones mind. Take care of yourself, my dear. May we meet again soon! The very curtains in this house behave as though they were in the presence of a drama & even the fire looks artificial – But perhaps that sounds cynical and coldhearted. I don’t feel either. Far from it. But Violet I do feel blessed in having you two for my friends. Ever Katherine.

[late February 1921] [BL] VILLA ISOLA BELLA GARAVAN MENTON A/M. Dearest Violet, I was on the point of writing to you this morning when I received your dear letter. How can I say how sorry I am that you should be ill again. Of course I have known you were not at all yourself ever since you came here; your courage couldn’t disguise it. But my heart goes out to you; it is dreadful to be losing precious moments – I love you and

602   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Sydney deeply, warmly, and I always wish you happiness and freedom from all those things that interfere with your beautiful understanding of Life. It is very good news that you have discovered Doctor Bouchage.1 He is extremely intelligent and sympathetic – I mean in the ‘professional’ sense – Hes quite the most satisfactory doctor I have ever met, except my London one. How I should love a long talk with you. Plague take the ugly road that divides us ! . . Now I am coming through your gate & I see, in the garden, my two dear friends whose appearance apart from all else is always a delight – There is a very long book about you and Sydney – never to be written by me – but its one of those books a writer always has on hand for himself alone. Dont worry about my old cook, Violet dear. I shall keep this serpent until Murry goes to England in May. I suppose Ive as much peace with her as I should have with anybody – Thanks most awfully for suggesting the other, but to tell the truth, Im frightened of any change for the moment. Here’s Murry come for the Post. ‘Cant wait. You ought to be ready’. What does that mean? Goodbye for now. Its very queer to have a grown up son. But there’s no doubt Ive got one. Love and Blessings Katherine. Note 1. See above, p. 287, n. 1. Violet may have either consulted the doctor, or read one of his works intended for non-specialist readers. As well as being a pulmonary consultant, Ambroise Bouchage published widely on the benefits of mountain air and hydrotherapy for lung disease, arthritis, nervous conditions and digestive complaints. See, for example, his Les Indications médicales de Vernet-les-Bains, station thermale et climatérique (1914).

[late April 1921] [BL] Isola Bella Garavan-Menton. Dearest Violet, Goodbye for just now. Ive not seen half as much of you as I had hoped. But I shall still look forward. It is good to think you are better than when you came. I hope with all my heart that you will keep well. Murry begs me to send his greetings to you both. He will be in London in the second week of May. Its curious, although I have seen



violet schiff  603

you and Sydney so seldom – now that you are gone I feel that everybody is going. The Riviera is finished. Little Doctor Bouchage came this morning. He told me Doctor Marmel had been to see them yesterday. He came at 3 and stayed until 8.30 & ‘talked incessantly all the time’. When he did not talk he whistled. I feel I could write a whole life of Doctor Marmel – Id even like to. The Swiss doctor, Spahlinger has never answered, so I don’t know whether his treatment is available or not. Its a disappointment. It sounded very marvellous. One didn’t only get better – one became perfectly well & able to fly again as high as ever. Dearest Violet – I hope youll read my story in the Mercury.1 Its not pride that makes me say that. Its only that you & Sydney are my two readers in such a special sense. I don’t care a farthing for what the others think. They don’t know what I am trying to do – but you know. I hope you will have a happy journey. Let me hear from you when you can – will you? Jones goes to Switzerland on Wednesday. I think I shall go the last week in May. Goodbye again. With my warm love Ever yours Katherine. Note 1. ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ was scheduled for publication in the London Mercury the following month.

[24 May 1921] [BL] [Postcard – panoramic view of Sierre] Hotel Beau-Site Clarens-Montreux. Many thanks for your letter. I want to write to you; I shall as soon as Ive got over this chill. At present I am in the very midst of it. The place is marvellous; the doctors incredibly fantastically, too hopelessly maddening. They will speak English, too. If I could only give you an imitation of the one who has just left me. ‘Dere is nudding for it but lie in de bed – eat – and tink of naice tings’ . . . He wore a little tiny straw hat too, & brown cotton gloves . . . What is one to do – dearest? To shoot or not to shoot . . . Katherine.

604   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [24 October 1921] [BL] Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre (Valais) Switzerland. Dearest Violet If I were to begin apologising I should have to fill the letter with protestations. Even then . . . I have been working fearfully hard to get my new book finished. That wraps one away. One leads a double life & the half that is this life grows almost shadowy. All the same, equally with Murry I have devoured Sydneys letters – Oh, how delightful his letters are! We long to see his new book. Its horrible to know you have both been ill. Are you really better? These chills, Violet – how they persist. I wonder if you expose yourself to the direct rays of the sun? Here in Switzerland that is considered simply the cause of feverish chills. And all my South of France recurrent ones are put down to that. It seems that not to be au bord de la mer1 and never to sit in the sun are the only rules if you are liable to fever. Thats why the Riviera is such a fatal climate except for those who seek fever . . . I am sure Switzerland is the place for health and for work – I mean especially and above all for nerves. There is an extraordinary feeling of ease here. It seems it is easy to live; one feels remote and undisturbed. Ive never known anything like the feeling of peace and when one isn’t working the freshness – the air, the smell of pines, the taste of snow in ones teeth – – Thats exaggeration – its only the spiritual flavour. I hope you and Sydney come here. I feel sure you would like it. I think I really judge a place by how vividly I can recall the past – one lives in the Past – or I do. And here it is living. Does Sydney know what I mean? My book is to lie in Constables bosom until after the new year. Its called, after all, The Garden-Party. I hope you like the title. The Mercury is publishing one of the stories in a month or two – terribly long.2 Too long for the Mercury. But that’s enough & too much about me – And now I have forgotten my health. Thank you, dearest Violet. I think my lungs are quiescent – rather the disease is. My heart is the same at present. But I feel much better – a different person altogether on the whole. No longer an invalid, even tho’ I still can’t walk & still cough and so on. Its interesting what you say about Sheila Kaye-Smith.3 Ill try & get her book. Murry is rereading Proust – all from the beginning. So far he likes it infinitely more than the first time. Ive been reading the book of Job! There are times when I turn to the bible. It is marvellous! As for



violet schiff  605

papers – I wonder what you read? The Dial? It is improved, I think. Its a mixed lot but on the whole there is always something in it. I thought Lawrence was good this month4 – so warm – so living. In spite of everything Lawrence’s feeling for life is there. Poor Eliot sounds tired to death5 – His London letter is all a maze of words. One feels the awful effort behind it – as though he were being tortured – But perhaps thats all wrong and he enjoys writing it. I don’t think people ought to be as tired as that, though. It is wrong – It is sad to hear of the tree being attacked by its cruelle maladie.6 I shall see that tree for ever – We live here in an ugly but snug chalet with a stalwart servant called the gentle Ernestine.7 Jones, is, as usual, the official wife of both of us. I have a most divine balcony room to work on. Its perfect up there. Would that you & Sydney could come & take tea with us while this summer weather is still as fine as ever – I don’t know why I can so imagine you here in Switzerland. I feel it is your place – Dearest Violet – Im writing late at night. Murry is asleep. He looks about 16. I must turn out the light. My fondest love to you and to Sydney.           Always           Your               K.M. Notes 1. (Fr.): On the seashore. 2. ‘At the Bay’, KM’s longest story, was published in the London Mercury in January 1922. For a gauge of Violet’s very warm response, see below, p. 606. 3. KM’s first assessment of the keenly ruralist fiction of the Sussex-based, British author Sheila Kaye-Smith (1887–1956) had been rather lukewarm (see her reviews of Tamarisk Town and Green Apple Harvest in CW3, pp. 505–7; 656–8). We do not unfortunately know what she made of Joanna Godden, which Violet Schiff had praised, a novel that was very well received overall and later brought to the screen. 4. The final part of Lawrence’s extended essay ‘Sea and Sardinia’ was published in the October 1921 issue of the Dial. See above, p. 579, n. 9. 5. See Eliot’s ‘London Letter: September 1921’, published in the Dial, October 1921, pp. 452–5. His focus is essentially on the season’s productions of two different variants of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (the British premiere of the orchestral version on 7 June 1921 and Diaghilev’s revised ballet version), and on George Bernard Shaw’s Back to Methuselah. 6. (Fr.): Cruel disease. 7. Ernestine Rey was the Swiss maid employed at the Chalet des Sapins.

606   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [8 January 1922] [BL] Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre Valais My dearest Violet I am so happy to know you like my story. It was the most delightful surprise to receive your letter at the end of rather a black day. I had thought At the Bay would pass quite unnoticed and your sympathetic note warms my heart. Thank you sincerely – very sincerely, dearest Violet. I shall not forget your letter. As a matter of fact all that I have written up till now seems to me to have been only – – – opening the windows, pulling back the shutters . . . Its only now I feel chez moi1 and in the work I am engaged in now – I have passed through a state of awful depression about work, lately – It had to be. But I see my way now, I think. What saved me finally was reading a book called Cosmic Anatomy – and reflecting on it – – – That sounds rather funny, doesn’t it? Ah, I do hope we shall meet in the spring. I feel we shall & all will be better than before – Congestion is quite simple. The lung becomes full of blood, & that means the heart beats too fast & that means one has fever – and pain and puts oneself to bed. But I am determined to make an end of all this very soon – I detest the idea of going to Paris at the end of this month but I shant stay – just see my man & arrange to return in the spring – Snow falls & falls. It is like living in the moon. I hate snow. I love the fertile, fertile earth! Goodnight, chere amie –2 With my warm love to you both –                  I embrace you                     Katherine. Notes 1. (Fr.): In my own home. 2. (Fr.): Dear friend.

[early March 1922] [BL] Victoria Palace Hotel 6/8 Rue Blaise Desgoffe Rue de Rennes. My dear Violet I have just received your letter which was posted on to me from the office. Will you forgive me – but I cant see anybody before May at earliest. I am trying a new treatment1 and until I know whether its in the least



violet schiff  607

successful or not I simply cant see anyone. That sounds horribly ungracious: I wish I had not to write it. Murry would be delighted to see you both. Do let him know when he may come and call upon you. I hope you’ll find Paris agreeable. When its fine its very very fine. With love to you both Yours ever K. M. Note 1. KM had just begun the X-ray treatment with Dr Manoukhin in Paris. See above, pp. 138–41.

[late March 1922] [ATL, copy of original] Permanent address c/o 10 Adelphi Terrace W.C.2 London. Victoria Palace Hotel Rue Blaise Desgoffe Rue de Rennes Paris My dear Violet, Your letter coming after so long a silence made me sorrowful. I had made up my mind that, either I had said something to hurt you and Sydney, or that that horrible whispering gallery, London, had decided you both to write no more.1 I wonder if I shall ever know what it was. And why are these relationships suddenly blotted out from one’s life? It happens so very often; it is always as though for the first time . . . Well, so it is! I’ve been in Paris since January and shall be here some weeks longer. I’ve not seen anybody and I feel I simply can’t just now. So I pretend to be always on the point of departure – not here. If, par hasard,2 anyone should ask for my address, please do not know it. I hope all goes well with you both, always Yours K.M. Notes 1. The Whispering Gallery of St Paul’s Cathedral in London owes its name to the discovery of whispering-gallery waves which reverberate and seemingly amplify even discreet soundwaves as they bounce off the circular walls of the dome. 2. (Fr.): By chance.

608   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [1 April 1922] [BL] [Victoria Palace Hôtel, Rue Blaise Desgoffe, Paris] Violet dearest You may imagine how much I dislike proving to you and Sydney how insupportable a creature I am. But I am now in bed with a violent cold. I caught it somehow on Wednesday in these corridors and there it is in all its vileness. This means of course that again I shant be able to see you. I am tired of being governed by the Furies; I think its time they left me alone a little. But the moment I am better may I telephone you and come and see you? I was so distressed that Sydney stayed such a short time on Wednesday. But Joyce was rather – – – difficile.1 I had no idea until then of his view of Ulysses – no idea how closely it was modelled on the Greek story, how absolutely necessary it was to know the one through and through to be able to discuss the other. Ive read the Odyssey and am more or less familiar with it but Murry and Joyce simply sailed away out of my depth – I felt almost stupified. Its absolutely impossible that other people should understand Ulysses as Joyce understands it. Its almost revolting to hear him discuss its difficulties. It contains code words that must be picked up in each paragraph and so on. The Question and Answer part can be read astronomically or from the geological standpoint or – oh, I don’t know! And in the midst of this he told us that his latest admirer was Jack Dempsey.2 No, I really believe there is no reason Civilisation should go. There is still a chance of saving it in spite of everything and Im against the destroyers . . . But oh, how much Id like to talk and not write this! Its just on the point of raining again. M. is standing over me waiting for this. Goodbye my dear Violet – Sydney dear Your loving regretful Katherine. Notes 1. As mentioned above, pp. 516; 517, n. 12, KM’s observation about Joyce’s being ‘difficile’ [difficult] is all we know about their encounter at KM and JMM’s hotel on 29 March. The meeting nonetheless remains fascinating from the perspective of Modernist history: it brings together one of the key patrons of Modernism, one ardent Modernist editor who had been one of the first critics to conceptualise the label ‘Modernist’ in its pre-World War One form, and three Modernist artists (Wyndham Lewis also having been present), all outsiders in their way, whose social circles sometimes overlapped but who in character were diametrically opposed, and whose formal and stylistic quests were frequently on a similar wavelength. 2. According to Alpers, Joyce’s latest admirer was not Jack Dempsey, an American world heavyweight boxing champion, but George Dempsey (1854–1924), one of Joyce’s former English teachers, believed to be the inspiration for



violet schiff  609 Mr Tate, the teacher in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. See Fargnoli and Gillespie, p. 267.

[4 April 1922] [BL] [Victoria Palace Hôtel, Rue Blaise Desgoffe, Paris] Dearest Violet, Your sweet letter – I feel a brute. Let me explain. After ten weeks without going out of this hotel except to the clinic Ive lost my nerve for the present. And then this wretched coughing and this not being able to reply to ‘how are you?’ But your letter makes me long to see you and Sydney. And since I wrote to you I have seen my doctor again and he declares the ‘réaction’1 will be over this week. These last weeks have been simply hell . . . Its so humiliating, so shameful to be always more or less ill. Its such a terrible bore for other people. But if we can ignore it – do, Violet dearest – forgive what looks like horrid ungraciousness and let me come and see you both on Sunday or Monday, or whenever you are free . . . If you would just tell Murry. With love to you both Yours ever Katherine. Note 1. The ‘grande réaction’ was an expected stage in the Manoukhin treatment of tuberculosis by X-ray radiation, which lasted about three weeks, during which the patient felt particularly debilitated by the intensity of the treatment. With her characteristic perkiness, despite being so weak, KM explained to her cousin Elizabeth von Arnim that ‘Its rather hard to work just now. I am at the moment when one feels the reaction. After five doses of X rays one is hotted up inside like a furnace and one’s very bones seem to be melting’ (CL1, pp. 48–9).

[13 April 1922] [BL] [Victoria Palace Hôtel, Rue Blaise Desgoffe, Paris] Thursday. Dearest Violet Once again I have to send my regrets – not because I am ill this time. But I have to go to the clinic early to have a séance extraordinaire1 – They want to take photographs and so on, and I dare not go out to lunch beforehand. Its damnable! I only heard from M. this evening. But this is positively my last seance. After tomorrow I shall become a reasonable human being. Forgive me once again.

610   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 My exquisite dip into life with you & Sydney has given me a longing for all kinds of things out of reach. Yes, money can buy very much. Your rooms, too! the peace of them and the subdued light. I did not realise such rooms existed in an hotel – With so much love to you both Katherine. Note 1. (Fr.) Additional session.

[11 May 1922] [BL] Victoria Palace Hotel Rue Blaise Desgoffe Rue de Rennes Paris Dearest Violet I shall love to come to lunch on Sunday as you suggest. It was delightful to see you and Sydney on Tuesday. I shall bring the Dial on Sunday with the ‘slashing’ attack on Murry1 – queer world! Yours with so much love Katherine. Note 1. Ezra Pound was the author of that month’s ‘Paris Letter’, and did indeed manage to condense within four pages a broad, systematic denunciation of Murry’s critical methods, a diatribe against the British periodical press in general, a scornful rant about literary impressions he disdained, and perceptive insights on French literature, Flaubert in particular. See the Dial, April 1922, pp. 401–5. See also the December issue of the Dial for the JMM article (‘Gustave Flaubert’) that prompted Pound’s outburst, pp. 625–36.

[14 May 1922] [BL] [Victoria Palace Hôtel, Rue Blaise Desgoffe, Paris] Sunday. Dearest Violet I am so very sorry – I cannot lunch with you and Sydney today. I waited until this morning in the hope that my lung would be better,



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but its no go, and I daren’t walk about. I am dreadfully disappointed; Ive been looking forward to seeing you both all the week – And what makes it more aggravating is that its only a recurrence of the réaction due to the treatment that has given me a touch of inflammation. It will be all over in a day or two . . . And here’s the sun; its going to be fine. I see you and Sydney in my mind’s eye and Im not with you. Curséd fate!      Please forgive         Your most loving           Katherine.

[9 August 1922] [BL] Hotel Chateau Belle Vue Sierre Valais. 9 viii 1922 Dearest Violet, Forgive me for not answering your dear letter sooner. I wanted to & I could not. Do you know the mood when one really cant write a letter? It sounds absurd, but if anyone will understand it – you will . . . I am constantly thinking of you and Sydney. I wonder when we shall meet again? I only stayed a week or two in the mountains, then I telegraphed Jones to join me and we came down here where we’ve been ever since. Its a relief to have Jones again. I have almost made her swear never to leave me even if I drive her away. I have been working here after a fashion but Ive had trouble with my heart & again I can’t walk & Ive fever – die alte geschichte which doesn’t bleib immer neue to anyone1 – However, there it is. Perhaps one ought to learn to accept it as one’s destiny and not fight against it. Who knows? Its hard to decide. The author of Futility is only known to me through letters.2 I call him in my mind my little undergraduate. He wrote to me, from Oxford last summer, and later sent me the MSS of his novel. I helped him with it a little & suggested a publisher. Since then we have kept in touch. He sounds a very delightful, impulsive, young man. Full of enthusiasm – But what I like him for is I think he has real feeling. His letters breathe. Perhaps you will meet him one day. Curiously enough, I have often felt you would. I hope success will not spoil him.

612   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Have you read Aarons Rod – Lawrence’s latest book? There seems to me something very fine in it – so vigorous – so full of growth. I had a long miserable disgusted look at Rebecca Wests Judge.3 Ugh! How dreadful! I felt horribly ashamed of it. Yes, wasn’t the Times shameful about Proust.4 The coarseness of the mind that could write so! But never has English criticism been at such a low ebb as at this moment. Nobody has anything to say. As for the Nation it is as dead as mutton. A storm rages while I write this dull letter. It sounds so splendid, I wish I were out in it. Murry has spent the summer in the mountains. At present he is with Elizabeth – the real one, of course. He looks forward, I know to seeing you next month. I go to Paris in about a fortnight. But my plans are very vague. I hope to spend the winter in Italy. Murry sent me Sydney’s *letter about his novel. I envied him such a letter with all my heart. Goodbye, dearest Violet. The time I spent with you & Sydney in Paris is so vivid – I love to think of it. With much love to you both – Ever yours K.M. * The rest of this letter is written sideways in the left-hand margin. Notes 1. (Ger.): The same old story which doesn’t always remain true. 2. William Gerhardi was an undergraduate at Oxford when he contacted KM to express his admiration for her writing, and then to ask her for advice about his getting his first novel published. See CL1, pp. 569–74. 3. The Judge was the second novel by Cicely Isabel Fairfield, better known as Rebecca West (1892–1983), the impressively prolific, popular and Modernist British author. She had first made her mark on British intellectual life as a bold, analytical journalist and feminist campaigner; her first novel, The Return of the Soldier (1918), was a pioneering work in terms of both theme and literary history, being the first novel by a woman to address shell-shock, the complexities of the post-war, and the insidious violence of war on a domestic scale. After the powerful politics and poetics of this novel, her more inwardly focused and even absurdist second novel was often misunderstood or deemed disappointing. 4. The Times Literary Supplement had published an acerbic, disdainful review of Sodom et Gomorrhe II, the fifth volume of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, along with an assessment of the ongoing literary saga to date, on 3 August (p. 506). It refers in particular to the ‘sordid digression’ in Le Côté de Guermantes II, and deplores some of the ‘frankly dull’ society scenes which supposedly amount to little more than a series of excavations ‘of the smooth grey paste in the terrine’.



violet schiff  613

[21 August 1922] [BL]

21 viii 1922

6 Pond Street Hampstead NW3.

Dearest Violet, I am so hoping I may see you and Sydney shortly. Do you return to town soon? I came over from Switzerland last week & have decided to stay here for the next 2 – 3 months to continue my course of treatment here instead of in Paris. (My doctor knows a London man who understands the Manoukhin treatment & will charge me only half what I paid before.) I am looking for a small furnished flat. How awfully nice it will be if there are real chances of real talks with you & dear Sydney this autumn! How are you both? My warm love to you! Its strange to be here again. London is empty, cool, rather shadowy – extraordinarily unlike Paris. I feel sentimental about it. Only the people Ive seen so far seem fatigué fatigué1 beyond words! One feels that they have come to an agreement not to grow any more to stay just so – all clipped and pruned and tight. As for taking risks, making mistakes, changing their opinions, being in the wrong, committing themselves, losing themselves, being human beings in fact – no, a thousand times! ‘Let us sit down and have a nice chat about minor eighteenth century poetry’ – I never want to sit down & have that chat as long as I live. But it doesn’t matter. They can’t alter the fact that Life is wonderful. Its wonderful enough to sit here writing to you, dear precious friends & to lean back & think about you – The past lets nothing be. Even our meetings in Paris are changed almost beyond recognition. One sees them, linked together now, and one realises the immense importance of the hero of them (whom I never saw & never shall see.)2 But I could write to you for ever today – And instead Im going out to lunch with Massingham père.3 Could one possibly shake him up – lean across the table & say quietly – – – – – what? With much love to you both Ever Katherine. Notes 1. (Fr.): Tired tired. 2. KM’s evocation of scenes from the past recalls the literary and narratological devices used by Proust in Marcel’s gradual piecing together of past recollections and sensations in the framing of his life as narrative.

614   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 3. Henry William Massingham (1860–1924), an English journalist and editor of the Nation from 1907 to 1923.

[24 August 1922] [BL]

24 viii 1922

6 Pond Street Hampstead NW3

Dearest Violet, Many many thanks for your letter. Will you forgive me if I do not accept your invitation to come and stay with you and Sydney? The truth is I am such a bad visitor (as one is a bad sailor) that I have made it a rule nowadays never to stay with anyone unless it is absolutely necessary. I hope this does not sound too extravagant and ungracious. I could give you literally hundreds of reasons for it. I look forward immensely to seeing you both in town next month. Isn’t the country rather chill? The country is so terribly airy. Murry is staying at this address for a week or two. He then moves into a small flat next door for the autumn. I have ‘taken’ Brett’s first floor for the next three month months and hope to be settled soon. At present all is in the air, and I can’t work or even think of work. It will be very nice to have my own possessions and to be out of hotels for a time, without being en ménage.1 I haven’t the domestic virtues. I see Elliots new magazine is advertised to appear shortly.2 It looks very full of rich plums. I always speak so grudgingly of Elliot to you. Yet I think Prufrock by far and away the most interesting and the best modern poem.3 It stays in ones memory as a work of art – so different in that to Ulysses. The further I am away from it the less I think of it. As to reading it again, or even opening that great tome – never! What I feel about Ulysses is that its appearance sometime was inevitable. Things have been heading that way for years. It ought to be regarded as a portentous warning. But there is little chance of that, I fear. Are you well? I feel so much better these last few days. My doctor, who is an angel, seems to be curing my heart with dark brown sugar! With much love to you both, dearest Violet Ever yours Katherine. Notes 1. (Fr.): Living as a couple.



violet schiff  615

2. The Criterion, a quarterly literary journal founded and edited by T. S. Eliot, was launched that autumn. Announcements for the forthcoming flagship magazine, designed along the lines of the French Nouvelle Revue Française and intended as a forum for Europe’s foremost Modernist writers, were to be found in all the major daily and weekly papers. 3. ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, first published in the magazine Poetry, 6: 3, pp. 330–5, in 1915, had fascinated KM from first publication, both for its striking effectiveness as a dramatic monologue to be performed and for its narrative, story-telling effects. A line from the poem, ‘Is that all? Can that be all? That is not what I meant at all’, appeared as a diary entry, dated ‘8.xii.16’ (CW4, p. 220). Alpers (1980, p. 239) notes how KM read it aloud to a gathering at Garsington in June 1917. KM also makes reference to it in a letter to Virginia Woolf (see below, p. 766).

[19 September 1922] [BL]

Tuesday

6 Pond Street Hampstead NW3

Dearest Violet, I am so sorry my letter distressed you. But what was ‘your doing’, my dear? There is nothing to undo as far as I am concerned. I felt Sydney would have been –– much more than bored. I wanted to spare him. And I felt, too, reluctant to speak of important things just now . . . that Id nothing ‘useful’ to say. Don’t you think one has these moments in life? ‘No’, you are saying ‘this won’t do, Katherine. Why, if all this is true, didn’t you on Sunday’ . . . But the fact is I did not realise until Sunday – until after Sunday my need for reflection. Dont, if you can help it, think me too horrid. Indeed I am with all my heart Devotedly yours Katherine.

To Sydney and Violet Schiff

(See individual introductions above.)

[7 April 1920] [BL]

7 IV l920

Villa Flora Menton.

Dear Mr and Mrs Schiff, I feel that I deceived you to-day about my health and I succumbed to the awfully great temptation of deceiving myself. Really and truly, thinking it over, I am afraid I am not well enough to live in that darling little flat. You see, there are days when Im completely hors de combat;1 I can’t walk a step further than I walked to-day and I have to take horrid and extravagant care of myself always. Sometimes I get a week when I can’t move and Im always under a doctor’s care & if I do go out Im supposed not to breathe the dust. This sounds ridiculous: I wish I didn’t have to say it. I feel there is plenty of room to be well in the petite appartement2 but there is not enough room to be ill and I have to provide for it. When I said I had to write for pennies I didn’t mean for the essential pennies but for all the luxuries which are alas! my necessities . . . Yes, forgive me, I was carried away today & I forgot I must behave like an invalid. But when I came in and lay down and rested I thought: you know these things aren’t for you; and you were deceiving those two dear people. You must let them know at once’. Will you forgive me? And thank you for a lovely day. Im lying here living it over and seeing in my mind’s eye your garden and house & hearing the torrent – and – much more important than those things – delighting in the fact of having met you. Yours ever sincerely            K.M.

    616



violet schiff  617

Notes 1. (Fr.): Unfit for action. 2. (Fr.): Small flat.

[2 May 1920] [BL]

Sunday.

2 Portland Villas East Heath Road Hampstead NW3

My dear friends, At last the writing table is in perfect order and I have put a notice round the neck of the small angelic creature who is ‘knock man’ to my door: ‘Engaged’ – – At last I’m free to sit down and think of last Sunday and wish it were this. This is cold, reluctant, uneasy. Now and again a handful of rain is dashed against the window. The church bells have stopped ringing and I know that there is a leg of something with ‘nice’ spring greens, rhubarb tart and custard in every house in Hampstead but mine. Its very cold, very grey; the smoke spins out of the chimney. But thank God there is a far-away piano, rocking, plunging, broken into long quivering phrases – it sounds as though it were being played under the sea. How glad I am – how deeply glad – that we stopped the car on the other side of the tunnel and got out & leaned against the wall – with the broken village behind and then the falling terraces of green – Will you ever forget how those mountains were heaped and folded together? And the fat comfortable man taking a cigarette at his ease in the lap of the world and the small impudent children watching us while we enjoyed our timeless moment? I shall go on reliving that day down to the very last drop – But so I shall with all the time we spent together. Life is so much the richer for knowing you both and rejoicing in you. Are you my friends as much as I am your friend? There you are in my life, part of all I do and think. Let us meet very soon after you come back. I have been thinking about your new work. Have you done any more? Its very good. Delicate perception is not enough; one must find the exact way in which to convey the delicate perception – one must inhabit the other mind and know more of the other mind and your secret knowledge is the light in which all is steeped. I think you have done this – Do more. Tell me, if you can, what you are writing. Violet, I have nearly finished the story I wrote for you.1 I shall type it out and send it to you.

618   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Murry is desperately pessimistic about – everything – more especially – he feels that the wicked writers are triumphing to such an extent that its nearly impossible ever to beat them.2 Things have gone too far. I don’t feel that at all. I think our duty lies in ignoring them – all except those whose faults are important – and in working ourselves, with all our might and main – It is waste of time to discuss them – and waste of energy. Its a kind of treachery to all that we intend to do. I am sure the ‘day will come – – – – – – It is joy to have one’s room again. Everything is in its place. The black & gold scarf lies across a little couch. I am meeting Elliot next week. Goodbye, this is not the letter I wanted to write – its only the fringe of it. K.M. Notes 1. The Anglo-French themes and setting of KM’s short stories ‘Revelations’ and ‘The Escape’ would presumably have found a particularly sensitive reader in Violet Schiff: hence KM’s suggestion that one or the other was composed for her. ‘Revelations’ was first published in the Athenaeum on 11 June, ‘The Escape’ on 9 July. See CW2, pp. 215–17. 2. JMM, with KM as silent, transparent helpmate in the wings, was then editor of the Athenaeum, and thus constantly grappling with the literary aspirations and egos of potential contributors.

[4 May 1920] [BL] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] My dear friends, Art and Letters came today reminding me of the day we talked it over.1 It looks very well. Still the sun lingers. Still, one walks up and down up and down waiting, staring out of the windows – waiting for that moment – – – that marvellous moment – when you step out of the shadow into the embrace which is like a blessing. It is very cold; do not come back too soon. Yesterday I drove down to the city to my Bank. It is almost terrifying to see such blank, strained faces moving in the fog. I drove to the office of the Athenaeum & thought there at least there would be men I knew who responded who – – were alive and cared about life and the paper and work and –– The untidiness of John’s desk (laugh, Violet dear!) was my first crushing blow. There was over all the office a smell of stone and dust. Unthinkable disorder and ugliness. Old Massingham



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like a cat dipped in dough blinking in the doorway & asking whether the French were furious with ‘George’2 – Huxley wavering like a candle who expected to go out with the next open door, poor silly old men with pins in their coat lapels, Tomlinson3 harking back to the mud in Flanders, Sullivan and E. M. Forster very vague, very frightened. I heard myself speaking of lemon trees & then I said that in one valley I knew there was a torrent. Nobody cared, nobody wanted to know. I ran downstairs back into the car with Murry (we were going to buy a coffee pot because it was the anniversary of our wedding.) He was sure the shop would be shut because I’d talked instead of coming away so he looked out of his window and I looked out of mine and I listened to that lovely swift rushing sound & remembered how blue the lavender was the day we sat in that part of the garden. One must live alone and work & put away one’s passion – ones passion for Life. It must all go into work. Queer – isn’t it – how one realises it and yet there persists this longing – not to take part in – but to see, to feel, to absorb, to find out. But perhaps, by accident, it will be fed occasionally – and for the rest – travailler – travailler – – –4 Goodbye K.M. Notes 1. Schiff was one of the patrons of the short-lived but influential journal Art and Letters, to which he would also contribute over the course of its two-year existence (1918–20), as well as co-editing an issue with Osbert Sitwell. 2. The post-war settlements defined before the Treaty of Versailles were still causing tense friction between the Allies, as well as between Germany and individual Allied Nations. The British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, was then rigorously opposing the imposition of harsher reparations and territory settlements defended by Raymond Poincaré, the French Premier. 3. See JMM’s very poignant portrait of Tomlinson during these months in his autobiography, BTW, p. 432. 4. (Fr.): Work, work. As well as voicing KM’s increasingly ardent desire to work more and fulfil her own aspirations as a writer, the final paragraphs have a richly Chekhovian resonance. See in particular the closing scenes of Uncle Vanya and Three Sisters.

[10 May 1920] [BL] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] Monday. This morning brought me the joy of letters from you. I look forward – with how much eagerness – to seeing you again. My story (don’t please

620   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 expect too much) I’ll send to Cambridge Place. Last week here I hadn’t time to write a word; this week is already covered under manuscripts to read, poems, essays to choose ‘finally’, novels to review, schemes to draft, an article to write on ‘why we intend to publish short stories’1 and then there’s a special smashing review to be written for the Nation2 – – – – I shall get these things into order presently; Ill find their each his separate place. Last week – really – it was like having Murry a wistful shepherd leading his troop of sheep into the room & I was ill and in dreadful pain, physical and mental pain, that could not be spoken of. But Work, real work – the longing & the desire to work is all that matters. Why does one rebel so at isolation. It must be. Why can’t one accept it once and for all, and put all that other side of oneself into work – all the desire to love, to share, to be someone’s first thought – to have some one who talks to you endlessly and to whom you talk endlessly – to give – to receive – tenderness – and all that quick, ardent interchange – I should like all this and work. I should like to live in this atmosphere – sympathy – happiness abounding – every moment lived – and then shut the door & sit down at the table & write. But here’s a woman who has been ill for over two years – who instead of ‘looking after’ the other has made demands upon a man who confesses he has very little vitality to spare and doesn’t ultimately care for people except as symbols. Who finds that after all, he doesn’t in the least desire her kind of Life – but wants to be a scholar & live quietly, remotely, writing poetic drama, growing learned, and feeling – that she is by and sympathetic but does not interfere – – – – –– Oh how well I understand this jealous passionate love of himself, this absorption and tenderness – which comes from his wretched childhood & poor stifled youth. Then, it seems to him now, he was engulfed, swept away . . . Someone tried to make him other than he was, to fit him with qualities he had not got, to look after him, to ‘give him things’ – – – – Now, he’s managed to get quite apart, to possess wholly this his critical, intellectual self. And people take him seriously, they make no demands, they ask nothing and never oppose him. I understand him beyond words. I have been living in a dream but it’s been a long intensely vivid dream. As we drove down to Sospel,3 Violet, I still believed what I said & thought when my illness was over – the queer cloud would sail out of the sky. . . . Does it seem revolting to you that however deeply one is shaken – Art remains – and yes, one goes on finding out that it is all. If one could only say what it means to have you two to write for – – – – – I remember that house, Violet. I should like it all for the season if they’d take 3000 frcs. for it. I wish I could make them rent it to me for that. I would decide immediately. The Hotel doesn’t sound quite mon affaire4 – but that solid house is extremely intriguing. Shall I write to



violet schiff  621

them? I shall try & read Madame Bovary5 again before you come back. Here’s a small letter I had from Elliot. He and Murry meet very often. I have asked them both here for Thursday or Friday evening. What will they be like, I wonder? The grey door of my room keeps on opening & opening in my mind & Mrs Elliot & Elliot enter. || I cant see her at all – only something slightly conscious & over confident . . . || Jones is in a hovering mood – very unsure. She brings the flowers that simply droop and hang their heads with soft sentiment. And I say I only like hard bright round flowers with straight stems. I can’t bear those curving languid creatures. So they go into her room. Poor Jones. I am so horrid. Men come up in the evenings – immense men about 7 or 8 foot high. They sprawl on the sommier,6 lounge on the little couch, take chance shots with the cigarette ash & never reach the inside of the fender. They boom: ‘It’s impossible to write now a days. For there is nothing to write about. The artist must be at one with his times. There must be, as there was in the 18th century, a rich, leisured, cultivated public who understood the artist . . . You can’t pretend that anything happens now a days. It’s impossible. An artist cant cut himself off from his times & what has he got to hang on to – now – a – days ? The short story is either over or its not going to be written in our time. . . . .’ One has the impression that each gentleman has a large loaf of household bread & is cutting you off & handing you large chunks on the tip of – such a dreadfully blunt knife. On Wednesday I am going to hear the Spanish singer I mentioned to you – Requel Mellor. Is the paper arriving regularly now? Please let me know if it is not . . . It is very exciting that you have written another sketch. I so want to read the first one again – Oh, there are so many things to be done – We start the short stories in the paper in the month of June. You will send one? They are to begin with my story about your tree.7 It is a pale English day – more silver than white. The cook has brought me in a bunch of bluebells. How lovely they are – these flowers of the wood – They have a sweet smell and like all these early spring flowers – as one touches them one thinks of water. Yours ever, K.M. Yes, the grey jersey was a parting gift from ces dames a la Villa Flora.8 Its much too big for me. Notes 1. From the outset, JMM and KM were clearly keen to foreground new short stories during his editorship of the Athenaeum – a shared editorial aspiration

622   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 that serves as a fine illustration of the extent to which she was an unnamed but highly implicated co-editor at times. The 18 June issue of the Athenaeum announces that the magazine will be ‘devot[ing] a portion of its space henceforth to prose fiction’, adding that although ‘we are confident that in the long run we shall be able to put a short story or prose sketch before our readers every week, we are aware that it may not be possible in the early stages of the enterprise to find work of a sufficiently high quality’. See also KM’s letter to Violet Schiff above, p. 592–3. 2. No review signed KM was published in the Nation. However, the 5 June issue includes a long review of A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: The Life and Death of King John, signed by JMM (pp. 320–2). Given JMM and KM’s mutual pleasure in reading Shakespeare and sharing insights, it is highly possible that KM had played a part shaping the reviewer’s critical assessment and reasoning. 3. Sospel is a fortified medieval town just behind the French Riviera, whose rich architectural heritage recalls its more glorious past as a larger, thriving city of trade and a key episcopal seat. 4. (Fr.) My sort of thing. 5. Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856), probably his finest and certainly his best-known novel, is both one of the nineteenth century’s most memorable, influential novels of adultery and one of the highest achievements of French psychological realism, as it paved the way for the exquisitely crafted and stylised form of the early Modernist novel. 6. (Fr.): Couch. 7. See ‘The Escape’, a short story with an unusually reassuring, soothing form of epiphany towards the end (‘It was then that he saw the tree’, p. 221), as the central focaliser looks at a great copper beech tree (CW2, pp. 218–22). The Schiffs’ home in Roquebrune was called Big Tree Villa. 8. (Fr.): Those ladies up at Villa Flora – by which KM means ‘her Catholic cousins’, Connie Beauchamp and her companion, Jinnie Fullerton.

[11 May 1920] [BL] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] Tuesday night. My dear Friends, I feel I have done wrong in speaking to you as I did about Murry. Yes, that was wrong. But I can’t recall the words, or the mood or anything. I can only ask you to forget them if you will – We look forward to seeing you on Thursday – very much. Yours ever K.M.



violet schiff  623

[14 May 1920] [BL] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] Friday. I have had your note; I have had your postcard and am wondering every day if you are home – The Elliots have dined with us tonight. They are just gone and the whole room is quivering. John has gone downstairs to see them off – Mrs E.’s voice rises – ‘Oh dont commiserate Tom; he’s quite happy’. I know its extravagant; I know, Violet, I ought to have seen more – but I dislike her so immensely. She really repels me – She makes me shiver with apprehension . . . I don’t dare to think of what she is ‘seeing’ – From the moment that John dropped a spoon & she cried: ‘I say you are noisy tonight – whats wrong’ – to the moment when she came into my room & lay on the sofa offering idly: ‘This room is changed since the last time I was here’. To think she had been here before. I handed her the cigarettes saying to myself: ‘well you won’t find it changed again’. Isn’t that extravagant. And Elliot, leaning towards her, admiring, listening, making the most of her – really minding whether she disliked the country or not – – ––– I am so fond of Elliot and as he talked of you both tonight I felt a deep sympathy with him. You are in his life like you are in mine – Don’t think that is impertinent. Oh, I could explain and explain that – But this tea shop creature. M. comes up after they are gone – and he defends her. He tells me of a party he gave here & how she came & was friends with him & how he drank to get over the state of nerves she had thrown him into. ‘I like her; I would do the same again’. I feel as tho’ Ive been stabbed. Now its dead still – except for the far-off noise of the trains drumming round the hollow world. Where are you both? You are somewhere. I am in the middle of a long long new story – I must push further out to sea – Let us meet soon.                  Yours ever                       K.M.

[23 August 1920] [BL] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] Tuesday night. Are we to meet again soon? I have been thinking of you both so much today. We loved the evening when you came; Mr Trench is delightful.1

624   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 My private feeling is that the last story in the paper – which reminded me of nothing so much as a galosh or an unclaimed umbrella has disgusted you both.2 It’s useless to pretend I can control what stories we do print. I can up to a certain point (that, of course, makes it ridiculous) but after that Murry says I am ‘too precious in my taste’. However, I shall go on until I do. I have been out today for a little walk on the Heath. It was so wonderful to feel the summer wind – I hope you are happy. Be happy. Thats my great constant wish for you. You are the people to whom happiness should come – I love you both.                        K.M. Notes 1. Frederic Herbert Trench (1865–1923) was an Irish poet, playwright and translator, many of whose poems were later set to music. It was early in his days as artistic director of the Haymarket Theatre in London that his muchpraised version of Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird brought him into sight in the theatre world; he wrote a number of historical dramas thereafter, living mostly between Italy and France. See Introduction to his wife, Lilian, p. 652. 2. The prose selection for the 13 August issue was ‘Two Sketches’ by Chekhov, already evoked above (p. 599). KM’s evocation of a galosh or umbrella thus seems to refer indirectly to Chekhov’s very characteristic use of random, everyday objects as the bearer of poetic or comic resonance.

[24 October 1920] [BL] [Villa Isola Bella, Garavan, Menton] Sunday October 24th I did not answer your letter at the time because I was ill, and I become so utterly weary of confessing it. Especially as its the kind of thing one does so hate to hear – one can’t really sympathise with. People who are continually crying out are exasperating. And they (or at any rate I) am dreadfully conscious of it. But now that I have been let out on ticket of leave at least – I long to write to you. You are never far from my thoughts. Some afternoons I feel positive that the voiture1 down below there is come from Roquebrune and that in another moment or two you will be here on the terrace. But there is too much to talk about. In London there never seems time. One is always just beginning when one is whirled away again. Here, one is so uninterrupted, it is like one immensely long night and one immensely long day.



violet schiff  625

. . . But it takes long before the tunes cease revolving in one’s head, before the sound of the clapping and the sensation of the crowd forsakes one. One cannot hail solitude as one can hail a dark cab. To disentangle oneself completely takes long . . . Nevertheless, I believe one must do it – and no less – if one wants to work. I feel I never shall see the story you sent to The English Review, about the boy.2 Have you been writing. Violet – do you remember the afternoon you sang just before we all came away – The shadow of the green leaves trembled in the dark piano          Forgive my long silence             With love to you both                  K.M. Would you send my ancient book to JMM before you come abroad. I forgot to ask you if you would on that last afternoon. Thank you. Notes 1. (Fr.): Car. 2. No story of this description by Stephen Hudson appeared in the English Review at this time, confirming the hypothesis that Schiff’s submission was turned down (see above, p. 598, n. 1, letter to Violet Schiff). The Athenaeum published one prose sketch by him during JMM’s editorship: ‘Sunrise in Conegliano’. See 23 July issue, p. 102.

Martin Secker (1882–1978)

Introduction There can be few sideline figures in the margins of early to mid-twentiethcentury pioneering British and European literary history that are more influential, more in-the-know and more effaced than Martin Secker. Mostly remembered today as one of the names in the powerful publishing partnership of Secker and Warburg, he actually began life with a different name and doubtless a different career path traced out for him. He was born into a family of well-established German descent, his father, Edward Henry Klingender, having taken over part of the family trading and shipping company. Secker’s mother distanced herself from the Klingenders, and it was an unexpected inheritance from her side of the family that would seem to have prompted the young Percy Martin to take up employment as a reader in a London publishing company in preference to trade. He changed his name by deed poll in 1910, both to signal his new departure and to avoid the overtly anti-German tensions of the time. He quite unexpectedly came to cross paths with JMM and KM at the same time, having moved into a flat in John Street, Adelphi,1 where he set up as an independent publisher next door to another emerging publishing figure, Stephen Swift – the business name of Charles Granville – who absconded with the company funds soon after, leaving Rhythm magazine and a host of other emerging writers bankrupt. Secker’s literary sensibility and keen alertness to new names and talents brought him to enjoy a series of often unexpected and impressive commercial successes. These began with his first publication, Compton Mackenzie’s first novel, The Passionate Elopement (1911), soon followed by warmly received new works by Hugh Walpole, Gilbert Cannan, Frank Swinnerton, Maurice Baring, Ford Madox Ford and, most importantly DHL, who adopted Secker as his British publisher from then on. The two men remained friends, although DHL’s occasionally derogatory, sneering comments about Secker in his own correspondence suggest a lack of any true warmth and sincerity. After making his mark with British and American works (notably the poetry of Emily Dickinson), Secker went on to become Britain’s foremost

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publisher of European works in translation, with an impressive line-up of Central European Modernists in translation, including Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse and Franz Kafka. Despite this outstanding flair for backing future masterpieces, Secker’s company found itself over-stretched by the mid-1930s, and he had to file for bankruptcy; despite this major setback, he set up anew as a publisher, launched a new company of his own – the Unicorn Press – which featured a number of overlooked fin-de-siècle works, and then brought out the Richards Press when the former owner, and Secker’s close friend, Grant Richards, retired. He thus continued to publish, highly successfully, until his own retirement in 1962. As well as having proved to be one of the most influential literary ambassadors of his day, respected equally for the tasteful, high-quality designs of his books, Secker was also a fine raconteur, with a wealth of tales to tell of early publishing adventures in the dawning twentieth century, and the lives and (mis)fortunes of three generations of writers, artists, designers and playwrights. These were published as a series of articles in the Cornhill Magazine in 1973 and 1974, extended extracts of which can still be enjoyed today, thanks to a TLS retrospective in the mid-1970s. The journalist’s preliminary observations prove an apt way to sum up Secker’s life as an essential yet shadowy literary mediator: ‘[These odds and ends] are casual, inconsequent, perky, pointed, modest, as informal as they are informative, occasionally perhaps apocryphal, once or twice, unfortunately, unprintable – and in all these ways wholly characteristic of the man himself.’2 Claire Davison Notes 1. The Adelphi district, near Charing Cross in the City of Westminister, is a small neighbourhood named after the ‘Adelphi Buildings’, a block of elegant terraced houses. 2. See Mervyn Horder (1976), ‘Conversations with Martin Secker’, TLS, 10 December, pp. 1565–6.

[late October 1912] [ATL] RUNCTON COTTAGE, RUNCTON, NEAR CHICHESTER Dear Mr Martin Secker. Thank you for your letter this morning and for the specimens of paper & type and for your kind note in The P.M.G.1 It felt very funny to be a ‘Thing that matters’ but Filson Young really was a darling to do it.2

628   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 We shall be in London on Monday. May we see you in the afternoon & discuss this matter of printing? We’ll bring the Trade list from Stephen Swift3 & some back numbers. So may we say 3.30. I should think we’d arrive with a rhythm painted hand barrow.4 But not really. Thank you again. Sincerely yours Katherine Mansfield. Notes 1. The Pall Mall Gazette was a London-based daily newspaper renowned for its broad variety of contributors and its keen interest in social issues as well as the arts; it was then under the general editorship of James Louis Garvin, also editor of the Sunday Observer. 2. Alexander Filson Young (1876–1938) was an energetic and enterprising investigative journalist and writer, whose passion for the fast-evolving contemporary world made him as keenly interested in the arts, especially music, as in technology, new transport and travel writing. He was also to have a pioneering role in early broadcasting. He published an appeal to patrons of the arts to provide financial backing for the floundering magazine Rhythm on 23 October 1912, presenting the call for help in the form of a fairy tale. The short piece, entitled ‘The Things that Matter’, begins, Once upon a time, a young man and young woman loved each other and poetry so much that they decided to devote their lives together to the furtherance and encouragement of English poetry – especially the new poetry of young and unknown writers like themselves. Having recounted the sad tale of how their ‘rainbow bridge’ had given way under them, Young concludes: ‘If you like this story; or if you love brave conduct in adversity; or if you care for poetry, tell your newsagent to pay in a year’s subscription to “Rhythm”. I guarantee you good value for your money’ (p. 5). 3. Stephen Swift Ltd was the publishing company and professional name of the English publisher Charles Granville, who had made a name for himself backing emerging authors and little magazines. His company had just collapsed after Granville absconded, taking the funds and fleeing the country to avoid charges of corruption. He had been the publisher of Rhythm as well as KM’s first anthology, In a German Pension. For full coverage of the affair, and the distressing consequences for KM and JMM, see Binckes, pp. 23–8. 4. It was not unusual for traders who could not afford to rent shop premises to sell their wares from push-along hand barrows – as other writings by KM in the same era attest. See above, p. 390, for an example. The image here is enhanced by the decorative element, the ‘rhythm-painted’ effects recalling the importance of visual design, bold graphics and woodcut illustrations in the journal that KM and JMM had been co-editing since June that year.

Clement Shorter (1857–1926)

Introduction KM’s brief correspondence with the editor and publisher Clement King Shorter dates from the final years of her life, when she began contributing short stories to The Sphere. Shorter established the popular illustrated paper in 1900 and edited it until his death in 1926. In total, KM published seven stories in The Sphere in 1921 and planned to produce a twelve-part serial in 1922 (which ultimately failed to come to fruition). In a letter to Ottoline Morrell, she acknowledged that her motivation in writing for The Sphere was primarily financial, noting that ‘it pays better than any other paper I know’ (24 July 1921 – see above, pp. 291–2). Nevertheless, she also wrote of her appreciation for the audience that she gained as a result of the association, telling Dorothy Brett that she derived ‘the greatest pleasure’ from the receipt of letters from readers and ‘value[d] [them] far more than any review’ (30 March 1922, CL1, p. 459). At this stage of her career, KM actively courted wider networks for the publication of her work in a diverse variety of magazines and periodicals, expanding her readership beyond the relatively small circulation of the little magazines and literary papers with which she had previously been associated. Her correspondence with Clement Shorter helps to locate KM’s writing within the broader publishing networks of the early twentieth century. This is further apparent in similar letters to her agents, J. B. and Eric Pinker, in which KM discusses the American and serial rights for stories, including those published in The Sphere (13 September 1921 and 30 March 1922, respectively – see above, pp. 451 and 439). Over the course of his career, Clement Shorter was closely linked with a range of popular illustrated papers, including the Illustrated London News, of which he was editor between 1891 and 1900. In addition to founding The Sphere and contributing a weekly ‘Literary Letter’ throughout his editorship of the paper, he established magazines such as the Sketch in 1893 and the Tatler in 1901. He was also a prolific publisher and, as J. M. Bulloch notes in his edition of Shorter’s (unfinished) autobiography, ‘between 1889 and 1926, C.K.S. wrote, edited, prefaced, and privately printed more than a hundred books and booklets’.1 Shorter was

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630   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 an especially influential figure in the publication of work on the Brontës, editing early editions of their correspondence, and also produced the first, private, printing of W. B. Yeats’s poem ‘Easter, 1916’ in 1917.2 Shorter’s first wife was Dora Sigerson, the Irish Revivalist poet and sculptor. After her death in 1918, he married Annie Doris Banfield, a close friend of Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman), H. D.’s partner. In this way, Shorter’s wider personal and professional associations arguably reflect the ways in which popular and ‘Modernist’ publishing circles co-existed within the marketplace and frequently intersected. It was in this context that KM encountered Shorter, and her correspondence with him provides some insight into her engagement with the professional writing world. Jenny McDonnell Notes 1. Bulloch, p. 152. 2. ‘Easter, 1916’, available at: (last accessed 31 August 2020).

[17 December 1921] [ATL]

17 xii 1921.

Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre Valais

Dear Mr Clement Shorter, Very many thanks for your most kind letter. I have duly received the two cheques today. I cannot tell you how gratified I am that my stories1 met with your approval. It was happiness to write them – double happiness that they gave pleasure.    Yours very sincerely   Katherine Middleton Murry    ‘Katherine Mansfield’. Note 1. As explained above, many of the stories collected in The Garden Party and Other Stories were first published in The Sphere. Shorter urged KM to compose a follow-up series as a result of their warm reception, an invitation which delighted her but which finally came to nothing, as a result of her deteriorating health.



clement shorter  631

[7 March 1922] [ATL]

7 iii 1922

Victoria Palace Hotel 6–8 Rue Blaise Desgoffe Rue de Rennes Paris.

Dear Mr Clement Shorter, I felt the very least I could do was to send you my book as a small token of my gratitude for your generous encouragement. And now I am to have the pleasure of working for you again! I shall be delighted to write the stories as you suggest. If I send you the first six in June and the second in August – would that be satisfactory?1 I wish I could look forward to visiting England this summer. But it is a remote possibility. I have left Switzerland and come to Paris to try an X ray treatment which promises new wings for old. But it is all promise for the moment. This little Swiss photograph is the only one I have. I hope it will be of use. Believe me to be Yours very sincerely – very gratefully Katherine Middleton Murry. Note 1. KM completed only seven of the promised twelves stories for The Sphere, her ill health in the latter part of the year making new work impossible. See ‘The Singing Lesson’, ‘Sixpence’, ‘Mr and Mrs Dove’, ‘An Ideal Family’, ‘Her First Ball’, ‘The Voyage’ and ‘Marriage à la Mode’ in CW2.

Dr Victor Sorapure (1874–1933)

Introduction Of all the doctors KM consulted during her short life, Dr Victor Edgar Sorapure was the one she trusted and admired above all others. Having first been introduced to him by her friend Anne Estelle Rice in September 1918, KM wrote to her on 13 January 1919, talking of her ‘new doctor’, and relating the story of his unpromising start in life: ‘Hes a wonderful man – He was a doorstep baby, left in Paris with nothing but a shawl on and a paper pinned on his poor little chest with SORAPURE written on it. That is what he calls himself’ (see above, p. 490). From such unpromising beginnings, Dr Sorapure soon rose to a position of prominence in his chosen field of medicine. After an education in Kingston, Jamaica, at St George’s Jesuit College, he obtained his medical degree in 1899 at the University of Edinburgh and undertook postgraduate work at St Andrews, before returning to Kingston as Chief Surgeon at the Government Hospital. He then moved to New York, where he was appointed to the Chair of Clinical Medicine at Fordham University. As his obituary in the British Medical Journal notes, ‘He brought to his duties there a clinical insight, fortified by an extensive acquaintance with the literature, and a capacity for precise and accurate detail that made him as a clinical teacher always learned, always interesting, sometimes illuminating.’1 When World War One broke out, he moved to London and worked as a consultant at Hampstead General Hospital, before opening a practice in Wimpole Street, where he was highly valued and respected by his patients and, more widely, within the medical profession. His obituary remarks how ‘It has been said, and with a certain justice, that no patient ever left him, save for geographical reasons. Sorapure was a man of outstanding character, personality, and intellect.’2 He himself died of tuberculosis at the age of fifty-nine. Characteristically, ‘His ill-health was the result of infection contracted during a bout of strenuous work, and aggravated by neglect of his own health in favour of what he conceived to be his duty.’3 From all of the above, it is clear that KM was lucky to find in Sorapure an intellect coupled with a generosity of spirit, as well as a spiritual understanding of the world, that guided her health and tuberculosis treatment for the last four years of her life. It was Sorapure, for example, in the winter

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of 1918, who first correctly diagnosed that the various aches and pains she had, for many years, referred to as her ‘rheumatiz’, was in fact caused by an old infection with gonorrhoea, possibly dating as far back as 1909 and her relationship with Floryan Sobieniowski; when the disease is left untreated, arthritis-type pain occurs. It was Baker who first confirmed this when she wrote: ‘the trouble was not correctly diagnosed nor was she fully cured until many years later in 1918 when Dr Sorapure took charge of her’.4 Baker had high praise for Sorapure and his general treatment of KM: He seemed to understand both her illness and the way in which she, with her character, could best come to terms with it. She told me once, when the treatment he was giving her proved almost unendurably painful, he helped her over it by quietly talking of the immensity and wonder of the universe and the incomprehensibility of space.5

Understanding that KM would never be able to survive the constraints of living in a sanatorium, where writing would be forbidden, it was Sorapure who recommended she travelled south instead, to warmer climates. As KM explained in a letter to Ottoline Morrell on 17 August 1919 (see above, p. 276), stating that Sorapure’s words were ‘breath, life – healing, everything’: My doctor strongly urges me not to put myself away – not to go into a sanatorium – he says I would be out of it in 24 hours and it would be a ‘highly dangerous experiment’. ‘You see’, he explained, ‘there is your work which I know is your Life. If they kept it from you you’d die – and they would keep it from you. This would sound absurd to a german specialist but I have attended you for a year and I know’.

KM’s poem ‘The Tedious Brief Adventure of K.M.’ (1919) makes playful reference to Sorapure in its first stanza: A doctor who came from Jamaica Said: ‘This time I’ll mend her or break her I’ll plug her with serum And if she can’t bear ’em I’ll call in the next undertaker’.6

KM also dedicated the first draft of her story ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ (1920) to Sorapure: ‘To Doctor Sorapure. Were my gratitude to equal my admiration, my admiration would still outstep my gratitude.’7 Around the time the story was completed, at a particularly low point in her life both physically and emotionally, KM wrote in a notebook under the heading ‘Suffering’: Here, for a strange reason, there rises the figure of Doctor Sorapure. 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

634   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 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.8

In her will, KM requested that Sorapure, alongside a few of her closest friends, be given one of her favourite books. Gerri Kimber Notes 1. Anon. (1933), ‘Obituary’, British Medical Journal, 1: 3764 (25 February), p. 348. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Baker, p. 55. 5. Baker, p. 128. 6. CP, p. 129. 7. Quoted in Alpers 1954, p. 308. 8. CW4, p. 336.

[mid-May 1921] [ATL] [Hôtel Beau Site, Clarens-Montreux] Dear Doctor Sorapure About a year ago you taught me how to breathe and how to sit and how to make my feet warm. Those ‘lessons’ started me thinking over – or rather observing one or two other little things. And I wonder whether you might be interested in what a tubercular patient has noticed. They are very slight; I only send you one or two out of a sheaf|full. Other people might think I was morbidly self conscious in thus giving expression to my symptoms but I know you will understand I do so because I have learned to think (and try to act by it) that ‘what is the matter’ is a question of no value whatever unless it is tripped up by ‘How can I put it right’ – I submit them in all humility – K.M.M. ‘I’ is of course just ‘x’ or ‘the patient’. I hope this doesn’t sound like Mrs Eustache Miles1 or that you will not think me impertinent in imagining that you might be interested in ‘what the patient feels’ – Breathing: When I wake in the morning I keep very still, lie on the back, breathe as I have been taught to breathe and, in addition, slowly open the arms to their fullest extent. Quite slowly, without effort, imitating the action of an opera singer who makes just this gesture before taking a high note which he wants to ‘hold’ as long as possible. I do this very



dr victor sorapure  635

thoughtfully, half a dozen times at most and it seems to air the lungs – to, in fact, fill the lungs quite full. This particular movement of slowly, gently, opening the arms is at all times extremely refreshing, but particularly in those peculiar moments of sudden fatigue which one feels. Humming: When I am resting and breathing is easy I hum. I make no attempt to sing or indeed to raise the voice at all, but just hum softly ‘under the breath’ as they say. This gentle sound distracts ones attention from the act of breathing and I find that in a few minutes the breathing is taking care of itself and is easier and gentler. At the risk of an Americanism I do think its very well worth while for tubercular patients to ‘get the humming habit’ – Whistling is a nervous effort and singing out of the question but its not natural for a normal healthy person to make no sound other than speech – and this humming seems to break the feeling of ‘isolation’, as well as to relieve the breathing. Breathing: When the breathing is very troublesome and the weather is dark I find it a help to look at pictures. I should think little children would benefit greatly from this. Reading is no help, and either talking or listening less, but the sight of pictures seems to ease one. Healthy creatures at sight of anything that pleases them give a ‘sigh of pleasure’; it seems to provoke them to breathe deeply and lightly. They are not so much excited as steadied and made tranquil and if one is ill this feeling is accentuated – I have proved this often. It seems so important when there is difficulty in breathing to distract the patient from the act of breathing and yet keep him tranquil. Appetite: I discovered that when I had no appetite my food gave me indigestion. At the sight of food I immediately felt nervous, and attacked it in a state of physical tension. Then I tried – relaxing consciously for a minute or two before eating and this relaxation not only made me eat slowly when I did eat, it made it possible to eat a great deal more – and (though this is extravagant, I suppose) I find it cured my indigestion. Perhaps grace before meat wasn’t only instituted so that infants should praise de Lord but also with a view of inducing this feeling of relaxation. Depression. When I am attacked by acute feelings of depression I find it a great help to change my position. If I am in bed I move, get an extra pillow, sit up if Im lying down, or lie down if Im sitting up. If I am not in bed I move gently about the room – The change of position seems to relieve a feeling of congestion, and that peculiar feeling that one is being smothered. (I wonder if healthy people realise the effect of a change of position on the patients mind. I mean now, the difference it makes to change the ‘site’ of a bed, to make the patient face another way, or escape the pattern of the wallpaper. It is extraordinarily refreshing.)

636   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Note 1. Dorothy Hallie Killick (1870–1947) was a British writer and feminist, married to the British tennis champion and pioneering food and lifestyle writer Eustace Miles. She published under the names Mrs Eustace Miles and Hallie Killick, on topics ranging from housekeeping and home economics to healthy living and women’s health.

Sir John Collings Squire (1884–1958)

Introduction A short article in The Times in 1961, looking back on very misunderstood dimensions of the pre-Second World War literary world, observes: Cheerfulness, indeed, is among the most damaging reproaches that can be levelled against a writer. It evokes such phenomena as cricket, Belloc, Sussex, beer, walking tours, ballades, punning in pubs, The Good Companions: in brief, that late Georgian world in which, for the last time, it was possible to evade the tragic sense of life without being branded as an escapist.1

Nowhere does this article mention the name of Squire, and yet every single term seems perfectly suited to sum up his impressively rich, diverse, genial, generous, companionable life. Sadly, the pattern of Squire’s rise and fall also conforms perfectly to that of the archetypal tragic hero: a one-time great and influential figure who, for want perhaps of the prerequisite social pedigree and weakened by a tragic flaw, gradually fell from the heights, and was left to the mercy of pithy jibes and caricatures. Squire was born and raised in Devonshire, in a family largely maintained and nurtured by his mother, a sensitive, literature-loving and highly musical woman, after the father absconded. A scholarship to St John’s College, Cambridge, to read history provided the first major turning-point in his life. He discovered his life-long passion for poetry, also engaging dynamically in play-reading circles and amateur dramatics, musical societies, political debates and sport, and in particular cricket, which remained an abiding passion to the end. During the Cambridge years he also met his future wife, Eileen Wilkinson, a committed fighter for women’s rights and also a gifted literary personality in her own right. Together they joined the Fabian Society and participated in various emerging socialist movements, while Squire began publishing the writings for which he would soon be renowned and highly respected: parodies, epigrams, literary reviews and, of course, poetry. He also published translations of Baudelaire’s poetry that were much admired. His acute musical sensibility played into this success; very much like KM, he had an ear for the natural flow of speech, perfectly pitched alternations between

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638   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 quips and bathos, the passing idiosyncrasies of idiolect and sociolect, ‘a joyous sense of the ridiculous’, and the pulse of rhythm and song-lines woven into and gently tussling with more conventional poetic forms and meters. In the immediate post-Cambridge years, Squire worked his way up through the ranks of journalism, coincidentally starting as an unpaid contributor at the Western Daily Mercury, whose title sounds as an uncanny prediction of the consecration in store at the London Mercury. He then made his way to London, where he began writing for the New Statesman, the Illustrated Daily News and, very fortuitously, the New Age, having moved into the hub of literary energies around A. R. Orage via his wife and his close association with Sydney and Beatrice Webb. The New Age years coincide almost exactly with those when KM and Beatrice Hastings were involved, and indeed they became fellow contributors to the pastiche and parody sections: pastiched political addresses and poems, and almost absurdist dramatic parodies. In these same years (1909–12) Squire also established what would prove to be a life-long friendship with Robert and Sylvia Lynd, and gained a literary reputation of his own for his prose works, one of which, Imaginary Speeches, was curiously published by the same Stephen Swift, publisher and scoundrel in the making, who would soon be undermining Rhythm, the now iconic arts review launched by JMM and J. D. Fergusson, and eventually co-edited by KM.2 During the war years, Squire was classified as unfit for active service on account of poor eyesight; he therefore remained at the heart of London’s more tenuous literary world, gaining recognition as both a journalist and a friend of quality, counting Hilaire Belloc, Edmund Gosse, Desmond MacCarthy, Walter de la Mare, Rupert Brooke and Arnold Bennett in his larger social circle, especially after first championing their works in reviews of his own. He had a keen interest in British war poetry, which was to gain him the warm affection of Siegfried Sassoon, who, when passing on his love referred to Squire as the ‘most generous of men’.3 With his reputation and credit then at their height, the 1920s were indisputably Squire’s years of glory. In 1919, he was appointed as editor of the newly launched London Mercury, which he shaped from the outset as the reflection of his literary loves and passions, and as the sounding box for new literary talent. Within two years, circulation figures rose to an impressive 10,000, and many established and emerging writers featured, month by month, in the Mercury’s pages: Aldous Huxley, Albert Thibaudet, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Max Beerbohm, R. L. Stevenson, Vita Sackville-West, D. S. Mirsky, Maxim Gorky, Maurice Baring, A. R. Powys and Dorothy L. Sayers, to name but a few. Squire proved innovative, too, in terms of cultural coverage – not just the expected arts, literature and drama, but sections focusing on contemporary architecture and land design, children’s writing (edited by his wife), travel and sport, and travel writing. He became a cherished champion of young writers, and also a vital intermediary in the reception of foreign



sir john collings squire   639

writing and the dissemination of British works abroad, Alfred A. Knopf becoming a close associate. Despite this spectacular success, the magazine was, however, run on a shoe-string budget, and Squire himself rarely made more than irregular income. This financial precarity, in addition to his burgeoning interest in other publishing and media-related activities, gradually paved the way to his downfall: his own prolific writing, publishing, editing, lecturing in America and broadcasting, along with an all-engrossing passion for cricket to the extent of organising and playing for his own, soon to be renowned team, the Invalids, and the slowly more regular, more extended evenings at the pub. The quality of his own writing and that of the London Mercury dwindled, especially as his tastes became increasingly associated with bygone times; he failed to drum up enthusiasm for the emerging voices of the early 1930s, the magazine ran into heavy debt, his marriage broke apart, and his alcoholism and physical decline gradually alienated all but his closest friends. It would be these sullied, deteriorated images, reduced to a collection of swift, acerbic caricatures of both the man and the Mercury, that made their way into Modernist history, as if one side of the Georgian world had been totally eclipsed by another: ‘our Georgian writers’, as Virginia Woolf called them, ‘Mr Forster, Mr Lawrence, Mr Strachey, Mr Joyce and Mr Eliot’, and of course ‘Mrs Brown’.4 Claire Davison Notes 1. George Cloyne (1961), ‘Black Humour’, The Times, 30 March, p. 15. 2. See above, p. 628, n. 3. 3. See Patrick Howarth’s rich biography (1963), Squire, ‘Most Generous of Men’, p. 101. 4. See Woolf’s essay ‘Character in Fiction’, pp. 434, 421, 436 (EVW3, pp. 420–38).

[1 December 1920] [Stanford]

December 1st. 1920

Villa Isola Bella Garavan Menton A/M

Dear Mr Squire, Murry sent me on your kind letter this morning. I am very happy to know that you think of publishing my story ‘The Stranger’.1 May I try and explain why I ended with that sentence ‘They would never be alone together again’. Yes, of course, I agree with you that man will forget – almost immediately, really – it certainly won’t be true of his future relations with Janey. But in the ‘keyed up’ state he was in,

640   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 and remembering how it was natural to him to exaggerate everything – to take the most extreme view of everything, and remembering too, his childishness – his childish desire for everything to be allright and really his childish grief that it wasn’t – I feel that nothing less than such an unqualified statement would fit. There in its glimpse of falsity, too, you had him. . . . It was all up with him, for ever. (Of course, it wasn’t!) I cannot hope to change your opinion. But I’ll be awfully sorry if this point prevents you from publishing my story. If you knew what The London Mercury means to an exile! It is devoured even to the covers – and the last number always seems the best. Yours sincerely, Katherine Mansfield. Note 1. See ‘The Stranger’ in CW2, pp. 240–9.

[10 April 1921] [Stanford]

10 V 1921

Villa Isola Bella Garavan Menton A/M

Dear Mr Squire, I am returning my proofs of the Story The Daughters of the Late Col.1 today. May I say, without impertinence that I wrote this story for the Mercury? Your kind letter giving me leave to send another started me off that very afternoon. But of course there was the risk of your not liking it or not thinking it good enough. But it really was a kind of thank offering for that letter. And much the more grateful am I to you now for your review of Bliss in the Observer.2 Of course its delightful and unexpected if people like ones work – But you told me so exactly where I failed, what I’d left undone and what I ought to do. One knows these things but it is the most precious encouragement to feel there is someone who realises what one is getting at! I hope my next work will please you better. Yours sincerely, Katherine Mansfield. P.S. On page 5 of the MS old grandfather Pinner, whose teeth have gone and whose tongue is stiff can’t say extraordinary. I hope the word is all right as it stands ‘esstrodinary’.



sir john collings squire   641

Notes 1. ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ featured in the May issue of the London Mercury. See CW2, pp. 266–83. 2. See Squire’s review ‘Short Stories’, in the Observer, 23 January, p. 4. As KM notes, it is indeed a meticulous, very rich review, all the more so as the reviewer discerningly cites minor flaws at the same time as he pinpoints visual and olfactory detail, creative method, musicality, emotional sensitivity and psychological delicacy.

[12 May 1921] [Stanford]

12 V 1921

Hotel Beau Site. Clarens-Montreux La Suisse.

Dear Mr Squire, Just in case anyone should write to me c/o The Mercury would you kindly readdress the letter to 10 Adelphi Terrace c/o The Nation and Athenaeum. I have left the South of France for good but I haven’t found my mountain yet and letters are so rare in my world that I cant bear the thought of them being lost. Yours very sincerely Katherine Mansfield.

[10 October 1921] [Stanford]

10 71 1921

Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre Valais. Switzerland.

Dear Mr Squire, Many thanks for your letter. I am delighted that you care to publish my story. I feel very lucky. I hope you like it. For a week after it had gone I was lost. Perhaps that sounds absurd about one short story, but to have been back to the Bay after 21 years – no less – was a joy.2

642   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 This is a good place for work. Remote from motors and the Rich-angreat. Its marvellously beautiful. We live in a forest clearing, overlooking a valley and very real live mountains the other side. One begins to tell the time again by the sky. Its a pity though, we are too high for the trees to turn. They stay green. Only the little wild strawberry turns, but it does seem to realise its responsibility; it does the turning for everything else. I was noticing it today. With your leave one has the whole autumn for reposing one’s hand. With best wishes Yours very sincerely Katherine Mansfield. Notes 1. KM appears to have mistyped the date. This letter was sent just after the one to Michael Sadleir on 10 October 1921. 2. See ‘At the Bay’ in the London Mercury, January 1922, and CW2, pp. 342–72.

Lytton (Giles) Strachey (1880–1932)

Introduction Lytton Strachey was one of ten gifted children, born into an impressively talented family that was part of what Leonard Woolf once referred to as an ‘intellectual aristocracy of the middle class’.1 After quite an unconventional education, and studies at Liverpool University, his life took a decisive turn in 1899, when he went up to Cambridge University. Here he was soon elected to the Apostles and became the close friend of all the key male figures of the future Bloomsbury Group: Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, Thoby Stephen, Saxon Sydney-Turner and John Maynard Keynes, all part of the generation of students marked by the personality and teaching of the philosopher G. E. Moore. It was following an introduction by Thoby Stephen that he met the two Stephen sisters, Virginia and Vanessa, whose presence was central to the formation of the Thursday evening gatherings at 46 Gordon Square that represent such a milestone in the history of British Modernism, and the changing map of London’s intellectual and artistic life in the first half of the twentieth century. From his earliest days, Strachey set out to become a writer. Having inherited from his mother a passionate love for and a broad, highly sensitive understanding of the French language and its literature, Strachey’s first major publication was his Landmarks in French Literature (1912), a sadly under-rated work to this day. He then made his début as a public intellectual by becoming an outspoken conscientious objector from the outset of World War One. He wrote pamphlets for the No Conscription Fellowship, and began the series of witty, bitingly satirical biographical portraits, the publication of which, with the now iconic title Eminent Victorians (1918), established him as one of the major critical thinkers and biographers of his generation. It also pinpointed the iconoclastic break with the nineteenth century that the Bloomsbury generation were so often to approve (but which did not prevent any of them from acknowledging many of their own intellectual forebears from exactly the same era). Strachey’s method and style in Eminent Victorians, determined by ‘becoming brevity’ and a ‘freedom of spirit’, as he pithily

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644   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 observes in the opening Preface, were also to prove highly influential on the genre and the intellectual hallmark of biographical writing.2 Curiously, he moved away from this very elegant, incisively sardonic, deft art of portraiture in the next two biographies he published, Queen Victoria (1921) and Elizabeth and Essex (1928), tending instead to a more understanding, gentle mode, closer to the ‘granite and rainbow’ blend of truth and fiction, as memorably defined by Virginia Woolf.3 He continued writing short, often wry and always vividly memorable biographical sketches, which were published in a number of key intellectual journals and reviews. Strachey’s life came to a tragic end in 1932, after undiagnosed and mistreated stomach cancer had rapidly wrecked his already delicate health. He had, by this time, been living for nearly fifteen years with Ralph Partridge, Dora Carrington and Frances Marshall in a tightly bound but emotionally fraught love polygon, that also extended to include various other liaisons. These friends, and the entire Bloomsbury Group, were absolutely devastated by his death, especially Carrington, who committed suicide seven weeks later. His personality and influence, however, remained firmly impressed on the group from then on. Strachey first met KM during the Garsington years when she visited Ottoline Morrell at the manor where he was living for extended periods, working on the land as alternative war work. He evoked their first meeting in a characteristically sly, epithetical cameo in a letter to Virginia Woolf on 17 July 1916, noting: Among the rout was ‘Katherine Mansfield’ – if that’s her real name – I could never quite make sure. Have you ever heard of her? Or read any of her productions? She wrote some rather – in fact distinctly – bright storyettes in a wretched little thing called the Signature, which you may have seen, under the name of Mathilda Berry. She was decidedly an interesting creature, I thought – very amusing and sufficiently mysterious. She spoke with great enthusiasm about the Voyage Out, and said she wanted to make your acquaintance more than anyone else’s. So I said I thought it might be managed. Was I rash? I really believe you’ld find her entertaining. [. . .] I may add that she has an ugly impassive mask of a face – cut in wood, with brown hair and brown eyes very far apart; and a sharp and slightly vulgarly-fanciful intellect sitting behind it.4

Neither KM or Strachey were consistently good at preserving letters and little is known of the extent of their intimacy, but there are enough signs to imply that despite striking differences, and of course KM’s life abroad for months on end, both during the war and afterwards, they keenly appreciated each other’s company. Given key traits in common, despite social and geographical divides, it is nevertheless likely that they would have appreciated each other in terms of their writer’s craft as much as their mutual talent for mischievous irony and role-playing. The mature writing style of both is characterised by tongue-in-cheek comic notes, comedy-of-manners theatricality, tenderness, crystal-clear memories and



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speculations, effortlessly combined and ideally suited to create concise narrative masterpieces. Claire Davison Notes 1. L. Woolf 1961, p. 120. 2. Strachey 1984 [1918], p. xi. 3. V. Woolf, ‘The New Biography’, in EVW4, p. 478. 4. L. Woolf and J. Strachey 1956, pp. 60–1.

[August 1916] [BL] [4 Logan Place, Earl’s Court] Dear Lytton – I think it ought to be allowed to die – No amount of Valerian Drops will keep alive a creature so unwilling1 –      + Katherine. Note 1. Doubtless a reference to the ‘Garsington Chronicle’ (see above, p. 174). Strachey wrote to Carrington in despair, having received his copy on 2 August, saying: Can’t you contrive to stamp it out? Oh dear – after all these years! To be so very far from the correct ton [Fr.: tone]! A ‘thread of eternity’ – mon dieu [Fr.: my God]! The gaiety and gravity of varied lives that cross and intertwine . . . most distressing! No, I will not stretch forth my skill and coloured fantasy. No, no. Mais que dire, que faire? [Fr.: But what is there to say? What’s to be done?] I beg you to waft it all into oblivion. (Levy, p. 316).

[3 October 1916] [BL] Tuesday:

3 Gower Street

I shall love to come to tea on Friday at about 4.30, Thank you.                           K.M.

646   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [late January 1917] [BL] [3 Gower Street, Bloomsbury] Dear Lytton, I am in a state of suspension until the end of next week. God forbid that we should take tea once again in what Miss Chapman1 calls ‘this coldblooded moratorium’. But on Monday I am gone and as soon as the paint is dry I shall write to you and beg you to come & drink a dish of tea.            Yours ever                Katherine. Note 1. Miss Chapman was John Maynard Keynes’s housekeeper at 3 Gower Street; no further information has been traced about her other than a note by one of Keynes’s biographers who observes she was ‘daughter of a bank manager, with whose aid he gave a “series of gay parties”’ (Skidelsky, p. 301).

[late August 1917] [BL] [141A Church Street, Chelsea] Dear Lytton I wish you would come and see me when you are in London again. my address is 141A Church Street Chelsea Please do. I am bitten to death. Herzlichen Gruss1 Katherine. Note 1. (Ger.): Affectionate kisses.

[early June 1919] [BL] 2 Portland Villas East Heath Road NW3. Dear Lytton I am glad you did not come to the Party.1 It was a very dull dog indeed. Perhaps all parties are – Jack Hutchinson came & was so immense. We



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seemed to revolve round him like stars round the moon (no they don’t revolve – no matter.) Frank Swinnerton2 came too with wiskers – like an Irish terrier & Roger3 sat on the sofa with Gerald Hopkins’ poems4 & Edward Dent5 told me such a terrible long story about a cabman who drank some fairy wine – – – its not finished yet – – My fat little sister6 hung with bright Indian beads chattered ever so gaily to your brother. Poor Murry was rather like a porter who had got at last! his passengers into the railway carriage but couldn’t somehow leave them until the train went – the train would not go. Our kitten, full of deliberate malice tried to tear off Bertie’s7 trousers while Bertie talked of Spring in Sicily – and Clive was in Ercles vein8 ––– No I feel my part in parties now is a corner away from the door & the window, beating time with a fan & trying to keep my mittens over my elbows – I hung my head when I thought of my silly little review of The Young Visiters.9 It was very bad & the book really is – as you say – full of suggestions. I cant understand just why it is so awfully attractive. But Miss A. should have died after it instead of jazzing in a plum coloured gown. There was a charming letter of Pet Marjorie’s quoted in last Sunday Observer: ‘I now sit downe on my botome to write to you’. That sense of settling in to her letter couldn’t have been better expressed . . . She was five.10       It is very nice seeing you. I hope you will come again.                   Katherine. Notes  1. KM’s party had taken place on 29 May; Virginia Woolf and Ottoline Morrell were also invited but could not attend.  2. Frank Swinnerton was a fine, discerning critic and literary intermediary, circulating in the margins of all the literary and Modernist circles at the time. See his Introduction and KM’s letters to him below (pp. 649–51).  3. As well as being Britain’s foremost modern art critic, Roger Fry was a perceptive reader and translator of poetry, often drawing on his methods of visual analysis to establish techniques for close reading and formal analysis. In the immediate post-war years, he was interested in the sound semantics of poetry, and the links between foreign languages and intuitive poetic understanding. See Reed, pp. 297–303.  4. Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89) was a British poet who, under the influence of Walter Pater and then the Oxford Movement, converted to Roman Catholicism in 1866 and became a priest and theologian. He wrote some of the finest nature poetry of the mid- to late nineteenth century, bridging the gap from late Romantic pastoral and sensuousness to intensely expressionist, stylised perceptions of the natural world. His development of sprung rhythm, inscape and instress – words and concepts of his own coining – fascinated Fry at the time, while he observed the links between late nineteenth-century British and French poetry.

648   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2  5. Edward Dent (1876–1957) was a Cambridge-based musicologist and music critic who had first come into JMM and KM’s orbit when they were editing the Blue Review, to which he contributed. He was also a fine translator and editor, whose annotated editions of a number of operas reflect a keen attention to the inter-related languages of word and music.  6. KM’s sister Charlotte (Chaddie) lived mostly in London, where she had returned after the death of her husband in India in 1916. See her Introduction, CL1, pp. 198–200.  7. Bertrand Russell and Ottoline Morrell shared a passion for Italy, and especially Sicily, although his letters reflect a greater passion for the rural and pastoral beauties, rather than the Renaissance art.  8. Along with Roger Fry, Clive Bell (1881–1964) was the Bloomsbury Group’s foremost art critic, especially since publishing Art, his essential appraisal of modern art and significant form. He was married to the post-Impressionist artist Vanessa Bell, sister of Virginia Woolf. It was when he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1899 that he first forged the vital friendships with Saxon Sydney-Turner, Leonard Woolf and Lytton Strachey that shaped the rest of their lives, and the destiny of British Modernism. During the war years, Bell had stood out as a committed public intellectual, publishing a number of outspoken antiwar pamphlets. The ‘Ercles vein’ denotes a highblown, bombastic or pompous manner of speaking, especially addressing a company at large; the expression derives from Bottom’s admission in A Midsummer Night’s Dream that he could ‘play Ercles [Hercules] rarely, or a part to tear a cat in, to make all split’, and later that Ercles’ vein is ‘a tyrant’s vein’ (I, ii, 31; 43).  9. The Young Visiters is a novel by the British writer Daisy Ashford (1881– 1972), supposedly written when she was herself a child of nine, and published in 1919, prefaced by J. M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan. The manuscript had been rediscovered and sent to Frank Swinnerton, who brought it to the publisher’s attention. The light irony and child’s perspective on upper society and romantic life assured its considerable public success. KM reviewed the work, with mitigated enthusiasm, for the Athenaeum (see CW3, pp. 469–70). 10. Pet Marjorie was the title given to the posthumously published journal, letters and poems of the child-author Marjorie Fleming (1803–11), a child prodigy much appreciated by Walter Scott. See Wiley 1909. The letter evoked by KM is quoted in the ‘At Random’ column of the Observer on 1 June 1919, p. 8. The unnamed columnist begins: We hear much about Miss Daisy Ashford’s success, but no one seems to have recalled little Marjorie Fleming, the friend of Walter Scott and Dr. John Brown, who before she died at the age of eight had written reams of journals and poems, including a 200-line epic on Mary Queen of Scots. After citing the letter, written before she was six, the columnist concludes by evoking Leslie Stephen’s note in the Dictionary of National Biography: ‘Pet Marjorie’s life is probably the shortest to be recorded in these volumes, but she is one of the most charming characters.’

Frank Swinnerton (1884–1982)

Introduction The Adventures of a Manuscript and Background with Chorus: the titles of these two volumes by Frank Swinnerton, both published in 1956, could serve as apt summaries of his life and works. Despite a very unpromising start in life, Swinnerton’s entire career, from his earliest days as an office boy in a newspaper office to the heights of publishing success at the thriving heart of London’s print-culture world and various social hubs, was defined by the material evolution of manuscripts, from draft form to post-publication appreciation. Posterity, however, has him firmly relegated to the margins – yet another figure in the background of Modernist, inter-war and post-war literature, whose voice is at most part of a chorus of secondary, partly forgotten voices. Books were part of his life from the very beginning. He was the son of a copperplate engraver and a designer and printer, whose health during childhood was so precarious that he was hardly expected to survive, and as a result he received little formal education. Reading and writing stories of his own thus became the focus of his young life. Apprenticed to a print shop at the age of fourteen, his first decisive step towards the life to come was taking a position as a clerk at publishing house Dent’s. His meticulous calligraphy and poised attention to page layout was soon picked up on, as were his perceptive insights as a reader. From page layout and office organisation he moved into manuscript assessment as a publisher’s reader and proved his reliability by backing works by as yet little-known new authors – such as Daisy Ashford, Aldous Huxley and Lytton Strachey – who were soon best-sellers. Meanwhile, he branched into reviewing and literary journalism, while also publishing novels of his own, his 1917 novel Nocturne establishing his reputation for poised, exquisitely balanced yet warm, gently readable prose, that a broad readership loved.1 He was also a cherished friend of nearly all the key literary figures in early to mid-century Britain, such were his talents for listening attentively to all, writing insightfully about fellow writers’ works and so enhancing their public reception, and giving offence to none. While he remained devoted to the literary figures

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650   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 who most influenced him – George Gissing, Arnold Bennett, Henry James, Hugh Walpole and James Barrie – he championed a number of pioneering new literary influences, and was one of the first critics to write perceptively about late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian literature without resorting to the standard clichés about a Russian or Slav soul, or innate Eastern European exoticism. Fortunately, by the end of his life, his vivid recollection of Britain’s rich literary and theatrical life across the decades was being acknowledged by young researchers, and he was renowned for always receiving students and young scholars with warmth and generosity, and providing them with sparkling insights to advance their dissertations. As this one surviving letter from KM attests, she clearly appreciated his writing, and addresses him with the warm vitality of a fellow author. Their contacts date back at least to the Rhythm era, however, when she published a sensitive review of his early, little noticed novel Happy Family (1912); she also reviewed his post-war novel September (1919) for the Athenaeum.2 Indirect links continued throughout her life, via Koteliansky, the Woolfs and above all her cousin Elizabeth von Arnim, whom Swinnerton visited in her Swiss chalet during the summer when KM was at times living in the valley below.3 There is no record of their meeting, however, after the London years. Claire Davison Notes 1. See the particularly glowing Foreword by H. G. Wells to Swinnerton’s 1917 novel Nocturne, pp. 1–8. 2. See CW3, pp. 434–6 and 514–16. 3. See Walker, pp. 228–9.

[8 September 1919] [Queen’s] 2 Portland Villas East Heath Road Hampstead N.W.3. Dear Swinnerton, I cannot refrain from thanking you for your Jane Austen – It was extraordinary pleasure to find it in this weeks Athenaeum.1 What an admirable, beautiful little article it is – Are you going to write more often for the paper? Will Murry persuade you? One of the great joys of being a writer (even though, God knows, I am only a beginner) is enjoying another man’s work – That’s what I have been feeling all this morning. I am leaving England on Wednesday for – more or less – ever



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more. It would be nice to think that you and Murry were seeing something of each other –          Goodbye               K.M. Note 1. Swinnerton contributed an extended, comprehensive essay, ‘Jane Austen’, which was published in two parts on 5 and 19 September (pp. 838–40; 906–8).

Lilian Trench (c. 1869–1961) (née Fox)

Introduction Lilian Isabel Fox was the daughter of Robert Fox. She married the Irish poet and playwright (Frederick) Herbert Trench (1865–1923) in 1891 and they had five children. KM had possibly encountered the couple as early as 1910, when both she and Herbert Trench were contributing to the New Age. By the time the article ‘The Staging of Plays, And a Conversation with Mr. Herbert Trench’ by T. Martin Wood had appeared in the New Age on 2 June 1910,1 KM had already met the editor A. R. Orage and contributed four of her Bavarian stories. In 1901 Herbert Trench’s translation of Dmitry Merezhkovsky’s 1895 novel, Death of the Gods, had been much admired. His early writing career and especially his two poetry volumes, Deirdre Wedded and other Poems (1900) and New Poems (1907), marked him out as a ‘mystical poet’. Joseph Holbrooke’s 1907 Symphony no. 2, Apollo and the Seaman (Dramatic Symphony, Opus 51), set Trench’s best-known and most anthologised poem, ‘Apollo and the Seaman’, to music. Some of Trench’s other poems were set to music by Arnold Bax. From 1909 to 1911 Trench was artistic director of the Haymarket Theatre in London, where his productions of King Lear and Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird were well received. In 1911 the couple moved to Settignano, near Florence. As a result, his later poetry collection, Ode from Italy in Time of War (1915), was inspired by their life in that country. His final volume of poetry, Poems, with Fables in Prose (1918), garnered little critical attention. Gerri Kimber Note 1. Wood, pp. 6–7.

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[August 1919] [ATL] 2 Portland Villas East Heath Road Hampstead NW3. Dear Mrs Trench, It is most kind of you and your husband to ask me to come & stay with you in October. I should love to: thank you most sincerely. I ought to tell you that Ive been ill for nearly three years & am only getting better. That means I cant walk very much or climb & have to go slow. It doesn’t mean anything more – I promise you I never wear a little shawl, or whimper faintly or ask for a cup of Bengers1 . . . I am going over to France in September – Will you be in London before then? It would be very nice if we could meet.          Yours sincerely          Katherine Mansfield Murry Note 1. Benger’s was an enriched milk drink made in Cheshire, England. Advertisements inciting readers to ‘Build up on Benger’s!’ claimed it was ‘milk in a most nourishing and easily digested form’ with added nutriments; this ensured it was ‘very satisfying and seems to soothe the digestion. You sleep better and feel much fitter in the mornings.’ For one example, see advert in The Sphere (1908), 32, p. 12.

Robert Calverly Trevelyan (1872–1951)

Introduction R. C. Trevelyan, known to his friends simply as ‘Bob’, is one of the many elusive figures of the Bloomsbury Group, so often to be encountered in the margins of others’ tales, letters and diary jottings, yet so rarely to be the focus of their – or more contemporary critics’ – interests. Likewise, as is so often the case with these more cameo figures, he proves to be yet another of the fascinating gathering of intellectuals and artists in London in the early years of the twentieth century. ‘Bob’ came from a respected family of senior civil servants and barristers but broke the tradition after studying Classics and Law by choosing to become a poet. He published a number of well-received volumes as well as a large number of translations, a significant number of which were for the Hogarth Press. J. H. Willis even claims that he was ‘the most published, if not the most distinguished, poet among the Hogarth Writers’.1 He was the older brother of the better-known social historian George Macaulay Trevelyan, and like his brother, a former Apostle who first met Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf and Thoby Stephen when they were students at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was particularly good friends with Roger Fry, with whom he had shared rooms during their Cambridge years, but also with the philosopher George Santayana and his fellow thinker, Bertrand Russell, both of whom, of course, connect in their different ways to KM.2 Trevelyan was an outspoken pacifist in World War One and applied for non-combatant status, which was granted, enabling him to work instead for a Quaker mission based in Paris which took care of the protection of books and manuscripts, the provision of a well-stocked lending library for refugees, and practical material support for refugee and exiled writers. His Pterodamozels, which inspired the one, co-signed letter below, is a direct and highly successful testimony to this ethical commitment, but it also bears witness to his artful, sharp and mischievous wit. Subtitled ‘An Operatic Fable’, The Pterodamozels is a verse-play, classical in structure but a biting satirical fantasy in terms of genre. When the four co-signatories affirm their pleasure reading it, a glimpse at the text indicates that by ‘reading’

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r. c. trevelyan  655

they mean reading aloud or performing, and the reader today cannot but wish they had been there to witness the event. The Pterodamozels are winged virgins created by Prometheus when he despairs of the destructive passions of the human creatures he had previously shaped from earth. One of these chimeras is taken aboard an aeroplane piloted by Mr Percival Smith, and one of three English conscientious objectors fleeing to Circe’s island to flee the horrors of war, or, as they put it, ‘compulsory race suicide’.3 Their impassioned dialogues inspire them to conceive a plan by which the Pterodamozels should capture the Kaiser of Germany, the Tsar of Russia and the various kings and presidents of their fellow European allies, along with the prime ministers, cabinet ministers, financiers, journalists and diplomats, bring them all to the island and impose a settlement. The mission is carried out with such aplomb and such flights of eloquence that it succeeds splendidly; the nations unite and Percival is elected President of their newly founded World Federation of Republics. Extensive celebrations ensue in which the Pterodamozels discard their virginity and jubilantly celebrate a new, collective wedlock with a saner, delightedly liberated human race. As befits an operatic fable, the play itself includes a number of solo arias and chorus hymns which can only have enhanced the already exuberant performers, one afternoon in Rodmell in August 1917. Claire Davison Notes 1. Willis, p. 142. 2. See above, p. 249, n.10. 3. Trevelyan, p. 27.

[19 August 1917] [Sussex] [Postcard] Asheham House, Rodmell Lewes (Sussex)1 Sunday Aug. 19 1917 We the undersigned, wish to say that we have read the Pterodamozels with great pleasure, & wish to thank the author. Virginia Woolf Katherine Mansfield Lytton Strachey Edward Garnett

656   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Note 1. The address is that of Virginia and Leonard Woolf; the postcard is equally in Virginia Woolf’s hand-writing, with the signatures of the three others at the end. Lytton Strachey wrote to Carrington the day after they sent this card, giving a brief account of the weekend house party, noting ‘Bunny and his father [David and Edward Garnett] appeared for supper yesterday – a queer couple! Katherine of course remarked that the père [father] looked like a toy sheep, and that he ought to be put on wheels. (But I don’t do her justice)’. See Levy 2005, p. 365. See also LVW2, p. 175.

(Thomas) Arnold Trowell (1887–1966)

Introduction Thomas Wilberforce Arnold Trowell, the twin brother of Garnet Trowell, was born in Wellington, New Zealand, into a thriving immigrant population.1 He was an eminent and successful musician in the United Kingdom from 1907 until his death in 1966. Notwithstanding a large number of pedagogical compositions that are still played by young cellists, he has virtually been forgotten since. However, some of his chamber works, notably those written during World War One and including the Piano Quintet Opus 45, are worthy of revival. KM – who fictionalised her relationship with ‘Tom’ in her unfinished novel Juliet – probably met her idol between April and September 1900 in Wellington, at which time she began cello lessons (or continued piano lessons) at the home of her classmate Esme Dean.2 As the older and more advanced musician, Tom was largely oblivious to the schoolgirl crush that KM had on him and, as eldest child-designate, studiously worked towards a music career, only really establishing a friendship with KM once they were abroad.3 Assisted by mother Kate and sister Dolly Trowell – who visited the brothers in Germany early in May 1904 – and possibly with KM as their guest, the family travelled from Germany to Brussels. KM recalled events years later: ‘There is a little child opposite me in a red cloak sleeping; she shakes her hair just as Dolly did when she was a girl in Brussels so many years ago.’4 During this sojourn KM’s songs Love’s Entreaty and Night – a copy of which is inscribed ‘To Tom from Kathleen’, dated 13 August 1904, and survives today – were published in Germany. KM’s diary entry for New Year’s Eve, 1904 (see CW4, pp. 13–14), which might be addressed to Tom, possibly demonstrates an ongoing friendship sustained by intense but infrequent meetings abroad. Whereas the construction of the letter is conventional, the stream-of-consciousness ramble of the next surviving draft letter, dated 11 August 1907, suggests the influence of Oscar Wilde. Another letter to Tom, written late in January 1908, acts to vent the frustration of the moment for KM (When can

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658   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 I go to England?). Despite, or because of, the German text, the tone of the letter – which was probably both sent and received – seems genuine. By 1908 – after he had begun using the professional name Arnold – Tom had already met his wife-to-be, Eileen Woodhead, a cellist from South Africa.5 Thus KM, who was still nominally in love with him, had to compete for his attention with Eileen, as well as her former classmate Gwen Rouse and Australian cellist Winnie Parsons – the latter already boarding at the Trowell household when KM came to stay in the winter of 1908–9.6 KM was still possessive of Arnold, once admonishing him for attempting to put his arm around her close friend and classmate Ida Baker on a train.7 Responding to the flattery, Tom dedicated his Morceaux Opus 20 for violoncello and piano ‘to Kathleen Beauchamp’. Inevitably, the level of the New Zealanders’ intimacy diminished. Notwithstanding this disappointment, introductions to touring musicians – including Boris Hambourg and Vera French, who briefly became a close friend – must have stimulated KM’s bourgeoning artistic identity at this time.8 In 1909 – after the Beauchamp and Trowell families became estranged – Arnold briefly became a celebrity. The list of artists, mainly singers, that he was billed alongside form a miniature who’s who: Blanche Marchesi, Nellie Melba, John MacCormack, Jan and Mark Hambourg and Alice Verlet.9 Later he became Professor of Cello at the Guildhall School of Music (from 1927 to 1959), although eventually, as KM’s posthumous career waxed, Trowell’s career waned. Martin Griffiths Notes 1. See Griffiths 2012. 2. Robert Parker – who took a six-month sabbatical at this time – and Mrs Edwin Dean, Esme’s mother, were Arnold and KM’s piano teachers, respectively. 3. Lindley Barnett Trowell, the eldest Trowell brother, died in 1894. 4. Letter to Garnet Trowell, 28–30 April 1909 (see below p. XXX). Although no trip by KM and her sisters to Germany in 1904 is chronicled by any biographer of the writer, Dolly’s single visit to Brussels in 1904 is, as far as this writer is concerned, proof that these events occurred. 5. Tom’s adoption of a professional name – Arnold – inspired KM, still known at the time as Kathleen Beauchamp, to change her name. See Kimber 2016, p. 130. 6. For information on Winnie Parsons, see Anon. 1909, p. 3. 7. See also Tomalin, p. 57. 8. New Zealand-born violinist Vera French – who performed professionally alongside Nellie Melba and Cyril Towsey – discouraged KM from associating with Floryan Sobieniowski after her pregnancy in 1909. See Kimber 2015, pp. 59–83. 9. John MacCormack was a superstar of the age and Trowell retained the experience of appearing alongside the singer, in Hull on 15 February 1909, as a major highlight of his professional career.



(thomas) arnold trowell  659

[11 August 1907] [ATL] [Notebook draft] [4 Fitzherbert Terrace, Wellington] Sunday 11. viii 07.1 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 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 lonliness 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 & 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 – Kātherine Schönfeld – – 2 Notes 1. There is no knowing whether this is really the draft of a letter intended to be, or actually, sent or whether it is composed as a diary entry in dramatic monologue form, the address to an absent other being an integral part of the poetic form. The stylised, rather sentimental conventions and pastiched archaisms (‘tho’ you marry another – tho we never meet again’) certainly lend weight to the idea that the entry is more of an apprentice writer’s self-conscious exercises in genre-writing, rather than any sincere outpouring of emotion. 2. (Ger.): Schön – Feld; (Eng.): Fair – field; (Fr.): Beau – champ. This is just one of the many pseudonyms that KM would adopt over the years. Here its interest lies in its Germanic rendering of her family’s French-derived name.

660   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [23 January 1908] [ATL] Outside the Town Hall, January 23rd Mein lieber Freund1 – Die letze woche hat Dr Crosby2 mir – Ihre ‘Reverie du Soir’3 – mitgebrocken – So muss ich etwas schreiben – Ich finde diese Werk so wunderbar schon – so traumerisch – und auch so sehnsuchtsvoll. Hoffenlich, diese Jahre – hore ich Ihr die Reverie du Soir in einer Konzert spielen! Meine gute Freundin Ida Baker hat mir mehrerere Blatter von den Zeitunge gegeben – Was für eine succes 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 Strasse4 – 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!5 Notes 1. (Ger.): 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 the Rêverie du Soir in a concert! My good friend Ida Baker has given me several pages from the newspapers. What a success merveille [Fr.: wondrous] 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 [Fr.: newspapers, i.e. cuttings] 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. 2. Dr Arthur Crosby was the superintendent at Mount View Mental Hospital in Wellington. He was a keen music lover. He socialised in the same circles as KM’s parents and encouraged KM’s artistic longings in her early years. See CW1, pp. 276–8. 3. ‘Rêverie du soir’ is a work for cello and piano (Opus 12, no. 1), written by Arnold Trowell in 1907. KM was also studying it that year. See CW4, p. 85.



(thomas) arnold trowell  661

4. The former home of the Trowell family was 18 Buller Street in Wellington, where KM used to go for her music lessons. She immortalised it in her story ‘The Wind Blows’ (1920), in which the piano teacher himself becomes Mr Bullen. See also Kimber 2016, p. 16. 5. (Ger.): ‘Must write German. There are so many people – who know nothing of this language at all!’ This note provides an early illustration of KM’s playful but also tactical inclusion of admissions and asides in foreign languages as a means to both heighten their coded signifying powers, and render meaning more obscure, should unwelcome readers come across her writing.

Garnet Trowell (1887–1947)

Introduction Garnet Carrington Trowell, violinist and twin brother of Arnold Trowell, was born and raised in Wellington, New Zealand. Considered the shy and less talented of the two twins, Garnet was nevertheless a fine musician. As an eleven-year-old, he toured the North Island of New Zealand with Pollard’s Opera Company Orchestra and performed alongside his father, Thomas Trowell, with the Wellington Orchestral Society. He attended Saint Patrick’s College in Wellington, where his father taught the violin. To further the twins’ musical careers they were sent to Europe in August 1903. Initially, they studied at Dr Hoch’s Conservatorium in Frankfurt, Germany, but the withdrawal of key teachers from the institution precipitated a relocation to the Brussels Conservatoire in 1904. While studying at Queen’s College in London, KM and her sisters were taken to Europe on a number of occasions, which allowed them to see the Trowell brothers perform. KM also attended Garnet’s début London performance – with Mrs Barrington-Waters (sister-in-law of Val Waters, KM’s maternal uncle) and Arnold Trowell – at the inauguration of the New Zealand Association at the Westminster Palace Hotel on Tuesday, 3 July 1906. The brothers subsequently went back to Brussels for concerts in the autumn of the same year, at which time KM reluctantly returned to New Zealand with her family. While in her home country, the frustrated author wrote letters to the Trowell family in London but her emotional focus at this time was not on Garnet, but on his twin brother, Arnold, and their sister, Dolly. Upon her return to London in August 1908, KM, realising that Arnold’s affections lay elsewhere, quickly switched her attentions to Garnet. The latter was frequently at London’s Lyric Theatre, performing operas by Wagner, Verdi, Gounod and Leoncavallo with the Moody Manners Opera Company. With his long hair and long cigarettes, Garnet easily passed for a bohemian musician, at least in the eyes of an impressionable KM. A physical relationship – ‘we will never get the landladies out of the room’ (see below, p. 676) – probably began in September and continued in November when Garnet had a week’s respite from touring

    662



garnet trowell  663

with the Moody Manners Opera Company – ‘I’m afraid you will be thoroughly spoiled’ (below, p. 692). The timing of KM’s pregnancy suggests a further liaison in December when Garnet spent three weeks in London for Christmas, or early in the New Year.1 The multiple surviving letters from KM to Garnet cover a period of less than a year. Several offer clues to the shrouded life of the writer during this time, including KM’s attendance, as a reporter, at a suffrage meeting held at the Portman Rooms in Dorset Street.2 Importantly, the letters hint at early non-literary influences, specifically the musicality of elocution or recited verse.3 KM was aware that Garnet was co-writing a serial ‘Dictionary of Cellists’, which was published in the Strad from 1905 to 1911. She sent him her ‘work’, presumably to critique, also commenting several times on a ‘journal’ or ‘book’ that they would write together.4 KM was fascinated with theatre, dance and movement – pianist, dancer and choreographer Maud Allan is mentioned twice in the letters (pp. 668 and 697)5 – as she expresses her desire to find ‘tone’, the ‘secret’ ingredient for her writing. KM even toured as a chorus girl with Garnet and the Moody Manners in Glasgow and Liverpool.6 Despite the pair enjoying their first extended period together without parental supervision, the experience was ultimately disappointing. The reality of the daily grind of the travelling performer quelled any ideas of marriage.7 Though he was no soloist or celebrity, Garnet’s musical career in London was substantial. As well as touring with the Carl Rosa Opera Company, he performed with the London Symphony, the Royal Philharmonic and the Thomas Beecham Orchestra. Garnet was an active proponent of his brother’s compositions, especially after he emigrated to Durban, South Africa, in April 1922.8 Although Garnet had already met Marion Smith (1894–1973), an accomplished pianist and former student of the Royal Academy of Music in London, they were not married until they were settled in Durban. Later on, living in Windsor, Ontario, during the 1930s, he taught and performed on the violin, gave concert broadcasts for radio, and played chamber music and solos as far afield as Detroit, Michigan. Often Marion provided piano accompaniment. At this time Garnet took a keen interest in photography and was vice-president of the Windsor Art Academy. During World War Two, his work at the Ford motor plant – which produced tens of thousands of Bren Gun Carriers (non-combat tanks) – precipitated a decline in his health and he stopped performing. He died of cancer in 1947.9 Martin Griffiths Notes 1. The lovers also probably met when Garnet took a week off from touring in February 1909. Biographical references to a liaison in Hull (e.g. Alpers 1980, p. 98n) suggest KM and Garnet attended one of Arnold’s concerts.

664   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 2. See below, p. 667. The venue, known as ‘The Portman Rooms’, as advertised in the ‘Programme of Events’ – Votes for Women (edited by Frederick and Emmeline Pethick Lawrence), 17 September 1908, p. 2 – was officially on Dorset Street but had alternate access from Baker Street (the location mentioned in KM’s letter). See (last accessed 9 December 2020). 3. See below, p. 696. 4. See below, pp. 694 and 687. 5. The Canadian-born pianist, dancer and choreographer Maud Allan (1873– 1956) had been settled in Europe since the end of the previous century, and dancing professionally since 1900, often in costumes of her own design and making. In 1908, she had toured Britain extensively, the conclusion of which was designed to coincide with the publication of her revealing part-autobiography, part-dancing guide, My Life and Dancing. She had gained the nickname ‘The Salomé Dancer’ after playing the lead role in Vision of Salomé, whose ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ had shocked and titillated public opinion at the time. The Maud Allan season began and ended at the Palace Theatre in London. See Cherniavsky, pp. 160–84. 6. See below, p. 705. Auditions for the £2-per-week position in the chorus were held in Liverpool on 22 March 1909, as advertised in The Era (London: Anon) on 20 March 1909, p. 3. For more information see Griffiths 2021, pp. 127–36. 7. Kathleen Jones suggests that the period the couple spent together – prior to the Moody Manners tour – amounted to only three weeks. However, it was probably somewhat more, given that Garnet had five-and-a-half weeks’ holiday during this time. See Jones, p. 103. 8. According to Garnet’s niece, Pamela Rice (in an interview with the author in Seaton, Devon, in 2007), the move to South Africa was precipitated by publicity concerning his association with Katherine Mansfield. 9. See (last accessed 9 December 2020).

[10 September 1908] [Windsor] [52 Carlton Hill, St. John’s Wood] My dearest – I feel I must just write you a little note – Fate has been so unkind to you both today. Dearest – I’ve wanted you ever since I saw you yesterday – I have been wretched – I don’t know why exactly – but I feel we have so much to say and so little time to say it in before you go away. Dearest – I love you so intensely that I feel I could tell you so now until we both are old – and then you wouldn’t understand – You are my life, now; I feel as though your kisses had absorbed my very soul into yours – that even when I am with others the real life – our life – must go on together – all the same.



garnet trowell  665

Last night I went to Queens Hall1 – do you understand me when I say the hall was full of emptiness. I feel I was all the time searching for you – through the music – through everything. Everybody I saw seemed to give me some faint resemblance – you know? I love you – I love you. I shall see you tomorrow. Get up & wake me early and let’s go for a walk before breakfast – you & I. Après tout2 – I am afraid. I’ll have to run away with you & live on a farthing a week down in Cornwall –– I have nothing to say because I am feeling so much. Do you think you will be home before me tonight? Pour la première fois3 we sleep in the same house. I shall surely dream. Yours Kass I can’t see you until tomorrow – quelque chose d’expliquer.4                          K Notes 1. KM attended one of the concerts of that year’s ‘London Proms’ or Promenade Concerts, the seasonal logic of which had been devised by the patron and impresario Robert Newman. The design of this eight-week-long summer music season was further shaped by the high-profile appointing of Henry Wood as sole conductor, using the Queen’s Hall as the venue, and its own house orchestra as main players. The programme that evening (‘Prom 22’) included Max Bruch’s violin concerto, Brahms’s 3rd Symphony and Tchaikovsky’s ‘Marche slave’. 2. (Fr.): After all/after everything. 3. (Fr.): For the first time. 4. (Fr.): There’s something to explain.

[16 September 1908] [Windsor] [Beauchamp Lodge, Warwick Crescent, Paddington] Wednesday Night. I have just come back from Carlton Hill, dearest, where I spent the afternoon – and stayed on to dinner. It was so delightful – they were really happy and merry, and I feel, very often – you understand me? I can bring happiness to that house – You see, my beloved – you have taught me so much of the joy of life – that the world is a glorious thing – and to be alive in it a tremendous delight – that I feel I must communicate it wherever I go. And when Mr and Mrs Trowell do not look on the bright side of things – I talk Beethoven to the one – and play with the other – and kiss Doll – so it goes better – du verstehst?1

666   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Dearest of all the world – you are never out of my thoughts. I love you – I love you eternally. With you I am secure and rested & content – and only with you – Oh, with you, I could conquer the world – Oh, with you I could catch hold of the moon like a little silver sixpence – & play ball in the garden with Dolly – with any one of the planets. Garnet – take me – hold me – kiss me – Let me lose myself in you – for I am yours. When I think of you I feel that a flame leaps up in my body. Words are so restricting and writing to you I feel they are but pebbles thrown into a bottomless sea – they create ripples on the surface of a great depth. I saw today such a fine picture of Beethoven.2 It would have appealed to you – I know – the wind seemed to be in his hair, and he seemed to hear with his eyes – comprends tu?3 – frowning so. There is a sublime simplicity in Beethoven, not in accord with the spirit of our times. He loved the universe and God and love and virtue with a great, abiding natural love – never realised the subtle joy in pain – which is the supreme ecstasy of modern music. He was like a giant child walking over the earth. Flying out of houses which poisoned him into the open air – lying on his back in a field with his face turned to the sky – and writing village band music and the morning stars singing together in one vast elemental surge – How absurd! I to write to you about music – – – – My darling, my dearest – while you are you I must needs be happy, and our Future seems to me such glorious happiness – such a perfect outlook that I feel I must run forward. Lying in my bed at night – I feel your kisses burn my mouth – I long inexpressibly for you – I love you love you love you Kass. Dearest, do send little Doll a note; she is waiting for a letter from you – anxiously. Find time to; I know you are terribly busy, and you remember Mrs Trowell’s birthday4 on the 20th? Thought I might remind you. Goodnight. Notes 1. (Ger.): Do you understand? 2. KM possibly has in mind one of the very famous series of pictures by the Viennese painter Julius Schmid (1854–1935), showing Beethoven intensely focused and inward-looking during his country walks. 3. (Fr.): Do you understand? 4. Of Welsh origin, Garnet’s mother, Kate Wheeler (1860–1943), was in her early twenties when she first arrived with her family in New Zealand; one year later, in 1883, she married Thomas Luigi Trowell.



garnet trowell  667

[17 September 1908] [Windsor] [Beauchamp Lodge, Warwick Crescent, Paddington] I shall send you what work I have; it’s very little just now. K.X. Thursday Night. Midnight. My dearest, I opened your letter just now and the three photographs fell into my thrilled and happy hands – Now you are framed on my writing table – you are on a little low shelf by my bed – and even against my candlestick; so your face shall be the last thing I see when I blow out the light, and go to sleep. I think they are splendid – they are you – I’ve been trying to tell you which one I like best, but each one I look at is so precious that I really cannot. I’ve said:– ‘now Kathleen, suppose you had to part with one – which two would you keep’, but that’s no use – I could never give up any. Thank you, darling for these – I must send you one next month of myself – I want to do so very much indeed, but funds won’t permit until October. Ever since early this morning I have been at work, and this evening I ended with going to report on a Suffrage Meeting at 8 o’clock in Baker Street.1 It was my first experience. Immediately I entered the hall two women who looked like very badly upholstered chairs pounced upon me, and begged me to become a voluntary worker. There were over two hundred present – all strange looking, in deadly earnest – all looking, especially the older ones, particularly ‘run to seed’. And they got up and talked and argued until they were hoarse, and thumped on the floor and applauded – The room grew hot and in the air some spirit of agitation of revolt, stirred & grew. It was over at 10.30. I ran into the street – cool air and starlight – I had not eaten any dinner, so bought a 2d sandwitch at a fearful looking café, jumped into a hansom, & drove home here, eating my sandwitch all the way – it was a tremendous two pen’north – almost too big to hold with both hands – & decided I could not be a suffragette – the world was too full of laughter. Oh, I feel that I could remedy the evils of this world so much more easily – don’t you? Starlight and a glad heart and hunger and beef in hansoms, and the complexities of life vanish like cobwebs before a giant’s broom. But I must needs look at life differently to others – wonderful and life giving miracle – you are alive – nothing else matters. Beloved, do you know what beautiful, satisfying letters you write? I kiss the pages where your hand has rested, and isn’t this a strange fact: this day I wake, and think I could not love him more – and yet each night, before sleeping I think ‘Well, I do love him more’ – So it is every day. Dearest, always after I post a letter to you I feel I have said so little. You must read between the lines, and then you will understand that I live for you – Tomorrow night I am going away to spend until Sunday night with some relations. I shall write to you from there, but your letters must

668   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 wait until I get back on Monday – I don’t feel that I could live through the days – but I must. Husband – you are all I have in the world, and you are the whole world – I love you. Oh, words, and my heart is almost breaking with joy and love – I worship you. Kiss me – take me – I am yours – How are we going to wait for Xmas? Goodnight – darling – Note 1. Since the appointment of H. H. Asquith as Prime Minister earlier that year, various groups of London suffragists and suffragettes had stepped up their campaigns in favour of votes for women, and increasingly militant tactics were being adopted as the only means to bring about a shift in the visibility of their cause and thereby appeal to benefactors and public sympathies. ‘Women’s Sunday’, 21 June, had been declared that year, leading to the biggest rally to date in London. See Pankhurst, pp. 280–9. KM may have been intending to try her hand at freelance reporting, as her near contemporary Rebecca West was doing at the time, either for one of the feminist papers or for a little magazine of the times.

[23 September 1908] [Windsor] [Beauchamp Lodge, Warwick Crescent, Paddington] Wednesday Night. Heart’s Dearest – I dreamed last night, most vividly, that I was with you. It was so sweet that I trembled to wake, and yet when I woke there was a letter from you – So reality was as good as dreaming. All that you say to me seems almost curiously familiar, for beloved – I feel it so strongly – Know that I shall love you eternally. When I think for one moment of what the Future holds for us together, what days, and oh, my Husband, what nights, I feel really that I do not belong to this earth – it’s too small to hold so much. You and I we are surely universal. Other husbands and wives seem to me to be sitting in corners, you and I – we are exploring the whole house – from cellar to garret – nicht?1 If all the world left me and you remained then Life would be full – if all the world came to me and you were not here, in my soul, then Life would be empty. . . . Oh, I could lock you in a prison of my arms and hold you there – until you killed me. Then, perhaps, I would be satisfied. I love you, Garnet, I love you. There is one comfort – every moment that we are parted brings us a moment nearer . . This afternoon I went to the Palace Music Hall & saw Maud Allen, the danseuse2 – She was wonderful – As she dances, under the changing lights, coming and going to the sound of a thin, heady music which



garnet trowell  669

marks the rhythm of her movements like a kind of clinging drapery, she seems to sum up the appeal of everything that is passing, and coloured and to be enjoyed. Dance music is wonderfully fascinating in its way. The rhythm of a walze, slow, insinuating, gathering impetus which is held back, creeping into the blood; and it is possession and abandonment, the very symbol of love – tu comprends?3 It is a clear, still night. I think I shall go down to the Victoria Hall & wait for the Opera to be over,4 then walk home with you, arm-in-arm. Are you tired, dearest. Would you like me to cut you some sandwitches, and I promise not to forget the mustard! Above me a woman is practising the drum – not an inspiring instrument. It sounds like the growling of some colossal dog, and I know I shall have dreadful nightmares. She is working to play next year at Westgate in a chef d’oeuvre5 called ‘The Policeman’s Chorus’6 –Bien, mon cher,7 there is surely nothing like aiming high – I wish her success! Oh, the people here would make you laugh. Three months ago I would have rather scoffed at them, now I feel that I can’t help loving them all – Beloved, I do so feel I can afford to be generous. Oh, dear, next door someone has started scales on the trombone – curiously like a Strauss Tone Poem of Domestic Snoring.8 I read & reread your precious letters – I’m still terribly busy, but over and above everything there is you – you – you. I am yours for ever. You know that – yet I can’t help but tell you over & over – Goodnight darling         Kass. Notes 1. (Ger.): Aren’t we? 2. Maud Allan (1873–1956) was a Canadian-born pianist, dancer and choreographer. See Introduction and n. 5, pp. 663; 664, n. 5. 3. (Fr.): Do you understand? 4. The proposed walk is a fantasy; the Moody Manners Opera Company were performing The Merry Wives of Windsor and The Marriage of Figaro that week at the Victoria Hall in Halifax. 5. (Fr.): Masterpiece. 6. ‘The Policeman’s Chorus’ is one of the best-known songs from the opera The Pirates of Penzance (1879) by Arthur Gilbert and W. S. Sullivan. Westgateon-Sea was a popular holiday resort on the Kent coast. 7. (Fr.): Well, my dear. 8. The German composer and conductor Richard Strauss (1864–1949), famous for his dramatic operas Salome and Elektra, made pioneering use of the tone poem or symphonic poem as a high Romantic narrative in musical form. His Opus 53 is known as Symphonica Domestica, a large-scale orchestral work evoking, in thematic musical motifs, the daily domestic lives of a family.

670   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [2 October 1908] [Windsor] [Beauchamp Lodge, Warwick Crescent, Paddington] Friday Night. My beloved – I am sitting, curled up in a big armchair – a red armchair which has just been put into my room – my writing case on my knee – and I bridge over the miles that separate us – I bridge them over with a thousand loving thoughts – and fly into your arms – Do you know, Garnet, I feel so curiously that you are the complement of me – that ours will be the Perfect Union – why I feel, my darling, that together, we could hold the world in the hollow of our hands, and watch it revolving – Apart from you Garnet – as I am, now, each separate thing in the world is a miracle, a revelation – because I seem to see all with double force – you and I – together – what will happen?. . . . . . My wonderful Husband – teach me – Yes, I feel that, too – Since I have lived through you – I am so happy – so ready to laugh with sheer joy – I had lost my way in a forest – seeing terror in shadows, bogeys in trees – you, you found me – – – – – – I think, Garnet, of us meeting again – being together and alone – a sensation creeps over me as though the very spirit of life itself within me, quivered and woke – Do you know exactly what I mean? So curious it is, and so tremendously intense – I love you – I love you – How can one speak of anything so vast as this happiness – I, too, feel that words will not express it – Today I had my photograph taken for you – but the proofs do not come until next week, and I shall send you copies the week after. How very overweight these envelopes must be! Oh, I wonder that mine do not really burst their bonds in that stuffy red pillar box – Letters, letters, they say so little, but they mean so much. It makes me happy, Darling, that you have our cigarettes. We must smoke those on our honeymoon – nicht?1 I shall take a box with me – and we shall lean out of the window, and look up at the mystical – night sky – which always fascinates and calls me – verstehst du2 – and the smoke of our Abdullah cigarettes,3 mingling together, shall wreathe itself into a fragrant incense upon the altar of – – – – – Love  Love  Love I went into your room today – beautiful sunshine streamed through the window – touched your books with my hands – stood where we had stood – so closely together, and still, my dearest, the hot air vibrated with the passion of our kisses – the silence seemed to sing. I must go to bed – Goodnight, darling – Folded closely to you – I kiss you – I am yours for ever Kass.



garnet trowell  671

Notes 1. (Ger.): Mustn’t we? 2. (Ger.): Do you understand? 3. Abdulla Cigarettes had been launched in 1902 by a British tobacco company based in New Bond Street. The brand name and packaging reflected the exoticism of Egyptian and Turkish tobacco, along with the glamour and seduction of smoking. Advertising targeted women more than men in the first decade of the century.

[3 October 1908] [Windsor] [Beauchamp Lodge, Warwick Crescent, Paddington] Saturday Night. Dearest – now if we were in our own home – we would be lying on a sofa before an open window – watching the moon gild the autumn trees in our garden – happy with the long night before us – and the days and nights of – how many years – to spend together. I am sure we would both be smoking, and I rather feel that we would have some coffee – not a good idea at this late hour – you know! And the warm night wind would be blowing the window curtains languidly, to and fro – We would lie still, whispering or silent, until, suddenly – – mon dieu,1 I know – do you? My poor boy! What a long journey before you tomorrow. I hope it is not so stiflingly hot as it is in London. I am afraid you will be very tired; do take care of your precious self. I had a letter from Gwen2 today. She really can’t explain what happened. It was a weak letter – you know, Garnet, lacked stability. I feel that Vivian Kidd3 could sway her in the same way time and again. Really it is difficult to know what to think. However Tom seems satisfied.4 She spoke of you and me in a way that made me exceedingly angry. She cannot understand what we mean to each other, and I – stupidly perhaps – feel that I would rather she did not mention us – I feel she has no right to – verstehst du?5 Well, darling, our Godmother is well and happy.6 A strange girl, you know, Garnet. She is more than good to me, and we have both brought into her life all the happiness it contains. That’s a strange fact, but I have to realise it. She never, by any chance, takes the initiative – must be shown everything – never thinks for herself, and is content, yes, radiantly content, to have a little spare room in our life, and, presumably, sew on buttons. Today I took little Doll to hear Madame Carreño.7 We became so enthusiastic, but of course, you were there. Didn’t you feel me slip my hand into yours, dear? What a tremendous genius! I am staggered by

672   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 her playing, by her tone, which is the last word in tonal beauty and intensity and vitality – No other pianist can so sway me. After the Concert we went & saw her. She kissed me and held my hands, and said in her fascinating voice:– ‘My dear child, I must see much of you. I am your friend, remember, and I hope you know I played the Erlkönig quite for you’.8 She wore a long green silk shawl over her dress, and her strange face, half tragedy and half laughter, looked brilliantly beautiful. There is, indeed, a woman after my own heart. This evening I had my New Zealand letters; they always strangely depress me. I think the shadow of the old life creeps over me, and I feel so out of touch with them – they hurt me bitterly. However Vera says ‘We have never been such a happy united family’, so I ought to rejoice, I suppose. Beloved, it is only you that I want. Thinking of you I could almost weep for longing for the shelter of your arms. I love you – I love you, and no one else in the world matters – and I cannot help feeling the necessity of you, my darling, more each day. I so need you. I want to come to you, I want you to come to me. You must come home in six weeks’ time. When can you know for certain? Christmas is too far off, dearest. If my Patience had to stretch so far it would surely break. Yet that is nonsense, I could wait fifty years for you – Well, dearest, it is so late, you had better lock the windows and doors – I shall go to bed – come soon. I feel lonely tonight, and yet almost savagely passionate. Let us go up the stairs, together and look in at little Doll’s room – she is sleeping. And, lying in your arms, I fancy the world is beating to the beating of our hearts. I love you – I love you, passionately, with my whole soul and body. Goodnight darling Kass Notes 1. (Fr.): My God. 2. Gwen Rouse was a schoolfriend from Queen’s College, who had started going out with Garnet’s twin brother, Tom (Arnold) Trowell, before KM arrived in London in the summer of 1908, prompting KM’s affections to be transferred from Tom to Garnet. See Kimber 2016, p. 206. 3. Although clearly a mutual friend or schoolfriend, no background information has been traced to identify Vivian Kidd. 4. The transfer of KM’s love interest from Tom (Arnold) to Garnet would appear to be, at least in part, at the root of an ongoing quarrel between friends. 5. (Ger.): Do you understand? 6. This is one of KM’s rarer nicknames for Ida Baker, the steadfast, benevolent implications of which were in fact to hold true for the rest of KM’s life. In the Windsor archive of KM’s letters to Garnet, there is also a letter written to Garnet from Baker, dated to 29 July 1910, written well over a year after the romance between KM and Garnet had ended. The letter reads as follows:



garnet trowell  673

Thursday.

2 Luxborough House Paddington Street Tel:– Pad. 1327

Garnet – I am so sorry we have not met after all – especially as I have to go away next Tuesday – K. came to see me today & asked me to send you this – and also to give you her address. She is living just now with some literary friends also on the staff of the New Age – & perhaps later will be able to take a small flat for herself – She will never join G. Bowden again – she only did so at the beginning of the year because she thought it her duty for the sake of her mother & sister & brother – Now she is Katherine Mansfield – 39 Abingdon Mansions Pater Street, Kensington –––––––––––––––– That is her writing name – & she is taking it almost entirely now –– I am so sorry – once more – we have not met – I shall be in a good deal of tomorrow I think, especially the later part of the afternoon, if you can come up & chance it – or of course you can always phone to be sure – Ah well – if not perhaps later – I feel there is so much to hear & say – always    Ida – As the letter reveals, KM had tasked Baker with meeting Garnet, but this had so far not proved possible. She had given Baker something to give to Garnet (perhaps a love token he had given her), and also wanted him to have her address. As Baker poignantly notes at the end of her letter, there was clearly much ‘to hear & say’ – on both sides. What KM’s reasons might have been for wanting to reconnect with Garnet at this time remain unclear: possibly to assuage her own guilt, or perhaps to see if the relationship could be rekindled. Baker does not discuss it in her memoirs. 7 Although largely marginalised or forgotten by music historians, the Venezuelan pianist Teresa Carreño (1853–1917) was frequently presented as one of the finest virtuosos of her era, sometimes nicknamed the ‘Walkyrie’, ‘Amazon’ or ‘Lioness’ of the keyboard. She was also an esteemed teacher and composer, and a fine mezzo soprano. The romantic recital given at the Bechstein (future Wigmore) Hall in London on 3 October included Schubert’s Der Erlkönig (setting to music Goethe’s poem ‘The Erl King’) and Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata, no. 21, Opus 53. 8 The ‘Erl King’ story and atmosphere, recounting the death of a child who is mysteriously assailed by a demon tree king while his father carries him home through a dark wood, had a lasting impact on KM’s poetic imagination and creative writing at the time. The original ballad formed part of Goethe’s 1782 music-drama Die Fischerin (‘The Fisherwoman’), comprising numerous fairy tale-inspired scenes in high Romantic vein.

674   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [5 October 1908] [Windsor] [Beauchamp Lodge, Warwick Crescent, Paddington] [First two pages of letter are missing] I know it is absurd, dearest, but there is a strong wind blowing this morning, & I cannot help but feel the old days back again – I mean I get that frightful sensation of grief that used to come over me in Wellington. You alone could take it from me. It is like suddenly finding myself face to face with this ghost which terrifies me. Garnet – I want you. I need you. I love you. I shall write to you again tonight, beloved, when I feel better. Yesterday Carreño wrote to me – such a charming loving letter, and asked me to spend next Sunday afternoon with her. Of course I go. It is just after breakfast – I will go to Carlton Hill and be ‘cheered up’. This morning it is too strong for me to fight – the restless longing and love & passion that I feel for you –       Come soon.          I am yours for ever               Kass.

[6 October 1908] [Windsor] [Beauchamp Lodge, Warwick Crescent, Paddington] Tuesday Night. The long day over, beloved, I turn to you, seeking from you what I know I shall always find – Yes, and more – rest & Divine Happiness. Today I was lunching with some old people up in Hampstead; after lunch they let me wander alone in their garden. Such green lawns and hedges – I was standing watching a plant in the shadow, small, bare, not beautiful. And then, suddenly the sunshine streamed over it – a radiance – Ah, I thought – so my soul must always feel, knowing his love – worshipping him. I love you, my Husband. Your voice – your touch, fills me with the spirit of Eternal Youth and Joy. I feel that we two, husband and wife, would be irresistible, would conquer the universe. Love is supreme over everything – I love you with every part of my soul, with every pulse of my body. This evening, Dolly and I walked in the garden, and the sound of the falling leaves at our feet was like the sea breaking upon sand and shell – a strange, shivering sweetness of sound – And, almost like a Debussy thème, stars shone through the barren boughs of the trees1 – The air was very still; a little fog wreathing itself about the garden. And you, came, Life of my Heart, and walked with me – I felt that strong, beautiful sensation of rest and



garnet trowell  675

support that I feel only with you. My life has resolved itself into you; I care only for you – I feel for you, do you know, beloved, a consuming passion – Ah, the opal on your finger is full of the fires of my heart.2 I feel that jewel has drawn from me the passionate fires of my soul – that you, wearing it, have really become part of me – I consume & burn in your arms – You, you are life itself. I love you – I love you. My darling, when we two are married, and go away together – more alone I feel than any other two people have ever been in the world – my heart will break into a thousand pieces of laughter and of joy – – – – – – – – verstehst du?3 The past, you know, like a ruined city – ivy grown towers & minaret – lies behind us – the future – still vague – but the present is ours – you & mine – to love each other in. I do not think that any man has ever been loved so strongly. It is very late – I want to go out and post this letter tonight before I go to bed – With you I welcome all the vicissitudes of the world – welcome them – Yes, with both hands – for surely at our touch they would change – glorify become turned into gold. Hold me – kiss me – never let me go for I am all yours for ever. Goodnight – my best beloved – Kass. Notes 1. The orchestral and piano music of the French composer and music critic Claude Debussy (1862–1918) experimented widely with effects of musical timbre, colour, texture and light to create sound impressions that would frequently be termed ‘Impressionism’ in line with the dominant artistic experimental mode of the time. Various orchestral sketches and chamber works would illustrate the sort of ‘Debussy theme’ that KM imagines here, the most obvious being his song ‘Nuit d’étoiles’ [Night Sky], based on a poem by Théodore de Banville, the piano solo ‘Clair de lune’ [Moonlight] from the Suite Bergamesque (1890), inspired by the poem by Verlaine of the same name, or the piano prelude no. 4, ‘Les Sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir’ [Sounds and Perfumes Swirl in the Evening Air]. 2. KM’s Aunt Li had given her an opal ring as a farewell gift in June 1908, just before KM sailed back to London. KM describes the ring in detail to Vera (see CL1, p. 294), noting that ‘as you know opals are my aura, & any jewellery which I do possess is mounted in silver [. . .] Doesn’t it sound beautiful.’ She had presumably entrusted this ring to Garnet as a token of their love. She later gave it to William Orton (see Tomalin, p. 88). 3. (Ger.): Do you understand?

676   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [7 October 1908] [Windsor] [Beauchamp Lodge, Warwick Crescent, Paddington] Little Doll sent you a X yesterday.

Wednesday morning

I must begin the day with you, my darling – Good morning – Here the city is smothered in fog, and the sun hangs like a gold ball in the half leafless trees – a raw, Winter morning. Your two letters, my beloved, lie beside me on the table – I read them over and over. Oh, Garnet, I feel what you feel – I understand you completely & fully. Your letters seem to grip me and hold me – Isn’t it terrible to have to translate ones passion into words – such agitating, bitter sweet words which yet are only ripples on the surface – of a boundless, untried ocean. Yesterday I heard two women speaking – One said a friend of hers – though she had been married two years, yet wrote to her husband every day when he was away – They commented upon the absurdity of the fact – the lack of news – the necessary dull routine, & I listened & smiled. Wondered what they could say if they knew that I wake in the morning with your name on my lips – think of you – mentally write to you all day, and do not end my letter until as I go to sleep – I say – I am yours. It is not ended even then – for – happily, I dream. Last night I dreamed we were together in the country – happy, my dear, laughing like children – and at this moment I see myself slipping a carnation into your coat for a buttonhole – I can smell that strange carnation perfume – mystic and passionately sweet. I think, beloved, that were we two together in the most deserted – God forsaken desert it would surely blossom as a rose – – I never knew before what Passion meant – this complete absorption of the one into the other – I love you, I love you boundlessly. You will have my photographs next week. My birthday is on Wednesday1 and I mean you to have one on that day. I hope the proofs will come today. Dear, I can picture your landladies – there must be something fatal about us – People always persist in confiding in me the most intimate facts of their domestic relations – in the first breath – So when we are together, j’ai peur2 that we will never get the landladies out of the room!! You have transformed me utterly – I am a different person – or rather – pour la premiere fois3 – I feel so much myself – In the early morning, Garnet, still half awake, I feel more curiously your nearness than at any other time. I try not to quite wake to reality – for half-dreaming – you are really beside me – I bury my head in the pillow & whisper your name over & over. I must begin work. I love* you – I kiss you – I belong to you for ever Kass.



garnet trowell  677

*Original underlined three times for emphasis.

Notes 1. KM was born on Sunday, 14 October 1888. 2. (Fr.): I am afraid. 3. (Fr.): For the first time.

[12 October 1908] [Windsor] ‘52’1 Monday – My dearest One – This morning I got your letter – oh-so gladly. But you do indeed raise my curiosity. What is the rumour? Do tell me even if does not eventuate – it is such a wonderfully, beautiful thought. Can’t I understand the surprise of those fellows at hearing you play! I wish indeed that I had been there also, darling – Dolly and I went out this morning on business. I had no time in which to write to you – I thought of you all yesterday especially in the afternoon when I went to see Madame Carreño and spent two hours with her – talking in the half dark – in a fascinating room full of flowers, and photographs – fine pictures of her famous friends, and Russian cigarets – and books and music and cushioned couches – you know the type of room – We talked, I think in the main – of Music in Relation to Life – of the splendid artist calling – of all her journeys – a great deal besides. Truly she is one woman in a thousand. Beloved, today I feel, I am ashamed to say, tired to death – I want you and you and you. Feel restless, needing you, and no one else in the whole world – Oh, Garnett, know how much I love you. I feel my love for you is like the whole sea – as deep and as boundless – as restlessly passionate. I feel I want to shut my eyes – to be deaf to all that is happening in the world – to fly to your arms – to pillow my head on your shoulder – Beloved – your arms round me – then would I have fresh strength to begin the world with again – Garnet, what is Love. Ah, there is a question I have asked myself all my life and the answer is you you & you. On Wednesday evening I leave London to go and stay in Surrey until the following Monday. So, dearest, will you address my letters       c/o Mrs Trinder2       Melrose       Upper Warlingham       Surrey. I do not want to go – your letters will be my only joy – and writing to you.

678   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 The house is quiet. Mrs Trowell is asleep in here – Doll reading – Tom upstairs. Beloved this silent, clockfilled room is waiting for you to come in. I shall see you pass the window & run and open the door for you – Still the weeks are surely passing. Histed3 is sending you one of my photographs to arrive on my birthday. Après tout,4 my darling, my birthdays belong to you. So I send this remembrance. My wonderful, splendid Husband, you alone I love – And I am yours for ever. Oh, how much better I feel for having written to you. So rested – so happy again Your Kass. Notes 1. 52 Carlton Hill, St John’s Wood, was the home of the Trowell family. 2 . KM’s Aunt Belle had married W. Harry Trinder, a wealthy London stockbroker, in September 1905; they made London and the Home Counties their home from then on. For KM’s description of the house and garden, see below, pp. 680–1 3. Histed’s was the photography studio run by the British-born photographer Ernest Walter Histed (1862–1947), who later settled in the United States. Histed had made a name taking portrait photos of a number of state figures and personalities from the art world, some of which are in the National Portrait Gallery in London. The shop and studio were at 42 Baker Street. 4. (Fr.): After all.

[13 October 1908] [Windsor] [Beauchamp Lodge, Warwick Crescent, Paddington] Tuesday Morning Beloved – though 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 goes on steadily, my inner life, I live with you, in leaps and bounds. I go through with you every phase of emotion that is possible – loving you – that life pulsates with sunshine and Happiness, unlimited, vast unfathomable wells of Happiness – and you*. Oh, would that I could once express in words all the passionate, heavenly thoughts that break in tumultuous waves over my heart at the thought of you. . . . I wonder if you have ever swum in a very rough sea – I have – You plunge into the breakers – the waves break right over you – but you shake the water out of your eyes and hair – and there is a sensation of extraordinary strength. Something gigantic has you in its power – you



garnet trowell  679

are laughing, intoxicated – half wild with laughter and excitement. So I feel when I am tossed upon the very sea of passionate bliss. I love you – I love you. Today London is muffled in a wrapper of grey fog. It is cold and raw. There is a heavy, rumbling sound of carts passing. . . . You know such a day in a city? Last night I went to the theatre – with some New Zealand people – and came right back here from Trafalgar Square in a hansom. It was close upon twelve o’clock. The sky was flushed with faint fires – hollowed into a perfect pearl – Dim men and women were clustering in broken groups round the doors of the public houses – From some of the bars came the sound of horrible laughter. And all the streets stretching out on every side like the black web of some monstrous spider. In the Edgeware Road we passed a great procession of the unemployed1 – They carried a scarlet banner. You cannot think how horrible and sinister they looked – tramping along – hundreds of them – monotonously, insistently – like a grey procession of dead hours – I came back into my room here and made some tea – & drank it, sitting curled up in my chair – a little heap of your letters on my lap. I read them slowly, my darling, and seemed to be living with you as I read – your wonderful satisfying letters. Were you, I wonder in bed and asleep, while I sat, still, and thought of you so vividly that I feel you would have been waked from the deepest slumber. Garnet, this is the last day of my nineteenth year. Just think when we are both over thirty. I think we will be very young indeed. I must work. My Beloved – dearest of all the World I kiss you. I kiss you – I am so happy today that I would like to wave a flag out of my window – you know that feeling? Ah, dearest – I love you I am yours for ever –        Kass. *Original underlined three times for emphasis.

Note 1. In a context of widespread unemployment and a severe economic recession, large-scale meetings of and demonstrations by the unemployed were being organised across the country, to coincide with the reassembling of Parliament. Since the previous Saturday, delegates had also been arriving from major British cities, often assembling at Salvation Army halls, to maintain political pressure on Asquith and his government throughout the week. See ‘The Unemployed’, in The Times, 13 October 1908, p. 10.

680   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [15 October 1908] [Windsor] Melrose, Upper Warlingham, Surrey. 15 X 08

Thursday.

My dearest, It seems so strange to be sitting in the sunshine, and outside, instead of Paddington Station, long vistas of garden and trees, and spreading far and away the sweet green English country. Only one regret have I this morning, which is that your letter has to arrive later than it does in London, but I woke with your name in my heart on my lips – I kissed our ring, my darling – and sent you, for this day, my loving loving greetings. It seems that Love grows like a magic flower – Oh, Beloved, I am thinking of you all the time, seeing everything with you. I went to Carlton Hill yesterday; they were so splendidly happy, and you can think how pleased the little Mother was with my ring – also Doll also Tom – they thought it perfect. Then I caught the 4.50 train and arrived at the country station in the middle of a sunset – – – tu comprends?1 Oh, Garnet, such a perfect drive to the house. I was all alone – and I felt that I must almost cry out at everything – at the green lawns, shadowed & sweet – the valley below all wreathed in fairy mist, and the sky full of pink rose leaves – – – – – – You see? This house, too, has furniture and indeed whole fireplaces that I feel I would like to steal for us in the Future – such a beautiful gate table, and brass carved Flemish buckets for coal, and old oak chests. My room looks out over the garden. When I woke I jumped out of bed, and leaned out of one of the little lead paned windows. The gardener was digging below, and the sun shone on the warm red earth – a breeze shook the lilac trees. Beloved, you are so near me today – that I am radiantly happy. Oh, how much do I love you. ‘To him that hath shall be given’2 – don’t you understand that phrase? Do let us bicycle away into the country today – Here is perfect summer weather & country – but I want you & you & you. My darling – I kiss you – I love you. We have never been out of London together – do you realise that – for I don’t. I feel that we have lived our lives together – I know how you feel about Nature. Garnet – what is ahead of us both – Oh, we shall seek out the heart of the world. Après tout3 – I have found it.



garnet trowell  681

Such a fascinating baby of two here!4 She’s a darling, and you would have loved her in her bath last night – squeezing the sponge over her curls – She’s like a little dimpled Cupid-ess. (What’s the feminine.) She is staggering in here now, with a white fur monkey as big as herself in her arms, and says:– ‘is you busy, Auntie Kassleen?’ I feel I could write to you forever – today – My darling, know that I belong to you – absolutely – Thinking of you I am in your arms – You give me Life –         Your            Kass. Notes 1. (Fr.): Do you understand? 2. From Jesus’ Parable of the Sower, Matthew 13: 9–12: Who hath ears to hear, let him hear. And the disciples came, and said unto him, Why speakest thou unto them in parables? He answered and said unto them, Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given. For whosover hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath. 3. (Fr.): After all. 4. KM’s cousin Madge, daughter of Aunt Belle and Harry Trinder, was then aged two.

[16 October 1908] [Windsor] [Melrose, Upper Warlingham, Surrey] Friday evening – I am in my room, dearest, sitting and watching the valley so smothered in blue mist that I cannot see where land ends and where sky begins – it is like a great, blue, motionless wave covering the land – – – – Garnet, I have had such a perfect day. Quite early this morning I motored with two women to a place called Ashdown Forest – a perfect sunshiny day. The hedges, like green ribbons fringing the white road – and the sweet Surrey woods powdered with gold, splashed with crimson lined our route. We passed through villages such as you and I love – the quaint towered church, the old inn, the cottages with tiny flowered filled windows – And commons ringed about with young oak trees, and a pond in the middle, and happy English children at play – as they were how many years ago – as they will be how many years hence – – – – – I always feel that an English village never was young – has excited always in an old, quiet way. That the ivy crept over

682   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 the church while it was being built – that the quaint worn stone steps of the houses were never new and hideously white! At Ashdown Park the women played golf all day, so I wandered by myself to a little village called Forest Row – where I posted your cards – and then, through some fields I discovered a fascinating castle – Brambletye Castle1 – old and ivy grown – There was no one to be seen – it stood in a meadow – and I could see, all about, fragments of the wall – an old Gothic gate etc. Garnet, I spoke to you, beloved all the time, and then I walked through a forest and a park – Sunlight was drenching the trees, but the road was in shadow. I was so happy that I felt I must fling myself down on the warm grass – feel one with the whole great scheme of things. You know the sunfilled world seemed a revelation – I felt as tho’ Nature said to me – ‘now that you have found your true self – now that you are at peace with the world accepting instead of doubting – now that you love – you can see’. Beloved half the world is blind, as you say – I cannot understand how they pass their days, but, since you have held and dominated my life, I feel the last veil between me and the heart of things has been swept away – We came back here in the twilight – I sat in the front of the car – the cold air blew upon my face – We seemed like a dragon, so fast we sped, eating up the road – tu comprends?2 And in my heart a fire raged and burned fiercely – I felt so close to you that I trembled with joy – – – and almost – – – fear – My darling, in my room your letter welcomed me. What inexpressible happiness! But in a way I’m worried – Don’t get over tired, dear Boy. Please take care of your precious self for this poor little girl who cannot take care of you – I think – yes, I’m rather afraid, Beloved – you’ll have a very tyrannical wife! It is quite dark now – a train passes – and fussily tears its way into the country – the sound excites me curiously. Don’t you like travelling at night – peering out of the window at the dark stations – & then half sleeping and waking and arriving at a quite strange new place. Not alone – Oh, that would be horrible, but together – Garnet – what fun! I could write to you for ever – I love you – I love you. Dearest of all the world – Take me and hold me – I am yours for ever Kass. Notes 1. The ruins of Brambletye House (also referred to as Brambletye Manor or Castle) can still be visited today, in the village of Forest Row, East Sussex. The house and its main towers were built in 1631, but the picturesque history of its slow decline is a matter of debate to this day, largely as a result of its being the setting of a best-selling historical romance, Brambletye House, or Cavaliers and Roundheads by Horace Smith, published in 1826. 2. (Fr.) Do you understand?



garnet trowell  683

[19 October 1908] [Windsor] [Beauchamp Lodge, Warwick Crescent] In My Room –

Monday Night.

Best Beloved and Dearest One – It’s so fine to be back here even tho’ I love the country – I feel so wonderfully happy tonight that were you with me, I really don’t know what would happen. Your letter is beside me. Would that I had heard ‘Die Meistersinger’1 – it must have been a fine performance – And you are coming home on November 23rd – that is the best news I could ever have – Not such a long way off, at all – Think when the train comes into the station. I’ll be meeting you this time, just reversing it – Oh, Husband – I love you – I love you. I came back this morning, lunched with our Godmother2 – Found her rather miserable, but I soon made her laugh and she became very merry indeed. We went up to Carlton Hill – I took Doll some sweets & bought some cigarets at Dicky’s (Ethel3 was there, to my disgust.) They were all so gay – Garnet we laughed together. Oh, I felt I could make them so happy through you – it was all through you, Beloved – We went down to the kitchen and sat on the table and talked. Little Mother was simply like a girl – you know when she is much younger than even Doll. They heard nothing from Tom – rather naughty not to have sent them a p.c.4 but perhaps they will have a letter tomorrow. Then Ida and I walked home – past the Warrington Hotel – our walk – you know – even the lights trailing in the canal did not look so haunted tonight – and I came gladly to this room which seemed filled with your presence – Someone has given me a white chrysanthemum – a great, soft blossom – so white – like snow – and the shadow of it on my brown wall is like some strange fantastic Japanese picture5 – I look round at your pictures – at you – and long to have you with me – Oh, my darling, I do need you – I am waiting for you – Beloved, in your arms I find myself – Was ever Love so strong before – No, and I know why. There can only be one you. My darling – the night seems full of light. I kiss you passionately – Oh, I feel that when we are together, I shall truly die of joy and love – Garnet – I feel that my thoughts are on fire – you know the sensation? What would we be doing in our home now. You would be working and I should come into the dim, half-lighted room. We would throw open the window and lean out, smoking, and looked at the lighted streets – at the trees – their brown leaves bronzed with gold – verstehst du?6 And then we would pull down the blind – and – Husband – the joy of thinking of it – takes my breath away. Oh, you have been gone so long – darling – It’s an eternity – and yet – it’s nothing – at all – but I want you. Think of it – we two together – have all before us – I want to put my arms round you, & kiss your mouth. Let me come – close to you – Beloved – so close – I love you.

684   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 And now to work – yet tonight your kisses burn my lips – my mouth is hot – my hands tremble – I shake with passion. I wonder when we will be married – I wish I knew – Garnet tonight – it is too strong for me – kiss me – kiss me – take me for I belong to you for ever Kass. Notes 1. Richard Wagner’s opera The Mastersingers of Nuremburg (1868) was one of the major works on the Moody Manners Opera Company’s repertoire during the 1908–9 autumn and winter tour. 2. KM’s choice of terms of endearment can be misleading. The ‘Little Mother’ refers to Mrs Trowell, Garnet’s mother; the Godmother refers to Ida Baker. See above, p. 666, n. 4, and also Baker’s memoirs, when she remembers the quite idyllic days when KM was in love with ‘Garnet, gentle, sweet-tempered, quiet Garnet’, pp. 42–5. 3. Ethel has not been identified. 4. ‘p.c.’ is KM’s shorthand for postcard. 5. The ‘kiku’ or chrysanthemum is the most revered flower in Japan, and features prominently in imperial and state imagery, traditional garden design, and across the ages within various schools of Japanese art and screen painting. During the London exhibitions of Japanese art at the turn of the century, the aesthetics of the plant’s autumn-flowering, very ornate blossoms brought western visitors to appreciate the rich colours and textures of the waxy petals anew, moving away from the previous western associations of chrysanthemums and still life, or flowers of mourning. Two revered Japanese masters of such floral prints, which KM may well have admired as part of her own ‘Japonist’ craze and her visits to such exhibitions, were Tawaraya Sotatsu of the Rinpa school and Kitagawa Utamaro of the Ukiyo-e school – one of the artists ‘of the floating world’, popularised more recently in Kazuo Ishiguro’s second novel, The Artist of the Floating World (1986). 6. (Ger.): Do you understand?

[21 October 1908] [ATL] [Draft] [Paris] Wednesday 21st

20 after three.

Well, after a day of most turbulent packing Margaret1 and I drove off to Victoria 20 after seven. London looked garish – festive – alluring – only in the Park there were vague thick crowds huddled together – at the Marble Arch – a body of Police waited by their horses2 –Victoria – the huge station seemed alive with police and passengers – Already by the Continental train strange foreign types of people gathered – a



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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 and then – out of the window pane, I saw a signal box loom up in the darkness – We shattered through the tunnels – then a halt at Lewes – ten minutes off Newhaven.3 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 dark gangway to the darker boat. I have a confused impression of rain and bracing lights and sailors in great coats & boots, like Flying Dutchman mariners4 – We go aft to the Ladies Cabin, where a little French woman is in attendance – her white face peering curiously at us over billows and 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 the little quiet woman knitting an eternal stocking – At last I really slept only to be wakened – deux heures et demi5 – 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 queuing on a gangway on board – We disembark, hustle up the sanded stairs to the luggage room where the play posters on the walls – Normandy – Bretagne6 – Paris – Luxembourg are like magic hands stretched out in invitation. See what I hold – come here. In the buffet

686   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 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 – wouldn’t he like that – Next table to me a honeymoon couple – she with a new wedding ring and all beautifully 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 cobble stones, 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 bit7 dashed along the platform – Opposite in a buffet 2 gendarmes 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 – washing-lines fields girt with Noah’s Ark trees8 – And now and again the moon – like steel, slipped through the strees. At last Dawn came – – in the sky hung a 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 fascinator round her head9 – At the station sleepy officials – shouted French French French – & then St. Lazare at last – a great platform – cold with the coldness of more than Winter – Notes 1. KM was travelling to France in the company of Margaret Wishart and her family; Margaret was a music student and fellow lodger at Beauchamp Lodge. 2. London had hosted the summer Olympics that year, and the closing celebrations were planned for just one week later, which doubtless explains the ‘garish, festive’ effects. However, as mentioned above, p. 679, n. 1, beneath the veneer of international events and trade fairs (the Franco-British exhibition was also under way), London was also the site of tense social strife, reflecting the increasing militancy of suffrage campaigns and demonstrations to protest against unemployment and economic precarity. 3. The Newhaven–Dieppe Channel crossing on the new steam ferries was the most popular route to Paris by train from London Victoria, stopping at Lewes in Sussex and then Rouen in Normandy. 4. 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 of the same name (1849) is one of many dramatisations and adaptations of the tale. 5. (Fr.): Half past two. 6. (Fr.): Brittany. KM refers to the now iconic Art Nouveau posters advertising choice destinations accessible by the new French railways, and appealing to the growing class of wealthy bourgeoisie looking for fashionable holiday resorts.



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7. The threepenny coin, known as the threepenny bit, was then a very small silver coin, just over 16 mm in diameter. 8. Chapters 6–8 in Genesis recount the adventures of Noah in the ark, escaping from the floods. Little mention is made of the trees, other than the leaves which the dove returns with, suggesting to Noah that the waters are abating. However, given the nature of the countryside in the north-western areas of France through which the Rouen–Paris train travelled, KM’s imagination is doubtless inspired by the rather spindly elm trees bordering the extensive fields in a flat, low-lying region that was frequently marshy and bleak in late October. 9. The description is an early example of KM’s emerging skill as a parodist and pastiche-writer. The dawn goddess Eos is traditionally referred to as having rosy fingers, a feature which becomes formulaic throughout Homer’s Odyssey. A fascinator is a decorative hairband or small hat.

[24 October 1908] [Windsor] [Paris] Saturday Night – My dearest Boy – Your letter last night did so enchant me but I feel so strongly, too – the stupidity of our separation – Do you know I feel indeed, curiously, married to you – that I shall go back to London on Sunday and find you at the Station – Oh, my darling, could that be so – we would I think – truly set the thames ablaze with our passion of love and joy – For indeed, dearest I love you so much now – see that foolish last word but I have always loved you – I love you so entirely that I feel – and especially in the evenings and at night – that I cannot rest without you. Oh, Garnet – my splendid Wonderful husband, each day, it seems, do I take the blossoms from the tree of Love, and each day new and more wonderful flowers burst into bloom in their place – I feel that you and I are bound together by a thousand thousand things. Oh, but when you come home. Indeed I feel that my love for you has so grown since you left that I can give you so much more – I did not think it could grow but it has, and does – comprends tu?1 Darling, mere words and a French pen can never express all this I mean – but I love and love you. How fine the Forth Bridge must be2 – I’m glad you didn’t walk back ten miles – You have the descriptive faculty in letter writing – One day I’ll come to you, for assistance – and we will write a book together – a Book of Love, nicht?3 Yesterday we spent the day at Versailles4 – starting by tram quite early in the morning – through Paris – by the riverside – through the gates – past St. Cloud5 – and into the beautiful French country and then to the Palace & Gardens. Looking back upon it all I feel I must have

688   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 dreamed so much beauty – the pictures – the rooms which Louis XV6 gilded with the very blood of the people – the chapel built by Madame de Maintenon7 to ‘purify the Palace’! the theatre where Madame de Pompadour8 sat with Louis XV – the statuary – the ballrooms – and above everything – the marvellous gardens and fountains – Avenues of chestnut trees, darling, burning a red bronze with the fires of Autumn – and among them these marvellous marble figures – Apollo – Venus – the four Seasons – Cupid – etc etc. Then the fountain of Apollo – the fountain of Neptune – the fountain where Latona9 is seen beautiful as a flower turning the inhabitants of a village into frogs & lizards & turtles – the grotto of Apollo set about with trees – and a lake where yellow leaves flooded like sunlight – the green lawns – and always the marvellous distance effects – one feels it is an eternal magic world – that Versailles is indeed the hunting ground of Gods & Goddesses – It was full of ghosts in the day, what would they be at night!! We left the gardens in the evening – outside there was a great Fair. Long, brilliantly lighted booths which made me feel like a child – especially the toys and gingerbread frogs – and kites and cakes and books and sweets. I bought you a little packet of most fascinating things which I will send you from London – Felt we two were buying them together – and the queer little old Frenchman seemed to be so pleased with my delight that he made me a present tied with ribbon of confiserie10 fearful and wonderful – We got back here – dined, and went to a Reception where I sat on a sofa & talked to an English Naval Lieutenant until after eleven, and this poor child was so tired & ennuyée,11 that I almost ‘saw double’ – you know that degree of fatigue? I came home, my darling, and went to bed, thinking of you – dreaming of you all the night through. Today I have been to the Arc de Triomphe and the very top of Notre Dame – and the Tomb of Napoléon and the Luxembourg – I feel very tired with so much beauty and fascinating new thoughts & conceptions. Life seems to me each day, my husband, fuller & more worth living – I feel I have such a vivid sense of existence – loving you – My next letter will be from London – again. I am more than sorry to leave Paris – Indeed it is easy to realise what Paris means – And she is a city for – – – – you & I. The picturesque aspect of it all – the people – and at night from the top of a tram – the lighted interiors of the houses – you know the effect – people gathered round a lamp lighted table – a little, homely café – a laundry – a china shop – or at the corners the old chestnut sellers – the Italians selling statuettes of the Venus de Milo12 – & Napoléon encore Napoléon.13 I picture us with perhaps two small rooms high in the Quartier Latin14 – setting out at night – arm in arm – and seeing it all and because we were together – a thousand times more – I picture us coming home at night – and sitting over a wood fire – coffee and cigarets – the shutters closed – the lamp on the open table – like the sun on a green world – & you & I – the world shut out – and yet the world in our power – I love you too much to dare to fully realise all this –



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It is late. High over the roofs – we are on the fifth floor – floats the sound of bells – very strange at this hour – haunted – like bells heard in deserted churches under the sea – – – – verstehst du?15 I must go to bed – We leave tomorrow so I must get up early & pack. Darling – you too will be travelling tomorrow – bon voyage – Ah, when will you surely come to London November 23rd or before – – – – J’attends.16 Goodnight – dearest-of-all-the-world. I kiss you – Oh, thank God for letters – they are my one grande consolation17 – Think of it – I love you for ever with all the strength I possess – Beloved – I am yours – I can never belong to you more than I do now – it’s impossible – yet, how one longs for the bond to be sealed. Ah, I love you.                Kass Notes  1. (Fr.): Do you understand?  2. The Forth Bridge was then the longest cantilever bridge in the world, and had been designed and built in the 1880s to transform train access to Edinburgh across the Firth of Forth. The Scottish season marked the conclusion of that autumn’s Moody Manners opera tour, and included performances of Wagner’s The Mastersingers of Nuremburg and Puccini’s Madame Butterfly.  3. (Ger.): Shall we not?  4. The Palace of Versailles, standing in extensive, exquisitely tended gardens, is in the town of Versailles to the south-west of Paris. It had been the principal residence of the French monarchs from Louis XIV until the Revolution in 1789, although the site and the earliest buildings date back to the reign of Louis XIII; in previous centuries, the gardens had housed a vast monastery. The most ample reconstruction and embellishment of the palace and gardens date from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.  5. Now a chic suburb of south-western Paris, St Cloud was then an elegant town famous for the ruins of a former royal manor standing in extensive gardens, on the River Seine, accessible by train.  6. Louis XV (1710–74) was King of France from 1715, and officially crowned in 1722; he was the only monarch of France to have been born and died in Versailles. Initially much beloved by his people, he was increasingly targeted for the foolhardy economic excesses of his increasingly lavish reign, for mismanaged wars and the financial corruption of his courtiers. The extensive gilding of the palace was part of the vast redecorations supposedly undertaken at the instigation of Marie Antoinette, but many of these rumours had originated in the stories of Ancien Régime decadence written after the Revolution. The delicate gilding work, however, foregrounding French craftsmanship and state opulence, were very much part of Versailles’s dazzling and luxury effects in the mid-eighteenth century.  7. Françoise d’Aubigné (1635–1719), known as Madame de Maintenon and officially named the Marquise de Maintenon by Louis XIV, was an elegant courtesan who became official mistress of the king and the mother of a number of his children, as well as main governess for the official royal offspring. After the death of the Queen, the Spanish Princess Marie-Thérèse, Mme de Maintenon was married to the King in a private ceremony but was never officially recognised as his royal wife. She was a woman of extensive culture

690   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 and learning, took an interest in promoting educational facilities and was a generous patron of the arts, who also took a keen part in state activities.  8. Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson (1721–64) was a courtesan who became the official mistress of King Louis XV. She was renowned for her beauty and sumptuous dresses – all immortalised by the leading artists of the day – but was also keenly intellectual, keeping abreast of the current poetic and philosophical debates, and generously subsidising the lives and works of a number of artists and philosophers, including Voltaire.  9. The Latona Fountain is one of the six famous fountains of Versailles. It was inspired by the Metamorphoses of Ovid, and illustrates Latona, mother of Apollo and Diana, protecting her children from the insults of the peasantry. Jupiter avenges their humiliation by turning the people of Lycia into frogs and lizards. The fountain was sculpted by the Marsy brothers and dates back to 1668. 10. (Fr.): A confectioner’s ribbon: that is, gilded or brightly coloured. 11. (Fr.): Bored. 12. The statue of Venus de Milo is doubtless the most famous marble statue from Ancient Greece, dating back to about 100 bce and attributed to the artist Praxiteles or (more probably) Alexandros of Antioch. It stands in the Louvre Museum in Paris. 13. (Fr.): Still more Napoleon. 14. The area around the Sorbonne University in the 5th arrondissement of Paris came to be known as the ‘Latin World’, and later the ‘Latin Quarter’ during the seventeenth century, to denote the widespread use of Latin in classes and in the local streets, as a result of the high number of scholars, libraries, colleges, learned institutions and bookshops that were to be found there. 15. (Ger.): Do you understand? 16. (Fr.): I am waiting. 17. (Fr.): Huge consolation.

[25 October 1908] [Windsor] [Beauchamp Lodge, Warwick Crescent, Paddington] Sunday Night. In My Room – Dearest, I am back in London again, and tho’ it is really Monday morning already I am stealing a night off and start a letter to you. We left Paris by an early train this morning, and travelled through the lovely French country – such woods all ruddy with Autumn colouring – and villages – and Rouen – where I should like to have spent at least a week – and finally Dieppe . . . A rough sea journey is a strange conglomeration of sensations – I, in a moment, seem caught in a web of a thousand memories – am a child again, sitting on the deck in my Grandmother’s lap, & me in a red riding hood cloak! And then going over to Picton & Nelson, to England for the first time and the second time1. . . It was frightfully rough today. I lay still, perished with cold and felt dreadful – the few



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hours seemed an eternity of time. What joy to reach Newhaven – to come into the air, and see the pale, grey town – the lights shivering in the cold harbor, and a gangway leading to land. Observe me a few moments later, dearest, on the Newhaven platform, wrapped in two coats and woolen gloves and furs, eating a sugared bun nearly as big as myself and laughing with sheer joie de vivre. Sorry tho’ I am to leave Paris – it is good to be here again – And in my room a glowing fire welcomed me and white chrysanthemums again. Do you know a mood when you unpack, and even change the position of the furniture – make minute accounts of the money you have spent – undress – arrange your books and pictures – that’s what I have been doing – & now my little reading lamp and this faint flutter of the fire – have lured me to stay up and write and read. Also, my darling, you have been in my thoughts so constantly and so strongly all day long, that I had to speak to you. Outside a cold wind shivers the branches of the leafless trees – but in this warm, lighted room, I feel alone with you. My darling my heart is so full of love – emotions seem to clamour for expression – all the time I feel on the verge of being able to express to you just what I do truly feel – but impossible. I can only say that I love you and love you – That our love for me lights the world – has made of Life something infinitely precious that now I can never be sad for long – or even tired for long – I am indeed, my dearest, so wrapped up in you – yes, just as I was that night – both of us – you remember under the big fur coat. Tonight, our ring on my finger shines with a strange radiance and brightness. Garnet, I think of you, and all the rest of the world dwindles and fades – You and I are together, alone, upon a strange new planet, whose wonders we two explore – – – – – How passionately do I love you – surely, my darling – you know – But the separation – doesn’t it seem ridiculous? Absurd, and meaningless. . . . Dear, I think you’d better have your fur coat posted to Middlesborough – don’t you – or will you wait till you come home? Don’t get cold just at the beginning of the Winter – it would be quite simple to post – – – – What do you think. Are you warm enough leaving the theatre at night now – & trains are the coldest places. Remember to tell me . . . I kiss you – my most precious one – I kiss you & I am yours forever         Kass. Note 1. Memories of her maternal grandmother, Margaret Isabella Dyer (1839– 1906), were among KM’s most treasured scenes from childhood; she had taken over the daily running of Harold and Annie’s household when KM and her siblings were small. See Kimber 2016, pp. 31–8. For other tellings of this scene, in fiction (‘The Aloe’) and draft form, see also CW1, pp. 474–5 and CW4, p. 97.

692   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [29 October 1908] [Windsor] [Enclosures: N] [Beauchamp Lodge, Warwick Crescent, Paddington] Wednesday Night.            1 AM. My most Beloved One – I feel that I must write you a long letter tonight and try and say what never can be said between us – only felt and expressed – never written – My soul is full of love for you. Your letter this morning did so satisfy me – that – oh, I had strength to conquer the world – and I wrote four poems – which I send you tonight – They are to be set to music – so you will understand just what music I want – I know. Can’t you imagine it. For instance that one ‘In the Church’ almost recitative1 at the beginning with a strange organ like passage – then the ivy, rough, cruel, horrible, and then the first verse in a dream – you hear it? And then ‘By the Sea Shore’, with strange Macdowell,2 Debussy3 chords – and the lilac tree, full of a rhythmic grace – I wrote them for you – truly – and to suit Tom’s composition – Take them with a thousand kisses. I wish that you could come in – home from the theatre – and this our room – I sit at the table – wrapped up in my kimono4 – a little reading by me – and a glass of hot milk – (which I detest) I am not at all inclined to sleep – Oh, what delight to lie in your arms and talk and talk – No, I wouldn’t do it – as it happens, my darling – as I’d make you go to sleep quickly – you would be so tired – I pause here and sip a little hot milk – it’s detestable – but excellent for the complexion – mon cher5 – so I suffer in silence – I ran up to ‘52’ for dinner tonight; they were all so gay. And as we sat by the fire – your letter to Doll and the little Mother arrived – Dearest I wish you could have seen their faces – heard their happy voices – heard Mother’s ‘Bless that darling child’, seen Doll, radiant – Oh, dear, I felt rather worried because I hate to think of you being cold and shut up in that theatre. Are you warm enough at night. Does Mrs Lyon provide you with plenty of blankets?6 Do keep warm – it’s the secret of keeping well this weather – Darling – I feel as though I’d been married to you for years – as though I ought to be looking after you – I’m afraid you will be thoroughly spoiled from the 22nd to the 30th. I put up little Doll’s hair tonight; she looked beautiful – and very like a Greuze girl7 – and the child was so excited – and begged me to let her go and meet you at the station in a long skirt – and her hair on top – but I said ‘no’ – what a horrible shock you would have had! When I think of you – Garnet – I am almost wild with love and joy and passion – Oh, that the days would fly past – Think of us going home – together & knowing that is for a week – I am jealous for you – I am hungry for you – I love & love & love* you – I am glad that you arrive late – there is a certain – almost intoxicating glamour over London then – that holds me always, and with you* – – –



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Beloved – I must copy out those poems – & then start work. Goodnight – What a journal we shall write in that week. Tom and Gwen declare that they possess the dining room – so we shall be in your room – I had much rather – I feel, to tell you the truth – a little curiously about Gwen – very out of sympathy with her – I do hope that the sensation will pass – – – – Goodnight – Husband – dearest I am forever your devoted wife                       Kass. Kiss me [Enclosures] Hull Nov. 5. 08   In the Church.8 In the church, with folded hands she sits Watching the ivy beat upon the pane Of a stained glass window, until she is fain To shut her eyes – – – Yet ever hears it tapping –9 . . . ‘Come out’, says the ivy I spring from the mound Where your husband lies buried You, too, in the ground – (The hour is at hand) You must lie down beside him. . . . In the church, with folded hands she sits Seeing a bride and bridegroom, hand in hand Stand at the altar, but no wedding band Crowns the young bride – save a chaplet of ivy leaves Hull. Nov. 5. 08   On the Sea Shore –10 Deafening roar of the ocean The wild waves thunder and beat Sea weed, fragments of wreckage They fling them up to her feet. . . . She, her pale face worn with waiting Stands alone in the shuddering day And watches the flight of a sea gull Wearily winging its way. . . . ‘Why do you scream – Oh, sea bird And why do you fly to me?’

694   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 ‘I am the soul of your lover Who lies drowned far out at sea’. Hull Nov. 5. 08

The Lilac Tree11

The branches of the lilac tree Are bent with blossom – in the air They sway and languish dreamily, And we, pressed close, are kissing, there The blossoms falling on her hair – Oh, lilac tree, Oh, lilac tree Shelter us, cover us, secretly – . . . The branches of the lilac tree All withered in the winter air Shiver – a skeleton minstrelsy Soon must the tree stand stripped and bare And I shall never find her there Oh, lilac tree, Oh lilac tree Shower down thy leaves and cover me Hull Nov. 5. 08

A Sad Truth12

We were so hungry, he and I We knew not what to do And so we bought a sugar cake Oh, quite enough for two – . . . We ate it slowly, bit by bit And not a crumb was wasted It was the very best, we said That we had ever tasted – . . . But all this happened years ago Now we are rich and old Yet we cannot buy such sugar cake With our united gold.

K. Mansfield 1908

* Original underlined three times for emphasis.

Notes  1. The letter offers one of the most detailed insights into KM’s life-long conviction that her literary writing should be conceived in terms of musical composition and musical performance. Defined in the Oxford Companion to Music as ‘speech-like solo singing, free in rhythm and lacking in structured melodies’, recitative dates back at least to operatic writing in the early modern era. There was a marked revival of interest in recitative-inspired



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speech on the threshold of song, especially with an underlying musical accompaniment, in many experimental works in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: see, for example, Debussy’s Pelléas and Mélisande and Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder.  2. Although largely forgotten today, the American composer Edward Alexander MacDowell (1861–1908) was much appreciated throughout the Anglophone world in these years, especially for his songs and piano works. His Sea Pieces (Opus 55, 1896) and Forgotten Fairy Tales (Opus 4, 1899) offer many points of comparison with KM’s works in the early1900s. See CW4, p. 31.  3. Claude Debussy was one of the French composers who revolutionised traditional theories, forms and practices of music. His interest in tonal colour, polymetric melodic patterns and evolving rhythmic shapes (or ‘Agogics’) led him to be associated with Impressionism and Symbolism. In the 1890s, Debussy worked with poets such as Mallarmé to expand his understanding of novel ways to link verse and music. (See also p. 675, n. 1 above.)  4. There was a marked interest in all forms of Japonisme in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, prompting a cultural revival which KM embraced. The influence of Japanese arts influenced her dress tastes, her home furnishings and also her reading habits. See Kimber 2017.  5. (Fr.): ‘My dear’. In this aside, KM clearly pastiches the theatrical tone and idiom of French mundanities.  6. Mrs Lyon was the landlady in Hull with whom Garnet Trowell was lodged during the Moody Manners northern tour.  7. Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725–1805) was a French artist and designer. Perhaps best remembered now for his painting Le Chapeau blanc (1780), he was highly reputed for his portraits of girls and young women, such as L’Oiseau mort or La Jeune Fille à la colombe.  8. Like many of KM’s poems from the same period, these verses attest to the strong influence of Hardy’s poetry in her literary apprenticeship. See in particular his ‘The Ivy Wife’ and ‘Her Immortality’, first published in book format in 1898. Like Hardy, KM cultivates a poetic voice that shifts constantly from the poignant and melancholic to the wryly detached and ironical. See CP, p. 63, and accompanying notes, p. 161.  9. The idiosyncratic punctuation here is one of the earliest examples of KM using typography to inject alternative rhythms and dramatic pauses into the flow of more regular poetic meters. 10. Evocative seascapes in music and poetry were highly popular in these years, as attested to by MacDowell’s Sea Pieces (1896) and Debussy’s La Mer, which premiered in 1905. See also CP, p. 64, and accompanying notes, p. 161. 11. Lilac blossom and lilac trees figure prominently in late nineteenth-century songs and poems. Mansfield shifts here from the more conventional pastoral note of the first stanza to a far more sombre tone in the second verse – especially the macabre ‘skeleton minstrelsy’. See also CP, pp. 63–4, and accompanying notes, p. 161. 12. In one draft of the letter, the poem bears the title ‘A Song with a Moral’. See also CP, pp. 61–2, and accompanying notes, p. 160.

696   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [2 November 1908] [Windsor] [Enclosures: N] [Beauchamp Lodge, Warwick Crescent, Paddington] Monday Evening – My Best Beloved One – I have just come in from such a fine afternoon with our little Doll. She is truly a dear child – and I like to take her about – and make her see things as we see them – our point of view – tu comprends?1 We wandered about in the British Museum – among the beautiful china & Venetian glass – and curios and precious books – a prodigal wealth of loveliness on every side – almost a fantastic glory of color. Then I took her to the Vienna Café2 – and she had some of their famose chocolate, and then we walked up to Baker Street – fog in the air – but lamps lighted everywhere – and Doll and I talking & talking – – – – do you know of whom? Now – seriously, my darling – how much do I love you – I pause and think – – but that’s manifestly absurd for the thought feeds on itself – becomes stronger and more passionate each time I pause – Oh, you and I, we stand on the shore of an ocean – boundless – untried – Over the horizon how many magic isles – lie hidden in clouds of rose color? But we stand, hearing only that marvellous, symphonic rush of sound – together – It seems, to me, that the world is ours – alone – we are one – now – here – Garnet – when I say your name – I almost tremble – I love you & you and you – – – – – I have been writing some words for two songs of Tom’s, so I send you a copy. The one called a ‘Song of Summer’ – I thought of you and me – waking in the morning – with the sun in our room in the country – so you will understand it – The other had to exactly fit the music – which it does – he’s delighted and says I have caught his thought exactly – but it’s a morbid thought and not at all as I feel – – – – And here is another poem after the style of the Newspaper Girl3 – realism – you know – it’s a little cruel – I have a strange ambition – I’ve had it for years – and now, suddenly here it is revived – in a different way – and coming hammering at my door – It is to write – and recite what I write – in a very fine way – You know what I mean. Do you know exactly what I mean. Revolutionize and revive the art of elocution – – – take it to its proper plane – Nothing offends me so much as the conventional reciter – stiff – affected – awkward – but there is another side to it – the side of art. A darkened stage – a great – high backed oak chair – flowers – shaded lights – a low table filled with curious books – and to wear a simple, beautifully colored dress – You see what I mean. Then to study tone effects in the voice – never rely on gesture – though gesture is another art and should be linked irrevocably with it – and express in the voice and face and atmosphere all that you say. Tone should be my secret – each word a variety of tone4 – – – – – – I remember once hearing a Danish woman with a violinist at the Æolian Hall give a recital5 but



garnet trowell  697

it was conventional & not on these lines – Even then it was fine – Well, I should like to do this – and this is in my power because I know I possess the power of holding people – I would like to be the Maud Allen of this Art – what do you think. Write me about this – will you? You see – I could then write just what I felt would suit me – and could popularise my work – and also I feel there’s a big opening for something sensational and new in this direction – – – – – It is a cold evening – how is it with you – My darling – how I love & love you – Oh, to feel your kisses once more thrill me with an anguish of joy – for you alone I love with all my soul – Garnet – it is certainly stronger every day – now. What will we do & say in the first few moments when we are together? Do you know? I cannot & yet can picture them – Take care of yourself – my darling – Don’t work too much – Oh, to be with you for five minutes even – to see you – – to feel you with me – I love and love you – I belong to you Kass. [Enclosures] [N] Hull Nov 4. 08

A Song of Summer.6

At break of day the Summer sun Shines through our windows one by one He takes us by his great, warm hand And the world is changed to Fairyland. . . . . He gives us fairy bread to eat And fairy nectar, strange and sweet While a magic bird, the whole day long Sings in our hearts his mating song. Hull Nov 4. 08

The Winter Fire.7

Winter without, but in the curtained room Flushed into beauty by a fluttering fire Shuttered and blinded from the ugly street A woman sits – her hands locked round her knees And bending forward . . . O’er her loosened hair The firelight spins a web of shining gold Sears her pale mouth with kisses passionate Wraps her tired body in a hot embrace . . . Propped by the fender her rain sodden boots Steam, and suspended from the iron bed Her coat and skirt – her wilted, draggled hat. But she is happy. Huddled by the fire All recollections of the dim grey day

698   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Dwindle to nothingness, and she forgets That in the street outside the rain which falls Muddies the pavement to a greasy brown. That, in the morning she must start again And search again for that which will not come – She does not feel the sickening despair That creeps into her bones throughout the day. In her great eyes – dear Christ – the light of dreams Lingered and shone. And she, a child again Saw pictures in the fire. Those other days The rambling house, the cool sweet scented rooms The portraits on the walls, and China bowls Filled with ‘pot pourri’. On her rocking chair Her sofa pillow broidered with her name – She saw again her bedroom, very bare The blue quilt worked with daisies white and gold Where she slept, dreamlessly. . . . . . . Opening her window, from the new mown lawn The fragrant, fragrant scent of perfumed grass The lilac tossing in the shining air Its purple plumes. The laurestinus bush Its blossoms like pale hands among the leaves Quivered and swayed. And, Oh, the sun That kisses her to life and warmth again So she is young, and stretches out her arms. . . . The woman, huddled by the fire, restlessly stirs Sighing a little, like a sleepy child While the red ashes crumble into grey. . . . Suddenly, from the street, a burst of sound A barrel organ, turned and jarred & wheezed The drunken, bestial, hiccoughing voice of London. 1908. Notes 1. (Fr): Do you understand? 2. The Vienna Café, 24–8 New Oxford Street, was a fashionable, lofty Art Nouveau café and restaurant, and a favourite meeting place for lunch among the London-based artists and Modernists – from Ezra Pound to Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey. The historic building was destroyed during the Blitz in 1941. 3. Possibly a reference to a novel published in 1902, Autobiography of a Newspaper Girl, by the American-born, London-based writer and journalist Elizabeth L. Banks (1870–1938), also the author of The Adventures of an American Girl in Victorian London, who had assumed a number of working-class identities to get a backstage view of working life in the capital. Potential intertextual echoes



garnet trowell  699

in terms of theme and tone can certainly be drawn between the observations of harsh daily life in Banks’s Newspaper Girl and KM’s poem ‘The Winter Fire’. 4. KM’s archly satirical story ‘The Modern Soul’ recounts with hilarious detail a concert during which a recitation along these lines is given by a Viennese artist, Sonia Godowska. See CW1, pp. 214–21. 5. The Aeolian Hall on New Bond Street, London, was a gallery used for exhibitions and concerts, especially recitals and chamber music. No Danish performer in this style has been traced; however, KM may have been recalling a concert given at the hall in October 1906, which included violinist Gertrude Turner-Schaerer and recitations by Blanche Theeman. The Times notes that the latter, ‘though comic in intention, hardly added to the gaiety of the evening, chiefly perhaps, because Miss Theeman does not let her audience hear sufficiently well what she is supposed to be saying’ (4 October 1906, p. 5). 6. In form (the ballad rhythm) and thematic echo (the magical powers of fairy bread), the short poem recalls Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, particularly stanza 7: She found me roots of relish sweet, And honey wild, and manna-dew, And sure in language strange she said— ‘I love thee true’.

See also CP, p. 92.

7. Whether deliberately or not, KM’s ‘realist’ poem resonates not only with prose-poems and prose vignettes, and the ‘city poems’ of Arthur Symons, but also with late nineteenth-century ballads and monologues for stage performance, in the form of recitative. See also CP, p. 92, and notes, p. 204.

[4 November 1908] [Windsor] [Beauchamp Lodge, Warwick Crescent, Paddington] Wednesday Night. My darling little Boy – Just a note to say ‘goodnight’ before I get into bed – I’m sitting curled up on my eiderdown in a frilled nightdress which I’m sure you could not but admire – and I feel so very wide awake – – – you know the sensation – Margaret (my Paris friend) and I have just finished a little supper – cooked over my fire – and eaten with horn spoons, out of little French bowls de mariage1 – of boiled onions – of all things on earth! And we have laughed so much at nothing and been so gay that I feel it is senseless to go to bed – You must meet Margaret. She is really a fine girl – full of joie de vivre – I was so glad of your letter tonight dearest – Oh, what a waste to turn the gas off at the meter when you were alone – I love you I love you I love* you.              I am yours for ever                 Kass

700   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 *Original underlined three times for emphasis.

Note 1. (Fr.): Paired set of round bowls.

[8 November 1908] [Windsor] Sunday Morning.

4, KEYHAM TERRACE, H.M. DOCKYARD, DEVONPORT.

My dearest – I am alone in the house; a cold day & everybody has gone to church – but here there is a brilliant fire and I am far happier. Since writing to you yesterday – a great deal seems to have happened – that is always the case – – – – – – – – Yesterday afternoon I saw the launching of a great battle-ship – – one of the most splendid, impressive sights possible, I think. There were thousands of people – from the ultra smart to the poorest workmen and their wives – all gathered together – And the ship was held in place by iron girders and supports. She towered above everybody. On a flag enveloped platform – Mrs Asquith1 – a very large section of the Naval world – and a chaplain and choir – assembled. We were all you see down below. It was a brilliant day, but a fierce wind rushed down and about. The crowd were silent, while the choir & sailors sang a hymn – you see the dramatic effect – it caught me. Strange visions – of the future – victories – defeats – death – storms – their voices seemed crying in the wind. And all the builders of the ships – the rough men who had toiled at her – stood silently on her deck, waiting for the moment to come – – – – And all the time, we heard inside the ship, a terrible – knocking – they were breaking down the supports – but it seemed to me almost symbolical – as tho’ the great heart of the creature pulsated – And suddenly a silence so tremendous that the very wind seemed to cease – then a sharp, wrenching sound, and all the great bulk of her swept down its inclined plank into the sun – and the sky was full of gold – into the sea – which waited for her – The crowd cheered, screamed – the men on board – their rough faces their windblown hair – cheered back – In front of me an old woman and a young girl – the little old woman, whose grand uncle had been in the fighting Temeraire2 – trembled & shook and cried – but the girl – her flushed face lifted – was laughing, and I seemed to read in her tense, young body, anticipation, realisation – comprends tu?3. . . . . . . . Oh, Garnet, why is it we so love the strong emotions? I think because they give us such a keen sense of Life – a violent belief in our Existence.



garnet trowell  701

One thing I cannot bear and that is the mediocre – I like always to have a great grip of Life – so that I intensify the so called small things – so that truly everything is significant – In Winter – to look out over a silent garden – I like first, to get that sense of loneliness, so simplicity of barrenness – and then always – I like to be able to see the flowers pushing their way up through the brown earth. It is the superficial attitude which kills Art, always. Give Life a little attention, a little enthusiasm – and ‘Fair Exchange is no robbery’, she says, & heaps our arms with treasures. Why, it is the same with Love. The more you give me, the more I feel that you enrich my nature so I can give you more. I dreamed last night that we were at a Tschaikovsky concert4 together last night – And in a violin passage, swift & terrible – I saw to my horror, a great flock of black, wide winged birds – fly screaming over the orchestra – it’s rather strange – waking I can see that – too, in much of his music – can’t you? Oh, Music, Music – Oh, my Beloved – the worlds that are ours – the universes that we have to explore – we two, my dearest, shall find the heart of Life hidden under its wrappings – like the gold seeds of a rose under a thousand crimson petals. I love you. I love you. It is like this. I have been wandering through a castle, with barred windows, locked doors – helplessly. At last I come to the gates – and you have unlocked them and you are there. I give you the keys – and you say ‘it is so simple it is like this’. Unlocking one door of my castle – all the others fly open to you – Keep my keys. What use are they to me – they are yours. I belong to you.            Loving you               Kass. Notes 1. On Saturday, 7 November 1908, the Prime Minister and Mrs Asquith travelled from Paddington to Plymouth, and thence to Devonport (declared by Asquith to be ‘the greatest naval arsenal in the world’) for a naval ceremony organised for the naming of the latest battleship of the Dreadnought type. Margaret Wishart’s father being a naval officer, the family had been invited to attend; KM accompanied Margaret as the family guest. See ‘The Collingwood. Launch by Mrs. Asquith’, The Times, 9 November 1908, p. 8. 2. The previous year, a very similar HMS Temeraire had likewise been launched from Devonport. However, KM refers here to its namesake, the first HMS Temeraire, which had been a French battleship, Le Téméraire, captured by the British fleet at the Battle of Lagos in 1759. It was thus incorporated into the Royal Navy until withdrawn from service in the 1780s. 3. (Fr.): Do you understand? 4. The music of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–93) was hugely popular at the time, on account of its great lyrical beauty and its powerful narrative suggestivity. His ballet music had been one of the major forces in the widespread renaissance of classical ballet across western Europe. Although not necessarily KM’s direct allusion here, the shift from the poised beauty and grace of

702   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Swan Lake (1876) to the ‘black, wide winged birds [. . .] screaming’ of KM’s nightmare is as powerful in visual terms as it is in terms of sound.

[28–30 April 1909] [ATL] [Brussels] In the train to Harwich1 – I am afraid I really am not at all myself – so here I am – I took a drug2 this afternoon & slept until after five – then Ida woke me – Still half asleep & terribly tired I packed – had some supper – M.3 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.4 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. 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 Dolly did when I was a girl in Brussels5 so many years ago – 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. Bendall6 – Morning in the Bruxelles – I have slept splendidly – taken a small brandy & soda before turning in, and now feel almost better, though 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 Bruxelles – Everybody thinks I am French – I must go to Cooks7 & see about everything –8 Notes 1. Harwich is a port town on the east coast of Britain; ferries sailed from here to Antwerp and the Hook of Holland. The exact dating and explanation for the visit remain a mystery, coming as they do in the complex weeks following KM’s sudden marriage to George Bowden, their even more abrupt separation, her escape to be reunited with Garnet, the impending arrival of Annie Beauchamp to restore order and respectability in her wayward daughter’s life, and sudden travels about which little in known. See Alpers 1980, pp. 91–3, including his piecing together of a likely chronology from Margaret Wishart’s recollections, and CW4, pp. 107–8, for the draft letter in the context of KM’s other notebook jottings of the time. 2. Baker (pp. 46–8) recounts that, in these weeks, KM was taking veronal, bought over the counter from a chemist, to help combat her despair and sleeplessness. 3. Margaret Wishart was one of KM’s key confidantes at the time, although to a lesser degree than Ida Baker. It was via Margaret’s intermediary that KM had met Bowden, whom she subsequently married.



garnet trowell  703

4. Liverpool Street Station in Central London was the mainline terminus of the Great Eastern Railways, and one of the country’s busiest stations. The boat trains to the eastern ports left from here, as did trains to the south-east and east of England. 5. KM had travelled to Brussels with her sisters, chaperoned by Aunt Belle, at Easter 1906, and there visited the Trowells, who had been living there since 1904 to enable the highly gifted musical twins to further their musical education. From February 1905, Arnold Trowell’s ‘Music in Brussels’ column featured regularly in the Strad magazine, thereby giving a host of insights into the life of the conservatoire and concert world in those years. 6. KM’s motivation behind her choice of moniker during this visit is uncertain; Edith Bendall was a friend from Wellington, with whom KM had a shortlived but intense emotional involvement on her return to Wellington. She used the name again for a character in a draft for a novel, which she began in 1913. See Introduction in CL1, pp. 332–5. 7. The travel agency Thomas Cook & Son. 8. The rest of the letter is in draft form, and is taken from her diary (CW4, p. 108).

[31 May 1909] [ATL] [Draft] Hotel Marquardt Stuttgart.

Whit Monday.

Dearest1 – there is so much to tell you of and yet all my impressions seem to be put into a lolly bag2 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 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 Rudy3 – 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 – Lorelei4 – all – all – I have heard many people cry their disappointment over the Rhine – maybe that accounted for my joy in it – in vine clad hills – in pink nuss bäume5 – 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 Medaeval 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 – chilly blue – you see the woods – the rivers – the Gardens –blossomful – you hear the people – and here is Frankfort – Mainz – Coblenz – Cöln (Nach Kevlaar) – Bonn and Heidelberg, where a real live Carl Heinz6 boarded our train – all sword slashed and be

704   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 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 & looked over a fence – Lilacs 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 feel he must have some connection with a railway official & on account of his size – got muddled with the tickets – Oh, but a beautiful child – peeked through the railings. Notes 1. Although written on hotel writing paper, the letter appears to have remained in KM’s possession. Whether she sent a copy to Garnet or not has not been established. The draft was included in CW4, pp. 113–14. 2. (Slang): A drawstring bag for sweets, money or other little treasures. 3. 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). 4. 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. 5. (Ger.:) Walnut trees. 6. Karl Heinz is a character from the novel Karl Heinrich (1898), translated into English in 1903 as Old Heidelberg by the German playwright Wilhelm Meyer-Förster (1862–1934), and adapted by the author into a successful stage play in 1901. It recounts a star-crossed romance between the Saxony Prince, Karl, and the innkeeper’s daughter, Käthie, at the Carl Hotel, where Karl lodges as a student at Heidelberg University. The death of the reigning Prince, Karl’s father, forces the young man to leave his beloved to take up the affairs of state. The newly crowned Prince, in the regalia KM evokes here, returns to Heidelberg by train in the final chapter for one last farewell. At this time, KM sometimes signed herself Käthie.

[June 1909] [ATL] [Draft – incomplete] [Pension Müller, Türkheimmer Strasse 2] Worishofen Bavaria A C.F. Letter.1 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 cold.



garnet trowell  705

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. Beloved – 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 Hill2 – Our Home. 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 Notes 1. KM frequently adopted her own coded acronyms to make her journal more obscure to outside readers. By the time this letter draft was written, her relationship with Garnet had ended; it therefore suggests a form of self-fictionalising, as well as a desire to maintain in written form the daily intimacy of their former exchanges. See also CW4, pp. 114–16. 2. The places named were all rich in memories associated with her and Garnet’s short but intense romantic idyll.

Thomas Luigi Trowell (1859–1944)

Introduction Thomas Luigi Trowell was born in Birmingham, UK, in August 1859. At the age of twenty he found a position playing in the band at the Tynemouth Aquarium near Newcastle, but when the venue closed after less than a year, he chose to follow his fiancée, Kate Wheeler, to New Zealand. During the 1880s Thomas organised balls and dances in Taranaki Street, Wellington, and played the viola in local concerts. He performed under conductor Robert Parker – who was later to become KM’s piano teacher – for the Wellington Orchestral Society from 1883. In 1886 Thomas accepted a teaching post at Saint Patrick’s College, beginning a long professional association with the Wellington school that helped educate his twin sons. Thomas continued to play for the Wellington Orchestral Society but transferred from viola to clarinet in 1892.1 His musical versatility was notable: he taught both violin and cello and conducted a variety of local orchestras and bands.2 A broad range of styles was required, including music for trapeze exhibitions, wrestling and sword-fighting, as well as for Sunday worship. The family eventually moved to 18 Buller Street, Wellington, where KM later attended rehearsals and music lessons. Tragically, the eldest son, Lindley, died on 28 July 1894, only weeks before the Second New Zealand Musical Festival – at which Thomas performed – opened at the nearby opera house. Thomas toured the North Island with the Bland Holt Opera Company in the summer of 1895–6; played for the Industrial Exhibition in November 1896; and performed – as a first violinist – for the Wellington Orchestral Society’s concert in April of the same year. By this time his twin sons, Garnet and Tom, were involved in these concerts, and much of their father’s energy was transferred to their musical education. After the twins left for Europe in 1903 to further their musical education, Thomas continued briefly at Saint Patrick’s College before dedicating himself to orchestral and opera conducting, playing and touring in New

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Zealand and Australia. Cello lessons and concerts with KM included an ‘At Home’, celebrating the Beauchamp family’s move to Fitzherbert Terrace in May 1907. KM’s subsequent letters to Thomas – who was back in England by the end of the year – provide glimpses of the powerful hold that music still had over KM: ‘the greatest joy I can imagine is to share a programme with you at a London concert’ (below, p. 708). Nevertheless, the joy with which KM describes carrying a newly acquired graphophone (see below, p. 708) home on the tram – with three packets of records – dispels the lie, perpetuated in her notebooks, that life in New Zealand was all misery. Meanwhile the Trowells’ protracted journey back ‘home’ to England finally ended in London in June 1908. Employment was scarce and Mrs Trowell initially welcomed KM in as the family’s lodger in late 1908, providing much-needed income (although she ended up admonishing her for not paying her laundry bills). The news of her pregnancy caused outrage in the Trowell family and KM was forced to leave their home. The family eventually decided to relocate to Leeds in 1910.3 Thomas had at least one violin student in London during World War One and his subsequent retirement in Kent was uneventful. He died peacefully in 1944. Martin Griffiths Notes 1. In the same year that daughter Dorothy (Dolly) was born. 2. He conducted the ‘St Mary’s Drum and Fife Band’ for the annual Catholic picnic. See Evening Post, 27 December. 1892, p. 2. 3. Anon. 1910, p. 7. Trowell’s tenure as musical director of the Royal Theatre in Leeds lasted no more than six months and a return to London in December of the same year suggests the exercise was a failure. See Jones, p. 94.

[26 September 1907] [ATL] 4 Fitzherbert Terrace 26. ix. 07. My dear Mr Trowell I cannot let you leave without telling you how grateful I am – and must be all my life – for all that you have done for me – and given me. You have shown me that there is something so immeasurably higher and deeper in Music – than I had ever realised before – And, do you know, so many times when we have been together I have felt that I must tell you, how when I came from London friendless – and disheartened – you changed everything for me – – –

708   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 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 such great difficulty, and leading to so wide a road! And Music, which meant much before in a vague desultory fashion – is now full of inner meaning. I wish you Everything in the Future – Don’t you feel – that your Golden Age is coming now – and what I look forward to as the greatest joy I can imagine is to share a programme with you at a London concert – Thank you for all – and happily not goodbye Your loving, grateful pupil Kass. Note 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; his canons are all choral works, for two, three or four voices. One biographer recalls that, ‘Towards the close of 1841, Ingres the celebrated artist painted Cherubini’s portrait, which was bought by the king, and is now in the Luxembourg gallery. It is a beautiful and faithful likeness of the composer who sent Ingres with his thanks a beautiful canon, set to words of his own, the last piece Cherubini ever wrote’ (Bellasis, pp. 359–60).

[14 November 1907] [ATL] [4 Fitzherbert Terrace, Wellington]

November 14th.

My dearest Mr Trowell, Mrs Trowell, & Dolly – By this time – though I can’t yet realise it at all, you are nearly Home – You know I am sure, how very much I have missed you all, and how eagerly I am awaiting news – I pass 18 Buller Street, and just look at it out of the corner of my eye, and cannot feel that I shall not be able just to come in for three minutes – and eat a friendly pea nut with Dolly – over the dining room fire! Do you know – what I have here, this evening, in my room. Well, the Graphophone!!!1 and I have had just a musical feast – including speeches from Birmingham – that I am sure it must have been a case of subconscious mind – and I am 11,500 miles nearer you than I feel I am – Miss Watson2 met me, the other evening at a ‘social’ (!) and then offered me the use of it – So imagine me today carrying the Graphophone – three packets of records, and the cylinder home in the tram – It was worth the carrying though – when I heard the Beethoven Sérénade3 – Oh! news – Selina is giving Miss Parker some fiddle lessons4 – Rumour has it that she has already reached the intoxicating strains of



thomas luigi trowell  709

‘Nellie Bly’ and ‘Lil is a Lady’5 – Such is the incense we offer to Fame. And last night Mr Smith played the trombone in Mr Parker’s production – the Bride of Dunkerron.6 I hear, on competent authority, that his part teemed with triple cadenzas – though of course, you may not have come across them – The Parkers7 are all well, and we speak, constantly, of you all, and of how good it would be to pay you a little surprise visit – one of these days, soon – Today an English Mail came in – and I heard from a man at home that Arnold Trowell is teaching in London – Is that so? And what news is there about the boys? Do tell me a great deal – I get such very second hand information. Mr Trowell – I am working for you very regularly, so that next year – if you will have me – I shall be a little better pupil than I have been, here. Dolly, dear, how is the French? Mrs Trowell, I want to ask you at least fifty things at once – which is horrid – By next year – they will have become hundreds. Kiss London for me – and tell it – that when I come back I shall live in a tent in Trafalgar Square – and only leave it for Bayreuth8 – I shall be with you soon, and Merry Xmas.        Ever your loving              Kass –– Notes 1. The Graphophone was an American-designed and made phonograph patented in the 1880s. It was used in secretarial colleges and offices as an early form of dictation machine but quickly became obsolete when stenography was developed; it continued to be used for its play-back facilities to listen to voice recordings, but for musical listening its cylinder system was soon replaced by the grooved record and gramophones. 2. Birmingham was Thomas Luigi Trowell’s city of origin; in June 1904, he had returned with his wife and children for a number of family reunions. See Griffiths 2012, p. 48. See also n. 6 below. There was a Miss Watson working at Wellington Technical College in the years 1906–8 who is possibly the person who lent KM the Graphophone. 3. The German composer Ludwig von Beethoven wrote a number of different Serenades for small musical ensembles. These include the Serenade for violin, viola and cello, Opus 8, and a Serenade for flute, violin and viola, Opus 25. Although the Serenade as a musical form dates back to medieval times, it was adopted as a formal accompaniment for ceremonies in the classical era, before evolving towards more a serene, introspective style in the Romantic era, often for larger musical groups. 4. Margaret A. Parker was a pianist and friend of KM, whose short memorial testimony of their early years evoking their music-making was published in the New Zealand Herald just after KM’s death. Selena has not been identified. 5. ‘Nellie Bly’ was a minstrel song written in 1850 by American songwriter Stephen Foster. It was brought back into public memory in the 1880s when the name was adopted by the intrepid investigative journalist and pioneering

710   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 feminist campaigner Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman. See also CL1, p. 437. ‘Lil’s ma Lady’ was also a minstrel song and music hall favourite, written in 1898 by British songwriter Leslie Stuart. 6. The Bride of Dunkerron is a dramatic cantata by the English composer and hymn-writer Henry Smart (1813–79), with a libretto by Frederick Enoch written for the Birmingham Festival of 1864. It was being performed by the Wellington Musical Union at the Town Hall under the direction of Robert Parker. The Evening Post notes that ‘the cantata was given in Wellington as long ago as 1879’, and sums up the story as follows: the theme [. . .] is the love of the Lord of Dunkerron for a sea-maid. She cannot live on land, and conveys him to her spirit home. The Sea-King refuses his consent to the union; the maiden dies, and a tempest casts the wooer’s body on the beach. The storm-spirits exult, the sea-maidens mourn, and the serfs lament their chief. (Anon. 1907, p. 2) The atmosphere and storyline recall a number of the seascapes and fairy-tale vignettes KM was writing at the time. 7. Robert Parker (1847–1937) was a London-born conductor, choirmaster and accomplished organist who had a highly distinguished musical career in New Zealand; he was music master at Miss Swainson’s school – which KM attended – and taught her piano for a while in Wellington. His wife, Emma Martin, was from Wellington. 8. The German town of Bayreuth is most famous for having been the chosen home of Richard Wagner (1813–83) in the last years of his life, and the site of his specifically designed Festival Hall, the architecturally pioneering opera house devoted to the performance of his vast-scale, epically construed operadramas. The first Bayreuth Festival inaugurated the annual opera season, whose immense musical and social prestige has not declined to this day.

[10 January 1908] [ATL] 4 Fitzherbert Terrace 10. 1. 08 My dearest Mr and Mrs Trowell and Dolly It is really as I thought – and I am now hoping to sail for London the month after next – but don’t expect me till I send that telegram from Graves End1 – which I shall most certainly not forget to do – What a magnificent recital Tom must have given on November 23rd I heard about it from my friend Ida Baker – and she sent me a number of cuttings from the papers2 – Each one seemed finer than the last – Do let me tell you my plans – My relations wrote last mail saying that they might take me, as they thought of having a home in London after all – So Father has written and asked them to cable the one word



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‘Kathleen’ if they finally decide to do so – and I shall leave here on receipt of the cable – How I am going to wait until I hear – I really do not know. Mr Johnson and his fiancée Miss Montague spent an afternoon quite lately with me3 – He had ‘picked up for a song’ in Palmerston an old Banks ’cello4 – so he brought it and played a great deal – Miss Montague is really a very clever pianist – she has such a fine grip of everything she plays – and a particularly full, round tone – He attempted a Klengel Concerto5 – Poppers Tarantelle6 – Alla Polacca7 – Goltermann8 – and a great deal more – It was not even pleasant to listen to – but Miss Montague enjoyed it. Oh, will that cable to come for me – please Mrs Trowell, and then I know that it must. I felt I must just let you know how things were shaping. I am so wanting to hear from you – Shall I – soon? With much love to you – from Kass. Notes 1. Gravesend and Tilbury Docks were then the first ports of entry on the Thames embankment, and therefore the first point of entry for travellers arriving in Great Britain by steamship. From Gravesend, there were river and train services taking travellers into London. 2. Thomas (Arnold) Trowell had given a concert at London’s Bechstein Hall on 23 November 1907; the programme included Popper’s Concerto in E Minor, Paganini’s Non più Mesta, Boccherini’s sixth sonata and Trowell’s only composition for cello, Rêverie du Soir. The concert was warmly reviewed in The Times, the journalist noting his sound technique, the sonorous beauty of the tone and his reserved, modest poise, even in passages requiring a virtuoso’s mastery (25 November 1907, p. 8). 3. The visitor was probably Wellington-based Australian virtuoso cellist and composer Frank R. Johnstone and his soon-to-be wife, A. M. Montague, who performed together on numerous occasions in Wellington until 1918. No further details about their career have been traced. See also Griffiths 2012, p. 58. 4. Palmerston was then a very small town on New Zealand’s South Island; it would doubtless have been in Palmerston North on the North Island that Johnson [Johnstone] came across a cello made by Benjamin Banks (1727–95), a renowned luthier and harpsichord maker in Salisbury, UK. He was one of England’s key followers of the Amati design, the Banks cellos being particularly reputed for their perfect proportions and sonic beauty. 5. A reference to Julius Klengel (1859–1933), a virtuoso cellist and esteemed teacher from Leipzig, and also a respected composer. His cello concertos counted among the most demanding of the repertoire in the early twentieth century. 6. David Popper (1843–1913) was a Prague-born cellist and one of the eminent cello teachers of his day. His prolific output as a composer for cello vastly expanded the repertoire, greatly advancing public esteem for the cello as a very versatile solo and virtuoso instrument of immense tonal and acoustic power.

712   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 7. (It.): In Polish style, a Polonaise [dance]. 8. Georg Goltermann (1824–98) was a German cellist and composer whose works were much esteemed in his day; a number remain on the cellist’s standard repertoire to this day. His ‘Alla Polacca’ for cello and piano is the fourth movement from his Opus 48, Morceaux caractéristiques.

Marion Tweed [n.d.]

Introduction It is uncertain who the ‘Marius’ in this letter refers to, but she was clearly a schoolfriend still in Wellington, and may possibly refer to a girl called Marion Tweed, who had been a fellow pupil of KM’s at Miss Swainson’s school. KM had soon established herself as the class rebel, to the consternation of the headmistress, Mrs Henry Smith, who ruled the school with a rod of iron and expected absolute obedience and discipline. She certainly met her match in KM, who became the leader of a group of girls who formed a secret club with literary aspirations, and who started a little magazine called The School: Kathleen was the leader of a group that met upstairs, under the eaves (rather influenced by Little Women perhaps) and keeping the ‘literary club’ and its activities secret. The School was composed of jokes collected from grownup papers and ‘original’ stories. Kathleen’s was a story [called ‘In-Flu-Enza’] about a dog: ‘The door opened and in-flu-Enza’. The first issue (for club members only) was copied in Kathleen’s irregular, rather distinctive hand, on large double sheets of foolscap.1

The club was called the A. R. Club (the ante-room), and a school rhyme of the time begins: ‘A. for A. R. Club confined to the fair’. There was certainly a cachet attached to the girls who belonged, amongst whom were KM, Maata Mahupuku and Marion Tweed. Gerri Kimber Note 1. See Kimber 2016, pp. 84, 102–3.

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714   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [16 April 1903] [N] 27 St. Stephen’s Sq. Bayswater. W. April 16th 1903 My dearest Marius. What a long time since I have had a talk to you? It seems years & years. Do you feel the same about it? I wish that I could give you an idea of London. It is totally beyond description. It is most marvellous!!! The traffic is so astounding. There is none other way to have a really splendid view, than to sit on the top of a bus, with a piece of strong elastic on your hat; Then it is superb!! The bus drivers are such cures. They look most beautifully comfy wrapped up in gloves and rugs, and are most talkative. My dear, I wish that you could see Westminster Abbey. It is so lovely!! It is utterly impossible to rush the Abbey, because immediately you enter you are held enthralled by some marvellous work of sculpture, and so it is the whole time that you are there. I fell in love with Sophia, daughter of James I, (I mean, I fell in love with her tomb.)1 She died when she was three days old. The tomb is of white marble. It is a baby’s basinette with a hood and deep curtains, and a little child asleep inside. I bent over and kissed the baby; it looked so sad! Are you laughing dear? It was not funny. We went to St. Paul’s Cathedral last Good Friday. What charmed me most was the beautiful paintings the exquisite arches, & the magnificence of the mosaic work. The service was fearfully impressive. The church was dim, and there was a wonderful anthem. It seems to go right through you, and made you quite choky. The building of St. Pauls is very fine but I don’t like all the pigeons that are constantly flying about. They remind me of the time that Christ came and turned the dove merchants out of the Temple.2 How interested you would be in the British Museum. My dear you could see enough Julius Caesar’s to last you a lifetime, with noses, and minus noses, according to B.C. & A.D.3 All the sculpture everywhere, was a huge revelation, to me. O the indescribable beauty of form and attitude, that can be hewn out of a block of marble. And, O Marius, the pictures. My dear they take away all my adjectives!!!!!! I have fallen in love with all Watts pictures in the Tate Gallery.4 The most marvellous originality of colour is so striking, the depth of his reds, the calm peace of his blues, and his figures!!!! I think that the two most beautiful I saw were ‘Love and Life’, & ‘Hope’. On Bank Holiday Father & I did the correct thing & went to ’Appy ’Ampstead ’Eath.5 When we arrived there it grew most fearfully cold, and we had a bad snowstorm. I loved it. The whole place looked like a picture postcard. A place I am very fond of going to is Hyde Park. The carriages, horses and babies are most lovely, especially the last named. In their perambulators they remind me of little bits of wedding cake tied up with white ribbons. The motor cars are very fascinating. You see hundreds dodging about everywhere.



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I never saw such beautiful curtains as the English have. Silk & silk lace of the most exquisite quality!!! I would just love some of them for dresses!!! We three girls go to school on the 29th of this month (April.) We are going to Queen’s College Harley Street. W.6 It is a most delightful school. The school headmistress is a Miss Croudace, and the house mistress a Miss Wood. They are both exceedingly nice. The school is most superbly furnished. The room where we study is carpets with thick Turkey carpeted great armchairs everywhere, neat little tables, rugs, and charming pictures. Even Latin would be interesting in this room. And now dear, I must stop. Diddy7 will give you my address if you have not got it. The best of luck to your matric.      With love       I am       Yrs. truly      Kassius. P.S. Do write me soon about everything. Love to all my friends. Notes 1. Princess Sophia of England, or Sophia Stuart (22 June to 23 June 1606), was the seventh child of the Stuart King James VI of Scotland/James I of England, whose tomb is in King Henry’s Chapel, Westminster Abbey. 2. KM refers to the scene known as the ‘Cleansing of the Temple’ (Matthew 21: 12–15), when Jesus drove the money changers and dove merchants from the temple courts. 3. The British Museum’s statue collection includes an impressive number of statues and marble busts of the Roman Emperor Caius Julius Caesar (100 bce to 44 bce). 4. The British artist and sculptor George Frederick Watts (1817–1904) was one of the leading painters of the Symbolist movement in England, renowned for his densely allegorical works that draw on the classical tradition of Titian and Tintoretto while also embracing Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics and experimenting with more modern painterly techniques and themes. His high Symbolist paintings Love and Life (1884) and Hope (1886), originally intended to be part of an immense allegorical scheme to be called ‘The House of Life’, were among the rich collection he donated to the Tate Gallery in 1897. 5. ‘’Appy ’Ampstead’ was a well-known musical hall coster song from the late 1880s, written by the English singer, comedian and actor Albert Chevalier (1861–1923), best known for stage performances of the irresistible idiolect and comic patter of the London Cockney. 6. See Kimber 2016, pp. 98–164 for a detailed and illustrated account of KM’s school years at Queen’s College. 7. ‘Diddy’ was the nickname of Hilda Nathan Salinger; KM dedicated her poem ‘Shadows’ to her. See CP, p. 48.

Hugh Walpole (1884–1941)

Introduction Given his illustrious literary forebears – the novelist and art historian Horace Walpole, and the novelist and chronicler Richard Harris Barham (usually known by his pseudonym Thomas Ingoldsby) – it appears quite fitting today that Hugh Walpole should have decided at an early age to become a man of letters. It was not, however, what his family had intended, for they marked him out for the clergy, following in the wake of his father, the Reverend Somerset Walpole, who was to become Bishop of Edinburgh in 1910. Somerset Walpole was the incumbent of the cathedral in Auckland, New Zealand, in the late nineteenth century, the coincidental result of which being that his eldest son, Hugh, shared with KM their country of birth. Only the very first years of Walpole’s life, however, were spent in New Zealand; when his father then moved on to his new incumbency in New York, his mother preferred to return to Britain, having long suffered from homesickness. Walpole thus grew up in Truro, in Cornwall, before going up to Cambridge to study history. He quickly evolved towards Cambridge’s more literary circles, however, especially under the influence of his long-term mentor and father-figure, the novelist A. C. Benson, who fostered Walpole’s lasting passion for the later nineteenth-century writers – Henry James, George Meredith, Joseph Conrad and Arnold Bennett. After an uninspired appointment as a lay teacher, he was encouraged by a former Cambridge friend, E. M. Forster, to take up a position as a tutor to a ‘British’ author based in Germany – it was thus, by coincidence, that he came to live for some months in the family of KM’s cousin, Elizabeth von Arnim, who would become a life-long friend. Walpole soon took up novel-writing himself, publishing six between 1909 and the outbreak of the war – thereby initiating a rhythm of output that was maintained almost throughout his life. Walpole took up journalism during the war, after being disqualified from military enrolment by very poor eyesight. This choice took him straight to Russia and the Eastern Front as the Daily Mail correspondent, which allowed him not only to report back in great depth on conditions

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in the trenches and field hospitals, but also to make extensive stays in Petrograd and Moscow, where he instinctively explored the world of arts and letters – especially among the entourage of Maxim Gorky. For the last two years of the war, he worked for the Anglo-Russian Propaganda Bureau, and drafted his two Russia-inspired novels, The Dark Forest (1916) and The Secret City (1919). By another coincidence, he also ran into another future friend and correspondent of KM’s while on the steps of the British Embassy – the future writer William Gerhardi, whom he would come to know better in later life. As KM’s and Walpole’s succinct exchange of letters shows, they were appreciative readers of each other’s works, but her enthusiasm was scarcely shared by their more mainstream Modernist contemporaries – largely on account of Walpole’s preference for the more traditionally structured and narrated, psychologically focused novels. As a result of this, plus his best-selling six-volume series, the regional saga The Herries, he has tended to be seen more as one of the late Edwardian or mainstream early twentieth-century writers. His prolific literary output and a far warmer contemporary reception in the United States, however, where he established a successful, lucrative career on the side as a lecturer and even a Hollywood scriptwriter and cameo actor, ensured that he lived comfortably thereafter, but was quickly relegated to the sidelines of literary history in post-war studies of British literature. Claire Davison

[27 October 1920] [HRC]

27 x 1920

Isola Bella Garavan – Menton France

Dear Mr Walpole, I must answer your letter immediately. It has dropped into the most heavenly fair morning. I wish instead of writing, you were here on the terrace & you’d let me talk of your book which I far from detested.1 What an impression to convey! My trouble is I never have enough space to get going – to say what I mean to say – fully. That’s no excuse, really. But to be called very unfair – that hurts, awfully, and I feel that by saying so you mean Im not as honest as I might be – Im prejudiced. Well, I think we’re all of us more or less prejudiced, but cross my heart I don’t take reviewing lightly & if I appear to its the fault of my unfortunate manner.

718   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Now I shall be dead frank. And please don’t answer. As one writer to another (tho’ Im only a little beginner, and fully realise it): ‘The Captives’ impressed me as more like a first novel than any genuine first novel Ive come across. Of course there were signs enough that it wasn’t one – but the movement of it was the movement of one trying his wings – finding out how they would bear him, how far he could afford to trust them. I felt you were continually risking yourself, that you had, for the first time, really committed yourself in a book. I wonder if this will seem to you extravagance & impertinence. I honoured you for it – – – You seemed to me determined to shirk nothing. You know that strange sense of insecurity at the last – the feeling: ‘I know all this. I know more. I know down to the minutest detail and perhaps more still but shall I – dare I trust myself to tell all?’ It is really why we write, as I see it, that we may arrive at this moment and yet – it is stepping into the air to yield to it – a kind of anguish and rapture. I felt that you appreciated this – and that, seen in this light, your ‘Captives’ was almost a spiritual exercise in this kind of courage. But in fact your peculiar persistent consciousness of what you wanted to do was what seemed to me to prevent your book from being a creation. That is what I meant when I used the clumsy word ‘task’, perhaps ‘experiment’ was nearer my meaning. You seemed to lose in passion what you gained in sincerity and therefore ‘the miracle’ didn’t happen – I mean the moment when the act of creation takes place – the mysterious change when you are no longer writing the book – it is writing – it possesses you. Does that sound hopelessly vague? But there it is. After reading ‘The Captives’ I laid it down thinking: Having ‘broken with his past’, as he has in this book, having ‘declared himself’ I feel that Hugh Walpole’s next novel will be the one to look for. Yes, curse me. I should have said it! I sympathise more than I can say with your desire to escape from autobiography. Don’t you feel that what English writers lack today is experience of Life – I don’t mean that, superficially. But they are selfimprisoned. I think there is a very profound distinction between any kind of confession and creative work – not that that rules out the first by any means. – – – About the parson and his sister. Yes, they are truly observed, but they wouldn’t come in to my review because I didn’t think they really came into the book! What was Maggie to them – or them to Maggie? What did they matter to Maggie – what was their true relation? I can’t see it. I can’t see the reason for those two. I can imagine Maggie forgetting them utterly the moment she set foot in London. That their religion was more foreign to her than the other – one doesn’t need to be told. The point is Maggie never was in Skeaton; she was somewhere else. As to her holiday in that place where everything was green – I



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never knew what happened on that holiday? The parson’s sister – what a story you might have made of her and Paul! . . . (I don’t think that Paul’s passion for Maggie would have lasted, either. He would have become frightened of her, physically – and terribly ashamed.) Yes, I feel Skeaton could have had a book to itself with Paul’s sister – getting old, you know – her descent into old age – her ‘fears’ increasing – and then something like the Uncle Mathew affair breaking into her life – – – And I stick to what I said about Caroline. Yes, you might have trusted Caroline – but a young female wouldn’t. If Caroline had come to her father’s door Maggie would have stiffened – have been on her guard immediately. As to trusting her with a letter to Martin – never! Some of their lovemaking was very beautiful – it had that tragic, youthful quality . . . But enough. Forgive this long letter. Ill try & see more round the books. Ive no doubt at all Im a bad reviewer. Your letter makes me want to shake hands with you – across the vast – I hope this isn’t too illegible. But Im rather a feeble creature in a chaise longue. Yours sincerely     Katherine Mansfield Notes 1. KM’s review of Walpole’s novel was published in the Athenaeum on 23 October (see CW3, pp. 672–4). From her opening gambit, the reviewer makes it clear that her vivid interest in the novel is tempered by a number of reservations in terms of technique and form. She begins: If an infinite capacity for taking pains were what is needed to produce a great novel, we should have to hail Mr. Walpole’s latest book as a masterpiece. But here it is – four parts, four hundred and seventy pages, packed as tight as they can hold with an assortment of strange creatures and furnishings; and we cannot, with the best will in the world, see in the result more than a task. (p. 672) Much of the novel’s narrative momentum and power derive from Walpole’s perceptive exploration of a tender romantic attachment in a sometimes grimly religious, sometimes fanatically puritanical family, and the paradoxical claims of secular and spiritual love and devotion. The heroine, Maggie Cardinal, is a clergyman’s daughter who tries to escape her passionate love for the leader of a revivalist sect (Martin Warlock) by marrying a traditional Anglican parson (Paul Trenchard).

720   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [4 November 1920] [HRC]

4 xi 1920

Isola Bella Garavan – Menton

Dear Hugh Walpole Please do not praise me. But – let me say how I look forward to that talk, one of these days. The fact that you care about writing as you do, that ‘you are working’ is such happiness that all my good wishes & my sympathy cannot repay you for letting me know. Your from-this-time-forth ‘constant reader’ Katherine Mansfield.

Sydney Waterlow (1878–1944)

Introduction Waterlow is one of the constant yet discreet figures in KM’s life story who recurs regularly over the years via a host of unexpected links and connections with family, friends and acquaintances. He was her second cousin, being the eldest son of Charlotte Elizabeth Beauchamp – Elizabeth von Arnim’s sister, also rather misleadingly known as ‘Chaddie’ within the family – and her husband, Sir Sydney Waterlow, a highly respected politician, social reformer and philanthropist. Waterlow moved into the emerging Bloomsbury circles when he went up to Cambridge, proving to be a brilliant classics scholar at Trinity College. Unlike a number of his illustrious contemporaries, he was never admitted to the Apostles, however, which proved a source of lasting disappointment. During the Cambridge years, Waterlow forged lasting links with Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, E. M. Forster and J. W. N. Sullivan, but moved away from the tighter group of friends when he took up his first diplomatic posting in Washington, in 1900. Initially unconvinced by this career choice, and distressed by a first, unhappy, marriage, he then left the Foreign Office to take up university teaching. In the same years he became a close confident of T. S. Eliot, especially during the difficult years of Eliot’s first, unstable, marriage; a respected writer, translator and co-editor / translator (with Koteliansky); and – after the annulment of his first marriage – even a hopeful suitor of Virginia Woolf, who declined his proposal in 1911. Waterlow married his second wife, Margery Eckard (often referred to as ‘Dawks’ by the closer Bloomsbury set), in 1913, forming a family unit which Virginia Woolf rather dispiritedly described as ‘humble, aspiring & without illusions’ (DVW1, p. 155). This rather humdrum, unfulfilled life changed again when Waterlow returned once more to the Foreign Office at the outbreak of the war. It was a career move that decided his professional path, and inevitably his social networks and geographical base until the end of his life. As a result of strategic, successful postings during the war years, he was, by 1919, Acting First Secretary of the Foreign Office, a function that made him one of the key British representatives at the Paris Peace Conference,

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722   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 alongside Sir Robert Cecil, Philip Noel-Baker, Molly Hamilton and Helena Swanwick, as well as a major architect of the emerging League of Nations framework (the mainstays of which were directly taken from Leonard Woolf’s International Government, as Waterlow scrupulously underlined).1 Thereafter, Waterlow rose through the ranks of higher statesmanship, with illustrious diplomatic postings in Bangkok, Bulgaria and Athens. Inevitably, this geographical mobility meant he socialised little with the various networks of friends and relations, but as both an expressive, regular and immensely considerate letter writer and a steadfast friend whenever he was back in Europe, he remained close to his cousin Elizabeth and KM, to his old Cambridge networks, and – immediately after KM’s death – to his life-long friend, Koteliansky, whom he championed outspokenly during Koteliansky’s protracted and bitter fall-out with JMM over the management and editorship of their Adelphi magazine, a dispute fuelled in part by their sharp disagreement about the image of KM and her posterity as a writer.2 This involvement in the crisis between JMM, DHL and Koteliansky is highly revealing. As the warmly affectionate letters below attest, KM and he clearly loved and respected each other, and not only as reliable family links; she clearly saw him as a sensitive, perceptive fellow writer who could read her works with genuine understanding and with a meticulous sense of her poetic craft. Claire Davison Notes 1. See D. Wilson, pp. 88–91. 2. The context, details and outcome of this dispute are carefully recounted by Galya Diment in her biography of Koteliansky. See Diment 2011, pp. 153–8.

[27 January 1921] [ATL]

January 1921.

VILLA ISOLA BELLA GARAVAN MENTON A/M.

My dear Sydney. Quite by chance, I learned – while talking to J.M.M. that you had received no reply to the letter you sent me in Italy – I answered it – to the best of my memory it was even on the same day – But it was the time of that cursed Postal Strike, and my letter must have miscarried. Friendly letters, letters such as you wrote me, dear Sydney, are so rare – so awfully rare in my life – it grieves me to think I should have appeared



hugh walpole  723

unappreciative . . . Oh dear! Why does Life make us so timid. I want to tell you Ive always felt such real affection for you; it has always been so very pleasant to hear your ‘well, Katherine’, & I have regretted we have seen so little of each other – But perhaps, by now, I am talking to no end of an enemy – I hope not – – – The fact, too that we were cousins. I confess that apart from all else my esprit de famille1 delighted in that – Well, here’s so very late in the day my thanks & my love to you for the Italian letter Katherine. Note 1. (Fr.): My sense of family values.

[9 February 1921] [ATL]

9 ii 1921

VILLA ISOLA BELLA GARAVAN MENTON A/M.

My dear Sydney, Don’t feel bound to answer this, but I can’t enjoy a letter as I did yours without saying thank you – – – And I want to tell you a queer thing. You know where you speak of your ‘superiority of apprehension’ . . . God knows we have seen little enough of each other, & I hadn’t (to be frank) the faintest idea that you thought of me other than as a ‘cold aloof little creature’ – that you shared the general opinion, in fact. And yet, just before Christmas I wrote a very long story & you were my reader.1 I hope that doesn’t sound impertinent. I confess the impression was that you enjoyed the story, saw it, felt it, as I did – in a quite special way that outsiders wouldn’t appreciate. I even had a mental picture of you sitting in an armchair, reading it. It is called, in case you should ever see it ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ . . . and Squire is going to publish it in The Mercury – Let me salute you, Sydney, through my story; let us be friends because of it. Good Heavens if you knew how pleasant it is to know there is someone who cares to tell you he makes his fire first arranging the twigs in a pyramid – & that the logs are ‘self cut’ – I share that delicious

724   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 first moment & while I warm my fingers I forget these nasty foreign palms. . . . Your room sounds lovely – I shall never live in England again. I recognise Englands admirable qualities, but we simply don’t get on. We have nothing to say to each other; we are always meeting as strangers – Murry, on the other hand is made for England and I am certain he will not remain abroad for long. I understand that very well in him – No, Ill go finally to some place like Yalta & build a little house at Oreanda2 – if I do succeed in keeping the coffin from the door for so long. What are you going to do in the immediate future, I wonder. Where are you going to live. And I wonder if you are happy and what you really think about Life & if you have friends – real friends. I am sitting up in bed in an ugly little room with a huge dead clock in it & a pink screen worked with a needlework picture. Scene: Game of billiards sur l’herbe fraiche.3 Lady with die-away look being kissed by military party & very impertinent dog looking on. At moments it seems to me that all France – all French literature is in that picture – The wind is blowing. Strange shadows fly over the walls & ceiling from the palm outside, and these quick shadows are awfully beautiful . . . Lebe wohl4 With love from Katherine. Notes 1. It is not clear why KM should have pictured Sydney Waterlow as her ideal reader for ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, but the sisters’ concern for the absent sons, Benny and Cyril, working overseas, may well have inspired fond mutual reminiscences. 2. Oreanda was then a township in Yalta, on the Crimean peninsula, renowned in the late nineteenth century for its sanatoriums. Chekhov had stayed there, and drawn on the mountainous setting, shores and urban atmosphere as the backcloth for his well-known story ‘The Lady with the Dog’ (1899). 3. (Fr.): On a freshly mown lawn. The tapestry is a reproduction of a famous 1480 French woodcut, depicting a game now referred to as ‘ground billiards’ in the foreground, while a host of rural and amorous encounters take place in the wings. 4. (Ger.): Live well; Fare thee well.



hugh walpole  725

[16 March 1921] [ATL]

16 iii 1921

VILLA ISOLA BELLA GARAVAN MENTON A/M.

Dear Sydney Since receiving your letter Life has driven me through dark little doorways, down underground passages which ended this week in one of those white tiled rooms, with glass shelves, a fine display of delicate steel, too many wash basins, a frosted windy glass & a narrow little black sofa with steel grips for the patient to cling to. Here the surgeon & my doctor decided to risk it and plunged about 2½ inches of hollow knitting needle into my neck & withdrew it.1 Success triumphant. This process, repeated twice or thrice will, they hope, in time, relieve the accumulation . . . And so on and so on and so on . . . Brett sends me a silly letter: I return a tart reply. But really to emerge, to be above ground long enough, peacefully enough to take my friend by the hand & beg him not to talk of ‘boring me’ and not to imagine Ill accept ‘obvious explanations’ – thats been awfully difficult. In fact its not been possible! So Ive had to risk your cursing me and turning away from me and thinking your very worst. All the same, I shall risk coming back to my small place by the fire. I shall even pretend (until I know) that you understand and are not at all fierce . . . I loved your letter. Life is so very short. Let me say again, quickly, nothing you can tell me bores me. The only thing in the world that bores me is falsity – insincerity – I cannot tell you how I value, how I appreciate, anything you may ever care to tell me. But I wish you may soon know me well enough to feel I do not misunderstand you – – – Yes, I feel you are going to write. Its in your letters. They have that curious deliberate quality of one who is revolving something in his mind – What is it? I feel that you can afford to, and you do, see Life as you see it at present because you are absorbed in something else. And heres a queer idea for which I’ve no justification. I feel certain that one day you’ll write a play. But a very fine play. Or is that wide of the mark. You see, as I ‘see’ you (forgive me if I ever sound impertinent. Its so hard to speak from a distance) you have been moving hidden through Life. You have been a hidden, secret spectator when les autres2 did not even know that YOU were by. You have lived by apprehensions far

726   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 far more than most people, I imagine. But I am timid of talking to you about yourself – even though I want to so much. You may dislike it extremely. Is your new room your real writing room? Will you be working late there at the weekends? And what do your windows look out on. It will be lovely as the spring advances. I love a room that is a fortress and I love to work at night. To be free to get up and lean out of window into that dark, airy stillness – is happiness. Dear Heaven! How little has been written about the extraordinary charm of not going to bed at night! Only to think of it and one passes into a whole strange world where to be awake is enough. As long as one isn’t at a London party, or taking dinner with the Hutchinsons. But I remember, I expect you do, too, walks, drives, walking over wet lawns and down dark garden paths, finding oneself on the wharf or the station at a quarter to two in the morning, exploring empty kitchens long after midnight, watching the light change while you lie on the divan smoking and listening – one could go on for ever. And I all too trivial – I mean something more – which makes every breath one takes, as it were – an emotion – It is very mysterious how, in spite of everything, we find ourselves at the last praising Life – But this disjointed letter must end. Big green stars glitter in the deep sky; the frogs are shrilling and the sea beats ‘A-Ah’ – It is like summer. Goodnight. I ought to give you news of Murry, tho’. Let me see . . . As far as I know he is quite unchanged. He is working, but not too hard. And in the intervals he smokes his pipe, sews, and irons his trousers. Salute your New Baby for me and her fortunate mother3 – I hope they are both well. Je vous serre le main4 Ever Katherine Notes 1. On 12 March, KM had had external surgery on a swollen gland in the throat, which her doctor punctured to release the pressure. See above, pp. 284–5. 2. (Fr.): The others. 3. The third child (Judith Mathilda, 1921–66) of Sydney Waterlow and his wife, Helen Margery Eckhard, was born on 21 February. 4. (Fr.): I shake your hand. KM’s final greeting pays affectionate tribute to her and Sydney’s mutual friend Koteliansky, who characteristically used this and other similar, slightly idiosyncratic, literal translations of French or Russian letter endings to convey an intimate note of his own.



hugh walpole  727

[late March 1921] [ATL] VILLA ISOLA BELLA GARAVAN MENTON A/M. Dear Sydney – This little room with its pale walls, yellow velvet curtains, faded gilt mirror and large jars of wide open roses and marigolds – is the salon. Its wonderfully still; even the clock seems to have stopped exprès1 – but outside the windows the young peach leaves are shaking and big silvery clouds spin over the blue. Murry and Sullivan are somewhere – ranging the mountains. We have been talking of you so much these last few days that your letter seemed almost to bring you here. I shall (if I may) read the Tom Eliot2 part to these two young men over déjeuner.3 It was an immensely interesting letter – a delight – Thank you for it. Just a word about a cursed subject. Its beautifully kind of you to worry about Switzerland. I wonder what J.M.M. said to you. I wish I knew. For my part I am decided to go to Gèneve in May & to see there a man called Spahlinger. Ill get him to treat me & then I shall stay in der Schweiz4 until such time as it shall please the Lord to leave plaguing me. But NOT in a sanatorium. I want to find a little chalet if possible near Thun – in German Switzerland. J.M.M. can of course be there when he likes, and there seems a chance that Sullivan may find a pied à terre in the neighbourhood. Also a Dane, a friend of mine, wants to come from time to time.5 This project seems to me engaging. Shall we be able to persuade you to come & make holiday – too? The curse is still heavy on me – but I ignore it all I can, and – merciful Powers! what strange compensations there are! Yesterday for instance, as I waited for the surgeon in a huge, grim antechamber – I thought as I watched my companions – especially the poor ones – as I realised the immense gulf between those who have a perfect right to be ill if they choose & can pay whatever is necessary – to be well again – and the others – for whom illness is the mysterious ill fortune for which they are somehow to blame . . . ‘Kindly excuse us, but even an insect will live’ . . . I felt, more sincerely than I can say: ‘I would not be anywhere else for worlds. I would not have missed this’. But Im writing quickly, and I haven’t expressed what really was there – Beauty . . . Do you know what I mean that word to convey? No, I must turn it into a story before its really intelligible – Thank you for telling me about O’Malley.6 Ive been feeling these last weeks that its only now that I know what I want the short story to be. . . . Yes, Brett is a brick. I get impatient with her sometimes because she will think it necessary to write to me about, what Koteliansky used to

728   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 call ‘extremely serious questions’. And somehow these questions ring a little false from Brett. They are not what one wants from her. But I do appreciate my wickedness. Later At this point they came in and we began with olives and sausage and very good herrings – M. saw the point of the affaire Elliot perhaps better than I did. I didn’t know he had been spending his very spare time with the Hutchinsons and not with the likes of you. Hes a rare, delightful being – isn’t he? Thats what I always feel, even when the bluff oppresses me. But Prufrock remains – I think thats what I want modern poetry to be. I even have a feeling (this is private!) that Johnny Keats would have admired it immensely and written Elliot no end of a letter.7 I confess Im a moralist enough to think no man can afford to run with the Hutchinsons, more especially if he feels about them as Elliot does. But I don’t know. One must lay down the law for nobody except oneself . . . but Life is so precious, so marvellous – can one afford to pour it out for the Hutchinsons – afford to waste it except – gloriously – with ones friends? Later still. This letter is fated to be interrupted. Now Sullivan, having drunk 2 bottles of wine and a wine glass of brandy has gone off to Marseilles. J.M.M. is in his bedroom which adjoins mine, preparing to go to bed. We have been having a tremendous discussion on personal freedom. He has come to the conclusion that to be honest is the whole of the law. You cannot be a ‘good’ artist if you are a hypocrite – but – thats as much as one can say – The rest is personal freedom – – – He looks youthful, excited and gay as he stalks about declaiming this. I imagine he sees white arms beckoning; I imagine he is sloping over Europe with a ruck sack – meeting – whom? A young man on the threshold of Life, in fact. Whereas my personal freedom is a big table, and to lose myself in work. Goodnight. Forgive this letter. Be happy. Katherine. Notes 1. (Fr.): On purpose. 2. T. S. Eliot had told Waterlow about his overwhelming concerns both for his own mental health and the devastating effect neurasthenia was having on his concentration and compositional powers (he was busily drafting what would become The Waste Land), and for the health of his wife, Vivienne, who was showing increasing signs of paranoia and depression. His critical essays, meanwhile, were frequently leaving reviewers perplexed. Waterlow was one of his more trusted confidants at the time. Vivienne, meanwhile, confided mostly in Mary Hutchinson. After a disagreement with Eliot linked to the Athenaeum, JMM had been engaging in detail with his critical work just at



3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

hugh walpole  729 this time, both to enrich his proposed lecture tour in Oxford, and to prepare for a forthcoming review of Eliot’s The Sacred Wood. Eliot was flattered and impressed by the review, which prompted him to restore more friendly relations between them. See Crawford, pp. 349–94. See also DVW2, pp. 90–101. (Fr.): Lunch. (Ger.): Switzerland. KM’s schoolfriend Marie Dahlerup was then living in the Geneva region. Owen O’Malley (1887–1974) was a diplomat and a colleague of Waterlow’s from the Foreign Office. Koteliansky had been in contact with him in his attempts to gain information about his family in Ukraine, but whether this is what Waterlow told KM about or not has not been ascertained. KM’s confession appears to be deliberately reading Eliot against his own critical principles at the time; by doing so, however, she intuitively picks up on the common aesthetic sensibility linking the high Romantic poems of John Keats with the sparsely modern, alienated poetic vision of Eliot. In The Sacred Wood, Eliot had maintained that though ‘there may be a good deal to be said for Romanticism in life, there is no place for it in letters’ (1920, p. 32). See note 2 above, p. 728.

[4 November 1921] [ATL]

4 XI 1921

Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre (Valais) Switzerland.

Dear Sydney, Your holiday sounded very delightful. I have often wanted to visit Perpignan. Do you know a little book ‘La Fortune de Becot’ by Louis Codet.1 Its about that part of the country – awfully worth reading for its first 18 chapters – Yes, we are very happy here. Switzerland has its disadvantages, the chief being the Swiss but its an amazing spot for work. Or so I find – I love this place; I love mountains and big skies and forests. And the weather is still supremely beautiful even though the lower peaks are powdered with fresh snow. But Heavens! What sun. It never has an ending. I am basking at this minute – half past four – too hot without a hat, & the sky is that transparent blue only to be seen in autumn – the forest trees steeped in light. Please don’t think of me as ‘ill’. I am not ill any longer, and never mean to be ill again – thats over. But the prime ‘reason’ for your leap in the dark was the Murry & Sullivan affair wasnt it?2 I mustn’t fly off – upon the beauties of squirrels

730   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 & the smell of quinces – & all those things which make Life Ah! how thrilling – Sullivan v. Murry . . . But my dear Sydney I know no more than you. All I know is that they are not writing to each other at present. Is there really anything more definite? Cross my heart it is not known to me. I thought they had both, for the time being, come to a pause – and that was all – As to the ‘Dodger’ M. denies that ever was his ‘mot’.3 I think, indeed I am sure he appreciates Sullivan – I gave him your letter to read, I questioned him about it and he laughed at me. Rien de rien4 – So there you are – Does that seem to you highly unsatisfactory? I am going to Italy in the spring – to Asissi to see the wild cyclamen in its glory. That is one tremendous advantage of being across the Channel – theres no Channel to cross. But no – it won’t do. I can’t write to you – Sydney. Its hollow – don’t you feel? I can only write letters when I feel a warm living sympathy exists between me & the person who replies. And for some cursed reason you are ‘suspicious’ of me – Farewell. I hope you are happy Katherine. Notes 1. The French writer, artist and politician Louis Codet (1876–1914) was a friend of André Gide’s, with whom he worked temporarily on the flagship French Modernist review, the Nouvelle Revue Française; he was also an intimate friend of Guillaume Apollinaire and Marie Laurencin, and other bohemian Paris Montparnasse artists. Most of his major work was published after his death in World War One, in Flanders, and in circumstances very similar to those of KM’s brother, Leslie. La Fortune de Bécot was among the posthumous works, first published in 1921; it is the third volume of a sparkling, warm-hearted and very epicurean novel, celebrating the coast and rural beauty of the southern region around Perpignan, as well as the tenderness of the local people. 2. Complications at the Athenaeum appear to have been at the root of a slight falling out between J. W. N. Sullivan, JMM’s assistant editor and literary editor, and JMM; Kaplan notes that their ‘late-night speculative, overly-intellectualised conversations [. . .] used to irritate Mansfield’ (Kaplan, p. 141). 3. (Fr.): The word he used. 4. (Fr.): Nothing at all.

[3 December 1921] [ATL]

Chalet des Sapins Montana-sur-Sierre Valais

My dear Sidney How are you? What is happening? What are you thinking? Are you in the mood for a talk. If you are – – –



hugh walpole  731

Tell me, Sidney, why are people clothed in this awful armour? Why is it shameful to feel warm hearted? Why must one go on and on pretending, ‘carrying it off’. I remember my immense surprise when my first husband1 sent me letters with without prejudice at the top. But all the letters one gets are without prejudice. Its very odd. Dont other people want real friendship as I do? Are they all content with a kind of game? But that is so boring; it is so barren, so cold. I suppose the truth is people prefer to be alone. There you are! They have not this cursed desire to share things, to understand and appreciate one another. Well, its very sad, Sidney, if that is so. In fact its insufferable. And the only way to bear it is by living in the past. But that is cold comfort. I want to live in the past, present and future all at one and the same time – dont you? You do feel that, in spite of everything, there is nothing wrong with Life? And this business of accepting, submitting, giving, taking, is deeply, deeply worth while. But wouldn’t it be wonderful if that was taken for granted once and for all so that we went on from that point. Ah me! Forgive me if I have bored you. Dont be bored, please. . . . I have just finished the proofs of my new book. Its been like getting back into the skin one had sloughed off. Not at all the skin I thought it, either. But it cant be helped. I think one must risk being seen not at one’s best. Its no good hiding the unfavourable photographs, though pride wants to. All the same I must take a deeper breath next time. There is a loud fierce wind blowing tonight from God knows where. It sounds very awful.       Farewell          Yours ever          Katherine. Note 1. KM had married George Bowden, a singing teacher and voice specialist, in 1909; they were not officially divorced until May 1918.

[22 August 1922] [ATL]

22 viii 1922

6 Pond Street Hampstead N.W.3

My dear Sydney, I understood you agreed to lunch with me tomorrow though how when or where I hadn’t a notion. I don’t think you would care about

732   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 dining here – Brett is having one of her Thursdays, I gather. Supposing we meet then? Even if I don’t come downstairs & sit among die Propheten perhaps you would come up & have a little chat – Its awfully, strangely nice being in London again – Yours ever Katherine. Note 1. (Ger.): The prophets.

Orlo Williams (1883–1967)

Introduction To have been identified as a ‘modern masculinist’ alongside Arnold Bennett and Desmond MacCarthy in an excised passage from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando1 is doubtless one of the lesser highlights in the life of Orlando Cyprian Williams, who from the earliest age was known to friends, family, work colleagues and the reading public as Orlo. Ironically, had the passage been maintained, he may, perhaps, have been better remembered today. Being close to the key players but never in the limelight, however, would seem to be a leitmotif of Williams’s rich, variegated life, characterised by ‘impressive accomplishment’ and ‘gaiety of manner’.2 Having been a King’s Scholar at Eton, where he was also president of the Musical Society, he went up to Balliol College, Oxford, where he did outstandingly well in Classics and Modern Languages, and proved equally proficient in boxing and fencing. In 1907, he gained his first appointment in public office as a clerk in the House of Commons, where he remained, holding positions of distinction and importance in the wings there throughout his career. He was an officer in World War One, notably serving as Chief Cypher to General Ian Hamilton during the Dardanelles Campaign, and later saw service in Egypt and Palestine before being appointed to the War Office in the department of Military Intelligence. One of his fellow officers in the Dardanelles was former schoolfriend Compton Mackenzie, who remained a life-long friend; it was also at the War Office that he first encountered JMM. It was his sideline activities as a writer, rather than his military experience and his sporting trophies, of course, that brought Williams into KM’s orbit, although his detailed and sensitive accounts of the ANZAC campaigns in the Dardanelles would doubtless have struck a chord.3 He was a prolific and eclectic essayist, literary critic, biographer, translator, novelist and short-story writer, whose essays and reviews featured in The Times, Blackwood’s, the TLS and the National Review. He also contributed frequently to the London Mercury, edited by his close friend J. C. Squire. Through another of his friends, Hugh Walpole, he was introduced to KM’s cousin, Elizabeth von Arnim, whom he visited in

    733

734   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Switzerland – thus establishing another overlap with KM and JMM’s life. It has not been possible to establish which of these many, varied works he had sent KM after first meeting her at a lunch party; had he been a closer friend, he may well have selected his volume of fairy stories for children. On the other hand, given his clear respect for her, a more likely choice was the recently published The Good Englishwoman (1920), which, despite the condescending gallantry of the title, proves to be a spirited appeal for more women to accede to all ranks of public office and the professions, as the only way forward in British social, cultural and political life. Claire Davison Notes 1. See Raitt, in Woolf 2018, p. lvi. 2. The Times, 11 March 1967, p. 12. 3. Williams’s war diaries and photographs, frequently cited in World War One historiography, are now archived at the Imperial War Museum, London. See also his (1931) ‘Gallipoli: Memories of a Gallant Adventure’, p. 195.

[17 January 1921] [ATL]

17 i 1921

VILLA ISOLA BELLA GARAVAN MENTON A/M.

Dear Mr Orlo Williams, Will you forgive me for having delayed so long to thank you for the delightful small book.1 The truth is I did write to you, but just before I sat down to do so I re-read your sympathetic note and away flew my pen in answer in a terrible way that exiles pens have of flying. I quite forgot that Id only met you twice or thrice at luncheon – I only remembered that you had said you knew the unhappiness of separation & the happiness of being together & sympathised with Murry and me. Before I knew where I was I found myself telling you what it did mean to us . . . which wasn’t at all the way to repay a kindness. – But sympathy is so rare – so awfully rare – it went to my head – I want to tell you how much I admired your story The Wild Thing.2 Perhaps Murry told you. It made me want very much to see other stories of yours.



orlo williams  735

I re-read ‘Gusev’3 the other day – Oh, Heavens! What a marvellous thing this writing is! With my sincerest thanks               Yours ever              Katherine Mansfield. Notes 1. By 1921, Orlo Williams had published a number of essays and studies in cultural history. Likely volumes which he may have sent to KM include his 1913 Vie de Bohème, A Patch of Romantic Paris or The Good Englishwoman (1920). 2. Williams contributed a number of essays, stories and reviews to the Athenaeum; his ‘A Wild Thing’ was published on 3 December 1920, pp. 752–3. It is an impressive story of separation and repressed emotion both as experience and as observed by an outsider, the ‘wild thing’ being the metaphorical figurations of emotion itself. Not only would the theme of parting have touched a chord in KM; so too would the fact that the distressed central character setting off on the train is a soldier, who is, in fact, no more than ‘a blubbering boy in khaki’ (p. 753). 3. Chekhov’s short story ‘Gusev’, published in 1918 in the collection The Witch and Other Stories, translated by Constance Garnett, offers clear intertextual echoes with Williams’s ‘A Wild Thing’, as his previous letter to KM would appear to have acknowledged. Likewise, a story voicing the thoughts and passing exchanges between travelling soldiers, it is one of Chekhov’s most masterful balances between trivial, inconsequential triflings and searing, deep-felt emotion. ‘Gusev’ was one of the key works that prompted Virginia Woolf to assert, in 1919, ‘The most inconclusive remarks upon modern English fiction can hardly avoid some mention of the Russian influence, and if the Russians are mentioned one runs the risk of feeling that to write of any fiction save theirs is a waste of time’ (‘Modern Fiction’, EVW3, p. 35).

[11 March 1922] [ATL]

11 iii 1922

Victoria Palace Hotel Rue Blaise Desgoffe Rue de Rennes Paris.

Dear Mr Orlo Williams, I cannot say how happy your generous letter has made me. Thank you from my heart. It is too generous. You say nothing, or almost nothing, about the big black holes in my book which I must mend next time.

736   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 But I know they are there. In fact I am so conscious of them that its awfully pleasant when a fellow-writer ignores them for a moment and says he liked the rest. It is a relief to me that you realise that my heart was with William in Marriage à la mode and with old Mr Neave and young Mr Dove.1 It makes me gasp when reviewers think I am jeering at them and poking cruel fun. When one has been away from people for so long – I have only seen glimpses of people for five years now – that is positively frightening . . . I had meant to convey that I loved them – especially the Doves. I have often wondered about their married life. How nice it is you should single out just that story! Nobody else has. Murry and I have left Switzerland. I am trying a new X ray treatment here which promises wonders. It is all promise as yet but we believe implicitly in it – perhaps for that reason – and have planned to walk into Germany this summer. Its strange to be in a city again. I do not see much of it – only what shakes past the taxi windows as we are hurled to and from the clinic once a week. We are like hermits and have seen nobody. Murry went to a Punch and Judy show today in the Luxembourg Gardens (Front Seats 2d) and enjoyed it very much.2 I don’t know whether he screamed. Everybody else screamed and one little boy was overcome and had to be led away. It would be delightful to meet you again and to talk over this mysterious business of story writing. There is so much to say, but letters wont do . . . I wonder if you will be seeing my cousin Elizabeth; she returned to London this week. Murry asks me to send you his love.        With my grateful thanks once more            Yours very sincerely           Katherine Mansfield. Notes 1. See ‘Marriage à la Mode’ and ‘Mr and Mrs Dove’ (published in The Sphere and then in The Garden Party and Other Stories) in CW2, pp. 330–9; 300–7. 2. See above, p. 515.

Wingley and Athenaeum

Introduction In the two postcards below, KM reveals once more the frequently playful aspect of her letter-writing, together with her love of bringing to life treasured possessions such as her dolls (see the Introduction to ‘Ribni’ above, p. 472), and here, her beloved cat family. Wingley and Athenaeum were the sons of Charlie Chaplin, KM and JMM’s cat when they lived in Hampstead, and who they had initially mistaken for a male. Little is heard of Athenaeum (‘Athy’) but much more is known about his Continentaltravelling brother, Wingley. As Ali Smith expresses so perfectly, he was a cat who’d travelled the world, walked up and down French and Swiss railway station platforms in collar and lead, Ida Baker having brought him all the way from England to Montana-sur-Sierre in Switzerland, no easy feat. From Hampstead Heath to the mountains, Wing, there in the chalet asleep on the window sill or out chasing birds in the snow as Mansfield writes some of her best stories in the last years of her life. But then, as the year and the illness close in on Mansfield a cat becomes not possible, a weight on her conscience, a worry, so much so that she suggests to Ida Baker quite unflinchingly that it might be a good idea to have Wing destroyed.1

Luckily, Ida Baker was ultimately able to find a permanent home for Wingley back in England with her aunt, Mrs Scriven, who lived in Lewes near Newhaven. Several of KM’s letters in this – and the previous – volume make mention of these cats. For example, in a letter to Ida Baker, written on 27 May 1922 (CL1, p. 153), KM reveals how emotionally invested she still is in her beloved Wingley: It is nice to know the poor little cat is out of its basket. Awful to love that cat as one does. I suppose you imagine I don’t care a bean for him because I keep on talking of having him destroyed. To say that and see his little paws dodging in and out of the wool basket, & see him sitting in the scales or returning from his walk with paw uplifted stopping now and then . . . In fact I shall one day write a cat story which will be heart breaking! In the meantime I do hope he will not die & that you will give him an occasional sardine tail . . .2

    737

738   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Sadly, just seven months later KM died, and no such story was ever written. Gerri Kimber Notes 1. Ali Smith, pp. 14–15. 2. CL1, p. 153.

[23 November 1919] [ATL] [Postcard, addressed to ‘Master Athenaeum Murry’]1 [Casetta Deerholm, Ospedaletti] Dear Athy Don’t be frightened of what I’ve marked with a + on the other side.        Your loving              Gran’ma Note 1. The postcard shows a colourised scene of the Via Vittoria Emanuele in Ospedaletti. KM’s cross is no longer visible.

[23 November 1919] [ATL] [Postcard addressed to ‘Master Wingli Murry’]1 [Casetta Deerholm, Ospedaletti] With love and a x from his         Gran’ma (Please show it to gran’pa) Note 1. A black and white view of Ospedaletti, showing ‘La chiesa e il Paese’ (It: the church and the countryside).

Leonard Sidney Woolf (1880–1969)

Introduction Of all the rich, intriguing personalities who came together at the beginning of the twentieth century to form the now infamous Bloomsbury Group, none is perhaps as paradoxically central and marginal as Leonard Woolf. As one of the close circle of friends around Thoby Stephen at the turn of the century, he certainly counts, along with Clive Bell and Lytton Strachey, as one of the founding members, present from the outset when the Thursday evenings first began at the home of the Stephen sisters – the future Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf. He nevertheless remains something of an enigma, and to a certain extent, a presence in the margins. The first reason must certainly be his origins: he was born into a precariously middle-class Jewish family and brought up in Reform Judaism, which, by his teenage years, he had rejected. In the ambient antisemitism of early twentieth-century Britain – the almost instinctive, glib nature of which permeated even into the sceptical, rational, open-minded attitudes of his fellow ‘Bloomsberries’ – he could easily be marginalised with a pointed quip. In his youth, he learnt to block out such racial and social prejudice – with such success that he could later claim that it had had no influence on his life. Whatever the case, he proved a brilliant pupil at St Paul’s, and just as gifted as a scholarship-winning student at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was soon to become the first ever Apostle of Jewish origin. After graduating, less brilliantly than predicted, he entered the Colonial Civil Service and proved a successful colonial administrator in Ceylon, where he served for seven years. He resigned after proposing to Virginia Stephen and they were married in 1912. Thereafter, Leonard Woolf willingly relegated himself to the margins, as his wife’s career and well-being became the centre of his life, to a great extent, although he did have an extraordinarily successful, dynamic and productive literary career of his own. In this case, it would appear to be merely his own impressively assiduous, earnestly professional, committed working ethos which left him in the shadows when others opted for more visible, flamboyant public and professional paths. Public service and the public good

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740   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 were Woolf’s life-long concerns: as a writer, his broad-ranging publications were devoted to astute, outspoken anticolonialism, social reform and welfare, international relations and crisis management, foreign policy and democratic government. He was a member of the Union of Democratic Control and the Independent Labour Party; a committed, active advisor to the Labour Party and the League of Nations (even authoring some of the texts used for its early constitution); and an exceptional journalist, editor and broadcaster in the pioneering days of wireless, the educational, democratising potential of which, as well as its propensity to propagate evil, he acknowledged before many of his peers. It was in a different type of energetically embraced marginality that he and Virginia Woolf also came to be the founders of the Hogarth Press. Initially construed as a manual occupation that could provide a form of therapeutic sideline for Virginia Woolf, whose bouts of manic depression were always most acute when she emerged, exhausted, from the final stages of writing, it soon became something of a shared passion, in the dining room or basement of their home. His autobiography evokes with warmth and beauty the sheer pleasure of learning to use the hand-press, setting the type, inking the rollers, and printing out the pages which they would bind themselves on carefully chosen paper. The activity also proved a godsend for the writers in their midst – themselves included – cutting out the anxiety of submitting manuscripts to often disdainful publishers, more on the look-out for commercial successes. This ‘commercial hippogriff’ of a press proved too successful for its own good1 – within five years, they were faced with the dilemma of having to devote the best of their time to it, or selling out, neither of which solutions suited them. At the same time, the modestly sized equipment imposed limits on their own productive capacities, which they also found frustrating. As a result, they remained directors but expanded the business, outsourced some of the stages of production and employed office help. In this renewed mode, Virginia and Leonard Woolf remained part-time publishers for the rest of their professional lives, their roles extending to reading and assessing manuscripts, commissioning works and series, proof-reading and co-translating, legal agreements and book-keeping, marketing and overseas partnerships. As recent studies of the Press have shown, the output, variety and range of their publishing endeavours were truly impressive, as was the beautiful quality of the printed works, even in the days when they were no longer hand-printing the covers embellished with bold woodcuts and painted designs by Vanessa Bell.2 It was at Garsington that Leonard first met KM; he even cites her as one of only three distinguished women he ever saw there, the other two being Margot Asquith and Virginia Woolf.3 His own evocations of their encounters from then on are quite poignant, seeming to pick up on the finesse and complex subtlety of her personality (‘By nature, I think, she was gay, cynical, amoral, ribald, witty’), but also suggesting that they never quite had the opportunity to appreciate each other. ‘I liked her’, he



leonard woolf  741

admits, ‘though I think she disliked me.’4 He also provides astute insights into the strangely dysfunctional yet fusional couple that she made with JMM, which in turn seemingly influences her instinctive mask-wearing and tendency to theatricality. While Woolf’s autobiography clearly states he had far less time for JMM, the Hogarth Press records suggest a slightly different story, and their testimony provides useful background in terms of the letter from Woolf published here. Prelude was, in fact, the Press’s second publication, and the single work produced in 1918. The year before, it was their own Two Stories that launched the Woolfs’ joint publishing venture. In retrospect, however, it was Prelude that Leonard saw as something as a landmark: When I look at my copy of Prelude today, I am astonished at our courage and energy in attempting it and producing it only a year after we had started to teach ourselves to print. [. . .] Virginia did most of the setting and I did all the machining, though I did set when there was nothing to machine. I did not machine Prelude on our small handpress; in fact, it would have taken much too long to do it page by page. I machined it on a large platen machine which printed four crown octavo pages at a time and which belonged to a jobbing printer called McDermott.5

The result was visibly something to be proud of. It was a copy of Prelude that Woolf then sent to T. S. Eliot as a proof of what they could do, and thereby to incite him to entrust his next work to them.6 The tactic paid off. In 1919, the Press produced three works: Poems, by T. S. Eliot, Kew Gardens, by Virginia Woolf, and Critic in Judgement, by JMM. We can thus surmise that however Pecksniffian and sentimental at times, JMM was also favourably judged as a writer, and presumably as a friend of sorts, at least in those years. KM’s sole surviving letter to Leonard Woolf attests both the professionalism and the affection that defined his relations with her. It also reflects the interesting working partnership that he and Virginia Woolf established from the beginning. They functioned together but their roles tended to be complementary, despite overlapping at times. As the archives of the Hogarth Press show, Leonard Woolf’s role tended to focus on the business arrangements, contracts, legal agreements and (meticulous) accounts and book-keeping; Virginia Woolf took over the negotiations with writers, the manuscript assessments, the more diplomatic exchanges and commissioning. As proof-readers and co-translators working with Koteliansky, however, manuscripts show they could be as interchangeable as KM and JMM. Claire Davison Notes 1. L. Woolf 1980, vol. 2, p. 243. 2. See, for example, Southworth 2010.

742   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 3. 4. 5. 6.

L. Woolf 1980, p. 146. Ibid., p. 147. Ibid., p. 172. See L. Woolf 1990, p. 279.

[late August 1917] [Sussex] 141a Church Street, Chelsea S.W.3.

Dear Leonard Woolf, I am exceedingly obliged to you for your kind letter. To think that Virginia and you like my story1 is most uncommon jolly – I still can hardly believe it, for, to tell the truth, I flung it with a timid fling and more than half expected to find it back on my doorstep – To be business-like. I agree, of course, to your conditions but do not think that you will sell 300 copies? It sounds a very large number and I should not think there would be any fear of a 2nd edition.2 When you come back to town perhaps I may come and see you and ‘settle’ the details. If I can help, later on, with addressing envelopes etc – you realise that I am at your service. I sent Virginia two lines in answer to her note but posted them to Hogarth House. Yours sincerely Katherine Notes 1. As detailed in the Introduction above, Hogarth Press had just agreed to publish her Prelude. 2. Despite KM’s apprehensions, Leonard Woolf’s provisions proved justified. He notes that the edition did indeed go out of print. A total of 257 were sold, and the others were distributed among friends or sent to reviewers and future authors (L. Woolf 1980, p. 172).

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) (née Stephen)

Introduction Virginia Woolf has become so much of a Modernist icon1 that to describe her was as difficult as ‘trying to count the colours in a floating bubble: it vanished before you had time to begin’; her nature was so complex and so varied that it could only be glimpsed from time to time, and then never seen as a whole.2

The ‘indelible footprint of truth’3 – at least, the solid facts of biography – are relatively straightforward to synthesise. She was born into a richly intellectual but complex family. Her father was Leslie Stephen (1832–1904), the eminent essayist, intellectual, literary critic and founding editor of the Dictionary of National Biography; her mother, Julia Prinsep, was a highly sensitive trained nurse and publicly engaged philanthropist, but also the incarnation of Victorian principles of caring, devoted femininity. Both parents brought desperate grief into the marriage, having both been widowed early and left with children to fend for. Woolf thus grew up in a recomposed family, the sister of seven siblings who included, of course, the future British post-Impressionist artist Vanessa Bell. Woolf’s childhood was spent between Cornwall and Kensington, which she later evoked with rich detail and personal insight.4 The great creative and imaginative freedom of the children’s world was, however, blighted by a harsh series of tragedies, which included the death of their beloved mother in 1895; the elder sister, Stella Duckworth, who had taken the bereft family in hand; Leslie Stephen in 1904; and Woolf’s beloved brother Thoby in 1906. These devastating upheavals, along with the sadness and bereavements of World War One and later the dread of an impending and soon ruthless World War Two, took an immeasurable toll on Woolf’s mental health, sometimes totally undermining her impressively rich, prolific and often pioneering life as a writer and public intellectual until the end of her days.

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744   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 As a typical representative of her class, era and gender in certain respects, Virginia Woolf’s education was lightweight compared to that of her Cambridge-educated brothers. She was mostly taught at home, took private classes with a number of respected tutors, and enrolled on a number of college courses available for women. Unlike the archetypal ‘educated man’s daughter’,5 though, she was also given free access to her father’s library, and it was here that she embarked on an impressive quest for knowledge, reading avidly across centuries, genres and traditions. Once Thoby went up to Cambridge in 1904, however, education of a different sort came into the home: during the holidays he brought back the friends who were soon to make their visits into regular Thursday evening slots when all imaginable topics from mathematics, science and philosophy to sexuality, poetry and travels were discussed openly. And so, as Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, E. M. Forster and Maynard Keynes, along with a select few of their friends and associates, gathered at their London home, the Bloomsbury Group came into being. When Leonard Woolf returned from colonial service in Ceylon in 1912, he and Virginia Stephen were married. By then, she was a reviewer and essayist for a growing number of newspapers and literary journals; she was also working on her first novel, The Voyage Out, which, after years in the making, was finally published in 1915. The Woolfs’ lives took on a new direction in 1917 when they purchased a hand-printing press and set up a publishing company of their own.6 Their lives would henceforth be divided – irregularly, admittedly – between commissioning, editing, designing and publishing what started as an impressive array of their friends’ work, and rapidly expanded to encompass a broad coverage of British and European literature, political essays, and trail-blazing series in psychoanalysis, musicology, cultural history, travel writing, poetry and epistolary essays. Woolf, meanwhile, pursued an intellectual life of her own, publishing the novels, short stories, essays and manifestoes that were gradually acknowledged as masterpieces in Great Britain, Europe and the United States in her lifetime: Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), A Room of One’s Own (1928), The Waves (1930) and Three Guineas (1938), to name but some. Her name and œuvre then met with adverse, sometimes viciously destructive criticism or disparaging dismissal until successive waves of Women’s and Gender Studies, new critical appraisals in the United States and various schools of cultural and critical theory, along with film-makers and biographers, returned to her works with increasing admiration. Woolf’s friendship with Katherine Mansfield began in the war years. Lytton Strachey initially brought them together (see above, p. 644), and the cultural and ethical context of Garsington Manor (p. 175, n. 5) soon reinforced their friendship. Nevertheless, misunderstandings and unspoken



virginia woolf  745

waves of resentment also shaped their relationship. This would doubtless be inevitable when an intimate friendship grows swiftly between two women sharing an avid passion for literature and a keen curiosity to explore evernew literary themes and methods, circulating in frequently overlapping literary circles and networks, but also having in common bereavement, a keen, finely tuned, susceptible sensibility and fragile health, about which they spoke reluctantly, but also separated by their origins, social aura and cultural capital. This irregularly paced intimacy emerges throughout their letters to each other, as it did in their letters to their friends. It was also recorded with astonishing honesty by Woolf in her diaries, which offer precious insights into the tender, fraught but incredibly intense understanding that they achieved.7 One of the most lasting examples of this was Woolf’s second novel, Night and Day (1919), which KM spoke warmly about but also reviewed with a certain degree of irregularly veiled disappointment and scepticism, which inevitably caused extended tension and mistrust. Given the beauty and sensitivity of the writing, its poetic and political currents, and the very engaging plot that earned Woolf comparisons with Jane Austen, whom KM also admired, the degree of critique that KM expressed in private has perplexed critics and biographers to this day. When one recalls, however, that the protagonist is called not only Katharine, but Hilbery – hill / berry, which is surely not so very far removed in semantic resonance to Mans / field, and even closer to home when we recall that Mathilda Berry was a pseudonym KM adopted – then perhaps an unmeasured, unmeasurable degree of subconscious identification had also fuelled KM’s complex reception of the novel, inviting a sense of reflected self or mask that both hit the mark and did not quite fit. Whatever the case, reading their letters and their literary writings in parallel offers one of the finest insights into the multiple facets of British Modernism. Claire Davison Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

See Silver 1999. See Noble, p. 13. See the evocation of the biographer’s task in V. Woolf (2000) [1928], p. 27. See V. Woolf ‘Sketch of the Past’, in Moments of Being (1976). See V. Woolf 1938, p. 10. For a more detailed account of the Hogarth Press, see above, pp. 740–1. For the richest study to date of their friendship, working relations and mutual influence, see Froula et al. 2018.

746   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [21 June 1917] [Sussex] 141A, CHURCH STREET, CHELSEA, S.W. Virginia dear, I shall love to come and dine on Wednesday night with you alone:1 I cant manage Friday. Ever since I read your letter I have been writing to you and a bit ‘haunted’ by you: I long to see you again. The memory of that last evening is so curious:2 your voice & Vanessa’s3 voice in the dark, as it were – white rings of plates floating in the air – a smell of strawberries & coffee – Murry telling Woolf that you worked it with a handle & it had a cylinder & then M. and W. disappearing4 – and a feeling that outside the window floated a deep dark stream full of a silent rushing of little eels with pointed ears going to Norway & coming back . . . My God I love to think of you, Virginia, as my friend. Dont cry me an ardent creature or say, with your head a little on one side, smiling as though you knew some enchanting secret: ‘Well, Katherine, we shall see’. . . . But pray consider how rare is it to find some one with the same passion for writing that you have, who desires to be scrupulously truthful with you – and to give you the freedom of the city without any reserves at all. Curse it! Here is the laundry boy snatching at my flying feet. Ill tell you about Garnett5 on Wednesday. (Come in, little boy and sit down. I won’t be two shakes of a lambs tail) and we’ll talk about Asheham, please & lots & lots of other things.            Yours ever,             Katherine Notes 1. The dinner at Hogarth House in Richmond finally took place on 26 June; Virginia Woolf wrote to her sister the next day to report that ‘I had an odd talk with K. Mansfield last night. She seems to have gone every sort of hog since she was 17, which is interesting; I also think she has a much better idea of writing than most’ (LVW2, p. 159). 2. See Woolf’s letter to her sister, 26 April 1917, two days after delivery of the printing press which she and Leonard Woolf installed in the drawing room: ‘I am going to see Katherine Mansfield, to get a story from her, perhaps; please experiment with papers’ (LVW2, p. 150). 3. Virginia Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell (1879–1961), the post-Impressionist painter and former student of the Slade School of Art, also developed an easy-going warm friendship with KM. 4. Leonard Woolf and JMM were exploring the new printing press. 5. As Woolf’s letter to Vanessa, written the following morning, makes clear, Constance Garnett’s son, David (Bunny) Garnett, was looking for reviewing work:



virginia woolf  747 I saw Katherine Mansfield last night, and asked her about the chance of getting reviewing. She thought it would be far best for Bunny to get work on the Daily News, as Desmond, the man who wrote on land and country things has been made prisoner. Murry knows Lynd the Editor. (LVW2 p. 159)

[25 July 1917] [Sussex] [141A Church Street, Chelsea] Wednesday – Dear Virginia – That will be delightful – Friday at 4.30. It makes me very happy that you liked my little story;1 I thank you so much for telling me.       Yours ever          Katherine. Note 1. KM had sent the Woolfs Prelude, to be printed by their Hogarth Press. See CW2, pp. 56–92.

[mid-August 1917] [Berg] [141A Church Street, Chelsea] Virginia: I should love to come to Asheham on the 17th. Do have me. My story I have sent to the typist who lets me have it back on Thursday. I couldn’t cope with the bloody copying: I’ve been so ‘ill’. Rheumatiz plus ghastly depression plus fury. I simply long to see you. I want to talk too about your Mark on the Wall.1 Now shall I write about it or talk about it? Tell me, may I come & see you on Sunday at tea time or after supper time or whenever it suits you? Oh when may I come. I thought you had finally dispatched me to cruel callous Coventry – without a wave of your lily white hand. Do let us meet in the nearest future darling Virginia & don’t quite forget        Katherine. Note 1. Woolf’s short story ‘The Mark on the Wall’ was one of the three she identified as the key compositions in the transition from short prose experiments

748   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 to the formal innovations of Jacob’s Room (DVW1 p. 13). It was published with Leonard Woolf’s ‘Three Jews’ in the first Hogarth Press publication, Two Stories, with woodcut illustrations by Dora Carrington.

[23 August 1917] [Berg] [141A Church Street, Chelsea] Dear Virginia I had a last glimpse of you just before it all disappeared & I waved: I hope you saw. Thank you for letting me see wonderful Asheham.1 It is very wonderful & I feel that it will flash upon one corner of my inward eye for ever. It was good to have time to talk to you; we have got the same job, Virginia & it is really very curious & thrilling that we should both, quite apart from each other, be after so very nearly the same thing. We are you know; there’s no denying it. But dont let THEM ever persuade you that I spend any of my precious time swapping hats or committing adultery – Im far too arrogant & proud – However, let them think what they like . . . Theres a most wonderful green gage light on the tree outside and little white clouds bobbing over the sky like rabbits. And I wish you could see some superb gladioli standing up in my studio very proud & defiant, like indian braves. Yes, your Flower Bed is very good.2 Theres a still, quivering, changing light over it all and a sense of those couples dissolving in the bright air which fascinates me – Old Mother Gooseberry,3 my char from Ludgate Hill has hung up her beetle bonnet; ‘please m’m if you would let me have the place to myself’. So I am chased off, to sit among those marble pillars of brawn at the Library & read not Henry James.4 –––––––– Murry hasn’t appeared yet, but I have asked my painter friend about the woodcuts & he wants to do them.5 But he says he would like to read the story before going to Scotland next week. Can you let me have those pages? I haven’t another ‘fair copy’ & then Ill send you the compleat artikel. Have you got your coffee mill down there? Would you like me to send you some of the coffee we once talked about. – You remember? I have to go into Soho & get some for myself & Id like to make you a small present at the same time. Let me know.        Yours ever           Katherine.



virginia woolf  749

Notes 1. Sadly, visitors’ records of their delight visiting Asheham are all that remains of the house today, which was demolished in the 1990s. Quentin Bell described it as ‘a strange and beautiful house in a lovely and romantic situation’ when he publicly denounced the council decision to scrap it (Sunday Telegraph, 15 May 1994, p. 18). 2. ‘Kew Gardens’ was the second major breakthrough for Woolf in her early prose experiments to revitalise the formal and expressive bounds of narrative poetics. The third was ‘An Unwritten Novel’. 3. In 1922, KM describes a fairy-tale-like character, old Mrs Gooseberry, to amuse Hugh Jones, a figure possibly inspired by the real-life housekeeper at JMM’s lodgings. See CL1, p. 627. 4. James had known the Stephen family well and Woolf had known him since childhood; she first wrote about his work in 1905. She had agreed to review James’s The Middle Years for the TLS and was engaged in quite extensive readings in preparation, in part to test her own earlier impatience with and distaste for his style. She had written to Strachey in 1915, saying, ‘Please tell me what merit you find in Henry James. I have disabused Leonard of him; but we have his works here, and I read, and can’t find anything but faintly tinged rose water, urbane and sleek, but vulgar and as pale as Walter Lamb’ (LVW2, p. 67). 5. The Hogarth Press edition of KM’s Prelude was to include woodcut illustrations, which KM hoped could be done by her and JMM’s close friend J. D. Fergusson (see CL1, pp. 536–9). When these were submitted, however, the Woolfs disliked them, and cancelled the commission, leaving just one frontwrapper illustration.

[mid-December 1917] [Sussex] 141A, CHURCH STREET, CHELSEA, S.W. My dear Virginia, I have not been able to get to a telephone even. For I am alone here – & nobody has visited me – Murry is at Garsington and my bloody rheumatism has ramped and raged – When it really descends on me – I become a crawling thing without the power of doing anything except cursing my fate. The attack ought to be over in a day or two when I will come & make my apologies in person if I may – but Lord! what a curse the flesh can be – or the bones rather. I am so down in the depths that I cant imagine anything ever fishing me up again. That is why you havent heard from          Yours ever              Katherine.

750   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [14 May 1918] [Berg] [47 Redcliffe Road, Fulham] Tuesday. Dear Virginia I have been ‘kept in’ ever since the summer I spent with you last week. And I thought you were leaving for Asheham sooner – that was why, missing one day, I did not send the drawings the next. I gave Murry the notices to have printed for me & I thought, as they were going to adorn picture galleries it would be a good idea to have the pictures on ’em. They ought to be ready by tomorrow. He will send you some, together with the blocks. Your notice looks awfully nice. I hope to go away tomorrow. Curse! I feel damned ill in body these last few days. ‘My wings are cut I can-not fly I can-not fly I can not fly’1 But Virginia dear – how I enjoyed my day with you; its such a lovely memory. I shall think of you a great deal while I am away – & then I must look out for your Tchekhov article2 – But I wish you’d write your Protest Against the Exclusion of the W. C.3 Well I was going to end off at the end of this page – but before I do I want to tell you that I reread The Mark on the Wall yesterday and liked it tre-mendously. So there. I hope Asheham is lovely: Katherine. Notes 1. Despite the quotation marks, KM would appear not to be quoting any particular lyrics but adapting her own by pastiching songs – for example, the rhythm of Mendelssohn’s ‘Wings of a Dove’ or the Scottish eighteenth-century ballad ‘Oh! Would fortune in my way’, in which the broken-hearted singer admits ‘I cannot fly, / I must not, durst not, cannot fly’ (Ramsay, p. 285). 2. Woolf’s essay ‘Tchehov’s Questions’ was due for publication on 16 May in the TLS. The review covered the publication of three contemporary Chekhov collections: The Wife and Other Stories and The Witch and Other Stories, translated by Constance Garnett (1918), and Nine Humorous Tales, translated by Isaac Goldberg and Henry T. Schnittkind (1918). 3. Bringing the water-closet, including the modernised, flushing version, into the acceptable narrative frame and language of the novel was a common concern of a number of Modernist writers engaging in the poetics of everyday life. These include, of course, James Joyce in Ulysses and Proust in A la recherche, but also Virginia Woolf in Mrs Dalloway, in which Peter Walsh muses, ‘Newspapers seemed different. Now for instance there was a man writing



virginia woolf  751 quite openly in one of the respectable weeklies about water-closets. That you couldn’t have done ten years ago – written quite openly about water-closets in one of the respectable weeklies’ (p. 108). Protesting, within literature, against the exclusion of the WC, along with other indecencies and taboos, would remain an aesthetic challenge until the end of Woolf’s life, when she was working on a prose piece ‘The Watering Place’. See DVW6, p. 356, and V. Woolf 1985, pp. 285–6.

[29 May 1918] [Berg] Headland House Looe Cornwall.

Dear Virginia. Its of course for you and Leonard to use em or not, and as you don’t like them – why theres an end on’t.1 But the blue paper with just the title on it would be nice: I hope you use that. Six or seven orders – what extreme minginess! I blush at the idea. I shall have to come back & persuade you & L. to let me sell it on a barrow – customers to bring their own wrappings. I thought of you at Asheham: I am glad it was so lovely – Don’t forget that you have asked us for later – will you – I want you to know Murry – I want to say to M. confidential, after retiring – ‘don’t you think they are extraordinarily nice?’ This is rather generous of me, Virginia, realising as I jolly well do, how much L. dislikes me.2 I really don’t know anything about this place. While the Lord continues allowing his sun to shine in this superb fashion – its heavenly – heavenly – To my drunk eyes it seems all Cornwall – not at all Devonshire – far better than the South of France – the place for great artists like ourselves to wander in – and so on – But Im frankly not sober. The tide comes in very big and brimming, goes out leaving heavy, weedy rocks and pools & little creeks and long sands & winkles. There are tiny islands covered with thick forest, valleys dipping down to the sea with marshes yellow with kingcups & irises. Then there is the little town, built on both banks of a deep river & joined by an extremely ‘paintable’ bridge. And seagulls – and flowers – and so on. (I wish I didn’t keep saying and so on. I loathe the phrase.) Well – Virginia if you would ask the Belgians to post me 4 packets of those Blue cigarettes cut my throat I will send you a postal order by return.3 I wish I could send you something in this letter . . . There’s that tiny little horseshoe I found yesterday – it would go into an envelope – No, you’d think it absurd – No, Ive nothing – Oh, did I say before how very greatly we enjoyed your Tchekov review?4 KMM

752   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Notes 1. Woolf was concerned that KM would be offended by her and Leonard Woolf’s decision not to use the Fergusson woodcuts, having been disappointed with the first print-offs (a very small number of which have survived). KM’s flippant, eighteenth-century pastiched tone may conceal more emotion than she wished to let on. 2. KM had lunched with the Woolfs on 9 May, just one week after marrying JMM. Woolf noted in her diary: Katherine as marmoreal, as usual, just married to Murry, & liking to pretend it a matter of convenience. She looks ghastly ill. As usual we came to an oddly complete understanding. My theory is that I get down to what is complete rock in her, through the numerous vapours & pores which sicken or bewilder most of our friends. (DVW1, p. 150) Leonard Woolf was initially quite reserved in his judgement of KM and but came back on any harsher judgements in later life. In his autobiography, he noted, ‘I liked her, though I think she disliked me. She had a masklike face and she, more than Murry, seemed to be perpetually on her guard against a world which she assumed to be hostile’ (L. Woolf 1980, p. 147). 3. A number of Belgian refugees were staying at a farmhouse near Charleston, the home of Vanessa Bell, where Roger Fry was also spending the summer. The landlady looking after them all was Mrs Brereton, who would later be employed as the nanny and governess for Vanessa’s children. 4. The review had been published in the TLS two weeks previously. See above, p. 750, n. 2.

[6 June 1918] [Berg]

Thursday.

Headland House Looe. Cornwall.

Dear Virginia, It was extraordinarily kind in you to have. Here (if its not stolen) is the P.O. That is right – isn’t it? And now I have their address for next time; Admirable cigarettes. I am very sorry to hear about your throat – What a very great bore for you – & not being able to smoke or talk – Oh dear – what’s left in this lovely languorous weather – Do you sit at the window & sip cups of wine all day? I hope you’ll ‘get better soon’ – How jolly about the Bluepaper1 & Tristyan Edwards, too.2 Perhaps he will sail up the river to get his copy in a three masted brigantine with eleven sails. But I am afraid not –



virginia woolf  753

This place is still exquisite: I wish I felt more of a little lion than I do. However, its nice to sit on one’s balcony under a campion-pink sun shade and stare at the sea and think what a wonderful business this writing business is. Ive been keeping a note book, too. Thats fun – but its rather lonely fun and it makes one feel a bit spinsterish, too. Its a form of Patience – almost. Truth is – I miss Murry terribly – but he is coming down on the 20th for ten days and then I shall come back to London with him, and come & see you, if I may. (But please don’t think I am a ‘sad old creature’. I’m not.) Wish you were here – We’d have strawberries for tea. They come from Polperro,3 from little gardens overhanging the sea. Goodbye for now Katherine. Notes 1. In her previous letter, KM had expressed her approval of the Woolfs’ suggestion of a plain blue cover for Prelude. They had presumably confirmed this plan. 2. Trystan Edwards (1884–1973) was a Welsh-born critic, journalist and writer specialising in architecture, art and aesthetics, who may have known JMM when they were both at Oxford. He served in the navy throughout World War One, remained a keen sailor and wrote widely about his naval and sea-faring activities during and after the war. Prelude was amongst the Hogarth Press publications for which he signed up in advance. 3. Now a fashionable but carefully preserved tourist resort on the southern Cornish coast, Polperro was then a picturesque fishing village. KM first discovered it when in Looe, just 4 miles away.

[23 July 1918] [Berg]

Tuesday.

47 Redcliffe Road S.W.10.

Dear Virginia I am sorry I shall not see you this week and her laship1 informs me that you are to be served hot-and-hot between two plates this week end at Garsington. She asked me to be there, too, but really after the great San Philip’s arunning down of the little Revenge in this weeks Nation2 I don’t think I can break ‘crumb’ in their house again. I should lose control of myself – I should do something dreadful – sin against very Decency – commit some hideous crime – eat the clove out of a stuffed orange or – or – God knows!

754   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 But it is only too plain from all this that Johnny Murry and I are arrogant outcasts with cannon balls for eyes. Do not be surprised, dear Virginia to see us arrive at Asheham, Murry en avance,3 with a knolled stick, fur cap, black eye, blue chin, me following with unbraided hair & a guilty shawl over my non-existing bosom – a kind of Bill Sykes and Nancy,4 with the bulldog tagging behind gripping a copy of Massingham’s paper in his slobbering jaws. However, I ‘note’ as Dostoievsky is so fond of saying5 that Enid Bagnold6 has all too beautifully come to Sassoon’s rescue this week as well as Philip . . . Generous creature! To have told us, too, so expressly that she hears with her ear! Now how could one have known a thing like that otherwise? I defy anyone to have guessed such a thing. ‘And I hear With my Ear’ – Great stuff!! as Frank Harris used to say – ‘Oh Miss this is an Ewent at which Evings itself looks down’. But I wish to God she would sit up occasionally in her uncomfortably twanging bed and read her verses aloud to that intelligent organ at a moment when it is – as one might say en rapport – – – Passons.7 I love to hear of Lyttons success. It seems quite measureless to man. I put my head out of window at night and expect to find his name pricked upon the heavens in real stars. I feel he is become already, a sort of myth, a kind of legend. Modern princelings are hushed to sleep with tales of him and grave young duchesses disguise themselves at their Fairs and Pageants with – – the delicate beard, the moonlit hat, the shy, reluctant umbrella . . . Yes, I am very sorry that we shall not see each other this week. Your Pearl of a Letter made me realise what an infinite deal I want to talk about with you. But it will keep – I have spent the last two days lying on the sommier with a temperature for doux ami.8 But writing seems a great labour and every book I want – out of reach – the topmost leaf of the tallest tree – But I like to listen to this street: There is a piano in it, a parrot, and a man who cries feather brooms – all excellent in their way –         Yours ever            Katherine. Notes 1. (KM’s language-play): Her ladyship, i.e. Ottoline Morrell. See Introduction to Morrell above, pp. 161–2, for background information on the falling out in question here. 2. See Philip Morrell’s letter to the editor (H. W. Massingham), in the Nation dated 20 July 1918, in which he expressed his profound disapproval of JMM’s critical review of Sassoon’s poetry collection Counter-Attack and Other Poems, published in June that year. For JMM’s review published the previous week, see ‘Mr. Sassoon’s War Verses’, 23 July 1918, p. 398.



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3. (Fr.): In front. 4. In Charles Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist (1838), Bill Sikes is the malicious burglar from London’s underworld, often shadowed by his dog, Bull’s-eye. Sikes is not only the novel’s main antagonist, but he is one of the rare ‘baddies’ in Dickens’s fictional world to have no endearing or vulnerable traits. His malevolence and potential for limitless violence are made clear when he brutally murders his girlfriend, Nancy, the young woman from Fagin’s gang of thieves who loves and protects Oliver. 5. See, in particular, Dostoevsky’s novel The Possessed (or The Devils, 1878), in which the narrator, the enigmatically named ‘Anton Lavrentyevich G–v’, is an eyewitness who pieces together the various threads of the plot, ‘notes’ key changes and presents the evidence, in near case-study form, to the reader / addressee. 6. Enid Bagnold (1889–1981) was a novelist and playwright who started training as an artist, studying with Walter Sickert, before branching into journalism (notably working with Frank Harris). Her A Diary Without Dates, published in 1918, was a moving account of her life and experiences as a nurse in the war years, addressed to a lover. From this, progressed to fiction, her first novel – The Happy Foreigner (also about a nurse at the Front in France) – being published in 1920. Like Philip Morrell, she was shocked by the tone and attitude of JMM’s review; he sent her poem ‘The Guns in Kent’, addressed to Sassoon, to the Nation, which published it with Morrell’s letter. 7. (Fr.): Relevant [. . .] But let’s move on. 8. (Fr): On the couch [with a temperature] as my bosom friend.

[2 August 1918] [Sussex] ‘47’ Dear Virginia, I have been hoping to get the better of a beastly attack of my rheumatiz in time to come to Asheham – but its no go. I am horribly disappointed & sorry, but the sofa leg has got me & I cant move from it. My right wing1 is playing up, too, so that altogether the machine is a thoroughly unsound machine & wont stand a journey. Its the devil of a blow – but there you are! And your letter promised such exciting things – a kind of sober walking by the sea with sudden immense waves of conversation scattering us or flinging us together –            Yours funereally                  Katherine – Note 1. After the first symptoms, and the diagnosis of tuberculosis, KM referred increasingly to her diseased lungs as her ‘wings’, although she had been using the metaphor long before.

756   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [mid-August 1918] [Berg] [47 Redcliffe Road, Fulham] Dear Virginia I do not want to leave your letter unanswered. I do hope we can come later; we were awfully disappointed, too. Forgive me – Ive nothing to say. This is just a friendly way – I love to think of you at Asheham – My mother has died.1 I cant think of anything else. Ah, Virginia, she was such an exquisite little being, far too fragile and lovely to be dead for ever more. Katherine. Note 1. Annie Dyer Beauchamp died in Wellington on 7 August 1918.

[September 1918] [Sussex]

We’re in the telephone 1277 Hampstead

2 Portland Villas East Heath Road Hampstead N W 3.

My dear Virginia We have not been able to go away. At the last moment I was afraid of the strange hotel and having to look after myself – and now I couldnt go anywhere. The weather caught me and Im not well. I do nothing but cough and rage – and Im allowed to do nothing but be still. So the weekend I looked forward to more than I can say must be a dream for this year. I cannot say how sorry I am. Forgive me. I want to write you a long letter but its no go to-day. I can only think about you instead. With my love, dear Virginia Katherine. Murry sends love to you both.



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[1 November 1918] [Berg]

I xi 1918

2 Portland Villas East Heath Road NW3.

Dear Virginia, I meant to answer your letter sooner but my strong right arm refused to obey me – I should love to see one afternoon next week. Would Wednesday suit you? I am a very dull dog, and in bed – but I try to look as though I were there for pleasure & not from necessity. But do come – there is a power of things to be talked over. Murry will send you a very pretty delicate little flowery map of the way. Its extremely easy to find & I swear to God its not more than 8 minutes from the Tube station. I am awfully glad that Prelude has given a little pleasure – I have felt guilty towards you on its account, as a matter of fact, for I thought it had been a Bad Failure & you cursed the day – – – Well, Virginia, dear – – – – THEY have tied a bunch of beech leaves to my bedpost. What lovely things they are – so full of life. The cold reluctant air blows in the fire streams up the chimney & a little clock outside strikes three in a way that raises your eyebrows – ‘My dear child – I am perfectly prepared to believe you; there is no earthly need to insist on it’. I hate that clock – Now, in France, a little clock like that would strike as though it were all astonishment & amusement at finding itself at three or four or five but – however its no matter Yours Ever                Katherine.

[7 November 1918] [Sussex] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] Thursday. Dear Virginia, This P.O. was sent me by: Thomas Moult                 Y.M.C.A.                 Peter Street                    Manchester. May he have a copy of Prelude for it? He is a very nice creature, & he would be one of your regular subscribers.

758   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 I keep thinking about your new book1. . . What a curse it is that one must wait so long before it is published. But there it is – at any rate, a real exciting thing to look forward to. I wonder why I feel an intense joy that you are a writer – that you live for writing – I do. You are immensely important in my world, Virginia. I didn’t say a quarter that I wanted to yesterday2 – but it will keep. (This of course I am writing under an ombré tree with the parakeets chattering.)3           Yours              KMM. Notes 1. Woolf was still working on her second novel, Night and Day, which was not published until the following year. 2. Woolf had visited KM on Wednesday, 6 November, but was struck by how weak and vulnerable she found her; she also notes that ‘Murry & the Monster [Ida Baker] watch & wait on her, till she hates them both; she trusts no one; she finds no “reality”’ (DVW1, p. 216). 3. The tropical decor is provided by the textile print of her furnishings.

[10 November 1918] [Sussex] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] Dear Virginia Thank you so much for remembering about the doctor. Miss Case1 has just sent me his address & I have written to him. Why are doctors so preposterous? I see them in their hundreds, moving among sham Jacobean furniture, warming their large pink hands at little gas fires & asking the poor visitor if this will come off or pull down – Curse ’em. Shall we see you & Leonard on Thursday? It would be delightful. Murry is free every Thursday afternoon. You do not know, Virginia, how I treasure the thought of you – that’s quite sober & true. Katherine. Note 1. During their conversation on 6 November, in which war and their hopes in credible peace settlements took up much of the conversation (DVW1, p. 215), Woolf and KM had clearly discussed a change of doctor, Woolf having an alternative in mind recommended by her former Greek tutor and close friend



virginia woolf  759 Janet Elizabeth Case (1862–1937). Case was a former Classics scholar at Girton College, Cambridge, now living in Hampstead; she was a life-long feminist and pacifist.

[mid-November 1918] [Sussex] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] My dear Virginia Do bring Desmond McCarthy1 – We shall be delighted. I have just bade goodbye to Doctor Stonham2 – who – oh dear! – says I must expect to be an invalid until I have been in Switzerland a year or so – He says both my lungs are rather badly affected – This is very tiresome, Virginia – but he is sending me roots and herbs, & he was awfully kind –       K.M.M. Notes 1. Desmond MacCarthy (1877–1952) was an editor, drama critic and distinguished writer, one of the original members of the Bloomsbury Group. Woolf referred to him in 1920 as their ‘oldest friend [. . .] perhaps the best’ (DVW2, p. 21), but she was sometimes irritated by his boorish egoism and condescending patriarchal judgements. 2. Henry Archibald Stonham was the Hampstead doctor recommended by Janet Case (see above, p. 758).

[27 November 1918] [ATL] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] Dear Virginia, Do come tomorrow – Your brilliant brilliant letter – was so captivating that Murry suggests we frame it in a revolving frame to be a joy for ever more. His poem makes you a humble leg & will be ready to go with thee tomorrow ––1 Note 1. The poem was JMM’s ‘The Critic in Judgment or Belshazzar of Baronscourt’, which was published by the Hogarth Press in May the following year.

760   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 [20 February 1919] [Berg] 2 Portland Villas East Heath Road Hampstead, N.W.3 Dear Virginia, Alas – I have just had another inoculation and by tea time tomorrow I shall be sailing on tropic seas – I am trying a new treatment which gives me a high temperature for 48 hours each time it is applied – I wonder if you could – and would come next Monday? I want very much to see you. You know Murry has been made editor of the Athenaeum;1 he was wondering whether you’d write for it. I wish you would – – – – Theres a deal to talk over; I wish I were more physically stable – its dreadful mizery – Ever Katherine. Note 1. Whatever her reservations about him as a person, Woolf clearly had great respect for JMM as an editor. She noted in her diary, ‘Murry is much of a small boy still, I think, in spite of his tragic airs. I suspect his boast will become true; the Athenaeum will be the best literary paper in 12 months’ (DVW1, p. 256). During the same conversation, he also urged her to write for the journal; Woolf responded well to the suggestion: her essay ‘The Eccentrics’ (EVW3, pp. 38–41) was published on 25 April, and another ten contributions were published before the year’s end.

[11 April 1919] [Berg] Portland East Heath Road N.W.3. My dear Virginia, I have burned to write to you ever since you were here last. The East Wind made my journey in the train an impossibility; it set up ponds & pools in my Left Lung wherein the Germs & the Toxins – two families I detest – bathed & refreshed themselves & flourished & multiplied. But since then so many miracles have happened that I don’t see how one will be able to bear real, full spring. One is almost tired already – one wants to swoon, like Charles Lamb,1 before the curtain rises – Oh God! to look up again & see the sun like a great silver spangle: big bright buds on the trees, & the little bushes caught in a net of



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green – – But what I chiefly love, Virginia, is to watch the people. Will you laugh at me? – it wrings my heart to see the people coming into the open again, timid, airing themselves; they idle, their voices change & their gestures. A most unexpected old man passes with a paper of flowers (for whom?) a soldier lies on the grass hiding his face; a young girl flies down a side street on the – positive – wing of a boy – – On April 5th our one daffodil came into flower & our cat, Charlie Chaplin, had a kitten. Charles Chaplin |–––––––––––––|–––––––––––––| Athenaeum   April.2 Athenaeum is like a prehistoric lizard, in very little. He emerged very strangely – as though hurtling through space – flung by the indignant Lord. I attended the birth. Charles implored me. He behaved so strangely; he became a beautiful, tragic figure with blue-green eyes, terrified and wild. He would only lie still when I stroked his belly & said: ‘it’s all right, old chap. Its bound to happen to a man sooner or later’. And, in the middle of his pangs, his betrayer, a wretch of a cat with a face like a penny bun & the cat-equivalent of a brown bowler hat, rather rakish over one ear, began to howl from outside. Fool that I have been! said Charles, grinding his claws against my sleeve. The second kitten April was born during the night, a sunny compact little girl. When she sucks she looks like a small infant saying its prayers & knowing that Jesus loves her. She always has her choice of the strawberry, the chocolate and the pistacchio one; poor little Athenaeum has to put up with an occasional grab at the lemon one . . . They are both loves; their paws inside are very soft, very pink, just like unripe raspberries . . . Would a baby be more enchanting? I could get on without a baby – but Murry? I should like to give him one – but then I should like that he should be denied nothing. . . . Love’s very strange. Virginia, I have read your article on Modern Novels.3 You write so damned well, so devilish well. There are these little others, you know, dodging & stumbling along, taking a sniff here and a stare there – & there is your mind so accustomed to take the air in the ‘grand manner’ – –––– To tell you the truth – I am proud of your writing. I read & I think ‘How she beats them – – – – – But I positively must see you soon – I want to talk over so much – Your room with the two deep windows – I should love to be there now. Last time the rambler roses were nearly over & there was a sound of someone sawing wood – I think of you often – with love Katherine.

762   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Notes 1. Charles Lamb (1775–1834) was a London-born essayist, Romantic poet and writer, whose Tales from Shakespeare, a retelling of Shakespeare’s plays in short-story form, co-authored with his sister, quickly became a classic in its day. He is also remembered for his Essays of Elia, Elia being a part-fictional mask for the essayist whose gentle, conversational essay style had a lasting influence on the evolution of the genre. In one of the essays, ‘My First Play’, he recalls his first thrilling visit to the theatre, and his ‘breathless anticipation’ as he waited for the rise of the ‘green curtain that veiled a heaven to my imagination, which was soon to be disclosed’. See Lamb, p. 221. 2 ‘April’ was soon to be renamed Wingley. 3 ‘Modern Novels’ was published in the TLS on 10 April 1919; it was later substantially revised and republished with the better-known title ‘Modern Fiction’ in The Common Reader. See EVW3, pp. 30–7.

[late April 1919] [Berg] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] My dear Virginia – I enjoyed immensely your article on Defoe1 – and it was immensely nice to see you at Athene’s2 tea party this week. I wish you were there every week – but I am an insatiable old creature as far as your writing is concerned. That awful fair!3 Never again. The time has gone by when one was young and rude enough for such things. It made me so utterly wretched. I felt there was nothing to do but sit on the stairs & lift up ones voice and – weep for Babylon.4 Were human beings in the mass always so shocking – or does one as one grows older shed a skin? I cant decide – I wonder what decision you are arrived at about the cottage with the tower5– Perhaps the house itself is very imperfect in many ways but there is a – – – something – – which makes one long for it. Immediately you get there – you are free free as air. You hang up your hat on a nail & the house is furnished – It is a place where you sit on the stairs & watch the lovely light inhabiting the room below. After nightfall the house has three voices – If you are in the tower & someone comes from the far cottage – he comes from far away – You go by the edge of the fields to Katie Berryman’s6 for the bread. You walk home along the rim of the Atlantic with the big fresh loaf – & when you arrive the house is like a ship. I mustn’t talk about it – It bewitched me – Sunday afternoon. John is downstairs discussing the theory of relativity with Sullivan. I feel they are being a trifle portentous – The kittens are trying to kill their mother with love in front of my fire; the wind makes a pleasant sound but all my daffodils are fallen before it. I feel awfully happy. A husband, a home, a great many books & a passion for writing – are very nice things to possess all at once – It is pleasant to think of you & Leonard together – I often do.



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Let us meet again soon and have a chat to ourselves – I wish the weather were quite summery: the cold shuts the door of my cage. K.M.M. Notes 1 . Woolf’s essay ‘The Novels of Defoe’ was commissioned by the TLS to mark the 200th anniversary of the publication of Robinson Crusoe. Woolf later revised the essay for inclusion in The Common Reader (1925). See EVW3, p. 35, and ‘Defoe’, EVW4, pp. 98–107. 2. The tea party is essentially metaphorical in this case – the Athenaeum (‘Athene’) had just published Woolf’s first contribution, ‘The Eccentrics’. See above, p. 593, n. 1. 3. See Woolf’s diary for her account of going with KM and JMM that Easter Monday to the fair on Hampstead Heath; she memorably records her very different impressions at close quarters (‘detestable; it smells; it sticks’) and from a distance (‘we could sit on a mound & look at the little distant trickle of human beings eddying round the chief centres of gaiety & filing over the heath & spotted upon its humps’) (DVW1, pp. 267–8). 4. KM appears to be conflating two biblical passages here as she recalls the ghastliness of the fair: Psalms 137: 1, which reads ‘By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion,’ and Revelation 18: 9–10, which foretells of the distress of kings and merchants on the day that Babylon would fall: ‘The kings of the earth [. . .] will weep and lament for her, when they see the smoke of her burning, standing at a distance for fear of her torment, saying “Alas, alas, that great city Babylon, that mighty city!”’ 5. Virginia and Leonard Woolf had been thinking about renting the cottages in Cornwall, where DHL, Frieda, JMM and KM had stayed earlier in the year. As Woolf notes, ‘their talk of Tregerthen combined with the image of it on a hot day made us determine to take it here and now’ (DVW, p. 268). They did indeed take on the lease, but subsequently sublet the rooms and stayed elsewhere in the village when they went to Cornwall in 1921. 6 . Katie Berryman ran the local village stores and post office in Zennor; she was greatly appreciated by DHL, who recommended the Woolfs to call there and borrow a trap if needed, or request help, citing her amongst ‘our very good friends’ locally. See LDHL3, pp. 199–200.

[5 May 1919] [Berg] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] I have mislaid that form. When I find it I will fill it up. Monday – My dear Virginia It is indeed thrilling to think that Higher Tregerthen is yours.1 God forbid that you should find the rooms too small or some Dreadful

764   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Inconvenience that I have forgotten. But when you sit at the tower window & look out upon that amazing hill I cannot but believe you’ll feel its enchantment – – – – Early this morning there was a white mist here & a smell of burning. It made me think of Cornwall – of those enchanted misty days – when you go just outside the door & are spirited away. It will be great happiness if I may come & stay with you in the summer – great joy to look forward to – white & purple veronica would grow excellently well there – But wait until you see the yellow irises & the foxgloves over 6 foot high – red indian encampments of foxgloves burning with passion & pride in the field next to yours – My dear Virginia, I feel quite overcome with pleasure that you should have so wonderful a place to go to. (It sounds as tho’ you were just ‘saved’.) I cannot help feeling that Mrs B’s book ought to be called The Life at Charleston 1652 – It is very intriguing.2 Murry has on several occasions lately expressed the wish that he knew Duncan Grant & your sister.3 He admires them extremely – The brilliant but cynical hero4 dined with us on Saturday – We ran over the 18th century in a very lively & high spirited fashion – a kind of small tour with a basket of wine under the front seat – in the dogcart of the period! Aldous came in later, lay upon the sofa, buried his head in a purple pillow and groaned over the hor-rible qual-ity of Smollett’s coarseness5 – In the afternoon of the same day Lytton came to tea. I was excessively dull but he was charming. Pray come to tea on Friday – I shall keep the day for you. Now I review The Moon & Sixpence6 – curse it. My mind says: But the fly is dead. Why bother to spin such a web round it – – Why indeed. Ever K–M– Notes 1. See above, p. 763, n. 5. See also DVW1, p. 269, in which Woolf records receiving confirmation from the owner, Captain Short, and her delight in imagining their future stay. 2. The title of the hypothetical book of memoirs refers to what Mrs Brereton considered the rudimentary state of Vanessa Bell’s home in Sussex. Mrs Brereton arrived in December 1917 to live at Charleston as governess to Vanessa’s sons, Julian and Quentin Bell. Their relations were becoming strained by spring 1919, when Brereton confided to Roger Fry that she felt ill-used (LVW2, p. 363). In February, Woolf wrote to her sister, noting that her housekeeper’s ‘account of your meagre meals desolated; but I suppose La B. (do tell me all her eccentricities) is trying to economise’ (LVW2, p. 332). By May she was telling Sydney Saxon-Turner: ‘Duncan came over the other night, driven out, so he said, by the prospect of an evening alone with Mrs Brereton, who



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has got on his nerves. But then the poor woman was abruptly told by Vanessa 10 days ago that her presence in the house was extremely disagreeable to them all’ (p. 362). 3. Duncan Grant (1885–1978) was an artist, designer and illustrator, and the partner of Virginia Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell, from 1916. They had chosen Charleston as their home that same year, and took up the challenge of decorating and redesigning it as a dynamic artwork and artistic focus from then on. 4. While the Bloomsbury Group counted a number of brilliant but cynical heroes likely to have enjoyed discussing life in the eighteenth century, the identity of the visitor cannot be confirmed. However, internal evidence (direct description) and conflated dairies and letters at the time suggest he was Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946), the American-born, naturalised British critic and philologist, a respected authority on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature, and a renowned and much appreciated wit, very much in the Johnson vein. Smith was related by marriage to Bertrand Russell, Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf, and all three, as well as Huxley, record encounters with him at this time. Woolf’s description of him to Ottoline Morrell in a letter written two weeks later likewise echoes the caricature that KM evokes here: ‘I couldn’t help seeing his perfect sentences of English prose served up in a muffin dish, over a bright fire, with the parrot on a perch’ (LVW2, p. 359). However, Smith makes no mention of an acquaintance with KM and JMM in his autobiography, Unforgotten Years (1939). 5. Tobias Smollett (1721–71) was an English writer, editor and critic, most famous for his satirical, picaresque novels which reflect his own sea-faring activities and medical training in his youth: The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748), The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751) and The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker (1771). 6. The Moon and Sixpence was published in 1919 by the Franco-British writer and playwright William Somerset Maugham (1874–1975), whose works largely reflect his own medical training and vivid interest in questions of public health and social welfare. See for example, Liza of Lambeth (1897) or Of Human Bondage (1915). His latest novel, in part based on the life of the painter Paul Gauguin, explores the psychology and torments of a respectable Englishman who abruptly severs all links with his comfortable bourgeois existence to become an artist. For KM’s review of the work, ‘Inarticulations’, in the Athenaeum, see CW3, pp. 457–60.

[12 May 1919] [Sussex] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] My dear Virginia It was very nice to get the two new books this morning;1 they look enchanting. I immediately re-read your story; its quality is exquisite. I have a queer feeling about the conversations – I don’t feel I understand in the least what is being said – any more than the snail did – or the flowers – They are as you say just ‘voices’ – Even Simon is like a word Ive never heard before – I think your end pages are a little pity.

766   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Eliot2 – Virginia? The poems look delightful but I confess I think them unspeakably dreary – How one could write so absolutely without emotion – – perhaps thats an achievement. The potamus really makes me groan. I don’t think he is a poet – Prufrock is, after all a short story. I don’t know – These dark young men – so proud of their plumes and their black and silver cloaks and ever so expensive pompes funèbres3 – Ive no patience.       (The bread was delicious –)          Your             K.M. Notes 1. KM had just received the latest Hogarth Press publications, Kew Gardens by Virginia Woolf, illustrated by Vanessa Bell, and Poems by T. S. Eliot. KM picks out a number of details from Woolf’s story – the snail, the flowers, the voices and the man called Simon, who figures in the first group to pass by the flower bed, and who is recalling an earlier visit to the same place, fifteen years previously. See also KM’s letter to Ottoline Morrell above (p. 208), which suggests the three women had been sharing ideas and impressions of life as seen from unexpected perspectives in a garden. 2. Eliot’s second book of poetry, Poems, contains seven pieces: ‘Sweeney among the Nightingales’, ‘The Hippopotamus’, ‘Mr Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service’, ‘Whispers of Immortality’, ‘Le Spectateur’, ‘Ménage Adultère de Tour’ and ‘Lune de Miel’. Those with French titles are written in French throughout, reflecting (in part) Eliot’s life in Paris before the war. 3. (Fr.): Undertakers.

[27 May 1919] [Berg] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] Tchekov has a very interesting letter published in next week’s A . . . what the writer does is not so much to solve the question but to put the question. There must be the question put.1 That seems to me a very nice dividing line between the true & the false writer – Come & talk it over with me. Dear Virginia I am very sorry you are not coming to the Party.2 I wanted everybody to be there & you to be there. I wanted the small private satisfaction of looking at the party with you. However it cant be helped. If you do come to Tea on Monday you will be very welcome. I am thankful people are buying a copy or two of Prelude; I hate to think of it loading up your ship. I dont see how your Press can be other than a Prodigious success. It must be very nice, cruising about among the islands & deciding to put in – now here – now there & seeing what the natives have to bring aboard. (Alas, my dear woman, I have no poems. I am not a poet.)



virginia woolf  767

God be thanked for this divine weather! The Vicar called upon me yesterday & asked if he might come occasionally & administer a little Private Communion to me at any time . . . just a drain of wine I suppose and a crumb of bread. Why a little? It puzzled me greatly. But I told him that while this weather continued I was nothing but a living Hymn of Praise, an incense, a harp responding – Which is more or less true.               Addio3                  K.M. Notes 1. Chekhov’s letter, published on 6 June in the Athenaeum and originally sent to his one-time friend and mentor, the editor and publisher A. S. Souvorin, in October 1888, had been co-translated by KM and Koteliansky. His comments read as something of an artist’s credo, to which Chekhov sought to remain true throughout his life: an artist must discuss only that which he understands; his sphere is as limited as any other – this I repeat, and on this I shall always insist. That his sphere does not contain questions, but is made up wholly and solely of answers, could only be argued by one who has never written and never had to do with creative work. An artist observes, selects, divines, relates – these activities alone presuppose a question. If from the very first one has not put a question to oneself, then there is nothing to divine or to select. (see CW3, pp. 220–1) 2. KM’s party was on 29 May. See above, pp. 646–7. 3. (It.): Farewell.

[4 June 1919] [Sussex] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] Wednesday Dear Virginia I have not thanked you yet for the lovely columbines. I enjoyed them so much. They are favourites of mine – very early favourites – intricate delicate things – I am glad you did not come to the Party – It was a dull dog. In fact, all parties are cursed if one cannot remain invisible at them. Then they must be heavenly – But to be a body revolving round other bodies is very heavy work. I have been reviewing your story1 – Virginia – You must forgive the review – I cant hope to please you, tho’ I wanted to – For one thing I hadn’t enough space – & Id like to have quoted – almost the whole ––– But I wish you would come & see me one day & talk about it. What a pleasure it is to talk to Lytton. E. M. Forster came the other evening.2 I don’t care for him. Partly perhaps because he dreadfully

768   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 dis-likes me – But I could forgive that. What I can’t get over is a certain silliness. Is that unfair? Its raining. That, I suppose will put off the Lord appearing on a cloud at the Derby3 – I thought he was going to – I wish I could take an umbrella & walk across to you.                 Lovingly                    Katherine Notes 1. See KM’s review of Woolf’s Kew Gardens in CW3, pp. 473–5. 2. The Bloomsbury novelist and critic Edward Morgan Forster (1879–1970) was one of the more reticent, withdrawn members of the group, but also a dearly loved and respected friend. Woolf noted in her diary, just months later, ‘he says the simple things that clever people don’t say; I find him the best of critics for that reason’ (DVW1, p. 311). 3. Weather for that year’s horse-racing at the Derby was clearly a key national concern. See The Times for that day which announces: ‘The Victory Derby Today – Epsom the “Same Old Place”’. The article (dated 3 June ) begins ‘If the weather be as fine to-morrow as it has been to-day there will be little to complain of. Some may desire more sun and a wind less cold, but others will hold that a temperate Derby is better for both horses and men than one of the torrid kind’ (p. 12). A history of the Derby follows on page 13 of that day’s Times.

[mid-July 1919] [Sussex] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] Dear Virginia Please do. We shall be enchanted to see you both on Sunday. How well one understands the Turkish point of view about Armenians:1 there is something maddening about them which makes one finally want, as Kot says, ‘to beat them simply to death.’ I have just had an invite from Mr Keynes and Mr Bell.2 But if one hasn’t a pumpkin and mice of one’s own its impossible to go: I’d like a farewell glimpse, otherwise – The roundabout is grinding out its one tune; the dwarf is sewing green buttons on the purple ‘body’ – Athenaeum is sitting on my lap purring like an aeroplane and I am trying to think about a novel called The Land they Loved3 instead of Monks House4 in September –                       Yours ever                          K.M. Notes 1. Discussions on the future of Turkey and Armenia in the aftermath of the war and the collapse of the Turkish Empire were then under way at the Paris Conference, and being reported regularly in the press. Tension in the region was extremely



virginia woolf  769

high, as were bitter resentment and ethnic violence, following both the genocide of Armenians in 1915, and outbreaks of border conflict in the absence of state authority in the region. Virginia Woolf’s interest in the matters was two-fold. Firstly, Leonard Woolf was directly involved in negotiations regarding a future mandate by the League of Nations or the United States (see F. Symonds, ‘The Future of Turkey’, The Times, 11 June 1919, p. 10, and Boghos Nubar, ‘The New Armenia’, The Times, 25 June 1919, p. 8). Secondly, and on a more personal level, Woolf notes in her diary that, on her way to meet up with KM (on 12 July), she ran into E. M. Forster, with whom she discussed the work of Dr Ernest Haig Altounyan (1889–1962), a friend of, and the son of, an Armenian doctor, who had just qualified as a physician while hoping to become a poet or novelist. That same evening Altounyan and his wife dined with the Woolfs, where he exasperated her with his conceited insistence on the merits of his work (DVW1, p. 292). She had clearly recounted the evening to KM. 2. The economist John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946), a key member of the Bloomsbury Group and future patron of the arts, who had been one of the main British representatives at the Paris Peace Conference, had invited KM and JMM to a dinner party on the 29th; they declined the invitation. 3. KM was reviewing The Land They Loved by the Irish novelist Geraldine Cummins (1890–1969), a novel characteristic of her naturalist poetics and narrative focus, set in a working-class Irish community. She later moved away from literature towards spiritualism, writing mainly about psychic experience and psychology. See ‘A Poser’, in CW3, pp. 491–2. 4. Monk’s House, or Monks House, in the Sussex village of Rodmell, near Lewes, was to be the Woolfs’ home from 1919 until their deaths. Now owned and operated by the National Trust, the house and its gardens remain the most moving surviving testimonies to their intertwined private lives, their creative and professional activities, and their deep-seated love of rural life and the natural environment, despite being lastingly labelled as ‘Bloomsbury’ intellectuals. The date of this letter makes KM’s comments particularly fascinating: the Woolfs only discovered Monk’s House in June, and did so quite by accident on their way to visit a nearby property which they had just acquired. They therefore sold it instantly and bought Monk’s House at an auction on 2 July, an event which Woolf recorded exuberantly in her diary (DVW, pp. 285–8). They moved in on 1 September.

[13 August 1919] [Berg] Wednesday.

2 Portland Villas –

Dear Virginia This is the first day I am up again and able to write letters. I have been rather badly ill – and its left me for the moment without an idea. . . . except that I must go abroad into a Sanatorium until next April. I can’t take a villa or manage anything for the next six months. I must just lie in the air & try & turn into a decent creature. Do not think I am forgetful of you. You would not believe me if you knew how often you are in

770   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 my heart & mind. I love thinking of you. I expect Asheham is a glory these days. I will write again very soon. This is just really a wave – I would I were a crocodile. According to your Sir Thomas Browne it is the only creature who does not cough: ‘although we read much of their Tears we find nothing of that motion’.1 Thrice happy oviparous Quadruped!      Ever yours         Katherine – Note 1. KM’s mention of ‘your’ Thomas Browne is part of a network of secondary evidence suggesting that Virginia Woolf’s posthumously published essay, ‘Reading’, was drafted and written in 1919, since the final third of the piece is devoted almost exclusively to him (see EVW3, pp. 141–61; 153–60. Many of the ideas were then included in her 1923 essay, ‘Thomas Browne’, EVW3, pp. 368–72). Thomas Browne (1605–82) was an eclectic, often eccentric but very brilliant English scholar and physician, with a fine reputation for wisdom and understanding across Europe. Even his most philosophically or aesthetically inclined writings are steeped in his medical training and keen interest in scientific knowledge. KM had clearly been reading his ‘Letter to a Friend, Upon occasion of the Death of his Intimate Friend’ (1686); the fact that the friend’s death had been from tuberculosis, and that Browne gives a wealth of details about signs, secondary symptoms and treatments of ‘consumptive Diseases’ is probably not fortuitous. It is while comparing male symptoms to those observed in women, and then human signs of disease with animals, that Browne makes the following observation: Aristotle makes a Query, Why some Animals cough as Man, some not, as Oxen. If coughing be taken as it consisteth of a natural and voluntary motion, including Expectoration and spitting out, it may be as proper unto Man as bleeding at the Nose; otherwise we find that Vegetius and Rural Writers have not left so many Medicines in vain against the Coughs of Cattel; and Men who perish by Coughs dye the Death of Sheep, Cats and Lyons: and tho Birds have no Midriff, yet we meet with divers Remedies in Arrianus against the Coughs of Hawks. And tho it might be thought, that all Animals who have Lungs do cough; yet in cetaceous Fishes, who have large and strong Lungs, the same is not observed; nor yet in oviparous Quadrupeds: and in the greatest thereof, the Crocodile, altho we read much of their Tears, we find nothing of that motion. (Wilkin, vol. 5, p. 320)



virginia woolf  771

[25 May 1920] [Sussex] 2 Portland Villas East Heath Road Hampstead N.W.3 Dear Virginia, Its very kind of you to have sent me a card. Yes, Im back in England until August. I would be delighted if you’d care to come & see me one afternoon, but I am grown very dull. Yours ever,                K.M.

[11 July 1920] [Sussex] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] My dear Virginia, This afternoon was such a terrific storm that I can hardly recover. The play was so wonderful1 – so bad – it triumphed – it failed – a little of everything seemed to happen and all round one there were these strange human-beings – I don’t know – they seem to me, I think, too strange. They frighten me beyond words at moments. I feel the only thing to do is to run away, crossing oneself – or doing whatever one would do if one was terrified. And I feel, too, that the only person who did understand The Cherry Orchard as Tchekhov meant it to be understood was – – – – Would you come & see me one day next week: Ill keep all next week free until I hear from you. Or I could meet you in town. There’s so much to say & I am going away the first week in September. May I have 2 copies of ‘Prelude’? I want to send you my love & admiration dear Virginia.                        Katherine. Note 1. Both Woolf and KM went to see the Moscow Art Theatre’s production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, directed by Vera Donnet, at St Martin’s Theatre in London; performances took place on 11 and 12 July. Woolf’s review of the play was published in the New Statesman (see EVW3, pp. 246–7). An unsigned review in the Athenaeum was published on 16 July, which was later attributed to KM by JMM when he reprinted it in the Adelphi (see CW3, pp. 631–4). Kaplan, however, notes, ‘Stylistically and conceptually, the review is

772   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 consistent with JMM’s other writings about Chekhov. It also might well have included some phrases and observations that came from conversations with KM’ (CW3, p. 634).

[August 1920] [Sussex] [2 Portland Villas, East Heath Road, Hampstead] My dear Virginia The lovely flowers came this morning. They are on the mantelpiece on either side of my French clock and the tiny creature who presides over the hours in a strawberry skirt and green jacket takes a most particular exquisite delight in them. So do I. Thank you for remembering me – Have you been looking at the moon tonight? I have been reading the letters of Dante1 and I found the moon a positive comfort after them – a warm, youthful light – a lamp almost friendly. Do many people really read Dante? I wonder – He seems to me dead beyond compare. I feel as though his writings were written in Eternity and for Eternity. He does not write for men but for certain types of angels. However – I don’t know why I bother about him when I am writing to you. Perhaps it is a snobbish desire to prove my lack of education. Will you give Lytton my love if you see him soon? And if that is too effusive a message – will you temper it for me? He is one of the few – the very few people whom I do want to send my love to sometimes. Here is Murry. ‘I want to read you a note on Perception. Do you mind?’ ‘Not at all. Pray proceed’. And now an enormous blue Government Notebook is opening . . .2           Goodnight –             Katherine – Notes 1. Extracts from the letters and other personal writings of the great Florentine poet and philosopher Dante Alighieri (c. 1265–1321) had been in circulation in translation, especially since the late nineteenth century, generally read by scholars as background material when studying his hugely influential Divine Comedy, the allegorical spiritual pilgrimage told in narrative verse, which conjures up the entire medieval mystical cosmology, blending lofty style and the vernacular. A much-heralded new and far more comprehensive edition of his letters, Dantis Alagherii Epistolae, The Letters of Dante, edited by Paget Toynbee, was published in summer 1920, prompting a keen renewal of interest in his life and writings. KM may have been reading the volume with a view to reviewing it, or while JMM prepared to do so: an unsigned short



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mention in the section ‘Our Library Table’ was published in the Athenaeum on 10 September 1920, p. 333. See also ‘The Letters of Dante’ in the TLS, 26 August 1920, p. 545. 2. Each department of the Civil Service was issued with stationery and notebooks with different-coloured covers, printed by Her Majesty’s Printing Office. JMM probably still had some of these, acquired when he was working for the War Office.

[27 December 1920] [Sussex]

27 xii 1920

Villa Isola Bella Garavan Menton A/M.

My dear Virginia Please don’t talk of a triumph, even in jest.1 It makes me hang my head. I wish some day I might deserve your long generous letter – but the day is far off, I realise that. Thank you for it all the same. It came on Xmas day too, and so was a two-fold gift. I think of you often – very often. I long to talk to you. Here, at last there is time to talk . . If Virginia were to come through the gate & were to say ‘Well – Katherine’ – oh, there are a thousand things Id like to discuss. I wonder if you know what your visits were to me – or how much I miss them. You are the only woman with whom I long to talk work. There will never be another. But leagues divide us. I have taken this little house until the end of 1922. Perhaps you will come here before then. It is in the country & there is a garden & a stone terrace. It is solitary but not lonely. One lives by the sky again – by the changes of cloud & light. Whenever I think of Asheham it is of clouds – big golden clouds, hazy, spinning slowly over the downs – – Oh, how beautiful Life is – Virginia, it is marvellously beautiful. Were one to live for ever it would not be long enough. Sometimes I sit on the wall watching the sun & the wind shake over the long grass & the wild orchid cups & I feel – – – simply helpless before this wonder. Farewell dear friend. (May I call you that)     Yours ever       Katherine.

774   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Note 1. See the first of only two letters from Virginia Woolf to KM believed to exist, dated 19 December 1920. The short note begins, ‘My dear Katherine, I wish you were here to enjoy your triumph – still more that we may talk about your book – For what’s the use of telling you how glad and indeed proud I am?’ (LVW2, p. 449). The book in question was Bliss and Other Stories.

Unidentified Recipients

[9 December 1920] [ATL] [Draft] [Villa Isola Bella, Garavan, Menton] Sir 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 ∴ to leave all unanswered Was that right?          KM1 (Bet I dont get a sniff of that £7. She’s furious with me!!!!!! Note 1. A pencil draft of a legal letter that KM had possibly asked JMM to type up for her; the circumstances surrounding its contents are unknown.

[early 1921] [Journal 1954, pp. 236–7] [Villa Isola Bella, Garavan, Menton] 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

    775

776   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 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 is 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.1 Note 1 Also included in CW4, p. 341.

[11 April 1922] [Letters 1928, 2, p. 204] Victoria-Palace Hotel Rue Blaise-Desgoffe Paris 6ème le 11 avril 1922 Chère Madame,1 Je vous remercie de votre lettre. Je regrette beaucoup de ne pas avoir eu le plaisir de voir V.; mais j’espère que je serai encore à Paris quand il revient du Midi, et qu’il sera tout à fait rétabli par le beau soleil. J’ai un si bon souvenir de ma soirée chez vous, Madame, que l’idée même d’une autre me donne un rouge vif aux genoux. Vous souvenez-vous du moment quand vous avez versé sur mon pantalon gris-perle la petite tasse de chocolat et ma reponse en vous frappant (façon anglais) avec ma porte-plume? ‘Helas mon passé: Où est-il passé?’ comme disait votre soi-disant mari. Avec un de mes fameux baisers sur la joue, Croyez-moi chère Madame, Votre Boule-Dogue le plus fidèle, John Middleton Murry. [Part not in italics written by KM]



unidentified recipients  777

Note 1. (Fr.): Dear Madam, Thank you for your letter. I’m terribly sorry not to have seen V, but I hope I shall still be in Paris when he returns from the Riviera, perfectly revived by the fine sunlight. I retain such a fine memory of the evening spent with you, Madam, that the mere thought of doing so again makes my knees burn bright red. Do you remember that moment when you spilt your little cup of hot chocolate onto my pearl-grey trouser leg, and my response as I hit you (in the English manner) with my pen-holder? ‘Alas, my past. Where has it passed?’ as your so-called husband used to say. I leave one of my famous kisses on your cheek Do believe me to be, dear Madam Your most faithful bull-dog.

Omission from Volume 1

Letter to Leslie Beauchamp [30 June 1915] [ATL] 95 Elgin Crescent Dearest1 I was overjoyed to hear from you at last & very disappointed that you had been so near & so far. But I will come to Reading on Saturday afternoon – I would love to. Will you wire me a train that suits you and also tell me where we shall meet – I long to see you – Any train that you mention will suit me for I will keep the day free for you – With a thousand things to say & to hear         Your own            Katie. Note 1. This letter, discovered by Gerri Kimber in the ATL in March 2020, is only the second precious letter still in existence from KM to her brother. Donated to the ATL by Jeanne Renshaw, KM’s sister, on 1 November 1977, it had been overlooked for many years since, by some chance error, it had been placed amongst letters written to Jeanne by her brother Leslie. A curator had placed the word [Jeanne] in pencil after the word ‘Dearest’ which begins the letter, indicating that the recipient was in fact Jeanne. However, Professor J. Lawrence Mitchell, an expert on the life of Leslie Beauchamp, now confirms this letter was indeed written by KM to her brother. In his essay on Leslie, ‘Katie and Chummie: Death in the Family’, in Kimber and Wilson 2011, he writes: By the end of May 1915, Leslie anticipated no more weekend leaves, so he was understandably upset when he somehow made a mistake and presented himself at 25 Elgin Crescent instead of 95, the latest address of his compulsively itinerant sister. In his subsequent letter to Kathleen, he

    778



omission from volume i   779 explained why he failed to show up and suggested meeting her in Reading: ‘I must see you soon – Could I possibly see you in Reading on Saturday afternoon or evening? [. . .] we must meet somehow – I have thousands of things to tell you’. (p. 31) This letter from Mansfield is clearly her response to the above letter. The reference to ‘so near & so far’ fits perfectly with his explanation that Leslie had mistakenly gone to 25 Elgin Crescent instead of 95.

Appendix

Book review by Katherine Mansfield in the Daily News, 28 November 1921, p. 8. BOOKS & AUTHORS. FAME AND ADVENTURE. (By KATHERINE MANSFIELD.) ‘The Secret Victory’. By Stephen McKenna. Hutchinson. 5s. 6d. net. ‘The Red Knight’. By F. Brett Young. Collins. 7s. 6d. net. This is the story of how Eric Lane, last and most pitiful of all the victims of Lady Barbara Neave, sought to recover his hold on life. The two preceding volumes of Mr. McKenna’s trilogy are devoted mainly to Lady Barbara, who is the queen of that little set in London society known as the Sensationalists. She is a siren. To see her button a glove or bite a caviare sandwich was to have a promising career ruined for ever. Her passion – and the passion of her set – was for notoriety. England talked of her, India murmured, Canada took up the refrain. However, her victims, being soulless, recovered. All but Eric Lane. Bruised, broken, his health so shattered that the doctor bluntly hinted at a sanatorium, he left England for ever. For desperate ills desperate remedies. He chose a six months lecturing tour in the United States. After that was over, still seeking oblivion, he was about to disappear into China when a cable from his mother called him home. Chapter I. tells how, the cynosure of a thousand eyes, he ate his last dinner in New York. Millbank, one time Ambassador in England, wished him, in the name of America, Godspeed. At his elbow stood row upon row of waiters with piled-up menu cards for him to sign. Twenty feet away scribbled the pressmen, and ‘he posed himself and sat patiently still’ while the sketch-artists bent to their task. Then he rose. ‘The applause broke out again, ten times louder and longer than before; there was a blinding flash of silver light. . . . followed by dense clouds of smoke’. He spoke. ‘There was no applause, for none dared break the silence’. Then ‘the pent storm of cheering gushed forth as though he had touched a spring’. The Young Playwright. The trouble is this unfortunate, retiring, broken-hearted young man is a playwright. And Mr. McKenna tells us what that means. It is grim

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appendix  781

knowledge. ‘In London, in Boston, in Tokyo, Eric was recognised in the street’; he ‘had to travel by unfamiliar lines and hide himself in unknown hotels’. For ‘ultimate and enduring sanctuary he must retire to a land untouched by books and theatres’. In fact it is Charlie Chaplin all over again, but translated into higher spheres. For, as Mr. McKenna explains in an epistle dedicatory he has ‘confined himself for the most part to men and women whose means and leisure enable them to be occupied with public affairs or – private introspection: as human beings they are not less interesting than those who devote a greater proportion of their time to the struggle for existence; in the opinion of some, they may win an added interest by the larger air of a more spacious life and by the subtile discrimination of wider intellectual sympathies. . . .’ So hunted and pursued by the rich and great only, Eric Lane returns to London. And shall he recover? Work has lost its savour since ‘above the mad houseful’s plaudits’ he looks ‘through all the roaring and the wreaths’, in vain, for Barbara. Then a little black-haired girl, broken plaything of an airman, cries her heart out on his shoulder. And, recognising her need of him, he makes the great sacrifice. He will marry her and bring up the other man’s child as his own. But, just as he thinks to have found peace at last from Barbara and her haunting telephone bells, he remembers that a woman’s first lover retains his hold for ever. Faithless, brutal though he be, he has only to lift a finger and the woman obeys. This is the great law of sex. This, the dramatist in him comprehends. It remains for the doctor to sound him again, and having told the hungry Press as little as possible, he settles £300 a year on Ivy and again leaves England for ever. In all this there is scarcely room for Lady Barbara. Once, obedient to another law, she follows him to his bedroom. But he repulses her, and after she had gone ‘turned on all the lights and explored the bedroom and bathroom on hands and knees’. He found only a handkerchief, which he tossed, flaming, away. But supposing it had been a hairpin? These things do not bear thinking about. In an ecstasy of self-sacrifice he might have swallowed it! We lay the book down with a vision of Eric, on some sunkissed verandah in Arizona, receiving a presentation from the ‘cultured’ Arizonians – a garland of oranges or a shy limousine. But can Mr. McKenna expect us to believe this to be a true picture of that more spacious life for which he has deserted ‘narrow streets and sunless cottages’ of this era? It is melodrama for idle young women, a kind of prolonged daydream after a heavy meal of illustrated newspapers and social paragraphs. No more. A Shot in the Head. Judging by ‘The Red Knight’, it looks as though Mr. Brett Young were voyaging round the world before he settles down for good and all. It is a story of romantic adventure not unlike a great many other stories, with a Southern background of sun, sirocco, banished Duke, a spy who is no

782   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 spy, and a woman whose beauty takes the breath, all complete. Robert Bryden inherited from his father a passion for lost causes. By birth he was only half English, for one of his father’s adventures had ended in marriage with a lovely and high-born young Trinacrian, who had died of cholera when her son was six years old. By upbringing Robert was English, for, his father having died too, he was adopted by an uncle and aunt in Hampstead. But blood will out. After developing a deplorable inclination for the plastic arts, after a stormy affair with a Trinacrian model, after a number of dinners in Soho, and some months at the war, he reads in a newspaper that there is bloody fighting in Pergusa. And nothing will hold him. Now the head of the new Communist republic in Trinacria is Massa, at one time his fellow diner in Soho, and his dear friend. He is the familiar figure we have met so often in romances of this kind, the ‘short man in a black coat with greasy lapels and a black felt hat several sizes too small for him, which he pulled down over his eyes as though he were anxious not to be recognised’. To him goes Robert and offers his services, and is accepted. He is to report upon the behaviour of a certain suspected family, to look in their house, in fact and to spy upon them. There is a mother, a wild, reckless, devil-may-care son. And, of course, there is a daughter, Maddelena – slender, pale, cold, and ardent. Need we say more? The Duke, for whom any member of that family would gladly die, is hidden in their very rooms. And Bryden, who discovers their secret, being half an Englishman, cannot love and lie. It ends with Maddelena handing him a revolver and begging him to shoot his friend Massa as the carriage drives past their windows. Naturally Robert goes downstairs obedient, and – more naturally still – he is carried up feet foremost with the shot through his own forehead. Not all Mr. Brett Young’s skill as a writer can make this plot take on life. He has lavished care upon the setting, the detail, little touches of character, and so on. But Bryden is wood, and Maddelena burning eyes through a veil, and Carmela is a red rose in raven hair. It is a disappointing book, especially so when – as we realise at the opening of Chapter II. – there is such an interesting mind, such real gifts of observation and sincerity, behind it.

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Index

A. P. Watt and Son, 445 Aaron’s Rod (Lawrence, D. H.), 96, 96n, 100n, 587, 587n, 612 Abdulla Cigarettes, 671n Acacia Road (London), 35, 38n, 51, 51n–2n, 89n, 93, 101, 190n Adam International Review, 477, 478n–9n Adam’s Rest (Millin, S.), 152, 154, 156n Addison, Joseph, 177n The Adelphi, 252n, 411, 722, 771n Adelphi Terrace, 30, 33, 118, 153–4, 413n, 549, 555, 556n, 607, 641 Adler, Alfred, 65n The Adventures of a Manuscript (Swinnerton, F.), 649 The Adventures of an American Girl in Victorian London (Banks, E.), 698n The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (Smollett, T.), 765n Adventures with Bernard Shaw (Rider, D. J.), 522n Affable Hawk ‘Books in General’, 399n see also Desmond MacCarthy L’Agent pathogène de la grippe dite espagnole (Manoukhine, I.), 140n Aiken, Conrad, 26, 594n ‘Letters from America’, 594n Ainger, William Bradshaw, 217n ‘Aix-en-Provence’ (Carco, F.), 189n Aktiebogalet Skolunds Bokförlag, 465n ‘Alastor’ (Shelley, P.), 502n

    797

Alcott, Louisa May Little Women, Or Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, 713 Aldington, Richard, 398–9 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll, L.), 14, 16n, 163, 170n, 212, 213n Allan, Maud, 663, 664n, 668, 669n, 697 My Life and Dancing, 664n Allen, Grant, 381, 382n–3n The Woman Who Did, 382n Allied Artists’ Association, 279n, 281n ‘The Aloe’ (Mansfield, K.), 35, 223, 224n, 470n, 691n ‘Along the Gray’s Inn Road’ (Mansfield, K.), 379 Alpers, Antony, 18, 35–6, 117, 317, 377, 389n, 395, 397–8, 402–3, 406n, 414, 484n, 545, 600n, 608n Katherine Mansfield: A Biography, 634n The Life of Katherine Mansfield, 20n, 37n, 40n, 117n, 119n, 144n, 187n, 318n, 346n, 379n, 399n, 404n, 406n, 415n, 466n, 484n, 525n, 533n, 547n, 600n, 615n, 663n, 702n Altounyan, Ernest Haig (Dr.), 769n Amiel, Henri-Frédéric, 428, 428n Amores (Lawrence, D. H.), 36, 177n Anchusa, 259, 260n Anderson, Sherwood, 311 Andreev, Leonid Nikolaevich, 107n, 244n

798   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Angus, Barbara ‘Mahupuku, Maata’, 137n Ann Veronica (Wells, H. G.), 390n Anna Karenina (Tolstoy, L., tr. Garnett, C.), 63n, 570n Les Années sanglantes 1914–1918 (eds Guicheteau, G.; Simoën, J.), 111n von Anrep, Boris, 539n Anthologie de l’amour asiatique (Thalasso, A.), 248n Antier, Chantal Les Femmes dans la grande guerre, 111n Apollinaire, Guillaume, 730n Apollo and the Seaman (Holbrooke, J.), 652 ‘Apollo and the Seaman’ (Trench, F.), 652 Apollo with Nymphs and Satyrs (Lauri, F.), 569n The April Baby’s Book of Tunes (von Arnim, E.), 427n Arc de Triomphe, 488n, 688 Architectural Association, 318 Ardis, Ann L., 377–8 ‘Democracy and Modernism: The New Age under A. R. Orage (1907–22)’, 379n ‘The Ark’, 178, 179n, 185n, 361n; see also Gower Street von Arnim, Elizabeth (née Mary Annette Beauchamp), 3, 22, 27n, 124n, 140n, 210n, 265, 265n, 267, 268n, 292, 295, 296n–7n, 301, 303n, 310n, 350n, 374n, 390n, 417n–18n, 426n–7n, 508n, 531, 585, 586n, 592, 592n, 609n, 612, 650, 716, 721–2, 733, 736 The April Baby’s Book of Tunes, 427n Elizabeth and her German Garden, 592n Tradition and Hugh Walpole, 586n Vera, 295, 297n, 531 von Arnim, Felicitas, 427n

‘Arnold Trowell – Violoncellist, Composer and Pedagogue’ (Griffiths, M.), 658n, 709n, 711n Arouet, François-Marie, 302n; see also Voltaire Arrangement in Grey and Black no. 1 (Whistler, J.), 198n Art (Bell, C.), 178n, 191n, 648n Art and Letters, 281n, 496n, 561–3, 567n, 618, 619n ‘Art and Philosophy’ (Murry, J. M.), 134n The Art of Spiritual Harmony (Kandinsky, W., tr. Sadleir, M.), 544 The Artist of the Floating World (Ishiguro, K.), 684n ‘An Artist’s Story’ (Chekhov, A.), 87n Arts and Crafts movement, 146, 387n As You Like It (Shakespeare, W.), 495n Ascari, Maurizio Cinema and the Imagination in Katherine Mansfield’s Writing, 184n, 538n Asheham House, 209, 209n, 229, 655, 746–8, 749n, 750–1, 754– 6, 770, 773 Ashford, Daisy, 268n, 648n, 649 The Young Visiters, 266, 268n, 647, 648n Aspects of Literature (Murry, J. M.), 206n Asquith, Herbert, 99n, 567n, 668n, 679n, 701n Asquith, Margot, 567, 568n, 700, 701n, 740 ‘At the Bay’ (Mansfield, K.), 5, 32n, 81n, 340n, 355n, 439, 439n, 451–2, 452n–3n, 454, 455n, 456, 457n, 464n, 502n, 528n, 551–2, 551n, 605n, 606, 642n At the Bay and Other Stories (Mansfield, K.), 5, 451

‘At the Cemetery’ (Chekhov, A.), 599n ‘At the Post Office’ (Chekhov, A.), 599n The Athenaeum, 26, 27n, 36, 61n–2n, 66n–7n, 75n–6n, 89n, 98n, 114, 116, 119n–20n, 143, 152, 154, 154n, 228n, 249n, 252–3, 252n, 256n, 260n, 265, 265n, 268n, 275, 276n–7n, 279n, 291n, 311–12, 323n, 339n–40n, 411, 413n, 430n, 462, 500, 500n, 517n, 563n, 566n–7n, 570n, 591n, 592, 593n–4n, 594, 597n, 599n, 618, 618n, 621n–2n, 625n, 648n, 650, 719n, 728n, 730n, 735n, 760, 760n, 763n, 765n, 767n, 771n, 773n Athenaeum (Cat), 6, 319, 320n, 322, 333, 350, 350n, 374n, 737–8, 761, 768 Aubanel, Théodore, 188, 189n–90n d’Aubigné, Françoise, 689n Auckland (New Zealand), 13–15, 17, 716 The Auckland Star, 17n Augustus John: A Biography (Holroyd, M.), 332n L’Aurore, 394n Austen, Jane, 300n Emma, 295, 297n Mansfield Park, 300n Pride and Prejudice, 300n Austin, Alfred, 385, 387n–8n ‘On the Crowning of Kingship’, 388n Australia, 15, 98, 99n, 236n, 272n, 323n, 658, 707, 711n An Autobiography (Woolf, L.), 107n, 164n, 246n, 741n–2n, 752n The Autobiography of a Newspaper Girl (Banks, E.), 699n The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (Russell, B.), 164n, 533n ‘Awake’ (de la Mare, W.), 303n Ayer, Nat, 239n

index  799 ‘If You Were the Only Girl (in the World)’, 177n, 239n Back to Methuselah (Shaw, G.), 605n Background with Chorus (Swinnerton, F.), 649 Bad Wörishofen, 405n Bagenal, Barbara, 172n Bagnold, Enid, 521, 754, 755n A Diary Without Dates, 755n ‘The Guns in Kent’, 755n The Happy Foreigner, 755n Bahai – The Spirit of the Age (Holley, H.), 510n Baillot, Juliette, 158, 236n Baker, Ida Constance (L.M., Jones), 2–3, 7, 18–19, 69n, 82, 86n, 94, 94n, 101, 108–9, 118n, 127n, 135, 140n, 160n, 183n, 207n, 219n, 233n, 246, 247n–8n, 257n, 264n, 280, 285n, 287, 302n, 316, 350, 350n, 359, 365, 371, 402, 405n, 414–15, 421n, 423, 427, 429, 430n, 433–4, 477, 564, 564n, 566, 571n, 573, 575, 578, 581–3, 594, 596, 600n, 601, 603, 605, 611, 621, 633, 658, 660, 660n, 672n–3n, 683, 684n, 702, 702n, 710, 737, 758n Katherine Mansfield: The Memories of L.M., 20n, 40n, 61n, 69n, 119n, 137n, 219n, 248n, 318n, 350n, 404n, 415n, 479n, 634n, 684n Baker, Mary Dora, 271, 272n ‘Ballad of the Dead Lover’ (Le Gallienne, R.), 388n Ballara, Angela ‘Mahupuku, Hamuera Tamahau’, 137n Ballets Russes, 94n, 213n, 276n, 288n, 476, 502n de Balzac, Honoré, 283, 284n Bandol, 19, 53, 161, 165–6, 219n, 220, 222, 475, 479

800   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Bank of New Zealand, 18–19, 149, 202 Banks, Benjamin, 711, 711n Banks, Elizabeth L., 698n–9n The Adventures of an American Girl in Victorian London, 698n The Autobiography of a Newspaper Girl, 699n Barbusse, Henri, 247, 248n Le Feu, 248n Barham, Richard Harris, 716; see also Thomas Ingoldsby Baring, Maurice, 142, 626, 638 Barnacle, Nora, 114 Barrie, J. M., 131, 187n, 648n, 650 Peter Pan, 648n Bartholomew, William, 230n ‘O for the Wings of a Dove’, 229n Baudelaire, Charles, 546, 637 Baume Bengué, 264, 265n Bavaria, 6–7, 19, 119n, 155, 183n, 365, 652, 704–5 Bax, Arnold, 652 Bay (Lawrence, D. H.), 479n Beach, Sylvia, 98n, 519n Beatty, David Richard, 271, 272n Beauchamp, Annie Burnell (née Dyer), 13, 15, 218n, 230n, 407, 408n, 414, 426n, 430n, 691n, 702n, 756n Beauchamp, Arthur, 345n Beauchamp, Charlotte Elizabeth, 721 Beauchamp, Charlotte Mary (m. Waterlow), 264n, 307n, 407, 426n, 433, 435n, 436, 529–30, 648n Beauchamp, Constance (Connie), 330n, 346n, 599n, 622n Beauchamp, Elizabeth Weiss (Louey, née Lassetter), 418, 418n Beauchamp, Estherel, 426, 427n Beauchamp, Harold, 13, 19, 20n, 277n, 307n, 408n, 416n, 430n, 466, 485n Reminiscences and Recollections, 18, 20n

Beauchamp, Henry (Guardy), 426n–7n Beauchamp, Henry Herron, 417n–18n Beauchamp, Horatio, 330n Beauchamp, Jeanne, 264n, 277n, 307n, 407, 426n, 435n, 529–30, 778n; see also Jeanne Renshaw Beauchamp, Kathleen Mansfield, 4, 13, 15, 17, 69n, 149, 264n, 407, 426n, 435n, 467, 529–30, 658, 658n; see also Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp, Leslie Heron (Chummie), 19, 36, 51n–2n, 55n, 246n, 316, 408n, 530, 730n, 778, 778n–9n Beauchamp Lodge, 665, 667–8, 670–1, 674, 676, 678, 683, 686n, 690, 692, 696, 699 Beauchamp, Mary Annette, 265n Beauchamp, Vera Margaret, 19, 65n, 264n, 407, 417, 426n, 435n, 470n, 529, 570n, 672, 675n Beaumont, Muriel, 270, 270n Bechstein Hall, 711n Beerbohm, Max, 196, 197n, 262n, 638 Zuleika Dobson, 197n Beethoven, Ludwig von, 23, 368n, 375n, 408, 409n, 665–6, 666n, 673n, 708, 709n Beethoven – His Spiritual Development (Sullivan, J. W. N.), 368n Behn, Aphra, 285n The Town Fop: Or Sir Timothy Tawdrey, 285n Belgium, 19, 44n, 539n Bell, Anne Olivier, 98 (ed.) The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 74n, 119n, 159n, 165n, 200n, 210n, 213n, 241n, 274n, 474n, 593n, 721, 729n, 748n, 751n–2n, 758n–60n, 763n–4n, 768n–9n

Bell, Clive, 98, 176, 178n, 191n, 197n, 205n, 216n, 277n, 643, 648n, 721, 739, 744, 768 Art, 178n, 191n, 648n Bell, Julian, 98, 764n Bell, Quentin, 98, 749n, 764n Bell, Vanessa, 98, 178n, 191n, 200n, 262n, 279n, 291n, 643, 648n, 739–40, 743, 746, 746n, 752n, 764n–6n Bellasis, Edward Cherubini: Memorials Illustrative of his Life and Work, 708n ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ (Keats, J.), 699n Belloc, Hilaire, 638 Belloc Lowndes, Marie Adelaide (née Belloc), 143, 145n, 502n Bendall, Edith Kathleen (m. Robison), 147n, 434n, 702, 703n A Children’s Book of Verse, 434n Bengué, Jules, 265n Bennett, Arnold, 221n, 377, 379, 386, 389n–90n, 398, 445, 638, 650, 716 Clayhanger, 389n The Old Wives’ Tale, 389n Benson, E. F., 569, 570n The Countess of Lowndes Square and Other Stories, 570n Sheaves, 570n Bergson, Henri, 377 Berlin, 525 Bernard, Peter, 194n Berry, Mathilda, 644, 745 Bertrand Russell (Moorehead, C.), 533n, 536n Best Poems of the Year (Moult, T.), 311 Between Two Worlds: An Autobiography (Murry, J. M.), 23n, 114n, 144n, 165n–7n, 173n, 175n, 201n, 215n, 246n, 315, 318n, 619n Bhagavad-Gita, 396 Bibesco, Antoine, 568n

index  801 A Bibliography of Katherine Mansfield (Kirkpatrick, B. J.), 474n, 554n, 557n Bibliography of the First Editions of the Prose Works of Herman Melville (Sadleir, M.), 547 Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 571n Bienstock, Vladimir Lvovitch, 92n A Bill of Divorcement (Dane, C.), 586n Binckes, Faith Modernism, Magazines, and the British Avant-Garde, 134n, 144n, 628n The Bing Boys Are Here, 177n, 239n The Bishop and Other Stories (Chekhov, A., tr. Garnett, C.), 66, 66n, 89n Bishop, Henry, 397, 402 Black and White, 446 The Black Diamond (Young, B.), 30, 31n, 553n Black, Dora (m. Russell), 296n, 533 ‘Black Humour’ (Cloyne, G.), 639n Blackwood’s, 733 Bland Holt Opera Company, 706 Blast, 309n, 507n Bleak House (Dickens, C.), 201n, 420, 421n Blend, Mathilde, 213n ‘Bliss’ (Mansfield, K.), 29–30, 52n, 229, 230n, 442, 449, 452–3, 464–5, 549–51, 556, 558, 640 Bliss and Other Stories (Mansfield, K.), 4, 25, 27, 29n, 31n, 117n, 395, 442n, 447–8, 453n, 455n, 465n, 494n, 517n, 545–6, 552n, 557n, 560n, 600n, 774n Bloomsbury Group, 3, 84n–5n, 119n, 127n, 134n, 161n, 177n–8n, 181n, 186n, 191n, 197n, 201n, 205n, 209, 209n–10n, 214n, 216n, 224, 237n, 249n, 259n, 261n–2n, 279n, 374n, 411, 517n, 643–4, 648n, 654, 721, 739, 744, 759n, 765n, 768n

802   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 The Blue Bird (Maeterlinck, M.), 652 ‘The Blue Cross’’ (Chesterton, G. K.), 388n The Blue Review, 109, 124n, 142, 403, 500n, 648n Blum, Jerome, 511, 512n Blunden, Edmund Charles, 411 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 264n Decameron, 264n Bodenheim, Max, 593, 594n ‘The Body Electric: A Long View of Electrical Therapy for Functional Neurological Disorders’ (McWhirter, L.; Carson, A.; Stone, J.), 233n Boer War, 151, 381n La Bohème (Puccini, G.), 562, 589 Bois de Boulogne, 89n, 516n Boltiansky, Bessie (m. Moult), 311 Bomberg, David, 142, 193n The Book of Lovat (MacFall, H.), 522n Book of the Martyrs (Foxe, J.), 325n The Bookman, 446, 448n ‘Books in General’ (Affable Hawk), 399n Boronia, 272n The Borzoi 1920 (Knopf, A.), 26, 27n, 29n Boswell, James, 83n, 369n The Life of Samuel Johnson, 83n, 369n Bouchage, Ambroise, 286, 287n, 602–3, 602n Les Indications médicales de Vernet-les-Bains, station thermale et climatérique, 602n Boulton, James T. (ed.) The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, 72n–3n, 81n, 112n–13n, 167n, 173n, 180n, 190n, 209n, 238n, 242n, 248n–9n, 448n, 763n Bourne & Hollingsworth, 211n Bourne, Richard Lords of Fleet Street, 525n

Bowden, George, 50, 52n, 224n, 315–16, 396, 673n, 702n, 731n Boylesve, René, 255n; see also René Tardiveau Brady, Edwin James, 467n Brambletye House, 682, 682n Brambletye House, or Cavaliers and Roundheads (Smith, H.), 682n Branford, F. V., 311 Brett, Dorothy, 3, 63n, 74n, 78n, 81n, 84, 84n–5n, 92–3, 95, 98–9, 101, 106, 110, 116, 127n, 140n, 153, 158, 172n, 179n–80n, 182, 183n, 185, 190, 193n, 199, 207n, 214–15, 215n, 219, 224, 224n, 226, 231, 235– 6, 236n, 245, 254, 256, 257n, 258, 261, 263, 271, 272n, 282, 289, 294n, 304, 316–17, 337–8, 359n, 362n, 364, 367, 373, 448, 514n, 519, 539, 539n, 587, 614, 629, 725, 727–8, 732 Brett: From Bloomsbury to New Mexico, A Biography (Hignett, S.), 98, 159n, 185n, 236n ‘The Bride of Dunkerron’ (Anon.), 710n The Bride of Dunkerron (Smart, H.), 710n Bridges, Robert, 146, 411 Brinker, J. A. H ‘A Historical, Epidemiological and Aetiological Study of Measles’, 200n British Autobiographies: An Annotated Bibliography (Matthews, W.), 522n The British Medical Journal, 632, 634n British Museum, 11, 73, 116, 535, 696, 714, 715n Broadhead, W. Smithson, 294n Brodsky, N. I., 103n Brontë, Charlotte, 630 Brontë, Emily, 268n, 630 Wuthering Heights, 268n Brooke, Rupert, 142, 638 Collected Poems, 142

Brooke, Sylvia Leonora, 183n, 539n Brooker, Peter (ed.) The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, 252n The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky, F.), 102n, 535n Brown, Curtis, 445 Brown, Ivor, 320, 320n, 331n Lighting-up Time, 321n, 331n Browne, Thomas, 770n ‘Letter to a Friend, Upon occasion of the Death of his Intimate Friend’, 770n Brussels, 657, 658n, 662, 702, 703n–4n Bryder, Linda ‘Mobilising Mothers: The 1917 National Baby Week’, 200n Bulloch, J. M, 629 (ed.) C.K.S.: An Autobiography – A Fragment by Himself, 630n Bunin, Ivan (Bounine), 80, 81n, 84, 87–92, 87n, 89n–90n, 104, 105n ‘The Gentleman from San Francisco’, 81n, 90n The Gentleman from San Francisco and Other Stories, 89n Burton, Robert, 469n Butler, Samuel, 241n, 566n The Way of All Flesh, 241n–2n Butts, Mary, 96n By the Ionian Sea (Gissing, G.), 236n Byrom, John, 484n Byron, George Gordon (Lord), 282n ‘She Walks in Beauty’, 282n C.K.S.: An Autobiography – A Fragment by Himself (ed. Bulloch, J. M), 630n Cabre, Teresa, 214n Café Royal, 36, 177n, 522, 522n Cambridge, 11, 142, 178n, 197n, 210n–11n, 216n, 395, 401, 419n, 531, 533, 547, 637–8, 643, 648n, 654, 716, 721–2, 739, 744, 759n

index  803 The Cambridge Biography of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 2: Triumph to Exile 1912–1922 (KinkeadWeekes, M.), 57n Campbell, Beatrice (née Elvery), 58–9, 58n–9n, 98, 98n, 109, 171n, 190n Campbell, Gordon, 59, 59n, 98, 99n, 190n Canada/Canadian, 7, 175n, 197n, 203n, 259n, 309n, 378, 381–2, 381n–3n, 387n, 416n, 453n, 507n, 529–30, 561, 664n, 669n, 780 Cannan, Gilbert, 134n, 144n, 186, 187n, 201n, 626 Cannan, Mary (née Ansell), 187n Canterbury Tales (Chaucer, G.), 264n, 288n ‘Captain Ribnikov’ (Kuprin, A.), 473, 484n The Captives (Walpole, H.), 718 Carco, Francis, 41n–2n, 44n, 49n, 111n–12n, 189n ‘Aix-en-Provence’, 189n Cardus, Neville, 311 Carl Rosa Opera Company, 663 Carlton Hill, 664–5, 674, 678n, 680, 683, 705 Carpenter, Edward, 396 Carrère, Eugène, 216n Carreño, Teresa, 671, 673n, 674, 677 Carrington, Dora de Houghton, 172, 172n, 175n, 179, 179n–80n, 644, 645n, 656n, 748n Carrington, Noel (ed.) Mark Gertler, Selected Letters, 37n Carroll, Lewis, 16n, 170n Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 14, 16n, 163, 170n, 212, 213n Through the Looking Glass, and what Alice Found There, 16n, 257n, 265n

804   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Carson, Alan ‘The Body Electric: A Long View of Electrical Therapy for Functional Neurological Disorders’, 233n Carswell, John, 35, 397 Lives and Letters: A. R. Orage, Katherine Mansfield, Beatrice Hastings, John Middleton Murry, S. S. Koteliansky 1906– 1957, 37n, 110n, 397, 399n Carter, Huntly, 377, 476, 521 Carter, Mita, 137n Carver, Beci, 8n The Casanova Fable (Gerhardi, W.; Kingsmill, H.), 23n, 787n Case, Bertha, 510n Case, Janet Elizabeth, 758, 759n Casetta Deerholm, 69–70, 69n, 319, 323–4, 738 Cassell & Co, 361n Cather, Willa, 5, 26, 28, 28n ‘On the Art of Fiction’, 26 ‘Youth & the Bright Medusa’, 5, 28 Youth and Bright Medusa, 28n ‘Catholic Picnic’ (Anon.), 707n Cavell, Caroline Mary Ann Eliza (née Scates), 561 Cecil May: A Tale of the Village (Lacy, F. E.), 248n Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary Volume of Essays (eds Kimber, G.; Wilson, J.), 778n The Celebrity’s Daughter (Hunt, V.), 179, 181n Celtic Revival, 197n Central School of Art and Design, 317, 372n The Century Magazine, 444n Ceylon, 99n, 739, 744 Chalet des Sapins, 30–1, 74–80, 115, 122, 124, 124n, 140, 291, 293n, 294, 297, 300, 313, 349, 351–2, 354–8, 358n, 360–1, 400, 449– 59, 508, 510–13, 530, 550–4, 577, 580–2, 584, 604, 605n, 606, 630, 641, 729–30

Chalet Soleil, 124n, 303n, 310n, 586n Chambers, Jessie, 170n D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record, 170n Chaminade, Cécile, 409n ‘Danse créole’, 409n Chancery Lane, 12, 143, 376, 396 Le Chapeau blanc (Greuze, J.), 695n Chapelle, Max (tr.) Old Heidelberg, 704n Chaplin, Charlie, 354n, 374n, 781 The Kid, 352, 354n, 355, 374 ‘Character in Fiction’ (Woolf, V.), 639n Charles Chaplin, (Cat), 61n, 737, 761 Charles Scribner’s and Sons, 255n de la Chataignerie, Emile Coué Self-Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion, 299n Chaucer, Geoffrey, 264n, 287, 288n, 290, 347 Canterbury Tales, 264n, 288n Chaundy & Co., 560n ‘Chekhov and the Buried Life of Katherine Mansfield’ (Polonsky, R.), 61n Chekhov, Anton, 2, 35–6, 47n, 60, 61n–8n, 62–7, 69, 70n, 71, 72n, 74n–5n, 82, 84n, 87–8, 91, 98n, 102n, 107n, 139, 244n, 265n, 284n, 290, 291n, 338, 339n, 340, 377, 396, 406n, 543n, 562, 569, 570n, 599, 599n, 619n, 624n, 634, 724n, 735n, 750–1, 750n, 766, 767n, 771, 771n–2n ‘An Artist’s Story’, 87n ‘At the Cemetery’, 599n ‘At the Post Office’, 599n The Bishop and Other Stories, 66, 66n, 89n The Cherry Orchard, 771, 771n ‘Easter Eve’, 88, 89n, 406, 406n ‘Gusev’, 735, 735n ‘In Exile’, 569 Ivanov, 65, 66n–7n, 67

‘The Lady with the Dog’, 724n ‘Misery’, 98n, 569 Nine Humorous Tales, 750n The Notebook of Anton Chekhov, 291n The Schoolmistress and Other Stories, 570n The Seagull, 68n, 72n ‘Sleepyhead’, 396 ‘The Steppe’, 66n–7n, 67 Three Sisters, 72n, 619n ‘Two Sketches’, 599n, 624n Uncle Vanya, 619n The Wife and Other Stories, 750n The Witch and Other Stories, 735n, 750n Chekhov, Mikhail, 67n, 89n Chelsea Flower Show, 592n Chentoff, Polia, 11 Cherniavsky, Felix The Salome Dancer: The Life and Times of Maud Allan, 664n The Cherry Orchard (Chekhov, A.), 771, 771n Cherubini, Luigi, 708, 708n Cherubini: Memorials Illustrative of his Life and Work (Bellasis, E.), 708n Chesterton, Gilbert Keith, 377, 384, 388n, 396, 398 ‘The Blue Cross’’, 388n Chevalier, Albert, 715n Cheyne Walk, 147–8, 402, 404–5, 404n, 434, 472 The Chicago Evening Post Literary Review, 529n ‘“A child of the sun”: Katherine Mansfield, Orientalism and Gurdjieff’ (Kimber, G.), 108n, 474n, 695n ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’ (Mansfield, K.), 396 Childe, Wilfred, 216n A Children’s Book of Verse (Bendall, E.), 434n Children’s Corner (Debussy, C.), 194n

index  805 A Child’s Garden of Verses (Stevenson, R. L.), 423n, 431n Chopin, Kate, 112n ‘An Egyptian Cigarette’, 112n The Chorus: A Tale of Love and Folly (Lynd, S.), 116 ‘“The Chorus Girl and the Tariff” by Katherine Mansfield’ (Griffiths, M.), 664n Christianity, 92n, 122n, 173n, 200n, 206n, 346, 346n, 376, 383n, 384, 388n, 410, 470n, 483, 542n, 599, 622n, 647n, 707n Chummie see Leslie Heron Beauchamp Chums, 366n Church Street, 144n, 159, 185–6, 188, 190, 192–3, 196, 198, 201, 204, 206, 208, 210–12, 214–17, 480, 482, 492, 523, 541, 646, 742, 746–9 Churchill, Winston, 142 Cinema and the Imagination in Katherine Mansfield’s Writing (Ascari, M.), 184n, 538n Cinnamon and Angelica (Murry, J. M.), 322, 323n, 327n Circulating Genius: John Middleton Murry, Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence (Kaplan, S.), 294n, 730n Civilisation (Duhamel, G.), 197n Clarens-Montreux, 30, 286, 288, 504, 506, 603, 634, 641; see also Montreux Claridge, Laura The Lady with the Borzoi: Blanche Knopf, Literary Tastemaker Extraordinaire, 27n Clarke, Isabel C., 466 Katherine Mansfield: A Biography, 466n Clarke, Stuart (ed.) The Essays of Virginia Woolf, 8n, 67n, 72n, 98n, 107n, 127n, 183n, 389n, 639n, 645n, 735n, 760n, 762n–3n, 770n–1n

806   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Clarke, Stuart (cont.) (ed.) Virginia Woolf and S. S. Koteliansky: Translations from the Russian, 102n–3n Clayhanger (Bennett, A.), 389n Clayton, Joseph, 376 Clovelly Mansions, 390n, 393, 406, 448, 484n Cloyne, George, 639n ‘Black Humour’, 639n Cobden-Sanderson, 297n, 321n, 323n, 327n, 330n, 337n, 356n Cobden-Sanderson, Richard, 329 Cobden-Sanderson, Thomas James, 323n Cocteau, Jean, 517n Codet, Louis, 729, 730n La Fortune de Bécot, 730n Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 325n ‘The Idiot Boy’, 426n ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, 325n, 426n The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence (Moore, H. T.), 110n The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, vol. 13: Prophecy and Dissent 1914–1916 (eds Frohmann, B.; Lippincott, M.; Rempel, R. A.), 542n Collected Poems (Brooke, R., ed. Marsh, E. H.), 142 Collected Poems (Hardy, T.), 323n The Collected Poems of Frank Prewett (ed. Graves, R.), 259n The Collected Poems of Katherine Mansfield (eds Kimber, G.; Davison, C.), 148n, 186n, 251n, 388n, 419n, 424n, 434n, 487n, 634n, 695n, 699n, 715n Collins see William Collins and Son Collins, Wilkie, 547 Coloured Stars: Versions of Fifty Asiatic Love Poems (ed. Mathers, E. P.), 248n The Common Reader (Woolf, V.), 762n–3n

Community Farm (Murry, J. M.), 318 The Complete Tales of Anton Chekhov (ed./tr. Garnett, C.), 88n Concessions (Schiff, S.), 562 ‘The Condition of English Poetry’ (Murry, J. M.), 144n The Confession of Ursula Trent (George, W. L.), 115n Confessions of an English OpiumEater (de Quincey, T.), 175n Congreve, R. H. ‘A Fourth Tale for Men Only’, 399n Congreve, William, 177n, 301, 302n The Way of the World, 302n Conquest of Peru (Prescott, W. H.), 248n Conrad, Joseph, 186, 187n, 295, 296n, 445–6, 593, 716 Heart of Darkness, 187n The Shadow Line, 187n Constable & Co., 5, 27, 32, 32n, 89n, 93n, 295, 297n, 356, 357n, 365, 366n, 437, 439–41, 442n, 447, 449, 452–3, 453n, 455, 463–5, 494, 494n, 545–7, 548n–50n, 556, 559n, 563n, 604 Constable, John, 368, 369n, 371n Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, 369n ‘Conversation Galante’ (Eliot, T. S.), 198n Conversations of Goethe (Eckermann, J., ed. Oxenford, J.), 83n, 369n ‘Conversations with Martin Secker’ (Horder, M.), 627n Coppard, A. E., 311 Corelli, Marie, 433, 434n The Cornhill Magazine, 562, 627 Cornwall, 55, 57n, 58–9, 109, 112n, 123n, 161, 167, 167n, 173n–4n, 190n, 209n–10n, 225–6, 225n, 416, 416n, 473, 475, 477–8, 484n, 499, 534, 534n, 665, 716, 743, 751–2, 763n, 764

Correspondance (Gide, A.), 159n Cosmic Anatomy (Oxon, M. A.), 108n, 362, 362n Le Côté de Guermantes II (Proust, M.), 612n Coué, Emile, 298, 299n, 304, 305n, 367, 369n Counter-Attack and Other Poems (Sassoon, S.), 754n The Countess of Lowndes Square and Other Stories (Benson, E. F.), 570n Countries of the Mind (Murry, J. M.), 585n Country Life, 413n Couperus, Louis, 26 Cowley, Malcolm, 455n Cowper, William, 565n–6n The Task, 565n Craig, Maurice, 217, 217n Psychological Medicine, 217n Crane, Stephen, 445 Crawford, Elizabeth The Women’s Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide, 729n Crawford, Robert Young Eliot: From St Louis to The Waste Land, 729n Creelman, Marion, 416, 416n Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky, F.), 102n, 203n Crippen, Hawley Harvey (Dr.), 378, 380, 380n–1n A Crisis of Brilliance: Five Young British Artists and the Great War (Haycock, D. B.), 144n The Criterion, 525, 615n The Critic in Judgement (Murry, J. M.), 741 A Critical Companion to James Joyce (Fargnoli, N.; Gillespie, M.), 609n Crome Yellow (Huxley, A.), 297n, 302n Crosby, Arthur (Dr.), 660, 660n Croucher, A., 576n

index  807 Croudace, Camilla, 425n–6n, 428n, 715 Crowley, Aleister, 502n Cummins, Geraldine, 769n The Land They Loved, 769n ‘A Cup of Tea’ (Mansfield, K.), 5, 450, 451n, 458, 461, 461n, 585n Curzon, George, 196, 197n D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record (Chambers, J.), 170n Dahlerup, Marie, 576, 576n, 729n The Daily Chronicle, 33n, 450, 450n The Daily Mail, 98, 99n, 201n, 243n, 378, 380, 381n, 514, 524, 716 The Daily Mirror, 211, 524 The Daily News, 4, 33n, 114, 115n, 116, 117n, 325n, 352n, 360, 361n, 558n, 747n, 780 Dalmaz, Gérard La Face cachée: Verdun 1914– 1918 Empreintes de l’armée allemande, 111n Dane, Clemence, 585, 586n, 727 A Bill of Divorcement, 586n Legend, 586n Will Shakespeare, 586n Dangerous Ages (Macaulay, R.), 30, 31n, 553n ‘Danse créole’ (Chaminade, C.), 409n Dante Alighieri, 8, 159n, 772, 772n Dantis Alagherii Epistolae, 772n The Divine Comedy, 772n The Dark Forest (Walpole, H.), 717 The Dark River (Millin, S.), 152, 154n, 156n Darroch, Sandra The Life of Ottoline Morrell, 159n, 219n, 264n Daudet, Léon, 577, 579n ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ (Mansfield, K.), 291n, 309n, 366n, 415, 450, 451n, 506n, 576, 603n, 633, 641n, 723, 724n

808   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 David Copperfield (Dickens, C.), 221, 222n, 234, 234n Davidson, Jo, 521 Davison, Claire, 3, 23, 27, 35, 98, 132, 140, 153, 159, 411, 474, 522, 525, 533, 627, 639, 645, 650, 655, 717, 722, 734, 741, 745 (ed.) The Collected Poems of Katherine Mansfield, 148n, 186n, 251n, 388n, 419n, 424n, 434n, 487n, 634n, 695n, 699n, 715n (ed.) The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, vol. 1, Letters to Correspondents A–J, 8n, 20n, 23n, 27n, 41n, 51n–2n, 58n, 63n–5n, 74n, 81n, 84n–6n, 94n, 98n, 100n, 109, 127n, 140n, 145n, 171n, 183n, 191n, 197n, 205n, 213n–15n, 218n, 236n, 264n, 266n, 284n–5n, 294n, 296n, 299n, 309n, 321n, 340n, 350n, 359n, 362n, 366n, 371n, 413n, 430n, 444n, 467n, 470n, 502n, 505n, 508n, 514n, 522n, 548n, 568n, 570n–1n, 586n, 609n, 612n, 629n, 648n, 675n, 703n, 710n, 737n–8n, 749n (ed.) The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield, vol. 4 – The Diaries of Katherine Mansfield, including Miscellaneous Works, 8n, 37n, 40n, 57n, 82n–3n, 93n, 108n, 111n–12n, 119n, 137n, 140n, 191n, 200n, 213n, 239n, 248n–9n, 254n–5n, 268n, 284n, 294n, 300n, 345n–6n, 348n, 357n, 363n, 369n, 393n, 416n, 421n, 430n, 434n, 439n, 464n, 468n, 487n, 543n, 570n, 585n, 597n, 615n, 634n, 657n, 660n, 691n, 695n, 702n–5n, 776n Translation as Collaboration: Virginia Woolf, Katherine

Mansfield, and S. S. Koteliansky, 37n, 61n, 66n, 102n, 200n, 474n Davison, Emily Wilding, 98 de la Mare, Walter, 26, 262n, 284n, 298, 299n, 325n, 638 ‘Awake’, 303n The Three Mullar-Mulgars, 26 The Veil and Other Poems, 299n, 303n ‘The Dead’ (Joyce, J.), 203n Dean, Esme, 657, 658n Dear Lady Ginger (ed. Shaw, H.), 165n, 209n, 213n, 228n, 279n Death in Venice (Mann, T.), 589 ‘The Death of Ivan Illych’ (Tolstoy, L.), 600n The Death of Society: Conte de Fée Premier (Wilson, R.), 123n, 288n Death of the Gods (Merezhkovsky, D., tr. Trench, F.), 652 Debussy, Claude, 194n, 502n, 674, 675n, 692, 695n Children’s Corner, 194n La Mer, 695n ‘Nuit d’étoiles’, 675n Pelléas and Mélisande, 695n ‘Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune’, 502n Suite Bergamesque, 675n Decameron (Boccaccio, G.), 264n ‘The Decay of Mr D. H. Lawrence’ (Murry, J. M.), 98n ‘The Deeper Life’ (Maeterlinck, M.), 421n Defoe, Daniel, 762, 763n Robinson Crusoe, 763n Degas, Edgar, 316, 362, 362n Deirdre Wedded and other Poems (Trench, F.), 652 ‘Democracy and Modernism: The New Age under A. R. Orage (1907–22)’ (Ardis, A.), 379n Dempsey, George, 608n Dempsey, Jack, 608, 608n Dent, Edward, 647, 648n, 649

Derain, André, 275, 275n–6n, 544 Desmond, Shaw, 577, 579n, 593n The Devils (Dostoevsky, F.), 102n–4n, 505n, 755n; see also The Possessed Dewey, Alice (née Chipman), 295, 296n Letters from China and the Far East, 296n Diaghilev, Sergei, 94n, 517n, 605n The Dial, 5, 80, 81n, 89, 90n, 249n, 455, 455n, 458, 459n, 525, 578, 579n–80n, 585n, 594n, 605, 605n, 610, 610n Diana of the Crossways (Meredith, G.), 171n, 207n The Diary of Virginia Woolf (eds Bell, A.; Nicolson, N.), 74n, 119n, 159n, 165n, 200n, 210n, 213n, 241n, 274n, 474n, 593n, 721, 729n, 748n, 751n–2n, 758n–60n, 763n–4n, 768n–9n A Diary Without Dates (Bagnold, E.), 755n Dick, Jane Warner, 146 Dick, Susan (ed.) A Haunted House: The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, 751n ‘Dickens’ (Santayana, G.), 578, 579n Dickens, Charles, 23, 201n, 222n–3n, 234n, 388n–9n, 421n, 491n, 578, 579n, 755n Bleak House, 201n, 420, 421n David Copperfield, 221, 222n, 234, 234n Oliver Twist, 491n, 755n Our Mutual Friend, 223n Dickinson, Emily, 626 Dictionary of National Biography, 648n, 743 Dictionnaire Larousse, 208n Dieppe, 517, 685, 686n, 690 ‘A Dill Pickle’ (Mansfield, K.), 600n Diment, Galya, 82n, 139, 722n

index  809 ‘Katherine Mansfield’s Russian Healers’, 77n, 82n, 86n, 140n–1n A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury. The Life and Times of Samuel Koteliansky, 38n–9n, 43n, 50n, 52n, 55n, 57n, 74n, 86n, 140n, 600n, 722n Disraeli, Benjamin, 547 Ditchling, 101n, 383, 387n Ditchling Press, 387n The Divine Comedy (Dante), 772n A Dogfight over the English Countryside (Murry, R.), 318 ‘The Doll’s House’ (Mansfield, K.), 441n, 459 A Doll’s House (Ibsen, H.), 231n Donat, Louis, 82n, 104, 105n, 139 Donne, John, 252n Doolittle, Hilda (H. D.), 630 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 2, 72n, 102n–4n, 106n–7n, 166, 167n, 181, 183n, 187n, 194, 199, 200n, 203n, 377, 505n, 535, 535n, 587n, 754, 755n The Brothers Karamazov, 102n, 535n Crime and Punishment, 102n, 203n The Devils, 102n–4n, 505n, 755n The Gambler, 107n An Honest Thief and Other Stories, 103n The Idiot, 102n Letters and Reminiscences, 107n ‘Life of a Great Sinner’, 102n The Possessed, 102–3, 102n–4n, 505, 505n, 755n ‘The Doves’ Nest’ (Mansfield, K.), 130n, 585n The Doves’ Nest and Other Stories (Mansfield, K.), 25, 465n Dowson, Ernest, 429, 430n ‘Le Dr Stephani et les sanatoriums’ (Galofaro, S.), 78n

810   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Le Drame secret de Katherine Mansfield (Merlin, R.), 41n, 140n, 305n ‘Drear-Nighted December’ (Keats, J.), 255n Drey, Anne, 492n; see also Anne Rice Drey, Raymond, 12n, 210n, 477, 478n, 481–2, 481n, 484, 484n, 487, 492, 492n, 496–7, 496n, 500, 505, 509, 512–13, 516, 519 Dreyfus, Alfred, 206n, 394n Drinkwater, John, 411 Dryhurst, Sylvia (m. Lynd), 114, 115n Dublin, 22, 98n Duchamp, Marcel, 519n Duhamel, Georges, 196, 197n Civilisation, 197n Dukes, Ashley, 398 Dumas, Alexandre, 491n Les Frères corses, 491n du Maurier, Daphne, 270n du Maurier, George, 270n Trilby, 270n du Maurier, Gerald, 270n Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 261n ‘To the Road’’, 261n Dunsany, Lord (E. J. Plunkett), 12n Dupin, Amantine-Lucile Aurore, 249n; see also George Sand Dürer, Albrecht, 327n Dyer, Belle (Aunt Belle), 98, 264n, 678n, 681n, 703n Dyer, Eliza, 414, 430n Dyer, Frank, 662 Dyer, Joseph (KM’s grandfather), 414 Dyer, Margaret Isabella (née Mansfield, KM’s grandmother), 432n, 691n Earp, Thomas, 215, 216n The Earth Child (Mansfield, K.), 4, 146–8, 148n ‘Easter, 1916’ (Yeats, W. B.), 630, 630n ‘Easter Eve’ (Chekhov, A.), 88, 89n, 406, 406n

‘The Eccentrics’ (Woolf, V.), 760n, 763n Eckard, Margery (Dawks), 721 Eckermann, Johann Peter, 83, 83n, 368, 369n Conversations of Goethe, 83n, 369n Eckhard, Helen Margery, 210n, 726n Ecole de Nancy, 299n Ecole des Beaux Arts, 512n Eder, David (Dr), 45n–6n Eder, Edith, 46n The Edinburgh Review, 549n ‘The Education of Audrey’ (Mansfield, K.), 470n Edward Marsh, Patron of the Arts: A Biography (Hassall, C.), 144n Edward VII: His Life and Times (ed. Rivington Holmes, R.), 119n Edwardian era, 132, 132n, 197n, 379n, 389n, 391n, 398n, 521, 717 Edwards, Ariadne Holmes, 261n ‘Heart of Mine’, 261n Edwards, Trystan, 752, 753n Eels, Emily ‘Sydney Schiff and Marcel Proust: Table-talk, Tribute, Translation’, 571n Egerton, George, 445 The Egoist, 270n The Egoist (Meredith, G.), 171n, 195n, 240, 241n ‘An Egyptian Cigarette’ (Chopin, K.), 112n The Egyptian Dancers (Rice, A.), 476 Einstein, Albert, 369, 371n electrotherapy, 232n, 235n ‘The Elephant’, 233, 233n, 316–17, 473; see also Portland Villas Elgin Crescent, 46, 778, 778n–9n Eliot, T. S., 26, 64, 65n, 143, 157, 194, 195n, 196, 197n–8n, 265n, 274n, 399, 411, 445, 525, 561, 564n–5n, 567n, 578n–9n, 589–90, 590n, 605, 605n, 614, 615n, 618, 621, 623, 639n, 721, 727–8, 728n–9n, 741, 766, 766n

‘Conversation Galante’, 198n ‘The Hippopotamus’, 766n ‘London Letter: September 1921’, 605n ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, 66n, 157, 614, 615n, 728, 766 ‘Lune de Miel’, 766n ‘Ménage Adultère de Tour’, 766n Modern American Poetry, 579n ‘Mr Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service’, 766n ‘Mrs. Violet Schiff’, 590n ‘Orage: Memories’, 399n Poems, 741, 766n Prufrock, and Other Observations, 65n, 195n, 198n ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’, 198n The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, 729n ‘Le Spectateur’, 766n ‘Sweeney among the Nightingales’, 766n The Waste Land, 65n, 525, 728n ‘Whispers of Immortality’, 766n Eliot, Vivienne, 525 Elisabeth (Rubens, P.), 350n Elizabeth and Essex (Strachey, L.), 644 Elizabeth and her German Garden (von Arnim, E.), 592n Elizabeth of the German Garden – A Literary Journey (Walker, J.), 124n, 650n Elkin Mathews, 4, 146–7 Ellis, Millie, 192, 193n, 268n Eminent Victorians (Strachey, L.), 532, 643 Emma (Austen, J.), 295, 297n Emmett, Daniel Decatur, 203n ‘I wish I was in Dixie’s land’, 202, 203n Enemies in the Empire: Civilian Internment in the British Empire during the First World War (Manz, S.; Panayi, P.), 323n

index  811 English Book Society, 116, 124n The English Review, 131, 132n, 187n, 229, 230n, 598, 625, 625n ‘Epilogue II’ (Mansfield, K.), 403 The Era, 664n ‘The Erl King’ (Goethe, J.), 673n Erlich, Paul, 138 Der Erlkönig (Schubert, F.), 672, 673n ‘The Escape’ (Mansfield, K.), 618n, 622n Essays of Elia (Lamb, C.), 762n The Essays of Virginia Woolf (eds Clarke, S.; McNeillie, A.), 8n, 67n, 72n, 98n, 107n, 127n, 183n, 389n, 639n, 645n, 735n, 760n, 762n–3n, 770n–1n Evans, Mary Ann, 213n The Evening News, 211, 239 The Evening Post, 710n The Evolution of an Intellectual (Murry, J. M.), 206n, 323n, 325n, 330n Excursions in Victorian Bibliography (Sadleir, M.), 547, 560n ‘Exhibition of French Art 1914–1919’ (Sitwell, S.), 275n The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker (Smollett, T.), 765n Eyler, John M. ‘The State of Science, Microbiology, and Vaccines circa 1918’, 599n Faber and Gwyre, 195n Fabian Arts Group, 396 Fabian Society, 46n, 376, 520, 637 La Face cachée: Verdun 1914–1918 Empreintes de l’armée allemande (Kaluzco, J.; Radet, F.; Dalmaz, G.), 111n Faded Leaves (Suhrawardy, H. S.), 177n The Faerie Queene (Spenser, E.), 61n

812   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Fairfield, Cicely Isabel, 302n, 612n The Judge, 612n The Return of the Soldier, 612n see also Rebecca West fairy-tales, 16n, 49n, 53n, 393, 628n, 673n, 710n, 749n ‘Family Happiness’ (Tolstoy, L.), 600n Fanny by Gaslight (Sadleir, M.), 546 fantasy, 16n, 35, 99n, 136, 645n, 654, 669n Farbman, Ghita, 52n, 94, 94n Farbman, Michael S. (Grisha), 50, 51n–2n, 94n, 104 Farbman, Sonia, 50, 51n–2n, 94n Fargnoli, Nicholas A Critical Companion to James Joyce, 609n A Fatal Reservation (Prowse, R. O.), 567n Fathers and Sons (Turgenev, I.), 236n Faust (Gounod, C.), 409n Fauvism, 275n, 369n, 476 ‘Fauvism and a Fauve’ (Sadler, M), 544, 547n ‘The Feast and the Eclipse’ (Russell, B.), 296n Les Femmes dans la grande guerre (Antier, C.), 111n Fergusson, J. D., 12n, 134n, 224n, 319, 476–7, 510n, 511, 512n, 521, 544, 638, 749n, 752n Rhythm, 544 Fern, Fanny, 248n Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of the Present Time, 248n Fête des Narcisses, 287n, 289 Le Feu (Barbusse, H.), 248n ‘A Few Words Apropos of the Book War and Peace’ (Sullivan, J. W. N.), 368n Figures in the Foreground: Literary Reminiscences (Swinnerton, F.), 522n ‘Finished with the War: A Soldier’s Declaration’ (Sassoon, S.), 195n

‘First Meetings with Katherine Mansfield’ (Hudson, S.), 562, 562n First World War see World War One Die Fischerin (Goethe, J.), 673n Fitzherbert Terrace, 135, 467–70, 659, 707–8, 710 Flaubert, Gustave, 610n, 622n Madame Bovary, 621, 622n Fleet Street, 62, 379, 380n Fleming, Marjorie, 648n Pet Marjorie, 647, 648n The Flint Heart (Phillpotts, E.), 389n Florence, 60n, 71, 72n, 285, 539n, 652 ‘The Flowers’ (Stevenson, M.), 431n ‘The Fly’ (Mansfield, K.), 441n, 444, 444n, 463, 463n Fontainebleau-Avon, 107, 161, 317, 398, 525–6 Ford, Ford Madox, 131, 132n, 181n, 187n, 445, 567n, 598n, 626 ‘Literary Portraits – 1’, 132n Forgotten Fairy Tales (MacDowell, E.), 695n Forster, E. M., 26, 96n, 619, 639, 716, 721, 744, 767, 768n–9n The Forth Bridge, 687, 689n La Fortune de Bécot (Codet, L.), 730n Foster, Stephen, 213n, 709n ‘Nellie Bly’, 709, 709n ‘Swanee River’, 213n ‘A Fourth Tale for Men Only’ (Congreve, R. H.), 399n Foxe, John, 325n Book of the Martyrs, 325n France, Anatole, 255n, 578, 579n ‘La Vie en fleur’, 579n Frank Harris (Kingsmill, H.), 23n, 522n Freckles (Stratton-Porter, G.), 490, 491n French, Vera, 658, 658n Les Frères corses (Dumas, A.), 491n Freud, Sigmund, 58n, 64, 65n, 98n, 293n

Frohmann, Bernard (ed.) The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, vol. 13: Prophecy and Dissent 1914–1916, 542n From the Eastern Sea (Noguchi, Y.), 402, 472, 474n Froula, Christine (ed.) Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, 193n, 745n Fry, Roger, 178n, 196, 197n, 262n, 265n, 266, 270n, 277n, 377, 539n, 647n–8n, 654, 744, 752n, 764n Fullerton, Jinnie, 330n, 346n, 599n, 622n Futility – A Novel on Russian Themes (Gerhardi, W.), 100n, 309, 309n, 444, 611 ‘The Future of Turkey’ (Symonds, F.), 769n Fyodor Dostoevsky: A Critical Study (Murry, J. M.), 167n ‘Gallipoli: Memories of a Gallant Adventure’ (Williams, O.), 734n Galofaro, Sylvie Doriot ‘Le Dr Stephani et les sanatoriums’, 78n Galsworthy, John, 25, 115n, 192n, 379, 595n The Skin Game, 595n To Let, 115n The Gambler (Dostoevsky, F.), 107n ‘The Garden Party’ (Mansfield, K.), 5, 454–5, 457, 460n, 551–2, 604 The Garden Party and Other Stories (Mansfield, K.), 5, 25, 30–1, 32n, 33, 93, 93n, 297n, 303, 305n, 314, 357n, 366n, 368n, 439n, 442, 444n, 447–8, 453n, 455n, 457–8, 460–1, 464n–5n, 465, 517n, 528n, 545, 550n, 554, 557, 557n–8n, 630n, 736n Gardner, Edmund Garratt ‘The Letters of Dante’, 773n Gargantua (Rabelais, F.), 299n

index  813 Garnett, Constance (née Black), 36, 64n, 66n–7n, 70n, 89n, 102n–3n, 187n, 191n, 239n, 291n, 570n, 735n, 746n, 750n (tr.) Anna Karenina, 63n, 570n (tr.) The Bishop and Other Stories, 66, 66n, 89n (ed./tr.) The Complete Tales of Anton Chekhov, 88n (tr.) The Horse Stealers and Other Stories, 291n (ed./tr.) Letters of Anton Chekhov to his Family and Friends, 84n, 89n (tr.) The Possessed, 102–3, 102n–4n, 505, 505n, 755n (tr.) The Schoolmistress and Other Stories, 570n (tr.) War and Peace, 105n, 191, 191n, 214n, 239, 239n, 570n, 600n (tr.) The Witch and Other Stories, 735n, 750n Garnett, David (Bunny), 656n, 746, 746n–7n Garnett, Edward, 655, 656n Garsington Manor, 3, 157–9, 160n, 161–3, 165n, 174–5, 175n, 177n, 180–1, 180n, 186, 186n, 190, 191n, 192–4, 193n, 195n–7n, 198, 204n–5n, 205, 207n, 209n, 213n, 216, 216n, 219, 219n–20n, 224, 229, 231, 243n, 245, 249n, 250–1, 251n, 255–6, 259n, 263, 265n, 271, 275, 288, 290, 302n, 305, 316, 328, 532, 539n, 542, 615n, 644, 645n, 740, 744, 749, 753 Garvin, James Louis, 628n Gaskell, Elizabeth, 547, 559, 560n Gasston, Aimée, 3, 110, 478 Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri, 521 Gauguin, Paul, 544, 589, 765n Gay, John, 177n Gelder, G. Stuart, 60n Young Lorenzo: Early Life of D. H. Lawrence, 60n, 167n

814   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Le Génie du christianisme (René, F.), 293n ‘The Gentleman from San Francisco’ (Bunin, I.), 81n, 90n The Gentleman from San Francisco and Other Stories (Bunin, I., trs Koteliansky, S.; Lawrence, D. H.; Woolf, L.), 89n George, David Lloyd, 98, 99n, 271, 450n, 483, 536n, 619, 619n George, W. L., 98, 115, 115n, 132–3, 132n, 134n, 180n The Confession of Ursula Trent, 115n Georgian Poetry (ed. Marsh, E. H.), 142–3 Georgian Stories (ed. Lunn, A.), 96n Gerardy, Jean, 468, 468n Gerhardi, William, 22–3, 117, 152, 309, 309n, 366n, 443, 444n, 612n, 717 The Casanova Fable, 23n, 787n Futility – A Novel on Russian Themes, 100n, 309, 309n, 444, 611 Memoirs of a Polyglot, 23n The German Danger, (Kennedy, B.), 388n Germany/German, 7, 11, 19, 22, 44n, 49n, 72n, 88, 99n, 156n, 168, 170n, 181n, 183n, 200n, 229n, 235, 241n, 242, 243n, 298, 305, 323n, 348, 359n, 363, 365, 368, 369n, 371n, 381n, 396, 401, 410–11, 420, 421n, 426, 427n, 430n, 515, 524, 545, 551, 551n, 561, 575, 592, 619n, 626, 655, 657–8, 658n–9n, 661n, 662, 669n, 704, 704n, 709n–10n, 712n, 716, 727, 736 Gertler (MacDougall, S.), 159n, 177n Gertler, Mark, 36, 78n, 84, 84n, 134n, 142, 158, 159n, 177n, 214n, 220n, 235, 245, 258, 259n, 263, 272n, 289, 290n, 304, 309n, 317, 364 Ghosts (Ibsen, H.), 232n

Gibbons, Arnold, 320, 321n, 340n, 371n Gide, André, 157, 255n, 263, 264n, 524–5, 730n Correspondance, 159n Prometheus Ill-Bound, 524 Gilbert, Arthur, 669n The Pirates of Penzance, 669n Gill, Eric, 387n, 399 Gillespie, Michael A Critical Companion to James Joyce, 609n Gillies, Mary Ann, 445 The Professional Literary Agent in Britain, 1880–1920, 448n Gilyarovsky, Vladimir Alexeyevich, 84n Gippius, Zinaida, 139 The Green Ring, 90n The Reign of the Antichrist, 85n The Tsar and the Revolution, 85n see also Zinaida Hippius Gissing, George, 236, 236n, 445, 650 By the Ionian Sea, 236n Glenavy, Beatrice Today We Will Only Gossip, 37n, 55n, 59n see also Campbell, Beatrice, 34, 59n Glyn, Elinor, 378, 381–2, 382n–3n Three Weeks, 382, 383n Godowska, Sonia, 699n God’s Stepchildren (Millin, S.), 152 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 83, 83n, 368, 369n, 409n, 673n ‘The Erl King’, 673n Die Fischerin, 673n Goldberg, Isaac, 750n (tr.) Nine Humorous Tales, 750n Golden Hour, 495n Golding, Louis, 311 Goltermann, Georg, 711, 712n Gontcharova, Natalia, 12n The Good Englishwoman (Williams, O.), 734, 735n Goodbye to All That (Graves, R.), 196n, 198n

Goodman, Victor, 158–9 Gordon Square, 278, 279n, 643 Gorky, Maxim, 27n, 52n, 86n, 91n–2n, 102n, 106, 107n, 132, 138–9, 243n–4n Reminiscences of Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy, 107n, 244n, 291n ‘Reminiscences of Leonid Andreev’, 107n Gosse, Edmund, 638 Gothic, 547, 682 Gounod, Charles, 409n, 662 Faust, 409n Gower Street, 179, 179n, 181, 183– 4, 533–41, 645–6, 646n; see also ‘The Ark’ Graham, Theresa B. ‘Rattray, Lizzie Frost’, 15n Grant, Duncan, 142, 262n, 744, 764, 765n Granta, 11 Granville, Charles, 144n, 626, 628n Graves, Robert, 196n, 198n, 213n, 216n, 259n, 262n, 411 (ed.) The Collected Poems of Frank Prewett, 259n Goodbye to All That, 196n, 198n Great Russia (Sarolea, C.), 26 Green Apple Harvest (Kaye-Smith, S.), 605n Green, Martin The Von Richtofen Sisters, 170n The Green Ring (Gippius, Z.), 90n Gregoreyvna, Anna, 103n Greuze, Jean-Baptiste, 407, 408n, 692, 695n Le Chapeau blanc, 695n La Jeune Fille à la colombe, 695n L’Oiseau mort, 695n Grey, Clifford, 239n ‘If You Were the Only Girl (in the World)’, 177n, 239n Griffin, Nicholas (ed.) The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell, 534n Griffiths, Martin, 658, 663, 707

index  815 ‘Arnold Trowell – Violoncellist, Composer and Pedagogue’, 658n, 709n, 711n ‘“The Chorus Girl and the Tariff” by Katherine Mansfield’, 664n Grigorievna, Anna, 107n Grzhebin, Sonia, 52n, 86n Guevara, Alvaro (Chili), 192, 193n, 258, 260n, 261, 277 Guicheteau, Gérard, 111n (ed.) Les Années sanglantes 1914–1918, 111n Gulliver’s Travels (Swift, J.), 178n ‘The Guns in Kent’ (Bagnold, E.), 755n Gurdjieff and Orage: Brothers in Elysium (Taylor, P. B.), 579n Gurdjieff, George Ivanovich, 108n, 139, 317, 398, 525, 579n Gurdjieff’s Institute, 37, 108n, 141n, 398, 526n, 579n Gurrelieder (Schoenberg), 695n ‘Gusev’ (Chekhov, A.), 735, 735n ‘Gustave Flaubert’ (Murry, J. M.), 585n, 610n H. D. see Hilda Doolittle, 630 Haigh-Wood, Vivienne, 195n Hambourg, Boris, 658 Hambourg, Mark, 468n, 658 Hamilton, Ian, 733 Hamilton, Mary Agnes (née Adamson), 33n, 236, 237n, 545, 558n Hamlet (Shakespeare, W.), 234n Hamnett, Nina, 261, 262n, 272n, 516, 517n Hankin, C. A. (ed.) The Letters of John Middleton Murry to Katherine Mansfield, 20n, 144n, 313n, 547n Hansson, Nils ‘Therapeutic Pneumothorax and the Nobel Prize’, 484n Happy Family (Swinnerton, F.), 650

816   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 The Happy Foreigner (Bagnold, E.), 755n ‘Happy Thought’ (Stevenson, M.), 423n Hardy, Thomas, 131, 322, 323n, 382n, 695n Collected Poems, 323n ‘Her Immortality’, 695n ‘The Ivy Wife’, 695n Jude the Obscure, 382n Hare, Kenneth, 521 Harley Street, 414, 420, 421n, 422–4, 485n, 576n, 715 Harmsworth, Harold Sidney, 524 Harper, Barbara, 423, 424n Harper’s Bazaar, 476 Harris, Frank, 22–3, 27n, 521–2, 522n Harrison, Austin, 598n Harrods, 263, 264n Harvey, W. F., 264n Hassall, Christopher, 143 Edward Marsh, Patron of the Arts: A Biography, 144n Hastings, Beatrice, 40, 40n–1n, 378–9, 383, 387n–91n, 396–7, 638 ‘A Pleasant Sunday Afternoon’, 378, 387n A Hasty Bunch (McAlmon, R.), 518, 519n ‘A Haunted House’ (Woolf, V.), 209n A Haunted House: The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf (Woolf, V., ed. Dick, S.), 751n Haycock, David Boyd A Crisis of Brilliance: Five Young British Artists and the Great War, 144n Headland House Hotel, 225, 475, 508, 751–2 Heal and Son, 275n Heart of Darkness (Conrad, J.), 187n ‘Heart of Mine’ (Edwards, A. H.), 261n Hedda Gabler (Ibsen, H.), 232n Heilbrun, Carolyn

(ed.) Lady Ottoline’s Album: Snapshots and Portraits of her Famous Contemporaries, 159n Heinemann, Francis, 406n, 600n Henry V (Shakespeare, W.), 330n ‘Her Bright Image’ (Taylor, M.), 318n ‘Her First Ball’ (Mansfield, K.), 444, 444n, 450n, 631n ‘Her Immortality’ (Hardy, T.), 695n ‘Herbert Palmer’ (Wolfe, H.), 412n Herbin, Auguste, 377n Hergesheimer, Joseph, 26, 260n Java Head, 258, 260n ‘Note on the Chinese Poems by Arthur Waley’, 26 The Hermitage, 117, 280, 326, 328–9, 330n Hero and Leander (Marlowe, C.), 348n A Hero of our Time (Lermontov, M.), 26 The Heron, 319, 321, 323, 326, 328, 332, 372 Heron Press, 246n, 317, 320n, 327n The Herries (Walpole, H.), 717 Heseltine, Philip (Peter Warlock), 113n, 167n, 177n Hesse, Hermann, 627 Hibbert, James, 35–6 Higher Tregerthen, 55, 57n, 109, 167–8, 167n Hignett, Sean Brett: From Bloomsbury to New Mexico, A Biography, 98, 159n, 185n, 236n Hippius, Zinaida, 84, 85n–6n, 86, 90–2, 91n, 104, 105n; see also Zinaida Gippius ‘The Hippopotamus’ (Eliot, T. S.), 766n ‘His Little Friend’ (Mansfield, K.), 8n, 15, 16n His Official Fiancée (Ruck, A. R.), 527 Histed, Ernest Walter, 678, 678n ‘A Historical, Epidemiological and Aetiological Study of Measles’ (Brinker, J. A. H), 200n

History of Samoa (Watson, R. M.), 200n Hoffmann, Heinrich, 360n Der Struwwelpeter, 360n Hogarth House, 279n, 742, 746n Hogarth Press, 8, 34, 89n, 92n, 107n, 127n, 210n, 224n, 228n, 244n, 246n, 268n, 274n, 291n, 654, 740–1, 742n, 745n, 747n– 9n, 753n, 759n, 766n Holbrooke, Joseph, 652 Apollo and the Seaman, 652 Holingdale, R. J. (tr.) Human, All Too Human, 251n Holley, Horace, 509, 510n Bahai – The Spirit of the Age, 510n Holroyd, Michael Augustus John: A Biography, 332n Hugh Kingsmill: A Critical Biography, 23n Home Chat, 527 Homer, 98n, 254n, 687n The Odyssey, 67, 98n, 254n, 608, 687n An Honest Thief and Other Stories (Dostoevsky, F.), 103n ‘Honeymoon’ (Mansfield, K.), 441n Hope (Watts, G.), 714, 715n Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 647, 647n Horace for English Readers: Being a Translation of the Poems of Quintus Horatius Flaccus into English Prose (Wickham, E. C.), 208n Horder, Mervyn, 627n ‘Conversations with Martin Secker’, 627n The Horse Stealers and Other Stories (tr. Garnett, C.), 291n Hôtel Beau Rivage, 53, 220, 475, 479 Hôtel Beau Site, 30, 286, 288, 504, 506, 603, 641 Hôtel Château Belle Vue, 95–6, 98, 289, 346, 372–3, 443, 611 Hôtel d’Angleterre, 91, 93, 369, 443, 559

index  817 House of Collins see William Collins and Son The House of Collins: The Story of a Scottish Family of Publishers (Keir, D.), 366n Howarth, Patrick, 639n Squire, ‘Most Generous of Men’, 639n Hudson, Stephen, 562, 563n, 578n, 592, 625n; see also Sydney Schiff ‘First Meetings with Katherine Mansfield’, 562, 562n Richard Kurt, 562, 578n ‘Sunrise in Conegliano’, 625n War-Time Silhouettes, 562 Hudson, W. H., 26, 402 Hueffer, Ford Madox, 181n, 187n, 598n Hugh Kingsmill: A Critical Biography (Holroyd, M.), 23n Hulme, T. E., 377, 398 Human, All Too Human (Nietzsche, F., tr. Holingdale, R. J.), 251n Hunt, Violet, 96n, 132n, 179, 180n, 445 The Celebrity’s Daughter, 179, 181n Hutchinson, Mary (née Barnes), 196, 197n, 726, 728, 728n Hutchinson, St John (Jack), 196, 197n, 256, 538, 646, 726, 728 Hutchinson, William, 189n Huxley, Aldous, 127n, 164, 176, 177n, 180n, 194, 195n, 199, 216n, 228n, 236n, 249n, 295, 297n, 300, 302n, 316, 374n, 539n, 589, 593n, 619, 638, 649, 764, 765n Crome Yellow, 297n, 302n ‘Leda’, 236n Huxley, Julian, 41n, 158, 194, 195n, 236, 236n, 254, 593n Huxley, Juliette, 41n I promessi sposi (Manzoni, A.), 248n ‘I wish I was in Dixie’s land’ (Emmett, D.), 202, 203n

818   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Ibsen, Henrik, 231, 231n A Doll’s House, 231n Ghosts, 232n Hedda Gabler, 232n Peer Gynt, 231n Ice-Skating on the Moat and Winter Landscape (Van de Velde, E.), 359n ‘An Ideal Family’ (Mansfield, K.), 294n, 502n, 631n The Idiot (Dostoevsky, F.), 102n ‘The Idiot Boy’ (Wordsworth, W.; Coleridge, S.), 426n The Idler, 397 If All These Young Men (Wilson, R.), 123n, 288n ‘If You Were the Only Girl (in the World)’ (Ayer, N.; Grey, C.), 177n, 239n Ile de la Cité, 41n, 44, 44n, 481, 481n The Illustrated Daily News, 638 The Illustrated London News, 629 Imaginary Speeches (Squire, J. C.), 638 Imperial War Museum, 734n Impressionism, 193n, 197n–8n, 345n, 362n, 369n, 429, 432n, 579n, 675n, 695n ‘In a Café’ (Mansfield, K.), 468n ‘In a German Pension’ (Anon.), 399n In a German Pension (Mansfield, K.), 183n, 397, 442, 442n, 466, 559, 559n, 564n, 628n ‘In Exile’ (Chekhov, A.), 569 ‘In Memory of . . . Katherine Mansfield’ (Morris, G.), 474n ‘In the Church’ (Mansfield, K.), 692–3 ‘In this deserted garden’ (Lynd, S.), 128n ‘Inarticulations’ (Mansfield, K.), 765n ‘Incidents in the Childhood of Katherine Mansfield’ (Ruddick, M.), 529, 529n Les Indications médicales de Vernetles-Bains, station thermale et

climatérique (Bouchage, A.), 602n ‘An Indiscreet Journey’ (Mansfield, K.), 111n–12n Ingoldsby, Thomas, 716; see also Richard Harris Barham The Inspiration of the Poet (Poussin, N.), 189n Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, 525 International Government (Woolf, L.), 722 ‘An Interview with Mr. J. B. Pinker’ (Article in the Bookman), 448n Ireland, Dorothy, 525, 578, 579n Ishiguro, Kazuo, 684n The Artist of the Floating World, 684n ‘It is a beauteous evening, calm and free’ (Wordsworth, W.), 128n Ivanov (Chekhov, A.), 65, 66n–7n, 67 ‘The Ivy Wife’ (Hardy, T.), 695n Jackson, Holbrook, 376, 396, 521 Jacob’s Room (Woolf, V.), 748n Jaeger, 354, 355n, 359, 359n James B. Pinker and Son, 437 James, Henry, 445, 567n, 569, 571n, 716, 748, 749n The Middle Years, 749n ‘The Real Thing’, 571n ‘The Right Real Thing’, 571n Jameson, Irene, 17 Jameson, Storm, 264n ‘Jane Austen’ (Swinnerton, F.), 650, 651n Japan/Japanese, 161, 248n, 316, 402, 472–4, 477, 480, 481n–2n, 484n, 683, 684n, 695n Japanese dolls, 6, 472–3, 482, 484n Japhet’s Christmas Eve (cartoon in the Daily News), 361n Java Head (Hergesheimer, J.), 258, 260n ‘Je ne parle pas français’ (Mansfield, K.), 246n, 248n, 317n, 327n, 545–6

Jerome, Jerome K., 114 La Jeune Fille bien élevée (Tardiveau, R.), 255n La Jeune Fille à la colombe (Greuze, J.), 695n Joanna Godden (Kaye-Smith, S.), 605n John, Augustus, 127n, 202, 203n, 318, 332, 332n, 374n, 399 The John Keats Memorial Volume (Wise, T.), 285, 286n John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed, 1883–1920 (Skidelsky, R.), 646n John the Baptist, 256, 257n Johnson, Lionel, 146n Johnstone, Frank R., 711, 711n La Joie de vivre (Zola, E.), 394n Jones, Alice Louisa, 413n, 505n Jones, Emily Beatrix Coursolles (E. B. C.), 337n Quiet Interiors, 337n Jones, H. F., 566n Samuel Butler, Author of Erewhon, 566n Jones, Hugh, 749n Jones, Kathleen, 318, 372n, 664n Katherine Mansfield: The StoryTeller, 664n, 707n Joplin, Scott, 195n Journal of Katherine Mansfield, Definitive Edition (1954) (ed. Murry, J. M.), 111n The Journal of Philosophy, 249n Joyce, James, 64, 65n, 98n, 114, 117, 146, 203n, 269, 270n, 273, 274n, 307n, 445–6, 507, 508n, 516, 517n, 519n, 581, 582n, 583–4, 589, 608, 608n, 639, 750n ‘The Dead’, 203n A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 65n, 582n, 609n Ulysses, 65n, 97, 98n, 100n, 270n, 273, 306, 446, 448n, 508n, 517n, 581, 582n, 589, 608, 614, 750n

index  819 Judaism, 11, 26, 34, 39n, 42n, 46n, 52n, 84n, 92n, 151, 167n, 311, 561, 588, 739 Jude the Obscure (Hardy, T.), 382n The Judge (Fairfield, C.), 612n The Judges (Wyspianski, S.), 183n Juliet (Mansfield, K.), 657, 704n Jung, Gustav, 65n Just Open (Ridge, W.), 570n Kafka, Franz, 627 Kaluzco, Jean-Louis La Face cachée: Verdun 1914–1918 Empreintes de l’armée allemande, 111n Kandinsky, Wassily, 544 The Art of Spiritual Harmony, 544 Über das Geistige in der Kunst, 544 Kaplan, Sydney Janet, 730n, 771n Circulating Genius: John Middleton Murry, Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence, 294n, 730n Kapp, Edmond Xavier, 4, 11–12, 12n ‘Life under London’, 11 ‘Sir Henry Wood. An Impression’, 4, 8n, 11, 12n Karl Heinrich (Meyer-Förster, W.), 704n Karori, 15 Katerina: The Russian World of Katherine Mansfield (Woods, J.), 37n ‘Katherine Mansfield’ (Lynd, S.), 117n ‘Katherine Mansfield’ (1923) (Moult, T.), 313n ‘Katherine Mansfield’ (1927) (Moult, T.), 313n Katherine Mansfield and Periodical Culture (Mourant, C.), 378 ‘Katherine Mansfield and the Aesthetic Object’ (Mitchell, J.), 474n Katherine Mansfield and the Bloomsbury Group (ed. Martin, T.), 119n

820   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Marketplace: At the Mercy of the Public (McDonnell, J.), 144n Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf (eds Froula, C.; Kimber, G.; Martin, T.), 193n, 745n ‘Katherine Mansfield as I Knew Her’ (Moult, T.), 313n Katherine Mansfield: A Biography (Alpers, A.), 634n Katherine Mansfield: A Biography (Clarke, I.), 466n Katherine Mansfield: A Biography (Meyers, J.), 164n, 330n Katherine Mansfield: A Darker View (Meyers, J.), 474n Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life (Tomalin, C.), 20n, 117n, 164n, 404n, 658n, 675n Katherine Mansfield: The Early Years (Kimber, G.), 16n, 49n, 137n, 416n, 424n, 427n–8n, 430n, 466n, 485n, 529n, 658n, 661n, 672n, 691n, 713n, 715n Katherine Mansfield: The Memories of L.M. (Baker, I.), 20n, 40n, 61n, 69n, 119n, 137n, 219n, 248n, 318n, 350n, 404n, 415n, 479n, 634n, 684n Katherine Mansfield: The Story-Teller (Jones, K.), 664n, 707n ‘Katherine Mansfield’s Animal Aesthetics’ (Ryan, D.), 108n ‘Katherine Mansfield’s Letters’ (Moult, T.), 313n ‘Katherine Mansfield’s Russian Healers’ (Diment, G.), 77n, 82n, 86n, 140n–1n ‘Katie and Chummie: Death in the Family’ (Mitchell, J.), 52n, 778n Kay, Alexander, 18–21 Kaye-Smith, Sheila, 604, 605n Green Apple Harvest, 605n Joanna Godden, 605n Tamarisk Town, 605n Keable, Robert, 549n

Keats, John, 255n, 285, 286n, 699n, 728, 729n ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, 699n ‘Drear-Nighted December’, 255n Keir, David The House of Collins: The Story of a Scottish Family of Publishers, 366n Kellogg, Shirley, 212, 213n Kennedy, Bart, 384, 387n The German Danger,, 388n Soldiers of Labour, 388n Kennedy, John McFarland, 382n ‘Kew Gardens’ (Woolf, V.), 127n, 209n, 268n, 291n, 741, 749n, 766n, 768n Key, Amy, 248n Tregarvon, 248n Keynes, John Maynard, 179n, 279n, 643, 646n, 744, 768, 769n ‘Kezia and Tui’ (Mansfield, K.), 136 The Kid (Chaplin, C.), 352, 354n, 355, 374 Kiev, 34, 46n Killick, Dorothy Hallie, 636n Kimber, Gerri, 3, 11, 20, 114, 117, 143, 146–7, 149, 313, 393, 407, 415, 436, 466, 528–9, 634, 652, 713, 738, 778n (ed.) Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary Volume of Essays, 778n ‘“A child of the sun”: Katherine Mansfield, Orientalism and Gurdjieff’, 108n, 474n, 695n (ed.) The Collected Poems of Katherine Mansfield, 148n, 186n, 251n, 388n, 419n, 424n, 434n, 487n, 634n, 695n, 699n, 715n (ed.) The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, vol. 1, Letters to Correspondents A–J, 8n, 20n, 23n, 27n, 41n, 51n–2n, 58n, 63n–5n, 74n, 81n, 84n–6n, 94n, 98n, 100n, 109, 127n, 140n,

145n, 171n, 183n, 191n, 197n, 205n, 213n–15n, 218n, 236n, 264n, 266n, 284n–5n, 294n, 296n, 299n, 309n, 321n, 340n, 350n, 359n, 362n, 366n, 371n, 413n, 430n, 444n, 467n, 470n, 502n, 505n, 508n, 514n, 522n, 548n, 568n, 570n–1n, 586n, 609n, 612n, 629n, 648n, 675n, 703n, 710n, 737n–8n, 749n (ed.) The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield, vol. 3 – The Poetry and Critical Writings, 41n, 62n–3n, 66n–7n, 75n, 102n–4n, 114n–15n, 123n, 132n, 153n– 4n, 183n, 260n, 262n, 265n, 268n, 288n, 321n, 337n, 339n, 563n, 567n–8n, 578n, 586n, 597n, 605n, 648n, 650n, 719n, 765n, 767n–9n, 771n–2n (ed.) The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield, vol. 4 – The Diaries of Katherine Mansfield, including Miscellaneous Works, 8n, 37n, 40n, 57n, 82n–3n, 93n, 108n, 111n–12n, 119n, 137n, 140n, 191n, 200n, 213n, 239n, 248n–9n, 254n–5n, 268n, 284n, 294n, 300n, 345n–6n, 348n, 357n, 363n, 369n, 393n, 416n, 421n, 430n, 434n, 439n, 464n, 468n, 487n, 543n, 570n, 585n, 597n, 615n, 634n, 657n, 660n, 691n, 695n, 702n–5n, 776n (ed.) The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield, vols 1 and 2 – The Collected Fiction, 32n, 43n, 52n, 67n, 111n–12n, 147n, 187n, 201n, 224n, 230n, 281n, 291n, 294n, 305n, 343n, 355n, 389n, 427n, 439n, 441n, 451n–3n, 456n, 460n, 468n, 470n, 496n, 502n, 506n, 517n, 528n, 543n, 553n, 570n, 576n, 585n, 600n,

index  821 618n, 622n, 631n, 640n–2n, 660n, 691n, 699n, 704n, 736n, 747n (ed.) Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, 193n, 745n Katherine Mansfield: The Early Years, 16n, 49n, 137n, 416n, 424n, 427n–8n, 430n, 466n, 485n, 529n, 658n, 661n, 672n, 691n, 713n, 715n ‘“That Pole Outside Our Door”: Floryan Sobieniowski and Katherine Mansfield’, 658n King, Emily, 72n King, Henry, 252, 252n King Lear (Shakespeare, W.), 652 Kingsmill, Hugh, 22–3, 27n, 521 The Casanova Fable, 23n, 787n Frank Harris, 23n, 522n The Life of D. H. Lawrence, 23n The Return of William Shakespeare, 23 The Sentimental Journey: A Life of Charles Dickens, 23n Kinkead-Weekes, Mark The Cambridge Biography of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 2: Triumph to Exile 1912–1922, 57n Kipling, Rudyard, 14 Kirkpatrick, B. J., 459n A Bibliography of Katherine Mansfield, 474n, 554n, 557n Klaidman, Stephen, 589 Sydney and Violet: Their Life with T. S. Eliot, Proust, Joyce and the Excruciatingly Irascible Wyndham Lewis, 525n, 590n Klengel, Julius, 711, 711n Klingender, Edward Henry, 626 Knapp, Helen, 11 Knightsbridge, 264n Knipper, Olga, 47n, 71, 72n Knopf, Alfred, 4, 25–33, 28n–9n, 66n, 449, 455n, 458, 521, 559, 560n, 639 The Borzoi 1920, 26, 27n, 29n ‘Kot’ (Woolf, L.), 37n, 98

822   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Koteliansky, S. S., 2, 26, 34–47, 38n–44n, 46n–7n, 50, 50n–3n, 55n, 57n, 59–60, 59n–62n, 62–5, 64n, 66n–7n, 67–71, 69n–70n, 72n–8n, 74–81, 81n, 83–5, 84n–7n, 87–90, 89n–90n, 92–3, 92n, 94n, 95–8, 99n–100n, 100–7, 102n–3n, 107n, 110, 134n, 139–41, 140n– 1n, 157, 159n, 177n, 190n, 225, 243n–4n, 249n, 265n, 284n, 291n, 339n, 344, 390n, 473, 474n, 484n, 600n, 650, 721–2, 722n, 726n, 727, 729n, 741, 767n, 768 (tr.) The Gentleman from San Francisco and Other Stories, 89n (tr.) Letters and Reminiscences, 107n (ed./tr.) The Life and Letters of Anton Tchekhov, 66n (tr.) Reminiscences of Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy, 107n, 244n, 291n Kouyoumdjian, Dikran, 167n Krylov, Ivan, 87n Kuprin, Alexander, 87, 87n, 473, 484n ‘Captain Ribnikov’, 473, 484n A la recherche du temps perdu (Proust, M.), 297n, 571n, 579n–80n, 584n, 612n, 750n Lacy, Fanny E., 248n Cecil May: A Tale of the Village, 248n Lacy, Gerald M. (ed.) The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, 72n–3n, 81n, 112n–13n, 167n, 173n, 180n, 190n, 209n, 238n, 242n, 248n–9n, 448n, 763n Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Lawrence, D. H.), 293n Lady Margaret Hall, 414, 416n The Lady of the Forest (Meade, L. T.), 14, 16, 16n Lady Ottoline’s Album: Snapshots and Portraits of her Famous

Contemporaries (ed. Heilbrun, C.), 159n The Lady with the Borzoi: Blanche Knopf, Literary Tastemaker Extraordinaire (Claridge, L.), 27n ‘The Lady with the Dog’ (Chekhov, A.), 724n Laforgue, Jules, 273, 274n Lamb, Charles, 760, 762n Essays of Elia, 762n ‘My First Play’, 762n Tales from Shakespeare, 762n The Lancet, 77n, 139, 505n The Land They Loved (Cummins, G.), 769n Landmarks in French Literature (Strachey, L.), 180n, 643 Lappalien (Sadleir, M.), 544 Lascelles, Henry, 509, 510n Lassetter, Elizabeth Weiss (Louey, m. Beauchamp), 418n The Last Romantic (Orton, W.), 392, 393n, 401, 403, 404n Lathan, George, 43n Laurencin, Marie, 730n Lauri, Filippo, 569n Apollo with Nymphs and Satyrs, 569n Lawlor, Pat, 137n The Mystery of Maata, 137n Lawrence, D. H., 6–7, 23, 34–6, 38, 38n, 41–2, 42n–4n, 44, 46n, 55–6, 57n–60n, 59, 66, 71, 72n–4n, 78n, 79–80, 80n–1n, 84n, 87n, 89n, 95, 96n, 97–8, 98n–100n, 100, 109–10, 112, 112n–13n, 114, 122–3, 123n, 132, 134n, 142, 153, 164, 165n–7n, 166, 169, 170n, 172–3, 173n, 176, 177n, 179, 179n–80n, 182, 188, 190n–1n, 209, 209n, 235, 236n, 238, 238n, 240, 242n, 247, 248n–9n, 261, 262n, 292, 293n–4n, 316, 318, 411, 445–6, 479n, 578, 579n, 583, 584n, 587, 587n, 605, 605n, 612, 626, 639, 722, 763n

Aaron’s Rod, 96, 96n, 100n, 587, 587n, 612 Amores, 36, 177n Bay, 479n (tr.) The Gentleman from San Francisco and Other Stories, 89n Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 293n The Lost Girl, 100n The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, 96n The Rainbow, 113n, 114, 123n, 179, 180n, 293n ‘Sea and Sardinia’, 579n, 605n ‘The Shadow in the Rose Garden’, 95, 96n Touch and Go, 242n The White Peacock, 46n, 60n Women in Love, 36, 100n, 110, 123n, 170n, 177n, 180n, 191n, 292, 293n, 522n Lawrence, Frieda, 6, 34–5, 38n, 42, 43n–4n, 44–5, 46n, 55–6, 57n– 8n, 61, 71, 72n, 74n, 79, 80n, 98, 99n, 109–10, 111n–12n, 112, 123n, 132, 153, 166, 167n, 168–9, 170n, 176, 180n, 182, 213n, 235, 236n, 238, 238n, 247, 249n, 763n Lawrence, Lettice Ada, 60n, 98, 167n Young Lorenzo: Early Life of D. H. Lawrence, 60n, 167n Le Gallienne, Richard, 384, 388n ‘Ballad of the Dead Lover’, 388n ‘Marjorie and the Spring’, 388n New Poems, 388n Prose Fancies, 388n Le Prieuré, 37, 107, 525–6, 579n League of Nations, 11, 177n, 181n, 241n, 545, 740, 769n Leaves of Grass (Whitman, W.), 191n, 211n Leblanc, Georges, 285n, 287n ‘Leda’ (Huxley, A.), 236n Leeds Arts Club, 396 Legend (Dane, C.), 586n Legros, Alphonse, 430n Lehmann, Rosamond, 164n

index  823 Lemaistre, Violet, 153 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 84, 85n Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press 1917–1941 (Willis, J. H.), 655n Leonard and Virginia Woolf, The Hogarth Press and the Networks of Modernism (ed. Southworth, H.), 741n Leonard Woolf: A Political Biography (Wilson, D.), 722n Leoncavallo, Ruggero, 662 Lermontov, Mikhail A Hero of our Time, 26 ‘Letter to a Friend, Upon occasion of the Death of his Intimate Friend’ (Browne, T.), 770n ‘Letter to Robert Graves’ (Sassoon, S.), 228n The Letters and Journals of Katherine Mansfield: A Selection (ed. Stead, C. K.), 15n Letters and Reminiscences (Dostoevsky, F., trs Koteliansky, S.; Murry, J. M.), 107n ‘Letters from America’ (Aiken, C), 594n Letters from China and the Far East (Dewey, A.), 296n Letters of a Post-Impressionist: Being the Familiar Correspondence of Vincent van Gogh (ed./tr. Ludovici, A. M.), 339n Letters of Anton Chekhov to his Family and Friends (ed./tr. Garnett, C.), 84n, 89n The Letters of D. H. Lawrence (eds Boulton, J.; Zytaruk, G.; Lacy, G.), 72n–3n, 81n, 112n–13n, 167n, 173n, 180n, 190n, 209n, 238n, 242n, 248n–9n, 448n, 763n ‘The Letters of Dante’ (Gardner, E.), 773n The Letters of Dante (ed. Toynbee, P.), 772n

824   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Letters of Dorothy Osborne to William Temple (ed. MooreSmith, G. C.), 8n The Letters of John Middleton Murry to Katherine Mansfield (ed. Hankin, C. A.), 20n, 144n, 313n, 547n Letters of Leonard Woolf (Woolf, L., ed. Spotts, F.), 742n The Letters of Lytton Strachey (ed. Levy, P.), 175n, 645n, 656n The Letters of Virginia Woolf (Woolf, V., eds Nicolson, N.; Trautmann, J.), 159n, 193n, 200n, 265n, 656n, 746n–7n, 749n, 764n–5n, 774n The Letters of Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey (eds Woolf, L.; Strachey, J.), 164n, 645n ‘Letters to the Editor as a Serial Form’ (Snyder, C.; Sorensen, L.), 379n Lettre sur les Anglais (Voltaire), 302n Lettres philosophiques (Voltaire), 302n The Levant Herald, 445 ‘Leves Amores’ (Symons, A.), 469, 469n Levy, Paul (ed.) The Letters of Lytton Strachey, 175n, 645n, 656n Lewis, Wyndham, 132n, 308, 309n, 396, 506–7, 507n, 567n, 589, 590n, 608n Lhote, André, 276n The Library World, 520 The Life and Adventures of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (Sterne, L.), 488n The Life and Letters of Anton Tchekhov (ed/trs Koteliansky, S.; Tomlinson, P.), 66n ‘Life of a Great Sinner’ (Dostoevsky, F.), 102n The Life of D. H. Lawrence (Kingsmill, H.), 23n

The Life of Katherine Mansfield (Alpers, A.), 20n, 37n, 40n, 117n, 119n, 144n, 187n, 318n, 346n, 379n, 399n, 404n, 406n, 415n, 466n, 484n, 525n, 533n, 547n, 600n, 615n, 663n, 702n The Life of Katherine Mansfield (Mantz, R.; Murry, J. M.), 466n ‘Life of Ma Parker’ (Mansfield, K.), 477, 484n, 516, 517n, 528, 528n Life of Oscar Wilde (Sherard, R.), 430n The Life of Ottoline Morrell (Darroch, S.), 159n, 219n, 264n The Life of Reason (Santayana, G.), 293n The Life of Samuel Johnson (Boswell, J.), 83n, 369n ‘Life under London’ (Kapp, E.), 11 Lighting-up Time (Brown, I.), 321n, 331n ‘Lil is a Lady’ (Stuart, L.), 709, 710n ‘The Lilac Tree’ (Mansfield, K.), 694 Lippincott, Mark (ed.) The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, vol. 13: Prophecy and Dissent 1914–1916, 542n ‘A Literary Approach to Tuberculosis: Lessons Learned from Chekhov, Franz Kafka, and Katherine Mansfield’ (Vilaplana, C.), 140n ‘Literary Portraits – 1’ (Ford, F.), 132n Literature in My Time (Mackenzie, E.), 131, 132n ‘“A Little Episode”: The Forgotten Typescripts of Katherine Mansfield, 1908–1911’ (Mourant, C.), 279n, 379n ‘The Little Governess’ (Mansfield, K.), 43n The Little Review, 270n, 508n Little Women, Or Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy (Alcott, L.), 713

Lives and Letters: A. R. Orage, Katherine Mansfield, Beatrice Hastings, John Middleton Murry, S. S. Koteliansky 1906–1957 (Carswell, J.), 37n, 110n, 397, 399n Liza of Lambeth (Maugham, S.), 765n Locke Ellis, Vivian, 101, 101n, 128, 387n Locke, John, 588 Loewe, Maximilien, 46n Logan Place, 175–6, 645 ‘The Logic of Armaments’ (Russell, B.), 542n The London Evening Standard, 524 London Hippodrome, 213n, 282n ‘London Letter: September 1921’ (Eliot, T. S.), 605n The London Magazine, 589 The London Mail, 199, 201n The London Mercury, 32, 32n, 249n, 290, 291n, 305n, 450, 451n–2n, 452, 454–6, 455n, 459, 505, 506n, 551, 551n, 569, 576, 576n, 603–4, 603n, 605n, 638–41, 641n–2n, 723, 733 London Philharmonic Orchestra, 663 London School of Art, 262n, 517n ‘Loneliness’ (Murry, J. M.), 243n Looe, 210n, 224–5, 225n, 474–5, 477, 479n, 482–3, 484n, 486n, 499, 508, 751–2, 753n Loraine, Violet, 239n Lords of Fleet Street (Bourne, R.), 525n ‘The Lost Battle’ (Mansfield, K.), 543n The Lost Girl (Lawrence, D. H.), 100n ‘The Lotus-Eaters’ (Tennyson, A.), 254n Lou Tresor dóu Felibrige (Mistral, F.), 189n Love Among the Artists (Shaw, G.), 521 Love and Life (Watts, G.), 714, 715n

index  825 Love and Mr Lewisham (Wells, H. G.), 390n ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (Eliot, T. S.), 66n, 157, 614, 615n, 728, 766 Love’s Entreaty (Mansfield, K.), 657 Low, Barbara, 46n Low, Ivy, 46n Lowell, Amy, 242n, 286n Lowndes, Frederick Sawrey A., 145n Lucas, Geoffrey ‘Treatment of Dry Pleurisy by Temporary Artificial Pneumothorax’, 484n Ludovici, Anthony M, 569, 569n (ed./tr.) Letters of a PostImpressionist: Being the Familiar Correspondence of Vincent van Gogh, 339n Too Old for Dolls, 569n Luke Delmege (Sheehan, P. A.), 470, 470n ‘Lune de Miel’ (Eliot, T. S.), 766n Lunn, Arthur, 96n (ed.) Georgian Stories, 96n Lunn, Henry, 22 Luxembourg Gardens, 152, 155, 364, 515, 517n Lynd, Robert Wilson, 4, 114–16, 119n, 120, 124n, 126, 128n–9n, 747n ‘A Tragic Comedienne’, 114 Lynd, Sylvia (née Dryhurst), 114–17, 115n, 117n–20n, 120–2, 122n–4n, 124, 128–30, 128n– 9n, 472, 638 The Chorus: A Tale of Love and Folly, 116 ‘In this deserted garden’, 128n ‘Katherine Mansfield’, 117n The Swallow Dive, 120n, 121, 122n López, Francesca Romana Marqués, 282n, 591n; see also Raquel Meller

826   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Maata (Mansfield, K.), 137 McAlmon, Robert, 519n A Hasty Bunch, 518, 519n Macaulay, Rose, 30–1, 31n, 117n, 549n, 553n Dangerous Ages, 30, 31n, 553n Macbeth (Shakespeare, W.), 478 MacCarthy, Desmond, 245, 246n, 395, 411, 638, 733, 759, 759n; see also Affable Hawk McCarthy, Lillah, 215, 216n MacCormack, John, 658, 658n McDermott, 741 MacDonald, Alexander (Father), 471n McDonnell, Jenny, 630 Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Marketplace: At the Mercy of the Public, 144n MacDougall, Sarah Gertler, 159n, 177n MacDowell, Edward Alexander, 695n Forgotten Fairy Tales, 695n Sea Pieces, 695n MacFall, Haldane, 521 The Book of Lovat, 522n McKellan, Thomas Moult see Thomas Moult McKenna, Stephen, 115n, 780–1 The Secret Victory, 115n, 780 Mackenzie, Edward Montague Compton, 133, 264n, 733 Literature in My Time, 131, 132n The Passionate Elopement, 131, 626 Poor Relations, 131 Sinister Street, 131 Whisky Galore, 131 Mackenzie, Thomas, 19–20 McNeillie, Andrew (ed.) The Essays of Virginia Woolf, 8n, 67n, 72n, 98n, 107n, 127n, 183n, 389n, 639n, 645n, 735n, 760n, 762n–3n, 770n–1n

McWhirter, Laura ‘The Body Electric: A Long View of Electrical Therapy for Functional Neurological Disorders’, 233n Madame Bovary (Flaubert, G.), 621, 622n Madame Butterfly (Puccini, G.), 689n Maeterlinck, Maurice, 420, 421n, 624n, 652 The Blue Bird, 652 ‘The Deeper Life’, 421n ‘Mahupuku, Hamuera Tamahau’ (Ballara, A.), 137n Mahupuku, Maata, 135–7, 137n, 713 ‘Mahupuku, Maata’ (Angus, B.), 137n Mahupuku, Tamahau, 135, 713 Maitland, Fredegond, 216n, 238n Les Maîtres sonneurs (Sand, G.), 248n Mallarmé, Stéphane, 502n, 546, 695n Malleson, Colette, 192n, 268n A Man of the Islands (Stacpoole, H.), 570n ‘The Man Without a Temperament’ (Mansfield, K.), 281n, 496n The Manchester Guardian, 321n Manet, Edouard, 344, 345n Mann, Thomas, 589, 627 Death in Venice, 589 Mannooch, Sylvia (m. Sullivan), 243n Manoukhin(e), Ivan Ivanovitch, 5–6, 37, 74n, 77, 77n, 81, 82n, 85, 86n, 87, 90–2, 104, 105n, 138–40, 140n–1n, 152, 156n, 299n, 302n, 305n, 365, 398, 510n, 577, 581, 583, 607n, 609n, 613 L’Agent pathogène de la grippe dite espagnole, 140n Le Traitement de la tuberculose par la leucocytolyse à l’irradiation de la rate, 140n ‘The Treatment of Infectious Disease by Leucocytolysis

Produced by Rontgenisation of the Spleen’, 77n, 140n Mansfield: A Novel (Stead, C. K.), 36, 37n, 533n ‘Mansfield, Chekhov and the Sneezing Sheep’ (Whiteley, G.), 84n Mansfield, Katherine ‘The Aloe’, 35, 223, 224n, 470n, 691n ‘Along the Gray’s Inn Road’, 379 ‘At the Bay’, 5, 32n, 81n, 340n, 355n, 439, 439n, 451–2, 452n–3n, 454, 455n, 456, 457n, 464n, 502n, 528n, 551–2, 551n, 605n, 606, 642n At the Bay and Other Stories, 5, 451 ‘Bliss’, 29–30, 52n, 229, 230n, 442, 449, 452–3, 464–5, 549–51, 556, 558, 640 Bliss and Other Stories, 4, 25, 27, 29n, 31n, 117n, 395, 442n, 447–8, 453n, 455n, 465n, 494n, 517n, 545–6, 552n, 557n, 560n, 600n, 774n ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’, 396 ‘A Cup of Tea’, 5, 450, 451n, 458, 461, 461n, 585n ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, 291n, 309n, 366n, 415, 450, 451n, 506n, 576, 603n, 633, 641n, 723, 724n ‘A Dill Pickle’, 600n ‘The Doll’s House’, 441n, 459 ‘The Doves’ Nest’, 130n, 585n The Doves’ Nest and Other Stories, 25, 465n The Earth Child, 4, 146–8, 148n ‘The Education of Audrey’, 470n ‘Epilogue II’, 403 ‘The Escape’, 618n, 622n ‘The Fly’, 441n, 444, 444n, 463, 463n ‘The Garden Party’, 5, 454–5, 457, 460n, 551–2, 604

index  827 The Garden Party and Other Stories, 5, 25, 30–1, 32n, 33, 93, 93n, 297n, 303, 305n, 314, 357n, 366n, 368n, 439n, 442, 444n, 447–8, 453n, 455n, 457–8, 460–1, 464n–5n, 465, 517n, 528n, 545, 550n, 554, 557, 557n–8n, 630n, 736n ‘Her First Ball’, 444, 444n, 450n, 631n ‘His Little Friend’, 8n, 15, 16n ‘Honeymoon’, 441n ‘An Ideal Family’, 294n, 502n, 631n ‘In a Café’, 468n In a German Pension, 183n, 397, 442, 442n, 466, 559, 559n, 564n, 628n ‘In the Church’, 692–3 ‘Inarticulations’, 765n ‘An Indiscreet Journey’, 111n–12n ‘Je ne parle pas français’, 246n, 248n, 317n, 327n, 545–6 Juliet, 657, 704n ‘Kezia and Tui’, 136 ‘Life of Ma Parker’, 477, 484n, 516, 517n, 528, 528n ‘The Lilac Tree’, 694 ‘The Little Governess’, 43n ‘The Lost Battle’, 543n Love’s Entreaty, 657 Maata, 137 ‘The Man Without a Temperament’, 281n, 496n ‘Marriage à la Mode’, 450n, 631n, 736, 736n ‘Mary’, 397 ‘Miss Brill’, 342, 528, 528n ‘The Modern Soul’, 699n ‘Mr and Mrs Dove’, 294n, 631n, 736n Night, 657 ‘Night-Scented Stock’, 186n ‘North American Chiefs’, 378, 381 ‘Ole Underwood’, 477 ‘On the Sea Shore’, 693 ‘Orchestra and Solo’, 154n

828   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Mansfield, Katherine (cont.) ‘A Paper Chase’, 378 ‘Pictures’, 96n ‘A Pleasant Sunday Afternoon’, 378, 387n ‘Prelude’, 35, 224n, 340, 354, 439, 757, 766, 771 Prelude, 8, 228n, 741, 742n, 747n, 749n, 753n ‘Revelations’, 618n ‘A Sad Truth’, 694 ‘Shadows’, 715n ‘A Ship Comes into the Harbour’, 119n ‘The Silence is Broken’, 567n ‘The Singing Lesson’, 631n ‘Sixpence’, 294n, 553, 631n ‘Something Childish but Very Natural’, 393, 403 ‘A Song of Summer’, 696–7 ‘Spring in A Dream’, 403 ‘The Stranger’, 528, 528n, 570n, 572n, 639, 640n ‘Summer Idylle’, 136 ‘Taking the Veil’, 201n, 450n, 459n ‘The Tedious Brief Adventure of K.M.’, 633 ‘A Tragic Comedienne’, 114 The Urewera Notebook by Katherine Mansfield, 149n ‘Violet’, 403 ‘The Voyage’, 450n, 631n ‘The Wind Blows’, 54n, 545, 661n ‘The Winter Fire’, 697, 699n ‘The Woman at the Store’, 545 ‘The Yellow Chrysanthemum’, 146 Mansfield Park (Austen, J.), 300n Mantz, Ruth Elvish, 466, 478 The Life of Katherine Mansfield, 466n Manz, Stefan Enemies in the Empire: Civilian Internment in the British Empire during the First World War, 323n Manzoni, Alessandro, 248n I promessi sposi, 248n

Māori, 17n, 135–6, 137n, 402 Maoriland: New Zealand Literature, 1872–1914 (Stafford, J.; Williams, M.), 137n Marchesi, Blanche, 658 Marie-Antoinette (Queen of France), 689n Marinetti, Filippo, 589 ‘Marjorie and the Spring’ (Le Gallienne, R.), 388n ‘Mark Gertler’ (article in Vogue), 305n Mark Gertler, Selected Letters (ed. Carrington, N.), 37n ‘The Mark on the Wall’ (Woolf, V.), 127n, 291n, 747n, 750 Marlowe, Christopher, 347, 348n Hero and Leander, 348n Marquet, Pierre-Albert, 368, 369n Le Marquis de Villemer (Sand, G.), 247, 248n The Marriage of Figaro (Mozart), 669n ‘Marriage à la Mode’ (Mansfield, K.), 450n, 631n, 736, 736n Marsh, Edward Howard (Sir), 142–5, 180n (ed.) Collected Poems, 142 (ed.) Georgian Poetry, 142–3 Marshall, Ann Herndon ‘Turning the Tables: Katherine Mansfield and W. L. George’, 134n Marshall, Frances, 644 Martin, Emma, 710n Martin, Percy, 626 Martin, Todd (ed.) Katherine Mansfield and the Bloomsbury Group, 119n (ed.) Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, 193n, 745n Marx, Karl, 248n ‘Mary’ (Mansfield, K.), 397 Mary Olivier: A Life (Sinclair, M.), 261, 262n, 263 Mason, C. P. (ed.) The Task, 565n

Masquelier (Mme), 40, 41n–2n Massingham, Harold John, 128n, 268n, 462 Massingham, Henry William, 267, 268n, 461, 613, 614n, 618, 754n ‘Master and Man’ (Tolstoy, L.), 359n The Mastersingers of Nuremburg (Wagner, R.), 684n, 689n Mathers, Edward Powys, 248n (ed.) Coloured Stars: Versions of Fifty Asiatic Love Poems, 248n Mathews, Charles Elkin, 4, 148 Mathieson, Colette, 532 Matisse, Henri, 369n, 510n Matthews, William British Autobiographies: An Annotated Bibliography, 522n Maugham, Somerset, 96n, 765n Liza of Lambeth, 765n The Moon and Sixpence, 764, 765n Of Human Bondage, 765n Maunsell, Gwendoline Ethel, 502n de Maupassant, Guy, 569, 570n Mayer, Yvonne, 11 Meade, Elizabeth, 16n; see also L. T. Meade Meade, L. T., 14, 16, 16n The Lady of the Forest, 14, 16, 16n see also Elizabeth Meade Measure for Measure (Shakespeare, W.), 293, 294n Melba, Nellie, 658, 658n Meller, Raquel, 282n, 591n; see also Francesca Romana Marqués López Melville, Herman, 547 Mémoires d’outre-tombe (René, F.), 293n Memoirs of a Polyglot (Gerhardi, W.), 23n ‘Memories of Katherine Mansfield’ (Rice, A.), 474n, 479n, 484n, 491n

index  829 ‘A Memory of Ypres’ (Tomlinson, H. M.), 26 ‘Men and Mansfield in Mansfield’ (Stead, C. K.), 37n ‘Ménage Adultère de Tour’ (Eliot, T. S.), 766n Mencken, H. L., 43n Mendelssohn, Felix, 229n, 750n ‘O for the Wings of a Dove’, 229n ‘Wings of a Dove’, 750n Menton, 21, 27–9, 73, 117, 119–21, 145, 161, 279–80, 282–4, 282n, 285n, 287n, 303, 326, 328, 330n, 331, 333, 335–6, 338–41, 343, 345, 399, 412, 413n, 494– 5, 498, 501, 503, 547–9, 561, 563, 563n, 565–6, 567n, 568, 571, 573–5, 574n, 590, 601–2, 616, 624, 639–40, 717, 720, 722–3, 725, 727, 734, 773, 775 La Mer (Debussy, C.), 695n Meredith, George, 170n–1n, 207, 207n, 240, 241n, 716 Diana of the Crossways, 171n, 207n The Egoist, 171n, 195n, 240, 241n The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, 170n–1n Rhoda Fleming, 240, 241n Merezhkovsky, Dmitry, 84, 85n–6n, 91n, 105n, 139, 652 Death of the Gods, 652 The Reign of the Antichrist, 85n The Tsar and the Revolution, 85n Merlin, Roland, 41n, 139 Le Drame secret de Katherine Mansfield, 41n, 140n, 305n The Merry Wives of Windsor (Shakespeare, W.), 669n ‘Metal for Munitions’ (article in The Times), 173n Metchnikoff, Elia, 138, 140n The Metropolitan Magazine, 476 Meyer-Förster, Wilhelm, 704n Karl Heinrich, 704n Old Heidelberg, 704n

830   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Meyers, Jeffrey Katherine Mansfield: A Biography, 164n, 330n Katherine Mansfield: A Darker View, 474n The Middle Years (James, H.), 749n A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare, W.), 648n Milan, 247, 248n, 501 Miles, Eustace, 634, 636n Milk for Babes: A Catechism in Verse intended for the use of Sunday Schools, 325n Miller, Robert B. T., 149 Millin, Sarah Gertrude (née Liebson), 151–4, 153n–4n, 156n Adam’s Rest, 152, 154, 156n The Dark River, 152, 154n, 156n God’s Stepchildren, 152 The Night is Long, 153n ‘A Pair of Button Boots’, 154n Two Bucks Without Hair and Other Stories, 154n Mills, A. J., 221n Mills, Julia, 234n Mirsky, D. S., 638 ‘Misery’ (Chekhov, A.), 98n, 569 ‘Miss Brill’ (Mansfield, K.), 342, 528, 528n Miss Million’s Maid (Ruck, A. R.), 527 The Mistletoe Child (Palmer, H.), 410, 412n Mistral, Frédéric, 188, 189n Lou Tresor dóu Felibrige, 189n Mitchell, J. Lawrence, 37, 403, 778n ‘Katherine Mansfield and the Aesthetic Object’, 474n ‘Katie and Chummie: Death in the Family’, 52n, 778n ‘Mobilising Mothers: The 1917 National Baby Week’ (Bryder, L.), 200n Modern American Poetry (Eliot, T. S.), 579n ‘Modern Fiction’ (Woolf, V.), 127n, 389n, 735n, 762n

‘Modern Novels’ (Woolf, V.), 127n, 379, 761, 762n ‘The Modern Soul’ (Mansfield, K.), 699n Modernism, Magazines, and the British Avant-Garde (Binckes, F.), 134n, 144n, 628n Modernist Journals Project, 479n ‘The Modernity of M. Augustus John’ (Murry, J. M.), 332n Modigliani, Amedeo, 517n Moments of Being (ed. Schulkind, J.), 745n Monday or Tuesday (Woolf, V.), 126, 127n, 291n Monet, 474, 477 Monk’s House, 279n, 768, 769n Montagu, Mary Wortley (Lady), 176, 177n–8n, 711 Turkish Embassy Letters, 177n Montana-sur-Sierre, Switzerland, 30–1, 74–80, 77n–8n, 91, 115, 122, 124–5, 140, 286, 287n, 289, 291, 294, 297, 300, 313, 347–9, 351–2, 354–8, 360–1, 369–70, 400, 443, 449–60, 508, 508n, 510–13, 530, 550– 4, 559, 576n, 577, 580–2, 584, 604, 606, 630, 641, 729–30, 737, 737n Monte Carlo, 281, 282n, 495, 524, 574n Montessori, Maria, 312, 594, 595n Montgomery, Robert E The Visionary D. H. Lawrence, 170n Montparnasse, 87n, 517n, 730n Montreux, 287, 287n, 289, 505, 575 The Moody Manners Opera Company, 662–3, 664n, 669n, 684n, 689n, 695n The Moon and Sixpence (Maugham, S.), 764, 765n Moore, G. E., 142, 531, 643 Principia Ethica, 531 Moore, George, 196, 197n Moore, Harry T.

The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, 110n Moore, Lesley, 68, 69n, 483; see also Ida Baker Moore-Smith, G. C. (ed.) Letters of Dorothy Osborne to William Temple, 8n Moorehead, Caroline Bertrand Russell, 533n, 536n (ed.) Ottoline at Garsington: Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell 1915–1918, 165n, 167n, 191n, 196n–7n, 199n, 206n–7n, 214n, 219n, 246n, 249n, 251n, 268n–9n, 302n, 539n Morceaux caractéristiques (Trowell, A.), 658, 712n Morgan, Evan Frederic, 213n, 593n Morning, Alice (pseudonym of Beatrice Hastings), 41n Morrell, Julian, 157–60, 159n–60n, 199n, 236n, 282n, 283–4 Morrell, Ottoline, 3, 57n, 127n, 134n, 157–9, 161–4, 164n, 166–8, 166n–7n, 170–1, 170n, 174–6, 175n, 177n–8n, 178–9, 180n–1n, 181, 183–4, 184n, 186, 186n–7n, 188, 189n–93n, 192–3, 195n–7n, 196, 198, 199n–200n, 201, 204, 204n–5n, 207n, 208, 209n–10n, 210–11, 213n–19n, 214–17, 220, 222–8, 227n, 230–5, 234n, 237, 237n, 239, 241n, 242, 244, 246–7, 246n, 248n–51n, 250–5, 257–8, 260n–1n, 261–4, 264n, 266, 267n, 271, 273–4, 277n, 278–86, 279n, 281n–2n, 284n, 288–91, 288n, 293–4, 296–301, 297n, 302n, 303, 305–10, 309n, 316, 374n, 477, 532, 534n–5n, 535, 539, 539n, 541, 567n, 629, 633, 644, 647n–8n, 754n, 765n–6n Morrell, Phillip, 157, 159, 163, 176, 178n, 180n, 198, 205n, 754, 754n–5n

index  831 Morris, Guy, 402 ‘In Memory of . . . Katherine Mansfield’, 474n Morris, Margaret, 192, 192n–3n, 202, 215, 216n Morris, William, 396 Morrison, Adrienne, 437 Moscow, 27n, 72n, 90n, 103n, 177n, 244n, 468n, 717 Moscow Art Theatre, 72n, 177n, 771n Moses, William Stanton, 363n Spirit Teachings, 363n Moult, Bessie (née Boltiansky), 311–12, 314, 593–4, 595n Moult, Thomas, 311–13, 411, 593, 595n, 757 Best Poems of the Year, 311 ‘Katherine Mansfield’ (1923), 313n ‘Katherine Mansfield’ (1927), 313n ‘Katherine Mansfield as I Knew Her’, 313n ‘Katherine Mansfield’s Letters’, 313n Snow Over Eden, A Story of Today, 312 Mourant, Chris, 214n, 379, 399, 438, 448, 547 Katherine Mansfield and Periodical Culture, 378 ‘“A Little Episode”: The Forgotten Typescripts of Katherine Mansfield, 1908–1911’, 279n, 379n Mozart The Marriage of Figaro, 669n ‘Mr and Mrs Dove’ (Mansfield, K.), 294n, 631n, 736n ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ (Woolf, V.), 379 ‘Mr Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service’ (Eliot, T. S.), 766n ‘Mr. Sassoon’s War Verses’ (Murry, J. M.), 754n Mrs Dalloway (Woolf, V.), 744, 750n ‘Mrs. Violet Schiff’ (Eliot, T. S.), 590n

832   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare, W.), 127n Muir, Edwin, 398 Murray, Elsie, 79 Murry, John Middleton, 98n ‘Art and Philosophy’, 134n Aspects of Literature, 206n Between Two Worlds: An Autobiography, 23n, 114n, 144n, 165n–7n, 173n, 175n, 201n, 215n, 246n, 315, 318n, 619n Cinnamon and Angelica, 322, 323n, 327n Community Farm, 318 ‘The Condition of English Poetry’, 144n Countries of the Mind, 585n The Critic in Judgement, 741 ‘The Decay of Mr D. H. Lawrence’, 98n The Evolution of an Intellectual, 206n, 323n, 325n, 330n Fyodor Dostoevsky: A Critical Study, 167n ‘Gustave Flaubert’, 585n, 610n (ed.) Journal of Katherine Mansfield, Definitive Edition, 111n (tr.) Letters and Reminiscences, 107n The Life of Katherine Mansfield, 466n ‘Loneliness’, 243n ‘The Modernity of M. Augustus John’, 332n ‘Mr. Sassoon’s War Verses’, 754n ‘The Nostalgia of Mr. D. H. Lawrence’, 123n (ed.) Poems by Katherine Mansfield, 147n Poems: 1916–1920, 207, 207n, 243n, 297n, 356n Poems: 1917–1918, 325n The Problem of Style, 366n ‘Raquel Meller’, 591n ‘Serenity’, 243n

‘The Sign-Seekers’, 323n ‘Surmise’, 243n The Things We Are, 294n, 350n, 559n ‘To my Dead Friends’, 207n Murry, Katherine Middleton, 115, 141, 241n, 324, 408, 530, 563, 593, 630–1, 653; see also Katherine Mansfield Murry, Richard (Arthur), 6, 204n, 243, 243n, 252n, 253, 273, 315–19, 318n, 321–2, 321n, 324, 325n, 326, 328, 330, 330n, 333–9, 335n, 337n, 341–6, 341n, 348–52, 348n, 350n, 354– 68, 368n–9n, 370–5, 371n–3n, 560n, 580, 583 A Dogfight over the English Countryside, 318 ‘Musical and Dramatic Notes’ (Anon.), 658n ‘My First Play’ (Lamb, C.), 762n My Life and Dancing (Allan, M.), 664n The Mystery of Maata (Lawlor, P.), 137n Nash, Paul, 142 The Nation, 5, 88, 89n, 119n–20n, 122, 126, 128n, 163, 249n, 268n, 295, 296n, 323n, 332n, 370, 440, 450, 456, 458–9, 461, 463, 557, 612, 614n, 620, 622n, 753, 754n–5n The Nation and Athenaeum, 30, 33, 128n, 154, 268n, 296n, 340n, 368n, 441n, 444n, 456n, 457, 462, 463n, 517n, 549, 556n, 579n, 641 National Baby Week, 198, 200n National Portrait Gallery, 11, 158, 316, 678n The National Review, 733 The Native Companion, 467n ‘Nellie Bly’ (Foster, S.), 709, 709n Nelson, Geoffrey, 258, 259n, 271, 272n

The New Age, 8, 41n, 147, 321n, 362n, 376–9, 382n–3n, 388n–9n, 391n, 395–9, 403, 476, 525, 542n, 567n, 600n, 638, 652, 673n ‘The New Biography’ (Woolf, V.), 645n The New Decameron, 263, 264n The New English Weekly, 398–9 New Poems (Trench, F.), 652 New Poems (Le Gallienne, R.), 388n The New Republic, 249n The New Statesman, 107n, 114, 116, 302n, 395, 411, 638, 771n New York, 5, 25–7, 29, 33, 43n, 116, 311, 382n, 437–8, 438n, 447, 458, 470n, 490, 509, 510n, 593, 594n, 632, 716, 780 The New York Times, 27n, 33n The New York Tribune, 33n New Zealand, 2, 7, 14–15, 17n, 18– 20, 96, 135–6, 137n, 147n, 152, 155, 164, 200n, 217n, 333n, 387n, 402, 416n, 418, 426n, 428–9, 430n, 468n, 470n–1n, 485n, 510n, 529, 557, 657–8, 658n, 662, 666n, 672, 679, 706–7, 710n–11n, 716 ‘New Zealand’ (Tye, J. R.), 15n The New Zealand Graphic and Ladies’ Journal, 3–4, 13–17, 15n, 17n The New Zealand Herald, 709n The News Chronicle, 114 Nicolson, Nigel (ed.) The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 74n, 119n, 159n, 165n, 200n, 210n, 213n, 241n, 274n, 474n, 593n, 721, 729n, 748n, 751n–2n, 758n–60n, 763n–4n, 768n–9n (ed.) The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 159n, 193n, 200n, 265n, 656n, 746n–7n, 749n, 764n–5n, 774n Nietzsche, Friedrich, 170n, 176, 251n, 396 Human, All Too Human, 251n Thus Spake Zarathustra, 396

index  833 Night (Mansfield, K.), 657 Night and Day (Woolf, V.), 114, 118, 119n, 174n, 745, 758n The Night is Long (Millin, S.), 153n ‘A Night with Proust’ (Schiff, V.), 590n ‘Night-Scented Stock’ (Mansfield, K.), 186n Nine Humorous Tales (Chekhov, A., trs Goldberg, I.; Schnittkind, H.), 750n XIX Century Fiction: A Bibliographical Record (Sadleir, M.), 547, 547n Nixon, Edna (née Smith), 392–3, 402 The Noahs on Holiday (cartoon in the Daily News), 361n Nobel Prize, 81n, 138, 189n, 371n, 579n Noble, Joan Russell (ed.) Recollections of Virginia Woolf, 745n Nocturne (Swinnerton, F.), 403, 649, 650n Nocturne: Grey and Gold – Westminster Bridge (1872–4) (Whistler, J.), 432n Noguchi, Yone, 12n, 402 From the Eastern Sea, 402, 472, 474n The North American, 476 ‘North American Chiefs’ (Mansfield, K.), 378, 381 ‘The Nostalgia of Mr. D. H. Lawrence’ (Murry, J. M.), 123n ‘Note on the Chinese Poems by Arthur Waley’ (Hergesheimer, J.), 26 The Notebook of Anton Chekhov (Chekhov, A.), 291n La Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF), 264n, 276n, 615n, 730n ‘The Novels of Defoe’ (Woolf, V.), 763n ‘Nuit d’étoiles’ (Debussy, C.), 675n Nys, Maria, 539, 539n

834   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 ‘O for the Wings of a Dove’ (Mendelssohn, F.; Bartholomew, W.), 229n O Hara San (doll), 472 The Observer, 33n, 640, 641n, 647, 648n Ode from Italy in Time of War (Trench, F.), 652 The Odyssey (Homer), 67, 98n, 254n, 608, 687n Of Human Bondage (Maugham, S.), 765n L’Oiseau mort (Greuze, J.), 695n Old Heidelberg (Meyer-Förster, W., tr. Chapelle, M.), 704n The Old Wives’ Tale (Bennett, A.), 389n ‘Ole Underwood’ (Mansfield, K.), 477 Oliver Twist (Dickens, C.), 491n, 755n O’Malley, Owen, 727, 729n ‘On Cutting Shakespeare’ (Shaw, G.), 366n ‘On Murder, Considered as One of the Fine Arts’ (de Quincey, T.), 175n ‘On the Art of Fiction’ (Cather, W.), 26 ‘On the Crowning of Kingship’ (Austin, A.), 388n ‘On the Sea Shore’ (Mansfield, K.), 693 Orage, A. R., 4, 7–8, 37, 41n, 108n, 147, 284n, 362n, 376–7, 379, 387n, 389n, 395–400, 399n, 403, 510n, 525, 567n, 587, 638, 652 ‘Talks with Katherine Mansfield at Fontainebleau’, 398 ‘Orage: Memories’ (Eliot, T. S.), 399n ‘Orchestra and Solo’ (Mansfield, K.), 154n The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (Meredith, G.), 170n–1n Orlando (Woolf, V.), 178n, 733, 745n

Orpen, William, 262n Orton, William, 392–3, 401–3, 404n, 406n, 675n The Last Romantic, 392, 393n, 401, 403, 404n ‘Our Yesterdays’, 403, 404n ‘Present-Day Criticism’, 403, 404n Ospedaletti (Italy), 69–70, 69n, 161, 163, 279–80, 319, 323–4, 738, 738n Ostropol, 34, 47n, 78n O’Sullivan, Vincent (ed.) The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield, vols 1 and 2 – The Collected Fiction, 32n, 43n, 52n, 67n, 111n–12n, 147n, 187n, 201n, 224n, 230n, 281n, 291n, 294n, 305n, 343n, 355n, 389n, 427n, 439n, 441n, 451n–3n, 456n, 460n, 468n, 470n, 496n, 502n, 506n, 517n, 528n, 543n, 553n, 570n, 576n, 585n, 600n, 618n, 622n, 631n, 640n–2n, 660n, 691n, 699n, 704n, 736n, 747n Othello (Shakespeare, W.), 273n, 478 Otter, Robert John, 502n Ottoline at Garsington: Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell 1915–1918 (ed. Moorehead, C.), 165n, 167n, 191n, 196n–7n, 199n, 206n–7n, 214n, 219n, 246n, 249n, 251n, 268n–9n, 302n, 539n Ottoline Morrell: Life on a Grand Scale (Seymour, M.), 159n, 191n, 205n, 246n, 250n, 277n Our Mutual Friend (Dickens, C.), 223n ‘Our Yesterdays’ (Orton, W.), 403, 404n Ouspensky, Pyotr Demianovich, 37, 108n, 525 Owen, Maggie, 202, 203n Owen, Wilfred, 195n The Owl – A Miscellany, 262n

Oxenford, John (ed.) Conversations of Goethe, 83n, 369n Oxford, 22, 134n, 159, 177n, 195n, 208n, 216n, 249n, 254, 309n, 320n, 366n, 414, 416n, 505, 520, 544, 546, 554, 561, 563n, 567n, 611, 612n, 729n, 733, 753n The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines (eds Brooker, P.; Thacker, A.), 252n Oxford Street, 211n, 421n, 698n Oxford University Press, 366n Oxon, M. A., 108n, 362n Cosmic Anatomy, 108n, 362, 362n pa-man, 110, 111n, 345n ‘A Pair of Button Boots’ (Millin, S.), 154n The Palatine, 216n The Pall Mall, 521 The Pall Mall Gazette, 628n Palliser, Charles, 483, 485n Palliser, Eileen, 416n, 485n Palmer, Clara Adeline, 407–8, 408n Palmer, Herbert, 411, 412n–13n The Mistletoe Child, 410, 412n The Roving Angler, 411 The Teaching of English, 411 Two Fishers, 411 Two Foe-Men and Other Poems, 413n Panayi, Panikos Enemies in the Empire: Civilian Internment in the British Empire during the First World War, 323n Pankhurst, Sylvia The Suffragette Movement, 668n Pantagruel (Rabelais, F.), 299n ‘A Paper Chase’ (Mansfield, K.), 378 ‘Paris Letter’ (Pound, E.), 580n, 610n Paris/Parisian, 6, 19–20, 30, 37, 41, 41n–2n, 44n, 49n, 51n, 74–7, 74n, 77n, 79, 81, 81n–2n, 85n,

index  835 87n, 88, 89n, 91, 92n–4n, 96, 98n, 104, 105n, 122, 128–9, 134n, 135, 138–40, 141n, 142, 152, 155, 161, 177n, 189n, 197n, 203n, 216n, 220, 221n, 266, 298, 300, 302n, 304, 317, 322n, 330n, 344, 362n, 367, 369n, 370–1, 371n, 374–5, 389n, 398, 434n, 460, 476–7, 487, 488n, 490, 491n, 494, 504–6, 508–13, 508n, 510n, 512n, 515–16, 516n–17n, 519n, 525, 527, 544, 552, 555, 577, 581, 582n, 583, 584n, 606–7, 607n, 612–13, 631–2, 654, 685– 8, 686n–7n, 689n–90n, 690–1, 699, 721, 730n, 766n, 768n–9n, 776, 777n Parker, Margaret, 708, 709n Parker, Robert, 658n, 706, 709, 710n Parsons, Winnie, 658, 658n Partridge, Ralph, 172n The Passionate Elopement (Mackenzie, E.), 131, 626 Pastiches et mélanges (Proust, M.), 571n A Patch of Romantic Paris (Williams, O.), 735n Pater, Walter, 647n Payne, Evelyn, 414–15, 416n Payne, Joseph Frank, 414, 435n Payne, Sylvia, 414–18, 416n, 420, 422–5, 427, 429, 431–4, 431n, 435n Pearson’s Magazine, 446 Peer Gynt (Ibsen, H.), 231n Péguy, Charles, 205, 206n Pelléas and Mélisande (Debussy, C.), 695n Pemberton, Max, 364, 366n Perkins, John Charles Campbell, 436 ‘Personal Matters’ (Anon.), 707n Pertwee, Roland, 96n Peshkov, Aleksey Maksimovich, 243n; see also Maxim Gorky Pet Marjorie (Fleming, M.), 647, 648n

836   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Pet Marjorie and Sir Walter Scott: The Story of Marjorie Fleming (Wiley, K.), 648n Peter Bell: A Tale in Verse (Wordsworth, W.), 356, 356n Peter Pan (Barrie, J. M.), 648n Petit Larousse, 207, 208n Pevear, Richard (tr.) War and Peace, 214n, 369n Pfeiffer Hall, 415, 416n Phillpotts, Eden, 386, 389n The Flint Heart, 389n Picasso, Pablo, 377, 510n, 517n, 589 ‘Pictures’ (Mansfield, K.), 96n ‘The Pilgrim Fathers’ (Wilcox, E.), 238n ‘The Pink ’Un’ (periodical), 29, 29n; see also Sporting Times Pinker, Eric Seabrooke, 4, 89n, 183n, 437–43, 447, 550–1, 551n, 558, 629 Pinker, James Brand, 4–5, 124, 127n, 190n, 437, 438n, 445–8, 450– 65, 546, 558 Pinker, Mary Elizabeth (née Seabrooke), 437 The Pirates of Penzance (Gilbert, A.; Sullivan, W. S.), 669n Pitter, Ruth, 398 Plato, 396, 425n The Republic, 425n ‘A Pleasant Sunday Afternoon’ (Mansfield, K.; Hastings, B.), 378, 387n pleurisy, 300, 406n, 482, 484n, 490 Ploegsteert Wood, 51n The Ploughshare, 541, 542n Plumridge, Anna, 137 (ed.) The Urewera Notebook by Katherine Mansfield, 149n pneumonia, 70, 323, 438n, 447, 599n Poe, Edgar Allan, 546 Poems (Eliot, T. S.), 741, 766n Poems by Katherine Mansfield (ed. Murry, J. M.), 147n

Poems: 1916–1920 (Murry, J. M.), 207, 207n, 243n, 297n, 356n Poems: 1917–1918 (Murry, J. M.), 325n Poems, with Fables in Prose (Trench, F.), 652 Poetry, 615n The Poetry Review, 311 ‘Poets and Anthologies’ (article in TLS), 579n The Poison of Asps (Prowse, R. O.), 567n Poisson, Jeannette Antoinette, 690n Polianski, Igor ‘Therapeutic Pneumothorax and the Nobel Prize’, 484n Pollard’s Opera Company, 662 Polonsky, Rachel ‘Chekhov and the Buried Life of Katherine Mansfield’, 61n Pond Street, 100–3, 128–9, 307–8, 310, 373, 517–18, 586, 613–15, 731 Pontings, 354, 355n Poor Relations (Mackenzie, E.), 131 Pope, Alexander, 177n–8n Popper, David, 711n Portland Villas, 36, 59–60, 62–5, 67–8, 232–3, 235, 237, 237n, 239, 242, 244, 246, 248n, 250–5, 257–8, 260, 262, 264, 266, 269, 271, 273–4, 276, 278, 281, 333, 407, 485, 487–9, 491–3, 497–8, 564, 591–3, 595–600, 617–19, 622–3, 646, 650, 653, 756–60, 762–3, 765–9, 771–2; see also ‘The Elephant’ The Portman Rooms, 663, 664n Portrait of a Woman (Rubens, P.), 350n Portrait of Katherine Mansfield (Rice, A.), 211, 477 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce, J.), 65n, 582n, 609n The Possessed (Dostoevsky, F., tr. Garnett, C.), 102–3, 102n–4n, 505, 505n, 755n; see also The Devils

‘The Post-War Novel’ (Tilby, A. W.), 549n Poulter, Edith, 318 Pound, Ezra, 132n, 146, 273, 274n, 398–9, 525, 578, 580n, 581, 610n, 698n ‘Paris Letter’, 580n, 610n Poussin, Nicolas, 188, 189n The Inspiration of the Poet, 189n Powys, A. R., 638 ‘Prelude’ (Mansfield, K.), 35, 224n, 340, 354, 439, 757, 766, 771 Prelude (Mansfield, K.), 8, 228n, 741, 742n, 747n, 749n, 753n ‘Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune’ (Debussy, C.), 502n Prescott, William Hickling, 248n Conquest of Peru, 248n ‘Present-Day Criticism’ (Orton, W.), 403, 404n The Prevention of Destitution (Webb, B.; Webb, S.), 391n Prewett, Frank, 258, 259n, 263 Pride and Prejudice (Austen, J.), 300n Priestley, J. B., 114, 117 Principia Ethica (Moore, G. E.), 531 Principia Mathematica (Russell, B.), 531 Privilege: A Novel of the Transition (Sadleir, M.), 549n The Problem of Style (Murry, J. M.), 366n The Professional Literary Agent in Britain, 1880–1920 (Gillies, M.), 448n Prometheus Ill-Bound (Gide, A.), 524 Prose Fancies (Le Gallienne, R.), 388n prose-poem, 102n, 189n–90n, 204n, 379, 699n Proust, Marcel, 295, 297n, 431n, 562, 569, 571n, 577–8, 579n–80n, 583, 584n, 585, 589, 604, 612, 612n–13n, 750n Le Côté de Guermantes II, 612n A la recherche du temps perdu, 297n, 571n, 579n–80n, 584n, 612n, 750n

index  837 Pastiches et mélanges, 571n Sodom et Gomorrhe II, 612n Prowse, R. O., 566, 567n A Fatal Reservation, 567n The Poison of Asps, 567n Prufrock, and Other Observations (Eliot, T. S.), 65n, 195n, 198n The Prussian Officer and Other Stories (Lawrence, D. H.), 96n Psychological Medicine (Craig, M.), 217n The Pterodamozels (Trevelyan, R. C.), 654–5, 655n Puccini, Giacomo, 588, 689n La Bohème, 562 Madame Butterfly, 689n Punch, 197n, 388n, 588 Punch and Judy, 366n, 517n, 736 Putnam, Martha (Mattie), 466–7, 467n–8n Quai aux Fleurs, 42n, 44–5, 44n, 47, 49n Queen Victoria (Strachey, L.), 644 Queen’s College, 135, 188, 264, 414–15, 416n, 419n, 421n, 423n–4n, 426n, 428n, 432n, 434n–5n, 466, 485n, 576n, 650, 662, 672n, 715, 715n The Queen’s Hall, 12n, 191n, 665n ‘The Question’ (Shelley, P.), 223, 223n Quiet Interiors (Jones, E. B. C.), 337n de Quincey, Thomas, 175n Confessions of an English OpiumEater, 175n ‘On Murder, Considered as One of the Fine Arts’, 175n Rabelais, François, 299, 299n Gargantua, 299n Pantagruel, 299n Radet, Frédéric La Face cachée: Verdun 1914– 1918 Empreintes de l’armée allemande, 111n

838   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Radford, Dollie, 173n, 238n Ragtime, 193, 194n The Rainbow (Lawrence, D. H.), 113n, 114, 123n, 179, 180n, 293n Ramsay, Allan The Tea-Table Miscellany: Or, A Collection of Choice Songs, Scots and English, 750n Ramsden, Eric, 137n Random House, 27 ‘Raquel Meller’ (Murry, J. M.), 591n Rasputin, Grigori Yefimovitch, 194, 195n Rattray, Elizabeth Frost (nee Fenton), 14–15 ‘Rattray, Lizzie Frost’ (Graham, T. B.), 15n Read, Herbert, 281n, 398, 567, 567n ‘Reading’ (Woolf, V.), 770n ‘The Real Thing’ (James, H.), 571n ‘Reason in Common Sense’ (Santayana, G.), 293n Recollections of Virginia Woolf (ed. Noble, J. R.), 745n The Red Knight (Young, B.), 115n, 780–1 Redcliffe Road, 224, 226, 228–32, 750, 753, 756 Reed, Christopher (ed.) A Roger Fry Reader, 647n The Reign of the Antichrist (Merezhkovsky, D.; Gippius, Z.), 85n Rembrandt, 371n Woman Bathing in a Stream, 371n Reminiscences and Recollections (Beauchamp, H.), 18, 20n Reminiscences of Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy (Gorky, M., trs Koteliansky, S.; Woolf, L.), 107n, 244n, 291n ‘Reminiscences of Leonid Andreev’ (Gorky, M.), 107n Rempel, Richard A. (ed.) The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, vol. 13:

Prophecy and Dissent 1914– 1916, 542n Renaissance, 165n, 189n, 257n, 299n, 327n, 648n, 701n René, François Auguste, 293n Le Génie du christianisme, 293n Mémoires d’outre-tombe, 293n Renshaw, Jeanne, 778n The Republic (Plato), 425n The Return of the Soldier (Fairfield, C.), 612n The Return of William Shakespeare (Kingsmill, H.), 23 ‘Revelations’ (Mansfield, K.), 618n ‘Rêverie du Soir’ (Trowell, A.), 660n, 711n ‘Revisiting Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and the Aesthetics of Respectability’ (Thomas, S.), 203n Rey, Ernestine, 124n, 293n, 298, 351, 578, 582, 605, 605n ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ (Eliot, T. S.), 198n Rhoda Fleming (Meredith, G.), 240, 241n Rhythm, 4, 11–12, 12n, 22, 59n, 109, 131–2, 134n, 142, 144n, 147, 189n, 193n, 284n, 311, 397, 403, 476–7, 500n, 522, 544–5, 563n, 626, 628n, 638, 650 Rhythm (Fergusson, J. D.), 544 Ribnikov (Ribni), 6, 472–4, 475n, 479n, 482n, 484n, 737 Rice, Anne Estelle (m. Drey), 12n, 134n, 184n, 209, 210n, 225, 225n, 277n, 308, 473–4, 476–9, 478n–9n, 482, 482n, 485–99, 485n–8n, 491n–2n, 495n, 498n, 500n, 501, 503–4, 506–9, 510n, 511–13, 512n, 515–19, 544, 632 The Egyptian Dancers, 476 ‘Memories of Katherine Mansfield’, 474n, 479n, 484n, 491n

Portrait of Katherine Mansfield, 211, 477 Richard Kurt (Hudson, S.), 562, 578n Richards, Grant, 563, 563n, 627 Richardson, Dorothy, 445 Rider, Daniel, 22, 23n, 520–3 Adventures with Bernard Shaw, 522n Ten Years’ Adventures among Landlords and Tenants, 522n Ridge Cap, 424–5, 425n, 427n Ridge, William Pett, 569, 570n Just Open, 570n ‘The Right Real Thing’ (James, H.), 571n Rihani, Ameen, 510n ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (Coleridge, S.), 325n, 426n Rippmann, Walter, 49n, 421n, 430n The Rite of Spring (Stravinsky), 605n Rivière, Jacques, 276n Rivington Holmes, Richard (ed.) Edward VII: His Life and Times, 119n Roberts, R. Ellis, 558n Robey, George, 212, 213n–14n, 239n Robinson Crusoe (Defoe, D.), 763n A Roger Fry Reader (ed. Reed, C.), 647n Rogers, John, 324, 325n romance, 7, 16n, 35, 49n, 57n, 66n, 104, 106, 170n, 175n, 195n, 223n, 249n, 255n, 268n, 284n, 297n, 382, 384, 409n, 411, 426n, 430n, 486, 491n, 527, 532, 547, 570n, 647n–8n, 669n, 672n–3n, 682n, 704n–5n, 709n, 719n, 729n, 749n, 762n, 781–2 Rome, 189n, 249n, 282n, 284n, 383n, 407 A Room of One’s Own (Woolf, V.), 744 Roosevelt, Theodore (Teddy), 380, 381n Roquebrune, 561, 563, 563n, 566–7, 588, 622n

index  839 Rose Tree Cottage, 34, 38–43 Rosenberg, Isaac, 193n Ross, Robert, 196, 197n, 235, 236n Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 421n Rothermere (Viscountess), 99n, 524–6, 526n, 579n Rotorua, 149, 150n Les Rougon-Macquart (Zola, E.), 394n Rouse, Gwen, 420, 421n, 658, 671, 672n, 693 The Roving Angler (Palmer, H.), 411 Royal Academy of Arts, 318 Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, 116 Royal Academy of Music, 426n, 663n Rubens, Peter Paul, 350n, 368, 370, 371n Elisabeth, 350n Portrait of a Woman, 350n Rubin, Martin Sarah Gertrude Millin – A South African Life, 153n Ruck, Amy Roberta (Berta), 527, 528n His Official Fiancée, 527 Miss Million’s Maid, 527 Shopping for a Husband, 528 Ruddick, John, 529–30 Ruddick, Marion, 529–30, 529n ‘Incidents in the Childhood of Katherine Mansfield’, 529, 529n Rudin (Turgenev, I.), 236, 236n Rumpelmeyer, Anton, 193n Runcton Cottage, 23, 144, 435, 627 Russell, Bertrand, 3, 142, 162–3, 164n, 181n, 186n, 192n, 205n, 211n, 266n, 268n, 296n, 531–3, 534n–6n, 538n, 542n, 648n, 654, 765n The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 164n, 533n ‘The Feast and the Eclipse’, 296n ‘The Logic of Armaments’, 542n Principia Mathematica, 531 ‘Sketches of Modern China’, 296n War: The Offspring of Fear, 534n

840   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Russell, John Conrad, 296n Russell, John Francis, 266n, 297n, 531 Russia/Russian, 11, 26, 27n, 34–5, 37, 39n–40n, 42n–3n, 43, 47n, 53n, 57n, 60n, 64, 65n–8n, 72n, 74, 74n, 77n, 81n–2n, 82, 84, 85n–7n, 89, 91n–2n, 94, 99n, 102n–3n, 105n, 107n, 138–9, 141n, 159, 177n, 183n, 191n–2n, 195n, 214n, 227n, 236n, 239n, 243n–4n, 261n, 290, 298–300, 304, 309n, 311, 328, 381n, 383n, 394, 398, 406, 406n, 411, 428n, 444n, 468n, 472–3, 484n, 509, 510n, 512, 539n–40n, 569, 570n, 595n, 650, 655, 677, 716–17, 726n, 735n The Russian Archive, 368n ‘The Russian Background’ (Woolf, V.), 67n A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury. The Life and Times of Samuel Koteliansky (Diment, G.), 38n– 9n, 43n, 50n, 52n, 55n, 57n, 74n, 86n, 140n, 600n, 722n Russian Law Bureau, 34, 37, 38n–9n, 55n, 73n ‘The Russian Point of View’ (Woolf, V.), 183n Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of the Present Time (Fern, F.), 248n Rutter, Frank, 279n, 281, 281n, 567n Ryan, Derek ‘Katherine Mansfield’s Animal Aesthetics’, 108n Rydstrand, Helen, 562, 590 Sackville, Anne, 178n Sackville, Thomas, 178n Sackville-West, Vita, 178n, 638 The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (Eliot, T. S.), 729n ‘A Sad Truth’ (Mansfield, K.), 694 Sadleir, Michael Thomas Harvey, 4–5, 452, 453n, 544–7, 548n–9n, 549–59, 552n–3n, 560n, 563n, 642n; see also Michael Sadler

(tr.) The Art of Spiritual Harmony, 544 Bibliography of the First Editions of the Prose Works of Herman Melville, 547 Excursions in Victorian Bibliography, 547, 560n Fanny by Gaslight, 546 Lappalien, 544 XIX Century Fiction: A Bibliographical Record, 547, 547n Privilege: A Novel of the Transition, 549n Trollope: A Bibliography, 547 Trollope: A Commentary, 547 Sadler, Michael T. H., 134n, 544–5, 548–9 ‘Fauvism and a Fauve’, 544, 547n see also Michael Sadleir St John’s Wood, 51n, 171–2, 477, 594, 664n, 678n St Martin-in-the-Fields, 11 St. Petersburg, 138, 444n, 539n, 569, 570n St. Petersburg Academy of Military Medicine, 138 Salinger, Hilda Nathan (Diddy), 715, 715n Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows (Constable, J.), 369n Salome and Elektra (Strauss, R.), 669n The Salome Dancer: The Life and Times of Maud Allan (Cherniavsky, F.), 664n Samuel Butler, Author of Erewhon (Jones, H. F.), 566n San Remo, 68, 258, 280 Sand, George, 234n, 247, 248n–9n Le Marquis de Villemer, 247, 248n Les Maîtres sonneurs, 248n see also Amantine-Lucile Aurore Dupin Sands, Ethel, 215, 216n Santayana, George (Jorge Agustín Ruiz de), 247, 249n, 292, 293n, 578, 579n, 654

‘Dickens’, 578, 579n The Life of Reason, 293n ‘Reason in Common Sense’, 293n ‘Soliloquies in England’, 249n Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies, 249n Sarah Gertrude Millin – A South African Life (Rubin, M.), 153n Sargant-Florence, Alix, 210n Sargeant, John Singer, 318 Sarolea, Charles, 26 Great Russia, 26 Sarton, May, 55n, 72n, 76n A World of Light: Portraits and Celebrations, 72n, 76n Sassoon, Siegfried, 142, 158, 163, 194, 195n–7n, 202, 228, 228n, 259n, 638, 754, 754n–5n Counter-Attack and Other Poems, 754n ‘Finished with the War: A Soldier’s Declaration’, 195n ‘Letter to Robert Graves’, 228n The Saturday Evening Post, 476 Sayers, Dorothy L., 264n, 638 Schiff, Sydney, 2, 517n, 525, 561–3, 562n, 564n–5n, 567n, 569n–72n, 572, 578n–9n, 589–90, 590n, 598n, 616, 619n, 622n, 625n Concessions, 562 see also Stephen Hudson Schiff, Violet (née Beddington), 312, 517n, 525, 561–2, 562n, 564n–5n, 567n, 588–90, 590n, 605n, 616, 618n, 622n, 625n ‘A Night with Proust’, 590n Schmid, Julius, 666n Schneider, Elisabeth, 396 Schnittkind, Henry T., 750n (tr.) Nine Humorous Tales, 750n Schoenberg, 695n Gurrelieder, 695n The School, 713 The Schoolmistress and Other Stories (Chekhov, A., tr. Garnett, C.), 570n

index  841 Schreiner, Olive, 155, 156n The Story of an African Farm, 156n Women and Labour, 156n Schubert, Franz, 673n Der Erlkönig, 672, 673n Schulkind, Jeanne (ed.) Moments of Being, 745n Scotland Yard, 380, 381n Scotland/Scottish, 132, 134n, 193n, 236n, 362n, 366n, 416n, 423n, 689n, 748, 750n Scott, Margaret, 393n Scott-Moncrieff, C. K., 297n Scriven (Mrs.), 94n, 350n, 737 ‘Sea and Sardinia’ (Lawrence, D. H.), 579n, 605n Sea Pieces (MacDowell, E.), 695n Seabrooke, Mary Elizabeth, 437, 445 The Seagull (Chekhov, A.), 68n, 72n Seaman, Elizabeth Cochrane, 710n Secker and Warburg, 626 Secker, Martin, 133, 134n, 292, 294n, 626–7 Second World War see World War Two The Secret City (Walpole, H.), 717 The Secret Victory (McKenna, S.), 115n, 780 Select Hôtel, 104, 105n, 106, 108, 374 The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell (ed. Griffin, N.), 534n Self-Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion (de la Chataignerie, E.), 299n de Selincourt, Ernest, 297n The Sentimental Journey: A Life of Charles Dickens (Kingsmill, H.), 23n ‘Serenity’ (Murry, J. M.), 243n Seymour, Miranda, 159n, 191n Ottoline Morrell: Life on a Grand Scale, 159n, 191n, 205n, 246n, 250n, 277n ‘The Shadow in the Rose Garden’ (Lawrence, D. H.), 95, 96n

842   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 The Shadow Line (Conrad, J.), 187n ‘Shadows’ (Mansfield, K.), 715n Shakespeare and Company, 98n Shakespeare, William, 223n, 272, 290, 293, 294n, 330n, 339, 342, 347, 351, 354, 362, 366n, 368, 495n, 521, 622n, 762n As You Like It, 495n Hamlet, 234n Henry V, 330n King Lear, 652 Macbeth, 478 Measure for Measure, 293, 294n The Merry Wives of Windsor, 669n A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 648n Much Ado About Nothing, 127n Othello, 273n, 478 The Tempest, 294n The Winter’s Tale, 294n Share, Mary Lilian, 524 Shaw, George Bernard, 216n, 366n, 376–7, 396, 398–9, 468n, 521, 605n Back to Methuselah, 605n Love Among the Artists, 521 ‘On Cutting Shakespeare’, 366n Shaw, Helen (ed.) Dear Lady Ginger, 165n, 209n, 213n, 228n, 279n ‘She Walks in Beauty’ (Byron, G.), 282n Sheaves (Benson, E. F.), 570n Sheehan, Patrick Augustine, 470, 470n Luke Delmege, 470, 470n Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 56, 57n, 169, 170n, 223, 223n, 502n ‘Alastor’, 502n ‘The Question’, 223, 223n ‘To a Skylark’, 56, 170n The Shepherd’s Calendar (Spenser, E.), 331n Sherard, Robert Harborough, 430n Life of Oscar Wilde, 430n

‘A Ship Comes into the Harbour’ (Mansfield, K.), 119n Shopping for a Husband (Ruck, A. R.), 528 Shorter, Clement, 4–6, 294n, 350n, 352, 439, 439n, 444, 458, 464, 629–31, 630n Shove, Gerald, 216n Sickert, Walter, 377, 755n Sierre, 95–6, 98, 122, 287, 289, 292, 346, 348, 372–3, 443, 603, 611 ‘The Sign-Seekers’ (Murry, J. M.), 323n ‘SIGNES OF SPRING: A Letter from Katherine Mansfield’ (Smith, A.), 738n ‘The Silence is Broken’ (Mansfield, K.), 567n Silver, Brenda Virginia Woolf: Icon, 745n ‘The Silver Net’ (Vintras, L.), 429, 430n Simoën, Jean-Claude (ed.) Les Années sanglantes 1914– 1918, 111n Simpson, Joseph, 521 Sinclair, Mary Amelia St Clair, 262n; see also May Sinclair Sinclair, May, 96n, 261, 262n, 308 Mary Olivier: A Life, 261, 262n, 263 see also Mary Amelia Sinclair ‘The Singing Lesson’ (Mansfield, K.), 631n Sinister Street (Mackenzie, E.), 131 ‘Sir Henry Wood. An Impression’ (Kapp, E.), 4, 8n, 11, 12n Sitwell, Edith, 143, 567n (ed.) Wheels, 143 Sitwell, Osbert, 619n Sitwell, Sacheverell, 275n ‘Exhibition of French Art 1914– 1919’, 275n ‘Sixpence’ (Mansfield, K.), 294n, 553, 631n The Sketch, 5, 450, 450n, 458–9, 459n, 461, 462n, 557, 629

‘Sketch of the Past’ (Woolf, V.), 745n ‘Sketches of Modern China’ (Russell, B.), 296n Skidelsky, Robert John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed, 1883–1920, 646n The Skin Game (Galsworthy, J.), 595n Slade School of Art, 85n, 116, 172n, 193n, 259n, 262n, 272n, 318, 373n, 388n, 430n, 517n, 527, 746n Slatkowsky, Ruvin Solomonovich, 73n ‘Sleepyhead’ (Chekhov, A.), 396 Small, Gertie, 245–6, 248n Smart, Henry, 710n The Bride of Dunkerron, 710n The Smart Set, 43, 43n Smith, Ali, 737 ‘SIGNES OF SPRING: A Letter from Katherine Mansfield’, 738n Smith, Angela (ed.) The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield, vol. 3 – The Poetry and Critical Writings, 41n, 62n–3n, 66n–7n, 75n, 102n–4n, 114n–15n, 123n, 132n, 153n– 4n, 183n, 260n, 262n, 265n, 268n, 288n, 321n, 337n, 339n, 563n, 567n–8n, 578n, 586n, 597n, 605n, 648n, 650n, 719n, 765n, 767n–9n, 771n–2n Smith, Edna, 392, 402 Smith, Horace Brambletye House, or Cavaliers and Roundheads, 682n Smith, Logan Pearsall, 531, 765n Unforgotten Years, 765n Smith, Marion, 663 Smithers, Leonard, 521 Smoke (Turgenev, I.), 265n Smollett, Tobias, 764, 765n The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, 765n

index  843 The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker, 765n Snow Over Eden, A Story of Today (Moult, T.), 312 Snyder, Carey, 378 ‘Letters to the Editor as a Serial Form’, 379n ‘“So now tell me what you think!”: Sylvia Lynd’s Collaborative Reading and Reviewing, and the Work of an Interwar Middlewoman’ (Wilson, N.), 117n Sobieniowski, Floryan, 6, 12n, 19, 195n, 633, 658n Sodom et Gomorrhe II (Proust, M.), 612n Soldiers of Labour (Kennedy, B.), 388n ‘Soliloquies in England’ (Santayana, G.), 249n Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (Santayana, G.), 249n ‘Something Childish but Very Natural’ (Mansfield, K.), 393, 403 ‘A Song of Summer’ (Mansfield, K.), 696–7 Sorapure, Victor, 93n, 98, 119n, 308, 490, 491n, 500, 632–4 Sorbonne, 104, 105n, 690n Sorensen, Leif, 378 ‘Letters to the Editor as a Serial Form’, 379n Southworth, Helen (ed.) Leonard and Virginia Woolf, The Hogarth Press and the Networks of Modernism, 741n Souvorin, Alexei Sergueyevich, 2, 62, 63n, 66n, 75n–6n, 84n, 265n, 339n, 767n Sowing: An Autobiography of the Years 1880–1904 (Woolf, L.), 645n Spahlinger, Henri, 78n, 287n, 576n, 603, 727

844   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Spanish flu, 599n ‘Le Spectateur’ (Eliot, T. S.), 766n Spenser, Edmund, 61n, 331n The Faerie Queene, 61n The Shepherd’s Calendar, 331n The Sphere, 6, 89n, 127n, 293, 294n, 350, 350n, 352, 439, 439n, 441, 444n, 449, 451, 464, 464n, 547, 548n, 557, 629, 630n–1n, 653n, 736n Spirit Teachings (Moses, W.), 363n Spitzbergen, 125, 127n The Sporting Times, 29n; see also Pink ’Un Spotts, Frederic (ed.) Letters of Leonard Woolf, 742n ‘Spring in A Dream’ (Mansfield, K.), 403 Squire, John Collings, 4, 26, 32n, 143, 262n, 291n, 411, 451, 451n, 551, 551n, 569, 637–41, 641n, 723, 733 Imaginary Speeches, 638 Squire, ‘Most Generous of Men’ (Howarth, P.), 639n Stacpoole, Henry de Vere, 569, 570n A Man of the Islands, 570n Stafford, Jane, 136 Maoriland: New Zealand Literature, 1872–1914, 137n ‘The Staging of Plays, And a Conversation with Mr. Herbert Trench’ (Wood, T. M.), 652n ‘The State of Science, Microbiology, and Vaccines circa 1918’ (Eyler, J. M.), 599n Stead, C. K., 35–6, 164 (ed.) The Letters and Journals of Katherine Mansfield: A Selection, 15n Mansfield: A Novel, 36, 37n, 533n ‘Men and Mansfield in Mansfield’, 37n Stein, Gertrude, 519n Stephani, Théodore, 77n–8n, 287n, 508n, 576n

Stephen, Leslie, 213n, 279n, 648n, 743 Stephen Swift, 397, 442n, 559n, 626, 628, 638 Stephen Swift and Company, 144n, 628n Stephen, Thoby, 178n, 279n, 643, 654, 739, 743–4 Stephen, Vanessa, 643, 739 Stephen, Virginia, 643, 739, 744; see also Virginia Woolf Stephens, James, 411 ‘The Steppe’ (Chekhov, A.), 66n–7n, 67 Sterne, Laurence, 488n The Life and Adventures of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, 488n Stevenson, Mae ‘The Flowers’, 431n ‘Happy Thought’, 423n Stevenson, Robert Louis, 423n, 431n, 638 A Child’s Garden of Verses, 423n, 431n ‘Will O’ the Mill’, 431n–2n Stone, Jon ‘The Body Electric: A Long View of Electrical Therapy for Functional Neurological Disorders’, 233n Stopes, Marie, 527 The Story of an African Farm (Schreiner, O.), 156n The Story-Teller, 388n, 451n, 461n Strachey, James (ed.) The Letters of Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey, 164n, 645n Strachey, Lytton, 3, 127n, 161, 172n, 175n, 178n, 180n, 197n, 210n, 249n, 279n, 291n, 374n, 428n, 532, 639, 643–4, 645n, 648n, 649, 654–5, 656n, 698n, 739, 744, 749n, 765n Elizabeth and Essex, 644 Eminent Victorians, 532, 643 Landmarks in French Literature, 180n, 643

Queen Victoria, 644 ‘Voltaire’, 278, 279n ‘Walpole’s Letter’, 279n The Strad, 663, 703n The Strand, 197n A Strange Beautiful Excitement, Katherine Mansfield’s Wellington Childhood, 1888–1903 (Yska, R.), 15n ‘The Stranger’ (Mansfield, K.), 528, 528n, 570n, 572n, 639, 640n Stratton-Porter, Gene, 491n Freckles, 490, 491n Strauss, Richard, 669, 669n Salome and Elektra, 669n Symphonica Domestica, 669n Stravinsky, 605n The Rite of Spring, 605n ‘The String Quartet’ (Woolf, V.), 291n Der Struwwelpeter (Hoffmann, H.), 360n Stuart, Leslie, 710n ‘Lil is a Lady’, 709, 710n Stuart, Sophia, 715n Studies in Prose and Verse (Symons, A.), 430n Studies in Seven Arts (Symons, A.), 432n The Suffragette Movement (Pankhurst, S.), 668n Suhrawardy, Hasan Shahid, 177n Faded Leaves, 177n Suite Bergamesque (Debussy, C.), 675n Sullivan, John William Navin (J. W. N.), 6, 228, 228n, 243, 243n, 256, 256n, 367, 368n, 575–6, 576n, 619, 721, 727–30, 730n, 762 Beethoven – His Spiritual Development, 368n ‘A Few Words Apropos of the Book War and Peace’, 368n Sullivan, Sylvia, 243n Sullivan, W. S., 669n The Pirates of Penzance, 669n

index  845 ‘Summer Idylle’ (Mansfield, K.), 136 The Sunday Observer., 628n The Sunday Telegraph, 749n Sunflowers (Van Gogh, V.), 362n Sunnyside Cottage, 58–9, 171–2, 534n ‘Sunrise in Conegliano’ (Hudson, S.), 625n ‘Surmise’ (Murry, J. M.), 243n Swainson (Miss), 16n, 135, 710n, 713 The Swallow Dive (Lynd, S.), 120n, 121, 122n ‘A Swallow Flight’ (Anon.), 120n Swan & Edgar, 161, 502n Swan Lake (Tchaikovsky, P.), 702n ‘Swanee River’ (Foster, S.), 213n Swanick, Anna, 432n Swanwick Society, 414, 431, 432n ‘Sweeney among the Nightingales’ (Eliot, T. S.), 766n Swift, Jonathan, 176, 178n Gulliver’s Travels, 178n Swift, Stephen, 183n Swinnerton, Frank, 521, 626, 647, 647n–8n, 649–50, 650n–1n The Adventures of a Manuscript, 649 Background with Chorus, 649 Figures in the Foreground: Literary Reminiscences, 522n Happy Family, 650 ‘Jane Austen’, 650, 651n Nocturne, 403, 649, 650n Switzerland, 22, 74, 76, 79, 92, 122–4, 123n, 155, 286–7, 288n, 289, 291–2, 295, 300, 304, 309, 310n, 348, 351, 370–1, 374n, 443, 449, 451–6, 461, 487, 490, 504, 507, 511, 513, 530, 549– 52, 555, 575, 576n, 577, 603–5, 613, 631, 641, 727, 729, 729n, 734, 736–7, 759 Sydney and Violet: Their Life with T. S. Eliot, Proust, Joyce and the Excruciatingly Irascible Wyndham Lewis (Klaidman, S.), 525n, 590n

846   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 ‘Sydney Schiff and Marcel Proust: Table-talk, Tribute, Translation’ (Eels, E.), 571n Sydney-Turner, Saxon, 178n, 643, 648n Symonds, F., 769n ‘The Future of Turkey’, 769n Symons, Arthur, 146, 430n, 432n, 469n, 570n, 699n ‘Leves Amores’, 469, 469n Studies in Prose and Verse, 430n Studies in Seven Arts, 432n Symphonica Domestica (Strauss, R.), 669n Symphony in White (Whistler, J.), 198n T.P.’s Weekly, 521 ‘Taking the Veil’ (Mansfield, K.), 201n, 450n, 459n Tales from Shakespeare (Lamb, C.), 762n ‘Talks with Katherine Mansfield at Fontainebleau’ (Orage, A. R.), 398 ‘Tall (and Short) Dark Strangers: KM and Foreign Men’ (Woods, J.), 37n Tamanin, Tatiana, 138, 140n Tamarisk Town (Kaye-Smith, S.), 605n Tardiveau, René, 255n La Jeune Fille bien élevée, 255n see also René Boylesve The Task (Cowper, W., ed. Mason, C. P.), 565n Tate Gallery, 304, 369n, 478, 714, 715n The Tatler, 557, 629 Taylor, Moira ‘Her Bright Image’, 318n Taylor, Paul Beekman Gurdjieff and Orage: Brothers in Elysium, 579n Taylor, Walter, 308, 309n Tchaikovsky, Peter Ilyich, 701n Swan Lake, 702n

‘Tchehov’s Questions’ (Woolf, V.), 750n The Tea-Table Miscellany: Or, A Collection of Choice Songs, Scots and English (Ramsay, A.), 750n The Teaching of English (Palmer, H.), 411 ‘The Tedious Brief Adventure of K.M.’ (Mansfield, K.), 633 The Tempest (Shakespeare, W.), 294n Ten Years’ Adventures among Landlords and Tenants (Rider, D. J.), 522n Tennant, Margot, 567n Tenniel, John, 170n, 257n, 265n Tennyson, Alfred, 254n ‘The Lotus-Eaters’, 254n Teresa of Ávila, 200n Thacker, Andrew (ed.) The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, 252n Thalasso, Adolphe, 248n Anthologie de l’amour asiatique, 248n ‘“That Pole Outside Our Door”: Floryan Sobieniowski and Katherine Mansfield’ (Kimber, G.), 658n Theeman, Blanche, 699n Theosophical Society, 396 ‘Therapeutic Pneumothorax and the Nobel Prize’ (Hansson, N.; Polianski, I.), 484n Thibaudet, Albert, 638 ‘The Things that Matter’ (Young, A.), 628n The Things We Are (Murry, J. M.), 294n, 350n, 559n ‘Thomas Browne’ (Woolf, V.), 770n Thomas Cook & Son, 50, 512n, 703n Thomas, Sue ‘Revisiting Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and the Aesthetics of Respectability’, 203n

Thompson, Marguerite, 144n Thorndon, 13, 15 Three Guineas (Woolf, V.), 744, 745n ‘Three Jews’ (Woolf, L.), 748n The Three Mullar-Mulgars (de la Mare, W.), 26 Three Sisters (Chekhov, A.), 72n, 619n Three Weeks (Glyn, E.), 382, 383n Through the Looking Glass, and what Alice Found There (Carroll, L.), 16n, 257n, 265n Thus Spake Zarathustra (Nietzsche, F.), 396 Tilby, A. Wyatt ‘The Post-War Novel’, 549n Time and Tide, 33n, 237n, 558, 558n The Times, 99n, 145n, 173n–4n, 200n, 243n, 272n, 545, 559n, 567n, 590n, 595, 612, 637, 639n, 679n, 699n, 701n, 711n, 733, 734n, 768n–9n The Times Literary Supplement, 3, 8n, 33n, 67n, 248n, 297n, 323n, 325n, 327n, 522n, 579n, 612n, 627, 627n, 733, 749n–50n, 752n, 762n–3n, 773n Tinakori Road, 13, 156n, 470n ‘To a Skylark’ (Shelley, P.), 56, 170n To Let (Galsworthy, J.), 115n ‘To my Dead Friends’ (Murry, J. M.), 207n ‘To Our Readers’ (article in the New Age), 379n To the Lighthouse (Woolf, V.), 744 ‘To the Road’’ (Dunbar, P. L.), 261n Today, 114 Today We Will Only Gossip (Glenavy, B.), 37n, 55n, 59n Tolstoy, Lev Nikolaevitch (Leo), 72n, 102n, 105n, 106, 191n–2n, 214n, 234n, 239n, 291n, 347, 359n, 367, 368n–9n, 428n, 569, 570n, 598, 600, 600n Anna Karenina, 63n, 570n ‘The Death of Ivan Illych’, 600n ‘Family Happiness’, 600n

index  847 ‘Master and Man’, 359n War and Peace (1904), 105n, 191, 191n, 214n, 239, 239n, 570n, 600n War and Peace (2007), 214n, 369n Tomalin, Claire, 19, 161, 600n Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life, 20n, 117n, 164n, 404n, 658n, 675n Tomlinson, Henry Major, 6, 26, 267, 268n, 619, 619n ‘A Memory of Ypres’, 26 Tomlinson, Philip, 66n (ed./tr.) The Life and Letters of Anton Tchekhov, 66n Too Old for Dolls (Ludovici, A. M.), 569n Touch and Go (Lawrence, D. H.), 242n The Town Fop: Or Sir Timothy Tawdrey (Behn, A.), 285n Toynbee, Paget, 772n (ed.) The Letters of Dante, 772n Tractatus Logico-philosophicus (Wittgenstein, L.), 532 Tradition and Hugh Walpole (von Arnim, E.), 586n ‘A Tragic Comedienne’ (Lynd, R. W.; Mansfield, K.), 114 Le Traitement de la tuberculose par la leucocytolyse à l’irradiation de la rate (Manoukhine, I.), 140n Translation as Collaboration: Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and S. S. Koteliansky (Davison, C.), 37n, 61n, 66n, 102n, 200n, 474n Trautmann, Joanna (ed.) The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 159n, 193n, 200n, 265n, 656n, 746n–7n, 749n, 764n–5n, 774n ‘Treatment of Dry Pleurisy by Temporary Artificial Pneumothorax’ (Lucas, G.; Vrooman, P.), 484n

848   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 ‘The Treatment of Infectious Disease by Leucocytolysis Produced by Rontgenisation of the Spleen’ (Manoukhin, I.), 77n, 140n Treaty of Versailles, 619n Tregarvon (Key, A.), 248n Trench, Frederic Herbert, 623, 624n, 652 ‘Apollo and the Seaman’, 652 (tr.) Death of the Gods, 652 Deirdre Wedded and other Poems, 652 New Poems, 652 Ode from Italy in Time of War, 652 Poems, with Fables in Prose, 652 Trench, Lilian, 214, 652–3 Trevelyan, George Macaulay, 654 Trevelyan, Robert Calverly (Bob), 142, 654 The Pterodamozels, 654–5, 655n Trilby (du Maurier, G.), 270n Trinder, Harry, 264n, 677, 678n, 681n Trollope, Anthony, 370, 371n, 547, 559, 560n Trollope: A Bibliography (Sadleir, M.), 547 Trollope: A Commentary (Sadleir, M.), 547 Trowell, Arnold (Thomas), 7, 418n, 657–8, 658n, 660n, 662–3, 663n, 672n, 703n–4n, 709, 711n Morceaux caractéristiques, 658, 712n ‘Rêverie du Soir’, 660n, 711n Trowell, Dorothy (Dolly), 657, 658n, 662, 666, 674, 677, 702, 707n, 708–10 Trowell, Garnet, 7, 657, 658n, 662–3, 663n–4n, 666, 666n, 668, 670–1, 672n–3n, 674, 675n, 676–7, 679–84, 684n, 687, 691–2, 695n, 696–7, 700, 702n, 704n–5n, 706

Trowell, Kate (née Wheeler), 665–6, 678, 684n, 707–11 Trowell, Lindley Barnett, 658n Trowell, Thomas Luigi, 662, 666n, 706–10, 707n, 709n The Tsar and the Revolution (Merezhkovsky, D.; Gippius, Z.), 85n tuberculosis, 6, 19, 37, 40n, 47n, 68n, 77n, 84n, 105n, 123n, 138–9, 141n, 173n, 179n, 215n, 217n–18n, 226n, 255n, 274n, 288n, 316, 318, 484n, 505n, 609n, 632, 755n, 770n Turgenev, Ivan, 107n, 236, 236n, 265n, 570n Fathers and Sons, 236n Rudin, 236, 236n Smoke, 265n Turkey, 177n, 241n, 445, 715, 768n Turkish Embassy Letters (Montagu, M.), 177n Turner, Corrine, 380n Turner-Schaerer, Gertrude, 699n ‘Turning the Tables: Katherine Mansfield and W. L. George’ (Marshall, A.), 134n Tweed, Marion, 713–14 Two Bucks Without Hair and Other Stories (Millin, S.), 154n Two Fishers (Palmer, H.), 411 Two Foe-Men and Other Poems (Palmer, H.), 413n ‘Two Sketches’ (Chekhov, A.), 599n, 624n Two Stories (Woolf, V.), 741, 748n Tye, J. Reginald ‘New Zealand’, 15n Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Kandinsky, W.), 544 Ukraine, 52n, 60n, 187n, 595n, 729n Ulyanov, Vladimir Ilyich, 85n Ulysses (Joyce, J.), 65n, 97, 98n, 100n, 270n, 273, 306, 446, 448n, 508n, 517n, 581, 582n, 589, 608, 614, 750n

Uncle Vanya (Chekhov, A.), 619n Unforgotten Years (Smith, L.), 765n Unicorn Press, 627 United Kingdom, 11, 657, 706, 711n United States, 114, 153, 167n, 177n, 192n, 200n, 203n, 241n, 293n, 311, 380n, 382, 382n, 387n, 401, 437, 533, 542n, 561, 678n, 717, 744, 769n, 780; see also America ‘An Unwritten Novel’ (Woolf, V.), 749n Urewera, 149, 149n The Urewera Notebook by Katherine Mansfield (Mansfield, K., ed. Plumridge, A.), 149n Valéry, Paul, 255n Van de Velde, Esaias, 359n Ice-Skating on the Moat and Winter Landscape, 359n Van Gogh, Vincent, 338, 339n, 362, 362n, 544 Sunflowers, 362n The Veil and Other Poems (de la Mare, W.), 299n, 303n Venus de Milo, 370, 371n, 688, 690n Vera (von Arnim, E.), 295, 297n, 531 Verdi, Giuseppe, 662 Verkhovensky, Stepan Trifimovich, 103n, 505n Verlet, Alice, 658 Versailles, 240, 241n, 243n, 272n, 545, 687–8, 689n–90n Victoria and Albert Museum, 11 Victoria Palace Hôtel, 32, 81, 83–5, 87–90, 92, 93n, 303, 306, 314, 363–4, 438–43, 460–5, 513, 515, 528, 554–8, 606–10, 631, 735 Vie de Bohème (Williams, O.), 735n ‘La Vie en fleur’ (France, A.), 579n The Vienna Café, 696, 698n Vilaplana, Cristina ‘A Literary Approach to Tuberculosis: Lessons Learned from Chekhov, Franz Kafka, and Katherine Mansfield’, 140n

index  849 Villa Flora, 69n, 119, 328, 330–1, 494–5, 561, 563, 590, 599, 616, 621, 622n Villa Isola Bella, 21, 27–9, 73, 120–1, 145, 199, 201n, 282–4, 333, 335– 6, 338–41, 343, 345, 399, 412, 498, 501, 503–4, 547–9, 565–6, 568–9, 571, 571n, 573–5, 599, 601–2, 624, 639–40, 717, 720, 722–3, 725, 727, 734, 773, 775 Villa Pauline, 165–6 Vinogradoff, Igor, 159 Vintras, Louis, 429, 430n ‘The Silver Net’, 429, 430n ‘Violet’ (Mansfield, K.), 403 Virgin Mary, 195n, 200n Virginia Woolf and S. S. Koteliansky: Translations from the Russian (ed. Clarke, S.), 102n–3n Virginia Woolf: Icon (Silver, B.), 745n Visiak, E. H., 399 The Visionary D. H. Lawrence (Montgomery, R. E.), 170n Vogue, 112n, 304, 305n, 557, 557n Voices, 311–12, 593, 595n Volokhonsky, Larissa (tr.) War and Peace, 214n, 369n ‘Voltaire’ (Strachey, L.), 278, 279n Voltaire, 301, 302n–3n, 690n Lettre sur les Anglais, 302n Lettres philosophiques, 302n see also François-Marie Arouet The Von Richtofen Sisters (Green, M.), 170n ‘The Voyage’ (Mansfield, K.), 450n, 631n The Voyage Out (Woolf, V.), 174, 174n, 644, 744 Vrooman, Peter ‘Treatment of Dry Pleurisy by Temporary Artificial Pneumothorax’, 484n Wagner, Richard, 662, 684n, 686n, 689n, 710n The Mastersingers of Nuremburg, 684n, 689n

850   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Wainwright, John, 484n Walker, Jennifer, 124n, 293n Elizabeth of the German Garden – A Literary Journey, 124n, 650n Wallace, Lewis Alexander Richard, 362n–3n, 376, 396 Walpole, Hugh, 3, 114, 116, 123, 124n, 278, 279n, 585, 586n, 626, 650, 716–18, 719n, 720, 733 The Captives, 718 The Dark Forest, 717 The Herries, 717 The Secret City, 717 ‘Walpole’s Letter’ (Strachey, L.), 279n War and Peace (1904) (Tolstoy, L., tr. Garnett, C.), 105n, 191, 191n, 214n, 239, 239n, 570n, 600n War and Peace (2007) (Tolstoy, L., trs Pevear, R.; Volokhonsky, L.), 214n, 368n War-Time Silhouettes (Hudson, S.), 562 War: The Offspring of Fear (Russell, B.), 534n Warlock, Martin, 719, 719n The Waste Land (Eliot, T. S.), 65n, 525, 728n ‘The Watering Place’ (Woolf, V.), 751n Waterlow, Sydney, 209, 210n, 295, 721–2, 724n, 726n, 728n–9n Watson, Robert McKenzie History of Samoa, 200n Watts, George Frederic, 714, 715n Hope, 714, 715n Love and Life, 714, 715n The Waves (Woolf, V.), 744 The Way of All Flesh (Butler, S.), 241n–2n The Way of the World (Congreve, W.), 302n Webb, Beatrice, 391n, 638 The Prevention of Destitution, 391n Webb, Sidney The Prevention of Destitution, 391n

Weber, Shirley, 392, 393n Weekley, Ernest, 80n, 170n The Weekly Westminster Gazette, 117, 460n Welbeck Abbey, 244, 246n Wellington, 13, 19, 34, 54n, 137, 150n, 156n, 230n, 407, 433, 436, 466, 468–70, 471n, 477, 510n, 529, 657, 659–60, 660n–1n, 662, 703n, 706, 708, 709n–11n, 713, 756n Wellington Girls’ High School, 529 Wells, Herbert George, 42n, 127n, 139, 141n, 374n, 377, 379, 387, 389n, 396, 398–9, 445, 650n Ann Veronica, 390n Love and Mr Lewisham, 390n The Wesleyan Magazine, 413n West, Rebecca, 98, 132n, 300, 302n, 445, 527, 549n, 612, 612n, 668n; see also Cicely Isabel Fairfield The Western Daily Mercury, 638 Westminster Palace Hotel, 662 Westminster School, 142, 437 Wheels (ed. Sitwell, E.), 143 Whisky Galore (Mackenzie, E.), 131 Whispering Gallery, 607, 607n ‘Whispers of Immortality’ (Eliot, T. S.), 766n Whistler, James Abbott McNeill, 196, 198n, 431, 432n Arrangement in Grey and Black no. 1, 198n Nocturne: Grey and Gold – Westminster Bridge (1872–4), 432n Symphony in White, 198n White, Arthur, 16n The White Peacock (Lawrence, D. H.), 46n, 60n Whitechapel Art Gallery, 11 Whiteley, Giles ‘Mansfield, Chekhov and the Sneezing Sheep’, 84n Whitman, Walt, 191n, 210, 211n Leaves of Grass, 191n, 211n

Wickham, Edward Charles, 208n Horace for English Readers: Being a Translation of the Poems of Quintus Horatius Flaccus into English Prose, 208n The Wife and Other Stories (Chekhov, A.), 750n Wilcox, Ella Wheeler, 238n ‘The Pilgrim Fathers’, 238n ‘A Wild Thing’ (Williams, O.), 735n Wilde, Oscar, 146, 197n, 379, 430n, 468n, 588, 657 Wilensky, Marjorie, 434n Wiley, Kate Pet Marjorie and Sir Walter Scott: The Story of Marjorie Fleming, 648n Wilkin, Simon (ed.) The Works of Thomas Browne, 770n Wilkinson, Eileen, 637 ‘Will O’ the Mill’ (Stevenson, R. L.), 431n–2n Will Shakespeare (Dane, C.), 586n William Collins and Son, 5, 365, 366n, 464, 464n Williams, Gladys, 418, 419n Williams, Leonard, 576n Williams, Mark, 136 Maoriland: New Zealand Literature, 1872–1914, 137n Williams, Orlo, 733–5, 734n–5n ‘Gallipoli: Memories of a Gallant Adventure’, 734n The Good Englishwoman, 734, 735n A Patch of Romantic Paris, 735n Vie de Bohème, 735n ‘A Wild Thing’, 735n Williamson, C. N., 446 Willis, J. H., 654 Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press 1917–1941, 655n Wilson, Amy Gwen, 199, 201n Wilson, Duncan

index  851 Leonard Woolf: A Political Biography, 722n Wilson, Florence Roma Muir, 123n, 288n, 310n; see also Romer Wilson Wilson, Janet (ed.) Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary Volume of Essays, 778n Wilson, Nicola ‘“So now tell me what you think!”: Sylvia Lynd’s Collaborative Reading and Reviewing, and the Work of an Interwar Middlewoman’, 117n Wilson, Romer, 123, 123n, 126, 287, 288n, 310n The Death of Society: Conte de Fée Premier, 123n, 288n If All These Young Men, 123n, 288n see also Florence Roma Muir Wilson Wilson, Thomas Woodrow, 181n, 240, 241n, 541, 542n ‘The Wind Blows’ (Mansfield, K.), 54n, 545, 661n Windsor Art Academy, 663 Wingley (cat), 6, 61n, 66, 67n, 94n, 319, 320n, 322–3, 330, 334, 350, 350n, 354, 357, 359–61, 371, 374n, 737–8, 762n ‘Wings of a Dove’ (Mendelssohn, F.), 750n ‘The Winter Fire’ (Mansfield, K.), 697, 699n The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare, W.), 294n Wise, Thomas James The John Keats Memorial Volume, 285, 286n Wishart, Margaret, 684, 686n, 699, 701n–2n The Witch and Other Stories (Chekhov, A., tr. Garnett, C.), 735n, 750n

852   collected letters of katherine mansfield, vol. 2 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 532 Tractatus Logico-philosophicus, 532 Wolf, Blanche, 25 Wolfe, Humbert, 411 ‘Herbert Palmer’, 412n ‘The Woman at the Store’ (Mansfield, K.), 545 Woman Bathing in a Stream (Rembrandt), 371n The Woman Who Did (Allen, G.), 382n Women and Labour (Schreiner, O.), 156n Women in Love (Lawrence, D. H.), 36, 100n, 110, 123n, 170n, 177n, 180n, 191n, 292, 293n, 522n The Women’s Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide (Crawford, E.), 729n Wood, Clara Finetta (Woodie), 420, 421n, 715 Wood, Henry Joseph, 4n, 11–12, 12n, 191n, 665n Wood, T. Martin, 652 ‘The Staging of Plays, And a Conversation with Mr. Herbert Trench’, 652n Woodhead, Eileen, 658 Woodhouse, Richard, 286n, 295 Woods, Joanna, 35–6, 428 Katerina: The Russian World of Katherine Mansfield, 37n ‘Tall (and Short) Dark Strangers: KM and Foreign Men’, 37n Woolf, Leonard, 3, 8, 34, 42n, 46n, 87n, 89n, 92n, 107n, 178n, 193n, 199, 210n, 223, 224n, 244n, 246n, 279n, 290, 291n, 411, 643, 648n, 650, 654, 656n, 721–2, 739–42, 742n, 744, 746n–9n, 751, 752n–3n, 758, 762, 763n, 769n, 771n An Autobiography, 107n, 164n, 246n, 741n–2n, 752n (tr.) The Gentleman from San Francisco and Other Stories, 89n

International Government, 722 ‘Kot’, 37n, 98 Letters of Leonard Woolf, 742n (ed.) The Letters of Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey, 164n, 645n (tr.) Reminiscences of Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy, 107n, 244n, 291n Sowing: An Autobiography of the Years 1880–1904, 645n ‘Three Jews’, 748n Woolf, Virginia (née Stephen), 1, 3, 8, 46n, 63n, 66n, 72n, 74n, 92n, 98n, 102n, 107n, 114, 119n, 126, 127n, 157, 161, 174n, 178n, 183n, 191n, 193n, 200n, 205n, 209n–10n, 213n, 216n–17n, 223, 224n, 228n, 241n, 244n, 246n, 249n, 265n, 267n–8n, 274n, 279n, 291n, 297n, 379, 389n, 472, 478, 593n, 615n, 638–9, 639n, 644, 645n, 647n–8n, 650, 655, 656n, 698n, 721, 733, 735n, 739–41, 743–6, 745n–7n, 749n–53n, 758n–60n, 763n–6n, 768n–71n, 774n ‘Character in Fiction’, 639n The Common Reader, 762n–3n ‘The Eccentrics’, 760n, 763n ‘A Haunted House’, 209n A Haunted House: The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, 751n Jacob’s Room, 748n ‘Kew Gardens’, 127n, 209n, 268n, 291n, 741, 749n, 766n, 768n The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 159n, 193n, 200n, 265n, 656n, 746n–7n, 749n, 764n–5n, 774n ‘The Mark on the Wall’, 127n, 291n, 747n, 750 ‘Modern Fiction’, 127n, 389n, 735n, 762n ‘Modern Novels’, 127n, 379, 761, 762n Monday or Tuesday, 126, 127n, 291n

‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, 379 Mrs Dalloway, 744, 750n ‘The New Biography’, 645n Night and Day, 114, 118, 119n, 174n, 745, 758n ‘The Novels of Defoe’, 763n Orlando, 178n, 733, 745n ‘Reading’, 770n A Room of One’s Own, 744 ‘The Russian Background’, 66n ‘The Russian Point of View’, 183n ‘Sketch of the Past’, 745n ‘The String Quartet’, 291n ‘Tchehov’s Questions’, 750n ‘Thomas Browne’, 770n Three Guineas, 744, 745n To the Lighthouse, 744 Two Stories, 741, 748n ‘An Unwritten Novel’, 749n The Voyage Out, 174, 174n, 644, 744 ‘The Watering Place’, 751n The Waves, 744 Wordsworth, An Anthology (Wordsworth, W.), 323n Wordsworth, William, 126, 128n, 323, 323n, 356, 426n ‘The Idiot Boy’, 426n ‘It is a beauteous evening, calm and free’, 128n Peter Bell: A Tale in Verse, 356, 356n Wordsworth, An Anthology, 323n The Works of Thomas Browne (ed. Wilkin, S.), 770n World Literature Publishing House, 52n, 86n, 91n–2n, 244n A World of Light: Portraits and Celebrations (Sarton, M.), 72n, 76n World War One, 11, 46n, 99n, 134n, 143, 217n, 221n, 244n, 259n, 272n, 437, 527, 532, 545–6, 565n, 608n, 632, 643, 654, 657, 707, 730n, 733, 734n, 743, 753n World War Two, 11, 12n, 311, 318, 533, 637, 663, 743

index  853 Wortley, Edward, 177n The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, 43n Wuthering Heights (Brontë, E.), 268n Wyspianski, Stanislaw, 12n, 183n The Judges, 183n Yeats, W. B., 146, 157, 396, 630 ‘Easter, 1916’, 630, 630n ‘The Yellow Book’, 146, 388n ‘The Yellow Chrysanthemum’ (Mansfield, K.), 146 Young, Alexander Filson, 627, 628n ‘The Things that Matter’, 628n Young, Brett, 30, 31n, 115n, 553n, 780–2 The Black Diamond, 30, 31n, 553n The Red Knight, 115n, 780–1 Young Eliot: From St Louis to The Waste Land (Crawford, R.), 729n Young, James Carruthers, 398 Young Lorenzo: Early Life of D. H. Lawrence (Lawrence, L. A.; Gelder, G. S.), 60n, 167n The Young Visiters (Ashford, D.), 266, 268n, 647, 648n Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), 14 ‘Youth & the Bright Medusa’ (Cather, W.), 5, 28 Youth and Bright Medusa (Cather, W.), 28n Yska, Redmer, 15, 16n A Strange Beautiful Excitement, Katherine Mansfield’s Wellington Childhood, 1888–1903, 15n Zola, Emile, 394, 394n La Joie de vivre, 394n Les Rougon-Macquart, 394n Zuleika Dobson (Beerbohm, M.), 197n Zytaruk, George J. (ed.) The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, 72n–3n, 81n, 112n–13n, 167n, 173n, 180n, 190n, 209n, 238n, 242n, 248n–9n, 448n, 763n