Katherine Mansfield at Chateau Prieurē

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Katherine Mansfield at Chateau Prieuré — a New Attitude From an essay on Mansfield and Russian Literature delivered at the Katherine Mansfield Society Symposium, Menton, France, 2009 William Direen

Alfred Orage was a mentor of Katherine Mansfield. When they first met in 1910, Orage had been editing The New Age for three years. With his help she rented a 2-roomed flat in Chelsea. Orage and the writer Beatrice Hastings had to be “cruel to be kind” to Mansfield, but she responded to their treatment. Orage’s influence endured up to the time of her death. In 1914, Orage met the Russian P. D. Ouspenski who was to have a big influence on both Orage’s and Mansfield’s philosophies of art and life; at the same time, the translation of Russian authors into English was in full swing. John Middleton Murry and Samuel Solomonovich Koteliansky were working on Chekhov’s The Bet & Other Stories (1915), Murry would publish an introduction to Dostoevski in 1916, Koteliansky worked with Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Murry, Gilbert Cannan and Mansfield herself to collaborate on and perfect his translations of Russian authors. The race was on for publication. Constance Garnett would “pip” Koteliansky and Mansfield’s translation of Chekhov’s letters “at the post” in 1920 — a big disappointment to both ‘Kot’ and to Mansfield. Katherine Mansfield was reading Russian literature, and even dreaming of it, from 1907 to 1922. * *

Russian literature was written in medieval Slavic, the ecclesiastical tongue, for a long time (much as Thomas More wrote Utopia in Latin), but with Pushkin came literature in Russian, from which a folk and ecclesiastical iconology was inseparable. The Bible wasn’t translated into Russian from Slavic until the 19th century and then it was mainly the New Testament, extracts from which Dostoevski cleverly worked into his novels (Stavrogin’s Confession in The Possessed, Raskolnikov’s transformation in Crime and Punishment to give only two examples). In Orthodox belief, the Good Thief along with Mary Magdalene represent the highest forms of saintliness through repentance. They are cited in the most important prayers of Orthodox liturgy and their examples of humility and transformation can be felt in story after story from Pushkin to Chekhov. Dostoevski investigates the idea of the good criminal in works beginning in the 1840s with “An Honest Thief’. Crime and Punishment’s Raskolnikov can be seen as a variant, and Father Zossima’s visitor in The Brothers Karamazov repents and is transformed, or is transformed and repents — Katherine Mansfield dreamed of Fr Zossima on February 13th, 1916. And in the dream he says “Do not let the new man die” . Shortly before her death in 1923 Katherine Mansfield told Alfred Orage that she now believed the role of a writer is to communicate an attitude to the reader: “An artist communicates not his vision of the world, but the attitude which results in his vision; not his

dream, but his dream-state; and as his attitude is passive, negative, or indifferent, so he reinforces in his readers the corresponding state of mind.” She called her previous attitude “a little mischievous”, calling her ‘slices of life’ “partial” and even “misleading”. According to Orage she said “my attitude … stood in need of a change if it was to become active instead of passive.” She had been a “selective camera without a creative principle”. Her aim was to widen the scope of her camera and to employ it – actively – for a conscious purpose, “that of representing life not only as it appears to a certain attitude, but as it appears to another, a different attitude, a creative attitude.” Orage, using a Christian symbolism present in her work (as in the poem, To God the Father) and found everywhere in 19th century Russian literature, suggests such a change of attitude is a bit like coming down from a cross, “a cross of amused suffering”. K.M. agrees with him, but she is conscious of subtle censure from Orage, since she asks “Do you think it is very presumptuous of me”. Orage, it is true, once unmistakeably censured her changeable nature. On May 16th, 1912, in The New Age, writing under the pseudonym of R. H. Congreve, he (& perhaps the formidable Beatrice Hastings had a hand in it), had written of Mrs Marcia Foisacre’s transformational powers to a certain Tremayne (meant to represent Murry), who had condescended to undertake her “serious education”. “With you (Tremayne) she assumes

the mask of satire. She probably discovered quite early in your acquaintance that satire amused you and produced in you a flattering estimate of herself. What more natural, then, than that she should wear satire in your company and forswear sentimentality? But I dare guess that in other circles she forswears satire with as much conviction.” Later Congreve unkindly suggests that Tremayne will have with her nothing more exhilarating than “a rough and tumble with Proteus.” But she had been through a lot in the interim. In 1922, Katherine Mansfield was desperate for a new approach. As Orage notes, she couldn’t read her early work without feeling “self-contempt”; and on October 26th she wrote, “What I write seems so petty. In fact, I can’t express myself in writing just now. The old mechanism isn’t mine any longer, and I can’t control the new.” The old mechanism, which had served her well, involved the accumulation of striking descriptive-narrative details, generating a kind of hypertension, an occasionally claustrophobic atmosphere resolved by means of genial and revelatory narrative devices. William New makes the observation that the shift from “specific documentary facts to subjective approximations” brings about a shift in the reader’s sympathy, so that “her [Mansfield’s] domain is the Chekhovian moment of truth, the Joycean revelation”.

The moment of revelation and transformation was not the consequence of an intellectual game, its arrival at the decisive moment of her stories frees them (and Mansfield) from accumulating feelings of disgust, and what Orage calls resentment, which may be felt in the impecunious situations, impossible loves and desperate loneliness of her characters. Furthermore, I’d suggest that this structural approach to narration may have been limiting her to the short story form. In 1916 she wrote “…if I do go back [to England] with a book finished, it will be a profession de foi pour toujours. Why [emphasised] do I hesitate so long?” She answers this by setting a table in her room and deciding to knuckle down to the task of completing stories, but she answered this question differently five years later, when, to break free from her old attitude she stopped writing her appealing and highly readable stories and set to work on herself. Orage relates how she tore up the beginnings of a few stories before his eyes. To develop a new attitude and to communicate it to her readers she needed to transform herself. Gurdjieff had bought a former Carmelite priory for himself and his followers to develop themselves, with the hope that their researches would eventually help humanity to develop. This would be the site for her transformation. The Wise men from the East had arrived. Mansfield had attended the lectures of Ouspenski and met him, and she had been recommended to the Greek-Armenian Russian

Gurdjieff, who was pursuing an idea of the collective – members had moved across a Western Russia in full revolution, Essentuki, Tuapse, Dresden, Berlin, Paris. They were, in a sense, ambassadors of the world of K.M.’s beloved Chekhov, and of Floryan Sobie­ nowski who had introduced her to Russian literature and to Chekhov. Ouspenski and Gurdjieff embodied Eastern Europe and Russia and things further East. With Orage they embodied, in a sense, Turgenyev, the superfluous man with whom K.M. was compared by the publishers of In A German Pension (1911), they embodied (Murry’s and) Koteliansky’s Dostoevski and Mansfield’s and Koteliansky’s Gorky. She was reading Chekhov on Jan 20th 1922 (the same year) — and in NB 20, she reveals “I can truly say I think of WJD [Walter de la Mare], Tchekhov, Koteliansky, HMT [Henry Major Tomlinson] and Orage every day. They are a part of my life.”) If the Russia of Koteliansky himself had arrived, so had the Eastern Europe of Orage’s Nietzsche and the East of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. So too the farther east of Orage’s Mahabarhata (lines from which are inscribed on his tomb), of Ouspenski’s seeking and that of the theosophist researchers. As for the idea of a collective, could the Prieuré have been an expression of Nietzsche’s vitalistic utopia? Might it not have had a hint, for Mansfield (and for Murry), a hint of the utopian fantasy of Rananim, notwithstanding Murry’s own description of Rananim as “probably of the same order of seriousness as Coleridge’s pantisocratic colony on the Susquehanna”. And in a sense the spirit (if not the exceptional person) of Beatrice Hastings had arrived in the form of Orage (her former partner). It is interesting to note that

Hastings was a friend of Annie Besant, social reformer and theosophist, and it was the fiery Hastings who had, years before, with Orage’s approval, been the first to publicly warn K.M. about her tendency for “lachrymose sentimentality”. As mentioned, she was probably in cahoots with Orage in the satirical articles about Mrs Marcia Foisacre – but these admonitions regarding style can only have been beneficial for K.M.’s development and the self-censorship every writer needs. We know that K.M. wrote to Orage on 9th Feb, 1921 (from Villa Isola Bella in Menton) to thank him for his “unfailing kindness” to her, “for all you let me learn from you”. She says (in the same letter she apologises for her style, saying it “sounds as if it was written with a screwdriver”), “you taught me to write, you taught me to think; you showed me what there was to be done and what not to do”; and again “how often in writing , I remember my master”. Pound pays credit to Orage in Canto 98 and George Bernard Shaw called Orage the greatest editor of the twentieth century. To say that Orage was her principal mentor in the craft of writing is not at all far-fetched. As for intellectual descent from the “cross of amused suffering” by simply willing it, in 1911 Orage may have believed it possible—in his book on Nietzsche, concerning Nietzsche’s new Europe he says as much — but in 1922, he was more under the influence of Ouspenski and Gurdjief, and Gurdjieff for one did not believe that the will was sufficient. Gurdjieff believed that one must work the body, that moral and spiritual perfection

will be hindered by a body that is not prepared. His exercises and dances were based upon a theory of breathing, and Mansfield could hardly breathe! Yet he admitted “his friend” (that’s how he described Katherine Mansfield just before his death) into the colony. She was an exception. Ouspenski relates a conversation (just before he speaks of the Château Prieuré in In Search of the Miraculous), in which one of his followers asks Gurdjieff specifically about the “robber on the cross” who underwent his transformation (causing Christ to say that he would go before Him into paradise). Gurdjieff replies, and I quote him in full: In the first place it took place on the cross, that is, in the midst of terrible sufferings to which ordinary life holds nothing equal; secondly, it was at the moment of death. This refers to the idea of man’s last thoughts and feelings at the moment of death. In life these pass by, they are replaced by other habitual thoughts. There can be no prolonged wave of emotion in life and therefore it cannot give rise to a change of being. Perhaps every artist at the point of true creativity is at that “moment of death”. If so, it’s hardly surprising that a weakened artist, never more aware of her mortality, should think

of form and method. It can’t have been without a sense of futility mixed with hope for a miracle cure, that Olgivanna Hinzenburg, who looked after Mansfield a little, listened to her talk of writing “a wonderful book”. And how much more so for Orage, who loved Mansfield, when she spoke not only of writing “a novel or two”, but of the end of her “passive, selective, and resentful attitude” and the birth of a new attitude, life-affirming, full of admiration, determination and laughter (“the laugh will be with the heroes”, she said), where “every power of the artist might be brought into play”. We can conclude that, in November and December of 1922, Katherine Mansfield had outgrown nineteenth century Russian literature, and again under the watchful eye of Orage she was maturing a new attitude connected to work method (steady work habits), to a new approach to subject matter (no more “petty” stories), and to the scale of a work, its power, its humour and “comic” aspects (“the laugh will be with the heroes”). If “Chekhovian” narrative form had been limiting her to the story, a new structural approach would allow the development of new and longer works.

NOTES References to K.M. NB are to The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, edited by Margaret Scott, Volume Two, Lincoln University Press and Daphne Brassel Associates & Whitireia Publishing, New Zealand, 1997.) The dream in which Fr Zossima says “Do not let the new man die” is found in K.M. NB II, NB34, p. 58. “An artist communicates not his vision of the world…” is quoted from Talks with Katherine Mansfield at Fontainebleau. A. R. Orage. The Century Magazine. November 1924. Reproduced in http://www.Gurdjieff-Bibliography.com The poem, To God the Father is found in Poems of Katherine Mansfield, edited by Vincent O’Sullivan. Oxford University Press. 1990, p. 37. See also A Book of Australian and New Zealand Verse, chosen by Walter Murdoch and Alan Mulgan. Oxford University Press. Melbourne. 1950. Pp. 297-8. Remarks about Mrs Marcia Foisacre by Congreve are found in the facsimile publication of the complete New Age archive. Issue of May 16th 1912, p 61. Number 3, Volume 11. See the The Modernist Journals Project for students and scholars of modernismhttp:// dl.lib.brown.edu:8081/exist/mjp/index.xml “The old mechanism isn’t mine any longer, and I can’t control the new” is quoted in

Murry’s “Introductory Note” to The Dove’s Nest and Other Stories, ed. J.M.Murry, London, Constable, June 1923. The “Chekhovian moment of truth” is found in W. H. New, Reading Mansfield and Metaphor as Form. 1999 McGill Queen University. “Why [emphasised] do I hesitate so long?” Feb 13, 1916. NB 34 op. cit. p. 57 Re: “Koteliansky’s Dostoevski and Mansfield’s and Koteliansky’s Gorky”, translations of Dostoevski and Gorky in collaboration with Murry and Mansfield appeared in 1915 and 1928 respectively. Mansfield “was reading Chekhov on Jan 20Th 1922”. Notebook 17, in K.M. NB II, p. 83. “[Orage] is a part of my life”. K.M. NB II, NB20, p. 318. Re: Rananim: the name itself seems connected to the French verb ranimer = to reanimate,to restore to life, as spring does). Lawrence hoped to establish Rananim after WWI. The group would have included Koteliansky. Re: Rananim see also Between Two Worlds. J.M. Murry. Jonathon Cape, 1935. p. 322. Beatrice Hastings’ criticism of Mansfield’s tendency for “lachrymose sentimentality” is found in the complete New Age archive op.cit. Vol 10, Number 8, Issue of 21st Dec. 1911. Thanking Orage “for all you let me learn from you”, is found in a letter ‘To A.R.Orage [9 February 1921]’ in The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, edited by Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott, Volume 4 (1920-1921). Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996. When she says, “how often in writing, I remember my master (Orage),” “writing” is

emphasised in the letter. Re: Shaw’s and Pound’s respect for Orage, see Ezra Pound in London and Paris 1908-25. James W. Wilhelm. Ch 7 p 84. Pound mentions Orage in Canto 98/ l 685. Orage’s book on Nietzsche is A. R. Orage, The Dionysian Spirit of the Age, T. N. Foulis, London, 1906. « Far from feebly sighing for a world of fixed truths and ideals, so easy to handle, these new philosophers would turn their backs upon every form of absolutism, and will only that the stage of the visible, perceptible and emotional world should be enlarged to contain more tragic, more terrible protagonists. » Nietzsche places the philosopher above the poet, Orage tells the reader on p. 128 of Nietzsche in Outline & Aphorism. For Nietzsche, Orage tells us, Art is in the service of philosophy. Even so, Mansfield, the poet-artist, was now showing that she had the will to take on a wider, and more philosophical view of the world. Gurdjieff’s conversation about the transformed thief is referred to in the penultimate chapter, Ch. 17, on p349 of Ouspenski, In Search of the Miraculous. Fragments of an Unknown Teaching. London. Routledge Kegan Paul. 1950. Mansfield’s comment about a new attitude in which “every power of the artist might be brought into play” is found in Talks with Katherine Mansfield at Fontainebleau, op. cit.