Katherine Mansfield, Illness and Death 9781399527439

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Katherine Mansfield, Illness and Death

KATHERINE MANSFIELD STUDIES

Katherine Mansfield Studies is the peer-reviewed, annual publication of the Katherine Mansfield Society. It offers opportunities for collaborations among the significant numbers of researchers with interests in modernism in literature and the arts, as well as those in postcolonial studies. Because Mansfield is a writer who has inspired successors from Elizabeth Bowen to Ali Smith, as well as numerous artists in other media, Katherine Mansfield Studies encourages interdisciplinary scholarship and also allows for a proportion of creative submissions.

Founding Editor

Dr Delia da Sousa Correa, The Open University, UK

Editors

Dr Aimée Gasston, Independent Scholar Dr Gerri Kimber, University of Northampton, UK Professor Todd Martin, Huntington University, USA International Advisory Board Elleke Boehmer, University of Oxford, UK Peter Brooker, University of Sussex, UK Stuart N. Clarke, Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, UK Robert Fraser, Open University, UK Kirsty Gunn, University of Dundee, UK Clare Hanson, University of Southampton, UK Andrew Harrison, University of Nottingham, UK Anna Jackson, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand Kathleen Jones, Royal Literary Fund Fellow, UK Sydney Janet Kaplan, University of Washington, USA Anne Mounic, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris 3, France Vincent O’Sullivan, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand Josiane Paccaud-Huguet, Université Lumière-Lyon 2, France Sarah Sandley, Honorary Chair, Katherine Mansfield Society, New Zealand Ali Smith, author Angela Smith, University of Stirling, UK C. K. Stead, University of Auckland, New Zealand Janet Wilson, University of Northampton, UK

KATHERINE MANSFIELD SOCIETY

Patron Professor Kirsty Gunn Honorary President Emeritus Professor Vincent O’Sullivan, DCNZM Honorary Vice-Presidents Emeritus Professor Angela Smith Emeritus Professor C. K. Stead, ONZ, CBE, FRSL

COMMITTEE

President Professor Todd Martin Vice-President Dr Janka Kascakova Secretary Dr Erika Baldt Treasurer Dr Alex Moffett Postgraduate Representative Joe Williams Events Coordinator Dr Tracy Miao Newsletter Editor Moira Taylor

Katherine Mansfield, Illness and Death Edited by Aimée Gasston, Gerri Kimber and Todd Martin

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 © editorial matter and organisation Aimée Gasston, Gerri Kimber and Todd Martin 2024 © the chapters their several authors 2024 Cover image: Frith Wilkinson, Memory lies in my faraway home. Watercolour, 2017. Cover design: Stuart Dalziel Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10.5/12.5 New Baskerville by Cheshire Typesetting Ltd, Cuddington, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 3995 2741 5 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 3995 2742 2 (paperback) ISBN 978 1 3995 2743 9 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 3995 2744 6 (epub)

The right of Aimée Gasston, Gerri Kimber and Todd Martin 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

Acknowledgementsvii Abbreviations  viii Introduction1 Aimée Gasston CRITICISM Towards a Vegan Future: Animal Death and the First World War in Katherine Mansfield’s Fiction Brigitte N. McCray ‘Oh, those grown-ups’ Angela Smith

5 19

Jacob’s Wrestling with the Angel from Bible Myth to Walter Pater’s and Katherine Mansfield’s Stories Maurizio Ascari

39

The Deadliest Game of Snooker: Katherine Mansfield’s Great War Revisited Janka Kascakova

57

Katherine Mansfield, ‘The Cowiness of the Cow’ and Medical History71 Derek Ryan Katherine Mansfield, Elizabeth Stanley and ‘The Song of Songs’90 Erika Baldt The Spanish Lady Cannot Speak: Katherine Mansfield and ‘Miasmic Modernism’ Jessica Whyte

105

Katherine Mansfield, Illness and Death Restlessness Transformed: Revisiting the Metaphor of Tuberculosis in Katherine Mansfield’s Notebooks and Letters  Wen-Shan Shieh

121

CREATIVE WRITING Poetry Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Praeludium Chopins’ Martin Griffiths

143

‘At the Bay’ C. K. Stead

157

‘Waiting for Snow’ John Middleton Murry (with a note by Gerri Kimber)

158

CRITICAL MISCELLANY John Middleton Murry’s Unfinished Second Volume of Autobiography163 Charles Ferrall REVIEW ESSAY Katherine Mansfield, Illness, Recuperation and Re-enchantment Rishona Zimring

191

Notes on Contributors 203 Index207

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Acknowledgements

The editors would like to extend particular thanks to the judging panel for this year’s Katherine Mansfield Society Essay Prize: Professor Angela Smith, Emeritus Professor of English Studies, University of Stirling, UK, and Chair of the Judging Panel; Professor Maurizio Ascari, Professor and Head of Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures, University of Bologna, Italy; Dr Janka Kascakova, Professor of English Language and Literature, Catholic University in Ružomberok, Slovenia. The prize-winning essay, ‘Towards a Vegan Future: Animal Death and the First World War in Katherine Mansfield’s Fiction’, by Brigitte McCray, Associate Professor of English at Pellissippi State Community College in Knoxville, Tennessee, USA, is featured in this volume. We would also like to extend our sincere thanks to New Zealand artist Frith Wilkinson, for her generous permission to reproduce the front cover image. As always, our thanks go to the entire team at Edinburgh University Press for facilitating the publication of the yearbook, especially Dr Jackie Jones, Fiona Conn, Elizabeth Fraser, as well as our diligent copy-editor, Geraldine Lyons. Finally, special thanks to our indexer, Ralph Kimber, for his professionalism and scrupulous eye for detail.

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Abbreviations

Unless otherwise indicated, all references to Katherine Mansfield’s works are to the editions listed below and abbreviated as follows. Letters, diary and notebook entries are quoted verbatim without the use of editorial ‘[sic]’. NB: Mansfield frequently uses style ellipses in both her personal writing and her short stories. Where these occur the stops are double-spaced thus: . . . To avoid any confusion, all omission ellipses are therefore placed in square brackets [. . .] CL1 and CL2 The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield: Vols 1 and 2 – Letters to Correspondents, eds Claire Davison and Gerri Kimber (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020). CP The Collected Poems of Katherine Mansfield, eds Gerri Kimber and Claire Davison (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016). CW1 and CW2 The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield: Vols 1 and 2 – The Collected Fiction, eds Gerri Kimber and Vincent O’Sullivan (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012). CW3 The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield: Vol. 3 – The Poetry and Critical Writings, eds Gerri Kimber and Angela Smith (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014). CW4 The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield: Vol. 4 – The Diaries of Katherine Mansfield, including Miscellaneous Works, eds Gerri  Kimber and Claire Davison (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016).

viii

Abbreviations Letters 1–5 The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, 5 vols, eds Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984–2008).

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Introduction: Katherine Mansfield, Illness and Death Aimée Gasston

Born in colonial Wellington in 1888, Katherine Mansfield’s first encounter with disease came early, when her younger sister Gwen died of cholera in the early days of 1891. The city’s poor sanitation contributed to the proliferation of infectious disease that catalysed the family’s move from the city centre to more rural Karori.1 During her adult life in Europe, Mansfield experienced miscarriage, peritonitis, rheumatism and tuberculosis, and would take up a peripatetic existence in search of more favourable climates. The First World War of 1914–18 and the influenza pandemic of 1918–20 informed the zeitgeist of her times. This volume of essays explores the extent to which this resonant context of disease and death shaped Mansfield’s literary output and her modes of thinking. Arthur Frank has argued that ‘[s]eriously ill people [. . .] need to become storytellers’.2 Illness both stimulated and limited Mansfield’s creativity – she would write to fund her medical care while simultaneously limited by her poor health, writing in 1922: ‘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.’3 As explored in this volume, her personal writings document the increasing influence of tubercular literary predecessors such as Anton Chekhov and John Keats, while her stories function compellingly as dialogue with loved ones who have been lost  – her brother, her mother, her grandmother – and endow them with life in the process. Although D. H. Lawrence wrote unsympathetically to Mansfield: ‘you revolt me stewing in your consumption’,4 her own attitude towards her illness was generally positive and practical, and she sought to mitigate against its deleterious effects through various strategies. She submitted to a variety of experimental treatments such as radiation, and wrote 1

Aimée Gasston to her doctor, Victor Sorapure, about methods she had developed for symptom management.5 Her notebooks also demonstrate that, rather than shying away from her disease and its associations, she had a keen interest in the body, and what might be termed a scientific imagination. Writing of the experience of illness, Mansfield recorded in 1918: ‘Tchekhov has known just EXACTLY this [. . .]. I discover it in his work – often.’ She goes on to explain that she has ‘discovered the ONLY TREATMENT for consumption’, which is ‘NOT to cut the malade off from life’.6 In later correspondence, Mansfield wrote of ‘bodily suffering’ and how this had ‘changed forever everything – even the appearance of the world is not the same – there is something added. Everything has its shadow.’7 Illness cannot be cut off from life, nor can life – or any holistic representation of it – be cut off from illness. If art ‘can’t just leave the war out’, equally it cannot ignore disease, or death.8 Walter Benjamin wrote in his influential essay ‘The Storyteller’ that ‘traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel’.9 The marks of illness and loss are left all over Mansfield’s gleaming stories, their fleetingness and honesty returning us always to ‘[t]he shortness of life’.10 This introduction is also marked by brevity. The intention is to let the essays collected here speak for themselves, as Mansfield’s stories do. They are testament to the fact that her work continues to speak with clarity, integrity and vivacity, and always amongst illness and death. Notes   1. This is a connection which has been made clear by the work of Redmer Yska in A Strange Beautiful Excitement: Katherine Mansfield’s Wellington 1888–1903 (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2017).   2. Arthur W. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness and Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. xii.   3. CL2, p. 440, to Eric Pinker, 2 April 1922.  4. Letters 3, p. 209, to John Middleton Murry, 7 February 1920.   5. See CL2, pp. 634–6, to Victor Sorapure, mid-May 1921.  6. Letters 2, p. 230, to John Middleton Murry, 9 June 1918.  7. Letters 4, p. 75, to John Middleton Murry, 18 October 1920.  8. Letters 3, p. 82, to John Middleton Murry, 10 November 1919.   9. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn (London: Pimlico, 1999), pp. 83–107 (p. 107). 10. CW2, p. 366.

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Towards a Vegan Future: Animal Death and the First World War in Katherine Mansfield’s Fiction Brigitte N. McCray

‘What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?’ Wilfred Owen, ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’1 ‘I must tell you, darling, my love of cows persists. We now have three. They are real beauties [. . .] I am becoming absorbed in animals, not to watch only but to know how to care for them & to know about them. Why does one live so far away from all these things?’ Katherine Mansfield in a letter to John Middleton Murry2

During the First World War, humans and animals became entangled in complex ways. According to the British Imperial War Museum, more than 16 million animals served in the First World War and were critical for the war effort.3 Naval cat mascots, messenger dogs, pack horses and more, all produced an emotional outpouring of soldier love, illustrated in a popular and famous poster, Fortunino Matania’s ‘Goodbye Old Man’, currently owned by the Blue Cross. A wounded horse struggles on the ground as a soldier cradles the horse’s head and kisses it.4 An animal’s death was somewhat more distressing than a soldier’s because animals could not understand what was happening and it was not their choice to go. As a signaller in the Royal Field Artillery explained: The mules used to scream, you know, when they got wounded and one thing and another, they were worse than the men in a way. Of course if they were too bad you used to put a revolver bullet through their brain, like. You hear very little about the horses but my God [. . .] That used to trouble me more than the men in some respects. Because we knew – well we presumably knew – what we were there for, but them poor devils didn’t, did they?5

Katherine Mansfield, whose beloved brother died from a faulty hand grenade during a training exercise in 1915, also understood that 5

Brigitte N. McCray human violence extends to the animal and was troubled by animal death. Headless corpses of animals seemed to have haunted her. Her empathy for animals in her fiction parallels British society’s growing empathy for animals, a direct result of First World War mass death. In The Sexual Politics of Meat, Carol Adams points to animal suffering from the war as accounting for the rise of vegetarianism in the post-war period,6 a similar argument to Hilda Kean’s Animal Rights: Political and Social Change in Britain Since 1800. Kean says the animals who served with the soldiers were perceived to be partners in suffering.7 Kenneth Monteath’s Science in Diet, a thesis on vegetarianism calling for abstaining from meat to end animal cruelty, was published in 1922,8 the same year as Mansfield’s The Garden Party and Other Stories. Mansfield seems to have understood that slaughtering an animal, or using an animal, entangled her with the animal’s death, a theme evident in her fiction. I argue then that Mansfield’s fiction has a ‘vegan sensibility’, a term taken from Catherine Brown’s work on D. H. Lawrence.9 An examination of Mansfield’s human characters who abstain from meat-eating and feel empathy for animals, as well as external and internal characterisations of the animals, reveals how her fiction facilitates empathy. I suggest this empathetic presence in Mansfield’s work anticipates the possibility of total species extinction, pointing us towards a vegan future. This sensibility begins in some of her earliest stories and slowly develops throughout her oeuvre. For example, in the 1910 short story ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’, Mansfield describes the protagonist as holding a baby compared to ‘a duck with its head off, wriggling’.10 The image becomes literal much later in ‘Prelude’ (1917) when Pat chops off a duck’s head in front of Kezia and the other children.11 It is not so much the uncanny nature of the headless animal characters that disturbs the author, but the fact that without a head, the animal essence vanishes. For example, near the end of her life, while living at spiritualist G.  I. Gurdjieff’s Fontainebleau Institute, where the followers cared for and then slaughtered the animals they ate, headless pigs disturbed Mansfield, who wrote to her friend Ida Baker: ‘Two were stuck yesterday and their horrid corpses were dissected in the kitchen. They are frightful things to watch and to smell. The worse of it is until their heads are cut off they are still so pig like. But we kill them outright. That is one comfort.’12 Once the head is cut off, the animal ceases to be, a recognition she perhaps came to as she too knew she would eventually cease to be. It is significant this is one of her last letters. She had visited the Institute in one final effort to heal herself from the tuberculosis that would take her life. As she explained in a letter to Murry, she believed Gurdjieff to be ‘the only man who understands 6

Towards a Vegan Future there is no division between the body and the spirit’ (296). Or, perhaps too, the connection between the body and the mind. In cutting off the head, the ability to truly know the animal becomes lost, but if one can begin to know the animal, empathy then develops. According to Mansfield’s stories, understanding another’s suffering and death leads to empathy. Like Kezia who shouts at Pat to ‘“Put head back! Put head back!”’,13 we, too, desire to ‘put head back’ if we are to understand the animals’ experiences. However, of course, there can be no putting heads back. Examining animals and the First World War in Mansfield’s fiction allows for a significant extension of Mansfield scholarly work. Jane Nardin, Melinda Harvey and Derek Ryan have all concentrated on what Harvey calls Mansfield’s ‘menagerie’. Using a critical animal studies lens, they argue the boundary between the human and animal in Mansfield’s fiction is never static.14 I would add the fact that the boundary can be attributed to its historical context. I will read Mansfield’s fiction through a vegan lens that will illuminate the ways in which her stories correspond to the shifting emotion towards animals in post-war British society. Vegan theory differs from critical animal studies, according to theorist Laura Wright, because animal studies ‘continues to reinforce a duality in its insistence that “animals” and “humans” are of different orders and that the rights humans might grant to animals are dependent upon the ability of animals to demonstrate their likeness to us’.15 My goal is to move beyond a critical animal studies lens and place more emphasis on how animals in Mansfield’s fiction lead to empathy and understanding of violent death.

The Animal on the Plate Mansfield’s first collection of short stories, In a German Pension (1911), appeared when the philosophy of veganism, the term yet to be coined, was slowly developing. A year before the collection hit the shelves, Rupert Wheldon published what could be considered the first vegan British cookbook, No Animal Food.16 In the years leading up to the war, members of Britain’s Vegetarian Society debated the merits of further eliminating other animal by-products like dairy, eggs and cheese. The First World War disrupted that debate, while at the same time introducing the rest of British society to reducing animal by-products, all in the name of the war effort. Dugald Semple worked for the government providing information about how to create meals while rationing sugar, meat, butter and margarine. Semple went on to become one of the founding members of the Vegan Society, whose members split from the 7

Brigitte N. McCray Vegetarian Society.17 These three factors converged, illustrating how the movement came into focus. Despite having been published three years before the start of the war, Mansfield’s In a German Pension demonstrates the complex ways food and eating symbolically represent a patriarchal and imperialistic drive: ‘“England is merely an island of beef flesh swimming in a warm gulf sea of gravy”’, a character says in ‘The Modern Soul’.18 Hunger, according to these stories, is not simply a hunger for food, but for conquest and domination over land and people. As an example of anti-invasion literature, informed by what Isobel Maddison claims was a ‘national paranoia’, the ‘grotesque caricatures of the German people’, for Mansfield, did not represent her best work. In fact, she later rejected the collection and refused republication.19 However, the stories offer us insight into Mansfield’s critique of a patriarchy that seeks to dominate women and animals. Meat in the text is more associated with the male characters rather than the female characters, and scholars like Patricia Moran have observed eating is, in the collection, ‘a peculiarly feminine mode of participating in the patriarchal economy’.20 The texts offer good examples of how ‘meat is a symbol of patriarchy’.21 Yet, more notably, given the rise of vegetarianism and veganism, the collection exhibits less empathy towards animals than Mansfield’s later stories and, therefore, Mansfield’s developing oeuvre parallels society’s changing views. While stories like ‘Prelude’, ‘At the Bay’ (1921) and ‘The Fly’ (1922) slip inside the heads of animals, the In a German Pension stories simply compare humans to animals and thus illustrate that the stories represent society’s pre-war thinking about animals, the ‘like’ or ‘as’ establishing a binary. For example, the title character from ‘The Baron’ is ‘rabbit-wise’,22 babies are described as ‘piggy’ and other characters are described as an owl and a duck in the ‘Child-Who-Was-Tired’.23 In ‘The Swing of the Pendulum’ (1911), a character is like a dog.24 While the comparisons may seem as if Mansfield demonstrates the connection between human and animal, the ‘like’ or ‘as’ mark off the human from the animal. If modernist empathy, as Meghan Marie Hammond states, is best presented through the interior mind and stream-of-consciousness narration, among other modernist techniques,25 and, if we consider, as Sydney Janet Kaplan notes, how Mansfield did not fully begin her modernist experimentation with prose until ‘The Aloe’ in 1915,26 then the In a German Pension stories are like a vegetarian who only occasionally avoids eggs, cheese and dairy because the stories neglect to fully present a vegan sensibility. The vegetarian narrator of the first story in the collection, ‘Germans at Meat’ (1910), stereotypically points to Germans as gluttons whose only drive is to consume food and other nations, and yet she, too, fails 8

Towards a Vegan Future to see how entangled she is with death. Believing she is better than the Germans who overly consume animal products, the abundant descriptions of meat, filtered through the narrator’s perspective, showcase her judgement: ‘The servant brought in veal, with “sauerkraut” and potatoes [. . .] The dishes were changed for beef, red currants and spinach. They wiped their forks upon black bread and started again.’27 The narrator is disgusted by the Germans’ consumption. However, in her conversations about the potential for war, the narrator parrots nationalistic pride, the kind that drives wars.28 Furthermore, she fails to see the animals on the plates. The text details the animal products, what Carol Adams refers to as the absent referent throughout the story:29 ‘cold ham’, ‘cold fish’, ‘kidneys’, ‘liver’, all within a few paragraphs.30 In other words, the animals in this story, and throughout most of the stories in the collection, are there and yet not there. Unlike Mansfield, who lived near the animals slaughtered at Fontainebleau and looked upon them, the narrator looks at the plate without acknowledging the animal death. The text suggests that the narrator, like all of us, is not immune from the cycle of death and destruction. Is she really any better than the meat-eating Germans? No, the text implies. One of the key conflicts in the vegan community is between those who refrain from consuming animals for the sake of the animals versus those who refrain for the sake of their health. Mansfield’s character ‘the Vegetable Lady’ in ‘The Luftbad’ (1910) anticipates the contemporary debate. Mansfield, like the character, stayed at a spa in Germany where she ate a strict diet,31 an experience that perhaps led to the absurd characterisation of the Vegetable Lady. This critique further illustrates Mansfield’s vegan sensibility. We are told the Vegetable Lady lives ‘“entirely on raw vegetables and nuts”’,32 and she is just as critical of others as the narrator from ‘Germans at Meat’. To another character she says, ‘“You over-eat yourself dreadfully . . . shamelessly!”’33 While the character could be considered a vegan, her diet is so restrictive I would argue she has orthorexia, an unhealthy focus on eating healthily, behaviour Mansfield may have struggled with herself due to her mother’s chastising her about her weight.34 Anne Fernihough argues Mansfield mocked diet purity movements that were popular during the early twentieth century.35 In the story, Mansfield’s Vegetable Lady highlights that no matter how far one attempts to consume ‘“uncontaminated”’ food,36 death is inevitable. The story’s beautiful setting with bathing women basking in the sun hints at death: a man buries himself in mud,37 the characters have a conversation about ‘“death agony”’,38 and a character warns another character about how upset their stomach could get from swinging too much.39 The characters’ relaxation or health will not last. 9

Brigitte N. McCray In her essay ‘Remnants: The Witness and the Animal’, Sarah Salith notes: ‘The sight of meat makes me feel I am in the presence of the dead or remnants of the dead, even though no recognizable corpse remains.’40 It is this, I argue, that is key to a vegan sensibility, acting as a witness, revealing what later Mansfield characters will do and what the In a German Pension characters, like the Vegetable Lady, neglect. The two characters, although they resist consuming meat, fail to consider how our deaths are entangled with those of animals. As vegan theorist Laura Wright argues, ‘Since its codification as a category distinct from vegetarianism, veganism has embodied and continues to embody a profound paradox, at once concerned with the preservation of and a respect for all forms of life, even as vegans, like everyone and everything else, are participants in the cycle of life and death.’41 Mansfield’s critique shows her own vegan sensibility emerging.

Mansfield’s Critical Empathy It is in her later stories, particularly in her use of stream of consciousness, where Mansfield’s vegan sensibility is solidified. The thoughts represented in her stories beg us to look, in fact, to witness. Jacques Derrida’s seminal work on animal studies, ‘The Animal that Therefore I Am (More to Follow)’, begins with Derrida looking at his cat.42 As Sarah Slith reminds us, Derrida’s looking propels his philosophical exploration of the ontology of animals. His witnessing propels Slith’s own exploration: Does meat have a face? If so, what kinds of witnessing could it encourage?43 Mansfield’s fiction answers that question. Her characters, particularly Kezia in ‘Prelude’, are witness to the face that has vanished once the head is chopped off. In other stories, Mansfield’s use of animal perspective also acts as witness. Witnessing, according to Kari Weil in Thinking Animals, is what animal studies, and vegan theory by extension, has in common with trauma theory: ‘We can recognize the serious harms rendered to victims of horrific acts, but we cannot count on those victims to tell us their stories or what to do about them.’44 How are we able to recognise animal suffering if we are unable to know their minds or are unable to hear them speak? Critical empathy solves that problem. The creative imagining of what an animal may be feeling enables us to better understand their suffering and death, particularly how their deaths are intimately tied to our own. In Empathic Vision, Jill Bennett explains that critical empathy is a conjunction of affect and critical awareness [that] may be understood to constitute the basis of an empathy grounded not in affinity (feeling for

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Towards a Vegan Future another insofar as we can imagine being that other) but on a feeling for another that entails an encounter with something irreducible and different, often inaccessible.45

It is Mansfield’s imaginative ability to slip inside the thoughts of animals, an act her characters are able to do as well, that provides her with that critical empathy. In her excellent study on empathy and modernism, Meghan Marie Hammond argues Mansfield’s ability to slip in and out of various characters’ minds is an example of ‘communal life’, a major impact on modernist empathy.46 Hammond, however, focuses on the human characters, excluding animals from that communal life and missing Mansfield’s vital contribution to the changing nature of empathy in regards to the animal in post-war society, meaning that, in accessing the minds of animals, Mansfield supplies for us what is often inaccessible. In her story ‘An Indiscreet Journey’ (1915), her most overt First World War text, not published until a year after her death, Mansfield forces the reader to confront war death, both human and animal, and anticipates the empathic connection between animals and soldiers. That entanglement is illustrated when a group of wounded soldiers ‘stood under a lamp-post, petting a mangy, shivering dog’,47 and a page later a soldier suffering from the effects of poisonous gas inhalation is compared to a rabbit: ‘In his white face his eyes showed, pink as a rabbit’s. They brimmed and spilled, brimmed and spilled.’48 As a number of scholars have argued, Mansfield’s story is significant because it contains one of the earliest descriptions of gas attacks from the war,49 and I would add it is also significant because it ties the wounded soldiers to these animals. The use of the rabbit as a simile differs from her In a German Pension comparisons because here she is not simply comparing but specifically imagining how animals could be affected by gas attacks as well. Additionally, Mansfield’s description of the wounded soldiers with the dog creates empathy through the word choices of ‘mangy’ and ‘shivering’. The words create empathy for the dog, and they also help the reader understand the soldiers’ psychological state. More importantly, for a vegan theory, it is striking that Mansfield privileges canine descriptive details over the soldiers, suggesting she feels more at ease describing the sad state of a dog than she does the soldiers. Mansfield later develops her empathy when she slips inside the canine’s thoughts in ‘Prelude’. This prepares readers to experience empathy for the duck in the slaughtering scene, which occurs a few paragraphs later. Before this moment, the male children have been tormenting the dog, Snooker: ‘They spent half their time combing 11

Brigitte N. McCray and brushing Snooker and dosing him with various awful mixtures concocted by Pip, and kept secretly by him in a broken jug covered with an old kettle lid.’50 It is because the boys treat the dog so poorly that the narrative slips inside his perspective, as if what cruelty feels like can only be understood through a feeling for another. Mansfield writes: ‘Snooker lay down, made one feeble effort with his paw to get the handkerchief off, but finding he could not, trailed after the children, shivering with misery.’51 Slipping inside Snooker’s perspective helps readers care less for the male children who call him a fighting dog and attempt to force his ‘soft’ ears back like a fighting dog’s. Snooker tries to slip away,52 and we, too, wish he could. The war enabled this empathetic understanding of animals. In the first version of ‘Prelude’, ‘The Aloe’ (1915), the story makes explicit references to the war, as Alex Moffett notes. Mansfield eventually removed those references, and yet the text remains a significant contribution to civilian war literature because, as Moffett says, the elimination of the references to the war creates ‘an ominous undercurrent’.53 I argue that part of that undercurrent stems from the treatment of the animals in the story, treatment that is challenged through Mansfield’s use of critical empathy. My reading of ‘Prelude’ expands on previous Mansfield scholarship that sees the story illustrating the ways ‘meat is a symbol of patriarchy’.54 Kezia’s ‘“Put head back! Put head back!”’,55 points to her identification with the duck. In an article that most closely performs a vegan reading of the story, Jane Nardin notes how it ‘firmly link[s] violence against animals to violence against women’.56 It is a violence that is also responsible for war. But what if we were to read the duck as a duck? The duck scene occurs a few pages after Linda, who feels trapped by marriage and children, has dreamed of birds. Especially in those pages, but throughout the entire story, the bird imagery is dense, wings, flight patterns, and sounds.57 By the time the reader reaches the duck scene, we empathise with the duck. Filtered through Linda’s perspective, we read that birds ‘listened, they seemed to swell out with some mysterious important content, and when they were full she felt that they smiled. But it was not for her, only, their sly secret smile; they were members of a secret society and they smiled among themselves.’58 The ideological thinking that animals belong to humans leads to animal violence. Mansfield here posits, through Linda, that animals are not for us. They live their own lives, and they should be respected as such. She even writes that the ‘ducks had made themselves at home, swimming and guzzling along the weedy banks’.59 It is because of those early details about birds that we feel for the duck. Linda, like Kezia, is imaginative. In the sequel to ‘Prelude’, ‘At the Bay’ (1921), Linda is intimately tied 12

Towards a Vegan Future to the natural world, using it as a way to escape from the confines of marriage and motherhood. In an early scene of ‘Prelude’, she refuses to eat pork chops,60 and while Patricia Moran argues (using a vegetarianfeminist lens), that the refusal is a refusal of the patriarchy,61 it is also because she sees the face that had once been the animal on the plate, a witnessing that comes from her affinity with the natural world. It is through Kezia’s experience of the slaughter, however, that readers are likely to feel the most empathy for the duck as Mansfield’s structuring of the scene develops Kezia’s feelings and aids in the reader feeling that empathy. She is the most imaginative of the children, as Diane McGee argues, noting how Kezia even has a writer’s sensibility.62 A writer is able to imagine what a duck could feel. That feeling slowly develops as the reader moves through the scene. After Pat has declared to the children he will slaughter one for them, Mansfield describes them and even gives them voice and personality: “‘Qua. Quaqua-qua-qua-” answered the ducks, making for land, and slapping and scrambling up the bank.’63 The reader is intrigued enough by the movement and sounds to follow the ducks through the rest of the scene. A few sentences later, they’re described as ‘greedy’ as they eat the food Pat has given them to coax them towards him.64 At first, this anthropomorphism seems negative, but we have all also been greedy, especially when it comes to food, and our thoughts about this greed is tied directly to our anticipation for what Pat is about to do, thus feeling more for the ducks. While some could argue Mansfield’s anthropomorphism denigrates animals, this parallels the concern of contemporary vegans who worry that our anthropodenial makes it much easier to harm animals. When Pat chops off the head, the other children perform as an excited audience. It is this part of the scene in particular that helps us distinguish Kezia’s empathy from the others: ‘Watch it!’ shouted Pat. He put down the body and it began to waddle— with only a long spurt of blood where the head had been; it began to pad away without a sound towards the steep bank that lead to the stream [. . .] That was the crowning wonder. ‘Do you see that? Do you see that?’ yelled Pip. He ran among the little girls tugging at their pinafores. ‘It’s like a little engine. It’s like a funny little railway engine,’ squealed Isabel. But Kezia suddenly rushed at Pat and flung her arms around his legs and butted her head as hard as she could against his knees.65

The duck is for the children’s amusement. It is also interesting that Isabel compares the duck to a human-made object. In almost every 13

Brigitte N. McCray Mansfield story, a human is compared to an animal. Instead, with this simile, Mansfield illustrates how animals are destroyed by human technology, a possible reference to the technology used during the war. By the time we reach Kezia’s reaction, we, too, want to head-butt Pat. In using her head as a weapon, like a goat, Kezia uses an animal gesture to protest, her critical empathy giving voice to the animal dead.

Towards a Vegan Future Mansfield’s vegan sensibility culminates in her most explicit and widely published First World War story, ‘The Fly’, as well as in her final completed story, ‘The Canary’ (1922). In both, the references to animal death remind us of collective death and, as Melinda Harvey says, show Mansfield’s ‘awareness of the fact that the animal-in-itself was disappearing from everyday human life’,66 thus demanding we share in such grief. The fly is a fitting insect figure for this purpose because its very nature is intimately connected to decaying flesh. Steven Connor argues that flies have often been thought of as a kind of threshold creature, a test-case for the idea of animality itself. Flies mark and make, not so much a boundary between humans and animals, as a boundary between animals and non-animals. Flies are in this sense, not the animal other, but the other of the animal.67

Mansfield seems to have been attuned to that otherness and intrigued by it. Flies are mentioned at least three times in her letters and notebooks.68 Most scholars and readers see the fly in Mansfield’s story as a metaphor for the boss’s son who died during the war. However, if we take Connor’s theory of the fly and apply it to Mansfield’s story, the fly does not simply represent the soldier; instead, it references the rotten flesh of animals and the soldiers, pointing to the enmeshment of human and animal death. Wings in particular represent this enmeshment. Scholars like Diana Harris have asserted wings, including those of birds and flies, in Mansfield’s work, represent her own death, the TB infecting her lungs, like wings becoming unusable.69 Mansfield, who studied French entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre’s work,70 would have perhaps been aware that flies, as Connor affirms, ‘become infested by a fungus, which will slowly consume them from the inside out’,71 and it could be she imagined the TB infecting her lungs similarly. In the story, she not only enmeshes the death of soldiers and animals via the fly, but enmeshes herself with them, suggesting that all of our deaths are tied to one another in an ecosystem of grief. 14

Towards a Vegan Future As in ‘Prelude’, this is accomplished by entering the other’s perspective. That anthropomorphism leads us to understand the other of the animal, as Connor says, an even more difficult project than helping her reader to understand the animal. This slippage into the liminal space not only aids us in empathising with the other, but also the animal and ourselves as well. Mansfield writes: ‘the boss noticed that a fly had fallen into his broad inkpot, and was trying feebly but desperately to clamber out again. Help! Help! Said those struggling legs. But the sides of the inkpot were wet and slippery; it fell back again and began to swim.’72 To compare the otherness of animality with the human, forces readers to imagine our own destruction, a fear soldiers faced during the war. As Siegfried Sassoon said of the soldier, ‘He is merely a writhing insect among this ghastly folly of destruction.’73 The animals working alongside the soldiers were reduced to specks as well. So when Mansfield refers to the fly as a ‘corpse’ at the end of the story,74 our own deaths are emphasised once again, as are the deaths of animals. As Connor notes, ‘The fly comes to allow an understanding of humans and animals, not as others or brothers, but as chimerical assemblages, constituted in their mutual interferences with each other, living out each other’s lives and deaths.’75 This awareness comes through creativity, like Kezia’s ability to imagine the animal’s thoughts, illustrated again in ‘The Canary’. In the first half of the story, the narrator, mourning the bird, focuses on the singing, saying, ‘You cannot imagine how wonderfully he sang’ and describes the beauty of the birdsong.76 Creativity brings beauty, but it also brings loss, since the story hinges on the narrator’s sorrow over the bird’s death.77 In remembering the beauty, though, the narrator comes to the realisation that the beauty was not for her alone. Early in the story, in describing the canary, she says, ‘he was mine’.78 Mansfield makes clear: ownership of an animal does not mean we will understand or be able to emphasise with an animal. Instead, the story distinguishes between two types of creativity. The narrator uses the term ‘entertainment’79 to describe the bird’s singing, a contrast from the bird’s pure creativity. The bird even imagines the woman’s sorrow in feeling outcast from her lodgers and soothes the woman.80 This intimate connection is what the character realises she is truly grieving. The story’s dominant image, an empty cage, represents sorrow, and the woman’s mourning points us towards the future. Her grief is evident: ‘I loved him. How I loved him!’,81 ‘I can hardly bear to recall it’, and ‘something seemed to die in me. My breast felt hollow, as if it was his cage.’82 Overcome by the emptiness of the cage, the narrator says at 15

Brigitte N. McCray the end, ‘I must confess that there does seem to me something sad in life. It is hard to say what it is. I don’t mean the sorrow that we all know, like illness and poverty and death. No, it is something different. It is there, deep down, deep down, part of one, like one’s breathing.’83 She is mourning the disappearance of us all, which war further enables. It is through mourning the death of the canary, here representing all sentient beings, that the hope for a vegan future is realised, a future where life is equally valued and protected, a future contemporary vegans hope for as well. Notes   1. Wilfred Owen, The Poems of Wilfred Owen, ed. and intro. by Jon Stallworthy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), p. 76.  2. Letters 5, p. 325.   3. Imperial War Museum, ‘15 Animals That Went to War’, [accessed 20 July 2022].  4. The Animals In War Memorial, ‘Stories’, [accessed 20 July 2022].   5. Imperial War Museum, ‘Voices of the First World War: Animals In War’, [accessed 20 July 2022].   6. Carol Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (New York: Continuum, 1998), p. 121.   7. Hilda Kean, Animal Rights: Political and Social Change in Britain Since 1800 (London: Reaktion Books, 1998), p. 169.   8. Alexandra Medcalf, Borthwick Institute Blog, ‘Vegetarianism in World War One’ (2013), [accessed 21 July 2022].   9. Catherine Brown, ‘DH Lawrence and the Anticipation of a Vegan World’ [accessed 21 July 2022]. 10. CW1, p. 164. 11. CW1, pp. 81–2. 12. Letters 5, p. 328. 13. CW1, p. 82. 14. Jane Nardin, ‘Poultry for Dinner in Katherine Mansfield’s “Prelude” and Virginia Woolf’s “The Shooting Party”’, Midwest Quarterly, 52: 3 (spring 2011), pp. 293–306; Melinda Harvey, ‘Katherine Mansfield’s Menagerie’, in Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber, and Susan Reid, eds, Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism (London: Continuum, 2011), pp. 202–10; Derek Ryan, ‘Katherine Mansfield’s Animal Aesthetics’, Modern Fiction Studies, 64: 1 (spring 2018), pp. 27–51. 15. Laura Wright, The Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015), p. 11. 16. Leah Leneman, ‘No Animal Food: The Road to Veganism in Britain, 1909–1944’, Society and Animals, 7: 3 (1999), pp. 219–28. 17. Colin Spencer, The Heretic’s Feast: A History of Vegetarianism (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1995), p. 298.

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Towards a Vegan Future 18. CW1, p. 216. 19. Isobel Maddison, ‘Mansfield’s “Writing Game” and World War One’, in Gerri Kimber, Delia da Sousa Correa and Todd Martin, eds, Katherine Mansfield and World War One (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), pp. 42–54. 20. Patricia Moran, Word of Mouth: Body Language in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), p. 103. 21. Adams, p. 37. 22. CW1, p. 172. 23. CW1, pp. 163, 164. 24. CW1, p. 249. 25. Meghan Marie Hammond, Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2014), p. 4. 26. Sydney Janet Kaplan, Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 103. 27. CW1, p. 166. 28. CW1, p. 167. 29. Adams, p. 40. 30. CW1, pp. 164–5. 31. Anne Fernihough, Freewomen and Supermen: Edwardian Radicals and Literary Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 230–1. 32. CW1, p. 176. 33. CW1, p. 177. 34. Diane McGee, Writing the Meal: Dinner in the Fiction of Early Twentieth-Century Women Writers (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), p. 85. 35. Fernihough, pp. 118–19. 36. CW1, p. 177. 37. CW1, p. 178. 38. CW1, p. 176. 39. CW1, p. 177. 40. Sarah Salith, ‘Remnants: The Witness and the Animal’, in Emelia Quinn and Benjamin Westwood, eds, Thinking Veganism in Literature and Culture: Towards a Vegan Theory (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), p. 61. 41. Wright, p. 174. 42. Jacques Derrida, ‘The Animal that Therefore I Am (More to Follow)’, trans. by David Wills, Critical Inquiry, 28: 2 (2002), pp. 369–418. 43. Salith, pp. 62–3. 44. Kari Weil, Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now? (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), p. 17. 45. Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 10. 46. Hammond, p. 92. 47. CW1, p. 445. 48. CW1, p. 447. 49. See, for example, Josiane Paccaud-Huguet, ‘“By what name are we to call death?”: The Case of “An Indiscreet Journey”’, in Katherine Mansfield and World War One, pp. 13–25. 50. CW2, p. 78. 51. CW2, p. 80. 52. CW2, p. 80.

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Brigitte N. McCray 53. Alex Moffett, ‘Katherine Mansfield’s Home Front: Submerging the Martial Metaphors of “The Aloe”’, in Katherine Mansfield and World War One, pp. 69–83. 54. Adams, p. 37. 55. CW2, p. 82. 56. Nardin, p. 293. 57. CW2, p. 68. 58. CW2, p. 68. 59. CW2, p. 81. 60. CW2, pp. 62–3. 61. Moran, pp. 107–9. 62. McGee, p. 170. 63. CW2, p. 81. 64. CW2, p. 81. 65. CW2, p. 82. 66. Harvey, p. 209. 67. Steven Connor, ‘Making Flies Mean Something’ (Beckett and Animality 2009 conference proceedings), [accessed 22 July 2022]. 68. Letters 2, pp. 8, 283; Letters 3, p. 45. 69. Diana R. Harris, ‘Milk, Blood, Ink: Mansfield’s Liquids and the Abject’, Journal of New Zealand Literature, 32 (2014), pp. 52–67. 70. Rachel Murray, The Modernist Exoskeleton: Insects, War, Literary Form (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), p. 8. 71. Connor, online. 72. CW2, p. 479. 73. Siegfried Sassoon, Siegfried Sassoon Diaries: 1915–1918, ed. and intro. by Rupert HartDavis (London: Faber and Faber, 1983), p. 133. 74. CW2, p. 480. 75. Connor, online. 76. CW2, p. 511. 77. For another analysis of how the story responds to ecological concerns, see Sebnem Kaya, ‘Katherine Mansfield’s “The Canary” as Pointer to Deep Ecology’, Explicator, 73: 2 (2015), pp. 97–100. 78. CW2, p. 512. 79. CW2, p. 512. 80. CW2, p. 513. 81. CW2, p. 512. 82. CW2, p. 513. 83. CW2, p. 514.

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‘Oh, those grown-ups’1 Angela Smith

Even though Katherine Mansfield wrote ‘I live to write’,2 it sometimes seems as though she lived to die rather than write, as if readers find her work shadowed by her own mortality well before she was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Similarly, undergraduates writing essays on the poetry of Sylvia Plath find omens of suicide even in celebratory poems about her children. More than most early twentieth-century writers, Mansfield’s work is discussed within biographical parameters, so that the eponymous man without a temperament in that story is identified with Murry and his wife with Mansfield, living as she had to in a Mediterranean climate to avoid a British winter. Though Mansfield’s letters and diaries trace her gallant, protracted struggle with disease, my focus will be on her fiction, investigating in this essay forms of contagion that emerge as a theme very early in her stories, long before she became ill, as she explored the Empire city of her birth and then its matrix on the other side of the world. In a vignette called ‘In the Botanical Gardens’ published in November 1907 in the Australian Native Companion, Mansfield, aged nineteen, compares what she calls ‘the orthodox banality of carpet bedding’3 near the entrance to the gardens in Wellington with the bush higher up the hill; there she sees ‘a great company moving towards me, their faces averted, wreathed with green garlands, passing, passing’.4 While the children in the carpet garden appear ‘meaningless’, the vague funereal forms, passing in every sense, wreathed and lurking in the shadow, seem to see the visitor as ‘the thief of their birthright’.5 The narrator is filled with guilt, and compares cultural aspiration with racial lamentation to evoke antithetical identities. Paˉkehaˉ people look ‘reverently, admiringly, at the carpet bedding, spelling aloud the Latin names of the flowers’,6 whereas the passing of the spectral Maˉori ‘is like the sound of weeping’. 19

Angela Smith The piece hints at the histrionic influence of decadent writers such as Oscar Wilde and Ernest Dowson whose work the young Mansfield admired, but it also shows political awareness. The paˉkehaˉ children ‘seem as meaningless, as lacking in individuality, as the little figures in an impressionist landscape’,7 as if the carpet gardens as cultural markers are ephemeral compared with the ‘great company moving towards me’.8 The vignette initiates Mansfield’s exploration of cultural and social infection, and its potential spread into disease. This is anticipated in one of Mansfield’s notebooks, now known as The Urewera Notebook, written when she was nineteen. As Anna Plumridge observes in her edition of the notebook, Mansfield romanticises Maˉori in her account of her camping trip in their country, at times suggesting the ‘noble savage’ trope that prefigures evolutionary disintegration. On one page of the notebook she describes the magnificent landscape in classical terms as ‘that Elysian valley of birds’ which is ‘all so gigantic – and tragic – even in the bright sunlight it is so passionately secret’.9 Her sense of the ‘bygone essence of it all’,10 suggests that she has also been influenced by the social Darwinism of the period, predicting as it did the decline of native populations in their encounter with imperial powers. At the same time she engages with the present, making efforts to learn the language of the people she meets and watching as an astute observer: ‘And across the paddock a number of little boys come straggling along from the age of twelve to three – out at elbow – bare footed – indescribably dirty – but some of them almost beautiful – none of them very strong.’11 Anna Plumridge comments that ‘within the Urewera, Mansfield demonstrated an interest in and respect for people who adopted both Maori and European modes of living’ and ‘was fascinated by the fusion of cultures’.12 Plumridge notes that, after a conversation between Mansfield, her companion Millie Parker and two Maˉori men, ‘Mansfield quotes the men’s Maori; Millie mocks their English’.13 Millie’s confidence in her sense of racial superiority is unquestioning. The interest Mansfield shows in babies and children in The Urewera Notebook anticipates her fiction set in Wellington. In rereading all Mansfield’s stories I have become aware of a preoccupation with psychologically and physically sick children, many of whom are damaged by their cultural context. That context is concisely evoked by Vincent O’Sullivan: Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp was born into a family, and a country, constantly checking themselves in a mirror. So much of their reality had to do with how ‘Britain’ was reflected in their values and assumptions, with

20

‘Oh, those grown-ups’ how they gave back, at times in aggressive miniature, features defined on the other side of the world.14

Living in what was known as ‘the Empire city’, ‘the more loyalty you had to “Home”, the more you believed yourself a New Zealander’.15 The effect of this mimicry is clear in the savage satire in Mansfield’s late stories about children as they parrot the cruel class attitudes of their parents. The target here is not the racism shown in Millie Parker’s mockery of Maˉori, which is one form of infection, but the transference across the world of British snobbery and class consciousness. The playground is a notoriously potent site of humiliation. In ‘The Doll’s House’ (1921) the two washerwomen’s children are chewing their jam sandwiches at lunchtime, isolated from their schoolfellows who are eating mutton sandwiches and cake. Their classmate Lena wants to provoke them: She put her hands on her hips; she shot forward. ‘Yah, yer father’s in prison!’ she hissed, spitefully. This was such a marvellous thing to have said that the little girls rushed away in a body, deeply, deeply excited, wild with joy. Someone found a long rope, and they began skipping. And never did they skip so high, run in and out so fast, or do such daring things as on that morning.16

The regrettable fact is that this takes place in a rural school, ‘not at all the kind of place their parents would have chosen if there had been any choice’. Though the judge’s daughters had to mix with the milkman’s, ‘the line had to be drawn somewhere. It was drawn at the Kelveys.’17 The bourgeois schoolgirls and Kezia’s Aunt Beryl feel they have scored a famous victory against ‘those little rats of Kelveys’,18 but other stories, set in Wellington, hint that the poor may have taken an unwitting revenge on their social superiors. Redmer Yska’s recent book, A Strange Beautiful Excitement: Katherine Mansfield’s Wellington 1888–1903, demonstrates, with its painstaking archival research, that polluted water supplies and plumbing were causing epidemics in the late nineteenthcentury Empire city: ‘As waste filled the ditches and piled up around the harbour, the funerals began. In 1885, 63 locals, mostly in Te Aro, sickened and died from acute infectious diseases, including typhoid, diphtheria, scarlet fever, measles, even cholera.’19 Mansfield’s baby sister Gwendoline died of cholera in 1891 and her contagious body was hastily buried. This mirrors not late but mid-Victorian London, the contagious world of Dickens’s Bleak House, rather than the Empire city’s looking-glass likeness at the end of the century. A municipal official attacked the council for its insouciance about the excrement tipped into the harbour: 21

Angela Smith Numbers of children . . . particularly on sunny days . . . congregated about the mouths of the main sewers of the city, just where the contents empty into the bay, amusing themselves by fishing etc, and seated in many cases right in the midst of the odours that arise from the drains.20

As Yska astutely comments, remarks in the stories that have probably mostly been assumed to be supercilious sneers might be motivated by adult concern for children. Aunt Beryl in ‘The Doll’s House’ scolds Kezia for allowing the Kelveys into the house: ‘“You know as well as I do you’re not allowed to talk to them.”’21 In ‘The Garden Party’ the Sheridans’ mansion is close to working-class cottages: ‘When the Sheridans were little they were forbidden to set foot there because of the revolting language and of what they might catch.’22 Beauchamp family members died of typhoid causing Harold Beauchamp to move his family to Karori in 1893 to escape from what Stanley in ‘Prelude’ thinks of as ‘that hole of a town’.23 Yska suggests that his mounting anxiety as he travels home from work may be prompted by his awareness of epidemics: ‘A sort of panic overtook Burnell whenever he approached near home. Before he was well inside the gate he would shout to anyone within sight: “Is everything all right?” And then he did not believe it was.’24 Mansfield never forgot the death of her baby sister, describing it in minute detail in her diary in 1917 and wondering about the passivity of the baby.25 She remembered a photographer coming to take a memorial photograph of Gwen. Yska comments that Mansfield ‘kept a copy of the photo, the doll’s house visible in the background, in a frame on her bedside table for the rest of her life’,26 probably partly because the photograph also shows her beloved grandmother. The 1917 description of Gwen makes clear how the baby’s features are chiselled into her sister’s memory: ‘She lay in Grandmother’s arms, her eyes just open to show a line of blue, her face very white & one tuft of goldy hair standing up on her head.’27 The infant Mansfield was puzzled by Gwen’s stillness, as she seems to have been later when she encountered Paul, the ailing son of Mr Dombey, in Dickens’s Dombey and Son. She refers to him in her letters and recalls that ‘I could make the girls cry when I read Dickens in the sewing class.’28 Possibly the sewing class was sobbing over the death of philosophical little Paul who asks his puzzled father, ‘“What’s money after all?”’ Paul’s meditative inquiry unnerves his father as well it might since Mr Dombey’s belief in capitalism is profound. Paul is what Gwen may have seemed to her sister to be, a thoughtful child. Mansfield wrote a series of whimsical stories and verses for children about the Thoughtful Child that were designed to be the text for a book to be illustrated by her friend Edith Bendall.29 They are sentimental 22

‘Oh, those grown-ups’ and cloying but there is a dark thread in all of them, most evidently in the one simply entitled ‘The Thoughtful Child’ (1908).30 Admitting as an adult in her diary her envy of Gwen, who displaced her from her grandmother’s lap, Mansfield wrote of her anticipated infant revenge on the baby: ‘I decided that even when she did play with the dolls house I would not let her go upstairs into the bedrooms.’31 The Thoughtful Child feels a similar envy of her newborn brother. She had been happy with the Shadow Children in her garden but when she asked them who they were they disappeared, and her brother took their place, to the Child’s disgust: ‘She wished Brother had never come. He could not play or talk inside him.’32 To her delight he dies, and the reader discovers who the Shadow Children are: ‘“Brother,” she said, in the “inside” voice, “are you a shadow child?” “Yes,” he answered, “I’ve come to play. Let’s go sunbeam-catching.”’33 The story has a macabre conclusion in which the Child comforts her parents with the news that her dead brother is playing in the garden, a ghostly but cheerful Shadow Child. In ‘Evening Song of the Thoughtful Child’, one of the collection’s verses, the Shadow Children come indoors: Shadow children, thin and small, Now the day is left behind, You are dancing on the wall, On the curtains, on the blind.34

There are many shadow children as there were many shadowy figures in the Botanical Gardens, betrayed by expansionist imperialism. The perky tone of the Thoughtful Child stories belies the writer’s underlying consciousness of the dead whose lives have been sacrificed to bureaucratic incompetence and carelessness. Unsurprisingly the poems and stories for children were not accepted for publication. Another Thoughtful Child story, ‘A Suburban Fairy Tale’, was written about ten years later, in 1919. Little B. is breakfasting with his parents but he ‘was not at all the child that such parents had every right to expect’.35 His plump parents are clearly revelling in food; rationing is a thing of the past and they gloat over the prospect of eating a hare: ‘they looked across at each other and there floated between them the Scotch hare in its rich gravy with stuffing balls and a white pot of redcurrent jelly accompanying it’.36 Little B. is tiny, weak, easily winded and uninterested in food. A flock of hungry sparrows alights on the lawn, fluttering and cheeping. As Little B. watches they ‘turned into tiny little boys, in brown coats, dancing, jigging outside, up and down outside the window squeaking, “Want something to eat”’.37 As Mr B. reads his newspaper, grumbling about the ‘fake’ news of famine it reports, Little 23

Angela Smith B. begs his parents to listen to the squeaking boys. They take no notice. When his parents look for their child again he is outside the window on the frozen grass flapping his arms like wings, and he flies off with the flock of sparrows. The story is pared down and savagely satirical in its treatment of the suburban values of the parents, using the parents’ dismissive tone to disparage the poignant agony of the vulnerable little boy: ‘But nobody noticed his nonsense.’38 There is no whimsy in the transformation of the birds. A footnote records Antony Alpers’s suggestion that the story gestures towards the famine in Germany after the First World War. Here the infection portrayed is the brutal British nationalism that justifies feeding itself and starving the alien needy. The story expresses what, a few months later, Mansfield explains to Murry as her impatience with the novels she was reviewing for the Athenaeum: I cant imagine how after the war these men can pick up the old threads as tho’ it never had been. Speaking to you Id say we have died and live again. How can that be the same life? It doesn’t mean that Life is the less precious or that the ‘common things of light and day’ are gone. They are not gone, they are intensified, they are illumined. Now we know ourselves for what we are. In a way it’s a tragic knowledge. Its as though, even while we live again we face death. But through Life: that’s the point.39

Little B. has tragic knowledge through a child’s intuitive sympathy, whereas his parents have picked up the old threads; there is trenchant irony in the title, ‘A Suburban Fairy Tale’. Reading through Mansfield’s stories in chronological order, focusing on those about children, produces shocks. After the mannered, rather smug satirical stories from In a German Pension the reader encounters a different landscape and a different lexicon and syntax in the first pieces that Mansfield wrote for Rhythm before the First World War. What the young editor, John Middleton Murry, and the art editor, J. D. Fergusson, wanted was to create a radical journal that would explore new movements in all the arts. Murry wrote in the first issue of Rhythm, summer 1911, slightly misquoting the Irish poet and dramatist J. M. Synge: ‘Before art can be human it must learn to be brutal.’ Our intention is to provide art, be it drawing, literature or criticism, which shall be vigorous, determined, which shall have its roots below the surface, and be the rhythmic echo of the life with which it is in touch. Both in its pity and its brutality it shall be real.40

Before they met, Mansfield sent Murry some kind of fairy story which he found underwhelming, but when she sent him ‘The Woman at the Store’ 24

‘Oh, those grown-ups’ he changed his mind and the story was published in Rhythm in spring 1912. It has all the qualities Murry was looking for and thus far had not found in the fiction in Rhythm, which had nothing of the uncanny vitality of the contributions from Fergusson and other visual artists. ‘The Woman at the Store’ has pity and brutality, with its roots well below the surface since its author herself felt the uging of those roots as she tried to come to terms with ‘civilised’ London. She later wrote to Murry: ‘I feel so immensely conscious of my own roots. You could pull and pull & pull at me – Ill not come out.’41 In a poem dedicated to the memory of the Polish patriot Stanisław Wyspianˊski Mansfield describes herself as: ‘I, a woman, with the taint of the pioneer in my blood, / Full of a youthful strength that wars with itself and is lawless.’42 She feels guilt in her descent from wealthy and successful pioneer stock; the central character in ‘The Woman at the Store’, comes from the deprived backblocks rather than the Empire city, where pioneering has not led to material success. This story, like the other New Zealand stories, ‘Millie’ and ‘Ole Underwood’, focuses on a brutal murder; one concerns a child and another, an adolescent. ‘The Woman at the Store’ plunges the reader into a spectral landscape smothered in white pumice dust, where literary conventions are upended. It is dusk but there is no melodious birdsong: ‘Hundreds of larks shrilled – the sky was slate colour, and the sound of the larks reminded me of slate pencils scraping over its surface.’43 With our teeth on edge but lured by the promise of ‘a fine store’ and a woman ‘with blue eyes and yellow hair, who’ll promise you something else before she shakes hands with you’,44 we read on and meet the woman whose eyes are blue, but with her front teeth knocked out and her dishevelled state she is not the mysteriously alluring folkloric figure of traditional stories. Her excuse for domestic chaos is: ‘“I ’aven’t ’ad time ter fix things today – been ironing”’.45 The imagination baulks at trying to think what might have been ironed as the store is full of flies, debris and dirt. There are markers of colonialism throughout; yellowing pages showing Queen Victoria’s Jubilee are on the walls and advertisements for Camp coffee decorate the storeroom. The coffee’s trademark was a picture of a turbaned sepoy serving coffee to a soldier in the military uniform of a Highland officer. The store seems to be almost bereft of stock and has no customers, as the coach that used to pass it and provide custom has been superseded by the railway. The blue-eyed woman who claimed, according to the narrator’s friend, to know a hundred and twenty-five ways of kissing, now has no one to surprise with her ingenuity. She claims that her husband has gone droving. The narrator finds the place sinister and alien, though she is a New Zealander: 25

Angela Smith ‘There is no twilight to our New Zealand days, but a curious half-hour when everything appears grotesque – it frightens – as though the savage spirit of the country walked abroad and sneered at what it saw. Sitting alone in the hideous room I grew afraid.’46 What the narrator sees as the savage spirit of the country might seem to the reader to be the brutalising effect of the pioneering life on women and girls. The woman in the empty store, demented by loneliness, describes her husband’s infrequent visits and their aftermath for her: four miscarriages. She is about to risk another as ‘“bein’ shut up ’ere like a broody ’en”’47 leads her to spend the stormy night with one of the narrator’s companions, Jo. Her unnamed child, a ‘mean, undersized brat, with whitish hair, and weak eyes’,48 is left with the narrator and Hin, his name suggesting that he may be Maˉori. The child has a perverse talent: And those drawings of hers were extraordinary and repulsively vulgar. The creations of a lunatic with a lunatic’s cleverness. There was no doubt about it, the kid’s mind was diseased. While she showed them to us, she worked herself up into a mad excitement, laughing and trembling, and shooting out her arms, ‘Mumma,’ she yelled. ‘Now I’m going to draw them what you told me I was never to – now I am.’49

What she draws is a picture of a woman shooting a man and burying him. The reader may remember that one patch of the store’s garden was divided off by pawa shells, and that it seemed to belong to the child as she began to dig in it with a broken peg when the strangers arrived. Perhaps it is her father’s grave. She does not draw baa-lambs and moocows as Hin suggests, but draws her family’s domestic life, a terrible parody of the Empire’s model of the pioneering adventure. The ‘“fine store, with a paddock for the horses an’ a creek runnin’ through”’50 has disintegrated, leaving the woman and the preternatural child irreparably damaged – psychologically and physically. There is no doubt, as the narrator says, that the kid’s mind is diseased. The relationship between mothers and children in the context of children’s contagion, disease and death in Mansfield’s stories does not resemble the devotion of Ma Parker to her grandson Lennie in ‘Life of Ma Parker’ (1921). In a bizarre story ‘There is Always Something Wonderfully Touching’, an opera singer is travelling by train with her frail son, Peter. The mother, Elena, is beautiful and radiant, so imbued with her art that she acts even when she is alone with her ailing son and sometimes ‘in front of her mirror she played most exquisitely of all’.51 In a graphic account of their journey Elena enacts the role of the devoted mother without noticing that Peter seems to be on the verge 26

‘Oh, those grown-ups’ of a coma. When they are settled in their destination and Peter is in bed, his critically feverish state evident to the reader, his mother has an uncontrollable urge to sing. Peter’s eyes implore her not to, but she does sing of snow. Peter seems to experience, in a symbiotic relationship with his mother, what she sings: ‘He felt the snow on his chest and creeping up to his throat it formed a little necklace round his neck.’52 When a young doctor calls he gives Peter a searching look and sees what his mother has failed to notice, that the child is dead. The implication is that the mother’s artistry, or perhaps the self-obsession of an artist, has killed her son, another Thoughtful Child. The callous treatment of her child by Elena, by the mother in ‘The Woman at the Store’, by Linda in ‘Prelude’ (1917), by the mother in ‘A Suburban Fairy Tale’ (1919) and by the mother in ‘Sun and Moon’ (1918) among other stories forms a menacing recurrence, and the implicit contrast between Maˉori and paˉkehaˉ childcare in ‘How Pearl Button was Kidnapped’ (1912) is ­suggestive of a similar critique. In the Thoughtful Child stories, ‘The Woman at the Store’ and ‘Millie’ (1913), in which Millie is in some sense in loco parentis to Harrison, and in the story about Peter and Elena there is something controlling or even destructive in the relationships between mothers and their children. In ‘Revelations’ (1920) the emphasis is different, with a focus on the snobbery that also characterises Ma Parker’s employer’s reaction to the death of her grandson. Part of Monica Tyrell’s daily routine is to suffer from her nerves from eight o’clock until half-past eleven. She must not be disturbed then but one ‘“can’t get over the fact that the post comes, and once it has come, who – who – could wait until eleven for the letters?”’53 The reader, having been asked the question, might reply that someone with severe mental illness would be unlikely to be tempted out of their depression or angst by the arrival of the post. The wind, the telephone, and the shouts of the coalman and the scrap metal merchant disturb Monica and, having rejected her husband’s invitation to lunch at Princes’, she goes out to her refuge, the hairdresser, where she ‘always had the feeling that they loved her in this shop and understood her – the real her’.54 But the usual ingratiating flattery is lacking; George does not dangle her bag ‘in his fingers as though it were something he’d never seen before – something fairy’.55 The perspective is Monica’s and, without knowing what has happened, she plunges into a melodramatic simile: ‘We whirl along like leaves, and nobody knows – nobody cares where we fall, in what black river we float away.’56 She is completely wrong; George tells her that his little daughter died that morning and he cares unbearably where she fell. Monica rushes out sobbing, hails a taxi and imagines ‘a tiny wax doll with a feather 27

Angela Smith of gold hair, lying meek, its tiny hands and feet crossed’, an echo of Mansfield’s memory of her dead baby sister. Monica thinks of stopping at a florist to buy flowers from ‘one who understands’ but the taxi driver does not hear her, ‘and, anyway, they were at Princes’ already’.57 The resemblance to ‘A Cup of Tea’ (1922) is obvious in the heavily satirical tone, the pace of the conclusion, and affected self-obsession of the protagonist. Whose the revelations of the title are remains a question, perhaps the reader’s or George’s rather than Monica’s. ‘The Voyage’ (1921) is a mature story, with a death as its point of departure, that breaks the mould of those discussed so far. Its perspective is Fenella’s. She is a little girl who has to ‘give an undignified little skip’58 to keep up with her father and grandmother. She clearly wants to seem grown-up. Sentences are short to remind us of her age; it is almost midnight, and she is intrigued by the unfamiliar darkness, trying to interpret what she is seeing through what is familiar to her: ‘Here and there on a rounded wood-pile, that was like the stalk of a huge black mushroom, there hung a lantern.’59 She carries her grandmother’s umbrella, a totemic object that rhymes with her name and has a swan’s head as its handle. This is a caring grandmother, like Ma Parker and Mrs Fairfield, who has obviously given Fenella the task of carrying the umbrella to distract her from parting with her father. While she was writing ‘At the Bay’ (1921), the story that precedes ‘The Voyage’, Mansfield was possessed by memories: ‘It is so strange to bring the dead to life again. Theres my grandmother, back in her chair with her pink knitting.’60 Though ‘The Voyage’ does not depend as ‘At the Bay’ does on Mansfield’s memory of her family, the impetus is the same, ‘to speak to the secret self we all have – to acknowledge that’.61 Fenella is not preoccupied by grief as the experience of boarding the ferry is so new to her: ‘Lying beside the dark wharf, all strung, all beaded with round golden lights, the Picton boat looked as if she was more ready to sail among stars than out into the cold sea.’62 Fenella’s is a liminar’s rite of passage and its successful conclusion depends on the companionship of her grandmother. Her mother has died; as her father and grandmother embraced and wept, this ‘was so awful that Fenella quickly turned her back on them’.63 This suggests both Fenella’s own grief and a child’s embarrassment at witnessing adult mourning. She is appalled by her father’s gift: ‘A shilling! She must be going away for ever!’64 Each stage of the boarding process is carefully manoeuvred, with delicate comedy: ‘At the bottom grandma stopped; Fenella was rather afraid she was going to pray again. But no.’65 Fenella is fascinated by her grandma’s agility in climbing up to the top bunk and undoing her stays, and she sleeps as the Picton boat pitches and tosses, but her sense of ‘being shut 28

‘Oh, those grown-ups’ up in a box with grandma’66 hints that she is haunted by her mother’s death. There is thick mist and bitter cold when they arrive at the landing stage in Picton. In its strangeness Fenella sees an animist seascape: ‘And now the landing-stage came out to meet them. Slowly it swam towards the Picton boat.’67 She shivers in a sepulchral atmosphere with gloomy passengers and ‘those strange silvery withered trees that are like skeletons’.68 Fenella is poised at a liminal moment but when she enters her grandparents’ house she meets first of all a warm white cat and then her grandfather, Mr Crane, who is in bed and asks about the swan umbrella. She crooks it over his bed rail as a sign that her journey is over. ‘Just his head with a white tuft, and his rosy face and long silver beard showed over the quilt. He was like a very old wide-awake bird’, as befits his name. He laughs at the moral text over his bed, painted by his wife. His conspiratorial wink at Fenella suggests that she has come home, and has made a voyage across the strait from death to life, though the whole experience is implied rather than stated. There is an almost visceral shock in the reader’s transition when reading the Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Fiction from ‘At the Bay and ‘The Voyage’ to what Antony Alpers describes as ‘that horrific unfinished febrile work begun at Looe, “A Married Man’s Story”’.69 In a letter to Koteliansky written in Fontainebleau in October 1922 Mansfield confides that she is ‘a divided being’, ‘always conscious of this secret disruption in me’.70 She plans to change her way of life, but it is possible that the psychological schism that she describes is what enabled her to plumb the darkness of Raoul Duquette, the decadent narrator of ‘Je ne parle pas français’ (1918) and of the narrator of ‘A Married Man’s Story’ (1921) as well as, conversely, in ‘The Voyage’, tracing without sentimentality the dawning light and warmth of a small girl’s transition from loss to belonging. The married man, as in ‘The Woman at the Store’, is part of a familial triangle, though in his case his relationship with his parents is framed initially by his role as a husband and a father to a baby son. He wants to tell ‘the plain truth, as only a liar can tell it’,71 with a cynicism that equals Duquette’s when he asks: ‘How can one look the part and not be the part? Or be the part and not look it? Isn’t looking – being?’72 The married man begins his story with an image of his wife and child who are with him beside the fire, ‘her shadow – an immense Mother and Child – is here and gone again upon the wall . . . .’73 The shadowy image dominates the whole story as the adult narrator’s contemptuous and controlling attitude to his wife and baby proves to be a mirror image of his own childhood. He is trying to write, and comments on his own turns of phrase as Duquette does, using a memorable image and then discrediting it: ‘You know those stories of little children 29

Angela Smith who are suckled by wolves and accepted by the tribe, and how for ever after they move freely among their fleet grey brothers? Something like that has happened to me. But wait – that about the wolves won’t do.’74 His wife does not understand what he is doing, nor why an apparently happy marriage has become so alienating. The narrator offers a chilling explanation to the reader by giving an account of how his father killed his mother, with the implication that history will repeat itself. His father was a chemist; his mother never left her room after the birth of her sickly son, moving between her bed, sofa and window. The boy copied his father, longing to be him as he handed a five-penny pickme-up with a sneer to the prostitutes who called at his shop in the evening. Downstairs the house is dominated by his father’s ‘remedy’: ‘God knows what it was made of. Years after I drank some, just to see what it tasted like, and I felt as though someone had given me a terrific blow on the head; I felt stunned.’75 One night the boy’s mother sits on his bed shivering, with her hands pressed between her knees, and says that his father has poisoned her. She goes back to her room and her son is immobilised by fear and does nothing to help her. By the morning she is dead, and soon the father is entertaining one of the gaudy women, and the boy is fantasising about doing the same thing. His arousal leads to the terrifying return to his earlier reference to wolves: The barriers were down. I had been all my life a little outcast; but until that moment no one had ‘accepted’ me; I had lain in the cupboard – or the cave forlorn. But now – I was taken, I was accepted, claimed. I did not consciously turn away from the world of human beings; I had never known it; but I from that night did beyond words consciously turn towards my silent brothers . . . .76

This is a revelation of the secret self but it is far from being life-enhancing, unlike Fenella’s meeting with her grandfather. The reader remembers the father’s attitude to his thin mother, dressed in a flannel dressinggown, compared with the appearance of the gaudy customer who ‘wore a green cape trimmed with fur and a hat with cherries dangling’.77 The married man’s wife once asked him whether he thought physical beauty very important and he congratulated himself on his ‘devilish’ skill in avoiding a reply though she ‘looked like the poor patient who hears the surgeon say, “It will certainly be necessary to perform the operation – but not now!”’78 ‘A Married Man’s Story’ appears to be unfinished, but perhaps its dark potency lies in provoking the reader to imagine how the married man re-enacts his father’s crime. The ‘disruption in me’ that enables Mansfield to disturb the reader’s imagination in ‘A Married Man’s Story’ hinges on the precision of 30

‘Oh, those grown-ups’ the a few visual images such as this: ‘I seem to have spent most of my time like a plant in a cupboard. Now and again, when the sun shone, a careless hand thrust me out on to the window-sill, and a careless hand whipped me in again – and that was all.’79 The punctuation enacts the movement and expresses what Mansfield wrote to Murry in 1919 about her impetus to show tragic knowledge in her work having witnessed the First World War: But of course you don’t imagine I mean by this knowledge ‘let us eat and drink-ism’. No, I mean ‘deserts of vast eternity’. But the difference between you and me is (perhaps Im wrong) I couldn’t tell anybody bang out about those deserts. They are my secret. I might write about a boy eating strawberries or a woman combing her hair on a windy morning & that is the only way I can ever mention them. But they must be there.80

The deserts of vast eternity come from Andrew Marvell’s poem ‘To His Coy Mistress’; the context is the poet’s desire to celebrate lovemaking before the chance is gone for ever. ‘A Married Man’s Story’ is a rare late example of Mansfield writing bang out about a married man murdering the mother of his child, with a haunting and frightening consciousness of mortality. I’ll finish with a story that both confronts and avoids death. ‘The Garden Party’ (1921) is a masterpiece of hinting at the secret self, leaving the reader to interpret Laura’s experience. This is a story about a child’s confrontation with death that touches on social, gender and moral contagion, physical and political infection, and psychological damage, while at the same time creating an idyllic vision of a garden party in lovely weather. The story opens with a sentence fragment: ‘And after all the weather was ideal.’81 In the first paragraph the reader is precipitated into a family’s anxiety about the garden party being rained off, apparently from the perspective of someone chatting about it as the sentence fragments suggest: ‘Windless, warm, the sky without a cloud.’ The tone is ecstatic, even overblown: ‘As for roses, you could not help feeling they understood that roses are the only flowers that impress people at garden parties; the only flowers that everybody is certain of knowing. Hundreds, yes literally hundreds, had come out in a single night.’ The reader may be sceptical and probably detects that this is the perspective of the hostess, as the exaggeration, ‘[H]undreds, yes literally hundreds’, seems gendered. The person directly involved in ensuring the garden’s perfection is the gardener who ‘had been up since dawn, mowing the lawns and sweeping them, until the grass and the dark flat rosettes where the daisy plants had been seemed to shine’. Daisies have been uprooted so that the view of the roses is not compromised. 31

Angela Smith The gardener has achieved manicured perfection for the garden and is not mentioned again. The story is Janus-faced, looking towards the wealthy party-givers in one direction and towards another community in the other. Members of the second group arrive to erect a marquee and Laura, the youngest child in the family who seems to be about sixteen, is sent to supervise them: ‘she loved having to arrange things; she always felt she could do it so much better than anybody else’.82 To her surprise the workmen have a view of their own about where the marquee should be positioned: ‘Laura’s upbringing made her wonder for a moment whether it was quite respectful of a workman to talk to her of bangs slap in the eye.’83 The reference to the controlling power of Laura’s ‘upbringing’ seems casual at this point. The man who may have been disrespectful then surprises Laura by pinching a sprig of lavender and snuffing its fragrance on his finger and thumb. She is lost in wonder at him caring for the smell and decides that she would like to have the workmen as friends; the fact that she hasn’t is the fault ‘of these absurd class distinctions. Well, for her part, she didn’t feel them. Not a bit, not an atom.’84 She has of course just given the reader evidence of her class consciousness and snobbery. The excitement of the preparations for the party is caught through a transferred epithet and compressed phrasing: ‘The house was alive with soft, quick steps and running voices.’85 Laura is awed and astounded by the extravagance of her mother’s purchase of pots of canna lilies. Her sister is giving ‘good little Hans’ orders: ‘Jose loved giving orders to the servants, and they loved obeying her.’86 One wonders whose view this is, though the tone is celebratory, with Jose patronising the cook by congratulating her on her ‘exquisite sandwiches’, and cook giving Jose and Laura conspiratorial encouragement to have a cream puff: ‘“Yer ma won’t know.”’87 There is no implicit criticism in the narrator’s voice; Jose imitates her mother’s haughty tone in her praise of the cook’s sandwiches but the girls’ capitulation when the cook proffers the cream puffs suggests that the cook is a familiar part of their domestic life, though as they enter adulthood they may become more condescending to her as Jose is moving in that direction. The crux of the story comes when the man who has delivered the cream puffs also delivers the news that a young carter, the father of five small children, who lived in a cottage close to the Sheridans’ house, has been thrown from his horse and killed. Significantly when she hears this Laura pulls her sister from the kitchen to the other side of the green baize door, away from the servants. The green baize door was a significant traditional marker, separating the servants’ domain from the family; the baize muffled the sounds made by the domestic staff. 32

‘Oh, those grown-ups’ Laura instinctively acts to conceal from the staff her administrative assumption that the garden party must be cancelled. In the shock of the moment both sisters’ behaviour exposes adolescent extremes. Jose adds an imaginary pejorative detail to the carter’s death: ‘“You won’t bring a drunken workman back to life by being sentimental.”’88 Laura is outraged by the assumption that the carter was drunk but she claims a fictitious proximity to his accident, saying that ‘“we can’t possibly have a garden party with a man dead just outside the front gate”’.89 The paragraph that follows is not attributed to a particular character but seems to express the general Sheridan view of the cottages where the man lived: True, they were far too near. They were the greatest possible eyesore, and they had no right to be in that neighbourhood at all. They were little mean dwellings painted a chocolate brown. In the garden patches there was nothing but cabbage stalks, sick hens and tomato cans. The very smoke coming out of their chimneys was poverty-stricken. Little rags and shreds of smoke, so unlike the great silvery plumes that uncurled from the Sheridans’ chimneys. Washerwomen lived in the lane and sweeps and a cobbler, and a man whose house-front was studded all over with minute bird-cages. Children swarmed.90

The condescending tone of the passage is a reminder of the adult voices in ‘The Doll’s House’, here a not-in-my-back-yard response to property values being compromised by proximity to urban squalor, and contempt for the lack of birth control among the poor. Laura has been attracted by a silver photograph frame inside the house, but it seems that even the silvery plumes of smoke from the Sheridans’ chimneys have an upmarket quality. The voice could be Mrs Sheridan’s as similar exaggeration and callousness are audible in her response to Laura who reports that the carter has been killed: ‘“Not in the garden?” interrupted her mother.’91 Laura assumes that the garden party must be cancelled because the bereaved family will hear the band and the bustle of arriving guests. In a maternal manoeuvre that is not physically cruel to her daughter as the woman at the store is, but which silences Laura’s attempt to explore a moral crisis, Mrs Sheridan drops her own new hat on Laura’s head and asserts that people ‘“like that don’t expect sacrifices from us”’.92 Laura is unprepared for her own reflection and doesn’t recognise it; she sees a charming girl in the mirror wearing a hat trimmed with daisies: ‘Never had she imagined that she could look like that.’93 Laura shows that she is still a child in her embarrassment over meeting the workmen with a slice of bread and butter in her hand, and she has a child’s intuitive sympathy with the carter’s family. She is 33

Angela Smith also a beautiful young woman who is confronting what she recognises as a life lesson, and she needs to be able to talk about it. She tries to tell her brother what has happened, but he is distracted by her appearance. The garden party is a glowing success with Laura’s nascent womanhood attracting compliments. As the family gather after the party Laura’s father mentions the carter’s accident sympathetically and her mother tells him that Laura insisted the party should be postponed. In a potentially awkward moment, Mrs Sheridan ‘had one of her brilliant ideas’.94 It is both materialistic and risky as she knows when she nearly gives Laura a warning about it; she sends Laura at dusk in her garden party dress and hat with a basket containing all the inappropriate leftovers from the party to deliver them to the bereaved family. Laura, understandably disorientated, wishes that she had put on a coat to cover her lace dress as people might stare at her, and they do. What she discovers is that working-class families have their ceremonies, just as the Sheridans have. She wants to leave the basket and go home but the carter’s sister-in-law draws her into the cottage to pay her respects to the corpse. Earlier in the day Laura has been told: ‘“I have never seen you look such a picture.”’95 Now Em’s sister draws the sheet off the dead carter’s face and says, with an irony she is not aware of: ‘“’e looks a picture”’.96 Laura agrees, and her meditation on the body of the young man catches a liminal moment between childhood and adulthood: There lay a young man, fast asleep – sleeping so soundly, so deeply, that he was far, far away from them both. Oh, so remote, so peaceful. He was dreaming. Never wake him up again. His head was sunk in the pillow, his eyes were closed; they were blind under the closed eyelids. He was given up to his dream. What did garden parties and baskets and lace frocks matter to him? He was far from all those things. He was wonderful, beautiful. While they were laughing and while the band was playing, this marvel had come to the lane. Happy . . . happy . . . . All is well said that sleeping face. This is just as it should be. I am content.97

The passage is dreamily expressed and could be read as nonsense. The carter is dead, not sleeping, and so his wife and five children are left destitute. This does not occur to Laura who has never had to think about her income. What she does understand is that something more significant than a successful garden party has happened, and her childish apology for her hat to the body is a token of that. What she urgently needs is to be able to discuss her conflicted feelings with an intelligent adult, possibly the workman who smelt the lavender whom she saw as a potential friend. Her older brother comes to meet her: 34

‘Oh, those grown-ups’ She stopped, she looked at her brother. ‘Isn’t life –’ she stammered, ‘isn’t life –’ But what life was she couldn’t explain. No matter. He quite understood. ‘Isn’t it, darling?’ said Laurie.98

Did he quite understand? This reader suspects not as the Sheridan emphasis cuts off Laura’s attempt to explore her experience with an exaggerated emphasis like his mother’s, but the subtlety of this slippery modernist story is that it frees the readers to interpret it for themselves. It is also different each time one reads it, showing different facets of its construction. It is no way propagandist; its portrayal of a bourgeois Wellington family is in many ways sympathetic, and their garden party – gesturing towards royal garden parties in Wellington’s centre of Empire with its marquee and band – is beautiful. The tone is not judgemental, and the perspective is often Laura’s as she swings from one mood to another. It is however worth noticing that the hired waiters, the workmen who erect the marquee, the cook, the gardener, Em’s sister and Godber’s man are nameless; the anonymity of the working class as far as the Sheridans are concerned is stressed when Laura visits her near neighbours and sees in one of the mean little cottages a ghostly creature rather than a human being: ‘a shadow, crab-like, moved across the window’.99 As O’Sullivan writes, the story is read ‘in terms of its lingering colonial charm’,100 but ‘The Garden Party’ also suggests infection by British imperial ambition, class-consciousness and expectations about gendered behaviour. As Antoinette Cosby says in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, ‘There is always the other side, always.’ There is physical disease in the pattern I have traced through the stories, but it is often used metaphorically to suggest moral infection as with the little boy in ‘A Suburban Fairy Tale’. As I have suggested, the source of this motif may be what Yska’s research reveals: that in the final twenty years of the nineteenth century the city fathers resisted the sanitary reform that the booming city of Wellington needed. The city fathers’ voting rights were based on being a rate payer; there were very few of them, and they resisted change: ‘So the city opted for a bargain-basement scheme based on open wooden ditches. This relied on moving water – not possible in flat areas such as crowded Te Aro at the south of the harbour where working people and the poor mostly lived.’101 From early in her career Mansfield linked physical and moral contagion, from the woman at the store, broken by sexual abuse and mental disintegration, to the married man whose diseased childhood leads him to terrorise in his turn. The relationship between mothers and children is often portrayed as unhealthy or destructive, as in ‘There 35

Angela Smith is always something wonderfully touching’, ‘The Woman at the Store’, ‘Prelude’ and ‘The Garden Party’. Mansfield’s vivid memory of her baby sister, dying of cholera in the Empire city, remained with her throughout her life. Her insight into the power relations that children are subject to invites the reader to see from a child’s perspective: ‘Oh, those grown-ups, laughing and snug, sitting in the lamp-light, drinking out of cups!’102 Notes 1. CW2, p. 364. 2. CW4, p. 263. 3. CW1, p. 84. 4. CW1, p. 85. 5. CW1, p. 85. 6. CW1, p. 85. 7. CW1, p. 84. 8. CW1, p. 85. 9. Anna Plumridge, ed., The Urewera Notebook by Katherine Mansfield (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), p. 95. 10. Plumridge, p. 95. 11. Plumridge, pp. 97–8. 12. Plumridge, p. 12. 13. Plumridge, p. 14. 14. Vincent O’Sullivan, ed., Katherine Mansfield: New Zealand Stories (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 1. 15. O’Sullivan, p. 1. 16. CW2, p. 419. 17. CW2, p. 416. 18. CW2, p. 420. 19. Redmer Yska, A Strange Beautiful Excitement: Katherine Mansfield’s Wellington 1888– 1903 (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2017), p. 61. 20. Yska, p. 61. 21. CW2, p. 420. 22. CW2, p. 408. 23. CW2, p. 74. 24. CW2. p. 75. 25. CW4, pp. 225–6. 26. Yska, p. 53. 27. CW4, p. 227. 28. CW4, p. 177. 29. See also Todd Martin, ‘The Thoughtful Child: The Sentimental Origins of Katherine Mansfield’s Children’, in Gerri Kimber and Todd Martin, eds, Katherine Mansfield and Children (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021), pp. 48–65. 30. CW1, p. 124. 31. CW4, p. 227. 32. CW1, p. 126. 33. CW1, p. 127. 34. CW3, p. 56.

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‘Oh, those grown-ups’ 35. CW2, p. 170. 36. CW2, p. 171. 37. CW2, p. 172. 38. CW2, p. 172. 39. Letters 3, p. 97. To John Middleton Murry. 40. Rhythm, 1: 1 (summer 1911), p. 36. 41. Letters 2, p. 103. To John Middleton Murry. 42. CW3, p. 74. 43. CW1, p. 268. 44. CW1, p. 269. 45. CW1, p. 270. 46. CW2, p. 271. 47. CW2, p. 274. 48. CW2, p. 272. 49. CW2, pp. 274–5. 50. CW2, p. 269. 51. CW1, p. 392. 52. CW1, p. 396. 53. CW2, p. 213. 54. CW2, p. 215. 55. CW2. p. 216. 56. CW2, p. 217. 57. CW2, p. 217. 58. CW2, p. 373. 59. CW2, p. 373. 60. CL1, p. 404. To Dorothy Brett. 61. CW4, p. 278. 62. CW2, p. 373. 63. CW2, p. 374. 64. CW2, p. 374. 65. CW2, p. 375. 66. CW2, p. 376. 67. CW2, p. 378. 68. CW2, p. 378. 69. Antony Alpers, The Life of Katherine Mansfield (New York: Viking, 1980), p. 339. 70. CL2, p. 108. To S. S. Koteliansky. 71. CW2, p. 384. 72. CW2, p. 123. 73. CW2, p. 380. 74. CW2, p. 384. 75. CW2, p. 386. 76. CW2, p. 390. 77. CW2, p. 386. 78. CW2, p. 385. 79. CW2, p. 386. 80. CW3, p. 98. 81. CW2, p. 401. 82. CW2, p. 402. 83. CW2, p. 402.

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Angela Smith 84. CW2, p. 403. 85. CW2, p. 404. 86. CW2, p. 405. 87. CW2, p. 407. 88. CW2, p. 408. 89. CW2, p. 407. 90. CW2, p. 408. 91. CW2, p. 408. 92. CW2, p. 409. 93. CW2, p. 409. 94. CW2, p. 410. 95. CW2, p. 409. 96. CW2, p. 413. 97. CW2, p. 413. 98. CW2, p. 413. 99. CW2, p. 411. 100. O’Sullivan, p. 9. 101. Yska, p. 60. 102. CW2, p. 364.

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Jacob’s Wrestling with the Angel from Bible Myth to Walter Pater’s and Katherine Mansfield’s Stories Maurizio Ascari

Why am I haunted every single day of my life by the nearness of death and its inevitability! Katherine Mansfield1

The Absence at the Heart of Home In December 1908 Katherine Mansfield noted: ‘I should like to write a life much in the style of Walter Pater’s “Child in the House”. About a girl in Wellington.’2 This project started to materialise in March 1915, when she began a novel called Karori, which was however abandoned. Her brother Leslie Beauchamp’s visit to London in August 1915 triggered further memories and these took shape in ‘The Wind Blows’ (1920), a first version of which was published as ‘Autumns: II’ in Signature on 4 October 1915, three days before Leslie died while training for war. Mansfield’s bereavement prompted an identification with Leslie that not only translated into the need to share her living experiences with her dead brother (‘I never see anything that I like, or hear anything, without the longing that he should see and hear, too’),3 but which also entailed a reversal of her expectations and authorial stance: I am just as much dead as he is. The present and the future mean nothing to me: I am no longer ‘curious’ about people; [. . .] and the only possible value that anything can have for me is that it should put me in mind of something that happened or was when we were alive.4 [My italics]

This emotional crisis proved conducive to a new source of inspiration, which Mansfield perceived as contrasting with her previous creative concerns as she noted in January 1916: 39

Maurizio Ascari Now, really, what is it that I do want to write? I ask myself. Am I less of a writer than I used to be [. . .] But no [. . .] at bottom never has been my desire so ardent. Only the form that I would choose has changed utterly. I feel no longer concerned with the same appearances of things.5

The result of this aesthetic shift was Mansfield’s momentous decision to write recollections of her ‘undiscovered country’, making New Zealand ‘leap into the eyes of the old world [. . .] with a sense of mystery, a radiance, an after glow because you, my little sun of it, are set’.6 During this period of mourning, Mansfield not only repeatedly addressed her deceased brother directly in her private writing but ended up turning him into an empowering authorial double: ‘Dear brother [. . .] now as I write these words and talk of getting down to the New Zealand atmosphere I see you opposite to me, I see your thoughtful seeing eyes [. . .] It is with you that I see & that is why I see so clearly.’7 These lines, which border on clairvoyance, testify to Mansfield’s ability to distil her bereavement into a ‘joint’ creative impetus that resulted in ‘The Aloe’ (1915) – a rewriting of Karori she ‘discussed’ with her brother as follows: The Aloe is right. The Aloe is lovely [. . .] And now I know what the last chapter is. It is your birth [. . .] That chapter will end the book. The next book will be yours and mine [. . .] Oh Bogey – I must hurry. All of them must have this book. It is good, my treasure, my little brother – it is good and it is what we really meant.8 [My italics]

The therapeutic value of this inner process is apparent. While conceptualising creativity in the plural, and as crossing the border between life and death, Mansfield addressed her text to the entire family, as if to heal their collective inner wound, although when she rewrote ‘The Aloe’ as ‘Prelude’ (1918), the climactic final chapter was excised and – with a powerful symbolic move – the entire story became the prelude to a birth that was actually a textual absence.

The Mythical Paradigm Concurrently with her 1908 reflection, Mansfield’s creative process was arguably informed by Pater’s The Child in the House (1878), for both Pater’s and Mansfield’s autobiographically inspired stories combine an incipient awareness of death with authorial Bildung, exploring the theme of mortality in relation to the burgeoning consciousness of a child. The present essay investigates this intertextual connection by means of a catalyst – Jacob’s fight with the angel, a biblical episode that plays a paradigmatic role in both stories. Although in all probability 40

From Bible Myth to Walter Pater’s and Katherine Mansfield’s Stories Mansfield borrowed this underlying structural element from Pater, the specific notebook she used while in the South of France, mostly to comment on the creation of ‘The Aloe’, includes this reflection: ‘Since I came here I have been very interested in the Bible. I have read the Bible for hours on end.’9 Before approaching this mythical layer, however, and before exploring its psychological import, let us consider the obvious source of Pater’s story. As argued by Gerald Monsman, The Child in the House ‘seems inescapably indebted to Lamb’s essays’,10 notably ‘Blakesmoor in H-----shire’.11 Like its literary ‘progeny’, Charles Lamb’s text is loosely autobiographical, since the author’s grandmother was the housekeeper at Blakesware Manor, the original of Blakesmoor, which the writer’s alter ego – Elia – revisits. This event triggers Elia’s memories of a house  that has prematurely fallen into ‘an antiquity’,12 due to the owner’s decision  to despoil it of its treasures. A set of reflections concerning mortality follows, contrasting affective and biological genealogies, for Elia ends up seeing himself as the rightful heir to the neglected place. Although some aspects of The Child in the House are adumbrated here, it is in turning to the Bible that further light can be shed upon its roots.

Wrestling with the Angel Jacob and Esau are the twin sons of Isaac and Rebekah, the latter of whom perceives them as already fighting in her womb. The first born is Esau, whose name means red and hairy, while Jacob follows, gripping his brother’s heel, as indicated again by his name (originating either from the ancient Hebrew verb ‘to follow’ or from the noun for ‘heel’). Esau, who brims with physical life, will grow to become a hunter, while Jacob, who is quieter, will become a herdsman. Their enmity precipitates when Rebekah helps Jacob cheat Esau of their elderly father’s all-important blessing by covering part of Jacob’s body with fleece to simulate his brother’s hairy skin. Having been deprived of his right of primogeniture, Esau vows to kill Jacob, who flees to his maternal uncle Laban. During his flight, however, he has a premonitory dream in which God himself promises him a huge number of descendants, who will occupy the land on which he is lying. Several years go by, during which Jacob marries Laban’s two daughters, until in another dream God enjoins him to return to the land of his fathers. As he draws nearer, Jacob grows afraid of Esau’s revenge, especially after being told that his brother has rallied a large group of men. As a safeguard, when darkness falls, Jacob sends his family and servants 41

Maurizio Ascari across a stream with their belongings, and at this fateful moment, once Jacob is alone, a man approaches and wrestles with him until daybreak. This mysterious, quasi-ritualistic struggle is conducive to a powerful narrative turn, for when Jacob meets Esau a reconciliation ensues. In the 1930s this biblical episode caught the attention of Erich Neumann, a Jewish student of Carl Jung who moved to Israel, where he became an analytical psychologist and wrote important essays such as Depth Psychology and a New Ethic (Tiefenpsychologie und neue Ethik, 1949) and On the Origins and History of Consciousness (Ursprungsgeschichte des Bewusstseins, 1949). Both these books are rooted in Neumann’s study of the Jacob and Esau myth, which was first written in 1934 (soon after he had settled in Israel), but which was published as Jacob and Esau: On the Collective Symbolism of the Brother Motif only in 2015.13 Neumann reads the Bible as encoding archetypal content. In his eyes, the Jacob and Esau myth opposes extraversion – as embodied by Esau, who is associated with lust, killing and impulsive action – and introversion, as typified by Jacob, who is as cunning as he is spiritually minded. Jacob is associated with the moon (the lesser light), while the red and hairy Esau is associated with the sun and male goats. Esau can be also related to the Jewish festivity of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when the so-called lottery of the goats takes place. While one goat is sacrificed to God, the other – which bears the sins of the community – has a red band tied around its horns and sent to Azazel, the wilderness. While in Jungian terms this episode signifies the useless attempt to project one’s shadow (or evil) onto the Other, thus actually perpetuating moral conflict, the story of Jacob and Esau offers a solution to that conflict by overcoming the stage of projection and acknowledging the presence of the shadow within oneself. Neumann regards the fight with the angel as encapsulating this psychological dynamic. While up to that point we have seen Jacob fighting only by means of his cunning, this physical act of wrestling with an unknown entity – which is presented as God-sent – results in a metamorphosis or rebirth, as proved by the fact that at the end of this confrontation Jacob is renamed as Israel. Jacob’s introjection of the Esau principle enables him to acknowledge his brother both outside and inside himself with a therapeutic impact that leads to the solution of the conflict. After bowing seven times before his brother, Jacob is embraced by a weeping Esau, while he is now able to see his brother’s face as the face of God. The twin’s mutual acknowledgement of their divine nature marks a reconciliation with the dual nature of both external reality and the psyche. Opposition is transcended and reunion effected, between not only introversion and extraversion, but also consciousness and the 42

From Bible Myth to Walter Pater’s and Katherine Mansfield’s Stories unconscious, since Jacob is clearly on the former side while Esau’s behaviour stems from primal drives. What invites a parallel between this archetypal story and the two texts to be discussed is the fact that – within the framework of Jungian theories – the Jacob and Esau myth can be related also to the sphere of childhood. Neumann presents the rise of an ego-consciousness in the early stage of life as entailing a powerful inner fight with an unconscious that, following Jung, he identifies with the dragon of classical and medieval myth. This process of self-fashioning, however, can be conducive to different results, depending on the nature of the child. While growing up, most individuals strengthen their ego-consciousness through a process of personalisation that brings about ‘an adaptation to reality’,14 detaching them from the engulfing world of archetypes. Yet artists experience a different psychic dynamic, which Neumann defines as ‘the objectification of archetypes’.15 This acknowledgement of ‘archetypes as the dominants of the unconscious’16 fosters creativity thanks to ‘the productive tension between the ego-consciousness and the collective unconscious’.17 It is my contention that Pater’s and Mansfield’s stories intuitively stage a similar rite of passage while describing the development of a child who is endowed with an artistic temperament. As we shall see, the two texts not only depict their young protagonists’ inner struggle, but also expand on their fascination with the objects of perception. This condition partakes of what Jung called mystical participation: ‘a peculiar kind of psychological connection with objects’, consisting ‘in the fact that the subject cannot clearly distinguish himself from the object but is bound to it by a direct relationship which amounts to partial identity’.18 Mansfield’s private writings amply testify to her vibrant empathy, as revealed by this letter to John Middleton Murry: I was looking at some leaves only yesterday – idly looking & suddenly I became conscious of them [. . .], but not as something outside oneself – but as part of one [. . .] And I felt as though one received – accepted – absorbed the beauty of the leaves even into ones physical being. Do you feel like that about things?19

A related form of identification – straddling the divide between human and non-human, animate and inanimate – is central to Mansfield’s immersive conception of writing, which is at the origin of her poetics of impersonality: Ive been this man, been this woman. Ive stood for hours on the Auckland Wharf. Ive been out in the stream waiting to be berthed – Ive been a seagull hovering at the stern and a hotel porter whistling through

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Maurizio Ascari his teeth. It isn’t as though one sits and watches the spectacle. That would  be thrilling enough, God knows. But one is the spectacle for the time.20

Having clarified that – in a Jungian perspective – Jacob’s mythical fight with the angel can be interpreted as signifying a reconnection with one’s shadow, let us now approach Pater’s and Mansfield’s stories, where the inner growth of an artist is described as stemming from both this struggle and a mystical participation in the circumambient reality.

Dream, Myth and Archetype in The Child in the House As Richard Bizot claims, in The Child in the House, ‘Pater surveyed his past in order to understand the present’, a time of crisis in which ‘retrospection was essential’,21 as shown by the fact that in 1877 the founding father of aestheticism had suppressed his notorious Conclusion from the second edition of The Renaissance. Originally titled Imaginary Portrait I: The Child in the House, this text revisits the circumstances of the author’s early years by eschewing the constraints of realism. The archetypal nature of Pater’s narrative is made clear from the opening lines, which place it under the aegis of the numinous: As Florian Deleal walked, one hot afternoon, he overtook by the wayside a poor aged man, and, as he seemed weary with the road, helped him on with the burden which he carried, a certain distance. And as the man told his story, it chanced that he named the place [. . .] where Florian had passed his earliest years, but which he had never since seen, and, the story told, went forward on his journey comforted. And that night, like a reward for his pity, a dream of that place came to Florian.22

Here Pater distances his narrative from both reality and consciousness, while reconnecting it to the unconscious, through a strategy of ‘depersonalisation’. The story is presented as authored by its hero, Florian Deleal, who writes it after experiencing a dream that is in turn described as a ‘reward’ resulting from his kindness towards a stranger. This exchange of gifts gestures back towards fairy tales and myth, both of which Jung regarded as a ‘well known expression of the archetypes’.23 Pater’s authorial stance thus stands in opposition to what Neumann describes as the common approach of psychoanalysis to childhood: The reduction of all mythological material to the family story, as undertaken by psychoanalysis [. . .] devalues the supremacy of archetypal images, by making them bearable to consciousness through secondary personalization and by connecting them with ego-consciousness in a manner beneficial to conscious dominance.24

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From Bible Myth to Walter Pater’s and Katherine Mansfield’s Stories Pater is conversely in tune with conscious objectification, which intuitively acknowledges the background dominance of archetypes, thus fostering creativity. Significantly, Florian’s dream is conducive to the realisation of a long-cherished project, ‘the noting, namely, of some things in the story of his spirit – in that process of brain-building by which we are, each one of us, what we are’.25 The autobiographical import of this self-reflexive narrative comes to mind, together with its paradigmatic value, since Pater famously defined The Child in the House as ‘the germinating, original, source, specimen, of all my imaginative work’.26 This prototypical imaginary portrait, tracing the development of an artistic temperament, can be regarded as typifying a new non-realistic approach to the Künstlerroman tradition through the pursuit of an accrued psychological insight, reaching out for the unconscious thanks to a dream-like trance: In that half-spiritualised house he could watch the better, over again, the gradual expansion of the soul which had come to be there – of which indeed, through the law which makes the material objects about them so large an element in children’s lives, it had actually become a part [. . .]27

These lines resonate with the above-mentioned logic of mystical participation, whereby children do not perceive the material world as separate. Pater’s imaginary portrait expands on this tension between the setting of the house and the impressions that mark the early years of Florian, who is presented (like Jacob) as an introvert: the child of whom I am writing lived on there quietly; things without thus ministering to him, as he sat daily at the window with the birdcage hanging below it, and his mother taught him to read, wondering at the ease with which he learned, and at the quickness of his memory.28

The birdcage and the window provide apt symbols for Florian’s ‘peculiarly strong sense of home’,29 which fails to protect him from the dark side of life. Although ‘the quiet of the child’s soul’30 is described as ‘one with the quiet of its home, a place “inclosed” and “sealed”’,31 soon the duality of the outside world seeps into the child’s sanctuary: there came floating in from the larger world without, as at windows left ajar unknowingly, or over the high garden walls, two streams of impressions, the sentiments of beauty and pain – recognitions of the visible, tangible, audible loveliness of things, as a very real and somewhat tyrannous element in them – and of the sorrow of the world, of grown people and children and animals.32

Eros and Thanatos cannot be kept out of the walls. Reality calls out loud. Florian is confronted with pain and death, even originating from 45

Maurizio Ascari his action, but he also discovers a new attraction for life and pleasure, as exemplified by a red hawthorn that has a deep emotional impact on him: ‘the beauty of the thing struck home to him feverishly; and in dreams all night he loitered along a magic roadway of crimson flowers’.33 The erotic appeal of the hawthorn is at the origin of Florian’s aesthetic temperament – ‘a passionateness in his relation to fair outward objects, an inexplicable excitement in their presence, which disturbed him, and from which he half longed to be free’.34 This thirst for the beautiful tinges the personality of Florian to the point that as an adult he feels the need to associate ‘all thoughts to touch and sight, as a sympathetic link between himself and actual, feeling, living objects’.35 What is found at the origin of the aesthetic temperament seems to be again a need for identification reminiscent of Jung’s mystical participation. Despite Florian’s aestheticising love of religious rituals, however, his revulsion in the face of death keeps growing, stemming from the decay of corpses and from the idea of ghosts haunting their former homes. These negative emotions might be just repressed by a child at an unconscious level, in a similar way to what Jung would term the shadow, but a different psychic dynamic is described by Pater. It is at this juncture that Florian’s fondness for religious books is introduced and readers are told that he ‘knew by heart the exact mode in which the wrestling angel grasped Jacob’.36 This implicit reference to the moment when the angel wrenches Jacob’s hip from its socket, causing his rival henceforth to limp, ushers in a reflection that proves central to our reading of this text, for we are informed that Florian is unable to relate to reality as such and always lives a double life, experiencing concrete events also on a different level: A place adumbrated itself in his thoughts, wherein those sacred personalities, which are at once the reflex and the pattern of our nobler phases of life, housed themselves; [. . .] Some ideal, hieratic persons he would always need to occupy it [. . .] Thus a constant substitution of the typical for the actual took place in his thoughts. Angels might be met by the way, under English elm or beech-tree; mere messengers seemed like angels, bound on celestial errands.37

Florian’s substitution of the typical for the actual – as stemming from sacred texts – clearly gestures towards the sphere of the archetypical, providing us with a valuable interpretative clue, which accounts for the mythical opening of the story and sets the ground for its conclusion. When Florian has reached the age of twelve, the gateway of adolescence, he is taken to live in another place. His desire to travel along what is described as ‘a favourite road’38 promises a joyful departure from the 46

From Bible Myth to Walter Pater’s and Katherine Mansfield’s Stories familiar setting of his childhood, but something happens. Once they have gone a little way, Florian realises that his pet bird has been left in the empty house, where he will die alone. The association between the bird and Florian, the cage and the house, is revived at this crucial moment. Florian goes back to save his pet, but while passing from room to room a new form of awareness dawns on him, for ‘the aspect of the place touched him like the face of one dead; and a clinging back towards it came over him, so intense that he knew it would last long, and spoiling all his pleasure in the realisation of a thing so eagerly anticipated’.39 This is the moment when the wrestling with the angel occurs, resulting in an increased degree of awareness, and henceforward Florian will be marked by a psychic ‘limp’, testifying to the life-changing combat he had fought. The text ends on an ‘agony of home-sickness’,40 but an important event has taken place. Having fully experienced the emptiness of his former home, which his psyche reads symbolically, Florian can no longer escape and repress the thought of death, which thus paradoxically loses its power as a parasitic revenant, finally turning into a source of creativity, hence the story we have read. In Jungian terms, Florian has wrestled with the Leviathan, the great sea monster that swims in his unconscious,41 and can thus begin his process of individuation, which will make an artist of him.

From ‘The Aloe’ to ‘Prelude’ and Back Critics of ‘Prelude’ have often perceptively emphasised the layered nature of this text, contrasting its apparently secure family setting with the underlying ‘pattern of contraries’,42 as phrased by Cherry Hankin: Juxtaposed to the orderly existence within the house is the disorder Kezia encounters outside in the natural world; in contrast to the safely humdrum outer lives of the characters are their disturbingly conflict-ridden inner lives; and, as if echoing this division, the world which appears safe and familiar by day assumes hidden fearful characteristics at night.43

Like Florian, Kezia can be described as an introvert child, whose fears, aesthetic appreciation of reality and empathy are often contrasted with the personality of other characters. Without questioning the aesthetic primacy of ‘Prelude’, one also needs to revert to ‘The Aloe’ in order to shed light on the archetypal roots of this story as stemming from the intertextual relation with Pater and the Bible. A contrapuntal reading will therefore be conducted. The opposition between introversion and extraversion is articulated right from the first section of ‘Prelude’, when Linda decides to leave 47

Maurizio Ascari Kezia and Lottie back in order to carry with her what she regards as ‘absolute necessities’,44 and Mrs Samuel Josephs offers to let them play with her children until the storeman can fetch them. The theme of aggression is thus introduced, as vividly articulated in ‘The Aloe’: The Samuel Josephs were not a family. They were a swarm. The moment you entered the house they cropped up and jumped out at you from under the tables, through the stair rails, behind the doors, behind the coats in the passage. Impossible to count them: impossible to distinguish between them [. . .] And every single one of them started a pitched battle as soon as possible after birth with every single other.45

The following paragraphs elaborate on the family ethos of the Josephs, underlining their lack of empathy (starting from their laughter when they face a crying Lottie) and their obsession with monetary transactions: Alice Samuel Josephs tugged at a lily leaf, twisted it off, turned it over. It was covered on the under side with tiny blue and grey snails. ‘How much does your Pa give you for collecting snails?’ she demanded. ‘Nothing!’ said Kezia. ‘Reely? Doesn’t he give you anything? Our Pa gives us ha’penny a hundred. We put them in a bucket with salt and they all go bubbly like spittle. Don’t you get any pocket money?’46

This attitude to life clearly stands in opposition to Kezia’s, who may not be able to confront the brutal force of the Josephs, but who gets her revenge by tricking them into eating a flower that burns their tongues. When the Josephs have gone to seek their mother’s help, Kezia ventures into her now empty home while Lottie continues to play in the garden. What amounts in ‘Prelude’ to section II is clearly inspired by Pater. The house becomes a trope for the psyche of Kezia, whose lonely exploration brings to light two fundamental aspects of her burgeoning personality. The first is what Jung would call her mystical participation – an intimately joyful, fully absorbing immersion in the surrounding world. This is at the core of Kezia’s artistic temperament, which metamorphoses reality into an aesthetic experience through the intensity and creativeness of her vibrant gaze. It is to ‘Prelude’ that we need to revert in order to find a richer rendering of Kezia’s aesthetic relation to reality, for two revealing passages are absent from the earlier version. The first concerns the way in which the light filters into the abandoned drawing-room: ‘The Venetian blind was pulled down but not drawn close. Long pencil rays of sunlight shone through and the wavy shadow of a bush outside danced on the gold lines. Now it was still, now it began to flutter again, and now it came almost as far as her feet.’47 The cinematic quality of these lines may well 48

From Bible Myth to Walter Pater’s and Katherine Mansfield’s Stories reflect the new interest for film Mansfield developed after working as an extra in the cinema industry in January 1917, as testified also by the six stories in dialogue form that she published in the New Age between May and June of that year.48 The following lines of ‘Prelude’ contain an oft-quoted exploration of the creative import of ‘visual aberrations’: The dining-room window had a square of coloured glass at each corner. One was blue and one was yellow. Kezia bent down to have one more look at a blue lawn with blue arum lilies growing at the gate, and then at a yellow lawn with yellow lilies and a yellow fence. As she looked a little Chinese Lottie came out on to the lawn and began to dust the tables and chairs with a corner of her pinafore. Was that really Lottie? Kezia was not quite sure until she had looked through the ordinary window.49

This passage conveys Kezia’s burgeoning interest in the subjectivity of vision, together with her imaginative ability to project herself into alternative worlds. Section II also sheds light on a different aspect of Kezia’s personality, having to do with fear rather than curiosity, with the projection of one’s shadow – in Jungian terms – rather than with the magic of objects. In order to discuss this part of the story, which brings us back to Jacob’s wrestling with the angel, let us focus on ‘The Aloe’, where this inner dynamic is more fully explored: As she stood the day flickered out and sombre dusk entered the empty house, thievish dusk stealing the shapes of things, sly dusk painting the shadows. At her heels crept the wind, snuffling and howling. The windows shook, a creaking came from the walls and floors, a piece of loose iron on the roof banged forlornly – Kezia did not notice these things severally, but she was suddenly quite, quite still with wide open eyes and knees pressed together – terribly frightened. Her old bogey, the dark, had overtaken her, and now there was no lighted room to make a despairing dash for.50 [My italics]

Kezia suddenly realises that she is alone in the empty, darkening house and that asking for help would be useless, until she starts running down the stairs and meets Lottie at the back door. The origin of this panic attack is conceptualised as It, a frightening creature that Kezia had tried to describe to Grandmother as yellow and round, like the sun, but with no eyes, which possibly hints to the sphere of sensory deprivation. Kezia – the all-observing artist child, the hyper-recipient, the alchemical transformer of impressions and memories – has met her shadow. Darkness is the Leviathan hidden in the dark waters of Kezia’s unconscious, no less than in the dark waters of Mansfield’s, as discussed 49

Maurizio Ascari already in 1954 by Celeste Turner Wright, who critically mapped the author’s fear of night darkness, tunnels and dark waters as rooted in her child terrors and as symbolising her fear of loneliness and death.51 The wealth of quotes this brief article contains testifies in itself to Mansfield’s life-long fight with the archetype of death, which she arguably managed to objectify, in Jungian terms, acknowledging its dominance, but also creatively negotiating with it. ‘Prelude’ exemplifies the complexity of this process, for this commemorative work opens with Kezia’s encounter with death, only to end with the implicit promise of Bogey’s birth, somehow reversing the biological pattern. What about Kezia herself? Although darkness is quickly seeping into her former home when Kezia leaves it in fright, the child bravely faces the night journey that waits for her and once she reaches her new home it is light that welcomes her – ‘now one and now another of the windows leaped into light. Someone was walking through the empty rooms carrying a lamp’52 [my italics]. Emptiness has been filled with light, and a moment later it is Kezia who is trusted to carry the lamp while Grandmother brings in sleeping Lottie.

Mansfield’s Ongoing Fight with Darkness Mansfield’s self-inquiring depiction of Kezia’s wrestling with darkness in ‘The Aloe’ did not free the author of her childhood fears. This inner conflict was not solved, but it was bravely acknowledged over and over. Thus on 19 May 1917, at the time she was working on ‘Prelude’, Mansfield wrote a letter to Murry, who lived in a separate flat at that time, and who was at Garsington for the weekend. It was from his home that she wrote the letter, which she left inside a book, explaining its origin as follows: When dusk came – flowing up the silent garden – lapping against the blind windows – my first & last terror started up – I was making some coffee in the kitchen. It was so violent, so dreadful I put down the coffee-pot – and simply ran away – ran ran out of the studio and up the street with my bag under one arm and a block of writing paper and a pen under the other. I felt that if I could get here & find Mrs. [illegible] I should be ‘safe’ – I found her and I lighted your gas, wound up your clock – drew your curtains – & embraced your black overcoat before I sat down – frightened no longer.53

The contrast between darkness and light actually recurs throughout Mansfield’s literary output, as shown already by ‘Night Came Swiftly’ (1907), an early draft of a story which ends on these words: ‘Tea please, and a lamp, and light candles in the music room.’54 A lamp is also at the 50

From Bible Myth to Walter Pater’s and Katherine Mansfield’s Stories core of ‘The House’, a 1912 story which activates a galaxy of interconnected symbols and themes – the wind and the rain in conjunction with darkness, a lamp at the entrance of a house, a dream that turns into death, and above all loneliness in the face of the absolute. This juvenile story, the discovery of which we owe to Gerri Kimber, can be regarded as a laboratory teeming with tools, and illustrates the making of the literary imagination that will shape Mansfield’s mature works. Marked by a ‘whipping wind’,55 the opening of the story shows darkness ‘pouring into the world like grey fluid into a greyer cup’,56 until the weak and tired heroine spots the iron gate of a stone house that is marked for rent or sale. Only after finding refuge in a basket chair under the porch of the house is her attention caught by an object that immediately irradiates its power: She stripped off her gloves and sat, hands folded in her lap, looking up at the green blistered door, and a little octagonal lamp hanging over the doorway. Found herself staring at the lamp . . . now where had she seen it before? What trick of memory . . . had she seen it? She remembered so well hearing a girl saying ‘An octagonal lamp over the doorway – that settles the question!’57

Through the visual impression it makes, the object links together the two time-levels on which the story is articulated, while fulfilling a number of related functions. In addition to encapsulating the idea of domesticity, its position right over the doorway marks the threshold between an outside and an inside, calling our attention to two related oppositions: loneliness vs intimacy, and reality vs fantasy. When the protagonist falls asleep on the basket chair, her ensuing ‘dream’ of material cosiness  and emotional fulfillment actually accompanies her through the gates of death with a compensatory value, which fully transpires from these words: ‘“Oh, it is the sense of ‘home’ which is so precious to me – it is the wonderful sense of peace – of the rooms sanctified – of the quiet permanence – it is that which is so precious after  – – ”’.58 These final dashes are revealing, for in this story the reassuring world of home is ultimately revealed to be insubstantial and uncannily circumscribed by its ‘others’. What we have been misleadingly led to regard as eimlich – although a sense of eeriness underlies even the brightest pages of this story – turns into the unheimlich thanks to the final twist, which leaves readers with a dead body under the porch and a house that will ‘always be empty now’.59 The relevance of this ‘homely’ imagination within Mansfield’s subsequent fiction is often concurrent with this uncanny awareness of alternative conditions, as shown by ‘The Doll’s House’ (1922), where a miniature lamp turns into a symbol of 51

Maurizio Ascari empathy, fi ­ guratively ­reconnecting Kezia to the Kelveys, themselves an ­embodiment of social exclusion. Mansfield’s creative acknowledgement of the disheartening power loneliness and darkness jointly held for her equally spanned her entire career. It marks her juvenile story ‘Die Einsame’ (1904), which opens on a nightmare of self-conscious isolation (‘All alone she was. All alone with her soul. She lived on the top of a solitary hill. Her house was small and bare, and alone, too’),60 in order to climax on a desperate deprivation of light: ‘No! it was hopeless. The sun had gone. Darkness had come. “I am afraid,” she cried aloud.’61 It also imbibes the last story Mansfield completed – ‘The Canary’ – which appeared posthumously in 1923. The text begins with the female protagonist speaking these words: ‘You see that big nail to the right of the front door? I can scarcely look at it even now and yet I could not bear to take it out. I should like to think it was there always even after my time.’62 The nail that was used to support the cage of her pet bird takes on the value of a memento for the heroine, whose narrative is commemorative, like ‘Prelude’. Possibly echoing The Child in the House, the woman and her pet are presented as doubles, as shown by the parallel between the singing of the bird and the chatter of the woman, emphasised through a peculiar narrative technique, for only the narrator’s voice can be heard, while her interlocutor’s replies are rendered by means of ellipses. In the light of this projection, the first lines of the story take on a double meaning as testifying to the heroine’s love for her bird, but also to her own desire for ‘affective survival’. The theme of death climaxes into a scene that significantly follows on a dream and pivots on darkness perceived as an all-encompassing threatening presence: I remember one night. I had had a very awful dream – dreams can be terribly cruel – even after I had woken up I could not get over it. So I put on my dressing-gown and came down to the kitchen for a glass of water. It was a winter night and raining hard. I suppose I was half asleep still, but through the kitchen window, that hadn’t a blind, it seemed to me the dark was staring in, spying. And suddenly I felt it was unbearable that I had no one to whom I could say ‘I’ve had such a dreadful dream,’ or – ‘Hide me from the dark.’ I even covered my face for a minute. And then there came a little ‘Sweet! Sweet!’ His cage was on the table, and the cloth had slipped so that a chink of light shone through. ‘Sweet! Sweet!’ said the darling little fellow again, softly, as much as to say, ‘I’m here, Missus. I’m here!’ That was so beautifully comforting that I nearly cried.63

In the absence of a protective blind, darkness intrudes into the room as an aggressive agent, but a compensatory balance is established when 52

From Bible Myth to Walter Pater’s and Katherine Mansfield’s Stories light filters into the cage and communication between living beings is made possible. While it was the death of Leslie that inspired Mansfield to write ‘Prelude’, the deep motive we find at the root of ‘The Canary’ is rather Mansfield’s fear of her own impending death, for the germ of this story dawned on her at a time of dejection, while she was staying at the Victoria Palace Hotel in Paris, and she observed a woman tending her canaries. The words Mansfield noted while impatiently waiting to set the story down confirm this reading, equating the woman’s loquacity with her own need to write: I should like to write the Canary story tomorrow. So many ideas come and go [. . .] Was it always so with me? I don’t remember. Looking back, I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was, too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all.64

Writing is yet another way to fill the feared emptiness (and silence and darkness) on which life and consciousness seem to border. Significantly, ‘The Canary’ is set in New Zealand, the land of Mansfield’s childhood, where emotions reverberate intensely. The more she was constrained by illness, the more important this inner space grew, until in January 1922 she noted: ‘I can’t say how thankful I am to have been born in N.Z., to know Wellington as I do and to have it to range about in.’65 Thanks to this deeply familiar setting, the story can better reach for the archetypal conflict between life and death, which is symbolised through the opposition between light and darkness.

Mansfield’s Symbolist Syntax In her seminal study of Jung, Jolande Jacobi explains that symbols are ways in which the conscious mind perceives archetypes (in themselves but a potential, a cluster of energy) in the here and now: ‘The symbols [the mind] creates are always grounded in the unconscious archetype, but their manifest forms are moulded by the ideas acquired by the conscious mind.’66 As we have seen, Mansfield bravely delved into archetypal content in her works, while aiming for a new narrative syntax, which Andrew Gurr describes as being indebted to symbolism and as an alternative to realism. This innovative mode is exemplified by ‘Prelude’, which balances an episodic structure through an underlying network of imagery. Gurr sees the text as rejecting explication in favour of implication, which ‘has to be drawn from the patterns of parallel and contrast and from the recurrent images’.67 It is apparent that this symbolist syntax gestures 53

Maurizio Ascari towards myth and dreams, concurrently with the immersive nature of Mansfield’s creative process: ‘I dreamed a short story last night even down to its name, which was Sun & Moon [. . .] I didn’t dream that I read it. No I was in it part of it and it played round invisible me.’68 Mansfield’s ability to communicate so effectively through the poetic brevity and intensity of her stories is undoubtedly due to her mastery of technique, psychological perceptiveness and musical ear for language (not to mention her engagement with the new language of cinema), but Jung and Neumann would have probably ascribed her success also to her in-depth connection with the collective unconscious. Understanding this Jungian concept is not easy, and while the existence and nature of this suprapersonal reservoir of archetypes are still open to debate, the present critical itinerary has mobilised the tenets of analytical psychology to shed new light onto an elusive yet solid pattern of intertextual relations. Unlike the father figure in ‘The Fly’ (1922), whose drowning of the insect into a pool of black ink (the darkest of water) symbolises his repression of bereavement, his refusal to acknowledge his son’s death in war, Mansfield opted for the painful legacy of memory and awareness. Her talent for writing, however, enabled her to achieve an alchemical transformation of the ensuing emotional complex – the Other’s death as mirroring One’s own death, the physical impossibility and yet psychic cogency of death in life – into a self-therapeutic form, in which readers meaningfully mirror their own psychic experiences. Was it this that Jung meant by the artist’s proximity to the collective unconscious? Notes   1. CW4, p. 446.   2. CW4, p. 100.   3. CL2, p. 51, to S. S. Koteliansky (19 November 1915).   4. CW4, p. 171.   5. CW4, p. 191.   6. CW4, pp. 191–2.   7. CW4, p. 203.   8. CW4, p. 205.   9. CW4, p. 189. 10. Gerald Monsman, ‘Pater’s “Child in the House” and the Renovation of the Self’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 2: 3 (autumn 1986), pp. 281–95 (p. 283). 11. First published in London Magazine, September 1824; republished in Last Essays of Elia, 1833. Lamb’s ‘Dream-Children: A Reverie’ (London Magazine, January 1822; Essays of Elia, 1823) could also be mentioned. 12. Charles Lamb, ‘Blakesmoor in H-----shire’, in Essays of Elia (London: Moxon, 1869), p. 240.

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From Bible Myth to Walter Pater’s and Katherine Mansfield’s Stories 13. Already in 1954, however, F. B. Elkisch published an article in which he regarded Jacob’s fight as representing ‘the story of man’s reconciliation with his other self, with the dark, shadowy side of unredeemed nature which is his own worst enemy’. F. B. Elkisch, ‘The Scriptures and the Spirit’, Life of the Spirit, 8: 92/93 (February– March 1954), p. 383. 14. Erich Neumann, Jacob and Esau: On the Collective Symbolism of the Brother Motif, ed. and intro. by Erel Shalit, trans. Mark Kyburz (Asheville, NC: Chiron, 2015). Kindle. 15. Neumann, Kindle. 16. Neumann, Kindle. 17. Neumann, Kindle. 18. C. G. Jung, Psychological Types, in The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 6 , eds and trans. Gerhard Adler and R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 781. 19. Letters 4, p. 73, to John Middleton Murry (17 October 1920). 20. Letters 4, p. 97, to John Middleton Murry (3 November 1920). 21. Richard Bizot, ‘Pater’s “The Child in the House” in Perspective’, Papers on Language and Literature, 8 (autumn 1972), pp. 79–95 (p. 81). 22. Walter Pater, The Child in the House: An Imaginary Portrait (Portland, ME: Thomas B. Mosher, 1896), p. 9. 23. C. G. Jung, Four Archetypes: Mother, Rebirth, Spirit, Trickster, trans. R. F. C. Hull (London and New York: Routledge, 2003 [1972]), p. 3. 24. Neumann, Kindle. 25. Pater, pp. 10–11. 26. Lawrence Evans, ed., Letters of Walter Pater (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), p. xxix. 27. Pater, p. 11. 28. Pater, pp. 16–17. 29. Pater, p. 19. 30. Pater, p. 22. 31. Pater, p. 22. 32. Pater, pp. 22–3. 33. Pater, p. 29. 34. Pater, p. 30. 35. Pater, p. 31. 36. Pater, p. 41. 37. Pater, pp. 42–3. 38. Pater, p. 45. 39. Pater, pp. 45–6. 40. Pater, p. 46. 41. See C. G. Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga: Notes on the Seminar Given in 1932 by C.G. Jung, ed. by Sonu Shamdasani (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 13–15. 42. Cherry Hankin, Katherine Mansfield and Her Confessional Stories (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), p. 117. 43. Hankin, p. 117. 44. CW2, p. 56. 45. CW1, p. 469. Kezia’s fear of aggression is further explored in the text, notably when she reveals to the foreman that she hates ‘rushing animals like dogs and parrots’, also adding: ‘I often dream that animals rush at me – even camels – and while they are rushing, their heads swell e-enormous’ (CW1, p. 61). The analogy between Kezia’s dream and her mother’s own fear of swelling things – which emerges in the course

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Maurizio Ascari of another dream, testifying to her ambivalent relation with her husband’s sexuality and the resulting pregnancies – has been thoroughly analysed by critics. See for instance J. Lawrence Mitchell, ‘Katherine Mansfield and the Aesthetic Object’, Journal of New Zealand Literature, 22 (2004), pp. 31–54 (p. 31). 46. CW1, p. 471. 47. CW2, p. 58. 48. See Maurizio Ascari, Cinema and the Imagination in Katherine Mansfield’s Writing (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 40. 49. CW2, p. 59. 50. CW1, p. 473. 51. See Celeste Turner Wright, ‘Darkness as a Symbol in Katherine Mansfield’, Modern Philology, 51: 3 (February 1954), pp. 204–7. 52. CW2, p. 61. 53. Letters 1, p. 307, to John Middleton Murry (19 May 1917). 54. CW1, p. 73. 55. CW1, p. 304. 56. CW1, p. 304. 57. CW1, p. 305. 58. CW1, p. 309. 59. CW1, p. 311. 60. CW1, p. 20. 61. CW1, p. 21. 62. CW2, p. 511. 63. CW2, p. 513. 64. CW4, p. 428. 65. CW4, p. 408. 66. Jolande Jacobi, Complex/Archetype/Symbol in the Psychology of C. G. Jung (Complex/ Archetypus/Symbol in der Psychologie C. G. Jung, 1957), trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959), p. 74. 67. Andrew Gurr, ‘Katherine Mansfield: The Question of Perspectives in Commonwealth Literature’, Kunapipi, 6: 2 (1984), pp. 67–80. 68. Letters 2, p. 66, to John Middleton Murry (10 and 11 February 1918).

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The Deadliest Game of Snooker: Katherine Mansfield’s Great War Revisited Janka Kascakova

In her 1998 ground-breaking article, Christine Darrohn persuasively argued for Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Garden Party’ (1921) to be read as a profoundly war-conscious story, among other things ‘haunted [. . .] by the dead young soldiers’,1 including her brother Leslie who died in October 1915. Many other scholars have since demonstrated that this is not the only one of Mansfield’s seemingly non-war stories which touch upon the ramifications of the four years of carnage that so tragically impacted her generation. Indeed, Volume 6 of Katherine Mansfield Studies was entirely dedicated to the First World War,2 and Alice Kelly’s recent Commemorative Modernisms: Women Writers, Death and the First World War,3 explores in many different ways how inextricably, even if obliquely, war is woven into the fabric of a number of Mansfield’s stories, including those that do not make any overt mention of it and whose temporal setting pre-dates it. Furthermore, analysing Mansfield’s personal writings and correspondence, Kelly and Lawrence Mitchell respectively have disproved some past claims that Mansfield and Murry were ‘oblivious to the cataclysm’ of the war and saw it only as a personal inconvenience.4 Kelly documents how, from its very beginning, war permeated Mansfield’s personal writing, firstly eliciting ‘creative joy in new linguistic possibilities offered by [it]’,5 and later becoming ‘a counter-trope to her own battle with illness, providing a framework for her depiction of her illness and a less immediate means of discussing the possibility of death’.6 This essay enters the discussion by examining some aspects of ‘Prelude’ (1917) and ‘At the Bay’ (1921) and proposing that both stories be approached in a similar way to Darrohn’s reading of ‘The Garden Party’. I shall focus mostly on one of the most intriguing yet usually neglected characters appearing in both stories, the dog Snooker, recognising his presentation as a rather unconventional yet deeply genuine and moving tribute to 57

Janka Kascakova Mansfield’s brother Leslie and his fellow soldiers. The analysis of the presentation of Snooker will demonstrate how its complex symbolism links it to Mansfield’s most acclaimed war story ‘The Fly’ (1922). No matter how peaceful and at times idyllic both ‘Prelude’ and ‘At the Bay’ appear, their leitmotif is death. Apart from many direct references to it, especially the powerfully symbolical exchange between Kezia and her grandmother in part VII of ‘At the Bay’, and the duck-killing scene in part IX of ‘Prelude’, it reverberates through the manifold layers of the symbolism of both stories. Death informs these stories as the very reason for their existence and the root of their form. On the one hand, they are the fulfilment of Mansfield’s solemn vow after the passing of her brother to ‘write recollections of [New Zealand]’7 and perform a duty ‘to the lovely time when [she and her brother] were both alive’;8 on the other, they are the manifestation of Mansfield’s famous claim that the experience of war – and deaths related to it – have to result in ‘new expressions, new moulds for our thoughts and feelings’, that is, new forms of writing fiction.9 Although she had taken inspiration from New Zealand before, it was death – or deaths: first at the Front, then back home, and eventually the fear of her own mortality as a result of illness – that turned the quaint but backwater island country Mansfield was only too happy to leave into a fictional mechanism through which she was able to channel her grief and fears, affording them a more productive outcome, as well as communicate profound ideas about – what she liked to call – Life. Both stories are an embodiment of the fact that death also acts as a prism or a filter through which one looks at the world, seeing familiar objects or scenes in a completely different light. Some things, as Mansfield herself asserted, ‘become intensified, they are illumined’;10 some become colourless or fade into the background; some words become unintelligible noises, while sentences that seemed to have no significant meaning before suddenly pop up. The many aspects of this sensory distortion and Mansfield’s awareness of the impossibility of anticipating its effects is beautifully encapsulated in the following extract from ‘At the Bay’: Dazzling white the picotees shone; the golden-eyed marigold glittered; the nasturtiums wreathed the veranda poles in green and gold flame. If only one had time to look at these flowers long enough, time to get over the sense of novelty and strangeness, time to know them! But as soon as one paused to part the petals, to discover the under-side of the leaf, along came Life and one was swept away.11

To the casual eye, this is an image of a perfect summer day which in no way seems to refer to anything unpleasant, let alone death or war, yet 58

Katherine Mansfield’s Great War Revisited the opposite is true. When Mansfield explained to Murry how she envisaged the experience of the war should be reflected in contemporary literature, she offered a clue that is directly applicable to this scene. According to her, the knowledge of death inevitably seeps into our view of life, ‘[w]e see death in life as we see death in a flower that is fresh unfolded. Our hymn is to the flower’s beauty – we would make that beauty immortal because we know.’12 Although she spoke figuratively and generally, here she does indeed make these and many other flowers eternal, and while the death underlying their life is well hidden, it is nevertheless present everywhere. The description of the flowers is so vivid it almost hurts one’s eyes to read it. As such, it can only be a memory, the famous Wordsworthian ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’,13 since, as Linda quite correctly muses, one never has time to pay proper attention or fully comprehend the meaning of such moments while they are still happening; one does not take death into account while being swept away by ‘Life’. The vividness (with an emphasis on the word’s origin in the verb ‘to live’) is further strengthened by its contrast to the greyness, despair and dead landscapes of First World War battlefields which, however, in spite of outward appearances, are evoked by this extract. The ‘under-side of the leaf’ is a subtle reference to Mansfield’s symbolical representation of the ugly side of life, what she frequently referred to as the ‘snail under the leaf’, which shows up when one least expects it and spoils the joy. This is further reinforced by the blindingly shining picotees, flowers typical of one basic colour with a contrasting dark border which symbolises the same thing, two sides of life, the balancing of darkness and light. What is more, picotees come in many colours, but in this case, they are white and as such normally have a lighter or dark pink border or staining, reminiscent of white fabric tinted with blood. The other flowers in the picture add further hidden meanings. Both marigolds and nasturtiums have such symbolical connotations that their inclusion in this picture can in no way be considered random. In the language of flowers, the popular Victorian pastime, ‘the marigold was synonymous with grief, despair and mourning’.14 While the huge post-war popularity of John McCray’s poem ‘In Flanders Fields’ (1915), recited frequently at memorials to fallen soldiers, gave rise to the poppy becoming an almost universal symbol of remembrance, to the Victorians the flower of remembrance was actually a marigold, a fact Mansfield would have been well aware of and the selection of which well fits the setting of her story. Nasturtiums, in their turn, symbolise conquest and patriotism, possibly because of their fiery colour, but some also mention that their frequent association with war is due to their flowers resembling helmets, and their leaves 59

Janka Kascakova shaped like shields.15 All the above turns the seemingly Arcadian scene into an ominous foreshadowing of what is ultimately going to be the fate of the baby still, for the moment, lying peacefully next to Linda. Thus, both ‘Prelude’ and ‘At the Bay’, as with ‘The Garden Party’, act as ways of processing the consequences of the war and facilitating its mourning. While ‘The Garden Party’, as Kelly has it, offers ‘a consolatory corpse – [Mansfield’s] own version of the Unknown Warrior’,16 in contrast to the mutilated or missing bodies of actual soldiers, the former two stories, in their turn, provide a colourful, unblemished and  peaceful landscape as an antithesis to the deafening noise and smell of  ravaged battlefields, a place where the bereaved would rather imagine their loved ones living for posterity. The ugliness is hidden, yet it is inevitably there, changing the very texture of the narrative, yet offering consolation by not speaking ‘bang out’ about the atrocities of war. Although ‘At the Bay’, as noted above, despite outward appearances, accomplishes Mansfield’s requirement for literature of not leaving the war out,17 the war-related deaths are just one layer of the story’s multiple meanings. As I have argued elsewhere, it is also a means for Mansfield of paying homage to several of her close relatives who had passed away in New Zealand, including her mother.18 Additionally, although directly after the loss of Leslie Mansfield had contemplated her own demise and felt as dead as him, at the time of writing ‘At the Bay’ her death was no longer a theoretical concept but an imminent threat, and this reality overshadowed the already-dimming memories of the war. In contrast, the earlier ‘Prelude’ has always been read as a tribute just to Leslie, not least because Mansfield directly claimed it was so. It was also written while the war was still raging, with the grief of the loss of her brother amplified by further fatalities among her friends and acquaintances, and the end of the conflict was nowhere in sight. It then makes sense to assume that the writing of ‘Prelude’ would be to a greater extent (or differently) affected by the war, that it would convey the immediacy of experience as opposed to the benefit of distance and hindsight of ‘At the Bay’. When discussing the reflection of war in ‘Prelude’, scholars usually focus on the duck-killing scene, its obvious violence, and the distress it causes Kezia.19 However, I argue that an even more complex allusion to the war is hidden in plain sight in the section preceding it, particularly in the character of Snooker, whose presentation I consider to be a slightly differently oriented version of Mansfield’s post-war masterpiece ‘The Fly’. Both ‘Prelude’ and ‘The Fly’ are strongly marked by absence. Unlike its first draft, ‘The Aloe’, which was supposed to end with Leslie’s birth,20 ‘Prelude’ makes only very few slight hints that Linda is pregnant, this 60

Katherine Mansfield’s Great War Revisited time ‘finally’ with a boy and the heir Stanley Burnell desires so much. Indeed it is debatable whether anybody reading ‘Prelude’, without knowing the context of Mansfield’s life or her other stories, would ever decode Linda’s ‘illness’ as pregnancy. The story is over before the anticipated son is born and the conspicuous absence of the subject of the tribute creates a tension within the narrative. In a stroke of genius, Mansfield chose to commemorate her dead brother by describing the time when his existence was not yet certain yet was highly anticipated; the blissful time when nobody knew how and where his life would end, and when his future held an infinite number of shining possibilities. When Stanley enters the nursery and yearningly looks at the chair at the head of the table thinking ‘that’s where my boy ought to sit’,21 he is happy, but his happiness holds in itself the magnitude of future heartbreak. This scene portends a very similar one in ‘The Fly’. Just as Stanley is immensely pleased with himself for providing his growing family with the new house and bigger nursery his son is about to enjoy, the nameless boss is ‘proud of his room; he liked to have it admired, especially by old Woodifield’.22 The office has been newly refurbished and the boss enjoys flaunting its luxury until Woodifield unexpectedly reminds him of the death of his son, springing on him his daughters’ visit to the war cemetery in Belgium. Then it becomes clear that boss’s refurbishments are in fact a coping mechanism, a way to keep on going after the death of his son six years previously. But he is well aware of the meaninglessness of his endeavours: His boy was an only son. Ever since his birth the boss had worked at building up this business for him; it had no other meaning if it was not for the boy. Life itself had come to have no other meaning. How on earth could he have slaved, denied himself, kept going all those years without the promise for ever before him of the boy’s stepping into his shoes and carrying on where he left off?23

Although unspoken, this passage resonates with Stanley Burnell’s thought ‘that’s where my boy ought to sit’, giving it a tragic new meaning. The boss then proceeds to play with a fly drowning in his inkpot, eventually killing it with his experiments. As many have pointed out, the fly represents the thousands of young men slaughtered as flies on the battlefields of the war, the boss’s son among them. So although ‘the boy’ is physically dead and absent, symbolically he is represented by the insect desperately fighting for its life and losing its battle on the blotting paper in the boss’s office. I would argue that, analogously to ‘the boy’ in ‘The Fly’, the yet unborn son/the dead Leslie of ‘Prelude’ is present in the story not just as an empty space, but also symbolically in a non-human form, namely that of 61

Janka Kascakova the dog Snooker. At first sight, this claim might seem controversial, since the overall presentation of Snooker is not very flattering. He is a rather pitiful mongrel, constantly following his little masters, even though they treat him badly and make him suffer. However, reading his character alongside ‘The Fly’ enables the reader to understand his depiction as a powerful criticism of patriarchal values, war machinery and propaganda, very similar to that of the more openly war-related ‘The Fly’. Snooker belongs to the little Trouts, the two boy cousins who come to visit and play with the three little Burnell girls. The older boy, Pip, characterises Snooker as a ‘grand fighting dog’,24 and keeps tying a handkerchief around his head to ‘train his ears to grow more close to his head’, since, according to him, ‘[a]ll fighting dogs have ears that lie back’,25 and Snooker’s are far too soft. What is more, he and his brother Rags constantly keep ‘dosing him with various awful mixtures concocted by Pip’, consisting of ‘some carbolic tooth powder and a pinch of sulphur powdered up fine, and perhaps a bit of starch to stiffen up [his] coat’,26 and, as Rags suspects, possibly even gunpowder, as he never was allowed to help with the mixing because of the danger . . . . ‘Why, if a spot of this flew in your eye, you would be blinded for life,’ Pip would say, stirring the mixture with an iron spoon. ‘And there’s always the chance – just the chance, mind you – of it exploding if you whack it hard enough . . . . Two spoons of this in a kerosene tin will be enough to kill thousands of fleas.’27

However, none of these procedures seems to have any flea-eradicating or fight-inducing effect on Snooker who seems to bear his fate patiently, albeit miserably, while stinking so abominably that he is never allowed inside the house. Whilst examining the differences between the draft of ‘The Aloe’ and the published ‘Prelude’, Alex Moffett has argued that in the process of transformation of the text, as a result of her brother’s death, Mansfield changed ‘her representational strategies’ and moved war ‘from a metaphorical yet tangible presence in the text, to a seeming and signifying absence’.28 The links to war were, in most cases, submerged deeper, but it is not entirely accurate to claim that ‘Prelude’ is ‘[w]ithout any reference to the First World War’,29 since the vocabulary of the section above is quite obviously connected to the war. Even a cursory glance at the text is enough to indicate that Mansfield’s presentation of Snooker offers many parallels with the soldiers of the Great War, but only further in-depth analysis reveals how profoundly they are symbolically interconnected. The choice and accumulation of words reminiscent of the conflict is merely the first layer. Snooker’s ordeal evokes that of the 62

Katherine Mansfield’s Great War Revisited soldiers in the trenches who were surrounded by explosions and the smell of sulphur, gunpowder and kerosene, their coats saturated with the stench of rot and decay and infested by fleas they would attempt to kill but never really manage to get rid of. They in their turn are viewed and treated like fleas by the politicians and military leaders, killed in their thousands, played with as the boss in ‘The Fly’ plays with the life of the little insect caught in his inkpot. In ‘The Fly’ Mansfield opts to use a faceless and nameless insect people usually have no relationship with, or pity for, to emphasise the heartlessness and detachment of the war machinery from the actual suffering of the troops. It is a chilling choice, and one that she could only make from a distance of some years. While creating the character of Snooker, the wound was still fresh and she could not help being more personal and emotional, choosing an animal that has a name and a face and which, unlike the fly, can communicate by use of body language. But nevertheless there are many parallels between Snooker and the fly. As Melinda Harvey points out: ‘The Trout boys’ mongrel dog, Snooker, in “Prelude” endures treatment that oscillates between care and cruelty’,30 which is a statement equally applicable to the fly. On the one hand, the boss drops ink on it to see how it copes; on the other, he encourages it, urges it on using stale phrases and propaganda slogans. The boss’s conduct towards the fly is also an unthinking experiment, not a conscious act of destruction, in the same way that Pip is not aware of the fact that he is actually torturing Snooker. Both Pip and the boss’s haphazard (chemical) experiments point at two much-discussed aspects of this particular war. The first is the massive involvement of science and technology, for the first time, on such a large scale, resulting in the creation of weapons that would change the face of warfare forever. On the one hand, they made killing the enemy faster and more efficient. War became industrialised and thus deadlier, bringing numbers of casualties incomparable to those of previous conflicts. On the other, imperfect scientific understanding or incompetent handling could turn weapons against the ones wielding them, as documented examples demonstrate. The most often mentioned example is the battle of Loos in 1915, when the British attempted to use poisonous gas against the Germans but it returned back with the wind onto their own men.31 The other aspect is the sheer chaos and arbitrariness that are as much a part of war as strategy and military experience, but which was amplified in this particular war in which ‘British officers struggled with the novelty of the war they were fighting’.32 Mansfield hints at the legendary ineptitude of the military leaders so common in most narratives about the First World War, suggesting that even seemingly ‘well-meaning’ actions could have disastrous 63

Janka Kascakova consequences and as such cannot be simply excused and disregarded. Finally, through Pip’s warning to Rags that the concoction could explode if whacked hard enough, Mansfield acknowledges the death of her brother who, significantly, never experienced actual battle and who died as a result of the random explosion of a faulty demonstration grenade. The fact that Snooker is a dog, not a fly, modifies the potential for symbolical interpretations connected to the war. The very nature of dogs and their relationships with their masters – notably their unwavering loyalty, even when mistreated – aptly reflect the situation of the soldiers. While many enlisted with enthusiasm, lured by the hope of adventure and ideals of patriotism, they soon found themselves in very difficult situations where any remaining feelings of love and duty for their country were interlaced with the misery in actually fulfilling that duty. Their ideals were taken advantage of, but they had no way out, so they had to resign themselves to their fate, perhaps hoping for deliverance, just like Snooker, who, in his cameo appearance in ‘At the Bay’, gives ‘an occasional desperate-sounding puff as much as to say he had decided to make an end of it and was only waiting for some kind cart to come along’.33 The connection between ‘The Fly’ and the Snooker passages in ‘Prelude’ is further reinforced by their possible inspiration by Shakespeare. As scholars habitually point out, ‘The Fly’ evokes his lines: ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods. They kill us for their sport.’34 Although Snooker is neither an insect nor is it likely he would actually succumb to Pip’s vile potions, the element of inflicting suffering as a game perfectly characterises the depiction of his existence in the Trout household. What is more, the fact that Snooker is a dog actually strengthens the association with Shakespeare by evoking another quotation – from Julius Caesar – that would give Mansfield a different opportunity for the criticism of the war and its aspects. Its striking parallels with the context of the First World War, especially the image of ‘carrion men, groaning for burial’, are chilling: And Caesar’s spirit, ranging for revenge, With Ate by his side come hot from hell, Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war, That this foul deed shall smell above the earth With carrion men, groaning for burial.35

Mansfield would not only know the passage first-hand from her own reading of Shakespeare, but also importantly from war propaganda which frequently used this reference to support the idea of rightful anger, and to justify the country’s involvement in the war. It would indeed seem 64

Katherine Mansfield’s Great War Revisited that Mark Antony’s fury while standing over Caesar’s dead body was an apt parallel with the situation of the Allied leaders, enraged in the wake of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, vowing to unleash the dogs of war on their enemies in revenge. In the image of Snooker, Mansfield reacts more to this propaganda usage than to Shakespeare himself, and offers a distinctly sarcastic reading. First of all, she does not portray Snooker as a fearsome and bloodthirsty beast causing havoc – quite the contrary; to Pip’s irritation, the dog’s ears are soft and his continuous attempts at training him to be a fighting dog remain futile. Snooker’s soft ears symbolise his mild and non-violent nature and are a comment on the character of men like Leslie Beauchamp whose family nickname, Chummie, reveals a good deal about his general disposition. Just as Pip’s mistake is to assume that any dog can be trained to fight, the same goes for military and political leaders pledging to ‘make men out of boys’, believing that by force of dressing them in uniforms and giving them weapons, they would automatically be turned into perfect soldiers and efficient killing machines. The boss’s memories also draw attention to the sunny disposition and amiable nature of his son: ‘No, he was just his bright, natural self, with the right word for everybody, with that boyish look and his habit of saying, “Simply splendid!”’36 When he decides to look at the boy’s photograph, he does not like it because ‘the expression was unnatural. It was cold, even stern-looking. The boy had never looked like that.’37 While here he only refers to his son’s facial expression, at the beginning of the story he also mentions that the photograph shows a ‘grave-looking boy in uniform standing in one of those spectral photographers’ parks with photographers’ storm-clouds behind him’.38 Therefore, his distaste for the picture can possibly be extended to what the boy is wearing; it is the uniform that is making him look unnatural as playing the part of a soldier necessitates being serious, something the boy apparently never was in reality. The fact that both in ‘Prelude’ and ‘The Fly’ the son is only referred to as ‘the boy’ adds another layer of war-related meaning. It could easily be explained away by the biographical detail that, apart from ‘Chummie’, Leslie was often simply called ‘Boy’, such was Harold Beauchamp’s joy at finally getting a son after so many daughters. In ‘The Fly’, the use of the general names ‘the boss’ and ‘the boy’ are an indication that the story is not about one man’s personal sorrow but the tragedy of a whole generation of fathers contributing to the destruction of a whole generation of young men perishing on the battlefields. But there is one further explanation that Snooker’s soft ears imply: that Mansfield insisted on calling her character ‘the boy’ because she wanted to emphasise the painfully young age of him and his comrades, that they were still just children 65

Janka Kascakova and had no business being in the situation they found themselves in, even if it was technically their own choice. Mansfield believed they had been misled by their imagination and propaganda and had no idea what they were actually signing up for. Indeed, browsing through images, in uniform or out of it, of Mansfield’s brother and his enlisted friends and contemporaries, it is evident that they do not resemble the larger-thanlife descriptions of heroes from classical literature, nor do they meet our contemporary notion of highly trained warriors. They certainly look nothing like snarling Rottweilers with their ears close to their heads, ready to attack. Quite the contrary, the faces gazing outwards from such images are youthful, boyish, slender; many, including Leslie, trying to emphasise their masculine looks with a barely-there moustache but not really succeeding. It is obvious that these young students, writers, painters, scholars, boys who brought books to the trenches and wrote poetry in between bloody battles,39 had little propensity for actual combat and inadequate training for what actually awaited them at the Front, making their four years in the trenches even more unimaginably terrifying than they otherwise would have been. In the character of Snooker, Mansfield acknowledges this suffering and legitimises what war propaganda and patriotic rhetoric suppresses; their right to be ordinary, not stereotypically heroic, afraid and reluctant to keep going; to be boys scared of the pandemonium around them and not wanting to fight any longer. So while ‘The Fly’ focuses on the ones in power: the politicians, military leaders and other kinds of ‘bosses’, and, for the sake of accusing them of indifference to individual soldiers’ suffering, suppresses the individuality and faces of their victims, the focus of the Snooker passages is slightly different. It honours the humanity and nature of soldiers and distances them from the war propaganda and clichéd depictions. Mansfield will return to the image of scared boys and unlikely heroes later when reviewing the war nurse, Sarah Macnaughtan’s My War Experiences in Two Continents in April 1919. It is evident that she was affected by the memoir and that the quotations she chose directly resonated with her, especially the longest one: Above all, one feels – at least I do – that one is always, and quite palpably, in the shadow of the death of youth – beautiful youth, happy and healthy and free. Always I seem to see the white faces of boys turned up to the sky, and I hear their cries and see the agony which joyous youth was never meant to bear. They are too young for it, far too young; but they lie out on the field between the trenches, and bite the mud in their frenzy of pain; and they call for their mothers, and no one comes, and they call to their friends, but no one hears. There is a roar of battle and of bursting shells, and who can listen to a boy’s groans and his shrieks of pain? This is war.40

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Katherine Mansfield’s Great War Revisited Just like Mansfield, Macnaughtan persistently refers to boys rather then men, not to in any way diminish their suffering or sacrifice, but to highlight the terrible waste of youth and, arguably, also to defy the propagandist rhetoric of inflated adult masculinity related to war. At the end of the review, Mansfield contemplates the meaning of heroism, directly dismissing its earlier literary depictions as no longer valid after the recent conflict. She claims that the heroes and heroines of old, ‘that shining band of knights and ladies’ who appeared to have been ‘born brave’ and ‘blind to the shadows’ are gone as are their ‘lifeless perfections’. They are replaced by those who fought against ‘Fear and his shadowy army, against the dark hosts of Imagination and the blacker hosts of Reality’ and, most importantly, that they are not ‘born brave’ and what keeps them going is ‘their own spirit, bright and solitary in the incomprehensible darkness of their being’.41 This time, Mansfield openly expresses what she was only hinting at in her depiction of Snooker: that a soldier’s ordinariness, fear, lack of oversized muscles or appropriate shape of ears do not prevent him from becoming a hero and that heroism is more of an unwelcome consequence of difficult external circumstances than an ideal inner state one should strive for. The ironical reading of the phrase ‘dogs of war’ in connection to Snooker is further supported by Mansfield’s frequent bitter allusions to war as a party or a game, as well as her own ways of coping with her illness by playing the game of pretending her body is a battlefield. As a matter of fact, Mansfield’s writing oscillates between understanding play as an important creative tool, as a means of fighting enemies one has no real way of combatting, but also as a way of expressing her sarcastic view of the authorities’ approach to their inferiors. Indeed, from the latter springs her description of the war as the ‘greatest of all garden parties’,42 and the presentation of both the fly and Snooker as victims of a disturbing game. For that reason, the fact that the poor dog is called ‘Snooker’ can be no coincidence; quite the contrary, it is an important clue that has eluded scholars until now. Snooker is, after all, a game, one that is commonly agreed to have been invented in the late nineteenth century by British military officers in India.43 Furthermore, it is strongly reminiscent of the war and its strategic planning; the military leaders visualised the position of troops and planned their tactics by moving the colour-coded armies from one place to another on a map set on a table, which is visually reminiscent of the game of snooker. This necessary schematising for the purposes of simplicity and better orientation at the same time dehumanises the actual soldiers and makes them nameless, faceless and as disposable 67

Janka Kascakova as flies. The officers become detached from the actual impact of their decisions, having no more connection to the hardship of their soldiers than if they were just colourful snooker balls shuffled back and forth with the use of cue sticks. The final element of this image is that, in the context of the war, the word ‘snooker’ actually refers to Leslie and his fellow servicemen, since it is a mostly derogatory military slang term for a new and inexperienced soldier.44 Furthermore, as a verb, the word can signify entrapment, being stuck in – or even tricked into – a difficult position, and it suggests that long before she wrote ‘The Fly’ and while the war was still ongoing, Mansfield had already expressed her opinion of it as a sham, a cynical abuse of power and a contemptible exploitation of idealistic young men’s desire for distinction. That she describes Snooker as a mongrel dog is not meant as a disparagement of the soldiers, but rather possibly a tongue-in-cheek way of expressing that they were from different classes and corners of the Empire. Thus, the inconspicuous and generally overlooked character of Snooker emerges as embodying a powerful criticism of war, equally sharp, even if less immediately obvious, than the fly in the eponymous story. This makes the First World War in Mansfield’s eyes not only the ‘greatest of all garden parties’, but also the deadliest game of snooker. Notes   1. Christine Darrohn, ‘“Blown to Bits!” Katherine Mansfield’s “The Garden Party” and the Great War’, Modern Fiction Studies, 44: 3 (autumn 1998), pp. 513–39 (p. 525).  2. Gerri Kimber, Todd Martin et al., eds, Katherine Mansfield and World War One (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014).   3. Alice Kelly, Commemorative Modernisms: Women Writers, Death and the First World War (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020).   4. Jeffrey Meyers, Katherine Mansfield: A Biography (New York: New Directions, 1980), p. 127.   5. Kelly, p. 227.   6. Kelly, p. 334.   7. CW4, pp. 191–2, 22 February 1916.   8. CW4, pp. 171–2, 20 October 1915.  9. Letters 3, p. 82, to John Middleton Murry, 10 November 1919. 10. Letters 3, p. 97, to John Middleton Murry, 16 November 1919. 11. CW2, p. 354. 12. Letters 3, p. 97, to John Middleton Murry, 16 November 1919. 13. William Wordsworth, ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads’, [accessed 30 September 2022]. 14. Mareike Doleschal, ‘Shakespeare’s Favourite Flowers: The Marigold’, [accessed 30 September 2022].

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Katherine Mansfield’s Great War Revisited 15. [accessed 30 September 2022]. 16. Kelly, p. 480. 17. Letters 3, p. 82, to John Middleton Murry, 10 November 1919. 18. Janka Kascakova, ‘Katherine Mansfield’s Children at Play’, in Joyce E. Kelley, ed., Children’s Play in Literature: Investigating the Strengths and the Subversions of the Playing Child (New York: Routledge, 2019), pp. 124–42 (p. 139). 19. See, for example: Richard Cappuccio, ‘War Thoughts and Home: Katherine Mansfield’s Model of a Hardened Heart in a Broken World’, in Katherine Mansfield and World War One, pp. 84–97 (p. 90); Derek Ryan, ‘Katherine Mansfield’s Animal Aesthetics’, Modern Fiction Studies, 64: 1 (spring 2018), pp.  27–51 (pp. 34–35). 20. CW4, p. 205: ‘And now I know what the last chapter is. It is your birth – your coming in the autumn [. . .] That chapter will end the book.’ 21. CW2, p. 76. 22. CW2, p. 476. 23. CW2, p. 478. 24. CW2, p. 79. 25. CW2, p. 80. 26. CW2, p. 78. 27. CW2, pp. 78–9, Mansfield’s ellipses. 28. Alex Moffett, ‘Katherine Mansfield’s Home Front: Submerging the Martial Metaphors of “The Aloe”’, in Katherine Mansfield and World War One, pp. 69–83 (p. 70). 29. Moffett, p. 81. 30. Melinda Harvey, ‘Katherine Mansfield’s Menagerie’, in Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber and Susan Reid, eds, Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism (New York: Continuum, 2011), pp. 202–10 (p. 207). 31. James Patton, ‘Gas in the Great War’, [accessed 25 October 2022]. 32. Dan Todman, The Great War: Myth and Memory (London and New York: Continuum, 2011), p. 79. 33. CW2, pp. 356–7. 34. King Lear, IV, 1. The story’s similarity to another Shakespeare’s play, Titus Andronicus, has also been pointed out. See Erika Baldt, ‘Mythology and/of the Great War in Katherine Mansfield’s “The Daughters of the Late Colonel”’, in Katherine Mansfield and World War One, pp. 98–112 (p. 98). 35. Julius Caesar, III, 1 (emphasis added). 36. CW2, p. 478. 37. CW2, p. 479. 38. CW2, p. 476. 39. The unparalleled significance of literature in the trenches of the First World War is examined in detail in chapter V, ‘Oh What a Literary War’, of Paul Fussell’s seminal The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000 [1975]), pp. 155–90. 40. CW3, p. 453. 41. CW3, p. 454. 42. CW3, p. 511.

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Janka Kascakova 43. Peter Ainsworth, ‘The Origin of Snooker: The Neville Chamberlain Story’ https:// www.snookerheritage.co.uk/normans-articles/days-of-old/origins-of-snooker/ [accessed 30 September 2022]. 44. Ainsworth, n.p.

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Katherine Mansfield, ‘The Cowiness of the Cow’ and Medical History Derek Ryan

On 31 December 1922, Katherine Mansfield wrote what would turn out to be her last letter to her father, Harold Beauchamp, describing her life at the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at Fontainebleau-Avon, France: [T]he people here have had built a little gallery in the cowshed with a very comfortable divan and cushions. And I lie there for several hours each day to inhale the smell of the cows. It is supposed to be a sovereign remedy for the lungs [. . .] the air is wonderfully light and sweet to breathe, and I enjoy the experience. I feel inclined to write a book called ‘The Cowiness of the Cow’ as a result of observing them at such close quarters.1

As is well known and has become part of her legend, Mansfield had chosen to enter this Institute after trying, without success, numerous medical treatments for her tuberculosis. It was a move ridiculed by several of her contemporaries who thought she was misguidedly turning her back on (Western) medicine in favour of an (Eastern) charlatan, the Armenian-Greek spiritual teacher and philosopher George Gurdjieff. Wyndham Lewis, T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence, for example, respectively judged Mansfield to be in the grip of a ‘psychic shark’ in a ‘retreat for maniacs’, a ‘rotten, false, self-conscious place of people playing a sickly stunt’.2 Even Mansfield’s husband, John Middleton Murry, ‘noisily regretted’ her being taken in by ‘the spiritual quackery of Gurdjieff’.3 It would be easy to read Mansfield’s words to her father, with their reference to the smell of cows as having healing properties, as evidence of her wrong-headed decision. In this vein, her claim that she wanted to write a book called ‘The Cowiness of the Cow’ could be dismissed either as a joke or just a silly idea. 71

Derek Ryan When read in full, however, there is little in Mansfield’s letter to support the notion that she had lost her senses and given up on her health, while there are also hints that her projected bovine book was more than a passing fancy. She opens with sober commentary on her ‘very tame semi-existence’ at the Institute, with emphasis not on dramatic spiritual revelation but on everyday bodily (dis)comfort: ‘My heart’, she writes, ‘under this new treatment, which is one of graduated efforts and exercise, feels decidedly stronger, and my lungs in consequence feel quieter too. It is a remarkable fact that since arriving here I have not had to spend one entire day in bed – an unprecedented record for me!’ Mansfield therefore informs her father that she intends to give Gurdjieff’s method ‘a fair trial’.4 The letter goes on to record scepticism about her chances of winning the ‘Vie Heureuse French Literary Prize’, which she had again been nominated for (this time for Bliss and Other Stories) because ‘the French never take short stories “seriously”’. As if reminding her reader not to overlook the thought that might have gone into ‘The Cowiness of the Cow’, Mansfield reflects on the care that is needed in selecting titles, a task that ‘ought to be studied as a separate art’ (she was undecided about what to call her new book, The Doves’ Nest and Other Stories, which alongside its titular story contained such creaturely titles as ‘The Fly’, ‘A Man and His Dog’ and ‘The Canary’, all completed that year).5 Undoubtedly, the fact that Mansfield died in Fontainebleau – little over a week after writing this letter – has added pathos to her words; it has also tended to skew how critics view her time there, just as it confirmed her contemporaries’ biases against Gurdjieff’s methods and non-traditional treatments. Yet this suspicious view of ‘the Svengali of modernist bohemia’ has come under reassessment by scholars who are keen to counter the ‘dim impression’ of his significance in the period more broadly.6 In conveying her reflections on her own wellbeing at the same time as imagining a future project, Mansfield’s letter to her father similarly belies a dismissive view of Gurdjieff’s influence. While no book, or short story, was ever produced by Mansfield about these cows, this essay contends that she had, in effect, already started writing ‘The Cowiness of the Cow’ in her letters. I argue that Mansfield’s distinctive and intimate engagement with ‘cowiness’, recorded and animated in her late correspondence, refocuses our understanding of her experience with illness in the last months of her life – including her decision to spend them in Gurdjieff’s Institute – and opens onto an exploration of interspecies medical history. In reading her epistolary writing in this way I am following the lead of Claire Davison and Gerri Kimber, who in their new edition of Mansfield’s letters, organised via recipient so as to emphasise their sense of narrative construction, argue 72

Katherine Mansfield, ‘The Cowiness of the Cow’ and Medical History that they ‘do not just complement her oeuvre; they are an essential part of it’. The sheer volume of Mansfield’s letters helps to make Davison and Kimber’s case (they double the entire word count of her writing), yet it is more importantly their craft, their ‘stylistic, imaginative and expressive scope’ that allows the best of them to rival her story-writing.7 In what follows, I first demonstrate that Mansfield’s increased attention to cows in letters written prior to and during her time in the Institute coalesced with her treatment of animal-human companionship in her late stories. I then go on to show that these letters evoke medical contexts – whether relating to contamination, inoculation or treatment – that challenge anthropocentric approaches to illness and expose assumptions about Western versus Eastern practices (the breathing of bovine odours is, we will see, one such example). In doing so, I show that Mansfield’s encounters with cows helped her to think about embodied experience and health in more-than-human terms. The result is an understanding of Mansfield’s letters as bringing together the central concerns – animals and illness – of two growing areas of research in modernist studies. From Margot Norris’s Beasts of the Modern Imagination (1985) to Carrie Rohman’s influential Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal (2009) and a host of recent studies, scholarship has revealed how modernists use literal and figurative language to unsettle species hierarchies, examine anthropocentrism and explore the merits or manipulations of anthropomorphic projection. While Mansfield has been largely absent from such approaches, this essay builds on my analysis elsewhere of how her experimental fiction, most notably ‘Prelude’ (1918) and ‘At the Bay’ (1922), at turns undermines, redraws and crosses species boundaries.8 It is already clear that much of modernism’s approach to animals is as concerned with challenging certain constructions of the human – what Rohman refers to as the ‘perforation of the humanized subject’ – as it is about claiming subjectivity or agency in animals. For Mansfield, too, I suggest, writing about ‘cowiness’ is less about capturing the nature of a cow or classifying bovine traits and more a question of reorienting herself or her readers away from human-centred selfhood and, to paraphrase one famous letter I return to at the end of this essay, entering into the external world. Nonetheless, cows do have a special significance for Mansfield given the shared history of human-bovine illness. As such, what follows also opens a dialogue with modernism’s examination of physical illness, which has been brought to light in recent book-length projects including Elizabeth Outka’s study of how modernism responded to the Spanish flu pandemic, Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature (2019), and – more pertinent to this essay – Peter Fifield’s exploration 73

Derek Ryan of a broad range of illnesses, including tuberculosis, in modernist literature, Modernism and Physical Illness: Sick Books (2020). Crucially, however, bringing Mansfield, cows and illness together speaks to a wider critical conversation now emerging between the medical (post)humanities and animal studies whereby health involves, in the words of David Herman, ‘an expanded sense of the self’s relationality’ and ‘its situation within wider webs of creatural life’.9

From Dancing Cows to Gurdjieff’s Institute The appearance of cows in Mansfield’s ‘Prelude’ is indicative of this animal’s minor status in Mansfield’s fiction: ‘it was splendid to live in the country’, we are told as we enter Stanley Burnell’s thoughts, ‘knowing all the while that his own house was at the other end, with its garden and paddocks, its three tip-top cows and enough fowls and ducks to keep them in poultry’.10 While we hear from the fowls and ducks again, the cows graze the field unremarked upon. Elsewhere, we catch glimpses of ‘cattle trucks’ on ‘the Old Wharf’ in Wellington as Fenella prepares to leave on a ship to Picton, at the top of New Zealand’s South Island, with her grandma in her 1921 story ‘The Voyage’, but the ‘wool sheds’ receive more attention.11 Or we hear Pip declare ‘Mooe-ooo-er!’ while playing the bull with the other children in ‘At the Bay’, though the scene is just as memorable for its depiction of Kezia as bee, Rags as sheep, Isabel as rooster and Lottie as donkey.12 The closest Mansfield comes in these stories to switching to a bovine viewpoint occurs towards the end of ‘The Doll’s House’ (1922), when the two Kelvey girls have been banished from the Burnells’ courtyard by Aunt Beryl: When the Kelveys were well out of sight of Burnells’, they sat down to rest on a big red drainpipe by the side of the road [. . .] Dreamily they looked over the hay paddocks, past the creek, to the group of wattles where Logan’s cows stood waiting to be milked. What were their thoughts?13

Floating in free indirect discourse, this question ambiguously signals the thoughts of the girls, or the cows, or perhaps both. Mansfield’s interest in writing about animals of other kinds soon gathered in intensity. Two of her late stories display a more studied focus on bonds formed between human characters and their nonhuman companions. In ‘A Man and His Dog’, written in March 1922, we see a cross-species connection between Mr Potts and the ‘bewildered wistful eyes’ of canine Lino.14 We are told that ‘Potts’ heart was wrung’ by his sense of connection to his dog and that ‘while Lino and his master looked at each other it was curious how strong a resemblance 74

Katherine Mansfield, ‘The Cowiness of the Cow’ and Medical History was between them’.15 Even though the story reminds us that the man is the dog’s ‘master’, Mansfield is quick to underline that Potts was ‘a humble little figure’ – indeed earlier in the story we find him having ‘dropped into the world’ in which a ‘little bee clung and rocked’ on a daisy.16 This sense of interspecies companionship is more pronounced in Mansfield’s ‘The Canary’, completed in July the same year. Near the beginning, the narrator stresses the canary’s ability to ‘sympathise’ and how they ‘shared each other’s lives’.17 Mourning his death, she remembers his movements and a kind of knowledge that crossed species barriers, even as she is still searching for the words to express it: ‘he used to hop, hop, hop from one perch to the other, tap against the bars as if to attract my attention, sip a little water, just as a professional singer might, and then break into a song so exquisite that I had to put my needle down to listen to him. I can’t describe it; I wish I could. But it was always the same, every afternoon, and I felt that I understood every note of it.’18 To underline the importance of personal encounters with animals as a mode of meaning-making, the narrator knowingly addresses the reader in the second person: ‘Have you kept birds? If you haven’t, all this must sound, perhaps, exaggerated.’19 But if Mansfield’s late stories are concerned with other species, cows appear with increasing frequency in letters she sent in the months before she moved to Gurdjieff’s Institute and, notably, in  the  months between her writing of these two stories. In one letter to the translator S. S. Koteliansky on 17 June 1922, for example, she begins by asking if he would look after her cat, Wingley, before turning to cows. ‘Would you care for a cat?’ is her opening line: ‘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.’20 She goes on to explain that Wingley’s qualities include the fact that he is ‘extremely independent’, ‘behave[s] like a gentleman’ and has ‘a superb tail’.21 But Mansfield soon switches focus from her feelings for her cat – which can be broadly aligned with the companionship for dogs and canaries explored in her stories – to a scene that had held her attention when staying at the Hotel d’Angleterre in Switzerland: 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. But best of all were the

75

Derek Ryan 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’. One wanted to weep as well.22

In staging this animal encounter as a kind of artistic performance, Mansfield foregrounds the cows’ surprising bodily capacities – they rank higher than both goats and the Ballet Russes (!) – through a combination of observation and imagination. The reference to Genesis 1: 24–5 – a ‘blend of echo and pastiche’ rather than direct quotation as Mansfield’s punctuation implies – places emphasis on the creation of animals, and specifically cattle, that precedes Man, even if once the latter appear they are to have dominion over the former.23 More to the point, the episode initiates what Mansfield calls, in a letter to Dorothy Brett a few days later on 22 June, her ‘cow complex’.24 Explaining that bovine charm has ‘swep’ over’ her, Mansfield writes that the sight of ‘watching the herds pass’ made her think of how Brett should ‘take furiously to cows & paint nothing but cows on green lawns with long shadows like triangles’.25 Evidently, these cows also sparked Mansfield’s creative energies. The above letter is clearly more than a communication of information. If Mansfield used the epistolary form for the various ‘practical functions’ we might expect of any letter-writer in the early twentieth century – ‘tokens of friendship, gestures of reparation, intermediaries for business correspondence, regrets for missed opportunities, records of medical care’ – she also, Davison and Kimber rightly emphasise, penned letters as ‘laboratories for creative writing’.26 To read Mansfield’s letters in this way is to place her in the company of fellow modernists who, scholars now recognise, enjoyed a form of writing situated tantalisingly between fiction and biography.27 This creative potential in the epistolary form was recognised by readers when the first edition was published under Murry’s editorship. Vita Sackville-West, reviewing the volumes belatedly in 1931 (they appeared in 1928) as one of her ‘Books of the Week’ for the Listener, wrote that the ‘craft of authorship’, in which ‘the skill of execution has to be exactly matched to the demands of the imagination’, can be found in Mansfield’s letters as much as in her fiction.28 ‘It is impossible to separate one from the other’, she concludes, adding a poignant note on the challenges of writing amid poor health: ‘The gaiety and liveliness of her letters are almost unbelievable, when one considers the conditions under which most of them were written. The sheer exuberance is amazing.’ Mansfield is a kind of ‘Centaur’, whose achievement is ‘like riding a fiery horse, whose spirit must never flag, and who yet must be kept under perfect and 76

Katherine Mansfield, ‘The Cowiness of the Cow’ and Medical History continual control. One must be, at one and the same time, both horse and rider.’29 Virginia Woolf had a few years earlier written in her review of Mansfield’s ‘journal’ (as it was packaged by Murry) that in reading her nonfiction we find ourselves ‘in the midst of unfinished stories’, and so it is frequently the case in her letters.30 Mansfield may have had a much more recent text than the Bible in mind when watching these cows dance. D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1920) notoriously depicts Gudrun Brangwen (recognised by Mansfield herself, and many others, as having been partly based on her), ‘to dance in the eurythmic manner’ in front of a herd of Highland Cattle.31 But while Mansfield takes pleasure in observing the Swiss cows and their captivating movements, in Lawrence’s novel Gudrun is found variously ‘looking as if some invisible chain weighed on her hands and feet’ and ‘clutched in pure, mindless, tossing rhythm, and a will set powerful in a kind of hypnotic influence’.32 Nor is there any sign of the stubbornly static cows here joining in the dance, as they do in Mansfield’s letter. There is a strange and somewhat comical disjunction between Gudrun’s ‘palpitating’ and ‘pulsing’ body and the cattle that simply ‘waited, and ducked their heads a little in sudden contraction from her’.33 When the narrative viewpoint briefly shifts from Gudrun to the cows and we are told they were ‘watching the scene below’, it is part of a double rupture whereby Gerald and Birkin enter as the cattle move away.34 Disconnection is further emphasised when Gudrun charges the cows. Her most purposeful movement towards them – a ‘sudden motion’ finds her ‘running forward with a flash’ – is one of disruption and distress: ‘they ceased pawing the ground, and gave way, snorting with terror, lifting their heads from the ground and flinging themselves away, galloping off into the evening, becoming tiny in the distance, and still not stopping’. The ‘defiant’ Gudrun then takes her aggression out on Gerald just as the cows are rendered ‘tiny’ and imperceptible.35 Rohman reads this scene as ‘Gudrun’s near-communion with the cattle – a rare moment of abandon’ (earlier she had been ‘embarrassed’ by Ursula’s ‘cross-species identification’ with a horse) which connects her to the ‘“electric pulse” of their nonhuman being’.36 Yet the partial and fleeting attention to the cows themselves also betrays, I think, the kind of ‘tensions’ Rohman finds elsewhere in Lawrence’s writing ‘between acknowledging, destroying, and incorporating the animal’s alterity’.37 If Lawrence’s depiction of Gudrun unwittingly prophesies Mansfield’s association with cows, her approach to writing about them differs in subtle but significant ways from this scene in his novel. Mansfield’s bovine encounters are marked by closeness and companionship. Once she arrives at Fontainebleau, she discovers there what she calls, in a letter to 77

Derek Ryan Murry on 20 October, her ‘private revolution’ in ‘looking after animals’ as a way to ‘really live, and in relation to everything’.38 It very quickly becomes clear that she will spend a lot of her time in bovine company – four of whose names she reports to Ida Baker as Equivoqueveckwa, Balda Ofim, Mitasha and Birofet39 – and within a couple of weeks she is writing to Murry that she is going to be ‘put in charge’ of what everyone is already calling ‘Mrs Murrys Cows’.40 Mansfield’s ‘little railed off gallery’ was accessible by ‘a small steep staircase’ built for her above the cowshed, or ‘cowhouse’ as she calls it here, while adding it was ‘simply too lovely’. Attuned to their physical bodies as well as to the animal aesthetic around her, Mansfield finds the walls and ceilings ‘decorated [by Alexandre de Salzmann] most exquisitely in what looks like a persian pattern of yellow, red and blue [. . .] Flowers, little birds, butterflies, and a spreading tree with animals on the branches, even a hippopotamus [. . .] all done with the most real art – a little masterpiece.’ Spending hours there every day gives her ‘the most happy feelings listening to the beasts & looking’, which seemingly gestures to both the ‘beasts’ in the paintings and the actual cows in close proximity. Anticipating her comments to her father about the idea for a bovine book, she adds that ‘one day I shall write a long long story about it’.41 James Moore was one of the earliest critics to demystify Mansfield’s time at the Institute, primarily in his 1980 monograph Gurdjieff and Mansfield, though he repeatedly plays down the significance of her interest in bovine life. A description of Mansfield milking the cows with the Russian Madame Ostrowska leaves him amazed that these human figures managed to ‘converse’ ‘by smiles and gestures’ even though they were ‘separated by language’; he overlooks the fact that Mansfield was more captivated by the non-linguistic communication with the cows who, in her words, ‘must experience a super-cow-sensation’.42 Furthermore, the hyperbole in his declaration that her cowhouse has ‘a place in history which perhaps no other cowshed has enjoyed for 2,000 years’ is soon deflated by the remark that ‘Katherine was enthusiastic about cows, in a nice Daisy Ashford way’.43 Daisy Ashford was best known for her novel The Young Visiters, written when she was only nine years old but published in 1919 (with unconventional spelling famously intact). The implication of Moore’s comments is therefore clear: Mansfield’s relationship to cows is her at her more childlike, naive, insubstantial – qualities Mansfield herself drew attention to when reviewing Ashford’s novel for The Athenaeum.44 At the level of the sentence the comparison is misleading, too. Ashford’s depiction of cows in that story is one of idyllic simplicity: ‘We must go for a day in the country and when surrounded by the gay twittering of the birds and the smell of the cows I will lay my 78

Katherine Mansfield, ‘The Cowiness of the Cow’ and Medical History suit at her feet and he waved his arm wildly at the gay thought.’45 In another story, Where Love Lies Deepest, bucolic cows are found grazing ‘the beautiful fields fresh with the smell of new mown hay’.46 These sentences lack the focus on embodied movement and interspecies connection that we find in Mansfield’s letters, while comparing them also misses the fact that the cows Mansfield encounters are far from an idealised natural setting. As Moore reminds us in his later biography of Gurdjieff: ‘the milieu he created by no stretch of the imagination mirrored ordinary life: it was removed; it was enclosed; it was quite special in its intensity’.47 It was, in other words, a carefully cultivated version of ‘nature’, a fact that Mansfield does not shy away from. Mansfield’s letters about cows, then, with their acuteness of observation, sensitivity to externality and humour in adversity, are not just emblematic of her vitality and strength of voice, but also signal a willing reorientation of the human towards animality. Even when Mansfield’s thoughts turn to death, they are focalised through a concern for animal life. Her very last letter, to Ida Baker early in January 1923, describes how animals are killed at the Institute: ‘Do you kill pigs where you are? It goes on here. Two were stuck yesterday and their horrid corpses were dissected in the kitchen. They are frightful things to watch and to smell. The worst of it is until their heads are cut off they are still so pig like. But we kill them outright. That is one comfort.’48 This commentary, at once gruesome and poignant, recalls the beheading and carving of the duck that ‘did not look as if it had ever had a head’ in ‘Prelude’ while also foreshadowing Mansfield’s own sudden death within days of writing the letter.49 Especially striking, however, is the way the letter is framed around concern, once again, for bovine life. A few lines in, Mansfield asks ‘How are your cows?’ and returns to the topic in the last paragraph: ‘Our calf is still allowed to be with its Mother. I can’t understand it. Its a huge creature now. We had great trouble with the mother who had to be massaged daily. Do you massage your cows? Will you tell me how your stable is kept? What is the condition of the floor. I’ll tell you about ours in my next letter. It worries me.’50 If this letter is, as novelist Ali Smith expresses in her evocative close reading, about ‘bringing of things to life’, ‘Common good’ and ‘Love’, then it is clearly framed by lively and affectionate engagement with bovine animality.51

Mysticism, Milk and Medicine Mansfield’s bovine affection appears to derive more from embodied proximity to these cows than from any specific aspect of Gurdjieff’s philosophy. On the one hand Gurdjieff decentres the human and the 79

Derek Ryan planet we inhabit in his vision of the universe. As Moore puts it, he ‘withers all our humanistic dreams’; ‘humanism is rebuffed’ and so is ‘terrestrial parochialism’.52 On the other hand, Gurdjieff upholds a sense of human superiority and what we might today call exceptionalism. If we find in his writings a non-anthropocentric (albeit eccentric) conceptualisation of what Henry Leroy Finch calls the ‘cosmos and everything in it as part of one universal materiality’, then it is one that at the same time reinscribes hierarchical relations where human agency exceeds or transcends animality: Man (as it is in Gurdjieff’s patriarchal schema) is ‘the being who can do’; ‘Man is a materiality of a uniquely active quality’; he alone has the capacity for ‘world-creation and worldmaintenance’ – all of which sounds a lot like Martin Heidegger’s theses on the human as ‘world-forming’ while animals are ‘poor in world’.53 In his recent book Gurdjieff: Mysticism, Contemplation, and Exercises (2020), Joseph Azize explains how Gurdjieff provides an ‘exulted anthropology’ in which man is ‘a different type of creature from animals’ and with a ‘unique place on the planet’; this difference is marked by the ability of humans ‘to ‘coat and crystallize’ within his physical (‘planetary’) body what Gurdjieff called ‘higher-being-bodies’, the ‘soul’ and the ‘spirit’.54 The distinction between the organic (animal) body and the psychic (human) body is one in nature rather than just in kind: ‘It belongs’, as Gurdjieff puts it, ‘to a different world, it is of a different nature. There is a conflict between these two bodies – one wishes, the other does not. It is a struggle which one must reinforce voluntarily by our work, by our will.’ The ‘specific state of man’ or ‘fight which exists naturally’ is ‘to create a third thing, a third state different from the other two, which is the Master’.55 Mansfield’s attraction to Gurdjieff’s Institute does not, moreover, seem to be a straightforward turning away from conventional medicine and towards a more mystic worldview. That she was clearly interested in aspects of mysticism and spirituality is undisputable. Pierce Butler is right to surmise that in the Institute ‘Mansfield underwent what might be termed an examination, or perhaps an experience, of conscience [. . .] that she hoped would be an expression of a new spiritual health.’56 And Richard Cappuccio helpfully charts Mansfield’s ‘pursuit of esoteric religious interests’ from ‘empathy with and enthusiasm for Maori culture’ in her youth in New Zealand to her discovery of a ‘passionate, visceral spirituality’ that broke with social and religious orthodoxy by the end of her life.57 Well aware of the realities of her illness, however, ‘Gurdjieff did not offer a miraculous path to new health but a compromise’; as a result, Cappuccio argues that we should neither ‘romanticise or dismiss the Gurdjieff dogma’, just as Mansfield herself never did: ‘I don’t speak 80

Katherine Mansfield, ‘The Cowiness of the Cow’ and Medical History of Mr. Gurdjieff. I couldn’t say he was near or dear to me! He is the embodiment of the life here, but at a remote distance.’58 ‘Embodiment of life’ for Mansfield at this time often meant being concerned with the weather, food, clothes and even toothbrushes, which receive far more attention in her letters than extended forays into mysticism.59 Returning again and again to bodily needs appears to bolster her sense of material presence in the world. Contrary to those who felt that Mansfield had somehow lost her sense of reality in joining the institute, she affirms: ‘I am far less disappeared than ever I was.’60 Both close to and distant from Gurdjieff and his teachings, Mansfield’s relationship with cows at his institute ironically brings her into contact with the Western medical context she is so often judged to have fled from. Her letters evoke a history of bovine connections relating to both the causes of and cures for human illnesses. The numerous examples of how diseases either pass between cattle and humans or how medicine has benefited from human proximity to cows was already well established in Mansfield’s day. They range from cattle plague in the 1860s laying the groundwork for the germ theory of disease, to the breakthrough in the extermination of Spanish fever at the end of the nineteenth century that resulted in the first supposition of a host animal transmitting to another’s bloodstream via a bite. Perhaps most significant of all was what Laurie Winn Carlson calls ‘the most unlikely breakthrough in the history of medicine: human vaccination with animal lymph’.61 British physician Edward Jenner devised a technique for preventing smallpox by injecting people with the cowpox virus, resulting in his coining of the word ‘vaccine’ derived from the Latin vacca for ‘cow’. Jenner’s 1798 An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae ‘proved to be a turning point in medicine; it marked the first efforts to introduce animal cells, in this case from cattle, into the human body in order to prevent disease’.62 Jenner’s discovery, in particular, challenged the boundary between human and animal. Rather than being judged solely on the basis of health benefits it could bring – that is focusing on ‘the hope of its becoming essentially beneficial to mankind’, as Jenner concludes in his book – it instead threatened the very stability and superiority of the category ‘man’.63 Writing of the opposition from the physician Benjamin Moseley among others in Smallpox and the Literary Imagination (2007), David Shuttleton details how more than just raising ‘concerns over the potential dangers of eroding a species boundary’, this resistance to what was called ‘Cow Mania’ and ‘Cow-pox infatuation’ ‘crudely exploited intensified postrevolution fears of constitutional degeneracy at both an individual and national level’; ‘defilement from contact with beasts’ was the fear they 81

Derek Ryan played on.64 Paradoxically, then, this anti-vaccination discourse was tied to an anthropocentric defence of species hierarchy and a fear for the corruption of the very concept of the human, even as it rejected the potential for the vaccination to save human lives. The most pertinent association between bovine and human illness in our consideration of Mansfield of course concerns tuberculosis and specifically the close relationship between Mycobacterium bovis (M. bovis) and the human illness (M. tuberculosis). When Mansfield was first diagnosed, she would have been aware of the illness’s animal associations. On 13 August 1919, Mansfield wrote to Virginia Woolf about having to go into a sanatorium, commenting: ‘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”. Thrice happy oviparous Quadruped!’65 Browne’s observation, quoted by Mansfield from ‘A Letter to a Friend, Upon Occasion of the Death of his Intimate Friend’ (1686) where the friend in question has died from tuberculosis, arrives at the moment when he is comparing human signs of disease with animals including ‘the Coughs of Cattel’.66 Mansfield would also have been aware that one source of infection for humans, and particularly children, was consuming raw infected cows’ milk.67 Newspapers were full of the worry around milk and advertisers played on these fears. In one striking example, in 1920 the Daily Mail ran an advertisement that begins by warning of the horrific stats around childhood exposure to the bovine strain, before we read its tagline: ‘give your Children Glaxo, The SuperMilk – free from risk of milk-borne tuberculosis’.68 By this point in time Glaxo was extremely well-known among the general public and their advertisements might especially have caught Mansfield’s eye given the company’s New Zealand origins.69 It found its way into modernist fiction, too, famously appearing in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, when the skywriting aeroplane spells out ‘Glaxo’. Recording this passage in their history of the company, Richard Davenport-Hines and Judy Slinn write that ‘Glaxo had arrived, was a catchword, even in Bloomsbury’.70 References to milk in Mansfield’s letters leave one wondering whether the link between milk and tuberculosis was on her mind: ‘like a fly who has been dropped into the milk jug & fished out again but is still too milky & drowned’, is how she described the pain in her lungs to Murry on 11 January 1918.71 There is no evidence to suggest that Mansfield contracted tuberculosis from drinking milk, and her chances of doing so were much lower than through other routes. Rather than seeing cows as harbingers of disease, it is more likely she would have recognised in them a shared ­creaturely 82

Katherine Mansfield, ‘The Cowiness of the Cow’ and Medical History vulnerability. Indeed, what is most evident in her letters from this period is that her contact with cows is viewed as opening up new modes of relationality and knowledge.72 In a letter she sends to Murry on 19 November 1922 she describes her observation of and caring for bovines in the Institute: ‘I must tell you’, she writes, ‘my love of cows persists. We now have three. They are real beauties – immense – with short curly hair? fur? wool? [. . .] I am becoming absorbed in animals, not to watch only but to know how to care for them & to know about them.’73 Mansfield’s absorption in animality is not limited to her bovine ­companions – she mentions the ‘intelligence’ of geese and her ‘determin[ation] to know about bees’ in the same letter – but the emphasis she places on her affection for cows suggests her relationship with them provides her comfort. Her curiosity for other forms of embodied, more-than-human life also adds weight to Galya Diment’s argument that Mansfield breaks with the ‘idealisation of tuberculosis in the West’.74 Consumption, as Susan Sontag outlines in Illness as Metaphor (1978), is often associated with the ‘spiritual’, ‘lyrical’ and ‘beautiful’ death: ‘A disease of the lungs is, metaphorically, a disease of the soul.’75 Clark Lawlor’s Consumption and Literature (2007) historicises this ‘Romantic disease’ over centuries of its Western cultural representations, but Diment notes that the same romanticism is not found in the Russian tradition, including in Anton Chekhov’s approach, which was more in keeping with Mansfield’s in its unsentimentality, while ultimately being too defeatist for her tastes; ‘Illness’, she remarks in her notebook, ‘swallowed him’.76 Mansfield’s use of the verb ‘absorbed’ – borrowed from the Middle French absorbir and Latin absorbeˉre meaning to ‘swallow’ or ‘devour’ – recalls her description of Chekhov’s experience but substitutes fear of disease with an openness to animal life. Mansfield’s letters refer explicitly to a specific story in the development of medical treatments of tuberculosis, namely the smelling of cows mentioned in the letter to her father at the beginning of this essay. While often dismissed as an old Eastern folk belief, the technique was actually used by English physician Thomas Beddoes, who in 1799 opened his Pneumatic Institute near Bristol. Reasoning that breathing oxygen-reduced air would be therapeutic and restore ‘an appropriate gaseous balance within the body’, he is said on a couple of occasions to have recommended that his patients lodge in cow houses, being ‘quite persuaded from experience of the power of these fumes to give a healing stimulus to ulcerated lungs’.77 Breathing the odour of cows may have been unsuccessful, but it was, Helen Bynum notes, no less so than any number of so-called ‘medical’ treatments offered in sanatoria, which included dyes, plant oils, fatty acids of cod liver oil, arsenicals and metals 83

Derek Ryan such as copper, gold, mercury, cadmium and manganese.78 This returns us to Lawrence, who, far from following doctors’ orders when he was diagnosed with tuberculosis himself, preferred to put his faith in another variation on breathing treatment. Taken up when in Baden-Baden in 1927, this treatment involved ‘a short course of inhalations’ whereby ‘the novelty lay in breathing in vapour from an underground spring known to contain radium’.79 As David Ellis concludes, drawing a comparison with Mansfield’s harmful X-rays (rather than the more direct connection to her own inhalation treatment): ‘This proved no more beneficial for Lawrence than X-rays had for Mansfield. He felt better for a few days but then the effects wore off which is perhaps just as well given the damage inhaling radium can cause.’80 The effects would undoubtedly have been worse than breathing cows. ‘Doctors in Lawrence’s time had scarcely more power over tuberculosis than Byron’s had over his uraemic poisoning’, even if they ‘understood much better the nature of their patients’ diseases and, with notable exceptions like the Russian who bombarded Mansfield’s spleen with X-rays, were unlikely in their ministrations to do more harm than good’.81 In Mansfield’s case, moreover, Kimber reminds us that in all likelihood the breathing of cows was not imagined as something that could cure her, either by Gurdjieff or by Mansfield herself.82 For all that Mansfield’s focus on cows brings to mind a longer medical history of human-bovine relations, her emphasis on lived experience and embodied encounters serves as a reminder that, as Fifield’s puts it in his study of modernism, ‘the greater part of the significance of illness lies beyond any strict or exclusive version of the medical’. Crucially, we have seen, Mansfield’s growing attachment to and fascination for bovine life shows that the ‘qualities of experience and meaning that are created by illness’ can also lie outside of a rigidly human frame of reference.83 Mansfield provided her own definition of health in a long entry in her notebook, written on 14 October 1922 as she was on the verge of entering Gurdjieff’s Institute: Do I believe in medicine alone? No. Never. In science alone? No. Never. It seems to me childish and ridiculous to suppose one can be cured like a cow if one is not a cow. And here, all these years I have been looking for someone who agreed with me. I have heard of Gurdjieff who seems not only to agree but to know infinitely more about it. Why hesitate? [. . .] Now, Katherine, what do you mean by health? And what do you want it for? Answer: By health I mean the power to live a full, adult, living, breathing life in close contact [with] what I love – the earth and the wonders thereof, the sea, the sun. All that we mean when we speak of the external world. I want to enter it, to be part of it, to live in it, to learn from it, to lose all that is superficial and acquired in me and to become a conscious, direct human being.84

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Katherine Mansfield, ‘The Cowiness of the Cow’ and Medical History There are several ways we could read Mansfield’s ambiguous and yet forceful reaction against the idea ‘one can be cured like a cow if one is not a cow’. It could signal her frustration at being dehumanised by Ivan Manoukhin’s treatment – notably described by her as ‘childish’ and ‘ridiculous’, echoing the language used by others regarding her choice to stay at the Institute – where she was blasted with X-rays in a technique that had itself been tested on a range of animals. Her words also steer us away from the notion that her interest is in collapsing differences between humans and animals altogether. Importantly, however, as she goes on to define what health means for her it becomes clear that she is not upholding any sense of human superiority over animals. To be treated ‘like a cow’ is just the opposite of contemplating what it might mean to write about ‘The Cowiness of the Cow’. This essay has suggested that the beginnings of Mansfield’s unwritten, not entirely serious and only vaguely imagined bovine book can nonetheless be traced to her letters during these last months of her life. A contextualised reading of these letters tells us not only about Mansfield’s experience of physical illness in the last year of her life, but also shows how she was responding creatively to the nonhuman world. In them, she expresses a vision of embodied human experience that is constituted and enriched via deeper engagement with animals – and, in her case, most especially cows. For Mansfield, understanding this interspecies affinity is neither a matter of equating human with animal nor of reinstating hierarchies between them. Instead, her letters invite us to explore the aesthetic, cultural, medical and intimate arenas in which modernism’s cross-species histories are staged. Smelling cows could never have cured Mansfield, but in writing about her material and meaningful encounters with them she reconceptualises what it means to breathe human life. Notes   1. CL1, p. 255.   2. On this hostile reception of various modernists towards Gurdjieff, see James Moore, Gurdjieff: The Anatomy of a Myth – A Biography (Shaftesbury and Rockport, MA: Element, 1991), pp. 188 and 204.  3. Moore, Gurdjieff: The Anatomy of a Myth, p. 189.   4. CL1, pp. 254–5.   5. CL1, p. 255.  6. Cecily Swanson, ‘“The Language of Behavior”: Gurdjieff and the Emergence of Modernist Autobiography’, Modernism/modernity, 24: 4 (2017), pp. 695–721 (p. 695). See also Beth Blum, ‘Modernism’s Anti-Advice’, Modernism/modernity, 24: 1 (2017), pp. 117–39.   7. Claire Davison and Gerri Kimber, ‘Introduction: Living in Letters’, in CL1, p. 3.   8. See Derek Ryan, ‘Katherine Mansfield’s Animal Aesthetics’, Modern Fiction Studies, 64: 1 (2018), pp. 27–51.

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Derek Ryan   9. David Herman, ‘Trans-Species Entanglements: Animal Assistants in Narratives about Autism’, in Anne Whitehead and Angela Woods, eds, The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), pp. 463–80 (p. 476). 10. CW2, pp. 56–93, 74. 11. CW2, p. 372. 12. CW2, pp. 361–2. 13. CW2, p. 420. 14. CW2, p. 488. 15. CW2, p. 488. 16. CW2, pp. 487–8. 17. CW2, p. 512. 18. CW2, p. 512. 19. CW2, p. 513. 20. CL2, p. 93. 21. CL2, p. 93. 22. CL2, p. 93. 23. CL2, p. 94n. 24. CL1, p. 481. 25. CL1, p. 481. Cows were later part of Mansfield’s dreams of buying a farm with John Middleton Murry and his brother, Richard. See for example CL2, p. 328. 26. Claire Davison and Gerri Kimber, ‘Introduction: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Epistolarity’, in CL2, p. 2. 27. See Logan Esdale, ‘Gertrude Stein, Laura Riding and the Space of Letters’, Journal of Modern Literature, 29: 4 (2006), pp. 99–123 and J. H. Stape, ‘E. M. Forster in Epistolary Mode: Beginning with the Letters’, English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, 55: 1 (2012), pp. 32–44. On letters in Katherine Mansfield’s fiction, see Kim Brindle, ‘“Mysterious epistles”: Letters Home in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Fiction’, Journal of New Zealand Literature, 38: 2 (2020), pp. 15–35. 28. Vita Sackville-West, ‘Books of the Week’, Listener, 6: 137 (26 August 1931), p. 334. 29. Sackville-West, p. 334. 30. Virginia Woolf, ‘A Terribly Sensitive Mind’, The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4 1925–1928, ed. by Andrew McNeillie (New York: Harcourt, 1994), pp. 446–9 (p. 447). 31. D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (London: Vintage, 2008), p. 160. As Sydney Janet Kaplan points out, Mansfield’s recognition of herself as a model for Gudrun may have been painful given how her own reality differed from Lawrence’s fictionalised – and for Mansfield ‘absurd’ – ‘world of emotional adventure and sexual discovery’. See Circulating Genius: John Middleton Murry, Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), p. 138. 32. Lawrence, p. 160. 33. Lawrence, pp. 161–2. 34. Lawrence, p. 163. 35. Lawrence, p. 164. 36. Carrie Rohman, Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), pp. 113–14. See also Rohman, Choreographies of the Living: Bioaesthetics in Literature, Art, and Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 52. 37. Rohman, p. 26. 38. Letters 5, pp. 303–4.

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Katherine Mansfield, ‘The Cowiness of the Cow’ and Medical History 39. CL1, p. 174. 40. Letters 5, p. 315. 41. Letters 5, p. 331. Mansfield’s emphasis on beasts may explain why she, as Roger Lipsey notes, ‘did not record that the faces of the animals [. . .] bore a more than accidental resemblance to various pupils of the Institute’. See ‘Gurdjieff Observed’, in Jacob Needleman and George Baker, eds, Gurdjieff: Essays and Reflections on the Man and His Teaching (New York: Continuum, 1996), pp. 324–50 (p. 336). 42. James Moore, Gurdjieff and Mansfield (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), p. 154. 43. Moore, Gurdjieff and Mansfield, pp. 153–4. 44. While ‘[a]t first glance Daisy Ashford may appear very sophisticated’, Mansfield writes that Ashford ‘remains a little child with a little child’s vision of her particular world. That she managed to write it down and make a whole round novel of it is a marvel almost too good to be true. But there it is, and even while the grown-up part of us is helpless with laughter we leap back with her into our nine-year-old self where the vision is completely real and satisfying.’ See Katherine Mansfield, ‘A Child and Her Note-Book’, Athenaeum, 4648 (30 May 1919), p. 400. 45. Daisy Ashford, The Young Visiters (London: Chatto & Windus, 1919). 46. Daisy Ashford, Where Love Lies Deepest (London: The Garden City Press, 1966). 47. Moore, Gurdjieff: The Anatomy of a Myth, p. 173. 48. CL1, p. 175. In her letter to Ida Baker on 24 December, Mansfield also, somewhat ambivalently, records the meat that will be served up at Christmas, with the festivities involving a newborn calf (CL1, p. 174). 49. CW2, p. 85. 50. CL1, p. 176. 51. Ali Smith, ‘SIGNES OF SPRING: A Letter from Katherine Mansfield’, in Aimée Gasston, Gerri Kimber and Janet Wilson, eds, Katherine Mansfield: New Directions (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), pp. 11–28 (p. 19). See also Kirsty Martin’s article on Mansfield, Lawrence and sun therapy, where she persuasively shows how Mansfield’s correspondence can be read as a ‘defiant celebration’ of life in the midst of severe illness. ‘Modernism and the Medicalization of Sunlight: D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, and the Sun Cure’, Modernism/modernity, 23: 2 (2016): pp. 423–41 (p. 439). 52. Moore, Gurdjieff: The Anatomy of a Myth, pp. 45–6. 53. Henry Leroy Finch, ‘The Sacred Cosmos: Teachings of G. I. Gurdjieff’, in Needleman and Baker, eds, Gurdjieff: Essays and Reflections, pp. 8–29 (p. 10). Jacob Needleman, ‘Gurdjieff, or the Metaphysics of Energy’, in Gurdjieff: Essays and Reflections, pp. 70–86 (pp. 74–5 and 78). On the idea of humans as ‘world-forming’ and animals as ‘poor in world’ see Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1968). 54. Joseph Azize, Gurdjieff: Mysticism, Contemplation, and Exercises (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), p. 54. 55. Qtd in Azize, p. 205. 56. Pierce Butler, ‘“The only truth I really care about”. Katherine Mansfield at the Gurdjieff Institute: A Biographical Reflection’, in Galya Diment, Gerri Kimber and Todd Martin, eds, Katherine Mansfield and Russia (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), pp. 125–49 (p. 125). 57. Richard Cappuccio, ‘The Swinging Gate: Katherine Mansfield’s Missionary Vision’, Journal of Religious History, 37: 3 (2013), pp. 341–52 (p. 341). See Gerri Kimber

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Derek Ryan for an informative discussion of Mansfield’s ‘spiritual development’: ‘Mansfield, Orientalism and Gurdjieff’, in Diment, Kimber and Martin, eds, Katherine Mansfield and Russia, p. 41. 58. Cappuccio, pp. 351–2. Letters 5, p. 323, to John Middleton Murry (14 November 1922). 59. Nowhere is Mansfield’s concern for everyday bodily comforts and care more evident than in her letters to Ida Baker. See, for examples, CL1, pp. 164, 165, 168, 172, 176. 60. CL1, p. 167, to Ida Baker (10 November 1922). 61. Laurie Winn Carlson, Cattle: An Informal Social History (Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), p. 196. 62. Carlson, p. 202. 63. Edward Jenner, An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae (London: Sampson Low, 1798), p. 75. 64. David Shuttleton, Smallpox and the Literary Imagination 1660–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 184. 65. CL2, p. 770. 66. See CL2, p. 770n. 67. For contemporaneous studies into the risks of cows’ milk see Louis Cobbett, The Causes of Tuberculosis, Together with some Account of the Prevalence and Distribution of the Disease (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 185–94 and pp. 657–72; see also Arthur Ransome, A Campaign Against Consumption: A Collection of Papers Relating to Tuberculosis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915), p. 213. 68. Daily Mail (15 April 1920), 7494, p. 9. 69. My thanks to Charlotte Suppe-Taylor for first drawing my attention to the company’s New Zealand origins in her doctoral project on motherhood in Virginia Woolf’s writing. For a discussion of this scene in Mrs Dalloway in relation to a supplementary milk powders of the period see Peter Fifield, Modernism and Physical Illness: Sick Books (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), p. 108. 70. R. P. T. Davenport-Hines and Judy Slinn, Glaxo: A History to 1962 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 42. 71. Letters 2, p. 8. Diana R. Harris argues that milk is an important symbol of life in Mansfield’s writing. See ‘Milk, Blood, Ink: Mansfield’s Liquids and the Abject’, Journal of New Zealand Literature, 32 (2014), pp. 52–67. 72. Mansfield could not have anticipated that in the process she was exposing the very anthropocentrism that has now been revealed in medical research on bovine tuberculosis, whereby DNA sequencing suggests that it is the human strain that came into existence first. See Helen Bynum, Spitting Blood: A History of Tuberculosis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 2–3. Bynum’s epilogue briefly mentions Mansfield’s death (p. 268). 73. Letters 5, p. 325. 74. Galya Diment, ‘Post Diagnosis: Bashkirtseff, Chekhov and Gorky through Mansfield’s Prism of Tuberculosis’, in Diment, Kimber and Martin, eds, Katherine Mansfield and Russia, pp. 24–40 (p. 25). 75. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978), pp. 18–19. 76. Mansfield made this remark about Chekhov on 14 October 1922. See CW4, p. 434. 77. Bynum, pp. 73–4. 78. Bynum, p. 146.

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Katherine Mansfield, ‘The Cowiness of the Cow’ and Medical History 79. David Ellis, Death and the Author: How D. H. Lawrence Died, and was Remembered (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 44–5. 80. Ellis, p. 45. 81. Ellis, p. 20. 82. Kimber, pp. 56–7. For a rich discussion of Mansfield’s ‘respiratory aesthetics’ in relation to new breathing exercises and fitness regimes in the early twentieth century, see Imola Nagy-Seres, ‘“I am short of puff”: Katherine Mansfield’s Poetics of Breathing’, Modernist Cultures, 17: 2 (2022), pp. 267–89 (p. 271). 83. Fifield, p. 27. 84. CW4, pp. 433–4.

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Katherine Mansfield, Elizabeth Stanley and ‘The Song of Songs’ Erika Baldt

‘Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave’: with its depiction of seemingly unbreakable commitment, this passage from the Old Testament Song of Solomon, also known as ‘The Song of Songs’, has long been associated with marriage.1 The full text features two lovers, each of whom extols the physical perfection of and passion for the other. The speakers continuously compare themselves to ideals found in nature, with similes like ‘As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters. As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons’,2 painting a picture of universal harmony that fits a couple embarking on a matrimonial journey. Katherine Mansfield’s work, on the other hand, is not known for such ‘glaring optimism’.3 The married couples she describes in her stories are far less romantically effusive, referring to each other in terms of ‘pals’4 or even pets.5 Yet exceptions to these platonic partnerships can be found in her poetry, in particular the poems she composed under the pseudonym Elizabeth Stanley for publication in the Athenaeum in 1919, at the beginning of her husband John Middleton Murry’s tenure as editor.6 Though many of these poems are often overlooked or dismissed, ‘the tired diction she returned to when she wrote as “Elizabeth Stanley” the kind of verse that met Murry’s editorial taste’,7 as Vincent O’Sullivan put it, the exploration of the relationship between lover and beloved may seem surprising to those who are only familiar with Mansfield’s fiction. In fact, I would argue that what O’Sullivan describes as ‘tired diction’ is actually Mansfield’s response to, and reworking of, ‘The Song of Songs’. ‘The Song’s’ promise of ‘love [. . .] strong as death’8 would have been particularly compelling to Mansfield in the year leading up to 90

Katherine Mansfield, Elizabeth Stanley and ‘The Song of Songs’ her marriage to Murry when her tuberculosis worsened considerably,9 and German bombing in France, where she had travelled to ameliorate her condition, meant returning to England was almost impossible.10 To make matters worse, their eventual reunion was short-lived, and the wedding on which she pinned so much of her hope became the cause of her resentment, both of her husband and her physical condition. A mere two weeks after marrying Murry in London on 3 May 1918,11 Mansfield travelled to Cornwall, again for her health. Writing in her diary a passage that seems to be directed at Murry, she asks, ‘Are you really, only happy when I am not there? [. . .] Do you remember when you put your handkerchief to your lips & turned away from me. In that instant you were utterly, utterly apart from me – and I have never felt quite the same since.’12 It is in this state of disconnection that Mansfield turned to ‘The Song of Songs’, which describes the unity that she so desperately wanted, but that she was gradually coming to realise she would never have. Mansfield thus draws on and subverts ‘The Song’s’ imagery of corporeal vigour and themes of intense, reciprocated ardour between lover and beloved in a way that reflects her attempts to come to terms with the realities of both her relationship and her impending death.

‘The Song of Songs’ and the Origins of Elizabeth Stanley The meaning of ‘The Song of Songs’ has been debated almost since its inception. While everything from the form and content to the number and identity of the speakers has been analysed for centuries, there is little agreement on a singular interpretation. A generally accepted reading is that there is a female speaker, often referred to as the Shulamite,13 her male lover, and a third party, identified in the text as ‘daughters of Jerusalem’,14 with whom the female protagonist speaks.15 In terms of the content of the song, some interpret it literally, as either ‘a collection of popular love-songs’16 or as a text meant ‘to honor marriage and the joys of wedded love’.17 Others view ‘The Song’ as a metaphor, the meaning of which varies according to religious tradition, as J. Paul Tanner explains: ‘Jewish interpreters understood the text as an allegory of the love between God and the nation of Israel, and Christian interpreters have suggested that the book depicts love between Christ and His bride, the church’.18  The  two seemingly opposing views stem from the question of whether the love described is earthly or spiritual, yet there is another reading that proposes combining the divergent branches into a single path.  As Richard A. Norris puts it, ‘The text of the Song has a kind of ­symbolic 91

Erika Baldt or sacramental character, then, in that to understand it fully is to be involved with the reality it speaks of.’19 While Norris here is referring to an allegorical interpretation in which ‘the Song in some fashion narrates an exemplary soul’s progress in knowledge and love of God’,20 the goal of higher knowledge is achieved through the ‘reality’ of romantic love. This idea of understanding by doing could be applied to Mansfield’s use of the text, in that by adapting it to her own ends, she was able to navigate her own troubled experience as a newlywed, which often failed to match up with the idealised vision of life and love that ‘The Song’ presents. Indeed, Anne Mounic suggests that ‘Katherine Mansfield resorts to biblical motifs as a way of transcending the experience of life through her imagination’,21 but she only identifies ‘an allusive hint at The Song of Songs’ in one of Mansfield’s stories, ‘Psychology’, from 1920.22 I suggest that it is in her poetry composed the previous year that Mansfield is truly able ‘to be involved with the reality’ of the text, as poems like ‘Covering Wings’, ‘Sorrowing Love’ and ‘The New Husband’ turn hints at ‘The Song of Songs’ into overt homage, even while hiding the author’s true identity. The first poem Mansfield published under the name Elizabeth Stanley, ‘Fairy Tale’, appeared in the Athenaeum on 18 April 1919.23 With its imagery of moody seas and fairy princesses, it is not unlike some of Mansfield’s earlier poem compositions such as ‘The Sea Child’24 and ‘The Opal Dream Cave’,25 written almost a decade earlier. Yet while such comparisons might confirm O’Sullivan’s allegation of ‘tired diction’ employed to suit Murry’s tastes – the earlier poems were published in Rhythm, also under Murry’s direction – they do suggest a pattern. Each was written during a period in Mansfield’s life defined by surprisingly similar milestones: the early stages of marriage and debilitating health issues.26 Turning to the childlike themes and imagery may have been a way to seek comfort, and, perhaps, to avoid the very grown up problems with which she was faced. Unlike with the earlier two poems, though, Mansfield did not use her own name for ‘Fairy Tale’, and the choice of pseudonym is a revealing one. [Mary] Elizabeth Stanley was the name of Mansfield’s grandmother, whom her son Harold Beauchamp described as ‘an earthly saint’ and whom Antony Alpers paints as a dutiful wife.27 Still within a year of her own wedding to Murry, it was only fitting that Mansfield should take on the name of such a paragon of wifely virtue, yet whether she aspired to or hid behind such a persona was less clear, as the subsequent poems, which are more explicitly focused on love, are at the same time more ambiguous. 92

Katherine Mansfield, Elizabeth Stanley and ‘The Song of Songs’

‘Strong as death’? ‘Covering Wings’ is the next poem Mansfield published as Elizabeth Stanley, and it is the first, I would suggest, to explicitly reference ‘The Song of Songs’. The first stanza of Mansfield’s poem sees the speaker in a dream-like state: ‘I lie in a kind of daze, / Neither asleep nor yet awake’.28 It mirrors a repeated episode of ‘The Song’ in which the female protagonist pines for her lover: ‘By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not’ and ‘I sleep, but my heart waketh’.29 Though both characters are in a liminal zone between sleeping and waking, Mansfield’s speaker remains in a passive ‘daze’, while the woman of the Song is active, her consciousness engaged even as her body rests. The contrast is further heightened when comparing the two speakers’ descriptions of themselves, which use the same imagery to very different effect. The protagonist of ‘The Song’ confidently proclaims, ‘I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys’,30 while Mansfield’s speaker refers to herself as ‘neither a bud nor flower’.31 Though the exact species of the ‘rose of Sharon’ is unknown, a common meaning given to lily of the valley in Victorian times was ‘return of happiness’,32 an idea with which the speaker of ‘Covering Wings’ is preoccupied, for even though she and her lover do not undergo such moments of parting as the couple in ‘The Song of Songs’, there is nonetheless a pervasive sense of impending doom throughout the poem, as Mansfield undermines ‘The Song’s’ imagery of passionate love to depict a stagnating relationship. The speaker’s listless mood extends to her lover as well. The same comparison used in ‘The Song’, in which the male character is ‘as the apple tree among the trees of the wood’,33 is again subtly shifted into a minor key in ‘Covering Wings’, as the lover, though also likened to a tree, bears ‘drooping and tragical boughs of grace’.34 The image is one of defeat, especially considering that where the protagonist of ‘The Song’ ‘sat down under [her lover’s] shadow with great delight’,35 the speaker of Mansfield’s poem feels no such joy; rather, As a tree droops over a stream You hush me, lull me, darken me The shadow hiding the gleam.36

The speaker’s passivity of the first stanza is still apparent here, but it is made more troubling by the fact that it is unclear whether she perceives  the lover’s actions as soothing or suffocating. In fact, death  is explicitly presented as an alternative to her current state, a possibility made even more jarring by the childlike nature of the verses 93

Erika Baldt t­ hemselves. The second stanza takes a morbid turn in what appears to be an imagined conversation: Love! Love! You pity me so! Chide me, scold me – cry, ‘Submit – submit! You must not fight!’ What may I do, then – die? But, oh – my horror of quiet beds! How can I longer stay! One to be ready, Two to be steady, Three to be off and away!37

Though the lines have the rhythm of a schoolyard chant and include the phrases traditionally used by children at the start of a race,38 their import is far from innocent. Why should the speaker be pitied? To what must she ‘submit’? The diction is abstract enough to invite comparisons to any unpleasant scenario, but the poem’s title gives a potential clue: ‘wings’ is the term Mansfield gave her lungs when she contracted tuberculosis.39 Knowing Mansfield’s own experience when she was writing this poem, it is therefore difficult not to connect the words to disease, or to feel the resentment behind the speaker’s perception that her lover is leaving her alone in her ‘quiet bed’ instead of supporting her in her ‘fight’. The poem’s seemingly upbeat conclusion, in which the speaker enjoins her interlocutor to Run! Run! Into the sun! Let us be children again40

thus reads as only a weak approximation of the reunion of the lovers in ‘The Song of Songs’, of which the protagonist declares, ‘I found him whom my soul loveth: I held him, and would not let him go.’41 It is precisely because the speaker of ‘Covering Wings’ feels she can no longer embrace her lover in this way that she suggests going back in time to a moment before the ‘shadow’ of death ‘[hid] the gleam’ of their love, a theme which is developed in subsequent Elizabeth Stanley poems. The poem that appeared in the Athenaeum a month later, ‘Sorrowing Love’,42 seems, with its naive litany of sweetly-coloured flowers, to be more akin in tone to the childlike ‘Fairy Tale’. Its title, though, gives away its sympathy with the mood of ‘Covering Wings’, and, in fact, it takes the allusions to ‘The Song of Songs’ even further than the previous poem, creating a pastiche of multiple chapters of the original text. 94

Katherine Mansfield, Elizabeth Stanley and ‘The Song of Songs’ For example, one of the better-known passages of ‘The Song’ is the following, which bears quoting at length: My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land; The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.43

These particular verses are often excerpted from the full text not only for readings at wedding ceremonies, but also as music for Easter services,44 as the description of springtime and rebirth correspond to the resurrection of Christ in the Christian tradition. Mansfield’s poem begins in a similar vein: And again the flowers are come And the light shakes And no tiny voice is dumb, And a bud breaks On the humble bush and the proud restless tree. Come with me!45

The first stanza follows the same pattern of flowers blooming and birds singing, and ends with the same exhortation that the beloved join the speaker. Without explicitly stating that spring has come, Mansfield’s poem still provides the sense of the regeneration of a new season by starting in medias res with the phrase ‘and again the flowers are come’. Yet while the next stanza sustains the springtime theme as the speaker points out specific flowers to her companion, there is poison, as it were, in the ‘pearl cup for your drink’: the stanza ends with a reference to ‘fairy money’, which, though ‘silver bright’46 now, according to legend ‘soon turned into withered leaves or rubbish’.47 This is where the poem itself turns, as the final stanza changes key to ruminate on the sorrow of the title. Instead of mirroring ‘The Song of Songs’ at the end of the poem, Mansfield twists several more verses from a later chapter to present almost a photographic negative of the original text. Another oft-quoted section of ‘The Song’ is the Shulamite’s description of a moment of union with her lover: ‘My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door [. . .] I rose up to open to my beloved; and my hands dropped with myrrh, and my fingers with sweet smelling myrrh, upon the handles of the lock. I opened to my beloved; but my beloved had withdrawn himself, and was gone.’48 There is little doubt that the moment described is a 95

Erika Baldt sexual encounter featuring the ‘marked, and cheerful, sexual eroticism’ that some early readers sought to downplay through allegory.49 Instead of trying to sanitise it, though, Mansfield simply bleeds any warmth or colour from the original, leaving the encounter grimly anaemic, in spite of the rhyming couplets in which it is conveyed: Here’s moss. How the smell of it lingers On my cold fingers! You shall have no moss. Here’s a frail Hyacinth, deathly pale. Not for you, not for you. And the place where they grew You must promise me not to discover, My sorrowful lover!50

Mansfield lifts the scent-dripping fingers from ‘The Song’, but in her poem myrrh becomes moss, and what was a heady perfume is now a dank chill. Meanwhile, the hyacinth that Mansfield’s speaker introduces only compounds the ‘sorrowful’ tone, as in Greek mythology the flower was believed to have sprung from the blood of the young Hyacinthus after he was killed by his lover Apollo.51 Thus, the landscape that Mansfield’s poem conjures is in stark contrast to that which is described in ‘The Song’, in which both the female protagonist and her lover refer to her body as a fecund garden where they both merge. Before the scene mentioned above, for example, the male character proclaims, ‘I am come into my garden, my sister, my spouse: I have gathered my myrrh with my spice’;52 while she, after locating him again, states to the daughters of Jerusalem, ‘My beloved is gone down into his garden, to the beds of spices, to feed in the gardens, and to gather lilies. I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine: he feedeth among the lilies.’53 There is a reciprocity here in that even though the ‘myrrh’ and ‘the lilies’, symbols for the female protagonist, have been claimed by the male character as his own, she acknowledges his possession while at the same time claiming him, as well. Yet unlike ‘the beloved’ of ‘The Song’, who comes and goes freely from ‘the garden’, Mansfield’s ‘sorrowful lover’ is granted access only to that which the speaker is willing to reveal. After offering the flowers ‘for [the lover’s] delight’ in the second stanza, the speaker suggests that the ‘deathly pale’ hyacinth and the moss belong to her alone and is insistent that ‘the place where they grew’ remains hidden. The confidence of the declaration that ‘I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine’ is replaced by a question: ‘Shall we never be happy again?’54 Mansfield’s poem ends, as the earlier fragment of ‘The Song’ does, with the words ‘come away’.55 This time, though, it seems as if the lover 96

Katherine Mansfield, Elizabeth Stanley and ‘The Song of Songs’ is being directed away from the speaker, as the original phrase ‘come with me!’ from the first stanza is not repeated verbatim. Reflecting again on the hyacinth, a symbol of one lover killed by another, it could be that the speaker is trying to protect the beloved, or that she is trying to protect herself from him. Either way, death has once again come between two lovers, and despite the yearning for happier times and the ability to ‘play’56 together as children, it seems that the pair is no longer able to share the same path, a dilemma that faced Mansfield and Murry in real life. Recalling a conversation about their future, in which Murry fantasised about the two of them living in the English countryside, ‘knocking about in [the] garden, rolling the lawn perhaps’,57 Mansfield records in her diary her response to his question about whether she shared the same vision: No, I don’t want that. No, I don’t want England [. . .] There is the inexplicable fact that I love my typical English husband for all the strangeness between us. I do lament that he is not warm, ardent, eager, full of quick response, careless, spendthrift of himself, vividly alive, high spirited. But it makes no difference to my love. But the lack of these qualities in his country I HATE.58

The qualities that Mansfield claims Murry is not – ‘warm, ardent, eager’ – are the very ones that could define the lovers in ‘The Song of Songs’, while the words that Mansfield does associate with him – ‘strangeness’, ‘lament’ – could easily be used to describe the relationship between the lovers in ‘Covering Wings’ and ‘Sorrowing Love’. Whether Mansfield’s claim that her vitriol for England ‘makes no difference’ to her love for Murry is convincing or not, the ‘HATE’ that explodes from the page of her diary soon finds its way into her Elizabeth Stanley poems, and it is directed squarely at her husband.

‘Cruel as the grave’ Of all Mansfield’s Elizabeth Stanley poems, ‘The New Husband’59 has received the most attention. Critical assessments range from ‘moving’60 to ‘maudlin’,61 and Murry himself left it out of Poems by Katherine Mansfield that he collected and published the year of her death.62 Mansfield composed the poem in Italy where she was again living apart from Murry. Ostensibly, she was avoiding what was believed to be the insalubrious English winter, and he was working to save money for their future home.63 The situation on Mansfield’s part had become untenable, however, as she struggled with an equally cold and damp climate and increasing ‘black’ moods.64 She sent the poem, along with two others, to Murry with 97

Erika Baldt the suggestion that he ‘just thrust them into the old file’ until she could ‘polish them up one day’,65 but the casual delivery could not hide the fact that ‘they were clearly a bitter attack on JMM’s perceived abandonment of her’.66 She again calls on ‘The Song of Songs’ for inspiration, amplifying a pattern that Kathryn Harding identifies between the two lovers in the original text: ‘The woman’s bold and restless pursuits of her lover, her eager and risky quests to unite with him, convey an urgency that is missing from the speeches of the male protagonist.’67 It is just such a lack of urgency to reunite with his bride that Mansfield assigns to the husband in her poem, who promises that he will join the speaker ‘in six months – he hope[s] – no longer’,68 but, in his case, it is too little, too late. The poem takes as its model a section of ‘The Song of Songs’ that is delivered from the male character’s point of view. There, he describes each of the female character’s facial features in terms of animals: ‘Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves’ eyes within thy locks: thy hair is as a flock of goats, that appear from mount Gilead. Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are even shorn, which came up from the washing; whereof every one bear twins, and none is barren among them.’69

The overall impression is one of strength and grace, and of harmony with nature. Mansfield’s speaker, on the other hand, is told: You’re like a leaf caught in the wind You’re like a lamb that’s left behind. When all the flock has pattered away You’re like a pitiful little stray Kitten that I’d put in my vest You’re like a bird that’s fallen from nest.70

The poem uses the same imagery of sheep and birds, but the picture painted here is one of frailty and abandonment. In a diversion from the other Elizabeth Stanley poems that feature only two lovers, ‘The New Husband’ also includes a third character that further subverts the original text. In ‘The Song’, ‘when the man describes the woman’s body, he imagines that almost every part of her is alive, animate, familiar’,71 but in ‘The New Husband’ the figure seeking to make the speaker his bride is Death. This ‘stranger’ fills the same role as the male lover in ‘The Song’ as he attempts to make the female character realise her worth, but instead of the repeated ‘behold, thou art fair’ of ‘The Song’, his refrain is ‘forget, forget that you’ve been wed’,72 as he leads the speaker away. The task is not a difficult one, because, unlike the woman of ‘The Song’, who ‘has an effective strategy for dealing with her lover’s 98

Katherine Mansfield, Elizabeth Stanley and ‘The Song of Songs’ absence: [. . .] she is able to create him with her speech, conjure him up with her language, and he suddenly appears’,73 the protagonist of Mansfield’s poem has no such ability. She laughs at the six months her husband promised, knowing full well they will not be reunited: Ha! Ha! Six months, six weeks, six hours Among these glittering palms and flowers With Melancholy at my side For my old nurse and for my guide Despair – and for my footman Pain – I’ll never see my home again.74

Because she cannot ‘conjure’ up her husband, the speaker chooses a new one, stating in the last stanza that she ‘became the stranger’s bride’.75 Finally, we have Mansfield’s most overt, if perverse, wedding song in which ‘jealousy [. . .] cruel as the grave’76 takes on new meaning as Mansfield creates a love triangle between the speaker, her husband, and Death itself. Yet in spite of the context in which they were composed, it would be inaccurate and unfair to assume that the Elizabeth Stanley poems are an objective reflection of Mansfield and Murry’s marriage. Kathleen Jones argues that the relationship between the two was in some ways a fiction created from absence and longing. Both Murry and Mansfield created a fictional ‘other’ who was everything they wanted, which was only sustainable while they were apart. When they were together they were continually confronted by how far the real Mansfield and the real Murry fell short of their expectations.77

Regardless of whether Mansfield’s vision of Murry matched her flesh and blood husband, the feelings he inspired were certainly real. ‘The New Husband’ suggests, though, that ‘the absence and longing’ Mansfield felt was, at this stage at least, not only for a partner, but for life itself, as the last two lines see the speaker celebrating a new freedom that comes, ironically, from accepting Death: ‘every moment however fast / It flies – we live as ’twere our last!’78 While both ‘Covering Wings’ and ‘Sorrowing Love’ end with the suggestion that going back in time is the antidote to the lovers’ current woes, ‘The New Husband’ seems to mark a turn away from such nostalgia. Less than two weeks after she sent the poem to Murry, Mansfield describes in her diary her seemingly newfound ability to ‘call up’ people and scenes from her past in vivid detail.79 In yet another allusion to ‘The Song of Songs’, she writes that ‘I lie on my right side & put my left hand up to my forehead as though I were praying. This  seems to 99

Erika Baldt induce the state.’80 Yet while the female protagonist of ‘The Song’ describes her lover’s embrace in almost the same terms (‘His left hand is under my head, and his right hand doth embrace me’),81 not only is Mansfield alone, she can not even imagine Murry or his presence. The ‘state’ Mansfield describes is one in which she claims to be able to ‘relive’ certain past moments with others, but, as she puts it, ‘my life with Jack I’m not inclined to. It doesn’t enter my head. Where that life was there’s just a blank.’82 Gone are the attempts to rewrite history. Not only is Mansfield unable to fill the ‘blank’ space with memories, she no longer wants or needs to, and this acceptance of the present, the willingness to savour ‘every moment however fast / it flies’, becomes the subject of her penultimate poem.

Conclusion: ‘the time of the singing of birds’ Brief at only eleven lines, ‘Winter Bird’83 was not signed Elizabeth Stanley and was not published during Mansfield’s lifetime; nevertheless, it forms a natural conclusion to the series of poems based on ‘The Song of Songs’. The dating is unclear,84 but Margaret Scott places it in The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks between two other poems,85 ‘He wrote’,86 and ‘A Little Girl’s Prayer’,87 both of which used the pseudonym even in draft form and the latter of which was also published in the Athenaeum. Murry, though, left both ‘He wrote’ and ‘Winter Bird’ out of his edition of Mansfield’s Poems of 1923.88 While it is easy to understand why ‘He wrote’ did not make the cut, since it came in the same letter as ‘The New Husband’ and is delivered by a male speaker who asks, ‘does it matter – being apart?’,89 ‘Winter Bird’ has nothing of the bitterness of the others. It revisits the same passage from chapter two of ‘The Song’ that Mansfield called on for ‘Sorrowing Love’ but starts from the male character’s assertion that ‘the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land’.90 Mansfield’s poem thus begins, My bird, my darling, Calling through the cold of afternoon – Those round, bright notes, Each one so perfect Shaken from the other and yet Hanging together in flashing clusters!91

Though the first line would suggest what follows will be an ode to a lover, as in ‘Covering Wings’ or ‘Sorrowing Love’, the focus here shifts to the natural world. It continues: 100

Katherine Mansfield, Elizabeth Stanley and ‘The Song of Songs’ The small soft flowers and the ripe fruit All are gathered. It is the season now of nuts and berries And round bright flashing drops On the frozen grass.92

The series of images corresponds to ‘The Song’s’ description of early spring, in which ‘the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; The flowers appear on the earth.’93 Mansfield’s text, however, reverses both the order in which the images are developed and the season being described: the ‘soft flowers [. . .] are gathered’ and the rain of ‘The Song’ is now evident ‘on the frozen grass’. Yet what sets this one apart from the other Elizabeth Stanley poems is the suggestion of an actual response to the speaker. In the Notebooks, these last five lines of the poem are presented in inverted commas, as if the ‘bird’ itself is answering.94 The ‘round, bright notes’ from one are echoed in the ‘round bright flashing drops’ of the other in a single moment of union, and though the title might again recall Mansfield’s own failing ‘wings’, the effect is one of peace, as the pining for something more has ceased. Though the Elizabeth Stanley poems suggest that love may not be as ‘strong as death’, in the end it seems Mansfield has come to an understanding of the message of ‘The Song of Songs’: the bird, the lovers, the flowers, all of it is life itself, and all of it is ‘perfect’. Notes   1. Song of Solomon 8.6. All references are to the King James Version of the Bible, and I will refer to the text as the more secular ‘The Song of Songs’ throughout. This passage in particular is one of the recommended scripture readings in a contemporary Church of England wedding service. See The Church of England, ‘Marriage’, [accessed 18 August 2022].   2. Song of Solomon 2.2–3.   3. Paul Haupt, ‘Difficult Passages in the Song of Songs’, Journal of Biblical Literature, 21: 1 (1902), pp. 51–73 (p. 52).   4. CW2, p. 145: In ‘Bliss’, ‘Harry and [Bertha] were as much in love as ever, and they got on together splendidly and were really good pals.’  5. CW2, p. 87: Linda Burnell of ‘Prelude’ thinks of her husband Stanley as ‘my Newfoundland dog [. . .] that I’m so fond of in the daytime’.   6. CW4, p. xvii.   7. Vincent O’Sullivan, Introduction to Poems of Katherine Mansfield (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. xii.   8. Song of Solomon 8.6.   9. On 19 February 1918, Mansfield wrote to Murry that she had ‘been spitting a bit of blood’. She referred to it as a ‘haemorrhage’ the next day. See Letters 2, pp. 79, 81. 10. See Mansfield’s telegram to Murry on 29 March 1918 that states ‘civilian traffic suspended’ between France and England. Letters 2, p. 145.

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Erika Baldt 11. See CW4, p. xvi and telegram to Murry announcing her arrival at the Headland Hotel in Looe on 17 May 1918 in Letters 2, p. 171. 12. CW4, pp. 247–8. 13. See Song of Solomon 6.13: ‘Return, return, O Shulamite; return, return, that we may look upon thee.’ 14. See Song of Solomon 1.5, 2.7, 3.5. 15. Russell Martineau explains that this division of characters is based on analyses of the grammar of early texts in ‘The Song of Songs’, The American Journal of Philology, 13: 3 (1892), pp. 307–28 (pp. 307–8). 16. Haupt, p. 52. 17. Merrill F. Unger, Unger’s Bible Handbook (Chicago, IL: Moody Press, 1967), p. 299. 18. J. Paul Tanner, ‘The History of Interpretation of the Song of Songs’, Bibliotheca Sacra, 154: 613 (1997): pp. 23–46 (p. 26). 19. Richard A. Norris, Jr., ‘Introduction: Gregory of Nyssa and his Fifteen Homilies on the Song of Songs’, in Gregory of Nyssa: Homilies on the Song of Songs (Atlanta, GA: SBL Press, 2012), pp. xiii–liv (p. xlv). 20. Norris, p. xlv. 21. Anne Mounic, Ah, What Is It? – That I Heard: Katherine Mansfield’s Wings of Wonder (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014), p. 50. 22. Mounic, p. 41. For ‘Psychology’ and its dating, see CW2, pp. 193–8. 23. CW3, p. 125. 24. CW3, pp. 79–80. 25. CW3, p. 82. 26. See the editors’ notes in CW3, pp. 80 and 82 as well as Ida Baker, Katherine Mansfield: The Memories of LM (London: Virago, 1971), pp. 55–8, in which Baker describes her time with Mansfield in Rottingdean, where she both helped Mansfield recover from an operation and escape her first marriage to George Bowden, and where she suggests the poems were written. 27. Antony Alpers, The Life of Katherine Mansfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 6–7. 28. CW3, p. 125. 29. Song of Solomon 3.1 and 5.2. 30. Song of Solomon 2.1. 31. Song of Solomon 2.1. 32. Mrs L. Burke, ed., The Miniature Language of Flowers (London: George Routledge and Son, 1865), p. 88. 33. Song of Solomon 2.3. 34. CW3, p. 126. 35. Song of Solomon 2.3. 36. CW3, p. 126. 37. CW3, p. 126. 38. See, for example, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Little Lord Fauntleroy, [accessed 20 August 2022] and Maud R. Burton, ‘Jim’ in Laura Augusta Yerkes, ed., The World’s Best Speaker for Boys and Girls, (Philadelphia, PA: World Bible House, 1906), p. 117. 39. See, for example, Letters 2, p. 80. 40. CW3, p. 126. 41. Song of Solomon 3.4. 42. CW3, p. 127.

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Katherine Mansfield, Elizabeth Stanley and ‘The Song of Songs’ 43. Song of Solomon 2.10–13. 44. See The Church of England, ‘Marriage’, [accessed 18 August 2022], and Healey Willan, ‘Rise Up, My Love, My Fair One’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1929). 45. CW3, p. 127. 46. CW3, p. 127. 47. William Dwight Whitney and Benjamin E. Smith, The Century Dictionary: An Encyclopedic Lexicon of the English Language, Volume II. D. to Hoon (New York: The Century Co., 1914), p. 2121. 48. Song of Solomon 5.4–6. 49. Norris, p. xxiii. 50. CW3, p. 127. 51. The editors of the Collected Works suggest that Hyacinthus was killed by ‘the jealous god of the wind, Zephyrus’ (see CW3, p. 127n1), but in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Hyacinthus is struck and killed by a discus thrown by Apollo, who proclaims, ‘I, I am the cause of your death’. See Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. David Raeburn (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 391. 52. Song of Solomon 5.1. 53. Song of Solomon 6.2–3. 54. CW3, p. 127. 55. CW3, p. 127. 56. CW3, p. 127. 57. CW4, pp. 278–9. 58. CW4, p. 279. All underlining and capitalisation, original. 59. CW3, pp. 130–1. 60. Jeffrey Meyers, Katherine Mansfield: A Darker View (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2002), p. 98. 61. Gerri Kimber, Katherine Mansfield: The View from France (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008), p. 175n40. 62. Kimber, p. 174. 63. See Murry’s letter to Mansfield on 16 November 1919: ‘The all-important thing is to have enough money to spend on the house.’ Cherry A. Hankin, ed., Letters between Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry (London: Virago Press, 1988), p. 213. 64. Hankin, p. 216. 65. Hankin, p. 231. 66. See the editors’ note in CW3, p. 131. 67. Kathryn Harding, ‘“I Sought Him but I Did Not Find Him”: The Elusive Lover in the Song of Songs’, Biblical Interpretation, 16: 1 (January 2008), pp. 43–59 (p. 52). 68. CW3, p. 130. 69. Song of Solomon 4.1–2. 70. CW3, p. 130. 71. Harding, p. 56. 72. CW3, p. 130. 73. Harding, p. 57. 74. CW3, p. 131. 75. CW3, p. 131. 76. Song of Solomon 8.6.

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Erika Baldt 77. Kathleen Jones, ‘The Mansfield Legacy’, in Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber, and Susan Reid, eds, Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), pp. 165–77 (p. 167). 78. CW3, p. 131. 79. CW4, p. 290. 80. CW4, pp. 289–90. Underline, original. 81. Song of Solomon 2.6. 82. CW4, p. 290. 83. CW3, pp. 134–5. 84. See O’Sullivan, p. 92. 85. Margaret Scott, ed., The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, Complete Edition, Volume 2 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. 250. 86. CW3, pp. 131–2. 87. CW3, pp. 127–8. 88. John Middleton Murry, ed., Poems by Katherine Mansfield (London: Constable, 1923). 89. CW3, p. 132. 90. Song of Solomon 2.12. 91. CW3, p. 134. 92. CW3, p. 134. 93. Song of Solomon 2.11–12. 94. Scott, p. 250.

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The Spanish Lady Cannot Speak: Katherine Mansfield and ‘Miasmic Modernism’ Jessica Whyte

‘Can you remember a time so full of death as this present one?’ Sigmund Freud1

In 1918, as four years of war came to an end, there arrived another unexpected threat: the so-called ‘Spanish flu’ pandemic. Between January 1918–March 1920 there were three waves of this deadly strain of influenza, with the most devastating peak in October 1918. At this time, Katherine Mansfield was living in Hampstead, in close proximity to an epidemic which flashed through London life and affected many of her contemporaries. Although Mansfield only tangentially engaged with the pandemic in her letters and diaries, I contend that she would have been aware of the ripple effect of Spanish flu, and that this universal threat imbues her post-pandemic writing. I will examine her story ‘Revelations’ (1920) through a pandemic lens, revealing how her writing is inflected with anxiety around contagion and loss. I also suggest that Mansfield herself may have succumbed to Spanish flu, an illness which could have played a part in the worsening of her tuberculosis. Spanish flu became the war’s shadow, a terrifying ‘dark angel’,2 during which, as Elizabeth Outka asserts in Viral Modernism: ‘the domestic space became as deadly as the front lines’.3 The result of this double trauma is that the pandemic has been largely overlooked in both the political and social history of our times. Critical consensus underlines this startling absence: Susan Sontag draws attention to ‘the near-total historical amnesia about the influenza pandemic’,4 Laura Spinney is astonished by ‘our collective forgetting of the greatest massacre of the 20th century’,5 while Mark Honigsbaum notes how it is a struggle to find ‘many novels, songs or works of art from the period that refer to the 1918 pandemic’.6 Although this silence around Spanish flu is largely 105

Jessica Whyte reflected in its absence in cultural works, Spinney suggests that the influenza outbreak ‘was probably responsible, at least in part, for the obsession of twentieth century artists with all the myriad ways in which the human body can fail’.7 The pandemic’s effects on culture may not be overt, but that doesn’t mean its traces can’t be detected – there are ways in which the pandemic may have silently contributed to the postwar cultural fascination with death, loss and mourning. Despite its interest in exiles and outsiders, modernist literature often excludes illness, and in particular Spanish flu, from its central explorations. Modernist pandemic narratives seem to have been silenced, or at least forced underground. Outka champions a new ‘Miasmic Modernism’, in which hidden references to the pandemic are excavated from modernist works and in which ‘we can bring the literary pandemic lens to these works to see what has been hidden in plain sight’.8 Following Outka’s framework, this essay explores the ‘subtle ways the outbreak weaves itself into the fabric of Modernism and begins to analyze rather than perpetuate the pervasive postwar evasion of the flu’.9 By  training the pandemic lens onto Mansfield’s short story ‘Revelations’, I aim to excavate hidden traces of the pandemic, highlighting those moments in which the effects of the virus are ‘paradoxically captured in gaps, silences, atmospheres, fragments, and hidden bodies’.10 I do not suggest that Mansfield was necessarily writing from a position of conscious engagement with the Spanish flu pandemic, but rather that she, alongside many of her modernist contemporaries, was influenced in subtle ways by the atmosphere of fear and threat of contagion or death that it engendered. As Outka argues: The pandemic was an experience that even as it was unquestionably unfolding was hard to register or believe was real; the pandemic’s very nature means its representation will not always be deliberate or clear. I argue instead for a critical recognition of a symbiotic atmosphere of influence; the pandemic is an essential presence in the style and structure of these works, and they in turn help define and confront the experience of the pandemic in its immediate aftermath. Collectively, these works share  the sense of global menace, of a coming apocalypse or wasteland that involves a form of mass death tied to – but distinct from – the more visible violence of the war.11

Outka argues that ‘modernist techniques of fragmentation and porous agency’12 and ‘the plotlessness inherent in so many modernist works’13 offer a ready-made model which can successfully represent the fragmentary, non-narrative and disorientating experience of illness. By reflecting the fever, delirium and hallucinatory episodes associated 106

Katherine Mansfield and ‘Miasmic Modernism’ with influenza, modernist techniques and forms can be powerful modes of conveying the subjective, embodied experience of living through Spanish flu. There are a multitude of reasons why Spanish flu was under-reported and underplayed. The short-lived, intense temporality of the pandemic, as well as a lack of medical knowledge about its origins and treatment, meant it was desirable to keep the scope and magnitude of the pandemic quiet. Official censorship also meant that many Western media outlets refused to report the scale of the pandemic, because of the risk of undermining morale as the First World War limped to its messy end. Yet there are other, discreet forces at work when it comes to silencing the pandemic’s impact. When we discount the pandemic in our literary scholarship ‘we take part in long traditions that align illness with seemingly less valiant, more feminine forms of death’.14 This feminisation of the pandemic was reflected in the slang names given to the flu, making the politics of naming a key issue. Jane Fisher notes how common nicknames for the flu were ‘the Spanish Lady’, or sometimes the less genteel ‘Spanish tart’ or ‘Spanish coquette’.15 The implication that flu was a domestic disease, spread by foreign women, served to reinforce the idea of the influenza pandemic as a source of weakness or shame. Catharine Arnold describes how cartoonists during the pandemic depicted the flu as ‘a nightmare lady grinning skull dancing across headlines in a black flamenco dress’.16 This pernicious idea that flu was somehow spread by women contrasts with the valiant depictions of masculine war. It is important to put the ‘Spanish Lady’ under the spotlight, to challenge the negative connotations around this feminisation of viral disease and recognise that Spanish flu claimed the lives of vast numbers of soldiers on active duty. As Arnold reveals, by 1918 ‘more Americans would have died from Spanish flu than perished in the war’.17 The likely origin of the Spanish flu was a military camp, either in Kansas, USA, or in Étaples, France, meaning that it was in a predominantly male environment that the virus first took hold. The misogyny which underscored the feminine depictions of Spanish flu was another way of managing morale, by conveniently downplaying the violence and severity of the pandemic, projecting the implicit message that the flu was a feminine footnote to the war effort. Instead of reading texts through the predominantly masculine lens of the First World War, the pandemic lens can be characterised by a focus on the language and experience of feminised, domestic spaces. Modernist texts which incorporate fragmented form, defy plot, texts which rely on interior monologue, female or domestic experience, which are polyvocal, and which incorporate intentional gaps or silences, can successfully represent – either overtly or covertly – the subjective 107

Jessica Whyte experience of Spanish flu. Mansfield’s intimate stories successfully reflect universal experiences within the domestic, feminine spaces of the home. She is adept at writing plotless, fragmented stories filled with interiority and unspoken frustrations, yet literary criticism has so far failed to make connections between Mansfield’s work and Spanish flu. Although she lived through the war and the pandemic, scholarship has largely focused on Mansfield’s work in the context of the First World War.18 In February 1918, Mansfield wrote to her husband John Middleton Murry: ‘I have a horror of the way this war creeps into writing . . . oozes in – trickles in.’19 Alice Kelly believes that Mansfield chose to ‘write the war through her increasingly debilitating illness, and to write her illness through the war’.20 Mansfield felt that acknowledgement of the war in writing was critical, and blurred the boundaries between the war and her own health, writing to Murry: We have to face our war – they [her contemporaries] won’t. I believe Bogey, our whole strength depends upon our facing things. I mean facing them without any reservations or restraints. I fail because I don’t face things. I feel almost I have been ill so long for that reason: we fear for that reason: I mean fear can get through our defences for that reason.21

If acknowledgement of the First World War, in which Mansfield’s brother lost his life, was a central preoccupation in her life and writing, it is impossible to imagine that the influenza pandemic did not to some extent impact on her. Indeed, the peak of its second wave exactly coincided with a severe worsening of Mansfield’s own health. On 5 October 1918, Mansfield wrote to Dorothy Brett: ‘I saw a big gun [an unnamed tuberculosis specialist] on my own – who was very intelligent. He says I have got this disease in both my lungs, that I can get better in London but must go off to some mountain peak to be cured.’22 Although Mansfield, perhaps optimistically, or not entirely honestly, told her friend that the prognosis was ‘serious but recoverable’, Murry’s verdict was less hopeful.23 He believed that a strict sanatorium was her one and only chance, and that if not, she only had two or three years to live – four at the outside.24 Yet despite the prevalence of Spanish flu in London by October 1918, Mansfield and Murry continued to socialise with their circle of friends, including Ottoline Morrell, plus D. H. and Frieda Lawrence, who spent two weeks between 7–22 October staying around the corner in Hampstead. On 22 October, Mansfield wrote to Morrell: ‘I wish you had not a cold. It’s such appalling ghastly weather to fight; one needs double strength and double health.’25 Morrell had visited Mansfield in London in early October, and now she was unwell. If Morrell was suffering from Spanish flu, it is possible she passed it on 108

Katherine Mansfield and ‘Miasmic Modernism’ to Mansfield before she left London, or there could have been another source of infection – by the third week of October, Mansfield wrote that ‘Lawrence has been running in and out all this week’, while ‘Frieda was ill and in bed’.26 Frieda’s illness is not specified, but it is possible, due to its prevalence, that it was Spanish flu, even if none of the parties involved suspected its presence. By 24 October 1918, Mansfield herself had fallen ill and wrote: I am in bed; I feel very sick. Queer altogether – decomposing a bit. Its a pale, silent day. I should like to be walking in a world, far away. Health seems to me now more remote than anything – unattainable. Best to stay in bed & be horrid from there. The sky in waves of blue & cream and grey is like the sky overhanging a dead calm sea.27

It would be easy to assume that this was her tuberculosis, and yet she describes herself as feeling ‘very sick’, ‘queer’ and ‘decomposing’; words which suggest that her illness feels different from her familiar tuberculosis symptoms. The other suggestive factor is the description of the day as pale – in colours of blue, cream and grey. Spanish flu often caused inflammation of the optic nerve and impaired colour vision, with patients describing ‘how washed out and dull the world appeared to them – as if those cyanosed faces had drained all the colour from it’.28 Mansfield’s description of a bleached world chimes with this unusual symptom of Spanish flu. In a letter of 27 October, Mansfield makes her first overt reference to the flu pandemic. She urges her friend Dorothy Brett ‘do not get flu’, and (possibly with a touch of resentment) writes how Murry ‘simply thrives’ with a healthy appetite, and ‘the flue has not penetrated the puddings’.29 This passage is too ambiguous to say with any certainty that Mansfield suspected that she herself was suffering from Spanish flu, but there is a suggestion that flu was in her house (if not in the puddings). Conversely, her flippant tone seemingly dismisses the pandemic as a storm in a teacup, although we know that her health wasn’t robust enough for flu to be an incidental threat – it would have posed a serious risk to someone whose lungs were already severely compromised by tuberculosis. A key scientific study by Andrew Noymer and Michel Garenne concludes that tuberculosis is the ‘missing piece of the puzzle’ when it comes to understanding Spanish flu, stating: ‘Tuberculosis and influenza very likely interacted in 1918’, and that being tubercular could present ‘a significant risk factor for contracting influenza’.30 In a more recent study, Svenn-Erik Mamelund and Jessica Dimka suggest that ‘the pandemic played a role in the early twentieth-century decline in TB by killing individuals who would otherwise have died of TB at a much later 109

Jessica Whyte date’, offering one explanation as to why so many younger adults died from Spanish flu.31 If Mansfield was exposed to Spanish flu in October 1918, it could offer an explanation as to why her overall health declined from this point onwards. Historian John Barry draws attention to the less well-known effects of Spanish flu, which could affect multiple organs and have a long-term impact post-virally, leading to ongoing neurological and cardiovascular issues.32 On 4 November 1918, Mansfield wrote to Morrell: ‘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.’33 Mansfield’s new and troubling symptoms might have been attributable to a post-viral reaction. When Virginia Woolf visited Mansfield in November 1918, she was struck by her friend’s frailty, and wrote: ‘Katherine was up, but husky & feeble, crawling about the room like an old woman. How far she is ill, one can’t say.’34 On 20 November 1918 Mansfield wrote to Murry: ‘I confess that these last days my fight with the enemy has been so hard that I just laid down my weapons and ran away.’35 She wrote to Brett on 17 December: ‘Life is ugly – I am hardly alive. I have not been out for months & cannot walk up & down the stairs with any success.’ She describes feeling ‘quite alone – quite isolated – a queer state’, as though she has been irrevocably altered by her illness of the past two months.36 Mansfield next encountered Spanish flu in February 1919, when Lawrence contracted a severe case. In a letter to Ottoline, Mansfield wrote how Frieda ‘passed through 100 years of agony’ trying to look after him.37 Despite Mansfield’s fractious relationship with Lawrence, she was deeply affected by his suffering, writing to their mutual friend S. S. Koteliansky: ‘I am anxious about him: he ought to be kept so quiet and allow to rest and who will let him? I cannot bear to think of him ill.’38 Mansfield found the autumn and winter of 1918–19 one of the most gruelling periods of her life. In April 1919, she confessed to Anne Estelle Rice: ‘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.’39 To Ottoline Morrell she wrote: I know you have the same Horror of that endless winter – – –– over at last [. . .] 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.40

This description of the ‘cold, dark wing’ may apply to Mansfield’s personal situation and to the hovering threat of the pandemic which had 110

Katherine Mansfield and ‘Miasmic Modernism’ consumed the country through the previous months. The end of the war did not bring relief, as the flu continued to rage, and it wasn’t until the early summer of 1919 that the ‘dark wing’ finally began to lift. By October 1919, Mansfield was living abroad in Italy, yet she could not help recalling her severe illness of the previous autumn. She described to Murry her birthday of 1918 as being a night during which she ‘had fever in that North room & felt [she] was going to die’.41 She credits her doctor, Victor Sorapure, with saving her: ‘a year ago I thought I was going to die and I think I was [. . .] don’t let’s forget how Sorapure has helped. I really think I should have just died in that room upstairs if he had not taken me by the hand.’42 It is impossible to prove definitively whether Mansfield’s bout of illness in October 1918 was Spanish flu, but her letters show what she went through during that difficult autumn and winter was out of the ordinary, even for someone used to the strictures of ill health. That bout of illness remained in her memory as a turning point, after which her tuberculosis symptoms were persistent, and her health progressively deteriorated. I suggest that the double threat posed by the pandemic and her own illness experience changed Mansfield’s life irreversibly, and this impact can be traced in a change of tone and subject matter in her short stories. ‘Revelations’ is one of Mansfield’s stories which is seldom discussed by critics, not even warranting a mention in renowned biographies by Jeffrey Meyers, Kathleen Jones and Claire Tomalin, while Mansfield’s original biographer, Antony Alpers, dismissed it with one word: ‘weak’.43 The story does get a mention in J. F. Kobler’s overview of Mansfield’s short fiction, in a chapter titled ‘The Nervous Characters’. Kobler writes: ‘Monica Tyrell in “Revelations” provides an excellent example of a woman who suffers “from her nerves”’.44 Kobler dismisses ‘Revelations’ as a ‘slight story’: ‘Probably most readers can take Monica no more seriously than her husband does; she really seems to have so little trouble accepting her own selfishness that she is not worth paying attention to.’45 Mary Burgan devotes more space to ‘Revelations’, but also criticises the character of Monica Tyrell as a satire of a ‘spoiled, childish society woman’.46 Burgan reads ‘Revelations’ as introducing ‘Monica’s neuroticism through showing her extraordinary sensitivity to the sounds of life outside’, but could this hypersensitivity not be neurosis, but a sign of true suffering?47 Burgan states: ‘in this cry against the corruption of women, Mansfield contrasts the hypersensitivity of the false invalid with the genuine illness of the daughter of Monica’s hairdresser, who has died during the night. Monica must flee this site of genuine illness at the end of the story.’48 Burgan describes Monica as one of a number of ‘cases who have either accommodated themselves to 111

Jessica Whyte the limitations of their sick roles or exaggerated their own labile sensitivities’.49 Critical commentary about ‘Revelations’ therefore seemingly reaches the consensus that Monica is a malingerer, faking an illness in order to gain attention and sympathy. The satirical tone of the story may lean towards this reading, yet I contend that there is something far more complex and ambiguous at play, and that Monica’s character should be read from the core assumption that her illness is real. Mansfield has form for using ambiguity and satire in her stories, especially when writing about illness, an attitude which reflects her ambivalence towards her own status as invalid. Humour is often the recourse of the sick, a useful defence mechanism, a way of deflecting the fear of being burdensome and instead turning suffering into satire. Mansfield walks this line with style, both in her stories and her letters. In January 1919 she wrote a humorous poem to her good friend Anne Estelle Rice, mocking her own ill health and revealing a self-consciousness about her own status as a relatively privileged female ‘invalid’. She satirises her own situation with as unsparing a lens as the one she trains on Monica in ‘Revelations’: (Pulse one sixteen Temperature one o three) Lying in bed With a wandering head And a weak, weak cup of tea. Injections, chère In my derrière Driven into a muscular wad With a needle thick As a walking stick – How can one believe in God!50

This ambivalence was also present in her personal life. From 1918 onwards, Mansfield vacillated between pleading for help and support from Murry, and berating herself for the demands she placed on him, writing to him in November 1919: I am tired of cursing myself – tired of repenting. I can say no more & do no more. You will never have to forgive me again as long as you write. I WILL NEVER CRY OUT AGAIN. You make me feel like a vampire. I can’t understand why you don’t hate me. There was all your pressure of work & I chose the moment to crash. What a fool I was – how blind! It has been the lesson of my life.51

This complicated relationship with her own illness is reflected in several of Mansfield’s short stories, most notably in ‘The Man Without a 112

Katherine Mansfield and ‘Miasmic Modernism’ Temperament’, written in 1920, the same year as ‘Revelations’. The story brutally satirises both an invalid recuperating abroad, and her husband who dances reluctant attendance. The story has elicited contrasting readings over the years, being interpreted either as a hymn of praise to Murry as an attentive husband, or as a searing critique of his coldness and lack of empathy. My reading of ‘Revelations’ will aim to reveal similar inherent ambiguities about illness, and question why critics have been so ready to read Monica Tyrell as a hypochondriac. I suggest that Monica in ‘Revelations’ could be a representation of a survivor of the Spanish flu pandemic, suffering from the long-term effects influenza has inflicted upon her body. ‘Revelations’ begins thus: ‘From eight o’clock in the morning until about half-past eleven Monica Tyrell suffered from her nerves, and suffered so terribly that these hours were – agonising, simply. It was not as though she could control them.’52 In these opening lines, Mansfield sets up a fundamental ambiguity in the reader’s understanding of her protagonist. Taken at face value, this compartmentalising of a specific timeframe during which to ‘suffer’ seems to be satirising Monica’s nervous illness and mocking the regularity of her ‘nerves’. By suggesting that she has a fixed time during which she suffers, Mansfield appears to be contradicting the idea of ‘Crip Time’, a concept propounded by Alison Kafer, in which she describes how time is experienced differently in the sickroom: Crip time is flex time not just expanded but exploded; it requires re-imagining our notions of what can and should happen in time, or recognizing how expectations of ‘how long things take’ are based on very particular minds and bodies [. . .] rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds.53

On surface reading, the satirical interpretation of Monica as a malingering invalid is understandable, but I suggest that Mansfield is doublebluffing us, using a satirical tone to call into question our assumptions about ill behaviour. She shows how easy it is to mock Monica’s ‘nerves’ without allowing for other interpretations of her set hours of suffering – for example, Monica could be reliving a trauma in which those particular hours played a part, or the morning could be the worst time for her symptoms – when the body is having to ‘restart’ and symptoms are frequently amplified. It can take several hours to be able to begin the day, both physically and mentally. Another consideration here could be that Monica’s husband, Ralph, impatient with her illness, has imposed limits on when she is allowed to ‘indulge’ her symptoms. In Virginia Woolf’s 113

Jessica Whyte Mrs Dalloway, Clarissa’s husband imposes similarly strict illness regimes, ordering ‘after her illness, that she must sleep undisturbed’,54 and he would insist upon ‘“an hour’s complete rest after luncheon” to the end of time, because a doctor had ordered it once’.55 Similarly, Ralph may have imposed the parameters of time and space in which Monica is ‘permitted’ to be ill. His solution: ‘“Why don’t you get Marie to sit outside your door and absolutely forbid anybody to come near your room until you ring your bell?”’56 Yet it is Ralph who phones and interrupts her rest time, disrespecting her need for quiet. Monica laments: ‘“You rang me up when the person who understood me simply couldn’t have”. It was the end.’57 Monica, like Mansfield herself, wants more than anything to be understood, and one of her most significant revelations is that Ralph does not: ‘understand her? He had understood nothing.’58 His suggestion that the maid sits guard outside her bedroom during the morning hours shows how little he understands her needs: ‘“Oh, if it were as simple as that!” She threw her little gloves down and pressed her eyelids with her fingers in the way he knew so well.’59 This sentence, switching viewpoints, is deeply revealing, showing both Ralph’s frustration with his wife’s illness behaviour, and Monica’s frustration that he has no grasp on her complex suffering. Monica fears that her maid would end up serving as ‘a kind of cross between a wardress and a nurse for mental cases!’60 She is fearful of being labelled as mentally unwell and of becoming a prisoner to her husband’s perception of her invalidism. Monica refuses to meet Ralph for lunch and is overwhelmed with a surge of fury: Anger – anger suddenly gripped her close, close, violent, half strangling her. How dared he? How dared Ralph do such a thing when he knew how agonizing her nerves were in the morning! Hadn’t she explained and described and even – though lightly, of course; she couldn’t say such a thing directly – given him to understand that this was the one unforgivable thing.61

Monica’s anger is in marked contrast to the portrayal of the nervous invalid that begins the story. This insight into her frustration at the lack of understanding, the refusal to respect her boundaries and needs, is followed by hurt and anger that her husband can so easily dismiss her affliction: ‘Did he think it was just a fad of hers, a little feminine folly to be laughed at and tossed aside?’62 Monica asks Ralph to take her seriously, but he answers her patronisingly: ‘“My darling, you’ll not believe me, but I know you infinitely better than you know yourself. Every delicate thought and feeling I bow to, I treasure.”’63 Ralph believes Monica’s ‘nerves’ are merely part of her feminine charms and foibles, 114

Katherine Mansfield and ‘Miasmic Modernism’ but she laments: ‘How could she have loved a man who talks like that?’ and dismisses his words as ‘utter nonsense’.64 Nothing of her behaviour accords with the role of malingering invalid, but rather of a woman railing against the imposition of illness restrictions. When Monica is woken by the front door slamming ‘she jerked up in bed, clutching the eiderdown; her heart beat’.65 This visceral reaction could be interpreted as conversant with her nervous anxiety, but another explanation is possible – that Monica’s heart has been affected in the wake of Spanish flu, and her sensitivities to noise and light are a genuine physical response to the aftermath of a debilitating illness. Even the opening of the curtains is distressing to her: ‘with a sharp tearing rip out flew the blind and the curtains, stiffening, flapping, jerking. The tassel of the blind knocked – knocked against the window.’66 There is an insupportable amount of noise, and the repetition of the words ‘jerk’ and ‘knocked’ reflect the jarring impact on her body. Not only is Monica sensitive to noise, but she is equally sensitive to light: ‘Up rolled the blind; the window went up with a jerk; a whitygreyish light filled the room. Monica caught a glimpse of a huge pale sky and a cloud like a torn shirt dragging across before she hid her eyes with her sleeve.’67 Monica begs Marie to close the curtains, as her eyes cannot bear the daylight. Her view from the window is washed out and monochrome, devoid of colour, just as Mansfield’s was when she fell ill in October 1918. In Katherine Anne Porter’s story ‘Pale Horse, Pale Rider’, a semi-autobiographical account of the author’s own experience of Spanish flu, the central character, Miranda, describes how in the midst of her suffering the turning on of a light results in a distressing sensory response: ‘at first she was blinded and turned her head away’.68 Miranda laments how she is condemned to see ‘the same monotonous landscape of dulled evergreens and leaden snow’.69 Miranda’s perception of colour and light has been inextricably altered by her illness, and Monica’s sensory reactions in ‘Revelations’ are strikingly similar. Monica’s only moment of elation comes as she sits before the mirror in her bedroom, staring at herself in ‘the blueish shadowy glass’.70 She is ‘pale’, her face ‘like a mask’, but for an instant she feels a tremendous excitement: ‘“I’m free. I’m free. I’m free as the wind”. And now all this vibrating, trembling, exciting, flying world was hers. It was her kingdom. No, no, she belonged to nobody but Life.’71 Monica’s transient revelation of a true self is soon followed by a stifling sense of claustrophobia: ‘she could not stand this silent flat, noiseless Marie, this ghostly, quiet,  feminine interior’.72 The mirror acts as a portal of authenticity, providing her with an alternative self, one that is not trapped in the domestic space, haunted by the spirit of her own sickness 115

Jessica Whyte or her invalid role. Her bedroom/sickroom becomes an uncanny space, and she races away in a taxi, longing to be free ‘of being the tiny kitten in the swansdown basket, of being the Arabian, and the grave, delighted child and the little wild creature’,73 all roles which echo her childlike dependency, the helplessness of her illness role and the imposition of her husband’s rules as paternal protector. Monica’s destination is the hairdressers. This could be used as evidence to reinforce the idea of her as a superficial society woman who only cares about frivolities, yet this reading does not allow for the limited world the sick person inhabits, in which a trip to the hairdressers would be a significant outing. Mansfield often wrote in her letters and notebooks of trips she took to buy small treasures, the effort it took, and the toll it had on her afterwards. In April 1920 she wrote to Murry: I’m staying in bed until lunch as I had a heavy day yesterday buying small presents to bring back and so on. Exhausting work because one gets so frightfully excited as well. Connie went with me in the morning & bought me an antique brooch, very lovely; three stones set in silver. Then she bought me a pastel blue muslin frock with frills like panniers at the side.74

Monica is looking for something more at the hairdressers than superficial beauty: ‘Monica always had the feeling that they loved her in this shop and understood her – the real her – far better than many of her friends did. She was her real self here.’75 After her moment of revelation in the mirror, she seeks similar security and authenticity in this familiar place, somewhere she is free from the sick role she plays at home. Yet the salon also becomes uncanny: the owner appears white-faced and unfamiliar, with red eyes, and the rings on her fingers which usually flash are ‘cold, dead, like chips of glass’.76 When her hairdresser, George, doesn’t arrive in his usual manner and minister to her, Monica feels it was a mistake to have come and cannot quite recapture the brief freedom she felt looking in her bedroom mirror: ‘When she opened a big pot of cream on the glass shelf her fingers trembled. There was a tugging feeling at her heart as though her happiness – her marvellous happiness – were trying to get free.’77 When George arrives: ‘how queerly he smiled! It was the mirror, of course. She turned around quickly. His lips curled back in a sort of grin, and – wasn’t he unshaved? – He looked almost green in the face.’78 The mirror manifests George as an uncanny presence, his greenish face like the sick or the dead. When George brushes her hair, she knows something is wrong: ‘Oh, oh, how mournful, how mournful! It fell quick and light, it fell like leaves; and then it fell heavy, tugging like the tugging at her heart.’79 Death has permeated Monica’s safe space 116

Katherine Mansfield and ‘Miasmic Modernism’ and the feel of the brush conveys grief and sadness and affects her troubled heart. Finally, she asks: ‘“is there something the matter here? Has something happened?” But George shrugs and grimaces and says “Oh no, Madame. Just a little occurrence.”’80 Yet Monica understands something awful has transpired: The silence – really, the silence seemed to come drifting down like flakes of snow. She shivered. It was cold in the little cubicle, all cold and glittering. The nickel taps and jets and sprays looked somehow almost malignant. The wind rattled the window-frame; a piece of iron banged, and the young man went on changing the tongs, crouching over her. Oh, how terrifying Life was, thought Monica. How dreadful. It is the loneliness which is so appalling. We whirl along like leaves, and nobody knows – nobody cares where we fall, in what black river we float away. The tugging feeling seemed to rise into her throat. It ached, ached; she longed to cry.81

George admits that his little daughter died that morning, and Monica cannot rid herself of the image of the dead child as she flees from the hairdressers, sobbing. The cause of his daughter’s death isn’t stated, but it is possible it was Spanish flu, which killed many children and wiped out entire families. Does George’s ‘green’ face suggest that he too is sickening? The familiar hair salon becomes horrifying and uncanny, revealing to Monica the greatest revelation of all: the futility and loneliness of life and the proximity of death. Beneath Monica’s mask of superficiality, death lurks – beneath the satirical tone of ‘Revelations’ deep fears are hidden. Mansfield’s frequent flippancy about her health, especially in her letters to friends, masked a very real fear of death, as expressed in a letter to Ottoline Morrell in October 1918: ‘Death, how dreadful a thing is Death!! I have such a horror of it; it ought not to be.’82 As she travels to meet Ralph, Monica sees a flower shop and tries to get the taxi driver to stop so that she can buy ‘lilies-of-the-valley, and white pansies, double white violets and white velvet ribbon . . . From an unknown friend . . . From one who understands . . . For a little girl . . . .’83 The driver does not hear her, and she does not buy the flowers which represent mourning and loss. Her gesture, rather than being empty, reveals that Monica is not lacking in empathy or suffering: beneath the superficial trappings of a society lady, she too has endured sickness and distress. Mansfield does not permit us full, first-person access into Monica’s stream of consciousness, allowing for deep ambiguity in the reading of the story and leaving us to draw our own conclusions about the authenticity of Monica’s illness experience. This narrative technique is a deliberate ploy of Mansfield’s, which chimes with Outka’s assertion of 117

Jessica Whyte the relevance of modernist tropes in representations of the pandemic: ‘Modernist shifts at the level of character – the borderless qualities of identity, the radical subjectivity of perception – are likewise suited for representing bodies infiltrated at the cellular level and the sense of dissolution this importation could produce.’84 Monica is a woman whose very existence is under threat, and this manifests in an ambivalent and conflicted sense of self. By reading between the lines of Monica’s superficial existence and shining the pandemic lens into every corner of this story, a new narrative begins to emerge: Monica as a genuine invalid, and a possible representation of a Spanish flu survivor. Despite the absence of the pandemic as an overt theme in Mansfield’s writings, by training the pandemic lens onto her work and aligning it with Outka’s idea of ‘Miasmic Modernism’, I have teased out clues that lurk in Mansfield’s letters and stories that suggest a subtle yet palpable connection with the Spanish flu pandemic. I conclude that it is possible that Mansfield suffered from Spanish flu in October 1918, which may have accelerated a decline in her overall health. I also assert that traces of contagion and loss permeate her post-pandemic stories, most notably represented in the character of Monica Tyrell in ‘Revelations’. Notes   1. Sigmund Freud, writing to his friend Ernest Jones in January 1920, a month before his pregnant daughter Sophie died of Spanish flu. Quoted in Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for our Time (London: Papermac, 1989), p. 390.  2. Jane Fisher, Envisioning Disease, Gender, and War: Women’s Narratives of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), p. 18.  3. Elizabeth Outka, Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020), p. 7.   4. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 72.  5. Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World (London: Vintage, 2018), p. 4.   6. Mark Honigsbaum, ‘Why the 1918 Spanish Flu Defied Both Memory and Imagination’, 25 October 2018, [accessed 25 August 2022].   7. Spinney, p. 8.   8. Outka, p. 100.   9. Elizabeth Outka, ‘“Wood for the Coffins Ran Out”: Modernism and the Shadowed Afterlife of the Influenza Pandemic’, Modernism/modernity, 21: 4 (November 2014), pp. 937–60 (p. 938). 10. Outka, Viral Modernism, p. 2. 11. Outka, Viral Modernism, p. 101. 12. Outka, Viral Modernism, p. 27. 13. Outka, Viral Modernism, p. 31. 14. Outka, Viral Modernism, p. 2. 15. Fisher, p. 13.

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Katherine Mansfield and ‘Miasmic Modernism’ 16. Catharine Arnold, Pandemic 1918: The Story of the Deadliest Influenza in History (London: Michael O’Mara Books Ltd, 2018), p. 60. 17. Arnold, p. 55. 18. Notably Gerri Kimber et al., eds, Katherine Mansfield and World War One (Edinburgh University Press: 2014); Allyson Booth, Postcards from the Trenches: Negotiating the Space Between Modernism and the First World War (New York: Oxford University Press: 1996); and Alice Kelly, Commemorative Modernisms: Women Writers, Death and the First World War (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020). 19. Letters 2, p. 70. 20. Kelly, p. 125. 21. Letters 3, p. 82. 22. CL1, p. 365. 23. CL1 p. 365. 24. Letters 2, p. 278n1. 25. CL2, p. 237. 26. CL2, p. 238; CL1, p. 367. 27. CW4, p. 259. 28. Spinney, p. 48. 29. CL1, p. 367. 30. Andrew Noymer and Michel Garenne, ‘The 1918 Influenza Epidemic’s Effects on Sex Differentials in Mortality in the United States’, Population and Development Review, 26: 3 (2000), pp. 565–81. 31. Svenn-Erik Mamelund and Jessica Dimka, ‘Tuberculosis as a Risk Factor for 1918 Influenza Pandemic Outcomes’, Tropical Medicine and Infectious Disease, 4: 2 (2019), p. 74, [accessed 13 October 2022]. 32. On 6 October 2020, historian John Barry compares COVID-19 to the 1918 flu pandemic [accessed 29 May 2021]. 33. CL2, p. 240. 34. Anne Olivier Bell, ed., The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume 1, 1915–1919 (London: Hogarth Press, 1977), p. 216. 35. Letters 2, p. 292. 36. CL1, p. 369. 37. CL2, p. 247. 38. CL2, p. 59. 39. CL2, p. 491. 40. CL2, p. 251. 41. Letters 3, p. 24. 42. Letters 3, pp. 26–7. 43. Antony Alpers, The Life of Katherine Mansfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 316. 44. J. F. Kobler, Katherine Mansfield: A Study of the Short Fiction (Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers, 1990), p. 87. 45. Kobler, p. 88. 46. Mary Burgan, Illness, Gender, and Writing: The Case of Katherine Mansfield (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), p. 87. 47. Burgan, p. 132. 48. Burgan, p. 132. 49. Burgan, p. 139.

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Jessica Whyte 50. CL2, p. 490. 51. Letters 3, p. 84. 52. CW2, p. 213. 53. Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), p. 27. 54. Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (London: Vintage, 2000), p. 32. 55. Woolf, p. 118. 56. CW2, p. 213. 57. CW2, p. 214. 58. CW2, p. 214. 59. CW2, p. 213. 60. CW2, p. 213. 61. CW2, p. 214. 62. CW2, p. 214. 63. CW2, p. 214. 64. CW2, p. 214. 65. CW2, p. 213. 66. CW2, p. 213. 67. CW2, p. 213. 68. Katherine Anne Porter, ‘Pale Horse, Pale Rider’, in Pale Horse, Pale Rider: Selected Short Stories (London: Penguin, 2011), pp. 314–63 (p. 342). 69. Porter, p. 359. 70. CW2, pp. 214–15. 71. CW2, pp. 214–15. 72. CW2, p. 215. 73. CW2, p. 215. 74. Letters 3, p. 286. 75. CW2, p. 215. 76. CW2, p. 215. 77. CW2, p. 216. 78. CW2, p. 216. 79. CW2, p. 216. 80. CW2, pp. 216–17. 81. CW2, p. 217. 82. CL2, p. 235. 83. CW2, p. 84. Outka, Viral Modernism, p. 100.

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Restlessness Transformed: Revisiting the Metaphor of Tuberculosis in Katherine Mansfield’s Notebooks and Letters Wen-Shan Shieh

Introduction Katherine Mansfield’s notebooks and letters include detailed accounts of her experience with tuberculosis (TB), as well her thoughts on other writers who also had the same disease, including John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson and Anton Chekhov. This essay examines Mansfield’s perception of herself as following in the footsteps of this illustrious group of nineteenth-century writers, and how she sought to explore the link between TB and literary talent, while simultaneously attempting to dispel the Romantic notions about TB and those who were infected with it. In her book Illness as Metaphor Susan Sontag argues that we should avoid using metaphorical language to describe illness, emphasising that ‘illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness – and the healthiest way of being ill – is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking’.1 Sontag discusses the various ways in which myths and metaphors about TB were culturally constructed and the all-pervasive influence these had on how patients experienced the disease, in many cases dissuading the patient from seeking appropriate treatment. Prior to the discovery by Robert Koch in 1882 of the bacteria which caused TB, it was seen as a ‘mysterious’2 disease, and such symptoms as ‘rosy cheeks’ and ‘fever’3 contributed to its reputation as a disease of ‘passion’.4 As Sontag puts it, ‘Fever in TB was a sign of an inward burning: the tubercular is someone “consumed” by ardor, that ardor leading to the dissolution of the body.’5 And it was this supposed connection between passion and TB that led many to believe ‘there is generally some passionate feeling which provokes, which expresses itself in, a bout of TB. But the passions must be thwarted, the hopes 121

Wen-Shan Shieh blighted.’6 In this mythologised version of the disease, TB is described as a ‘delicate, sensitive’, and ‘“romantic agony”’.7 Taking as an example of the notion that TB only affected those who were highly sensitive and creative, Sontag observes that ‘Shelley consoled Keats that “this consumption is a disease particularly fond of people who write such good verses as you have done”’.8 In responding to this Romantic notion that ‘the character causes the disease’, she argues: Such preposterous and dangerous views manage to put the onus of the disease on the patient and not only weaken the patient’s ability to understand the range of plausible medical treatment but also, implicitly, direct the patient away from such treatment. Cure is thought to depend principally on the patient’s already sorely tested or enfeebled capacity for self-love.9

Next, Sontag cites an excerpt from a notebook entry written by Mansfield in 1922, the year before her death, to illustrate how she was affected by this myth of the disease emanating from the patient, leading her to believe that only by first healing her ‘Self’ would it be possible to recover from TB: ‘A bad day . . . horrible pains and so on, and weakness. I could do nothing. The weakness was not only physical. I must heal my Self before I will be well . . . This must be done alone and at once. It is at the root of my not getting better. My mind is not controlled.’10 Sontag adds in a footnote on Murry’s perception that she had come to the conviction that her bodily health depended upon her spiritual condition. Her mind was henceforth preoccupied with discovering some way to ‘cure her soul’; and she eventually resolved, to my regret, to abandon her treatment and to live as though her grave physical illness were incidental, and even, so far as she could, as though it were non-existent.11

Sontag’s quotations from Mansfield and Murry show that Mansfield had fallen under the sway of this myth which portrayed TB as a ‘disease of the soul’,12 and which stereotyped the patient as ‘someone quintessentially vulnerable, and full of self-destructive whims’,13 such that Mansfield failed to realise the severity of her condition, and eventually gave up on finding an effective medical treatment. In view of Sontag’s comments on the TB myth and her position that Mansfield subscribed to it, this essay addresses the following questions. First, did Mansfield exclusively view TB as a ‘disease of the soul’, in terms of her writing and treatment? Sontag only quotes from two passages in Mansfield’s notebooks, and both of these are from the edition edited and annotated by Murry. Would a different understanding of Mansfield’s 122

Restlessness Transformed: Revisiting the Metaphor of Tuberculosis views on her condition and treatment emerge by making a close examination of all her letters and notebook entries written between 1918 and her death in 1923, especially the more complete editions published since 1980? Second, how did the metaphor of TB function in Mansfield’s conceptualisation of her condition? Might the quotations in Mansfield’s autobiographical writings and those of earlier writers who also had TB, such as Keats, be reinterpreted in such a way as to help us revisit the metaphors of TB and its relationship to creative writing? Building on Sontag’s discussion of TB as a metaphor, in Consumption and Literature: The Making of the Romantic Disease, Clark Lawlor states that while Sontag presents a brilliant analysis of how metaphors about illness affect patients, making the description of illness in literature an integral part of the patient’s experience of illness, her approach tends to ‘flatten out its varied narratives into one homogeneous entity stretching from the late eighteenth century to the twentieth century’, ignoring the evidence that views on the relationship between TB and creative endeavour have varied considerably in different historical periods. Lawlor presents a more historical account of the TB myth, exploring the metaphors and literary narratives which have surrounded TB from the Renaissance, through the Age of Enlightenment, and into the nineteenth century, with a particular focus on the Romantic poet’s writings about consumption and their legacy.14 Katherine Byrne’s Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination explores how in the Victorian era the ‘cult of invalidism’ strengthened the perceived association of TB and aesthetic sensitivity, such that ‘a painful, debilitating and fatal disease became a fashionable, even sought-after illness’.15 Although neither Lawlor nor Byrne undertake an in-depth analysis of TB narratives in the twentieth century, in their concluding chapters both authors consider how and why TB metaphors have changed in the twentieth century, and this is what has inspired the present enquiry into the role of the TB myth in Mansfield’s writing. Lawlor points out that after 1882, when Koch discovered that Mycobacterium tuberculosis is the causative agent of TB, it began to be called tuberculosis and it became widely known that ‘consumption’ affects ‘rich and poor alike’.16 Yet the myth persisted well into the twentieth century, mainly because, according to Lawlor, ‘different narratives of consumption were still performing certain important discursive functions in society’, i.e., the ‘creative classes’ such as writers, critics, and artists still needed a narrative to justify ‘their consumptive condition’.17 Lawlor does not explore the impact these lingering perceptions about TB had on twentieth-century writers, which is what I will do here in the case of Mansfield. Byrne argues that the TB metaphor took on a 123

Wen-Shan Shieh new form in the early twentieth century, as convalescence in the privacy of a domestic ‘sickroom’ gave way to treatment in the ‘public’ setting of a sanatorium.18 However, in all the twentieth-century novels Byrne mentions in her concluding chapter, including Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924), Brian Bulman’s The House of Quiet People (1939) and A. E. Ellis’s The Rack (1958), the protagonist is a male patient; there is no mention of female TB patients or patients who were reluctant to move into a sanatorium. Byrne mentions in a footnote that Mansfield’s work might also be considered as TB literature, but she does not do so, since the scope of her study is limited to the ‘direct textual representation of consumption’, as in the three novels mentioned above.19 In fact, the topic of TB is not entirely absent from Mansfield’s fiction. For example, in ‘Life of Ma Parker’ (1921) we read that Parker’s husband died of ‘consumption’,20 and in ‘The Man Without a Temperament’ (1920), which is considered by many commentators to allude to her relationship with Murry, the heroine Jinnie’s coughing suggests that she is suffering from TB.21 Nevertheless, the most detailed descriptions of TB in Mansfield’s work are found in her letters and notebook entries, and these form the main source material for the present essay.

The Restlessness in the Illness Narratives of TB, and Making Treatment Choices In addition to Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, another study particularly important to the issues addressed in this essay is Mary Burgan’s Illness, Gender, and Writing: The Case of Katherine Mansfield. Burgan argues that having a fatal illness is experienced as a kind of ‘fragmentation’,22 which echoes Sontag’s description of TB as a disease of ‘disintegration’ that separates the TB patient’s body into fragments of ‘phlegm and mucus and sputum and, finally, blood’.23 Considering the experience of TB as a process of being fragmented, Burgan suggests that Mansfield’s writing can be seen as a ‘conscious defense against fragmentation’,24 a perception perhaps arising from the use of ‘scraps’ and ‘bits’ in Mansfield’s notebook entry for 19 February 1918, where she records that she coughed up blood for the first time since her TB diagnosis in December 1917. She found this terrifying, since it was widely understood to mark ‘the moment at which phthisis could be diagnosed without doubt’:25 I spat – it tasted strange – it was bright red blood. Since then Ive gone on spitting each time I cough a little more. Oh, yes, of course I am frightened. But for two reasons only. I don’t want to be ill, I mean ‘seriously’ away from Jack [Murry]. Jack is the 1st thought. 2nd I don’t want to find this is real consumption, perhaps its going to gallop – who knows? – and I shan’t

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Restlessness Transformed: Revisiting the Metaphor of Tuberculosis have my work written. Thats what matters. How unbearable it would be to die, leave ‘scraps’, ‘bits’, nothing real finished.26

The restless tone of this entry stems from Mansfield’s fear that her condition would cause her to be separated from her husband and would prevent her from completing the literary undertakings she had committed to. Sontag notes that TB patients were generally regarded as ‘restless, bitter, self-destructive’, and that their ‘restlessness’ was seen as a sign of their self-destructive tendency.27 According to the Oxford English Dictionary,28 ‘restlessness’ as a noun refers to ‘the state or condition of being restless’, and ‘restless’ as an adjective means ‘uneasy in mind or spirit’ (sense 1a) or ‘characterized by unrest’ (sense 1b). These common definitions of ‘restless’ imply scattered energies and distraction that may have resulted in the very ‘scraps’ and ‘bits’ that Mansfield was hoping to avoid creating. Yet this essay also wants to call attention to the lesser-known definitions of ‘restless’ in order to revisit the restless tone of Mansfield’s writing and the restlessness of her actions. As the OED indicates, ‘restless’ as an adjective also means ‘never ceasing or pausing’ (sense 2b) or ‘constantly active or in search of new stimulation’ (sense 3b). These additional connotations of being ‘restless’ suggest that ‘restlessness’ could also serve as a kind of energy that invigorates Mansfield to unceasingly search for health and pursue her writing career. Drawing on Burgan’s view that Mansfield’s writing was ‘a conscious defense against fragmentation’ and these diverse definitions of ‘restless’, I argue that the restless tone of Mansfield’s writing, and the restlessness of her writing process and travelling resulted from her being diagnosed with a fatal disease, but she transmuted it into the driving force behind her writing, which became for her a way of facing her impending demise. In other words, Mansfield’s restlessness is creative rather than ‘self-destructive’ and is inseparable from her pursuit of an effective treatment for TB and the sense of urgency she attached to her writing. The term ‘restless’ is frequently used to describe both Mansfield’s writing and her attitude towards life. In her introduction to Mansfield’s Selected Stories, Angela Smith describes Mansfield as ‘a restless traveller’.29 According to Jeffrey Meyers, after being diagnosed with tuberculosis at the end of 1917, and being advised by Dr Ainger that her condition could not endure the freezing British winters, Mansfield began to spend the colder months in warmer climes, such as the Mediterranean coast.30 Sontag, based on certain notebook entries written in the last year of her life and on Murry’s annotations, concludes that by that time Mansfield had given up on conventional medical treatment and that 125

Wen-Shan Shieh she saw the healing of her inner self as her only hope of recovery.31 However, as I will argue below, it seems more likely that Mansfield’s restless travels between 1918 and 1922 demonstrate an active quest for health. Murry’s compilation and publication of Mansfield’s work, as well as his related publicity efforts, were a major factor in her becoming widely known in literary circles. However, his omissions and some of his annotations in editing Mansfield’s notebooks and loose papers reveal his intention to portray Mansfield in an otherworldly light. In his 1924 poem ‘In Memory of Katherine Mansfield’, Murry refers to her as ‘a child withouten stain’,32 and in his introduction to the Journal of Katherine Mansfield he writes that ‘purity’ is the only word he can come up with to describe the peculiar quality of her work and life.33 This overemphasis on the ‘purity’ of Mansfield’s character and work tends to obscure the technical skill that went into her writing, as well as the complexity of her life experience. Janka Kascakova points out that as a consequence of this misrepresentation, ‘readers were offered a distorted image of Katherine Mansfield, of her ideas, motivations and actions’.34 Sontag, for example, cites a note in which Murry explains why TB has been portrayed as ‘the “dread disease” which “refines” death’:35 I have never seen, nor shall I ever see, any one so beautiful as she was on that day; it was as though the exquisite perfection which was always hers had taken possession of her completely. To use her own words, the last grain of ‘sediment’, the last ‘traces of earthly degradation’ were departed for ever. But she had lost her life to save it.36

From this note, along with another passage cited earlier, we can see that Murry felt that Mansfield’s understanding of her experience of TB and her attitude towards treatment were entirely spiritual, such that she was in search of ‘some way to “cure her soul”’,37 as if this disease of the body was only the ‘sediment’ of worldly life. However, a close reading of Mansfield’s notebooks and letters shows that very few of her descriptions of her condition touch on spiritual considerations, and that she mostly writes about her physical symptoms and sensory perceptions. For example, in her letters from late 1917 up to 1919 she writes: ‘There is a SPOT in my right lung’;38 ‘night coughing and sweating’;39 ‘For I, who weighed 10 stone 3 at age of fifteen now [age twenty-nine] weigh 8 stone 6. At this rate I will be a midget tooth pick at fifty’;40 ‘my left lung aches & aches [. . .] It is like an appalling burn’;41 ‘spitting the bright arterial blood’;42 ‘spinal rheumatiz’;43 and ‘acute neuritis in my arm and shoulder’.44 126

Restlessness Transformed: Revisiting the Metaphor of Tuberculosis Mansfield’s actual experience of her debilitating illness was far from Murry’s romanticised depiction of it, as found in his annotation to The Letters of Katherine Mansfield in which he writes of ‘that process of selfannihilation which is necessary to the spiritual rebirth’.45 And when he speaks of her search for ‘self-annihilation’ and a way to ‘cure her soul’, he seems to be referring only to the approach she adopted in 1922, in the last year of her life. Against Murry’s objections, in October 1922 Mansfield went to France to reside at the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, founded in Fontainebleau-Avon by the Russian spiritual teacher George Gurdjieff, where she died on 9 January 1923 from a pulmonary heamorrhage. Gurdjieff taught that ‘a cure for physical ailments such as tuberculosis depended first upon a healing of the inner spirit’.46 In a note on one of the entries in Mansfield’s notebook for 1922, Murry expresses his chagrin at her attraction to mysticism and choosing to treat her ‘inner spirit’ instead of her physical body. However, there is evidence that between 1918 and 1922 Mansfield sought out a range of medical treatment from various doctors, and it was only when all of these were unsuccessful that she finally resorted to this ‘healing of the inner spirit’. In 1918 and 1919 Mansfield ‘underwent treatments that further debilitated her, among them strapping of her chest so that she could hardly breathe, injections of strychnine which gave her a high fever, and electric shocks’.47 Cristina Vilaplana points out that ‘the therapeutic options available at that time and the poor outcomes obtained did not offer much hope. Moreover, some of the doctors even tried to convince patients to undergo new treatments that sometimes turned out very badly’.48 In January 1922 Mansfield travelled from Switzerland to Paris for medical treatment with Ivan Manoukhin, a Russian physician living in exile, who had developed a new treatment for tuberculosis which involved exposing the patient’s spleen to massive amounts of X-ray radiation. The fifteen-week course of treatment cost a total of £300 (about £15,630 in 2022),49 failed to improve her condition, and resulted in painful side effects, leading Mansfield to not only discontinue the treatment but to give up on conventional medical treatment altogether.50 Vincent O’Sullivan observes that Mansfield’s ‘restlessness expanded into that delight in detail and observation which bad health and loneliness both fretted at and was consoled by at the same time’.51 Burgan finds a sense of urgency and commitment invigorated by this same restlessness throughout Mansfield’s notebooks and letters, in ‘her urge to inscribe symptomatic sensory detail in her work’, in ‘her urge to articulate her own diagnosis’ and in her intention ‘to enact the best therapy she could manage’.52 Burgan’s argument seems to be based on 127

Wen-Shan Shieh such passages as the following: a letter written to Murry on 3 February 1922, just prior to beginning the X-ray treatment in Paris, in which she ‘articulates’ her doubts about the treatment and the prospects for a positive outcome: Do you really believe all this? There is something that pulls me back the whole time and which won[’t] let me believe. I hear, I see. I feel a great confidence in Manoukhine – very great – and yet – – I am absolutely divided. You know how, to do anything well, even to make a little jump, one must gather oneself together. Well, I am not gathered together. A dark secret unbelief holds me back. I see myself after 15 goes apologising to them for being not cured, so to speak.53

Mansfield’s hunch unfortunately came true. Not only did the treatment prove ineffective, but its painful effects hindered her writing. In a letter written on 8 March 1922 to her cousin Elizabeth von Arnim, she vividly describes the effects of the X-ray treatment: ‘Its rather hard to work just now. I am at the moment when one feels the reaction. After five doses of Xrays one is hotted up inside like a furnace and one’s very bones seem to be melting.’54 After fifteen weeks of X-ray therapy, she felt that it was only ‘upsetting’ her ‘heart’, and she decided to discontinue the treatment.55 The failure of the X-ray therapy with Manoukhin convinced Mansfield that her condition was not curable by medical treatment, and that ‘the best therapy she could manage’ would be ‘to try a new life altogether’,56 which is exactly what she did when she went to stay at the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. She explained her decision to Murry by declaring that Gurdjieff ‘is the only man who understands there is no division between the body and the spirit, who believes how they are related’. In other words, she accepted Gurdjieff’s view that one’s spiritual condition affects physical health, and that doctors only treat half of the person.57 According to Adèle Kafian, a young Lithuanian girl who was also living at the Institute at the time, Gurdjieff had a wooden balcony with divans installed in the cowshed, and advised Mansfield to spend a few hours there every day, based on the traditional notion amongst farmers that ‘the exhalations of cows’ are an effective treatment for TB. According to Kafian, simply being exposed to ‘the radiation of animal magnetism’ and inhaling ‘the healthy smell of fresh manure’ would restore Mansfield’s strength.58 In her letter to Murry written on 23 October 1922, one week after her arrival, she writes that, in addition to inhaling the salubrious air in the cowshed, she was also spending about three hours each morning and afternoon walking in the garden and trimming the flowers.59 After dinner, the community 128

Restlessness Transformed: Revisiting the Metaphor of Tuberculosis would gather in the salon, where there was music, dance, and perhaps ‘a display of all kinds of queer dance exercises’, all of which she enjoyed as a spectator only, due to her poor health.60 In another letter to Murry written on 24 October 1922 she shares her confidence that she has come to the right place: I believe M[r] Gurdjieff is the only person who can help me. It is great happiness to be here. Some people are stranger than ever but the strangers I am at last feeling near and they are my own people at last. So I feel. Such beautiful understanding and sympathy I have never known in the outside world’.61

About three weeks later, she informs Murry that the dancing at the Institute has inspired her writing: I must say the dancing here has given me quite a different approach to writing. I mean some of the very ancient Oriental dance. There is one which takes about 7 minutes & it contains the whole life of woman —but everything! Nothing is left out. It taught me, it gave me more of woman’s life than any book or poem.62

It is noteworthy that Mansfield’s experience at the Institute – spending time in the cowshed, breathing in the healthy air, strolling and working in the garden, enjoying music and dance, receiving ‘understanding and sympathy’ – are all forms of palliative care typically provided in a hospice setting, such as pet therapy, horticultural therapy, art therapy and spiritual support.63 In the article ‘Palliative Care as an Active Treatment’, Dr Jen-kuei Peng, the attending physician working in the Department of Family Medicine at National Taiwan University Hospital, points out that since palliative care focuses on alleviating symptoms and eschews invasive treatments, it is often regarded as a ‘passive treatment’, and both Murry and Sontag consider Mansfield’s choice to forgo conventional medical treatment as an expression of passivity and resignation. Reflecting on the meaning of ‘active treatment’, Peng writes: But what is meant by ‘active’? My opinion is that whether or not a treatment is active is not determined by the form or cost of the treatment, but rather on whether or not it is approached with an active attitude in the here and now, so as to determine the most appropriate treatment for the patient, taking into consideration such factors as the severity of the patient’s condition, the pros and cons of the available medical treatments, and the patient’s wishes.64

From this perspective, Mansfield’s decision to abandon invasive treatment in favour of the hospice-like environment of Gurdjieff’s Institute can be seen as an active approach, one which provided the kind of 129

Wen-Shan Shieh palliative care which best suited both her physical condition and her spiritual needs and aspirations. And even though she never regained her health, during her three-month stay at the Institute, as indicated in her letters, she did find a degree of happiness,65 as well as much needed ‘understanding and sympathy’. Despite the constant spectre of her impending death, Mansfield gained much benefit from her experience at the Institute, including the creative inspiration for a new approach to writing which arose in relation to the whirling dances. Realising that her time was running out, a sense of restless urgency and commitment had fuelled her creativity since her TB diagnosis. On 3 and 4 February 1918, while writing the short story ‘Je ne parle pas français’, she wrote to Murry that the story ‘excites’ her ‘so tremendously’ that she has ‘been at it with hardly a break all day’, and that she has copied out the first part and sent it to him, ‘in case any misfortune should happen’ to her.66 According to Antony Alpers, Mansfield was in such ‘a flurry of frantic creativity’ at this time that she ‘wrote the story on a variety of sheets of paper’.67 Burgan also observes that ‘while she complied with doctors’ orders to some extent – she agreed that she had to spend most of her time at rest – she also contrived to set up each place of exile as a place for writing’.68 From this point of view, it seems that Mansfield was keen on making use of every opportunity to continue writing, lest she not be able to complete the work she wanted to in the limited time she had.

The Function and Shifting of the TB Metaphor Mansfield and Murry were married in London on 3 May 1918. However, right from the start, their marriage was clouded by Mansfield’s incurable disease. Because she had to spend the winters away from London, convalescing in a warmer place, they were often apart, and her letters and diary entries from this period make frequent mention of disappointment and unhappiness. In her letter to Murry written on 9 June 1918, while convalescing at a hotel in Cornwall, Mansfield gives voice to the deep sense of loneliness that was exacerbating her condition: I really have suffered such AGONIES from loneliness and illness combined that Ill never be quite same again [. . .] Tchekhov would understand: Dostoevsky wouldn’t. Because he’s never been in the same situation [. . .] But Tchekhov has known just EXACTLY this that I know. I discover it in his work – often. I have discovered the ONLY TREATMENT for consumption. It is NOT to cut the malade off from life: neither in a sanatorium nor in a land with mild rivers, butter mountains & cream valleys. One is just as bad as

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Restlessness Transformed: Revisiting the Metaphor of Tuberculosis the other. Johnny Keats’ anchovy has more nourishment than both put together. DON’T YOU AGREE??? [. . .] I MUST NOT BE LEFT ALONE.69

As this letter shows, Mansfield feared the loneliness and isolation of illness, and longed for Murry’s understanding and companionship. However, as revealed in a notebook entry for 17 December 1919, Murry was reluctant to leave London and his literary pursuits to stay with her while she was convalescing, since it entailed ‘living alone together for 2 years on not much money’.70 In February 1919 Murry was appointed chief editor of the Athenaeum, furthering their separation and leading Mansfield to seek spiritual support and companionship from other tubercular writers. She especially felt that Chekhov would have understood her feelings, since he had spent time convalescing in Yalta on the Black Sea coast, while his wife, the actress Olga Knipper, remained in Moscow.71 In a letter written to Murry on 19 February 1918 from Bandol, she borrows the term ‘arterial blood’, used by Keats to describe his coughing up of blood on a handkerchief, heralding his impending death,72 when he writes, ‘This is arterial blood: I cannot be deceived by its colour. It is my death warrant.’73 In a letter written to Murry two days later, she informs him that during her convalescence she has become more and more able to grasp the poetry of Shelley and Keats.74 In one of her June 1922 letters to Ida Baker,75 Mansfield writes that she is staying in a ‘dreadful’ room at a hotel in Switzerland, making the best of it by imagining that it must be ‘The kind of place R. L. Stevenson might have stayed at’ when he was recuperating in Switzerland.76 It is worth noting that all of the tubercular writers mentioned in Mansfield’s letters were active in the nineteenth century, rather than her contemporaries. Assuming, as mentioned in the previous section, that Mansfield’s restlessness, as manifested in her far-flung search for an effective treatment and in her preoccupation with her physical symptoms, reveals that her understanding of TB was quite different from the nineteenth-century romantic view of TB as a ‘a disease of the soul’, why does she make such frequent reference to this outdated myth? What function did the metaphor of TB play in Mansfield’s writing and her understanding of her condition? Lawlor argues that the main reason for the persistence of the TB myth, even after the discovery of the pathogen that caused it, was that various narratives of consumption were still needed to justify certain social groups’ superior status. For example, the TB narrative was used to legitimate ‘the stigmatization of the lower classes, foreigners and various social “others”’.77 Lawlor cites Sontag’s example in Illness as Metaphor, illustrating how Adolf Hitler 131

Wen-Shan Shieh used the TB metaphor to stigmatise the Jews, describing them as ‘a racial tuberculosis among nations’ in his first political tract, published in 1919.78 The most likely reason for Mansfield’s frequent references to the nineteenth-century myth of TB is that doing so was a source of creative inspiration and helped fulfil her need for self-identity. As such, ‘the cliché which connected TB and creativity’79 provided her with a narrative framework to justify her poor physical condition. As she wrote in a notebook entry on 24 November 1921, ‘I, being what I am, had to suffer this in order to do the work I am here to perform.’80 Seeing herself as somehow belonging to the illustrious lineage of writers who derived creative inspiration from their tuberculosis helped Mansfield to ‘make meaning’81 of her pain. In a letter to Murry dated 9 June 1918 she refers to John Keats by the nickname ‘Johnny’, expressing the closeness she felt to Keats as a fellow writer who suffered from TB, while declaring her belief that eating anchovies as Keats did ‘has more nourishment’ for TB patients than moving into a sanatorium or living in seclusion in the mountains.82 The ‘nourishment’ she speaks of refers to literary inspiration, a widespread notion in Romanticism. In a notebook entry from 1922 she recalls her restless state of mind while writing ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ in December 1920: ‘I was so terribly unhappy that I wrote as fast as possible for fear of dying before the story was sent.’83 This urgency of being in a race against time echoes Keats’s verse: ‘When I have fears that I may cease to be / Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain’.84 Mansfield’s notebook entry for 14 October 1922, her final birthday before her death, includes her thoughts about how Chekhov faced his illness: ‘Risk! Risk anything! [. . .] True, Tchekhov didn’t. Yes, but Tchekhov died [. . .] Then read the final letters. He has given up hope. If you de-sentimentalize those final letters they are terrible. There is no more Tchekhov. Illness has swallowed him.’85 This passage shows that although Mansfield disapproved of Chekhov’s ‘seeming defeatism’ in the face of TB, his reluctance to take risks actually inspired her to risk everything by trying out various experimental treatments.86 As Galya Diment argues, Mansfield’s admiration for Chekhov’s work influenced her decision in 1922 to seek treatment with two Russians healers Manoukhin and Gurdjieff.87 Mansfield attempted to forge a connection with these nineteenthcentury writers who were also infected with TB, since this ‘singular’ quality of being affected by TB due to one’s creativity and sensitivity was no longer present amongst twentieth-century writers.88 As Byrne points out, the advances in medical science by the beginning of the 132

Restlessness Transformed: Revisiting the Metaphor of Tuberculosis twentieth century which made it possible to diagnose TB, triggered a shift in the metaphor of TB. By the 1920s, X-ray technology was widely used in the UK for diagnosing TB, and the way in which it made the patient’s lungs visible helped to dissolve the mystery and romance of TB.89 In the nineteenth century, TB was seen as a type of private experience in which an individual suffered alone in a domestic sickroom, but with the establishment of sanatoria for treating TB in the early twentieth century, the metaphor of TB began to shift. As Byrne puts it: Institutionalisation signalled that tuberculosis was now regarded as a widespread social problem and that suffering from it had become a public experience shared with a wide array of doctors, nurses and other patients, whereas previously consumption had necessitated the private, personal suffering of the individual.90

Thus, the main reason for Mansfield’s refusal to be admitted to a sanitarium was that it would make her ‘ill with the other ill’,91 i.e., being just another patient in a crowd of patients, she would lose her sense of being ‘singular’. In other words, because she associated TB with creativity and uniqueness, Mansfield felt that her physical suffering enhanced her talent as a creative writer, and that being institutionalised would reduce her to two lobes of lung under the X-ray. Murry’s view of TB as ‘one index of being genteel, delicate, sensitive’92 both sustained and yet strained their marriage. In a notebook entry of 17 December 1919 Mansfield touches on the function of the Romantic metaphor of TB in her marriage: When we first met, in fact, it was I who kept him and afterwards we’d always acted (more or less) like men friends. Then this illness – getting worse & worse & turning me into a woman and asking him to put himself away & to bear things for me. He stood it marvelously. It helped very much because it was a ‘romantic’ disease (his love of a ‘romantic appearance’ is immensely real).93

As shown in this notebook entry, at first their relationship was one of equals, rather than a traditional marriage in which the woman is dependent on the man, but falling ill forced Mansfield to accept the role of being largely dependent on her husband. As she emphasised in her letter of 5 September 1919 to S. S. Koteliansky, ‘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.’94 She goes so far as to state in a tone of self-mockery that at least she has been lucky enough to have come down with the ‘glamorous’95 disease of TB, and that Murry finds the ‘pale 133

Wen-Shan Shieh and drained’96 look of TB patients rather charming, making him more willing to take care of her. However, other passages in Mansfield’s diary and letters, as well as her friends’ recollections, suggest that her praise of Murry as a ­caregiver  – ‘He stood it marvelously’ – may have been ironic. In a letter dated 23 May 1918, shortly after their marriage, she informs Murry that his distant behaviour following the wedding changed her expectations for the marriage: ‘Do you remember when you put your handkerchief to your lips & turned away from me. In that instant you were utterly, utterly apart from me – and I have never felt quite the same since.’97 In a notebook entry for 12 August 1920 she relates that her symptoms were making Murry increasingly uncomfortable with the role of caregiver: I cough and cough and at each breath a dragging, boiling, bubbling sound is heard. I feel that my whole chest is boiling. I sip water, spit, sip, spit. I feel I must break my heart. And I can’t expand my chest; it’s as though the chest had collapsed [. . .] And Murry is silent, hangs his head, hides his face with his fingers as though it were unendurable. ‘This is what she is doing to me! Every fresh sound makes my nerves wince.’ I know he can’t help these feelings. But, oh God! how wrong they are. If he could only for a minute, serve me, help me, give himself up!98

Murry’s body language described in this diary entry suggests that when he was actually confronted with the reality of his wife’s illness, as Baker observed, ‘He was too full of self-pity to give any help.’99 In one of her letters to Baker she complains that it was Murry’s belief in Keats’s line ‘Beauty that must die’, and his fondness for the appearance of a TB patient, that led him to think that his wife ‘should be so subdued and helpless’, adding that ‘it is deadly to know he NEVER tries to help. But I was not born an invalid and I want to get well.’100 In fact, from 1918 until Mansfield’s death in 1923, Murry took a break from his literary career in London several times so that he could join his wife while she was convalescing in the relative warmth of Southern Europe. In an apparent attempt to save the marriage, Murry spent Christmas of 1919 with his wife in Ospedaletti, Italy, but, as Baker recalls, he was so full of self-pity over the whole affair that ‘the hurt was too deep for a quick cure’.101 Nevertheless, Mansfield’s determination to ‘get well’ alone despite Murry’s reluctance to provide practical care for her debilitated condition highlights her awareness of the peculiar plight of female tubercular patients like herself, thereby casting doubt on Burgan’s view that Mansfield had fallen victim to ‘the narcissistic self-absorption of invalidism’.102 134

Restlessness Transformed: Revisiting the Metaphor of Tuberculosis

Conclusion By re-examining the letters and notebook entries written by Mansfield from the time she was diagnosed with TB in 1917 to her death in 1923, the ‘restlessness’ exhibited in Mansfield’s vivid descriptions of her symptoms and in her first-person narratives of her search for an effective treatment should be given a more productive interpretation, as a corrective to Sontag’s relatively negative assessment of Mansfield’s attitude towards her condition and treatment. Building on Burgan’s notion that Mansfield’s writing was ‘a conscious defense against fragmentation’, it would appear that her restlessness arose out of her awareness of having a limited amount of time to write, and that this became the driving force behind her writing and gave her the courage to face her condition. Mansfield’s letters and notebooks from the last few years of her life indicate that she saw herself as extending the lineage of nineteenthcentury writers who had TB, and that this had the possibility of lending both meaning and glamour to her experience. In a 1918 notebook entry titled ‘Pulmonary Tuberculosis’, however, she described the awkwardness she felt about coughing in a hotel: The man in the room next to mine has got the same complaint as I. When I wake in the night I hear him turning. And then he coughs. And I cough. And after a silence I cough. And he coughs again. This goes on for a long time. Until I feel we are like two roosters calling to each other at false dawn. From far-away hidden farms.103

As this entry shows, a twentieth-century writer stricken with TB was no longer the noble nightingale of Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, but more like a rooster crowing in a barnyard. The discovery in 1882 of the pathogenic agent underlying TB demanded a realistic approach to the disease, making it clear that anyone could be infected and dispelling the nineteenth-century myth that it was somehow associated with literary talent, thus reducing Mansfield’s potentially distinctive identity as a writer to that of just another unknown, neglected patient. The mocking tone in which she writes of TB in her notebooks reveals that she was aware of the difference between her own situation and that of the nineteenth-century Romantic poets, and not, as Sontag and Burgan contend, indulging herself in the Romantic myth of TB. Moreover, Mansfield’s decision to avail herself of hospice-like care at Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man was not a passive resignation or a giving up on treatment altogether, but rather an active act on her part, based on her new understanding 135

Wen-Shan Shieh of health and well-being. In a notebook entry written on the eve of moving to the Institute, she clarifies the kind of health she is interested in gaining: By health I mean the power to live a full, adult, living breathing life in close contact [with] what I love [. . .] I want, by understanding myself, to understand others [. . .] Then I want to work. At what? I want so to live that I work with my hands and my feeling and my brain. I want a garden, a small house, grass, animals, books, pictures, music [. . .] I want to be writing.104

Here, the therapeutic benefits offered by the Institute all fit into her new understanding of health. Her intention to work with her hands, feelings and brain indicates that she had accepted Gurdjieff’s teaching on the interdependence of body, mind and spirit, and her fervent desire to know herself echoes Gurdjieff’s claim that self-observation promotes physical, mental and spiritual health.105 Mansfield’s letters and notebooks written during her stay at the Institute detail her increasing capacity for self-observation and her deepened understanding of herself. For example, in her letter of 1 December 1922 to Murry she writes about the transformation she was going through: ‘I cannot see you until the old Wig [Mansfield herself] has disappeared. Associations, recollections would be too much for me just now. I must get better alone.’106 She decides to let go of her disappointment with Murry’s lack of empathy and willingness to take care of his wife, and to break away from her dependence on her past associations and recollections on marriage, in an effort to heal independently. On 9 January 1923 Murry arrived at the Institute for the opening night of its newly completed theatre and, as it turned out, this was the last time they were to meet. Meyers conjectures that Mansfield may have been trying to show Murry the good results of her three-month stay at the Institute when she briskly ran up the stairs while returning to her room that night, resulting in a fatal pulmonary hemorrhage.107 In her letter of 19 October 1922 to Koteliansky, Mansfield reveals her sense of inner fragmentation: I am a divided being with a bias towards what I wish to be, but no more [. . .] I am always conscious of this secret disruption in me [. . .] The world as I know it is no joy to me and I am useless in it [. . .] What is important is to try & learn to live – really live, and in relation to everything – not isolated (this isolation is death to me).108

Both Mansfield’s writing and convalescence were continually complicated by ‘this secret disruption’: she actively sought various treatments, 136

Restlessness Transformed: Revisiting the Metaphor of Tuberculosis but she harboured doubts as to their efficacy; she vividly portrayed her symptoms, but also seems to have subscribed to the myth and metaphor of tuberculosis; she feared the isolation required for her convalescence, but most of her best work was written when she was living apart from her husband.109 The restlessness caused by ‘this secret disruption’ did not cause her to give up therapy and writing, but rather drove her to continue to seek out a suitable treatment and to make the most of her limited time by continuing to write. In addition to her personal battle with TB, Mansfield’s career as a writer spanned the First World War and the Spanish flu.110 A century later, as the Russia-Ukraine War endures and the COVID-19 pandemic drags on, that era is far less distant than it might otherwise seem. Perhaps Mansfield’s determined persistence in writing at such a time, as well as her active attitude towards seeking a type of treatment that would suit her particular needs, can inspire us today to transform the restlessness caused by uncertainty into the motivation and courage to ‘really live’.

Acknowledgement I would like to express my thanks to Dr Gerri Kimber, Dr Aimée Gasston and the judging panel for the 2022 Katherine Mansfield Society Essay Prize for their insightful comments on my essay. The Chinese version of this essay was published in a collection of essays on medical humanities (in Chinese) entitled Zai tan wen xue yu yi xue (Revisiting Literature and Medicine) in Taiwan in May 2023.111 I thank the editor of this collection of essays, Professor Pin-chia Feng, for granting me permission to submit a revised English version of this essay to the 2022 Katherine Mansfield Society Essay Prize. Notes 1. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors (New York: Picador, 1990), p. 3. 2. Sontag, p. 5. 3. Sontag, p. 13. 4. Sontag, p. 20. 5. Sontag, p. 20. 6. Sontag, p. 22. 7. Sontag, pp. 28–9. 8. Sontag, p. 32. 9. Sontag, pp. 46–7. 10. Quoted in Sontag, p. 47; original emphases. 11. Quoted in Sontag, p. 47. 12. Sontag, p. 18. 13. Sontag, pp. 63–4.

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Wen-Shan Shieh 14. Clark Lawlor, Consumption and Literature: The Making of the Romantic Disease (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 3. 15. Katherine Byrne, Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 7. 16. Lawlor, pp. 186–7. 17. Lawlor, p. 187. 18. Byrne, p. 178. 19. Byrne, p. 210. 20. CW2, p. 294. 21. CW2, p. 206. 22. Mary Burgan, Illness, Gender, and Writing: The Case of Katherine Mansfield (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), p. xvi. TB was considered a terminal disease until the first antibiotic, streptomycin, was discovered in 1944 (Lawlor, p. 187). 23. Sontag, p. 13. 24. Burgan, p. xv. 25. Byrne, p. 32. 26. CW4, p. 241; original emphases. 27. Sontag, p. 45. 28. All dictionary definitions in this essay are from the Oxford English Dictionary (hereafter OED), 2nd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), in its latest online version (at http://www.oed.com). 29. See Angela Smith’s introduction to Katherine Mansfield, Selected Stories, ed. by Angela Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. ix–xxxii (p. ix). 30. Jeffrey Meyers, Katherine Mansfield: A Biography (New York: New Directions, 1978), p. 154. 31. Sontag, p. 47. 32. Quoted in Meyers, p. 256. 33. See Murry’s introduction to Journal of Katherine Mansfield, ed. by John Middleton Murry (London: Constable, 1929), pp. vii–xvii (p. xv); original emphasis. 34. See Janka Kascakova’s review in SKASE Journal of Literary Studies, 1: 1 (2009), pp. 86–91 (p. 86). 35. Sontag, p. 16. 36. Quoted in Sontag, p. 16. 37. Quoted in Sontag, p. 47. 38. Letters 1, p. 356. 39. Letters 2, p. 11. 40. CL1, p. 191. 41. Letters 2, p. 22; original emphasis. 42. Letters 2, p. 79. 43. CL1, p. 83. 44. CL2, p. 240. 45. Quoted in Burgan, p. 155. 46. For more on Mansfield’s association with the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, see Gerri Kimber, ‘“A child of the sun”: Katherine Mansfield, Orientalism and Gurdjieff’, in Galya Diment, Gerri Kimber and Todd Martin, eds, Katherine Mansfield and Russia (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), pp. 41–65 (p. 52). 47. Burgan, p. 155.

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Restlessness Transformed: Revisiting the Metaphor of Tuberculosis 48. Cristina Vilaplana, ‘A Literary Approach to Tuberculosis: Lessons Learned from Anton Chekhov, Franz Kafka, and Katherine Mansfield’, International Journal of Infectious Diseases, 56 (2017), pp. 283–5 (p. 284). 49. Conversion made by Vilaplana, p. 284, using the online Historical UK Inflation Rates and Price Conversion Calculator, [accessed 3 August 2022]. 50. Vilaplana, p. 284. 51. See Vincent O’Sullivan’s introduction to Katherine Mansfield, Selected Letters, ed. by Vincent O’Sullivan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. vii–xiii (p. ix). 52. Burgan, pp. xiv–xvi. 53. Letters 5, p. 39. 54. CL1, p. 48. 55. CL1, p. 63. 56. CL1, p. 63. 57. Letters 5, p. 296; original emphasis. 58. Quoted in Kimber, p. 58. 59. In her letters Mansfield does not mention exactly what she did while in the garden, but according to Meyers (p. 248), she studied flower arranging while at the Institute, so it would be reasonable to surmise that she spent some time in the garden pruning the flowers. 60. Letters 5, p. 307. 61. Letters 5, p. 309. 62. Letters 5, p. 322. Meyers (p. 245) conjectures that this ‘the very ancient Oriental dance’ is the Sufi whirling dance learned by Gurdjieff in Turkey. 63. For more on hospice and palliative care, see Stephen R. Connor, Hospice and Palliative Care: The Essential Guide (New York: Routledge, 2017). 64. Jen-Kuei Peng, ‘An ning liao hu shi yi zhong ji zhi liao’ (Hospice and Palliative Care is a Kind of Active Treatment), Kang jian za zhi (Common Health Magazine) (6 May 2014), [accessed 3 August 2022]; my translation. 65. Letters 5, pp. 309, 346. 66. Letters 2, p. 56. 67. Burgan, p. 122. 68. Burgan, p. 154. 69. Letters 2, p. 230; original emphases. 70. CW4, p. 288. 71. Meyers, p. 179. 72. Letters 2, p. 79. 73. Quoted in Byrne, p. 32. 74. Letters 2, p. 83. 75. For more on the relationship between Baker and Mansfield, see Jessica Whyte, ‘In Sickness and in Health: Murry, the Mountain and the Duty of Care’, Tinakori: Critical Journal of the Katherine Mansfield Society, 5 (2021), pp. 6–18. 76. CL1, p. 155. 77. Lawlor, p. 187. 78. Quoted in Lawlor, p. 188. 79. Sontag, p. 32. 80. CW4, p. 446.

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Wen-Shan Shieh 81. Ann Jurecic, Illness as Narrative (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), p. 4. 82. Letters 2, p. 230. 83. CW4, p. 405. 84. John Keats, Bright Star: The Complete Poems and Selected Letters of John Keats (London: Vintage Books, 2009), p. 301. 85. CW4, p. 434. 86. Galya Diment, ‘Post Diagnosis: Bashkirtseff, Chekhov and Gorky through Mansfield’s Prism of Tuberculosis’, in Diment et al., eds, Katherine Mansfield and Russia, pp. 24–40 (p. 33). 87. Diment, p. 28. 88. Sontag, p. 31. 89. Byrne, p. 177. 90. Byrne, p. 178. 91. Letters 2, p. 292. 92. Sontag, p. 28. 93. CW4, p. 288; original emphases. 94. CL2, p. 68. 95. Sontag, p. 48. 96. Sontag, p. 28. 97. Letters 2, p. 187. 98. CW4, p. 315. 99. Quoted in Meyers, p. 180. 100. CL1, p. 101. 101. Quoted in Whyte, p. 9. 102. Burgan, p. 172. 103. CW4, p. 243. 104. CW4, pp. 434–5; original emphasis. 105. Meyers, p. 246. 106. Letters 5, p. 330. 107. Meyers, p. 251. 108. CL2, p. 108. 109. The longest period Mansfield and Murry lived together was from the end of August 1918, when they moved into their first house in Hampstead, to 11 September 1919, when she went to Switzerland to convalesce for about a year. However, during this same period she wrote very little; apart from several reviews of novels for the literary journal Athenaeum edited by Murry, Mansfield only wrote a few minor short stories, including ‘A Suburban Fairy Tale’, ‘See Saw’ and ‘This Flower’. Antony Alpers, The Life of Katherine Mansfield (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), pp. 412–13; Meyers, pp. 182–3. 110. For more on the Spanish Flu and its impact on England and Ireland, see Patricia Marsh, The Spanish Flu in Ireland: A Socio-Economic Shock to Ireland, 1918–1919 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). 111. Wen-Shan Shieh, ‘Zhuan hua xie zuo yu zhi liao de zao dong bu an: Zai tan man shu fei er ri ji yu shu xin zhong fei jie he de yin yu’ (Restlessness Transformed: Revisiting the Metaphor of Tuberculosis in Katherine Mansfield’s Notebooks and Letters), Zai tan wen xue yu yi xue (Revisiting Literature and Medicine), ed. by Pin-chia Feng (Taipei: Bookman, 2023), pp. 171–201.

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POETRY

Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Praeludium Chopins’ Martin Griffiths

Introduction: ‘Vignette: I Look Out Through the Window’ 1 “‘If I were outside the window and looked in and saw myself I really would be rather struck,” she thought. Still more softly she played the accompaniment [on the guitar] not singing now but listening.’ ‘Prelude’ (1917)2

The apparently dreary and clichéd nature of the song that Beryl sings in the quotation above is illusory; it is a text that, for Katherine Mansfield, has a disguised but defined personal association, that is, to a specific Russian folk song arranged for guitar and voice.3 Mansfield was an amateur guitarist and an aspiring vocalist so that the inclusion of this reference in ‘Prelude’ gives it even more potency for any biographer of Mansfield or scholars examining that story.4 The specificity of musical reference in the scene is prefigured several times in Mansfield’s oeuvre, including ‘The Story of Pearl Button’ (1907), a piece about the humiliation of Pearl’s first day at school. In this text, the class sing-along ditty ‘To the Woods’ – from the German folk song ‘Gruss Dem Walde’ – is interrupted by the movement of the swinging scythe so reminiscent of Mr Dyer’s own ‘supplejack whipping’.5 There are multiple other examples in her fictional work for which the disguised precision of the musical reference fulfils Mansfield’s desire to write something ‘a little sonoro’.6 Although the term ‘vignette’ implies prose, Mansfield uses the word for both poetry and fiction. An example of the latter, ‘Vignette: I Look Out Through the Window’, which was written while the author’s lover Garnet Trowell was on tour with the Moody Manners Opera Company, represents her acute sensitivity to the synaesthetic and symbolic potentials of music.7 Integral to the mood of the text is the presence of the 143

Martin Griffiths window, ‘that most liminal of all spaces’, that represents the author’s sense of aloneness and through which she sees the trees as frail human souls trembling with fear.8 Despite the rhododendron not flowering – it is winter after all – somehow the tree reaches to the sun, and to music, for comfort and protection. The evergreen plant, here representative of Mansfield herself, contains the promise of renewal and life and contrasts with the deciduous pines or ‘crucified trees’ which are barren of foliage and frightening. The manuscript, which is uncharacteristically tidy and clearly indicated for layout and punctuation, appears to have been prepared as a  final, definitive version ready for publication. However, a different  version was almost certainly given to Garnet Trowell and published – six months after it was written – in Cremona, in July 1909. In  this  version titled ‘Praeludium Chopins. (To. T. C.)’, the trees are both ‘bare’ and ‘lone’, giving them an exceptionally bleak countenance:9 Praeludium Chopins. (To T. C.) I look out through the window . . . a rhododendron bush sways restlessly, mysteriously, to and fro. The lone trees stand crucified against an opalescent sky. In the next room someone is playing the piano. The sun shines whitely – touches the rhododendron leaves with soft colour. To and fro the branches sway, stretching upwards and outwards so mysteriously as though they moved in a dream. Through the open window the cold air, blowing in, stirs the lace curtains languidly. . . . What is being played in the next room? Does the music float out of the window to the garden? Does the plant hear it, and answer to the sound? The music, too, is strangely restless – it is seeking something – . . . perhaps this mystic green plant so faintly touched with sun colour. I dream . . . And there is no plant, no garden — there is only a dark, mysterious seeking, to and fro – a stretching upwards and outwards — a dream-like movement. What is it? I look out into the garden at the bare trees crucified against the opalescent sky. The sun is smothered under the white wing of a cloud . . . In the shadowed garden the plant is trembling . . . K. Mansfield, 1909.

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Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Praeludium Chopins’ A comparison of the two versions – including the title and dedication ‘To T. C.’ (which will be discussed later), and the adjective ‘lone’ – reveal that the changes are often small but significant. Twice in the revised text punctuation is altered or removed to create flow: in the first line an ellipsis replaces a full stop, and a semi-colon is removed altogether. Some words are altered or removed – ‘Does the music float through this room, and [text removed by Mansfield] out of the window to the garden?’ – such that removal of the authorial direction ‘this room’ [my italics] anticipates practices applied to ‘The Aloe’. A further comparison of the texts shows several subtle changes, of which two pertain directly to music: Manuscript [Vignette] I dream . . . And there is no plant, no music — only a restless, mysterious seeking – a stretching upwards and outwards — a dream-like movement.

Published revision I dream . . . And there is no plant, no garden — there is only a dark, mysterious seeking, [to and fro] – a stretching upwards and outwards — a dream-like movement.

The addition of the ‘to and fro’ motif – it appears only twice in the original – and the removal of the phrase no music, ensures that the sense of musical ostinato is sustained. A further change – the description of the curtains as languid and lacy rather that heavy and folded – suggests movement: as the garden disappears the sensory becomes exclusively auditory, while the mysterious seeking is both ‘dark’ and ‘restless’. As the scene transforms into a dream the garden disappears and the ‘seeking’ music signals a kind of ‘stretching upward’. The deliberate addition of an indentation and a new line (space) before the final stanza – a change that is absent in the earlier version of the text – acts as a kind of scene change before we return from the dreamworld to our position at the window. Thus, the revision can be seen as an opportunity to improve the text as well as to make it more relevant to a music journal. Although there are no drafts in any notebooks, clues to the revision can be found in earlier writings. In Mansfield’s poem ‘I Could Find No Rest’ (1909) branches stretch ‘on tiptoe’ up to the light as the curtains ‘swing and tremble’.10 Likewise the ‘languid’ movement of the curtains (or blinds), ‘to and fro’, appears as a trope in the story ‘Silhouettes’ (1907) and in a 1907 notebook entry.11 Furthermore, ‘Vignette: Summer in Winter’ – which is on the other side of the page in the same 1907 notebook entry, and is punctuated exclusively by dashes (there are no recognisable commas or full stops) – appears as ‘stream-of-consciousness’ prose, or a prose-poem: ‘The skeleton trees 145

Martin Griffiths rattled together – The wind had torn a rose bush from the ground – it sprawled across the path, ugly and thorn-encrusted – Heavily, drearily fell the winter rain upon the dead garden – Upon the skeleton trees – I turned from the window and in the warm firelit room – With almost a noble defiance in her voice – Carlotta at the piano sang passionately of love.’12 Both vignettes contain the musical imagery but relinquish rhyming couplets: in ‘Praeludium Chopins’ the three questions remains unanswered musically and rhetorically. Further, Mansfield’s process of revision, which Sydney Janet Kaplan describes as the ‘continuing attempt to eliminate the personal intrusion’ is consistent with ‘Praeludium Chopins’ and ‘Vignette: Summer in Winter’: the pianist is no longer named and the authorial voice –indicated by the word ‘I’, which appears in both vignettes – is reduced, though not eliminated altogether.13 The piano and piano playing were passions for Mansfield – at least until she felt compelled to sell her piano in 1912 – and the dedication ‘T.  C.’ almost certainly refers to Teresa Carreño, the Venezuelan-American virtuoso pianist who specialised in the interpretation of Frédéric Chopin (Carreño was a student of George Matthias who in turn was a student of Chopin). Mansfield first met Carreño – who  spent her schooling and childhood in New York City – in Wellington, New Zealand, in July 1907.14 After travelling to London they met again several times, Mansfield even spending an afternoon at the pianist’s flat, smoking Russian cigarettes. The fiftieth  anniversary of the  death of Chopin had been recently celebrated and it is  likely that  the Preludes Op. 28 – one of which Carreño requested to be played at her own funeral – were performed by  the  virtuoso pianist and heard by Mansfield at this time.15 Most significantly, the posthumously nicknamed the ‘Raindrop’ Prelude, Op.  28, No. 15  – which repeats the note D flat (C sharp) almost continuously – was performed by Carreño in both Wellington and London at this time.16 Carreño explains the genesis of the ‘Raindrop’ Prelude: Of course some compositions are undoubtedly tone-pictures, and were intended as such. Among these I include Chopin’s A-flat Polonaise, and  his prelude, known as the ‘Raindrop’ [which] was composed when  he  was staying in Majorca with Georges Sand. He was beginning  to  think that he was losing her love, and sat down to the piano  while  she was  out  marketing. They were living in an old ruined cloister, and Chopin imagined he saw the monks go round the square in procession  all the time the rain was dripping through the roof.17

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Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Praeludium Chopins’ Although there is no imagery of rain in ‘Vignette: I Look Out Through the Window’, an associated monotony seems implied by eight dots in the margin of the manuscript, three of which are retained in ‘Praeludium Chopins’. These markings, which are clearly not doodles, seem to be a shorthand indication, more than just an indent, perhaps even a syllabic ‘map’ that functions like the three dots beneath the word ‘shivering’ in the manuscript of the contemporaneous ‘October to V. M. B.’18 However, the subsequent question in the published version – ‘What is being played in the next room?’ – suggests a rhetorical function. We know what is playing in the other room as we can hear it. Thus, they may be interpreted as a visual representation of the piano sounds, that is, the repeated D flat (C sharp). A clue to the auditory nature of ‘Praeludium Chopins’ is found in Mansfield’s contemporaneous poem ‘In the Church’ in which the ­punctuation – a series of dashes after the words ‘to shut her eyes’  – indicates silence and can, perhaps, be interpreted as a visual representation of unseeing eyes. Mansfield took an auditory and musical view of the poem herself: ‘Can’t you imagine it. For instance that one “In the Church” almost recitative at the beginning with a strange organ like passage.’19 Sound is evoked by the ivy – summoning the widowed bride outside to her husband’s grave – beating on the stained glass window: ‘[she] ever hears it tapping’.20 Likewise, the quotation marks surrounding the central stanza – the speech of the ivy tree – demands an auditory interpretation. Elsewhere the sensory can be so heightened in Mansfield’s prose that she begins to interpret the inaudible as music: ‘the dew as well as the rain has a sound for [Chopin]’.21

Chopin’s ‘24 Preludes’ (24 Praeludien) Despite Chopin’s long association with France (he lived most of his life in Paris), the Latin variant spelling ‘P-r-ae-l-u-d-i-e-n’ – preferred in Germany and Eastern Europe – was adopted for select editions of the Polish composer’s ‘Preludes’. Moreover, it was used by Arnold Trowell for his arrangement of Domenico Scarlatti’s Keyboard Sonata in B minor K. 377 (c. 1926), his own ‘Praeludium’ for unaccompanied violin (c. 1950) and in Hugo Becker’s edition of Bach’s cello suites (c. 1911). It is worth noting that the six Bach suites are in themselves a set of six movements that evolve through a series of keys – or tonal ­centres – s­ ometimes (for instance in the minuets) switching between the major and minor. Numerically, then, we can see a relationship between the twelve notes of the chromatic musical scale and with Chopin’s ‘24 Preludes’ and Bach’s ‘48 Preludes & Fugues’. Most importantly Bach’s preludes are on a large 147

Martin Griffiths scale and are invariably paired with a fugue. As  such, we may regard ‘Praeludium Chopins’ as a Chopin-style Prelude – i.e., stand-alone – and ‘Prelude’ the story as a Bach-style work – i.e., paired with other stories of the Burnell family. An overlay of the twelve chapters of Mansfield’s ‘Prelude’– or thirteen sections if we treat Beryl’s guitar scene as a separate chapter – with Chopin’s Preludes Opus 28, reveals a matching character in the text.22 Broadly speaking the keys, or tonalities, match the colour of the words, and the alignment of the ‘Raindrop’ Prelude with Chapter Seven (the guitar-playing Beryl) is appropriate: such a monumental piece (by far the largest and most intense of Opus 28) could only be assigned to Beryl, a central character in the story and arguably the one who represents Mansfield herself. In addition, the duality of the major and minor in the ‘Raindrop’ prelude – a tonic minor relationship which is clearly delineated by a key change from D flat to C sharp – echoes the structure of ‘Prelude’: the thematic context pairs opposites of male and female; naivety and experience; desire and fear; life and death; freedom and restraint. Similarly, ‘At the Bay’ – the longest of the stories in The Garden Party collection – and ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ – also have twelve or thirteen sections and associated musical connotations. One of Chopin’s most important legacies was the adoption and indication – in a musical score – of tempo rubato, that is, the slowing down or speeding up such that the larger units of time are unaltered in a musical performance.23 Carreño, who adopted this practice and was considered a leading exponent, may have inspired in Mansfield a literary application of a similar kind. One might even say the ‘Prelude method’, used and identified by Mansfield as the inventive process behind her story ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ is the outcome of this association.24 Either way, for Mansfield, aspects of Carreño’s and Chopin’s lives, both actual and legendary, and including the latter’s early death (he was five years older than her), would not have gone unnoted. If Chopin’s death provided some of the inspiration for the content of ‘Praeludium Chopins’, then another musician, the famous Austrianborn violinist Fritz Kreisler, may have had an influence on its title, in so far as the word ‘Praeludium’ had recently entered the public consciousness via his composition for violin and piano titled ‘Praeludium and Allegro’.25 According to her notebooks Mansfield attended a concert by Kreisler soon after arriving in London in 1908, possibly on a recommendation from Arnold Trowell – himself a prolific composer of preludes and arranger of the works of Chopin – who had heard Kreisler the previous year in Brussels.26 148

Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Praeludium Chopins’ Finally, if the title ‘Praeludium Chopins’ means a prelude by Chopin, as seems likely, rather than a prelude of Chopins (plural), then the lack of an apostrophe before the ‘s’ in ‘Chopins’ seems problematic (similarly, and by way of opposing longstanding convention, the inclusion of a full stop in the title). However, Mansfield is known to have serially neglected the apostrophe and the full stop, presumably because of writing in haste, so it is, perhaps, not an unexpected error.

The Prelude and Musical Form As I have mentioned, Mansfield’s prose is often equivalent to improvisation, a practice inbuilt into the art-music of the nineteenth century.  An early example is her unfinished novel Juliet (1906) which is musical (rather than simply about music): the fatal passion is presented in  an improvisatory manner, or as stream of consciousness, and is ‘heavy with auditory allusion’.27 More importantly her  short stories often develop in an improvisatory manner and, as the ‘outcome of the Prelude method [a text] just unfolds and opens’.28  To achieve this Mansfield adopts a ‘tuning’ up or ­warming-up of a mode (and mood) and in ‘Prelude’ she finds ‘perhaps the first of the most mature expressions of [this] unique style’.29 Mansfield herself explains: ‘In fact this whole process of becoming the duck [. . .] is so thrilling that I can hardly breathe, only to think about it. For although that is as far as most people can get, it is really only the ­“prelude.”’30 So the  experience, for the character, reader and writer alike, is dependent on a state of mind and emotion, prior to  the  event. For  W.  H. New, Mansfield’s writing shifts ‘the focus  [. . .] from some putative need to explain the present to an evocation of the character or condition of what it feels like, what it means, to experience the world prior to change’.31 As New goes on to explain, the word prelude is etymologically linked to the Latin prae ludere (to play before) and that any musical and leisurely associations are intended and were known by the writer. For Mansfield the opening word, sentence, story or chapter were the most important of all: ‘I am often given away in the first sentence. I seem almost to stand or fall by it. It is to me what the first phrase of the song is to the singer.’32 This reference to ­singing – in Mansfield’s review of Mill of the Gods – though metaphorical (it is the absence of the poetic that she is lamenting), is still relevant here: she often adopts the function of the song, that is, the reflection on a state of being or an emotion, but within the framework of an open-ended, unstructured recitative or prelude. 149

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Caesar and The Cremona The question of why ‘Praeludium Chopins’ eluded scholars for more than 100 years is hard to answer. Certainly the magazine is obscure and as rare today as it was in 1909. But was the poem supressed by Mansfield and by her family in Wellington? My answer is a tentative yes, given the persona non grata that Kathleen Beauchamp was in July 1909, a married and possibly adulterous pregnant woman only months away from being excluded from her mother’s will. As potential evidence I would present a report of a letter from Thomas Trowell published in the Dominion on 18 September 1909, one which refers to an interview with violinist Jan Kubelik in the same issue of the Cremona magazine as the one which contains Mansfield’s poem.33 The magazine – with the relevant text consecutive and adjacent to the poem such that it could not have gone unnoticed by Thomas Trowell – was sent by the latter to the music editor of the Dominion. Although the interview lacks any obvious interest for New Zealand readers – it promotes the notion of an ‘English’ school of composition – it is the entire focus of the newspaper article. Given Mansfield’s connection to New Zealand and Arnold Trowell – who is dubiously cited as the subject of Kubelik’s manifesto on English music – as well as her well-established publishing record with the Dominion, the absence of a reference to ‘Praeludium Chopins’ is startling. In 2020 I speculated that a fabricated news story – in the form of an article in the March 1907 edition of Cremona magazine titled ‘Children of the Sun God’ – was written by both the Trowells and Mansfield in collaboration.34 Since then, I have discovered that Mansfield had already contributed at least one letter to a contemporary London music magazine and that an extended version of the story had first appeared in Birmingham – the ‘home’ city of the Trowell family – a month earlier.35 Latterly, two concert reviews by ‘Caesar’ – the nickname Mansfield gave to Arnold Trowell that appeared briefly in her unfinished novel Juliet – appeared in the Cremona.36 The first review, published in June 1909, concerns a performance of Max Reger’s music (featuring the composer himself at the piano) on 10 May 1909.37 Mansfield was still in London on the date of the Reger performance and may have attended with Arnold and Garnet Trowell. The review, which includes a direct attack on the Bavarian’s compositions (his songs are described as ‘positively hideous’ and his string quartet as ‘dreadful’), was probably penned by Arnold Trowell who had documented distaste for Reger’s music.38 However, the style is not inconsistent with pastiches written by Mansfield. Further, the multiple use 150

Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Praeludium Chopins’ of the phrase ‘might-have-been’ – which occurs at least thirty-eight times in Mansfield’s notebooks, letters and stories – as well as the use of the word ‘positively’ as an adverb to qualify a negative act, emotion or other sensation (Mansfield uses the word ‘positively’ in this way at least a dozen times in her short stories), support this interpretation. The dropping of the apostrophe in the review – ‘One must admire the composers [sic] technical ability in this work’ – is consistent with the lazy punctuation of some early Mansfield texts. The second review by ‘Caesar’ in the Cremona concerns a concert at Queen’s Hall, London, on 17 June 1909.39 Here the writer adopts the voice of the bemused parochial advocate: why is native music overlooked in favour of the foreign? This time there is no hint of the negative flavour of the previous review. Importantly, Mansfield could not have attended the concert – she was in Bad Wörishofen, Germany. However, the printing of ‘I Looked Out Through the Window’ – retitled ‘Praeludium Chopins’ – by ‘K. Mansfield’, only a few pages earlier in the same edition of the Cremona, suggests that the review and the creative prose were sent together by the Trowell twins to the magazine.40 After all, Arnold had a knack of getting published: by the end of 1907 his works for cello and piano, or violin and piano had been printed and published in Belgium, Germany and England.41

Conclusion By repurposing ‘Vignette: I Look Out Through the Window’ as a prosepoem at this early stage of her career Mansfield sets a precedent for her use of free verse and repetition in poems submitted to, or published in, the New Age and Rhythm magazines. Although the cycle of twenty-eight poems known as ‘The Earth Child’ – for which non-metrical rhythms ‘complement the poem’s subject, romantic disappointment’42 – were rejected by the former magazine, they contain innovative examples of musical repetition: in ‘XXIV’ a kind of variation or development schematic emerges as the grandmother’s ‘folded’ hands become ‘folded’ thoughts and in turn ‘enfolded’ kisses.43 All the poems are substantial works, whereby a directness and simplicity supplants the need for eloquence and ‘poetic’ rhyming. Aspects of the rhythm of ‘Praeludium Chopins’ are notable: irregular phrase lengths – all but two of the fourteen sentences have an odd number of syllables – create a sense of ‘trembling’ and anxiety. Several phrases adopt adjuncts that undermine any regular pulse: ‘I look out through the window’ is revised to read ‘I look out into the garden’ and precedes the sentence ‘Does the music float out of the 151

Martin Griffiths window to the garden?’ Likewise, irregular meter is also a feature of ‘The Story of Pearl Button’, as passages of unmeasured prose contrast with the regularity of the words from the song ‘O Forest Green and Fair’ (forming an iambic trimeter).44 In this latter case a combination of rhyming verse, free verse and prose ensures that the boundaries of poetry, narrative, sound (singing) and spoken text are blurred. For Arthur Symons and other theorists, Wagner’s music is the best starting point for examining music’s relationship to speech and recitation. However, Johann Mattheson – writing more than 100 years before Wagner wrote his first opera – provides the best description of music’s link to the functions of punctuation: ‘Comma sustinet, the comma makes a little stop; Colon suspendit, that colon procrastinates longer; Periodus deponit, the movement calls for rest.’45 Mattheson makes a direct connection between melody, dance and literary punctuation: ‘If a melody of a minuet is only sixteen measures [bars] long [. . .], then it will have at least some commas, a semicolon, a few colons, and a few periods in its make-up. Many a person would scarcely think that; yet it is true.’46 Thus, by Mattheson’s analysis, the prelude – as a kind of embodiment of human speech – precedes and introduces the dances that follow, and tonal centre, or key, indicates – like tone in language – the subsequent mood. The latter is only identified subconsciously by the listener: Mansfield even goes as far as to say ‘Tone should be my secret – each word a variety of tone.’47 Consciously, then, Mansfield places the first stories in her collections Bliss and Other Stories and The Garden Party and Other Stories – ‘Prelude’ and ‘At the Bay’, respectively – as actual preludes to the other stories. As a culmination of these experiments ‘Praeludium Chopins’ hints at the possibility that Mansfield considered prose and poetry interchangeable, such that formal aspect of scale, genre or style are secondary to moments of intensity. Finally, Mansfield’s concern for directness in these ‘vignettes’ anticipates later explorations in a larger format. So the story ‘Prelude’ – representative of ‘a single state of emotion or a single charged moment in time’ – is, for our purposes, the answer to the ‘riddle’ posed by The Mill of the Gods.48 Further, the aloe, as the central symbol in ‘Prelude’ is, like the dead rosebush in ‘Vignette: Summer in Winter’, thorn-encrusted and barren; like the rhododendron in ‘Praeludium Chopins’, unable to bloom. Yet the notions of renewal, rebirth, even the existence of an afterlife – which tentatively surface in ‘Praeludium Chopins’ – are still present in ‘Prelude’; this, despite the concurrent themes of domestic violence and patriarchal entrapment. 152

Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Praeludium Chopins’

Postlude That Mansfield’s last years of life were fraught with illness seems ironic given that her childhood memories emerged – for instance, in ‘Prelude’ and ‘At the Bay’ – during this time. Already she was, in early June 1918 (when she had already started writing the latter story, and completed the former), lonely and in a tubercular state in a hotel in Looe, Cornwall, yearning for music as a means of salvation: ‘To have a ’cello again. That I must try.’49 The standalone publication of Prelude by the Woolfs’s Hogarth Press in 1918 was not widely reviewed and did not sell well. Nevertheless, it became one of her most important works, marking a momentous shift in her career and legacy as a writer. In fact, the signs were already emerging early in Mansfield’s career – as early as 1909 when ‘Praeludium Chopins’ was published. The central image of the poem, the rhododendron – the same plant that is referred to in the story ‘In the Botanical Gardens’ (1907) – seems to represent the displaced New Zealander writer’s isolation.50 Like the exotic plant, Mansfield belongs to neither London nor Wellington. Despite, or because of, her state of mind when the poem was revised and ­published – she was pregnant with Garnet Trowell’s child – the poem connects music with loneliness and vulnerability. Similarly it marks, at least for the purposes of this essay, the beginning of Mansfield’s adult life and thus the beginning of her illness. References to crucifixion, in both the original and final draft of ‘Praeludium Chopins’, return at regular intervals in other writing and pre-empt this state of mind. Furthermore, corrections and changes to the ‘draft’ of the poem – the existence of which may challenge the view that Mansfield wrote much of her verse ‘with no desire to revise’51 – are, if not wide-ranging, illustrative of an interdisciplinary creative process. The author, like the musician, allows herself and her audience or reader time to adjust to the acoustic of the room, the language of time and place, and the peculiarities of the instrument (be it a physical object or a voice, a text or a mode of thought, and whether or not communicated via conventions of spoken or written language). For practical purposes this allows Mansfield to connect seemingly unrelated passages, or episodes, as if in a musical setting, and traverse distinctions of genre with ease. Notes   1. CW1, p. 140.   2. CW2, p. 77.  3. Nature has gone to her rest, love / See, we are alone / Give me your hand to press. Love / Lightly within my own – words from a ‘Gipsy-Song’ written (or translated) by Fred

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Martin Griffiths Wishaw. The fourth verse begins: List to my soft balaleika [sic], sobbing and laughing too. The balaleika (or balalaika) is a Russian plucked instrument of the guitar family. See Album of Russian Songs with Guitar Accompaniment, ed. F. de Lisle Allen (London: Stanley Lucas Weber, Pitt, & Hatzfeld Ltd, 1893).   4. Nicola Saker, The Performative Katherine Mansfield (dissertation, Victoria University of Wellington, 2017), p. 15.   5. CW1, pp. 91–3.   6. CW4, p. 112.   7. CW1, p. 140.   8. Gerri Kimber, Katherine Mansfield: The Early Years (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), p. 128.   9. See the Cremona (London: Sanctuary Press), 3: 32 (July 1909), p. 78. The New Age and the Cremona were both in Cursitor Street, Chancery Lane, London. 10. CW3, pp. 36–7. 11. In ‘Silhouettes’ the window blinds move ‘languidly, to and fro’ and the Laurestinus bush moves ‘languidly, gently, backwards and forwards’ in front of a ‘ghost-like’ bed. See also ‘Vignette’ (CW4, p. 58). 12. CW1, pp. 66–7. 13. Sydney Janet Kaplan, Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 113. The title ‘Praeludium Chopins’ refers to the short story ‘Prelyudiya Shopena’ by Lev Lvovich Tolstoy (1869–1945). 14. Kathleen Jones, Katherine Mansfield: The Story-Teller (London: Penguin, 2010), p. 90. 15. Prelude (or Praeludium) Op. 28, No. 4 was played at Carreño’s funeral. 16. Performance in Wellington on 29 July. See The Evening Post Advertisement 27 July, p. 6 column 3. Note that the ‘Prelude’ is mistakenly listed here as Op. 23, No. 15 rather than Op. 28. There is no doubt that it is the same work. See ‘A Queen of the Piano: The Carreno Recital’ in The Poverty Bay Herald, 21 August 1907, p. 2. Carreño’s London performance, which included at least one work by Chopin, was at the Bechstein Hall, 3 October 1908. 17. See ‘The Ideal of Music: What Madame Carreno Says’, Gisborne Times, 19 August 1907, p. 4. 18. See ATL, MS-Papers-3988 Folder 11. 19. CL2, p. 693, Mansfield to Garnet Trowell, 29 October 1908. 20. CW3, p. 66. 21. Quoting Arthur Symons, Mansfield writes: ‘And that trilling of Chopin – the dew as well as the rain has a sound for him’ (CW4, p. 98). 22. Vincent O’Sullivan notes that Mansfield planned her story in thirteen, rather than twelve, sections. See Vincent O’Sullivan, ed., The Aloe with Prelude (Manchester: Carcanet, 1983), p. 163n10. 23. Sandra P. Rosenblum, ‘The Uses of Rubato in Music, Eighteenth to Twentieth Centuries’, Performance Practice Review, 7: 1, pp. 41–2. 24. ‘Prelude’, ‘At the Bay’ and ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ – the latter identified by Mansfield as an experiment in the ‘Prelude Method’ – all have twelve or thirteen chapters. See Letter to Richard Murry dated 1 January 1921. See CL2, pp. 340–1 (p. 341). Although the episodic and temporal progression of ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ and ‘At the Bay’ suggest a similar construction, it is only the latter story – as the first in the collection – and ‘Prelude’ from Bliss and Other Stories, that are true ‘preludes’. 25. Kreisler’s ‘Praeludium and Allegro (in the Style of Pugnani)’ remains to this day a

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Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Praeludium Chopins’ staple of the violin repertoire and had propelled the America-based ­violinist into the limelight immediately after it was debuted at the Queen’s Hall in London in 1905. 26. See CW4, p. 22. 27. Delia da Sousa Correa, ‘Katherine Mansfield and Music: Nineteenth-Century Echoes’, in Gerri Kimber and Janet Wilson, eds, Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary Volume of Essays (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) pp. 84–98 (p. 89). 28. See endnote 25. 29. Miao Miao, ‘Katherine Mansfield and the Artistic Synaesthesia: Weaving Colour, Rhythm and Mood’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Auckland, 2015), p. 139. 30. Miao, p. 175. See letter to Dorothy Brett: CL1, pp. 343–6. 31. W. H. New, Reading Mansfield and Metaphors of Form (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990), p. 147. 32. Katherine Mansfield, [review] The Mill of the Gods by Elizabeth Robins, in ‘Wanted a New World’, Athenaeum, 25 June 1920 (CW3, pp. 620–2 [p. 621]). See also Ailsa Cox, ‘Katherine Mansfield and the Short Story’, in Todd Martin, ed., The Bloomsbury Handbook to Katherine Mansfield (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), pp. 181–98 (p. 183). 33. [Music by ‘Treble Clef’]: ‘Kubelik on Trowell’, Dominion, 18 September 1909, p. 9. The supposed reference to Arnold Trowell in the article is highly tenuous. 34. Martin Griffiths, ‘A Mysterious Lost Story by Katherine Mansfield’, in Katherine Mansfield and Bliss and Other Stories, pp. 123–34 (p. 127). See ‘Children of the Sun God’, Cremona, 1: 4 (March 1907), pp. 29–40 (p. 37). 35. ‘Children of the Sun God’, Birmingham Gazette, Wednesday 20 February 1907, p. 4. See also Correspondence [letter by K. M. B.], Strad, 16: 190 (February 1906), pp. 316–17, and Martin Griffiths, ‘Katherine Mansfield: Musical Student’, in Alexander Turnbull Library Record, 2022, pp. 17–25. 36. CW1, p. 140. The manuscript of Juliet includes a deleted reference to Arnold Trowell’s concert reviewing: returning from a concert David (also called ‘Caesar’) is heard to say ‘I’ve got an infernal headache and have to write up my Mus[ic review]’. See ATL, Notebook I, qMS-1242 (pp. 87 and 87a). 37. ‘Caesar’, Cremona, 3: 31 (June 1909), pp. 75–6. 38. Arnold Trowell’s diary entry for 12 April 1956: ‘Heard Reger Cello Sonata (No. 1) – rather dull stuff.’ From the private collection of Oliver Trowell, Brabourne, Kent. 39. ‘A Mass of Life’, Frederick Delius, by ‘Caesar’, Cremona, 3: 32 (July 1909), pp. 90–1. 40. K. Mansfield, ‘Praeludium Chopins.’, Cremona, 3: 32 (July 1909), pp. 77–92 (p. 78). 41. Arnold Trowell Lamento, Op. 37 was published by Maison Beethoven-Georges Oertel in Brussels in April 1907, and Reverie du Soir in London by Laudy and Co. See Le Guide Musical, 7 April 1907, p. 288. 42. Richard Cappuccio, ‘“His broad hat shading his face”: Tracing Rupert Brooke in the Writing of Katherine Mansfield’, Dymock Poets and Friends, 20 (2021), pp. 38–46 (p. 41). 43. CP, pp. 122–3. 44. Repetitions not only frame the story but influence the nature of the prose connecting the repetitions (refrains). 45. Johann Mattheson, Der Vollkommene Capellmeister (Hamburg, 1739), p. 184. 46. Mattheson, p. 224. 47. CL2, p. 696. 48. See footnote 30. Anna Jackson suggests that ‘[poetry] is more a mode of reading

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Martin Griffiths than a genre of writing [and] is often about a single state of emotion or a single charged moment in time’. Anna Jackson interviewed by Mark Broatch, ‘Inhabiting a Moment’, NZ Listener, 19 March 2022, p. 50. 49. CW4, p. 251. For MS see ATL, Notebook 11, qMS-1258. 50. CW1, pp. 84–6. 51. Vincent O’Sullivan, in Poems of Katherine Mansfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. ix.

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‘At the Bay’ Montaigne thought we were going to bless the future        but it was the past she wanted to bless –             the mother surprised by love for her unintended baby,     the Pa-man’s pain and self-regard and bluster, the promise the grandmother knitting could not make,      the hollow voice of the uncle seeing himself           as an insect trapped in a room of inkpots and wire blinds, and the young auntie’s moonlit vision on the veranda                 and over the lawn to the dark pit under the fuchsia that was life – or was it death? C. K. STEAD

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‘Waiting for Snow’ Not a whisper of wind in the pines,   Not a cry from a bird;   The stillness is stirred By no fluttering feather of snow. From the blackening seed-pods the down,   Nor living nor dead,   Is hung by a thread While it waits for the severing blow Not a cloud in the sullen sky,   No warmth in the air,   But a chill, blank stare From the colourless eye of the sun. From the jungle of yellowing grass   A grasshopper crawls   On to a stone, and falls Silent, unmoving as one Passing to death in a dream   At the end of a world:   His red wings are furled For ever, his singing is done. JOHN MIDDLETON MURRY (October 1921)

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‘Waiting for Snow’ Note: By October 1921 when this poem was written, both Mansfield and Murry were living at the Chalet des Sapins in Montana, Switzerland, not far from the much grander Chalet Soleil of Mansfield’s cousin Elizabeth von Arnim. They had moved into the Chalet des Sapins at the end of June 1921 and would stay there until the end of January 1922. Murry was happy in Montana and relished both the outdoor life and the proximity to von Arnim, her luxurious chalet, and her coterie of literary visitors. Mansfield remained more or less bedridden, but the enforced solitude, together with one of the couple’s rare periods of domestic harmony, fostered one of the most creative periods of her writing life. Murry’s poem was sent to an unknown recipient. The brief accompanying letter, dated 17 January 1922, written on Chalet des Sapins headed notepaper, and signed John Middleton Murry, reads as follows: ‘Dear Sir, / Here is a copy of some unpublished verses I have lately written. I must ask you not to publish them.’ Any other poems sent in the letter are now mislaid. Murry’s poem evokes the Swiss landscape surrounding the Chalet des Sapins, and the onset of winter. The poem is reproduced with the kind permission of Bernard Bosque, together with the Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of John Middleton Murry. Gerri Kimber

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John Middleton Murry’s Unfinished Second Volume of Autobiography Charles Ferrall

John Middleton Murry’s writing is always confessional; his biographer F. A. Lea observed that ‘in the case of Murry, the distinction between “public” and “private” is impossible to maintain’.1 Murry published an autobiography in 1935, Between Two Worlds, which finishes at the Armistice, nearly four years before the death of Katherine Mansfield. Between Two Worlds has the postscript: ‘(Here ends the first part of this narrative. Whether the second part will be written depends on many things. I can only say that it is my desire and hope to write it.)’.2 In 1947 he began the next part but never completed it. Murry’s son, John Middleton Murry Jr (from his second wife, Violet le Maistre, also known as Colin), attached the following to a handwritten version of the second part of the autobiography which is now in the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington: The following substantial extract from an uncompleted sequel to my father’s autobiography ‘Between Two Worlds’ was written in 1947. It covers the years of Katherine Mansfield’s death in 1923, my father’s second marriage to Violet le Maistre (1924) and the discovery that she too had contracted [pulmonary] T.B. It was also the period during which my father founded ‘The Adelphi’ magazine (1923) and gave The Clark lectures (1924) – subsequently published [in book form] as ‘Keats and Shakespeare’ (1925).3

Since Colin Murry describes it as an ‘extract’, he may have been aware of a longer version. In the Turnbull there is also a much longer, typewritten MS which reproduces but for a few very minor corrections this ‘extract’. Much like a journal or diary entry, the beginning of this version is headed ‘Nov. 20, 1947’.4 This longer version has continuous pagination and ‘1953’ is typed in the margin of its last section which 163

Charles Ferrall deals with events in Murry’s life after 1947. Lea quotes extensively from this first section of the autobiography as well as the ‘extract’ that follows. However, Lea makes no reference to the last, post-1947 section, which raises the possibility that there was a third version of the autobiography which concluded in 1947. Only the ‘extract’, or at least the typewritten version of it, is reproduced here because that is the section concerned largely with Mansfield. Some of this section is quoted by Lea and by subsequent Mansfield biographers and critics but the latter make no reference to the original manuscript. The first section of the typewritten autobiography has four main themes: Murry’s ‘despair’ occasioned by the First World War; his marriage to Elizabeth ‘Betty’ Cockbayne after the death of Violet; his ambition to become an Anglican ‘priest’; and the health crisis which put an end to this ambition. The Violet/Katherine section reproduced below is the heart of the autobiography and is embedded in the comparison of the two world wars, his two contrasting marriages with Betty and Mary Gamble and his reading of Keats, first as a schoolboy and later in 1946 when he was preparing his own edition of the poet. The section concerning his life after 1947 is partly an elaboration of the equation he makes at the start of the autobiography, between his marriage with Mary and the influence of Keats in which he states that ‘I have the strong certainty that my philosophy and my life are one.’ In this section he also reprises his relationship with D. H. Lawrence and the latter’s marriage to Frieda, comparing it to his own marriages, firstly to Mansfield, which was of the ‘soul’ but not adequately consummated sexually, secondly to Violet, which was inadequate sexually and to some extent spiritually, and thirdly to Betty, which was entirely sexual.5 Murry’s ‘despair’ during and after the First World War is contrasted with his life during and just after the Second World War when he experienced ‘the fundamental simplicities of life – as farmer, as gardener, as thinker as writer, but above all as a man blissfully in love with the one woman’. During and after the First World War, he felt there was a ‘terrible failure in the spiritual leadership of democracy’, epitomised by Lloyd George’s betrayal of his ‘conscience’ after the Boer War, and Murry felt a ‘deathly sense of isolation’; during the Second World War he feels ‘a growing sense of identification with what [he] believe[d] to be the soul of [his] country’, despite his declared pacifism. In the autobiography, Murry avoids the circumstances of his marriage to Betty whom he had employed as a housekeeper and nurse in May 1930. Soon after Betty’s arrival, Violet confesses to Murry: ‘I don’t love you anymore. I am in love with Max [Plowman]’, their close friend who had nearly convinced Murry that Mansfield could be cured by spiritual 164

John Middleton Murry’s Unfinished Second Volume of Autobiography means and with whom, together with his wife, Dorothy, she had been living for a time.6 Betty had at first been a welcome presence in the house, and later, while Violet was dying, she and Murry had a sexual relationship, just as Murry did with Dorothy Brett while Mansfield was dying. Violet and Murry had had two children, Katherine Violet Middleton Murry (1925–2003) and Col (1926–2002). Betty and Murry married on 23 May 1931 and had two children, Mary (b. 1932) and David (b. 1938). In his autobiography, Murry says he ‘adored’ his son from his second marriage and lavished on him the attention he could not give to his and Violet’s older children.7 But Betty was ‘cruel to [this] defenceless child’, a cruelty Murry attributes to her terror at the ‘idea of a just God’. At first Murry had thought that Betty was a non-believer which troubled him because ‘A man and a woman cannot be married unless they believe in God.’ He decided, then, that his ‘appointed task’ would be to instruct Betty, as one would a ‘backward child’ at first by ‘improving her own handwriting and spelling, which was that of an illiterate’, and then progressing to saying at night ‘the Lord’s prayers aloud in the hope that she would join me’. But during one of these prayers he asks her why she does not join him and feels ‘her shy away, like a scared horse [. . .] And suddenly I knew . . . It was not true that she did not believe in God at all. She did. She was mortally afraid of Him. She was terrified of the very idea of God; it was utterly unbearable by her.’ If Betty was cruel to her child as well as Murry, it was because, as she declared to Murry on one occasion, ‘women are all bitches – all of them!’ It was this self-hatred, as we might call it now, that explained why during their numerous quarrels she goaded him, or so he believed, to physical violence: Quite slowly did it dawn on me, when for the hundredth time she hurled at me a string of accusations, which I knew to be false, which ninety-nine times over she had eventually confessed to be false, that the words had no meaning; or only too much. They were merely a gesture of hatred, the cry of the demon, an animal charge at one end of the circuit of which the other was me [. . .] Sometimes, it seemed to me it must be something terrible which surged up and beat her and longed to kill her. But it did not kill her. Sometimes I believed that the only thing that prevented me from killing her was fear of the law. Certainly not any fear of God. I felt that if it had been left between me and her and God, I should have killed her many times without an atom of compunction. Perhaps I was mistaken: for this murderous impulse was so completely new in my experience of myself, the condition in which it arose was so entirely strange, so revolutionary and so revolting, that it is impossible for me to say what ‘I’ might have done

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Charles Ferrall in it. Assuredly, any fair-minded judge would have had to say that I was temporarily insane, reduced by long torment to the condition of a goaded animal.

In these circumstances, Murry claims that he decided to become an Anglican ‘priest’, a significant word choice since it evokes Catholicism rather than Anglicanism, and later they would sleep in separate beds. On his way to visiting the Canon of Westminster to discuss his ‘vocation’, Murry says ‘I was conscious of a curious pain in my left foot, as it were a kind of cramp.’ He would then undergo unsuccessful electro-therapy followed by an operation on his leg, six weeks of ‘fantastic’ pain, a brief recovery and then a relapse into what he repeatedly calls the ‘Terror’. The experience was the most awful and profound of his life and allowed him to make an emotional ‘severance’ with Betty and ‘began another process towards spiritual and physical life’. But it also brought to an end his ‘vocation’: he could no longer walk more than 200 metres and ‘What was the use of a country-parson who could not walk?’ The ‘extract’ that follows this section reproduced below culminates with Violet’s revelation that she had wanted to contract tuberculosis just like Mansfield. Murry’s brother Richard believed that Violet was ‘possessed’ by Mansfield and she adopted the same haircut, wrote stories in the style of Mansfield and named their daughter Katherine.8 There was an aspect of Girardian mimetic rivalry in her relationship with the dead wife, and one that has reminded some of the relationship between Ted Hughes’s partner Assia Wevill and Sylvia Plath. But for Mansfield scholars what is of primary interest is not the desperate sadness of Violet’s marriage but how Murry was possessed by Mansfield and created what Jeffrey Meyers calls his ‘cult of Katherine’.9

An Extract from the Unpublished Second Autobiography of John Middleton Murry The lung-specialist had passed what I knew to be a sentence of death on Katherine Mansfield. He had told me that her only chance lay in submission to the strict discipline of a sanatorium. I knew that she would not accept that. I knew that she could not accept it and remain what she was. God knows I did not want her to change; I only wanted her to be herself and be well. But at the back of my mind, at the bottom of my heart, there was a doubt. Was it not my duty to insist that she should go to a sanatorium? Had I not betrayed something which I ought not betray when her question: ‘Do you want me to go?’ I had replied, dully, ‘No, what’s the good?’ Of course, I did not want her to go; equally, of 166

John Middleton Murry’s Unfinished Second Volume of Autobiography course, I did want her to go. Was it not my responsibility to have taken the decision, to have steeled myself against the glances of reproach, the cries of misery? What is Love? And what does Love do in such a strait? Always, at the back of my mind, at the bottom of my heart, until Katherine died, lurked the poison of this unanswered and unanswerable question. It was a poison that never ceased to work insidiously, and it numbed the life in me. Though the issue was taken out of my hands when Dr. Sorapure began to attend Katherine, because she had faith in him and he told her what she wanted to be told, it could not stop the poison working.10 I think now that he was wise in telling her what she wanted to be told; and I think that what he told her was true: namely, that a sanatorium would kill her. But it was not the whole truth: which was that not going to a sanatorium would also kill her. I think he was wise not to tell her that. I think he was wise to tell her other things that she also longed to hear: above all, that there was no reason why she should not have a child at the appointed time. I still have the little drawing which he made for her of the side of her body to show her what the anatomical difficulty was. It had probably been the result of the treatment to which she had submitted herself in Bavaria, not long before I first met her.11 I have never thought it my business to pry into that painful story of a passionate love-affair which ended in disaster. Katherine herself was absolutely reticent about it; but I know now she had suffered greatly both in body and soul, so that she winced even at the memory. I leave to others the ferreting out of that episode in the life of a lovely woman. But at this time, immediately after the end of the 1914–18 war, Katherine longed with all her heart and mind and soul to have a child. At times the longing was desperate. In all the many pictures her letters to me contain, from this time onwards, of our life together in the home of our dreams – ‘The Heron’12 – there are always two children, a little boy and a little girl. I dreamed the dream with her. But there was the worm of doubt at the core of my faith. But I believe that Dr. Sorapure did well to reassure her, in this also. She needed faith: simple animal faith in the future. And for a time he gave it her, loyally and royally. I could not have done that. The deathsentence of the specialist echoed on. It never ceased to echo. ‘Silence that dreadful bell!’13 I was haunted by the fear of Katherine’s death. Katherine dead: it was a condition which I could not conjecture or imagine. My life would be gone, yet I should be living. It would be, and it was unthinkable. Towards the end of her life Katherine quoted in her Journal as speaking to her heart the line: 167

Charles Ferrall ‘Lo! I have made Love all my religion.’14 ‘Who wrote that?’ she asked. The answer is that I wrote it, and at this time. I wrote it in a little book which she was not meant to see. She had forgotten that. She had forgotten it, I think, because she had blotted it out of her memory, for it was a line from a poem in which I had tried to ease my heart, and strengthen my courage, against the thought of her death. She had come upon it unawares, and it had pierced her heart, as well it might, what I should thus have meditated on the possibility of her death. Still it was true, that I had made Love all my religion; and equally she had made it hers. Who was in the worst case of these two lovers? I was haunted too by feelings that I had failed: that it was somehow my duty to have warded off death from her even at the sacrifice of Love itself. I ought to have had the courage to hurt her – to wound her even to the heart – by sending her away to the sanatorium. Not all my gratitude to Dr. Sorapure could put that doubt at rest. The pattern repeated itself to the end. When we were finally in Switzerland, I felt I could not have allowed her to go in pursuit of health from Dr. Manoukhin in Paris;15 still more, towards the very end, I felt I ought not to have allowed her to go to the Gurdjieff Institute at Fontainebleau, where she died. But, as always, I numbly acquiesced, and eventually accompanied her, from England to the South of France, from the South of France to Switzerland, from Switzerland to Paris, from Paris to London. But not from London to Fontainebleau. For in that journey a different issue was involved. To have entered the Gurdjieff Institute would have meant, for me, the violation of my own spiritual, or intellectual, integrity. Not that Katherine demanded, or expected, that I should go with her. There was not even the mute appeal that I should do so. We had come, at last, to a parting of the ways, and we both acknowledged it. It was a sad business after so long a pilgrimage together. There had been many, far too many, partings of the body; but this was a parting of the mind. Obscurely, I felt that I was to blame. It was my duty to have given her a faith – a real faith, not an animal one – a faith that could face death undismayed. I had none to give. I was dismayed by death, by the prospect of her death. I recognised that she could no other than turn from me. I knew what I lacked. And perhaps, even here, as in so many other things, she was braver than I. She took a plunge that I could never have taken. If I had done what she did, I should have lost my spiritual integrity. I cannot pretend to believe. She kept hers, because she really did believe. Though I still 168

John Middleton Murry’s Unfinished Second Volume of Autobiography think her belief was mistaken, I feel that there was something essentially true in her way of believing. She sought the discipline rather the doctrine: the renunciation rather than the authority for renunciation. Chief of the things by far which she renounced was part of our love. I think she was right. Our love, as it was lived, had become the progressive exhaustion of a mutual anguish. She broke the bond. It must have cost her much. She, who had cried aloud in agony at our physical separation, now decreed it. It had not happened, in fact, so abruptly. She had suffered herself to be drawn along a path at the end of which shone the promise of mastery of the body by the purified spirit, and the separation had come in consequence of that quest, which I could not share. Was she preparing for life, or her death? In her own mind for life; in reality for death. We said Goodbye. We loved one another very deeply. But the old anguished love was buried – the love which had been our life. When I went, at her pressing and unexpected summons, to visit her some twelve weeks later, I saw a creature radiant with love and tenderness, renewed, prepared for the vita nuova. On the evening of the day I arrived she died, of a sudden and violent hemorrhage. She was not expecting death. There was anguish and terror in her eyes when the blood poured from her mouth. The two doctors shut me out of the room. The thing had happened. I was alone. The shock was so great that I lived for some weeks in a kind of numbness. Unreal myself, I lived in an unreal world, as it were a painted scenery. Katherine’s funeral, the negotiations with the Pompes Funèbres, supercilious at my blind insistence on a simple coffin, fantastic éloge in the cold Protestant temple, for which the Pastor has asked me for notes, the cortège to the municipal cemetery, – it was the beginning of a chilly phantasmagoria, which, as far as I know, might go on and on for ever. I returned to Ditching in Sussex, where I had gone to live in a furnished red-brick villa, in order to be near a friend who was a mystic.16 I had come to think, during the months of my final separation from Katherine, that he might be able to help me to find the way I had so hopelessly lost. I did my best to follow the instructions in an elementary book of Yoga which he lent me. I sat still, I breathed rhythmically, I tried to make my mind a blank, and once I distinctly saw shining bright in the dark behind my closed eyelids, the crux ansata. I duly reported it, and was told that it was the symbol of eternal life. If I had been told it was the symbol of eternal death, I should have been moved just as much, or as little. But he and his wife were very kind to me. Still better, they had four little boys, who at least distracted me. Thither I returned. His wife 169

Charles Ferrall hugged me to her bosom, in a simple womanly way, and for a moment I felt relief. I could have stayed thus for hours with my head against her breast, in a warm waking sleep. ‘Here rests his head upon the lap of the Earth.’ I rested my head. But she took it in a different sense. I will not say a wrong one, because she may have known what I needed better than I. But when, one day, her husband, with the simple seriousness with what made him attractive to me, explained to me that she was a rare woman because she had had four little boys, and that he was willing for her to leave him and come to me. I felt that I was being carried out of my depth. When, shortly after, his wife completed my bewilderment by telling me, like a Sibyl, that ‘I must come to her as myself, not as the bereaved husband of Katherine Mansfield’, I fled to London. I want to make it quite clear that I believe both of them were acting as true friends to me. It is easy, very tempting to snigger at them; and part of myself was tempted to do so. But I am certain that they were in what they did of far more real worth than the sniggers, or the sniggering part of me. The woman understood me better than I did myself when she said to me: ‘You’ve never been really married’; and though I could not accept the implication that it was my destiny to be ‘really married’ to her, the judgement went home, and lodged itself for good in that part of my being where elemental truths are recognized and received. But I was scared. I felt as a ship may feel when it is torpedoed well below the water-line. I did not want to be ‘really married’ – in this obscure but frightening sense – to any woman. I had an intellectually vague but emotionally clear idea of what it meant: a following of a physical urge, so great that it overwhelmed the thinking part, the plunge into an elemental struggle between the male and the female, such as I had witnessed between Lawrence and Frieda, and between my mystical friend and his wife. In the past, it had both revolted and frightened me; now it merely frightened me. In my fear, I did a foolish thing. I asked a faithful woman-friend to promise to marry me, if I was really cornered, although I had not the least positive desire to be married to her.17 But I felt that the sound of Heaven or Hell was hot on my trail, and I took refuge hysterically. What I remember chiefly about this strange period of my life was that I had no coherent self at all. No action of mine was veritably my own. Everything I did, or might do, was equally sensible or equally absurd. I reacted precipitately against the threat of ‘being really married’; but it was not with what Keats called an ‘identical self’ – a self, that is, possessing its own peculiar sense of identity, – that I reacted.18 I felt indeed that I should have been false in accepting this particular offer of ‘real 170

John Middleton Murry’s Unfinished Second Volume of Autobiography marriage’; but I felt still falser in pretending to myself that I was shocked by it. If the one aroused in me a faint sense of outrage, the other I knew clearly to be humbug; and just as clearly I knew that what I had done in asking B. to promise to marry me was foreign to me. I can only repeat that I was unreal to myself, and everything was unreal to me. By far, the most real moments had been those in which I had rested my head on the woman’s bosom. That rest, at least, was real. It was the kind of warm tenderness, bringing self-forgetfulness, which gave me comfort. In my memory it remains as a moment of bliss indeed in a period of sickening unreality. Why drive me out of it? I suppose the answer is that the woman who is not capable of giving that is not capable of giving it on those terms – whatever the terms were. It is almost true; but not quite true, or this book would never have been written. I should not be alive to write it. I am alive to-day because a woman had tenderness and warmth and imagination: because she loved without the desire to possess, and, so lovingly, restored a dying man to life, and possessed him wholly. But that was many years away; and though I have often wondered what would have been my destiny if I had met such a woman at this time, it is one of those idle and meaningless speculations that really deny the nature of God and the wonder of life. As it was, I existed in limbo. No bond of any kind united me to my friends or to myself. The intense, all-suffering, all-devouring bond that had united me to Katherine was snapped. I was outcast from life, outcast from myself. Love and religion at once clean gone. Nothing for it but ‘a wild dedication of myself To unpath’d waters, undream’d shores, most certain To miseries enough.’19 But not a gleam of knowledge as to the boat or even the sea. Gradually, I became convinced that the only thing to do was to go away and be really alone: simply because it was unworthy and ignominious to be with people to whom I must present a relation which I did not feel. I should at least regain some dignity in my own eyes. Once so much was decided, things happened quickly. I was offered an isolated furnished cottage in Ashdown Forest, which I gratefully accepted. I quickly made my preparations, and set off on a motor-bicycle I had lately learned to ride. It was an afternoon in late March, or thereabouts. As the dusk came on, I began to be troubled. I was going to be, I was determined to be, ok really alone. I found myself vaguely terrified of what might happen to me; and the fear grew the nearer I approached my destination. I was required 171

Charles Ferrall to do or to endure something now from which I could not escape. The plunge into the unknown which had haunted me for weeks, and from which in one form I had withdrawn, because the form was alien to me, now confronted me in a form which I knew to be my own, and I must take it. It was as though I was being compelled to explore a dark cave alone, and I was afraid. But there was no possibility of retreat. To run away from this would be a final ignominy, from which I should not recover. That was my feeling, and it was compulsive. But I had not the faintest notion of what I should, or could do: and now the memory of what I actually did is faint to me. I am positive of two things: I had no plans, and I had no hesitations. Something that had to happen was going to happen. Here is an account of what actually happened, which was written in June 1923, that is to say, within three or four months of the experience itself. As I remember, it happened on the night of my arrival; but memory may play me false in this. It does not matter. Then in the dark, with only the gleam of the dying fire, I sat at the table facing the embers. I sat there motionless, it seemed for hours, while I tried to face the truth that I was alone. As I had wanted to turn back, so now I wanted to turn away. There was in me something that simply would not look, and, again and again, as it turned its eyes away, I took its head in my own two hands and held its face towards what I had to see. Slowly and with an effort I made myself conscious that I was physically alone. Prompted by some instinct I tried to force this awareness into every part of my body. Slowly I succeeded. At last I had the sensation that I was in my hands and my feet, that where they ended I also ended, as at the frontier of my being and beyond that frontier stretched out vast immensities, of space, of the universe, of the illimitable, something that was other than I. Where I ended, it began – other, strange, terrible, menacing. It did not know me, would never acknowledge me, denied me utterly. Yet out upon this from the fragile rampart of my own body, I found the courage to peer, to glance, at last to gaze steadily. And I became aware of myself as a little island against whose slender shores a cold, dark, boundless ocean lapped devouring. Somehow in that moment I knew that I had reached a pinnacle of personal being. I was I, as I had never been before, – and never should be again. It was strange that I should have known that; but then I did know it, and it was not strange. What happened then? If I could tell that, I should tell a secret indeed. But a moment came when the darkness of that ocean changed to light, the cold to warmth; when it swept in one great wave over the shores and frontiers of myself, when it bathed me and I was renewed; when the room was filled with a presence, and I knew I was not alone, that I never could be alone any more, that the universe beyond held no menace, for I was part of it, that in

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John Middleton Murry’s Unfinished Second Volume of Autobiography some way for which I had fought in vain for so many years, I belonged and because I belonged, I was no longer I, but something different, which could never be afraid to the old fears or cowardly with the old cowardice.

That was the crucial experience of my life. Indeed, the whole of the rest of my life can be truly described as the working-out of that experience: the endeavour to understand it, the search to corroborate it, and above all the effort to live by it. Yet the falsity of that phrase – ‘the effort to live by it’ – is such that I must instantly repudiate it. For the revolutionary effect of the experience was to plant in me the absolute conviction that my life had meaning. No matter what kind of life it turned out to be, it would have meaning. But, in a simple and subtle way, it changed the pattern of my life from within. While, on the one hand, it made me passive and receptive to experience, whatever it was, it gave me a criterion of the experience I would seek. I must move forward with my whole being, when I did move. I must wait, before any decisive moment, until my whole being ‘could no other’. My business, my duty, and in a sense my privilege, now, was to be an instrument of Life. But it required no effort. The effort would be required not be an instrument of Life; and that effort would be quite inconceivable. In feeling my way to some sort of adjustment to this new dimension of experience, into which I had been thrust, I did some very foolish things. In groping about for clues, I entangled myself with women, not in the ordinary sense of that phrase, but as it were touching them with my feelers, almost blindly, in order to discover whether they were the person to whom I was destined to respond with the whole of my being. I was not in search of love. That I now had, as never before. The intensity of personal love which I had felt for Katherine, and which I had made my religion, now flowed out, as it were, over the universe. In religious terms, my love for a woman had been changed by its own vehemence into the love of God. But those words are unnatural. To say that I now knew that God loved me sounds to my spiritual ear as preposterous as to say that I knew that Life loved me. They may be mirages of truth, and as such ‘possible to be believed’, as Blake says.20 But they are images of truth which leave me blushing and distressed. By far the truest thing to say is what I have said, namely, that I knew my life had meaning, and that that knowledge gave me an assurance that I had sought before in love. In that sense, I had love as never before, and therefore I was not in search of love. I have it. I was not in search of being loved, anymore, in order to assured of my own being. I was in search of someone to love: someone 173

Charles Ferrall upon whom I could unfold the warmth of my own being, which I now knew to be, as Keats says. But this is written in retrospect, and makes conscious a condition which was certainly unconscious at the time. What I did know was that I wanted children. How many times, in the misery of my isolation after Katherine’s death, I said to myself that I should have been saved if she had had a child. Only during the first of the eleven years of my life with Katherine had I consciously desired that. We thought it was going to happen, but it did not; and, after that, I seem somehow to have known that it would never be. Until Katherine became ill, we never spoke about it. Then the vision of children emerged again, as I have said; but they were dream-children, and I think we both knew they were. I certainly did. Now, I wanted children, and children by a woman I could love with the new power of love that had been released in me. This, as I have explained, no longer desperately sought to create a pathetic citadel of love in the teeth of a hostile universe; it was itself in harmony with the universe. It would therefore be a natural love, a love without anguish, necessarily creating children. It would have, of course, all the enchantment of my love with Katherine – it was inconceivable that, having that experience behind me, I should be content with less – but it would be simply and earthly and happy as it had been between Katherine and me in the golden days at the Villa Pauline.21 That this was possible, I never doubted. Had I not been granted the one thing that I lacked – a faith in Life? Had I possessed it, (I said to myself) Katherine herself would not have died. This was her great, her incredible gift to me, which she had died to give. I, too, had had to die a death in order to receive it. Having received it, I had now the capacity for true Love: the love that does not need to be protected, but to protect. For the opportunity of this my feelers were out. The situation was complicated by the sudden re-entry of Lawrence into my life, after an estrangement of several years. Katherine’s death had brought us together, and he had sent me his Fantasia of the Unconscious. I read it eagerly in my Sussex cottage and felt that it brought me a great illumination. I was one of those whom he describes, who loved from the spiritual centre to the exclusion of the lower centres, and the effect had been tuberculosis, as he said it must be; I was of the men who had failed to lead his woman, and so had destroyed her. True, according to the Lawrence pattern, it was I who should have been destroyed. But, then, the pattern did not really fit my case. It took no account of such a thing as had happened to me, whereby I had been re-born as a direct consequence of the intensity of the spiritual love between Katherine and me. But I was in no mood for reservations. Lawrence was saying 174

John Middleton Murry’s Unfinished Second Volume of Autobiography something of immense importance for men and women, which did not conflict with what I now know. It complemented it. It was clear to me that we must work together. Now that he was coming back to England from America, we would. Before he came, I had launched The Adelphi, with his full permission to use many chapters of the Fantasia of the Unconscious as I liked. Since it had been published only in America, and had fallen flat over there, I used it freely. But I did not realise that the Lawrence of The Fantasia already belonged to the past. When he actually returned, all my brave hopes were strangely dashed. England had no meaning for Lawrence anymore. It was a dying country, a sinking ship. The only thing to do was for a tiny group of like-minded people – primarily himself and me – to begin a new way of life in the new world. I was sorely tempted, and dithered for many weeks, struggling against an obstinate instinct that my business was in my own country, and a deeper instinct still that the group, as he wanted it, would have landed me in personal disaster. Fortunately, I now had my criterion. In a matter of great moment I must move with my whole being. My whole being refused to move in the direction to which he beckoned it. But while I was hesitating, he put a fearful stress upon me, for I was deeply attached to him, and it was hard not to be dragged off my line by sheer affection; above all, since I had no clear idea of what my own line was. Actually, the only clue I had was The Adelphi, which I had founded in the first flush of my new conviction, and which was enjoying a totally unexpected success. That seemed to indicate that there was some response to the creed I set out in it; and that to throw it over, as Lawrence wanted me to do, within a few months of having started it, seemed to be irresponsible. In the general confusion that alone seemed pretty clear. I, at any rate, had no right to shake the rest of England off my feet. That sense of identification with my own country, for good or ill, has grown steadily in me since that time. I suppose that, intellectually, I have ploughed as lonely a farrow as any man of my time – except perhaps Lawrence himself. And I certainly cannot pretend either to be a representative Englishman, or to have made any impression upon the British public. If I have had the good fortune to be able to do my own way, that has been almost entirely due to the fact that Katherine Mansfield has become a classic, and the sale of her books has until recently brought me in a small but steady income. Nevertheless, I have increasingly felt consubstantial with my country, and that my mission was to give expression to a specifically British aspiration. So that the clue I followed was the right one for me. After some years of hesitation, the reasons for which will be apparent, I came to the 175

Charles Ferrall conclusion that I did well not to follow Lawrence to New Mexico. In so far as I did that in order not to give up The Adelphi, the next phase in my life directly depended upon it. For it was as a would-be contributor to The Adelphi that I met the girl who was to become my second wife. A Violet le Maistre had sent me some little pieces of prose, in which I had recognised, though immature, the authentic note. I accepted one of them, and returned the rest with some encouraging words. I replied gratefully, and asked if she might bring some more in person so that she could have some minutes talk with me. She came. She was a slip of a girl, with wavy chestnut hair, an entire absence of sophistication, and a simple determination to be a writer. ‘Her voice was soft and low – an excellent thing in woman,’22 and there was, in the fragments of her writing, a lovely and incorrupt fidelity to the beauty seen which, though hesitant, belonged to the same order as Katherine Mansfield’s. I told her to read the stories of Tchekov, of whom she had never heard; and I said I would do my best to criticise anything she sent to me. At the end of about a month she came again to see me in the Adelphi, and I took her out to tea in the Strand. We talked about Tchekov, whom she had read assiduously in the meanwhile, and I expounded my view of his exquisite and heroic morality, without which so pure a perception of the beauty in all things was impossible. While I was talking to her the thought came to me that she was the very girl for my brother – an artist, thirteen years younger than myself, therefore at this time about 22. She, I imagined, could not be more than 20. She was too good not to be kept in the family, so to speak, though obviously she was not for me: 35 and old and battered. Indeed, it did not even cross my mind for a moment that I might love her, or she me. My attitude towards her was instinctively paternal. So I began to talk of my brother, suggesting that she would find him congenial, and proposed to bring him to tea when next she came. They met, and liked one another. ‘She’s straight,’ said my brother to me, meaning that she had no feminine wiles. But my first and only effort at match-making failed comically. I had invited her to supper one evening in my tiny flat in Hampstead, for I was rather proud of my cooking. After supper, I was showing her some of my brother’s drawings, when suddenly I heard her say, in her small calm voice: ‘Mr. Murry, I like these drawings, and I like your brother very much; but I can’t love him, because you see I love you.’ Instantly the speaking of the word whisked away the veil of illusion. The fact that I loved her stared me in the face. In vain I muttered that I was too old for her. She brushed that aside. ‘The only question is: Do you love me?’ ‘I didn’t know I did; but I do.’ I took her in my arms. It seemed to be very wonderful to be loved by one so young, for I did 176

John Middleton Murry’s Unfinished Second Volume of Autobiography feel old. I felt that the kind of love she had for me, and which she had awakened in me, had passed out of my life thirteen years before, when I first fell in love with Katherine; and, even at the moment, it struck me as strange that precisely the same thing had happened again. Once again, I had been entirely ignorant that I was in love; once again, the woman had spoken, and only that had revealed it to me. I was too happy to do more than smile at myself for my own simplicity. It was really, I thought, an endearing kind of naivety. Still, it was strange. I had not changed so much as I imagined. It was not long before we married: in church, to please her parsonuncle who was fond of her. In the interval, I had taken a long-promised camping holiday with my brother, which is described in an essay of mine called ‘The Well at Cerne,’ and had discovered a dreamhouse – an old coastguard station on the Chesil Beach, not far from Abbotsbury.23 I had made up my mind to buy it, if it were humanly possibly. I went to the auction, and I did buy if for £900, though without any clear notion how I was to raise the money. While I was summoning up my courage to approach the bank, I was amazed to receive a cheque for a little over £1000 for royalties on Katherine Mansfield’s books. It was by far the biggest cheque I had ever received, and ten times as big as any Katherine had received for her own work. Even at that moment I was struck by the irony of it. On the other hand, in my half-superstitious way (of one who seeks meanings in all things) I felt that Katherine’s blessing was on our marriage and our tamarisk-gifted house by the sea, over which the swans came honking from the swannery every day. They were, at least, the next best birds to herons. As I look back now, I find myself to have been sadly inexperienced as a lover. My feeling of age, though real enough, had to come through the spiritual, not the physical experience of love. For many years I had lived with Katherine in enforced celibacy; and even before that I had not known what Lawrence calls sexual fulfilment. Since that is, essentially and necessarily, a mutual experience, it follows that Katherine had not known sexual fulfilment with me. Whether she was disappointed in me as a lover, I cannot say. I was entirely not disappointed in her. But that, I suppose, was because I was curiously unawakened to the beatitudes of physical love. Moreover – though this is only tender and timid conjecture – I think that the same physical disability which disappointed her of children prevented the mutual fulfilment which I then did not even know was possible. So it was that I entered on my marriage with Violet naive and shy in the matter of physical love. Even my deep desire for children was a thing of which I did not speak. Whether that was due to shyness, I cannot say. 177

Charles Ferrall As I remember my state of mind, it was much more because I took it absolutely for granted that we both desired children. I had known too much of Katherine’s longing for children, both at the beginning and the end of our life together, not to the certain that Violet also would feel the same. It never struck me for a moment that there was a great difference between Katherine when I first met her, and Violet now: that Katherine had had much, and some very bitter, experience of love, whereas Violet had had none. It was not likely to occur to me, because Katherine had deliberately blotted out her past, from which, in a sense, I had been her refuge. There was, indeed, a curious innocence about me which in retrospect I realise to have been the reason why, as she insisted again and again, her life had only begun with me. There was her precious childhood – the age of Innocence, which she has so marvelously portrayed in some of the most magical of her stories; there was the age of Innocence regained, in her life with me. These alone she recognised. But the age of Experience between was something which she longed to forget, and mostly did forget. But there was that in it which made her afraid. I have known moments when she betrayed almost a panic fear of her own past, and shuddered away from renewed contact with persons who had played a part in it, as though, they were symbols of that corruption against which she was compelled to cry. Since I was immune from that insatiable, devouring and fatal curiosity concerning the past of the beloved which Marcel Proust, perhaps truly, attributes to his generality of passionate lovers, it may well be that I was not a passionate lover, in his sense, at all. Indeed, since passionate love, in his sense, is essentially possessive love, which I have never experienced, that must be true. The love which greedily, jealously, desperately struggles to possess the whole of the loved one is foreign to my nature. Though I believe I am as capable of faithful love as most men, I am incapable of jealousy. If it has happened to me – and it has happened – that my beloved has turned away from me to another, I have accepted it, not without pain, indeed, but as something against which I had no right to protest or rebel. It is to me of the very essence of love that it leaves the loved one free to cease to love. That is what love is: the bestowal of freedom. To demand more of the beloved than she or he will freely give, in the positive desire to give, is an offence against the nature of love. Moreover, I have become convinced that this urge to possess turns love, which makes for life, into something which makes for death. I knew that only by instinct, when I was a young man: since then it has been proved upon my pulses. But my instructive knowledge was clear enough to prevent me from trying to probe into Katherine’s past. What she did not want to tell, I did not want to know. Since she had made it 178

John Middleton Murry’s Unfinished Second Volume of Autobiography unreal for herself, it was entirely unreal to me. And so it was that I was entirely oblivious of the fact that there was a great difference between the Katherine with whom I had fallen in love in 1911, and the Violet with whom I had fallen in love in 1924. I naively attributed to Violet the same ardent desire for children which had tormented Katherine. I did not think that, in all probability, Katherine, when she was at the same stage of life as Violet was, did not desire children. It seemed to me absolutely not real that Violet should share my desire for children. That, much rather than any shyness, was the real reason why I took it for granted, and did not talk about it. I can see now, plainly enough, how great was my failure in imagination. I can see now that, had I been a wiser man, I should gently have initiated her into all the infinite delights of physical love between a man & woman who truly love one another, and waited patiently until the positive desire for children was kindled in her. But in those days I did not know her, and I did not understand the need. Thus, it was a profound shock to me when, in the middle of her first pregnancy, which filled me with happiness, I began to be aware that she herself was unhappy. At first, I had thought it nothing more than physical malaise. But one day she said she wanted to confess something to me, which she was afraid would hurt me. I said, quite truthfully, that I loved her in such sort that I did not believe that anything she could do or say would hurt me. It would be herself, and that would be enough. Then she said: ‘Golly!’ That was her name for me, transferred to me from a golliwog she had adored as a little girl. ‘Golly! I didn’t really want this baby. I’ve tried to want it, but I can’t. I only want you. And I’m afraid it will come between us. You won’t love me so much. You will love her – I know you will.’ Hurt? No, I was not hurt; I was numbed, not so much by the shock of disappointment, though that was great, as by the sudden discovery of my utter ignorance of what she had been feeling. I was bewildered and lost, once more. What had seemed so simple and natural and lovely to me, the perfect juncture of the dream and the reality in which I had lived ever since it was revealed to me that I loved her, was now frayed and forlorn. I loved her for loving me so much; I loved her for her courage in telling me: but the blissful sense of complete union in love was torn away. I did my utmost to comfort her, and to implant in her my simple faith that when the baby came it would be to her, as it would be to me, our own bond of love made incarnate, which, so far from coming between us, would only unite us the more. I begged her to believe it, to trust me. ‘I really do know,’ I said. 179

Charles Ferrall But the faint shadow that had fallen between us remained. The bloom of our love had been smutched. When the little girl was born in the Old Coastguard Station, it was not the blissful happening I had dreamed. It was marvelous indeed to me, but not blissful. The long waiting in the dark in the room below, listening to the murmur of voices above, then the sudden intense silence, like a lapse into the womb of all life, then out of the covering darkness, the tiny incredible cry, that sounded high and incommensurable above the steady room of the great Atlantic waves: this was marvelous. And because it was marvellous, because of the kind of marvel that it was, there was bitterness in my heart when I learned that the baby was not to be fed at her mother’s breast. That seemed to me all wrong, as it were to shut the door upon the angel. But I forbore to insist. Love gives freely, or the gift is not of love. Then began four months of misery for me. What Violet had feared, really did happen. The baby came between us. I soon realised that she was not thriving; and it caused me anguish. I began to re-live the last years with Katherine. I determined that I would take over the baby entirely. I plunged into that disheartening business of trying to find the food on which she could thrive. For three months she seemed to go steadily backward. From 8½ lbs. she sank to under 6 lbs. and the vitality seemed to leave her. Sometimes, I would sit in the garden with her for hours, just watching in a dumb agony of the soul, her drawn little face; and I felt that I would willingly give my life for the life of this child, if only I knew how. In spite of myself, I was withdrawn from Violet, though I knew she was unhappy and none too well. Perhaps, if I had known how strong is the will to love in these atoms of life, I should have taken it more lightly. But I was ignorant. I felt simply that this little child had been cheated of her rights, and that I was somehow to blame. I must keep the flame of life in her by spending all the power of love I possessed. Then, quite suddenly, when I was in complete despair, the miracle happened. Instead of losing weight, at the end of one week during which I had tried a new food, she had indisputably gained a little. Then, after being apparently too weak to suck at her bottle so that it took me sometimes two hours to give her a single feed, she became positively gluttonous. Within a month from the turn of the tide, she had overhauled and passed her birth-weight. When I carried her off, in my fantastic little motor-car, to be christened by her uncle in the parish church, her little blue bonnet was cocked insouciantly sideways, and she radiated health and unconcern. The stone was lifted. No more anguish, no more worry even. Katherine  – for that was her long pre-determined name – could go 180

John Middleton Murry’s Unfinished Second Volume of Autobiography her own gait now, and I could turn to her mother. No sooner had I turned to her the full current of my love, than another miracle happened. She had been indifferent, even resentful, towards the baby, as though she grudged the impotent love I lavished on it. Now, for the first time, she saw it, and found it funny and delightful. She smiled at it with tender amusement, and to the scandal of its godparents nicknamed it the Egg, because of its brown and shiny head. Quickly softened to Weg, the name has stuck to her ever since. Then, it seemed, the happiness of which we had been disappointed, came in full measure, running over for the delay. Violet’s writing began to take wings. I printed a story of hers, A Queer Old Man, with full conviction of its quality, in The Adelphi, over the name Mary Arden, which I chose for her; and no sooner had it appeared than Mr. Edward O’Brien – that forceful champion of the short-story – wrote to ask if he might include it in his yearly anthology. And soon afterwards she wrote another story, ‘A Casual Acquaintance,’ which was even better.24 There was no doubt at all of the authenticity of her gift. I, also, had my piece of luck. Out of the blue came an invitation to give the Clark lectures at Cambridge, and that set me off on writing Keats and Shakespeare. It was like the golden days at the Villa Pauline, when Katherine sat writing ‘Prelude’ on one side of the kitchen-table, while I wrote Dostoevsky on the other. Truly, we stood on the top of happy hours. Of course, we were lovers, and of course we took no precautions. In the twinkling of an eye Violet was pregnant again. She did not appear to mind it so much this time; and since even I, eager for parenthood though I was, had not wanted it to happen so soon, there was no estrangement between us. Violet was, at least, free of her old fear that a child would come between us, for Weg had become as much her darling as mine. The pregnancy was a nuisance, not a nightmare. A little boy was duly born. Since I knew exactly what to do, I was free to take care of Violet. She needed it. She could not regain her full strength; and what she did regain came to her very slowly. Fatigue had soaked her through. She was tired and listless all through that summer. By the time the winter came, and we were back from the Coastguard Station in our little flat in the Vale of Health in Hampstead, she appeared to be better. No sooner was she better than a third baby was on the way. This time I was alarmed. It seemed to be tempting Providence, for her to risk a third pregnancy in her condition; I felt, too, that I had already neglected my little boy. He had to be taken into hospital to be circumcised, because his penis had not been attended to by the maid who looked after him. I had been so concentrated on Violet that I had not supervised his washing as I ought to have done. 181

Charles Ferrall I persuaded Violet to be curetted, and a doctor to pronounce that it was necessary. Carrying my little boy up Dollis Hill to the hospital, I felt he was a heavy burden and noticed I was short of breath. However, the next day I had to take Violet to a nursing home. When I returned to the Vale of Heath, I was depressed and empty. Things were getting on top of me, and I was obviously sickening for influenza. I felt rather bitter, too, about Lawrence. After a time at the ranch in New Mexico, he had tired of it. He was at odds with America, after all; and perhaps the exertions and the altitude had been too great a strain. Anyhow, he had gone down to Mexico and fallen seriously ill, with incipient tuberculosis. He had returned to Europe, where, he now said, he belonged. Had I followed his lead, I reflected, I too presumably should have been back again. But he was friendly enough, and had promised to come to see us at the Coastguard Station. When the time came, he was again in a hurry to flee from England. So I went instead to see him in London in October 1925. He seemed much gentler, and I promised that, if he settled in North Italy as he said he was going to, Violet and I would come and stay with him and Frieda. But, by the end of January, when we were to go, Violet’s second pregnancy was so far advanced that neither she nor I were inclined for the journey. Lawrence was furious. Once again, it appeared, I had let him down. I, in return, was deeply hurt by his unfairness. To rage against me because I refused to take Violet, carrying a six months’ baby, the long journey to Spotorno, whereas he had shrunk from making the simple train journey to Abbotsbury, seemed to me fantastic.25 If that was friendship, I too had better have done with it. From this time forth, I made no more advances, until I learned that he had not much longer to live. But that did not prevent me from grieving over the severance. With Violet in a nursing home, my little boy in hospital, and the beginnings of something or other in myself, my brooding was not cheerful. Nevertheless, I pulled myself together and went to see Violet every afternoon until evening, returning home, I felt very queer indeed. Finding my temperature between 104° and 105°, I called in aid my nextdoor neighbour, Helen Thomas; rang up my friend, Dr. James Young,26 made up some sort of bed with Helen’s help in our little living room, so as to leave the big bed free for Violet on her return, and lay down with the feeling that not even Last Trump could fail to budge me. When James Young arrived, he told me that I had double pneumonia, and was (he thought) just past the crisis. Which seemed very odd; but not so odd as I was to feel during the next two or three days. Each afternoon my temperature would climb and climb and climb and climb, to something over 105°. And every afternoon as it climbed, the same perfectly blissful 182

John Middleton Murry’s Unfinished Second Volume of Autobiography feeling would rise within me. I was going to die, I wanted to die, and the process of dying, as I was experiencing it, was pure beatitude. I daresay the experience is quite common in double pneumonia, but it was entirely new to me. This serene unconcern with the vicissitudes of my own body would have been impossible if there had been any pain. But, so far as I remember, there was none at all. What bodily sensation there was was warm and pleasant; but sense of detachment, of freedom from all responsibility, of entire impotence to struggle, or desire, or will, was heavenly. Meanwhile, Violet had returned home. Since I could not welcome her, it seemed, even by the flicker of an eyelid, it is not surprising that she thought I was going to die. I thought so myself, and no doubt I looked like it. But not only I was not absolutely happy, my perceptions were extraordinarily clear; and I noticed, without any sense of disappointment or surprise, that Violet withdrew herself from me. It seemed quite in order. I understood that life cannot endure the approach of death. And when, a day or two afterwards, Violet told me, with her transparent honesty, that she had been almost overwhelmed by a strong and sudden physical attraction towards my brother, who had come to visit me, it seemed the most natural thing in the world. I assured her that I understood it perfectly. I emerged from that curious illness definitely a wiser man. But in what the access of understanding consisted, it is hard to say. I loved Violet just as much as ever; and I am persuaded that she loved me equally. But I had seen more clearly than ever before that life, instinctively, turns towards life and away from death. Moreover, the simple fact that I in my soul welcomed what I believed to be the approach of death, plainly meant that, while I was in that condition, Violet was absolutely released from any physical bond of love. I had not learned that body and soul are independent of one another, going each its own way; but that there was some kind of exquisite independence, the nature of which I could not fathom. For I felt sure that it was so because I looked as though I were dying, that Violet had turned away from me, but because I had myself, unwillingly, passed away from her. However, I had no time to discover what it was I had learned. Whatever element of possessiveness there may have been in my feeling of love was dissolved away by what that minor revelation, and a new element of tenderness entered into it. It was just in time. Violet began to be unwell again. No sooner was I fairly on my feet than I had to ask James Young to turn his attention to her. He did so, and after a few days’ observation told me that he did not like the look of the situation. He suspected tubercle. Still, we must 183

Charles Ferrall wait for a sputum analysis. But he did not feel sanguine about it. While we waited for the result, I went down into the depths. What the result would be was a foregone conclusion. Though the idea of such a destiny had never been on the fringe of possibility, the moment it was put before me I recognised it as my own. This was what would happen. It was the most meaningful thing that could have happened. But what was the meaning? With that problem I struggled. I reached back, for help, to Lawrence’s conclusion in The Fantasia of the Unconscious. Was it love from the upper, the spiritual centres, once more? But it had not been so, on my side. Had I not passionately desired children? But what difference did that make? Violet had not. I had imagined that she wanted what I wanted. But, though she had been an unwilling mother, she loved me with all her physical being. Still, it must have started all wrong. She must have fallen in love with the idea of me, not with me. I grimly remembered that she had told me once that, on seeing my photograph in some literary journal, she had shown it to a friend, and said quite positively: ‘That’s the man I am going to marry!’ When she told it me, it seemed naive and delightful: but now almost sinister. Had I myself not been the naive one? For all my age and my conceit of my own wisdom, Violet had simply captured me in her innocent web. But why not? Since I was so apparently ignorant of the fundamental simplicities of life, what other way was there for me but to wait, all unconsciously, till the woman captured me? After all, it was Violet and not another who had been able to capture me. And what was there intrinsically absurd in the notion that she also had been, even in a newspaper photograph of me, the lineaments of that which she longed to love. Neither a note in the voice of a woman, nor a curve in the lip of a man, is an idea. The voice and the lip are alike in the utterance of the soul. Or was the soul just one great illusion? Lawrence had denounced ‘love in the head’; and I had understood it, or thought I had. Agreement of ideas is no basis for love. But without agreement of soul, there was no possibility of love. Not even Lawrence could deny that. Or did he? Had I just taken what I needed from his doctrine and left the rest? But if I had, and if the rest when I rejected was that not my agreement of ideas but the meeting of souls was a false basis for love, then what could I do but reject it still? But was that the meaning of what was happening? Had I to be taught, in this terrible fashion, that the love of the soul was indeed an illusion which led to death? I reacted against the thought with all my being, even to nausea. If that was the meaning, then to learn it would kill me. 184

John Middleton Murry’s Unfinished Second Volume of Autobiography I scarcely even shaped the thought. I reared away from the darkness and desolation out of which it would have arisen. No, the meaning was truly different from this, and it was plain. When I had, after my fashion, struggled for Katherine’s life, I was impure. I had no faith in life. Having no faith in life, I did not, because I could not, give my all. Time and again, in little ways I failed her. Time and again, I had shrunk from insisting where I should have insisted, and in order not to hurt her, took the weaker line. As I had failed in courage, so I had failed in patience. Now, God helping me, I would fail in neither. My faith in life would give me courage and patience which would make my love a power. I had failed Katherine; Violet I would not fail. The very whole of me would be cast into the struggle for her life, and by the completeness of my dedication it would prevail. That was the meaning; that was the test. I emerged from this long wrestling like a man renewed. I was now completely prepared for the verdict of the bacteriological analysis was, of course, what James Young had feared. I was completely prepared to tell Violet the bad news: which I did. But I was completely unprepared for her reply. ‘O I’m so glad!’ she said. ‘I wanted this to happen.’ I stared into her shining eyes. ‘You wanted this to happen?’ I repeated, slowly and dully, while my world turned upside down. ‘You see, Golly!’ she explained. ‘I wanted you to love me as much as you loved Katherine – and how could you, without this?’ Something within me turned to stone, or ice. A far-away voice, cold and crystal, seemed to be saying to me: ‘Faith in life, my dear . . . Faith in life?’ I do not know whether I ever got over the shock of that revelation, or ever worked myself entirely free from the sense that a grim cosmic joke was being played on me. Perhaps I did. I do know that I flung myself into the long struggle for Violet’s life with an even greater sense of dedication. But the only way I could prevent myself from feeling a kind of bitterness towards her was to look upon her as a child. When I looked at what she had said that night, it appeared pathetic and loveable. But that did not take away from the irony. We were playing at man and wife, and the game had turned dreadful. The child-wife greeted with ecstasy this romantic disease. I talked to her seriously. T.B. (I said) was a deadly enemy. I had lived with it too long to be under any illusion. It was something we had to fight. ‘And I don’t really know whether you are on my side.’ She said she was. Of course she was. In the sense that she obeyed implicitly whatever decisions I took, or whatever instructions I gave, she 185

Charles Ferrall was on my side. But in some deeper sense, I doubt whether she ever was. I never felt that she, in her innermost self, was fighting the disease. She went, without the least demur, to the sanatorium at Midhurst. Every weekend I set out from the Old Coastguard Station in my preposterous motorcar, whose maximum speed was 30 miles an hour, to spend two days in the neighbourhood at Midhurst. The journey invariably took me about seven hours. But it was not long before I realised that it was doing no good; and that I, as well as she, would be much happier if I were looking after her at home. So back we came, one afternoon in the late summer, in the same preposterous car; and I settled down to the work of nursing her. In some strange way we were happy. I suppose her queer little childish doubt whether I loved her as much as I did Katherine was settled in her heart. Assuredly, I loved her with every fibre of my being. Never for an instant did I grow tired of caring for her. Not that she was an exacting patient. She only wanted me to do everything for her that needed to be done; and since I demanded nothing better, we were well content. It was a queer timeless existence that winter. The Coastguard Station, at any rate in those days, was remote enough in the summer; but in the winter it was isolated indeed. The Atlantic breakers pounded incessantly against the beach at the bottom of the tamarisk garden, and a faint tremor seemed to shake the earth and the long low house continually. But, for the rest, I remember little, save the sense that we were totally withdrawn from the world – a tiny little community whose only contact with the life beyond was the postman, a handsome middle-aged man with a splendid white moustache, who battled his way along the coast road every morning. Every morning, the children would stagger off to meet him, and he would appear, carrying one or sometimes both of them. They adored him. Notes   1. F. A. Lea, The Life of John Middleton Murry (London: Methuen, 1959), p. 114.   2. John Middleton Murry, Between Two Worlds (London: Jonathan Cape, 1935), p. 496.   3. Alexander Turnbull Library (hereafter ATL), Murry family: Literary and personal papers, Wellington, MS-Papers-11327-004.   4. ATL, Murry family: Literary and personal papers, MS-Papers-11327-166.   5. In a diary entry for 28 May 1946, Murry writes: ‘my sexual adventures have been few and far between: my disaster at Oxford, the Australian whore I picked up in the months after Katherine died and who came to see me in Aston Forest, the little French whore at Le Touquet, when Violet was deadly ill and I was worn out with missing her. That is the sum total of my experience of the meretrix: all I learned from it was that it was not my way. Then came my experiences with amateurs – in all of which the thing was made possible by an element of love-in-the head, [Dorothy] Brett, Vere [?], Helen [Thomas]. The first two were complete failures, the last a

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John Middleton Murry’s Unfinished Second Volume of Autobiography profoundly unhappy and bewildering experience. Then came my physical loves: Marguérite, Frieda [Lawrence], Betty, Mary. In mere honesty I have to put Betty in that list, and the fact that I have to means that she cannot be a pure demon. But though she belongs there by some rights, yet she crashes in. Katherine and Violet were my purely spiritual loves. In Mary all my loves are consummated. And in that love, more than any other, I can distinguish the Christian element.’ ATL, MSX-4157.   Elsewhere in his diary he draws a number of diagrams using the categories of body, mind and the children or not of his four marriages, as though these women accorded to the pattern of his life. The sexual relationship with his friend and nextdoor neighbour Helen Thomas may have occurred while Violet was in a nursing home after the birth of Katherine, since this is the only mention of her in Lea’s biography. Marguérite was a ‘country-girl’ from Corrèze but working as a sempstress and ‘petite femme’ in the café in Paris where Murry first met her. For a while Murry supported her financially but eventually broke off their relationship because he was not prepared to ‘throw up Oxford [. . .] and take any job that he could get’ (Between Two Worlds, pp. 164, 163).   6. Lea, p. 174.   7. In his memoir, Colin Middleton Murry believed that his birth, eight months before Violet’s death ‘seems to have set the final seal on my mother’s fate. Certainly she never recovered from it [. . .] I can understand my father’s extraordinary life-long ambiguity towards me [. . .] Subconsciously he must, at least in part, have blamed me for Violet’s illness and death and the ten years of unrelieved misery which followed it.’ See Colin Middleton Murry, A Memoir of Childhood: One Hand Clapping (London: Victor Gollancz, 1975), pp. 16–17.   8. Kathleen Jones, Katherine Mansfield: The Story-Teller (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), p. 171.   9. The title of Meyer’s final chapter of Katherine Mansfield: A Biography where he dissects ‘Violet’s pathological attachment’ to Mansfield (Auckland: Hodder & Stoughton, 1978), p. 254. 10. Dr Victor Sorapure was a gynaecologist who worked at Hampstead Hospital and had been recommended to Mansfield by Anne Estelle Rice. See Antony Alpers, The Life of Katherine Mansfield (London: Viking, 1980), p. 285. 11. In 1909 in the spa town of Bad Wörishofen, Mansfield, pregnant by Garnet Trowell for a period of six months, gave birth to their stillborn child. 12. Heron was the middle name of Mansfield’s brother, Leslie, who was killed in the First World War in 1915. 13. The words of Othello when awoken by a bell which sounds after a fight disrupts his first night with Desdemona. Othello, II, 3. 14. Letters 3, pp. 111–14, Mansfield letter to Murry, 23 November 1919. 15. The Russian doctor Ivan Manoukhin claimed to have invented a cure for tuberculosis but Meyers (p. 230) observes that ‘Despite her serious doubts, Katherine agreed to begin immediately the painful, dangerous and totally ineffectual treatment, which cost 4500 francs for fifteen séances.’ 16. Lea does not reveal the identity of this man and his wife, instead calling him ‘Miller’. However, Kathleen Jones identifies them as Millar and Bill Dunning, describing the latter as ‘a self-advertised medium [. . . who] claim[ed] to be possessed by Katherine’s spirit’. See Jones, p. 42. 17. Dorothy Brett.

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Charles Ferrall 18. Keats does not actually use the phrase but in his famous letter to Richard Woodhouse on the ‘camelion Poet’ he writes: ‘It is a wretched thing to confess but is a very fact that not one word I ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical nature – how can it, when I have no nature?’ Grant F. Scott, ed., Selected Letters of John Keats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 195 (27 October 1818). 19. Camillo’s plan is not for ‘myself’ but ‘yourselves’, the eloping lovers Florizel and Perdita, The Winter’s Tale, IV, 1, 665. 20. ‘Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth’, William Blake, ‘Proverbs of Hell’, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. 21. In Bandol, Southern France, where she and Murry moved in 1915. 22. ‘Her voice was ever soft, / Gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman’: the words of King Lear about Cordelia, and therefore suggesting that Murry adopted something of a parental attitude towards Violet (King Lear, V, 3.273–4). 23. ‘The Well at Cerne’, Adelphi, 11: 1 (1924), pp. 1–9. 24. The story of Le Maistre’s that Murry published that year (1925) was actually ‘The Dream’ (under the pseudonym Mary Arden), Adelphi, 2: 8 (1925), pp. 679–84. The previous year Murry had also published one of her poems, ‘Ghost Hunters’, Adelphi, 2: 8 (1924), p. 317. The unnamed story to which Murry refers is ‘The Idealist’, The Best British Stories of 1927, ed. Edward J. O’Brien (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1927). ‘A Charming Old Man’ and ‘The Casual Acquaintance’ were published in Luck, and Other Stories under the name of Mary Arden (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928). Some of Le Maistre’s stories are a kind of writing back to Mansfield. In ‘A Charming Old Man’, for example, the Colonel feels that his daughter, who is lying down with a headache and therefore unable to attend to him, has become ‘alien’ to him, whereas the daughters in ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ are still in fear of their dominating late father. 25. Since no further mention is made of this baby it seems reasonable to assume that Violet miscarried. 26. A psychiatrist, Young was a friend of Mansfield and Murry, a disciple of Gurdjieff, and attended Mansfield when she died in Fontainebleau-Avon.

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Katherine Mansfield, Illness, Recuperation and Re-enchantment Rishona Zimring

Claire Davison and Gerri Kimber, eds, The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, Volume 2: Letters to Correspondents K–Z (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022), 853 pages, ISBN 9781474445481. Aimée Gasston, Modernist Short Fiction and Things (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 227 pages, ISBN 9783030785444. Andrew Kahn, The Short Story: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 141 pages, ISBN 9780198754633. Gaurav Majumdar, Illegitimate Freedom: Informality in Modernist Literature, 1900–1940 (New York: Routledge, 2022), 169 pages, ISBN 9780367444624. Joyce Morgan, The Countess from Kirribilli: The Mysterious and FreeSpirited Literary Sensation Who Beguiled the World (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2021), 344 pages, ISBN 9781760875176. During the COVID-19 pandemic, sales surged of The Enchanted April, the popular 1922 novel about English tourists in Italy. So one learns from The Countess from Kirribilli, the vibrant new biography of The Enchanted April’s author, Elizabeth von Arnim, Katherine Mansfield’s cousin and friend. Why this novel during the pandemic? Was it because it is a book about feeling housebound and wanting to travel, or because it is a book about being ill? Because it is both, and thus apt for these times. How are its characters ill? They grieve losses, they suffer  depression, they feel frustrated, they are bored. These are common illnesses, and modernist literature more often than not offers readers companionship in such states, and even guidance. It may not hurt to remind ourselves that suffering is neither a virtue nor a ­necessity. The books under review provide many angles on how to 191

Rishona Zimring alleviate it: on various sorts of ­recuperation in Mansfield’s life, work and orbit. Elizabeth von Arnim has found the right biographer in Joyce Morgan, whose lively account of Elizabeth’s peripatetic, energetic life is extremely good company. (I will follow Morgan’s lead in referring to the author by her chosen first name; she was born Mary Beauchamp in Sydney, and chose for her pen name Elizabeth von Arnim, the aristocratic surname a product of her marriage to Prussian landed gentry and of her life in Pomerania.) Morgan’s biography is true to her subject, who was remembered as ‘enchanting company’ by the writer Frank Swinnerton; ‘What a devil she was, but what good company!’ exclaimed the novelist Gladys B. Stern in a letter to fellow author Hugh Walpole after Elizabeth’s death (p. 304). Morgan too has found her so; as she writes in her ‘Acknowledgements’, she spent two months immersed in the Huntington Library’s archive of Elizabeth’s papers, and found there ‘the feeling of intimacy’ as she read handwriting that became ‘as familiar as the sound of a friend’s voice’ (p. 314). Morgan is a virtuoso when it comes to bringing that feeling of intimacy and friendship into her own writing of Elizabeth’s story: she brings Elizabeth to life on the page, charming the reader throughout with a sharp, selective eye for detail and anecdote that refrains from overwhelming us with minutiae, biography’s biggest drawback as a genre. Some details are more important than others. Morgan deems it important to include no fewer than seventeen examples of Wagner’s presence in Elizabeth’s life, beginning with the foundational introduction by her future husband to Bayreuth and to his friend, Wagner’s widow (and Liszt’s daughter) Cosima (p.  27). Elizabeth shared musical proclivities with her cousin Katherine, who would later comment that The Enchanted April could only have been written by one other person: Mozart.1 The implication of such musical references goes beyond personal tastes; Morgan’s insistence on the devotion Elizabeth felt towards attending Wagner’s operas and other musical performances is a strong reminder of the cultural milieu that influenced the writers of the period. We neglect these influences at our peril, and we have Morgan to thank for not letting us off easy in that regard.2 In addition to keeping company with Cosima Wagner and Wagnerism, the Elizabeth of Morgan’s biography is to be found in conversation with a range of both familiar figures and obscurer ones who spark curiosity. There is her poignant and even passionate friendship with cousin Katherine, nurtured on the slopes of the Alps in neighbouring chalets in the very same months Elizabeth was writing The Enchanted April; or the months E. M. Forster spent tutoring three of Elizabeth’s daughters 192

Katherine Mansfield, Illness, Recuperation and Re-enchantment at her Pomeranian home, Nassenheide; or her affair with H. G. Wells; or her terrible marriage to Frank (Lord Francis Russell), Bertrand Russell’s older brother. Mansfield readers steeped in the literary history of modernism will find much to recognise and trace here. But there are also intriguingly shadowy figures who will perhaps inspire future archival searches and newfound readerships: the company Elizabeth kept included the bestselling American writer Amélie Rives, whom she met in Virginia late in life, with her ‘pet wolf called Fang and a morphine addiction’ (p. 300), and another cousin, Connie Beauchamp, and her ‘long-time companion, Jinnie Fullerton, who dressed as a man in pin-striped suits [. . .] together they ran a nursing home in England and spent their winters at Menton’ (p. 288). These few names hardly do justice to the rich explorations of social life to be found in The Countess from Kirribilli (a title which underscores Elizabeth’s Sydney origins), but give some indication of the many leads one might follow back into this tremendously vital realm. As Morgan writes, this is a world in many ways ruled by strong women who imbue it with an ‘independent and unorthodox spirit’ (p. 288); from reading about these many lives, we may gain some hints as to how to lead our own. While providing an affectionate account of Elizabeth’s enticingly busy social and cultural life throughout the decades, Morgan also plunges in detail into particularly intense periods of Elizabeth’s story. We find here a breathtaking account of that time of crisis, the 1930s, with which we think we are familiar, but come to know afresh through Elizabeth’s terror for German daughter Trix’s fate during the Nazis’ rise to power. From Elizabeth’s letters to another daughter (who, along with her other children, had emigrated to the United States), we learn that her Prussian husband’s grandmother was a Jewish commoner who became mistress to Prince August of Prussia. Morgan wisely chooses to include excerpts from these letters to convey how writing took on terrifying urgency and risk: ‘Trix writes that she can’t understand why the foreign papers tell such tales of Jews being beaten, & that there’s not a word of truth in it [. . .] The fact is that the German press is completely muzzled, & she hears nothing of these things’ (p. 265). While tormented by fear for her daughter and her family, Morgan relates compellingly, Elizabeth pens one of her most popular novels, eventually titled Mr Skeffington (1940), a story of Jewish characters whose lives are shattered by the Nazi invasion of Vienna, which turns its male protagonist into ‘a sort of frightened animal’ (p. 297). Although Mr Skeffington was eventually made into a film (1944) starring Bette Davis and Claude Rains, and upon its publication was a lucrative Book of the Month Club selection, it may be less known now to Elizabeth’s fans than Elizabeth and Her German 193

Rishona Zimring Garden and The Enchanted April. Certainly less known until now is the pressure historical context exerted on its composition, given Elizabeth’s personal entanglement in the Nazi rise to power. Morgan’s biography inspires fresh appreciation of historical contextualisation. This is one of the many important examples of recuperation in Morgan’s biography: writing biography brings back to vivid understanding the personal experiences, revealed in archival documents like letters, within history’s master narratives, as well as cultural influences like Wagnerism. In doing so, such authorship built upon archival intimacies and insights recuperates significance and poignancy otherwise lost. The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield is a masterpiece of archival research and literary and historical recuperation. Not only does it demonstrate the remarkable dedication of its editors, Claire Davison and Gerri Kimber, but like Morgan’s biography it succeeds magnificently in bringing its subjects, Mansfield and her correspondents, to life on the page. This edition does much more than collect the letters; the general introduction, the introductions to each correspondent and the footnotes reveal worlds of detail and nuance. A world otherwise lost floats to the surface when a letter from Mansfield to S. S. Koteliansky is accompanied by explanatory footnotes fleshing out references to Maxim Gorky and other writers of the Russian diaspora, with comments on the early years of the Soviet Union and on the pioneering work of the World Literature Publishing House (pp. 91–2). In another example of the volume’s wealth of erudition, the editors explain Mansfield’s reference to the shadow of a white chrysanthemum on her wall, ‘like some fantastic Japanese picture’ (p. 683), in a longing 1908 letter to her lover, Garnet Trowell. The footnote reveals another world within this world of correspondence, that of the chrysanthemum’s revered status in Japanese culture and of late nineteenth-century Japonisme (p. 684). Mansfield’s own love of detail is shared by her letters’ editors, but, again, the overall impression is one of selectivity and discernment, and not of a ferocious will to include everything exhaustively. Editorial selectivity has informed this project’s recuperation of former lives, and readers come away enlightened, amazed and curious. The collection offers myriad ways to recover the past and its shimmering vitalities. One would be to imagine Mansfield’s life as Elizabeth’s neighbour in the Swiss Alps, and to consider how their friendship might have influenced the conceptualisation and composition of The Enchanted April. While volume 1 of the Letters contains the correspondence with Elizabeth von Arnim herself, this volume, with correspondents K–Z, contains many letters to other correspondents from Mansfield’s Swiss retreat. These include letters written from the chalet to both 194

Katherine Mansfield, Illness, Recuperation and Re-enchantment S. S. Koteliansky, one of her dearest friends and her cherished literary collaborator, and to Lady Ottoline Morrell. Indeed, these two correspondents occupy considerable space in the volume: 70 and 251 pages, respectively. In June of 1922, Mansfield writes to Koteliansky with wry affection about one of her cats, currently under the care of Ida Baker: ‘he has a superb tail. In all his ways he can be trusted to behave like a gentleman. He is extremely independent and, of course, understands everything that is said to him’ (p. 94). Mansfield’s characteristic charm in this letter continues with her description of a view of cows from her hotel: (I)n 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. 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. (p. 94)

Written under the duress of illness, this description reminds us of Mansfield’s fertile, transformative imagination, her sheer command of living to write, and writing to live, with impressive sparks of optimism and joy. Is it too much of a stretch to imagine that the kind of pose Mansfield strikes here might have influenced the author of The Enchanted April and her creation of delighted, transformed characters who embrace nature anew? We find the same enchanted demeanor in a 1921 letter Mansfield wrote to Morrell from her rented Swiss chalet: We are so high up (5000 feet above the sea) that a cool breeze filters from Heaven – and the forests are always airy . . . [. . .] 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. (p. 292)

Mansfield’s joy in her setting is much like that of The Enchanted April’s London transplants on their Italian sojourn; like them, she is reawakened, even reborn. Readers need not balk at the sentimentality of twinkling streams and dancing cows. This is salutary good humour. The letters may be putting on a brave front where her journals convey a greater admission of physical and mental suffering: but are the letters, 195

Rishona Zimring in their insistent sociability, necessarily less accurate? We know from Mansfield’s letters to Elizabeth that the latter showered her with gifts of flowers during the months of their shared Swiss idyll. Perhaps Mansfield returned the favour with gifts of words. If The Enchanted April is a novel about recuperation, surely it is a novel about the recuperative power of friendships and sociability, their capacity to bring and sustain joy in difficult circumstances. Such, too, is the resounding lesson of Mansfield’s letters. In the absence of such gifts and companionship, sometimes things take their place and offer consolation. Aimée Gasston is a particularly skillful and eloquent interpreter of objects and their emotional meanings. Her book on Modernist Short Fiction and Things elucidates their role in works by Woolf, Mansfield and Bowen. She also provides a kind of toolbox for reading objects with which we might consider another dimension of recuperation in The Enchanted April and its COVID-19-era popularity. In The Enchanted April, the eldest of the English tourists, Mrs Fisher, feels her recuperation, somewhat nervously, as a transformation from a previous self of ‘mere dead wood’ to a new one ‘suddenly putting forth fresh leaves’: ‘Dignity demanded that she should have nothing to do with fresh leaves at her age and yet there it was – the feeling that at any moment now she might crop out all green’ (p. 178).3 Rose Arbuthnot, who has lost a child and has been living ‘swamped’ in thoughts of her husband, experiences her Italian transformation as a restoration of vision, and in particular a newfound ability to see the things around her: ‘Rose was ashamed of how little she had noticed in the house, and how few of the things [its owner] spoke of as curious and beautiful in it she had even seen [. . .] she appeared to have lived in San Salvatore blindly’ (p. 197). The dominant metaphor for rejuvenation in The Enchanted April is in fact Mrs Fisher’s; the novel’s restorative powers reside in its oft-noted profusions and catalogues of greenery. But Rose’s restored vision of objects hints at another dimension of recuperation for readers of both The Enchanted April and of Mansfield’s stories: the life-enhancing pleasure in appreciating things. Gasston’s attentiveness to this dimension of sanative experience reveals substantial meanings in what otherwise might seem small and insignificant. In her chapter on Mansfield, Gasston exudes delight in celebrating the many pleasures, often therapeutic, of taking seriously the seemingly ordinary. The inspirational object of this interpretation is an everyday object many readers or fans might ignore, but which was in fact one of Mansfield’s ‘most prized and faithful possessions, a travelling fruit knife which she kept with her in her handbag wherever she went’ (p. 82). In light of this review essay’s theme of illness and recuperation, the knife 196

Katherine Mansfield, Illness, Recuperation and Re-enchantment takes on a special significance. As a faithful companion to travelling, eating, and eating while travelling, it fires up our imaginations to consider the many moments Mansfield was on the move, not bedridden, not too ill to eat: each moment a glorious and poignant achievement. For Gasston, the knife is a symbol of the achievements of Mansfield’s ‘strongest stories, where creativity, liberty, and incorporation mingle and coalesce’ (p. 82). The governing metaphor of Gasston’s celebration of Mansfield’s life and work is the snack, and she imbues it with meanings which allow us to understand her stories as snacks without denigrating them. For the snack is ‘portable, brief, and satisfying’ (pp.  81–2) and ‘a means of negotiating personal and literary freedoms in defiance of convention, questioning boundaries and working against the restrictions inherited from the endless, many-coursed meals and novels of the Victorian era’ (p. 83). Gasston offers many insightful interpretations of Mansfield’s stories, letters and journals. Especially meaningful in the present context is a 1921 letter to Elizabeth von Arnim in which Mansfield writes: ‘There are times when Milton seems the only food to me’ (p. 97). With a heightened sense of the ways Mansfield defiantly affirmed life through passionate and sustained reading as well as writing, Gasston traces Mansfield’s artistic method as a ‘sensuous interaction with the material world’ (p. 94). Gasston considers, first, certain stories which explore the failure of such an artistic method in Mansfield’s fictional characters. Such failure is found in a man who refuses to eat (‘The Man Without a Temperament’); in the rejection of food and experience (‘Je ne parle pas français’); and in food’s meaninglessness and ‘empty culinary encounters’ (‘Bliss’) (pp. 107–11). Gasston contrasts such failures with stories which offer ‘gustative wisdom’ (p. 113). Her chapter expresses a bracing confidence in these stories’ life-affirming powers, in the details and qualities which make them, like The Enchanted April, lively companions in a recuperation from illness, including the illness of (self) denial. Gasston finds these restorative qualities in the ‘creative eating’ of ‘Prelude’, in which the fantasy picnic of Kezia and Lottie conjures ‘the alchemical out of the ordinary’ (p. 115). Such powers are in the magical gift of the egg at the end of ‘Feuille d’Album’ and that story’s profound optimism (p. 117). They are in that ‘gloriously chaotic hymn to life’, ‘Bank Holiday’ (p. 121); in the ‘reckless eating’ that signifies freedom from convention and class in ‘The Garden Party’ (pp. 122–3); in the ‘liberty’ of Mrs Stubbs’ tea spread in ‘At the Bay’ (p.  125). Gasston’s generous and joyful interpretive approach persuasively argues the link between eating and autonomy in ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, offering an optimistic reading of that story in which Constantia 197

Rishona Zimring ‘­grapples with profound inquiry rather than evading it’ (p. 128). Many of the triumphant characters who arrive at autonomy and liberty are women. Gasston’s chapter is informed by a range of literary critics and cultural theorists, including John Dewey, Pierre Bourdieu, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Baudrillard and Roland Barthes. The French influence on Gasston’s celebration of the literary, and of food, suggests, as well, the ongoing relevance of the term ‘écriture feminine’ to modernist studies. To quote from Gasston’s introduction to this book on Woolf, Mansfield and Bowen: here we find ‘a democratic space where a smallscaled, experimental écriture was able to blossom without restraint in the hands of these female writers’ (p. 14). Modernist Short Fiction and Things privileges female writers and, in the stories by Mansfield it elevates to the category of ‘strong’, it privileges female characters who have exceptional imagination, creativity, resourcefulness, resilience and powers of endurance. The ‘feminine informal’ is Gaurav Majumdar’s theme for his chapter on Mansfield in Illegitimate Freedom: Informality in Modernist Literature, 1900–1940. That chapter joins others on Woolf, Eliot, Joyce and Auden in a return to the idea that, above all, modernism is oppositional and subversive. Rather than argue this through a valorisation of irony (as Fredric Jameson did in ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’),4 Majumdar foregrounds the term informality as a kind of attitude of free association, irreverence and anti-normative resistance. He draws on a wide range of theorists, including those associated with affect theory such as Lauren Berlant, Sianne Ngai and Sara Ahmed, to define informality in conversation with enquiries into intimacy and (referring to an older paradigm) transgression (with reference to Peter Stallybrass and Allon White’s The Politics and Poetics of Transgression). Indeed, one recuperation at work in Illegitimate Freedom is the effort to restore the prominence of theory per se to interpretive methodology. However, while Illegitimate Freedom welcomes readers to meander among names like Benjamin, Derrida and Foucault as well as Marx and Freud, its introduction gives priority to one woman writer above all, as theorist: Virginia Woolf. Woolf’s ‘The Mark on the Wall’ and ‘Modern Fiction’ dictate the terms of Majumdar’s argument and strongly inform his position that informality ‘reflects a modern attitude – ways of seeing, style, or behavior that reflects the dynamism and agitation of modernity’ (p. 6). Majumdar’s writing attentively negotiates the differences and tensions between such a reflection of modernity and a resistance to it. In other words, does modernist fiction (such as Woolf’s and Mansfield’s) succeed in its capacity to hold up a highly sensitised mirror to the rapidity and ephemerality of modern experience? Or, does it resist that ‘agitation’ 198

Katherine Mansfield, Illness, Recuperation and Re-enchantment in its capacity to slow readers down and back them off from routines of haste? Is informality modernity’s illness or its cure? At the beginning of his introduction, Majumdar quotes a long passage from Woolf’s ‘The Mark on the Wall’, protesting ‘generalisations’ which ‘bring back somehow Sunday in London, Sunday afternoon walks, Sunday luncheons, and also ways of speaking of the dead, clothes, and habits – like the habit of sitting all together in one room until a certain hour, although nobody liked it. There was a rule for everything’ (p. 2). Woolf’s passage ends with excited anticipation of a post-war mood that will do away with such rules, ‘leaving us all with an intoxicating sense of illegitimate freedom – if freedom exists’ (p. 2). Hence the title of Majumdar’s book, and a reading of informality as rule-breaking, a resistance to normality. In the passage from Woolf, the conspicuous and repeated ‘Sunday’ indicates that not just any rules, but religious rules, are at stake. And the rules of the Church hold true for both illness and cure, a topic Woolf famously explored in her defiant essay ‘On Being Ill’, in which she rejects sympathy and ritual in favour of a freedom and solitude that come from the escape from rules that illness affords, including rules of feminine behaviour in sickrooms.5 This brings us back to the ongoing relevance of écriture feminine to the reading of modernist women writers, and I would include here both the more avant-garde Mansfield and Woolf, and the middlebrow and subtly subversive Elizabeth von Arnim. Illegitimate Freedom foregrounds écriture feminine in its interpretation of Mansfield, quoting Hélène Cixous in order to show how Majumdar’s ‘informality’ shares subversive potential with her terms. He quotes the following passage from ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’: Flying is woman’s gesture – flying in language and making it fly . . . [W]omen take after birds and robbers just as robbers take after women and birds. They . . . go by, fly the coop, take pleasure in jumbling the order of space, in disorienting it, in changing around the furniture, dislocating things and values, breaking them all up, emptying structures, and turning propriety upside down. (p. 73)

Majumdar reads ‘Bliss’ as exemplary of Mansfield’s deployment of ‘formal disorientation and impropriety’ (p. 73), qualities he goes on to describe as ‘textual forms [. . .] that resist, critique, subvert, or exceed conventionally sanctioned expression’ and ‘have their behavioural analogue in an easing and reconstitution of normative interaction’ (p. 75). He finds these forms and behaviours in ‘The Garden Party’ as well, in the ‘colloquialism and unexpected physical ease’ in the dead man’s house. Earlier in his chapter, he provides a reading of Locke that associates the bourgeois home with liberalism; hence informality plays out as a class struggle, in which 199

Rishona Zimring écriture feminine is mapped onto a working-class opposition to middle-class norms. These oppositions may not always fall into place neatly. Women’s creativity and complexity may exceed and challenge the boundaries of class and the rigidities of class struggle, and such may be one of the lessons of Morgan’s biography, the edited Letters, and Gasston’s reading of ‘things’. Would The Enchanted April be as popular as it is if it were a novel about four men who vacation in Italy? Perhaps Majumdar’s book on the illegitimate freedom of informality offers another way to read the recuperation in The Enchanted April. Not only female companionship in a cultivated floral haven leads to rejuvenation; it was the very informality of the chance encounter with a London newspaper advertisement that planted the idea in a fertile female imagination in the first place. The recuperation of the chance encounter as a hallmark of modernity, of modern storytelling and of a rejuvenating approach to daily life, brings us to the final new book under consideration here. Andrew Kahn’s The Short Story: A Very Short Introduction belongs to Oxford University Press’s series of ‘Very Short Introductions’ launched in 1995. It is a welcome addition to the scholarship on Mansfield and on the form for which she is justly celebrated as an innovator and expert. Kahn’s first chapter, ‘The Rise of the Short Story’, underscores Mansfield’s importance in the history of the genre by quoting V. S. Pritchett’s appreciation of Mansfield’s ‘ability to crystallize “in a cry, a phrase, a gesture, a moment of feeling or vision”’ an ability to manipulate what is ‘best about the genre’ (p. 12). Kahn goes on to use several stories by Mansfield as examples in his Introduction’s eight chapters on history, openings, voices, place, plot, ironies and reversals, Chekhov’s influence and legacy, and endings. With a focus on Paris, the chapter on ‘Place’ explores ‘Je ne parle pas français’ as an example of stories about characters ‘striving to find in Paris an escape from a present condition into a more fluid state’ (p. 62). This ambition may of course lead to failure (as we see in Gasston’s reading of the same story), but it raises possibilities for the chance encounter in urban settings that we find to succeed (as in Gasston’s example of ‘Feuille d’Album’ and, of course, The Enchanted April). Kahn’s inclusion of a chapter on Paris allows for a newfound appreciation of Mansfield’s work in a transtemporal context: her stories are considered alongside stories about Paris by Guy de Maupassant, Georges Perec, Henry James, Edith Wharton and Richard Ford. This list of authors draws attention to another virtue of Kahn’s approach: its geographical and cultural diversity. Indeed, the internationalism of Kahn’s Very Short Introduction enhances an understanding of Mansfield’s achievements, along with his bracingly clear explanations of the short story’s specific formal features. 200

Katherine Mansfield, Illness, Recuperation and Re-enchantment Kahn’s international range of reference situates readers in a cosmopolitan context. That may be peculiarly poignant at the present time. On the first page of his preface, Kahn writes that the twentieth century is the period in which the short story accelerated the pace of its innovations and impacts, and went global. For much of the century, from the 1930s to the 1980s, scholarship on the genre promoted ‘the story as a proxy for national history’, grounded in assumptions that certain national cultures lent themselves to expression in the form, especially the Irish, Americans and Russians. In other words, Kahn explains, the cultures of the Irish, Americans and Russians were seen to be those of people who had ‘suffered social exclusion, whether through poverty or colonization’, providing a pool of ‘marginal characters [. . .] best suited to short narratives’ (pp. xix–xxi). This provocative claim linking three cultures then gives rise to counter-claims (the English too have excelled at the genre), and to various examples of the ways in which globalisation and translation have shaped an international market for short stories. One example can be found in Chapter 5, ‘The plot thickens . . . and thins’. Kahn gestures towards the ways in which short stories thrill readers with dread and suspense, pointing to the international influence of ‘Anglo-American potboilers and ghost stories’ (p. 66). His first example of this influence is the 1921 short story ‘In a Bamboo Grove’ by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, later adapted as Rashomon by Akira Kurosawa: a striking example of the short story genre’s tremendous cultural adaptability, power and reach. Cultural exchange comes to the fore again in the chapter on Chekhov (Kahn is a Russian specialist), which offers a lucid summary of his stories’ appeal: their social inclusiveness, their representation of the lives of ordinary people, their irresolution, and their ability to ‘create female characters from the inside out’ (p. 95). Kahn offers a cogent and complex understanding of Chekhov’s appeal to Mansfield. Though readers might approach Chekhov like they would a sentimental uncle, Mansfield recognises this as a distortion of the satire and ironic bite of his work that allow him to construct a position of both moral disinterestedness and empathy (p. 96). Kahn’s formalist and ethical vocabulary and reasoning are lucid and compelling, enriching and deepening our understanding of the genre and its forms, its history, and its ongoing relevance and power. Each of the recent books considered here could provoke one to look back. In 2023, one might look back just a few years to a time of global crisis beginning in 2020; one might look back around a hundred years to the publication of The Garden Party and Other Stories or of The Enchanted April, two books published in the wake of war and a global pandemic, and to the final, illness-afflicted years of Mansfield’s life; one 201

Rishona Zimring might look back within a shorter time span, to the heyday of theory in the Anglo-American academy, or to new historicism, or to new formalism; one might look back to print culture itself, to ink-stained fingers setting type or penning the letters retrieved from library archives. From this contemplative stance towards the past, we might pause to reflect on how we spent the months – turning to years – of the pandemic. Like Hardy’s speaker, one leans, as it were, upon a gate between then and now and uncertainty about what’s to come. In this context, and in consideration of the books gathered here, an impression lingers with me. In each book, Mansfield emerges enchanting and enchanted: in each book, she is a genius figure. She is Elizabeth’s muse and inspiration; she pours forth an astonishing volume of letters and an overwhelming spiritual vitality in the midst of extreme physical fragility; her acumen glitters in and like the shining blade of a picnic knife; she belongs on high beside Eliot, Joyce, Auden and Woolf; she is the modern innovator of the short story form, alongside Chekhov. Each of the books gathered here, in its own way, celebrates the life and work of Katherine Mansfield as vast, durable, portable and generative. If we read and talk about them together, we might participate with them in healing. Notes 1. Letter from Katherine Mansfield to Elizabeth von Arnim, 31 December 1922, CL1, p. 64. 2. For a thoroughgoing and bracing account, see Alex Ross, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2020). 3. Elizabeth von Arnim, The Enchanted April (New York: New York Review Books, 2007), p. 178. 4. Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, in Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1983), pp. 111–25. 5. Virginia Woolf, ‘On Being Ill’, with Notes from Sick Rooms by Julia Stephen (Amherst: Paris Press, 2012).

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Notes on Contributors

Maurizio Ascari teaches English Literature at the University of Bologna (Italy). He has published books and essays on crime fiction (A CounterHistory of Crime Fiction, 2007, nominated for the Edgar Awards), transcultural literature (Literature of the Global Age, 2011) and inter-art exchanges (Cinema and the Imagination in Katherine Mansfield’s Writing, 2014). He has also edited and translated works by Henry James, Katherine Mansfield, William Faulkner, Jack London and William Wilkie Collins. Erika Baldt is a professor at Rowan College at Burlington County in New Jersey, where she teaches composition and literature. Her research interests include Anglo-American modernism and cosmopolitanism, and she has published several essays on Katherine Mansfield and her contemporaries. Charles Ferrall is Associate Professor in English at Victoria University of Wellington. His most recent book, co-edited with Dougal McNeill, is British Literature in Transition: 1920–1940 Futility and Anarchy (2018). He is currently writing a book about New Zealand during the ‘heroic age’ of Antarctic exploration. Aimée Gasston is author of Material Modernisms: Short Fiction and Things (2021) and co-editor of Katherine Mansfield: New Directions (2020). She is a previous winner of the Katherine Mansfield Essay Prize and has published on Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen and Katherine Mansfield. Her current research interests include Claude Cahun and Robert Walser. Martin Griffiths is a cello teacher and examiner for the New Zealand Music Education Board and principal cellist of Opus Orchestra (NZ), as well as guest member of NZ Barok and founding member of Vox Baroque. His presentations of ‘Katherine Mansfield, Cellist’ include the 2019 KMS conference in Krakow, Poland, and the ‘Mansfield & Music’ exhibition at the Katherine Mansfield House and Garden, Wellington, 2022. Martin has published in Katherine Mansfield Studies, Turnbull Library Record, and Tinakori. 203

Katherine Mansfield, Illness and Death Janka Kascakova is Associate Professor in English at the Catholic University in Ružomberok, Slovakia, and Palacký University Olomouc, the Czech Republic. Her research centres mainly on early twentiethcentury English literature, modernism and the modernist short story. She is the author of numerous articles and book chapters and is co-editor of several volumes; most recently with Gerri Kimber and Władysław Witalisz, she co-edited Katherine Mansfield: International Approaches (2022). Gerri Kimber is a Visiting Professor at the University of Northampton. She is co-editor of Katherine Mansfield Studies and was Chair of the Katherine Mansfield Society for ten years (2010–20). She is the author of Katherine Mansfield: The Early Years (2016), Katherine Mansfield and the Art of the Short Story (2015) and Katherine Mansfield: The View from France (2008). She is the Series Editor of the fourvolume Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield (2012–16). Together with Claire Davison, she is currently editing a new four-volume edition of Katherine Mansfield’s complete letters for EUP (2020–4). Brigitte N. McCray is Associate Professor of English at Pellissippi State Community College in Knoxville, Tennessee. Her article ‘“Good Landscapes Be But Lies”: W. H. Auden, the Second World War, and Haunted Places’ won the Lionel Basney Award for outstanding article of the year from Christianity & Literature in 2017. Her other essays and reviews have appeared in Affirmations: of the modern, The Explicator, The Journal of Homosexuality, and Ecozon@:European Journal of Literature, Culture, and Environment. Todd Martin is Professor of English at Huntington University, and President of the Katherine Mansfield Society. He has published articles on John Barth, E. E. Cummings, Clyde Edgerton, Julia Alvarez, Edwidge Danticat, Sherwood Anderson, and Katherine Mansfield. He is the coeditor of Katherine Mansfield Studies, editor of Katherine Mansfield and the Bloomsbury Group (2017), and The Bloomsbury Handbook to Katherine Mansfield (2021). He has also edited the manuscripts of several Mansfield stories for publication with the book series, Modernist Archives: Selected Stories of Katherine Mansfield: A Manuscript Critical Edition (forthcoming, 2023). Derek Ryan is Senior Lecturer in Modernist Literature at the University of Kent. He has published widely on modernism, animal studies and 204

Notes on Contributors critical theory, and he is editor of Edinburgh University Press’s book series Virginia Woolf – Variations. His latest monograph is Bloomsbury, Beasts and British Modernist Literature (2022). Wen-Shan Shieh (Hannah) is Associate Professor in the Department of Applied Foreign Languages at Shih Chien University in Taipei, Taiwan. Her research interests include modernism, English short fiction and medical humanities. She received her PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of Sussex in 2013. Her publications include ‘Establishing a Relational Self in Collaborative Caring Relations: Alice Munro’s Illness Narrative of Alzheimer’s Disease’ (2020, in Chinese), ‘A Critique of Stigma Transformation in Alice Munro’s “Face” and “Child’s Play”’ (2018) and ‘The Uncanny, Open Secrets, and Katherine Mansfield’s Modernist Legacy in Alice Munro’s Everyday Gothic’ (2017). Angela Smith is Professor Emerita at the University of Stirling. Her books include East African Writing in English (1989), Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two (1999), Katherine Mansfield: A Literary Life (2000), an edition of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1997) and of Katherine Mansfield Selected Stories (2002); and, with Gerri Kimber, The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield, vol. 3 (Edinburgh University Press, 2014). C. K. Stead is Professor Emeritus at the University of Auckland and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has written a lot about Mansfield and edited an edition of her letters and journals. His most recent publication was a third volume of memoirs, What You Made of It. His new collection of poems, Say I Do This, was published in 2023. Jessica Whyte is a PhD student at the University of Sussex, working on a Creative and Critical Writing thesis about modernist women, illness and writing, including Katherine Mansfield. She is a published poet and writer and has published works in the Katherine Mansfield Studies, as well as in Tinakori and Heron. Rishona Zimring is the author of Social Dance and the Modernist Imagination in Interwar Britain (2013). She has published essays on modernist writers such as Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, Jean Rhys and Virginia Woolf, as well as on later writers such as Brigid Brophy, Philip Larkin, Alice Munro and Salman Rushdie. In addition to her book on social dance, she has published essays on modern dance in e­ xamples 205

Katherine Mansfield, Illness and Death ranging from the Camargo Society to Katherine Dunham. She teaches modernist and postcolonial literature at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, and has recently added a course on ‘Writing and Illness’ to her regular offerings.

206

Index

‘15 Animals That Went to War’ (Imperial War Museum), 16n ‘The 1918 Influenza Epidemic’s Effects on Sex Differentials in Mortality in the United States’ (Noymer, A.; Garenne, M.), 119n Abbotsbury, 177, 182 Adams, Carol, 6, 9, 16n–18n The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory, 6, 16n The Adelphi, 163, 181 Ah, What Is It? – That I Heard: Katherine Mansfield’s Wings of Wonder (Mounic, A.), 102n Ahmed, Sara, 198 Ainsworth, Peter, 70n ‘The Origin of Snooker: The Neville Chamberlain Story’, 70n Akutagawa, Ryunosuke, 201 ‘In a Bamboo Grove’, 201 Album of Russian Songs with Guitar Accompaniment (de Lisle Allen, F.), 154n ‘The Aloe’ (Mansfield, K.), 8, 12, 40–1, 47–50, 60, 62, 145 The Aloe with Prelude (ed. O’Sullivan, V.), 154n Alpers, Antony, 24, 29, 37n, 92, 102n, 111, 119n, 130, 140n, 187n The Life of Katherine Mansfield, 37n, 102n, 119n, 140n, 187n America, 107, 146, 175, 182, 193, 201–2 Animal Rights: Political and Social Change in Britain Since 1800 (Kean, H.), 6, 16n ‘The Animal that Therefore I Am (More to Follow)’ (Derrida, J., tr. Wills, D.), 17n ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ (Owen, W.), 5 Apollo, 96, 103n Arden, Mary (pseudonym of Violet le Maistre), 181, 188n ‘The Casual Acquaintance’, 181, 188n ‘A Charming Old Man’, 188n ‘The Dream’, 188n ‘Ghost Hunters’, 188n ‘A Queer Old Man’, 181 von Arnim, Beatrix (Trix), 193 von Arnim, Elizabeth, 128, 159, 191–2, 194, 197, 199, 202n Elizabeth and Her German Garden, 193

The Enchanted April, 191–2, 194–7, 200–1, 202n Mr Skeffington, 193 Arnold, Catharine, 107, 119n Pandemic 1918: The Story of the Deadliest Influenza in History, 119n Ascari, Maurizio, 56n Cinema and the Imagination in Katherine Mansfield’s Writing, 56n Ashford, Daisy, 78, 87n Where Love Lies Deepest, 79, 87n The Young Visiters, 78, 87n ‘At the Bay’ (Mansfield, K.), 8, 12, 28–9, 57–8, 60, 64, 73–4, 148, 152–3, 154n, 197 The Athenaeum, 24, 78, 90, 92, 94, 100, 131 Auden, W. H., 198, 202 ‘Autumns: II’ (Mansfield, K.), 39 Azize, Joseph, 80, 87n Gurdjieff: Mysticism, Contemplation, and Exercises, 80, 87n Bach, Johann Sebastian, 147–8 Bad Wörishofen, 151, 187n Baker, George, 87n (ed.) Gurdjieff: Essays and Reflections on the Man and His Teaching, 87n Baker, Ida, 6, 78–9, 88n, 102n, 131, 134, 139n, 195 Katherine Mansfield: The Memories of LM, 102n ‘Bank Holiday’ (Mansfield, K.), 197 ‘The Baron’ (Mansfield, K.), 8 Barry, John, 110, 119n Barthes, Roland, 198 Baudrillard, Jean, 198 Bavaria, 150, 167 Beasts of the Modern Imagination (Norris, M.), 73 Beauchamp, Connie, 193 Beauchamp, Gwendoline, 1, 21–3 Beauchamp, Harold, 22, 65, 71, 92 Beauchamp, Leslie, 39, 65 Beauchamp, Mary, 192 de Beauvoir, Simone, 198 Becker, Hugo, 147 Beddoes, Thomas, 83 Belgium, 61, 151 Bell, Anne Olivier, 119n (ed.) The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume 1, 1915–1919, 119n

207

Katherine Mansfield, Illness and Death Bendall, Edith, 22 Benjamin, Walter, 2, 2n, 198 ‘The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’, 2n Bennett, Jill, 10, 17n Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art, 10, 17n Berlant, Lauren, 198 Between Two Worlds (Murry, J. M.), 163, 186n Bizot, Richard, 44, 55n ‘Pater’s “The Child in the House” in Perspective’, 55n Blake, William, 173, 188n ‘Proverbs of Hell’, 188n ‘Blakesmoor in H-----shire’ (Lamb, C.), 41, 54n Bleak House (Dickens, C.), 21 ‘Bliss’ (Mansfield, K.), 101n, 197, 199 Bliss and Other Stories (Mansfield, K.), 72, 152 ‘“Blown to Bits!” Katherine Mansfield’s “The Garden Party” and the Great War’ (Darrohn, C.), 68n ‘Books of the Week’ (Sackville-West, V.), 76, 86n Booth, Allyson, 119n Postcards from the Trenches: Negotiating the Space Between Modernism and the First World War, 119n Bosque, Bernard, 159 Bourdieu, Pierre, 198 Bowen, Elizabeth, 196, 198 Brett, Dorothy, 37n, 76, 108–10, 155n, 165, 187n Bright Star: The Complete Poems and Selected Letters of John Keats (Keats, J.), 140n Brindle, Kim, 86n ‘“Mysterious epistles”: Letters Home in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Fiction’, 86n British Imperial War Museum, 5 Brown, Catherine, 6, 16n ‘DH Lawrence and the Anticipation of a Vegan World’, 16n Browne, Thomas, 82 ‘A Letter to a Friend, Upon Occasion of the Death of his Intimate Friend’, 82 Brussels, 148, 155n Bulman, Brian, 124 The House of Quiet People, 124 Burgan, Mary, 111, 119n, 124–5, 127, 130, 134–5, 138n–40n Illness, Gender, and Writing: The Case of Katherine Mansfield, 119n, 124, 138n Burke, L. (Mrs.), 102n (ed.) The Miniature Language of Flowers, 102n Burnett, Frances Hodgson, 102n Little Lord Fauntleroy, 102n

Butler, Pierce, 80, 87n ‘“The only truth I really care about”. Katherine Mansfield at the Gurdjieff Institute: A Biographical Reflection’, 87n ‘“By what name are we to call death?”: The Case of “An Indiscreet Journey”’ (PaccaudHuguet, J.), 17n Bynum, Helen, 83, 88n Spitting Blood: A History of Tuberculosis, 88n Byrne, Katherine, 123–4, 132–3, 138n–40n Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination, 123, 138n Caesar (Nickname for Arnold Trowell), 150–1, 155n A Campaign Against Consumption: A Collection of Papers Relating to Tuberculosis (Ransome, A.), 88n ‘The Canary’ (Mansfield, K.), 14–15, 52–3, 72, 75 Cappuccio, Richard, 69n, 80, 87n–8n, 155n ‘“His broad hat shading his face”: Tracing Rupert Brooke in the Writing of Katherine Mansfield’, 155n ‘The Swinging Gate: Katherine Mansfield’s Missionary Vision’, 87n ‘War Thoughts and Home: Katherine Mansfield’s Model of a Hardened Heart in a Broken World’, 69n Carlson, Laurie Winn, 81, 88n Cattle: An Informal Social History, 88n Carreño, Teresa, 144–6, 148 ‘The Casual Acquaintance’ (Arden, M.), 181, 188n Cattle: An Informal Social History (Carlson, L.), 88n The Causes of Tuberculosis, Together with some Account of the Prevalence and Distribution of the Disease (Cobbett, L.), 88n The Century Dictionary: An Encyclopedic Lexicon of the English Language (Whitney, W.; Smith, B.), 103n Chalet des Sapins, 159 Chalet Soleil, 159 ‘A Charming Old Man’ (Arden, M.), 188n Chekhov, Anton, 1–2, 83, 88n, 121, 130–2, 200–2 The Child in the House: An Imaginary Portrait (Pater, W.), 40–1, 44–5, 52, 55n ‘“A child of the sun”: Katherine Mansfield, Orientalism and Gurdjieff’ (Kimber, G.), 88n, 138n ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’ (Mansfield, K.), 6, 8 ‘Children of the Sun God’ (Trowell, A.; Trowell, G.; Mansfield, K.), 150, 155n

208

Index Chopin, Frédéric, 146–9, 154n ‘Preludes’, 146–8 ‘Raindrop’, 146, 148 Choreographies of the Living: Bioaesthetics in Literature, Art, and Performance (Rohman, C.), 86n Cinema and the Imagination in Katherine Mansfield’s Writing (Ascari, M.), 56n Cixous, Hélène, 199 ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, 199 Cobbett, Louis, 88n The Causes of Tuberculosis, Together with some Account of the Prevalence and Distribution of the Disease, 88n Cockbayne, Elizabeth (Betty), 164–6 The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield (eds O’Sullivan, V.; Scott, M.), 2n, 16n, 18n, 37n, 55n–6n, 68n–9n, 86n–8n, 101n–2n, 119n–20n, 138n–40n, 187n, 194, 200 Commemorative Modernisms: Women Writers, Death and the First World War (Kelly, A.), 57, 68n, 119n Complex/Archetype/Symbol in the Psychology of C. G. Jung (Jacobi, J., tr. Manheim, R.), 56n Connor, Stephen R., 14–15, 139n Hospice and Palliative Care: The Essential Guide, 139n Connor, Steven, 14–15, 18n ‘Making Flies Mean Something’, 18n Consumption and Literature: The Making of the Romantic Disease (Lawlor, C.), 83, 123, 138n Cornwall, 91, 130, 153 The Countess from Kirribilli: The Mysterious and Free-Spirited Literary Sensation Who Beguiled the World (Morgan, J.), 191, 193 ‘Covering Wings’ (Mansfield, K.), 92–4, 97, 99–100 ‘The Cowiness of the Cow’ (Proposed story) (Mansfield, K.), 71–2, 85 Cox, Ailsa, 155n ‘Katherine Mansfield and the Short Story’, 155n The Cremona, 144, 150–1, 154n–5n ‘A Cup of Tea’ (Mansfield, K.), 28 ‘Darkness as a Symbol in Katherine Mansfield’ (Wright, C. T.), 56n Darrohn, Christine, 57, 68n ‘“Blown to Bits!” Katherine Mansfield’s “The Garden Party” and the Great War’, 68n ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ (Mansfield, K.), 132, 148, 154n, 197 Davenport-Hines, R. P. T., 82, 88n Glaxo: A History to 1962, 88n Davis, Bette, 193 Davison, Claire, 72–3, 76, 85n–6n, 191, 194

(ed.) The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield: Vols 1 and 2 – Letters to Correspondents, 2n, 37n, 54n, 85n–8n, 119n–20n, 138n–40n, 154n–5n, 191, 194, 202n (ed.) The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield: Vol. 4 – The Diaries of Katherine Mansfield, including Miscellaneous Works, 36n–7n, 54n, 56n, 68n–9n, 88n–9n, 101n–4n, 119n, 138n–40n, 154n–6n ‘Introduction: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Epistolarity’, 86n ‘Introduction: Living in Letters’, 85n Death and the Author: How D. H. Lawrence Died, and was Remembered (Ellis, D.), 89n Delius, Frederick, 155n ‘A Mass of Life’, 155n ‘The Well at Cerne’, 177, 188n Depth Psychology and a New Ethic (Jung, C. G.), 42 Derrida, Jacques, 10, 17n, 198 ‘The Animal that Therefore I Am (More to Follow)’, 17n Dewey, John, 198 ‘DH Lawrence and the Anticipation of a Vegan World’ (Brown, C.), 16n The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume 1, 1915–1919 (ed. Bell, A.), 119n Dickens, Charles, 21–2 Bleak House, 21 Dombey and Son, 22 ‘Difficult Passages in the Song of Songs’ (Haupt, P.), 101n Diment, Galya, 83, 87n–8n, 132, 140n ‘Post Diagnosis: Bashkirtseff, Chekhov and Gorky through Mansfield’s Prism of Tuberculosis’, 88n, 140n Dimka, Jessica, 109, 119n ‘Tuberculosis as a Risk Factor for 1918 Influenza Pandemic Outcomes’, 119n Doleschal, Mareike, 68n ‘Shakespeare’s Favourite Flowers: The Marigold’, 68n ‘The Doll’s House’ (Mansfield, K.), 21–2, 33, 51, 74 Dombey and Son (Dickens, C.), 22 The Dominion, 150 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 130, 181 The Doves’ Nest and Other Stories (Mansfield, K.), 72 Dowson, Ernest, 20 ‘The Dream’ (Arden, M.), 188n ‘Dream-Children: A Reverie’ (Lamb, C.), 54n ‘E. M. Forster in Epistolary Mode: Beginning with the Letters’ (Stape, J.), 86n

209

Katherine Mansfield, Illness and Death ‘The Earth Child’ (Mansfield, K.), 151 The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield: Vols 1 and 2 – Letters to Correspondents (eds Davison, C.; Kimber, G.), 2n, 37n, 54n, 85n–8n, 119n–20n, 138n–40n, 154n–5n, 191, 194, 202n The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield: Vols 1 and 2 – The Collected Fiction (eds Kimber, G.; O’Sullivan, V.), 2n, 16n–18n, 29, 36n–8n, 55n–6n, 68n–9n, 86n–7n, 101n–2n, 120n, 138n, 153n–6n The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield: Vol. 3 – The Poetry and Critical Writings (eds Kimber, G.; Smith, A.), 36n–7n, 69n, 102n–4n, 154n–5n The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield: Vol. 4 – The Diaries of Katherine Mansfield, including Miscellaneous Works (eds Kimber, G.; Davison, C.), 36n–7n, 54n, 56n, 68n–9n, 88n–9n, 101n–4n, 119n, 138n–40n, 154n–6n ‘Die Einsame’ (Mansfield, K.), 52 Eliot, T. S., 71, 198, 202 Elizabeth and Her German Garden (von Arnim, E.), 193 Ellis, A. E., 124 The Rack, 124 Ellis, David, 84, 89n Death and the Author: How D. H. Lawrence Died, and was Remembered, 89n Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Bennett, J.), 10, 17n Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism (Hammond, M.), 17n The Enchanted April (von Arnim, E.), 191–2, 194–7, 200–1, 202n England, 8, 75, 91, 97, 151, 168, 175, 182, 193 Envisioning Disease, Gender, and War: Women’s Narratives of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic (Fisher, J.), 118n Eros, 45 Esdale, Logan, 86n ‘Gertrude Stein, Laura Riding and the Space of Letters’, 86n Evans, Lawrence, 55n (ed.) Letters of Walter Pater, 55n ‘Evening Song of the Thoughtful Child’ (Mansfield, K.), 23 Fabre, Jean-Henri, 14 ‘Fairy Tale’ (Stanley, E.), 92, 94 The Fantasia of the Unconscious (Lawrence, D. H.), 174–5, 184 Feminist, Queer, Crip (Kafer, A.), 120n Fergusson, J. D., 24–5

Fernihough, Anne, 9, 17n Freewomen and Supermen: Edwardian Radicals and Literary Modernism, 17n ‘Feuille d’Album’ (Mansfield, K.), 197, 200 Fifield, Peter, 73, 84, 88n–9n Modernism and Physical Illness: Sick Books, 74, 88n Finch, Henry Leroy, 80, 87n ‘The Sacred Cosmos: Teachings of G. I. Gurdjieff’, 87n First World War, 1, 5–7, 11, 14, 24, 31, 57, 59, 62–4, 68, 69n, 107–8, 137, 164 Fisher, Jane, 107, 118n Envisioning Disease, Gender, and War: Women’s Narratives of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic, 118n ‘The Fly’ (Mansfield, K.), 8, 14, 54, 58, 60–6, 68, 72 Fontainebleau-Avon, 9, 29, 71–2, 77, 127, 168 Forster, E. M., 192 Foucault, Michel, 198 Four Archetypes: Mother, Rebirth, Spirit, Trickster (Jung, C. G., tr. Hull, R.), 55n France, 41, 71, 91, 107, 127, 147, 168 Frank, Arthur W., 1, 2n The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness and Ethics, 2n Freewomen and Supermen: Edwardian Radicals and Literary Modernism (Fernihough, A.), 17n Freud, Sigmund, 105, 118n, 198 Freud: A Life for our Time (Gay, P.), 118n Fullerton, Jinnie, 193 The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (Heidegger, M., trs McNeill, W.; Walker, N.), 87n Fussell, Paul, 69n The Great War and Modern Memory, 69n Gamble, Mary, 164 ‘The Garden Party’ (Mansfield, K.), 22, 31, 35–6, 57, 60, 197, 199 The Garden Party and Other Stories (Mansfield, K.), 6, 148, 152, 201 Garenne, Michel, 109, 119n ‘The 1918 Influenza Epidemic’s Effects on Sex Differentials in Mortality in the United States’, 119n ‘Gas in the Great War’ (Patton, J.), 69n Gasston, Aimée, 87n, 191, 196–8, 200 Modernist Short Fiction and Things, 191, 196, 198 Gay, Peter, 118n Freud: A Life for our Time, 118n George, Lloyd, 164 ‘Germans at Meat’ (Mansfield, K.), 8–9 Germany, 9, 24, 147, 151

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Index ‘Gertrude Stein, Laura Riding and the Space of Letters’ (Esdale, L.), 86n ‘Ghost Hunters’ (Arden, M.), 188n Glaxo, 82 Glaxo: A History to 1962 (Davenport-Hines, R.; Slinn, J.), 88n ‘Goodbye Old Man’ (Matania, F.), 5 Gorky, Maxim, 194 The Great War and Modern Memory (Fussell, P.), 69n The Great War: Myth and Memory (Todman, D.), 69n Griffiths, Martin, 155n ‘Katherine Mansfield: Musical Student’, 155n ‘A Mysterious Lost Story by Katherine Mansfield’, 155n Gurdjieff and Mansfield (Moore, J.), 78, 87n Gurdjieff, George, 6, 71–2, 79–81, 84, 85n, 127–9, 132, 136 ‘Gurdjieff Observed’ (Lipsey, R.), 87n ‘Gurdjieff, or the Metaphysics of Energy’ (Needleman, J.), 87n Gurdjieff: Essays and Reflections on the Man and His Teaching (eds Needleman, J.; Baker, G.), 87n Gurdjieff: Mysticism, Contemplation, and Exercises (Azize, J.), 80, 87n Gurdjieff: The Anatomy of a Myth – A Biography (Moore, J.), 85n, 87n Gurr, Andrew, 53, 56n ‘Katherine Mansfield: The Question of Perspectives in Commonwealth Literature’, 56n Hammond, Meghan Marie, 8, 11, 17n Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism, 17n Hampstead, 105, 108, 176, 181 Hankin, Cherry A., 47, 55n, 103n Katherine Mansfield and Her Confessional Stories, 55n (ed.) Letters between Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry, 103n Harding, Kathryn, 98n, 103n ‘“I Sought Him but I Did Not Find Him”: The Elusive Lover in the Song of Songs’, 103n Harris, Diana R., 14, 18n, 88n ‘Milk, Blood, Ink: Mansfield’s Liquids and the Abject’, 18n, 88n Harvey, Melinda, 7, 14, 16n, 18n, 63, 69n ‘Katherine Mansfield’s Menagerie’, 16n, 69n Haupt, Paul, 101n–2n ‘Difficult Passages in the Song of Songs’, 101n ‘He wrote’ (Mansfield, K.), 100

Heidegger, Martin, 80, 87n The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, 87n The Heretic’s Feast: A History of Vegetarianism (Spencer, C.), 16n Herman, David, 74, 86n ‘Trans-Species Entanglements: Animal Assistants in Narratives about Autism’, 86n ‘“His broad hat shading his face”: Tracing Rupert Brooke in the Writing of Katherine Mansfield’ (Cappuccio, R.), 155n ‘The History of Interpretation of the Song of Songs’ (Tanner, J.), 102n Hitler, Adolf, 131 Hogarth Press, 153 Honigsbaum, Mark, 105, 118n ‘Why the 1918 Spanish Flu Defied Both Memory and Imagination’, 118n ‘Hospice and Palliative Care is a Kind of Active Treatment’ (Peng, J.), 139n Hospice and Palliative Care: The Essential Guide (Connor, S.), 139n The House of Quiet People (Bulman, B.), 124 ‘How Pearl Button was Kidnapped’ (Mansfield, K.), 27 Hull, R. F. C., 55n (tr.) Four Archetypes: Mother, Rebirth, Spirit, Trickster, 55n Hyacinthus, 96, 103n ‘“I am short of puff”: Katherine Mansfield’s Poetics of Breathing’ (Nagy-Seres, I.), 89n ‘I Could Find No Rest’ (Mansfield, K.), 145 ‘“I Sought Him but I Did Not Find Him”: The Elusive Lover in the Song of Songs’ (Harding, K.), 103n Illegitimate Freedom: Informality in Modernist Literature, 1900–1940 (Majumdar, G.), 191, 198–9 Illness as Metaphor (Sontag, S.), 83, 88n, 118n, 121, 124, 131 Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors (Sontag, S.), 137n Illness as Narrative (Jurecic, A.), 140n Illness, Gender, and Writing: The Case of Katherine Mansfield (Burgan, M.), 119n, 124, 138n Imperial War Museum, 16n ‘15 Animals That Went to War’, 16n ‘Voices of the First World War: Animals In War’, 16n ‘In a Bamboo Grove’ (Akutagawa, R.), 201 In a German Pension (Mansfield, K.), 7–8, 10–11, 24 ‘In Flanders Fields’ (McCray, J.), 59 ‘In Memory of Katherine Mansfield’ (Murry, J. M.), 126

211

Katherine Mansfield, Illness and Death ‘In Sickness and in Health: Murry, the Mountain and the Duty of Care’ (Whyte, J.), 139n ‘In the Botanical Gardens’ (Mansfield, K.), 19, 153 ‘In the Church’ (Mansfield, K.), 147 ‘An Indiscreet Journey’ (Mansfield, K.), 11 An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae (Jenner, E.), 81, 88n The Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, 6, 71–2, 75, 80, 84, 127–9, 135, 138n, 168 ‘Introduction: Gregory of Nyssa and his Fifteen Homilies on the Song of Songs’ (Norris, R.), 102n ‘Introduction: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Epistolarity’ (Davison, C.; Kimber, G.), 86n ‘Introduction: Living in Letters’ (Davison, C.; Kimber, G.), 85n Irish, 24, 201 Israel, 42, 91 Italy, 97, 111, 134, 182, 191, 200 Jacob and Esau: On the Collective Symbolism of the Brother Motif (Neumann, E., tr. Kyburz, M.), 42, 55n Jacobi, Jolande, 53, 56n Complex/Archetype/Symbol in the Psychology of C. G. Jung, 56n James, Henry, 200 Jameson, Fredric, 198, 202n ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, 198, 202n ‘Je ne parle pas français’ (Mansfield, K.), 29, 130, 197, 200 Jenner, Edward, 81, 88n An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae, 81, 88n Jerusalem, 91, 96 Jones, Kathleen, 99, 104n, 111, 154n, 187n Katherine Mansfield: The Story-Teller, 154n, 187n ‘The Mansfield Legacy’, 104n Journal of Katherine Mansfield (ed. Murry, J. M.), 126, 138n Juliet (Mansfield, K.), 149–50, 155n Julius Caesar (Shakespeare, W.), 64, 69n Jung, Carl, 42–4, 46–50, 53–4, 55n Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, 42 Four Archetypes: Mother, Rebirth, Spirit, Trickster, 55n On the Origins and History of Consciousness, 42 Psychological Types, 55n The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga: Notes on the Seminar Given in 1932 by C.G. Jung, 55n

Jurecic, Ann, 140n Illness as Narrative, 140n Kafer, Alison, 113, 120n Feminist, Queer, Crip, 120n Kafian, Adèle, 128 Kahn, Andrew, 191, 200–1 The Short Story: A Very Short Introduction, 191, 200 Kaplan, Sydney Janet, 8, 17n, 86n, 146, 154n Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction, 17n, 154n Kascakova, Janka, 69n, 126, 138n ‘Katherine Mansfield’s Children at Play’, 69n Katherine Mansfield and Her Confessional Stories (Hankin, C.), 55n ‘Katherine Mansfield and Music: NineteenthCentury Echoes’ (da Sousa Correa, D.), 155n ‘Katherine Mansfield and the Artistic Synaesthesia: Weaving Colour, Rhythm and Mood’ (Miao, M.), 155n Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction (Kaplan, S.), 17n, 154n ‘Katherine Mansfield and the Short Story’ (Cox, A.), 155n Katherine Mansfield and World War One (eds Kimber, G.; Martin, T.), 68n, 119n The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks (ed. Scott, M.), 100–1, 104n Katherine Mansfield, Selected Letters (ed. O’Sullivan, V.), 139n Katherine Mansfield, Selected Stories (ed. Smith, A.), 125, 138n Katherine Mansfield: A Biography (Meyers, J.), 68n, 138n, 187n Katherine Mansfield: A Darker View (Meyers, J.), 103n Katherine Mansfield: A Study of the Short Fiction (Kobler, J.), 119n ‘Katherine Mansfield: Musical Student’ (Griffiths, M.), 155n Katherine Mansfield: New Zealand Stories (ed. O’Sullivan, V.), 36n Katherine Mansfield: The Early Years (Kimber, G.), 154n Katherine Mansfield: The Memories of LM (Baker, I.), 102n ‘Katherine Mansfield: The Question of Perspectives in Commonwealth Literature’ (Gurr, A.), 56n Katherine Mansfield: The Story-Teller (Jones, K.), 154n, 187n Katherine Mansfield: The View from France (Kimber, G.), 103n

212

Index ‘Katherine Mansfield’s Animal Aesthetics’ (Ryan, D.), 16n, 69n, 85n ‘Katherine Mansfield’s Children at Play’ (Kascakova, J.), 69n ‘Katherine Mansfield’s Home Front: Submerging the Martial Metaphors of “The Aloe”’ (Moffett, A.), 18n, 69n ‘Katherine Mansfield’s Menagerie’ (Harvey, M.), 16n, 69n ‘Katherine Mansfield’s “The Canary” as Pointer to Deep Ecology’ (Kaya, S.), 18n Kaya, Sebnem, 18n ‘Katherine Mansfield’s “The Canary” as Pointer to Deep Ecology’, 18n Kean, Hilda, 6, 16n Animal Rights: Political and Social Change in Britain Since 1800, 6, 16n Keats and Shakespeare (Murry, J. M.), 163, 181 Keats, John, 1, 121–3, 131–2, 134–5, 140n, 164, 170, 174, 188n Bright Star: The Complete Poems and Selected Letters of John Keats, 140n ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, 135 Kelly, Alice, 57, 60, 68n–9n, 108, 119n Commemorative Modernisms: Women Writers, Death and the First World War, 57, 68n, 119n Kimber, Gerri, 17n, 51, 68n, 72–3, 76, 84, 85n–7n, 89n, 103n, 119n, 138n–9n, 154n, 159, 191, 194 ‘“A child of the sun”: Katherine Mansfield, Orientalism and Gurdjieff’, 88n, 138n (ed.) The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield: Vols 1 and 2 – Letters to Correspondents, 2n, 37n, 54n, 85n–8n, 119n–20n, 138n–40n, 154n–5n, 191, 194, 202n (ed.) The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield: Vols 1 and 2 – The Collected Fiction, 2n, 16n–18n, 29, 36n–8n, 55n–6n, 68n–9n, 86n–7n, 101n–2n, 120n, 138n, 153n–6n (ed.) The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield: Vol. 3 – The Poetry and Critical Writings, 36n–7n, 69n, 102n–4n, 154n–5n (ed.) The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield: Vol. 4 – The Diaries of Katherine Mansfield, including Miscellaneous Works, 36n–7n, 54n, 56n, 68n–9n, 88n–9n, 101n–4n, 119n, 138n–40n, 154n–6n ‘Introduction: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Epistolarity’, 86n ‘Introduction: Living in Letters’, 85n (ed.) Katherine Mansfield and World War One, 68n, 119n

Katherine Mansfield: The Early Years, 154n Katherine Mansfield: The View from France, 103n King Lear (Shakespeare, W.), 69n Knipper, Olga, 131 Kobler, J. F., 111, 119n Katherine Mansfield: A Study of the Short Fiction, 119n Koch, Robert, 121, 123 Koteliansky, S. S., 29, 37n, 54n, 75, 110, 133, 136, 194–5 Kreisler, Fritz, 148, 154n ‘Praeludium and Allegro (in the Style of Pugnani)’, 154n Kubelik, Jan, 150 Kurosawa, Akira, 201 Rashomon, 201 Kyburz, Mark, 55n (tr.) Jacob and Esau: On the Collective Symbolism of the Brother Motif, 42, 55n Lamb, Charles, 41, 54n ‘Blakesmoor in H-----shire’, 41, 54n ‘Dream-Children: A Reverie’, 54n Last Essays of Elia, 54n Lamento (Trowell, A.), 155n ‘“The Language of Behavior”: Gurdjieff and the Emergence of Modernist Autobiography’ (Swanson, C.), 85n Last Essays of Elia (Lamb, C.), 54n ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (Cixous, H.), 199 Lawlor, Clark, 83, 123, 131, 138n–9n Consumption and Literature: The Making of the Romantic Disease, 83, 123, 138n Lawrence, D. H., 1, 6, 71, 77, 84, 86n–7n, 109–10, 164, 170, 174–7, 182, 184 The Fantasia of the Unconscious, 174–5, 184 Women in Love, 77, 86n Lawrence, Frieda, 108–10, 164, 170, 182 Lea, F. A., 163–4, 186n–7n The Life of John Middleton Murry, 186n Leneman, Leah, 16n ‘No Animal Food: The Road to Veganism in Britain, 1909–1944’, 16n ‘A Letter to a Friend, Upon Occasion of the Death of his Intimate Friend’ (Browne, T.), 82 Letters between Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry (ed. Hankin, C.), 103n The Letters of Katherine Mansfield (ed. Murry, J. M.), 127 Letters of Walter Pater (ed. Evans, L.), 55n Lewis, Wyndham, 71 The Life of John Middleton Murry (Lea, F.), 186n The Life of Katherine Mansfield (Alpers, A.), 37n, 102n, 119n, 140n, 187n ‘Life of Ma Parker’ (Mansfield, K.), 26, 124

213

Katherine Mansfield, Illness and Death Lipsey, Roger, 87n ‘Gurdjieff Observed’, 87n de Lisle Allen, F., 154n Album of Russian Songs with Guitar Accompaniment, 154n The Listener, 76 Liszt, Franz, 192 ‘A Literary Approach to Tuberculosis: Lessons Learned from Anton Chekhov, Franz Kafka, and Katherine Mansfield’ (Vilaplana, C.), 139n ‘A Little Girl’s Prayer’ (Mansfield, K.), 100 Little Lord Fauntleroy (Burnett, F.), 102n Locke, John, 199 London, 21, 25, 39, 91, 105, 108–9, 130–1, 134, 146, 148, 150–1, 153, 168, 170, 182, 195, 199–200 The London Magazine, 54n Looe, 29, 153 ‘The Luftbad’ (Mansfield, K.), 9 McCray, John, 59 ‘In Flanders Fields’, 59 McGee, Diane, 13, 17n–18n Writing the Meal: Dinner in the Fiction of Early Twentieth-Century Women Writers, 17n Macnaughtan, Sarah, 66–7 My War Experiences in Two Continents, 66 McNeill, William, 87n (tr.) The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, 87n Maddison, Isobel, 8, 17n ‘Mansfield’s “Writing Game” and World War One’, 17n The Magic Mountain (Mann, T.), 124 le Maistre, Violet, 163, 176, 188n; see also Mary Arden Majumdar, Gaurav, 191, 198–200 Illegitimate Freedom: Informality in Modernist Literature, 1900–1940, 191, 198–9 ‘Tuberculosis as a Risk Factor for 1918 Influenza Pandemic Outcomes’, 119n ‘Making Flies Mean Something’ (Connor, S.), 18n Mamelund, Svenn-Erik, 109, 119n ‘A Man and His Dog’ (Mansfield, K.), 72, 74 ‘The Man Without a Temperament’ (Mansfield, K.), 124, 197 Manheim, Ralph, 56n (tr.) Complex/Archetype/Symbol in the Psychology of C. G. Jung, 56n Mann, Thomas, 124 The Magic Mountain, 124 Manoukhin, Ivan, 85, 127–8, 132, 168, 187n Mansfield, Katherine ‘The Aloe’, 8, 12, 40–1, 47–50, 60, 62, 145

‘At the Bay’, 8, 12, 28–9, 57–8, 60, 64, 73–4, 148, 152–3, 154n, 197 ‘Autumns: II’, 39 ‘Bank Holiday’, 197 ‘The Baron’, 8 ‘Bliss’, 101n, 197, 199 Bliss and Other Stories, 72, 152 ‘The Canary’, 14–15, 52–3, 72, 75 ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’, 6, 8 ‘Children of the Sun God’, 150, 155n ‘Covering Wings’, 92–4, 97, 99–100 ‘The Cowiness of the Cow’ (Proposed story), 71–2, 85 ‘A Cup of Tea’, 28 ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, 132, 148, 154n, 197 ‘The Doll’s House’, 21–2, 33, 51, 74 The Doves’ Nest and Other Stories, 72 ‘The Earth Child’, 151 ‘Die Einsame’, 52 ‘Evening Song of the Thoughtful Child’, 23 ‘Feuille d’Album’, 197, 200 ‘The Fly’, 8, 14, 54, 58, 60–6, 68, 72 ‘The Garden Party’, 22, 31, 35–6, 57, 60, 197, 199 The Garden Party and Other Stories, 6, 148, 152, 201 ‘Germans at Meat’, 8–9 ‘He wrote’, 100 ‘How Pearl Button was Kidnapped’, 27 ‘I Could Find No Rest’, 145 In a German Pension, 7–8, 10–11, 24 ‘In the Botanical Gardens’, 19, 153 ‘In the Church’, 147 ‘An Indiscreet Journey’, 11 ‘Je ne parle pas français’, 29, 130, 197, 200 Juliet, 149–50, 155n ‘Life of Ma Parker’, 26, 124 ‘A Little Girl’s Prayer’, 100 ‘The Luftbad’, 9 ‘A Man and His Dog’, 72, 74 ‘The Man Without a Temperament’, 124, 197 ‘A Married Man’s Story’, 29–31 ‘Millie’, 25, 27 ‘The Modern Soul’, 8 ‘The New Husband’, 92, 97–100 ‘Night Came Swiftly’, 50 ‘Ole Underwood’, 25 ‘The Opal Dream Cave’, 92 ‘Praeludium Chopins’, 144, 146–53, 155n Prelude, 153 ‘Prelude’, 6, 8, 10–13, 15, 22, 27, 36, 40, 47–50, 52–3, 57–8, 60–5, 73–4, 79, 101n, 143, 148–9, 152–3, 154n, 181, 197 ‘Psychology’, 92, 102n

214

Index

‘Revelations’, 27, 105–6, 111–13, 115, 117–18 ‘The Sea Child’, 92 ‘See Saw’, 140n ‘Silhouettes’, 145, 154n ‘Sorrowing Love’, 92, 94, 97, 99–100 ‘The Story of Pearl Button’, 143, 152 ‘A Suburban Fairy Tale’, 23–4, 27, 35, 140n ‘Sun and Moon’, 27, 54 ‘The Swing of the Pendulum’, 8 ‘This Flower’, 140n ‘The Thoughtful Child’, 23 The Urewera Notebook, 20 ‘Vignette: I Look Out Through the Window’, 143, 151 ‘Vignette: Summer in Winter’, 145–6, 152 ‘The Voyage’, 28–9, 74 ‘The Wind Blows’, 39 ‘The Woman at the Store’, 24–5, 27, 29, 36 ‘The Mansfield Legacy’ (Jones, K.), 104n ‘Mansfield’s “Writing Game” and World War One’ (Maddison, I.), 17n ‘The Mark on the Wall’ (Woolf, V.), 198–9 ‘A Married Man’s Story’ (Mansfield, K.), 29–31 Marsh, Patricia, 140n The Spanish Flu in Ireland: A Socio-Economic Shock to Ireland, 1918–1919, 140n Martin, Todd, 36n, 68n (ed.) Katherine Mansfield and World War One, 68n, 119n ‘The Thoughtful Child: The Sentimental Origins of Katherine Mansfield’s Children’, 36n Marvell, Andrew, 31 ‘To His Coy Mistress’, 31 Marx, Karl, 198 ‘A Mass of Life’ (Delius, F.), 155n Matania, Fortunino, 5 ‘Goodbye Old Man’, 5 Mattheson, Johann, 152, 155n Der Vollkommene Capellmeister, 155n Matthias, George, 146 de Maupassant, Guy, 200 Medcalf, Alexandra, 16n ‘Vegetarianism in World War One’, 16n A Memoir of Childhood: One Hand Clapping (Murry, J. M. Jr.), 187n Metamorphoses (Ovid, tr. Raeburn, D.), 103n Meyers, Jeffrey, 68n, 103n, 111, 125, 136, 138n–40n, 166, 187n Katherine Mansfield: A Biography, 68n, 138n, 187n Katherine Mansfield: A Darker View, 103n Miao, Miao, 155n ‘Katherine Mansfield and the Artistic Synaesthesia: Weaving Colour, Rhythm and Mood’, 155n

Miasmic Modernism, 106, 118 Midhurst, 186 ‘Milk, Blood, Ink: Mansfield’s Liquids and the Abject’ (Harris, D.), 18n, 88n The Mill of the Gods (Robins, E.), 149, 152, 155n ‘Millie’ (Mansfield, K.), 25, 27 Milton, John, 197 The Miniature Language of Flowers (ed. Burke, L.), 102n Mitchell, J. Lawrence, 56n, 57 ‘Modern Fiction’ (Woolf, V.), 198 ‘The Modern Soul’ (Mansfield, K.), 8 Modernism and Physical Illness: Sick Books (Fifield, P.), 74, 88n The Modernist Exoskeleton: Insects, War, Literary Form (Murray, R.), 18n Modernist Short Fiction and Things (Gasston, A.), 191, 196, 198 Moffett, Alex, 12, 18n, 62, 69n ‘Katherine Mansfield’s Home Front: Submerging the Martial Metaphors of “The Aloe”’, 18n, 69n Monsman, Gerald, 41, 54n ‘Pater’s “Child in the House” and the Renovation of the Self’, 54n Monteath, Kenneth, 6 Science in Diet, 6 The Moody Manners Opera Company, 143 Moore, James, 78–80, 85n, 87n Gurdjieff and Mansfield, 78, 87n Gurdjieff: The Anatomy of a Myth – A Biography, 85n, 87n Moran, Patricia, 8, 13, 17n–18n Word of Mouth: Body Language in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, 17n Morgan, Joyce, 191–4, 200 The Countess from Kirribilli: The Mysterious and Free-Spirited Literary Sensation Who Beguiled the World, 191, 193 Morrell, Ottoline, 108, 110, 117, 195 Moseley, Benjamin, 81 Mounic, Anne, 92, 102n Ah, What Is It? – That I Heard: Katherine Mansfield’s Wings of Wonder, 102n Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 192 Mr Skeffington (von Arnim, E.), 193 Mrs Dalloway (Woolf, V.), 82, 88n, 114, 120n Murray, Rachel, 18n The Modernist Exoskeleton: Insects, War, Literary Form, 18n Murry, John Middleton, 2n, 5–6, 19, 24–5, 31, 37n, 43, 50, 55n–6n, 57, 59, 68n–9n, 71, 76–8, 82–3, 86n, 88n, 90–2, 97, 99–100, 101n, 103n–4n, 108–13, 116, 122, 124–34, 136, 138n, 159, 163–6, 186n–8n Between Two Worlds, 163, 186n

215

Katherine Mansfield, Illness and Death Murry, John Middleton (cont.) ‘In Memory of Katherine Mansfield’, 126 (ed.) Journal of Katherine Mansfield, 126, 138n Keats and Shakespeare, 163, 181 (ed.) The Letters of Katherine Mansfield, 127 (ed.) Poems by Katherine Mansfield, 97, 100, 104n Murry, John Middleton Jr. (Colin), 163, 165, 187n A Memoir of Childhood: One Hand Clapping, 187n Murry, Katherine Violet Middleton, 165 Murry, Richard, 154n My War Experiences in Two Continents (Macnaughtan, S.), 66 ‘“Mysterious epistles”: Letters Home in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Fiction’ (Brindle, K.), 86n ‘A Mysterious Lost Story by Katherine Mansfield’ (Griffiths, M.), 155n

Notes from Sick Rooms (Stephen, J.), 202n Noymer, Andrew, 109, 119n ‘The 1918 Influenza Epidemic’s Effects on Sex Differentials in Mortality in the United States’, 119n

Nagy-Seres, Imola, 89n ‘“I am short of puff”: Katherine Mansfield’s Poetics of Breathing’, 89n Nardin, Jane, 7, 12, 16n, 18n ‘Poultry for Dinner in Katherine Mansfield’s “Prelude” and Virginia Woolf’s “The Shooting Party”’, 16n The Native Companion, 19 Nazism, 193–4 Needleman, Jacob, 87n ‘Gurdjieff, or the Metaphysics of Energy’, 87n (ed.) Gurdjieff: Essays and Reflections on the Man and His Teaching, 87n Neumann, Erich, 42–4, 54, 55n Jacob and Esau: On the Collective Symbolism of the Brother Motif, 42, 55n The New Age, 49, 151, 154n ‘The New Husband’ (Mansfield, K.), 92, 97–100 New, W. H., 149, 155n Reading Mansfield and Metaphors of Form, 155n New Mexico, 176, 182 New Zealand, 21, 25–6, 40, 53, 58, 60, 74, 80, 82, 88n, 146, 150, 153 Ngai, Sianne, 198 ‘Night Came Swiftly’ (Mansfield, K.), 50 No Animal Food (Wheldon, R.), 7 ‘No Animal Food: The Road to Veganism in Britain, 1909–1944’ (Leneman, L.), 16n Norris, Margot, 73 Beasts of the Modern Imagination, 73 Norris, Richard A., 91–2, 102n–3n ‘Introduction: Gregory of Nyssa and his Fifteen Homilies on the Song of Songs’, 102n

O’Brien, Edward J., 181 ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (Keats, J.), 135 ‘Ole Underwood’ (Mansfield, K.), 25 ‘On Being Ill’ (Woolf, V.), 199, 202n On the Origins and History of Consciousness (Jung, C. G.), 42 ‘“The only truth I really care about”. Katherine Mansfield at the Gurdjieff Institute: A Biographical Reflection’ (Butler, P.), 87n ‘The Opal Dream Cave’ (Mansfield, K.), 92 ‘The Origin of Snooker: The Neville Chamberlain Story’ (Ainsworth, P.), 70n O’Sullivan, Vincent, 20, 35, 36n, 38n, 90, 92, 101n, 104n, 127, 139n, 154n, 156n (ed.) The Aloe with Prelude, 154n (ed.) The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, 2n, 16n, 18n, 37n, 55n–6n, 68n–9n, 86n–8n, 101n–2n, 119n–20n, 138n–40n, 187n, 194, 200 (ed.) The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield: Vols 1 and 2 – The Collected Fiction, 2n, 16n–18n, 29, 36n–8n, 55n–6n, 68n–9n, 86n–7n, 101n–2n, 120n, 138n, 153n–6n (ed.) Katherine Mansfield, Selected Letters, 139n (ed.) Katherine Mansfield: New Zealand Stories, 36n (ed.) Poems of Katherine Mansfield, 101n, 156n Outka, Elizabeth, 73, 105–6, 117–18, 118n, 120n Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature, 73, 105, 118n, 120n ‘“Wood for the Coffins Ran Out”: Modernism and the Shadowed Afterlife of the Influenza Pandemic’, 118n Ovid, 103n Metamorphoses, 103n Owen, Wilfred, 5, 16n ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, 5 The Poems of Wilfred Owen, 16n Paccaud-Huguet, Josiane, 17n ‘“By what name are we to call death?”: The Case of “An Indiscreet Journey”’, 17n ‘Pale Horse, Pale Rider’ (Porter, K.), 115, 120n Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World (Spinney, L.), 118n ‘Palliative Care as an Active Treatment’ (Peng, J.), 129

216

Index Pandemic 1918: The Story of the Deadliest Influenza in History (Arnold, C.), 119n Paris, 53, 127–8, 147, 168, 200 Parker, Millie, 20–1 Pater, Walter, 39–41, 43–8, 55n The Child in the House: An Imaginary Portrait, 40–1, 44–5, 52, 55n The Renaissance, 44 ‘Pater’s “Child in the House” and the Renovation of the Self’ (Monsman, G.), 54n ‘Pater’s “The Child in the House” in Perspective’ (Bizot, R.), 55n Patton, James, 69n ‘Gas in the Great War’, 69n Peng, Jen-Kuei, 129, 139n ‘Hospice and Palliative Care is a Kind of Active Treatment’, 139n ‘Palliative Care as an Active Treatment’, 129 Perec, Georges, 200 The Performative Katherine Mansfield (Saker, N.), 154n Picton, 28–9, 74 Plath, Sylvia, 19, 166 Plumridge, Anna, 20, 36n (ed.) The Urewera Notebook by Katherine Mansfield, 36n Poems by Katherine Mansfield (ed. Murry, J. M.), 97, 100, 104n Poems of Katherine Mansfield (ed. O’Sullivan, V.), 101n, 156n The Poems of Wilfred Owen (Owen, W., ed. Stallworthy, J.), 16n The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (White, A.; Stallybrass, P.), 198 Pomerania, 192–3 Porter, Katherine Anne, 115, 120n ‘Pale Horse, Pale Rider’, 115, 120n ‘Post Diagnosis: Bashkirtseff, Chekhov and Gorky through Mansfield’s Prism of Tuberculosis’ (Diment, G.), 88n, 140n Postcards from the Trenches: Negotiating the Space Between Modernism and the First World War (Booth, A.), 119n ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’ (Jameson, F.), 198, 202n ‘Poultry for Dinner in Katherine Mansfield’s “Prelude” and Virginia Woolf’s “The Shooting Party”’ (Nardin, J.), 16n ‘Praeludium and Allegro (in the Style of Pugnani)’ (Kreisler, F.), 154n ‘Praeludium Chopins’ (Mansfield, K.), 144, 146–53, 155n ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads’ (Wordsworth, W.), 68n Prelude (Mansfield, K.), 153

‘Prelude’ (Mansfield, K.), 6, 8, 10–13, 15, 22, 27, 36, 40, 47–50, 52–3, 57–8, 60–5, 73–4, 79, 101n, 143, 148–9, 152–3, 154n, 181, 197 ‘Preludes’ (Chopin, F.), 146–8 Pritchett, V. S., 200 Proust, Marcel, 178 ‘Proverbs of Hell’ (Blake, W.), 188n Prussia, 192–3 Psychological Types (Jung, C. G.), 55n ‘Psychology’ (Mansfield, K.), 92, 102n The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga: Notes on the Seminar Given in 1932 by C.G. Jung (Jung, C. G., ed. Shamdasani, S.), 55n ‘A Queer Old Man’ (Arden, M.), 181 The Rack (Ellis, A.), 124 Raeburn, David, 103n (tr.) Metamorphoses, 103n ‘Raindrop’ (Chopin, F.), 146, 148 Rains, Claude, 193 Ransome, Arthur, 88n A Campaign Against Consumption: A Collection of Papers Relating to Tuberculosis, 88n Rashomon (Kurosawa, A.), 201 Reading Mansfield and Metaphors of Form (New, W.), 155n Reger, Max, 150 Reid, Susan, 104n ‘Remnants: The Witness and the Animal’ (Salith, S.), 10, 17n The Renaissance (Pater, W.), 44 ‘Revelations’ (Mansfield, K.), 27, 105–6, 111–13, 115, 117–18 Rhys, Jean, 35 Wide Sargasso Sea, 35 Rhythm, 24–5, 37n, 92, 151 Rice, Anne Estelle, 110, 112 ‘Rise Up, My Love, My Fair One’ (Willan, H.), 103n Rives, Amélie, 193 Robins, Elizabeth, 155n The Mill of the Gods, 149, 152, 155n Rohman, Carrie, 73, 77, 86n Choreographies of the Living: Bioaesthetics in Literature, Art, and Performance, 86n Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal, 73, 86n Rosenblum, Sandra P., 154n ‘The Uses of Rubato in Music, Eighteenth to Twentieth Centuries’, 154n Ross, Alex, 202n Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music, 202n Russell, Bertrand, 193

217

Katherine Mansfield, Illness and Death Russell, Francis, 193 Russia, 78, 83–4, 127, 132, 137, 143, 146, 194, 201 Ryan, Derek, 7, 16n, 69n, 85n ‘Katherine Mansfield’s Animal Aesthetics’, 16n, 69n, 85n Sackville-West, Vita, 76, 86n ‘Books of the Week’, 76, 86n ‘The Sacred Cosmos: Teachings of G. I. Gurdjieff’ (Finch, H.), 87n Saker, Nicola, 154n The Performative Katherine Mansfield, 154n Salith, Sarah, 10, 17n ‘Remnants: The Witness and the Animal’, 10, 17n de Salzmann, Alexandre, 78 Sand, Georges, 146 Sassoon, Siegfried, 15, 18n Siegfried Sassoon Diaries: 1915–1918, 18n Scarlatti, Domenico, 147 Science in Diet (Monteath, K.), 6 Scott, Grant F., 188n (ed.) Selected Letters of John Keats, 188n Scott, Margaret, 100, 104n (ed.) The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, 2n, 16n, 18n, 37n, 55n–6n, 68n–9n, 86n–8n, 101n–2n, 119n–20n, 138n–40n, 187n, 194, 200 (ed.) The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, 100–1, 104n ‘The Sea Child’ (Mansfield, K.), 92 ‘See Saw’ (Mansfield, K.), 140n Selected Letters of John Keats (ed. Scott, G.), 188n Semple, Dugald, 7 The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (Adams, C.), 6, 16n Shakespeare, William, 64–5, 69n Julius Caesar, 64, 69n King Lear, 69n Titus Andronicus, 69n ‘Shakespeare’s Favourite Flowers: The Marigold’ (Doleschal, M.), 68n Shamdasani, Sonu, 55n (ed.) The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga: Notes on the Seminar Given in 1932 by C.G. Jung, 55n Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 121–2, 131 The Short Story: A Very Short Introduction (Kahn, A.), 191, 200 Shuttleton, David, 81, 88n Smallpox and the Literary Imagination 1660–1820, 81, 88n Siegfried Sassoon Diaries: 1915–1918 (Sassoon, S.), 18n The Signature, 39

‘SIGNES OF SPRING: A Letter from Katherine Mansfield’ (Smith, A.), 87n ‘Silhouettes’ (Mansfield, K.), 145, 154n SKASE Journal of Literary Studies, 138n Slinn, Judy, 82, 88n Glaxo: A History to 1962, 88n Slith, Sarah, 10 Smallpox and the Literary Imagination 1660–1820 (Shuttleton, D.), 81, 88n Smith, Ali, 79, 87n ‘SIGNES OF SPRING: A Letter from Katherine Mansfield’, 87n Smith, Angela, 125, 138n (ed.) The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield: Vol. 3 – The Poetry and Critical Writings, 36n–7n, 69n, 102n–4n, 154n–5n (ed.) Katherine Mansfield, Selected Stories, 125, 138n Smith, Benjamin E., 103n The Century Dictionary: An Encyclopedic Lexicon of the English Language, 103n ‘The Song of Songs’ (Song of Solomon), 90–8, 100–1, 101n–4n Sontag, Susan, 83, 88n, 105, 118n, 121–6, 129, 131, 135, 137n–40n Illness as Metaphor, 83, 88n, 118n, 121, 124, 131 Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors, 137n Sorapure, Victor, 2, 2n, 111, 167–8, 187n ‘Sorrowing Love’ (Mansfield, K.), 92, 94, 97, 99–100 da Sousa Correa, Delia, 155n ‘Katherine Mansfield and Music: NineteenthCentury Echoes’, 155n Spanish flu, 73, 105–11, 113, 115, 117–18, 137, 140n The Spanish Flu in Ireland: A Socio-Economic Shock to Ireland, 1918–1919 (Marsh, P.), 140n Spencer, Colin, 16n The Heretic’s Feast: A History of Vegetarianism, 16n Spinney, Laura, 105–6, 118n–19n Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World, 118n Spitting Blood: A History of Tuberculosis (Bynum, H.), 88n Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal (Rohman, C.), 73, 86n Stallworthy, Jon, 16n (ed.) The Poems of Wilfred Owen, 16n Stallybrass, Peter, 198 The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 198 Stanley, Elizabeth, 90, 92–4, 97–101 ‘Fairy Tale’, 92, 94

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Index Stape, J. H., 86n ‘E. M. Forster in Epistolary Mode: Beginning with the Letters’, 86n Stephen, Julia, 202n Notes from Sick Rooms, 202n Stern, Gladys B., 192 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 121, 131 ‘The Story of Pearl Button’ (Mansfield, K.), 143, 152 ‘The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’ (Benjamin, W., tr. Zorn, H.), 2n A Strange Beautiful Excitement: Katherine Mansfield’s Wellington 1888–1903 (Yska, R.), 2n, 21, 36n ‘A Suburban Fairy Tale’ (Mansfield, K.), 23–4, 27, 35, 140n ‘Sun and Moon’ (Mansfield, K.), 27, 54 Sussex, 169, 174 Swanson, Cecily, 85n ‘“The Language of Behavior”: Gurdjieff and the Emergence of Modernist Autobiography’, 85n ‘The Swing of the Pendulum’ (Mansfield, K.), 8 ‘The Swinging Gate: Katherine Mansfield’s Missionary Vision’ (Cappuccio, R.), 87n Swinnerton, Frank, 192 Switzerland, 75, 127, 131, 159, 168 Sydney (Australia), 192–3 Synge, J. M., 24 Tanner, J. Paul, 91, 102n ‘The History of Interpretation of the Song of Songs’, 102n Tchekhov see Chekhov ‘A Terribly Sensitive Mind’ (Woolf, V.), 86n Thanatos, 45 Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now? (Weil, K.), 10, 17n ‘This Flower’ (Mansfield, K.), 140n Thomas, Helen, 182 ‘The Thoughtful Child’ (Mansfield, K.), 23 ‘The Thoughtful Child: The Sentimental Origins of Katherine Mansfield’s Children’ (Martin, T.), 36n Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare, W.), 69n ‘To His Coy Mistress’ (Marvell, A.), 31 Todman, Dan, 69n The Great War: Myth and Memory, 69n Tomalin, Claire, 111 ‘Trans-Species Entanglements: Animal Assistants in Narratives about Autism’ (Herman, D.), 86n Trowell, Arnold, 147–8, 150–1, 155n ‘Children of the Sun God’, 150, 155n Lamento, 155n

Trowell, Garnet, 143–4, 150, 153, 154n, 187n, 194 ‘Children of the Sun God’, 150, 155n Trowell, Thomas, 150 tuberculosis, 1, 6, 14, 19, 71, 74, 82–4, 91, 105, 108–9, 111, 121–8, 130–5, 137, 166, 174, 182 Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination (Byrne, K.), 123, 138n ‘Tuberculosis as a Risk Factor for 1918 Influenza Pandemic Outcomes’ (Majumdar, G.; Dimka, J.), 119n Unger, Merrill F., 102n Unger’s Bible Handbook, 102n Unger’s Bible Handbook (Unger, M. F.), 102n The Urewera Notebook (Mansfield, K.), 20 The Urewera Notebook by Katherine Mansfield (ed. Plumridge, A.), 36n ‘The Uses of Rubato in Music, Eighteenth to Twentieth Centuries’ (Rosenblum, S.), 154n The Vegan Society, 7 The Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror (Wright, L.), 16n Veganism, 6–14, 16 The Vegetarian Society, 7–8 ‘Vegetarianism in World War One’ (Medcalf, A.), 16n ‘Vignette: I Look Out Through the Window’ (Mansfield, K.), 143, 151 ‘Vignette: Summer in Winter’ (Mansfield, K.), 145–6, 152 Vilaplana, Cristina, 127, 139n ‘A Literary Approach to Tuberculosis: Lessons Learned from Anton Chekhov, Franz Kafka, and Katherine Mansfield’, 139n Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature (Outka, E.), 73, 105, 118n, 120n ‘Voices of the First World War: Animals In War’ (Imperial War Museum), 16n Der Vollkommene Capellmeister (Mattheson, J.), 155n ‘The Voyage’ (Mansfield, K.), 28–9, 74 Wagner, Cosima, 192 Wagner, Richard, 152, 192, 194 Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music (Ross, A.), 202n Walker, Nicholas, 87n (tr.) The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, 87n Walpole, Hugh, 192

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Katherine Mansfield, Illness and Death ‘War Thoughts and Home: Katherine Mansfield’s Model of a Hardened Heart in a Broken World’ (Cappuccio, R.), 69n Weil, Kari, 10, 17n Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now?, 10, 17n ‘The Well at Cerne’ (Delius, F.), 177, 188n Wellington, 1, 19–21, 35, 39, 53, 74, 146, 150, 153, 163 Wells, H. G., 193 Wevill, Assia, 166 Wharton, Edith, 200 Wheldon, Rupert, 7 No Animal Food, 7 Where Love Lies Deepest (Ashford, D.), 79, 87n White, Allon, 198 The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 198 Whitney, William Dwight, 103n The Century Dictionary: An Encyclopedic Lexicon of the English Language, 103n ‘Why the 1918 Spanish Flu Defied Both Memory and Imagination’ (Honigsbaum, M.), 118n Whyte, Jessica, 139n–40n ‘In Sickness and in Health: Murry, the Mountain and the Duty of Care’, 139n Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys, J.), 35 Wilde, Oscar, 20 Willan, Healey, 103n ‘Rise Up, My Love, My Fair One’, 103n Wills, David, 17n (tr.) ‘The Animal that Therefore I Am (More to Follow)’, 17n ‘The Wind Blows’ (Mansfield, K.), 39 Wingley (Mansfield’s Cat), 75 ‘The Woman at the Store’ (Mansfield, K.), 24–5, 27, 29, 36 Women in Love (Lawrence, D. H.), 77, 86n ‘“Wood for the Coffins Ran Out”: Modernism and the Shadowed Afterlife of the Influenza Pandemic’ (Outka, E.), 118n

Woolf, Virginia, 77, 82, 86n, 88n, 110, 113, 120n, 153, 196, 198–9, 202, 202n ‘The Mark on the Wall’, 198–9 ‘Modern Fiction’, 198 Mrs Dalloway, 82, 88n, 114, 120n ‘On Being Ill’, 199, 202n ‘A Terribly Sensitive Mind’, 86n Word of Mouth: Body Language in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf (Moran, P.), 17n Wordsworth, William, 59, 68n ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads’, 68n The World’s Best Speaker for Boys and Girls (ed. Yerkes, L. A.), 102n The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness and Ethics (Frank, A.), 2n Wright, Celeste Turner, 17n, 50, 56n ‘Darkness as a Symbol in Katherine Mansfield’, 56n Wright, Laura, 7, 10, 16n–17n The Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror, 16n Writing the Meal: Dinner in the Fiction of Early Twentieth-Century Women Writers (McGee, D.), 17n Wyspianski, Stanisław, 25 Yerkes, Laura Augusta, 102n (ed.) The World’s Best Speaker for Boys and Girls, 102n Young, James, 182–3, 185 The Young Visiters (Ashford, D.), 78, 87n Yska, Redmer, 2n, 21–2, 35, 36n, 38n A Strange Beautiful Excitement: Katherine Mansfield’s Wellington 1888–1903, 2n, 21, 36n Zephyrus, 103n Zorn, Harry, 2n (tr.) ‘The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’, 2n

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Also available in the series: Katherine Mansfield and Continental Europe Edited by Delia da Sousa Correa and Gerri Kimber Katherine Mansfield Studies, Volume 1 Katherine Mansfield and Modernism Edited by Delia da Sousa Correa, Gerri Kimber and Susan Reid Katherine Mansfield Studies, Volume 2 Katherine Mansfield and the Arts Edited by Delia da Sousa Correa, Gerri Kimber and Susan Reid Katherine Mansfield Studies, Volume 3 Katherine Mansfield and the Fantastic Edited by Delia da Sousa Correa, Gerri Kimber, Susan Reid and Gina Wisker Katherine Mansfield Studies, Volume 4 Katherine Mansfield and the (Post)colonial Edited by Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber and Delia da Sousa Correa Katherine Mansfield Studies, Volume 5 Katherine Mansfield and World War One Edited by Gerri Kimber, Todd Martin, Delia da Sousa Correa, Isobel Maddison and Alice Kelly Katherine Mansfield Studies, Volume 6 Katherine Mansfield and Translation Edited by Claire Davison, Gerri Kimber and Todd Martin Katherine Mansfield Studies, Volume 7 Katherine Mansfield and Psychology Edited by Clare Hanson, Gerri Kimber and Todd Martin Katherine Mansfield Studies, Volume 8 Katherine Mansfield and Russia Edited by Galya Diment, Gerri Kimber and Todd Martin Katherine Mansfield Studies, Volume 9 Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf Edited by Christine Froula, Gerri Kimber and Todd Martin Katherine Mansfield Studies, Volume 10 Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth von Arnim Edited by Gerri Kimber, Isobel Maddison and Todd Martin Katherine Mansfield Studies, Volume 11 Katherine Mansfield and Bliss and Other Stories Edited by Enda Duffy, Gerri Kimber and Todd Martin Katherine Mansfield Studies, Volume 12 Katherine Mansfield and Children Edited by Gerri Kimber and Todd Martin Katherine Mansfield Studies, Volume 13 Katherine Mansfield and The Garden Party and Other Stories Edited by Gerri Kimber and Todd Martin Katherine Mansfield Studies, Volume 14 Katherine Mansfield, Illness and Death Edited by Aimée Gasston, Gerri Kimber and Todd Martin Katherine Mansfield Studies, Volume 15 www.edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/KMSJ