Mansfield

Chapter1. Life and Literary Career 1.1 Early life Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp was born in 1888 in a socially prominent family in Wellington, New Zealand. Mansfield had two older sisters and a younger brother. Her father, Harold Beauchamp, became the chairman of the Bank of New Zealand and was knighted. Her grandfather represented the Picton electorate in Parliament. The Mansfield family moved from Thornton to Karori in 1893, where Mansfield spent the happiest years of her childhood. Her first published stories appeared in the High School Reporter and the Wellington Girls' High School magazine (the family returned to Wellington in 1898), in 1898 and 1899. She fell in love with a cellist, Arnold Trowell (Mansfield was an accomplished cellist, having received lessons from Trowell's father), in 1902, although the feelings were largely unreciprocated. Mansfield wrote in her journals of feeling alienated to some extent in New Zealand, and, in general terms, of how she became disillusioned due to the repression of the Māori people, who were often portrayed in a sympathetic or positive light in her later stories, such as “How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped”. She moved to London in 1903, where she attended Queen's College along with her two sisters. Mansfield recommenced playing the cello, an occupation that she believed when at Queen's that she would take up professionally, but she also began contributing to the school newspaper with such dedication that she eventually became editor during this period. She was particularly interested in the works of the French symbolists and Oscar Wilde, and she was appreciated amongst her peers for her vivacious and charismatic approach to life and work. She met fellow writer Ida Baker (also known as Lesley Moore), a South African, at the college, and the pair became lifelong friends. Mansfield began journeying into continental Europe in 1903–1906, mainly to Belgium and Germany. After finishing her schooling in England, Mansfield returned to her New Zealand home in 1906, only then beginning to write short stories. She had several works published in the Native Companion (Australia), which was her first paid writing work, and by this time she had her mind set on becoming a professional writer. It was also the first occasion on which she used the pseudonym 'K. Mansfield'. During this time she rapidly wearied of the provincial New Zealand lifestyle and of her family, and two years later headed again for London.  Mansfield had two lesbian relationships during this period, notable for their preeminence in her journal entries. Mansfield biographer Angela Smith has said that this is evidence of her "transgressive impetus", although Mansfield continued to have male lovers, and attempted to repress her feelings at certain times. Her first relationship was with Maata Mahupuku, a young Māori woman whom Mansfield had first met in Wellington, and then again in London. The second relationship, with Edith Kathleen Bendall, took place from 1906 to 1908, and Mansfield professed her adoration for her in her journals. 1.2 Return to London Back in London in 1908, Mansfield quickly fell into the bohemian way of life lived by many artists and writers of that era, although she published only one story and one poem during her first 15 months. There Mansfield sought out the Trowell family for companionship, and whilst Arnold was involved with another woman, Mansfield embarked on a passionate affair with his brother, Garnet. By early 1909 she had become pregnant with his child, though Trowell's parents disapproved of the relationship, and the two broke up. She hastily entered into a marriage with a singing teacher 11 years older, George Bowden, on 2 March, but left him the same evening, having failed to consummate the marriage. After a brief reunion with Garnet, Mansfield's mother, Annie Beauchamp, arrived in 1909. She blamed the breakdown of the marriage on a lesbian relationship between Mansfield and Baker, and she quickly had her daughter dispatched to the spa town of Bad Wörishofen in Bavaria, Germany. Mansfield miscarried after attempting to lift a suitcase on top of a cupboard. It is not known whether her mother knew of this miscarriage when she left shortly after arriving in Germany, but she cut Mansfield out of her will. Mansfield's time in Bavaria was to have a significant effect on her literary outlook. She was introduced to the works of Anton Chekhov, a writer who proved to have greater influence upon her writing in the short term than Wilde, on whom she had been fixated. She returned to London in January 1910, and had over a dozen works published in A.R. Orage's The New Age, a socialist magazine and highly-regarded intellectual publication. She became a friend and lover of Beatrice Hastings, who lived with Orage. Her experiences of Germany formed the foundation of her first published collection, “In a German Pension”, in 1911, a work that was lauded by a number of critics (and enjoyed for its unfavorable portrayal of Germans) but which she later described as "immature". The most successful story from this work was “Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding”. On her return to London, Mansfield became ill with an untreated sexually transmitted disease she contracted from Floryan Sobieniowski; a condition which contributed to her weak health for the rest of her life. Sobieniowski was a Polish émigré translator, whom she met in Germany. Although discouraged by the volume's relative lack of success, Mansfield submitted a lightweight story to a new avant-garde magazine called “Rhythm”. The piece was rejected by the magazine's editor, John Middleton Murry, who requested something darker. Mansfield responded with “The Woman at the Store”, a tale of murder and mental illness. Mansfield was inspired in her writing by Fauvism, a contemporary art movement of the period, as well as Chekhov, although neither literary style had a profound effect on her writing in the long term (Fauvist literature has been described as 'savage'). In 1911 Mansfield and Murry began a relationship that culminated in their marriage in 1918. They led a troubled life during this time - Mansfield left Murry twice in 1911–13. In October 1912, the publisher of “Rhythm”, Stephen Swift, absconded to Europe, and left Murry responsible for the debts the magazine had accumulated. Mansfield pledged her father's allowance towards the magazine, but it was discontinued, being reorganized as The Blue Review in 1913 and folding after three issues. Mansfield and Murry were persuaded by their friend Gilbert Cannan to rent a cottage next to his windmill in Cholesbury, Buckinghamshire in 1913, in an attempt to alleviate Mansfield of her ill health. It has been suggested that she was suffering from gonorrhea amongst other things, but there is no real evidence for this. In January 1914 they moved to Paris, with the hope that the change of setting would make writing for both of them easier. However, Mansfield wrote only one story during her time there (“Something Childish but Very Natural”) before Murry was recalled to London to declare bankruptcy. Mansfield had a brief affair in 1914 with French writer Francis Carco; her visiting him in Paris in February 1915 was retold in one of her short stories, “An Indiscreet Journey”. Mansfield's life and work were changed forever by the 1915 death of her brother, Leslie Heron "Chummie" Beauchamp, as a New Zealand soldier in France in World War I. She was shocked and traumatized by the experience, so much so that her work began to take refuge in the nostalgic reminiscences of their childhood in New Zealand.  Despite this turbulence in Mansfield's life, she entered into her most productive period of writing in early 1916, and her relationship with Murry also improved. The couple had befriended D. H. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda von Richthofen, in 1913, and maintained a strong relationship with them until falling out in 1916. Mansfield began to broaden her literary acquaintances for the remainder of the year, encountering Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Lytton Strachey and Bertrand Russell through social gatherings and introductions from others. At the beginning of 1917 Mansfield and Murry separated, although he continued to visit her at her new apartment. Baker, whom Mansfield often called, with mixture of affection and disdain, her "wife", moved in with her shortly afterwards. Mansfield entered into her most prolific period of writing post-1916, which began with several stories, including “Mr. Reginald Peacock's Day” and “A Dill Pickle”, being published in The New Age. Woolf and her husband, Leonard, who had recently set up Hogarth Press, approached her for a story, and Mansfield presented "Prelude", which she had begun writing in 1915 as “The Aloe”. The story is centered around a family of New Zealanders moving home, with little external plot. Although it failed to reach a wider audience and was little noticed and criticized on its publication in 1918, it later became one of Mansfield's most celebrated works. In December 1917 Mansfield became ill, and was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Rejecting the idea of a sanatorium on the basis that it would cut her off from writing, she took the only available option, to move abroad during the English winter. She moved to Bandol, France, and stayed at a half-deserted and cold hotel, where she became depressed. However, she continued to produce stories, including “Je ne parle pas français”, one of her darker works (believed to have been inspired by Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, it is a deeply personal work that casts Murry in negative light). “Bliss”, the story that lent its name to her second collection of stories in 1920, was also published in 1918. Her health continued to deteriorate, and she had her first lung hemorrhage in March. By April, Mansfield's divorce from Bowden was finalized and she and Murry married, although they parted two weeks later. They rejoined, and in March 1919 Murry became editor of “Athenaeum”, a prestigious weekly journal. Mansfield wrote over 100 reviews for the magazine, and they were published as a collection, posthumously, in Novels and Novelists by Murry. For the winter of 1918–19 she and Baker stayed in a villa in San Remo, Italy. Their relationship came under strain during this period, and after writing to Murry to express her feelings of depression, he stayed over Christmas. Although her relationship with Murry became increasingly distant after 1918 and the two often lived apart, this intervention of his spurred her on, and she wrote “The Man Without a Temperament”, the story of an ill wife and her long-suffering husband. Biographer Joanna Woods has said that this work signaled a turning point for Mansfield, when she was able to display a "new objectivity that gives the story a universal dimension". “Miss Brill”, the bittersweet story of a fragile woman living an ephemeral life of observation and simple pleasures in Paris, established Mansfield as one of the preeminent writers of the Modernist period on its publication in the 1920s Bliss. The story from the collection, "Bliss", which involved a similar character facing her husband's infidelity, also found critical acclaim. She followed with the equally praised collection “The Garden Party”, published in 1922. 1.3 Final years Mansfield spent her last years seeking increasingly unorthodox cures for her tuberculosis. In February 1922, she consulted the Russian physician Ivan Manoukhin. His "revolutionary" treatment, which consisted of bombarding her spleen with X-rays, caused Mansfield to develop heat flashes and numbness in her legs. The Dictionary of National Biography reports that she now came to feel that her attitude to life had been unduly rebellious, and she sought, during the days that remained to her, to renew and compose her spiritual life. In October 1922, Mansfield moved to Georges Gurdjieff's Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleau, France, where she was under the care of Olgivanna Lazovitch Hinzenburg (later Mrs. Frank Lloyd Wright). Mansfield suffered a fatal pulmonary hemorrhage in January 1923, after running up a flight of stairs to show Murry how well she was.  She died on 9 January and was buried in a cemetery in the Fontainebleau district in the town of Avon. Mansfield proved to be a prolific writer in the final years of her life, and much of her prose and poetry remained unpublished at her death. Murry took on the task of editing and publishing her works. His efforts resulted in publication of two additional volumes of short stories in 1923 (“The Dove's Nest”), in 1924 (“Something Childish”), her poems, “The Aloe”, a collection of critical writings (Novels and Novelists) and a number of editions of her letters and journals. 1.4 Relations with the contemporaries Among literary friends of Mansfield were Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence. Virginia Woolf once said that Katherine Mansfield had produced ‘the only writing I have ever been jealous of.’ Woolf also, jealously, wrote, ‘. . . the more she is praised, the more I am convinced she is bad.’ Virginia Woolf—who alternately disapproved of and envied Mansfield's wider and more amorphous sexual, economic, and social experience and who was both her principal rival and close friend in a shifting, difficult, intense, and communicative relationship—always respected and learned from Mansfield's writing. After Mansfield died, Virginia Woolf often dreamed at night of her great rival. The dreams gave her a Mansfield who was vividly, shockingly alive, so that the ‘emotion’ of the dream encounter remained with Woolf for the next day. It was Virginia Woolf, in her psychological interest and her minute detailing of sensation who was always closest to Mansfield. Hermione Lee, Woolf’s biographer, writes that ‘Katherine haunted her as we are haunted by people we have loved, but with whom we have not completed our conversation, with whom we have unfinished business.’ It is a formulation that captures wonderfully the current position of Mansfield. She is a key figure in the development of the short story and yet she remains somehow on the margins of literary history. She is also the great ghost of New Zealand cultural life, felt but not quite grasped. ‘Lawrence and I are unthinkably alike’, wrote Mansfield. Mansfield and Murry were closely associated with D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda at whose marriage they featured as official witnesses. There were innumerable quarrels and the friendship was broken off several times. D.H. Lawrence, with whom Mansfield had a fraught friendship, visited Wellington, her birthplace, and was moved to send Mansfield a postcard bearing a single Italian word, ‘Ricordi’ (‘memories’),. It was a small and cryptic gesture of reconciliation; they’d fallen out badly and in his previous letter he had said ‘You are a loathsome reptile—I hope you will die.’ Mansfield left Bandol in the spring of 1916 to join Murry and the Lawrences in renting adjoining cottages in Cornwall. Given the volatility and the rapid oscillations between love and hate among the four, such an arrangement clearly could not work for long. Yet letters, biographies, and a reading of the fiction provide evidence of the constant intellectual interchange in the focus on nature and natural description, the interest in psychology, and the incessant reappraisal of the dynamics of relationships. Mansfield’s friendship with the Lawrences had reached crisis point in Cornwall in mid-1916. Although she felt Lawrence’s dark spasms of rage were so close to her own temper, the ‘dear man’, as she wrote to a mutual friend, had become lost in ‘the immense German Christmas pudding which is Frieda. And with all the appetite in the world one cannot eat one’s way through Frieda to find him. Katherine and Frieda never became real friends - Katherine’s affinity was always with Lawrence. There was tension in the relationship because Lawrence was deeply attracted to John, wanting to establish a ‘blood brother bond’ with him. John was also attracted to Frieda, with whom he had an affair after Katherine died. D.H. Lawrence though equally miserable over the state of industrialized city life, often railed in his work against the ‘civilizing’ aspects of culture and sought the real in more primitive modes of sexual feeling. Mansfield was drawn to Lawrence—he was, after all, another outsider in the English literary world—but her journal also records her impatience with what she saw as Lawrence’s reductive view of human nature: ‘I shall never see sex in trees, sex, in the running brooks, sex in stones & sex in everything. The number of things that are really phallic from fountain pen fillers onwards!’ Nevertheless, Mansfield’s belief in Lawrence was unshaken. In August 1916, when she overheard in the Cafe Royal a group of people deriding his recently-published book of poems Amores, she went up to them and snatched the book away, before stomping out - an incident Lawrence put into Women in Love in the chapter 'Gudrun in the Pompadour'. In Women in Love, however, Gudrun is not a full portrait of Katherine, but rather an amalgam made up of some of her characteristics and portraying her in episodes based on actual events. Lawrence also portrayed aspects of Katherine in several short stories, such as Smile, and more particularly in the guise of Anabel in his 1920 play Touch and Go - alongside Gerald, who is clearly a composite depiction of Murry. Mansfield was close to Lady Ottoline Morrell and, more cautiously, to Virginia Woolf. For a time Maynard Keynes was her landlord, Lytton Strachey was attracted to her because she was like a Japanese doll, Bertrand Russell admired her mind and attempted an affair, while T.S. Eliot warned Ezra Pound she was ‘a dangerous woman’. He found her ‘a fascinating personality’ but also ‘a thick-skinned toady’. The Irish writer Frank O’Connor, in his classic study of the short story, The Lonely Voice, called Mansfield ‘the brassy little shop girl of literature who made herself into a great writer.’ But Mansfield’s wary colonial elusiveness allowed more relaxed friendships with artists and the mildly eccentric—for a time, with the East End painter Mark Gertler, and the androgynous Carrington; more enduringly, from 1912 onwards with the Scottish painter J.D. Fergusson, and the American Anne Estelle Rice, whose portrait of her is in the National Museum in Wellington; and increasingly with the deaf aristocrat, Dorothy Brett, who also painted. But it was illness, rather than choice, that led to her gradual separation from most of her friends in England. Katherine Mansfield revolutionized the 20th Century English short story. Her best work shakes itself free of plots and endings and gives the story, for the first time, the expansiveness of the interior life, the poetry of feeling, the blurred edges of personality. She is taught worldwide because of her historical importance but also because her prose offers lessons in entering ordinary lives that are still vivid and strong. And her fiction retains its relevance through its open-endedness—its ability to raise discomforting questions about identity, belonging and desire. Even before she died at the age of thirty-four Katherine Mansfield had achieved a reputation as one of the most talented writers of the modern short story in English. From 1910 publications in periodicals like the New Age through the five volumes of stories published before her death, Mansfield was recognized as innovative, accessible, and psychologically acute, one of the pioneers of the avant-garde in the creation of the short story. Her language was clear and precise; her emotion and reaction to experience carefully distilled and resonant. Her use of image and symbol were sharp, suggestive, and new without seeming forced or written to some preconceived formula. Her themes were various: the difficulties and ambivalences of families and sexuality, the fragility and vulnerability of relationships, the complexities and insensitivities of the rising middle classes, the social consequences of war, and overwhelmingly the attempt to extract whatever beauty and vitality one can from mundane and increasingly difficult experience. The high critical estimate in which Mansfield’s work is held has never substantially changed but has only broadened and expanded through the years with the discovery of further materials and information. Even the grounds on which she has been considered and praised have not substantially altered: the remarkable capacity to describe flowers, plants, and animals in ways that are simultaneously naturalistic and symbolic; the astringent satire of character that also shows a penetrating understanding; the depiction of the complexity of human relationships, particularly overt and covert sexual relationships; the Chekhovian qualities; the themes that insist on the contemporary, on using the past to establish connections to the immediate and the present. Above all, Mansfield has consistently been praised for the compression and understatement of her prose, for her capacity to pack complex emotion and thought into the deceptively simple and direct outlines of her stories. Her work has for many years been seen as a model of the specifically modern short story in English and of the changes in literary focus it represents.