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Redmer Yska - 'Katherine Mansfield's Europe'
The Mansfield Industry continues to proliferate. Frances Wilson, in a recent NYRB review of Claire Harman’s All Sorts of Lives: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Risking Everything (from which the following information was largely gathered), wrote that Kathleen Beauchamp was “a shapeshifter with as many selves as Stendhal.”
In a journal entry after she had adopted the name Katherine Mansfield, she scoffed at Polonius’ meretricious advice in Hamlet - “True to oneself! Which self? Which of my many … hundreds of selves? For what with complexes and suppressions and reactions and vibrations and reflections - there are moments when I feel I am nothing but a small clerk of some hotel who has all his work cut out to enter the names and hand the keys to the wilful guests.”
AR Orage, the editor of The New Ag in which many of her short stories first appeared, noted her “rapid and disconcerting” mood swings - “A laughing joyous moment would suddenly turn through some inadequate remark into biting anger … Her great delight was a game she played of being someone else … She would act the part completely until she even got herself mixed up as to who and what she was.”
George Bowden, Mansfield’s first husband, said she resembled Oscar Wilde when draped in her flamboyant scarf in a sartorial affectation shared by such contemporaries as Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound. With the willing assistance of her second husband, John Middleton Murry, a self-serving, sex-fearing sentimentalist, she went on to create the character he described as the “perfectly exquisite, perfectly simple human being.”
Despite their hectic, homeless, and infantilising union, it was this mawkishly sanctified persona whom Murry promoted after Mansfield’s death from tuberculosis at the age of thirty-four. She died in January, 1923, having haemorrhaged after running up a flight of stairs at Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleau.
Despite (or perhaps because) she married the asexual Mury largely as a matter of convenience, Mansfield was intensely disliked by the Bloomsbury group. When Virginia Woolf first met Mansfield she was “a little shocked” by her lines, “so hard and cheap,” and her musky odour resembling a “civet cat that had taken to street walking.” Lytton Strachey described her as a “foul-mouthed, virulent, brazen-faced broomstick of a creature” with an “ugly impassive mask of a face.”
Many others commented on the mask, another literary affectation borrowed from Wilde, whose work Mansfield had eagerly consumed as a teenager. “Give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth,” wrote Wilde. “Don’t lower your mask,” Mansfield similarly advised Murry, “until you have another mask prepared underneath.” Or, as Hilary Mantel insisted, always be sure to ‘arrange your face.’
The image that Mansfield most often presented in pre-War London was that of the ‘wild colonial,’ evoking the spirit of her barbaric homeland with bad manners, rapid costume changes, and hints of a dark sexual past. She appeared to have gone “every sort of hog since she was seventeen,” Woolf wrote to her sister, Vanessa Bell. “Forever pursued by her dying,” she later wrote to Vita Sackville-West, “[Mansfield] had to press on through stages that should have taken years in ten minutes.”
T.S. Eliot, to whose wife Vivien Mansfield took an immediate and visceral dislike, was similarly unimpressed. He wrote to Ezra Pound in November, 1922 - “[Mansfield] is not by any means the most intelligent woman Lady [Rothermere] has ever met. She is simply one of the most persistent and thick-skinned toadies and one of the vulgarist women Lady R. has ever met and is also a sentimental crank.”
Angela Carter wondered why “someone so gifted, so charming should have been so universally detested,” but it’s easy to comprehend why and how she managed to repulse “the Blooms Berries”, as she called them. If DH Lawrence, the son of a Nottingham coal miner, was considered to be a “mongrel terrier among a crowd of Pomeranians and Alsatians,” as David Garnett put it, then Mansfield’s duplicitous cunning, Antipodean accent, and class indifference was equally unworthy of serious consideration.
The fourth of five children, Mansfield was born in Wellington in 1888. Redmer Yska has already written about her privileged childhood as the daughter of Harold Beauchamp, a successful banker and one of the richest men in the country, in A Strange Beautiful Excitement. As an overweight and sensual child in a thin and cold family, she had a noticeable lust for life. In 1902, she fell in love with Arnold Trowell, a cellist, but her feelings were for the most part unreciprocated. Mansfield was herself an accomplished cellist, having received lessons from Trowell's father. In 1903, she was sent to Queen’s College, a progressive girl’s high school in London, where she embarked on a number of lesbian affairs, exhorting her guardian angel - “O Oscar! Am I particularly susceptible to sexual impulse?”
After a brief return to New Zealand, she was back in London in 1908, hurtling headlong through a series of impulsive, impetuous, and ill-fated relationships. First she sought out the Trowell family for companionship and then moved in. Arnold was involved with another woman, so Mansfield embarked on a passionate affair with his twin brother Garnet, to whom she became engaged. She was thrown out when his parents discovered they were sleeping together. After Garrnet abandoned her in 1909, she realised she was pregnant.
She immediately married George Bowden, having only met him two weeks previously. Leaving him that same day, she moved in with Ida Baker, her future ‘wife’ and one of the most curious minor characters in literary history. She briefly reunited with Garnet (who knew nothing of her marriage or pregnancy), joined a touring light opera company, became addicted to the barbiturate Veronal, and suicidal.
Highly alarmed by reports of her daughter’s decline and rumours of her louche lifestyle, her mother soon arrived from New Zealand. Blaming the lesbian relationship with Baker for the breakdown of her marriage to Bowden, she consigned Mansfield to a Bavarian clinic for psychosexual treatment, before sailing back home and cutting her out of her will.
When Mansfield lost the baby in a late miscarriage caused by lifting a heavy suitcase, she asked Baker to procure her an orphan boy who was delivered to Bavaria, then immediately returned and never mentioned again. Around this time, Floryan Sobienowski introduced Mansfield to Chekhov’s short stories in German translations (from whom she would later lift several useful plot lines). As a parting gift, he also gave her gonorrhoea.
Fleeing Sobienowski, Mansfield returned to London and was taken in again by the hapless Bowden. She collapsed with peritonitis, had a fallopian tube removed, escaped with Baker’s help from the rehab centre, and hot-footed it to Rottingdean, where they lived together for a couple of months. The peritonitis was the result of her undiagnosed gonorrhoea, which lead in turn to pericarditis, arthritis in her hips and feet, and vulnerability to tuberculosis. Claire Tomalin has plausibly suggested it was D.H. Lawrence who infected Mansfield with TB. Chekhov, Yeats, Proust, Joyce, Lawrence, Mansfield, and Mantel all wrote about death as they did precisely because they were chronically ill.
Mansfield first met Murry, an Oxford undergraduate who was one year younger than her, in 1911 and he moved into her flat a year later. She started to publish more frequently, but was diagnosed with TB in 1917. When her divorce from Bowden was finalised the following year, she married Murry, who remained largely in London during his wife’s dying years in Europe.
It was Baker who continued to make her writing possible, accompanying Mansfield from pensione to pensione, like a swallow accompanying Keats in pursuit of an ever warmer climate. Their relationship was twisted and tinged with sadomasochism, with Baker, who could leave nothing uneaten, the frequent victim of Mansfield’s cruelty. “I really do feel,” Mansfield wrote to Murry, “that if she could she’d EAT me.”
Long before she was “stewing “ in her own “consumption,” as Lawrence ungraciously put it in one of his less charming letters to Mansfield, eating had always been one of her central metaphors. All relationships, she concluded, including those between writers, were cannibalistic - “Anatole France would say we eat each other, but perhaps nourish is the better word.” The meat, fruit, cheese, and desserts that lard up her writing are both tempting and terrifying to consume.
As the consumption consumed her and the TB bacillus spread, the pudgy girl became wafer thin and addicted to a morphine-based cough syrup. After a series of bizarre experimental treatments that did nothing to prevent her precipitous decline (and probably encouraged it), Mansfield finally entered Gurdjieff’s care. As a guest rather than a pupil, she was not required to take part in the rigorous routines of the institute.
Nevertheless, within a few weeks she was dead. Because Murry forgot to pay for her funeral expenses, she initially was buried in a pauper's grave. It was not until six years later that matters were rectified, her casket moved to its current resting place next to Gurdjieff’s in Fontainebleau, and a tombstone erected in her honour.
There has been no shortage of biographers since then. Antony Albers’ The Life of Katherine Mansfield (1953, revised and expanded in 1980) remained largely protective of her legacy. Claire Tomalin, in Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life (1987), also kept her distance, concludingh that “Katherine was a liar all her life - there is no getting around this." Jeffrey Meyers decided it would take not one, but two books to peel away her various masks like onion skins - Katherine Mansfield, A Biography (1978) and the revisionist Katherine Mansfield: A Darker View (2002).
How then to inhabit the desultory final years of Mansfield’s life? Yska’s answer is an epic quest to retrace the proto-feminist’s final footsteps across Europe are never less than stimulating. He has filled in another lacunae by concentrating on Mansfield’s European travels in the years leading up to her death in 1923. His curious subtitle - Station to Station - combines a focus on her peripatetic exploration of Europe by train with his own adventure over a century later, while also evoking the Stations of The Cross, Leo Tolstoy, and even perhaps David Bowie. The result is that only half of the book is about the writer Mansfield, since the other is firmly occupied by the author Yska.
Fortunately, he’s excellent company, alternately amused and bemused by his encounters with a zany cast of Mansfield enthusiasts he encounters along the way. Throughout the book, Yska interweaves nuggets from Paris reporter Roland Merlin’s 1960 biography of Mansfield, which helped him decode France’s unique relationships with her. His research is never less than thorough, whether poring over her letters in the National Library or exploring the alleyways of Menton.
By focusing on her European sojourn, Yska neatly sidesteps the more unfortunate aspects of Mansfield’s earlier (mis)adventures in England and why she fled London in the first place. He doesn’t shy away from revealing the chemical details of her notorious “red cough mixture,” however, or that she started packing heat “to protect herself after she was tossed out of her accommodation because of her TB,” as he said in a recent Post interview.
“I was really interested in this because it shows another side of her. The minute we see Katherine Mansfield with a gun in her hand we see her differently. What I love too think about with this book is that we might bring her out from behind the desk, from behind the inkpot and see her as a snooker player, as a knitter, as a card player, a walker, and so much more than that bookish woman we know.”
As befits the life of a miniature modernist, Yska’s book is a small, but heavy paperback, handsomely illustrated with luminous photographs by Conor Horgan and elegantly published by Otago University Press.
Howard Davis
Scoop Arts Editor
Educated at Cambridge and UCLA; worked on several major Hollywood feature films and as a Kundalini Yoga instructor in Los Angeles; currently enjoying life in Wellington.
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