ON HAPPINESS

 

IN Colm Toibin’s BROOKLYN, Eilis makes the sudden decision to leave her mother and friends in small town provincial Ireland to return to Brooklyn and a future that is more daring, filled with promise and potential, but infinitely risky. She does this because she thinks this course is the one that is most likely to bring her happiness.

In Alex Miller’s equally beautiful CONDITIONS OF FAITH, Emily Elder makes the sudden decision to stay in Europe and abandon her French husband and her new born child. It is a decision that is even more risky and momentous than Eilis’. When she tells her husband Georges of her decision whilst they are dancing at a Paris nightclub, he asks her ‘why?’, which is a fair enough question. She tells him it is because she is not content. His response is ‘Content? For Christ’s sake, no-one’s content.’

They are both interesting ideas because they are weighty decisions filled with risk. Each person knows something is lacking and they know they just need something more. To say that ‘no one’s content’ seems pretty meaningless to me. These are the cowards like most of us, me included, who travel on the road already taken, and are not prepared to risk everything for a life that could be so much better. Maybe the doors haven’t opened sufficiently. Maybe the mindset will mean that the doors will never open up, or widely enough. The world is filled with risktakers like Eilis and Emily, but they pale into significance when compared with the multitudes of us who settle for what they have.

It must be about security. It is just too scary to risk giving up all you have strived for. Joni Mitchell, in her song HEJIRA, sings ‘You know it never has been easy/ Whether you do or you do not resign/ Whether you travel the breadth of extremities/ Or stick to some straighter line.’ Mmmm… ‘travelling the breadth of extremities.’ It sounds easy enough.

Georges said ‘no-one’s content’, and I wonder how true this is. I read somewhere, posted on a wall for everyone to see, that you should be careful criticising someone else because you never know ‘what particular shit they may be going through.’ In many ways, I would love to be someone like Eilis or Emily. I don’t mean chucking everything in, after all that’s not what they were doing. They weren’t suicidal. Emily was wanting to continue her archaeological studies and her European adventure. Eilis was going back to Brooklyn to meet her husband and start their American dream. Both wanted more of being foreigners in a foreign land.

If there is anything that would make me truly happy, or even ‘content’- Emily’s word-( I am not even sure how close to ‘happiness’ this is),  it would be to go back to being a foreigner again. Van Morrison on ASTRAL WEEKS says ‘I’m nothin’ but a stranger in this world…’. Both Katherine Mansfield and Sylvia Plath were strangers in a strange world. Both refused to go back to a potentially easier life with family in their home lands.

Twenty years ago, almost to the day, I arrived in the UK with my wife and began a European adventure of my (our) own. I dreamt of the day multitudes of times growing up where I could have Cornwall, Somerset, Yorkshire, Northumberland, Shropshire, at my fingertips. And then suddenly I did. I had experiences I will never forget, including motoring holidays around Italy and France and Switzerland. But was I content? After just over two years of this I suddenly wanted to ‘come home.’

Coming home. I will probably take this to my grave as the biggest mistake of my life. I look at Emily and Eilis with profound respect for the decisions that they made, how they chose the road not taken. But if we are ever going to live a life where we ever feel even remotely ‘content’ we have to live with these decisions, or doing something extraordinarily wild and unpredictable, and ‘travel the breadth of extremities’ like the trailblazers that have done this before us.

So, I salute those who are foreigners in foreign lands. I wish I could join you. But I also know many of you have given up important things and made extreme sacrifices along the way.

I come back once again to Nick Cave’s ‘There is a town…’

‘And now I live
In this town
I walk these dark streets
Up and down, up and down
Under a dark sky
And I dream
That one day
I'll go back home’

I have no doubt that Eilis and Emily thought of home every day. And perhaps Sylvia and Katherine as well. Were they content? Well, illness and fate always play a part. I like to think that things worked out well for the fictional Eilis and Emily. For Sylvia Plath and Katherine Mansfield… the former took her life through gassing herself at age 30, and the latter died of tuberculosis at just 34. For the rest of us? Well we live a lot longer- most of us- snug in our protective cocoons, a satisfying, safe life, or a life devoid of mystery and filled with mediocrity… depending on your point of view.

 

Landscapes in Emily Bronte, Lawrence and Mansfield

LANDSCAPES

Tonight, I am thinking a lot about landscapes.

It has come about because I have recently read the ultimate landscape novel ‘Wuthering Heights’. The landscape, or the setting, is of course the moors surrounding the Bronte Parsonage near Haworth, in Lancashire. I don’t have the book with me, but some of the vocabulary I am left with in my memory is craggy, rocky, heather, black frost, fleecy cloud, abundant rain, temporary brooks, shadows and sunshine, transient mist, wintry drifts, primroses & crocuses, impassable roads, and so on. It is a tough environment which suited only the toughest of people. And Emily Bronte must have been one of the toughest young women who ever lived. The novel is extraordinary for its power, cruelty, violence and menace. It paints a visceral world of loneliness, imprisonment, and despair, as well as other gothic elements like madness, imprisonment, the supernatural and mysticism.

 It must have been thrilling for EJB to apply her imaginative world to such a ‘fantastic’ and surreal story, dark and foreboding, although in the case of Heathcliff and Cathy, and younger Cathy and Edgar, her father, full of romantic love and filial bonding as well. My impression of EJB is that of someone who could be ruthless like her characters, hard-nosed and wilfully independent and determined and capable of cruelty. Filled from top to toe with the ‘romantic imagination’ but understanding of the uncompromising tenor of her times and the people who inhabited remote areas of the wild countryside in the nineteenth century.

The landscape of D H Lawrence’s childhood never left him. He grew up in Eastwood, Nottingham, semi-rural with a fairly short distance to town (Nottingham) but also enclosed by woods and country paths and farms and wild nature. His landscape crept into novels his whole life, from the beginnings with ‘The White Peacock’ and ‘Sons & Lovers’, to latter works such as ‘The Rainbow’ and ‘’The Lost Girl’. Despite the fact that he spent a good deal of his fertile writing career living abroad in places like Australia, New Mexico and Italy, Lawrence also came back to the world of his childhood in his latter books like ‘The Virgin & The Gypsy’ and ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’. Just like a venture into Bronte territory is manna from heaven for me, it is similar with the Lawrence world of Eastwood, Moorgreen Reservoir, Cossal (Cossethay in ‘The Rainbow’).

Lawrence’s favourite place of his childhood was Hagg’s Farm, where he would walk several miles to visit the Chambers family, all of the Chambers family who were a second family, and in particular the love of his youth, Jessie Chambers (Miriam in ‘Sons & Lovers’) who he might have married but for the fact as he later said ‘she would have destroyed (my) genius’ (not a feminist-friendly afterthought). Lawrence wrote Jessie’s brother a letter near the end of his life about the joy of visiting The Haggs, which never left him. He called it ‘the countryside of my heart’. The closest, perhaps, to experiencing these feelings of joy and comfort and landscape again were probably whilst living in New Mexico with his wife and friends, baking bread, writing novels, riding horses, visiting ancient places like Guadalajara…

Katherine Mansfield came to hate New Zealand, her birthplace, as enclosed, smothering, provincial. As an adolescent she had a taste of life in London, and on return she had a miserable period in Wellington with her parents where she felt listless and angry. She was the archetypal bored young adult in her restlessness and feelings of confinement and restlessness. On her return to Queens College London, she blossomed in an environment more conducive to her study of music, imagination and literature, in particular Oscar Wilde and other so-called ‘decadents’.

 This is not to say that NZ did not feature in her writing as she grew to become a highly talented and revered writer of short stories. We see Wellington and its environs crop up in stories like ‘The Voyage’ and ‘At The Bay’ and ‘Prelude’ and ‘The Garden Party’. These are some of her best stories. It is just that when we think of Katherine Mansfield, we sometimes forget she is from New Zealand because she embraced Europe and everything it had to offer in the 1920’s so wholeheartedly, and never seemed to entertain thoughts of ever going back there.

Landscapes feed writers’ imaginations. I doubt that Virginia Woolf would ever have said that Katherine Mansfield was the only writer she was jealous of if KM had have stayed in NZ all her life. Lawrence’s books and stories and poems and plays are much more vivid and varied for having the thirst to travel and experience life in some of its extremities on his so-called ‘savage pilgrimage’ to far flung places in Europe, America and Australia. As for EJB, who lived until only 30, what might she have created had she travelled more, and lived on the continent or the US or some island for a period of time. When she died it is said that she was busy with a second novel. It is difficult to imagine Emily Bronte attached to anywhere other than her beloved moors that seem such an intrinsic part of her psyche and her life. And I want to go back there and search for Cathy and Heathcliff.

KATHERINE MANSFIELD- BEFORE ENGLAND

I HAVE nearly finished Gerri Kimber’s ‘Katherine Mansfield -The Early Years’, and it is so snug and warm and calming and reassuring and lovely, it’s like an old lost friend. Except it is also luxuriating in its richness and wonderment, and I don’t really have an old friend like this.

 I have come to it after many books by and about Katherine Mansfield. The famous Antony Alpers’ biography, her notebooks and journals, Kathleen Jones’ biography, a favourite, and recently I acquired the Edinburgh University Press editions of her complete works, a great treasure. I was about 20 when I first read Mansfield. I nominated her short story collection ‘Bliss & Other Stories’ as a personal favourite when I was with a group of students in an English tutorial at university many years ago. I read all her short stories then. Those wondrous years of active imagination, fervent reading, abundant curiosity. She has stayed the course with me- along with D H Lawrence and Sylvia Plath- when many others, I have somehow, let go.

When I was in England she was a part of that great literary pilgrimage conducted over a period of more than two years. The ‘Elephant’ house with Murry in Hampstead Heath, her friend Koteliansky’s house at Acacia Road in St John’s Wood, in Fontainebleau in France stumbling luckily upon her gravestone- ‘the wife of Middleton Murry…’. Then many years later to Wellington itself, the childhood home in Thorndon, now a museum.

So I sit in my bedroom any spare moment of any day, thinking of KM constantly, wishing this book of her early years would never end. Somehow, despite the amount of time I have dedicated to her, I have forgotten a lot of these early years. Or at least some of it. It intrigues me from beginning to end. Nothing ordinary about her. Her very real passions and frustrations. Solitariness. Desires. Influences. Loves. Resentments. Ambition.

The book begins with her wealthy origins in Wellington and the various births in the family- the sisters and the much-loved younger brother who would be killed during the war. Not long after Vera was born came Chaddie, then KM in 1888, and Gwendoline who died as a baby followed very quickly by KM’s youngest sister, Jeanne. The family moved to nearby Karori, presumably for health reasons, to a house with a 14-acre garden called ‘Chesney Wold’ where the last sibling, KM’s favourite, Leslie was born. Karori became important to KM’s fiction. She wrote many stories as an adult based on her time there. I also saw that the school she went to- called, interestingly, Karori Normal School’ - is still functioning- http://www.kns.school.nz/

When she was 9 the family moved back to Thorndon (75 Tinakori Road), and the Beauchamp girls were enrolled in Wellington Girls’ High School, also still extant- https://wgc.school.nz/  This is where her first short story was published, aged 9. This is where the book begins to show KM as emerging as different to her sisters and her peers- an outsider, aloof, moody, idiosyncratic. And poetic. But now, and through her teen years, there is also a sense of awkwardness as well- her plumpness, glasses (which mysteriously disappeared later), and bourgeoning interest in music. KM would become quite an accomplished cellist. 

At this time the wealthy Beauchamp’s took a number of domestic summer holidays and rented cottages at places like Day’s Bay. I re-read the longish ‘At The Bay’ recently as a memorial to her time spent on summer holidays.  Important friendships were formed at this time around the turn of the century, that would later develop into strong romantic and sexual relationships- the Trowell twins, Garnet and Tom, highly accomplished musicians, and Maata, a dark-skinned Maori princess that KM met at a wealthier, more prestigious school in Fitzherbert Terrace. She also knew somebody called Edith Bendall and wrote about laying her head on her naked breast at the holiday house at Day’s Bay. Her yearning also extended to one of the English cricketers on board a ship KM was on, returning from her first trip to England. She refers to him as Adonis in her journal.

KM has such a restlessness for love and desire like any teenager from any time, but also for culture, literature, music. Her writing is dominated by ‘decadent’ influences like her favourite, Oscar Wilde, whose aphorisms she adored. She soaked up time in London where she studied during her formative years at Queen’s College on Harley Street- http://www.qcl.org.uk/

Here she met her lifetime friend and ‘slave’, Ida Baker, also known as LM, for KM an emotional support until the very end. What an incredibly rich and fulfilling time she had at Queen’s College. It enabled her to study music (her beloved cello), practise her craft of writing, meet fascinating intellectuals and like-minded people she struggled to meet in Wellington. Once back home again when her education ‘finished’ she got into a real funk, angry with her family, her father in particular who held the purse strings, and becoming notorious for her moods and dissatisfaction. NZ was, it seemed, a stale city with little to offer (Kimber shows that intellectually, it was in fact quite rich for its size), but for the restless KM, pining for England, it was stuffy and provincial in the worst possible way. It did not fit in with her bohemian ways, her grandiose, modern thinking, her dreams of decadence and separateness. KM was establishing, in her own mind, the idea of having a career in writing as a modernist author, and Wellington seemed to dampen her ambitions.

Eventually she realised a way of getting around her father and gaining his support. At about 18 or 19 she eventually went back to London to pursue a new life, but not until after a camping holiday around the north island where she learned some valuable lessons about living a more practical life and learning how to peel potatoes, amongst other things.

Oh, how much she would have savoured getting on a boat again, escaping the stifling Wellington, and getting away from her father, except for his much- needed money, which was 100 pounds a year. And oh, how I can relate, right now, to the idea of getting on that boat and going once again to England and the promise of great adventure- Northumberland, Shropshire, Lakes District, Cornwall, Kent, Yorkshire, Cotswolds, Herefordshire, Devon, Wiltshire, Nottinghamshire…

She went back to England and eventually met John Middleton Murry and published short stories and created a deeply enriching life around her, inhabited by D H Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and many others. She never forgot New Zealand, though, which crept into her stories time and time again. There is something about memories of our youth, and how we can paint them somehow rosier in our minds. If there was some rosiness.

   

Looking For, and Finding, The Lost Girl

I STARTED reading short stories and novels by D H Lawrence in 1989. At the time I was living in Wangaratta. I was browsing books at a newsagent on the main street. I didn’t know many people in the town. I had a lot of time on my hands. I’d read the odd short story during my university days. Probably about six or seven. The Rocking Horse Winner and You Touched Me, among others. Two of his best stories. So there I was in Wangaratta, with plenty of time on my hands and wanting to get back into reading, looking for a good cause to devote my energies to. Perhaps I had even read Sons & Lovers by then. And here it was, a paperback version of the Keith Sagar illustrated biography. I was hooked. His story was powerful, and led me in the following months to devour The Trespasser, Lady Chatterley, The Rainbow, Women In Love, etc, etc. but this wasn’t enough. Soon I found myself buying the hardback CUP editions of his letters, all eight volumes of them. Well, as they say, the rest is history- many first editions of books by him and about him, mostly courtesy of Michael Logie in Adelaide, and eventually visiting houses he once inhabited, in countries like England and Italy.

This past two years I have been wandering around, doing my job, carrying a tacky Penguin embossed aluminium water bottle of The Lost Girl (1920). It has occurred to me, on and off, that this is one of the few novels that has slipped my grasp. I had never read it. If people asked me about, I, the so-called ‘Lawrence expert’ would go totally blank. So I thought I had better do something about.

This past week I have had a couple of days where I found some rare space, some real solitude. I found a copy besides my first edition in the Niddrie library. One of those green ‘Phoenix’ copies. I found myself at the zoo the other day. The kids went off with some other kids and some adults, and I had a 3-4 hour stint alone next door to the carousel. I saw kid, after kid, after kid line up and go off on their $3.95 ride. But most of the time I was engrossed on this bench seat next to the carousel, reading The Lost Girl. By the time I was re-united with everybody, I was just over half way through. And, as everyone knows, the second half of any book is easier and quicker to devour than the first half.

I finished The Lost Girl that night, or the next day, I’m not sure. Reading, to me, and especially reading D H Lawrence, is a great adventure. The next port of call was the CUP volume of letters- Vol III, I think, marking the period leading up to and around 1920. Here, Lawrence was living in Taormina, Sicily, and quickly writing his novel (the novel was initially started, then abandoned, back in 1913 when Lawrence was still in England). So here were all the interesting references to his friends in his letters about the novel he was currently working on in Taormina. Initially it was called The Insurrection of Miss Houghton (!), then I think Mixed Marriage, and finally The Lost Girl (his publisher was apparently concerned that libraries would be scared away from this title- this was not long after the controversy of The Rainbow, you see).

So evidently Lawrence had great fun writing The Lost Girl, and thought it would be a success. The next thing to read was Vol II of the III part CUP biographies. Vol II covers the period around the 1920’s, and here was a great discussion about Lawrence’s intentions and his life at this time.  As is typical with Lawrence, the so-called ‘scandalous’ sections raised the most questions. Alvina Houghton is the daughter of a middle class businessman, owner of Manchester House drapery firm, and later joins a travelling theatre group as they play to audiences around England. Here she meets the working class Italian man with green eyes called Ciccio. Twice Alvina and Ciccio make love in the story- Alvina is a virgin until she meets Ciccio, well into her thirties. It is fairly dominant love-making, weighted on the male side, and according to the Lawrence scholar, Mark Kinkead-Weekes, there might be some anal sex in it as well (although I could not really pick that up in reading the sections he alludes to). So as it turns out, there are three variants in the Secker (English) first edition. The second variant, which is the one I have, has tipped in pages based on Lawrence’s apparently controversial intent. The first variant contained the altered text that was used to satisfy the prudishness of the libraries. The third variant (I think) contains Lawrence’s original intentions, not tipped in. all this is in the Lawrence bibliography I own, so I could pore over this with the second variant in my other hand.

Then there was the internet. The Australian scholar, Sandra Jobson-Darroch, has written an article claiming that Lawrence based his heroine, Alvina Houghton, on Katherine Mansfield. Another researcher, someone who completed her doctorate on this link, colludes with Jobson-Darroch, and says, yes, there are strong links suggesting that although Lawrence may have begun to use Notts woman Flossie Cullen as his model for Alvina Houghton, she became Katherine Mansfield when he took the novel up again just before 1920. It is interesting reading all this, yet I don’t get the sense at all, from reading The Lost girl, that there is more than just a passing reference to Katherine Mansfield in his novel (I certainly agree, however, she was the model for Gudrun in Women In Love).

All this is very interesting to me. I weigh up what these writers have written and I dismiss their ideas, but I can see how exciting it must be for them, to think they are on to something new, something the CUP biographers never seemed to think about. But I find their conclusions very non-conclusive, and I think it’s good to have an independent, critical mind as well ( I remember being at university, and the lecturer, Tony French, told me not to heed the ideas by the Cambridge scholar in his introduction to Hardy’s poems. The thought of rejecting the ideas of a Cambridge scholar in my Penguin copy of Hardy’s poems back then seemed to be almost sacrilegious).

What is more interesting than all of this, anyway, is the fact that Lawrence created another interesting and modern heroine in his Alvina Houghton, who paved a path for herself that is courageously completely at odds with her upbringing and those genteel influential folk around her (in this regard Lawrence’s own wife, Frieda, is a much more likely model for Alvina, although Katherine Mansfield forged a completely independent path for herself as well!).  Bravo to another of Lawrence’s heroines. Look closely, though, and you will see he is criticized by some well-meaning modern critics who detest Lawrence’s sexual politics and find fault with all of his heroines, and feel somehow that they are too male reliant and are victims of Lawrence’s so-called misogynistic world view.

Having read The Lost Girl I can, now, with greater confidence, saunter around the corridors and fields of my workplace, dangling my Lost Girl water bottle in my right hand, competently answering questions about the identity of this mysterious ‘lost girl’, and discuss the irony of the title- Alvina Houghton, a woman who discovers what she truly desires, and forges a courageous path to achieve it.

THE LITERARY LANDSCAPE OF LONDON, 1918

OF KATHERINE MANSFIELD, DH LAWRENCE AND VIRGINIA WOOLF


THIS morning I spent a glorious hour or so trawling through a book that came my way recently: Katherine Mansfield Collected Letters Vol 2. One of the best things about a good book collection is that it allows one book to lead on to another, and then another, and then another. It started like this:
I was reading some of KM’s letters to Ottoline Morrell, Dorothy Brett and Virginia Woolf as well as some others. The year was 1918 and she was living with John Middleton Murry, a comfortable middle-class existence, at Portland Villas, Hampstead. KM was earning money from the occasional short story (‘Bliss’, for example, in the English Review). She was also contributing reviews and articles for various other publications, and had her father’s annual stipend of 300 pounds. Murry himself was doing a good deal of writing for the TLS and the Nation and working for the War Office , and as editor of the Athenaeum was earning a healthy 800 pounds.

    KM 1919 PASSPORT PHOTORAPH

The Murry’s, fairly recently married, nicknamed their new house the ‘Elephant’ in reference to its white colour and large shape. KM was very ill by 1918. The good news at the end of the year was that the Armistice was signed. The war had taken its toll on everyone, not the least KM who lost her closest relative, her beloved brother Leslie, on the battlefield in 1915. At around the same time the war ended KM was told news she must have already suspected. Tuberculosis was going to take her life at a premature age. In 1918, at the age of 30, she was told she probably only had a few years to live. She died in January, 1923 at the age of 35.

'THE ELEPHANT', PORTLAND VILLAS

So here she is, on October 22, 1918, writing to Brett, having just received a visit from D H Lawrence: “He takes himself dreadfully serious now-a-days; I mean he sees himself as a symbolic figure- a prophet- the voice in the wilderness crying ‘woe.” Lawrence and Frieda are around the corner at Well Walk, Hampstead. It’s all fortuitous timing because Frieda and KM don’t get on well anymore, and Murry and Lawrence have had (at this point) and unspoken falling out, later to become much worse. Now Frieda has the ‘flu and is in bed, Murry is working, so Lawrence is taking the opportunity to make lots of visits to KM. even though he doesn’t think a lot of her writing (possibly isn’t terribly familiar with it). Just five days later, again to Brett, KM seems to have changed her tune a little: “For me, at least, the dove brooded over him too. I loved him: He was just his old merry, rich self, laughing, describing things, giving you pictures, full of enthusiasm and joy in a future where we were all ‘vagabonds’- …oh, there is something so lovable in him- and his eagerness, his passionate eagerness for life- that is what one loves so.” What a change! With her horrible illness, perhaps her moods are interchangeable. Lawrence is very fond of her and recreated her personality for some of his important texts (such as Gudrun in ‘Women In Love’). In this case it is the MSS of a play he has just written, called ‘Touch & Go’ which he has placed in her hands during the same week. There is a character called Anabel Wrath in the play that Lawrence has clearly based on KM and I suspect that he wants to share the portrait with her. Alas, as KM writes to Ottoline Morrell, she makes an initial observation, probably off-putting- ‘I have glanced inside and it looks black with miners…I do wish he could come up up out of the Pit for ever- But he won’t” and doesn’t bother with the rest, therefore not coming across the character called Anabel (Lawrence’s hopes extinguished).


D H LAWRENCE CIRCA 1920

Now during the time of these little visits, Lawrence is writing to a farmer friend on October 30 called Hocking about KM and how she is an invalid these days and can’t get about anymore : “Poor Mrs Murry has consumption of the lungs- cannot go outside the house.- But still, I think if the war ends, and she could go away to Italy or somewhere warm, she might get better.” Lawrence’s heart no doubt goes out to her. He is in denial himself because he has the same illness (often talks of ‘bronchial troubles’), yet he is in a sense lucky because he still has six or seven years of reasonable health, eventually succumbing in 1930. Lawrence wasn’t the only one that thought a warm climate might ‘cure’ tuberculosis. It would certainly be a comforting thought. He was to pack his bags for Italy a few years later too.


And then we have Virginia Woolf writing in her diary (Vol 1-18 Feb 1919), weighing up whether or not she can classify KM as a friend: “The truth is, I suppose, that one of the conditions unexpressed but understood of our friendship has been precisely that it was almost entirely founded on quicksands. It has been marked by curious slides and arrests; for months I’ve heard nothing of her; then we have met again upon what has the appearance of solid ground.” How much more difficult to communicate in those days, and how many instances there must have been of problems associated with communication, especially around war time. Letters go missing, people misinterpret things. Woolf visited KM at the ‘Elephant’ several times in 1918, but her diary mainly details a response to Murry, who, like Lawrence, she looks upon mostly unfavourably. Woolf’s feelings about KM are ambivalent. But at times she records admiration for her both as a person and as a writer. A perfect example of her ambivalence is when she writes in her diary, on October 11, 1917, “We could both wish that ones first impression of KM was not that she stinks like a- well civet cat that had taken to street walking. In truth, I’m a little shocked at her commonness at first sight; lines so hard and cheap. However, when this diminishes, she is so intelligent and inscrutable that she repays friendship.” An interesting weighing up of somebody- is she worthy to be my friend or not? The ‘civet cat’ label is telling. KM was an extraordinary woman of her times. A similarly middle-class background to Woolf (her father was an eminent banker in New Zealand, and Woolf’s father was the well known and highly respected critic and writer, Leslie Stephen. KM became a kind of rival to Woolf, even though KM didn’t write novels. Virginia Woolf, like Lawrence, saw KM at her most vulnerable at the end of 1918. Visiting Portland Villas, she commented in her diary “..husky and feeble, crawling about the room like an old woman…Illness, she said, breaks down one’s privacy so that one can’t write- The long story she has written breathes nothing but hate.” Woolf’s body didn’t cave in like this- which may be seen as a lucky thing. But her handicap in a sense was much worse. For years she battled madness and heard voices in her head, and eventually drowned herself near her property in Sussex.


VIRGINIA WOOLF CIRCA 1920


And KM, for her part, described Leonard and Virginia Woolf as ‘smelly’ in a letter to Murry on February 17, 1918 (no reference to ‘civet cat’, however). When she Woolf three months later, just after marrying Murray in May, she describes her as ‘very nice’ in a letter to Brett (in her diary Woolf sums up KM as being ‘marmoreal’ in regards to the same outing). An in a letter to Woolf herself, on November 7, 1918, from Portland Villas, KM probably feeling somewhat tragic and vulnerable over her fate, tells her “You are immensely important in my world, Virginia.” This letter comes the day after Woolf visited her, and made the diary entry about KM being ‘husky and feeble’, above.


What a glorious thing, therefore, are letters, and how lucky I am to be able to access all these from within the confines of my own bookshelf!


Less than a year later KM will write her first serious will which she leaves at the Bank of New Zealand for Murry to access when she dies four years later: “Any money I have is yours, of course. I expect there will be enough to bury me. I don’t want to be cremated and I don’t want a tombstone or anything like that. If its possible to choose a quiet place- please do. You know how I hate noise.” Well KM didn’t quite get her wish. She died at Fontainbleau in 1923 and is buried with a lovely inscription from Henry IV. This particular letter finishes with “That’s all. But don’t let anybody mourn me. It can’t be helped. I think you ought to marry again and have children.” Murry did- his next wife also died young, of tuberculosis. But first they had a daughter together- whom he named Katherine Middleton Murry.

‘But I tell you, my Lord fool, out of this nettle danger, we pluck this flower, safety.’

Notes:

D H Lawrence: Touch & Go, C W Daniel Ltd, London, 1920

The Letters of D H Lawrence Vol 3 1916-1921, Cambridge University Press, 1984

Katherine Mansfield: Collected Letters Vol 2 1918-1919, OUP 1987

The Diary of Virginia Woolf Vol 1 1915-1919, The Hogarth Press, London, 1977

KATHERINE MANSFIELD: A NEW BIOGRAPHY

KATHLEEN Jones is the author of a new biography about Katherine Mansfield. There is also a large section of research devoted to the life of John middleton Murry, particularly the turbulent years following Mansfield's death. Following is a letter of appreciation to the author, and following that is the author's emailed reply.


LETTER TO KATHLEEN JONES- SEPT 29 2010

Dear Kathleen,



This is a quick note to thank you for the recently published biography of the intriguing Katherine Mansfield which has greatly preoccupied me the last few days, until 6:00 PM tonight when I finished it. It is fresh in my mind and I felt that I would like to send you some impressions from a humble school teacher of High School English living in the northern suburbs of Melbourne.



I first encountered KM, the writer, when I completed Year 12. She, and other brave, unorthodox women like Sylvia Plath and Kate Chopin, interested me more than the male writers that I was studying at that time at university. I remember Carson McCullers was another. I read the Bliss and Garden Party collections, and this naturally led on to an interest in writers in her circle, like Virginia Woolf, Huxley, and D H Lawrence in particular. Then I read Gillian Boddy’s beautifully photographed text, as well as the revised Alpers. I thought the Alpers biography was dry and a bit disconnected, and I realise now that it may be because of a lack of knowledge in his subject, and a difficulty on his part to locate and utilise enough resources.



I showed Bliss (the story) to an intelligent Literature bunch at school many years ago, and we were all fascinated by it, and became involved in trying to interpret its symbolism. I have now visited the birthplace cottage in Wellington, and proudly carry my KM key ring with me everywhere- the Alexander Turnbull library awaits. A few years ago I also had the opportunity to purchase the three slim volumes of The Signature which I can see from my bookcase shelf as I write. I collect books nowadays- most of them are by or about DHL, but I have three Constable first editions with wrappers n fine condition- Something Childish, The Scrapbook and Novels & Novelists. I saw Dove’s Nest in similar condition in London at Ulysses Bookshop, but couldn’t afford it.



So KM is someone that I have kept at the back of my mind throughout my reading life. An excellent short story writer and an equally fascinating subject. Your book has resuscitated a great interest in her, and I thank you for it, although it has come at a bad time in that I am about to go back to work, after holidays, hopelessly underprepared. It is the most detailed and enthralling book I have encountered about her, and it is better than many biographies I have read on other literary subjects. Your hard work has paid off and here are some of the qualities I have enjoyed:



- You haven’t created a ‘saint’ in KM, in that you fully explore her foibles and weaknesses- her damaging episodes of indecision, her inexperience upon arriving in London, her unfortunate ability to create mess after mess in her private life and her difficulty in being honest and the need to constantly wear a mask (which frustrated those like Kot who truly loved her).

- At the same time, KM comes across as unconventional, determined, incredibly brave and prepared to give up so much for (to use a cliché), ‘her art.’ We can see in the more conventional lives that her sisters led how easily it would have been to stay in NZ, or marry and live respectfully in England, and be popular with her wealthy, aristocratic parents. The number of house changes, and the amount of times she lived in cold and almost decrepit conditions, makes you shiver as a reader. On top of her brave battle with her all encompassing illness and her desperate search for better health, I can see why she has become greatly admired.

- There must be a temptation to not only glorify KM, but to also demonise some of those around her, especially DHL, who we associate with KM so much. But while acknowledging the awful moments- probably the worst being the ‘stewing in consumption’ quote, you also acknowledge the undoubted generosity, seen in such moments as the simple postcard from Wellington, and especially the beautiful and tender letter he sent her after the death of her beloved brother, Leslie. No, Lawrence doesn’t come under anywhere near as much dark scrutiny as Murry (and to a lesser extent, LM) , which seems to me fair.

- I found the chapters about Murry fascinating, particularly the ones post- Katherine. In these stages of the book you must have been tempted to acknowledge Murry in the title. Perhaps it was an afterthought to include so much research on Murry? Or is it because KM is strangely enough so much still a spiritual force in Murry’s life, right up until his death? I didn’t know any of the details about Murry and this nightmare existence with Betty, and the incredibly sad details of the lives of his children, and the terrible outcome of his marriage to Violet. Murry is such an intriguing character, and the intensity of his life with DHL has been written about numerous times before. There seems to me something in the history of Murry and KM’s life that is repeated in the story of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, and how her memory came to equally haunt him. DHL’s comments about him being a ‘dirty worm’ seem reasonable on balance don’t they?

- Your knowledge, too, of KM’s creative life, not just her personal life, is very good. I would have preferred a bit more analysis of her writing- after all, what she wrote comes from her, and tells us just as much about her than what she actually did- the best biography I have read in this regard- in which we come to intimately know the author though his actual writing- is the DHL biography by Mark Kinkead- Weekes (the second CUP biography). Nevertheless I really appreciated commentary on a number of stories and journal fragments, and it has led me to want to rediscover her work.

- Finally, the way you evoke the time- England, NZ and Europe in the period up to and after the war- is brilliantly done. We must remember the social mores were very different then- Murry hiding when visitors come around! The unfortunate episode when KM thinks she has to contact George Bowden- the ‘incomprehensible decision’- and the ever increasing threat of war, especially in the poignant moment in Paris when sees a zeppelin when staying in Carco’s flat.

My wife and I visited Fontainebleau for the express purpose of seeing KM’s grave. We were rushed for time and fortunately it was about the sixth or seventh headstone I scanned. I didn’t know as much about the journey then, s I wish I could go again now. I have seen some of the houses from the outside- ones in Hampstead Heath, the Acacia Road house. Alas, I never went to Bandol, but a beautiful experience was seeing Lawrence and Frieda’s Villa Mirenda in Florence. I thought that Frieda and KM had a better relationship displayed in your book, but you have altered this perception. KM’s sad and bitter experience in the end gives us all some hope- just as much a ‘savage pilgrimage’ surely, as Lawrence. Thank you once again- I am sure that KM, and your book, will stay with me forever.



Darren Harrison.

                                                                         
Kathleen Jones' reply:


Dear Darren


Your letter gave me so much pleasure. I can't tell you how much it means to an author to have such a detailed, enthusiastic response from their readers. I didn't write the book as an academic exercise, but because I'm passionate about KM's work and fascinated by her life and it's good to know that some of that communicates.



Thank you very, very much for letting me know that you enjoyed the book. Biography isn't doing so well in Europe at the moment - hit by the economic downturn. Good to know that the odd copy is selling in Australia!

best wishes

Kathleen Jones



www.kathleenjones.co.uk