Redmer Yska – Katherine Mansfield, Part II

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.

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