Katherine Mansfield, The Woman Behind The Books (Including Letters, Journals, Essays & Articles)
for Plymouth.
True to his character, her father was generously concerned for her at the last. He and her mother went with her to Lyttleton to see her off. He had cabled to relatives in London, asking them to take her; but they had refused. So he had found for her in London a kind of hostel for unmarried business women. By a queer coincidence of the same sort which decided that she should look out, from her first rooms in Queen’s College, upon Mansfield Mews, the name of the hostel was Beauchamp Lodge. Further, she was to receive an allowance of £100 a year, paid monthly, through the London manager of the Bank of New Zealand, who was to keep a friendly eye upon her. Friendly, indeed, it proved to be; but perhaps not altogether of the disciplinary benevolence imagined by her father. The manager found it impossible to maintain the semblance of austerity required in face of Katherine’s critical gaze. He took the safer course, and made her his confidant and adviser in his affairs of the heart. In return, he became a loyal defender of hers. Of his bones were coral made. Some elements of him went to the picture of the Boss in The Fly.
Katherine’s memories of Beauchamp Lodge were always depressing. Her husband seems to remember that she pointed it out to him one day from the top of a ‘bus, and that it was a tall grey building, standing up sheer from the railway, behind Paddington Station, perhaps somewhere near the beginning of the Harrow Road.
She lost no time in renewing her relations with the Trowell family, who were now settled in Carlton Hill, St. John’s Wood; and she stayed in their house for some time. She conceived an affection for St. John’s Wood which endured; and in 1915, when she first chose a house to live in herself, it was in St. John’s Wood that she found it. Six years later still she wrote to a friend:
“What a pity it is you can’t get a house in St. John’s Wood. I think it is the one darling part of London…. It has a charm. But perhaps that is because I lived there in Carlton Hill for a long time when I was young and very very happy. I used to walk about there at night — late — walking and talking on nights in Spring with two brothers. Our house had a real garden, too, with trees and all the rooms were good — the top rooms lovely. But it’s all the musical people who make St. John’s Wood so delightful. Those grunting ‘cellos, those flying fiddles and the wonderful pianos. It’s like a certain part of Brussels.”
It was in the drawing-room at Carlton Hill, as Katherine remembered long afterwards in her Journal, that she played cribbage so often “with such intense — Heavens with what! — feelings while T. played the piano.”
T. was Tommy Trowell — Arnold’s baptismal name — the other brother was Garnet, and the happy spring she remembered was, apparently, the spring of 1909. But perhaps her memory was charitable. Certainly, in the early spring of that year she was very miserable; and in her misery did a rash and impulsive thing in the effort to escape from it.
Nor, apparently, was her stay at Carlton Hill so long as she afterwards imagined. She was back at Beauchamp Lodge by the end of February; and somewhere about that time, being in straits for money, she sold her ‘cello for two pounds. Katherine being what she was, it is difficult not to believe that this was not expressive of a farewell to music. With the sale of her ‘cello, she gave up her musical ambitions. They had been curiously personal, as we have seen. Music, a family of musicians, and one young musician with a touch of genius, had been the only path leading from the world of New Zealand to the world of art. Since it had been the only path, she had to tread it. And there is little doubt that her romantic passion for Arnold Trowell was rather a necessary part of the artistic destiny she dreamed for herself than an expression of her essential nature. A simple affection, a sincere comradeship, had been idealised through separation (at Queen’s and in New Zealand) into something more glorious which could not stand the test of proximity.
Indeed, what genuine love-passion was at the heart of this dream appears to have been transferred to Arnold’s brother, Garnet. This was, at least, a flesh and blood affair; but it also seems to have derived less from love than from the desire to be in love. At this moment, Musset’s dictum was true of Katherine. Elle se passionnait pour la passion. She was eager for essential experience, and even eager to pay the price for it. Probably she could have given to herself no account of the hunger which possessed her and drove her on. It was, indeed, elemental: an instinctive need to prove life “upon her pulses.” The creed of conscious experiment, which she believed she had imbibed from Dorian Gray, was not really for her at all. That demanded a deliberate and advised withholding of some part of herself, which was not in her nature. Surrender herself she must. There never could be, and never was, any holding back.
She seemed even to grasp at the opportunity of suffering. The fragments of her journal at this time are fevered and shrill; but the pain is there.
“It is the evening of Good Friday; the day of all the year, surely, the most significant. I always, always feel the nail-prints in my hands … the agony of Jesus. He is surely not dead, and surely all we love who have died are close to us. Grandmother and Jesus and all of them — only lend me your aid — I thirst too — I hang upon the cross. Let me be crucified — so that I may cry ‘It is finished.’”
Her inward turmoil was extreme. She found that the experience for which she hungered was shattering. It did not, as she believed it would, issue in self-expression. She was discovering that she could not have life on terms of her own, even when those terms were by no means prudential. Dimly, at the back of her mind, was the purpose of sacrificing herself to life to enrich her art. She would have the experience to express. But Life cannot be managed in that way. You cannot say “Thus far, and no farther” to suffering when you have once exposed yourself to it. It becomes the master, and declares that its will, not yours, shall be done. The fine point of detached awareness, from which in imagination the artist should serenely contemplate his own experience, is itself engulfed in the experience. What should be art is merely the cry of animal pain.
The deception was bitter; and suddenly Katherine revolted against it. She would not any longer endure the sordidness of the suffering to no end. She would become calm and cool and calculating. She would marry somebody who would respect her right to be an artist, who would stand between her and life, and secure to her the calm which she now believed to be necessary for creation. After all, that was what other women seemed to her to have done, or had had done for them; was not such a calm established — she did not guess with what toil and long-suffering — around a famous woman-poet with whom, and with whose family, she now came slightly into contact? And she came into contact with it by means of a man she had met in the musical circles of St. John’s Wood. He was eminently fitted to be the link between the genuine Bohemianism of the professionals of Carlton Hill and the decorous combination of art and complete respectability which had been achieved in the famous family to which he introduced her. He was, indeed, a professional musician; a singer and a teacher of singing — but he had advanced into the profession by the flowery path of a choral scholarship at Cambridge. He had education and refinement; he was the gentleman-artist with the bedside manner, of the type afterwards depicted with subtle understanding in Mr. Reginald Peacock’s Day. And he was, indubitably, like Mr. Peacock, an idealist, and, in particular, as it was almost an article of faith in the famous family, an idealist about women.
He had, no doubt, a genuine respect for Katherine’s talent; and perhaps he may have dreamed that he, with her, might found another such illustrious family, with another such centre of art and adoration in its midst. At any rate he offered Katherine homage — he spoke lavishly of “laying himself at the feet of her genius” — and apparent security. In her weariness and disillusion, her desire to escape the exhaustions of Beauchamp Lodge, she suddenly accepted the offer, and married him in the spring of 1909. She was dressed all in black, with Ida Baker for her only attendant. Within a few days she had left him. Idealism about women at close quarters was not at all the refuge she had allowed herself to dream. She tried in vain to return to Beauchamp Lodge — for which her marriage now disqualified her — and this may be the moment when she went on tour as a super in a travelling opera company. She used to tell of cooking kippers over a fish-tail gas-flame in her bedroom; and she sometimes sang, with all the absurd gestures required of an opera chorus, snatches of her former parts.
Contadine!
Signorita!