Many serious readers in New Zealand are likely to know the broad outlines of Katherine Mansfield’s sad and colourful life: the hugely talented daughter (born 1888) of a Wellington banker and merchant, who is sent in her teens with her two sisters to be schooled in London, where she discovers the literary avant garde of the time. After almost three years, she returns to the colony she now finds intolerably boring and pesters her parents to let her return to Europe, which reluctantly they do.
In the decades that follow, she has considerable success as a “modernist” writer, is credited with having made something new of the short story form in English, moves in the most distinguished literary circle of the early 20th century, and dies of tuberculosis aged 34.
As a consequence, and because so many of her best stories draw on her life in New Zealand, Mansfield remains something of an icon for those interested in our literature, a mixed blessing some would say, an irrelevance others would say, but difficult to ignore, if only in the form of a statue on Lampton Quay. There is, of course, no need to know about her life; it is the stories, together with her incomparable letters and journals, that are her legacy. But the life contains so much social history it does deserve our attention; and Gerri Kimber’s new biography has some surprises for us.
Mansfield tried to lead the life of the new “free woman” without the protections of birth control and antibiotics. A lot of her life had to be hidden from view, which is why modern scholars have to dig deep to find the truth. It has long been known, for example, that Mansfield’s puzzling marriage to the unappealing George Bowden in 1909 had occurred because she was pregnant to a man she was in love with who could not marry her, and to render the pregnancy respectable. At every turn, the free life she wished to pursue was curbed and frustrated by a social puritanism that even she could not be entirely indifferent to, or free of.
Her suffering was immense and it is not wrong to call it tragic: she can be seen as a beautiful and talented soul destroyed by a conflict between the dictates of biology and those of social norms. Later, she could make comedy of her life, in conversation rather than in serious fiction, telling stories about her adventures with the lover Garnet Trowell to amuse Virginia Woolf and Woolf’s husband Leonard, who would record that no one had ever been able to make him laugh as Mansfield had. But over a period of a few years hers became a life so “free” and so complicated even our most diligent academic researchers show signs of impatience.
“One of the main features of Mansfield’s personal life during these two years,” Kimber writes, “was the sheer number of her sexual partners and liaisons.” There are seductions, panics, pregnancies (“unbelievably, she was pregnant again”, p104), venereal infection, a miscarriage, an abortion, but no child; there is even a sexual assault by Mansfield on a 15-year-old schoolboy. “Take me!”, taking his hands and pressing them to her naked breasts. “Do with me what you will.” But the boy reported there wasn’t anything he wanted to do with her.
In the world of academia, I suppose being confident about the details of who did what to whom can matter; and one of Kimber’s special claims for her new biography is that it uncovers the truth about Mansfield’s affair with AR Orage, editor of The New Age, in which some of the stories that made up her first collection, In a German Pension, were first published. She also reveals Mansfield did not just leave her unwanted first husband unsatisfied on their wedding night but returned to him later, for a brief period, to give an impression of propriety when her family came to London for the coronation of George V, and for two of her sisters to be presented at court.
If the complexities of Mansfield’s relationships at this time can’t be said to defeat Kimber, they do produce a sometimes cluttered narrative, and one that might incline the reader to ask, “Does much of this matter?” What does matter is not the detail but the pain and the sadness, and most importantly, the outcome in her writing.
By the end of chapter 5, the narrative has settled with “Mansfield and Murry” – her erratic and unsatisfactory liaison with and ultimately marriage to John Middleton Murry (for whom Kimber has little patience and no sympathy). There is World War I and her brief romantic adventure with the French soldier-writer Francis Carco; then the death of her brother triggering her return to her New Zealand subject (childhood and family) and the romantic idyll with Murry in Bandol, where her important story Prelude was completed; her discovery of (and by) Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury set, and the turbulent friendship with DH and Frieda Lawrence.
As her health declines she seeks warmer locations – Ospedaletti in northern Italy, where her deep depression causes her to wish her faithful, necessary and lifelong companion Ida Baker dead; Menton, where (briefly) she thinks about converting to Catholicism; and then, recognising there is no safety in a warm climate and that the local graveyards are full of dead escapees from English winters, she pins new hope on the purity of mountain air and retires to the Swiss Alps. Finally, there is the resort to pseudoscience, the ghastly and entirely bogus Manoukhin treatment, where her spleen is bombarded with X-rays; and last of all mysticism, through GI Gurdjieff and his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at Fontainebleau, where she dies and is now buried beside her guru.
All this time she is still writing often brilliant stories, publishing two new much-acclaimed collections, while writing endless letters and journals and clever reviews for The Athenaeum, of which Murry was the distinguished editor.
Most of it is here, the familiar story adequately if not always elegantly told. But what of the claim to have shone new light on her biography by including the previously insufficiently acknowledged AR Orage? This is a promise of something fresh, new and essential which Kimber can’t be said to fulfil.
When she lacks the evidence she needs, she imagines: “It seems inconceivable that Mansfield would not also have been writing to Orage” (p172); “It seems highly unlikely that Orage would have been in the dark …” (p196). “It seems entirely possible that Orage deliberately sent …” (p235). That Mansfield valued Orage and wrote him a letter acknowledging him as her “master” is quite true, and he was partly responsible for her finally resorting to Gurdjieff. But none of this is new; it has long been recognised. If you don’t already know the Mansfield story, you will find it here in its brilliant light and terrible shadow, its weird Kiwi mix of the banal and the marvellous. Not the best source, but adequate.
