[In the following excerpt, Gurr comments on Katherine Mansfield's attitude toward her being, in effect, an exile in England from her native New Zealand.]

1. THE LITTLE COLONIAL

The exiled artist is like the rag which is tied in the middle of the rope used in a tug of war. He marks the still point between two straining forces. From one direction he is pulled by the sense of his own individuality which helped to make him an artist, the distinctive voice ready to tell its audience what they are not yet conscious of. From the other direction comes the tug of the unknown, the blank fear of the exile who has lost that sense of identity which comes from the feeling of belonging in a community. By reacting against this community the artist knows his individuality. By exiling himself he loses it. If the two pulls are equal the rope under the rag will quiver but get nowhere. The artist likewise will strain in one direction, towards the realisation of his individual vision, but find it impossible to move to it because of the counter-pull towards the communal identity which has shaped that individuality and without which he has no identity, or therefore individuality, of any kind. The result is fear, and stasis.

Katherine Mansfield acknowledged this two-way strain. In a review she wrote in 1920, about a book by another New Zealander, she notes sympathetically her fellow-colonial's struggle to write. The impulse to compose and to realise one's self in words is so often nullified, Mansfield declares, by timidity, the insistent need for the security which comes from modelling oneself on somebody else. And yet standing out from chapters of imitative prose, she observes, “there is a sentence, there is a paragraph, a whole page or two, which starts in the mind of the reviewer the thrilling thought that this book was written because the author wanted to write.”¹ But such self-realisation easily drowns in a sea of timidity. “One would imagine that round the corner there was a little band of jeering, sneering, superior persons ready to leap up and laugh if the cut of the newcomer's jacket is not of the strangeness they consider admissible.” The true personal voice lacks the confidence to be itself in a crowd of strangers. Her image is of a new boy at school, or a colonial under the long noses of fashionable society. “In the name of the new novel, the new sketch, the new story, if they are really there, let us defy them.”

This lament sets out the fundamental values by which Katherine Mansfield lived. The artist has an individual voice which is distinctive, uniquely the artist's. His or her duty as an artist is to use it. Fashionable accents and the weight of received opinion are dangerous because they destroy that individuality if the fear they inspire overcomes the artist's determination to be himself. Fear is a natural condition for the artist because of his isolation, his individuality. Defiance, overcoming the timidity which grows out of isolation, is the obligation the artist owes to his individuality. It follows from this, too, that the cost of being oneself, of artistic freedom, is isolation.

One of the rewards of reading Katherine Mansfield is a sense of the unity of her work. Her personality emerges naturally from the style of her writing. Whether this is because she wrote mainly in the form of the short story—a form whose ancestry in the folk tale and whose brevity emphasise the narrator's voice and personality—or because of the accessibility of her intimate writings, all the letters and journals published posthumously by her husband, the result is a clear aura of her personality in all she wrote. The same narrator, the same marvellous command of exact description and delicate nuance, present the same acutely discerning vision in her private writing and her fiction alike. So the life and the work, both in the end products of the impulse to flight, must be taken together.

2. THE LIFE OF AN EXILE

Katherine Mansfield was an identity, the colonial writer in London, assumed by the girl born as Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp in 1888. Her birthplace was Wellington, in New Zealand—in a distant province, as she and all her fellow-countrymen thought themselves to be, a remote colony of Britain. Culture was what arrived, packaged, on the mail steamer after six or eight weeks of unavoidable delay. With greater comfort than in the British climate and with no very special sense of an exotic setting, Wellingtonians at the turn of the century lived their lives in accordance with an idealised model filtered through distance and inaccessibility.

Because it was idealised, and because of the predominantly mercantile ethos of the people who idealised it, the culture of provincial Wellington was emphatically, insistently, bourgeois-respectable. Although the country was still largely dominated by pioneers—Wellington was less than fifty years old when Kathleen Beauchamp was born there—its values were not frontier values. It was, on the whole, suburban England which was transplanted to Wellington. Even its politics were local government politics. The transplant was too young to have evolved any very sturdy growth of its own. Cultural values, which usually evolve more slowly than material or political changes, were almost wholly imitative of London.

It was natural therefore that Kathleen Beauchamp and her sisters, as the daughters of one of Wellington's leading merchants, should finish their education at a school for young ladies in London. She spent three years of her adolescence, from fifteen to seventeen, at Queen's College in Harley Street. There she read a lot, not very conscientiously, but with a keen appetite for the most modern cultural delicacies. These were chiefly Wilde and the Decadents, and they stimulated in her the kind of tastes which provincial Wellington was never going to satisfy. Predictably, therefore, within two years of her return with her family to New Zealand, she had prevailed on her apprehensive father to release her for some real adventures as a young adult back in London.

He had good reason to be apprehensive. It was much more her strength (all her sisters agree on her egocentricity) than his judgement which got her away. He could see that the intensity of her appetites and the sharpness of her vision might make her a self-destroying rebel against his bourgeois values. “Isn't it terrible to love anything so much?” she asked herself in her journal before leaving Wellington. “I do not care at all for men, but London—it is life.”² So (following the metaphor of colonial transplantation) she bundled her roots around her and planted herself back at the source, in London. She adopted Wilde's principles: art and life were inseparable, life must be crammed with experiences to feed art, and the artist must be free both to receive experience and to record it. “Art is absolutely self-development”, she declared.³ In provincial Wellington the development of the artistic self was constrained. Deracination was accordingly a condition of art.

She left New Zealand thinking of herself as an expatriate, not an exile. To her father she made it clear that she wanted to return to England to become a writer. The early stories he helped her to get published in the Australian Native Companion convinced him of her talent. What he must have sensed, but feared to admit, was her own precondition for writing, the experience of life which would fertilise her art. Experience as a precondition for art was the dogma she had learned from Wilde. The artist might adopt fictive roles and names, but the experience which art recorded had to be real. A later writer has observed that by the age of fourteen most writers have enough experience for a lifetime of art. But Katherine/Kathleen was a girl, in a society which put up even more nets against female freedom than Joyce's Stephen Dedalus was trapped by, and she spent several years struggling in the nets before she could feel the truth of that simple assertion.

In the next four years she got the experience which turned her from an expatriate into an exile. As her friend of the time, Beatrice Campbell, rather sniffily described it many years afterwards,

With some idea of gaining “experience”, she got herself involved in about as much suffering as any young writer ever faced up to. A broken and meaningless marriage, unhappy love affairs, poverty, two pregnancies of illegitimate children of which one ended in a miscarriage and one in an abortion …⁴

If her devotion to the cultural metropolis was not enough in itself to cut her off from her New Zealand roots, the life of those years certainly was. She acted out many roles in this period—the allowance from her father was not enough to finance all her experiences, and she used many ways of getting money, including a chorus line in repertory in northern England, and entertaining at parties in London drawing rooms. Role-playing and attitudinising were the only means she had of getting through her experiences in a society she felt increasingly to be alien.

During these years she never belonged to Bohemia, unless it was on the fringe of Orage's New Age coffee shop coterie. For two years she wrote regularly for The New Age, chiefly under the feminist banner of Orage's fellow editor Beatrice Hastings. But she was too separate from any community, too bare in her sensibilities, to feel she belonged. She blundered from crisis to crisis, plunging in (for instance into her one-day marriage) and then running away as far as her finances would allow. Not until she met Middleton Murry early in 1912 did she stop running. He, because he was passive and did not hurt her, and because he was undemanding, provided her with what she most needed, an artistic platform, a place where she could freely do what she still wanted above all things. His role was to give her a point of rest where she could stop and put her experiences into place in her mind. He gave her at last the freedom to write. From this time on she stopped playing with names and different roles and firmly became Katherine Mansfield the writer.

For more than a year the two of them lived for their work, editing Murry's magazine Rhythm (called for its last three issues The Blue Review), writing for it and financing it. By the time it collapsed, leaving Murry a bankrupt and sucking away her allowance, their relationship was a working (in both senses of the word) partnership, a bond. Their lifestyle, living for their art, satisfied her highest priority, and the intimacy of two eased some of her day-to-day discomforts. Murry was cool, slow, not phlegmatic but certainly not irascible, fairly painless to live with and a stabilising point for her literary ambitions. For nearly eight years their relationship was the mainstay of that insecure mainmast her emotional life. In 1918 she wrote to him from Bandol, “the more I think the more astounded I am at the immense division between you and me and—everybody else alive.”⁵ But she was then in the south of France for her health, and twelve days after this declaration she began to cough up the blood which confirmed the existence of tuberculosis. This, as much as the physical separation it forced on them, sent her off on her own again.

When the tuberculosis was confirmed she began an increasingly frantic search for recovery, for any escape from the terror of death which possessed her life. It separated her from Murry, even though they still lived together for years at a time—ironically she began to cough blood only two months before they were freed from her first marriage and she could become Mrs Murry. It was beginning to separate them by the time they did get married, in May 1918. From then on her vision was less and less the unit of two against the world. She became more and more isolated by her sickness. (Several hotels refused to take her in; she got a bed once in Switzerland only by claiming, she declared, the wrong symptoms: a weak heart and lungs “of Spanish leather”.)⁶ She was free to write but not to live. In 1920 she wrote to Ann Estelle Rice that, lovingly nursed though she was by her elderly cousin in Menton, “I pine for my own people, my own wandering tribe.”⁷ She wrote to Murry in the same month “It is a great strain to live away from one's own tribe, with people who, however dear they are, are not artists.”⁸ Wryly using a different metaphor, more appropriate than the lost people of Israel to her residence in a Catholic household and her enforced solitude, she told Dorothy Brett, “We belong to the Order of Artists, and it's a strict order.”⁹ By 1920 Murry was no longer her community. Her freedom as a writer was now complete. She no longer depended even on the order of two against the world for her security. Her finest work came in the years that followed the achievement of this isolation.

Insecurity dogged her whole life. She saw it as the chief constraint on the artistic freedom which was always her proclaimed goal. “If you are without fear you are free’, she wrote in 1921 to her brother-in-law, the aspirant painter Richard Murry. “Writers … are self-conscious to such a pitch now-a-days that their feeling for life seems to be absolutely stopped—arrested.”¹⁰ She never herself had the unselfconscious security of belonging anywhere, even to her wandering Order, and she valued the sense of belonging and the security which belonging somewhere gave accordingly. Her ultimate home was far away, in place and time, though her father always kept her supplied with enough money to subsist on. Her finances were one of the securities she did have. They were kept independent of Murry's and she fought hard to hold them that way.

Her insecurity was in England, and was largely social. The South African exile Beatrice Hastings was her mentor for a while. Later the Irish Beatrice Campbell became her confidante. She has said in retrospect that she and Katherine were relaxed together “rather as if we were both exiles and did not ‘belong’ in London.”¹¹ In the early years with Murry their closest friends were exiles—the Russian Koteliansky, Lawrence the internal emigré with German Frieda, the American Anne Estelle Rice, the Campbells. In his autobiography Between Two Worlds Murry tells anecdotes which illustrate the social insecurity which he shared with Katherine and Lawrence.¹² In his own journal he says, “We were all socially outsiders, quite without the social and domestic tradition of which the Bloomsburies, Aldous Huxley, and expatriate—plus royaliste que le roi—Eliot inherited.”¹³ The feeling seems to have been mutual. Virginia Woolf always saw Murry as the leader of what she called the underworld, and after her first evening with Katherine she described her in a letter to her sister as stinking like a civet cat which had taken to prostitution, a simile presumably inspired by Katherine's unsubtle perfume. Ida Baker, Katherine's most lasting friend, who called for her at the end of the evening, was described equally acidly as “another of those females on the border land of propriety and naturally inhabiting the underworld.”¹⁴ They were guests in Bloomsbury, but there was no warmth in the welcome.

In his biography of Virginia Woolf Quentin Bell writes that she used the term underworld “with malicious intent and certainly with a kind of snobbery, sometimes with a purely social meaning, but also to classify those who were not so much creative artists as critics and commentators—people who could write a clever essay or a smart review; people who were more interested in reputations than in talents.”¹⁵ In fact her initially snobbish social reaction to Katherine Mansfield was diluted even at the first encounter. “She is so intelligent and inscrutable that she repays friendship”, was her conclusion. What they had in common in the end overran the social hostility. Virginia Woolf records a meeting in the summer of 1920 which began coolly, but “then we talked about solitude and I found her expressing my feelings as I never hear them expressed … A queer effect she produces of someone apart, entirely self-centred; altogether concentrated upon her ‘art’: almost fierce to me about it.”¹⁶ But this affinity was a late and isolated occurrence. For most of her writing career Mansfield was inextricably tied in Bloomsbury eyes to Murry, and Murry was never welcome. As Bell again records, “The perpetual president and oracle of the Underworld was John Middleton Murry, for he added another ingredient—a high moral tone, a pretentious philosophy borrowed in part from his friend D. H. Lawrence—which allowed the game to be played under the cover of deep, manly, visceral feelings and virtuous protestations.”¹⁷ So long as Katherine Mansfield clung to Murry as the one tree on her island, so long would Bloomsbury see her as an outcast, a colonial.

She herself knew all this, and at times hated England for it. Although she went to stay with Ottoline Morrell at Garsington and to evenings at the Woolfs', her letters to them are always strained and unspontaneous. To Virginia Woolf in April 1919, for instance, she wrote in an English falsetto, “You write so damned well, so devilish well.”¹⁸ To Murry she wrote of loathing the English. About to visit Garsington she reassures him that she feels quite strong enough to face them. “I feel I could get into the very middle of a Bloomsbury tangi and remain untouched.”¹⁹ The Maori word (a tangi is a communal feast, the antithesis of isolation) stresses her feeling of alienation. Later she took Bloomsbury as the focus of her anger against that section of English culture which tried to ignore the war and the way it transformed everything.

She felt less alienated in France. Bandol in particular, during her first stay there, before the war changed it, gave her a feeling of security like home. “Oh God, this place is as fair as New Zealand to me”, she wrote to Murry, “as apart, as secret, as much a place where you and I are alone and untroubled.”²⁰ Being in England was an imprisonment, and she felt while she was there as unsafe as a criminal. Several letters written in the summer of 1921 from Switzerland speak of her sense of being cut off from life as a result of being “on the island”.²¹ The “little band of jeering, sneering, superior persons” that she wrote of in her review of 1920, the Bloomsbury tangi, was never far from her mind while she lived in England. Isolated, in France or Switzerland, or in her private memories, she was free to be unselfconscious. Writing to Dorothy Brett from Hampstead, shortly before the decision was again taken to travel to the sun for her health, she confessed, “I have to keep as solitary as I can, to have nobody depending and to depend as little as I can.”²² Not even Murry was a protection by then. And in the same letter, defending her solitude as the price of her freedom, she added, “Were I perfectly sincere I'd have to confess that I was always acting a part in my old palmy days. And now I've thrown the palm away.” In England, conscious of her exclusion, she could either live a pretence or retreat into isolation.

Katherine Mansfield wrote a number of fine, delicate stories about the relationship between Murry and herself and about their English life. To the insect-on-a-pin scrutiny of the triangle, her French lover Francis Carco, Murry and herself in “Je ne parle pas français” of February 1918 she added the portrait of the man living abroad for the sake of his invalid wife in “The Man without a Temperament” in January 1920. The period in 1917 when the two of them had separate establishments lies behind “Psychology”, while “The Escape” (1920) is a superb portrait of a strained, destructive relationship, the woman as compulsive bitch and the man as tortured evader:

And she bent her spiteful, smiling eyes upon him, regardless of the driver. “I'll go myself. I'll walk back and find it, and trust you not to follow. For”—knowing the driver did not understand, she spoke softly, gently—“if I don't escape from you for a minute I shall go mad.”

She stepped out of the carriage. “My bag.” He handed it to her.

“Madame prefers …”

But the driver had already swung down from his seat, and was seated on the parapet reading a small newspaper. The horses stood with hanging heads. It was still. The man in the carriage stretched himself out, folded his arms. He felt the sun beat on his knees. His head was sunk on his breast. “Hish, hish,” sounded from the sea. The wind sighed in the valley and was quiet. He felt himself, lying there, a hollow man, a parched, withered man, as it were, of ashes. And the sea sounded, “Hish hish.”

To these stories of strain she added others from her English experience, catching moments of infidelity, epiphanies of English life (“Bliss”, “Revelations”). Others were written with the same incisive anger that informs the earlier stories she wrote for The New Age. There is a surge of feminism behind “The Little Governess” (1915) and “Mr Reginald Peacock's Day” (1917), and a warmer kind of derision in the stories of human weakness such as “Marriage à la mode” or the extended joke “Feuille d'Album”. Taken as a whole, however, they vary in quality much more than the New Zealand stories. One of the English stories in particular may help to explain why.

All the English or European stories share the economic precision of phrase which is one of the characteristics of her style. The last section of “Life of Ma Parker”, for instance, opens with a pair of similes which compose a marvellously exact and compact word-picture:

It was cold in the street. There was a wind like ice. People went flitting by, very fast; the men walked like scissors; the women trod like cats.

The short sentences hurry along with the urgent rhythm of the street scene. The strong, evocative similes make the atmosphere thus created visual. And the similes do not stand out as a casual vividness. The mature stories are all perfectly integrated structures—difficult to quote from without the feeling that the passage has been crudely ripped out of its context. In this passage, for instance, the men like scissors and the women like cats are at the same time visual images and menacing ideas, the dangerous, hostile creatures of the chilly world Ma Parker walks out into. In fact the paragraph continues directly from the similes into Ma Parker's response to the cold world of scissors and cats:

… And nobody knew—nobody cared. Even if she broke down, if at last, after all these years, she were to cry, she'd find herself in the lock-up as like as not.

A superb pair of similes, deployed with an exact regard for their place in the story as a whole. And yet this paragraph, the opening of the final section of “Life of Ma Parker”, is to my mind one of the most awkward passages in all of Katherine Mansfield's mature writing. It is bad for reasons which I think relate directly to her position as an exile in the England of which she is writing. Integrated though the similes are into the associative design of the whole their evocativeness has to appear as Ma Parker's own verbalisation of her grief. And it does not work. The vision—scissors and cats in the cold street—is Ma Parker's but the words are the author's. Ma Parker is too alien, too different a creature from her author to share her language. The technique of sliding from an authorial voice imperceptibly into the mind of the beholder was a normal device in Katherine Mansfield's short stories, one of the advances she made for the short story form. In the opening of “At the Bay” it works immaculately.

Very early morning. The sun was not yet risen, and the whole of Crescent Bay was hidden under a white sea-mist. The big bush-covered hills at the back were smothered. You could not see where they ended and the paddocks and bungalows began. The sandy road was gone and the paddocks and bungalows the other side of it; there were no white dunes covered with reddish grass beyond them; there was nothing to mark which was beach and where was the sea. A heavy dew had fallen. The grass was blue. Big drops hung on the bushes and just did not fall; the silvery, fluffy toi-toi was limp on its long stalks, and all the marigolds and the pinks in the bungalow gardens were bowed to the earth with wetness. Drenched were the cold fuchsias, round pearls of dew lay on the flat nasturtium leaves. It looked as though the sea had beaten up softly in the darkness, as though one immense wave had come rippling, rippling—how far? Perhaps if you had waked up in the middle of the night you might have seen a big fish flicking in at the window and gone again …

The morning landscape and mood are evoked by a seamless transition from word-painting to the child's vision from her bedroom overlooking the bay. No such seamless transition is possible with Ma Parker because to her author she is an alien.

The story of Ma Parker is of course a rather special case in the Katherine Mansfield canon. Interior monologue was by no means an essential technique, and some of the best of the English stories do very well without it. And yet the best of the English stories are the ones which venture the shortest distance from her own intimate experience: “The Man without a Temperament”, “The Daughters of the Late Colonel”, “Bliss”. The finest of them all, “The Daughters of the Late Colonel”, was readily recognised and acknowledged by its model Ida Baker as “that gentle caricature of her cousin Sylvia Payne and me”.²³ It was actually written in Ida's company, and Ida made the tea for a celebration when it was finished. Apart from that one rather anomalous achievement, Katherine Mansfield wrote her best about intimately known subjects held at a distance. “The Man without a Temperament” and “Je ne parle pas français” she wrote while she was in France and Murry was in London. England was too oppressive, her isolation from it was never sufficiently complete for the elevation and detachment in which she wrote at her best. The isolation she needed was a freedom from the social pressures which the metropolis laid on her. Even Murry became oppressive in time.

The part Murry played in the growth of her isolation is complex. The process was gradual, and her shift from relying on him as the other half of the twosome facing a hostile world towards withdrawal into self-consuming solitude is marked only crudely by such milestones as the first diagnosis of her disease. In 1919 her journal records two versions of an experience when the geraniums in her Hampstead garden seemed to be shouting “Impudence!” at the colonial.

I am the little Colonial walking in the London garden patch—allowed to look, perhaps, but not to linger. If I lie on the grass they positively shout at me: “Look at her, lying on our grass, pretending she lives here, pretending this is her garden, and that tall back of the house, with the windows open and the coloured curtains lifting, is her house. She is a stranger—an alien. She is nothing but a little girl sitting on the Tinakori hills and dreaming: ‘I went to London and married an Englishman, and we lived in a tall grave house with red geraniums and white daisies in the garden at the back.’ Im-pudence!”

It was a small epiphany which she felt was worth working over.

The entries were followed by a note about a talk between Murry and his brother Richard in which they speculated about the need for a sense of place. She registers her own rejection of England, and adds “They were of one nation, I of another, as we sat talking. I felt R. offered himself to his brother, in my stead.”²⁴ The world of two babes in the wood was not evident that night. Alienation has no visible stigmata, but this note records a wound which Murry did not have in common with his wife. She was apart from him by then not only in her social insecurity (they were then living in Hampstead, and he was editing The Athenaeum), but in her consciousness of the world he would never share, her New Zealand memories. There is a touch of self-pity and perhaps of self-dramatisation in both the note about the geraniums and the note about different nations, but it affirms that she knew that she was withdrawing, and where.

During the five years of her final illness, when she was struggling with tuberculosis and the physical isolation it so often imposed on her, she frequently referred in her notebooks and letters to her fellow consumptives Chekhov and Keats. They were the saints she worshipped in her Order of Artists, and their experiences gave her comfort in her solitude. But she had other, unique company through that time, company guaranteed by and guaranteeing her solitude, her remembered childhood.

Notes

1. Novels and Novelists by Katherine Mansfield, ed. J. Middleton Murry, London, 1930, p.220. First published 9.7.1920.

2. The Journal of Katherine Mansfield, p.21. Entry dated 21.10.1907.

3. Ibid, p.37. Entry dated May 1908.

4. Beatrice Campbell, Lady Glenavy, “Today we will only Gossip”, London, 1964, p.56.

5. Katherine Mansfield's Letters to John Middleton Murry 1913-1922, ed. J. Middleton Murry, London, 1951, p. 156. Letter dated 7.2.1918.

6. The Journal of Katherine Mansfield, p.249.

7. The Letters of Katherine Mansfield, ed. J. Middleton Murry, 2 vols, London, 1928, II, p.24.

8. Letters to John Middleton Murry, p.503. Dated March 1920.

9. The Letters of Katherine Mansfield, II, p.23. Dated 26.3.1920.

10. Ibid, II, p.27. Dated 9.8.1921.

11. “Today we will only Gossip”, p.69.

12. Between Two Worlds. An Autobiography, London, 1935, pp.289-92.

13. Quoted by F.A. Lea, The Life of John Middleton Murry, London, 1959, p.110.

14. Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf. A Biography, 2 vols. London, 1972, II, p.45.

15. Ibid, II, p.50.

16. Ibid, II, pp.70-1.

17. Ibid, II, p.50.

18. The Letters of Katherine Mansfield, I, p.227. Dated April 1919.

19. Letters to John Middleton Murry, p.275. Dated 1.6.1918.

20. Ibid, p.78. Dated 29.12.1915.

21. The Letters of Katherine Mansfield, II, p.124. Dated July 1921.

22. Ibid, I, p.231. Dated 10.6.1919.

23. Ida Baker, Katherine Mansfield. The Memories of L.M., London, 1971, p.153.

24. The Journal of Katherine Mansfield, p.158.