Claire Tomalin: Katherine Mansfield, a Secret Life

Katherine Mansfield: a secret life - by Claire Tomalin

That I love the work of Katherine Mansfield probably is apparent from the way I've rattled on in this blog.How I wish for a new biography of this doomed and brilliant miniaturist! In the meantime, I recommend this 1987 work by Claire Tomalin.

Tomalin can always be counted on for clarity and an unbiased rendition of a life. In the case of Katherine Mansfield, both must have been difficult. Not only did Mansfield try on various personae and artistic identities, not only did she hide and lie about some of her past - she even changed her name several times, finally alighting on the name we know today.

She was, for her times, more sexually adventurous than many. Her early lovers may have included women. Some of the physical suffering she endured before her death from tuberculosis may have been the result of an STD she contracted, relatively early in her life.

Even as her strength ebbed, she flung herself into her art and the artistic life, socializing with such luminaries as Lady Ottoline, Virginia Woolf, and Aldous Huxley. She and her odious husband lived with the volatile D.H. Lawrence and Frieda Lawrence for a tumultuous period. (Lawrence later based two characters in Women in Love on Mansfield and Lady Ottoline.) Her stories, crystalline and (sometimes) bitter, caught the attention of Virginia Woolf, who considered Mansfield her only true literary threat.

Mansfield's death in the enclave of the mystical Gurdjieff was part of a desperate search for a cure when conventional medicine failed her. Tomalin takes the reader through the last days and last hopes with the dispassionate details that make Mansfield's decisions tragically clear.

Tomalin's biography brought me closest to feeling that I was in the presence of this complicated woman. I recommend it to all who love Mansfield, and all who admire a good biography.

Katharine Mansfield: Marriage a la Mode (Rereadings)

Technically, this is not a "rereading." It's an offshoot of the last book I read for Rereading. That's what I do, as a voracious reader: I follow pathways from one book to something else.


"Marriage à la mode" -- Katherine Mansfield

Imagine Isabel, if you will: a young, married woman who once lived in a pretty London house with her loving husband William and two little children. Picture the house, with lush petunias in a window box: a harmonic convergence of peace and bliss after the First World War.

Now think of the changes perfuming the ancient English air: women's suffrage, feminism, artistic and literary modernism. Each change drew advocates and acolytes, many of them famous (the Bloomsbury group) and colorful (Lady Ottoline's many-hued estate, harboring artists, pacifists, and pugs). These were the glitterati of the new London.

Pretty Isabel goes to Paris with her friend Moira, and returns discontented, a new Isabel who laughs "in the new way." William, baffled by her desire for a new house, new music, and new friends, nonetheless buys her a house in the country. He stays in London and visits on weekends while Isabel lives her new life with new friends. Bohemians and artists surround her, sharing a sunlit idyll with their pretty muse. She thrives, the children thrive, and William continues to work and support the merry band of early flower children that has replaced the traditional family.

Satisfactory, no? It's feminist fairy tale, if the prince and the princess don't mind a long-distance happily-ever-after.

Not so fast.

We meet William as he prepares for a weekend visit. His children expect presents, as children do. Toys, perhaps? No: Isabel has thrown out their old toys because they were "appallingly bad for the babies' sense of form." What else would please the children? William buys a pineapple and a melon, boards the train, and thinks of his lovely, "petal-soft" Isabel and the featherbed they one shared. Worries surface. Will the merry ones be there this weekend? Will they try to steal the fruits (of his labors?) from the children?

They are, and they do.

Mansfield's pen loathes artifice, and it wastes no time peeling each acolyte. (This, one senses, is personal.) Dennis, the wannabe ironist, frames every scene into a precious verbal tableau ("A lady in love with a pineapple"). Bobby, the fey freeloader, wants to don a Nijinsky dress and dance. Moira, Isabel's friend, discovers that "sleep is so wonderful. One simply shuts one's eyes, that's all. It's so delicious." (This, one senses, is very personal.)

They tolerate William because Isabel chides them (and William overhears): "Be nice to him, my children! He's only staying until tomorrow evening." Left alone, he wanders into a sitting room that is littered with the leavings of Isabel's new children -- piles of cigarette ashes, a grotesque mural on a yellow wall, strips of paint-daubed cloth strewn over the furniture ...

What makes a house a home? Mansfield offers a gesture. William, sitting in an armchair, feels the space next to the cushion. In London, in the old house, he would have retrieved his children's toys: a three-legged toy sheep, perhaps, or a little horn. Here, he finds "yet another little paper-covered book of smudged-looking poems." Not even the detritus of Isabel's new life belongs to him. Isabel's new life has both alienated and trivialized him. The reader hears a window slam shut before a clearly-relieved Isabel shoves him into a taxi.

Mansfield's pen loathes artifice. It also loathes sentimentality. Another writer may have pounced on William and reveled in the long love-letter he begins to compose on the train. William's lachrymose letter might have been lampooned with as much savagery as Dennnis' faux irony. But it isn't; she doesn't.

Instead, she follows the letter as it is delivered to Isabel the next day, a sultry Monday that finds the sulky group moping. Only Isabel receives a letter that day, "and mine's only from William." The envelope is thick, and the letter is long. It begins: "My darling, precious Isabel," and it continues, page after heartfelt page.

Isabel, astonished, feels an unexpected, unwanted emotion. A sentimentalist may have led Isabel up to the cool privacy of her bedroom, there to have an epiphany, and to resolve to reunite with her loving husband.

Instead, Mansfield leads Isabel to her bedroom, but not before she shares the letter with her new, feral children. They whoop and jeer when they read the clumsy prose. "God forbid, my darling, that I should be a drag on your happiness." They roll on the ground, weak with hilarity.

Something about the raucous scene catches Isabel's attention. Perhaps, Mansfield seems to suggest, the letter has touched Isabel's disregarded heart. Perhaps the letter shifts Isabel's attention. Indeed, Isabel begins to berate herself, calling herself "shallow, tinkling, vain..."

Is this a liminal moment? Mansfield certainly has given Isabel a chance, but she chooses, with minimal consciousness of error, to rejoin her friends, "laughing in the new way."

Virginia Woolf once characterized Katherine Mansfield as "hard and cheap" (although she recognized Mansfield's potential to equal her own art). Hard and cheap. How else to tell this story? Isabel squanders the opportunities of liberation, congress with serious artists, and a loving husband. She chooses cheap thrills.

This fairytale does not end with Cinderella and her prince, beautiful to the end. Sleeping Beauty does not awaken to the true value of true love. The story holds up a mirror to every frivolous, self-reverential society that is so enthralled with itself that it stagnates. As it was, Mansfield implies, so shall it be.

- - - - -
- - - - -

Mansfield died of tuberculosis, at the estate of a charismatic, esoteric teacher, Gurdjieff. The wizard could not heal her - another fairy tale gone awry. Perhaps Katherine Mansfield knew that the mage would fail, but she chose to reach for the fantasy after hard reality had failed her.

Bliss - Katherine Mansfield

When we meet Bertha Young, she is a happy woman. She loves Harry, her husband, and Little B, her baby girl. She loves her home, her thrilling friends, her flowering pear tree, the beautiful fruit she has purchased for the night's dinner party. She is so happy as she approaches her home that she wishes she could run or dance, but she knows better than be so unseemly. "How idiotic civilization is," she thinks. "Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?" But no, she thinks. "... that about the fiddle is not quite what I mean."

The exuberance, the love of place, the pleasure in the preparations for a party predate the appearance of Mrs. Dalloway , but Bertha could be her younger, less-introspective sister. She also could be the younger, less-callous sister of Isobel in "Marriage a la Mode," eager to know interesting people and to enjoy the moment. In fact, she shares one circumstance with them both: her enthusiasms do not lead to true intimacy in marriage. All three women who love life and color and friends have marriages that are companionable, but passionless.

After she arranges the smooth pears and ripe grapes, Bertha visits the nursery, where Nanny is feeding Little B. Nanny does not want to allow Bertha to feed the baby, but Bertha insists, thinking "why have a baby if it has to be kept - not in a case like a rare, rare fiddle- but in another woman's arms!" Bertha feeds Little B and admires the child, saying "I'm fond of you, I like you," as she admires the child's doll-like toes, and the sweetness of her lips and hands. Her blissful, ecstatic afternoon continues as she thinks of her books, her artistic friends, the scent of jonquils, and the lovely white dress she will wear to dinner.

Amongst the guests at her dinner party are characters who could have been lounging in the heat along with Isobel. Bertha loves them all: Eddie, the writer in the blazing white socks, the monocled Norman Knight, and his wife, who tucks things into the front of her dress "as if she kept a tiny, secret hoard of nuts there." She loves them, and wishes she could tell them "what a decorative group they made, how they seemed to set one another off and how they reminded her of a play by Chekhov!"

But the most beloved guest is the mysteriously cool, blonde, silvery Pearl Fulton. "They had met at the club and Bertha had fallen in love with her, as she always did fall in love with beautiful women who had something strange about them." Bertha feels a deep connection with Pearl, although her husband has been most uncomplimentary about her ("cold like all blond women") and Pearl has been indirect, quiet, observant, inexact. Like a schoolgirl with a crush, Bertha wants a sign, proof that Pearl shares that mystical connection, although "what would happen after that she could not imagine."

As the guests mingle and talk after dinner, she and Pearl look at the pear tree, its white flowers gleaming in the moonlight, illuminating and encircling them both (she feels) in a silvery, unearthly, intimate light. The moment passes, the party goes on, and Bertha thinks of how she will praise and champion her silvery friend later, in bed with Harry.

With that thought, Bertha is caught in a wash of a feeling - terrifying, new - one she never has before known: sexual desire. Desire for her husband. Desire that makes her ache."Was that what this feeling of bliss had been leading up to?" As her guests are leaving, bustling about with their coats and their taxis, she is as detached as if it were she who is departing, leaving an old world behind.

Mansfield has prepared the reader for the story's end, but gently, quietly. A body should not be hidden like a fiddle, she has said, twice. Look at the grapes, the pears, the flowering fruit tree in Bertha's Eden; look for the silence behind the chattering guests and the thoughts that skip through Bertha's mind as she would skip through her blissful, ecstatic, childlike life. But look also to the violin's sensual curves, the fecundity of the fruit and the flowers. Be prepared to participate in the world as it is.

Bertha is prepared for her old life to recede, and, perhaps, the reader is prepared for what Bertha sees when she looks to the hallway as her guests leave. She sees her husband and Pearl, "with her moonbeam fingers on his cheeks...and her sleepy smile" as Richard turns her violently toward himself for an embrace and a promise. Pearl touches Bertha's hand and says good-bye, leaving Bertha to gaze at the pear tree in her garden, still blooming, still lovely, and still. With that touch, Bertha loses her virginity.

Although Mansfield's observations are sharp, and although she is relentless in her parodies of the modern, artistic people who populate the world of the Youngs, she seems to have more compassion for Bertha than for many of her women characters. Bertha has served a purpose in the lives of her husband and her friends. She has been decorative, cheerful, and pliable. She simply never has grown up. Her only flaw has been innocence that has never been tested. Perhaps her daughter will be better prepared to be a woman in the real world. Perhaps her daughter will truly understand Chekhov.