She Slept With the Wrong Men

ReadingRoom

On Katherine Mansfield’s relatable inability to be careful with herself

When did anyone last read, Katherine Mansfield? When did I? Do I even have a Katherine Mansfield anymore? My heart leaps at a grubby ivory spine on a dusty top shelf and a narrow detail of a woman in a huge black hat at a café table painted in the Impressionist style.  On the fly-leaf of Selected Stories, “Victoria University of Wellington Catholic Society Bookstall 1985” is stamped. $5 someone had scribbled in fat hand. Katherine Mansfield would have been on the reading lists of Engl 101.

I think of the claustrophobia the writer inspired in me when I was a young woman writing poetry and art criticism. In the mid-1980s I was listening to Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers and, probably, Blondie. Reading Michael Ondaatje’s Coming through Slaughter. Ondaatje was the new possible as far as I was concerned. Katherine Mansfield was an atmosphere too close to my Wellington home where the author herself had been born a century prior and went, briefly, before she shot through to England, to the same school as me: Wellington Girls High.

Swoony, private moments. Emotion turning on a dime. The blurrily precise rendering of subjectivity. Characters’ bliss or sensual captivation turns capsizing to indifference or spite or a desire to escape. A consummate choreographer of a scene. Then there were the startlingly stylish photographic portraits of the author herself with em-dash fringe and striped top – so modern, emphatic, gorgeous, and, potentially, cutting.

In her biography of the author A Secret Life, Claire Tomalin notes that “hatred was her favorite emotion.” I think she refers to Katherine nakedly revealed in the letters and journals, but it is there in the stories too. This emotion circulated in my childhood household. Hatred could nail moments and others in a way that was funny, pungent, acute, literary: pathologically so. There’s nothing like a bad marriage to bring out hating. In the preface to Selected Stories, Dan Davin cites Katherine’s talent for “morbid detail”.

If I had been born and raised by women who possessed a similar talent, Katherine Mansfield was the exemplar. What I am trying to unpack here is the claustrophobia the mere thought of KM inspired in me when I was young and, presumably, ripe for influence. There was a lot of my family in these stories, and it may be the sign of a powerful writer that I felt this so keenly. Not least in the fact that my mother, the artist Christina Conrad, had inhaled almost everything Katherine ever wrote, including the letters and journals, and was an authority on the despicableness of John Middleton Murray and the way he had failed his wife.

Now, when I re-read the exquisite scene in “At the Bay” where the child Kezia, said to be modeled on Katherine herself, “begs her grandmother not to die, ever”, I am transported back to the ardent intimacy and future-sadness the grandmother who brought me up inspired in me. Like many of the best things, it is a painfully beautiful story to read.

Trying to fashion myself in my ways, I had my reasons for keeping the writer at arm’s length. I was in what, a young friend, might call my ‘punk-bitch’ years. I am still in them, she maintains. I do my best. Those of us born in the mid-late twentieth century came to Katherine Mansfield late. Arguably, too late. In my hometown, Mansfield was a brand, that was clamorously claimed by what felt like all of New Zealand—including those that had not read her.

In her essay “Katherine Mansfield Would Approve”, Ashleigh Young writes of her summer managing the Tinakori Katherine Mansfield Trust house, a place teeming with literary fanboys and other keepers of the writer’s legacy: “…the stories seemed not to belong to me now. People had crowded inside them and were digging between words for something new to hold up and turn in the light. I couldn’t hold them close to me without feeling someone looking over my shoulder, without noticing the empty cans thrown in the gully.”

The aura of Katherine’s early death intensified these effects. This aura makes her stories retrospectively more poignant, more fatalistic, and more appalling in their take-no-prisoners brevity.  Her long-tentacled illness—gonorrhea conspiring fatally with TB—is a shade that haunts the stories. In and out of bed myself, albeit far less tragically than she, this long deterred me from getting close to her writing. I am susceptible to exaggerated identifications and empathies, not unlike the writer herself. Her transmission of subjectivities, and her mercurial movements in and out of others’ unfolding consciousness, being, and mood continue to be remarkable in her work. She was, and still is, a past mistress of this transmission.

There’s something else, something related. Of this adventurer and traveler Claire Tomalin writes, “She lived, worked and died with the Furies on her heels” and, “…But she was not well; nor was it in her nature to be careful with herself. ” That’s the clincher. The killing detail whereby last century’s gal reaches across the decades and seizes my attention by the throat. Her marvelous, terrible, relatable inability to be careful with herself. Which I take to mean, in part, that she was impulsive and that she slept with the wrong men. It could just as easily have been women.

Who can’t identify? “Don’t make a silk purse of a sow’s ear”, I hear my grandmother whispering. One of these poor choices was the man who gave her the fatal dose of gonorrhea and later blackmailed her, possibly about her cribbing of a Chekhov story. None of which stopped her from making her way across continents, style, and form, armed with that fabulously morbid eye for detail—until it did.

Courageous, crafty, clever. She was an adventurer, in body and mind, back in the first decades of the 20th century. In these things, she was an enabler. Someone who continues to show us how it is done—and even, the price that is to be paid.

In her last years—she died at 34—she writes from Villa Bela Isola in Menton, of one more doctor in a long string of those helpers and hinderers, of a certain Bouchage who investigated her medical history with particular rigor: “I recognized his smile—just the least shade too bright…his air of being a touch more vividly alive than other people—the gleam—the faint glitter on the plant that the frost has laid finger on…He is only about thirty-three. ”

It strikes me that she marks in the man the qualities of her prose and herself.

Let Katherine Mansfield’s superb eye for observation and her ear for transformative simile and metaphor have the last word. In her story “The Man Without a Temperament”, she writes, “Her white skirt had a patch of wet; her neck and throat were stained a deep pink. When she lifted her arms big half hoops of perspiration showed under her armpits; her hair clung on wet curls to her cheeks. She looked as though her young husband had been dipping her in the sea and fishing her out again to dry in the sun – in with her again – all day.”

That ecstatic vision has a dark under-leaf that resurfaces in a letter to John Middleton Murray, a few years on. Starkly capturing the sticky gravity of disabling sickness that distilled her sentence-making, Katherine Mansfield wrote, “I feel like a fly who has been dropped into the milk jug and fished out again, but it’s still too milky and drowned to start cleaning up.”

The superb new illustrated book Katherine Mansfield’s Europe: Station to Station by Redmer Yska (Otago University Press, $50) is available in bookstores nationwide.