Selected Stories

There is a certain amount of truth in the above, but the ‘wife of John Middleton Murry’ whose legacy was initially defined by her highly edited posthumous outpouring was not quite the same person as the Katherine Mansfield who had lived, loved and written so briefly and intensely. She was in fact an extraordinarily conflicted and complicated woman, a restless soul, critical of others as much as herself, a free spirit born in the wrong era – and the ‘wife’ of a good many more people than John Middleton Murry.

Restless Wonder

Born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp in Wellington, New Zealand, Katherine Mansfield was the middle daughter of five born to Annie and Sir Harold Beauchamp, a successful banker; the couple eventually had a much-longed-for son. The Beauchamp parents were descended from British immigrants and retained an affinity with England that was transferred to Katherine. When the family moved to London in 1903, Katherine’s creative side was brought to life. Although she was already a talented cellist and an amateur writer showing ‘promise of great merit’, albeit ‘surly’ and ‘imaginative to the point of untruth’, in England she discovered a rich literary heritage that she yearned to become a part of. She composed a number of stories for her school’s newspaper, of which she later became the editor.

By the time the Beauchamps returned to New Zealand in 1906, Katherine was convinced that ‘the days full of perpetual Society functions’ that her father’s position demanded were unequivocally not for her. It was a ‘waste of life’ – something she would continue to find deplorable to her dying day. She considered her parents ‘quite unbearable’, as well as ‘so absolutely my mental inferiors’. ‘What is going to happen in the future?’ she wrote in her journal. ‘I am full of restless wonder.’ Mansfield longed to be elsewhere doing more exciting things – and in 1908, having secured an annual allowance of £100 from her father, she sailed for London and did just that.

Living Dangerously

Katherine Mansfield arrived in London as a nineteen-year-old on the lookout for life. Even by modern standards, she threw herself into this pursuit as if she were out for revenge. She later looked back on this period as one in which she became ‘an ardent disciple of the doctrine of living dangerously’. Within eight months she had resumed a friendship with Arnold Trowell, a fellow cellist from Wellington with whom she had previously thought herself in love; become pregnant by his twin brother, Garnet; hastily married George Bowden, an older music teacher whom she barely knew; and abandoned him on the night of their wedding.

Of greatest concern to her mother back in New Zealand, however, was Mansfield’s intense friendship with Ida Baker, a South African girl she had met during the family’s three-year stint in London. Deducing – not without cause – that Katherine’s apparent breakdown was the result of a romantic relationship with Baker, Mrs Beauchamp packed her daughter off to a Bavarian spa resort, returned to Wellington and promptly deleted her from her will. Katherine suffered a miscarriage during her expulsion to Germany.

But, as so often in her short life, Mansfield would not be beaten down or told what to do. Returning to London in 1910, she struck up a series of relationships with both men and women, including Ida Baker, and embarked on a period of prolific short-story writing. She even found inspiration in her hellish Bavarian exile, writing satirical sketches of German life that became her first published collection, In a German Pension (1911). She wrote articles for a socialist magazine, The New Age, and also submitted stories including the Maori-inspired ‘How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped’ to a new arts magazine called Rhythm, whose editor was John Middleton Murry.

Rhythm was not to last, but Mansfield’s connection with Murry was permanent. They had an on-off relationship until 1918, and then an on-off marriage that lasted until her death. Ida Baker likewise remained a fixture until the end.

Real Life

Mansfield’s output during and after the First World War was abundant, and fuelled in large part by two terrible tragedies: the first was the death on the battlefields of France of her beloved brother, Leslie, in 1915; the second was the news, in late 1917, that she had tuberculosis, a condition from which she never recovered. The war itself seemed to stifle her – ‘I have simply felt it closing in on me … and all to no purpose’ – and its effects caused her to reconsider the youthful exuberance of her earlier work. One of her last stories, ‘The Fly’, deals with grief in the wake of the First World War, and the ultimate futility of the struggle to survive.

In 1918, Mansfield’s story ‘Prelude’ was published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press. (The Murrys had become friendly with the Woolfs, among other literary luminaries on the London scene, including D. H. Lawrence and his wife.) The story was a revised version of one she had begun writing in the wake of her brother’s death – a story she felt she owed it to him to write – and is about a New Zealand family and the intricacies and complications of their lives, loves and secrets. She later continued their story in ‘At the Bay’, as well as exploring similar settings and family dynamics in other stories including ‘The Garden Party’.

As in so much of Mansfield’s fiction, her characters’ inner emotional lives are richer and more intuitively described than their outer actions; there tends to be less ‘plot’ in her stories than there is longing, and agonising, and finding that reality rarely matches expectation. It was a natural theme to pursue for Mansfield, for whom the grass was repeatedly greener on the other side. The tedium of reality forever intruded on her fantasies – in the middle of the First World War she had even temporarily abandoned Murry and Baker to track down another lover, writer Francis Carco, who was serving on the treacherous Western Front in France.

‘I Am Simply Unworthy’

Mansfield never forgot that she was an outsider: in New Zealand she was pained by the exploitation of the indigenous Maori by wealthy white interlopers such as herself; in England she was ‘a little savage from New Zealand’; as a lover of both men and women she was at odds with the moral code of her era. It was perhaps because of this that she had elements of the fantasist about her, always imagining life to be more full of possibility than it really proved to be – a trait evident in her most memorable, most disillusioned, characters.

She was a true life-liver at a time when it wasn’t strictly acceptable to be one; a writer whose villains are cold and self-regarding but who consistently sought to suit herself. And she knew she was not perfect: writing to Ida Baker just ten months before dying of a haemorrhage related to her tuberculosis, she admitted, ‘I am simply unworthy of friendship … I take advantage of you, demand perfection of you, crush you. And the devil of it is that even though that is true as I write it I want to laugh.’

Mansfield published just three collections of stories in her lifetime, and although they made her popular she knew she was seriously unwell; she once confessed to a friend: ‘I shall not be “fashionable” long.’ She was planning her next collection of stories when she died in France in early 1923, but she left behind instructions to Murry to ‘tear up and burn as much as possible’ – an instruction he ignored, for better or worse. In truth she had been horrified at the idea of dying without publishing everything she’d hoped to (‘How unbearable it would be to die – leave “scraps”, “bits”’), and it is thanks to Murry that much of her writing ever came to light, even if his version of her was highly edited. But of all the posthumous tributes she received, perhaps none was more telling of her talent than that from Virginia Woolf, her friend, critic and publisher, who admitted: ‘I was jealous of her writing – the only writing I have ever been jealous of.’

FROM RHYTHM (1912) (#ulink_30024cd7-03b6-5c17-81c0-ebfbd34b1d76)

HOW PEARL BUTTON WAS KIDNAPPED (#ulink_6195b28e-eae2-57a5-8a2c-04448c73dc18)

Pearl Button swung on the little gate in front of the House of Boxes. It was the early afternoon of a sunshiny day with little winds playing hide-and-seek in it. They blew Pearl Button’s pinafore frill into her mouth, and they blew the street dust all over the House of Boxes. Pearl watched it—like a cloud—like when mother peppered her fish and the top of the pepper-pot came off. She swung on the little gate, all alone, and she sang a small song. Two big women came walking down the street. One was dressed in red and the other was dressed in yellow and green. They had pink handkerchiefs over their heads, and both of them carried a big flax basket of ferns. They had no shoes and stockings on, and they came walking along, slowly, because they were so fat, and talking to each other and always smiling. Pearl stopped swinging, and when they saw her they stopped walking. They looked and looked at her and then they talked to each other, waving their arms and clapping their hands together. Pearl began to laugh.

The two women came up to her, keeping close to the hedge and looking in a frightened way towards the House of Boxes.

“Hallo, little girl!” said one.

Pearl said, “Hallo!”

“You all alone by yourself?”

Pearl nodded.

“Where’s your mother?”

“In the kitching, ironing-because-its-Tuesday.”

The women smiled at her and Pearl smiled back. “Oh,” she said, “haven’t you got very white teeth indeed! Do it again.”

The dark women laughed, and again they talked to each other with funny words and wavings of the hands. “What’s your name?” they asked her.

“Pearl Button.”

“You coming with us, Pearl Button? We got beautiful things to show you,” whispered one of the women. So Pearl got down from the gate and she slipped out into the road. And she walked between the two dark women down the windy road, taking little running steps to keep up, and wondering what they had in their House of Boxes.

They walked a long way. “You tired?” asked one of the women, bending down to Pearl. Pearl shook her head. They walked much further. “You not tired?” asked the other woman. And Pearl shook her head again, but tears shook from her eyes at the same time and her lips trembled. One of the women gave over her flax basket of ferns and caught Pearl Button up in her arms, and walked with Pearl Button’s head against her shoulder and her dusty little legs dangling. She was softer than a bed and she had a nice smell—a smell that made you bury your head and breathe and breathe it …

They set Pearl Button down in a log room full of other people the same colour as they were—and all these people came close to her and looked at her, nodding and laughing and throwing up their eyes. The woman who had carried Pearl took off her hair ribbon and shook her curls loose. There was a cry from the other women, and they crowded close and some of them ran a finger through Pearl’s yellow curls, very gently, and one of them, a young one, lifted all Pearl’s hair and kissed the back of her little white neck. Pearl felt shy but happy at the same time. There were some men on the floor, smoking, with rugs and feather mats round their shoulders. One of them made a funny face at her and he pulled a great big peach out of his pocket and set it on the floor, and flicked it with his finger as though it were a marble. It rolled right over to her. Pearl picked it up. “Please can I eat it?” she asked. At that they all laughed and clapped their hands, and the man with the funny face made another at her and pulled a pear out of his pocket and sent it bobbling over the floor. Pearl laughed. The women sat on the floor and Pearl sat down too. The floor was very dusty. She carefully pulled up her pinafore and dress and sat on her petticoat as she had been taught to sit in dusty places, and she ate the fruit, the juice running all down her front.

“Oh!” she said in a very frightened voice to one of the women, “I’ve spilt all the juice!”

“That doesn’t matter at all,” said the woman, patting her cheek. A man came into the room with a long whip in his hand. He shouted something. They all got up, shouting, laughing, wrapping themselves up in rugs and blankets and feather mats. Pearl was carried again, this time into a great cart, and she sat on the lap of one of her women with the driver beside her. It was a green cart with a red pony and a black pony. It went very fast out of the town. The driver stood up and waved the whip round his head. Pearl peered over the shoulder of her woman. Other carts were behind like a procession. She waved at them. Then the country came. First fields of short grass with sheep on them and little bushes of white flowers and pink briar rose baskets—then big trees on both sides of the road—and nothing to be seen except big trees. Pearl tried to look through them but it was quite dark. Birds were singing. She nestled closer in the big lap. The woman was warm as a cat, and she moved up and down when she breathed, just like purring. Pearl played with a green ornament round her neck, and the woman took the little hand and kissed each of her fingers and then turned it over and kissed the dimples. Pearl had never been happy like this before. On the top of a big hill they stopped. The driving man turned to Pearl and said, “Look, look!” and pointed with his whip.

And down at the bottom of the hill was something perfectly different—a great big piece of blue water was creeping over the land. She screamed and clutched at the big woman, “What is it, what is it?”

“Why,” said the woman, “it’s the sea.”

“Will it hurt us—is it coming?”

“Ai-e, no, it doesn’t come to us. It’s very beautiful. You look again.”

Pearl looked. “You’re sure it can’t come,” she said.

“Ai-e, no. It stays in its place,” said the big woman. Waves with white tops came leaping over the blue. Pearl watched them break on a long piece of land covered with gardenpath shells. They drove round a corner.

There were some little houses down close to the sea, with wood fences round them and gardens inside. They comforted her. Pink and red and blue washing hung over the fences, and as they came near more people came out, and five yellow dogs with long thin tails. All the people were fat and laughing, with little naked babies holding on to them or rolling about in the gardens like puppies. Pearl was lifted down and taken into a tiny house with only one room and a verandah. There was a girl there with two pieces of black hair down to her feet. She was setting the dinner on the floor. “It is a funny place,” said Pearl, watching the pretty girl while the woman unbuttoned her little drawers for her. She was very hungry. She ate meat and vegetables and fruit and the woman gave her milk out of a green cup. And it was quite silent except for the sea outside and the laughs of the two women watching her.

“Haven’t you got any Houses of Boxes?” she said. “Don’t you all live in a row? Don’t the men go to offices? Aren’t there any nasty things?”

They took off her shoes and stockings, her pinafore and dress. She walked about in her petticoat and then she walked outside with the grass pushing between her toes. The two women came out with different sorts of baskets. They took her hands. Over a little paddock, through a fence, and then on warm sand with brown grass in it they went down to the sea. Pearl held back when the sand grew wet, but the women coaxed, “Nothing to hurt, very beautiful. You come.” They dug in the sand and found some shells which they threw into the baskets. The sand was wet as mud pies. Pearl forgot her fright and began digging too. She got hot and wet, and suddenly over her feet broke a little line of foam. “Oo, oo!” she shrieked, dabbling with her feet, “Lovely, lovely!” She paddled in the shallow water. It was warm. She made a cup of her hands and caught some of it. But it stopped being blue in her hands. She was so excited that she rushed over to her woman and flung her little thin arms round the woman’s neck, hugging her, kissing …

Suddenly the girl gave a frightful scream. The woman raised herself and Pearl slipped down on the sand and looked towards the land. Little men in blue coats—little blue men came running, running towards her with shouts and whistlings—a crowd of little blue men to carry her back to the House of Boxes.

FROM BLISS AND OTHER STORIES (1920) (#ulink_27f04893-7d5e-57d0-9499-5fdba077186c)

PRELUDE (#ulink_75a17477-6fcc-5ea7-b923-84b0f251844e)

I

There was not an inch of room for Lottie and Kezia in the buggy. When Pat swung them on top of the luggage they wobbled; the grandmother’s lap was full and Linda Burnell could not possibly have held a lump of a child on hers for any distance. Isabel, very superior, was perched beside the new handy-man on the driver’s seat. Hold-alls, bags and boxes were piled upon the floor. “These are absolute necessities that I will not let out of my sight for one instant,” said Linda Burnell, her voice trembling with fatigue and excitement.

Lottie and Kezia stood on the patch of lawn just inside the gate all ready for the fray in their coats with brass anchor buttons and little round caps with battleship ribbons. Hand in hand, they stared with round solemn eyes, first at the absolute necessities and then at their mother.