Katherine Mansfield, The Woman Behind The Books (Including Letters, Journals, Essays & Articles). Katherine Mansfield
New Zealand of Kathleen Beauchamp’s childhood had no “leisure” — no “cultured class.” When talent did appear, the artist was sent to study at “home” where — for one reason or another — he usually remained. Yet New Zealanders were proud, justly and sensitively proud, of what they had built up; so a situation arose which was to make it difficult for Katherine Mansfield, as she grew older — and difficult, indeed, for New Zealand to comprehend her, afterward.
Years later,”the little Colonial” still, looking back with longing from the various points of her exile, she was to rediscover the heritage she had received from the Pa Men. If England was to teach her how to write, New Zealand — Wellington, the Sounds, Karori — had given her what she was to write about.
CHAPTER II
WELLINGTON: 11 TINAKORI ROAD
“Coming continually on the spirit with a fine suddenness.” — Keats.
1
THE True Original Pa Man coined a phrase which became part of the Beauchamp heritage:
“The umbrageous hills kissed the waters of the South Pacific.” This was “very Pa,” Katherine Mansfield thought, and she laughed at it as one laughs at things because one likes them. She herself had a “special” feeling for certain places that she knew in New Zealand: Day’s Bay, and “the ferny paths” through the manukas and tree ferns; Anikiwa on Marlborough Sounds; Karori. As she looked back, they became “a kind of possession.” She belonged to that Island. Her navel string had been fastened to it, and from it she was nourished.
The grandmother had so often told her of the storm on the day of her birth, that she more than half believed she remembered it, herself:
“She had come forth squealing out of a reluctant mother in the teeth of a ‘Southerly Buster.’ The Grandmother, shaking her before the window, had seen the sea rise in green mountains and sweep the esplanade. The little house was like a shell to its loud booming. Down in the gully the wild trees lashed together and big gulls wheeling and crying skimmed past the misty window.”
She was born at eight o’clock on Sunday morning, October 14th, 1888. It was early spring in Wellington, and azaleas were out in the Botanical Gardens.
She might have been born of the wind and the sea on that wild morning.”The voice of her lawless mother the sea” called to her all of her life; she was “the sea child” of her early poem.
“Into the world you sent her, mother,
Fashioned her body of coral and foam
Combed a wave in her hair’s warm smother
And drove her away from home.”
She never was happy far from it, not happy for long with it. When Cornwall, Ospedaletti, the South of France, reminded her of New Zealand, she was at home while the illusion lasted. But wind always frightened her. It brought back the night terrors of childhood and made it impossible for her ever to live long alone.
From the time she was fifteen and first seriously trying to “write,” her notebooks were filled with such beginnings as:
“The storm on the day of her birth. Now to plan it — She is born in New Zealand on the day of the storm.”
The storm at her birth seemed to have some mysterious significance for her which was part of her being and must be expressed.
In The Birthday, as it was first published with a New Zealand setting, she developed that storm into part of her story; but when she rewrote it for The German Pension, she transferred the setting to Germany. It was not what she meant: it was not “that Island.” It merely reflected her ironic state. In The Aloe she tried once more to describe it; but when she revised the tale as Prelude, she omitted the description. She felt, it seemed, that the storm at her birth had a meaning which lay beyond words. It belonged, in its elusiveness, with The Voices of the Air.
2
In later years, Katherine Mansfield was laughingly disappointed over her early appearance. When her sister “Marie” sent her a photograph of herself as a baby, it was a “dreadful shock” :
“I had always imagined it — a sweet little laughing thing, rather French, with wistful eyes under a fringe, firmly gripping a spade, showing even then a longing to dig for treasure with her own hands. But this little solemn monster with a wisp of hair, looked as though she were just about to fall over backwards head overheels! On her feet she wears, as far as I can make out, a pair of ordinary workman’s boots which the photographer, from astonishment or malice, has photographed so close up that each tootsie is the size of her head. The only feature about her is her ears which are neatly buttonholed on to the sides of her head and not just safty-pinned on as most babies’ are. Even the spade she clasps with the greatest reluctance.”
But it was hardly a fair picture, for she had jaundice at three months old, and was sent to Anikiwa, in the Sounds, where her cousins remember her as “a yellow, ill-looking baby” who took an inexplicable fancy to a certain stone in the garden, and refused to be quiet unless they sat on the uncomfortable seat and nursed her.
Knowing (as did The Thoughtful Child) that “the right sort of people must expect children to sit on them,” she fortunately had a lap undisputedly her own for her first two years. She had been her grandmother’s child from the moment the old woman so unceremoniously shook her before the streaming window on the night she was born in the “Southerly Buster.” Her father was ordered “home” to England for a cure soon after her birth. Since he could never think of going far without his wife, Kathleen Mansfield was left in her grand-mother’s care. She was always to be more Mansfield than she was Kathleen. Margaret Mansfield Dyer was spiritual godmother to her, as well as grandmother.
Most children pass in the accepted manner through the hands of the angel who (in the Garden Behind the Moon where they shine the stars) wipes each child’s mind clean with a sponge when he reaches the age of three. But there was one corner in the mind of Kathleen Beauchamp which never was erased. It was the memory of a morning two days before her second birthday:
“Things happened so simply then, without preparation and without any shock. They let me go into my mother’s room. (I remember standing on tiptoe and using both hands to turn the big white china door-handle) and there lay my mother in bed with her arms along the sheet, and there sat my grandmother before the fire with a baby in a flannel across her knees. My mother paid no attention to me at all. Perhaps she was asleep, for my grandmother nodded and said in a voice scarcely above a whisper, ‘Come and see your little sister.’ I tiptoed to her voice across the room, and she parted the flannel, and I saw a little round head with a tuft of goldy hair on it and a big face with eyes shut — white as snow. ‘Is it alive?’ I asked. ‘Of course,’ said grandmother. ‘Look at her holding my finger.’ And — yes, a hand, scarcely bigger than my doll’s, in a frilled sleeve, was wound round her finger. ‘Do you like her?’ said my grandmother. ‘Yes. Is she going to play with the doll’s house?’ ‘By-and-by,’ said the grandmother, and I felt very pleased. Mrs. Heywood had just given us the doll’s house. It was a beautiful one with a verandah and a balcony and a door that opened and shut and two chimneys. I wanted badly to show it to someone else.
“‘Her name is Gwen,’ said the grandmother. ‘Kiss her.’
“I bent down and kissed the little goldy tuft. But she took no notice. She lay quite still with her eyes shut.
“‘Now go and kiss mother,’ said the grandmother.
“But mother did not want to kiss me. Very languid, leaning against the pillows, she was eating some sago. The sun shone through the windows and winked on the brass knobs of the big bed.