Katherine Mansfield, The Woman Behind The Books (Including Letters, Journals, Essays & Articles). Katherine Mansfield
— A.W.
“A woman really cannot understand music till she has the actual experience of those laboriously con- cealed things which are evidently the foundation of them all.” — A.W. (K.M.)
“The translation of an emotion into act is its death — its logical end…. But … this way isn’t the act of unlawful things. It is the curiosity of our own temperament, the delicate expression of our own tendencies, the welding into an Art of act or incident some raw emotion of the blood. For we castrate our minds to the extent by which we deny our bodies.” — O.W.
March 20, 1907. Selections from Dorian Gray
“Being natural is simply a pose — and the most irritating pose I know…. I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.”
“The worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic.”
“Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love; it is the faithless who know love’s tragedies.”
“No influence is immoral — immoral from the scientific point of view. Nothing can cure the soul but the senses — just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.” — O.W.
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The novel, Juliet , which Kathleen Beauchamp began on May 18th, 1907, her last term at Queen’s, shows this influence. She absorbed so completely what she was reading at the time; it became such a part of her, that it was inevitable she should reflect something of it, just as she reflected in all of her writing her state, her immediate attitude to life, as well as her mood of the moment.
What she was writing for herself, then, was vastly different from the sketches she wrote for publication in the College Magazine. Those, with one exception, had been stories of her New Zealand childhood. That exception was the second to be published (March, 1904), Die Einsame, unlike the others in style, with something of herself in its conception of the solitary life of the spirit, but in its form obviously influenced by her reading. Ida Baker, at the same time, had written a story “practically the same thing, but, of course, without the literary mark,” as she explained :”it was because we were so much in harmony.”
Kathleen’s story was highly spoken of by Miss Bedford, the drawing instructor. In her next three, nevertheless, she returned to her childhood theme, in great contrast to the contributions which made up the rest of the magazine : what The Candid Critic, a caustic scarlet-covered junior pamphlet appearing in June, 1905, called “Odes to Spring and Fairy Tales by College Hans Andersens.” Her next published sketch (December, 1904) was Your Birthday, a sprightly but very tender study of a child. For the following half-yearly issue (July, 1905) the twenty-second year of the magazine, Kathleen Beauchamp was sub-Editor and Ida Baker, Treasurer. Kathleen’s story was One Day, a day in the life of the children of her family; and, her sister says, a true picture. She had not yet mastered her material, however, and the style was artificial, though there were some amusing and several charming touches and consistent character drawing of the four children. For the next issue (December, 1905) she was Head Editor, with Francis Maurice sub-Editor. In that number, her sketch, About Pat, showed something of the perception that triumphed in her later work.
She evidently had no connection with the issue of her final term (July, 1906). By that time she was writing for herself alone. She was beginning to live vividly and with new awareness, and she was putting so much of it into Juliet that the “novel” was too “advanced” to be offered to a college audience.
3
During the time she was writing Juliet (her last three months at Queen’s) Arnold Trowell was in London giving recitals at the Bechstein Hall, before audiences that were, for the most part, very enthusiastic. He had finished his two years’ study in Brussels, and had been playing on the Continent.
Kathleen herself heard him in Brussels on March 26th (1906), while she was on Easter holidays under the chaperonage of Bell Dyer. What must have been her exhilaration to sit in that audience applauding with enthusiasm the boy whom she had made her artistic counterpart during the three years since she left New Zealand? All was altered. All was different from that far-away time of her childhood when she had sat in the Sydney Street Hall in Wellington and listened to the fourteen-year-old “local prodigy.” She felt that she was a woman now. Through her reading, through glimpses of London cafés, she felt she “knew life.” How much older she thought herself than most of the girls about her! And the belief that this genius of seventeen, this young composer who could transport his audiences actually belonged to her, sent her imagination winging in the wake of his music to ecstasy.
It was about this time — when they met again — that there was a tacit agreement between them practically amounting to an engagement.
While she was in Brussels, too, she met Rudolph, upon whom she modelled the “villain” in Juliet. Rudolph was one of Arnold’s musician friends — a handsome, excitable and temperamental youth. He had brusque ways, covering his supersensitiveness. It was he who gave Kathleen the cue to calling Arnold “Old Hoss,” with a clap on the shoulder (perhaps it was, too, a reminiscence of Trilby, which was a favourite book of Kathleen’s at this time).
Rudolph shot himself soon afterward. Kathleen took it very much to heart. This experience of sudden death in her own world — the death of a friend of Arnold, a boy whom she had known, and who had fired her imagination — was quite another thing from “knowing life” through books. This was her first personal experience of the feeling which she later tried to convey through Laura (in The Garden Party) whose bewilderment she described in a letter :
“The diversity of life, and how we try to fit in everything, Death included. That is bewildering for a person of Laura’s age. She feels things ought to happen differently. First one and then another. But life isn’t like that. We haven’t the ordering of it. Laura says, ‘But all these things must not happen at once.’ And Life answers, ‘Why not? How are they divided from each other?’ And they do all happen; it is inevitable.”
She was too near the beginning of things, then, to be able to add:
“And it seems to me there is beauty in that inevitability.”
She met Maata again. Maata stayed in London for a short time on her way back from Paris. She came — a finished little Parisian in dress and manner.”She kept her feet as exquisitely as she did her hands,” Maata’s mother said. Their meeting was rapturous and romantic. Two years later, when they both were keeping diaries (and Kathleen preserved Maata’s all her life, expecting to make some use of it) she looked back longingly to that time together in London :
“In the pocket of an old coat I found one of Ariadne’s gloves — a cream coloured suede glove fastening with two silver buttons. It has been there two years — but still it holds some exquisite suggestion of Carlotta (Maata) — still when I lay it against my cheek I can detect the sweet of the perfume she affected. O, Carlotta — have you remembered? We were floating down Regent Street in a hansom — on either side of us the blossoms of golden light — and ahead a little half hoop of a moon.”
When Maata had gone, Kathleen arranged to meet the Trowell brothers. This was possible by taking advantage of the permission given to girls over a certain age to go out in the company of another Queen’s girl.
“I met them both (writes one of her friends) at the London Academy of Music, where Kathleen went to play in the orchestra every Friday (I believe). I thought them (the two T.’s) the most extraordinary beings I had ever met. Red-haired, pale, wearing huge black hats (a very familiar thing that, now) and smoking the longest cigarettes I had ever seen, or have.”
From that purely external picture, one can guess the importance of the two brothers in Kathleen’s life at this time. They were authentic denizens of the enchanted world of Art, wearing its livery. In their company, and their genuine friendship, Kathleen was for moments made free of another kind of existence; and she