The Garden Party and Other Stories - Katherine Mansfield [2]
Looking back in 1931, some years after Katherine’s death, Virginia wrote to Vita Sackville-West:
I thought her cheap, and she thought me priggish, and yet we were both compelled to meet simply in order to talk about writing… she had, as you say, the zest and the resonance – I mean she could permeate one with her quality; and if one felt this cheap scent in it, it reeked in ones nostrils…
It’s as though, as soon as she thinks about Mansfield, even eight years dead, she catches that shocking feral smell on the air: of the sexual adventuress, the stray cat, so disturbing because they shared the same dedication to writing. Katherine was a rival writer, not someone’s girlfriend. Woolf liked, as she said, to talk about work in a ‘disembodied’ way, but Mansfield’s body wasn’t so easily dismissed.
We know how she struck another rival writer and sometime friend, too, for D. H. Lawrence based the character of Gudrun in Women in Love at least in part on Mansfield. In the spring of 1916 Lawrence, Frieda, Katherine and her lover (later husband) John Middleton Murry had rented next-door cottages in Cornwall. They lived in great emotional closeness too. Katherine, in a letter to a mutual friend, Koteliansky, famously provided an eye-witness account of one of Lawrence’s murderous rows with Frieda (‘Suddenly Lawrence… made a kind of horrible blind rush at her… he beat her to death… her head and face and breast and pulled out her hair’) and the even more horrid spectacle – she implies – of their reconciliation afterwards: ‘… next day, whipped himself, and far more thoroughly than he had ever beaten Frieda, he was running about taking her up her breakfast in bed and trimming her a hat.’ Lawrence, Claire Tomalin argues in her biography of Mansfield A Secret Life (1987), made Gudrun very like Katherine in general – ‘gifted artistically, charming, spirited, a good talker, a bit of a feminist, a bit of a cynic…’ (p. 151) – as well as putting actual incidents from the period of their friendship into the novel. By the time Women in Love was finished, she and Murry had disappointed Lawrence, by refusing to fit into his plans, particularly Murry, with whom he imagined making a male bond of brotherhood. Claire Tomalin suggests, though – gruesomely but plausibly – that the real blood-bond (Blutbrüderschaft) was the one Lawrence formed unknowingly with Katherine: he may have infected her with the tuberculosis that killed her, since he was already suffering from the disease, though he died later than she did.
Woolf and Lawrence in their very different ways reflect the force of Katherine Mansfield’s personality, her gift for closeness and her sly separateness, too. She was an object of speculation and gossip and jealousy, and she often gave as good as she got. The philosopher Bertrand Russell, with whom she flirted in 1916, wrote that ‘her talk was marvellous… especially when she was telling of things she was going to write, but when she spoke about people she was envious, dark and full of alarming penetration’ (The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, Vol. II, London, 1963, p. 27). The hostility to her, as a species of adventuress, was very real. You can, though, catch more inward and tender glimpses of her in the work of her contemporaries. Tomalin points out that Lawrence’s portrait of Gudrun includes passages which peer inside her head when she lies sleepless in the night as Katherine often did, ‘conscious of everything, her childhood, her girlhood, all the forgotten incidents, all the unrealized influences, and all the happenings she had not understood, pertaining to herself, to her family, to her friends, to her lovers, her acquaintances, everybody. It was as if she drew a glittering rope of knowledge out of the sea of darkness…’ (Women in Love, Ch. 24). If this is Katherine, she must have talked eloquently to Lawrence about her past, ‘telling of things she was going to write…’ For as