The Garden Party and Other Stories - Katherine Mansfield [3]
It is appropriate that ‘At the Bay’ comes first. Along with ‘Prelude’ (1917, collected in her earlier book, Bliss and Other Stories) and ‘The Aloe’, a longer, messier, early version of ‘Prelude’, it represents Katherine Mansfield’s fragmentary and extraordinarily vivid account of her origins and of her family, the Beauchamps – renamed Burnell in the stories. ‘At the Bay’ is set in Karori, four miles outside Wellington; the Beauchamps moved there when Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp, as she was christened (Mansfield was her maternal grandmother’s maiden name), was four and a half years old. The move was a sign of her father’s success and growing prosperity – Harry Beauchamp was already well begun on the brilliant business career that would make him a prominent figure in the colony’s commercial life, leading to directorships of many companies, and (eventually) the Chairmanship of the Bank of New Zealand and a knighthood. Kathleen was the third child. The fourth, Gwen, died as a baby, and after the sixth, Leslie, the only son, there would be no more, probably because Annie Beauchamp (like Linda Burnell in the story) had a ‘dread of having children’, and so stopped after producing the necessary boy. Certainly she didn’t dote on her offspring any more than her fictional counterpart. She went with her husband on a long trip to Europe when Kathleen was one, and in general the mothering was left to her mother, Granny Dyer.
Kathleen, the middle child, was plump, intense and bespectacled, and maybe more trouble than the rest – though the evidence for that may have been informed by hindsight, when she became the family’s black sheep. The first innocent step in that direction was in 1903 when, along with her two older sisters, she was taken to England for the first time, and enrolled in Queen’s College, Harley Street. It was an expensive school that offered a very good education, one of the best available for girls then, and there she became absorbed in music, literature, fashionably ‘decadent’ taste (Wilde in particular) and passionate friendships. She wrote for and later edited the college magazine, learned the cello, and fell in love with London – or at least London as reflected in the paintings of Whistler. She began to see herself as an artist, though it wasn’t clear at all which art she meant. And (perhaps most important) she formed a connection that would be life-long with Ida Baker, who’d also had a colonial background, being born in Burma. This wasn’t a lesbian relationship – though people sometimes thought so – but a kind of surrogate sisterhood, or even marriage (Mansfield actually referred to Ida as a ‘wife’, not exactly a term of affection for her). Ida would over the years become companion, nurse or servant when required, and would retreat into the background whenever Mansfield didn’t need her. She was needed a lot, and much resented for it. None the less, it may be said that if Kathleen/Katherine discovered the beginnings of her vocation at Queen’s College, she also discovered, in Ida – whom she later renamed Lesley Moore, ‘L.M.’ for short, a pseudonym to complement her own disguise – the person who would supply the support that made it possible for her to produce her best work.
From her family’s point of view, however, her superior London education was not at all meant to lead to a career; it was designed to fit her for a superior style of domestic and social life, and in December 1906, at eighteen, she returned according to plan to New Zealand. As it turned out, it was too late: she had become a native of elsewhere. In the words of biographer Claire Tomalin, ‘something more than the sense of being at home in Europe was stamped on her… this was the habit of impermanence.