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going to bed with Carco, she focuses on his prettiness (‘one hand with a bangle over the sheets, he looked like a girl’), and their talking and laughing together under the bedclothes: ‘lying curled in one another’s arms… A whole life passed in thought. Other people, other things.’ Their resemblance was perhaps increased by the fact that she seems to have chopped off her hair on the way as a vague ‘disguise’. As for her real brother, again they were said to look very alike, and according to her biographer Alpers, Leslie was known to contemporaries as rather a ‘pansy’. After his death, she wrote to him in her Journal: ‘You know I can never be Jack’s lover again. You have me. You’re in my flesh as well as in my soul.’ Though she and Jack were reconciled once more, she did make dead Chummie into a kind of Muse: ‘The next book will be yours and mine. It is the idea that I do not write alone. That in every word I write and every place I visit I carry you with me.’ He was one of the reasons why she turned more and more to New Zealand memories, and he is also a character in some of those same stories: a new-born baby – but already a charmer – in ‘At the Bay’ the real-life original of the ideal brother whose very name mirrors the heroine (Laura/Laurie) in ‘The Garden Party’:

‘… But Laurie – ‘ She stopped, she looked at her brother. ‘Isn’t life,’ she stammered, ‘isn’t life – ‘ But what life was she couldn’t explain. No matter. He quite understood.

‘Isn’t it, darling?’ said Laurie.

These famous last words of one of her best-known stories are of course thoroughly ambiguous, and include an element of mockery. But that only means that – characteristically – Mansfield was critical of her own longing for closeness, someone ‘in my flesh… in my soul’. Any Muse of hers could not be all sweetness and light. Indeed Alpers thinks that Leslie also lurks behind spoiled Harold in ‘An Ideal Family’, the despair of his father: ‘too handsome by far; that had been the trouble all along. No man had a right to such eyes, to such lashes and such lips; it was uncanny.’

Mansfield seems to have felt that her own vocation as a writer was vindicated in Leslie’s death: she could immortalize their shared childhood world somehow, carry on the family ‘line’ in the way only an artist can. That he was not aggressively masculine, may have been bisexual or gay, underlines their closeness. He was on her ‘side’ somehow, also an outsider. Carco too lived on in her fiction, in no very flattering fashion. Mansfield scholars generally agree that she borrowed his voice, and something of his feline knowingness, in creating Raoul Duquette in her 1918 story ‘Je ne parle pas français’, one of the first in which she found her own distinctive voice. Maybe in the end Katherine Mansfield’s bisexuality was not so much a matter of sexual practices (there’s no evidence of sexual relationships with women after her teens), but of what went on inside her head, the character of her creative self.

Like almost all her important work ‘Je ne park pas français’ was written outside England, at the various resorts and refuges she visited in search of kinder weather and better health. She was increasingly driven by her illness, and subject to despair and rage. She wrote to Murry from the South of France, in November 1920, in this vein, scorning his long-distance praises and desperate for his real attention:

I don’t want dismissing as a masterpiece… I haven’t anything like as long to live as you have. I’ve scarcely any time, I feel… Talk to me. I‘m lonely. I haven’t ONE single soul.

D. H. Lawrence, himself very ill but refusing to know it, raging on his own account, sent her a horrible letter – ‘He spat in my face and threw filth at me, and said: “I loathe you. You revolt me stewing in your consumption.” ’ Curiously, perhaps because of her own volatile and terrible temper, she doesn’t seem to have found this as devastating as one might expect. And in any case, she was not alone, for she had L.M. (Ida Baker), though all too often L.M. didn’t quite count except as an object of disgust and resentment.