LITMIR.BIZ

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She met there a few people who lived, precariously but independently, by literature; and she felt something of that intoxication which usually comes to the young English writer when he first meets continental co-evals and confrères. It is due partly to the sense that he is welcomed as a member of an international brotherhood; partly to the sense that the lesser political freedom abroad is compensated by a greater intellectual freedom. To start a newspaper, to found a substantial magazine is not — and was not in 1909 — the arduous commercial undertaking it is in England. There is a feeling of infinite possibilities. And when Katherine’s new acquaintances talked to her, as they did, of translating her stories for the journals with which they were already connected, or which they proposed (as a matter of course) to found, her literary ardour was kindled anew.

      She had begun to write the sketches which ultimately became her first book, In a German Pension. The first she wrote was The Child who was Tired. It is remote from the quality of her later work; but it is deeply interesting. Superficially, it is a realistic story of peasant life; but in essence it is nothing of the kind. The Child who was Tired is indubitably herself in the summer of 1909 — the Katherine wearied with pain and crying in vain for rest— “the frightened child lost in a funeral procession.” The peasant household is not any peasant household that Katherine experienced — actually the Bavarian peasants were kind to her, and she liked them — but merely a symbol of her experience of life.”My experience of life,” she wrote years afterwards,”is that it is pretty terrible.” The Child who was Tired is her first effort to translate that experience into the forms of art — to utter “her cry against corruption.”

      It was not to be wondered at that even those who saw the promise of the story should have mistaken its intention and missed its deeper meaning. Very possibly Katherine herself was not fully conscious of this; nor perhaps was she at first wholly averse to being received as a cynical realist. It was part of her plan for protective armour that she should achieve a reputation as one who, having seen through everything, was incapable of further disillusionment.

      Probably Mr. Orage, the editor of The New Age, who accepted her story and immediately encouraged her to write more, was not wholly deceived by her pose as the complete woman of the world. After all, she was barely twenty-one when The Child who was Tired was published in The New Age, and followed fairly rapidly with the remaining sketches which comprise In a German Pension. None the less, he seems to have decided that Katherine’s real bent was cynical and satirical, and to have used his influence — which was naturally considerable — to keep her in that straight and narrow path.

      The slightly mistaken conception of Katherine’s genius was probably inevitable. But the time was to come when its limitations were felt by her as constraints which she must not accept; and there ensued a lamentable severance of her relations with the one journal and the one editor of standing who had given a real welcome to her work.

      The Child who was Tired appeared in The New Age of February 24th, 1910. At about this time she returned to England.

      Katherine was in England in February, 1910, and had apparently returned for the time being to her then husband: for Mr. Orage remembers that she brought the manuscript of The Child who was Tired to the office of The New Age in person, and that her husband was waiting outside for her and the editor’s decision. She came out radiant. Mr. Orage had not only accepted her story, he had offered to publish it in the very next issue, and he had asked her for more. This generous recognition was never forgotten. To the end of her life, when Mr. Orage once more played a part in it, Katherine thought of him with affection and admiration; and certainly the friendship which now developed between her and him and Beatrice Hastings was the one period of her life between 1908 and 1911 upon which she constantly looked back with delight. She stayed with them frequently in a cottage in Sussex, and had the joy of being among her own kind.

      But in the full spring she was seriously ill once more. Writing to Sylvia Lynd in 1920, she remembered it.

      “You’re better now? It’s a cursed thing to have. I had an attack once — ten years ago — above a grocer’s shop in Rottingdean; no more than ten years ago, or less, the year our great Edward the Peace Maker died. He died when I was in the thick of it.”

      That means that Katherine was in the thick of it above the grocer’s shop in May, 1910. But before that she had been in a nursing home, where she had undergone an operation of which the after-pains haunted her memory for years. She recovered. Her power of recuperation in her early twenties was remarkable; and she came to have such faith in them that she took risks with her health which her Grandmother would have gently but firmly forbidden.

      In the early autumn, Mr. Alfred Bishop, the painter, with whom she had become acquainted through Mr. Orage, lent her his studio-flat in Chelsea, at 131 Cheyne Walk, while he went abroad. There she spent the autumn and winter, and turned to writing poetry once more. This was the time of the famous first exhibition of the Post-Impressionist painters in England, at the Grafton Galleries. Two pictures at least she remembered for many years, though she mistook the gallery where she saw them. Both are now familiar.

      “Wasn’t that Van Gogh shown at the Goupil ten years ago? (she wrote to Dorothy Brett in January, 1921). Yellow flowers, brimming with sun, in a pot? I wonder if it is the same. The picture seemed to reveal something that I hadn’t realised before I saw it. It lived with me afterwards. It still does. That, and another of a sea-captain in a flat cap. They taught me something about writing, which was queer, a kind of freedom — or rather, a shaking free. When one has been working for a long stretch one begins to narrow one’s vision a bit, to give things down too much. And it’s only when something else breaks through, a picture or something seen out of doors, that one realises it.”

      It seems that Katherine was remembering the actual effect upon her of the Van Gogh paintings in the winter of 1910–11. Evidently, she was working hard. And there is evidence that she was experimenting. For one story of hers which can be definitely assigned to this winter is A Fairy Story which appeared in The Open Window for October — March, 1910–11. That story, which is markedly different from her other published work of this time, is further distinguished by the fact that she changed the form of her name. It was printed as Katherina Mansfield; and evidently not by accident, for it appeared no less than eight times at the head of the pages. There is not much doubt that she was trying to “shake free” of the personality she had created for herself in her work in The New Age, and the change of name was meant to be symbolic of her emancipation. To this period probably also belong the poems which she afterwards published in Rhythm as “translations from the Russian of Boris Petrov-sky.” Like the Fairy Story, they are delicate lyrical evocations, the expression of an element of her nature which evaded the satirical.

      It was during this time that Madame Alexander, who lived in the flat above, heard Katherine singing, and was so impressed by the quality of her voice that she endeavoured to persuade her to have it properly trained. In vain. Katherine felt that it would take too much from her writing, in which she was now absorbed. But the quality of her voice was, indeed, remarkable. It was singularly pure and silvery, yet very flexible; and she could use it when she chose with extraordinary dramatic skill. She had an intimate repertoire of the oddest songs:”The Magistrite looked angry, and the pris’ner ‘ung ‘is ‘ead,” “Ah’m a Jonah, ah’m an unlucky man,” “Sister Mary, she keeps the golden gites,” “I worked all day for forty cents pay,” “Where have you been all the day, Randall my son?” which was heart-rending as she sang it. But most of all in the voice she used for her favourite songs, one remembers a far-away, other-worldly quality, akin to that which finds expression in her poetry as distinct from her prose. And sometimes she sang the lovely poem of her own— “The Sea-Child” — which has not yet taken hold of the general memory as one day it will. For in it is expressed, in a tiny compass, that sense of being a stranger in a strange land among men and women which always lay deep in Katherine Mansfield’s heart. That quality was in her voice when she sang.

      In the early spring of 1911 Katherine took a flat at 69 Clovelly Mansions, Gray’s Inn Road; and with it she took a charwoman called Mrs. Bates. Six years afterwards, when Katherine was living in a studio in Church Street, Chelsea, Mrs. Bates

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