Today, October 14, 2024 is the 136th anniversary of Katherine Mansfield's birthday. Born in Wellington, New Zealand in 1888, she longed to escape her provincial community and try her wings in London, where she studied from 1903-1906, hoping to make a career in music. But the petite, plump girl in glasses lugging a 'cello up the stairs to her unheated bedsitter was destined to find other means of expression for her immense talents and ambitions. After 1906, she traveled in Europe, returned to NZ, and dedicated herself to writing and to a passionate friendship with Maata Mahupuku, the grand-daughter of a Maori chief. At the age of 19, she moved to London permanently, determined to become a writer. No one back in New Zealand who had read her girlish writings -- some of which had shocked her elders-- could have imagined that she would become a major modernist writer and an icon of women's aspirations.
Audio Links for this Blog: Radio Play based on the novel Katherine's Wish https://yorickradio.buzzsprout.com/1084415/10203906-radio-revelry-a-public-of-two
Traditionally Mansfield has been seen as a pioneer of the short story in English. Some detractors have tried to lessen her reputation in recent years by overemphasizing her debt to Chekov. Feminists and gender studies scholars, like Angela Smith, see her as a representative of "liminal experience," that which lies beyond the fixed boundaries of gender, identity, self. Friends and biographers alike have puzzled over her penchant for "playing" with many masks and names and with the mendacious lives that seeped from her fiction into fact and then back again.
Her death in January 1923 at Gurdjieff's Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at Fontainebleau is an enigma to many – how did she end up there and why? Reading the last stories, the last journals and letters, one finds many glimpses of her hunger for a more "permanent core" of self which attracted her to the teachings of Gurdjieff. Perhaps this is what Virginia Woolf alluded to when, writing of Katherine's diary, she remarked, " But writing, the mere expression of things adequately and sensitively, is not enough. It is founded upon something unexpressed; and this something must be solid and entire."
Mansfield's journal, diaries, and letters remain among her best loved works – and, like Virginia Woolf's diary, give us a full portrait of Katherine as a woman as well as a writer. The moods, flashes, experiments; the epiphanies and the anxieties ,the make-overs and the mistakes of a writer's working life are all there to be pondered, sifted through, studied, absorbed.
Though Mansfield lamented the "fragmentary" nature of her work, despite the pressures of her illness, she strove continually for a higher level of achievement in her work. Many readers find a mysterious "wholeness" and sense of unity in the stories, diaries, letters, and fragments all taken together, in a seamless coalescing of art and life. Mansfield was not only a story-teller – she herself was the story, a story whose quality fascinates and yet refuses to be defined.
My novel Katherine's Wish drew inspiration from a journey I made to Fontainebleau in July 2000. I was attending a writing workshop at WICE while visiting a terminally ill friend who lived in Paris. I knew that Mansfield had died at Gurdjieff's Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleau and that she was buried at the cemetery in Avon, near Gurdjieff's own grave. I had read her moving letters and journals from that phase of her life as well as many accounts of life at the Prieuré where Gurdjieff's school was housed. I was keen to see what traces were left of these two luminous souls.
The Prieure had gone through several transformations since Gurdjieff's era. After the second world war, it had become a hospital and a nursing home. In 2000, the magnificent monastery was being renovated and divided into apartments. On that bright July afternoon, the gates and doors stood wide open; tall ladders leaned against the façade, dusty looking workmen were coming in and out. I headed towards the open door and spoke to one of the men: May I go inside and have a look? I think he believed I wanted to buy or rent one of new housing units. I stepped into a dark, dusty hall permeated with the smell of fresh paint and plaster. I snapped a picture of stairway whose wood had been scraped bare. Katherine had died running up a staircase the day her husband arrived to visit her at the Prieure. Were these those very stairs? I had to find out.
Katherine was enmeshed in a triangle with Ida, devoted companion to whom Katherine referred as wife, slave, monster. And John Middleton Murry, her handsome, vacillating husband who once confessed that he could not love her the way she wanted to be loved.
As for Katherine, she felt she was not one self but many conflicting selves whom she hoped to strip away to find the essence inside. "There are moments when I feel I am nothing but the small clerk of some hotel without a proprietor who has all his work cut out to enter the names and hand the keys to the wilful guests," she once confessed. Gurdjieff promised to help her discover the one great I who would put everything in its proper place.
To that end, in late October 1922, she took a train to Fontainebleau, arriving on a crisp, wind-swept afternoon. She and Ida were driven in a cart to the old monastery, where Gurdjieff and his pupils welcomed her. The next day Ida returned to Paris to fetch Katherine's things from the hotel—Katherine was to remain at Gurdjieff's institute for the brief time she had left.
A radio adaptation of part of the novel, dealing with Mansfield's friendship with Virginia Woolf, is available on Yorick Radio Broadcasts.