Happy Birthday– Katherine Mansfield! October 14, 2023

Oct 14, 2023 marks the 135th anniversary of Katherine Mansfield’s birth. Born in Wellington, New Zealand in 1888, she longed to escape her provincial community and spread her wings in London, where she studied from 1903-1906, hoping to make a career in music. She soon discovered she had no real talent for it. The petite, plump girl in glasses lugging a ‘cello up to her unheated bedsitter was destined to find other means of expression for her immense talents and ambitions. After 1906, she traveled about Europe, returned to NZ, and dedicated herself to writing and to a passionate friendship with Maata Mahupuku. 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 scribblings — some of which had shocked her elders — would ever have imagined that she would change the face of modern English literature.

Traditionally Mansfield has been seen as a pioneer of the short story in English. Some detractors have sought to diminish 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.”

Virginia Woolf, Katherine’s friend and keen competitor. “Hers was the only writing I was ever jealous of,” Woolf once said.

A few of Mansfield’s stories may seem dated today – but most have stood the test of time. Many are masterpieces: The Woman at the Store, The Daughters of the Late Colonel, The Fly, Prelude, The Man without a Temperament. Her journal, diaries, and letters remain among her best loved works – and, like Virginia Woolf’s diary, give us a full portrait of the author 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 – and continually strove, despite the pressures of her illness, for a higher level of achievement, 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.

The Evolution of My Novel, Katherine’s Wish

The Prieuré after its renovation, photo from 2004

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 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. So I set out by train from Paris, and then, after a long wait, by taxi, to visit the Prieuré. The taxi driver informed me that he had driven others on that same route.

The Prieuré of Fontainebleau, seat of Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man.

The building of the Prieurè went through several transformations after Gurdjieff’s era. Following the second world war, it had become a hospital and a nursing home.  In 2000, the magnificent, crumbling monastery was being renovated and subdivided into apartments.  On that bright July afternoon of my visit, the gates and doors stood wide open; tall ladders leaned against the façade; dusty looking workmen were coming in and out, carrying planks and buckets.   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 sawdust, fresh paint and plaster.  A winding stairway opened before me, leading up into the darkness—all varnish had been scraped and sanded away to reveal the smooth grain of naked wood.   Katherine Mansfield died after running up a stairway — the very day her husband, Middleton Murry had come to visit her.

Were these those very stairs? I had to find out.

In researching my novel, it became apparent that Katherine was enmeshed in an inescapable triangle – Ida, devoted companion to whom Katherine referred as wife, slave, monster. John Middleton Murry, her handsome vacillating husband who once confessed that he could not love her the way she wanted to be loved. And herself, who was not one self but many conflicting selves she hoped to strip away to find the essence inside. That was what she hoped Gurdjieff would give her.

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 day after Ida returned to Paris to fetch Katherine’s things from the hotel—Katherine was to remain there for the brief time left.

From the window of her room over the grounds, she would stare out at the evening skyline and expressed a heart-felt desire: I wish to be a child of the sun.

the cheapest and best source for Katherine’s Wish is Bookshop.org

In addition to my novel, Katherine’s Wish, I have written two essays about Mansfield’s spiritual search, several blog posts, and two radio plays. You can find those here: The Ghosts of Fontainebleau. Katherine Mansfield and D.H. Lawrence: A Parallel Quest – winner of the Katherine Mansfield Society Essay Prize. Katherine Mansfield & the Wish to Be Real

My radio play — A Public of Two was produced by Yorick Radio Productions and deals with the friendship between Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf https://yorickradio.buzzsprout.com/1084415/10203906

100 Years Ago — Katherine Mansfield and the Wish to be Real

On January 9,1923, Katherine Mansfield died in Fontainebleau, just outside Paris, at Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. In October 1922, she had set out for Fontainebleau in the company of Ida Baker, for an interview with Gurdjieff. Deep depression and a spiritual crisis had led her to this decision, as she wrote in a letter that winter:

It seems to me that in life as it is lived today the catastrophe is imminent; I feel this catastrophe in me [. . . ] This world to me is a dream and the people in it are sleepers. I have known just instances of waking but that is all. I want to find a world in which these instances are united.

To her husband John Middleton Murry, she had written in December 1922 “I want to be real.”

She hoped to be admitted as a pupil of Gurdjieff’s teachings, but instead was welcomed as a guest with a very special regime which she describes in her letters. She rose at seven-thirty and lit a small fire in her room. The crumpled pages of the Literary Supplement were just the thing to get the blaze going. She washed in icy water, dressed before the fire and then went down to an abundant breakfast: eggs, toast, gorgonzola, quince jam. After breakfast she tidied her room and if weather permitted, she took a stroll around the grounds, observing the pupils busy with construction and yard work or visiting the farm animals kept as livestock. After lunch, some days she had a Russian lesson. On other days, bundled in her fur coat, she would help out in the kitchen at small task — like scraping carrots or peeling potatoes. Or she might be assigned the task of arranging flowers.

The culmination of each day at the Prieuré was the sacred dance class held after dinner. Though she had never cared for dancing, this dancing, she explained to Murry, was something different: it appeared to her as ‘the key to a new world within one’.  ‘I have no words with which to describe it. To see it seems to change one’s whole being for the time’. 

Despite what might seem a regimented schedule, there was also time for Katherine to nurture friendships with the other pupils — many of whom were artists, musicians, dancers, and this is one aspect of her life at the Prieuré that she underlined often in her letters. Her writing mentor, Richard Orage, who had become a transmitter of Gurdjieff’s teachings, has collected his conversations with her at the Prieuré in his book, “Talks with Katherine Mansfield.” Although Gurdjieff had advised Mansfield to use her time there for complete rest, to “live in her body again,” and not to use her energies writing –she did think deeply about her work at this time, and about the changes she wished to make in her life and in her writing.

Reflecting on her past work, she confessed to Orage: “I’ve been a camera.  But that’s just the point.  I’ve been a selective camera, and it has been my attitude that has determined the selection; with the result that my slices of life (thank you, Mr. Phillpotts!) have been partial, misleading, and a little malicious.  Further, they have had no other purpose than to record my attitude, which in itself stood in need of change if it was to become active instead of passive.  Altogether, I’ve been not only a mere camera, but I’ve been a selective camera, and a selective camera without a creative principle. ”

According to Orage, she believed she had found that new creative principle but still had to put it into practice.

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.” It was this something “solid and entire” that Katherine was searching for, within herself.

In my novel, Katherine’s Wish, I follow the last five years of Mansfield’s life, the events, the musing, and the quest which led her to Fontainebleau.

Resources: Letters of KM, Orage: Talks with Katherine Mansfield, Lappin: Ghosts of Fontainebleau, Lappin: Katherine Mansfield and DHL A Spiritual Quest

Listen to a reading from Katherine’s Wish here

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A radio play adaptation of a part of the book dealing with the friendship of Mansfield and Virginia Woolf is available on YORICK RADIO PODCASTS. Click here to listen