Katherine Mansfield in France

by JOHN MIDDLETON MURRY

1

THE most tragic contrast in the life of Katherine Mansfield was that between her happiness at Bandol in the South of France in the winter and spring of 1915-1916 and her suffering there two years later, when the hardships and misery she endured gave her incipient phthisis the fatal hold upon her. The full story of that later suffering has yet to be published. It was almost grotesque in its intensity. And not the least powerful of its elements was the bitterness of her knowledge that in that same place, two years earlier, she had been happier than she had ever been before or was ever to be again. There was sealed in the flesh and spirit of a delicate genius the terrible truth of Dante’s saying: “There is no greater suffering than the memory of a happy time in the midst of misery.”

After her happiness in Bandol in the winter and spring of 1915-1916 Katherine Mansfield cherished a golden memory of the little town. She fell ill in November, 1917, with a severe pleurisy and was making a slow but satisfactory recovery, when her London doctor made in good faith the rash suggestion that she should go to the South of France to convalesce. She jumped at the possibility. She was certain that she had only to return to Bandol to get. well as if by magic; and probably she would have recovered, had conditions been what they were two years before. But they were not.

It was the last year of the war, and France was all but exhausted. The railways were in a miserable state. Her journey south was one of fearful hardship. All the recovery she had made was instantly lost, and she arrived at Bandol much more ill than she ever had been before. She was terrified. For now she was cut off. She could not return to England and she was incapable of making the journey alone. From the moment she arrived she had but one desire — to get back again. But for three months she was a prisoner. When eventually she did reach England she was a pathetic shadow of her former self.

A week after she got to Bandol on her second, fateful visit, she called at the Villa Pauline where she had been so happy. The contrast was almost more than she could bear. In a letter she tells how, on the slow walk to the villa, she realized she was “suffering — terribly, terribly.” She was already so changed that the kindly old proprietress did not recognize her, except by her voice, which was indeed one to remember. The old woman and the young one sat together in the familiar little salon and talked.

But oh, as we sat there talking and I felt myself answer and smile and stroke my muff and discuss the meat shortage and the horrid bread and the high prices and cette guerre, I felt that somewhere, upstairs, you and I lay like the little Babies in the Tower, smothered under pillows, and she and I were keeping watch. like any two old crones! I could hardly look at the room. When I saw my photograph, the one that you had left, on the wall. I nearly broke down, and finally I came away and leaned a long time on the wall at the bottom of our little road, looking at the violet sea that beat up high and loud against those strange dark clots of sea-weed. As I came down your beautiful narrow steps, it began to rain. The light was flashing through the dusk from the lighthouse, and a swarm of black soldiers was kicking something about on the sand among the palm-trees — a dead dog, perhaps, or a little tied-up kitten.

There is a terrible beauty and power in that simple prose. Katherine Mansfield was sick at heart and sick in body. And she was trying to begin writing again as the one solace for her suffering. Exactly a fortnight later she said in a letter: “As I write, I feel so much nearer my writing self — my ‘Pauline’ writing self— than I have since I came.” Two days after she had begun to write, on February 1, she said: “I am rather diffident about telling you. because so many sham wolves have gone over the bridge, that I am working and have been for two days. It looks to me the real thing. But one never knows.”

But she was writing that heartbreaking story Je ne parle pas Français, and she was not writing from her “Pauline" writing self. In a letter that is of crucial importance for a true understanding of her work, written two days later, she says: —

I’ve two “kick-offs" in the writing game. One is joy — real joy the thing that made me write when we lived at Pauline and that sort of writing I could only do in just that state of being in some perfectly blissful way at peace. Then something delicate and lovely seems to open before my eyes, like a flower without thought of a frost or a cold breath, knowing that all about it is warm and tender and “ready.”And that I try ever so humbly to express.

The other “kick-off" is my old original one, and had I not known love it would have been my all. Not hate or destruction (both are beneath contempt as real motives) but an extremely deep sense of hopelessness, of everything doomed to disaster, almost wilfully, stupidly. . . . There! as I took out a cigarette paper I got it exactly — a cry against corruption — that is absolutely the nail on the head. Not a protest — a cry. And I mean corruption in the widest sense of the word of course.

I am at present fully launched, right out in the deep sea, with this second state.

Katherine Mansfield’s genius for the precise word is here applied to the sources of her own inspiration in a moment of entire clarity. She has, she says, the absolutely right word for the condition out of which she was writing Je ne parle pas Français: it was “a cry against corruption.” And Prelude, which she had written two years before at the Villa Pauline, in her time of happiness, was the outcome of a condition of love — of being in some perfectly blissful way at peace — unaware of, unheeding, ignoring, rising joyfully above corruption and the threat of disaster.

The connection between this lucid self-awareness in the act of writing and the immediate experience she had undergone during her return to the Villa Pauline is intimate. There the same contrast was experienced and expressed as it were instinctively. There was the memory of Pauline —its joy and confidence and achievement — and the knowledge that it had been swept away, doomed wilfully, stupidly to disaster; and the agonized and agonizing “cry against corruption.”

2

IN November, 1915, shortly after the death of her brother in the war, Katherine Mansfield left England for the South of France. Her conscious motive was to overcome her grief at her brother’s death. But other motives were working in her. Her brother was killed almost immediately after going to France in October, 1915. He had spent his last home leave with her and they had talked and talked together of their childhood memories of New Zealand. For the first time in many years — really for the first time since she bad finally left New Zealand in July, 1908 — her slumbering love of her country and a nostalgia for her childhood were awakened in her. Her dislike of New Zealand quite suddenly changed into love.

That rebirth of love for her own country was intimately and mysteriously mixed with her affection for her brother. She wanted to go to a country that was like New Zealand — to seek a new state of soul. At the time I did not clearly understand her motives. Neither (I think) did she. I went with her a little reluctantly, for I felt that her grief for her brother was something into which I could not fully enter, any more than I could enter into the memories of New Zealand, which I did not share. But we went together. After a rather miserable time exploring the coast for a modest place to settle in and being constantly disappointed, I decided to return home, as soon as we had found a place where Katherine would like to stay. We found it at Bundol, at the Hôtel Beau Rivage. I stayed there two days with her, helping her to settle in, and then left for England.

On the night before I left, we noticed at dinner an attractive, thoroughly well-washed man of about sixty with a white mustache, who had “English” written all over him. The next evening (as Katherine’s letters record) he proved Ids nationality and his courtesy by “making her a leg and offering her two copies of The Times.”

Shortly afterwards, Katherine fell ill, not seriously but with the fibrositis that sometimes painfully incapacitated her, and also with what she called her “Marseilles fever.” She had to take to her bed. Two days later, on December 14, she wrote to me: —

After mid-day that Englishman, terribly shy, knocked at my door. It appears he has a most marvellous cure for just my kind of rheumatism. Would I try it? All this was explained in the niost preposterous rigmarole, in an attempt to appear offhand and at his poor unfortunate ease. I never saw a man so shy. Finally he says that if the pharmaeien can’t make it up here he will take the first train to Toulon and get it for me. It is a rubbing mixture which he got off a German doctor one year when he was in Switzerland for the winter sports. It sounds to me very hopeful — but I’d catch at any straw.

So I thanked him, and humming and hawing he went off. I can’t think what frightened him so. I shall have to put on a hat and a pair of gloves when he brings me the unguent.

Two days later, the ointment was working. Katherine was slid in bed, but

I think my Englishman’s stuff is going to do me a great deal of good, and he has made me so perfectly hopeful — and has been in many ways such a comfort to me. Should this stuff not quite cure me, he has given me the address of a place in Normandy where one goes for a cure once a year . . . he says it’s simply miraculous. . . . “You’ll be skipping like a twoyear-old after a week there,”says my nice tunny man. This man isn’t really a doctor. He’s the Head of Guy’s Dental Hospital — but he is a queer, delightful, good-natured person, and he has certainly been a comfort to me. . . . I have the bed covered with copies of The Times, marked at certain places with large blue crosses, and a copy of Le Temps with arrows in the margin and “this will interest you written underneath. All Ironi the same kind and only donor.

Another two days and “my rheumatism this morning n’existe pas. I’ve not been so free for a year.”

I can positively jump. I’m to go on using the unguent and my Englishman is going to give me the prescription today, for he leaves here on Monday [the next day].

But “my Englishman ” did not leave on Monday, He stayed on another week for her sake. On Wednesday, December 23, she wrote: —

I am going to drive in a kerridge to that little Dürer town I told you of. [That was the little town in Katherine’s poem, “The Town Between the Hills.”] The Englishman did not go away on Monday. He stayed till the end of the week to show me the different walks he has discovered here, and it is he who is taking me there this afternoon. How we get there. Heaven only knows, but he says there is a road. This man has certainly been awfully kind to me. You he can’t understand at all, and for all I say I am afraid you will remain a villain. I can’t persuade him that I am more than six years old and quite able to take my own ticket and manage my own affairs.

“But why should you?” says he. “What did he marry you for if it wasn’t to look after you?" He is 62, and old-fashioned at that. But I feel in a very false position sometimes, and I can’t escape from it. However, it’s no matter.

On Christmas Day she wrote: —

Now I am going for a walk with the Englishman, who leaves definitely the day alter tomorrow.

Later. It was a long walk through the woods and then we left the paths and he taught me how to climb as taught by the guides in Norway. It was boring beyond words but absolutely successful — we scaled dreadful precipices and got wonderful views. Then I had to learn how to descend, and how to balance if the stones roll when you put your foot on them — What a pa-man! All this he takes really seriously and I find myself doing so too and I don’t get one bit tired. I wish you could see my room. Even the blue glass vases we put away have had to come out for the big bouquets of yellow and pink roses. Tonight I have promised to dine with this pa-man. I don’t doubt I shall get a lecture on touring in Spain.

I already know more about bow to travel in Italy than any living being, I should think.

Then “my Englishman" disappears forever from Katherine’s letters. He was indeed a true “paman,” to use the Beauchamp family phrase of which Katherine was particularly fond. It meant an oldish man who was “a character,” set in ways that were a trifle eccentric, but charming; old-fashioned, courteous, and above all reliable. And behind all this it meant a man who belonged to the childhood world — a man whom a child could trust.

Among Katherine’s papers lately I found the precious prescription. It was signed, in a firm handwriting, “F. Newland-Pedley F.R.C.S.” So he was a doctor after all — obviously, from his qualification, a distinguished surgeon, who had specialized in dentistry. I thought that I should like, il it were possible, to learn more about this Englishman who had befriended Katherine and been so great a comfort to her. Accordingly, I wrote to the Secretary of Guy’s Hospital to ask for information. I was richly rewarded. I received a copy of Guy’s Hospital Gazette for May 24, 1947, containing an article by Mr. Lees Read, the Clerk to the Governors, on the man himself. The substance of that article follows here. It gives a fascinating picture of the closing years of a lovable, distinguished, and eccentric Englishman who richly descries a niche in the temple of Fame, in his own right as a “character,” as well as for his kindness to Katherine Mansfield.

3

MR. NEWLAND-PEDLEY was one of the cofounders in 1889 of the famous dental school at Guy’s Hospital. He was evidently deeply attached to his foundation, for when he died at Aquaseria, near Como in Italy, on May 4, 1944, at the age of ninety, it was found that he had bequeathed to Guy’s Hospital the residue of his estate of about £60,000. But the first charge on his estate was the payment of annuities amounting to £900 a year to five Italians.

The Clerk to the Governors was accordingly deputed to go to Italy, where Mr. Newland-Pedley had become domiciled, to discover whether the. Italian legatees still existed. In the course of his investigations he learned much of the closing years of the surgeon’s life.

Newland-Pedley arrived in the village of Aquaseria a sick man, aged seventy-six, in the year 1930, and asked for accommodation at the inn. He was taken in by the proprietors and nursed by them through a serious illness. But he made a good recovery, and declared that he had not felt so well for years and that he had decided to make the village his home for the rest of his life. He persuaded the owners to sell their inn and buy a villa where he would be the sole guest. He in return promised to provide for their future by his will.

The arrangement worked well. Newland-Pedley became the godfather of the little Italian village. Perhaps his most remarkable act was to build a church from no religious motive at all. The inhabitants of Aquaseria were hard hit in consequence of the sanctions imposed on Italy during the Abyssinian war. The only industry in the village closed down, and the people were near starvation. To remedy this, Newland-Pedley proposed to the parish priest that he should pay a weekly wage to every able-bodied man who did a full week’s work in quarrying and hauling stone and in building the village church, of which there existed only the foundations and the crypt in which the services were held. Shrewdly, he left it to the padre to supervise the work and the payment. So the village was the richer by an excellent stone church that cost Newland-Pedley ,£1500, and the villagers were saved from misery.

On one occasion he bought up the entire contents of the village sweet shop and distributed them in packets to the school children. The nuns who taught in the school remonstrated gently with him and suggested that there were many things more urgently needed by the children than free sweets — new blackboards, for instance. Would he not consult them before making any other gifts to the school?

Perhaps their remonstrances had some effect, for his next gift to the school children, during a severe winter, was skirts and pink woolen jerseys for the little girls and shirts and navy-blue jerseys for the little boys, and a pair of stout boots for both alike. But he was unrepentant in the matter of the sweets, and he was heard to declare, after the nuns had gone, that he knew far better than they what was good for children. And at another time, on being asked to help with the provision of facilities for the education of the elder children, he retorted in the same spirit by buying a hoop and stick for every child in the school. Plainly, there was method in his madness. It is easy to see that Newland-Pedley was mainly concerned that the children should play vigorously and grow up healthy.

He stubbornly refused to make any financial arrangement that would have secured him some income in the event of war. In consequence, when hostilities began he was almost destitute and had to be maintained by the people he had befriended. They had eventually to pay for his funeral.

He died at the age of ninety and was buried in the village. A marble plaque in the village church commemorates his generosity in building it.

Such is the picture of the closing years of Katherine’s “my Englishman,” One feels how he would have been drawn to her, and she to him. He was a man after her own childlike heart. How she would have appreciated his gesture in giving all the sweets of the village at one swoop to the children — she who urged me, in the last months of her own life, never to go to a family of small children whom I knew without a supply of barley sugar, that I might live in their memory as “the barley-sugar Man.”

Now for the contrast. It is not a pleasant subject, so one may well be brief. Two years after “my Englishman ” had tended her at Bandol in her brief illness, she was again ill in Bandol, but this time desperately. “As good luck,” she said, “ would have it,” an English doctor was in the place. Her good luck was an illusion. He turned out to be “a shady medicine man" : an addict of drink and drugs. There exists (among the painful letters of this period of illness and anxiety that I left out of the first edition of The Letters of Katherine Mansfield, Knopf, 1929) a vivid letter from her to me in which she describes her final interview with him.

She, utterly mistrusting him, had paid his bill and severed all connection with him. But when at last she was preparing to return to England she discovered to her horror that the only chance of permission being given her to travel was to obtain a medical certificate. She sent to him to ask him to visit her again for this purpose. Again and again she sent. He did not come. Finally, after two days delay, he came, half-drunk and half-drugged.

He gave her the certificate and she left Bandol straightway. At a café in Marseilles, while waiting for the train, she wrote me the letter. Here is a bit of it.

He came far more than three parts on, and I sat down and played the old game with him—listened — looked — smoked his cigarettes — and asked finally for a chit that would satisfy the Consul. He gave me the chit, but whether it will I’ll not know till tomorrow. It could not be more urgent in its way. I dictated it and had to spell it and had to lean over him as he wrote and hear him say — what dirty hogs do say. . . . Ah, the filthy little brute. There I sat, and smiled and let him talk. . . .

Oh dear! oh dear! I feel so strange. An old dead sad wretched self blows about, whirls about in my feverish brain — and I sit here in this café — drinking and looking at the mirrors and smoking and thinking how utterly corrupt life is — how hideous human beings are — how loathsome it was to catch this toad as I did — with such a weapon. I keep hearing him say, very thick, “Any trouble is a pleasure for a lovely woman,” and seeing my soft smile. . . . I am very sick. Bogey,

Sick indeed she was, by this time very dangerously ill. Only an utterly inhuman doctor, or one whose professional conscience had been rotted by drink and drugs, would not have given her at sight the certificate she needed — that she was unfit to travel alone. Where, if anywhere, she had a right to expect integrity she found corruption.

She does not say that she thought back to the far different doctor who had cared for her in the same hotel two years before. But she cannot have failed to think of him.