Katherine Mansfield, The Woman Behind The Books (Including Letters, Journals, Essays & Articles). Katherine Mansfield
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look back on her life, with all its miseries and all its brevity, and declare that,”in spite of all” it was good.”In spite of all” — the phrase, mysterious and simple, contains the secret of herself and her art. It is a phrase which, more than any other, echoes in my heart, with all the sweetness of a long familiar pain, when I think back upon what she was, and what she wrote from what she was.”In spite of all.” In spite of all, the little lamp glows gently and eternally in The Doll’s House; in spite of all, the sleeping face in The Garden Party murmurs that all is well;”in spite of all,” she wrote to her husband in a letter found among her belongings, to be opened only after her death;”no truer lovers ever walked the earth than we were — in spite of all, in spite of all.”
J. Middleton Murry.
CHAPTER I
THE PA MEN
1
KARORI was exactly the place that Katherine Mansfield would have chosen for Kezia to live in as a little girl. Wellington had its magic of sea, and the docks where ships blossomed from the dark water like lilies from a stagnant pond. But Karori had something quite other vibrating in its keen air — an electric current, stimulating, exhilarating, charged with exuberance. How completely, as she breathed it, she became a child of that country. An instinct more powerful than reason woke in her a thousand inherited impulses and desires. It was the instinct impelling the pioneers before her to “search behind the mountain ranges”; and which had rooted them, at last, in that Island. Growing in her, it was fanned by that air, fed by the sound of the sea, and by sight of those sharply-folded hills. It was to live on in her, and grow continually more living, all her life. No matter what country was stamped upon her passport, it was by virtue of Karori that she was to remain “the little Colonial.”
But Katherine Mansfield’s Karori was a Karori that had suffered a sea-change, and been transmuted into something rich and strange. It was to become for her, and for certain of her readers, the symbol of a quality of experience — of that experience of the external world which came to her when she was “crystal-clear.” The seed of this pearl of price was a certain quality of physical atmosphere:
“I love this place more and more” (she wrote of the Isola Bella at Mentone).”One is conscious of it as I used to be conscious of New Zealand. I mean if I went for a walk there and lay down under a pine tree and looked up at the wispy clouds through the branches I came home plus the pine tree.”
But it was far more than a physical effect.”Un paysage, c’est un état d’âme,” said Amiel. And the crystal clarity of Katherine Mansfield’s memory of Karori was not due to the light of the sun. Karori shone for her in another light.
“Why should one love? No reason; it’s just a mystery. But it is like a light. I can only see things truly in its rays.”
What had come to pass in those later days was her emergence out of the valley of the shadow of Experience into the light of Innocence regained, and just as William Blake turned to the child world to find terms to express his wisdom, so Katherine Mansfield turned back to Karori.
Therefore it would be to deny the very inmost law of high human experience to believe that if only her memory of Karori had remained with her undimmed from childhood, she might have been spared much suffering, or escaped that constraint of destiny which compelled her to meet unhappiness in the pursuit of strange gods whose ways were not her ways, and to be caught in the toils of experience which “wasn’t All experience.” The experience that “isn’t All experience” is precisely what Experience is. And it was in virtue of that suffering, that pursuit of strange gods, that “waste,” that she became crystalline. She was marked out to tread “the road of excess that leads to the palace of wisdom.” It was not merely after, but because, she had felt the full impact of life — not merely after, but because she had reached the conclusion:”I adore Life, but my experience of the world is that it’s pretty terrible” — that she came fully into her possession of Karori. That possession was the reward of a spiritual victory.
Her flowering was the flowering of the aloe— “that flower safety” — which, rooted in its own soil, pushing through its nettles, measures its height in the upper air, at last — and flowering, dies. But the first stirring, the first breaking of that ground which was to nourish the plant, began generations before the conception of Prelude or The Doll’s House — began even before the Pa Men had left their England to pioneer in their New Zealand.
2
The Pa Men were a vigorous race. They were descended from characteristic English merchant stock. The Beauchamps were goldsmiths and silversmiths in the City of London for two centuries. It appears to have been the seventeenth-century head of the house, the great-great-great-great-grandfather of Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp, who had Samuel Pepys for a customer.
“I went into Cheepside to Mr. Beauchamp’s, the goldsmith, to look out a piece of plate … and did choose a gilt tankard,”
Pepys recorded on November 14th of 1660. And on the 19th:
“So home, and there came Mr. Beauchamp to me with the gilt tankard, and did pay him for it £20.”
Three years later (June 1st, 1663) the goldsmith was involved in Pepys’ more serious affairs:
“So to Mr. Beauchamp, the goldsmith, he being one of the jury to-morrow in Sir W. Batten’s case against Field. I have been telling him our case, and I believe he will do us good service.”
And on November 23rd of that year:
“I went to Mr. Beauchamp’s, one of our jury, to confer with him about our business with Field at our trial to-morrow.”
From this Master Beauchamp the business descended in the direct line, to Ralph (b. about 1670); to Robert (b. 1717); to Edward (b. 1750); until it came, in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, into the hands of John Beauchamp (b. 1781), who was — in the private language of Katherine Mansfield’s family— “The Original Pa Man.” A “Pa Man,” it seemed, was a “character,” rugged, whimsical, vital, life-generating — paternal.
John Beauchamp,”The Original Pa Man,” was father of the pioneering generation. British New Zealand belonged to his era. Captain James Cook, sighting it on October 16th, 1769, was contemporary with John Beauchamp’s father, Edward; and his sister, Jane Beauchamp, was one of those “ladies who appeared the most daring speculators” on July 29th, 1839, when Edward Gibbon Wakefield, in the face of Parliament’s refusal of authorisation, arranged the London drawing of 100,000 acres of Wellington lots, prior to his colonisation of the Islands. It was John Beauchamp’s sons: Arthur (Katherine Mansfield’s grandfather), and Henry Herron (father of her cousin,”Elizabeth,” the Countess Russell), and Cradock of Anikiwa, who helped to push back the frontiers — first of Australia, then of New Zealand. If Katherine Mansfield found herself for ever and for ever part of “that Island,” there was reason enough.
Arthur Beauchamp, born in Hornsey Lane, Highgate, in 1827, was twelve years old when his Aunt bought her dozen sections of Wellington city land, besides two sections in Napier, and a farm in that vicinity. When these lands (which he, as “The True Original Pa Man,” was one day to possess) were purchased, they had not been seen even by Colonel William Wakefield, the founder’s brother, who — at that very moment — was sailing toward Wellington in the first expeditionary ship, the Tory, with thirty-five souls, and high hopes of bartering land from the Maoris to meet his obligations to his London purchasers.
Jane Beauchamp’s purchase had an odd history.
Had not Lady Laura Tollemache, youngest daughter of the Countess of Dysart (of Ham House, Richmond Park), entered into her unfortunate marriage, in 1808, with John Dalrymple (later, by the death of his cousin, the seventh Earl of Stair), the whole course of the Beauchamp line