Katherine has been dead a week, & how far am I obeying her “do not quite forget Katherine” which I read in one of her old letters. Am I already forgetting her? It is strange to trace the progress of one’s feelings. Nelly said in her sensational way at breakfast on Friday “Mrs Murry’s dead! It says so in the paper!” At that one feels - what? A shock of relief? - a rival the less? Then confusion at feeling so little - then, gradually, blankness & disappointment; then a depression which I could not rouse myself from all that day. When I began to write, it seemed to me there was no point in writing. Katherine won’t read it. Katherine’s my rival no longer. More generously I felt, But though I can do this better than she could, where is she, who could do what I can’t! Then, as usual with me, visual impressions kept coming & coming before me - always of Katherine putting on a white wreath, & leaving us, called away; made dignified, chosen. And then one pitied her. And one felt her reluctant to wear that wreath, which was an ice cold one. And she was only 33. And I could see her before me so exactly, & the room at Portland Villas. I go up. She gets up, very slowly, from her writing table. A glass of milk & a medicine bottle stood there. There were also piles of novels. Everything was very tidy, bright, & somehow like a dolls house. At once, or almost, we got out of shyness. She (it was summer) half lay on the sofa by the window. She had her look of a Japanese doll, with the fringe combed quite straight across her forehead. Sometimes we looked very steadfastly at each other, as though we had reached some durable relationship, independent of the changes of the body, through the eyes. Hers were beautiful eyes - rather doglike, brown, very wide apart, with a steady slow rather faithful & sad expression. Her nose was sharp, & a little vulgar. Her lips thing & hard. She wore short skirts & liked “to have a line round her” she said. She looked ill - very drawn, & moved languidly, drawing herself across the room, like some suffering animal. I suppose I have written down some of the things we said. Most days I think we reached that kind of certainty, in talk about books, or rather about our writings, which I thought had something durable about it. And then she was inscrutable. Did she care for me? Sometimes she would say so - would kiss me - - would look at me as if (is this sentiment?) her eyes would like always to be faithful. She would promise never never to forget. That was what we said at the end of our last talk. She said she would send me her diary to read, & would write always. For our friendship was a real thing we said, looking at each other quite straight. It would always go on whatever happened. What happened was, I suppose, faultfindings & perhaps gossip. She never answered my letter. Yet I still feel, somehow that friendship persists. Still there are things about writing I think of & want to tell Katherine. If I had been in Paris & gone to her, she would have got up & in three minutes, we should have been talking again. Only I could not take the step. The surroundings - Murry & so on - & the small lies & treacheries, the perpetual playing & teasing, or whatever it was, cut away much of the substance of friendship. One was too uncertain. And so one let it all go. Yet I certainly expected that we should meet again next summer, & start fresh. And I was jealous of her writing - the only writing I have ever been jealous of. This made it harder to write to her; & I saw in it, perhaps from jealousy, all the qualities I disliked in her.
Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 16 January 1923.
KATHERINE MANSFIELD
This blog is my labor of love and a little bit of an obsession. It is dedicated to the life and work of Katherine Mansfield
(October 14, 1888 to January 9, 1923)
Creator:
A Writer's Ruminations
It is bitter to be ill. And the idea of being well — haunts me. Ever since I have realised this possibility I dream of it at night — dream I am alone — crossing streams or climbing hills or just walking. To be alone again. That is what health means to me; that is freedom.
Honeysuckle, roses pink & white, periwinkles, syringas, red hot pokers, those yellow flowers - the ground is smothered. Fruit trees with promise of harvest, the hot lake & pools, even the homely clothes-prop in the lush grass - & more mimosa. The birds are magical. I feel I cannot leave but pluck the honeysuckle, & the splashes of light lie in the pine wood.
In fact the pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.
I am a recluse at present & do nothing but write & read & read & write.
You know, if the truth were known I have a perfect passion for the island where I was born. Well, in the early morning there I always remember feeling that this little island has dipped back into the dark blue sea during the night only to rise again at gleam of day, all hung with bright spangles and glittering drops. (When you ran over the dewy grass you positively felt that your feet tasted salt.) I tried to catch that moment—with something of its sparkle and its flavour. And just as on those mornings white milky mists rise and uncover some beauty, then smother it again and then again disclose it, I tried to lift that mist from my people and let them be seen and then to hide them again…. It’s so difficult to describe all this and it sounds perhaps over-ambitious and vain. But I don’t feel anything but intensely a longing to serve my subject as well as I can.
It is ages since I have heard of Virginia [Woolf]. I thought she would have a new book out this winter. Perhaps it will come in the spring. I can see her in that dress. She is a lovely creature in her way.
I have been pretending to have read Proust for years but this autumn M. and I both took the plunge. I certainly think he is by far the most interesting living writer. He is fascinating! Its a comfort to have someone whom one can so tremendously admire.
An Excellent arrangement is now made. Maynard and Sheppard are to live in Clive’s house and we take 3 Gower Street for nine months. Katherine and Murry will live in the Bottom floor, Brett on the second, and I in the attics. But my rent will only be nine pounds a year!!! So what affluence I shall have for Hotel life!!! I shall like living with Katherine I am sure - Murry has a job at the War Office.
Dora Carrington in a letter to Lytton Strachey, 6 Sept 1916
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I had no idea these guys shared a house, how exciting!
Grey, grey…there is no light at all, and the autumn air is cold with the coldness of traceless spaces. Out of the grey sea creeps the ghastly, drowned body of Night. Her long dark hair swam among the branches of the pine trees, her dead body walks along the little mauve ribbon of an asphalt path. She stretches out her arms and the autumn world sinks into that frozen embrace, pillows its tired head upon the pulseless heart.
I read of primroses in the paper. Primroses! Oh, what wouldn’t I give for some flowers. Oh Brett - this longing for flowers. I crave them. I think of them - of the feeling of tulip stems and petals, of the touch of violets and the light on marigolds & the smell of wall flowers. No, it does not bear writing about. I could kiss the earth that bears flowers. Alas, I love them far TOO much!
How well I know that rapture that comes sometimes when one is alone. I think perhaps it is the greatest joy of all. If only it would stay - if only one might live like that, always. I sometimes think that if one were well there is no reason why it should ever go. But that is nonsense. The feeling I mean is … it’s as though the barriers were down and you stepped into another world where even the silence lives and you are accepted, you are received as part of everything. Nothing is hidden. And there is that precious sense of awareness.
I am alone. I am hidden. Life seems to have passed away, drifted, drifted…Very faint & clear the bird calls & cries, and another on a little scarlet touched pine tree close by me answers with an ecstasy of song.
