KATHERINE MANSFIELD

acandleandawick:

For the third time this summer, though no other summer, I went to London on Monday, paid 5/- for a plate of ham, & said goodbye to Katherine. I had my euphemism at parting; about coming again before she goes; but it is useless to extend these farewell visits. They have something crowded & unnaturally calm too about them, & after all, visits can’t do away with the fact that she goes for two years, is ill, & heaven knows when we shall meet again. These partings make one pinch oneself as if to make sure of feeling. Do I feel this as much as I ought? Am I heartless? Will she mind my going either? And then, after noting my own callousness, all of a sudden comes the blankness of not having her to talk to. So on my side the feeling is genuine. A woman caring as I care for writing is rare enough I suppose to give me the queerest sense of echo coming back to me from her mind the second after I’ve spoken. Then, too, there’s something in what she says of our being the only women, at this moment (I must modestly limit this to in our circle) with gift enough to make talk of writing interesting. How much I dictate to other people! How often too I’m silent, judging it useless to speak. I said how my own character seemed to cut out a shape like a shadow in front of me. This she understood (I give it as an example of her understanding) & proved it by telling me that she thought this bad: one ought to merge into things.

[…] It suddenly strikes me as I write that I should like to ask her what certainty she has of her work’s merit. - But we propose to write to each other - She will send me her diary. Shall we? Will she? If I were left to myself I should; being the simpler, the more direct of the two. I can’t follow people who don’t do the obvious things in these ways. I’ve recanted about her book; I shall review it; but whether she really wanted me to, God knows. Strange how little we know our friends.

V. Woolf about Katherine Mansfield. Diary Entry. 25 August 1920.

acandleandawick:

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.

Please don’t talk of a triumph, even in jest. It makes me hang my head. I wish some day I might deserve your long generous letter - but the day is far off, I realise that. Thank you for it all the same. It came on Xmas day too, and so was a two-fold gift.

I think of you often - very often. I long to talk to you. Here, at last then is time to talk. If Virginia were to come through the gate & were to say “Well - Katherine” - oh, there are a thousand things Id like to discuss.

I wonder if you know what your visits were to me - or how much I miss them. You are the only woman with whom I long to talk work. There will never be another.
But leagues divide us. I have taken this little house until the end of 1922. Perhaps you will come here before then. It is in the country & there is a garden & a stone terrace. It is solitary but not lonely. One lives by the sky again - by the changes of cloud & light. Whenever I think of Asheham it is of clouds - big golden clouds, hazy, spinning slowly over the downs -

Oh, how beautiful Life is, Virginia, it is marvellously beautiful. Were one to live for ever it would not be long enough. Sometimes I sit on the wall watching the sun & the wind shake over the long grass & the wild orchid cups & I feel - - - simply helpless before this wonder.

Farewell dear friend. (May I call you that).

Yours ever
Katherine

[Letter to Virginia Woolf]