The first thing you notice in Wellington is the wind. A full
southerly buster was blowing as I drove in around the bays of
the harbour, hurling the waves onto the rocks. At the hotel
on Tinakori Road, shutters slapped and banged in a crazy percussion,
just as Katherine described in one of her earliest stories,
‘The Wind Blows’. I recognised the way it blew the
stinging dust ‘in waves, in clouds, in big round whirls’,
heard the ‘loud roaring sound’ from the tree ferns
and the pohutukawa trees in the botanic garden, the clanking
of the overhead cables for the trolley buses. Clinging to the
car door to steady myself, the street map levitating from my
grasp, I experienced the exactness of Katherine’s images
– ‘a newspaper wagged in the air like a lost kite’
before spiking itself onto a pine tree; sentences blew away
‘like little narrow ribbons’.
Tinakori Road, where Katherine was born and where her father
occupied progressively larger houses as his status rose, runs
along a steep hillside with spectacular views of the city. Above
it, a tree- clad slope climbs upwards towards the ridge and
below it, houses stagger downhill towards the brief fringe of
level ground that edges the circular bay, enclosed by hills.
The street follows a major fault line in an area that remains
seismically active, and tremors were part of Katherine’s
childhood experience.
Katherine loved the view from Tinakori Road, writing in her
youthful notebook how ‘all in a fever myself I rushed
out of the stifling house . . . on to the gorse golden hills.
A white road round the hills – there I walked. And below
me, like a beautiful Pre- Raphaelite picture, lay the sea and
the violet mountains. The sky all a riot of rose and yellow
– amethyst and purple. At the foot of the hill –
the city – but all curtained by a blue mist that hung
over it in pale wreaths of Beauty.’ Though engulfed by
the expanding capital, the old houses renumbered to accommodate
the new, Tinakori Road has changed little in a hundred and twenty
years. It is still lined by brightly painted wooden houses,
and you can have a drink in the local working men’s pub,
where Katherine’s inscrutable face looks down from the
wall. The prime minister now occupies the residence where Katherine
was given a farewell garden party before leaving for England
in 1908 and which she used as material for one of her best-
known stories.
The fabric of her narratives is laid out in front of me as
I look from the motel window. The curve of the bay where Katherine
spent her summers,the quays where she and her brother watched
the steamers depart and dreamed of one day leaving themselves;
the botanic garden where she wandered with her sisters, conscious
always of the untamed wilderness just on the other side of the
garden fence. ‘Here is laughter and movement and bright
sunlight – but behind me – is it near, or miles
and miles away? – the bush lies hidden in the shadow.’
Katherine’s childhood was spent on the insecure margin
between a recent immigrant civilisation and the encroaching
wilderness, inhabited by an older, more primitive culture that
was being dispossessed.
As a visitor to Wellington you can walk along the road Katherine
took each day to school, visit the cemetery where her family
were buried, see ‘the gully’ where their servants
lived in relative poverty, and visit the house where she was
born, now meticulously restored. A square, white, plain, two-
storey weatherboard house behind a picket fence, it has four
bedrooms, two reception rooms, a kitchen, scullery and ‘other
offices’.
In the space of a decade Harold Beauchamp would be able to
move his family to a sprawling mansion further up the street
– opposite, and similar in size, to the prime minister’s
house. The increasing opulence of Harold Beauchamp’s houses
signified his changing position in the city as he rose from
a mere finance clerk to become chairman and director of the
Bank of New Zealand and a member of the Wellington Harbour Board,
and of a dozen other public companies. Eventually he was given
a knighthood. In the New World, where the infrastructure was
still unformed and flexible, ambition was worthy, ability was
rewarded and anything was possible. It was an optimistic country
where women would become the first in the world to win the right
to vote in 1893, and where they worked alongside men to develop
frontier land and commercial enterprises. This was the atmosphere
that formed Katherine, and shaped her own dreams and ambitions.
Katherine’s grandfather, Arthur Beauchamp, was a self-
made extrovert who came to New Zealand from England by way of
the Australian goldfields, settled at Picton at the upper end
of the South Island and became active in local politics, being
elected briefly to the New Zealand parliament. His son Harold,
Katherine’s father, started out working for Arthur at
the family store. Lively and enterprising, Harold realised that
the future lay in the capital rather than the provinces and
a family story tells how he and a friend made plans to move
there, raffling their horse and boat – the only things
they possessed – in order to finance the trip. Raffling
was a novel notion to raise more money and they sold a lot of
tickets. But the two young men also bought a couple of tickets
themselves and were suspected of foul play when they won both
the boat and the horse. They got the money and kept the goods,
but had to leave town quickly. In Wellington, Harold found a
job as a finance clerk in the import- export business of W.
M. Bannatyne & Co., and prospered. Marriage to Annie Dyer,
the beautiful daughter of another Australian immigrant, in 1884
established him socially and, when his employer died, he was
made a partner.
In New Zealand terms, the Beauchamps were not part of the colonial
aristocracy, but of the vigorous, commercial class that underpinned
and would eventually overtake it. Harold traced his origins
back to a London silversmith at the time of Samuel Pepys, and
several Beauchamp relatives in England were upper middle class
professionals – doctors, lawyers and businessmen. Katherine’s
cousin Mary Beauchamp, known as Elizabeth, made a very advantageous
marriage in 1891 to the German Count Henning August von Arnim,
which gives some indication of the social classes on whose fringes
the family moved. Respectable, solid, but not above taking a
gamble occasionally, they were the backbone of the Victorian
commercial empire – the class so authentically portrayed
by John Galsworthy in his Forsyte saga.
The girl who would eventually become known internationally
as Katherine Mansfield was born on 14 October 1888. She was
christened Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp in the wooden cathedral
church of St Paul’s in the centre of Wellington, though
her siblings called her Kass. She was the third daughter and
her entrance into the world was something of a (never publicly
acknowledged) disappointment to parents who wanted a son to
be heir to the growing Beauchamp estate. Katherine’s two
elder sisters, Vera and Charlotte (known as Chaddie), were already
attractive, intelligent, unexceptionable young girls who would
grow up to do everything expected of them by their parents and
social peers. A younger sister, Jeanne, and a brother, Leslie,
were equally conventional. Katherine, with all the privilege
of the middle child, always believed herself to be different
and this conviction was reinforced by her parents’ response
to a girl who refused to conform or to be pleasing in order
to please. Her resistance showed itself in the stubborn, direct
gaze scowling at the observer from family photographs, the penetrating
point- blank questions that disconcerted both her family and
their social circle.
There were physical differences too. Katherine wore glasses
and was plumper than her sisters. She did not smile as often.
She could be awkward and was regarded as the most demanding
of the five children. She felt herself to be loved less than
her siblings and as a result became more difficult to love.
The feelings of rejection grew. When her parents went off to
Europe, leaving Katherine with her grandmother, her mother’s
first returning words to the eager little girl waiting on the
quayside were ‘Well, Kathleen, I see you’re still
as fat as ever!’ Katherine’s answer was to cultivate
her difference and develop a keen inner life that divided her
ever more sharply from her family.
She was always imaginative. A school friend remembered playing
with Katherine in the garden at Tinakori Road and hearing ‘a
noise which to ordinary people would have sounded like a lawn
mower’. To Katherine it was ‘Bronzo the dragon gnashing
his teeth’. The spiral of smoke from a bonfire became
the dragon spitting fire. Katherine armed herself and her friend
with spears and shields cut from aloe and flax plants and stealthily
crept through the mysterious, forbidden, green door that led
to the neighbour’s garden. The dragon was quickly revealed
as ‘an irate gardener’ who chased the two girls
with a rake. They ran out of the gate and in a panic turned
the wrong way, rushing up the drive instead of into the street.
They were trapped. ‘It was tea time, but to go up past
the dragon and his rake was unthinkable.’ But Katherine
had the answer and approached a ‘kindly looking man’
walking past. They were, she told him, two princesses who had
been chased by a gardener, who was ‘really a dragon in
disguise’. The man, who knew Katherine’s family,
entered into the spirit of the occasion and escorted the girls
home ‘as though we really were fairy princesses’.
Katherine received yet another scolding and would always be
labelled an actress and a liar. But the adventures that took
place in her head were as real as anything that happened outside
it. She published her first story at the age of nine. ‘Enna
Blake’ – printed in the Wellington Girls’
High School magazine – is an imaginary trip to Torquay,
relocated to rural New Zealand, where girls go on walks to collect
ferns and mosses. It opens in Enna’s voice with a directness
that already presages Mansfield’s mature style: ‘“Oh
mother, it is still raining, and you say I can’t go out.”
It was a girl who spoke; she looked about ten. She was standing
in a well- furnished room, and was looking out of a large bay
window.’ The editor comments: ‘This story, written
by one of the girls who have lately entered the school, shows
promise of great merit’.
The house at 25 (once 11) Tinakori Road is a shrine to Katherine’s
memory, its fussy Victorian colonial interior carefully matched
to the period. The rooms seem crowded now with even two or three
visitors. How they contained the expansive personality of Harold
Beauchamp, his languid wife Annie, her two unmarried sisters,
her mother, Margaret Dyer, three children and a live-in servant,
is difficult to imagine. It perhaps gives an insight into the
adult Katherine’s love of Japanese minimalism, her hatred
of clutter, and her obsession with order.
The Katherine Mansfield Birthplace Society, founded by Oroya
Day, has several treasures that belonged to Katherine. In pride
of place are her typewriter, locked away in a glass case, and
an exquisite black, embroidered jacket – narrow-waisted
and buttoned Chinese fashion. These items found their way back
to New Zealand after Katherine’s death, gifted by Ida
Baker, her lifelong companion, through the scholar Margaret
Scott, who has dedicated her life to the transcription of Katherine’s
letters and notebooks. While Oroya painstakingly restored the
house, Margaret decoded the work and, through her friendship
with Ida, returned a number of surviving artefacts to New Zealand
– some to the Birthplace Society and some to the Alexander
Turnbull Library, where the memory of New Zealand’s most
famous writer is preserved.
Although the Katherine Mansfield Birthplace Society thrives
on visitors, Harold’s own memorial to his daughter, erected
in 1933, is run down and neglected. When I went to see it, graffiti
had been scrawled on the pergola, and the filthy water of the
concrete pool contained the body of a dead bird. There were
no flowers and the paint was peeling. Katherine’s portrait,
a triumphant statement of personality by the American Colourist
Anne Estelle Rice, is hidden away in the vaults of the Museum
of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, along with much of the art
collection Harold Beauchamp gave as an endowment to the capital
city he helped to build.
Katherine’s literary fortunes have fluctuated since she
died in 1923. For many years her work was undervalued in her
birth country, as her first biographer Ruth Mantz discovered,
and there were those who considered her to be more European
than authentically a New Zealander. In the Oral History Centre
of the Alexander Turnbull Library, listening to the cultured
Kensington accents of her sisters on tape, one can well imagine
how this might happen – after all, Katherine spent a large
part of her life in Europe.But there are other voices there
too, reassuringly New Zealand voices. Edie Bendall, the object
of Katherine’s eighteen-year-old passion, talks of the
stifling atmosphere of Katherine’s family, the social
calendars of fashionable young women, the corseting of young
minds along with their bodies, and how she and Katherine walked
every evening to talk of literature and art and the world beyond
their limited horizons. ‘I am ashamed of young New Zealand,’
Katherine wrote in a letter. ‘All the firm, fat framework
of their brains must be demolished before they can begin to
learn. They want a purifying influence – a mad wave of
Pre-Raphaelitism, of Superaestheticism, should intoxicate the
country.’ Katherine and Edie’s views were in direct
conflict with the prevailing mores, expressed by one of Annie
Beauchamp’s contemporaries. ‘After all that is said
of the advantages of art & high civilisation & the way
some girls consider home ties, duties & affection mere dust
in the balance when weighed against European culture & advantages,
I had far rather my children & grandchildren grew up loving
dunces than have them value intellectual gains as the supreme
objects to be striven for in life.’
The teenage Katherine was on the side of intellectual gain
and European culture, but against the Victorian straitjacket
its social conventions imposed. It was a dichotomy she struggled
with. ‘On one hand lay the mode bohème –
alluring, knowledge- bringing, full of work and sensation, full
of impulse, pulsating with the cry of Youth Youth Youth . .
. On the other hand lay the Suitable Appropriate Existence.
The days full of perpetual Society functions, the hours full
of clothes discussions – the waste of life. The stifl
ing atmosphere would kill me . . .’ Part of her would
always be rooted in an older, more primitive heritage. In Wellington
Katherine had a passionate adolescent love affair with a Maori
girl, Maata Mahupuku. Even after the affair was over, they remained
friends. Maata’s nephew talks on tape of her funeral,
and asserts that draft chapters of an early autobiographical
novel called ‘Maata’, which Katherine sent to her
from England, as well as their personal letters, were put into
the coffin when Maata was buried.
In the novel, fragments of which exist elsewhere in manuscript,
Katherine herself takes on the Maori persona of the heroine.
Her fictional and actual relationships with Maata illustrate
her fascination with the double heritage of her birth country
– the balance between Maori and Pakeha. As early as 1906,
in a piece called ‘Summer Idylle’, Katherine assumes
a Maori identity, but with a Pakeha name – Marina. She
imagines the ‘slow, tranquil surrender of the Night Spirits’
and dreams of eating ‘eggs and bread and honey and peaches’
with her female Pakeha counterpart, who bears the Maori name
Hinemoa. The whole of Katherine’s sexual and racial ambivalence
is there – the crossover of names, Marina and Hinemoa’s
erotic exchange in a room redolent of tea tree blossom, and
Hinemoa saying ‘it is because you are so utterly the foreign
element . . .’
Leaving Wellington on the ferry as Katherine did, I crossed
Cook Strait to the South Island, the vessel edging its way through
narrow fjords of impossibly turquoise water to the small port
of Picton, where Arthur Beauchamp, Katherine’s entrepreneurial
grandfather, ran a store and tried to farm. She remembered visiting
him, ‘lying to one side of an immense bed . . . like a
very old wide-awake bird’ Further south, the city of Christchurch
was the last place in New Zealand Katherine saw before she left
for England. She arrived by ferry from Wellington and transferred
to the liner anchored in the deep- water terminal at Lyttelton,
over the hill from Christchurch, which now takes container ships
and oil tankers. I went there to visit Margaret Scott, whose
home nearby Diamond Harbour is a focus for scholars and writers
from all over the world who want to share a bottle of wine and
talk Mansfield.
Margaret describes the almost impossible task of learning to
read Katherine’s handwriting as like translating a foreign
language, and the specimens on show in the Alexander Turnbull
Library support this description. Margaret once spent an entire
week deciphering one word, the blown-up photocopy propped in
front of her at breakfast, lunch and dinner in the hope that
some blinding flash of insight would eventually occur. And it
did. Katherine’s habit of choosing the unusual, the least
expected, word – as in the phrase ‘the swooning
sun’ – added to the difficulty of the task.
Margaret is one of the few people still alive to have known
Katherine’s surviving family and friends. She visited
Katherine’s sister, Vera, in the United States, stayed
with John Middleton Murry’s fourth wife in Norfolk and
became a trusted friend of Ida Baker – the famous ‘L.M.’
of Katherine’s diaries and letters. Margaret tells wry
stories of Ida’s haphazard housekeeping. On one occasion
Ida, her eyesight very poor, cooked some rather elderly mushrooms
she had kept for too long in a paper bag. ‘Lesley, dear,
they’re crawling with maggots!’ Margaret said, as
they sizzled and seethed in the pan. Ida was mortified, throwing
them out into the garden with profuse apologies to the maggots
she had almost cremated. ‘Of course,’ she said,
‘they had eaten so much mushroom they would have been
more mushroom than maggot. So it wouldn’t have been too
bad if we had eaten them.’ Margaret glimpsed the infuriatingly
irrational logic that had so enraged Katherine, as well as the
naivety and honesty that kept Ida loyal.
On subsequent visits to New Zealand, I spent weeks in the archives
of the Alexander Turnbull Library, reading Katherine’s
letters and original notebooks, which reveal much more than
their printed transcriptions. They are human documents that
show their author’s method of working and her fluctuating
moods. Katherine liked to write in ‘cahiers’ –
French school exercise books – but she also used Strakers’
diaries and pocketsized notebooks with board covers. She wrote
on the right- hand side of the page, leaving the left- hand
side free for annotations. The notebooks are well used: there
are pages torn out, corners folded down and sometimes pressed
flowers between the pages. In the margins, she scribbled comments
and doodles, shopping lists and occasionally, in a fit of boredom,
snatches of music hall songs and jokes. You can tell by her
handwriting when she is angry or exhausted.
John Middleton Murry’s diaries and letters are there
too. For the first time it is possible to put them side by side
with Katherine’s to provide a complete narrative of their
years together. John’s diaries, which he kept until his
death in 1957, and his fragments of autobiography, are a harrowing
record of emotional inadequacy and how his obsession with Katherine
destroyed two of his three subsequent marriages and adversely
affected the lives of his four children. He is often accused
of being ‘the man who made Mansfield miserable’
and, before I went to New Zealand, my background reading had
reinforced that view. I began my research prepared to be critical.
But, after reading his diaries, I found myself much more compassionate
and better able to understand why he had behaved as he did,
and why Katherine went on loving him ‘in spite of all’.
Mansfield scholar and author Vincent O’Sullivan, who co-edited
The Letters of Katherine Mansfield with Margaret Scott, was
a sane and objective adviser in my quest to understand their
complex relationship and to unravel the ‘Mansfield myth’
that John Murry’s editing of her work created.
To go to New Zealand in search of Katherine Mansfield is to
be aware of the heart of her duality. This remains one of the
least urbanised places on earth. Small oases of human habitation
exist in a vast wild landscape still largely unshaped by humans,
full of dramatic contrasts and contradictions. Snow-covered
alps, volcanoes, glaciers, craters and geysers, glacial torrents
in wide flood plains, impenetrable rain forests and tropical
beaches give place to each other just as they did in Katherine’s
time. She experienced this landscape with a passionate physicality.
It became a metaphor for the disordered adolescent landscape
within her that resisted ‘European cultivation’
as forcefully as the Maori had resisted appropriation of their
traditions and their land by the white immigrants – the
Pakeha. The hinterland of Maori culture, ancient and powerful,
exerted a strong influence on Katherine. Harold Beauchamp learned
their language in order to do business with Maori. His cousin
married a Maori and had five children. Katherine’s Maori
relatives and friends showed her a different view from the European
perspective, a new way of living and experiencing the world
around her, and a way of resisting colonisation. Katherine knew
she had ‘the taint of the Pioneer’ in her blood.
She was aware of the role of Pakeha as usurpers, insensitive
to any kind of right that was not expressed in a legal document.
Katherine could see, when she looked out into the bush, ‘vague
forms lurking in the shadow, staring at me malevolently, wildly,
the thief of their birthright’. She imagined a shadowy
host of dispossessed, ‘passing, passing’. And the
sound of water, the wind swaying in the trees suddenly became
‘the sound of weeping’. Yet the bush was a source
of strength and creativity as she fed on its erotic power. ‘There
is bush, silent and splendid . . . and everywhere that strange
indefinable scent. As I breathe it, it seems to absorb, to become
part of me – and I am old with the age of centuries, strong
with the strength of savagery.’
Born across two cultures, educated in yet another, Katherine
would always struggle for one definitive identity. And her work,
edited for a European audience, reflected the divisions, though
it remained always recognisably antipodean. As one of Katherine’s
compatriots remarked, ‘It touches neither fiord nor geyser
certainly but it has the feel of the land. – If she mentioned
neither street nor tree that New Zealand knows, if her work
were set before us unknown and unplaced I think we would lift
our noses like dogs to the wind and smell our country. I think
we would know the Picton boat and morning At the Bay . . . I
cannot pass a certain house in Tinakori Road without a stir
of pain for the girl who they say lived there as Cassie Beauchamp.
It is a far cry from Tinakori to Fontainebleau where from the
nettle, danger, she plucked the flower, safety.’
