The first thing you notice in Wellington is the wind. It was
blowing a full ‘southerly buster’ as I drove in
along the bay, hurling the waves onto the rocks with all the
force of the South Pacific Ocean behind it. At the run down
hotel on Tinakori Road, shutters slapped and banged in a crazy
off-beat 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 Pohutakawa trees in the botanical gardens, the clanking
of the overhead cables. Clinging on 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’.
I had chosen to stay on Tinakori Road - where Katherine was
born and where her father occupied progressively larger houses
as his status rose. It’s an elevated street perched on
the hillside above the city. Above it, tree-clad hills climb
steeply upwards; below, the city staggers downhill in close
terraces, down to the brief fringe of level ground that edges
the circular bay, still declaring itself a volcanic crater.
Tinakori Road runs along a major fault line in an area that
remains seismically active - the buildings rumble and shake
at intervals as if built over an underground railway.
Katherine loved the view from the street, 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 years. It is still lined by brightly painted wooden
houses, and you can have a drink in the original workman’s
pub across the road where Katherine’s inscrutable face
looks down on you 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 dreamt of one day leaving themselves;
the botanical gardens 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 in the process
of 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, which has been meticulously
restored. It is a modest detached white house, boarded, behind
a picket fence. Small but not tiny - by English standards at
least - a reasonable four bed-roomed property with two reception
rooms, kitchen, scullery and ‘other offices’.
It was a very humble beginning for Katherine’s ambitious
father, who in the space of a very few years would rise from
the wrong end of Tinakori Road 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 - the rise
from a mere finance clerk to Governor of the Bank of New Zealand,
Chairman of the Harbour Board, and of a dozen other public companies.
Eventually he was given a knighthood. The New World was a place
where ambition was worthy, ability rewarded and anything was
possible in a place where the infra structure was still unformed
and flexible. It was an optimistic country where no one had
thought to exclude women from the Parliamentary franchise and
where they worked alongside men to develop frontier land and
commercial enterprises. This was the atmosphere that shaped
Katherine, where her own dreams and ambitions were formed without
being infected by the cynical pre-supposition that dreams only
came true in fairy tales.
Katherine’s grandfather, Arthur Beauchamp, was a self
made extrovert who came to New Zealand from England by way of
Australia, settled at Picton on 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 his father at the family store. Lively and enterprising,
he realised that the future lay in the capital rather than the
provinces and an apocryphal family story tells how he made plans
to move there, raffling his horse and boat - the only things
he possessed - in order to finance the trip. Raffling rather
than selling was a novel notion to raise more money and he sold
a lot of tickets. But, being Harold Beauchamp he also bought
a couple of tickets himself and was suspected of foul play when
he won both the boat and the horse. He got the money and kept
the goods, but had to leave town quickly.
In Wellington he got a job as a finance clerk in an import/export
business, and rapidly made himself so indispensable to his elderly
employer that he became a partner. Marriage to Annie Dyer, the
beautiful daughter of another Australian immigrant, established
him socially, and when his employer died - the rest was inevitable.
In ‘Pakeha’ 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 silver smith at the time
of Samuel Pepys, and several Beauchamp relatives were upper
middle class professionals - doctors, lawyers and business men
- back in England. They too, were upwardly mobile. Katherine’s
cousin Mary (known as ‘Elizabeth’) made a very advantageous
marriage to the German Count Von Arnim, which gives some indication
of the social classes on whose fringes they moved. They were
respectable, solid, but not above taking a gamble occasionally,
the absolute backbone of the Victorian commercial empire - a
class so beautifully portrayed by John Galsworthy in his Forsyte
Saga.
It was into this volatile setting that the girl who would eventually
become known internationally as Katherine Mansfield was born
on 14th October 1888. She was christened Kathleen Mansfield
Beauchamp in the wooden cathedral church in the centre of Wellington,
though her siblings called her Kass. She was the third daughter,
whose entrance into the world was something of a (never publicly
acknowledged) disappointment to parents who were looking for
a son to be heir to the growing Beauchamp estate. Katherine’s
two elder sisters, Vera and Charlotte, 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, was different.
She believed herself to be so from the very first and this conviction
was reinforced by her parents’ response to the child who
refused to conform or to be pleasing in order to please. It
showed itself in the stubborn direct gaze scowling at the observer
from the obligatory family photograph, the penetrating point
blank questions she uttered that disconcerted both her family
and their social circle.
There were physical differences too. Katherine wore glasses
and was plumper than her sisters. She smiled less. 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 mother and father went off to Europe
leaving Katherine with her grandmother, her mother’s first
returning words to the eager little girl who waited for her
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, running up the drive instead of out 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 to Katherine, 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 High School
Reporter - is an imaginary trip to Torquay, re-located to up-country
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 that ‘This story, written
by one of the girls who have lately entered the school, shows
promise of great merit.’
The little, white, clapperboard house at 25 (once 11) Tinakori
Road, is a shrine to Katherine’s memory - its fussy Victorian
colonial interior carefully matched to the period, though there
is little that was actually there in Katherine’s time.
The rooms seem crowded now with even two or three visitors.
How they contained the expansive personality of Harold Beauchamp
- never a small man - his languid wife Annie, her two unmarried
sisters, her mother Mrs Dyer, three children and a live-in servant,
beggars belief. It gives an insight into the adult Katherine’s
love of Japanese minimalism, her hatred of clutter, her obsession
with order.
The Mansfield Birthplace Trust, founded by the indefatigable
Oroya Day, has several treasures that belonged to Katherine.
In pride of place are Katherine’s 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 dedicated her own 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 Trust and some to the
Turnbull Library, where - thanks partly to these women who have
given their lives to Katherine - the memory of New Zealand’s
first and its most famous writer, is preserved.
In North Island there is otherwise a mixture of pride and indifference.
Though the Birthplace Trust thrives on foreign visitors, Harold’s
own memorial to his daughter is run down and neglected. Tucked
into the corner of a municipal park in the centre of Wellington,
it resembles a bus shelter. 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 Colorist Anne Estelle Rice, is hidden away in
the vaults of the new Te Papa museum, along with the art collection
Harold Beauchamp gave as an endowment to the capital city he
helped to build. His colonial legacy, as with his daughter’s,
has been replaced with a vibrant celebration of ethnicity. In
New Zealand, Katherine seems more ours than theirs.
In the Alexander Turnbull library, listening to the cultured
Kensington accents of her sisters on tape, one can well imagine
how this might happen. 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 Super-aestheticism,
should intoxicate the country.’ Katherine and Edie’s
views were in direct conflict with the prevailing mores, expressed
by one of Mrs 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.’
While Katherine was on the side of intellectual gain and European
culture, she was against the Victorian straitjacket it’s
social conventions imposed. It was a dichotomy the teenage Katherine
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 stifling 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 Maata Mahupuku,
a Maori princess. Even after the affair was over, they remained
friends. Maata’s nephew talks on tape of her funeral,
and how draft chapters of an early autobiographical novel called
Maata, which Katherine sent to her from England, were put into
the coffin with their namesake, as well as their personal letters,
when Maata was interred. 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 Picton Ferry as Katherine did, I
crossed the Cook Strait to South Island, the ferry edging into
a tropical fjord-land in impossibly turquoise water to land
in the village of Picton - too small to qualify as a town by
European standards - a cluster of houses and jetties on a finger
nail clipping of cultivated land, where Arthur Beauchamp, Katherine’s
entrepreneurial grandfather, once tried to farm. She remembered
visiting him, ‘lying to one side of an immense bed . .
. like a very old wide-awake bird.’ Further south, Christchurch,
another volcanic crater, which was the last place in New Zealand
Katherine saw when she left for England. She arrived by ferry
from Wellington and transferred to the liner anchored in the
deep water terminal at Lyttleton that now takes container ships
and oil tankers. I went there to visit Margaret Scott who lives
in Christchurch, in a house overlooking Diamond Harbour, 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 like a foreign language.
The specimens that are on show in the Turnbull Library reveal
this to be a task equivalent to the interpretation of Egyptian
hieroglyphs! 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 word - the least expected in a
particular context, as in the phrase ‘the swooning sun’,
added to the difficulty of the task.
No one has a more detailed knowledge of the contents of Katherine’s
letters and journals and Margaret is one of the few people still
alive to have known Katherine’s surviving family and friends.
She visited Katherine’s sister in America, 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 - before she died.
Margaret tells wry stories of staying with Ida and being on
the receiving end of her haphazard housekeeping. On one occasion
Ida 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 in the pan,
seething with the wriggling worms Ida couldn’t see. Ida
was mortified - throwing them out into the garden with profuse
apologies to the maggots she had almost cremated. To Margaret
she said ‘Of course 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 her loyal.
To go to New Zealand in search of Katherine Mansfield is to
be aware of the heart of her duality. It is still one of the
least civilised places on earth. Small oases of human habitation
exist in a vast wild landscape still largely unshaped by man,
full of dramatic contrasts and contradictions. Snow covered
Alps, volcanoes, glaciers, craters and geysers, glacial torrents
in flood plains a mile wide, impenetrable rain forests and tropical
beaches give place to each other just as they did in Katherine’s
time. They are there, just over the garden fence - primeval,
tropically sensual, savage and dangerous, almost obscenely fecund.
Katherine experienced the 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 incomers - 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 them. His cousin married
a Maori and had five children. Katherine’s Maori relatives
and friends showed her a different view to the European perspective,
a new way of living and experiencing the world around her, a
way of resisting colonisation.
Much of Katherine’s early writing reflects the concerns
of the Pakeha, of which she is one, having ‘the taint
of the Pioneer’ in her blood, aware of their role 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
compatriot’s 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.’
