Scraps of Genius

By Christopher Porterfield

THE LIFE OF KATHERINE MANSFIELD by Antony Alpers Viking; 466 pages; $16.95

On a sunny morning in 1918, a weak, feverish Katherine Mansfield arose in a shabby hotel on the French Riviera and, for the first time, coughed up blood. "I don't want to find this is real consumption," she wrote in her journal. "I shan't have my work written. That's what matters. How unbearable it would be to die --leave 'scraps,' 'bits' ... nothing real finished."

But, as she well knew, it was tuberculosis. And when she did die five years later at the age of 34, the writing she left behind was indeed a scrappy oeuvre: 88 stories, 26 of them unfinished, many others juvenilia, sketches, magazine-formula pieces, experimental cul-de-sacs. Fortunately, among them were also shards of genius. Her best stories--At the Bay, Je ne parle pas franc,ais, The Daughters of the Late Colonel, The Garden Party, perhaps half a dozen others--leaped beyond the traditional 19th century tale in a few quick, bright strokes. Although they were short on narrative, the pieces proved startlingly fresh, almost hallucinatory in their vividness, yet anchored in wit and ruthless reportage.

After her death, Mansfield's husband and executor, Critic John Middleton Murry, set out to canonize her as "the most wonderful writer and most beautiful spirit of our time." As Antony Alpers shows in this sturdy, sensible book, Murry's hagiography was as much a disservice as the excessive imitation, dismissal and neglect that later overtook her.

Mansfield's life was an even more ill-matched jumble than her work. The daughter of a prosperous New Zealand business leader, she had "gone every sort of hog since she was 17," as Virginia Woolf put it. That included a string of lesbian as well as heterosexual affairs, a pregnancy and miscarriage and a bizarre episode in which she married a singer whom she had known for three weeks, then abandoned him on their wedding night. In her first eight years in England she had 29 postal addresses, not counting excursions to Europe. She compartmentalized her life, playing different roles to different people: the reckless bohemian, the exalted votary of art, the matey colonial. Paraphrasing Polonius in her journal, she wrote: "True to oneself Which self?" --Christopher Porterfield

She and Murry began as intellectual roommates. They shook hands before retiring to separate beds: "Goodnight, Murry" -- "Goodnight, Mansfield." Al though they lived apart during their troubled, debt-ridden marriage almost as much as they were together, he was one of the two enduring people in her life.

The other was a quiet, hulking former schoolmate named Ida Baker, a sort of Alice B. Toklas in search of a Gertrude Stein. Ida was never Mansfield's lover, but she attached herself as factotum, confidante and nursemaid. To Mansfield, these ministrations were occasionally suffocating but ultimately indispensable. She sometimes referred to Ida as her wife.

Her wide-ranging literary friendships tended to be edgy at best -- as with Virginia Woolf, and quarrelsome at worst -- as with D.H. Lawrence (who seems to have used her as the model for Gudrun in Women in Love). In later years, increasingly ravaged by her disease, she yearned to rise above personal relations, as if a spiritual regeneration might trigger a physical one. She flirted with Roman Catholicism and tried a quack course of X-ray treatments. Finally, one of her old editors and mentors led her to the Russian mystic Gurdjieff, in whose community at Fontainebleau, France, she spent her final days.

Footloose to the last, she was able to go home again only symbolically. The death of a favorite brother in World War I turned her thoughts back to her family and to New Zealand, the raw land that had been settled but not yet imagined. Mansfield determined to "make our undiscovered country leap into the eyes of the Old World." Alpers, a fellow New Zealander who teaches at Queen's University in Ontario, writes feelingly of the spacious, humane vision she brought to Prelude, At the Bay and her other New Zealand stories. They were, he suggests, "a form of atonement for the sins of her youth." As an erratic schoolgirl in Wellington, Mansfield was once described by a teacher as "imaginative to the point of untruth." By the time she died, unhappy and unfulfilled at Fontainebleau, she had learned to be imaginative to the point of truth.

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