For many young New Zealanders, an OE is more than just a trip overseas or a holiday in the sun. It’s primarily a cultural experience at a stage when the adult world of family commitment still lies in the future.
Later in life, when financial resources allow, they may make a several more trips to rediscover those cultural roots. If they are in the UK, Ireland, and continental Europe – or a combination of them – the OE is rewarded with a greater appreciation of how the modern world was formed, and the impact it had on other civilisations.
Wellington writer Redmer Yska (OUP).
Some might be content just to research their family tree; others might visit sites where New Zealanders fought and died in wars. Europe is rich in palaces, churches, and other edifices that go back hundreds if not thousands of years. Grand museums house artifacts from civilisations that did not acquire the tools to store them, as outlined in Culture, a book I reviewed a few weeks ago.
New Zealand has produced several people who left a lasting impact on that part of the world. Atomic scientist Lord Rutherford is just one. The subject of this column is a literary figure: the most studied of New Zealand writers, whose early death cut short her legacy, which today on the centenary of her death aged 34 is as strong as it has ever been.
Wellington writer Redmer Yska’s Katherine Mansfield’s Europe has already been widely and favourably reviewed – and no wonder. It is the perfect guidebook for some intensive OE as it traces that final 14 years of Mansfield’s life from being taken by her disapproving mother, Annie Beauchamp, to Germany in 1909. Mansfield was 21, pregnant, and had already ditched her first husband, who was not the baby’s father.
Abandoned by mother
They travelled to Bad Wörishofen in Bavaria where Mansfield was soon abandoned by her mother. The circumstances of Mansfield’s stillbirth are still unknown but her presence there remains in a town square and a statue. Contact with a sick boy probably resulted in the tuberculosis that afflicted the rest of her life.
Privileged with a weekly allowance of $500 in today’s money and armed with a .32 Smith & Wesson revolver, she was already a prodigious writer. She completed her first book of short stories, In a German Pension, two years later in 1911. Most were about her experiences at the spa town.
This trip was just the start of seven more locations in Germany, France, Switzerland, and Italy, interspersed with return visits to England, in what Yska calls a “desperate attempt to stay alive”.
Mansfield had been on her solo OE since her late teens, after growing up in Wellington – the subject of Yska’s earlier book, A Strange Beautiful Excitement (2017).
This European assignment took Yska three years, visiting all the places where Mansfield stayed, sometimes for up to months at a time. We also meet those who keep her memory alive, such as Bernard Bosque at Fontainebeau/Avon, where she died and was buried, Henning Hoffman in Germany, novelist Roberta Trice in Italy, and Jean François-Primo in Menton, France.
Yska embellishes these encounters with lengthy extracts from Mansfield’s journals, letters, and published writings. He also tracks down other sources. This country’s leading literary authority, CK Stead, who wrote a novel about Mansfield’s life in 1915-18, notes in his 4000-plus-word review that Yska’s research included a sensationalist biography by Roland Merlin, who has been ignored by other Mansfield scholars.
Her private life first attracted public attention after a trip in 1915 to Paris where she and John Middleton Murry, whom she later married after her divorce, had an apartment. She had previously visited Paris in 1908 and 1912. She had an affair with a New Caledonian, Francis Carco, who wrote about it in Les Innocents (1916). After her death, Merlin’s Le Drame Secret de Katherine Mansfield (1950) was one of many biographies that elevated her to mythical status in France.
The tragic loss of her soldier brother ‘Chummie’ (Leslie), from a grenade at Flanders later in 1915, sent Mansfield and Murry to the French Riviera in the hope she would overcome her suicidal fears. Murry continued to spend time on his literary business in London, but returned to Bandol, near Marseille, at new year, 1918.
By this time, Mansfield was diagnosed with pleurisy as well as TB. The damp, salty air was doing her no good. She was joined by Ida Baker, a companion who remained with until the end. During these years, Mansfield produced stories that appeared in Bliss (1920), the title story being written in 1918. Mansfield and Baker were back in southern Europe during 1919, staying in San Remo, Ospedoletti, and Menton, three towns near the French-Italian border.
Heavily sedated
Ida Baker’s photo of Mansfield in 1921 at Menton. (Alexander Turnbull Library)
Despite being isolated and heavily sedated with morphine, Mansfield wrote 170 letters between September 1919 and April 1920 – a total of 110,000 words. By the end of that year, again in Menton after a trip to London, she could no longer walk.
In the next move, to Switzerland in 1921, at Montana and Sienne, Mansfield had views from the Matterhorn to Mt Blanc while under the care of a lung doctor. But the drier, cooler climate made no impression on her high fever and chronic dysentery. In seven productive weeks, she produced several dozen stories, including At the Bay, The Garden Party, and A Doll’s House.
Radiation was the next attempted cure for her illness. That occurred in Paris, where she stayed at the Victoria Palace Hotel, as did Yska nearly 100 years later. (Conor Horgan provides sumptuous modern-day photographs of its interior among the book’s many illustrations.)
A fellow guest in March 1922 was James Joyce, who dined with author and literary patron Sydney Schiff, Murry, and Mansfield. A few weeks later, Schiff and his wife Violet hosted the legendary dinner with Diaghilev, Picasso, Proust, Stravinsky, and Joyce. If her health had been better, Mansfield may well have also been invited.
After the suspect X-ray treatment from the Russian physician Ivan Manoukhin, it was back to Switzerland, where Mansfield wrote her final story, The Canary, then again to London to see her father, Harold Beauchamp, who was to be knighted in the 1923 New Year’s Honours.
Mansfield’s final months, from October 1922 until her death in January 1923, were spent in Fontainebleau, near Paris, at an institute run by Georgian mystic George Gurdjieff, whose teachings were more spiritual than physical. A dash up the stairs at the institute caused a fatal collapse.
The entrance to the suite in the Victoria Palace Hotel where Mansfield stayed in 1922. Photo: Conor Horgan.
Initially, Mansfield was buried without a tombstone in the cemetery at Avon because Murry left the funeral without paying for a permanent plot. Six years later, she was re-interred with a gravestone paid for by her father.
In Merlin’s account, the reburial found her body exquisitely intact: “Her face bore no marks of decomposition, her body seemed intact. Quite literally she was resting.” The local guide and guardian of Mansfield's grave today, Bernard Bosque, rejects Merlin’s version and doubts the remains are even hers as she had been disinterred from the unmarked paupers’ graves.
Katherine Mansfield’s grave at the cemetery in Avon. Photo: Conor Horgan.
The gravestone was soon one of the village’s chief attractions, drawing literary and religious pilgrims from throughout France, New Zealand, and the US in the 1930s. She was revered by some French Catholic intellectuals as being a “pearl of Oceania” and having a “tender spirit”, while American devotees saw her as one of the world’s greatest short story writers.
On Murry's death in 1957, the gravestone was upgraded at the behest of the New Zealand ambassador to France, Joseph Wilson, to include a reference to her country of birth.
Much of Mansfield’s work was unpublished at her death. Murry quickly compiled two more volumes of short stories, The Dove’s Nest (1923) and Something Childish (1924). These were followed by poems, and collections of her letters and journals. Many of her papers were subsequently acquired by the New Zealand Government for the Alexander Turnbull Library.
Stead encapsulates her life as a literary figure: “Mansfield not only wrote stories. Fiction seemed to be generated around her life as she lived it. In a way that is quite extreme, she is a living story, a ‘short story’ only in the sense that she died at 34. In that sense, her life became a novella, but never a novel.”
If you have more than a passing interest in the Mansfield story, and a yen for interesting travel, this book is where you would start. It will undoubtedly lead you on a further journey of discovery.
Katherine Mansfield’s Europe: Station to Station, by Redmer Yska (Otago University Press).
Nevil Gibson is a former editor at large for NBR. He has contributed film and book reviews to various publications.
This is supplied content and not commissioned or paid for by NBR.
