London wc
Monday 8 Sept 1914
My dear Henry,
I will ask my tailor to send you some samples at once, if he has any winter goods now; he could make you a suit to my measure; as he is a cash tailor he would have to have the money before you have the suit. I will pay him if you like, when the time comes.
I fear that I have no interesting anecdotes of my adventures beyond what I have already imparted. I was interviewed by a reporter when I got here, but had nothing interesting to give him even had I been willing to communicate it. It is really much more interesting to be in London now than it was to be in Germany: the latter experience was much like the childhood’s exasperation of being in an upper berth as the train passed through a large city. – In fact it was an intolerable bore. There, one was so far from any excitement and information that it was impossible to work; here in all the noise and rumour, I can work.
The quarter where I live is rather foreign anyway, being composed exclusively of boarding houses, in rows, all exactly alike except for the fancy names on them; and now we are full up with Belgian and French refugees, whole families of them, of the well-to-do sort, with babies and nurses; – we have just acquired a Swiss waiter instead of a German one who was very unpopular (one excited lady said what’s to prevent him putting arsenic in our food?’ I said ‘Nothing! – he already puts blacking on my tan shoes’) so I have been talking French and acquiring a war vocabulary. The noise hereabouts is like hell turned upside down. Hot weather, all windows open, many babies, pianos, street piano accordions, singers, hummers, whistlers. Every house has a gong: they all go off at seven o’clock, and other hours. Ten o’clock in the evening, quiet for a few minutes, then a couple of men with late editions burst into the street, roaring: GREAT GERMAN DISASTER! Everybody rushes to windows and doors, in every costume from evening clothes to pajamas; violent talking – English, American, French, Flemish, Russian, Spanish, Japanese; the papers are all sold in five minutes: then we settle down for another hour till the next extra appears: LIST OF ENGLISH DEAD AND WOUNDED. Meanwhile, a dreadful old woman, her skirt trailing on the street, sings ‘the Rosary’ in front, and secures several pennies from windows and the housemaid resumes her conversation at the area gate.
I find it quite possible to work in this atmosphere. The noises of a city so large as London don’t distract one much; they become attached to the city and depersonalize themselves. No doubt it will take me some time to become used to the quiet of Oxford. I like London better than before; it is foreign, but hospitable, or rather tolerant, and perhaps does not so demand to be understood as does Paris. Less jealous. I think I should love Paris now more than ever, if I could see her in these times. There seems to have come a wonderful calmness and fortitude over Paris, from what I hear; the spirit is very different from 1870. I have a great deal of confidence in the ultimate event: I am anxious that Germany should be beaten; but I think it is silly to hold up one’s hands at German ‘atrocities’ and ‘violations of neutrality’. The Germans are perfectly justified in violating Belgium – they are fighting for their existence – but the English are more than justified in turning to defend a treaty. But the Germans are bad diplomats. It is not against German ‘crimes’, but against German ‘civilization’ – all this system of officers and professors – that I protest. But very useful to the world if kept in its place.
Yours affy
Tom
To Eleanor Hinkley
28 Bedford Place, Russell Square
8 Sept 1914
My dear Eleanor
Here I am in Shady Bloomsbury, the noisiest place in the world, a neighbourhood at present given over to artists, musicians, hackwriters, Americans, Russians, French, Belgians, Italians, Spaniards, and Japanese; formerly Germans also – these have now retired, including our waiter, a small inefficient person, but, as one lady observed, ‘What’s to prevent him putting arsenic in our tea?’ A delightfully seedy part of town, with some interesting people in it, besides the Jones twins, who were next door for a few days, and – who is a few blocks away. I was quite glad to find her, she is very pleasant company, and
Perhaps when I learn how to take Englishmen, this brick wall will cease to trouble me. But it’s ever so much easier to know what a Frenchman or an American is thinking about, than an Englishman. Perhaps partly that a Frenchman is so analytical and selfconscious that he dislikes to have anything going on inside him that he can’t put into words, while an Englishman is content simply to live. And that’s one of the qualities one counts as a virtue; the ease and lack of effort with which they take so much of life – that’s the way they have been fighting in France – I should like to be able to acquire something of that spirit. But on the other hand the French way has an intellectual honesty about it that the English very seldom attain to. So there you are.
I haven’t said anything about the war yet. Of course (though no one believes me) I have no experiences of my own of much interest – nothing, that is, in the way of anecdotes, that are easy to tell – though the whole experience has been something which has left a very deep impression on me; having seen, I mean, how the people in the two countries have taken the affair, and the great moral earnestness on both sides. It has made it impossible for me to take adopt a wholly partizan attitude, or even to rejoice or despair wholeheartedly, though I should certainly want to fight against the Germans if at all. I cannot but wonder whether it all seems as awful at your distance as it does here. I doubt it. No war ever seemed so real to me as this: of course I have been to some of the towns about which they have been fighting; and I know that men I have known, including one of my best friends, must be fighting each other. So it’s hard for me to write interestingly about the war.
I hope to hear that you have had a quiet summer, at best. Did Walter Cook ever call? If you have seen Harry [Child] let me know how he is, and that he is not starving himself.
Always affectionately
Tom
P.S. (After rereading). Please don’t quote Pomona. It’s perhaps a literary as well as a social mistake to write as one would talk. I apologize for the quality of this letter anyway.
Katherine Mansfield
[1888–1923]
Katherine Mansfield was born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp in Wellington, New Zealand, the fourth child of wealthy parents. In 1903 she was sent to London to complete her education at Queen’s College, where she began writing for the college magazine. After graduation in 1906, she went back to New Zealand, but she harboured ambitions to return to Europe and write. By 1907 she had made several small contributions to the Australian monthly Native Companion, and by 1908 she had persuaded her parents to allow her to return to London to pursue her literary career. It was to be the last time she saw New Zealand.
In 1909 she married George Bowden, but left him shortly after. It was he who suggested that she contribute some of her short stories to the Fabian-socialist magazine The New Age. She wrote for the magazine between 1910 and 1912, submitting various feminist pieces and satires including the ‘Bavarian Sketches’, which were collected and published as In a German Pension (1911). In 1911, she met and began living with the critic John Middleton Murry. Together they founded Rhythm, an avant-garde literary quarterly. It was as a result of this partnership that Mansfield met D. H. Lawrence and Leonard and Virginia Woolf, all of whom were to have a great influence on her life. In 1915, after the news of her brother’s death, she wrote Prelude (1917). The story was one of many that focused upon her childhood in New Zealand. It was also one of the earliest publications by the Hogarth Press, owned by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. By the time Mansfield published her next collection, Je Ne Parlais Français (1918), she was becoming well known for her skills as a short-story writer. It was at this point that tuberculosis was diagnosed and, knowing that death was imminent, she began to write at a phenomenal pace.
In 1918 she and Middleton Murry were married, and Mansfield spent the last years of her life seeking relief from her illness in France. Despite great suffering, she managed to build up a body of work that, in its experimentation with literary form, was to transform the genre of the short story. Concentrating less on plot and more on conveying the continuity of ordinary life, Mansfield developed her technique by using devices such as internal monologue, flashbacks and daydreams. Her polemical writing, concerned with themes of self-development, sexual corruption and female art, was also to make an important contribution to feminism. Among the last works to be published during her lifetime were Bliss and Other Stories (1920), The Garden Party and Other Stories (1920) and The Dove’s Nest and Other Stories (1922). She died in France in 1923. Posthumous works include Poems (1923), edited by Middleton Murry, Something Childish and Other Stories (1924) and The Aloe (1930). Middleton Murry also edited Mansfield’s journals and two collections of her letters.
Unlike T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield did not have a place at university waiting for her. She arrived in England determined to make a career for herself as a writer. However, being both a ‘colonial’ and a woman, this was difficult and in her story ‘The Tiredness of Rosabel’ (1924) she clearly draws upon her own feelings of loneliness and isolation during her first years in Britain.
The Tiredness of Rosabel
At the corner of Oxford Circus Rosabel bought a bunch of violets, and that was practically the reason why she had so little tea – for a scone and a boiled egg and a cup of cocoa at Lyons are not ample sufficiency after a hard day’s work in a millinery establishment. As she swung on to the step of the Atlas ’bus, grabbed her skirt with one hand and clung to the railing with the other, Rosabel thought she would have sacrificed her soul for a good dinner – roast duck and green peas, chestnut stuffing, pudding with brandy sauce – something hot and strong and filling. She sat down next to a girl very much her own age who was reading Anna Lombard in a cheap, paper-covered edition, and the rain had tear-spattered the pages. Rosabel looked out of the windows; the street was blurred and misty, but light striking on the panes turned their dullness to opal and silver, and the jewellers’ shops seen through this, were fairy palaces. Her feet were horribly wet, and she knew the bottom of her skirt and petticoat would be coated with black, greasy mud. There was a sickening smell of warm humanity – it seemed to be oozing out of everybody in the ’bus – and everybody had the same expression, sitting so still, staring in front of them. How many times had she read these advertisements – ‘Sapolio Saves Time, Saves Labour’ – ‘Heinz’s Tomato Sauce’ – and the inane, annoying dialogue between doctor and judge concerning the superlative merits of ‘Lamplough’s Pyretic Saline.’ She glanced at the book which the girl read so earnestly, mouthing the words in a way that Rosabel detested, licking her first finger and thumb each time that she turned the page. She could not see very clearly; it was something about a hot, voluptuous night, a band playing, and a girl with lovely, white shoulders. Oh, Heavens! Rosabel stirred suddenly and unfastened the two top buttons of her coat … she felt almost stifled. Through her half-closed eyes the whole row of people on the opposite seat seemed to resolve into one fatuous, staring face …
And this was her corner. She stumbled a little on her way out and lurched against the girl next her. ‘I beg your pardon,’ said Rosabel, but the girl did not even look up. Rosabel saw that she was smiling as she read.
Westbourne Grove looked as she had always imagined Venice to look at night, mysterious, dark, even the hansoms were like gondolas dodging up and down, and the lights trailing luridly – tongues of flame licking the wet street – magic fish swimming in the Grand Canal. She was more than glad to reach Richmond Road, but from the corner of the street until she came to No. 26 she thought of those four flights of stairs. Oh, why four flights! It was really criminal to expect people to live so high up. Every house ought to have a lift, something simple and inexpensive, or else an electric staircase like the one at Earl’s Court – but four flights! When she stood in the hall and saw the first flight ahead of her and the stuffed albatross head on the landing, glimmering ghost-like in the light of the little gas jet, she almost cried. Well, they had to be faced; it was very like bicycling up a steep hill, but there was not the satisfaction of flying down the other side …
Her own room at last! She closed the door, lit the gas, took off her hat and coat, skirt, blouse, unhooked her old flannel dressing-gown from behind the door, pulled it on, then unlaced her boots – on consideration her stockings were not wet enough to change. She went over to the wash-stand. The jug had not been filled again to-day. There was just enough water to soak the sponge, and the enamel was coming off the basin – that was the second time she had scratched her chin.
It was just seven o’clock. If she pulled the blind up and put out the gas it was much more restful – Rosabel did not want to read. So she knelt down on the floor, pillowing her arms on the window-sill… just one little sheet of glass between her and the great wet world outside!
She began to think of all that had happened during the day. Would she ever forget that awful woman in the grey mackintosh who had wanted a trimmed motor-cap – ‘something purple with something rosy each side’ – or the girl who had tried on every hat in the shop and then said she would ‘call in tomorrow and decide definitely.’ Rosabel could not help smiling; the excuse was worn so thin …
But there had been one other – a girl with beautiful red hair and a white skin and eyes the colour of that green ribbon shot with gold they had got from Paris last week. Rosabel had seen her electric brougham at the door; a man had come in with her, quite a young man; and so well dressed.
‘What is it exactly that I want, Harry?’ she had said, as Rosabel took the pins out of her hat, untied her veil, and gave her a hand-mirror.
‘You must have a black hat,’ he had answered, ‘a black hat with a feather that goes right round it and then round your neck and ties in a bow under your chin, and the ends tuck into your belt – a decent-sized feather.’
The girl glanced at Rosabel laughingly. ‘Have you any hats like that?’
They had been very hard to please; Harry would demand the impossible, and Rosabel was almost in despair. Then she remembered the big, untouched box upstairs.
‘Oh, one moment, Madam,’ she had said. ‘I think perhaps I can show you something that will please you better.’ She had run up, breathlessly, cut the cords, scattered the tissue paper, and yes, there was the very hat – rather large, soft, with a great, curled feather, and a black velvet rose, nothing else. They had been charmed. The girl had put it on and then handed it to Rosabel.
‘Let me see how it looks on you,’ she said, frowning a little, very serious indeed.
