Between the Sheets: Nine 20th Century Women Writers and Their Famous Literary Partnerships
368
Between the Sheets: Nine 20th Century Women Writers and Their Famous Literary Partnerships
368eBook
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Overview
Why did a gifted writer like Sylvia Plath stumble into a marriage that drove her to suicide? Why did Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) want to marry Ezra Pound when she was far more attracted to women? Why did Simone de Beauvoir pimp for Jean-Paul Sartre?
In Between the Sheets, author and feminist scholar Lesley McDowell examines nine famously troubled literary romances to arrive at a provocative insight into the motivations of these and other great female writers. The list of the damages done in each of these sexual relationships is long, but each provokes the same question: would these women have become the writers they became without these relationships?
Delving into their diaries, letters, and journals, McDowell examines the extent to which each woman was prepared to put artistic ambition before personal happiness, and how dependent on their male writing partners they felt themselves to be.
“McDowell . . . has culled incredibly juicy details. With so many affairs and broken hearts, the most surprising thing may be that anything got written in the last 100 years.” —The New York Times Book Review
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781468301410 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | ABRAMS, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 05/15/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 368 |
| Sales rank: | 763,362 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
THE "COMPANION": KATHERINE MANSFIELD AND JOHN MIDDLETON MURRY
I have tried through my illness ... to prevent him facing wholly what was happening. I ought to have tried to get him to face them. But I couldn't. The result is he doesn't know me. He only knows Wig-who-is-going-to-be-better-some-day. No. You do know that Bogey and you are only a kind of dream of what might be.
— Katherine Mansfield
14 October 1922
For you and I are not of the world, darling; we belong to our own kingdom, which truly is when we stand hand in hand, even when we are cross together like two little boys.
— John Middleton Murry
to Katherine Mansfield,
16 December 1915
The relationship between Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry ought to be the least mysterious, the least difficult to understand of all the literary liaisons in this book, mainly because we have so much of their unqualified testimony to it. Mansfield's reputation as possibly the greatest short story writer in the English language rivals masters of the art like Chekhov. And it rests largely on the collections she published during her relationship with Murry, such as Bliss and Other Stories (1919) and The Garden Party (1920), as well as her posthumous work that Murry continued to bring out, particularly Something Childish and Other Stories (1924). Murry himself is best known as an enthusiastic editor of Modernist writers such as T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, whom he published in his magazine The Adelphi, although he also wrote fiction, now considered far inferior to the work of the other writers he published and read little. His contribution to literature lies in his editorial role, and as Mansfield's posthumous champion, it should not be underestimated. Their many letters to each other, as well as Mansfield's own journal entries and notebooks, were written during the ten years the couple were together. They make up a remarkably vivid testimony that explains their feelings about each other, about themselves, and about their work while living together and apart.
But that lack of mystery is partly a blind. It exists, insomuch as a "lack" can be said to exist at all, because Mansfield and Murry both insisted on it. The lack of mystery in their relationship may appear to have depended upon their being open and honest with each other about all things, even their feelings for other people. In reality, it relied on certain key strategies that were the very opposite of open and honest. It relied, instead, on their pretending and fantasizing and lying to each other repeatedly. They both used the strategies of delusion, and self-delusion, throughout their time together. These strategies, ironically intended to obfuscate, are what make both parties appear to be innocent and easy to understand.
Those scrupulously maintained letters and diary entries have provoked every biographer since to question their love for one another and their real motives for being together. Indeed, Murry's enthusiastic publication of his wife's private papers after her tragically early death at the age of thirty-four from tuberculosis has provoked even worse insinuations. Was he, the obvious lesser talent, merely cashing in on his wife's genius when he published her letters and journal entries? Did he merely hang on her coattails during their time together because she was so much the better writer? Or was it in fact Mansfield who was the dependent one, as the letters seem to show, the one who needed Murry's attention because she was ill and frightened of dying? Did she need him to help her with her writing, too, or is that another delusion?
I think it is quite clear that Mansfield and Murry's joint strategies of delusion and self-delusion were not intended to undermine their relationship, but to maintain it, as such delusion often is. Mansfield, for instance, as we will see with many of the women in this book, repeatedly emphasized the permanence of her sexual relationships (not just her relationship with Murry). It is almost as though she believed they would last forever as long as she reiterated it. The temporariness of a relationship — especially a literary and sexual one like this — frightened her.
It's therefore natural to conclude that, as dangerous as such willful self-delusion can be, it was the lifeblood of their (and many another) relationship. Without such self-delusion, Mansfield might have listened to stronger individuals who wanted her to to reside in various sanatoriums as soon as the first signs of tuberculosis appeared in 1918. And without such self-delusion, she might have proved Leonard Woolf's reading of her relationship with Murry correct, when he said that "in some abstruse way Murry corrupted and perverted and destroyed Katherine both as a person and as a writer. She was a very serious writer, but her gifts were those of an intense realist, with a superb sense of ironic humor and fundamental cynicism. She got enmeshed in the sticky sentimentalism of Murry and wrote against the grain of her own nature ..."
Yes, without willful self-delusion she might have lived longer, and she might have written differently, too. But without deluding herself about him, and about her own feelings for him, perhaps the outcome for Katherine Mansfield would have been even worse. What is worse than death, some may ask? Well, death without leaving anything of value behind is one possible answer. Mansfield, after one miscarriage and possibly one abortion, and suffering from gonorrhea and tuberculosis, would never have been able to have children with Murry. But she could and did make her gift to posterity in the shape of her writing. Short story after short story, reviews and essays were all produced with Murry's constant exhortations and encouragement. After her death, he devoted himself to making sure the world didn't forget her. Had she left him after the first year or two, she might have lived longer, or written less, or just produced different kinds of books. But she wouldn't have become the Katherine Mansfield we celebrate today, the writer of such masterpieces as "Prelude," "Bliss," "Daughters of the Late Colonel," and "Je Ne Parle Pas Francais." And she might not have had the kind of champion after death that so many writers need in order to be remembered.
It is Leonard Woolf's notion of Mansfield, however, as the misdirected fly caught in Murry's web that has symbolized the conflict between Mansfield's and Murry's various biographers since her death in 1923. Some take the view of her recent biographer Claire Tomalin, who regards Murry as at best an "incubus" feeding off her talent, at worst little better than a killer for not pushing her into a sanatorium that might have saved her life, or at least prolonged it. According to Tomalin, Murry was "culpably stupid," a man who was "baffled" by his partner and who played "a crucial and largely unfortunate role in her life." She regards the Mansfield-Murry game of "encouraging one another into realms of high fantasy" as a destructive one that Murry could have stopped had he not been so weak and of such a "biddable nature."
There are other opinions, however. According to Murry's biographer, F. A. Lea, Mansfield was "controlling, dominant" and "in Murry, she found a child as much as a husband." Margaret Scott, the editor of Mansfield's notebooks and joint editor of five collections of her letters, also feels Murry has been harshly judged by too many. She expresses "no doubt whatever that Mansfield loved him for the ten years they were together," insisting that we read their exchange of letters "for what it was — a dialogue of troubled, intense and continuing affection." While acknowledging the "childlike" nature of their passion, she does not see it as lesser for avoiding sexual relations, as they seem to have done for most of their time together.
What, then, has inspired such divided reactions to Murry himself and to the part he played in their relationship? What has led to doubts even about Mansfield's own feelings for him? Was there indeed no real love between them, as Tomalin hints with her belief that Mansfield would have left Murry had she not been so sick? Or should we, as Scott says, take their often effusive correspondence, their repeated statements of true love, at face value, proof of a more innocent kind of love, as Mansfield and Murry constantly exhorted each other to do? Is it possible to read their many declarations of love simply, without cynicism, when we have evidence of lies on both sides, of heart-breaking weakness? And how are we to read what appears to be a sexual impotence in both partners, in the midst of passionate declarations of physical love?
Should we also believe that, undeniably deluding themselves about the extent of Mansfield's illness, they also deluded themselves about the extent and the true nature of their love for each other? Is Murry's support of Katherine Mansfield throughout their relationship and of her work after her death the only reason we still read her today? Or did her association with him do her reputation more harm than good, as Leonard Woolf believes? And, most crucially, were they really more companions than lovers? Did their writing absorb most of their passion?
* * *
Any analysis of how passionate the Mansfield-Murry relationship really was must be mindful of two things: first, the nature of their sexual life, and, second, how much of it was conducted in the face of severe illness. Tuberculosis became the third "person" in their marriage, directing how long and how often they could spend time in each other's company. A jealous illness, isolating the victim from contact with others, even from the most beloved, tuberculosis hugs the host body possessively. When Mansfield was first diagnosed with this dangerous infection, she and Murry had been together for just over five years. It would dominate the next five years of their relationship.
Virulent and damaging as it would b,e however, before that diagnosis came, illness was not the controlling force behind their sexual relationship. The question of their sex life may seem a prurient one, but, possibly more than for any other couple in this volume, it is crucial to an understanding of the power dynamic between the two of them. It raises precisely the kind of questions about truth and lies that have troubled so many of their readers ever since.
Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry first met in December 1911, through a mutual friend, Willy George, who was also contributing to the same magazine as Mansfield, The New Age. Mansfield was only a year older than Murry, but she had much more life experience at this point than he did. She was born into a rather typically bourgeois, late-Victorian family (her Australian father was a banker) in 1888 in New Zealand, and was the third of five daughters, one of whom died as a baby. The only boy, Leslie, was the youngest of the siblings. Her relationship with her cold, distant mother in some ways prefigures that of Elizabeth Smart's with her mother, and, like Smart, Mansfield was to become the colonial writer who found her first artistic home away from her native country, in London.
Fond of music at an early age, she had something in common with the sons of the neighboring Trowells, an English family, who had settled in New Zealand. One son, Garnet, would reappear in her life a few years later. But that was all to come, after she had left New Zealand for good. Her first visit abroad in 1903 was a temporary one while still a schoolgirl, on a trip to England with her family. There she befriended Ida Baker, a girl who would become almost as constant and devoted a companion to Mansfield over the years as Murry. She then spent three years at Queen's College in London before returning to New Zealand in 1906. It was a difficult homecoming. She was homesick for the metropolis and chafed at her native country's narrower outlook and smaller cultural opportunities. Her musical talents were still much in evidence and she was already writing a great deal, jotting down outlines for stories in her notebooks, although, like Rebecca West and Jean Rhys, she also toyed with the idea of becoming an actress. Whatever kind of artist she chose to become, it was clear that she could not remain with her family in Wellington.
And so, in 1908, when she was twenty years old, she sailed alone back to the city she wanted to make her home. Mansfield had become physically close to other girls while she was growing up: Tomalin reports her kissing a school friend, Vere Bartrick-Baker, when she was fifteen, and four years later, she befriended the twenty-seven-year-old Edith Kathleen Bendall, who was an artist. Tomalin quotes the following passionate entry from Mansfield's 1907 journal about Bendall: "She enthrals me, enslaves me — and her personal self — her body absolute — is my worship. I feel that to lie with my head on her breast is to feel what life can hold ... pillowed against her, clinging to her hands, her face against mine, I am a child, a woman, and more than half a man." This mixing of the sensual with the childlike — lying with her head on someone else's breast, "pillowed" and "clinging" — would also be a feature of her relationship with Murry. Tomalin claims that Bendall, recalling the relationship decades later, "said she thought Katherine had simply misinterpreted her motherly gestures," but throughout her life, Mansfield would confuse the maternal and the childlike in her relationships with both women and men.
Her most serious sexual affair to date, though, did not occur until one year later, and it took place while she was in London. She had fallen in love with the now grown-up Garnet Trowell, who was also in England, working as a professional musician. His job with a touring opera company meant a peripatetic lifestyle and inevitably long absences from Mansfield. She wrote him many letters which were physically passionate ("Lying in my bed at night — I feel your kisses burn my mouth — I long inexpressibly for you ..."), and called him "husband" several times. He was, she told him, "the complement of me ... ours will be the perfect Union." This anticipates the kind of love she will say she wants to share with Murry much later, where it will be just the two of them against the world ("I feel that we two, husband and wife, would be irresistible, would conquer the universe"). She and Trowell will be together "for ever"; she loves to think of "what the Future holds for us together"; she will love him "eternally." In another foreshadowing of her relationship with Murry, she emphasizes her need for Trowell, both physically and emotionally ("I could almost weep for longing for the shelter of your arms ... I so need you"), and she reverts to the childlike here too, as she does so often with her lovers: "Last night I dreamed we were together in the country — happy, my dear, laughing like children," addressing her lover as "my darling little boy." Mansfield sent her letters only a day or two apart, testifying to the intensity of her feelings and the great need she had for him.
By the end of 1908, however, Trowell's parents had "put an end to their son's romance" with her, according to Scott (Tomalin speculates on a row over money between Mansfield and the hard-up Trowell family, who were all now back in England), and on March 2, 1909, Mansfield suddenly married George Bowden, a male admirer she barely knew. The reason for such a hurried marriage was, according to Tomalin, that Mansfield was pregnant by Trowell, who apparently had been unable to defy his parents and offer to marry her himself (not without his family's financial support, anyway). To save her reputation, she opted for Bowden, but she couldn't see the plan through: she left Bowden on their wedding night and went back to Trowell a week later.
In April, though, she wrote unhappily to Trowell on her way to Brussels. She was obviously planning to have her baby abroad and she was finding the situation, alone and pregnant abroad, a difficult one: "I am afraid I really am not at all myself — so here I am — I took a drug this afternoon and slept till after five ..." She came back to London, then went off again, this time to Bavaria with her mother, who funded the trip. Tomalin doubts that Mrs. Beauchamp was ignorant of her daughter's physical state, especially as she subsequently cut her daughter out of her will. Did she want Mansfield to have an abortion abroad, or give the baby up, perhaps? She might not have got her way, because, in June, when Mrs. Beauchamp left her daughter alone in Germany, Mansfield wrote again to Trowell: "Some day when I am asked —'Mother, where was I born' and I answer —'In Bavaria, dear', I shall feel again I think this coldness — physical, mental — heart coldness — hand coldness — soul coldness ..." This doesn't sound like a woman about to abort or give up her baby, and possibly she and her mother argued, hence her mother's departure and removal of her name from her will. Unfortunately for Mansfield, though, her fantasy of becoming a mother turned out only to be a fantasy, in the end. While she was staying at Pension Muller in Turkheimer Strasse in Bad Worishofen she suffered a miscarriage. There are no more letters to Trowell after this date.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Between the Sheets"
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Copyright © 2010 Lesley McDowell.
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