Katherine Mansfield ‘a tragic woman’

Press, 20 July 1977, Page 15

Katherine Mansfield ‘a tragic woman’

NZPA staff correspondent , London Katherine Mansfield was a i passionate and tragic woman who could control her art 'but not regulate her life, according to a book which Hooks at her relationship (with her husband and father. I “Married to Genius” deI votes a chapter to each of I the best-known writers of the twentieth century — including Ernest Hemingway, IF. Scott Fitzgerald, D. H. i Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and George Bernard Shaw i— and looks at the way

s 'marriage influenced their -art. The author. Jeffrey f Meyres, in each case traces tithe difficulties the writers jjhad with their spouses to . I troubled relationships with lat least one parent.

“Katherine Mansfield’s attitude towards her father, a self-made tycoon whom she called the richest man in New Zealand, and the meanest, influenced her attitude towards men just as his financial support (which provided money instead of love) led to emotional insecurity,” Mr Meyers says in his book. She needed emotional protection and support, he says, but her husband, John Middleton Murry, was never able to give it. “Murry guarded his personality against her emotional onslaughts and developed a tendency to resist and withdraw from her.”

The most difficult periods of their turbulent marriage were the winters that Katherine Mansfield spent outside England because of her health, according to Mr Meyers. Murry refused to go with her on those trips and she realised that “all was not well with them.” In a poem she wrote to her husband in 1919 (“The New Husband”) she is pictured as a helpless child abandoned by Murry with death her “rescue.”

Not only did Murry’s stinginess make Katherine Mansfield’s life more difficult, Mr Meyers says, but

his acceptance of her death and refusal to abandon his romantic picture of it made the. end come sooner for her. “Influenced by Murry’s view of her as a doomed genius, she saw herself in the great tradition of tubercular artists.” When doctors advised her in 1918 that she could be saved by a year of self-discipline in a sanatorium, Murry refused to persuade her to follow the doctors’ warnings — because of her selfish pessimism, Mr Meyers says, Katherine Mansfield was a classic example of female liberation in her age — she smoked, had bobbed hair, lesbian experiences, and an abortion. Yet she was frustrated by not having children and craved an orthodox and secure marriage with a “Powerful and intelligent husband, an equal partnership like that of George Eliot and George Henry Lewes.” Murry was a charming and attractive man, according to Mr Meyers, but he was also insensitive and remarkably stupid. Shortly before she died, Katherine Mansfield clearly recognised their relationship. “Life together, with me ill, is simply torture with happy moments. But it is not life.”