A century ago, on January 9, 1923, the New Zealand-born writer Katherine Mansfield died in France.
She had recently published her third book, The Garden-Party and Other Stories, a collection of the kind of keenly observed short stories for which she was already renowned, and that would earn her an enduring reputation as one of the most important Modernist writers in the English language.
She was also, at only 34, a frail, emaciated woman who could barely walk across a room.
She loved Life, which she liked to spell with a capital L, and declared that she would "never get out of the habit of it — its [sic] always a marvel", but she had been a chronic invalid since she was in her twenties and for at least four years had known that she would die young.
Her health troubles began with attacks of crippling joint pains, the cause of which was eventually diagnosed as gonorrhea. Alongside her "rheumatiz", as she called it, she also suffered repeated chest infections and a persistent cough.
From 1915 onwards, her mobility was limited by pain and breathlessness.
When tuberculosis (Tb) was confirmed in 1918, it came as no surprise.
A year before the diagnosis she had woken in a jubilant mood and dashed out of bed to fling open the curtains. The sudden movement provoked a coughing fit.
She was no stranger to coughing fits, but this time, when she spat in her handkerchief, she saw blood. She stared, horrified, at the "crimson lake" that bloomed there.
When Mansfield held her stained handkerchief that day, the discovery of streptomycin, the first life-saving antibiotic for tuberculosis, was still decades away.
For Mansfield, as for the hundreds of thousands of others suffering from this highly infectious disease at the time, there were no drugs to stop the Tb bacilli eating at her lung tissue. Treatment relied on resting and nourishing the body, in the hope that the patient’s own immune system would rally and defeat the infection. If, however, the disease was already well-advanced by the time it was diagnosed, there was little hope of survival.
In Mansfield’s case, Tb had already invaded most of her left lung and part of her right.
She and her doctor discussed the idea of her entering a sanatorium, one of the specialised Tb convalescent hospitals that until the 1950s were the primary way of managing Tb in developed countries. (New Zealand had five sanatoria, including the Waipiata Sanatorium in Central Otago.) Tubercular patients spent months, sometimes years, quarantined from the world, undergoing a regime of bed rest, fresh air and calorie-rich meals.
But Mansfield refused to consider a sanatorium.
Her first collection of short stories, In a German Pension, had been published in 1911, and with the Tb diagnosis came an intense awareness that she would have little time to complete the "modest shelf of books with K.M. backs" that she dreamed of writing.
She feared that institutional life in a sanatorium would result in an unbearable loss of privacy and independence. Her doctor was sympathetic. He understood the depth of her desire to keep writing and agreed that, for her, a sanatorium would likely do more harm than good.
But her health continued to deteriorate, and in 1919 he advised her to leave London, where she was then living, for the warmer climate of the Italian Riveria.
Accompanied by her husband John Middleton Murry and her friend Ida Baker, Mansfield set off for San Remo. Italy turned out to be the first stage on a peripatetic European journey that would, three years later, end at Fontainebleau, near Paris. Along the way she consulted doctor after doctor in search of a cure.
Her stay at the San Remo hotel was very short.
Tb was a notifiable disease in Italy. When her incessant coughing gave her away the manager was obliged to evict her and have the room sanitised. She and Ida moved to a nearby villa at Ospedaletti, but things did not go well there.
Murry had disappeared back to London, where he was immersed in the intellectually and socially stimulating life she had once shared with him. She, meanwhile, was isolated in a cold, drafty house, writing daily letters to her husband and waiting for replies that were frequently delayed due to postal strikes.
She was dependent on Ida for everything that required any degree of physical ability: shopping, cooking, cleaning, laundry, collecting the mail and ensuring there was enough firewood to feed the inefficient stove for heating.
The postal strikes not only disrupted communication with her husband and friends in England, but also interfered with regular delivery of her opiate-containing cough mixture.
After an unhappy few months, and some furious arguments with the faithful but often clumsy and (to Mansfield’s mind) irritating Ida, Mansfield accepted an invitation from a cousin to move to Menton, on the French side of the Riviera. She and Ida shifted across the border in January 1920 and (apart from a short return visit to England), lived in Menton until May 1921, spending many of these months living in the Villa Isola Bella.
1920 in Menton was a relatively settled period for Mansfield. She loved the climate and the house. She found the garden charming, with its date palm, magnolia, French artichokes and darting geckos, the sounds of cicadas and frogs and, from a nearby house, "someone playing a little chain of notes on a flute".
Looked after by Ida and a housekeeper, she earned money reviewing books for the literary journal that Murry edited. She also worked on her own stories, including Miss Brill and The Daughters of the Late Colonel. Her second book, Bliss and Other Stories, was published at the end of 1920.
But she remained extremely unwell. She was increasingly preoccupied with time. Would there be enough of it, she worried, to finish the work she wanted to do?
By December 1920, she had been placed on strict bed rest.
"I hate bed. I shall never go to bed in Heaven or eat anything off a tray."
She gave up book reviewing, explaining to Murry that her Menton doctor had stressed this was "ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY", that it would be "a question of shortening [my] life, to keep on". To her friend, the artist Dorothy Brett, she confided her sense of urgency: "The time to work is here ... you see, Brett, the days are so short and who knows whether there is going to be a long evening? I for one, don’t dare count on one."
After Christmas her misery was increased by a swollen tubercular gland in her neck. It was "a vile thing" that felt like "a continual small hammering", causing numbness on that side of her head.
A Menton surgeon drained it of pus. The relief was welcome, but temporary. The infected gland would require ongoing regular surgical "tapping".
The gloss had gone off Menton. Even the climate now seemed oppressive and unhealthy. After consulting another specialist, Mansfield and loyal Ida relocated to Switzerland in May 1921, eventually to the Chalet des Sapins in the forested alpine village of Montana-sur-Sierre.
Here, in an intense burst of creativity, Mansfield wrote three major stories: At the Bay, The Doll’s House and The Garden Party. They all recall her New Zealand childhood. It was as if, in the isolation of her sickness and of her marriage, she was drawing around herself in imagination the warmth and busy-ness of family life that she lacked in reality.
At the Bay, for example, recalls three generations of an extended family on summer holiday together. It’s an intensely physical story, populated by children, cousins, aunts, uncles, parents and a grandmother, all versions of her own family, and all portrayed vividly, in motion — walking, running, swimming, splashing, thinking, and talking.
Mansfield wrote to a friend that she had written something "full of sand and seaweed and bathing dresses hanging over verandas and sandshoes on window sills, and little pink ‘sea’ convolvulus, and rather gritty sandwiches and the tide coming in. And it smells (oh I do hope it smells) a little bit fishy."
But there was no reversing the advance of her Tb.
Towards the end of 1921, rail-thin and with her teeth "falling like autumn leaves", Mansfield heard of a "revolutionary treatment" being offered in Paris by a Russian doctor who claimed to cure patients by bombarding their spleens with X-rays. Dr Manoukhin agreed to take her on as a patient.
In February 1922 she moved to a hotel room in Paris, and commenced his expensive course of primitive radiotherapy.
The treatment was harsh. She endured it — just — for several months, then staggered back to Switzerland where she dredged up enough energy to write one last complete story, The Canary, about the death of a caged singing bird.
In August, after making her will, she shifted back to London.
Probably she would have died there, had a friend not paid her a visit and spoken about a man called George Gurdjieff.
He had developed a system for self-improvement that he was introducing to the West. It utilised dance and music, alongside lectures and manual labour, with the aim of harmonising body, mind and spirit. Mansfield’s interest was piqued.
In early October 1922, she returned to Paris for one last-ditch, unsuccessful, attempt at a cure with Dr Manoukhin.
A fortnight later she went looking for Gurdjieff.
He was living, with about 60 of his mainly Russian-speaking followers, in a former priory at Fontainebleau, near Paris, where they were establishing a communal residency dedicated to the practice of Gurdjieff’s system.
The old priory was now the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man.
Mansfield believed she had at last found the kind of sanatorium (the word is Latin in origin, from sanare: to heal) that she needed.
Gurdjieff allowed her to stay, despite the fact that she was too ill to do her share of work around the house and garden, let alone partake in the sacred dances that formed part of the institute’s daily programme.
She was under no illusions that Gurdjieff would cure her disease. But it was a different kind of health she was now pursuing.
The old priory was buzzing with activity. She pitched in as she was able. She could peel a few carrots in the busy kitchen where meals were prepared from the community’s own livestock and vegetables. Everyone was helping to build a Study House in the style of a Dervish "tekke", or sacred meeting house. The floor was covered with Persian carpets. There was a perfumed fountain, and a canopied dias lined with red drapes for Gurdjieff’s throne-like chair. The walls and windows were being decorated with murals and symbols.
But the old priory was not a comfortable place for someone so sick. It was cold, for one thing, and Mansfield was tormented by cold. In her final weeks, she wrote a list of words and phrases for which she needed the Russian equivalent: "I am cold; Bring paper to light a fire; Paper; Cinders; Wood; Matches; Flame ..."
Yet she also wrote of finding contentment, of being buoyed up by the company and the bustling sense of purpose. "This is the place," she wrote to Murry, "and here at last one is understood entirely, mentally and physically. I could never have regained my health by any other treatment ...". Murry thought Gurdjieff’s ideas were bunkum. He had not wanted Mansfield to go to Fontainebleau, and Mansfield had not wanted Murry to accompany her there. In the new year of 1923 though, she invited him to visit her.
Murry arrived after lunch on 9 January. He and his wife spent the afternoon in the Study House. She watched the others working, and he picked up a paintbrush to add some colour to the symbolic drawings. After dinner, they sat by the fire together to watch the ritual dances. Then they climbed the stairs to bed. On the landing Mansfield coughed, and arterial blood began to spurt from her mouth. "I believe," she gasped, "I’m going to die." It had arrived, the moment she had been working hard towards, and hard against, for so many years, breathless, coughing, pushing her pen across page after page, determined to capture the marvellous world in words while she still had time.
Katherine Mansfield died within half an hour of the start of her final hemorrhage. She is buried at Avon cemetery, near Fontainebleau. Her grave bears an inscription from Shakespeare: "But I tell you, my lord fool, out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety."
Sue Wootton is the publisher at Otago University Press. Later this year, OUP is publishing Katherine Mansfield’s Europe: Station to station by Redmer Yska. Wootton was awarded the pandemic-deferred 2020 Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship, and will take it up this year. The fellowship provides access to a writing room at the Villa Isola Bella, Mansfield’s home in 1920-21.
