Archives: Persephone Forum

When Winston Churchill’s American mother, Jennie Jerome, crossed the Atlantic for the first time in 1867, the expected journey time would have been about ten days. Thirty years earlier it might have taken twenty days or more and thirty years later, with a good following wind, it would take as little as five. Iron hulls had replaced wooden ones, steam engines and screw propellers had replaced paddle wheels and sails. Average passenger capacity had increased from two hundred to fifteen hundred. Crossings were frequent, regular and, for those who could afford it, comfortable.

 

 

The Jeromes, Jennie, her sisters Clara and Leonie, and their mother, were heading for Paris and later London, where they would find the entrée into the higher échelons of society which had evaded them in New York. Leonard Jerome’s fortunes fluctuated, but when he was rich he was very, very rich, and he shared his wife’s ambitions for their daughters. His money, unfortunately, was of the wrong sort. Only old money secured a place among ‘The Four Hundred’, the élite of New York Society, presided over by Mrs William Backhouse Astor – the number being, anecdotally, based on the limitations (if that is the appropriate word) of Mrs Astor’s ballroom.

Parisian society, and the English aristocracy, offered a warmer welcome to American girls described by the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, as ‘livelier, better educated and less hampered by etiquette … not so squeamish as their English sisters and better able to take care of themselves.’ And, he might have added, in the main richer. These ‘dollar princesses’ would be the answer to a prayer for a land-owning class whose land was producing diminishing returns. The same advances in marine engineering which had speeded the Jerome girls on their way had transformed transatlantic merchant shipping. Imports of cheap American grain, and meat (the new refrigerators that so conveniently chilled champagne for the first class passengers could also ensure the delivery of fresh carcases to British butchers) had a devastating effect on the incomes of England’s landed aristocracy. Farm rents had to go down, and with them allowances for younger sons or brothers and dowries for daughters or sisters. Dwindling funds led to the collapse of cottages and stately homes. Add a gambling habit, drinking or expensive womanising to the mix and the most valuable remaining asset was a title. The marriage between Jennie Jerome and Lord Randolph Churchill, younger son of the Duke of Marlborough, was the result of a whirlwind romance and not a commercial transaction; but she so loved the title that after Randolph’s death, and divorce from her second husband she changed her name back by deed poll to Lady Randolph.

 

Jennie’s father had provided a marriage settlement of £50,000, yielding an income of £2000 a year (£140,000 today), which was deemed insufficient by the Marlboroughs, all the more so as Leonard, wisely, ensured that half the income was paid directly to his daughter. American law was many years ahead of English law: the Married Women’s Property Act had been enacted in 1848; English women would not secure the same rights until 1882.

Her title had not been cheap, but cheaper by far than that of her nephew’s title. When, ten years later, Consuelo Vanderbilt married the future Duke of Marlborough, she brought with her $2.5 million ($65 million today). It has been estimated that between the 1870s and 1914, four or five hundred American heiresses married into the British aristocracy, filling the depleted coffers with the equivalent of £1 billion. Yet ‘cash for titles’ was not a recipe for marital harmony. Consuelo Vanderbilt’s marriage was unhappy from the start: the Marlboroughs separated in 1906 and divorced in 1921. The Churchills’ ‘love match’ cooled rapidly after the birth of Winston, although Jennie remained a loyal political wife, and was with him as he lay dying (most probably from syphilis). Anne Sebba has written a wonderful biography of Jennie Churchill, and in her preface to The Shuttle convincingly links it to the story of Jennie and Lord Randolph, with which Frances Hodgson Burnett would most certainly have been familiar: such marriages were widely reported.

Five years older than Jennie, born in Manchester in 1849, Burnett made her first Atlantic crossing, in the opposite direction, in 1865. She was fifteen and would come to know the ‘shuttle’ well, making the journey more than thirty times in her lifetime, closely observing society at all levels in England and in America, like Edith Wharton, Trollope and Henry James fascinated by the meeting of the two cultures. Old money (jn diminishing supply) meets new (abundant); lazy confidence, based on history and a calcified class system, confronts the ‘can-do’, forward-looking confidence of the new country, in which the social ladder has not been pulled up. The Americans, however rich and clever, and on their own ground sophisticated, show a certain trusting innocence – Burnett calls it ingenuousness – which can leave them vulnerable to the cynical, low cunning of the worst of Englishmen. Financially ‘cash for title’ could prove an expensive failure, emotionally it could prove a disaster.

 

 

Just such a near disaster is at the heart of The Shuttle.  Burnett wrote to a friend that she was ‘not in the least anti international marriage’, only against ‘a certain order of particularly gross, bad bargain’. She weaves a complex and compelling plot around the consequences of just such a bad bargain. Reuben Vanderpoel’s money, like Leonard Jerome’s and William Vanderbilt’s, is of the wrong sort. In one of the early international unions, he marries his older daughter, ‘pretty little simple’  Rosalie, to Sir Nigel Anstruthers, an evil-tempered, arrogant, impoverished Englishman, with an equally unpleasant mother, a crumbling estate, and a past that he prefers to conceal. Vanderpoel is a loving father, in no way desperate to find a match for his daughters, but ‘the republican mind had not yet adjusted itself to all that such alliances might imply. It was yet ingenuous, imaginative and confiding in such matters’. Like many others the Vanderpoels were easily seduced by the promotional image of ‘a baronetcy and a manor house reigning over an old English village and over villagers in possible smock frocks’. Only eight year old Bettina sees through Sir Nigel’s assumed charm: ‘I loathe him … He’s stuck up and he thinks you are afraid of him and he likes it.’ Sir Nigel detests her.

While English girls rarely emerged from ‘the schoolroom’, and both boys and girls ‘were decently kept out of the way and not in the least dwelt on except when brought out for inspection  during the holidays and taken to the pantomime’ – Burnett’s pen is as sharp as it is in The Making of a Marchioness (Persephone Book No. 29) – American children joined fearlessly in adult conversation. Although she lacks the adult words, Rosalie’s younger sister has seen Sir Nigel for what he is, ‘an unscrupulous, sordid brute, as remorseless an adventurer and swindler in his special line, as if he had been engaged in drawing false cheques and arranging huge jewel robberies, instead of planning to entrap into a disadvantageous marriage a girl whose gentleness and fortune could be used by a blackguard of reputable name.’ Betty is a force to be reckoned with, unlike her non-too-bright malleable sister, and indeed unlike her father, a kind man, who may be a shrewd businessman but strikes the reader as a poor judge of character.  The Anstruthers’ family solicitors, we later learn, had similarly concluded that Rosy’s father’s ‘knowledge of his son-in-law must have been limited, or that he had curiously lax American views of paternal duty.’

Burnett is remarkably forgiving of Reuben Vanderpoel’s ingenuousness. She allows him a period of sorrowful reflection many years later, when Betty, now grown-up, has already taken matters into her own strong hands. ‘The memory of that marriage had been a painful thing to him, even before he had known the whole truth of its results. The man had been a common adventurer and scoundrel, despite the facts of good birth and the air of decent breeding.’ Reuben fears even for Betty: ‘… no man knows the thing which comes, as it were, in the dark and claims its own – whether for good or evil. He had lived long enough to see beautiful strong-spirited creatures do strange things, follow strange gods, swept away into seas of pain by strange waves.’

Frances Hodgson Burnett herself had learned some cruel lessons from her second marriage to her long-time lover Stephen Townsend. They married in February 1900, by May she is already referring to him as a blackguard and a blackmailer, to which she would later add a liar and bullying coward, complaining of his insistence on her ‘duties as a wife’, which included ending her acquaintance with anyone who did not admire him, and making over all her property to him. In April 1901 she insisted on a separation. Nigel Anstruthers is a darker version of Stephen, with even more extreme views on wifely duties, and crueller and more devious ways of enforcing them, the most cruel of all being isolating Rosy from her family so that she felt herself abandoned by them, and they by her. ‘If you shocked, bewildered or frightened her with accusations, sulks or sneers, her light innocent head was set in such a whirl that the rest was easy.’ Time, a little effort and any number of lies, which came easily to him, would ensure that Rosy’s money, protected by American law, became his money, as, by English law, he, and his scheming mother, believed it should rightfully have been. Only Betty’s persistence, strength and courage can rescue Rosy.

 

 

Bettina Vanderpoel had long ago proved herself the cleverest and most promisingly handsome as well as the richest at her ‘ruinously expensive school’, where she was educated ‘with a number of other inordinately rich little girls, who were all too wonderfully dressed and too lavishly supplied with pocket money’ (Burnett loves the Americans but she is not blind to their faults, and paints a vivid and keenly observed picture of their excesses). At twenty she proves to be one of the girls so admired by the Prince of Wales, lively, educated and well able to take care of herself, and her sister and her nephew, as well as the needy and the sick in the village, the house and most importantly, and symbolically, the garden at Stornham Court. With the help of a sympathetic gardener, Kedgers (one of Burnett’s charming ‘walk-on’ parts), Betty, like Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden, brings a neglected, overgrown garden back to life – the same garden, in fact, as both were based on the garden at Frances Hodgson Burnett’s house, Maytham Hall in Kent, where she lived with Stephen and began writing The Shuttle.

 

 

The Shuttle  brilliantly interweaves two narratives of two very different American sisters, and two very different titled Englishmen, one a villain with no redeeming features, the other a strong, complicated, romantic hero who wins our hearts as swiftly as he wins Betty’s – but no more of him, the story is far too good for spoilers! Suffice to say that in this stark indictment of late Victorian England, where good people are more likely to be found at the gates of the rich (or not so rich) man’s castle than inside, Mount Dunstan is a rare shining example of a man with a noble heart to go with a noble title.

There are good Englishmen, but Burnett clearly believes that the English had more to gain from the shuttle than the Americans, and not only financially. The Vanderpoel sisters and others like them brought their fortunes, but not all Americans made the shuttle in first class. Many travelled steerage. G.Selden, is a delightful character and vital intermediary in the plot, who arrives with only the clothes on his back, a sales catalogue, a sample typewriter, and a bold charm, uninhibited by old world social conventions and  free ‘from the insular grudging reserve’. Like Betty, he is confident that he can move obstacles, and like her, he is uncowed by England, his ‘nobles’, Pierpoint Morgan and W.K. Vanderbilt, being in his mind entirely parallel ‘with the heads of any great house in England’.

Frances Hodgson Burnett indentified increasingly with the New World. By the time The Shuttle was published in 1907, she had already become an American citizen. The success of the novel, $38 thousand dollars in US royalties in the first three months , enabled her to buy a plot of land at Plandome, Long Island, overlooking Manhasset bay, and build an Italianate villa, with a colonnade and a balustraded terrace. It was there that she died, not quite sixty years after her first ‘shuttle’, from Liverpool to Quebec.

 

 

 

Between August 1908, when she left New Zealand permanently for Europe, and January 1923 when she died, Katherine Mansfield lived at more than thirty addresses, rooms, flats, cottages, houses, hotels, and occasionally clinics.  Move number twelve was to Clovelly Mansions in Grays Inn Road in April 1911, and it was here, a year later, that her life with John Middleton Murry began.

Not long after her burial at Avon-Fontainebleau in the winter of 1923, Katherine Mansfield’s coffin was moved into the communal part of the cemetery. Her husband, Middleton Murry, having commissioned a stone on which his name features prominently, and already receiving royalties from her posthumously published stories, while putting together more of her work for future publication, had failed to pay the fee required for an individual plot. ‘Even in death,’ writes her biographer, Kathleen Jones, ‘Katherine is not allowed to remain in one place.’

 

 

Katherine first met Middleton Murray in December 1911. He was twenty-two, a few months younger than her, still at Oxford, and already editing the literary magazine Rhythm. She urged him to leave Oxford, offering him a room in her flat, and before long a place in her bed. A bold move for a young woman in 1912, but KM,  though mildly indifferent to political freedom, finding the world ‘too full of laughter’ to spend time with ‘strange-looking’, ‘deadly earnest’ suffragettes, was an energetic exponent of sexual freedom, far more experienced than Murry.

 

 

In her three London years, this newest of ‘New Women’ had had affairs with both men and women, undergone a late miscarriage, and possibly an abortion, and married – the marriage was unconsummated; she and her ‘husband’ co-habited for less than twenty-four hours.  She had also, at some stage almost certainly been infected with gonorrhoea. She would tell Murry about the marriage, but little else. Murry tells us that ‘she destroyed all record [she refers in the Journal to her ‘complaining diaries’] of the time between her return from New Zealand to England in 1909, and 1914.’

 

 

If she confided the untold secrets of her early life to the ‘complaining diaries’, we cannot know but it is at least probable.  While still in New Zealand, together with the works of  Balzac, Tolstoy, Zola, Flaubert, Maupassant and other European masters, we know that she read the then popular diaries of  Marie Bashkirtseff. Bashkirtseff, a friend of Maupassant, was a wealthy Ukrainian painter (a career as a singer had been cut short by health problems), who spent much of her short life in Paris and died there of TB in 1884 at the age of 25. Even in their bowdlerized form, her confessional diaries reveal a fiercely ambitious feminist with little patience for bourgeois hypocrisy, a seductive model for K.M.’s own journal, and life.

 

 

 

Bashkirtseff however explicitly intended her journal for publication, which K.M. did not. Indeed on the flyleaf of her 1915 diary is a short note, ‘I shall be obliged if the contents of this notebook are regarded as my private property’. She was twenty-six but it has a curiously adolescent ring.

Throughout her life K.M. routinely destroyed papers. Leaving Switzerland for Paris in 1922 she writes, ‘Tore up and ruthlessly destroyed much. This is always a great satisfaction. Whenever I prepare for a journey I prepare as though for death.’ Given the astonishing number of journeys for which she prepared in her short life, it is remarkable how much material she left behind (and must have carried around with her). In her will, written in August 1922, she instructs that all her manuscripts, notebooks, papers and letters be left to John M. Murry, adding, ‘I should like him to publish as little as possible and to tear up and burn as much as possible.’ Murry’s detractors later criticised him for publishing as much and burning as little as possible: ‘editorial scavenging’, wrote one, ‘boiling Katherine’s bones to make soup’ wrote another.

In his introduction to the Journal he is less than open about his editorial ‘policy’ in making his selection from the papers which he inherited – over forty notebooks and diaries and hundreds of loose sheets of paper.  The quality he claims to be seeking to convey, he writes, is ‘a kind of purity’. In so doing, his critics argued, he created an idealised picture, an over-rarified spirit, toning down material which might reflect in his view badly on her. Some complained that he left out reference to her ‘less conventional sexual proclivities, others like K.M.’ s great friend Solomon Koteliansky regretted that he ‘left out all the jokes’. Leonard Woolf missed her ironic humour and fundamental cynicism.

 

 

The impression we get of Murry is of a rather dour, humourless character, handsome and attractive to women, but immature and unable to face too much reality. And K.M. may well have represented too much reality: volatile, and moody, a habitual liar who valued truth above all things, self-centered and acerbic, and ill (he found this very difficult), but such a life-force that no amount of ‘purification’ can diminish the thrill of the Journal.  ‘Touched-up’ it may have been, but this is a multi-faceted, and utterly credible self-portrait of a writer struggling with her craft, an invalid doing battle with her failing body, a voracious reader, a keen eyed observer of others, and of herself, an early twentieth-century woman at odds with convention, fiercely individual, racing against time.

Unloved by her mother, in her teens K.M. lost her adored grandmother, the one person on whom she could rely to comfort her, with hot bread and milk, and ‘a little pink singlet softer than cat’s fur’ around her feet.  Her beloved brother was killed in the War, within weeks of arriving at the Front. The men Katherine loved proved unreliable, the women too. Friends were rarely a source of comfort for long. K.M. was demanding and fickle. It is almost as hard to keep track of the people in her life as it is of her addresses, so rapidly did they go in and out of favour, their initials appearing for a few pages of the Journal then disappearing. Apart from Murry only her life-long friend Ida Baker, (aka Lesley Moore) features to the very end, but try as she might to provide comfort and succour, and L.M. tried to excess, she could never replace Grandmother Dwyer, her ‘best’ efforts provoking angry irritation, followed by guilt. At various times flat-mate, housekeeper, travelling companion, nursemaid, generous provider of loans, furniture, clothes, K.M. needed L.M., but found ‘something profound and terrible in this eternal desire to establish contact’, quite cruelly evoking her puppy-like devotion, ‘If I do absolutely nothing then she discovers my fatigue under my eyes’.

‘I’d always rather be with people who loved me too little rather than with people who loved me too much.’ Did Murry love her ‘too little’? He most certainly loved her a great deal less in sickness than in health, and candidly included K.M.’s references to this: given than he would behave in a similar way to his second wife, it is possible that he saw nothing blameworthy in distancing himself from the coughing and the pain. It would seem that K.M. got from J. the love that she required: ‘why I choose one man for this rather than many is for safety. We bind ourselves within a ring [how easy it is to miss her subtle use of ‘within’ rather than ‘with’] and that ring is as it were a wall against the outside world’. The Journal offers touching glimpses of their life together, ‘After tea we knitted and talked then read’, ‘Played cribbage with J. I delight in seeing him win’ – not exactly the hurly-burly of the chaise-longue. Towards the end of her life, bravely accepting that ‘life together, with me ill, is simply torture with happy moments’ and acknowledging that they shared ‘almost nothing’, that the two of them ‘are only a kind of dream of what might be’, she still longs for him.  ‘I do not feel that I need another to fulfil my being, and yet having him, I possess something that without him I would lack … to be together is apart from all else an act of faith in ourselves’ .   To be herself for Katherine was to be a writer, and Murry enabled that, from the next room, the next street, even from the far side of the Channel.

 

 

The Journal is not a narrative record, no use indeed as an historic document. Apart from her mourning dreams of her brother, and a brief note by Murry that ‘no single one of Katherine Mansfield’s friends who went to the war returned alive from it’, there is no mention of the defining events of 1914-1918. The occasional tantalising social detail leaves one longing for more: on 14^th April 1914 she writes, ‘Won a moral victory this morning to my great relief. Went out to spend 2s 11d and left it unspent’. What was she going to buy? Though there are occasional passages of self-criticism, the Journal is not a confessional diary, and there are moments when we feel that we know more about her neighbours than we do about her. In her final ‘entry’, for want of a more accurate word, Katherine includes a short wish-list: a garden, a small house, grass, animals, books, music, pictures. It hardly differs from a list drawn up some years earlier and is dreadfully sad. Her material wants were so modest and she had gathered barely half of them.

More than anything throughout her life she wanted to work, to write, and much of the Journal is a writer’s diary,  vividly describing the daily struggles, successes (rare) and failures (frequent) of the writer. ‘It’s the continual effort – the slow building up of my idea and then, before my eyes and out of my power, its slow dissolving’; ‘… what is it that I do want to write?; ‘I look at the stories that wait and wait just at the threshold. Why don’t I let them in?’. Time and again the cry goes up, ‘It’s not good enough’; ‘I didn’t get the deepest truth out of the idea’; ‘Musically speaking it is not – has not been – in the middle of the note.’ Constantly critical of herself as a writer, she does not spare other writers, even the ‘greats’. Worried about her own writing, she is reassured to read Gorky and ‘realise how streets ahead’ of him she is; Turgenev is ‘such a poser’; Forster ‘never gets any further than warming the teapot.’ Chekhov she admires unreservedly and Dostoevsky too, for his ability to build up a character from ‘vague side-lights and shadowy impressions’, so that when he at last turns a full light upon him, ‘he behaves just as we would expect him to do.’ She could be describing her own writing.

Vignettes, memories, sketched passages for future stories, simple observations of street activity or chance encounters all delight with her mastery of detail: the ‘endless family of half castes, who appeared to have planted their garden with empty jam tins and old saucepans and black iron kettle without lids’; a dog ‘so thin that his body is like cage on four wooden pegs’; a little French boy ‘bursting out of an English tweed suit that was intended for a Norfolk, but denied its country at the second seam’, a baby ‘at that age when it droops over a shoulder … when it cries, it cries as though it were being squeezed’. Ill as she was towards the end of the Journal , more often than not confined to one room, looking at her reducing world through a window, she didn’t lose her eagerness for people, for characters, for nature, and for words. Her eye remained as keen, and her ear as acute. She never lost her fascination with life, even as her own ebbed away.

 

 

 

In his Introduction Murry writes that Katherine died ‘suddenly and unexpectedly on the night of January 9, 1923’, unexpectedly maybe for him, who for years had denied the symptoms of her illness, deliberately blinkered himself to a progressive decline that is obvious even from her photographs.  But Katherine did not shirk the reality. Her most ‘confessional’, and tragic entries describe the illness which is swallowing her, the pain, the breathlessness, the cruelly limiting fatigue, the despair and the hope.

Ironically while he was so scrupulously honing the dead Katherine’s image, Murry was shaping his second wife Violet Le Maistre into a second K.M., a pale reincarnation: an aspiring writer, similar in looks to the young Mansfield, she quickly adopted the same severe hair cut, and almost identical hand-writing, bore a daughter whom Murry named Katherine, and sickened and died of TB before she was thirty. Somehow, and although Murry has been, probably fairly, charged with falsification, manoeuvring, idealising and sentimentalising, a flesh and blood, living and dying Katherine Mansfield escapes the editorial knife, and emerges from the pages of the Journal.