Katherine Mansfield’s art of commemoration: Leslie Beauchamp and World War I

Wilson, J. M. (2015) Katherine Mansfield’s art of commemoration: Leslie Beauchamp and World War I. Paper presented to: Katherine Mansfield, Leslie Beauchamp and World War One, Messines, Belgium, 26-27 September 2015. (Unpublished)

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Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Abstract:	For Katherine Mansfield, World War One was experienced as apocalyptic, life defining: the sudden death of her beloved brother Leslie Beauchamp, in a hand-grenade accident in Belgium in 1915 made her profoundly aware of ‘tragic knowledge’, the destruction of a generation. Her devastation at Leslies’ death led her to vow to ‘find new expressions, new moulds for our thoughts and feelings’. In her elegiac celebration of her brother’s life in stories that returned to their childhood in New Zealand, written in the few years that were left to her, Mansfield developed her modernist technique into an art of commemoration. This paper addresses Mansfield’s process of mourning and her struggle to compensate for a personal tragedy by turning to memory, spirituality and psychic powers. Making reference to Mansfield’s letters and notebooks, I will ask what part religion and faith, transcendence and immortality play in the perceptions and apprehensions of death that pervade ‘commemorative’ last stories like ‘The Fly’ and ‘Six Years After’.
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Katherine Mansfield, Leslie Beauchamp, World War One, Ploegsteert Wood, 'The Fly', 'Six Years After'
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PR English literature > PR8309 English literature: Provincial, local, etc. > PR9639.3 New Zealand literature
Creators:	Wilson, Janet M
Faculties, Divisions and Institutes:	University Faculties, Divisions and Research Centres - OLD > Research Centre > Centre for Critical and Creative Writing University Faculties, Divisions and Research Centres - OLD > Faculty of Education & Humanities > English and Creative Writing Faculties > Faculty of Education & Humanities > English and Creative Writing Research Centres > Centre for Critical and Creative Writing
Date:	27 September 2015
Date Type:	Presentation
Event Title:	Katherine Mansfield, Leslie Beauchamp and World War One
Event Dates:	26-27 September 2015
Event Location:	Messines, Belgium
Event Type:	Conference
Language:	English
Status:	Unpublished
Related URLs:	Conference
References:	‘Katherine Mansfield Letter to J. M. Murry’, 16 November 1919, in O’Sullivan and Scott (eds) Letters, vol. 5, 75. ‘Katherine Mansfield Letter to J. M. Murry’, 10 November 1919 in O’Sullivan and Scott (eds) Letters vol. 3, 82. ‘Katherine Mansfield Letter to J. Middleton Murry’, 18 October 1920 in O’Sullivan and Scott (eds) Letters vol. 4, 75. On 20 January 1922 Mansfield wrote, “the real cause of my illness is not my lungs at all, but something else. And if this were found and cured, all the rest would heal.” Scott (ed.) Notebooks vol. 2, 319. In aiming to improve on “The Aloe” Mansfield wrote: “The last chapter is your birth, your coming in the autumn, you in Grandmothers [sic] arms under the tree, your solemnity, your wonderful beauty, your hands, your head, your helplessness… And you must mean the world to Linda.” Scott (ed.) Notebooks vol. 2, 60. I am indebted to Claire Drewery’s discussion (33-49) of incomplete mourning as a liminal condition outside conventional social strictures. “Taking the Veil” was published in the Sketch on 22 February 1922. Kimber and O’Sullivan in Volume 2 of The Collected Fiction of Katherine Mansfield, 481-81 at 484 prints two versions of “The New Baby,” with the comment: “Mansfield made several attempts at beginning this story, as well as later paragraphs, without arriving at an apparent a sequence.” This is almost the last of Mansfield’s surviving jottings. “The New Baby” fragments appear as the penultimate entry in Mansfield’s final notebook, Newberry 3 (one of the Mansfield manuscripts held by the Newberry Library in Chicago), but Scott in her edition places it last; see Scott (ed.) Notebooks vol. 2, 345-49. An earlier occult phase in 1909-11, which included socializing with Alistair Crowley, and a theosophist community, encouraged by A.R. Orage and his mistress, Beatrice Hastings, testifies to her abiding interest in eastern spirituality and mysticism, but most records from this period have been destroyed. See Gerri Kimber in an unpublished paper, “‘A Child of the Sun’: Katherine Mansfield’s Spiritual Journey.” O’Sullivan and Scott (eds) Letters, vol. 4, 177; Webb 229; Alpers 353-54. Letters, 4. She also comments on resurrection in O’Sullivan and Scott (eds) Letters, vol. 5, 290 See also Barker, xviii. Sinclair’s views are outlined in A Defence of Idealism. Moore discusses Cosmic Anatomy but offers little analysis of its attraction for Mansfield, as O’Sullivan notes in “Signing Off: Mansfield’s Last Year” 13-27 at 14. Middleton-Murry (ed.), Journal of Katherine Mansfield, 330; October 3 1922 . Moore 137. See also Mansfield in O’Sullivan and Scott (eds) Letters, vol. 5, 294: “We were a nothingness shot with gleams of what might be.” Mansfield in Scott (ed.) Notebooks vol. 2, 204. Also cited in O’Sullivan, “Signing Off” 20. Dunning was another theosophist from New Zealand (like Lewis Wallace) with whom Murry in particular was friendly. Yet when Mansfield read Tertium Organum in December 1922, she wrote to Murry: “For some reason it didn’t carry me away” O’Sullivan and Scott (eds) Letters, vol. 5, 332. The incorrect appellation of her husband as “Daddy” appears earlier when memory intrudes as the couple walk on the deck: “But she just had time to breathe, ‘Not so fast, Daddy, please,’ when he remembered too and slowed down” (422). Mansfield in Kimber and O’Sullivan (eds.) Collected Fiction, vol.2 424. This echoes the conclusion of “Life of Ma Parker”—“There was nowhere.”—underlining Ma Parker’s placelessness and hence her inability to mourn her grandson’s death. See Drewery 39-41. The manuscript has “oh my hatred!” written at the end; see Mansfield in Scott (ed.) Notebooks vol. 2, 295. Mansfield in O’Sullivan and Scott (eds.) Letters vol. 3, 37; cited by Smith139-40. The story is usually considered as incomplete but this breaking off may have been intentional. The two-volume EUP edition of the stories publishes a fragment from an earlier draft after the ellipsis. A version of this is in Scott (ed.), Notebooks vol. 2, 294-95. In previous editions the story concludes with the unfinished sentence. Mansfield in O’Sullivan and Scott (eds.) Letters vol. 4, 170; Mansfield in Middleton-Murry (ed.) Journal of Katherine Mansfield, 237. Orage, “Talks with Katherine Mansfield,” 109-111 at 111; cited in Webb 252.
URI:	http://nectar.northampton.ac.uk/id/eprint/8035

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