Yet seven years after Katherine’s death, Virginia admitted she still dreamed of Katherine, who had a quality she “adored and needed,” so in a sense she loved her too. This afternoon the thought of Katherine trying to be “right” in London made me get all clutchy, and Dick, that isn’t alclass="underline"
No matter where you go, someone else has been before.
Because like me, Katherine Mansfield fell in love with Dick.
On page 85 of “Je Ne Parle Pas Français,” she writes:
“It was impossible not to notice Dick. What a catch! He was the only Englishman present (italics mine), reserved and serious, making a special study of literature and instead of circulating gracefully round the room he stayed in one place leaning against the wall, that dreamy half smile on his lips and replying in his low soft voice to anybody who spoke to him.”
But unlike you, this Dick had no “previous engagements.” Straight off, he invited Katherine out to dinner. And they spent the night at his hotel,
“Talking—but not only of literature. I discovered to my relief that it wasn’t necessary to keep to the tendency of the modern novel… Now and again, as if by accident, I threw in a card that seemed to have nothing to do with the game, just to see how he’d take it. But each time he gathered it into his hands with his dreamy look (my emphasis) and smile unchanged. Perhaps he murmured: ‘That’s curious.’ But not as if it were curious at all.”
Dick was Katherine’s perfect schizophrenic listener. As Géza Róheim wrote, Dick was dreamily empathic because “a lack of ego boundaries makes it impossible for him to set limits to the process of identification.” And Katherine flipped:
“Dick’s calm acceptance went to my head at last. It fascinated me. It led me on and on ’til I threw every card I possessed at him and sat back and watched him arrange them in his hand.”
By that time both of them were very drunk. Dick didn’t judge. He just said, “Very interesting.” And she was overwhelmed,
“…quite breathless at the thought of what I’d done. I had shown somebody both sides of my life. Told him everything as sincerely and truthfully as I could. Taken immense pains to explain things about my submerged life that really were disgusting and never could possibly see the light of day.”
Have we talked enough about the schizophrenic phenomena of coincidence?
Last week at school Pam Strugar wondered why the brilliant girls all die. Both Katherine Mansfield and the philosopher Simone Weil lived lives of passionate intensity. Both died alone of tubercular starvation in rooms attached to flakey “institutes,” dreaming in their notebooks about childhood happiness and comfort at the age of 34.
It moved me so that tears came into my eyes.
For weeks they had been talking about Butterfly Creek. “Let’s go to But-ter-fly Creek!” Eric Johnson intoned, mimicking the plummy baritone of his father, the Reverend Cyril Johnson.
All January long there’d been record heat in Wellington. Miraculously still and cloudless days, sunlight glinting off the cars on Taranaki Street. That January all the offices shut down at 3 p.m. Clerks and typists mobbed the sandy crescent beach at Oriental Bay.
High up on The Terrace overlooking Willis Street, even the fieldstone stucco’d walls and lead-glass windows of the Vicarage gave no protection from the heat. But the Vicar and his wife, Vita-Fleur, who’d emigrated here from England after Cyril’d finished university and seminary school, were prepared for this colonial eventuality. All summer long Vita-Fleur made ginger-beer for her children. The recipe’d been handed down by her mother, an Anglican missionary’s wife who’d spent 16 hellish years in Barbados. Five great stone jugs of ginger-beer sat outside the kitchen-garden on The Terrace: enough to last at least that many New Zealand summers. Mother to Laura, Eric, Josephine and Isabel, Vita-Fleur was a large, conservatively-dressed, pigeon-breasted woman who’d married well. No more trundling round the globe to dark-skinned colonies. Cyril was acerbic, brilliant and everybody knew that he’d eventually be made a bishop. And Vita-Fleur’s mission was to set a good example of wifely domesticity at St. Stephen’s, the largest Anglican church in Wellington. Wellington is the capital of New Zealand. New Zealand is the cultural center of the whole Pacific Rim. Therefore, Vita-Fleur was a a role model to at least one third of the world.
(All rise, hats off, for the singing of the National Anthem at the 8 p.m. show on Saturday night at the Paramount on Courtney Place. Jaffas rolling down the aisles… Because the Paramount shows “popular” films, the audience is often mixed with Maoris…)
It was 2 p.m. that January Sunday afternoon at the Vicarage and the dinner plates had just been cleared away. Eric Johnson and Constance Green sat on the floor beside the window seat in the living room playing records. Both were in their teens. They had an ongoing debate about the merits of English folk-rock versus American rock & roll. Eric played Lydia Pence and Fairport Convention; Constance countered with Janis Joplin and Frank Zappa. Every 15 minutes the grownups (Cyril, Vita-Fleur and Constance’s parents, Louise and Jaspar Green) hollered from the bloated depth of armchairs to “TURN THE RECORD DOWN!” Eric’s sisters were reading Elle and English Vogue in their rooms upstairs, and Carla, Constance’s little sister, was outside playing in the garden. Dull-dull-dull. But for Eric and Constance, the promise of this summer afternoon was still not killed.
The Greens had only just arrived in New Zealand in December, emigrating from a Connecticut suburb about 20 miles northeast of Westport/Greenwich, Episcopal nirvana. The Johnson’s knowledge of geography did not extend to all the differences contained within the twenty miles between Bridgeport and Old Greenwich. Jaspar and Louise, both Anglophiles, were both still thrilled with their move to Wellington, which compared to Bridgeport was an epicenter of English-speaking culture. Meanwhile Eric and Constance circled round each other like two strange animals. Neither had met anyone like the other before.
That summer, Eric was permanently “home” from Wanganui Boy’s Collegiate. He’d been expelled. After putting up with six years of torture—beatings from school prefects, classmates, even younger boys; being picked last for every team; weeping in the toilets, the School decided Eric “lacked character.” That is, he wasn’t using queerness as a means of negotiating power in Wanganui Boy’s Collegiate hierarchy. He was a full-time queer. The very sight of him—blonde tousled hair, gray shirt tails, pale and thin as a pre-Raphaelite Ophelia—became disruptive to the school. “Sent down” (from Wanganui back to Wellington, New Zealand) at 17, Eric wanted to go straight to university. His parents refused. He was socially “not ready.” They insisted he attend the new, optional seventh-form, created for future math and science majors. Eric rebelled. In desperation, Cyril agreed to let Eric choose from any school in Wellington.