Writer Bill Direen presented the following paper at a conference on Katherine Mansfield in Menton, France earlier this year.

Alfred Orage was Katherine Mansfield’s principal mentor in the craft of writing. When they first met, as early as 1910, Orage had been editing The New Age for three years, and with his help she rented a 2-roomed flat in Chelsea. Orage and the writer Beatrice Hastings had to be “cruel to be kind” to Mansfield, but she responded well to their harsh treatment. Orage’s influence endured right up to the time of her death.

In 1914, Orage met the Russian mystic P. D. Ouspenski, who was to have a big influence on both Orage’s and Mansfield’s philosophies of art and life; at the same time, the translation of Russian authors into English was in full swing. John Middleton Murry and Samuel Solomonovich Koteliansky were working on Chekhov’s The Bet & Other Stories (1915), Murry would publish an introduction to Dostoevski in 1916, Koteliansky worked with Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Murry, Gilbert Cannan and Mansfield herself to collaborate on and perfect his translations of Russian authors. The race was on for publication. Constance Garnett would “pip” Koteliansky and Mansfield’s translation of Chekhov’s letters “at the post” in 1920 — a big disappointment to both ‘Kot’ and to Mansfield. Katherine Mansfield was reading Russian literature, and even dreaming of it, from 1907 to 1922.

Russian literature was written in medieval Slavic the ecclesiastical tongue for a long time, (much as Thomas More wrote Utopia in Latin), but with Pushkin came great literature in Russian, from which a folk and ecclesiastical iconology was inseparable. The Bible wasn’t translated into Russian from Slavic until the 19th century and then it was mainly the New Testament, extracts from which Dostoevski cleverly worked into his novels (Stavrogin’s Confession in The Possessed, Raskolnikov’s transformation in Crime and Punishment to give only two examples). The Good Thief (along with Mary Magdalene) represent the highest form of saintliness through repentance. They are cited in the most important prayers of Orthodox liturgy and their examples of humility and transformation can be felt in story after story from Pushkin to Chekhov. Dostoevski investigates the idea of the good criminal in works beginning in the 1840s with “An Honest Thief’. Crime and Punishment’s Raskolnikov can be seen as a variant, and Father Zossima’s visitor in The Brothers Karamazov repents and is transformed, or is transformed and repents — Katherine Mansfield dreamed of Fr Zossima on February 13th, 1916. And in the dream he says “Do not let the new man die” .

Shortly before her death in 1923 Katherine Mansfield told Alfred Orage that she now believed the role of a writer is to communicate an attitude to the reader: “An artist communicates not his vision of the world, but the attitude which results in his [sic] vision; not his dream, but his dream-state; and as his attitude is passive, negative, or indifferent, so he reinforces in his readers the corresponding state of mind.” She called her previous attitude “a little mischievous”, calling her ‘slices of life’ “partial” and even “misleading”. According to Orage she said “my attitude … stood in need of a change if it was to become active instead of passive.” She had been a “selective camera without a creative principle”. Her aim was to widen the scope of her camera and to employ it – actively – for a conscious purpose, “that of representing life not only as it appears to a certain attitude, but as it appears to another, a different attitude, a creative attitude.”

Orage, using a Christian symbolism present in her work (as in the poem, To God the Father ) and quite inescapable in 19th century Russian literature, suggests such a change of attitude is a bit like coming down from a cross, “a cross of amused suffering”. K.M. agrees with him, but she is perhaps afraid of censure from Orage, since she asks “Do you think it is very presumptuous of me”.

Orage, it is true, once censured her changeable nature. On May 16th, 1912, in The New Age, writing under the pseudonym of R. H. Congreve, he (& perhaps the formidable Beatrice Hastings had a hand in it), had written of Mrs Marcia Foisacre’s transformational powers to a certain Tremayne (presumably meant to represent Murry), who had condescended to undertake her “serious education”. “With you (Tremayne) she assumes the mask of satire. She probably discovered quite early in your acquaintance that satire amused you and produced in you a flattering estimate of herself. What more natural, then, than that she should wear satire in your company and forswear sentimentality? But I dare guess that in other circles she forswears satire with as much conviction.” Later Congreve unkindly suggests that Tremayne will have with her nothing more exhilarating than “a rough and tumble with Proteus.”

But she had been through a lot in the interim. In 1922, Katherine Mansfield was desperate for a new approach. As Orage notes, she couldn’t read her early work without feeling “self-contempt”; and on October 26th she wrote, “What I write seems so petty. In fact, I can’t express myself in writing just now. The old mechanism isn’t mine any longer, and I can’t control the new.”

The old mechanism, which had served her well, involved the accumulation of striking descriptive-narrative details, generating a kind of hypertension, an at times claustrophobic atmosphere that achieved epiphany and revelation by means of various genial resolution-devices. William New makes the observation that the shift from “specific documentary facts to subjective approximations” cause the reader’s sympathy to shift, so that “her [Mansfield’s] domain is the Chekhovian moment of truth, the Joycean revelation”.

And so, the moment of revelation and transformation, of epiphany, was not just a useful literary device, nor an intellectual game, its arrival at the decisive moment of her stories frees them (and perhaps Mansfield) from accumulating feelings of disgust and what Orage calls resentment which may be felt in the impecunious situations, impossible loves and desperate loneliness of her characters. Furthermore, I’d suggest that this structural approach to narration may have been limiting her to the short story form.

In 1916 she wrote “…if I do go back [to England] with a book finished, it will be a profession de foi pour toujours. Why [emphasised] do I hesitate so long?” She answers this by setting a table in her room and deciding to knuckle down to the task, but perhaps she answered this question differently five years later, when, to break free from her old attitude she stopped writing her appealing and highly readable stories. In fact, Orage relates how she tore up the beginnings of a few stories before his eyes. To develop a new attitude and to communicate it to her readers she needed to transform herself. Gurdjieff’s Prieuré must have seemed the right place for this to occur. Gurdjieff had bought a former Carmelite priory for himself and his followers to develop themselves, and with the hope that their researches would eventually help humanity to develop.

The Wise men from the east had arrived. Mansfield had attended the lectures of Ouspenski and met him, and she had been recommended to the Greek-Armenian Russian Gurdjieff, who was pursuing an idea of the collective – members had moved across a Western Russia in full revolution, Essentuki, Tuapse, Dresden, Berlin, Paris. They were, in a sense, ambassadors of the world of K.M.’s beloved Chekhov, and of Floryan Sobienowski who had introduced her to Russian literature and to Chekhov. Ouspenski and Gurdjieff embodied Eastern Europe and Russia and things further East. With Orage they embodied, in a sense, Turgenyev, the superfluous man with whom K.M. was compared by the publishers of In A German Pension, they embodied (Murry’s and) Koteliansky’s Dostoevski and Mansfield’s and Koteliansky’s Gorky. She was reading Chekhov on Jan 20Th 1922 , so the same year — and in NB 20, she reveals “I can truly say I think of WJD [Walter de la Mare], Tchekhov, Koteliansky, HMT [Henry Major Tomlinson] and Orage every day. They are a part of my life.” ) If the Russia of Koteliansky himself had arrived, so had the Eastern Europe of Orage’s Nietzsche and the farther East of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. So too the farther east of Orage’s Mahabarhata (lines from which are inscribed on his tomb), of Ouspenski’s seeking and that of the theosophist researchers. As for the idea of a collective, could the Prieuré have been an expression of Nietzsche’s vitalistic utopia? Might it not have had a hint, for Mansfield (and for Murry), a hint of the utopian fantasy of Rananim, though Murry described Rananim as “probably of the same order of seriousness as Coleridge’s pantisocratic colony on the Susquehanna” . And in a sense the spirit (if not the exceptional person) of Beatrice Hastings had arrived in the form of Orage (her former partner). Hastings was, incidentally, a friend of Annie Besant, social reformer and theosophist. It was Hastings who had, years before, with Orage’s approval, been the first to publicly warn K.M. about her tendency for “lachrymose sentimentality” and, as mentioned, she was probably in cahoots with Orage in the satirical articles about Mrs Marcia Foisacre – but these admonitions regarding style can only have been beneficial for K.M.’s development and sense of self-censorship. We know that K.M. wrote to Orage on 9th Feb, 1921 (from Villa Isola Bella in Menton to thank him for his “unfailing kindness” to her, “for all you let me learn from you” . She says (in the same letter she apologises for her style, saying it “sounds as if it was written with a screwdriver”), “you taught me to write, you taught me to think; you showed me what there was to be done and what not to do”; and again “how often in writing , I remember my master”. Pound pays credit to Orage in Canto 98 and George Bernard Shaw called Orage the greatest editor of the twentieth century. This letter suggests that Orage was her principal mentor in the craft of writing.

As for intellectual descent from the “cross of amused suffering” by simply willing it, in 1911, Orage may have believed it possible—in his book on Nietzsche, concerning Nietzsche’s new Europe he says as much — but in 1922, he was more under the influence of Ouspenski and Gurdjief, and Gurdjieff for one did not believe that the will was sufficient. He believed that one must work the body, that moral and spiritual perfection will be hindered by a body that is not prepared. His exercises and dances were based upon a theory of breathing, and she could hardly breathe. Yet he admitted “his friend” (that’s how he described Katherine Mansfield just before his death) into the colony, as an exception.

Ouspenski relates a conversation, just before he speaks of the Château Prieuré in In Search of the Miraculous , in which one of his followers asks Gurdjieff specifically about the “robber on the cross” who underwent his transformation (causing Christ to say that he would go before Him into paradise). And Gurdjieff replies, and I quote him in full:

In the first place it took place on the cross, that is, in the midst of terrible sufferings to which ordinary life holds nothing equal; secondly, it was at the moment of death. This refers to the idea of man’s last thoughts and feelings at the moment of death. In life these pass by, they are replaced by other habitual thoughts. There can be no prolonged wave of emotion in life and therefore it cannot give rise to a change of being.

Perhaps every true artist at the stage of true creativity is at that point, that “moment of death”. If so, Katherine Mansfield was there doubly, as artist and as one of the soon-to-die. And so, it can’t have been without a certain sense of futility mixed with hope for a miracle cure, that Olgivanna Hinzenburg, who looked after Mansfield a little, listened to her talk of writing “a wonderful book”. And how much more so for Orage, who loved Mansfield, when she spoke not only of writing “a novel or two”, but of the end of her “passive, selective, and resentful attitude” and the birth of a new attitude, life-affirming, full of admiration, determination and laughter (“the laugh will be with the heroes”, she said), where “every power of the artist might be brought into play” .

We can conclude that, in November and December of 1922, Katherine Mansfield had rejected the methodology of influential nineteenth century Russian literature, and under the watchful eye of Orage, was maturing a new attitude, connected to work method, (she spoke of steady work habits), to a new approach to subject matter (no more “petty” stories), to the scale of a work, its power, its humour and “comic” aspects (“the laugh will be with the heroes”), and (if we accept that “Chekhovian” narrative form was limiting her to a certain story form) a new structural approach that would have allowed the development of new and perhaps longer works.