Kathryn Mansfield
A guest contribution by Chris Quartermaine
Let me start by confessing. I am a dowser, which doesn’t mean I look for water underground, rather it means that I can ask questions which can be answered by the spin of a pendulum rather than looking things up on Google.
Now one day, I got this strange feeling that I was supposed to be writing for someone. So, I did a bit of dowsing, and came up with the name of an early 20th century short story writer that I had vaguely heard of.
I discovered that she had been born in New Zealand in 1888 but was sent to school in England at age 15. After a tour of Germany and Belgium, she returned to NZ to start writing, however she quickly became bored of provincial life and returned to England at age 19. There followed a whirlwind of female and male romances, involvement in the Bloomsbury group with the likes of DH Lawrence and Virgina Woolf and a marriage which she left the same evening.
She eventually settled down to a tumultuous relationship with John Murry, editor of a magazine she was writing for. She was profoundly affected by the death of her brother in Belgium during WW1, and in 1917 contracted tuberculosis. At that time, this was not treatable, so she threw herself into her writing and this was her most productive period.
She travelled to Switzerland and then to France in search of cures, eventually finishing up at the institute of the famous Russian mystic George Gurdjieff in Paris, where she died in 1923.
Having followed Gurdjieff’s writings in my youth, I thought this was quite serendipitous, but that was nothing to later on, when discussing with my cousin my connection with Kathryn Mansfield, I discovered that my mother’s mother had known her in her Bloomsbury days.
Kathryn wrote many short stories, many of them about life in New Zealand including a rather eerie one called ‘The Woman at the Store’. She also wrote many poems, some of which scanned and rhymed sufficiently for me to put to music.
I have now written a children’s story and several songs inspired by her. In particular I was inspired by her quote “That is the satisfaction of writing, one can impersonate so many people”. However, my favourite song is one about her life, named Kass after her childhood nickname:
Kass
I am but a spirit, waiting to be free
I am but a soul on the path to become me
I am just the essence of what I can become
I am Kass and Kass is but a part of the whole sum (of me)
My life was but a fleeting glimpse of tragedy and pain
My life was such a joy to live I’d love to live again
My life was just a brazen piece of living for its time
My life was sweet, but short, for I was cut down in my prime.
I was but an author playing on this stage
Stories within me would blossom on the page
Here are my final words, my lasting epitaph
“To be alive and to be a writer is enough”
O come with me dear reader still and dwell upon this scene
O come with me and find that Kass is yet as evergreen
For as my life came short and swift, as blossom on the tree
So my soul is radiant yet, and so will ever be
Chris Quartermaine
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