‘Nearer than anyone else’: Katherine Mansfield, D.H. Lawrence, and the ‘Modern’ Short Story.

Steven Matthews, Annual Birthday Lecture Number 9, November 2018

Steven Matthews, continuing the now well-established tradition of annual Birthday Lectures, explored Katherine Mansfield’s complex, and in many ways intriguing, relationship with D.H. Lawrence. Focussed initially through the image of the wedding ring given to Mansfield by Frida Lawrence, and developed through the imaginative significance for both Mansfield and Lawrence of rings in their fiction – Lawrence’s early draft of what was later to become The Rainbow and Women in Love was called ‘The Wedding Ring’ – Matthews reflected on the intimate link between the two couples, noting that Mansfield ‘kept Frida’s first wedding ring safe, wore it across her life, and was buried with it on’. Its significance was clearly greater than the bourgeois respectability it gave to her relationship with Murry, particularly given that it was this binding element of convention which both Mansfield and Lawrence resisted: ‘a shared centre for their writing…was a questioning as to what a true loving relationship and marriage might be’. In this regard Matthews’ choice of image for his lecture was striking: in the Lawrences’ wedding photograph we could see Murray, volume tucked under his arm, expressing a bookishness at odds with the virile and energetic masculinity proposed by Lawrence, that powerful connection to the life force so celebrated by Mansfield herself. It is perhaps not surprising that she declared herself ‘nearer’ to Lawrence than anyone else.

And yet Murry was the man Katherine had chosen as her companion, an influential part in those tensions that would resurface again and again between the couples. There was also Mansfield’s own difficulty in reconciling herself to Lawrence’s attitude to sex and relationships, and of his 1920 novel The Lost Girl, she lamented that ‘his hero and heroine are not human. They are animals on the prowl’. But opening up to us their letters and conversation, Matthews skilfully revealed aspects of their shared vision, and showed how the two writers enjoyed a bond ‘best emblematized through their exchanges around books each thought the other would like, and also through their exchange of particular gifts’. He explored the parallels and tensions between them, the energy of the creative impulses which bound them in spite of differences of opinion, each striving for ‘a way to unlock the human possibility…in a world and time…[that] worked against that possibility’.

And when Mansfield died, she left Lawrence the distinctive yellow fluorspar bowl which he had given her some years before - it had intrigued him with its vibrant colour dug deep out of the underground world of the Derbyshire mines, a world so familiar to him from his childhood. Matthews’ photograph of the bowl made concrete Lawrence’s own description of its source as a ‘golden underworld, with rivers and clearings’, expressing for him perhaps something of Mansfield’s definitive sensitivity to nuance, and the subconscious. Matthews mapped the intricate journey to this moment, showing how what she called ‘the little golden bowl’, with its Jamesian innuendo, might be seen to represent the luminous but hidden undercurrent which developed between Mansfield and Lawrence, ‘co-workers in an ambition to re-create story-telling as something flexible, pliable, undefinable’, alive to the pulse of life as it is lived. Expressed ultimately in the powerful symbol of shimmering bowl or binding ring, theirs was ‘a molton secret shared ambition’. No one came closer to its secret meaning than they themselves.

Lesley Sharpe