China and the West

Xu, Zhimo. Manshufei'er [ID D29983]. [Katherine Mansfield].
… It was a wet evening last July. Braving the rain I walked alone through the streets of Hampstead, asking policemen and pedestrians the way to No. 10 Pond Street. On that evening I had my first, and, alas, my last encounter with Mansfield – my 'twenty immortal minutes'.
I already knew John Middleton Murry, who was the editor-in-chief of the Athenaeum, a poet and a well-known critic, and Mansfield's closest companion in the last ten years of her life.
They started living together in 1913, but she always used the 'pen name' Katherine Mansfield, which she adopted after settling in England. She was born in New Zealand. Her original name was Kathleen Beauchamp. She was one of the daughters of Sir Harold Beauchamp, chairman of the Bank of New Zealand. She had left her native land fifteen years before I met her. Together with her three sisters, she first went to England and studied at Queen's College, London University. Even as a child she was known for her good looks and intelligence. But she always had delicate health. She later lived in Germany, where she wrote her first stories, published in the collection In a German Pension. Then she spent some time in France during the war. In recent years she had spent a lot of time in Switzerland, Italy and the south of France. She had lived mostly abroad because of her poor health. She could not bear the wet foggy London weather. To be with her, Murry had to give up part of his work (this is why the Athenaeum merged with the London Nation). He followed his angel in her search for health. After the war, she had contracted tuberculosis and a doctor had given her no more than two or three years to live. So Murry's days with her were numbered. With every sunrise and every sunset, her beauty became more and more transfigured by the approach of death, and her last energies were consumed. Her fate recalls the famous words spoken by the Lady of the Camellias, as she passed the days of her critical illness in wine and pleasure: "You know I have not long to live. Therefore I will live fast!"
It is hard to conceive the helpless sorrow that the tender Murry must have felt as he watched this most beautiful of all sunsets gradually fade.
Mansfield's way of "living fast" was different from that of the Lady of the Camellias. She never indulged in wine and pleasure. Instead she devoted herself to her writing. Like the nightingale on summer nights in the elm-woods, she sang her songs of love with her heart's blood, until she could sing no more. Even then, she still considered it her duty to dedicate her remaining energy to the task of adding a little beauty to nature, of giving a little artistic consolation to this wretched world.
Her hard work produced two collections of stories: Bliss, and The Garden Party (published last year). She established herself in the British literary world with the stories in these two collections. While most fiction is mere fiction, hers is pure literature, true art. Mediocre writers crave popularity, the acclaim of the ephemeral public, but she wanted to bequeath to the world a few genuine crystals, whose glory would not be darkened by the 'dust of time'. She sought appreciation from that minority of readers who really understood her.
Because hers is pure literature, its brilliance is not shown, it is hidden deep within. It requires careful perusal to reach the essence. I had the honour of being granted by her in person the right to translate her works. Now that she is dead, I must treasure all the more this task entrusted to me, though I doubt if I can be worthy of it. My good friend Chen Tongbo, who must be better versed in European literature than anyone else in Peking, has lectured on Mansfield at Peking University, in his course on the short story. Lately he, too, has promised to do some translations of her work, and for this I will be deeply grateful to him. I hope that one day he will find time to say something further on her art as a short story writer.
Now let me tell you about the night I met Mansfield. A few days before, I had a discussion on English and French literature with Mum at the noisy ABC cafe behind Charing Cross. In passing I mentioned the Chinese literary renaissance of recent years. I told him that Chinese novelists had mosty been influenced by Russian writers. He almost jumped for joy on hearing that, since both he and his wife worshipped the Russians. He had made a study of Dostoievsky and written a book entided Dostoievsky: A Critical Study. As for Mansfield, her preference was for Chekhov. It was a source of constant regret to them that Russian literature had been so little noticed by the English. They believed that this neglect had enabled Victorian philistinism to exercise an influence over the content and form of fiction right up to the present day. Then I inquired how Mansfield was. He said that she was quite all right for the moment, and that he had been able to bring her back to London for two weeks. He gave me their address and asked me to meet her and their friends the next Thursday evening.
So I would see Mansfield. I was the luckiest of men. The following Wednesday I visited H. G. Wells at his country house in Easton Glebe and returned to London with his wife the next day. It was raining hard that day. I remember being soaked to the skin by the time I arrived home.
It was hard to find their house. (I always have great trouble finding my way in London. I really hate this labyrinthine city.) Finally I reached the place, a small two-storey house. Murry opened the door. I felt a bit awkward, standing there, holding an umbrella and several Chinese scrolls, paintings and examples of calligraphy that had just been returned to me by a friend of mine. I entered the house, took off my raincoat, and was led into a room on the right. Until then I had had a holy reverence for Mansfield as a famous young woman writer. I had never expected to find in her a creature of 'beauty and grace'. I had presumed her to be a literary woman in the style of Rose Macaulay, Virginia Woolf, Roma Wilson, Mrs Lucas and Vanessa Bell. Male writers and artists have always had a reputation for eccentricity…
Although I never expected Mansfield to be futuristic, I had certainly never imagined her as an ideal of femininity. So when I pushed the door open, I was almost expecting a middle-aged, kindly woman to stand up from the sofa in front of the fireplace, greet me with a smile, and shake me by the hand.
But as it turned out, the room —a long narrow one, with a fireplace opposite the door—contained not a single soul. A lamp cast a calm, pale yellow light. Paintings hung on the walls, and ornaments stood on the mantelpiece, in a variety of colours. A few easy chairs with patterned covers were placed before the fire. Murry told me to sit down in one of the chairs and started chatting with me. We talked about the similarities between the oriental Goddess of Mercy, Guan Yin, the Blessed Virgin Mary in Christianity, the Greek Virgin Diana, the Egyptian Isis and the Virgin in Persian Mithraism. The virginal saint seemed an indispensable symbol in every religion. We were in the midst of a heated discussion when there was a sound at the door. A young lady came in and stood smilingly in the entrance. 'Could this be Mansfield? She is so young . . . ' I said to myself. She had brown curly hair and a small rounded face, lively eyes and an expressive mouth. She was dressed in bright colours; patent leather shoes, green silk stockings, a rose-coloured silk blouse and a plum-coloured velvet skirt. She stood there gracefully, like a tulip nodding in the breeze. Murry stood up and introduced us. She was not Mansfield, but the landlady, a Miss Beir or Beek (I forget exactly). Murry was living there temporarily. She was an artist, and most of the paintings on the walls were her work. She sat down in the chair opposite me, taking something like a miniature motor from the mantelpiece and holding it in her hand. Then she put on a pair of earphones like the ones used by telephonists, and when she talked, she leaned over and tried to get very close to me. At first I thought what she had on was some sort of electronic toy. But later I realised that this pretty lady had trouble in hearing (as I had in seeing), and had to use some mechanical means to make good nature's deficiency. (At the time I thought what a good subject it would be for a poem 'The Deaf Beauty'. It would be impossible to 'whisper sweet nothings' to such a lady!).
She had just sat down when the door bell rang loudly; it seemed to me to be unusually loud. The man who came in was Sydney Waterlow, whom I had met at Mr Roger Fry's. He was a very humorous individual. Once, to amuse us, he took out from his huge pocket half a dozen pipes in different sizes and colours. As soon as he came in, he asked Murry how Katherine was that day. I was all ears to hear his answer: 'She is not coming downstairs tonight. It's been such terrible weather today. None of us can stand it'. Mr Waterlow asked him if he could go upstairs to see her, and Murry agreed. Then he politely excused himself to Miss B, and stood up. He was about to leave the room when Murry went over to him and said in a low voice: 'Sydney, don't talk too much!'
Light footsteps were heard from upstairs. W was already in Katherine's room. Presently two more guests came, a short one, a Mr M, who had just come back from a journey to Greece, and a tall handsome gentleman called Sullivan, who wrote the science column in the London Nation and Athenaeum. M told us about his trip to Greece, reciting all the names of ancient Greek sites such as Parnassus and Mycenae. S also inquired about Katherine. Murry told him she was not coming downstairs and that W was at that moment upstairs with her. Half an hour later, the heavy footsteps of W were heard coming down the stairs. S asked him if Katherine was tired. 'No', he replied, 'she doesn't seem to be. But I can't tell. I was afraid of wearing her out, so I left her.' After a while, S also received permission to go upstairs from Murry, who gave him the same warning not to tire her. Murry then asked me about Chinese painting and calligraphy. I used the scrolls I had brought to give him a brief introduction to Chinese calligraphy. That evening I had with me a painting by Zhao Zhiqian, called 'Plums in Cursive Script', a piece of cursive script by Wang Juesi, and a piece of running script by Liang Shanzou. I opened them and displayed them all. Miss B sat close to me with her hearing-aid in her hand, and seemed to be enjoying what I was saying.
But I was feeling profoundly disappointed. I had braved the rain to see the author of Bliss only to find her unable to come downstairs and receive her friends. The way W, S and Murry treated her made her seem all the more precious; it only increased my curiosity. I thought myself exceptionally unlucky. There she was, confined to her own room, into which it seemed that only old friends were allowed. I was a foreigner and a stranger, and it would be impossible for me to gain access. It was now half past ten, and with some reluctance I stood up and said my goodbyes. Murry saw me to the door. As he helped me on with my raincoat, I said how very sorry I was that Miss Mansfield had not been able to come downstairs, and how very pleased I would have been to see her. To my surprise, Murry responded by saying with great earnestness: 'If you wish to, you may go upstairs and see her'. I was overjoyed, took off my raincoat immediately and followed him step by step up the stairs.
Once upstairs, we knocked at the door, and went into the room. I was introduced, and S took his leave, going out of the room with Murry, and closing the door behind him. Mansfield told me to sit down, which I did, and then she sat down too. This long complicated procedure seemed to happen in an instant. In fact I was not even consciously aware of it taking place. I am just presuming now, in retrospect, that we must have gone through all these motions. Everything seemed so blurred to me at the time. And now when I recall it in my memory, it still seems blurred. Whenever we enter a brightly-lit house from a dark street, or when we leave a dim house and walk into the brilliant sunshine, we feel dizzy with the sudden brightness. We have to stand still for a while before we can see what is in front of us. Our senses are overwhelmed by excessive light. It is not only excessive light; strong colours too have the effect of 'overwhelming' our senses. That evening my senses may not have been overwhelmed by the brilliance of Mansfield's personality, but the lighting in her room and the strikingly bright colours of her jewellery and the clothes she was wearing confused my unprepared senses for an instant. It was perhaps understandable.
I do not have a particularly clear impression of her room. While she was talking to me, I was unable to detach myself and scrutinise my surroundings. All I remember is that the room was rather small. A large bed occupied most of it. Several oil-paintings hung on the papered walls, probably again the work of the landlady. She sat with me on the couch, against the wall to the left of the bed. Because she was sitting upright and I was reclining, she seemed to be much taller than I was (indeed, who would not seem small in her presence?). I suspect that the two lamp-shades were red. Otherwise why should I always associate her room with the image of 'red candles burning on high'? But the setting was in the end unimportant. What mattered was Mansfield herself and that 'purest aesthetic feeling' that she inspired in me. She enabled me to use the magic key to Paradise given me by God; she added new treasure to my soul. But even such high-flown language as this is inadequate to describe her as she was on that night! It is difficult enough to describe my own impressions of her that day, let alone to conjure up in words the very essence of her personality…
She was dressed in a similar fashion to her friend Miss B. She too had on a pair of shiny patent leather shoes and bright green stockings. She wore a burgundy velvet skirt and a pale yellow silk blouse, with elbow-length sleeves, and a string of fine pearls around her bare neck. She had black hair, cut short like Miss B's. But the way her hair was combed was something I had never before seen in Europe or America. I suspected that she was intentionally imitating the Chinese style, for her hair was pitch black and straight and cut in a neat fringe at the front. It was extraordinarily well combed. Though I could not hope to do it justice in words, I felt that hers was the most beautiful hair I had ever seen.
As for her features, I would never be able to describe a thousandth part of their crystalline beauty. Before her you felt yourself in the presence of one of nature's masterpieces: an alpine lake bathed in autumnal moonlight; a sunset swathed in roseate clouds; or a clear, star-studded night sky of the southern seas. Or she was like a masterpiece of art: one of Beethoven's symphonies, or Wagner's operas, or a sculpture by Michelangelo, or a painting by Whistler or Corot. There is something about such beauty that is complete, pure, perfect, irreducible, ineffable. It is as if you have been granted a direct insight into the creator’s will, a most intense experience, bringing with it a feeling of infinite joy. It cleanses the soul to be in the presence of a truly great personality. Mansfield's features seemed to me like the purest Indian jade, her gaze alive with spiritual revelation, her manner gentle as a spring breeze. She gave me a sense of what I can only call total beauty. She was like crystal. You could not but marvel at the flawless purity of her spirit. The brightly coloured clothes she was wearing might have aroused some trifling criticism had they been worn by someone else. But on her it looked so becoming, like green leaves, the peony's indispensable complement. H. M. Tomlinson, a good friend of hers, once compared her transcendent beauty to that of the pristine snow on the Alps. I think it a wonderful comparison.
He said : "She has been called a beautiful woman. That is hardly the word. Beauty, as we commonly understand it, is attractive. Katherine Mansfield's beauty was attractive, but it was also unearthly and a little chilling, like the remoteness of Alpine snow. The sun is on it, and it is lovely in a world of its own, but that world is not ours. Her pallor was of ivory and there was something of exquisite Chinese refinement in the delicacy of her features, her broad face, her dark eyes, the straight thick fringe, and her air of quiet solicitude. And her figure was so fragile that a man beside her felt his own sound breathing to be too evident and coarse for proximity to the still light of that wax taper, a pale star sacramental to what was unknown."
He went on to write of her penetrating gaze, the way her eyes pierced to the very depths of your soul and brought up into the light every secret hidden within it. There was something uncanny about her, something supernatural. When she looked at you, Tomlinson wrote, what she saw of you was not your outward appearance, but your innermost heart. But she did not wish to pry, she was not inquisitive, merely sympathetic. With her you felt no need for caution. She knew everything about you without having to be told. And when you told her your story she would not be surprised. She would offer neither blame nor praise, nor would she urge you on to any particular course of action. She would never-offer any practical advice. She would just listen, quietly, and then offer her thoughts, which contained a wisdom that transcended conventional morality.
These impressions of Tomlinson's were those of a man who had had the benefit of a long friendship with her. In my twenty minutes I could not reach such an understanding. But from the spiritual light that emanated from her eyes, I venture to say that the truth of his words is beyond doubt.
That night, as we sat together on the blue velvet couch, a soft light quietly enveloped her. As if in a hypnotic trance, I stared into her mystical eyes, letting her sword-like gaze penetrate my being, while the music of her voice washed over me and flooded into the depths of my soul. Whatever consciousness I had left resembled Keats's:
My heart aches, and a drowsy
numbness pains My sense, as
though of hemlock I had drunk . . .
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thy happiness...
Her voice was another miracle. Notes rippled from her fragile vocal cords one after the other, revealing to my common ears a world of wonders, bright stars appearing one by one in a sapphire sky. It was like listening to music which you known you have never heard before, and which yet seems familiar, perhaps from a dream, or from a previous life. Her voice was pleasing to the ear. It seemed to reach directly to the depths of your soul, soothing its hidden pain, kindling half-dead hopes, washing away stultifying worldly cares, and revitalising your spirits. It was as if she were murmuring into the ear of your soul, communicating some news from a fairy land that you had never dreamt of. When I recall it now, I still feel a tragic sense of grief. Tears almost come to my eyes. She is gone. Her voice and her smile have vanished like a mirage…

Mansfield : an elegy.
Last night in my dream I entered a dark vale
And heard cuckoos crying tears of blood amid lilies.
Last night I dreamed I ascended a mountain peak
And saw a gleaming tear falling from the sky.
In the suburbs of ancient Rome, there is a grave ;
In it lies a poet who died on a voyage.
A century later, the wheels of Hades' chariot
Rumbled in the grove of Fontainebleau.
If the universe is a machine,
Why do ideals shine before our eyes like lamps ?
If all things manifest truth, goodness, and beauty,
Why doesn't the rainbow stay in the sky ?
Although you and I met only once,
Those twenty minutes are immortal.
Who could believe your heavenly presence
Is forever gone from this dewy world ?
No ! Life is but a dream of substance ;
The fair soul is forever in the Lord's keeping.
A thirty-year sojourn is like a night-blooming cereus ;
Though tears I see you return to the Celestial Palace.
Do you remember our London pledge, Mansfield,
That this summer we'd meet by Lake Geneva ?
The lake always holds the reflection of snow-capped Mont Blanc –
When I look at the clouds, my tears fall.
That year, when I first came to understand the message of life,
I was struck, as if in a dream, by the solemnity of love.
Compassion is an unbreakable crystal ;
Love the only path to realizing life.
Death is a grand, mysterious crucible
That forges the spirits of us all.
How can my condolences fly like electric sparks
To touch your soul in the distant sky ?
I send you my tears with the wind –
When can I shatter the gate between life and death ?
March 11, 1923