There has been considerable discussion about the use of the nickname ‘Kathy’ by Christopher Isherwood’s long-time close friend, W. H. Auden. In Auden’s poem ‘Here on the cropped grass of the narrow ridge I stand’, he includes the lines: ‘And Kathy in her journal, “To be rooted in life / That’s what I want.”’ Gerri Kimber brought the poem to our attention when she arranged to have it reprinted in 2012 in the fourth volume of Katherine Mansfield Studies. Susan Reid’s ‘A Note on Auden’s “Kathy”’ appears in the same volume and beautifully draws out interesting parallels between Mansfield and Auden in both their writing and their lives.

Yet it was actually Isherwood who introduced Auden to that nickname, many years before Auden’s poem appeared in 1936. Auden had been collaborating with Isherwood in writing and producing several verse plays, most recently The Dog Beneath the Skin, which was first performed on 30 January 1936 at the Westminster Theatre. It is conceivable that their current close association might have reawakened Auden’s memory of Isherwood’s adolescent literary game-playing: Brian Finney, Isherwood’s biographer, mentions that Isherwood and Edward Upward, his closest friend at Repton Public School, enjoyed dividing literary figures into enemies and allies and referring to them with nicknames. They had been influenced by Robert Nichols, a well-known poet of the Great War, who liked to refer to writers that way, such as using ‘Wordy’ for Wordsworth.

Later, when Isherwood and Upward were students at Cambridge in 1923, they added to their ‘allies’ (which had included Wilfred Owen and Baudelaire) both Katherine Mansfield and Emily Brontë, whom they now called ‘Kathy’ and ‘Emmy’. Finney calls it ‘a strange amalgam, united possibly by their cult of strangeness and their early deaths’. Without delving too deeply into Freudian territory, I might mention that there could also be an oedipal element in Isherwood’s attraction to the name ‘Kathy’. His mother’s name was Kathleen and he had a very complicated relationship with her, especially after his father died in battle in 1915 (the same year that Mansfield lost her brother).

* * *

Ironically, in writing about Isherwood’s responses to Mansfield, I am also making a personal return. I find myself reminiscing about the very beginning of my academic career and how I once spent a day with Christopher Isherwood.

On 13 April 2017, an article appeared in the Los Angeles Times intriguingly titled: ‘Is It Time to Rediscover Conrad Aiken?’ The coincidence of its publication while I was in the midst of writing this essay was startling, not only because of its timing, but because its title corresponded with an implicit question that might have been asked about Katherine Mansfield's reputation in the United States when I first began writing about her several decades ago. It might also have been asked about Virginia Woolf's reputation before she was taken up by American Second Wave feminists.

I had been reading Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) as part of a larger project on Katherine Mansfield's American legacy because of his role in shaping her critical reception in the 1920s. I had not yet known about his personal interactions with her, and more importantly, how his prose narratives bore witness to her influence. I discovered Aiken during my first year as a university student when I read his most famous short story: ‘Silent Snow, Secret Snow’. I had yet to read any modernist literary fiction, although I had struggled through T. S. Eliot's ‘Prufrock’ in the same Freshman English class. Aiken's evocation of the mysterious inner world of a child, revealed through its symbolic manifestations, preceded my discoveries of both Mansfield and Woolf and prepared me for reading them a few years later. I knew nothing about the author himself. Those were the days of strict conformity to the principles of the New Criticism. Biographical and other contextual approaches to literary works were dismissed as unfashionable. I would not have been aware then (nor would I have cared) that Aiken had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1929 for his Selected Poems, or that he had recently served as the poetry consultant for the Library of Congress (a position now called the Poet Laureate). Neither would I have known that Aiken was a long-time friend of Eliot and introduced Eliot to Ezra Pound, thus launching a relationship that produced the final version of The Waste Land; nor that John Middleton Murry had selected Aiken to write ‘Letters from America’ soon after he took on the editorship of the Athenaeum in 1919.

Katherine Mansfield's death did not follow a period of heightened intensity in her relationship with Murry, rather the contrary. Her last year displayed yet another cycle, similar to those in the past, of closeness, misunderstanding, disappointment and separation. Even during the relatively peaceful and productive months alone together at the Chalet, there had been signs of difficulty, which Murry did not completely perceive. On 7 September 1921, two days after he had sent The Things We Are to his publishers, Mansfield wrote to Ida Baker requesting that she take on the job of managing the household again, realising that she could not handle both ‘housekeeping’ and her writing. She asked her to ‘accept this situation as the outcome of our friendship’, which she considered ‘every bit as sacred and eternal as marriage’ (KMCL 4: 277). By late October, she would describe Ida Baker as ‘the official wife of both of us’ (KMCL 4: 303).

Mansfield's reference to the ‘sacred and eternal’ nature of friendship bears so much Lawrentian weight that it again reveals how much Women in Love had invaded her consciousness that past summer, and the loss of Murry's closeness to Lawrence underlies her concern over his isolation with her at the Chalet, as is evident in her letter to Sydney Schiff on 25 December 1921, where she mentions that he ‘craves friends’, but men he knows are too ‘frightened … to ever show him more than a kind of head sympathy’.

The gradual shift from the influence of Lawrence to that of Bloomsbury marks a significant turning point in Murry's and Mansfield's positioning within British modernism. Their tentative, still awkward entry into the circle around Lady Ottoline Morrell at Garsington in the summer of 1916 would lead them in new directions, with profound consequences. It would not take long, however, for the same configurations of erotic desire and displaced sexual energy that lurked behind Murry's writing of Still Life to surface under the pressures of a new, if painfully familiar, triangular situation. This time Mansfield's jealousy would not be aroused by Murry's intimacy with another man – as it had been with Campbell and Lawrence – but another woman: Ottoline Morrell. It may well be that the events I describe in this chapter form the emotional background of one of Mansfield's most famous stories, ‘Bliss’ (1918). C. A. Hankin goes so far as to assert that ‘the germ’ of Mansfield's ‘central idea in “Bliss” … seems to have been her own and Murry's relationship with Ottoline Morrell’ (Hankin 1983: 142).

Beyond that ‘germ’, however, is the strong relationship between numerous elements of the story with Murry's Still Life. Its central character, Bertha Young, resembles Anne Cradock. Both are women around thirty, married, financially secure, their social lives centred in a world of fashionable people, artists and writers, up to date on the latest craze.

According to Murry, he only sought from Lawrence ‘the warmth and security of personal affection’ when he visited Greatham in February 1915. He later recognised that Lawrence's response to his need was more complex: ‘What his consciousness required was an impersonal bond between us: that we should be servants of the same purpose, disciples of the same ideal’ (BTW: 332). Murry was confused by that because ‘ideas and purposes meant nothing to me. Persons were everything … But when, as now, we were intimately together, I felt that Lawrence was making a personal appeal to me to follow him impersonally’ (BTW: 332). Murry admitted that he had not been completely honest in professing to accept Lawrence's ideas, but was more ‘like a woman instinctively humouring her husband by accepting his argument and principles, although in fact they are quite indifferent to her’ (BTW: 333). He was ‘uneasy’ about his own willingness to go along with Lawrence in this way, which, as his awkward simile suggests, placed him in the ‘feminine’ role in their relationship. During that conversation on 21 February, Lawrence was to make a statement that would have significant long-range implications in the relations between the two men. Murry writes that Lawrence ‘was sad, for he was a forerunner, like John the Baptist before the Christ, whose place it was to give up & surrender’ (BTW: 336).

If Murry had more than two decades to come to terms with Lawrence's ‘excessive sensibility’ and to realise his ‘genius’ without ‘ignoring the contradictions’ (Murry 1957: 121), Lawrence would never be able to do the same for Murry. He died too soon, and his circulation of Murry during his last years was almost totally negative. The spate of fiction following Murry's romantic entanglement with Frieda in the autumn of 1923 contains representations of Murry that reveal Lawrence's animosity so blatantly that it must have been obvious to all their mutual acquaintances. Earlier, when Lawrence might have suggested aspects of his relationship with Murry in Women and Love, the physical and social attributes of Gerald Crich were so different from Murry's that their friends – and even Murry himself – did not recognise the connection when the book was first published. In contrast, the three stories Lawrence wrote in the winter and spring of 1924, ‘The Last Laugh’, ‘The Border Line’ and ‘Jimmy and the Desperate Woman’, are satiric portraits of Murry that seem calculated to evoke public ridicule of the man he had once asked to be his blood-brother. A fourth story, ‘Smile’, which was written a year and a half later, reveals how the passage of time did not dampen Lawrence's urge to ridicule Murry, even if it may have muted the element of sexual rivalry (no Lawrentian figure appears in that story).

Mansfield's softening of heart towards Lawrence during the last months of her life allowed for a gradual reconciliation to begin for Murry as well. Apparently, some time in December 1922, Murry wrote to Lawrence in New Mexico, ‘suggesting’ that their ‘relation should be renewed’ (RDHL: 98). He responded, cautiously, on 30 December: ‘Heaven knows what we all are, and how we should feel if we met, now that we are changed. We'll have to meet and see’ (LDHL 4: 364). Lawrence's softening might have been hastened by Murry's positive review of Aaron's Rod in August. Nevertheless, Murry's need for Lawrence had only become acute after Mansfield's death. As it was in 1915, when Lawrence had offered a distraught Murry emotional intimacy to assuage the pain of Mansfield's (temporary) abandonment, so now, in 1923, Lawrence would offer a similar – if more guarded – sympathy to a Murry devastated by his awareness of an abandonment that was final. The letter he received from Lawrence on 2 February 1923 made certain the possibility of genuine reconciliation:

A happy ending to their epistolary story remained only in the realm of the imagination for Murry and Mansfield. The linear movement of a teleological narrative suggests some form of apocalyptic transformation: the timeless ‘bliss’ of The Heron. But Mansfield's return to London on 11 April 1918 is only the beginning of another story, a return to a cyclical rather than a teleological pattern. It is a return to dissatisfaction with Murry, to Bloomsbury social politics, to the competition and opportunism of the literary life, a narrative pattern far more in keeping with the flavour of modernist disjunction, disillusionment and deconstruction. This is not to say that the teleological Romance is completely destroyed, however. It continues to haunt their relations with each other. But for Mansfield now, the only certain resolution of it is her dying. And for Murry, as we shall see, it will remain both a motivating force and an explanatory tool for his life's trajectory, in which a variety of utopian plans and schemes continue to collide with cyclical encounters with what he called ‘Necessity’. These collisions exemplify his enduring propensity both to repeat and to escape from the defining moments of his life.

Instead of the longed-for ‘Heron’, Mansfield had returned to live with Murry in his dreary rooms on the Redcliffe Road. They were finally married on 3 May 1918 with Brett and J. D. Fergusson as their witnesses. In her diary, Virginia Woolf describes Mansfield, only six days afterwards, as ‘marmoreal, as usual, just married to Murry, & liking to pretend it a matter of convenience. She looked ghastly ill’ (DVW 1: 150).

Unlike Robert Salesby in ‘The Man Without a Temperament’, Murry appeared to settle into his new life abroad with Mansfield in 1921 without apparent signs of repressed resentment. Robert Salesby had been cast adrift with nothing to occupy himself but the daily rituals of taking tea with his wife and bringing her a shawl. The one essential quality that Mansfield had neglected to give him was a dedication to the act of writing. In contrast, Murry would find himself suddenly freed from the exhaustive entanglements – professional and social – of the Athenaeum, and now ready to pursue his creative endeavours. It should be noted here also – as Alpers has suggested – that Murry's removal from the editorship meant ‘the parting of the ways between the Murrys and Bloomsbury as a whole’ (Alpers 1980: 331). For, without Murry's influence as an editor to consider, Woolf and her friends had no need to pretend to interest in him and their barely submerged hostility need no longer be held in check.

During his stay in Menton in the first months of the year, Murry started work on his second novel, The Things We Are, and completed a series of lectures which he delivered at Oxford in May, and published the next year under the title The Problem of Style. By the end of June, he had joined Mansfield in the mountains of Switzerland, at the Chalet des Sapins in Montana-sur-Sierre, where they lived in productive intimacy and tranquillity.

There must be a certain perversity in writing a book centred on John Middleton Murry (1889–1957), the editor and critic who was once called ‘the best-hated man of letters’ (L: 213). After all, didn't Virginia Woolf name him ‘the one vile man I have ever known’ (LVW 4: 312)? And wasn't he supposed to be the infamous editor Burlap in Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point? And didn't D. H. Lawrence once call him ‘an obscene bug sucking my life away’ (RDHL: 79)? There was something about Murry that alienated people and even his supporters have prefaced their remarks (as I do here), with qualifications. I must admit that I used to go along with the general critical opinion and even contributed my share to his bad reputation in Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction (1991), by objecting to his behaviour as her husband and literary executor. Like most Mansfield critics, I found it easy to use Murry as her negative counterpoint.

For years I had been so absorbed in Katherine Mansfield's writing that I had not interrogated her reactions to Murry sufficiently. I had pored over her letters; read biographies, critical studies and memoirs by friends and acquaintances; and travelled to New Zealand to study her notebooks at the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington. As it happened, Murry's letters to Mansfield, which had not yet been published, were also housed at the Turnbull Library.

‘You are evidently a genius as an editor – nothing short of that – a perfect genius’, Mansfield tells Murry on 13 October 1919, after reading through a particularly lively issue of the Athenaeum (KMCL 3: 21). Murry is equally complimentary in his response to her letter on 17 October, exclaiming that she is ‘the only genius in the whole bunch of good ones among us’ (LJMM: 187). He also magnanimously suggests she help Lawrence by writing something on Sons and Lovers, ‘saying how it stands out etc. You know what the average is like nowadays & you can speak your mind’ (LJMM: 188). In this optimistic mood, he lays out his plans for her to consider: ‘I have two determinations – one to make the paper a success against all competition this winter – the other to write a novel with among other things some real you and me love in it’. As editor, Murry is now able to control the direction of his own literary criticism without interference. He can select the books he wants to review and use them for his own purposes, especially as vehicles for his developing aesthetic principles. In fact, the Athenaeum provides the opportunity for both Murry and Mansfield to cultivate their critical talents and to articulate the theoretical bases for their critical practices. Mansfield's ‘novel page’, as Murry calls it, is ‘one of the features most appreciated in the paper’, and he believes that it is ‘quite unlike – in a different class to – anything that's being done in the way of reviewing anywhere to-day’ (LJMM: 210).

John Middleton Murry's first novel, Still Life, published in 1916, was considered a failure by friends and critics alike. Lawrence complained that it was ‘the kind of wriggling self-abuse I can't make head or tail of’ (LDHL 3: 53). His complaint conceals a troubled history of his relations with Murry, but it astutely addresses one of modernism's most significant critical problems: how to combine the new psychological awareness of the moderns with a literary form that would control the inevitable tendency to self-disclosure, a subject Murry was interrogating in his concurrent critical writing. The density of his novel results from Murry's refusal to simplify, condense or symbolise, a function of his need not to ignore any aspect of what he believed to be ‘the psychological truth’.

I should say at the start that I am not suggesting that Still Life is a lost masterpiece nor that Murry's fictional talents should have been encouraged. Murry himself recognised his limitations. Although he persevered through the writing of two more novels after Still Life, he came to the conclusion that writing fiction was ‘merely my blundering way of learning – as always by hard experience – that I was not a novelist’ (BTW: 259). His failure partially stems from a conception of the novel still dependent upon nineteenth-century narrative conventions. Murry's narrative practice stumbled behind his critical theory.

There is a moment in Women in Love when Birkin at last concedes to Ursula's demand and admits that he loves her, saying: ‘“Yes, I do. I love you, and I know it's final. It is final, so why say any more about it”’ (WL: 251). He then embraces her and suddenly feels

The words ‘still’ and ‘bliss’ should remind us of the titles of the two works of fiction by Murry and Mansfield which have occupied our attention so far in this book. If Murry – who could not stop talking – envisioned what is still as lifeless, and Mansfield a bliss that was deflected hysteria, Lawrence – seemingly without effort – momentarily penetrates to the essence of these words. True, he describes a moment that will not last, as is the nature of all epiphanic experience. But linked with his emphasis on finality, it is a moment that should endure underneath the struggles yet to come.