Feature
A life distorted
Yasmine Ryan finds that the
French cult surrounding Katherine
Mansfield is more fantasy than fact.
‘There are some writers with whom we form enduring friendships,” says Charles Juliet, a French writer with a fondness for Katherine Mansfield. Bookshelves line the walls of his home in Lyon, testimony to a life devoted to literature. Of all the authors he has read, the New Zealand writer holds a special place in his heart. He has paid more than one visit to her tomb in the town of Avon, near Fontainebleau, over the years.
At 73, the literary laureate favours Mansfield’s letters, which he finds “vastly superior” to her short stories. He is impressed by the simplicity and profundity of her prose.
But according to author Gerri Kimber, the writer that Juliet knows is a distorted shadow of Mansfield. The French translations of KM’s writing he is familiar with, says Kimber in her new book, Katherine Mansfield: The View from France, have been thoroughly censored.
Kimber argues that a widespread mania for Mansfield in France emerged after her death in January 1923. But it was based on a manufactured fantasy: Mansfield as a saintly young maiden of literature.
“The person they worshipped is not Mansfield,” says Kimber. “It’s just this invention. It’s a purely French phenomenon.”
Tragic. Suffering. Tubercular. Young and beautiful. Otherworldly. Pure. This is Mansfield as the French came to know her.
John Middleton Murry, the husband who survived Mansfield, was the central player in propagating this image. His attempts to mythologise Mansfield in his native England had backfired. Too many people remembered the actual woman for a white-washed image to gain popular acceptance. The fawning over-exposure damaged both his and Mansfield’s reputations in England, creating a backlash against her writing that lasted until the late 1950s. An opinion poll taken at Cambridge in the 1930s rated Murry as “the most despised literary figure of the time”.
In France, however, Murry was in total control of Mansfield’s legacy. A Francophile and fluent in French, Murry found willing and well-placed partners in the French literary establishment.
Conservative, Catholic and overwhelmingly male, they happily accepted this sanitised Mansfield. Though Mansfield herself had had numerous affairs and experimented with bisexuality, she was used as a foil by conservatives shocked by the overt sexuality of French authors like Rachilde and Colette. A Catholic literary revival claimed this well-packaged Mansfield as its heroine.
Murry spoon-fed his compilations of her writing and selected biographical information to editors, critics and translators. A mythic St Katherine was born.
After Mansfield’s death, Murry undertook an enormous editorial job to assemble the piles of her unpublished stories, loose papers and notebooks he had inherited, into many volumes that were published over the years.
His editorial selectiveness has been well and truly sprung in the English-speaking literary world. Thanks to the labours of Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott, The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield have appeared in five volumes between 1984 and 2008. That the “journal” was an editorial creation of Murry’s is now common knowledge, particularly with the 1997 publication of Margaret Scott’s two-volume The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks.
None of these comprehensive collections of Mansfield’s writing has been translated into French. So while English speakers now have access to practically everything that Mansfield ever wrote, French readers are stuck in the dark ages of Mansfield scholarship. The journal and letters still in print in France today are the originals that appeared in the 1930s. These abridged, single-volume editions are far more censored than their English equivalents ever were.
Some of this changed in the 1950s, when Murry published fuller versions of both the journals and the letters. Whatever his motives, criticisms of the French and other previously omitted passages are restored. However literal these editions may have been, one thing that is not restored is the humour and vitality of Mansfield’s prose. Today, these fuller editions can be found only in French second-hand bookshops.
During the research for her PhD that led to The View From France, Kimber compared the translations of Mansfield’s writing with the originals. What she found stunned her: a body of work quite different from what Mansfield actually penned, and reeking of editorial manipulation.
French editors and translators have made additional omissions to counter the frankness of her journals and letters. “By the time you get to the French version, there is almost nothing left of the ‘real’ Katherine.”
For instance, criticisms of the French were cut, Kimber says. “Paris looked exactly like anywhere else: it smelled faintly of lavatories” becomes “Paris looked exactly like anywhere else …. ” “Yet I am very sincere when I say I hate the French” didn’t make it at all.
Anything overtly political was censored, and Mansfield’s humour and often scathing wit disappears. Mansfield was not a practising Christian, yet Murry edited the texts in a way that emphasises her spirituality.
As well as this censorship, the playful, experimental language that characterises Mansfield’s writing has been dulled by translators, even in her fiction. Quirkiness and nuance evaporate into conventional grammar. Child-speak in Sun and Moon disappears, while Ma Parker loses her idiolect. In the letters, the journal and the stories, colloquialisms and lapses into verse don’t survive translation.
This prim and tame Mansfield was a success, and the cult took off. The letters and journals made her reputation in France, far more than her fiction ever did.
Page 1 2 
