Katherine Mansfield in the gardens of the Villa Isola Bella, Menton, France. Photo / Alexander Turnbull Library
David Herkt interviews Redmer Yska about his just-released book on the European travels of Katherine Mansfield – a book that also explores, for the first time, the real extent of her long dependence on morphine.
“Would you ask Dr Sorapure to make me a new prescription or, failing that, would you have the medicine sent to me from a chemist?” begged Katherine Mansfield in a letter from Ospedaletti on the Italian Riviera to her husband, John Middleton Murray, in London, in October 1919.
“I’d rather it was stronger”, she added tellingly, “than weaker.”
Eventually strings were pulled and a family relative and diplomat, Sydney Waterlow, managed to get a bottle through Europe to Italy in a diplomatic bag. “The ACID is here: a bottle has been made up & it has a most superb effect. Très potent – the best I have come across”, she writes back to Murray in excitement.
“You pick up the letters and you look at the letters and there is this word ‘ACID’ ... and you wonder … Most literary scholars are not pharmacists,” says Wellington writer and historian, Redmer Yska, “so you have to unpick the thing and ask what was this stuff she was taking? No one seems to have asked the question seriously.”
Mansfield’s letters in the last years of her life are an account of the relentless effects of tuberculosis, a slow but fatal lung disease, on her body. They are also the record of her increasing use and dependence on medications containing drugs, like morphine, to quell her cough and physical pains.
In short, Mansfield was an opiate addict during her most creative period, when she wrote many of the works for which she is now celebrated globally: At the Bay, The Voyage, The Garden Party, and The Doll’s House, amid numerous others.
In his just-released book, Katherine Mansfield’s Europe: Station to Station, Yska follows Mansfield’s life abroad after she left New Zealand, backing up his library research in Wellington by travelling to Europe to dog her footsteps through France, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland.
He also exposes and emphasises the importance of Mansfield’s reliance on a potent mixture containing large qualities of morphine – and then subsequently upon other opiate drugs – from 1919 until her death in Fontainebleau in 1923. She was taking high-strength liquid morphine in four-hourly doses from the beginning.
A few days after the arrival of her bottle in the diplomatic bag, Mansfield was again writing to Murray: “When I shut my eyes gardens drifted by – the most incredible sort of tropical gardens with glimpses of palaces through the rich green. Trees I’ve never seen or imagined – trees like feathers and silver trees and others quite white with huge transparent leaves passed and passed. My heart just fluttered: I scarcely had to breathe at all. It was like a vision brought about by drugs.”
“Mansfield had got this Red Cough Mixture which had morphine anhydride in it,” explains Yska. “And she is having it six times a day. That first time when she says that this is a particularly good drop and asks for more, I think she is completely out of it and experiencing opiates for the first time ... Then she probably gets used to it – but we just don’t know. We have got these very scattered clues.”
Her awareness of the true nature of her medicine was initially limited. Mansfield’s London doctor had never explained why the mixture he prescribed seemed so effective – or that one of the effects was visionary “trances” or that physical dependence and sometimes nervous sleeplessness could also be a consequence.
Mansfield often enjoyed the drug so much she would arrange herself in mediative postures to experience the hallucinatory consequences.
But there were also darker experiences. The effects could be auditory, at other times they were more graphic. “It was like great black birds dashing at one’s face,” she wrote in one letter. She heard mystery voices outside and a painting of a cat on her bedroom wall disturbed her.
Her depression could also become overwhelming. “This is reality: bed, medecine [sic] bottle, medecine [sic] glass marked with tea and table spoons ... Come – tell me – tell me – exactly what am I to do to recover my faith.”
By 1920 Mansfield was gaining a broader and more realistic view of her dependence. “[My] brain is going like a rocket ... a fox eating it ... feverish when I write ... In my cough mixture that I’ve been taking for 2 years there has been a certain amount of opium,” she explains to Murray, coming clean to someone else for the first time.
“I’m trying to knock it off now but it has had a certain effect and I think accounts for my sensitivity now – nervous sensitiveness ... [I’m] relieved to have told someone, to have broken the silence.”
Mansfield appears not to know it, but cutting down her dose leads to exactly the nervous withdrawal symptoms she describes, including restless kicking.
“I have pored through every written source – the diaries and letters,” Yska comments, “and everything I found I have used, even those statements she made in Switzerland which is getting very close to the end when she is still talking about the soporific nature of the codeine.”
“Meanwhile back at the ranch, she is writing these masterpieces which just makes us love her more. So, she’d never stop writing. Not even hails of bullets would make her stop. No chemical soup would make her fall by the wayside. She was such a tough cookie – she was so strong.”
It isn’t the first time Yska’s dogged detective work has produced real results.
His previous book, A Strange Beautiful Excitement, focused on Mansfield’s childhood. His detailed account of Wellington – Tinakori Rd, Karori, and the city’s schools, slums, and bathing places – showed both a new side to Mansfield’s childhood and teenage years as well as revealing the detailed lives of those who surrounded her, from the family washing-woman to her swimming-instructors.
He also demonstrated just how close many of Mansfield’s characters were to those in reality. In the process, Yska located her first published story, unknown to readers since its appearance in the New Zealand Graphic and Ladies Journal when Mansfield was 11.
Katherine Mansfield’s Europe, however, is not like any other Mansfield biography. Yska has travelled to the locations involved. His experiences and the people he meets – all with their own Mansfield interests and involvements – are essential parts of the story.
“It is footstepping, really. You just have to go to the places and the minute you get to the places you see things differently. I am a reporter and I’m on the spot. I’m Johnny-on-the-spot.
“I think that is such an important part of the book to say how she is remembered in Europe. I really wanted to find out what was left of her old stamping grounds and her haunts and how she is remembered there today.
“When I went to these places it was clear to me that she had been the original backpacker and this whole travelling world she had was night-trains and Channel ferries and cheap hotel rooms,” he explains. “But the joy of it was making all these human connections, meeting all these admirers of her, all these knowledge-holders.”
Katherine Mansfield’s Europe is dedicated to Bernard Bosque, “who opened all doors”. “
Yska says, “Bernard is Mansfield’s guardian spirit in France. He maintains her tomb at Avon Cemetery, an hour from Paris, runs her birthday party every year, and is a world authority on her French and Swiss trails.”
Together, the pair travelled from the railway stations where Mansfield disembarked from midnight-trains to the chateau where she died and to the moss-covered memorial rock that was unveiled in Fontainebleau Forest in 1938 to celebrate what would have been her 50th birthday, a few months before World War II began.
Roberta Trice is an Italian novelist and curator. “In 2008, as San Remo marked the 120th anniversary of Mansfield’s birth, Trice organised an exhibition at the city museum,” Yska explains. “The municipality later constructed a belvedere or memorial lookout, the first-ever recognition of her Italian stay.” The belvedere overlooks the deep blue of the Ligurian Sea, looking towards Corsica.
“Then Henning Hoffman is Mansfield’s literary sleuth in Germany,” Yska continues. “He was the impetus for a statue to be raised in the Cure Park in Bad Worishofen in 2018, the climax of her 130th anniversary party.”
The comparison between the very high regard that Mansfield is held in Europe and the history of her sometimes-indifferent status in the minds of New Zealanders is particularly apparent in Yska’s book.
“What amazed me was how the French discovered her long before we did. In 1938, in France, the national newspaper Le Figaro said “Today Katherine Mansfield would have been 50.″ Her whole relationship with France was told across mass-media and broadcast to schools. There is that strange comment Le Figaro makes, ‘We love Katherine Mansfield as we love the characters of miracles and fairy tales.’
“I think there is a very strong point there to be made that the French taught us how to value Mansfield. Our diplomats were completely baffled when they turned up in France in 1949 and realised she was a superstar there. We didn’t rate her here at all. We did rate her amongst certain literary circles but generally we didn’t rate her, and we were slightly resentful, as we always are, of this belief.”
Filled with the results of his dedicated research, Yska says that he tried to get Mansfield “out from behind the desk to show her as the gun-slinging, snooker-playing, skinny-dipping, chain-smoking foodie” that she was, while also showing how her travels across Germany, Switzerland, and wartime France fired her creativity.
His revelations of the extent of her morphine dependence is a game-changer, but so is final miracle of her deathless short stories set against the final debilitating progress of a fatal disease that killed her at the age of 34.
Katherine Mansfield’s Europe: Station to Station, by Redmer Yska (Otago University Press, $50) is out on May 2.
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