Floral tribute
By Robin Lane Fox
FT
February 21 2009 00:22
Flowers and gardens do not spring from our heads without a history.
There are memories in us all: memories of flowers seen long ago or
ideal gardens from a childhood we can never revisit. It must be hard to
be a `designer’ and have to keep starting afresh on someone else’s
site. I prefer to wrestle with my own dreams, knowing that they will
never attain the underlying image.
Carried through life, such flowers and gardens stay with us to the end.
They surface with a new intensity in the face of approaching death.
Bunches of flowers from visitors activate these old and immovably deep
memories. Quite often it is to flowers that onlookers, too, will turn
for consolation. The artist Ã?douard Manet found inspiration in vases of
flowers as his life reached its end. His last flower paintings are the
supreme tribute to the comfort of flowers near death.
I can now add another to the list of flower-lovers in their last days.
The novelist Katherine Mansfield lived for four years with a diagnosis
of probable death before she succumbed to tuberculosis in January 1923.
She was aged 34. Those years saw her writing the short stories that
include her best work. Nowadays she is better remembered for her In A
German Pension, a work of her youth that she later refused to have
reprinted. It does not do her justice and we should respect her as a
writer who never lost her penetrating eye and critical standards. She
also never lost her deep rooted love of flowers and gardens. They are
entwined fascinatingly in her newly published letters.
I have been waiting keenly for Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott,
her editors, to reach the final volume of their magnificent five-part
work. There were flowery moments in the first three as Mansfield
thoughtfully emerged from the years of the Great War. She confronted
its pervasive effects and complained, acutely, that they were not
addressed in the airy fiction of her contemporary, Virginia Woolf. From
autumn 1919 flowers come to the fore in her thinking after the
life-sentence of tuberculosis had been passed, a curse which took her
out to Italy and southern France in the hope of a remission. She loved
the fields of anemones (pictured right) and the local narcissi. She was
delightfully happy watching the men who came to help in the garden. In
north Italy, `a big kind grey old dog in a cap’ came to speak bad
French about violets `savage and mild’ and roses that flowered in le
mois de Noel and a lily as big as a villa. In January she enjoyed
double-flowered stocks. She walked in a floral heaven near Menton
(pictured above) in years when its coast was still teeming with wild
flowers. It is fascinating that this young genius of a writer, exiled
by her health, was lodged near Menton while the great future gardener
Lawrence Johnston, creator of Hidcote Manor Garden, in Gloucestershire,
western England, was attending on his mother in a rest-home nearby.
They never met.
Already Mansfield’s excellent letters from these years are explicit
about the roots of her love of flowers. It went back deep into her
childhood in faraway New Zealand. `When I was about the height of a
garden spade,’ she writes in March from Menton, `I spent weeks ` months
` watching a man do all these things and wandering through canes of
yellow butter beans and smelling the spotted speckled broad bean
flowers and helping to plant Giant Edwards and White Elephants. Oh
dear, I do love gardens! I had better stop.’
Constantly she responds to cut flowers and the floral baskets sent to
encourage her. She dreams of the outlines of a future garden. In
January we find her thinking of `little curly blue hyacinths and white
violets and the bird cherry. My trouble is that I had so many flowers
when I was little. I got to know them so well that they are simply the
breath of life to me. It is no ordinary love. It is a passion.’ A
lifetime later not one of my university pupils has even known what a
primrose looks like whenever I have asked them in the past 35 years.
By October 1922 all other treatments had failed and Mansfield had
herself accepted into the institute of the legendary guru George
Gurdjieff, whom her editors succinctly present as `a widely travelled
Armenian Greek’. It was back in Russia that this prince of baloney had
first established his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man.
He was the most imposing presence and his theories of cosmic rays and
curative dancing only helped to enhance the mystique. After the
revolution he transferred his blend of communal living, `healing’
labour and Far Eastern carpets to the Priory at Fontainbleau with the
help of newly found French supporters. Mansfield learned of him through
a lecture in Paris by his accompanying fantasist, PD Ouspensky. In
later years the famous landscape gardener Russell Page would also turn
to Ouspensky and the Fontainbleau institute for the theories of
`harmony’ that underpinned his views of the natural world.
You can imagine the wry anticipation with which I have awaited the
final letters from this farmhouse of Russian exiles and souls in need
of help. `According to Mr Gurdjieff all of us have our `illness’ and it
takes very severe measures to put us right.’ For Mansfield he
prescribed a hide – away above the cows in the farm barn where she could
sit `and inhale their breath’. She duly sits up there on a pile of
carpets. Life is appallingly cold and, away from the cows, the main
business seems to be cooking, cleaning and simply staying alive.
Tremendous Russian dancing punctuates a life spent peeling carrots. Her
editors propose that the company and social grouping were what most
appealed to Mansfield. Authors live isolated, stressful lives and I can
well believe it. `They are all very different but they are the people I
have wanted to find ` real people ` not people I make up or invent.’
They were so real that before long they had even stolen all her
underclothes.
And what about her love of flowers? Wonderfully, it was still with her,
in spite of the pigsties and the intense cold and damp. The autumn of
her entry to the institute, 1922, had been a `marvellous’ year for
dahlias: `big spiked red ones, white ones and a little bright orange
kind ` most lovely’. As she left Paris, she had still been recalling in
letters the `Michaelmas daisies on a solitary bush in Acacia Road’. `I
like them. They have such very delicate petals.’ In the Institute of
Harmonious Development, in early January 1923, she was `looking for
signs of spring already’. `Under the espalier pear trees there are
wonderful Xmas roses … and somebody found four primroses the other
day.’ Within a day or two she would be dead. The deeply felt memory of
flowers had sustained her for so much of her shortened life. Three
years earlier, in Menton, she had written home about her `fifteen
cinerarias in Italy’ and how `they grew against the sea’. `I hope,’ she
added, `one will be able to call these things up on one’s deathbed.’ I
strongly believe that she could and did.
`The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield’, Clarendon Press, from
£66.