The Letters of Katherine Mansfield: Volume I
Sunday morning — February 3, 1918
February 3, 1918
It is early for me to be up, but I had such a longing for a cigarette, and as I sit here in my pyjamas smoking a good one I'll begin your letter….
I really feel I ought to send you some boughs and songs, for never was time nor place more suited, but to tell you the truth I am pretty well absorbed in what I am writing 1 and walk the blooming countryside with a 2d. notebook, shutting out les amandiers. But I don't want to discuss it in case it don't come off….
I've two ‘kick offs’ in the writing game. One is joy—real joy—the thing that made me write when we lived at Pauline, and that sort of writing I could only do in just that state of being, in some perfectly blissful way at peace. Then something delicate and lovely seems to open before my eyes, like a flower without thought of a frost or a cold breath, knowing that all about it is warm and tender and ‘ready.’ And that I try, ever so humbly, to express.
The other ‘kick off’ is my old original one, and, had I not known love, it would have been my all. Not hate or destruction (both are beneath contempt as real motives) but an extremely deep sense of hopelessness, of everything doomed to disaster, almost wilfully, stupidly, like the almond tree and ‘pas de nougat pour le noel.’ 2 There! as I took out a cigarette paper I got it exactly— a cry against corruption—that is absolutely the nail on the head. Not a protest—a cry. And I mean corruption in the widest sense of the word, of course.
I am at present fully launched, right out in the deep sea, with this second state. I may not be able to ‘make my passage,’ I may have to put back and have another try: that's why I don't want to talk about it, and have breath for so little more than a hail. But I must say the boat seems to be driving along the deep water as though it smelt port (no, better say harbour, or you'll think I am rushing into a public house).
After lunch.
Yes, I agree with you. Blow the old war. It's a toss up whether it don't get every one of us before it's done. Except for the first warm days here, when I really did seem to forget it, it's never been out of my mind—and everything is poisoned by it. It's here in me the whole time, eating me away, and I am simply terrified by it. It's at the root of my homesickness and anxiety and panic. I think it took being alone here and unable to work to make me fully, fully accept it. But now I don't think that even you would beat me. I have got the pull of you in a way because I am working, but I solemnly assure you that every moment away from my work is misery. And the human contact—just the pass the time away chat—distracts you, and that of course, I don't have at all. I miss it very much. Birds and flowers and dreaming seas don't do it. Being a biped, I must have a two-legged person to talk to. You can't imagine how I feel that I walk about in a black glittering case like a beetle….
Queer business….
I wonder what you will say to my ‘important’ letter, and if you agree, will they let me thorough? Can they keep me out of my own country? These area couple of refrains which are pretty persistent. They say here that after March this railway will probably be closed till June.
1 “Je ne parle pas francais,” in Bliss.
2 This a reference to a beautiful poem in Provençal by Henri Fabre, the naturalist, telling of the withering of the almond blossom by the cold.