Other formats

    TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

The Letters of Katherine Mansfield: Volume I

May 24, 1918 —

May 24, 1918

To Lady Ottoline Morrell

I have been walking up and down this huge, bright, bare hotel bedroom, really, if one had looked through the ‘spiritual’ keyhole,—wringing my hands, quite overcome, for the nth time by the horror of life—the sense that something is almost hopelessly wrong. What might be so divine is out of tune—or the instruments are all silent and nobody is going to play again. There is no concert for us. Isn't there? Is it all over? Is our desire and longing and eagerness, quite all that's left? Shall we sit here for ever in this immense wretched hall—waiting for the lights to go up—which will never go up.

Heavens! the hysterical joy with which I'd greet the first faint squeakings of a tuning up—the lovely relief with which one would lean back and give oneself up and up to it. But no—I don't hear a sound.

It's all very well to say like Koteliansky: “I am dead,” but what the devil is the good of that with all this fury of living burning away in my bosom—with God knows nothing to feed it or fan it—just burning away.

But the ugliness—the ugliness of life—the intolerable corruption of it all—How is it to be borne? To-day for the first time since I arrived, I went for a walk. Anne Rice has been telling me of the beauty of the Spring—all the hedges one great flower—of the beauty of these little ‘solid’ white houses set in their blazing gardens—and the lovely hale old fishermen. But—the sea stank—great grey crabs scuttled over the rocks—all the little page 177 private paths and nooks had been fouled by human cattle—there were rags of newspaper in the hedges—the village is paved with concrete and as you pass the “tiny solid white houses” a female voice yells: “You stop it or I'll lay a rope end across eë.”

And then—hotels, you know, strange hotels! The horror of them—The grimace for service rendered, the perpetual “Would you please bring up my letters as soon as the post arrives?”—another strange bed, and the mysterious people whom one always passes going to or coming from the lavatory….

Oh—how I loathe hotels. I know I shall die in one. I shall stand in front of a crochet dressing table cover, pick up a long invisible hairpin left by the last ‘lady’ and die with disgust. It's almost funny—loving as I do, loving passionately, beautiful rooms, the shape of furniture, colours, quiet, I find myself wandering eternally in rooms papered with birds, chrysanthemums in urns and bunches of ribbons, and furnished with fumed oak and lace curtains—and that glare from the windows—that dreadful gape which reaches to every corner—that sense of nowhere to hide!

But all that is only part of the other, greater curse which is upon life—the curse of loneliness—I am quite certain that it is all wrong to live isolated and shut away as we do—never exchanging and renewing and giving And receiving—There ought to be something fine and gay that we tossed about among us—and kept ever so thrillingly in the air, as it were, and never let fall—a spirit. But where is it, and who wants it? … I am in despair. In such despair, that sometimes I begin weeping like a green girl—but that is no use, either. My tiny world tinkles: “Of course, with all that sea and air outside and all that butter, milk, and cream in you'll be as fit as a fiddle in no time.”

Which is altogether too simple.

Write to me—will you? I shall be here another week at any rate. Then I must wander somewhere else I think. This place is grotesquely expensive, too. But write to me—if you can.