Paris 2015: Cimetière parisien de Bagneux #5: Francis Carco

'FRANCIS

CARCO

DE L'ACADÉMIE

GONCOURT

1886 – 1958'

Francis Carco was born in Nouméa, New Caledonia, which he is quoted as calling the '[French] prison capital' by André Negis in his biography Mon ami Carco (1953; repr. 1986). Negis's first chapter is called 'Le Goût du Malheur' (lit. 'The Taste of Misfortune') after Carco's novel Vérotchka l'Étrangère ou le Goût du malheur (1923). Carco spent the first five years of his life in New Caledonia, and was considerably marked by it, by his father speaking of the treatment of the prisoners at the family dinner table, by a man being beheaded for killing his prison warden, by regularly seeing convicts in chains.

In his early twenties he frequented the 'Lapin Agile' in Montmartre with such regulars as Pierre Mac Orlan, Maurice Garçon et Roland Dorgelès. His first novel, Jésus-la-caille – which involves a homosexual pimp – was first published in Mercure de France thanks to the novelist Rachilde, who was co-director of the magazine and the wife of Alfred Valette, its founder: they are also buried in the Cimetière parisien de Bagneux (see my next post).

Famously, Carco had a brief relationship with Katherine Mansfield in an 'escape' from her husband John Middleton Murry in 1915, and the character Duquette in her short story 'Je ne parle pas français is modelled on Carco.

Carco wrote a number of novels, and Le Roman de François Villon (1926), a fictionalised biography.

Katherine Mansfield and Gurdjieff in Avon, Seine-et-Marne (77), France

'VILLE d'AVON
Rue
Katherine Mansfield
Ecrivain née le 14 octobre 1888
A Karori (Nouvelle-Zélande)
Décédée le 9 janvier 1923
Au prieuré des Basses-Loges, Avon'

It's not much but at least it recognises the importance of its former resident.

Obviously, no one would expect a conventional grave for Gurdjieff. Below I transcribe a poster at the side of the grave, and then translate it into English, changing the tense into the past as is conventional in English.

'Georges Ivanovitch GURDJIEFF

né au Caucase en 1877

mort à Paris en 1949
 

–––––––––––– 

Dès son enfance, il s'intéresse aux questions

inexpliquées philosophiques et religieuses et, avec

un groupe de Chercheurs de Vérité, poursuit à

travers l'Asie sa quête de sources

de connaissances traditionnelles.

Pour mettre en pratique son enseignement

il crée en 1920 à Tiflis l'Institut pour

le Développement Harmonique de l'Homme.

En 1922 il s'installe à Avon, au Prieuré des

Basses Loges (actuellement propriété privée).

Le lieu devient un centre qui attire quelques

intellectuelles parmi les plus éminents de l'époque,

en particulier des Anglais et des Américains.

Quelques années plus tard il ferme l'Insitut et

poursuit son travail à Paris et aux Etats-Unis.

L'œuvre de Gurdjieff suscite toujours recherches

et interrogations passionnées, scepticisme

ou admiration sans bornes.'

 

'George Ivanovitch GURDJIEFF 

born in the Caucasus in 1877

died in Paris in 1949'

 

–––––––––––––––––

 

'From childhood, he was interested in unexplained

religious and philosphical matters and, with

a group of Seekers after Truth, pursued his

quest for the sources of traditional

knowledge across Asia.

To put his teaching into practice,

in 1920 in Tiflis he created the

Institute for the Hamonious Development of Man.

In 1922 he moved into the

Prieuré des Basses Loges (now private property).

The place became a centre of attention for

some of the most eminent intellectuals of the day,

English and Americans in particular.

A few years later he closed the Institute

and continued his work in Paris and the United States.

Gurdjieff's work still arouses endless enthusiastic

research and investigation, scepticism and admiration.'

 

'KATHERINE MANSFIELD

WIFE OF

JOHN MIDDLETON MURRY

1888 – 1923

BORN AT WELLINGTON

NEW ZEALAND

DIED AT AVON'

 

'Katherine MANSFIELD

(de son vrai nom: Kathleen BEAUCHAMP)
(1888 – 1923)
Ecrivain

 

–––––––––––––––

 

Très tôt, elle révèle des dispositions
pour la littérature et la musique.
En 1917, elle contracte une pneumonie
qui se complique en tuberculose pulmonaire.
Le 18 octobre 1922, elle arrive à Avon pour
effectuer une retraite auprès de GURDJIEFF.
dans son "Institut pour le Développement
harmonique de l'Homme"
installé au Prieuré des Basses-Loges
(actuellement propriété privé).
Elle y mourut le 9 janvier 1923
d'une hémophtysie.
Parmi ses nouvelles les plus célèbres,
on peut citer
"Pension allemande" (1911)*
et "Sur la baie" (1922)*.'

*The dates given are the first editions in English, but I doubt very much that they were translated into French in the same year.

'Katherine MANSFIELD

(birth name: Kathleen BEAUCHAMP)
Writer

 

–––––––––––––

 

At a young age she showed a predilection
for literature and musique.
In 1917 she contracted pneumonia
which developed into pulmonary tuberculosis.
On 18 October 1922, she arrived in Avon
to stay at Gurdjieff's retreat,
in the "Institute for the Harmonious
Development of Man" at the
Prieuré des Basses-Loges
(now private property).
She died on 9 January 1923
of a pulmonary haemorrhage.
Among her famous short stories,
of note are
"In a German Pension" (1911)
and "At the Bay" (1922).'

 

My other Mansfield posts are below:

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Claire Tomalin: Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life
Katherine Mansfield in Wellington, New Zealand

Katherine Mansfield in Wellington, New Zealand

Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923) was born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp at 25 Tinakori Road, Thorndon, Wellington, New Zealand, which is now a museum. The photo on the above leaflet shows Mansfield in 1921, surrounded by a representation of the original wallpaper from the house. Her parents were businessman Harold Beauchamp and his wife Annie (née Dyer).

 

The family moved to Karori when Katherine was four or five years old.

She only remained in New Zealand until 1908, when she left for England, and died just fifteen years later at Gurdjieff's Institute for the Harmonius Development of Man in Fontainebleau, France, at the age of thirty-four.

 

Photography is not allowed in the house.

 

'KATHERINE MANSFIELD BIRTHPLACE

RESTORED HOUSE OPENED BY

HER EXCELLENCY LADY REEVES

14 OCTOBER 1988 CENTENARY

OF THE WRITER'S BIRTH

 

KATHERINE MANSFIELD BIRTHPLACE SOCIETY

PATRON HER EXCELLENCY LADY REEVES

PRESIDENT OROYA DAY

PRINCIPAL ARCHITECT JAMES BEARD

ARCHITECT MARTIN HILL'

 

The Heritage Garden.

 

The Thistle Inn at 3 Mulgrave Street, Thorndon, was built in 1840, burned down in 1866 and rebuilt the same year. Katherine Mansfield's one-page story 'Leves Amores' was written when she was nineteen and begins 'I can never forget the Thistle Hotel'. The unnamed narrator lives in a room opposite a woman in the hotel and one evening invites her to dine and then to the opera. They return to the hotel and the evidently previously sexually charged evening becomes much more sexually charged. Although the sex of the narrator is not mentioned, many have read this as a lesbian story: curiously, she gave it to her father's secretary Matty Putnam to type out, and sent a copy to Vere Bartrick-Baker*, who held onto it until her death.

 

*A friend from when they were at Queen's College, London.

 

There is a link to the story below, along with a link to my review of Claire Tomalin's biography, plus Mansfield in Avon, France:

 

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
'Leves Amores', by Katherine Mansfield
Claire Tomalin: Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life (1987)
Katherine Mansfield and Gurdjieff in Avon, France

Katherine Mansfield on Picton, New Zealand

The above photo shows Picton, the port on South Island where the ferries for Wellington depart.

 

In her short story 'The Voyage', published in 1921, Katherine Mansfield describes the journey (obviously much longer then, and the ship had cabins) of the young child Fenella with her grandmother to Picton following the recent death of the child's mother. As they approach Picton, the narrator mentions the 'little houses [...] clustered together, like shells on the lid of a box'.

 

Janet Frame's mother Lottie was born in Picton, and – in a startling re-play of Janet's sister Myrtle's death by drowning ten years earlier – the same thing happened to her sister Isobel in 1947 when Isobel was on holiday there with her mother at her aunt May's.

 

Janet Frame later visited the (really very small) town in 1984 and thought it the most beautiful place she'd ever been to, finding its fords and blue water wonderful. I didn't form a similar impression to that as it was the only miserable day of our stay in New Zealand, all of the others indeed being wonderful.

Claire Tomalin: Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life (1987)

Initial research for Claire Tomalin's biography of Katherine Mansfield was postponed partly because of Jeffrey Meyer's and Antony Alper's books in 1978 and 1980 respectively. Tomalin describes Alpers's biography as 'epic', representing (he believes) a generally misunderstood genius, and Meyers's as 'more cynical', showing a darker Mansfield. She feels that certain aspects of her life have not been dealt with sufficiently, 'in particular the chain of events leading from her first foray into sexual freedom in 1908, and the various long-term results of her association with Floryan Sobieniowski in 1909.' She investigates Mansfield's medical history and Sobieniowski's blackmail of her.

Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp (1888–1923) was born in Wellington, New Zealand the daughter of banker Harold Beauchamp, who became wealthy shortly after her birth and, like her mother Annie, was born in Australia. Family legend has it that Katherine wanted to become a writer on finding out about her father's cousin Elizabeth von Arnim's novel Elizabeth and Her German Garden.

Katherine was the outsider in an otherwise more or less conventional family, although (something she didn't know) the rebellious or transgressive gene seems to have existed in Harold's first cousin Fred, who had at least five unmarried children by a Māori.

On leaving New Zealand to settle permanently in England, Mansfield was entering a society that was changing, becoming more democratic, less male-dominated, with freer sexual habits, a country breaking away from the constraints of the Victorian ethos which had dominated for several decades. In a chapter titled 'London 1908: New Women', Tomalin writes about four women – Virginia Stephen (later Woolf, of course), Ottoline Morrell, Dorothy Brett, and Frieda Weekley, all of whom rebelled against their backgrounds: all of whom came to know and love Mansfield, who had also broken free – from the colonial shackles she'd left at the other end of the world, one to which she would never return.

This compelling book, then, shows a woman eager to embrace different forms of liberation, as Mansfield indeed did, although her story is no exhilarating read, describing a (then) forbidden love followed by pregnancy and miscarriage, sexually transmitted disease followed by a disastrous operation, suffering and illness, an essential relationship that it was essential to keep escaping from, more suffering and illness, and early death. In between, Mansfield never managed to complete a novel but left a number of fine short stories. And she was the inspiration behind a number of fictional characters, of which these are a few examples:

Lawrence's depiction of Ursula Brangwen's distinctly lesbian relationship with the older Winifred Inger in the 'Shame' chapter of The Rainbow seems in part an imagining of Mansfield and her friend Edith Bendall; in Women in Love too, Lawrence based Ursula's sister Gudrun on Mansfield; J. R. Orage satirized her as 'Moira Foisacre' in a series in New Age; the uneasy colonial Louis in Woolf's The Waves has an Australian banker father like Mansfield; and she was posthumously satirized by Aldous Huxley in Those Barren Leaves.

I can't say I'm convinced that Sobianiowski's blackmail of Mansfield was on account of her 'plagiarizing' Chekhov's 'Spat' khochetsia' (translated as 'Sleepy' by Constance Garnett in 1927), and although her 'The-Child-Who-Was-Tired' may well have a similar basic story outline to Chekhov's it is far from being anything like a copy. But Tomalin goes out of her way to put her case for this tenuous blackmail construction, as well as including an Appendix containing several pages from the TLS letters pages for 1951, where several academics argue about the short story.

A few minor grouses:

Unlike Katherine's maternal grandfather Joseph Dyer, or her maternal grandmother Margaret Isabella Mansfield, or her paternal grandmother Elizabeth, nowhere in the text itself, only in the Index, is Katherine's paternal grandfather's name Arthur mentioned, although he is present in several sentences.

I find Tomalin is too eager to psychologize: for instance, regarding a photo of Mansfield aged about nine, the author sees 'a rebellious and inquisitive glimmer' in her eyes, whereas I, especially when bearing in mind the long exposures necessary at the time, merely see a suggestion of boredom.

And a 'Māori kit', as C. K. Stead points out in Kin of Place (originally published in the November 1987 issue of the London Review of Books as a review of Tomalin's biography), is not, as Tomalin seemed to think, something that Mansfield wore to show off in England, but is simply a basket.

 

My links to Katherine Mansfield's Birthplace and the place of her death are below:

 

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Katherine Mansfield in Wellington, New Zealand
Katherine Mansfield and Gurdjieff in Avon, France

Newly Discovered Katherine Mansfield Story

This week's TLS (3 October 2012) has an article by PhD student Chris Mourant titled 'A Little Episode: An Unknown Story among the Forgotten Typescripts of Katherine Mansfield'. Mourant is researching ADAM International Review,¹ a literary magazine edited by Miron Grindea from 1929 to 1995.

The ADAM archive in King's College London has been little used, but in it Mouret found five boxes labelled 'Mansfield', and among them he discovered two very interesting typescripts: the short story 'A Little Episode' (1909), and fifty aphorisms written in 1911. Wary of the trap of confusing fiction with autobiography, Mouret nevertheless sees a number of parallels between the fictional world of 'A Little Episode' and that of Katherine Mansfield's life.

 

He finds the protagonist Yvonne 'clearly a self-portrait' of Mansfield herself, the pianist Jacques St Pierre similar to Mansfield's pianist lover Garnet Carrington Trowell² (by whom she became pregnant but later miscarried in Germany), and Geoffrey Mandeville is similar to Mansfield's first husband George Bowden. There are a number of other similarities.

 

According to Mouret Oscar Wilde's influence abounds in 'A Little Episode', and Mansfield followed Wilde by compiling the later aphorisms, which she significantly called 'Bites from the Apple'. Mansfield contracted gonnorrhea from Floryan Sobieniowky, whom she met in Bad Wörishofen, where her mother had taken her to avoid the social stigma of the pregnancy. Some of the aphorisms speak of love as a disease. The danger of love is common to Mansfield's stories, and I'm incidentally reminded once again of Reynolds Price's work.³

 

Unfortunately I don't think the article gives any indication of how long the story is.

 

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

¹ The acronym stands for 'Arts, Drama, Architecture and Music'.

 

² Claire Tomalin's Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life (London: Viking, 1987) has a rather unflattering double-page photo of Trowell playing the piano with a cigarette end determinedly clamped in his mouth, and an even more unflattering inset photo of him with spotted bow-tie at a slant and a goofy-toothed smile.

³ Price's 'Mayfield Trilogy' A Great Circle, which comprises The Surface of Earth (1965), The Source of Light (1981), and The Promise of Rest (1995) is a vast achievement covering ninety fictional years and frequently returns to the dangers of love – from death in childbirth at the beginning to death by AIDS at the end.

The Vale of Health: Literary London #25

The Vale of Health must be one of the best kept secrets in London. A kind of hamlet without any retail outlets, it stands in the south-west corner of Hampstead Heath and just outside Hampstead proper. Once a bog known as Hatch's Bottom, it was drained in 1777 by Hampstead Water Company, and a few cottages were erected for poor people. The picture is very different now, although to walk around this very quiet, very small cul-de-sac is like being in a different time.

In 1915 D. H. Lawrence lived with his wife Frieda at 1 Byron Villas, although the plaque is on another house. While here, Lawrence began the literary magazine The Signature with John Middleton Murry, for which Murry's wife Katherine Mansfield contributed under the pseudonym Matilda Berry. It was against the patriotic spirit of the time, and lasted only three issues. The Lawrences left for Cornwall on 1 December 1915, and persuaded the Middleton Murrys to join them shortly afterwards.

The poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) lived at 3 Villas-on-the-Heath in 1912.

After two years' imprisonment for insulting the Prince Regent, Leigh Hunt then took up residence at Vale Lodge from 1815-1821. During his stay here, he wrote five sonnets in praise of Hampstead, and introduced Keats to Shelley. He is perhaps most noted for Dickens's depiction of him as Harold Skimpole.

Stella Gibbons lived in Vale Cottage from 1927 to 1930, a few years before she became the noted author of Cold Comfort farm (1932).

Compton Mackenzie lived at Woodbine Cottage from 1937 to 1943, during which time he wrote the six volumes of The Four Winds of Love. He noted that village life was only a half hour away from Piccadilly Circus.