CHAPTER 9

MARVELLOUS GARDENS:KATHERINE MANSFIELD, COLETTE,CATHERINE POZZI,DOROTHY RICHARDSON

J’ai craché du sang, mais si peu qu’à peu je croirais, comme l’autre jour, que j’ai une dent qui saigne .… Et c’est parce que l’on “m’a fait parler” hier. Et c’est en me levant, au réveil, à chaque fois, just like Katherine Mansfield : tout y est, jusqu’à la douleur de la jambe. Le soir, je lis les lettres de cette fille qui ont ௅ ironie ! ௅ un succès de librairie ….1

In November 1914, Katherine Mansfield wrote in her Notebook:

I feel very happy and free. Colette Willy is in my thoughts tonight. I feel my own self awake and stretching ௅ stretching so that Im on tiptoe; full of happy joy. Can it be true that one can renew oneself.2

A few days later: “I don’t care a fig at present for anyone I know except her.” She was reading L’entrave, a novel Colette (1873-1954) published in 1913, the year when she gave birth to her daughter, Colette de Jouvenel, called Bel-Gazou. The first-person narrator, Renée Néré, has a love affair with a man called Jean and tells how what was only sensual delight at the beginning is transformed into love. Then there is “no remedy to his mystery”. Colette gives such definition of love: “Love is that painful, ever-repeated bump against a

1 “I’ve spat up blood, but so little that I would almost think, as the other day, that I have a tooth which is bleeding .... And this is because I ‘was made to talk’ yesterday. And it happens when I wake up and stand up, each time, just like Katherine Mansfield: the whole thing, the pain in my leg. At night, I read that girl’s letters, which ௅ ironically ௅ sell well ...” (Catherine Pozzi, Journal 1913-1934, eds Lawrence Joseph and Claire Paulhan, Paris: Ramsay, 1987, 589-90). 2 The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, I, 284 (Mansfield’s emphasis). 162 “Ah, What Is It? – That I Heard” wall which cannot be burst.”3 Some sort of wrestling replaces the first embrace until a new feeling of confidence follows words of reproach. The narrator briefly remembers her childhood, saying that from that period she has kept the gift of emotion.4 For the brief comparative study I wish to carry out in this chapter I have chosen a novel she published earlier, in 1907, under the name of Colette Willy, at the time when she was playing pantomime at the Moulin-Rouge. In La retraite sentimentale (A Sentimental Retreat), the main character, Claudine, lives apart from her husband who is ill and has to stay in a sanatorium until he comes back and dies. Her garden and the animals which live in it enable her to transcend that tragic break in her life. The marvellous gardens described in this chapter are all linked with the wonders and joys of childhood: “Can it be true that one can renew oneself?” That sensitiveness to the outer world of trees, flowers and animals as revelations of being is a common feature to the four women’s voices I wish to gather in this chapter. In the excerpt quoted in the epigraph, Catherine Pozzi (1882-1934) wrote she felt “just like Katherine Mansfield”. She too was ill and died of tuberculosis. Dorothy Richardson (1873-1957), one of the Modernists, even if she may be less famous than Katherine Mansfield or Virginia Woolf, recorded with great sensitiveness the marvellous details of the past. Pointed Roof (1915), the first novel in the long series, Pilgrimage, she dedicated her energy from 1912 to her death, in 1957, is the first example of the use of the stream of consciousness technique in English. She preferred the term “interior monologue” however. I am going to consider a short story she published in August 1924, called “The Garden”.

“Refleurir”:5 Colette’s garden of plenitude After her husband’s death, Claudine wishes to renew herself, to forget the pain and remember the happy moments of her past life. Her garden, the animals in it, the blossoming flowers keep a promise of

3 Colette, L’Entrave (1913), Paris: Librio, 2013, 113: “Il n’y a pas de remède à son mystère” and “L’amour, c’est ce choc douloureux et toujours recommencé, contre une paroi qu’on ne peut pas rompre”. 4 Ibid., 66. 5 “Blossoming again”, in Colette, La retraite sentimentale (1907), Paris: Gallimard Folio, 1977, 228.