Chapter 15 Chapter 10

Forget, forget, erase everything, cover everything──Bai Xue said, it was a long time ago, it can never be reproduced, it can never torture you again, everything is gone... your wish has come true, You are safe, hidden, at peace -- free. ── 1921 At New Year's Day 1923, Harold Beecham was knighted for his services to the Dominion of New Zealand's finances.Then came the news of the death of his famous daughter, and a few weeks later he publicly acknowledged the duty of business to art. The Dominion of February 7 reported that "Yesterday Sir Harold Beecham donated an estate valued at £5,000 to £6,000 to sponsor the establishment of the Wellington National Gallery." The house is Catherine's last home in New Zealand and her last real home.In a letter to the Secretary of the Home Office, Sir Harold said that he had originally intended to leave it to his bequest upon death, "but recently I have decided to do so while I am alive." He does seem to have Catherine in mind when he made this decision, and the letter He also mentioned that he hoped to establish a love of art in the "best and truest form" among the younger generation. A few months later, his partner Walter? She paid £150,000, and he later gave the Turnbull Library £200 to buy first editions of her work.He gave Catherine Mansfield 2,600 pounds for living expenses, and her own real estate, excluding personal property, totaled 232 pounds.

After the funeral, Murray and Ida returned to England with sorrow.Murray soon invited Ida to Sussex to help him organize Catherine's papers and date earlier manuscripts.He wrote back to Otlin: "The only thing I care about now is that she must get her due status, and let people recognize her as the greatest writer of our time, with the best soul."Because Brett was very unhappy with Ada's involvement in the work, and Murray vigorously defended Ada.In fact, Brett wanted to marry Murray after Catherine died, and as early as February 1, he had to tell her that this idea must be dismissed immediately.Brett himself was so frustrated in every way that he couldn't bear to see this "big dolphin-like woman" dispose of Catherine's things and put her clothes on himself, and she sent Murray a letter, his reply It goes like this: Dear Brett: Got your letter and frankly I didn't like it, didn't like the insinuations you made about Edda.

You shouldn't, it's not worth it.. your letter is totally wrong, some insinuations are unbearable, you have no right to say "Ada tortured Catherine", do you think you never made Catherine miserable? Or myself, for the same reason? "She's that insensitive", really?If you haven't seen it, you can't say that, you have to wait a long time.. believe me, your attitude towards Edda has to be completely changed, really changed, uprooted and replanted before you can have good intentions.How could this simple fulfillment of duty, the rectification of your relationship with a fellow man as loving and loyal to Catherine as yourself, Virginia's sympathy, or anything else, compare to?Why take such a condescending attitude towards her, such a real high school student's air?Really, do you think Catherine would have depended on her for 20 years if she was like that?

It was not often that Murray wrote in such an agitated tone that, in fact, it betrayed his own complete disequilibrium.Another consequence of Murray's desperation was that he forgot to pay for Catherine's funeral, so that she could not stop wandering after her death. In 1929, a New Zealand worshiper found that her tomb was not in the permanent area, but was moved to a poor cemetery that could be used again, so he notified Harold Beecham, who ordered the British son-in-law Charlie Renshaw to go to Aiqi to deal with it For this matter, the tomb moved again. Gurdjieff and his family rest today in a prominent place a meter or two away, so friends are close by.

In 1923 Murray published "Dovecotes and Other Stories", followed by "Poems", then "Childish Tales", and in 1927 was the first edition of "Katherine Mansfield's Diary", which has kept Katherine alive for 30 years. A perfect image, the 1930 "Letter Collection" was also edited out of necessity, and many unkind comments on friends and fellow writers were deleted, so the image of Catherine displayed in front of the public conforms to Murray's "perfect image". ’ Catherine, and not to the essence of Beecham.Its admiration faded to embarrassment in Britain, where Murray was felt to have taken advantage of his late wife's work, while in France it aroused something bordering on cult.

Meanwhile, Murray founded Brothers magazine, which had a readership of nearly 15,000, but exhausted himself by shedding too many tears for Catherine in it, and was greatly influenced by Lawrence and Huxley in their own widely The merciless sarcasm of circulating fiction.By the 1940s, he was not very popular in England, overshadowing the value of her and his own works; gradually the concept of "English Chekhov" took root in people's minds, and for a long time critics and biographers No writer is immune to this influence. Now that she's had a natural death -- past the period of indifference that usually accompanies the death of a highly regarded author -- she can start from scratch, allowing the authenticity of her work to be valued.

Christopher Marlowe died in a hotel fight at the age of 28. If Shakespeare was stabbed to death at the same time, we can only find that he was just a little playwright with a little lyrical talent in the Elizabethan era; Catherine died at the age of 34, If Virginia Woolf committed suicide at this age, we would know that she had written "The Voyage" and nothing else; she would not have read "The Garden Party" and could not have written "Mrs. Dalloway" , modern reviews do not seem to have sufficient data available to study latent capacity and longitudinal imitation.

Elizabeth Bowen, in a striking 1960 quote, referred to Catherine as "our peer who died young".She had already suffered from lung disease when she first met Murray in 1911, and there may be traces of the disease in the "Aloe Vera" written in Bandar; and all her art from 1917 is like Keats or Stee The art of Finn Klein is also affected by the imminence of death.We have no reason to ask what would have happened if she had survived, the question itself is philosophically absurd, but one could explore what would have happened if she had been able to drag on longer--long enough to finish writing her own book, for example. The book conceived--just being in the cabin quietly, with her own clear language, with the title and beginning already drawn up, it's not impossible to form an idea of ​​what that book will be.

Murray has said that neo-subjectivist novelists, such as Joyce and Proust, seem to attempt "specially to represent the real," while writers such as Chekhov and Katherine Mansfield pursue "a The Art of Authentic Consistency".By 1921, she really no longer had that distracting thought, and she no longer had any other thoughts. ① Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), a British poet and playwright, had a certain influence on the drama creation of Shakespeare and others. ──Annotation ②Elizabeth Bowen (1899～1973), a British female novelist, her main works include "Last September", "Devil Lover", "Scenes and Conversations", etc. ──Annotation ③Stephen Crane (1871～1900), an American novelist, whose representative works include "Mei Ji" and so on. ──Annotation is based on the desire of the fashionable intellectual circles at that time.Her aborted book might have had a place in modern music that approximates the place that Maurice Ravel's music has in modern music: impeccable hearing, masterful use of existing tones, straight classical style With its structure, scale and clear and sharp outline, it all lends itself to this comparison.So we have a Ravel who didn't write Daphne and Chloe, is not considered a mediocre composer because the form she takes seems to lack weight, and she is not something to be ignored Mediocre.

The moral connotation of life, which is closely related to works, is difficult to evaluate. How can we evaluate the sincere pursuit of art by such a person who often deceives in his life?We must search for the elusive irony of life, and in the end, let the irony choose a letter from Cornwall written by Catherine's sympathetic enemy Frieda - who still wears Frieda's ring, "close to the bone Brilliant gold jewelry"--to conclude "She had to be simple, as we all will learn, but I did love her, and though she lied, she also knew the truth better than anyone else, and tried not to Let us see too many ugly things."

①Maurice Ravel (1875～1937), French composer.In addition to "Daphne and Croy" mentioned in this book, his representative works also include "Water Game", "Phantom of the Night", "Bolero" and so on. ──Annotation