ENNEAGRAM PROFILES
Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry
The love affair of a bohemian and an iconoclast
Fives bring an inquiring, intellectual temperament, the habit of asking questions and of being interested in a wide variety of things and of being willing to break with old conventions. Fours contribute an appreciation of aesthetics and of the effect that ideas and discoveries have on people: feelings and unconscious processes are powerful and are not to be taken lightly (Enneagram Institute, Enneagram Type Four with Enneagram Type Five: What each type brings to the relationship)¹
When Katherine Mansfield met John Middleton Murry in London in December 1911, she was the newly-published author of a book of short stories and he was an Oxford graduate dipping his toes into the world of journalism and literary criticism. In April 1912, Murry moved into Mansfield’s flat as a lodger, and in time they became lovers. From then on and until Mansfield’s death at the age of 34, despite many ups and downs, they remained a couple. They were finally able to marry in 1918, when Mansfield’s divorce from her first husband was finalised.
In terms of the Enneagram personality typing system, theirs was a relationship that had all the hallmarks of an Enneagram Type Four (Mansfield) with a Type Five (Murry). They tended to see their love (friends had the same impression) as private and child-like, as if they were babes in the wood, clinging together against the demands of a harsh external world.
According to the Enneagram Institute, a Four/Five relationship often has a ‘quirky and unique character all of its own,’ perhaps because ‘both share an “outsider” status.’² It is true that Murry and Mansfield were both, in a way, outsiders in the London literary world of the early 20th century. Katherine was a New Zealander, trying to make her way as a writer in the face of snobbery about her ‘colonial’ background. Jack had grown up poor in a South London suburb and only achieved a good education through dint of his father’s bizarre efforts to cram him with facts as a child. Though he adapted himself in order to fit in socially at school and later at Oxford, he never felt that he essentially belonged in an effortlessly moneyed and cultured milieu.
Neither of them was afraid of controversy. Before they met, Katherine had lived a wilder, more ‘bohemian’ life than Jack; she had had sexual encounters with both men and women, contracted gonorrhoea, survived at least one miscarriage, and had left her first husband on the night of their wedding. Though on the surface more conventional, Jack was nevertheless determined to plough his own furrow. He upset his parents by making a new home for himself with a farming family in the Cotswolds , during the vacations from Oxford. On an extended stay in Paris, he fell deeply in love with Marguerite, an uneducated French girl, and later wrote in his autobiography that ‘if I could have seen my way to even the barest livelihood, I would have married her.’³ Later, in his professional life as a critic, Murry would often take the role of iconoclast; he was a romanticist at a time when literary criticism was moving in a different direction. During WW2 he was an outspoken pacifist, then later changed his mind and advocated a pre-emptive war against Soviet Russia.
Neither Type Fours nor Type Fives are naturally adept at negotiating the practicalities of life or making money. In the case of the Five, there are often ‘ deep insecurities about being able to function successfully in the world’ (Enneagram Institute, Type Five Overview).⁴ Despite Murry’s academic success (he took a First at Oxford) he writes in his autobiography: ‘I was terrified of life … my attempts to take the plunge into it were pathetic.’⁵ The Four, on the other hand, is so focused on their inner life and the often wild fluctuation of their feelings, that they can feel ‘exempt from ordinary ways of living’ (Enneagram Institute, Type Four in Brief).⁶ Even when it came to her work, Katherine’s passionate love for writing could sometimes render her helpless. In her journal entry for 31st May 1919, she writes of it as her substitute for religion: ‘The temptation is to kneel before it, to adore, to prostrate myself, to stay too long in a state of ecstasy before the idea of it. I must be more busy about my master’s business.’⁷
Over the course of their lives together, Mansfield and Murry were rarely comfortably off and in 1914 Murry was declared bankrupt. Their financial insecurity, together with sometimes ill-judged decisions, meant that Mansfield and Murry clocked up at least sixteen changes of address in their eleven or so years together, within England alone. There were also repeated sojourns abroad that Katherine made (sometimes with Jack), due to her declining health.
Not that they relished all the changes. Since boyhood, and despite growing up in an urban setting, Murry had felt ‘a blind hunger for the country’.⁸ Although Mansfield was more drawn to cities than Murry, they developed a joint dream of living together quietly in the countryside, working companionably at their separate writing projects. The first attempt to make this dream a reality, in a rented cottage in Sussex, was short-lived. Against their will, they had agreed to share the cottage with their friends, Henri Gaudier and Sophie Brzeska, but the two couples fell out spectacularly before the experiment even began. A month after moving in, the publisher of Rhythm, the literary magazine they edited together, went bankrupt, leaving them with crippling debts for years to come and forcing them to abandon the cottage and return all the furniture they had purchased for it on hire purchase.
Further country cottages were rented for short periods but financial difficulties, the stress of being parted when Murry had to work in London and the quarrelling of friends close by (principally D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda!) took their toll. It was not till the winter months of 1915/1916 which they shared together in Bandol, South of France, that the idyll became a reality. During this time, which Murry described as ‘a period of simple happiness together, when every day was pure delight,’⁹ they were alone together: Murry writing his book on Dostoevsky and Mansfield bringing to birth her wonderful story — The Aloe (a longer version of her short story, Prelude). Katherine’s friend, Ida Baker, later described this time of ‘harmony and felicity’: ‘ they both worked hard during the day, sitting either side of the same table to write, and in the evenings they would relax together.’¹⁰ For this all too brief period, they experienced what a Type Four and a Type Five can be to each other, at their best. As the Enneagram Institute puts it, ‘They generally find each other stimulating and are tolerant of each other’s idiosyncrasies. Both inspire creativity in the other and give permission to the other to be themselves and follow their own inspirations.’¹¹
If those months in Bandol were to be their happiest, Katherine’s worsening health (she was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1917) and the separations it necessitated were to place increasing pressures on the couple during the following years. The Enneagram Institute’s outline of the potential trouble spots or issues in a Type Five and Type Four pairing describes almost exactly what happened in Mansfield and Murry’s relationship.
The greatest area for discord in a Four/Five pairing is that Fours are emotional types and tend to push for more contact and intimacy, sometimes becoming overly demanding, whereas Fives are thinking types and tend to push for more detachment and space in the relationship, sometimes becoming more reclusive and private. Fours can experience Fives as being too intellectual and feel that Fives are analyzing them rather than sympathizing with their emotional needs and states. They can also feel that Fives are unavailable and detached, uncaring and unresponsive to their needs in their relationship. On the other hand, Fives can see Fours as bottomless pits of emotional needs who drain their time and energy. Fives also feel that Fours’ emotionality reflects a lack of rationality or is a sign of immaturity that seems potentially dangerous and out of control.¹²
As Katherine became more ill and escaped to the climate of the Mediterranean during the cold, wet, English winters, she and Jack were frequently separated: she staying in hotel rooms and villas in Italy, Switzerland and the South of France, he living and working in England. Although Murry needed to be in London to earn money, both at reviewing books for newspapers and at his translation work for the War Office, Katherine often felt that he had abandoned her to cope with her illness alone. Even when they were together, as in London during the summer of 1920, she often felt that he was not there for her. In her journal entry for 12th August, she describes powerfully her terrible cough with its ‘dragging, boiling, bubbling sound... Life is — getting a new breath. Nothing else counts.’ Yet the torment is heightened by Murry’s response. ‘J. is silent, hangs his head, hides his face with his fingers as though it were unendurable.’ Mansfield fancies she can see him analysing the experience of having to witness her suffering, and imagines him later writing an account of it: ‘every fresh sound makes my nerves wince … I could do nothing all day, my hands trembled …’¹³
From Murry’s point of view, however, what Mansfield asked of him was almost too much to give. Even before her illness, she had been prone to dramatic mood swings and restlessness. Jack writes of the ‘familiar pattern’¹⁴ whereby Katherine would be elated when arriving in a new place, only to plunge down into despair within days. She had always been prone to feeling abandoned if she did not receive his letters: ‘do not leave me like this without news,’ she wrote to him from France in December 1915, ‘it is so cruel — cruel.’¹⁵ But as the tuberculosis took increasing hold, the demands made of Murry became acute. When Katherine rejoined him from France in 1918, he was shocked at ‘the gaunt and bright-eyed shadow’ of the woman he knew, at the amount of weight she had lost. Katherine’s divorce had come through and they were at last free to marry, but they did so under the cloud of her illness, and it was a disappointing affair. Katherine complained that Jack was not happy and loving but he was struggling to do what she seemed to demand, to ‘ignore her illness altogether.’¹⁶ Murry felt her approach to her condition was irrational and dangerous yet he could not bear to cause her more pain by challenging her.
When they arranged for Katherine to go to Cornwall to convalesce while Jack stayed in London to get their new home ready, she accused him of being happy to be rid of her. No doubt the TB affected her moods and ate away at her resilience, but emotional neediness and the potential for cruelty had always been a part of her character. ‘I feel in your letters,’ she writes from Cornwall, ‘(your anguish) is lifting and you are breathing again. ‘She’s away and she is famously “all right”. Now I can get on.’¹⁷ With the emotional intelligence of the Four, Katherine was able to home in on one element of what Jack probably was feeling. He wrote back, protesting that she was right, he was happy that she was going away, to rest in the sun, with good food and the company of a friend, but that was only because he was desperate for her to feel better and for them to have a future together. No doubt Katherine would have been unable to argue with the logic of his reply, but it was not logic she was craving but reassurance.
There was anguish and misunderstanding in Mansfield and Murry’s relationship, but there was also great joy. To Jack, Katherine felt able to show the vulnerability that was hiding under her cynical, aloof manner. In a letter to her ‘dearest Bogey darling’ in May 1921 (Bogey was her pet name for him), Katherine describes what she thinks Love is: ‘It is the drawing out all that is noblest and finest in the soul of the other.... That is, I think, the relationship between lovers, and it is in this way that, because they give each other their freedom (for evil is slavery) they ‘ought’ (not in the moral sense) to serve each other.’ She felt that, at times, they had been able to rise to that kind of love.¹⁸ For his part, Murry found that, with Mansfield, he could ‘be real, and with no one else.’ He writes in his autobiography: ‘With her I felt free and careless, gay and confident, as though the immense accumulation of an artificial self, which had been gathering about me ever since I could remember, were suddenly lifted from me.’¹⁹
As Katherine’s illness worsened, she and Jack sought to escape the painful, frightening present by retreating together mentally into the private dream they must have known could never come true. They would live simply off the land in a farmhouse-cottage, writing and printing their own books, surrounded by a clutch of children, happy in their love and safe from the outside world. The house was to be called The Heron Farm. There is no way of knowing whether, in a TB-free world, they could have realized the dream; their relationship was never without its tensions and periods of separation.
In the last year of her life, Mansfield grew further apart from Murry. She was increasingly interested in seeking healing of a more spiritual sort and attended esoteric lectures in London in the summer of 1922. With the rational bent of the Type Five, Murry was desperate for her to place her hope in medical treatment and he did not support her decision to join the spiritual teacher Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, near Paris, in October 1922.
It would seem, from her letters, that Katherine did find some measure of the peace she was seeking, through her time in the community. Full of enthusiasm, she wanted to share what she had found with Jack and wrote, asking him to come and visit her. When he did so, on Jan 9th, 1923, he found her ‘very pale, but radiant.’ She explained to him that she now felt able to love him in a new way, free of all neediness and clinging (the characteristic response of a Type Four to the perceived withdrawal of a Type Five).²⁰ Describing this conversation later, Murry wrote that in choosing to come to the Institute she had been very fearful, but ‘by acting in spite of her fears, she had overcome them. By risking losing me she had found her love for me; it was entire and perfect.’ He went on to write. ‘Truly as I looked at her, while I listened, she seemed a being transfigured by love, absolutely secure in love.’²¹
[1] Relationship Type 4 with Type 5 — The Enneagram Institute
[2] Relationship Type 4 with Type 5 — The Enneagram Institute
[3] Between Two Worlds, published by Jonathan Cape, London, 1935, p142.
[4] Type Five: The Investigator — The Enneagram Institute
[5] Between Two Worlds, p.198.
[6] Type Four: The Individualist — The Enneagram Institute
[7] Journal of Katherine Mansfield, ed. J. Middleton Murry, published by Constable, London, 1954, p.161.
[8] Between Two Worlds, p.35.
[9] Ibid, p.393.
[10] Katherine Mansfield: The Memories of LM, published by Virago Press, London, 1985, p.97.
[11] Relationship Type 4 with Type 5 — The Enneagram Institute
[12] Relationship Type 4 with Type 5 — The Enneagram Institute
[13] Journal, p.207.
[14] Between two Worlds, p.482.
[15] Katherine Mansfield’s Letters to John Middleton Murry, 1913 to 1922, published by Constable, London, 1958, p. 54.
[16] Between the Worlds, p. 481.
[17] Ibid, p.483.
[18] Katherine Mansfield’s Letters to John Middleton Murry, p.637.
[19] Between the Worlds, p.210.
[20] ‘Romantic relationships can get very intense quickly and combust. Usually, the Five retreats first, feeling overwhelmed by the Four’s escalating needs and demands. Of course, the Five’s withdrawal triggers more clinging and neediness in the Four, more demands, and more endless analysis of the relationship itself.’ Relationship Type 4 with Type 5 — The Enneagram Institute
[21] Postscript, Katherine Mansfield’s Letters to John Middleton Murry, p.699–700.
