‘Making a Stay in X’: Suppressing Translation in ‘An Indiscreet Journey’

Summary

On 19 February 1915, Katherine Mansfield made her way by train from Paris to Gray to meet the French author, Francis Carco. He had been stationed there during World War One, and after making his acquaintance via John Middleton Murry, Mansfield believed herself to be in love with him. According to Antony Alpers, it was the discovery in Murry's notebook of the ‘confess[ion] to Gordon Campbell that he didn't know whether she was “more to him than a gratification”’, which finally led Mansfield to make her daring trip to France. By the time she had taken him as her lover, she admitted to herself that, ‘I don't really love him now I know him’, but the relationship had enough of an impact on her to be fictionalised in her short story ‘An Indiscreet Journey’. The elopement is also described in detail by Mansfield in her notebooks and in letters to both Carco and Murry, as well as in an unsent letter to Frieda Lawrence. From these, we are able to witness the ways in which Mansfield figures and refigures this event, hovering on the border between reality and fiction, altering and editing her actions and emotions so that any ‘true’ depiction of the event becomes occluded.

Before she embarks on her journey, her plan seems to her a fantasy that is intangible, yet once she is there it becomes a concrete reality in which, she tells Frieda, ‘England is like a dream’ (2/10). Once she finds herself back in the ‘real’ world of England, she decides to transform the event completely into fiction by writing it up as a story. I want to suggest that Mansfield's use of the French language helps her to turn the actual events into fiction, representing, as it does for her, otherness and fantasy. Indeed, the language seems inextricably linked to an association with her lover; her notebooks in particular reveal that during January and February 1915, as she made her plans to visit Carco, every mention of the French language makes her think of him. French becomes part of the disguise she adopts as she visits Gray, and the way in which Mansfield slips between French and English reveals how she attempts to bring her fantasy of Carco to life.