Customer Reviews

The Memories of LM

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It is one of the mysteries of literary history that nobody knows why Ida Baker stayed as long as she did with the unfortunate New Zealand-born author Katherine Mansfield.

It's not exactly that they were in love, but Ida seems so devoted to Katherine she is like a zombie. At the same time, her memories, written when she was past 80, are sharp and concise when it comes to remembering tiny details about the various apartments the two shared in the days before World War I. Typically Katherine Mansfield would take a grand bedroom, while Ida slept practically with the hogs, and emerge when Katherine wanted some laundry done or her meals served in silence. Why so devoted, I would have told her where to go quite early on, except of course she was so sick and I can imagine Ida's maternal side took precedence often over her hurt feelings.

Evidently Miss Baker, for so long discreet about her part in keeping Katherine Mansfield's dishes clean and making sure the dear thing didn't overexert herself, was stung by the publication of a biography that pretty much dismissed Baker as a significant force in her idol's life. So unfair! And so, in old age, she wrote it all down at last, as a rebuttal. She still thought it wise to use some fake initials as a pseudonym--a double blind, since "L.M." the initials she chose, you might think concealed someone with those initials, but no.

It remains to be seen what was Mansfield's own state of mind. Certainly in this book, as we see her through the adoring eyes of "L.M.," she's not so appealing. But some of this folie a deux has to be traced back to Ida's determined mummification of her mistress. From schooldays she petted and cosseted and spoiled Katherine, and Katherine got used to it just as you or I would do. Ida obviously made her believe she was her chattel, fit for bossing around and dealing with tradespeople and cleaning up afterwards when Ottoline Morrell or Virginia Woolf had gone home. It was just sort of cruel when Katherine, at her wits' end about her illness, finally dismissed Ida so she could join the Fontainebleau cult of Gurdjieff, and let Ida take a job at a factory to help support her. It's hard to read Mansfield's stories--which once I thought the most beautiful writing in the world--now that this Killing of Sister George storyline has come to light, yet everything comes round again