The great swimmers of literature

He has been familiar with water since childhood Catherine Mansfield (1888-1923), which this year marks one hundred years after his disappearance. Born in Wellington, New Zealand, at the southern end of the North Island on Cook Strait, her eyes were trained very early on to observe the fickle colors of sea and skies: “Crescent Bay was hidden under a white veil of mist coming from the sea… the white dunes were lost in the distance, the water was warm: of a marvelous and transparent blue, streaked with silver” (“On the bay”, 1921). She as a child, she would have learned to dive into those waters with sandy shores to learn by herself how her body could float and move easily. She knew how to gracefully describe her swims, attributing them to her characters in her stories about her: “She remained floating on the water, gently moving her hands, similar to fins, and letting the sea cradle her thin body and slender”. Katherine was petite, but the pleasure of being rocked by the sea waves, of swimming, of reading, of writing, gave wings to her short existence thanks to the fact that she was an expert in the art of listening, indispensable in the water and with the pen in hand. Whether or not she was aware of her impending fate, the desire to forge ahead, to live without fear, giving herself completely to her, led her, at the age of 15, to flee to England across the ocean. Twenty years old, her father wanted to call her back to his side and she spent a month and a half on her ship that brought her home from London. Have you been through storms? Have you dreamed of letting yourself slide into the water from the bridge and giving powerful, daring strokes among high waves? Wasn’t it the same with writing? Swim or write to sink into yourself, body and heart, write as a lunge of words (and strokes) that must be calibrated with skill. During the war she was on the French Riviera, in Bandol, in a villa overlooking the sea, beaten by the winds (“there must have been a storm like this when Shelley died”, she wrote in her diaries). She spent New Year’s Eve 1915 there. At seven in the morning, under a leaden sky, while it was cold outside, she plunged into a boiling sea, to escape the ghosts of her mind “always suspended on the edge of poetry” is sad. Katherine died early, aged 34, swimming and breathing training did not save her lungs: tuberculosis patient, she passed away in 1923, when Colette was in the height of summers in Brittany, where she braved the tides and taught her stepson Bertrand her favorite sport. The two swimming writers had a mutual friend, the writer Francis Carco, a regular visitor to Colette’s house in Rozven in the 1920s, by which time the liaison with Katherine during the war had already ended. Between Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf there were only six years of difference: Virginia was older than her and she will survive her almost twenty years. They weren’t exactly friends, too different in character, in choices, the first passionate, impetuous, the other more rigid in interpersonal relationships; they met only once, yet they kept an eye on each other, and in shared diary habit related thoughts bounced from one to the other. Curious that Woolf chose water, so loved by Mansfield and Colette, as an element in which to abandon her life: on March 28, 1941, at the age of 58, she headed towards the Ouse river, in the Sussex district, not far from Monk House, his home. She entered slowly, regardless of the cold, but not before having filled her pockets with stones to be sure of going to the bottom, she who couldn’t swim. And she began to walk with resolute steps, her eyes fixed on the murky, slightly undulating surface.