Ten stories from the ‘brilliant’ Katherine Mansfield set in New Zealand.
As Vincent O’Sullivan states, those encountering Mansfield’s stories for the first time have invariably found they ‘were alive, they were witty, they were moving, they covered new ground’. But with about 70 stories to choose from and a vast array of themes and approaches, where do you start, and how do you begin to understand and best appreciate her writing and achievements?
This series features selections of her best stories, grouped by subject and introduced by Mansfield scholar Vincent O’Sullivan, who is also a writer of fiction in his own right. Each volume offers a different way to view Mansfield’s work. This selection includes her most-loved stories about the New Zealand of her childhood. As O’Sullivan explains, his choices cover ‘everything of importance that happened to her, that she observed and experienced, between childhood in Wellington’s wooden houses, to her deciding in Switzerland in July 1922 that her final paragraph about a singing bird was the place for her to stop’.
Contents
Title Page
Introduction by Vincent O’Sullivan
The Woman at the Store
How Pearl Button was Kidnapped
Ole Underwood
Prelude
The Wind Blows
The Stranger
Her First Ball
At the Bay
The Doll’s House
Taking the Veil
About Katherine Mansfield
About Vincent O’Sullivan
Copyright
Introduction
I
Until Katherine Mansfield, few writers in English would have thought of writing only short stories. If they had, they were unlikely to have been taken very seriously. It is the reason why, among her friends who were also writers, and even with critics who admired her, for the most part she was thought of as brilliant, but minor. As reviewers were quick to point out, her stories were alive, they were witty, they were moving, they covered new ground. If comparisons were made, they were likely to be with the Russian Anton Chekov, who was very much in fashion, and none admired him more than Mansfield. But it would be quite wrong to think that what she took from Chekov explained the freshness of form and method that she brought to the English short story. Much of that had to do with the fact that she wrote as an outsider — she was not English, she was part of no coterie or group, and although she had a finely incisive eye for manners and fashions, she always, whether in England or Germany or France, wrote not from the centre, but from the margins, not as a person truly at home, but as the astute outsider.
She struck some of those who knew her well as deliberately not wanting quite to belong anywhere. Virginia Woolf was rather startled by her independence, her seeming not to care whether or not she conformed. D. H. Lawrence shrewdly saw that she expected to be made rather a fuss of, while insisting on keeping her distance. Others variously saw her as suspicious, constantly on guard, quick to strike, almost expecting to be hurt. Although those who knew her best — the Russian translator S. S. Koteliansky, the Scottish painter J. D. Fergusson, the American artist Anne Estelle Rice — remembered her remarkable warmth, her extraordinary courage, others were wary. Bertrand Russell considered her more intelligent than any woman he knew, but with a dark gift for penetrating to what people preferred to conceal. Virginia Woolf’s husband Leonard thought her funnier than anyone he knew. T. S. Eliot warned Ezra Pound that she was “a dangerous woman”. Even to the next generation, among those writers who admired her work but had not known her personally, there was a curious ambivalence. While Elizabeth Bowen mourned her absence as her important missing contemporary, Bowen’s fellow Irish writer, Frank O’Connor, deplored her as “the brazen shop girl of literature”, loathing her personality and her sentimental games, yet lauded her turning herself “into a great writer”, doing what no other writer had done, and placing her, for that achievement, with Proust and Joyce.
There is another aspect of Mansfield’s life that has proved something of a problem. For several years she lived with, and then married, a man who for fifty years has taken something of a trouncing from biographers and commentators. John Middleton Murry was academically brilliant, a fine critic, an inexhaustible journalist, and roundly disliked by many of his contemporaries. There is a strain of Mansfieldian commentary that still rather enjoys dancing on his grave, quite missing the telling fact that Mansfield loved him more than any other man, and meant it when she once told him “we are grown into each other like the wings of one bird”. More than half of her marvellous correspondence, already considered by many as placing her among the great letter writers, was written to Murry. He obsessed her thinking for ten years. And although it has become something of a knee-jerk response to judge him harshly for cracking her up as more sentimental, more saintly, than she ever was, it is only because of his diligence and care for her papers that we know as much of her as we do. Whether we like it or not, Katherine Mansfield chose to be Mrs Murry.
The Mansfield story of illness, early death, such limited time, is a grim one. It is also surprisingly exhilarating. She was dying, slowly and painfully, from her mid-twenties. For much of the time she was confused, lonely, depressed, battling a dark fury at what circumstances dealt her. But she was tough and witty and resilient, and refused to be intimidated by the fact that, as she said with a nod towards Chekov, “for me they already are chopping down the cherry trees”. Writing mattered to her until nothing else was anywhere near as important. And she was severe in how she judged herself. She knew her limitations, and spelled them out. Even after finishing such stories as “Prelude” or “At the Bay”, she took herself to task for not doing them better. Only with “The Daughters of the Late Colonel” did she come close to satisfying her own standards. Although even here she felt she was misunderstood by so admirable a reader as Thomas Hardy. He had written to congratulate her on what he thought a masterly story, but told her how he wanted to know more about those shy awkward sisters. How he missed the point, Mansfield thought. As if there was anything more to be said of them! For that is what a short story was. It was not, as was often supposed, a vivid glimpse of something larger. It was something totally complete in itself. There was nothing more to be said that needed to be said. Her stories were composed as deliberately as a poem. Their conciseness, their inevitability, their completeness, was what she worked towards. As she had once told Murry, when as the editor of a journal he asked her to trim a story back to fit the space he had, “You know how I choose my words; they can’t be changed. And if you don’t like it or think it wrong just as it is, I’d rather you didn’t print it.”
II
Although, year by year, Mansfield’s life reads as a constant challenge, an emotional and financial roller-coaster, the arc of her writing from her first story — as a nine-year-old girl in Wellington, but imagining herself in England — to the last — written in Switzerland a few months before her death, and set in the same street she lived in when she had penned her first — has an expansive, questing vibrancy. Her earliest stories, not surprisingly, were an imitative tribute to what any bright girl of her time might have been reading in her teens: accounts of English middle-class families and their timid adventures, the wealth of fairy stories then in vogue, the sudden revelation of reading Oscar Wilde, with his seductive agenda of paradox, defiance, the spell of art, the glamour of transgression. Mansfield filled notebook after notebook with her imitations, with a schoolgirl’s eager response to living in London, and with hints of her own country, her own city, increasingly nudging in.
“The Tiredness of Rosabel”, written during her return to Wellington from Queen’s College, is the first of her stories to take up what became a comp
ulsive theme: the young woman who faces a grim or hostile world. Her femmes seules, as they are sometimes called, will appear in some of her finest stories, from the pretty but impoverished shop assistant who catches glimpses of romance as she attends the pampered rich, to the ageing and lonely Miss Brill, whose bid for colour in her life is at last packed away with her fox fur, “its little cry” being her own as well. You might even argue that such stories are politics conducted by other means, Mansfield’s confronting poverty and gender inequality with fiction rather than placards, with an intense identifying with what the poor and solitary endure, with such figures as the skivvy in “The Life of Ma Parker”, where silent grief is all life means. There is that other kind of exploitation, too, the predatory sexual advance that is part of being poor. For the little governess, it comes as the seemingly kindly, old, German gentleman, with the marvellous detail of the nerve in his ancient knee ticking against her as he gropes; for the down-at-heel, over-the-hill actress in “Pictures”, it arrives as the blunt, fat man who buys her a drink, at the moment when poverty compels her to change, as one might say, one profession for another.
Not that Mansfield writes anything like insistent “social realism”. She is too stylish for that, taking delight in her narrative deftness, in the details that catch her eye, the vivid freshness of her turns of phrase. She was too independent a writer to join what might be called “a cause”, just as she seems so often drawn towards satire, with her gift for winkling out human weakness. It was a gift that also saved her from the sentimentality to which at times she sailed a little too close. One of the important points of her writing life, in fact, was the realisation when as a twenty-one year old she lived in Bavaria, carefully tucked out of sight by her mother as she waited for the baby she then lost, that the way to deal with something so fracturing as her personal circumstances was not to rage, as she did in one unsuccessful story from that time, but to bring to it a steely satiric eye, to sidestep personal complaint by mocking the world that surrounded it. Her first book, In a German Pension, came at the historical moment when the English and the Germans more than usually cast insults at each other, and Bavaria offered her a satirist’s dream. Her personal bitterness, however, found its voice in details that show sex for the nasty ruse it can be. As a disillusioned married woman considers, after attending a coarse local wedding, and while waiting for her drunken husband to come to bed, “all over the world the same; but, God in heaven — but stupid.”
It was this making fun of the Germans that first brought her name before the public, with the collection she later so disliked. She refused to have the book republished during the First World War, when it would have brought her easy money as anti-German propaganda. Yet it was the War that brought about the most significant change in how Mansfield wrote, the stories that turned her back towards the Wellington years she now accepted as the emotional centre to her life.
Already she had written a small group of stories that explored a very different New Zealand to the one she knew as a businessman’s daughter, and light years, one might say, from clever, privileged sisters and their cultivated families, like her own. They were part of a deliberate career ploy. When she had first met the young John Middleton Murry, he was editing a magazine that deliberately set out to impose modern ideas on Edwardian complacency. His journal Rhythm took as its motto a line from J. M. Synge, the declaration that “Before art can be modern it must learn to be brutal.” Mansfield answered the call with New Zealand back-blocks stories of violence, hysteria, child depravity, raw colonial turmoil. There is nothing else like “The Woman at the Store” or “Millie” or “Ole Underwood” in the rest of her writing. They are stories that see her country with a disturbing, heightened realism that answered that call to brutality, and that she soon put aside as she returned to her social satires, to her isolated women and smart literary coteries.
As her biographies rightly underscore, the great change in Mansfield’s writing followed the death of her younger brother in the early years of the War. Leslie was her favourite among her siblings. Before his being sent to the Front, they had gone over their memories of life together back in Wellington, their childhood in that world of quiet middle-class certainties and now distant charm. Once her brother was dead, those memories flared again on the world’s far other side, as she set out to recover them in what she called “a kind of special prose”. It was the city and the suburbs of her girlhood she was now driven to reveal as she had never yet attempted, a celebration of “that lovely time when we were both alive”. There was an almost religious zeal to this artistic mission, “for one moment to make our undiscovered country leap into the eyes of the old world”. And so she began on what at first she thought of as a novel, but trimmed back to the long short story “Prelude”. It is a luminous memory as well as an immediate evoking of her family as they leave the house where she was born in Thorndon for the remote, enchanted spaces of Karori, where a sense of childhood reality is raised, to quote Frank O’Connor, to something unique. These Wellington stories “set out to do something that had never been done before and to do it in a manner that had never been used before, a manner that had something in common with that of the fairy tale…. These stories are conscious, deliberate acts of magic, as though a writer were to go into a room where his beloved lay dead and try to repeat the miracle of Lazarus.”
There was a new maturity in what Mansfield wrote from then on, an emotional confidence, a finer stylistic poise. But there was her awareness, too, that the clock was ticking down. She made elaborate plans for what she intended to publish, drawing up ideas for stories she did not always write. She shuttled back and forth between London and the South of France, sometimes with Murry, sometimes alone, often with Ida Baker — the devoted friend who was indispensable but infuriated her — and drove herself to write in that narrowing terrain between urgency and desperation. Always tougher on herself than she need be, she was, as she said, “a writer first, a woman second”. Her stories now took in two worlds: the one she had come from, and wrote of with the hoarded emotional accuracy of distance, and that other world she knew as an adult, with its deceptions, its rigours, its dark spoiling ironies.
Wellington is there again in “The Doll’s House”, “The Voyage”, “Her First Ball” — the stories her name immediately brings to mind. But even there, in her breathing life into that past that now so drew her back, her gaze is too direct to flinch from what she called “the snail under the leaf”, the shadow that continually falls, as a world-weary older partner reminds the young girl in “Her First Ball”. And the girl’s answer in fact is the only one that life allows, which is to fling herself with delight into “the beautiful flying wheel” that is the dance of time.
In her last years the stories came quickly, as did the worsening of her health. Her notebooks record the swings of her moods, her depression, her resilience, her refusal to accept the dark figure at the door. At times her stories penetrate to how corrupt certain lives can be, stories as fine as “Je ne parle pas français” where the narrator’s moral void is dredged with scouring clarity, even with ambiguous charm. It was a story, as Murry astutely told her, where she was plumbing her own unconscious. There were stories, too, where her implacable eye turned on her own life as an invalid and as a demanding wife, as she does in “The Man Without a Temperament”, with its chilling pun on “Rot” at the story’s end. She goes even further into emotional corruption in “A Married Man’s Story”, which she put aside and did not come back to. But what survives is the closest she came to depicting the glitter of deliberate evil.
Not that many of the stories in her last years quite hit what she hoped for. She spoke of “raising into the light”, meaning a clarity, a simplicity, an uncluttered immediacy, that she thought prose so seldom achieved but must aspire to. She tends to speak of improving as an artist in the same way as she did of making oneself a worthier person. She is not afraid to accept such a word as “mystery” to convey what “acceptance of experienc
e” puts more prosaically. Some stories hint at it, and scholars argue about quite what it is that Mansfield means. But it was there, say, in the vision of the pear tree at the end of “Bliss”, and in that other extraordinary tree that concludes “The Escape”. There, too, in the curious frisson Linda feels as she looks at the moonlit aloe in “Prelude”, and that “our Else” finds in the little lamp of “The Doll’s House”, those moments are rare illumination. It is what the Colonel’s timid daughters almost apprehend. And it is what her last brief story, “The Canary”, is both about yet does not quite grasp, what the dead bird’s song had hinted at, in the last sentences of fiction that she wrote: “It is there, deep down, deep down, part of one, like one’s breathing. However hard I work and tire myself I have only to stop to know it is there, waiting. I often wonder if everybody feels the same. One can never know. But isn’t it extraordinary that under his sweet, joyful little singing it was just this — sadness? — Ah, what is it? — that I heard.”
Most of Mansfield’s stories, you might say, are brushings with possibility, even when grounded in their firm details of love, deceit, childhood, trust, and trust’s betrayals. These selections of her stories cover everything of importance that happened to her, that she observed and experienced, between childhood in Wellington’s wooden houses, to her deciding in Switzerland in July 1922 that her final paragraph about a singing bird was the place for her to stop.
Vincent O’Sullivan
April 2013
The Woman at the Store
— 1912 —
All that day the heat was terrible. The wind blew close to the ground; it rooted among the tussock grass, slithered along the road, so that the white pumice dust swirled in our faces, settled and sifted over us and was like a dry-skin itching for growth on our bodies. The horses stumbled along, coughing and chuffing. The pack horse was sick — with a big open sore rubbed under the belly. Now and again she stopped short, threw back her head, looked at us as though she were going to cry, and whinnied. Hundreds of larks shrilled — the sky was slate colour, and the sound of the larks reminded me of slate pencils scraping over its surface. There was nothing to be seen but wave after wave of tussock grass, patched with purple orchids and manuka bushes covered with thick spider webs.
New Zealand Stories Page 1