Katherine Mansfield
Page 34
In 1903 and 1908 two volumes of Chekhov's short stories appeared in London. The 1903 collection, translated by R. E. C. Long and published by Duckworth, bore the title The Black Monk. It contained twelve stories, and ‘Spat' khochetsia’, there rendered as ‘Sleepyhead’, was among them. That, I think, disposes of the idea that ‘Spat' khochetsia’ could not have been available to an English reader in 1909.
E. M. Almedingen
Sir – The extensive space you give, in your issue of 19 October, to Miss E. M. Almedingen's analysis of the likenesses between Chekhov's story ‘Sleepyhead’ (as the title appears in the published translation) and Katherine Mansfield's ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’ places undue and distorting emphasis upon what is after all a minor matter. The similarities between the two stories have already been examined by Miss Elizabeth Schneider (Modern Language Notes, June, 1935), again in the Mercure de France (I think in an issue of about 1940; the exact reference is not accessible to me at present). A detailed comparative analysis of several of Katherine Mansfield's stories and Chekhov's appears in Dead Reckonings in Fiction, by Dorothy Brewster and Angus Burrell, so that Miss E. M. Almedingen may be spared further research.
Originally ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’ was published by Orage in his journal the New Age. I am inclined to think that Katherine Mansfield deliberately adapted the story as a literary exercise, and was careless, rather than devious, about acknowledgement when it appeared in print. It is exceedingly unjust to ascribe her unwillingness to have In a German Pension reprinted to the fact that she knew she had ‘copied’ a Chekhov story a decade before. She took her calling as a writer very seriously. As she matured, her whole consuming endeavour was to attain the greatest possible fidelity to her understanding of life. However one may estimate her achievement (and the stories do persist in being read, in the United States, in France, in Italy, even in England), her sincerity is beyond question. When she writes that she is not proud of her early work, she speaks truthfully; she is referring to attitude, judgement, interpretation of experience, apprehension of truth, the constant preoccupations of her closing years, as one can readily find in her Journal and her Letters. To impugn her integrity is to impugn the substance of the intense spiritual struggle which culminated in her death at Fontainebleau.
Sylvia Berkman Via Raimondo da Capua 4, Rome
9 NOVEMBER 1951
Sir – In the course of writing a biography of Katherine Mansfield I have tried to clear up the case of ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’ and ‘Spat' khochetsia’, and to determine its bearing on the whole Mansfield–Chekhov question.
I am convinced that Katherine Mansfield did not know the English version of ‘Spat’ khochetsia’, published in 1903, when she was a schoolgirl in London, in The Black Monk and Other Stories. Neither in the copious ‘Reading Notes’, which she kept at school and later, nor in a collection of letters of the time which I have seen, nor in the recollections of intimate friends with whom she invariably discussed her latest literary ‘discoveries’ as a girl, is there a single reference to Chekhov.
I believe that her means of access to the story was either a German or even a Polish translation, and that she encountered it in 1909.
‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’ was first published by A. R. Orage in the New Age in February 1910, immediately after Katherine Mansfield's sojourn in Bavaria. It was the first story of hers that Orage printed. I incline to the belief that she was introduced to ‘Spat' khochetsia’ – and to the Russian concept of the short story in general – by one of the enthusiastic literary Poles whom she met in Wörishofen; that she may never have read it for herself but had it read to her (though a direct reading from the German seems more likely); that she tried her hand at recomposing it as an exercise; and that she offered it, rather naughtily, to Orage on her return in the belief that it had not previously appeared in English.
Miss Almedingen's insinuation that the real reason for Katherine Mansfield's reluctance to allow a reprint of In a German Pension (which contained the story in question, with others belonging to the Bavarian episode) was a fear of being found out this time will not stand up beside the facts. It implies a furtiveness which had no place in Katherine Mansfield's character, and which her subsequent removal of the prohibition belies. I am sure Miss Almedingen would not have made it had she been familiar with the severe self-criticisms contained in the Letters and the Journal, and in certain of the Athenaeum reviews reprinted in Novels and Novelists. She would have known that Katherine Mansfield didn't waste shame on youthful peccadilloes, but did feel deeply about the facile satire of the rest of In a German Pension, satire that had been welcomed with anti-German glee in 1912.
As to the larger question of whether Katherine Mansfield imitated Chekhov or derived her method from him, the starting point for that is not, in my opinion, ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’, but an earlier story. ‘The Tiredness of Rosabel’, written in 1908 when K.M. was nineteen and had not (as I submit) read anything of Chekhov's, embodies, with all its immaturities, all the essential features by which a characteristic Katherine Mansfield story can be recognized. It was a fluke which foreshadowed her later work with perfect originality and remarkable completeness. Coming after it, ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’ was in the nature of an exercise, an á la maniére de Chekhov by an artist who had already hit upon her personal métier.
Antony Alpers
Sir – I apologize for this further trespass on your space, but how does Miss Berkman explain ‘undue and distorting’ emphasis on what she calls ‘a minor matter’, and what is, in fact, the whole theme of the story? Katherine Mansfield's self-confessed unwillingness to have the story reprinted is, I believe, a point in her favour rather than otherwise. Miss Berkman is inclined to believe that the story was deliberately adapted ‘as a literary exercise'. Even if I were prepared to accept that, I would still maintain that such ‘literary exercises’, if printed at all, should be accompanied by a frank acknowledgement of the source. Anyone wholly unacquainted with Chekhov's work, either in the original or in a translation, would naturally accept ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’ as an original story, and it is not.
E. M. Almedingen
16 NOVEMBER 1951
Sir – May I interpose with a possible explanation of the ‘Sleepy’ story mystery? Among the snares besetting the pathway of the short-story writer are those kind creatures who insist upon telling you incidents for you to ‘write up’. Their episodes are always personally experienced by them, or the participants are their actual acquaintances, it is real life, they vouch for its truth, and so forth. These realities generally fail to arouse any enthusiasm in the writer's bosom, but very very occasionally he may be inspired to use a piece of such material. This kind of thing has happened to me three times – with rather embarrassing results. I can quite well see that this story of ‘Sleepy’ came to Katherine Mansfield in such a way, was told to her by a person who claimed to know the participants personally in a real-life story.
My own first instance was presented to me in a country inn near Oxford where an old thatcher related an excellent yarn about a friend of his ‘dead these thirty year, can see his gravestone over there in churchyard,’ etc., and so on. I wrote up the story, published it, got paid for it, gave the old thatcher a present, and a few years later came across the undoubted origin of my thatcher's yarn in The Hundred Merry Tales referred to by Shakespeare in Much Ado About Nothing. My second example was a clear case of appropriation by a reader from one of Stephen McKenna's novels. Fortunately I was made aware of it in time and destroyed the manuscript. The third case likewise was told me as a true tale, not fiction. I wrote it and published it in the usual way. Some time later I read a story in the Cornhill which was obviously based on my tale. I kicked up a fuss about such ‘blatant plagiarism’, but was soon convinced that the Cornhill writer had never heard of me, but had derived his material from a source which if not identical with mine was closely related!
I have no doubt at all that some similar circumstance
betrayed Katherine Mansfield, that someone who had read or heard of Chekhov's tale told it to her as original material, and that the questions of whether she understood Russian or had access to early German or French translations of Chekhov, and the dates thereof, are of no importance. Incidentally, I must say that Miss Almedingen's ‘discovery’ was common knowledge twenty years ago.
Although I neither knew Katherine Mansfield nor corresponded with her, I am as convinced of her artistic integrity as Miss Berkman and Mr Alpers; nobody who has read her sympathetically, as well as delightedly, could have any possible doubt of that, while you have only to read In a German Pension to understand her later reluctance to republish such minor work.
As to whether she was influenced by Chekhov – why of course she was! The writer who has not been has still a lot to learn in the art on which she conferred so much distinction.
A. E. Coppard
23 NOVEMBER 1951
Sir – Writing as one of the few surviving members of the staff of the New Age under Orage's editorship, who also knew Katherine Mansfield, there can be no question about the derivative character of her stories. At that time (1906–8), I had read many of Chekhov's short stories, which were available in several volumes in English translations.
The theme of ‘Spat' khochetsia’ reappeared in Katherine Mansfield's moving story ‘A Day in the Life of Ma Parker’. The derivative nature of her stories was the subject of several mild protests from me to Orage; but they were without effect as Orage was a close friend of Katherine Mansfield, he being with her at Fontainebleau at her death.
Some other books from which Katherine Mansfield derived the basis of her stories were Hubert Crackanthorpe's remarkable volumes of short stories, Wreckage and Sentimental Studies, many of which first appeared in the Yellow Book. Others were Henry Harland's Grey Roses and Mademoiselle Miss, and George Egerton's Keynotes and Discords. Two French authors she apparently knew well were Villiers de Lisle Adam, whose Contes cruels is perhaps the most borrowed from collection of short stories (except E. A. Poe) in literature, and Barbey D'Aurevilly. I had happened to have read these authors with some attention, so I could trace many of the themes of Katherine Mansfield's stories back to their origins. Orage's reply to my remonstrance was that all writers of fiction, other than the rare genius like Poe, were derivative, and he quoted many examples from leading figures in the history of literature in support of his action in publishing Katherine Mansfield's stories. Yet he was very critical of other forms of literary borrowing then and now indulged in by some of the leading figures in literature.
C. H. Norman
Sir – Miss Almedingen has asked me to explain the phrases ‘undue and distorting emphasis’ and ‘a minor matter’ in my earlier letter in the Chekhov-Katherine Mansfield exchange. To isolate the ambiguous origin of ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’, written in 1910, drawing from it a damaging insinuation against Katherine Mansfield's integrity a decade later, places an emphasis upon the matter which throws it out of proper focus (distorts). It may be worth remarking that at the very time Katherine Mansfield rejected In a German Pension as ‘too immature’, ‘not good enough’, for the same reasons she rigorously excluded all the stories she had written before 1914 from the collection she was preparing for Bliss. In its relationship to her development as a woman and a writer, the whole ‘Spat' khochetsia’ incident is of distinctly subsidiary (minor) importance.
Sylvia Berkman
14 DECEMBER 1951
Sir – Will you allow me to sum up the question? Of the correspondents who have written on this subject, Mr Middleton Murry thought that the Chekhov story could not have been accessible to Katherine Mansfield. Miss Berkman thought it to have been ‘a deliberately adapted literary exercise’. Mr Alpers had an idea that the Chekhov story may have come to Katherine Mansfield via some Poles met in Germany. Mr Coppard dismissed all the findings as irrelevant, and Mr Norman recorded his own impression of the derivative character of Katherine Mansfield's stories – (incidentally I do not, pace one of the correspondents, claim to have made any ‘discovery’) – but nobody, except Mr Norman, seemed prepared to admit that a story written by Chekhov in 1888 came to be used by Katherine Mansfield in a manner far beyond the scope allowed by mere influence. Bernard Shaw was indebted to Chekhov and, incidentally, in an article in Pravda he said that the idea of Heartbreak House had come to him after studying Chekhov, but Shaw's play is no echo of Chekhov's.
Katherine Mansfield tried to find her way, and very likely she would have found it, had she been allowed more time, but it is a pity that a writer so gifted never acknowledged her debt to one of the greatest masters of the short story, and I still hold that it was a debt which cannot be explained by mere ‘influence’, at least, to anyone really familiar with Chekhov's work. I came to read Katherine Mansfield with an open mind – certainly with no intention of ‘damaging’ her integrity, but I did not see why such a curious example of unacknowledged imitation should pass without comment.
E. M. Almedingen
21 DECEMBER 1951
Sir – Katherine Mansfield has been left so bedraggled by the animus of this belated attack upon her, which she, being dead, is unable to meet, that I beg to be allowed a comment on Miss Almedingen's summing up.
The point at issue is how did Katherine Mansfield come to write that particular story ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’, for nobody could be so stupid as to deny that its origin is Chekhov's story ‘Sleepy’ – the evidence glares at you. I have not dismissed Miss Almedingen's findings as irrelevant, but I certainly reject her interpretation of the evidence and have cited three examples from my own experience as a short-story writer which indicate a far more probable solution of the little mystery. Furthermore, if Katherine Mansfield was ‘merely copying’ Chekhov's tale, as Miss Almedingen contends, why did she alter it so calamitously? Her version contains only three items actually paralleled in ‘Sleepy’, the impact of the visitors, the bright idea, and the murder, the latter being, of course, the dominating intention of both tales. Apart from this, as Miss Almedingen herself insists, the Mansfield version is very different, and inferior, both in structure and décor, Chekhov's marvellously adjusted pre-history of the sad little Varka being replaced by the ineffectual intrusion of three other children, one of whom, Miss Almedingen may care to note, is rather startlingly named Anton!
Mr C. H. Norman, appearing for the prosecution, is altogether summary. ‘Writing as one of the few surviving members of the staff of the New Age… there can be no question about the derivative character of her stories.’ I may be dull, but this seems to me to be a complete non sequitur. He goes on to assert that Katherine Mansfield derived the bases of her stories from many other writers besides Chekhov; he names five of these but omits to give any instances of such derivations beyond the extraordinary assertion that the theme of ‘Sleepy’ reappears in ‘A Day in the Life of Ma Parker’. This piles such a ramshackle Pelion on Miss Almedingen's doubtful Ossa that one obtains quite a clue to the process whereby that wretched sheep-stealing Shakespeare reft all the glamour from high-souled Francis Bacon, de Vere, Uncle Tom Cobley and all.
A. E. Coppard
Bibliography
I. WORKS BY KATHERINE MANSFIELD
Stories and articles are found in the New Age, 1910, 1911, 1917, Rhythm, 1912-13, the Blue Review, 1913 and Signature, 1915.
In a German Pension, Stephen Swift, London, 1911; Knopf, New York, 1922; Constable, London, 1926.
Prelude, Hogarth Press, London, 1918.
Je ne parle pas français, Heron Press, London, 1920.
Bliss and Other Stories, Constable, London, 1920; Knopf, New York, 1921.
The Garden Party and Other Stories, Constable, London, 1922; Knopf, New York, 1922.
The Doves' Nest and Other Stories, Constable, London, 1923; Knopf, New York, 1924.
Poems edited by J. M. Murry, Constable, London, 1923; Knopf, New York, 1924.
Something Childish and Other Stories, Constable, London, 1924; Knopf,
New York, 1924.
The Aloe, Constable, London, 1930; Knopf, New York, 1930.
Novels and Novelists edited by J. M. Murry, Constable, 1930. These are the reviews she wrote for the Athenaeum.
Stories by Katherine Mansfield, Knopf, New York, 1930. Approximately in chronological order.
Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield, Knopf, New York, 1937; Constable, London, 1945. This edition, which contains all the stories from In a German Pension, Bliss, The Garden Party, The Doves’ Nest and Something Childish, is still available in hardback.
‘Brave Love’, a story written in 1905 and never published, was printed by Margaret Scott in Landfall, the New Zealand quarterly, 1972.
Undiscovered Country edited by Ian Gordon, Longman, London, 1974, contains all the New Zealand stories, including some omitted by Alpers.
Katherine Mansfield: Publications in Australia 1907–9 edited by Jean Stone, Sydney, 1977. Includes some early material not available elsewhere.
The Stories of Katherine Mansfield edited by Antony Alpers, Oxford University Press, 1984, has useful notes, but, although it is described as the ‘definitive edition’, omits several stories and some, but not all, fragmentary stories.
Among the many paperback editions in print are a Penguin Collected Stories (same text as the Constable hardback); separate Penguin editions of In a German Pension, Bliss and The Garden Party; a Selected Stories chosen by D. M. Davin (Oxford University Press) and an Everyman Classics Selected Stories chosen by the present author. The Aloe is also available from Virago.
2. LETTERS
The Letters of Katherine Mansfield edited by J. M. Murry, Constable, London, 1928, 2 vols.; Knopf, New York, 1929, 1 vol.
Katherine Mansfield's Letters to John Middleton Murry 1913–22 edited by J. M. Murry, Constable, London, 1951; Knopf, New York, 1951.