In Memory of …
Katherine Mansfield

(By G. N. Morris)

(S. P. Andrew, photo.)
Katherine Mansfield.

On my rare visits to Wellington I do not fail to take a stroll down Tinakori Road. I go to reassure myself that a certain house is still there—that it has not yet been burnt or pulled down or even remodelled. I mean the house where Katherine Mansfield was born, just fifty years ago. Some years ago Eileen Duggan confessed that she could not pass this house without a stir of pain for the girl who lived there as Cassie Beauchamp. Quite recently O. N. Gillespie in this magazine has given us the dictum of a London journalist: “You can rest on your laurels in New Zealand now for a long time. One Katherine Mansfield is enough for you to produce every hundred years.” No doubt the average New Zealander will consider that statement an exaggeration. American and English critics, however, in dealing with the literature of this century, are unanimous in conceding a high place to K. M. She has been translated into at least eight European languages. The French indeed make definite claim to her, not only because she spent so many years in France and because she was buried at Fontainebleau, but also because they see in her own name—Beauchamp—an indication of a distant French ancestry. There is, too, a book of her stories in Japanese. This surely is world-wide recognition. I wonder when she will receive equal appreciation in her own country?

There was a story published as recently as 1935 in an American magazine. The writer had come to Wellington, as on a pilgrimage, and he went into a bookshop to make inquiries. He asked to be directed to a Katherine Mansfield shrine. Let us try to be fair. Let us concede that probably the bookseller was annoyed because this queer man was not a customer. His reply was: “They've put up a gate in her memory. You'll find it at the top of Molesworth Street.” Even after that the writer exhibits a faint surprise at finding that the memorial had been erected, not by a grateful public, but by her father. That story hurts, and it is difficult not to be bitter about it. One thinks of the French critic who dismissed the preoccupations of the Wellington of Katherine Mansfield's youth in a contemptuous “des affaires et du pot-au-feu.” But bitterness is futile. We are indeed not far enough removed from the days when food and warmth and shelter occupied all of our lives. It is a demerit inseparable from a new country. How shall the tree flower before its roots are firm and deep? In my more optimistic moments I think our budding time is near. But we must first overcome our ancient lack of faith. It is still necessary for a New Zealander to go abroad before we acknowledge his greatness. We do not yet believe enough in ourselves.

The memorial is the very heart of the Mansfield country. Close at hand are three of the homes in which K.M. has lived. A circle with this as centre, drawn to include Karori on one side and Muritai on the other, has within it the scenes of most of her New Zealand stories. Here she walked and scribbled and fretted and yearned after life. Amid all the beauty which has been created in Fitzherbert Terrace one can sit awhile to think about this girl. One thinks of the storm on the day of her birth, a storm which was prophetic, symbolic of the life of turmoil she was to lead. And she seemed to know it. At fifteen she wrote concerning a projected story: “Now to plan it—she is born in New Zealand on the day of the storm.” The wind was to blow through so many of her stories. Her friend Frieda Lawrence has said that Katherine hated a high wind. Really I think she loved it—love with a spice of fear. From those windows on many a night she must have watched the wind tossing the trees in the old pine avenue. Sometimes I regret that those trees are gone, old and gnarled and sombre though they were. I think she loved them, too, again with a spice of fear. Lest this should seem fantastic I quote from one of her French friends: “She loved to be afraid, listening to the wind at night chasing the leaves in the garden and slamming doors and shutters. She took a shuddering pleasure in it.” There is no denying it; the storm of her birthday remained always a part of her.

Those who can appreciate her artistry will not be content merely to hear this charming voice. What did she look like? What was the personality behind the vivid stories, the poignant Journal? Many of her friends page 26 page 27 have given us their impressions, but always you feel that there was something in K.M. which is not to be caught upon paper. That she had beauty all are agreed, and it was beauty of an exotic kind. Her fringe has been compared with Chinese and Japanese fashions. Sylvia Lynd for instance has written: “With her straight, square-cut black fringe, dark eyes and small aquiline nose Katherine Mansfield when last I saw her was not unlike one of those little dolls that, in Japan's less commercial days, were among the most precious and transient treasures of one's toy cupboard. Perhaps it was the dressing-gown she wore that emphasized the resemblance—a purple dressing-gown with crimson velvet belt and emerald green buttons.” H. M. Tomlinson, too, has said: “Her pallor was of ivory, and there was something of exquisite Chinese refinement in the delicacy of her features, her broad face, her dark eyes, the straight black fringe, and her air of quiet solicitude.” From her friend Dorothy Brett comes this picture: “Katherine, small, her sleek dark hair brushed close to her head, her fringe sleeked down over her white forehead; she dresses nearly always in black with a touch of white or scarlet or a rich deep purple…. Her movements are quaintly restricted; controlled, small, reserved gestures. The dark eyes glance about much like a bird's, the face is a pale quiet mask, full of hidden laughter, wit and gaiety.” But it was “those Deirdre eyes of hers” which bewitched many others than Eileen Duggan. Here, too, you might call it fantastic were it not that the descriptions are unanimous.

Again and again you come upon such phrases as: “a transparent spiritual quality”; “an expression which was not of this world”; “living in a zone which was not life, but its halo”; “unearthly and a little chilling, like the remoteness of Alpine snow”; “she did not seem to see your face, but the back of your mind”; “so assured that I felt shy and clumsy.” As these phrases come from such men as Conrad Aiken, Frank Swinnerton and H. M. Tomlinson they cannot be dismissed as mere hysteria. Katherine Mansfield had a crystalline quality, difficult to define, but surely the source of the elusive and inimitable charm of her work.

Her stories, particularly I think the New Zealand stories, are extraordinarily vivid. The compositor who set up “Prelude” was forced into the exclamation: “Gosh, those kids are real!” You have, as a French critic has pointed out, the illusion of hearing K.M. actually speak. You feel that you are living amongst the people described and that you know them intimately and in detail. Yet when you read the story again it is difficult to ascertain the source of your knowledge. Katherine Mansfield wrote between the lines. “In all her stories,” says J. B. Priestley, “you may say the air tingles. She was one of the few writers of our time who made life seem as rich, exciting and significant at every turn as it does in one's best moments.” Edith Sitwell wrote: “Katherine Mansfield's style is pellucid beyond measure—like a clear shallow water through which you can see something shining and lovely, impalpable and beyond your reach.”

Professor Sewell has shown how she has wrought a new texture out of English words. “Nowhere else in English prose narrative, I would almost say in English prose, is the veil of words so rare, so translucent. Nowhere is the subtle play of feeling in the lives of children and children grown-up—nowhere is the troubled inwardness of life more directly, more purely conveyed.” She has in fact introduced a greater poetic content into English prose and already I think this has influenced our literature. H. W. Massingham, writing in the “Nation” at the time of K.M.'s death, remarked that her “spiritual excellence lay in the reflective power of a mind that caught up a thousand rays of revealed or half-revealed consciousness, and gave them out again in a serene order and a most delicate pattern.”

A most discerning French critic, whose love and pity for Katherine Mansfield shine through all that he has written about her, pays this tribute: “She gave forth a music, which, scarcely heard, could never be confused with any other. She was so dauntless, so young and so perfect, with the charm and radiance of rare but natural flowers. She was woman from head to foot, woman to the ends of her finger-nails, filled with a tepid sensuousness, and at the same time with a fastidiousness, an adorable feminine purity, without ever once allowing herself to be mixed up with those moral problems, those questions of marriage and of education, which in England fascinate so many writers in skirts, so much so that most of them use their novels to quarrel with life and to take on it revenge for disappointments of their own.”

Quotations of this sort could be multiplied. Those I have used are intended to indicate the esteem in which Katherine Mansfield is held elsewhere in the world and to quicken appreciation in her own country. On the Continent of Europe many people must have come to picture New Zealand from her books. It has not always been realised that these stories were written as a sacred debt due to her brother and that in them she tended to idealise the land of her youth. This at any rate is a Continental impression of New Zealand, written by a critic of her work: “It was one of those islands, a happy island, golden, bathed in a sea of mother-of-pearl, where life flowed on, infinite; an island such as one believed could not exist but in a dream, which however she had seen, whose sands she had touched, whose perfume she had breathed. The prodigal child had returned to her native land, on the wings of a dream and with dazzled eyes.”

One cannot write an article of this

(Photo, Thelma R.)
On the road to the Lewis Pass (Westland side), South Island, New Zealand.

page 28 page 29

(Rly. Publicity photo.)
The ferny entrance to “Aladdin's Cave,” in the Orakel—Korako thermal region, North Island, New Zealand.

sort without some reference to her courage. As I have said she seemed to know that she was destined to misfortune, and so she mistrusted her moments of felicity. In her own words, there was always “the snail under the leaf.” This philosophy appears in some of her stories, for instance, in “In a Café,” which was one of her earliest, and in “Bliss.” But she never gave in, though, as her Journal and Letters witness, courage did not always come easily.

Thomas Moult, an English critic, writes of a visit to her in 1918: “Katherine Mansfield's sleeping-room was next to mine, and each morning at the same hour—how I came to dread it for her sake—the woeful sound of coughing, body-racking and relentlessly prolonged, would pierce the walls—and the hearts of those that heard it. Later in the day, though, she showed such sparkling gaiety downstairs, that anyone who had not listened to that coughing must have been utterly deceived and reassured about her.” Compare what she herself wrote in her Journal in the same year. “The man in the room next to mine has the same complaint as I. When I wake in the night I hear him turning. And then he coughs. And I cough. And after a silence I cough. And he coughs again. This goes on for a long time. Until I feel we are like two roosters calling to each other at false dawn. From far-away farms.” Thus indeed does a sense of humour reinforce courage.

Vain it may be, human it is to speculate as to the work she might have produced, had she lived to blossom into her full maturity. We know that at the end she was dissatisfied with all that she had written. She had said that there was nothing she dared show to God. Appropriately, A. R. Orage, the man who had introduced her to the English public, was with her at Fontainebleau at the last. He has written of a conversation with her on this subject from which I choose an extract:

(Photo. courtesy French Railways—National Tourist Office)
One of the famous Chateaux (Amboise) in the beautiful Valley of the Loire, France.

“I've been a camera. But that's just the point. I've been a selective camera and it has been my attitude that has determined the selection, with the result that my slices of life have been partial, misleading and a little malicious. I could not write my old stories again, or any more like them, and not because I do not see the same pattern as before, but because somehow or other the pattern is different. The old details make another pattern, and this perception of a new pattern is what I call a creative attitude to life.”

May she sleep sound in that quiet old forest cemetery at Avon, near Fontainebleau. I cannot think she frets that this should be her last resting-place, for around her are the trees she loved so well, and the birds singing their little unfinished songs. Not far away her beloved brother lies in the same French soil. She is amongst a people who love and admire her, who claim her as one of their own. “I tell you, my lord fool, out of this nettle danger we pluck this flower, safety.” Words she had loved and lived by make a fitting epitaph. Perhaps at last she has found the flower. Perhaps, too, as Louis Gillet suggests: “if there is in Paradise a little corner for consumptives, it is there she is, near the poets that she loved, near Keats, near her dear Tchekov, immortal group of ephemerals. Chopin makes music for them. Watteau prepares the dress for Venus. But that corner assuredly exists. It is in our hearts.”