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The Letters of Katherine Mansfield: Volume I

June 1919 —

June 1919

To Lady Ottoline Morrell

I have been working all the morning, trying to discover why Java Head is not a good novel and trying to say it is not a bad one. But one always seems to arrive at the same conclusion—nothing goes deep enough—the risk has not been taken. Whenever the crisis is reached they decide to wait until the sea is calmer. How tired one becomes of all these surfaces. Why do not more people live through and through? Must one spend one's life paying calls on the emotions? Why isn't the dreary fashion obsolete—And if it is not this superficial nothingness, it is M. au grand sérieux throwing himself bodily into the milk-jug after the drowning fly!

But Oh, if we could have a few weeks Gaiety!! The sun burns to-day and our mysterious plant, the anchusa, is in bloom. But I should like to see whole vast plains covered with it. But instead I must go down to the Laundry office and ask why they have carried forward 10/8. Why—Oh why—and what a mission to take me forth on a golden day! And then B. R. says a woman is incapable of real detachment—But only to think of the things that do catch at our heels if we try to fly! I can imagine a whole rich Hell where the weekly books were always late, always more than one expected and always had unaccountable items.

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How one grudges the life and energy and spirit that money steals from one! I long to spend and I have a horror of spending: money has corrupted me these last years.