A Dill Pickle by Katherine Mansfield
AND then, after six years, she saw him again. He was seated at one of those little bamboo tables decorated with a Japanese vase of paper daffodils. There was a tall plate of fruit in front of him, and very carefully, in a way she recognized immediately as his "special" way, he was peeling an orange.
He must have felt that shock of recognition in her for he looked up and met her eyes. Incredible! He didn't know her! She smiled; he frowned. She came towards him. He closed his eyes an instant, but opening them his face lit up as though he had struck a match in a dark room. He laid down the orange and pushed back his chair, and she took her little warm hand out of her muff and gave it to him.
Mansfield's lovers are reunited here through an exchange not unworthy of Noel Coward. Both embrace inauthenticity rather easily and the reader is all too aware of the artificiality of the setting with its ostentatiously precious decorations and 'fragility' of decor.In fact of course they are the fake flowers, the bamboo furniture and the Japanese vase!
We are also aware of the performative nature of the male as he affects misrecogntion or forgetfulness. He almost seems histrionic and once again in Mansfield is rather feminised in his gestures and behaviour. He is not all that far from the Wildean chacter of Duquette in 'Je ne parle pas francais'.
I do enjoy the focus upon the orange. Once again, as in Dickens, a character's gestures give away their inner self( or lack of). The focalisation of the woman upon this 'special way' of peeling an orange demonstrates continuity of character and judgement and also a revisitation perhaps of earlier misgivings. Look at the theatrical description of their reunion. The rhythm is pure melodrama! When the woman gives her hand to the man it is as if the hand is separated from the rest of her body..synecdochical revelation! Some disassociated gesture that indicates their mutual estrangement and self-absorption.
I do like this tale and I think I must have somehow missed it when doing my research on KM. It is brittle and almost cruel and reflects a preoccupation with remebrance as a psychological 'review' - a means of contemplating apparently lost chances and the faultlines of memory. It is also told from the apparent 'inside' of the female character in particular and yet we realise that such a focus is really more outside than in. There is very little authentic interiority to either and the reader enjoys the 'drama' of their meeting as theatre glimpsed from another 'table' so to speak.
I can hear the surreptitious chink of silver spoons and the faint scent of citrus.
Hell is other people!
At The Bay by katherine mansfield
There was poor little Lottie, left behind again, because she found it so fearfully hard to get over the stile by herself. When she stood on the first step her knees began to wobble; she grasped the post. Then you had to put one leg over. But which leg? She never could decide. And when she did finally put one leg over with a sort of stamp of despair–then the feeling was awful. She was half in the paddock still and half in the tussock grass. She clutched the post desperately and lifted up her voice. "Wait for me!"
"No, don't you wait for her, Kezia!" said Isabel. "She's such a little silly. She's always making a fuss. Come on!" And she tugged Kezia's jersey. "You can use my bucket if you come with me," she [Page 14] said kindly. "It's bigger than yours." But Kezia couldn't leave Lottie all by herself. She ran back to her. By this time Lottie was very red in the face and breathing heavily.
"Here, put your other foot over," said Kezia.
"Where?"
Lottie looked down at Kezia as if from a mountain height.
"Here where my hand is." Kezia patted the place.
"Oh, there do you mean!" Lottie gave a deep sigh and put the second foot over.
"Now–sort of turn round and sit down and slide," said Kezia.
"But there's nothing to sit down on, Kezia," said Lottie.
She managed it at last, and once it was over she shook herself and began to beam.
"I'm getting better at climbing over stiles, aren't I, Kezia?"
Lottie's was a very hopeful nature.
The pink and the blue sunbonnet followed Isabel's bright red sunbonnet up that sliding, slipping hill. At the top they paused to decide where to go and to have a good stare at who was there already. Seen from behind, standing against the skyline, gesticulating largely with their spades, they looked like minute puzzled explorers.
Oscar Wilde's The Importance of being Earnest!
A Perfect candyfloss of a play or is there something more important lurking about its fringes?!
'''Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can’t get into it do that.''
Far From The Madding Crowd: Thomas Hardy
Reading this novel again in 36 degrees of heat in Tunisia was a delightful and slightly unusual experience! As I sat moderately baking in occasional shade, Bathsheba and Oak wrestled out their very pragmatic romance amidst the debris and lives of other characters whose impracticality and passion proves their undoing. The novel recommends survival through work and co-operation and this core value in the narrative far from being dull and tame compared to the heated, reckless drives of others,provides humour and finally healing. The scenes where Oak saves the gas ridden sheep and the stacks communicate Oak's consummate competence and care and Hardy 's sensory skills are marvellously suggestive and psychologically apt:
'He felt a zephyr curling about his cheek and turned.It was Bathsheba's breath - she had followed him, and was looking into the same chink.'
Far From The Madding Crowd is full of 'peeping tom' moments where characters watch each other through hedges,chinks and doors! This moment is beautifully laid out, the metaphor 'zephyr' registers the magic of Bathsheba's physicality...even more, her very breath, her life force enchants Oak. She is as special and magical to Oak as any legend from the Greeks. The simplicity of this shared watching explores their natural equality and the unconscious attraction of Bathsheba for Oak. How beautifully erotic is this scene and yet how it reveals their hesitancy and delay.
Hardy allows Bathsheba her eventual happiness which is rare indeed in the so-called 'great' novels, and he is also astute in granting Bathsheba autonomy in characterisation. She remains true to her perverse, challenging self and we do not see a shadowy, chastened figure at the end, though this Bathsheba has learnt about consequences!
' I have thought so much more of you since I fancied you did not want even to see me again.'
Human nature is perverse! This admission is fully in keeping Bathsheba's vanity and wilfulness. Yet is also reinforces the honesty and intimacy that has existed between them. Such intimacy elevates their relationship and makes their future marriage and happiness certain.
A final glimpse, simply because it is highly Impressionistic and tender and would not be out of keeping in a Katherine Mansfield story or a Monet painting:
'Ten minutes later, a large and smaller umbrella might have been seen moving from the same door, and through the mist along the road to the church.'
The tenderness of the ordinary here is palpable. Oak and Bathsheba are granted some privacy away from the speculative eye of reader and community and under their umbrelllas remains sanctuary and promise!
Wonderful!
Gabriel Oak meets Bathsheba and 'destiny' for the first time!
"The tailboard of the waggon is gone, Miss," said the waggoner.
"Then I heard it fall," said the girl, in a soft, though not particularly low voice. "I heard a noise I could not account for when we were coming up the hill."
"I'll run back."
"Do," she answered.
The sensible horses stood -- perfectly still, and the waggoner's steps sank fainter and fainter in the distance.
The girl on the summit of the load sat motionless, surrounded by tables and chairs with their legs upwards, backed by an oak settle, and ornamented in front by pots of geraniums, myrtles, and cactuses, together with a caged canary -- all probably from the windows of the house just vacated. There was also a cat in a willow basket, from the partly-opened lid of which she gazed with half-closed eyes, and affectionately-surveyed the small birds around.
The handsome girl waited for some time idly in her place, and the only sound heard in the stillness was the hopping of the canary up and down the perches of its prison. Then she looked attentively downwards. It was not at the bird, nor at the cat; it was at an oblong package tied in paper, and lying between them. She turned her head to learn if the waggoner were coming. He was not yet in sight; and her eyes crept back to the package, her thoughts seeming to run upon what was inside it. At length she drew the article into her lap, and untied the paper covering; a small swing looking- glass was disclosed, in which she proceeded to survey herself attentively. She parted her lips and smiled.
It was a fine morning, and the sun lighted up to a scarlet glow the crimson jacket she wore, and painted a soft lustre upon her bright face and dark hair. The myrtles, geraniums, and cactuses packed around her were fresh and green, and at such a leafless season they invested the whole concern of horses, waggon, furniture, and girl with a peculiar vernal charm. What possessed her to indulge in such a performance in the sight of the sparrows, blackbirds, and unperceived farmer who were alone its spectators, -- whether the smile began as a factitious one, to test her capacity in that art, -- nobody knows; it ended certainly in a real smile. She blushed at herself, and seeing her reflection blush, blushed the more.
Dorothy L Sayers: Gaudy Night
How much do we love Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane?!
When we were bad by Charlotte Mendelson
This is a third novel by Charlotte Mendelson, whose second, Daughters of Jerusalem, won the Somerset Maugham Award and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Her novels are perfectly balanced observations of human nature captured in all its hideous glories, usually in family settings. As intelligent as it is funny, her writing is brilliant at bringing out the awkwardness of the transition from family life to independent adult existence (if, indeed, any of us really achieve it).
from Sunday Observer by Viv Groskop
The Bell Jar: Sylvia Plath by Cath Corri
Is there such a thing/person/reality of/as a doomed genius - the tautology is simple? Take out the doomed, for we are all that, but maybe less perpetuated (although feminist in our ways) ???? psychological awkwardness/angst I think - rather than social for the book itself dis-reveals the latter - with its ruthless incisiveness and the thin veil between the somatic body and social constructions around about and within it.and what is a poet? And how to tell one when you read one? How words are placed in constructive frameworks matter? isn't dickens a poet purely by having that genius on board? There are no better poetic signifiers than the names he chooses for characters. the Bell Jar is memorable for its mental exhaustion, femininity (rather than the feminine) and its adolescent perpetuation of the morbid - how more poetic can one get? if there is any doomed genius in it at all - it is external to the creative process within the book - which finally found its place in the poetry and the passion of her life as well as death. but i still like the word womanist rather than feminist jan - her work reminds me of afro-american writers - in love and trouble (sometimes with herself)
Sylvia Plath: The Bell Jar
How far does this book serve to perpetuate Sylvia Plath's cult status as doomed genius and feminist icon? Does the book unexpectedly amuse us too with its incisive exploration of social awkwardness and 'angst'?
Can we tell it is written by a poet?
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