I first met Katherine Mansfield in a hut. Every Friday in the Upper Sixth form we would read a short story from a battered collection extracted from the book cupboard in order to improve our wider reading for that gold standard test of English Lit A level, English paper 3. I can remember reading Mansfield’s story The Garden Party and thinking it wonderful and then being publicly aghast that no one else shared my enthusiasm. Who could not be spellbound by the ending?

 

Isn’t life,’ she stammered, ‘isn’t life- ‘But what life was she couldn’t explain. No matter. He quite understood.

‘Isn’t it, darling? ‘Said Laurie.

 

Do we make people up? I rather think we do! But perhaps this need to feel connected compensates for the reality of the (missed) connection itself.  We just have to make do.

 

Secretly I suppose looking back; I was pleased that my pleasure in Mansfield’s writing appeared singular and special.  A year later, I bought up the Penguin editions of Mansfield at the now long defunct Hudson’s Bookshop in Liverpool and eagerly read them all whilst supposedly studying Renaissance Literature. Mansfield’s final New Year’s Eve letter to her cousin the Countess Russell made an impression upon me that has remained and I quote it here as it combines the flattening fatigue of the desperately ill with something like creative transcendence.

 

‘I haven’t written a word since October and I don’t mean to until the spring. I want much more material: I am tired of my little stories like birds bred in cages.

Goodbye, my dearest cousin. I shall never know anyone like you; I shall remember every little thing about you for ever.’

 

Mansfield’s poignant dismissal of her stories sits awkwardly with her promise of a spring renewal of her writing. The irony of time when anyone is terminally ill needs no elaboration and reading this passage once more I is impressed by the dignity of her underlying acceptance of her impending death.  Mansfield’s doubt in the artistic merit of her tales is inescapably mixed up with her detachment as a ‘dying body’. She is already moving elsewhere watching all that she cared for, and value diminish away.

 

And of course,  if Mansfield had a recurring subject in her ‘little stories’ then that subject would have to be death, and death in all its many forms: physical, geographical, sexual, emotional, spiritual, linguistic.

 

One of the most resonant moments in her journal for me occurs in May 1922:

 

‘A queer bit of psychology: I had to disappear behind the bushes today in a hollow. That act made me feel nearer to normal health than I have for years. Nobody there; nobody wondered if I was alright, i.e. there was nothing to distinguish me, at that moment, from an ordinary human being.’

 

Mansfield’s honest pleasure at being ‘normal’ reveals the intense loneliness of illness.  An adult life spent travelling in search of health from one rented room to another, accentuated her feelings of exile and isolation from her own kind. She talks to her journal, she writes letters, she creates fictions about people on the outside; visitors to happiness and love. So that the repetition of ‘nobody’ in this passage actually has a fragile power of its own. Mansfield rarely had ‘anybody’ there, and her elation at her temporary normality seems both humbling and practical.

 

More later. I want to post this!