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 English book cupboard by ‘Daddy Gray’ one of our English teachers. We were reading stories each Friday afternoon in order to improve our chances for that gold standard test of English Lit A level, the English paper 3.
I can still remember reading Mansfield’s story The Garden Party for the first time and thinking it subtly wonderful and then being aghast that no one else shared my enthusiasm when we were allowed to discuss it.
Who could not be spellbound by this 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.
Well there were certainly several in my old class who didn’t agree!
Some still remembered my enthusiasm years later at an old school reunion when I had even obtained my PhD exploring her stories, somewhat tellingly(for I was not a diligent research student) called ‘A Mind At Bay.’
But returning to that hut-moment, and my epiphany as I pretentiously called it then. The ending to the story prompted me to think about the way we related to others and how personal time was in all this relating.
So here it came:
Did we make people up as we went along with our lives? I rather decided that we did! Does Laurie actually understand anything or is he carried along by his sister’s need for connection? And does it matter? perhaps that feeling of connection or reciprocity transcended mistaken assumptions or beliefs. How could we know what we did not know?
Over the years I changed my mind a few times and then decided that perhaps this need to feel connected to others compensated for the reality of the often (missed) connection itself.
We just have to make do. Or so I began to think years ago in that hut classroom in Ormskirk.
Secretly too, I suppose when I look back, I was pleased that my pleasure in Mansfield’s writing appeared singular and therefore special. Mansfield was MINE! I enjoyed being different to the rest of my class. Teenage egotism coupled with a genuine admiration for Mansfield’s painter like impressionism.
A year later, I bought up all the Penguin editions of Mansfield’s stories at the now long defunct Hudson’s Bookshop in Liverpool and eagerly read them all whilst supposedly studying Renaissance Literature in my first year at Liverpool university. Mansfield was my reward for studying Tragedy!
Mansfield’s final New Year’s Eve letter to her cousin the Countess Russell made an impression upon me that has remained with me 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.’
Katherine Mansfield (October 14th 1822 – January 9th 1923)
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 valued 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 briefly ‘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. Thus, 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. For ironically Mansfield rarely had ‘anybody’ there, and her elation at her temporary normality seems both humbling and practical.
She temporarily enjoys the release of not feeling that she is like her stories, a bird bred in a permanent cage, separated from the chaotic energies of ‘normal life.’