Our experience of life is often thwarted by our inability to express what we feel through our words. It is as if language is always apart from us, apart from our experience, so that our words may feel like ill fitting approximations, straining after ‘truth’ yet never quite getting there.
Yet without language, how can we make our experiences known- how can we communicate not only with others, but perhaps more importantly, with ourselves? Can we even experience our experience without resorting to the ‘salvation’ of language?
‘These fragments I shall shore against my ruins’ said T S Eliot at the end of The Wasteland, one of the most honest and powerful declarations about language and its innate insufficiency, I have ever read.
For writers language is always a challenge, and the skill of a writer is to find the ‘right words’ in order to reach the reader, so that an experience can be translated and re -experienced in a meaningful and resonant way.
Katherine Mansfield as a short story writer was well aware of the ‘thriftiness’ of her chosen genre. A successful story is hard work, as like poetry, there is very little room for redemption in a short story. The language of a short story is highly selective, standing in place of many alternative words, which then place considerable responsibility on the words present to communicate to the reader.
Little wonder Mansfield in her Journal and letters, worried about how ‘near’ her writing was to the experience she wished to communicate. She worried her stories seemed a little ‘made up’ and below in one of her final, most poignant letters, she told her cousin that she was ‘tired of my little stories, like birds bred in cages.’
A recent study of her work takes a phrase from one of her final tales, encapsulating perhaps the truly ‘wonderful’ job of the writer to find the right words for the experience. ‘Ah-what is it? -That I heard? ‘ Look how KM’s senses are STRIVING after authenticity, for the ‘right’ effect even. She wonders and she wanders, playing with her sensory experience and impressions.
For writing is a quest for the identity of ‘things’ ; for words of whatever genre, to be ‘REAL’- whatever that momentary reality may happen to be!
All the same, without being morbid, and giving way to—to memories and so on, I must confess that there does seem to me something sad in life. It is hard to say what it is. I don’t mean the sorrow that we all know, like illness and poverty and death. No, it is something different. It is there, deep down, deep down, part of one, like one’s breathing. However hard I work and tire myself I have only to stop to know it is there, waiting. I often wonder if everybody feels the same. One can never know. But isn’t it extraordinary that under his sweet, joyful little singing it was just this—sadness ?—Ah, what is it ?—that I heard. ( Katherine Mansfield, The Canary)
You see Bogey if I were allowed one single cry to God that cry would be I want to be REAL
You see, my love, the question is always ‘Who am I’ and until that is discovered I don’t see how one can really direct anything in ones self ‘Is there a Me.’ …
I see no hope of escape except by learning to live in our emotional & instinctive being as well and to balance all three.
But I cannot tell you what a joy it is to me to be in contact with living people who are strange and quick and not ashamed to be themselves. It’s a kind of supreme airing to be among them….
(Letters to John Middleton Murry)
But what nonsense this all sounds. That is the worst of letters; they are fumbling things.
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.
Do you see John, I wonder? He sounds very happy and serene – Life is a mysterious affair!
Goodbye, my dearest Cousin. I shall never know anyone like you; I shall remember every little thing about you for ever.
Lovingly yours,
Katherine(Letter to Countess Russell)
But then the diary is so private and so instinctive that it allows another self to break off from the self that writes and to stand a little apart watching it write. The writing self was a queer self; sometimes nothing would induce it to write. 'There is so much to do and I do so little. Life would be almost perfect here if only when I was pretending to work I always was working. Look at the stories that wait and wait iust at the threshold. . . . Next day. Yet take this morning, for instance. I don't want to write anything. It's gray; it's heavy and dull. And short stories seem unreal and not worth doing. I don't want to write; I want to live. What does she mean by that? It's not easy to say. But there you are!' (Woolf 'A Terribly Sensitive Mind'- Review of Katherine Mansfield's Journal) )
Very involving, subtle and nuanced writing here – interesting how Mansfield’s journal/letters become another form of literature – not a criticism – always something performative about autobiography, even in a diary meant only for oneself.
Woolf is a brilliant critic!