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| ISBN-13: | 9781775581000 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Auckland University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 392 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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Kin of Place
Essays on 20 New Zealand Writers
By C. K. Stead
Auckland University Press
Copyright © 2002 C. K. SteadAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77558-100-0
CHAPTER 1
Katherine Mansfield: The Art of the 'Fiction'
The major part of this was delivered as a lecture at University College London in 1977. It was published in The New Review, London, September 1977 and in In the Glass Case.
Katherine Mansfield became famous only after her death, and it was as much for the extraordinary talent and personality revealed in her letters and journals as for the qualities of her stories. I think the fame was deserved; but it rested on style rather than substance, and for that reason it has survived better in France than in England. In England art is seldom valued for its own sake; it is a vehicle, like a coal truck; and from Dr Johnson to Dr Leavis the English critics have almost without exception seen their primary task as being to check the quantity and quality of the coal.
In Katherine Mansfield's letters and journals are displayed qualities of mind, imagination, sensibility, intelligence, wit – all finding verbal expression, coming to life on the page, running irresistibly day by day off the tip of the pen. This is not the same as saying that she is always revealed as a good person, a nice person, that she is always controlled, or fair minded, or strong, or sensible. She is afraid, defeated, hysterical, waspish as often as she is affirmative, joyful, witty, or wise. But whatever the state of her mind or soul, there is always distinction in the writing, distinction of intellect and of personality transmitted through all the rare and lovely skills of the natural writer. She has more than talent. She has genius – and only a part of that genius gets into the stories. Fiction writers usually do their best work after the age of forty. Katherine Mansfield died at thirty-four, leaving about ninety stories, some of them unfinished – a total of perhaps 250–300 thousand words. It is clear that she needed a longer life to produce the best work she was capable of. Nevertheless she has a distinct place as one who made certain discoveries about the form of fiction. It is the nature of these discoveries that still calls for critical definition; and at the same time, if they are to be usefully discussed, it becomes necessary to disengage the Mansfield image from some of the mythology that has surrounded it since her death in 1923.
To speak of Katherine Mansfield's discoveries in fiction is not to speak of something achieved in full consciousness, or critically articulated. In her conscious intentions she was often very conventional. She was always setting out to write a novel. What became 'Prelude' began as a novel with the title The Aloe. As she wrote 'Je ne parle pas français' she called its sections chapters, apparently expecting it to grow into a book. She planned a novel called Maata, and another called Karori. All these came either to nothing or to smaller items which, not being novels, we call stories, but which would be better described as fictions. It was not lack of stamina which brought this about. She had ample energy and fluency and determination as a writer. It was her instinct as an artist that gave her fictions their modern shape. She taught us the fiction as distinct from the narrative, and it is in that sense that she is an innovator.
It is usually agreed by critics that Katherine Mansfield's New Zealand stories are her best. But her identity as a New Zealander is revealed more interestingly in other ways, ways more indirect, than in the material of her stories. She is of largely Anglo-Saxon stock. But she comes from a physical environment in which there are empty spaces, distances, a great deal of sky (and usually water), and in which, whatever the season, there is ample light. Her visual sense is developed to a degree unusual in Englsh writers; and this is just as apparent in her European stories as anywhere else:
Four of the clock one July afternoon she appeared at the Pension Müller. I was sitting in the arbour and watched her bustling up the path followed by the red-bearded porter with her dress-basket in his arms and a sunflower between his teeth. The widow and her five innocent daughters stood tastefully grouped upon the steps in appropriate attitudes of welcome.
Secondly, and more importantly, in the European context she has the detachment of someone who comes from a great way off, and on whom in terms of established convention very little has been decisively stamped. Her social sense is superficial. She adopts roles easily, without any real conviction about which of them properly belongs to her. She can take nothing for granted. She has both freedom, and uncertainty about how it should be used. She has very little custom – only intelligence and instinct to guide her. Virginia Woolf, who was both fascinated by Katherine Mansfield and intensely jealous of her, set out to be a writer and in due course produced a first novel because that was what writers wrote. Katherine Mansfield had it for review and was surprised. She expected something more original of Virginia. She could not say what it ought to have been, only that this conventional item was a disappointment.
Her own first book had emerged very differently, under the pressure of painful experience which made its stories all of a piece. This was the collection called In a German Pension, published in 1911 when she was twenty-three. The received standard view of Katherine Mansfield, which is essentially that established by her husband, John Middleton Murry, invites us to excuse the book on the grounds of youth; yet what Murry calls its 'youthful bitterness and crude cynicism' speak very directly to the a later age. It is not, as it once seemed, an anti-German book so much as an anti-male book – but not quite simply anti-male either. It is full of that subtle humour, that dead-pan presentation of absurdities, which characterized Katherine Mansfield's talk and letters and made her seem to Leonard Woolf the most amusing conversationalist he had known. But the humour of In a German Pension skates on very thin ice. It is laughter right at the brink of hysteria, tears, revulsion and hatred. The gross, insensitive German males dominate and enslave their fraus and turn them into domestic animals, while natural appetite is seen to be drawing the young girls towards sexual involvement and the same destruction. In one story a young man putting his hands over the breasts of a girl is interrupted by a 'frightful, tearing shriek' upstairs where a baby is being born. In another a young woman, disillusioned with her lover and determined to leave him, viciously bites the hand of a man who tries to kiss her, and immediately feels compliant once again towards the lover. There is violence just below the surface of these stories; and these two qualities, the violence and the humour, are held together by a third – a delicate precision in the portrayal of scene and atmosphere, so that in the best of the stories everything happens at a slight remove, it floats somewhere in the middle distance, as if on a stage with misty lighting or behind a gauze curtain:
'Are you an American?' said the Vegetable Lady, turning to me.
'No.'
'Then you are an Englishwoman?'
'Well, hardly –'
'You must be one of the two; you cannot help it. I have seen you walking alone several times. You wear your –'
I got up and climbed on to the swing. The air was sweet and cool, rushing past my body. Above, white clouds trailed delicately through the blue sky. From the pine forest streamed a wild perfume, the branches swayed together, rhythmically, sonorously.
The chapter of biography that lies behind the writing of In a German Pension has yet to be fully written. Katherine Mansfield had come to London at the age of twenty to be a writer. She had had lovers. She had married a singing teacher, George Bowden, and had left him next day. She had possibly experimented with drugs. She had become pregnant to someone who was not her husband and gone to Bavaria to have the child, but the pregnancy miscarried. All this in 1909 or '10. As Brigid Brophy puts it: 'The life of the "free woman" which is now being imposed on us as a postwar phenomenon – post our war – was being lived by Katherine Mansfield, and with incomparably more style, before women were properly out of long skirts.' With more style, no doubt; but also without antibiotics and without the pill, and it was very nearly too much for her. She survived the crisis, however, and under the pressure of so much experience wrote her first book very rapidly, not at all in the confessional manner most young gentlewomen in like circumstances would have chosen, but converting it all into black comedy. In the story called 'The Modern Soul' there is a German professor who likes to eat cherries because he says they free saliva for his playing on the trombone. He is also very skilled at spitting the cherry stones great distances across the garden. He explains to a young woman that all cherries contain worms, but if you like cherries you must put up with that. '... it amounts to this,' he says; 'if one wishes to satisfy the desires of nature one must be strong enough to ignore the facts of nature.' That is really the dilemma Katherine Mansfield is wrestling with in these stories. Only a rare talent would have allowed it to emerge in such a bizarre and oblique way.
The book was a success. It went through three printings before the publisher vanished abroad, pursued by a charge of bigamy. But it left Katherine Mansfield uncertain what direction her writing should take. She experimented a great deal and did not publish another collection of stories for nine years. One brief experiment consists of three stories which are interesting because they indicate a whole line of development she denied herself by becoming a European writer. 'Millie', 'Ole Underwood', and 'The Woman at the Store', are New Zealand stories quite different from the evocations of a middle-class childhood for which she is best known. They are stories of raw colonial life, conventionally shaped towards a dénouement. They anticipate a whole genre of New Zealand fiction; and they lead Elizabeth Bowen to ask whether Katherine Mansfield might not, under different circumstances, have become a regional writer. The dénouement of 'The Woman at the Store' is a very professional exercise in surprising us with what on reflection we have to concede was apparent all along. The revelation comes when the strangely malevolent child does for the visitors the drawing her mother has forbidden her to do. Subtly the story has led us to expect something pornographic. Instead, the drawing reveals that the woman, who is portrayed as having been ruined by neglect, maltreatment, and the strain of outback life, has murdered her husband. Thus elements of the thriller and the social documentary are combined; and at the same time the story can be seen to contain another version of Katherine Mansfield's central preoccupation – female sexual involvement and the destruction she seems to feel goes inevitably with it.
The experiment of those three stories was not continued. Linear narrative was not going to be Katherine Mansfield's fictional mode. She could manage it very skilfully; but so could many writers of much more limited talents. What she worked for continually was texture, density, a feeling of richness, of reality; and it is one of the dilemmas of fiction that the more totally readers are engaged in an on-rushing narrative, the less they are left afterwards with a sense of having experienced a piece of real life. We can move so fast through a landscape we experience, not the landscape, but only a sense of momentum.
There is a phenomenon I think characteristic of a great many respectable novels. It goes something like this. For the first twenty or thirty, or even fifty pages, we are absorbed and enchanted by the articulation of a scene, a situation, a set of characters. The development is not a straight line but a movement in slow circles over the same ground. Then all at once the novelist feels obliged to set characters moving along a narrative path towards a climax and a conclusion. What felt real and life-like both to reader and writer now turns conventional. The imagination gives up and the magic vanishes. I think Katherine Mansfield's artistic instinct was too strong ever to let this happen. Again and again she disappointed herself by not being able to force herself onward by sheer acts of will. But the instinct was right and the effort misplaced. The cut-off point often leaves an unconventional but artistically complete work.
Quite a number of her shorter fictions do have something of the character of a 'story', though few rely primarily on narrative for their effect. They develop around a single image or scene or situation, and they move towards the recognition, or realization (in the French sense of making real) of something latent there. These pieces of five or ten pages are taken, and often written, at a single sitting. They are tightly unified, so that the mind holds them as a single item. With intermediate-length fictions, however, there is the problem for the writer of how to add on if the addition is not to be linear, and here I think Katherine Mansfield developed two methods: one might be called 'accretion', the second 'circumlocution'. Accretion is the method of 'Prelude' and 'At the Bay'; circumlocution is the method of 'Je ne parle pas français' and 'The Daughters of the Late Colonel'.
'Prelude' and 'Je ne parle pas français' are crucial because each represents something of a technical breakthrough; and this means a breakthrough not merely for Katherine Mansfield but in the history of fiction. Frank O'Connor, by no means her kindest or fairest critic (he calls her 'the brassy little shopgirl of literature who made herself into a great writer'), says of 'Prelude' and 'At the Bay': 'These extraordinary stories are Katherine Mansfield's masterpieces and in their own way comparable with Proust's breakthrough into the subconscious world.' And Elizabeth Bowen, another practitioner: 'Had [Katherine Mansfield] not written ... as she did, one form of art might still be in infancy. ... We owe to her the prosperity of the "free" story: she untrammelled it from conventions. ... How much ground [she] broke for her successors may not be realized. ... she was to alter for good and all our idea of what goes to make a story.'
Can we characterize this breakthrough? If we are to try we must first disengage these stories from a certain amount of Mansfield mythology, emanating from John Middleton Murry's commentaries on his late wife's work, and abetted in certain particulars by what might be called New Zealand critical nationalism. Murry's account of his wife's fiction shows little comprehension of technical matters. He comprehends only the substance of the stories; and he divides them accordingly into two simple categories – positive and negative. At the centre of his interpretation he places a passage from a letter she wrote him on 3 February 1918. He quotes the passage in both of the full-length articles he published on her work; and he refers to it again and again in introductions to, and commentaries on, her letters, journals, and stories. The passage, he insists, 'is vital to any true understanding of Katherine Mansfield'. It was written while she was engaged on 'Je ne parle pas français', and it goes as follows:
I've two 'kick-offs' in the writing game. One is joy – real joy – the thing that made me write when we lived at Pauline, and that sort of writing I could only do in just that state of being in some perfectly blissful way at peace. Then something delicate and lovely seems to open before my eyes, like a flower without thought of a frost or a cold breath – knowing that all about it is warm and tender and 'ready'. And that I try, ever so humbly, to express.
The other 'kick-off' is my old original one, and (had I not known love) it would have been my all. Not hate or destruction (both are beneath contempt as real motives) but an extremely deep sense of hopelessness, of everything doomed to disaster, almost wilfully, stupidly ... There! as I took out a cigarette paper I got it exactly – a cry against corruption – that is absolutely the nail on the head. Not a protest – a cry.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Kin of Place by C. K. Stead. Copyright © 2002 C. K. Stead. Excerpted by permission of Auckland University Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction,Katherine Mansfield: The Art of the 'Fiction',
Katherine Mansfield: The Letters and Journals,
Katherine Mansfield's Life,
Frank Sargeson: The Realist and the Sprite,
Frank Sargeson's Peon,
A. R. D. Fairburn: The Argument Against,
R.A. K. Mason: Bringing Disorder to Life,
Sylvia Ashton-Warner: Living on the Grand,
Allen Curnow: Poet of the Real,
Second Wind: Allen Curnow's Continuum,
Allen Curnow, 1911–2001,
John Mulgan: A Question of Identity,
Hubert Witheford: Rhetoric and Wit,
Maurice Duggan: Language is Humanity,
Kendrick Smithyman: Hiding the Lunch,
Ronald Hugh Morrieson: The Man from Hawera,
David Ballantyne: Whimsical Losers,
Janet Frame: Language is the Hawk,
A Retrospect: Janet Frame's Pocket Mirror,
King's Frame,
Lauris Edmond,
James K. Baxter: A Loss of Direction,
James K. Baxter: Towards Jerusalem,
Maurice Gee, Moralist,
Witi Ihimaera: Old Wounds and Ancient Evils,
Keri Hulme's the bone people,
Ian Wedde and the 'From Wystan to Carlos' Lecture,
Knox's Oxen,
Dates of Authors who are the Subject of Individual Essays,
References,
Index,