Katherine Mansfield—Greatest Writer Produced by New Zealand

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 188, 29 October 1927, Page 24 (Supplement)

Katherine Mansfield —Greatest Writer Produced by New Zealand

her straight, squarecut black fringe, dark e y es and small aquiline nW mTK nose, Katherine Mansp«§aFoin field, when last I saw her, was not unlike one of those little dolls that, in Japan's less strictly commercial days, were among the most precious and transient treasures of one’s toy cupboard. Perhaps it was the dressing-gown she wore which emphasised the resemblance —a purple dressing-gown with crimson velvet belt and emerald-green buttons. There was a big wardrobe at one end of the room painted with flashes of green and scarlet, and in the square of garden outside were marigolds and asters, of brightest mauve and pink and yellow. So, though the walls of her room were a sombre, thunder-cloud sort of grey, and she herself was already gravely ill, it was as a creature of gaiety and brilliance that she appeared, it is as such that I shall always remember her. And not less than her appearance, her conversation made this effect. Whatever she described, became at once a delightful experience, so writes Sylvia Lynd, reviewing “The Journal of Katherine Mansfield,” in “T.P.’s Weekly.”

Katherine Mansfield was much alone, she suffered much, she knew poverty, illness and every kind of defeat; but she seemed to go about the world with the daring self-sufficiency of an explorer. She knew the strangest and horridest of human beasts familiarly in their lairs. Perhaps it was because she, too, with all her sympathy and tenderness and love of delicate and dainty living, was essentially untamed, that she moved among them so securely. I remember her description of two notorious scoundrels, one an anarchist (who habitually wore, so she said, a costume that comprised emerald studs and sand shoes), the other a wizard whom she discovered residing with one of his young witches (with a completely shaven head) in a grotto built of the unsold copies of his books. Equally with beauty, she loved humour, raciness. Light and clouds and flowers, one part of her nature craved, the other half was boldly and fearlessly at home in squalor and mockery.

The beauty dominates this book, however, as it does her stories. Incidents of wretchedness and ugliness as many of those are, the effect is yet of a world brimming with sunshine and colour. A dish of fruit, a cherry tree in flower, a matchbox with a small white pink and a violet in it, a crochet hook in the shape of a tiny mother-of-pearl umbrella, plates of sandwiches beflagged with little labels, a glass door-knob—these things are as real, when she writes of them, as if we could touch them with our hands. Perhaps it was that the sun of her New Zealand childhood had saturated her with a radiance sc intense as to-stay with her all her life

The journal is not an autobiography. It is her mind rather than her life that it reveals. She confesses, but she seldom dramatises herself. But •"lien she does, how much we wish tbat she would do it more! For through all the tragedy of her illness and early death, the figure of Katherine Mansfield contrives to be a figure of vivacity and laughter. There is a glimpse of her at school for instance, at Queen’s College, when the Principal in the course of a lecture asked "any young lady in the room to hold up her hand if she had been chased by a wild bull.” "As nobody else did,” says Katherine Mansfield, “1 held up mine (though, of course, I hadn’t). ‘Ah,’ he said, T’m afraid you do not count. You are a little savage from New Zealand’— which was a trifle exacting,” the jour- * nal continues, “for it must be the ■ v. ai i? st to be chased by a wild ■ bull up and down Harley Street, Wim-

pole Street, Welbeck Street, Queen Anne Street, round and round Cavendish Square . .

How characteristic, too, is her retort to the begging collector, who pretended that she “remembered her from last year.” But I wasn’t there last year. Ah, people change so quickly, said she. Yes, but perhaps their faces don’t, said I, seriously, giving her the shilling I was just going to put into the gas meter. . . . That little incident illustrates the mixture of charity and derision with which she regarded so much of life. There was in her the quality which she tells us she sometimes seemed to detect in the stars —a secret gaiety. Nothing failed to provoke her wit. Even of her illness she writes:

The man in the room next to mine h: the same complaint as I. When I wal

in the night I hear him turning. And then he coughs. And I cough. And after a silence I cough. And he coughs again. This goes on for a long time. Until I feel we are like two roosters calling to each other at false dawn. Prom far-away hidden farms.

And the grave itself becomes a jest, when she describes her husband gloomily digging the garden “as though he were exhuming a hated body or making a hole tor a loved one.”

As for the ordinary absurdities of life, how dexterously she seizes them! There is the French boy in the restaurant, for example, who “looked as though he spent his nights under an eiderdown eating chocolate biscuits with the window shut.” and there is her indictment of French diet when, after a prolonged series of omelettes and oranges, she longs for a sirloin of beef. “I feel sentimental about England now—English food, decent English waste!” She writes:

How much better than, these thrifty French, whose flower gardens are nothing but potential salad bowls. There’s not a leaf in France that you can’t faire une infusion avec. not a blade that isn’t bon pour la cuisine. By God. I’d like to buy a pound of the best butter, put it on the window sill, and watch it melt to spite ’em.

It is in defiance of circumstance rather than because of it that Katherine Mansfield is gay. She cannot help seeing the fun of things, even when they make her miserable. She confesses that when she is alone her mood is often one of misery. “The peculiar wretchedness one can feel when the wind blows,” she notes, or pens a warning:

Late in the evening, after you have cleared away your supper, blown the crumbs out of the book that you were reading, lighted the lamp, and curled up in front of the fire. That is the moment to beware of the rain.

Her journal—and how in its nature could it be?—is not, for all its fiery valour, the journal of a happy woman. It is the record of a long struggle with death—never far away, and never forgotten. But, partly, perhaps because of that ever-hovering menace, this book is a celebration of life. To catch every shade, every change, whether of human minds and moods, or of weather, seasons, countries, rooms and to make us know them as she did —that is the effect of this journal. This book must be at once one of the most intimate and one of the least egotistical diaries ever written. If here and there she reveals the intensity of her anguish, it is as if she wrote of someone not herself. She is never flagrantly 'on her own side. It

is through her appreciation of the beauty of a day, of a landscape through her savouring of a phrase, that she brings herself before us. “Sat in my room watching the day change to evening. The fire like a golden stag,” she writes. Or, “Here alone — a perfect day. I wandered in the garden. There was a ship, white and solid on the water. . . . The fire in my room and the double light. All was exquisitely beautiful." And again: “More beautiful by far than a morning in spring or summer. The mist—the trees standing in it ... a faint smell of burning. The sun comes slowly—slowly the room grows lighter. Suddenly on the carpet there is a square of pale, red light.”

It m as if all experience were composed of jewels, and she a goldsmith, setting them. Something delightful, something queer, something lovely, something quite frightening, horrible, each she regards dispassionately with an appraising eye, and knows just what to make of it. It is this absolutely original, untrammeled freshness of regard, that makes her book so exquisite. Formality, use, staleness are brushed aside, and we share a child-like clarity of vision and a more than child-like candour.

Here, w*e feel as we read, walks a free spirit, one in whose nature there are no commonplaces, and no samenesses; an explorer, to whom all parts of the earth are strange. “He who sees best,” says the Irish proverh, “is the guest of a single night.” It was as the guest of too brief a lifetime that Katherine Mansfield sojourned here, and the earth is duller for her absence.