New Zealand’s Greatest Woman Writer Assessing Katherine Mansfield’s Position in the World of Letters

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 631, 6 April 1929, Page 18

New Zealand’s Greatest Woman Writer Assessing Katherine Mansfield’s Position in the World of Letters

rIE case of Katherine I Mansfield is extraordinarily interesting (writes Louis Kronenberger). (WErfMr'wl 5n er she won 1 i JKr A*v* the respect and the regard of many of her contemporaries. Since her death, six years ago, there has grown up about her a legend of genius and a depth of admiration which clash strongly with the more usual procedure, once a writer must be judged by achievement alone, of arriving at a more seasoned judgment. There are now those who lament Katherine Mansfield’s death as one of the major tragedies of contemporary letters and who place her work on an almost immeasurably high level. To the present reviewer this seems one of the unwisest things that could be done, since it inevitably invites a reaction against her which will be as much out of proportion with the truth as is the present idolatry. Katherine Mansfield was a person of rich and genuine talent, a writer of some very fine short stories; and her death was undeniably tragic. She had sensitiveness, delicacy, an absolute passion for truth and an increasingly Fupple and individual technique. But it is at least questionable whether any single thing she did was really great, and it is extremely questionable whether the whole body of her work, containing perfect short stories though it does, assumes major proportions as art. She was only on her way to doing permanent and memorable things; she was only on her way toward complete artistic realisation. Her true status almost certainly lies lower than her most devoted admirers would Put it.

But any such critical reservations •bout her work cannot destroy the re-

markable personality and character of the woman herself as she is revealed in her Journal, published, last year, and in the two recently-published volumes of her letters. Very seldom do letters, particularly letters which comprise an edited selection, prove so varied, so stimulating, so genuine, so moving. They have about them at times! an intolerable beauty, a beauty compounded of many elements —suffering, gay courage, the inner loneliness of the heart, appreciation of the visible and tactile world, and love. Katherine Mansfield was ill for many years, was often separated from her husband, was burdened with financial worries, was moved about from place to place, working with almost the difficulties under which Stevenson worked. Above everything else she was deeply sensitive. All these things made the tragedy run deep. ■ We admire the spirit of an R. L. S. with his sporting courage, but Katherine Mansfield's inability always to rise above herself, above not only ill health but also spiritual loneliness and personal frustration, is nearer our own weakness and limitations, a more kindred suffering for us to understand. She turned to her husband, she turned to her friends, she gave them all she had of love and understanding and mental stimulation, but in the end she found herself alone —bored, disheartened, deracinated. No one, her husband perhaps least of all, could requite what she had to give. And there, in her maisonettes, her rented villas, her foreign hotels, her sanitariums, she struggled as best she could toward truth and self-realisation. These letters compose a moving document, however one may appear to sentimentalise Katherine Mansfield’s life by trying to summarise it. Perhaps it is inaccurate to call her a “remarkable” woman; she was simply and wholly an artist. If at times she seems, too patly conscious of the fact, or too concerned with the fact, at other times her rejection of the world of convention, of propriety, of artifice, is a cry from within. She was an artist who knew always what she was doing, toward what she was working; yet with all of an artist’s fears and doubts. Again and again one hears the old cry: Oh. God! [she writes her husband conearning a storv.l Is it good? I am frightened. For I stand or fall by it. It’s as far as T can get at present; and I have gone for it —bitten —deeper and deeper than ever I have before. . . . But what is it like? Tell me—don’t spare me. Is it the long breath, as I feel to my soul it is, or is it a false alarm? You’ll give me your dead honest opinion, won’t you? But there is another side to these letters —they are also what letters on the surface should bo —aumorous,

lively, personal, full of casually uttered critical insight, of opinions, reactions, literary discussion. Not that they are ever the good “familiar” letters; they are almost always too sincere, too intense, for that. But they are filled with fine turns of phrase, fresh and stimulating remarks. A very large number of them are addressed to her husband, J. Middleton Murry; but there are many written to such people as Galsworthy, Walpole, Virginia Woolf, William Gerhardi, Stephen Hudson. There is commentary on the work of these people, on Joyce and Proust; delight in Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, Dostoievsky, Techkov, Tolstoi, Jane Austen. There is an endless observation of concrete small objects and of the minutiae of Nature. In this Katherine Mansfield reveals herself sharing the peculiarly English joy in the world about her. She never takes it for granted. It is not only the sea, the downs, the mountains which engage her attention; it is also a ribbon, a new hat, a few figs, a strange kind of insect. Unlike her husband, K. M. Kept outside the “literary world.” She had little use for contemporary literature, almost none at all for psychoanalytical literature. “These people who are nuts on analysis,” she remarks, “write to prove—not to tell the truth.” Yet she confesses that D. H. Lawrence, almost alone of his generation, really impresses her! Sometimes in a vivid phrase she strikes home very well at a writer. Gissing writes “with cold, wet feet under a wet umbrella.” Shaw is a kind of concierge in the house of literature—sits in a glass case, sees everything, knows everything, examines the letters, cleans the stairs, but has no part, no part in the life that is going on. * Her potentialities, one imagines, were very great. She had put her whole self to school; there was no task, no suffering, no naked tmth she was afraid to face. She dug, and for the sake of depth she allowed her work to fail sometimes in scope. Her correspondence is a revelation of volte-faces, of turnings away from people, from books, from life, upon herself; and then of returns to life and people and literature. At bottom certainly she loved life, and needed itto feed her in all her capacities. We are faced with the old fruitless question of how much she lost, or gained, by being so constantly ill. We can at least suppose that illness destroyed a natural balance in her which, had she always had it. would have lightened the burden of her work. In the end, perhaps, her Journal and her letters are her real fulfilment. Their subjective truth is what she has best passed on to us. It has a very special, and perhaps a very lasting, value.