Katherine Mansfield and a "Little Lady"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 2, Issue 37, 8 March 1940, Page 43

Katherine Mansfield and a "Little Lady"

If we have had a New Zealand woman writer very near to genius it is, undoubtedly, Katherine Mansfield. She could write-but she could also suffer. Perhaps it might be true to say that she could write because she could suffer. Whatever it was, she made even Wellington live with frightening vitality in the short stories that are a record of her childhood and her youth. Its restless water, its leaning trees, its hills and its high winds she gives again, but acute, as these things are to a sensitive mind-a little exquisite, a little terrible. Turning over the leaves of her "Novels and Novelists "--a reprint of her 1919-20 Reviews for "The Afthenaeum,’ London — I chanced upon her criticism of the Diary of a "little lady sitting upright ‘and graceful in a high-backed chair" who died on active war service. She comments further, "It would be hard to deceive those eyes-they are steady, shrewd, and farseeing." But, also, she quotes the diary, "This damage to human life is horrible . . . the sheer imbecility of it." "Boys ... bite the mud in their frenzy of pain. They call for their mothers but no one comes. . . This is War." "A million more men are needed-thus the fools called men talk. But youth looks up~with. haggard eyes, and youth, grown old, knows that Death alone is merciful." And, dying, she writes these words out of a selfless grief: "I wish I could give my life for some boy who would like to live very much and to whom all things are joyous. . ."