BEAUTY OUT OF DESPAIR

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 358, 3 May 1946, Page 10

BEAUTY OUT OF DESPAIR

Katherine Mansfield’s Letters

From a talk by

J. MIDDLETON

MURRY

| in the BBC’s Overseas Service |

*°T T really is a heavenly gift to be able to put yourself, jasmine, summer grass, a kingfisher, a poet, a pony, an excursion, and a new sponge bag and bedroom slippers, all into an envelope. How does one return thanks for a piece of somebody’s life? When I am depressed by the superiority of men, I comfort myself with the thought that .they can’t write letters like that.’ So Katherine Mansfield wrote to a friend. I think there is something in it. Of all the great men letter-writers I know, Keats came nearest to putting a piece of his life into them, but then he did it deliberately, in his ‘letters to his brother and sister-in-law, who were on the other side of the Atlan‘tic. But Katherine Mansfield did it because she couldn’t help it. First, then, hers are the letters of a woman. Second, of a woman in love. And third, of a "woman in love not with her husband only, but with everything. Not with everything always-her letters are continually passing from gaiety to despair and despair to gaiety, but she. never giyes rein to her despair for long, and she didn’t believe that it was possible to express her despair directly. "I simply go dark," she says. "It is terrible, terrible. How terrible I could only put into writing, and never say in a letter." Partly, no doubt, this was sheer fastidiousness. She had a horror of what she called confession. But much more deeply it was a profound aesthetic conviction that despair could not be expressed directly. The same conviction that inspired Keats’ Ode on Melancholy: "No, no, go not to Lethe . . ." to find the Goddess of DespairShe dwells with Beauty-Beauty that must die; And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips, Bidding adieu. I think this doctrine that despair should be and can only be expressed by beauty is extraordinarily profound. Katherine Mansfield hints at it continually in her letters, and applies it instinctively in her stories. In one letter she wrote, "We see death in life as we see death in a flower that is fresh unfolded. Our hymn is to the flower’s beauty. We would make that beauty immortal, because we know. I mean, by this knowledge, deserts of vast eternity. But the difference is, I couldn’t tell anybody bang out about those deserts, they are my secret. I might write about a boy eating strawberries, or a woman combing her hair on a windy morning, and that’s the only way I can ever mention them, but they must be there." I suppose it’s no accident that Keats and Katherine Mansfield both died early

of tuberculosis, whose toxic fevers seem immensely to heighten the beauty of the created world and give it an almost intolerable definition-at the same time as they sound an inward warning of the precariousness of one’s hold of life. But the effects are dazzlingly rich. They give one a sense of the’ triumph of beauty. Let Katherine Mansfield herself explain the meaning of her phrase. "Do you really feel that all beauty is marred by ugliness, and the lovely woman has _ bad teeth? I don’t feel quite that. For it seems to me that if beauty were absolute it would no longer be the kind of beauty it is. Beauty triumphs over ugliness in life, that’s what I feel. And that marvellous triumph is what I long to express. The poor man lives, and tears glitter in his beard. And that is so beautiful I could bow down. Why? Nobody can say. I sit in a waiting room where all is ugly, where it’s dirty, dull, dreadful, where the sick people waiting, with me to see the doctor are all marked by suffering and sorrow; and a very poor workman comes in, takes off his cap, humbly, beautifully, walks on tiptoe,has a look as though he were in church, has a look as though he believed that behind that doctor’s door there shone the miracle of healing, and all is changed, all is marvellous, life is all at one and the same time far more mysterious and far simpler than we know." "In Love With Everything" Now I’ve let Katherine Mansfield herself explain, far better than I could, why she can be truly described as a woman in love with everything. The constant alternations of joy and despair in her letters, in themselves so painful, are expressed in terms of beauty. In that language she contrives, by her own natural magic, to convey the subtlest modulations of personal feeling. You need to read the letters over and over again to understand all that is contained in some of her pellucid unpremeditated phrases. (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) It is a kind of chamber music, exquisitely controlled, in which vast depths of feeling are half hidden in a slight change of tone. She writes to a friend, "Was there teally a new baby in your letter? Oh dear, some people have all the babies in this world. And as sometimes happens to us women, just before your letter came, I found myself tossing a little creature into the air, and saying, "Whose boy are you?’ But he was far too shadowy, too far away, to reply.’’ There’s a personal tragedy uttered there. A Little Black Spot Or again, when she writes in a mood of despair from: her isolation in Italy, after being cheated by a gardener? "Oh, why are people swindlers? My heart bleeds when they swindle me, doesn’t yours? Why am I not a calm, indifferent, grown-up woman? And this great, cold, indifferent world, like a silent, malignant river, and these creatures rolling ever on like great logs-crashing into one. I can try to keep to one side, slip down unnoticed among the trembling rainbowcoloured bubbles of foam and the faint reeds, I try to turn and turn in a tiny quiet pool, But it’s no good. Sooner or later one is pushed out into the middle of it all. Oh, I’m really sadder than you, I believe. Shall I send this letter or write another one-a gay one? No, he'll understand. There is a little boat far out, moving along, inevitable it looks, and dead silent. A little black spot, like the spot on a lung." The power of that final phrase is terrifying. One understood, only too well. Or again, during one of the times when the high fever was upon her. "L.M. has broken my thermometer. Good! I got another for 12 francs. It seems to play the same tune, though the notes are not so plain." The same tune. It would be hard to pack more pain into a smiling phrase. i The Style was the Woman But the gaiety of her letters is never forced. Her natural mode of speech was gay, and her letters are full of jokes. Rather rueful jokes, many of them, but quite irrepressible, and all with an inimitable quality of their own. One might call it a blend of wit and humour. What

is more peculiar is that they are. illuminating. They flash a quick, glancing light 2m a person or a situation, so that they seem to be an inherent part of her magic of style. Of her, Buffon’s famous maxim concerning style is the obvious and literal truth, Style is the woman herself. So for that matter is Flaubert’s "Style is'a way of seeing." And Katherine Mansfield’s way of seeing was a smiling way. Because of her six years’ wandering as an invalid, whole periods of her life are chronicled day by day in her letters. They become in one sense an intimate autobiography, but it is curiously and delightfully objective. Not so much that she saw herself objectively (though she did), as that she is not directly concerned with herself at all. She is forever describing the life about her-the things she sees from her windows, the maids who look after her in the hotels, her doll, her cats. The doll and the cats she endowed with a language and a character of their own. They speak their own minute and enchanting commentary on the things that happened. And the women who wait upon her, what personalities they are. Juliette and Marie in the south of France, Mrs. Honey in Cornwall. Under Katherine Mansfield’s touch they reveal the genius of the race. Marie and Mrs. Honey-are they not the exquisite and simple flowering of a whole civilisation?’ And so it is that Katherine Mansfield’s letters are like a long and lovely story in which joy and pain are inexplicably intertwined. They are life-but life revealed by the vision of one who, knowing that she hadn’t very long to look at the pattern, turned all the energies of her eager soul into examining and marvelling at it. Setting down its beauties with the tender fidelity of love, a love that laughed, yet with tears in its eyes. And behind all this is the story of a struggle to live. Faith to live in order to be able to receive the wonder of life into her soul and to express it. And then, as the brief years draw to an end, the struggle to live in a different sense, to achieve an entire simplicity of soul, a central and crystal clarity which.should not change, to which joy and sadness should be as one. So it is that since her letters were first published in 1929 they have made the conquest of the world. They have, I think, been translated into every European language and though, when I first made up my mind to publish them, I hardly expected this to happen, it seems to me natural enough to-day. In one letter she speaks of the only treasure, the only heigloom we have to leave, our "little grain of truth’-the truth that can be discovered only by love. Her grain of truth-she would never have claimed that it was larger-is of such quality that it is self-evidently universal.