KATHERINE MANSFIELD AND THE SHORT STORY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 378, 20 September 1946, Page 9

KATHERINE MANSFIELD AND THE SHORT STORY

T# publication late last year of the first English collected edition of Katherine Mansfield’s short stories was the occasion for some examination ‘by English literary critics of the position Katherine Mansfield now holds in English literature, and in the field of the short

story in general.

V. S.

PRITCHETT

who is a novelist himself and a

frequent contributor to the "New Statesman and Nation," recently gave a talk (reprinted below) in the BBC's overseas service, in which he discussed her stories, and the significance of her New Zealand origin, and compared her work with Chekhov's.

years ago, when she was a youngish woman of little more than 30, Katherine Mansfield was the pre-eminent short story writer of her day. Her position was distinctive. It was as if one had said she was the most interesting poet of her time; for the short story seemed, at that time, to owe a great deal to poetic inspiration. One spoke of the "art of the: short story" as one might speak of the "art" of the sonnet or the madrigal; for the short story had ceased to be an anecdote or novel in brief. It owed nothing to other literary forms, but stood on its own feet by itself. When we \" the time of her death 23

picked up a volume of short stories by Henry James, Maugham, Kipling, Wells, Bennett, W. W. Jacobs, we felt that here were stories with plots, ideas and chatacters; they could be expanded at will until they became novels. The stories of Katherine Mansfield, on the contrary, were incapable of becoming novels. After he had read one of her stories called "Prelude," D. H. Lawrence said: "Yesbut prelude to what?" The answer was "Nothing. Just Prelude." Katherine Mansfield’s stories were not stories in the common use of the term; they were not, I hasten to say, prose poems. They were like fragments of music, some nocturne or polonaise of Chopin’s heard on the piano in the evening.

But is this picture of Katherine Mansfield a true one? The moment we open her stories again, after 20 years, we feel the need of a total reconsideration. It used. to be said that she was the English Chekhov and it is indeed true that she owed much to Constance Garnett’s translations of Chekhov’s stories which have had a very mixed influence on . English writers. But that she resembled Chekhov is the least important thing about Katherine Mansfield. It has been suggested, also, that her choice of the brief form of writing, her eye for the agitated and evan-

escent, her instinct for the moments rather than for the years of life, was due to the invalid’s knowledge that she had not long -to live. This may well be. But to understand what kind of writer Katherine Mansfield was, it is important to look beyond Chekhov and beyond her character as an invalid. No Prodigal’s Return Katherine Mansfield was a New Zealander. She spent her girlhood in New Zealand and her adult life mainly in England. She left New Zealand because she found no satisfaction in the life there. Once established in England she found she had lost her roots. What was she to do? She could either go back and, as it were, submit to New Zealand again, return like the mature prodigal. Or she could try to work out a new spiritual basis for her life. She could invent, as it were, a private religion, a private myth to live by; the myth of pure receptivity. This was the course she chose. One can see it clearly stated in her Journal, which are literary documents of great interest to students of this period. After reading between the lines one forms a much clearer picture of Katherine Mansfield’s position. She is the prim exile who belongs neither to her own society nor to London; but who like some nervous spider lives on an ingeniously contrived web that she has spun between the two places. The traditions of the optimistic and ruthless pioneer are strong in countries like "New Zealand, and they are oppressive to the sensitive. But the sensitive get their revenge in satire, in cynicism, in exposing the hollowness of spiritual life. Katherine Mansfield. enjoyed her own hard, acute wit, her malice, her bitterness, but she felt guilty about them. Hence. the cult of self-perfection, of pure art, the religious devotion to the idea that an artist must create within himself a clean heart. Women on the Defensive The collected stories of Katherine Mansfield make a single volume of eight hundred pages and even this includes a great deal of unfinished work. On the whole the steries about New Zealand, and especially about her childhood’ there, are the best, though there are also one

or two good ones about vagrant life in London. Her bad stories are chiefly the semi-sophisticated ones she wrote about London love affairs. I will quote the titles of some of her best stories. They are: "Prelude," "At the Bay," "The Garden Party," "The Little Governess," "The Woman at the Store," "The Daughters of the Late Colonel." From this list you will see that it is women on their own, on the defensive before the excessive male; and then children, that are her characteristic subjects. She has the manner of the acid, catty, nervous spinster whose cattiness is capable of becoming a firm and melancholy irony; and whose nervousness suddenly turns into poetic feeling and a wonderful eye for vivid imagery. Katherine Mansfield had, so to say, always an eye or an ear; sometimes a heart. Her stories are as clear and brittle as glass. Being isolated herself she seeks to describe what living is like when one is alone. Primness Led Her Astray On the whole she does not draw men well. Her primness makes her imagine men are clumsy, floundering sentimentalists; she punctures their conceit and their foibles well, but that is all. For Kath- erine Mansfield’s women and girls are: brilliantly done. In the story called "At the Bay,’ the women are excellent. I think especially of Beryl, the play-act-ing adolescent girl who lives in an unreal world, who poses the whole time‘and, when she repents, is acting even in her repentance. Or there is the cynical childless woman of a certain age, the scandalous woman of the little town. Her relationship with the girl is terrifying. The older woman and the young girl are bathing: "TI believe in pretty girls having a good time," said Mrs. Harry Kember. "Why not? Don’t you make a mistake, my dear. Enjoy yourself." And _ suddenly she turned turtle, disappeared and swam away quickly like a rat. Then she flicked round and began swimming back. She was going to say something else. Beryl felt that she was being poisoned by this cold woman, but she longed to hear. But oh, how strange, how horrible! (Continued on next page)

KATHERINE MANSFIELD

(continued from previous page) As Mrs. Kember came up close she ‘looked, in her waterproof bathing cap, with her sleepy face lifted above the water, just her face touching, like a horrible caricature of her husband. Yes-and the husband had already frightened the girl by flirting with her. The inexperienced girl was having her first dim impression of the campaigning strength, the ruthlessness of the married. Katherine Mansfield’s contribution to the writing of short stories came at a time when the traditional methods had become wearisome. And if her subjects were small and depended ‘upon catching some private cry of ecstasy, loneliness, fear, the handling of her stories was bold. She had the art of sliding through the thoughts and day-dreams of her characters, of moving backwards and forwards in time as our minds do; and, unlike most of what is called the "stream of consciousness" school, she treated this dramatically and gracefully. Her writing changes its landscapes as noiselessly as they are changed in our minds and with the alacrity of Nature. She catches the disparity of thought and action; she might be called the artist of

disparity. Katherine Mansfield liquefied the short story. She broke up many of its formal conventions. She cut out the introductions, the ways and means that are simply barriers. She cut: across-country, following a line of her own which once seemed very erratic but which was really the direct line. She caught how people talk-that is one important link with the later generation-and she moved as quickly as life itself. She learned how a spoken sentence may start the ‘speaker’s mind on to thoughts that are absurdly, poetically, strangely at variance with what he or she has said. She caught human lives as they dissolve and form again and she had the power of dissolving and reassembling our many selves, in a few vivid and dramatic lines. Katherine Mansfield belonged to the arty generation which isolated private sensibility, and detached private life from the life of its times. This was partly due to the appalling mass pressure of the first world war; it was a protest against the clumsy use and slaughter of the masses, the denial of human personality which that war instituted. One finds her shuddering, retreating protest, repeated in louder, more violent and (continued on next. page)