KATHERINE MANSFIELD.

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 481, 10 September 1948, Page 5

KATHERINE MANSFIELD.

Sir,-I see that I probably owe J.S. (and no doubt others as ~well), an apology for making Fenella and her grandmother travel the wrong way in my Katherine Mansfield talk. I would say, though, that I do not believe it possible to establish the direction of the journey beyond all doubt on the evidence of the story alone. Very likely it is possible to do so with knowledge of raw material-but it is the business of a story long to outlive its raw material. And on this view the point is a very minor one.

FRANK

SARGESON

(Takapuna) _

Sir-aAn artist is not necessarily a first-rate critic of his kindred, and this truism encourages me to break a lance with Frank Sargeson on certain parts of his 1YA broadcast about Katherine Mansfield (published in The Listener of August 6). First of all, I suggest that he has missed or: passed over’ the outstanding quality of Katherine Mansfield’s aft, mamely her evocation of atmosphere. By that I mean her supreme powers of taking a facet of life and transmuting it through the written word until it is part of the reader’s own experience. It is obvious from a reading of * her Journal and Letters, and also from the content of her stories, that this was the aim to which above all she strived, never to her complete satisfaction. Nevertheless, I know of no other writer who has been so successful in this. _F.S. seems to me to have, missed the point entirely so far as Bliss is concerned. This story is a good ‘deal deeper and more subtle than being about a wife who is "just happy to be alive" and then "ends with discovery" of! her husband’s love-affair. It is clearly an evocation of the bliss engendered by a wife’s feeling for her husband, especially intense on that day, followed by the crushing despair of finding that the bliss has heen erected on a foundation of rotten’ wood. Again Her First Ball is a story of moodthe mood of happiness and gaiety in a young girl, on this occasion so special for her, with the subsequent sadness which so often accompanies happiness, in the knowledge that age and death are inevitable. The character of’ this particular girl is not the point, as F.S. appears to suggest. The mood and changes of mood of any young girl constitute the problems to which the authoress addressed herself. The change of mood could have been caused by any other reason without affecting the point of the story. It is undoubtedly the case that many young girls, as F.S. admits, would.have been affected similarly by her. experience. F.S. is a sincere and discriminating. admirer of Katherine Mansfield, and no person would be so foolish as to contend that her writings are beyond reproach. But I do feel that to some small extent, as I have attempted to describe, F.S. has failed to "get under the skin" of some of her works.

R.T.

D.

(Wellington).