The Work of Guy Morris

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 520, 10 June 1949, Page 12

The Work of Guy Morris

An Appreciation, written for "The Listener’ by

ALAN

MULGAN

| ANY men die in harness | that is not military: the farmer at his plough, the merchant in his office, the seaman on his bridge, the doctor in his surgery. When Guy Norman Morris, retired magistrate, of ‘Auckland, was stricken down in Wellington on the evening of Wednesday, May 18, he was a book-lover and a book-collector lecturing to the Friends of the Turnbull Library in that library, on the hobby of his later years, Katherine Mansfield. He died in hospital the following Saturday. _ He had come to Wellington for the jubilee of his Alma Mater, Victoria University College, to the city where

#Satherine iVLansfield was born and bred, and where she laid the scene of some of her best stories. Wellington was also the centre of his work as a civil servant-as a clerk in the Justice Department, officer in the Cook Islands (where he wrote articles for the "Journal" of the Polynesian Society), Official . Assignee, and Stipendiary Magistrate. As he spoke in that brief 15 minutes or so before the blow fell, he was at the heart of his life’s work and of his particular literary

love. Even on this " last visit to Wellington he had met people who could give him information about her, and identify characters andsettings of her stories. And he was giving this meeting of book-lovers the fruit of years devoted to collecting Katherine Mansfield material and the study of her life and work. HE story of Guy Morris as a collector illustrates the germinating power of literary enthusiasm. Living at Whangarei, Guy Morris learned from Frank Reed, the famous collector of and authority on Dumas, the pleasure of concentrating on a particular author. He had complete sets of several writers, but he found difficulty in choosing an author on whom he could specialise at this distance from the literary centre of the world. However, he and Mrs. Morris had lived in Wellington when Kathleen ‘Beauchamp was there; he and Kathleen had separately shared a fruitless search in Wellington for the books they wanted; Mrs. Morris had met Kathleen ‘and shared acquaintances and could detect the originals of some of her characters and the locations of her stories, which were always photographically ‘true; and she persuaded her husband to visit the various houses in which Kath- leen had lived. So when Professor Arthur Sewell, Professor of English at Auckland, published in 1936 his little book on Katherine Mansfield, Guy Morris was ready to realise that research into her life and works could be a fascinating and worth-while occupation for his projected retirement. Using his wife’s

small collection as a nucleus, and Sewell’s book as a revelation of her genius, Morris began in 1938 to build up what is now said to be the most exhaustive library of Katherine Mansfield»items in the world. OOK-collecting is a pleasant hobby, but it may involve a great deal of work. Since Katherine Mansfield wrote at the other side of the world, and became an international figure, any New Zealander collecting items about her

must go far afield. Guy Morris’s last major work before his death was to make a complete list for History and Bibliography, edited by Dr. David McMillan, of Christchurch, of every item in his collection. This list included first editions of all Katherine Mansfield’s books except Je ne Parle pas Francais, all publications of her works in England and America, and publications in several other languages — almost every European, and Chinese and Japanese: a huge collec-

= tion of the original magazines in which her work appeared, and where these were not available, photostats or typed copies; biographies, bibliographies, articles about her, reviews of her work, novels in which she is the original of characters, including Huxley’s Point Counter-Point; letters to Morris from her family, her intimates and acquaintances; photographs of herself, family, friends, homes, schools, and identified locations of her stories; in fact every detail, however small, pertaining to K.M., her life and writing. On her way to Wellington Mrs. Morris identified the location of The Woman at the. Store, the first story Middleton Murry published for Katherine Mansfield in Rhythm, from the author’s photographic description and from notes supplied by some of the people who accompanied her through the Urewera just before her departure for England. MORRIS corresponded with Middleton Murry, who sent him a number of books, some of them presentation copies, and with many others overseas. Through the American H. L. Mencken he was introduced to the writings of Mrs. Mencken and Frances Newman, two women whom Morris likened to Katherine Mansfield. For some of the items he added recently he was indebted to Antony Alpers, a young New Zealand friend who is in England writing a book on Katherine Mansfield, with assistance from the New Zealand State Literary Fund. Morris himself was most generous in passing on information to other collectors. (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) From what he said that evening and the notes he had made, which Mrs. Morris has permitted us to see, his lecture way to-be largely a psychological study of Katherine Mansfield. She had what he called the Cinderella complex. Plain in face and figure, she suffered from the cruelty of children. She felt inferior socially, and at the same time frightened people. In her adolescence she was fed on heady literature: Wilde and Dowson and Symons, Verlaine and Baudelaire. She fought her family to get away to London again. Then there were her early love affairs. All she knew of life, Morris considered, had come to her at second-hand from her reading, and she was driven to test things for herself because she wanted to write about them at first-hand. She was the little Colonial who had torn up _ her roots, so that there was disintegration in her life and work. The last passage in Morris’s notes reads: "How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’"’ There I think is the essence of her tragedy. The Lord’s song was to her her art. She was never satisfied for long with anything she wrote. Of how many stories did she leave only fragments? How many never reached paper at all? Nostalgia dammed her art’s flow, or else as in the New Zealand stories it. drove her further into her world of fantasy so that she was never able to face reality. Nostalgia had a hand in sowing the seeds of tuberculosis, which in turn isolated her from Murry and destroyed any chance there was of happy life for them. As I have said, other factors come in, but I do think Sewell was fight in his suggestion that however necessary it may seem.for a Colonial artist to go to live in England, it is a very dangerous proceeding, especially if the artist is a woman. Guy Morris wrote many articles on Katherine Mansfield. An essay won an award in the centennial competitions, and four long papers which he wrote for History and Bibliography are shortly to be published in pamphlet form by the Griffin Press, Auckland.