PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 774, 21 May 1954, Page 8

PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST

KATHERINE MANSFIELD, a_ Biography, by. Antony Alpers; Jonathan Cape, English price 21/-.

(Reviewed by

James

Bertram

O critical study by a New Zealander has been more eagerly awaited than this one. For Katherine Mansfield is not merely our most distinguished writer: she is also an extreme example of the artistic temperament born into the peculiar environment’ of these islands, and driven by her quest for self-realisation along remote and dangerous roads. We may flatter ourselves that in her best work something of our country finds lasting expression. But we need to remember that in her divided life of exile and Self-torment, much of our complacency in our easier way of living is both challenged and judged. When the New Zealand Literary Fund, very early in its career, made a grant to a young writer to enable him to complete a full-length biography of Katherine Mansfield, some murmurs of protest were heard. This was work at second-hand; why subsidise books about books? The plain fact was, of course, that there was no adequate life of Katherine Mansfield in existence-and if one "was ever to be written, only a New Zealander could write it. The task of gathering highly perishable information was sufficiently complicated: the trail led from Tinakori Road, Karori, and Day’s Bay, through a vanished European art-world and the war that helped obliterate it, to a cemetery near Fontainebleau. And if anyone was to sort out the tangled personal relationships that clustered round this writer in her lifetime, he would need a good deal of tact to secure the evidence that was still available-and considerable cour"age to speak his mind about the facts, once secured. It should be said at once that Mr. Alpers has succeeded magnificently. His book is packed with new and valuable information, some of it startling enough: but he has avoided sensationalism, and

he makes no excessive claims or charges. His work as a whole is sane, balanced, scrupulously documented, and superbly readable: To New Zealanders it has a special interest through its subject. But on its;own merits, as a solid piece of research and as a brilliantly handled literary biography, it deserves to stand with the best books of its kind in recent years. Mr. Alpers opens with a Prologuehis only personal intrusion into the story -in which, after a pleasantly-evoked sketch of the Wellington of his. own childhood, he describes his own discoyery of Katherine Mansfield) in her writings. She seemed to him an embodiment of the still unresolved New Zealand literary dilemma, the writer torn between two worlds of’ feeling and allegiance, the New and the Old. He delayed his impending departure for England, and began the close study of which this volume is the result. And the earliest debt he acknowledges is to that generous and indefatigable collector of Mansfieldiana, the late Guy Morris, of Auckland. But Mr. Alpers’s major triumph as a biographer was to succeed in gaining the confidence of the remarkable woman who was closest to Katherine Mansfield, in human sympathy and in all the practical ways of service, from her London schooldays until her death. This was Miss Ida Baker, the "L.M." so omnipresent and so often pilloried in moments of exasperation in the Letters and the Journal. "L.M."’ was to Katherine Mansfield all that Severn was to Keats-but for much longer, and without the faintest shadow of self-interest. The value of her testimony is beyond question, and she becomes very properly the second heroine of Mr. Alpers’s narrative. The hero, quite as clearly, is Katherine Mansfield’s first husband, a long-suffering gentleman to whom for the first time belated justice is done in these pages. The biography, with an appropriate regard for musical form, falls into. three movements, each composed of three chapters. The first part deals with the

family background and early life of Kathleen Beauchamp up to her twentieth year, when she left New Zealand for good. Mr. Alpers has rescued from oblivion a suggestive figure jin a maternal grandfathera Secretary of the Baptist Missionary Society -who also kept "huge complaining diaries," and whose melancholy broodings upon Judgment Day were. to end, disastrously, in his own water-tank. The New Zealand childhood and Queen’s College years-here traced in considerable detailseem to have been normal enough and reasonably happy. It was on Kathleen’s return to New Zealand after London that the first real revolt occurred, and her determination to make her own life-the life of a dedicated artisttriumphed over the opposition of a formidable parent. This meant London again, and an almost complete renunciation of New Zealand until her brother’s death in the First World War.

Part Two deals with the years of Sturm und Drang: an immersion into a restless world of musicians, artists and the literary avantgarde. This period Mr. Alpers describes as "one prolonged selftrial in the cause of self-discovery, a tussle between her voracious appetite, on the one hand, for something that she called ‘experience,’ and her fastidious attitude, on the other, towards experience itself." The quest for experience led her, perhaps naturally enough, into a number. of ill-judged love-affairs; but a good deal less naturally into a coldblooded marriage that sounds like something out of a Restoration comedy. We must be grateful to Mr. Bowden, the unsuspecting. victim of this strange contract, for telling his side of the story with imperturbable good humour — he seems to have preserved a quite admirable aplomb throughout. The full measure of Katherine Mansfield’s defiance of convention once estab-lished-and it was important that it should be established — Mr. Alpers is free to give his attention to her development as a writer over these years of association with Orage’s New Age and the other periodicals to which she contributed after her meeting with Middleton Murry. Above all, this was a time for fresh influences--Post-Impres-sionist painting, Chekhov (Mr. Alpers has a very plausible explanation for *The-Child-Who-Was-Tired"), the Russian Ballet-and for the acquisition of technique. New Zealand is featured only occasionally as a convenient stage-pro-perty, in tard experimental stories or sentimental verses: Katherine Mansfield made her first reputation as a writer of brilliant and malicious personal sketches, in which her talent for mimicry was unrestrained. The division and rootlessness of her life were matched by a

division in her art: the reconciliation with her "undiscovered country" tvas yet to come. It came through her brother’s death and the "tragic knowledge" she gained in the war years. This later story, which forms the third part of Mr. Alpers’s book, is more familiar than the middle period: though with the recollections of L.M. and Katherine’s letters to her to draw upon, his chapters fill in much background detail. It is in these last years of illness, creation and _ spiritual pilgrimage that our sympathies are most closely engaged, both for the woman who had in part subdued her own fierce egotism, and for the artistat last. after Prelude, fully conscious of her powers-who realised how little time was left for her to express her newly-clarified vision of the world. The (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) final tragi-comedy of the Gurdjieff Institute is fairly and objectively treated by Mr. Alpers; and by the time his story closes, there are few unanswered questions about the major developments and relationships of her life. Of all those relationships, the most persistent and perhaps the dominant one was that with her father. Here Mr. Alpers has given us another notable portrait of a New Zealander. Resisting the inevitable temptation fo caricature, and doing full justice to the energy and ambition which made Sir Harold Beauchamp as successful in his own chosen field of endeavour as his daughter (with her so much rarer gifts) in hers, he yet reveals unsparingly how immense was the barrier between their different points of view. That here, too, a kind of reconciliation was reached at the end does not absolve Sir Harold-and that side of New Zealand life which he represents- from the major charge of indifference and incomprehension that no mere human kindliness can bridge. Until the values that became paramount. for Katherine Mansfield are more widely understood and appreciated in this country; the tragedy of her life is likely to be repeated again and again. And that is one reason why we should not (as the editor of The Times has recently suggested) "get rid of her" as quickly as _possible. Her example is so

significant that we can always learn from it: we have few other examples of the same validity. If the pattern of Katherine Mansfield’s life in relation to her homeland may be seen as first, rejection; then flight to Europe and the painful acquisition of technique; finally; as achievement after a genyine change of heart, it is important that we should recognise the conditions of that reconciliation. The finest passages of insight in Mr. Alpers’s book dare those, at the beginning of his last chapter, where he considers the themes and the distinctive quality of the last New Zealand stories. He finds in them ail a preoccupation with death-hardly surprising in a writer herself under sentence, still struggling with the legacy of a war that had killed her brother and driven her fellow-artists mad. But it is here that Mr. Alpers, following Mr. Holcroft, is able to supply the answer that had eluded English critics — V. S. Pritchett, for example, who complained of the lack of "unseen characters, the anonymous people," in the New Zealand stories. The "silent character," in Mr. Alpers’s words, "was not a human society but the lack of one. The silent character was the stillness of the bush, the disdain of the

(LT ERTLI ES LRT Tay BIL SOG a at lofty islands for their huddled little pockets of colonial intruders, the silence of the vast sea-desert that encircled | them." In her art, Katherine Mansfield reached aserenity and a moment of perfection denied her in life. The enduring value ofa study such as this is that: with the life at last clearly defined, we can concentrate upon the miracle of the poised, fragile crystal of her artknowing, at last, all it cost her to attain | it. ) The English edition of this book follows by some months upon the Ameri-_ can edition: it seems to have been re-| produced: (photographically?) from the. American type, designed for a larger page and heavier paper. One regrets here the absence of portraits of Sir. Harold and Leslie Heron Beauchamp, © and an air of, austerity extending ‘to a bleak and unattractive wrapper. The difference between five dollars and a guinea is considerable, yet one hopes | that the much handsomer American edition may find its way into some New Zealand libraries. For the rest, this English edition is quite generously illustrated, and supplied with the same admirable Note on | Sources and index, It is a volume which | no New Zealander remotely interested | in writing can afford to be without, and will remain a rare example of a true | artist finding a biographer really worthy | of her. 2 i iS atte P50 Se Re

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