THE HEART'S EXILE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 785, 6 August 1954, Page 12

THE HEART'S EXILE

KATHERINE MANSFIELD, by Ian A. Gor- * don; Longman, Green and Co., English

(Reviewed by

David

Hall

HE latest addition to the excellent series on British writers sponsored by the British Council, Professor Gordon’s short critical study of Katherine Mansfield is lucid and perspicuous. We are lucky at the present time in the amount of new material on Katherine Mansfield which has recently come to light-the letters to Middleton Murry, Sylvia Berkman’s thorough and painstaking critical study, and finally Antony Alpers’s biography. Professor Gordon has made good use of these new tools, and his pamphlet admirably sums up the state of critical opinion in regard to K.M. at what is, I think, the end of a chapter. For it seems doubtful that she will ever again be a field for exploration or conjecture. Reassessments of her work there may well be, but little can now be added to our fund of information about it. Ian Gordon states the dilemma of Katherine Mansfield with characteristic clarity and insight: ". . . She came to recognise that a New Zealander can be as much an exile in England as an Englishman on.an island in the Pacific. From the moment of this discovery a

note of elegy entered her work, and she turned for her themes to her origins." He points out how much can be gained "in force and significance" from reading the stories in the order in which she wrote them. Throughout he relates

her work to her life with rewarding perceptiveness, and his own knowledge of both hemispheres stands him in good stead. The _ key period of her life was near its end, after illness had laid its hand upon her, and she must have realised, even if subconsciously,

that what she had to do must be done soon-two years of writing with "concentrated fury" in two separate "bursts of febrile activity." It is always attractive to speculate, chicken and egg fashion, whether illness comes as the way out of a pyschological impasse, or whether the psychological malaise is in fact created by the illness. Did Katherine Mansfield die because fundamentally she wanted to die? Her life was an unhappy one, but the unhappiness fed her art. Perhaps the greatest strength of Professor Gordon’s well-proportioned study

is its statement of the skill of Katherine Mansfield as an artist. "She is assured in her craft, and knowledgeable even to the placing of a comma. She writes with precision, knowing the effect she intends. . ." He comments, too, on the evocative poetic quality of the fabric of many of her stories, creating an immediate effect of a sort of shimmering iridescence, a sensuousness of detail which contributes to a total effect but which is detachable like a flower plucked from a bush.