GUY MORRIS KATHERINE MANSFIELD COLLECTOR

Turnbull Library Record, Volume VIII, 1 November 1951, Page 15

GUY MORRIS KATHERINE MANSFIELD COLLECTOR

It is not the ordinary expectation of The Turnbull Library Record to chronicle biographies of notable friends, but in this instance the Friends of the Turnbull Library are intimately concerned. For it was in May, 1949, as he began to address members of the organization at the Library on the subject that had engrossed his last several years, that Guy Morris was suddenly taken ill. Two days later he died, and literary circles in New Zealand cannot but realize the loss, the more so in that after these years of preparation, when he was ready to speak and write on the fruit of his studies, he was enjoined to silence by the Judge whom he, the justiciary could not gainsay. The Library and its friends join in mourning his loss, and to his widow extend all sympathy and the goodwill that he attracted so fully in life. The following appreciations by Mr Antony Alpers and by Mr P. A. Lawlor have been written especially for these pages:

‘Six feet of honesty and decency* is how i should like to describe Guy Morris, the news of whose death reaches me, to my great sorrow, in England. He was what we call a typical New Zealander when we mean an ideal New Zealander —all gentleness and sensitivity under the rough exterior. He was not typical at all, in fact, but remarkable. And remarkable not only as a man but also, surely, among the race of Collectors. It is from the point of view of one who met him as a Collector that I want to draw an appreciative picture of him now—not without some desire to ease a conscience that tells me I accepted unlimited generosity from him and now cannot thank him in the way I intended.

In 1946 I decided to venture upon a biographical study of Katherine Mansfield, meaning to complete the work in England,

where I now am. I was told by everyone in Wellington to whom I confided my plan that of course I must see Guy Morris. I was referred to an article by him on the subject I was proposing to make my own. I found it dull. I learned that he was a retired magistrate and that he had been collecting everything he could that related to Katherine Mansfield—reviews of her books, periodicals in which her stories first appeared, rare editions, translations into a dozen languages, unpublished photographs, books on related subjects, and so on. I formed a picture in my mind of a sort of elevated stamp-collector, cherishing immaculate bindings and uncut pages, pricing rather than valuing this assemblage of volumes and documents; and so with some misgiving I wrote him a long letter saying what I had in mind, asking whether he proposed to write a book himself, defining the scope of mine, and (rather daringly, as I thought) asking if I might come and see his collection. His reply was to the effect that I was being unduly diffident in approaching him, that I was ‘entitled’ to his help, and that I could have access to anything that was in his collection (‘there is a typewriter here’). In short, he invited me to use his study as a sort of public library.

A few months later, I spent some weeks in Auckland, and something like twenty evenings in the little room that housed his collection. Hot summer evenings they were (the room faced west) and now I recollect this great tall man, big boned, very brown from the sun, with his shirt-sleeves rolled up beyond his elbows, sitting in a curiously small low chair (though I may be wrong about that; he would make any chair look small). He was slightly stooped, not by any means from age (he was still very youthful) but rather, I should imagine, from going through doorways, or so it appeared. His movements were lumbering, and his voice was rough. You felt safe in his presence at once because you knew he hid nothing. There was no polish or refinement in his manner, and on the other hand there were no exaggerated assertions to cover the defects of a disappointed self. He had nothing to be afraid of or to be disappointed about. There was certainly something in his exterior which was absurdly incongruous with the exquisite, refined, very feminine personality who was the cause of our meetingsomething she would undoubtedly have laughed at at once. I remember that he began one remark, ‘Well, psychologically, I reckon K.M.

was . . . * It seems significant now that I can’t remember how it went on; so bemused was I at the juxtaposition of this gruff giant and the pale slender ghost who seemed to me to be laughing at our seriousness. What, I wondered, could those big horny hands have to do with the delicate creature whose secret we presumed to fumble over? But this particular incongruity is of course neither absurd nor unique, There was something in him of Steinbeck’s Lennie (in Of Mice and Men); something we can only love with all our heart once we perceive it.

I remember that he used to take me into his study, ask me what I wanted to work on that evening, and pull out anything he felt I ought to have by me. Then he would begin to talk, and shamefaced like an over/friendly dog would move from the door back to the chair. Once he had me in his den he wanted to talk about ‘K.M.’ as he invariably called her — ‘have some good old yarns with you on the subject anyway* as I see he put it in the first letter he wrote me. I learned how he had come to be a collector of ’Mansfieldiana’. During his years as a magis/ trate at Whangarei he had come to know F. W. Reed, the authority on Dumas; I think he had then seen in book/collecting the possibilities of a hobby that was something more than a hobby, for his retirement, which was a few years ahead. Then I believe he heard a W.E.A. lecture by Arthur Sewell on the subject of the New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield. Pro/ ■fessor Sewell had said that Katherine Mansfield was shamefully neglected in her own country; here was precisely the field for Guy Morris —one where he might achieve something of lasting value to New Zealand. Before the war came, making more difficult all the correspondences and remittances on which his work of gathering his ‘items’ depended, he had amassed a truly remarkable collection.

He had perceived that the life of Katherine Mansfield was one of those lives in which (partly because some of the genius had been spent on the living itself instead of on the writing alone, thus producing a pattern of life and work) every piece of information, however slight, had potential interest. And being utterly without prejudice (and sometimes of course not quite critical enough, for he had some of that unexceptionable credulity that goes with great kindness) he had excluded nothing. If one of Katherine Mansfield’s books had been reviewed in the Springfield (Mass.) Republican and catalogued by the en/

thusiastic Miss Mantz, Guy Morris must have a photostat ot the review. He had hundreds of photostats of reviews and critical articles. He had written to most of the people who had known Katherine Mansfield and who he thought would answer him. I remember that he ruefully showed me a letter from Frieda Lawrence in which a few ragged ideas flapped about in a gusty wind of enthusiasm; the interesting thing was of course that that enthusiasm had not died. And there always was some interesting thing about any of his ‘items’. He even had a set of photostats of Katherine Mansfield’s letters to her literary agent. How he obtained these is a secret which I imagine he has taken with him to the grave. He had photographs of Kathleen Beauchamp sitting sulkily among some Urawera Maoris, taken during the months of her imprisonment in New Zealand after her liberating years at school in London. He had paid a photo/ grapher to take good photographs of the various Beauchamp homes in Wellington. He had got a relative to take snaps of the houses in Chelsea and Fulham and St John’s Wood where Katherine Mansfield had laid her restless head at one time or another. He had got someone to go the British Museum and copy out from the original edition of Je ne Parle Pas Francais the passages which Messrs Constable insisted on removing before publication in Bliss. (That rare copy of the story, privately printed by the brothers Murry with their own hands, is one of the grubbiest books I have handled in the British Museum.)

One of his correspondents, William Orton, had given him the manuscript of an early poem and a postcard which Katherine Mansfield wrote from Geneva in 1911. Morris much valued these slender relics, and kept them in a protective covering of cellophane. These things, and other letters which he had, showed me how his sincerity had won him the confidence of people who in the nature of things would not have trusted him carelessly. After one of our ‘good old yarns’, Morris would draw himself out of his chair and make an effort to leave me alone with the typewriter. ‘Fire ahead, boy’ he would say (with a hand on the doorknob) when I asked if I might take notes of some document which I could never have found elsewhere and which I naturally felt should be regarded as his for his own use, if he was planning further writings. Then I would be left alone for the evening, except for the moment when his discreet wife

would sidle in with catlike tread, carrying a tray and some things from the tins in the pantry. When I took the tray to the kitchen I would find the family playing cards across the big table. At length I would leave, usually carrying some treasure which I was permitted to take away for a day or two at a time. His farewell, from the darkness of the verandah, was always ‘Right oh, boy’. That is how I like to remember him now.