The Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield,
with an introduction by John Middleton Murry.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1937.
THIS past fourteenth of October [1937] would have been Katherine Mansfield’s forty-ninth birthday. This year is the fifteenth since her death. During her life she had a fabulous prestige among young writers in England and America. Her readers were not numerous but they were devoted. It must be a round dozen years since I have read any of her stories; reading them again in the collected edition, I am certain she deserved her fame, and I wonder why it was not greater.
Of late I find my interest diverted somewhat from her achievement as artist to the enigma of her personal history. Actually there is little in her work to justify this, since the work itself can stand alone without clues or notes as to its origins in her experience; a paper chase for autobiographical data in these stories may be interesting in itself, but it adds nothing to the value of the stories. They exist in their own right. Yet I find it impossible to make these few notes without a certain preoccupation with her personal life of constant flight and search with her perpetual longing for certainties and repose; her beginnings in New Zealand; going to London to find the kind of place and the kind of people she wanted; her life there first as musician and then as writer; the many influences upon her mind and emotions of her friends and enemies—who in effect seem to have been interchangeable; her prolonged struggle with tuberculosis; her insoluble religious dilemma; her mysterious loss of faith in her own gifts and faculties; the disastrous failure of her forces at thirty-three, and the slowly engulfing despair that brought her finally to die at Fontainebleau.
These things are of first importance in a study which is yet to be done of the causes of Katherine Mansfield’s own sense of failure in her work and in her life, but they do little to explain the work itself, which is superb. This misplaced emphasis of my attention I owe perhaps to her literary executor,* who has edited and published her letters and journals with a kind of merciless insistence, a professional anxiety for her fame on what seems to be the wrong grounds, and from which in any case his personal relation to her might have excused him for a time. Katherine Mansfield’s work is the important fact about her, and she is in danger of the worst fate that an artist can suffer—to be overwhelmed by her own legend, to have her work neglected for an interest in her “personality.”
There are eighty-eight stories in the collected edition, fifteen of which, her last, were left unfinished. The matter for regret is in these fifteen stories. Some of her best work is in them. She had been developing steadily, along a straight and fairly narrow path, working faithfully toward depth and concentration. Her handling of her material was firmer, her style had reached the flexibility of high tension and control, she had all her prime virtues and was shedding her faults, but her work had improved strictly in kind and not in difference. It is the same quick, ironic, perceptive mind, the same (very sensual) emotional nature, at work here from beginning to end.
In her the homely humility of the good craftsman toward his medium deepened slowly into a fatal self-distrust, and she set up for herself a standard of impossible perfection. It seems to have been on the grounds of the morality of art and not aesthetics that she began to desire a change in her own nature, who would have had quite literally to be born again to change. But the point is, she believed (or was persuaded that she believed) she could achieve a spiritual and mental rebirth by the practice of certain disciplines and the study of esoteric doctrines. She was innately religious, but she had no point of reference, theologically speaking; she was unable to accept her traditional religion, and she did finally, by what appears to have been an act of the will against all her grain, adopt means to make her fatal experiment in purification. As her health failed, her fears grew, her religious impulse wasted itself in an anxious straining toward some unknown infinite source of strength, of energy-renewing power, from which she might at the cost of single-hearted invocation find some fulfillment of true being beyond her flawed mortal nature. Now for her help and counsel in this weighty matter she had all about her, at different periods, the advice and influence of John Middleton Murry, A. R. Orage, D. H. Lawrence, and, through Orage, Gurdjieff.
Katherine Mansfield has been called a mystic, and perhaps she was, but in the severe hierarchy of mysticism her rank cannot be very high. André Maurois only yesterday wrote of her “pure feminine mysticism.” Such as it was, her mysticism was not particularly feminine, nor any purer than the mysticism of D. H. Lawrence; and that was very impure matter indeed. The secret of her powers did not lie in this domain of her mind, and that is the puzzle: that such a good artist could so have misjudged herself, her own capacities and directions. In that rather loosely defined and changing “group” of variously gifted persons with whom Katherine Mansfield was associated through nearly all her working years, Lawrence was the prophet, and the idol of John Middleton Murry. They all were nervously irritable, self-conscious, and groping, each bent on painting his own portrait (The Young Man as Genius), and Katherine Mansfield’s nerves suffered too from the teaching and the preaching and the quarreling and the strange vocabulary of perverted ecstasy that threw a pall over any true joy of living.
She possessed, for it is in her work, a real gaiety and a natural sense of comedy; there were many sides to her that made her able to perceive and convey in her stories a sense of human beings living on many planes at once, with all the elements justly ordered and in right proportion. This is a great gift, and she was the only one among them who had it, or at least the only one able to express it. Lawrence, whose disciple she was not, was unjust to her as he was to no one else, and that is saying a good deal. He did his part to undermine her, and to his shame, for personal rather than other reasons. His long maudlin relationship with John Middleton Murry was the source of his malignance toward her.
Mr. Murry’s words in praise of her are too characteristic of the time and the special point of view to be ignored. Even today he can write that “her art was of a peculiarly instinctive kind.” I confess I cannot understand the use of this word. That she was born with the potentialities of an artist, perhaps? I judge her work to have been to a great degree a matter of intelligent use of her faculties, a conscious practice of a hard-won craftsmanship, a triumph of discipline over the unruly circumstances and confusions of her personal life and over certain destructive elements in her own nature. She was deliberate in her choice of material and in her methods of using it, her technical resources grew continually, she cleared away all easy effects and tricky turns of phrase; and such mastership is not gained by letting the instincts have it all their own way.
Again Mr. Murry, in his preface to the stories: “She accepted life. . . she gave herself. . . to life, to love. . . she loved life, with all its beauty and pain. . . she responded to life more completely than any writer I have known except D. H. Lawrence. . . .”
Life, love, beauty, pain, acceptance, response, these are great words and they should mean something, and their meaning depends upon their exact application and reference. Whose life? What kind of love? What sort of beauty? Pain from what cause? And so on. It was this kind of explicitness that Katherine Mansfield possessed and was able to use, when she was at her best and strongest. She was magnificent in her objective view of things, her real sensitiveness to climate, mental or physical, her genuinely first-rate equipment in the matter of the five senses, and my guess, based on the evidence of her stories, is that she by no means accepted everything, either abstractly or in detail, and that whatever her vague love of something called Life may have been, there was as much to hate as to love in her individual living. Mistakenly she fought in herself those very elements that combined to form her main virtue: a certain grim, quiet ruthlessness of judgment, an unsparing and sometimes cruel eye, a natural malicious wit, an intelligent humor; and beyond all she had a burning, indignant heart that was capable of great compassion. Read “The Woman at the Store,” or “A Birthday,” and “The Child-Who-Was-Tired,” one of the most terrible of stories; read “The Fly,” and then read “Millie,” or “The Life of Ma Parker.” With fine objectivity she bares a moment of experience, real experience, in the life of some one human being; she states no belief, gives no motives, airs no theories, but simply presents to the reader a situation, a place, and a character, and there it is; and the emotional content is present as implicitly as the germ is in the grain of wheat.
Katherine Mansfield has a reputation for an almost finicking delicacy. She was delicate as a surgeon’s scalpel is delicate. Her choice of words was sure, a matter of good judgment and a good ear. Delicate? Read, in “A Married Man’s Story,” the passage describing the prostitute who has been beaten, coming into the shop of the evil little chemist for his famous “pick-me-up.” Or such a scene as the fat man spitting over the balcony in “Violet”; or the seduction of Miss Moss in “Pictures.” “An Indiscreet Journey” is a story of a young pair of lovers, set with the delicacy of sober knowledge against the desolate and brutalized scene of, not war, but a small village where there has been fighting, and the soldiers in the place are young Frenchmen, and the inn is “really a barn, set out with dilapidated tables and chairs.” There are a few stories which she fails to bring off, quite, and these because she falls dangerously near to triviality or a sentimental wistfulness, of which she had more than a streak in certain moments and which she feared and fought in herself. But these are few, and far outweighed by her best stories, which are many. Her celebrated “Prelude” and “At the Bay,” “The Doll’s House,” “The Daughters of the Late Colonel” keep their freshness and curious timelessness. Here is not her view of life but her many views of many kinds of lives, and there is no sign of even a tacit acquiescence in these sufferings, these conflicts, these evils deep-rooted in human nature. Mr. Murry writes of her adjusting herself to life as a flower, etc.; there is an elegiac poesy in this thought, but—and remember I am judging by her pages here under my eye—I see no sign that she ever adjusted herself to anything or anybody, except at an angle where she could get exactly the slant and the light she needed for the spectacle.
She had, then, all her clues; she had won her knowledge honestly, and she turned away from what she knew to pursue some untenable theory of personal salvation under a most dubious teacher. “I fail in my personal life,” she wrote in her journal, and this sense of failure infected her life as artist, which is also personal. Her decision to go to Fontainebleau was no whim, no accident. She had long been under the influence of Orage, her first publisher and her devoted friend, and he was the chief disciple of Gurdjieff in England. In her last finished story, “The Canary,” a deep parable of her confusion and despair, occurs the hopeless phrase: “Perhaps it does not so much matter what one loves in this world. But love something one must.” It seems to me that St. Augustine knew the real truth of the matter: “It doth make a difference whence cometh a man’s joy.”
“The Canary” was finished in July, 1922. “In the October following she deliberately abandoned writing for a time and went into retirement at Fontainebleau, where she died suddenly and unexpectedly on the night of January 9, 1923.” And so joined that ghostly company of unfulfilled, unhappy English artists who died and are buried in strange lands.