Katherine Mansfield, The Woman Behind The Books (Including Letters, Journals, Essays & Articles). Katherine Mansfield
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reader, her brother was not important to Katherine Mansfield. He was a symbol and a part of that New Zealand which she was striving to remember in purity of soul. No doubt it was indeed his bitter death, the mockery of his own triumphant confidence in his safe return from the war, that brought her up sharp and sudden against the bitterness of her own memory of New Zealand, the elusive purpose of her own life, and the necessity of hastening on towards the goal she felt she must reach. The death of her brother was indeed a decisive event in Katherine Mansfield’s life; but as an occasion, not as a cause. It brought her to a moment of profound self-knowledge.
From this moment onward her life was a constant effort towards inward clarity, towards what William Blake called Self-annihilation. And the purification of her memory of New Zealand, the purging of all resentment from her soul until that island could emerge, as from the waters of its own Pacific, with the bloom and brightness of a new creation, was the outward and visible sign of the inward and spiritual grace. To be worthy of New Zealand was to be worthy in an absolute sense; it was to have achieved a certain condition of being — to have recaptured the vision of innocence.
“In the early morning there I always remember feeling that this little island has dipped back into the dark blue sea during the night only to rise again at the gleam of day, all hung with bright spangles and glittering drops. … I tried to catch that moment — with something of its sparkle and flavour. And just as on those mornings white milky mists rise and uncover some beauty, then smother it again and then again disclose it, I tried to lift that mist from my people and let them be seen and then to hide them again. … It’s so difficult to describe all this, and it sounds perhaps over-ambitious and vain. But I don’t feel anything but intensely a longing to serve my subject as well as I can.”
It was difficult to describe. For in fact it was nothing but the mystical vision in the specific form in which it comes to the artist of genius:”as when the eye, having looked upon the sun, thenceforward sees the sun in everything.” Katherine was seeking to make firm her hold upon a kind of vision — the true vision of the Imagination — of which she was now visited with glimpses. To this kind of vision one achievement was absolutely necessary. There must be a complete abeyance of the Self.
She feels her way towards the expression of the nature of this inward necessity. Here, in October, 1917, it is to be completely occupied, to the exclusion of all other feelings, by “an intense longing to serve my subject as well as I can.” It is the authentic self-effacement of the true artist — the compulsion whereby the artist becomes the priest of what Blake called “The Everlasting Gospel.”
Four months later, in February, 1918, she has advanced quite definitely to a deeper understanding of her purpose and her own nature. She wrote:
“I’ve two ‘kick offs’ in the writing game. One is joy — real joy — the thing that made me write when we lived at Pauline, and that sort of writing I could only do in just that state of being, in some perfectly blissful way at peace. Then something delicate and lovely seems to open before my eyes, like a flower without thought of a frost or a cold breath, knowing that all about it is warm and tender and ‘ready.’ And what I try, ever so humbly, to express.
“The other ‘kick-off’ is my old original one, and, had I not known love, it would have been my all. Not hate or destruction (both are beneath contempt as real motives) but an extremely deep sense of hopelessness, of everything doomed to disaster. … There! I got it exactly — a cry against corruption — that is absolutely the nail on the head. Not a protest — a cry …”
Now let us remember that the months at the Villa Pauline were the days when she was writing Prelude: that they were also the months when the superficial reader of her Journal would imagine that she was sorrowing over the death of her brother. In fact, they were months of real joy — of the self-abandonment of love, in living and in writing. And if we wish to understand, still more intimately, the connection between the blissful humility of that peace and the cry against corruption, we shall find it in Blake’s “Book of Thel,” which ends precisely with what Katherine meant by the cry— “not a protest” — against corruption.
The struggle which was in Blake’s soul was also in hers. In the last resort Katherine can be understood, or the understanding of her expressed, only in such terms as Blake used to express his experience. His effort towards self-annihilation — the condition of true Imagination — was renewed in her. In 1921 it had become the burden of all her thinking on her purpose and herself.”Marks of earthly degradation still pursue me,” she wrote on July 16th.”I am not crystal clear.” Then, suddenly, in At the Bay, she achieves the condition.
“There’s my Grandmother, back in her chair with her pink knitting, there stalks my Uncle over the grass; I feel as I write, ‘You are not dead, my darlings. All is remembered. I bow down to you. I efface myself so that you may live again through me in your richness and beauty.’ And one feels possessed.”
There is the doctrine, there is the experience, there is Art. That, in the last resort, is what Art is, in so far as Art is a thing of consequence for the lives of men. It is the utterance of Life through a com- pletely submissive being. That and nothing else is the secret of great art — from the cave man drawing to the little tragedy of “The Doll’s House.”
Let us have no compromise and no evasion on this vital issue. In scope Katherine Mansfield was a tiny artist; but because she was a pure artist, she was a great one. In this order of artistic achievement, the small is veritably great, and the great no greater. In this order achievement is absolute or not at all. There is Art, and there is not-Art; and between them is precisely the absolute difference, which the philosophers of the Christian religion sought so often to express, between the descent of the divine grace and the utmost effort of the conscious personal being to achieve it. As Blake said — the great artist who was isolated because he knew the ultimate identity of Christianity and Art— “We, in our selves, are nothing.”
Katherine Mansfield died young; Blake was an old man when he died. Katherine Mansfield did not achieve all the conscious wisdom of Blake. But she was going the same path; as Keats, when he died, was going the same path. Apparently, this path is inevitable to natures of a certain composition which constrains them to prove life “upon their pulses.”
What may be the secret of this delicate and invincible integrity, no man dare say. It is perhaps enough that it should exist, and that we should recognise it. But those who do recognise it see that it is manifest from the beginning in a strange compulsion to submit to experience. Between Life and such natures the impact is not mitigated. It is naked, all the while. Neither creed nor conception can interpose its comfortable medium. They are doomed, or privileged, to lead “a life of Sensations rather than Thoughts.” Such a life seemed, no doubt, good to Keats when he wrote those words, which after-generations have found so hard to understand; but he was to learn that, as the joys of the immediate nature are incomparable, so are its sufferings: and that the time inevitably comes when the joy is suffering and the suffering joy. For such natures, as though compelled by an inward law, return to the organic simplicity of the preconscious being; but they return to that simplicity enriched with all the subtleties of consciousness. If they are artists, they have the power to bend all the complexities of language to the primal innocence of a cry — whether of delight or pain. The cry is innocent; the protest is not.
Hence the fundamental and miraculous simplicity of all true art: a simplicity which evades the intellect for ever, because it is a simplicity which is expressed through complexity. The intellect grasps the complexity, and nothing more. The life, the meaning, the value, the significance eludes it, as the life of the flower eludes the microscopist. There are wonders to be seen through the microscope — those stupendous marvels of the infinitely small which, no less than the infinite greatness of the interstellar spaces, dismayed Pascal — but the simple miracle of life is not among them. That is closed from us, as Blake said, by our five senses, and by the intellect that is merely “a Ratio of the five senses.” We know it immediately, or not at all.
And so with Art, which is Life made audible or visible, through its subtlest vehicle — the human being in whom Life has overcome the alien and hostile enemy of Life: the Self. For, as we have said, the simplicity in