Katherine Mansfield, The Woman Behind The Books (Including Letters, Journals, Essays & Articles). Katherine Mansfield
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as a musical student. And since she probably felt that a musician would have a natural understanding of her method, it is from her musician-friend, Milly Parker, that we have a firsthand description of it.
“… We named the flowers she brought each week. I remember two glorious tulips, one a great rich brown satin fellow, the other a smart little scarlet bud, thin and perky— ‘Dignity and Impudence.’ This finding of names for the flowers prompted us to spend a day in the Wellington Botanical Gardens for the purpose of writing down what we saw. We came to a new fence, I remember — upright posts at even intervals apart, and 5 rails across. Just in front of it a bed of young cabbage trees reared their round heads at varying heights. In a flash she saw it as a line of music, the fence the stave, the heads of the cabbage trees the notes, on the line and in the spaces. There being no clef mark, we hummed the melody through first as treble, then as bass, but found no tune either way, so it was put down as ‘a strange native pattering melody.’
“On the slope of a hill a man was busy burning scrub: ‘a vigorous figure in blue smoke,’ she jotted down as we walked by. Though she read aloud much of her work that day I remember only those two phrases…
“She was at that time only about eighteen but very mature and experienced for her age and often delighted and amused when people mistook her age for twenty-eight. Her handwriting too, looked more like twenty-eight than eighteen. There was an unusual forcible-ness in its emphasis, very like a man’s writing, with odd kinks that gave it a rather hieroglyphic effect, though always quite legible.
“I have come across a piece of music, a gift from her, inscribed in her interesting looking handwriting. ‘With best wishes from the ‘cello,’ and also a leaf from an autograph book. An accident spoilt this book years ago, but before destroying it I removed one sheet, K. Mansfield’s contribution. I still have it. We had raced through the Goltermann concerto at a terrific pace and had gone out on the balcony to get cool. There the roses were in bloom, and in an ecstasy of delight she pronounced the following lines, whether actually extempore, I did not think to ask.
“Red as the wine of forgotten ages,
Yellow as gold by the sunbeams spun,
Pink as the gowns of Aurora’s pages,
White as the robe of a sinless one,
Sweeter than Araby’s winds that blow,
Roses! Roses! I love you so!
“I asked her to write them in my book, which she did, adding below the following:
“It cannot be possible to go through all the abandonment of music and care humanly for anything human afterwards.
“K. Mansfield, 1908.
“I remember her remarking about the signature ‘K. Mansfield,’ for it was the first time I had seen it. She had been writing as Julian Mark for the Native Companion, a Magazine which was then being published in Melbourne.”
2
It happened to be her father who was indirectly responsible for the paid publication of Katherine Mansfield’s first short stories — when she was eighteen.
She had been writing what her Wellington acquaintances called “stories of the sex-interest type.” The justification for the description was slight. True, she was inclined towards the exoticism of the ‘nineties, which represented for her, as for many others of her age and generation, the vindication of art against the Philistine. Since New Zealand was, in her eyes, in comparison with London, Philistia itself, she leaned more heavily towards the ‘nineties than she would otherwise have done. The exotic perfume was very noticeable in the New Zealand atmosphere; and it was labelled “sex-interest.” The same label, we may be sure, would have been attached indiscriminately to Flaubert and Hardy, to Tolstoy and Tchehov.
New Zealand had had no time for modern literature. Its literary classifications were simple: as simple as good and bad. Writing was either “pretty and sweet,” or “sexy” and horrible. It was very obvious to which kind Katherine Mansfield’s belonged. There was a legend current at the time concerning a story of hers called From my Bedroom Window, which was rumoured to have been published in some New Zealand newspaper — a story of lovers overheard talking on a bench in Fitzherbert Terrace. This story was reputed to have burst on the community like a bomb.”A nice sweet young girl to have such thoughts!”
It is fairly certain that the story had no existence, though, as we shall see, there was something out of which eager scandal-mongers may have fashioned it for themselves. But the legend lasted for years. It seems to have been chiefly born of a scandalised apprehension of moral outrage, lurking always in the fact that Kathleen claimed the freedom of an artist. The very conception was outside the range of contemporary New Zealand. The books which she had read were quite unknown to them; they were completely unprepared for the liberties of the artist. To them, with their curtailed opportunities for making the acquaintance of “modern” literature, it seemed that Kathleen was a pioneer of what appeared to them literary licence: that she had invented freedom of speech in fiction.
When a young New Zealand journalist remarked that “she wrote like a mature and widely experienced woman of thirty,” he might have found had he searched for it — that “wide experience of life” dormant between the covers of the books in Kathleen Beauchamp’s studio-room. This secret, closed from him, and other Wellington contemporaries, was indicated in the first paragraph of one of her stories, printed at that time, In a Café:
“Each day they walked down Bond Street together, between the hours of twelve and one, and turned in at the Blenheim Café for lunch and conversation. She, a pale, dark girl, with that unmistakable air of ‘acquaintance with life’ which is so general among the students in London and an expression at once of intense eagerness and anticipated disillusion. Life to a girl who had read Nietzsche, Eugene Sue, Baudelaire, D’Annunzio, Barrés, Catulle Mendés, Suder-mann, Ibsen, Tolstoi, was, in her opinion, no longer complex, but a trifle obvious …”
Kathleen had showed her sheaf of stories to several friends whom she hoped might help her with publication. Among others, she took them to a young journalist who admired her work but was in no position, then, to aid her; and one of the musicians who played in her trio — a fastidious, highly sensitive woman, older than herself. Even she was shocked.”But, Katie!” she said in consternation,”In a Garret is beyond words! How do you know such things?”
“I just know them,” Kass answered.”That is life.”
“She was like the ultra-modern painters,” her friend said afterwards.”She had to have all barriers down before she could do new things. And her quality of imagination was such that it was difficult to tell where truth ended and imagination began.”
True it was that she tinged her anecdotes with colour all her own; she gave them form and substance — sensing the dramatic possibilities of the immediate situation, and the responsiveness of her audience. The anecdote had been formed by wit and invention, before she had done with it; for even then she was telling her story as a writer.
First success came upon her in the most unexpected manner. Her father said casually, à propos of nothing:”Re your stories, Katie, I saw young Mills to-day at a match. I told him I thought you’d been spoiling paper long enough, but your mother was sympathetic; I asked him if he still ran the literary page of The New Zealand Mail. He said, ‘No. Why?’ I told him I remembered he used to read MSS. of young writers as a feature of the page, and wondered if he ever read them now. He said, ‘Yes, whenever they happen along.’ So I said you were following ‘Elizabeth’s’ footsteps, but hadn’t got out of the bush, and I asked him if he’d read some of your stuff.”
She went up to her room and shut herself into her own world, spread out the big black Note Book and the smaller Black Note Books scrawled heavily with violet ink, and read everything with a newly critical eye. She even went back through the Queen’s College years, re-reading sketches and jottings, and the verses in Little Fronds. Nothing