TOO SOON?

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 19114, 24 September 1927, Page 13

TOO SOON?

♦ . KATHERINE MANSFIELD'S .JOURNAL. (FROIT OUR OWN CORRESPOKDEKT.) LONDON; August 13.' Not all the admirers of the late Katherine Mansfield's exquisite writings will welcome the publication of her Journal, which has been edited by Mr J. Middleton Murry. No one can deny the extreme interest attaching to these fragments set down in diaries from 1914 to 1922, but one feels that some of the substance is too intimate for publication. During a number of these years the authoress was struggling with ill-health, and a tragic note runs through the 1 personal jottings, which perhaps were not intended tor the eyes of the general public. However that may bo, we have in the Journal such a wor*k as might he considered justifiable twenty or thirty years after the death of a writer who has been proved to be among the immortals. Whether such a work has been presented too soon in the present case or not is a matter open to discussion.

"I really only ask for time to write it—time to w.rite my books. Then I don't mind dying. 1 live to write. The lovely world (God, how lovely the external world is!) is. there, and I bathe in it and am refreshed. But I feel as though I had a duty, some one has set me a task which I am bound to finish. Let me finish it; let me finish it without hurrying—leaving all as fair as I« can." This is the desire that is oft repeated in her private writings during the latter years of her life. Even as early as February of 1918, Tvatherine Mansfield wrote: "How unbearable it would be to die-—leave 'scraps.' 'bits' . . . .-. nothing real finished."

Even two years before she developed that pulmonary trouble which caused her death, Katherine Mansfield was suffering from a rheumatic pain which had a pernicious effect on the action of her" heart. In December of 1915 she wrote: "T've touched bottom. TCven my heart doesn't beat any longer. I only keep, alive by a kind of buzz of blood in my veins. Now the dark is coming: hack again: only at the windows there is a white glare. My watch ticks loudly and strongly on the bed table, a* tlioneh it were rich with a minute life, while I faint—-I die.'' Splendid Fragments.

These are jnelancholy reflections, and they are only a few of many that recur again and again throughout the book. Let it not 1)6 supposed, however,, that there is not other matter which concerns the lighter side of life. There are many fragments, some of which formed the basis, of her published stories; there are still more that were doubtless intended to bo used in due course. For these we have to thank the editor for bringing them to light. They are just "scraps," "bits," certainly, but they are scraps one would not care to lose.

In the last entry of the last journal Katherine Mansfield catechises herself. Her answer to one of her own questions is: "By health I mean the power to live a full, adult, living, breathing life in close contact with what I'love—the earth and the wonders thereof—the sea—the sun.' All that.we mean when we speak of the external world. I want to enter into it, to be part of it, to live in it, to learn from it, to lose all that is superficial and acquired in me and to become a conscious, direct human being. I want, by understanding myself, to understand others. I want to be all that I am capable of becoming so that I may be (and here I have stopped and waited and waited and it's no good—there's only one phrase .that will do) a child of the sun.'' "All is Well." And so down to the final words of the lentry: "And this afll sounds very, strenuous and serious. But now that I have wrestled with it, it's no longer so. I feel happy—deep down. All is well." "With those words," says the editor. "Katherine Mansfield's Journal come 3 to a fitting close. Thenceforward the conviction that 'All was well' never left her. She entered a kind of spiritual brotherhood at Fontainebleau. The object of this brotherhood, at least as she understood it, was to help its members to achieve a spiritual regeneration. "After some three months, at the beginning of 1923, she invited me to stay with her for a week. I arrrived early in the afternoon of January Slh. I have never seen, nor shall I ever see, any one so beautiful as she was on that day; it was as though the exquisite perfection which was always hers had taken possession of her completely. To use her own words, the last grain of 'sediment,' the > last 'traces of earthly degradation,' were departed for ever. But she had lost her life to save it." That night Katherine Mansfield died.