KATHERINE MANSFIELD.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19792, 12 November 1927, Page 1 (Supplement)

KATHERINE MANSFIELD.

BY KOTARE.

HER JOURNAL,

The " Journal of Katherine Mansfield" is one of the most tragic books I have ever road. Many times one wonders why it was published; for. it was meant only for the writer's eyes and one turns the pages often with a shamefaced sense of eavesdropping. There are some things one does not shout from the housetops, and the soul struggles of a dying invalid are of that intimate life which is taken for granted and is not spoken of even among friends. Yet there is something to be said for publication, and, after all, her husband, who has edited the record, is the best and final judge. v

New Zealand owes much to Katherine Mansfi<jJd. She put New Zealand, the land of her birth, on the literary map. Many of her best, stories deal with her early, life in Wellington. Day's Bay, Tinakori Road, Karori, the Picton boat, the Thorndon Baths became under her magic touch familiar as household words to' many | people who had - never been within ten thousand miles of Lambton Quay. Somehow she had captured most of her most vivid impressions during her school days at Karori. The people she knew best were the friends and companions of childhood, the clearest visual memories the places she had played in as a small girl. The glory she won was won too for her own homeland. With so great a debt it seems unworthy to object that she regarded us as a hopelessly Philistine lot, and New Zealand as a country where the artistic soul is stifled by the bourgeois atmosphere. Perhaps we are a dull crowd, inveterately Victorian and stodgy, and it may do us no harm to realise for a change our limitations.

•jhe records many of hei dreams, and of these nocturnal visitors she seems to have had more than her share. On one dreadful night she dreamed that she was in Wellington and had lost her return ticket to London. Her husband notes in his introduction that she had early rebelled against the narrowness and provincialism of a remote colonial city, which was to her an intellectual desert. And here is an entry in her journal: " Above all., cooking smells 1 hate that of mutton, chops. It is somehow such an ill-bred smell. It reminds me of commercial travellers and second-class, N.Z." Our Limitations. Well, she was undoubtedly in her small way a genius, and those of us who are simple workaday folk mu3t e'en accept her judgment. We could not give her the atmosphere necessary for the full development of her unusual powers, and after all we are a bit out of things, and only the very young or very ignorant would claim that we are past our hobbledehoy stage yet, or will be for many a year to come.

l'he journal reveals a mind introspective even to morbidity. She will take her soul to pieces; she cannot help torturing herself. In fact tortured is the one word left clearly in my mind as I lay dowrr this too intimate record. Others have told of her high spirits, her griety. Only here and there do we catch a glimpse of that side of her. 1 should hazard the guess that she had steeped * herself in. Russian literature until she had overlaid and interpenetrated her natural disposition with a Slavic soul. And 31a\> arid Saxon do not mix. In her wise running commentary on " Hamlet," which I jjudge she thought to be an interpretation of a soul much akin to herself, she notes that one can begin acting a part and end by actually becoming the character played. That does not mean, of course, that there was any trace of insincerity in her composition. "She castigates herself for her shams and pretences, but that was only one way in which her passion for sincerity expressed itself. She relentlessly tracks down every vestige of self deception in her own make-up. But a native instinct for introspection, stimulated by her absorption in the Russians, made her so occupied in watching herself live and react that she seems almost to have lost the sense and gusto of living. One is never far from tragedy when, that stage is reached. The Invalid. Besides, she was during most of the years covered by the journal an invalid fighting a courageous but losing battle against a deadly disease. Sho loved life, instinctively, and not from any confidence that life was necessarily a good thing. " Life is a hateful business, there'r no denying it," she wrote in 1914, years before consumption marked her down. The other great catastrophe that shook her to the depths was the death of her brother in France in October, 1915. Life was never again the same to her. In one way, ho was nearer to her than, ever before. She had always been able to people her world with tho few friends she bound to her heart with hoops of steel. Their absence in the body made no difference. They might be a thousand miles away or they might have been long dead. She was conscious of their presence, could talk with them, gather impressions of them. Not clairvoyance one judges, but a special gift of imagination. She considered herself in a partnership with her brother; she was to use her pen to reveal what life had been to them in hapmer days. That was why she turned to New Zealand for the places and people of her stories. She had a sacrsd trust. Of him she wrote and for him. No part of her journal comes home to the reader more closely than this; at least so 1 have found it. Her Stories. When Catherine Mansfield's stories were first published, I read carefully all her books as they appeared. I must admit they made a big impression on me. It was difficult to say just what the charm was. They were fragile, delicate, like very fine porcelain. They seemed clear as an etching by a master who knew the supreme value of economy of line; and yet tlicy gave too the suggestion of a beautiful old hand in faded ink." That twin impression of an ultimate clarity and the apparently unrelated, quality of wispmess- still persists. All the vividness has vanished from my memories. 1. can remember tho impression, but 1 cannot recall the work that produced it. 1 cannot remember the titles of more than two or three, of the stories. The ink has faded from sight altogether. • .

The fault is probably my own; but it seems to me that the journal in its revelation of her methods of work gives us some ground to anticipate such a fading. Beside her' passion for sincerity she had a dread of imitativeness. She wanted to bo sure she saw her theme and characters from her own angle. She went over them, refining and still refining, dreading sentiment and emotion, eliminating this and that as her almost morbid conscience dictated, until what was left had scarcely the pulse of life within it. In reducing things to their ultimate essence, she had! jettisoned elements necessary to a complete human appeal. She wrote exquisitely. Apparently she spent endless labour finding the exact word, the perfect phrase, iler style fits the ultra-refined thought as its skin a snake. But when in her journal she forgets the discipline she has imposed on herself, when she writes currente calamo, there at once emerges a breadth, a humanity, a sometimes even Rabelaisian gusto that might have been a better, gift to her day and generation than the one she has left f But one roust dree one'# own weird.