KATHERINE MANSFIELD.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19798, 19 November 1927, Page 1 (Supplement)

KATHERINE MANSFIELD.

A TRAGEDY OF GENIUS.

BY KOTABE,

I find it very difficult to get away from Katherine Mansfield. That intimate record of her soul's tortured struggles during the last years of her life haunts one and will not be shaken off. It may be that hers will be the first New Zealand name to find a permanent place of honour in future histories of English literature. It may be that the story of art will assign her the honour of introducing New Zea-

land to its carefully guarded pages. She is worthy of at least as much space as the achievements of a New Zealand racehorse or a New Zealand boxer.

There is something of the panting urgency of Keats in her determination to glean the harvest of heij teeming brain before the swift night fell. She knew her time was short, that she was running a race with death. And the very knowledge that sent her passionately to work dried up her pen. Time and again she cries in anguish that the thronging thoughts will not flow over into woi ds. She has everything to say and only a few days to say it in, and she sits helpless before her paper.

The Handicap. How much this sense of impotence was the result of her physical weakness and pain and how far it contributed to the victory of her dire enemy it is impossible to say. But one suspects that the nervous condition induced by her inability to write helped to burn up her physical resources, just as a similar state of mind hurried Keats to that Roman grave with its pathetic cry: "Here lips one whose name was writ in water." " I've decided to tear up everything that I've written and start again. I'm sure that is best The misery persists, and I am so crushed under it. If I could write with my old fluency for one day, the spell would be broken. It's . the continual effort—the slow building-up of' my idea and then, before my eyes and out of my power, its slow dissolving."

That was written before the final breakdown in health. That mood grew in power and persistency when she was racked with pain, and saw herself inexorably drawing near the shadows. That is the aspect of her last months that clutches the heart. A less noble soul would have given up the struggle. If Fate treated her so scurvily, then Fate could have its will of her. She would probably have lengthened her life, but we should have lacked her best work and the inspiration of a courage that fought through to the last heart beat.

Suppressions. Perhaps it was a combination of all these factors that kept in check the high spirits that her friends always remarked in her, but that find almost no place in her journal. Occasionally the fun breaks through. Here is an excellent example, though even hero one detects a bitter flavour.

"Hallo! Here come two lovers. She has a pinched-in waist, a hat like a saucer turned upside down—he sham panama, hat guard, cane, etc.; his arm enfolding. Walking between sea and sky. His voice floats up to me; of course, occasional tinned meat does not nratter, but a perpetual diet of tinned meat is bound to produce .... I am sure the Lord loves them and that they and their seed will prosper and multiply for ever and ever . . ."

She is struck by whimsical analogies on occasion. Babies in arms have, she thinks, an extraordinary resemblance to Queen Victoria. "They have just the same air of false resignation, the same mcurnful regal plumpness." But these are only the rare lights that deepen the shadows. I have felt time and again that when the discovered her Russian soul she spoiled a very good and wholesome Saxon, for whom life might have been a most entertaining affair. And sometimes I get a clear impression, beneath the passion for modernity, of a very simple and unsophisticated person who would have been more at homo among lavender and old laco than in the swirling life of artistic London. But that may be illusion. Anyway she fought life to a finish, and genius must take its own way.

The Last Days. In her last days sho seems to have leaned less upon the great Russians and girded herself to a close study of Shakespeare. Her comments are surprisingly sane and penetrating. There is more sound wisdom in one or two of her vivid sentences than in some massive and erudite tomes I have read. But it is not her powers as a critic that I wish to emphasise here, admirable as they were. Shakespeare seerus to lay a healing hand upon her.

The Entries in her journal during the period of absorption in Shakespeare seem to me to have leapt out of the growing morbidness of her ordinary mood, into the clear sunshine. She is calmer; some of her worst problems resolve themselves, or at least lose much of their insistence. They come back again for nothing could finally allay them. That is what one would expect. There is a breadth about Shakespeare, a comforting wholesomeness, a fundamental sanity even in his most tragic moments, that dispel, as with the fresh breezes i heaven, the miasmata that constitute the chief part of the artificial air of most of our modern hot-house artistic movements. I think Shakespeare brought her back to normal for a time. During the same period I notice that she thought more kindly of New Zealand. She plans to come back to the land of her birth. It seems that long-broken ties are being knit up- again. But her dreams wore never destined to fulfilment. Physically she seems no worse. A great spiritual change is manifest in her. She becomes increasingly self-condemnatory. She searches her life and character for hidden defects; sho scourges herself for lack of humility; shp laughs bitterly at her tendency to preen herself on her superior accomplishments.

Finally she decided to enter a spiritual brotherhood not far from Paris. Here in great content she made her soul; here the peace she had so desperately sought flooded her heart, and here she died suddenly. "Lord, make mo crystal clear for Thy light to shine through," was her cry toward the end. And the last words she ever wrote were these: "I feel happy—deep down. All is well."