Katherine Mansfield and the Arts: Katherine Manfield Studies, Volume 3 9781474465861

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July 11, 2011

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Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 3 · 2011

Katherine Mansfield and the Arts Edited by

Delia da Sousa Correa, Gerri Kimber and Susan Reid

Edinburgh University Press

July 11, 2011

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02:37pm

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How to order Subscriptions can be accepted for complete volumes only. Print prices include packing and airmail for subscribers in North America and surface postage for subscribers in the Rest of the World. All orders must be accompanied by the correct payment. You can pay by cheque in Pound, Sterling or US Dollars, bank transfer, Direct Debt or Credit/Debt card. The individual rate applies only when a subscription is paid for with a personal cheque, credit card or bank transfer. To order using the online subscription form, please visit www.eupjournals.com/kms/page/subscribe Alternatively you may place your order by telephone on +44 (0)131 650 6207, fax on +44 (0)131 662 3286 or email to [email protected] using your Visa or Mastercard credit card. Don’t forget to include the expiry date of your card, the security number (three digits on the reverse of the card) and the address that the card is registered to. Please make your cheque payable to Edinburgh University Press Ltd. Sterling cheques must be drawn on a UK bank account. If you would like to pay by bank transfer or Direct Debit, contact us at [email protected] and we will provide instructions. Advertising Advertisements are welcomed and rates are available on request, or by consulting our website at www.eupjournals.com. Advertisers should send their enquiries to the Journals Marketing Manager at the address above.

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Contents

Introduction Kirsty Gunn Articles ‘As fastidious as though I wrote with acid’: Katherine Mansfield, J. D. Fergusson and the Rhythm Group in Paris Angela Smith Performativity in Words: Musical Performance in Katherine Mansfield’s Stories Delia da Sousa Correa

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A Literary Impressionist?: Mansfield’s Painterly Vignettes Melissa C. Reimer

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Mansfield, Woolf and Music: ‘The queerest sense of echo’ Vanessa Manhire

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‘All glittering with broken light’: Katherine Mansfield and Impressionism Young Sun Choi

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‘The beauty of your line – the life behind it’: Katherine Mansfield and the Double Impression Rebecca Bowler

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Creative Writing The ex-wife Ali Smith

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Poetry Walter de la Mare: ‘To K. M.’ Jan Kemp: ‘A Little Pneumonia’ Fleur Adcock: ‘Villa Isola Bella’

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Report ‘Dear Mrs Murry’: A Little-Known Manuscript Letter from D. H. Lawrence to Katherine Mansfield Andrew Harrison Review Article Suzanne Raitt: Sydney Janet Kaplan, Circulating Genius: John Middleton Murry, Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence Reviews Faith Binckes: Gerri Kimber and Janet Wilson, eds, Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary Volume of Essays Bruce Harding: Katherine Mansfield, The Aloe, original text ed. by Vincent O’Sullivan, with a Foreword by Kirsty Gunn Robert Fraser: Lorae Parry, Bloomsbury Women & The Wild Colonial Girl: A Play About Katherine Mansfield Alissa G. Karl: Jenny McDonnell, Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Marketplace: At the Mercy of the Public Kate Kennedy: Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber and Susan Reid, eds, Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism Gerri Kimber: Kathryn Simpson, Gifts, Markets and Economies of Desire in Virginia Woolf Sydney Janet Kaplan: Kathleen Jones, Katherine Mansfield: The Story Teller

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Notes on Contributors

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Acknowledgements

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Introduction Kirsty Gunn

What a pleasure it is to take part in the conversation that is every issue of Katherine Mansfield Studies! For in these pages, as we hear a range of voices, styles of discussion and ways of conveying ideas, it’s as though, every time we open up a new volume, we’re at the very best sort of cocktail party. This third volume on ‘Katherine Mansfield and the Arts’ is full of that kind of fun. The Katherine Mansfield on display here is the one who’s at the centre of cultural life – with her love of painting and of music and of the quicksilver interchange of thought and inspiration that comes from looking and looking again and remembering and imagining and turning it all into her art – her ideas the start of a host of others. Indeed, colour and music are most present in this volume – and line. Mansfield’s line. That beautiful fastidiousness of hers turned to every sentence she wrote, drawn right into the centre of her thinking about the way a sentence might fall and sit upon the mind. Angela Smith’s opening piece sets the tone exactly as she places the relationship between Mansfield and the Scottish painter J. D. Fergusson along that same line of certitude and exactitude in art, showing us how two exiles fetched up in the swirl of colour and life that was Paris at the beginning of the last century and forged a precise aesthetic from that experience that drew their art together. It reminds us how literature and painting can have a dialogue that describes so well how and why work is made – and is an idea that continues in Rebecca Bowler’s essay, the worthy winner of the second Katherine Mansfield Society Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 3 (2011): 1–3 DOI: 10.3366/kms.2011.0002 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

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Katherine Mansfield Studies essay prize competition. Again we have a coming together of art and literary practice as we see how the effects of Impressionism and PostImpressionism played against Mansfield’s page. Fergusson’s remark about ‘paint that is living’ from Angela Smith’s piece seems to slide right up next to Rebecca Bowler’s questions about Impressionism’s ‘patterning’ and in turn starts a discussion in Melissa Reimer’s ‘A Literary Impressionist?’ in which she shows how some of the New Zealand stories were framed within a particularly European painterly sensibility so as to merge the far-away and the near, the stuff and content of those Tinakori Road memories coloured and shaped in Prussian Blue and Paris Green, ‘shaken free’ of their provenance in the same way, it seemed to Mansfield when she saw Van Gogh’s sunflowers – those Cadmium yellow blooms of his lived on the canvas and were not just rendered there. And colour and brushwork, line, turn also to the draw of the bow across the strings in articles by Vanessa Manhire and Delia da Sousa Correa where they bring us to consider the aspects of practice and play, musical play, in Mansfield’s stories and approach to writing. Both remind us of the importance of sound, the way the cellist’s attention to the very tone and rhythm in her writing lent it certain effects that are intensely musical. Vanessa Manhire reminds us, too, of Virginia Woolf’s care for music as a modus operandi in creating fiction, and of the similarities and differences in the two artists’ approaches (one a practising musician, the other not; one with private funds for concert going, the other a wild colonial living from suitcase to suitcase on uncertain funds). She recalls the way Mansfield, throughout her writing, continued to give the sound to Woolf that came from practise first, technique, technique, technique – from whence would follow the beauty and the art. That relationship, between the two writers, is very much on show at our party actually. The ‘myriad of impressions’ Woolf talked about in her ‘Modern Fiction’ is vividly sketched in Young Sun Choi’s article when she talks about Mansfield being affected by the painting of Whistler and seeing boats on the Seine at dusk, noting: ‘one of those boats is exactly what I want my novel to be . . . ’ with people moving about inside it and the ‘bright shivering lights and the sound of water.’ The same reflections and echoes come to play in a glancing, slippery and beautifully elegiac short story by Ali Smith who writes about the influence of Mansfield upon her characters in a way that reminds us of how she’s written about the influence of Woolf in her fiction before. ‘The ex-wife’ is itself a musical performance – a trio, really – and a collage as well, a painterly ‘mash-up’ – to use Frank O’Hara’s lovely

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Introduction definition of those blends of image and text – of narrative, speech and KM’s own words slipping in and out of the story in the italics of a whisper. Then, as with all good get-togethers, there are poets here – Walter de la Mare and Fleur Adcock and Jan Kemp – and a hint of gossip; a letter that’s been uncovered that Andrew Harrison writes about with delicacy and insight, shedding new light on the relationship between Lawrence and Mansfield. And finally, there’s a crowd of reviews of new publications that speak loud of the growing momentum and weight of Katherine Mansfield studies and work around the world. So the conversation continues. As we look at Mansfield’s stories, listen to them. . . . An idea picked up here, developed there. . . . A query opened, or an agreement fixed by some fresh finding or detail of fact. . . . All the time describing how Mansfield’s writing, like every piece of true art, reveals more and more of itself and of our own practice, as scholars and artists and writers, the more we look at it, listen to it, and take part in its pleasures. Each volume of Katherine Mansfield Studies brings us together this way, into one room. And just listen to the patterns of ideas our voices make upon the page as we play back our responses to one of literature’s great modernists, here at the centre of this particular party. *

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‘As fastidious as though I wrote with acid’: Katherine Mansfield, J. D. Fergusson and the Rhythm Group in Paris Angela Smith

Abstract This article focuses on the cultural and political ferment in Paris exemplified by the Ballets Russes, and on its impact on Katherine Mansfield’s writing when she was a member of the Rhythm group. She was engaged with Rhythm’s mantra adapted from J. M. Synge’s preface to his poems, ‘Before art can be human again it must learn to be brutal’, clearly expressed in its Fauvist illustrations. Mansfield’s exposure to the dynamic aesthetics of the second wave of Fauvist painters, centred on the Scottish Colourist J. D. Fergusson, and to the work of Rhythm’s young essayists, poets and writers of fiction, is contextualised within this turbulent period. Fergusson’s brilliance as the art editor of Rhythm depended to some extent on his own interest in anti-colonial cultural nationalism, and on his opposition to rules, boundaries and conventional academic practices. Rhythm’s editorial policy, expressed in the first issue, makes this explicit. Mansfield’s stories first published in Rhythm will be discussed in relation to her interest in Fergusson’s aesthetic practice. Her subsequent development as a writer with a unique inflection of modernism can be connected to an etched awareness of design: ‘I’m a powerful stickler for form in this style of work’.

Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 3 (2011): 4–20 DOI: 10.3366/kms.2011.0003 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

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Mansfield, J. D. Fergusson and the Rhythm Group in Paris Key words: Mansfield, J. D. Fergusson, Rhythm magazine, Ballets Russes, line, cultural nationalism, Anne Estelle Rice Margaret Morris, the dancer who was the Scottish painter J. D. Fergusson’s partner from 1913, writes that in ‘1909 he was elected a sociétaire of the Salon d’Automne, and after that, he received complimentary seats for the first nights of all Diaghilev ballets’.1 We know that he used the tickets as he wrote that he and his friends, including John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield, ‘were all very excited with the Russian Ballet when it came to Paris’ and that ‘They were the greatest nights in anyone’s life – Sheherazade, Petruchka, Sacre du Printemps, Nijinski, Karsavina, Fokine’.2 This essay contextualises and explores the complementary aesthetic that developed from December 1912, with a focus on line, between Mansfield who visited Paris and Fergusson who was living there. The rapport that existed between Mansfield and Fergusson was rooted in excitement about the integration of formal and thematic experiment in the arts exemplified by the Ballets Russes. Fergusson describes the impact on him of the artistic radicalism of the period on his arrival in Paris in 1907: Something new had started and I was very much intrigued. But there was no language for it that made sense in Edinburgh or London; an expression like, ‘the logic of line’ meant something in Paris that it couldn’t mean in Edinburgh.3

Together with this aesthetic revelation came a political awareness for Mansfield and Fergusson as expatriates. Both were able to recognise aspects of the colonialism of their own countries by seeing them from abroad. Three interlinked aspects of twentieth-century Parisian life before the outbreak of the Great War provided a context for the synergy between Fergusson and Mansfield: the visits of the Ballets Russes; the physical transformation of Paris and its staging of international exhibitions; the dynamic waves of innovation in Post-Impressionist painting and sculpture. The first of these, the Ballets Russes, was a touring troupe formed by Sergei Diaghilev, which became a company in 1911. In 1912, it presented the first ballet to be choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky, L’Après-midi d’un faune. Although the work lasted only fourteen minutes, it was symptomatic of a new movement in dance in that, thematically and stylistically, it shocked the audience. Léon Bakst’s set was a mottled, non-representational landscape against

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Katherine Mansfield Studies which nymphs stood out in long pleated white tunics with stencilled borders. Their poses were not those of classical ballet, but were stylised and often static, suggesting a two-dimensional frieze on a Greek vase. Nijinsky made himself up so that his mouth had ‘an infinite languor and a bestial line [. . .] He did not imitate; he merely brought out the impression of a clever animal who might almost be human’.4 As the curtain went up, Debussy’s languorous and sensuous music introduced the faun, who was fascinated when he saw the nymphs on their way to bathe. They ran away but one left her scarf behind. The faun nuzzled it, lay on it, then, with thrusting movements, abruptly reached orgasm. The curtain fell. There was no human yearning in the piece, but a bestial and pagan sexuality denounced as loathsome by Le Figaro’s reviewer but praised by Auguste Rodin: ‘Form and meaning are indissolubly wedded in [Nijinsky’s] body, which is totally expressive of the mind within’.5 The move away from celebrating civilisation and its moral complexities spoke to the Rhythm group’s evolving raison d’être. Anne Estelle Rice, herself a painter, wrote on the Ballets Russes in Rhythm, focussing on Bakst, who created both set and costumes for the ballet: A painter in line, a painter in movement, a painter in forms, he knows the value of line to give energy and force, the value of a dominant colour and shape, the value of daring juxtapositions to create life and movement in masses of colour, where costumes, drapery and decorations reverberate to sound, action, and light. The modern tendency in all forms of art is towards ‘la recherche des lignes,’ which in their quality and direction must be ‘les lignes vivantes,’ or the result is banal and sterile. The genial and dominant idea of the Russian Ballets is based upon line.6

The overt eroticism of many of the ballets was as disconcerting to the audience as their radical choreography. Even before Sacre du Printemps provoked a riot in the theatre in May 1913, the voluptuous Schéhérazade had caused a sensation in 1910. Although Rimsky-Korsakov’s music was more familiar than Stravinsky’s alarmingly throbbing rhythms in Sacre du Printemps, the spectacle of the orgy and the massacre in Schéhérazade took by surprise audiences who associated ballet with such classical tragedies as Giselle. The essence of the company’s success was Diaghilev’s ability to recognise and encourage the avant-garde in music, dance, choreography, costume and set design, and to foster loyalty to the company, enabling practitioners ranging over different arts to work together. While Rhythm lasted, the group worked in a similarly collaborative way.

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Mansfield, J. D. Fergusson and the Rhythm Group in Paris Paris was the centre of artistic innovation in the west in the early years of the twentieth century, and the annual Parisian season of the Ballets Russes provoked ecstasy in the audiences and influenced fashion. When Schéhérazade was in the repertoire dress-designers ‘borrowed the cut of the odalisques’ costumes, turbans and skirts resembling oriental trousers became fashionable, “haute couture’’ filled its salons with low divans, heaped with bright cushions’.7 Paris itself had been radically transformed into a metropolis of style during the second half of the nineteenth century, when Baron Haussmann was commissioned by Napoleon III to modernise the city. The introduction of wide boulevards and avenues, parks and gardens, opened up sweeping perspectives and enabled the construction of the first department stores, with their huge plate glass windows. Shopping became a leisurely pastime enjoyed by flâneurs, both male and female. When the entrepreneur Aristide Boucicaut finished building the Bon Marché in 1887 it occupied an entire city block and had a turnover of 123 million francs. Émile Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise, first published as Au Bonheur des Dames in 1883, captures the irresistible magnetism of the consumers’ heaven, in which material goods take the place of nature: At the far end of the hall, around one of the small cast-iron columns which supported the glass roof, material was streaming down like a bubbling sheet of water, falling from above and spreading out on to the floor. First, pale satins and soft silks were gushing out: royal satins and renaissance satins, with the pearly shades of spring water; light silks as transparent as crystal – Nile green, turquoise, blossom pink, Danube blue [. . .] Women pale with desire were leaning over as if to look at themselves.8

The power of the consumer, and the sensual power of the commodity over the consumer, are evident in this passage, and the popularity of window-shopping as a spectator pastime combined with another new phenomenon. In large department stores the staff were used to display the goods, modelling them for bourgeois customers. The commodification of human beings mutated from this into a similarly fashionable and, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, new phenomenon, the international exhibition. This was the heyday of major international exhibitions, such as the famous Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900. At the same time, an interest in anthropology was developing in Europe, and the two phenomena came together in a new feature of the exhibitions. Between 1889 and 1914, as Paul Greenhalgh expresses it, ‘objects

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Katherine Mansfield Studies were seen to be less interesting than human beings, and through the medium of display, human beings were transformed into objects’.9 In Paris, the Jardin d’Acclimatation branched out into a new venture. A merchant who employed hunters in Africa to supply live animals had the entrepreneurial idea of collecting people instead. The imported specimens were required to recreate a bastardised form of village life to demonstrate ‘savage’ customs and the practice spread to the exhibitions as is clear in a photograph of the Congolese Village in the Exposition Universelle held in Paris in 1900.10 In it elegant women with parasols and bowler-hatted men stroll through the village of mud huts as they strolled through the department stores, here watching the ‘primitive’ people who were required to turn their domestic life into a performance, and act out ‘rituals’. Congolese people had been brutally exploited by Europeans in the rubber plantations and now Europeans could view the ‘savages’ at close hand. Who are the savages, one might ask, and such journals as L’Assiette au beurre did ask awkward questions about French and Belgian colonial policy. Mansfield could well have seen the British add their own dimension to the exhibition of ‘primitive’ peoples in the Coronation Exhibition in 1911, when she was living in London, where the most popular attraction was a Maori village. The programme note to the exhibit assures the visitor that ‘the Maoris are now a most peaceful race’ though it does not explain its own statistics: ‘Their population has diminished since 1846, when they numbered 100,000, to about 45,000’.11 The savagery of attempted genocide lurks behind this affirmation, and social Darwinist implications are clear in the archaic description of the Maori as ‘warriors and maidens’ – the reader infers that they are dated and doomed. It is significant that Mansfield first met Fergusson in Paris. Though Paris at the turn of the century was a focus for artistic innovation and debate, elements of the life there were politically and socially familiar, so they offered expatriate artists a comparative insight into their own national history. The artistic movement that transformed Fergusson’s aesthetic and painterly practice was one that spoke directly to his experience as a Scot; it was Fauvism. In autumn 1906 the Fauvist painter Maurice Vlaminck acquired a Fang mask from the Congo and sold it to André Derain who showed it to Picasso and Matisse. Derain found it a source of inspiration: These Africans being primitive, uncomplex, uncultured, can express their thought by a direct appeal to the instinct. Their carvings are informed with emotion. So Nature gives me the material with which to

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Mansfield, J. D. Fergusson and the Rhythm Group in Paris construct a world of my own, governed not by literal limitations, but by instinct and sentiment.12

The description of Africans as ‘uncomplex’ and ‘uncultured’ appears today to damn them with patronising praise but Derain’s intention is clearly to celebrate primitivism as the binary opposite of civilisation, in admiration of its supposed authenticity and responsiveness to intuition rather than to intellect. One of the most influential paintings encoding a spontaneity that the Fauvists believed western culture had lost was Henri Matisse’s Le Bonheur de vivre (1905–6); the picture had a profound effect on both Picasso and Fergusson when they first saw it. Fergusson was dazzled by its aesthetic adventurousness. It had an enormous impact when it was shown at the Salon des Indépendants in 1906 for its absolute updating of an ancient – indeed academic – theme: the paysage champêtre (rural landscape) [. . .] The unsettling lack of spatial consistency in the Matisse, combined with its arbitrary colour, free brush-work and lack of ‘finished’ form seemed even more shocking when applied to its pastoral subject, and on the scale of the more important paysage historique (historical landscape).13

The painting shows a mythical scene of sensuous and erotic pleasure, with a ring of dancers in the background and languorous, mostly female, naked figures in the foreground playing pipes and embracing. Trees curve like the figures, and the colours are vibrantly nonnaturalistic. The perspective is inconsistent; some of the figures are heavily outlined in red or green, and the non-naturalistic palette is dominated by vibrant yellows, pinks, reds and greens. When the painting was shown as Matisse’s only submission to the Salon des Indépendants in March 1906, like some of Diaghilev’s productions, it caused a riot: Parisians who can still remember the event say that from the doorway, as they arrived at the salon, they heard shouts and were guided by them to an uproar of jeers, angry babble and screaming laughter, rising from the crowd that was milling in derision around the painter’s passionate view of joy.14

When the critic Louis Vauxcelles disparagingly called Matisse and his group the Fauves (wild beasts), Matisse thought that he had done them a favour; he told Mansfield’s future lover, Francis Carco, ‘Frankly, it was admirable. The name of Fauve could hardly have been better suited to our frame of mind’.15 So Paris, when Mansfield and Fergusson met there in 1912, was a hub of artistic innovation and political dissent, with potent links between

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Katherine Mansfield Studies the two facets of urban life. The synergy between them was expressed five years later in her journal: This man is in many ways extraordinarily like me. I like him so much; I feel so honest with him that it’s simply one of my real joys, one of the real joys of my life, to have him come and talk and be with me. I did not realise, until he was here and we ate together, how much I cared for him – and how much I was really at home with him. A real understanding. We might have spoken a different language – returned from a far country.16

The new, mutually comprehensible language of exploration arises out of comparable cultural and political experience. At a superficial level, both were sneered at in England for their provincialism. Ottoline Morrell referred to Mansfield’s ‘exotic vulgarity and sensitively showy bad taste’,17 rather a startling allegation from a woman whose clothes in photographs and paintings look as if she is permanently dressed to play a parodic part on the stage. Morrell’s snobbish view was endorsed by Rupert Brooke’s assertion, possibly mocking Mansfield’s accent, that she ‘really ought to remember she’s a lidy’.18 Virginia Woolf said that Fergusson’s cover illustration for the Hogarth Press’s publication of Mansfield’s Prelude ‘makes our gorges rise’,19 and his paintings were excluded by Roger Fry from the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition of 1912. Frances Spalding interprets this as ‘the English tendency to relegate Scottish art to a secondary, peripheral position’.20 On a more significant level, there was a consonance in Mansfield’s and Fergusson’s personal histories that led to professional affinity, and a mutual awareness of the significance of line. Mansfield’s pakeha consciousness of what she calls ‘the taint of the pioneer in my blood’21 is evident in her published and personal writing; she is intrigued by Maori experience. At the end of ‘How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped’, which was first published in Rhythm in 1912, ‘little blue men’,22 supposedly the police, arrive paradoxically to kidnap Pearl Button, taking her from her Maori liberators; they are presented as aliens from the child’s perspective. The much earlier unpublished ‘Summer Idylle’ is a homoerotic story about a doppelganger in which the pakeha girl has a Maori name, Hinemoa, and the Maori girl is called Marina. The craving to be the Other is clear from the journals – Mansfield’s licentious obsession with the beautiful Maori girl Maata frightens even her: ‘I want Maata. I want her as I have had her – terribly’.23 Her disjunction from both Maori life and the bourgeois respectability of the Empire city was intensified when she arrived back in London, the longed-for hub, as she saw it, of artistic

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Mansfield, J. D. Fergusson and the Rhythm Group in Paris and intellectual innovation, in 1908 and was treated as a colonial gypsy. Fergusson’s experience was similar but his response was more robust. Paris was the place that transformed his view of himself – he said, paradoxically, ‘Paris is simply a place of freedom [. . .] It allowed me to be Scots as I understand it’.24 His response is explained partly by his background. More consistently than Mansfield, he hated rules and conventions. When he was at primary school in about 1882, he received a formal invitation to a children’s party, along the lines of ‘Master McLean requests the company of Master Fergusson’. His mother said he must write a formal acceptance and he wrote across the centre of a piece of notepaper, ‘Master Fergusson doesn’t want to go’.25 And he didn’t go. As he grew up, he felt at odds with the constraints of what he saw as a bureaucratic and Calvinist society in Edinburgh; he refused to go to Edinburgh School of Art when he discovered that he would have to spend years doing studies from plaster casts, whereas he wanted to look at life. Of the academicians he said, ‘Scotland is producing British Imperial Art, that is Art that is doing its best to fit in with the Imperial control’.26 From early on, he identified with his Highland forebears whom he perceived as colonised; his parents spoke Gaelic and his father had to learn English in school. As a result he says: I was born without a language – which was perhaps lucky for me. When I say it was lucky, I mean that I started with a Gaelic point of view, in a surrounding of English! For at that time, for most Scots to be English seemed to be the chief thing. . .Gaelic and the Gaelic point of view were useless and even absurd – in the ‘Modern Athens!’.27

So he sympathised with a Highland way of life that he saw as marginalised by metropolitan Edinburgh. Looking back much later, he wrote, with his usual ebullience, that ‘black is certainly not fundamentally characteristic of the Scottish temperament. It is characteristic of Calvinism, night, degeneration, despair, disease and death’;28 it sounds a bit like a Calvinist hell-fire sermon in reverse, asserting Scottish Colourism. He eventually found what he was looking for, not in a place but in paintings, when he moved to Paris at the age of 32, in 1907. Matisse’s Le Bonheur de vivre would have seemed startling to an eye attuned, as Fergusson’s was, to Whistler’s muted palette. In response to this, Fergusson made an extraordinary aesthetic leap within a couple of years. His The White Dress (1904) is a charming, conventional Edwardian portrait in muted colours in the style of Whistler; the sitter’s

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Katherine Mansfield Studies

Le manteau chinois, by J. D. Fergusson (1909). © The Fergusson Gallery, Perth & Kinross Council, Scotland.

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Mansfield, J. D. Fergusson and the Rhythm Group in Paris features would be recognisable to those who knew her, and the setting is genteel, with a flower in a vase complementing the flowers in her hat. Le manteau chinois (1909), on the other hand, confronts the viewer with a demanding stare from a mask-like face, resembling in this respect Matisse’s portraits of the same period. The background takes up and repeats rhythmically in vibrant colours the shapes and motifs in the figure; the motif on the sleeve of the jacket is repeated on the lefthand side of the picture, the shape of the eyebrows is echoed in the hat, and the background flowers reiterate the decoration in the jacket. The big curves in the upper part of the painting are juxtaposed against the vertical lines at the bottom. There is a strange Fauvist green outline to the right-hand side of the face which heightens the alienating effect of the gaze. Fergusson wrote much later, when he had absorbed the impact of Paris: I remember when I was young any colour was considered a sign of vulgarity. Greys and blacks were the only colours for people of taste and refinement. Good pictures had to be black, grey, brown or drab. Well! let’s forget it, and insist on things in Scotland being of colour that makes for and associates itself with light, hopefulness, health and happiness.29

The joy of Matisse’s Le Bonheur de vivre with its vibrant colour is clearly still in his mind. What he looked for in painting was ‘paint that is living and not merely a coat of any sort of paint placed between containing lines like a map’.30 From its inception, before Mansfield became its assistant editor, Rhythm associated itself with freedom from the constraints of conventional civilisation and conventional wisdom about colonialism, though of course at the same time it was engaged in a network of responses to the market and specifically to other little magazines. John Middleton Murry’s Bergsonian essay ‘Art and Philosophy’ in the first issue of Rhythm formulates Fergusson’s beliefs as well as his own about the arts, with an emphasis on line: [The artist] must return to the moment of pure perception to see the essential forms, the essential harmonies of line and colour [. . .] [Modernism] penetrates beneath the outward surface of the world, and disengages the rhythms that lie at the heart of things, rhythms strange to the eye, unaccustomed to the ear, primitive harmonies of the world that is and lives.31

The idea of deep structures and the significance of line is central to the Post-Impressionist work of Cézanne, Picasso and Matisse; the first number of Rhythm includes an essay by Michael Sadler on Fauvism and

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Katherine Mansfield Studies a study by Picasso of mask-like faces. The painters’ artistic innovations are implicitly linked to the opening piece in the first issue, ‘The New Thelema’ by Frederick Goodyear. It develops the magazine’s watchword, modified from J. M. Synge’s preface to his poems: ‘Before art can be human it must learn to be brutal’.32 Goodyear’s emphasis is on political and artistic liberation, stressing: a true impulse towards conscious freedom. It comes to men who see instinctively that no man is certainly free till all men are free [. . .] it is neobarbarians, men and women who to the timid and unimaginative seem merely perverse and atavistic, that must familiarize us with our outcast selves.33

Fergusson seized the role of neo-barbarian art editor and exercised freedom in a variety of ways. Most significantly, he did not employ artists to provide illustrations linked to the text but asked his friends and acquaintances to allow him to use their work. Free-standing pictures, such as a powerful woodcut by Derain, appear in all the issues of Rhythm. Fergusson’s ambition was to place work by artists in the new movement in the hands of ordinary people, rather than simply on the walls of galleries and salons; as he said, he wanted the magazine to be cheap enough so that ‘any herd boy – in Auckland or the extreme north of Scotland could have the latest information about modern painting from Paris’.34 He insisted that the magazine should be cheap so that herd boys could afford it, and it must be beautifully produced, on deckle-edged paper, rather than appearing ephemeral. That ambition seems to have been realised as, for instance, the Australian painter, Margaret Preston, bought and kept her copies, like the English painters Nina Hamnett and Paul Nash. Fergusson’s innovative interpretation of rhythm appears in the design of the magazine, as there is a rhythmic repetition of some of the images; for example, a malign little face by Marguerite Thompson recurs unpredictably as a header, as witty tailpieces do. The artwork signals that it is aware of tradition and is reforging it; each issue begins with an illuminated capital as if it were a manuscript. Andrew Thacker analyses what he calls ‘rhythmic interchange, between the visual images used for articles and those for advertisements’.35 As Faith Binckes writes: ‘Without the contributions of the Rhythmists [the artists], then, Rhythm would have been vastly different. In fact, given Fergusson’s centrality to the project, it might not even have existed’.36 Rhythm’s use of line is dynamic. For a Colourist, it might seem a bit daunting to have to work in black and white, but nothing fazed

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Mansfield, J. D. Fergusson and the Rhythm Group in Paris Fergusson, as his cover for Rhythm attests. The artists made a virtue of necessity: Throughout its run Rhythm demonstrated how the print culture it had inherited, and in which it was circulating, impacted upon the discourses of value in the visual arts. Most significantly for a magazine that supported Fauvism but could not afford to print in colour, Rhythm participated in shifting and appropriating terminology to allow an interchange of value between painted images and the monotone graphics. This, in turn, reflected the destabilization of the relationship between the world of art and that of ‘illustration’.37

Some of the artists who worked with Fergusson, such as Anne Estelle Rice, were employed in the business of commercial illustration for such magazines as Harper’s Bazaar and the Ladies’ Home Journal and were disparaged for it. Faith Binckes observes: However, this sense of the contaminating influence of ‘art journalism’ was not one that Rhythm shared. In fact, the way in which the magazine framed line as a medium, privileging its fluent immediacy, allowed it to take advantage of the sense in which reproduceability, artistic authenticity, and a culture of modernity existed in a state of interdependence.38

The writers and artists who worked on Rhythm believed in individual freedom including freedom from gendered constraints; Mark Antliff writes that in Bergson’s ‘theory of creative evolution, the élan vital transcends its gendered manifestations’.39 Fergusson empowered a team of women who produced vibrant images that used the limitations of black and white to heighten the impact of line. Anne Estelle Rice, the American painter who was Fergusson’s lover for six years, wrote incisively for the magazine about the Ballets Russes and Bakst, in this case unusually providing her own illustrations for her text. In images by Rice, Jessica Dismorr, Georges Banks (a woman) and Marguerite Thompson, the logic of line expresses different rhythms, all of them suggesting Bergson’s élan vital rather than offering a female body as the object of a lecherous gaze. As in Fergusson’s painting Rhythm, the female figures are assertive and sometimes monumental, joyfully rather than provocatively naked. As Binckes observes, Dismorr’s drawing to accompany a poem by Jean Pellerin ‘playfully foregrounded a representational taboo by making pubic hair the main feature for the delineation of the nude female body’ while her woodcut ‘Isadora’ ‘moved away from the curvaceousness traditionally associated with the female form and replaced it with a stark monumentality’.40

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Katherine Mansfield Studies This makes a pointed comparison with much English art of the period, such as Walter Sickert’s nudes lolling on unmade beds displaying their genitalia to a lascivious (or possibly horrified) male gaze. In a review of the Autumn Salon in 1912, Raymond Drey wrote in Rhythm that ‘J. D. Fergusson [. . .] is a host of painters in himself, for his mind seems to be too alert and questioning ever to be content for long with one sort of achievement’.41 Among Rhythm’s creative writers, the only comparable multiplicity, a marker of modernity, is Mansfield’s. She adopts a series of personae: Katherine Mansfield; Lili Heron; Boris Petrovsky; the Tiger. Her formal range is equally diverse: poetry; satire; dialogues; fiction; think pieces (with Murry); reviews. Much of the fiction in Rhythm is far from savage – there are limp echoes of Gissing and Wilde – whereas Mansfield’s stories are consonant with the vigour of Rice’s and Gaudier-Brzesca’s use of line. Three of the stories published in Rhythm or the Blue Review offer a raw picture of loneliness in the backblocks of New Zealand. All three, ‘The Woman at the Store’, ‘Ole Underwood’ and ‘Millie’, pivot on one brutal murder possibly leading to a second, on crude social stereotyping by the community, and on hysteria induced by solitude. In each case, Mansfield crosses literary boundaries and writes of poverty-stricken and inarticulate colonial misfits. ‘Ole Underwood’ first appeared in Rhythm, dedicated to Anne Estelle Rice. My reading of the story is contextualised by Fergusson’s phrase derived from Fauvism, ‘the logic of line’. Middleton Murry disrupted the logic of Mansfield’s line when he published some of the Rhythm stories after her death, in Something Childish and Other Stories (1924). His is the version of the stories published in the Constable/Penguin edition of the stories, though not of course in the fine volume edited by Antony Alpers for Oxford University Press in 1984. Murry tidied up the paragraphing and punctuation; whereas in the Rhythm version of ‘Ole Underwood’ the story contains only four paragraphs, the final one extending over two pages, Murry’s version separates out the dialogue and also chops the narrative into nine paragraphs. The effect is to lose the frenetic surge of Ole Underwood’s interior monologue. His deranged mind is lodged in an ageing body fighting with a hostile wind, which is conveyed through the remorseless rhythm of the prose. The first paragraph is full of rhythmic repetition, insistent present participles representing the power of the wind, and the beat of both his heart and his powerless frenzy, almost enacting in prose the throbbing beat of Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps:

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Mansfield, J. D. Fergusson and the Rhythm Group in Paris Ah-k! shouted Ole Underwood, shaking his umbrella at the wind bearing down upon him, beating him, half strangling him with his black cape. Ah-k! shouted the wind a hundred times as loud, and filled his mouth and nostrils with dust. Something inside Ole Underwood’s breast beat like a hammer. One two – one two – never stopping, never changing. He couldn’t do anything. It wasn’t loud. No, it didn’t make a noise – only a thud. One, two – one, two - like some one beating on an iron in a prison – some one in a secret place – bang – bang – bang – trying to get free. Do what he would, fumble at his coat, throw his arms about, spit, swear, he couldn’t stop the noise. Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop! Ole Underwood began to shuffle and run.42

The effect of Murry’s editing is evident in the following passage, though I can only illustrate it by cutting into a long paragraph set in a pub: Ole Underwood stared at them as he drank and frowned at them. Red – red – red – red! beat the hammer. It was very warm in the bar and quiet as a pond, except for the talk and the girl. She kept on laughing. Ha! Ha! That was what the men liked to see, for she threw back her head and her great breasts lifted and shook to her laughter. In one corner sat a stranger. He pointed at Ole Underwood. ‘Cracked!’ said one of the men.43

Murry opens a new paragraph with the phrase, ‘In one corner sat a stranger’. This gives the narrator an external perspective that is lacking in the Rhythm version, where the reader is trapped claustrophobically within what Ole Underwood sees; in this passage he is totally and resentfully aware of everything that is said and thought about him. The rhythmic repetition of three or four monosyllables throughout the story sustains the sense of his pounding heart and thumping rage: ‘bang – bang – bang’; ‘Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop!’; ‘Red – red – red – red!’; ‘Kit! Kit! Kit!’ twice; ‘I will! I will! I will!’; ‘Mine! Mine! Mine!’. The pared-down palette of the story focuses on black and red – Ole Underwood carries a red and white spotted handkerchief, the prison has high red walls, a woman shakes a red soapy fist at him, he crushes a bunch of red flowers, and he finds a man on the boat sleeping, ominously, on a red pillow. The symbolic Colourist implication is that he is seeing red, full of repressed rage, but also of a tenderness that is gestured towards and then overtaken, with his brutality to the kitten anticipating a surge of violence which propels him on to the ship. The final mention of Ole Underwood’s glance at the ‘prison perched like a red bird’ among ‘the black, webby clouds’,44 as he holds high his red and white handkerchief, implies that he intends to butcher the man sleeping on the red pillow whom his

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Katherine Mansfield Studies deranged mind sees as the lover of Underwood’s woman, killed by him twenty years earlier. The story has none of the mateship and laconic heroism of Henry Lawson’s stories, with which it is sometimes compared; it is oblique, violent and unredemptive, with an unremitting logic of line. The emphatic phrase in my title is taken from Katherine Mansfield’s response when in 1913 Murry, by then the editor of the Blue Review, asked her to cut a story she had written for the magazine. She replied saying she couldn’t do it and why: ‘Im a powerful stickler for form in this style of work. I hate the sort of licence that English people give themselves – – to spread over and flop and roll about. I feel as fastidious as though I wrote with acid’.45 The implication is that her work is etched. There is plenty of English flopping and rolling about in some of the fiction published in Rhythm, but virtually none in its artwork. Though Mansfield of course continued to develop as a writer after the Rhythm period, it seems to me that her interaction with an international group of young artists, who refused to be confined by orthodoxies of artistic practice, shows in the fine, almost sculpted, stories she produced for Rhythm. Her friendship with both Rice and Fergusson was developing as she increasingly understood what they achieved. Anne Estelle Rice’s portrait of Katherine Mansfield, which appeared on the cover of Katherine Mansfield Studies volume 1, was painted in June 1918. Rice’s Fauvist technique is evident; the sitter’s face is outlined in red with green shadows, the rather mask-like appearance focusing on the eyes. There is a rhythmic tension between the curves of the eyes and their echo in the background flowers, and the angular line of the fringe, the neck of the dress and the book on the sitter’s lap. The interaction of pliancy and determination suggests a lot about the subject. Rice wrote, remembering Mansfield, in 1958: ‘The arresting feature was the beautiful, sombre, questioning eyes. They seemed to send out a penetrating beam into the crannies and recesses of one’s nature and there was no escape from the searching scrutiny, often disconcerting and I’m sure not flattering’.46 Even though Rhythm only survived for two years, the young Mansfield surely learnt something from its artists about finding a form of her own for that searching scrutiny. Notes 1. Margaret Morris, ed., Café Drawings in Edwardian Paris from the Sketch-books of J. D. Fergusson 1874–1961 (Glasgow and London: Blackie, 1974), p. 5. 2. Margaret Morris, The Art of J. D. Fergusson: A Biased Biography (Glasgow and London: Blackie, 1974), p. 47. 3. J. D. Fergusson, ‘Memories of Peploe’, Scottish Art Review, Vol. 8:3 (1962), p. 12.

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Mansfield, J. D. Fergusson and the Rhythm Group in Paris 4. Romola Nijinsky quoted in Richard Buckle, Nijinsky (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 280. 5. Quoted in Buckle, pp. 285–6. 6. Rhythm 2.7 (1912), p. 107. 7. Ann Kodicek, ed., Diaghilev Creator of the Ballets Russes (London: Barbican Art Gallery with Lund Humphries, 1996), p. 61. 8. Émile Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise, trans. by Brian Nelson (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998), pp. 103–4. 9. Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester University Press, 1988), p. 82. 10. See Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten, Cubism and Culture (London: Thames & Hudson, 2001), p. 40. 11. Greenhalgh, p. 94. 12. Quoted in Antliff and Leighten, p. 30. 13. Antliff and Leighten, p. 30. 14. Hilary Spurling, The Unknown Matisse (London: Penguin, 1998), pp. 339–340. 15. Quoted in Spurling, p. 332. 16. John Middleton Murry, ed., Journal of Katherine Mansfield 1904–1922 (London: Constable, 1954; paperback edition 1984), p. 123. 17. Helen Shaw, ed., Dear Lady Ginger: an exchange of letters between Lady Ottoline Morrell and Darcy Cresswell (London: Century, 1984), p. 118. 18. Christopher Hassall, Edward Marsh: Patron of the Arts (London: Longmans, 1959), p. 226. 19. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, eds., The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 6 vols (London: Chatto & Windus, 1980–3), Vol. 2, p. 244. 20. Frances Spalding, British Art Since 1900 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1986), p. 38. 21. Vincent O’Sullivan, ed., Poems of Katherine Mansfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 30. 22. Angela Smith, ed., Katherine Mansfield Selected Stories (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2002), p. 23. 23. Margaret Scott, ed., The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, 2 vols (NZ: Lincoln University Press and Daphne Brasell Associates, 1997), Vol. 1, pp. 103–4. 24. J. D. Fergusson, Modern Scottish Painting (Glasgow: William MacLellan, 1943), p. 70. 25. Morris, The Art of J. D. Fergusson, p. 16. 26. Quoted in Tom Normand, The Modern Scot: Modernism and Nationalism in Scottish Art, 1928–1955 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), p. 109. 27. Saltire Review, Vol. 6:21, (Summer 1960), p. 31. 28. Fergusson, p. 86. 29. Fergusson, p. 86. 30. Fergusson, p. 31. 31. Rhythm, Vol 1.1 (1911), p. 12. 32. Rhythm, Vol. 1.1 (1911), p. 36. 33. Rhythm, Vol. 1.1 (1911), p. 3. 34. Fergusson archive, Perth. 35. Andrew Thacker, ‘Modern Tastes in Rhythm’, Katherine Mansfield Studies, Vol. 2, (2010), p. 14. 36. Faith Binckes, Modernism, Magazines, and the British Avant-Garde Reading, Rhythm, 1910–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 134. 37. Binckes, p. 133.

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Katherine Mansfield Studies 38. Binckes, p. 152. 39. Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 100. 40. Binckes, p. 159. 41. Rhythm, Vol. 2.11 (1912), p. 329. 42. Rhythm, Vol. 2.12 (1913), p. 334. 43. Rhythm, Vol. 2.12 (1913), p. 335. 44. Rhythm, Vol. 2.12 (1913), p. 337. 45. Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott, eds., The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984–2008), Vol. 1, p. 124. Punctuation, and occasionally spelling, are erratic in the letters and journals; I quote them as they appear in the text. 46. Anne Estelle Rice, Katherine Mansfield in Her Letters and Works Exhibition 25 April–16 May 1958, New Zealand House, p. 5.

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Performativity in Words: Musical Performance in Katherine Mansfield’s Stories Delia da Sousa Correa

Abstract This essay is about musical performance in Mansfield and about the ‘performative’ in that her stories perform rather than merely invoke musical analogy. Many of Katherine Mansfield’s musical stories make little direct reference to music. For my purposes here, I read four stories that do include specific accounts of musical performance and which therefore dramatise performative concerns that pervade Mansfield’s work as a whole. Through its contemplation of the musicality of Mansfield’s writing, the essay arrives at a sense of performativity in language that highlights the importance of affect: a notion of performative language fundamental to Mansfield’s writing and much other. Key words: Katherine Mansfield, performance, music, performative, affect, Mendelssohn ‘If I let the bow ever so softly fall/ – – – The magic lies under my hand’ wrote Mansfield of her beloved cello in 1903.1 Although she chose literature rather than the cello as her career, Mansfield became a writer for whom performance, especially musical performance, was even more acutely significant than for other literary Modernists. Indeed, Vanessa Manhire, in her essay for this volume of Katherine Mansfield Studies, believes that Mansfield’s experience as a musical performer Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 3 (2011): 21–34 DOI: 10.3366/kms.2011.0004 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

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Katherine Mansfield Studies was to give the use of musical analogy in her writing a precision which would have a formative and salutary influence on Virginia Woolf’s development of a musicalised prose. Mansfield’s concern, as a critic of her own and others’ writing, was always whether it had struck ‘the middle of the note’.2 From her habitual use of musical terminology to provide a critical vocabulary, we know that she wrote with musical performance very consciously in mind. ‘I chose not only the length of every sentence, but even the sound of every sentence’ she recorded of her 1920 story ‘Miss Brill’, ‘I read it aloud . . . just as one would play over a musical composition’.3 Sydney Janet Kaplan sees an early engrossment with musical practice as fundamental to the ‘passion for technique’ that Mansfield identified in herself as a writer: ‘Out of technique is born real style, I believe’ Mansfield declared, ‘There are no short cuts’.4 The rhythmical prose and astute dramatic timing of her stories were to manifest, in the ‘silent’ medium of fiction, her continued interest in performance. Mansfield’s early letters include many which convey how important music was to her. In 1907, during her camping trip through the Ureweras before her longed-for return to London, her letters and notebook entries also show her turning to musical analogy to convey her responses to the New Zealand landscape. The musically specific ‘booming sound’ of the Huka Falls ‘rises half a tone about each minute [. . . ] but never ceases’; travellers perched on a rock against a violent sunset and above a raging river sit ‘fiercely almost brutally thinking – like Wagner’.5 Mansfield’s letters following her arrival in London in 1908, especially those written to her lover, the violinist Garnet Trowell, reveal her continuing fascination with musical performance. Mansfield wrote lyrics for which Garnet’s twin brother Arnold composed music, at one point requesting that they should be set ‘with strange Macdowell, Debussy chords’.6 In Wellington, she had met the Venezuelan pianist Teresa Carreno, and was invited to visit her when she came on tour to London. Mansfield felt ‘staggered’ by Carreno’s concert performances, ‘the last word in tonal beauty and intensity and vitality’.7 She relished their subsequent discussions of ‘Music in Relation to Life’ and ‘of the splendid artist[ic] calling’.8 It had above all been the ‘tone’ of Carreno’s playing which excited Mansfield and, in a letter written in 1908 whilst she was still sharpening her spurs as a writer, she declared her plan to ‘to write – and recite what I write – in a very fine way’.9 To this end she intended to develop a new style of recitation in order ‘to study tone effects in the voice [. . . ] Tone should be my secret – each word a variety of tone’.10 This interest in ‘the

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Performativity in Words tone effects of the voice’ was fundamental to the innovative prose style that she developed for her fiction, where meaning is often conveyed by the ways in which the rhythmic and symbolic disposition of language combine to create the tone of her stories. Both her experience as an instrumental player and her interest in voice underpin Mansfield’s literary technique. As Elizabeth Bowen declared, ‘Words had but one appeal for her, that of speakingness’.11 **** Mansfield’s letters to Garnet Trowell show her experimenting with many of the modernist literary techniques that she was later to employ in her fiction, often fuelled by the sense of a shared passionate responsiveness to music, which seemed to open up a sense of unlimited possibilities to be lived and imagined, ‘Oh, Music, Music – Oh, my Beloved – the worlds that are ours – the universes that we have to explore’.12 This letter, the last in a sequence of long intimate letters before Garnet’s parents intervened to terminate their relationship, includes an intensely auditory account of a ship launch which she had attended the day before. She describes crowds of onlookers below the battleship on a ‘brilliant’ but windy day, and, towering above them, the lines of ship-builders assembled on deck, all silent ‘while the choir & sailors sang a hymn’ from a platform, the sound of their voices ‘crying in the wind’ prompting ‘Strange visions’ of ‘victories and defeats – death – storm’.13 A rush of phrases strung on dashes which convey the swift sequence of thoughts and impressions, the ‘dramatic effect’ that has ‘caught’ together the writer, the different sections of the crowd, the weather, sky, sea and ship, the future and the past, into breathlessly animated stream of consciousness: And all the time we heard inside the ship a terrible – knocking – they were breaking down the supports, but it seemed to me almost symbolical as tho’ the great heart of the creature pulsated – And suddenly a silence so tremendous that the very wind seemed to cease – then a sharp, wrenching sound, and all the great bulk of her swept down its inclined plank into the sun – and the sky was full of gold – into the sea – which waited for her. The crowd cheered, screamed – the men on board, their rough faces – their windblown hair – cheered back – In front of me an old woman and a young girl – the little old women, whose grand uncle had been in the fighting Temeraire – trembled & shook and cried – but the girl – her flushed face lifted – was laughing.14

And this same letter quite specifically confirms the musicality of the imagination that has been inspired to this performance in words;

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Katherine Mansfield Studies Mansfield describes a dream on the night following the ship launch in which she and Garnet attended a Tchaikovsky concert where, ‘in a violin passage, swift & terrible – I saw to my horror, a great flock of black, wide winged birds – fly screaming over the orchestra – it’s rather strange – waking I can see that – too, in much of his music – can’t you?’.15 The ready transitions between the arts of drama, music and writing in her plans for a new art of recitation indicate Mansfield’s acute capacity to take on board the aesthetic and technical concerns of other art forms. Music was of particular importance, but ‘performance’ is a principle that informs Mansfield’s work in a wider sense, and extends to her engagement with film and painting, as well as with music, drama and the written word. Scholars interested in relationships between her writing and the visual arts have claimed her in turn as a Fauvist and an Impressionist. Others have noticed the radical extent to which her writing internalised the long-shot, close-up, jump-cut techniques of the new art of cinema, long before other Modernists descended from their lofty disparagement of this vulgar form of entertainment (Mansfield even acted as a film extra while she was living in London). Her peculiar ability to engage with the technical and performance practices of art forms other than her own is perhaps relevant to the extraordinary degree to which she continues to influence artistic performances today; writers as various as Elizabeth Bowen and Ali Smith have been conscious of her influence and she has been the subject of numerous dramatic performances and works in visual media.16 **** Performance is certainly a term that can appropriately be transposed to literature when describing Mansfield’s concentrated and perfectlytimed stories. For this essay, I have selected stories that overtly dramatise musical performance, but unlike her early works, such as her novel-draft ‘Juliet’, Mansfield’s published fiction contains relatively few explicit accounts of music.17 In this respect, it exemplifies how, in modernist writing, the specific references to musical repertoire and performance typical of nineteenth-century fiction give way to a selfconsciously ‘musical’ literary technique. The performed musicality of Mansfield’s prose emerges not only in its lyricism, rhythmic complexity and wealth of auditory allusion, but also in the highly comic sense of timing that structures her characteristic blend of dialogue and free indirect discourse. Music and drama obviously go hand in hand in her conception of literary

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Performativity in Words practice, and her own comic-dramatic gifts are recorded in Leonard Woolf’s autobiography. ‘I don’t think anyone has ever made me laugh more than she did in those days’ he recalled, recounting how: She would sit very upright on the edge of a chair or sofa and tell at immense length a kind of saga, of her experiences as an actress or of how and why Koteliansky howled like a dog in the room at the top of a building in Southampton Row. There was not the shadow of a gleam of a smile on her mask of a face, and the extraordinary funniness of the story was increased by the flashes of her astringent wit.18

The comic-dramatic gifts with which she entertained her friends are certainly on display in the stories that satirise musical performance, including ‘Mr Reginald Peacock’s Day’, first published in Bliss and Other Stories (1920). Mansfield’s singing master views his life as a bravura performance, upon which nothing but applause must intrude. ‘[E]ven the bath tap seem[s] to gush stormy applause’ as Peacock’s day begins: quite a performance on Mansfield’s part as on his (‘performative’ too in the manner in which it engages the creative capacity of its reading audience). This rises to Wagnerian hyperbole as he dries himself ‘singing while he rubbed as though he had been Lohengrin tipped out by an unwary Swan and drying himself in the greatest haste before that tiresome Elsa came along’.19 At breakfast, an adulatory letter, which Peacock opens with theatrical grace, begins ‘I cannot go to sleep until I have thanked you again for the wonderful joy your singing gave me this evening’, continuing with several lines of swooning vacuity before extolling him for ‘doing a great thing. You are teaching the world to escape from life. P.S. – I am in every afternoon this week’ (147–8).20 As he gives lessons to a succession of adorable – because adoring – pupils and performs at a private concert, Mansfield’s mode of free indirect discourse conveys Peacock’s fantasies and the narrator’s satire on their vacuity in the same thirdperson narrative flow: ‘Blushing and shy’ his first pupil ‘parted her pretty lips and began to sing like a pansy’ (148–9): He was an artist. He could sway them all. And wasn’t he teaching them all to escape from life? How he sang! As he sang, as in a dream he saw their feathers and their flowers and their fans, offered to him, laid before him, like a huge bouquet. (152)

Or a huge peacock’s tail the reader might remark, having the benefit here of Mansfield’s narrative performance of Peacock’s trite simile. ‘Dear lady, I should be only too charmed’, his parting words to all

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Katherine Mansfield Studies his pupils, are, ‘for some fiendish reason’ all Peacock is capable of drunkenly repeating at the close of his day (128). ‘Her First Ball’ and ‘The Singing Lesson’, both published in The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922), make adroit use of the contrasting emotions inspired by music to construct narratives that hinge on a turn of feeling for the protagonist. Leila, who has lived all her life in the country, with nothing more glamorous than all-girl dancing lessons in a corrugated iron mission hall, is so excited that she feels as though it is impossible to say ‘[e]xactly when the ball began. [. . . ] Perhaps her first partner was the cab’ (336). Here is a comic, momentary, yet expressive instance of the stream-of-consciousness animation of the material and animal world that Mansfield pioneered well in advance of Virginia Woolf, and which in her early writing produces some stunning soundimbued performances, such as an invocation, in an early ‘Vignette’, of a sensuous, personified London which, as crowds throng out of the theatre, is orchestrated as an ‘intoxicating madness of night music’, and ‘the penetrating rhythm of the hansom cabs’.21 Leila, in ‘Her First Ball’ enjoys a state of elation which is suddenly deflated when she dances with a cynical fat man who warns her that in no time she will be one of the frustrated chaperones sitting at the end of the hall. At the story’s close, this uncomfortable epiphany is musically affirmed, then erased: Was this first ball really only the beginning of her last ball after all? At that the music seemed to change; it sounded sad, sad; it rose upon a great sigh. Oh how quickly things changed! [. . . ] Leila didn’t want to dance any more [. . . ] But presently a soft, melting, ravishing tune began, and a young man with curly hair bowed before her. She would have to dance, out of politeness [. . . ] But in one minute, in one turn, her feet glided, glided. The lights, the azaleas, the dresses, the pink faces, the velvet chairs, all became one beautiful flying wheel. And when her next partner bumped her into the fat man and he said ‘Pardon’ she smiled at him more radiantly than ever. She didn’t even recognise him again. (342–3)

The musical repetitions ‘sad, sad’, ‘glided, glided’ in this passage may owe something specifically to Mansfield’s experience as a cellist, echoing the physical bow-change rhythms of the instrument on which she had herself performed, leading a fellow cellist to remark that ‘it is almost possible to bow Mansfield’s texts’.22 In ‘The Singing Lesson’, Mansfield conspicuously exploits her experience of practical music-making, and the fickle emotional responses inspired by music to underpin a turning point within

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Performativity in Words a brief comic narrative. Like ‘Her First Ball’, this performs what Trev Broughton has termed a ‘crisp’ dramatisation of ‘readerly suspicion’ – and what better vehicle to dramatise readerly suspicion that the yet more suspect affective power of music?23 Miss Meadows begins her singing class in a state of ‘cold, sharp despair’ (343). Her fiancé has sent a cruel letter ending their engagement. Sternly, she beats time as she makes the girls practice ‘A Lament’: Fast! Ah too Fast Fade The Ro-o-ses of Pleasure Soon Autumn yields into Wi-i-nter Drear. Fleetly! Ah Fleetly Mu-u-sic’s Gay Measure Passes away from the Listening Ear. (346) Mansfield’s story ‘performs’ this text – quite probably remembered from her own school days – as repeatedly sung by the schoolgirls. The ‘Lament’ is Mendelssohn’s ‘Herbstlied’ (op. 63, 1845) a two-part song for female voices which had been popular in the English-speaking world since the mid-nineteenth century and which was frequently included in anthologies for girls’ school choirs.24 The triplets of the 6/8 time signature of this work are indicated by the story’s typography, and the words are a poetic approximation to the German lyrics ‘Ach, wie so bald verhallet der Reigen’ (in a more literal translation the first lines are rendered ‘Soon ah, too soon die the sounds of enjoyment / Spring passes fast into Wintertime’).25 There are five distinct performances of the song text embedded into the story and interwoven with the text of the fiancé’s letter and Miss Meadows’s thoughts. It is fabulous as a satire on literary affect (and on the pathetic fallacy) and as a precise and utterly convincing dramatisation of the singing lesson of the title. What follows, is a quite heavily abbreviated quotation from Mansfield’s bravura performance: Miss Meadows lifted her arms [. . . ] and began conducting with both hands. ‘. . . I feel more and more strongly that our marriage would be a mistake . . . ’ she beat. And the voices cried: Fleetly! Ah, Fleetly. [. . . ] His last letter had been all about a furmed bookcase he had bought for ‘our’ books and a ‘natty little hall-stand’ he had seen [. . . ] Music’s Gay Measure, wailed the voices. The willow trees, outside the high, narrow windows, waved in the wind. They had lost half their leaves. The tiny ones that clung wriggled like fishes caught on a line. ‘. . . I am not a marrying man. . . . ’ The voices were silent; the piano waited. [. . . ] ‘Quite good’ said Miss Meadows, still in such a strange stony tone that the younger girls began to feel positively frightened. ‘But [. . . ] Think of the words, girls. Use your imaginations. Fast! Ah, too Fast [. . . ] That

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Katherine Mansfield Studies ought to break out – a loud, strong forte – a lament. And then, in the second line, Winter Drear, make that Drear sound as if a cold wind were blowing through it. Dre-ear!’ said she so awfully that Mary Beazley, on the music-stool, wriggled her spine. ‘The third line should be one crescendo. Fleetly! Ah, Fleetly Music’s Gay Measure. Breaking on the first word of the last line Passes. And then on the word, Away, you must begin to die . . . to fade . . . until the Listening Ear is nothing more than a faint whisper. . . . [. . . ] ‘Repeat! Repeat!’ said Miss Meadows . . . . ‘More expression girls! Once more!’ Fast! Ah too Fast. The older girls were crimson; some of the younger ones began to cry. Big spots of rain blew against the windows, and one could hear the willows whispering ‘. . . not that I do not love you. . . . ’ (346–8)

The performance continues until: The voices began to die, to fade, to whisper . . . to vanish. . . . Suddenly the door opened [. . . ] (348)

Literally the hinge, this, on which the story turns. A fidgety young messenger brings Miss Meadows a summons to the headmistress’s office, by which time her class is very subdued, ‘Most of them were blowing their noses’ (348). In short clinking phrases, Mansfield takes Miss Meadows to the headmistress’s room: ‘The corridors were silent and cold; they echoed to Miss Meadow’s steps. The head mistress sat at her desk’ (348). Kindly at the prospect of terrible news, the headmistress hands her a telegram: ‘Pay no attention to letter must have been mad bought hat-stand today’ (349). An immediate reversal of mood as, ‘On the wings of hope, of love, of joy’ and in a breathless tumble of sentences ‘Miss Meadows sped back to the music-hall, up the aisle, up the steps, over to the piano [. . . ] Then she turned to the girls, rapped with her baton: ‘Page thirty-two girls. Page thirty-two.’ And the girls, still solemn and melancholy, sing: ‘We come here To-day with Flowers o’erladen, With baskets of Fruit and Ribbons to boot, To-oo Congratulate . . . ’ And Miss Meadows’s response?: ‘Stop! Stop!’ Cried Miss Meadows. ‘This is awful. This is dreadful’ And she beamed at her girls. ‘What’s the matter with you all? Think, girls, think of what you’re singing. Use your imaginations. With Flowers o’erladen, With baskets of Fruit and Ribbons to boot. And Congratulate.’ Miss

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Performativity in Words Meadows broke off. ‘Don’t look so doleful, girls. It ought to sound warm, joyful, eager. Congratulate. Once more. Quickly. All together. Now then!’ And this time Miss Meadows’ voice sounded over all the other voices – full, deep, glowing with expression (349–50).

And thus the story ends with a moment of ironic linguistic performativity, in its most exact sense, as the sung lyrics perform the act of congratulation upon Miss Meadow’s continued engagement. **** Despite the happy narrative turn in these two stories, they leave the reader with a sharpened sense of ‘how quickly things change’. The story immediately preceding ‘Her First Ball’ in The Garden Party collection is ‘Miss Brill’ – the work Mansfield recorded having played over like a musical composition and in which she uses language as notation as much as narration. In one of the few critical observations of the musical specificity of Mansfield’s prose, Clare Hanson and Andrew Gurr suggest that the story is ‘shaped specifically as a lament’ with ‘something of the quality of a sung lament [. . . ] infused into it by the use of para-musical prose rhythms’.26 Without requiring the surrender of ‘readerly suspicion’, ‘Miss Brill’ sustains the lament that is comically forestalled in ‘The Singing Lesson’. Listening to the band at the Jardins Publiques, which ‘sounded louder and gayer [. . . ] because the Season had begun’, Miss Brill enjoys her part in a ‘play’ that includes even the ‘odd silent’ old people who were there ‘Sunday after Sunday’ and ‘from the way they stared [. . . ] looked as though they’d just come from dark little rooms, or even – even cupboards!’ (331–2). The music seems to change – from tenderness to gaity – as people laugh, converse and greet one another. An old lady in shabby ermine is unkindly snubbed by a gentlemanacquaintance. And now, Miss Brill’s imagined drama becomes a choral performance, imbued with music’s (suspiciously) uncertain emotive power, as the band plays something ‘warm and sunny’: yet there was just a faint chill – a something, what was it? – not sadness – no not sadness – a something that made you want to sing. The tune lifted, lifted, the light shone; and it seemed to Miss Brill that in another moment all of them, all the whole company, would begin singing. The young ones, the laughing ones who were moving together, they would begin, and the men’s voices, very resolute and brave, would join them. And then she too, she too, and the others on the benches – they would come in with a kind of accompaniment – something low, that scarcely rose or fell, something so beautiful – moving . . . . And

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Katherine Mansfield Studies Miss Brill’s eyes filled with tears and she looked smiling at all the other members of the company. Yes, we understand, we understand – though what they understood she didn’t know. (334–5)

The ellipsis towards the end of this quotation is Mansfield’s, a silence as acute as a rest in music, a moment for the reader to register and anticipate the continuing flow of Mansfield’s prose, to find it as ‘moving’ as the music Miss Brill invokes. Also a space for lament, lament for Miss Brill, for all the dames seules and their war dead, for the silent old people who visit the park each Sunday. ‘Yes, we understand, we understand’ thinks Miss Brill, ‘soundlessly singing’ an instant before her unspoken choral empathy is shattered (335). The young couple who share her bench make it plain that they resent the existence of such unattractive old women as she. They laugh at the tatty fox-fur which she had fondly taken from its box that morning, re-enacting the snubbing of the old lady in ermine – the tiny play within her ‘play’ that she has just been watching. Miss Brill returns to her own ‘cupboard’ of a room and, the story, as all who read it remember, ends with a voicing of repressed grief as ‘quickly; quickly, without looking’ she puts the fur away in its box, and the unrecognised sadness that earlier had made her ‘want to sing’ emerges as disembodied anguish: ‘But when she put the lid on she thought she heard something crying’ (336). **** Mansfield’s was never a narrowly aestheticist concern with performance. In Bowen’s view, ‘Indignation at injustice, from time to time, makes her no less inflammatory a writer than Charles Dickens’ and like Dickens: She concerns herself with bad cases rather than bad systems: political awareness or social criticism do not directly express themselves in the stories. [. . . ] Unimaginativeness, with regard to others, seemed to her one of the grosser sins. The denial of love, the stunting of sorrow, or the cheating of joy was to her not short of an enormity.27

This aspect of Mansfield’s work is more amply recognised in recent criticism, which has established its receptivity to post-colonial and feminist readings, and is sometimes even in danger of forgetting, in the effort to convey its political seriousness, the aesthetic qualities – those shimmering performances – that make one want to read her stories in the first place. That the business of art was no ‘escape from life’ was always clear from Mansfield’s identification of ‘a cry against corruption’ as a primary

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Performativity in Words motivation for her writing.28 ‘Not a protest – a cry,’ she asserted, and it is significant (and at one with the ‘speakingness’ of her writing), that Mansfield insists on that vocal term, rather than the abstract and instrumental ‘protest’.29 The performance and the cry against corruption are, of course, inseparable. ‘Bliss’ for example – one of her most brittle, virtuosic verbal show-pieces – is simultaneously a satire and an enactment of aesthetic sensibility. Aspiring poet Eddie Warren is entranced by the whiteness of his socks by moonlight and the heroine, Bertha, is self-consciously bewitched by the beauty of red soup in a grey bowl – almost as much as by her mysteriously attractive guest Pearl Fulton, and the blossoming pear tree outside her window – but only almost. The story, as Hanson and Gurr emphasise, hovers on the edge of a near tragic portrayal of a character just self-conscious enough to know her limitations; Mansfield described to John Middleton Murry the intended effect of the ‘borrowed’ phrases that she gave Bertha, who, ‘not being an artist, was yet artist manqué enough to realise that these words and expressions were not & couldn’t be hers’.30 All this is given symbolic rather than discursive force in Mansfield’s prose and is performative also in the sense that it depends on the degree to which readers are intuitively and emotionally engaged by Mansfield’s language as to whether they find, in Bertha’s final contemplation of her lovely pear-tree, a genuine epiphany. Mansfield’s hatred of literature that was lacking in emotion led her to assert that even the weather must be ‘passionately realised’ in fiction; it forms the basis of her criticism of T. S. Eliot’s poetry and her extreme disappointment at Woolf’s failure in Night and Day to convey the ‘tragic knowledge’ wrought by the First World War.31 Few of Mansfield’s own stories refer directly to the war; she was certainly not merely criticising Woolf’s subject matter: ‘I dont want G. forbid mobilisation and the violation of Belgium’.32 Rather, she was aghast at what she regarded as Woolf’s failure of aesthetic sensibility and acuteness of vision in that novel, so unlike the ‘vivid and disturbing beauty’ that she praised in ‘Kew Gardens’ in the same year.33 The war had brought her a new consciousness of Marvell’s ‘deserts of vast eternity’. But in a statement that illuminates the way in which she values the oblique expression of this consciousness – so eloquently demonstrated in her stories – she explains: I couldn’t tell anybody bang out about those deserts. They are my secret. I might write about a boy eating strawberries or a woman combing her hair on a windy morning & that is the only way I can ever mention them. But they must be there. Nothing less will do.34

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Katherine Mansfield Studies ‘We have to face our war’, she insisted and artists who failed to see the war as transforming the common things of life she described, in strong terms, as ‘traitors’.35 For Mansfield, this transformation had to be communicated indirectly; by recording the ‘creaking of the laundry basket’ at home in Tinakori Road, in the musicalised ‘kind of special prose’ for which she consciously strove, and which Bowen called ‘a marvellous sensory notation hitherto undreamed of outside poetry’.36 The stories where accounts of musical performance exist in ironic parallel with Mansfield’s own musical prose highlight the more pervasive musicality of all her work. Mansfield’s modernist writing makes music more important as a constituent of structure and style, than of thematic substance – but with so much more than merely style – or performance – at stake. Interestingly, it is precisely a description of musical performance that so enraged her in Woolf’s Night and Day; a scene in which ‘a charming young creature in a light fantastic attitude plays on the flute’ most represents, for Mansfield, Woolf’s failure to admit the ‘tragic knowledge’ of war into her writing.37 Her declaration that writing must be ‘passionately realised’ is echoed in the philosopher Stanley Cavell’s recent assertions that the linguistic conception of a performative utterance needs to encompass the idea a ‘passionate utterance’.38 In Mansfield, the performative power of language cannot be divorced from its affective power.39 Her literary performances, even at their most virtuosic, proclaim a commitment to the performative capacity of art, in this enriched sense. Notes 1. Mansfield ‘This is my world’ [1903], in Poems of Katherine Mansfield, ed. Vincent O’Sullivan (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 1. 2. Margaret Scott, ed., The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, 2 vols (Canterbury, New Zealand and Wellington: Lincoln University Press and Daphne Brasell Associates, 1997), Vol. 2, p. 137; and see Mansfield’s letter to J. M. Murry [9 December 1915], in Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott, eds, The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984–2008), Vol. 1, p. 205. Hereafter referred to as Letters, followed by volume and page number. 3. Mansfield to Richard Murry [17 January, 1921], Letters 4, p. 165. 4. Sydney Janet Kaplan, Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 203–4; Mansfield to Richard Murry [3 February, 1921], Letters 4, p. 173. 5. Mansfield to [?Thomas Trowell], [2 December 1907], Letters 1, p. 35; Notebooks 1, p. 145. For a discussion of Wagner’s importance for Mansfield see my ‘Katherine Mansfield and Music: Nineteenth-Century Echoes’ in Gerri Kimber and Janet Wilson, eds, Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary Volume of Essays (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 84–98. 6. Mansfield to Garnet Trowell [29 October 1908], Letters 1, p. 80. The American composer Edward MacDowell was a pupil of Teresa Carreno.

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Performativity in Words 7. Mansfield to Garnet Trowell [3 October 1908], Letters 1, p. 64. Carreno’s programme for her recital at the Bechstein Hall on the date of this letter included Liszt’s transcription of Schubert’s Der Erlkönig, Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata and compositions by Chopin, Schubert and MacDowell, see Letters 1, p. 65, n. 4. 8. Mansfield to Garnet Trowell [12 October 1908], Letters 1, p. 68. 9. Mansfield to Garnet Trowell [2 November 1908], Letters 1, p. 84. 10. Mansfield to Garnet Trowell [2 November 1908], Letters 1, p. 84. 11. ‘She uses no literary shock tactics. The singular beauty of her language consists, partly, in its hardly seeming to be language at all, so glass-transparent is it to her meaning’, Elizabeth Bowen, ‘Introduction’, Katherine Mansfield, 34 Short Stories, (London: Collins, 1957), pp. 9–26 (p. 15). (Essay first published as ‘A Living Writer’ Cornhill Magazine, Vol. 1010, Winter 1956–1957, pp. 120–34.) 12. Mansfield to Garnet Trowell [8 November 1908], Letters 1, p. 88. 13. Mansfield to Garnet Trowell [8 November 1908], Letters 1, p. 88. 14. Mansfield to Garnet Trowell [8 November 1908], Letters 1, p. 88. 15. Mansfield to Garnet Trowell [8 November 1908], Letters 1, p. 88. 16. Some of which may be seen on the Katherine Mansfield Society website: http://www.katherinemansfieldsociety.org/. 17. For an account of Juliet and its relationship to Mansfield’s later fiction see my ‘Katherine Mansfield and Music: Nineteenth-Century Echoes’ as cited in note 5 above. 18. Leonard Woolf, The Autobiography of Leonard Woolf (Hogarth Press, London, 1964), Vol. 3, p. 204, quoted in Claire Tomalin, Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life, ([1987] Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), pp. 180–1. 19. Mansfield, The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield ([1945] Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), p. 145. Further references to Manfield’s stories are to this edition and page numbers are supplied in the text. 20. This letter, as the editors of Mansfield’s collected letters point out, parodies a letter that Mansfield herself sent to her cello teacher Thomas Trowell in 1907 beginning ‘I cannot let you leave without telling you how grateful I am and must be all my life – for what you have done for me – and given me. You have shown me that there is something so immeasurably higher and greater than I had ever realised before in Music – and therefore, too, in Life’. There is also something parodic about the original letter, in which Mansfield seems to enjoy trying out hyperbolic declarations, ‘I must tell you that [. . . ] you changed all my life – – – And Music which meant much to me before in a vague desultory fashion – is now – fraught with inner meaning,’ and a Germanic continuous tense, ‘Please I want you to remember that All my life I am being grateful & happy and proud to have known you’; Mansfield to [Thomas Trowell, sen.], [September, 1907], Letters 1, p. 25, n.1. At the same period, Mansfield was composing rhapsodic letters to Trowell’s cello-playing son Arnold (also known as ‘Tom’ Trowell, including a letter in German praising a composition of his in a string of – possibly ironic – Romantic clichés: ‘so wunderbar schön – so träumerisch – und auch so sehnsuchtvoll’, [‘so wonderfully beautiful – so dream-like and so full of longing also’] Mansfield to [Thomas Trowell], [23 January 1908], Letters 1, p. 39. 21. Mansfield, ‘Through the Autumn Afternoon’, in Poems, p. 4. 22. ‘Mansfield has the eyes and ears of a cellist’ concludes Kate Kennedy in ‘Sight Reading Mansfield’; Kennedy, herself a cellist, provides an evocative discussion of the ‘string techniques’ audible in Mansfield’s writing. Landfall Vol. 219 (May 2010), pp. 115–19, pp. 117, 119, 115.

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Katherine Mansfield Studies 23. Trev Broughton, ‘Review of Volume 5 of The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, ed. Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott’, Times Literary Supplement, Vol. 5507, 17 October 2008, pp. 3–5 (p. 5). 24. I am immensely grateful to Peter Dayan, who exceeded his duties as the world’s first Professor of Word and Music Studies by identifying the music for these words. 25. Peter Ackroyd suggests that Mendelssohn’s ‘Fast, ah too fast fade the Roses of Pleasure’ may have been among the popular songs that Charles Dickens sang with Ellen Ternan (this would obviously have required transposing one of the melodic lines). See Dickens (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990), p. 895. The two soprano lines made ‘Autumn Song’ a favourite for girls’ school choirs; (Kate Kennedy recalls singing this work at her school in the 1990s). Recent performances of ‘Herbstlied’ by girls’ choirs can be found on YouTube (for example at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHRiybd3unY accessed 8 April 2011). The Purcell Consort of Voices has very recently released a CD recording directed by Grayston Burgess under the title ‘Music All Powerful: Music to entertain Queen Victoria’ which includes a setting of this translation (Decca Cat. No.: 480 2091, April 2011). I am grateful to Katia Chornik for drawing my attention to this recording. 26. Clare Hanson and Andrew Gurr, Katherine Mansfield (London: Macmillan, 1981), p. 77. 27. Bowen, pp. 23–4. 28. Mansfield to J. M. Murry (3 February 1918), Letters 2, p. 54. 29. See Bowen, p. 15: ‘She was to evolve from noun, verb, adjective, a marvellous sensory notation hitherto undreamed of outside poetry; nonetheless, she stayed subject to prose discipline. And her style, when the story-context requires, can be curt, decisive, factual. It is a style generated by subject and tuned to mood – so flexible as to be hardly a style at all’. 30. Mansfield to J. M. Murry [14 March 1918], Letters 2, p.121, Hanson and Gurr, p. 60. 31. John Middleton Murry, ed., Novels and Novelists by Katherine Mansfield (London: Constable, 1930) p. 51; Mansfield to J. M. Murry [16 November 1919], Letters 3, p. 97. 32. Mansfield to J. M. Murry [10 November 1919], Letters 3, p. 82. 33. Clare Hanson, ed., The Critical Writings of Katherine Mansfield (London: Macmillan, 1987), p. 53. 34. Mansfield to J. M. Murry [16 November 1919], Letters 3, pp. 97–8. 35. Mansfield to J. M. Murry [10 November 1919], Letters 3, p. 82. 36. Mansfield, Notebooks 2, p. 33; Bowen, p. 15. 37. Mansfield to J. M. Murry [10 November 1919], Letters 3, p. 82. 38. Stanley Cavell, ‘Performative and Passionate Utterance’, Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 155–91; see also p. 5 and pp. 16–20. According to Cavell, the revision by literary critics of the notion of performative language to include affect, is an elaboration that ought to be made of J. L. Austin’s original theory of performativity. 39. For a discussion of related understandings of the performative and affective ‘force’ of language see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (London: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 90.

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A Literary Impressionist?: Mansfield’s Painterly Vignettes Melissa C. Reimer

Abstract Despite the constant recourse to different stylistic tendencies throughout her mature fiction, one of the most striking features of Katherine Mansfield’s writing is its pictorial quality, which demonstrates a heightened aestheticism and a desire to realise painterly effects within a verbal or written medium – a concept which her diaries and letters reinforce. Her stories point towards a congruent knowledge of developments and trends in the visual arts, particularly Impressionism. While leading scholars have linked Mansfield to Impressionism, her work has been neither explored nor substantiated from an art-historical perspective. This essay draws on research into the concept of literary impressionism, alongside Mansfield’s early exposure to painterly Impressionism in New Zealand and abroad. It aims to elucidate possible painterly sources for her highly pictorial prose and to consider the painterly quality of her work, shaped by that exposure, in several of her earliest stories. These demonstrate how early the influence of Impressionism can be seen in her fiction, and go some way towards explaining why her writing developed as it did. Key words: Katherine Mansfield, Impressionism, painterly, Manet, Baudelaire, Van Gogh, vignette

Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 3 (2011): 35–50 DOI: 10.3366/kms.2011.0005 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

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Katherine Mansfield Studies While Katherine Mansfield’s contribution to modernism is now well documented and her position within the modernist canon firmly established, the seemingly indefinable quality of her writing continues to defy categorisation and to elude critics and those seeking a more specific or concrete definition of her place within literature. Arguably, one of the most striking features of her writing is its pictorial quality, which demonstrates a heightened aestheticism and a desire to realise painterly effects within a verbal or written medium, as the following comment from a letter to Ottoline Morrell reveals: ‘I am absolutely uneducated about painting. I can only look at it as a writer but it seems to me the real thing. It’s what one is aiming at’.1 The results point towards a congruent knowledge of developments and trends in the visual arts, particularly Impressionism. This is manifest not only in her stories, but in her notebooks and letters in which she discusses Manet and Renoir, for example, and which note exhibitions of modern French paintings in London.2 Scholars including Frieder Busch, Vincent O’Sullivan, Kate Fullbrook, Julia Van Gunsteren and Ulrich Weisstein, have linked Mansfield to Impressionism and to limited degrees have shown that she took the key elements of that art and applied them to her own literature, in which mere glimpses or ‘slices of life’ constitute 3 the narrative. Among the ways in which Mansfield aligned herself with Impressionism is her use of everyday subject matter and privileging of modernity, her focus on small, seemingly insignificant details at the expense of comprehensive description, her preference for the vignette which provides the reader with only fleeting glimpses of people and places, and her preoccupation with colour and her emphasis on surfaces and reflections. Her employment of multiple, shifting perspectives which are both subjective and fractured also displays an affinity with Impressionism, as does the attention she pays to the ephemeral effects of artificial and natural light, weather effects, and seasonal changes. Like the Impressionists, Mansfield privileges mood and atmosphere over action; she honours the senses, paying heed to colours and sounds. However, while Mansfield’s work has been described as impressionistic, its alliance with Impressionism has been neither explored nor substantiated from an art-historical perspective. This essay aims to reveal possible painterly sources for Mansfield’s highly pictorial prose. It draws on my research into the concept of literary impressionism, alongside Mansfield’s early exposure to painterly Impressionism in New Zealand and abroad, and considers the painterly quality of her own work – shaped by that exposure – in her stories from 1907 onwards.

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Mansfield’s Painterly Vignettes While Mansfield’s writing has readily been described as impressionistic, scholars have been reluctant to discuss her work within the context of painterly Impressionism or to make anything more than vague generalisations, such as Fullbrook’s observation that the identity of Mansfield’s characters ‘is as impermanent as the dappled moments in a Renoir or a Manet’.4 Their reluctance partly relates to critical distaste for being too programmatic in imputing likeness, indeed, ‘influence’, that modernist bête noir, between one artist or creative medium and another. However, their unwillingness may also relate to the fact that relatively little is known about what Mansfield saw in the galleries of Europe, owing to the number of missing notebooks and letters which relate to periods in her early life, during which she was exposed to significant cultural developments. O’Sullivan, for example, estimates that less than half of Mansfield’s letters have been retrieved.5 And in his introduction to The Aloe (1930), John Middleton Murry estimates that during her career, Mansfield destroyed possibly two-thirds of her manuscripts and papers.6 Not all reliable traces have been lost, however. Within the extant papers it is still possible to trace Mansfield’s literary development in relation to her exposure to various artistic movements and developments during her early professional years in New Zealand and then in London and Paris. Of specific interest to scholars charting Mansfield’s relationship to the visual arts is, of course, her response to Van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the 1910 ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ exhibition, held at the Grafton Gallery: That picture seemed to reveal something that I hadn’t realised before I saw it. It lived with me afterwards. It still does – that and another of a sea captain in a flat cap. They taught me something about writing, which was queer – a kind of freedom – or rather, a shaking free. [. . .] I can smell them as I write.7

These are post-Impressionist works. However, while the writer’s debt to Fauvism, which was strong if short-lived, has been well argued by Angela Smith, Mansfield’s commentary here does not reveal an overarching affinity with Post-Impressionism.8 Rather, it demonstrates that she was inspired and influenced by the aesthetic principles of a medium other than her own; the resultant prose style is best described as literary impressionism.9 Although O’Sullivan does not carry out a sustained critique of Mansfield’s work within the context of literary impressionism, he recognises Mansfield’s primary aesthetic aims and succinctly outlines the impressionistic quality of her writing: ‘She is after a style that will hold the glancing imitations of form, a form

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Katherine Mansfield Studies that catches rather than sets’.10 An early journal entry of 26 February 1907 goes some way in substantiating O’Sullivan’s claim; it refers to paintings Mansfield had either seen at an exhibition in London during her school years, or for which she had at least obtained the catalogue; alternatively, she may be referring to a small volume of reproductions newly available in New Zealand where, at this time, Whistler’s name was often in the Press.11 Significantly, the journal entry reveals an affinity for urban landscapes – one of three dominant subjects in Impressionism – and for the rendering of atmosphere which aligns her with the Impressionist painters.12 Twilight walkers with sand – out building roof tops 5. 22 Poets cottage – sombre – mysterious – good colouring. 2. From Lambeth Bridge – London Atmosphere – Every object in smoke – Street scene St Ive’s superb colouring – bright – lustrous signboard. 10. Distance – Immensity & age – London. 19. Chelsea & [. . .] by Whistler – composition pleasing. English Village The absolute effect.13

The catalogue becomes part of Mansfield’s reservoir, a visual reminder of the effects achievable through heightened colouring and how atmosphere might be evoked through smoke, reflections and experiments in composition. It is a crucial piece of evidence from which one can infer how conversant she was with the Impressionist ‘way of seeing’. Such effects find their way into ‘The Tiredness of Rosabel’ (1908), which is stylistically impressionistic in, for example, its treatment of atmosphere and time with Rosabel’s wholly subjective and senseoriented observations of her surroundings largely informing the narrative, and the protagonist unable to differentiate between illusion and reality: ‘Rosabel looked out of the windows; the street was blurred and misty, but light striking on the panes turned their dullness to opal and silver, and the jewellers’ shops seen through this, were fairy palaces’.14 Both Antony Alpers and O’Sullivan point to the significance of this story, as indicative of the style that would characterise her best work; O’Sullivan explains: Such stories seem to play a beam over life, to catch at fragments of personality and the glancing revelations of a moment rather in the manner of Impressionist painting. It is an approach to fiction that also places her squarely in that tradition, running from Wordsworth’s ‘spots of time’ to Joyce’s ‘epiphanies’, where the writer’s emphasis attends

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Mansfield’s Painterly Vignettes to the value of illuminating and singular moments, to pattern rather than continuity.15

The story is also thematically in line with one of Impressionism’s tenets, in its portrayal of a working-class girl. In fact, Mansfield’s story contains echoes of both the subject and theme of Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1881–2) in which a weary waitress halfheartedly accepts the attentions of a bourgeois male patron. Murry (in his autobiography) and Mansfield (who relayed the event to an acquaintance) recalled an evening at a bar early in their relationship during which they both, as Alpers describes it, ‘caught a glimpse in the mirror of a prostitute called Lil, who was gazing at herself in terrible self-knowledge’.16 Mansfield’s characterisation in ‘The Tiredness of Rosabel’ is comparable to both Manet’s and Degas’s images of working women such as laundresses, milliners and, in some cases even ballet dancers, in capturing a sense of drudgery and revealing the monotony of their everyday existences. And also like Manet and Degas, she hints at the liberties bourgeois men take with women in service roles through Harry’s attitude to Rosabel in his fiancée’s absence: ‘The man leant over her as she made out the bill, then, as he counted the money into her hand – “Ever been painted?’’ he said’ (516). Unarguably, it was a rich cultural field that informed Mansfield’s literary imagination; and it should be noted that the short story emerged as a genre around the same time as photography and Impressionism, both of which seem to some extent interested in capturing ‘glimpses’. While no one Mansfield story is a direct rerepresentation or an imitation of any one modern painting, her stories often amalgamate allusions to several art works, not necessarily just one school. ‘In the Botanical Gardens’ (1907) contains Maoriland echoes,17 incorporates threads of Symbolism and directly references Impressionism; it is, moreover, one of Mansfield’s earliest attempts at assimilating foreign aesthetics into an otherwise colonial sketch. In fact, Maurizio Ascari asserts that it is a pivotal work in her oeuvre because it represents ‘the transition that led from aestheticism to impressionism and modernism’; and is a story in which Mansfield ‘reveal[s] her aesthetic sources’.18 Specifically, Mansfield observes that the people in Wellington’s public gardens ‘seem as meaningless, as lacking in individuality, as the little figures in an impressionist landscape’ (170). Her description corresponds with a number of Impressionist works including Monet’s The Garden of the Princess (1867), the focus of which is one of the new urban spaces which bore testament to Baron Haussmann’s redevelopment of Paris, but

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Katherine Mansfield Studies which denies the importance of the individuals who populate that space. Both the Impressionists in paint, and Mansfield in her stories, addressed the dramatic changes they were witness to in their respective contemporary urban landscapes. Areas like those privileged in Monet’s Garden – widely considered civilised spaces – entailed significant urban demolition and displacement (whereas Mansfield’s implicit concern in the ‘Botanical Gardens’ vignette is with a privileged colonised/‘civilised’ space, carved from the birthright of a displaced people). While Paris was the centre of an empire – and New Zealand at the periphery of another – from an historical perspective, for Mansfield, Paris’s makeover partly corresponds with the expansion she witnessed in the colonial society of her childhood and adolescence, initially in Wellington and its burgeoning suburbs. Passages in her letters reveal that she consciously drew analogies between the scenes of energetic industry to which she bore witness and to Impressionist painting; a search for a European analogy, as in the ‘Botanical Gardens’ sketch, and also a conscious attempt to approach the aesthetics of this kind of painting in her writing style: They have been making havoc of our pine avenue – cutting down some of the trees – sawing the branches off others – a horrible, crashing, tearing sound, then the clinging roots scattered on the yellow clay – The whole sight – the men in their rough clothes – the toiling horses – patches of sunshine lacing through the silver point boughs – on to the emerald grass – makes me think of a modern Belgian painting – do you see it – full of suggested sound – and strangely – death!19

The commentary above again demonstrates how Mansfield was continually looking through imported pictorial frames. The depth of Mansfield’s appreciation and understanding of the underlying themes that permeate Impressionism is only hypothetically determinable. However, the thematic and stylistic commonalities between the urban landscapes of the Impressionists and her sketch of Wellington’s public gardens suggests that Impressionism resonated with her more than any other painting style flourishing at that time.20 Mansfield describes these public gardens as ‘a subtle combination of the artificial and the natural’ (170) – a notion which fits well with specific Parisian spaces where nature is orderly and contrived, such as in Monet’s Garden of the Princess. The content and style in both the draft and the final script of this vignette lack the control demonstrated in her mature work, and show the still potent influence of Wilde;21 they also reveal Mansfield’s simultaneous resistance to the ‘orthodox banality’ (170) of imitative colonial life (represented by the contrived borders of

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Mansfield’s Painterly Vignettes carpet bedding), and her curious engagement with this banality (171), thereby perhaps evidencing compliance in a colonial romanticisation of nature and native culture. More importantly, this early experimental example of Mansfield’s prose points to the writer she would become, by revealing her tendency to appropriate and modify different stylistic traits in the development of her own signature style – a style that, in its maturity, Mark Williams describes as ‘laminated’.22 To E. J. Brady, editor of the Native Companion, Mansfield writes: ‘I send you some more work – practically there is nothing local – except the “Botanical Garden’’ Vignette – The reason is that for the last few years London has held me – very tightly indeed – and I’ve not yet escaped’.23 The date of the letter – 23 September 1907 – is significant in that she acknowledges that she was then in London’s grip, but endeavouring to write colonial or local stories. Mansfield’s referencing of native New Zealand elements – such as ferns and cabbage trees – in an Impressionist landscape, suggests that she had recognised the aesthetic principles of Impressionism though she had not yet fully realised how she might use them for her own purposes.24 Mansfield’s focus within ‘In the Botanical Gardens’ particularly corresponds with the way in which the Impressionists concentrated on rendering the effect of a scene or event. She echoes the Impressionist preoccupation with ‘tone’, observing ‘the bright dresses of the women, the sombre clothing of the men’ (170) and describes ‘On the green moss, on the brown earth, a wide splashing of yellow sunlight’ (171). She acknowledges too, the ‘laughter and movement and bright sunlight’ but also the presence of ‘vague forms lurking in the shadow staring at me malevolently’ (171). Here, her description is strongly reminiscent of Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1866), which was reproduced in The Studio magazine in 1903 and 1904, and exhibited in London in 1904. Manet’s group portrait contains a group of women and men, one of whom is separated from the group and only barely visible in the dark shadow behind the broad trunk of a birch tree. The heart and arrow carved into the trunk of the light-dappled tree trunk is subtly suggestive of the picnicking group’s latent sexuality. Mansfield’s pictorial description in ‘In the Botanical Gardens’, within the context of Manet’s imagery, calls to mind Fullbrook’s observation that ‘the darkness of her art is one of its hallmarks. While the surfaces of her stories often flash with sparkling detail, the underlying tones are sombre, threatening, and register the danger present in the most innocent seeming aspects of life’.25 As I have previously stated, critics have noted Mansfield’s impressionistic impulses but struggle to understand how the aesthetic

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Katherine Mansfield Studies principles of one medium, in this case painting, can be modified for literary purposes. How could Impressionism – a nineteenthcentury movement – be perceived as a crucial influence on an artist as avant-garde as Mansfield? Ferdinand Brunetière’s review-article: ‘Impressionism in the Novel’ (1879), represents the first attempt to define the concept of literary impressionism. Brunetière asserts that it is ‘a systematic transposition of the means of expression of one art – the art of painting – into the domain of another art: the art of writing’.26 Brunetière argues that literary impressionism developed out of painterly Impressionism; thus, J. Theodore Johnson notes that for some critics, literary impressionism is therefore relevant only within the context of French Impressionist painting.27 By contrast, Van Gunsteren in her comprehensive assessment of Mansfield’s position as a literary impressionist, discusses ‘The interrelationship with painting [. . . only] fleetingly [. . . because] it is literature that must be at the heart [of her work as a] comparatist [. . .] and it is literary devices that must be investigated’.28 However, because the visual arts, literature and music were inextricably linked at the finde-siècle, and increasingly so during Mansfield’s career, and because Mansfield described her work in painterly terms, there are strong grounds for interdisciplinary (or cross-disciplinary) investigations of her work. Alpers for example, has shown that Mansfield was influenced by paintings and cartoons reproduced in various contemporary periodicals – such as the illustrated magazine Jugend (1896–1940), from which the name Jugendstil (Germany’s version of art nouveau) developed. According to the writer C. E. Bechhofer-Roberts, Mansfield would ‘take a picture out of Jugend, and have a story round it in no time’.29 Despite its inception in Paris in 1874, in London it was not until the mid 1880s that Impressionism enjoyed any degree of visibility and coherent representation, and it was not until January 1905 that London had its first proper experience of French modern art, with an exhibition at The Grafton Gallery. It was the first time that such a representative collection of Impressionist works had been available to Londoners. A review of the exhibition in the Times (London) of 17 January 1905, stated: Assuredly London cannot complain of a dearth of picture exhibitions this winter. To the Watts at the Royal Academy and the International at the New Gallery there is now added, at the Grafton, the first really important display that has been seen there for years – the display of the work of nine French painters. [. . .] this is by far the most representative

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Mansfield’s Painterly Vignettes exhibition of the kind that London has ever seen. Manet and Monet, Degas and Renoir [. . .] names that everyone knows.30

With over three hundred pictures and drawings on display, including nineteen works by Manet, fifty-five by Monet, thirty-five by Degas, fiftynine by Renoir, forty by Pissarro, thirty-six by Sisley, ten by Cézanne, thirteen by Morisot, and thirty-eight by the proto-Impressionist, Boudin, the Times reviewer continues: All are good examples; and if some of the most famous are not here, the show is none the less highly characteristic, showing each of the painters in several moods and at several periods. The leaders of the modern movement in French art can here be thoroughly appreciated and judged.31

Given Mansfield’s cultural inclinations and her familiarity with Impressionism prior to the 1910 show, as revealed particularly in the 1907 vignette, ‘In the Botanical Gardens’, it is highly likely that she attended the 1905 exhibition at the Grafton, either of her own accord, or possibly with a school group; certainly her school was in close proximity – less than a ten minute walk – and the Queen’s College Magazine notes visits to both the National Portrait Gallery and the National Gallery at this time.32 A letter to her sister reveals that in addition to her attendance at the state-owned galleries, Mansfield participated in the dealer-gallery art scene from an early age and that she was familiar with the exhibition turnarounds: ‘I pray you – marry an Englishman & come and live in London – and take your Poor Relation to an Art Gallery with an Entrance Fee once a month’.33 In fact, there existed in New Zealand from the 1890s an attenuated version of the Impressionist landscape, most notable in the lighter colour palette and sketchy execution employed by a number of artists.34 In light of Mansfield’s relationship with E. K. Bendall, who participated in the annual exhibition at the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts in 1907, at which a reviewer notes specifically, the ‘strides [being] made in Impressionism’, it is likely that Mansfield attended and this might possibly have lent further support to her early burgeoning affinity for Impressionism.35 Unarguably, the 1905 Impressionist exhibition in London proved influential upon that generation’s artists, writers and poets, yet surprisingly, it has been largely ignored by contemporary literary critics for whom the 1910 ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ exhibition, which was organised by Roger Fry and attended by Virginia Woolf, represented the first

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Katherine Mansfield Studies significant exhibition of modern art outside of France. However, the impact of the 1905 exhibition on the artists and writers based in London at this time cannot be underestimated. The diversity of critical opinion indicates that well into Mansfield’s career, Impressionism, if not at the forefront of avant-garde practice in France, was still inciting debate in England. Even had she not been keenly attuned to the artistic styles and aesthetic trends of the time, even had she not been a voracious consumer of the newspapers and periodicals, Mansfield cannot have failed to absorb the tide of Impressionism which had already swept London by the turn of the twentieth century. Indeed, British artists and artists in Britain such as Whistler, Fergusson and Sickert, were all using Impressionist techniques by 1900. Although Mansfield failed to acknowledge the primary influence of any one artist, school or style, her work demonstrates an allegiance to Impressionism in the subjects, themes and issues she chose to address and the techniques she employed to realise them from the various forms of expression that were available to her to inherit and modify. Early diary entries and letters reveal fragments which would later make their way into her stories; for example in the highly pictorial story unfinished story ‘Daphne’ (1921, published posthumously in The Doves’ Nest and Other Stories,1923), in which she utilised diary notes made as early as 1907 if not earlier.36 ‘Daphne’ is evidence of her knowledge of modern art and reveals where her aesthetic preferences lay. This story represents an early, experimental and piecemeal response to the visual arts which significantly predates Woolf’s protagonist-artist, Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse (1927). Mansfield’s unnamed male protagonist is a painter and the story takes place in the fictional town of Port Willin (easily recognisable as Wellington). In her description of the place, Mansfield merges elements of the city of her childhood with the French landscapes of Cézanne, particularly his views of L’Estaque, several of which were exhibited at the 1910 Post-Impressionist exhibition, for example, View of Estaque and the Château d’If (1883–85) and Monet’s Bordighera (1884), effectively rendering the colonial in an Impressionist context: I took an extraordinary fancy to the shape – to the look of the place. It’s a small town [. . .] planted at the edge of a fine deep harbour like a lake. Behind it, on either side, there are hills. The houses are built of light painted wood. They have iron roofs coloured red. And there are big dark plumy trees massed together, breaking up those light shapes, giving a depth – warmth – making a composition of it well worth looking at. . . . (461)

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Mansfield’s Painterly Vignettes While historical photographs of Wellington reveal that Mansfield’s description is very accurate, her use of painterly terms seems to suggest she had in mind pictorial reminders. In ‘Daphne’, Mansfield describes the city’s buildings in a manner which points to both her own affinity with exoticism and Impressionism’s interest in Japonisme, particularly the delineated flat colour planes: ‘There was a theatre too, a big bare building plastered over with red and blue bills which gave it an oriental look in that blue air, and a touring company was playing “San Toy’’ ’ (462).37 Mansfield also implicitly acknowledges Degas, who was one of her favourite artists according to Richard Murry:38 The inside smelled of gas, of glue and burnt paper. Whistling draughts cut along the corridors – a strong wind among the orchestra kept the palms trembling, and now and again the curtain blew out and there was a glimpse of a pair of large feet walking rapidly away. (462)

Mansfield’s description is reminiscent of several of Degas’s oblique compositions within which the artist denies any one component of the picture eminence and instead renders the transitory aspects of the scene, such as the sounds and variable light; for example, The Orchestra at the Opera (c. 1870), in which the composition has been divided, zigzag fashion, allowing only partial glimpses of the orchestra and the dancers beyond. Degas’s method of fracturing the composition would undoubtedly have resonated with Mansfield, who was herself at pains to present simultaneous and limited viewpoints, most significantly realised in ‘Prelude’ and ‘At the Bay’. Here, in ‘Daphne’, Mansfield achieves effects comparable to those by Degas in two significant ways: firstly, in her attention to the multitude of sensory stimulus palpable in the theatre environment and secondly, in the structure of the narrative, which is told from a limited, non-omniscient perspective, and which progresses randomly, alternating between the past and present tense/events. Though the story was left unfinished, it is rather the method of narration – particularly in the details she chooses to omit, versus those which she allows – that renders the work inconclusive and ambiguous, and which echoes Impressionist techniques. Continuing with her pictorial treatment of a painterly subject, in ‘Daphne’ Mansfield describes the women in terms of a Renoir or a Cassatt whose paintings of fashionable theatre-goers pointed to the spectacle that they were both witness to, and participants in: But what women! What girls in muslin dresses with velvet sashes and little caps edged with swansdown! In the intervals long ripples of laughter sounded from the stalls, from the dress-circle. And I leaned against a

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Katherine Mansfield Studies pillar that looked as though it was made of wedding-cake icing – and fell in love with whole rows at a time. . . . (462)

Mansfield’s description mirrors pictorial and compositional elements of both Cassatt’s Lydia in a Loge Wearing a Pearl Necklace (1879) and Renoir’s The Loge (1874), the latter of which was shown at the 1905 Impressionist exhibition in London and included in the illustrated catalogue. Mansfield’s artist-protagonist acknowledges that his work is somewhat avant-garde, and that the residents of Port Willin were ‘still trying to swallow Rossetti, and Hope by Watts’ (463) – a reference to the works she had seen at the Tate upon her arrival in London in 1903 – 39 but claims, in a clear reference to the cubist experiments of Picasso and Braque: ‘I’m by no means an out-and-out modern [. . .] people like violins and landscapes of telegraph poles leave me cold’ (463). Mansfield might have had in mind Picasso’s Girl with a Mandolin (Fanny Tellier) (1910). Fauvist J. D. Fergusson, by contrast, had been quite taken with ‘Picasso’s portrait of a woman with a guitar’.40 In its semibiographical elements – for example, like Mansfield, the protagonist is a self-confessed ‘impermanent movable’ and its New Zealand setting, with references to visiting galleries in Europe – this story represents a deliberate attempt to internationalise an otherwise colonial sketch; experimental in content, it points to her tendency to borrow and modify from developments and trends in modern art, and specifically, Impressionism. Essentially, like the Impressionists, Mansfield was a voyeur – a trait celebrated particularly by Baudelaire, who championed modernity and whose influence the Impressionists unarguably felt and whose entreaty they met. Baudelaire insisted that the modern artist should aspire to the position of the flâneur, and henceforth experience the city as a detached spectator – as one able ‘to see the world, to be at the centre of the world and yet to remain hidden from the world’.41 Letters and journal entries throughout her career reinforce the fact that, fundamentally, Mansfield met Baudelaire’s call and continued to share the Impressionists’ preoccupations and goals. In a letter of 1916 to Bertrand Russell – to whom she ‘talk[ed] about [. . .] all kinds of “odd’’ things – like [. . .] what is it one really wishes to convey in writing’42 – Mansfield describes her purpose and methods and reveals her artistic aspirations and creative vision: Its true that my desire is to bring all that I see and feel into harmony with that rare ‘vision’ of life of which we spoke [. . .] life never bores me. It is such strange delight to observe people and to try to understand them [. . .] to arrive late at night in strange cities or to come into little harbours

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Mansfield’s Painterly Vignettes just at pink dawn [. . .] to push through the heavy door into little cafés and to watch the pattern people make among tables & bottles and glasses, to watch women when they are off their guard [. . .]. To air oneself among these things, to seek them, to explore them and then to go apart and detach oneself from them – and to write –43

Mansfield’s description calls to mind works such as Manet’s aforementioned Bar at the Folies-Bergère, which, like Degas’s café scenes, emphasises artificial light effects and reflections in glass or mirrored surfaces. Her comment regarding watching women who are unaware of her gaze aligns her with the Impressionists, who make this the subject of so many of their paintings, particularly Degas, who epitomises the voyeur, as revealed in his numerous intimate toilette scenes and snapshots of backstage at the ballet. Her summary is reminiscent too of the evocative descriptions of the city found in the work of Flaubert and Zola – literary figures whose prose style is sometimes impressionistic and whose work she read, admired and sometimes emulated. And finally, Mansfield’s letter to Russell points to her reading of Baudelaire44 and his notion of the flâneur – a keenly observant and yet detached spectator, albeit her commentary here seems less voyeuristic than that which characterises her youthful diary entries when she was exploring her bisexuality.45 Mansfield’s subjects, themes and aesthetic preoccupations tie her closely to the Impressionists who were most active some three decades prior. I have endeavoured to reveal some of her painterly sources and to demonstrate how that exposure shaped her writing. I would also argue that Mansfield’s preference for the short story as opposed to the novel correlates with the Impressionists’ predilection for smallscale canvases which were not only more portable, allowing them to make studies en plein air, but which also allowed only glimpses of larger scenes. I shall conclude by drawing attention to Mansfield’s overarching and enduring preoccupation with the ephemeral aspects of a scene or event, particularly those which create atmosphere and which hint at the transitory nature of life. Describing a dancer at the Palace Music Hall, Mansfield writes, ‘As she dances, under the changing lights, coming and going to the sound of a thin, heady music which marks the rhythm of her movements like a kind of clinging drapery, she seems to sum up the appeal of everything that is passing, and coloured and to be enjoyed’.46 Mansfield’s description closely echoes the effects Degas has achieved in Café Concert Singer (1880). In both cases, the emphasis is on flickering light, unstable vision and rhythm – even the

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Katherine Mansfield Studies writing itself captures the movement of Degas’s dancer. Mansfield’s description clearly demonstrates that the two artists were similarly inspired by such images and endeavouring to reproduce the effect within their respective mediums. Notes 1. See Mansfield to Ottoline Morrell, 13 August 1919, in Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott, eds, The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984–2008), Vol. 2, p. 346. Hereafter referred to as Letters, followed by volume and page number. See also Mansfield to Brett, 12 September 1921, Letters 4, p. 278. 2. See Mansfield to Ottoline Morrell, 13 August 1919, Letters 2, p. 346, in which she refers to an exhibition of contemporary French art at the Mansard Gallery, Heal and Son, Tottenham Court Road. 3. As have Edward Wagenknecht (1928), André Maurois (1935), Anne Friis (1946), Sylvia Berkman (1951) and Fern Corin (1956). See also Frieder Busch, ‘Katherine Mansfield and Literary Impressionism in France and Germany’, arcadia 5 (1970), pp. 58–76; Vincent O’Sullivan, Letters 1, p. xiii; Ulrich Weisstein, ‘Butterfly Wings without a Framework of Steel?: The Impressionism of Katherine Mansfield’s Short Story “Her First Ball’’ ’. Literatur Und Bildene Kunst: Ein Handbuch Zur Theorie Und Praxis Eines Komparatistischen Grenzgebietes/ Herausgegeben, ed. E. Schmidt (Berlin, c. 1992), pp. 279–97; Kate Fullbrook, Katherine Mansfield (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1986); Julia Van Gunsteren, Katherine Mansfield and Literary Impressionism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990); and Angela Smith Katherine Mansfield: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000). 4. Fullbrook, p. 64. 5. O’Sullivan, Introduction, Letters 1, p. xxii. 6. See also William Orton’s recollections cited in Antony Alpers, The Life of Katherine Mansfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 119. 7. Mansfield to Dorothy Brett, 5 December 1921, Letters 4, p. 333. Mansfield’s sea captain is most likely Van Gogh’s postman, The Postman/Le Postier, Joseph Roulin (1889). 8. Angela Smith has produced a number of insightful articles discussing Mansfield’s debt to and affinity with Fauvism; see, for example, ‘Rhythm’, Temporel: Revue littéraire & artistique 7 (2009). See also Sarah Shieff and Ralph Crane (eds), Katherine Mansfield: Stories and Pictures (Waikato, NZ: Department of English, University of Waikato, 2003). Mansfield’s Fauvist tendencies represent an isolated response to those artists and writers with whom she was at that time associating, and was undoubtedly influenced by including painters J. D. Fergusson (1874–1961), and Anne Estelle Rice (1879–1959). 9. See for example, Gerri Kimber, A Literary Modernist: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of the Short Story (London: Kakapo Books, 2008), pp. 22–6. 10. O’Sullivan, Introduction, Letters 1, p. xiii. 11. I can neither locate this catalogue nor determine the exhibition to which it refers. It does not correspond with then current exhibitions at The New Zealand Academy of Fine Art in Wellington. It may have been a catalogue from her initial period in London. 12. Above all, the Impressionists privileged domestic interiors, urban landscapes and rural landscapes. Broadly speaking, Mansfield’s preferred subjects may also be

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13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34.

grouped under these categories, which have formed the basis of my investigations into her relationship to Impressionism. Margaret Scott, ed., The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, 2 vols (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), Vol. 1, p. 82. Hereafter referred to as Notebooks 1 and Notebooks 2. ‘The Tiredness of Rosabel’ in Katherine Mansfield, The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield (London: Penguin Books, 1981), p. 513. All subsequent references to Mansfield’s stories will be to this edition and page numbers placed parenthetically within the text, except for quotations from ‘In the Botanical Gardens’, which references page numbers from Notebooks 1. O’Sullivan in Katherine Mansfield, The Aloe, ed. Vincent O’Sullivan (London: Virago, 1985), p. x; Alpers, pp. 239 and 191. Alpers, pp. 140–1. For example, Mansfield waxes lyrical over the native bush and notions of ancient savagery and her desire ‘to become one with it all’, Notebooks 1, p. 170. Maurizio Ascari, ‘Katherine Mansfield and the Gardens of the Soul’, Katherine Mansfield Studies, Vol. 2 (2010), pp. 39–55; p. 47; p. 43. Mansfield to Vera Beauchamp, 19 June 1908, Letters 1, p. 50. As do the family portraits and Mansfield’s depiction of domestic interiors in which strong similarities to female Impressionists Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt can be detected, particularly in their portrayal of detached mothers – an interesting line of research which I will elaborate on in an upcoming publication. The anemones are described as ‘seductive but poisonous’. Williams, in conversation with the author, February 2007. Williams borrows the term ‘laminated’ from Muriel Bradbrook who used it to describe the work of the novelist, Malcolm Lowry in Under the Volcano (1947). Letters 1, p. 26. It was not until 1918 that Mansfield really felt she had discovered the successful formula: ‘I feel I have found an approach to a story now which I must apply to everything’, Mansfield to Murry, 14 February 1918, Letters 2, p. 71; Mansfield is referring to either ‘Sun and Moon’ or ‘Je ne parle pas français’. Fullbrook, p. 8. My translation from the French: ‘une transposition systématique des moyens d’expression d’un art, qui est l’art de peindre, dans le domaine d’un autre art, qui est l’art d’écrire’, ‘L’Impressionisme dans le roman’, La Revue des deux mondes (1879): pp. 446–59, p. 452. Brunetière was responding to Alphonse Daudet’s Kings in Exile (1879). See also Kimber, pp. 22–6. See J. Theodore Johnson, Jr., ‘Literary Impressionism in France: A Survey of Criticism’. L’ Esprit Créateur 13: 4.Winter (1973), pp. 271–97. Van Gunsteren, p. 16. Alpers, p. 137. Times (London), 17 Jan. 1905, p. 6. Ibid. A school visit to the National Portrait Gallery is noted in the Queen’s College magazine, no. 76 (June 1905), p. 176; a visit to the National Gallery, London and subsequent review of Turner’s marine pictures features in no. 81 (March 1906), p. 367. Mansfield to Vera Beauchamp, 19 June 1908, Letters 1, p. 51. Scottish-born, Wellington-based artist James McLachlan Nairn (1859–1904), was the leading practitioner of this style in New Zealand; New Brighton

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Katherine Mansfield Studies

35. 36.

37.

38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44.

45.

46.

Beach (1893), watercolour, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, is a good example of Nairn’s Impressionist style. Evening Post, Wellington, 12 October 1907, p. 9. Alpers observes that Mansfield’s ‘early writing often shows signs of following quickly upon direct experience, whatever it might contain of fantasy’ (p. 80). She may have begun ‘Daphne’ and then put it aside for some time, as it draws on her early experiences in London in 1903 but also implicitly references art works which were not produced until around 1912. San Toy or The Emperor’s Own is a Chinese musical comedy in two acts. It was originally performed at Daly’s Theatre in London on 21 October 1899 and ran for 768 performances. However, J. C. Williamson’s Dunedin-based Musical Comedy Company performed the play in Wellington in November 1902 and it seems likely that Mansfield attended. See the advertisement for the show in the Evening Post, 22 November 1902, p. 4. Richard Murry in an interview with Moira Taylor, published in the New Zealand Listener, 11 May 1974, pp. 18–19. See Mansfield to [?Marion Tweed], 16 April 1903, Letters 1, p. 5. Margaret Morris, The Art of J. D. Fergusson: A Biased Biography (Glasgow: Blackie, 1974), p. 190. Arriving in Paris from Scotland in 1907, J. D. Fergusson describes seeing ‘Picasso’s portrait of a woman with a guitar in the rue Vignon on an Opening day in 1907’. Mansfield was back in New Zealand in 1907 so could not have seen these particular Picassos (unless in reproduction), until after mid-1908. However, as this story was composed in parts this reference might have been thought of earlier rather than later. Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays [1863], (London: Phaidon, 1995), p. 9. Mansfield to Ottoline Morrell, 22 May 1917, Letters 1, p. 309. Mansfield to Bertrand Russell, 17 December 1916, Letters 1, pp. 287–8. For a detailed discussion of the influence of Baudelaire on Mansfield’s œuvre, see Gerri Kimber, Katherine Mansfield: The View from France (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008), pp. 107–10. See Notebooks 1, pp. 99–101, early June 1907, regarding her affair with Edith Bendall and pp. 103–4, 29 June 1907, regarding her passion for Maata Mahupuku with whom she was at Miss Swainson’s and had later seen in London. Mansfield to Garnet Trowell, 23 September 1908, Letters 1, p. 61.

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Mansfield, Woolf and Music: ‘The queerest sense of echo’ Vanessa Manhire

Abstract Both Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf repeatedly invoke music as a metaphor for writing. More than just a descriptive mechanism, music serves them as an explicit model for the development of stream-of-consciousness narrative techniques. This article explores the importance of the idea of music to the literary projects of Mansfield and Woolf. After comparing Mansfield’s extensive training in classical music with Woolf’s assumed position as a ‘common listener’, it traces the deployment of musical analogies in their respective discussions of their own compositional processes as well as of modern fiction more generally. Finally it analyses a pair of short stories composed during the period of greatest interchange between the rival writers: in Mansfield’s ‘The Singing Lesson’ and Woolf’s ‘The String Quartet’, music is the catalyst for new representations of interiority and a key influence on the narrative practices of both writers. Key words: modernism, music in literature, Mansfield, Woolf, ‘The Singing Lesson’, ‘The String Quartet’ In its selection of audiobooks, amazon.com carries a CD called Classic Women’s Short Stories, part of the Naxos series ‘Classic Literature with Classical Music’. Alongside two Kate Chopin short stories, the disc contains readings of Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Garden Party’ and Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 3 (2011): 51–66 DOI: 10.3366/kms.2011.0006 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

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Katherine Mansfield Studies ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ as well as Virginia Woolf’s ‘The Mark on the Wall’. The Publishers Weekly review calls it a ‘fine collection of classic tales by women [. . . ] complemented by appropriate, unobtrusive classical music from the Naxos music catalogue’.1 At first glance, these writers seem like the perfect candidates for such a project. Both Mansfield and Woolf, like Kate Chopin, were interested in classical music – particularly in the relationship between music and literature – and they both invoke music as an analogy for their writing. Likewise, both writers liked to read literature aloud, making it something dramatic which required active listening: Mansfield planned a series of staged readings of her stories, and Woolf used to read to her sister as she painted. Yet the description of music as ‘appropriate’ and ‘unobtrusive’ here seems at odds with the stories included on the CD itself. Mansfield and Woolf aimed to create something which was emphatically not ‘appropriate’ or ‘unobtrusive’, but which took current literary convention in radical new directions. Such a CD, then, might find its target market in bourgeois families like the Sheridans, Burnells, or Beauchamps, the Dalloways, Ramsays, or Stephens: its packaging of both literature and music represents the very notion of accepted cultural decorum that both writers were trying to leave behind. Despite their famously fraught relationship, Mansfield and Woolf also found much in common: after all, as Mansfield puts it in a 1917 letter to Woolf, ‘we have the same job, Virginia, and it is really very curious and thrilling that we should both, quite apart from each other, be after so very nearly the same thing’.2 Describing a conversation with Mansfield, Woolf notes in her diary of August 1920 that she keeps finding ‘the queerest sense of an echo coming back to me from her mind the second after I’ve spoken’.3 The echo motif Woolf employs here highlights the marked resonance between the ideas of the two writers, one which would ultimately outlast their sometimes unkind assessments of each other’s fiction, not to mention character. The year 1920 seems to have been a period of particularly rich exchange between the two writers: Woolf notes in her diary entry for 31 May ‘a common certain understanding’ between them which means that she ‘can talk straight out’ to Mansfield, and in December Mansfield writes to Woolf ‘I wonder if you know what your visits were to me – or how much I miss them. You are the only woman with whom I long to talk work. There will never be another’.4 It is tempting to imagine that in some of those intense discussions of their work, the two women may have talked about their shared interest in music’s effect on literature. For alongside this ongoing, if interrupted, dialogue

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Mansfield, Woolf and Music about their aims as writers, Mansfield and Woolf also shared a keen interest in the relationships between different art forms. In their letters and notebooks, both writers repeatedly turn to images of music when talking about their own writings as well as those of others. Yet for both Mansfield and Woolf, music is more than just a descriptive mechanism: it actually provides a model for the kind of work they were trying to do, and one which explicitly informs their development of streamof-consciousness narrative techniques. In this essay, then, I want to explore the importance of the idea of music as it relates to the literary projects of Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf. It is worth covering some familiar ground in a brief sketch of the two writers’ varying musical backgrounds. While Mansfield, like both James Joyce and Dorothy Richardson, had extensive formal training in classical music, Woolf was an enthusiastic yet relatively unschooled listener. Yet although Mansfield was actively involved in London musical life over a period of several years, her lack of money and ill health meant that she was eventually denied the chance to hear much music: she may have written of how easy it would be to pop down from Switzerland to Milan to go to the opera, but she was never remotely well enough to consider actually doing so.5 By contrast, Woolf’s privileged and comfortable existence – even given the restrictions imposed by her own illness – provided her with opportunities to hear a wide variety of musical performances on a regular basis. We must therefore keep in mind the significant disparities in these two women’s knowledge and experience of music – gaps that affect the ways in which each writer deploys the image of music in both fictional and critical writings. Life – Life – it is playing past me in a torrent of divine melody. Keep me at it. Keep me at it. Let me too become a great Musician. They are my people, by a glance we understand each other. There is fresh impetus. I adore them.

So rhapsodised the 18-year-old Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp in her journal.6 Mansfield’s musical knowledge was quite simply vast, and as such was unusual for a woman of her social background. Her musical education went a long way beyond the amount thought necessary for drawing-room displays by well-brought-up girls in turn-of-the-century Wellington.7 Her interests and accomplishments had their source in her teenage obsession with a pair of promising young Wellington musicians, Tom (better known as Arnold) Trowell, a talented cellist, and his twin brother Garnet, a violinist. Thirteen-year-old Kathleen was completely taken with the entire Trowell family: she learned

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Katherine Mansfield Studies the cello from Mr Trowell and apparently even insisted on wearing brown to match her instrument. Though the Trowells were short of money, and represented for Kathleen the romantic and oppositional world of the arts, they were nevertheless deemed respectable by the Beauchamps: the twins were invited to perform at Tinakori Road, Harold made a large donation to help fund their further studies abroad, and at Easter 1906 the Beauchamp sisters even travelled to Brussels to visit the twins, who were then studying there. Mansfield came close to becoming a professional musician herself. While a student at Queen’s College, she took cello lessons both there and at the London Academy of Music. Her notebooks and letters from this period are full of references to music: as well as being a repeated motif in her literary efforts, it appears in poems and lists, song lyrics of her own composition, records of performances given and attended.8 Music seems to have been at least as important as – and probably even more important than – writing for her: in 1908, she practised cello for six hours a day and wrote for three. On returning to London, she lived in a hostel in Paddington mostly populated by music students. She transferred her affections from Tom to Garnet Trowell: they became engaged, and her pregnancy by Garnet Trowell prompted her hasty first marriage – to yet another musician, the singing teacher and former choral scholar George Bowden. Not long afterwards, she joined Garnet in Liverpool, where he was touring with the MoodyManners opera company, and was subsequently hired to sing in the company’s chorus. She also found occasional work at London parties, doing mimicry, recitation and musical performances. So although Mansfield later gave up music and sold her cello, she was nevertheless accomplished enough to be able to earn money as a musician.9 Mansfield’s interest in music was not confined to strictly classical and formal contexts. In her letters she often quotes from popular songs, and she makes as many references to music hall performers as to classical musicians.10 She went to concerts, operas and music hall, minstrel bands and Balalaika orchestras;11 but she also appreciated a barrel organ being pulled ‘Along the Gray’s Inn Road’ (see her poem of that title), the ‘grunting cellos, [. . . ] flying fiddles and the wakeful pianos’ of St Johns Wood, or just the ‘intoxicating madness of night music’ in London’s streets.12 It makes sense then that music was one of the things she missed in her final few years. Her admitted longing for ‘queer things, like gramophones’ in one letter to Dorothy Brett is soon followed by ‘Stop! You are not to send a gramophone’;13 but she acknowledges the genuine pleasure she feels at the luxury of having a piano in the chalet at Montana-sur-Sierre.14 In her letters

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Mansfield, Woolf and Music and notebooks, music always features in Mansfield’s lists of what she wants in life – neither as a necessary attainment for sociability, nor as a display of talent, but as something that contributes to real ‘living’. In 1909, the year that saw Mansfield singing in a touring opera chorus from Glasgow to Liverpool, Woolf was listening to opera in two of its most venerated contexts. Despite her relative lack of knowledge on musical topics, she was commissioned to write both a preview of the Royal Opera season at Covent Garden and a review of the Wagner festival at Bayreuth for the Times of London. Unlike Mansfield, Woolf was an enthusiastic consumer of music rather than a producer: Peter Jacobs has described her position as that of the ‘common listener’.15 Though Woolf seems to have been very musical, she obviously had much less specialised knowledge than Mansfield; she was informed instead by broader aesthetic theories and ideas of music as a cultural practice. Like the Beauchamp girls, she and her sister had suffered through the obligatory musical training that was deemed essential to their late Victorian upbringing. Somewhat unusually, Virginia Stephen learned the violin rather than the piano; and while she did not continue to play beyond her childhood, she did retain a keen interest in music. She took an active part in London concert-going life, from classical performances to the music hall; at one stage she went ‘almost nightly’ to the opera, and at home she listened to a range of gramophone records (Leonard Woolf kept a meticulous record of these, as well as of their radio listening).16 Woolf, of course, was by no means ignorant of the ways in which music could work. In her three early essays on the topic, written under the name Virginia Stephen, she raises explicit questions about music’s ambiguous nature as an art form, institution, and expressive medium. ‘Street Music’ (1905) examines music’s ability to move independently of social and spatial boundaries, displacing fixed rules of London society with its dangerously hypnotic (and often foreign) rhythms. ‘The Opera’ (1909) light-heartedly caricatures the clearly demarcated groups which make up Covent Garden audiences, creating a world which is ‘brilliant, beautiful, and absurd’. And ‘Impressions at Bayreuth’ (1909) questions the relationship between music, language, and mobility, stressing the inability of words to represent music adequately. In the late 1920s, the Hogarth Press published several works on musical topics.17 And within the Bloomsbury group, there were countless informal discussions of the relationships between, and influences across, different media. While Jacobs correctly observes that music was the one area in which Bloomsbury had no real resident expert (though Sydney Saxon-Turner was a keen Wagnerian,

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Katherine Mansfield Studies and Adrian Stephen played the pianola), music nevertheless played a key part in such conversations: with Roger Fry, for example, Woolf discussed both literature and the visual arts in terms of ‘rhythm’, ‘texture’ and ‘structure’. On a less metaphorical level, too, interdisciplinarity was a characteristic feature of the group’s work. Duncan Grant’s ‘Abstract Kinetic Collage Painting with Sound’ (1914) was a notable mixed media experiment: fifteen feet long and eleven inches high, it was intended to be displayed in continuous motion and with a musical accompaniment, the Adagio from Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 1.18 Despite these quite dissimilar musical backgrounds, the figure of music recurs throughout both writers’ descriptions of their respective literary projects. Woolf’s theorisations of the work of modern fiction are well-known, and so oft-quoted as to have become clichés; Mansfield’s, by contrast, are scattered and fragmented through her letters and reviews, as Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott have stressed.19 It should also be noted at this point that Mansfield uses musical analogies for just about everything, from sexual attraction (as a musician, she writes, she desires ‘the whole octave of the sex’) to people’s characters (Ottoline Morrell, she complains to Brett in a 1917 letter, ‘is music’, while William Gerhardi, in a photo, strikes her as looking ‘very musical. Are you?’).20 Clearly music is a straightforward point of reference for her, a language which makes sense without explanation, and whose mentions at times almost function as a kind of shorthand. For Woolf, however, who lacked Mansfield’s technical proficiency, the idea of music was not something known and understood; rather, it stood for a kind of uncharted territory, a newness and immediacy of expression which bypassed language altogether. In their letters, both Mansfield and Woolf draw explicit comparisons between their own compositional methods and those of music. To her brother-in-law Richard Murry, Mansfield invokes music as a figure for her pursuit of technical perfection: Its a very queer thing how craft comes into writing. I mean down to details. Par exemple. In Miss Brill I chose not only the length of every sentence, but even the sound of every sentence – I chose the rise and fall of every paragraph to fit her – and to fit her on that day at that very moment. After Id written it I read aloud – numbers of times – just as one would play over a musical composition, trying to get it nearer and nearer to the expression of Miss Brill – until it fitted her. Don’t think Im vain about the little sketch. Its only the method I wanted to explain. I often wonder whether other writers do the same. If a thing has really come off it seems to me there mustn’t be one single

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Mansfield, Woolf and Music word out of place or one word that could be taken out. Thats how I AIM at writing. It will take some time to get anywhere near there.21

Woolf’s most explicit statement about her writing’s relationship to music occurs in a letter dating from more than a decade after the period under consideration here. Bob Trevelyan’s widow Bessie had written to Woolf praising her biography of Roger Fry and noting her impression of the book’s musical structure. In reply, Woolf writes that Bessie has ‘found out exactly what I was trying to do when you compare it to a piece of music. [. . . ] there was such a mass of detail that the only way I could hold it together was by abstracting it into themes’. She uses the terms ‘developments and variations’ to explain the ways in which she worked with these themes ‘to make them all heard together and end by bringing back the first theme in the last chapter’. The musical structure of Roger Fry is quite intentional and deliberate. Yet as Woolf points out, it is not the only one of her works that is selfconsciously underpinned by the idea of music: ‘Its odd, for I’m not regularly musical, but I always think of my books as music before I write them’.22 Both Mansfield and Woolf, then, take a Paterian approach to their work, stressing the autonomy of art and elevating the idea of music over language as a vehicle for constructing and communicating meaning. They were seeking new forms in which to represent the new experiences and artistic aims of their generation. In 1916, Mansfield addressed her (deceased) brother in her notebook: ‘I feel always trembling on the brink of poetry. [. . . ] I want to write a kind of long elegy to you – – – perhaps not in poetry. Nor perhaps in prose. Almost certainly in a kind of special prose’.23 Woolf, too, was constantly seeking new structures for her fiction. As early as 1908 she claims ‘I shall re-form the novel and capture multitudes of things at present fugitive, enclose the whole, and shape infinite strange shapes’.24 These figurations of new ways to combine poetry and prose recall Pater’s dictum ‘all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music’.25 For Pater, music was the ultimate art form because of its lack of materiality, its focus on the moment, and its fusion of form and content, and for Mansfield and Woolf, music was the perfect analogy for what Mary Burgan calls their shared ideal of ‘narrative art as pure expression’.26 In addition to this Paterian focus on music’s enviable formal attributes, Mansfield and Woolf draw on music as direct subject matter in their fiction, investigating not only its social role but also its ability to communicate extra-linguistic meaning. In several Mansfield stories, explicit emphasis is placed on musical scenes as subject matter from

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Katherine Mansfield Studies which to build social critique. The Victorian figure which Burgan calls ‘the heroine at the piano’ makes repeated appearances, as Angela Smith and W. H. New have noted.27 In ‘The Wind Blows’, musical language is conflated with that of seduction in Matilda’s piano lesson; Beryl Fairfield, in ‘Prelude’, constructs herself quite self-consciously as a visual spectacle framed by the window, singing a love song as she strums her guitar with a rose in her hair; and Jose Sheridan, in ‘The Garden Party’, performs despondency as she plays the piano and sings ‘This Life is Wee-ary’. As well as highlighting the continual social performances put on by characters, Mansfield’s musical scenes contain implicit social criticism in the disjunctions between what is sung or played and what else is going on in the stories. Woolf turns to music for similar effect in her early fiction. Rachel Vinrace, the protagonist of her first novel The Voyage Out, is a pianist whose music is contrasted directly with the writing of would-be novelist Terence Hewet: the two compare the abilities of their respective media to achieve their shared aim, that of expressing ‘what’s behind things’ or the silence of ‘the things people don’t say’.28 In Night and Day (1919), Katherine Hilbery, who much prefers mathematics to music, is juxtaposed favourably with her cousin Cassandra Otway, whose drawing-room Mozart recitals struck Mansfield as so out of place in a contemporary novel. As Smith argues in relation to both writers, the piano becomes ‘complicit with bourgeois hypocrisy’, and these female pianist characters remain ‘subjects of a prescribed and masculine musical language’.29 Yet at the same time, Mansfield and Woolf also draw heavily on images of music to represent thought and communication, using it as a key metaphor for the movement of the mind. In so doing, they make music a metaphorical equivalent for very real contrasts between the solitary and the social, between individuals and their communities, and between interiority and exteriority. Both writers draw on this element of music in their development of new styles of narration. As Sarah Sandley has demonstrated, Mansfield is always attentive to aspects of ‘musicality, voice and tone’.30 She is critical of her own and of others’ writing when it fails to find ‘the middle of the note’;31 she is acutely sensitive to the ‘musicality of the prose – the rhythm of arrangement and the crafting of sound sequence’;32 and she always aims for a narrative voice that is musical in its direct presentation of characters’ thoughts unmediated by a controlling narrator.33 In Woolf’s early novels she employs images of music to challenge conventional models of communication and representation; yet her narrative style in those novels largely reinscribes those very models. In her Monday or Tuesday short stories,

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Mansfield, Woolf and Music however, her style is quite the opposite: in such brief, experimental pieces as ‘Kew Gardens’ and ‘The Mark on the Wall’, both of which Mansfield admired, the narrative voice moves impressionistically and associatively without much in the way of explication to guide the reader. Mansfield’s ‘Prelude’ and ‘At the Bay’ also avoid the intervention of a synthesising authorial voice: Sandley compares these stories’ structure with music’s division into movements, and New points out that ‘words can score the space of the page’.34 Likewise Smith calls Mansfield’s narrative voice in ‘The Garden Party’ ‘flexible’ and ‘polyphonic’.35 As these critics’ choice of terms implies, both Mansfield and Woolf use a musical layering of voices to create effects of immediacy and simultaneity in their fiction. Two less well-known short stories by these writers are centred on scenes of musical performance. In Mansfield’s ‘The Singing Lesson’ and Woolf’s ‘The String Quartet’, music features as both form and content. Both stories explore the constant, often erratic, movement of an individual mind as music plays, and both highlight the tensions between interiority and the external world. ‘The Singing Lesson’ was probably composed in October 1920 and was published first in the Sphere in April 1921 and then in The Garden Party. ‘The String Quartet’ was also first published in 1921, in the short story collection Monday or Tuesday. The story’s impetus seems to have come directly from a private subscription chamber music series Woolf attended from 1918 to 1920: she explicitly describes her attendance at one such concert in March 1920 as work for this story.36 So the stories’ near-identical dates of composition come toward the end of that period in 1920 when these two writers are in most regular contact and are constantly discussing their work.37 Mansfield’s ‘The Singing Lesson’ is a psychological study, focusing on the feverish and melodramatic thoughts of music mistress Miss Meadows, who puts her high school girls’ choir through an emotional rehearsal of two trite songs.38 The first, ‘A Lament’, illustrates Miss Meadows’ emotional state – she is ‘bleeding to death, pierced to the heart’ on learning that her fiancé has broken their engagement (347); the second is a rejoicing song of congratulation, after she receives a telegram asking her to ignore his previous letter and returns to the music-hall ‘on the wings of hope, of love, of joy’ (351). Miss Meadows’s incongruous instructions to the choir, first to avoid expression altogether and then to increase it, indicate her efforts to keep her own emotions under check: the narrative veers from straightforward factual descriptions to the banal language of the romantic songs the choir is rehearsing, and back again. Even when

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Katherine Mansfield Studies it is sung ‘without expression’, Miss Meadows finds the lament tragic: ‘every note was a sigh, a sob, a groan of awful moanfulness!’ (348). Her focus on the technicalities of the music, on its dynamics of sound and speed, highlights the conscious manipulation of emotion, and suggests a perverse enjoyment of her predicament: ‘ “Repeat! Repeat!’’ ’ she urges the choir (349). The performance of the two songs thus serves as a soundtrack of Miss Meadows’ emotions, a heightened – and faintly ludicrous – pathetic fallacy for girls’ chorus, with the girls themselves ending up in tears and still dabbing their eyes at the point of Miss Meadows’s sudden and seemingly inexplicable emotional about-face. ‘The String Quartet’ is a rare example of first-person narrative in Woolf’s fiction.39 With the title as its only contextual key, its structure follows the twists and turns of a listening mind, tracing the particularities of its responses to both inner and outer realities as they unfold. By leaving the narrative fragmentary, Woolf puts her reader in the position of the listener, who can only ‘furtively’ shape images and impressions and construct threads of narrative (139): the reader too must respond associatively to the style of ‘The String Quartet’ in order to shape an individual version of the story’s meaning. While ‘The String Quartet’ self-consciously foregrounds issues of form and narrative, it is more than merely a formal imitation of the music itself – Woolf probably had neither the musical expertise nor the intention to carry out such a technical exercise. Rather than trying to reproduce the music formally, she transposes its indeterminacy of meaning into linguistic play, while holding that indeterminacy in tension with the formal and controlled social setting of the concert, ‘a hundred people sitting here well dressed, walled in, furred, replete’ (139). External descriptions and mundane social interchange are mingled with over-the-top romantic narrative: ‘I screamed, and the Prince, who was writing in the large vellum book in the oriel window, came out in his velvet skull-cap and furred slippers, snatched a rapier from the wall – the King of Spain’s gift, you know – on which I escaped’ (140). The story also borrows the fluid imagery and style of a prose poem: ‘Flourish, spring, burgeon, burst! The pear tree on the top of the mountain. Fountains jet; drops descend’ (139). As a result, it is often difficult to distinguish between dialogue, interior monologue, and associative fragments of thought: the narrator herself remarks in a mid-sentence aside ‘it’s difficult this’ (139), and comments self-consciously on her ‘despair – I mean hope. What do I mean? That’s the worst of music!’ (138). Such constant shifts in perspective create a complex texture of meaning, as Gillespie points out: ‘Woolf counterpoints scraps of conversation

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Mansfield, Woolf and Music with the feelings and corresponding images aroused by music’.40 This metaphor of counterpoint, like the description of Mansfield’s style as ‘polyphonic’, emphasises Woolf’s creation of the fictional effects of overlapping voices, simultaneity of action, and continual movement. Both these stories are about the interpretation of music, whether it be a conscious production on the part of the performer as in ‘The Singing Lesson’ or an allusive reaction by the audience as in ‘The String Quartet’. Where Mansfield’s Miss Meadows barks technical instructions for the shaping of meaning and emotion, using musical effects to illustrate the words of the song, Woolf’s nameless listener responds intuitively to the wordless shape presented by the musicians, crafting her own interpretation of the quartet through associative narrative which seeks to capture a musical effect in words. Despite the differences between the unsympathetic Miss Meadows and Woolf’s listener-narrator, both stories hinge on the interplay of the main character’s thoughts with what is going on around them: they constantly highlight not only the disjunctions between inner and outer worlds, but also the intensity of their respective effects on each other. For both Mansfield and Woolf, music contains the potential for movement between these worlds of thought and action, external reality and interiority. The movement of music thus serves as an important analogy for the kind of mobility they aim to create in language. In ‘The Singing Lesson’ and ‘The String Quartet’, then, Mansfield and Woolf use music as a vehicle for a new kind of narration: simultaneously as subject matter and as self-conscious formal analogy, it is an important part of both writers’ development of new techniques for representing interiority. Whether as a source of such direct structural analogies or of broader ideas about sound, form, and meaning, music is a widespread model for literature in the modernist period. Yet these stories by Mansfield and Woolf come well before the well-recognised vogue for the ‘musicalisation of fiction’ in the later 1920s – before E. M. Forster’s discussion of ‘rhythm’ in Aspects of the Novel (1927) or Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point (1928). While both Woolf and Mansfield had a good ear for rhythm, phrasing, tone, and cadence, and both turned to music as a model for fiction, they used metaphors of music in relation to their writing in opposing ways. Roland Barthes notes that ‘There are two musics (or so I’ve always thought): one you listen to, one you play. They are two entirely different arts, each with its own history, sociology, aesthetics, erotics: the same composer can be minor when listened to, enormous when played’.41 This distinction is key to the differences between the

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Katherine Mansfield Studies two writers’ concepts of music. For Mansfield, musical analogies usually describe the labour of writing, the craft and technique involved, as really concrete applied effort – for example, that technical sense of hitting ‘the middle of the note’. Music, then, is a potential solution to the problem that Mansfield thought of as her ‘particular difficulty’ in writing: ‘a kind of facility – which I suspect very much. Its not solid enough’.42 At this point in Woolf’s writing career, however, music’s mysterious nature makes it a catalyst for the imagination, a figure of fluidity, artifice, and freedom from referentiality quite opposed to the solidity and exactitude it implies for Mansfield. Small wonder, then, that Mansfield didn’t care for the stories in Monday or Tuesday: ‘She’s detached from life – it won’t do – will it? Nothing grows. Its not even cut flowers, but flower heads in flat dishes. I dont think one can “scrap’’ form like that. In fact I suspect novelty as novelty – don’t you?’43 Harold Child’s review in the Times Literary Supplement took a similar stance, taking a swipe at Woolf’s Paterian idea of musical fiction: ‘Prose may “aspire towards the condition of music’’; it cannot reach it’.44 Reading Woolf’s later work with Mansfield’s musical narratives in mind, however, you can still catch what Woolf called that ‘queerest sense of echo’ between their ideas, albeit with the direction notably reversed: instead of Mansfield ‘echoing’ Woolf’s own ideas, Woolf’s subsequent writings come to reflect Mansfield’s earlier ideas about music. In fact, the narrative experiments carried out by Mansfield, who kept tight control of overall form while also letting her characters’ voices have full expression, can be seen as influential on Woolf’s later works. As Patricia Laurence notes, almost no critic can resist musical analogies when discussing the form of the novels from Mrs Dalloway to The Waves, all of which combine Mansfield’s technical precision with the mobility Woolf first associated with music.45 Woolf’s diary entries also show a change in her use of musical metaphors, whereby they start to echo Mansfield’s sense of music as constructive work in itself: in 1924, during the composition of Mrs Dalloway, she notes that ‘in this book I practise writing; do my scales; yes & work at certain effects’ and in 1927 she describes working on The Waves ‘in the evening when the gramophone is playing late sonatas’.46 In 1930, Woolf met the composer Dame Ethel Smyth, and subsequently recorded her wish to ‘burn my pen and take to music’.47 She explains that she is writing The Waves ‘to a rhythm and not to a plot’, and records in December 1930 that its ending ‘occurred to me last night while listening to a Beethoven quartet’.48 And as she tells Smyth in a 1940 letter, Woolf herself became more and more interested in exploring the relationship between the two arts:

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Mansfield, Woolf and Music Now let us talk of something interesting. I was going to say why dont you write a Common Reader review of music? Now consider that. Write your loves and hates for Bach Wagner etc out in plain English. I have an ulterior motive. I want to investigate the influence of music on literature. But there’s not a book on music that gives me a hint – Parry all padding. What about Tovey? Too metaphysical.49

The self-imposed reading programme Woolf outlines here attests to the growth of her real engagement with questions of interdisciplinarity. In her 1937 BBC radio address ‘Craftsmanship’, her unpublished essay draft ‘Anon’, and her final novel Between the Acts (1940), Woolf historicises the development of English fiction, focusing on its origins in oral and aural traditions, and on its affinities with music, the visual arts, and the stage. Woolf does indeed ‘investigate the influence of music on literature’ indirectly in these works, but she can never really tackle the question raised in that letter head-on; had she lived, Katherine Mansfield might have been just the person to help her. Notes 1. See http://www.amazon.com/Classic-Womens-Stories-Literature-Classical/dp/9626 342382/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1230552131&sr=8-1 (accessed 30 January 2011). 2. Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott, eds, The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984–2008), Vol. 1, p. 327. Hereafter referred to as Letters, followed by volume and page number. Much ink has been spilt in addressing the complexities of this relationship: a full chapter is devoted to it in both Antony Alpers’s The Life of Katherine Mansfield (London: Jonathan Cape, 1980) and Claire Tomalin’s Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life (London: Viking, 1987), as well as in Hermione Lee’s Virginia Woolf (London: Chatto and Windus, 1996). For critical approaches that compare the works of the two writers, see Sydney Janet Kaplan, Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991), especially pp. 145–68; Ann L MacLaughlin, ‘An Uneasy Sisterhood: Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield’, in Virginia Woolf. A Feminist Slant, ed. by Jane Marcus (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), pp. 152–61; Ann L. MacLaughlin, ‘The Same Job: Notes on the Relationship Between Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield’, Virginia Woolf Miscellany 9 (Winter 1977): p. 11; Ann L. MacLaughlin, ‘The Same Job: The Shared Writing Aims of Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf’, Modern Fiction Studies 24 (1978): pp. 369–82; Patricia Moran, Word of Mouth: Body Language in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1996), especially pp. 7–16; Nóra Séllei, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Personal and Professional Bond (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1996); Angela Smith, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 3. Anne Olivier Bell, ed., The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 5 vols (London: The Hogarth Press, 1977–84), Vol. 2, p. 61. Hereafter referred to as Diary followed by the volume and page number.

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Katherine Mansfield Studies 4. Diary 2, p. 45; Letters 4, p. 154. 5. See for example her letters to Dorothy Brett of 29 July and 29 August, 1921 (Letters 4, pp. 257, 269). In her last months, music – especially in combination with group dance – played an important part in her life at Gurdjieff’s Institute at Fontainebleau (Letters 5, pp. 307, 319, 322, 335, 339): she even planned to teach the cello to other members of the community (Letters 5, p. 308). 6. Margaret Scott, ed., The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, 2 vols (Canterbury and Wellington: Lincoln University Press and Daphne Brasell Associates, 1997), Vol. 1, p. 107. Hereafter referred to as Notebooks 1 and Notebooks 2. 7. As Tomalin notes, girls of Mansfield’s social milieu were kept busy with ‘giving orders to servants, flower-arranging, party-giving, travel, tennis, a little music, a little reading, a little French and German, a little hypochondria and much choosing of hats and camisole ribbons’ (p. 9); they always had to be ‘prepared to entertain guests around the ebony piano on its dais’ (p. 16). 8. To cite just a few early examples from this early period (when Mansfield was still a student at Queen’s): the 1903 poem ‘This is My World’ catalogues the contents of her room: her sheet music is ‘elixir of life’ and ‘heaven to me’, while her cello is ‘my all in all’ and directly addressed as ‘my beloved’. A July 1904 notebook entry lists books read, music studied, letters written and writing done. With a characteristic pose of exclusivity, on Monday 12 September 1904 she inscribes to L.M. ‘Two Songs: Love’s Entreaty and Night, words by Kathleen M. Beauchamp and music composed by Vera M. Beauchamp’ – and then inscribes the same songs to Tom Trowell a mere day later. In February 1905, she performs Tchaikovsky’s ‘Sérénade Mélancholique’ to some acclaim. In November 1908 she sends Garnet Trowell lyrics for two songs composed by Tom Trowell (Letters 1, pp. 83–6). 9. For new information on the intricacies of the relationships between Mansfield and the Trowells, see Gerri Kimber, ‘Katherine Mansfield and the Public Census of 1911’, Katherine Mansfield Society website. < http://www.katherinemansfield society.org/assets/SiteContentImages/KMS-CENSUS-OF-1911-Gerri-Kimber.pdf > (accessed 30 January 2011). 10. As O’Sullivan and Scott note, ‘KM and Lady Ottoline particularly enjoyed going together to music-hall and minstrel shows’ (Letters 4, p. 7, n. 3). Mansfield’s letters bear testament to the breadth of her musical interests: she mentions, for example, music hall star ‘turns’ Marie Lloyd, Connie Ediss (Letters 4, p. 80) and Sam Mayo (Letters 4, p. 94), music hall dancer Gaby Delys (Letters 4, p. 218), Spanish singer Raquel Mellor (Letters 4, pp. 6, 7, 10); and Argentine pianist Teresa Carreno (Letters 1, pp. 64–5, 68). 11. Mansfield, Letters 4, p. 356. 12. Mansfield, Letters 4, p. 337; Mansfield, ‘Vignette 1’ in The Poems of Katherine Mansfield, ed. Vincent O’Sullivan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 4. 13. Mansfield, Letters 4, pp. 332–3, 338. 14. Mansfield, Letters 4, pp. 252, 265. 15. Peter Jacobs, ‘The Second Violin Tuning in the Ante-Room: Virginia Woolf and Music’, in The Multiple Muses of Virginia Woolf, ed. Diane Filby Gillespie (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993), pp. 227–60, p. 227. 16. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, eds., The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 6 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1975–80), Vol. 1, pp. 329–33. 17. These included Robert H. Hull, Contemporary Music (1927) and Delius (1928); Basil de Selincourt, The Enjoyment of Music (1928); Thomas J Hewitt and Ralph Hill, An Outline of Musical History (1929).

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Mansfield, Woolf and Music 18. This ambitious project was realised in 1974 by the Tate Gallery, and exhibited again more recently in the 1999 exhibition ‘The Art of Bloomsbury’. 19. Mansfield, Letters 4, pp. x–xi. 20. Notebooks 1, pp. 78–9; Letters 2, p. 334; Letters 5, p. 221. 21. Mansfield, Letters 4, pp. 164–5. 22. Woolf, Letters 6, p. 426. 23. Notebooks 2, pp. 32–3. 24. Woolf, Letters 1, p. 356. 25. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry in Walter Pater: Three Major Texts, ed. by William E. Buckler (New York and London: New York University Press, 1986), pp. 69–220, p. 156. 26. Mary Burgan, Illness, Gender and Writing: The Case of Katherine Mansfield (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), p. 172. For Pater’s influence on Mansfield, see Kaplan, especially her discussion of ‘impersonality’ (p. 179); for Pater’s influence on Woolf, see Perry Meisel, The Absent Father: Virginia Woolf and Walter Pater (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980). 27. Mary Burgan, ‘Heroines At the Piano: Women and Music in Nineteenth-Century Fiction’, in The Lost Chord: Essays on Victorian Music, ed. by Nicholas Temperley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 42–67; Smith, pp. 140–5; W. H. New, Reading Mansfield and Metaphors of Form (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1999), p. 58. 28. Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), pp. 207, 204. 29. Smith, pp. 140, 145 30. Sarah Sandley, ‘The Middle of the Note: Mansfield’s “Glimpses’’’, in Katherine Mansfield: In from the Margins, ed. Roger Robinson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994), pp. 70–89. 31. Letters 1, p. 205. 32. New, p. 58. 33. Sandley, p. 81. 34. New, p. 58. 35. Smith, p. 140. 36. Diaries 1, p. 219. 37. Critics have neglected Mansfield’s ‘The Singing Lesson’ altogether, and ‘The String Quartet’, like Woolf’s short fiction more generally, has only recently attracted the attention of Woolf scholars. Although Woolf notes in her diary that Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry admired the story, and T. S. Eliot singled it out for particular praise – an opinion which especially pleased her, disappointed by reactions to the collection – contemporary critical responses largely dismissed it as no more than a light formal experiment (Diaries 2, pp. 106, 125). 38. Katherine Mansfield, ‘The Singing Lesson’, in The Collected Short Stories (London: Penguin, 1981), pp. 343–9. References to this story subsequently cited parenthetically. 39. Virginia Woolf, ‘The String Quartet’, in The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, ed. by Susan Dick (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), pp. 138–41. References to this story subsequently cited parenthetically. 40. Diane Filby Gillespie, The Sisters’ Arts: The Writing and Painting of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1988), p.141. 41. Roland Barthes, ‘Musica Practica’, in The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, trans. by Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1971), pp. 261–6, p. 261.

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Katherine Mansfield Studies 42. Letters 4, p. 247. 43. Letters 4, p. 285. Mansfield was not exactly in a hurry to read Monday or Tuesday, asking Ottoline Morrell in late May 1921 ‘Have you read Virginia’s stories? I havent – yet’ (Letters 4, p. 244). Woolf’s attitude to Mansfield’s writings is marked by a similar ambivalence: as Tomalin points out, for example, while Woolf found the Bliss stories ‘clever and disagreeable’, there is nevertheless a certain ‘kinship . . . in the shape of the sentences’ in the two writers’ work (pp. 218, 202). 44. Jacobs, p. 227. 45. Patricia Ondek Laurence, The Reading of Silence: Virginia Woolf in the English Tradition (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 185. 46. Diary 2, pp. 319–20; Diary 3, p. 139. 47. From a draft of ‘Professions for Women’ held in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. Quoted by Jane Marcus in ‘Art and Anger’, Feminist Studies, 4 (1978), pp. 68–98, p. 83. 48. Letters 3, p. 316; Diary 3, p. 339. 49. Diary 5, p. 450.

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‘All glittering with broken light’: Katherine Mansfield and Impressionism Young Sun Choi

Abstract Mansfield has often been noted for a visually perceptive or ‘painterly’ style of writing. If the form and content of her oeuvre are informed by the fine arts, the rhetoric involved in her text can be best termed as ‘impressionist’. Not only is her writing vibrant with light, colour and perceptual sensations, but it also established the short story, her hallmark genre, as the most appropriate mode for the impressionist record of transience, speed and mutability – the defining qualities of urban modernity. This article, accordingly, considers affinities between Mansfield and the Impressionists in terms of aesthetics, technical innovation and thematic concerns. Both based their art upon the same epistemological grounds that human knowledge and perception, conditioned by individual sensory experience at a specific time and space, are essentially subjective. They thus found conventional modes of representation inadequate to accommodate shifting awareness, seeking to forge a new aesthetic through a series of formal experiments. Common ground is also found in their thematic concerns. Mansfield, like the Impressionists, developed a predilection for urban subject matter, tapping into the ambivalent aspects of modern city life. An exploration of Mansfield and Impressionism thus sheds new light on her art, suggesting the fascinating interplay between text and image within a modernist framework. Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 3 (2011): 67–80 DOI: 10.3366/kms.2011.0007 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

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Katherine Mansfield Studies Key words: Katherine Mansfield, Impressionism, urban modernity, the fine arts, text and image

‘In descriptions of nature one should seize upon minutiae, grouping them so that when, having read the passage, you close your eyes, a picture is formed’ Anton Chekhov, in a letter to A. P. Chekhov of 10 May 1886.

Katherine Mansfield has often been noted for a visually perceptive or ‘painterly’ style of writing and indeed the fine arts are intimately related to her personal and professional life. Her oeuvre, interspersed with numerous references to paintings, sculptures, and pictorial images, clearly indicates her abiding fascination with art. Mansfield was also in close touch with the trends of French avant-garde art of the day, introduced to the British public through the epoch-making events held in early-twentieth-century London, including the 1905 Durand-Ruel Impressionist exhibition at the Grafton Galleries and Roger Fry’s two seminal Post-Impressionist exhibitions in 1910–12.1 Mansfield was present at both of the latter and thus had first-hand acquaintance with the masterpieces of modern art. She may well have found the experience liberating as it inspired her own art with new scope and new vitality. A decade later she writes to her painter friend Dorothy Brett: Wasn’t that van Gogh shown at the Goupil ten years ago? Yellow flowers – brimming with sun in a pot? [. . .] That picture seemed to reveal something that I hadn’t realised before I saw it. It lived with me afterwards. It still does – that & another of a sea captain in a flat cap. They taught me something about writing, which was queer – a kind of freedom – or rather, a shaking free.2

Mansfield was a connoisseur of the arts, with a discerning eye, which asserts itself through the critical comments she made. She identifies ‘beautiful real maturity’ in Manet, who, she confesses, stirs up something profound in her. She also admires the grace of Renoir, while not failing to note the increasingly lax style of his later works. Her witty observation of 1921 on Renoir reads: I saw a reproduction of a very lovely Renoir the other day – a young woman, profile or three-quarter with the arm lazily outstretched, lovely throat, bosom, shoulder – such grace. But I think that in his later paintings he is often so muzzy. I can’t appreciate the queer woolly outline, and I feel it was so often as like as not rheumatism rather than revelation.3

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Mansfield and Impressionism Reading a book on Cézanne to which she was sympathetically drawn, she even uses an inter-art analogy to indicate a potentially enriching dialogue between the verbal and the visual: I can only look at it as a writer, but it seems to me the real thing. Its what one is aiming at. One of his men gave me quite a shock. He is the spit of a man Ive just written about – one Jonathan Trout. To the life. I wish I could cut him out & put him in my book.4

Mansfield’s writing, therefore, tends to be intensely visual. It often embodies the idea of ut pictura poesis, creating remarkable pictorial effects and immediately evoking a visual equivalent.5 The image that her text conjures up is vivid and telling, leading readers to feel they are living in the moment it relates. An evening sketch of the river Seine dated 25 March 1915 illustrates such highly imagistic prose: I [. . . ] went for a long walk along the quai – very far. It was dusk when I started – but dark when I got home. The lights came out when I walked – & the boats danced by. Leaning over the bridge I suddenly discovered that one of those boats are exactly what I want my novel to be – Not big, almost ‘grotesque’ in shape I mean perhaps heavy – with people rather dark and seen strangely as they move in the sharp light and shadow and I want bright shivering lights in it and the sound of water.6

If the form and content of the Mansfield oeuvre are informed by the fine arts, the rhetoric involved in her text can be best termed as ‘impressionist’.7 Not only is her writing vibrant with light, colour, and optical sensations but it also established the short story, her hallmark genre, as the most appropriate mode for the impressionist record of transience, speed and mutability, the defining qualities of urban modernity. This article is, in this context, intended to investigate the far-reaching influence of Impressionism on her literary practice.8 It will explore affinities between Mansfield’s art and Impressionism from three major perspectives: aesthetics, style and technique, and thematic concerns, which are, intrinsically, interlocking questions. In dealing with the present topic, alongside her stories, I shall consider Mansfield’s letters and notebooks. Remarkable in quality and substantial in bulk, these documents constitute an integral part of her literary output and therefore claim attention in their own right. Moreover, Mansfield’s impressionist aesthetic is not confined to her narrative art. Rather it permeates her oeuvre as a whole and is often best exemplified by her personal writing.

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Katherine Mansfield Studies The philosophical ideas that underlay Impressionism in general also inform Mansfield’s literary impressionism. Impressionism epitomises the cultural currents of late-nineteenth-century France where it originated, addressing the same vital issues which engaged contemporary thinkers and writers like Flaubert, Sainte-Beuve and the Goncourts.9 It is, first and foremost, predicated upon a new epistemology that human perception and knowledge are fundamentally subjective, since they are bound to be mediated through sensory experience at a particular time and space. Therefore, Impressionism casts doubt on the typically nineteenth-century preoccupation with achieving objective or universal truth. In effect, this line of philosophical inquiry dates back to the empiricism of David Hume. In A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), he contends that human beings are nothing but a ‘collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement, then there appears to be nothing to the self other than the impressions that compose it’.10 He thus challenges epistemological generalities and his use of the term ‘impression’ in this context is striking. Hume’s argument anticipates such late-nineteenth-century art criticism as Baudelaire’s Le Peintre de la vie moderne (1859) or Walter Pater’s The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873), to which the notion of impression or subjective individual sensation is equally crucial. Baudelaire argues that rendering the artist’s personal vision is a key to modern aesthetics. He attributes the ‘thrilling originality’ of Constantin Guys – the Parisian illustrator whom he considers the ultimate painter of modern life – to his ‘faithfulness to the impressions received’.11 Pater also owes the basis of his ideas to Hume, whom he read in 1861. In ‘The Conclusion’ of The Renaissance, he refers to a world ‘not of objects in the solidity with which language invests them, but of impressions, unstable, flickering, inconsistent’.12 Modernist writers took up this philosophical and aesthetic direction, foregrounding the problem of perception and representation. They felt that, after the unprecedented experience of the First World War, fiction could never be the same as before.13 It should break from its old-fashioned mould and forge a new one to accommodate the shifting conditions of human existence and consciousness. What matters now is not the exterior but the interior or ‘the mind’, which in itself has proved a contested terrain of the numerous impressions from the outside. Henry James, in ‘The Art of Fiction’ (1884), had already made the bold claim that ‘a novel is in its broadest definition a personal, direct impression of life’.14 Virginia Woolf observes in her

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Mansfield and Impressionism celebrated essay ‘Modern Fiction’ (1925) that, ‘The mind receives a myriad impressions – trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms’. She thus affirms that life is not ‘a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged’ but ‘a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end’.15 Mansfield’s literary impressionism should be placed within this intellectual context. Although she aimed to communicate through fiction a sense of reality, her conception of realism was radically different from that of Victorian novelists. In her view, realism in the Dickensian sense, although still deployed by Edwardian writers like Bennett and Galsworthy, had already run its course. A new kind of realism was demanded in response to the disruptions that both art and life had undergone in recent years. Instead of documenting the details of the world outside, Mansfield turned to the world inside. She attempted to delve into the inner life of the subject, exploring its depth and width and mapping out its immense complexities. She articulates this particular orientation in the light of the Zeitgeist, giving voice to the cutting-edge sensibilities of postwar literature. In a letter to Murry of 1919 she writes: Its not in the least a question of material or style or plot. I can only think in terms like ‘a change of heart’. I cant imagine how after the war these men can pick up the old threads as tho’ it never had been. Speaking to you Id say we have died and live again. How can that be the same life? It doesn’t mean that Life is the less precious or that the ‘common things of light and day’ are gone. They are not gone, they are intensified, they are illumined.16

Like her modernist contemporaries, Mansfield called into question the plausibility of reaching objective truth. For her, reality consisted in the kaleidoscopic workings of one’s consciousness rather than in the matter-of-fact details of the outer world. Reality meant not an external but an internal vision, constructed by subjectivity or individual perceptual awareness. To put it another way, reality is ‘a synthesis of pure sensations, modulated by consciousness and changed into impressions’.17 Virginia Woolf, reviewing the published version of Mansfield’s journal after her death, incisively pinpoints her friend’s signature literary quality as ‘the spectacle of a mind – a terribly sensitive mind – receiving one after another the haphazard impressions’. Woolf goes on to ask: ‘From what point of view is she looking at life as she

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Katherine Mansfield Studies sits there, terribly sensitive, registering one after another such diverse impressions?’18 What Mansfield charts is, in the final analysis, not a landscape but a sensation invoked by it, which is clearly shown in a letter of 19 September 1920, written in Menton, South France: After lunch today we had a sudden tremendous thunder storm, the drops of rain were as big as marguerite daisies – the whole sky was violet. I went out the very moment it was over – the sky was all glittering with broken light – the sun a huge splash of silver. The drops were like silver fishes hanging from the trees. I drank the rain from the peach leaves & then pulled a shower bath over my head. Every violet leaf was full.19

This is Mansfield at her most graphically radiant. The extraordinary mindscape with its dazzling imagery above is akin to the Impressionist landscape and, especially, the plein air pieces of Pissarro, Morisot, Monet or Sisley. These artists investigated the transient effects of light by painting quickly in the open air and rendering its shifting qualities as perceived by the eye. To achieve the impact of intense chromatic vibration, they juxtaposed complementary colours on the canvas for optical mixture, rather than blending them on the palette, as was customary. In summary, they were, in Richard Bretell’s terms, devoted to ‘the transcription of visual reality as it affects the retina of the painter within a discrete, and short, period of time’.20 The result is a sparkling surface featuring coloured reflections with all the implications of light and air. In this manner, their image suggests fidelity to an individual vision of the outer world in much the same way as Mansfield’s texts. Consequently, Impressionism represents the aesthetics in which beauty and truth consist not in stasis but in incessant flux and transition. Everything is set in motion and flow and ‘all that is solid melts into air’.21 The Impressionist vision is inextricably implicated in this awareness, seeking to extract the timeless from the fleeting. It regards impermanence as the nature of things and its overriding concern converges on the momentary, the contingent and the constantly changing. In brief, Impressionism signifies the worldview of ‘the dominion of the moment over permanence and continuity’.22 Indeed this outlook constitutes the single most significant doctrine of Impressionism, to which all the stylistic and thematic concerns of the movement are subject.23 As a practitioner of literary impressionism, Mansfield attempted to catch a glimpse of reality through a precarious moment. What she captures is merely a single incident at an unguarded moment, through which a whole tableau comes to the surface. Her method draws upon

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Mansfield and Impressionism selection and illumination of essentials – ‘we single out, we bring into light’, she notes.24 In brief, she gives form to ‘fragmentary, momentary, evocative reality’.25 Her preoccupation with the idea of transience is reflected in a letter to Brett of 29 July 1921: Don’t you think the stairs are a good place for reading letters? I do. One is somehow suspended. One is on neutral ground – not in one’s own world nor in a strange one. They are an almost perfect meeting place. Oh Heavens! How stairs do fascinate me when I think of it. Waiting for people – sitting on strange stairs – hearing steps far above, watching the light playing by itself – hearing – far below a door, looking down into a kind of dim brightness, watching someone come up.26

The quotation above deserves attention due to the remarkable effect achieved whereby, in the course of a short passage, one perceives a tangible entity (the staircase) dissolving into ambience pure and simple. What remains is a mood or sentiment, indefinite, elusive and essentially fluid.27 Her sensibility revealed here perfectly epitomises that of urban modern life, redolent of the Impressionist images that envisage the dissolution of substance into a passing mood. A picture like Waiting (L’Attente), Degas’s arresting ballet pastel of 1882, could stand as a parallel with such passages in Mansfield’s writing. Degas’s young ballerina and her companion are seated on a bench at repose, presumably during an intermission. They are placed at the top left of the composition and seen from a steep angle. The extraordinary design, although anchored by the artist’s magnificent sense of equilibrium, generates a sense of unease or tension nonetheless. The two, seated side by side, are not together, each being immersed in a separate world. Their psychological state is unidentified and the moment is gliding away. The prevailing mood is that of uncertainty and evanescence; and as an image that charts an atmosphere per se, Waiting remains ‘elusive and uninterpretable’.28 In this manner the picture serves as a visual equivalent of Mansfield’s prose above, crystallising a highly charged moment of tentativeness. Stylistically, Mansfield was committed to moulding new aesthetic forms. She found conventional narrative paradigms inadequate to accommodate the inward sensory experiences that she strove to delineate. In other words, she discredited the ‘neat finality’ of the well-wrought story with its clean-cut characterisation and set structure, as it was, in her view, prone to misrepresent modern sensibilities.29 Mansfield had ‘a passion for technique’.30 She employed a variety of formal devices appropriate for her own aesthetic principles,

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Katherine Mansfield Studies which encompass interior monologue, stream of consciousness, and cinematic flashbacks with implicit fade-ins and fade-outs. Mansfield saw her narrative method as amorphous and formless, sharply divergent from the entrenched linear plot: ‘again it seems to me that what I am doing has no form!’31 Her fiction is, above all, characterised by the ambiguous narrative stance. Mansfield’s deft use of free indirect discourse creates the polyphonic narrative voice,32 best exemplified by ‘The Garden Party’ (1921). The following paragraph – featuring a shift of time, perspective and narrative position from the narrator to various characters – speaks with multiple voices. We can hear the third-person narration alternating with Mrs. Sheridan’s anxieties about the seedy quarter nearby and with Laura and Laurie’s voices:33 They were little mean dwellings painted a chocolate brown. [. . .] Washerwomen lived in the lane and sweeps and a cobbler, and a man whose house-front was studded all over with minute bird-cages. Children swarmed. When the Sheridans were little they were forbidden to set foot there because of the revolting language and of what they might catch. But since they were grown up, Laura and Laurie on their prowls sometimes walked through. It was disgusting and sordid. They came out with a shudder. But still one must go everywhere; one must see everything. So through they went.34

A considerable number of Mansfield’s stories display a vignette quality, shaking themselves free of plots.35 They are open-ended and tantalisingly inconclusive in their narrative possibilities, leaving the reader to ‘infer’ the ultimate meaning.36 They strike one as ruptured or even plotless. Featuring ‘no history’ or ‘no exploration of motive’, these pieces are, observes Claire Tomalin, often ‘grotesquely peopled and alight with colour and movement’.37 The following scene from ‘Bank Holiday’ (1922), a croquis of the goings-on in town on a glorious day, brilliantly conjures up such a tableau vivant: A crowd collects, eating oranges and bananas, tearing off the skins, dividing, sharing. One young girl has even a basket of strawberries [. . .] Old fat women in velvet bodices – old dusty pin-cushions – lean old hags like worn umbrellas with a quivering bonnet on top; young women, in muslins, with hats that might have grown on hedges, and high pointed shoes; men in khaki, sailors, shabby clerks [. . . ] the loud, bold music holds them together in one big knot for a moment. The young ones are larking, pushing each other on and off the pavement, dodging, nudging; the old ones are talking.38

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Mansfield and Impressionism Mansfield’s formal experimentation parallels a series of stylistic reductions that Impressionist painting achieved. Central to these are the technique of improvisation with rapid free-flowing brushstrokes and the stress on the purely pictorial aspect of painting. This is particularly apparent in Manet’s Races at Longchamp (c.1867), which shows a lifelike racing scene in the Bois de Boulogne, Paris. A daring snapshot, the image is a rough sketch-like rendering of speed and of its immediate optical perception. The brushstrokes are animated and elliptical with spots and dabs of colour all over. A sense of spontaneity is palpable. The focus is on the intense visual impact per se caused by the dynamic central act with minimal reference to literary or anecdotal elements of the subject. Arguably, the flexible mobile viewpoint through which Mansfield structures her fiction is analogous with the perspective experiments of Impressionist painting in that both of these verbal and visual techniques contribute to imposing the spatial and temporal complexities on their work. For example, much of the intrigue and mystery pervading Degas’s oeuvre stems from his compositional innovation or the ‘peeping-through-the-keyhole’ doctrine. In Caillebotte’s Pont de l’Europe (1876–7), likewise, the prevailing sense of tension and ambiguity is by and large ascribed to its unusual perspective. The image, which features cropped off-centre figures and a camera-like angle, displaces traditional mise-en-scène, creating a sense of spatial and psychological uncertainties. All these points discussed thus far mark a radical departure from conventional modes of verbal and visual representation. It should, then, be underscored that the particular style of Mansfield and the Impressionists was formally suitable for a rendition of the modern urban existence that they sought to portray. Indeed Impressionism is a quintessential art of urban modernity, the concept that Baudelaire succinctly summed up as ‘the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent’.39 It is decidedly an ‘urban style’ – not only because it reclaims the ‘landscape quality of the city’ but because it depicts ‘the changeability, the nervous rhythm, the sudden, sharp but always ephemeral impressions of city life’, ‘with the overstrained nerves of modern technical man’.40 The Impressionists, accordingly, took their subject matter from contemporary Paris, which reinvented itself as a monumental modern metropolis under the administration of Baron Haussmann. A massive scheme for urban renewal was set in train in tandem with the boom in commerce and real estate of the mid-nineteenth century. Parks, public squares, palatial edifices and commercial institutions came into

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Katherine Mansfield Studies being along the expansive grands boulevards. The erstwhile cramped medieval town was transfigured into a dazzling modern city. The majestic architectural style of Beaux-Arts classicism that embellished the new Paris was intended as propaganda to manifest the power of the bourgeois state.41 It was indeed ‘a city designed by and for the bourgeoisie’.42 Arnold Hauser explains that it became the capital for capitalism adapted to the demands of modern commercial life: Paris acquires a new splendour, a new metropolitan air. But its grandeur is often only an outward appearance, the pretentious materials are often only a substitute, the marble only stucco, the stone only mortar [. . . ] An unreliable element comes into architecture, corresponding to the parvenu set-up of the prevailing society. Paris again becomes the capital of Europe, not, however, as formerly, the centre of art and culture, but the metropolis of the world of entertainment, the city of opera, operetta, balls, boulevards, restaurants, department stores, world exhibitions, and cheap, ready-made pleasures.43

The Impressionists were highly susceptible to this new city. The physical reorganisation of the urban space provided the artists with a new vista and they explored the world of urban modernity strolling in the boulevards. In so doing, they assumed the persona of a flâneur, the rambler/observer/explorer of the urban space, as depicted in Degas’s Place de la Concorde (1875) or Caillebotte’s Boulevard Seen From Above (1880).44 They thus promenaded and observed the street-as-theatre with savoir-faire, where ‘life in all its variety and inexhaustible wealth of variations’ is staged.45 At a glance, their picturesque cityscapes and elegant Parisian scenes appear to encapsulate the optimistic worldview of the era of middle-class hegemony. Yet a closer look reveals that they are far from the mere chroniclers of ‘the genteel bourgeois society of the Second Empire, the world of the crinoline and the décolleté’.46 Rather, the Impressionists tend to present a trenchant social critique of contemporary urban reality. This is particularly the case with intellectual painters such as Manet and Degas. These artists with upper-middle-class social origins penetrated the glamorous façade of Haussmann’s Paris, the city of the nouveaux riches and of conspicuous consumption par excellence, opening its inherent conflicts and contradictions to critical scrutiny. Many of their paintings, set in modern commercial establishments like cafés, café-concerts, theatres and operas, are layered with critical subtexts, problematising the age of high capitalism in which the whole spheres of social practice were subject to market forces and thus revealing the symptoms of strain.47 In this context, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, Manet’s last major statement

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Mansfield and Impressionism on Parisian entertainment, shown in the Salon of 1882, can be read as a commentary upon alienation or the disintegration of interpersonal relations in urban modern society. In much the same terms, Mansfield also developed a predilection for urban themes. She was, like the Impressionists, alert to the double-edged junctures of the modern city and her urban vision was equally astringent and clear-headed.48 Although she often pronounces her personal attachment to the city and its liberal cosmopolitan spirit (‘London – it is Life’, she notes),49 her professional reaction to urban existence is by no means monolithic. It is nuanced, equivocal, and fraught with a troubled awareness of the city-as-text. Like the Impressionists, she adopted the identity of a flâneuse, exploring the street of London and Paris, rediscovering its splendour and squalor, and pinning them down in her literary output: At about seven I [. . . ] went for a walk behind the Hotel de Ville. I found most curious places – and I found at last a little market where every third body was either frying or eating polish pancakes. The air smelled of them and of ‘petits gris’ [. . . ]. It began to rain – Under an old stone arch 3 hags wrapped in black shawls were standing – their hands crossed over their bellies. At their feet there lay three little baskets of herbs – Dry twigs – withered bundles and tiny packets. Their heads were raised, watching the drizzle and the green light from a lantern fell on their faces. All of them were talking – whether to each other or to themselves you could not tell, for their voices did not pause. It sounded like a song. It was one of the most ancient things I have ever seen or heard.50

The iconography of modern city life in the body of Mansfield’s work is wide-ranging, from fashionable bourgeois lifestyle to urban low life, often evincing the stance of a coolly detached observer. One of the recurrent themes in the Mansfield canon is an inquiry into facets of middle-class society: its tastes, values, aspirations and dilemmas. A group of her stories, including ‘The Garden Party’, ‘The Doll’s House’, ‘A Cup of Tea’, ‘Marriage à la Mode’ and ‘Bliss’, deal with such issues in one way or another. These tales, in varying degrees, suggest that the construction of middle-class identity in contemporary society is involved not only with the matter of means of production but also with that of style of consumption or commodity exchange. Mansfield’s concern, however, is not limited to the configuration of the well-todo leisured class. It cuts across a broader spectrum of modern city life. Stories like ‘Pictures’, ‘Life of Ma Parker’ and ‘The Tiredness of Rosabel’ firmly focus on the darker fringe of the metropolis, delving

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Katherine Mansfield Studies into the liminal existence of the urban underclass and thus indicating the writer’s lucid social intelligence. As a major ‘period style’ of the late nineteenth century,51 Impressionism had a far-reaching impact on contemporary intellectual currents as a whole,52 shaping the course of twentieth-century European art and literature. It is, therefore, worth considering the inter-art implications of Impressionism by comparing the pictorial and literary modes of this movement. Mansfield seems to accord a distinctive reference point in this respect, as her fiction is profoundly informed by the ideas and practices of this particular artistic trend. As discussed here, the affinities between Mansfield’s art and Impressionism can be addressed in terms of the interconnected questions of aesthetics, technical innovation and thematic concerns. Mansfield and the Impressionists based their art upon the same epistemological grounds that human knowledge and perception, conditioned by individual sensory experience at a specific time and space, are essentially subjective. They thus found conventional modes of representation inadequate to accommodate shifting awareness, seeking to forge a new aesthetic through a series of formal experiments. Their common ground is also found in their thematic concerns. Mansfield, like the Impressionists, developed a predilection for urban subject matter, tapping into the ambivalent aspects of modern city life. A comparison of Mansfield and Impressionism thus sheds new light on her art, suggesting the fascinating interplay between text and image within a modernist framework. Notes 1. Angela Smith, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), pp. 146–55. 2. Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott, eds, The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984–2008), Vol. 4, p. 333. (Hereafter referred to as Letters, followed by volume and page number. All subsequent quotations from Mansfield’s letters and journals retain original spelling and punctuation.) In fact, the first Post-Impressionist exhibition of 1910, where Mansfield saw van Gogh’s Sunflowers, was in the Grafton Galleries not the Goupil. 3. Letters 4, p. 257. 4. Letters 4, p. 278. 5. The Latin phrase, ut pictura poesis, literally ‘as is painting, so is poetry’, is an analogy that Horace uses in his Ars Poetica to draw a parallel between text and image. 6. Letters 1, p. 168. 7. Kate Fullbrook, Katherine Mansfield (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986), pp. 64–5. 8. The term Impressionism originated from Monet’s Impression: Soleil Levant (1872). It was coined by Louis Leroy in his satirical article entitled ‘L’Exposition des Impressionnistes’ in Le Charivari of 25 April 1874. For an account of the origin and context of the movement in the fine arts and its subsequent application to

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Mansfield and Impressionism

9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25.

26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

literature, see, among others, Maria Elizabeth Kronegger, Literary Impressionism (New Haven: College & University Press Service, 1973). Phoebe Pool, Impressionism (London: Thames & Hudson, 1973), p. 7. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 252. Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1964). http://docentes. uacj.mx/museodigital/cursos_2005/gabriela/Baudelaire.pdf [accessed 2/1/2008]. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980), p. 187. Strictly speaking, modernist fiction began to take shape well before 1914, as seen in Chekhov or Conrad, but the Great War was a major turning point. Henry James, ‘The Art of Fiction’ (1884), in William Veeder and Susan Griffin eds, The Art of Criticism: Henry James and the Theory and Practice of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 178. See also Ford Madox Ford, ‘On Impressionism’, Poetry and Drama II (1914). Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’ (1925), in The Common Reader: First Series (London: Hogarth Press, 1968), p. 189. Letters 3, p. 97. Kronegger, p. 36. Woolf, ‘A Terribly Sensitive Mind’, in The Collected Essays, 4 vols (London: Chatto & Windus, 1966–7), Vol. 1, p. 356. Letters 4, p. 44. Richard Bretell, Modern Art 1851–1929: Capitalism and Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 15. For a study of the underlying ideas of modern aesthetics, see Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Viking, 1988); especially the section on Baudelaire, pp. 131–55. Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, 4 vols (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), Vol. 4, p. 159. Michele Hannoosh, ‘Painters of Modern Life: Baudelaire and the Impressionists’, in William Sharpe and Leonard Wallock eds, Visions of the Modern City: Essays in History, Art, and Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 183. C. K. Stead, ed., The Letters and Journals of Katherine Mansfield (London: Allen Lane, 1977), p. 241. Julia van Gunsteren, Katherine Mansfield and Literary Impressionism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990), p. 9. See also Conrad Aiken, ‘The Short Story as Colour’, Freeman, 21 June 1922. Letters 4, p. 256. Mansfield was adept at conveying a sense of ephemerality without spelling it out, exemplified by the following quotation from ‘The Stranger’ (1921): ‘But her words, so light, so soft, so chill, seemed to hover in the air, to rain into his breast like snow’. Mansfield, The Garden Party and Other Stories (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923), p. 229. For an in-depth monograph on this particular picture, see Richard Thomson, Edgar Degas: Waiting (Malibu: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1995). Quotation on p. 90. Clare Hanson, Short Stories and Short Fictions 1880–1980 (London: Macmillan, 1985), p. 55. Letters 4, p. 173.

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Katherine Mansfield Studies 31. Stead, p. 231. 32. Angela Smith, Introduction to Katherine Mansfield: Selected Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. xxvii. 33. For a study of Mansfield’s practice of this particular technical device and its significance in shaping the style and perceptions of modernist fiction, see Sarah Sandley, ‘The Middle of the Note: Katherine Mansfield’s “Glimpses’’ ’, in Roger Robinson ed., Katherine Mansfield: In from the Margin (Baton Rouge & London: Louisiana State University Press, 1994), pp. 70–89. 34. Mansfield, The Garden Party, pp. 71–2. 35. Gerri Kimber, A Literary Modernist: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of the Short Story (London: Kakapo, 2008), p. 24. 36. Saralyn Daly, Katherine Mansfield (New York: Twayne, 1994), p. 61. 37. Claire Tomalin, Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life (London: Penguin, 1988), p. 6. 38. Mansfield, The Garden Party, p. 231. 39. Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’. 40. Hauser, p. 158. 41. Peter Hall, Cities in Civilisation: Culture, Innovation, and Urban Order (London: Phoenix, 1999), p. 723. 42. Hall, p. 937. 43. Hauser, p. 58. 44. Robert Herbert, Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 33–7. For a classic formulation of the flâneur, streetwalking, and modern urban experience, see Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1973). The critic notes: ‘The street becomes a dwelling for the flâneur; he is as much at home among the façades of houses as a citizen is in his four walls. [. . . ] The walls are the desk against which he presses his notebooks; news-stands are his libraries and the terraces of cafés are the balconies from which he looks down on his household after his work is done’, p. 37. 45. Benjamin, p. 37. 46. Hauser, p. 166. 47. T. J. Clark, The Paintings of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999), pp. 205–58. 48. For a detailed account of Mansfield’s urban vision, see Sydney Janet Kaplan, ‘ “A Gigantic Mother’’: Mansfield and the City’, in Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 67–81. 49. John Middleton Murry, ed., Journal of Katherine Mansfield (London: Constable, 1954), p. 21. 50. Letters 1, p. 171. 51. Jesse Matz, Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 45. 52. Peter Stowell, Literary Impressionism: James and Chekhov (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980), p. 6.

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‘The beauty of your line – the life behind it’: Katherine Mansfield and the Double Impression Rebecca Bowler

Abstract This article examines Katherine Mansfield’s aesthetics and attitude to the relation between what she called ‘life’ and work, the visual and the intellectual. It emphasises doubleness both in Mansfield’s selves and in her aesthetics, a doubleness which led her to experiment with the literary impression. ‘The Meaning of Rhythm’, that manifesto for the privileging of ‘life’ in art, is read as a manifesto for the primary impression. Mansfield’s letters, particularly to the painter Dorothy Brett, are analysed for what they reveal about Mansfield’s ideas about ‘life’ and the purely perceptual in art, and one can see her begin to formulate views on what painting should encompass, and what fiction can take from painting. Her review of Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage in the Athenaeum is set against the letters in an attempt to delineate her attitude toward the visual and the primary impression in fiction. Jesse Matz’s theory of the ‘double impression’ is used as a key to understanding the dichotomy between perception and definition, life and writing, glimpses and recording in Mansfield’s fiction and journals, but ultimately I will argue that through her use of the symbol, Mansfield progresses beyond the bounds of literary impressionism and creates her own unity.

Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 3 (2011): 81–94 DOI: 10.3366/kms.2011.0008 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

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Katherine Mansfield Studies Key words: Mansfield, impressionism, painting, selves, Henry James, visual, Dorothy Richardson Katherine Mansfield was an artist of many masks. As her close friend Ida Baker expressed it, she was ‘a born actress and mimic [. . .] like a lantern with many sides; not octagonal but centagonal’.1 Mansfield had a heightened awareness of the different selves she presented for different people. She assumed names for these different selves, different moods, and different modes of writing: Kathleen Beauchamp, Katherine Mansfield, Tig, Wig, Kissienka, Katie, KM, Lili Heron, The Tiger and Boris Petrovsky. Her letters show the importance she placed on producing an external image as display. Clothes are important markers of self. Mansfield writes to her sister in 1908 that she believes ‘clothes ought to be a joy to the artistic eye – a silent reflex of the soul – so I’m training my amenable little soul accordingly’.2 Ida Baker, who was being put to use as a buyer of material was given these instructions in 1921: ‘I am a very MODERN woman. I like Life in my clothes [. . .] Try & think of a picture in a French pattern book or a figure for the stage, cant you?’3 Mansfield dresses not only to reflect her modernity and energy of ‘Life’, but also implies that life itself is being shaped by the clothes. Her self display is an artistic creation: she is bohemian, French, and an artiste. All modes of dress are a ‘symbol of the wearer’s tastes and politics’,4 as Elizabeth Wilson puts it: All art draws on unconscious fantasy [. . .] hence [fashion’s] compulsiveness, hence our ambivalence, hence the immense psychological (and material) work that goes into the production of the social self, of which clothes are an indispensable part.5

Mansfield’s performances almost became literal. In 1908 she was enthusiastically embarking on projects for poetry readings in dramatic settings. She wrote to Garnet Trowell that her plan involved: a darkened stage – a great – high backed oak chair – flowers – shaded lights – a low table filled with curious books – and to wear a simple, beautifully coloured dress [. . .] I know I possess the power of holding people . . . I could then write just what I felt would suit me.6

Claire Tomalin likens this project to ‘Dickens’s public performances’,7 but Mansfield is not focused on verbal drama. Instead she seems to have a very specific aesthetic in mind. The emphasis is on the setting: a combination of the scholarly Victorian gentleman’s study,

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Mansfield and the Double Impression the feminine flowers and beautiful colours, and the mysterious séancelike shaded lights. Mansfield’s projected artist-self is intellectual, sensual, and supernaturally mesmerising. Any poetry or sketches that Mansfield might read in this ornate setting are of secondary importance. She wishes to write what would ‘suit’ her personality. To the fledgling writer image is of primary importance, and actual writing, actual poetry is secondary. As Mansfield matures as an artist, the writing itself becomes important. Her work comes to define her life, rather than the other way around. This prominence is not accepted with good grace. She writes to John Middleton Murry: I do not know how it is but I live withdrawn from my personal life. (This is hard to say.) I am a writer first. In the past, it is true, when I worked less, my writing self was merged in my personal self.8

The personal self and the writing self are seen as two complete selves: two irreconcilable units. The struggle between ‘life’ and all the sensuous joy that it contains (flowers, colourful clothes, beautiful lighting effects), and the detached attitude of a writer is a defining aspect of Mansfield’s fiction. The living self and the writing self are in continual opposition. This is not merely a struggle between the perceptual and the written word, however. In her critical reception of all the arts, Mansfield creates the same oppositions. In ‘The Meaning of Rhythm’, co-written with Murry, ‘life’ is made central to the successful practice of any art: [the artist] is so secure that he can give himself wholly up to the delight of living. At every moment he finds some newness of life. He is intimate and at one with all that he meets. He is in love with life.9

The artist is set up by Mansfield and Murry not only as a ‘type’ or romantic image, but a being with ‘consciousness of superiority’. The superiority stems from ‘a certainty of knowledge that he sees the reality of things’.10 Rhythm’s manifesto glamorises and privileges the artist as created self. However, the artist, despite being more than human, also has a direct connection to ‘life’, and this sacred connection, along with a certain kind of self-assurance, brings freedom and creativity. Mansfield’s letters to Dorothy Brett are full of observations about painting and its relation to life. Painting is good painting if it captures life and bad painting if it doesn’t. Art, real art, must create a meeting space for the two attitudes: the direct perception of life, rendered with detachment and a sense of composition. Mansfield tells Brett delightedly:

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Katherine Mansfield Studies I meant to tell you the barber was in raptures with your still life. I think that’s a great compliment, don’t you? It’s before ones eyes says he, ‘il y a de la vie. Un movement dans la feuilles.’ [my translation: it has life. A movement in the leaves.] Excellent criticism! [. . .] Oh Brett, how I like simple people – not all simple people, some are simple pigs – but on the whole – how much more sympathetic than the Clive Bells of this world! Whatever else they have – they are alive. What I cannot bear is this half existence, this life in the head alone. Its deadly boring.11

The pleasures of life, the breezes stirring the leaves of flowers, are simple pleasures. To live, and to live fully, means to be aware of these aesthetic delights, and to appreciate them. There is, however, an awareness that the analytical predominates in Mansfield’s life. She embraces perceptual simplicity, while feeling herself too detached from it. The craving is for one ‘half’ of existence to pair off with the other half to create a fully realised whole, to live, and to record. ‘Je ne parle pas français’ plays with all of these ideas through the figure of Raoul Duquette, the cynical poseur artiste in the French café,12 who struggles with his idea of life and the need to impress and analyse. He has moments of pure emotion, which he attempts to reconcile with the impulse to record: There! It had come – the moment – the geste! And although I was so ready, it caught me, it tumbled me over [. . .] Then it passed, and the very second after I was thinking: ‘Good God! Am I capable of feeling as strongly as that? But I was absolutely unconscious! I hadn’t a phrase to meet it with! I was overcome! I was swept off my feet! I didn’t even try, in the dimmest way, to put it down!13

Raoul, the second rate writer, struggles to articulate the emotions generated by life, by inspiration. The ‘geste’ or ‘moment’ is so transient as to be impossible to translate or press down with a phrase. The moment of perception itself is, however, important: If you think what I’ve written is merely superficial and impudent and cheap you’re wrong. I’ll admit it does sound so, but then it is not all. If it were, how could I have experienced what I did when I read that stale little phrase written in green ink in the writing-pad? That proves there’s more in me and that I really am important, doesn’t it?14

The moment of vision is essential to the artist, so much so that the essentially insecure Raoul protests the validity of it even while admitting an inability to record. Mansfield’s irony is apparent here, but her character’s privileging of a direct apprehension of life, a direct ‘experience’, is shared by her.

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Mansfield and the Double Impression Mansfield continually felt the joy of life. Even when she was ill, her letters record sudden epiphanic moments of happiness, prompted by a scent, a ray of sunlight, a letter. This joy is also present in her fiction. Bertha Young experiences ‘moments’ in ‘Bliss’ when she wanted to run instead of walk, to take dancing steps on and off the pavement, to bowl a hoop, to throw something up in the air and catch it again, or to stand still and laugh at – nothing – at nothing, simply.15

Bertha’s bliss is prompted by her impressions of the day and the atmosphere of her home: the ‘blue dish, very lovely’, the ‘bright round shapes’ of fruit, the ‘exquisite toes’ of her ‘warm baby’.16 It is the ‘incredibly beautiful’17 objects that threaten to overwhelm Bertha, and they do this because impressions of beautiful objects, particularly flowers and fruit, evoke life. In a letter to Anne Drey, Mansfield makes this observation: ‘Whenever I examine things here – the lovely springing line of flowers & peach leaves par exemple, I realise what a marvellous painter you are – the beauty of your line – the life behind it’.18 The ‘life’ is emphasised, but it is only reached via the beautiful ‘line’. Mansfield’s sense of a visual aesthetic was highly developed, and she saw her task as a writer as being similar to that of the painter. Ida Baker notes this aspect in her, characterising the young Kathleen Beauchamp as ‘practising the art of word painting, looking and seeing to make her true and perfect picture’.19 Mansfield’s writing is full of exquisitely recreated objects, her attempts at the ‘beauty’ of the ‘line’. We are presented with Kezia’s cinematic close-up visions of the debris left in the old house in ‘Prelude’, ‘A bluebottle knocked against the ceiling; the carpet-tacks had little bits of red fluff sticking to them’,20 the vibrant lilies in ‘The Garden-Party’, ‘wide open, radiant, almost frighteningly alive on bright crimson stems’,21 the coveted ‘exquisite little amber lamp with a white globe’ of ‘The Doll’s House’.22 Mansfield herself called these images and epiphanies ‘glimpses’, what Sarah Sandley calls her ‘intense and intuitive apprehension’.23 This intense visuality has led to Mansfield’s writing being styled ‘impressionistic prose’, and thus a continuation of Henry James, Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford, with their prioritising of impressions.24 Henry James’s impressionism puts a heavy emphasis on the visual. In ‘The Art of Fiction’, he elaborates his sense of what visual fidelity means in the context of literary realism, producing ‘the illusion of life’: ‘[The author] competes with his brother the painter in his attempt to render the look of things, the look that conveys their meaning, to catch the colour, the relief, the expression, the surface, the substance of the human spectacle’.25 As with Mansfield’s collation of painting,

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Katherine Mansfield Studies drama and fiction as ‘Art’, James’s representation of life using words is repeatedly compared to the representation of life using pigment. The author, at his greatest, attempts to ‘catch the colour of life itself’;26 the painter and the author ‘may learn from each other’.27 This emphasis on the visual, on colour and surface, is rather more than literary pictorialism, however. The visual impressions of which James stresses the importance are only of value when they are ordered. Life is compared to a tapestry, with many coloured threads that must be woven together to create a picture. The best authors, James says, have ‘the power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece from the pattern [. . .] this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience’. The writer must give due attention to the ‘seen’, if only to make possible a wider knowledge: a prediction of what constitutes the ‘unseen’; an artistic arrangement of impressions. James goes on to specify what exactly he means by experience: ‘If experience consists of impressions, it may be said that impressions are experience’.28 Experience gives one the power to create a whole from a fragment. The whole is only art if it captures the colour and the sensation of life. The colour and sensation comes from the impressions themselves, duly ordered. ‘The Art of Fiction’ and its emphasis on both the word ‘impression’ and the painterly metaphors James relies on imply that he is consciously linking the art of his fiction to the Impressionism of painters such as Monet and Renoir, who used ‘informal brushwork’ to paint ‘light and atmosphere’ and create an ‘overall optical impression’.29 Jesse Matz, in Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics, marks the similarities between Impressionism in these two arts: The Impressionisms of painting and literature share an interest in subjective perception. This shift from object to subject, with its emphasis on point of view, seems to have entailed in both arts attention to evanescent effects, radical fidelity to perceptual experience, and a consequent inattention to what had been art’s framing concerns. [. . .] Emphasis on the experience of the senses enabled the artist to make art more perfectly reflect lived experience.

However, Matz sees literary impressionism as simultaneously a move away from simple visual representation, or ‘sensation’, to an awareness of the ‘combination of (or middle ground between) sense and thought’.30 Painterly Impressionism was firmly grounded in the senses, and the simple representation of atmosphere. Indeed, Henry James disliked Impressionist painting, calling the artists in a review

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Mansfield and the Double Impression ‘partisans of unadorned reality and absolute foes to arrangement, embellishment, selection’ giving merely ‘a vivid impression of how a thing happens to look, at a particular moment’.31 The vision alone, James suggests, is not enough. Mansfield takes a similar line. Discussing painting with Brett, she asserts: Renoir – at the last – bores me. His feeling for flesh is a kind of super butchers feeling about a lovely cut of lamb. I am always fascinated by lovely bosoms but not without the heads & hands as well – and I want in fact the feeling that all this beauty is in the deepest sense attached to Life. Real Life! In fact I must confess it is the spirit which fascinates me in flesh. That does for me as far as modern painters are concerned, I suppose. But I feel bored to my last groan by all these pattern mongers.32

Although ‘lovely bosoms’ are fascinating, something more must be captured: the head, the ‘spirit’, the mind and intellect. Literary impressionism, as Matz defines it, is not simply the perceptual, sensory impression, it is ‘a metaphor for perception’.33 Within this metaphor the impression is double. It is both ‘what brushes by the mind and the physical impress it leaves there’. It is the moment, and the reflection on the moment. For Virginia Woolf, it unites ‘experience and essence’, or ‘living and being’.34 In Jamesian terms, the doubleness is expressed as experience and impression. Mansfield’s impression is a dichotomy of life and art, or glimpses and recording. The impression as it ‘brushes by the mind’ and the experience implied by ‘the physical impress it leaves there’ are inextricably linked. As James notes, ‘impressions are experience’. Julia Van Gunsteren theorises this doubleness in Mansfield’s work as ‘thought and feeling’, where the perceptual impression is the feeling and the thought is the experience. She states that: ‘Mansfield’s aim was to present an immediate, pure recreation of the actual sensation of living, as opposed to an orderly analysis or a generalisation of experience’.35 The ‘pure recreation’ of sensation is a painterly Impressionism, akin to Renoir’s ‘lovely bosoms’. This kind of Impressionism of sensation in the works of contemporary writers was exactly what Mansfield distrusted. In her review of Dorothy Richardson’s Interim, she objects to the ‘bits, fragments, flashing glimpses, half scenes and whole scenes’, and pictures Richardson as ‘holding out her mind, as it were’, with: Life hurling objects into it as fast as she can throw. And at the appointed time Miss Richardson dives into its recesses and reproduces a certain number of these treasures, - a pair of button boots, a night in Spring, some cycling knickers, some large, round biscuits.36

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Katherine Mansfield Studies Mansfield perceives Richardson’s fictions as just an incantation of these objects gathered, with no selection, and no analysis. She applies her own glimpses/recording dichotomy to Richardson’s Pilgrimage, and finds it unbalanced. In ‘Dragonflies’, another review of Richardson’s work, she emphasises her earlier judgement: Darting through life, quivering, hovering, exulting in the familiarity and the strangeness of all that comes within her tiny circle, she leaves us feeling [. . .] that everything being of equal importance to her, it is impossible that everything should not be of equal unimportance.37

Mansfield calls for greater selection. Richardson does select her material, of course: Pilgrimage would be impossible to lift if she didn’t. However, Mansfield seems to have felt that the selection was not thorough, and that there had been no pattern set as a criterion for the selection. Antony Alpers writes of her time at the Athenaeum that ‘One does not easily discover an aesthetic in Katherine’s reviews [. . .] Always elusive on the subject, she avoided making any overt statement on the short-story form’.38 She was, however, very clear about what she did not like, even while seeming to imitate the hated forms. Mansfield’s rejection of Richardson’s elevation of the trivial seems ironic when viewed in the light of Ottoline Morrell’s attitude to ‘Prelude’. Morrell saw Mansfield’s glimpses in much the same light as Mansfield viewed Richardson’s, writing: ‘I hate such endless observation of trivialities . . . . . Why make such a damned fuss about it’.39 However, Mansfield’s ‘trivialities’ were to her important symbols of life and of vibrancy. Her early letters emphasise this time and time again. To Garnet Trowell she writes in 1908: ‘I like always to have a great grip of Life, so that I intensify the so-called small things – so that truly everything is significant’.40 This statement could almost invite the criticism that (to paraphrase the Pilgrimage review), if everything is significant then nothing is significant. Mansfield wrote in a similar vein to S. S. Koteliansky in 1915: ‘Do you, too feel an infinite delight and value in detail – not for the sake of detail but for the life in the life of it’.41 So long as an object communicates ‘life’ then it is important. Brett, as a visual artist, was assumed to understand this importance: It seems to me so extraordinarily right that you should be painting Still Lives just now. What can one do, faced with the wonderful tumble of round bright fruits, but gather them and play with them – and become them, as it were. When I pass the apple stalls I cannot help stopping and staring until I feel that I, myself, am changing into an apple.42

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Mansfield and the Double Impression This supreme ‘imaginative sympathy’, J. Lawrence Mitchell calls a ‘fundamental feature of Mansfield’s creative sensibility’.43 The apples are life, of the still variety, and as such are real, vivid and important to Mansfield. She continues: But that is why I believe in technique, too (you asked me if I did.) I do, just because I don’t see how art is going to make that divine spring into the bounding outlines of things if it hasn’t passed through the process of trying to become these things before recreating them.44

Mansfield is convinced of the impossibility of realistic recreation of life (even still life) without an imaginative leap: an effort to realise the phenomenological essence of the object being portrayed. This intense imaginative task is reflected in Mansfield’s characters. Bertha Young gazes at the pear tree in ‘Bliss’ with such intensity that she does become it. Her clothes reflect the tree’s colours: ‘a white dress, a string of jade beads, green shoes and stockings’. Although the colour scheme ‘wasn’t intentional’, her dress becomes ‘petals’ and she feels the ‘lovely pear tree with its wide open blossoms as a symbol of her own life’. Mansfield is playing with the idea of the pear tree as a symbol here. Bertha’s dressing up in the colours of the tree is not left to gently hint at a ‘becoming’ but rather denied: ‘She had thought of this scheme hours before’.45 Instead, it is Bertha and not the narrator who takes the pear tree as a symbol of sexual awakening, and of joy yet to come. The ‘bliss’ Bertha feels is revealed to be false. Similarly, in ‘At the Bay’, Linda examines, wonders at, and ultimately becomes the manuka tree: If only one had time to look at these flowers long enough, time to get over the novelty and strangeness, time to know them! But as soon as one paused to part the petals, to discover the underside of the leaf, along came Life and one was swept away. And, lying in her cane chair, Linda felt so light; she felt like a leaf. Along came Life like a wind and she was seized and shaken; she had to go.46

Through looking long at the transient ‘wasted’ flowers, tracing the lines of ‘each pale yellow petal’ and ‘tiny tongue in the centre’,47 Linda’s imaginative sympathy lets her become one with the manuka tree. The whole cycle of nature, with flowers blossoming and falling, not only reminds Linda of her own mortality, but allows her to feel it as if she were a leaf being ripped from the tree itself. The perception of the detail of the flower allows for the flower to be realised. Mansfield finds a way to bridge the gap between the duality of the impression: first to perceive, then to become, and then to transcribe.

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Katherine Mansfield Studies Mansfield’s battling two selves – the one who lives, and the one who writes – reflect the duality of the impression as defined by Matz. The simple perceiving self, who loves life and embraces the aesthetics of nature pushes against the detached intellectual ‘half’ of the mind. Literary impressionists, according to Matz’s definition, often stage their encounters with the doubleness of the impression by creating opposing characters to personify each part of the impression. Matz cites Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ as an example of this, as well as Ford’s ‘peasant cabman’ in ‘On Impressionism’, and James’s ‘woman of genius’ in ‘The Art of Fiction’.48 Matz posits that: In order to imagine sensations and ideas fully working together, the Impressionists seem also to need to imagine collaboration of the social beings to whom sensations and ideas correspond. Uncertainty about the impression’s perceptual status derives in large part from the conviction that certain people naturally correspond to certain faculties – specifically that women and lower-class people have special access to contingent, sensuous, concrete existence.49

Mansfield’s joy at the barber’s response to Brett’s still life is typical of this division. Perceptual faculties are seen as more predominant in ‘simple’ people, and not the trained critics and intellectuals (‘the Clive Bells of this world’). In her fiction, Mansfield often creates characters who typify one side of the impression and lets their interaction unify the perceptual and the intellectual. ‘Prelude’ has many such uneasy collaborations. Mansfield does not however merely restrict herself to essentialist differences between men and women, the lower classes and the middle classes. In Mansfield, age determines a character’s perceptual/analytical level. Kezia, Mansfield’s child double, still retains the simplicity that allows pure perception without the intrusion of analysis. The aloe is experienced by three generations of the same family very differently. The ‘simple’ Kezia sees it as: One huge plant with thick, grey-green, thorny leaves, and out of the middle there sprang up a tall stout stem. Some of the leaves of the plant were so old that they curled up no longer; they turned back, they were split and broken; some of them lay flat and withered on the ground. Whatever could it be? She had never seen anything like it before. She stood and stared.50

The astonished Kezia notes the size, the colour and the oddity of effect that age produces. Her mother Linda, coming down the path,

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Mansfield and the Double Impression preoccupied with thoughts of children, fertility and mortality, sees the aloe differently: Linda looked up at the fat swelling plant with its cruel leaves and fleshy stem. High above them, as though becalmed in the air, and yet holding so fast to the earth it grew from, it might have had claws instead of roots. The curling leaves seemed to be hiding something; the blind stem cut into the air as if no wind could ever shake it.51

The aloe becomes threatening and mysterious. Linda’s perceptions of the plant cannot be purely visual: her reading of the plant is an emotive one. The aloe is not only ‘huge’ and ‘thick’ as Kezia sees it, but ‘fat’ ‘swelling’ and ‘fleshy’ like a pregnant woman. The ‘blind stem’ is intensely phallic, and threateningly so, ‘cutting’ the air. The whole becomes a symbol of Linda’s own maternal insecurities. Mrs Fairfield, Linda’s own mother, has a prosaic vision of the plant: ‘ “I have been looking at the aloe,’’ said Mrs Fairfield. “I believe it is going to flower this year. Look at the top there. Are those buds, or is it only an effect of light?’’ ’52 Mrs Fairfield has dispensed with romance, and with symbol. She is concerned with the fruit trees, and whether it would be possible to make ‘much jam’ this year.53 She is methodical, annoying Beryl: ‘Mother’s deliberate way of doing things was simply maddening. It was old age she supposed, loftily’.54 The ‘old age’ of Mrs Fairfield means that she does not perceive the aloe as a purely visual object, nor does she experience the leap of imaginative sympathy which would allow her to recreate the aloe as a symbol. She instead analyses its fertility patterns and records its actions with her words. In ‘The Aloe’, an earlier version of the story, Mrs Fairfield’s speech is longer. She exclaims: ‘ “I believe it is going to flower – this year. Wouldn’t that be wonderfully lucky! Look at the top there! All those buds – or is it only an effect of light’’ ’.55 Mrs Fairfield’s attitude here is almost rhapsodic. The exclamation marks and reference to wonder imply a greater engagement with the plant and with joy. ‘All those buds’ similarly indicates a detailed gaze at the top of the plant, whereas in ‘Prelude’ the dryer ‘Are those buds?’ suggests lack of interest. Linda, although based loosely on Mansfield’s own mother, is roughly the same age in ‘Prelude’ as Mansfield was when she wrote it. She is caught halfway between childhood and old age, rebelling against her married life, her enforced respectability and the care of the children she has given birth to. She is no longer able to perceive visually without interpretative gloss, as Kezia does, and does not have the ‘maddening’ deliberation of Mrs Fairfield. Her uneasy halfway world is a threatening one, full of symbol and meaning.

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Katherine Mansfield Studies Mansfield is unable to reconcile the perceptual and the interpretative except through symbol. In this way she develops literary impressionism for her own modernist purposes. The leap from perception to the ‘impress’ having been achieved by an imaginative leap of sympathy, the objects thus set down must have some place in the pattern of the story. They must not stand alone, as she implies Richardson’s do: they must have meaning. They must stand for something else. The literary impression develops into Symbolism, what Clare Hanson and Andrew Gurr call ‘the imaginative discovery and recreation of the ideal hidden within the real’.56 Hanson and Gurr go on to relate this Symbolism to Pater’s ‘the finer sort of memory’, which can best discover the ideal essence of experience, which is obscured in the confusion of immediate impressions and experience’.57 The duality of the impression is unintentionally evoked in this description of Mansfield’s symbolism. The Jamesian ‘experience’ is paired with ‘immediate impressions’, and the ‘ideal essence’ is reached through symbol. The technique Mansfield tells Brett she ‘believes’ in is not only selection, ‘the beauty of your line’, the ‘bounding outlines’ as symbol. The desire to shape, to delineate was strong. Mansfield believed that each word in a story must contribute to the effect, saying to Murry of one of her stories for the Blue Review that: you can’t cut it without making an ugly mess somewhere. Im a powerful stickler for form in this style of work. I hate the sort of licence that English people give themselves – to spread over and flop and roll about. I feel as fastidious as though I wrote with acid.58

Mansfield’s passion for recording the aesthetic is not a simple self-indulgent ‘flopping around’. Despite what Van Gunsteren calls Mansfield’s reluctance ‘to analyse experience intellectually’, the intellectual and the analytical are necessary to her art.59 The purity of sensation and the uncomplicated image is not allowed to predominate: it must be controlled, must be turned into something more. The ‘essence’, as Hanson and Gurr would have it, must be extracted. Her imaginative leaps into the essence of objects, and her characters’ symbolic identifications, are what allows her to create the unity of impression. Notes 1. Ida Baker, Katherine Mansfield: The Memories of LM (London: Michael Joseph, 1971), p. 233. 2. Mansfield to Vera Beauchamp [19 June, 1908], in Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott, eds, The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon

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Mansfield and the Double Impression

3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

Press, 1984–2008), Vol. 1, p. 50. Hereafter referred to as Letters, followed by volume and page number. Mansfield to Ida Baker [29 August 1921], Letters 4, p. 272. Mansfield’s idiosyncratic use of punctuation and her misspelled words have been preserved in my quotations from the letters. Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (London: Virago Press, 1985), p. 218. Wilson, p. 246. Mansfield to Garnet Trowell [2 September 1908], Letters 1, p. 84. Claire Tomalin, Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life (London: Penguin Books, 1988), p. 60. Mansfield to J. M. Murry [12 December 1920], Letters 4, p. 149. Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry, ‘The Meaning of Rhythm’ in Rhythm 2: 1, pp. 18–20, p. 19. Mansfield and Murry, pp. 18–19. Mansfield to Dorothy Brett [26 February 1922], Letters 5, pp. 247–48. Raoul Duquette poses himself as an artist much as Mansfield does in her letter to Garnet Trowell. He twice stands in front of a mirror telling himself what he aims to achieve as a writer, and reciting his successes: ‘It was impossible not to believe this of the person who surveyed himself finally, from top to toe, drawing on his soft grey gloves. He was looking the part; he was the part’. In Angela Smith, ed., Katherine Mansfield, Selected Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 154. One senses Mansfield’s rueful acknowledgement of her own mirror-gazing creation of self-as-artist. Smith, p. 145. Smith, p. 149. Smith, p. 174. Smith, pp. 175–6. Smith, p. 175. Mansfield to Anne Drey [26 December 1920], Letters 4, p. 152. Baker, p. 23. Smith, p. 82. Smith, p. 339 Smith, p. 351. Sarah Sandley, ‘Katherine Mansfield’s “Glimpses’’ ’ in Katherine Mansfield: In from the Margin, ed. by Roger Robinson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994), pp. 70–89, p. 74. Jenny McDonnell, “‘Wanted, a New Word’’: Katherine Mansfield and the Athenaeum’ in Modernism/Modernity, 16: 4, Nov. 2009, pp. 727–42, p. 734. Henry James, ‘The Art of Fiction’, in Partial Portraits (London: Macmillan, 1922), pp. 375–408, p. 390. James, p. 408. James, p. 378. James, p. 389. Bernard Denvir, ed., The Impressionists at First Hand (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991), p. 48. Jesse Matz, Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 49–50. Henry James, ‘Parisian Festivity’ in Denvir, pp. 102–3, p. 102. This piece was first published in The New York Tribune, 13 May 1876.

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Katherine Mansfield Studies 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59.

Mansfield to Dorothy Brett [29 August 1921], Letters 4, p. 270. Matz, p. 18. Matz, p. 32. Julia van Gunsteren, Katherine Mansfield and Literary Impressionism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990), p. 68. Katherine Mansfield, ‘Three Women Novelists’, Athenaeum 4640 (4 April 1919), pp. 140–1, p. 141. Katherine Mansfield, ‘Dragonflies’, Athenaeum 4680 (9 January 1920), p. 48, p. 48. Antony Alpers, The Life of Katherine Mansfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 295. Vincent O’Sullivan, ed., Katherine Mansfield: Selected Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 299. Mansfield to Garnet Trowell [8 November 1908], Letters 1, p. 88. Mansfield to S. S. Koteliansky [17 May 1915], Letters 1, p. 192. Mansfield to Dorothy Brett [11 October 1917], Letters 1, p. 330. J. Lawrence Mitchell, ‘Katherine Mansfield and the Aesthetic Object’, Journal of New Zealand Literature, 2004, 22, pp. 31–54, p. 32. Mansfield to Dorothy Brett [11 October 1917], Letters 1, p. 330. Smith, p. 178. Smith, pp. 294–5. Smith, p. 294. Matz, p. 33. Matz, p. 34. Smith, p. 98. Smith, p. 98. Smith, p. 114. Smith, p. 116. Smith, p. 95. Katherine Mansfield, The Aloe, with Prelude, ed. by Vincent O’Sullivan (Wellington: Port Nicholson Press, 1982), p. 139. Clare Hanson and Andrew Gurr, Katherine Mansfield (London: Macmillan Press, 1981), p. 16. Hanson and Gurr, pp. 16–17. The reference is to Walter Pater, ‘The Child in the House’, Miscellaneous Studies, Macmillan Library Edition of the Works of Walter Pater (1910), p. 172. Max Saunders, in the introduction to his discussion of literary Impressionism, interprets ‘The Child in the House’ as an example of ambiguity and duality of experience: ‘Paterian memories, like impressions, are alienated from the self that is remembering or receiving them’. Pater’s memories are the primary perceptual half of the impression, and the self ‘remembering’ is the impress, in this reading. Max Saunders, Self-Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 55. Mansfield to J. M. Murry [19 May 1913], Letters 1, p. 124. Van Gunsteren, p. 67.

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CREATIVE WRITING

The ex-wife Ali Smith At first I thought it was just that you really liked books, just that you were someone who really loved your work. I thought it was just more evidence of your passionate and sensitive nature. At first I was quite charmed by it. It was charming. She was charming. But here are three instances of what it was like for me. 1: I’d be deep asleep, in the place where all the healing happens, the place all the serious newspapers talk about in their health pages as crucial because that’s where the things that fray or need patched in our daily lives get physically and mentally attended to and if we don’t attend to them something irreparable will happen. Then something would wake me. It’d be you, suddenly sitting straight up in the bed so all the covers would be off both of us, then it’d be you not there, I mean I’d come to myself and the covers would be off me, I’d open my eyes into a blur of dark, put my hand out and feel the place going cold where you should be. Then a light would come on somewhere in the house. Then a small noise would be happening. I’d get up. I’d blur my way downstairs, one hand on the wall. I’d blur into the front room, or the kitchen, or the study. You’d be sitting at the table. There’d be a toohigh pile of books on it. Even in the blur I’d be able to see that that pile was going to topple any moment. You’d be sitting beyond it, looking through a book. Your eyes would be distant, as if closed and open at the same time. I’d stand there for a bit. You’d not look up. What’s going on? I’d say. It’d come out sounding blurry. Nothing, you’d say, I just need to know whether Wing was actually the original kitten of Charlie Chaplin. To know what? I’d say. In a letter to Woolf somewhere, you’d say. There’s a kind of family tree, and I know Athenaeum is one of the kittens that Charlie Chaplin gave birth to. But there’s another one and I’m pretty sure it’s not Wing or at least not called Wing in this particular reference and I need to know what its name is and whether it’s another Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 3 (2011): 95–106 DOI: 10.3366/kms.2011.0009 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

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Katherine Mansfield Studies name for Wing, or whether Wing was actually another cat altogether or maybe even another name for Charlie Chaplin. You’re looking up her cats now? I’d say. Now? What the fuck time is it? I need to know, you’d say. Why exactly do you need to know this? I’d say. Because I realised I don’t know it, you’d say. In what context could it possibly be useful? I’d say. I’ll just be another minute, you’d say. I know pretty much where to look, it’ll just take a minute. You’d pull another book out of the pile and catch the pile, shunt it back together with your elbow, wait till it was definitely not going to fall, and open the book at the index at the back. I’d go up to bed. I’d lie there unable to sleep. When you’d come up again two and a half hours later I’d be pretending not to be awake. You’d sigh back into bed and lie down next to me. Immediately you’d be asleep. But for me the window blind would be edged with something far too bright. What would that noise be now? Birds. 2: We’d be talking about something really important, well, important to me at least. We’d be talking, for instance, about what happened to me at work, how everybody’s running really scared about the cuts. I’d tell you what had happened in the office that day. And you’d say, god, you know that’s exactly like in psychology. And I’d say, what in psychology, like manic depression or passive aggression? And you’d say, no, not psychology, I don’t mean psychology, I mean pictures, it’s exactly like in pictures, and I’d say, pictures of what? and you’d say, well, what happens is, this woman, she’s a bit past it though she used to be a good singer, she got a medal for it, but now she’s more middle-aged and she’s trying to get a job as an extra in films so she can pay her rent, and the first thing Mansfield does is, like, the story opens and this woman is lying in bed in a rented room and she’s got no rent. Oh, right, Mansfield, I’d say. Yeah, you’d say, and she wakes up and she’s cold and she thinks it’s maybe because she hasn’t eaten properly, so then it’s like a pageant of images crosses the ceiling in front of her, pictures of hot dinners sort of marching over the ceiling, and then she thinks she’d like some breakfast and then on the ceiling it’s a pageant of images of big breakfasts, it’s brilliant really when you consider what it’s doing, it’s a story about the fantasy of nourishment and what happens when that fantasy hits, like, reality, she even uses the word nourishing at one point I think. It’s a fantastic critique of cinema actually. Yeah, I’d say, but I’m struggling to make the link between you telling me the plot of a short story and Johnston email-bullying me at work. Are you saying I’m a bit past it? No, you’d say, listen, if you read it you’d see, it’s obvious, I’ll go and get it for you. No, don’t, I’d say. It’s okay, really. I can sort it out for myself. I don’t need to talk about it to anybody. But you’d be on your way to the shelf, and it’s

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The ex-wife got this really lovely little throwaway phrase, you’d be saying, I can’t remember it exactly but it kind of goes, something fell, sepulchral, she’s so brilliant, that so-simple word fell with the word sepulchral after it, wait, it’s here somewhere, I’ll look it up. Look up the word sepulchral for me while you’re at it, would you? I’d say. You know what sepulchral means, you’d say. Yeah, obviously, I’d say, everyone knows what sepulchral means. Well, everyone will one day, you’d say. Ha ha, yes, I’d say. Too true. And I’d have to tell myself to remember to look up what it meant later. I myself am not very interested in books, or words. When we were first together you used to tell me it was a relief, to be with me, because I wasn’t. 3: There was the day I came home from work and I found you sitting holding a glossy book, and the cardboard envelope from Amazon still on the floor. The book was open on your knee, one page black, one page white. On the black page there was a picture of a twined thick piece of hair. On the white page there was another picture of a coiled palmful of hair, darker, and a black and white picture of a woman, a girl. You were crying, and it was about the most ridiculous thing I could think of, in the real world with all its awful things to really cry about. The thing is, I never imagined her in colour before, you said. The book you were holding was called Traces of a Writer. It was full of pictures of what was left of your favourite writer after she died, pictures of a brooch, a little knife, bits of fabric, a little pair of scissors, a chess set, things like that. This was the day I first called her your ex-wife. I said, it’s like living with an extra person in our relationship. It’s like there’s always someone else. I meant it as a joke. But you were off onto the next page. You said, look, look, what’s this little leather thing? It’s called the fairy purse. Look. It’s a purse, for a sovereign. She gave it to her friend when they were schoolgirls, her friend that stayed with her all through her life, you know. It’s a bit weird, though, looking at this private stuff, isn’t it? I said. You’d stopped crying. It’s a bit necro, no? I said. You wiped at the sides of your eyes. It says here there’s a message inside it, a note, you said. It says here it’s never been taken out because it’s too fragile, but that it says on it, ‘Katie and Ida’s fairy purse’ How do they know it says that, if they haven’t ever taken it out? I said. And what if your ex-wife doesn’t want people looking at her private stuff? I don’t know that I’d want the general public always to be reading my letters or looking at my private writings, even if they did have research grant money to do it and they could give looking at old bits of rubbish left behind by a dead person a grandiose name like The Memory Meme and Materiology in Katherine Mansfield’s Metaphorical Landscape. Stop pretending you’re stupid, you said, why

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Katherine Mansfield Studies do you always pretend you’re stupid, why do you always pretend to be less than you are, and why do you always use my passion for what I’m working on against me to duck responsibility in our relationship? Ha! I said, I do know some stuff, actually. I can read Wikipedia as well as the next person, actually, and if she’s your ex-wife, then which does that make you, the vain incompetent who was always letting her down and who sold everything after she was dead and made a fortune out of it, or that poor woman she kept calling the Mountain. Because whichever one of those you are, that makes me the other, and I’m not playing that kind of weirdo role-play thank you very much. She was cruel, your ex-wife. She was a piece of work, all right. It was shortly after that that you threw the glossy book at the shelf and four of the little cups we’d bought in Mexico broke. Then I went over to the shelf, took the fifth cup, held it up above the fireplace and dropped it, and we both watched it break. It wasn’t long after that particular day that you and I split up. Not long after that, I remembered, and looked up the meaning. Something fell. Sepulchral. * I was walking through the park, through the bit where the fountains and the bushes are all laid out neatly. It was dusk and I was coming home from a meeting. It had been quite a tough meeting. I had had to lay off three people, most of a whole team, and we’d been told that Google Translate was basically going to be used to replace our report copywriting in all the sub-Saharan countries. I was a bit fed up. On top of this, I’d gone into the park to get a bit of space from the traffic and the people on the pavements, but I was still feeling crowded even here in the park, as if someone was walking a little too close to me. Someone was walking a little too close to me. There was a definite feeling of boundary-trespass in it. Then this voice, close to my ear, said: To think one can speak with someone who really knew Tchekhov. I stepped to the side, turned like you do when you want to signal to people to back off. I’ve no change, I said, I’ve no money at all to spare and there’s no point in asking me. Indecent, she said and shook her head. We must never speak of ourselves to anybody: they come crashing in like cows into a garden. Look, I said – – How did Dostoievsky know, she interrupted me, about that extraordinary vindictiveness, that relish for bitter laughter that comes over women in pain?

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The ex-wife What? I said because she had stopped me in my tracks, was standing right in front of me now blocking my way, and because it was the first time I had realised quite how in pain I was. I was actually in physical pain, walking through the park, without you. It was a dead person stopping me on my path, young and wiry and alarmingly lively, alarmingly bright at the eyes. Supposing, she said, ones bones were not bone but liquid light. Back off, I said. I mean it. I don’t know who you are, but I know who you are. She laughed. She turned on her heel in a little dance, like I was the dead person, compared to her. I shall be obliged, she said, if the contents of this book are regarded as my private property. Then she threw me a little look. Yes! I said. Yes exactly! Because that’s what I was always saying! I am thinking over my philosophy, she said. The defeat of the personal. And let us be honest. How much do we know of Tchekhov from his letters. Was that all? Of course not. Don’t you suppose he had a whole longing life of which there is hardly a word? That’s what I told her, over and over! I said. This is the moment which, after all, we live for, she said, the moment of direct feeling when we are most ourselves and least personal. You’ve no idea, I said. I mean, one night it was even the genealogy of your cats, for god sake. She flung her arms into the air and shouted at the sky. Robert Louis Stevenson is a literary vagrant! she shouted. Then she burst out laughing. I joined in. Whatever it was she was laughing about, it was contagious. Fiction, she said when she’d stopped laughing, is impossible but enables us to reach what is relatively truth. Okay, I said, yeah, I think that’s fair, I mean, if people are reading your stories and enjoying or understanding and analysing them as stories and everything. That’s different. But people who were born, like, decades after you died, writing about pictures of your scissors. I sat down on a bench. She sat down next to me with a thump and huffed a breath out loud like a teenage girl. She turned towards me nodding, confidential, like we were such friends: What the writer does is not so much to solve the question, but to put the question. There must be the question put. That seems to me a very nice dividing line between the true and the false writer. Then she stood up on the bench. She laughed, then got her balance. She spoke generally, to the trees in the park.

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Katherine Mansfield Studies As I see it, she said, the whole stream of English literature is trickling out in little innumerable marsh trickles. There is no gathering together, no fire, no impetus, absolutely no passion! She waved her arm at the bushes behind us, and her other arm at the pond in front of us. This new bracken is like HG Wells dream flowers, like strings of Beads, she said. The sky in the water is like white swans in a blue mirror. She was right. The sky in the water did look like she said. The bloom on the bracken behind us was like beads, did look strange, like made up in a dream. But while I was looking at this, off she went. When I looked back there was nobody else on the bench and though the park was full of people it was like there was nobody left in it either. * I don’t know who you are but I know who you are. The way it was impossible haunted me. That night I sat down in front of my computer and wrote you an email. It was the third email I’d sent you since we broke up. The first one had been fifteen pages long when I printed it out; it was mostly mundane lists of things: kitchenware, dvds, things you’d done that’d made me furious. The second one said: Please also return the three Kate Rusby cds, the hat that belonged to my father, the picture frame which I bought and paid the whole amount for in Habitat and have a receipt for, the tv digibox, the food processor which I bought and paid the whole amount for in Dixons and have the receipt for, and the kitchen bin which I still can’t believe you took. I will record any other items I find missing as I find them missing. You had sent me none, not even one saying you wanted those precious books back. This time I typed in your address (I had to do it by hand and from memory because I’d deleted you off my system) and I wrote, in the subject box not about the Kate Rusby cds etc please read. Then in the body of the email I wrote: Please write back telling me one single thing you think I should know about the life of the writer K Mansfield. I pressed send, then I went to bed. I saw the light come round the edge of the windowblind. I heard the waking of the birds. I logged on before I left for work, and under the subject heading one thing you had sent me this:

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The ex-wife Mansfield was close good friends with the writer DH Lawrence, but it was a very rocky friendship, it blew hot and cold, and there were times in their lives when neither of them could stand the other. Once, when they’d had one of their most serious fallings-out and Mansfield was full of fury at him, she was sitting in a tea-room with some friends and they overheard two or three people talking about one of Lawrence’s books, a collection of poems called Amores. One of them was holding it up and they were all talking about it, being most disparaging about it. She herself had just been being most disparaging about Lawrence to her friends, before they went to tea. But seeing these other people be it, she leaned over and asked politely, sweetly, might she just have a look at that book they were talking about for a moment. Then she stood up and simply left the tearoom, taking the book with her. The people sat there waiting for her to come back. She didn’t come back. I read this three times before I left for work. At work I read it too many times to count. I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I liked it. I sat in my mid morning break and thought about how like you it was to use the words most disparaging. Most disparaging. Most disparaging. Blew hot and cold. I sat in my lunch break. I loved the last sentence, but all the same it worried me. She didn’t come back. * Wasn’t it Santayana who said: every artist holds a lunatic in leash? I was back in the park with what was left of the life of your favourite writer, whose five volumes of letters and whose big thick journal I had removed from the book box by the front door when you were busy loading the van, and the space left by which I had filled with my Stieg Larssen Girl with the Dragon Tattoo etc books, which I knew you hated, and which I had disguised by placing all those volumes of that book Pilgrimage on top of. I went most evenings after work now to the park, before I got the bus home. I went at lunchtimes too. James makes me ashamed for real artists. He’s a pompazoon. Who was James? I didn’t care. I never knew what she was talking about, but I loved it. She was so much herself, and she was different every time, could change her air like the horse can change colour in The Wizard Of Oz. It crossed my mind to ask her, did she know what The Wizard of Oz was. Maybe the book. She’d definitely died before the film. Strange to think she never knew Judy Garland or the tune of Somewhere Over the Rainbow, or that song about the munchkins. I wondered if anybody in your work circles had ever written a paper about that. What would it be called? UltraModern Future-Memory: A Study Of Things That Happened After My

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Katherine Mansfield Studies Ex-Wife’s Ex-Wife Died And How They Feature In The Work Of My Ex-Wife’s Ex-Wife. What makes Lawrence a real writer is his passion. Without passion one writes in the air or on the sands of the seashore. Oh, I know about you and Lawrence, I said, because a friend of mine told me a story about that. But she was off like a butterfly on to the next flowerhead. Nathaniel Hawthorne – he is with Tolstoi the only novelist of the soul. He is concerned with what is abnormal. His people are dreams, sometimes faintly conscious that they dream. Right, I said. I get that. Right. The intensity of an action is its truth. Is a thing the expression of an individuality? No, I said. Well, maybe sometimes it is. Sometimes yes and sometimes no. Maupassant – his abundant vitality. Great artists are those who can make men see their particular illusion. I like that, I said, looking her right in the eyes. She did have extraordinarily clear and piercing eyes. I want to remember, she said, how the light fades from a room – and one fades with it. And one what? I said. Fades, did you say? The sky is grey today – it’s like living inside a pearl, she said. She said such beautiful things that often they left me with nothing to say. She leaned forward on the table, shook her head, held her face in her hands. I have been feeling lately a horrible sense of indifference, she said. Indifferent? I said. You? No way. A very bad feeling, she said. Neither hot nor cold; lukewarm. Doesn’t sound at all like you, I said. Nearly all people swing in with the tide, she said, and out with the tide again like heavy seaweed. And they seem to take a kind of pride in denying Life. Yes, I said. Much better to be hot or cold, like you and your friend, what’s his name. The delivery man. DHL. Mentioning him to her was usually a good way to get her up and talking and excited. But she placed her hands on the edge of the table in fists that were little and bony. I woke up early this morning, she said, and when I opened the shutters the full round sun was just risen. I began to repeat that verse of Shakespeare’s; lo here the gentle lark weary of rest, and I bounded back into bed. The bound made me cough. I spat – it tasted strange – it was bright red blood. I felt myself go pale. You what? I said. Since then I’ve gone on spitting each time I cough a little more, she said. No, I said.

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The ex-wife Perhaps it’s going to gallop – who knows – she said, and I shan’t have my work written. That’s what matters . . . unbearable . . . ‘scraps’, ‘bits’ . . . nothing real finished. I saw then how ill she looked, and how thin, and how far too young. I had to look away in case she saw, by looking at me, what I was seeing. I began reading the songs in Twelfth Night in bed this morning early, she said. Right, Twelfth Night, right, yes, I said. Mark it, Cesario, it is old and plain. The spinsters and the knitters in the sun. And the free maids that weave their thread with bones. Do use to chant it – it is silly sooth. And dallies with the innocence of love. Like the old age, she said. She saw how close to tears I was. Come away, come away death, etc, she said. Then she gave me a sly look from under her fringe. I could make the girls cry when I read Dickens in the sewing class, she said. * And here it fell. Sepulchral. That’s the actual real line from the story you were telling me about once. I’ve read the story now. I’ve read all her stories, from the one at the start of the book where the girl is in the emptied house and the little birds flick from branch to branch, to the one at the end of her life about the poor bird in a cage, and that one about the fly that gets all inked. Oh, the times when she had walked upside down on the ceiling, up, up glittering panes floated on a lake of light, flashed through a shining beam! I sat down in front of my computer in what was once our house and I typed the word WING into the subject heading. Then I wrote this. Hello. I wanted to tell you that I found out a thing that might be of use to you, well a couple of things, well three things altogether. 1: I was speaking to a lady from New Zealand at work because of our New Zealand contract and I told her I was reading your ex-wife and she told me an amazing story, and then she sent me a newspaper clipping, and this is what it says in short, that your ex-wife maybe was actually given birth to in a hot air balloon. Yes I know it sounds unlikely and that I’m lying but I have the newspaper to prove it and I knew it would interest you. It says in it that her mother was pregnant with her and on the day your ex-wife was born she had actually booked to

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Katherine Mansfield Studies go up above Wellington in a balloon with a man called Mr Montgolf who was charging five shillings a shot. Anyway on 15 October 1888 a newspaper called The Dominion reported that the flight the day before took ‘much longer than expected because of the medical condition of one of its female occupants . . . fortunately this young woman had recovered by the time the balloon landed’. Which means, the paper implies, that your ex-wife might have been born with both feet off the ground. 2: You know the story you told me about, the one with the word sepulchral in it? The one about the past-it lady who goes to act as an extra in films. Can you remember, I wonder, that there is a moment when she is filling in a form to see if she is the right sort of extra and it says ‘Can you aviate – high-dive – drive a car – buck-jump-shoot?’ And you know how your ex-wife also did quite a lot of extra-work in films in the war years and once even caught a quite bad cold from doing a long shoot in evening dress in January? Well, I went looking for whether there was any chance of seeing her on any of these films, so far I have been unsuccessful. But I have discovered, by chance, that in the mid 1920s loads of those films, hundreds and hundreds made by the British film industry in the earlier years were melted down and used to make the resin that was painted on the wings of aeroplanes to make them weather resistant. So now when you think of your ex-wife it is possible to think of those pictures of her moving as maybe really on the wing. Also I remember that one of the things you were working on was a book by her friend and rival Virginia Woolf about a plane that all the people in London look up and see, that’s writing words in the sky above them, and I remember you gave a paper about it somewhere. Well, I have deduced that because they started coating the wings of planes in or before 1924 with melted films, it is perfectly possible that the wings of the plane all those people are craning their necks and looking up at in Virginia Woolf’s famous novel which if I am right is the one that was published in 1925, could actually be coated in melted-down moving pictures of your ex-wife. It is funny to me too because I have a sense that Virginia Woolf always thought your ex-wife a bit flighty. 3: Finally did you know that it is now possible to fly from Auckland to Sydney in your ex-wife? There is a new generation Boeing 737 that Qantas use whose features include a 12 seat business class and 156 seat economy, with individual state of the art Panasonic in-flight entertainment-on-demand systems in both business and economy, ergonomic cushions and adjustable headrests and a choice on board of New Zealand or Australian wines. The plane is called The Katherine Mansfield.

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The ex-wife It all really makes me think of the thing she says where she says: ‘Your wife won’t have a tomb – she’ll have at most a butterfly fanning its wings on her grave and then off’. You might say I have been thinking of you a bit. I very much hope you are well. * I didn’t send that flight email in the end. I looked at my language and couldn’t. I knew I’d got punctuation and things wrong, and was embarrassed at the words I’d used when I looked back at it later after a glass of wine, which is usually when embarrassment disappears and it’s easier to press send. Those are some of the reasons I didn’t send it. The main one, though, was that I didn’t want you to think I was trying to know more about something you knew about than you did. Also, I was worried that maybe you really wouldn’t know these things. I realised I really didn’t want to know more about what you knew about than you. Which is all a roundabout way of saying I didn’t want to trespass on what was yours. Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change. So suffering must become love. That is the mystery. In the end what I did was this. The next time I was in London, I went to find the house your ex-wife had lived in for, well I didn’t know if it was for longest, but I knew it was for happiest. I stood outside it and I thought about how close it was to the Heath, and how much that must have pleased her cats. I worried about what an uphill climb it must have been to get to the house from the nearest Tube, for somebody not very well. I thought about how she wrote to this address from a cold house in Italy. She wrote imagining coming home and kissing its gate and door, and about how she imagined the cat going up the stairs, it was how she pictured home, and I think the word she used is lopping, Wing come lopping up. There’s a big locked gate on it, too high to see over and you can’t see in, though there is a blue plaque on it saying it is your ex-wife’s house and that her husband lived there too. (The plaque doesn’t mention the Mountain.) But I took a photo of the outside of it on my phone, and then I took a close-up of the brick of the whitewashed wall of it, where ivy or some plant with tiny splayed out roots has grown over the place and someone has repeatedly stripped it back. Some of it, delicate, is preserved forever

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Katherine Mansfield Studies under the whitewash, and some of it has kept on growing new roots on top of the whitewash. When I got home that night I keyed in your address above an email and sent you that photo of the wall and the plantlife without saying where it was of, or telling you anything about it. Then I put the books I had stolen from you back on the shelf you’d kept them on in the study, and I shut the door. And then I went and got on with it, the rest of my life.

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POETRY

TO K. M. And there was a horse in the king’s stables: and the name of the horse was, Genius We sat and talked. . . It was June, and the summer light Lay fair upon ceiling and wall as the day took flight. Tranquil the room – with its colours and shadows wan, Cherries, and china, and flowers: and the hour slid on. Dark hair, dark eyes, slim fingers – you made the tea, Pausing with spoon uplifted, to speak to me. Lulled by our thoughts and our voices, how happy were we! And, musing, an old, old riddle crept into my head. ‘Supposing I just say, Horse in a field,’ I said, ‘What do you see?’ And we each made answer: ‘I – A roan – long tail, and a red-brick house, near by.’ ‘I – an old cart-horse and rain!’ ‘Oh no, not rain; A mare with a long-legged foal by a pond – oh plain!’ ‘And I, a hedge – and an elm – and the shadowy green Sloping gently up to the blue, to the west, I mean!’. . .

Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 3 (2011): 107–111 DOI: 10.3366/kms.2011.0010 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

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Katherine Mansfield Studies And now: on the field that I see night’s darkness lies. A brook brawls near: there are stars in the empty skies. The grass is deep, and dense. As I push my way, From sour-nettled ditch sweeps fragrance of clustering may. I come to a stile. And lo, on the further side, With still, umbrageous, night-clad fronds, spread wide, A giant cedar broods. And in crescent’s gleam – A horse, milk-pale, sleek-shouldered, engendered of dream! Startled, it lifts its muzzle, deep eyes agaze, Silk-plaited mane . . . ‘Whose pastures are thine to graze? Creature, delicate, lovely, with woman-like head, Sphinx-like, gazelle-like? Where tarries thy rider?’ I said. And I scanned by that sinking ship’s thin twinkling shed A high-pooped saddle of leather, night-darkened red, Stamped with a pattern of gilding; and over it thrown A cloak, chain-buckled, with one great glamorous stone, Wan as the argent moon when o’er fields of wheat Like Dian she broods, and steals to Endymion’s feet. Interwoven with silver that cloak from seam to seam. And at toss of that head from its damascened bridle did beam Mysterious glare in the dead of the dark. . . . ‘Thy name, Fantastical steed? Thy pedigree? Peace, out of Storm, is the tale? Or Beauty, of Jeopardy?’ The water grieves. Not a footfall – and midnight here. Why tarries Darkness’s bird? Mounded and clear Slopes to yon hill with its stars the moorland sweet. There sigh the airs of far heaven. And the dreamer’s feet Scatter the leagues of paths secret to where at last meet Roads called Wickedness, Righteousness, broad-flung or strait, And the third that leads on to the Queen of fair Elfland’s gate. . . . This then the horse that I see; swift as the wind; That none may master or mount; and none may bind – But she, his Mistress: cloaked, and at throat that gem – Dark hair, dark eyes, slim shoulder. . . . God-speed, K. M.! WALTER DE LA MARE

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Poetry

A little pneumonia for Katherine Mansfield The German word for a lung is Lungenflügel – lung wing – clever thing you, Katy, naming it your ‘wing’, to fly on. Now one of mine’s infected too, the right, and this antibiotic will kill all those bacteria, well, on the wing. Also cures gonorrhoea, would have cured your TB & you’d have had more life – brave thing! Looking death straight in the face at thirty-four. Till then, each move calculated: ‘shall I try to get up, if I do will I cough, if I cough I can’t breathe’, ‘lift my head Ida’, ‘say it pathetically, please’ (you quote yourself) into the pillow. Then, ‘I’ve got to try.’ Your will, that steel. Enfant de courage. After lunch though, having to lie down yet again, (know what you mean & me a swimmer! Lungs again!), then, all those stories waiting, like mist on the land, then lifting up to your pen & then, all that quick, fine, flying work till they found their places: your children of the sun. JAN KEMP

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Katherine Mansfield Studies

Villa Isola Bella ‘You will find Isola Bella in pokerwork on my heart’ KATHERINE MANSFIELD to JOHN MIDDLETON MURRY 10 November 1920 (inscribed outside the Katherine Mansfield memorial room in Menton)

Your villa, Katherine, but not your room, and not much of your garden. Goods trains boom all night, a dozen metres from the bed where tinier tremors hurtle through my head. The ghost of your hot flat-iron burns my lung; my throat’s all scorching lumps. I grope among black laurels and the shadowy date-palm, made like fans of steel, each rustling frond a blade, across the gravel to the outside loo whose light won’t wake my sleeping sister. You smoked shameless Turkish all through your TB. I drag at Silk Cut filters, duty-free, then gargle sensibly with Oraldene and spit pink froth. Not blood: it doesn’t mean, like your spat scarlet, that I’ll soon be dead – merely that pharmacists are fond of red. I’m hardly sick at all. There’s just this fuzz that blurs and syncopates the singing buzz of crickets, frogs, and traffic in my ears: a nameless fever, atavistic fears. Disease is portable: my bare half-week down here’s hatched no maladie exotique; I brought my tinglings with me, just as you brought ragged lungs and work you burned to do; and, as its fuel, your ecstasy-prone heart. Whatever haunts my bloodstream didn’t start below your villa, in our genteel den (till lately a pissoir for passing men).

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Poetry But your harsh breathing and impatient face, bright with consumption, must have left a trace held in the air. Well, Katherine, Goodnight: let’s try to sleep. I’m switching out the light. Watch me through tepid darkness, wavering back past leaves and stucco and their reverent plaque to open what was not in fact your door and find my narrow mattress on the floor. FLEUR ADCOCK

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Time: 10:08am

Fig. 1. Manuscript letter from D. H. Lawrence to Katherine Mansfield of 21 July 1913. Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, New Zealand. Reproduced with kind permission of Laurence Pollinger Ltd.

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Katherine Mansfield Studies

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REPORT

‘Dear Mrs Murry’: A Little-Known Manuscript Letter from D. H. Lawrence to Katherine Mansfield Andrew Harrison Readers of Katherine Mansfield Studies may not be familiar with the text of a letter from D. H. Lawrence to Katherine Mansfield of 21 July 1913. An abridged form of this letter was published among the ‘Previously Uncollected Letters’ in Volume VIII of The Letters of D. H. Lawrence (2000), edited by James T. Boulton.1 It was transcribed here from the Maggs Bros Catalogue, 1071 (1986), where it was listed for sale as Item 106. It subsequently came into the possession of the notable Lawrence collector John Martin; it was transcribed in another, fuller but still incomplete, form in 2002 in the catalogue of John Martin’s collection published by Simon Finch Rare Books Limited.2 James T. Boulton was able to publish a full text transcription in the first number of the Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies in 2006.3 A recent article in the Guardian alluded to it as an item on sale from Michael Silverman.4 Fortunately, Silverman sold the letter to the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, New Zealand. I am grateful to the Library for making a high-quality scan of the letter available to me, and to Laurence Pollinger Ltd, executors of the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli, for granting permission to reproduce the full text and manuscript of the letter together in this journal.

Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 3 (2011): 112–117 DOI: 10.3366/kms.2011.0011 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

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Katherine Mansfield Studies The letter reads as follows: 28 Percy Avenue, Kingsgate, Broadstairs Monday [21 July 1913] Dear Mrs Murry, I hope you found my book at your new address. You must come down here this coming week-end. – How are you fixed up now? – better for the load shifted off? Frieda is bothering you about her children. You will help, wont you? The best way is to get one of the boys to bring Monty to you – Monty Weekley. I think it scarcely safe to ask the porter for him. He is 13 years old – so you’ll ask one of the bigger boys of the Preparatory School for him. The Colet Preparatory School is across the road from St. Pauls. Try and get Monty to come and see you, will you? Then Frieda might meet him at your house. – We will get a little flat for you in Bavaria, for a month, in return – not in return – but it seems rotten to drag you into our troubles, one straightway thinks of reparation. Frieda is putting half a sovereign in her son’s letter. Yours D. H. Lawrence I am thick headed with the thunder I haven’t got half a sovereign after all, and the post office is shut. If you’ve got a spare 10/- you might put it in the envelope, and I’ll send it you – if not, never mind. DHL

The importance of the letter rests partly on the scarcity of the existing early correspondence between Lawrence and Mansfield, and partly on the dramatic biographical significance of its content. This is only the second extant letter from Lawrence to Mansfield. The earlier one (addressed to ‘Miss Mansfield’) is dated 26 January 1913; it responds to Mansfield’s request for a short story from Lawrence for Rhythm, and so marks the beginning of the association between the two writers.5 The first meeting occurred at the end of June 1913 when Lawrence and Frieda visited Mansfield and Murry at their flat-cum-office at 57 Chancery Lane and they rode on a bus to have lunch together in Soho. According to Murry’s 1935 account of that first meeting the couples ‘liked one another, and when it emerged, as it quickly did, that Katherine and I were not married, and that Katherine like Frieda was waiting to be divorced, it began to appear [. . . ] that we were made for one another’.6 The second meeting also took place in London on Wednesday 9 July, and it only served to confirm the affinity between the couples. Lawrence reported to Constance Garnett that he had met ‘Katharine [sic] Mansfield’:

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‘Dear Mrs Murry’ She is (like F and me) with Murry [. . . ] only a lad of 23 [. . . ] He has been with KM – for 16 months. Now they are bankrupt over the Rhythm – Not starving – she has some money, and he earns £7 a week. But the bailiffs are in. It made me sad to be with them. Love and running from husbands is desperately ticklish work.7

Lawrence had contributed a review to Rhythm;8 he had also published the short story ‘A Soiled Rose’ and a review of Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig in its successor, the Blue Review, which ceased publication in July, after just three issues.9 The debts incurred by the journal placed Murry and Mansfield under extreme financial pressure. Lawrence and Frieda clearly identified with the young couple’s financial problems, and with the ‘ticklish’ legacy of Mansfield’s marriage to George Bowden in March 1909. In his first letter to Mansfield, Lawrence had declared himself ‘as poor as a church mouse’,10 and he would have wanted to share with Mansfield and Murry his own sadness over Frieda’s struggles with her husband, Ernest Weekley, to gain access to her three children, Montague (‘Monty’), Elsa, and Barbara (‘Barby’). By 21 July 1913, the shared sadness had eased somewhat, giving way to a degree of collective optimism. Murry had given up the Chancery Lane flat and Mansfield had moved from her temporary home at ‘The Gables’, Cholesbury, Buckinghamshire, back to London, to live with Murry in a flat in Barons Court: their new address was 8 Chaucer Mansions, Queen’s Club Gardens, West Kensington. By this time, Lawrence was referring to them as ‘the Murrys’, in spite of their unmarried state (note the way Lawrence addresses his letter to ‘Mrs Murry’). They had finally ceased publishing the journal, which would certainly have felt like a ‘load shifted off’. Lawrence, for his part, had sent one of his books to their new address. It has been assumed that this was a copy of his latest novel, Sons and Lovers, which had been published by Duckworth on 29 May,11 but circumstantial evidence suggests that it may rather have been Love Poems and Others, published by the same firm in February.12 Sending on the love poems would have been a significant and touching gesture: a way for Lawrence to commemorate a bond of kinship with this young couple asserting their love in the face of considerable social and financial pressures. Frieda was certainly keen to draw on Mansfield’s sympathy for her situation – and the great good luck of the new address – to have her act as a go-between in gaining access to her thirteen-year-old son, Monty, who was a pupil at the nearby Colet Court Preparatory School. Frieda had already seen Monty outside the School, and she was attempting to gain access to her daughters through him. Lawrence’s letter solicits

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Katherine Mansfield Studies her help on Frieda’s behalf; it instructs Mansfield in the best way to facilitate Frieda’s access to her son. Mansfield was to approach one of the bigger boys at the School in order to find Monty (he was in his final year at Colet Court before going up to St Paul’s). She was to hand him a letter from Frieda, which his mother and Lawrence had hoped to fill with ten shillings, or half a sovereign. The ultimate plan was for Mansfield to arrange for Monty to visit her in her new flat, and for Frieda to meet him there. The dramatic context of the letter is graphically illustrated by Lawrence’s inclusion of Monty’s full name above the second appearance of its shortened form in the letter (he did not want Mansfield to mistake the boy for somebody else), and by the inclusion of the rushed pencil postscript, written sideways at the top of the first page of the letter. Lawrence clearly felt that he could not wait for the next day to post the letter, so he sent it in a rush, without the half sovereign. His agitated frame of mind can be gauged from the scrawled nature of the postscript; he describes himself as ‘thick headed with the thunder’. The next day, Lawrence wrote to Murry, and he appears to have enclosed a sovereign, hoping that Mansfield would still have the opportunity to pass on a half sovereign to Monty; he wanted the two of them to use the rest of the money to pay for the train tickets which would allow them to visit Lawrence and Frieda on the following weekend (26–27 July) at the house they were renting by the coast in Kingsgate, Broadstairs, Kent.13 Mansfield and Murry accepted the invitation, bringing with them their friend, Gordon Campbell.14 Sadly, Frieda’s clandestine efforts to gain access to her children had already created more trouble for her. Ernest Weekley’s sister, Maude, had grown suspicious and discovered a letter to Monty from Frieda. Weekley and his sister swiftly applied for a Court Order; on 28 July he was awarded legal custody of the children, and Frieda was restrained from interfering with them. The letter of 21 July 1913 commemorates the deepening friendship between the two couples, but it also stands as a monument to the tensions that they were both forced to negotiate throughout that eventful summer. Notes 1. James T. Boulton, ed., The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, 8 vols, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), Vol. VIII, p. 6. Hereafter referred to as Letters, followed by the volume and page number. 2. D. H. Lawrence: An Exceptional Collection of First Editions, Autograph Material, Manuscripts, Original Paintings, Photographs, and Association Items, Simon Finch Catalogue 51 (2002), Item 279, p. 130.

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‘Dear Mrs Murry’ 3. James T. Boulton, ‘Further Letters of D. H. Lawrence’, Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies, 1: 1 (2006), pp. 11–12. 4. Geoff Dyer, ‘Writing on the Wall’, Guardian, Saturday Review Section, 11 September 2010, p. 20: ‘Of the ones on offer, the longest and most expensive was to Katherine Mansfield (21 July 1913)’. 5. See Letters I, pp. 507–8. 6. John Middleton Murry, Between Two Worlds: An Autobiography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1935), p. 261. 7. Letters II, pp. 31–2. 8. ‘ “The Georgian Renaissance’’: review of Georgian Poetry, 1911–12, edited by Edward Marsh’ was published in the March issue of Rhythm. 9. ‘A Soiled Rose’ (an early version of ‘The Shades of Spring’) was published in the May 1913 issue of the Blue Review; ‘ “German Books’’: review of Der Tod in Venedig, by Thomas Mann’ appeared in the third, and final, July 1913 number. 10. Letters I, p. 507. 11. Boulton, ‘Further Letters of D. H. Lawrence’, p. 11, fn. 5: ‘DHL had sent her a copy of Sons and Lovers’. 12. In a letter of 20 July 1913, the day before the one to Mansfield, Lawrence thanks his friend Henry Savage for sending him ‘the copy of my own poems’ (Letters II, p. 43); it is possible that he passed the copy straight on to Mansfield. In Between Two Worlds, Murry suggests that Lawrence gave Mansfield and Murry a copy of Sons and Lovers a few days later, during their visit to his home in Kingsgate, Broadstairs; they read it ‘in the train returning; and I can still remember the impression of warm rich darkness which the opening pages of that great novel made upon me’ (p. 262). A review of Love Poems and Others was published in the June 1913 number of the Blue Review, but it seems likely that this copy was retained by the reviewer, Lascelles Abercrombie. 13. See Letters II, pp. 45–6. 14. See Mark Kinkead-Weekes, D. H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile, 1912–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 87.

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REVIEW ARTICLE

Sydney Janet Kaplan, Circulating Genius: John Middleton Murry, Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 228 pp., ISBN 978 0 7486 4148 2 Sydney Janet Kaplan’s study of the intertwined lives and writings of John Middleton Murry, Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence is a tender and intricate account of the attachments and betrayals that marked both their literary texts and their relationships with one another from 1914, when they met, until Mansfield’s and Lawrence’s deaths in 1923 and 1930 respectively. Murry was left to bear solitary witness for another twenty-seven years to the ebb and flow of their mutual loves and their intellectual and aesthetic journeyings together. As he noted in a diary entry the year before his death: ‘I am the sole remaining representative of our particular integrity, our particular concern’ (211). The premise of Circulating Genius is that fiction and criticism are produced out of ‘the intensity and pressure of [. . .] daily life’ (10). This unassuming statement of the book’s aims does not prepare the reader, however, for the intensity of the analyses that it contains. Kaplan develops an intertextual method that sees lives and art as linked realms of experience, offering fine and provocative readings of Murry’s little-known novels, Still Life (1916) and The Things We Are (1922), copious essays and reviews, and books about Lawrence. She also offers remarkably careful and insightful discussions of some of Mansfield’s greatest stories (‘Bliss’, ‘Je ne parle pas français’, ‘The Man Without a Temperament’), and an analysis of Lawrence’s Women in Love (1920). The difficult emotional, sexual and intellectual dynamics of the trio had effects on literary modernism that were far-reaching and profound. Although Murry has been frequently written off as oldfashioned, self-interested and/or intellectually dull, Kaplan shows how his magnetic presence and intellectual influence on Mansfield and Lawrence shaped the modernist literary movement just as surely as Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 3 (2011): 118–120 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

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Sydney Janet Kaplan, Circulating Genius did his editorial interventions, reviews and, later on, championing of his dead wife and his erstwhile friend. Murry is the unlikely hero of this book, and he emerges from these pages as a much more sympathetic, complicated and influential figure than one might have thought him. At first glance, Circulating Genius might seem like a version of the ‘biographical criticism’ that we teach our graduate students to avoid. Using letters, diaries and autobiographies, Kaplan deftly weaves analysis of the progression of the relationships between the three authors with critical discussion of the texts they produced during the tortured years of their intimacies. She defends herself against the claim that this kind of criticism has a certain kind of naivety: ‘A biographically informed criticism [. . .] cannot avoid making use of “experience,’’ despite its contested and overly mediated representations’ (10). But it is precisely in its sophisticated and understated exploration of the contestation and mediation of ‘experience’ that this book makes its greatest contribution. Experience becomes reflection, reflection becomes art or criticism, and that art or criticism becomes its own kind of experience, especially when the subject of the art or criticism is a close associate who is either beloved or hated. This is the kind of ‘circularity’ that Kaplan traces on every page of Circulating Modernism, in a fruitful and surprising expansion of the metaphor. Threaded through the book are the biographical and literary repercussions of the erotically-laden encounters of Murry and Lawrence in the winter of 1914–15. Kaplan shows how Murry resisted naming the homoerotic aspects of his love for Lawrence and of Lawrence’s hopes for him in every subsequent revisiting of their relationship – whether in the flesh (as at the Café Royal Christmas dinner in 1923 when Murry apparently confessed to Lawrence that he had betrayed him) or in his many textual recreations of their attachment (including in two books specifically about Lawrence, Son of Woman [1931] and Reminiscences of D. H. Lawrence [1933]). Mansfield’s illness and what Kaplan calls the ‘collaborative text’ of her correspondence with Murry, ‘in which each participant engages in the construction of a writing self’ (84), also haunt Circulating Genius from the second chapter on. The correspondence includes not only their private letters but also their published texts, stories and reviews, in which each reflected on their experiences of the other in ways that were simultaneously reminiscence, fantasy and recrimination. Kaplan writes beautifully about the emotional and textual function of Mansfield and Murry’s cloying fantasy of themselves as small children (67), arguing that it was in part an attempt to transgress gender

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Katherine Mansfield Studies boundaries and allow themselves the kind of textual explorations that Murry found so hard to sustain in his everyday life. Although it would have been a mistake to include copious biographical narrative – these stories have been told often enough – there are moments when the reader looks in vain for a date or an explanation to situate the events Kaplan is discussing. Where and what was Rose Tree Cottage, for example? And it is hard to locate a specific conclusion to the book’s argument: the final chapter deals mainly with Murry’s debate with T. S. Eliot over Romanticism and his after-life in autobiographical texts, ending with Murry’s own wistful comment that ‘It is just possible that I shall regain some significance’ (211). But like the lives that Circulating Genius describes, its value is in its process. This book is an experience. I read it at one sitting, entirely immersed in the stories it tells. Empathetic and modest, Kaplan’s book is a pioneering study of the intertextuality of lives and writings. Murry, Mansfield and Lawrence will never seem quite the same again. Suzanne Raitt College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia DOI: 10.3366/kms.2011.0012

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REVIEWS

Gerri Kimber and Janet Wilson, eds, Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary Volume of Essays (London: Palgrave, 2011), 256 pp., £50.00, ISBN 978 0 2302 7773 1 This volume celebrates the centenary of Mansfield’s arrival in London in July 1908, and both demonstrates and contributes to the growing interest in Mansfield in the second decade of the twentyfirst century – indeed, several of the major critical texts cited in the introduction were published as recently as 2010. The editors also remind us that no collection of essays devoted to Mansfield has been published since 1994. This fact is revealing in itself. On one hand, a good deal of important scholarship has been produced during this sixteen-year period, much of it exploring Mansfield’s significance to reconfigurations of literary modernism. In terms of critical interest, this places her on a par with figures such as Jean Rhys and Dorothy Richardson. On the other hand, the absence of such a volume would be unimaginable in the case of Woolf or Joyce, indicating entrenched hierarchies with their own role to play in the composition of the critical field. Celebrating Katherine Mansfield sets out to address this state of affairs. Its structure plays to existing strengths within the scholarship, while emphasising a critical innovation to match Mansfield’s own ‘dynamic and innovative relationship with the experimental modernism of contemporaries’ (3). For instance, it both opens and closes with a section responding to the ongoing interest in discourses of auto/biography. Part I focuses upon ‘Biographical Readings and Fiction’. These articles navigate the crucial if complex relationship between Mansfield’s life, her work, and the writings of others, emphasising historical recovery and reinterpretation. Vincent O’Sullivan focuses on her final year. Sydney Janet Kaplan looks at Murry and Mansfield’s flowering on or around 1916. J. Lawrence Mitchell draws upon a wealth of unpublished material to accurately Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 3 (2011): 121–134 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

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Katherine Mansfield Studies reconstruct Mansfield’s lost brother, Leslie Beauchamp. Part IV, ‘Autobiography and Fiction’, embraces a wider range of approaches to a similar theme. Janet Wilson considers Mansfield’s liminal position as a colonial author, Anna Jackson explores Mansfield and the art of the letter, and C. K. Stead’s ‘Meetings with the “Great Ghost’’ ’ draws the figure of the critic (as author, academic, and editor) firmly into the frame. This piece is an account of a series of significant moments in the career of one of the most notable Mansfield experts. As such, it reminds us not only of the specific issues attached to Mansfield as a critical subject, but also of the personal and professional investments that underpin our scholarly projects. Part II: ‘Mansfield and Modernity’ opens with Elleke Boehmer’s reading of Mansfield as an exemplar of a colonial modernism marked by Bhabha’s ‘difference within’ (58) – a critique that connects fruitfully with Wilson’s essay. Sarah Sandley’s ‘Mansfield as a Cinematic Writer’ pins down elements of this notoriously elusive engagement. Delia da Sousa Correa’s contribution draws upon Mansfield’s well-known interest in music and the musicality of prose. This is deployed not only to illuminate less well-known early texts, but also to explore questions of periodicity, as da Sousa Correa unpicks more than one influence ‘impeccably nineteenth-century in its pedigree’ (88). Angela Smith also draws attention to Mansfield’s investment in Victorian literature, exploring her interest in Dickens. Both pieces illuminate significant, neglected influences upon Mansfield, and contribute to a more accurate awareness of the underpinnings of modernist ‘newness’. The final contribution to this section is Janna K. Stotz’s “‘Is This Play?’’: Katherine Mansfield’s Play Frames’. In an original critical move, Stotz frames the act of reading as an ambiguous perceptual game through which, simply by playing, ‘we are fluidly changing the definitions of things’ (100). The story Stotz selects as her focal point is ‘Je ne parle pas français’ – a popular choice. As the editors note (3), this particular text occupies a central position in much recent work on Mansfield, and one of the pleasures of this volume is the opportunity to compare a range of distinctive readings. In Part III: ‘Psychoanalytical Readings’, Clare Hanson, Josephine Paccaud-Huguet, Anne Mounic and Anna Smith draw upon a range of theorists – Freud, Lacan, Kierkegaard, Agamben – in order to elucidate their readings of Mansfield. It is also worth noting that these critiques undertake the sort of work Stephen Ross has recently described as ‘the missing link’ (Modernism and Theory, 2009) in the ‘new’ modernist studies. Whether or not we subscribe to Ross’s view, this sort of methodological variety is another of the strengths of the volume,

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Reviews reminding us that historical particularity, archival research and theoretical critique should not exist in different scholarly universes. For my money, the contribution that gains most from such intellectual cross-pollination is Jackson’s ‘Mansfield and the Familiar Letter’, from Part IV. Reading Mansfield via Tom Paulin – who is in turn reading Charles Lamb – Jackson explores the centrality of epistolary poetics to Mansfield’s work, thematically uniting Stotz’s interest in readerly experience, Paccaud-Huguet’s discussion of consciousness, Smith and Da Sousa Correa’s trans-periodic analyses, and the delicate, accurate close readings that characterise the volume as a whole. From this summary, it should be apparent that Celebrating Katherine Mansfield performs more than just the act of affirmation suggested by its title. It makes available a range of critical possibilities, allowing the reader to forge their own connections between one position and another while avoiding the sort of repetition (or lack of coherence) that can dog collected volumes. Similarly, although there are some extremely high-profile contributors, there is no sense of tokenism – every article earns its keep. Here’s hoping that we won’t have to wait another seventeen years for a companion volume. Faith Binckes Worcester College, University of Oxford DOI: 10.3366/kms.2011.0013

Katherine Mansfield, The Aloe, original text ed. by Vincent O’Sullivan, with a Foreword by Kirsty Gunn (London: Capuchin Classics, 2010), 88 pp., £7.99, ISBN 978 1 9074 2908 8 All Mansfield scholars and addicts will welcome this crisp, freestanding paperbound publication of Mansfield’s neglected classic, The Aloe (1930). We owe Capuchin Classics a debt of gratitude for making this seminal text in the Mansfield canon accessible in a portable and inexpensive format. The volume is part of a series of novels and novellas by female authors such as Anne Brontë, Elizabeth Goudge, Patricia Grace and Christina Stead. The self-styled châtelaine and publisher is Emma Howard. Kirsty Gunn, a New Zealand-born, British-based author, has contributed an admirable and illuminating foreword which emphasises the deeply fragmented nature of Mansfield’s life and aesthetic and argues that her fiction finally triumphs over this fragmentation. Oddly, however, Gunn fails to comment on the strong feminist dynamic of Mansfield the Ibsenite ‘New Woman’, for The Aloe was the prototype

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Katherine Mansfield Studies for ‘Prelude’ (1918) and her ‘gynocritique’ of patriarchy was more frontal, robust and energised in this former text. Gunn’s foreword is less scholarly than the one Vincent O’Sullivan supplied to the 1983 Carcanet edition,1 and we owe this original publication of the full manuscript of The Aloe to his ardent and exacting endeavours as a skilled textual redactor. The great merit of O’Sullivan’s original edition of the whole manuscript is that we can see Mansfield at work recasting one text into the other due to the parallel matched pages of each. Capuchin have clearly decided – and it is a worthy aim – to let The Aloe novella stand on its own and speak for itself with its own unique freshness and vivacity. Ian Gordon once pointed out that The Aloe was Mansfield’s ‘first major story’ completed at Bandol in 1916, and that it was not published in her lifetime. Mansfield knew, Gordon observed, that ‘Emotion and nostalgia were not enough’ and ‘an intellectual effort that demanded more time and cooler reflection’ led to its revision as ‘Prelude’.2 The Indian scholar Nariman Hormasji has defined Mansfield as ‘a feminine impressionist’ who used a ‘three-zero brush’ to portray a ‘predominantly feminine world’ that was ‘full of minor crises’.3 This is the prime territory of The Aloe, gilded with Mansfield’s skills ‘in concrete visualisation, in richness of imagery, and in the lyrical quality of her language’.4 Yet this text reads, prima facie, as a completed, stream-of-consciousness, episodic, chatty, sometimes ungrammatical and barely coherent flow, so that one might question why Capuchin have published this unrevised verbal collage. A combination of ‘Prelude’ and ‘At the Bay’ – Mansfield’s revised and linked texts about an upper-class family in colonial Wellington – would have certainly offered a more polished revelation of the conflict between repressed female rage and good manners in colonial ‘Godzone’. Yet the great value of this new edition is that it allows readers to explore the raw experimentation that transformed Mansfield from being a mere scribbler from ‘the colonies’ into a modernist icon. Capuchin Classics are to be heartily commended for providing us with this fresh opportunity to revisit the lost world of colonial New Zealand as a society encrusted with transplanted Edwardian patriarchy and to see how one of its most talented ex-citizens rendered those stifling environs in an innovative manner, which also helped to spur the evolution of literary modernism. Bruce Harding University of Canterbury, New Zealand DOI: 10.3366/kms.2011.0014

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Reviews Notes 1. Vincent O’Sullivan, ed., ‘The Aloe’ with ‘Prelude’ by Katherine Mansfield (Manchester: Carcanet, 1983), ‘Introduction’, pp. 7–20. 2. Ian A. Gordon, Katherine Mansfield (London: British Council /Longmans, Green & Co., 1954), p. 11. 3. Nariman Hormasji, Katherine Mansfield: An Appraisal (Auckland and London: Collins, 1967), p. 83. 4. Hormasji, p. 88.

Lorae Parry, Bloomsbury Women & The Wild Colonial Girl: A Play About Katherine Mansfield (Wellington: The Women’s Play Press, 2010), 43 pp., $22.50, ISBN 978 0 9582 3101 5 Writing to her friend Dorothy Brett in 1918 about her story ‘Prelude’, just published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press, Katherine Mansfield mused: ‘What form is it, you ask? Ah, Brett, it’s so difficult to say. As far as I know it’s more or less my own invention’ (16). Audiences, and now readers, of Lorae Parry’s Bloomsbury Women & the Wild Colonial Girl: A Play about Katherine Mansfield are quite likely to put to themselves the same interesting question, but are unlikely, I would say, to arrive at an equivalent answer. For anyone familiar with the modern theatre, with biography and learning, the mix on offer here is fairly familiar. The printed text is illustrated with historic photos and closes with a bibliography, conventions more familiar in biography than in drama. And in her ‘Production Notes’, the dramatist comes clean about one matter: ‘All the words in Bloomsbury Women & the Wild Colonial Girl are verbatim and have been compiled from letters, journal entries, short stories and published writings’ (xi). By means of this dexterously managed collage, Parry guides us through the thirtyfour year morass of Mansfield’s life: her New Zealand background, her travels, her hate-love relationship with her native land, her love–hate relationships with various women and men, her experiments in writing, her vanity and her modesty, her illnesses, her death. Given the constraints of the method, the task could not have been carried out much better. ‘Few’, declares Vincent O’Sullivan – doyen of Katherine Mansfield studies – on the back cover, ‘get so close as does Lorae Parry’s short, incisive play to suggesting Mansfield’s instinctive engagement with life, and her finding a way to talk of it with originality and flair’. The fact that so many of the words are Mansfield’s own is a great help in this respect. The feat is partly one of selection and partly one of arrangement, but the result is pretty faithful to the self-contradicting, refractory, loving, witty, spiteful, affirming-denying, feline, rapturously

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Katherine Mansfield Studies creative personality of its subject. If as one of the young Kathleen Beauchamp’s teachers said of her at Queen’s College, Harley Street, ‘she was imaginative to the point of untruth’ (4), this dramatic cameo is both imaginative and unimaginative, and it is both to the point of truth. That ambivalent praise being offered, a play, a lecture and a biography are quite distinct exercises, say I. When one is undertaking any one, it is desirable to avoid lapsing into either of the others. There is invariably a danger of that when one resorts to the kind of cut-and-paste technique adopted, however skilfully, here. Parry has added an extra element to her hybrid: fifty-five back projected slides that bring the entire performance a step closer to a PowerPoint presentation. The last slide shows Mansfield’s magnified signature as if it is she who has written the play, as I suppose in one sense she has. At the first performance in London in September 2008, Parry herself played Mansfield delivering Parry’s anthology of Mansfield’s lines: personal, and possibly political, identification could not go much further. It was a two-hander, with the other actress playing Ida Baker and Virginia Woolf, distinguishing each role with a shawl. Parry admits that there is a potential for a third actress, but would not an actor fare better? In the current setup, the various men whom Mansfield knew – Lytton Strachey, Bertrand Russell and so on – all feature as Voices Over, as if disembodied. This is fair enough for Strachey, who was incorporeal at the best of times, but seems a little ethereal for Russell – Lady Ottoline objected to his bad breath. There is only one fully composed scene: Mansfield and Woolf’s last parting, when the rivalry, the emotional, artistic and possibly sexual tension between them, is palpable. Afterwards, Mansfield (I had typed ‘Parry’), moves upstage and turns her back to the audience while Virginia speaks of their friendship and Mansfield’s beautiful eyes: a dramatic turn that epitomises the tug of war between attraction and repulsion at the heart of the play. The front cover, though not the title page, announces this as ‘A play about Katherine Mansfield’, a daring claim since, unless your name is George Bernard Shaw or Berthold Brecht, true plays are not usually ‘about’ anything, any more than ‘Bliss’ is about elation and betrayal, ‘Prelude’ is about childhood and Wellington, or ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ is about subservience and loss. Admittedly, the stories that make up the earlier In A German Pension come close to being ‘about’ their author’s perceptions of middle-class Germans, but thereafter Mansfield’s experimental journey took her further and

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Reviews further away from ‘about-ness’ of any kind. For all its signals and signs, I doubt if Mansfield could have been prevailed upon to sign this plucky and well-made play. Robert Fraser The Open University DOI: 10.3366/kms.2011.0015

Jenny McDonnell, Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Marketplace: At the Mercy of the Public (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 220 pp., £50/US $80, ISBN 978 0 2302 3479 6 McDonnell’s book is a fine example of how a single-author study can put the expanded accessibility of modernist periodicals and little magazines to good use. This study tracks Katherine Mansfield’s engagement and frequent conflict with what McDonnell terms the literary marketplace – editors, publishers, agents and reading publics – throughout the former’s relatively brief career. Relying largely upon letters and materials published in modernist magazines like the New Age, Rhythm and the Athenaeum, in which Mansfield published short fiction, sketches, reviews and editorials, McDonnell delineates a series of stages through which Mansfield’s thinking about authorship and audience evolved. Not only does McDonnell claim that such ‘negotiations with her reading publics and the literary marketplace [. . . ] provid[e] a new framework in which to understand [Mansfield’s] work’ (4), but the study as a whole stands as an argument for reading Mansfield’s celebrated experiments with the short story form as a function of, and response to, anxieties of authorship and production. From the overbearing editorial influence of A. R. Orage and Beatrice Hastings at the New Age, the climate of bohemian-literary elitism cultivated by John Middleton Murry at Rhythm and the Blue Review, delicate dealings with the Woolfs and their Hogarth Press and the threat of censorship by the publisher Constable, to a kind of merger of popular and experimental forms in the London Mercury and the Sphere, McDonnell details how the negotiation of ‘high’ and ‘low’ literary forms, coterie models of literary production, and financial exigencies alike all inform the development of Mansfield’s ‘professional’ sense of authorship and her experiments with short fiction. In particular, McDonnell reads a number of Mansfield’s fictional works as allegories of authorship; such allegories persist, McDonnell claims, across earlier stories like ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’ and ‘The Woman at the Store’ to very late works including ‘The Canary’. Perhaps more interesting – and of greater import for the

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Katherine Mansfield Studies continued interrogation of the intersections of literary form with literary circulation – is McDonnell’s analysis of the technical and formal manifestations of Mansfield’s authorial anxieties. In the places where she examines such formal matters as the unstable narrative frameworks of texts like ‘The Woman at the Store’ and the refusal of narrative closure in ‘Mr. and Mrs. Dove’ as manifestations of editorial, generic and pecuniary pressures, McDonnell effectively posits the socalled ‘literary marketplace’ as constitutive of the kinds of formal preoccupations that we have come to associate with the modernist period. McDonnell’s readings, likewise, open up larger questions about modernist authorship in light of increased scholarly attention to publishing arrangements and environments. Following as it does her examination of Mansfield’s struggle with coterie models of literary production and publication earlier in her career, McDonnell’s examination in Chapter 5 of Mansfield’s traversal of literary and popular categories in the later stages of her career not only stands as a corrective to older readings of modernism’s hostility to mass publics (what Andreas Huyssen has famously called its ‘anxiety of contamination’ in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism [Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1986, vii]), but indicates how notions of singular authorship are perhaps as effaced in so-called ‘literary’ contexts as they are in popular ones. Indeed, McDonnell’s study is predicated upon such a singular notion of authorship that her readings effectively problematise – a conflict that is provocative and promising for further studies of modernist authorship within the literary marketplace. Alissa G. Karl State University of New York, College at Brockport DOI: 10.3366/kms.2011.0016

Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber and Susan Reid, eds, Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism (London and New York: Continuum, 2011), 208 pp., £60.00, ISBN 978 1 4411 1130 2 This collection of essays, edited by Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber and Susan Reid, appears in a series of studies under the title Historicizing Modernism. The series aims to re-appraise modernism’s key figures, approaching their work through primary sources such as archives, letters, drafts and notes, in order to develop critical thinking about literary modernism within a historical context. Mansfield is an ideal addition to such a series. The publication of the last volume of her

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Reviews letters in 2008 helped promote a resurgence of interest in her work. Now her life in letters can be considered in full alongside her writing, and her ambiguous position in relation to the long accepted maledominated canon of modernists can be re-evaluated. Mansfield’s is a brand of sentimental modernism, so different in its focus from the Francophile, clear-cut writing of T. S. Eliot. And yet major figures such as Eliot and Woolf were intimidated by her, Eliot ominously declaring her a ‘dangerous woman’. What is it about this femme fatale that both repels and attracts her contemporaries? Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism contains sixteen essays by academics from all around the world (in itself an interesting statement about the wide-spread appeal of Mansfield’s work). One of the most useful approaches to Mansfield in recent years has been the reappraisal of her life as a contributor to magazines and periodicals such as Rhythm.1 As assistant editor of Rhythm, Mansfield’s literary development was bound up with periodical culture, an awareness of the public, and reviewing and evaluating books. Even when desperately ill in Menton, Mansfield was still earning a meagre living by sending an astonishing number of book reviews back to Murry to publish in the Athenaeum. Following its ‘Introduction’ by J. Lawrence Mitchell, this essay collection takes an evaluation of her work as a periodical writer as its starting point. Gerri Kimber examines Mansfield’s work for Rhythm, and her influence as the driving force behind the range of foreign émigré contributors. She also discusses ‘To God the Father’, an intriguing and overlooked poem of Mansfield’s that appeared in the magazine in 1912, and was, Kimber argues, inspired by a stained glass window by the Polish artist Stanislaw Wyspianksi, which Mansfield may have visited in Poland. Eiko Nakano focuses on the influence of Bergson on both Mansfield’s work and Rhythm itself, while Jenny McDonnell argues that Mansfield felt the ‘popular’ and the ‘literary’ aspects of her work need not be mutually exclusive. This first section, which has a philosophical stance, concludes with Miroslawa Kubasiewicz’s examination of Mansfield’s characters, which discusses how their ‘authentic existence’ might have been informed and influenced by Mansfield’s own struggles for personal authenticity, and her experiences of loss and alienation. The collection then turns its attention to Mansfield’s voice and sense of self in her stories, with wide-ranging enquiries by Joanna Kokot, Nancy Gray, Anne Besnault-Levita and Delphine Soulhat. Kokot summarises aspects of Mansfield’s style, and the elusiveness of her reality or realities portrayed in her stories. For Kokot, Mansfield’s

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Katherine Mansfield Studies sense of reality ‘appears to be a medley of various interpretations and world visions; it is not clear what is objective and what is not; interpretations are not complementary but exclusive’ (73). The lens widens in the third section to consider Mansfield’s handling of issues of class and gender in her stories, with a broadening out to make comparison between her world and the different understanding of masculinity in D. H. Lawrence’s work in a chapter by Susan Reid. Bruce Harding looks closely at how Mansfield develops her concerns about the construction of gender, by looking at ‘The Aloe’ and subtly teasing out the complexities of the character of Linda Burnell. Ana Belén López Pérez investigates Mansfield’s treatment of women and the city, while Gerardo Rodríguez Salas with Isabel María Andrés Cuevas compares uses of the grotesque in writing by Mansfield and Virginia Woolf. The collection ends with an assessment of Mansfield’s legacy, including an essay by her recent biographer Kathleen Jones and a discussion by Valérie Baisnée based on readings of Mansfield’s Journal. Innovative contributions by Janka Kašˇcáková and Melinda Harvey focus respectively on coldness and the faunal. Where is Mansfield in relation to modernism? Sydney Janet Kaplan argued in 1991 that her rightful place alongside other modernists had been forgotten, or so taken for granted that it provoked little discussion. Things have moved on a great deal since then. Now, Mansfield’s place as a modernist, as someone who can sit alongside if not de-throne Woolf, is assured. But the nuances of this position are still to be established. This is a valuable contribution to the fast growing canon of Mansfield studies, approaching her work with sensitive analysis, and a strong, historical background. Kate Kennedy Girton College, University of Cambridge DOI: 10.3366/kms.2011.0017 Note 1. For the first such major study of periodical culture and its relationship to modernist writers, see Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker’s Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume I Britain and Ireland 1880–1955 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) (reviewed in Volume 2 of this journal).

Kathryn Simpson, Gifts, Markets and Economies of Desire in Virginia Woolf (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 200 pp., £52.00, ISBN 978 1 4039 9706 7 In recent times, the modernist marketplace has become a popular focus for scholarship. Of particular relevance to this journal is Jenny

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Reviews McDonnell’s Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Marketplace: At the Mercy of the Public (2010) (reviewed in this volume), which claims a new reading of Mansfield’s short stories via a detailed analysis of the author’s publication history, thereby establishing a social reality for her writing within a network of literary modernists. Most recently, a collection edited by Jeanne Dubino entitled Virginia Woolf and the Literary Marketplace (2011), examines Mansfield’s great rival in the context of the modernist marketplace and gift economies, and includes an essay by Katie Macnamara called ‘How to Strike a Contemporary: Mansfield and Woolf on the Market’. Encompassing a much wider remit is Alissa G. Karl’s Modernism and the Marketplace: Literary Culture and Consumer Capitalism in Rhys, Woolf, Stein, and Nella Larsen (2009), which focuses attention on the dichotomy of globalised modernism’s overt distaste for – but covert fascination with – marketing and consumerism. Inspired by Lewis Hyde’s groundbreaking study, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (1999), Kathryn Simpson takes the notion of the marketplace and extends it to include gifts and gift economies, at the same time highlighting the homoerotic importance accorded the gift in Woolf’s oeuvre: ‘As Hyde explains, gifts can act as agents of transformation, as “a sort of guardian or marker or catalyst. . . . a gift may be the actual agent of change, the bearer of new life’’ ’ (63). In Woolf’s story ‘A Woman’s College from Outside’, for example, the protagonist’s homoerotic desires, experienced through the bestowing of a gift, vindicate for Simpson ‘this story’s challenge to the social and sexual norms for middle class women and the limitations these norms impose’ (143). The book touches on the subject of Mansfield as Woolf’s literary arch rival while the former was alive, this rivalry co-existing alongside an uneasy friendship that left both women troubled. Woolf ‘anxiously compar[ed] herself to Katherine Mansfield whose commercial success she both envied and despised’ (138), though in the end it was Mansfield who avoided the contact more keenly sought by her rival. Nevertheless, Simpson astutely reminds the reader – in a remarkably apt quotation from Woolf’s own diaries – how great was ‘the significance she attributed to Mansfield at this time: she valued the “priceless talk’’ she and Mansfield shared, seeing Mansfield as “the only woman . . . with gift enough to make talk of writing interesting’’ ’ (128). For Simpson, this suggestion of a gift-related bond linking women can be seen as a key to unlocking an understanding of Woolf’s shorter fiction. Woolf’s ‘gift’ to Mansfield was the publication of ‘Prelude’ in 1918, hand printed by her and Leonard at the recently created

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Katherine Mansfield Studies Hogarth Press – the second of its publications. Simpson also highlights a homoerotic moment of gift-giving in Mansfield’s story ‘Carnation’, where one schoolgirl slips a carnation inside the blouse of another girl, noting that Janet Winston sees an intertext here between this story and Woolf’s ‘Slater’s Pins’ (184). Simpson’s book offers a dense seam of research, coherently expressed, investigating Woolf’s gift-giving and her interaction with the marketplace. ‘That gifts are complex, ambiguous and indeterminate, and that the risk in giving them is great, are factors central to Woolf’s own sense of her creative gift, to her negotiation of the literary market, and to her own acts of generosity’ (163). After reading this volume, it is tantalising to think of how the notion of gift-giving in Mansfield’s life and work might offer similarly exciting research possibilities. Gerri Kimber The Open University DOI: 10.3366/kms.2011.0018

Kathleen Jones, Katherine Mansfield: The Story Teller (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 528 pp., £25.00, ISBN 978 0 7486 4354 7 As its title suggests, ‘story-telling’ is a central concept in Kathleen Jones’s impressive new biography of Katherine Mansfield: Mansfield as the creator of stories, and Mansfield as the subject of stories. Indeed, Jones recognises the essential paradox at the heart of any attempt at biography: the impossibility of ever telling the ‘whole story’. Foremost a ‘story-teller’ herself, the more the biographer amasses the ‘facts’, diligently scours the archives, tracks down informants, and discovers previously unknown sources, the more difficult the task of illumination and the search for the right method to bring it ‘alive’. A skilled and successful author of four biographies of women writers, Jones here moves away from the established conventions of the genre. In this way, she seems to parallel the creative process of Mansfield herself, struggling to discover the right technique to convey her unique vision, and breaking with established narrative conventions to do so. Consequently, in an implicitly meta-critical turn, the seemingly fractured structure of this biography makes its own comment on the problematic nature of the genre itself. Jones thus juxtaposes two ‘stories’: one about Katherine Mansfield, the other about John Middleton Murry. She tells Mansfield’s story partially in the reverse,

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Reviews beginning with her death at Fontainebleau and circling back to Fontainebleau at the very end, all the while presenting Mansfield’s story through a present tense point of view. Murry’s story is told in the past tense and moves in a traditionally linear fashion, taking up his life after Mansfield’s death and examining the persistence of his obsessive interest in her throughout his three later marriages. The effect created by this structure is of Katherine Mansfield being ‘alive’ for us, whilst her after-life becomes more remote, more ‘finished’; she remains there a presence used by others and one haunting the lives of Murry, his second wife and his children, not to mention the biographers, critics, and friends who have perpetuated the often-conflicting and partial views of ‘their’ Katherine Mansfield. The circularity of the book’s structure allows for an interweaving of past and present that ultimately makes it a book without an ending. In situating herself boldly within the book’s parameters, Jones also figures in this circularity making it a study of both the search and the discovery. This duality is echoed in her assertion of the overwhelming significance of New Zealand in any attempt to understand Mansfield’s life and work: ‘To go to New Zealand in search of Katherine Mansfield is to be aware of the heart of her duality’ (21). This biography goes further than earlier ones in exploring the complexities of Mansfield’s relationship with Ida Baker, who, in the passages Jones quotes from her diary and other papers housed in the Alexander Turnbull Library, emerges as a far more intelligent and sympathetic figure, a woman whose talent for writing was largely suppressed. Jones’s skill is apparent in her depiction of Mansfield’s personality during adolescence. Imaginative sympathy is evident also in Jones’s wise analysis of Mansfield’s involvement with Garnet Trowell and the tragic loss of their baby during Mansfield’s stay in Bavaria, a traumatic event that would continue to torment her for the rest of her life. Equally impressive is the care Jones has taken to study the medical history and come to new conclusions about the various diagnoses and treatments Mansfield endured. Unlike most Mansfield biographers, Jones approaches Murry with sympathy. While noting that his diaries ‘are a harrowing record of emotional inadequacy’, she still finds herself ‘more compassionate and better able to understand why he had behaved as he did, and why Katherine went on loving him “in spite of all’’ ’ (21). She is able to base her interpretation of Murry on a far greater range of sources than were available to her predecessors – she is the only biographer, to my knowledge, who has been able to see the diaries of his daughter,

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Katherine Mansfield Studies Katherine Middleton Murry, for example – and her extensive use of Murry’s unpublished writings enhances this book immensely. Sydney Janet Kaplan University of Washington, USA DOI: 10.3366/kms.2011.0019

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Fleur Adcock was born in New Zealand but has lived in England since 1963. Her earlier books of poetry are gathered in Poems 1960–2000 (2000), and a new collection, Dragon Talk, appeared in 2010. She has also published translations from Romanian and medieval Latin poetry, and edited several anthologies. Faith Binckes is Departmental Lecturer in English at Worcester College, University of Oxford, where she teaches literature from 1800 to the present day. She is the author of Modernism, Magazines, and the British Avant-Garde: Reading Rhythm, 1910–1914 (2010), and is currently researching women’s writing, visual culture, and the periodical press. Rebecca Bowler is a PhD student at the University of Sheffield. Her thesis focuses on literary impressionism in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, and how visuality and visibility affect Richardson’s development and portrayal of her autobiographical self in fiction, including Richardson’s adoption of and development of the ‘impression’ in relation to earlier impressionist writers. Young Sun Choi obtained her PhD in English from King’s College London. Her research interests are modernist fiction and the visual arts. Publications include: ‘Writing Food (for Thought): Katherine Mansfield’s In a German Pension’ (2010); ‘Haunting the London Streets: Virginia Woolf’s Urban Travelogues Re-appraised’ (2009). She teaches at Kyungpook National University, Korea.

Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 3 (2011): 135–138 DOI: 10.3366/kms.2011.0020 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

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Katherine Mansfield Studies Delia da Sousa Correa is Senior Lecturer in English at the Open University and is co-editor of Katherine Mansfield Studies. She was educated in New Zealand, London and Oxford. Her published research centres on connections between literature and music in the nineteenth century and modernist periods. Robert Fraser is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and currently Professor of English at the Open University. His staged plays include life portraits of Byron, Dr Johnson and the composermurderer Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa. His published books include studies of Proust, Sir James Frazer, Victorian quest romance and international print history. Following his full-length biography of the British poet George Barker, a Spectator Book of the Year in 2002, his life of the poet David Gascoyne will appear with Oxford University Press during 2011. Kirsty Gunn is the author of several works of fiction, as well as 44 Things, a collection of notes, essays, short stories and poetry. She was the Randell Cottage Resident in New Zealand in 2009, where she worked on a book called Thorndon, with Katherine Mansfield at its centre. She has a Chair in Writing at the University of Dundee. Bruce Harding is a literary scholar based in Christchurch, New Zealand, whose doctorate in English (about aspects of a shared trans-Tasman literary tradition) included analysis of Mansfield’s colonial New Zealand frontier stories (echoing Henry Lawson’s emphases on crime and madness). He is the Curator of the Ngaio Marsh House and has been a long-standing fellow and Associate of the Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies and fledgling Ngai Tahu Research Centre at the University of Canterbury. Andrew Harrison is Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature at the University of Nottingham. He is currently writing the volume on D. H. Lawrence for the Blackwell Critical Biographies series. Sydney Janet Kaplan is Professor of English at the University of Washington. She is the author of Circulating Genius: John Middleton Murry, Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence (2010), Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction (1991), and Feminine Consciousness in the Modern British Novel (1975).

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Notes on Contributors Alissa G. Karl is Assistant Professor of English at the State University of New York, Brockport. She is author of Modernism and the Marketplace: Literary Culture and Consumer Capitalism in Rhys, Woolf, Stein and Nella Larsen (2009), as well as of articles on the interfaces of literature, culture and economic thought and form in the twentieth century. Jan Kemp, a New Zealand-born poet, lives outside Frankfurt am Main, Germany, with her husband, the critic Dieter Riemenschneider. Coeditor of three double-CD anthologies, Classic, Contemporary and New NZ Poets in Performance (2006/7/8), she received an MNZM in 2005. A CD ‘Jan Kemp reading her poems’ is available from www.poetryarchive.org Kate Kennedy studied music and literature at Cambridge University, cello at the Royal College of Music and biography at King’s College, London. She also has a PhD from Cambridge, focusing on early twentieth-century poetry and music. She freelances as a baroque cellist for London orchestras, and is a Research Fellow at Girton College, Cambridge. She has published numerous papers on music and literature around the First World War, and is currently working on a biography of the poet and composer Ivor Gurney. Gerri Kimber is an Associate Lecturer at the Open University. She is Chair of the Katherine Mansfield Society and co-editor of Katherine Mansfield Studies. She is the author of Katherine Mansfield: The View from France (2008), and A Literary Modernist: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of the Short Story (2008). She is co-editor of two essay collections: Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism (2011) and Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary Volume of Essays (2011). Walter de la Mare (1873–1956) was an English poet, short story writer and novelist. ‘TO K. M.’ was originally published without the first line epigraph as ‘To Katherine Mansfield’ in The Captive and Other Poems in 1928, but de la Mare then made subtle alterations, and the definitive version is as printed here. For a detailed analysis of the relationship between de la Mare and Mansfield, see J. Lawrence Mitchell. ‘Katherine Mansfield and “the man who came to tea’’ ’, Journal of Modern Literature, XVIII: I (Winter 1992), pp. 147–55. Vanessa Manhire is a writer and editor based in Dunedin, New Zealand. She completed her PhD at Rutgers University. Her dissertation explores the changing importance of music in the work

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Katherine Mansfield Studies of Virginia Woolf. Her research interests are modernist fiction and the relationship between music and literature. Suzanne Raitt is Professor of English at the College of William and Mary, USA. Her books include Vita and Virginia (1993) and May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian (2000). She edited Katherine Mansfield’s Something Childish and Other Stories for Penguin in 1996. Susan Reid is co-editor of Katherine Mansfield Studies, co-editor of the recent essay collection Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism (2011), editor of the online ‘Katherine Mansfield Blog’ http://www.katherinemansfieldsociety.org/today, and reviews editor for the Journal of Postcolonial Writing. Her published work includes articles on Mansfield, Lawrence and Woolf, with a particular focus on masculinity. Melissa Reimer completed her PhD at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, in 2011 and is the Manager of Gallery 33, Wanaka, New Zealand. Her independent research focuses on the stylistic traits and defining qualities of both painterly and literary Impressionism alongside the development of Mansfield’s particular impressionistic style. She has published in New Zealand and internationally and has presented aspects of her research in London, Menton and Wellington including at Te Papa Tongawera, in association with the exhibition: Monet and the Impressionists (2010). Ali Smith’s most recent novel is There But For The, published in 2011 by Hamish Hamilton. Angela Smith is Professor Emeritus of English Studies at the University of Stirling. Her books include East African Writing in English (1989), Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two (1999), Katherine Mansfield: A Literary Life (2000) and editions of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1997), and Katherine Mansfield Selected Stories (2002).

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Fleur Adcock’s poem, ‘Villa Isola Bella’ was first published in Poems 1960–2000 (Bloodaxe Books, 2000) and is reproduced here with kind permission. For permission to reproduce Walter de la Mare’s poem ‘TO K. M.’, first published in The Captive and Other Poems in 1928, the editors would like to thank The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Walter de la Mare. The editors would also like to thank the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, New Zealand, and Laurence Pollinger Ltd, executors of the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli, for granting permission to reproduce the full text and manuscript of a D. H. Lawrence letter together in this journal. The frontispiece picture by Anne Estelle Rice appears with the kind permission of the Drey family. The editors would also like to thank Victoria Hogarth at the Bridgeman Art Gallery, together with the Bibliotheque des Art Decoratifs in Paris, for allowing the reproduction of the Ballets Russes design on our front cover. Jenny Kinnear at The Fergusson Gallery, Perth, Scotland, continues to be generous with her assistance and time and the editors are grateful to her and the Gallery. Finally, we would like to thank the judges of the 2011 Essay Prize – Professor Kirsty Gunn, and Emeritus Professor Vincent O’Sullivan – together with the Chair of the Judges, Emeritus Professor Angela Smith. Angela has been the invisible co-editor of every volume of the journal to date, offering sound advice and support whenever called upon. The editors remain immensely grateful to her.

Katherine Mansfield Studies Volume 3 (2011): 139 DOI: 10.3366/kms.2011.0021 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/kms

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