I'll preface a few remarks on Katherine Mansfield with an extract from a letter she wrote to a friend in 1916, when she and her husband, John Middleton Murry (who was also her publisher), were sharing a cottage in Cornwall with D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda. (The person to whom Katherine refers in this extract as the "Pasty" is their maid.)
I want to talk about the L's, but if I do don't tell Kot or Gertler for then it will get back to Lawrence and I will be literally murdered. He has changed very much. He is quite 'lost.' He has become very fond of sewing, especially hemming, and making little copies of pictures. When he is doing these things he is quiet and gentle and kind, but once you start talking I cannot describe the frenzy that comes over him. He simply raves, roars, beats the table, abuses everybody ... What makes these attacks insupportable is the feeling one has at the back of one's mind that he is completely out of control, swallowed up in an acute insane[?] irritation. After one of these attacks he's ill with fever, haggard and broken. It is impossible to be anything to him but a kind of playful acquaintance. Frieda is more or less used to this. She has a passion for washing clothes – and stands with big bowls of blue and white water round her, wringing out check tablecloths – and looking very much at home indeed. She says this place suits her. I am sure it does.
They are both too tough for me to enjoy playing with. I hate games where people lose their tempers in this way – it's so witless. In fact they are not my kind at all. I cannot discuss blood affinity to beasts for instance, if I have to keep ducking to avoid the flat-irons and the saucepans. And I shall never see sex in trees, sex in the running brooks, sex in stones and sex in everything. The number of things that are really phallic, from fountain pen fillers onwards! But I shall have my revenge one of these days – I suggested to Lawrence that he should call his cottage "The Phallus" and Frieda thought it was a very good idea. It's lunchtime already and here is the pasty looming through the mist with a glimmering egg on a tray. (Katherine Mansfield, Letters and Journals, Penguin Modern Classics 1977: 76-77)
Katherine Mansfield was born in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1888 and came to England for the latter part of her education. Her first collection, In a German Pension – which she later disowned and begged Murry not to reissue – appeared in 1911 to considerable acclaim. She contracted TB in 1917 and spent most of her life thereafter travelling in Europe seeking (to no avail) to mend her health. Her second collection, Bliss, came out in 1921 and was followed, a year later, by The Garden Party. She died of a catastrophic haemorrhage in Fontainebleau in 1923.
As the eminent Australian novelist (and sometime MBM screenwriter) Christina Stead (you may have read her wonderful book The Man Who Loved Children) notes in her introduction to the Penguin edition of Mansfield's letters and journals:
"D.H. Lawrence used to say [according to Frieda] that Katherine Mansfield's nearest literary relation was Dickens – the Dickens who pounces quick and sharp on funny details and by a slight (often satirical) exaggeration, and by the repetition of certain magically comic phrases, expands an insignificant scene or event until it becomes unforgettably significant." How spot-on is that?
Stead also notes: "There is no reason why her performance, had she lived, should not have outstripped that of Forster and Woolf: and one is not in the least surprised to discover that on hearing the news of her death Virginia Woolf, who in the published version of her diary is only recorded throwing Bliss across the room exclaiming "She can't write!", confided to the same diary "I was jealous of her writing. The only writing I have ever been jealous of". (I sometimes suspect that what Woolf found frustrating was Mansfield's absolute mastery of wit – which was never Virginia's strong point. Just a thought ...)
Stead also notes that "Leonard Woolf recalled in his autobiography, describing [Mansfield] sitting upright on the edge of a chair telling stories "with not a shadow of a gleam of a smile on her mask-like face, the extraordinary funniness of the story ... increased by the flashes of astringent wit."
Wit, I would say, is not the easiest thing to turn into high art – but Mansfield succeeds.
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