ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

I came across All Sorts of Lives, Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Risking Everything,  via Brona’s review of Claire Tomlin’s biography — both books published to coincide with the anniversary of the death of New Zealand’s best-known author Katherine Mansfield in 1923.

I had already read a Kathleen Jones’ wonderful biography Katherine Mansfield The Storyteller (2010), not to mention C.K. Stead’s novelisation Mansfield, (2004), but I do like a literary analysis of an author’s writing, as long as it’s not so scholarly that I feel out of my depth. Or that I have to Make An Effort instead of just enjoying myself.

Well, I did have to Make a Bit of An Effort with Harman’s book, because although I’ve read Mansfield’s collections and her novella…

• In a German Pension (1911), 
• The Garden Party (1922), and
• The Aloe (published posthumously in 1930),

… I hadn’t read all the short stories that Harman explores and so I had to engage in the pleasurable task of finding them online and reading them.

Chapter One starts with How Pearl Button was Kidnapped (1912), and here it is — online at the Katherine Mansfield Society’s site —  if you want to read it too.  It was first published under a nom-de-plume in the avant-garde monthly Rhythm which was edited by her husband-to-be John Middleton Murry but soon became a joint venture between them.  Apparently, as well as editing, KM wrote quite a bit for this journal: poems, fiction and book reviews but these were not always under her name because they didn’t want Rhythm to have ‘too much’ of her work in it.

Harman says that Pearl Button wasn’t identified as one of KM’s until it was included in a posthumous collection.  (Unless I missed it, Harman doesn’t say which one.  It’s in my 2007 Penguin Classics Collected Stories, which was first published by Constable in 1945, maybe that one?)  It’s not long — only about 1000 words —and it’s a story which would seem less disquieting without that word ‘kidnapped’ in its title.  Pearl, playing in her front garden, is beguiled into joining a couple of women who take her for a long walk, and then a ride in a cart down to the sea which she has never seen before.  She has a lovely time.  She is cuddled, and carried, and fed treats.  Nobody gets cross when she spills food on her clothes, and she is made a fuss of because her new ‘dark’ friends are enchanted by her blonde curls. She is never frightened at all, and it is not until a crowd of little blue men arrive to take her back where she belongs, that the reader is made aware that there’s been a hue-and-cry over her disappearance and that the little blue men knew exactly where to find her.  As Harman says, the story relies heavily on withholding all sorts of information…

The location is exotic but not specified; the protagonist is guileless yet unreliable; the plot develops but isn’t in any ordinary sense resolved.  We are told the story entirely from the point of view of Pearl, a child of about three years old, who has been left to look after herself while her mother is busy working. (p.18)

Harman notes that this is an early work, of an unsubtle kind of simplicity and has the air of an experiment, or fragment of something bigger.  

But the cleverness of the story, and the thing that Mansfield learned to exploit more effectively later, is in the manipulation of the point of view.  In ‘Pearl Button’ she is using what is (now) called ‘free indirect discourse’ or a ‘close third person’ voice, that is, writing as if the narrator is passing on a character’s experiences and thoughts, but not judging them. Or not appearing to judge them, for of course there’s always space between the author and the narrator in which to plant doubts and ironies; that’s what the space is for. (p.19)

The reader’s doubt about Pearl’s delightful day arises because of that word in the title.

From there, Harman goes on to explore the biographical origins of the themes of Otherness, belonging and an awakening sensuality that permeate Mansfield’s fiction.

The Tiredness of Rosabel (1908) is the next story. (You can read it at the KM Society’s site.)  This was a story written in NZ before KM had arrived in London in 1908.  It features a young milliner returning to her dreary rented room after a difficult day.  She is wet, cold and hungry, having spent her ‘tea money’ on some violets — a fanciful gesture triggered by a couple who come to the shop to buy a hat.  She envies their loving relationship, and though it turns out that he’s a sleaze who makes a suggestive remark to her, she spends her lonely evening fantasising about him.

It is, as Harman says, an unconventional story where not much happens, but again it’s the narrative PoV that’s interesting.  Rosabel’s thoughts are a mixture of the conscious and the half-formed, the latter suggested through a mesh of interconnected symbols, many of which allude to consumerism and sensuality, reinforcing that Rosabel is not likely to be able to indulge in any kind of luxuries and that her fantasy of a generous lover is just that.

If these effects in this story — the time shifts, the ‘interior’ action, the double-mindedness — seem unremarkable to us today, it’s worth remembering that it was composed a decade before D.H. Lawrence spoke of ‘apparent formlessness’, or May Sinclair applied the term ‘stream of consciousness’ to the latest modern fiction. It was two years before the date when ‘human character changed’, according to Virginia Woolf, and the ‘smashing and the crashing began’ in the arts. (p.45)

KM was only a teenager in NZ when she wrote this story which expresses, perhaps, her anxieties about whether she could live independently in London. (Fears which turned out to be well-grounded because of the miserly allowance provided by her disapproving father.) She hadn’t read the Russians then, or had much published, and she was still in the relative cultural isolation of the Antipodes.  BTW Harman tackles the debate about the dating of this story: faced with four flights up to her room, Rosabel wishes there were an ‘electric staircase like the one at Earl’s Court’, and scholars who like to fuss about such things say that there was no ‘electric staircase’ staircase at Earl’s Court until 1911.  Harman demurs: there was one at the Earl’s Court Exhibition from 1901, and KM probably saw it when she was a schoolgirl on her first trip to England.

The next story also has tiredness in the title, and I’d read it.  ‘The Child Who Was Tired’ is in my copy of In a German Pension and also in The Collected Stories.  It was KM’s entry into publication in book form, because the editor of The New Age liked it so much in 1910 that he published it immediately and followed it up with more stories of life among the patrons of a Bavarian spa, which became known and enjoyed by many of us in the collection In a German Pension. In the increasingly anti-German atmosphere of the years leading up to the war, the way the collection poked fun at stereotypical Germans may have helped propel it to a new edition in 1914.

We read it differently today, and KM herself was embarrassed by it, because it represented a phase of youthful bitterness and crude cynicism. Some critics today note a resemblance to a Chekhov story called ‘Spat’ khochetsia’ (Sleepy, or Sleepy-head’, and they suspect that she disowned the collection to cover up what was either derivative or outright theft. Harman deals with this in depth…which is probably of more interest to scholars.

‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ (1920) is a longer story.  It’s about 18,000 words and you can read it here at the KM website. It’s about two middle-aged spinsters suddenly freed from their domineering father, and not knowing how to behave in their new found freedom.  It is, as Harman says, a depiction of what we know call coercive control, not unlike the characters that populate Elizabeth Harrower’s fiction. KM knew about a father’s power, but she wasn’t above exercising it herself in her relationship with the long-suffering Ida Baker, who cared for KM in practical ways throughout the last years of her life and got very little thanks for it.

Alas, I didn’t get to finish this absorbing book because there are eight reserves on it at the library and they won’t let me renew it.  When the enthusiasm dies down, I’ll borrow it again.

Author: Claire Harman
Title: All Sorts of Lives, Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Risking Everything
Publisher: Chatto and Windus, 2023
ISBN: 9781784744779, pbk., 295 pages including Acknowledgements, a list of Illustrations, a Bibliography, notes and an Index.
Source: Bayside Library