‘I feel as though I were living in a world of strange beings—do you?’
(Edna speaking for all of us, in ‘Something Childish but Very Natural’)

And years passed. Perhaps the war is long since over—there is no village outside at all—the streets are quiet under the grass. I have an idea this is the sort of thing one will do on the very last day of all—sit in an empty café and listen to a clock ticking until—.
(Vision of the end)

This is the third of three blog posts dealing with the Oxford University Press volume, ‘Selected Stories by Katherine Mansfield’. In posts one and two I summarised the stories (stories 1 to 15 in post one, 16 to 33 in post 2). In this third blog post I look at some themes and images which recur throughout the stories.

Skies

Mansfield likes skies. No matter where they’re set (New Zealand, London, Paris), and whether she’s among the posh upper classes or farm hands or the shabby genteel, all her stories include some reference to, some description of, the sky. After a while I looked out for the sky description in each story and came to wonder why they were so ubiquitous. Maybe Mansfield was always looking up to the sky and wishing to escape the dreary human scene. Or it’s a symbol of wishing to escape the fragility of her increasingly ill body into something eternal and transcendent.

All that day the heat was terrible. The wind blew close to the ground; it rooted among the tussock grass, slithered along the road, so that the white pumice dust swirled in our faces, settled and sifted over us and was like a dry-skin itching for growth on our bodies… Hundreds of larks shrilled; the sky was slate colour, and the sound of the larks reminded me of slate pencils scraping over its surface.

It was half-past two in the afternoon. The sun hung in the faded blue sky like a burning mirror, and away beyond the paddocks the blue mountains quivered and leapt like sea.
(Millie)

Although it was so brilliantly fine – the blue sky powdered with gold and great spots of light like white wine splashed over the Jardins Publiques – Miss Brill was glad that she had decided on her fur. The air was motionless, but when you opened your mouth there was just a faint chill, like a chill from a glass of iced water before you sip, and now and again a leaf came drifting–from nowhere, from the sky…
(Miss Brill)

The train had flung behind the roofs and chimneys. They were swinging into the country, past little black woods and fading fields and pools of water shining under an apricot evening sky.

Behind the rotunda the slender trees with yellow leaves down drooping, and through them just a line of sea, and beyond the blue sky with gold-veined clouds.
(Miss Brill)

Out of the smudgy little window you could see an immense expanse of sad-looking sky, and whenever there were clouds they looked very worn, old clouds, frayed at the edges, with holes in them, or dark stains like tea.
(Ma Parker)

It had been raining all the morning, late summer rain, warm, heavy, quick, and now the sky was clear, except for a long tail of little clouds, like duckings, sailing over the forest.
(Mr and Mrs Dove)

When he looked up again there were fields, and beasts standing for shelter under the dark trees. A wide river, with naked children splashing in the shallows, glided into sight and was gone again. The sky shone pale, and one bird drifted high like a dark fleck in a jewel.
(Marriage à la Mode)

Posh people

Katherine was born into a socially prominent, upper-middle class New Zealand family. Distant relatives included novelists and painters. She was sent to an elite school. All this explains the confidently upper middle-class tone, settings and characters of many of her stories.

‘My word, Laura, you do look stunning!’ said Laurie. ‘What an absolutely topping hat!’
(The Garden Party)

But at the same time, this privileged world is subject to all kinds of underminings, velleities and subtleties. Although the incidents described appear, on the face of it, very straightforward, they are always subtly undermined by, inflected by… by what exactly? By the hidden depths of life, of sensibility, of meanings which are sometimes only hinted at or, in some of the most delirious stories, often don’t make sense.

Working class people

But in other stories she just as confidently captures the speech rhythms of the servant class. Something that interested me was how a servant in 1890s New Zealand (in, say, ‘Prelude’) sounds just like a servant sounds in Virginia Woolf 30 years later, or in Noel Coward’s plays which include working class characters (like Cavalcade or This Happy Breed). Did the working classes all across the white Empire have the same stock phraseology and rhythm? Did they all sound the same?

Here’s Mansfield impersonating the voice of Alice the serving girl. I’ve highlighted in bold the working class locutions.

Oh, Alice was wild. She wasn’t one to mind being told, but there was something in the way Miss Beryl had of speaking to her that she couldn’t stand. Oh, that she couldn’t. It made her curl up inside, as you might say, and she fair trembled.

Is this how the proles actually spoke? Or how they speak in books i.e. was it a convention? I suspect it is the phraseology and tone they used because it’s the same in all the talkies from the 1930s and ’40s. Unless that, also, is a convention?

Short sentences

Tackling Mansfield’s prose style is too massive a task for me. I’ll just register the importance of short sentences in (some of) her stories. On the whole her sentences are not long and incantatory like Conrad or compiled into long, repetitive paragraphs like Lawrence. Quite the opposite: they are mostly to-the-point and practical, sometimes deliberately curt.

An awkward little silence fell. Mrs Sheridan fidgeted with her cup.

Should she go back even now? No, too late. This was the house. It must be.

Not all the sentences are this short, of course. But it’s often these short sentences which anchor the texts. They are like rivets. Bolts. Nailing the fleeting perceptions down like canvas in a wind.

Like painting

Often Mansfield’s prose consists of individual lines which are like individual brushstrokes, like elements of a painting, and of a very post-impressionist painting at that. She takes realistic subjects but does them with wild colouring, as if by the German Expressionists or the French Fauves.

Here is just one paragraph from ‘An Indiscreet Journey’, which I’ve split up into its separate sentences so you can see how distinct and freestanding each sentence is, each one like a broad vivid brushstroke.

Through an open door I can see a kitchen, and the cook in a white coat breaking eggs into a bowl and tossing the shells into a corner.

The blue and red coats of the men who are eating hang upon the walls. Their short swords and belts are piled upon chairs.

Heavens! what a noise. The sunny air seemed all broken up and trembling with it.

A little boy, very pale, table to table, taking the orders, and poured me out a glass of purple coffee.

Ssssb, came from the eggs. They were in a pan.

The woman rushed from behind the counter and began to help the boy. Toute de suite, tout’ suite! she chirruped to the loud customers.

There came a clatter of plates and poppop of corks being drawn.

The purple coffee feels very Fauve, as do the blue and red and white coats. They remind me of the big broad vivid brushstrokes of the extravagantly anti-realist German Expressionists.

There are many, many, many other descriptions where you notice the presence of colour. They’re generally bright primary colours, although this is partly a function of the limitation of the English language. English has hundreds of words or phrases for colours, but most writers use only a handful, only ten or so. Which is a bit boring. But Mansfield consistently embeds these ten or so colours in wonderfully vivid phraseology.

There was a lovely pink light over everything. He saw it glowing in the river, and the people walking towards him had pink faces and pink hands.

Sound effects

Note, also, in the extract I broke up into individual sentences, Mansfield’s sensitivity to sounds: Ssssb go the eggs, poppop go the corks. And the accumulated noise is so loud that it makes the air break up and tremble with it. So as well as colour, in all her stories Mansfield is very alert to sounds and noises.

The clock ticked to a soothing lilt, C’est ca, c’est ca. In the kitchen the waiting-boy was washing up. I heard the ghostly chatter of the dishes.

And the point of the following paragraph is the way it leads up to the onomatopoeic description of the train sound at the end.

Outside, stars shone between wispy clouds, and the moon fluttered like a candle flame over a pointed spire. The shadows of the dark plume-like trees waved on the white houses. Not a soul to be seen. No sound to be heard but the Hsh! Hsh! of a far-away train, like a big beast shuffling in its sleep.
(An Indiscreet Journey)

Same happens in this paragraph:

It had been nice in the Ladies’ Cabin. The stewardess was so kind and changed her money for her and tucked up her feet. She lay on one of the hard pink-sprigged couches and watched the other passengers, friendly and natural, pinning their hats to the bolsters, taking off their boots and skirts, opening dressing-cases and arranging mysterious rustling little packages, tying their heads up in veils before lying down. Thud, thud, thud, went the steady screw of the steamer.
(The Little Governess)

Transcribing sounds

She doesn’t just describe sounds but goes to some lengths to enact them, to directly transcribe them into language. As in the first of these sentences in ‘The Man without a Temperament’:

‘Hoo-e-zip-zoo-oo!’ sounded the lift. The iron cage clanged open. Light dragging steps sounded across the hall, coming towards him…

Or:

Over a bed of scarlet waxen flowers some big black insects ‘zoom-zoomed‘.

And as the man without a temperament comes across some old Italian women in his walk:

At a fountain ahead of him two old hags were beating linen. As he passed them they squatted back on their haunches, stared, and then their ‘A-hak-kak-kak!’ with the slap, slap, of the stone on the linen sounded after him.

And the sound of the landscape itself:

‘Ah-Aah!’ sounded the sleepy sea. And from the bush there came the sound of little streams flowing, quickly, lightly, slipping between the smooth stones, gushing into ferny basins and out again; and there was the splashing of big drops on large leaves, and something else–what was it?–a faint stirring and shaking, the snapping of a twig and then such silence that it seemed some one was listening.

For the duration of reading one of her stories, you become as sensitised to light, colour and sound as she evidently was, and it’s marvellous.

Pings

Mansfield likes the word ‘ping’. In ‘Mr and Mrs Dove’ the protagonist goes for a walk after the rain.

It had been raining all the morning, late summer rain, warm, heavy, quick, and now the sky was clear, except for a long tail of little clouds, like ducklings, sailing over the forest. There was just enough wind to shake the last drops off the trees; one warm star splashed on his hand. Ping!

In ‘Psychology’, the tense encounter between the passionate friends who are trying to ignore their physical attraction is expressed in pregnant silences during which inanimate objects make ironic noises, including the tell-tale ping:

The clock struck six merry little pings and the fire made a soft flutter.

Listen to these sounds in ‘The Daughters of the Colonel’:

The blinds were down, a cloth hung over the mirror, a sheet hid the bed; a huge fan of white paper filled the fireplace. Constantia timidly put out her hand; she almost expected a snowflake to fall. Josephine felt a queer tingling in her nose, as if her nose was freezing. Then a cab klop-klopped over the cobbles below, and the quiet seemed to shake into little pieces.

A perfect fountain of bubbling notes shook from the barrel-organ, round, bright notes, carelessly scattered.

Some little sparrows, young sparrows they sounded, chirped on the window-ledge. Yeep–eyeep–yeep. But Josephine felt they were not sparrows, not on the window-ledge. It was inside her, that queer little crying noise. Yeep–eyeep–yeep. Ah, what was it crying, so weak and forlorn?

In ‘An Indiscreet Journey’:

I ran down the echoing stairs—strange they sounded, like a piano flicked by a sleepy housemaid.

In ‘Prelude’:

She rolled herself up into a round but she did not go to sleep. From all over the house came the sound of steps. The house itself creaked and popped. Loud whispering voices came from downstairs. Once she heard Aunt Beryl’s rush of high laughter, and once she heard a loud trumpeting from Burnell blowing his nose.

And:

A blow-fly buzzed, a fan of whitey steam came out of the kettle, and the lid kept up a rattling jig as the water bubbled. The clock ticked in the warm air, slow and deliberate, like the click of an old woman’s knitting needle, and sometimes–for no reason at all, for there wasn’t any breeze–the blind swung out and back, tapping the window.

Mansfield’s world is alive with wonderful, subtle sounds.

Silence

Sound is often contrasted with absolute silence, to the intensification of both:

In waves, in clouds, in big round whirls the dust comes stinging, and with it little bits of straw and chaff and manure. There is a loud roaring sound from the trees in the gardens, and standing at the bottom of the road outside Mr. Bullen’s gate she can hear the sea sob: “Ah! . . . Ah! . . . Ah-h!” But Mr. Bullen’s drawing-room is as quiet as a cave.
(The Wind Blows)

Something similar in ‘At the Bay’:

Ah-Aah! sounded the sleepy sea. And from the bush there came the sound of little streams flowing, quickly, lightly, slipping between the smooth stones, gushing into ferny basins and out again; and there was the splashing of big drops on large leaves, and something else–what was it?–a faint stirring and shaking, the snapping of a twig and then such silence that it seemed some one was listening.

Voices

And human voices, of course, are included in this world of sounds, of strange sounds, of common sounds which have become strange, alien and intensified:

Her voice was quite calm, but it was not her voice any more. It was like the voice you might imagine coming out of a tiny, cold sea-shell swept high and dry at last by the salt tide…
(Je ne parle pas francais)

Their laughing voices charged with excitement beat against the glassed-in verandah like birds, and a strange saltish smell came from the basket.
(The Man without a Temperament)

Or the other, non-verbal sounds that people make:

Wheeling, tumbling, swooping, the laughter of the Honeymoon Couple dashed against the glass of the verandah.
(The Man without a Temperament)

At last [Fenella] was inside [her bedclothes], and while she lay there panting, there sounded from above a long, soft whispering, as though some one was gently, gently rustling among tissue paper to find something. It was grandma saying her prayers…
(The Voyage)

Smells

Once you become aware of it, you realise that all the senses are intensified in Mansfield’s stories. Along with vividly coloured sights and dramatic sounds go strongly flavoured smells.

From the corner by the gate there came the smell of swedes, a great stack of them, wet, rank coloured.

Frau Brechenmacher’s wedding reeks of beer. Cafés smell of cooked cabbage. Rooms are musty. Flowers have powerful aromas. Women’s hair smells of shampoo. Smell is maybe the most fragile sense and the one most overlooked in fiction but Mansfield is as alert to smells, scents and aromas as she is to the world of sounds.

She was softer than a bed and she had a nice smell—a smell that made you bury your head and breathe and breathe it.
(Pearl Button)

The café slowly filled. It grew very warm. Blue smoke mounted from the tables and hung about the haymaker’s hat in misty wreaths. There was a suffocating smell of onion soup and boots and damp cloth.
(An Indiscreet Journey)

I leaned over the table smelling the violets, until the little corporal’s hand closed over mine.
(An Indiscreet Journey)

But Kezia edged up to the storeman. He towered beside her big as a giant and he smelled of nuts and new wooden boxes.
(Prelude)

The drawing-room was full of sweet smelling, silky, rustling ladies and men in black with funny tails on their coats—like beetles.
(Sun and Moon)

How strong the jonquils smelled in the warm room.
(Bliss)

Her room, a Bloomsbury top-floor back, smelled of soot and face powder and the paper of fried potatoes she brought in for supper the night before.
(Picture)

It had been raining—the first real spring rain of the year had fallen—a bright spangle hung on everything, and the air smelled of buds and moist earth.
(Feuille d’Album)

He leaned towards her, and she smelled the warm, stinging scent of the orange peel.
(Dill Pickle)

He began to imagine a series of enchanting scenes which ended with his latest, most charming pupil putting her bare, scented arms round his neck, and covering him with her long, perfumed hair.
(Mr. Reginald Peacock’s Day)

God isn’t the ‘stinging scent’ of the orange peel brilliant? She had a Shakespearian ability for amazing perceptions expressed in astonishingly vivid phrases.

Personifications

Mansfield is restrained in her use of them but many of the stories have at least one telling instance of personification, when an object is given the quality of a person or being.

A shout from the card-players made him turn sharply, and crash! over went the bottle, spilling on the table, the floor—smash! to tinkling atoms. An amazed silence. Through it the drip-drip of the wine from the table onto the floor. It looked very strange dropping so slowly, as though the table were crying.
(An Indiscreet Journey)

She stared at Miss Moss, and the dirty dark red rose under the brim of her hat looked, somehow, as though it shared the blow with her, and was crushed, too.
(Pictures)

There was the great blind bed, with his coat flung across it like some headless man saying his prayers.

The train seemed glad to have left the station. With a long leap it sprang into the dark.
(The Little Governess)

The train began to slow down. The engine gave a long shrill whistle. They were coming to a town. Taller houses, pink and yellow, glided by, fast asleep behind their green eyelids, and guarded by the poplar trees that quivered in the blue air as if on tiptoes, listening.
(The Little Governess)

They sat outside the house in long chairs under coloured parasols. Only Bobby Kane lay on the turf at Isabel’s feet. It was dull, stifling; the day drooped like a flag.

‘Cyril says his father is still very fond of meringues, father dear.’
‘Eh?’ said Grandfather Pinner, curving his hand like a purple meringue-shell over one ear.

Pat the handy-man sprawled in his little room behind the kitchen. His sponge-bag, coat and trousers hung from the door-peg like a hanged man.

A little less dramatically:

Here and there on a rounded wood-pile, that was like the stalk of a huge black mushroom, there hung a lantern, but it seemed afraid to unfurl its timid, quivering light in all that blackness; it burned softly, as if for itself.

All the world comes alive around her, dancing, smelling, dropping, in vivid colours and a huge variety of subtle sounds.

Brilliant phrases

And then there are just scores and scores of brilliant phrasing you want to wrap up and carry around with you forever.

There was the gardener’s cottage, with the dark ilex-tree beside it. A wet, blue thumb of transparent smoke hung above the chimney. It didn’t look real.

Rain was falling, and with the rain it seemed the dark came too, spinning down like ashes. There was a cold bitter taste in the air, and the new-lighted lamps looked sad. Sad were the lights in the houses opposite. Dimly they burned as if regretting something.

Away we jolted and rattled like three little dice that life had decided to have a fling with.

Mansfield was a very great writer indeed, far greater, in my opinion, than Virginia Woolf whose stream-of-consciousness technique is highly advanced but whose actual phrase-making is often quite boring. Mansfield had an ability to wrap an endless number of brilliantly acute perceptions in staggeringly inventive new phrases, in paragraph after paragraph, that exceeds most of the writers I’ve ever read.

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Credit

‘Selected Stories’ by Katherine Mansfield was published by Oxford University Press in 2002. I read the 2008 reissued edition.

Related links

• List of Katherine Mansfield’s short stories
• Katherine Mansfield short stories online
• A Portrait of Katherine Mansfield (documentary on YouTube)
• A short vivid summary by John Espey

Related reviews

• Virginia Woolf reviews