Ping went the door.
(Mansfield’s interest in sounds)
‘Oh,’ she cried, ‘I am so miserable–so frightfully miserable. I know that I’m silly and spiteful and vain; I’m always acting a part. I’m never my real self for a moment.’
(So many of her characters feel like they’re acting a part)
‘Nobody understands me. 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’)
Open this book anywhere, start reading any one of these wonderful short stories, and you know at once that you are in the presence of something very special. Something edgy, lyrical, disconcerting, always moving beyond what you expected, opening doors where you didn’t even know there were walls. Katherine Mansfield is a magical writer whose stories overflow with subtle but overwhelming power.
She wrote about 100 short stories in her short life. This Oxford University Press paperback brings together 33 of them. This post contains a short biography then my summaries of the first 15 stories. In a subsequent blog post I summarise the remaining 18 stories, then in a third blog post I look at some of the themes and images which recur in them.
Biography
Katherine Mansfield was born in Wellington, the capital of New Zealand, in 1888. Her parents were affluent and she was sent to a good private school. In 1903 she was sent to London to be educated at a private school. From 1903 to 1906 she travelled in Europe and then returned to New Zealand for a year. Unsurprisingly, on her return she found New Zealand life provincial and her family stifling, and so in 1908 she returned to London, aged 19. Her father gave her an annual allowance of £100 for the rest of her life, but she often lived in some poverty.
In England Mansfield was introduced to the society hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell and the Bloomsbury Circle, the Woolfs, the Stracheys and all the rest of them. She complained that, with their characteristic snobbery, they treated her as an outsider. She had a closer if challenging relationship with that other outsider, D.H. Lawrence. They eventually fell out, as everyone did with Lawrence.
She began a relationship with the literary editor John Middleton Murry, with her leaving him 1911 and again in 1913, although they ended up getting married in 1918. It is widely agreed that the characters Gudrun and Gerald in D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love are based on Mansfield and Murry, although I’ve read Murry’s quote that if Lawrence thought Gudrun was a portrait of Katherine, it just went to prove that he didn’t know or understand her at all.
Mansfield’s first collection, ‘In A German Pension’, was published in 1911 directly resulting from her stay in Germany. During the Great War, in 1915, her brother Leslie was killed, triggering thoughts, poems and stories nostalgic for her girlhood and family. In 1917, she was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis and she had her first lung haemorrhage in March 1918. She went to stay with friends at Looe in Cornwall in the hope of improving her health. It was here that the American painter Anne Estelle Rice painted a brilliant portrait of her:
Portrait Of Katherine Mansfield by Anne Estelle Rice (1918)
As soon as the war was over she was advised to go to a warmer climate and from 1919 onwards she spent every winter abroad. She travelled round France seeking a cure. ‘Bliss and Other Stories’ was published in 1920. In October 1922 she abandoned traditional medicine and moved to Fontainebleau to stay at G.I. Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. On 9 January 1923, she suffered a pulmonary haemorrhage after running up a flight of stairs and died within the hour. She was just 34.
In the last few years of her life, Mansfield was a prolific writer and much of her work remained unpublished at her death. Her widower, Murry, took on the task of editing and publishing it in two further volumes of short stories, ‘The Doves’ Nest’ in 1923, and ‘Something Childish’ in 1924.
The OUP edition
This Oxford University Press edition is edited with introduction and notes by Angela Smith and was published in 2002. Of Mansfield’s 100 or so stories, it selects 33.
1. Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding (1910)
Frau Brechenmacher is the wife of the village postman, Herr Brechenmacher, and mother of his five children. It is winter and snow lies thick on the ground. It’s the end of the working day and the pair are late to a wedding taking place in the Gasthaus. Having helped him into his best suit and boots, the pair hasten to the festivities. Inside is warm and packed and noisy and smelling of beer. Frau Brechenmacher plumps into a chair beside friends Frau Rupp and Frau Ledermann. It is like Breughel, a vigorous celebration of north European peasant life and manners. The bride, Theresa, has brought her baby, born out of wedlock, to the wedding.
Frau Brechenmacher turned round and looked towards the bride’s mother. She never took her eyes off her daughter, but wrinkled her brown forehead like an old monkey, and nodded now and again very solemnly. Her hands shook as she raised her beer mug, and when she had drunk she spat on the floor and savagely wiped her mouth with her sleeve.
The village gossips tell our Frau that the man the frail young bride got pregnant by only stopped a couple of nights in the village. He was a travelling button salesman. The dance music makes Frau Brechenmacher feel young again and she wishes she could dance, too. Then things quieten down for her husband to make a speech and present the happy couple with a present but as the crowd roar and laugh she has an oppressive feeling that everyone is laughing at her.
They make it back to their house alright and Frau Brechenmacher feeds her man then checks on the children and then, in the last brutal lines, undresses and gets into bed ready for the onslaught of his big drunk drooling husband.
Then even the memory of the wedding faded quite. She lay down on the bed and put her arm across her face like a child who expected to be hurt as Herr Brechenmacher lurched in.
2. The Woman at the Store (1912)
In the New Zealand outback (apparently referred to in New Zealand as the ‘backblocks’) three travellers on horseback, Hin and Jo and the unnamed woman narrator, after a long hot ride arrive at a remote farmstead. They’re greeted by a half-mad wizened lady holding a gun and tending a 6-year-old girl. She says her husband is off sheep-shearing and asks them to ride on but they stop, hitch a tent and bathe in the creek.
Jo talks the woman round to inviting them up to the house for drinks, they all get slowly drunk while the woman moans and feels sorry for herself, taking her frustration out on beating the child almost whenever she speaks. The woman has been seduced by Jo and they’ve reached an arrangement to sleep together. Slowly a storm comes up and breaks overhead with lightning and rain. The woman invites them to get their stuff from the tent and bunk down in the store, alongside the girl, while she and Jo share the bed.
All through the afternoon and evening drinking the girl (clearly a bit mad herself) has been sketching and drawing. Now, angry at her ma, she draws the drawing her ma threatens to shoot her for. She shows it to Hin and Jo who see it’s a drawing of a woman shooting a man then digging a grave: the husband she was moaning about and complaining had gone off shearing, she must have shot him!
Hin and the narrator stay up all night terrified and as soon as dawn comes, strike camp and pack their horses. Jo announces he’s going to stay on with her but the other two can’t wait to put distance between them and the murder store. A story packed with utterly believable detail and then with a mule kick in the tail.
Commentary
It is fascinating to learn from Angela Smith’s introduction that Mansfield refused to allow this story to be reproduced during her lifetime. This is because that ‘mule kick in the tail’, that last-minute punchline, is precisely the standard short story format which she was hoping to escape or move beyond, towards stories with less predictable structures, which make their impact through vivid details and puzzling, fugitive moments.
3. How Pearl Button was Kidnapped (1912)
Little Pearl is stolen from outside her house by two plump Indigenous women and walks miles to their camp where everyone is delighted with her and pets her, then they load her up into a cart, one among many horsedrawn wagons (‘a green cart with a red pony and a green pony’) and they trek for miles through the bush till they reach a bluff overlooking the sea and the women take Pearl down to the beach and she digs holes and frolics in the warm little surf until she hears whistles and men in blue coming running towards them. It is the police come to ‘rescue’ her.
4. Millie (1913)
New Zealand: Millie is the working class wife of Sid, a labourer in a rural farming community, waiting for him and some other men who have gone in search of Harrison, an Englishman who has supposedly shot and killed a neighbour, Mr Williamson. Millie hears a noise and finds a wounded man lying in the garden. When she sees he is little more than a boy she stops being scared and, despite realising that this is probably Harrison the alleged murderer, she becomes sympathetic and helps him, and then hides him, promising that he will go free. The men return home, eat, and settle down to sleep, with Millie on tenterhooks about Harrison in his hiding place – until a neighbour’s dog starts barking, the men rouse and go outside, only to see Harrison saddled up and go galloping through the compound and off. The men set off in pursuit and Millie, who had been so sympathetic and nursing, is swept up in the thrill of the chase, runs into the street in her nightdress and yells after the men to catch him and shoot him:
‘A—ah! Arter ‘im, Sid! A—a—a—h! Ketch him, Willie. Go it! Go it! A—ah, Sid! Shoot ‘im down. Shoot ‘im!’
A brilliant evocation of the susceptibility, the deep irrationality, of human nature.
5. Something Childish but Very Natural (1914)
Henry is not yet 18 and likes books. Browsing in a bookshop at the railway station he is so enchanted with a poem titled ‘Something Childish but very Natural’ that he nearly misses his train, jumping into the nearest carriage as it pulls away, where he gets talking to a girl, really a girl, 16-year-old Edna, and feels an overwhelming attraction to her. The next Saturday he seeks her out at the station and they get on the train and talk again.
Somehow they have both been seized by a tremendous but somehow naive friendship, attachment, understanding. They both feel it and are shy and laugh.
Their eyes were not frightened—they looked at each other page with a sort of desperate calmness. If only their bodies would not tremble so stupidly!…
‘I feel as if I’d known you for years.’
She tells him her mother is Hungarian and wild and rebellious and she shares her character, completely unlike her small quiet father. He asks her to take off her hat and let down her hair and they both marvel at how natural their intimate friendship seems:
‘My God!’ he cried, ‘what fools people are! All the little pollies that you know and that I know. Just look at you and me. Here we are—that’s all there is to be said. I know about you and you know about me—we’ve just found each other—quite simply—just by being natural. That’s all life is—something childish and very natural. Isn’t it?’
They exchange love letters. One Saturday he buys tickets and takes her to a concert. Here he becomes really vexed because she won’t ever let him touch her, won’t let him touch her hair or take her hand, won’t let him help her off with her coat, won’t let them jointly hold the concert program. He is desperate to touch her, feel that she is real, and she is just as anxious, almost panic-stricken, at the thought of being touched, and after the concert, in the square, she bursts into tears and says it tortures her that he is upset at her refusal to let him touch her, let alone kiss her, but she just can’t: she feels that if they did that they would cross a line, it would no longer be childish and innocent, they would be hiding something from their parents, they would no longer, somehow, be free.
They wander London until they come to a suburb down by the river (Brentford? Kew?) and fantasise about living in one of the riverside cottages. Henry naively says they can live without money, they just need each other and faith.
Cut to a new scene of them in a wood, Henry lying on a bed of leaves ‘faint with longing’ – it seems like he is sexually aroused and primed but, when he goes to find Edna he discovers her in a dell picking flowers, so he has to suppress himself in order not to spoil her sexless happiness.
As if in a dream, in a hallucination, they get up and walk for miles until they come to a village tea rooms whose owner asks if they know anyone who is interested in renting her sister’s cottage, so they go and inspect the cottage, in their dreamy idyll mode. Here she suddenly impulsively embraces him and tells him she’s been wanting him to kiss her all day. Well, there is the language of speech; she could say: ‘Kiss me’, but they are young and think everything happens by unspoken agreement.
In the last scene Henry is in the cottage impatiently waiting for Edna’s train to arrive so he can collect her and walk her back through the country lanes and their ideal life can continue. Only now does the text make it explicit that this is all a dream.
Henry thought he saw a big white moth flying down the road. It perched on the gate. No, it wasn’t a moth. It was a little girl in a pinafore. What a nice little girl, and he smiled in his sleep…
A young girl in a white pinafore comes down the road and hands him a telegram.
He laughed gently in the dream and opened it very carefully.
And we aren’t told what the telegram says but suddenly a web of darkness is thrown over the woods, the cottage and Henry – and that is the end of the story. How wonderful, lyrical, transporting and strange.
Colours
[Spring] had put a spangle in every colour… the black portfolio… her cheek and shoulder half hidden by a long wave of marigold-coloured hair… one little hand in a grey cotton glove… Henry noticed a silver bangle on the wrist… She wore a green coat… She bent her head to hide the red colour that flew in her cheeks… her grey eyes under the shadow of her hat and her eyebrows like two gold feathers… her throat was white… White smoke floated against the roof of the station—dissolved and came again in swaying wreaths… She pulled it round her shoulders like a cape of gold… A blue net of light hung over the streets and houses, and pink clouds floated in a pale sky… above his head the new leaves quivered like fountains of green water steeped in sunlight… Two little spots of colour like strawberries glowed on her cheeks… It was evening—the pale green sky was sprinkled with stars…
6. The Little Governess (1915)
This text vividly conveys the terror of travelling abroad as a small, vulnerable woman in a man’s world, presumably based on the lonely journey Mansfield took to Germany to have an abortion in 1911.
A small, shy young woman gets a job via an agency for governesses. It’s in Germany and the text describes her solo journey there from England. Basically she is terrified of everything. The Governess Bureau set the tone by telling her to lock all doors and not to speak to strangers. When her ship docks a big rough man asks where she’s headed then seizes her baggage and strides off before she can stop him. She struggles to keep up and when he finally delivers her to the right train platform, he is cross that she doesn’t tip him adequately. Then a group of rowdy men come shouting down the corridor and go into the next-door compartment, re-emerging to knock on her door and invite her to join them, with mock courtesy. ‘I wish it wasn’t night-time. I wish there was another woman in the carriage. I’m frightened of the men next door.’
The train bounds forward through the night and at the next station an old man is shown into her carriage. He is to be her downfall. He appears to be a courteous old man who tuts and frets about the rowdy blokes next door. Most of the text is devoted to the way he very slowly butters her up. When he discovers she’s going to Munich he offers to show her to her hotel and around the sights of Munich which he proceeds to do. The woman who is employing her as a governess isn’t due to meet her at her hotel till 6pm, so they have all day to get her settled in, then for the old man to reappear and take her round the sights.
With each new sight and lunch and treats, ice cream at a cafe and so on, she feels more relaxed in his company until, at the end of the afternoon, he makes his move and invites her back to his humble abode. This turns out to be down a dark alley and in a grubby house and a dingy apartment where he invites her to sit next to her on the sofa and next thing she knows has leaned over and kissed her on the lips!
Leaping up, she runs out the room and takes a cab back to the hotel but disaster has struck. It’s well past 6pm and, according to a porter, the woman offering her the job turned up at 6pm only to be told that she had gone swanning off with an older gentleman and hadn’t been seen since. The implication is that by being taken in by the old man, she has lost the position she came all this way to take up.
It sounds simple but as with all Mansfield, the story is riven by complicated dynamics and psychology which I haven’t had space to summarise. It is another small masterpiece.
7. An Indiscreet Journey (1915)
Like ‘Something Childish but Very Natural’ only more so, this is a fantasia, a fever dream, a wild, exaggerated, fanciful narrative which follows the first-person narrator as she dashes out of her Paris apartment, runs down into the Metro and catches a train to the main railway station, hurtles onto a train to X (it is never explained where this is). The narrative is full of fancy and whimsy.
I conjured up my sweetest early-morning smile and handed it with the papers. But the delicate thing fluttered against page the horn spectacles and fell.
But it is wartime and so the train and every station are packed with soldiers and Red Cross nurses and the train flies past fields full of flowers except they are graves with bunches of coloured ribbon attached. She arrives at the unnamed town and rushes into a buffet which is all hustle and bustle and colours and sounds.
A little boy, very pale, swung from 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 impatient voices. There came a clatter of plates and the poppop of corks being drawn.
From where she ran to another platform and jumped onto a smaller train. She has been invited to stay by her uncle and aunt. M. and Mme. Boiffard. Whimsy. Fantasia.
I smiled faintly, and tried to keep my eyes off her hat. She was quite an ordinary little woman, but she wore a black velvet toque, with an incredibly surprised looking sea-gull camped on the very top of it. Its round eyes, fixed on me so inquiringly, were almost too much to bear. I had a dreadful impulse to shoo it away, or to lean forward and inform her of its presence… Could the bird be there on purpose? I must not laugh… I must not laugh.
And indeed, the seagull starts interrogating the narrator, asking why she’s going to X at this perilous time (in the middle of a war)? The narrator passes a cursory passport control with two bumptious colonels and is taken by a corporal to a hotel with a cab which she takes with him, and they set off round the town, dropping off stuff, a parcel at the barracks, then onto a house which the corporal urges her to jump into and there are two figures who, she assumes, are her uncle and aunt.
In the next section she has been out walking and gotten lost. The fragility of her location, her bearings, of the aunt and uncle she’s never seen before – all feel highly experimental and modernist. And yet veined with wonderfully vivid descriptive phrases.
Already the village houses were sealed for the night behind big wooden shutters. Strange and mysterious they looked in the ragged drifting light and thin rain, like a company of beggars perched on the hill-side, their bosoms full of rich unlawful gold.
She is rescued by the waiter-boy who takes her to her favourite cafe which, as she takes a seat, turns into a big barn with strange wallpaper and the clatter of dishes being washed. For a moment the narrative gives up any pretence of being realistic.
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—.
‘What one will do on the very last day of all…’ Wow. Suddenly a massive idea. And then back to the cafe-barn where the pretty waiting-boy serves some orange drink but the bottle is knocked over, the liquid drips onto the floor. Then she finds herself in an extended conversation with two soldiers and the corporal, about trivia, about whether the English drink whiskey with their meals, a big drunk one with a black beard, a slighter one with blue eyes. Blue eyes insists on dragging them across the village to a bar, the Café des Amis, to drink what he swears is the finest drink, Mirabelle. The landlady is scandalised because it’s past the 8 o’clock curfew but she serves them anyway.
The patriarchy
So silly – men, the patriarchy, the war.
It was a hot little room completely furnished with two colonels seated at two tables. They were large grey-whiskered men with a touch of burnt red on their cheeks. Sumptuous and omnipotent they looked. One smoked what ladies love to call a heavy Egyptian cigarette, with a long creamy ash, the other toyed with a gilded pen. Their heads rolled on their tight collars, like big over-ripe fruits… ‘What’s this?’ said God I., querulously.
8. The Wind Blows (1915, revised 1920)
A wild wind is blowing, where? Across the island, New Zealand? The wind symbolises and echoes the turbulent heart of Matilda, the teenage girl protagonist who disobeys her mother, running out into the tearing wind in order to get to her music lesson with kind old, tweed-jacketed Mr Bullen. The turmoil is in her heart, too, because she has a crush on Mr Bullen and notices every aspect of his physical presence, the way he reaches across the shoulders of the piano student before her, the way his hands nearly touch hers, the way he sits close to her on the piano bench, and so on. Feverish teenage crush.
Finally the wind accompanies Matilda and her (male) friend, Bogie, when they walk down to the docks and watch a big old steamer pushing through the waves and, in a magical modernist touch, suddenly she and Bogie are adults, on just such a steamer returning to the island after years away.
Breath-taking and singled out for praise by Virginia Woolf, apparently.
9. Prelude
‘Prelude’ is a long piece, based on Mansfield’s memories of her family moving from the centre of Wellington to a country suburb in 1893 when Katherine was 5. It was originally the first chapter of a novel which she worked at off and on between 1915 and 1918, and which her widower, John Middleton Murry, edited and published in 1930 under the title ‘Aloe.’
It’s long and in 12 parts but the basic idea is simple enough: Stanley Burnell, his wife Linda, and their two children – Lottie, Kezia and Isabel – along with her mother, Grandma (Mrs Fairfield) and her sister (Aunt Beryl Fairfield) Fairfield, along with the servants (Pat, the Irish handyman and Alice, the servant girl with adenoids) are moving house in the slow laborious late-Victorian way of piling their belongings on a horse and cart. In the morning the husband goes off to work while the women supervise the loading of the cart, its journey to the new place and unpacking, while the children are left behind in the care of a fat friendly neighbour, Mrs Josephs (who happens to have a comically heavy cold). In the evening Fred the storeman returns with the cart to take the second and final load of belongings and collect the three young children.
The day’s wait, the eerie emptiness of the old home, the cart journey as night falls, the sights and smells of the new house, the arrival of morning and exciting new sights – are all seem through the children’s eyes with a magical freshness and vividness. The text has more than the usual amount of vivid similes and descriptions.
As she stood there, the day flickered out and dark came. With the dark crept the wind snuffling and howling. The windows of the empty house shook, a creaking came from the walls and floors, a piece of loose iron on the roof banged forlornly.
Bright stars speckled the sky and the moon hung over the harbour dabbling the waves with gold… ‘There comes the Picton boat,’ said the storeman, pointing to a little steamer all hung with bright beads.
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. Outside the window hundreds of black cats with yellow eyes sat in the sky watching her–but she was not frightened.
It wanted a few minutes to sunset. Everything stood motionless bathed in bright, metallic light and from the paddocks on either side there streamed the milky scent of ripe grass.
A strong theme is the adult women’s sense of entrapment. Linda (pregnant) daydreams about getting into a cart and just driving away from her family, leaving them without even a parting wave goodbye. Towards the end she has a passage where she seems to be thinking about them having sex and how she hates and fears those moments (‘When she had not quite screamed at the top of her voice: “You are killing me.”‘) And her sister, Aunt Beryl, wishes she wasn’t utterly dependent on Stanley and dreams of a phantom lover who will take her away from it all, the final section is a letter she writes to her friend, Nan Pym, full of disgruntlement and frustrated longing. Both of them want to be free…
10. Mr Reginald Peacock’s Day (1917)
A satirical portrait of a pompous music teacher, his tremendous self-regard, his flirtations with all his female students, his strained relationships with his son Adrian but especially his wife, who he considers has the inestimable privilege of living with an artistic genius, but doesn’t seem to appreciate it.
11. Feuille d’Album (1917)
A short piece about that stock figure, The Artist, only in this case it’s not a big famous Society artist but the opposite – a young unknown called Ian French. The narrative starts in the voice of a Society lady, established in the very first sentence: ‘He really was an impossible person!’ which continues in this vein for the first half. It describes how a succession of well-meaning women of the Parisian, artist-hunting type set their caps at young Ian and tried to seduce him, or take him out partying and so on, but always he slipped away and when they went knocking at his studio door… silence.
Inside his studio was not the chaotic mess of legend, but spick and span and tidy. He worked all day at his painting and then he sat and read. Until (and this is where part two beings) one day he spies a young woman his own age emerge onto the balcony of the small shabby house across the way, and is entranced and soon sits every evening, waiting for her to appear. She seems to speak sometimes to someone else back inside the apartment but he never sees anyone, although he fantasises about the characters of her mother and father.
In fact he gets quite carried away and imagines their life together, if they were living together, how frugally they would live, how she disliked the drawings he made of her because they made her look so thin, how she had a terrible temper and rarely laughed…
Then he discovers that goes shopping every Thursday evening, and on the third Thursday he runs down the stairs and out into the street to follow her. He watches her at the grocer’s, the butcher’s, the draper’s, and then the fruit shop (where she buys a lemon). Finally she visits the dairy and he watches her buy an egg. When she comes out he pops in and also buys an egg, and follows her home. He slips through the front door of the house and tiptoes up the stairs behind her. And as she’s putting the key in the door of her rooms, he runs up and faces her and:
Blushing more crimson than ever, but looking at her severely he said, almost angrily: ‘Excuse me, Mademoiselle, you dropped this.’ And he handed her an egg.
How extraordinarily strange, beguiling, mysterious, spooky, and moving but with an unknown emotion, or an unknown complex of complicated emotions and responses. You can speculate all you like whether this Ian is a young idealist, or a creepy stalker, or an obsessive or a romantic – the point of this as so many Mansfield stories is that no one label fits because so much is going on. Similarly, as to genre, is it a satire (as it starts out) or a fairy story (as it ends up) or both with a lot of realistic stuff about the market outside his apartment building thrown in? Or is it a kind of love story to Paris, and its strange, eccentric, Bohemian alleyways and people? It’s just two-and-a-half thousand words long but feels like, within its sliver of a story, it somehow contains worlds.
12. A Dill Pickle (1917)
Everything about this story is marvellous. It describes the encounter of a young man and woman (Vera) six years after they had an ill-fated affair which ended abruptly. She bumps into him in a restaurant, after a moment’s blankness (which should be sufficient warning) he remembers her and offers her a chair at his table.
Right from the get-go she recognises all his mannerisms, including his controlling:
She was thinking how well she remembered that trick of his–the trick of interrupting her–and of how it used to exasperate her six years ago. She used to feel then as though he, quite suddenly, in the middle of what she was saying, put his hand over her lips, turned from her, attended to something different, and then took his hand away, and with just the same slightly too broad smile, gave her his attention again.
He was obviously a bit of a fool six years ago. She remembers his farcical behaviour trying to deal with a wasp in the tea rooms at Kew, at his melodramatic declarations that he wanted to die for love of her. Now he is much more sleek and successful, well-dressed and offers her hand-made cigarettes from a Russian cigarette case.
In fact it turns out he has been doing all the travelling they used to fantasises about, to Spain, Corsica, Siberia, Russia, Egypt. In Russia he spent some days on a river boat on the Volga and at length sings the praises of the marvellously warm unaffected river people. And here we get to the title of the story: One evening a party of him and some friends went for a picnic by the Black Sea, taking supper and champagne. And while they were eating the coachman came up and offered them a dill pickle.
For the affected, pretentious young man, this epitomised the wonderful free spirit of the unaffected ordinary Russians. There’s a silence as she vividly imagines the scene. Then he cuts to remembering how candid they used to be, how he told her all kinds of stories of his boyhood. But the gap between them is indicated by the way she remembers the occasions but different details: if he is remembering what he told her about running away from home as a boy, what she remembers is that he made a huge fuss about an expensive jar of caviar he had bought her.
He describes how he recently found and reread the letter in which she dumped him, and loftily says how accurate it was. But around about now, she begins to suspect him and his whole tone; he is mocking his younger self but, as part of that, also mocking her.
She buttons her coat and lets down her veil (she’s wearing a veil? well, it is set during the First World War) preparatory to leaving, but she tells her more and she stays and she feels the strange beast, love, stirring in her bosom again. And as he carries on flattering her, she is stricken with regret: was he the only person who’d ever understood her? Had she thrown away her only chance at happiness?
But then he blows it. He leans back in his chair and his pompous, pretentious, sounding-off side kicks in. He begins to mansplain that while he was in Russia he studied the ‘Mind System’ and when he looks up again… she has gone!
All this has been staggeringly vivid and beautifully described, I felt like both the man and the young woman, I felt like they were my memories. And Mansfield rounds it off perfectly with a beautiful comic touch. The young man calls the waitress over and asks for the bill but, penny-pinching to the last – as we saw in the anecdote about the expensive jar of caviar — he asks her not to include the cream he ordered to accompany Vera’s coffee.
‘But the cream has not been touched,’ he said. ‘Please do not charge me for it.’
In just 5 or 6 pages it feels as if all of human nature has somehow been explained. Marvellous!
13. Je ne parle pas francais (1918)
‘Pray don’t imagine…’
This is one of Mansfield’s longer stories, at ten and a half thousand words. It’s an experiment in tone of voice, a first-person narration by a loftily superior, artistic type, a writer, archly self-aware and toying with phrases, priding himself on little turns of phrase and observations (‘That’s rather nice, don’t you think, that bit’). He addresses the reader as ‘ladies and gentleman’. He says ‘don’t you know’. Posh and performing. He is a dandy, priding himself on his immaculately stylish appearance.
Well into the story, the narrator introduces himself as Raoul Duquette, a 26-year-old Parisian, who wants to be a writer, tackle new subjects, amaze the world etc. He swanks that he is the author of ‘False Coins’, ‘Wrong Doors’, ‘Left Umbrellas’ and, he assures us, two more in preparation. But is he a writer at all, or a man of a different profession lying to his readers?
In the event, very little happens. The narrative is in about 8 stages: 1) the narrator meets an Englishman named Dick at an arty party, and they become friends; 2) Dick goes back to England; 3) Dick mails the narrator to tell him he’s coming to Paris with his true love so can he find them somewhere to stay; 4) Raoul meets the pair off the train and immediately notes the distance and restraint between Dick and the sweet little woman he calls ‘Mouse’; 5) he’s barely taken them in a cab to the hotel rooms he’s fixed up for them before Dick, very flustered, says he just has to pop out to post a letter to his mother; 6) when, after a wait, Mouse goes across the hall to her husband’s room she discovers he’s bolted and left a letter for her; 7) the letter says he’s gone back to England to look after his mother, he should never have left her, he felt bad the moment he got onto the train with Mouse; 8) the narrator offers Mouse his help, says he will look after her etc, then takes his leave. You might expect that they then have an affair, but the whole thing is stranger and more blocked than that because in the event 9) he never sees her again. He thinks about it, he tries, he sets off, but he never follows through.
Instead he prefers, in his dilettantish, aesthetic manner, to harbour the memories of Dick, then of greeting the unhappy couple, and of their unease with each other. These are more thrilling sensations than actually going out with her could ever provide; that would just be banal.
As to the title of the story, ‘Je ne parle pas francais’, it’s a phrase the little woman used half a dozen times after they’d arrived in Paris, apologising for herself. And the entire ‘story’ is really a flashback, triggered some time later when the narrator has dropped into his favourite café and is leafing through his notebook when, among his numerous bad drawings, he comes across the phrase written out and it sparks a wave of intense memory.
It’s a peculiar piece, not so much because of the central narrative, which I’ve summarised, but because of the extremely mannered, pretentious manner of the narrator, both in terms of style, and his constant preening and celebration of himself and his fine sensibility. It would be easy to dismiss it as a satire on a certain type of pretentious author; it might even be a lampoon of a Paris author Mansfield knew or met.
Either way it has a strangeness, a wordy obliqueness, which is often puzzling. And then again, viewed a different way, it may have started out as Mansfield’s own notes and jottings describing sitting in your average Parisian café – perceptions, descriptions and phrases she recorded, ordered, and then cobbled together a plot around. From this perspective is the odd, frustrating ‘plot’ more like a pretext, a scaffold on which to hang fantastical ideas? Such as this description of Dick’s fiancée, the Mouse,
She was exquisite, but so fragile and fine that each time I looked at her it was as if for the first time. She came upon you with the same kind of shock that you feel when you have been drinking tea out of a thin innocent cup and suddenly, at the bottom, you see a tiny creature, half butterfly, half woman, bowing to you with her hands in her sleeves.
That touch of fantasy at the end – not of finding an ant or a woodlouse at the bottom of your cup (as is possible) but a creature ‘half butterfly, half woman’, is typical of the unexpected phrases, ideas and tone which characterise this strange ‘story’.
The influence of cinema
I’ve noted the references to movies in the comic stories of P.G. Wodehouse, including one character in the Blandings series who’s absolutely dominated by film, perceives everything that happens through movie filters, incessantly quotes movie dialogue.
This story, also, contains a few contemporary movie references which reinforce the notion that film colonised the imagination, crystallising a range of character types so that, after a while, writers of novels and stories started to see, not the person in front of them, but see them as a type such as you’d see in a movie.
Query: Why am I so bitter against Life? And why do I see her as a rag-picker on the American cinema, shuffling along wrapped in a filthy shawl with her old claws crooked over a stick?
Answer: The direct result of the American cinema acting upon a weak mind.
And:
If the pale, sweaty garçon had not come in at that moment, carrying the tea-tray high on one hand as if the cups were cannon-balls and he a heavy weight-lifter on the cinema…
Film came to provide an immediate and widely understood language of character types and situations. It’s hard to see this as anything but a reduction in the range and variety of the human imagination.
14. Sun and Moon (1920)
Sun and Moon are the son and daughter of an upper middle class family. the house is in uproar because the parents are hosting a big party. All the preparations – the furniture taken out of the living room to be replaced by hired chairs, the piano pushed to one side – and the marvels being prepared in the kitchen by Minnie the cook, until they are marched off by nurse to wash and get dressed. Full description of two Edwardian children in full fig, and Nurse calls their mother in to admire them.
Finally the bell rings and they are summoned to go downstairs and be on their best behaviour in front of all the adult guests.
The drawing-room was full of sweet smelling, silky, rustling ladies and men in black with funny tails on their coats—like beetles. Father was among them, talking very loud, and rattling something in his pocket.
After being petted and adored, they are taken back to their bedrooms, hustled through their prayers and it’s time for bed. Periodically they wake up at later points in the evening… Bounding up the stairs their father nearly trips over them and, clearly drunk, decides they must come down and share scraps from the meal and so scoops them up under each arm and carries them downstairs despite the joking objections of his wife (Kitty).
Both children are staggered at how wrecked everything is, with food and dirty plates and glasses everywhere, knocked over bottles, all the fine lace bows undone, all the wreckage of a grand dinner. Moon is delighted to be carried to a chair at the table and be fed sweet titbits from the candy toy house by her father.
But the son (Sun) remains by the door and it feels so right, so true, if only because it so completely fits the stereotype, that the sight of so much wreckage appals him and suddenly he starts wailing (although to be honest, it would work as well or better the other way round, with the chunky son heedlessly stuffing his face with sweetmeats and the more sensitive daughter finding the whole thing overwhelming). Either way, it is a brilliantly vivid rendition.
15. Bliss (1918)
What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly, by a feeling of bliss—absolute bliss!—as though you’d suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle, into every finger and toe? . . .
Although Bertha Young is now 30 she still feels overcome with moments of shout-out-loud blissful happiness! She has a husband Harry, a nice house, a baby, a nurse and maids and all the rest, but is still regularly seized by fires of bliss! She has modern, thrilling friends, writers and painters and poets or people keen on social question. She admires her house, she admires the lovely garden.
‘I’m too happy—too happy!’ she murmured.
She’s hosting a dinner party tonight and this is described in the usual satirical way, with the usual arty friends:
The Norman Knights—a very sound couple—he was about to start a theatre, and she was awfully keen on interior decoration, a young man, Eddie Warren, who had just published a little book of poems and whom everybody was asking to dine, and a “find” of Bertha’s called Pearl Fulton.
The Knights arrive in their preposterous clothes, he with his monocle, and Eddie the poet in his lovely white scarf, complaining about his taxi driver. Moments later, running late as usual, arrives Bertha’s adorable husband Harry, so funny, so rich, so adorable, such a zest for life.
Last to arrive is Miss Fulton, Bertha’s ‘find’, all in silver, with a silver fillet binding her pale blond hair, Bertha feels they have such an understanding. In to dinner they go and have such scintillating conversation, the new play that’s being written, the wonderful soufflée, Bertha is beside herself with happiness, everything is too too perfect. She is so happy she wants to laugh hysterically and only by digging her nails into the palms of her hands can she stop herself.
Bertha feels she is waiting for some kind of ‘sign’ from Miss Fulton to full acknowledge their sympathy and it finally comes when Miss F asks whether they have a garden and Bertha whisks the curtains aside to reveal it and the women stand side by side to admire the pear tree in the silver moonlight. Have any two women ever understood each other more perfectly? When Harry is a trifle curt to Miss F when he offers round a cigarette case, Bertha is wounded and vows to tell him later how much the silver young woman means to her, a talisman of all her happiness.
And yet, somehow, inspired by the happiness of her day and the union of minds with Miss Fulton, for the first time in her life Bertha experiences heterosexual desire. She has always loved her husband, just not in that way. She worries that he initially resented her physical coldness but he assured her it was fine and they have grown to be good friends without any of that other messy business. But tonight, for the first time, she feels she could actually ‘give herself’ to him.
It’s time for the Knights to catch their train back to Hampstead. Bertha and Harry shake hands and wave them goodbye. Eddie goes to get his coat and Miss Fulton makes for the hall, when Harry, almost rudely, pushes past Bertha to get to her. Bertha thinks he just wants to make amends for his earlier rudeness. How sweet of him.
She turns to talk to Eddie who tells her about some recently published poem and they both walk silently to a table to get the book and open it. It is here, from this vantage point, that Bertha sees Harry:
Harry with Miss Fulton’s coat in his arms and Miss Fulton with her back turned to him and her head bent. He tossed the coat away, put his hands on her shoulders and turned her violently to him. His lips said: ‘I adore you’, and Miss Fulton laid her moonbeam fingers on his cheeks and smiled her sleepy smile. Harry’s nostrils quivered; his lips curled back in a hideous grin while he whispered: ‘To-morrow’, and with her eyelids Miss Fulton said: ‘Yes’.
Not suspecting a thing, Miss Fulton comes into the living room to touch hands and thank her for a wonderful evening, and dwells on the pear tree, the pear tree in the moonlight which Bertha thought symbolised their imaginative union.
Harry, boisterous and efficient as always, tells her he’ll lock up. But Bertha runs over to the garden window and stares out at the pear tree in the moonlight and wails:
‘Oh, what is going to happen now?’
Credit
‘Selected Stories’ by Katherine Mansfield was published by Oxford University Press in 2002. I read the 2008 reissued paperback edition.
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