The Collected Stories – Katherine Mansfield
Just received COLLECTED STORIES by Katherine Mansfield.
I intend to read or re-read these, and, Covfefe permitting, I shall review them on my site.
In the comment stream below.
(My previous reviews of older or classic books: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/reviews-of-older-books/)
16 thoughts on “The Collected Stories – Katherine Mansfield”
nullimmortalis Edit
“The sense of touching, not God, but the closest thing to a God-mind one is ever likely to meet; an exquisite merger of innumerable histories and experiences reaching far back through time, gathering up stories and knowledge and sensory impressions…”
— Shauna O’Meara (‘Scapes Made Diamond)
Mansfield as this ‘gestalt’ godDESS?
THE MAN WITHOUT A TEMPERAMENT
“And she knoo it was there — she knoo it it was looking at her just that way. She played up to it; she gave herself little airs.”
Klaymongso sounds as it it is the American woman’s pet. But we never seem to know what sort of pet! Another slice of existence with a series of idiosyncratic fragments and impressions: descriptions and dialogue in a hotel with several guests we try to latch onto. But mainly about a couple from England, the man having seemed to have scared some small girls in their under-drawers earlier, in this hot land where you need mosquito nets. A Man Without Qualities, too, as in Musil? The contrast of a letter from London about snow. And we feel he is here under duress, because of his wife’s health, her needing to be in a hot clime…
— Shauna O’Meara (‘Scapes Made Diamond)
Mansfield as this ‘gestalt’ godDESS?
THE MAN WITHOUT A TEMPERAMENT
“And she knoo it was there — she knoo it it was looking at her just that way. She played up to it; she gave herself little airs.”
Klaymongso sounds as it it is the American woman’s pet. But we never seem to know what sort of pet! Another slice of existence with a series of idiosyncratic fragments and impressions: descriptions and dialogue in a hotel with several guests we try to latch onto. But mainly about a couple from England, the man having seemed to have scared some small girls in their under-drawers earlier, in this hot land where you need mosquito nets. A Man Without Qualities, too, as in Musil? The contrast of a letter from London about snow. And we feel he is here under duress, because of his wife’s health, her needing to be in a hot clime…
Reply
- A DILL PICKLE“She was that glove that he held in his fingers. . . .”A man and woman encounter each other again, after six years, by chance, in a restaurant, and have a short conversation about their previous relationship. Discreet as well as intensely discrete, almost solipsistic. Like untouched cream. As gloves divide us today. The solipsism, too, of a chance dill pickle evocative of a Russia they never, in the end, visited together. Proust made manifestly Mansfield. All her Mansfieldisms of emotional wordplay … plus a dog whose name only one of them remembers the name of — and the only one of them who remembers that name is actually the one who never knew the dog in real-time! Aickman’s Same Dog, notwithstanding.
- THE LITTLE GOVERNESS“‘But it’s all over now,’ she said to the mirror face, feeling in some way that it was more frightened than she.”A young anxious naive abstemious social-distancing Governess, travelling alone, and abroad for the first time, due to meet her new employer at a hotel in Munich after reaching there by train, and after first getting off the boat. The Ladies Only carriage on the train is soon violated by an old man who kindly treats her but later tempts her astray via strawberries, an art gallery and an ice cream (but not wine as she refused it) … and suddenly kisses her ON THE MOUTH, beyond the pale, indeed, before she can escape back to the hotel. But back there too late for the assignation with her employer to be governess, as a previously aggrieved waiter at the hotel smugly notes. I truly felt for her, and even felt violated myself via a deep empathy, somehow because, no doubt, the delightful language describing her journey in this story is so utterly precious and so sensitively penetrable. But surely she should have noticed that the old man was so caught up with her, he had earlier forgotten to put his umbrella down after the rain had long since stopped.“Alas! how tragic for a little governess to possess hair that made one think of tangerines and marigolds, of apricots and tortoiseshell cats and champagne!”
nullimmortalis
REVELATIONS
“She could not stand this silent flat, noiseless Marie, this ghostly, quiet, feminine interior. She must be out;”
Monica, a precious thirty-something, too old before her time, partial to self-isolation, impulsively, in the gusty wind, goes out to the hairdressers… And then I thought, somehow, that it would be shut, surely. But no.
Her usual favourite hairdresser George is late coming from the back to do her hair! His lateness stemmed, it seems, as I discovered eventually, from a reason so utterly in keeping with why I thought the hairdressers would be shut, I very nearly cried.
“Oh, how terrifying Life was, thought Monica. How dreadful. It is the lonelIness which is so appalling. We whirl along like leaves, and nobody knows – nobody cares where we fall, in what black river we float away.”
“She could not stand this silent flat, noiseless Marie, this ghostly, quiet, feminine interior. She must be out;”
Monica, a precious thirty-something, too old before her time, partial to self-isolation, impulsively, in the gusty wind, goes out to the hairdressers… And then I thought, somehow, that it would be shut, surely. But no.
Her usual favourite hairdresser George is late coming from the back to do her hair! His lateness stemmed, it seems, as I discovered eventually, from a reason so utterly in keeping with why I thought the hairdressers would be shut, I very nearly cried.
“Oh, how terrifying Life was, thought Monica. How dreadful. It is the lonelIness which is so appalling. We whirl along like leaves, and nobody knows – nobody cares where we fall, in what black river we float away.”
Cross-referenced with Melanie Tem’s Black River: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/03/29/black-river-melanie-tem/#comment-18655
THE ESCAPE
A perfect non-story story, where somehow each sentence of this relatively brief story miraculously holds a million stories. An escape as a journey, a missed train somehow become a horse carriage journey, marital disputes of her blaming him, later blaming him for her lost parasol. Her hatred of his smoking, and it as if at the end an alternate world takes over, before they are back on the train of life, whereby, in the alternate world, he dies of something that goes wrong with his lungs, as we all fear today. Or another sort of escape?
Amazingly, for me, I read this morning HERE the opening of JUSTINE by Lawrence Durrell where the narrator tells us about the explicit use of the word ‘escape’ in this journey sense AND also a story by David Surface HERE where the ‘train’ of life is similarly disrupted by such diaspora of a married couple as we see here in the Mansfield!
A perfect non-story story, where somehow each sentence of this relatively brief story miraculously holds a million stories. An escape as a journey, a missed train somehow become a horse carriage journey, marital disputes of her blaming him, later blaming him for her lost parasol. Her hatred of his smoking, and it as if at the end an alternate world takes over, before they are back on the train of life, whereby, in the alternate world, he dies of something that goes wrong with his lungs, as we all fear today. Or another sort of escape?
Amazingly, for me, I read this morning HERE the opening of JUSTINE by Lawrence Durrell where the narrator tells us about the explicit use of the word ‘escape’ in this journey sense AND also a story by David Surface HERE where the ‘train’ of life is similarly disrupted by such diaspora of a married couple as we see here in the Mansfield!
AT THE BAY
I – V
“I dreamed I was hanging over a terrifically high cliff, shouting to someone below.”
Midsommar Bay, or not, this is Crescent Bay together with Daylight Cove, here Mansfieldfully evoked from early morning shepherd to the men swimming, their personal territories even earmarked in the sea; then with gender stereotypical differences deployed, men are off to work, and the beach is now earmarked for children and women, who can liberally change into bathing attire. One woman, awful Mrs Kember — with ash elongating on her fag, a clone of her otherwise deadpan younger husband — Sapphically admires Beryl’s body changing into swimwear. No stays. As in PRELUDE earlier, we are allowed to gradually build a gestalt from hints about various other characters and the ambiance of this often delicately picked-out genius-loci.
“‘It’s a nemeral,’ said Pip solemnly.”
VI – XII
“Say never!”
Exquisite – and here exquisite actually means exquisite – continuation of the whole sort of Ulysses single day At The Bay, towards siesta and then the night. Linda and the baby boy. The boy of the Bay. She feels like a leaf and he ‘talks’ to her. Kezia with a grandmother who ‘stares down the years.’ That Never indeed. Alice the servant girl and her sunshade she calls a “perishall.” Visiting Mrs Stubbs’ shop, and Alice’s “persistent little coughs and hems…” Later, in Linda’s washhouse children playing an animal game, BEING animals, but not a “ninseck”! Later, we hear of a real insect that is imprisoned in a room, significant when compared to thoughts on ‘freedom’ earlier. A face and beard later pressed against the window at them! Was it their uncle? Jonathan who canoodles discreetly, if at all, with his sister-in-law Linda, till Stanley comes home. Compare the two men’s territories in the sea earlier. Then, in full circle, we reach Beryl again, here wanting a lover, but it is the earlier Sapphic woman’s husband not the woman herself. Or is it him, after all, as it was a man that Beryl expected, if against her own hidden nature? The husband is so much like his wife, and vice versa and this ending has a double entendre ‘bush’ as sexual reference, I guess. A double entendre ‘dying fall’ love, as a potential fulfilment one day? Has any other reader noticed that before? “But when Beryl looked at the bush, it seemed to her the bush was sad.”
“Both of them had forgotten what the ‘never’ was about.”
THE GARDEN-PARTY
“And the perfect afternoon, slowly ripened, slowly faded, slowly its petals closed.”
‘Perfect’ and ‘ideal’ day starts in this story, as perfect as our own potential day today in 2020, and by entering this story makes our own day even more perfect (!) in experiencing it without breaking the rules of barricade by entering the real, otherwise perfect weather of the day outside us. The story of a girl or little woman called Laura as the garden-party is spreading out in preparation around her, its marquee being erected by surprisingly nice workmen (Laura discovers), the rest of her excited family, the moving of the piano, the prospect of a band playing, the comestibles including flagged sandwiches, the cream puffs, the not so logical mother, the constructive glut of lilies… until she hears about the accidental death of one of the poor people down the lane from her family’s house. She appears to be the only one believing that the party should be cancelled. How this pans out makes this story a delight as well as a thing that contains the very thing that potentially spoils it. The character and actions of Laura are so utterly believable, and it makes me peer out of the story of my own life in 2020 and understand it fully for the first time. From within the environs of my head’s own garden-party. Isn’t life … isn’t life what it always is?
“He was given up to his dream.”
Cf Chapter 7 of Melanie Tem’s Black River today here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/03/29/black-river-melanie-tem/#comment-18691
THE DAUGHTERS OF THE LATE COLONEL
“Why did the photographs of dead people always fade so? wondered Josephine. As soon as a person was dead their photograph died too.”
Two spinsters, Constantia (Con) and Josephine (affectionately know as Jug) are released from their father’s influence by dint of his one-eyed deathbed scene, and now they confusedly try to sort things out, such as the funeral, presents of some of his things to other relatives, whether to keep the servant, and so forth. Yet he still lives on, it seems, in various clothes-drawers and wardrobes in his room. In fact I got confused myself at one point that he DID still live on, in a scene about meringues! At one point, too, I got the hint that he was one of the big-headed people, by dint of his hat size! And that they were still subservient to his orders and his presence, even to the extent of thinking they still needed to silence, on his behalf, the organ-grinder outside. I feel sorry for these two women, and their lack of husbands, partly explained at least by some non-politically correct connections to Anglo-India and untrustworthy ‘natives’. They were once pursued by a chap in Eastbourne. But which of them was pursued? The clue was in the jug, I guess.
MR. AND MRS. DOVE
“This was such bliss that he could dream no further.”
A delightful tale of Reggie, hoping against hope, visiting the girl whom he fancies marrying, but who, he fears, does not reciprocate his hopes. She even compares him to one of her two cooing doves. And she has always laughed at him. Yet…
This is amazingly the PERFECT match with a story called ‘A Perfect Relationship’ by William Trevor that I happened to read yesterday here.
THE YOUNG GIRL
“But at that moment a tragedy happened to Hennie. He speared his pastry horn too hard, and it flew in two, and one half spilled on the table. Ghastly affair!”
Yet, this tale is more centrally about Mrs Raddick’s nameless 17 year old daughter as told by a nameless narrator, a person who is left to look after the daughter and the daughter’s twelve year old brother called Hennie, by taking them to a restaurant for afternoon tea. They needed looking after because excitable Mrs Raddick – who always seemed to carelessly leave her handbag open – is visiting a casino, certain she is due to be on a winning streak. The daughter was forbidden entry because she did not look 21. The daughter is feisty, pouting, sullen … and the narrator has some difficulties keeping her happy. A spoilt girly brat, you could say, but on the brink of blossoming into soft womanhood as the narrator notices, even if we don’t!
Katherine Mansfield manages to create a panoply of a whole type of human existence in a living past with the disarming flair of this brief piece of fiction.
Katherine Mansfield manages to create a panoply of a whole type of human existence in a living past with the disarming flair of this brief piece of fiction.
- MARRIAGE À LA MODE“Simply everything is running down the steep cliffs into the sea, beginning with the butter.”The word-crepitating story of William whose marriage to Isabel – and their ‘babies’ – has been moved from a small place in London where they were happy to a larger one in the country, back and forth to which he commutes. She has taken up with a number of young bright things who now surround her as a sparkling coterie. He is only interested in her happiness and indicates he will leave her – and as this truth dawns on her, we wonder whether she will recant. I was most interested in the choice of presents he brings his ‘babies’ from London. They seemed more interested in the packaging. But today, a pineapple and a melon. I can see both sides of this still resonating story.
THE VOYAGE
“Lying beside the dark wharf, all strung, all beaded with round golden lights, the Picton boat looked as if she was more ready to sail among stars than out into the cold sea.”
Fenella and her Grandma are seen off by the father/son onto this boat, where we learn of the business and props of their shared cabin, including Grandma’s swan umbrella. They are in black mourning, it seems. But what are the circumstances of this. The stewardess, helping them, says: “What I always say is […] sooner or later each of us has to go, and that’s a certingty.” (Sic) But who has gone? Meanwhile, Grandma shows her prowess in niftily getting to the top bunk. They eventually reach a tropical seeming place where they reach the house where Grandpa welcomes them. A white cat is folded up like a camel. Grandpa is in bed.
Probably the most unaccountable story so far in this book. Life is full of unaccountabilities, I guess. Have I missed something?
Probably the most unaccountable story so far in this book. Life is full of unaccountabilities, I guess. Have I missed something?
MISS BRILL
“‘What has been happening to me?’ said the sad itself eyes.”
At first I thought these were the eyes of a fox fur as retrieved by Miss B from a dark box. But later some children likened this garment to fried whiting! Anyway, she wears it to the park that is in busily strange contrast to our hopefully empty parks today on Easter Saturday. A wonderful evocation of the day, the various individual people and their idiosyncrasies, and the musical band. In fact, she sees the whole thing as a performance in which gestalt she sees herself a regular participant actor. “They weren’t only the audience, not only looking on; they were acting.”
The whole performance finishes Brilliantly but ironically with one of Mansfield’s best pathetic/bathetic endings. But jumping back a bit, I loved the honey-cake treat, especially if it came with an almond…
The whole performance finishes Brilliantly but ironically with one of Mansfield’s best pathetic/bathetic endings. But jumping back a bit, I loved the honey-cake treat, especially if it came with an almond…
HER FIRST BALL
“Dark girls, fair girls were parting their hair, tying ribbons again, tucking handkerchiefs down the fronts of their bodices, another smoothing marble-white gloves.”
Leila’s first ball is summoned for us all, the journey there with cousins and friends, the anxious reluctance to go at all, when earlier with one boot on, one boot off. The multiplying oddments of excitement and image, as the young men mark their programmes to a girl for each dance. Suddenly swept off her feet by one of them. Yet one older man later co-opts her for a dance, a moment or glitch darkly summoning an end already embedded in this her start. Yet she is glided off her feet again by another young man. For once, not a bathetic/ pathetic ending. A night reborn with light.
Or a start embedded, if invisibly, in its end. Twig?
Or a start embedded, if invisibly, in its end. Twig?
I – IV
“They could see the lighthouse shining on Quarantine Island,…”
I loved the fictionoitus-interruptus sense of things already happening, characters and their interrelationships forming inchoately in my mind, the story of the moving of house near Wellington, the two girls Lottie and Kezia left in the old place to be brought later (not room enough in removal vehicle), the lady with strange speech patterns who looks after them while they wait to be picked up, someone’s boasting about having chops for dinner, one of the girls being scared by something nasty called ‘IT’, and later prayers…
“God only excuses you saying your prayers in bed if you’ve got a temperature.”
From ‘IT’ to ‘THEY’ – this passage is worth quoting as a whole, an amazing prehensility of the environment. Matchless.
“Then she did not hear them any more. What a glare there was in the room. She hated blinds pulled up to the top at any time, but in the morning it was intolerable. She turned over to the wall and idly, with one finger, she traced a poppy on the wall-paper with a leaf and a stem and a fat bursting bud. In the quiet, and under her tracing finger, the poppy seemed to come alive. She could feel the sticky, silky petals, the stem, hairy like a gooseberry skin, the rough leaf and the tight glazed bud. Things had a habit of coming alive like that. Not only large substantial things like furniture, but curtains and the patterns of stuffs and the fringes of quilts and cushions. How often she had seen the tassel fringe of her quilt change into a funny procession of dancers with priests attending. . . . For there were some tassels that did not dance at all but walked stately, bent forward as if praying or chanting. How often the medicine bottles had turned into a row of little men with brown top-hats on; and the washstand jug had a way of sitting in the basin like a fat bird in a round nest.
‘I dreamed about birds last night,’ thought Linda. What was it? She had forgotten. But the strangest part of this coming alive of things was what they did. They listened, they seemed to swell out with some mysterious important content, and when they were full she felt that they smiled. But it was not for her, only, their sly secret smile; they were members of a secret society and they smiled among themselves. Sometimes, when she had fallen asleep in the daytime, she woke and could not lift a finger, could not even turn her eyes to left or right because THEY were there; sometimes when she went out of a room and left it empty, she knew as she clicked the door to that THEY were filling it. And there were times in the evenings when she was upstairs, perhaps, and everybody else was down, when she could hardly escape from them. Then she could not hurry, she could not hum a tune; if she tried to say ever so carelessly—‘Bother that old thimble’—THEY were not deceived. THEY knew how frightened she was; THEY saw how she turned her head away as she passed the mirror. What Linda always felt was that THEY wanted something of her, and she knew that if she gave herself up and was quiet, more than quiet, silent, motionless, something would really happen.”
“Bother that old thimble,” – a Persian saying?
“She did not believe that she would ever not get lost in this garden.”
I may overuse the word ‘rhapsody’, but this novella is an apotheosis of rhapsody. Even rapture. Family life in past days, its social mœurs, its blessings and small mercies. A descriptive delight in flowers and Proustian memories. Including a buttonhole of Siamese twin cherries. With the counterpoint of someone singing this song:
“Nature has gone to her rest, love,
See, we are alone.
Give me your hand to press, love,
Lightly within my own.”
“You have to have a flat place for standing on your head.”
The in-media-res fictionoitus flow of events continues till the end of PRELUDE, a quilt of existence, children playing with Snooker the dog, the girls and some boys playing, later a duck beheaded that then waddles still alive till finally dying, the resultant duck for eating is so wonderful it is as if the duck was nurtured to the sweet strains of a German flute, the Dream Book with superstitions or directives based on the flow of direction by beetles and spiders, the idyllic shades of plants and food…
…the thoughts of one’s separate Proustian selves, in a mirror or as a self-image, in the light (or darkness) of being self-isolated. By means of this story’s metaphor of moving from the town to the middle of nowhere.
And, of course, there is the social distancing represented by cribbage pegs…
“The cribbage pegs were like two little people going up the road together, turning round the sharp corner, and coming down the road again. They were pursuing each other. They did not so much want to get ahead as to keep near enough to talk—to keep near, perhaps that was all.
But no, there was always one who was impatient and hopped away as the other came up, and would not listen. Perhaps the white peg was frightened of the red one, or perhaps he was cruel and would not give the red one a chance to speak. . . .”
“She hugged her folded arms and began to laugh silently. How absurd life was—it was laughable, simply laughable. And why this mania of hers to keep alive at all? For it really was a mania, she thought, mocking and laughing.”
“I do not know why I have such a fancy for this little café. It’s dirty and sad, sad. […] It was very quiet in the café.”
Where has this novelette of genius been all my life!? It is the perfect Proustian gem, where the Petite Madeline lost-time effect is the novelette’s title as a sentence written in green ink in his writing-pad while in this genius loci of a French café. This being the French author of ‘False Coins’, ‘Wrong Doors’ and ‘Left Umbrellas.’
A deliciously effete vision of almost strobingly androgynous Englishman with whom this writer communes, after, as a child, having been arguably and regularly abused or just passionately kissed by an African laundress in an outhouse … and when the Englishman brings a woman back with him to France, I feel the writer falls in a unique type of love with this woman called Mouse…
To match the Proustian memory trigger there is also much drinking of tea at the end. Much ambiguous love, with a perfect panoply of words, words that link together in an unrequited dream of something you half experience in a rhapsody stemming, with many ‘dying falls’, from rarifications of pent-up idiosyncrasy and love. There is no way I can give it due justice here. The only way for you is to steep yourself in this text, pungent with early twentieth century France.
It looks the part and IS the part. Gestalt Real-Time Reviewing finally crystallised as what it should always have been. The submerged world apotheosised.
“For Mouse was beautiful. 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.”
“It begins with an incredibly beautiful line:“
If a story itself can be bliss, this is it. Seriously.
Even with its premonitory ‘dying fall’ pre-echoed only just a half an hour ago when I happened to read and quote this (“When you feel safe, like something is predictable and can’t ever go wrong, it goes wrong.”) in a disarmingly different but somehow mutually synergistic story called ‘Shattering’ HERE.
An exquisite story about thirty year old Bertha’s apotheosis or epiphany of bliss in her life, a bliss in the pear tree, the moon, her baby, her husband, her dinner party tonight, her friends attending the dinner: a married couple who call themselves Mug and Face, she with monkeys decorating the hem of her dress, a young idealistic poet called Eddie, and Pearl Fulton as Bertha’s latest unacknowledged Sapphic crush or bliss, I sense. This is all conveyed in a way that is quite beyond belief that it can be expressed so … blissfully? forever?
“I must laugh or die.”
“How idiotic civilisation is! Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?”
“‘Life is so dreadful,’ she murmurs, but she does not feel it’s dreadful at all.”
A vignette. Matilda defies the wind to go to her music lesson, and then travels in time to her future – we can all reach this new perspective, I reckon. Even today!
“And I think it’s because this generation is just wise enough to know that it is sick…”
Here the sickness relates to the title, but also can now relate to our physical condition today, I feel. And there is also a sense of intrusion as if compromising social distancing or self-isolation for the sake of sociability as a precursor to (or on the cusp of) unrequited, or even requited, romance. A brief and very complex story of Proustian or Quentin S. Crisp meetings between tea-drinkers, amid self-referential writerly subtleties. The ‘sleeping boy’ sculpture gives me the sense of a variation upon the theme of a human/ wood-metal-stone palimpsest in ‘sacred statues’ from a William Trevor story I read yesterday here.
“A pageant of Good Hot Dinners passed across the ceiling, each of them accompanied by a bottle of Nourishing Stout . . .”
The poignant story of dodgily feisty Ada Moss, of fuller figure and slightly older than some other ambitious, usually poverty-stricken, starlets. Her landlady (whose son she says had been in France during the Great War) threatens to throw her out of the digs where Ada boards, to throw her out for non-payment of rent. Ada, meanwhile, has many conversations of in-denial or wishful thinking with herself in various mirrors, as one acting job after another falls flat. Until she takes off with a man who likes fuller figures and whose small hat sailed like a yacht on his hair. Makes me think that the world today is all at sea, if not at visible war — with an unseen ceiling of sky now closing down on us and on whatever craft we have boarded…