PENSION SÉGUIN
“I smiled, wondering why pears should follow chestnuts.”
And why other “appearances” – important to our narrator – such as gooseberry jam as apricot jam or industrious mat making meaning a quiet hotel to rent a room at…
A hilarious, yet quietly painterly and Proustian, story of this woman who wants a quiet place to stay and how appearances, like all great literature, are never quite what they seem!
A hilarious, yet quietly painterly and Proustian, story of this woman who wants a quiet place to stay and how appearances, like all great literature, are never quite what they seem!
“: the walls were white, decorated with pictures of pale ladies drifting down cypress avenues to forsaken temples, and moons rising over boundless oceans.”
VIOLET
“I met a young virgin
Who sadly did moan . . .”
“I met a young virgin
Who sadly did moan . . .”
“I thought how true it was that the world was a delightful place if it were not for the people,…”
The narrator from the Pension of the previous story – Katherine herself? Dreaming of meeting another Katherine writer, one called Tynan. Meeting, too, an old friend named Violet Burton and gossiping in the impressionistic streets, but with the serious point of whether pinnacles follow depths, or vice versa, peaks and vales, veils and piques… until VB tells of being kissed (pinnacle) and then hearing the man is already engaged (depth)! Or have I got that all wrong? Alas, the loneliness of a real-time reviewer.
“What peculiar pleasure it is to wander through a strange city and amuse oneself as a child does, playing a solitary game!”
BAINS TURCS
“I don’t care,” she said, in her hideous German voice. “I shouldn’t lower myself by paying any attention to a couple of street women. If my husband knew he’d never get over it. Dreadfully particular he is. We’ve been married six years. We come from Pfalzburg. It’s a nice town. Four children I have living, and it was really to get over the shock of the fifth that we came here. The fifth,” she whispered, padding after me, “was born, a fine healthy child, and it never breathed! Well, after nine months, a woman can’t help being disappointed, can she?”
This is an amazing statement, is it not? Also an amazing scene as the narrative woman enters a lift with a liftman sneezing upon her, and finally reaching the steam room, and nude women together, some laughing uncontrolledly and offering mandarins to eat, and some scorning each other’s bodies and relative modesties and assumed social mores. I felt the steam actually coming off the letters making up the words, and the mutual sights of each other!
“Things always come better from a man, don’t they?”
SOMETHING CHILDISH BUT VERY NATURAL
“I am sure he wrote it when he was half-awake some time, for it’s got a smile of a dream on it.”
As city folks walk as though with real bodies under their clothes, and “stiff blood” (later “wild blood”), we learn of Henry and the eponymous poem that he reads at a station book stall, this love of books causing him abruptly to change carriages on the train and meet a young girl called Edna with the strange but beautiful hair he immediately wants to touch. She claims she is over 16 and he claims he is 18. But I sense she exaggerates in one direction, and he in the other. A sense of forbidden touch that lasts for most of this book’s social distancing of such supposed illicit love. The dream becomes one of Picnic at Hanging Rock, I feel, and a vision of their life together in an idyllic abode halted by the story’s ending, as all stories are halted by their endings. A story that can “steam open an elephant’s ear of an envelope.” The childish secret exposed. But did you know a cottage can stand on tiptoe?
“If I start flying suddenly, you’ll promise to catch hold of my feet, won’t you? Otherwise I’ll never come down.”
AN INDISCREET JOURNEY
An indiscreet journey for the reader, too, as it is delightfully, if sometimes anxiously, Mansfieldesque until we reach some nonsense at the end about a parrot and whiskey.
It starts unedifyingly, too…
“; the tall black trees on the far side, grouped together like negroes conversing. Sinister, very, I thought, as I buttoned my age-old Burberry.”
Of its time, perhaps. This English woman seems to be on an anxious journey amid strict rules, as if concerning the rules we have today about travelling during Covid lockdown. Then it was war in France, and her confusion as to the names of the aunt and uncle to whom she journeys. Years pass as she sits in an empty café. Not forgetting the lady with a sea-gull on her head. And places with letters like X, Y and Z as their names. (“What is the name of the station where I have to change? Perhaps I shall never know.”) At least she got further than Mr Ramsay’s Q!
“; the tall black trees on the far side, grouped together like negroes conversing. Sinister, very, I thought, as I buttoned my age-old Burberry.”
Of its time, perhaps. This English woman seems to be on an anxious journey amid strict rules, as if concerning the rules we have today about travelling during Covid lockdown. Then it was war in France, and her confusion as to the names of the aunt and uncle to whom she journeys. Years pass as she sits in an empty café. Not forgetting the lady with a sea-gull on her head. And places with letters like X, Y and Z as their names. (“What is the name of the station where I have to change? Perhaps I shall never know.”) At least she got further than Mr Ramsay’s Q!
Here, equally gratuitous, is my old review of THE WAVES: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2017/07/25/the-waves-virginia-woolf/
SPRING PICTURES
“Nobody wants to buy. You must walk in the middle of the road, for there is no room on the pavement.”
This extraordinary downbeat (extraordinary for Mansifeid) seems exactly how I imagine those of you starting to emerge from lockdown today (in our real-time) must appear to others and feel like to yourselves!
“At the doorway there stands a lean man in a pair of burst carpet slippers.”
LATE AT NIGHT
“; her boots are faintly steaming in the fender.”
A monologue of a near-elderly or middle-aged or simply-young-but-old-for-her-age lady with stage directions, snubbed by a man’s letter written to her about the socks she had given him. She muses on her life, now averse to wind and rain which she wasn’t when she was younger. Another downbeat work. Is Katherine herself having a mid-life crisis? Possibly too late to ask. Too late at night.
TWO TUPPENNY ONES, PLEASE
“ . . . !”
In this gratuitous play, this type of ellipsis is all ‘FRIEND’ has to say to the other “LADY” on this bus journey; even the bus “CONDUCTOR” has some real words to say, insisting on the right fares being paid, but LADY gabbles much, about wartime strictures, about this and that.
It is amazingly counterintuitive how Mansfield and Jean Ray HERE are kindred spirited writers.
It is amazingly counterintuitive how Mansfield and Jean Ray HERE are kindred spirited writers.
THE BLACK CAP
“SHE. Please don’t! I hate being kissed in trains.”
A playlet and a monologue, as a woman leaves her uncaring husband — who at breakfast was at (tantamount to) a Zoom conference with the Meat Export Company instead of paying attention to her. He thinks she is going to the dentist. But she is really running away with a lover until she sees him wearing a ludicrously unsuitable black cap…
There is no doubt a moral to all this, but currently I have not found it!
There is no doubt a moral to all this, but currently I have not found it!
A SUBURBAN FAIRY TALE
“Father! They’re not sparrows. They’re little boys.”
A family breakfast, Mr B & Mrs B — and their son Little B, a wishful Little-Ender with his boiled egg. Rationing with food coupons has just ended and they discuss jugged hare versus a good old sirloin. And date pie. Little B thinks the sparrows outside are like little boys, Little B eventually among them, until they all fly away…
I defy you to work out the moral of this oblique Swiftian fable!
Suburban fairies, not birds at all — my own modest proposal.
I defy you to work out the moral of this oblique Swiftian fable!
Suburban fairies, not birds at all — my own modest proposal.
CARNATION
[[ She brought a carnation to the French class, a deep, deep red one, that looked as though it had been dipped in wine and left in the dark to dry.
[…]
Shall we ask old Hugo-Wugo to shout us a thrippenny vanilla on the way home!!!” and passed it across to Connie Baker, who turned absolutely purple and nearly burst out crying. All of them lolled and gaped, staring at the round clock, which seemed to have grown paler, too; the hands scarcely crawled.
[…]
The great difficulty was, of course, if you felt at all feeble, not to get the most awful fit of the giggles. Not because it was funny, really, but because it made you feel uncomfortable, queer, silly, and somehow ashamed for old Hugo-Wugo.
[…]
Katie did not know enough French to understand, but Eve sat listening, her eyebrows raised, her eyes half veiled, and a smile that was like the shadow of her cruel little laugh, like the wing shadows of that cruel little laugh fluttering over her lips.
[…]
Hoo-hor-her! Hoo-hor-her! came from the pump. Now he dashed the water over the horse’s legs and then swooped down and began brushing.
[…]
And “Keep it, dearest,” said Eve. “Souvenir tendre,” and she popped the carnation down the front of Katie’s blouse. ]]
[…]
Shall we ask old Hugo-Wugo to shout us a thrippenny vanilla on the way home!!!” and passed it across to Connie Baker, who turned absolutely purple and nearly burst out crying. All of them lolled and gaped, staring at the round clock, which seemed to have grown paler, too; the hands scarcely crawled.
[…]
The great difficulty was, of course, if you felt at all feeble, not to get the most awful fit of the giggles. Not because it was funny, really, but because it made you feel uncomfortable, queer, silly, and somehow ashamed for old Hugo-Wugo.
[…]
Katie did not know enough French to understand, but Eve sat listening, her eyebrows raised, her eyes half veiled, and a smile that was like the shadow of her cruel little laugh, like the wing shadows of that cruel little laugh fluttering over her lips.
[…]
Hoo-hor-her! Hoo-hor-her! came from the pump. Now he dashed the water over the horse’s legs and then swooped down and began brushing.
[…]
And “Keep it, dearest,” said Eve. “Souvenir tendre,” and she popped the carnation down the front of Katie’s blouse. ]]
This is pure golden Mansfield, the painterly crepitating impressionisms of lol as laughter for the first time in literary history. Plus dark emotions starting off as Sapphic flirtations…
Very apt that I started my review yesterday of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway…having it away with dolls. https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/06/10/mrs-dalloway-virginia-woolf/
“But she’s not married; she’s young; quite young, thought Peter, the red carnation he had seen her wear as she came across Trafalgar Square burning again in his eyes and making her lips red.“
My favourite Mansfield so far.
A story of a woman and her Roy worried about her heart, and he orders the attendance of a discreet doctor who would not tell others, one who turns out to be a toad of a man, and I do not trust this doctor when he tells them what they want to hear. Loved the description of her redressing after the examination, though. Full of many impressions that surround this event with the safest flowers of the Mansfield. The woman seems to be the only one without a berth of roots in her own woman’s field.
“Clickety-clock-clock. Cluk! Cluk!”
A drink – with poison? – that, if tasting queer, would have stopped someone drinking any more? This edition of the book’s text’s “The creek of the gate […] drew us apart” somehow seems SICnificant in a Sapphic context, too.
No, this story is about a BIRTH day. The man – so scornful of his servant girl – is worried about his wife Anna who is about to give birth and how she is worried about him, an accumulation of worry causing its infection of worry in herself. He is asked by his mother to go for the doctor for Anna…a doctor who feels he has the right to poke fun at everyone. And towards the end — an end that I will get you to read for yourself (the birth being a boy or girl or nothing, as allotted gambling chances as you lay the table) — the church bells ring out “as though all the churches in the town had been suddenly transplanted into their street.” The delightful infection of Katherine’s Impressionisms transplanted like Spanish Flu?
This ‘Blaze’ being the coda to the whole book, and particularly to the immediately previous rôle-play story above, as two men knowingly negotiate the slip and slide of snow toward moments that will enhance their S-M pleasure with the same woman, one his wife, the other his mistress. The woman’s final submission as a child. An ironic bathos, a meaningful ‘dying fall’. As with the last movement of the feisty Pathétique Symphony, the ultimate nut cracker.