Monday, April 13, 2020

Katherine Mansfield Stories (2)

CONTINUED FROM HERE: https://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-collected-stories-katherine.html

THE SINGING LESSON
“Everything about her was sweet, pale, like honey. You would not have been surprised to see a bee caught in the tangle of that yellow hair.”
Miss Meadows, can hear that bee buzzing, I guess, as she conducts literally the singing lesson in the school assembly hall. The buzzing of a letter she had just received from her fiancé, one about his having cold feet about getting married! It even caused denial of a regular chrysanthemum given to her as such lessons. The saving telegram with his change of mind, however, improved, in media res, the lesson and the way the lines of the particular song were sung! The headmistress, though, claimed that telegrams are for bad news and good news can always wait. This story seems to deny that theory in real-time! Made my day.


THE STRANGER
“Yes, my wife’s been in Europe for the last ten months.”
The husband waits excitedly, obsessively, for the ship to reach the wharf side. He has missed his wife so much, he solipsistically believes everyone around him shares his excitement. Almost Asperger’s, almost pitiful. I felt at first as if she were toying with or indulging this excitement when she finally landed, but she acts otherwise. I felt something amiss; was the delay in the ship’s berthing a virus or what? [POSSIBLE SPOILERS] She later claims in the hotel room that the man who was taken off the ship (thus delaying it) was not “infectious”. But is SHE infected by her memory of his dying in her arms? Can this husband and wife ever be alone together again? Can ANYONE ever be ‘alone together’, two words that have always struck me as paradoxical when used together?
“It struck him, as the gulf of water closed, how small she looked on that huge ship. His heart was wrung with such a spasm that he could have cried out.”


BANK HOLIDAY 
“Fevvers! Fevvers!”
Covfefe, too!
An old style Bank Holiday razzamatazz, with no social distancing, in Mansfield’s signature sharp yet impressionistic style of staccato sentences and vocatives, as well as longer softer descriptions.
All excitable participants appear to reach out for journey to the sun itself, or at least its Corona.



AN IDEAL FAMILY
“, old Mr. Neave felt he was too old for the spring.”
He suddenly feels he can’t cope, despite – or because of! – the jollity of spring, and if his ‘ideal’ family, the useless hobbies and trivia of his dear daughters, daughters he no longer recognises or does recognise for the first time, and his wife, and his handsome heir Harold, or whom I took to be his heir, ready to take over the firm. Mr. Neave sees himself as a little old spider going down the stairs, and now on his deathbed where his wife much younger than she is now saying farewell, but no, he still alive, still being helped to dress by his valet… six springs in his step, I wonder?


THE LADY’S MAID

“White! he turned as white as a woman.”

This monologue - or one-sided dialogue with an unheard and unseen companion - is by the eponymous maid, spoken with a stream of excited consciousness undercurrented, I feel, by a sense of ‘in denial’ beyond the donkey rides, beyond the ladies she had each night put to bed  (even sometimes ladies prepared for death in dynastic line), and not forgetting the boyfriend suitor for her hand, and other such sacrifices she had made.
I even wondered if it was to herself she spoke, and was making whatever preparations she needed to make....beyond the pale.


THE DOLL’S HOUSE
“Perhaps it is the way that God opens houses at the dead of night when He is taking a quiet turn with an angel. . . .”
Opening the whole front of a Doll’s House in contrast to peering through a real house’s door entrance. This is a classic story, I feel. A story that is as great a story as the actual Doll’s House it contains is a great Doll’s House, the optimum Doll’s House and the optimum story you can ever imagine, a Doll’s House complete with a lamp with oil in it ready to be lit… as it is lit at the end by a poor child’s mind, a poor child allowed to see it, when that child’s socially-spurned family had been forbidden to see it, but now allowed to see it by Mansfield making one of the posh children show it to that poor child, showing it to that child in addition to all the posher jolly and naïve children who were either given the Doll’s House to own or who showed it to their equally posh friends. Indeed, my mind lit up at the idea of it all…

HONEYMOON
“As a rule he merely kissed her. But now he caught hold of her hand, stuffed into his pocket, pressed her fingers, and said, ‘I used to keep a white mouse in my pocket when I was a kid.’
‘Did you?’ said Fanny, who was intensely interested in everything George had ever done.”
A wonderfully typical Mansfield with, inter alia, the atmospheres and accoutrements of a Mediterranean resort. Complete with a reminder of how dangerous it is to swim in that “gorgeous” sea, and there is a waiter at a lobster café who acts like a fish.
My only debate with myself was why, at the end, George wanted to rush back with Fanny to the hotel!
“‘It’s this.’ Fanny paused a moment, looked down, looked up again. ‘Do you feel,’ she said softly, ‘that you really know me now? But really, really know me?’
It was too much for George. Know his Fanny?”


A CUP OF TEA
“—rich people had hearts, and that women were sisters.”
With a rich husband who satisfied her every whim, even to the extent of allowing Rosemary Fell to consider buying a blue velvet box with, on it, minute creatures depicted as strangling each other, a box being sold for a near fortune in those days of 28 Guineas, and Rosemary Fell then fell, if unconsciously, for a sister’s Sapphic charms, as a homeless girl of her own age asked her in the street for the price of a cup of tea….
Her heart NEARLY fell for such charms, but Rosemary eventually rose, with the hinted help of her husband, to the challenging realisation on which side her afternoon tea was buttered!

TAKING THE VEIL
“It seemed impossible that anyone should be unhappy on such a beautiful morning.”
Yet, towards the end of this story Edna “is found tossing in high fever . . . in delirium . . . and she never recovers.”
But that, happily, is not a spoiler, because it depends on who found her thus tossing! Whether it be God finding an angel saint or herself finding a truth.
A story of a pretty Edna, engaged to be married, but falling in love with an actor on the stage, and when the word ‘fallen’ was used when sitting watching this actor from the balcony in the theatrical auditorium, you will perhaps guess what immediately jumped into my mind!

THE FLY
This seems to be a perfect prophetic metaphor for Trump and Covid; just read it and see! This old businessman continuously dousing a fly with ink blots, to make himself forget personal “storm-clouds” of death from the First World War. Even then breathing on the poor fly in a false attempt to help it dry out until it finally expires under yet another ink blot released from his fountain pen. The fountain pen, I guess, that usually scrawled his unruly signature….?
Seemed somehow appropriate that I read this immediately after receiving Rourke’s Vantablack in the post.


THE CANARY
“Flowers respond wonderfully, but they don’t sympathise.”
A perfectly inadvertent fable for today’s lockdown, and loneliness, here someone who buys a canary off a “Chinaman” and hangs on the hook outside the front door, and sometimes brought inside. Those who pass along the road at a social distance are filled with its rhapsodies of song. A meticulous, caring canary. The narrator is “nothing” to those younger people who SEEM to come in for supper in the abode, and I wonder who is the most imaginary, them or the narrator, even if ALL of them are imaginary by dint of being in a fiction. Even when the canary dies, despite the immanent sadness of life around us, the canary is still there, ironically, perhaps, a part (“deep down, deep down”) of our actual breathing….”
“I shall get over it. Of course. I must. One can get over anything in time.”

A MARRIED MAN’S STORY
“Nothing Happens Suddenly”
This still evolving story has its own “second self”, one that notices unanswered questions and the relationship (described in this monologue by the man in the title) with Things (like the moon, the green star, some white peaks of wax and a shy creeper) for Past’s distancing Remembrance, say, of poison delivered between the thus remembered parents; the social-distancing of his own marriage, gaslighting or not, is seen from amidst those who seek help and those who are asked for such help needing even more help themselves. Not even physical beauty can be evaluated in such a numb bell’s ringing disguised as fiction, a story that never happens to end…but suddenly stops.

THE DOVE’S NEST
Mother and daughter Milly, with the father having died two years before, have two servants, Marie and Yvonne, and a companion Miss Anderson who, disappointingly, “had turned out to be a Roman Catholic. Half her time, more than half, was spent wearing out the knees of her skirts in cold churches”. Except this work is full of Mansfield’s ambiance of the warm French Riviera. These women are without the seasoning of change as provided by a man. Then, Mr Prodger, an American, arrives to visit the father whom he once knew but did not know had died, except the questions he asked when he was told about this, “You sure? You positive?”, seemed to make it appropriate — when Fate in the form of a message from the dead meant that he was invited, like a live lion into a female den, to a future lunch — that one of the women later designed flower displays with the names of various tombs, for that very lunch occasion! Do please imagine the eventual lunch’s interactive repercussions (“It was like (O ciel!)— it was like handing potatoes to a corpse.”) of all these characters. And their conversation. No social distancing despite his having had a heavy cold in Florence. Accoutrements like the hats that Mother thought about wearing, a jampot or a mushroom, and, later, roast lamb, a special Gorgonzola, ice cream as icebreaker, or Milly sucking a sugar cube as a disastrous faux pas even worse than someone once calling another male visitor Mr Sandiman, Mr Sandybags! O ciel! Another ice to break….during a conversation, all conversations needing to be nursed or rocked like a babe.
“. . . Miss Anderson rustled, rustled about the house like a dead leaf.”

SIX YEARS AFTER
“But he—hated cabins, hated to be inside anywhere more than was absolutely necessary.”
This is a story of cabin fever and its dreams, a strikingly oblique prophecy – based on a cruise liner – of the marital conflicts of lockdown today, where fever leads to dreams or nightmares, and the consequent problems of one’s children or childlessness, whichever applies, as transposed to self and one’s partner as parent. Individuals as indivisible. But must now be read by all Coviduals. Six years of lockdown as in WWII?

DAPHNE
“It was rather like finding oneself in the playground of an extremely attractive girls’ school.”
A painter artist with a one man show in Port Willin (note the name), an idyllic place full of young girls and tea shops where they all resort at certain times of day. One girl in particular, Daphne, instead of being chased, as the myth has it, by him, he expected her to chase after him. I guess, as sort of his wish to role play the sexual awakening of children? Even more important to him than painting. No wonder it somehow all went awry. Or was it her view of his pipe?

FATHER AND THE GIRLS
“When she saw the dark, flat breast of the engine, so bare, so powerful, hurled as it were towards her, she felt a weakness—she could have sunk to the earth.”
Ernestine with her “beautiful, youthful bosom buttoned…”, watches, from amid the Hotel’s vines, the train from Italy draw in and watched people alight who had not been there before and would not be there for long…
Indeed, not long enough to leapfrog the story’s ending as ellipsis.
A new indiscrete story of an 84 year old man who loved travelling across Europe pre-pandemic and hated home. With his two daughters who were old discreetly enough not to want to see themselves in mirrors! Or in stories?
The hotel itself is a wonderfully depicted genius-loci.

ALL SERENE!
“Our porch black with mining engineers”
Or is it as serene as it seems? An idyllic breakfast scene of a happy in-love couple (three years married) amid references to petunias and a silver pear on a silver teapot. I wonder if the mining was for silver? Or a mine’s overshadowing a letter one of them receives and does not show the other! 
=========
“Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was Oh no, not again. Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the Universe than we do now.”
— Douglas Adams

A BAD IDEA
“I’m not one of your actor Johnnies, or a chap in a book.”
That’s why he is in denial about his wife, a wife who IS in this book by dint of being included in this his short monologue about being in denial whilst being in denial about being in denial. Starting that audit trail of denials was a bad idea, I guess. Any grudges about a coworker’s garden, notwithstanding.



A MAN AND HIS DOG
“He was tired. He’d been up half the night rubbing his wife’s chest—she had one of her mysterious pains—“
No wonder, her husband Potts was relegated to the end of the garden to smoke his pipe. Actually, she often became delirious with this early form of Covid, I sense, until she invokes her ex boy friend’s name, this being a sign of remission. Potts is too much like his own dog as I gather from this hilarious patchwork of his life, his shoes’ tongues gone missing, like his dog he himself a watch dog not a fighting one.
“…when he cried ‘for the wings, for the wings of a dove,’ the ladies in the congregation wanted to club together and buy him a pair.”

SUCH A SWEET OLD LADY
“Foreign clocks never go. They are always stopped at twenty minutes to two. Twenty minutes to two! Such an unpleasant time, neither one thing nor the other.”
Dreams, too, are foreign, neither here nor there, too, as stuck between waking and sleeping, and in these days of lucid, vivid, covid dreaming, I find myself, at my advanced age, like this lady, automatically waking up at 4.30 to check my bearings of the place where I fell asleep. In one’s dreams, it is like visiting foreigners in a foreign country, one step or notch between realities, neither one thing or another.
SHE, though, has a waking base in a hotel, cared for by caring relatives, with her sometimes watching palm trees from her hotel window, amid the mirrors that triangulate her coordinates. She thinks the palms look like spiders …. or foreigners?
HONESTY
Two men in a story that ends elliptically. Honestly can’t say whether it was intended to end elliptically or was passively unfinished. But if you want my honest opinion, I sense it was intended thus. Two men living together as housemates, differentiated by those two levels of certainty and uncertainty in the word ‘honestly.’
One of them “had not really made up his mind. He had not really made up his mind on any subject whatsoever. Why! Because he could not. He was unlike other men. He was minus something—or was it plus?”
[Cf “From the cosmic point of view, to have opinions or preferences at all is to be ill; for by harbouring them one dams up the flow of the ineluctable force which, like a river, bears us down to the ocean of everything’s unknowing. Reality is a running noose, one is brought up short with a jerk by death. It would have been wiser to co-operate with the inevitable and learn to profit by this unhappy state of things – by realising and accommodating death! But we don’t, we allow the ego to foul its own nest. Therefore we have insecurity, stress, the midnight-fruit of insomnia, with a whole culture crying itself to sleep. How to repair this state of affairs except through art, through gifts which render to us language manumitted by emotion, poetry twisted into the service of direct insight?”
– from ‘The Avignon Quincunx’ by Lawrence Durrell (‘Constance’ 1982)]
The other man Rupert sort of bullies the indecisive one called Archie. On bathroom etiquette and ornaments. And “Poor Archie hated scrambled eggs, but alas! he was practically certain that scrambled eggs were expected of him too.”
And Archie’s father once made him “count the yachts racing in the harbour, divide them by four and multiply the result by three.”
Archie ended up spending most of his time reading, as I do.


SUSANNAH
“…the doll’s teapot wouldn’t pour out even after you’d poked a pin down the spout and blown into it.”
Susannah is the youngest of the three daughters of the “high feather” father whose tirelessly hard work to earn money – and what the mother calls his vital days of rest – are only questioned by Susannah when faced with not going to the current Exhibition’s circus… Each half of this story is a separate triangulation of truth as the four quarters of the Alexandria Quartet are such triangulations, too. Perfect that Susannah didn’t really want to go to the circus at all!

SECOND VIOLIN
“People look small and shrunken as they flit by; they look scared as if they were trying to hide inside their coats from something big and brutal.”
Worth reading this absurdist coupling of another two halves, gratuitously connected halves. One about a girl arriving for rehearsal with her instrument, where people were named after their instruments. And a game of cribbage where two of the people involved would likely ‘get the beetroot’ if they didn’t get to a rehearsal. The same rehearsal? The big and brutal connective freehold narrator gets the beetroot, too, for missing the end, as well as the train? O Henry comes to mind. My 

MR. AND MRS. WILLIAMS
“As a matter of fact it was Mrs. Williams’ Aunt Aggie’s happy release which had made their scheme possible. Happy release it was! After fifteen years in a wheel-chair passing in and out of the little house at Ealing she had, to use the nurse’s expression, ‘just glided away at the last.’ Glided away … it sounded as though Aunt Aggie had taken the wheel-chair with her. One saw her, in her absurd purple velvet, steering carefully among the stars and whimpering faintly, as was her terrestrial wont, when the wheel jolted over a particularly large one.”
“I say, has it ever struck you that both our names begin with G?”
They use the money of Aggie’s legacy to go on a trip to Switzerland, much to the disapproval of such a contravention of conventions from the neighbours in Wickenham, Surrey. Words such as “Hun”, “Boche” and “Bolshy”, notwithstanding. 
Note the name ‘Aggie’…
“Two Gs. Gee-Gee. See?”

WEAK HEART
“…Ah, if life must pass so quickly, why is the breath of these flowers so sweet?”
I think this possibly the saddest story you will ever read. Of flowers, and piano playing by a 14 year old girl…
This is essential impressionistic and impressionable WoMansfield – its imputed unfinishedness being its greatest strength…

WIDOWED
“I do so hate to be short of toast, don’t you?”
An idyllic married breakfast with the servants sent for more toast. The husband then went out riding. The wife receives a phone call…
I received a call, too, figuratively speaking, warning that the story’s title is a plot spoiler! So to ignore it.

THE TIREDNESS OF ROSABEL
“There was a sickening smell of warm humanity—it seemed to be oozing out of everybody in the bus—and everybody had the same expression, sitting so still, staring in front of them.”
And later her forehead was hot.
Meanwhile, hatress Rosabel — having sold a wonderful black hat to a lady, bought for her by her beau — goes hungry because she has bought too many violets but then she dreams of being that lady for real, with all that lady’s finery in a boudoir … and Rosabel in that rôle is taken out by the handsome beau. Even gets married to him! In your dreams, I say!

HOW PEARL BUTTON WAS KIDNAPPED
Kidnapped from “the House of Boxes.”
A little white girl enticed by two fat coloured women, and shown a more natural semi-nude life where she becomes happy, sees the sea and its foam for the first time after watching men roll peaches or pears at her. Just need cream to go with them? Till snatched back by those in the House of Boxes.
This is the most agratuitously, apolitically, acorrectly and adidactically amoral story you will ever read.

  1. A JOURNEY TO BRUGES
    “I saw them watch me with that delighted relish of the hot in the very much hotter.”
    On a hectically characterful and character full journey by train and ship to Bruges via Dover, the narrator of unknown gender is addressed towards the end as ‘Madame’, at which point she imagines the lady (who is addressing her) falling in love with her and leaving her her lace as a legacy. A story full of luggage and with little social distancing. And impressions of multitudinous porters and Sherpas. Other days, other ways.
  2. A TRUTHFUL ADVENTURE
    Truthful, because the narrator in the previous story, visiting Bruges, turns out to be Katherine herself! Hotel is full so such a Missiah needed to be put elsewhere I guess, and she is out in a room with paper thin walls whereby she can hear everything next door. And all the candles were handled like frying pans. Don’t ask! And later she did not seem to have any sympathy with the Suffrage movement because of an ex girl friend met by chance that evening in Bruges whose honeymoon husband had inculcated his bride thus. She as narrator had earlier declined a room where a man had stayed in it with an illness… but she herself later “coughed” anyway. The scene in the boat with a woman who fell in the water I will leave to your imagination.

NEW DRESSES
“It was for your sake I made the dresses; of course, you can’t understand that, but really, Henry.”
A marital dispute about the seemingly expensive green material purchased and sewn by breadwinner Henry’s wife (and her old mother) into their two daughters’ run-ups. And the family doctor comes along quite fancying the older, but still underage, daughter & somehow gets her out of the scrape of tearing her dress and her hiding it in a satchel! The younger daughter who behaved better than her elder sister, I felt more sorry for! Another of Mansfield’s lightly impressionistic family slices of life, peppered with darker imputations.

THE WOMAN AT THE STORE 
A wildly mad version of O Henry’s Wilder West here in the New Zealand of yore. With mucho elided dialogue, two men and a woman on horses arrive moseying at this store in the middle of nowhere where a woman and her ‘kid’, a girl who does diseased drawings, and has concupiscence leanings but complains being put in a room with two men, as much as the woman, her mother, yearns, too, for ‘company’, as it were, with her husband often abandoning her here, as now, to go ‘shearing’ as he says. There is a prehensile ominous sense around them of doom and thunder as if the universe is playing with them all.

 nullimmortalis
OLE UNDERWOOD
“The mad wind smelled of tar and ropes and slime and salt.”
This character, escaped from the the jail on the hill, becomes part and parcel of that mad wind as if such an inchoate force is harnessed as a retrocausal vehicle of sporadic surge for all the bad things he has done. Making them good. Doing the same bad things again to a cat or a little girl or his wife as a means to UNdo them. Only literature can manage that, I guess. Literature is essentially amoral. It can make him do all those bad things again, given its whim.

THE LITTLE GIRL 
“Mother, I wish you would teach this child not to appear on the brink of suicide. . . .”
I cannot ignore the potentially meaningful coincidence that I happened to watch the Greek film, ‘Miss Violence’ (2013), yesterday, thus pointing me to perhaps the only possible interpretation of this story. How her father treats his young daughter and what one can extrapolate beyond the events at its end…
In fact, the tone of some other Mansfield stories I have read would not exclude such an interpretation’s likelihood.

MILLIE 
“I wunner why we never had no kids. . . .”
Simpaïve and inflex, Millie’s feelings range wide … and her husband Sid and someone called Willie Cox, and a young wastrel she adopts, for a few moments taking the side of this dotty wastrel (though the book calls him half dotty), yes, the one who murdered Mr Williamson. Till others in her life sway her in the polar opposite direction. She is a fleeting soul, more half dotty than dotty, who sees frightening things at home swell and lurch sometimes like dreams, and is one of Mansfield’s wonderful “muddle” of impressions, including, somehow, a garden party at far-off Windsor Castle!


CONTINUED HERE: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/03/12/the-collected-stories-katherine-mansfield/

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