KATHERINE MANSFIELD AND HER CONFESSIONAL STORIES

Transcription

1 KATHERINE MANSFIELD AND HER CONFESSIONAL STORIES

2 Also by the same author CRITICAL ESSAYS ON THE NEW ZEALAND NOVEL (editor) CRITICAL ESSAYS ON THE NEW ZEALAND SHORT STORY (editor) LIFE IN A YOUNG COLONY (editor)

3 KATHERINE MANSFIELD AND HER CONFESSIONAL STORIES C. A. Hankin M MACMILLAN

4 C. A. Hankin 1983 Katherine Mansfield text 1983 The Estate of Katherine Mansfield John Middleton Murry text 1983 The Estate of John Middleton Murry Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission First edition 1983 Reprinted 1984 Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD London and Basingstoke Companies and representatives throughout the world ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI /

5 To those teachers and friends from North America whose generous encouragement made this book possible Professors Frederick Crews, Henry Nash Smith, John Garrett and the late Charles T. Samuels

6 Contents Preface Acknowledgements PART I I Childhood Fantasies 2 The Pains of Adolescence 3 'Juliet': an Autobiographical Experiment 4 Forbidden Love 5 The Consolation of Art 6 Emotion versus Will 1x xu PART II London and a Dual Existence 55 8 The German Pension Stories 61 9 Loneliness and its Dangers Middleton Murry and the Theme ofchildhood Reality versus Dream Role-playing 90 PART III Death of Little Brother I 'Prelude' Garsington as Fiction 'je Ne Parle Pas Fran~ais' The Nightmare Marriage 164 Vll

7 Vlll Contents PART IV 'The Man Without a Temperament' Mother, Father and 'Daughters of the Late Colonel' More Thrilling than Love - Honesty 'At the Bay' Haunted by Death Postscript 248 Notes 258 Select Bibliography 265 Index 267

8 Preface The special quality of Katherine Mansfield's writing has kept her work before the public ever since her premature death in Yet there is a sense in which the nature ofher achievement has resisted definition. Different generations of admirers have read her stories, but remained puzzled by their significance. Critics have discussed her inimitable prose, have analysed her technique, and have averred that Katherine Mansfield helped change the direction of the short story in English. Two new biographies have been published. The question that remains unanswered is why a modest body of work, written by a relatively young woman, should continue to fascinate readers of all ages and nationalities. In 1923 Conrad Aiken offered his opinion as to what distinguished Katherine Mansfield from her contemporaries. 'Far more identifiably than most modern writers,' he said, '[she] used the short story as the medium for undisguised confession... She was at her best when a theme, a scene, a character, most closely and intricately invited her own unclouded confession.' 1 He was right. Greatly influenced in her girlhood by the French diarist Marie Bashkirtseff, Katherine Mansfield belongs in a long line of confessional writers stretching from Rousseau to Proust. Her achievement was to carry the confessional tradition forward into the twentieth century, examining the inner life in a manner which places her among the major psychological writers of her age. Confession, albeit under the guise of fiction, was an inseparable part of Katherine Mansfield's lifelong quest for psychological understanding. Relentlessly, she probed her own conflict-ridden personality, the personalities of her parents - and, by extension, human nature. Quite deliberately, she wove her stories around her own emotional experiences. Emotion, she once wrote, is what makes a work of art a unity. 'Without emotion, writing is dead; it IX

9 X Preface becomes a record instead of a revelation, for the sense of revelation comes from that emotional reaction which the artist felt, and was impelled to communicate.' 2 Invariably, the revelation which is at the heart of Katherine Mansfield's best stories is psychological. She was impelled to explore and communicate, with remarkable honesty, the unconscious as well as the conscious determinants of human behaviour. Like Freud and D. H. Lawrence, she turned for information about the unconscious mind to her own mind. Even as she used her own dreams and disappointments as the raw material of fiction, however, she employed all the resources of art to disguise, distance and shape her themes. In the process, she created a great variety of characters whose emotions with astonishing skill she examined under the microscope of her art. Because Katherine Mansfield's unique contribution to twentieth-century literature has not been fully understood, the present study takes as its subject the psychological bases of her stories. Her experiments in the fictional representation of human personality are, I believe, as important in their own way as those of her more celebrated contemporaries: Joyce, Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf. Virginia Woolf possibly knew this when she wrote after her friend's death, 'Katherine's my rival no longer. More generously, I felt, but though I can do this better than she could, where is she, who could do what I can't.... And I was jealous of her writing- the only writing I have ever been jealous o('3 In her quest for understanding, Katherine Mansfield again and again looked back to her own beginnings. It was as if only there she could find the clue to her true identity. She was still wondering in 1920: 'Is it not possible that the rage for confession, autobiography, especially for memories of earliest childhood, is explained by our persistent yet mysterious belief in a self which is continuous and permanent?' 4 This study follows her own line of enquiry by starting at the beginning and examining her earliest writing- and emotional reactions. Her youthful stories and poems throw light both on the meaning of her mature fiction, and on the development of her artistic technique. As Murry noted long ago, it is hard to separate Katherine Mansfield's art from her life. Paralleling a discussion of individual stories, therefore, is an account of the emotional experiences they in some way reflect. At the end of her life, what

10 Preface XI Katherine Mansfield wanted more than anything else (except health) was to be understood. It seems fitting that an attempt to penetrate the psychological meanings of her stories should also be an attempt to understand the woman who had the courage to write them. University of Canterbury New Zealand C.A.H.

11 Acknowledgements I owe a debt of gratitude to Professor F. C. Crews of the University ofcalifornia at Berkeley, who inspired this study and continued to offer advice and encouragement; and to Professor J. C. Garrett of the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, who helped with his encouragement and valuable checking of the typescript. Other people who generously assisted me are the late Mrs Maude Morris (and her daughter, Susan Graham), Mrs Margaret Scott and Mrs Julian Vinogradoff. I am also grateful to the reference librarians at the University of Canterbury for their assistance, and to the typists and others who gave practical help. I am indebted to the University of California at Berkeley for the Advanced Graduate Travelling Fellowship which first enabled me to undertake research on Katherine Mansfield's unpublished papers, and to the University of Canterbury for generous research assistance. The Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and the British Museum kindly allowed me to use material in their possession. Permission to quote from the unpublished letters of Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry has been granted by the Society of Authors on behalf of the Estates of Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry.