The Madness of Writing and Katherine Mansfield

 I did not read Katherine Mansfield until prison. I did not study her. Having now read Stories that simply unfold Katherine Mansfield’s place in the literary canon by Kirsty Gunn (Times Literary Supplement), I think I should have done so. But then I have always heavily discounted my own talents with the short story, while Mansfield seems to have been a great talent.

That sentiment, it is true, has been echoed by writers from William Faulkner to Elizabeth Hardwick to Angela Carter – all of whom admired the form of narrative that Mansfield had made her own, one that takes the reader straight into the midst of a situation, a world, and simply lets events play out there, as though in real time. (“Katherine Mansfield liquefied the short story”, V. S. Pritchett said. “She cut out the introductions, the ways and means which are simply barriers.”) But has her influence ever been fully acknowledged? It’s that word “only” again – like another Mansfield word, “little” – as though the sheer brevity of her genre, the apparent inconsequentiality of her themes – “little stories like birds in cages” is how she described her work at the end of her life – hasn’t served her literary status at all well. “If only I could learn to work in the right way”, she despaired, “to write something that will be worthy.” Yet, as our own age reminds us, those who have become used to describing themselves thus – not good enough, not important enough, not “worthy” – are no less due our attention. So how fitting it is that at a time in our cultural life when we have never been more engaged by seeking to include and listen to those who’ve up until now only ever been “only” – on the margins, at the edges, from someplace other, a somewhere else – we might, in this year, the centenary of Mansfield’s death, look afresh at what this writer has to offer and why those “feminine” little stories, as Eliot called them, might not be so little after all.

As for the madness, you might want to read my The Madness of Writing.

Why I continue this theme with Mansfield:

The subtitle of this book – a biography that is not, per se, a biography – conveys its key note. Risk is a fine word to include in the title of a literary study, especially in a publishing environment more often than not averse to it. It seems all too appropriate for Mansfield, who strove to keep testing the limits of her ability and eschewing traditional methods of storytelling. “Risk! Risk anything”, she wrote in her notebook. The results were significant. Harman shows in her attentive close readings how Mansfield risked representing otherness in “all sorts of lives”, well outside the charmed circle of Bloomsbury. “Je ne parle pas français”, for example, as Harman reminds us, is a creepy story of a failed writer with “his sexualised imagination”. Both Murry and her publisher wanted certain passages redacted, for fear of losing sales and prestige. Mansfield defended the story as a breakthrough in her creative method.

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...To really think about what it might be to be marginalized or left behind or ignored – to imagine so fully, as Mansfield does, what it is to be inside and outside – is to see that risk exploding at the level of the sentence. “Prelude” portrays a disillusioned wife and her blustering patriarchal husband even as it portrays a woman with post-natal depression and a man who only wants her to be happy. To show both, to change, to let a story jump around in all kinds of directions so it’s never “about”, but rather just “is” – that’s risk. In the end Claire Harman’s book does that thing that all good literary biographies do. It sends us straight back into the delicate, exhilarating, risking world of Mansfield’s fiction and shows us how the greatest risk she took was in letting something “little” do so much.

Therein the lies the madness, to create as well as one can on one's own terms. I gave up writing to make money. There was one who had faith enough in me to support me while I wrote, and I refused her offer, thinking she would resent it later on. After she left me, I gave up writing almost altogether, until I destroyed all I had tried to build up since her departure. Then I had no choice. I had nothing more to embarrass myself with. I suggest strongly that you who think you can, make the effort of doing. Have the backbone I did not have. Succumb to the madness of creation against the the universe's indifference to humanity's existence.

sch 1/7/23

1/8/23: The Guardian has The outsider: why Katherine Mansfield still divides opinion 100 years after her death, a more general appreciation of the writer. While The Spectator's The imaginative energy of Katherine Mansfield reviews the same book as the TLS.

1/12/23, this from the Public Domain Review's Eating and Reading with Katherine Mansfield by Aimée Gasston feels pertinent:

This dissatisfaction, Mansfield's letter concludes, is the result of being spoilt by too much Shakespeare, drawing sharp relief between the “rich” language of English, and the French, which she finds “hard to stomach”.²¹ The word “kickshaw” itself derives from French (quelque-chose) and is defined as a “fancy but insubstantial cooked dish, especially one of foreign origin”.²² To Mansfield, literature is then a comestible object, but one which should not yield too easily to its consumer.²³ It should satiate a voracious appetite with a robust, succulent, and varied heartiness, not offer scanty titbits, attractive to the eye and sliding down easily but ultimately failing to satisfy. The discriminatory attitude towards the diminutive that is discernible here would also carry through to Mansfield's view of the short story genre, with her insecurities strengthened by the weighty authority of the traditional literary canon.

1/22/2023, and The Guardian strikes again with Where to start with: Katherine Mansfield.

The one that deserves more attention

Mansfield led a reckless life in her teens and 20s, “going every sort of hog”, as Virginia Woolf remarked disapprovingly, in a frantic quest for experience. This resulted in unwanted pregnancies, illnesses and rejection by her family and Mansfield’s stories are full of girls in similar straits: impoverished, threatened or ostracised. Her decision to write about sex and its perils was bold and hasn’t been given enough attention. There are assaults and attempted rapes in Juliet, The Little Governess and His Sister’s Keeper, but a particularly shocking instance is in The Swing of the Pendulum, which appeared in Mansfield’s first book, In a German Pension, in 1911. Mansfield’s earliest biographer, Antony Alpers, found the story disturbing and excluded it from his 1984 collection on the grounds of “crudity”, so it hasn’t had much exposure and I’ve never seen it discussed by scholars. But if there was ever a #MeToo story a hundred years ahead of its time, it is this one: when consensual flirting turns quickly to non-consensual sex, the girl in the story shouts and struggles, only to be met with “an expression of the most absurd determination” from her attacker; “he did not even look at her – but rapped out in a sharp voice: ‘Keep quiet – keep quiet’.”