People, Places, Feelings, and Objects (Short Stories - Katherine Mansfield)

Member Name: Celandine

Product:	Short Stories - Katherine Mansfield
Date:	25/06/01 (5652 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: beautiful writing style, nice and short if you don't like wading through huge books

Disadvantages: In some ways a little dated, but that doesn't make them irrelevant

Katherine Mansfield. I've been wanting to write this for ages. She is, you see, one of my very favorite authors, and one of the few authors who I've continued to like, and read, as I've grown up. I think it's only the really good writers whose books you continue to find new things in each time you read them, and who remain relevant through the years.

I think it's probably because Mansfield writes about people, characters in situations, rather than concentrating on plot. She died in 1923, and her stories are set firmly in that era, but people haven't changed that much, and this is what she excells at. Reading her stories is rather like lifting the lid off a rather old-fashioned looking Dolls House, and unscrewing the heads of the character dolls in it, then peering inside them to see how they work, and function in their own little environment.

She tends to concentrate on these small situations. In 'Honeymoon' she lets you in to the private thoughts of a newly-married couple, as they sit, all lovey-dovey, on a terrace in Spain. Something happens, and because Mansfield lets you read their thoughts, you start to see how wide the gulf is between these two people - not because they want it to be, just because it is. They simply see things differently, however nice and cosy they are together on the surface.

In 'A Birthday' we are let into the world of the middle class businessman, whilst his wife is having a difficult labour with his third child. Mansfield carefully opens up the private thoughts of this stereotype, and shows us not only how he reacts to this situation, but who he is, and he is exposed, in a way, as a spoilt little boy, but without malice or any spurious sense of an author passing judgment. This is clever, and it's also a bit of a trick, I think. There isn't much physical description, just enough to give us an insight into their weaknesses. Maybe an earring here, a waistcoat there.
Maybe there's a particular picture on a wall. It's the thoughts that we see, and the rest is left up to us to imagine. I like this in writing - here, you're told just enough to make up your mind about someone, and then suddenly, a turn, and you realise, that as in real life, you don't really know this character at all. There is always something left secret, just hinted at, enough to force us to make judgments on a character, and then to doubt them.

'The Daughters of the Late Colonel' is one of my favorite stories in this particular collection. Again, these two ladies could, at first, be stereotyped figures. They are 'typical' Spinsters, who lived with, and at the beck and call of, their fierce father. We see them in their nightclothes, lost, formal, like small children who've been caught eating the cooking chocolate, but with no-one there to admonish them after his death. There's something unbearably sad about this story, but something funny, too. Almost all Mansfield's writing is witty. This isn't 'belly laugh' humour, rather little twists of words, or moments when the utter ridiculousness of a situation, or thought, is suddenly exposed. Everyday things are funny when they're looked at from someone else's viewpoint.

Mansfield's way of writing is detatched. As an author, I'd call her an eternal observer. She has often been described as 'childlike', but I do think that her writing is cleverer than that. We may, at times, see the world she portrays through a child's eyes, but she uses no childish superfluity of language, and her detatchment is always controlled. In one of her best known stories: 'Prelude' we follow the day of a little girl, Kezia, as her family moves house. In turn, we watch each of the characters - Auntie Beryl, Linda Burell, 'Mother' and the servant girl. This is one of Mansfield's longer stories, but it's still only 43 pag
es long, and it's so beautifully written it only feels like 10 pages.

Thriller lovers will probably hate Mansfield. There are drawbacks to her writing style. You don't get excitement or intrigue in her stories, and you're lucky if you get much narrative. There's people, and situations, but on a global scale there isn't much movement. The events she describes tend to be those affecting a small and close-knit circle of people, with one small outside event as a catalyst. She doesn't really deal much in social conscience, either, and, of course, in a way the stories are dated, for she was writing 70 years ago. The middle class life of people then, is not like life now - but I don't, honestly think that the essentials of people have changed all that much. You may not agree with all her views, too. I don't. She's elitist, was probably a tearing snob, but at least she writes wholly as herself. There's no pretension in her writing, and no posturing. No fakery or trickery, and she doesn't set out to be liked as an author. I like that.

In the introduction to this particular anthology, Claire Tomalin talks of her writing as:

' A key to the foreign land of the Past'.........'the language spoken by her characters, their way of life, their preoccupations are all foreign now'.

I'd dispute that. Yes, she gives us an insight into middle class life of that era, but the preoccupations of the characters involved are pretty universal. One drawback I wouldn't dispute, is that she can be patchy. This particular volume of her stories is one I like because most of the stories in it are the good ones.

One of the other things that always wins me over to her is her writing style. It's beautiful, and so compact. If you took a thick black marker pen to one of the stories, and tried to find uneccesary words, you'd maybe cull two, at most. Each word that Mansfield uses earns its
keep. They all fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. There's no superfluous passages of prose, no purple descriptions. It's like looking at a Matisse line drawing - they seem effortless, but scenes are described minutely and perfectly, with no frilly fuss and extravagance, unlike, lets say, DH Lawrence, who was one of her friends. Here's an example of her descriptive style, taken from 'Bains Turcs':

'.....a glass roof through which one could see the sky, pale and unreal as a photographer's background screen. Some round tables strewn with shabby fashion journals, a marbe basin in the centre of the room, filled with yellow lilies, and on the long, towel-enveloped chairs a number of ladies, apparently languid as the flowers.....I lay back with a cloth over my head, and the air, smelling of jungles and circuses and damp washing, made me begin to dream.

That's of a place, and about as lengthy a description as we ever get. Here's Linda, in 'Prelude':

'It had never been so plain to her as it was at this moment. There were all her feelings for him, sharp and defined, one as true as the other. And there was this other, this hatred, just as real as the rest. She could have done her feelings up in little packets and given them to Stanley. She longed to hand him that last one, for a surprise. She could see his eyes as he opened that.....'

I've found it very difficult, getting quotes. It's almost as if Mansfield only works when she's read in context. Taken outside of the story, her writing doesn't seem quite so beautiful. Maybe that just shows how perfectly the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle fit together to form the story.

Much of Mansfield's subjects do seem to dwell on men and women not getting on very well, children, and death. This isn't really surprising. I'll only skim over her biography here, but she was suffering from TB for most of her life, and died w
hen she was 34. John Middleton Murray, her husband, was also her literary advisor, and controlled much of her output. He, in many ways, is responsible for presenting her as sentimental, and somewhat twee, by publishing unfinished scraps of material in his 'Collected Stories'. Please don't take the twee image too seriously, though. She was, in actuality, quite feisty as a person. She ran away from her very conservative family, and held fast to modernist values even when they became unfashionable, and when she was too ill to really enjoy them. I won't go into it too much here though. I'm not sure how much difference knowing about her life makes to enjoying her fiction. If you are interested, then I'd recommend a modern biography, and the introduction to this 'Collected Stories' is informative, and reasonably unbiased, although it does have a slightly feminist sway.

And, if you're ever passing a library, and have a spare few moments, then she's worth looking at, at least. Lots of the stories in this volume are very short, some only 10 pages long, so it wouldn't take long to look. But, if you're looking for a rip-roaring tale of adventure, then you're probably not going to like them. If you're, like me, terribly curious about people, then you might. I hope I haven't put you off, anyway.

For those who are interested, here's a list of the stories published in this particular collection:

The Tiredness of Rosabel, Frau Brechenmacher Attends A Wedding, The Swing of the Pendulum, A Birthday, Millie, The WOman at the Store, Bains Turcs, An Indiscreet Journey, The Little Governess, Prelude, Bliss, A Married Man's Story, Carnation, This Flower, The Man Without a Temprament, The Daughters of the Late Colonel, Her First Ball, The Voyage, At the Bay, The Garden Party, and Honeymoon.


Katherine Mansfield: Short Stories: Selected and Introduced by Claire Tomalin. (Everyman 1983
)

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