PART TWO OF MY REAL-TIME REVIEW…
COLLECTED STORIES by Katherine Mansfield.
CONTINUED FROM: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/03/12/the-collected-stories-katherine-mansfield/
My review thoughts will be in the comment stream below.
(My previous reviews of older or classic books: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/reviews-of-older-books/)
Shadows & Elbows 
FEUILLE d’ALBUM
“. . . Perched up in the air the studio had a wonderful view. […] One evening he was sitting at the side window eating some prunes and throwing the stones on to the tops of the huge umbrellas in the deserted flower market.”
Yet whence he sat and watched the girl he fancied, she must in turn have seen him, from her balcony, as “a hollow in the air”…. Hopeless.
This little thing is my favourite Mansfield so far, about an obsessively shy man as artist with meticulous manners of self distancing and personal-goal behaviour. Many have tried to seduce him but … Hopeless.
One day, he sees from his studio window this girl on a lower balcony, who only goes out once a week for specific items of grocery. He imagines talking to her and imagining the co-tenant inside she turns to talk to, a disabled mother or what? The ending is such an utterly great (possibly requited?) ending, that you wonder forever all the implications in dropping, or not dropping, an egg! Surely NOT Hopeless at all?
[This works co-resonates so perfectly with my happenstance reading earlier today HERE, the equally impossible views in John Howard’s Steaua de Munte.]
A DILL PICKLE
“She was that glove that he held in his fingers. . . .”
A man and woman encounter each other again, after six years, by chance, in a restaurant, and have a short conversation about their previous relationship. Discreet as well as intensely discrete, almost solipsistic. Like untouched cream. As gloves divide us today. The solipsism, too, of a chance dill pickle evocative of a Russia they never, in the end, visited together. Proust made manifestly Mansfield. All her Mansfieldisms of emotional wordplay … plus a dog whose name only one of them remembers the name of — and the only one of them who remembers that name is actually the one who never knew the dog in real-time! Aickman’s Same Dog, notwithstanding.
THE LITTLE GOVERNESS
“‘But it’s all over now,’ she said to the mirror face, feeling in some way that it was more frightened than she.”
A young anxious naive abstemious social-distancing Governess, travelling alone, and abroad for the first time, due to meet her new employer at a hotel in Munich after reaching there by train, and after first getting off the boat. The Ladies Only carriage on the train is soon violated by an old man who kindly treats her but later tempts her astray via strawberries, an art gallery and an ice cream (but not wine as she refused it) … and suddenly kisses her ON THE MOUTH, beyond the pale, indeed, before she can escape back to the hotel. But back there too late for the assignation with her employer to be governess, as a previously aggrieved waiter at the hotel smugly notes. I truly felt for her, and even felt violated myself via a deep empathy, somehow because, no doubt, the delightful language describing her journey in this story is so utterly precious and so sensitively penetrable. But surely she should have noticed that the old man was so caught up with her, he had earlier forgotten to put his umbrella down after the rain had long since stopped.
“Alas! how tragic for a little governess to possess hair that made one think of tangerines and marigolds, of apricots and tortoiseshell cats and champagne!”
REVELATIONS
“She could not stand this silent flat, noiseless Marie, this ghostly, quiet, feminine interior. She must be out;”
Monica, a precious thirty-something, too old before her time, partial to self-isolation, impulsively, in the gusty wind, goes out to the hairdressers… And then I thought, somehow, that it would be shut, surely. But no.
Her usual favourite hairdresser George is late coming from the back to do her hair! His lateness stemmed, it seems, as I discovered eventually, from a reason so utterly in keeping with why I thought the hairdressers would be shut, I very nearly cried.
“Oh, how terrifying Life was, thought Monica. How dreadful. It is the lonelIness which is so appalling. We whirl along like leaves, and nobody knows – nobody cares where we fall, in what black river we float away.”
Cross-referenced with Melanie Tem’s Black River: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/03/29/black-river-melanie-tem/#comment-18655
THE ESCAPE
A perfect non-story story, where somehow each sentence of this relatively brief story miraculously holds a million stories. An escape as a journey, a missed train somehow become a horse carriage journey, marital disputes of her blaming him, later blaming him for her lost parasol. Her hatred of his smoking, and it as if at the end an alternate world takes over, before they are back on the train of life, whereby, in the alternate world, he dies of something that goes wrong with his lungs, as we all fear today. Or another sort of escape?
Amazingly, for me, I read this morning HERE the opening of JUSTINE by Lawrence Durrell where the narrator tells us about the explicit use of the word ‘escape’ in this journey sense AND also a story by David Surface HERE where the ‘train’ of life is similarly disrupted by such diaspora of a married couple as we see here in the Mansfield!
AT THE BAY
I – V
“I dreamed I was hanging over a terrifically high cliff, shouting to someone below.”
Midsommar Bay, or not, this is Crescent Bay together with Daylight Cove, here Mansfieldfully evoked from early morning shepherd to the men swimming, their personal territories even earmarked in the sea; then with gender stereotypical differences deployed, men are off to work, and the beach is now earmarked for children and women, who can liberally change into bathing attire. One woman, awful Mrs Kember — with ash elongating on her fag, a clone of her otherwise deadpan younger husband — Sapphically admires Beryl’s body changing into swimwear. No stays. As in PRELUDE earlier, we are allowed to gradually build a gestalt from hints about various other characters and the ambiance of this often delicately picked-out genius-loci.
“‘It’s a nemeral,’ said Pip solemnly.”
VI – XII
“Say never!”
Exquisite – and here exquisite actually means exquisite – continuation of the whole sort of Ulysses single day At The Bay, towards siesta and then the night. Linda and the baby boy. The boy of the Bay. She feels like a leaf and he ‘talks’ to her. Kezia with a grandmother who ‘stares down the years.’ That Never indeed. Alice the servant girl and her sunshade she calls a “perishall.” Visiting Mrs Stubbs’ shop, and Alice’s “persistent little coughs and hems…” Later, in Linda’s washhouse children playing an animal game, BEING animals, but not a “ninseck”! Later, we hear of a real insect that is imprisoned in a room, significant when compared to thoughts on ‘freedom’ earlier. A face and beard later pressed against the window at them! Was it their uncle? Jonathan who canoodles discreetly, if at all, with his sister-in-law Linda, till Stanley comes home. Compare the two men’s territories in the sea earlier. Then, in full circle, we reach Beryl again, here wanting a lover, but it is the earlier Sapphic woman’s husband not the woman herself. Or is it him, after all, as it was a man that Beryl expected, if against her own hidden nature? The husband is so much like his wife, and vice versa and this ending has a double entendre ‘bush’ as sexual reference, I guess. A double entendre ‘dying fall’ love, as a potential fulfilment one day? Has any other reader noticed that before? “But when Beryl looked at the bush, it seemed to her the bush was sad.”
“Both of them had forgotten what the ‘never’ was about.”
THE GARDEN-PARTY
“And the perfect afternoon, slowly ripened, slowly faded, slowly its petals closed.”
‘Perfect’ and ‘ideal’ day starts in this story, as perfect as our own potential day today in 2020, and by entering this story makes our own day even more perfect (!) in experiencing it without breaking the rules of barricade by entering the real, otherwise perfect weather of the day outside us. The story of a girl or little woman called Laura as the garden-party is spreading out in preparation around her, its marquee being erected by surprisingly nice workmen (Laura discovers), the rest of her excited family, the moving of the piano, the prospect of a band playing, the comestibles including flagged sandwiches, the cream puffs, the not so logical mother, the constructive glut of lilies… until she hears about the accidental death of one of the poor people down the lane from her family’s house. She appears to be the only one believing that the party should be cancelled. How this pans out makes this story a delight as well as a thing that contains the very thing that potentially spoils it. The character and actions of Laura are so utterly believable, and it makes me peer out of the story of my own life in 2020 and understand it fully for the first time. From within the environs of my head’s own garden-party. Isn’t life … isn’t life what it always is?
“He was given up to his dream.”
Cf Chapter 7 of Melanie Tem’s Black River today here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/03/29/black-river-melanie-tem/#comment-18691
https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/04/04/thinking-outside-the-box/
THE DAUGHTERS OF THE LATE COLONEL
“Why did the photographs of dead people always fade so? wondered Josephine. As soon as a person was dead their photograph died too.”
Two spinsters, Constantia (Con) and Josephine (affectionately know as Jug) are released from their father’s influence by dint of his one-eyed deathbed scene, and now they confusedly try to sort things out, such as the funeral, presents of some of his things to other relatives, whether to keep the servant, and so forth. Yet he still lives on, it seems, in various clothes-drawers and wardrobes in his room. In fact I got confused myself at one point that he DID still live on, in a scene about meringues! At one point, too, I got the hint that he was one of the big-headed people, by dint of his hat size! And that they were still subservient to his orders and his presence, even to the extent of thinking they still needed to silence, on his behalf, the organ-grinder outside. I feel sorry for these two women, and their lack of husbands, partly explained at least by some non-politically correct connections to Anglo-India and untrustworthy ‘natives’. They were once pursued by a chap in Eastbourne. But which of them was pursued? The clue was in the jug, I guess.
MR. AND MRS. DOVE
“This was such bliss that he could dream no further.”
A delightful tale of Reggie, hoping against hope, visiting the girl whom he fancies marrying, but who, he fears, does not reciprocate his hopes. She even compares him to one of her two cooing doves. And she has always laughed at him. Yet…
This is amazingly the PERFECT match with a story called ‘A Perfect Relationship’ by William Trevor that I happened to read yesterday here.
THE YOUNG GIRL
“But at that moment a tragedy happened to Hennie. He speared his pastry horn too hard, and it flew in two, and one half spilled on the table. Ghastly affair!”
Yet, this tale is more centrally about Mrs Raddick’s nameless 17 year old daughter as told by a nameless narrator, a person who is left to look after the daughter and the daughter’s twelve year old brother called Hennie, by taking them to a restaurant for afternoon tea. They needed looking after because excitable Mrs Raddick – who always seemed to carelessly leave her handbag open – is visiting a casino, certain she is due to be on a winning streak. The daughter was forbidden entry because she did not look 21. The daughter is feisty, pouting, sullen … and the narrator has some difficulties keeping her happy. A spoilt girly brat, you could say, but on the brink of blossoming into soft womanhood as the narrator notices, even if we don’t!
Katherine Mansfield manages to create a panoply of a whole type of human existence in a living past with the disarming flair of this brief piece of fiction.
LIFE OF MA PARKER
“To take off her boots or to put them on was an agony to her, but it had been an agony for years. In fact, she was so accustomed to the pain that her face was drawn and screwed up ready for the twinge before she’d so much as untied the laces.”
…as are her bereavements over the years thus accustomed. So wonderful, in a devastating way, to read this by chance straight after reviewing Black River here by Melanie Tem.
The interaction of her housework for a dilatory literary man alternating with memories of her life are attritional, heartfelt, even beautiful.
“; the men walked like scissors; the women trod like cats.” The dying chest of her husband’s coughing is likened to being full of the white dust of baker’s flour, and the later details of the coughing chest of an ‘angel child’ are utterly, together, picked out in an agony in real-time rather than merely anticipated…
“—not to have seen a black beedle! Well! It was as if to say you’d never seen your own feet.”
MARRIAGE À LA MODE
“Simply everything is running down the steep cliffs into the sea, beginning with the butter.”
The word-crepitating story of William whose marriage to Isabel – and their ‘babies’ – has been moved from a small place in London where they were happy to a larger one in the country, back and forth to which he commutes. She has taken up with a number of young bright things who now surround her as a sparkling coterie. He is only interested in her happiness and indicates he will leave her – and as this truth dawns on her, we wonder whether she will recant. I was most interested in the choice of presents he brings his ‘babies’ from London. They seemed more interested in the packaging. But today, a pineapple and a melon. I can see both sides of this still resonating story.
Cf KM’s Prelude
THE VOYAGE
“Lying beside the dark wharf, all strung, all beaded with round golden lights, the Picton boat looked as if she was more ready to sail among stars than out into the cold sea.”
Fenella and her Grandma are seen off by the father/son onto this boat, where we learn of the business and props of their shared cabin, including Grandma’s swan umbrella. They are in black mourning, it seems. But what are the circumstances of this. The stewardess, helping them, says: “What I always say is […] sooner or later each of us has to go, and that’s a certingty.” (Sic) But who has gone? Meanwhile, Grandma shows her prowess in niftily getting to the top bunk. They eventually reach a tropical seeming place where they reach the house where Grandpa welcomes them. A white cat is folded up like a camel. Grandpa is in bed.
Probably the most unaccountable story so far in this book. Life is full of unaccountabilities, I guess. Have I missed something?
MISS BRILL
“‘What has been happening to me?’ said the sad itself eyes.”
At first I thought these were the eyes of a fox fur as retrieved by Miss B from a dark box. But later some children likened this garment to fried whiting! Anyway, she wears it to the park that is in busily strange contrast to our hopefully empty parks today on Easter Saturday. A wonderful evocation of the day, the various individual people and their idiosyncrasies, and the musical band. In fact, she sees the whole thing as a performance in which gestalt she sees herself a regular participant actor. “They weren’t only the audience, not only looking on; they were acting.”
The whole performance finishes Brilliantly but ironically with one of Mansfield’s best pathetic/bathetic endings. But jumping back a bit, I loved the honey-cake treat, especially if it came with an almond…
HER FIRST BALL
“Dark girls, fair girls were parting their hair, tying ribbons again, tucking handkerchiefs down the fronts of their bodices, another smoothing marble-white gloves.”
Leila’s first ball is summoned for us all, the journey there with cousins and friends, the anxious reluctance to go at all, when earlier with one boot on, one boot off. The multiplying oddments of excitement and image, as the young men mark their programmes to a girl for each dance. Suddenly swept off her feet by one of them. Yet one older man later co-opts her for a dance, a moment or glitch darkly summoning an end already embedded in this her start. Yet she is glided off her feet again by another young man. For once, not a bathetic/ pathetic ending. A night reborn with light.
Or a start embedded, if invisibly, in its end. Twig?
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.
Or was it the Science Mistress who had the bee in her hair?!
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?”
Not sure I reached the right interpretation there!
I, for one, enjoyed the old man’s singing, by the way!
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.
Cross-referenced above with Old Flame: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/22207-2/#comment-18904
THIS REVIEW WILL NOW CONTINUE HERE: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/760-2/