TWO LITERARY LADIES OF LONDON: KATHERINE MANSFIELD AND REBECCA WEST
Many persons are so constituted that they accept any positive statement
as fact unless they know it to be false. Few more positive statements
are made in print than “So and So is England's or America's or France's
leading or most popular writer of fiction or verse.” Publicity agents
have found apparently that such claim sells books and needs no
substantiation. The reading public rarely protests. It denies in a more
effective way, but before the denial gets disseminated many credulous
seekers of diversion and culture are misled.
There are several young women writing fiction in England today of whom
it can be said truthfully that they ornament the profession of letters.
Women have long justified their reputation for being intuitive by their
fictional writing. It is likely that they may proceed to establish
an equal reputation for accurate observation, logical inference, and
temperate narrative. Had not the waves of death recently encompassed
Katherine Mansfield in her early maturity she would have remained at
the top of the list, the place where now, varying with individual taste
and judgment, stand the names of Dorothy Richardson, Rebecca West,
Stella Benson, Virginia Woolf, Sheila Kaye-Smith, Mary Webb, Rose
Macaulay, to mention no others. For the first time in history women
prose writers preponderate, and it is a good augury for a country which
has been so quickly and successfully purged of anti-feminism.
Katherine Mansfield's output has been small, but quality has made
up for quantity. Her reputation is founded on two volumes of short
stories. To say that they reveal capacity to create life, to recognise
the temperament, intellectuality, and morality of the ordinary human
beings that one encounters, and to display their behaviour; as well
as a power to analyse personality and to depict individuality that
equals de Maupassant, is to make a truthful statement, and a temperate
one. Indeed, she seemed to her contemporaries to be possessed of some
unsanctified and secret wisdom.
Her history is brief. She was Kathleen Beauchamp, third daughter of
a man of affairs, recently knighted, and was born in Wellington, New
Zealand. She was 23 years old when she married, just before the war,
J. Middleton Murry, the British critic and novelist. Her first book
“In a German Pension,” published when she was 21, gave no promise of
great talent. Her first mature work was a series of book reviews in
_The Nation and Athenæum_, about 1919. She was quickly recognised to
be a subtle and brilliant critic. In 1920 the publication of “Bliss
and Other Stories” revealed her metal and temper. Development and
maturity marked her second and last collection, “The Garden-Party and
Other Stories,” which followed in 1922. Hardly had the promise of her
early work been recognised before it was overshadowed by progressive
pulmonary disease, and after long months of illness, during which she
was obliged to spend most of her time away from England, she died in
France on January 9, 1923.
Katherine Mansfield had a technique which may be compared to that of
a great stage manager. When the play is put on, the scenes and the
characters, the atmosphere and the environment, the sentiment and the
significance are satisfying, intelligent and convincing. The world seen
through her eyes, and the conduct of its most highly organised product,
is the world that may be seen by anyone who has normal, keen vision.
The conduct of the people who encumber it is that which an observer
without inherited bias or acquired bigotry knows intuitively, and has
learned from experience, is the conduct that reflects our present
development, our attitudes, our interests, our desires, and most of all
our dispositions.
[Illustration: KATHERINE MANSFIELD]
She prepared the stage and then her characters came on. She didn't
bore with narrative of their birth, weary with incidents of their
development, or disgust with details of their vegetative existence.
They reacted to their immediate desires and environment in the way that
people act in real life. She had a comprehensive understanding of human
motives, and she realised how firmly engrained in man is the organic
lust to live and to experience pleasure.
To find the balance in fiction midway between the “joy stuff” which for
the last decade has been threatening to reduce American literature to
a spineless pulp, and morbid realism which, in both England and this
country, has been reflecting the influence of so-called psychoanalysis,
is an accomplishment deserving of the thanks of all admirers of sanity
in art. Miss Mansfield has succeeded in doing this, with the result
that a large measure of the charm of her art lies in its sanity,
its extraordinary freedom from obsessions, from delusions, and from
excessive egocentricity. To borrow a term from music, she may be said
to have possessed an unerring sense of pitch.
The easiest way of estimating any unknown element is to compare it
to something already known, and Katherine Mansfield has been called
the Chekhov of English fiction. Such a comparison may be useful as an
approach to her work. In truth, however, while her position in English
fiction may be compared with that of the illustrious Russian, she is in
no sense an imitator, a disciple of him or of any one else. Her art is
her own.
It can best be estimated from study of her last published story. If
Katherine Mansfield, feeling herself already drawn into the shadow of
approaching death, had tried to leave the world one final sample of
her art which would epitomise her message and her method, “The Fly,”
published in _The Nation and Athenæum_ of March 18, 1922, is a lasting
triumph of her success. In a story of twenty-five hundred words she
has said more than most authors say in a one-hundred-thousand word
novel, or, indeed, in many novels. Not only is every word pregnant
with meaning, but for those who can read between the lines there is an
indictment of the life she is picturing too poignant for any but strong
souls who can look upon the wine of life when it is red; who can even
drain the cup to the bitter dregs in their sincere desire to learn its
truth, without suffering the draft to send its poison into their souls.
It is not that Katherine Mansfield was poisoned with the bitterness of
life, or weakened with the taint of pessimism. On the contrary, she
was as immune to bitterness, to poison, to weakness, as a disembodied
spirit would be to disease. She was like pure white glass, reflecting
fearlessly the part of life that was held before her, but never
colouring it with her own personality. Her reflection was impartial.
In “The Fly” the _dramatis personæ_ are old Mr. Woodifield, the boss,
and the fly. Old Mr. Woodifield is not described, but the reader sees
him, small of body and of soul, shrivelled, shaky, wheezy, as he
lingers in the big, blatantly new office chair on one of the Tuesdays
when, since the “stroke” and retirement from his clerkship, he has
escaped from the solicitude of the wife and the girls back into his
old life in the city--“we cling to our last pleasures as the tree
clings to its last leaves”--and revelled in the sense of being a guest
in the boss's office. The boss is more graphic because he remains
nameless. “Stout, rosy, five years older than Mr. Woodifield and
still going strong, still at the helm” is what we are told he is, but
this is what we see: A brutal, thick man, purring at the admiration
of the old clerk for his prosperity revealed in the newly “done-up”
office; self-satisfied, selfish, and supercilious, offering a glass
of whiskey as a panacea for the old man's tottering pitifulness, and
then listening, insolently tolerant, to the rambling outpourings of
the old soul, harmless, disciplined to long poverty of purse, of life,
of thought, about the “Girls” visit to the soldier's grave in Belgium
and the price they paid for a pot of jam. Then the picture changes.
The shuffling footsteps of the old man have died out, the door is
closed for half-an-hour, the photograph of a “grave-looking boy in
uniform standing in one of those spectral photographers' parks with
photographers' storm-clouds behind him,” looks out at the boss who has
“arranged to weep.” But the floodgates which have opened at the tap of
the one sentiment of which the boss was capable are now suffering from
the rust of six years. Tears refuse to come.
A fly drops into the pot of ink, and the boss, absent-mindedly noticing
its struggles for freedom, picks it out with a pen and shakes it on
to the blotting paper, where the little animal makes a heroic effort
to clean off the ink and get ready for life again. But the boss has
an idea. In spite of himself, his admiration is aroused by the fly's
struggle, his pluck--“that was the way to tackle things, that was the
right spirit. Never say die; it was only a question of.... But the
fly has again finished its laborious task and the boss has just time
to refill his pen, to shake fair and square on the newly cleaned body
yet another dark drop. What about it this time?” And yet another.
“He plunged his pen back into the ink, leaned his thick wrist on the
blotting paper, and as the fly tried its wings, down came a great
heavy blot. What would it make of that?... Then the boss decided
that this time should be the last, as he dipped the pen deep in the
inkpot. It was. The last blot fell on the soaked blotting-paper and the
bedraggled fly lay in it and did not stir.” And as he rings for some
new blotting-paper, a feeling of unaccountable wretchedness seizes him
and he falls to wondering what it was he had been thinking about before
the fly had attracted his attention. “For the life of him, he could not
remember.” And that is the end of the story.
Katherine Mansfield's art resembles that of the great Russian
physician-novelist in that she preaches no sermon, points no moral,
expounds no philosophy. Although there is no available exposition of
her theories, her work is evidence that her conception of art was
to depict the problematic as it was presented to her, and leave the
interpretation to the reader's own philosophy. She made Raoul Duquette
say, in “Je ne parle pas Française,” one of the most psychologically
remarkable of her stories: “People are like portmanteaux, packed with
certain things, started going, thrown about, tossed away, dumped down,
lost and found, half emptied suddenly or squeezed fatter than ever
until finally the Ultimate Porter swings them on to the Ultimate Train,
and away they rattle.” That may have been her own belief.
While it may be true in a certain sense that the artist sees only
himself in his art, there is an essential difference between seeing
himself reflected in life and in seeing life as in himself. Katherine
Mansfield habitually did the latter. And it is this fact that enabled
her to use as models, or accessories, or background any of the chance
travellers she may have encountered with almost equal success. If she
ever reflected herself in her art, it was a normal and objective self,
a self which was interested in the drama being enacted about her, not
merely the drama of her own soul; and in the fine points of this drama
as well as in its leading actors and more obvious aspects.
Her world from which she has gathered the material for her two books of
stories has been richly variegated, and her readers are given the full
benefit of a versatile experience. She was _La Gioconda_ of English
fiction writers. “Je ne parle pas Française” shows that she knew
the soul maladies and, like Walter Pater's conception of Leonardo's
masterpiece, she knew some of the secrets of the grave: though she had
not “been a diver in deep seas,” nor “trafficked for strange webs with
Eastern merchants.” She did not _finish_ an individual. She narrated
an episode which revealed his or her character; she didn't lead up to
some epochal event like marriage, a dramatic reconciliation, a studied
folly, or a crime. She depicted an episode, and left you to put
such interpretation upon it, or to continue it, as your experience,
imagination, or desire might suggest. She was a picture maker, not
pigment by pigment, cell by cell, but with great sweeps of the brush.
She usually depicted sentimental _men_, whose long suits were fidelity
and constancy, or men whose fundamental urges were not harmonised
to convention. Her women were, in the main, fickle, designing,
inconstant, shallow, truckling, vain. “Marriage à la Mode,” is a
specimen. William keeps his romantic and sentimental view of life
after prosperity and progeny come. Isabel doesn't. She is all for
progress and evolution--new house, new environment, new friends, new
valuation of life's possessions. He goes home for week-ends chockful
of love and sentimentality. She meets him at the station with her new
friends--sybarites and hedonists in search of sensation. He soon finds
he isn't in the game at all as Isabel now plays it. So he decides to
abbreviate his visit. On the way back to town he concocts a long letter
full of protestations of unselfish love, and willingness to stand aside
if his presence is a drag on her happiness. She reads it aloud to her
guests who receive it with sneers and jeers. Isabel has a moment of
self-respect, and withdraws to her room and experiences the vulgarity
and loathesomeness of her conduct. She will write to William at once
and dispel his fears and reassure him, but while she is holding her
character up to her eyes disparagingly she hears her guests calling her
and decides “I'll go with them and write to William later--some other
time. Not now. But I shall _certainly_ write.” Procrastination, not
hesitation, condition her downfall.
In “Je ne parle pas Française” she handled a subject--the implantation
of the genesic instinct--in such a way that the reader may get little
or much from it, depending upon his knowledge and experience. But in
the lines and between the lines there is exposition of practically all
that is known of the strange deviations of the libido. Raoul Duquette
and Dick, his English friend, who cannot kill his mother, cannot give
her the final blow of letting her know that he has fallen in love with
Mouse, are as truly drawn to life as Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud,
or as Encolpius and Giton of the Satyricon.
It is a far cry from the depths glimpsed--but with such terrible
sureness--in this story, to the budding soul of a young girl from the
country as pictured in Leila in “Her First Ball”; or to the very spirit
of healthy youth, both frivolous, superficial youth, and sensitive
idealising youth, which exudes from the pages of “The Garden-Party.”
She depicted transformation of mental states, the result of suggestion
or impulse, much as a prestidigitator handles his Aaron's rod. This is
particularly well seen in Leila. The reader shares her joyous mental
state, full of vistas of hope and love and joy. Then a fat man who has
been going to parties for thirty years dances with her and pictures her
future follies, strifes, struggles, and selfishness at forty. At once
she realises her doll is stuffed with sawdust, and cries and wants to
go home, but a young man comes along, dances with her again, and behold
the filling isn't sawdust, but radium!
Katherine Mansfield's art may be studied in such a story as “At the
Bay.” The _dramatis personæ_ are: Beryl, a temperamental young lady
looking for romance, seeking fulfilment of destiny, thwarted by a
Narcissus inhibition; Linda, her sister, without temperament, to whom
fulfilment is repellant; Mrs. Harry Kember, unmoral and immoral, a
vampire with a past and keen for a future; Harry Kember, her husband of
whom many things are said, but none adequate to describe him; Stanley
Burnell, a conventional good man--mollycoddle; Jonathan Trout, a poet
compelled by fate to be a drone; Alice, a servant in transformation
from chrysalis to butterfly; Mrs. Stubbs, a vegetative hedonist; and
several delightful children and a devoted “Granma.”
They spend a holiday at the seashore and Beryl looks for romance. Here
is the picture:
“Very early morning. The sun was not yet risen, and the whole
of Crescent Bay was hidden under a white sea-mist. The big
bush-covered hills at the back were smothered. You could not see
where they ended and the paddocks and bungalows began. The sandy
road was gone and the paddocks and bungalows the other side of
it; there were no white dunes covered with reddish grass beyond
them; there was nothing to mark which was beach and where was
the sea. A heavy dew had fallen. The grass was blue. Big drops
hung on the bushes and just did not fall; the silvery, fluffy
toi-toi was limp on its long stalks, and all the marigolds and
the pinks in the bungalow gardens were bowed to the earth with
wetness. Drenched were the cold fuchsias, round pearls of dew
lay on the flat nasturtium leaves. It looked as though the sea
had beaten up softly in the darkness, as though one immense wave
had come tippling, rippling--how far? Perhaps if you had waked
up in the middle of the night you might have seen a big fish
flicking in at the window and gone again....”
You feel the wetness of it. Then come the first signs of waking up in
the place: the shepherd with his dog and flock making for the Downs,
the cat waiting on the gatepost for the milk-girl--harbingers of the
day's activities.
Then the picture is animated.
“A few minutes later the back door of one of the bungalows
opened, and a figure in a broad-striped bathing suit flung down
the paddock, cleared the stile, rushed through the tussock
grass into the hollow, staggered up the sandy hillock, and
raced for dear life over the big porous stones, over the
cold, wet pebbles, on to the hard sand that gleamed like oil.
Splish-splosh! Splish-splosh! The water bubbled round his legs
as Stanley Burnell waded out exulting. First man in as usual!
He'd beaten them all again. And he swooped down to souse his
head and neck.”
This is a complete revelation of his character--smug, righteous,
selfish, the centre of a world in which every tomorrow shall be like
today, and today is without romance. He feels cheated when Jonathan
Trout tries to talk to him.
“But curse the fellow! He'd ruined Stanley's bathe. What an
unpractical idiot the man was! Stanley struck out to sea again,
and then as quickly swam in again, and away he rushed up the
beach.”
There is something pathetic in his determination to make a task of
everything, even the entailments of matrimony.
“You couldn't help feeling he'd be caught out one day, and then
what an almighty cropper he'd come! At that moment an immense
wave lifted Jonathan, rode past him, and broke along the beach
with a joyful sound. What a beauty! And now there was another.
That was the way to live--carelessly, recklessly, spending
oneself. He got on to his feet and began to wade towards the
shore, pressing his toes into the firm, wrinkled sand. To take
things easy, not to fight against the ebb and flow of life, but
to give way to it--that was what was needed. It was this tension
that was all wrong. To live--to live!”
The whole world of his home moves round Stanley. When he returns for
breakfast he has every member of the family working for him. When Beryl
does not help him at once, its mechanism must be dislocated. But Linda
he can't draw into the net. “Linda's vagueness on these occasions could
not be real, Stanley decided.”
The bathing hour on the beach for the women and children is as vivid as
if taken by a camera.
“The firm, compact little girls were not half so brave as the
tender, delicate-looking little boys. Pip and Rags, shivering,
crouching down, slapping the water, never hesitated. But Isabel,
who could swim twelve strokes, and Kezia, who could nearly swim
eight, only followed on the strict understanding they were not
to be splashed. As for Lottie, she didn't follow at all. She
liked to be left to go in her own way, please. And that way was
to sit down at the edge of the water, her legs straight, her
knees pressed together, and to make vague motions with her arms
as if she expected to be wafted out to sea. But when a bigger
wave than usual, an old whiskery one, came lolloping along in
her direction, she scrambled to her feet with a face of horror
and flew up the beach again.”
Mrs. Harry Kember and Beryl give an exhibition of the vampire and the
novice, while Linda dreams the morning away in revery and retrospect.
Beryl's dream of romance when she is alone in the garden after
everybody else in the household has gone to bed receives a rude jolt
from Harry Kember.
The story is illustrative of Miss Mansfield's art in leaving her
characters without killing or marrying them or bringing great adventure
into their lives. It leaves one with a keen interest in what is next
for Beryl, although she is not the most attractive of the figures in
the story, but there is no indication that we shall meet her again.
“Granma” and the children are the features of this story, and appear as
real as life. The author's faculty in making the reader interested in
characters who do not play heroic or leading rôles is distinctive. Even
the sheep-dog's encounter with the cat on the gatepost is delightful,
also the glimpse of Mrs. Stubbs' cottage with its array of bathing
suits and shoes and the lady's reception of Alice are art: “With her
broad smile and the long bacon knife in her hand, she looked like a
friendly brigand.”
“Prelude,” the introductory story of “Bliss and Other Stories,” is
a further revelation of Beryl, with side lights on her sister Linda
and Linda's husband, Stanley, and her quite wonderful mother. The
Narcissus in Beryl has bloomed. Forced to accept bed and board from her
brother-in-law, she bewails her fate while chanting the praises of her
physical charms and mental possessions. Linda, by this time, has given
herself all the air of confirmed invalidism. Linda gets her emotional
appeasement from what might have been; Beryl, from what is going to
be--both foundationed in introspection. When Linda first met Stanley
out in Australia she scorned him, but previous to or after their
marriage she fell in love with him. But her antipathy to childbearing
and her fear of it are so profound that they colour all her thoughts
and emotions. This is best seen when she relates her dream about birds.
“Prelude” is not a story of Linda, but of Beryl and her hypocrisy.
It should be dovetailed into “At the Bay.” The overtures and the
temptation which were made to her by Mr. and Mrs. Harry Kember have
not borne fruit. She is in love with herself and it may be that that
is what the author meant to convey. The description of herself and
her comment on her own appearance: “Yes, my dear, there is no doubt
about it, you really are a lovely little thing” is very illuminating.
She persuades herself that she is a potential Nina Declos and that
if opportunity had not been denied her she could rival Messalina.
Hypocrisy is bearing in on her and it is not quite evident, at the
close of “Prelude,” where it is going to lead her.
The burden of the story is to intensify interest in Beryl, and her
influences and surroundings, and to heighten the suspense of the
reader. On finishing “At the Bay” one has a picture of the romantic
girl; at the close of “Prelude” one feels that something is going to
happen to her before the author finishes with her. The reader gets no
clue, however, to what it might be, except that it would be the working
out of her temperament--admiration for self and longing for romance
through which to express this self. Her longing at first seemed to be
for expression of self biologically and intellectually; now it seems
to be to find a setting in which to frame becomingly this adorable
self--an essential difference in character and the difference that is
the axis upon which the story might be expected to turn. If people are
their temperaments, it is such subtle differences of temperament which
determine destiny, or what they shall work out for themselves from
given circumstances.
Beryl is more cold-blooded, more calculating than she at first appeared
to be, and never again will she be in danger of capitulating to a
Kember. What she wants is to shine, and she is going to use her valued
attractions designedly as currency to accomplish this. Beryl and Linda
are studies in selfishness and introspection. The latter is phlegmatic
and lazy, mentally and emotionally as well as physically.
“Granma” and the children are still the most attractive figures in the
family. How such a woman as “Granma” could have had daughters like
Beryl and Linda is truer to life than to fiction. Had we known their
father they might not have been so enigmatic.
Katherine Mansfield had a genius for catching the exact meaning of
the little touches in life, the little ironies and comedies as well
as the single little wild flower in a rank growth of weeds. She was
delightfully objective. She had a quality rare in women writers,
especially, of not putting all her treasures in one basket, of not
concentrating upon one character and that character more or less the
expression of herself; and of being interested in the whole drama as it
passed. She could enter into the soul of a charwoman or a cat and take
a snap-shot of it which made the reader love the charwoman or the cat,
as well as she could paint a picture that gives the very atmosphere
of children at play or of dawn at the seashore or night in a quiet
house--even better than she could make an X-ray study of the soul of a
selfish woman or a stupid self-righteous man.
The “high light” of “The Garden-Party” is the contrast between a
typical happy prosperous family and an equally unhappy poor one; a
garden-party for the young girls of the first family, the accidental
death of the man and the wage-earner of the second. One lives on the
hill in the sunlight; the other in the damp forbidding hollow below.
They are near neighbours in point of space; strangers in all other
respects. One makes an art of the graces and pleasures of life; the
other is familiar with the gloom typified by poverty and death.
Both accept their existences unquestioningly, in worlds as different
psychologically as they are physically.
The author does not preach; there is no straining for effect. Laura,
one of three sisters, is more sensitive than the other members of the
family. She alone feels contrasts. She is revelling in the preparations
for the garden-party when she hears from the workmen of the man's
sudden death, and her joy is clouded. But her mother and sisters make
light of it, and the party proceeds--a picture of average wholesome
young joyousness. Then the mother sends Laura, with a basket of cakes,
to the man's family. The dramatic contrast is in Laura's impressions
when she goes, in her party clothes, with the frivolous-looking basket,
down into the hollow at dusk. That is all. There is no antagonism, no
questioning of fate, no sociology--just a picture. Only the ability
not to use an extra word, the taste and the humour which kept out any
mawkishness saved the story from being “sob stuff.”
When Katherine Mansfield read virtues into her female characters she
usually made them humble, lowly, or plain, such as Ma Parker, Miss
Brill, and Beryl's mother. She could introduce Ma Parker who cleaned
the flat of the literary gentleman every Tuesday, and in eleven pages,
without a single approach to sentimentality, make you in love with the
old scrubwoman, with her hard life and heroic unselfish soul, when you
left her standing in the cold street wondering whether there was any
place in the world where she could have a cry at last. The motive of
this story is much the same as that of “The Garden-Party,” the sharp
contrast between two extreme types of life which circumstances bring
close together.
In “The Daughters of the Late Colonel” the author walked with a sure
step on thin ice from the first sentence to the last, never taking a
false step or undignified slide. Humour alone preserved the balance
where the ice was not too thin, and kept her from slipping over the
invisible line of safety in the direction of bathos on the one side,
or of the coarsely comic on the other. To make two old ladies who had
spent their lives “looking after father, and at the same time keeping
out of father's way” and who at father's death find themselves among
those whom life had passed by, interesting and intriguing, is a severe
test for a writer. Not only are they dead emotionally, but their habit
of thought has become too set to be readjusted to their new freedom.
Miss Mansfield made them as funny as they naturally would have been,
without “making fun” of them. Their funniness is lovable. For instance:
“At the cemetery while the coffin was lowered, to think that
she and Constantia had done this thing without asking his
permission. What would father say when he found out? For he was
bound to find out sooner or later. He always did. 'Buried. You
two girls had me buried.' She could hear his stick thumping.”
Or when the organ-grinding and the spot of sunshine on their mother's
picture start in both silent reminiscence as to whether life might have
been different if she had lived.
“Might they have married? But there had been nobody for them to
marry. There had been father's Anglo-Indian friends before he
quarrelled with them. But after that she and Constantia never
met a single man except clergymen. How did one meet men? Or even
if they'd met them, how could one have got to know men well
enough to be more than strangers? One read of people having
adventures, being followed, and so on. But nobody had ever
followed Constantia and her.”
“Miss Brill” is a sketch with a whimsical pathos. A little old maiden
lady who dresses up every Sunday and goes to the _Jardin Publiques_ in
Paris and sits on a bench, getting her romance out of watching people
and feeling that she is a part of the passing life, goes one Sunday as
usual. The feature in the sketch is the little fur piece around her
neck.
“Miss Brill put up her hand and touched her fur. Dear little
thing! It was nice to feel it again. She had taken it out of its
box that afternoon, shaken out the mothpowder, given it a good
brush, and rubbed the life back into the dim little eyes.”
It is to her like a pet animal or even a child. At first she finds the
park less interesting than usual, but finally, as she senses romance
in a pair of park lovers who sit down on her bench, she hears the boy
say, “that stupid old thing at the end there. Why does she come here at
all--who wants her? Why doesn't she keep her silly old mug at home?”
And the girl, giggling, replies, “It's her fu-fur which is so funny....
It's exactly like a fried whiting.” Suddenly the romance and the joy
have all gone out of the old lady, and when she lays away her little
fur piece in its box sadly and puts on the lid she thinks she hears
something crying.
Ability to depict the hidden speck of beauty under an uncompromising
exterior not only inspired some of Katherine Mansfield's finest
touches, but is especially refreshing after acquaintance with many
writers who seem bent solely upon discovering some inmost rottenness
and turning upon it the X-rays. There are many old ladies in this book,
and the loving skill with which she has reproduced for the reader the
charm she was able to see in them is indicative not only of her art,
but also of her essential wholesomeness.
“The Man Without a Temperament” is an objective study of an unpopular
man. One knows him from the few outward glimpses given of him as well
as if the author had made an intensive psychological study of him.
That is, one knows him as one knows other people, not as he knows
himself. The sketch is pregnant with irony and pathos. Without a
temperament--unfeeling--is the world's verdict of him. In reality, he
has more feeling than his critics. What he lacks is not feeling, but
expression. He is like a person with a pocketful of “paper” who has
to walk because he hasn't change to pay his carfare, or to go hungry
because he can't pay for a meal. People who know him trust him, even
if they do not fancy him or feel quite at ease with him; but with
strangers he has no chance. A life study of such a character would make
him interesting. A photograph shows him as one of the people who “never
take good pictures.”
In “Bliss and Other Stories,” the author went into deeper water than in
the other collection. She was less concerned with the little ironies
and with the fine points of her characters, and more with great
passions.
“Bliss,” the story, shows the same method as do many of her other
stories, but reversed. It is as if her reel were being run before the
reader backwards. Instead of hunting out the one flower in a patch
of weeds, she painted a young married woman's Garden of Eden and
then hunted down the snake. From the first note of Bertha Young's
unexplainable bliss one knows that the snake motive is coming, but
does not know how or where. The feeling of it runs through Bertha's
psychical sense of secret understanding--the “something in common”
between herself and Pearl Fulton, who, by a subtle uncanniness, is made
to suggest a glorified “vamp.” The leading motive of the story is the
psychic sympathy between the women, who are antitheses. Commonly such
a sense of understanding would take the form of antipathy. That it
is attraction--harking back in all likelihood to something in Bertha
remote and unrecognised--constitutes the distinctiveness of the motive.
The art is revealed in a clear-cut picture--nothing more. Katherine
Mansfield knew so marvellously where to stop. She had a good eye, a
deft hand, an understanding mind, a sense of humour, and she loved her
fellow-beings.
* * * * *
Until “The Judge” was published Miss Rebecca West, in the opinion of
many amateur and professional critics, was the most promising young
woman to enter the field of literature in the reign of King George. Her
advent to the literary world was impressive, and in a little book on
Henry James in the “Writers of the Day” series she revealed a capacity
of interpretation and facility of expression which made her elders
envious and her contemporaries jealous. It was obvious to the casual
reader of this book, and of her journalistic contributions, that not
only had she the artistic temperament, but that she was familiar with
its display in others, and that she had read widely, discriminatingly,
and understandingly. Moreover, she was a thoroughly emancipated young
woman and bore no marks of the cage that had restrained her sex. Her
cleverness, her erudition, her resourcefulness were admitted. It was
rated to be an asset, also, that she did not hesitate to call a spade
a spade or to use the birch unsparingly when she felt it was for the
benefit of the reading public, misled and deluded as it so often is
by false prophets, erring evangelists, and self-seeking promoters. In
other words, though she had sentiment and sympathy, she knew how to use
them judiciously. In “Notes on Novels” she constantly reminds herself
that there is a draught that we must drink or not be fully human. One
must know the truth. When one is adult one must raise to one's lips the
wine of truth, heedless that it is not sweet like milk but draws the
mouth with its strength, and celebrate communion with reality, or else
walk forever queer and small like a dwarf. Miss West does not intend
that her countrymen shall display these deformities.
Her first novel, “The Return of the Soldier,” a fictional exposition
of the Freudian wish, was acclaimed by critics as the first fulfilment
of the promise she had given. The teachings of the Austrian mystic
were not much known then in England, the country that now seems to
have swallowed them, bait, line, and sinker, not only in the fields
of fiction but in pedagogy and in medicine; so Miss West's little
book was more widely read and discussed than it might be today when
Miss May Sinclair, Mr. J. D. Beresford, Mr. D. H. Lawrence, and many
other popular novelists have made his theories look like facts to the
uninitiated.
The story is of Christopher, the ideal type of young Englishman who
knows how to fight and to love.
“He possessed in a great measure the loveliness of young men,
which is like the loveliness of the spring, foal or the sapling,
but in him it was vexed with a serious and moving beauty by the
inhabiting soul. To see him was to desire intimacy with him so
that one might intervene between this body which was formed
for happiness and the soul which cherished so deep a faith in
tragedy.”
It is narrated by his cousin who has loved him platonically since
youth. Chris had a romantic and ardent love affair with an inn-keeper's
daughter in his youth, but he married Kitty, a beautiful little
conventional non-temperamental young woman with a charming and
cultivated soprano voice, of the class of women who
“are obscurely aware it is their civilising mission to flash the
jewel of their beauty before all men so that they shall desire
and work to get the wealth to buy it, and thus be seduced by
a present appetite to a tilling of the earth that serves the
future.”
He goes to the war, gets concussion of the brain which causes amnesia,
or forgetfulness of certain epochal events in his life, particularly
his marriage to Kitty. “Who the devil is Kitty?” he replies when he
is told she might have something to say on hearing of his plan to
marry Margaret Allingham. Though some of the events of his life from
twenty-one, when he fell in love with Margaret, to thirty-six, when
he got injured, can be revived in his memory by Jenny, a resourceful
understanding person, the sort of cousin every man should have, no
argumentation can reconcile him to Kitty, and “he said that his body
and soul were consumed with desire for Margaret and that he would never
rest until he once more held her in his arms.”
After exhausting every means that love and science can suggest to jog
his memory or wipe out the amnesia, it is decided to bring him and
Margaret together. No one who had known her as the “Venus of Monkey
Island,” a composite of charity and love, would recognise her now,
seamed and scarred and ravaged by squalid circumstance, including
dreary matrimony to a man with a weak chest that needed constant
attention. Moreover, “all her life long Margaret had partaken of the
inalienable dignity of a requited love, and lived with men who wore
carpet slippers in the house.” Such experience had left deforming
scars. However, Chris sees her with the eyes of youth, and her presence
resurrects juvenile emotions. Under their influence Margaret undergoes
transformation.
“She had a little smile in her eyes as though she were listening
to a familiar air played far away, her awkwardness seemed
indecision as to whether she would walk or dance to that distant
music, her shabbiness was no more repulsive than the untidiness
of a child who had been so eager to get to the party that it has
not let its nurse fasten its frock.”
However, their interviews do not get them anywhere from Kitty's
standpoint, and she decides to send for Dr. Gilbert Anderson.
“Heaven knows she had no reason for faith in any doctor, for
during the past week so many of them sleek as seals with their
neatly brushed hair and their frockcoats, had stood around Chris
and looked at him with the consequential deliberation of a
plumber.”
But Dr. Anderson was different.
“He was a little man with winking blue eyes, a flushed and
crumpled forehead, a little grey moustache that gave him the
profile of an amiable cat and a lively taste in spotted ties,
and he lacked that appetiteless look which is affected by
distinguished practitioners.”
[Illustration: REBECCA WEST] Photograph by _Yevonde, London._
Dr. Anderson explains to the family that Christopher's amnesia is the
manifestation of a suppressed wish and that his unconscious self
is refusing to let him resume his relations with his normal life.
He forgot his life with his wife because he was discontented, and
there was no justification for it for “Kitty was the falsest thing
on earth, in tune with every kind of falsity.” The doctor proposes
psychoanalysis, but Margaret says she knows a memory so strong that it
will recall everything else, in spite of his discontent, the memory of
the boy, his only child who had died five years before. Dr. Anderson
urges her to take Christopher something the boy had worn, some toy they
used to play with. So she takes a jersey and ball and meets Chris in
the garden where there is only a column of birds swimming across the
lake of green light that lays before the sunset, and as Chris gazes
at Margaret mothering them in her arms the scales fall from his eyes
and he makes obeisance to convention and bids his creative libido _au
revoir_.
Jenny is witness of the transformation and when Kitty asks “How does he
look?” she answers, though her tongue cleaves to the roof of her mouth,
“Every inch a soldier.”
When Miss West next essayed fiction in “The Judge” it was the
diagnosis of the creative urge that was her theme. It is one of
Freud's contentions that the male child, before it hears the voice
of conscience and the admonition of convention, has carnal yearnings
for the mother, the female child for the father. With the advent of
sense, with the development of individuality, with the recognition of
obligation to others, and particularly with the acquisition of the
sense of morality, these are replaced with what are called normal
desires. In some instances the transformation does not take place. The
original trend remains, and it is spoken of as an infantile fixation.
Its juvenile and adult display is called sin ethically and crime
socially.
The wages of sin still is death, according to Miss West's portrayal,
but it is not called sin. It is merely behaviourism interpreted in the
light of the New Psychology.
“Every mother is a judge who sentences the children for the sins of
the father” is her thesis. As a work of art “The Judge” has elicited
much praise. As a human document, a mirror held up to actual life, a
statement of the accepted facts of heredity and of behaviour, and of
the dominancy and display of passion, lust, jealousy, anger, revenge, I
doubt that it merits unqualified approbation.
Marion Yaverland, daughter of a Kentish father and a French mother,
had yielded without compunction to the wooing of the local squire and
had borne a child, Richard, around whose development, personality, and
loving the story is built.
“Vitality itself had been kneaded into his flesh by his parents'
passion. He had been begotten when beauty, like a strong
goddess, pressed together the bodies of his father and mother,
hence beauty would disclose more of her works to him than to
other sons of men with whose begetting she was not concerned.”
But the goddess did not give him straight genesic endowment, so he
was not able to keep filial love and carnal love in their proper
channels. And from this flowed all the tragedy. His mother realised his
infirmity, though she didn't look upon it as an infirmity, from the
earliest days; and, unfortunately, she did not attempt to eradicate
it--if it is ever eradicable.
Squire Harry behaved badly to Marion, save financially, and public
opinion backed up by a stoning in the streets (a real Old Testament
touch) by a moron and his more youthful companions, made her accept an
offer of marriage from the squire's butler, a loathsome creature called
Peacey. In proposing marriage and promising immunity to its obligations
he said:
“Marion, I hope you understand what I'm asking you to do. I'm
asking you to marry me. But not to be my wife. I never would
bother you for that. I'm getting on in life, you see, so that I
can make the promise with some chance of keeping it.”
But Peacey deceived no one save Marion. Miss West's description of
the one visit of violence which he made to his wife, and which was
followed in due time by Roger, whom Richard hated from birth, is a bit
of realism that in verisimilitude has rarely been excelled. Roger was
a pasty, snivelling, rhachitic child who developed into a high-grade
imbecile of the hobo type, and finally managed to filter through the
Salvation Army owing to some filter paper furnished by his mother that
bore the legend “For the Gov^t and Comp^a of the Bank of England.”
From earliest childhood Richard and his mother both realised that their
intimacy was unnatural and unpromising for happiness. When he was two
years old
“He used to point his fingers at her great lustrous eyes as he
did at flowers, and he would roll his face against the smooth
skin of her neck and shoulders; and when he was naked after his
bath he liked her to let down her hair so that it hung round him
like a dark, scented tent.”
Poor little monster, how unfortunate that he could not then have been
given a hormone that would extrovert his budding perversion!
“She always changed her dress for tea, and arranged her hair
loosely like a woman in a picture, and went out into the garden
to gather burning leaves and put them in vases about the room,
and when it fell dark she set lighted candles on the table
because they were kinder than the lamp to her pain-flawed
handsomeness and because they kept corners of dusk in which
these leaves glowed like fire with the kind of beauty that
she and Richard liked. She would arrange all this long before
Richard came in, and sit waiting in a browse of happiness,
thinking that really she had lost nothing by being cut off from
the love of man for this was very much better than anything she
could have had from Harry.”
Somewhat like the way the daughter of Senator Metellus Celere, called
by some Claudia and by others Lesbia, arranged the visits of Catullus.
When Richard was sixteen he forced life's hand and leapt straight
from boyhood into manhood by leaving school where he had shown great
promise in science, and becoming a sailor so that he should be
admirable to his mother. His wanderings took him to South America
where he had great success in affairs of the heart and of the purse.
It is with disposition of the latter that the book opens in the office
of a lubricitous old Scotch solicitor where sits a young red-haired
temperamental suffragette whimpering for the moon.
Ellen Melville is a lovable Celt of seventeen, and her creator displays
a comprehensive insight into her mind and emotions. She is what Rebecca
West once was and wished to be. It is sad that the pathway of her life
leads so early to the _Via Dura_ and that Richard Yaverland had not
tarried in Vienna or Zurich to be psychoanalysed.
Richard falls in love with her at first sight. He woos her ardently,
though simply, and she responds like a “nice” girl, like a girl who
feels that for the endowment of that most wondrous thing in the world,
the cerebral cortex, it is vouchsafed her to exercise restraints and
make inhibitions which insects and animals cannot. In the highest sense
she is rational and instinctive.
Ellen goes south to visit her future mother-in-law and a few days later
Richard joins them. Roger meanwhile has “found Jesus,” and Poppy, a
Salvation Army lassie, one stage removed from “Sin.” While knocking
at Marion's door to gain entry that they may announce their intention
to marry, their gaze floats upward and they see Ellen being kissed by
the man to whom she will be married in three months. Roger, who is
instinctive but not rational, puts a wrong interpretation upon it, and
from that mal-interpretation the final tragedy flows. A few days later
Marion realises there is no happiness for Richard and Ellen so long
as she lives. She walks out into the marshes. Roger accuses Richard
of driving his mother to it “because she saw that there was something
wrong between you two.” He elaborates the accusation, and Richard
drives a bread-knife into Roger's heart.
Richard knows his doom is sealed. So he invites Ellen to share a
cattlemen's hut with him on the farther side of the creek where his
mother had drowned herself, until the people come to take him--and to
share it comprehensively.
“Her love had not been able to reach Richard across the dark
waters of his mother's love and how like a doom that love had
lain on him. Since life was like this she would not do what
Richard asked.”
But she does.
The mode in which “The Judge” is cast is noteworthy because of its
novelty and of the success attending it. Here is no sequential
narrative, no time-table of events in the order in which they happened.
The contact of Richard and Ellen is set forth in a straightforward
way, but the main thesis of the book, the Laocoon grip of mother-love
on Richard is conveyed indirectly, surreptitiously, atmospherically
rather than verbally. Ellen, though she is quite normal, senses it at
once when she meets Marion, and the writer approximates perfection of
her art most closely in narrations of the first interviews of these two
women, who are as unlike as the Colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady.
While this mode may not prove an obstacle to an easy grasp of the
novel upon first reading by writers or critics, it is doubtful whether
the casual reader for diversion will comprehend its significance
without special effort and perhaps several attempts at mastering the
intricacies in the development of the story. The plan which the author
has adopted of beginning, in direct narrative form, with the mature
life of Richard and his love for Ellen, and then revealing through
retrospect and suggestion the events of his early life and that of his
mother, is a tax upon the technique of any novelist. The form has been
used with notable success by Miss Elizabeth Robins in “Camilla.” But
Miss West has not entirely mastered its difficulties, and her failure
to do so seriously mars the story.
Miss West's reputation for brilliancy has not suffered by “The Judge,”
but if one were to sentence her after reading it, he would be compelled
to say she is no novelist. If it is an index of her imaginative
capacity, of her conception of life, of her insight into conduct,
of her knowledge of behaviour, we must content ourselves with her
contributions as critic and guide.
The subject of her two novels is behaviourism of sexual motivation. It
is an index of the change that has taken place in Great Britain within
the past ten years, a change that should be acclaimed by everyone
desirous of the complete emancipation of women.
Rebecca West has leaned her ear in many a secret place where rivulets
dance their wayward round, and beauty born of murmuring sound has
passed into her soul, to paraphrase the words of one who, were he in
the flesh, would likely not meet Miss West's entire approbation.