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.