The Collected Letters Of Katherine Mansfield. Volume Four: 1920-1921. - Review - book review

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1998 by Tracy Ware

THE COLLECTED LETTERS OF KATHERINE MANSFIELD. VOLUME FOUR: 1920-1921, edited

by Vincent O'Sullivan and Margaret Scott. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. xix + 372 pages. $80.

The importance of Katherine Mansfield's letters was established long ago by John Middleton Murry:

   If ever there was a writer whose life and work were one and inseparable, it
   was she. I can think only of Keats to compare with her in this respect,
   that her letters are essential to a real understanding of her work.

Of course it is largely because of Murry that we see Mansfield in this way. If he had not made his wife's letters and journals available, Mansfield's life might not have become "the modern equivalent of the folk tale," in Dennis McEldowney's phrase. Even if some of us would like to see criticism move away from life, the importance of these letters is beyond dispute, and so it is good to see them carefully edited by Vincent O'Sullivan and Margaret Scott. I assume that a fifth volume will complete the project.

Volume Four includes letters from May 1920 to the end of 1921. These were the months when Mansfield wrote such masterpieces as "The Daughters of the Late Colonel," "At the Bay," and "The Garden Party," despite her tuberculosis. Many of these letters are magnificent, but, if they fall short of Keats's letters, it is because Mansfield is too modest--or too diffident--to discuss her own work in more depth. She is happy to discuss the work of her correspondents fully and frankly, but such comments as this on "Miss Brill" are all too rare:

   I chose not only the length of every sentence, but even the sound of every
   sentence--I chose the rise and fall of every paragraph to fit her--and to
   fit her on that day at that very moment.

Both "At the Bay" and "The Daughters of the Late Colonel" are also discussed briefly and engagingly, but Mansfield usually prefers to write in general terms about her devotion to art. Perhaps the closest she comes to formulating her aesthetics is in a letter to Marie Belloc-Lowndes:

   I simply can't afford to die with one very half-and-half little book and
   one bad one and a few -- ? stories to my name. In spite of everything, in
   spite of all one knows and has felt--one has this longing to praise
   Life--to sing ones minute song of praise, and it doesn't matter whether its
   listened to or no.

In context, such passages are immensely moving, but they direct attention to the pathos of the life, not to the work that may or may not be inseparable from it.

Mansfield is strikingly ambivalent about her great contemporaries. She recognizes their merit, but she is fully sympathetic to none of them. Her attitude toward her great Russian predecessors is quite different. Chekhov in particular appears repeatedly in these letters as a touchstone of value and as a kind of model. Thus she tells Murry that "... I would give every single word de Maupassant and Tumpany ever wrote for one short story by Anton Tchekhov"; in another letter to Murry, she explains the suitability of her Villa Isola Bella in these terms: "Tchekhov would be happy here. Of that Im certain." Later she describes the importance of such "old masters" as "Chaucer & Shakespeare & Marlowe & even Tolstoi":

   Id like to make the old masters my daily bread--in the sense in which its
   used in the Lord's Prayer, really to make them a kind of essential
   nourishment. All the rest is--well--it comes after.

At the same time, she never forgets her own writing, as when she states in another letter: "Work to me is more important than anything, I fear, and Im working against time." Despite her illness and early death, she was remarkably productive, not least as the author of these letters.

TRACY WARE Queen's University