POETS Day! Katherine Mansfield

She’s flighty, hops from love to love, racist but only around kids, and though capable of putting together a good poem, rarely does.

Section from Anne Estelle Rice’s Portrait of Katherine Mansfield

Is it birthday season where you live?

Lord, we have a passle of them going on right now. August is supposed to be the most popular month for U.S. births, but the bleed into September is more Romanov than slight. We’ve had four in the last two weeks with three on deck and that’s just in town immediate family that, though Catholic, doesn’t have a single nuclear branch that wouldn’t fit in an modest Protestant preferred sedan.

Statistics say your family clustered as much as ours, so Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Skip out of work early and enjoy the afternoon/kick off the weekend early. It’s probably your birthday. Treat yourself. If it’s not yours, take a moment to wrap a present and sharpen a suddenly dulling cake knife. Maybe try to figure out why grade school kids shout “Eat more chicken” followed by an ever changing litany after the birthday song. (How do they know each week’s new variation? Those who aren’t parents of small children will have no idea what I’m talking about but kids add to the birthday song – my nephews from Albuquerque in sync with the kids here in Birmingham because they somehow know even though it changes from week to week, water park pavilion to pizzeria long table. They’re like druids receiving unwritten arcana.)

First, a little verse.

***

I thought about doing this week’s POETS Day about one of the Bloomsbury Group because I have a knee jerk dislike of them and I was feeling snarky. They were mean cool-kid gatekeepers. Nepotism involves relatives. Cronyism describes promoting friends. For the Bloomsbury clique I need a new word; one for promoting the person you’re having an affair with to make your spouse take notice and prove how cosmopolitan he or she is by sleeping with that person too, before, as a couple, dropping the promotee and pretending neither ever had anything to do with that middle class climber. I feel like the word should also convey mocking laughter in the direction of Roy Campbell. Nasty little hive of lit-rury hornets.

Wikipedia has a decent list of Bloomsbury members, satellites, and associates. You have to do a little digging to find out who was discarded for getting too clingy, but it’s a handy reference. What caught me was the few listed after the sentence “writers who were at some time close friends of Virginia Woolf, but who were distinctly not ‘Bloomsbury’.” T.S. Eliot was mentioned. Good man. As was the Campbell wife seducing Vita Sackville-West. Good story. I’d never heard of Katherine Mansfield, but she was listed among people of interest with the good sense to be distinctly not “Bloomsbury,” even if Vita was at the very least more than Bloomsbury-adjacent until she became a middle class climber. That’s despite Vita’s being a brilliant gardener and real-deal inbred baroness.

I looked into Katherine Mansfield. She was born in 1888 in Wellington, New Zealand as Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp, moved to London with her family in 1903, and played cello seriously enough to consider a career in music. Her involvement with the Queen’s College student newspaper pulled her towards writing and that was that. She published under the name Katherine Mansfield with occasional use of the pseudonym Elizabeth Stanley and even briefly passing her own poems off as translations of a made up Russian poet named Boris Petrovsky. She spent the remainder of her short life between London, New Zealand, and stays on the Continent where she died at the age of thirty-four from tuberculosis.

She’s known for her short stories and said to be a great force in shaping Modern literature, but by whom I can’t say. That she was thought to be is stated here and there but without attribution or cause. I read her stories “Bliss” and “The Garden Party,” picked because they were titular stories in her collections Bliss and Other Stories and The Garden Party and Other Stories. Both were good, “Bliss” in particular. She’s lively and does a risible job satirizing society types. In both, characters go about enjoying occasions before realizing that there are troubles that have been festering. In “Bliss” a woman realizes her husband’s infidelity and in “The Garden Party” a woman stumbles through new empathy and embarrassment. Both collections are available for free at Project Gutenberg here. I can’t vouch for the lot, but the titular picks are bangers.

Gutenberg also has her Poems, published posthumously in 1923. It’s a mixed bag. She was fitful with her verse and would obsess over a few works for weeks before abandoning poetry for months to years. The entries are divided in periods. Her prose editor declined printing the early works when she submitted them because they didn’t rhyme.

Butterfly Laughter
Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923)

In the middle of our porridge plates
There was a blue butterfly painted
And each morning we tried who should reach the butterfly first.
Then the Grandmother said: “Do not eat the poor butterfly.”
That made us laugh.
Always she said it and always it started us laughing.
It seemed such a sweet little joke.
I was certain that one fine morning
The butterfly would fly out of the plates,
Laughing the teeniest laugh in the world,
And perch on the Grandmother’s lap.

At best, it’s a cute anecdote from her childhood. While the anecdote might hold significance for her, what that is or why I should be interested isn’t clear. There’s no rhyme, as her editor pointed out. I don’t see why that was an obstacle. There’s no meter I can discern. Free verse was the cat’s meow at the time but there’s no music to the poem.

This next is from a later grouping, after her editor’s rejection. If she took his criticism and considered it, “Villa Pauline” can be described as malicious compliance.

Villa Pauline

But, ah! before he came
You were only a name:
Four little rooms and a cupboard
Without a bone,
And I was alone!
Now with your windows wide
Everything from outside
Of sun and flower and loveliness
Comes in to hide,
To play, to laugh on the stairs,
To catch unawares
Our childish happiness,
And to glide
Through the four little rooms on tip-toe
With lifted finger,
Pretending we shall not know
When the shutters are shut
That they still linger
Long, long after.
Lying close in the dark
He says to me: “Hark,
Isn’t that laughter?”

My penciled note next to that one reads only “Ahhhhhh!”

There’s a sweet introduction to Poems written by someone, probably her second husband John Middleton Murry but possibly her longtime friend Ida Baker with whom she seems to have been really good friends during her frequent separations from Murry. The introduction is unsigned and no credit is given on the title page or anywhere else I can find. My suspicion is Murry because he was a professional editor and the tone is intimate. There are other candidates. She left her first husband on their wedding night so probably not him, but other men and women knew her well enough.

Probably Murry writes:

“Perhaps her poetry is not quite poetry, just as her prose is not quite prose. Certainly, whatever they are, they belong to the same order; they have the same simple and mysterious beauty, and they are, above all, the expression of the same exquisite spirit. To my sense they are unique.”

It’s reminiscent of Thomas A. Johnson’s introduction to The Complete Poems of Emily Dickenson. Dickinson gave her poems to Thomas Wentworth Higgens fo Atlantic Monthly. He had no idea what to do with them.

“Higginson’s problem was compounded by the fact that during Emily Dickinson’s lifetime he was never convinced that she wrote poetry. As he phrased his opinion to a friend, her verses were ‘remarkable, though odd… too delicate – not strong enough to publish.’”

Mansfield isn’t Dickinson, though she has her moments.

“Voices of the Air” is a favorite of Probably Murry. “For a whole of one week,” he wrote,

“we made a practice of sitting together after supper at a very small table in the kitchen and writing verses on a single theme which we had chosen. It seems to me now almost miraculous that so exquisite a poem as, for instance, “Voices of the Air,” should have been thus composed.”

Voices of the Air

But then there comes that moment rare
When, for no cause that I can find,
The little voices of the air
Sound above all the sea and wind.

The sea and wind do then obey
And sighing, sighing double notes
Of double basses, content to play
A droning chord for the little throats—

The little throats that sing and rise
Up into the light with lovely ease
And a kind of magical, sweet surprise
To hear and know themselves for these—

For these little voices: the bee, the fly,
The leaf that taps, the pod that breaks,
The breeze on the grass-tops bending by,
The shrill quick sound that the insect makes.

I like that. I could do without the first line’s inversion especially when poetry gives license to use commas to pause the reader for a breath or so. Instead of

But then there comes that moment rare
When, for no cause that I can find,

she could have added commas for the less clumsy

But then there comes that moment, rare,
When, for no cause that I can find,

but I don’t mind because that line signals what follows in a messy and way: indifferent meter. Iambic tetrameter, to be precise (though it’s not very precise so don’t look too closely.) It was a pleasant enough change from what came before that by the time I got to the second stanza I didn’t mind the awkward inversion in its first line. It’s enjoyable for its flaws.

The next one’s just infuriating.

Sanary

Her little hot room looked over the bay
Through a stiff palisade of glinting palms,
And there she would lie in the heat of the day,
Her dark head resting upon her arms,
So quiet, so still, she did not seem
To think, to feel, or even to dream.

The shimmering, blinding web of sea
Hung from the sky, and the spider sun
With busy frightening cruelty
Crawled over the sky and spun and spun.
She could see it still when she shut her eyes,
And the little boats caught in the web like flies.

Down below at this idle hour
Nobody walked in the dusty street
A scent of dying mimosa flower
Lay on the air, but sweet—too sweet.

The first stanza has nice music to it. There’s a pleasant enough rhythm. She wrecks it in the second. Or maybe she doesn’t. There are words with more than one proper pronunciation. One every so often is a stumbling block, but it won’t wreck a poem. Three in succession will.

“Shimmering” is best pronounced “shim’ring” here. “Frightening,” “Fright’ning.” “Cruelty” works with three syllables if those are shortened to two, and then it’s fine. But it’s an unnecessary distraction. And then the pleasant eight syllable/nine syllable beat you get in the last two lines of of the first stanza is repeated in the second, but ruined by the last line’s three dead syllables after “caught.” They force stress on “like” so it carries weight nearly even to “flies.” It’s off from the line before and there’s no parallel – which is what was attempted – with the last two lines of first stanza.

And then there’s “Fairy Tale.”

Fairy Tale

Now folds the Tree of Day its perfect flowers,
And every bloom becomes a bud again,
Shut and sealed up against the golden showers
Of bees that hover in the velvet hours.…
Now a strain
Wild and mournful blown from shadow towers,
Echoed from shadow ships upon the foam,
Proclaims the Queen of Night.
From their bowers
The dark Princesses fluttering, wing their flight
To their old Mother, in her huge old home.

It’s very pretty. It’s inconsistently in iambic pentameter, but recognizable as such. The repetition of “o” sounds and “w”s, clusters of alliteration sounding a note and passing off, and a simple presentation of a moment and its why; I wish she had more like it. Very pretty.

Finally, she had a knack gone awry for children’s verse. There’s a section devoted to nursery type stuff in Poems.

Autumn Song

Now’s the time when children’s noses
All become as red as roses
And the colour of their faces
Makes me think of orchard places
Where the juicy apples grow
And tomatoes in a row.

And to-day the hardened sinner
Never could be late for dinner,
But will jump up to the table
Just as soon as he is able,
Ask for three times hot roast mutton—
Oh! the shocking little glutton.

Come then, find your ball and racket,
Pop into your winter jacket,
With the lovely bear-skin lining.
While the sun is brightly shining,
Let us run and play together
And just love the autumn weather.

It’s not bad. I don’t think the target audience is that discerning. It’s catchy. That works. It’s in a few of her other kid’s poems where her awry going shows up. There’s an “N-word” here and there and then there’s a little ditty about God overcooking black people.

She’s flighty, hops from love to love, racist but only around kids, and though capable of putting together a good poem, rarely does. I don’t think that sounds distincly un-Bloombury. Maybe she wasn’t elitist enough. Her short stories were good; charming enough reading that for a passing second you’re thinking “I could fix her.”

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]