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12 ISSN 2040-2597 (Online) NEWSLETTER Issue 21 August 2015 Published by the Katherine Mansfield Society, Bath, England ‘I love the rain’ portrait of Katherine Mansfield by Roger Daniell Inside: Conference at the Newberry Library, Chicago by Rishona Zimring, page 10 KMS News and competition results, page 2 Announcement: Katherine Mansfield Research in New Zealand at the Alexander Annual Birthday Lecture, page 13 Turnbull Library by Gerri Kimber, page 3 In the footsteps of Katherine Mansfield by Recent discoveries: The Earth Child by Gerri Joanna Fitzpatrick, page 14 Kimber, page 6 Finding Katherine by Emma Timpany, page 16 Katherine Mansfield and the ‘Blooms-Berries: by Karen R. Daubert page 8 Going Home by Kirsty Gunn, page 18 2 Issue 21 August 2015 Welcome to the autumn edition of the Katherine Mansfield Society Newsletter. It is appropriate to celebrate our twenty-first newsletter with a thank you for the work of our chair Gerri Kimber, who recently found time to trowel the Mansfield archives while presenting papers at the Newberry Library in Chicago and the Turnbull Library in Wellington. I am excited that Gerri has personally written reports on her marvellous discovery of the Earth Child poems as well as on her time as fellow of the Friends of the Turnbull Library. In Wellington I was not disappointed by the intriguingly titled ‘Tea, Zen and Cosmic Anatomy: The mysticism of Katherine Mansfield’ nor by the breadth of questions drawn from a large audience. In this edition we also have reports by Karen Daubert and Rishona Zimring from the conference Katherine Mansfield and the ‘Blooms-Berries’ held in Chicago, and a photo essay from Switzerland by Joanna Fitzpatrick. You will find details of the forthcoming Katherine Mansfield Society Annual Birthday Lecture 2015 and ordering information for Anna Plumridge’s edition of The Uruwera Notebook and Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence edited by Sarah Ailwood and Melinda Harvey. Creative responses to the work of Mansfield are a testament to the potency of her output. Her on- going influence to writers of today can be sampled in the works of two expatriate New Zealanders: Kirsty Gunn’s Going Home and Emma Timpany’s Finding Katherine. Finally, please consider making a written contribution to the next newsletter published in December. These should be sent to [email protected] by November 30. Martin Griffiths Competition: The winner of the competition Judy O’Kane correctly noted that twenty KMS newsletters have been published and she wins a copy of my CD ‘Cello for a Song’ which features music by Arnold Trowell. To be in the draw for the next competition send us an email giving the street numbers for the two different houses on the Tinakori Road in Wellington that Katherine Mansfield’s family lived in. Please note that for the first house, we will accept either of two numbers, as it was subsequently renumbered! The prize is a beautiful New Zealand Paua shell ornament (see picture below). Send answers to: [email protected] Correction KMS newsletter would like to offer an apology for an error in the April edition on page 10: the caption of the photo of the New Zealand ambassador should read H. E. James Kember not H.E. Harry Kember. 1 3 Issue 21 August 2015 Research in New Zealand at the Alexander Turnbull Library by Gerri Kimber As the recipient of the 2015 Friends of the Turnbull Research Grant, I was fortunate to spend a month in Wellington, researching at the Alexander Turnbull Library (ATL), which houses the world’s largest collection of material pertaining to Mansfield. I have been fortunate to visit the library before, but it was wonderful to be able to devote an extended period of time on the collection, following up leads and various avenues of enquiry, without the ticking of a clock beckoning me back to Europe! My forthcoming biography, Katherine Mansfield’s Early Years, will be published by EUP some time next year. Some of you might remember us posting a copy of a previously unknown poem in a recent newsletter (see no. 18, August 2014). The poem is called ‘Limbo’ and I discovered it last year amongst the Middleton Murry archive acquired by the ATL in late 2012. As it was not signed and was unknown, there was some doubt as to whether it might in fact have been by Murry himself. However, having now located a second copy in the archive, I think it is reasonable to claim that the poem was written by Mansfield. It’s a strange little poem, written in 1911, shortly after the Earth Child cycle. During my time in Wellington, I was invited to give three talks. The first was at the ATL itself on 4 August when I gave a talk entitled ‘Tea, Zen and Cosmic Anatomy: The mysticism of Katherine Mansfield’. In the talk I explored Katherine Mansfield’s spiritual development during her life, culminating in her decision to enter Gurdjieff’s ‘Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man’ in Fontainebleau in the autumn of 1922, claiming that ‘I want to be all that I am capable of becoming so that I may be – […] a child of the sun’. It is hoped that a version of this talk will be published in the next volume of the Turnbull Library Record (2016). On 5 August I was invited to give a talk on behalf of the Katherine Mansfield Birthplace Society, who work so tirelessly to maintain the house in Wellington where Mansfield was born. This talk took place in the marvelous setting of Wellington’s City Gallery. Here I discussed my poetry find in Chicago, to a very receptive audience, eager to find out more about these exceptional poems. Finally on 18 August, I was invited to talk to the U3A at the Paramount, Courtenay Place, an iconic venue in the heart of Wellington. Here I discussed Mansfield connections with Poland, via Floryan Sobieniowski and Stanislaw Wyspianski. A version of this talk has recently been published in Katherine Mansfield and Continental Europe: Connections and Influences, edited by Janka Kascakova and myself. Even though it was winter in New Zealand, the inclement weather could not dampen my enthusiasm for this wonderful city that Mansfield knew so well. I hope to return again very soon! 2 Issue 21 August 2015 4 Gerri with Nicola Saker, President of the Katherine Mansfield Birthplace Society, and Emma Anderson, Director of the Birthplace. Tea, Zen and Cosmic Anatomy at the Turnbull Library, Wellington City Art Gallery, Wellington 5 Issue 21 August 2015 12 6 Issue 21 August 2015 Exciting discovery of previously unknown Katherine Mansfield manuscripts at the Newberry Library by Gerri Kimber The Earth Child It was whilst working my way through the rich holdings of Katherine Mansfield materials at the Newberry Library in May 2015 that I came across a thick folder of poems. On opening the folder and leafing through the contents, I realized that I had uncovered a large number of previously unknown poems by Mansfield dating from 1909/10, written when she was just 22. This is a period of her life where biographical information is at its most scant, since she systematically destroyed all her personal papers from this difficult youthful period in her life. Of the 35 poems in the folder, only 9 have been published. The others are completely unknown and are mostly of the very best quality, representing, I believe, some of the finest poems she ever wrote, and, moreover, containing information about people, places, and events for which almost no other biographical evidence is available. In addition, the significance of the collection is that it reveals for the first time that just when Mansfield was starting to have stories accepted for publication in London journals, she was also taking herself seriously as a poet. A couple of years earlier, when in New Zealand, together with her friend Edith Bendall she had also tried to publish a little illustrated book of children’s verse, but that venture also came to nothing. Those poems, however, which are all now published, have no literary merit, whereas the unknown collection in the Newberry reveals Mansfield perhaps at the height of her poetic powers. According to the two handwritten letters that accompany the poems, it appears Mansfield sent the collection in late 1910 to the London publisher Elkin Matthews regarding possible publication. Having heard nothing from the publisher, Mansfield sent a follow- up letter in early January 1911, written in an amusing style, explaining her frustration at not having received a response and asking that Matthews put her out of her misery. The Newberry Library, Chicago manuscript was clearly never accepted for 3 7 Issue 21 August 2015 publication, but if she did receive a rejection note, it no longer survives. Evidently the publisher retained the two letters, together with Mansfield’s original manuscript, and many years later they found their way into an auction (the cut-out auction listing is also to be found in the folder, but with no date) and subsequently, in 1999, were bequeathed to the Newberry by the estate of Jane Warner Dick, a prolific collector of materials related to Mansfield. The folder also contains a small calling card, which must have been attached to the manuscript or one of the letters, inscribed with the name “Katharina Mansfield,” and her address in Cheyne Walk, London. This was Mansfield’s self-styled nom de plume at the end of 1910/early 1911, deliberately made to sound vaguely Eastern European. It was also the name she (illegally) used on the official U.K. National Census for April 1911.