12

ISSN 2040-2597 (Online)

NEWSLETTER

Issue 21 August 2015

Published by the 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

4 Issue 21 August 2015

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. As far as I am aware, no other example of this calling card exists outside of the Newberry Library.

The poem collection will be published in its entirety in volume 4 of the Collected Edition, The Diaries of Katherine Mansfield: Including Miscellaneous Works (EUP, 2016), co-edited by Claire Davison and myself.

Letter from Katherine Mansfield to Elkin Through the dark forest, a poem by Matthews 1911 Katherine Mansfield 12

8 Issue 21 August 2015

Katherine Mansfield and the ‘Blooms-Berries: An international conference organized by the Katherine Mansfield Society Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois, USA 29-30 May 2015

by Karen R. Daubert

The Katherine Mansfield Society’s first conference in the U.S. for nearly thirty years featured 24 high-quality presentations amid an atmosphere of warm engagement. Hosted at the Newberry Library in Chicago, the gathering offered participants a keynote address by Sydney Janet Kaplan, a small exhibit of items from the Newberry’s Mansfield collection, two casual lunches in situ, a conference dinner at a nearby French bistro, and an outing to the Art Institute of Chicago. Organizers Todd Martin, Erika Baldt, and Alex Moffett arranged the presentations into chaired panels that encompassed intriguing, groundbreaking basic research, highly crafted theory, and my personal favorite: creative and insightful close reading.

The Newberry (a private research library with an extensive holding of Mansfield manuscripts) served as an appropriate backdrop for an emergent subtheme, the transmission of Mansfield’s oeuvre. “Bloomsbury” (that ever elusive name) significantly enabled and thwarted the transmission of Mansfield’s work, as Janet Wilson in her “Katherine Mansfield and T.S. Eliot” and Gerri Kimber in her “Katherine Mansfield and Aldous Huxley: A Blighted Friendship” brought out clearly. Eliot and Huxley each inspired ideas and characters in Mansfield’s fiction, and they each likewise wove their perceptions of Mansfield into moments and characters in their work. More significantly for transmission, they each penned negative reviews of Mansfield’s work.

Not surprisingly, the keynote speech and seven other presentations included Virginia Woolf in their titles, making Woolf a strong presence throughout. Indeed, the prevalence of Woolf at the conference is due in part to the fact that Woolf contributed significantly to the transmission of Mansfield’s work, especially through soliciting a manuscript from Mansfield for the Hogarth Press and publishing , as well as through Mansfield’s presence in Woolf’s diary and letters. In addition, Woolf’s much more bulky and well-known oeuvre opens doors to continuing interest in Mansfield as people investigate Woolf’s literary technique, feminism, and modernism, not to mention her role in Bloomsbury. 43

9 Issue 21 August 2015

From Mansfield’s mention of Eliot’s Prufrock as a “story” to a conference participant’s suggestion that journalistic reviewing could double as a sort of dialogic post-graduate study, literary and intellectual genres and their deconstruction repeatedly came to the surface, forming another subtheme. With reference to Roger Fry, J. D. Fergusson, and theories of perceptual frameworks, Mary Ann Gillies introduced the differing ways in which cultures and temperaments see forms and genres. Both Philip Keel Geheber’s analysis of Out and Prelude as transgressing definitions of Bildungsroman and Alice Kelly’s exploration of the wartime “epistolarium” as a specific sub-genre furthered understanding of the intricacies of genre in Mansfield’s work.

Exciting new research provided fresh perspectives. Yingjie Cheng opened eyes to “Chinese Bloomsbury;” Faye Harland introduced the history of optical toys in the nineteenth century in Britain as well as New Zealand, as well as that history’s contribution to cinematic influence on forms of fiction; and Nicola Saker unearthed Mansfield’s stint as cabaret dancer, investigated her boasts of appearing in itinerant theater productions, and highlighted her talent as mimic and her fame at Garsington as author of The Laurels. Attention to less-known Bloomsbury participants Miller Dunning (in Erika Baldt’s essay) and W. L. George (in Ann Marshall’s) brought to light connections and potential paths of research.

Within my personal experience of the conference, limited by concurrent panels to slightly more than half the presentations, the most intriguing theoretical moment came in Alex Moffett’s investigation of the satirical, casual mastery of knowing, or what he calls the genealogy of coolness. Linking this to circumstances of exclusion that help to form subcultures, Moffett seemed to lead us to the heart of the earliest Bloomsbury “Thursday evenings” while simultaneously demonstrating palpable relevance both to Mansfield and to late twentieth- and early-twenty-first century academic circles.

For compelling use of close reading at the conference, the prize in my view goes to Christine Darrohn’s philosophical treatment of hospitality as portrayed in “,” “The Doll’s House,” and Mrs. Dalloway. With reference to Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and Rachel Hollander, Darrohn subtly grounded her argument in relevance to our world’s stubborn difficulties in encountering the 15

10 Issue 21 August 2015

stranger, the other. Through attention to textual details such as Clarissa Dalloway’s ruminations about Septimus (“closeness drew apart”) and the name of the little girl “Our Else” in “The Doll’s House,” her presentation demonstrated that Mansfield and Woolf chose not to shy away from the struggles between inclusion and exclusion but directly to address them. Darrohn examined the writings for clues as to where to locate an ethically fitting line between appropriateness and empathy.

Kaplan’s keynote address, “A Critical Duet: Mansfield and Woolf Reviewing Their Contemporaries,” first contextualized the two writers in the “curiously incestuous” world of British journalism. The focus then turned to Mansfield’s and Woolf’s separate treatments of September by Frank Swinnerton (1884-1982), one of eight novels reviewed by both in the period 1919-1921. In discussing Woolf’s interests in the development of the novel and in the handling of female characters alongside Mansfield’s comparison of Swinnerton to Chekhov, Kaplan touched on the threads that held Katherine Mansfield and the ‘Blooms-Berries’ together: transmission of texts, definitions of genre, and intertwinement of inclusions and exclusions – social, textual, and perceptual.

Along with a handful of other artifacts, the supporting exhibit (sponsored by Huntington University) displayed two letter manuscripts and three fiction manuscripts by Mansfield. A description and images of the exhibit may be found at: http://www.newberry.org/04102015-katherine-mansfield-and-blooms-berries and http://www.katherinemansfieldsociety.org/chicago-conference-2015/

Conference at the Newberry Library Chicago

by Rishona Zimring

As usual, the Katherine Mansfield Society delights and stimulates. This time, it’s in the heart of Chicago, just minutes from the “Magnificent Mile,” with its fabulous examples of Art Deco architecture, including the 1925 Tribune Tower and the former Palmolive building. Having attended several Mansfield conferences since the Society’s first, held in London in 2008, I am becoming a something of a devotée, and as much of a regular as living in Portland, Oregon will allow me to be. My reminiscences range from a rainy walk to Persephone Books in Lamb’s Conduit Street (2008), to an evening stroll among the spring daffodils of Cambridge (2011), and a hauntingly beautiful concert at the breathtaking New Zealand Embassy off the Place Victor Hugo in Paris (2014). Like Mansfield herself, the companions at this conference are lively, witty, warm, passionate, engaged, lovers of beauty, playful, occasionally sentimental, 23

11 Issue 21 August 2015

occasionally sharp, and full of insight. Who wouldn’t look forward to these gatherings during the rainy season (9-10 months) of the Pacific Northwest, which happens to coincide with the academic calendar and its routine of hints and rumors about a crisis in the humanities? No such crisis, only vibrant intellectual and artistic life, at this roving literary sanctuary.

And literary it is. As a scholar who loves archives, and has been working in them since graduate school, I feel very much at home in this historicist milieu, where scholars share their investigations into Mansfield’s wartime letters (Alice Kelly), reviews (Sydney Janet Kaplan), Garsington photographs and Huxley first editions (Gerri Kimber), music hall turns and not- to-be-forgotten music hall stars (Nicola Saker), Gurdjieff’s followers (Erika Baldt), and 19th- century pre-cinematic motion picture technologies (Faye Harland). The scholarship is a feast for those of us who return again and again to the scene of material history and relish the sometimes hidden details of the past. Yet a literary sensibility prevails. Mansfield scholars with a bent for archival investigations are also superb narrators. No surprise, given their shared connoisseurship of the art of the short story. They can brilliantly marshal the materials of cultural history into elegant presentations. They blend rigorous research with an aesthetic sensibility attentive to the art of description, and with a distinct flair for narrative order and pacing. The range of reference is vast, and one comes away eager to read, and re-read, not only Mansfield, but the Iliad and Levinas.

Furthermore, when one (who is a literary scholar and cultural historian) has been immersed in the archives (as I had been already for several weeks, as a fellow researching pre-WWII performing arts at the Newberry Library, where this June’s Mansfield conference found a welcoming home), one can bask in the opportunity to be reminded of first loves, too, by presentations that elucidate the literary forms of Mansfield’s writing. One learns anew about Mansfield as brilliant satirist and her fiction’s vicissitudes of reticence and verbal excess (Alex Moffatt), Mansfield’s negotiations of the Bildungsroman genre (Keel Geheber), the role of hospitality as metaphor in Mansfield and Woolf (Christine Darrohn), the complexities of Mansfield’s modes of nostalgia (Jay Dickson and Marlowe Miller), Mansfield’s (Lacanian) “extimacy” (Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze). And one begins (with Janet Wilson’s paper in the first session) with something utterly fundamental and timely: the way that “Feuille d’Album” 45

12 Issue 21 August 2015

responds to the writing (and the person) of T.S. Eliot, and especially “Prufrock.” Why timely? 100 years ago, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” was first published in Poetry magazine, edited by Harriet Monroe, a publication based in, appropriately enough and significantly…Chicago.

Chicago’s Newberry Library brings Mansfield scholars to the scene of a vital and important literary and artistic culture, then and now. (Full disclosure: I was born and raised in Chicago, and have worked with other scholars on Chicago’s role in the making of modernism). Salutations to organizers Todd Martin, Erika Baldt, and Alex Moffatt for continuing and revitalizing the transatlantic conversations, inspirations, exchanges, and cross-fertilizations that were, and are, such a key part of literary and other forms of modernism (not least, the steel and glass explosion that Mansfieldians experienced all around them in what is arguably the architectural capital of the 20th century: thank you, or not, Mies van der Rohe). Chicago’s contributions to modernism included not only its renowned architecture and Poetry editor Harriet Monroe, but the collecting of French Impressionists (now displayed at the Art Institute), the Arts Club’s hosting of Tate curator Jim Ede, and repeated enthusiastic receptions of the touring Ballets Russes (to name just a few). Though some famous modernists left, they were indelibly shaped by Chicago: Ernest Hemingway and modern dancer Katherine Dunham come to mind. Gerri Kimber has reminded us of the incredible sociability that was Garsington, and it is rather wonderful to think about the convergences, rather than the divergences that might first come to mind, when we transpose the conversations at the manor to the industrial American metropolis. And if we are a little wary of the sea’s sublimity, we are able to enjoy the meetings, unlike Diaghilev (who complained bitterly about the voyages), without enduring the journey on the Atlantic itself. Here’s to more transatlantic modernist gatherings!

13 Issue 21 August 2015

!

Katherine Mansfield Society Annual Birthday Lecture 2015 2pm, Sunday 18 October

Professor Clare Hanson (University of Southampton) ! ‘Katherine Mansfield and ’

Keynes Library, Birkbeck, University of London, 43, Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PD

For further details and to book tickets, please go to our website: http://www.katherinemansfieldsociety.org/birthday-lecture-2015/ or contact the KMS: [email protected]

12

14 Issue 21 August 2015

In the footsteps of Katherine Mansfield (Sierre en Valais, Switzerland 11-16 August)

By Joanna Fitzpatrick

I spent a year researching Katherine Mansfield’s life before I wrote a novel portraying her amazing journey between 1918-1923, entitled KATHERINE MANSFIELD. I travelled to Bandol, Menton, and Avon, France to capture the essence of where Katherine had pursued a cure and a place to continue her creative work. Though unable to include Switzerland in my travels, her letters and journals gave me the vivid details I needed to imagine her life in Switzerland between 1921- 1922.

So to actually join Bernard Bosque, a dedicated associate of KMS, for a ride up the funicular rails that had carried Katherine up to Montana from Sierre, then walk the alpine paths she walked, see the views she saw, and step into the fields where she collected wildflowers was no less than thrilling. Though Chalet des Sapins (1500m) has been destroyed and Hotel d’Angleterre is in disrepair, I could still feel Katherine’s courageous, lofty spirit Bernard Bosque at memorial to Elizabeth von Arnim

that never ceases to inspire me in my own work as a writer.

How did she do it? During her five-month stay at Chalet des Sapins, Katherine took Dr. Stephani’s open-air cure for tuberculosis. In her journal she wrote: Words cannot describe how cold I feel, and it’s not even winter yet. We have central heating that never goes out, but I must remain outdoors at least six hours of the day and even buried in blankets my fingers turn to icicles. Yet it was on the second floor of this chalet that she wrote some of her most creative work: “The Doll’s House,” “,” Château Bellevue hall and “The Garden Party.”

3

15 Issue 21 August 2015

After the breathtaking ride up the funicular to Crans-Montana, under gray clouds we huddled around the passionate storyteller Bernard Bosque, who warmed us up with an informative biography of Katherine Mansfield. The damp weather did not stop us from following the path Katherine once walked to Elizabeth von Armin’s Chateau Soleil in Randogne. There I stood at the iron-gated entrance and imagined Katherine strolling up the road between bordering pines in anticipation of a cup of tea and conversation with her cousin.

Later that afternoon we visited Caves de Courten in Sierre to see Bernard Bosque’s elegantly displayed collection of Katherine’s memorabilia. Then he gave a slide-show presentation of detailed maps and vintage architectural photographs from when Katherine lived in Montana and Sierre. That evening many of us wined and dined at the salle à manger where Katherine ate her dinners at the Hôtel-Château Bellevue: All gay, all glittering, the long French windows open onto the green and gold garden . . . fifty little tables with the fifty pots of dahlias . . .

The next morning we were given a tour by Anne Catherine Fontannaz of Hôtel-Château Bellevue (now known as Hôtel de Ville) where Katherine first met Dr. Stephani in its grand salon in 1921. She returned a year later to spend a month recuperating from Dr. Manoukhine’s radiation treatments in Paris. It was in room #12, behind heavy mahogany doors, she wrote “”: I must confess there does seem to me something sad in life . . . It is there, deep down, deep down, part of one, like one’s breathing. It was also here where, with LM’s unfailing assistance, Katherine rewrote her Will: Whenever I prepare for a journey I prepare as though for Death. Should I never return all is in order.

Less than six months later, Katherine Mansfield stood on the staircase landing at Gurdjieff’s Institute in Avon and, wanting to convince her husband John how much better she was feeling, called down to him on the steps below, “Watch me,” then she skipped up the stairs. It was January 9, 1923, the night she died from a lung hemorrhage at age thirty-four.

The Bellevue staircase (left) and riding on the funiculaire to Montana (right) 1

16 Issue 21 August 2015

Finding Katherine

By Emma Timpany

Amongst the sixteen stories in my short story collection, The Lost of Syros (published this July by Cultured Llama Press), four are inspired by Katherine Mansfield’s life-long influence on me: Albatross, Katherine and the Lighthouse, Painting Katherine and Learning To Be.

I grew up in Macandrew Bay, a small village on the Otago Peninsula. Set near the albatross colony at Taiaroa Head, Albatross, about an unequal friendship between two young women, touches on the relationship between Katherine Mansfield and Ida Baker. It also references my favourite Mansfield story, At the Bay, in particular the scene where Kezia and her grandmother are supposed to be having a siesta.

After moving from London to Falmouth in Cornwall thirteen years ago, I realised that Katherine and John Middleton Murry, after leaving Zennor, had lived for a brief time in the nearby village of Mylor. Whilst there, in May 1916, they were visited by the poet Fred Goodyear, on leave from the battlefields of France; one day the three of them crossed the River Fal and picnicked at a beautiful beach below the lighthouse on St Antony’s Head. I’ve often visited this beach, and swum there, when walking the coast path; I also spent a lot of time looking at the lighthouse during my regular seafront walk in Falmouth. In time, this inspired my story, Katherine and the Lighthouse.

I remember seeing Anne Estelle Rice’s ‘Portrait of Katherine Mansfield’ hanging in the Dunedin Public Art Gallery. I must have been in my twenties, because my husband, an artist, was with me. In London, where we were living at the time, we had recently been to a Scottish Colourist exhibition. The exhibition catalogue had mentioned the connections between J.D. Fergusson, Anne Estelle Rice, John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield through 2

17 Issue 21 August 2015

Fergusson’s painting ‘Rhythm’ and Murry’s magazine of the same name. It was only much later that I realised Anne Estelle Rice had painted the portrait in Looe, Cornwall, in May 1918.

The final story, Learning To Be, was sparked by reading in Kathleen Jones’ biography Katherine Mansfield: The Storyteller that, on the last day of her life, Katherine Mansfield was conjugating the past tense of the verb ‘to be’ in Russian.

The journey to write these stories has been a long one. Perhaps it started almost thirty years, when my fifth form English class read The Doll’s House. Or perhaps it was the impact that the one woman show, The Two Tigers, made on me when it was performed in our school hall a year or so later. Or maybe it started during the long summer holidays after I’d finished University Entrance and I read the Antony Alpers biography of Katherine Mansfield. I was eighteen years old. Sitting on my bed in my tiny room, looking out over the harbour towards the spit of sand at Aramoana, the lighthouse at Taiaroa and the sea beyond, I wondered what my life would be like; what life as a writer might be like.

Despite having lived in England for twenty-two years, I visited Paris for the first time only last year. I wanted to see Carco’s flat, 13 Quai aux Fleurs, where Katherine stayed in March 1915 and began to write The Aloe. To reach it we walked over a little bridge covered in padlocks. Though it was the end of May, and the flower stalls were piled high with bundles of pink and white peonies, a cold wind blew through the streets. On the windows of the building, all but a few of the shutters were closed. No-one home. Despite being near the centre of the city, the curving, waterside street was strangely quiet; soft gold stone lined the banks of the river, the grey-green water flowed by, parted by the Île St Louis. I heard what sounded like a voice, saying, Paris is an island. Paris est une île. It made no sense. That night, I dreamed the river rose, flooding the city.

1

18 Issue 21 August 2015

Excerpt from "My Katherine Mansfield Project" to be published by Notting Hill Editions in September 2015

by Kirsty Gunn

Going Home

There were two little girls on the train and the mother did not seem to be able to keep them quiet. They were running up and down the length of the carriage and before the train even started had talked to everyone who was seated, everyone except Ursula, that is, talking to them in a direct and forceful way. "Where are you going" she heard one of them say to the old woman who was sitting behind right her. "I am going to visit my granddaughter." "Why?" "Because I love her and I want to see her." "Why do you?"

Really, Ursula thought, it was frightful. Why didn't the mother rein them in? It was none of the little girls' business what people on the train were doing, where they were going or why. The mother should tell them to be quiet, to stop running around. Yet here they were now, coming upon her at her seat where she was wanting to be quiet and on her own, lunging up with their bright eyes and wide smiles. "Hello." "Hello." One of them was sucking loudly on a sweet that seemed too big for her mouth and the other held the bag with all the other sweets in it, screwed up into a knot of bright paper. "What do you do?" she said, the eldest one, the one with the bag, leaning in at Ursula, her face hectic and flushed. "Are you a mummy or are you just on the train?" "I'm -" "Be quiet, Rosie" came the mother's voice from half-way down the carriage. "Come back 2

19 Issue 21 August 2015 to your seat." "In a minute, mum" the girl replied, not taking her eyes off Ursula. She was studying her face very carefully, as though there were something on it she'd never seen before on a woman, that there was something about Ursula that was very, very strange. Then she rattled the bag experimentally. It might have been a little instrument and she was practising how it might sound. She shook it again, but at Ursula this time, and smiled a bright smile. "Are you lonely?" the other child asked. The sweet in her mouth was enormous. The girl took a great slurp and said, "You look lonely" and then, "Would you like a sweet or are you going home for your tea?" At the mention of the word, "home", Ursula's stomach dropped. "I -" she started again, but found she couldn't speak. "Are you going home now?" the second one asked again, chewing frantically and then swallowing the contents of her mouth in a great gulp. "We are. We've been shopping in town with our mother but now we are going home.” "That's nice" Ursula managed. "Going shopping..." "Are you going home too?" the older girl rattled the bag and asked. "Are you? And do you like this train?" "Girls..." Ursula could hear the mother's ineffectual voice sound out again, exhausted, as though she'd woken from a sleep. "Leave that poor lady alone..." "It's alright, mum" the older one answered, over her shoulder, as though she were the adult and the mother the child. "She doesn't mind" She turned back to Ursula. "Do you? You don't mind us talking? " "Look" the little one said, pointing. "We talked to that lady and that lady and that lady and that man and that lady..." She shouted out, "Hello everyone!" and laughed loudly. "All of you!" she shouted, pointing one by one at various people scattered around the carriage who were now studiously intent on reading a newspaper or looking in a bag, all except a pair of young women over the aisle from Ursula who giggled, one saying to the other "How adorable..." Adorable! Ursula thought, what a word. "And that one and that one..." The little girl was all worked up and showing off, now that 3

20 Issue 21 August 2015

she knew she had an audience. Adorable? Really? What utter nonsense. Ursula felt like leaning over to the young woman and saying, "For God's Sake don't encourage them!" Clearly the mother had no control over the children whatsoever.

Then all at once the little one seemed bored. She turned back to her sister and reached over for the sweets as though to take them from her. "No!" the older one said, stepping back. She'd stopped rattling the bag and was holding it clenched in her hand, forming a fist. "I haven't finished yet,” she told her, and then, turning back to Ursula, said, "You never answered. Remember? Are you going home? Does this train take you to where you live?" "Oh, just stop it!" All at once the mother seemed to have roused herself and was up from her seat and grabbing both the girls by their hands. "Be quiet the pair of you. We've all had enough of your shenanigans..." She hauled them both back to the place where they were sitting and Ursula felt the relief of it, like an exhalation of breath. Her heart, she realised, was pounding. For long minutes, it seemed, she sat, while she waited for her breathing to come easily again, until she felt calm. She sat very still, as though she were in a film or in a sort of picture - looking on at herself - a woman dressed smartly, in a nice shirt and a very good jacket. She had on her lap a brand new bag, expensive, in bright orange leather, that she d bought especially for this trip about a month ago in Bond Street, and inside it was a book, her wallet, sunglasses... All was neat, and in perfect order. She was a woman on a train, is how she saw herself, like in a short story. Sitting there in the late afternoon sun, her back very straight.

There was no more from the children after that. It was as though their own energy had demanded too much of them and they must have gone straight to sleep. Ursula hazarded a glance, and, sure enough, there they were, snuggled up at their mother's side; she herself had her head back on the headrest with her eyes closed.

Outside the window the station slipped slowly away. The train picked up speed and then the platform was left behind and they were out into the daylight, passing through the 4

21 Issue 21 August 2015

familiar station yards with their random-looking buildings and disused train carriages, portacabins and shipping crates. There was something about the quality of the late afternoon early Spring light that was familiar, a feeling of sadness, loss, a sense in the air that, despite the brightness of the sunshine, the day hadn’t quite played out to expectation and now could go no further. It was if this was one hour in this afternoon, in this September light, was all there was. Ursula wished she could close her eyes. The whole trip had been exhausting. She’d been away for nearly three weeks and it seemed like thirty, all over the place – Asia, Australia and now here – and she was tired, tired of being away, tired of what she did, all the travel, the deadlines, the hotels and the checking in, checking out, getting off planes, getting on planes...Let someone else be her after this trip, she thought. She looked out at the familiar road that ran alongside the tracks, busy with a steady stream of late afternoon traffic – and what was the reason for any of it? Did anybody need to be going anywhere? What could they even be doing, those cars out there on the road, leaving this place to arrive at another... It all seemed so pointless, having the idea of a destination, of knowing, caring, where you might end up...

Yet of course everyone did care. Those people in the cars, here on the train, they had friends and families, people to see, things they needed to do. It was only she who was tired and disconnected, wanting to sleep and not being able to, jet-lagged from a job she didn’t even want any more, at an agency she'd given up being excited by long ago. Because, really, it had been a long time since she’d been excited by any of...This. The being away, the travel. Sure, she may have once thought it fun, spending every month at Heathrow going off to some country or other, meeting everyone from all the foreign offices, flying in to help them close a campaign or start up another, with the parties afterwards and the celebrations... Now it was just a case of getting it all finished and done with so she could get back to London again. There was the flat, waiting for her, with Peter in it and asleep, right now, in their bedroom... And the flat, Peter...It seemed, he seemed...They were both so very far away.

Now they had left the no-man's land of disused tracks and sidings behind them, the motorway dropped along beneath and the train began its ascent over the edge of the 5

22 Issue 21 August 2015

harbour, along the elevated track that had always felt precarious - you were on and off it in such a short time that when she was a girl Ursula used to pretend, for that couple of seconds, that they were flying. There, she looked down and saw a plate's worth of the bright blue water below, as though there was nothing at all supporting them below the wheels, and then they were back on track again, headed straight into the side of the hill. She was tired, of course she was, but of course she couldn’t sleep either, wouldn’t want to close her eyes. After all, she’d chosen to be here, wanted to be, didn’t she? Despite everything, she’d wanted to be alert to every minute, every second of this little journey?

They turned the bend and right beside them, was the row of Victorian worker's cottages that had always been there, though much smarter than they used to be, painted in a range of pastel colours and with bright gardens to the front. It used to be that those houses were where the railway workers lived, the “poorkids” Ursula remembered they used to call the children of those families, because they wore jandals in winter and were shy and didn’t speak much. “Poorkids” – that expression – a leftover from a darker age when children talked about those others as if they had nothing to do with them - as, it was true, they didn't. How the whole country had changed. Ursula thought that on every trip she came out here - though normally she was up North and they had always been keen on change there, with their skyscrapers and concession stores from LA. But as the train passed the little cottages and she saw roses, clematis... She thought how it was all change, here too – the whole society so different, in every way, from how it used to be. And yet...Something deeply unchanged, too. As always, there seemed to be not a soul about. Yes, there was that little row of cottages, so pretty and neat, sociable, somehow, but there was no one in the gardens, or standing at the gate. You looked out, Ursula thought, from the train window and there was that emptiness all around you and that sense of quiet. Where was everybody? As though the whole place existed in a kind of dream.

In fact this whole journey was like a dream. The way everything about it was both known, and recognised, and also foreign, peculiar and disconcerting: Because what kind of train might go on a little suspension bridge that would leave you hanging over the harbour like that? And what kind of commute could it be that took you, in just a few seconds, from 6

23 Issue 21 August 2015

something like a generic, urban landscape of railways station platforms and busy roads into the side of a hill so thickly covered by native bush it may as well be no city at all they were in but a place as rural and remote as the country's own dark heart? Really, Ursula thought, it was like a strange dream, to feel so cut off from everything and yet be so familiar that every view now and sighting from her window that was grimy and smeared in the bright sunlight was like a little thump at her heart. Remember this? And this? And this? Because yes, of course, she did remember. Though she'd been away a long, long time. She remembered it all.

The train went into the tunnel, through the hill and out the other side. Emerging, briefly, felt like coming into a new day. There was a moment of hope, optimism, the mood one might have waking up early to a bright morning, with all its expectations and promise, before the reality of time, real time, came back again – and knowing that the bright spring light, though warm through the glass, contained a cold and brittle wind, the sense from before, of the day’s length and the hours given, that this was all there was. It was a feeling settled within her, as though it had been there all her life and she’d never been able to make it go away. There was the view of the gully and its few houses scattered amongst the bush – and how could anyone want to live down there? - and up onto the side of the hill, a ragged collection of red tin roofs and wooden verandahs and newer buildings with large decks and picture windows... All of them like they 'd been folded out of card and made to stand there for a while before they'd be taken down again. It seemed so impossible, tenuous and fragile the little buildings. Only the bush had always been permanent, the manuka and the scrub. You could put up as many new houses in this country as you wanted, bring in a fancy architect to use concrete and brushed steel...But the bush was always going to be there at your back. This part they were going through now, Ursula saw, was as thick and dense as ever. Its shadows were ancient. Nothing changed there, then.

They pulled into the first station, the one that had always been like a little country station - you may as well be in the country – and set behind it were the hills with gorse and sheep. There was the same wooden building with its waiting room and ticket office - just like in 7

24 Issue 21 August 2015 the country anywhere, anywhere in the world, Ursula thought... Those stations you might think no one might arrive at or leave from, and yet people do. The train slowed, stopped, then started on its way again. Minute by minute, mile by mile, they were drawing closer to where Ursula herself would get off, a passenger arrived at one of those lonely places herself, at one of those little empty railroad stations somewhere in the world.

And when she stepped off the train onto the platform fifteen minutes or so later, she had that exact same thought again: Here I am getting off the train somewhere in the world and it’s as though I am the only person here. That’s what it had always felt like, too, those endless afternoons with her schoolbag heavy with books, carrying p.e. kit and tennis racket, swimming things, art gear. In summer, in the heat, she would sit down on the platform and take off her shoes and socks right there, so she could walk barefoot; there was never anyone to see her and always the smell of honeysuckle on the little path that led up from the station to the hill. The honeysuckle was out now. All the flowers in this country seemed to come out early, or any time through the year - maybe with this climate they didn’t stop flowering? Certainly, though the wind was cold, the sun was fierce. Ursula could feel it burning through the breeze, on her face, on her back as she made her way up onto the road and past the empty streets full of houses and gardens though no one seemed to be living there. A car went by. She heard shouts in the distance - some kind of game or match being played. In the athletic fields over by the swimming pool, perhaps? But generally, everywhere about her was quiet and so still. She wouldn’t be long here.

The sun stayed warm, the scudding clouds kept clear of it and the sky was blue as blue. It would be getting cooler by now, back in London. She'd been away three weeks today and could see the way the season had turned, with the brightness in the air, daffodils coming up, while in London the leaves would all be going yellow with October just about here. Ursula took off her jacket and folded it loosely to put in her bag. Everything felt heavy - her jacket, her bag, her feet on the pavement, her whole body. It was true, she was utterly exhausted. Jet-lag these days took her weeks to shake off – another reason to quit the job. It was crazy to spend your life flying around the world for a living. It wasn’t healthy, couldn‘t be. Maybe when you were young, but not later when it hits so hard, the crazy 8

25 Issue 21 August 2015

hours and schedule... She'd never been good at that side of things. That phrase she’d come up with in the meeting yesterday? "Global time”? That had just occurred to her because of how she was feeling, using those words, out of the blue, for the airline they were launching because it summed up exactly how tired she was. “Global time” – global tired, more likely. And now it was going to be the strapline for the whole campaign - the ads, all the TV, the billboards. An entire creative agenda off the top of her own exhausted, jet-lagged head...

And here she was, here, in global time herself, you might say, come over the brow of the hill and turned into the street, her destination and the whole reason for her being here, for flying down to the city this morning, for taking the train, for buying her ticket and finding a seat on the carriage, putting up with those awful, awful children. When she'd got off at her station she'd turned back for a moment and seen that the two little girls had woken up and were at the window, looking out at her. They weren’t smiling or excited, they were perfectly still, staring at her, actually. Ursula didn’t know why she was thinking about that now. She shifted her bag on her shoulder, her lovely, brand new orange bag. Four weeks ago it was, buying it in Bond Street, and here she found herself with it, carrying the same bag with her, deep, deep in the past. "If that's not Global Time then what is, I suppose" Ursula said, aloud, hearing her voice clear in the still air. She was so very far from London now. Everything there further away than it had ever been... From this hour she was moving through, this minute, this second, this street. Her flat, her life with Peter and their friends and where they lived, the pub on the corner, the park across the road...Did it even exist right now? Was it even real?

At that second, as though part of her premonition, her mobile phone rang - its sharp insistent call coming through the stillness like an alarm. She fumbled for it out of the bottom of the bag and pressed the call button. It was Peter. "Why are you calling?" she cried out. What on earth was he doing? "It’s the middle of the night there! Is everything okay?" "Darling...” Then she heard his deep voice, the lovely familiar drawl. “Everything is dandy,” he said. He was drunk. "Darling, I’ve been out. I’ve just got in. I missed you, we all missed you." 9

26 Issue 21 August 2015 "Oh...” Ursula stopped where she was. That was it. “I see...” She was in front of the gate. There was a ‘For Sale’ sign up on the fence. “Well I miss you, too” she said. "It’s been a big night,” Peter continued, as if she hadn’t spoken. “ And I miss you. I wish you were here...” “Are you alright? “ Ursula asked. Over the ‘For Sale’ part of the sign was pasted a band – ‘Sold’. “You sound completely loaded..." Peter laughed, “I am loaded. Darling, I told you, I'm dandy.” He laughed again, his lazy, funny laugh. “These trips of yours, though -" she could hear him pause, lighting a cigarette - "they get longer and longer..." "I know” Ursula said. The sign looked like it had been there a while. She reached up and touched it, the paint was peeling. “I feel the same way,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about that. Are you sure everything is...?” "Everything...” Peter sighed. “Is lovely." She could hear him closing his eyes. She looked again at the word ‘Sold’, it was a paper strip pasted over the sign and it too was peeling away. It was just paper and glue. Right now, it came to her: she could be with Peter this minute, she didn’t need to be here. She could have chosen not to be. They both could have come home from whatever party he'd been at, late, tired, they could have come up to the bedroom together, and they could have undressed and gone to bed, turned off their mobile phones, turned off the light. She could be there in the dark with him now. Instead there he was, with his phone on, here she was, with her phone; he on one side of the world, she on another. "Well" Ursula said. " You should go to sleep now. I miss you.” The gate, she saw, wasn’t locked - but when was it ever locked? – and she pushed at it. "I can t wait to get back..."she said, and she pushed harder at the gate and it swung part-way open. In London, Peter wouldn’t even remember making this call. "Oh, darling..." he said again. "Where are you? I’ve lost track. Where have you been?" Ursula pushed the gate wider and stepped onto the path. There it all was. The rhododendrons were in flower at the edge of the lawn. The blossom tree was out. The whole place utterly empty. "Don’t hang up" she said to Peter. "I'm not going anywhere..." She heard him taking a drag on his cigarette. "I'm right here,” 10

27 Issue 21 August 2015

he said. “ I'm just closing my eyes..."

When she’d got off the train and seen those two little girls looking at her, Ursula had had to turn quickly away. Both of them staring like that, it had frightened her, the older one with the expression on her face Ursula had seen before, when she’d come up to her and pestered her with her questions, an expression of naked curiosity, and of shock, incredulous somehow, as though Ursula were a sort of freak. "Don't hang up" she whispered to Peter again, though there was no response. "Please stay" she said, and, still holding the phone to her ear, walked along the path and up the stone steps to the front door and knocked, though it was obvious that there was no one around. What are you doing here?

That was what the expression on that child's face had meant.

Who are you, really?

As though the little girl had seen something about her that she knew to be true, something that Ursula kept hidden, deep inside her; both children knowing somehow, from the start, as she’d sat there on the train, so composed, with her smart clothes and her expensive Bond Street bag, that she would end up being this person here now, to be back here and so unmoored, unfixed from everything, so uncertain.

That she would be a person who might imagine that she would knock and immediately inside the house they would hear, she thought, know somehow that it was her and come running down the hall to fling open the door and she would be standing on the front porch to greet them. "I'm here,” she would say to them then, and she would put down her orange bag. "I'm home,” she said to Peter now, though she knew by the silence at the end of the phone that he was sleeping and that she was absolutely alone.

*