An Eden for Insiders: 's New Zealand Author(s): Don W. Kleine Source: College English, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Dec., 1965), pp. 201-209 Published by: National Council of Teachers of English Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/373108 . Accessed: 04/05/2011 11:12

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http://www.jstor.org KATHERINE MANSFIELD'S NEW ZEALAND 201

talk, blarney and flattery, ignorant and the story is ironic, for "grace"remains futile. Dante's words are of grace; these a word and does not become a reality. are of ingratiation.Etymologically iden- With no better men than the Dubliners tical, the two terms are as far apart as to illustrateit, Dante's "Comedy"turns revelation and damnation.The title of into pointless farce.

An Eden for Insiders KatherineMansfield's New Zealand DON W. KLEINE

OF ALL THE STAGES of life, childhood By sympathetic projection, an inspired is in serious fiction that most scantily straight man like Seymour Glass or Boo represented.The tradition of the novel, Boo Tannenbaumconverses with them. to be sure, aboundswith tiny juveniles: Unlike Sybil or Lionel, the grownup is pious ones, picturesqueones, even plaus- only pretending-and it is through the ible ones (most often, unobtrusiveones, grownup that we see. The child'sprivate brief and drab in their dramatic ap- abode is preserved inviolate: he might pearances). Yet what a child genuinely almost be from Mars. thinks, feels, what he is-from these, If the infant observed is an exotic, writer and readeralike are in a real sense the infant observer is often something sealed off. An explicit hindsight holds worse, a fraud. Yet at the last remove he sway over the autobiographicalmemory too remainsa creature of mystery, gaze story, for example,and the tacit theme is fastened on the adult'sreality, never his always the pastness of the past. To in- own. Queer and ironic are the miscon- habit the small child's world, as Dos- structions of his Innocent Eye, but its toevsky inhabits Raskolnikov's, Proust perpetual unwinking alertness hints of inhabits Marcel's, or Faulkner inhabits a depravedprecocity. A suspiciousvir- Benjie's, is a creative feat novelists have tuosity implacablyattaches to this tech- pointedly shunned. nical maneuver:still, it permitsan author Even writers who "know" children to illuminate adult conduct by indirec- view them from the outside. J. D. Salin- tion, sidesteppingthe region of the child ger, to take a recent instance, has an himself. acute eye and ear for infant manners Who is this odd, familiar being? He and nursery patois. Portrayed without flies before us, pursued in "children's archness or condescension, Salinger's books": escape literature, from which children are nevertheless, in the adult the perplexitiesof his actual milieu are sense, "marvelous"ones. It is as if they carefully censored. In any case, escape were acting up for the reader-being literaturefor children,like seriouslitera- perfectly childish. Salinger young come ture through "children,"works to alien- equipped with adult straight men; we ate two domains-thus confirmingevery- neversurprise them alonewith playmates. day experience, where parenthood is a wild frontier of human and A member of the Department of English at relations, Cornell University, Mr. Kleine is at present where tragi-comic isolation of adult and completing a critical study of Katherine Mans- offspring is ultimately incurable. True, field's fiction. the man is the father of the child; a 202 COLLEGE ENGLISH child's adventures are those which adults A Dickens, a Twain or (perched give him; a child's world intersects the ambiguously between art and entertain- parent's in alliances of fear, love, and ment) a Lewis Carroll suggest other- imitation. Yet to penetrate the realm of wise. Each can appropriate and project the very young is an artistic act as with behavioristic exactitude childhood's disastrous in practice as it is legitimate inner flavor and psychic pitch, yet reveal in theory. its substantial humanity and profound Who can authentically bridge mental basis in our own enterprises. Frequently light years? If fictional children are these anomalous exceptions fall prey to seldom really there as characters, it is rules they have broken, and a soporific because they are somewhere else-acces- nostalgia then drains much of their sible to their creators chiefly by guess- authority. Yet the fact remains: a queer work, over long distance as it were, with imaginative polarity enables each of these artistic tolls mounting up while the child otherwise disparate talents to retrieve a babbles cutely and obscurely into the narrow, coherent poetry from the receiver.1 For most writers, there is little chaotic debate of generations. recourse to exalt his except evasively Since I wonder if fiction affective hide his inscrutable Dickens, any innocence; writer has disclosed the under masks of opportunities visage clarifying piety of such double vision so as and his impressively charm; punish preposterous Katherine Mansfield. in the naivet6 with distortions which Expert solipsistic mental and in that childhood weathers, circumstantial, deny, effect, actually which authenticate a child's milieu exists. The creative (and exasperation ("Grow of the bathos and which echoes down the avenues of guiltless charlatanry up!") which are often their Dickensian modern fiction to breed a host of equiva- juvenile she exerts at times a fakes reflects a natural be- lents), unique, puz- perfectly over the wilderment: how did it what zling power memory, refreshing really, feel, it to remind us we two did it mean? It meant its forgot; fusing something, worlds alien and as and existential and human relevance magnetic planets validity in a of loss at once are intuitive truths. seem fore- sexes, perception They and lamented. doomed literary falsehoods with even portended the greatest writers, otherwise lucid in- To be sure, the child claims but a scant terpreters of the self in its adult varieties. number of her more than sixty completed Recalling our selves, however dimly, in stories; while Katherine Mansfield's actual offspring (who impatiently fore- popular image issues chiefly from "The cast their selves in ours), we are almost Garden Party," The Young Girl ac- tempted to conclude that serious fiction counts for even fewer. And indeed, Miss offers no remedy whatever for an amne- Mansfield's small, faultless idiom is com- sia which belies the continuity of per- monly invoked in causes quite different sonality and the unity of experience. from these two youthful creations: the feminine intensities, of which she is pre- infantile 'Ambitious attempts upon "pure" sumed high-priestess; Chekhov, whose consciousness must always reckon with a pierc- but re- tour de force impetus she professed, fostered, ing dilemma. Joyce's impressionist than a score of her suc- at the of A Portrait of the Artist is flects no more beginning within psychologically credible but, like a children's cessors; a romantic legend which, story, morally uninteresting. The infantile view- like Scott Fitzgerald's, her accomplish- point in What Maisie Knew is morally interest- ment is often misplaced. A figure as ing but, like most infant spectatorships, less and momentous as the short one has ever that slight story than credible-no pretended form Miss Mansfield has in- heroine, qua old female, is itself, always James's eight year a measure of bewilder- brilliantly realized, spired complacent KATHERINE MANSFIELD'S NEW ZEALAND 203 ment. "Inexplicable" her art has frequent- acknowledged to be the core of Miss ly been deemed, "sacramental"her career Mansfield's accomplishment. "Debts of aborted by tuberculosis in 1923. If a Love," she called these masterpieces, but posthumous cult (urged onward and up- they are equally transfigurations of an ward by her husband John Middleton obsessive sorrow, arbitrating distances Murry) inflated the Mystery to Tolstoy- of space and time which perplexed her an proportions, subsequent opinion has from the day she left Wellington at tempered such exaltations, in a compul- nineteen. "A long typical boat dream sive and equally delusive formula: [last night]. I was as usual going to Chekhov's little prot6g6, his "disciple." N.Z." Such Journal entries reveal that In truth, of course, Katherine Mans- the death of a well-loved brother in 1915 field discovered (through a fanatic self- focused childhood memories. It was as surrender to which her Journal and if more than a brother had died, and must Letters famously testify) a type of lyric now be fiercely reconstituted, "perhaps revelation quite dissimilar to Chekhov's. not in poetry. Nor perhaps in prose. Comparable, in her commitment to Almost certainly in a kind of special the unfathomable but somehow por- prose." tentous obliquity of our everyday occa- A chronic homesickness shrewdly sions-in selecting and ordering these polarizes past and present, lending her with the strict intensiveness of a poet- creative intelligence a resonance matched she departed abruptly in strategies of but fitfully in the far more numerous signification. Anthology prefaces not- England and South of France stories. withstanding, her "contribution" is less To be sure, if Miss Mansfield's domina- to have extracted Plot from the short tion of childhood and adolescence may story, than to have inserted Sensibility: be traced to the ambivalences of early articulated the patternless pattern of self-exile, her private dilemma is objecti- tangential event with novelistic modes fied in definitions of European adulthood of inner exposure (certainly her "atmos- as well, by a dualism tensely imagined-a phere" is more Woolfian than Che- foreboded deprivation not of what we khovian). Developed independent of con- had but of what we should have, a temporaries (though hardly, more than sensed disparity between the promises with them, of an experimental climate), and shattering betrayals of experience. multiple time shift, flashback, dream We leave the youthful heroine of "The image, interior monologue, above all an Garden Party" weeping gladly for the exquisite verbal equivalent of fleeting inviolable dead man who almost spoiled mental nuances, represent her true her afternoon. Adult analogues in pieces originality. like "," "Life of Ma Parker," "The Miss Mansfield's is di- of the Late legacy surely Daughters' Colonel," "Mar- verse for one who died at thirty four. riage la Mode," and "" are Yet, after all, the chief vindication of left staring amazed upon abruptly ruined her radical, introspective instrument is lives. While Katherine Mansfield's Jour- to be found in the handful of her stories nal counsels mystic acceptance (she died which capture the private life of the seeking it in Gurdjieff's Institute near young to link it with the life of elders in Fontainbleau), the largest portion of her haunting, exact images of social process, work indicates implacable unforgiveness. personal growth and loss, family inti- Its light exclamatory cadence, fanciful macy. Based upon her New Zealand girl- childlike free play, brilliant irony and hood, such writings as "," impersonality, hardly conceal the under- "," "The Garden Party," "The lying, exasperated romantic idealism. "I Doll's House," and "" are adore Life," she declares in a letter to 204 COLLEGE ENGLISH

Murry's brother, "but my experience of smile, but our Else only looked." Such the world is that it's pretty terrible." terrors are transcribedwith the laconic In resolving this dualismby anticipat- circumstantialityof a police blotter. Yet ing it, the New Zealandfictions do sug- when Lena glides over the playground gest the higher accomplishment.Imme- to ask Lil if it's true she's going to be a diacy and clarity give these a rapt, servant when she grows up, we can charmed ambience, as if some preter- hardly doubt that absentelders are loom- naturaldeceit had been performedupon ing dimly in shadow like the tall, anon- our expectations; yet within an idyllic ymous figures of Freudiannightmare. suspension,the relationshipsof offspring If schoolchildrenfind in a doll's house gain a pertinence uncommon in any a simulacrum of the adult world, the re- serious fiction. Exemplary for their adult world finds its image in school- elsewhere so conquest of a fugitive children. "Nudging, giggling together, of recall quaintly at large, such prodigies the little girls pressedup close"to Kezia's need of are richly in exploration. sister Isabel, custodian of the amazing "The Doll's House" is the most alarm- house. "One by one they put their arms ing of Miss Mansfield'sdispatches from round Isabel'swaist and walked her off. childhood'smagic land. Three small sis- They had something to whisper to her, ters are given a wonderful, life-like house a secret." The future is writ small in for their dolls. One of them, Kezia, falls such little women, whose apprenticeship in love with a tiny lamp inside, which proves convincing only because its in- seems to smile at her and say " 'I live fantile basis is accuratelyintuited: "And here.'" Over the next few days, all her sliding, gliding, dragging one foot, gig- classmates are allowed to inspect the gling behind her hand, Lena went over doll's house, except the washerwoman to the Kelveys. . . ." In short, the Mrs.Kelvey's daughters. This creepy pair juxtapositionof a toy's mental pleasures are natural outcasts, fair game for the and the hard-heartedrites of a play- taunts of respectable schoolmates like ground persuadesus of our own mixed Lena Logan. One day Lena's squeals humanity:"'Yah, yer father'sin prison!' prove particularly bitter; after school she hissed, spitefully . . . This was such Kezia, sitting on a gate, sees the Kelveys a marvelousthing to have said that the pass by. In an impulse of experimental little girls rushedaway in a body, deeply, generosity, she invites them to see the deeply excited, wild with joy. Some one doll's house. But after a moment her found a long rope, and they began skip- grown-up aunt has discoveredthem, and ping. And never did they skip so high, drives the two outlaws away like chick- run in and out so fast, or do such daring ens. Once out of sight, the Kelveys sit things as on that day." down on a big red drain pipe along the The smiling lamp lives in the animis- road. Reminiscently, the younger mur- tic fancy of an ignorant child, and the murs, " 'I seen the little lamp.'" wide world shrinks to fit within "a The factuality of this unhappy fable perfect little house" for dolls, which might have seemed a gratuitousslander, encloses it as a glass ball encloses an had it been arguedby an authorto whom artificialsnowstorm. Real snow is general infant folkways are knowable from the all over "The Dead"-but it is profitless outside and at a terrific distance.It isn't, to comparethe small,perfect story with however, much of an Eden if you're in the large, imperfect one. Rather we it: "Now they hovered at the edge; you might note how more formidable New couldn't stop them listening. When the Zealand writings draw a measure of exact little girls turned round and sneered, power from Katherine Mansfield's Lil, as usual, gave her silly, shamefaced apprehension of childhood. KATHERINE MANSFIELD'S NEW ZEALAND 205

The lengthy fragments "At the Bay" tralian uncle, is Kezia's recurrent query. and "Prelude" lack dramatic event or He died. She can't fathom the contra- discovery. Occupying by turn the aware- diction: "Kezia waved her left leg and nesses of its members, "At the Bay" waggled the toes. They felt sandy." traces a family's day at a seaside resort, The little girls and their boy cousins "Prelude" the same family's first week follow the handyman, to watch him kill in a new house. Again the interfusion and ducks; they cry with primal approval alienation of adult and juvenile spheres when a head flies up from the stump, are perceived, here in an impasse of and the headless body goes waddling family love. Father, mother, little girls, away. Kezia runs at the handyman, grandmother, romantic young aunt: all shouting "'Put head back!'" The others, these Burnells meet in cryptic bondage drained and shaky, fall silent. Bossy Isabel to each other, yet their respective soli- bustles up to her sister Lottie, but Lottie tudes are absurd, distressing, and more snatches her hand away: "'What are you ultimate. Their lives together seem based always touching me for, Isabel?'" Mean- on a vital misunderstanding. time, the discovery of the handyman's Scenes of childhood crucially focus gypsy gold ear-rings dispels Kezia's " less radical distances between adults shock. "'Do they come on and off?' (though it is the latter which Miss Mans- she asks, "huskily." field measures most extensively). Reduced The curious young forget disclosures to a domestic category, each small Bur- of death while grownups, remembering nell escapes the family in her essence. death, scarcely imagine childhood. In- Surely the most unimpersonated in doors, adults chatter, quarrel, boast, flirt; modern fiction, these wholly individual just outside the window, children hop young are framed lucidly against the and screech, straggle through gardens, natural scene: in "Prelude" a half-tropic, and practice parental faces. The disparity half-pastoral New Zealand landscape, in of generations is a functional analogue "At the Bay" sand dunes and the sea. of less extreme separatenesses which Their impressions, puzzlingly familiar, temper connections of husband and wife, are fervently appropriated. When Kezia master and servant, woman and woman. and Lottie, arriving at night, first glimpse In "At the Bay," Kezia's mother lies in their new up-country home, "A strange a steamer chair wondering, Why is every- beautiful excitement seemed to stream thing like this and not some other way? from the house in quivering ripples." Her more confident offspring, somewhere Kezia is handed a lantern, a "bright "out of sight, out of hearing," sing in breathing thing," and the sleepy sisters their chains like the sea. are hurried through "a square hall filled In "At the Bay" the sea also sings, with bales and hundreds of parrots (but though its response to Linda's fretful the parrots were only on the wall-paper) queries is surely unintelligible. Personi- down a narrow passage where the parrots fied as if by a child, it serves parents persisted in flying past Kezia with her and offspring alike as an element of lamp." ritual immersion. At the exact mid-point, The Burnell daughters move undream- the dead noon, of "Prelude," two of the ing in an eternal present and their elders, most antithetical Burnells do impinge mortgaged to the past or bemused by thematically, if not psychologically; the the future, can impart little of a dis- aloe where Linda and Kezia uncommuni- parate reality. Generations meet without catively meet is the story's symbolic and rapport, over the enigmas of an aloe structural center. Like the sea's, its im- plant, a headless duck, or a long-dead plicit presence holds all the Burnells' uncle. Whatever happened to that Aus- lives in ambiguous solution; through these 206 COLLEGE ENGLISH two correlatives in nature flows the Picton? Baffled by death, she can hardly mystery of relationship. What are a suspect what her own journey rehearses, family's attachments? Unknown to and its associations are at once enlivened either, Linda and her daughter share and forestalled within her sensations. private terrors: swelling objects, rushing Juvenile wonder at the sheer fact of things, vague infantile bogies. Affinity travel is exactly intuited, and conveyed and isolation coexist inscrutably. The in pace, descriptive selection, above all coherence and gravity of the Burnells' in drastically scaled imagery. A little life exceed their fragmentary aware- boy on the loading pier is "jerked along nesses, and they move in their diversity angrily between his mother and father; with an indefinable unity that compre- he looked like a baby fly that had fallen hends parents and offspring alike. into the cream." There is "a little green "Prelude" and "At the Bay" are vir- star on a mast head"; a porthole is a tually unmatched in the tradition of the "dark round eye"; three "little spiderlike modern British story, and rank with steps" hang down from her grand- "The Daughters of the Late Colonel" as mother's upper berth. Fenella's arrival is the author's best work. Yet for all their bright, slow, strange: in the icy dawn she integration and resonance, they are in struggles into black clothes and a button one respect a qualified accomplishment. springs off her glove; the grandparents' They lack depth of background. The yard is lined with "drenched sleeping aloe, the bush, a sand dune, the sea: flowers"; her grandfather looks like "a natural scene is organically realized with- very old wide-awake bird." Most infant in these plotless ensembles. But it presses spectatorships seem ruses of despair, the values of the fiction inward upon compared with Miss Mansfield's confi- the family. We have little sense of the dent pursuit of that mode. Adult signifi- tacit outside reality against which we cances, scaled out from the defining are accustomed to view in relief even perspective of Fenella's credible but ab- the most tenuous literary actions. True, solute immaturity, linger as an imminence circumscription is presupposed by real- never immanent. However narrowed in ized intention. Family vibrations are scope, the voyage to childhood is cogent of other inherently idyllic, and sacrificing mise enough to evoke the strangeness en scene, we gain the felt immediacy of trips. our own intimacies. Still, such flourishing That the rightness and depth of stories self-containment is no less provocative like "The Voyage" or "The Doll's for its artistic necessity. It is as if the House" presume a shrinkage of range Burnells were viewed by an omniscient is hardly surprising. Humanly concrete, eccen- pre-school child. a child's sense of life is humanly which to If exploited circumscription brings tric, since he lacks forms with to the lyric intensification to these extended attach his eerie, brilliant insights with such designs, its benefits are as clearly appar- experience he receives appall- ent in shorter New Zealand pieces, such ing intensity. Cramped by the inexplica- as "The Doll's House," "The Garden ble resistances of a world in which there the Party," or "The Voyage." In "The Voy- is little else for him to do but play, often the age," conflict, crisis and resolution are deeds of his imagination suggest To absent: a little girl whose mother has solemn audacity of a lunatic. explore whimsical Miss just died makes an overnight trip to live this disparate, purview, in a void created with her grandparents, she and her grand- Mansfield suspends it mother arrive in the morning, the story by subtracting our own climate of factu- ends. What accounts for the eloquence ality. The void is not absolute, however, of Fenella Crane's effortless passage to but is electrified with strategies of poetic KATHERINE MANSFIELD'S NEW ZEALAND 207 indirection which travel into Kezia Bur- prevented by the impetuosity of youthful nell's immediate, hermetic province (as emotion. "All the doors in the house well as the hermetic domesticity of seemed to be open. The house was alive elders) to transfigure it with a fine reson- with soft, quick steps and running ance of implication. voices." Adolescent bliss, a disease that Since The Young Girl is herself half makes one misconstruct appearances a child at the end of its rope, it seems artistically, is diagnosed with an odd, natural enough that the charmed solitude acute sympathy, and its juvenile origin of other New Zealand pieces should conveyed in feverish, artificial proposi- accompany the true pitch of her ex- tions: "A great quivering jet of gas posure. "The Garden Party" and "Her lighted the ladies' room. It couldn't wait; First Ball" are, like "The Voyage," rites it was dancing already." de passage misconstrued from the inside, Such configurations are mirrors of the universalized through a lucid projection guileless exuberance which commands of the innocence imaginative they pre- things so, not lamps upon the hidden suppose. "She blushed and tried to look texture of appearances, and it seems severe and even a little bit short-sighted hardly incongruous that the ballroom as she came to up them." and garden at moments suggest locales of A young girl, allowed to play "grown- fairy tale or pastoral, modes which reflect up" hostess at her mother's garden party, our wishes without illuminating our cir- tries to call it off when she hears a cumstances. Less particular beings than neighboring workman has been killed in lyric concretions, Laura and Leila are an accident; after the party, she is sent normative intelligences of ordeals which to the widow's house with a basket of focus their fleeting, timeless condition. tidbits, and perceives in the dead man's "The road was bright on either side with peace and detachment the rich, mixed moving fan-like lights, and on the pave- quality of life. At the first ball she has ment gay couples seemed to float through ever attended, another young girl is the air . ." Their arbitrary, reflexive told she will someday be old; but her vision affords a property (appropriate to shattered happiness is quickly recovered myth) of renewal, not discovery: our in the glamor of the dance. Laura's party present, less tractable, reality is inferred and Leila's ball are customary, not ordi- as a momentous exclusion, just as it was nary, events: myths of loss and gain for in "The Voyage." these aging young, upon whom mortality If the author transcends the compen- is levied and its pleasures unlocked. In dium of maidenly ardors and alarms to other words, ominously "symbolic" oc- which a less serious "femininity" might casions-for the ritual dilemmas of the have descended, it is because she has female adolescent have proved an alarm- tellingly penetrated not only the feel but of ing penchant successors, whose pon- also the meaning of this closed viewpoint. derous signals of intimacy remind us Disconcerting messages arrive in the "The Garden Party" is less inimitable middle of Laura's and Leila's adventures: than incomparable. to grow up they must apprehend their From an inside report of what it feels deaths. Yet deaths begin when they are like to be a child and stop being one, apprehended, and in precipitate debate "The Garden Party" gets an authority each heroine's fanciful, passionate world denied more recent counterparts; and starts to fall apart; childhood, waning even the New Yorkerish lapses of "Her before our eyes, augurs (though it First hardly Ball" are expiated by ramifying clarifies) the erosion of adult opportun- intensities. In either case, perils of ab- ity and the transience of life. straction (The Garden, The Dance) are In the very purity of these two sad- 208 COLLEGE ENGLISH happy masterpieces there is something field were personally reluctant to under- equivocal. It is not, to be sure, Miss write it), but wins herself alone. What Mansfield's refusal to spell out their now? On that point, "The Garden Party" social dimension. While she does ear- is flawlessly unclear-as if it couldn't nestly hint that the initiate to grown-up afford not be a flawless minor classic, processes may be robbed of vivacity and couldn't afford to complicate the artistic candor, this piety is obviously subordi- one's bright expectant stance by articu- nated, and quite properly blurred within lating its radical isolation. the attitudes of her heroines. For ex- Leila doesn't even make an exit. "Why ample, the cutely stylized view of the didn't happiness last for ever? For ever lower orders in "The Garden Party" wasn't a bit too long," she unnervingly would be atrocious, if social specification reflects, and surrenders to enticements were its effect. of the ball with its distracting contra- Or rather, social specification would dictions still unresolved. Metaphysically be its effect only if we granted the speaking, you can't not dance whatever equation in a neat, limited metaphor of you know. But the fact remains: her first Laura's economic class and childhood. ball ends as it began, in the bliss of an The glibly "domestic" pitch of prepara- undiscovered garden party. That she tions for the Sheridans' party recalls the can't have the experience she consumes milieu of a family magazine. A "woman's (what good is happiness if it lasts for world" made effortless by the absence of ever?), an insight provisional enough in its men (amiable specters even when they implications for Miss Sheridan, is plain- reappear) and the exertions of its serv- tively postponed by Leila, whose delayed- ants (faceless as appliances, and as open action myth is less decisive and less to playful personification), the Sheridan beautiful. household is drained of seriousness or It is not less "true," judging by stylis- particularity. Its daughter Laura, "the tic rhythms which in both works convey artistic one" ("Again, how curious, she a girlish impulse of flight, to and from seemed to be different from them all"), is the compelling, unspecific promise ex- cheated of the moral experience she tended from somewhere outside the craves, by evasions only money can buy. story, of Womanhood. Tidily opposed, When Laura sees "All is well" in the these alternatives are reconciled by an dead workman's face, and apologizes to expectant poise eloquent in its lack of him for her gay party hat, she escapes content. The party guests seem "bright her mother's infantile, death-denying birds that had alighted in the Sheridans' Good Life by acknowledging mortality garden for this one afternoon, on their and the classless solidarity it suggests. way to-where?" But this metaphor is soon exhausted (for On their way to where indeed. Reeling instance, she never does find out what the impatiently within her riskless domain, workmen really are like), and Laura's The Young Girl is vividly blind to am- exit from the land of The Ladies' Home bushes awaiting her silly happiness. After Journal appears hardly social in essence. all, it may be dreadfully unsafe to grow No, it's a psychic exit, to a future up: the exacting suppression of this seemingly unconditioned by the story premise is a means to the poetry of on- itself. Amid omens of crisis and farewell, coming disaster that attaches us to Laura, she slays her wicked mother and wins, Fenella, Kezia and her male cousins. It not a dim, obliging father or an equally is obviously an end as well, since disaster dim brother who glides from the shadows is averted by the timeless anticipation. "I the to verify her happy acceptance of life's adore Life, but my experience of mysterious variety (as if Katherine Mans- world is that it's pretty terrible." The SHORT FICTION OF E. M. FORSTER 209

hypnotic calm of the New Zealand fic- are penetrated by a suspicion that off- tions signifies a violent truce within the spring will not easily live down the author. selves that are predicted and created by The truce is restrictive. Colonial girl- finely-gauged adult dilemmas. Yet the hood is charged with portent but ex- transience of Laura's strange artificial empted from actual dramatic possibility. liberty or Kezia's racy instinctuality Still, masterpieces always draw force equally hints at the disconcerting burden from their limitations, and if Miss Mans- of adult intimacies. After all, small sons field retreats from the terrain of risk and are brothers, whose experiences are choice which contains the final implica- transient and irrevocable-Miss Mans- tion of our predicament, she does so to field's discipline works across distances remind us that irrevocable discoveries to inform this obscure literary platitude can be made elsewhere. Like tragedy, with a grace and power of an uncommon childhood is apt to be quite fatal (gone order. Her creative feat seems recondite, before we know it, though we could but in tendering us the gift of ourselves have changed our lives if we had known it manifests the ambiguous generosity it in time). "Prelude" and "At the Bay" of memorable art.

Eternal Moments in the Short Fiction of E. M. Forster JOHNV. HAGOPIAN

FORSTER'S SHORT STORIES can be divided ments in short fiction: "The Road from into two groups: the allegorical fantasies Colonus" (1903), which comes at the such as "The Celestial Omnibus" and beginning of his career, and "The Eter- "The Other Side of the Hedge" which nal Moment" (1928), which comes at have become standard anthology pieces; the end. and the realistic psycho-moral narratives As the title and several references in such as "The Eternal Moment" and "The the text make clear, "The Road from Road from Colonus" which, despite the Colonus" is a variation on the theme of fact that they most resemble his novels, Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus. But it is have been neglected even though no less significant that the road is from Colonus; an authority than Lionel Trilling has i.e., leads away from the willing sub- judged them to be Forster's best stories. mission to death that transfigured the Perhaps the reason for such neglect is aged and deposed king of Thebes into the that, according to G. D. Klingopulos, genius loci of a foreign place. Mr. Lucas "there is something in the stories them- at Plataniste, far from his native England, selves which discourages and seems to also feels that he may have found his mock the whole business of careful defini- apotheosis, but he is robbed of his trans- tion and appraisal" (The Modern Age, figuration by the stout common sense of Pelican 1963, p. 245). This paper attempts his mock-Antigone of a daughter and her to take up the challenge of rendering crass friend Arthur Graham. careful definition and appraisal of For- Forster divides the story into two main ster's two most distinguished achieve- parts: (1) an account of the English and Mr. Hagopian, professor of English at Harpur travelling party's arrival, conflict, College, has published extensively in the field of departure at a remote Greek khan on a contemporary literature. hot April day in 1903; and (2) a brief