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An Eden for Insiders: Katherine Mansfield's New Zealand Author(S): Don W An Eden for Insiders: Katherine Mansfield'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 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ncte. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. National Council of Teachers of English is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to College English. 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
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