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Issue 10 December 2011

INSIDE:

KMS News and Competition Results Page 2

Report on the Second Birth- day Lecture by Lesley Sharpe Page 3

CFP: Katherine Mansfield and Continental Europe Page 5

Report on Rachel Polonsky lecture by Sue Reid Page 6

‘Katherine’s Tower’ by Jes- sica Whyte Page 7

Announcement: KMS Essay Prize 2012 Page 9

Katherine Mansfield’s Diaries by Paul Capewell Page 10

Linda Lappin Profile by Susan Jacobs Page 11

CFP: Katherine Mansfield Masked and Unmasked Page 13

‘August in New Zealand’ by Gerri Kimber Page 14

‘Arnold Trowell: Cello for a Song’ by Martin Griffiths Page 18

Watercolour of Katherine Mansfield by Natassia Levanchuk (2011) CFP: Katherine Mansfield Stud- Reproduced with kind permission ies Page 19

Issue 10 December 2011 Page 2 KMS News Welcome to the tenth issue of the KMS Newsletter! To celebrate reaching double digits, we’ve put together a bumper collection of articles, reports and updates on the KM world. These include an ac- count of the most recent KMS event, the Second Birthday Lecture held in London in October (p. 3) and news of two future events, conferences in Slovakia in June 2012 (p. 5) and Wellington in Febru- ary 2013 (p. 13), as well as announcements about the next issue of Katherine Mansfield Studies (p. 19) and the next KMS Essay Prize (p. 9). The Wellington conference will coincide with the publica- tion of a new edition of KM’s stories edited by Vincent O’Sullivan and KMS Chair Gerri Kimber – turn to page 14 for Gerri’s report on her recent trip to New Zealand. Elsewhere, you’ll find several accounts of the ways in which KM’s writing, both fiction and non-fiction, continues to inspire. Paul Capewell discusses his fascination with Mansfield’s journals (p. 10) and invites members to contrib- ute to his own study of the diary form, while Jessica Whyte recalls the time she spent in ‘Katherine’s Tower’ in 1994 (p. 7) and provides an extract from her KM-influenced short story ‘Sunday’ (p. 8). Mansfield’s life and writing has, of course, provided inspiration for fictional re-imaginings by several writers in recent years; on page 11, Susan Jacobs writes about one name that will be very familiar to KMS members, Linda Lappin. One of Mansfield’s own influences crops up on page 6, in Sue Reid’s report on Rachel Polonsky’s talk about Chekhov, Murry and Mansfield, held in Cambridge in No- vember. Finally, turn to page 18 to read about Martin Griffiths’ work on the cellist and composer Arnold Trowell as well as information on how to purchase Martin’s CD of Trowell’s work. Plenty to keep you going over the festive season!

There’s a lot to look forward to in 2012, and as ever the KMS Newsletter will continue to bring you reports on all things KM-related. Please do get in touch with your submissions – we’re always happy to hear from you! Jenny McDonnell, Newsletter Editor COMPETITION

Last issue, the KMS Newsletter competition went interactive, and all members who left comments on the KMS blog were automatically entered into a draw to win a set of postcards featuring Murray Webb’s brilliant caricatures of KM. Congratulations to our winner, Paul Capewell! Your prize will be winging its way to you shortly. And don’t forget – the KMS blog is not just for Christmas! The competition may be closed, but you can still read daily entries and continue to post your comments on the KMS website: http://www.katherinemansfieldsociety.org/today/ Thanks as ever to the Southern Trust for their generosity in funding the KMS blog, and to Sue Reid for her tireless work in maintaining it.

For this issue’s competition, we’re keeping it old school. To win a copy of Kevin Boon’s novella Kezia (based on KM’s childhood in New Zealand), simply answer the following question (chosen by Kevin himself):

The mother of a famous New Zealand literary figure was once housekeeper for Katherine Mansfield's paternal grandparents in Picton. Who was that literary figure?

Please send your answers to the editor: [email protected] The winner will be drawn at random from the correct answers, and will be announced in the April issue of the KMS Newsletter.

Published by the Katherine Mansfield Society, Radstock, England

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‘How Katherine Mansfield Inspires Me’: the Second Birthday Lecture, October 2011

Report by Lesley Sharpe

The Katherine Mansfield Society’s Second Birthday Lecture was held on Sunday 16 October 2011 at the Open University, Camden Town, London. The event featured contributions by Dame Jacqueline Wilson and Dame Margaret Drabble on the subject of ‘How Katherine Mansfield Inspires Me’; a reading of ‘Sun and Moon’ by actress Susannah Harker; and was chaired by Professor Kirsty Gunn. The event booklet is now available from the KMS shop for just £4!

About Katherine Mansfield one might say there was something mercu- rial. She had that power of slipping in and out of voices, guises, points of observation, conjuring images and shattering illusions. The inarticulate and neglected can be lifted, momentarily, out of their silence. An ice house with its little nut door handle can appear as both an otherworldly presence and a powerful moral symbol. In yet another mood her narra- tion becomes impish to the point of cruelty, stripping away at surfaces with dark mockery. In her life her behaviour is as contradictory – seduc- tive and beguiling, she inspires devotion and even, in Ida Baker’s case, idolatry. Admired, she also provokes jealousy, as for Virginia Woolf. She adopts the childish attitude for Murry, endures neglect, misunder- standing. Or is herself the target, mocked for her cheap civet scent. Yet her presence in life or on the page remains distinctive. She dares to do and say and be. She is precise yet uncontained. And in this closeness, this shape-shifting, she can be something, as it were, for everyone. No one knew better than she the need to survive, how to enlarge and diminish both herself, and the many subjects touched by her penetrating con- sciousness.

This was the picture of Katherine Mansfield which emerged from the reflections offered by both Jacqueline Wilson and Margaret Drabble, and Susannah Harker’s reading of ‘Sun and Moon’ for the second Birthday Lecture. Both authors emphasised their sense of discovery at an early age of stories which spoke of something not yet fully comprehended, but whose presence could be felt on the page, the sudden sense that someone has observed the things that we have observed, and given them back to us enlarged. But the discovery was both exciting and unsettling. For Jac- queline Wilson, the hazily mapped world of childhood was suddenly closely charted; for Drabble, there was the recognition of the cruelly compelling power of ridicule, the voice in ‘Miss Brill’ which we know has been our own. They spoke too of the complexity of these interac- tions: we recognise the Kelvey child, the outsider, but also the child who, as Jacqueline Wilson observed, must disdain the even more disdained. In an act of self-sustaining survival the boundaries are drawn and kept. We are all these characters, as Mansfield knows: we have all been cruel; we have all been pathetic.

Both paid homage to the compressed concentration of Mansfield’s style, the subtle shifting voice so carefully analysed by the writer herself in the unfinished fragment quoted by Drabble. The reading of ‘Sun and Moon’ which followed demon- strated that deft sense of perspective, a mastery of free indirect discourse which could encompass

Issue 10 December 2011 Page 4 both a supple third person narration and a careful symbolism. The actress Susannah Harker’s reading drew out the compelling sense of theatre developed in the story, animating both the atmosphere of the dining room, darkened even in daylight, with the ice house centre stage, and the process by which the tiny nut handle of its little door becomes the focus of the moral drama. The pristine ap- pearances prove as fragile as the ice. A world contained by preci- sion and propriety dissolves and overflows. The father bites at the dishevelled mother’s shoulder; there is the lingering image of the abandoned spilt bottle – details which make the denouement of the melting broken ice house as inevitable and ancient as the decay and passage of time itself, and as tragic.

The universal scale of the drama, hinted at in the archetypal echoes of the children’s names, is further played out through the interactions of male and female. But in a skilful reversal of these forces it is Sun, silent, observant, upon whom darkness falls, while Moon’s extroverted egotism, formed in the image of her mother, remains untouched. Susannah Harker captured with feeling the sense that it is Sun whose light can see and feel the brightness and shadow of events, and Mansfield’s interest here in the universal loss of innocence, the sudden seeing into the dark heart of the shabby world of adult- hood, was dramatised as a deeply personal realisation, as individual and particular as the little nut itself.

The enchantment and the chill with which this transition is effected in the story mark out Mansfield’s artistry, leading us, like Sun, into the loveliness of the vision, only to turn a cold light upon it. In the sharpness of her light, we find a sudden and mercurial recalibration of what it means to be human. Kirsty Gunn too, in the precision of her own analysis, helped to develop discussion about Mansfield’s tech- nique and to draw out through questions the way in which the authors viewed Mansfield’s particular achievement. And there was, of course, the tantalising question of whether Katherine Mansfield might have written a novel had she lived longer, and not felt the urgency created by the shortness of time. For Jacqueline Wilson, the building up of the layered Burnell world came close to creating the sense of a novel being crafted, with its expansion of a world, a time, a family. She showed through her interest in the biographical details of Mansfield’s family life the process by which memory had been reframed to show another world: a world that might ‘leap’ as Mansfield said and show ‘the old country’, but which could be uncompromising too in its portrait of her sisters and the limits of colo- nial life. Margaret Drabble observed that perhaps many of the stories simply could not have been developed into novels because of their acute and unsustainable cruelty, and reflected on the very de- liberate crafting of her art which Mansfield undertook, the importance for her of the form of the short story, and its relationship to a more novelistic kind of prose.

So what, finally, is inspiring about Mansfield? The constant self-renewal and enquiry that she en- gaged in was captured by Jacqueline Wilson in the description of her own devotion, the urgent read- ing over and over inspired first by her discovery of a writer who ‘knew everything’ about children, and later by the richness of the letters and journals. The lecture revealed again the complexity of Mansfield’s life and achievement, and showed that we might also claim Margaret Drabble and Jac- queline Wilson as inspirations in their own right, offering, as they do, their very different perceptions so fully. They too understand their craft, and bring to the often hazily mapped worlds of our experi- ence their own distinctive clarity.

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‘Creating the “English Chekhov”: Middleton Murry, Anton Chekhov, and the buried life of Katherine Mansfield’, by Dr Rachel Polonsky

A Reading & Reception Studies Seminar at Clare Hall, Cambridge on Thursday 24 November, 2011 Report by Sue Reid, KMS Treasurer

With great expectations, KMS stalwarts – Sandra Butterworth, Lesley Sharpe and I – arrived at Cam- bridge University to hear Rachel Polonsky speak about the intriguing combination of Mansfield, Murry and Chekhov. We were warmly welcomed by the organiser, Dr Elinor Shaffer, who introduced us (and the Society) to assembled scholars from both the English and Slavonic Studies departments. It was a select but enquiring gathering of about twelve enthusiasts, who engaged in prolonged and lively debate after Rachel’s paper. Dr Rachel Polonsky is an Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Slavonic Studies at Cambridge University, having recently returned from Moscow, where she spent ten years as an independent scholar. Her most recent book Molotov’s Magic Lantern: A Journey in Russian History (Faber & Faber, 2010) was acclaimed for its mastery in spinning ‘an extraordinary web of connections between people, places and books’ (Sunday Telegraph). Her talk on Mansfield, Murry and Chekhov accomplished a similar feat, weaving connections between their legacies, letters and lives. Polonsky began her paper with a quotation from Murry’s poem written for the first anniversary of Mansfield’s death, in which he describes her as a ‘perfect thing’ and uses terms similar to those which he applied to Chekhov’s ‘perfect art’. Yet while Murry drew implicit parallels between the work of Mans- field and Chekhov – and was to some extent inspired by the standard set by Chekhov’s letters in his own editions of Mansfield’s letters – he chose to edit out most of the references to Chekhov in her letters, thus erasing the year she spent on translations of Chekhov’s letters with her Russian friend S. S. Koteliansky. The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield have therefore revealed the importance of Chekhov to Mansfield, particularly in 1919 when, following her diagnosis of TB, she felt a renewed kinship with him, expressed, for example, in her yearning to escape to Yalta, where Chekhov retreated to recuperate. But further, Polonsky argued, Chekhov’s last complaining letters, in which his illness seems to swallow him, influenced Mansfield’s decision to stop writing during her final months and to seek ‘Life’ instead. Her immersion in Chekhov’s letters also resulted in the publication in Murry’s Athenaeum of about 20-30 extracts of her joint translations with Koteliansky. But Murry kept for himself the job of reviewing Con- stance Garnett’s translation of the Letters of Anton Chekhov and thus deprived the world of the insights which we glimpse in Mansfield’s letters and which he recycled (inadequately) in his own criticism. His review ‘Thoughts on Chekhov’, collected in his Aspects of Literature, contained exactly the sort of ‘falsity’, according to Mansfield, that Chekhov had eliminated from his writing. Russian literary critic D. S. Mirsky (who emigrated to Britain in 1921) deplored the English cult of Chekhov propagated by Murry and the Woolfs, among others. Instead, Mirsky recognised Mansfield as Chekhov’s heir, claiming that she had learned from him without imitating. Mirsky admired Chekhov for structuring his stories on musical lines and for his leitmotifs of mutual isolation and the tangled web of consciousness – qualities which he does not explicitly trace into Mansfield’s writing, but which are read- ily recognisable. For example, Polonsky noted ‘The Fly’ as being particularly Chekhovian in style. Overall, Polonsky argued that the reception of Chekhov in Britain took an unfortunate turn with Murry, drawing intriguing parallels with his management of his wife’s output both before and after her death, specifically as regards her work on Chekhov. Polonsky’s interpretation of Murry’s behaviour was less nuanced, perhaps, than recent studies by Kathleen Jones and Sydney Janet Kaplan, but nonetheless made for a compelling narrative which should prompt Mansfield scholars to look afresh at the influence of Chekhov and his letters. To this end, I was delighted to discover that Constance Garnett’s translation of the Letters of Anton Chekhov to his Family and Friends is fully accessible online at: http:// ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/c/chekhov/anton/c51lt/complete.html My thanks once again to Rachel Polonsky for her stimulating perspective and to Elinor Shaffer for extending such a warm welcome to KMS members.

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Katherine’s Tower by Jessica Whyte

I had my first encounter with Katherine Mansfield seventeen years ago, in a remote tower overlooking a stormy sea in Cornwall. The thick stone walls kept out the worst of the grasp- ing ocean winds, and from the tower room you could look out to the sweep of gorse and the tiny neighbouring cottage sheltering from the weather. The tower room seemed to me then just like any other room, unremarkable if welcoming, but what made it extraordinary was that the room had once been Katherine Mansfield’s tower; somewhere she had lived, breathed, suffered and tried to work. For two months in the troubling year of 1916, she and Middleton Murry holed up in this distant place, outside the tiny Cornish hamlet of Zennor, a place which, even now, seems out of time and place.

When Katherine stayed here they were cut off with only their neighbours for company, whose cottage was so close they could see right into it. The two cottages were surrounded by moorland rolling down to the sea. This proximity to their neighbouring cottage was Katherine’s main problem; the reason she couldn’t work, the rea- son her health declined in what would for many have been a peaceful idyll away from the stresses of life. For the Murrys’ close neighbours were D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda and the Zen- nor experiment was part of Lawrence’s failed search for utopia; his ‘Rananim’. After not much more than six weeks, Katherine could stand it no longer. Precipitated by a traumatic, physical fight between the Lawrences, Katherine and Murry escaped the doomed Rananim and left its period of creative block behind them.

For me, at the tender age of 18, a budding writer and an avid reader, the romance of staying in Mansfield’s temporary tower home intrigued me, but at this point in my life it did not captivate me enough to find out more. Life was hard for me then – I was suffering terrible ill health and my own dreams and ambitions were beginning to look under threat. At that stage in my life I hadn’t yet discovered what kind of writer I wanted to be and maybe I wasn’t quite ready for Mansfield yet. Little did I know that fifteen years later, while doing my creative writing degree, I would revisit that tower in my imagination. Somehow the impression it had made had never really left me. This time I discovered Katherine Mans- field through the eyes of her Cornish serving girl, Hilda, who is mentioned briefly in KM’s letters of 1916. I was fascinated to learn that Katherine had felt so marooned in Cornwall; in a letter to Beatrice Campbell in May 1916, KM wrote ‘I feel as though I and the Cornish

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Pasty had drifted out to sea’ (the ‘Cornish Pasty’ was her unflattering name for Hilda). In Claire Tomalin’s biography Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life, Katherine is described as she was in the Tower House: ‘She lay alone beside a fire in her tower, like Mariana, smoking and listening to the sound of her maid at work in the kitchen.’

I was inspired to write my own story about Katherine, through the eyes of Hilda, in an at- tempt to mimic Katherine’s style and learn about her writing in the process. It made me read Mansfield in an intense and absorbingly thorough way, studying the construction of her sto- ries in detail. It was a revelation. I was immediately captivated by Katherine’s stories and felt an affinity with her style of writing. I was amazed how closely my own writing style connected with Katherine’s modernist principles; the element of pathos and disappointment, the idea of incomplete epiphany, the attention to material detail and the use of symbolism. I now know what kind of writer I want to be and the novel I am currently writing is haunted by the presence of Katherine. The tower in which Katherine experienced writer’s block un- wittingly became, nearly a century later, the catalyst which unleashed my imagination. It was now safe to say I was officially hooked on Mansfield.

So hooked that I decided to do an academic MA at Sussex University for the primary reason that I get to study Katherine Mansfield in depth. My course has just started but I already have my dissertation planned: I am looking at Mansfield as a colonial girl, her contribution to the journal Rhythm and her links with the Fauvist art movement, most particularly the American Fauvist Anne Estelle Rice. Rice painted a well-known portrait of Katherine in 1918, which seems to capture the essence of her... it was painted in Cornwall. So we come full circle, something which I hope Katherine Mansfield would have found as satisfying as I do.

Extract from my short story ‘Sunday’ about Katherine Mansfield and the serving girl, Hilda

“Hilda crept into the room with what she hoped was a penitent smile. ‘Put it on the desk,’ Mrs. Murry said dismissively, as she flung herself back onto the sofa. Hilda heard the striking of a match and soon a wreath of cigarette smoke enveloped them both. Hilda hardly dared disturb the immaculate desk; books in neat piles... medicine bottles lined up together like soldiers awaiting commands... ink bottles full, a pen lying unused beside them. Hilda heard a rattling cough coming from the corner. She looked over at Mrs. Murry... her hair was blunt and shocking to Hilda, like unexpected nakedness. She was wearing an exquisite jacket in black and gold. Hilda longed to reach out and touch the rich material but feared it would sting like a wasp. A few drops left over from yesterday’s rain were seeping through the cracks in the ceiling. They shimmered in the sunlight which streamed into the room from the huge win- dows. The rays bounced back from the yellow walls and bathed Mrs. Murry in a near- angelic light. Hilda gazed at her transfixed; she was breathtaking... marvellous! What Hilda wouldn’t give to be marvellous, even just for one day. The room was studded with Cornish pitchers to catch the rain. Mrs. Murry sat deep in thought, staring into the fire, the pitchers round her feet like an attentive crowd. Hilda silently left the room, feeling both hurt and en- raptured.”

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Katherine Mansfield’s Diaries by Paul Capewell Diaries have always fascinated me – from reading about the minutiae of the life of someone with no claim to fame other than to have lived through a particular period of time, to the habits and thoughts of the talented and the famous. I’ve kept a diary myself since I was about 15 years old, and the prac- tice is very interesting to me.

When a dear friend introduced me to Katherine Mansfield’s writing a few years ago, I was immedi- ately taken by her allusions to and descriptions of her native New Zealand, so often written about from so far away – both spiritually and physically.

Image by Paul Capewell

But it was when I got to her diaries and letters that KM really came alive to me. Her words spat and crackled with vitriol and passion, or else they soothed and calmed with a delicious conjuring up of images of the places she visited and people she met.

KM’s diaries and letters are a pleasant combination of a running commentary on her writing work, and of the perhaps more mundane things such as weather and daily activities. It’s a combination that wouldn’t work without her playful, often mischievous (occasionally childlike?) way of looking at things.

Where other literary diarists ramble on incessantly about the trials and tribulations of writing – in- stead of actually getting any done – KM touches on her stories as they come together, and the con- cerns she has as they are sent off to publishers. And she offsets the talk of ‘work’ with beautiful illus- trations of her surroundings or vivid accounts of conversations with others.

Although she would at times demand that her diaries be destroyed, it is a wonderful thing that they have come to be published and loved so widely. It is thanks to this that she has become a renowned diarist.

I’m often interested when speaking to fellow KM enthusiasts, to find out whether it’s her fiction or her personal writing which they get more out of. I must admit that for me it’s the latter. I couldn’t take one without the other, but I’ve always leaned more to the diaries and letters of writers than to their fiction, for some reason.

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All of this has indirectly led up to a project I am undertaking for my final year at university. I’m studying Information Management at Manchester Metropolitan University, and have decided to focus my attention on asking why we keep diaries, what we get out of them, and whether the medium in which they are kept (on paper or online) alters the way we write about ourselves.

I’m recruiting fellow diarists (whether online, on paper, or both) to help with my research for this project by filling out an anonymous survey about their diary habits. No personal or demographic in- formation is recorded – I simply want to gather some thoughts on the nature of diary writing from as many people as possible.

If this sounds like something you’d like to be involved in, could I ask that you drop me an email at [email protected]. I can provide more information, should you like it, or simply a link to the online survey.

Linda Lappin Profile by Susan Jacobs

Although New Zealand claims Katherine Mansfield as a national treasure, her startling writ- ing gifts and intensely experienced life resonate with a wide audience. American Linda Lap- pin, an award-winning writer and translator, has been fascinated by Mansfield, ever since she picked up a copy of Bliss over thirty years ago.

A graduate from the University of Iowa Creative Writing Program, Lappin travelled to Italy in 1978 on a Fulbright Scholarship. As a young expatriate she identified with the restless, rootless Mansfield. ‘I was also writing short stories about being a young woman alone in a foreign city, dealing with intense feelings of displacement and longings to create a real life for myself.’ Since her writing was fuelled by ‘encounters with the spirit of place’ she stayed and cobbled out a living teaching English in Italian universities.

For Lappin Mansfield’s life sums up many conflicts felt by young women writers and artists. The exhilaration and despair over creative work and relationships; the transgressions and the guilt; the burning ambition and the striving for something beyond ego satisfaction; independ- ence and vulnerability; the need to be ‘desirable’ and the need to be oneself. These are age- old conflicts that women generally feel, ‘how much time to dedicate to home and family, to other job commitments, friendships and the need to make money, which never seems to be enough.’

In 2008, after fifteen years of painstaking research, Lappin published Katherine’s Wish (Wordcraft of Oregon), a biographical novel that explores crucial episodes from the last five years of Mansfield’s life. In the meantime, she wrote two novels, including the well-received The Etruscan, a Gothic mystery set in England and Italy, and several essays about women writers and artists in the 1920s.

She read everything by and about Mansfield she could find. The first key moment was her discovery of Ida Baker’s memoirs that offered an intriguing alternative view on many of the episodes and experiences Mansfield describes in her letters and journals.

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‘Their relationship has been described in so many ways: that Ida was a slave, or a monster. For me they were perfectly suited to each other, rather like two sides to the same self, the risk-taker and the care-taker.’

Next she read John Middleton Murry’s autobiography and reread Mansfield’s work, along- side Baker’s and Murry’s accounts. This sparked the idea of examining a period in Mans- field’s life from the perspectives of these three principal characters without trying to judge them, or to justify their often puzzling behaviour. Even more ambitiously, Lappin sought to weave details, images, and atmospheres of the stories and letters into her own text. Although C.K. Stead’s Mansfield was published some years ago, his novel ends where hers begins, with Mansfield’s trip to Bandol when she discovered she had tuberculosis.

Lappin is keen to underline how Mansfield’s reading of Cosmic Anatomy had influenced her decision to go to the Gurdjieff Institute at Fontainebleau. She maintains that those who have branded Gurdjieff a fraud have not looked beyond the image he created around himself as a ‘larger than life’ character. She rejects the view that Mansfield was a victim of Gurdjieff, deluded into believing that she would be healed.

Noting that recent scholarship confirms Mansfield was genuinely interested in the psycho- logical aspects of his teaching, she points to Vincent O’ Sullivan’s introduction to Volume V of the Letters, published just weeks after Katherine’s Wish came out. Lappin has long been a student of Gurdjieff’s ideas and feels they have helped her immensely. ‘Over time, you learn to enhance the quality of attention you bring to any task, physical, emotional, or intellectual.’

It is gratifying that her novel won two Independent Publisher Book awards. However, writ- ers have a worrying future these days as less literary fiction is published, let alone read. ‘Whenever I go into a bookstore now, I don’t see books, but lives, hours, days and years of work compressed into those covers.’ Despite the ‘madness’ that compels her to tell stories for very little financial return being a writer is a privilege that carries its own rewards, even if often buried beneath enormous self-doubt and sacrifices.

‘I think Mansfield very courageously dwelled in a state of “negative capability,” to use Keats’ term, a receptivity to life necessary in order to produce art.’ But she had to get there by means of a journey described in her journals, letters, and stories. ‘At one point, Mansfield says, “To be alive and to be a writer, there is nothing like it!”’ Lappin agrees wholeheart- edly, but Mansfield’s journey shows it came with a price. ‘I think this is why she remains so essentially contemporary and why her life is of great interest to everyone who writes. Her letters and journals allow us to follow the evolution of a creative mind and its coming to terms with a creative gift.’

Linda Lappin’s essay, ‘Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence: A Parallel Quest’ was the joint winner of the Katherine Mansfield Society essay prize in 2010, and published in vol. 2 of Katherine Mansfield Studies.

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August in New Zealand by KMS Chair Gerri Kimber

I was fortunate to be able to spend the month of August in New Zealand, researching in the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington for the forthcoming two volume annotated edition of KM’s fiction which I am co-editing with Vincent O’Sullivan, to be published by Edin- burgh University Press next October. The trip would not have been possible without the gen- erous support of the NZ Society of Great Britain, the NZ UK Graduate Association and the NZ UK Link Foundation.

I flew to Auckland via Singapore. After a 12 hour flight to Singapore, I was staggered to re- alise I was still only half way there! I was lucky enough to be able to spend the first couple of days recovering from jetlag at the Auckland home of Sarah Sandley, KMS Honorary Chair.

Auckland is an incredible city, and I fell in love with the view of the harbour and the brooding presence of the volcanic island of Rangitoto.

During my brief stay in Auckland, I met up with Steph Hancox our NZ membership sec- retary and her mother Conor Williamson, a relative of KM, and the granddaughter of the real ‘Jonathan Trout’. I was also able to spend

time with Reuben Williams, the KMS’s web- site designer, who lives in Christchurch but flew up to Auckland for a couple of nights. It was so wonderful to finally get to meet all

Issue 10 December 2011 Page 15 these people with whom I have been in contact for so long, but never actually met! Karl and Kay Stead also invited me to dinner whilst I was in Auckland and I spent a lovely evening there, enjoying their wonderful hospitality.

With my jetlag finally gone, it was time to make my way to Wellington. As this was a research trip, and there would be very little opportunity to do any travelling, I decided to take the famous ‘Overlander’ train to Wellington from Auckland – a journey of 12 hours – and thus be able to ex- perience a little of the interior of most of the North Island. (It was also cheaper than the plane!) The sights exceeded all my expectations.

Finally I was in Wellington, smaller than Auckland, but just as beautiful.

Vincent, his wife Helen, and their adorable miniature Schnauzer Norman, looked after me during my stay in Wellington. There was great excitement in my first week, as there was a snow storm through much of New Zealand – a few flakes even made it as far north as sub-tropical Auckland! The hillier suburbs of Wellington, including Karori, were actually cut off from the city for a short time. During the week- end of the storm, we were staying in the Wairarapa and had to make a hasty return to Wel- lington in order to cross over the Rimu- taka mountain pass before it was closed by snow fall.

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One of the highlights of my trip was to be able to visit the KM Birthplace House. I was actually staying on the Tinakori Road and so it was an easy downhill walk to the Birthplace. Mary Morris and her colleagues made Vincent and I very welcome, and it was an unforgettable experi- ence.

KMS member Maggie Rainey-Smith organised for me to give a talk to the NZ Society of Authors on the proposed KM sculpture, in the idyllic setting of Day’s Bay where she lives. There I met Dame Fiona Kidman (who invited me to attend the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards at Premier House), Joanna Woods, Neil Plimmer, Don Long, and other Wellington luminaries, as well as KMS members including Kevin Boon and Simone Oettli. It was a wonderful evening and money was raised for the sculpture.

On another occasion, the NZ UK Link Foundation invited Vincent and I to speak about KM and our book project to their members in the very grand setting of the official residence of

the British High Commissioner at Homewood. There was a delicious afternoon tea, with the most dainty and delightful sandwiches and cakes prior to our talk, which was introduced by Joanna Woods and Jane Kirkcaldie.

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There were many memorable dinners during the trip including with Fiona and Ian Kidman in their hillside home, with spectacular views over Wellington harbour. As previously men- tioned, I was able to see Fiona (Fiction), James Belich (Non Fiction) and Peter Bland (Poetry) each awarded the 2011 Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement at Premier House – an occasion I shall never forget! Richard Cathie and the committee of the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship also in- vited Vincent and I to lunch – it was wonderful to be able to catch up with them following our collaboration on the week of events in September 2009 in Menton, to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Fellowship.

Aside from all of the above, most of our time was spent in the Alexander Turnbull Library, temporarily housed in the Archive Building whilst the ATL building is being revamped. Here is housed the world’s most significant collection of KM-related manuscripts and books. Being able to spend so much time there was an incredible experience. We were able to make significant progress on our manuscript, going back to the original source material wherever possible. The ATL also houses microfiches of all the Newberry archive’s holdings (the li- brary in Chicago which houses the other main collection of KM manuscripts), which was of great help to us. Finally it was back to Auckland, again on the ‘Overlander’ train, with time to drive to Cambridge with Sarah Sandley for Sunday lunch with liter- ary columnist Stephen Stratford and his delight- ful family before the long journey home. Thanks to Sarah again and her part- ner Brett, whose wonder- ful hospitality made the beginning and end of my trip so memorable. And of course to Vincent and Helen for all their kind- ness throughout this un- forgettable journey, and my three fantastic spon- sors.

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Arnold Trowell: Cello for a Song by Martin Griffiths

Katherine Mansfield’s own letters and other published material include refer- ences to the twins Arnold and Garnet Trowell born in Wellington in 1887. The former was a cellist and composer and became a renowned virtuoso of his in- strument. Only now are the details of his life coming to light.

The Alexander Turnbull Library in Wel- lington has held the complete collection of Arnold Trowell papers since 2008: several hundred folders contain published and unpublished scores, photographs, concert programmes and reviews, diaries and other manuscripts. These have formed the basis of my PhD on the life and music of the Wellington-born musician. Are there any revelations about Katherine Mansfield?

Thomas Trowell, Harold Beauchamp, Robert Parker, Arthur Crosby and Millie Parker are all familiar characters in the literature on Katherine Mansfield, whose musical pursuits they followed. Some new details and personalities have emerged including Frank Johnstone, a cellist from Australia.

For the Beauchamps’ ‘at home’ at the new residence in Fitzherbert Terrace, Thomas Trowell and Katherine Mansfield took the opportunity to perform Arnold’s music together. There is a photo of Arnold and Katherine on a picnic somewhere near Wellington but the hoped-for collaborations that were to contain ‘MacDowell [and] Debussy chords’ (letter to Garnett Trowell, 29 October 1908) did not eventuate, or have not survived.

Trowell published Morceaux for Violoncello and Pianoforte Op. 20, dedicated to ‘Kathleen Beauchamp’ and the budding writer performed Serenade at St Paul’s Cathedral in 1907. (This work, along with another seventeen ‘morceaux’ by Trowell, is included on my CD titled Cello for a Song. In this collection, elegant Edwardian salon music is interspersed with fiery virtuosity and innocent childhood dance. For availability email [email protected])

After Mansfield arrived in London on 24 August 1908 she switched her affections from Arnold to Garnet. Why did she prefer Garnet to Arnold? The received wisdom is that Arnold rejected her atten- tions but this might not be the full story.

At the Trowells’ home in Carlton Hill Road in St. John’s Wood there were other colonial musicians that were rivals for Arnold’s affection. A relationship with Eileen Woodhead, a South African cellist who may have been one of Trowell’s students as early as 1907, proved to be serious (they later mar- ried). Australian cellist Winnie Parsons, who arrived in London before Katherine, was living and studying the cello with Arnold Trowell from 1908 until at least 1911. Further, Gwen Rouse, Kathe- rine’s friend from Queen’s College, the Australian pianist Madeline Royle and Dorothy Rogers were all rivals for Garnet and Arnold’s attention.

My PhD thesis titled ‘Arnold Trowell: Violoncellist, Composer and Pedagogue’ contains more de- tails of the musical life of Katherine Mansfield, and of course, Arnold Trowell. For further reading see the full text from the University of Waikato: http://researchcommons.waikato.ac.nz (available from mid-January 2012).

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Issue 10 December 2011 Page 20