SMALLER Draft Newsletter December 2011.Pub

ISSN 2040-2597 (Online) NNEEWSLETTEREEWSLETTERWSLETTERWSLETTER 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 Issue 10 December 2011 Page 3 ‘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 mercurial. 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 narration 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 interactions: 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 precision 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.

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