ISSN 2040-2597 (Online) NNEEWSLETTEREEWSLETTERWSLETTERWSLETTER Issue 4 December 2009 Inside: KMS News and Competition Results Page 2 ‘A Memory of Place’ by Riemke Ensing Pages 3-6 ‘Celebrating Katherine Mansfield’ Symposium Report Pages 7-10 ‘Enough to know— she’s there’ By Kathryn MacLean Pages 11-12 ‘Katherine Mansfield, the Underworld and the Blooms Berries’ Page 13 ‘Katherine Mansfield in Picton’ by Julie Kennedy Pages 14-16 New Board Member Page 17 Villa Isola Bella, Menton ‘Finding Katherine Mansfield’ by Susannah Fullerton Photo courtesy of Mary Gaudin Pages 18-20 Please visit http://www.marygaudin.com to see more of Announcements Mary Gaudin’s photography Pages 21-22 Issue 4 December 2009 Page 2 KMS News The Katherine Mansfield Society recently celebrated its first anniversary. What a year it has been, and there’s much more in the pipeline for 2010! The ‘Celebrating Katherine Mansfield’ Symposium in September was a wonderful success, bringing together scholars and enthusiasts from all over the world to reflect on Mansfield in the glorious Men- ton scenery. Those who couldn’t be there can read all about it on pages 7-12, and might like to con- sider making the trip to Melbourne in June 2010 for a symposium on the theme of ‘Katherine Mans- field, the Underworld and the Blooms Berries’. Check out the call for papers on page 13. You will by now have received your copy of the first issue of Katherine Mansfield Studies, which unites scholarly articles with visual arts and creative writing pieces. The Editors are already planning the 2010 edition on the theme of ‘Mansfield and Modernism’. Details are on page 21. 2010 will also see the inaugural Katherine Mansfield Society Essay Prize, on the theme of ‘Katherine Mansfield and D.H. Lawrence’ (see page 22). The last few months have seen a number of changes to the Board. Gerri Kimber has taken over the reins as Chair following Sarah Sandley’s move to the honorary position of Advisory Chair. Anna Jackson and Kate Kennedy have joined the Board in the roles of educational strategy and member- ship respectively. Tracey MacLeod has passed the role of Secretary over to Sarah Ailwood, and Gina Wisker has joined the Conference Committee. The Board is confident that this renewed team will see the KMS flourish in 2010 and beyond. As always, we are happy to receive your personal and professional contributions on KM for the Newsletter. We would love to hear some new voices in the Newsletter in 2010! Best wishes for the festive season, Sarah Ailwood and Jenny McDonnell Joint Editors of the Katherine Mansfield Society Newsletter Competition results Thank you to everyone who entered the ‘Katherine Mansfield is better than Virginia Woolf’ competi- tion. The entries were so terrific that we couldn’t decide a winner, and drew a name from a hat in- stead. So the lucky recipient of Hilary Newman’s Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield: A Crea- tive Rivalry is Penelope Jackson with her entry ‘Katherine Mansfield is better than Virginia Woolf because she left behind the very people and places of her stories, never to return, yet she gave so much to a nation bereft of a literary tradition in her time’. Here are the other excellent entries: ...she captured the essence of human experience in fewer words which she put into a new form that helped Virginia find her own voice. ~ Miroslawa Kubasiewicz ...unlike reading Woolf, it is consistently apparent that Mansfield actually lives within her characters, her writing crafted with an awareness always of the reader. ~ Margaret Arthur ...she’s a wild colonial girl! ~ Lorae Parry ...though they each illuminate the world for me, it’s Katherine who shines light upon the pathway for Virginia, rather than the other way around. ~ Jan Leavey ...although both women’s writing demonstrated a feminist consciousness and a modern sensibility, Mansfield first showed the possibilities of the symbolic, the imaginary and the real. ~ Glen Adams Published by the Katherine Mansfield Society, Stroud, England Issue 34 AugustDecember 2009 2009 Page 3 A Memory of Place1 by Riemke Ensing (a note from the past) In 1984, New Zealand writer Helen Shaw journeyed to Menton in an attempt to capture something of the essence of Katherine Mansfield that might still linger round the ‘Villa Isola Bella’. I have in front of me one of Helen Shaw’s distinctive and instantly recognizable letters. In a hurry of expectation to open it, I tore at the back of the light blue envelope and created the kind of damage the poet herself would have avoided by using a paper knife. The tear is a constant reminder of my immoderate haste and my regret at defacing this treasured corre- spondence, which still, twenty-five years later, bears the scent of Menton. The letter is undated but the contents and postmark (in a time when local mail cost 24 in- stead of the present-day 50 cents) suggest November 1984 and is by way of a ‘thank you’ note for a poem I wrote her,2 in response to her book Dear Lady Ginger: an exchange of let- ters between Lady Ottoline Morrell and D’Arcy Cresswell.3 Image reproduced courtesy of Topic The letter is written on blue (slightly darker than the envelope) paper, in blue (a deeper tone still) ink. Enclosed, in waxed (blue) paper, is a sprig of pressed greenery (now turned brown with the years), still faintly scented although I remember the absolute strength of the aroma Issue 4 December 2009 Page 4 when I first opened it and the delight of receiving this ‘scrap of foliage which I managed to plunder from outside the locked gate into the Villa Isola Bella at Menton. I mean, I reached up to take the memory of the place from a bush which grew inside the small garden’.4 Helen Shaw and her husband, photographer Frank Hofmann, had just returned to New Zea- land from a trip abroad, which had included a four-day stay at Menton. Here, on Thursday September 6 1984, at the age of 71, she had made the ‘fairly arduous one-hour-each-way’ pilgrimage from the Hotel Chambord up ‘the steeply climbed (Katherine Mansfield) memo- rial drive’ and recorded ‘some lovely smelling cypress – little low green shrubs with little green cones’.5 Cypress is what came in Helen’s letter to me and is no doubt the ‘foliage, scented, green’ of the poem ‘Today at the Villa Isola Bella’ she wrote in memory of her visit to Katherine Mansfield’s villa in Menton: Today At The Villa Isola Bella 6 Your memorial drive steeply climbed round / up to the gate closed to a stranger against a villa of orange stone. Open The windows are staring, over foliage, scented, green, at blue glass of sky into the afternoon at Menton. Today No entry here, for this stranger I am, to the Villa Isola Bella. No strangers, here, the lizards slide in and out of sight / flashing belonging/ not outsiders in this garden. Katherine, in the long shadows of your fame almost you might be writing here finding light in the shadowed room a secret / ‘Oh, what was it…?’ / of a Buddha. Out of this rough grass an aloe planted grows here? Image reproduced courtesy of Topic in thorny flesh of leaves? not that magical aloe in the moon’s light of Prelude. Issue 4 December 2009 Page 5 Small garden of your personality, time shifts the emphasis today at the Villa Isola Bella. Your sowing was earlier. Katherine, shadowy one aloe floats flowers and occupies the air. Your aloe miraculous mystifies the glittering sea. It is poignantly ironic, that in this poem, the gate to Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Villa Isola Bella’, is ‘closed to / this stranger’ the poet feels herself to be. Certainly the physicality of the place may have been new to her, but Helen Shaw was no stranger to Mansfield’s writ- ings. Although she categorically denied Mansfield’s influence on her own work as a short- story writer, proclaiming Chekhov instead as the mentor who ‘walked with me, guiding and teaching, as I stumblingly found my way’,7 there is no doubt that she was interested in and studied Mansfield’s style and technique. In an early essay, which focused on the mystical significance of ‘Prelude’, she notes that Mansfield’s stories are ‘cleared of irrelevancies, or- dered by craftsmanship and made to bloom intensely after the interval of time between the event and the creation’8 – a comment that might well apply to her own poem, here. Similarly Helen Shaw’s observation that Mansfield’s vision is elusive – ‘a lantern threading a dark landscape where light is used to point out an object and link it with a thought’9 – is sugges- tive in relation to her own poem where both the images of the lizards and the aloe create mo- ments of illumination. As in Mansfield’s stories, the juxtaposition of light and dark is central to the poem: ‘Almost you might be writing here / finding light in the shadowed room / a secret…’. The writing itself – the process of writing – is like finding the light. It enlightens, brings out the light, and clarifies what is being written about, but around Mansfield herself that sense of ambiguity and mystery – suggested by the shifting use of the words ‘shadow/shadowed/shadowy’ – re- mains as elusive as the aloe that ‘floats/ flowers and occupies the air.’ As with Mansfield in ‘Prelude’, Helen Shaw has found ‘a way to bring the very air’ into the poem. ‘And not only the air of a certain day, but around a certain person’.10 Reading the poem, the reader immediately receives a very definite and acute sense of the physical ‘air’ of ‘this afternoon at Menton’ where the sky is blue and clear as glass and the ‘glittering sea’ flashes, like the lizards ‘into and out of sight’ in the garden.