The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 75/Artist or Nun
ARTIST OR NUN
The Dove's Nest. By Katherine Mansfield. 12mo. 250 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $2.50.
ONE wonders if Mr Middleton Murry is wholly aware of the injury he is doing his wife's reputation by treating as sacred every chance scrap of paper on which she recorded her most denuded and transient moods. Like a somnambulent acolyte with bowed head and reverential step he bears the chalice of her fame unconscious that in replenishing it with ever thinner and thinner dilutions he is imperilling the clear wine with which he began his pilgrimage. Certainly, in Miss Mansfield's earlier books, Bliss and The Garden Party, one could delight in so original and potential a talent, while reserving judgement as to certain suggested limitations. Like a cutter racing lightly over tossing waves her style carried her mobile perceptions and if one waited somewhat anxiously for the craft to turn full-blown for port one remained at least in doubt as to just what port it was to be, after all, headed toward. Now with the poems and excerpts from her journal appearing in consecutive numbers of The Adelphi, together with the introductory notes to The Dove's Nest, one sees Katherine Mansfield either as a supplicating girl plundered pitifully of her dignity, her grief mounting in distorted curves of rationalization, or as one reduced by sheer thinness of inspiration into startling lapses of literary taste. Both she and Mr Murry seem to discuss the art of writing as if it were only to be attained through some mysterious purification of one's inner being. "She purged the last vestige of rebellion from herself . . . she was preparing to write stories of a new kind with the whole truth in them," he records in an article telling of her death. Or, she herself cries out, "I haven't felt pure in heart, not humble, not good . . . Lord make me crystal pure for thy light to shine through." Is this, one asks oneself, an unhappy novitiate for some strange religious order? For surely such rapt supplications in the interests of "goodness" and "purity" are more in keeping with the attitude of a nun than with the free and fearless pursuit of an artist who follows ever more attentively the dangerous implications of his own developing experience. Again, "I look at the mountains, I try to pray—and I think of something clever." But if anything more had been needed to deliver her into our hands we have but to listen to Mr Murry as he chants his pathetic and monotonous litany. In the September issue of The Adelphi with complete solemnity he quotes as a final solution of that mysterious secret which has baffled so many great minds—namely, "the essential of style"—Miss Mansfield's "simple and striking metaphor"—"to speak to the back of the room." One wonders just how Walter Pater would have received such a relaxed and domesticated formula.
Nowhere in The Dove's Nest do we find that "complex of fine measurements" commended by Henry James which distinguished Prelude, a story where each character gives out vibrantly yet driftingly without attenuation or discord its own separate note. Here are, indeed, many instances of her caressing insight, her own singular lightness of approach. Just as a child might imprison for a moment in the cup of its hand a fledgeling fallen by the wayside and then suddenly abandon it on some grassy plot, Miss Mansfield seems to clasp in the circle of her thought a passing protest over the crudeness of life, a sense of the fugitive unacknowledged differences that lurk between the sexes, a sympathetic understanding of adolescence, and then depositing her tremulous and explicit burden hurriedly on the ground, with a toss of the head, is off down the road whistling a bar from Bohême.
Perhaps the most interesting of the stories in this latest volume, although like most of the others, unfinished, is that entitled A Married Man's Story. Here, as in a much discussed earlier story, Je ne Parle pas Français, one detects in the composition a tranced tension combined with an underlying confusion of purpose, as though the mood that nurtured it, though fertile, though imaginative, had in the end served but to make glide stealthily through the pages Miss Mansfield's own lambent or perplexed observations. For Raoul Duquette, the little Frenchman in the former story, is neither mad enough, shallow enough, nor deep enough to be convincing, and the authentic ring in his suddenly enunciated misery, which his facile articulacy negates, announces itself unmistakably as a vicarious release for the author’s own private anguish, just as in A Married Man's Story she voices again her own insistent problem when she makes the husband say "Tell me! Tell me! Why is it so difficult to write simply—and not only simply but sotto voce, if you know what I mean? That is how I long to write. No fine effects—no bravura. . . ."
The most accomplished of these stories is The Fly. Here we see Miss Mansfield at her best, her percipient eye undiverted gazing through without prejudice to the secret sources of action of "the boss" and exposing them with a few brilliant objective strokes. There is here no suggestion of that exiguous world, a world somehow softened and diminished, though so dazzlingly extended, which many of her stories reveal; none of those clever strokes which she herself deplored, but which her artistic prescience was not robust enough to circumvent; none of those chance banal similes about "ultimate porters" and "ultimate trains" which one could not be altogether sure received her own condonation until one finds them corroborated in the following manner—"Perhaps it is the way God opens houses at dead of night when he is taking a quiet turn with an angel," or "They refused to realize that conversation is like a dear little baby that is brought in to be handed round."
To know Katherine Mansfield at her best one must really, then, return to her earlier stories, to Prelude, to At the Bay, to Bliss, so subtle in possibilities that one wonders if she herself caught at more than the floating straw of her own intuition, to The Stranger, and to Escape. Whether her work will live beyond our own generation or not is difficult to foretell, but it is perhaps not too much to say that, in those exceptional instances where her own sensitive psychology corresponded most exactly with that of the character she portrayed, she could hardly have failed to please even that great master of intricate thought whose four requisites of good literature remained, "intensity, lucidity, brevity and beauty."