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Letter
During June 1918 Katherine Mansfield was in Looe in Cornwall. 'Jour
Maigre’ she wrote on the 26th. ‘On Wednesday mornings Mrs Honey
comes into my room as usual and pulls up the blinds and opens the big French
windows. Letting in the dancing light and the swish of the sea and the creak
of the boats lying at anchor out in the Roads, and the sound of the lawn mower
and the smell of cut grass and syringa and the cheeky whistle of [the] blackbird.
Then she comes back to my bed and stands over me, one hand pressed to her
side,
her old face puckered up as though she had some news that she didn’t
know how to break gently. “’Tis a meatless day” she says.’
This extract is typical of Katherine Mansfield’s simple but perfect
prose style, her acute awareness of her physical surroundings, her humour.
It comes from her Journal, which we will reprint this November. Each
of the two hundred and fifty pages is full of similar gems. It is an oddity
that
the
Journal is not in print but an even greater oddity that, since its original
posthumous publication in 1927, there have only been two editions, a slightly
re-edited 1954 version and a 1977 edition which used selected extracts both
from the Journal and from the Letters.
Our edition of The Montana Stories, Persephone Book No. 25, sells steadily.
For those unfamiliar with it, we reprinted all the stories Katherine Mansfield
wrote between May 1921 when she came to live at the Chalet des Sapins in Montana
and her death at Fontainebleau in January 1923; we also included uncompleted
fragments, quotations from her letters and the Journal ‘so that the reader
is able to see how a writer of genius who knew, in her heart, that she had
little time to live, forced herself on during these extraordinarily creative
and productive few months. Apart from the poetry of Keats, the closest parallel
is in music – the last pieces of piano written by Schubert’ (Publisher’s
Note).
The edition contains pictures: on the frontispiece a photograph of the now-demolished
Chalet des Sapins (reproduced below) which inspired a wonderful Persephone
trip to Montana so that we could stay in the hotel that occupies the site of
the chalet, indeed stay in the room that occupies the same airspace as Katherine
Mansfield’s room (top floor in the photograph). And every evening before
going into dinner we could wash our hands in the ‘lavabo’ (basin)
used by Katherine in 1921; and during the day we sometimes walked along the
path named after her. The
Montana Stories also reproduces the drawings that
accompanied the publication of some of the stories in magazines. Katherine
disliked these intensely because she thought them tawdry, which indeed they
are; yet for the modern reader it is extremely interesting to see that the
editor of the magazine in which the stories first appeared could not even begin
to anticipate that they would one day be seen as some of the greatest pieces
of work in twentieth century literature and that to commission such sentimental,
second-rate drawings was almost grotesque.
Coincidentally, while we at Persephone Books were beginning to work on our
edition of the Journal (writing the Afterword, choosing the fabric – it
is to be ‘Amenophis’, a design Roger Fry did for the Omega Workshop
in 1913, a length of which in fact hangs in the office), last week the Guardian published an
article by Ian Jack about Katherine Mansfield’s visit to Menton in 1920. He ended: ‘Accounts
of her life suggest she was tiresome and selfish. [We do not agree! She was
a genius, which makes all the difference.] It doesn’t matter. She wrote
some of the greatest short stories of the last century: ‘Bliss’, ‘The
Garden Party’, ‘The Man Without a Temperament’. To have written
just of them, I thought on the platform of Menton Garavan [the station]: that
would be something.’
Nicola Beauman
15 June 2006
Lamb’s Conduit Street
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