The Garden Party and Other Stories
by . New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1922. 12mo, viii+255 pp. $2.00.
HAVE modern readers ceased to demand a fresh supply of good short stories, or have modern writers ceased to meet the demand? Plenty of talented young persons are turning out readable novels, original plays, clever essays, and interesting poems, but the bewildered public fails to understand why it so seldom has the opportunity of enjoying a volume akin to that which has just appeared in an American edition — The Garden Party and Other Stories, by Katherine Mansfield.
This is a successor to Bliss and Other Stones, which received a sufficiently cordial welcome to prove that, in spite of the torrent of modern fiction which annually inundates the land like a spring freshet, there are still thirsty lips asking for a stream of fresh short stories.
This new volume consists of ‘pictures’ rather than of conventional narratives. Miss Mansfield gives us realistic impressions of life and character — if realism includes humor, pathos, irony, and sentiment, and is not limited to the presentation of unalloyed sordidness, as certain so-called ‘realists’ would have us believe. She presents a scene or a character with a technique as modern as that of contemporary painters. Who but a writer of to-day, for example, could give so vivid an impression of a rapid flight by motor through lighted streets, as in the phrase, ’We tore through the black-and-gold town like a pair of scissors through brocade ? With how penetrating a flash and a slash does this picture cut its way into one’s imagination!
The subjects chosen by Katherine Mansfield are, for the most part, trivial rather than important. ‘More matter with less art,’ we feel inclined to cry at moments, but this is not to say that a genre picture, if painted with sincerity and delicacy, may not yield the same quality of pleasure that is derived from a more impressive production.
The first and longest sketch in the book (and one which characteristically does not supply the title of the volume) contains perhaps her best work, as a picture, rather than a story, for of plot there is scarcely a thread. In ‘At the Bay’ we look at a real place, inhabited by living people and vitalized by imaginative, not imaginary, children. But it is not a camera which reproduces the scene for us, it is a painter with moods who makes us see the mist-soaked landscape, smell the salty air, and feel the vibrations quivering from the interplay of different temperaments. ‘The Garden Party,’ with its study of contrasts, is as typical of her work as any of these sketches, and perhaps in limiting her scope the writer is most of all an artist, for she undertakes to do nothing of which she is unsure.
Very happily the talented author’s photograph on the jacket of the new volume suggests that she has still time to grow into true artistic fulfillment of a promise that is both hopeful and unusual.
A. L. GRANT.