The Dove's Nest and Other Stories
by . New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1923. 12mo. 242 pp. $2.50.
A SHARP stab of regret cuts into our sense of artistic satisfaction in this latest volume of Katherine Mansfield’s stories, as we realize that we are reading the last words that will ever be penned by a most promising young writer. Fragments many of the tales frankly are, suggestions, hints, bits of brilliantly colored mosaics collected by an artist’s eagerly searching hand to be pieced together later into one of her truthful and illuminating pictures of life. Yet even these broken bits seem not so much unfinished as incomplete — like fragments of a cunningly wrought vase, shattered by some evil chance, yet still revealing the color and design of the artist who conceived the whole.
Katherine Mansfield’s own unfinished life seems a symbol of her work — so full of promise, so controlled by what one of her characters terms a ‘psychological awareness,’ that her life, like her work, seems complete in its very incompleteness.
Even in the most finished of her pictures of life there is never the conventional structure of the usual short story. Realizing that no experience ever really begins or ends at any definite moment, she gives us a section of existence at whatever point her truth-seeking blade chooses to cut out a segment. She not only enables us to visualize a scene, as almost no other modern writer of short stories does, but she makes us feel, smell, taste, and hear through our spiritual senses, with the same poignancy which she herself experiences in every impression she invites us to share. One feels that this ardent spirit created always under a feverish impulsion, conscious of its own doom, and a softly penetrating sadness, like a haunting perfume, pervades all her work. This is accounted for in large measure — as we read in her journals — by the devastating pain she never ceased to feel at the loss of her young brother killed in the war.
If it is necessary to mark with special commendation the sketches that most stand out in this last volume, one perhaps remembers with peculiar satisfaction ‘The Doll’s House, ‘A Married Man’s Story,’ and ‘The Dove’s Nest.’ The ‘Introductory Note’ throws light on the artistic truthfulness of this talented young writer, so critical of her own work, so despairingly eager to attain the heights of absolute integrity on which even her dying eyes were fixed.
‘I look at the mountains,’ she writes, ‘I try to pray — and I think of something clever. Anything that I write in this mood will be no good, it will be full of sediment.’
But sediment is precisely what most of us find lacking in the clear sparkling draught that Katherine Mansfield holds out to us. The cup that holds it is deep, and lends its own sombre reflections to the shimmering surface, but the water itself is unmuddied by morbidity and unpolluted by false sentiment.
A. L. GRANT.