Journal of Katherine Mansfield
Edited by . New York: Alfred A.Knopf. 1927. 8vo. xvii+256 pp. Illus. $3.50.
GENIUS lies, it seems to me, in the few stories which Katherine Mansfield was able to finish before her young death. Her journal skims the last seven years of her life, — the years of most of her finished work, — catching in brief disconnected notes the mood of a moment or a day, or throwing a flash of insight back to light the course of weary months; outlining in a bold sentence or two the stories she did write or might have written; rounding, in a phrase so right that it clutches you, the essential quality of a chance face or gesture through which can be glimpsed the whole drama of the random life behind it. And, as genius is only the apotheosis of the spark of creation in all of us, this revelation of the birth of art is both exciting and profound.
Katherine Mansfield’s writing sprang, as does all the purest quality of art, from the joy of comprehending the wholeness, the power, the eternity of life itself. She could not force this comprehension; she had to wait, clearing away the unessential, until in some beautiful moment, as clear and round as the crystal globes of her own best stories, understanding came. Then she was off — glory, adventure, cleansing tragedy, and the cosmic mirth which is delight in the resilient victory of the spirit over the clumsy obstacles of circumstance.
‘Now who is to decide,’she writes, ’between “Let it be” and “Force it”? J. believes in the whip: he says his steed has plenty of strength, but it is idle and shies at such a journey in prospect. I feel, if mine does not gallop and dance at free will, I am not riding at all, but just swinging from its tail. . . .’
The agony lay in tbe waiting, knowing that beauty lay just around the corner, hidden by some obstacle which could not be passed or pierced until, in its time, understanding should melt away the dross and leave only the translucent understanding. Katherine Mansfield struggled under a weight of ill health which would have extinguished completely a less ardent spirit, yet it was not this adversary, but some dark conflict within herself, that cost her the bitter and often vain striving to write. In that writing, in the act of creation, her life existed, and in it only.
Would she have been less of an artist had her health permitted her to enter into the minor amusements and preoccupations of living, wherein her beauty, her wit, and her gayety would have served so well? She seems to have thought so. Or to have had the little house and garden she wanted, the child for whom she so longed? ‘And I thought,’ she wrote, ‘if I had a child I would play with it now and lose myself in it and kiss it and make it laugh. And I’d use a child as my guard against my deepest feeling. . . . That’s true, I think, of all, all women. And it accounts for the curious look of security that you see in young mothers: they are safe from any ultimate state of feeling because of the child in their arms.’
This entry comes in the early part of the journal, and I think that if she had come back to it toward the conclusion, seven years later, she might have changed it. Katherine Mansfield wagered her all — her frail life — in an attempt to capture the wholeness of that ultimate feeling.
Before she entered on her last few months, at Fontainebleau, the journal stops with the words, ‘All is well.’ What that meant she did not live to say, perhaps even to know. But the flame of her gallant life was of the quality that must have meant the most intense art in living, — though perhaps a different art, — however commonplace the external course of that life might have been.
MARY ROSS