The Garden Party and Other Stories - Katherine Mansfield [7]
In fact two of these stories, ‘The Young Girl’ and ‘Miss Brill’, are actually set on the French Riviera, and feature characters from the endlessly shifting, motley, rootless population of towns like Menton. Mansfield’s immediate surroundings weren’t a major stimulus, though: she was working largely with themes and materials she had squirrelled away in her memory. However, it is rash to generalize about her processes of composition, as one particular example, ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, will demonstrate. One of the germs of this story, Antony Alpers was able to show, is found in a scribbled note interpolated in the manuscript of ‘The Young Girl’, a monologue from L.M. which Mansfield seemingly took down verbatim, as it was uttered: ‘”It’s queer how differently people are made,” observed L.M. ”I don’t believe you could understand even if I told you… And it isn’t as if there were anything to explain – if there was I’d understand – anything tangible, I mean. But there it is, I‘ve always been the same from a child… out of my depth in the big waves – or when I’m walking along a dark road late at night…” ’ This she made over into Constantia’s closing meditation in the story, with its marvellous evocation of misgivings, signs misread, a life let slip. She began, ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ in late November 1920, and finished it in a marathon session on 13 December: ‘… at the end,’ she wrote in her journal, ‘I was so terribly unhappy that I wrote as fast as possible for fear of dying before the story was sent’. When she finished it, late at night, L.M. provided egg sandwiches and tea. Like the other stories, it was published first in a magazine, in this case the London Mercury: Mansfield had no difficulties now in placing her work, and did not rely only on the Athenaeum, which Murry edited, though she was as always short of money. One group of the Garden Party stories was written for the Sphere magazine, at ten guineas each – ‘Mr and Mrs Dove’, ‘An Ideal Family’, ‘Her First Ball’, ‘Marriage à la Mode’, and ‘The Voyage’. She worked on these with great speed, and in some cases it shows, in the rather pat shapes, and stagey effects. But again, it’s wrong to generalize, since ‘The Voyage’ is as fine-tuned and suggestive as the best of her late writing.
She was writing against her body’s clock in any case, and this pressing sense of urgency is always felt in the work. Her very experimentalism – the way, for example, her narrative voice speaks through one character after another, her refusal to take a secure, generalizing overview – is itself informed by her impatience. There’s no leisure to generalize, and no place to stand to take the broad, panoramic view. Claire Tomalin describes the effect very well: ‘The particular stamp of her fiction is the isolation in which each character dwells… there is no history in these stories, and no exploration of motive. The most brilliant of them are post-impressionist… grotesquely peopled and alight with colour and movement’ (pp. 6–7). The tone is not sad or depressed, often the reverse. She wrote in a letter to Murry from this period, from Menton, that ‘suffering, bodily suffering such as I’ve known… has changed for ever everything – even the appearance of the world is not the same – there is something added. Everything has its shadow.’ This shadow serves to heighten the colours, and sharpen one’s awareness of the present moment. Her very lightness of touch, in fact, and her economy with description and analysis can themselves be read