• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The craft of writing is what’s left to her, and the pleasure of the text becomes a kind of secular salvation. What’s not said is frequently as vital as what is said – if she assumes the voices of different characters, she also takes possession of their silences, when they catch their breath and run out of words. Critics have registered this curious cross-infection of her illness and her style, sometimes in slightly macabre ways. So, for example, Claire Tomalin calls the work ‘short-winded’ and even someone who starts from the texts rather than from the life, like feminist critic Kate Fullbrook, will write, ‘her characters’ identities are riddled with gender codes as if with an unshakeable disease…’ (Katherine Mansfield, 1986, p. 31). And, of course, death is more or less openly a theme in the Garden Party stories, a terrible and tasteless event that can’t be allowed to intrude on the land of the living, but does all the time and everywhere. ‘The Stranger’, a story which pays a kind of homage to James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ from Dubliners – a salute from one modernist to another – marvellously casts death as a most accidental acquaintance. Mr Hammond (based on Harry Beauchamp, and so boyishly energetic, possessive, hopeful) chafes at the delay on the quay as he waits for his wife’s boat to dock, bringing her back from a trip to Europe. When she does arrive, he is ardent, proprietorial and – such is their relationship – aware as always that she holds something of herself back. This time, though, the ‘something’ takes on more definition than usual, for she tells him that the cause of the delay was that a passenger died, and he died in her arms. It’s as though she’d confessed to a ship-board romance, but much worse. She has embraced the enemy that keeps people separate for ever, the fact of their deaths. This is why he can’t own her, and why for all his striving he can’t, in the end, compete. It’s a frightening and blackly funny story – and it may in part have been inspired by a hidden set of family facts. Mansfield’s parents had had a similarly shadowed meeting in 1909 in Hobart, Tasmania, though the ‘stranger’ had been buried at sea; perhaps even more to the point were her mother’s death in 1918 and her father’s marriage eighteen months later to his dead wife’s closest friend, Laura Bright, one day after disembarking from the boat at Auckland – for all the world as if, faced with death, he did everything he could to deny it.

The resulting story stands on its own of course – and it also interacts in the reader’s imagination with the others in the collection. Mansfield may have been too breathless – or simply too ‘episodic’ and ‘modern’ in her whole view of narrative – to settle to writing a novel, but she did create a different kind of continuity made up of allusions, cross-references and affiliations among the separate stories in the book. They were, in other words, open-ended not only in the sense that they frequently tail off on her characteristic note of questioning, evasion and bad faith (see the ending to ‘The Garden Party’ quoted on page xv above), but also in the sense that they suggest each other. One example is the very theme of death, which itself develops a weird continuous life from one story to another: in ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ the death of Con’s and Jug’s mother is associated in their minds with the black feather boa round her neck in her fading photograph; the boa links across to Miss Brill’s pathetic fur-piece, which ‘dies’ when she is mocked by a couple of young lovers in the public gardens. When she puts it back into its box, she links with another image, the little girl and her Grandma in their tiny cabin on the boat in ‘The Voyage’ – a cabin a bit like a coffin, though the child’s mother’s death, the reason for the trip, is never directly mentioned. And this ‘box’ takes one back to the blackly comic sense the daughters of the late Colonel have that he is somehow still living in the chest of drawers, or the wardrobe.

Associations of this kind