The Garden Party and Other Stories - Katherine Mansfield [89]
6. the Burnells’ cat Florrie: the Burnell family are introduced via their cat – appropriately, perhaps, since they are a very extended family, as was K. M.’s own. As in her earlier autobiographical story ‘Prelude’, her actual Beauchamp family are transformed into Burnells: father Harry becomes Stanley Burnell, mother Annie becomes Linda, and K. M.’s three sisters and one brother (who was known as ‘Boy’ when he was small) become two sisters and the baby boy. K. M.’s maternal grandmother, Granny Dyer, is renamed Mrs Fairfield, a punning translation of Beauchamp, and also a partial allusion to her maiden name, Mansfield, which K. M. borrowed. Annie’s sister Belle, who lived with the Beauchamps, is rechristened Beryl. And Annie’s brother-in-law, Valentine Waters, who moved with his family to a smaller neighbouring house in Karori at the same time as the Beauchamps, is Jonathan Trout. Like his fictional counterpart he worked for the Post Office in Wellington, was musical (a church organist) and had two sons, Barrie and Eric (Pip and Rags in the story). K. M. was not at all alone in using the materials of her own life in this way: D. H. Lawrence did so habitually, including indeed K. M. herself (see Introduction pp. ix-x). It’s often said that ‘At the Bay’ is a kind of answer to Lawrence’s Women in Love. She wanted, she said in a letter, to explore ‘the love between growing children – and the love of a mother for her son, and the father’s feeling – but warm, vivid, intimate – not “made up” – not self-conscious’. Another, younger woman writer, Christina Stead (an Australian, and a modernist), made elaborate and sometimes vengeful use of her own family, and seems to have taken her cue in part from Mansfield, in autobiographically based novels like The Man Who Loved Children (1940) and For Love Alone (1944).
7. whare: a Maori word for a hut or shack.
8. The whole family of Samuel Josephs: the family was based on the family of Walter Nathan, a Jewish friend and business-partner of Harry Beauchamp. Mrs Samuel Joseph’s adenoidal voice (amused/abused) is a low-comic device that has as much to do with class as with race. K. M. harks back to Dickens’s broad social comedy, but her addiction to mimicry also points forward to a modern interest in telling stories from the inside of characters’ heads, not from any neutral-seeming narrator’s angle.
9. dinkum: an Australian word meaning honest, genuine or real.
10. In a steamer chair, under a manuka tree: a ‘steamer chair’ was a lounging-chair, of the kind used on passenger ships. ‘Manuka’ is the Maori name for a local tree with aromatic leaves. These names underline the sense that this is a distant world, across the ocean, and also prepares for Linda’s mental travels in her chair.
11. Picotees: a kind of carnation.
12. Johnny cake: according to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘Johnny-cake’ was perhaps once upon a time journey cake, and may have an African-American origin.
13. ‘Where are the other noble dames?: Jonathan Trout is literary and sentimental, and talks in garbled quotations from poems and plays. For instance, ‘Or do I fondly dream?’ on p. 31 echoes John Milton’s elegy Lycidas, line 56, ‘Ay me, I fondly dream!’
14. Nobody answered him: after this line, in the 1922 American edition published by Knopf in New York, K. M. inserted a final division, and numbered the last short paragraph XIII.
THE GARDEN PARTY
1. The Garden Party: the story seems to have been based on events one day at 75 Tinakori Road in Wellington, the house K.M.’s family had moved to in 1898. K.M. and her sister returned there from school in London in 1906, and she described it in her journal as ‘a big, white-painted square house with a slender-pillared verandah and balcony running all round it’. There was a view over the harbour in one direction, and in the other were workmen’s shacks.
2. ‘You’ll have to go, Laura; you’re the artistic one.’: Laura is usually taken to be an ironic