Reviews of the Week
SOME degree of embarrassment is commonly felt by anyone who reads a book of passionate and intimate letters, especially when the letters are those of a woman, written with impulsive and heart- rending sincerity for the recipient, and for him alone. Many prob- lems of taste, of selection, and indeed of simple human decency, will present themselves to the reader. We are told that Mr. Murry has restored, in this volume, "all the passages he omitted from the letters on their first appearance" in 1928. We are intended, I suppose, to congratulate Mr. Murry (and ourselves) upon this lifting of a private censorship, this untrammelled release of the secret thoughts and desires of a noble, sensitive, gallant and affectionate nature. But the doubts remain, and they will have to be solved by each reader for himself. Even the obviously sincere brevities of Mr. Murry at the beginning and end of the book, and his business- like objective interpolations, cannot entirely evaporate a feeling of uneasiness. What has been gained, we may ask, by exposing to the curiosity of the public so many things written so privately and in generous confidence, things written only for the lover and the hus- band who has now become their " editor " ? An editor, let us note, who can write so impersonally of "the mood of despair which engulfs the tubercular patient."
That this book is important, and even highly important, is unquestionably true. It was impossible for Katherine Mansfield to write anything commonplace, anything from which the flickering energies of her spirit were excluded, anything which did not reveal, however tersely, the high qualities of literary aptitude and imagina- tion. To say this is to say nothing new : what is perhaps new in this unexpurgated edition of her love-letters may best be described as an eroding though generally concealed awareness of bitter frustration ; the sense, often piteously evident, of the weakness that lay in the very citadel of her strength and her courage. Sometimes this is revealed in physical fear and sometimes in the ordinary forms of domestic anxiety (" all my nerves are up in arms "), and sometimes it is just "the horrid state of things" or "hate for this awkward, hideous world." Always the courage and always the weakness ; the living of her life with a phthisical, doomed and appealing intensity.
These pathetic and yet splendid letters, worthy of a place among the best that were ever written, these letters diffusing the whole warmth and essence of a woman's nature, carry into the reader's mind an impression of contact and understanding so intense as to be nearly painful. It is not like the memory of past and recorded things, but of things poignantly present, almost unbearably so. The helplessness and the strength, the blinding jets of wit and irony, that relentless exploitation of environment or character, the swift though anxious forethought, the sharp response to physical reality, and all those moods of brave, bantering despair, so strangely alternating with anticipated ecstasy—these give to the love-letters of Katherine Mansfield a personal impact which no sensitive reader can possibly forget. Through each complexity of scene -or mood the impression is constant. If the letters reveal the garrulous egoism, the fretful malaise of their period—the inevitable D. H. Lawrences and equally inevitable visits of Garsington—nothing ever breaks the vivid integrity of Katherine herself.
It would be possible to feel too acutely tbe undertones of tragedy, perhaps of more than one tragedy, that are present, though not continuously audible, in the letters as a whole. But so vital a nature and so fruitful a mind as those of Katherine Mansfield were unconquerable, full of delights and even full of gaiety. There are more sallies of the spirit in these letters, more quirks and inventions, more delicate exuberance than you will find in any other single volume. Even through the increasing gravity, the facing of ultimate problems in the later letters, the liveliness remains. There was a time when she "lost her capacity for happiness," almost rejected with horror the prospect of happiness ; but that was only a mood of transient and alien despondency. To read this book is in some ways a harrowing experience. These are indeed astonishing letters ; to describe them as merely " remark- able " would be sinfully tepid. The reader may be distressed by a too frequent violation of privacy, but he will at least agree that these will take their place among the great letters of our literature—and, indeed, among the great letters of the world. C. E. VulaiAmv.
Previous page
