Leaving fingerprints behind
Alberto Manguel
MANSFIELD: A NOVEL by C. K. Stead Harvill Press, L1499, pp. 246, ISBN 1843431769 The poet Philippe Soupault used to write in a café next to his house. One morning he noticed a little man across from him, studiously observing him as he wrote. After some time, Soupault, irritated by the unwanted attention, burst out, 'Why are you watching me like that?' To which the little man answered, 'I want to know how it's done.' That is perhaps the nagging question behind our prurient interest in the lives of artists and writers: we want to know how it's done. Kipling called the labours to satisfy this curiosity 'higher cannibalism'. Cannibal chef C. K. Stead has served us the most delicious, exquisitely prepared, delicately spiced Katherine Mansfield dans son fits that one could ever wish for, and the gourmet in me is immensely grateful. If we are to have biographies, fictional biographies at that, let them all be like this three-star novel, done to a turn. I came away from Stead's Mansfield (precisely subtitled 'A Novel') feeling that I now understood something of 'how it's done', or at least of how Mansfield succeeded in doing that which made even the lofty Virginia Woolf jealous: 'the only writing I have ever been jealous of,' the author of Mrs Dalloway once confessed. It may be supposed that being the editor (for Penguin Modern Classics) of The Letters and Journals of Katherine Mansfield had destined C. K. Stead to the writing of this novel. I don't think so. It is one thing to know the material of your subject in scholarly detail, to have read all her work, to have the dates and names and places of her biography at your fingertips; it is quite another to bring her to life as a sentient, complex, believable person. Stead's Mansfield may or may not be true to the documentary truth, but she is as large as life and twice as natural.
In Mansfield, Stead has wisely chosen to cover not the writer's entire career but only a few years from her early adulthood, ranging from her relationship with John (Jack) Middleton Murry to the death of her beloved brother in the war, and the appearance of the first symptoms of the tuberculosis from which she was to die in 1923. Covering so short a period, no epic eye need obviate the ordinary details. On the contrary: it is the details on which Stead concentrates: on her shifts of mood, her inklings of inspiration, her small reactions to common things, her day-today dealings with other writers, lovers and friends. Above all, Stead chronicles her painful progress from muddled love affairs and inspired scribbles to a commitment to both love and literature, a late realisation that led the (historical) Mansfield to record in her journal, three years before her death: 'So, to be together is apart from all else an act of faith in ourselves.'
Stead's ability to make the reader see the world through Mansfield's 'act of faith' is remarkable. He does not copy or merely report: he translates that which we know or intuit of her thoughts and feelings into the language of story, so that the jottings of her documented voice in journals and letters become a moving, comprehensible, convincing fictional narrative. This, for instance, is Katherine Mansfield on 8 December 1916, on that common literary lament, the inability to put on the page that which inspiration creates in our mind:
And even in my brain, in my head, I can think and act and write wonders — wonders; but the moment I really try to put them down I fail miserably.
And this is Stead's brilliant rendering:
His [Jack's] industry is a constant reproach to her. He seems only to need to think of a project, and then to begin it and work at it, and complete it. Simple! She, by contrast, has ideas, brilliant they sometimes seem. Each one as it comes to her, usually in the form of a story, she follows through in her head, finding the tone, the narrative sequence and strategy, the right words and phrases. She laughs at her own wit, admires her own devices. She goes over and over it, often in the night when she can't sleep. Gradually the urgency goes out of it, as if the task has been completed. Now it looks like a fish caught an hour ago and well dead. The colours are still there, but the brilliance, the shine, the living gloss are gone.
Unaware of the pun, Stead has named his own literary procedure: his Mansfield is that 'living gloss' of which he speaks. One of the dangers of any kind of historical fiction is that well known characters easily become costume-ball figures. Not so in Mansfield: the timid and yet priggish T. S. Eliot, the inspired and violent D. H. Lawrence, the kind and scatterbrained Lady Ottoline Morrell, the randy and politically engaged Bertrand Russell, the lovesick and intelligent Carrington are not summed up in the epithets I have given them but developed by Stead with loving subtlety as persons seen through Katherine Mansfield's imagination and understanding, sometimes conjured up in only a few words of description or a successful turn of phrase. Let this example suffice (Eliot explaining why he uses the Latin name for the kiwi, Aptetyx, as a pseudonym): 'And it's flightless — that's really why I chose it. It suits my pose, you see. The antiRomantic modern.' Eliot's persona is here defined in these less than 20 words.
After finishing Mansfield, I went back through its 246 pages, trying to see 'how it's done' and, I must confess, I have no idea. A dearth of adjectives, an extraordinary accuracy of description merely through the use of verbs and nouns, the right intuition of when to comment and when to leave good enough alone, a taste for the right anecdote and a certain Mansfieldean humour that permeates the entire story from choice beginning to measured end: all these things no doubt contribute to build the moving, truthful core of this novel, but they hardly explain its perfect workings. These are the words Stead lends his Mansfield on the final page: 'If I have to go ... I'll go quietly — but not quickly, and I will leave my fingerprints on things.' This commitment, this knowledge that you must leisurely leave your mark on what you write, is perhaps a clue to the secret.
Previous page
