Tag Archives: Katherine Mansfield

Reading at a tangent

Reading, , , , , ,

Recently, turning the pages of a newly released book, I’ve been reminded of the simple truth that different ways of reading can provide different kinds of pleasure.

Most of the time, whether it’s a newspaper article that we’re reading, or a poem, a novel or whatever else – we focus intently on what the language in front of us is directly presenting. We keep within a framework provided by the author because we want to follow closely the line of argument, or the plot, or the revelation of character, or the patterns of figurative meaning. The words on the page encircle ideas and images within which our attention is held. We try not to miss anything relevant, and so we stay within that circle, avoiding stray associations that might distract us.

But there is another, less disciplined kind of reading, which can yield another kind of pleasure. This happens when we move beyond the circle that the text itself has drawn around its subject matter, and let our thoughts wander off digressively.

This is what I call “reading at a tangent.” Being easily distractible, I often do it: I find myself thinking not so much about what’s within the text as about something that’s absent from it. It may be quite legitimately absent as far as the author’s apparent intention is concerned because it’s extraneous to the topic, off to the side at an odd angle. But to me, as a digressive reader, irrelevant associations can become absorbing.

I’ve enjoyed the experience of tangential reading while looking through Amanda Curtin’s just-published book Kathleen O’Connor of Paris, a study of the life and work of a notable painter who (like me) was born in New Zealand and eventually found a home in Western Australia, but (unlike me) spent most of her life as an expatriate in France.

There’s much to admire in Amanda’s meticulously researched, imaginatively written and handsomely produced book, but I’m not offering a review of it here. Instead I’m just recording a few musings that it has brought to my mind – musings about possible questions and imaginary connections that lurk silently outside the circumference of Kathleen O’Connor of Paris. In several passages Amanda indicates that she herself is aware of such possibilities but chooses not to pursue them, apart from a few speculative asides, because they are beyond the book’s scope. Fair enough. I’m not suggesting that she should have treated these things differently, just confessing to my own pleasurably undisciplined habits as a reader.

In this case what sets my reading off at a tangent is the fact that so many aspects of Kathleen O’Connor’s life remain obscure despite patient research. This is especially true of most of her personal relationships. Time and again Amanda scrutinises the available evidence in an effort to discover why Kathleen’s friend X seems to have fallen suddenly out of favour, or what may perhaps have been behind Kate’s coolness towards Y, or whether Z was really more than a casual acquaintance. Often the answers cannot be found. Kate was discreet, even secretive, and covered her tracks carefully.

This can lead a distractible reader (moi) to drift into a reverie about things that almost certainly didn’t happen to Kate but could conceivably have done so.

For instance, what if she had met Katherine Mansfield (who was also Kathleen until she adopted a pen-name)? Both spent childhood years in New Zealand, including Wellington, where they lived in the same street and went to the same school. Though KO’C was twelve years older, and left New Zealand when KM was only three, their paths might have crossed briefly in that little colonial outpost… Or later, as expatriates in London or Paris? Both women spent time to-ing and fro-ing between both those cities in the years 1906 to 1908, and again in 1914-16. Both, by then, were strictly dedicated to the vocation of an artist, though they differed not only in their choice of medium – the written word for KM, paint for KO’C – but also in their tastes. They were unlike each other, too, in temperament, and in their attitudes to men. KM was wildly promiscuous during those years; KO’C seems to have had a tendency towards ascetic habits.

But just suppose they had met, perhaps introduced by one of the many other antipodean-born writers and artists working in London or Paris: what would these two have thought of each other? Both tended to be severe in judging people, and my guess is that they would have irritated one other. If they had met after April 1917, they would have had one painful thing in common: each, by then, had suffered the loss of a brother on the western front. But they reacted differently to this trauma: KO’C wrote an embarrassingly sentimental verse tribute to Australian soldiers in general (which reveals not only a tin ear but also, as Amanda comments, an “emotional lack”), while KM’s response was to inscribe particular memories of her beloved brother into that great portrait of family and place, the story “Prelude.”

Still reading at a tangent, I begin to imagine other possible meetings of expatriate artists and writers in Paris and London during the time when KO’C was there. The New Zealand painter Frances Hodgkins certainly did know KO’C, who was for a while one of her pupils and friends; but there is no record of FH ever meeting KM – though one of FH’s pupils while she was in Wellington was Edith Bendell, with whom KM had an erotic affair a couple of years later. So if FH and KM did happen to meet, and get talking about people they both knew, there might well have been some delicate nuances in their conversation.

Regarding the O’Connor/Hodgkins friendship, Amanda allows herself a passing conjecture about its sudden severance. “If there had been a romantic relationship between them, might that have contributed to the irrevocable nature of the estrangement? But I have seen no supporting evidence in Kate’s archives.”

This print of Rice’s Mansfield portrait has been above my desk for many years.

What if those three – FH, KO’C and KM had at some stage shared a table in a Montparnasse café, reminiscing about Wellington days? And if that had happened in, let’s say, 1922, the little gathering of female expatriate artists could also have included Australian writer and painter Stella Bowen (five years younger than KM), who had moved to Paris from London that year with her novelist/critic husband Ford Madox Ford, and also the American painter Anne Estelle Rice (one year younger than KO’C), who previously lived in Paris before the war, then moved to England, painting a famous portrait of her friend KM there in 1918, but often visited Paris during the 1920s.

As far as I know, KO’C never mentions Rice, though they both exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in the same years, 1911-13. Nor does she make any reference to Stella Bowen, though it’s hard to believe she hadn’t at least heard of her. But then SB’s talents were considerably more versatile than KO’C’s; they extended beyond painting to writing, and her  memoir Drawn From Life (1941, often reprinted) shows that she belonged to a much more prominent community of artists than KO’C ever did. KO’C, probably knowing this, might well have felt resentful. (I haven’t read Drawn From Life, but I’ve seen extracts from it in an absorbing chapter of Rosemary Lancaster’s book Je Suis Australienne: Remarkable Women in France, 1880-1945.)

If those five had met together in 1922, surely sparks would have been flying. I’ve mentioned the tensions between FH and KO’C, and my surmise is that KM wouldn’t have found either of them congenial. As for SB, her literary circles were markedly different from KM’s. The previous year, KM’s husband John Middleton Murry had reviewed dismissively the latest novel by SB’s husband Ford, and the two men were intensely rivalrous editors of notable magazines. It’s likely that Rice, being close to KM and Middleton Murry, would not have been comfortable in SB’s company either.

Not a relaxed social occasion, I imagine. But all the more fascinating for that. It’s the sort of thing that can take shape when one reads at a tangent.

 

Character and consistency

Character, Literary fiction, , , , ,

Most novels and short stories operate largely within the conventions of realism, and so their fictional worlds are inhabited by lifelike ‘characters.’ But what makes a character credible and interesting?

Dickens with his characters

Charles Dickens dreaming of some of his characters (detail from a painting by Robert W. Buss, 1875; public domain)

Although we know that characters are artificial creatures, illusions created entirely by language, we’re willing to suspend our disbelief in them as long as their attributes seem quasi-human. (Of course it’s more complicated than that. There’s a sophisticated theoretical analysis of ‘the centrality of fictional character – and, by extension, of social models of personhood – to reading of almost any kind’ in John Frow’s book Character and Person, newly published by Oxford University Press. My own book Narrative Exchanges, recently reissued in the Routledge Revivals series, also has a chapter on theoretical aspects of characterisation.)

When we read a work of fiction in the realist tradition, we want to be convinced that its characters are lifelike. But believing in them isn’t a simple matter. It often requires a reader to hold in mind two different things: on the one hand a sense that the actions, thoughts, words and attributes associated with a particular name (Heathcliff or Cathy or whoever) hang together credibly enough to represent an individualised personage, and on the other hand a sense that not everything about this personage is perfectly consistent. Total consistency would imply the repetitiveness of a robot, the flatness of a caricature. This may be appropriate for some minor characters in certain kinds of hyper-realist fiction (Dickensian figures such as Uriah Heep, for instance) but not otherwise.

So usually – unless the story is feeble – a major character will turn out to be less homogeneous than first impressions suggest. Readers can miss much of the point if they assume that a character in a story represents (or should represent) an entirely unified personality, a stable set of coherent and consistent traits. In reality that’s not how we ourselves are, and sometimes the point of a story may be to reveal incoherence and inconsistency within a character’s sense of self.

‘To thine own self be true…’ says Shakespeare’s Polonius – but let’s not take this long-winded old codger’s sententious advice at face value. Quoting his remark in her Journal, Katherine Mansfield comments scornfully:

True to oneself? Which self? Which of my many – well, really, that’s what it looks like it’s coming to – hundreds of selves? For what with complexes and repressions and reactions and vibrations and reflections, there are moments when I feel I am nothing but the small clerk of some hotel without a proprietor, who has all his work cut out to enter the names and hand the keys to the wilful guests.

One of the Australian novelists I most admire, Kate Grenville, has some astute remarks on characterisation in The Writing Book, an excellent practical how-to manual which is well worth the close attention of any aspiring author. Here’s part of what she says about consistency: 

Consistent characters run the risk of being boring characters. People aren’t consistent and characters don’t have to be either. Inconsistencies can make characters interesting, as long as they’re inconsistent in a way that adds something to the story.

While perfectly consistent characters may be boring, perfectly inconsistent ones may be frustrating to a reader: they never add up to a coherent personality. Inconsistencies can add depth to a character, but they have to be carefully controlled by the writer.

Exactly a century ago, while working on the novel that became The Rainbow, D.H. Lawrence wrote a letter to Edward Garnett in which he tried to explain his view of characterisation. His aim, he declared, was to move beyond ‘the old-fashioned human element – which causes one to conceive a character in a certain moral scheme and make him consistent.’ He went on to say, ‘You mustn’t look in my novel for the old stable ego of the character. There is another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognizable, and passes through, as it were, allotropic states…’ The analogy here is with different states of the same element, just as diamond and coal are forms of carbon.

Even in classic nineteenth-century realist fiction, what looks like inconsistency is sometimes just the gradual development and disclosure of a character’s complexity. Tertius Lydgate in George Eliot’s Middlemarch is introduced to us as an idealistic young doctor propelled by an ambition to reform medical practices. But time goes by, and under the weight of an unhappy marriage, he abandons his high social purpose and behaves in contradictory ways towards his wife. So in a sense the later Lydgate may seem hardly consistent with his previous self. But the change in him is credible because there have been early glimpses of a fundamental flaw: from the start his altruism is tinged with an arrogance that makes his attitude to the common people ‘benevolently contemptuous.’ There’s a Reader Alert when Lydgate first enters the story and the narrator advises us not to jump to conclusions: ‘For surely all must admit that a man may be puffed and belauded, envied, ridiculed, counted upon as a tool and fallen in love with, or at least selected as a future husband, and yet remain virtually unknown – known merely as a cluster of signs for his neighbours’ false suppositions.’

Think, too, of Dickens – not in the cartoonist mode he employs for minor characters but when he traces the intricate workings of a fully rounded personality as it moves this way and that in response to different pressures. David Copperfield, telling his own story from the vantage point of maturity and looking back at his younger selves with their incomplete self-knowledge, remarks: ‘These, with their perplexities and inconsistencies, were the shifting quicksands of my mind…’

Copperfield’s reflection sums up the topic nicely for me. When I read or write fiction, what interests me above all is an engagement with those same aspects of character: perplexities, inconsistencies, the shifting quicksands of the mind.

 

 

Residues of a year’s reading: instalment 2

Literary fiction, Reviewing, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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This is the second and final instalment of a retrospect on books I read last year that continue to impress me months afterwards. The previous post discussed several works of non-fiction, but most of my reading in 2013 was fiction – mainly Australian. A few novels from other parts of the world still stir my imagination, most notably Herman Koch’s The Dinner with its unforgettably creepy narrator; Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder with its strong narrative momentum and troubling theme that comes much closer to home than the exotic setting led me to expect; Susan Abulhawa’s heartbreaking evocation of Palestinian suffering, Mornings in Jenin; Pat Barker’s Regeneration, a powerful psychological study of World War 1 experiences; and Julian Barnes’s witty and cunning The Sense of an Ending. Nevertheless it was Australian fiction that attracted most of my attention, and several novels (plus some short story collections) have kept a tight grip on me.

It would be hard to forget the narrator of Toni Jordan’s lovely story Addition: hilariously and sadly compulsive, intelligently self-aware, Grace almost manages to wreck her chance of happiness – but despite the shadows of mental instability this is a comic romance, after all. Comparable in its affiliation with true romance, though focused on a less quirky protagonist, Deborah Burrows’s A Stranger in My Street blends the love interest with a murder mystery and an historical setting (Perth in the WW2 years) that is convincingly rendered. Lynne Leonhardt’s Finding Jasper is similarly set in Western Australia and partly in the same period, but its narrative structure is more complicated than in A Stranger in My Street, and what has imprinted itself most distinctly on my memory is the nostalgic elaboration of its descriptive detail.

The genre of Kathryn Heyman’s Floodline seemed at first a satirical blend of a Hollywood disaster movie with a Deep Southern evangelical morality play – except that the muddle-headed self-thwarting characters and the emotional troubles generated by their poignantly dysfunctional family relationships soon compelled me not only to believe in them but also to want the best for them. Convincing characterisation is also the main thing that sticks in my mind from Jesse Blackadder’s Chasing the Light, a well-researched story of Norwegian whaling and Antarctic exploration in the 1930s: all three women at the story’s centre are distinctive and entirely credible.

The fine achievement of M.K Stedman’s The Light Between Oceans stems largely from its devising of an outlandish situation that is fraught with moral conflict and insoluble dilemmas, so that everything that unfolds from the brilliant narrative premise carries a sense of almost inevitable doom. ‘Brilliant’ is also an apt descriptor for Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel, in which sentence after polished sentence sparkles with a mordant wit that often reminds me of Patrick White – though in retrospect that bright hard surface is more memorable than the interactions between characters.

During 2013 I read a number of short story collections, which by their nature are difficult to summarise although I still have a precise recall of several individual stories. Some of them were first published long ago: Katherine Mansfield’s New Zealand stories (which I re-read every two or three years, and which I’ve discussed in a chapter of Narrative Exchanges) belong to the early 20th century, and Shirley Hazzard’s Cliffs of Fall goes back half a century. Mansfield’s are full of startling imagery, Hazzard’s are full of subtle perceptions, and both writers remind me that even the most economical form of narration can be capacious in its implications. The best pieces in two short-story volumes by Perth-based writers also made an impact on me last year and won’t be forgotten for a long while: Susan Midalia’s An Unknown Sky and Amanda Curtin’s Inherited. I’ve commented on both, along with Alice Munro’s Dear Life, in a previous post titled Brevity with Scope.

Amanda Curtin’s latest book is the outstanding novel Elemental, which for me (and many others, I’m sure) provided one of the most memorable reading experiences of 2013. Much of its enduring power comes from the sustained and marvellously individualised narrating voice of its main character, Meggie Tulloch, but there is a great deal more to admire in the language of the text as a whole – every word counts, every sentence is perfectly balanced – as well as in the clever structure and in the vivid rendering of historical detail. Last year I also read Amanda’s previous novel, The Sinkings, which had been on my shelf since it appeared five years ago. (I’d delayed my reading of it when I became aware that its subject matter appeared to have something in common with a novel of my own that I was working on, and I didn’t want to be distracted or influenced by seeing how she had handled her story. As soon as I finished mine I read hers, and it turns out that I needn’t have worried: despite some similar ingredients, our novels are quite different from each other.) The Sinkings is a haunting tale; it depicts hardship, cruelty and loneliness unforgettably; and in my mind its most remarkable quality is the way it combines its unblinking realism with a deep compassion.

The main thing that sticks in my mind from Iris Lavell’s novel Elsewhere in Success is its insight into what can lie beneath the seemingly banal surface of suburban Perth. Most of the story’s foreground action is unspectacular and the characters are (as one of them says) ‘just ordinary people’ – which poses a considerable narrative challenge. But as deep currents swirl under them they thresh around, gasp for breath, and struggle towards something close to redemption.

I read a couple of novels by another Western Australian writer in 2013, and both have continued to give me plenty of food for thought. Nicholas Hasluck’s Our Man K and Dismissal are fine examples of political fiction grounded in historical fact – a genre that few novelists in this country have successfully grappled with. The central figure in Our Man K is Egon Kisch, a real-life Czech journalist who came to Australia in 1934 and caused a considerable commotion in legal and political circles. Hasluck’s portrayal of Kisch emphasises his connections with middle-European literary figures, especially Franz Kafka (with whose own character ‘K’ Kisch becomes associated), and with machinations leading to the fall of the Habsburg Empire. Dismissal is an absorbing tale of espionage, ethical dilemmas and personal disloyalties in Australia during the period from the 1930s to the fall of the Whitlam government. I can’t think of any other novelist so well equipped to write this kind of work.

So there it is – a mere glance back over my shoulder at residues of a year’s reading. The retrospect doesn’t extend to every publication I consumed last year but takes in about 30 books of various kinds (including those mentioned in the previous post) that for different reasons have lodged in my consciousness more than other things read during the same period. Two-thirds of them were written by women.

I wonder whether I’ll still recall the same aspects of the same books a year or two from now.

 

The Heads in the header

Landscape & seascape, , , ,

Someone has asked me about the header image (above) that I’ve chosen for my website. Although it looks abstract, it does represent in stylised silhouette a specific place: the meeting of land and sea at Wellington Heads, the harbour entrance near where I was born in New Zealand. This image is an enlarged detail from the cover of my book of poems The Shifting Shore, taken from a screen print by Wellington artist Malcolm Warr with his kind permission.

I like the blurriness of those looming shapes, suggesting the deceptive weather and sombre light often found there at the edge of Cook Strait, where from time to time even big ships come to grief. One of my earliest memories is of being taken as a small boy by my father to a hilltop above our home in Island Bay to look down at the Wanganella, a liner from Sydney that had gone aground on a reef at the harbour entrance and remained stuck there with its 400 passengers for more than a fortnight before being refloated. Years later the larger and more hapless Wahine struck same reef in a ferocious storm and 51 people drowned.

Katherine Mansfield

Wellington’s most famous writer, Katherine Mansfield, evoked its harbour scenes in several of her stories, such as ‘The Voyage’ –

Silently the dark wharf began to slip, to slide, to edge away from them… The strip of water grew broader, darker…

– and ‘When the Wind Blows’:

A big black steamer with a long loop of smoke streaming, with the portholes lighted, with lights everywhere, is putting out to sea. The wind does not stop her; she cuts through the waves, making for the open gate between the pointed rocks that leads to…

Mansfield also wrote memorably about quieter inlets and beaches enclosed within Wellington harbour. In a chapter of my book Narrative Exchanges I’ve analysed the opening passage of her story ‘At the Bay’, drawing attention to the way it accentuates misty indistinctness, obscuring the margin between sea and land and the margin between domesticated areas and the surrounding bush. Here’s how it begins:

Very early morning. The sun was not yet risen, and the whole of Crescent Bay was hidden under a white sea-mist. The big bush-covered hills at the back were smothered. You could not see where they ended and the paddocks and bungalows began. The sandy road was gone…there was nothing to mark which was the beach and where was the sea.

In large measure At the Bay is a story about the blurring of boundaries, the unreliability of natural and social demarcation lines. Its imagery is infused with a strong sense that coast-dwellers (almost all New Zealanders live near the coast) have only an insecure temporary footing in their landscape.

I’m reminded of an eloquent sonnet by Charles Brasch (founding editor of the premier NZ literary magazine Landfall) called ‘The Islands’, which begins: ‘Always, in these islands, meeting and parting / Shake us, making tremulous the salt-rimmed air…’ The poem ends like this: ‘Remindingly beside the quays, the white / Ships lie smoking; and from their haunted bay / The godwits vanish towards another summer. / Everywhere in light and calm the murmuring / Shadow of departure; distance looks our way / And none knows where he will lie down at night.’

I wish those lines were my own invention. But I’ve written other lines that try to express similar feelings, and they’re in this book:

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