It’s as though the pieces of her past are allowed to make a pattern then, one vivid part laid next to another, background and foreground in one. Here at one corner is the bright garden, at another the mysterious horse-and-cart ride through the streets at night as the little girls leave their city home for the house in the hills. Here is Pat the handyman coming along with his axe to take the head off a white duck, here is the Grandmother sleeping softly next to her favourite grandchild. One scene after another falling into place as the writer takes each moment and sets it next to another, creating in that “special prose” a story of fragments and scenes – one would not even call them “chapters” – as a sort of mosaic, or better, re-conjoined in much the same way as a cleanly fractured ceramic may have all its shards fitted together and presented again as a whole. So we are meant to see the cracks, I think, and to find them just as lovely.

For those who admire Mansfield’s work, the avid reader or student of writing, this Capuchin volume, taken from Vincent O’Sullivan’s edition of the comparative texts of the two stories first published in 1982 and then singly as The Aloe in 1985,5 allows us full access to Mansfield’s creative mind. For one can compare this earlier version with the later, shorter Prelude and get a real sense of how she went to work on her story, of those scenes that were first scribbled down in bits in a child’s exercise book in London and in France. To see that writing, the pen moving so fast one can barely make out the letters of the words, is to see how the structure came together quite clearly for this writer as something made in fragments, how the fragments bore her away... One might barely conceive at times that they would ever become any kind of joined together book or novella. A vision of that way of making a story, a kind of piece-work, remains in the published form of The Aloe, with all the words in it given over to considering the life that Katherine Mansfield had once known so well, those detailed scenes crammed with remembered New Zealand details, its bush and plants and native birds… And how rich and rewarding it is to read the two stories side by side, to see what was taken and what was left, to regard first hand the burgeoning writing imagination before the editing mind comes in to prune and clear and cut away.

There is an “abandonment to the leisurely rhythm of her own imagination” wrote Rebecca West of Mansfield’s New Zealand stories, of which The Aloe is the most concentrated as well as the most extensive example. It’s as though the ideas have lived so long in her mind that she can “ransack them for the difficult, rare, essential points”.6 And indeed in the scenes that remain here, that are gone from Prelude, it is as though Mansfield, in her writing, has built her house of words with as many rooms as she can to move around in, so she can discover later where best to stand to hold the light, the shadow… Only then will she find out that she doesn’t need to use all of her initial construction – but somehow it must be there at her back for now, as she starts out in her enterprise, to give ballast, the balance and sense of reality upon which to base her art.

Towards the end of her short life Mansfield turned repeatedly to the subject of what was “real”7, in her search for wholeness, unity, a melding of the spiritual and practical, her personality and her literary sensibility – a drive that Vincent O’Sullivan has described as existential in nature, and one that had her seeking the elemental, the necessary, as she sought to make peace with her past and present, to reconcile the self she represented to the world with her inner secret being, the one still inevitably connected with her home, her birthplace and her beginning and whom, he shows us, she came to inhabit in her best work and at the end of her life.8

In this book, her first committed attempt to begin that reconciliation as she starts to gather up these aspects of her past and get it all down in words, we find her claiming the thing she sought so desperately in those last months of her life – and in it shines the singularity of her art. Her broken world is made whole again. In the shattered parts of The Aloe we find the “real”.

Kirsty Gunn

Thorndon, Wellington 2009

Notes and Further Reading

1. Katherine Mansfield’s letters and journals give us vivid insights to her literary and creative processes. The “invention” that is the form of The Aloe is taken from the following passage:

“What form is it? you ask… As far as I know it’s more or less my own invention. And how have I shaped it? This is about as much as I can say about it. You know, if the truth were known I have a perfect passion for the island where I was born... Well in the early morning there I always remember feeling that this little island had dipped back into the dark blue sea during the night only to rise again at beam of day, all hung with bright spangles and glittering drops… I tried to catch that moment – with something of that sparkle and its flavour. And just as on those mornings white milky mists rise and uncover some beauty, then smother it again and then again disclose it. I tried to lift that mist from my people and let them be seen and then to hide them again.”

From The Letters of Katherine Mansfield, 1903-1917, ed Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott, Oxford University Press 1984, p. 331

2. A comparative edition of The Aloe and Prelude was published by The Port Nicholson Press, Wellington, New Zealand in 1982 and Carcanet New Press, Manchester in 1983, showing clearly where cuts were made in the text, paragraphs eliminated, words changed and so on – and so describing, page by page, how Mansfield created a lighter, less obviously autobiographical Prelude from her more definitively “colonial” New Zealand original.

For a deft and important account of the literary relationship between Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield, about whom Woolf wrote “I was jealous of her writing – the only writing I have ever been jealous of”, see Angela Smith’s Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two (1999) which sets the writers side by side and uses their letters and journals (both were keen on both) to delineate similarities and differences.

3. When Mansfield’s beloved younger brother Leslie was killed in the First World War, Mansfield’s grief turned her back to the past. She vowed in her journal to create a kind of memorial to the dead boy in her writing – “the only possible value that anything can have for me is that it should put me in mind of something that happened when we were alive,” she wrote. This creative desire, to make life out of death was the impulse that generated The Aloe and Mansfield is addressing Leslie directly when she ends the passage quoted in the introduction “But all must be told with a sense of mystery, a radiance, and afterglow, because you, my little sun, are set.”

From Journal of Katherine Mansfield, ed John Middleton Murray, 1962, pp 89, 94

4. Edward Said has written in his memoir that a writer is most always “an outsider, nomadic, somehow, in temperament – and that no matter where he or she lives or for how long it is only in writing, in each attempt at a story, at a poem or a piece of text, that he or she can make something fixed in the midst of uncertainty, create a place of safety, be at home”.

Taken from the Introduction to Out of Place by Edward Said, Granta, 2000

5. Rebecca West was a great admirer of Katherine Mansfield’s work and wrote with keen perception about Mansfield’s “poetic temperament” as it applied to her creation of characters and setting in a review of The Garden Party:

“Abandonment to the leisurely rhythm of her own imagination, and refusal to conform to the current custom and finish her book in a year’s session, has enabled her to bring her inventions right over the threshold of art. They are extraordinarily solid; they have lived so long in her mind that she knows all about them and can ransack them for the difficult, rare, essential points.”

From the New Statesman 18 March 1922: 678. Reprinted in Katherine Mansfield’s Selected Stories, ed Vincent O’Sullivan, Norton, 2006

6. Katherine Mansfield died of tuberculosis in 1923 when she was 35. As her illness worsened, her need to find a place for herself in the world that might be safe and give her comfort, that might allow her to feel somehow authentic and honest and true… This instinct crystallised in her use of the word “real” – “If I were allowed one single cry to God that cry would be: I want to be REAL,” she wrote in December 1922, a month before her death.

From The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, ed Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott, Oxford, 2008, p.