Her stories now took in two worlds: the one she had come from, and wrote of with the hoarded emotional accuracy of distance, and that other world she knew as an adult, with its deceptions, its rigours, its dark spoiling ironies.
Wellington is there again in “The Doll’s House”, “The Voyage”, “Her First Ball” — the stories her name immediately brings to mind. But even there, in her breathing life into that past that now so drew her back, her gaze is too direct to flinch from what she called “the snail under the leaf”, the shadow that continually falls, as a world-weary older partner reminds the young girl in “Her First Ball”. And the girl’s answer in fact is the only one that life allows, which is to fling herself with delight into “the beautiful flying wheel” that is the dance of time.
In her last years the stories came quickly, as did the worsening of her health. Her notebooks record the swings of her moods, her depression, her resilience, her refusal to accept the dark figure at the door. At times her stories penetrate to how corrupt certain lives can be, stories as fine as “Je ne parle pas français” where the narrator’s moral void is dredged with scouring clarity, even with ambiguous charm. It was a story, as Murry astutely told her, where she was plumbing her own unconscious. There were stories, too, where her implacable eye turned on her own life as an invalid and as a demanding wife, as she does in “The Man without a Temperament”, with its chilling pun on “Rot” at the story’s end. She goes even further into emotional corruption in “A Married Man’s Story”, which she put aside and did not come back to. But what survives is the closest she came to depicting the glitter of deliberate evil.
Not that many of the stories in her last years quite hit what she hoped for. She spoke of “raising into the light”, meaning a clarity, a simplicity, an uncluttered immediacy, that she thought prose so seldom achieved but must aspire to. She tends to speak of improving as an artist in the same way as she did of making oneself a worthier person. She is not afraid to accept such a word as “mystery” to convey what “acceptance of experience” puts more prosaically. Some stories hint at it, and scholars argue about quite what it is that Mansfield means. But it was there, say, in the vision of the pear tree at the end of “Bliss”, and in that other extraordinary tree that concludes “The Escape”. There, too, in the curious frisson Linda feels as she looks at the moonlit aloe in “Prelude”, and that “our Else” finds in the little lamp of “The Doll’s House”, those moments are rare illumination. It is what the Colonel’s timid daughters almost apprehend. And it is what her last brief story, “The Canary”, is both about yet does not quite grasp, what the dead bird’s song had hinted at, in the last sentences of fiction that she wrote: “It is there, deep down, deep down, part of one, like one’s breathing. However hard I work and tire myself I have only to stop to know it is there, waiting. I often wonder if everybody feels the same. One can never know. But isn’t it extraordinary that under his sweet, joyful little singing it was just this — sadness? — Ah, what is it? — that I heard.”
Most of Mansfield’s stories, you might say, are brushings with possibility, even when grounded in their firm details of love, deceit, childhood, trust, and trust’s betrayals. These selections of her stories cover everything of importance that happened to her, that she observed and experienced, between childhood in Wellington’s wooden houses, to her deciding in Switzerland in July 1922 that her final paragraph about a singing bird was the place for her to stop.
Vincent O’Sullivan
April 2013
—1908—
At the corner of Oxford Circus Rosabel bought a bunch of violets, and that was practically the reason why she had so little tea — for a scone and a boiled egg and a cup of cocoa at Lyons are not ample sufficiency after a hard day’s work in a millinery establishment. As she swung on to the step of the Atlas bus, grabbed her skirt with one hand and clung to the railing with the other, Rosabel thought she would have sacrificed her soul for a good dinner — roast duck and green peas, chestnut stuffing, pudding with brandy sauce — something hot and strong and filling. She sat down next to a girl very much her own age who was reading Anna Lombard in a cheap, paper-covered edition, and the rain had tear-spattered the pages. Rosabel looked out of the windows; the street was blurred and misty, but light striking on the panes turned their dullness to opal and silver, and the jewellers’ shops, seen through this, were fairy palaces. Her feet were horribly wet, and she knew the bottom of her skirt and petticoat would be coated with black, greasy mud. There was a sickening smell of warm humanity — it seemed to be oozing out of everybody in the bus — and everybody had the same expression, sitting so still, staring in front of them. How many times had she read these advertisements — “Sapolio Saves Time, Saves Labour” — “Heinz’s Tomato Sauce” — and the inane, annoying dialogue between doctor and judge concerning the superlative merits of “Lamplough’s Pyretic Saline”. She glanced at the book which the girl read so earnestly, mouthing the words in a way that Rosabel detested, licking her first finger and thumb each time that she turned the page. She could not see very clearly; it was something about a hot, voluptuous night, a band playing, and a girl with lovely, white shoulders.
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