Katherine Anne Porter (93 page)

This poet’s vision: “Seeing the immense design of the world, one image of wonder mirrored by another image of wonder—the pattern of fern and feather by the frost on the window-pane, the six rays of the snowflake mirrored in the rock-crystal’s six-rayed eternity—seeing the pattern on the scaly legs of birds mirrored in the pattern of knot-grass, I asked myself, were those shapes molded by blindness? Are not these the correspondences, to quote a phrase of Swedenborg, whereby we speak with the angels?” Her theme: the eternal theme of saints and poets: the destiny of Man is to learn the nature of love and to seek spiritual rebirth. Her range of variations on this theme is endless. Every poem therefore is a love poem, even those towering songs of denunciation out of her counter-passion of hatred for the infamies of life and the willful wrong man does to the image of God in himself. So many peevish and obscene little writers of late have been compared to Swift I hesitate to set his name here even where I feel it is not out of place. In “Gold Coast Customs” I find for the first time in my contemporary reading a genius for invective as ferocious as Swift’s own, invective in the high-striding authoritative style, the same admirable stateliness of wrath, the savage indignation of a just mind and generous heart outraged to the far edge of endurance. The mere natural murderousness of the human kind is evil enough, but her larger rejection is of “the terrible ideal of useless Suffering” symbolized by “Lazarus, the hero of death and the mud, taking the place in men’s minds of the Hero of Life who was born in a stable.”

This passage is from “Gold Coast Customs”:

Again: “Though Death has taken/And pig-like shaken/ Rooted, and tossed/the rags of me—”

“At one time,” writes Miss Sitwell, “I wrote of the world reduced to the Ape as mother, teacher, protector. But too, with poor Christopher Smart, I blessed Jesus Christ with the Rose and his people, a nation of living sweetness. My time of experiment was over.”

This was later, and there is still the vast middle section of the work, the rages, the revolts, the burning noon of drunkenness on sensuous sound and image, the exaltation of the pagan myth, the earth’s fertility; the bold richness of the roving imagination taking every land and every sea, every far-off and legendary place, every dream and every nightmare of the blood, every response of every human sense for its own. In this part, I find my own favorites are all, one way or another, songs of mourning: “Colonel Fantock”; “Elegy on Dead Fashion”; “Three Rustic Elegies”—“O perfumed nosegay brought for noseless death!” She acknowledges his power over the suffering flesh, the betrayed heart: but he can plant only carrion which belongs to his kingdom of the dust; Christ the Golden Wheat sows Himself perpetually for our perpetual resurrection. Rarely in the poetry of our time is noseless death stared down so boldly.

“After ‘Gold Coast Customs,’” writes Miss Sitwell, “I wrote no poetry for several years, with the exception of a long poem called ‘Romance,’ and one poem in which I was finding my way. Then after a year of war, I began to write again—of the state of the world, of the terrible rain” (of bombs). During this long pause, she made the transition from the short, violently accented line, to a long curving line, a changed tone and pace. Of the late poems, the first one begins:

Again, in “Tattered Serenade”:

In these later poems, without exception tragic, a treasure of distilled tragic experience, the mysterious earthly rapture is mingled with a strain of pure, Evangelical Christianity, raised to the apocalyptic vision. Here, rightly, are some of the most wonderful (wonderful, and I know the meaning of that word) love songs in the English language: “Anne Boleyn’s Song”; “Green Song”; “The Poet Laments the Coming of Old Age”; “Mary Stuart to James Bothwell”; and here begins the sustained use of the fire symbols, of gold the color of fire, the sun, the sun’s flame, the gold of wheat, of lions’ manes, of foxes’ pelts, of Judas’ hair, fire of the hearth, molten gold, gold seed, the gold of corn, golden cheeks, golden eyelids; “the great gold planets, spangling the wide air,” “gold-bearded thunders”—a crescendo of rapture in celebration of fire after the ice-locked years of war when fire carried only death. As every symbol has many meanings, and is corruption or purification according to its relationships, so the sun, “the first lover of the earth,” has been harnessed by man to his bloody purposes, and must be restored as the lover, as the giver of life:

In “The Song of the Cold,” the cold which is the symbol of poverty, death, the hardened human heart, there is the final speech of marrow-frozen grief: “I will cry to the Spring to give me the birds’ and the serpents’ speech,/That I may weep for those who die of the cold—” but “The Canticle of the Rose” says:

This is the true flowering branch springing fresh from the old, unkillable roots of English poetry, with the range, variety, depth, fearlessness, the passion and elegance of great art.

T
HIS
past fourteenth of October [1937] would have been Katherine Mansfield’s forty-ninth birthday. This year is the fifteenth since her death. During her life she had a fabulous prestige among young writers in England and America. Her readers were not numerous but they were devoted. It must be a round dozen years since I have read any of her stories; reading them again in the collected edition, I am certain she deserved her fame, and I wonder why it was not greater.

Of late I find my interest diverted somewhat from her achievement as artist to the enigma of her personal history. Actually there is little in her work to justify this, since the work itself can stand alone without clues or notes as to its origins in her experience; a paper chase for autobiographical data in these stories may be interesting in itself, but it adds nothing to the value of the stories. They exist in their own right. Yet I find it impossible to make these few notes without a certain preoccupation with her personal life of constant flight and search with her perpetual longing for certainties and repose; her beginnings in New Zealand; going to London to find the kind of place and the kind of people she wanted; her life there first as musician and then as writer; the many influences upon her mind and emotions of her friends and enemies—who in effect seem to have been interchangeable; her prolonged struggle with tuberculosis; her insoluble religious dilemma; her mysterious loss of faith in her own gifts and faculties; the disastrous failure of her forces at thirty-three, and the slowly engulfing despair that brought her finally to die at Fontainebleau.

These things are of first importance in a study which is yet to be done of the causes of Katherine Mansfield’s own sense of failure in her work and in her life, but they do little to explain the work itself, which is superb. This misplaced emphasis of
my attention I owe perhaps to her literary executor,
*
who has edited and published her letters and journals with a kind of merciless insistence, a professional anxiety for her fame on what seems to be the wrong grounds, and from which in any case his personal relation to her might have excused him for a time. Katherine Mansfield’s work is the important fact about her, and she is in danger of the worst fate that an artist can suffer—to be overwhelmed by her own legend, to have her work neglected for an interest in her “personality.”

There are eighty-eight stories in the collected edition, fifteen of which, her last, were left unfinished. The matter for regret is in these fifteen stories. Some of her best work is in them. She had been developing steadily, along a straight and fairly narrow path, working faithfully toward depth and concentration. Her handling of her material was firmer, her style had reached the flexibility of high tension and control, she had all her prime virtues and was shedding her faults, but her work had improved strictly in kind and not in difference. It is the same quick, ironic, perceptive mind, the same (very sensual) emotional nature, at work here from beginning to end.

In her the homely humility of the good craftsman toward his medium deepened slowly into a fatal self-distrust, and she set up for herself a standard of impossible perfection. It seems to have been on the grounds of the morality of art and not aesthetics that she began to desire a change in her own nature, who would have had quite literally to be born again to change. But the point is, she believed (or was persuaded that she believed) she could achieve a spiritual and mental rebirth by the practice of certain disciplines and the study of esoteric doctrines. She was innately religious, but she had no point of reference, theologically speaking; she was unable to accept her traditional religion, and she did finally, by what appears to have been an act of the will against all her grain, adopt means to make her fatal experiment in purification. As her health failed, her fears grew, her religious impulse wasted itself in an anxious straining toward some unknown infinite source of strength, of energy-renewing power, from which she might at the cost of
single-hearted invocation find some fulfillment of true being beyond her flawed mortal nature. Now for her help and counsel in this weighty matter she had all about her, at different periods, the advice and influence of John Middleton Murry, A. R. Orage, D. H. Lawrence, and, through Orage, Gurdjieff.

Katherine Mansfield has been called a mystic, and perhaps she was, but in the severe hierarchy of mysticism her rank cannot be very high. André Maurois only yesterday wrote of her “pure feminine mysticism.” Such as it was, her mysticism was not particularly feminine, nor any purer than the mysticism of D. H. Lawrence; and that was very impure matter indeed. The secret of her powers did not lie in this domain of her mind, and that is the puzzle: that such a good artist could so have misjudged herself, her own capacities and directions. In that rather loosely defined and changing “group” of variously gifted persons with whom Katherine Mansfield was associated through nearly all her working years, Lawrence was the prophet, and the idol of John Middleton Murry. They all were nervously irritable, self-conscious, and groping, each bent on painting his own portrait (The Young Man as Genius), and Katherine Mansfield’s nerves suffered too from the teaching and the preaching and the quarreling and the strange vocabulary of perverted ecstasy that threw a pall over any true joy of living.

She possessed, for it is in her work, a real gaiety and a natural sense of comedy; there were many sides to her that made her able to perceive and convey in her stories a sense of human beings living on many planes at once, with all the elements justly ordered and in right proportion. This is a great gift, and she was the only one among them who had it, or at least the only one able to express it. Lawrence, whose disciple she was not, was unjust to her as he was to no one else, and that is saying a good deal. He did his part to undermine her, and to his shame, for personal rather than other reasons. His long maudlin relationship with John Middleton Murry was the source of his malignance toward her.

Mr. Murry’s words in praise of her are too characteristic of the time and the special point of view to be ignored. Even today he can write that “her art was of a peculiarly instinctive kind.” I confess I cannot understand the use of this word.
That she was born with the potentialities of an artist, perhaps? I judge her work to have been to a great degree a matter of intelligent use of her faculties, a conscious practice of a hard-won craftsmanship, a triumph of discipline over the unruly circumstances and confusions of her personal life and over certain destructive elements in her own nature. She was deliberate in her choice of material and in her methods of using it, her technical resources grew continually, she cleared away all easy effects and tricky turns of phrase; and such mastership is not gained by letting the instincts have it all their own way.

Again Mr. Murry, in his preface to the stories: “She accepted life. . . she gave herself. . . to life, to love. . . she loved life, with all its beauty and pain. . . she responded to life more completely than any writer I have known except D. H. Lawrence. . . .”