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Alpers Bio

Anthony Alpers

• Jerk thinks that menstrual cycle determined her emotional state
• Too easily assigns biographical sources to her stories
• Has a fairer assessment of JMM than others: he is more sympa to JMM
• Has a fairer assessment of Gurdjieff, who to Alpers was charitable, hard-working, and generous to KM

Some Early Bio

• Born on a fault-line, near docks and wharves
• Reared by Granny, not parents
• Father is a colonial importer: a big business man and a government figure once he gets power over the Bank of NZ
• Thought NZ needed a pre-Raphaelite or Decadent stage so it could be artistic (presently, it had no roots or history or ruins and therefore no art)
• A descendant of doggerel poets and cousin of Eliz von Armin
• As a child, dumpy, surly, moody, but smart

Influenced By

• Dickens
• Keats
• Theocritus (mimes/dialogues)
• Post-Impressionist Exhibit (freedom of Van Gogh)
• Not as much Chekhov as everyone claims
• Passion for NZ after brother dies in WWI
• Walter de la Mare
• Oscar Wilde
• Hotel life: she could have as many personalities as possible
• Maud Allen: dancer leads her to elocution

Quotes

• 60: “I purchase my brilliance with my life.”
• 81: “to intensify the so-called things so that truly everything is significant”
• 167: on a terrible, pseudo-philosophical novel JMM wrote: ” ‘I am afraid you are too psychological, Mr. Temple.’ And then I went off and bought the bacon.” (she’s interested in real, practical life)
• 198: her friend Frederick Goodyear wrote to her, “you hanker after and greatly feel union with external things….”
• 327: significance of WWI: “They are cutting down the cherry trees; the orchard is sold—that is really the atmosphere I want.” (she critiqued Woolf for writing as if WWI had never happened) (p.s. you could see KM as a WWI victim b/c the time in France in 1918 is what makes her health turn for the worse)
• 330: “pure risk” is the key to love and writing both
  • 321: “It hasn’t all been experience. There is waste—destruction too.”

Formal Qualities

• “Marvellous dexterity in handling shifts of time—a technique owing nothing to any writer,” he says about “The Daughters of the Late Colonel” (327)
• The narrator is disappearing (this is no realist narrator!): you jump in the story cold, as if you knew the facts already (the reader has to be active! and alert!) (238)
• “Prudent wife” theme Alpers finds (174)
• 255: Materialism: Becoming the Apple (she wants to become the objects, and even more apple than apples “so you can create them anew”)
• Significance of Journeys: she never settles down; everyone is traveling, moving, foreigners, etc
• Significance of Form in a Story
  • She is the first person to see that a short story needs form, Alpers claims (330)
  • that form is as important to the story as its content

Goals in Writing

• 315: Multiplicity of the Self (there is not just one single, stable identity)
  • 73: Alpers calls it “the multiplex confusion [in which] veracity can be found”
  • 370: Ouspensky, her link to Gurdjieff, used to lecture about how the “I” is an illusion (we are a bunch of mysteriously related fragments)
• Impersonation: Becoming the Thing
  • 87: One of her friends recalled that her changes of costume (ie, Maori dress or Russian dress or kimono etc) was “a psychic transformation rather than a mere impersonation”
• 308: Getting Beyond the Personal (“my philosophy—the defeat of the personal”)
  • 309: you do not “announce” what you are doing; you shouldn’t be self-conscious and self-reflexive
  • 307: getting past “personal love” and instead loving the whole world
• 270-1: “a cry against corruption”
• 280: According to Alpers, she needed to find beauty in modern life and was having trouble doing so; only sometimes could she see beauty in the now (she was too sick to develop it enough, he said)

Opinions of her

• Had a friendship with Eliot early on (she called Prufrock a short story!)
• Lawrence ended up railing against her (310: the “I hope you die” letter)
• Woolf said KM was her only real competition and the only person to talk biz with (totally jealous)
• Joyce said she understood Ulysses better than JMM, who knew all the Homer intertext
• Wyndham Lewis truly despised her as a “Mag.-writer” sentimentalist (a terrible meeting with him was one of her last ever activities in England)
• Hardy wanted more about the Daughters of the Late Colonel

Books written around her/about her

• Elizabeth von Armin, Elizabeth and Her German Garden
• Marie Bashkirtseff, Diaries
• Elizabeth Robins, Come and Find Me (feminist book)
• Beatrice Hastings, “The Changling” in New Age
• Francis Carco, “Les Innocents” (Winnie)
• Aldous Huxley (a few works of his)
• D H Lawrence, Women in Love (and some short stories @ her and JMM)
• Memoirs of LM, JMM, Frieda Lawrence, and letters/journals of Ottoline, Woolf, etc
• Brigid Brophy, a Freudian study of her in “Don’t Never Forget”

Where did she publish?

• Elementary school, high school, and Queen’s College publications
• The Native Companion (NZ)
• The New Age
• Rhythm and The Blue Review (her and JMM, editors)
• Athaneaum (mostly reviews, very well-received)
• The Sphere (commissioned from her, 1920-2)
• Nation
• The English Review (Ford Madox Ford)

Some neat stuff

• CAFES: See the book itself for all the references, but she wrote a story called “In a Cafe” that was one of her very first published (54), she used to hang out in teashops, The New Age used to meet in tearooms when couldn’t afford office, a letter from Woolf says KM seems glad to be away from teashop atmospheres when she’s at Ottoline’s (250), think of “Je ne parles” which is in one, etc.
• INTERIORS: descriptions of her stuff (118, 121, 142-3, 197) (cf golden fluorspar bowl from Lawrence)
• TRAINS: always made her in a literary mood, Alpers claims
• SPAS: and health resorts (the first, Bad Worishofen, and then Mann’s areas of Switzerland….)