Andrew's Wiki
Journal Mansfield

JMM

• Published in 1927 by JMM, scrupulously edited by him: purged, whitened
• “Katherine Mansfield was natural and spontaneous as no other human being I have ever met. She seemed to adjust herself to life as a flower adjusts itself to the earth and to the sun.” (xv)
• Where is her hatred, her masks?

Themes

• Laziness, and guilt over laziness
  • Constantly complains that she can’t work
  • Can’t get over her will to relax
  • Says her body (“my prison”) won’t let her work
  • Illness gets in the way of her work (“I have a sense of guilt, but at the same time I know that to rest is the very best thing I can do,” 1921)
    • Sometimes she blames illness; other times, she blames herself mercilessly
• Continual self-improvement
  • Chastises herself for not learning enough
  • Read the Dictionary, Shx, Dickens
  • Momentary belief that saving her personality will save her body
• Need for cleanliness, things being “ship-shape”
• “Am I ever happy except when overcoming difficulties? Never.” (163)
• Fervent search for “truth” at the end of her life
• Sense of voice and mimicry is amazing (“fiangsay”)

On Writing

• On her talent
  • “I feel that my talent as a writer isn’t a great one – I’ll have to be careful of it.” (110)
• Constantly worries that she’s too sentimental a writer
  • “Nothing that isn’t satirical is really true for me to write just now. If I try to find things lovely, I turn pretty-pretty.” (1914)
  • “The feeling roused by the cause is more important than the cause itself.” (1919, 123)
  • ” In fact (perhaps you realise I am putting a terrific curb on myself) it was delicious.” (182, 1921, avoiding the ooey-gooey descriptive mode)
• On Henry James: “I can wade through pages and pages of dull, turgid James for the sake of that sudden sweet shock, that violent throb of delight that he gives me at times… I feel my case is exactly like his [Bernard Longueville] – the amount of minute and delicate joy I get out of watching people and things when I am alone is simply enormous.” (31)
• Changing Views
  • 1916:
    • “The people who lived or whom I wished to bring into my stories don’t interest me any more… They are not near to me. All the false threads that bound me to them are cut away.” (43)
    • “No novels, no problem stories, nothing that is not simple, open.” (44)
  • 1921:
    • “I want to use all my force even when I am taking a fine line.” (187)
    • On “The Dove’s Nest:” “I didn’t get the deepest truth out of the idea…. I feel again that this kind of knowledge is too easy for me; it’s even a kind of trickery. I know so much more. This looks and smells like a story, but I wouldn’t buy it.” (187-8)
• On Form
  • “What I am doing has no form!” (193)
  • “The truth is one can get only so much into a story; there is always a sacrifice. One has to leave out what one knows and longs to use…. It’s a kind of race to get in as much as one can before it disappears.” (221)
• New Zealand
  • “Sacred debt” because she was born there, to write about it, but also “to make out undiscovered country leap into the eyes of the Old World.” (44)
  • “And I am the little Colonial walking in the London garden patch – allowed to look, perhaps, but not to linger.” (108)

Impersonality

• “Only there are no personalities. Neither am I there personally. People are only a part of the silence, not a part of the pattern….only since I was really ill that this…’consolation prize’ has been given to me.” (136)
• “I am thinking over my philosophy – the defeat of the personal.” (145, 1920)
• “I must pass from personal love to greater love. I must give to the whole of life what I gave to one.” (167, 1920)

On Illness

• “When one is little and ill and far away in a remote bedroom all that happens beyond is marvellous… Is that why I seem to see, this time in London – nothing but what is marvellous?” (94)
• “I really only ask for time to write it all – time to write my books. Then I don’t mind dying.” (104)
• Illness as the revenge of the heavens on the aesthete: “And with it, I’ve one of my queer attacks when I feel nauseated all the time and can’t bear light or noise or heat or cold.” (184, 1921)
• Her last hope, the Gurdjieff: “Something has been built, a raft, frail and not very seaworthy; but it will serve.” (231)
• POSITIVE: “By health, I mean the power to live a full, adult, healthy, breathing life in close contact with what I love – the earth and the wonders thereof…. I want to enter into it, to be a part of it…to become a conscious direct human being…a child of the sun.” (254)
• NEGATIVE: “I feel a bit of a sham…. And so I am. One of the K.M.s is so sorry. But of course she is. She has to die. Don’t feed her.” (248)

On War

• Describes a fisherman, then: “the old man stood humbly waiting for someone to attend to him, his cap in his hands, as if he knew that the life he represented in his torn jacket, with his basket of fish – his peaceful occupation – did not exist any more and had no right to thrust itself in here.” (27)

On Modernity

• “I positively feel, in my hideous modern way, that I can’t get into touch with my mind. I am standing gasping in one of those disgusting telephone boxes and I can’t ‘get through.’ ‘Sorry, there’s no reply,’ tinkles out the voice.”

On Moving

• “In the night I thought for hours of the evils of uprooting. Every time one leaves anywhere, something precious, which ought not to be killed, is left to die.” (232)