Katherine Mansfield, the ‘Underworld’ and the ‘Blooms Berries’ Symposium

Written by Elizabeth Welsh

As a scholar, enthusiast and society member I was recently fortunate enough to attend Katherine Mansfield, the ‘Underworld’ and the ‘Blooms Berries’ Symposium held in the UNESCO city of literature, Melbourne.  I was there to present a paper and to soak up all things Mansfield.  Having spent the last five years immersed in Mansfield studies I was in my element. The two day celebration of Mansfield’s life and works was held at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in conjunction with the recently established Katherine Mansfield Society. 

The symposium kicked off with the keynote speaker, Mansfield scholar Professor Sue Thomas from La Trobe University in Melbourne.  She delved into Virginia Woolf’s perception and judgement of Katherine Mansfield with her presentation “Lines So Hard and Cheap’: Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and the Aesthetics of Respectability.’  The paper was fascinating in its discussion of Mansfield’s construction of a ‘short fiction’ that was both commercially marketable and simultaneously capable of contributing to the canon of literary modernism. Woolf, who was extremely cautious of the labels ‘mass-market’ or ‘popular fiction’, clearly felt that Mansfield was ‘selling out’.  I was amused at Professor Thomas’ recurring focus on scent, particularly in Virginia Woolf’s letters.  Woolf’s equation of scent with a distrustful commerciality, commonness and prostitution seems remarkably absurd today and yet was an all too natural association for Mansfield and her contemporaries.  Woolf’s obvious social snobbery explains so easily her jealousy towards Mansfield’s writing and publication success.

The first session after the morning tea of cupcakes and steamy cups of tea and coffee (reminding me of Mansfield’s A Cup of Tea) was entitled ‘Mansfield and Women’.  This session described Mansfield’s influence on two celebrated Australian writers, Marjorie Barnard and Eleanor Dark.  This was followed by a presentation of the enigmatic literary model that French writer Collette provided for Mansfield.  The presentations ‘Viewing Intimacy in the Work of Katherine Mansfield and Marjorie Barnard’ and ‘Anxious Beginnings: ‘Prelude’ and Prelude to Christopher’ by Ann Vickery and Sarah Ailwood (respectively) on the Australasian regional responses to modernism was captivating.  Ailwood rebutted the common assumption that Australasian writing was and is “geographical curiosities removed from global impulses”.  This is a position I feel very strongly about and so listened with relish about the politics of colonial nation building in literature.

From envy to servitude, the stand-out paper for me from the Intimates session was Anna Jackson’s ‘Katherine Mansfield and the ‘little maids’’.  Anna effortlessly skipped across the lines between biography and fiction, discussing Mansfield’s irrational and demanding dependence on Ida Baker (or ‘LM’ as she called her) and her contradictory representations of figures of servitude in her short fiction.  She recalled a hilarious incident when Mansfield asked Baker to smuggle a chair out of a fire escape and across London to avoid repossession, illustrating Mansfield’s unappreciative attitude towards her “little maid”, Baker.  My mind still reels at the nuances of this relationship between Baker and Mansfield.

The next presentation made me eager to get out my Spanish language tapes again.  Annabelle Lukin from Macquarie University presented an intriguing Mansfield collaboration between the Laboratory for Experimentation in Translation and the Centre for Language in Social Life.  Lukin is producing the Spanish and Portuguese translations of Mansfield’s short story Bliss.  Her presentation looked into the narrative shifts and the ‘planes of narration’ present in the story.  This may seem solely the joy of an English student or linguist, but the excitement about Lukin’s project rippled throughout the Radio Theatre, it revolutionised the way I thought about narrative and I will be first in line when she has completed the project. 

Throughout the two days of the symposium the delegates enjoyed sumptuous morning and afternoon tea surrounded by a visual presentation of Katherine Mansfield art works.  Penelope Jackson, Director of the Tauranga Art Gallery, had arranged for a series of (replica) art works to be installed in the symposium building.  Her knowledge of the contemporary use of Mansfield’s image as inspiration for New Zealand artists was incredibly informative.  It was a delight to see that the bonds between writing and art are still as permeable as they were in Katherine Mansfield’s day when she sat for the famous Anne Estelle Rice portrait.  Apparently, despite Virginia Woolf’s communication and insistence that this painting was significant, Rice’s bold painting was declined by the British National Gallery.  Cue the collective sighs of colonial despair.

On the morning of the second day we were treated to two sessions of academic papers, ‘Mansfield and Men’ and ‘Influence’.  Two gems stood out for me among these presentations. 

Naomi Milthorpe, the 2009/2010 Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center Fellow presented a humorous paper on the connection between satirists Evelyn Waugh and Katherine Mansfield in her paper titled ‘The Twilight of Language: The Young Evelyn Waugh on Bliss'.  Evelyn Waugh is commonly catalogued as belonging to the ‘other’ or ‘alternative’ modernism, a position he advocated in his abuses of modernity.  However, Naomi discussed the unpublished manuscript The Twilight of Language which demonstrates an earlier sympathy with modernism, despite the extended parody of Mansfield’s Bliss.  Milthorpe was eloquent and engaging in her explication of Waugh’s taste, providing some marvellous satirical quips from Waugh.

The other presentation that piqued my interest was Jessica Gildersleeve on the literary relationship between Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth Bowen. Gildersleeve gave an extensive discussion of Bowen’s heart rending lament for Mansfield ‘where is she?’ written after Mansfield’s death at 34 years old and explored Mansfield’s influence on Bowen’s writing.  Bowen openly documented her constant textual influence as a short story writer, while lamenting her death at such a young age.  Mansfield was her lost literary forebear and she never forgot this.  This presentation struck to my core as it articulated the intimacy between reader and writer that is intangible and yet achingly real.

In the slot directly before lunch (upon consideration, perhaps not the best time available) I gave my own presentation, ‘Mansfield’s ellipses as phenomenological markers of time’ which was followed by Louise Edensor’s eloquent power point presentation on ‘The influence of the writings of Henri Bergson and Arthur Symons on the short stories of Katherine Mansfield’.  These two presentations fitted together like a glove, both concerned with the presentation of the elusive nature of ‘time’ in Mansfield’s works, and both discussing the influence of Mansfield’s contemporary philosophers.  I was ecstatic at the chance to discuss the grammatical tool of the ellipsis*, an opportunity I don’t often have the fortune to engage with in any depth.  The mechanics of each discipline is truly only interesting to those engaged in that field; ellipses anyone?

Out of professional curiosity, I often undertake visits to literary birthplaces such as Shakespeare’s Stratford-Upon-Avon, Beatrix Potter’s Hill Top Farm in Cumbria, and of course the Katherine Mansfield Birthplace in Thorndon (to name a few).  It is always a strange and awkward thing to do and I imagine most visitors leave feeling an uncertainty about the site’s preservation and re-creation for a tourist market.  afternoon.  Brigid Magner (from etc) avidly recalled her visit to Mansfield’s Villa Isola Bella in Menton complete with a slide show of photographs and a discussion of the ‘cellar’ that the New Zealand Post Mansfield Prize Fellows occupy.  Her thoughts on literary tourism and literary pilgrimage as they reflected my own inclinations to visit and yet be cautious about the act of visiting.

The symposium concluded with our very own (New Zealand) key note speaker and eminent Mansfield scholar, Vincent O’Sullivan.  He chose to talk about Mansfield’s adoration for theosophist Lewis Wallace’s Cosmic Anatomy and her decision to enter George Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at Fontainebleau, an esoteric school and the site of her death from tuberculosis.  O’Sullivan littered his discussion with a plethora of Mansfield’s final utterances “I have known just instances of waking” and left us with these final words recorded in her diary: “What is the time, time”. 

The symposium was over far too quickly, as all good things are, but I was left feeling as captivated by Mansfield, her work, and her life as I had been at fourteen when I first experienced those tantalizing words: “What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly, by a feeling of bliss – absolute bliss! – as though you’d suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle, into every finger and toe?...”

*  A definition for ellipses from the Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms & Literary Theory:
"An ellipsis is a 'leaving out'. Technically it is a rhetorical figure in which one or more words are omitted. The practice of marking them originated in late 16th c. drama as a manifestation of the imperfections of the voice: the omissions, pauses, and interruptions fundamental to spoken language."