Katherine Mansfield, The Woman Behind The Books (Including Letters, Journals, Essays & Articles)
me.’
“She did not understand, but she sewed the card inside her pocket, and kissed the Wanderer on both cheeks.
“… She had begun reading seriously….
“And the Wanderer did not forget her. He sent her a postcard of Maxim Gorki, and a little book, ‘The Virgins of the Rocks’; she did not understand it, but it gave her beautiful dreams. One night, the following summer, the Girl sat on the doorstep watching the stars, and the Boy, beside her.
“‘Boy,’ she said, ‘What are you going to do?’
“‘I am going to find the world,’ he cried…. ‘And you, Girl?’
“‘I am going to find myself,’ the Girl answered. She put her hand into her pocket, and pressed the Wanderer’s little card….”
What all this reading had revealed to the eager Colonial girl is only to be discovered in her diaries of those days. Of course, her aloof air, her composure (which began now, to be studied), her withdrawn, almost haughty manner when in a group, was deceptive. Who would have guessed the fire beginning to flare fanned by the emotions which turned back deep into her? For the other girls of sixteen, the decadents may have been safe enough, deflected by ignorance, or, at most, flowering from shallowly turned soil. But in Kathleen Beauchamp nothing flowered from a shallow place : whatever mattered to her was taken in until roots touched bottom.
Partly, at least, her introduction to Wilde, and in particular to Dorian Gray with its doctrine that life was something to be consciously explored, came through her friend “Mimi.” She first lent Kathleen the book — an old number of Lippincott’s Magazine — which had been lent to her by one of the teachers in the College school, with many injunctions to secrecy. From “Mimi” also came the notion of the emblem of the white gardenia. But probably it was the complete version of Dorian Gray which Kathleen’s room-mate, Eileen Palliser, remembers as beneath her pillow at night and with her during the day. Eileen came upon her once, in her cubicle, reading a German book. Kathleen, a second senior, had studied German all through Queen’s, and Eileen, several years younger and a junior, had only taken it for two or three terms; but she leaned over to see the book. To her surprise Kathleen snatched it away and closed it without stopping to mark the place. She merely said,”That’s not for you!” But afterwards she kept all the books she was reading hidden from Eileen.
Kathleen’s reading notes for that year (and for the two years following, when she was back in New Zealand) are filled with passages and epigrams copied from her reading. Wilde predominates, and his maxims were taken and absorbed into her, accepted as ethics, as the gospel of living. She said in those days,”I would rather have the highest heights and the lowest depths — anything rather than the placid middle line of life.” In her first introduction to literature, she gave herself utterly to absorbing from it what she believed was “experience of life.”
Reading Notes (1905–1907)
“To be premature is to be perfect.” — O.W.
“Greek dress was in its essence inartistic. Nothing should reveal the body but itself.” — O.W.
“Genius in a woman is the mystic laurel of Apollo springing from the soft breast of Daphne. It hastens the growing and sometimes breaks the heart from which it springs.” — M.C.
“To acknowledge the presence of fear is to give birth to failure.” — K.M.
“A man who speaks effectively through music is compelled to something more difficult than parliamentary eloquence.” — G.E.
“Any great achievement in acting or in music grows with the growth. Whenever an artist has been able to say ‘I came, I saw, I conquered,’ it has been at the end of patient practice. Genius is at first little more than a great capacity for receiving (discipline). Your muscles, your whole frame must go like a watch true, true, true, true as a hair.” — G.E.
“If any one should importune me to give a reason why I loved him, I feel it could not otherwise be explained than by making answer, ‘Because it was he; because it was I’.” — Montaigne.
“The strongest man is he who stands most alone.” — Henrik Ibsen.
“Happy people are never brilliant. It implies friction.” — K.M.
“It is not naturally or generally, the happy who are the most anxious for a prolongation of the present life or for a life hereafter; it is those who have never been happy.” — J.S.M.
“… it is no unnatural part of the idea of a happy life, that life itself is to be laid down, after the best that it can give has been fully enjoyed through a long lapse of time; when all its pleasures, like those of benevolence, are familiar, and nothing untasted or unknown is left to stimulate curiosity and keep up the desire of prolonged existence.” — J.S.M.
“Push everything as far as it will go.” — O.W.
“The old desire everything — the middle-aged believe everything — the young know everything.” — O.W.
“To love madly — perhaps is not wise — yet should you love madly — it is far wiser than not to love at all.” — M.M.
“People who learn only from experience do not allow for intuition.” — A.H.H.
“No life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested.” — O.W.
“We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices.” — O.W.
“If you want to mar a nature, you have merely to reform it.” — O.W.
“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.” — O.W.
“Conscience and cowardice are the same things. Conscience is the trade mark of the firm. That is all.” — O.W.
“To realise one’s nature perfectly — that is what each of us is here for.” — O.W.
(1907)
“I am that which is.”
“No mortal man dare lift the veil.”
“He is alone of himself; to him alone do all men owe their being.” — Religion Of Beethoven; August, 1805.
“Realise your youth while you have it. Don’t squander the gold of your days listening to the tedious — trying to improve the hopeless failure — or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common or the vulgar — which are the aims, the false ideals of our Age. Live! Live the wonderful life which is in you. Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always reaching…. Be afraid of nothing.” — O.W.
“Ambition is a curse if you are not … proof against everything else, unless you are willing to sacrifice yourself to your ambition.” — A Woman (K.M.).
“It cannot be possible to go through all the abandonment of music and care humanly for anything human afterward.” — A Woman.
“All musicians, no matter how insignificant, come to life emancipated of their power to take life seriously. It is not one man or woman but the complete octave of sex that they desire.” — A.W.
“You feel helpless under the yoke of creation.” — A.W.
“Nature makes such fools of us! What is the use of liking anyone if the washerwoman can do exactly the same thing? Well, this is Nature’s trick to ensure population.” — A.W.
“Most women turn to salt, looking back.” — A.W.
“Big people have always entirely followed their own inclinations. Why should we remember the names of people who do what everyone does? To (be in) love with success is to be illustrious.” — A.W.
“I do not want to earn a living; I want to live.” — O.W.