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Book Description
In July 1942 Irène Némirovsky, author of the
now-bestselling Suite Française, wrote in her notebook on her last day of
freedom before she was deported by the Nazis, `The pine woods all around
me. I am sitting on my blue cardigan in the middle of an ocean of leaves,
wet and rotting from last night's storm, as if I were on a raft, my legs
tucked under me! In my bag I have put Volume II of Anna Karenina, the
Journal of KM and an orange.'
now-bestselling Suite Française, wrote in her notebook on her last day of
freedom before she was deported by the Nazis, `The pine woods all around
me. I am sitting on my blue cardigan in the middle of an ocean of leaves,
wet and rotting from last night's storm, as if I were on a raft, my legs
tucked under me! In my bag I have put Volume II of Anna Karenina, the
Journal of KM and an orange.'
Katherine Mansfield's Journal is one of the great classics of
twentieth century literature but has not been in print for many years. Yet
it is a uniquely truthful record of a great writer at work, of the spirit
of a genius in the last ten years of her life, and of the development of
the modern mind during the early years of the last century.
Most people will have read Katherine Mansfield's stories. The Journal
was compiled by her husband John Middleton Murry soon after she died and
was published in 1927. It consists of fragments of diary entries, unposted
letters, scraps of writing, in other words anything that was dated or could
have a date attributed to it and that could be woven into a volume called a
`journal'.
Katherine Mansfield had not thought of posterity reading anything she
wrote apart from her short stories; indeed, she asked Murry to publish `as
little as possible'. But failure to destroy something is quite different
from meaning something to be read by others; which is why Dorothy Parker
said of the Journal, `so private is it that one feels forever guilty of
prying for having read it.' For it is indeed an intimate and
self-revelatory record of a writer's mind, far more intimate, surely, than
Katherine would have wanted it to be had she known it would be published.
Thus, unusually for its time, the Journal is honest, sharp, tragic and
over-sensitive: but a writer's sharpness and over-sensitivity, not a
gossip's or a politician's or a mother's. When the Journal was first
published in 1927 the poet Conrad Aiken said: `It is a fascinating, and
extraordinary, and in some respects an appalling book. And again and again
one is reminded of Keats.' Partly he meant this because both died of
consumption and he was referring to the consumptive temperament; partly
because both were creative geniuses; and partly because both explored the
art, the act, of writing every time they put pen to paper.
As in Virginia Woolf's A Writer's Diary, and then her complete Letters
and Diaries, or in Keats's Letters, the reader can watch the act of
creation as it happens in the mind of the writer who was above all else
`rooted in life'. This is why so many saw Katherine Mansfield as an ideal.
Christopher Isherwood and Edward Upward, for example, bracketed her with
Wilfred Owen and Emily Bronte: `We talked about them as if they were our
personal friends, wondered what they would have said on certain occasions,
or how they would have behaved, what advice they would have given us.'
Katherine Mansfield's Journal is far more than an intermittent record
of twelve years of a writer's life: it is intensely observant,
self-critical, self-chastising, confessional, atmospheric, agonised and
funny, an essential document for anyone interested in women's writing of
the last century and in one of its greatest writers.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
'I haven't written a word since October and I don't mean to until the spring. I want much more material: I am tired of my little stories like birds bred in cages.
Goodbye, my dearest cousin. I shall never know anyone like you; I shall remember every little thing about you for ever.'
Mansfield's poignant dismissal of her stories sits awkwardly with her promise of a spring renewal of her writing. The irony of time when anyone is terminally ill needs no elaboration and reading this passage once more I am impressed by the dignity of her underlying acceptance of her impending death. Mansfield's doubt in the artistic merit of her tales is inescapably mixed up with her detachment as a 'dying body.' She is already moving elsewhere watching all that she cared for and valued, diminish away.
And of course, if Mansfield had a recurring subject in her 'little stories' then that subject would have to be death, and death in all its many forms: physical, geographical, sexual, emotional, spiritual, linguistic.
One of the most resonant moments in her journal for me occurs in May 1922:
'A queer bit of psychology: I had to disappear behind the bushes today in a hollow. That act made me feel nearer to normal health than I have for years. Nobody there; nobody wondered if I was alright, i.e. there was nothing to distinguish me, at that moment, from an ordinary human being.'
Mansfield's honest pleasure at being 'normal' reveals the intense loneliness of illness. An adult life spent travelling in search of health from one rented room to another, accentuated her feelings of exile and isolation from her own kind. She talks to her journal, she writes letters, she creates fictions about people on the outside; visitors to happiness and love. So that the repetition of 'nobody' in this passage actually has a fragile power of its own. Mansfield rarely had 'anybody' there, and her elation at her temporary normality seems both humbling and practical.
Goodbye, my dearest cousin. I shall never know anyone like you; I shall remember every little thing about you for ever.'
Mansfield's poignant dismissal of her stories sits awkwardly with her promise of a spring renewal of her writing. The irony of time when anyone is terminally ill needs no elaboration and reading this passage once more I am impressed by the dignity of her underlying acceptance of her impending death. Mansfield's doubt in the artistic merit of her tales is inescapably mixed up with her detachment as a 'dying body.' She is already moving elsewhere watching all that she cared for and valued, diminish away.
And of course, if Mansfield had a recurring subject in her 'little stories' then that subject would have to be death, and death in all its many forms: physical, geographical, sexual, emotional, spiritual, linguistic.
One of the most resonant moments in her journal for me occurs in May 1922:
'A queer bit of psychology: I had to disappear behind the bushes today in a hollow. That act made me feel nearer to normal health than I have for years. Nobody there; nobody wondered if I was alright, i.e. there was nothing to distinguish me, at that moment, from an ordinary human being.'
Mansfield's honest pleasure at being 'normal' reveals the intense loneliness of illness. An adult life spent travelling in search of health from one rented room to another, accentuated her feelings of exile and isolation from her own kind. She talks to her journal, she writes letters, she creates fictions about people on the outside; visitors to happiness and love. So that the repetition of 'nobody' in this passage actually has a fragile power of its own. Mansfield rarely had 'anybody' there, and her elation at her temporary normality seems both humbling and practical.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
1 review
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
The lifetime of one of our greatest writers
17 May 2003
Format:Paperback
I first heard of this book in a 1927 review of it by Dorothy Parker (available in the 1944 edition of The Portable Dorothy Parker, as well as subsequent editions I believe, including the 1973 one). Parker's review is beautifully apt. She says, "I think that the Journal of Katherine Mansfield is the saddest book I have ever read. Here, set down in exquisite fragments, is the record of six lonely and tormented years, the life's-end of a desperately ill woman. So private is it that one feels forever guilty of prying for having read it." Mansfield suffered from a heart condition and later tuberculosis which kept her in a constant state of physical misery for years. Even worse for her was the constant torment of never being able to achieve enough as a writer to satisfy herself. Parker is completely right: I can't think of who could capture that constant, acute sorrow better than Katherine Mansfield. As Parker said, "She was not of the little breed of the discontented; she was of the high few fated to be ever unsatisfied."
If you've never read her short stories (she never wrote anything else), please do, and I would advise you to read them before you read her journal.
The book itself seems like it could be published as a stream-of-consciousness novel (it's impossible to follow at times but no worse for it. It seems to make perfect sense - even the numerous cryptic little notes). It's full of little pieces of stories never finished. Mansfield's body of work was so small (something that upset her deeply) that these little fragments would be enough to make any fan of hers need to read this journal.
She is most often compared to Chekhov, and it's not difficult to see why. I truly believe that Mansfield innovated and practically invented the English (language) short story. Besides Chekhov (whom she often mentions in her journal) I've never read anything quite like her, particularly not anything that predates her.
What else you need to know:
1. Mansfield was born in New Zealand, the influence of which can be seen in short stories like "At the Bay".
2. Her husband, J. Middleton Murry, published her journals, causing some to accuse him of taking advantage of her.
3. You must read this book.
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