Fascinated not obsessed

There’s quite a collection of books about Katherine Mansfield on the bottom shelf of one of my bookcases. S0me of them I haven’t read yet – and wonder if I will. When I read Claire Harman’s book All Sorts of Lives recently, I realised how limited my knowledge of ‘our’ famous writer is, and promptly followed it with Katherine Mansfield’s Europe by Redmer Yska. I learnt that Mansfield smoked constantly, was probably addicted to morphine, had indeed ‘gone every sort of hog’ as Virginia Woolf commented, lived beside the Seine during WWI and endured Zeppelin bombing raids, and is now a celebrated writer in France. And in other parts of the world, too, according to the back cover of the Collected Poems.

It seems people keep writing about KM whether from academic or personal or journalistic perspectives. In the last week, I’ve read two reviews of KM’s Europe in the digital newsletter ReadingRoom. The first was very thorough and academic as you’d expect from C.K. Stead. The second is a more personal response, by Miro Bilbrough, who finds KM relatable for her inability to be careful of herself. Ali Smith wrote about a woman obsessed by Mansfield in her story ‘The ex-wife’ (in Public Library and other stories). When Ashleigh Young became director of the Katherine Mansfield Birthplace people commented on her likeness to Mansfield. The volunteers and other staff were pretty much obsessed with KM and seem, in Young’s essay ‘Katherine Would Approve’ (in Can You Tolerate This?), distinctly unhinged. At the end of her time as Director, Young concludes that she probably would not much like Mansfield if she met her and is somewhat appalled to find she is going off her stories as well.

Katherine Mansfield was obsessed by her own writing, as she would have to be to have completed so much work (not to mention the letters and journals – plus reviews for literary magazines) in her short life. She needed to publish to earn a living, but she was also aware that her TB, complicated by venereal disease and a history of childhood respiratory illness, was going to finish her off before long. She seemed unaware that smoking was not helping to prolong her life.

I am neither obsessed nor indifferent to Mansfield. Redmer Yska’s earlier journalistic work, A Strange Beautiful Excitement about KM’s Wellington childhood which I finished reading this week, has added yet more depth to my understanding. I will dip into her stories now and again and continue to find them fascinating.