I'm aware it's an age since I posted anything on here so I thought I would begin posting occasional articles that I write, reviews etc.
Below is a review of a rather interesting book that has come out on Katherine Mansfield's most indepth experience of New Zealand landscape.
This was when, as a 19 year old, she went on a 'tiki tour' (meaning a journey) in the area of Hawke's Bay, going up towards the Ureweras and Lake Taupo.
This was before she left New Zealand never to return.
So the journey is of great importance - it gave her an insight into landscape, the wairua (soul) of place.
And as she crosses over what I might call 'my territory' which is Hawke's Bay the book had special resonance for me.
The book below is based on the scribblings Katherine Mansfield did as she journeyed along.
The review appeared on this site if you want to look at it with pictures (not always well chosen in my view.) http://thespinoff.co.nz/author/peter-wells/
The Napier Taupo
road has the high status of being one of those roads on which you lose cell
phone coverage. This means you leave behind the 21st century. You
plunge into the uncertainties of real time, presented naked of technology to
the landscape. And the landscape itself is powerful. There are still very few
‘amenities’ along this twisting, tormented and lonely road. In fact the
only amenities – attempts at hostelries offering hot coffee and toilets - echo the four stages that horses and
stagecoach could reach in a day. There is none of the effluvia of contemporary
life – no McDonalds, no Huntervasse toilets, no car yards. In fact there are no
petrol stations.
This is by way of
saying the Napier Taupo road is still a dramatic setting. And it was on this
seemingly mysterious stretch of nowheresville that Katherine Mansfield found
her one and only completely New Zild Gothic story, “The Woman at the Store”. This is a story that
is at least as much Ronald Hugh Morrieson as fluttery fluting Mansfield. It is
realist, twisted and vicious. And sad. It has the melancholy of lives left
behind that have curdled – in other words a typical New Zild narrative
arc. And this little pearl of a book,
“The Urewera Notebook”, edited by Anna Plumridge, tells us it was based on one
Helen Himing (date of birth unknown) who was the wife of a roadman who tended a
lengthy and lonely stretch of Napier-Taupo Road.
Anna Plumridge is
one of those literary terriers to whom you give a simple and seemingly banal
fact and she will thrash it back and forth until the poor fact leaks out its
origins and everything it can divulge by way of information. This is code for
saying this rather prim hardback is a doctoral thesis warmed up for
publication. I hasten to add it isn’t trussed up in that clunky
university-speak that shows no respect for language. It is fairly speckled all
over with insights both large and minute.
The book is based
on Plumridge’s intensive research into the 3 week voyage into “a heart of
darkness” that Katherine Mansfield made as a sulky 19 year old in November 1907. The road trip went
from Hastings, along the Napier Taupo Road, branched off towards the Ureweras,
headed up towards Rotorua, down to Taupo and back along that dismal road to
Napier. This took place in between her first introduction to life in London, a
return to the tiny town antics of provincial Wellington, and her swift removal
to the Centre of it All (London in 1908) where she stayed for the rest of her
life. In a way the notebook has the interest of a major artist confronting
essential Aotearoa, scribbling in her notebook as she went. It is kind of
apprentice material in which “Kathleen Beauchamp” tries on a thousand and one
costumes before the admiring mirror of a self. “I look completely charming” she
notes at one point, taking a snap of herself as she sat on the train from
Woodville.
She also records vivid glimpses of what she sees. And as it is 1907,
she sees an awful lot.
It was, after all,
a slim forty years since the land wars, with all this meant in terms of
appropriation, loss and damage. It was also less than a century since the
dystopian “musket” wars that had effected a kind of tribal ethnic cleansing
from one end of the North Island to the other. Kathleen Beauchamp was looking
at and travelling through a disruptive landscape – but one that she found
extremely fascinating and beautiful – mysterious, and “other”. And like that
experience of suddenly losing cell phone coverage – it felt very real.
The party was made
up of middle class people with enough cash to allow them to take time off work
and go off on a gypsy caravan tour. It was made up of three men, three women
and two girls. They travelled with a coach and a dray that
held all their camping equipment. They did their own cooking and slept in tents
or houses if they could find them. (This revealed that the spoilt Miss Beauchamp
did not know how to cook, or even how to make a cup of
tea.)
Katherine
Mansfield, as she later became, was always a master of disguise. She
fastforwarded through personae, trying on personalities – the vamp, the
aesthete, the slut, the Bloomsbury wicked wit, the suffering tubercular woman
facing death. Sexually she had the same transience as she went from teenage
lesbian love with a young Maori woman, promiscuous heterosexuality which landed
her with gonorrhoea before finally settling on a strategic heterosexual
marriage with a husband in another country and a lesbian love slave in the same
room. She was a lot of things to a lot of people, not least to herself. The
question of who “Katherine Mansfield” really was is a never ending quest, with
many pilgrims lost and confused along the wayside. Mansfield was an assumed
identity anyway and in these notebooks it is an apprentice Mansfield we are
looking at. She is plain Kathleen Beauchamp and the rather dim photographs
reveal a dumpy teenager under a big hat, rather too sharply corseted for her
own health. (It is the one major defect of this book that all the photographs
are reproduced in exceptionally poor quality. I guess literary people have
severed visual nerves but for me, the photographs of Mansfield standing or seated
among Maori and fellow travellers are so rare that I really want to zoom in on the
details. The poor photographic reproduction was probably a result of budgetary
caution but it also will curtail sales of the book.)
One of the larger
questions Plumridge looks at is whether Kathleen Beauchamp was the nightmare
teenager frumping round Wellington, hissing like a cat when she wasn’t
scratching the furniture in her fury at not being back in cosmopolitan London. This
has been a pretty standard trope for a long time. But the evidence supplied by Kathleen’s own
diaries is that she was that quintessential kiwi lass – a good sport. She
walked in the dust up mountainous roads when the horses couldn’t cart the
humans any longer, she went “in her nakeds” into hot pools, she looked, she
laughed, she wrote. Her companions on the tour - who could have dobbed her in -
talk of her humour, kindness and interest. It may be a fact that Kathleen Beauchamp
was a 19 year old having the time of her life roughing it in old Aoteoara.
This brings me to
the writing. The first three quarters of Plumridge’s book is a rather
protracted entr’acte looking at the various interpretations of “The Urewera Notebook”. This relates to the
fact that the notebook is itself, a little like Mansfield, full of possible
interpretations. There is Mansfield’s famously difficult-to-decipher
handwriting for a start. Add in the fact most of the notebooks are written in
pencil (a sign of roughing it – no fountain pens at this stage.) But then
Mansfield really did use the notebook as a kind of verbal sketchpad. She gave
no dates, she often simply went back and filled in an empty space with more
verbal doodlings. (In fact if I made an analogy to another art form I would
parallel this entire diary to the pad of a plein air impressionist painter,
quickly doing sketch after sketch after sketch. The aim is to capture something
on the wing. A tint of light, a look in a face, a way of holding a baby. Nothing
is “improved” or “worked up”. The artist quickly moves on, trying out language
in this case, seeing what works, what can be evoked. The notebook also has
lists – Tea, lunch, wire [meaning telegram], milk, flour, walnuts – and an
affectionate sketch of a letter to her mother.)
I sometimes
thought with this book that Mansfield herself was a kind of unkempt landscape that
various voyagers travelled into and brought back interpretations which were
only ever approximations of something inherently undiscoverable. She remains, a
little like the landscape of Aotearoa itself, wild, mysterious, other.
The first
“discoverer” of the notebook was that cad Middleton Murray. It is hard to think
of a man with worse press than the unfortunate repository of Mansfield’s
amatory writing. She needed a romantic object to whom to send her immortal
letters about love and marriage. She created a fictional Murray who so often
disappointed her bitterly either in person or in his failure to understand just
how terrible her predicament was – a young woman in her early thirties facing
death in a foreign hotel room. Her disease – tuberculosis – was notifiable and needed
to be hidden if possible. If discovered she could be ejected from the room on
the spot and might even have to pay special cleansing costs. He really wasn’t
interested.
After her death of course Middleton Murray
minted the Katherine Mansfield that became a 1920s legend. She was in a way his
greatest literary production. He culled her lovely bitchyness, he tidied away
the mess of a pregnancy. Certainly gonorrhoea was not a saintly attribute.
Murray didn’t know anything about NZ and apparently didn’t even bother to look
at a map. His understanding of the notebook is full of gaffes so bad – from
this end of the telescope – as to be laughable. His knowledge of Maori was nil.
The next intrepid
explorer of terra Mansfieldiana was Professor Gordon of Victoria University. He
sought to create a happier Kathleen Beauchamp than the furious termagant
Middleton Murray created, the girl who hated low rent Wellington. (It is
possible that is how Mansfield may have talked to her husband about her adolescence.
It would have made her transition to Bloomsbury so much more gratifying if you
posit that she came from ‘nothing’ to the centre of ‘everything’. The distance
travelled is greater.)
Professor Gordon
dusted down the notebook and applied his own magic. It was he in fact who
fictionalized these scrappy doodlings into the rather formal and impressive
title “The Urewera Notebook”. Fact: the notebook had no such title. It is my
assertion that conferring such a weighty moniker on these slight
impressionistic jottings risks overwhelming them with connotations of the
Clytemnestra of NZ history, Dame Judith Binney. It gives the notebook a
gravitas, a sense of tragedy that is too consciously nationalistic, too
embedded in the fraught weightings of contemporary political correctness. Fact:
Kathleen did indeed go to the Ureweras on her trip but it was only a small part
of the journey. It took three days. The notebooks could have as easily been
called “My Summer Hols!” as this is
probably closer to the teenage narcissism and slightly jejeune and jolly tone
that underlies much of the writing. But of course that is really not a good
marketing ploy and it underplays the goddess role that Mansfield occupies at
the very apex of our national literature. Everything the goddess touched
becomes sacred.
Seriously though.
When the curtain finally goes up on the actual diary (a mere 20 pages at the
end of a 118 page book) the writing is immediate and crisp. Writers have often
commented on the cinematic speed of Mansfield’s writing. Well, here it is in
genesis, sped along by dashes which connect flares of images – thoughts –
feelings. (In fact she mentions an early form of cinema in passing.) Any quote
is as good as another. “I stand in the
manuka scrub – the fairy blossom – Away ahead the pines – black, the souring of
the wind.” It isn’t exactly a connected train of thought – it is image
leapfrogging over image. There is a theory that the sparkling novelty of Mansfield’s
greatest short story, “At the Bay” gets its music from her experiences on this
trip. And indeed in the notebooks one comes across, again and again, extremely
vivid glimpses, as swift as a camera lens opening and shutting, of essentially
New Zealand sounds, smells, sights. “–It
is a queer spot – ramshackle & hideous, but the garden is gorgeous – A
Maori girl – with her hair in two long braids, sat at the doorstep – shelling
peas - & while we were talking to her – the owner came & offered to
show us the shearing sheds – You know the sheep sound like a wave of the sea -.”
Plumridge has done
a stellar job hunting down the merest hint of a detail and supplying
information that may explicate it. She also supplies some context for throw
away remarks by Mansfield which may have been misunderstood. Her infamous dismissal
of Pakeha as “the third rate article” seems to point to an infinite disdain. “Give
me the Maori or the tourist – but nothing between”. This makes more sense if
you relate it her rampant colonial snobbery. The “real English” article she
fawns over is actually an individual with the unglamorous moniker of Prodger.
Prodger’s great virtue is his father was an aristocrat and his younger sister
managed to snavel the 18th Lord Sempell and the 9th
baronet of Craigievar (the same person, she wasn’t a bigamist). We all like a
good title.
In fact Kathleen,
with her lower class Irish sounding Christian name, had ‘the taint of pioneer’
in her own blood. Her grandmother came from a pub in the Rocks in Sydney, a
notoriously rough area. Her family were upwardly mobilizing bourgeois and her
own insecurity about her ‘third rate’ origins is projected onto fellow Pakeha
in an attempt to point out her own distinction. (To Virginia Woolf however Mansfield
was always ‘cheap and common’, stinking like a civet cat.)
Perhaps a truer
note here for Kathy the good sport is when she writes home to Mum and lets slip
that “I’m quite fond of all the people – they are ultra-Colonial but thoroughly
kind & good hearted & generous – and always more than good to me.” This
is probably a saner assessment of what Mansfield really thought about the
people who were, ethnically and culturally, of exactly the same background as
herself. She dropped the lorgnette and got real.
It is notable that
on the whole the 19 year old colonial had a refreshing openness to Maori that
she met. Given this was the highest arc of imperialism and hence patronising
ways of looking at non-British races, she is nearly always looking at the
human, the individual, the person. Part of this is her openness to physical
beauty. She especially loved handsome or striking Maori women and Maori men.
There are many descriptions of their physical attractiveness, the way they distinctively
dressed, that sudden rapport which is not part of Anglo-saxon cultural
etiquette. She commented on the greenstone jewellery worn, the clothing, the
long luscious curls of men of the followers of Rua. She tried to write down Maori
sayings and showed an openess to tikanga Maori that is surprising given the
period. She did hate the commercialisation of Rotorua. Yet in fact it was just
the kind of setting she later deployed in a masterly fashion – hotels –
alienation - transience – the sale of love. Mansfield’s ambivilance towards her
NZ identity is often seen through her complicated family relationships, her
defeats, her own betrayals. Yet the evidence in these free-flowing jottings is
that she was a rapt inhabitant of Aotearoa, lens wide open, fresh to
impressions and storing away information for later deployment.
In the end that is
the interest of this notebook. Nowhere else do we have a record, made on the
spot, of how she responded to her native country. It is as real and close as it
could get. It wasn’t Aotearoa as she looked back with longing, after the shock
of her brother’s death. Here she is not trying to reclaim it, as a loving
testament to memory. It is as it was lived. Vivid, real, moment by moment, closely
observed. That is its great virtue.
In the end the gypsy
caravan traipsed back along that endless Napier-Taupo Road. It was on the
return journey that Kathleen came across the setting for “The Woman at the
Store”. Plumridge reconstructs the scene
through the words of fellow traveller Elsie Webber (aged 12 to Kathleen’s
19). They knocked on the door of a
cottage “at a very lonely, isolated spot” to ask if they could pitch their tent
on the property. The door was opened by “a cheerful blowsy woman” who was thrilled
to see some humans. “Come in and sit down. I’ll make a cup of tea. I haven’t
got me drorin room boots on!”[drawing room boots]. Kathleen’s sharp ear for
dialogue was captured by this. But it was the crushing sense of isolation, the
lurking menace of the landscape which spoke to Katherine Mansfield and so she constructed
her gothic story with its hints of violence, madness, repressed sexuality and death.
It is to Plumridge’s
credit that she completes the story for us. Long after Kathleen’s party had
disappeared Helen Himing vanished. “…several days after being reported missing,
her body was found in the hill country near Rununga.” In her own way Helen
Himing provides a small footnote for this larger journey of a writer apprentice
who, having passed through her native land, looked at it sharply - and never came
back.
End.
The Urewera Notebook
Katherine Mansfield
(edited by Anna Plumridge)
Hardback
Otago University Press
$49.95