The Aloe (2 page)

Towards the end of her short life Mansfield turned repeatedly to the subject of what was “real”
⁷
, in her search for wholeness, unity, a melding of the spiritual and practical, her personality and her literary sensibility – a drive that Vincent O’Sullivan has described as existential in nature, and one that had her seeking the elemental, the necessary, as she sought to make peace with her past and present, to reconcile the self she represented to the world with her inner secret being, the one still inevitably connected with her home, her birthplace and her beginning and whom, he shows us, she came to inhabit in her best work and at the end of her life.
⁸

In this book, her first committed attempt to begin that reconciliation as she starts to gather up these aspects of her past and get it all down in words, we find her claiming the thing she sought so desperately in those last months of her life – and in it shines the singularity of her art. Her broken world is made whole again. In the shattered parts of
The Aloe
we find the “real”.

Kirsty Gunn

Thorndon, Wellington 2009

Notes and Further Reading

1
. Katherine Mansfield’s letters and journals give us vivid insights to her literary and creative processes. The “invention” that is the form of
The Aloe
is taken from the following passage:

“What form is it? you ask… As far as I know it’s more or less my own invention. And how have I shaped it? This is about as much as I can say about it. You know, if the truth were known I have a perfect passion for the island where I was born... Well in the early morning there I always remember feeling that this little island had dipped back into the dark blue sea during the night only to rise again at beam of day, all hung with bright spangles and glittering drops… I tried to catch that moment – with something of that sparkle and its flavour. And just as on those mornings white milky mists rise and uncover some beauty, then smother it again and then again disclose it. I tried to lift that mist from my people and let them be seen and then to hide them again.”

From
The Letters of Katherine Mansfield
, 1903-1917, ed Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott, Oxford University Press 1984, p. 331

2
. A comparative edition of
The Aloe and Prelude
was published by The Port Nicholson Press, Wellington, New Zealand in 1982 and Carcanet New Press, Manchester in 1983, showing clearly where cuts were made in the text, paragraphs eliminated, words changed and so on – and so describing, page by page, how Mansfield created a lighter, less obviously autobiographical
Prelude
from her more definitively “colonial” New Zealand original.

For a deft and important account of the literary relationship between Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield, about whom Woolf wrote “I was jealous of her writing – the only writing I have ever been jealous of”, see Angela Smith’s
Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two
(1999) which sets the writers side by side and uses their letters and journals (both were keen on both) to delineate similarities and differences.

3
. When Mansfield’s beloved younger brother Leslie was killed in the First World War, Mansfield’s grief turned her back to the past. She vowed in her journal to create a kind of memorial to the dead boy in her writing – “the only possible value that anything can have for me is that it should put me in mind of something that happened when we were alive,” she wrote. This creative desire, to make life out of death was the impulse that generated
The Aloe
and Mansfield is addressing Leslie directly when she ends the passage quoted in the introduction “But all must be told with a sense of mystery, a radiance, and afterglow, because you, my little sun, are set.”

From
Journal of Katherine Mansfield
, ed John Middleton Murray, 1962, pp 89, 94

4
. Edward Said has written in his memoir that a writer is most always “an outsider, nomadic, somehow, in temperament – and that no matter where he or she lives or for how long it is only in writing, in each attempt at a story, at a poem or a piece of text, that he or she can make something fixed in the midst of uncertainty, create a place of safety, be at home”.

Taken from the Introduction to
Out of Place
by Edward Said, Granta, 2000

5
. Rebecca West was a great admirer of Katherine Mansfield’s work and wrote with keen perception about Mansfield’s “poetic temperament” as it applied to her creation of characters and setting in a review of
The Garden Party
:

“Abandonment to the leisurely rhythm of her own imagination, and refusal to conform to the current custom and finish her book in a year’s session, has enabled her to bring her inventions right over the threshold of art. They are extraordinarily solid; they have lived so long in her mind that she knows all about them and can ransack them for the difficult, rare, essential points.”

From the
New Statesman
18 March 1922: 678. Reprinted in
Katherine Mansfield’s Selected Stories
, ed Vincent O’Sullivan, Norton, 2006

6
. Katherine Mansfield died of tuberculosis in 1923 when she was 35. As her illness worsened, her need to find a place for herself in the world that might be safe and give her comfort, that might allow her to feel somehow authentic and honest and true… This instinct crystallised in her use of the word “real” – “If I were allowed one single cry to God that cry would be:
I want to be
REAL,” she wrote in December 1922, a month before her death.

From
The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield
, ed Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott, Oxford, 2008, p. 341

7
. For a poignant and finely tuned account of Mansfield’s last years, describing the writer’s sense of herself as an artist in search of an honest account of herself and her work before her death, see Vincent O’Sullivan’s introduction to the above volume – the last broken lines of which, taken from a list of Mansfield’s notes of Russian phrases and words, is itself testament to the keen beauty, emotional truth and wholeness of a fragmented literary sensibility: “I was late because my fire did not burn… The sky was blue as in summer… The trees still have apples. Apple… I fed the goats… I go for a walk… What is the time. Time.”

Publisher’s Note

The text as it appears in this edition is taken directly from Mansfield’s original notebooks.

Chapter One

T
here was not an inch of room for Lottie and Kezia in the buggy. When Pat swung them on top of the luggage they wobbled; the Grandmother’s lap was full and Linda Burnell could
not possibly
have held a lump of a child on hers for such a distance. Isabel, very superior perched beside Pat on the driver’s seat. Hold-alls, bags, and band boxes were piled upon the floor.

“These are
absolute
necessities that I will not let out of my sight for
one instant,”
said Linda Burnell, her voice trembling with fatigue and over excitement.

Lottie and Kezia stood on the patch of lawn just inside the gate all ready for the fray in their reefer coats with brass anchor buttons and little round caps with battle ship ribbons. Hand in hand. They stared with round inquiring eyes first at the “absolute necessities” and then at their Mother.

“We shall simply have to leave them. That is all. We shall simply have to cast them off” said Linda Burnell. A strange little laugh flew from her lips; she leaned back upon the buttoned leather cushions and shut her eyes . . . laughing silently.

Happily, at that moment, Mrs Samuel Josephs, who lived next door and had been watching the scene from behind her drawing room blind, rustled down the garden path.

“Why nod leave the children with
be
for the afterdoon, Brs Burnell. They could go on the dray with the storeban when he comes in the eveding. Those thigs on the path have to go. Dodn’t they?”

“Yes, everything outside the house has to go,” said Linda Burnell, waving a white hand at the tables and chairs that stood, impudently, on their heads in front of the empty house.

“Well, dodn’t you worry, Brs Burnell. Loddie and Kezia can have tea with by children and I’ll see them safely on the dray afterwards.”

She leaned her fat, creaking body across the gate and smiled reassuringly. Linda Burnell pretended to consider.

“Yes, it really is quite the best plan. I am
extremely
obliged to you, Mrs Samuel Josephs, I’m
sure.
Children, say ‘Thank you’ to Mrs Samuel Josephs.” . . .

(Two subdued chirrups: “Thank you, Mrs Samuel Josephs.”)

“And be good obedient little girls and – come closer –” – they advanced – “do not forget to tell Mrs Samuel Josephs when you want to” . . .

“Yes, Mother.”

“Dodn’t worry, Brs Burnell.”

At the last moment Kezia let go Lottie’s hand and darted towards the buggy.

“I want to kiss Grandma ‘good-bye’ again.” Her heart was bursting.

“Oh,
dear
me!” wailed Linda Burnell.

But the grandmother leant her charming head in the lilac flowery bonnet towards Kezia and when Kezia searched her face she said – “It’s alright, my darling. Be good.” The buggy rolled off up the road, Isabel, proudly sitting by Pat, her nose turned up at all the world, Linda Burnell, prostrate, and crying behind her veil, and the Grandmother rumminaging among the curious oddments she had put in her black silk reticule at the last moment for lavender smelling salts to give her daughter.

The buggy twinkled away in the sunlight and fine golden dust – up the hill and over. Kezia bit her lip hard, but Lottie, carefully finding her handkerchief first, set up a howl.

“Mo-ther! Gran’
ma
!”

Mrs Samuel Josephs, like an animated black silk tea-cosey, waddled to Lottie’s rescue.

“It’s alright, by dear. There-there, ducky! Be a brave child. You come and blay in the nursery.”

She put her arm round weeping Lottie and led her away. Kezia followed, making a face at Mrs Samuel Josephs’ placket, which was undone
as
usual with two long pink corset laces hanging out of it.

The Samuel Josephs were not a family. They were a swarm. The moment you entered the house they cropped up and jumped out at you from under the tables, through the stair rails, behind the doors, behind the coats in the passage. Impossible to count them: impossible to distinguish between them. Even in the family groups that Mrs Samuel Josephs caused to be taken twice yearly – herself and Samuel in the middle – Samuel with parchment roll clenched on knee and she with the youngest girl on hers – you never could be sure how many children really were there. You counted them and then you saw another head or another small boy in a white sailor suit perched on the arm of a basket chair. All the girls were fat, with black hair tied up in red ribbons and eyes like buttons. The little ones had scarlet faces but the big ones were white with blackheads and dawning moustaches. The boys had the same jetty hair, the same button eyes but they were further adorned with ink black finger nails. (The girls bit theirs, so the black didn’t show.) And every single one of them started a pitched battle as soon as possible after birth with every single other.

When Mrs Samuel Josephs was not turning up their clothes or down their clothes (as the sex might be) and beating them with a hair brush she called this pitched battle “airing their lungs”. She seemed to take a pride in it and to bask in it from far away like a fat General watching through field glasses his troops in violent action . . .

Lottie’s weeping died down as she ascended the Samuel Josephs’ stairs, but the sight of her at the nursery door with swollen eyes and a blob of a nose gave great satisfaction to the S.J.’s, who sat on two benches before a long table covered with american cloth and set out with immense platters of bread and dripping and two brown jugs that faintly steamed.

“Hullo! You’ve been crying!”

“Ooh! Your eyes have gone right in!”

“Doesn’t her nose look funny!”

“You’re all red-an’-patchy!”

Lottie was quite a success. She felt it and swelled, smiling timidly.

“Go and sit by Zaidee, ducky,” said Mrs Samuel Josephs, “and Kezia – you sit at the end by Boses.”

Moses grinned and pinched her behind as she sat down but she pretended to take no notice. She did hate boys!

“Which will you have,” asked Stanley, (a big one,) leaning across the table very politely and smiling at Kezia. “Which will you have to begin with – Strawberries and cream or bread and dripping?”

“Strawberries and cream, please,” said she.

“Ah-h-h!” How they all laughed and beat the table with their tea spoons. Wasn’t that a take in! Wasn’t it! Wasn’t it now! Didn’t he fox her! Good old Stan!

“Ma! She thought it was real!”

Even Mrs Samuel Josephs, pouring out the milk and water, smiled indulgently. It was a merry tea.

After tea the young Samuel Josephs were turned out to grass until summoned to bed by their servant girl standing in the yard and banging on a tin tray with a potato masher.

“Know what we’ll do,” said Miriam. “Let’s go an play hide-and-seek all over Burnells. Their back door is still open because they haven’t got the side board out yet. I heard Ma tell Glad Eyes
she
wouldn’t take such ole rubbish to a new house! Come on! Come on!”

“No, I don’t want to,” said Kezia, shaking her head.

“Ooh! Don’t be soft. Come – do!”

Miriam caught hold of one of her hands; Zaidee snatched at the other.

“I don’t not want to either, if Kezia doesn’t,” said Lottie, standing firm. But she, too, was whirled away . . . Now the whole fun of the game for the S.J.s was that the Burnell kids didn’t want to play. In the yard they paused. Burnells’ yard was small and square with flower beds on either side. All down one side big clumps of arum lilies aired their rich beauty, on the other side there was nothing but a straggle of what the children called “grandmother’s pin cushions”, a dull, pinkish flower, but so strong it would push its way and grow through a crack of concrete.