… Have you kept birds? If you haven’t all this must sound, perhaps, exaggerated. People have the idea that birds are heartless, cold little creatures, not like dogs or cats. My washerwoman used to say every Monday when she wondered why I didn’t keep “a nice fox-terrier”, “There’s no comfort, Miss, in a canary.” Untrue! Dreadfully untrue. I remember one night. I had had a very awful dream — dreams can be dreadfully cruel — even after I had woken up I could not get over it. So I put on my dressing-gown and went down to the kitchen for a glass of water. It was a winter night and raining hard. I suppose I was still half asleep, but through the kitchen window, that hadn’t a blind, it seemed to me the dark was staring in, spying. And suddenly I felt it was unbearable that I had no one to whom I could say “I’ve had such a dreadful dream”, or “Hide me from the dark”. I even covered my face for a minute. And then there came a little “Sweet! Sweet!” His cage was on the table, and the cloth had slipped so that a chink of light shone through. “Sweet, Sweet!” said the darling little fellow again, softly, as much as to say, “I’m here, Missus! I’m here!” That was so beautifully comforting that I nearly cried.
… And now he’s gone. I shall never have another bird, another pet of any kind. How could I? When I found him, lying on his back, with his eye dim and his claws wrung, when I realised that never again should I hear my darling sing, something seemed to die in me. My heart felt hollow, as if it was his cage. I shall get over it. Of course. I must. One can get over anything in time. And people always say I have a cheerful disposition. They are quite right. I thank my God I have.
… All the same, without being morbid, and giving way to — to memories and so on, I must confess that there does seem to me something sad in life. It is hard to say what it is. I don’t mean the sorrow that we all know, like illness and poverty and death. No, it is something different. It is there, deep down, deep down, part of one, like one’s breathing. However hard I work and tire myself I have only to stop to know it is there, waiting. I often wonder if everybody feels the same. One can never know. But isn’t it extraordinary that under his sweet, joyful little singing it was just this — sadness? — Ah, what is it? — that I heard.
About Katherine Mansfield
Katherine Mansfield, short-story writer and poet, was born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp in 1888 in Wellington. At 19, she left for the UK and became a significant Modernist writer, mixing with fellow writers such as Virginia Woolf, TS Eliot and DH Lawrence. She wrote five collections of short stories, the final one being published posthumously by her husband, the writer and critic John Middleton Murry, along with a volume of her poems and another of her critical writings. Subsequently there have been collections of her letters and journals. She died of tuberculosis at the age of 34 at Fontainebleau. Although New Zealand settings do feature in her works, she looked to European movements in writing and the arts for inspiration, and also wrote stories with a European setting.
Virginia Woolf famously admitted that Mansfield was the only writer she was jealous of, and it is believed that conversations with Mansfield prompted Woolf to write Mrs Dalloway. Many writers in the 1930s, such as Christopher Isherwood and Aldous Huxley, consciously adopted Mansfield’s pioneering styles, and, along with DH Lawrence, used her character (she was called ‘a dangerous woman’) in their fiction. This parallel influence of her life as well as her literary voice has continued in such works as CK Stead’s novel Mansfield. The clarity and vividness of her pared-back writing lend it a timeless quality that continues to weave its magic with new readers.
Roger Robinson writes that it took 50 years for ‘New Zealand imaginative writing to begin to engage with this complex presence in the country’s cultural history’ (The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature). Since then, Murry’s tireless efforts to establish Mansfield’s reputation have been built upon by others, with much scholarly attention, and leading to the five-volume Letters, edited by Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott, and Anthony Alpers’ seminal biography. In 1959 the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Awards were established, and in 1970 the Mansfield Memorial Fellowship was created.
About Vincent O’Sullivan
Vincent O’Sullivan is an editor, poet, short story writer, novelist, playwright, essayist, academic and critic and has served as literary editor to the New Zealand Listener. Among other residencies and fellowships, O’Sullivan has held the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship in Menton, France, and has won numerous literary prizes throughout his distinguished career, including several Montana Book Awards. In 2000, he was made a Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit. He is a graduate of the University of Auckland and Oxford University, and has lectured at Victoria University of Wellington and the University of Waikato. In 1997, he became Director of Victoria University’s Stout Research Centre, and is now Emeritus Professor of English. In 2004 he was awarded the Creative New Zealand Michael King Writer’s Fellowship, and in 2006 he received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement.
Known for his powerful intellect, and the broad range of his writing, O’Sullivan has also earned international acclaim as the joint editor, with Margaret Scott, of the five-volume Letters of Katherine Mansfield.
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