by Ali Smith
The letter has a separate footnote beneath the end of it where the editors of the book of letters quote a funny limerick she’s written earlier about this doctor: A doctor who came from Jamaica/Said: This time I’ll mend her or break her./I’ll plug her with serum/And if she can’t bear ’em/I’ll call in the next undertaker.
He riffles the pages, lets them fall open. She hears there’s a Russian doctor in Paris who can cure people with consumption outright by X-raying their spleens. He says he has cured 15,000 people. She tries to work out how to afford this doctor, who is very prestigious indeed, and clearly very rich. He sends her a letter telling her how much his seances, or sessions, cost. In it he uses the word guerison.
She writes to a friend on Christmas Day 1921 saying how much this word shines.
Richard doesn’t know what guerison means.
He looks it up on Google Translate.
Healing, cure.
Of course, there’s no cure for TB in being X-rayed. It’s a joke. It’s a swizz. The more he reads, the more he is angered on her behalf. He likes her, this woman who died a century ago. He likes her immensely. She is funny. It has all been mush of a mushness. She is brilliant, tricksy, arch, flirty, charming, and full of an unfathomable energy for someone so ill, full of black moods, yet I always write as though I am laughing. She finds Switzerland very laughable, but she likes it too, because the 3rd class passenger is just as good as the 1st class passenger in Switzerland, and the shabbier you are the less you are looked at. She is courageous beyond belief. She is fierce. I feel as fastidious as though I wrote with acid. She is generous. She sends an infatuated young writer, someone writing a fan letter to her and asking for advice, the name of a publisher; she says she’ll write to the publisher for this young writer and tell him about him. She tells this young man, I’m in love with life – terribly. She apologizes for the unfashionableness of being so in love with life. Then she writes, I am sending you a postcard of myself & the two knobs of the electric light. The photographer insisted they should be there as well.
That night, when Richard eventually gets himself off to bed, he dreams he is a young writer and that he answers the door to his flat and a postman hands him a sheaf of letters and one of them is from a woman who has sent him a picture of herself with her hand on a light switch shaped like a breast, like she is demonstrating electricity by holding electricity’s nipple.
It is unbelievably lovely.
He wakes up coming into his own hands.
He gets up, washes, drinks a glass of water, goes back to bed and back to sleep.
He sleeps well.
He wakes so late next day it’s already afternoon.
He spends what’s left of Sunday’s daylight hours browsing online to see if he can find the image that will have been on that postcard Katherine Mansfield sent to the young writer, the one with the electric light switch somewhere in it. He looks in Google Images. He looks on eBay. He looks on some of the countless sites that come up when you look up her name and the word postcard. By the end of the afternoon he hasn’t found the picture but he knows quite a lot about what some of the postcards Katherine Mansfield sent said.
It strikes him, as the dark comes down outside, that in paying this attention to Katherine Mansfield he has been neglecting the other writer, Rainer Maria Rilke.
So he types in, instead, just to see what will happen, R. M. Rilke followed by the word postcard.
Something does happen.
A series of sites comes up and each one tells a version of the same story, that a big reason R. M. Rilke even wrote one of his great works at all, a set of sonnets dedicated to Orpheus, in that turret in 1922, was that a lover of his had chanced to tack a postcard with a renaissance picture of the musician Orpheus on it to one of the walls in his writing room.
Orpheus, who went down into the underworld to find his dead wife, and he did find her, and nearly rescued her, nearly brought her back to the surface, back to life, but then he ruined it by turning to look at her when he’d been told specifically not to, because looking back at what is behind you, if you’re trying to get out of the world of the dead alive, is against the rules.
A couple of the internet sites reproduce the renaissance picture the poet had on his wall in postcard form. It’s not that beautiful. It’s not even that interesting. A curly-haired man wearing Roman-looking clothes and playing a stringed instrument is sitting in a tree that seems to have formed itself round him into an armchair. A small gathering of deer and rabbits is listening to him play.
It’s not an image that would’ve moved Richard to write a work of art.
It’s completely dark out now, the last October Sunday of summertime. Next week will be even darker. Richard puts the lights on all round his flat. As he moves from light switch to light switch he can feel the edges of himself all alive.
His lungs have started to hurt again too.
In the early evening he composes the following message. It takes him two hours to get right.
Dear Martin,
Thanks for the drafts.
To come straight to the point. If I’m to direct this project I want us to go about this story quite another way.
With respect I must confess to having been uneasy all along at the form of fictionalizing of real people’s lives that the script has taken thus far.
I’d like to suggest a radical departure.
Please hear me out.
I’m going to insist that if you want to work with me we approach this project differently and start over with a new script. Re this new script: I see it shaped formally as like a series of postcards from these writers’ lives. By which I mean depiction of very slight moments from their lives that will act as revelations of depth.
This I think is more in keeping with the spirit of the book we are adapting and also with the truth of a relationship between two real people who did not know each other and about which and whom, even though they may be famous writers with seemingly well-documented lives, we still know next to nothing.
Also with the time we are portraying, the postcard being the most contemporary and popular way of being in touch at this point in time, rather like the text or email or even instantgram of today.
Also it gives us a way to use both image and text. As well as a way to gesture towards some of the other things happening at the time in history I mean in the world as it was – as well as to the world as it is right now – but all of this with some courtesy towards truth and to what we know and don’t know in this instance.
For instance you will know K. Mansfield’s little brother Leslie whom she loved beyond belief died in 1915 in Belgium, when a grenade he was teaching recruits how to throw blew up in his hand.
And yet in 1918 she sends a postcard from Cornwall to her friend Ida in London (who she also sometimes as a pet name called Lesley, a version of her brother’s name) asking her to buy her the brand of cigarettes specifically called GRENADE. This is when she is already really ill with tuberculosis just diagnosed, and these are a particularly heavy duty kind of cigarette, it says in the Col. Letters of K Mansfield. She was not an unthinking user of words as I know from my own lengthy perusal of her letters etc. This is just one example. I am convinced there is mileage in this. Images/moments – take this one – will radiate by themselves with revelation of her spirit, anger, desperation, defiance. As well as, here for instance, the terrible unspoken story of the loss of the brother.
Add to this what a picture postcard, depicting a myth – Orpheus the mythical musician – meant to R. M. Rilke. I am sure you will know already from your research that the great poems he wrote in 1922 were partly inspired or enabled by an image on a postcard that his lover pinned on the wall in his writing room. A postcard meant that all those great poems somehow got themselves written.
The slightness of it gestures against the odds. It is like a magic spell.
And this in itself is very like the fact of those two writers just living in the same place at the same tim
e in their lives, whether they met or not.
This is the kind of coincidence that sends electricity through the truths of our lives.
Our lives which often have what we might call a postcard nature.
I hope you see what I am getting at?
I have always believed in not compromising the form the drama takes by underestimating what its natural potential offers.
I believe that if we pay this project the right and true attention the outcome could be really something. I feel that if we don’t it will be a waste and a lost chance.
Our April really could be something great.
Knowing this is a difficult letter to stomach. And with respect.
Look forward to hearing from you,
all the best,
R.
Richard reads it over.
He removes the word lengthy from the word perusal; he decides he doesn’t want to lie.
He makes the decision not to copy it to the office or the sponsors. He addresses it singly to Terp.
He reads it through once more and then, feeling a bit cavalier, he clicks the send box.
Remember Paddy and him at that big multimedia conference, Adjust Your Sets: The Future Is Spectacular, when was it, 1993? Onstage in one of the afternoon sessions a very young man, a graduate from Cambridge, was making a splash displaying a website (before very many people were even familiar with the word website) where he’d created and displayed the obituaries of people who’d never existed.
The young man was fashionable beyond self-doubt. He flashed up images on the big screen of gravestones, urns, photos of real people his website claimed were these ‘dead’ people, and of their families, their pets, their possessions. He displayed alongside this some of the messages that had come in from members of the public in response to the obituaries on the site.
They’d been truly moving, he said, deeply personal and responsive, real cries from the heart. A picture of a bicycle or a guitar that had ‘belonged’ to a ‘dead’ person could move strangers all over the world to tears.
But why? Richard had asked when it came to audience questions. Why are you doing this? Why go out of your way to create any of this at all?
To demonstrate what people will write or send when they contact the website, the young man said. People like feeling. They like to be asked to feel. Feeling is a very powerful thing. I’ve already been approached by numerous advertisers keen to advertise on Mourning Has Broken.
Do the people who respond to your, your, website, do they know that these people you’re displaying as having so sadly passed away are all completely made up? Richard said.
We explain that the profiles are fictional prototypes in the small print of the terms and conditions for initial log-in on the website, the man said. You have to log in if you want to send us a message. Which also means we have, as by-product, an expanding list, it’s called a database, of personal information about our website members.
But you’re lying, someone else in the audience said. You’re lying about life, about the deaths, and about emotional connection.
No, I’m storytelling, the young man said. The emotional connection is true. And it’s very very valuable.
But you’re pretending it’s real, and it isn’t, the woman holding the microphone said.
It is real, the young man said. It’s real if you think it is.
Paddy, sitting next to Richard, stood up. She waited for the microphone to be passed to her.
What you’ve just said about reality and thought is, if we’re talking philosophically, both interesting and bankrupt, she said. And very clever. It’s the ultimate immorality.
It’s a new morality, Terp onstage beneath the massive image of the graveyard had said.
Congratulations, Paddy said. You’re going to make a lot of money.
And not just for me, Terp said.
It makes me want to cry just seeing it, the next person who had the microphone said. Even though I know you’ve just made up that person and they’ve never died or anything. It makes me feel for what will be my own death, and for all the people I know who are going to die. Thank you.
No, thank you, Terp had said. Thank you for your feedback.
Far in the past, Richard, incredulous, is shaking his head.
Far in the future, Richard has just ordered a steak on Deliveroo on his Mastercard.
It’s touch and go as to whether any of his cards will work these days. But the order goes through. After he’s eaten, he’ll look up online some of Katherine Mansfield’s fiction. He really ought to read some now.
He spends his suppertime online trying to unsubscribe from a site he’s visited once and which now sends his inbox three advertising emails a day, a site on which every time you click the unsubscribe link you’re sent to a blank page. He is cramming the food delivery packaging into the binbag by the front door when his inbox lights up across the room. He doesn’t hurry back. It’ll be Dibs.com sending him more messages about things he never wanted to buy in the first place to prove to someone or something somewhere how much advertising clout Dibs.com has.
It’s a message from Terp.
He sits down. He opens it.
Subject : Insta-grandad
Thank you you Dick for your email. The really exciting news is we’ve found an actress who thinks she actually is Katharine Mansfield. I mean really her reincarnated – yeah she psychotically believes herself to be her. I’m not joking. And she is AMAZING. The vibe that comes off her is so strong. She says she even tried to contract TB herself once so she could more authentically feel the whole experience! Mad eh mate! Pleased to say I am already getting spectacularly good feedback on the new drafts, backers readers are loving them I’ve also been requested by broadcaster to include more varied ethnicity in the project and am looking at range of new hotel worker characters/visiting dignitary guests to tick those boxes any inspiration here v welcome. Thanks etc for all ideas etc all ideas always welcome looking forward to your feedback and to seeing you tomorrow PLUS I’ve just been reading up on 1940s in Swiss sanatoriums where people got sent into coma on and off for a year as sleep cure and how if they did this they might wake up not just cured but also looking 20 years younger for the record. !! something you’d like to try yourself Dick? ;) Think I can work it into script. What if she never died or not till the 1970s or something? – turnup for the books eh! Yes we can change history
till tomorrow
MT
Terp has deleted Richard’s original email from the bottom of this one and copied this reply to the broadcaster, the backers, and everybody at the office.
Insta-grandad
Thank you you Dick
something you’d like to try yourself
Cheeky little fucker.
Richard breathes in.
It hurts.
He breathes out.
It hurts.
A horse hoof with a wooden peg nailed through it, seen up close.
A letter, unfolded, with a word in it in another language which shines so strongly that the light that comes off it lights a dark room.
A small boy manning a lift in a grand hotel. Here comes the dying woman again. What can he give her today? His forehead creases; you can see the lines form in it.
With his own head full of the wasted images Richard shuts the lid of his laptop.
11.59.
The station automaton announces the arrival of a train. It tells him that ScotRail apologizes for the late running of the service and for any inconvenience caused.
Richard is sorry too. He’d like to apologize. He knows he is being as clichéd as a character in a Terp drama. But what can he say? He is sorry, sorry, sorry. He is sorry.
He also knows he is and will be being recorded by CCTV cameras on both sides of the station. He knows these are the kinds of cameras that don’t know anything, don’t show anything beyond surface. He knows that what they do is the stupid new way of knowing everything.
He is pretty sure he can move
faster than any people who may or may not be paying attention to CCTV images wherever those people may be in the station. It’s as if those images the cameras will take of him, though they haven’t even happened yet, are already somewhere behind him. They belong to posterity. They’re not about now.
He also knows, and he’s sorry, that he will be leaving a mess for someone else to clear up after him.
He doesn’t know what else to do.
Sorry.
He is ten years old, a boy with his arms out wide from his sides, not playing aeroplanes like the other post-war boys, no, his arms are not wings, or about flight. What they’ve become is the long flexible pole of a boy on a tightrope as high as the clouds (so high the clouds sometimes dampen his fringe).
He is balancing against air on a wire as thin as the stuff inside his father’s fishing reels. His father is a man who, though that war is more than a decade in the past, more than a lifetime ago to his son, wakes up shouting in the middle of the night, then gets up and batters himself against the doors of the big wardrobe his parents have in their room.
He himself, on the other hand, has achieved a near-impossible standard for a boy of ten, of balance and height against the odds.
Now Richard is in his thirties, in bed with the woman who’ll become his wife. When is this? More than thirty years ago. His future wife, in his arms, is crying because spring, her favourite season, is over.
You can’t cry about summer coming, he says. I could understand you crying about winter. But summer?
