SECOND VIOLINS: New Stories Inspired By Katherine Mansfield
Ed. Marco Sonzogni
Vintage, $34.99, hbk
Although she has been dead 86 years, Katherine Mansfield's presence is still felt in the New Zealand literary world, and not just because of the awards and fellowships in her honour.
This collection celebrates her work in a new way: contemporary New Zealand writers were invited to take the first paragraph from one of Mansfield's late unfinished stories as a starting place for new work.
Mansfield had left at her death 15 stories that were intended for her next collection that she had been unable to finish, varying from substantial fragments such as "A Married Man's Story" or "The Dove's Nest" to evocative scraps of openings such as "Such a Sweet Old Lady" or miscellaneous bits of a story as in "Potts"; all are reprinted here as a group.
They point towards most of Mansfield's concerns: marriage and relationships, parents and children (of all ages), old age and death.
The contemporary writers have plenty to work with, to transform or translate into their own languages and concerns.
The variety of the translations and transformations is remarkable, Annemarie Jagose in "Kittenelle" takes the first few sentences of "The Married Man's Story" and changes the narrator and situation from the married man sitting at home in the evening reading and writing in front of the fire to an old female scholar in the sitting-room of a retirement home surreptitiously sipping brandy and working on her theory that could redeem her barren scholarly career - that there had been a brief lesbian relationship between Virginia Woolf and Mansfield.
"Reading" a scrap of paper with a bit of Mansfield's indecipherable handwriting as "evidence", she lies awake in her room afterwards, convinced she is "the only person in the world with this bit of knowledge. So tremblingly new, like a lapful of raspberry jelly, it can scarcely hold its shape."
This is a witty translation of Mansfield into academese.
The irony is as sharp as Mansfield's could be, but in an utterly different world.
Charlotte Grimshaw, on the other hand, in "The Olive Grove", a story that later made up part of her collection, Singularity, has "incorporated" the opening of "The Dove's Nest" "in spirit rather than exactly", but the story takes place in Mansfield's Menton, and the use of the child's-eye point of view and the exploration of the child's understanding of the complex adult world are very reminiscent of Mansfield's work.
It is a fully successful creation of a contemporary equivalent of a Mansfield story.
Vincent O'Sullivan in his "On a Differing Note" ends the story with the bleak opening paragraph of Mansfield's "Second Violin", and it works wonderfully, matching the mood of the main character who is deciding to end her relationship with her rock journalist boyfriend.
And so they go.
Each writer makes his or her own thing from the Mansfield starting point, in the process demonstrating the range of contemporary New Zealand fiction from several generations: from Marilyn Duckworth, O'Sullivan, Fiona Kidman, Albert Wendt, Witi Ihimaera, Fiona Farrell and Bill Manhire (a poem); to Stephanie Johnson, Peter Wells, Jagose, Catherine Chidgey, Grimshaw and Sarah Quigley; to Alice Tawhai, James George, Carl Nixon and Tracey Slaughter.
Not all of the stories are as superb as Jagose's or Grimshaw's or O'Sullivan's, but they are all well worth reading, from Farrell's portrait of a woman leaving her marriage with its verbal richness and wonderful imagery (taking off from Mansfield's images rather than her words), to Wells' witty portrait of an ageing homosexual couple on holiday (taking from the Mansfield fragment both words and situation).
The anthology offers the reader a unique way both to sample the variety of contemporary New Zealand fiction and to see how Mansfield's modes and themes can relate to contemporary life.
- Lawrence Jones is an emeritus professor of English.
