The Descendants: Modernism in the Age of the Market
My Katherine Mansfield Project by Kirsty Gunn.
Notting Hill Editions, 2016, $18.95 cloth.
Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish by Tom McCarthy.
New York Review Books, 2017, $16.95 paper.
“AND WON’T the ‘Intellectuals’ just hate it,” Katherine Mansfield wrote to a friend in 1918, on the eve of the publication of her long story Prelude as a book. “They’ll think it’s a new primer for Infant readers. Let ’em.” She knew many of these “Intellectuals” personally—indeed, counted many of them as friends. They included the publishers of Prelude, Leonard and Virginia Woolf at Hogarth Press. Mrs. Woolf wrote of her first meeting with Mansfield: “She stinks like a—well civet cat that had taken to street walking.” D. H. Lawrence would have been another of these hating “Intellectuals.” He had fallen afoul of Mansfield and her partner John Middleton Murry after his insistence on making Murry his “blood-brother” had alarmed her. “You are a loathsome reptile,” he would write to Mansfield two years later. “I hope you will die.” Mansfield would die, like Lawrence, of tuberculosis in France. But Mansfield herself might have hated Prelude—the Mansfield who wrote In A German Pension in 1911, her first collection of short stories. The men in those stories loved to eat, everything from bread soup to veal and sauerkraut; the women freely talked of bodily functions, and seemed abnormally proud of the number of children they had borne in their lives. Despite the cool voice, and the comedy of the conversations, it was difficult to tell such a book apart from propaganda, more so after the German defeat in World War I. One hears that early, more mordant Mansfield in the phrase “new primer for Infant readers.” Neither Woolf nor Lawrence could have been at once so disdainful and so sharp.
In fact, when they were not being rancorous, calling each other names in diaries and letters, the modernists directed their most intense criticism at themselves. “I have to write differently,” D. H. Lawrence wrote to his editor in 1913. “I have no longer the joy in creating.” With Virginia Woolf, it was not so much that human character had changed on or about December 1910, but that her sense of the world and its verities—a world she had inherited, in many ways, from her knighted father—had become obsolete. Whereas, beginning with , Mansfield wanted to write about the world that she had been born into, the bright New Zealand landscapes she left behind in adulthood for the dreariness of London:
