Katherine Mansfield International Approaches 1St Edition Janka Kascakova Online Ebook Texxtbook Full Chapter PDF

You might also like

Download as pdf or txt
Download as pdf or txt
You are on page 1of 68

Katherine Mansfield International

Approaches 1st Edition Janka


Kascakova
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmeta.com/product/katherine-mansfield-international-approaches-1st-editi
on-janka-kascakova/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Circulating Genius John Middleton Murry Katherine


Mansfield and D H Lawrence 1st Edition Sydney Janet
Kaplan

https://ebookmeta.com/product/circulating-genius-john-middleton-
murry-katherine-mansfield-and-d-h-lawrence-1st-edition-sydney-
janet-kaplan/

A Contrary Wind A variation on Mansfield Park 1st


Edition Lona Manning

https://ebookmeta.com/product/a-contrary-wind-a-variation-on-
mansfield-park-1st-edition-lona-manning/

Towards Convergence in International Human Rights Law


Approaches of Regional and International Systems 1st
Edition Carla M. Buckley

https://ebookmeta.com/product/towards-convergence-in-
international-human-rights-law-approaches-of-regional-and-
international-systems-1st-edition-carla-m-buckley/

Introduction To International Relations: Theories And


Approaches (8th Edition) Georg Sørensen

https://ebookmeta.com/product/introduction-to-international-
relations-theories-and-approaches-8th-edition-georg-sorensen/
International Baccalaureate IB Mathematics HL analysis
and approaches November 2021 Paper With Marking Scheme
International Baccalaurete Orgnizaton

https://ebookmeta.com/product/international-baccalaureate-ib-
mathematics-hl-analysis-and-approaches-november-2021-paper-with-
marking-scheme-international-baccalaurete-orgnizaton/

London House 1st Edition Katherine Reay

https://ebookmeta.com/product/london-house-1st-edition-katherine-
reay/

Civil Savage 1st Edition Katherine Anderson

https://ebookmeta.com/product/civil-savage-1st-edition-katherine-
anderson/

Restrained Desires 1st Edition Katherine Mcintyre

https://ebookmeta.com/product/restrained-desires-1st-edition-
katherine-mcintyre/

Empirical International Entrepreneurship A Handbook of


Methods Approaches and Applications 1st Edition Vahid
Jafari-Sadeghi

https://ebookmeta.com/product/empirical-international-
entrepreneurship-a-handbook-of-methods-approaches-and-
applications-1st-edition-vahid-jafari-sadeghi/
Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield has been widely recognised as one of the key authors
of her generation, continuing to influence literary modernism and the
short story genre through her nomadic existence, colonial perspective,
eclectic interests and impressive range of literary acquaintances. This
volume utilises these seemingly endless avenues for critical exploration,
analysing Mansfield’s influences, including the familial, historical and
geographical as well as literary and artistic approaches. Some connections
are well established and acknowledged, some controversial, many still
undiscovered. This volume brings a fresh collection of original viewpoints
on Katherine Mansfield’s life and work, both of which, in her own case,
are frequently indistinguishable. It investigates her fascinating connection
with Poland which is explored in a complex and detailed way for the first
time; suggests new or revised views on her connections to other English
and American writers; and finally examines some of the aspects of her
writing process, her engagement with the arts, imagination, memories
and her constructions of different kinds of space.

Janka Kascakova is an Associate Professor at the Catholic University


of Ružomberok, Slovakia, and Palacký University Olomouc, the Czech
Republic, and earned her PhD in English literature (on Katherine
Mansfield’s modernism) from the Comenius University, Bratislava,
Slovakia (2007). She is the Vice-President of the Katherine Mansfield
Society, co-editor of several volumes including Katherine Mansfield and
Continental Europe: Connections and Influences (2015), translator of
Katherine Mansfield’s short stories into Slovak (2013) and the author
of numerous articles, book chapters and a full monograph on Katherine
Mansfield (2015).

Gerri Kimber is a Visiting Professor in English at the University of


Northampton, UK. She earned her PhD (2007) from the University of
Exeter, UK, for a thesis examining Katherine Mansfield’s reception in
France. She is a co-editor of the annual yearbook Katherine Mansfield
Studies and is the author of Katherine Mansfield: The Early Years (2016),
Katherine Mansfield and the Art of the Short Story (2015) and Katherine
Mansfield: The View from France (2008). She is the Series Editor of the four-
volume Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield
(2012–16) and is currently co-editing a new, four-volume, complete edition
of Mansfield’s letters.

Władysław Witalisz is a Professor in the English Department of the


Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, and earned his PhD (1996)
and post-doctoral degree (2011) in English literature from the Jagiellonian
University. He has published numerous articles on medieval romance,
medieval religious literature and Shakespeare. He is the author of The
Trojan Mirror: Middle English Trojan Narratives as Books of Princely
Advice (2011).
Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature

Literary Criticism, Culture and the Subject of ‘English’:


F.R. Leavis and T.S. Eliot
Dandan Zhang

Clemence Dane
Forgotten Feminist Writer of the Inter-War Years
Louise McDonald

Memory, Voice, and Identity


Muslim Women’s Writing from across the Middle East
Edited by Feroza Jussawalla and Doaa Omran

Postcolonial Realism and the Concept of the Political


Eli Park Sorensen

William Faulkner and Mortality


A Fine Dead Sound
Ahmed Honeini

T. S. Eliot’s Ariel Poems


Making Sense of the Times
Anna Budziak

Katherine Mansfield
International Approaches
Edited by Janka Kascakova, Gerri Kimber and
Władysław Witalisz

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www​.routledge​


.com​/Routledge​-Studies​-in​-Twentieth​-Century​-Literature​/book​-series​/
RSTLC
Katherine Mansfield
International Approaches

Edited by Janka Kascakova,


Gerri Kimber and Władysław Witalisz
First published 2022
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2022 selection and editorial matter, Janka Kascakova, Gerri
Kimber and Władysław Witalisz; individual chapters, the
contributors
The right of Janka Kascakova, Gerri Kimber and Władysław Witalisz
to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the
authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance
with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-032-05855-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-05856-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-19952-6 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003199526
Typeset in Sabon
by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
Contents

List of figures ix
List of contributors x
Acknowledgements xiii
List of abbreviations xiv

Introduction 1
JANKA KASCAKOVA, GERRI KIMBER AND WŁADYSŁAW WITALISZ

PART I
The Polish Katherine Mansfield 7
1 ‘From the other side of the world’: Katherine Mansfield,
Poland and Poetry 9
GERRI KIMBER

2 God the Father: Stanisław Wyspiański and Katherine


Mansfield 24
WOJCIECH BAŁUS

3 The Deed, the Dead and the Living Blood: Katherine


Mansfield’s ‘To Stanislaw Wyspianski’ and Its
Translation into Polish by Floryan Sobieniowski 47
MAGDA HEYDEL

4 Between Absence and Presence: On Katherine


Mansfield’s Early Reception in Poland 66
JOANNA SOBESTO
viii Contents
PART II
Katherine Mansfield’s Connectivity 83
5 Absence, Distance and Influence: Dorothy Wordsworth’s
Journals, Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry 85
RICHARD CAPPUCCIO

6 Compassion and Moral Responsibility: Emma and


‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ 101
JANKA KASCAKOVA

7 The Perils of Autobiography: Katherine Mansfield and


the Case of George Gissing 115
ANN HERNDON MARSHALL

8 Gendered Violence and Narrative Complicity in


Katherine Mansfield and Leonard Woolf: ‘The Woman
at the Store’ and ‘A Tale Told by Moonlight’ 131
ELYSE BLANKLEY

9 Katherine Mansfield’s American Legacy: The Case of


Dorothy Parker 143
SYDNEY JANET KAPLAN

PART III
Arts, Spaces and the Writing Process 157
10 Making Music, Making Room: Musical Performances
and the Construction of Space in the Works of
Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf 159
ANNA LAWATTANATRAKUL

11 Waves and ‘moment[s] of suspension’: Katherine


Mansfield’s Painterly and Kinetic Language in Fiction 171
TRACY MIAO

12 The Function of the Domestic Garden Space in ‘Prelude’


and ‘At the Bay’ 183
ANNA KWIATKOWSKA

13 On Being Chased by a Bull: Imagination, Writing and


the Rush of the Short Story 200
KIRSTY GUNN

Index 211
Figures

2.1 Stanisław Wyspiański, murals on the northern wall


of the choir of the Franciscan church in Kraków
(St Michael the Archangel and the Fall of the Rebel
Angels) (1895), together with two stained-glass
windows depicting The Element of Fire (1897–9).
Photo credit: Piotr Guzik 25
2.2 Stanisław Wyspiański, St Francis of Assisi, stained-
glass window in the choir of the Franciscan church in
Kraków (1897–9). Photo credit: Corpus Vitrearum
Poland (Grzegorz Eliasiewicz and Rafał Ochęduszko) 27
2.3 Stanisław Wyspiański, God the Father, stained-
glass window in the western wall of the Franciscan
church in Kraków (1897–1904). Photo credit: Corpus
Vitrearum Poland (Grzegorz Eliasiewicz and Rafał
Ochęduszko) 28
2.4 Stanisław Wyspiański, right hand of God the Father.
Photo credit: Corpus Vitrearum Poland (Grzegorz
Eliasiewicz and Rafał Ochęduszko) 29
2.5 The Holy Cross church in Kraków c. 1900. Photo
credit: Architekt 1, 1900 30
2.6 Marian Pavoni, the central part of the main altar in
the Dominican church in Kraków (1876–84). Photo
credit: Daniel Podosek 39
3.1 Floryan Sobieniowski, ‘To Stanislaw Wyspianski’,
Gazeta Poniedziałkowa [Monday Newspaper], 36 (26
December 1910) p. 1. Photo credit: Jagiellonian Library 56
Contributors

Wojciech Bałus is a Professor at the Institute of Art History, Jagiellonian


University, Poland. His field of study includes the theory and history of
art from the nineteenth century to the present, as well as the relations
between art and philosophy, cultural anthropology and literary studies.
Elyse Blankley is a Professor of English at California State University, Long
Beach, USA. She has presented widely on literary modernism and has
published reviews and essays on Anglo-American modernists and con-
temporary American writers. Her most recent essay, on Leonard Woolf,
appears in Queer Bloomsbury.
Richard Cappuccio has presented papers at the Katherine Mansfield Society
and the International Virginia Woolf conferences. Recent publications
appear in Katherine Mansfield Studies and the Journal of New Zealand
Literature. He is a letterpress printer and also tends his garden alongside
his wife in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Kirsty Gunn is a Professor of Writing Practice and Study at the University
of Dundee, UK. She is the author of six novels – Rain, The Keepsake,
Featherstone, The Boy and the Sea, The Big Music and Caroline’s Bikini,
as well as extended essays and short stories about identity and Katherine
Mansfield. She is the recipient of a number of international awards and
prizes.
Magda Heydel is Professor of Literature and Translation Studies at
Jagiellonian University in Kraków. She has published two monographs
on the presence of T. S. Eliot’s work in Polish literature (2003) and on
Czesław Miłosz’s poetic translations (2013). She has co-edited three
anthologies of Translation Studies, most recently Polish Translation
Studies in Action. Concepts-Methodologies-Application (2019). She is
the editor-in-chief of Przekładaniec. A Journal of Literary Translation.
She is also an award-winning literary translator into Polish, and her
translations include works by Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, Seamus
Heaney, Alice Oswald and Katherine Mansfield.
Contributors  xi
Sydney Janet Kaplan is a Professor of English and Adjunct Professor of
Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington,
Seattle, USA. She is the author of Circulating Genius: John Middleton
Murry, Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence; Katherine Mansfield
and the Origins of Modernist Fiction; and Feminine Consciousness in the
Modern British Novel.
Janka Kascakova is an Associate Professor in English at the Catholic
University in Ružomberok, Slovakia, and Palacký University in Olomouc,
the Czech Republic. She is the Vice-President of the Katherine Mansfield
Society and the author of numerous articles, book chapters and a mono-
graph on Katherine Mansfield (2015), as well as a translator of her short
stories into Slovak (2013).
Gerri Kimber is a Visiting Professor at the University of Northampton,
UK, and co-editor of Katherine Mansfield Studies and was Chair of the
Katherine Mansfield Society for ten years. She is the deviser and Series
Editor of the four-volume Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of
Katherine Mansfield (2012–16), and together with Claire Davison is cur-
rently preparing a new four-volume edition of Mansfield’s letters, also
for EUP.
Anna Kwiatkowska is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Literary
Studies in the Department of Humanities at the University of Warmia-
and-Mazury, Olsztyn, Poland. She specialises in the works of Katherine
Mansfield and E. M. Forster. She is the Secretary of the International E.
M. Forster Society, a member of the Katherine Mansfield Society and a
member of the International Society for the Study of Narrative.
Anna Lawattanatrakul holds a BA in Language and Culture from
Chulalongkorn University, Thailand, and an MLitt in Modern and
Contemporary Literature and Culture from the University of St Andrews,
UK. She is independently researching the influence of music on early
twentieth-century women writers, while working as a journalist and lit-
erary translator.
Ann Herndon Marshall lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, with her husband
Richard Cappuccio. She is interested in Victorian and Edwardian writ-
ers like George Gissing against whom modernists define their project.
Encouraged by the current opening of the literary canon to women writers
outside the obviously experimental Bloomsbury group, she has especially
enjoyed writing about Elizabeth von Arnim and Vita Sackville-West.
Tracy Miao (Miao Miao) is a lecturer at Xi’an International Studies
University, China, where she teaches literary as well as language courses.
She has published reviews, articles and book chapters on Katherine
Mansfield. Her recent essay ‘Katherine Mansfield and the East’ is pub-
lished in The Bloomsbury Handbook to Katherine Mansfield (2020).
xii Contributors
Joanna Sobesto is a translator and PhD student in the Polish Department at
the Jagiellonian University, Poland, where she earned her BA in Cultural
and Translation Studies. She devoted her MA to a study of the recep-
tion of Katherine Mansfield in Poland. Her areas of academic interest
are mainly translation studies and translation history. She is currently
working on her doctoral thesis, investigating the politics of translation
in interwar Poland.
Władysław Witalisz is a Professor in the English Department of the
Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland. He completed his PhD on
medieval literature and art in 1996 and received his post-doctoral degree
from the Jagiellonian University in 2011. He has published numerous
articles on medieval drama, romance, medieval religious literature and
Shakespeare. He is the author of The Trojan Mirror: Middle English
Trojan Narratives as Books of Princely Advice (2011) and is co-editor of
the Peter Lang series Text-Meaning-Context.
Acknowledgements

We would like to offer our sincere thanks to the Jagiellonian University


(IDUJ POB Heritage Project) for their financial support of this volume.
Special thanks also go to the Society of Authors as the literary representa-
tives of the Estate of Katherine Mansfield, for granting permission to repro-
duce all copyright material, and especially Sarah Baxter. We would also
like to thank the incredibly professional team at Routledge, and especially
Senior Editor Michelle Salyga, Editorial Assistant Bryony Reece, and our
copy editor Grainne O’Shea. Special thanks also go to our diligent indexer
Ralph Kimber. The outstanding contributors to this volume were a pleasure
to work with and made our task as editors an enjoyable experience.
Abbreviations

Unless otherwise indicated, all references to Katherine Mansfield’s works


are to the editions listed below and abbreviated as follows. Letters, diary
and notebook entries are quoted verbatim without the use of editorial ‘[sic]’.

NB: Mansfield frequently uses style ellipses in both her personal writing and
her short stories. Where these occur the stops (which can vary in number)
are double-spaced thus: . . . . To avoid any confusion, all omission ellipses
in the volume are therefore placed in square brackets […].
CP The Collected Poems of Katherine Mansfield, eds Gerri
Kimber and Claire Davison (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2016).
CW1 and CW2 The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of
Katherine Mansfield: Vols 1 and 2 – The Collected
Fiction, eds Gerri Kimber and Vincent O’Sullivan
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012).
CW3 The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works
of Katherine Mansfield: Vol. 3 – The Poetry and
Critical Writings, eds Gerri Kimber and Angela Smith
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014).
CW4 The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of
Katherine Mansfield: Vol. 4 – The Diaries of Katherine
Mansfield, including Miscellaneous Works, eds Gerri
Kimber and Claire Davison (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2016).
Letters 1–5 The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, 5 vols,
eds Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1984–2008).
Introduction
Janka Kascakova, Gerri Kimber
and Władysław Witalisz

Referring to the happy times she had spent in Menton in the south of France,
Katherine Mansfield once wrote to her lifelong friend and companion Ida
Baker: ‘How hard it is to escape from places. However carefully one goes
they hold you – you leave little bits of yourself fluttering on the fences – like
rags and shreds of your very life’.1 This is one of the many moments in her
correspondence which affirms Mansfield’s supreme talents as a short story
writer. In the middle of a letter full of mundane concerns and banal chatter,
in two short sentences she suddenly expresses an idea others would have
invested many more words trying to explain, and still never coming near
the accuracy and pertinence of her deceptively simple statement. Mansfield,
seemingly only talking about her own life, in fact also captures the creative
method associated with literary modernism. Indeed, critic Kathleen Wheeler
encapsulates all the definitions of the modernist short story which have
evolved over the years and sets Mansfield’s work into this body of evidence:

Modernist fiction largely dispensed with (or even de-emphasised) plot,


action, drama, structure, shape, development, and so on [...]. These
conventions are used in the service of the greater expression of the inte-
rior life, though not at the expense of social relations and externalised
dramatics which provide a social-realist context. Mansfield’s stories and
many other modernist fictions, then, are not quite accurately described
as rejecting such conventions, so much as for wrenching them away
from traditional emphasis on the realistic representation of external,
social, public relations, which relegate interiority to the sidelines or
even into virtual non-existence.2

Thus, the reader is destined to keep coming back to those metaphorical


fences, lifting the sun-bleached and weatherworn scraps that cling to them,
reconstructing out of them fragmented and ambiguous images which ulti-
mately represent something profound and universal.
This new volume of essays delves further into the international dimen-
sion of Mansfield’s oeuvre, exploring both the personal experiences that
shaped her writing, as well as the influence she herself would exercise over

DOI: 10.4324/9781003199526-1
2 Kascakova, Kimber and Witalisz
the evolution of the modernist short story, which would lead critics such as
Peter Childs to acknowledge that she was ‘the most important modernist
author who only wrote short stories’.3 What is more, it is not only a ques-
tion of lifting and examining these ‘rags and shreds’ but also, and more
importantly, a question of locating the fences to which they cling when the
whirlwind that was Mansfield flew by in her desperate quest to squeeze into
the brief time that remained to her all those ‘sorts of lives’ she yearned to
experience.4
To say that Mansfield was itinerant is a massive understatement; follow-
ing the departure from her native New Zealand in 1908 at the age of 19,
she was, it would appear, in constant motion, and especially in the last 5
years of her life, both in spite of – and as a consequence of – her terminal
diagnosis of pulmonary tuberculosis, which killed her in January 1923, less
than 3 months after her 34th birthday. She was a restless bird on the wing,
flitting from one place to another, alone or with different people, for a vari-
ety of reasons, with joy, with sorrow, voluntarily or out of necessity, con-
stantly looking for a home, a place to belong, yet never really achieving her
goal. The accounts in her letters and notebooks of these many journeys and
sojourns in different countries and places reflect these manifold aspects; she
often records pleasure, her sense of adventure and artistic enrichment, but
conversely also the feelings of futility, acute loneliness and loss. However,
it is not only her physical travelling but also her unquenchable, intellectual
and spiritual curiosity, the multitude and variety of sources and stimuli she
constantly sought and absorbed that create a road map for today’s schol-
ars searching for new approaches to her writing, for hitherto undiscovered
pathways, and those still unidentified ‘rags and shreds’ to be recovered and
examined, in order to appreciate anew her genius.
Although some preliminary work on Mansfield’s connection to central
and eastern Europe in general, and Poland in particular, has already been
undertaken in the last decade, the first part of this volume, entitled ‘The
Polish Katherine Mansfield’, offers a much more detailed and broader exam-
ination of her fascinating connection with Poland. This association revolves
around Mansfield’s short-lived relationship with translator and critic
Floryan Sobieniowski and his devotion to one of Poland’s most important
artists, Stanisław Wyspiański, which he passed onto Mansfield. The chap-
ters in this part reveal how fruitful yet controversial this interaction proved
to be and the myriad ramifications that ensued, not only for Mansfield and
her oeuvre but also for the future understanding and reception of her work
in Poland. Gerri Kimber opens the part with an examination of some of the
poems Mansfield wrote during her stay in Bavaria in 1909 or soon after
her return to London in early 1910, when she was conducting her brief
but intensive love affair with Sobieniowski, and traces in them references
to, and possible echoes of, the works of Stanisław Wyspiański, the lead-
ing poet, playwright and visual artist of the Young Poland movement. In
the next chapter, Wojciech Bałus offers an art historian’s introduction to
Introduction 3
Wyspiański’s visual art, and more particularly his work on the redecora-
tion of the interior of the Franciscan Church in Kraków and in particular
the monumental stained-glass window God the Father in its western nave,
which Kimber previously identified as an inspiration for Mansfield’s poem
‘To God the Father’.5 Bałus debates the connection between the power-
ful Creator from Wyspiański’s window and ‘the little, pitiful God’ from
Mansfield’s poem, and searches for other possible artistic impulses that may
have influenced her during her likely visit to Kraków. The third chapter,
by Magda Heydel, compares Mansfield’s poem ‘To Stanislaw Wyspianski’
with Sobieniowski’s significantly unfaithful translation into Polish and
raises important questions about the translator’s own agenda in creating
this unusual rendition. In the final chapter of the part, Joanna Sobesto eval-
uates Poland’s connection with Mansfield, by tracing the ups and downs
of the history of the translation, reception and positioning of Mansfield in
Polish literature and culture.
The authors of the chapters in the second part, ‘Katherine Mansfield’s
Connectivity’, consider various aspects of Mansfield’s connections to the lit-
erary world. Some continue to search for Mansfield’s inspirations, this time
among Anglo-American writers; others discover how Mansfield’s own writ-
ings, in turn, influenced later twentieth-century literature in English. Richard
Cappuccio begins by reading the notes Mansfield made in the margins of
her copy of Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals and discusses the influence the
journals had on her, especially on the consistently female perspective of
her writing. Janka Kascakova discusses the morally controversial attitudes
expressed by – and read into – Mansfield’s narratives depicting vulnerable
characters. In particular, Kascakova focuses on ‘The Daughters of the Late
Colonel’ within the context of Jane Austen’s Emma, a text Mansfield knew
well, and finds her narrative voice in the story to be, like Austen’s, full of
understanding and compassion. Ann Herndon Marshall reads Mansfield’s
short story ‘The Tiredness of Rosabel’ as a corrective to George Gissing’s
depictions of working-class girls in his novels, and in particular her story
‘Carnation’ as a reaction to his novel Eve’s Ransom, showing how Mansfield
enters into a debate with the novel and criticises the confessional nature of
Gissing’s writing. Elyse Blankley offers a parallel reading of two stories:
Mansfield’s ‘The Woman at the Store’ and Leonard Woolf’s ‘A Tale Told
by Moonlight’, viewing them as similarly critical exposés of gendered and
colonial violence. Blankley argues that the presentation of violent, domes-
tic relationships in both stories reveals their ability to question the norms
of patriarchy and English imperial authority. Sydney Janet Kaplan’s chap-
ter on Mansfield’s American legacy focuses on the importance of Dorothy
Parker’s review of the Journal of Katherine Mansfield in the New Yorker on
8 October 1927 in creating a certain image of Mansfield in the USA and in
boosting her popularity among American readers. Kaplan also argues that
Parker’s familiarity with Mansfield’s writings can be traced in many of the
American writer’s own works which satirise class and race.
4 Kascakova, Kimber and Witalisz
The third and final part, ‘Arts, Spaces and the Writing Process’, focuses
on Mansfield’s absorption of a number of international, literary and
artistic influences, which shaped the way she thought about writing, and
contributed to the development of her own literary techniques. Anna
Lawattanatrakul explores the references to music in the works of Virginia
Woolf and Mansfield from a spacial point of view, revealing how the rep-
resentations of women’s musical performances in the confined, gendered
space of the drawing room contribute to the authors’ critique of traditional
gender roles. Tracy Miao examines the importance of the narrative pause
that Mansfield uses so often and argues that her modernist ‘freeze-frame’
technique, akin to the concept of ‘suspension’ in Post-Impressionist paint-
ing, or the ballet dancer’s choreographic stasis in mid-air, is an important
marker of Mansfield’s own aesthetic expression. Anna Kwiatkowska looks
at Mansfield’s two favourite narrative spaces, the home and the garden, and
studies the implications of the effect of the narrative and descriptive merg-
ing and intertwining of both spaces in her connected stories ‘Prelude’ and
‘At the Bay’. As Kwiatkowska considers the domestic in the architecture of
Mansfield’s imagined gardens, she defines the author’s unique narrative per-
spective which brings together the interior and the exterior, both in terms of
space and characterisation. The final chapter of the volume by Kirsty Gunn
continues the nature theme and searches for it in Mansfield’s own memory
of her homeland. Gunn explores the legacy of the mostly untamed, indig-
enous landscape Mansfield grew up in – its traps, terrors and excitements
– and shows how she negotiated, via her powerful imagination, the close,
mysterious world of the dense New Zealand bush which both captivated
and horrified her.
In her now legendary review of Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day,
Mansfield criticised Woolf for her treatment of minor characters which,
she felt, although they were kept ‘within the circle of steady light’, the light
seemed ‘to shine at them, but not through them’.6 For Mansfield, charac-
terisation, even of minor figures in a story, should have a purpose and be
meaningful. Indeed, the faithful Ida Baker once famously called Mansfield
‘a lantern with many windows’,7 and of course the symbolical, visual centre-
piece of this volume, illuminating both Mansfield’s modernity as well as her
life struggles, is Wyspiański’s stunning stained-glass window. And so per-
haps the ‘rags and shreds’ metaphor from the beginning of this Introduction
might now be reconfigured as shards of colourful glass of all shapes and
sizes, through which are refracted multiple aspects of Mansfield’s own life,
as well as her luminous, modernist stories.

Notes
1 Letters 1, p. 122. 7 March 1922.
2 Kathleen Wheeler, Modernist Women Writers and Narrative Art (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1994), p. 124.
3 Peter Childs, Modernism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2001), p. 94.
Introduction 5
4 Letters 1, p. 19.
5 Gerri Kimber, ‘“That Pole outside our door”: Floryan Sobieniowski and Katherine
Mansfield’, in Katherine Mansfield and Continental Europe: Connections and
Influences, eds Janka Kascakova and Gerri Kimber (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2015), pp. 59–83.
6 CW3, p. 533.
7 Ida Baker, Katherine Mansfield: The Memories of LM (London: Virago, 1985),
p. 233.
Part I

The Polish Katherine


Mansfield


1 ‘From the other side
of the world’
Katherine Mansfield, Poland and Poetry
Gerri Kimber

Today, Katherine Mansfield is well known as one of the most exciting and
cutting-edge exponents of the modernist short story. Little critical atten-
tion, however, has been paid to her poetry, which seems a strange omission,
given how much verse she wrote during the course of her short life, starting
as a very young schoolgirl, right up until the last months prior to her death
in 1923. Even Mansfield devotees are not really familiar with many poems
beyond the five or six that have most frequently been anthologised since her
death. Mansfield’s husband, John Middleton Murry, edited a slim volume,
Poems, in 1923, within a few months of her death, followed by a slightly
extended edition in 1930, and another selection, also titled Poems, was pub-
lished by OUP in 1988.1 Unsurprisingly, therefore, critics and biographers
paid little attention to Mansfield’s poetry, tending to imply that it was a
minor feature of her art, both in quantity and, perhaps more damagingly, in
quality. Yet, in a notebook jotting in January 1916, Mansfield made the fol-
lowing candid admission: ‘I feel always trembling on the brink of poetry’.2
This imbalance was recently addressed by the publication in 2014 of vol-
ume 3 of the Edinburgh Edition of Mansfield’s Collected Works, edited by
myself and Angela Smith, which included her poetry,3 and by the standalone
volume, The Collected Poems of Katherine Mansfield, published in 2016,
edited by myself and Claire Davison.4 This latest edition reveals the sheer
quantity of Mansfield’s poetry which remains extant, and affirms her abso-
lute need to find an outlet for such poetic expression throughout her life.
In this chapter, I want to concentrate on the poems which were written in
Bavaria in 1909, many of which were collected in Mansfield’s poetry book
manuscript The Earth Child, sent unsuccessfully to a London publisher in
1910 – and which remained forgotten and untouched in the archives of
the Newberry Library in Chicago, until my discovery of it in 2015. These
poems also connect us to Poland, as I shall reveal. In addition, the discovery
last year of another poem by myself and Claire Davison offers yet another
glimpse into Mansfield’s possible Polish connections.
In May 1909, Mansfield had been taken to Bavaria by her mother,
who believed a water cure would turn her daughter away from lesbian-
ism, the only reason she could come up with as to why she might have

DOI: 10.4324/9781003199526-3
10 Gerri Kimber
left her then-husband, George Bowden, the morning after her wedding. In
reality, Mansfield (who indeed had had bisexual relationships) had married
the hapless Bowden to provide legitimacy for her unborn child, the result
of a previous liaison, which her family – and indeed George Bowden him-
self – were unaware of. In late June 1909, in Bad Wörishofen, Mansfield
tragically lost the baby she was carrying but stayed on in the spa town for
another seven months, the memories of which would be channelled into
her first story collection – a series of satirical sketches – titled In a German
Pension (1911).5 Whilst in Bavaria, she was soon caught up in a group of
central European, mostly Polish, émigrés, for the most part writers, artists
and intellectuals, which included Floryan Sobieniowski (1881–1964). He
was a devotee of Stanisław Wyspiański (1869–1907), the recently deceased
Polish artist, designer, poet and playwright from Kraków, who became one
of the figureheads of Polish nationalism, and whose early death occasioned
days of national mourning in Poland.
Mansfield and Sobieniowski soon began an intense love affair, and her
immersion in that bohemian community of central and East European
writers left a lasting impression on her creative imagination, long after the
romance itself had soured. Nevertheless, in late December 1909, having
promised to follow him to Paris in order to set up home together, Mansfield
suddenly abandoned Sobieniowski and returned to London. She returned
briefly to her estranged husband, George Bowden, before once more
abandoning him and having surgery – apparently for ‘peritonitis’ – but in
fact, almost certainly an ectopic pregnancy, resulting from her affair with
Sobieniowski.
Elsewhere, I have written at length about the relationship between
Mansfield and Sobieniowski,6 where I suggested that they did in fact
travel to Poland together in the late autumn of 1909, that they visited
Kraków and that she saw the evidence of Wyspiański’s artistic achieve-
ments visible everywhere in his home town. If there was no visit, then
she clearly must have seen photographic reproductions provided by
Sobieniowski, because the fact remains that the image from what has
now become Poland’s most iconic stained-glass window was etched into
Mansfield’s mind when she wrote her poem ‘To God the Father’. I dis-
covered in 2010, following a personal visit to Kraków, that this poem
described a stained-glass window, ‘God the Father, Let It Be’, designed
by Wyspiański for the Franciscan Church, portraying a monumental
figure of God in the act of creation. The window had been installed
in the Franciscan church in 1904, three years before Wyspiański’s
death in 1907. In her poem Mansfield’s descriptions echo the design of
Wyspiański’s window:

To the little, pitiful God I make my prayer


The God with the long grey beard
And flowing robe fastened with a hempen girdle
Who sits nodding and muttering in the all-too-big throne of Heaven
‘From the other side of the world’ 11
What a long, long time, dear God, since you set the stars in their
places
Girded the earth with the sea, and invented the day and night.
And longer the time since you looked through the blue window of
Heaven
To see your children at play in a garden . . . . .
Now we are all stronger than you and wiser and more arrogant
In swift procession we pass you by.
‘Who is that marionette nodding and muttering
In the all-too-big throne of Heaven?
Come down from your place, Grey Beard,
We have had enough of your play-acting!’
It is centuries since I believed in you
But today my need of you has come back.
I want no rose-coloured future
No books of learning – no protestations and denials –
I am sick of this ugly scramble,
I am tired of being pulled about –
O God, I want to sit on your knees
In the all-too-big throne of Heaven.
And fall asleep with my hands tangled in your grey beard.7

Indeed, Sobieniowski’s devotion to Wyspiański was soon shared by


Mansfield, resulting in another poem written by her at this time: ‘To
Stanislaw Wyspianski’.8 The poem was later freely translated into Polish
with a commentary by Sobieniowski and published in a Warsaw weekly
in December 1910. Speaking in her own voice as the colonial subject from
New Zealand, Mansfield clearly unites the cause of one small, occupied
country with another:

From the other side of the world,


From a little island cradled in the giant sea bosom,
From a little land with no history,
(Making its own history, slowly and clumsily
Piecing together this and that, finding the pattern, solving the problem,
Like a child with a box of bricks),
I, a woman, with the taint of the pioneer in my blood,
Full of a youthful strength that wars with itself and is lawless,
I sing your praises, magnificent warrior; I proclaim your triumphant
battle.9

Beyond the powerful personal voice, however, these ardent lines are very
much in keeping, in tone, vocabulary and rhetorical intensity, with Walt
Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, particularly the panoramic ‘Swift wind!
Space! My Soul’ section, and the overarchingly Messianic voice of a politi-
cal prophet. As Mansfield’s early notebooks make clear, she had been
12 Gerri Kimber
reading Whitman’s poetry since at least 1907. In addition, the intensity of
the poem’s personal, ardent admiration for Wyspiański himself points to a
physical knowledge and understanding of his achievements in Kraków – as
evidenced in her vivid descriptions within the poem, including those ‘clog-
ging tendrils’ – still visible today in so many of his paintings and decorative
church walls, and which seem hard to reconcile with knowledge of just a
couple of photographic postcards, if no visit to Kraków took place.10
The third poem, ‘Floryan Nachdenklich’ [‘Floryan Pensive’], was written
during Mansfield’s relationship with Sobieniowski in 1909:

Floryan sits in the black chintz chair,


An Indian curtain behind his head
Blue and brown and white and red.
Floryan sits quite still – quite still.
There is a noise like a rising tide
Of wind and rain in the black outside.
But the firelight leaps on Floryan’s wall
And the Indian curtain suddenly seems
To stir and shake like a thousand dreams.11

It is a warm, delightful poem, expressing both affection and admiration,


clearly composed at the height of their romance, reflecting an intimacy that
had vanished by the end of 1909, when she made the decision to return to
London and ‘normal’ life.
Until recently, it was believed that these three were the only poems writ-
ten by Mansfield in Bavaria in 1909. However, two recent discoveries reveal
that Mansfield had been a prolific writer of poetry during 1909, continuing
after her return to England. A book-length selection of poems compiled
by Mansfield, many of which had clearly been written earlier, was sent to
the London publisher Elkin Mathews in the second half of 1910, as I men-
tioned earlier. The unpublished book manuscript was bequeathed to the
Newberry Library in Chicago in 1999, by its previous owner, Jane Warner
Dick, where it remained unnoticed until my discovery of it in May 2015.
The collection affirms how, although Mansfield was starting to have stories
accepted for commercial publication at this time, she was also evidently tak-
ing herself seriously as a poet.
The Earth Child manuscript comprises 36 typewritten poems, of which
only 9 had been previously published. The others were unknown and are
mostly of the very best quality, arguably representing some of the finest
poems Mansfield ever wrote, and, moreover, containing information for
which almost no other biographical evidence is available. Furthermore,
read as a poem-cycle, rather than as individual poems, which is clearly how
she presented the manuscript, since the first 28 are presented as a sequence
of numbered poems without titles, the manuscript reveals a very different
literary style and shape. It shows the development of Mansfield’s lyrical
‘From the other side of the world’ 13
voice and poetic persona, providing a fascinating bridge from her earliest
poems, sketches and vignettes, through the prose-poems written during the
months she spent back in Wellington in 1907–08 following her schooling in
London, leading eventually to the composition of her pitch-perfect modern-
ist short stories, written in the years before her death in 1923, thus offering
new insights into her evolution and apprenticeship as a writer.
A couple of years earlier, in 1907, when still in New Zealand, Mansfield
had composed a book of children’s verse – her first collection of poetry
intended for publication – to be illustrated by talented professional artist
Edith Bendall, nine years her senior (and with whom she conducted a youth-
ful affair for a short time). The venture was inspired by her cousin Elizabeth
von Arnim’s hugely successful publication, The April Baby’s Book of Tunes,
first published in 1900, a mix of little tales, songs and nursery rhymes, with
beautiful illustrations by Kate Greenaway. The manuscript and drawings
were sent off to a publisher in America, but without success. Mansfield’s
poems were eventually returned, the illustrations sadly lost. Nevertheless,
four of the poems would go on to represent some of her earliest profes-
sional publications.12 That collection of poems, however, which are all now
published in the Collected Poems,13 has little literary merit, whereas the
unknown collection in the Newberry revealed Mansfield to be at the height
of her poetic powers.
The Earth Child manuscript was clearly never accepted for publication,
and if Mansfield did receive a rejection note, it no longer survives. Evidently,
however, the publisher retained two of Mansfield’s letters, together with
her original manuscript, since they now form part of the Newberry collec-
tion. Dated 8 November 1910 and 15 January 1911, the letters chronicle
Mansfield’s failed efforts to persuade publisher Elkin Mathews to print the
poems. The second letter is written in a tongue-in-cheek style, pleading with
him to put her out of her misery on whether her material will be accepted
or not:

Dear Mr. Mathews


May I hear from you soon the fate of my poor ‘Earth Child’ Poems – I
really am worrying about her immediate future – yea or nay.
Love her or hate her, Mr. Mathews, but do not leave her to languish!
Sincerely yours
Katharina Mansfield14

Many years later the collection found its way into an auction (the cut-out
auction listing is also to be found in the folder containing the manuscript, but
with no date) and subsequently, in 1999, as noted earlier, was bequeathed
to the Newberry Library.
Mansfield’s choice of publisher is revealing. Charles Elkin Mathews
(1851–1921) was a British publisher and bookseller who played an impor-
tant role in the literary life of London in the late nineteenth and early
14 Gerri Kimber
twentieth centuries, having strong contacts with the Irish Literary Society,
Rhymers Club and the Arts and Crafts Movement. His publishing catalogue
included names such as Oscar Wilde and Arthur Symons, and later on he
would publish volumes of poetry by W. B. Yeats, Lionel Johnson, James
Joyce, Ezra Pound and Robert Bridges, among others. From 1892 to 1894
he worked in partnership with the publisher John Lane, culminating in the
publication of the infamous Yellow Book in 1894, a leading journal of the
day, associated with both Aestheticism and Decadence. The journal had
exerted a deep fascination for Mansfield during her late teenage years, when
death, love, decay and extreme emotion were all expressions of her mind-set,
revealed in her fiction and personal writing from this period. This influence
culminated in the first of her stories written in dialogue form, ‘The Yellow
Chrysanthemum’,15 composed in March 1908 at the height of her fascina-
tion with Wilde, the Decadents and of course the notorious Yellow Book.
Thus, the Earth Child poems comprise a fascinating record of Mansfield’s
literary endeavours in 1909–10, as well as offering an incisive illustration of
her ability to forge a new literary voice assembled from personal memory,
intercultural experimentation and contextual echoes. Of course, had Elkin
Mathews published the collection instead of rejecting it, Mansfield might
have trod a much more assured – and renowned – poetic literary path.
Later in her life, Mansfield destroyed as much personal material – diaries,
notebooks, letters – from the years 1909–11 as she could, because she was
embarrassed – and possibly ashamed – of much of her conduct during this
time. These were Mansfield’s ‘experimental’, hedonistic years, where she
could be found smoking hashish with Aleister Crowley, where she had one –
possibly two – abortions, and where she suffered a traumatic stillbirth alone
in Bavaria in June 1909. And as noted earlier, it was whilst in Bavaria that
she conducted an intense affair with Sobieniowski, from whom she almost
certainly contracted the gonorrhoea that would blight her health thereafter
until its formal diagnosis and treatment in 1918. Also during her time in
Bavaria (and possibly as a result of the trauma of her stillbirth) Mansfield
had become addicted to Veronal (a barbiturate), a habit she found hard
to conquer for many months afterwards. And just to add to the complica-
tions in her life at this time, there also followed another affair when back
in England during 1910–11, with both young schoolmaster William Orton
and his then-girlfriend, Edna Dixon. As a result, uncovering any material
from this period, such as the Earth Child collection, offers a rare glimpse
into her mindset at this time.
Despite Mansfield’s hedonistic behaviour during this troubled interlude
in her life, there are some touching poems in the collection, redolent with
metaphors about children and love. The generic versatility that is a hallmark
of Mansfield’s poetry as a whole – her ability to move between lyric, satire,
parody and elegy – is much in evidence here. There is also a striking com-
parison to be made with Heine’s poem-cycle ‘The North Sea’, from his Book
of Songs (Buch der Lieder, 1827). The Earth Child shares with Heine a
‘From the other side of the world’ 15
combination of elfin and human characters, fairy-tale-like settings, a lyrical
first-person speaker who occasionally takes on a slightly ironical, distanced
stance, reflections on childhood and pastoral memories. Heine’s poetry was
much in vogue in early twentieth-century Germany, and indeed Central
Europe as a whole, on account of its Romantic anti-authoritarianism.
Although Mansfield had been gifted her copy of his Book of Songs in 1903,
she may well have encountered Heine’s poems anew through Sobieniowski
and his circle of émigré writers during her stay in Bavaria in 1909.
In poem III of the Earth Child collection, for example, the lyrical ‘I’
takes the reader into an eerie, fantasy world reminiscent of much late
Romantic German and Central and East European poetry – Goethe, Heine,
Lermontov, Kuprin and Mickiewicz, for instance. Mansfield’s familiarity
with such works can be traced back to London, where, since the 1830s,
translations of Russian and Central European poetry had circulated, or to
Sobieniowski’s own émigré circle in Germany:

III
Through the dark forest we walked apart and silently
Only the dead leaves beneath our feet kept up a ghostly conversation.
As we touched them – they cried out: ‘It is all over you are killing us’.
Yet with swift steps and joyfully, we walked through the muffled
forest.
A wild scent burst from the ground and broke over us in waves
The naked branches stiffened against the black air.
Behind us an army of ghosts mimicked our steps
They caught at the trailing shadows and fashioned them into cloaks.
And pretended that under their cloaks, like us, they were trembling
and
burning.
On the brow of the hill we stopped – the ghosts forsook us
The forest drew back and the road slipped into the plains.
A moon swung into the sky – we faced each other
He said! ‘Do not fly away’.
I said: ‘Are you a dream’
We touched each other’s hands.16

Additionally, her reworking of classic fairy-tale motifs, such as we find


in poem XIV, reveals a mature, ‘modern’ voice creeping through, where
modernity meets fantasy in her poetry for the first time:

XIV
A little wind crept round the house
It rattled the windows and door handles
‘Let me in – let me in’, it lamented.
But I pulled the curtain and lighted my lamp.
16 Gerri Kimber
‘O, how can you be so cruel’, sobbed the wind
‘My wings are tired: I want to go to sleep in your arms
There is peace in your heart, and a soft place for a tired child’.
I bent low over my books
‘The night is so dark and the shadows are hurting me’.
I opened my window, leaned out and took the wind to my bosom
For a moment he lay silent
Then drew a long breath and opened his eyes
Maliciously smiling.
He sprang from my arms – blew out the lamp
Scattered the book leaves, leapt and danced on the floor
‘Did you know’, he sang,
‘There was a spark in your heart
I have kindled it into flame with my breath –
Now rest if you can’.17

Furthermore, some of these poems could only have been written for – or
about – Sobieniowski. For example:

III
Through the dark forest we walked apart and silently
Only the dead leaves beneath our feet kept up a ghostly conversation.
[…]18

XI
Sometimes when my room is flooded with blue light
– The blue light that you love –
And I look out over the snow –
I wonder: ‘Shall I call to him?’
But my wise heart answers: ‘No,
Perhaps he is sleeping’.
[…]19

XVIII
There are days – O, they are many – when I am possessed by you.
Their shape and colour and sound – above all sound
(The voice of rain and wind
Leaves in a tree – the lapping of water,
The noise of cart wheels on a wet road
[…]20

XXII
In the swiftly moving sleigh
We sat curled up under the bear skin rugs
And talked of the dangers of life.
‘From the other side of the world’ 17
You told me all your adventures
And though they were very terrible and violent
I could not help laughing, sometimes you ceased speaking
Turned to me with a funny gravity
‘I just escaped being killed’.
Then our laughter rang over the snow

These are just a few examples. The proliferation of descriptions of snow,


forests and water, together with references to an unnamed lover, all point to
the influence of Mansfield’s time in Bavaria with Sobieniowski.
As I mentioned in my introduction, there is also another poem written
during this period to add to Mansfield’s Bavarian poetry collection. Last
year, whilst researching in the British Library for our forthcoming new four-
volume edition of Mansfield’s letters for EUP, Claire Davison and I came
across a strange little collection of photocopied pages from an old autograph
book, which included a hitherto unknown poem by Mansfield, handwrit-
ten, signed and dated ‘09’. It is a formally conventional composition called
‘To You’, with three four-line stanzas. What is fascinating, however, is the
story behind the poem. As the date indicates, the poem was written during
Mansfield’s stay in Bad Wörishofen, and it thus affords us yet another tan-
talising glimpse into that obscure period of her life. Understandable as it is
that Mansfield did her utmost to cover up the traces of this painful period,
it is no less fascinating today to uncover unexpected pieces of the jigsaw
puzzle of those difficult months in continental Europe.
The documents in the British Library comprise a sequence of pages from
an autograph book belonging to an unspecified female acquaintance of
Mansfield’s, which in itself is intriguing, since we have no record of any
female friendships during her sojourn in Bavaria. Mansfield’s poem figures
alongside other inscriptions, all literary, quite heightened and flattering in
tone. They are also in four different languages. Besides Mansfield’s poem
in English, there is a slightly misquoted, well-known extract from The
Merchant of Venice, signed by a certain Eugenie Littauer, beginning ‘All
that glitters is not gold’. Another inscription from a woman is in French:
a Mademoiselle Odette Moursy, writing ‘with fond memories’, and dated
16 September 1908. There follow two entries in Russian, dated September
1909. This autograph book in which Mansfield’s poem figures might well
have belonged to a fellow guest at the spa, or even perhaps another resident
of the Pension Müller itself, when Mansfield resided there. Frustratingly, we
were unable to discover who had deposited these few, tantalising photocop-
ied pages from it in the British Library.
In her poem, Mansfield does not just address the enigmatic ‘you’ of the
title; instead she has flicked back though the autograph album itself to see
how others have commemorated its owner and seized on two phrases:
‘Lady as tigress’, and ‘Lady with flower’. And, rather impossibly in logical
terms, but rather evocatively as a trope, she conflates both to create the line:
18 Gerri Kimber
‘Tigress with a flower in your hair’. There’s an artful, bold, post-impression-
ist touch here, as if prefiguring the artistic milieu towards which Mansfield
would later gravitate, when she would become closely linked with artists
such as J. D. Fergusson, Anne Estelle Rice and Dorothy Brett.
Here then is the context in which Mansfield’s neat little composition
figures:

‘To You’

There are two portraits, sketched in this your Book;


The first has something of a Tigress air
But fascinating! And the second, look,
Profile, with just a flower in your hair

And, looking at these portraits, I can see


Your Modern Soul, the greatness of your Part.
Indeed, indeed, they both reveal to me
You are an Artist, with the Artist’s heart.

I have not seen you play, but yet I know


How well you play, with what a grace – an air!
Till I am tempted to describe you so –
A Tigress with a Flower in your Hair.21

One tantalising lead as to a possible identity is to be found in lines 5–6:


‘And, looking at these portraits, I can see / Your Modern Soul, the greatness
of your Part’. She reinforces the theme of theatricality and performance,
both directly and indirectly, pointing us in the direction of perhaps the most
accomplished of her German Pension stories, itself titled ‘The Modern Soul’.
It is a story which blends pastiche, social satire and an archly poised autho-
rial ‘I’, with an incisive, wicked eye for ridicule, and a dramatic rendering
of performers performing. Indeed, its sense of timing and voice is so artfully
balanced that it could almost be a script for actors, as Mansfield targets her
satire on the medley of hotel guests, rather than the local Bavarian citizens
who feature in many of the other stories. Such an approach echoes another
story in the collection, ‘The Luftbad’, which also ridicules the pretensions
and practices of the cure guests in the Bavarian spa town, and their barely
restrained smouldering sexuality and greed.
The principal male character in ‘The Modern Soul’ is the trombone-play-
ing Herr Professor who plays in the pine woods so as to be accompanied by
the sighing delicacy of the trees, and who clutches a bag of worm-infested
cherries between his knees. However, he is not the story’s ‘Modern Soul’.
This privilege goes to Sonia Godowska from Vienna, a stage-struck, hyper-
sensitive young actress whom the trombone professor claims once to have
‘described in her autograph album as a tigress with a flower in the hair’ (my
‘From the other side of the world’ 19
italics).22 Sonia Godowska teeters ardently on the brink of modernity – she
recites Ibsen, entreats her audiences to go with her ‘as lightly draped as pos-
sible’ to the pine woods, ‘and bed with her among the pine needles’,23 but
almost swoons with horror when anything intimate concerning the body is
mentioned. As she tells her mother, ‘I would rather my skirt dropped off my
body’,24 than hear any hint of down-to-earth vulgarity.
Sonia Godowska has been read by some critics as a wickedly ironical self-
portrait by Mansfield. Nothing could be more understandable – Mansfield
frequently plays with literary masks and deflected identification, just as she
doubtless joins Sonia in finding ‘in all the works of all the greatest writ-
ers, especially in their unedited letters, some touch, some sign of myself’.25
Now, however, with an autograph book and an evocation of a tigress in
hand, things become more complicated. Could Sonia Godowska have been
inspired by someone else residing at the Pension Müller, since she was
clearly known to Mansfield? Might her name even suggest the presence
in Bad Wörishofen of another ‘modern soul’, the passionate Polish harp-
sichordist Wanda Landowska (1879–1959), renowned for her heightened
sense of dramatic performance, and often hailed as the ‘high priestess of the
harpsichord’?26 This makes sense when we recall the first two lines of the
last stanza: ‘I have not seen you play, but yet I know / How well you play,
with what a grace – an air!’
Wanda Landowska, a member of Natalie Clifford Barney’s famed
Parisian lesbian salon, was almost single-handedly responsible for the revival
of the harpsichord as a performance instrument in the twentieth century. As
Patricia Juliana Smith notes, ‘In her enthusiastic research to uncover the for-
gotten music and performance styles of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies, she paved the way for today’s interest in authentic performances of
early music on original instruments’.27 Landowska had married Polish folk-
lorist Henryk Lew in 1900, who encouraged her research and performance
of early music, and assisted her in writing the book, Musique ancienne
(1909).28 Nevertheless, as Smith notes, ‘While the relationship was a mostly
supportive one, Landowska wished to be relieved of the sexual aspects
of marriage’. At the beginning of the marriage, therefore, ‘she arranged a
ménage à trois, by hiring a maid who would also function as Lew’s mistress.
The situation was apparently satisfactory for all involved, and, even after
Lew died in 1919, the maid remained in the musician’s service until the lat-
ter’s death’.29 From 1912 to 1919 she had taught harpsichord at the Berlin
School of Music, and following Lew’s death settled in Paris, ‘often provid-
ing musical accompaniment for the various artistic functions of [Barney’s]
renowned lesbian salon’.30 In the 1930s, Landowska met Denise Restout,
‘who became, in turn, her student, her life companion, and the preserver
of her artistic legacy’.31 It is entirely possible that Landowska could have
been a ‘cure’ guest in Bad Wörishofen at the same time as Mansfield and
Sobieniowski, and her presence would have undoubtedly caused a stir in
the small spa town. As a highly competent cellist herself, Mansfield would
20 Gerri Kimber
have delighted in the contact with Landowska, and of course Sobieniowski
would have been on hand to facilitate any conversations between the two
women.
After Mansfield abandoned Sobieniowski at the end of 1909 and
returned to London, he spent a year in Paris and Munich before return-
ing to Poland in 1911. There he made a name for himself as a transla-
tor of Walt Whitman’s poetry – a fascination he almost certainly inherited
from Mansfield, whose admiration for the American poet is clearly reflected
in her own poetic endeavours at this time, and particularly visible in the
Whitmanesque style of her own poem ‘To Stanislaw Wyspianski’, as noted
earlier. In 1912 Sobieniowski moved to London and renewed contact with
Mansfield, so that by the sixth issue (July 1912) of Rhythm, the little maga-
zine she was now co-editing with her new partner John Middleton Murry,
Sobieniowski was listed as the magazine’s ‘Polish correspondent’. In his
autobiography, Murry noted his own reaction to Sobieniowski:

Suddenly a Slavonic friend of Mansfield’s came to England, and being


penniless, came to us, with two big black trunks full of books and man-
uscripts, for he was a writer. Once again, we resented this intrusion
upon us, not personally, but as an unkind stroke of fortune, that would
not suffer us to be alone. We made him welcome, though he was a bur-
den to our purse as well as our spirit. In the solemn autumn evenings the
house would echo to his forlorn Slav songs, and once more we would
be spell-bound by a sense of the precariousness of all things human and
lovely.32

Alexander Janta, a Polish poet and translator, once recorded the fact that
Mansfield and Murry had planned to devote an entire issue of Rhythm to
the work of Wyspiański.33 This would have been a considerable achieve-
ment and done much to raise awareness of Wyspiański’s genius outside
his native land. Unfortunately, the project was never realised: it was first
threatened by complications in the relationship between Mansfield, Murry
and Sobieniowski, and was finally destroyed by the editors’ bankruptcy and
the demise of the magazine in March 1913. Nevertheless, Sobieniowski
remained the ‘Polish correspondent’ until the very last issue.
Having moved on from his role as Rhythm’s ‘Polish correspondent’,
Sobieniowski’s 1913 translation of Irish playwright J. M. Synge’s The
Playboy of the Western World, a project apparently suggested by Mansfield,
was praised by Polish scholar A. Bruce Boswell, enabling Sobieniowski to
then make contact with George Bernard Shaw. He was soon granted exclu-
sive Polish translation rights to Shaw’s output, becoming the first to translate
him from the original English, rather than from German; indeed, Pygmalion
was staged in Warsaw as early as 1913. The quality of Sobieniowski’s trans-
lations was later contested by critics, but nevertheless they became his entry
ticket into British literary circles. He also translated a number of Polish plays
‘From the other side of the world’ 21
into English, including Wyspiański’s most celebrated drama, The Wedding,
in collaboration with E. H. G. Pearson.
Sobieniowski continued to make London his home until 1931. He then
moved to Warsaw, where he lived during the war, before returning to
London in 1945, where he remained for two years as a cultural attaché at
the Polish embassy; there he renewed his acquaintance with Shaw and con-
tinued his translation work. In 1959, five years before his death in Warsaw,
Sobieniowski again turned his attention to the literary remains of his intense
relationship with Mansfield from 50 years earlier, probably inspired by two
recent publications: a new translation of ‘To Stanislaw Wyspianski’ by the
Polish poet Beata Obertyńska, and a critical essay on Mansfield by Polish
literary scholar Wiktor Weintraub. He himself published a translation of the
short story ‘The Baron’ from In a German Pension, and then revisited his
own translation of ‘To Stanislaw Wyspianski’, adding a new commentary
to the poem in which he shed more light on his role as Mansfield’s ‘guiding
spirit’ at that time.
It was clearly a brief but nevertheless intense love affair that Mansfield
fled from at the end of 1909. For several years afterward, perhaps as a
result of guilt at her own shoddy behaviour and unease over the informa-
tion Sobieniowski possessed about her early personal life, she could never
deny her former Polish lover favours. Finally, in 1920, Mansfield paid
Sobieniowski the equivalent of £40 – around £3000 in today’s money – to
retrieve all the letters she had written to him during their relationship, which
were then apparently burned. For his part, as noted above, Sobieniowski
remained faithful to his memories of Mansfield till the end of his life.
As for Mansfield, her early affection for Sobieniowski is best revealed in
the poem ‘Floryan Nachdenklich’, mentioned earlier in this essay, written at
the height of their love affair in Bavaria in 1909, before tenderness gave way
to annoyance – and worse. Perhaps this is the best and most fitting epitaph
for a relationship that fed into Mansfield’s creativity in a remarkable, and
as yet not fully appreciated way:

Floryan sits in the black chintz chair,


An Indian curtain behind his head
Blue and brown and white and red.
Floryan sits quite still – quite still.
There is a noise like a rising tide
Of wind and rain in the black outside.
But the firelight leaps on Floryan’s wall
And the Indian curtain suddenly seems
To stir and shake like a thousand dreams.
The Indian flowers drink the fire
As though it were sun, and the Indian leaves
Patter and sway to an echo breeze.
On the great brown boughs of the Indian tree
22 Gerri Kimber
Little birds sing and preen their wings.
They flash through the sun like jewel rings.
And the great tree grows and moves and spreads
Through the silent room, and the rising tide
Of wind and rain on the black outside
Fades – and Floryan suddenly stirs
And lifts his eyes, and weeps to see
The dreaming flowers of the Indian tree.

Notes
Gerri Kimber would like to record her grateful thanks to Claire Davison and
Magdalena Heydel, without whose scholarship this essay would be the poorer.
1 John Middleton Murry, ed., Poems by Katherine Mansfield (London: Constable,
1923); John Middleton Murry, ed., Poems by Katherine Mansfield (London:
Constable, 1930); Vincent O’Sullivan, ed., Poems of Katherine Mansfield
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
2 CW4, p. 192.
3 CW3.
4 See CP.
5 Katherine Mansfield, In a German Pension (London: Stephen Swift, 1911).
6 See Gerri Kimber, ‘“That Pole outside our door”: Floryan Sobieniowski
and Katherine Mansfield’, in Katherine Mansfield and Continental Europe:
Connections and Influences, eds Janka Kascakova and Gerri Kimber (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 59–83.
7 CP, p. 91.
8 The title of Mansfield’s original poem does not contain any Polish diacritical
marks.
9 CP, p. 71.
10 ‘How could they know of poisonous weed, of rotted and clogging tendrils?’, CP,
p. 72.
11 CP, p. 71.
12 ‘The Lonesome Child’ was published in the Dominion, Wellington, 1: 217, 6
June 1908, p. 11, a month before Mansfield left New Zealand for the last time.
Similarly, ‘A Little Boy’s Dream’ was published in the Dominion, Wellington,
1: 221, 11 June 1908, p. 5. ‘A Day in Bed’ was published in the Lone Hand,
Sydney, 1 October 1909, p. 636, with its third verse omitted. ‘The Pillar Box’
was published in the Pall Mall Magazine, London, 45: 202, February 1910,
p. 300.
13 CP, pp. 28–47.
14 CW4, p. 463.
15 CW1, pp. 116–19.
16 CP, p. 77.
17 CP, p. 82.
18 CP, p. 77.
19 CP, p. 80.
20 CP, p. 84.
21 British Library, archives and manuscripts collection, RP 7880/2.
22 CW1, p. 215.
23 CW1, p. 218.
24 CW1, p. 217.
‘From the other side of the world’ 23
25 CW1, p. 219.
26 Martin Elste, The High Priestess of the Harpsichord: Wanda Landowska
and Early Music. Catalogue for the Temporary Exhibition at the Berlin
Musikinstrumenten-museum (13 November 2009 to 28 February 2010), trans.
Oliver Dahin (Berlin: SIMPK, 2009).
27 Patricia Juliana Smith, ‘Landowska, Wanda, (1879–1959)’, entry in glbtq ency-
clopedia: http://www​.glbtqarchive​.com​/arts​/landowska​_w​_A​.pdf (accessed 3
June 2020).
28 Wanda Landowska, Musique ancienne (Paris: Mercure de France, 1909).
29 Smith, online.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid.
32 John Middleton Murry, Between Two Worlds (London: Jonathan Cape, 1935),
p. 233.
33 See Kimber, p. 76.
2 God the Father
Stanisław Wyspiański and
Katherine Mansfield
Wojciech Bałus

I
Katherine Mansfield’s fascination with Poland’s most celebrated artist,
Stanisław Wyspiański, its origins and development, have already been the
subject of critical commentary, most recently by Mirosława Kubasiewicz
and Gerri Kimber.1 Kubasiewicz draws parallels between various aspects
of Mansfield’s writing and the production (literary or otherwise) of the
multi-talented Pole, illustrating why it was so easy for Mansfield to feel
such an immediate connection to the one she styled ‘magnificent warrior’,
and ‘master’ in her poem celebrating him.2 Kimber discusses the histori-
cal background of Mansfield’s Polish connection, her acquaintance with
Floryan Sobieniowski, first her lover, later an unwelcome nuisance, who,
however, introduced her to Wyspiański’s work. She presents a bold yet
compelling hypothesis that Mansfield and Sobieniowski visited Kraków
together in 1909 and that Wyspiański’s monumental stained-glass window,
God the Father, Let It Be, installed in the local Franciscan church, was the
direct inspiration for Mansfield’s poem ‘To God the Father’, written in the
same year. To assess whether this is indeed plausible and what it was that
Mansfield would have seen, had she visited the church in person, it is neces-
sary to first understand the background to Wyspiański’s work on the reno-
vation of the church in general, and the stained-glass windows in particular.
In addition, this chapter also offers a detailed analysis of the God the Father
window’s iconographical and scientific connotations and concludes with a
discussion on whether it was indeed this particular artistic rendition of God
that could have inspired Mansfield to write one of her most famous poems.
When Mansfield was writing ‘To God the Father’ sometime during the
second half of 1909, Stanisław Wyspiański was already dead. He had died
on 28 November 1907, leaving a prolific literary and painterly output in
the form of a huge number of paintings and drawings, dramas on Poland
and classical-related subjects, and two groups of monumental decorations
in two of Kraków’s iconic buildings: the interior decoration and furnishings
of the House of the Society of Physicians, together with murals and stained-
glass windows in the Franciscan church.3

DOI: 10.4324/9781003199526-4
God the Father 25
The thirteenth-century Franciscan church had been heavily damaged in
the great fire that swept through Kraków in July 1850. The rebuilding of the
structure and the renovation of the interior dragged on for years. In 1893
the then-guardian, Father Samuel Rajss, listed all the tasks that almost half
a century after the disaster had still not been completed:

The enormous roofs require new covering, the tall elevations are in need
of a costly restoration, while inside everything is in want of completing.
[…] The restoration of the marble floor […] awaits substantial funds,
and the church’s huge walls, so far only roughly plastered, wait to be
– even if only modestly – painted. Let alone […] the remodelling of the

Figure 2.1 Stanisław Wyspiański, murals on the northern wall of the choir of the
Franciscan church in Kraków (St Michael the Archangel and the Fall
of the Rebel Angels) (1895), together with two stained-glass windows
depicting The Element of Fire (1897–9). Photo credit: Piotr Guzik.
26 Wojciech Bałus
church’s windows which, because of the insecure lead mounting, have
to be covered with cloth in winter to prevent excessive draughts.4

Thanks to Rajss’s industriousness, funds had been raised, and in 1895 res-
toration works, which were to encompass the painted wall decoration in the
eastern part of the church (built on a Greek cross plan), commenced. After
an unsuccessful competition, the commission was eventually entrusted to
Wyspiański, then a young, 26-year-old artist, who only a short time before
had returned from Paris where he had studied painting. He fulfilled the task
by covering the walls with painted decorations consisting of ornamental and
floral motifs (mainly flowers, undoubtedly as a reference to St. Francis of
Assisi’s love of nature), accompanied by two figurative scenes in the chancel:
St Michael the Archangel and the Fall of the Rebel Angels on the north wall
(see Figure 2.1), and a personification of Caritas and the Virgin and Child,
on the south wall.
Two years later, despite misunderstandings over Wyspiański’s remunera-
tion for his work that had arisen in the meantime, the painter accepted
Guardian Rajss’s offer to design the stained glass for the seven windows of
the chancel.5 Wyspiański did not carry out the job in full, as he drew just six
designs (representing St Francis of Assisi [see Figure 2.2], three thirteenth-
century Polish Clarissian nuns – Kunegunda, Salomea and Jolenta – as well
as the elements of Fire [see Figure 2.1] and Water, each split between two
windows). Instead of the seventh design for the chancel, he produced –
apparently on his own initiative – a cartoon for a window in the church’s
western wall (see Figure 2.3). The sketches for this window had been made
as early as the autumn of 1897. The stained-glass panels for the chancel
windows were executed and installed in the summer of 1899, but the pro-
duction of the last design was delayed until 1904, when it was realised in
Innsbruck by the Tiroler Glasmalerei und Mosaik Anstalt factory (Tyrolean
Stained Glass and Mosaic Institution).

II
Wyspiański’s western stained-glass window, titled God the Father, Let It
Be was initially named God Creating the Universe Out of Chaos. Against
a background of the dark, slightly rippled depths of the sea, there hovers a
colossal S-shaped figure of a bearded, white-haired Creator. His left arm,
depicted in warm, yellow hues, is raised with its hand open, arrested in a
dynamic gesture above his head. The right arm (see Figure 2.4) is pointing
downwards, with an emphasis on the stretched-out hand with its visible
veins and bony, claw-like fingers. It is almost as if the figure of God seems to
be governed by two different movements at the same time. The yellow and
red rays emanating from the fingers of the right hand rush down towards
the water and, although they do not reach its surface, their impetus takes the
entire figure of the Creator upwards. This movement is further emphasised
God the Father 27

Figure 2.2 Stanisław Wyspiański, St Francis of Assisi, stained-glass window in


the choir of the Franciscan church in Kraków (1897–9). Photo credit:
Corpus Vitrearum Poland (Grzegorz Eliasiewicz and Rafał Ochęduszko).

by the glass panes forming the bottom part of the body of God – which are
arranged diagonally, parallel to the direction of his right hand and its rays
– and a similar arrangement of his beard and the left forearm. At the same
time, the left hand, turned around into a vertical position and neatly fitted
into the window’s uppermost pointed-arch light in the middle, seems to be
checking the impetus of this movement, suggesting some sort of pause, a
moment between the already completed movement of raising an arm and its
lowering in a vehement, commanding gesture.
In the lower part of the window the figure of God is more flat and static,
as if its three-dimensionality grows proportionally to its height and the
simultaneous increase in the dynamics of the figure’s entire disposition, thus
further emphasising an impression of God’s upward movement, making his
28 Wojciech Bałus

Figure 2.3 Stanisław Wyspiański, God the Father, stained-glass window in the


western wall of the Franciscan church in Kraków (1897–1904). Photo
credit: Corpus Vitrearum Poland (Grzegorz Eliasiewicz and Rafał
Ochęduszko).

figure even less real – a kind of spectre with an undetermined lower half,
which ‘materialises’ only in its upper parts.
Zdzisław Kępiński interprets this incorporeal quality in the rendering of
the figure of God as his emergence from a fire that springs from water.6
Indeed, the tongues of flame appear both on the surface of the water at the
height of God’s right hand and in the lower parts of his gown. However,
they do appear to be rather a product of the rays flowing from God’s right
hand rather than a result of his body materialising from fire and smoke,
since they appear precisely where the rays emitted by God’s right hand are
supposed to strike. The emphasis on the volume of activity in this area of the
window is highlighted by the waves, as the remaining waters are absolutely
still (because the rays themselves do not reach the surface of water).
God the Father 29

Figure 2.4 Stanisław Wyspiański, right hand of God the Father. Photo credit:
Corpus Vitrearum Poland (Grzegorz Eliasiewicz and Rafał Ochęduszko).

III
Wyspiański’s window is unique in the stained-glass art of the period.
Although the chancel windows, especially those representing floral motifs
and water, are comparable to similar Parisian art nouveau examples (they
reveal affinities, for instance, with designs by Albert Besnard, such as Les
cygnes sur le lac d’Annecy [Swans on Lake Annecy] at the École de Pharmacie
in Paris, from 1890),7 the colossal, single figure of God the Father has no
counterparts, either in works from the end of the nineteenth century or
earlier. Even though representations of enormous figures did indeed appear
both in Romanesque and Gothic art (as for example in the famous Notre-
Dame de la Belle-Verrière at Chartres Cathedral, or the figures of saints in
the windows of the west façade of Reims Cathedral, which Wyspiański saw
30 Wojciech Bałus
during his trip to France in 1890),8 they never achieved the sheer dynamism
displayed in the works of the Kraków artist. Perhaps the stained-glass win-
dow Christ Ascending to Heaven in the Paris church of St Sulpice (Philippe
Le Clerc, 1672–4)9 also had some influence on Wyspiański, but the windows
of this church were never mentioned by him.
If one were to identify real influences that directed Wyspiański’s imagina-
tion towards colossal human figures during this period one could point to
an event in which he participated the year before executing the Franciscan
designs. At that time he was working on a design for another series of wall
paintings for a different Kraków church then undergoing restoration, that
of the Holy Cross. When the external layer of plaster had been removed
from the church’s walls, sixteenth-century paintings depicting huge figures
were revealed (see Figure 2.5). Although this discovery prevented any pos-
sibility of Wyspiański’s executing replacement paintings according to his
own design, it aroused his enormous excitement. In a letter to a friend he

Figure 2.5 The Holy Cross church in Kraków c. 1900. Photo credit: Architekt 1,
1900.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
BOYS’ COPYRIGHTED BOOKS
Printed from large, clear type on a superior quality of
paper, embellished with original illustrations by eminent
artists, and bound in a superior quality of binders’ cloth,
ornamented with illustrated covers, stamped in colors from
unique and appropriate dies, each book wrapped in a
glazed paper wrapper printed in colors.

BOY SCOUT SERIES


By
G. HARVEY RALPHSON, of the Black Bear
Patrol.
1.—Boy Scouts in Mexico; or, On Guard With Uncle Sam.
2.—Boy Scouts in the Canal Zone; or, The Plot Against
Uncle Sam.
3.—Boy Scouts in the Philippines; or, The Key to the
Treaty Box.
4.—Scouts in the Northwest; or, Fighting Forest Fires.
5.—Boy Scouts in a Motor Boat; or, Adventures on the
Columbia River.
6.—Boy Scouts in an Airship; or, The Warning from the
Sky.
7.—Boy Scouts in a Submarine; or, Searching an Ocean
Floor.
8.—Boy Scouts on Motorcycles; or, With the Flying
Squadron.
9.—Boy Scouts Beyond the Arctic Circle; or, The Lost
Expedition.
10.—Boy Scout Camera Club; or, The Confessions of a
Photograph.
11.—Boy Scout Electricians; or, The Hidden Dynamo.
12.—Boy Scouts in California; or, The Flag on the Cliff.
13.—Boy Scouts on Hudson Bay; or, The Disappearing
Fleet.
14.—Boy Scouts in Death Valley; or, The City in the Sky.
15.—Boy Scouts on the Open Plains; or, The Round-up
not Ordered.
16.—Boy Scouts in Southern Waters; or, the Spanish
Treasure Chest.
17.—Boy Scouts in Belgium; or, Under Fire in Flanders.
18.—Boy Scouts in the North Sea; or, the Mystery of U-13.
19.—Boy Scouts under the Kaiser; or, the Uhlans in Peril.
20.—Boy Scouts with the Cossacks; or, Poland
Recaptured.

THE MOTORCYCLE CHUMS SERIES


By
Andrew Carey Lincoln
1.—Motorcycle Chums in the Land of the Sky; or, Thrilling
Adventures on the Carolina Border.
2.—Motorcycle Chums in New England; or, The Mount
Holyoke Adventure.
3.—Motorcycle Chums on the Santa Fé Trail; or, The Key
to the Treaty Box.
4.—Motorcycle Chums in Yellowstone Park; or, Lending a
Helping Hand.
5.—Motorcycle Chums in the Adirondacks; or, The Search
for the Lost Pacemaker.
6.—Motorcycle Chums Storm Bound; or, The Strange
Adventures of a Road Chase.
BOYS’ COPYRIGHTED BOOKS
Printed from large, clear type on a superior quality of
paper, embellished with original illustrations by eminent
artists, and bound in a superior quality of book binders’
cloth, ornamented with illustrated covers, stamped in
colors from unique and appropriate dies, each book
wrapped in a glazed paper wrapper printed in colors.

MOTOR BOAT BOYS SERIES


By Louis Arundel
1.—The Motor Club’s Cruise Down the Mississippi; or, The
Dash for Dixie.
2.—The Motor Club on the St. Lawrence River; or,
Adventures Among the Thousand Islands.
3.—The Motor Club on the Great Lakes; or, Exploring the
Mystic Isle of Mackinac.
4.—Motor Boat Boys Among the Florida Keys; or, The
Struggle for the Leadership.
5.—Motor Boat Boys Down the Coast; or, Through Storm
and Stress.
6.—Motor Boat Boys’ River Chase.

THE BIRD BOYS SERIES


By John Luther Langworthy
1.—The Bird Boys; or, The Young Sky Pilots’ First Air
Voyage.
2.—The Bird Boys on the Wing; or, Aeroplane Chums in
the Tropics.
3.—The Bird Boys Among the Clouds; or, Young Aviators
in a Wreck.
4.—Bird Boys’ Flight; or, A Hydroplane Round-up.
5.—Bird Boys’ Aeroplane Wonder; or, Young Aviators on a
Cattle Ranch.
CANOE AND CAMPFIRE SERIES
By St. George Rathborne
1.—Canoe Mates in Canada; or, Three Boys Afloat on the
Saskatchewan.
2.—Young Fur-Takers; or, Traps and Trails in the
Wilderness.
3.—The House-Boat Boys; or, Drifting Down to the Sunny
South.
4.—Chums in Dixie; or, The Strange Cruise in the Motor
Boat.
5.—Camp Mates in Michigan; or, With Pack and Paddle in
the Pine Woods.
6.—Rocky Mountain Boys; or, Camping in the Big Game
Country.

For sale by all booksellers, or sent postpaid on receipt of 50 cents.

M. A. DONOHUE & CO.


701-733 So. Dearborn Street, Chicago
BOYS’ COPYRIGHTED BOOKS
The most attractive and highest class list of copyrighted
books for boys ever printed. In this list will be found the
works of W. Bert Foster, Capt. Ralph Bonehill, Arthur M.
Winfield, etc.
Printed from large clear type, illustrated, bound in a
superior quality of cloth.

THE CLINT WEBB SERIES


By W. Bert Foster
1.—Swept Out to Sea; or, Clint Webb Among the Whalers.
2.—The Frozen Ship; or, Clint Webb Among the Sealers.
3.—From Sea to Sea; or, Clint Webb on the Windjammer.
4.—The Sea Express; or, Clint Webb and the Sea Tramp.

THE YOUNG SPORTSMAN’S SERIES


By Capt. Ralph Bonehill
Rival Cyclists; or, Fun and Adventures on the Wheel.
Young Oarsmen of Lake View; or, The Mystery of Hermit
Island.
Leo the Circus Boy; or, Life Under the Great White
Canvas.

SEA AND LAND SERIES


Four Boys’ Books by Favorite Authors
Oscar the Naval Cadet Capt. Ralph Bonehill
Blue Water Rovers Victor St. Clare
A Royal Smuggler William Dalton
A Boy Crusoe Allen Erie

ADVENTURE AND JUNGLE SERIES


A large, well printed, attractive edition.
Guy in the Jungle Wm. Murray Grayden
Casket of Diamonds Oliver Optic
The Boy Railroader Matthew White, Jr.
Treasure of South Lake Farm W. Bert Foster

YOUNG HUNTERS SERIES


By Capt. Ralph Bonehill
Gun and Sled; or, The Young Hunters of Snow Top Island.
Young Hunters in Porto Rico; or, The Search for a Lost
Treasure.
Two Young Crusoes; by C. W. Phillips.
Through Apache Land; or, Ned in the Mountains; by Lieut.
R. H. Tayne.

BRIGHT AND BOLD SERIES


By Arthur M. Winfield
Poor but Plucky; or, The Mystery of a Flood.
School Days of Fred Harley; or, Rivals for All Honors.
By Pluck, not Luck; or, Dan Granbury’s Struggle to Rise.
The Missing Tin Box; or, Hal Carson’s Remarkable City
Adventure.

COLLEGE LIBRARY FOR BOYS


By Archdeacon Farrar
Julian Home; or, A Tale of College Life.
St. Winifred’s; or, The World of School.

For sale by all booksellers, or sent postpaid on receipt of 50 cents.

M. A. DONOHUE & CO.


701-733 So. Dearborn Street, Chicago
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been
standardized.
Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BIRD
BOYS ***

Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions


will be renamed.

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S.


copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright
in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and
distribute it in the United States without permission and without
paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General
Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and
distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the
PROJECT GUTENBERG™ concept and trademark. Project
Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if
you charge for an eBook, except by following the terms of the
trademark license, including paying royalties for use of the
Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is
very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such
as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
research. Project Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and
printed and given away—you may do practically ANYTHING in
the United States with eBooks not protected by U.S. copyright
law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially
commercial redistribution.

START: FULL LICENSE


THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK

To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the


free distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this
work (or any other work associated in any way with the phrase
“Project Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of
the Full Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or
online at www.gutenberg.org/license.

Section 1. General Terms of Use and


Redistributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand,
agree to and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual
property (trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to
abide by all the terms of this agreement, you must cease using
and return or destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works in your possession. If you paid a fee for
obtaining a copy of or access to a Project Gutenberg™
electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the terms
of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.

1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only


be used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by
people who agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.
There are a few things that you can do with most Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works even without complying with the
full terms of this agreement. See paragraph 1.C below. There
are a lot of things you can do with Project Gutenberg™
electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement and
help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg™
electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the
collection of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the
individual works in the collection are in the public domain in the
United States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright
law in the United States and you are located in the United
States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from copying,
distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative works
based on the work as long as all references to Project
Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope that you will
support the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting free
access to electronic works by freely sharing Project
Gutenberg™ works in compliance with the terms of this
agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg™ name
associated with the work. You can easily comply with the terms
of this agreement by keeping this work in the same format with
its attached full Project Gutenberg™ License when you share it
without charge with others.

1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also
govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most
countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside
the United States, check the laws of your country in addition to
the terms of this agreement before downloading, copying,
displaying, performing, distributing or creating derivative works
based on this work or any other Project Gutenberg™ work. The
Foundation makes no representations concerning the copyright
status of any work in any country other than the United States.

1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project


Gutenberg:

1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other


immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must
appear prominently whenever any copy of a Project
Gutenberg™ work (any work on which the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” appears, or with which the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed,
viewed, copied or distributed:

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United


States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it
away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg
License included with this eBook or online at
www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United
States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
you are located before using this eBook.

1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is


derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to
anyone in the United States without paying any fees or charges.
If you are redistributing or providing access to a work with the
phrase “Project Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the
work, you must comply either with the requirements of
paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use
of the work and the Project Gutenberg™ trademark as set forth
in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is


posted with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and
distribution must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through
1.E.7 and any additional terms imposed by the copyright holder.
Additional terms will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™
License for all works posted with the permission of the copyright
holder found at the beginning of this work.

1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project


Gutenberg™ License terms from this work, or any files
containing a part of this work or any other work associated with
Project Gutenberg™.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute
this electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1
with active links or immediate access to the full terms of the
Project Gutenberg™ License.

1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form,
including any word processing or hypertext form. However, if
you provide access to or distribute copies of a Project
Gutenberg™ work in a format other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or
other format used in the official version posted on the official
Project Gutenberg™ website (www.gutenberg.org), you must, at
no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a copy, a
means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
request, of the work in its original “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other
form. Any alternate format must include the full Project
Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.

1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,


performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™
works unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or


providing access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works provided that:

• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the
method you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The
fee is owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark,
but he has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to
the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty
payments must be paid within 60 days following each date on
which you prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your
periodic tax returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked
as such and sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation at the address specified in Section 4, “Information
about donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation.”

• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who


notifies you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that
s/he does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™
License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and
discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of Project
Gutenberg™ works.

• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of


any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in
the electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90
days of receipt of the work.

• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.

1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project


Gutenberg™ electronic work or group of works on different
terms than are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain
permission in writing from the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, the manager of the Project Gutenberg™
trademark. Contact the Foundation as set forth in Section 3
below.

1.F.

1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend


considerable effort to identify, do copyright research on,
transcribe and proofread works not protected by U.S. copyright
law in creating the Project Gutenberg™ collection. Despite
these efforts, Project Gutenberg™ electronic works, and the
medium on which they may be stored, may contain “Defects,”
such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or corrupt
data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other
medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
cannot be read by your equipment.

1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES -


Except for the “Right of Replacement or Refund” described in
paragraph 1.F.3, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation, the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark,
and any other party distributing a Project Gutenberg™ electronic
work under this agreement, disclaim all liability to you for
damages, costs and expenses, including legal fees. YOU
AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE,
STRICT LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH
OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH
1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER
THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR
ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF
THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If


you discover a defect in this electronic work within 90 days of
receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any) you
paid for it by sending a written explanation to the person you
received the work from. If you received the work on a physical
medium, you must return the medium with your written
explanation. The person or entity that provided you with the
defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu
of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person or
entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.
If the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund
in writing without further opportunities to fix the problem.

1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set


forth in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’,
WITH NO OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS
OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR
ANY PURPOSE.

1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied


warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this
agreement violates the law of the state applicable to this
agreement, the agreement shall be interpreted to make the
maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by the applicable
state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any provision of
this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.

1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the


Foundation, the trademark owner, any agent or employee of the
Foundation, anyone providing copies of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works in accordance with this agreement, and any
volunteers associated with the production, promotion and
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works, harmless
from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees, that
arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project
Gutenberg™ work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or
deletions to any Project Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any Defect
you cause.

Section 2. Information about the Mission of


Project Gutenberg™
Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new
computers. It exists because of the efforts of hundreds of
volunteers and donations from people in all walks of life.

Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the


assistance they need are critical to reaching Project
Gutenberg™’s goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™
collection will remain freely available for generations to come. In
2001, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was
created to provide a secure and permanent future for Project
Gutenberg™ and future generations. To learn more about the
Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and how your
efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4 and the
Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.

Section 3. Information about the Project


Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-
profit 501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the
laws of the state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by
the Internal Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal
tax identification number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the
Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation are tax
deductible to the full extent permitted by U.S. federal laws and
your state’s laws.

The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500


West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact
links and up to date contact information can be found at the
Foundation’s website and official page at
www.gutenberg.org/contact

Section 4. Information about Donations to


the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation
Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without
widespread public support and donations to carry out its mission
of increasing the number of public domain and licensed works
that can be freely distributed in machine-readable form
accessible by the widest array of equipment including outdated
equipment. Many small donations ($1 to $5,000) are particularly
important to maintaining tax exempt status with the IRS.

The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws


regulating charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of
the United States. Compliance requirements are not uniform
and it takes a considerable effort, much paperwork and many
fees to meet and keep up with these requirements. We do not
solicit donations in locations where we have not received written
confirmation of compliance. To SEND DONATIONS or
determine the status of compliance for any particular state visit
www.gutenberg.org/donate.

While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states


where we have not met the solicitation requirements, we know
of no prohibition against accepting unsolicited donations from
donors in such states who approach us with offers to donate.

International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot


make any statements concerning tax treatment of donations
received from outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp
our small staff.

Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current


donation methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a
number of other ways including checks, online payments and
credit card donations. To donate, please visit:
www.gutenberg.org/donate.

Section 5. General Information About Project


Gutenberg™ electronic works
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could
be freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose
network of volunteer support.

Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several


printed editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by
copyright in the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus,
we do not necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any
particular paper edition.

Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.

This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,


including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new
eBooks, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter to hear
about new eBooks.

You might also like