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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.
Clemence Dane
Forgotten Feminist Writer of the Inter-War Years
Louise McDonald
Katherine Mansfield
International Approaches
Edited by Janka Kascakova, Gerri Kimber and
Władysław Witalisz
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
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
Index 211
Figures
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:
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
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:
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:
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
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
‘To You’
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:
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
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 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.
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