Top 6 - Katherine Mansfield

I feel as though I ought to be reading new fiction or at least catching up with some of the many classics that my feeble education hasn't yet covered but I've been taking advantage of a hiatus in fresh reading material by re-reading one or two old favourites. Sometimes they are not quite as good as one remembers but other times they show they have retained all the qualities and greatness that you admired so much the first time.

I'm glad to say that Katherine Mansfield's short stories have been thoroughly as good as I thought they were 20 and more years ago.

Bliss and The Garden Party collected her best work, published posthumously. And The Stranger among these is the one that made the biggest impression now as a husband meets his wife off a liner after a long absence. It transpires that on the voyage a young man died in his wife's arms, the two of them alone, and it leaves any number of unanswered questions in his mind, and

They would never be alone together again.

The theme is not unlike that of The Dead by Joyce except it is more compact and simpler in form but equally beautifully made and moving.

Pictures tells a story of an out of work singer and her deluded search for opportunities to perform on stage in lesser roles. One can see the ending coming from a little way out but it is nonetheless a finely-observed and elegantly written story.

In the great tradition of Chekov, that includes Turgenev, George Moore, Joyce and more recently William Trevor, Katherine Mansfield's stories are of ordinary lives and everyday struggles. She can do a great line in brittle or even slightly unhinged hope or happiness but one can be confident it is undermined by character or circumstances. Her First Ball is an exciting evening of rapture and possibility; one can see the suitor in Mr. and Mrs. Dove can't help but be out of his depth in love and the Life of Ma Parker has some more of the immacualtely observed and realized writing that one begins to take for granted in these stories. Some sympathy is due to the writer of whichever fiction one reads after Katherine Mansfield because it is going to have to be doing something special if it isn't to suffer in comparison.

I could leave the selection at 5, partly to balance the the time I picked 7 cover versions in a previous Top 6, but might mention the description of bliss in the opening pages of Bliss.

The tuberculosis that took Katherine Mansfield at the untimely age of 34 in 1923 robbed literature of another 40 years, perhaps, of writing from one who could only have been a major figure to put alongside Virginia Woolf and the great names of that period and the whole twentieth century. She's long been my idea of a major literary idol anyway and a bit of re-reading has done nothing but confirm her as that.

Luckily, there are copies of a biography at nothing prices on Amazon New & Used and so finding out more of her own story is going to fill the available gap I have in my reading for the time being. As well as all the above unmitigated praise that I have for her, and more, she also provides a timely reminder why there is no point, simply no point, in me trying to write fiction if one is in competition with writing like hers.