At the risk of this becoming a dog blog, you need to know what I overheard on Monday.
It was one of those crisp and still autumn mornings which Wellington has been nailing lately - a perfect dry day for the dog park. When I arrived and pushed through the double gates, three owners were already inside and chatting pleasantly: a woman of about 60 with a Labrador, and two forty-somethings, one with a Löwchen on her lap.
I got the impression they hadn’t met before or exchanged names. By this I mean they hadn’t introduced each other by dog. If you meet someone in a dog park you tend to ask their dog’s name, but not theirs, because it’s somehow too much. You then assign the dog’s name to the owner. I do this all the time, so there are women walking around Wellington at this very minute known to me only as Diesel, Colin, and Bowser.
Anyway, we wound up chatting about this and that, including that one of the women hadn’t shaved her legs in three years. (This is impressive by anyone’s standards. If I went without depilating for such a length of time, I’d block out the sun. Parents would swerve their prams if I walked towards them, and scientists would discuss me at conferences.)
At this point the Labrador waddled over, looking stricken. One of the women bent down to take a closer look. “He has two balls in his mouth,” she told us, straightening up. Then she looked at his owner and said, “And who did he learn that from?”
Well, I don’t need to tell you this was a mightily big call. It was what I’ll forever consider a Two Balls moment, in which you have a choice about the potentially unacceptable thought on the tip of your tongue. Do you say it, without knowing how it’s going to land, or just think it?
Well, she took the risk and so an oral sex joke was out there, floating around the heads of middle-aged strangers in a suburban dog park at nine-thirty in the morning. And it was so releasing! The four of us had an excellent snortle at the expense of nobody, except maybe the Labrador, before parting ways more buoyantly than usual, likely never to cross paths again.
One unpopular feeling you must keep to yourself and say never say, especially in Wellington, is how fed up you are with bloody Katherine Mansfield.
The Mansfield industry forever churns, picking up a bit of speed lately. Last year marked the solemn centenary of her early death, complete with reminders of her punk 1920s cool slapped on the back of buses, and then a big old symposium in her honour; since then, still more books have hit the shelves, breathlessly picking apart her relationships and choices, charting her developing artistry alongside her descent into tubercular illness, and all of them lingering on her coughing herself to oblivion after running up the stairs.
It’s weird how much this moment fascinates Mansfield fans and scholars and makes their enthusiasm seem, at times, like a death cult. Nobody in their right mind wants to be in the room when someone still full of love and desperate to keep living, dies. If you’ve experienced this, you don’t want to recall it, and will do anything to block the memory out; and yet we keep returning to that staircase, over and over again. (Oh, crap. Two Balls).
If you’ve had it with the whole thing, you’re especially out of luck in Karori, where Mansfield was a child. She seems to be referenced everywhere here, in the form of a lopsided-looking memorial birdbath at her old school; by Beauchamp Street, I imagine in recognition of her father; even by the local beauty salon, named Absolute Bliss - a quote, surely, from one of her stories.
Her family home still stands at the western end of Karori Road - a pretty white confection in the face of groaning traffic. This means I think about her at least once a day when I pass it, and sometimes twice, depending on my car-pool situation; and I’d rather think about other brilliant, dead women writers this often. The peerless Sue Townsend, for example, about whom there is no biography, and who doesn’t to my knowledge have a birdbath, and yet she gave us Adrian Mole.
Katherine Mansfield was a luminous artist, a true bohemian, and for me, the finest nature writer New Zealand has yet produced. The way she describes raindrops, petals, fronds, sand, the sea - everything shimmering and trembling and spangled and sort of aching with life - is completely narcotic and gorgeous, endlessly life-affirming, and deserving of repeat readings for the term of our natural lives.
What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly by a feeling of bliss - absolute bliss! - as though you'd suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle, into every finger and toe?
Katherine Mansfield, “Bliss”, 1918
However, she could be cruel, snobbish, and a complete wasp. She was unforgivably mean to Ida Baker, her moony best friend who, like all women in selfless, caring roles, was either invisible or a source of contempt to The Artist in the house. Mansfield lived on boiled eggs in little garrets, dedicated to her writing - but her poverty was also genteel. The bank of Dad was involved, at least to a point. I can’t bring myself to lionise this, somehow. She had some riches unavailable to other people in other garrets - cultural ones, which are guarded by a particular class as closely as material ones. For a while, anyway, there was the opportunity to write poems, edit journals, sit around in country houses, and talk about Chekhov. I don’t want to overstate this, but I wonder if the maids who serviced her apartments, also liked to dream and write? It’s probably a very undergraduate point to be making, but you know. Two Balls.
I don’t think I would have liked her had I met her, swathed in boho clothes (a turban, did I read somewhere? A kimono?). She would definitely have disliked me, with my Mum jeans and my tedious domesticity; I walked past Karori’s laundromat yesterday and the warm smell of wool mix and bubbles was so delicious, it totally reset my mood. (There’s nothing like the pull of fresh, clean cotton from a hot dryer. It’s so satisfying).
And of course, I live here, in distant and unfashionable Karori, furthest from even the modest city lights of Wellington; swathed in mist in the mornings, always colder than the town, nobody-ever-goes-in, nobody-ever-comes-out, where we wash the Rav 4 on the street on Sundays, neat lines of buxus and the house with Please Clean Up After Your Dog on the gate, bridge club upstairs and drama club downstairs, and late night at the library on Thursdays; how dull and suburban, how deathlessly quiet and under-lit by night, how full of prams and balance bikes, shopping bags and walking sticks by day.
And yet, this wet and green place, this boring far-away, inspired some of the most beautiful modernist stories in English, implying that all bohemia begins with boredom, and that boredom is possibly the finest gift you can give an artist, especially when they’re young.
And the boredom is full of heavy meaning, anyway. You can’t think of Karori without grieving for the long gone, especially if you’re Katherine but also when you’re you, in the now. Because this suburb is where children grow up - as did the dough-faced ones in starched Edwardian pinafores, and as are the eager ones now in patterned leggings, pegging down Karori Road on micro-scooters, with fluffy charms swinging from their backpacks. You, standing on the road edge while your dog is straining to toilet, are a middle-aged witness to these fleeting childhoods. These are the days you’ll never get back, so for now you’d better stay inside them, instead of longing for somewhere else, somewhere that matches your ambitions, whatever they were, you’ve forgotten now?
And that’s what I think about when I provide luxuriant, warm and soft, fresh-smelling boredom to my children - armfuls and armfuls of it, spilling over at every turn - and why I try to roll in its fluffy billows, gratefully, instead of muffling a scream.
Can I say we are having one of the best autumns in forever in Karori? The cherry trees are absolutely red at the moment - totally on fire - and the fallen leaves are curled up and bleached-looking, like heaped wood shavings. There’s some very crunchy leaf-litter in St Mary’s churchyard on Fancourt Street, if you feel like a good time. If you see a demented dog-walker stepping around in happy circles by the gravestones, it’s probably me.
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Did the lady of about 60 really need the added description of “older”? I’m getting sensitive in my 50s. We were made to read Mansfield at school. For some reason forced reading repels me. I’ve never liked it, and haven’t ever read an author again afterwards, despite being a constant reader.
So funny - if only Karori were not so grey and landlocked
KM led a number of simultaneous lives - there were the lovely sun-drenched houses and gardens in Days Bay, France and Bloomsbury..
But like Janet Frame, it's not the NZ part of her life we might envy - it's what they went on to once they got to leave NZ.
KM's exciting times and writing in London exchanging barbs in her uneasy friendship with Virginia Wolfe.and Janet Frame's New Yorker stint - the short stories and cocktail parties with the literati. There's a great graphic essay The Blue Fury about a High School teacher haunted by the ghosts of KM and JF - I think in a way we all are.