<&>Wellington Corpus of Spoken New Zealand English Version One <&>Copyright 1998 School of Linguistics & Applied Language Studies <&>Victoria University of Wellington <&>side one <&>0:50 it may be true that all artists of genius are consumed by one passionate idea and that all their work strives towards its perfection and <&>1:00 utterance one can date katherine mansfield's maturity as a writer from her realisation that she has one SINGLE overwhelming task to perform to recreate in fiction the reality of that life in new zealand which she had experienced as a child to make live again the time when she and her younger brother were so much in sympathy that they seemed one being <,> in her new zealand stories katherine mansfield's evocation of the complexity and wholeness of life is at its most intense and this intensity is achieved with a subtlety of skill and a finesse that is difficult to define <,> clearly however a certain focus of vision and a use of recurrent symbolic imagery which seeks to make coherent elements of the surrounding natural world are important elements in her art tut i want here to look at some aspects of her unique artistic focus and imagery as it works towards creating our perception of a new reality in a work of art <&>2:00 the finished short story <,> i'd like to recall some of the facts of katherine mansfield's complex and crowded life you may associate her with the english literary context of d h lawrence john middleton murray virginia woolf and lady ottoline morrell and you would not be wrong <,> but let ME as a new zealander emphasise that she IS a new zealander and that her greatest work is to some extent a glorification of new zealandness tut she was born kathleen mansfield beauchamp in eighteen eighty eight at eleven tinakori road thorndon wellington a street which overlooked the most beautiful harbour in the world she was the third daughter of a wealthy businessman and banker and a mother who had little energy left after childbearing to love and play with her children that maternal role belonged to the grandmother margaret mansfield dyer a fourth daughter died in infancy the fifth child six years younger than kathleen was the only son in the family leslie heron beauchamp the sixth and last child <&>3:00 was another daughter the family was completed by an unmarried aunt belle dyer this then is the family which is familiar to us from stanley and linda burnell of and and with their little girls the grandmother old missus fairchild aunt beryl and eventually an infant boy these are the relationships that are familiar from the grandmother and child of the almost grown up sisters and brother of and the brother and sister of and <,> when katherine mansfield was five her family shifted from thorndon alongside the city on the hill above the harbour to the bush surrounded farming valley of karori where there were at that time no more than three or four houses a family of cousins with two little boys already lived in the valley the little girls first attended the tiny local school the two families spent their summer holidays across wellington harbour at days bay a sandy beach with rocks <&>4:00 each end and bush behind at the age of nine kathleen beauchamp entered wellington girls' high school with her elder sisters she was one of the youngest in the school the girls later left for the more socially select and smaller miss swainson's before leaving THERE to join their english cousins at school in london at queens college few new zealand families could afford such an expensive education for their daughters <,> returning unwillingly from london to new zealand social life at the age of eighteen katherine mansfield attended the wellington technical school for typing and bookkeeping and fell in love with the son of her music teacher a young cellist who was going to london to study she too therefore studied the <.>ch cello with passion and persuaded her father that she needed to return to london to make perhaps music her career she never returned from europe <,> but she was already a writer her father had helped her to publish work in a melbourne paper her travels her sexual adventures her mimicry her music <&>5:00 her theatrical ability her seemingly quixotic temperament her frenetic search for experience her marriages even were all in support of the freedom and knowledge she needed to realise her art <,> the nature of this art is evident very early her first published story appeared in the wellington girls' high school reporter when she was nine it concerns a ten year old girl called enna blake it begins dramatically in the middle of things just as katherine mansfield's most celebrated mature stories do and this LONG before she had read chekhov this is how it begins <&>5:35 <&>excerpt from story not transcribed <&>5:50 where is this well furnished room with its bay window let's see enna receives a letter from a little girl in torquay which is in devon england and the very next day sets out with her mother they arrive at a place called sunny glen <&>6:04 <&>excerpt from story not transcribed <&>6:52 the child in wellington concentrates her imagination on london and england the enticing far off places but what she describes is a new <&>7:00 zealand scene a new zealand activity ferning let's go ferning up the glen my own grandmother would say the bush covered slopes of the glen in wellington remain as part of the botanical gardens really THIS is katherine mansfield's first new zealand story the activity is one of contentment the memory it leaves is of an unclouded childhood day the child's voice speaks through the story but katherine mansfield's extraordinary achievement is that in adulthood aware of transience she can retain and recreate that child's voice and vision along with a sense of its rareness and value childhood is brought into adulthood not lost through her art in her art she will use the plants and flowers and trees of the outdoors world and see them transformed in their indoor settings and show us through a child's eye daytime house and garden transformed by the mysterious effects of night <,> not only in its imagery of plants and trees but in its theme of <&>8:00 journey and narrative movement from day to night does this juvenile story foreshadow her later achievement <,> the new zealand child wrote of an unknown england the adult in europe will write of a KNOWN new zealand she came to this obsessive and greatest subject out of two motives love and despair she wrote to john middleton murray in nineteen eighteen <&>8:23 <&>excerpt from letter not transcribed <&>8:56 by nineteen eighteen her experience had suggested that love was always bound up with <&>9:00 despair her love for her brother leslie had been strengthened and in some profound way realised when he came to london at the outbreak of the first world war to enlist in a british regiment brother and sister never wearied of reminiscing about their childhood do you remember <,> john middleton murry was excluded from that emotional bond when in nineteen fifteen leslie was killed katherine mansfield realised that her love for her brother was deeper far more intimate and profound than her love for her husband john middleton murry couldn't compete with the dead brother and felt resentful katherine mansfield's despair was intensified at his inability to meet her emotional need <,> but out of this despair came the determination to write about the shared experience her brother could not now remember she wrote in her journal <&>9:50 <&>excerpt from journal not transcribed <&>9:59 later she says <&>10:01 <&>excerpt not transcribed <&>10:20 soon her feeling of urgency was quickened by realising how close her own death might be in THIS story brother and sister are at their youngest <&>10:29 <&>excerpt from story not transcribed <&>10:56 the brother and sister of the story are so young that they exist in a universe which has scarcely formulated a notion of individual identity their real names are unknown to us their world is upstairs a nursery their experience of larger society is so new that they haven't yet fully comprehended a difference between real things and not real ones <,> from their perspective looking down from the balcony above the real flowers could be not real and again looking up from below into the refrigerator the ice cream house could be real <,> when they're dressed for the party they seem decorated like the table downstairs for the strange downstairs world so that they themselves look not real to the adults they look a picture <&>11:41 <&>excerpt not transcribed <&>11:49 not children at all the known dining table of their outside world has been transformed by flowers and water into an outside garden the stern behaviour of the daytime father is <&>12:00 transformed into nighttime jolliness the table like mother is in a disarray never countenanced in the known daytime world the little pink house was broken sun cannot perceive it was only ice cream <&>12:13 <&>excerpt not transcribed <&>13:00 to express this first experience of disillusionment the story uses a formulaic symbolism but more remarkably perhaps a sustained oblique perspective made up of the elongated or foreshortened view which the children's physical relationship to the adults gives them together with their innocence <,> i mean that in this story perspective is something literal for instance it derives from the children's sight line upstairs looking down so that point of view becomes something to do with the angle of vision not merely a matter of emotional attitude it perhaps causes us to ask what is real how can we tell is truth a matter of perspective <,,> the little story also derives from katherine mansfield's memory of her brother and her duty to record it it gives a sense of the closeness of the brother and sister like hermia and helena in shakespeare's a midsummer night's <&>14:00 dream or like plato's parable of the yolk and egg of the one shell their affinity is profound here they are in wellington's wind running down from thorndon to the sea front <&>14:09 <&>excerpt not transcribed <&>16:52 this is very different from her earlier satirical stories about life in a german pension and bohemian london and paris her art has changed because she is no longer concerned with the same appearances of things her direction is now towards elegy and this demands a new style addressing her dead brother in her journal she said <&>17:14 <&>excerpt not transcribed <&>17:28 she is trying out a kind of special prose here it's not yet the technique we shall see in but it's approaching it here the urgent need to convey immediacy is suggested by her use of the simple present tense rather than the historic present which she uses so flexibly elsewhere here it is as if even the movement of the sentences seems to echo the breathless downhill progress from the moment of pause as brother and sister hook arms <&>18:00 we're taken up into their speed until the stop at esplanade <,> there's no pause before the phrase and on to the esplanade but there were zig zag pauses before that <,> the wind and their downhill career do not allow for conversation but they do for observation then as it gets dark together in imagination they have left the shore and are on board the lighted steamer looking towards themselves and the little town in sympathy with each other they experience the desire to travel to go away the WHERE remains nebulous it's the departure and the journey which is longed for life is before them <,> that sudden change of focus and consciousness to a future farewell in which that windy day is no longer present helps to prepare us for a further refocusing upon the greater distance in space and time which is the author's present there is a fluctuation of <&>19:00 vision here <,> what is being referred to as the little island <,> for author and reader this may be not only an island in wellington harbour obscure in the dusk but new zealand itself and that life there the narrative consciousness has become double who is saying goodbye to what who is it that must not forget the future two on the ship the future one who remembers the two watchers and the potential future two is it us the readers who are also being asked not to forget the tone is complex here but the image of the lighted ship moving across the dark harbour to an unknown destination is charged with emotion behind the theatricality of the adolescent goodbyes is hidden the scarcely bearable knowledge of an already enacted future <&>19:50 <&>excerpt not transcribed <&>20:26 <&>end of sample