By Stuart Mitchner
All manuscripts notebooks papers letters I leave to John M. Murry likewise I should like him to publish as little as possible and tear up and burn as much as possible he will understand that I desire to leave as few traces of my camping ground as possible.
—from Katherine Mansfield’s will
At the moment, I’m writing a rainy-day sequel to a Memorial Day column that never happened. So it goes when you sit down with raindrops in your hair amid a shambles of old letters and manuscripts you can’t bring yourself to tear up and toss into one of three huge recycling bags, knowing that if you’re not careful you might be tearing pages from the typed journals your mother kept when she ventured onto what Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) called her “camping ground.”
Lunch with the Pope
Along with the heaps of paper strewn across the chaise I used to share with our cat Nora, who died five years ago this month, are copies of the New York Review of Books that might have landed in the recycling bags but for the essays of Fintan O’Toole, most recently his piece on Robert Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV. After reading all the good things O’Toole had to say about Leo’s predecessor Francis, who let in “daylight upon the magic of the papacy,” I begin to understand why my 100-year-old mother-in-law routinely claimed that she had lunch with the Pope every day. “She keeps saying that as if she really believes it,” the nurses at the Motion Picture Home told my wife, right up to the day her mother died in August 2023.
Wednesday’s People
“As if she really believes it” resonates for me since most of the people I commune with, celebrate, and wonder over every date-driven Wednesday are here as if they were literally keeping me company. “Date-driven” usually means birth and death, but on this June 4, it’s different, as my desk-top copy of A Book of Days for the Literary Year (Thames and Hudson 1983) reminds me. While yesterday, June 3, was a date to “die for” (no pun intended, but why not), with the death of last year’s subject, Franz Kafka, in 1924 and the birth of Allen Ginsberg in 1926, June 4 offers nothing more than the 1849 passing of the Countess of Blessington and the 1917 arrival of playwright Robert Anderson (Tea and Sympathy).
Whenever additional material is called for, however, Book of Days editor Neal T. Jones and his helpers always provide some choice items, like the fact that on June 4, 1909 Katherine Mansfield, “having left her husband on her wedding night, and already pregnant with another man’s child, is taken by her mother to a Bavarian spa for cold-water therapy.” All this occurred on Mansfield’s “camping ground,” along with several same-sex love affairs, and a miscarriage three years before she began living with John Middleton Murry in 1912.
A Great Title
Another June 4 item featured in A Book of Days is the 1940 publication of 23-year-old Carson McCullers’s novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter “to great critical approval.” When I wrote about the novel here (Feb. 22, 2023), I began with an appreciation of the title, which McCullers found in “The Lonely Hunter,” a poem by the Scottish poet Fiona MacLeod: “Deep in the heart of Summer, sweet is life to me still / But my heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill.”
When I learned that “Fiona MacLeod” is actually a literary biographer named William Sharp, who managed to keep the pseudonym a secret during his lifetime, I left the Memorial Day theme behind to follow the “lonely hunter” and his wife Elizabeth all the way to Taormina and his death in December 1905 while staying at the Castello de Maniace near Mount Etna in Sicily. Since I was there only two weeks ago writing about Mansfield’s intimate friend D.H. Lawrence, I ended up finding myself, as happens half the time I hunt for a combination I’ve already covered.
A Lost Friend’s Poetry
In a journal entry from November 1915, Katherine Mansfield asks “Where are these people? They are not saints or philosophers; they are decent human beings — but where are they?” I found such a person, a poet, when I worked at Western Publishing in 1964. Among the papers I can’t bring myself to toss into recycling are some poems by an old friend and fellow worker at Western who should have been as famous as her double Susan Sontag but who died in September 2006. By that time we’d been out of touch for decades; when I knew her she was living in a small rent-controlled apartment a block from the park on Madison Ave. where every space was covered with poetry she’d either pencilled in or taped to the walls.
One poem, “Die Forelle,” after the title of Schubert’s song “The Trout,” comes with a quote from Theodor Adorno suggesting that after Auschwitz, it is no longer possible to “commemorate.” Published in the Aug./Sept. 1969 issue of Midstream: A Monthly Jewish Review, the poem begins with a six-line stanza: “If the stream is poisoned beyond forgiveness, what shall we do with the innocent fish, the kind onlooker, the imprisoned poet?” The responding stanza is emphatic: “Cut away the near past or the far past with a sharp knife. Dump the guts into a pail. Demonstrate. Print books. Indict.” Next stanza: “We can write, but can we live?” Last stanza: “As if the trout pondered this, as his life dimmed.”
“As if” again. Mansfield would have liked my friend. “The mind I love most,” she once wrote, “must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind.”
Mansfield’s “Daily Life”
In a letter from May 1921, a year and a half before she died, Katherine Mansfield observes that the writers “we read as we read Shakespeare are part of our daily lives,” that it doesn’t seem at all strange to be thinking about Othello at breakfast or to be wondering about poetry in the bath: “It’s all part of a whole. Just as that vineyard below me is the vineyard of the song of Solomon — and that beautiful sound as the men hoe between the vines is almost part of my body — goes on in me. I shall never be the same as I was before I heard it, just as I’ll never be the same as I was before I read the death of Cleopatra. One has willingly given oneself to all these things — one is the result of them all.”
My mother drew a bold line alongside the above passage. On one of the pages I’ll “recycle” here, rather than in the bins just now being collected in the front of our house, she wrote: “Dear God, please let this be it. Please let me find my way to the mysterious something I’ve hunted for so long. Please let me say what I’ve seen and felt and thought, but say it so that it isn’t me — say it so that it is a picture of a time and a way of living. It isn’t that I feel that I have been specially endowed, it’s really that, having existed at all, there must be something to show. I mean, what has been the point, then, of the marvelously unorthodox and fantastically full life I have led?”
“It’s Raining Again”
In a journal passage from August 1917 headed “Beware of the Rain!” Mansfield refers to a late evening “after you have cleared away your supper, blown the crumbs out of the book that you were reading, lighted the lamp and curled up in front of the fire, that is the moment to beware of the rain.” I discovered a remedy for fear of the rain during the recent rainy period, a tune that’s been playing on repeat in my head, Supertramp’s “It’s Raining Again,” surely one of the most charming songs ever written about the weather. Composed by Rodger Hodgson on a day he was feeling the loss of a friend, the song comes with the most engaging of music-videos, as every repeat of the “raining again” chorus makes joy of the downpour as the “little fighter” gets knocked down and gets back up, drenched beyond drenching, and by then the rain has become poetry, a ritual benediction, like Keats’s forever “happy, happy love.”
Still Life
You could call my littered chaise a mess, but not if painted by Vermeer, as at this moment, muted sunlight falling on a casual disorder of papers, folders, files, each layer in a form-fluid, comradely contact with the other, on top of it all pages from the journal my mother kept when we lived in New York, East 53rd, January 1953, typed on the back of mimeographed sheets recycled from her job with the Waterfront Crime Commission. On the side of the chaise that Nora the cat preferred, the best spot for staring out at the trees, birds, and the street, the clutter gets a bit chaotic, less suited to Vermeer than to a New Yorker cover like the one atop a pile of NYRBs including the recent issue I began with. The New Yorker cover (April 21, 2025), an antic delight by Frank Viva, plays on Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, showing an impish cartoon president puffing up a world balloon and dancing with it, Chaplin-style, until it explodes. The blind is closed on that side. Hours later the same day, the effect is a cross between Vermeer and film noir.
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Note: You can meet the poet Florence Victor, as I knew her, in my January 13, 2016 review of Brandon Stanton’s Humans of New York.