Katherine Anne Porter (94 page)

Life, love, beauty, pain, acceptance, response, these are great words and they should mean something, and their meaning depends upon their exact application and reference. Whose life? What kind of love? What sort of beauty? Pain from what cause? And so on. It was this kind of explicitness that Katherine Mansfield possessed and was able to use, when she was at her best and strongest. She was magnificent in her objective view of things, her real sensitiveness to climate, mental or physical, her genuinely first-rate equipment in the matter of the five senses, and my guess, based on the evidence of her stories, is that she by no means accepted everything, either abstractly or in detail, and that whatever her vague love of something called Life may have been, there was as much to hate as to love in her individual living. Mistakenly she fought in herself those very elements that combined to form her main virtue: a certain grim, quiet ruthlessness of judgment, an unsparing and sometimes cruel eye, a natural malicious wit, an intelligent humor; and beyond all she had a burning, indignant heart that was capable of great compassion. Read “The Woman at the Store,” or “A Birthday,” and “The Child-Who-Was-Tired,” one of the most terrible of stories; read “The Fly,” and then read “Millie,” or “The Life of Ma Parker.” With fine objectivity she bares a moment of experience, real experience, in the life of some one human being; she states no belief, gives no motives, airs no theories, but simply presents to the reader a situation, a place,
and a character, and there it is; and the emotional content is present as implicitly as the germ is in the grain of wheat.

Katherine Mansfield has a reputation for an almost finicking delicacy. She was delicate as a surgeon’s scalpel is delicate. Her choice of words was sure, a matter of good judgment and a good ear. Delicate? Read, in “A Married Man’s Story,” the passage describing the prostitute who has been beaten, coming into the shop of the evil little chemist for his famous “pick-me-up.” Or such a scene as the fat man spitting over the balcony in “Violet”; or the seduction of Miss Moss in “Pictures.” “An Indiscreet Journey” is a story of a young pair of lovers, set with the delicacy of sober knowledge against the desolate and brutalized scene of, not war, but a small village where there has been fighting, and the soldiers in the place are young Frenchmen, and the inn is “really a barn, set out with dilapidated tables and chairs.” There are a few stories which she fails to bring off, quite, and these because she falls dangerously near to triviality or a sentimental wistfulness, of which she had more than a streak in certain moments and which she feared and fought in herself. But these are few, and far outweighed by her best stories, which are many. Her celebrated “Prelude” and “At the Bay,” “The Doll’s House,” “The Daughters of the Late Colonel” keep their freshness and curious timelessness. Here is not her view of life but her many views of many kinds of lives, and there is no sign of even a tacit acquiescence in these sufferings, these conflicts, these evils deep-rooted in human nature. Mr. Murry writes of her adjusting herself to life as a flower, etc.; there is an elegiac poesy in this thought, but—and remember I am judging by her pages here under my eye—I see no sign that she ever adjusted herself to anything or anybody, except at an angle where she could get exactly the slant and the light she needed for the spectacle.

She had, then, all her clues; she had won her knowledge honestly, and she turned away from what she knew to pursue some untenable theory of personal salvation under a most dubious teacher. “I fail in my personal life,” she wrote in her journal, and this sense of failure infected her life as artist, which is also personal. Her decision to go to Fontainebleau was no whim, no accident. She had long been under the influence of Orage, her first publisher and her devoted friend, and
he was the chief disciple of Gurdjieff in England. In her last finished story, “The Canary,” a deep parable of her confusion and despair, occurs the hopeless phrase: “Perhaps it does not so much matter what one loves in this world. But love something one must.” It seems to me that St. Augustine knew the real truth of the matter: “It doth make a difference whence cometh a man’s joy.”

“The Canary” was finished in July, 1922. “In the October following she deliberately abandoned writing for a time and went into retirement at Fontainebleau, where she died suddenly and unexpectedly on the night of January 9, 1923.” And so joined that ghostly company of unfulfilled, unhappy English artists who died and are buried in strange lands.

P
ROBABLY
the best that a married pair have to offer each other at the end of a long life together is a courteous mutual apology. But this should be privately spoken and the secret guarded. Husbands and wives do ill to explain each other in print, more especially if the one explained is dead.

The preface written by Mr. H. G. Wells for the collected short stories of his wife is a singularly unfortunate example of the literature of marital bereavement. Catherine Wells was a noble wife, a happy mother and the maker of a free, kind and hospitable home. She was sweet and valiant, faithful, wise and self-forgetful. Pity and habitual helpfulness were very characteristic of her. She was stoical in suffering, shy and reserved in her real emotions and briskly impatient of nonsense in any form. She died with courage and dignity after months of suffering.

All this, it seems to me, should have served fully for the enrichment of Mr. Wells’s life while she lived and for the present consolation of his memories. It is rather sadly beside the point in a preface written with the stated purpose of introducing Catherine Wells, not as the wife of her distinguished husband but as a talented writer of short stories.

The literary judgment of Mr. Wells seems somewhat at fault, too, as well as his taste in other matters. The short stories in this book of Catherine Wells have qualities of delicacy, tender feeling and a restrained fancy, but the book as a whole belongs to her husband and will attract the reader because his name is conspicuous on the cover.

This is sad and the end of a story full of irony. Amy Catherine Robbins meant to become a biologist; she married H. G. Wells while she was a member of his class in practical biology. This was about 1893. They had £50 between them and small
expectations of a long life, for neither of them was in good health. Mrs. Wells developed at once the hundred-sided capacity necessary for successful wifehood to a driving, ambitious, vastly confused but completely self-centered literary man. The compromises, the adjustments of temperament to the common life were mainly hers: she furnished the faith and the attention to practical details of daily life; she was the charming companion and the good housekeeper; she acted as private secretary, literary agent and shock-absorber for her busy husband, and she had the legitimate satisfaction of seeing him famous and wealthy at an early age. The role of hostess to the many friends of fame now devolved upon her. She became a talented amateur actress and the inventive entertainer of her two children. Her gardens were works of art. Her husband and his friends even took the liberty of changing her name to fit their conception of her domestic character. They called her Jane and she answered to it cheerfully.

In the classic role of woman her life was complete. Yet this indefatigable woman asked for one thing more. She asked for one fragment of her mind that might be her own to use as she liked. She resolutely set herself to write and took no one, not even her husband, into her confidence. Through agencies unconnected with her husband and under her right name of Catherine she attempted to market her stories, rejecting the easy use of her husband’s influence. Most of the stories remained unpublished.

Jane had quite supplanted Catherine. When Mrs. Wells searched that part of her mind left for her own uses there remained only the heroically suppressed preoccupations with death, the terror fantasies of ghosts, of childish disappointments and griefs, the young maiden dreams of frustrated romantic love. All the adult experiences of her life since marriage refused to be transmuted into literature. She could not evoke the realities of Jane on paper.

Within less than a year after her death the stories she could not publish by herself have been collected, chosen by her husband as final critic and introduced with his praise, his name joined to hers on the cover. Death served to force her withheld confidences and shatter her last reserves. The stories offer a
strange contrast to the portrait her husband gives of a vivid, tireless, beautiful woman whose endless good sense and ground loyalty to the man of her choice make her a model for all good women and prove that she was a writer of very slender talents. An act of conscious cruelty could never have been so subtle.

“She stuck to me so sturdily that in the end I stuck to myself,” says Mr. H. G. Wells. That is her epitaph.

J
OHN
M
ALCOLM
B
RINNIN
has described this personal memoir of his friend and fellow-poet, Dylan Thomas, as an act of exorcism, and the reader will easily understand why, as he reads on; but I take it also as a very honorable attempt to set his share of the record straight, at a time when the events he writes about are so near and bitter a memory to him. Dylan Thomas died two years ago [November 9th] in a New York hospital of brain lesions caused by alcoholism.

Certain English newspaper critics were very quick to say that we, the Americans, had in our usual thoughtless way destroyed a great poet by tempting him with our easy money to work himself to death traveling about exhibiting himself. It was not easy money, to begin with, and after he was here the poet confessed that he hated his public readings and suffered fearful anxieties on account of them. But he needed money desperately and this was something he could do well. It is perhaps true that he came here out of despair, in his poverty and distraction. This may have been the jumping-off place, but there was going to be one soon, anywhere at all—time was closing in on him; he was probably as well-off here as he would have been anywhere at that exact time, for the simple reason that he was not going to be well-off anywhere ever again.

But obviously he did not know this, and Mr. Brinnin’s idea of bringing him to this country, to arrange for him a transcontinental poetry-reading tour, and to manage his financial affairs for the time being, resulted in one of those fateful events which leaves moral and emotional wreckage, an almost incurable sense of wrong and bitterness and frustration in all those concerned in it. Yet as so often happens, the thing began for such good reasons, in such charming high hopes on Brinnin’s
part, at least good faith, good motives, and splendid practical prospects all around.

There was quite simply nothing visibly wrong with the plan; Thomas confessed he had been longing for years to come to America, but nothing had happened to put him in the way of it. Brinnin, himself a fine poet, was in a position as director of programs for the Poetry Center to be positively helpful. Dylan Thomas was at the top of his fame, he had achieved what turned out to be his life work, and though his first youthful poetic fervor had passed, he appeared to be in a cycle of change for further development; yet, as all artists do at that time, he feared a waning of his powers. He needed a radical change by way of rest and refreshment; and he would make enough money to go back to Wales to his fishing village, his wife and three extraordinarily beautiful children and go on writing poetry.

This book is the story of disgrace and disaster and death that came of all these hopes and plans. For the poet the end was death, tragic yet sordid, in a strange uproar of conflicting claims and feelings, from the most oddly assorted lot of people; with hospital discipline and medical science and the few steadfast friends keeping vigil hardly able to stem the rush of rage and hysteria and melodrama of visitors to his bedside; and all around the cloud of scandal and outrageous gossip floated like dirty smoke in anybody’s ears, leaving its gritty deposit in the memory. But the dying of the silent figure at the center of this disturbance, already wrapped in darkness, has its own majesty, and Brinnin never loses sight of this reality in the clutter of mean detail.

No man can be explained by his personal history, least of all a poet. Dylan Thomas’ life was formed by his temperament, his genius, in relation—in collision—with his particular human situation. As Brinnin discovered in his saddest days, a drunken poet is not more interesting than any other drunken man behaving badly and stupidly. His daily, personal life in fact was no better than that of tens of thousands of dull alcoholics who never wrote a line of poetry. His poetry made the difference, and that is all the difference in this world. All his splendor and virtue are in this poetry—the terrors and follies of his short life here below may very well be put away and forgotten. He
wrote his own epitaph, as a poet should: “This was not everlasting death, but a death of days; this was a sleep with no heart. We bury the dead, said the voice that heard my heart, the brief, and the everlasting.”

“I added that I loved him still, and perhaps later. . . so reluctant is love to part with any part of itself. Or should I say so tenacious is a bitch of her carrion meat.” This is one of the milder tones of this book which Caitlin Thomas promised to write, telling her side of the story, in her foreword to John Malcolm Brinnin’s memoir,
Dylan Thomas in America
. She felt bitterly injured then, and one might have expected a counterattack. But time has worked its changes, and, while her hatreds of others and fierce repudiation of almost every human relationship is as hot as ever (except for a few chosen ones who indulge her moods), her rage, as W. B. Yeats once described it, is now like a knife turned against itself. Subjective, self-centered to the last degree, she tells nothing that contradicts or falsifies Mr. Brinnin’s story, nor the stories of others, even the wildest rumors that flew about. This is quite simply another story, from her own valid point of view, and a more painful one than any I have known.