Marjorie si sedette sulla coperta con le spalle al fuoco e attese Nick. Nick si avvicinò e si sedette sulla coperta accanto a lei. Dietro di loro c’erano gli alberi ricresciuti sul promontorio e davanti c’era la baia con la foce di Hortons Creek. Non era ancora completamente buio. La luce del fuoco arrivava fino all’acqua. Entrambi potevano vedere le due canne d’acciaio oblique sopra l’acqua nera. Il fuoco faceva brillare I mulinelli.

(La fine di qualcosa, p. 124) ( )

"The child-who-was-tired," this was my favorite story in this collection. I like this author for her observation skills; she lets you see the humans in her world. Hypocrites, hypochondriacs, selfish, self-righteous, arrogant, flesh-eating, . . . All the assholes all around us every day are brought to life in these stories. A delight. ( )

[From Traveller’s Library, ed. W. Somerset Maugham, Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1933, p. 1319:]

Probably of all the modern writers who have been influenced by Chekov Katherine Mansfield is the best. I admire her delicate insight, her minute appreciation of the appearance of things and lucid and easy English, but I cannot think that she has used the manner in her longer stories with complete success. I feel in them the want of a supporting skeleton. They remind me of great jelly-fishes, iridescent and strangely lovely as they float aimlessly about the sea, but floppy and inert. I like them page by page, but I do not quite know what they are all about, and I finish them with a slight sense of having been taken in. Her shorter stories on the other hand seem to me to have great excellence. They can do without a backbone. In them her charming gifts are admirably shewn.

[From Great Modern Reading, ed. W. Somerset Maugham, Doubleday, 1943, pp. 463-4:]

The last name in this group is Katherine Mansfield. She wrote little and died young. She has been extravagantly praised. She was not a genius, but partly by the booming of her literary friends, partly because in the poverty of the short story in England at the time she was writing, she seemed better than she was, she was acclaimed as such. She had a small and delicate talent and a sensitive feeling for visual things, but when she tried to write a story of any length, it broke to pieces in the middle because it was not supported by a structure of sufficient strength. Her slight, charming gift is best shown in short pieces such as the one I have printed [“Revelations”]. It may amuse you to note that in this she has used with effect the surprise ending which the elect now look upon as reprehensible. This of course is nonsense; the surprise ending is excellent if it is logical: in this case it gives the story its point.

[From Points of View, Vintage Classics, 2000 [1958], “The Short Story”, pp. 184-7:]

It has been generally accepted that Katherine was greatly influenced by Chekhov. Middleton Murry denied this. He claimed that she would have written her stories exactly as she did if she had never read one of Chekhov’s. There, I think, he was wrong. Of course she would have written stories, to do so was in her blood; but I believe that save for Chekhov they would have been very different. Katherine Mansfield’s stories are the outpourings of a lonely, sensitive, neurotic, sick woman who never felt quite at home in the Europe she had chosen to live in. This was their content. Their form she owed to Chekhov.

[...]

She had a small but delicate talent. I think her extravagant admirers have done her a disservice in making claims for her which her work scarcely justifies. She had little power of invention. Invention is a curious faculty. It is an attribute of youth and with age is lost. That is natural, for it is an upshot of experience and with advancing years the events of life cease to have the novelty, the excitement, the stimulation that they had in youth and so no longer incite the author to expression. Katherine had no great experience of life. She knew she needed it. Murry, somewhat disapprovingly, says that “she wanted money, luxury, adventure, the life of cities”; of course she did, for only then could she get the material for her stories. The writer of fiction, in order to tell the truth as he sees it, must play his part in the hurly-burly of life. If what the dictionary tells us is correct, that a story is a narrative of events that have happened or might have happened, it must be admitted that Katherine Mansfield had no outstanding gifts for telling one. Her gifts lay elsewhere. She could take a situation and wring from it all the irony, bitterness, pathos and unhappiness that were inherent in it. An example of this is the narrative which she called Psychology. She wrote a few stories which are objective, such stories as The Daughter of the Late Colonel and Pictures; they are good stories, but they might have been written by any competent writer; her most characteristic stories are those that are commonly known as stories of atmosphere. I have asked various of my literary friends what in this connection is the meaning of the word ‘atmosphere’; but they either could not, or would not, give me an answer that quite satisfied me. The Oxford Dictionary does not help. After the obvious definition it gives, “figuratively, surrounding mental or moral element, environment.” In practice it seems to mean the trimmings with which you decorate a story so thin that without them it would not exist. This, Katherine Mansfield was able to do with skill and charm. She had a truly remarkable gift of observation and could describe effects of nature, scents of the country, wind and rain, sea and sky, trees, fruits and flowers with rare delicacy. Not the least of her gifts was that which enabled her to give you the heartbreak that lay behind what to all appearances was a casual conversation over, say, a cup of tea; and heaven knows, that is not an easy thing to do. She wrote in a style that is pleasantly conversational and you can read even her slightest stories with pleasure. They do not stick in your memory as, for instance, does Maupassant’s Boule de Suif or Chekhov’s Ward No. 10; that is, perhaps, because it is easier to remember a fact than an emotion. You can remember falling down the stairs and spraining your ankle, but not what it felt like to be in love. But whether it is a merit in a story that you should remember it after you have read it is something on which I would not venture to offer an opinion.

Katherine Mansfield found little to please her in New Zealand when she lived there, but later, when England had not given her what she expected, when her health failed, her thoughts went back to the early years she had spent there. There were moments when she wished she had never come away. In retrospect the life she had led then seemed full and varied and delightful. She could not but write about it. The first story she wrote was called Prelude. She wrote it when she and Murry were spending three months at Bandol on the French Riviera, and when they were happier together than they had ever been before or would ever be again. She intended to call it The Aloe and it was Murry who suggested she should call it Prelude. I suppose he felt that rather than a story it was the setting for one. She began it, as we know, with the idea of writing a novel, and on that account, perhaps, it is somewhat shapeless. Later, she wrote, among other stories with the same background, The Voyage, At the Bay and The Garden Party. The Voyage describes a night’s journey that a little girl, with her grandmother to take care of her, takes by sea from one port in New Zealand to another. It could not be more tender or more charming. The other stories are about her father, her mother, her brother, her sisters, her cousins and neighbours. They are fresh, lively and natural. We know that she put a lot of work into them, but they have an engaging air of spontaneity. They have none of the bitterness, the disillusionment, the pathos, of so many of her stories. They are to my mind the best things she ever wrote.

I am told that Katherine Mansfield’s stories are not so highly thought of as they were during the ‘twenties. It would be a pity if she were forgotten. I don’t think she will be. After all, it is the personality of the author that gives his work its special interest. It does not matter if it is a slightly absurd one, as with Henry James, a somewhat vulgar one, as with Maupassant, a brash, tawdry one, as with Kipling – so long as the author can present it, distinct and idiosyncratic, his work has life. That surely is what Katherine Mansfield succeeded in doing.

The only short-story writer that comes close to Chekhov. Brilliant. ( )

I thought Katherine Mansfield's collected short stories were okay. I might have liked them better if I hadn't read her collected works -- some of the stories were good, others were just so-so. I didn't find them particularly noteworthy or memorable thought. ( )