Chatting up Katherine Mansfield

I like the New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield, who according to Virginia Woolf smelt like a civet cat and had a hard, cheap face, and who was the only contemporary writer of whom she was remotely jealous. I like her writing and I like what I read about her short life. I’m not saying she was a great writer. I’m only saying that my imagination finds her writing voice oddly congenial. It strikes it as supremely impersonal, poker-faced and tart, with a quietly powerful undertow of sexual recklessness. But that might be just me. Funny things, writers’ voices. I suppose we meet them halfway and we either embrace them or we don’t. Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp and I embraced. My favourite short story of hers, and I honestly couldn’t say why, is an odd little thing never mentioned by critics called ‘The Young Girl’.

In 1916, she and her husband, the utter cad and weakling John Middleton Murry, went to Provence to write. They stayed at the Hotel Beau Rivage at Bandol, near Marseilles. They had a tiff and on the third day Murray returned to London. Shortly after that she was walking alone along a stone embankment that juts out into the sea and a chap came along and chatted her up. She recorded the conversation in her notebook. This was what it was like to chat up Katherine Mansfield. ‘You are alone, Madame?’ ‘Alone, Monsieur.’ ‘You are living at the hotel, Madame?’ ‘At the hotel, Monsieur.’ ‘Ah, I have noticed you walking alone several times, Madame.’ ‘It is possible, Monsieur.’ She says the man then blushed and put his hand to his cap. ‘I am very indiscreet, Madame.’ ‘Very indiscreet, Monsieur.’