In a German Pension (Hesperus Classics)

If you’re a Kiwi, you already know who Katherine Mansfield is. Born on some damp islands on the bum-side of the world, her father was a self-made businessman who, like any colonial of means in those days, sent his daughter to England, where she was to finish her education and find her way in the world.

London didn’t go so well. After a one day marriage—which both began and ended for reasons nobody could quite explain—Mansfield became pregnant with the child of another man. She ran away to Bavaria and subsequently miscarried. Her observations there formed the basis for In a German Pension, her first short story collection.

Calling some of these pieces “stories” might be putting it too strongly, however; Mansfield herself called them “sketches”. De-emphasising plot and action, she used words primarily to capture the moods and depths of her characters. Some of the stories have disorienting beginnings, often right in the middle of an episode or conversation. From there they spiral outwards to reveal the social constraints and psychological tensions ensnaring the characters. This conflict is often implied, rather than stated, and usually remains unsolved by the story’s end.

In The Modern Soul the narrator is hanging around with an older gentleman, The Herr Professor. Like all Germans—and men—and especially German men—he is a bit crude and self-assured; before he is due to perform with Fräulein Sonia at a charity concert, the Herr-Professor, still a bit greasy from dinner, biffs his filthy handkerchief into the piano.

Sonia is a self-proclaimed “modern woman”. Yet she cannot escape the embarrassing domesticity of her mother. When she gets up from her seat to join the Herr-Professor on stage, her mother fussily adjusts the safety pin on her skirt. After a mediocre performance she falls in with the narrator, who makes her disdain clear:

Thus the modern soul and I found ourselves together under the stars.

“What a night!” she said. “Do you know that poem of Sappho about her hands in the stars... I am curiously sapphic. And this is so remarkable – not only am I sapphic, I find in all the works of all the greatest writers, especially in their unedited letters, some touch, some sign of myself – some resemblance, some part of myself, like a thousand reflections of my own hands in a dark mirror. (43)

Though Sonia aspires to be something more than she is, she only finds herself reflected back in the lives of those that seem more significant than her: the “thousand reflections of my own hands in a dark mirror.” And while affecting rebellion, she longs for the stability and assurance only the Herr-Professor can give her through marriage. It is there, she believes, that she will find her life’s purpose and contentment. But in Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding, we see that marriage can be just as equally disillusioning.

The eponymous Frau is rushing around the house to get her husband’s outfit ready. When they arrive at the venue it is very busy. Her own husband pushes past her while trying to get ahead of everyone else. The bride sits at the head of a long table. She is wearing “a white dress trimmed with stripes and bows of coloured ribbon, giving her the appearance of an iced cake all ready to be cut and served in neat little pieces to the bridegroom beside her.” (29-30)

There could not be a more obvious image to summarise the unfairness in the room. Women must present themselves for the enjoyment and delight of men. While the men get drunk and raucous, all the women in the room are vaguely unhappy: the bride’s mother warily eyes all the men who dance with her daughter, while Frau Brechenmacher, wedged between two fat women, gives up hope of being asked to dance.

The “highlight” of the evening comes in the bridegroom’s ribald speech. He concludes by giving his wife a coffee pot. Inside she finds children’s toys, a pointed reminder of her infidelity (she has borne a child by another man). The men are at best oblivious to the woman’s dissatisfaction; the women dare not bring it up. Yet everything in the tone and manner of the bridegroom’s speech speaks to the power he has over her. His actions say: regardless of where we might stand up till now, you are mine.

Back home Herr Brechenmacher reminisces about his own wedding and how he and his wife made love when they came home: “Such a clout on the ear as you gave me... But I soon taught you.” Frau Brechenmacher refuses to entertain him. She puts the children to sleep and lays down on the bed, her arm “across her face like a child who expected to be hurt as Herr Brechenmacher lurched in.” (34)

For the bride, the events of the day conclude her passage into womanhood. For Frau Brechenmacher, they summon painful recollections of the moment at which she lost her youth and innocence. And with those things went her sexual availability, the only meagre bit of power she had in life.

Yet for these women there is hardly an alternative. They still need to live by the affections of the men around them, whether they obtain that in marriage or—at the other extreme—prostitution. And however (un)fair this strikes us—however obvious it may seem that patriarchy is the source of their anguish—the women still yearn for the psychological satisfaction of having won the man.

This conflicting mindset—at once loathing of yet needful for the recognition of a man—is shown in The Swing of the Pendulum. Viola is waiting for her lover, the unsuccessful writer Casimir, to come home. She is visited in turn by the landlord—angry over some unpaid rent—and then a stranger who has the wrong address.

When the door closes a fantastic stream-of-consciousness passage begins. The stranger remains in the hallway, smoking a cigarette. As his smoke wafts under the door, Viola fantasises about being with him. She begins to feel disgust for Casimir’s “frightful seriousness”, noting that failure is the only reason they are together: “If she had been happy when they first met she never would have looked at him – but they had been like two patients in the same hospital ward – each finding comfort in the sickness of the other.” Yet she does not want to admit that she despises Casimir because he is a failure: “I suppose it’s the savage pride of the female who likes to think the man to whom she has given herself must be a very great chief indeed.” (97)

Viola dreams of being a prostitute; or rather, she dreams of being an escort to someone of means, a benevolent patriarch who would sweeten his dominion with all the luxuries of success:

[She dreamt of] a wonderful house, and of presses full of clothes, and of perfumes. She saw herself stepping into carriages – looking at the strange man with am mysterious, voluptuous glance – she practiced the glance, lying on the bed – and never another worry, just drugged with happiness. (99)

When she finally invites the stranger in, she feels comforted merely having him around. But when he tries it on with her, Viola rejects him, and he turns aggressive. She bites him and forces him out. The story ends with her feeling once more tender towards Casimir and rehearsing how she will comfort him when he returns.

Despite its rather implausible unfolding, the twists and turns of this story don’t take away from it, but rather add to a certain impalpably manic undertone. Viola’s affections swing in a fickle way from Casimir to the stranger and back again. After two visits from the outside world, it suddenly falls away with the narrative shift to a highly claustrophobic stream-of-consciousness which mirrors Viola’s own excited mental state.

While the story orders a sequence of random events through Viola’s internal response to them, she is ultimately powerless. The pendulum swings and then it swings back, and by the end of the motion it has not moved from where it started. The realisations Viola makes—honest as they may be—take shape and exhaust themselves entirely within her mind. The rest of the world is not even disturbed; for them, her epiphanies may as well not have happened.

One more story deserves our attention. The Child-Who-Was-Tired is the most unusual piece in this collection. It is written almost like a fairy tale, beginning with a little servant girl’s dreaming of “a little white road with black trees on either side, a little road that led to nowhere.”

I have already mentioned how Mansfield likes to begin stories in the middle. When the servant girl is suddenly yanked out of sleep, the reader, not having had a chance to orient himself between the story’s real-world and dream-world, experiences a juddering effect just like the servant girl in the story. The master of the house is looming over her: “What do you mean by sleeping like this the whole night through – like a sack of potatoes? You’ve let the baby wet his bed twice.” (71)

It is curious that nobody in this story has a name. They are identified only by their position in the household, as though the girl is her perpetual wariness and servitude, a piece of chattel for the master to command as he pleases. Amid various scenes of drudgery and child-care, Mansfield describes certain things in a vividly off-putting way: dahlia roots in the cellar are a “twisted mass” that look “as though they were fighting one another”; the grass in the meadow blows in the wind “like green little hairs.” Something about this household, in some inscrutable way, feels blighted and unnatural.

Delirious from lack of sleep, the Child-Who-Was-Tired watches the lord and his wife as they eat. They seem to change in size. The baby, too, becomes something monstrous:

. . . the Man and the Frau swelled to an immense size as she watched them, and then became smaller than dolls, with little voices that seemed To come from outside the window. Looking at the baby, it suddenly had two heads, and then no head. (78)

The baby is put in the other room and begins to cry. Longing to sleep, the Child-Who-Was-Tired enters with a cushion and smothers him: “[she] pressed with all her might as he struggled, ‘like a duck with its head off, wriggling’ she thought.” The oddly specific comparison with the headless duck recalls the previous delusion in which the baby has no head. It also reduces the baby to something monstrous, seemingly forgiving the Child-Who-Was-Tired for her act, which she carries out in a mechanical, almost uncontrollable manner. Her duties complete, she finally collapses on the floor, dreaming once more of “a little white road with tall black trees on either side, a little road that led to nowhere, and where nobody walked at all – nobody at all.”

There is an obvious feminist reading to these stories. The women long for security and comfort, but the men who might give it to them are disgusting and self-assured. Mansfield rescues her characters from becoming man-hating caricatures through subtle hints as to their psychic instability and a general preference for gesture and implication over force and action. But this also undermines their suffering: coarse masculinity can be tamed, and pride goes before the fall, but by the end of the story the object of feminine dissatisfaction never really comes into focus.

A rather catty, contemporaneous review—probably written by Beatrice Hastings under pseudonym—states: “when Mansfield gets quite clear of the lachrymose sentimentality that so often goes with the satirical gift, she will be a very amusing and refreshing writer.” But what would the bloody English know about the English language? These stories are at their best precisely when, turning away from stuffy conventions and contrived poses, they linger on repressed emotions. Thankfully, the two wounded characters who most deserve to end up together—Casimir and Viola—do.

What I also noticed about these stories is how unrecognisable they are as the voice of a New Zealander. The satire is as dry as sandpaper and thoroughly English with its fixation on manners and properness. It was fresh ground, I suppose; the New Zealand identity was still nascent, not having yet had people like Mansfield collectively will it into existence. She later got over the cultural cringe which afflicts every colonial mind at one point or another (“we don’t have a culture!”) and wrote her best stories for it.

I wonder if the presentation of these stories—as “sketches” from a “German pension”—doesn’t let them down somewhat. In those days it was the thing for writers to go abroad to gather “material” for their writing, as if inspiration were a precious metal to be found and harvested. Discussing Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust—the last third of which inexplicably whisks the reader away to Brazil—P. G. Wodehouse lamented: “What a snare this travelling business is to the young writer. He goes to some blasted jungle or other and imagines that everyone will be interested in it.”

Mansfield was already an outsider to the English, though, and the touristic veneer only ends up acting like a kind of double-filter on her subject matter. Though you see early flashes of her brilliance—the quick, witty dialogue, the idiosyncratic punctuation—most of it bubbles away beneath the surface, apprehended only as though through a glass darkly.

Read this review and other writings at my blog.

Bibliography

Most of the stories of In a German Pension were originally published in a magazine called The New Age. They were collected into a book for the first time in 1911. I quote from the version by Hesperus Press Limited 2003.

The catty review about Mansfield’s “lachrymose sentimentality” is quoted in The Life of Katherine Mansfield by Anthony Alpers (p. 129), published by Oxford University Press 1982.

P. G. Wodehouse's comments about travel are quoted in Robert Murray Davidson’s introduction to A Handful of Dust (p. xxi) by Evelyn Waugh, published by Penguin Classics in 2000.