“I think that the Journal of Katherine Mansfield is the saddest book I have ever read. Here, set down in exquisite fragments, is the record of six lonely and tormented years, the life’s-end of a desperately ill woman. So private is it that one feels forever guilty of prying for having read it.

Her journal was her dear companion. “Come, my unseen, my unknown, let us walk together,” she says to it. Only in its pages could she show her tragically sensitive mind, her lovely, quivering soul. She was not of the little breed of the discontented; she was of the high few fated to be ever unsatisfied. Writing was the precious thing in life to her, but she was never truly pleased with anything she had written. With a sort of fierce austerity, she strove for the crystal clearness, the hard, bright purity from which streams perfect truth. She never felt that she had attained them. 

Journal of Katherine Mansfield is a beautiful book and an invaluable one, but it is her own book, and only her dark, sad eyes should have read its words. I closed it with a little murmur to her portrait on the cover. “Please forgive me,” I said.”

-Dorothy Parker, from The Private Papers of the Dead 

the moment of direct feeling

Nevertheless, there are signs that we are intent as never before on trying to puzzle out, to live by, our own particular self. Der Mensch muss frei sein - free, disentangled, single. Is it not possible that the rage for confession, autobiography, especially for memories of early childhood is explained by our persistent yet mysterious belief in a self which is continuous and permanent, which, untouched by all we acquire and all we shed, pushes a green speer through the leaves and through the mould, thrusts a sealed bud through years of darkness until, one day, the light discovers it and shakes the flower free and - we are alive - we are flowering for our moment upon the earth. This is the moment which, after all, we live for, the moment of direct feeling when we are most ourselves and least personal.

Katherine Mansfield -- Journal, April 1920

Can I make for you in words that safe place where we can stay?

A number of years ago I wrote a collection of short stories called This Place You Return to is Home. The title story, connected to the others by themes of homecoming and identity, explored the idea that, as the poet Robert Frost had it, 'Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in,' could be created in a narrative. 'Do you remember? How we were safe there?' I wrote, about the grandmother's house in that title story. 'Can I make for you in words that safe place where we can stay?'
It's an idea that has always preoccupied me - that notion of creative process as a making, a willed brick-by-brick, word-by-word building of a place on the page that might let a story inhabit it - to create a home of words where I, the writer, may also live. And the idea of return, too, as is there in the title of that story - that writing itself may enact a kind of going back, to the next story one is writing and then to the next and the next - back to the desk, again and again, to the page, to the paragraphs, those bricks and mortar of the writer's life - returning, as well, to some central idea that powers and draws all my work to it in the first place, that's ineffable and, in the end, mysterious to me, writing at the end of the road, to take me in.

Kirty Gunn -- My Katherine Mansfield Project

Katherine Mansfield [MS-Papers - 4006-8] (p201)

I should like this to be accepted as my confession.

Suffering.
There is no limit to human suffering. When one thinks: "now I have touched the bottom of the sea, now I can go no deeper" -- one goes deeper. And so it is for ever. I thought last year in Italy any shadow more would be Death, but this year has been so much more terrible that I think with affection of the Casetta! Suffering is boundless -- it is eternity. One pang is eternal torment. Physical suffering is -- child's play. To have one's breast crushed by a great stone -- one could laugh!
I do not want to die without leaving a record of my belief that suffering can be overcome. For I do believe it. What must one do? There is no question of what Jack calls passing beyond it: this is false. One must submit. Do not resist. Take it. Be overwhelmed. Accept it fully -- make it part of Life.
Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change. So suffering must become Love. This is the mystery. This is what I must do.
[...]
It is to lose oneself more utterly -- to love more deeply -- to feel oneself part of Life -- not separate. Oh Life! accept me -- make me worthy -- teach me -- I write that. I look up...

19.XII.1920

A new way of being is not an easy thing to live. Thinking about it, preparing to meet the difficulties and so on, is one thing, meeting those difficulties another. I have to die to so much; I have to make such big changes. I feel the only thing to do is to get the dying over -- to court it, almost. (Fearfully hard, that.) And then all hands to the business of being born again. What do I mean exactly? Let me give you an instance.
...Looking back, my boat is almost swamped sometimes by seas of sentiment. 'Ah, what I have missed! How sweet it was, how dear, how warm, how simple, how precious!' And I think of the garden at the Isola Bella and the furry bees and the house-wall so warm. But then I remember what we really felt there -- the blanks, the silences, the anguish of continual misunderstanding. We were positive, eager, real, alive? No, we were not. We were a nothingness shot with gleams of what we might be. But no more. Well, I have to face everything as fas as I can see and where I stand -- what remains.


Katherine Mansfield -- Letter [October 11th 1922]