C.K. Stead: Mansfield: A Novel

Reviewed by JOHN MCCRYSTAL

Katherine Mansfield remains buoyant, Karl Stead once wrote, while other, worthy writers are swamped by the waves of literary fashion. Indeed, she is set to undergo something of a major revival this year: this is the first of two novels based on her life due out, and at least two major nonfiction treatments are set for re-runs, too.

Her perennial appeal has partly to do with her work which, while thin on the ground -- she published less in her short lifetime than was published on her posthumous behalf -- is marked by a talent of imposing dimensions, but it also has to do with her life and character.

Mansfield was a brilliant, complex and, of course, tragic figure, as magnetic to her contemporaries as to her posterity, and it is our double fortune that not only was she a prolific diarist and letter-writer, but also that her husband, Jack Middleton Murry, ignored her dying wish to burn it all.

Karl Stead is in as good a position as anyone to try to resurrect Mansfield in fiction. He was already a specialist in her historical period and literary milieu when he took up the Mansfield Fellowship in Menton in 1972 and began work on a selection of her letters and journals, which was published in 1977 (and which is to be reprinted this year).

This enterprise gave him a window on her inner world, and the instances in his latest novel where he allows himself to occupy her character -- he invents a letter to her close friend, Fred Goodyear, and an inscription to Bertrand Russell's copy of In a German Pension -- show how thoroughly he enjoys the view.

Mansfield tells Katherine's story from the summer of 1917 to the winter of 1918, a particularly tumultuous period in a fairly turbulent life.

He has resisted the temptation to deal with the melodramas of her life -- her miscarriage before this novel opens, and her death after it closes. More sentimental novelists would surely have succumbed to it.

Instead, he has concentrated on the period during which she sought to liberate herself from her relationship with Murry and mingled with the likes of D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley and Bertrand Russell.

The timeframe coincides with the most destructive phase of World War I, to which she lost first her brother and then, soon afterward, Fred Goodyear, with whom she was becoming romantically entangled.

It concludes with her discovery that her worst fears about the aches and pains which plagued her through most of her adult life are well-founded. And it forms a kind of prelude to the most productive and significant period in her life as an artist.

Stead characteristically tells the story through the points of view of a number of characters, so that our experience of Mansfield and her world is not limited to her perspective. This places her in her socio-historical context.

Murry, whom history has taken to task for usurping fame through his tireless promotion of Mansfield's life and work and his own place in them, is neatly written back into place.

But I felt slightly more removed from Katherine herself than I prefer to feel about the main character of a novel. It's as though Stead felt an obligation to square his fiction with the facts, and a related need to namecheck Mansfield's brilliant contemporaries, with a corresponding loss of traction on Mansfield herself, her character and motivations.

Mansfield is a well-crafted novel, with the period and the people nicely evoked, even if in the end they never quite came alive on the page.

* Vintage, $26.95