The legendary British news died a century ago, at 34 years old. Several collections of his news reappear for this centenary: detail of what always constitutes it today the dazzling modernity.
by Florence Noville
A hundred years ago, on January 9, 1923, at the Avon cemetery (Seine-et-Marne), near Fontainebleau, a very small procession was shaking. We had just built up “the newist from the end of the world” as we called it at the time, Katherine Mansfield, of her real name Kathleen Beauchamp. Born thirty-four years earlier in Wellington, New Zealand, Mansfield had chosen as pen name that of his grandmother and thus signed her first texts, at 14 years old. Great Britain, Germany, France: it was also at this age that the girl had left her island to go study first, then live in Europe a free woman in Europe. A life prematurely abbreviated by the scourge of then, tuberculosis, but rich in twists and turns, scandals, love of all kinds.
In this short time, Mansfield, inspired by modernism and nourished by Tchekhov (1860-1904), will have helped to revolutionize the art of the short stories that make up the entire work if we except the Correspondence (letters, Stock, 1985) and the newspaper (Stock, 1932; reed. 2008). In 2006, the “La Cosmopolite” collection (Stock) had gathered most of these jewelry in some thousand pages entitled Les Nouvelles. The reissue of collections Félicité, La Garden Party and the Colombes nest followed by German pension (1920, 1922, 1923), at Archipoche, and the publication of another, Revelations, at Mikros, is an opportunity to study Up close to the news according to Mansfield: “Examine visible things and those that are not”, mix with the essence of joy a few drops of pure melancholy, spice up with strangeness, make it intensely vibrate.
vibration
Ah, the famous vibrato of Casals or Rostropovitch! All the cellists will tell you, this art of modulating the note to create a kind of sound wave can completely change the effect produced by a piece. When she was young, Katherine Mansfield knew it perfectly, too. She dreamed of a career as a professional cellist, but her father – businessman and future director of the New Zealand bank – opposed it. Having become a writer – not without having, to please her, followed a dactylography course! -, Mansfield transposed, if one can say, this technique of the strings to the words. His writing is made of these suspended moments.
In his news unfolds an ever free virtuosity, a minor phrasing which, with an incredible sensitivity, expresses the most tenuous perception, and often crack. His contemporary Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), who could not have a thinner too, had immediately spotted it. And appreciated. Not without an ounce of envy. Just after the death of his friend and rival, Woolf admitted in his newspaper (1915-1941, Stock, 2008 for the full version): “When I got to work, it seemed to me that writing had no meaning. Katherine would not read me. “And in the same momentum of honesty, she adds further:” I did not want to admit it, but I was jealous of her writing, the only writing that I have ever been jealous. She had the vibration. “
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