Introduction: ‘Vignette: I Look Out Through the Window’

The apparently dreary and clichéd nature of the song that Beryl sings in the quotation above is illusory; it is a text that, for Katherine Mansfield, has a disguised but defined personal association, that is, to a specific Russian folk song arranged for guitar and voice. Mansfield was an amateur guitarist and an aspiring vocalist so that the inclusion of this reference in ‘Prelude’ gives it even more potency for any biographer of Mansfield or scholars examining that story. The specificity of musical reference in the scene is prefigured several times in Mansfield's oeuvre, including ‘The Story of Pearl Button’ (1907), a piece about the humiliation of Pearl's first day at school. In this text, the class sing-along ditty ‘To the Woods’ – from the German folk song ‘Gruss Dem Walde’ – is interrupted by the movement of the swinging scythe so reminiscent of Mr Dyer's own ‘supplejack whipping’. There are multiple other examples in her fictional work for which the disguised precision of the musical reference fulfils Mansfield's desire to write something ‘a little sonoro’.

Although the term ‘vignette’ implies prose, Mansfield uses the word for both poetry and fiction. An example of the latter, ‘Vignette: I Look Out Through the Window’, which was written while the author's lover Garnet Trowell was on tour with the Moody Manners Opera Company, represents her acute sensitivity to the synaesthetic and symbolic potentials of music. Integral to the mood of the text is the presence of the window, ‘that most liminal of all spaces’, that represents the author's sense of aloneness and through which she sees the trees as frail human souls trembling with fear. Despite the rhododendron not flowering – it is winter after all – somehow the tree reaches to the sun, and to music, for comfort and protection. The evergreen plant, here representative of Mansfield herself, contains the promise of renewal and life and contrasts with the deciduous pines or ‘crucified trees’ which are barren of foliage and frightening.

Introduction

My discovery in 2019 of several forgotten stories almost certainly by Katherine Mansfield, including ‘The Chorus Girl and the Tariff’, drew me towards a reappraisal of The Garden Party and Other Stories in the context of theatre. Theatrical, cinematic or performative tendencies in the writings of Mansfield have been examined by Gerri Kimber (2008), Delia da Sousa Correa (2011, 2013), Sarah Sandley (2011), Erika Baldt (2015) and Faye Harland (2020), and Claire Davison notes that, in Mansfield’s stories, ‘Cinema techniques are transposed back into writing, theatrical monologues and dialogues are re-mediatised as prose.’ To take one of many possible examples, the visual clarity of the story ‘Millie’ – published in the Blue Review in 1913 – is partially created by a cinematic cutting and splicing of short phrases: ‘and the furniture seemed to bulge and breathe … and listen, too. The clock – the ashes – and the venetian – and then again – something else, like steps in the back yard.’ Yet with no creative prose by Mansfield pertaining directly to theatre – at least before 1909, when Mansfield was reading G. K. Chesterton’s critical study, Charles Dickens, and when ‘The Chorus Girl and the Tariff’ was written – a reappraisal seems timely. To this end, I will examine ‘Life of Ma Parker’, the sixth story in The Garden Party collection, written in Menton, France, in February 1921.

Introduction

Garnet Carrington Trowell, violinist and twin brother of Arnold Trowell, was born and raised in Wellington, New Zealand. Considered the shy and less talented of the two twins, Garnet was nevertheless a fine musician. As an eleven-year-old, he toured the North Island of New Zealand with Pollard’s Opera Company Orchestra and performed alongside his father, Thomas Trowell, with the Wellington Orchestral Society. He attended Saint Patrick’s College in Wellington, where his father taught the violin.

To further the twins’ musical careers they were sent to Europe in August 1903. Initially, they studied at Dr Hoch’s Conservatorium in Frankfurt, Germany, but the withdrawal of key teachers from the institution precipitated a relocation to the Brussels Conservatoire in 1904. While studying at Queen’s College in London, KM and her sisters were taken to Europe on a number of occasions, which allowed them to see the Trowell brothers perform. KM also attended Garnet’s début London performance – with Mrs Barrington-Waters (sister-in-law of Val Waters, KM’s maternal uncle) and Arnold Trowell – at the inauguration of the New Zealand Association at the Westminster Palace Hotel on Tuesday, 3 July 1906. The brothers subsequently went back to Brussels for concerts in the autumn of the same year, at which time KM reluctantly returned to New Zealand with her family. While in her home country, the frustrated author wrote letters to the Trowell family in London but her emotional focus at this time was not on Garnet, but on his twin brother, Arnold, and their sister, Dolly.

Upon her return to London in August 1908, KM, realising that Arnold’s affections lay elsewhere, quickly switched her attentions to Garnet. The latter was frequently at London’s Lyric Theatre, performing operas by Wagner, Verdi, Gounod and Leoncavallo with the Moody Manners Opera Company. With his long hair and long cigarettes, Garnet easily passed for a bohemian musician, at least in the eyes of an impressionable KM. A physical relationship – ‘we will never get the landladies out of the room’ (see below, p. 676) – probably began in September and continued in November when Garnet had a week’s respite from touring with the Moody Manners Opera Company – ‘I’m afraid you will be thoroughly spoiled’ (below, p. 692).

Introduction

Thomas Luigi Trowell was born in Birmingham, UK, in August 1859. At the age of twenty he found a position playing in the band at the Tynemouth Aquarium near Newcastle, but when the venue closed after less than a year, he chose to follow his fiancée, Kate Wheeler, to New Zealand.

During the 1880s Thomas organised balls and dances in Taranaki Street, Wellington, and played the viola in local concerts. He performed under conductor Robert Parker – who was later to become KM’s piano teacher – for the Wellington Orchestral Society from 1883. In 1886 Thomas accepted a teaching post at Saint Patrick’s College, beginning a long professional association with the Wellington school that helped educate his twin sons.

Thomas continued to play for the Wellington Orchestral Society but transferred from viola to clarinet in 1892. His musical versatility was notable: he taught both violin and cello and conducted a variety of local orchestras and bands. A broad range of styles was required, including music for trapeze exhibitions, wrestling and sword-fighting, as well as for Sunday worship.

The family eventually moved to 18 Buller Street, Wellington, where KM later attended rehearsals and music lessons. Tragically, the eldest son, Lindley, died on 28 July 1894, only weeks before the Second New Zealand Musical Festival – at which Thomas performed – opened at the nearby opera house. Thomas toured the North Island with the Bland Holt Opera Company in the summer of 1895–6; played for the Industrial Exhibition in November 1896; and performed – as a first violinist – for the Wellington Orchestral Society’s concert in April of the same year. By this time his twin sons, Garnet and Tom, were involved in these concerts, and much of their father’s energy was transferred to their musical education.

After the twins left for Europe in 1903 to further their musical education, Thomas continued briefly at Saint Patrick’s College before dedicating himself to orchestral and opera conducting, playing and touring in New Zealand and Australia. Cello lessons and concerts with KM included an ‘At Home’, celebrating the Beauchamp family’s move to Fitzherbert Terrace in May 1907. KM’s subsequent letters to Thomas – who was back in England by the end of the year – provide glimpses of the powerful hold that music still had over KM: ‘the greatest joy I can imagine is to share a programme with you at a London concert’ (below, p. 708).

Introduction

Thomas Wilberforce Arnold Trowell, the twin brother of Garnet Trowell, was born in Wellington, New Zealand, into a thriving immigrant population. He was an eminent and successful musician in the United Kingdom from 1907 until his death in 1966. Notwithstanding a large number of pedagogical compositions that are still played by young cellists, he has virtually been forgotten since. However, some of his chamber works, notably those written during World War One and including the Piano Quintet Opus 45, are worthy of revival.

KM – who fictionalised her relationship with ‘Tom’ in her unfinished novel Juliet – probably met her idol between April and September 1900 in Wellington, at which time she began cello lessons (or continued piano lessons) at the home of her classmate Esme Dean. As the older and more advanced musician, Tom was largely oblivious to the schoolgirl crush that KM had on him and, as eldest child-designate, studiously worked towards a music career, only really establishing a friendship with KM once they were abroad.

Assisted by mother Kate and sister Dolly Trowell – who visited the brothers in Germany early in May 1904 – and possibly with KM as their guest, the family travelled from Germany to Brussels. KM recalled events years later: ‘There is a little child opposite me in a red cloak sleeping; she shakes her hair just as Dolly did when she was a girl in Brussels so many years ago.’ During this sojourn KM’s songs Love’s Entreaty and Night – a copy of which is inscribed ‘To Tom from Kathleen’, dated 13 August 1904, and survives today – were published in Germany.

KM’s diary entry for New Year’s Eve, 1904 (see CW4, pp. 13–14), which might be addressed to Tom, possibly demonstrates an ongoing friendship sustained by intense but infrequent meetings abroad. Whereas the construction of the letter is conventional, the stream-of-consciousness ramble of the next surviving draft letter, dated 11 August 1907, suggests the influence of Oscar Wilde. Another letter to Tom, written late in January 1908, acts to vent the frustration of the moment for KM (When can I go to England?). Despite, or because of, the German text, the tone of the letter – which was probably both sent and received – seems genuine.