| In her new novel Thieves, Canadian poet, fiction writer and scholar Janice Kulyk Keefer explores the life of Katherine Mansfield. But Keefer’s book is as much about the connection between readers and authors as it is about the New Zealand writer who died in 1923 at only 35 years of age.
"I’m very much interested in the relationship between readers and books," says Keefer, speaking by phone from her home in Toronto. "In some senses, some of our most satisfying relationships, erotically or emotionally, are with characters in books. There’s a sort of intimacy when you read. You are able to be in the mind of that character in a way that you can never be in the mind of another human being that you happen to love as well."
In Thieves, a fascination with the story of Mansfield’s life becomes the thread that links a young student and his aloof father with an eccentric Chicago book collector and a lively young waitress. Keefer admits to "stealing" that last character, Edna, out of the pages of a Mansfield story in order to invent a new ending for her. There’s a lot of thieving going on in the novel. Much is taken from Mansfield, from her letters to her health, while other characters steal their own best possibilities from themselves. As the expression goes, they "can’t get out of their own way."
Mansfield was not a woman to let things stand in her way.
"Mansfield took, sexually in particular, all kinds of risks," says Keefer. "That adventurousness is part of what makes her an incredibly arresting sort of character." But the story Keefer wants to explore here is not just that of Mansfield as a banker’s daughter who left respectable New Zealand society in order to re-invent herself as a socially and artistically daring modernist in Europe. What especially fascinates Keefer is Mansfield’s resilience in the face of hardship.
Keefer recalls seeing a film dramatization of one especially desperate moment in Mansfield’s brief life when, stranded alone in a miserable Italian hotel, abandoned by her husband and realizing that she is dying of tuberculosis, she faces the waves crashing over the coastal rocks and cries out "Where is my mate?"
It sounds melodramatic, but Keefer describes Mansfield’s journals from that period as genuinely "devastating."
"I guess one of the things that then struck me most powerfully was how she came into her full voice as a writer when she was in her most desperate straits," Keefer says. "You’d think that that would tend to silence someone, knowing that you’ve got your death sentence, but she somehow was able to pull things together and then, within a couple of months after that episode, she was writing ‘Daughters of the Late Colonel.’"
For Keefer, Mansfield was a powerful figure who somehow remains hard to grasp. Her work has what Keefer calls a "quicksilver" quality, a "sense of this elusive apprehension or perception we have of what is at the heart of life. It’s sadness but it’s not quite sadness. You can never really articulate it in any satisfying way, but you can sense it, and the sensing of it is what is important. It’s the closest you can come to sort of knowing what this whole mysterious thing you call your own life is about. And I think that’s what makes it so haunting and that’s what makes her readers particularly attached to her." |
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