Katherine Mansfield

A Picture of KM. BBC. Episode 1

A Picture of KM. BBC. Episode 2

A Picture of KM. BBC. Episode 3

A Picture of KM. BBC. Episode 4

A Picture of KM. BBC. Episode 5

A Picture of KM. BBC. Episode 6

A Portrait of Katherine Mansfield

Short Stories Audio BBC

A BRIEF SUMMARY OF HER LIFE

Katherine Mansfield was born in 1888, in Kaori, near Wellington, the capital city of New Zealand. There are two main islands in New Zealand, the North Island where the capital is and another important city, Auckland, and the South Island, with Christchurch as the most populated city there. But, at that moment, all the New Zealander cities were almost villages.
Her father, Harold Beauchamp, was an Australian who had made his living with business related to gold mines. Then he immigrated to New Zealand and, little by little, achieved a very important position in society and became a magnate of finances, and even he was made a knight for his services to the British Empire.

Katherine had two older sisters and a younger sister and a younger brother. Their parents give them some education and encouraged them to play the piano, to learn how to paint, to read, etc.

You have to remember that New Zealand was the first country in the world where women had the right to vote, in 1893.

At 14, Katherine Mansfield fell in love with a neighbour, Arnold Trowell, a cellist, and from that moment she decided she wanted to be a musician.

When she was 15, her father decided to send his three older girls to London to study at Queen’s College, a very liberal school in Bloomsbury, a neighbourhood in London. Bloomsbury was also the name of a group of intellectuals with a great influence in arts and science.

There she starts her long-life friendship with Ida Baker. It was a singular relationship because Ida (whom Katherine Mansfield called her “wife”) was (perhaps) her lover, her loyal friend but also her slave. Ida Baker wrote a book about Katherine Mansfield with the title Katherine Mansfield, The Memoirs of L.M., being L.M. Lesley Moore, a male name that Katherine Mansfield gave her.

She was at Queen’s College for 3 years; then she had to go back to New Zealand, but she couldn’t stand the provincial life of her native country and, in the end, she convinced her father to allow her to travel again to the UK and stay there with an annual allowance. She was 20.

She accommodated in a student hostel with a lot of freedom.

There she got in contact again with Arnold Trowell, but she fell in love with his brother Garnet, a violinist. She got pregnant, but we don’t know if he knew it. And then, all of a sudden, she got married to George Bowden, a singing teacher 10 years her senior. Nobody knows for sure the reasons of this marriage. The wedding was a surrealistic affair: she wore black, Ida was their only witness, and she left her husband the wedding night without consuming the marriage. George didn’t want to give her the divorce for six years.

She left the idea of being a musician and bet on being a writer.

Her mother knew about all the affair and travelled to London to take her daughter to a small spa in Bavaria. But they quarrelled, and she disinherited her forever, left her there and went back to New Zealand.

In this spa, Katherine Mansfield had a miscarriage. Her stay in Germany was the ground of her book In a German Pension.

She became briefly involved with a Polish translator, Floryan Sobieniowsky, who infected her with gonorrhoea; that was possibly the cause of her bad health during all her life, her rheumatism, her infertility, surely of her tuberculosis and her premature death. But, thanks to Floryan, she knew Chekhov. A story of hers, The-Child-Who-Was-Tired, a version of a Chekov’s short story (Sleep), almost a plagiarism, was published in 1910 in the magazine The New Age and marks the introduction of this Russian writer to the English critics and readers.

She went back to London, and since then, she moved house restlessly, mostly due to shortness of money.

She published In a German Pension, and she met John Murry, an undergraduate from Oxford, editor of Rhythm, who was going to be her partner, lover and husband in a very troublesome relationship. Their relationship began when she accommodated him in her flat and asked him to make her his mistress. Katherine then worked in his magazine writing book reviews.

Murry and Katherine met D. H. Lawrence and his lover Frieda, and went to live together in Cornwall in a kind of commune; but the society only lasted six months. The characters Gerald and Gudrun in D. H. Lawrence’s novel Women in Love are the portraits of Murry and Katherine.

In 1914 the Great War started, and in 1915 her brother Leslie, her favourite in her family, died in an army training.

She met people from the Bloomsbury Group. Leonard Bloom published her Prelude, and she had affairs with members of the group. Her relationship with Virginia Woolf was of admiration and jealousy.

At 29, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis, but she didn’t want to go to a sanatorium. She went to live in the South of France, where a lot of English people with the same illness tried to recover their health.

These last years of her life were her most productive in literature. She published Bliss in 1918 and The Garden Party and Other Stories in 1922.

From the South of France she went to Paris looking for a cure with a famous bacteriologist, and then to Fontainebleau, where a Russian exile (George Gurdjieff) ruled an alternative community that tried to live nearer the nature.

She died from a massive haemorrhage in January 1923.
The Dove’s Nest, Something Childish but Very Natural, her letters and diaries were published posthumously by her husband John Murry.

Errand, by Raymond Carver

Raymond Carver at the Wikipedia

Raymond Carver: bibliography

Errand: review

Errand: summary and analysis: enciclopedia

Errand: enotes

Short Cuts (trailer)

Jindabyne (trailer)

Birdman (trailer)

Everything must go (trailer)

A little bit of biography

Raymond (or Ray) Carver was born in a milltown in Oregon (on the West coast), in 1938 and died when he was 50 years old of lung cancer.
His father was a millsaw worker and a heavy drinker, and his mother worked as a waitress and a clerk, so they were a lower class family.
Raymond also worked with his father in the millsaw. He also learned to fish, so fishing is a theme that appears in some of his stories.
At 19 he got married to Maryann Burk, 16 years old. We have to suppose that they married because they had a baby the same year. Then they had another next year.
Both, Raymond and Maryann, had different jobs and they try to go on studying; Maryann finished her studies, but Raymond never finished any of his courses. Besides temporary occupations, he got precarious jobs as a writing teacher or university teacher, but because of his alcoholism he finished working as a janitor in a hospital and writing in his spare time.
At 34 he fell in love with Diane Cecily, editor at university, and he started drinking heavily and abusing his wife.
When he was 38 he began to date Tess Gallagher, a writer who later will become his wife. In this time he had to go to the hospital several times because of liquor intoxication. He realized that he had to stop drinking, and he started his second life thanks to Alcoholics Anonymous (but he never stopped smoking marihuana and even tried cocaine).
At 44, he got divorced (he was already living with Tess).
Six weeks before dying at 50, he got married to Tess.
He published his first short story when he was 23 and was studying at Chico Public University. It was called The Furious Seasons and bore a strong influence of William Faulkner.
His first short story collection Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? was published when he was 38. But although it was shortlisted for the National Book Award, he didn’t sell many copies.
He had more collections of short stories, and the most famous are What We Talk When We Talk About Love and Cathedral.
When we talk about Carver we talk about minimalism and dirty realism. Minimalism means avoiding all rhetoric, and that if you can say something in ten words, please, don’t use twenty. And dirty realism implies that in your stories you are going to use characters that belong to the lower classes of the society, that your heroes are going to be anti-heroes, e.g., isolated marginalized people, people with alcoholic problems or difficult relationships or broken families. So we have to suppose they are sad stories.
Everyone can feel the influence of Hemingway minimalism in his work, but he said his main influence was D. H. Lawrence.
It’s an irony, but the last story he wrote, before dying, is Errand, where he narrates an anecdote of Chekhov, another famous short story writer, just before his own death.

Errand

In this story, very different from his other stories because it’s almost “classical”, Carver writes about the last days of the life of Chekhov, a Russian writer revered by most short story writers. Chekhov was having dinner with Suvorin, a publisher, in Moscow, when he started bleeding from his mouth. The Russian author knows that his life is in danger and travels first to Berlin with his wife Olga Knipper, where he sees a doctor who doesn’t help him, and then to Badenweiler, a spa resort where he says he expects to get some recovery (although he doesn’t really believe it). He and his wife are staying in a hotel, and the doctor who treats him, Dr Schwörer, realizes that there’s no hope and orders champagne as the last honour to the famous writer. The author drinks and dies, and then there is a change in the way of telling the story, because we see the situation through the eyes of his widow Olga. Then, after a wake until morning, she asks a waiter who had come into the room to bring a vase of flowers to go and fetch the mortician. The story has a special ending, but I’m not going to be a spoiler revealing it.

QUESTIONS

Talk about the characters according what it is said about them in the story. But what do you know about them as historical people? Did they know Chekhov or his writings?

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

Suvorin

Maria Chekhov

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy

Olga Knipper

Dr Karl Ewald

Dr Schwöhrer (and his presciptions)

The waiter (the young blond man)

What happened at the restaurant in Moscow?
What were the characters’ feelings about the TB?
Personal question: Do you have an opinion or a belief about the immortality of the soul?
What do you know about TB?
Where is Badenweiler?
Explain the courtship between Olga and Anton.
What can you say about The seagull and The Cherry Orchard?
Why did Chekhov mention the Japanese?
Summarize in one sentence Chekhov’s death.
What do you think is the meaning of the “large moth”?
What is the meaning of “history” in the sentence “Dr Schwöhrer picked up his bag and left the room and, for that matter, history.”
What happened with the bottle’s cork?
Describe the scene between Olga and the young man at Anton and Olga’s room.
What is the meaning of the title Errand?
In the last paragraphs, there is a change in the verbal tense: the past tense has changed into “would”? Why?
What do you think is the meaning of picking up the cork in the last sentence of the story?

VOCABULARY

private, take in (took in), stanch, jest, sleet, well-wisher, out-line, junk, bearskin, numbered, reckless, on the mend, complexion, Moët, grapple, mortician