Katherine Mansfield - how to write an opening

 

The opening of Katherine Mansfield's wonderful story, The Doll's House, is worthy of analysis. Here it is:

When dear old Mrs. Hay went back to town after staying with the Burnells she sent the children a doll's house. It was so big that the carter and Pat carried it into the courtyard, and there it stayed, propped up on two wooden boxes beside the feed-room door. No harm could come of it; it was summer. And perhaps the smell of paint would have gone off by the time it had to be taken in. For, really, the smell of paint coming from that doll's house ("Sweet of old Mrs. Hay, of course; most sweet and generous!") -- but the smell of paint was quite enough to make any one seriously ill, in Aunt Beryl's opinion. Even before the sacking was taken off. And when it was . . .

There stood the doll's house, a dark, oily, spinach green, picked out with bright yellow. Its two solid little chimneys, glued on to the roof, were painted red and white, and the door, gleaming with yellow varnish, was like a little slab of toffee. Four windows, real windows, were divided into panes by a broad streak of green. There was actually a tiny porch, too, painted yellow, with big lumps of congealed paint hanging along the edge.

But perfect, perfect little house! Who could possibly mind the smell? It was part of the joy, part of the newness.

"Open it quickly, some one!"

The hook at the side was stuck fast. Pat pried it open with his pen- knife, and the whole house-front swung back, and -- there you were, gazing at one and the same moment into the drawing-room and dining-room, the kitchen and two bedrooms. That is the way for a house to open! Why don't all houses open like that? How much more exciting than peering through the slit of a door into a mean little hall with a hat-stand and two umbrellas! That is -- isn't it? -- what you long to know about a house when you put your hand on the knocker. Perhaps it is the way God opens houses at dead of night when He is taking a quiet turn with an angel. . . .

The point of view in the opening paragraph is interesting: it is omnisicent third person – an external narrator telling us the story. But it is also closely told from the point of view of Aunt Beryl. “Dear old Mrs Hay” and “Sweet of old Mrs Hay” could almost be her speaking. This is an example of the Uncle Charles Principle, where the voice becomes so linked to a specific character it begins to take on characteristics of that person. The fact that the opening is so closely linked to Aunt Beryl alerts the reader to the fact that she will be a key person in the story.

But then there is an ellipsis (…) which clearly separates this paragraph from the next one. And now the second and third paragraphs are more closely linked to the children. The doll’s house is described in loving detail. “Perfect little house! Who could possibly mind the smell?” This is a totally different POV from the first paragraph. Compare the constant references to paint (and even glue and varnish) with the staid distaste for the smell in that opening paragraph. Could a greater distinction be made between these opposing viewpoints?

And then in paragraph five we have “there you are”, which has the effect of drawing the reader into the story. But which point of view are we drawn into? Aunt Beryl’s or the children’s? It is the children’s, of course, and in this way the reader becomes complicit in their excitement.

In the space of very few words, Mansfield has brilliantly established the tension in the story –  the doll's house – and the source of conflict – Aunt Beryl. This opening is rich in description. There is strong characterisation of both Aunt Beryl and the – as yet unnamed but clearly excited – children. But there is clearly a distinction between the reactions of Aunt Beryl and the children, and it is clear that this is where the tension will develop in the story. It is also clear, from that fifth paragraph, where the reader's sympathies are expected to lie.

The economy is exemplary. A brilliant piece of writing.

Remarkably, Katherine Mansfield was dissatisfied with her short stories. She said: "I've been a selective camera, and . . . my slices of life have been partial, misleading, and a little malicious. Further, they have had no other purpose than to record my attitude which in itself stood in need of change if it was to become active instead of passive." I think she is being unnecessarily hard on herself here. While many of her stories end in great unhappiness, there is nothing malicious in them. On the contrary, the stories are designed to allow us, the impartial readers and observers of these people’s misfortunes, to assess what might be done to remedy those misfortunes. They are, then, entirely hopeful and honest endeavours.

Shortly before her death (at the very early of 34, from tuberculosis), she wrote witheringly of her friends in London who:

have come to an agreement not to grow any more, to stay just so – all clipped and pruned and tight. As for taking risks, making mistakes, changing their opinions, being in the wrong, committing themselves, losing themselves, being human beings in fact –no, a thousand times!

And this, it seems to me, is the key to her work. There is a serious and earnest searching for something in these stories, some understanding of what it is to be human, to be alive, to be in love.

Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty

 

It is a rarity to completely fall into a novel and experience its slow unfolding almost as though one were a character oneself but, with Eudora Welty’s masterpiece, Delta Wedding, this is exactly what happens. The action is relayed through the various perspectives of the extended Fairchild family and, indeed, sometimes the same events are seen through more than one set of eyes with inevitable, subtle shifts of emphasis and interpretation. Even within the best of families there will be tensions, and there certainly are with the Fairchilds, some of whom have a grip on reality that is tenuous to say the least. Nonetheless, there is a real spirit, a kinship which overcomes all. This is a family that is rooted in its Delta homeland and that looks after its own, and the result is that the reader is swept up in their close and happy embrace. It is as though we have been privileged to stay with them for those few days before and after the grand family wedding and, at the story’s conclusion, at the end of our stay, we are forced to bid them an unwilling farewell.

On a simple reading, Delta Wedding could perhaps be considered Faulkner- or O’Connor-lite – Southern eccentrics doing eccentric things, but without the underlying tragedy of Faulkner or the violence of O’Connor. But this would be to grossly underestimate the novel and to overlook, amid the genuine warmth of its vision, those hints and portents of the darkness of life. There is a remarkable subtlety to the novel which, for me, marks it out as certainly superior to the didacticism of Flannery O’Connor and right up there at the pinnacle of southern fiction. This is not southern gothic: the Fairchilds, although strange indeed, are not freaks. Nor do they dance to their author's tune. They feel like real, breathing human beings.

The novel revolves around the extended Fairchild family, but in particular focuses on three characters. Firstly, nine-year old Laura, whose mother has just died and who is staying with her aunt and uncle and cousins, ostensibly for the wedding but possibly for good, as the Fairchilds decide whether to close ranks and embrace her to their bosom. Secondly, and possibly most importantly, there is Laura’s uncle George, the only person in the family seemingly untouched by southern eccentricity, and someone who is idolised by the family. And thirdly, Laura’s cousin Dabney, who is to marry (beneath herself, as is frequently hinted) the farm overseer Troy Flavin. Besides these, there is a cast of rich and beautifully described family members – mother and father Ellen and Battle, George’s wife Robbie, who has run away and left him, but who returns because she adores him, the remaining children, ranging from the toddler Bluet upwards, each with his or her own character, and a range of eccentric aunts and uncles who lend humour and warmth to the action.

But it is the family as a collective unit that is perhaps the principal character here. Welty establishes a wholly credible family whose kin-loyalties leave them devoted to one another but also insensitive to the needs of others. Robbie, for example, George’s wife, struggling to gain acceptance in the family, complains to Ellen at one point: “Once I tried to be like the Fairchilds. I thought I knew how,” and ends with the devastating critique: “You’re just loving yourselves in each other – yourselves over and over again!” And there is, indeed, a cockiness, even arrogance, about the Fairchilds, demonstrated most tellingly in the novel’s most dramatic moment, told several times in the narrative from different perspectives. On a family outing, they are dallying by the railway line and one of the family, the slow-witted Maureen, gets her foot trapped in the tracks. George calmly tries to free it, while the rest of the family jump clear. A train approaches but George, although he could have escaped, remains resolutely on the trestle, as though facing down the train. Ultimately, the train stops just short of them and the engineer shouts his apologies from the window. It becomes a grand, humorous family story. ‘Inevitable,’ Ellen describes it to herself later, while acknowledging that non-family members would have seen it as ‘conceited.’ George Poore, in his contemporary review, sums this moment up neatly: ‘To the Fairchilds...it was an amusing episode; to outsiders it was a piece of reckless quixotry typical of the Fairchilds, the essence of Fairchildism.’

But then again, it might be argued this was the nature of the Delta people in general. As Dr. Murdoch states at one point: “But – can’t do a thing about Delta people... They’re the worst of all. One myself, can’t do a thing about myself.” The family are summed up best, near the end of the novel, from the point of view of the matriarch Ellen: ‘Passionate, sensitive, to the point of strain and secrecy, their legend was happiness. “The Fairchilds are the happiest people!”’

Throughout, the novel is told in subtly changing voices, from a range of points of view. It is remarkably controlled and beautifully handled, giving each character strength and individuality. However, Paul Binding argues:

In the novel's overall movement there is rather too little overt tension for its theme to emerge as sharply above its context as it should, and again, there is insufficient concentration on one viewpoint. We forsake Laura for Ellen, for Dabney, for Robbie, and a certain dissipation of attention results.

I simply do not agree. The theme emerges from the whole, from the gradual revelation of the family in its various misconceptions and misperceptions, its prejudices and partialities. Throughout, there is a sense of excitement and anticipation and of a tremendous vitality, as everyone awaits the forthcoming wedding. There is the bustle of ordinary family life, given fresh breath by the ensemble nature of the characterisations, and with each shift of point of view we see a subtle change in the narrative frame, are given a slightly different impression, offered another interpretation. In just the way that Faulkner uses different voices in The Sound and The Fury to help establish theme out of narrative, Welty uses her characters to ensure Delta Wedding is more than just a snapshot of an idyllic life. Without these shifts the novel could easily have become bucolic, a comfortable despatch from arcadia, but instead Welty ensures that we see this family as it really is – fine, happy, but as flawed as everyone else’s – and we see the world in all its dark reality. The beautiful girl who, unlike simple Maureen, is indeed knocked over by the train and killed, ensures we do not lose sight of that.

And so Eudora Welty creates something truly memorable. Delta Wedding is a remarkable novel because it is a slice of typical southern realism relayed through characteristically fine dialogue and strong characterisation, while at the same time it manages to convey something deeper, a glimpse of the realities of human nature, in all its good and bad.

Clock Without Hands by Carson McCullers

 

Clock Without Hands is set in the early 1950s in a small town in Georgia and features four principal characters. JT Malone is a forty year old pharmacist diagnosed with leukaemia and given twelve to sixteen months to live. Judge Fox Clane is a redneck judge with diabetes who is lame following a stroke and lives a life of quiet melancholy, mourning his dead wife and son. His grandson, Jester is a young boy gradually becoming aware of racial prejudice and the tensions in his community. And Sherman Pew is a black boy hired by the Judge to act as his amanuensis and to give him his daily insulin injections. There is an undercurrent of homoerotic desire in Jester for Sherman, but Sherman is increasingly fuelled by indignation at the treatment of blacks in the racist society in which they live. Jester’s father, the judge’s son, committed suicide many years before in circumstances we discover, later, which link him tragically to Sherman. Sherman’s father, we find out late in the novel, was hanged for a crime he probably didn’t commit. This is a novel, then, with a lot of backstory. The narrative meanders along for 180 or so pages before exploding – literally so, with a firebombed house – into life near its conclusion. Even now, though, there are no histrionics. Carson McCullers doesn’t do melodrama: she doesn’t need to.

This, McCullers’s last novel, is certainly her least effective. That isn’t to say it is bad, but it is not a great work, like The Member of the Wedding or The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. The McCullers trademarks are here: loneliness, disconnection, a skewed, black humour. But something is missing. There isn’t quite the heart that is in those earlier novels, the beautiful beating promise of human potential. I’m wary of saying there are no characters here who grab our sympathy the way that Frankie or Mick do, because it’s not that: I consistently argue against criticism of novels on the basis that characters should be likeable. And yet I found myself waiting for and wanting a Frankie to enter the narrative, somebody to anchor it in human emotion. Perhaps it is a sense of hope that is missing here. JT Malone, the nearest character to the central Frankie/Mick role in Clock Without Hands, is too passive. Jester, who could fulfil the role, is not well enough drawn. Sherman, who might have fitted the bill best of all, finally falls into caricature. He could be a cousin of Dr Copeland in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, wrapped up in himself and his situation, but he does not ring true in the way that the doctor does.

The judge is the most complex character in the novel. In lesser hands he could have been a caricature of the old south, a reactionary stubbornly clinging to the old ways and the old morality. And indeed, the judge is that. He has a history in the Ku Klux Klan; he has an insane passion to pass a Bill in Congress decreeing that old Confederacy currency (which he possesses by the million) be declared legal tender; his response to the events at the conclusion of the novel is chilling. And yet there is more to him than this. His devotion to Sherman, the young black boy, comes close to paternal affection. His view of black people – racist to the core – is imbued with a wrong-headed but nonetheless genuine intention to do them good. He is a man to be pitied. He is still mourning the death of Miss Missy, his wife who died of breast cancer, and his son, who committed suicide after the death of his wife in childbirth. He is an unhappy man, and his passions and cares and concerns feel genuine. It is possible to be simultaneously repelled by and sorry for someone, and in the judge Carson McCullers has created just such an individual.

But it isn’t enough to carry the novel.

I think the biggest disappointment about Clock Without Hands is its evocation of mood. Mood is everything in McCullers. She creates worlds, little sad, hopeful places which draw you in, make you want to be a part of them, even while warning you of their incipient dangers. The mixture of melancholia and hope she conjures is miraculous. But somehow, in Clock Without Hands, it does not come off. I don’t know whether the principal reason is the subject matter, the racism of the south just before desegregation, the casual violence and thoughtless hatred which occurred during that difficult period. While there is a timeless quality to the loneliness of Frankie and Mick in The Member of the Wedding and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter the drama of Clock Without Hands now feels dated. It cannot beguile in the same way as her earlier works.