To travel both and be one traveller…
Muriel Spark and Katherine Mansfield Give Life Lessons on Poetry in Prose

In Munich recently, en route to Bayreuth for Wagner and performances of that particular iteration of Wissenschaft, I was startled to see, passing before me on the other side of the street, a line of three barefoot boys in wetsuits all carrying surfboards. Their hair was damp and their boards clearly just out of the water. But how? Where was the beach? The sea? We were in the middle of a landlocked city in Bavaria, an urban criss-cross of grand squares and two-lane expressways… Where was the wave?

The boys’ profiles as they passed before me – elbows at an angle and their boards pointing forward, bare feet flat on the ground, heel to toe – were elongated and purposeful as the drawings of pharaohs on the walls of Egyptian tombs. Who were they? Where had they come from? Was any of this real?

These are the kinds of questions – many and varied – that come to mind when I consider the life and work of Muriel Spark and Katherine Mansfield. ‘Who are these people?’, V.S. Pritchett famously asked of the characters and the implied author of Mansfield’s short stories. ‘We can scarcely guess.’ It was as though anything to do with the New Zealand-born writer – those fictions of hers based on her family and upbringing in a tiny city way off in the South Pacific – only beggared belief. How could someone, who came from that far away, writing in the first quarter of the twentieth century, be part ...