Don’t lower your mask until you have another mask prepared beneath —

Letter from Katherine Mansfield to her husband John Middleton Murry (late July 1913)

Have recently returned from Wellington where I attended the first day of the Katherine Mansfield Society's conference. The title of the conference was ‘Katherine Mansfield: Masked and Unmasked based around the above quote. This is an interesting concept about how people wear a mask (or face), to show the world so they never fully reveal themselves.  From my reading of her letter Katherine Mansfield seems to be suggesting to Murry that at times he was wasting his intelligence wallowing in self pity.

   The highlight for me was in the evening at a reception at the Alexander Turnbull Library when I picked up a postcard sent by D H Lawrence to Katherine Mansfield. The library had prepared an exhibition of newly acquired Katherine Mansfield papers and Dr Gerry Kimber of the Katherine Mansfield Society pointed the postcard out to us.  Lawrence and his wife visited New Zealand and sent the postcard to Katherine Mansfield in England c/- Lady Ottoline Morrell at Garsington Manor. I had always read that Lawrence wrote only one word ‘Ricordi’ which means a token of remembrance or a souvenir.  In actual fact his wife, Frieda, had written a sentence underneath saying something like:  ‘We are thinking about you even more here’.  Earlier the same evening at the library a young student from the NZ School of Music, accompanied by her sister on the piano, performed two pieces of music composed for cello by Arnold Trowell. He was the young man who Katherine Mansfield first fell in love with, she later transferred her attentions to Garnet his brother but his parents did not approve of the relationship.  

   The plenary sessions of the conference were held in the Council Chamber of the Hunter Building at Victoria University. It has a magnificent stained glass window and was fortunate to be saved after earthquake strengthening was required.

   Angela Smith gave a keynote address about Katherine Mansfield and parties. She talked about the Bloomsbury group, the parties they had, the plays they performed in and how they met ‘to savage each other's words’. She also said that every time she reads ‘Bliss’ it’s a different story and the questions she puts to herself are different each time. This comment appealed to me as a reader. I believe a story needs the consciousness of the reader to achieve its goal and the reader’s interpretation may not always be what the writer intended, indeed Angela Smith's comment suggests that readers can change their opinions too on re-reading a story.

    A highlight for me was Sarah Laing talking about the graphic novel about Katherine Mansfield that she is going to be working on during her residency at the Michael King Centre in Auckland. She showed us some of the ideas and drawings that she has been playing around with using characters speaking in cartoon bubbles. There are touches of humour as when Ida Baker insists that Katherine Mansfield have Oxo to drink and not Milo, and a sequence where Katherine Mansfield sitting in bed looks around the room and sees herself as many different selves,  each figure with a black plume coming out of its head.

   In the afternoon after lunch I sat with a friend in the Bolton Street cemetery, a place of quiet reflection overlooking Wellington Harbour. You would think that the gravestones would be better looked after and indeed one did have a new white picket fence around it and a gate with a shiny new hinge.

   I had hoped to see the Virginia King sculpture in Lambton Quay titled ‘Woman of Words’.  It was commissioned in February 2012 and is created from stainless steel panels, laser cut with phrases from Mansfield's writing. Unfortunately soon after she began work Virginia King was hit by a car and the sculpture is only about halfway finished. In her talk she documented the progress to date of the work. It was one of the most interesting talks I have ever attended as I had no idea how difficult and time-consuming the process of making a sculpture is and the creative imagination required and the heavy labour and collaboration involved.  Neil Plimmer from the Wellington Sculpture Trust outlined the commissioning process. He said something I wish I had recorded explaining the difference between a statue and a sculpture.  

   What I'm really looking forward to seeing, apart from Katherine Mansfield striding along with her right hand out ‘offering the stories’, is the ‘shopping list hair’, long thin pieces of metal inscribed with presumably the shopping lists which Mansfield recorded in her journals.

   More on the conference next week including my visit to the art exhibition, 'The Painted Word', at the Katherine Mansfield Birthplace. Also I went on a day trip to Ship Cove on Sunday for the 100^th anniversary of the unveiling of the Captain Cook memorial, to lay a wreath to commemorate his death in Hawaii on 14 February 1779, and for a re-enactment of the original photograph of the memorial ceremony taken at Ship Cove in February 1913.

    What a weekend!