Margaret Scott: Recollecting Mansfield

By MARGIE THOMSON deputy books editor

Many scholars live double lives, their bodies in this world but their minds among the dead.

Margaret Scott, joint editor of The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield and The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, and the first person to win the prestigious Mansfield fellowship to Menton is one such who has lived her life among ghosts - of her husband, Harry, who fell to his death on Mt Cook in 1960 when Margaret was pregnant with their third child, and then, redemptively, of Katherine Mansfield.

Transcribing the near-impenetrable letters of Mansfield became Scott's "life's work" - the means by which she could "stay afloat and make a proper life" for her children. In fact, the two women, one dead, one living, brought each other to life. But for Mansfield, Scott would have us believe, she might have languished, depressed and impoverished, on a widow's pension; but for Scott, Mansfield's letters and journals might have remained closed and inaccessible, or been poorly transcribed by less sympathetic scholars.

Anyone you talk to in what one academic describes as the "bloody landscape of Mansfield scholarship" freely admits Scott is probably the only person alive with the "extraordinary facility" for deciphering Mansfield's famously illegible hand.

Comments Scott: "The illegibility of Mansfield's handwriting is legendary. It varies from day to day, page to page, and, because she never fell back on cliches to express herself, the word you are trying to decipher is never an easy, expected one."

Scott is a librarian, which puts her on the outer with university-based scholars, and which is possibly behind the only whiff of dirty laundry in this otherwise warm, witty and just plain interesting memoir.

Like so many of us, she had been introduced to Mansfield by an enthusiastic teacher who read the class The Doll's House, thereby hooking at least one of her listeners for life. Scott then read "everything by or about Mansfield" that she could get her hands on, so that when, on the birth of her third child, she was sent a box of Mansfield documents by Antony Alpers (who wrote the first and now controversial biography of Mansfield and who was at the time courting the recently widowed Scott) she was well disposed to be "utterly fascinated" (although not so much that she would agree to marry the sender).

Alpers suggested she call her new baby "Katherine, and have done with it" (which Scott did) and then presented her with "a little leatherbound complete Milton that had belonged to Katherine Mansfield."

And so there seems a peculiar confluence of personal circumstances, objects, and chance encounters that we may now see as leading inexorably toward the day some six years later when Scott was appointed first manuscripts librarian at the Alexander Turnbull Library. It took her breath away to discover that she was in charge of masses of Mansfield manuscripts, some of which had never been read since they were written.

Soon after, a friend, the literary critic Eric McCormick, recommended Scott to Oxford University Press (OUP) editor Dan Davin as a potential editor of the letters.

"It hardly needs to be said that I was both thrilled and terrified," Scott writes in her typically frank and dangerously self-effacing style.

But another great friend, Charles Brasch, pointed out: "Well, my dear, you can't turn that down," and so she signed the contract and, as she puts it, climbed firmly aboard the "Mansfield raft which carried me to dry land and to a later life she herself was not allowed." She immediately began the gargantuan task of tracking down Mansfield letters all over the world, held in libraries and also by people, still living, with whom Mansfield was known to have corresponded. In 1970 she won the first Mansfield fellowship to Menton, which enabled her to travel to the northern hemisphere and, in particular, to meet Mansfield's Old Faithful, Ida Baker.

Scott's insights into this unfortunate woman who was at once desperately hated and yet needed by Mansfield are in themselves a good reason for anyone interested in Mansfield to read this book.

Returning to Wellington, she began to feel overwhelmed by the size of the task, which she had to undertake in her spare time after working full time and raising three children. She accepted an offer of help from writer and academic Vincent O'Sullivan, and contacted OUP asking that he be included in the contract. She reveals how this arrangement was ultimately a disaster for her and resulted in his name taking priority over hers on the resultant book jacket. "Failing to soldier on alone was a piece of cowardice for which I paid dearly," she writes.

Of course, as in all such conflicts, others will tell the story differently. But, while some academics agree that Scott's role in the collected letters has not had the acknowledgment she perhaps deserves, others are firm that she did not have the scholarly practice or background to by herself carry off the project with its requirement for an enormous amount of contextual footnoting.

Nevertheless, Scott's disappointment is palpable, and the consequences to her professional reputation are, as she tells it, probably insuperable.

There is much in this book to attract aficionados of Mansfield and of New Zealand literature in general. Scott has known many famous names, and her funny anecdotes and poignant reminiscences serve to put flesh on the bones of those most of us know only from their bylines. Charles Brasch, in particular, comes alive to serve as Scott's soul mate and sometime bed mate (she provided him with his first sexual experience of any kind).

The death of her husband, Harry, who was considered by his peers in New Zealand's intellectual elite to be one of this country's brightest men, is something Scott, now in her 70s, never got over, and so there is a sense of her insidious isolation at the emotional level, despite her many friends and lovers (a presumably heady mixture of intelligence, self-assurance and good looks attracted many suitors). Her association with Mansfield was therefore probably always as much personal as scholarly and this intelligent memoir is a fitting tribute to a rich relationship between the living and the dead.

Godwit

$29.95