The paper knife: Patrick White and Katherine Mansfield

Speakers

Katherine Baxter, Oliver Stead

Welcome

Katherine Baxter: Kia ora ano koutou katoa. Nau mai haere mai kia koutou ko huihui mai nei tenei Paul. Nga mihi nui kia koutou.

Welcome. I'm Katherine Baxter, President of the Friends of the Turnbull Library. Nga hou Te Whare Pukapuka Turnbull.

Welcome to those who are here with us this evening in the auditorium. And a very warm welcome also to others who are joining the session online via Zoom.

As always with these sessions, we thank our National Library and our ATL staff for assisting us with the evening because it takes a bit of doing to bring two audiences together, those in the auditorium and those online. And we're very grateful for your support. You know who you are.

Before going to our speaker, I do need to talk about, to those in the auditorium, about our safety messages, which we do deliver each time, but just to remind you. In the event of an emergency, please be reassured. This is a very safe building. We're asked to stay calm and wait for the instructions of the library staff. If it's an earthquake, adopt the brace position as if you are in an aeroplane. If we're asked to leave the building, we exit on Aitken St, that ground floor level entrance, and turn left towards archives New Zealand. In general, follow the instructions of our library colleagues, because they're here to help look after us.

And note the wharepaku, the toilets, are outside the auditorium, turn right. And if you're in the auditorium, please do make sure your cell phones are on silent.

If you're tuning in via the webinear link and have any questions — Lynette, who is helping looking after that process for us, will have you on no audio. But if you have questions you want to put into the Q&A, please do. Or any other comments, she will have put them in the chat bits. And she will make sure that they are passed on appropriately.

So here we are for tonight's session. And I'm very pleased to be welcoming Dr Oliver Stead, who's here to deliver a talk intriguingly entitled 'a Paper Knife, Patrick White and Katherine Mansfield', a connection that probably many of you in the room weren't aware of.

Oliver is Curator of Drawings, Paintings and Prints here at the Alexander Turnbull Library and he holds degrees in art history and information studies.

Before joining the Turnbull team, Oliver held curatorial and collection management roles at the Dunedin Art Public Art Gallery, Auckland Museum, National Library of Australia, and the Wallace Arts Trust. And I understand from you, Oliver, that you'll be referring to some of that experience as you work through your talk this evening.

So here to the talk. Oliver's going to talk about the influence of Katherine Mansfield on Patrick White, the British born writer who grew up in Australia to become a renowned novelist and playwright. I'm sure many of us here were aware of that pre-eminence.

But while he's the only Australian to have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, which was in 1973. But what we're here about it tonight is to hear his link with the ATL, which on a visit to the Turnbull in 1961, Patrick White made the unusual link that connected the two writers when he first revealed that he would be donating to the library a silver and greenstone paper knife that had belonged to Katherine Mansfield.

It's a curious connection and Oliver is here tonight to tell us a little bit more. So welcome and over to you.

Oliver Stead: Thank you, Katherine.

Tēnā koutou katoa. Nau mai, piki mai, haere mai ko Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa ne Te Whare Pukapuka Turnbull. Ko Oliver Stead taku ingoa. Hei whakatauki no tenei pou ‘Ahakoa, he iti he pounamu’. Although it is small, it is greenstone. It is precious.

Welcome everyone. Thank you for coming this evening to hear my talk called 'the Paper Knife: Patrick White and Katherine Mansfield'.

Many scholars of Patrick White will know of the Australian writer's fascination with Katherine Mansfield. But I suspect fewer readers of Mansfield will be aware of the powerful influence exerted by the New Zealand born writer on the Australian novelist.

Patrick White's gift to the Turnbull Library

On the 2nd of January, 1972, by then a strong contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Patrick White wrote from his Sydney home to the Chief Librarian of the Alexander Turnbull Library, that he was gifting to the library a paper knife formerly owned by Katherine Mansfield. He would be sending it care of his friend, Desmond Digby, who was returning to New Zealand to visit his family in Auckland, and should be paying Wellington and visit.

"Dear Sir," he wrote. "When I was in Wellington some years ago, Anthony Alpers gave me a paper knife which had belonged to Katherine Mansfield, and which he had been given by LM. I was going to leave the paper knife to the Alexander Turnbull Library in my will. But as I may not die for some time yet and the paper knife is such a small object that could easily get lost or stolen, I'm letting you have it now."

If listeners will excuse a personal digression, it intrigues me that Patrick White donated the knife — I'm continuing to call it a knife because Katherine herself did in a letter to John Middleton Murray — at the same time that the Stead family was on its way to Menton so that my father C.K. Karl Stead could take up the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship for 1972.

I was eight. While in Menton, we were visited by the fellowships founders Celia and Cecil Manson and other literary New Zealanders. I remember that a lot of Karl's conversations with my mother Kay and others involved a mysterious person called LM. LM. and KN. became inextricably linked in my mind during that year, long before I had any real understanding of who they were or what their relationship might be. LM, of course, was Mansfield's friend Ida Baker.

Back home in Auckland, I remember my eye being drawn off into the spines of several first edition volumes of Mansfield's writings in the family bookshelves, including In A German Pension, a title I found intriguing.

I don't know whether this was because the books looked inherently interesting to me, or whether they had come to acquire a talismanic significance due to Karl's preoccupation with them.

Later still, aged perhaps between 10 and 12, I began to read Mansfield. Struck by the vivid images, the wide eyed, observant character of Keziah, and the very sinister the woman at the store. In these features, Mansfield stories functioned in the manner of young adult fiction for me, much more so than Karl Smith's Dream, which I found unsettling or even more disturbing; Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn and Seksus, Neksus and Pleksus; Allen Ginsberg's Howl; William Burroughs' Naked Lunch; Jack Kerouac's On the Road; Norman Mailer's the White Negro; and Thomas Pynchon's the Crying of Lot 49, all of which I encountered in those same shelves much too young and found apocalyptic.

Fast forward some 3 plus decades to 2010, when as Exhibitions Curator at the National Library of Australia, I first became aware of the knife. This talisman I encountered while researching Patrick White for an exhibition commemorating the 100th anniversary of his birth, which the Library opened in 2012.

I was fascinated by the greenstone handled life with its connotations of New Zealand and its association with Katherine Mansfield. I first learned of the knife through reading David Marr's magnificent Twin Tomes, Patrick White, A Life, and Patrick White letters. My interest intensified through the same wistful nostalgia for my home country I'd felt as a child and as a teenager, jogging along behind Karl on the Mansfield Trail with my family in France and London.

I wanted very much to use the knife in the exhibition as a symbol of White's fascination with Mansfield stories, letters, and correspondence. I like the idea that the knife might add a Kiwi element into an international story, which was becoming overwhelmingly Australian in the telling.

So I was dismayed to find rather too late that the knife was not in fact in Canberra but in Wellington, at the Alexander Turnbull Library, part of the National Library of New Zealand.

The reason for this oversight lay in my reading of Patrick White: A Life, in which David Marr describes the knife, stating that it remained among White's most valued possessions. Marr was evidently not aware of White's gift to the Turnbull when writing his biography. I therefore assumed wrongly that the knife resided in the realia collection of Australia's National Library, along with Patrick's glasses. By the time I realized the knife was actually at the Turnbull, it was two late to request its loan for an exhibition already over freighted with loans.

Later still, in my present role as Curator Drawings, Paintings, and Prints at the Turnbull, I had my first proper encounter with the knife, in the flesh, as it were. Because my role entails looking after the quaintly called Curios Collection, I also took on the day-to-day housekeeping and administration of other three-dimensional items of Katherine Mansfield memorabilia and curios.

Now I'll just make an aside here to say that my colleagues have instructed me to tell you that we are no longer calling objects in the Alexander Turnbull Library curios because of the rather, sort of, derogatory connotations that has. And because there are items in the curios collection, which are sort of heirlooms and and of ancestral interest. And I have heard it said in in conferences, "My ancestor is not a curio." So we are moving away from that terminology. It is quaint. I was also struck by the term 'realia' that the National Library of Australia used to use. And they have since moved to the term objects as well.

Anyway, I took on the day-to-day housekeeping and administration of other three-dimensional items of Katherine Mansfield memorabilia, including her chair; typewriter; items of her clothing; and two locks of hair also purporting to be Katherine's. After 13 years of repatriating human remains in a previous curatorial role, I've viewed the hair somewhat circumspectly. But I now had the chance to investigate the knife and it's extraordinary provenance more closely.

Background context of Patrick White's gift

What could be the background context, and possible motivations for White's presentation of the knife to the Alexander Turnbull Library in 1972? White's letter to the Turnbull's Chief Librarian A.G. Bagnall suggests that serious concern for the safety of the object was one motivation.

David Marr notes that at the time, White was very concerned about the possibility of items going missing from the house at 20 Martin Road, Sydney, which he shared with his partner, Manoly Lascaris. He and Manoly had recently returned from an extended tour of the USA and Europe. And White was apoplectic to discover items missing from the property, which had been tentative in their absence.

At more or less the same time, White had learned that the whole area around Martin Road on the fringe of Centennial Park was to be bulldozed to make way for facilities needed should Australia be successful in its bid to host the Olympic Games. He was concerned about what might happen to his extensive collection of Australian paintings should he and Manoly be forced to move.

In 1972, White also knew that he was a serious contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and was corresponding extensively with the Swedish critic Ingmar Björkstén, who was lobbying for him to win the prize. That year, his nomination was pipped at the post by that of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, but he expected to be nominated again the following year. In 1973, his nomination won a narrow victory over that of Saul Bellow, the citation curiously mentioning his introduction of a new continent into literature.

In years to come, White would champion unsuccessfully a nomination to be made for the New Zealander Janet Frame, of whom he had written in 1963 to Ben Hoops, with the Viking Press, New York, that her novel Owls do Cry had bowled him right over, making him feel that he had always been a few steps out from where I wanted to be, to get to, in my own writing.

In the same letter, he mentions his correspondence with Katherine Mansfield's biographer Anthony Alpers, and talks about the despair and confusion under the simple, uncomplicated New Zealand surface. I shouldn't be surprised if any New Zealander took a gun to his neighbor, he opined, going on to say that he laughed when the Queen referred to New Zealand as this happy country in a speech made recently in Auckland.

In gifting the paper knife to New Zealand, he may have been affirming his own hard won literary accomplishment and survival as an Australian author, and also acknowledging the many literary friends he had made in New Zealand through his cousin, Margaret Peggy Garland née Withycombe.

Katherine Mansfield's influence on Patrick White's fiction

Patrick White's first encounters with Katherine Mansfield's fiction took place in 1930, at the family home of Lulworth in Sydney, on his return from England, where he'd been at pupil at Cheltenham College. His mother, Ruth, had a volume of Mansfield stories in her shelves, and he quickly became a passionate admirer of them, liking especially at the Bay. He was also intrigued by Mansfield's connections to DH Lawrence, who's writing he also admired, enjoying the evocation of New South Whales scenery in Kangaroo. Mansfield also had relatives among the Beauchamps of Sydney, providing an Australian connection for Patrick to savor.

Mansfield's influence on White's fiction has been widely noted. Without going into a detailed critical comparison of the respective works, one has only to think of the similarities in mise en scène, evident in Mansfield's the Garden Party, for example, and the opening scenes of White's novel Voss, which also involve a Victorian garden party, to recognize the literary debt owed by the Australian writer to the New Zealander.

White was already writing novels when he left Australia again for university in Cambridge in 1932. While studying, he read Mansfield's letters and journals published in 1927 and 1928. Intrigued by Mansfield's unflattering portrait of Lawrence, in 1934 he made a literary pilgrimage to Zennor in Cornwall, where Katherine and Jack Murray had stayed with Lawrence and his wife, Freda.

When he got back, he submitted poems to the London Mercury and was thrilled to have them accepted. So White earned his literary debut in the journal that had published Mansfield and Lawrence before him.

In Germany in 1936, White journeyed to Randogne and the Sloss of Katherine's Australian cousin Elizabeth Gräfin von Arnim, who's writing he also greatly admired.

1961 found White and Lascaris living together on their lifestyle block, Dogwoods at Castle Hill outside Sydney. A frequent correspondent and occasional visitor was his first cousin, Peggy Garland. English born Peggy was then living rather unhappily in Wellington with daughters Tanya and Sally, and sons David, Nick and brain-damaged Phillip, who needed much care. All would soon leave the family home in Kilbirnie.

Peggy found strength and adversity as a beloved friend of Wellington's leading intellectual families, who became lifelong correspondence. Five years earlier, Peggy's husband Tom Garland, a doctor and pioneering medical administrator, had returned to England, leaving Peggy and the children behind in Wellington.

To ease her stressful domestic situation, Peggy found a congenial lodger in the New Zealand scholar and author Anthony Alpers, whose 1953 biography of Mansfield, published by Knopf, was considered the most significant of its time. In the course of many years of research, Alpers had acquired several pieces of Mansfield memorabilia, befriending Ida Baker, LM, from whom he had acquired the paper knife, in appreciation of his work.

Preparing to leave permanently for England herself, Peggy was keen for Patrick to visit her in Wellington before her departure. Patrick arrived by air in March 1961. The visit inspired him to write some letters which, to a New Zealander, reveal an uncanny, almost prescient insight into the Kiwi
zeitgeist. All the more extraordinary considering the brevity of his visit.

Wellington, he informed Ben Hoops, makes Australia seem like a rubbish dump. And yet, with all the sudden spoiled beauty, there are the most astonishing outbreaks of human violence and youthful degeneracy. To Frederick Glover he wrote, "Peggy's lodger, Anthony Alpers went out of his way to show me a lot of interest. He took me to the various houses in which KM had lived. The family seems to have gone through a series of increasingly impressive colonial mansions. The House of the Garden Party was particularly fascinating. Anthony took me to the Turnbull Library, and we looked at a lot of original letters and notebooks, some of them not normally produced. Katherine had a rather hectic, purple ink phase while a girl in Wellington. And when I left, he presented me with a little paper knife and greenstone and silver, rather fin de siècle in style, which had belonged to her."

If White was fascinated by Mansfield's letters, he was also a little repelled. To Marshall Best he declared. "Letters of the devil. I always hope that any I have written have been destroyed. Katherine Mansfield is a good example of the letter writer traduced." Observing that her letters and notebooks reveal her as a monster of sensibility and egotism, but confessing to be intrigued by the private, sometimes automatic outpourings. Alpers remained friends with White and stayed with him and Lascaris in Sydney on several occasions.

White's encounter with Mansfield's letters and notebooks at the Turnbull had lasting consequences for his own notes and correspondence. Having decided to leave Dogwoods in 1964, White ordered Lascaris to burn much of his manuscript material, evidently to avoid leaving a legacy of the kind of monstrous sensibility and egotism he'd seen in Mansfield's material at the Turnbull.

According to David Marr, a bonfire of letters and manuscripts burned for two days in the pit behind the house before the two men left. Years later, White would declare in a letter to the Director General of the National Library of Australia, "I can't let you have my papers because I don't keep any. My manuscripts are destroyed as soon as the books are printed. I put very little into notebooks, don't keep my friends' letters as I urge them not to keep mine. And anything unfinished when I die is to be burnt." In the event this turned out to be patently untrue.

But to return to the knife. Nevermind.

How was Patrick White's gift received?

White's gift to the Turnbull Library was both generous and emblematic. But how was it received? Chief Librarian AG Bagnall's rather less than effusive reply to White's letters is as follows.

"Dear Mr. White. I was most interested to receive your letter of 2nd January, in which you kindly advised that you are sending across to us per Mr. Desmond Digby, a paper knife, which had belonged to Katherine Mansfield, given to you by Anthony Alpers. Coincidentally LM, through our Manuscripts Librarian Mrs. Margaret Scott, who has been working on Mansfield material in France and England during the last year, has presented the library with KM's typewriter, while Anthony Alpers has arranged with someone in California to let us have a doll, which she gave to a friend leaving New Zealand over 60 years ago.

So this is indeed the season of homing Mansfield relics. Your thoughtful action is much appreciated. There are some suggestions and notes among the Turnbull's internal files that Bagnall is in fact less than enthusiastic about receiving relics into the library's collection.

The doll that he mentioned is the charming hussif, or housewife doll, intended for use as a needle holder. The Catherine Beecham made in 1901 or 1902 for her teacher Rebecca Howell, who was leaving New Zealand for the United States. According to the provenance note on the library's catalog record for the doll, Rebecca Howell gave it to another pupil called Emma Nox some time before September 1956, and the doll later became the property of Wellington Girls' College.

The doll was finally donated to the Turnbull by Wellington Girls' High School in 1991. There is no mention on the record of Alper's unsuccessful attempts to interest Bagnall in the doll. At some point, though, the hussif doll did come into Alper's possession. On 5th April 1972, in a postscript to a letter penned from Queens University, Canada, to Margaret Scott, he mentions the doll and says that it will be coming to the Turnbull Library in his trunk.

Nonetheless, the Turnbull was receiving relics directly from LM, most recently, her tiny, beautiful Corona Typewriter. A typewritten library internal memo dated 20th of February 1972, lists these, ironically, with the typewriter repeated at the bottom of the list in ballpoint because it arrived distressingly late in a separate shipment.

Articles received from Miss Aida Baker: Complete first draft of her book, Katherine Mansfield: The Memories of LM; many variations from the published version; typed script copies of nine letters from S S Koteliansky to Aida Baker; Originals and Bird Collection, New York Public Library; one original letter from S S Koteliansky to Ida Baker, missed when the others were sold; Ida Baker's pocket diary for the last months of KM's life; photo copy of KM's inscription on the copy of Bliss, which she gave to Aida Baker on publication; KM's copy of the Imitation of Christ, given to her by her cousin, Ginny Fullerton, when the latter was trying to convert KM to Roman Catholicism; contains KM's pressed wildflowers, picked on walks from the South of France; negatives of photographs of KM, most of which have never been printed; sundry letters to Miss Baker; KM's handbag mirror, silk fan, fruit knife, Chinese jacket, broach, typewriter, small leather purse, etc; photocopy of Brave Love and notebook manuscripts.

The fruit knife LM had given to Margaret Scott personally. This is not to be confused with the paper knife. To Cherry Hankin in April, 1970, Scott Rd. "I'm sorry you were here a bit too soon to see the gift I received from Ida Baker yesterday. It is a little green pocket knife which KM always carried in her handbag and used for fruit and for sharpening pencils when traveling. It smells of tobacco. It will end up in the Turnbull collection of Mansfieldiana of course, but at the moment I'm enjoying the feeling that it is mine."

In the end though, Margaret Scott gave the green bakelite handled knife not to the Turnbull but to the Katherine Mansfield Birthplace Society.

What was the significance of the paper knife to Katherine Mansfield?

What was the significance of the paper knife to Katherine Mansfield? We do know something of this from a letter she wrote to Murray in 1919. "Your life is so dreadfully hard, I feel. I ought to give you all that's fair. LM has gone off to look at ‘Your life is so dreadfully hard, I feel. I ought to give you all that's fair. LM has gone off to ‘look’ at ‘Bawdygerra’, as she calls it, and won't be back till evening. So I'm quite alone. Now I've come in to get out of the glare and I'm sitting in my room. Your spectacle case is on the mantle piece. On the table, with the Russian bottle and Ottoline's book. And the green paper knife is your spoon. I don't use it. I can't have it washed and polished here. I only eat fairy soup out of it."

Clearly the paper knife was of great sentimental value to Katherine. While researching this article, I decided to see if I could identify its manufacture. This turned out to be much easier than expected. From 1903 to 1905, the combination Balkan paper knife, bookmark and paper knife turns up with startling regularity and illustrated advertisements placed by Stuart Dawson and Co. Jewelers in New Zealand newspapers.

Using a surprisingly effective, simple stupid approach, I typed greenstone bookmark into Papers Past, the digitized newspaper website of the National Library of New Zealand. And not only did I get a number of direct hits providing illustrations of the knife, I found its price, four and six, and then the same price one could obtain a similar button hook. The price is modest for this nice present to send home.

Within the same frame, a pair of elegant golden and greenstone sleeve lengths is illustrated in different styles. These could be had a 9 carat for 21 shillings, or 43 shillings for 15 carat. Grouping these items together was evidently effective advertising. As under the heading presentations, the Otago Daily Times for 16th of May 1904 reports that an appropriately named Mr Stud was the recipient of links in bookmark in honor of his recent mission in Dunedin.

In compliance with the wish of the choir and workers of his recent mission, Mr Stud was photographed with them in First Church grounds on Saturday afternoon and adjournment was then made to the Young Men's Christian Association hall for a farewell, praise, and prayer meeting.

Before separating, Mr WL Logie was asked to be spokesman, and made a small presentation to Mr Stud. This took the form of a set of gold mounted greenstone sleeve links and a silver paper cutter and bookmark with greenstone handle. In the course of his remarks, Mr Logi referred to the happy and beneficial mission just closed. He would not insult Mr Stud by saying that the souvenirs were meant to keep him in mind of his Dunedin mission, for he was sure nothing material was required. They were all certain that he would never forget them, nor they him. There was a strong link binding them together, a link which neither mountain range nor ocean depths could divide, for they were united in Jesus Christ.

He, on behalf of the workers, prayed. "The Lord bless thee and keep thee. The Lord make his face shine upon thee." Mr Stud thanked all concerned for their kindness to him and for the expression of such. It was fitting that a Stud had two links, and he was doubly linked to them, as a Christian and now as a friend.

In view of the suggestion of the jeweler that the paper knife would make a nice present to send home, and the actions of Mr Logi and the choir and workers of the mission and farewelling Mr Stud, who no doubt was going home. It would seem likely that Katherine's own combination paper knife and bookmark and silver and greenstone was given to her as a parting gift and memento of New Zealand before she left for home, either in 1903 or in 1908. As she matured, it must have become for her, a potent symbol of her ex-patriot identity.

Certainly the paper knife held sentimental value for others in the colony. The New Zealand Herald for 11th of March 1905 carries the lost and found notice for one lost in Auckland. "Lost near Queen Street. A silver mounted greenstone combined paper knife and bookmark. Reward." This notice reminds me forcibly of the immemorial notice in the shop window of At the Bay. "Lost. Handsome gold broach. Solid gold. On or near beach. Reward offered." And also of the notice in the deep black frame above Fenella's grandpa's bed in the voyage. "Lost. One golden hour. Set with 60 diamond minutes. No reward is offered, for it is gone forever."

Patrick in Menton

Patrick in Menton. In 1976, Patrick White and Manoly Lascaris toured the South of France, armed with an addition of the letters and journals of Katherine Mansfield as a travel guide. He thought her very good on the feel and look of that part of the French coast. And her rather dreadful outpourings helped me when I was gathering material for the French section of the Twyborn Affair.

They visited the Villa Isola Bella and Menton, where they were welcomed by Katherine Mansfield fellow, Michael King. During their visit, King contrived with great difficulty to have White meet the deputy mayor of Menton, in an attempt to influence the French authorities to restore funding to the Mansfield fellowship, which had been cut off due to New Zealand protests against French nuclear testing in the Pacific.

At the formal reception, the deputy gave a florid speech and White was invited to respond. As King described it, "White said clearly in his beautifully modulated voice. 'Actually, this sort of thing gives me the shits.'" Not surprisingly, French funding for the fellowship was not restored as a result of White's visitation in Menton.

In 1980, the Viking priests in New York brought out the Life of Katherine Mansfield, Anthony Alpers long-awaited improvement on his 1953 Tour de Force, Katherine Mansfield: A Biography.

On the jacket cover verso was a typically pithy vote of praise from Patrick White. "A skillful unraveling of the web of literature, deceit, friendship and feud till now clinging to Katherine Mansfield. A New Zealander himself, Alpers is well equipped to interpret the childhood idol. But he is equally good on the brittle bitcheries of Garsington and Bloomsbury and the stations of Katherine Mansfield's European purgatory, in her trial by tuberculosis and early death at Fontainebleau." Thank you.

And I just want to acknowledge a few people and organisations. So I've been mightily helped in this work by the Alexander Turnbull Library, Friends of the Turnbull Library, Katherine Mansfield Society, Gerry Kimber, Todd Martin, David Marr, who peer reviewed the text, and the National Library of Australia. And this is the rough draft of an essay which I published last year in volume 13 of Katherine Mansfield studies published by the University of Edinburgh, Katherine Mansfield and children. So thank you all very much.

Questions

Katherine Baxter: Stand here just for a moment. So thank you for that presentation, that talk. And it just shows the the value of one object and the stories that come from it.

Just wondering if there's any questions from the room. And then I haven't worked out a way of getting Lynette to come and tell me if there's any from the webinar. But we'll see if she comes forth.

Now, there is usually a micro— oh Lynette, you are there, is that right?

Okay. Is there a microphone that can be passed around? Could somebody please— usually it's on the table at the back. Sorry I didn't bring it down.

So I'm sure you're willing to answer a few questions if there are any?

Oliver Stead: If I can.

Katherine Baxter: Or comments. Okay, Kate there's someone just.

Is it on?

Yes. Is there anyone else with their hand up? No, it's not on. What are we doing? Why is it not on?

Question 1: Similarities between Voss and the Garden Party

Audience member 1: Here we go I. Think it and thank you. Oliver, you mentioned the similarities between Steads opening of Voss and the Katherine Mansfield the Garden Party. Can you just elaborate on that a bit?

Oliver Stead: Patrick White?

Audience member 1: Patrick White, I'm sorry.

Oliver Stead: So, casting my mind back to my last reading of Voss.

Katherine Baxter: [INAUDIBLE] a wee bit, so just —

Oliver Stead: Yes. So Voss opens with a sort of a garden party scene, which to me it's very similar to the Garden Party. And there's a similar evocation of Victorian society, of social status, of arrangements, of Things going on in the background, of a complex society. Which is sort of presented through the medium of the social event. And it seems to me there is a, you know, a real sort of echo, I guess, of Mansfield in that opening section of Voss.

Katherine Baxter: [INAUDIBLE] and we get a bit of echo.

Question 2: Christianity's influence on Patrick White

Audience member 2: Oliver, thank you for your talk. I gather that Patrick was a Christian. I've not read his writing. In his writing, would Christianity influence the way he writes and the way he relate things? Thank you.

Oliver Stead: Thank you. So the question was was Patrick White a Christian? I don't think he was. I think Patrick was a pretty staunch atheist. He certainly was an iconoclast. But I think— I mean there is a very strong sort of spiritual dimension to Patrick White's writing, and it's very much centered in his relationship to the land.

People find Patrick White very difficult these days. And when I was curating the exhibition of Patrick White at the National Library of Australia, at the occasion was the the 100th anniversary of his birth in 1912. But it was kind of a source of amusement to everybody that people had kind of really gone off Patrick White over the last 30 years. And there was a strong feeling that Australian literature had moved on a long way since. Patrick White was, since he won the Nobel Prize.

But I kind of re-encountered Patrick White. My age group read the Tree of Man in the fifth form. With you know great reluctance 'cause it's a huge book and an awful lot for a teenager to be expected to read. But rereading it, you know, a wonderful experience and just really interesting to find out that Patrick White cared so much about Katherine Mansfield, that he actually made a trip to the Turnbull Library, especially to see her letters and journals. That's amazing to me. Thank you.

Question 3: Did Patrick White and Katherine Mansfield ever meet?

Audience member 3: Probably project but Oliver, did they ever meet? I mean, he was in Europe towards the end of her life and he obviously followed this path down to Cornwall. I know she died 1934. Any chance they— what did I say? 1953, four? Any chance they met?

Oliver Stead: I don't think so because he was in Australia until 1932. So Patrick was born in London. But he went backwards and forwards between the family farm Belltrees in northern New South Wales, the family house in Sydney, Lulworth and Elizabeth Bay. And he had very much an Australian upbringing, but an English education. So he was sent to school at Cheltenham School in England and educated there, and then came back to Australia. And then in his late teens, went back to Cambridge.

And for a long time he made his way in the English literary scene, so it's significant that he published his first poems in the London Mercury, which was, you know, a bastion of Bloomsbury. And he definitely was modeling his writing on the writings of people like Mansfield and DH Lawrence, who he admired.

And he could have had a very successful life as a British writer. But after the war, and he had a good war. Calling in airstrikes in North Africa. He decided that he didn't want to be an English writer, he wanted to be an Australian writer. And so he made that very momentous decision after the war to come back to Australia. By that time, he had met Manoly Lascaris, his Greek partner who he had met in Egypt. And Manoly was able to follow him out after his return to Australia after the war. And they became sort of Australia's first really iconic gay couple.

Audience member 3: Yes. Just one little anecdote you probably know. I was most amused to read that sort of pithy humour. He loved New Zealand. He thought it was a sort of cross between Greece and Norway. But he— that thing you mentioned about the violence and he was intrigued and he would describe a murder as a really New Zealandy kind of a murder.

[LAUGHTER]

Oliver Stead: Well it's so true really. Sadly.

Audience member 3: This sort of darkness lying underneath the sunny prospect.

Oliver Stead: Yeah. Thank you.

Katherine Baxter: Lynette, were there any comments online that you wanted to— if you can re-emerge without echoing?

Nothing? Thank you. Anyone else got a comment or a question they'd like to put to Oliver?

Question 4: Who is Todd Martin?

Audience member 4: We just wondered who is Todd Martin?

Oliver Stead: Oh, Todd Martin is the co-editor of Katherine Mansfield studies. So he's at the Huntington University in the states. And he and Jerry Kimber edit Katherine Mansfield studies. So that's an annual publication. And in fact I'm not sure that the Turnbull has a complete run of that journal. It's a wonderful journal. So I shall look into that.

Katherine Baxter: Well placed to do so.

Oliver Stead: Thank you.

Katherine Baxter: Anyone else? Oh yes, something from Lynette. Do you want to say something?

Question 5: DNA checking

Lynette Shum: Thank you, Oliver. Virginia is asking if we would consider a DNA check of the hair samples.

[LAUGHTER]

Oliver Stead: Well, I guess it depends on how invasive that would be. It certainly would be interesting to do, but I'm not sure whether we've got a base example of Katherine Mansfield DNA to compare it against. Interesting question. Thank you.

Katherine Baxter: Nice note to finish on. I think I might ask Rachel to come forward and say thank you to you.

Oliver Stead: Thank you Katherine.

Rachel Underwood: Probably leave the mic.

Oliver Stead: Sure, I'll step aside.

Closing

Rachel Underwood: Well, what an amazing journey. Like many of you I have read Patrick White and we were all in New Zealand, imbued with Katherine Mansfield, but I didn't know of any connection. And when you made your lovely whakatauki, I thought, "That's nice. Not realizing that in fact the paper knife was greenstone, so it's absolutely appropriate to us. But what an interesting amount of research to establish that chain of connections between all those people and objects. And I'm sort of reminded of another recent book, Jock Phillips' 100 Objects.

Now that how important objects are for knowing who's held them, who's used them, who's passed them, why they pass them to somebody else. And in terms of Patrick White and his caustic remarks, I'm also very fascinated in the latest Turnbull Library record, Simon Nathan's article on Katherine's use of his family and the caustic comment she made in that story.

So nothing's sacred for writers, and that seems fair enough. But I just do thank you very much, Oliver for giving us such a rich connection and so much to think about real detective work, real research and real use of the amazing resource of the Turnbull. Please join me.

Oliver Stead: Thank you.

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