Books like In a German Pension: 13 Stories

Short stories can be like photographs, catching people at some moment in their lives and trapping the memory for ever . There they are, smiling or frowning, looking sad, happy, serious, surprised ... And behind those smiles and those frowns lie all the experience of life, the fears and delights, the hopes and the dreams.― Katherine MansfieldLast year, I was enraptured by a collection of Katherine Mansfield’s short stories, Something Childish But Very Natural so while reading Willem Elsschot’s Villa des Roses, written around the same time and also set in a boarding house, Mansfield’s debut collection from 1911, In a German Pension popped up from some hidden corner of the mental bookshelf. For these pension stories, Mansfield took inspiration from her own stay as a ‘cure guest’ in Villa Pension Müller at a Bavarian spa of Bad Wörishofen in 1909, send off there by her mother to muffle her extramarital pregnancy which would end in a miscarriage. With demonic zest Mansfield’s sharp-witted and observant narrator, a young English woman, looks at the peculiarities and behaviour of the pension guests, many of them at the spa on account of their ‘nerves’, trenchantly depicting the gross and distasteful table manners of the German pensioners, picking teeth with a hairpin, overeating, cleaning ears with a napkin, talking about saliva, spitting cherry stones in public, repugnantly displaying the use of handkerchiefs. The narrator’s bantering commentary on the boarders’ preoccupancy with bodily functions and digestion and their unctuous attitudes is mirrored by the depreciatory and spiteful opinion which the German guests confide to the narrator vis-à-vis the odd manners of the English: “It is a great pity the English nation is so unmusical”. ‘I have never been to England’, interrupted Fräulein Sonia, ‘but I have many English acquaintances. They are so cold!’ She shivered. ‘Fish-blooded’, snapped Frau Godowska, ‘Without soul, without soul, without grace. But you cannot equal their dress materials.' ‘England is merely an island of beef flesh swimming in a warm gulf sea of gravy’. “She was like a young tree whose branches had never been touched by the ruthless hand of man. Such delicacy! Of course it is difficult for you English to understand when you are always exposing your legs on cricket fields, and breeding dogs in your back gardens. The pity of it! Youth should be like a wild rose. For myself, I do not understand how your women ever get married at all.” After all, one ought not forget WWI is hovering over some of these stories, and Mansfield astutely bares the stereotyping in the hearts and minds of her coevals, speaking their minds openly, some lines alluding to the oncoming conflict: \ “I suppose you are frightened of an invasion too, eh? Oh, that’s good. I’ve been reading all about your English play in a newspaper. Did you see it?”“Yes.” I sat upright. “I assure you we are not afraid.”“Well then, you ought to be,” said the Herr Rat. “You have got no army at all – a few little boys with their veins full of nicotine poisoning.”“Don’t be afraid,” Herr Hoffmann said. “We don’t want England. If we did we would have had her long ago. We really do not want you”.“We certainly do not want Germany,” I said.\ (Germans at Meat).Fairly light-hearted and jocular as long as the pension guests are concerned, the tone and themes of the stories gradually darken, and angst, even tragedy enter. The few stories that do not focus an on the pension guests but on the villagers convey pictures of quotidian domestic cruelty, reminding us that barbarism begins at home, touching upon the deplorable plight of womanhood, the discomfiture of childbirth, the imbalance of power in the institution of marriage and its subsequent violence and exploitation and the sexual and social oppression of women and girls. Lofty musings on conformist femininity and love are exposed as fibbing and lampooned: \ Whom then, asked Fräulein Elsa, looking adoringly at the Advanced Lady – “whom then do you consider the true woman?” “She is the incarnation of comprehending Love!” “But Love is not a question of lavishing”, said the Advanced Lady. “It is the lamp carried in the bosom touching with serene rays all the heights and depths of – “Darkest Africa,” I murmured flippantly.\ (The Advanced Lady)The swing of the PendulumNonetheless men and women alike get a good dressing-down by Mansfield’s barbed pen, men are repulsively unhygienic and egocentric, women coquettish and wanton, like in the last two stories portraying the female protagonists as cold-hearted and calculative temptresses, taking umbrage at the men eventually succumbing to their frivolous games, like the allumeuse in Blaze when confronted with the consequences of displaying her ambivalent nature: I can’t help seeking admiration any more than a cat can help going to people to be stroked . Depicting Germans as boorish and self-righteous, English women as silly sporty moos unlikely finding or keeping husbands and having procreation issues – in some sense reflecting her own - Mansfield’s sardonic blow-up of the mutual tribal biases are far from political correct - if that anachronism would make any sense in the context of these tales - with its irresistible vitriolicism my children found me chuckling aloud. As immature Mansfield might have considered this debut herself, a work of juvenilia that she refused to have republished during her lifetime, the stories are in spurts hilarious in their hyperbolism and razor-sharp observations, stunningly precise and incisive in its details, rich in themes and worded in effervescent and sensuous prose, full of life. Some of the stories might be less subtle and slightly more predictable than what she will write later in her so brief a life, or have not the delightful open-endedness that will characterize later stories, to me this collection was sheer delight. \ At the head of the centre table sat the bride and bridegroom, she in a white dress trimmed with stripes and bows of coloured ribbon, giving her appearance of an iced cake all ready to be cut and served in neat little pieces to the bridegroom beside her, who wore a suit of white clothes much too large for him and a white silk tie that rose half-way up his collar. \ ( Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding)The oil paintings are from the New Zealand artist Susan Wilson, who illustrated Katherine Mansfield’s short stories for The Folio Society in 2000.