“An art that strikes deeper”: Katherine Mansfield and Rhythm

From 1911-13, Katherine Mansfield contributed to and eventually helped to edit with her partner, John Middleton Murry, a short lived magazine entitled Rhythm, an avant-garde publication with a bias towards Symbolism, the arts and Post-Impressionism, the music of Debussy and Mahler and the philosophy of Bergson. From the very outset, Rhythm’s editorial slant was towards ‘the ideal of a new art’. As the editors stated in the first issue: ‘“Before art can be human it must learn to be brutal.” Our intention is to provide art, be it drawing, literature or criticism, which shall be vigorous, determined, which shall have its roots below the surface, and be the rhythmical echo of the life with which it is in touch.’ This editorial philosophy freed up Mansfield’s own experiments in the prose form, made her reckless and gave her the desire to be courageous in her own profession. As a result she came to develop a stream-of-consciousness form of writing, also linked to literary impressionism, culminating in her position as perhaps the instigator, but in any case certainly one of the most important exponents of the Modernist short story. Mansfield placed four of her stories in Rhythm: ‘Millie’, ‘The Woman at the Store’, ‘Ole Underwood’ and ‘Ole Tar’. With their subject matter emphasising the savagery and cruelty of her colonial heritage, she embraced entirely the remit of the magazine as quoted above and focussed her attention on the violent and uncultured aspect of her homeland New Zealand. For many years glossed over by critics, these stories have lately come to be viewed as some of Mansfield’s most important works, their avant-garde influences informing all her subsequent writing. This paper will also highlight the extent of the émigré creative input and influence in Rhythm. Integrated as they were into the principal intellec¬tual and artistic currents of European life, both Murry, Mansfield and their colleagues assimilated foreign creativity in all its manifestations into their own view of life, literature and art, thus giving the magazine a transnational identity, with a plethora of international correspondents from France, Poland, Russia and beyond, publicizing the new movements of the avant-garde. Many of their contributors and / or subject matter – Picasso, Goncharova, Wyspianski, Carco, Derain, Sobienowski, Van Gogh, to name but a few – would go on to form part of established or ‘high-brow’ art and literature