Simon Jenkins The bombers’ gift to brutalism
Barbara Graziosi Stesichorus sweetly sings
Richard Tuck Mesmeric István Hont
Andrew Scull Politics of madness
FEBRUARY 5 2016 No. 5888
n
www.the-tls.co.uk
THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
Decadent survival
Kate Hext
UK £3 USA $5.75
L I T E RARY CRI T I CI S M
3
Moderns and the mood
How decadence in literature survived the fall of Wilde and
the disfavour of the TLS
O
scar Wilde’s arrest on April 6, 1895
for “Acts of Gross Indecency”
sparked a violent conservative
backlash against the “movement” in
which he had put himself centre stage: Decadence. A mob attacked the office of the Bodley
Head, the publisher of Wilde’s Salome and of
The Yellow Book, the Decadent periodical he
was erroneously reported to be carrying when
the police officers arrived. In the next few
years, The Yellow Book ceased publication; its
illustrator and co-editor, the boy wonder Aubrey Beardsley, succumbed to tuberculosis; and
Arthur Symons, who had enthusiastically
defined “The Decadent Movement” in 1893,
dismissed its aesthetic innovations as a mere
“mood”. By the time of Wilde’s death in a Paris
hotel in 1900, the Decadent Movement he popularized was dead, too.
Or was it? For various reasons – not least
more posturing and homophobia – it suited
early Modernists and the literary critics who
promoted them through the twentieth century
to believe that Decadence ceased on or around
April 6, 1895. Important new studies by Vincent Sherry and Kristin Mahoney tell a different
story. Mahoney focuses on self-styled Decadent writers and artists who long out-lived
Wilde, arguing that their continued engagement with 1890s Decadence shaped their critiques of early twentieth-century culture and
politics. Sherry traces how Decadent poetics
and aesthetics became integral to the canonical
Modernism of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, with
shorter framing sections on how it influenced
Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, Rebecca West,
Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett and others. On
these readings, Decadence re-emerges as a
movement without which Modernism as we
know it would have been impossible; a movement which in fact shaped literary Modernism
on the quiet, while its own distinct aesthetics
continued to evolve in Modernism’s shadow
until at least the 1940s.
The consignment of Decadence to what F.
Scott Fitzgerald called “the misty side streets of
literature” is largely due to the very Modernists
on whom Sherry focuses. The early years of the
twentieth century saw the Decadent Movement
of the 1890s widely memorialized, mummified
and vilified – and it is the villifiers who have
written literary history. In 1915, Wyndham
Lewis’s short-lived magazine Blast denigrated
just about everything Victorian, from Robert
Bridges to codliver oil. Amid this tsunami of
scorn, a special space was reserved for the
“Aesthete” or Decadent:
KATE HEXT
Vincent Sherry
MODERNISM AND THE
REINVENTION OF DECADENCE
333pp. Cambridge University Press. £30.
978 1 10707 932 8
Kristin Mahoney
LITERATURE AND THE POLITICS
OF POST-VICTORIAN DECADENCE
259pp. Cambridge University Press. $99.
978 1 10710974 2
DANDY
CURATE.
Lewis’s friend Pound needed no capital letters to convey his outrage when he felt that the
public had failed to appreciate the genius of
James Joyce’s Ulysses enough and that the
Decadent Movement was to blame. “The
decayed-lily verbiage which the Wilde school
scattered over the decadence is much more to
the popular taste”, he complained, ‘”Vomit,
carefully labelled ‘Beauty’, is still in the literary
market and much sought after in the provinces.” Meanwhile, a gentler Max Beerbohm
endlessly replayed his own youthful dalliance
with Decadence in drawings of its main figures.
His caricatures of Wilde – bloated, overadorned, aloof, limp-wristed – seemed to testify to the Decadent Movement’s obsolescence
in the thrusting new century.
The presentation of Decadence as passé and
provincial put Lewis, Pound and “the Incomparable Max” in good company. Founded in
1902, the TLS underscored its mission to modernize literary criticism with high-minded
rejections of fin-de-siècle Decadence, if a little
too frequent and zealous to be fully believed.
Thus a review of De Profundis in 1905 concluded that Wilde’s only genius was for “lawless irresponsibility”, and in 1906 readers were
cautioned that Symons’s survey of the Seven
Arts trod the “perilous path of aestheticism”.
Eight years later, following many more similar
remarks in these pages, a relieved reviewer was
able to reassure readers that Decadence was but
a “billabong”: a stagnant pond set apart, thank
goodness, from the living rivers of literary
progress.
Sherry and Mahoney beg to differ, and
rightly so. Decadence lived on into the twentieth century in a multitude of ways. Few of these
were as simplistic as the fey pursuit of the beautiful, fragranced with hedonistic excess, to
which the movement was too often reduced by
conservative critics. Most noticeably it evolved
into camp: Alan Sinfield’s The Wilde Century
(1994) laid the foundations for compelling
research in this area over the past twenty years.
Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence
takes a different tack, seeing the imaginative
sense of time – the relationship between past,
present and future – as the main legacy of the
Decadent Movement for Modernist literature.
At the outset, time seems a surprising link.
After all, High Modernism still resonates in the
cultural memory with Pound’s famous call to
arms: “Make it new!” What Sherry shows so
successfully is that those Modernists who
would “Make it new!” have much in common
with Decadents who believed they had no
tomorrow. The Decadent inhabits an intensely
felt now, the “vertiginous thrill” of which is
defined both by a nostalgia for the past and a
sense that the future is impossible or at least
undesirable. Think of Dorian Gray’s obsession
with beautiful objects lost in history – Nero’s
velarium over the Colosseum, the mortuary
cloth of King Chilperic – as he sinks into a life
lived only for sensuous objects, or Symons’s
early poetry, in which every moment of sexual
pleasure contains a premonition of its soon
becoming a painful memory. Thus does the
present become “queer” and inorganic.
Analogies soon emerge between this Decadent vision of time and that woven into the early
works of the poets who would become Modernists. Ezra Pound’s derivative verse of the early
1910s sets him firmly in the Decadent tradition.
With its archaic language, affected exclamations, Latinate titles and one poem dedicated to
Rhymer’s Club poet Ernest Dowson, it is
underpinned by a quintessentially Decadent
nostalgia. Even the fearless Futurism emblazoned on the opening pages of Blast is a little
misleading: a flick through its pages reveals
many Decadence-tinged pieces within. In his
own Blast poems, “Preludes” and “Rhapsody
of a Windy Night”, the young Eliot breathes the
same night air as Symons; alone and palely loitering in the backstreets, a flâneur held rapt
between memory and desire:
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
THE BRITANNIC AESTHETE
CREAM OF THE SNOBBISH EARTH
ROSE OF SHARON GOD-PRIG
OF SIMIAN VANITY
SNEAK AND SWOT OF THE SCHOOLROOM
IMBERB (or Berbed when in Belsize) –
PEDANT
PRACTICAL JOKER
Like a Decadent, Eliot looks backward,
extricating himself from the forward movement of progress in a sublime nostalgia that, as
Sherry tells us, “envisions the condition of existence as aftermath”.
Around the same time, Des Imagistes
grounded their poetry in a musicality and Helle-
TLS FEBRUARY 5 2016
4
nism learnt from Decadence. If they seemed to
flaunt their Decadent influences at a time when
this was highly impolitic, they did so with a new
directness and intensity that resisted comparison. Eliot would have to tread more carefully.
In July 1914 he sent some of his recent poems
to Conrad Aiken along with an apologetic letter. “[I] wonder whether I had better knock it off
a while – you will tell me what you think. Do
you think that the Love Song of St Sebastian part
is morbid or forced . . . .There is nothing homosexual about this.”
His anxiety was not misplaced: Decadence
was practically a byword for homosexuality,
with St Sebastian one of its pin-up boys, and
this impression would only intensify as the
decade wore on. As Eliot walked from his day
job in the Colonial and Foreign Department of
Lloyds Bank to his little flat in Marylebone in
the summer of 1918, the placards he passed told
of a scandal unfolding at the Old Bailey: the
Billing libel trial. Noel Pemberton Billing MP
had sensationally claimed that 47, 000 British
men and women had been drawn into a homosexual cult – centred on a circle, including the
Salome actress Maud Allan and Wilde’s closest
friend, Robbie Ross – and were being blackmailed by the Germans to undermine the war
effort. Lord Alfred Douglas, once Wilde’s
beloved “Bosie”, was among those who testified for Billing as to the existence of this
so-called “Cult of the Clitoris”. Allan sued for
criminal libel, but Billing won. Evidently the
deviant side of Decadence was not as dead as
the TLS had hoped, at least not in the panicked
public imagination. No wonder Eliot seemed
keen to “knock it off” with any ostentatiously
Decadent poetics.
Only he didn’t, and neither did Pound. Or not
exactly. The straight academics who would
later define the literary establishment and its
canon – F. R. Leavis in Great Britain and Hugh
Kenner and Edmund Wilson in the United
States – might suggest so. As Sherry reconstructs this critical history in his introduction,
he shows how they expunged these Decadent
roots from the history of Modernism or otherwise, with a sleight of hand learnt from
Symons, attributed its stylistics to the more
respectable (for which read less queer) “Symbolism”. Granted, the story of Eliot’s and
Pound’s Decadent juvenilia has been told to
some extent in more recent years, but Sherry
goes much further. His careful readings in
Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence
undermine the version of literary history in
which, as both poets entered the major phase of
their writing in the late 1910s, the futility of
Victorian progress learnt from the “tragic generation” of the 1890s was rejected in a great
watershed of “making it new”. Far from vanquishing the fin-de-siècle Decadents’ acute
sense of decline, the First World War became
its objective correlative. Those early poetic
experiments with Decadent poetics become far
more deeply interfused as the pessimism inherent in Decadent temporality is enlarged and
enriched by the war and the weakening of
Empire. No longer is this pessimism merely
personal; it is a sense of the historical present
itself as a “declining afterward”.
The concept and word “Decadence” recur
often in Pound’s wartime letters and essays as
he seeks to articulate his contemporary culture.
When, in 1916, he decided to edit a book titled
“This Generation: The spirit of the half-decade” “dealing with contemporary events in the
woild-uv-letters”, he playfully punned on the
L I T E RARY CRI T I CI S M
An illustration by Beresford Egan for an edition of Charles Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal
translated by C. Bower Alcock (1929)
subtitle in a letter to his American patron:
“Humourists please copy “half-decayed’”. The
implicit parallel between his own tragic generation and that of the 1890s is poignant here. This
was to become the basis of his poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley in 1920. Sherry teases out how
this poem structurally and linguistically echoes
itself and 1890s Decadence to create a haunting, heckling sense of the present as but a weakening repetition of the past. It is with this as a
basis that the spectre of Pound’s own doomed
generation is brought into parallel with that of
the 1890s: the poem retraces the narrative arc of
Beerbohm’s short story about the boom and
bust of Decadent careers in the mid-1890s,
“Hilary Maltby and Stephen Braxton” (1919),
while emblematic cases of ruined youth – Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson and Pound’s
friend Victor Plarr – are woven into the text to
foreshadow the massacre that would, which
Pound himself would feel so deeply after the
deaths of Henri Gaudier and T. E. Hulme in the
trenches.
1920 was also the year in which T. S. Eliot
published Poems, a collection often overlooked
between Prufrock and Other Observations
(1917) and The Waste Land (1922). Poems
expands Eliot’s poetic rendering of Decadent
time from the condition of one jaded individual
to the condition of the age, as his heightened –
if reactionary, indeed racist – interest in the political realities of Empire come to the foreground. The opening section of “Sweeney
amongst the Nightingales” is one of Sherry’s
examples:
Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees
Letting his arms hang down to laugh,
The zebra stripes along his jaw
Swelling to maculate giraffe.
With the Easter Rising fresh in the memory,
Sweeney’s Irish name gestures to the fragility
of Empire, while the human degeneration suggested by Eliot’s animal imagery denies any
possibility of progress. The brisk, mechanical
rhythms here – such a jarring contrast with the
vers libre of Prufrock – draw on Gautier’s style
to versify the marionettes that populate
Symons’s early poetry, as inorganic or uncanny
likenesses of our human selves. So it is that the
individual’s sense of time as a “declining afterward” without any possibility of a future
expands to a far broader vision of the historical
present on the precipice of its own dissolution.
Sweeney, of course, makes a cameo appearance in The Waste Land. Eliot’s [mock-epic?
not epic] vision of Imperial decline and fall, set
by critics at the heart of Modernism’s annus
mirabilis, 1922, is formed through his early
immersion in Decadent writing. It should not be
forgotten that parts of its first drafts were written alongside those verses Eliot sent so hesitatingly to Conrad Aiken. Eliot together with
Pound, il miglior fabbro, edited ostentatious
debts to the fin de siècle out of The Waste Land:
excising for example the original epigraph
taken from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
(“The horror! The horror!”). When recovered
by Sherry, such references emerge as the scaffolding of The Waste Land’s awful apprehension of Western civilization as a repetition and
devolution. Reconstructions of this kind
become central in Sherry’s study as “as an inner
history of textual memory which, once recovered, may reveal the coherence and power of
the decadent sensibility in this landmark of literary modernism”.
Kristin Mahoney’s Literature and the Politics of Post-Victorian Decadence must be
placed alongside Sherry’s Modernism and the
Reinvention of Modernism as a turning point in
how critics conceive the place of the Decadent
Movement in literary history. Not only does
Mahoney illustrate that Decadent forms continued to evolve well into the twentieth century
alongside Modernism, but she demonstrates
that its evolutions are diverse and critically
engaged with the politics of their present.
It is a an absorbing and revelatory study, not
least because critical neglect of post-Victorian
Decadence means that most of Mahoney’s subjects are today indistinct figures, as elusive as
they are captivating: Max Beerbohm, Vernon
Lee, Baron Corvo, Althea Gyles and Beresford
Egan among them. Egan, a novelist and illustrator in the mould of Beardsley, whose heyday
was in the 1920s and 30s, is now so little read
that his books are consigned to the British
Library’s Boston Spa holdings. His illustrations harness the eroticism and wit of Beardsley’s distinctive style to parody the sexual
conservativism of the interwar period.
The Sink of Solitude (1928), a verse satire of
the controversy around Radcliffe Hall’s The
Well of Loneliness (1928), is one such example.
TLS FEBRUARY 5 2016
Written by P. R. Stephenson and C. Bower
Alcock with illustrations by Egan, it mercilessly lampoons the nationalist prudery that
saw Hall’s novel suppressed under the Obscene
Publications Act. With its allusions to The Picture of Dorian Gray, combined with Beardsleyesque illustrations, The Sink of Solitude
recalls both Wilde’s conviction and the Billing
Trial to put nationalist indignation around
same-sex desire into a Decadent genealogy. In
the following years, Egan and his wife Alcock
would collaborate on more controversial
material, including the sensational De Sade:
Being a series of wounds, inflicted with brush
and pen upon sadistic wolves garbed in masochists’ wool (1929), an illustrated essay that
uses Decadent “wit, morbidity, and detachment” in its exploration of sadistic impulses
and critique of strictures against same-sex
desire, the marriage market, moral policing and
modern war. Ironic detachment had always
been essential to the Decedent pose, and Mahoney shows that Egan became a modern master
of its art, influenced, too, by the fact he was
himself an outsider as a South African in
London.
Max Beerbohm was another outsider in the
twentieth century. Was he a Decadent? Well,
he wasn’t always in love with them, but he was
open to persuasion. He “oscillated between
reverence and satire” of Wilde before going on
to affect the Decadent poses Wilde practically
created. Despite a voluminous output and high
profile during his lifetime, Beerbohm is
another who now occupies a ghostly place in
literary history. He is a critic whose subjects
were often too ephemeral to resonate for long;
a man who came of age among the Modernists
but was never one of them. “Aren’t you just a
trifle over-loyal to this particular era?” he asked
Virginia Woolf in 1927. All the best Decadents
are nostalgics, of course, but Beerbohm was
nostalgic for the 1890s even before they had
ended. During the war, his cosy portraits of
Rossetti, Wilde, Swinburne and company
recast them, Mahoney explains, as “sweet, silly
specters from a lighter time brought into the
present by a dandy who smirks at the bohemianism he has reanimated”.
Beerbohm’s memories offered light relief,
but his pose was not benign. From the 1910s
until his death in 1956, the way he closely
linked himself with the Decadent circles of the
1890s allowed him to suggest a critical detachment from the contemporary world he found so
sadly wanting. To his tastes, new technologies
were too vulgar, advertisements were too vulgar, and modern transport was both too vulgar
and too dangerous. On the evidence of Literature and the Politics of Post-Victorian Decadence, his views were not particularly nuanced.
Yet Beerbohm’s pose as a Decadent marooned
in the wrong century did allow him to give an
impartial commentary on twentieth-century
“progress”. His distaste for the technologies
and politics of the modern era defined his popular radio lectures in the 1930s and 40s. So the
movement that at the fin de siècle kidded itself
it could live only “for art and song” evolves in
surprising ways. In the twentieth century, the
disinterestedness of Decadent poses and its
camp style are harnessed into dissent from the
social and political status quo.
The complementary approaches of Sherry
and Mahoney force us to rethink the claims
Modernism made for itself and how far those
claims have determined literary values since.
Examining how Decadence exerted an impor-
L I T E RARY CRI T I CI S M
tant influence on mainstream culture, they lead
the way in a critical reshaping of twentieth-century literary history that promises to continue in
the coming years. In an academic landscape
where too many monographs are written in
haste, as British academics are hurled toward
another Research Excellence Framework, so
calm and considered is the prose of Sherry and
Mahoney – who are both American academics
– that it seems to exist in the drawing room of a
Wildean dialogue. Sherry’s work is rich and
uncompromising, interwoven with carefully
meditated readings of the poetry and prose on
which it focuses. It is generous to its readers,
granting that each one of us has already thought
extensively about, say, the connotations of the
tetrameter quatrain. Having said which, it must
be admitted that at times this reader required a
little hock and seltzer to ease her passage
through the denser sections of Modernism and
the Reinvention of Decadence. That Sherry’s
textual analyses are compelling, there is no
doubt. Still, a little more cultural context and
some consideration of the broader artistic continuities of Decadence might have made this
difficult study a little more accessible. As it is,
important cultural circumstances like the Billing trial, mentioned above, do not appear. Neither does, say, The Cave of the Golden Calf, the
self-consciously Decadent nightclub opened
by Frida Strindberg in 1912, where Wyndham
Lewis was one of the contributing designers; or
the marvellous Beardsleyesque drawings with
which Djuna Barnes expanded the Decadent
cosmopolitanism that Sherry identifies in her
writing. Literature and the Poetics of Post-Victorian Decadence presents, if anything, the
opposite problem despite the fact that it is
utterly compelling from start to finish: its
incredible fusion of cultural and biographical
details at times crowds out some of the textual
analyses. So, for instance, analysis of how precisely the innuendo of Beardsley’s style is
appropriated by Egan and more extended analysis of the significance of Beerbohm’s interventions would have been welcome.
In the context of these monographs’ great
achievements, these are minor quibbles. Other
critics can fill in any silences, and will. The signal achievements of Sherry and Mahoney in
challenging the self-servingly proclaimed rupture between Decadence and Modernism make
these landmark studies. Literary historians
have asked in recent years when and indeed if
Modernism ends; now more attention might be
given to how and when it began, and how it
once had to jostle for cultural supremacy. Vincent Sherry and Kristin Mahoney have also
paved the way for a larger reconsideration of
how to place the Decadent Movement in literary history. In the coming years, further work
will be published on how Decadence influenced the Harlem Renaissance and how it
shaped the poetics of the New York cityscape in
the 1920s, as well as recoveries of latter-day
Decadents such as Ronald Firbank and Carl
Van Vechten. Meanwhile, the influences and
evolutions of Decadence persist into the early
twenty-first century just as surely as they persisted a century ago. They are as palpable in the
devastating climax of Russell T. Davies’s
recent Channel 4 series Cucumber as they are in
the final moments of Alan Hollinghurst’s The
Line of Beauty (2004). One-hundred-andtwenty years after Wilde’s incarceration, the
Decadent Movement was not snuffed out after
all, but it continues to cast a long, deep purple
shadow along those misty side streets.
5
Homesick blues
M
y Katherine Mansfield Project is a
book to be treasured by anyone who
has left home and moved away.
Sometimes people return to what they once
called “home”, only to find “home” is now,
effectively, somewhere else. Others, like the
New Zealand modernist short story writer
Katherine Mansfield, whose life was cut short
by tuberculosis at the age of thirty-four, never
return, but instead recreate a memory of home
in their writing that is more powerful, more
alive, more profoundly real – down to the
memory of a squeaking laundry basket – than
the original.
In this personal meditation on the significance of home, another New Zealand emigant,
Kirsty Gunn, gently entices the reader to consider what “home” means to them, while offering innovative and moving biographies of both
herself and Mansfield. The structure is so delicately constructed, and so cleverly does Gunn
weave together fact and fiction, real life and
fantasy, introspection and scholarship, that
after reading the book in one sitting, the reader
emerges as if from a cocoon; their world, their
sense of home, as Mansfield put it, “has been
dipped back into the dark blue sea during the
night only to rise again at beam of day, all hung
with bright spangles and glittering drops”.
In 2009, Gunn was the recipient of the Ran-
GERRI KIMBER
Kirsty Gunn
MY KATHERINE MANSFIELD
PROJECT
139pp. Notting Hill Editions. £14.99.
978 1 910749 04 3
dell Cottage Writer’s Residency in Wellington, New Zealand, the city where she was born
and raised before she moved to London. For
six months the little nineteenth-century
wooden settler’s cottage, now beautifully
restored, was home to Gunn and her two young
daughters, then aged eight and ten. Its position
in the suburb of Thorndon, just off the Tinakori
Road, afforded her an unrivalled opportunity
to immerse herself in the life and work of Wellington’s most celebrated literary offspring –
Katherine Mansfield – who had walked the
same streets as a young girl, just over a hundred years before her. Indeed, Gunn’s essay is
a tribute to the author who seems to have
haunted her earliest memories; when she was
a little girl, her mother read her “The Doll’s
House”, and she discovered “Prelude” for herself, and fell in love with Mansfield’s writing,
at the age of twelve.
The premiss of the essay is printed in red on
TLS FEBRUARY 5 2016
the cover under the title: “One has left a version
of oneself at the place of departure and it waits
for us at the point of return – but she is not me
when I get there”. There can be no true return
home, since “self consciousness has leapt up in
the space between one shore and another and
created another person for ourselves in the
gap”. Nevertheless:
as we sense the terror of the gap between then and
now, here and there, so the roaring, constructing
power of the intellect and the imagination fills
the space with another reality . . . making cities
and worlds of the places we have left.
Both Mansfield and Gunn departed New
Zealand for England as young writers, initially
thinking little of the land left behind, only to
find in later life that their best work was influenced by memories of their birth country.
Mansfield had been educated in England at
Queen’s College in Harley Street from
1903–06 with her two older sisters. She was
eighteen when the family returned to Wellington, then a small colonial capital of barely
59,000 people. Having lived in London for
three exhilarating years, she determined to
return as soon as possible; after eighteen
months, her father reluctantly allowed her to
move back to the other side of the world in
1908, with an allowance of £100 per annum.
For several years, she was barely conscious of
her homeland, but by 1915, with the death of
her beloved younger brother Leslie in Ploegsteert Wood near Ypres, blown to bits by a
faulty hand grenade he was demonstrating,
there was a sea change in Mansfield’s consciousness, and her childhood memories
became the focus of nearly all of her best stories for the remainder of her short life.
For Gunn, there is a similar awakening to the
richness of the concept of home, which the residency puts into sharp focus: “I understand . . .
the homewardness that runs through Mansfield’s stories and journals and letters that’s
both sick of home and homesick for it, as though
I were reading an account of my own life”. As
a writer, she has honed her skills far from the
land of her birth, and yet over the course of six
months in Wellington, reading and rereading
Mansfield’s stories, letters and diaries, holding
and touching original manuscript material held
in the Alexander Turnbull Library, visiting
Mansfield’s birthplace house a short walk away
at the other end of the Tinakori Road, her
immersion in the life of her favourite author
reaches a point where both authors’ work
becomes interchangeable: among the meditations on the notion of “home”, “belonging” and
heimweh, are pieces of fiction, short extracts by
Mansfield intertwine with polished little stories
by Gunn herself.
My Katherine Mansfield Project is an
enchanting – and at times haunting – essay, as
well as a moving tribute to Mansfield. The publisher, Notting Hill Editions, specializes in
“reinvigorating the essay as a literary form”,
and Kirsty Gunn’s offering is a triumph of the
genre. The book is also a lovely object, stitched
with red ribbon, and with a dove-grey cloth
cover stamped with striking white and red print.
Inside, the page numbers are red and chapter
titles have red embellishments. It is a tribute to
the book as art form; for once, one really can
judge a book by its beautifully produced cover.