Abstract
As the Herr Professor produces a bag of cherries from his tail pocket and proceeds to demonstrate his skill in spitting the stones great distances, Katherine Mansfield conducts a satirical scrutiny of German cultural pretensions, and perhaps implicitly also of German Romanticism, through the Herr Professor’s combined account of his woodland trombone playing and bodily processes: ‘There is nothing like cherries for producing free saliva after trombone playing, especially after Grieg’s “Ich Liebe Dich”. Those sustained blasts on “liebe” make my throat as dry as a railway tunnel’ (1:214). The comic upstaging of the Professor’s Romantic posturings by his cherry-spitting parallels a moment in ‘Germans at Meat’ when the Herr Rat’s boasts about the Wagner festival, Mozart and Japanese pictures of München, the ‘Art and Soul’ of Germany, modulate into a peon of praise for the city’s beer (1:166).
‘Good Evening,’ said the Herr Professor, squeezing my hand; ‘wonderful weather! I have just returned from a party in the wood. I have been making music for them on my trombone. You know, these pine trees provide most suitable accompaniment for a trombone! They are sighing delicacy against sustained strength, as I remarked once in a lecture on wind instruments in Frankfort.’1
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Notes
Gerri Kimber and Vincent O’Sullivan, eds, The Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield, 4 vols (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012–15), Vol. 1, p. 214. Further references to Mansfield’s fiction will be to this edition and page numbers will be given in the text.
Thomas Pinney, ed., Essays of George Eliot (London: Routledge, 1963), pp. 222–3.
Margaret Scott, ed., The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks (Canterbury, NZ and Wellington: Lincoln University Press and Daphne Brasell Associates, 1997), Vol. 1, p. 106. Hereafter referred to as Notebooks followed by volume and page number.
Mansfield to the Trowell Family (14 November 1907), Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott, eds, The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984–2008), Vol. 1, p. 29. Hereafter referred to as Letters, followed by volume and page number; Mansfield to Vera Beauchamp, (19 June 1908), Letters, 1, p. 51.
Diane Milburn, The Deutschlandbild of A.R. Orage and the New Age Circle (Frankfurt am Main and Bern: Peter Lang, 1996);
Isobel Maddison, ‘Mansfield’s “Writing Game” and World War One’ in Katherine Mansfield and World War One, eds Gerri Kimber, Todd Martin and Delia da Sousa Correa, with Isobel Maddison and Alice Kelly, Katherine Mansfield Studies, Vol. 6 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), pp. 42–54.
See Jenny McDonnell, Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Marketplace: At the Mercy of the Public (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 34.
For an analysis of von Arnim’s ‘German’ novels in the context of attitudes to Germany before the First World War see Isobel Maddison, Elizabeth von Arnim: Beyond the German Garden (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 49–83.
Dorothy Richardson, Pointed Roofs (London: Duckworth, 1915), p. 13. See Francesca Frigerio, Playing the Body/the Playing Body: Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage and the Anatomy of Music, WMA Forum, 2009. http://wordmusicstudies.org/forum-2009/forum-2009-frigerio.htm (accessed 20 April 2014).
Alexander Herzen, trans. Constance Garnett, quoted in Rosemary Ashton, Little Germany: German Refugees in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 24.
See Delia da Sousa Correa, ‘Katherine Mansfield and Music: Nineteenth-Century Echoes’, in Gerri Kimber and Janet Wilson, eds, Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary Volume of Essays (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2011), p. 93.
Emma Sutton, ‘Fiction as Musical Critique: Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out and the Case of Wagner’, in Phyllis Weliver and Katharine Ellis, eds, Words and Notes in the Long Nineteenth Century (Woodbridge and Rochester, NY: Boydell and Brewer, 2013), p. 156.
Vanessa Manhire, ‘Mansfield, Woolf and Music: “The queerest sense of echo”’, in Delia da Sousa Correa, Gerri Kimber and Susan Reid, eds, Katherine Mansfield and the Arts, Katherine Mansfield Studies, Vol. 3 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), pp. 53, 56.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Lines Composed in a Concert Room’ (1799) line 37, The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 2 vols, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), Vol. 1, pp. 324–5.
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da Sousa Correa, D. (2015). Katherine Mansfield’s Germany: ‘these pine trees provide most suitable accompaniment for a trombone!’. In: Kascakova, J., Kimber, G. (eds) Katherine Mansfield and Continental Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137429971_7
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