Last Wednesday I was teaching a member of my student body: current body count: 14. At some stage in a conversation, this particular student began to extol the virtues of a writer, one Katherine Mansfield, and urged me strongly to familiarise myself with her prose. Now I always welcome tips, suggestions and dicas from students: restaurants, films, places of broad and places of specific interest, music, places to go to find stuff, bars, plumbers, slang, shortcuts, sound advice, etc, and I often write them down at the back of my notebook and forget all about them. Thus I wasted no time whatsoever in noting down this writer with a view to doing the very same. I left the house of this student, boarded my bus and headed on to my next port of call.
I always teach this student in her study, walled in by an impressive library. I seated myself, as I always do, and my eyes wandered casually around the giant wooden table while she searched out a cigarette lighter on which to fix her concentration, and I gathered thoughts in the name of education.
Something at once caught my eye. What should be sitting on top of a pile of books right in front of me but a collection of short stories by Katherine Mansfield.
Now that in itself, I agree, is not terribly strange, but when I asked her about the book and what she thought of it, not only had she not read it, but she didn't have the slightest clue where it had come from, and claimed not to know who it belonged to. In other words, she assured me it wasn't hers. That's just the mystery of Mansfield.
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It's a spooky tale, alright. It reminds me of an anecdote of Paul Auster's where he had been searching for a specific book for ages. He saw a woman on the street reading it, and commented that he couldn't find it anywhere. "I know" she said, "I've just finished it and I'm here to pass it on to you!". She was probably just fucking with his head.
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