Katherine Mansfield
Katherine Mansfield was a modernist writer of short fiction who was born and brought up in New Zealand
Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp Murry was born in 1888, into a prominent family in Wellington, New Zealand. She became one of New Zealand's best-known writers, using the pen name of Katherine Mansfield. The daughter of a banker, and born into a middle-class family, she was also a first cousin of Countess Elizabeth von Arnim, a distinguished novelist in her time. Mansfield had two older sisters and a younger brother. Her father, Harold Beauchamp, went on to become the chairman of the Bank of New Zealand. In 1893, the Mansfield family moved to Karori, a suburb of Wellington, where Mansfield would spend the happiest years of her childhood; she later used her memories of this time as an inspiration for her Prelude story.
Her first published stories appeared in the High School Reporter and the Wellington Girls' High School magazine in 1898 and 1899. In 1902, she developed strong feelings for a musician who played the cello, Arnold Trowell, although her feelings were not, for the most part, returned. Mansfield herself was an accomplished cellist, having received lessons from Trowell's father. Mansfield wrote in her journals of feeling isolated to some extent in New Zealand and, in general terms, of her interest in the Maori people (New Zealand's native people), who were often portrayed in a sympathetic light in her later stories, such as How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped.
She moved to London in 1903, where she attended Queen's College, along with her two sisters. Mansfield recommenced playing the cello, an occupation that she believed, during her time at Queen's, she would take up professionally. She also began contributing to the college newspaper, with such dedication that she eventually became its editor. She was particularly interested in the works of the French writers of this period and in the 19th-century British writer Oscar Wilde, and she was appreciated amongst fellow students at Queen's for her lively and charismatic approach to life and work. She met fellow writer Ida Baker, a South African, at the college, and the pair became lifelong friends. Mansfield did not become involved in much political activity when she lived in London. For example, although at that time many women in London were demonstrating for the right to vote, Mansfield did not actively support the suffragette movement in the UK. Women in New Zealand had gained the right to vote in 1893.
Mansfield first began journeying into other parts of Europe in the period 1903–1906, mainly to Belgium and Germany. After finishing her schooling in England, she returned to her New Zealand home in 1906, only then beginning to write short stories in a serious way. She had several works published in Australia in a magazine called Native Companion, which was her first paid writing work, and by this time she had her mind set on becoming a professional writer. It was also the first occasion on which she used the pseudonym "K. Mansfield".
Mansfield rapidly grew discontented with the provincial New Zealand lifestyle, and with her family. Two years later she headed again for London. Her father sent her an annual subsidy of £100 for the rest of her life. In later years, she would express both admiration and disdain for New Zealand in her journals.
In 1911, Mansfield met John Middleton Murry, the Oxford scholar and editor of the literary magazine Rhythm. They were later to marry in 1918. Mansfield became a co-editor of Rhythm, which was subsequently called The Blue Review, in which more of her works were published. She and Murry lived in various houses in England and briefly in Paris. The Blue Review failed to gain enough readers and was no longer published. Their attempt to set up as writers in Paris was cut short by Murry's bankruptcy, which resulted from the failure of this and other journals. Life back in England meant frequently changed addresses and very limited funds.
Between 1915 and 1918, Mansfield moved between England and Bandol, France. She and Murry developed close contact with other well-known writers of the time such as D. H. Lawrence, Bertrand Russell and Aldous Huxley. By October 1918 Mansfield had become seriously ill; she had been diagnosed with tuberculosis and was advised to enter a sanatorium. She could no longer spend winters in London. In the autumn of 1918, she was so ill that she decided to go to Ospedaletti in Italy. It was the publication of Bliss and Other Stories in 1920 that was to solidify Mansfield's reputation as a writer.
Mansfield also spent time in Menton, France, as the tenant of her father's cousin at "The Villa Isola Bella". There she wrote eight stories including Miss Brill and The Daughters of the Late Colonel, the latter of which she pronounced to be "...the only story that satisfies me to any extent."
Mansfield produced a great deal of work in the final years of her life, and much of her prose and poetry remained unpublished at her death in 1923. After her death, her husband, Murry, took on the task of editing and publishing her works. His efforts resulted in two additional volumes of short stories, The Dove's Nest and Something Childish, published in 1923 and 1924 respectively, the publication of her Poems, as well as a collection of critical writings (Novels and Novelists) and a number of editions of Mansfield's previously unpublished letters and journals.
The Tasmanian Tiger
The Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, was a carnivorous marsupial (a meat-eating mammal which carries its young in a pouch). It was given the name 'tiger' because it had striped fur, and because it was ferocious. Between 24 million and 15 million years ago, many types of thylacine roamed across Australia, their powerful jaws playing a role in maintaining a balance in the ecosystems of their day. Some species were fox-sized, while others were barely the size of kittens.
But when a period of climate change cooled Australia about 12 million years ago, the numbers of these ancient thylacines began to decline. By about 3 million years ago, only one species was left. About 4,000 years ago, these vanished completely from the Australian mainland, so that Tasmania, a large island to the south of Australia, became the last remaining place where thylacines existed. They ruled the island's animal life unchallenged until Europeans, with sheep, dogs and a great indifference to native flora and fauna, seem to have brought about their extinction. In 1936, the last captive Tasmanian tiger died in Hobart Zoo. Since then, many expeditions have searched for tigers in the Tasmanian bush, but no definitive evidence has been found. Despite this, there are many who keep searching.
In 1981, Dutch-born zoologist Hans Naarding was in Tasmania conducting a survey of Latham's snipe, a species of endangered bird. One night he saw an animal in the light from the searchlight mounted on his vehicle. He described it as about the size of a large dog, but with slightly sloping hindquarters and a fairly thick tail continuing straight on from its backbone. He said that it had 12 distinct stripes on its back, running down to the point where the tail began.
He reported the sighting to the Director of Tasmania's National Parks. 'When the news broke,' said Naarding, 'I was besieged by television crews, including four or five from Japan, and others from the United Kingdom, Germany, New Zealand and South America.' Government and private search parties combed the region, but no further sightings were made. The tiger, as always, had escaped to its lair — a place that many insist exists only in the imagination.
Others disagree. There have been more than 4,000 claimed sightings of the animal since it supposedly died out, and the average number of claims reported to the authorities each year is now 150. So is it out there? Even experts differ in opinion.
Randolph Rose, Associate Professor of Zoology at the University of Tasmania, says that he dreamed of seeing a thylacine, but is now convinced that his dream will go unfulfilled. The consensus among conservationists is that any animal with a population base of less than 1,000 is headed for extinction within 60 years. 'Sixty years ago,' he says, 'there was only one thylacine that we know of, and that was in Hobart Zoo. Take it from me, the tiger is gone.'
But Dr David Pemberton, curator of zoology at the Tasmanian Museum, states that, despite scientific thinking that a relatively large number of animals is required to sustain a population, 'the Florida panther is down to a dozen or so animals, and, while it does have some inbreeding problems, is still ticking along!' After all, animals can be notoriously elusive. The strange fish known as the coelacanth, with its 'proto legs', was thought to have died out with the dinosaurs about 70 million years ago until a specimen was dragged to the surface in a shark net off the coast of South Africa in 1938.
Wildlife biologist Nick Mooney has the unenviable task of investigating all so-called sightings of the tiger. It was Mooney who was first consulted in late February 2005 about the authenticity of new digital photographic images of a thylacine allegedly taken by a tourist. On face value, Mooney says, this particular account of a sighting and the photographs submitted as proof amount to one of the most convincing cases for the species' survival that he has seen.
Many other 'sightings' have been hoaxes, and many sincere seekers are victims of obsession. 'It is a blind optimism that something is, rather than cynicism that something isn't,' Mooney says. 'If something crosses the road, it's not a case of "I wonder what that was?" Rather, it is a case of "That's a thylacine!"'
However, Mooney treats all sightings on face value. 'I never try to embarrass people,' he says, 'but the fact that I don't pack the car immediately after they telephone can often be taken as ridicule. Obsessive characters get angry that someone in my position is not out there when they think the thylacine is there.'
Hans Naarding, whose sighting of a striped animal two decades ago was the highlight of a lifetime of animal spotting, remains puzzled by the time and money people waste on tiger searches. He says resources would be better applied to saving another endangered animal, the Tasmanian devil, and helping declining migratory bird populations.
Could the thylacine still be out there? 'Sure,' Naarding says. 'I know the vast south-west wilderness of Tasmania well. They could survive ... [But] if this is the case, it will not be long before they do disappear completely.' Naarding believes that any discovery of surviving thylacines would be 'rather pointless'. 'How do you bring a species back from extinction?' he asks. 'What could you do with it? If there are thylacines out there, they are better off right where they are.'
The art of deception
Do tiny changes of facial expression show whether someone is telling lies?
Forty years ago, the research psychologist Dr Paul Ekman was addressing a group of young psychiatrists in training when he was asked a question, the answer to which has kept him busy ever since. Suppose, the group wanted to know, a particular patient swears they are telling the truth. They look and sound sincere. So here is the question: is there any way you can be sure they are telling the truth? Ekman did not know the answer then, but wanted to find out.
As part of his research, he had already filmed a series of 12-minute interviews with psychiatric patients. In a subsequent conversation, one of the patients told him that she had lied to him. So Ekman sat and looked at the film but saw nothing noteworthy. Then he slowed it down and looked again. Then he slowed it even further. And suddenly, there, across just two frames of the film, he saw it: an intense expression of extreme anguish. It lasted less than a 15th of a second, but once he had spotted the first expression, he soon found three more examples in that same interview. He termed his discovery 'micro-expressions': very rapid, intense demonstrations of emotion that the subject intended to be concealed.
Over the course of the next four decades, Ekman successfully demonstrated a proposition first suggested by Charles Darwin: that the ways in which we express rage, disgust, contempt, fear, surprise, happiness and sadness are universal. The facial muscles triggered by those seven basic emotions are, he has shown, essentially standard, regardless of language and culture, from the US to Japan and Brazil to Papua New Guinea. What is more, expressions of emotion are impossible to suppress and, particularly when we are lying, micro-expressions of powerfully felt emotions will inevitably flit across our face before we get the chance to stop them.
Fortunately for liars, most people will fail to spot these fleeting signals of inner torment. Of the 15,000 Ekman has tested, only 50 people, whom he calls 'naturals', have been able to do it. But given a little more training, Ekman says, almost anyone can develop the skill. He should know: since these tests were completed in the mid-1980s and the first publication of his research, he has been called in by the FBI and CIA, among countless more law-enforcement and other agencies around the world, not just to solve cases but to teach them how to use his technique for themselves. He has held workshops for defence and prosecution lawyers, health professionals, even jealous spouses, all of them wanting to know exactly when someone is not being 100 per cent candid.
Most recently, Ekman's research has resulted in a new television series about the exploits of the fictional Dr Cal Lightman, a scientist who studies involuntary body language to discover not only if you are lying, but why you might have been motivated to do so. According to the publicity blurb, Lightman is a human lie detector, even more accurate than a polygraph test. Ekman concedes he was sceptical when the producer first approached him with the idea of turning his life's work into a TV series, and initially would have stopped the project if he could. In particular, he was fearful that the show would exaggerate the effectiveness of his techniques and create the quite inaccurate impression among audiences that criminals could no longer hope to get away with lying. In the worst-case scenario, he was concerned about unfair convictions: that one day someone not properly trained in his techniques might be sitting on a jury and wrongly find someone guilty of a crime simply on the basis of a television programme.
In the end, though, he was won over because the series is unusual in several respects. It is the first time, as far as Ekman is aware, that a commercial TV drama has been based on the work of just one scientist. That scientist is also deeply involved in the project, talking through plot ideas and checking five successive drafts of each script to ensure details are correct. He was also impressed with the producer's manifestly serious and well-intentioned reasons for making the programme. Now that the first series has been completed, he believes probably 80–90 per cent of the show is based on fact, and that's good enough for what is, after all, a drama, not a documentary.
Ekman, incidentally, professes to have been a terrible liar ever since he was a small boy and observes that the ability to detect a lie and the ability to lie successfully are completely unrelated. He has been asked by people running for high office if he could teach them to become more credible with the public but has always refused to use his skills in that way on ethical grounds. He also insists that there are various kinds of lies. A 'true' lie can be identified by having two essential characteristics: there must be a deliberate intent to mislead and there must be no notification that this is what is occurring. This means that an actor or a poker player isn't a true liar. They are supposed to deceive you; it's part of the game, and the same is true of flattery. He prefers to focus on the kinds of lies where the liar would be in grave trouble if they were found out, and where the target would feel properly aggrieved if they knew.