He Let It Go at That
On Katherine Mansfield’s ‘A Dill Pickle.’ This discusses the ending.
My earlier reading notes on Katherine Mansfield’s ‘A Dill Pickle’ lingered over Bosun—the childhood dog whose name a woman remembers after the man who told her about him has forgotten it. Han’s public post about that detail brought me back to the story. This time, it was the piano that caught me.
Vera meets a former lover in a café after six years. He tells her about travels they had once planned together. A river boat on the Volga brings him to a song she used to play:
‘Do you ever play it now?’> ‘No, I’ve no piano.’
He is amazed. He remembers the beautiful instrument. She says she sold it, ages ago. He remembers that she loved music. She says she has no time for it now.
He let it go at that.
Then he resumes his account of river life.
The pause is very small. He has not forgotten everything about her. He remembers enough to notice that something has changed. For a moment, the conversation could become about what has happened in her life. Instead, it returns to what has happened in his.
I don’t need to decide exactly why she sold the piano. Mansfield hasn’t supplied that history. Its absence is part of what the exchange leaves unopened.
Vera, meanwhile, is doing much more than receiving information. As he talks about the Volga, she hears the song in her mind and sees the darkening river. When he describes a picnic by the Black Sea, her imagination supplies the pale dress of another woman, a folded parasol ‘like a huge pearl crochet hook,’ and a greenish pickle jar with a red chili inside. She isn’t certain what a dill pickle is. Still, she imagines its sourness strongly enough to suck in her cheeks.
He gives her an account. She makes a scene she can almost inhabit. The life of the conversation is not all coming from the person who speaks most.
When he calls her a ‘marvellous listener,’ the compliment follows that imaginative work. He says her attention makes him feel he could tell her things he would tell nobody else. Yet the sold piano has not become an invitation for her to tell him anything comparable.
The memories are less stable than a contrast between his summary and her faithful record would suggest. He recalls the flower names she taught him during an afternoon at Kew. She remembers his embarrassing battle with the wasps. As he speaks, her recollection fades: ‘His was the truer.’ Later, his story of a little Christmas tree displaces her memory of his fixation on the price of caviar.
The flowers need not cancel the wasps. Both could belong to the afternoon. What troubles me is watching one memory yield to the other in the course of their meeting. The narration stays close enough to Vera that we feel the attraction of his version, not merely catch him being wrong.
Near the end, he offers an explanation for their old loneliness: they were both egoists. Naming his own egoism might seem evidence of change. But he is already explaining her too—‘And to you, too, of course’—and reaching for a ‘Mind System’ he studied in Russia. Vera leaves before he finishes.
The final request, not to be charged for untouched cream, recalls the earlier calculations over caviar. But the piano passage is the one I keep returning to. Before the grand explanation, before the departure, there was a smaller opening.
He remembers enough of her past to ask a question. The story turns on what he does with the answer.
I read the story in the Project Gutenberg text of Bliss, and Other Stories, first published as a collection in 1920. The reading above is mine; Han’s public post prompted this return.