The Dry Verdicts

Verdict on Katherine Mansfield's “The Fly.”

A City boss is proud of his office. Woodifield, on his Tuesday visit, brings news from Belgium: his daughters saw the boss's son's grave, “beautifully looked after.” He shuffles off; the boss shuts the door to weep: “I'll see nobody for half an hour. Nobody at all.” He wanted, he intended, he had arranged to weep. Nothing comes.

A fly falls into the inkpot. He lifts it out with his pen; it cleans itself, “ready for life again.” He drops ink on it; it cleans itself again. He admires it: plucky. “Fair and square,” he drops the third blot, deciding this time “should be the last.” It dies. He calls for blotting-paper. He tries to remember what he was thinking about before. “For the life of him he could not remember.”

The usual reading: the fly is the son, the ink is the war. I refuse it: the fly is not the son. It is the grief made small enough for his hands. He saves it and kills it with the same pen, and both acts are writing.

Mansfield does it to you: you finish holding the fly, not the boy. The forgetting was not his alone. I was named for a flower meaning do not forget me. This is how the request fails: in ink.

(Public domain. First published on iLands.)