[In the following essay, a response to F. W. Bateson's and B. Shahevitch's 1961 essay on “The Fly,” Copland complains that those critics miss the basic point the story, which he says is “less about a man's personality than about a man's crisis.”]

It was disappointing to discover that Mr. Bateson and Mr. Shahevitch had applied but not really employed their valuable techniques in criticising Katherine Mansfield's short story “The Fly” (Essays in Criticism, January 1962). It seems a pity that the authors' method should reveal so much of the artist's method while casting so little light upon her effects:

Early in the story we had quite liked the boss, then we discovered that we detested him and now we can merely despise him.

This is a lamentably naïve conclusion. But then throughout the exercise the implication is that the story's value derives from the surprise that has been sprung upon us. Surely Katherine Mansfield and all writers of comparable imaginative sympathy are concerned rather to surprise their characters. The authors of the exercise are content to accept the story as static—i.e. the story merely reveals ‘the essential boss as he really is all the time’ (p. 52). I would say at once that if this were so the value of the story would be greatly reduced—almost to a point indeed where their critical industry was unwarranted.

To become more precise I would point out that the authors are patient in their examination of Mansfield's ‘mixing of direct statement with indirect or concealed dialogue’. They do not examine the effect of this device which is to efface the narrator-reader relationship and to lure all awareness into direct sympathy with the characters. For this reason the ‘mixing’ is begun even before the point at which the authors first notice it: It was time to be off … the wife and the girls kept him boxed up … to cut back to the City. All these are slang expressions reported from the consciousness of Woodifield; and they have the intention and the effect of characterising him. (He is rather common—he speaks of ‘the wife’.) Again, nothing could be clearer than the fact that the following sentence is also ‘reported’: Though what he did there the wife and girls couldn't imagine. The words, inversion and all, are a faithful transcription of these women's talk, characterising them and sketching, with all the economy that the short story imposes, the relationships at Woodifield's home. (The ‘couldn't’ should have convinced the authors in their strange hesitation. Mansfield's ‘straightforward narrative prose’ uses ‘did not’ and ‘was not’ soon afterwards.) But the point I am at is that this ‘mixing’ is done to involve the reader with the characters as closely as possible so that when the crisis arrives, the management of which is Mansfield's supreme achievement, the reader will still be sympathetically involved. The authors of the exercise have noticed the device without being engaged by it. So they miss the crisis.

The boss is the sorry ‘hero’ of this story and his ‘grinding and frightening feeling of wretchedness' had set in long before the fly's death. Not to perceive that the idea of inking the fly in the first place was a direct, dictated result of this feeling is to suppose that Mansfield calmly broke the back of her own story. The fly-baiting is vastly more than a device of character-exposure. It is a triumphant device by which a psychological and emotional crisis is explained. The story is less about a man's personality than about a man's crisis. The deterioration from ‘plump’ and ‘rosy’ to ‘fat’ and ‘thick’ which the authors properly note is, like all but the barest structural forms of the story, reported out of the character and his plight. ‘He wasn't feeling as he wanted to feel.’

Mansfield shows a man sheltering behind certain complacencies, a man spoken of ironically as the boss simply because he is conscious of his emotional security. Under the assault of fate he has built himself a respectable refuge, like Dorrit in the Marshalsea. Like Dorrit he has arrived at a point where ‘he was proud of his room; he liked to have it admired’. In his security he is rather arrogant and patronising. His emotional self-esteem is maintained upon the conviction that his grief for the dead son is deep and perpetual. ‘Other men perhaps might recover, might live their loss down, not he.’ Our attitude towards him at this stage is one of disliking.

When old Woodifield blunders abruptly against this supposed emotional foundation the boss hastily and confidently prepares for a shock to the whole structure. Nothing happens, until bewilderment itself produces a shock more shattering. The boss's grief, he himself suspects in anguish, has succumbed, has refused to rally. Obsessed with this cruel possibility he tests, relieves and expresses his plight by re-enacting the cruelty upon the fly. He watches its behaviour. ‘What would it make of that?’ The boss in the fear and frustration of his own predicament has become a wanton boy. He watches the fly, and it confirms his loss, and dies. He has passed around by passing on his pain. He calls sternly for fresh blotting paper to conceal the scape-goat act; he resumes his air of security. But he is not the same man. We shall not find this man by skipping back over the peripeteia.

Mansfield's penultimate sentence is not meant to be ‘reassuringly particular’, a seemingly random mention of fact for purposes of ‘realistic fiction’. ‘He took out his handkerchief and passed it inside his collar.’ Indeed he did. He had just been obliged hastily to rebuild the whole edifice of his self-esteem. If ‘Katherine Mansfield leaves [a] question unanswered, almost unasked’, it has little to do with ‘moral nihilism’, but is all to do with how the boss will manage now with only the grief of the loss of grief.

As a good story it gives off a wide radiation of relevance which the critics have not failed to notice. But simply as a story its high value lies in its power not merely to surprise but to terrify, not merely to expose but to involve; and in its dynamic, tragic movement.