A CUP OF TEA
By Amy Ephron
Morrow, 200 pages, $20
In Katherine Mansfield’s 1922 story, “A Cup of Tea,” a pampered society wife picks up a penniless girl outside a London flower shop and impulsively invites her home for tea. She settles the girl into a big chair in front of a leaping fire and vows to prove to her that fairy godmothers do exist, that all women really are sisters. But when her husband casually remarks on the girl’s “astonishing prettiness,” the society wife abruptly sends her away.This rueful, eight-page story, one of the last completed by Mansfield before she died of tuberculosis at 34, is a gem of minimalist fiction, capturing in a few bold strokes the uncertainty and emptiness of one woman’s life.It’s not hard to understand why Amy Ephron was attracted to the story. Unfortunately her novel–inspired by Mansfield’s work and identically titled–is flat and predictable. Ephron has used Mansfield’s story as a scaffold on which to build a novel, moving the action to New York during World War I, adding characters, changing details and conjuring a plot that expands Mansfield’s story. In Ephron’s version, the society woman, Rosemary Fell, is engaged, not married. When her fiance, Philip, exchanges “a look” with the penniless girl, Eleanor, Rosemary gives her some money and shows her the door, thinking that she and Philip will never see her again.
But the couple’s sporty lesbian friend, Jane Howard (a silly imitation of Jordan Baker in “The Great Gatsby”) finds Eleanor a job in her lover’s hat shop. There Philip seeks Eleanor out, and they fall into a torrid affair. Nevertheless, Philip goes through with his planned wedding to Rosemary. A few weeks later, America enters World War I and he’s sent overseas to fight. While he’s gone, Rosemary pines, and Eleanor gives birth to a girl.
The charm of Mansfield’s story lies in its fresh images and nuanced dialogue. In contrast, Ephron’s work is marred by cardboard characters and dime store prose. It comes to life only when it parrots the expatriate New Zealand writer.Here’s Ephron describing an enamel box coveted by Rosemary in an antique shop:”(The antique dealer) unrolled a tiny square of blue velvet and pressed it on the glass counter with his pale finger-tips. It was an enamel box he had been keeping for her with a glaze so fine it looked as though it had been baked in cream. `I saved this for you.’ On its lid, a minute creature stood under a flowery tree. A hat, no bigger than a geranium petal, with green ribbons, hung from a branch. And a pink cloud like a watchful cherub floated about the creature’s head.”Here’s Man(tilde) 3/4sfield:”And breathing deeply, he unrolled a tiny square of blue velvet and pressed it on the glass counter with his pale finger-tips. Today it was a little box. He had been keeping it for her. He had shown it to nobody as yet. An exquisite little enamel box with a glaze so fine it looked as though it had been baked in cream. On the lid a minute creature stood under a flowering tree, and a more minute creature still had her arms around his neck. Her hat, really no bigger than a geranium petal, hung from a branch; it had green ribbons. And there was a pink cloud like a watchful cherub floating above their heads.”Mansfield’s art was a triumphant adjustment to a tortured life (her letters and diaries are a tragic record of illness, loneliness, sexual ambiguity and yearning for motherhood, which she never achieved). Like all her best work, “A Cup of Tea” is infused with a sense of the fragility and fear behind life’s complacent surface.
At the dawn of modernism in the early 1900s, her talent for sketching character and delineating emotion in a few swift images earned her the admiration of D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy and Virginia Woolf. Her collection containing “A Cup of Tea” has never gone out of print, and the story is as compelling today as it was 75 years ago. Amy Ephron should have left it alone.
