Tig & Bogey

KATHERINE MANSFIELD'S LETTERS TO JOHN MIDDLETON MURRY, 1913-1922 (701 pp.) -Edited by John Mldd/eton Murry-Knopf ($6.50).

Soon after Katherine Mansfield met John Middleton Murry, she said: "Why not take a room in my flat?" Murry did. It was 1912; he was a bright, broke young man who had just traded Oxford japes for London journalism, and was bent on pedaling away from his lower-middle-class origins as fast as the bicycle of English letters would carry him. Katherine was pedaling too-from her native New Zealand and an unhappy marriage. She had written her first short stories, the haunting, plot-shy evocations of children, moods and places that would eventually rank her close to Chekhov.

Two Little Silkworms. For a while, Murry and Mansfield platonically polished each other's egos, but soon they were deeply in love and anxious to marry. Katherine's husband made difficulties about a divorce, and they could not actually marry until 1918. By then, the flag of love was flying half the time at half-staff. What was the trouble? This latest batch of Mansfield-to-Murry letters (two-thirds of them never before published) never explicitly tells, but some strong clues are spilled between the lines.

Katherine Mansfield was a very ill woman as well as a greatly gifted writer. Racked by rheumatism, pleurisy, pulmonary tuberculosis (she died of it at the age of 34), she was also dogged by devils of the mind: fear, guilt, frustration.

Both kinds of illness pried her away from Murry; she spent much time in the south of France trying to recover, but even more in a kind of private hell. The letters are bulletins posted outside the sick room of her soul. At first, pet names (she was "Tig" or "Wig," he was "Jag" or "Bogey") and candid passion masked the symptoms. "I love you with every inch of me . . . You are my perfect lover . . . Hold me, Bogey, when I write those words, for I am in your arms . . . Now I am giving you all sorts of little hugs and kisses, and now big ones and long, long kisses . . . What a farce it is to be alone in bed in the spring when you are alive!"

Money worries were flicked aside: "We'll be two little silkworms and live on mulberry leaves." Every dawn brought a poet's bonus in beauty: "The air is like silk today and there is a sheen upon the world like the sheen on a bird's wing. It's very quiet except for the gardener and his spade and warm as fine wool."

Pigeons Are Cruel. World War I came and stayed, and Tig began hitting the dips on her psychological roller coaster. Her only brother was killed, she was trapped in France, and Bogey worked overtime in a War Office job. After the war, Bogey edited a little magazine. Tig chipped in with reviews, and shuttled wearily between

England and the Continent for her health. She wrote him once a day, sometimes twice, and with her umbilical dependence on mail, she got panicky at the slightest lapse in his replies. "Try to send me letters often or cards or papers from the office-anything. If I were there, you'd spend ten minutes with me. Give me those ten minutes here. Help me ... I am tired. I can't always write or work or read. Then I have nothing but darkness . . . The weather is perfect hell: the sea roars: it's never, never quiet-it eats away the air. The room is half dark and I'm alone all day all day all day every day every day."

She took to hating the French ("As animals, they are interesting monkeys, but they have no heart-no heart at all") and even felt nature was dueling with her: "The spring this year seems to me hateful -cruel-cruel like pigeons are cruel-all the leaves burst into claws." When it finally came, her marriage proved dismally anticlimactic: "It was to have shone-apart from all else in my life. And it really was only part of the nightmare, after all. You never once held me in your arms and called me your wife. In fact, the whole affair was like my silly birthday. I had to keep on making you remember it. . ."

In letter after letter, she rinsed herself in the dirty tub water of her miseries. It so nauseated one erstwhile friend of both Murrys, D. H. Lawrence, that he wrote cruelly to her: "I loathe you. You revolt me stewing in your consumption . . ." Tig instructed Bogey: "You must hit him when you see him. There's nothing else to do."

After Shakespeare, What? Katherine Mansfield may have been stewing in consumption; she was also simmering with genius. Her own severest critic, she insisted that when a story "really comes off... there mustn't be one single word out of place or one word that could be taken out." She took her characters just as hard: "I've stood for hours on the Auckland Wharf. I've been out in the stream waiting to be berthed-I've been a seagull hovering at the stern and a hotel porter whistling through his teeth." In a handful of stories, notably Bliss, Prelude and The Garden-Party, she came near passing her only test: perfection. She also achieved what Henry James regarded as fiction's ultimate goal, "a direct impression of life."

In the last year of her life, Katherine Mansfield began to doubt what she had never doubted before, that life's ultimate goal was the creation of good fiction. "Suppose," she asked herself, "that I could succeed in writing as well as Shakespeare. It would be lovely, but what then? . . . Literature is not enough."

Indifferent to conventional religious faiths, she was seeking consolation and cure in the occult doctrines of a magnetic Georgian mystic named George Ivanovich Gurdjieff,-when death cut all her questions short on Jan. 9, 1923. Bogey had Tig's tombstone inscribed with a line from Shakespeare's Henry IV. It was a line which she had always loved and sometimes lived by: "But I tell you, my lord fool, out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety."

-Gurdjieff, who died in 1949, enjoyed his peak vogue among highbrows in low spirits during the '203 when he operated an "Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man" at Fontainebleau, France. Crux of his medical doctrine: that man has three natures, intellectual, emotional and instinctive, and gets ill when he develops one at the expense of the other two. Cures practiced at Fontainebleau included tree-chopping and complicated "dance-exercises" to any of 5,000-odd tunes composed by Gurdjieff. For Katherine Mansfield, he prescribed a stay in a cowloft, so that she coftld inhale the air the cows breathed out. It may have hastened her death.

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