Autograph letters signed (4) : Dorset and London, to Edward Wagenknecht, 1925 Aug. 20, 1928 May 15, 1931 July 1 and Oct. 15.

Asking Wagenknecht to send reviews of American books, so that he may "promote at least some literary & `cultural' understanding between the two nations ... Americans often write as though we [the English] were uppish & condescending. It isn't true"; praising Wagenknecht's essay on Katherine Mansfield [his wife], which he feels "would have gone to her own heart. Nothing cut her so much to the quick as the general, insensitive notion that she was a cruel writer"; discussing his work editing Mansfield's letters; agreeing to contribute to The Unicorn; commenting on another Wagenknecht essay on Mansfield, offering a few corrections, and describing the extraordinary effect Mansfield's death had on him: "It happened like this. The shock of K.M.'s death was the decisive event in my life. It plunged me into veritable isolation.Whether we were near or apart, while she was alive, whether we were enduring agonies or moments of happiness, I was never isolated in this absolute sense. (This absolute isolation, I have come to the conclusion, is rare. I think K.M. knew it in 1922). It is from the change wrought in me by this experience of absolute isolation that all my subsequent work takes rise. You are therefore right in saying that I am still profoundly under the influence of K.M.; but wrong in the implication that I am under her personal influence. There was [in] between an impersonal phase, perhaps best expressed by saying that `her death was the cause of my losing my life to save it.' If she had not been what she was, her death could not have had this colossal effect upon me. In a very real sense--in essentially the same sense as, according to the true mystery of Christianity, Jesus died that men might live (i.e., that they might die in their personal selves, by contemplating his agony, and be reborn in their impersonal, eternal selves) K. M. died to save me. Not that my death came by contemplating her agony--though no doubt that struck deep into my unconscious being--but rather through the naked isolation following her loss." With a typed letter signed, dated 10 February 1932 to Murry from T. S. Eliot, signed "Tom," declining Wagenknecht's essay for The Criterion, with an autograph note at the bottom from Murray to Wagenknecht, saying he thinks Eliot was wrong to reject the article (this letter is also listed separately in the catalog).