Mansfield and Gaudier: the clash of genius

In June 1912 the frail, attractive New Zealand short-story writer Katherine Mansfield and her partner, the English critic John Middleton Murry, met the emotional French artist Henri Gaudier.  He had sent some impressive drawings to Rhythm, the little magazine they were editing, and they asked him to contribute more art.  An exceptionally gifted sculptor, Gaudier had a slender build, an ascetic-looking face, thin lips and nose, and long dark hair.  He spoke English with a heavy accent and had a great deal of nervous energy.  Emotional and impulsive, he demanded an intense and absolute friendship, and seemed to be an unmistakable genius.  Like the unmarried Mansfield and Murry, Gaudier was an impoverished artist living with a lover, and had joined the name of his 19-years-older Polish companion, Sophie Brzeska, to his own.

The Gaudier-Brzeskas were real bohemians, while the Murrys were middle-class rebels who hated poverty and still believed in marriage, family and home.  Gaudier felt they were destined to become intimate, and when they parted after their first meeting the ebullient Frenchman shocked Murry by hugging and kissing him, which made Mansfield wrongly suspect he might be homosexual.  At the beginning of their careers, these young close contemporaries craved an alliance with congenial spirits, but their promising relations lasted for only three volatile months and ended tragically.  Mansfield and Gaudier were marked for an early death.

At first, Mansfield saw fictional potential in Sophie and told her, “You fascinate me, I can’t make you out, you interest me tremendously.”  But the reserved Anglo-Saxon was soon repelled by the Slavic intensity of Sophie’s personal revelations, her litany of woes and tales of harsh treatment by her family, employers and lovers, including lesbians.  Mansfield  felt more pity than affection, disliked her gauche gestures of friendship, pulled away from Sophie’s physical contact, and feared she would be strangled and sucked dry by Sophie’s tentacles.

Imposing on their hospitality, Gaudier had brashly suggested that they all share, though he could not pay for, the Murrys’ cottage in Runcton near Chichester (80 miles southwest of London).  Mansfield had sentimentally and possessively called the cottage “our wedding house.”  Emphasizing their therapeutic benefits, Gaudier insisted, “Sophie will live there—it will do her good: and I shall be able to come every week-end.”  In his autobiography Between Two Worlds, Murry recalled that Mansfield was appalled by the threat of their parasitic invasion: “It’s our house,” she moaned, “Our first house.  I can’t bear the idea of anybody else living there.  They could come at the week-ends and be welcome; but all day and every day—no, it’s too much.”

In late August, Sophie pressed on with their plans and sent Gaudier on a surprise visit to see if the cottage was finished and her room was ready.  Short of money, he walked the last 25 miles from the railroad station.  He arrived unannounced at the cottage with great plans and expectations, and overheard Mansfield dreading Sophie’s visit and insulting his beloved:

Murry: I think she should come down here now, there is plenty of room.  Just let us speak to Gaudier about it.

Mansfield: Oh, no. I don’t want to see her here—she’s too violent [in her emotions]—I won’t have her.

Murry: But, Tiger, look here, she’s not like that—I don’t see why—

Mansfield. (violently): Leave me alone, I don’t like her and I don’t want to see her—she’ll make me ill again.

In his autobiography Murry desperately tried to explain and excuse Mansfield’s self-protective but unfortunate outburst: “She had said nothing cruel, and nothing untrue: merely that she was quite sad that the good time of our being together alone was coming to an end, and that now, with Sophie’s coming, everything was going to be spoiled: that she did not, could not really like Sophie.  She couldn’t make herself like a person. With Sophie, she never had an impulse to go out towards her, but only to shrink back.  She felt that Sophie wanted to drag her into a morass.”

Like an ill-fated character in a Thomas Hardy novel, the hypersensitive Gaudier was deeply wounded by accidentally hearing this conversation through an open window. He left unseen, and sent a dejected postcard to Sophie using the Murrys’ nicknames, cursing “les sales tigres” (the dirty tigers) and swearing never to meet them again.  He sent Murry a furious frenchified letter that exposed his raw wounds, defended Sophie and condemned the “fiendish” Mansfield: “Your acquaintance has been for me one long suffering—not only for me but also for the object of my love, which is twice worse.  I met you at a dangerous turning, the brains burned by the recent summer, thirsty for good friendship, only with one drawback: poverty.  Being then freshly strong, promising all kinds of things and favours, you behaved stupidly, thinking I was lashed to you, and that I would not mind any dirt.  I was confirmed into my thought of the wickedness of Katherine Mansfield by a conversation I overheard when at Runcton.  K.M., with a fiendish jealousy, upheld to the end that Zosik [Sophie] was too violent.”  He had a limited and unhappy sexual life with Sophie, which ranged from celibacy with her to relief with prostitutes.  As Gaudier’s biographer writes, he felt sorry for the passive and besotted Murry, “who seemed to be entirely in the hands of Katherine Mansfield, who made love to him all the time, until he was squeezed dry.”  Mansfield similarly felt she’d be “sucked dry” by Sophie.

Gaudier then became a persistent and malignant enemy, mistakenly believing that Mansfield and Murry were making an enormous profit out of Rhythm by exploiting contributors and getting their writing and drawings for nothing.  In fact, they supported the magazine with their own money, to the tune of 200.  Another Hardyesque misunderstanding occurred when Gaudier ordered Murry to return a French book he had borrowed.  After moving their household several times, Murry couldn’t find it and sent Gaudier a note with a postal order to pay for the book.  But in his haste he forgot to include the payment.  Before Murry could resend it, Gaudier unleashed another abusive letter about this cruel deceit, stating that “though I was vile beyond imagination, Katherine was yet worse; and he was sure it was she who had put me up to this trick.”

As French hysteria clashed with English reserve, the deranged Gaudier now sought revenge and actually threatened to kill the timid Murry.  In May 1913, when Murry was working in the Rhythm office on Chancery Lane, Gaudier  and his friend suddenly rushed into the room:

“Now, we’ve got you,” said Gaudier.

“So it seems.  What do you want?”

“All sorts of things.  We’ve come to pay you out.”

“Very well.  Fire away.”

“I should like,” said Gaudier, squeezing his fingers together round an imaginary throat, “to throttle you.  But you’re not worth murdering.  But you’re going to pay me for the drawings of mine you published.”

Terrified at what Gaudier might do to him but pretending to be calm, Murry again denied that he had promised to pay for the art and reminded Gaudier that he had been very keen to get it published.  Gaudier then tore two drawings from the wall and—as if provoking a duel—slapped the face of Murry.  He tried to ignore the insult and act as though nothing had happened.  Gaudier exclaimed, “That’s enough—for to-night.  But we’ve only begun,” and rushed away.  After his narrow escape, Murry immediately wrote to Mansfield in Runcton: “Gaudier has just been.  Of course I am not worth a twopenny damn now.  I’ve been crying out of sheer nervous reaction.  The old lies shrieked at me & some Gaudier lies & venom.  [Someone should] crush that woman when he sees her—or I shall kill her.  I love you—but suddenly the beast has fouled everything.”

At the height of their excruciating friendship Gaudier had made a portrait head of Murry, which Murry described as a “massive, heroic, hieratic, the head of a sort of brooding demiurge,” a creator.  In a ritualistic execution, Gaudier and Sophie, expressing her hysterical hatred of Mansfield, threw bricks at the clay statue, destroyed it and excised Murry from their life.  Gaudier was killed in France during the Great War in June 1915 at the age of 23.  Mansfield died in France of tuberculosis in 1923, aged 34.  Sophie was confined to an English insane asylum in 1922 and died there three years later.

Jeffrey Meyers published Katherine Mansfield: A Biography (1978, reprinted 2002) and wrote about Gaudier in The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis (1980).

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