Word: gaudier
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Literary Guild celebrates its fifth anniversary this month by publishing "Savage Messiah" by H. S. Ede, a biography of the young French sculptor, Henri Gaudier. The biography is one of the finest yet selected by the Guild and was an appropriate choice to round out their fifth year of existence...
Biographer Ede says it was a purely platonic relation, and most of Gaudier's letters in this book bear him out. After reading them you can believe it. Sophie was a neurotic, Henri a genius (super-neurotic). They had a hard time in other ways too. Sophie cooked whatever food there was on Monday, they ate it cold the rest of the week. They were both nearly always ill, largely from undernourishment. Their lodgings were always depressing, dirty. Sometimes Sophie put cotton in her ears, sat down facing the wall, shut her eyes and sang...
Whether or not he was selling anything Gaudier worked like a demon, sometimes made 150 drawings in an evening. Gradually he met some useful friends: Frank Harris, Paul Morand, Jacob Epstein, John Middleton Murry. But he quarreled bitterly with Murry because Katherine Mansfield did not like Sophie. Nobody liked Sophie. Gaudier himself quarreled with her constantly. Frequently he tried to get her to become his mistress but she always refused, though she was not pleased when he went to other women...
...Just as Gaudier's work was beginning to be known-and bought-the War came. He went to France to enlist, was arrested as a deserter and told he would get twelve years' imprisonment; so he escaped and went back to England. But he was determined to join the French army, and his second attempt was successful. Sophie's last letter to him was bitter, nagging, complaining; she demanded he come back and take her away. Then the news came that Gaudier was dead. Says Ede: "Many people will remember Miss Brzeska in the streets of London...
...Author. Harold Stanley Ede, of London's National Gallery, Millbank, long an admirer of Gaudier's work, has done what few modern biographers are willing to do: kept himself completely out of sight. Content with reprinting Gaudier's letters, with supplying a running comment that is sympathetic but perfectly impersonal, he has achieved a biography far above the common run, which the Literary Guild did well to nominate their March choice...