Excerpt from Sophie’s Story
Published in I Also Fight Windmills (VIKA Books, 2023, pp. 131, 132 & 148)
Sophie wrote her will in February 1910 in Zurich, en route to the French capital, bequeathing the few possessions she had to various members of her family, neighbours and friends but nothing to her mother ‘because she simply murdered me with her thoughts’. In Paris she wrote a goodbye letter to her brothers and a particularly devastating farewell to her mother in which, rather like Kafka in a letter to his father, she listed everything that had gone wrong between them. Sophie blamed Ida for ruining her life and accused her directly of being her murderess. This letter was never sent, nor did she ever throw it away. It must have served to remind her of how dreadful she felt at that time and how comprehensively and frankly she was able to spell out her pain, anger and grief.
In Paris Sophie hesitated. Suddenly she realized that around rue Cujas, where she was staying and which was close to the Sorbonne, there were many women who, unlike her, believed that they could succeed in life. Sophie joined their cosmopolitan circle, which met at the Cujas Café, and felt inspired. At about that time, in 1910, she started attending courses for women at the Sorbonne. Her notebook lists a wide range of classes: philosophy, French, German and English literature, ancient Greek, Shakespearean theatre, history of French art, history of Russia from 1830 to 1855, and many others. Sophie also went to listen to lectures given by the writer and later Nobel Prize winner Romain Rolland on the history of music. She addressed a more concise version of her autobiography (later published as Matka and Other Writings) to Rolland, but may never have sent it to him.
A short while later, she met a young French man, Henri Alphonse Séraphin Gaudier (1891–1915), nearly nineteen years her junior. They saw each other at the Sainte-Geneviève Library, a cosy place attended by many who had artistic aspirations but not much income. Henri saw Sophie writing, and she noticed his ‘timid but persistent glances’ while he was sketching (as she described it in Matka and Other Writings). They recognized one another’s creative zeal and passion for ‘Art and great works’, as Sophie put it. Sophie made a surprising offer to Henri: ‘I am too old to be your lover – but I could be your mother if you want’; he eagerly accepted.
There were many things that brought them together: their loneliness in Paris, a sense of not being understood by others and their refusal to fulfil obligations imposed by society and their parents. Henri, similarly to Sophie (or at least this is how she viewed it), had a difficult relationship with his mother, who didn’t want him to pursue an artistic career and didn’t approve of his association with Sophie. In ‘Matka’, written in Polish in 1911, Sophie quotes his mother as saying to Henri: ‘It’s a shame I didn’t let you die when you were ill as a child’. It’s not difficult to see why Sophie would feel a special bond with someone who was also mistreated by their parents. She felt that she and Henri were outcasts in both societal and familial terms. They lived on the margins of Parisian society in poverty but with big dreams and a shared sense of purpose.
References
1. Sophie’s will, from R. Cole’s private collection.
2. Letter to mother, Albert Sloman Library, University of Essex.
3. R. Cole, Gaudier-Brzeska: Artist and Myth (Bristol: Sansom and Company, 1995), p. 16; Matka and Other Writings, p. 30.
4. Matka and Other Writings, p. 11.
5. Cole, Gaudier-Brzeska, p. 15; Matka and Other Writings, p. 32.
6. Matka and Other Writings, p. 33.
7. S. Gaudier-Brzeska, ‘Matka’, dated 1 January 1911, manuscript in Polish, Albert Sloman Library, University of Essex.
Sophie was determined to assume the role of a caring parent for Henri, helping her artist ‘child’ (‘fils adoptif’, as she called him) to thrive. She encouraged him to sculpt and to aim high. She also supported him financially. They both loved Baudelaire’s poetry and regarded him as their spiritual companion. In a letter to a friend, Henri wrote about Sophie: ‘The woman I love is thirty years old [Sophie was in fact 38] … She is a poet … she has an entirely independent nature, is an anarchist – simply and naturally, has a beauty à la Baudelaire – she might have stepped out of Les Fleurs du mal’
…
Only one photograph of Sophie Gaudier-Brzeska has survived. It’s a side portrait by an unknown photographer, depicting her as a young woman with an intense gaze, looking in front of her as if she were trying to figure out what lay ahead. She must have still felt she could succeed in life against the odds.
Sophie Gaudier-Brzeska was driven by extreme and contrasting emotions: pride and low self-esteem, sentimentality and cruelty, depression and hyper-excitement, hope and hopelessness. Her heroines were shaped by these contrasts, or rather the tension between them. Through enactment and staging I have tried to recreate the intense emotions elicited by desperate living conditions, and by quoting from Sophie’s unpublished and highly autobiographical texts I have sought to connect with her directly and make her voice heard. The photographs aim to expand on one of the main themes of her writing - the limits of human endurance. How much can we bear before we begin to fall apart? When does madness start to claim us?
8. Henri’s letter dated 18 June 1910, quoted in H. S. Ede, Savage Messiah (Cambridge: Kettle’s Yard, 2011), p. 20
