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94 THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL
proved of Americans from 1914 through 1917, because they were
Neutrals. And there is no doubt that he disapproved of her manner
at table, as he disapproved of most Americans in this regard.
He wrote, in his New York Essays, of a man in Chicago, a considerable
patron of the arts, that "He eats like a pike snapping
semi-circular gobbets out of a corpse." 11
During his London period, another friend of Gaudier's was
Horace Brodzky, who says that for a time, Gaudier supported
himself by working as a foreign correspondence clerk in the city.
He occupied Railway Arch 25, beneath the electric trains that ran
to Putney. 12
Gaudier lived with an odd consort, whose name he had taken.
She was a Polish lady twice his age, whom he had met while
studying in Paris. She had come to that city to kill herself, and
while waiting for an opportune moment (for it is very formal
and exact ritual), she spent her time reading in the St. Genevieve
Library, where Gaudier also was studying. They adopted each
other, and went to London. Gaudier took her name, Brzeska, in
order to have a more aristocratic appellant, for he had come from
an humble French family. She ordinarily addressed him as "Pik"
or "Zosik", and he called her "Mamus" or "Mamuska". They
were an extraordinary pair, very poor, and, as Aldington has recorded,
they seldom washed.
In a letter to his mother in 1913, Pound pointed out that
Epstein had the same shortcoming. "Epstein is a great sculptor,"
he remarked. "I wish he would wash, but I believe Michael
Angelo never did, so I suppose it is part of the tradition." 13
Excited by the new work of Gaudier and Epstein, Pound wrote,
in the February 16, 1914, issue of The Egoist, on "The New
Sculpture":
"Humanism long had no chance in the occident, in life, I mean,
save for an occasional decade which has been followed by some
plot like the counter-reformation or Praise-God Barebones or the
most estimable S. Webbs & Co. Humanism has, I was about to
write, taken refuge in the arts. The introduction of djinns, tribal
gods, fetiches, etc. into the arts is therefore a happy presage. The
artist has been for so long a humanist! He has had sense enough
to know that humanity was unbearably stupid and that he must