‘As fastidious as though I wrote with acid’: Katherine Mansfield, J. D. Fergusson and the Rhythm Group in Paris

Abstract

This article focuses on the cultural and political ferment in Paris exemplified by the Ballets Russes, and on its impact on Katherine Mansfield's writing when she was a member of the Rhythm group. She was engaged with Rhythm's mantra adapted from J. M. Synge's preface to his poems, ‘Before art can be human again it must learn to be brutal’, clearly expressed in its Fauvist illustrations. Mansfield's exposure to the dynamic aesthetics of the second wave of Fauvist painters, centred on the Scottish Colourist J. D. Fergusson, and to the work of Rhythm's young essayists, poets and writers of fiction, is contextualised within this turbulent period. Fergusson's brilliance as the art editor of Rhythm depended to some extent on his own interest in anti-colonial cultural nationalism, and on his opposition to rules, boundaries and conventional academic practices. Rhythm's editorial policy, expressed in the first issue, makes this explicit. Mansfield's stories first published in Rhythm will be discussed in relation ...