Mansfield, Rhythm and the émigré connection

Rhythm, established in 1911, was an avant-garde publication with a bias towards Symbolism, the arts and Post-Impressionism, the music of Debussy and Mahler and the philosophy of Bergson. The list of contributors, unknown at the time beyond the confines of the Left Bank in Paris, reads impressively today and included Derain, Picasso, Tristan Derème and Francis Carco. Co-editors John Middleton Murry and his future wife Katherine Mansfield, were well read in French literature; Murry in particular had spent time in Paris and made many acquaintances within its artistic community. There was also an émigré aspect to the contributors of both journals; Mansfield and Carco were both born and brought up in the South Pacific, and Eastern Europe was also strongly represented, with contributions by Floryan Sobienowski, who was also the magazine’s ‘Polish correspondent’. This essay highlights the extent of the émigré creative input into both magazines and also consider Murry’s and Mansfield’s own contributions, which frequently took French/émigré subjects as their theme. In addition, integrated as they were into the principal intellec¬tual and artistic currents of French life, both editors would assimi¬late this Gallic creativity and its view of life, literature and art. This influence would manifest itself on the pages of Rhythm and its short-lived reincarnation as the Blue Review. As a result, both little magazines could be described as having a transnational identity, with a plethora of international correspondents publicising the new movement of the avant-garde