If
there is one figure of the Twentieth century who connects nearly all the major
modern writers, dancers, artists, and musicians it would have to be Nancy
Cunard. The great-granddaughter of the founder of the transatlantic steamship
line Samuel Cunard, Nancy was the daughter of Bache Cunard and Maud Burke, a
woman from a California family even wealthier than the Cunards. As in many a
Henry James novel, Maud's marriage with Cunard was an arrangement between old
wealth and newer, more accessible money. In exchange for a dowry of two
million, Maud became a “Lady,” and, presumably, the inheritor of Bache’s
13,000-acre estate, Nevill Holt. But unlike many a James character, young
American women tricked by members of the corrupt old world, Maud was no
innocent. It is likely that Nancy’s real father was not Bache, but the noted
novelist and critic (author of Esther
Waters), George Moore, whom Maud had met some two years earlier. For over
forty years, Moore would be Maud’s frequent lover, and she his willing muse.
And throughout most of her years with Bache and after their separation, Maud
courted—and was courted by—the great British orchestra conductor (founder of
the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra) Thomas
Beecham.
Maud, moreover, was intensely social,
compared with her husband’s preference for the fox and hound, and turned Nevill
Holt into a veritable social resort, regularly inviting to Leichestershire numerous
social, literary, and artistic figures of the day—biographer Lois Gordon lists
a few of them: Somerset Maugham, Max Beerbohm, the Dutchess of Rutland, the
Asquiths, the Balfours, Lady Randolph Churchill (then Jennie Cornwallis-West),
Ford Madox Ford, Fyodor Chaliapin, even Lenin—for weekends and longer periods.
In one of the most hilariously telling episodes of Maude’s social and sexual
appetites, Gordon describes Bache returning home one evening “to find the house
full of music lovers gone berserk.”
One of them had opened his
bedroom window to sing
the cry of the Valkyries, after which voice
after voice
responded with anotherWagnerian melody. Maud said of
this occasion to the photographer Cecil Beaton, “When
my husband
came back, he noticed an atmosphere
of love.” Bache had remarked: “I don’t
understand
what is going on in this house, but I don’t like
it.
Like many wealthy British mothers and
fathers, Maud—far too self-involved for parenting—kept her daughter at a
distance, often putting her under the care of punitive nannies. Throughout her
engaging biography Gordon expresses Nancy’s later inability to develop a
lasting relationship and her desperate need for love as the result of this
distant, even frigid relationship between mother and daughter (the biographer
is perhaps at her weakest when she attempts psychological analyses of her
subject). Yet as Gordon herself notes, Maud had grown up in just such a
household, and one has only to read a handful of British (and American) biographies
of wealthy families to know that many, if not most of such children were
treated similarly.
Nancy, born on March 10, 1896, grew up to
be a stunning beauty with piercingly blue eyes and a graceful, almost musical
way of walking, was one of the most popular young women of her day both in
pre-World War I England and, even more so, in postwar Paris. As her black
American lover, Henry Crowder, would later describe her sexual appetite, she
slept with everyone and anyone, from noted writers, musicians, and artists of
the day to bellhops, chauffeurs, bartenders, nearly anyone with whom she might
come in contact. Gordon even suggests that Nancy might have undergone a
hysterectomy connected with an abortion or to prevent herself from becoming
pregnant.
It was not simply the fact that Cunard
was an available beauty of the day, however, that makes her such a remarkable
figure. Were she more like most of her set, she might have simply developed a
hobby, as the British press predicted, such as raising dogs. Because of her
keen intellect, her complete knowledge of several languages, her wit, and her
own significant contributions of poetry—as well as her beauty—the men who
dogged her, were some of the most notable figures of the period. Beyond the
one- or two-night stands with writers and artists such as T. S. Eliot and,
perhaps, Ernest Hemingway, she had long-term affairs with Wyndham Lewis, Ezra
Pound, Michael Arlen, Louis Aragon, and Tristan Tzara among
others—relationships that would last for years and make her into a muse for
much of their writing. Among her friends were James Joyce, Man Ray, Robert
McAlmon, John Dos Passos, Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, Malcolm Cowley, Norman
Douglas, Samuel Beckett, William Carlos Williams, George Antheil, and such
women as Gertrude Stein,
Kay Boyle,
Mina Loy, H. D., Bryher, Dolly Wilde (niece
of Oscar), Romaine Brooks, Josephine Baker, Djuna Barnes, Marie Laurencin,
Greta Garbo and her lover Mercedes De Acosta, and the journalist Janet
Flanner—and these represent only a few of the hundreds of friendships she
developed over the years. Nancy was the model for characters in numerous novels
and other writings of the century, including several books by Aldous Huxley and
Michael Arlen, and works by Evelyn Waugh, Tristan Tzara, George Moore, Wyndham
Lewis [see my essay on
The Roaring Queen],
Kay Boyle, Pablo Neruda, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Bob Brown, and more. Some
believe that she, more than Duff Twysden, was the basis of Hemingway’s Lady
Brett in
The Sun Also Rises.
Yet as Gordon reveals, all of this pales
in relationship to Nancy’s real coming of age in the late 1920s, lasting
through the rest of her eventful life. First, Nancy found a passion in
publishing, purchasing a printing press and moving to La Chapelle-Réanville in
Normandy in 1928. Clearly, Cunard was a natural when it came to the laborious
activity of printing and binding, her Hours Press producing twenty books from
1928 to 1931, including Beckett’s Whoroscope,
Pound’s XXX Cantos, and Havelock
Ellis’s The Revaluation of Obscenity,
along with works by Robert Graves, Louis Aragon, Richard Aldington, George
Moore, John Rodker, Laura Riding, Bob Brown, and Arthur Symons.
But it was her next “passion” that would
captivate the world’s attention, ending in her expulsion from high society and
the denial of any further financial support, including her inheritance, from
her mother. In 1928, after a two-year affair with Aragon, Nancy met the African-American
jazz musician, Henry Crowder, then working in Paris. A relationship with him
brought her an increasing awareness of white prejudice, which, coupled with her
long-time fascination with and, perhaps, romanticizing of all things African,
led her to edit and publish one of the most important documents of black
history outside of the activities of the Harlem Renaissance, Negro: An Anthology. Gordon’s long and
detailed description of this book is one of the most fascinating in a study
filled with revelations:
Negro is a staggering accomplishment—in purpose,
breadth of
information, and size. Almost 8 pounds,
855
pages (12 inches by 10 ½ inches), with 200 entries
by 150 contributors (the
majority, black) and nearly
400 illustrations, it was, and in many ways remains,
unique—an encyclopedic introduction to the history,
social and political
conditions, and cultural
achievements of the black population throughout much
of the world: the United States, Europe, South and
Central America, the
West Indies, and Africa. It is one
of the earliest examples of African
American, cross-
cultural, and transnational studies and a call to all
civilized people to condemn racial discrimination and
appreciate the great social
and cultural accomplishments
of a long suffering people.
Cunard’s
involvement with Crowder led her to write a polemic, Black Man and White Ladyship, that scandalized most of British and
American society, and resulted in her life-long commitment to black political
issues, including the attempt to free the Scottsboro Boys and to protect Haile
Selassie and Ethiopia from Italian fascist takeover. Beyond the rejection of
her own family and the end of long relationships with figures such as George
Moore, Nancy suffered anonymous threats and hate mail, some so obscene, she
declared, that “this portion of American culture cannot be made public.”
Had Nancy done nothing else in her life,
she would have been a significant figure of the century. Yet her political
stands against fascism, and, in particular, her struggles to support the
Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and, most importantly, to save the
defeated soldiers and intellectuals interned in French camps, is heroic. One of
the few individuals willing to walk long distances to cross the borders of
Spain and France, Cunard wrote dozens of articles, many about the horrific conditions
of the French camps, arguing that the world must come to the rescue of these
men. When no salvation appeared, she personally saved several individuals. The
Spanish cause was a passion as strong as her determination to fight prejudice,
and it became a battle that would last until the end of her life.
During World War II, Nancy returned to
London, witnessing the terrible bombings of the blitz first hand, while working
as a journalist and reporter for various government agencies, one of her tasks
being to translate Pound’s fascist rants, for which she never forgave him. Upon
her return to France after the War, she was distressed to find that her house,
revered paintings, and African bracelets, as well as her archives and
correspondence had been destroyed, many of the possessions stolen by her
Vichy-collaborating neighbors.
Gordon suggests that that event, her
continued financial woes, her shock at the silence of the Allied countries with
regard to Spain, and her deteriorating health led, ultimately, to a brief
mental breakdown and incarceration in an institution, her friends arguing that
Nancy was not mad as much as mad about life. Cunard’s life clearly had been one
lived at high pitch, and the passionate commitments to social and literary causes
had been met primarily with silence and scorn. Despite her continued
friendships with notables throughout the world and an embracement of younger
friends such as Philadelphian Charles Burkhart, Cunard’s body and mind
continued to decline during her last years.
In her final hours in a cheap Paris hotel—having
refused to accept refuge in the home friends, fearing that she would become an
imposition to them—she could barely climb the stairs to her room, and events
became almost surreal. Yet throughout her life she staunchly stood as a beacon
of joyful living, social commitment, and moral courage that one rarely finds
combined in a single individual.
[The material in this essay was
based on Lois Gordon Nancy Cunard:
Heiress, Muse, Political Idealist (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007)
and written as a review in 2007.
BOOKS OF POETRY
Outlaws (London:
Elkin Mathews, 1921); Sublunary (London:
Hodder and Stoughton, 1923); Parallax (London:
Hogarth Press, 1925); Poems (Two) (London:
Aquila Press, 1925); Poems (London:
Aquila Press, 1930); Poems for France (1944);
Relève into Maquis (Derby, England:
The Grasshopper Press, 1944); Poems of
Nancy Cunard: From the Bodleian Library (ed. by John Lucas) (Nottingham:
Trent Editions, 2005)
from Parallax
* * * * *
Dry moss, grey stone, hill
ruins, grass in
ruins
Without water, and multitudinous
Tintinnabulations
in the poplar leaves;
A spendrift dust from desiccated
pools,
Spider in draughty husk, snail
on the
leaf—
Provence, the
solstice.
And the days after
By the showman's travelling
houses, the
land caravels
Under a
poplar; the
proud grapes and the burst grape-skins.
Arles in the
plain, Miramas
after sunset-time
In a ring of
lights,
And a pale sky with a sickle
moon.
Thin winds undress the
branch, it is October.
And in Les Baux, an old life
slips out, patriarch of
eleven
inhabitants:
"Fatigué" she said,
a terse beldam by the latch,
"Il est fatigué,
depuis douze ans toujours dans le même
coin."
In Aix what's remembered of
Cezanne?
A house to let (with
studio) in a garden.
Meanwhile "help yourself to these
ripe figs,
And if it doesn't suit, we,
Agence Sextus, will find
you another just as good."
The years are sown together
with thread of the same
story:
Beauty picked in a
field, shaped, recreated,
Sold and dispatched to distant
municipality&emdash;
But in the
master's town merely an old waiter, crossly:
"Of course I knew him, he
was a dull silent fellow,
Dead now."
And beauty walked alone
here,
Unpraised, unhindered,
Defiant, of single
mind,
And took no rest, and has no epitaph.
* * * * *
"—Then I
was
in a train in pale clear country
By Genoa at night where the old
palatial banks
Rise out of vanquished
swamps,
Redundant—
And in San Gimignano's
towers where Dante once ..
And
in the plains
with the
mountains' veil
Before me and the waterless rivers of
stones—
Siena-brown with
Christ's head on gold,
Pinturicchio's trees on the
hill
In the
nostalgic damps, when the
maremma's underworld
Creeps
through at evening.
Defunct Arezzo, Pisa the
forgotten—
And in
Florence, Banozzo
With
his
embroidered princely
cavalcades,
And Signorelli, the
austere passion.
Look: Christ hangs on a sombre mound,
Magdalen dramatic
Proclaims the
tortured god. The rest have gone
To a far hill. Very dark it is,
soon
it will thunder
From that last rim of amaranthine
sky.
Life broods at the
cross's foot,
Lizard and
campion, star-weeds like
Parnassus grass,
And plaited
strawberry leaves;
The
lizard inspects
a skull,
You can foretell the worm
between the
bones.
(I am
alone. Read from this letter
That I have left you and do not intend
to return.)
Then I was
walking in the
mountains,
And drunk in Cortona, furiously,
With the black
wine rough and sour from a Tuscan
hill,
Drunk and silent between the
dwarves and the cripples
And the military
in their
intricate capes
Signed with
the Italian
star.
Eleven shuddered in a
fly-blown clock—
Oh frustrations,
discrepancies,
I had you to myself then
....."
* * * * *
Zeppelins
I saw the people climbing up the street
Maddened with war and strength and thoughts to kill;
And after followed Death, who held with skill
His torn rags royally, and stamped his feet.
The fires flamed up and burnt the serried town,
Most where the sadder, poorer houses were;
Death followed with proud feet and smiling stare,
And the mad crowds ran madly up and down.
And many died and hid in unfounded places
In the black ruins of the frenzied night;
And death still followed in his surplice, white
And streaked in imitation of their faces.
But in the morning men began again
To mock Death following in bitter pain.
