Lois Gordon
NANCY CUNARD
Heiress, muse, political idealist
447pp. Columbia University Press. £21 (US $32.50).
978 0 231 13938 0
Nancy Cunard was a phenomenon. The beautiful heiress of the Cunard shipping line, she cut a swathe through the intellectual and bohemian circles of London and Paris in the first half of the twentieth century, eventually finding her métier as a journalist, political activist and champion of the oppressed. Yet here was a complex character, full of contradictions, and her turbulent private life veered from a somewhat desperate gaiety to black despair. At the same time, as this exhaustive biography reveals, she possessed great strength, hidden resources and depth of feeling.
As the great-granddaughter of Samuel Cunard, founder of the transatlantic shipping line, Nancy was born into Edwardian wealth and privilege on the family’s estate at Nevill Holt in Leicestershire. She was the only (supposed) child of Sir Bache and the flamboyant Maud, later “Emerald” Cunard, who counted motherhood “a low thing – the lowest”, and an unwelcome distraction from her pursuit of cultural and social advancement. Nancy’s true father may in fact have been Maud’s lover, the Irish writer George Moore, or “G. M.”, whom Nancy took as her “first friend” in childhood and whose political idealism may later have inspired her passionate social conscience. Raised by governesses in a lonely nursery against the rackety background of her mother’s frenetic entertaining and open infidelities, Nancy was an unhappy child, and Maud’s socialite values bred in her the seeds of a lifetime of rebellion.
Nancy, too, became aware early on of the power of her sexuality. Bored to distraction by her stint as a debutante, she and her new friend Iris Tree rented a studio flat in Fitzroy Place, colonized Stulik’s Eiffel Tower on Percy Street, and launched themselves into “drink, cynicism, and unlimited promiscuity” (in her lover Richard Aldington’s words), befriending a wide circle of artists and writers including Wyndham Lewis, Augustus John, the Sitwell brothers and “the Sybil of Soho”, Nina Hamnett herself. It is hard to exaggerate the numbers of lovers Nancy took at this time of her life (if we are to believe it) both within the “Corrupt Coterie” that she formed with Iris Tree, and among the young men going off to meet their doom in the trenches. With one of these, Peter Broughton Adderly, she fell genuinely in love; his death soon after their five-day romance plunged her into despair and precipitated a loveless and short-lived marriage to another Guardsman, and the start of her own serious writing. She lived her life on several levels: while her wealth, beauty and extrovert behaviour made her the darling of the popular press, she was also pouring out her horror at the senseless carnage of war (and her own febrile, sexual reaction to it) in poems such as the following, published in Outlaws in 1921:
What is this cry for toys? You’ve had them all;
This clamouring for lovers? Take your choice:
Outgrown and senseless dolls with timid voice,
Like marionettes unstrung they can but fall
Into your merciful hands, your tender grasp
That pities them and tidies up their tears,
The while you wince, yet put away their fears.
She was much influenced by Eliot, and her later epic poem Parallax, published by the Hogarth Press in 1925, was closely modelled on The Waste Land.
Exhausted and demoralized by the war and the end of her marriage, she moved to Paris in 1920, where she was immediately swept up into the vortex of the avant-garde, forging new friendships within Dada and Surrealist circles, and indeed having affairs with Ezra Pound, Tristan Tzara and Louis Aragon – the latter a lengthy and passionate liaison. And Paris, in thrall to Josephine Baker’s Revue Nègre, fuelled her growing fascination with black and ethnic culture; she haunted the “nigger cabarets” (Aldington again) and the galleries of African and Oceanic art, and built up a significant collection of ethnic painting and sculpture along with her trademark ivory bracelets.
Nancy was searching for an occupation: founding the Hours Press in 1928 in her house in Normandy gave her one. She published a wide range of experimental new writing such as Beckett’s Whoroscope, setting the text by hand, commissioning artwork from friends such as Duchamp and Man Ray, and managing the business side. She had fallen in love with a black musician, Henry Crowder, and it was through him that her interest in Africa’s heritage came into clearer focus and took shape in the publication of Negro (1934), an anthology of writings and artwork on black politics and culture. At 855 pages, with 150 contributors (the majority of them black), it was a remarkable synthesis of scholarship and personal testimony, a plea for racial equality; and its compilation was a labour of love.
Needless to say, Negro did not endear Nancy to her mother, any more than did her affair with Crowder. Goaded by Margot Asquith’s taunt “Hello Maud, what is it now? Drink, drugs or niggers?”, Maud finally sloughed her daughter off (without much money), and Nancy’s life moved into a different gear. She had already taken up the defence of the Scottsboro Boys, battling for them in print and in person on both sides of the Atlantic, organizing demonstrations and petitions and hosting what was billed by a West Indian newspaper as “An Exotic Party to Champion the Martryed Negroes”, in which “the exquisitely refined accents of Bloomsbury mingled with the resonant speech of coloured people”. The arena of civil rights was henceforth to give new purpose to her existence. She proved herself an industrious and acute journalist for black and radical papers. She joined in the hunger marches and pitted herself against her mother’s friend Oswald Mosley, she flirted with Communism though she never joined the party and styled herself “an anarchist”. It was as war correspondent in Spain during the Civil War that she made her greatest mark, sending dispatches back to the Guardian from the front line.
Cunard’s later life makes for sadder reading. Her house in Normandy was vandalized by collaborators, her health declined, and her money ran out. She moved to the Dordogne and continued writing, campaigning, researching, all the while taking much younger lovers in an attempt to keep loneliness at bay. She poured her diminishing energy into keeping her old friendships alight – with Samuel Beckett, Sylvia Townsend Warner, John Banting, Jean Guérin – but slid inexorably into exhaustion, nervous collapse (she was briefly committed), and an ignominious and lonely death in a Paris hospital.
Here is the difficulty, however: can we believe everything we read here? From early on, Lois Gordon is too keen to establish Nancy’s credentials as a siren, where there is no need. Suspicion sets in in Chapter Two, awkwardly entitled “Coming of Age During a Revolution in the Arts”. Anyone familiar with the letters and diaries of the era will be surprised to read that Nancy was a frequent guest at Bloomsbury parties, “especially during the war period”, but owed her peripheral position to the fact that Virginia Woolf was consumed with jealousy, and “grew to fear that Leonard would replace her with Nancy in their complicated relationship”. From Virginia Woolf’s letters and diaries, however, we learn that she did not meet Nancy until November 1924, and during the somewhat desultory friendship that developed not a single hostile word is recorded; they visit each other and invite each other to parties, and indeed Woolf plans to spend June 1927 “in Italy with Nancy”, as she tells Vita Sackville-West. She was plainly intrigued by Nancy: “We met at Raymond’s, & she slipped into easy desperate-sounding chatter, as if she didn’t mind saying everything – everything – had no shadows no secret places – lived like a lizard in the sun, & yet was by nature for the shade”. By conflating separate diary entries and quoting carelessly and out of context, Gordon constructs a picture which is far from accurate. As for the “affair” with T. S. Eliot, he is plainly another distinguished scalp, and much is made of their intimacy, which amounted to little more than sitting on the floor in front of a gas fire discussing poetry.
There are numerous elementary errors – St John Hutchinson as simply John or “Sir” John Hutchinson, for example – and the writing is often clumsy. Nevertheless, we are swept along by the story of this human cyclone who blew through continents, intellectual and artistic milieux, and war zones. The breathless tone of the earlier chapters becomes more measured later on, and Nancy Cunard’s essential seriousness and complexity are there for all to see. She was a class act, and although she never wanted to be written about, she was well served by Anne Chisholm’s biography of 1979. Lois Gordon’s book, for all its length and detail, adds little wisdom to that earlier assessment, but it does tell an arresting story of interesting times.
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Ariane Bankes is a freelance writer and editor living in London and Derbyshire. She is compiling an Aldeburgh Anthology to mark the opening of the new music campus at Snape Maltings in 2009. She edits the Charleston Trust Friends’ magazine, Canvas.
