Nancy Cunard

Poet, publisher, and professional radical Nancy Cunard (1896-1965) used both craft and cunning to fight for the equality of races, of sexes, and of classes.

The Reluctant Heiress

Nancy Clara Cunard was born at the 13,000–acre estate of Nevill Holt on March 10, 1896 in Leicestershire, England—the only child of third baronet Sir Bache Edward Cunard and Lady Maude Alice (Burke) Cunard. Sir Bache had inherited the wealth of the Cunard family shipping line, while Lady Cunard—an American– born socialite from San Francisco living in England—stirred passionate opinions in everyone she met, both celebrated later in her daughter's obituary from The Times as a “brilliant hostess, conversationalist and patron of the arts” and maligned in the Encyclopedia of Women Social Reformers as an “outrageous snob, and wit, famous for her put–downs.” She included her daughter Nancy in the parties and gatherings of prominent aesthetes of the time— writers, artists, politicians and musicians.

In 1910, Cunard's mother left Sir Bache and took her daughter to London where she became involved with conductor Sir Thomas Beecham and changed her name to Lady “Emerald” Cunard. While in Europe, Cunard attended schools in London, Paris and Germany. It was in London, in 1914 however, that Cunard began to assert herself and gather the circle of friends that would later be known as the “Corrupt Coterie”—Iris Tree, Dianna Manners, Osbert Sitwell, Augustus John and Ezra Pound. In 1916, Edith Sitwell printed Cunard's poetry in the publication Wheels, and on November 15 of that same year she married Sidney George Fairbairn—a wounded Grenadier Guard soldier. The openly rebellious heiress's conventional marriage shocked and puzzled everyone, but the relationship evaporated twenty months later and was legally annulled in 1925, at which point she took back her maiden name.

Cultural Awakening

In 1919, Cunard suffered through a bout of the Spanish flu epidemic that left her permanently weakened, but her fragile health failed to dampen what would prove to be an adventurous interest in gifted men. Cunard was reported to have had affairs with a wealth of talented male colleagues, including authors Michael Arlen and Aldous Huxley and surrealist intellectual Louis Aragon. In 1920 Cunard moved to Paris and met the Dadaists, Surrealists, and other expatriate American artists and authors living there at that time. She lived with Arlen, during which time she had a mysteriously unexplained hysterectomy and appendectomy that almost killed her. It was rumored that she was affiliated with the Communist party, and some sources confirm that it was at this time that Cunard developed what would become a life– long addiction to drugs and alcohol.

Cunard also attended Virginia Woolf's private London school, where she excelled as a student and eventually became friends with the famous author and her husband, Leonard. She published two poetry collections, Outlaws (1921) and Sublunary (1923). In 1925 the Woolfs' Hogarth Press published Cunard's third and final poetry collection titled Parallax—a single poem about estrangement and belonging that ran for more than 500 lines. It was approved by some, but largely dismissed by critics as being too imitative of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922).

Cunard was a faithful member of avant–garde literary and artistic circles in both France and England in the 1920s. She was living with Aragon, who had attempted suicide when Cunard left him in 1926, when she saw African– American jazz musician Henry Crowder perform in a night club and they began a public and controversial relationship that quickly tuned her in to the problems of racism in the United States.

From Poet to Publisher

In 1927, Cunard bought a farmhouse in Reanville, just outside of Paris, and set up a press that would give her the opportunity to publish inventive and contentious works of her choosing. In 1928 she established The Hours Press and published, among others, Richard Aldington, Ezra Pound, Samuel Beckett, Louis Aragon, George Moore, Robert Graves, and Laura Riding. The Hours Press was active for only four years because Cunard quickly became an aggressive and outspoken advocate for the rights of African Americans, which prompted her to devote all her time and efforts to a new project that would address issues of prejudice and race.

Cunard and Crowder suffered significant and sometimes violent discrimination when they moved to New York and lived in Harlem briefly, where she spoke to blacks about their rights and experiences. Cunard was impressed with the Harlem renaissance, but openly critical of blacks for what she saw as a disinterest in their African heritage. She also became deeply involved in the Scottsboro Boys trial, organizing public protests in an effort to support nine young black boys—aged thirteen to nineteen—who had been falsely accused but convicted and sentenced to death in Montgomery, Alabama for reportedly assaulting a pair of young white girls on a train.

Some sources claim that Cunard successfully transformed or evolved from mere aesthete to political activist, calling other writers and artists of the time to stand up and take a side on controversial issues. In 1931 Cunard wrote and published an opposition piece titled Black Man and White Ladyship, described in The Feminist Companion to Literature in English as a “bridge–burning attack” in response to her mother's negative reaction to Cunard's relationship with Crowder. But it was in 1934 that Cunard edited and published Negro—described by The Bloomsbury Guide to Women's Literature as a “civil liberties plea,” whereas Caroline Weber of the New York Times called it “an anthology of black history and culture,” and “a call to 'condemn racial discrimination and appreciate the … accomplishments of a long–suffering people.”

Negro tipped the scales at close to 900 pages written by over 150 benefactors—including “Harlem Renaissance man” Langston Hughes, activist and scholar W.E.B. Du Bois, authors Theodore Dreiser and Claude McKay and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston. It contained poetry, history, photographs, manifestos, rants, ethnographies, hate mail, confidential military material, ads, comics, folk songs and scores, maps and reproductions of artworks. Cunard wrote the preface and published the broad volume at her own expense, but it was met with critical disdain and included material that pleased some but also managed to offend most people in one way or another. As Laura Winkiel explains in Nancy Cunard's NEGRO and the Transnational Politics of Race, the anthology was essentially a collection that attempted to “reconstruct a past that is lost … that, if recontextualized and recirculated, might compose an alternative future.” She noted how “Cunard herself commented very little on the … [scandals]” she was personally involved in, believing that the “ ‘sex–scandal’ [was] merely an effort to detract from antiracist work.”

From Publisher to Activist

Cunard, who had lived through World War I, followed her passion for fighting fascist regimes to Spain where she served as a relief worker during that country's civil war, organizing the transfer of food parcels from Britain to Spain. Cunard also acted as a journalist for the Manchester Guardian and the Associated Negro Press while in Spain. In a Columbia University Press interview about her 2007 biography, Nancy Cunard: Heiress, Muse, Political Idealist (hailed by the International Herald Tribune as the “first substantial study to be published in almost 30 years”), Lois Gordon— English professor at Fairleigh Dickinson Unversity— described how Cunard served in the Spanish Civil War by “carry[ing] the wounded to safety… feed[ing] the hungry … walk[ing] with refugees … brib[ing] guards to give food to starving … soldiers … [seeking] homes for the refugees in Central America … work[ing] with underground organizations … [and engaging] in guerilla activities.”

In 1937 she and Chilean poet Pablo Neruda invited British writers to take a stand on the Spanish conflict and published the results in the booklet Authors Take Sides. In 1937 Cunard joined the British Delegation to the Second Congress of the International Association of Writers for the Defense of Culture in Madrid, Spain—campaigning for the rights of Republican prisoners and Spanish refugees in France following Franco's conquest. She also traveled as far as South America, the Caribbean and Tunisia to better understand the imprint left by colonialism, always returning to raise the issues of race and class in Britain.

In 1944 Cunard put out an anthology of poems honoring France and its people that got her included in Adolf Hitler's list of enemies. Following its release, her home in Reanville was vandalized by locals and occupying German soldiers, and as a result, she took to traveling.

Debutante in Decline

Cunard wrote two memoirs, the 1954 Grand Man about Norman Douglas, and G.M., about George Moore two years later, but her physical and mental health declined rapidly and she suffered from episodes of drunken paranoia that drove away friends and antagonized police. She was arrested, among other things, for throwing her shoes at police officers and eating a train ticket rather than giving it to the conductor of a train traveling across France. She was ordered to check into the Holloway Sanatorium for four months, after which she lived a grim life until, broken both in body and mind, she cut herself off from even her closest friends. Cunard died alone in the Hopital Côchin—a charity hospital in Paris—on March 17, 1965. She was 69 years old. The official cause of death was natural causes and severe emphysema from years of heavy smoking. She was cremated and her remains were buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetary in Paris.

Those who knew Cunard assert that she was never comfortable with the fact that she became a symbol of the “roaring twenties” rather than being taken seriously. In Contemporary Authors, Critic Chris Hopkins pointed out that Cunard's personal life tends to be discussed more widely than her prose and her poetry, but despite any judgments about the merit of her writing, Cunard's works are important because they offer “insights … into the aesthetic and political possibilities of poetry in the period 1916 to 1940” and provide “a unique perspective on some of the most important issues of her time.” The posthumously released These Were the Hours (1969) added to Cunard's substantial legacy.

While Cunard was an infamous figure in her lifetime, her work remains little known to modern readers. Labeled in The Bloomsbury Guide to Women's Literature as an “indomitable rebel” and portrayed in the International Herald Tribune as an “unconventional child of privilege,” many sources are surprisingly disparaging. Cunard's biographical entry in The Feminist Companion to English Literature states that she “left her mother's fashionable, establishment circle to conduct a sexually and socially unorthodox life.” and her Women in World History biographical sketch describes Cunard as “the archetypal spoiled English upper–class rich girl … [who] often suffered from lack of direction and purpose in life … [and] engaged in shocking behavior, alienated friends and family, and treated her many lovers as sexual objects to be used and discarded.” The author also describes Cunard as “beautiful, tall, slender, aggressive, reckless, sexually promiscuous, unconventional to an extreme, and an immutable hater.”

Advocate and Muse

One fact remains irrefutable, however: Nancy Cunard inspired. Dadaist playwright Tristan Tzara dedicated a play to her. Sculptor M. Constantin Brancusi crafted a wooden image of her, and photographer Man Ray chose her as a subject repeatedly—producing, among others, the iconic portrait of Cunard wearing stacks of African ivory bracelets and looking away from the camera. Samuel Beckett infused a long, notable speech with her name in his famous play Waiting for Godot, and male authors of the day—from T.S. Eliot and Michael Arlen to Ezra Pound, Aldous Huxley and Ernest Hemingway—created fictional characters based on her, many of which have since been given the weight of personal accounts. As quoted from the Spartacus Schoolnet Web site, Langston Hughes wrote in 1965 that Cunard was “kind and good and catholic and cosmopolitan and sophisticated and simple all at the same time and a poet of no mean abilities and an appreciator of the rare and the off– beat … she had an infinite capacity to love peasants and children and great but simple causes across the board and a grace in giving that was itself gratitude.”

Whether marginalized or completely ignored, scorned or celebrated, Nancy Cunard fought conventions in ways that many felt made her dangerous. George Seldes wrote— as recorded by the Spartacus Schoolnet Web site—that “We who talk and write about nonconformity rarely have the courage to live the lives of nonconformists, but Nancy Cunard had the courage and paid the price society still demands.” One might argue that Cunard's character and historical status is still paying the price.

Books

Beckett in Black and Red: The Translations for Nancy Cunard's NEGRO (1934), edited by Alan Warren Friedman, University Press of Kentucky, 2000.

The Bloomsbury Guide to Women's Literature, edited by Claire Buck, Bloomsbury Publishing Ltd., 1992.

Contemporary Authors: Volume 219, The Gale Group, Inc., 2004.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 240: Late Nineteenth– and Early Twentieth–Century British Women Poets, edited by William B. Thesing, The Gale Group, 2001.

An Encyclopedia of British Women Writers, edited by Paul Schlueter and June Schlueter, Rutgers University Press, 1998.

Encyclopedia of Women Social Reformers, edited by Helen Rappaport, ABC–CLIO, Inc., 2001.

The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present, edited by Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy, Yale University Press, 1990.

The New York Times: Sunday Book Review, April 1, 2007.

Obituaries from the Times 1961–1970, compiled by Frank C. Roberts, Newspaper Archive Developments Limited, 1975.

Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia, edited by Anne Commire, Yorkin Publications, 1999.

Periodicals

Biography, Summer 2007.

Cineaste, v25 no4, 2000.

The Globe and Mail (Canada), June 16, 1979.

Modernism/modernity, vol 13 no 3, 2006.

Online

“Interview with Lois Gordon,” Columbia University Press, http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cup/publicity/gordoninterview.html (November 13, 2007).

“Nancy Cunard,” Spartacus Schoolnet, http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Wcunard.html (November 13, 2007).

“Nancy Cunard, 1896–1965 Biographical Sketch,” Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/research/fa/cunard.n.bio.html (November 13, 2007).

“Nancy Cunard: A troubled heiress with an ideological mission,” International Herald Tribune, http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/29/arts/IDSIDE31.php (November 13, 2007).

“Nancy Cunard: Heiress, Muse, Political Idealist,” Columbia University Press, http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cup/publicity/cunardexcerpt1.html (November 13, 2007).

“Poster-Man Ray: Nancy Cunard,” Image Exchange, http://www.imageexchange.com/featured/manray/6900.shtml (November 13, 2007).