Nancy Clare Cunard
(March 10, 1896 - March 17, 1965)
was an English writer, editor and publisher, political activist, anarchist and poet.
She was born into the British upper class but strongly rejected her family's values, devoting much of her life to fighting racism and fascism. 
Stumble It!
She became a muse to some of the 20th century's most distinguished writers and artists, including Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Tristan Tzara, Ezra Pound, and Louis Aragon, who were among her lovers, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Constantin Brancusi, Langston Hughes, Man Ray, and William Carlos Williams.
In later years she suffered from mental illness, and her physical health deteriorated. She died penniless at age 69.
1910sHer father was Sir Bache Cunard, an heir to the Cunard Line shipping businesses, interested in polo and fox hunting, and a baronet. Her mother was born Maud Alice Burke (1872-1948), and was an American heiress; as Lady Emerald Cunard, she became a leading London society hostess, and was later celebrated as a friend of Wallis Simpson. Nancy had been brought up on the family estate at Nevill Holt, Leicestershire but when her parents separated in 1910 she moved to London with her mother. Her education was at various boarding schools, including time in France and Germany.
She had a short-lived marriage during World War I to Sydney Fairbairn, a cricketer, an army officer and wounded war veteran; it lasted less than two years before they separated. She was also at that time on the edge of the influential group The Coterie, associating in particular with Iris Tree.
She contributed to the Sitwell anthology Wheels, providing its title poem; it has been said that the venture was originally her project.
Cunard's lover Peter Broughton-Adderley was killed in action in France less than a month before Armistice Day. Many who knew her claimed that she never fully recovered from that loss.
ParisIn 1920 Nancy Cunard moved to Paris, where she became involved with literary Modernism, Surrealists and Dada. Much of her published poetry dates from this period. During her early years in Paris, she was close to Michael Arlen.
A brief relationship with Aldous Huxley influenced several of his novels. She was the model for Myra Viveash in Antic Hay (1923) and for Lucy Tantamount in Point Counter Point (1928).
It has been suggested that she became dependent on alcohol at this time, and may have used other drugs
The Hours Press
In 1927 Cunard moved into a farmhouse in La Chapelle-Reanville, Normandy. It was there in 1928 that she set up the Hours Press. Previously the small press had been called Three Mountains Press and run as a hobby by William Bird, an American journalist in Paris, who had already produced work by Ezra Pound. Cunard wanted to support experimental poetry and provide a higher-paying market for young writers; her inherited wealth allowed her to take financial risks that other publishers could not. Hours Press became known for its beautiful book designs and high-quality production.
It brought out the first separately published work of Samuel Beckett, a poem called Whoroscope (1930). It also published Pound's initial XXX Cantos. By 1931, Wyn Henderson had taken over day-to-day operation of the press, and in the same year it published its last book, The Revaluation of Obscenity by sexologist Havelock Ellis.
Political activism
In 1928 (after a two-year affair with Louis Aragon) she began a relationship with Henry Crowder, an African-American jazz musician who was working in Paris. She became an activist in matters concerning racial politics and civil rights in the USA, and visited Harlem. In 1931 she published the pamphlet Black Man and White Ladyship, an attack on racist attitudes as exemplified by Cunard's mother, whom she quoted as saying "Is it true that my daughter knows a Negro?".
She also edited Negro: An Anthology, collecting poetry, fiction, and nonfiction primarily by African-American writers, including Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. It also included writing by George Padmore and Cunard's own account of the Scottsboro Boys case. Press attention to this project in May 1932, two years before it was published, led to Cunard's receiving anonymous threats and hate mail, some of which she published in the book, expressing regret that "[others] are obscene, so this portion of American culture cannot be made public."
Anti-fascism
In the mid-1930s she took up the anti-fascist fight as well, writing about Mussolini's annexation of Ethiopia and the Spanish Civil War. She predicted, accurately, that the "events in Spain were a prelude to another world war". Her stories about the suffering of Spanish refugees became the basis for a fundraising appeal in the Manchester Guardian. Cunard herself helped deliver supplies and organize the relief effort, but poor health - caused in part by exhaustion and the conditions in the camps - forced her to return to Paris, where she stood on the streets collecting funds for the refugees.
In 1937, she published a series of pamphlets of war poetry, including the work of W. H. Auden, Tristan Tzara and Pablo Neruda. Later the same year, she distributed a questionnaire about the war to writers in Europe; the results were published by the Left Review as Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War.
During World War II, Cunard worked, to the point of physical exhaustion, as a translator in London on behalf of the French Resistance.
Later life
After the war, she gave up her home at Reanville and traveled extensively. She suffered from mental illness and poor physical health, worsened by alcoholism, poverty, and self-destructive behavior.
She was committed to a mental hospital after a fight with London police; but, after her release, her health declined even further, and she weighed only sixty pounds when she was found on the street in Paris and brought to the Hospital Cochin, where she died two days later.
Her body was returned to England for cremation and the remains were sent back to the Cimetiere du Pere-Lachaise in Paris. Her ashes rest in urn number 9016.
Tributes
According to an account of drafts of the poem "Nancy Cunard", by Mina Loy, held in the Yale University Library,
Drafts of Loy's poem about Nancy Cunard, her friend, fellow poet, and editor of The Hours Press, provide a window on her [Loy's] creative process. The final, published version of the poem ends with lines derived from this draft's beginning and its final lines are now the poem's center:
The vermilion wall
receding as a sin
beyond your moonstone whiteness,
Your chiffon voice.
~Source: Wikipedia
quote
I've always had the feeling
that everyone alive can do
something that is worthwhile.
~Nancy Cunard
BOOKS
Nancy Cunard: Heiress, Muse, Political Idealist
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Negro: An Anthology
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As Wonderful As All That? Henry Crowder's Memoir of His Affair With Nancy Cunard, 1928-1935
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Release Date: 12/31/1969
quote
All that remains
is a furious sense
of indignation."
~Nancy Cunard
WORKS
- Outlaws (1921), poems
- Sublunary (1923), poems
- Parallax (1925, Hogarth Press), poems
- Poems (1930)
- Black Man and White Ladyship (1931) polemic pamphlet
- Negro: an Anthology (1934) anthology of African literature and art, editor
- Authors Take Sides (1937) pamphlet, compiler
- Los poetas del mundo defienden al pueblo espa%uFFFD(1937, Paris), co-editor with Pablo Neruda
- The White Man's Duty: An analysis of the colonial question in the light of the Atlantic Charter (with George Padmore) (1942)
- Poems for France (1944)
- Releve into Marquis (1944)
- Grand Man: Memories of Norman Douglas (1954)
- GM: Memories of George Moore (1956)
- These Were the Hours: Memories of My Hours Press, R%u986Eville and Paris, 1928-1931 (1969), autobiography
Her body had wasted away in a long battle against injustice in the world. Her reward was a life that had become progressively lonelier, and a god forsaken death.
~Pablo Neruda
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DVD
Paris Was a Woman
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FURTHER READING
LINKS
- Nancy Cunard: A troubled heiress with an ideological mission ...
- Mar 30, 2007 ... Nancy Cunard: A troubled heiress with an ideological mission.
- Nancy Cunard
- Nancy Cunard, the only child of Sir Bache Cunard, of the shipping family, was born in 1896. Educated at several exclusive schools, Cunard's poetry first ...
- University of Delaware: NANCY CUNARD AND HUGH FORD LETTERS TO ...
- Nancy Cunard and Hugh Ford Letters to David Garnett.
- On Nancy Cunard and Hurricane Katrina | Negrophilia [the blog]
- Ideas about identity and black culture in the 1920s, exploring Nancy Cunard's life, her travels, her work on Negro, and questioning why this cosmopolitan ...
- Nancy Cunard Directory
- Biographical Sketch of Nancy Cunard: Harry Ransom Centre ... Nancy Cunard: A troubled heiress with an ideological mission By Caroline Weber ...
- Nancy Cunard, rebel lover - TLS Highlights - Times Online
- 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 ...
- Nancy Cunard (1896-1965), Writer
- National Portrait Gallery, list of portraits for Nancy Cunard including Nancy Cunard by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Nancy Cunard by Cecil Beaton, Nancy Cunard by ...
- BBC - Radio 4 Woman's Hour -Nancy Cunard
- Aug 3, 2007 ... Nancy Cunard was heir to the great shipping line that bore her name but turned her back on a life of opulence and privilege.
- Nancy Cunard Biography
- Nancy Cunard summary with 23 pages of encyclopedia entries, essays, summaries, research information, and more.
IMAGES
BLOG POSTS
- The PIP (Project for Innovative Poetry) Blog: The PIP List of ...
- Nancy Cunard (England) [1896-Nancy Cunard (England) [1896-1965] Gerardo Diego (Spain) [1896-1987] Elmer Diktonius (Sweden) [1896-1961] Jacob Glatshteyn (Poland/USA] [1896-1971] Friedrich Glauser (Switzerland) [1896-1938] ...
- AN AESTHETE'S LAMENT: Well Said: Nancy Cunard
- Seriously, Nancy Cunard is just amazing. She's just perfect. November 3, 2008 10:18 AM · An Aesthete's Lament said... Porter, You are so right. Have you read the relatively new biography about her? The 2007 book by Lois Gordon? ...
- AN AESTHETE'S LAMENT: Dream Weaver
- Nov 05 (2). Well Said: My Mother · America Has Spoken · ? Nov 04 (1). Famous Last Words: Charlotte von Mahlsdorf · ? Nov 03 (1). Top Drawer · ? Nov 01 (1). Well Said: Nancy Cunard ...
- La bohème
- Nancy Cunard edited and published Negro in 1934. A 900-page anthology of black history and culture and a call to condemn racial discrimination and appreciate the . . . accomplishments of a long-suffering people. ...
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