by Carla Kaplan
Her greatest asset was her extraordinary ability to empathize and identify with others. She often told a proud story about strolling in the Nevill Holt grounds with the writer George Moore, her mother’s lover and Nancy’s dear friend, and encountering a number of tramps: “generally dirty, slouchy men with stubbly chins and anger in their eyes.” She “wanted to run away and be a vagabond,” she told Moore. The story was a perfect combination of noble feelings and outrageous behavior. It was the sort of thing she would use to build her growing reputation. Her ability to feel and understand the pain of others helped her step into other worlds. Once she was there, her unusually high tolerance for discomfort—her own as well as that of others—kept her from becoming easily discouraged. She often failed to notice disapproval. That too, gave her a unique social footing, allowing her to take great risks but also setting her up for large failures. The question was what she would do with that combination of traits and proclivities.
A rail-thin, determined Nancy Cunard with her reflection.
Nancy had been writing poetry since her childhood, and her first published poem, “Soldiers Fallen in Battle,” set the stage for what would follow. Appearing in 1916, the year of her marriage, the poem asked who would speak for the voiceless:
These die obscure and leave no heritage
For them no lamps are lit, no prayers said,
And all men soon forget that they are dead,
And their dumb names unwrit on memory’s page.
The answer, for her, was clear. She would write their “dumb names” into public consciousness. Once she swerved from her class and its activities, the privileges and comforts she’d been born to quickly became intolerable. Gritting her teeth through every ball and dinner, she now felt keenly “the guilt of our immunity” from the sufferings of poverty and the war. How was it possible, she wrote in another early poem, “Remorse,” to have been so
wasteful, wanton, foolish, bold
. . . All through the hectic days and summer skies . . .
I sit ashamed and silent in this room.
She did not want to “live while others die for us.” Her world now became repellent to her, and she needed—desperately—to escape. “Were I not myself so irreducibly myself I should be very happy,” she told one friend. She now saw the struggles for freedom and “equality of races . . . of sexes . . . of classes” as “the three things that mattered” in the world. She needed to feel connected to them. “How hidden and remote one is from the obscure vortex of England’s revolutionary troubles, coal strikes, etc.,” she wrote in her diary. “So much newspaper talk does it seem to me, and yet—is it going to be always so?” Surely there was a way to live a more meaningful life?
Nancy moved to Paris in 1920, taking a small apartment on the corner of quai d’Orléans and rue Le Regrattier on the Île Saint-Louis, just down the street from her friend Iris Tree and around the corner from a small café frequented by expatriate Americans. There were a number of salons on the tiny island, as well as Three Mountain Press, from which she would later buy her gigantic Belgian Mathieu printing press. In Paris, she quickly became central to a growing circle of modernists and surrealists. She “knew everybody, was known by everybody,” Janet Flanner remembered. The British writer Harold Acton claimed that she had inspired and probably slept with “half the poets and novelists of the twenties.” Among her many lovers were the artists and writers Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Michael Arlen, Robert McAlmon, Louis Aragon, Richard Aldington, Tristan Tzara, Wyndham Lewis, and Aldous Huxley, all key modernists. The intellectual circle she assembled was a who’s who of the avant-garde, including the writers Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman), Sybille Bedford, Ernest Hemingway, Janet Flanner, Solita Solano, Havelock Ellis, Djuna Barnes, and John Dos Passos; the artists Man Ray and his model Kiki de Montparnasse, Marcel Duchamp, Constantin Brancusi, Cecil Beaton, the surrealist André Breton, the photographer Berenice Abbott, and George Antheil; writer-activists such as Kay Boyle; and powerful collectors and tastemakers such as Peggy Guggenheim. Nancy’s poetry was published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Her slick-haired, cigarette-smoking, dark-eyed image began to appear everywhere, and her lean, elegant, and carefully exotic look—embodying the decade’s new freedoms—became synonymous with rebellious style. Before she knew it, Nancy Cunard had become “legendary”:
She was photographed, armored from wrist to shoulder in her African bracelets, by Cecil Beaton and Man Ray; and her sapphire-blue eyes, darkly rimmed with kohl, were often to be seen gazing mesmerically from the pages of glossy magazines. Inevitably, but hardly ever successfully, she was imitated, so that scores of lesser leopards slank along the corridors of expensive hotels, helmeted in cloche hats or turbans, their hair cut short, dyed gold, and arranged in two strands (which Nancy herself called “beavers”) curving over the cheekbones like twin scimitars.
A “toast of the twenties,” the papers called her.
If becoming a “toast” and a “legend” had been her goal, Nancy could have celebrated. Instead she found herself increasingly dissatisfied. The modernists she’d so admired now struck her as mock rebels, claiming to eschew conventionality while clinging to comfort and tradition. “Their manners, exalting high-mindedness and ostensibly rebelling against class, were hypocritical. They continued to enjoy the world of high society and the things it could afford.”
Losing faith in the modernists soured Nancy on the twenties altogether. “Why the smarming over ‘The Twenties,’” she would later sneer. “To hell with those days! They weren’t so super-magnificent . . . [not] in the least amazing.”
As she had done in her childhood, she once again turned her gaze toward Africa. Like Charlotte Mason, she had already accumulated a remarkable collection of African art: sculptures, shields, beading, masks, bottles, paintings, carved horns and tusks, music boxes, rugs, and, most famously, ivory bracelets in all shapes and sizes, which she wore “elbow deep.” She tallied the bracelet collection alone at 486 pieces, probably the largest such collection in the world. The objects helped keep alive the connection she had felt to Africa going back to her childhood dreams of “the sand, the dunes, the huge spaces, mirages, heat and parchedness.” But she did not want to just love, collect, and appreciate things; she wanted the “vital life-theme” of human “contact.” That meant knowing blacks, being accepted by them, becoming a part of their world. She did not want to flounce in and out, merely skimming the surface as a cultural tourist, though primitivism had made such tourism fashionable. In 1915, she glimpsed what “contact” might look like when her modern friends introduced her to jazz. They heard “tom-toms beating in the equatorial night” when they went to see the bands. But Nancy heard something else. And she saw the possibility of being “one of them, though still white.”
“One of Them, Though Still White”
Nancy had a very advanced formulation of equity, ethics, and morals. It was as exceptional as it was different.
—Hilaire Hiler
If it is not easy to document what Nancy Cunard was seeking, it is easier, since she was very vocal on this score, to document just what she wanted to avoid and subvert. Chiefly, she hated any and all cultural scripts. She detested traditions. Believing that “common sense” was “NON-SENSE (in the true meaning of this word: a thing without reason, of no sense),” she tended to feel that she was on the right track when the majority found her incomprehensible.
Loneliness can challenge rebels, lure them back into the fold. Nancy Cunard had the advantage there. Aristocratic isolation had already inured her to loneliness. Her high tolerance for isolation made her unusually brave. She could use it to dispense with all but the most stalwart companions. That let her venture farther out on limbs than most people would have found comfortable. Isolation may have been a source of unhappiness for her, but it was also a kind of ballast. “One should learn how to live entirely alone from childhood,” she once wrote to a friend.
Nancy felt strong inducements to broadcast her interest in
blackness, her “blacklove” as some would have called it. Broadcasting her views was not only Nancy’s way but also part of her conviction that she could turn publicity—good or bad—to her own purposes. Public pronouncements enabled a final break from the society of her parents. That demonstrated her fitness for entering black society. As far as she was concerned, since identity was declarative and associative, having little—if anything—to do with birth or family, announcing her affiliation with blacks and declaring herself to be “one of them, though still white” made it so. To her, it made perfect sense that in spite of every imaginable difference in cultural and national background, she could “speak as if I were a Negro myself.”
Harlemites did not necessarily see things that way. Few ideas are as riven by contradiction and confusion as American ideas of race. Nancy’s conviction that whites could, and should, volunteer for blackness underscored many of those contradictions. It highlighted the tension within Harlem, between seeing race as a social construction to be debunked and treasuring it as a deep essence. Nancy’s idea of volunteering for blackness was mixed with her own agendas, both flattering and offensive, appealing and alarming.
Race-crossing did not work the same way for white men and white women. White men were encouraged to cross races to offset the supposedly soul-crushing effects of industrialized economic modernity. For them, the spiritual power of primitive blackness was thought to be restorative, a force that could regenerate their souls, restore their creativity, and charge their sexuality. Taken in small doses, blackness would strengthen, not threaten, their essential identity as white men. Not so for white women. In 1926, the French art dealer Paul Guillaume proclaimed that “the spirit of modern man—or of modern woman—needs to be nourished by the civilization of the Negro.” But Guillaume, one of primitivism’s most influential proponents, was decidedly in the minority in his inclusion of women. White women’s sexuality was not widely seen as needing a powerful charge. And women’s souls were seen not only as undamaged by industrial and economic modernity but as impervious to its negative effects, insulated and protected by the home and domestic sphere over which they were expected to preside. Unlike white men, who were urged to take medicinal doses of black culture, white women were cautioned that overexposure to blackness would ineluctably alter their nature. A white woman who overexposed herself to blackness, by duration or degree of intimacy, risked becoming black by association, developing “Black skin” and forfeiting white status: “darkening your complexion,” as one angry letter writer put it to Nancy Cunard.
Nancy with a mask from Sierra Leone.
A white woman who had “gone Negro” (as the U.S. State Department described Nancy) not only became less white but also became less female, untethered from both racial and gender norms and adrift without a social category at just the moment when identity categories reached the apex of their cultural importance. An infusion that was promoted as curative for white men was prohibited as a pollutant for white women. Hence, opting into Harlem was, for white women, a far more consequential decision than it could have been for any of their white male counterparts or peers. It was, as one black French friend of Nancy’s wrote her, a bold move: “White men have contributed their support, which is all well and good, but when a white woman, or Lady, I should say, of your caliber condescends to engage in the bitter, exhaustive and ostensibly impossible struggle, than that’s a phenomenon. . . . I think you are the most marvelous woman in the world.” It was, as Nancy’s first biographer put it, “a sign of insanity to have a black lover and advertise the fact.”
Race-crossing was especially a minefield for Nancy Cunard. Described by one of her friends as “incapable of restraint or discretion,” she had an almost preternatural energy. If she had been a car, she would have had one speed: ninety miles per hour. “I find life quite impossible,” she once declared, “as I cannot enjoy a thing without carrying it to all extremes.” Whatever she pursued, she chased with her whole being, unable to stop in midstream, reassess, pull back, change course, or even note the passing landscape. She had neither interest in nor skill at the arts of compromise. Her attempts to opt into blackness helped advance the racial politics of the Harlem Renaissance because she seemed to put into practice what many were then theorizing about the mutability, flexibility, or “free play,” as we say now, of identity. But at the same time, her celebrity, and her stubbornness, threatened to topple some of those very advances and goals.
Many white women in Harlem went to great lengths to avoid exactly the sort of press attention that Nancy Cunard encouraged. Josephine Cogdell Schuyler, for example, claimed to be “colored” on her marriage certificate and did much of her best writing under various pen names. Mary White Ovington and Annie Nathan Meyer honed carefully crafted matronly roles to keep the scandal-mongering press at bay. Lillian Wood never bothered to correct the misimpression that she was black. Charlotte Osgood Mason was fanatical about not being mentioned in public. But Nancy Cunard wanted nothing of evasions or caution. A determined New Woman, she crafted a persona in which her posture of brave border crossing and “extreme” sensuality (in reality, she was reputed to experience little pleasure in sex) were crucial components, and no amount of political pressure could induce her to tamp those down.
Privacy never mattered to her. Harlemites, however, placed a high value on discretion. Nancy Cunard failed to grasp, and therefore to respect, that value. Nor did she ever accept the idea that one should tread carefully so as to protect the larger community and its goals. She had, as one black friend remembered, “an unfortunate faculty for producing reams of scandalous publicity.” Nancy “liked to shock.” She seemed, moreover, unaware that shock was a weapon more easily wielded by the privileged than the powerless. To some, she seemed to have more to gain from Harlem than she could offer it. The black journalist Henry Lee Moon put his skepticism this way, wondering if she was
just another white woman sated with the decadence of Anglo-Saxon society, rebelling against its restrictive code, seeking new fields to explore, searching for color, she was not to be taken seriously. I must confess that I shared with Harlem the quite general impression most effectively expressed by a slight upward twist of the lip and a vague shrug of the shoulder.
Certainly her idea that identity was desire and that you could choose new identities and adopt those of others was something that would not necessarily appeal to those she was trying hardest to court: Harlem’s blacks could ill afford any appearance that they wanted to be white. All that made Nancy Cunard a difficult ally for those with whom she most wanted to align herself. She made her friends in Harlem uncomfortable. “Nancy’s back, we’re in trouble,” they would say. “Hold onto your hats, kids, Nancy’s back!”
Fortunately, Nancy also had an extraordinary work ethic. And if there was one thing that many Harlem intellectuals understood and valued, it was hard work. None of them, including the privileged and patrician Du Bois, had been handed or inherited success. Zora Neale Hurston had launched herself up from rural Florida, without clothes or cash, arriving in Harlem with little but faith in her own talent and a willingness to work; her jobs included being a secretary and selling fried chicken. Langston Hughes had worked as a busboy, an assistant cook, a launderer, and a seaman. Countée Cullen, considered by many to be the finest poet of the Harlem Renaissance, had been abandoned by his mother, taken in by relatives, and forced to make his own way. To them and others, Nancy’s willingness to roll up her sleeves and escape her own advantages was endearing. Her delight in discomforting other whites afforded a guilty pleasure that Harlemites could watch with glee. Langston Hughes, who had a keen sense of the joys of discomforting others, adored Nancy Cunard and remembered her as “one of my favorite folks in the world!” One of Nancy’s “coloured friends in Harlem” remembered that “all of them loved Nancy and all deplored her.”
Between her intransigent personality and her complex ideas of identity, Nancy Cunard—by accident or design—became a kind of cultural litmu
s test for how far the racial politics of the 1920s and 1930s could be pushed. No other white woman in Harlem had the potential to contribute as much to Harlem’s racial experiments. On the other hand, no other white woman had the potential to do as much harm.
“Does Anyone Know Any Negroes?”
Among all of us in the avant-garde in Paris, Nancy was by far the most advanced. She was doing something about the central issue of our time, the Negro people.
—Walter Lowenfels
Dorothy Peterson once asked [Salvador] Dali if he knew anything about Negroes. “Everything!” Dali answered. “I’ve met Nancy Cunard.”
—Langston Hughes
By the mid-1920s, Paris and Harlem presented the greatest possibilities of interracial “contact.” Paris was so much in thrall to its own “black craze,” fueled in part by the arrival of international superstar Josephine Baker, that some were calling it the “European version of the Harlem Renaissance.”
Black was the color of designer high fashion for women: black stockings, black dresses, black hats, black blouses. Consistent with the latest mode, women’s hair was dyed black, bobbed, and carefully kinked. Dark-skinned men became even more popular as companions, as French women asserted that “dark-complexioned men understand women so much better.”
One French Vanity Fair reporter wrote that he could not take his eyes off the “tom-toms” in Montmartre’s jazz and the white ladies “swaying luxuriously in the long arms of dark cowboys.” In 1925, Nancy went to one of Josephine Baker’s first French performances and wrote a glowing review in the French Vogue, praising Baker’s “astounding . . . wild-fire syncopation.”
