by Carla Kaplan
But admiring black performers and frequenting their clubs went only so far. Nancy was learning that nightclub “encounters between black and white women did not lead to enduring friendships.” As enticing as interracial contact now looked, it was not as easy to achieve as someone so accustomed to getting her way might have imagined.
Her interracial breakthrough occurred, ironically enough, only when she traveled out of France to Italy in the late summer of 1928. With her lover Louis Aragon, her friends Janet Flanner and Solita Solano, and her cousins Edward and Victor Cunard, she traveled to Venice, as she had been doing for many summers. They went to balls, barge parties, and carnivals; dressed in “glittering” costumes; danced until dawn at some of the “sinister new night-bars.” It was, she later said, a “hell of a time . . . gay and mad, fantastic and ominous . . . spectacular.” She almost forgot that she was discontented. One rainy night, she and Edward took a gondola to the oldest hotel in Venice, the Hotel Luna, to eat dinner and dance. The Luna was featuring an American jazz band, Eddie South’s Alabamians: “coloured musicians . . . so different to all I had ever known that they seemed as strange to me as beings from another planet . . . the charm, beauty and elegance of these people . . . their art, their manners, the way they talked. . . . Enchanting people.” “A new element had come into my life, suddenly,” she later said. She immediately took to Henry Crowder, a piano player with “great good looks . . . partly Red Indian,” who was older than Nancy and whom she found “thoughtful” and “serious-minded.”
Henry Crowder’s background could not have been more different from Nancy’s. The child of Georgia Baptists, Crowder came from a large family (twelve children) in which both parents worked: his father as a factory worker and carpenter and as a church deacon, his mother as a cleaning woman. Before becoming a professional musician, Crowder had been a postal worker, a dishwasher, a handyman, a chauffeur, and a tailor. When Nancy met Henry, he was married and had a young son. Henry had been trained all his life “to hate white people,” and the last thing he needed was a white woman. Nancy had the opposite response. She felt that she’d been looking for Henry all her life. “My feeling for things African had begun years ago with sculpture, and something of these anonymous old statues had now, it seemed, materialized in the personality of a man partly of that race,” she wrote.
A romance developed almost overnight, and its intensity surprised them both. Nancy had a reputation for being difficult and mercurial with her lovers. But with Henry she was “the sweetest woman I have ever known,” he said.
He followed her back to Paris and from there to her country house in Réanville, where he composed music and helped her launch her small press, The Hours. Henry, Nancy wrote, did “billing and circulars and parcels . . . and he drove the car too; he was indispensable.” The Hours was one of the most successful small presses, in large part because Nancy and Henry worked so hard—as many as eighteen hours a day, hunched over a massive two-hundred-year-old Belgian machine in semidarkness, setting type by hand, their fingers coated in printer’s ink, their shoulders, neck, back, and knees aching.
Many of Nancy’s friends were supportive of her affair with Henry, if a bit baffled, but some took it for granted that he was a “caprice” or “sexual drug.” “He has,” Richard Aldington said, “the poise, the sense of life of the blacks, which we whites are losing.”
Nancy’s account of “the first Negro I had ever known,” on the other hand, describes finding a “born teacher” in Henry, who
introduced me to the astonishing complexities and agonies of the Negroes in the United States. He became my teacher in all the many questions of color that exist in America and was the primary cause of the compilation, later, of my large Negro Anthology. But at this time I merely listened with growing indignation to what he had to tell: of the race riots and lynchings, the segregation in colleges and public places, the discrimination that was customary in all aspects of life.
Nancy’s friends were “astounded and revolted” by what they learned, through Henry, about American racism. “They had not realised its existence,” Nancy wrote. She refused to be revolted. She felt that she must do something about what she had learned. She could not sit in a dining room, tsk-tsking about the world, while others paid for her advantages.
Sometimes the least sentimental people seem to respond most powerfully to the suffering of others. Nancy was often described as calculating, and many of her lovers complained about her lack of proper feminine feeling. But when it came to her embrace of blackness, her emotions were on the surface. “Her vast anger at [racial] injustice embraced the universe,” Solita Solano remembered. “There was no place left in her for the working of any other emotional pattern. . . . It was her mania, her madness.”
Their life in Nancy’s Normandy farmhouse, sixty miles from Paris, was productive. They ran their press out of an unheated stable without having to bother with the “conventions and long-established rules” that governed other printers. They were relieved to be away from the troubles of Nancy’s Paris friends, who were drinking and using drugs to excess and sometimes suicidal. The Hours produced beautiful small books and, because it had almost no overhead, could give its authors—George Moore, Laura Riding, Robert Graves, Samuel Beckett, and Ezra Pound, among others—more than three times the usual royalties. But life in Réanville was almost as isolated as life at Nevill Holt had been. Henry was folding neatly into Nancy’s world, but aside from a brief friendship with the wife of one of Henry Crowder’s former bandmates, she was not folding into his. And if they were pleasantly protected, they were also cut off. Nancy, Henry remarked, was “at a loose end.”
Other troubles presented themselves, and in the seclusion of Réanville the contrast between Nancy’s and Henry’s personalities became glaring. Nancy was bossy, impulsive, and filled with energy. She was also physically ill, and she exacerbated her illness by not eating. “A snack now and then, but seldom a regular meal; she looked famished and quenched her hunger with harsh white wine and gusty talk.” Henry was cautious, deliberative, diffident, inexpressive, and prone to crabbiness. He resented what he believed to be Nancy’s wealth, complaining bitterly about being dependent on her while also expecting her to support him. He felt entitled to more than his weekly salary and could not believe that Nancy was as cash-strapped as she claimed. He became reckless: smashed the car, embroiled them both in a difficult legal settlement, demanded that Nancy buy him another car, then groused about having to share it with her. As the world moved toward an economic depression and what profits The Hours earned had to be poured back into the press, their situation worsened. The work of running the press became ever less romantic as “the back-breaking as well as wrist-breaking” tasks wore on. Nancy loved printing—“everything about the craft seemed to me most interesting”—but neither she nor Henry had a head for business. Both of them tired of distribution, correspondence, and bookkeeping, which all “greatly added to the work of the ‘firm.’” Nancy’s bed was “always littered with papers . . . correspondence, proof-reading and accounts. . . . Work never seemed to stop.”
In 1930, The Hours moved to Paris, where Nancy took a long lease on a shop on rue Guénégaud, a steep side street around the corner from the surrealists’ main gallery on the Left Bank, and she and Henry took rooms at separate, but nearby, hotels. Back in the city, Nancy increased her pace to a fever pitch. “The shop,” a friend remembered, “had an hysterical atmosphere. Nancy could never rest. . . . The clock did not exist for her; in town she dashed in and out of taxis clutching an attaché case crammed with letters, manifestoes, estimates, circulars and her latest African bangle, and she was always several hours late for any appointment.” Unsure of her next move, she became reckless as well. According to a later account by Henry Crowder, she initiated affairs with two other black men, one white woman, and a young white man roughly half her age named Raymond Michelet. “It was an absurd life,” Michelet recalled. “She lunched with one, passed the afternoon with
the other, dined with the first, and spent the night with the second. In each, she went to the limit.”
Nancy and Henry stayed together on and off until 1935, in spite of all their troubles. Her attitude toward monogamy humiliated him and left him bitter, although he had been married when they met and remained married throughout their affair. In later years he would claim that Nancy had taken advantage of her race and class privileges first to seduce him and subsequently to bully him into accepting their “peculiar association.” For her part, Nancy never had an unkind word to say about Crowder and always credited him with opening blackness for her. “Henry made me,” she said.
The more demanding and difficult Henry became, the more Nancy tried to honor and placate him. She now embarked on an ambitious project designed to highlight what she insisted were his latent skills as a natural composer. She arranged for him to set poems by some of her most successful and prominent friends—Richard Aldington, Walter Lowenfels, Harold Acton, and Samuel Beckett—to music. She would contribute a poem as well, she promised. To devote more time to the project, she turned the press over to an associate, Wyn Henderson, and she and Henry drove off—“very fast”—to southern France in Henry’s blue sports car, “The Bullet,” renting a tiny cottage and a small upright piano that had to be brought in with an oxcart. There they completed the volume, Henry Music, in one intense month of nonstop work, and Nancy arranged for Man Ray to do the cover: a photomontage of her African art collection and a photo of Henry, with Nancy’s bangle-draped arms covering his shoulders like exaggerated epaulets. Man Ray’s cover opened out to reveal an array of African art and instruments, above which floated Henry’s face. The message that Nancy intended was clear: Henry was the modern embodiment of all that was best in the African legacy, all that Nancy loved most. The book was printed in a small, elegant edition of 150 copies. On Nancy’s copy Henry inscribed “To describe requires one with more linguistic capabilities than I possess. She is the one rare exquisite person existent. I love her I adore her. She is everything to me. I wish her happiness and eternal life.” Once the project was over, however, Henry returned to his discontent. Nancy was “at a loose end” again.
The truth is that Nancy Cunard and Henry Crowder were ill suited to each other. Without the attraction of racial difference, which was a powerful pull for both of them, they would probably never have come together at all. Nancy was explosive, impulsive, and conflict-driven. Henry was controlled, reserved, and profoundly averse to conflict. As she put it, he was “a most wary and prudent man . . . who often said: ‘Opinion reserved!’ Whereas to me, nothing—nor opinion nor emotion nor love nor hate—could be ‘reserved’ for one instant.” Both sought advantages from crossing race lines. Nancy almost certainly gave Henry too much credit for introducing “a whole world to me . . . and two continents: Afro-America and Africa” (considering that she had introduced Henry to African arts and culture, not the other way around). And Henry, just as certainly, gave Nancy too little credit for paving his way and making him comfortable in a “whole world” to which, otherwise, he would have had little access.
Henry disappointed Nancy politically most of all. He had no interest in politics, did not keep up with what was happening in the United States, and showed no eagerness to do so, even when pushed by Nancy. Instead of relying on Henry, she had to undertake her own self-education. Learning everything there was to know about blackness was no easy task. But she created a rigorous course of self-study, modeled on her experience as a lifelong autodidact. She subscribed to all major—and many minor—black American periodicals and had them shipped to her in France. She ordered—and sometimes borrowed—every book by black writers she could locate. Found at her death were folders of black poetry, culled from many sources and carefully retyped and filed. All were poems of militancy and protest, including Claude McKay’s famous call to arms “If We Must Die,” Will Sexton’s “The New Negro,” Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask,” and others.
Shortly after meeting Henry, Nancy wrote a poem that built on that file. She called it her “battle hymn” and dedicated it to Henry. Published in various places under the titles “1930” and “Equatorial Way,” it speaks in the voice of a black man who “says a fierce farewell” to America and threatens to “tear the Crackers limb from limb” as “vengeance . . . for the days I’ve slaved.” He heads for “an Africa that should be his”:
Go-ing . . . Go-ing . . .
. . .
I dont mean your redneck-farms,
I dont mean your Jim-Crow trains,
I mean Gaboon—
I dont mean your cotton lands,
Ole-stuff coons in Dixie bands,
I’ve said Gaboon—
. . .
Last advice to the crackers:
Bake your own white meat –
Last advice to the lynchers:
Hang your brother by the feet.
Imagining this point of view helped Nancy feel “the agonies of the Negroes.” That others might see her assumption of the man’s voice as presumptuous, even offensive, did not occur to her. To her, it made perfect sense that she could be the vessel through which “the Negro speaks.” The poem was the opening composition of Henry Music. Under various titles she republished it as often, and in as many places, as she could.
Around that time, Nancy also had a series of photographs taken by the British photographer Barbara Ker-Seymer. Though more famous photos of Nancy exist, taken by her friends Cecil Beaton and Man Ray, none of them is more interesting than the Ker-Seymer series. Ker-Seymer’s photographs are solarized, or printed in reverse, so that Nancy appears black and everything around her white. Some of the photographs depict Nancy with dozens of strands of beads wound about her long, thin neck, as if she were being lynched or strangled. In the photos, Nancy becomes not just an exotic object, a New Woman, an iconic flapper, or an icon of modernism. She becomes a “white negress,” whose agonized expressions and constrained postures signal a “bonding” with her black targets of identification.
Nancy Cunard solarized by Barbara Ker-Seymer.
Through her “battle hymn” and the photo series, Nancy was developing the politics of racial identification that would guide the rest of her life and that she had been moving toward since, as a six-year-old, she had dreamed of Africa. She had never believed that race was in the blood or biologically determined. She did not need to locate—or invent—remote black ancestors to claim a black identity. “As for wishing for some of it [blood] to be Coloured, no; that’s beyond me. That, somehow, I have NOT got in me—not the American part of it. But the AFRICAN part, ah, that is my ego, my soul.” Affiliation or affinity, not blood or lineage, Nancy felt, enabled her to “speak as if I were a Negro myself.” She was black, or partly black, she believed, because she felt herself to be so. What seemed so complicated to other people was, for Nancy, straightforward. “I like them [blacks] because I seem to understand them,” she declared. For those who truly care about others, Nancy wrote, “the tragedies of suffering humanity become as their own.” Feeling as strongly as she did about Africa meant, to Nancy, that she was part African and that giving expression to the realities of black life was her mission or calling. Volunteering for blackness seemed to her a necessary act, not an arrogant or appropriative one.
Contemporary critics have been quick to dismiss Nancy’s view as a refusal “to acknowledge her race and class privilege” and an attempt “to escape the privileged claustrophobia of her background through an identification with black diasporic and African cultures.” For that, Nancy would have probably had a ready answer. Her identification with blacks did not fail to acknowledge her privileges, she might have pointed out, but rather cost her those privileges. Once it became clear which side she was on—and she made sure that no one could be left guessing—she did not have to escape from her claustrophobic background; rather, that world firmly closed its doors to her. She welcomed that exile, moreover, actively courting it. Announcing her affiliative ide
ntity, she might have countered, had changed her identity as a white woman and made her something else.
Nancy’s challenge to available ideas of identity and race was more complex than it might seem. She was, in effect, throwing down a high-stakes gauntlet: if you did not believe that race was permanently in the blood, immutable and fixed, then on what grounds, she asked, could she be denied the right to “speak as if I were a Negro” and be “one of them, though still white”? If identity was not affiliative and voluntary, an act of desire and choice, then what, exactly, was it? Was there an alternative to affiliation that did not fall back, ultimately, on the old, worn-out ideas of essence and blood?
Nancy Cunard did not take the idea of voluntary identity lightly. It was not sufficient, she believed, to passively announce one’s identification with the Other. A person had to invite conflict and rage, had to risk being thrown out of white society for her choice. That risk taking and publicity, she believed, made a voluntary switch more than just imaginary; it put the volunteer in the shoes, to some extent at least, of those with whom she identified.
Given Nancy’s goals, a break with her family was inevitable. According to Nancy, her mother, Lady Cunard, knew of her affair with Henry Crowder as early as 1928 but pretended ignorance as long as she could. Finally, on a cold December day in 1930, at her home in Grosvenor Square, one of her lunch guests, Margot Asquith, Countess of Oxford, leaned forward confidentially across the vast dining table. “What is it now?” she asked Maud. “Drink, drugs, or niggers?” Confronted with public knowledge that Nancy had been living openly with Henry for the past two years, Lady Cunard flew into hysterics: “the hysteria caused by a difference of pigmentation,” Nancy called it. She attempted to have Nancy and Henry, then in London, arrested. She tried to have Henry deported from England to America. She enlisted friends to intercede with Nancy and beg her to leave Crowder. Finally she made it known that Nancy would be disinherited if she did not toe the line.
