by Carla Kaplan
288 “began to be drawn towards”: Cunard, Grand Man, 140.
288 $83 million: The Consumer Price Index, on July 31, 2010, provided a conversion factor of 0.041 for 1895; Chisholm provides the figure of $83 million, Nancy Cunard, 6.
289 “heyday of Anglo-American society marriage”: Scholars date the custom of marrying “socially hungry American wives” in search of “position and esteem” to “impoverished but titled Englishmen” from 1874, with the marriage of Jennie Jerome to Lord Randolph Churchill. See Eliot, They All Married Well.
289 “darkly paneled”: Chisholm, Nancy Cunard, 10.
289 “incompatibility of the couple’s tastes”: Chisholm, Nancy Cunard, 11. Maud may have hoped to lure Bache away from Nevill Holt. But he disliked travel, except for a summer hunting month in Scotland, preferring to stay home near his studio, built at the top of one of the old towers, where he spent hours—sometimes days—happily engaged in elaborate and detailed metalworking. Nancy later remembered him as “thoroughly conservative in his ideas” but “manually an ingenious, gifted man,” a side of him that almost no one but Nancy knew.
289 “a low thing—the lowest”: Chisholm, Nancy Cunard, 12.
289 occupying more square footage: Flanner, “Nancy Cunard,” in BPIR, 87.
290 “men in armour”: Cunard, G.M.: Memories of George Moore, 21.
290 “It seems fantastic”: Cunard, G.M.: Memories of George Moore, 22.
290 “Not allowed a step out”: Cunard, G.M.: Memories of George Moore, 49.
290 “longed for friends”: Fielding, Those Remarkable Cunards, 15.
290 “Like most Edwardian society parents”: Fielding, Those Remarkable Cunards, 15.
290 “a strange, solitary child”: Fielding, Those Remarkable Cunards, 14.
290 “Somehow I felt”: Cunard, G.M.: Memories of George Moore, 22.
290 “sullen-hearted”: Cunard, “Toulannaise,” in Cunard, Sublunary.
290 “my capacity for happiness was starved”: Nancy Cunard, 1919 diary, Nancy Cunard Papers, HRC.
290 “the nearest thing to a Salon”: “The Season in Town,” Sketch, March 29, 1922, scrapbook 1913–1921, Box 26, Folder 1, Nancy Cunard Papers, HRC.
291 “fashionable beauties”: Press clipping, scrapbook 1913–21, Box 26, Folder 1, Nancy Cunard Papers, HRC.
291 “Her hobby in life”: Chisholm, Nancy Cunard, 35.
291 “goldy bride”: Press clippings, scrapbook 1913–21, Box 26, Folder 1, HRC.
291 her mother’s lover: Cunard, GM, 40. Nancy lived all her life with rumors, which she did little to dissuade, that George Moore was her real father. Moore would never definitively confirm or deny the rumors.
293 “These die obscure”: Cunard, “Soldiers Fallen in Battle.”
293 “wasteful, wanton, foolish, bold”: Cunard, “Wheels,” reprinted in BPIR, 1916. Lois Gordon reads this as a poem about Nancy’s fear of aging. See Gordon, Nancy Cunard, 49.
293 “live while others die for us”: Cunard, “War,” Outlaws, 29.
293 “Were I not myself”: Nancy Cunard to Solita Solano, LOC, quoted in Gordon, Nancy Cunard, 124.
293 “equality of races”: Nancy Cunard, notebook, 1956, Nancy Cunard Papers, HRC.
293 “How hidden and remote”: Nancy Cunard, diary, 1919, Chisholm, Nancy Cunard, 49.
293 There were a number of salons: Hansen, Expatriate Paris.
294 “knew everybody”: Flanner, “Nancy Cunard,” BPIR, 88.
294 “half the poets and novelists”: BPIR, 73.
294 She was photographed, armored: Fielding, Those Remarkable Cunards, 74.
294 “toast of the twenties”: The Evening Standard, quoted in Gordon, Nancy Cunard, 371.
295 “Their manners, exalting high-mindedness”: Gordon, Nancy Cunard, 45. As Nancy’s friend Bryher put it, “Those rebels were no more free from the conventions that they fastened upon themselves than a group of old ladies gossiping over their knitting.”
295 “Why the smarming”: Nancy Cunard, “Memories” notebook, HRC.
295 “To hell with those days!”: Walter Lowenfels, “Nancy Cunard,” BPIR, 91; Cunard, Grand Man, 70–71.
295 a remarkable collection: My description of Nancy’s collection is drawn from multiple sources, including a report from NAACP field secretary Pickens, “African Art in Cunard’s Home,” 5. For years Nancy kept elaborate notebooks filled with meticulous notes for a planned (but never published) book on African ivories: carved tusks from Benin, masks from the Congo, Abyssinian women’s “aprons,” call-horns, “pounders,” and sculptures, carefully illustrated with Nancy’s small, detailed ink drawings. Cunard, notebooks, Box 5, Folder 7, HRC.
295 bracelet collection: Lois Gordon reported the collection at 1,000 pieces. According to Nancy, after her French farmhouse was ransacked by Nazi sympathizers, only 170 of her bracelets remained, some of which she scavenged by scrabbling in the dirt with her hands. See also Cunard, These Were the Hours, ed. with a foreword by Ford, 26–27, 203, 198–208.
295 “the sand, the dunes”: Cunard, Grand Man, 140.
295 “vital life-theme”: Nancy Cunard to Arthur Schomburg, n.d., Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations (hereafter abbreviated Schomburg). See also Cunard, “Black Man and White Ladyship” in Moynagh, ed., on the importance of human “contact” versus the “unreal ” socializing of aristocrats.
295 “tom-toms beating”: Goffin, “Hot Jazz,” in Negro, ed. Cunard, 378.
295 “one of them, though still white”: Cunard, Grand Man, 140.
296 “Nancy had a very advanced”: Hiler, “Introductory,” BPIR, 35.
296 “common sense”: Cunard, “Does Anyone Know Any Negroes?,” 301.
296 “One should learn how to live”: Nancy Cunard to Solita Solano, LOC.
297 “speak as if I were a Negro”: Cunard to Mrs. Davies, March 20 [1931], HRC.
297 “spirit of modern man”: Guillaume, “The Triumph of Ancient Negro Art,” 147.
297 Guillaume, one of primitivism’s most influential: “Guillaume,” Nancy wrote, “has probably the best collection [of African art] in the world—he is also very sympathetic and a good friend of the Negro.” Nancy Cunard to Arthur Schomburg, January 19 [between 1928 and 1930], Schomburg Papers, Schomburg.
297 “Black skin”: Nancy Cunard, Hate Mail [1932], HRC. See also Dreisinger, Near Black; Torgovnick, Gone Primitive.
297 “darkening your complexion”: Nancy Cunard, Hate Mail [1932], HRC.
298 “gone Negro”: Marcus, Hearts of Darkness, 139.
298 “White men have contributed”: Edgar W. Wiggins to Nancy Cunard, April 9, 1934, HRC.
298 “a sign of insanity”: Chisholm, Nancy Cunard, 319.
298 “incapable of restraint or discretion”: Chisholm, Nancy Cunard, xii.
298 “I find life quite impossible”: Nancy Cunard, diaries, 1919, HRC.
299 “an unfortunate faculty”: Moon, “Review.”
299 “liked to shock”: Chisholm, Nancy Cunard, xii.
300 “just another white woman”: Moon, “Review.”
300 “Nancy’s back, we’re in trouble”: Macpherson, “Ne Mai,” in BPIR, 348. Not only Nancy’s black friends felt that way. Sybille Bedford, who was white, wrote that “to us she was the friend one loved, whose arrival one often dreaded.” Bedford, Aldous Huxley: A Biography, 132.
300 abandoned by his mother: In 2008, a niece, Shirley Porter Washington, came forward to dispute the widely disseminated biography of Cullen. According to Washington’s self-published book, Cullen was born to a well-educated, elite New Orleans family. Countée Cullen’s Secret Revealed by Miracle Book. See, however, Molesworth, And Bid Him Sing, for a scholarly account of the known facts of Cullen’s life.
300 “one of my favorite folks”: Hughes to Cunard, June 2, 1954, HRC.
301 “all of them loved Nancy”: McPherson, “Ne Mai,” BPIR, 348.
301 “Among all of us in the
avant-garde”: Lowenfels, BPIR, 91.
301 Dorothy Peterson once asked: Hughes, The Big Sea, 252–53.
301 “black craze”: Shack, Harlem in Montmartre, xvi, 33, 38.
301 “Black was the color”: “Paris Beauties Kink Their Hair in Suki Glory,” quoted in Shack, Harlem in Montmartre, 38.
302 “swaying luxuriously”: Bald, “Montparnasse Today,” Vanity Fair, July 1932, 31, 58, quoted in Shack, Harlem in Montmartre, 40.
302 “astounding . . . wild-fire syncopation”: Cunard, Vogue, 1926, quoted in Ward, “The Electric Body.”
302 “encounters between black and white women”: Weiss, Paris Was a Woman, 23.
302 “glittering” costumes: Cunard, Grand Man, 83.
302 “A new element”: Cunard, Grand Man, 84.
302 “great good looks”: Cunard, Grand Man, 84, 86.
303 “My feeling for things African”: Cunard, Grand Man, 86.
303 “the sweetest woman I have ever known”: Chisholm, Nancy Cunard, 123.
303 “billing and circulars and parcels”: Cunard, Grand Man, 87.
303 The Hours was one of the most successful small presses: During the time that Nancy was running The Hours, from 1928 to 1931, she published works by George Moore, Norman Douglas, Ezra Pound, Louis Aragon, Robert Graves, Laura Riding, Samuel Beckett, Henry Crowder, and others. According to Hugh Ford, her total of two dozen or so published books “far exceeds the output of any other private press for a comparable period.” Ford, “Foreword,” in Cunard, These Were the Hours, viii.
303 “He has,” Richard Aldington said: Chisholm, Nancy Cunard, 130.
303 “the first Negro I had ever known”: Cunard, “Does Anyone Know Any Negroes?,” 300–1, quoted in Gordon, Nancy Cunard, 152.
303 “introduced me to the astonishing complexities”: Cunard, These Were the Hours, 26ff.
304 “astounded and revolted”: Cunard, “Does Anyone Know Any Negroes?,” 300.
304 “Her vast anger”: Solano, “Nancy Cunard,” BPIR, 77.
304 the usual royalties: Cunard, These Were the Hours, 13–14.
304 brief friendship with the wife: Crowder wrote that she “became quite fond of the drummer [Jerome Bourke]’s wife, an extremely beautiful colored girl who had travelled from America with us.” Crowder, As Wonderful as All That?, 68. (This memoir, written at the encouragement and with the assistance of editor Hugo Speck, was not published during Crowder’s—or Cunard’s—lifetime.)
304 “at a loose end”: Crowder, As Wonderful as All That?, 120.
305 “A snack now and then”: Acton, in BPIR, 74.
305 “the back-breaking”: Cunard, These Were the Hours, 16.
305 “always littered with papers”: Cunard, Grand Man, 92.
305 “The shop”: Acton, in BPIR, 74.
305 she initiated affairs: Crowder, As Wonderful as All That?
305 “It was an absurd life”: Michelet, “Nancy Cunard,” excerpt translated by Chisholm, Nancy Cunard, 172. Published first in French as Michelet, “Nancy Cunard,” in BPIR, 127–32.
306 “Henry made me”: Nancy Cunard to Charles Burkhart, April 24, 1955, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Nancy’s copy of Negro is at HRC.
307 “a most wary” . . . “Afro-America and Africa”: Thorne, “A Share of Nancy,” in BPIR, 295.
307 a rigorous course of self study: One “childhood diary” from 1910, for example, outlines a study plan of nine books a month, including works by Kingsley, Shelley, Schiller, Goldsmith, Molière, Shakespeare, Dickens, Aeschylus, and Chaucer, as well as the Book of Job, the Book of Esther, and more. Nancy was sixteen at the time.
307 poems of militancy and protest: Her folder of “Negro poetry copies from various sources, 1920s,” for example, includes many poems on lynching, Africa, the slave trade, and civil rights. Nancy Cunard scrapbooks, Box 22, Folder 5, HRC.
308 “battle hymn”: Cunard, These Were the Hours, 149.
308 “tear the Crackers”: Cunard, These Were the Hours, 149. Published in The Crisis, Henry Music, and elsewhere.
308 “agonies of the Negroes”: Cunard, These Were the Hours, 26.
308 “the Negro speaks”: Cunard, draft of advertisement for proposed “symposium of poetry,” never published, HRC.
309 “white negress”: Marcus, “Bonding and Bondage,” in Borders, Boundaries, and Frames, ed. Henderson, 48. See also Marcus, Hearts of Darkness. Marcus’s forthcoming left-feminist biography of Nancy Cunard will differ from previous accounts.
310 “As for wishing”: Nancy Cunard to Clyde Robinson, September 25, 1961, quoted in Ford, Introduction to Cunard, Negro, abridged edition, n. 4, xii.
310 “I like them [blacks]”: Quoted in “Girl’s Fight for Negroes,” Ceylon Observer, July 30, 1933, clipping file, HRC.
310 “the tragedies of suffering humanity”: Cunard, “Three Negro Poets,” 355.
310 “to acknowledge”: Winkiel, “Nancy Cunard’s Negro and the Transnational Politics of Race,” 508, 510.
311 “What is it now?”: This story was already famous in its day, and many accounts of it exist, some told by luncheon guests and others by Nancy’s friends. See, e.g., Fielding, Those Remarkable Cunards, 104, and Lowenfels, “Nancy Cunard,” in BPIR, 92. Nancy’s own account appears in various versions, including in “Black Man and White Ladyship,” reprinted in Moynagh, ed. Essays on Race and Empire.
311 “the hysteria caused”: Cunard, “Black Man and White Ladyship,” 182.
311 “friendships between whites”: Cunard, “Does Anyone Know Any Negroes?,” 301.
312 “the most repulsive conception”: Spanish newspaper, quoted in Morris, This Loving Darkness, 28–29.
312 British Union of Fascists: Both Oswald Mosley and Diana later—to Nancy’s great delight—spent time in London’s Holloway prison for their fascist activities. When they were to be let out of prison early, Nancy joined with many others to protest their release.
312 “She was democratic”: Burkhart, Herman and Nancy and Ivy, 17.
313 “so hyper-sensitive” . . . “Totally baffling”: Cunard, These Were the Hours, 128–29.
313 “I intend to devote my life”: as quoted in clipping, “Two First-Class Families,” Nancy Cunard clipping file, HRC.
313 “collective lunacy”: Cunard, “On Colour Bar,” 172.
314 “not unparalleled”: Cunard, “Scottsboro and Other Scottsboros,” in Negro, ed. Cunard, 245.
314 “the indignation, the fury”: Nancy Cunard to Hugh Ford, March 1, 1963, fragment (last page missing), HRC.
314 “it looked like blackbirds”: Walter Ballard, interview, www.livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe30s/movies/ballard_water_07.html.
314 Good manners and emotional reserve: Her father, Bache, assiduously avoided all emotional expressiveness, while her mother got away with speaking her mind in society by developing her own “acute sense of social propriety.” Fielding, Those Remarkable Cunards, 99.
315 “It is only by fighting”: Cunard, “Scottsboro and Other Scottsboros,” in Negro, ed. Cunard, 269.
315 “The facts please”: Thorne, in BPIR, 293.
315 “extremist in words”: Duff, in BPIR, 188.
315 “delightful manners”: Harper, “A Few Memories,” in BPIR, 343.
315 “to avoid antagonizing Southern prejudice”: Ransdell, “Report on the Scottsboro, Ala., Case,” May 27, 1931, typescript, http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scottsboro/Scottsbororeport.pdf.
315 “pig-headed”: Miller, Remembering Scottsboro, 33.
315 “would make saving”: “Reds Take Charge of Boys’ Defense,” New York Amsterdam News, January 6, 1932, 1, 3.
316 “the nasty propaganda potential”: Wedin, Inheritors of the Spirit, 87, 99.
316 “the struggle for Negro rights” . . . dancing classes: Naison, Communists in Harlem, 46, 47, 137.
316 “The Communists”: Cunard, “Reactionary,” in Negro, ed. Cunard, 146.
316 “a new spirit”: Cunard, “Reactiona
ry,” in Negro, ed. Cunard, 147.
317 “Throughout the 1920s”: Naison, Communists in Harlem, 3, 21.
317 The weekly Amsterdam News: Matusevich, “‘Harlem Globe-Trotters,’” in The Harlem Renaissance Revisited, ed. Ogbar, 230; Editorial, Amsterdam News, February 9, 1935; see also Naison, Communists in Harlem, 136–37.
317 “bitter lot”: McKay, Harlem: Negro Metropolis, 234.
317 “the wrong kind of pride”: Cunard, “Harlem Reviewed,” in Negro, ed. Cunard, 68, 73.
318 “white man’s niggers”: Cunard, “Reactionary,” 147.
318 “one of the most spectacular and curious parties”: F. G. H. Salusbury, “Miss Nancy Cunard’s Exotic Party to Champion the ‘Martyred Negroes,’” HRC.
318 the 1920s suntanning craze: Mighall, “A History of Tanning.” Suntanning was partly a rebellion against the use of parasols, gloves, and white powder (and for many a rebellion against clothes altogether, since sunbathers were often associated with nudism).
319 “tropically hot”: Daily Mail, clipping marked July 10, 1933, HRC.
319 “hate[s] so many white people”: “Girl Who Hates ‘So Many White People,’” The Daily Express, July 6, 1933, clipping, HRC; reprinted as “Girl’s Fight for Negroes,” Ceylon Observer, July 30, 1933, clipping, HRC.
319 “Miss Cunard’s attitude”: “Party Given by Miss Cunard at London Hotel,” Daily Gleaner, July 22, 1933, HRC.
319 “scoundrel”: Cunard to Schomburg, March 14 [1935], Schomburg Papers, Schomburg.
319 “unbearable” . . . “comforting”: Patterson to Cunard, February 22, 1937, HRC.
319 “Dearest”: James Threadgill to Nancy Cunard, September 3, 1954, HRC.
319 “not really thinking of anything else”: Quoted in Chisholm, Nancy Cunard, 209.
320 “is Negro”: Nancy Cunard, circular advertisement for Color, HRC.
320 “possessed”: Cunard, Grand Man, 97.
320 “Imagine, a Negro man”: Crowder, As Wonderful as All That?, 133.
321 “He would not even join her”: Chisholm, Nancy Cunard, 212.
321 “fantasies . . . [of] black innocence”: George Schuyler, “Views and Reviews,” December 2, 1933.
