Nevertheless, Cunard’s admiration of Eliot’s poem ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’ initially drew her to him, though their ‘affair’ was short-lived and judging from her portrayal in The Waste Land it is not difficult to guess why: Eliot clearly paints Cunard as predatory. Yet their loose friendship appears to have been significant enough for him to gift Cunard a handwritten copy of his poem ‘Gerontion’, the first and more innocuous appearance of Lady Fresca, which she treasured for decades.
Cunard’s earliest published poems were written at the start of World War I. Some of these appeared in The Eton College Chronicle between 1915 and 1916, then edited by Cunard’s cousin Victor Cunard. ‘Prayer’ is her very first published poem, a sort of individualist anti-prayer for self-preservation: ‘Oh God, make me incapable of prayer, / Too brave for supplication’. The nine-line poem uncannily prophecies her legacy as a writer, editor and activist: ‘Make me symbolically iconoclast, / The ideal Antichrist, the Paradox.’ Her two sonnets ‘Soldiers Fallen in Battle’ and ‘Sonnet’, published together in June 1916, reflect her wartime anguish more generally, but also personally for those friends who never returned from the Front: ‘all men soon forget that they are dead, / And their dumb names unwrit on memory’s page.’ Like the war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, Cunard criticises the living as ‘the morning crowd, / Who walked like hypocrites, with bare heads bowed.’ Sometimes her wartime sense of exasperation and despair was self-directed, as in her poem ‘Remorse’, published in Edith Sitwell’s 1916 Wheels anthology (named after Cunard’s poem of the same title). Describing herself as ashamed and silent, Cunard begins, ‘I have been wasteful, wanton, foolish, bold’. Already one senses her political consciousness and her emerging disconnect with the values of ‘civilised’ society brewing in these poems and in her first two poetry collections, Outlaws (1921) and Sublunary (1923). A review of Wheels in the Times Literary Supplement notes the ‘dark and boding phantoms’ oppressing Cunard’s mind – other contributors to the first (of six) cycle of Wheels include the three Sitwells, Iris Tree, Helen Rootham and James Arnold. The TLS reviewer also notes the volume’s pervasive lack of hope in the present and future. According to Cunard’s biographer, a combination of ‘survivor’s guilt’ on seeing wounded soldiers returning from the Front and the death of one of Cunard’s lovers (a Grenadier Guards officer named Peter Broughton Adderly with whom she had a five-day romance) most probably led Cunard to suddenly and ill-advisedly marry a soldier with whom she had little in common. Nancy Cunard and Sydney Fairbairn, an Australian officer also in the Guards, married on November 15, 1916. They separated twenty months later and divorced finally in 1925.7
Cast into the ring with Cunard’s later work, her first two fulllength collections are comparatively sentimental and at times archaic, making use of inverted syntax, emotive personifications of ‘Death’, ‘Night’, ‘Love’, ‘Joy’, ‘Time’ and ‘Sin’, as well as traditional form (the sonnet) and regular end-rhyme. Although images of romance, loss, and modern warfare run throughout Outlaws, Cunard hadn’t yet found a modern language to transmit the horrors of conflict.
And yet we live while others die for us;
Live in the glory of sweet summer, still
Knowing not death, but knowing that life will
Be merciless to them – and so to us.
Blood lies too rich on many battlefields,
Too many crowns are made for solemn sorrow;
We rise from weeping, and the cruel morrow
Has nought, but to a further sorrow yields.
(from ‘War’)
As she wrote to Pound, many years later in 1946, excoriating him at length for his Fascism, she would learn from her war experience and exposure to battle that ‘War is not abstract.’8
In 1920 Cunard left London to live in Paris. Much of Sublunary is set in France – Paris and Provence – and the Basque region of northern Spain. In 1922, after a serious illness that led to a hysterectomy, she set off on a walking tour of Southern France with Ezra Pound, who had visited her in Paris during her convalescence. Only two letters from Pound survive in Cunard’s archive: one from the 1930s addressed intimately to ‘Avril’ (as he called her), and another from his incarceration at St Elizabeth’s Hospital in response to Cunard’s vocal disgust for his Italian radio broadcasts. Cunard and Pound became lovers in 1922, and her biographer rightly reads Sublunary as reflective of Cunard’s adoration of him and his connection to the French landscape.9
‘Shall We Forget?’ indicates the tenuousness of their brief affair, already anticipating separation – Pound was by this time married to Dorothy Shakespear and living with her in Rapallo.
When we must go our ways no more together
After this shortening time that love has given
Our hearts to meet, remember that day of driven
And wayward rains, soft lulls in the wild weather,
And we on the road, full-hearted with mute lips
Masking the sorrow each should have of each
Once all things told. […]
Although their ‘delicate vow of love’ is ‘wrought with uncertainty’, this and other poems in Sublunary, such as ‘The April Hour’, suggest that their journey, the cyclical seasons, and the renewed promises of spring ordain their fated union.
‘From Afar’ and ‘I Think of You’ date from Cunard’s separation from Pound later that year and are absorbed by nostalgia and solitude. And Sublunary marks a departure of another kind: Cunard’s poetry after 1923 shifts towards more of what she would refer to as an ‘experimental’ (and, by her definition, non-commercial) poetics, which she aimed to foster through the Hours Press. Although contemporary readers may see Parallax and her poems written during the 1940s as invested in conventional syntax and meaning, traces of high modernist and avant-garde lineation, attention to high and low forms of diction, polyvocality, itinerancy and intertextual allusion point most convincingly to echoes of Eliot’s The Waste Land and to the influence of French Surrealism and the political, temporal inflections of some modernist poetry. Even Sublunary’s ‘Ballad of 5 Rue De L’Etoile’ strongly echoes Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’.
I’ll tell you how the women come and go,
Seemly and neat – for love will have it so;
Love that must climb some narrow midnight stair
Up several floors, demands good comfort there,
And comfort finding maybe will return –
After Sublunary Cunard finally abandons this hesitant, sentimental aesthetic and comes of age: ‘I am in years almost the century’s child, / At grips with still the same uncertainty / That was attendant to me at the school.’ (‘Adolescence’) In the coming years, and through experiences of war and injustice, she would level her poetic aims away from the personal and her own past in order to give voice to those suffering social and political crisis.
Virginia and Leonard Woolf advised Cunard against starting her own publishing press unless she did not mind her hands always being black with printer’s ink. Cunard wrote in her memoir, These Were the Hours, ‘This seemed no deterrent. And it was with curiosity I looked at my black and greasy hands after the first go with the inking table.’10 When it came to publishing Parallax in 1925, two years after having typeset the Hogarth edition of The Waste Land (1923) and long after Virginia’s famous struggle with Hope Mirrlees’s complex typography in Paris (1920), the Woolfs were well prepared for the poem’s long lines and liberal spacing. Reviewers of Parallax noted the poem’s self-confessed similarity with Eliot’s work: ‘T. S. Eliot is the first who heard the new music in its full harmony. Miss Cunard has caught strains of it too. She is not piping over again Mr Eliot’s tune [but] adding her own motifs and orchestration to the general theme.’ The same reviewer notes that Cunard displays an understanding of the ‘zeitgeist’.11 The Nation’s reviewer also noted the example of Eliot’s poem but argued for Parallax’s individuality and subtle emotionality. Indeed, the Eliotic echoes are present and unmasked, and bot
h poems move through space and time with a similar expressive restlessness (some of which Pound edited out of The Waste Land). The idea of parallax – the appearence of movement in external objects caused by the movement of the viewer – is an apt metaphor for the movement of Cunard’s speaker through cities and rural landscapes. Following the ‘poet-fool’ through the streets of London, then south through France and Italy, the drift (and backward drift to London, ‘the hideous wall, the jail of what I am’) re-treads Cunard’s move away from England and her travels with (and without, but longing for) Pound. Cunard’s many Eliotic constructions of postwar London include:
By the Embankment I counted the grey gulls
Nailed to the wind above a distorted tide.
On discreet waters
In Battersea I drifted, acquiescent.
We encounter the Prufrockian rhythms of Cunard’s repeated ‘immortal Question’ amid the mundane
Habit of days,
The yawning visits, the forced revisitations.
Oh very much the same, these faces and places,
These meals and conversations […]
[…]
‘Hail partner, that went as I
In towns, in wastes – I, shadow,
Meet with you – I that have walked with recording eyes
Through a rich bitter world, and seen
The heart close with the brain, the brain crossed by the heart –
I that have made, seeing all,
Nothing, and nothing kept, nor understood
Of the empty hands, the hands impotent through time that lift and fall
Along a question – […]’
Startlingly concrete images (‘Two old women drinking on a cellar floor / Huddled, with a beerish look at the scavenging rat’) anchor the listless motion of the wandering poet engaged in the struggle between life, art, and nihilism. Crucially, a fluidity of pronouns and perspectives reappears throughout Cunard’s work but takes on a wider purpose as it becomes more overtly political. As Jane Dowson has written, referring to Cunard’s poem ‘Wheels’, ‘she bridges personal and public discourses by moving between first person singular and plural’.12
After the 1930s, Cunard’s poetry blurs the personal and political in a way that anticipates postwar protest and feminist poetry especially. Parallax, and her poems from World War II and the Spanish Civil War, are the best measure of Cunard’s poetic genius, even though her published and unpublished work after 1925 would, until now, remain largely uncollected. Carefully preserved drafts and hand-bound manuscripts of these early poems contrast sharply with the state of Cunard’s later work in her archive, attesting to the relative instability of those years.
The years after 1927 are characterised by Cunard’s enormous Negro anthology project (1934), the Hours Press, her war journalism for various newspapers including despatches on Mussolini’s annexation of Abyssinia for the American Negro Press and Spanish Civil War reports for the Manchester Guardian, and increasingly feverish international travel. Already inspired by Surrealism and its attraction to African ‘primitive’ art, Cunard set out to publish (by hand, on a two-hundred-year-old Belgian Mathieu press) ‘contemporary poetry of an experimental kind – always very modern things, short pieces of fine quality that, by their nature, might have difficulty in finding commercial publishers’.13 In 1929, struggling with the rural inconveniences of the farmhouse Le Puits Carré in La Chappelle-Réanville, Cunard moved the Hours Press to Paris, renting a small shop on the Rue Guenégaud, a minor street near the Left Bank’s Rue de Seine. There she fell quickly into an active literary and artistic community, which included her lover Louis Aragon, whose meetings took place in local cafés Les Deux Magots and Café Flore, or at the Gallerie Surrealiste in the nearby Rue Jacques Callot. The Gallerie sold works by Francis Picabia, Picasso, Miro, Klee, Tanguy and Man Ray, as well as fetish objects and masks from Africa and Oceania. Cunard credits her fascination with African art to the abstract painter and photographer Curtis Moffat (husband of Iris Tree) who, around 1921, introduced her to what would become a life-long obsession. In her memoir of the Hours Press, Cunard recalls Arthur Symons bringing the sexologist Havelock Ellis to dine at her apartment on the Ile St Louis in 1926; she describes a then-unknown Samuel Beckett’s submission to her publication prize; she lovingly recounts seeing many of her books from manuscript to the finished product. These years, which saw her tireless, expert production of the Press’s twenty-four books and pamphlets by Ezra Pound (A Draft of X X X Cantos), Richard Aldington, Samuel Beckett (Whoroscope), Laura Riding, Robert Graves, and Havelock Ellis (The Revaluation of Obscenity), were among Cunard’s most productive and happiest.
From the late 1920s Nancy Cunard’s authorial self and poetic consciousness formulated itself in response to internationalism, cultural and racial otherness, as well as a strong rejection of the values of her social class and ‘home’ nation. Much of her activism has its origins in the political movements taken up by certain avant-gardes in the postwar generation, including her exposure to Aragon’s interest in Communism (which Cunard did not subscribe to, ever suspicious of ideologies). However, it was the ‘race question’ in the United States that seems to have ultimately galvanised her passion for social justice. The complex and controversial publication history of Cunard’s Negro anthology in 1934 – with its stated aim to record ‘the struggles and achievements, the persecutions and the revolts’ largely against ‘the black race’ in America and Europe – is well documented. One hundred and fifty voices contributed to the anthology in an editorial process that saw Cunard zig-zagging the Atlantic (from Europe to the United States and the West Indies) in support of her project. Negro included historical resources from the beginning of the slave trade to its abolition as well as expressions of black culture, religious belief and political aims produced by leading black writers and thinkers such as W. E. B. Dubois, James W. Ford, George Padmore, and Zora Neale Hurston, alongside several sympathetic white poets and writers. Designed as an indictment of America’s legal and social divisions between races, and the legacy of transatlantic slavery, Cunard’s book was meant to lead onto a second (unfulfilled) project: a poetry anthology titled Revolution – the Negro Speaks.
Presumably an expansion on the poetry from Negro by black poets (such as Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes), Revolution intended to celebrate ‘the triumphant solution in the Russian Soviets of race and class questions’ and to denounce ‘rival imperialisms and parallel class struggles’ at the heart of racial oppression worldwide. Her call for submissions reads:
Your Collaboration is wanted to make a short Symposium of Poetry: “Revolution – the Negro Speaks”
Oppressed, despoiled, weighted down with the lies of his savagery and inferiority – since the first contacts of white men with black – slave at first, victim now, witness of rival imperialisms and parallel class-struggles, witness also of the triumphant solution in the Russian Soviets of race and class questions, the new Negro of today… how else than a revolutionary-born can he be?
Let us make a record of the Negro’s rising spirit against oppression. That this may have shape, and be more than an atmosphere of revolt, let us make it as much as possible a collection of poems inspired by some revolutionary event, some phase of the struggle in Negro history, past and present.
Free verse, sonnet, ballad, lyric or folk-poem – no matter the form – but a call to freedom, now, or in the past.
“Poets are the Trumpets that sing to Battle”
No Poem should be longer than two typed pages at most.
The editor’s aim is to publish this volume at a very popular price – if possible at 1 / or 25 cents – and as soon as enough poems have come in to make a record, for today and for tomorrow, of the Negro’s struggle for equal rights.
Please send a poem or poems to
Nancy Cunard, Co Lloyds, 43 Boulevard des Capucines, Paris, France14
Cunard’s tone is undoubtedly odd – who were the intended contributors? One can’t he
lp but feel that the shape of her projected revolutionary history ought to have been determined by the revolutionaries themselves. One feels similarly about the strangely pre-determined space of the Negro anthology – a detailed analysis and critique of the Scottsboro case (discussed below), and similar cases of racist injustice, is published alongside a highly personal and somewhat predatory essay by the American poet William Carlos Williams about being sexually attracted in his youth to his overly sexualised, permissive black servant girl. It has also been pointed out – justly – that Cunard’s self-fetishising image, replete with ‘tribal’ headgear and jewellery, exceeds the reasonable limits of fashion by purposefully staging photographs in poses that imply victimisation and bondage; when the photographer Barbara Ker Seymer produces a negative photographic print of Cunard, in which her whiteness is turned black, this again seems purposeful and self-annihilating.
Like Alain Locke’s New Negro published nearly ten years earlier, Negro was originally designed as a celebration of black art and literature but soon became an indictment of America’s racial divisions, as well as a direct response to the infamous Scottsboro rape case. In 1931, a group of African American boys were falsely accused of raping two white women on a train in Alabama. Speedy trials and death sentences were handed out to the boys, in spite of a clear lack of evidence. The Scottsboro trial quickly became an international symbol of race hatred in the United States, in particular in segregated Southern ‘Jim Crow’ states. Cunard penned an exhaustive study of the trial, stating that ‘the Scottsboro case is not such an astounding and unbelievable thing as it must, as it certainly does, appear to the public at large.’ Contrasting it to cases of judicial racism with outwardly political motives, she asserts that ‘the same capitalist oppression and brutality are at the root – because every Negro worker is the potential victim of lynching, murder and legal lynching by the white ruling class, simply because he is a worker and black.’ Her unrealised Revolution – the Negro Speaks seems a likely extension of her efforts for the Scottsboro boys – Cunard, like her friend Kay Boyle, responded to the case in both poetry and journalism. The present volume includes a previously unpublished poem by Cunard entitled ‘Rape’, for Haywood Patterson, one of the Scottsboro nine. Voiced in the southern dialect of an (imagined?) white farmer’s wife, the poem is chilling and no doubt controversial in its employment of racist language and violence. The poem ends with the words: ‘And that was just one more lynching that year / Among the 48 in 1933’, suggesting at least a basis in reported fact.
Selected Poems Page 2
