Nancy was disinherited by her mother when she was discovered to be in a relationship with the African American jazz musician Henry Crowder, whom she met in Venice in the summer of 1928. Crowder’s band, Eddie South and His Alabamians, were playing at the Luna Hotel, and Nancy was immediately entranced by Crowder’s piano skills. She later wrote that Crowder was the first black person she’d ever known, and he became her lover for the next seven years of her life and the source of her interest in producing the Negro anthology. This phase of Cunard’s life was devoted to the cause of race equality, in particular inequalities suffered by African Americans that Crowder recounted to her, and celebrating the art and culture of the Harlem Renaissance. Cunard and Crowder would travel to Harlem in 1931 and 1932. Cunard was hounded by the American and British press who reported, often erroneously, on her activities in the United States. On more than one occasion she wrote to the international press to clarify, and eventually to seek damages for, falsehoods printed about her company and her title.
In his study of jazz aesthetics and modernism, told through the lives of black Americans Paul Robeson and Josephine Baker, James Donald describes ‘jazz modernism’ as a ‘history of migrations and detours, the movement of ideas and influences as well as of people, between the United States and Europe and back again, as well as across racial borderlines’. Jazz, as music and mode, served as ‘symbol and symptom of the modernist attitude’.15 The importance of Crowder’s influence on Cunard’s worldview cannot be overstated. In her memoir of the writer Norman Douglas, Cunard recalls meeting Crowder and his band: ‘They were Afro-Americans, coloured musicians, and they played in that “out of this world” manner which, in ordinary English, would have to be translated, I suppose, by “ineffable”. Such jazz and such Swing and such improvisations! And all new to me in style!’16 Although Cunard would have been familiar with jazz music before 1928, the ‘otherworldly’ aspect of Crowder’s physical presence, and the band’s improvisational live performance of jazz, is remarkable to one who’d spent little actual time around African Americans. Crowder made Cunard aware of the daily racism he and others faced in the United States. In 1930, with Crowder working by her side at the Press, Cunard and he co-produced, a book of poems by Beckett, Aldington, Walter Lowenfels, Harold Acton, and Cunard herself, set to original compositions by Crowder.17 Both of her poems ‘The Boeuf Blues’ (inspired by the surrealist ballet Le Boeuf sur le Toit) and ‘Equatorial Way’ are included in this volume. Man Ray’s cover for Henry-Music, a photograph of Crowder with Cunard’s heavily braceleted arms resting on his shoulders, makes for a compelling, suggestive image about their mutual roles.
Cunard’s mother used every weapon in her powerful arsenal against her daughter’s relationship, including an attempt to legally deport Crowder from England. Nancy described Maud Cunard’s racism in embarrassing detail in an eleven-page pamphlet entitled Black Man and White Ladyship published in 1931: ‘a few days before our going to London last year, what follows had just taken place, and I was unaware of it until our arrival. At a large lunch party in Her Ladyship’s house things are set rocking by one of those bombs that throughout her “career” Margot Asquith, Lady Oxford, had been wont to hurl. […] “Hello, Maud, what is it now – drink, drugs or niggers?” […] Half of social London is immediately telephoned to: “Is it true my daughter knows a Negro?” etc., etc.’ Nancy delighted in exposing the conservatism of her mother’s aristocratic circle and her own social class. She longed to reject what she felt was their inhumanity, the sickness of their moral hypocrisies.
But Cunard’s interest in Africa began long before her meeting with Crowder aged thirty-two. In her memoir of Norman Douglas she recalls:
[at] about six years old, my thoughts began to be drawn toward Africa, and particularly towards the Sahara. Surely I was being taught as much about El Dorado and the North Pole? But there it was: the Desert. The sand, the dunes, the huge spaces, mirages, heat and parchedness – I seemed able to visualize all of this. Of such were filled several dreams, culminating in the great nightmare in which I wandered, repeatedly, the whole of one agonising night, escaping through a series of tents somewhere in the Sahara. Later came extraordinary dreams about black Africa – ‘The Dark Continent’ – with Africans dancing and drumming around me, and I one of them, though still white, knowing, mysteriously enough, how to dance in their own manner. Everything was full of movement in these dreams; it was that which enabled me to escape in the end, going further, even further! And all of it was a mixture of apprehension that sometimes turned into joy, and even rapture.
Initially, Cunard’s dreamed-up African landscape is unpeopled, a sea of sand and endlessly iterative undulating space. The introduction of time (an ‘agonising night’) and figures of Africans dancing and drumming, turns an inescapable nightmare into a liberating, almost anonymising rhythm. There is intense satisfaction grounded in communal movement and the deferral of recognition or self-consciousness. To an extent Cunard’s biographers and critics, such as Jane Marcus and Maroula Joannou, read her wish for exoticism and identification with the racial ‘Other’ as an expression of her wish to escape her socially privileged (and thereby repugnant) self. For Nancy, Africa was an idea rather than an actual place – her mother’s connections at the British consulate barred her from travelling farther south than the Maghreb. Without a doubt, Henry Crowder was Cunard’s doorway into black culture. He gave her access to other black intellectuals and artists, and enabled her to be a legitimate advocate for civil rights and anti-imperialist, anti-nationalist movements. Crowder remembers in his memoir that Cunard repeatedly exhorted him to ‘Be more African!’, to which he replied ‘I’m not African, I’m American’, much to her displeasure.18 Needless to say, if Nancy was masquerading as oppressed then she was keen on casting those around her in the appropriate supporting roles. In the most direct terms, one cannot deny that Cunard’s fantasy of otherness plays itself out in a radicalised political order that relies on her authority as enforcer of such values. Consider her poem ‘Psalm for Trinidad’, the first in a short pamphlet published in 1941 in Havana titled Psalm of the Palms:
PSALM FOR TRINIDAD
I am Trinidad – Columbus discovered me,
Land of the Carib then, land of palm-trees, humming-birds,
I am Africa, India now; gone are slaves and indentured labour,
The songs of these am I, the wage-serfs, under a still-Victorian Union Jack.
(Oh de sun de sun ha laash me; it 96 in de shade.)
[…]
I am the cane-break, the largest sugar-factory in the Empire,
Thin silent folk of India in those fields, dividends, engineers,
Bullock-carts, piety – brown hands splitting the golden
cocoa-pods,
African faces in green depths, silent too, wondering ‘how long dis way?’
(40 cents, 20 cents – depend if I am man or woman – it so, my day.)
[…]
I am Calypso, brown bards of the people improvising irony in song;
I am the multitude, the articulate, keen
Brown face and black and gold; the courteous Chinese
Trading in towns, Indians passing mute almost ghostly;
I am the young hotheads, the cackle of old dark laughter, the ripe vernacular on the roads…
(What about after de war, man you think it come to Democracy?)
[…]
I am the Iron Music, the fork on the bottle with the spoon,
The drum out of Africa, the tambu-bambu, the collective Carnival;
Always always a note of sadness under the singing,
Always a wistfulness, an uncertainty, a back-bringing…
[…]
Trinidad, effervescent -------
look at me, look at me, look at me here.
In a way this is not so far from the monolithic otherness of Cunard’s childhood dream – even the ‘courteous Chinese’ are passive, but for song – reminding us of Whitman’s ‘wage laboure
r as Democratic America’ portraits and the all-encompassing lyrical self that silences by singing. The final lines of the poem, ‘Trinidad, effervescent ------ / look at me, look at me, look at me here’, are strangely ambiguous; the position of the subject is unclear, or rather, the multiple voices of blackness and oppression result in a displacement of the lyrical ‘I’ by the plurality of ‘me’. The final poem in Psalm of the Palms, titled ‘In answer to Trinidad’s poet who asks me “…What was it moved you to enlist / In our sad cause your all of heart and soul?”’ and dedicated to Alfred Cruickshank, offers an additional clue.
My friend, ship rocks, and seas come great and small
Over the gunwale, but the captain reads
On, despite this. On land the teeming seeds
Breed without fear, and after the gusty fall
Of rain comes ready are they, present, erect,
Grown. Do you sense the symbol in it all?
The man outlives the storm, the tribunal
Of nature judges, tempering the elect.
Our lives are wars – You ask: ‘Why love the slave,
The “noble savage” in the planter’s grave,
And us, descendants in a hostile clime?’
Call of the conscious sphere, I, nature and man,
Answer you: ‘Brother, instinct, knowledge… and then
Maybe I was an African one time.’
Cunard lamented that she did not have any actual African blood (instead she insisted that she had the soul of an African), but her levelling of insurmountable class and racial boundaries in the natural world of Trinidad (surrounded by sea and plagued by the labour of agriculture) is eye-wateringly direct. As a self-appointed conduit between black and white culture and society, Cunard’s work is defined by this kind of reciprocity (idealistic and naive though it may be). Her willingness and ability to mimic the rootlessness and alienation of historically displaced people is fascinating both in and of itself, but also as a document of modernity more generally. After her relationship with Crowder deteriorated and the Negro anthology failed to garner press attention, Cunard headed south to report on the war in Spain.
In 1937, near the start of the Spanish Civil War, Cunard distributed a questionnaire among writers and poets: ‘Are you for, or against, the legal Government and the People of Republican Spain? Are you for, or against, Franco and Fascism?’ Cunard, along with W. H. Auden, Louis Aragon, Pablo Neruda, and Stephen Spender, signed their names to the charge against Fascism: ‘For it is impossible any longer to take no side.’ Among the many printed responses are several notable writers who support the left-wing communist government democratically elected in 1936, including Kay Boyle, Rebecca West, Ford Madox Ford, Aldous Huxley, C. Day Lewis, C. L. R. James, and Leonard Woolf. The poet David Gascoyne writes: ‘One would have to be devoid of the most elementary feelings for decency and justice in order to preserve an attitude of indifference towards the inhuman gangster warfare being waged by Fascism against the people of Spain and their elected government.’19 A handful of neutral replies – and a smaller handful of responses favouring Fascism (Evelyn Waugh, Edmund Blunden) – are equally intriguing in view of Britain’s neutrality. Eliot, who also refused to contribute to Negro, writes: ‘While I am naturally sympathetic, I still feel convinced that it is best that at least a few men of letters should remain isolated, and take no part in these collective activities.’ Perhaps Ezra Pound’s reply is most fascinating of all those Cunard included: ‘Questionnaire an escape mechanism for young fools who are too cowardly to think; to lazy to investigate the nature of money, its mode of issue, the control of such an issue by the Banque de France and the stank of England. You are all had. Spain is an emotional luxury to a gang of sap-headed dilettantes.’20 At this point Pound was living in Italy and had expressed support for Mussolini’s fascist government. His conspiracies about banking and usury notwithstanding, Pound’s objections and Eliot’s unwillingness to take sides on the grounds of intellectual freedom must have been disappointing to Cunard. Nevertheless, all three thousand copies of Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War sold out, with proceeds going to the Spanish cause.
According to Lois Gordon, Cunard’s most recent biographer, Cunard spent much of the war as a journalist for various newspapers, first arriving into Barcelona in August 1936. Her despatches from the Front found their way into her poetry during this period, sometimes taking on the reportage quality of her eye-witness accounts for the Manchester Guardian. Her 1938 poem, ‘To Eat Today’, written during the bombardment of Barcelona, begins with an epigraph from ‘the press’: ‘In Barcelona today’s air raid came as we were sitting down to lunch after reading Hitler’s speech in Nüremberg.’
You heroes of Nazi stamp, you sirs in the ether,
Sons of Romulus, Wotan – is the mark worth the bomb?
What was in it? salt, and a half-pint of olive,
Nothing else but the woman, she treasured it terribly,
Oil for the day folks would come, refugees from Levante,
Maybe with greens… one round meal… but you killed her,
Killed four children outside, with the house, and the pregnant cat.
Hail, hand of Rome, you passed – and that is all.
Cunard details the cruelty of the indiscriminate aerial bombing of civilians. Spain, and her experiences witnessing bombing campaigns by Franco’s forces and its allies as well as the exodus of starving refugees fleeing into relocation camps in France from Catalonia, never left Cunard’s imagination. Well into the last years of her life, she continued to work on her unfinished ‘Epic on Spain’, which included her observations from return visits in the 1950s and early 1960s. In a section omitted from the manuscript of her ‘Epic’ held at Oxford University’s Bodleian Library, but restored in the present volume, Cunard writes:
I cannot compute the bodies, cannot compass the dead.
And one day
Came from the sky this, a present to the earth:
Journalist’s despatch, November something: “Witnessed today
opening of box dropped over Madrid by parachute of Francoist
plane. Contents, horribly mutilated body. Carved-up corpse of
Republican aviator. Obviously work of professional butcher. Note
attached: ‘We will serve all your fliers in like manner.’”
His name was Juan Antonio Galarza.21
Her ‘Epic’ – and all the poems she wrote from Spain during the war – are polyvocal and polylinguistic (she was fluent in both Spanish and Catalan) and incorporate local languages and voices in ways that are colloquial and intimate. The poem’s act of witness, grounded in Cunard’s textual strategies that place the sufferer at the heart of her writing, is poignant. Never does her own strong political will upstage real, lived experience. Her bravery as a journalist, poet, and advocate for the many refugees (both civilian and military) housed by Vichy France in Perpignan in ‘reception centres’ that amounted to concentration camps is a part of Cunard’s wider, tireless campaign against the spread of fascist powers throughout Europe and North Africa (indeed, at one point she was able to rescue five prisoners – including the poet César Arconada – and take them to her house in Réanville).22
In 1937, the year of her Authors Take Sides, Cunard raised funds for the Spanish resistance through another publication, this time hand-printed by her at the Hours Press, with Neruda’s assistance. Six pamphlets of poetry were produced entitled The Poets of the World Defend the Spanish People! These pamphlets included poems by Tristan Tzara, the executed Andalusian poet Federico Garcia-Lorca, Langston Hughes, Raphael Alberti, and W. H. Auden (his now well-known poem ‘Spain’), among others. With the Scottsboro trial, Cunard’s advocacy for black Americans in the United States (and, by extension, the black Atlantic) had roused her sense of injustice in otherwise democratic societies. The rise of Fascism in Europe during the Spanish Civil War and into the Second World War crucially inspired her distrust of nationalism, patriotism and, most acutely, politic
al apathy.
Among Cunard’s archived manuscripts from the 1930s is a poem dedicated to the controversial social Darwinist and eugenicist Bernelot Moens, who theorised classifications of humanity through the ages into ‘primitive’, ‘civilised’, ‘humanised’, ‘cultured’ and, finally, ‘perfect’ man. The perfect man was a future condition of society, one in which all race hatred and prejudice – and indeed, borders – would no longer exist. The perfect man emerges from ‘the world in fusion’, total racial mixing, and hence heralds an end to discrimination.
The Supra-Nation crests the racial seas,
Docks in new sunset splendours, where the great
Banquet transcendent science that no State
May triumph over. Yet, my friend, what frees
The peon’s hands that raised the warrior’s shield,
The loin-clothed coolie in the paddy-field?
(from ‘To Professor Bernelot Moens’)
Written in 1934, the year the Negro anthology was published, Cunard’s celebration of an anti-nation on a cruise ship is revealing. The urge to eradicate boundaries of class, race and nationality – again mediated through the sea, a space of forced forgetting – may just be an inexact desire for self-determination, played through the terrible rejection of whiteness, Americanness, Englishness, wealth, and privilege – all categories to which Cunard was ‘guilty’ of belonging. Cunard’s archive is full of photographs of African artefacts – masks, statues, and of course jewellery. Surveying these, one senses her careful scholarly dedication as she handles and surrounds herself with the living objects of her dreams. At best, Cunard’s activism was a wish for a community – preferably for a community of outsiders, of others like herself, for whom she could reject her wealth, her class, and the privileges of her name.
Selected Poems Page 3
